> From: FBI Office > Subject: Federal Bureau of Investigation! > To: > Date: Monday, April 4, 2016, 12:02 AM > FBI Headquarters in Washington , > D.C. > J. Edgar Hoover Building , 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, > NW Washington , D.C. 20535-0001 USA > www.fbi.gov > > > ATTENTION: BENEFICIARY > This e-mail has been issued to you in order to officially > inform you that we > have completed an investigation on an International Payment > in which was > issued to you by an International Lottery Company. With the > help of our newly > developed technology (International Monitoring Network > System) we discovered > that your e-mail address was automatically selected by an > Online Balloting > System, this has legally won you the sum of $2.4million USD > from a Lottery > Company outside the United States of America. During our > investigation we > discovered that your e-mail won the money from an Online > Balloting System and > we have authorized this winning to be paid to you via > INTERNATIONAL CERTIFIED > BANK DRAFT. > > Normally, it will take up to 5 business days for an > INTERNATIONAL CERTIFIED > BANK DRAFT by your local bank. We have successfully notified > this company on > your behalf that funds are to be drawn from a registered > bank within the world > wined, so as to enable you cash the check instantly without > any delay, > henceforth the stated amount of $2.4million USD has been > deposited with IMF. > We have completed this investigation and you are here by > approved to receive > the winning prize as we have verified the entire transaction > to be Safe and > 100% risk free, due to the fact that the funds have been > deposited with IMF > you will be required to settle the following bills directly > to the Lottery > Agent in-charge of this transaction whom is located in > Cotonou, Benin > Republic. According to our discoveries, you were required to > pay for the > following, > > (1) Deposit Fee's ( IMF INTERNATIONAL CLEARANCE CERTIFICATE > ) > (2) Shipping Fee's ( This is the charge for shipping the > Cashier's Check to > your home address) > > The total amount for everything is $98.00 We have tried our > possible best to > indicate that this $98.00 should be deducted from your > winning prize but we > found out that the funds have already been deposited IMF and > cannot be > accessed by anyone apart from you the winner, therefore you > will be required > to pay the required fee's to the Agent in-charge of this > your transaction In > order to proceed with this transaction, you will be required > to contact the > agent in-charge ( Mr. Mark Ben ) via e-mail. Kindly look > below to find > appropriate contact information: > > CONTACT AGENT NAME: Mr. Mark Ben > E-MAIL : international.monitory.fund@yandex.com > PHONE: +229 68658982 > > You will be required to e-mail him with the following > information: > > FULL NAME: > ADDRESS: > CITY: > STATE: > ZIP CODE: > DIRECT CONTACT NUMBER: > OCCUPATION: > > You will also be required to request Western Union or Money > Gram details on > how to send the required $98.00 in order to immediately ship > your prize of > $2.4million USD via INTERNATIONAL CERTIFIED BANK DRAFT from > IMF, also include > the following transaction code in order for him to > immediately identify this > transaction: EA2948-910. > > This letter will serve as proof that the Federal Bureau of > Investigation is > authorizing you to pay the required $98.00 ONLY to Mr. Mark > Ben information in > which he shall send to you, > > Faithfully Yours, > For And On Behalf Of > Federal Bureau of Investigation > Mr.James B. Comey, Jr. > Executive Director > On Tuesday, April 5, 2016 8:43 PM, FROM FBI < cfb@dfbi.cn.tn > wrote: FBI HEADQUARTERS IN WASHINGTON, D.C. FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION J. EDGAR HOOVER BUILDING 935 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE, NW WASHINGTON, D.C. 20535-0001 Website: www.fbi.gov reply to : Urgent attention needed We have been informed through our global intelligence monitoring network that the sum of $10.500, 000.00, has been released from a bank in Africa bearing your name as the beneficiary without dist certificate to clear your name and fund from every terrorist or drug or money laundering activities The bank knowing fully well that they do not have enough facilities to make this payment from any part of the world to your account directly, used what we know as a secret diplomatic transit payment (s.t.d.p) method to make the payment. direct transfers are difficult and secret diplomatic transit payment (s.t.d.p) are not usually made unless the funds are related to terrorist activities and we ask why must your payment be made in a secret transfer if your transaction is legitimate. We do not want you to get into trouble as soon as these funds reflect in your personal account, so it is our duty as an international agency to correct these little problems before this fund reflects into your personal account. we advice you to contact us immediately, as your funds have been stopped and are being held in our custody, until you are able to provide us with the dist certificate within 3 days from the country that authorized the transfer to certify that the funds that you are about to receive are terrorist/drug free or we shall have cause to impound the payment and subsequently prosecute you for cross border terrorist financial activites. based on our findings, our investigative department wish to warn you against some miscreants, hoodlums and touts who go about scamming innocent people by claiming to be who they are not and thereby tarnishing the image of this wonderful country. By sending out fraudulent emails without our official logo and emblem we shall release your funds immediately we receive this legal document and we will ensure that you receive your payment without any further delay. Note We decided to contact you directly by email to acquire the proper verifications and proof from you to show that you are the rightful person to receive this fund, because of the huge amount involved. Be informed that the funds are now with a top bank in the united state in your name and under the monitoring/custody of the FBI. At the moment, we have asked the bank not to release the fund to anybody that comes to them, unless we instruct them to do so, and only if we receive the dist certificate this is to enable us carry out a comprehensive investigation first before releasing the fund to you. hence, you are to forward your dist certificate to us immediately if you have it in your possession, if you do not have it, then let us know so that we will direct you to the appropriate authority to obtain the certificate then you are to send it to our office. And thereafter, we will instruct the bank holding the funds, to go ahead and credit your account immediately. If you fail to provide the documents to this office, we will prosecute you and take appropriate action against you for not proving the legality of the funds. Finally if you truly want to receive this funds without F.B.I troubles then Reconfirm your full name, occupation, age, contact address and telephone number to the above mentioned office either by phone or E-mail to facilitate the processing of your payment. Yours Faithfully SPECIAL AGENT TIMOTHY GALLAGHER FOR FBI DIRECTOR MR,JAMES B. COMEY ANTI-TERRORIST AND MONETORY CRIMES DIVISIONFBI HEADQUARTERS IN WASHINGTON, D.C.FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATIONJ. EDGAR HOOVER BUILDING935 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE, NW WASHINGTON, D.C. 20535-0001 Website: www.fbi.govreply to : fbi.tgallagher@aol.com Urgent attention neededWe have been informed through our global intelligence monitoring network that the sum of $10.500, 000.00, has been released from a bank in Africa bearing your name as the beneficiary without dist certificate to clear your name and fund from every terrorist or drug or money laundering activitiesThe bank knowing fully well that they do not have enough facilities to make this payment from any part of the world to your account directly, used what we know as a secret diplomatic transit payment (s.t.d.p) method to make the payment. direct transfers are difficult and secret diplomatic transit payment (s.t.d.p) are not usually made unless the funds are related to terrorist activities and we ask why must your payment be made in a secret transfer if your transaction is legitimate.We do not want you to get into trouble as soon as these funds reflect in your personal account, so it is our duty as an international agency to correct these little problems before this fund reflects into your personal account.we advice you to contact us immediately, as your funds have been stopped and are being held in our custody, until you are able to provide us with the dist certificate within 3 days from the country that authorized the transfer to certify that the funds that you are about to receive are terrorist/drug free or we shall have cause to impound the payment and subsequently prosecute you for cross border terrorist financial activites.based on our findings, our investigative department wish to warn you against some miscreants, hoodlums and touts who go about scamming innocent people by claiming to be who they are not and thereby tarnishing the image of this wonderful country. By sending out fraudulent emails without our official logo and emblem we shall release your funds immediately we receive this legal document and we will ensure that you receive your payment without any further delay.NoteWe decided to contact you directly by email to acquire the proper verifications and proof from you to show that you are the rightful person to receive this fund, because of the huge amount involved. Be informed that the funds are now with a top bank in the united state in your name and under the monitoring/custody of the FBI. At the moment, we have asked the bank not to release the fund to anybody that comes to them, unless we instruct them to do so, and only if we receive the dist certificate this is to enable us carry out a comprehensive investigation first before releasing the fund to you.hence, you are to forward your dist certificate to us immediately if you have it in your possession, if you do not have it, then let us know so that we will direct you to the appropriate authority to obtain the certificate then you are to send it to our office. And thereafter, we will instruct the bank holding the funds, to go ahead and credit your account immediately. If you fail to provide the documents to this office, we will prosecute you and take appropriate action against you for not proving the legality of the funds.Finally if you truly want to receive this funds without F.B.I troubles then Reconfirm your full name, occupation, age, contact address and telephone number to the above mentioned office either by phone or E-mail to facilitate the processing of your payment.Yours FaithfullySPECIAL AGENT TIMOTHY GALLAGHERFOR FBI DIRECTORMR,JAMES B. COMEY anna.elpidio@alice.it > Attention: Beneficiary, This is the final warning you are going to receive from us, do you get me? I hope you understand how many times this message has been sent to you? change your email password because they hacked your password and if you change it do not send it to anyone another time, We would also send a letter to the company/agency that you are working for so that they could get you fired until we are through with our investigations because a suspect is not supposed to be working for the government or any private organization. Your ID which we have in our database have been sent to all the crimes agencies in America for them to inset you an their website as an internet fraudsters and to warn people from having any deals with you. This would have been solved all this while if you had gotten the CERTIFICATE ENDORSED AND STAMPED as you were instructed in the e-mail below. This is the federal bureau of investigation (FBI) am writing in response to the e-mail you sent to us and am using this medium to inform you that there is no more time left to waste because you have been given a mandate. As stated earlier to have the document endorsed, signed and stamped without failure and you must adhere to this directives to avoid you blaming yourself at last when we must have arrested and jailed you for life and all your properties will be seized and bank account will be confiscated too. You failed to comply with our directives/instruction and that was the reason why we didn' t hear from you, as our director has already been notified about you get the process completed yesterday and right now the WARRANT OF ARREST has been signed against you and it will be carried out in the next 48hours as strictly signed by the FBI director. We have investigated and found out that you didn' t have any idea when the fraudulent deal was committed with your information/identity and right now your ID is placed on our website as a wanted person, I believe you know that it will be a shame to you and your entire family because after then it will be announce in all the local channels that you are wanted by the FBI. As a good Christian and a Honest man, I decided to see how i could be of help to you because i would not be happy to see you end up in jail and all your properties confiscated all because your information' s was used to carry out a fraudulent transactions, i called the EFCC and they directed me to a private attorney who can help you get the process done and he stated that he will endorse and stamp the document at the sum of $68 usd only and i believe this process is cheaper for you. You need to do every possible thing today and tomorrow to get this process done because our director has called to inform me that the warrant of arrest has been signed against you and once it has been approved, then the arrest will be carried out, and from our investigations we learnt that you were the person that forwarded your identity to one impostor/fraudsters in Nigeria when he had a deal with you about the transfer of some illegal funds into your bank account which is valued at the sum of $10,500,000.00 only. I pleaded on your behalf so that this agency could give you till this week-end so that you could get this process done because i learnt that several e-mails has been sent to you without getting a response from you. Bear it in mind that this is the only way that i can be able to help you at this moment or you would have to face the law and its consequences once it had befallen on you. You would make the payment through western union money transfer with the below details. RECEIVER ' S NAME:Henry Chuma ADDRESS: Benin Republic, CITY. . . . COTONOU TEXT QUESTION: BETTER ANSWER: BEST AMOUNT: $68 Senders Full Name: Sender Full Address: Direct Phone Number: MTCN::::::::::::: Send the payment details to me as stated above and make sure that you didn' t hesitate making the payment down to the agency by today so that they could have the certificate endorsed, signed and stamped immediately without any further delay. After all this process has been carried out, then we would have to proceed to the bank for the transfer of your compensation funds which is valued at the sum of $10.500,000.00 usd which was supposed to have been transferred to you all this while. Note: All the crimes agencies have been contacted on this regards and we shall trace and arrest you if you disregard this instructions. You are given a grace today to make the payment for the document after which your failure to do that will attract a maximum arrest and finally ygu will be appearing in court for act of terrorism, money laundering and drug trafficking charges, so be warned not to tryn anything funny because you are been watched. change your email password because they hacked your password and if you change it do not send it to anyone another time, Yours in service, James B Comey 2016-04-06 19:53 GMT-04:00 JAMES B. COMEY > From: FBI Office > Subject: Federal Bureau of Investigation > To: > Date: Tuesday, April 12, 2016, 8:29 PM > FBI Headquarters in Washington , > D.C. > J. Edgar Hoover Building , 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, > NW Washington , D.C. 20535-0001 USA > www.fbi.gov > > > ATTENTION: BENEFICIARY > This e-mail has been issued to you in order to officially > inform you that we > have completed an investigation on an International Payment > in which was > issued to you by an International Lottery Company. With the > help of our newly > developed technology (International Monitoring Network > System) we discovered > that your e-mail address was automatically selected by an > Online Balloting > System, this has legally won you the sum of $2.4million USD > from a Lottery > Company outside the United States of America. During our > investigation we > discovered that your e-mail won the money from an Online > Balloting System and > we have authorized this winning to be paid to you via > INTERNATIONAL CERTIFIED > BANK DRAFT. > > Normally, it will take up to 5 business days for an > INTERNATIONAL CERTIFIED > BANK DRAFT by your local bank. We have successfully notified > this company on > your behalf that funds are to be drawn from a registered > bank within the world > wined, so as to enable you cash the check instantly without > any delay, > henceforth the stated amount of $2.4million USD has been > deposited with IMF. > We have completed this investigation and you are here by > approved to receive > the winning prize as we have verified the entire transaction > to be Safe and > 100% risk free, due to the fact that the funds have been > deposited with IMF > you will be required to settle the following bills directly > to the Lottery > Agent in-charge of this transaction whom is located in > Cotonou, Benin > Republic. According to our discoveries, you were required to > pay for the > following, > > (1) Deposit Fee's ( IMF INTERNATIONAL CLEARANCE CERTIFICATE > ) > (2) Shipping Fee's ( This is the charge for shipping the > Cashier's Check to > your home address) > > The total amount for everything is $98.00 We have tried our > possible best to > indicate that this $98.00 should be deducted from your > winning prize but we > found out that the funds have already been deposited IMF and > cannot be > accessed by anyone apart from you the winner, therefore you > will be required > to pay the required fee's to the Agent in-charge of this > your transaction In > order to proceed with this transaction, you will be required > to contact the > agent in-charge ( Mr. Mark Ben ) via e-mail. Kindly look > below to find > appropriate contact information: > > CONTACT AGENT NAME: Mr. Mark Ben > E-MAIL : international.monitory.fund@yandex.com > PHONE: +229 68658982 > > You will be required to e-mail him with the following > information: > > FULL NAME: > ADDRESS: > CITY: > STATE: > ZIP CODE: > DIRECT CONTACT NUMBER: > OCCUPATION: > > You will also be required to request Western Union or Money > Gram details on > how to send the required $98.00 in order to immediately ship > your prize of > $2.4million USD via INTERNATIONAL CERTIFIED BANK DRAFT from > IMF, also include > the following transaction code in order for him to > immediately identify this > transaction: EA2948-910. > > This letter will serve as proof that the Federal Bureau of > Investigation is > authorizing you to pay the required $98.00 ONLY to Mr. Mark > Ben information in > which he shall send to you, > > Faithfully Yours, > For And On Behalf Of > Federal Bureau of Investigation > Mr.James B. Comey, Jr. > Executive Director On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 5:02 am, Mr James B. Comey FBI < michael@abko.co.kr > wrote: Attention From: Mr James B. Comey (FBI) This is to inform you that your payment of USD$10 Million from the Federal Republic of Nigeria has been released and ready to be paid to your via ATM VISA CARD which you will use to withdraw the US$5 Million from any ATM Machine in any part of the world. we have a meeting with the Federal Government of Nigeria, we informed them that your fund should not cost you any thing because is your money (Your Card). Moreover, we have an agreement with them that you should pay only delivering of your card and insurance coverage fee which will cost you $98 U.S. DOLLARS for the delivering of your ATM CARD/insurance coverage. However, you have only three working days to send this $98 U.S.DOLLARS To Mr. Fred Cole for the delivering of your card, if we don't hear from you with the payment information; the Federal Government will cancel the card. We have mandated the Arab Bank Nigeria to issue an ATM VISA CARD and PIN# which you will use to withdraw the fund from any ATM machine in any part of the world but the maximum amount you can withdraw per day is US$20,000.00. You are strongly advice immediately to contact Mr. Fred Cole the Manager of Arab Bank Nigeria Plc via this email address: No other charges except the delivering of your ATM CARD/insurance coverage. Listen as soon as he received the $98 Your delivery will take place( Pin Release order confirmation same day). Note: You will only apply the pincode when you have paid your delivering of your ATM CARD/insurance coverage. because for now, it is still invalid until your ATM visa card get to you. If you pay your delivering of your ATM CARD/insurance coverage fee your pin number will be authenticated and gets valid thereby withdrawing your funds to the newly introduced system of payment by the Federal Republic of Nigeria and you can then make withdrawal by yourself. This is very simple just contact Mr. Fred Cole.and send him your information such as; 1) Your Full Name. 2) Your Contact Address. working one because is where the ATM card will go in to avoid mistake. 3) Your Home Phone, Mobile/Cell Phone and fax Number. REMEMBER YOU HAVE SPENT A LOT TOWARDS THIS PACKAGE ONCE THE CHARGE FEE REQUIRED NOW IS PAID SHIPMENT WILL COMMENCE AND YOU WILL RECOVER ALL YOU HAVE SPENT RECENTLY. THE CHARGE FEE REQUIRED NOW IS NOT MUCH SO YOU WILL BE ABLE TO AFFORD THE LAST FEE NEEDED WHICH IS $98 ONLY MY ADVICE TO YOU IS TO GO AHEAD AND SEND THE CHARGE FEE VIA WESTERN UNION. THE WESTERN UNION INFORMATION BELOW BELONG TO Mr. Fred Cole THE BRANCH MANAGER OF Arab Bank Nigeria SHIPPING DEPARTMENT NIGERIA. SEND $98 TO BELOW NAME . RECEIVER NAME: AKACHI JOHN LOCATION: LAGOS/NIGERIA TEXT QUESTION: OK ANSWER: OK AMOUNT:$98 MTCN# SENDER'S NAME:. . Immediately contact Mr. Fred Cole via E-mail along with the MTCN because the ATM VISA CARD approval in your name has been sent to Mr. Fred Cole and he is waiting for your above information include the evidence of Western Union or Money Gram (payment paper) to enable the most complete and up-to date records possible so that he will process and send you the CARD and PIN number without any delay. If the $98 can not be send now to Mr. Fred Cole , we can as well cancel this and contact all the neccesary authorities to this, we are waiting, asap your question,So make sure you contact him right now with your information and tell him that you received a message from the FBI of united state, Instructing you to contact him to pay only $98 for immediate release of your fund via ATM VISA CARD.you have no other payment to make except the delivering fee/insurance coverage fee. Presently, this are few people that received there payment through FedEx and Dhl website (www.FEDEX.com)/ (www.dhl.com) LINDA KNICKERBOCKER = = = = = = = 1426426772 (www.dhl.com) LD = = = = = = = = 1426425862 (www.dhl.com) GARY METZGER = = = = = = = 871363130860 (www.FEDEX.com) MARK STUBBS = = = = = = = 871363116168 (www.FEDEX.com) Contact me if there is any delay from the so called gentleman incharge.Note that, the delivering fee/insurance coverage is must and very important, so take note of that.any other contact or payment you make apart from the delivering fee/insurance coverage is at your own risk. After Mr. Fred Cole bring a report to us here that he have received the fee and your delivery will fasten under 24hours, latest 48 hours after confirmation. WE will like your respond to this call to avoid any further delaying. Do not be afraid for the fee, when replying this mail, include your position and address so that we can register it here. Remember: you require urgently to contact Mr. Fred Cole with below e-mail address ( NOTE:IF YOU CAN NOT PAY FOR THE SHIPPING/INSURANCE COVERAGE OF YOUR ATM CARD AND THE CARD IS NOT FOR YOU. SO YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. Your immediate response will be required. Yours Sincerely, CONGRATULATIONS. Mr James B. Comey FBI Washington DC FBI.Room, 7367J. Edgar Hoover Building 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, D.C. 20535-0001 IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF YOUR FUND US$10M ONLY VIA ATM VISA CARDAttention From: Mr James B. Comey (FBI)This is to inform you that your payment of USD$10 Million from the Federal Republic of Nigeria has been released and ready to be paid to your via ATM VISA CARD which you will use to withdraw the US$5 Million from any ATM Machine in any part of the world.we have a meeting with the Federal Government of Nigeria, we informed them that your fund should not cost you any thing because is your money (Your Card). Moreover, we have an agreement with them that you should pay only delivering of your card and insurance coverage fee which will cost you $98 U.S. DOLLARS for the delivering of your ATM CARD/insurance coverage.However, you have only three working days to send this $98 U.S.DOLLARS To Mr. Fred Cole for the delivering of your card, if we don't hear from you with the payment information; the Federal Government will cancel the card.We have mandated the Arab Bank Nigeria to issue an ATM VISA CARD and PIN# which you will use to withdraw the fund from any ATM machine in any part of the world but the maximum amount you can withdraw per day is US$20,000.00. You are strongly advice immediately to contact Mr. Fred Cole the Manager of Arab Bank Nigeria Plc via this email address: mrfred.cole1960@outlook.com Or call him on this number +234-7068019880 only for your (delivering of your ATM CARD/insurance coverage) and he will delivered your ATM visa card to you immediately.No other charges except the delivering of your ATM CARD/insurance coverage. Listen as soon as he received the $98 Your delivery will take place( Pin Release order confirmation same day).Note: You will only apply the pincode when you have paid your delivering of your ATM CARD/insurance coverage. because for now, it is still invalid until your ATM visa card get to you. If you pay your delivering of your ATM CARD/insurance coverage fee your pin number will be authenticated and gets valid thereby withdrawing your funds to the newly introduced system of payment by the Federal Republic of Nigeria and you can then make withdrawal by yourself. This is very simple just contact Mr. Fred Cole.and send him your information such as;1) Your Full Name.2) Your Contact Address. working one because is where the ATM cardwill go in to avoid mistake.3) Your Home Phone, Mobile/Cell Phone and fax Number.REMEMBER YOU HAVE SPENT A LOT TOWARDS THIS PACKAGE ONCE THE CHARGE FEE REQUIRED NOW IS PAID SHIPMENT WILL COMMENCE AND YOU WILL RECOVER ALL YOU HAVE SPENT RECENTLY. THE CHARGE FEE REQUIRED NOW IS NOT MUCH SO YOU WILL BE ABLE TO AFFORD THE LAST FEE NEEDED WHICH IS $98 ONLY MY ADVICE TO YOU IS TO GO AHEAD AND SEND THE CHARGE FEE VIA WESTERN UNION. THE WESTERN UNION INFORMATION BELOW BELONG TO Mr. Fred Cole THE BRANCH MANAGER OF Arab Bank Nigeria SHIPPING DEPARTMENT NIGERIA. SEND $98 TO BELOW NAME .RECEIVER NAME: AKACHI JOHNLOCATION: LAGOS/NIGERIATEXT QUESTION: OKANSWER: OKAMOUNT:$98MTCN#SENDER'S NAME:. .Immediately contact Mr. Fred Cole via E-mail along with the MTCN because the ATM VISA CARD approval in your name has been sent to Mr. Fred Cole and he is waiting for your above information include the evidence of Western Union or Money Gram (payment paper) to enable the most complete and up-to date records possible so that he will process and send you the CARD and PIN number without any delay. If the $98 can not be send now to Mr. Fred Cole , we can as well cancel this and contact all the neccesary authorities to this, we are waiting, asap your question,So make sure you contact him right now with your information and tell him that you received a message from the FBI of united state, Instructing you to contact him to pay only $98 for immediate release of your fund via ATM VISA CARD.you have no other payment to make except the delivering fee/insurance coverage fee.Presently, this are few people that received there payment through FedEx and Dhl website (www.FEDEX.com)/ (www.dhl.com)LINDA KNICKERBOCKER = = = = = = = 1426426772 (www.dhl.com)LD = = = = = = = = 1426425862 (www.dhl.com)GARY METZGER = = = = = = = 871363130860 (www.FEDEX.com)MARK STUBBS = = = = = = = 871363116168 (www.FEDEX.com)Contact me if there is any delay from the so called gentleman incharge.Note that, the delivering fee/insurance coverage is must and very important, so take note of that.any other contact or payment you make apart from the delivering fee/insurance coverage is at your own risk. After Mr. Fred Cole bring a report to us here that he have received the fee and your delivery will fasten under 24hours, latest 48 hours after confirmation. WE will like your respond to this call to avoid any further delaying. Do not be afraid for the fee, when replying this mail, include your position and address so that we can register it here.Remember: you require urgently to contact Mr. Fred Cole with below e-mail address ( mrfred.cole1960@outlook.com ) immediately after making the payment for the delivery of your ATM VISA CARD.NOTE:IF YOU CAN NOT PAY FOR THE SHIPPING/INSURANCE COVERAGE OF YOUR ATM CARD AND THE CARD IS NOT FOR YOU. SO YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.Your immediate response will be required.Yours Sincerely,CONGRATULATIONS.Mr James B. Comey FBIWashington DC FBI.Room, 7367J. Edgar Hoover Building935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NWWashington, D.C. 20535-0001 > From: FBI United States > Subject: FBI PAYMENT INFORMATION > To: "Recipients" > Date: Thursday, April 14, 2016, 9:47 PM > Federal Bureau of Investigation > J. Edgar Hoover Building 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, > NW Washington, D.C. 20535-0001 > > Beneficiary ID Email Owner. > > > Be won to stop > sending your money to scammer > > The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Headquarters > Washington, D.C, United States in conjunction with others > relevant Security Investigation Agencies in the United > States have been informed through our Global intelligence > monitoring network in the Western Union and Money Gram > Service here in USA that you always send your money to > fraud/scam group regarding some recovering award payment in > your name. > > It might interest you to know today that those peoples you > are dealing with is fake bank/company and you must stop send > your money to scam company in Africa or USA to avoid you > been arrested by FBI Special Agent Headquarter in Washington > DC. > > The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Headquarters have > also verify with World Bank central Computer here Washington > DC, United States on the 13- April -2016 and discover that > the only money award in your name is US$4.5Million been > approved with UBA Bank New York, in the person Dr. > Rafiq Bengali is confirm to be real and you have the lawful > right to claim your VISA CARD Payment by contact the paying > bank officer again at information bellow. > > Contact Person : Dr. Rafiq Bengali. > Director General of UBA Bank. > Address: 1 Rockefeller Plaza (8th Floor) New York, NY 10020 > USA > Office Tel: +1 315 567 4881 or +1 315 889 6138 > Bank E-mail: uba.ny@qq.com > > For more information about Dr. Rafiq Bengali at UBA Bank > NYC, see link at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMjkmu2oe5Q > > So stop contact with any other offices else. Unless only Dr. > Rafiq Bengali at UBA Bank New York because the only money > sign on your behalf is US$4.5 Million from Neil Trotter > donation company and according to Dr. Rafiq Bengali, the DHL > COMPANY will deliver your visa card worth US$4,5 MILLION and > all document to you in one parcel within 24hrs today once > you send the payment US$352 require for DHL courier bills. > > You are hereby required to go ahead and deal with Dr. Rafiq > Bengali at UBA Bank New York accordingly with good Faith as > we will be monitoring all their correspondence with you > started from now because the ATM Visa card worth your > payment must deliver to you within 24hours today once you > send the US$352 require direct to DHL Accountant Agent in > California. > > THIS IS LAST MAIL/CHANCE FOR YOU. > > Thank you very much for your anticipated co-operation in > advance. > > Perfect Regard > James B. Comey, Jr. Director > Federal Bureau of Investigation > FBI Washington, D.C. United States 2016-04-16 18:36 GMT-04:00 < jbc.fbi21@openmailbox.org > : J. Edgar. Hoover Building, 935 Pennsylvania Ave., NW Washington D.C 20535-0001, United States of America FBI Field Office Websites: www.fbi.gov Attention: This is to inform you that it has come to the notice board of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), That the sum of US$2,500,000.00 is being transferred to your local account via Bank of America here in United State of America, and the rightful beneficiary is you . That is why we have decided to contact you directly to acquire the proper verification and proof from you to show that you are the rightful person to receive this fund, because the above mentioned amount is a big amount of money, that is why we want to make sure that it is a clear and legal money you are about to receive. Be informed that the fund have hit your local bank account, but right now we have given instruction to your bank, not to release the fund to anybody that comes to them in respect of this money, unless we ask them to do so, because we have to carry out our investigations with the World Bank in Switzerland first before releasing the fund to you. Note that the fund is in BANK OF AMERICA right now, but we have ask them not to credit your designated account yet, because we need some proof to verify that this fund is not related to Drug Free/Anti Terrorist from you before releasing. So to this regard you are to reassure and proof to us that what you are about to receive is a clean money by sending to us FBI Identification Record and also Drug Free/Anti-Terrorist Certificate to satisfy to us that the money you are about to receive is real money. You are to forward the document to us immediately if you have it with you, if you don' t have it let us know so that we will direct and inform you where to obtain the document and send to us so that we will ask the Bank Of America/World Bank Switzerland to go ahead in Crediting your designated account immediately. These Document are to be issued to you from the place where the fund was transferred from, so get back to us immediately if you don' t have the document so that we will inform you on the particular place and what it will take to obtain the document in your favour in Federal Republic Of Nigeria, because we have come to realize that the fund is transferred from the Federal Republic Of Nigeria. You are advised to forward immediately the Award Ownership Certificate of this fund if you have it with you, but if you don' t have it we will urge you to contact our representative in Nigeria below this message to help you secure the Award Ownership Certificate if at all you did not have it. Name: Mr. Nnowa Ocha Email: Furthermore, we are giving you only but 3 working business days to forward the requested Award Ownership Certificate. NOTE: An FBI Identification Record and Certificate Of Ownership often referred to as a Criminal History Record or Rap Sheet, is a listing of certain information taken from fingerprint submissions retained by the FBI in connection with arrests and, in some instances, federal employment,Naturalization or military service. If the fingerprints are related to an arrest, the Identification Record includes name of the agency that submitted the fingerprints to the FBI, the date of arrest, the arrest charge, and the disposition of the arrest, if known to the FBI. All arrest data included in an Identification Record is obtained from fingerprint submissions, disposition reports and other reports submitted by agencies having criminal justice responsibilities. The FBI will charge you and take proper action against you if you do not proof to us the legitimacy of the fund you are about to receive. This is to inform you that it has come to the notice board of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), That the sum of US$2,500,000.00 is being transferred to your local account via Bank of America here in United State of America, and the rightfulbeneficiary is you .That is why we have decided to contact you directly to acquire the proper verification and proof from you to show that you are the rightful person to receive this fund, because the above mentioned amount is a big amount of money, that is why we want to make sure that it is a clear and legal money you are about to receive.Be informed that the fund have hit your local bank account, but right now we have given instruction to your bank, not to release the fund to anybody that comes to them in respect of this money, unless we ask them to do so, because we have to carry out our investigations with the World Bank in Switzerland first before releasing the fund to you. Note that the fund is in BANK OF AMERICA right now, but we have ask them not to credit your designated account yet, because we need some proof to verify that this fund is not related to Drug Free/Anti Terrorist from you before releasing.So to this regard you are to reassure and proof to us that what you are about to receive is a clean money by sending to us FBI Identification Record and also Drug Free/Anti-Terrorist Certificate to satisfy to us that the money you are about to receive is real money. You are to forward the document to us immediately if you have it with you, if you don' t have it let us know so that we will direct and inform you where to obtain the document and send to us so that we will ask the Bank Of America/World Bank Switzerland to go ahead in Crediting your designated account immediately.These Document are to be issued to you from the place where the fund was transferred from, so get back to us immediately if you don' t have the document so that we will inform you on the particular place and what it will take to obtain the document in your favour in Federal Republic Of Nigeria, because we have come to realize that the fund is transferred from the Federal Republic Of Nigeria.You are advised to forward immediately the Award Ownership Certificate of this fund if you have it with you, but if you don' t have it we will urge you to contact our representative in Nigeria below this message to help you secure the Award Ownership Certificate if at all you did not have it.Name: Mr. Nnowa OchaEmail: nnowa.ocha@openmailbox.org Furthermore, we are giving you only but 3 working business days to forward the requested Award Ownership Certificate.NOTE: An FBI Identification Record and Certificate Of Ownership often referred to as a Criminal History Record or Rap Sheet, is a listing of certain information taken from fingerprint submissions retained by the FBI in connection with arrests and, in some instances, federal employment,Naturalization or military service. If the fingerprints are related to an arrest, the Identification Record includes name of the agency that submitted the fingerprints to the FBI, the date of arrest, the arrest charge, and the disposition of the arrest, if known to the FBI. All arrest data included in an Identification Record is obtained from fingerprint submissions, disposition reports and other reports submitted by agencies having criminal justice responsibilities.The FBI will charge you and take proper action against you if you do not proof to us the legitimacy of the fund you are about to receive. Thank you. James B. Comey, Jr. C-C -. Homeland Security Council C-C -. CIA C-C -. International Police On Monday, April 18, 2016 7:50 AM, FBI Office < washington.field@ic.fbi.gov > wrote: J. Edgar Hoover Building , 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington , D.C. 20535-0001 USA www.fbi.gov ATTENTION: BENEFICIARY This e-mail has been issued to you in order to officially inform you that we have completed an investigation on an International Payment in which was issued to you by an International Lottery Company. With the help of our newly developed technology (International Monitoring Network System) we discovered that your e-mail address was automatically selected by an Online Balloting System, this has legally won you the sum of $2.4million USD from a Lottery Company outside the United States of America. During our investigation we discovered that your e-mail won the money from an Online Balloting System and we have authorized this winning to be paid to you via INTERNATIONAL CERTIFIED BANK DRAFT. Normally, it will take up to 5 business days for an INTERNATIONAL CERTIFIED BANK DRAFT by your local bank. We have successfully notified this company on your behalf that funds are to be drawn from a registered bank within the world wined, so as to enable you cash the check instantly without any delay, henceforth the stated amount of $2.4million USD has been deposited with IMF. We have completed this investigation and you are here by approved to receive the winning prize as we have verified the entire transaction to be Safe and 100% risk free, due to the fact that the funds have been deposited with IMF you will be required to settle the following bills directly to the Lottery Agent in-charge of this transaction whom is located in Cotonou, Benin Republic. According to our discoveries, you were required to pay for the following, (1) Deposit Fee's ( IMF INTERNATIONAL CLEARANCE CERTIFICATE ) (2) Shipping Fee's ( This is the charge for shipping the Cashier's Check to your home address) The total amount for everything is $98.00 We have tried our possible best to indicate that this $98.00 should be deducted from your winning prize but we found out that the funds have already been deposited IMF and cannot be accessed by anyone apart from you the winner, therefore you will be required to pay the required fee's to the Agent in-charge of this your transaction In order to proceed with this transaction, you will be required to contact the agent in-charge ( Mr. Mark Ben ) via e-mail. Kindly look below to find appropriate contact information: CONTACT AGENT NAME: Mr. Mark Ben E-MAIL : PHONE: +229 68658982 You will be required to e-mail him with the following information: FULL NAME: ADDRESS: CITY: STATE: ZIP CODE: DIRECT CONTACT NUMBER: OCCUPATION: You will also be required to request Western Union or Money Gram details on how to send the required $98.00 in order to immediately ship your prize of $2.4million USD via INTERNATIONAL CERTIFIED BANK DRAFT from IMF, also include the following transaction code in order for him to immediately identify this transaction: EA2948-910. This letter will serve as proof that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is authorizing you to pay the required $98.00 ONLY to Mr. Mark Ben information in which he shall send to you, Faithfully Yours, For And On Behalf Of Federal Bureau of Investigation Mr.James B. Comey, Jr. Executive Director FBI Headquarters in Washington , D.C.J. Edgar Hoover Building , 935 Pennsylvania Avenue,NW Washington , D.C. 20535-0001 USAwww.fbi.govATTENTION: BENEFICIARYThis e-mail has been issued to you in order to officially inform you that wehave completed an investigation on an International Payment in which wasissued to you by an International Lottery Company. With the help of our newlydeveloped technology (International Monitoring Network System) we discoveredthat your e-mail address was automatically selected by an Online BallotingSystem, this has legally won you the sum of $2.4million USD from a LotteryCompany outside the United States of America. During our investigation wediscovered that your e-mail won the money from an Online Balloting System andwe have authorized this winning to be paid to you via INTERNATIONAL CERTIFIEDBANK DRAFT.Normally, it will take up to 5 business days for an INTERNATIONAL CERTIFIEDBANK DRAFT by your local bank. We have successfully notified this company onyour behalf that funds are to be drawn from a registered bank within the worldwined, so as to enable you cash the check instantly without any delay,henceforth the stated amount of $2.4million USD has been deposited with IMF.We have completed this investigation and you are here by approved to receivethe winning prize as we have verified the entire transaction to be Safe and100% risk free, due to the fact that the funds have been deposited with IMFyou will be required to settle the following bills directly to the LotteryAgent in-charge of this transaction whom is located in Cotonou, BeninRepublic. According to our discoveries, you were required to pay for thefollowing,(1) Deposit Fee's ( IMF INTERNATIONAL CLEARANCE CERTIFICATE )(2) Shipping Fee's ( This is the charge for shipping the Cashier's Check toyour home address)The total amount for everything is $98.00 We have tried our possible best toindicate that this $98.00 should be deducted from your winning prize but wefound out that the funds have already been deposited IMF and cannot beaccessed by anyone apart from you the winner, therefore you will be requiredto pay the required fee's to the Agent in-charge of this your transaction Inorder to proceed with this transaction, you will be required to contact theagent in-charge ( Mr. Mark Ben ) via e-mail. Kindly look below to findappropriate contact information:CONTACT AGENT NAME: Mr. Mark BenE-MAIL : international.monitory.fund@yandex.com PHONE: +229 68658982You will be required to e-mail him with the following information:FULL NAME:ADDRESS:CITY:STATE:ZIP CODE:DIRECT CONTACT NUMBER:OCCUPATION:You will also be required to request Western Union or Money Gram details onhow to send the required $98.00 in order to immediately ship your prize of$2.4million USD via INTERNATIONAL CERTIFIED BANK DRAFT from IMF, also includethe following transaction code in order for him to immediately identify thistransaction: EA2948-910.This letter will serve as proof that the Federal Bureau of Investigation isauthorizing you to pay the required $98.00 ONLY to Mr. Mark Ben information inwhich he shall send to you,Faithfully Yours,For And On Behalf OfFederal Bureau of InvestigationMr.James B. Comey, Jr.Executive Director On Wednesday, April 20, 2016 4:11 PM, JAMES B. COMEY < donrobi56@alice.it > wrote: Attention: Beneficiary, This is the final warning you are going to receive from us, do you get me? I hope you understand how many times this message has been sent to you? change your email password because they hacked your password and if you change it do not send it to anyone another time, We would also send a letter to the company/agency that you are working for so that they could get you fired until we are through with our investigations because a suspect is not supposed to be working for the government or any private organization. Your ID which we have in our database have been sent to all the crimes agencies in America for them to inset you an their website as an internet fraudsters and to warn people from having any deals with you. This would have been solved all this while if you had gotten the CERTIFICATE ENDORSED AND STAMPED as you were instructed in the e-mail below. This is the federal bureau of investigation (FBI) am writing in response to the e-mail you sent to us and am using this medium to inform you that there is no more time left to waste because you have been given a mandate. As stated earlier to have the document endorsed, signed and stamped without failure and you must adhere to this directives to avoid you blaming yourself at last when we must have arrested and jailed you for life and all your properties will be seized and bank account will be confiscated too. You failed to comply with our directives/instruction and that was the reason why we didn't hear from you, as our director has already been notified about you get the process completed yesterday and right now the WARRANT OF ARREST has been signed against you and it will be carried out in the next 48hours as strictly signed by the FBI director. We have investigated and found out that you didn't have any idea when the fraudulent deal was committed with your information/identity and right now your ID is placed on our website as a wanted person, I believe you know that it will be a shame to you and your entire family because after then it will be announce in all the local channels that you are wanted by the FBI. As a good Christian and a Honest man, I decided to see how i could be of help to you because i would not be happy to see you end up in jail and all your properties confiscated all because your information's was used to carry out a fraudulent transactions, i called the EFCC and they directed me to a private attorney who can help you get the process done and he stated that he will endorse and stamp the document at the sum of $68 usd only and i believe this process is cheaper for you. You need to do every possible thing today and tomorrow to get this process done because our director has called to inform me that the warrant of arrest has been signed against you and once it has been approved, then the arrest will be carried out, and from our investigations we learnt that you were the person that forwarded your identity to one impostor/fraudsters in Nigeria when he had a deal with you about the transfer of some illegal funds into your bank account which is valued at the sum of $10,500,000.00 only. I pleaded on your behalf so that this agency could give you till this week-end so that you could get this process done because i learnt that several e-mails has been sent to you without getting a response from you. Bear it in mind that this is the only way that i can be able to help you at this moment or you would have to face the law and its consequences once it had befallen on you. You would make the payment through western union money transfer with the below details. RECEIVER'S NAME:Henry Chuma ADDRESS: Benin Republic, CITY. . . . COTONOU TEXT QUESTION: BETTER ANSWER: BEST AMOUNT: $68 Senders Full Name: Sender Full Address: Direct Phone Number: MTCN::::::::::::: Send the payment details to me as stated above and make sure that you didn't hesitate making the payment down to the agency by today so that they could have the certificate endorsed, signed and stamped immediately without any further delay. After all this process has been carried out, then we would have to proceed to the bank for the transfer of your compensation funds which is valued at the sum of $10.500,000.00 usd which was supposed to have been transferred to you all this while. Note: All the crimes agencies have been contacted on this regards and we shall trace and arrest you if you disregard this instructions. You are given a grace today to make the payment for the document after which your failure to do that will attract a maximum arrest and finally ygu will be appearing in court for act of terrorism, money laundering and drug trafficking charges, so be warned not to tryn anything funny because you are been watched. change your email password because they hacked your password and if you change it do not send it to anyone another time, Yours in service, James B Comey From: info@fbi.gov Reply-to: internet-wiretap@dept-federalbureau-investigation.info Sent: 4/20/2016 9:23:31 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time Subj: VERY URGENT AND IMPORTANT NOTIFICATION . . Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Anti-Terrorist And Monitory Crime Division. Federal Bureau Of Investigation. J.Edgar.Hoover Building Washington Dc Customers Service Hours / Monday To Saturday Office Hours Monday to Saturday: Direct Email: internet-wiretap@dept-federalbureau-investigation.info Dear Beneficiary, Series of meetings have been held over the past 7 months with the Secretary General of the United Nations which ended 3 days ago and Its obvious that you have not received your fund which is is the sum of $4,500,000.00 due to past corrupt Governmental Officials who almost held the fund to themselves for their selfish reason and some individuals who have taken advantage of your fund all in an attempt to swindle your fund which has lead to so many losses from your end and unnecessary delay in the receipt of your fund. The National Central Bureau of Interpol enhanced by the United Nations and Federal Bureau of Investigation have successfully passed a mandate to Some President whose country are involved in internet scam to boost the exercise of clearing all foreign debts owed to you and other individuals and organizations who have been found not to have receive their Contract Sum, Lottery/Gambling, Inheritance and at this point we which to congratulate you because your Fund is now in our care here in the United States so you have nothing to ever lose again and this is the reason why we have provided you with our private and Official Email address for you to be %100 confident that you are dealing directly with the United States FBI (internet-wiretap@dept-federalbureau-investigation.info) Note that you have just one option of receiving your fund which is just Bank to Bank Wire Transfer, this was approved due to all the unnecessary fee that where always being demanded by various Offices/Department in the past which we do not want that to ever occur ,We also guarantee the Wire of your fund to be successfully reflect in your Bank Account within 48 hours after the receipt of transfer charges has been confirmed from you because everything has been signed by The United Nation as well as we the FBI which made us so sure about every our word states in this letter including 100% money back guarantee if you do not receive payment within 48 hours after transfer charges have been confirmed. Yours Sincerely, Mr. JAMES B COMEY FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE WASHINGTON, D.C. 20535 > Subject: FBI HEADQUARTERS IN WASHINGTON, D.C > To: info9@enufon.gq > From: info9@enufon.gq > Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2016 05:15:01 -0400 > > ANTI-TERRORIST AND MONITORY CRIMES DIVISION > FBI HEADQUARTERS IN WASHINGTON, D.C. > FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION > J. EDGAR HOOVER BUILDING > 935 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE, NW WASHINGTON, D.C. 20535-0001 > DATE: 26/04/2016 > > Attention Fund Beneficiary > > This is to officially inform you that the Central Bank in Nigeria has wired the sum of Ten Million, Five hundred thousand U.S Dollars into the United States of America in your name as the beneficiary. > > The said funds is still under intense investigation from this office regarding it's source. > > The Central Bank of Nigeria knowing fully well that they do not have enough facilities to effect this payment directly into your account, used what we know as a secret diplomatic transit payment (S.T.D.P) to pay this fund through wire transfer. > > However, Secret diplomatic transfer payments are normally funds related to drug/terrorist and money laundering system of payment. > > The Question now is? why must your payment be made in such secret transfer? If your transaction is legitimate and not related to drug/terrorism, why can't the Central Bank in Nigeria effect direct transfer into your account than secret diplomatic payment transfer? > > Due to the increased difficulties and thorough scrutiny by the American authorities when funds come in through such payment process from Europe, Africa and Middle East and based on the records we have had in the past, such method of payment has always been identified as drug/ terrorist/money laundering funds. > > However, in line with the United States policy on funds transfer, as soon as these funds are transferred into the United States, it is our compulsory obligations to establish the credentials and official recognition of this funds before final crediting into your account. > > For this reason therefore, You are advised to contact the United States Funds monitoring unit, a sub-division of the US Treasury department for the Certificate of Funds Legality Immunity Seal of transfer in our Virginia office for the procurement of the needed documents. > > This Document or Certificate empowers the transfer and also licenses that funds originating from Europe, Africa and Middle East are free from terrorist/drug and money laundering and ISIS. > > Failure to provide this document within 3 days will warrant us to confiscate these funds and further charge you for money laundering offenses. > > We will allow the funds to be released into your account as soon as you make provision for the essential document. > > Awaiting your urgent response to this effect. > > > Yours faithfully, > James B. Comey > Director FBI. If you received a similar letter, please ignore it. Do not answer it. If you do, you will end up on more of the mailing lists used by the criminals behind this fraud. Read more.... , , , , . Forget Tinder, Here Comes Metadating Trending News: Tinder Is Dead, Long Live Metadating Why Is This Important? Because the number of steps you took this week could be the new has a good sense of humor. Long Story Short Researchers at Newcastle University have come up with a new form of dating called metadating where the information stored by devices such as your smartphone is used to find suitable partners. Long Story Our smartphones, tablets and laptops probably know more about the real us than anyone else so it makes sense that they could probably do a better job of finding you a suitable partner than your (heavily fictionalized) dating profile. Dating sites dont usually ask for your heart rate, number of steps taken or hours slept each night the kind of information automatically gathered by your smartphone but researchers at Newcastle University have experimented with what would happen if they did. On a speed dating night, couples were paired according to the data their devices would record on them and gave information on food intake, how far theyd been away from home that day, how often they called their mother and how well theyd slept. The results will be presented at CHI 2016 in California next month but at least one couple from the experiment have formed a long-term relationship through metadating. For this test the participants filled in a questionnaire (rather than hacking into their phones) and they then discussed their stats with prospective partners at the dating event. The potential dates filled in a section of information called My Self with factors like walking speed and shoe size, then they listed favorite books and films and gave information on recent habits such as distances walked. They then filled in a blank sheet with the data as they wanted it to be shown for example one participant used their FitBit data, another chose to write "Miles Run This Week: 0" and swapped sheets with others, in total showing their information to 28 others. Study author Chris Elsden of Newcastle Universitys Open Lab said in his paper Metadating: Exploring the Romance and Future of Personal Data: Some explicitly chose unusual and interesting data to record, while others felt they should be more honest and accurate. However, for all participants, the hand-drawn profiles offered a new and more expressive way of sharing and talking about their data. The key to metadatings appeal seems to be picking the data that you feel gives an interesting representation of your character as a ticket for talk with a potential partner rather than boring them with a statistical breakdown of your typical Monday at work. Elsden explains: Our study showed that you can be creative with data, you can play around with the way you present it and use it to relate to other people. Id like to see something like Instagram for data, where you could be playful and find new ways to design what your data says about you. Own The Conversation Ask The Big Question: Is metadating more effective than Tinder? Disrupt Your Feed: Thanks metadating, I never realized how sexy it could be to tell a date how many steps Ive taken or when I last called my parent Drop This Fact: More than 10 million people use Tinder daily. UK Issues Travel Warning To Tourists Visiting The United States Trending News: The UK Just Slapped The US With A Travel Warning Why Is This Important? Because its depressing that it has come to this Long Story Short The UKs Foreign Office issued a travel warning to its LGBT population about visiting certain parts of the US. This follows the passing of laws in North Carolina and Mississippi widely considered homophobic and anti-trans. Long Story The laws passed in the two conservative southern states have been stirring up outrage and controversy for weeks now and, not surprisingly, people outside the US are taking notice. Usually, the UK Foreign Office wants LGBT travelers to simply take care abroad. But now it has included a specific mention of the laws passed in North Carolina and Mississippi in the Local Laws and Customs section of its US travel advice web page. It reads, The US is an extremely diverse society and attitudes towards LGBT people differ hugely across the country. LGBT travellers may be affected by legislation passed recently in the states of North Carolina and Mississippi. Before travelling please read our general travel advice for the LGBT community. The North Carolina HB2 law, known as the bathroom bill, bans individuals from using public bathrooms assigned to the gender they were not born with. And, more stringently, it prohibits North Carolina municipalities from passing anti-discrimination ordinances designed to protect the LGBT community. The bill has already cost the city of Raleigh at least $3 million in lost tourism and business revenues, and will likely cost much more as companies cancel their plans to open branches and facilities in the state in protest of the law. By some estimates, another $44 million is at risk. Raleigh city council recently passed a motion calling for the repeal of HB2. Over in Mississippi, HB1523, the so-called religious liberties law, takes North Carolinas law a step further. While including provisions against trans people using the bathrooms for the gender they identify as and limiting the ability of cities to pass anti-discrimination laws, HB1523 also allows businesses and religious groups to deny certain services to LGBT individuals. Those services include wedding planning, adoption support and counselling. In a statement on its website, the LGBT-advocacy group Human Rights Campaign said, It is both frightening and embarrassing that one of our nations staunchest allies has warned its citizens of the risks of traveling to North Carolina and Mississippi because of anti-LGBT laws passed by their elected officials. It is now more clear than ever that these terrible measures are not only harming individuals and taking an economic toll on the states, but are also causing serious damage to our nations reputation, and the perceived safety of LGBT people who travel here. The travel warning comes on the heels of ESPN's dismissal of broadcaster Curt Schilling after he shared a meme that supported North Carolina's anti-transgender legislation. Own The Conversation Ask The Big Question: Will continued international shaming lead to the repeal of these laws? Disrupt Your Feed: Even Donald Trump opposes the North Carolina bathroom bill (on, it must be said, economic and not moral grounds). Drop This Fact: Some estimates value gay tourism in the US at around $70 billion annually. They said Tuesday night that they were tired and not yet ready to talk about Forest Wagner, 35, who was teaching the class on Mount Emmerich near Haines when he was attacked by the brown bear sow on Monday. The mountain is near Kicking Horse River in Alaska's panhandle. A student hiked into cellphone range on the mountain and called Haines police, who reported it to the Alaska State Troopers. Haines police would not comment on the incident. Initial reports were that Wagner had extensive injuries to his leg, according to a police report shared with the Washington Post. Wagner arrived in Anchorage in critical condition, but he was later upgraded to serious condition on Tuesday. A hospital spokesman said he would not give interviews. Wagner has been coordinating and teaching in the university's outdoor studies program since 2006, according to his biography. He teaches rock and ice climbing, backcountry navigation, glacier travel and mountaineering. It took several hours to get Wagner from the mountain to the hospital. Troopers reported that they were called just before noon, but Wagner didn't arrive at the Providence Alaska Medical Center until after 4 p.m. Wagner was transferred between two helicopters and first reported to be headed to Juneau before he was taken to Anchorage. Haines is about 90 miles north of Juneau and more than 500 miles from Anchorage. Troopers' spokeswoman Megan Peters said the delay is unavoidable when dealing with accidents in rural Alaska. In this case, a student had to hike down the mountain, then two troopers in Haines contracted with a helicopter company from Juneau that was used to take Wagner down into Haines to a waiting medical helicopter. "People are used to being in urban places where it takes a matter of minutes to get that help," Peters said. Troopers coordinated a helicopter rescue into Haines on Monday. None of the students were injured. They were, however, evacuated from the mountain. The bear, which had cubs, was spotted about 200 yards from the helicopter, and a trooper had to hike back in to provide security, according to the report shared with the Post. Bear sows can become aggressive if they think their cubs are in danger, experts say. The group of 11 students spent the night in Haines with University of Alaska Southeast professor Kevin Krein, Bausler said. Krein did not return messages seeking comment on the situation. Through a university spokeswoman, Krein told the Post that he was proud of the students and that they had applied their medical and wilderness training during the situation. Details about the specifics of the attack had not yet emerged, Peters said. "From what it sounds like, they were spread out," Peters said. "I don't know if anybody actually witnessed the mauling except for the person that was mauled." Juneau is about 90 miles south of Haines and can only be reached from the capital city by boat or plane. The ferry takes about four hours to travel between the two locations. University Chancellor Rick Caulfield was waiting at the Juneau ferry terminal when the students arrived late Tuesday evening. He said administrators would make sure the students got counseling if they needed it. Students also would be able to take their end-of-semester finals which are scheduled to begin next week, Caulfield said. Meanwhile, an Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist was seeking information on the attack and planned to interview the students upon their return to Juneau, spokesman Ken Marsh said. Wagner is the second man attacked by a bear in Alaska within days. A 77-year-old bear hunter is recovering at an Anchorage hospital from injuries he suffered when a grizzly mauled him in interior Alaska on Friday. The Douglas County School District guards are former law enforcement officers and already carry handguns. District security director Richard Payne said he decided to spend more than $12,000 on the Bushmaster brand rifles for the district's eight armed officers to give them the same tools as law enforcement, including the sheriff's deputies they train with. Payne said the rifles will be kept locked in patrol cars, not in the schools. Payne said he made the decision to buy assault rifles himself and the school board has not discussed it. The superintendent approved the purchase after lengthy discussion, district spokeswoman Paula Hans said. "Overall, parents recognize that based on lessons learned, we must be prepared," she said. The move raised new questions about how far school officials should go in arming employees, a practice that has become standard in the aftermath of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. Districts across the nation rushed to increase the number of school resource officers on campus and, in a few cases, allowed teachers to carry concealed weapons themselves. In Colorado, where the scars of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre still run deep, volunteer reserve sheriff's deputies patrol some elementary schools, and an armed resource officer was credited with stopping further violence at a suburban Denver high school in 2013 by cornering a student gunman, who then shot himself. Ken Trump, a school safety consultant in Cleveland, said the Douglas County case may mark the first time a district has equipped its in-house security officers with semiautomatic rifles. "Taking this step certainly ratchets up a notch the whole idea, the question of what's reasonable, what's necessary in terms of arming officers," Trump said. The Bushmaster rifle is a semi-automatic descendant of the original M-16 automatic rifle used by the military in Vietnam. Versions of it are made by different manufacturers, but a Bushmaster rifle was used in the Sandy Hook shootings. Victims' families are suing the company, claiming it is a military weapon that should not have been sold to civilians. A gunman used a similar weapon in a 2012 attack on a suburban Denver movie theater in which 12 people were killed and 70 injured. Mass shootings underscore the need for school officers to have access to rifles so they're not outgunned, said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers. "We're not talking about officers walking around with this strapped on all day long, but certainly to have reasonable access to defend against a really bad situation," he said. Securing the weapons will also be a challenge, Trump said, adding that it was not clear officers would have time to get their weapons when they needed them. Douglas County's plan could work if the security staff has the right credentials and training, Canady said. The eight security officers who will be equipped with the new weapons receive the same training as their active duty colleagues, Hans said. They will have to complete a 20-hour training course before the rifles are distributed. The first few guns will be deployed by next month and the rest will be handed out in August, Payne said. Colorado state law empowers school districts to arm their security guards. Other Denver-area school districts provide their security guards only with handguns; some have no firearms at all. Police officers who work as school resource officers carry police-issued weapons. The same is usually true when it comes time to pay Uncle Sam, especially in Colorado, Washington state and Oregon, where the booming recreational marijuana market brings in big money to state coffers. When Oregon began taxing recreational pot this year, it raked in $3.5 million in its first month a exceeding expectations for the entire year a and more than half came from pot dealers dropping off duffel bags, brief cases and shopping bags stuffed with anywhere from $7,000 to over $100,000 in cash. Having that kind of money floating around is a big security risk. So the state Department of Revenue, using a nearly $4 million budget, has been beefing up its headquarters in Oregon's capital city of Salem. It transformed a small, unused office space into a high-security operation with bullet-proof payment windows, full-time police security and a new staff solely dedicated to carrying out a meticulous cash-counting process that ends with armored cars transporting the pot cash daily to the state's bank. State government officials don't like talking much about this pot tax-collecting operation, for security reasons. It came to light only briefly in early February when a Department of Revenue official appeared before state lawmakers to request $2 million to expand the operation. "Our first person came in with a bag a a Christmas bag," Jolene Swint told a committee of lawmakers. Lawmakers were on the edge of their seats as they listened to Swint and other Department of Revenue officials that day explain the cash-counting process, step-by-step, which they likened to a bank. "This might be more like a casino than a bank," state Sen. Doug Whitsett said. Oregon's pot cash-collecting enterprise isn't the first of its kind. Colorado and Washington state put similar systems in place a security cameras, secure payment windows, cash-counting machines a when recreational sales taxes there began in 2014, and Alaska has similar plans for when its tax program rolls out next year. But new data raise questions as to how much longer these efforts will be necessary. Although weed is still at the top of the Drug Enforcement Administration's dangerous drug list, the number of banks and credit unions nationwide that are willing to handle pot money has increased more than fourfold in less than two years, from 51 in early 2014 to 260 last fall, according to the latest data from the U.S. Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. And unlike Oregon a Colorado officials declined specifics about cash payments, so the situation there is less clear a the overwhelming majority of pot business in Washington state pay taxes electronically. It's facts like these, experts say, that suggest the banking system isn't shutting out the marijuana industry as it once did. "People don't call me anymore and say, 'I'm opening a new business and I can't find a bank account,' " said Robert McVay, a Seattle marijuana business attorney. Early on, only two credit unions serviced Washington's newly regulated industry a Seattle-based Salal and Spokane-based Numerica a but now several others have followed suit, and even big banks seem more tolerant of pot-related accounts, McVay said. As for Oregon, he said, "I'm guessing it's just a matter of time. In Washington you saw Salal and Numerica do it for a little while and not get into trouble, and then you had a lot of the other ones step out and do the same thing." Today marijuana is legal or decriminalized in some form in 35 states, and voters in Arizona, California, Nevada and four other states in the East could decide this November whether to legalize recreational use. While Bank of America, Wells Fargo and other giants whose operations cross state borders are reticent about serving the pot industry, it's the state and community banks and credit unions that are stepping up, in large part because Colorado, Washington and Oregon have passed laws that protect them from state criminal liability. Yet the cash problem still exists. Even as bankers warm up to the industry, many experts say it won't be enough if and when legalization hits California, where legalization could bring in as much as $1 billion a year in tax revenue. Even if three-quarters of that money is paid electronically, as is the case in Washington, that still leaves about $250 million annually to be paid in hard cash, or nearly $21 million a month. The recent monthly cash figure in Washington, by contrast, is roughly $4 million. Beau Whitney, an industry economist in Portland who also handles government affairs for a local dispensary, said California would certainly force reform, whether by federal action or banks taking it on themselves. Washington state, meanwhile, wants to eventually wipe away cash-handling entirely. Language tucked into a budget deal that state lawmakers reached late last month allows the Liquor and Cannabis Board, which collects most of the pot taxes, to require electronic-only payments, though it's not clear how soon that might happen. "If people have the ability to pay electronically, we want to move in that direction," said board spokesman Brian Smith. Oregon, on the other hand, appears to be headed in the opposite direction. The existing cash drop off site in Salem a the only location for the entire state a was only meant to be temporary. The Department of Revenue is planning to build out a larger, more elaborate cash drop-off site on its main floor that'll handle larger cash volumes, which officials say is inevitable as the recreational industry grows and the banking situation still unpredictable. The government has long said that it places the children with family and friends regardless of immigration status. But since more children began arriving on the border in 2014, officials have not revealed how often those sponsors had legal papers. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the Department of Health and Human Services provided data showing that 80 percent of the 71,000 mostly Central American children placed between February 2014 and September 2015 were sent to sponsors who were not here legally. Another 6 percent were placed with adults who had temporary protected status, a U.S. government program that has let some Central American citizens stay and work in the country legally for more than a decade. Four percent were sponsored by American citizens and 1 percent by immigrants facing deportation proceedings. Many of the others were placed with sponsors who had other forms of legal status or who have filed immigration applications. Tens of thousands of children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras began arriving on the border in Texas in 2014, overwhelming border officials, overflowing government shelters and further backlogging the country's immigration courts. Once apprehended by border agents, the children were placed in the care of Health and Human Services in line with U.S. law until caseworkers could screen and select suitable sponsors to care for them. Republican lawmakers have blamed the border influx on Obama administration policies they say encourage kids to leave their countries and come here. They say releasing unaccompanied children to sponsors who lack legal papers encourages illegal immigration and reduces the chances the children will attend deportation hearings in immigration court. Immigrant advocates say the minors are fleeing violence and should be granted asylum. The top priority for children, they say, is to be placed with parents or close relatives so they can get on stable footing in the U.S. Any effort to deport sponsors might spook them from coming forward and put the children at risk. Immigration status is not a factor in determining whether someone can sponsor a child. But sponsors are asked their status, and those in the country illegally must provide a backup plan to care for the children if they are deported. U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican, said he was not surprised by the data. He blamed current policies for the surge on the border, but did not say whether placing children with sponsors who are here illegally created any additional problems. "Since the president refuses to enforce our immigration laws, unlawful immigrants in the United States consistently pay criminal organizations along the border thousands of dollars to smuggle their family members into the United States," he said in a statement. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California and a Judiciary Committee member, said the government is required to find a safe home and guardian for children. Immigration status shouldn't matter, she said. "If you were here as a legal resident or a U.S. citizen, you would petition for your child," she said. "Their only route is political asylum. It is not the visa system." During the 20-month period covered by the data, more than half of unaccompanied children were released to a parent. Many others were placed with siblings, aunts and uncles. Potential sponsors must provide proof of identity and their relationship to the child and undergo screening and background checks. In some cases, the department's Office of Refugee Resettlement conducts a home study to determine if the placement is safe. The office has collected information about sponsors' immigration status since at least 2005, the Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement. Sponsors who are not the children's parents also are fingerprinted. "The safety and well-being of every child in our care is of paramount importance at every stage," the statement said. The statistics were culled from a database created in January 2014, according to the department. Geyso Lemus from El Salvador said she didn't know what would happen to her 10-year-old son when he landed at a shelter in Illinois in 2014 because she didn't have legal papers, but a government social worker quickly put her at ease. Two weeks later, she said, her son was sent to live with her in Southern California. He has since been granted asylum. "She told me not to be afraid, that she wasn't from immigration," Lemus said in Spanish. "I tell other moms not to be afraid ... so long as you can meet their requirements." The U.S. Air Force's B-52 Stratofortresses on their first combat deployment to the Mideast since the 1991 Gulf war have conducted their initial airstrikes against ISIS, military officials said Wednesday. "On Monday, this iconic platform conducted its first mission against an [ISIS] weapons storage facility in Qayyarah" in northwestern Iraq south of Mosul, said Army Col. Steve Warren, a spokesman in Baghdad for Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve. Earlier this month, the B-52s, flying out of the al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, replaced B-1 Lancer bombers in the Air Force inventory for precision-guided bomb attacks against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and for close-air support missions for local forces. The B-1s returned to the U.S. for maintenance and upgrades. The Eisenhower-era B-52s last conducted airstrikes in the Mideast from a base in Saudi Arabia against Iraq during Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990s. The aircraft also flew operational missions against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq continued Tuesday and Wednesday with the main focus on the Mosul area, where Iraqi Security Forces and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters are in the early stages of attempting to isolate the ISIS stronghold, according to a task force statement. Bomber, ground-attack, fighter and remotely piloted aircraft conducted 21 strikes in Iraq, with nine of those strikes targeting the Mosul area, the statement said. "Near Mosul, nine strikes struck an ISIL staging area, an ISIL-used power plant and four separate ISIL tactical units, destroying two ISIL assembly areas, three ISIL supply caches, an ISIL mortar system and two ISIL vehicles," it said, using another term for ISIS. In a phone briefing from Baghdad to the Pentagon, Warren also said that the B-52s and all other U.S. manned and unmanned aircraft were now operating under new rules of engagement to speed up the strike approval process. The changes, first reported by USA Today, gave approval authority to lower-level commanders in situations where civilians might be put at risk. Previously, high-risk strikes had to be approved by a four-star commander at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa. "This does not translate to more civilian casualties," Warren said of the changes. "This translates to a more rapid execution of strikes because we don't have to send requests all the way to Tampa anymore. We can do it here" in Baghdad, he said. "The more authorities that are delegated down, the more rapidly we are able to respond." In some cases, strike approval will rest with Army Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, the task force commander, and in other cases with commanders below MacFarland, depending on the estimated number of civilians who might be at risk. "It's levels. It's how many civilians we believe are potentially at risk," Warren said, but approval from Tampa may still be required for the riskiest strikes. In a briefing on Monday from Baghdad, MacFarland did not refer to the airstrikes rules changes. The remarks focused mainly on the 217 additional Special Operations advisers and AH-64 Apache attack helicopters that Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced would be sent to Iraq to support the Mosul offensive. "So the advisers are going to be doing largely what we've been doing all along, which is providing the kind of military advice and access to enablers that help our partners on the ground against the enemy," MacFarland said. The Special Ops troops will "not necessarily" be closer to the front lines, but they would be "closer to the [Iraqi] commanders who are making the critical decisions on the ground," he said. MacFarland would not specify how many Apaches might be used for the push on Mosul. "I don't want to be specific on numbers" but "there's a range of ways that we employ attack helicopters in the U.S. military. And we can employ them in singles, pairs, groups of four, eight, and on and on," he said. "And how we employ those depends very much on what the mission is and what the enemy situation is." -- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com. Related Video: The U.S. Defense Department's Tricare program may increase over time the number of urgent care visits some beneficiaries can access without a referral, officials said. Starting May 23, users of the health care program under the active-duty and retiree Prime plans, as well as Tricare Prime Remote and Tricare Young Adult users, will be able to access two urgent care visits per person every year without first receiving authorization from a provider or Tricare nurse advice line. The change is part of a three year pilot program ordered last year by Congress. Those who use urgent care more than twice per year must get pre-approval or pay for the visit out of pocket. Some potential users have criticized the plan, saying that two non-approved visits per year won't be enough to truly ease the stress seeking a referral can cause. But Tricare officials said they will constantly reevaluate their visit cap, and can expand the program if they see a need. "For the three-year pilot, we do plan to make adjustments on at least an annual basis," Navy Capt. Edward Simmer, a Tricare deputy director, told Military.com in an interview on Wednesday.. "So if we see a lot of people are using up their two visits early in the year, we're going to adjust that." Simmer said the cap was based off a pilot program run for the Coast Guard in the south region that ended last May. Users in that trial were permitted four non-referral urgent care visits a year, but less than 5 percent of patients used more than two visits, he said. As that test was wrapping-up, Congress worked to include the new pilot program in legislation for 2016. Absent of that order, Simmer said, the system would still likely have run the upcoming test. "I think it does make sense now to test this on a much larger scale," he said. "Let's learn how it's going to work best." Patients are still encouraged to call the Tricare nurse advice line to seek authorization when they can in an effort to help them understand whether or not they actually need urgent care. If they receive pre-approval to visit and urgent care, their visit will not be counted against their allotment. Officials said the regional contractors, which will manage each person's urgent care use, have been instructed to develop a system that can match urgent care use to a database tracking who has received referrals and who has not. To receive a urgent care referral, users who are seen in military treatment facilities must call the Tricare nurse advice line. Those seen by civilian providers must receive a referral from their primary care provider. Urgent cares used under both the referral and non-referral program must be Tricare authorized. -- Amy Bushatz can be reached at amy.bushatz@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @amybushatz. The family of a CIA contractor killed in the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya will receive $400,000 after the agency expanded survivor benefits for employees and contractors killed in the line of duty overseas in acts of terrorism. Glen Doherty, a former Navy SEAL who was working for the CIA's Global Response staff in Libya at the time of Benghazi, held a standard federal insurance policy that pays a survivor benefit only to spouses and dependents. Doherty, 42, was divorced and had no children, rendering his family ineligible for compensation under the 1941 Defense Base Act, which still requires all overseas contractors including CIA employees to carry disability and life insurance. According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, the CIA informed lawyers for Doherty's mother, Barbara, Wednesday that the agency's policy change had been finalized. Barbara Doherty told WFXT that she was relieved that the expanded benefit had approved. She also called on Congress to repeal the Defense Base Act. "It gives me solace that the CIA has done the right thing, Doherty said. Now its up to Congress to see if they can step up to the plate." Legislation introduced last year by Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass. and Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., would expand the death benefit to include families of all defense employees killed in terror attacks since Sept. 11, 2001, even if they don't have spouses or dependents. "It is entirely disrespectful to make [the families] fight through a long bureaucratic process to get the benefits that that heroism has earned," Lynch told WFXT. The CIA policy change is retroactive to April 18, 1983, the date a suicide attacker crashed a truck into the front of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans, some of whom were CIA officers. "It wasnt about the money, at all," Doherty told WFXT. It was a fight for [all families], because they didnt have a voice and we did thats what kept us going on, knowing that they would eventually be recognize." "I am glad the [CIA] made this decision so the Doherty family and others who have lost loved ones in service to and sacrifice for our country will finally receive the recognition and honor they deserve," Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., the chair of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, said in a statement. Doherty's family filed a $1 million damages claim against the CIA and the State Department in September 2014. The Union-Tribune reported that the family will drop all claims against the federal government in the wake of the expanded death benefit. --The Associated Press contributed to this report. Retired Military Officials Are Finding High-Paying Jobs With the Saudi Government and Can Make up up to 7-Figure Salaries Working for Other Foreign Governments Retired U.S. military personnel cannot receive consulting fees or jobs from foreign governments without expressed approval... Some military families with adult children currently using a transferred GI Bill say while the housing allowance the students get as a part of the transfer eases their financial burdens, they understand why officials are looking to reduce it. Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this year approved a measure as part of the Veterans Employment, Education and Healthcare Act that would cut in half the housing allowance for military dependents using a transferred GI Bill. The new rule would only impact benefit transfers that take place more than 180 days after the change is signed into law. It would not impact families who have already transferred the benefit, are currently using the benefit or transfer it during that 180 day period. The savings from the cuts would cover the costs of a variety of programs, including increases to other aspects of the GI Bill. For example, it would fund two Fry Scholarship expansions for spouses of troops killed in action after September 11, 2001, as well as a measure allowing Guard and Reserve members on medical hold from injuries received on active duty to earn their GI Bill faster than has traditionally been permitted. A service member's GI Bill can be transferred to his children or spouse and split between them by months. The housing allowance payment is also split by months, meaning that if a child is given five months of the benefit, he will receive five months of housing allowance based on the zip code in which his school is located. Poll: Change GI Bill Transferred Benefits? Military families interviewed by Military.com said they worked with their children to choose a school based off knowledge that the money provided through the housing payment would cover much of their living expenses. They said without it they would likely have had to make different, less expensive decisions, such as choosing a school close to home. "It wouldn't be devastating -- I'm not going to make it sound absolutely horrible, but it would make us reevaluate our college budget," said one Army spouse who asked that her name not be used because of her husband's job. She said they will be putting at least one child through school using the GI Bill, and possibly splitting it between two children. They'll also be tapping into personal savings. Any money they have saved for college costs that isn't used will pay for her husband's master's degree after he retires, she said. Erin Ward, whose husband serves in the Army, said her family could not afford to send her two children to school away from home were it not for the full housing stipend. Ward's children, who split the GI Bill benefit, go to school in two different states. One child lives in school dorms, while the other rents an apartment. The housing payments help them cover the costs of those living quarters, she said. "There's no way we could do this without that, I don't know what we would've done without it," she said. Ward said their family viewed the GI Bill transfer as a "thank you" gift to their children for dealing with 15 military moves over their lifetimes. The housing allowance payment allows them to go to school without worrying about holding down a job so they can afford living expenses, she said. Without it they would likely have to work their way through school. "The one thing we wanted to give these military kids was some kind of stability, and that's what the housing allowance gave us," she said. "We told them 'you get to go to school and not worry as much about this stuff as much as other kids.' That's a benefit their father gave them to say 'hey thanks for hanging in there, military brats.'" Still, she said she knows that tight budgets mean that sometimes cuts have to happen to fund other programs, such as the three GI Bill expansions included in the House legislation. "As military families we have to look at it and say 'what's best for the greatest good?'" she said. "I think that that's a big thing -- stop looking at what's best for you and you have to look at the greater good." Alice Swan, whose daughter is using her father's transferred GI Bill to attend a state college in Pennsylvania and will graduate this year, said a 2015 rule requiring state schools to extend in state tuition rates to GI BIll funded students has drastically reduced their costs. The housing allowance, she said, covers her daughter's living expenses as well as other expenses like books, which cost far more than the GI Bill book stipend covers. A housing allowance cut, she said, will likely force families like her's to deeply examine where they send children for school. "It will make families in the future take long, hard looks at where their child goes to school," she said. "More families may have to pick having the child living at home." --Amy Bushatz can be reached at amy.bushatz@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @amybushatz. The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said Thursday that his version of the defense budget bill for fiscal 2017 would fund overseas military activities for only half a year to allocate more money to buy new equipment and maintain aging gear and facilities. Rep. Mac Thornberry, a Republican from Texas, spoke to reporters ahead of a second day of committee mark-ups for the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, annual legislation that sets policy goals and spending targets for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1. His own draft of the bill, set to be released early next week following the full committee mark-up, would preserve the overall budget topline of $610 billion from President Barack Obama's defense budget request, but bulk up base budget spending to $574 billion, with an additional $18 billion pulled from overseas contingency operations funds. This pot of money, known as OCO, funds ongoing combat operations against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, sustainment efforts in Afghanistan, and efforts abroad including the European Reassurance Initiative, a force presence effort and safeguard against Russian aggression for which Obama has asked to quadruple funding next year. Ultimately, Thornberry said, the remaining war budget will fund planned overseas activity until about next April, rather than through the end of the fiscal year in September as planned.The money had been reallocated in the mark-up, the congressman said, because of urgent concerns for military readiness, particularly in the Army and Marine Corps. "As we have dug into what is happening with our force, I'll just say in the past week or two, I've had two people say that the force is beginning to fracture like it did in the late 70s," he said. "We're losing pilots, aircraft maintainers. That means the maintainers who are left are stretched thinner and thinner, working harder and harder, shifting from squadron to squadron, whichever one's about to deploy." In recent tours of bases, he said, he had seen an F/A-18 that had flown in the 1986 air strikes on Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and spoken to pilots who were completing fewer than half the flight hours they needed for proficiency. Shortfalls like this, he said, were to blame for an uptick in major accidents, known as Class A mishaps, in which significant equipment damage or loss of life occurs, that both the Army and the Marine Corps have experienced. "There is more stress on the force than I think most of us have recognized," he said. "And if I can leave you with one point that is the strongest for me, it is absolutely wrong to send service members out on missions for which they are not adequately prepared or supported." It remains unclear how much money is expected to be redirected into operations and maintenance from the $18 billion. Emerging subcommittee drafts of the bill show significant funding increases for new purchases. The seapower and projection forces subcommittee of House Armed Services added $2.3 billion in shipbuilding funds, enough to build three additional ships, and paid for new heavy-lift aircraft for the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. The additional money will also prevent end strength cuts to the Army and fund modest force increases for the Air Force and Marine Corps, he said. All additions to the base budget, he added, were taken from the services' unfunded priorities lists, in which they highlight priorities not included in the budget request. While the $18 billion does include money for operations and maintenance and facilities, Thornberry said he believed procurement was the real way out of the readiness pit. "I don't care how many more people or more money you put into maintenance, you're going to have a harder and harder time keeping that 1980s F-18 flying, so the real answer is to replace it with an F-35," he said. "Service by service, component by component." As far as what will happen when war funding runs out next April, Thornberry said that will be a problem for the next administration to deal with after a new president takes office in January. "Maybe the new president decides it's hopeless against ISIS or whatever and decides to reduce those OCO-funded activities, in which case, you don't need as much money," he said. "Maybe the new president says President Obama got it just right, maybe new president said he's not doing enough. In that case, the new president can ask for supplemental funding to finish out the fiscal year at whatever level he or she thinks is appropriate." Asked if this partial budget solution was creating a future fiscal cliff in the active fight against the Islamic State, Thornberry cast it instead as an opportunity for the next administration to reframe policy. "It's not the best way to run a railroad, no question," he said. "Going back to what I was saying awhile ago, we've got two or three options, none of which are ideal. But if I'm going to err on the side of somebody, I'm going to err on the side of preparation and support of people in the military." -- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HopeSeck. Russia should be warned that its dangerous flybys of U.S. ships and planes could be met by force, President Barack Obama's nominee as the next NATO and U.S. European Command commander said Thursday. "Sir, I believe that should be known -- yes," Army Gen. Curtis M. "Mike" Scaparrotti said when asked by Sen. John McCain whether Russia should be told that the U.S. would take action if American lives were endangered. Pursuing the same line of questioning, Sen. Joe Donnelly, an Indiana Democrat, asked Scaparrotti whether the Russians should be told that "next time it doesn't end well for you." The general responded that "we should engage them and make clear what's acceptable. Once we make that known, we have to enforce it. "I think they're pushing the envelope in terms of our resolve," Scaparrotti added. "It's absolutely reckless, it's unjustified and it's dangerous." As NATO commander, he said one of his first actions would be to review the rules of engagement for U.S. and allied forces in the region. On Monday, two Russian Su-24 fighters made numerous, close-range and low-altitude passes while the U.S. guided missile destroyer USS Donald Cook was conducting landing drills with helicopters in the Baltic Sea. On Tuesday, a Russian helicopter circled around the Cook seven times at a low altitude. About 40 minutes later, two Su-24s made 11 close-range and low-altitude passes. Secretary of State John Kerry later said that the sailors of the Cook would have been justified in shooting down the Russian fighters. "It's unprofessional, and under the rules of engagement that could have been a shoot down, so people need to understand that this is serious business, and the United States is not going to be intimidated on the high seas," Kerry said in an interview on CNN Espanol. Scaparrotti, now commander of U.S. Forces Korea, was testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee at what could be called a historic confirmation hearing. Seated next to him at the witness table was Air Force Gen. Lori Robinson, currently commander of Pacific Air Forces, who has been nominated as the next commander of U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). If confirmed, Robinson would become the first woman to command a combatant command. Both Robinson and Scaparrotti appeared headed to easy confirmation. "I look forward to moving your nominations through the U.S. Senate," said McCain, an Arizona Republican and the SASC chairman. -- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com. Related Video: 110514_news_mckinley_pr_41.JPG TD Ameritrade announced Wednesday that it will create 75 jobs at the office space it will occupy in McKinley Towne Centre. (File photo | The Ann Arbor News) ANN ARBOR, MI -- Three months after agreeing to move into new office space at McKinley Towne Centre, TD Ameritrade announced Wednesday it will be creating 75 new jobs in Ann Arbor and investing $5.75 million. ThinkTech, Inc., a technology subsidiary of TD Ameritrade, will open a new financial services center where it will develop stock trading software in Ann Arbor. "We are thrilled to be expanding our presence in the city of Ann Arbor," said Marv Adams, executive vice president and chief operating officer, TD Ameritrade Holding Corporation in a press release. "The city has a flourishing technology and business community that we want to continue benefiting from and contributing to. We're looking forward to our planned expansion and bringing on additional talent to our team." In its announcement of the move, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) said the investment and job creation will result in a $500,000 Michigan Business Development Program performance-based grant. According to the MEDC release, Ann Arbor SPARK will be helping TD Ameritrade with recruiting talent for the office. "TD Ameritrade's new technology location in downtown Ann Arbor is exciting: It means more people working, shopping, and dining in Ann Arbor, which adds to the vibrancy of our community and our economy," said Paul Krutko, president and CEO of Ann Arbor SPARK. "What's more, with its move to a new location, there's now great space on the real estate market that's ideal for another tech company. This cycle of moving in and moving up is a sign of a healthy economy." TD Ameritrade came to Ann Arbor in 2014 and has been occupying space on the 8th floor of 101 N. Main. In January, the company announced it signed a lease to move into the entire fifth floor of the McKinley Towne Centre - roughly 23,000 square feet. The space is currently occupied by Google, but will be vacated on April 30 when its lease runs out. "TD Ameritrade's investment means Michigan residents will find good job opportunities that could well have gone to other states," MEDC chief executive officer Steve Arwood said. "The company's decision to expand here demonstrates that our business climate and our state's world-class talent make Michigan a top destination for tech companies to locate, expand and grow new jobs." Matt Durr is a business reporter for The Ann Arbor News. Email him at mattdurr@mlive.com or follow him on Twitter. DETROIT - The first 1,000 custom New Belgium Brewing Company Fat Tire bicycles from Detroit Bikes have rolled off the line. It's been just over a year since Colorado-based New Belgium Brewing announced they were tapping Detroit Bikes to manufacture a custom cruiser, which looks a little like the bike on the label of the popular New Belgium Fat Tire Amber Ale. The beer company ordered 2,500 custom bikes to celebrate its 25th anniversary. It's the largest order Detroit Bikes has ever filled. The bike takes its inspiration directly from the bike on the Fat Tire beer label, officials said last year. The order makes Detroit Bikes one of the largest bicycle manufacturers that builds bikes in the U.S. The only way to get your hands on one of the custom cruisers is through a New Belgium fundraiser, a giveaway or if you're celebrating a one-year anniversary as a New Belgium employee, according to a Wednesday news release. The ordered prompted Detroit Bikes to bump its workforce from 20 to 40 employees. "As I started to think about production and making bikes back in 2011, Detroit was the best place to look," said Zak Pashak, founder and president of Detroit Bikes, in the release. "Detroit has such a rich history of production and certainly we've benefited greatly with a skilled local workforce. This partnership is hugely exciting because it marks a big shift in the industry and an amazing show of support for American bike manufacturing." Said Ryan McKee, New Belgium Brewing bike designer: "Bikes are a big part of our history and culture so partnering with Detroit Bikes just made sense in every way...Zak first reached out to us and we were inspired by his vision. We've been looking to source U.S. made bikes for some time, which isn't easy at scale. We now get to work with a U.S. bike manufacturer to produce thousands of bikes, while also giving an economic boost to Detroit." New Belgium will mark its 25th anniversary with a celebration later this summer, according to a release. Detroit Bikes specializes in minimalist bicycles. The company was launched in 2012 by Pashak in a 50,000 square foot factory on the city's west side with a team of five people. The company's A-Type and B-Type bikes are both assembled and manufactured in Detroit -- a claim no other company can make. Ian Thibodeau is the business and development reporter for MLive Media Group in Detroit. He can be reached at ithibode@mlive.com, or follow him on Twitter. Michigan is moving closer to increasing its role as an international freight hub -- and adding hundreds of new jobs -- as plans take shape for the Gordie Howe International Bridge in Detroit, said Andrew Doctoroff. Beyond the economic impact of the bridge, the new span -- expected to open by 2020 -- will symbolize a reawakening of Detroit and Michigan, he said, due to the ability of bridges to define urban landscapes. Doctoroff, special projects advisor for Gov. Rick Snyder, also is known as "the bridge guy," due to his focus on plans for the 2nd international crossing over the Detroit River. The $2.1 billion bridge financed by Canada "is moving full speed ahead," said Doctoroff on Wednesday, April 20, during a panel presentation in Lansing coordinated by Michigan State University's Institute for Public Policy and Social Research. Doctoroff continued: "More progress can't come too quickly. There are compelling needs for a new crossing." The six-lane bridge will add to the nearby Ambassador Bridge's four lanes, allowing trucks a streamlined route at the Canadian side and creating more logistics opportunities in both nations due to more direct access to rail, highway and air transportation. Also included in the project are two state-of-the-art customs centers, with the opportunity to attract more private investment on both sides of the border. "I believe it can transform the logistics industry in Michigan," Doctoroff said. Land acquisition in Canada is nearly complete, Doctoroff said. About 130 acres in Windsor, southwest of the Ambassador Bridge, will be used for the largest Canadian Port of Entry along the U.S. border. On the U.S. side, acquisition is underway for the 300 houses and 45 businesses located within the 145 acres in southwest Detroit that will be used for inspection facilities for both inbound and outbound vehicles at the U.S. Port of Entry. Also included in the Detroit portion of the project is a new I-75 interchange that will include "four new crossing road bridges, five new pedestrian bridges, four long bridges crossing the railway and connecting I-75 to the US Port of Entry, and service roads and local road improvements," according to the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority. The project also is moving ahead with a Request for Proposals for the design, construction and operations of the bridge. That RFP is being finalized, Doctoroff said, to give the three competing consortium groups announced earlier this year specific information about what the WLBA seeks in the project. "It's coming soon," Doctoroff said. "We're working on it really hard. It's an uppermost priority." Among the details to be included in the RFP are the community benefits expected for the Delray neighborhood as the host community for the project. Zeenat Kotval-Karamchandani, an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at Michigan State University, said that while pockets of Detroit are experiencing economic growth, Delray isn't among them. The area -- about 5 miles southwest of downtown, south of Mexicantown -- is "completely surrounded by industry," she said, but about 2,500 people make it home. And one-third of the households are in poverty. "Remember it is a residential area," she encouraged. "There are people there." Meanwhile, the value of freight traveling between the U.S. and Canada fell to $575.2 billion in 2015, a 12.6 percent drop, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. About $69.1 billion came through Michigan, the most of any state. Data also shows that trucks carried the most freight to and from Canada, at 58.3 percent. Rail accounted for 15.7 percent. The most common freight is auto-related: Vehicles and vehicle parts, according to the DOT. Other speakers at the MSU IPPSR event were Bill Anderson, political science professor at the University of Windsor, and Roger Hamlin, professor of urban planning and public administration at MSU. Paula Gardner covers Michigan business for Mlive.com. She can be reached by email or follow her on Twitter. Ben's Soft Pretzels - Meijer - Rockford IL 2.jpg In the last few years, Ben's Soft Pretzels have opened in a doze Meijer stores including the Rockford store show here. (Courtesy photo) GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- Ben's Soft Pretzels is finding its sweet spot in Meijer stores. In the last few years, the fastest-growing soft pretzel franchise in the United States has opened a dozen locations in Meijer stores across the Michigan-based retailer's Midwest footprint. "Meijer has been great partners and have offered a tremendous real estate opportunity to us," said Scott Jones, Ben's Soft Pretzels CEO and co-founder of the Goshen, Ind.-based company. Ben's Soft Pretzels opened its newest West Michigan location in the Knapp's Corner Meijer, 1997 E. Beltline Ave. NE, on Thursday, April 21. That location, along with bakeries at Meijer stores in Rockford and Standale, are owned and operated by Dan Ross and Kim Wojahn. "It's the best pretzel you will ever eat," said Wojahn, who lives in Holland. There are also West Michigan locations at the Kalamazoo and Grand Haven Township Meijer stores. Ben's Amish-inspired soft pretzels are baked fresh on-site daily and hand rolled with imported German pretzel salt. "It's a very unique pretzel," Jones said. "It's yeast rise, a fully light texture and more bread-like. It's twice the size of our competitors'." The pretzels sell for $3.50 apiece. There are 11 different dips that range from nacho cheese to spicy mustard to hot. They can also be sweetened up with hot fudge or vanilla icing. The pretzels are only served within 30 minutes of when they are pulled out of the oven, Jones adds. There are currently 60 Ben's Soft Pretzels bakery locations throughout Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida. Ben's Soft Pretzels has a master lease and license agreement with Meijer, as well as Wal-Mart, which allows its franchise partners to open bakeries. A corner in a store like Meijer or Wal-mart can be a less-expensive location than a standalone operation. "We know we are getting a very good customer base," Jones said. The company expects to open more than 20 locations in 2016. The business launched in 2008 by Scott, Brian Krider and Ben Miller, an Amish baker who came up with the recipe.. Miller was making baked goods when he fell into the pretzel business, and Scott and Krider convinced to him to go into business with them. Ben's has been in Wal-Mart locations longer, but the company has more Meijer locations in the Midwest, especially in Michigan. He and his partners own the northern Michigan locations in Williamsburg and Alpena. Ben's Soft Pretzels was recently named "Best Fast Food Franchise" by FranchiseRankings.com. A franchise costs between $119,000 to $308,000, depending on the location. The chain pays homage to National Pretzel Day, which is Tuesday, April 26, by giving away free jumbo soft pretzels with a minimum $1 donation to the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund. The nonprofit organization provides support to United States military personnel and their families. Last year, Ben's Soft Pretzels raised more than $30,000 to support the organization. Shandra Martinez covers business and other topics for MLive. Email her or follow her on Twitter @shandramartinez. HOLLAND, MI - LG Chem Michigan Inc. announced it will host a job fair on Tuesday, April 26, in hopes of finding 50 new employees for its 5-year-old Holland facility. The job fair will take place at Michigan Works, located at 121 Clover St, in Holland from 10:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. The job fair is open to everyone seeking employment opportunities with the company. Open positions primarily include technical operators, starting at $13.50 an hour, and some production engineer, supervisor and office positions, the company said in a press release on Thursday, April 21. LG Chem, which makes lithium ion polymer batteries for electric vehicles (EV) and energy storage systems, said it will have more than 400 employees when the latest round of hiring is complete. "Due to increased volume, LGCMI continues to grow," the company said in a press release. "Globally, LG Chem has numerous automakers as clients for EV batteries including GM, Ford, Renault, Hyundai/Kia, Volvo, Audi and Daimler." In February, LG Chem announced the 2017 Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid will be a new customer for the lithium ion battery packs made at its factory in Holland. The announcement marked the second major automotive customer for the factory, which has supplied batteries for the General Motors Corp.'s Chevrolet Volt, Spark and Cadillac's CT6 since 2013. RELATED: Holland's LG Chem and GM show off 2016 Volt's new, improved battery Candidates should come prepared with a copy of a recent resume and may pre-apply online at www.lgchemjobs.com or at the job fair. Those interested in operator positions should bring their WorkKeys certificate if they already have one. Otherwise, WorkKeys testing can be scheduled at the job fair. Jim Harger covers business for Mlive Media Group. Email him at jharger@mlive.com or follow him on Twitter or Facebook or Google+. FENNVILLE, MI - Brian Geerlings estimates his 2,000 cows produce enough milk each day to supply each resident of Grand Rapids with an 8-ounce glass of milk. But that's not all his cows produce. Thanks to three "anaerobic digesters" that process the manure on the "back end" of the farm, the Scenic View Dairy also generates enough electricity to power more than 700 homes. "We're able to produce our milk with a negative carbon footprint," says Geerlings, a 36-year-old farmer who moved his Scenic View Dairy to Allegan County from the Zeeland area in 2000 to escape the urban sprawl that inhibited expansion. The cows are milked three times a day, eating from a carefully blended mix of silage designed to give them the optimal amount of protein, fiber and nutrients. "It's calculated to produce milk," says Geerlings, who estimates each cow eats about 110 pounds each day. Housed in open-air barns designed to keep them comfortable and out of the weather, each cow's milk output is individually weighed and recorded. "We have records from the day she's born until the day she dies," said Geerlings, who said the herd produces about 18,000 gallons of milk each day - about 75 pounds per cow. After it leaves the cow, the milk is piped into a chiller and transported within 24 hours by truck to a milk processing plant in Reed City, where it is converted into Yoplait yogurt, or Coopersville, where it dried and used in the food processing industry or sent overseas. That's on the front end. What makes Geerlings' farm unusual is his handling of the cows' manure, which has historically been treated as a smelly nuisance. At Scenic View Dairy, the manure is treated like gold. While the cows are in the milking parlor, their manure is scraped into holding tanks and sent to one of three large green silos, where it is heated over a 22-day period. The heating process causes the slurry to emit methane gases that are captured by the large cones. As a bonus, capturing the methane gas also eliminates much of the smell associated with the farm. The captured methane is used to fuel two 12-cylinder Caterpillar motors that run round-the-clock to drive electrical co-generators that supply electricity for the farm and are fed back into the grid operated by Consumers Energy. Besides eliminating an electrical bill that could reach up to $15,000 a month, Geerlings estimates he sells about two-thirds of the electricity generated by the farm back to Consumers Energy. "We just renewed our 20-year contract with Consumers," he said. The farm's negative carbon footprint also allows Geerlings to sell "carbon credits" to companies who need to offset their carbon consumption. While the market price of carbon credits fluctuates, Geerlings estimated he pockets about $50,000 a year from their sale. After the methane is extracted, liquid is expelled from the manure and returned to the barns for bedding. Some of the "bio-mulch" also is sold to landscape companies for mulch or soil conditioners. The liquid from the manure is stored in lagoons and injected back into the 3,200 acres which Geerlings owns or rents in the area to raise corn, soybeans, wheat and rye. Much of those crops are fed back to the herd. The digesters not only add cash to Geerlings' bottom line, but also stabilizes his balance sheet when dairy prices fluctuate. "There are times in the past year when the digester has made more than the cows," says Geerlings, who employs 35 full-time workers. "It takes dedication and it takes focus to make it pay." Jim Harger covers business for Mlive Media Group. Email him at jharger@mlive.com or follow him on Twitter or Facebook or Google+. Prince played dozens of live shows in Michigan over the years, from Kalamazoo to Saginaw and many stops in between, especially during his early career. From 1980 to 1988, he played the state nearly two dozen times, and he was back in the mid-1990s through the 2000s for more. Prince's last Michigan show was a concert with 3RDEYEGIRL at The Fox Theatre in Detroit on April 9, 2015. The Detroit News reported then that Prince raised his fist and yelled: "Detroit! It seems like only yesterday. They told me it's been 11 years! Well, if that's true, we're gonna play 17 hits in a row, until I see tears!" Plenty of tears for Prince fans today, as millions mourn the loss of this music legend, who was found dead at his Paisley Park studio on Thursday morning. Did you see Prince at any of these shows? Share your Prince stories in the comments below, and we can all remember what a dynamo he was as a performer. Fire it up Tour 23 MAR 1980 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Cobo Arena 04 APR 1980 ::::: Saginaw, MI, USA - Saginaw Civic Center: Wendler Arena Dirty Mind Tour 20 DEC 1980 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Cobo Arena 11 MAR 1981 ::::: Royal Oak, MI, USA - Royal Oak Music Theatre (1st show) 11 MAR 1981 ::::: Royal Oak, MI, USA - Royal Oak Music Theatre (2nd show) 20 MAR 1981 ::::: Ypsilanti, MI, USA - EMU - Bowen Field House Controversy Tour 04 DEC 1981 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Joe Louis Arena 01 FEB 1982 ::::: Ann Arbor, MI, USA - Hill Auditorium 1999 Tour 30 NOV 1982 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Masonic Temple Auditorium 01 DEC 1982 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Masonic Temple Auditorium (1st show) 02 DEC 1982 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Masonic Temple Auditorium (2nd show) (am, billed as: 01 DEC 1982, midnight) 02 DEC 1982 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Masonic Temple Auditorium (1st show) 03 DEC 1982 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Masonic Temple Auditorium (2nd show) (am, billed as: 02 DEC 1982, midnight) 03 DEC 1982 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Masonic Temple Auditorium 08 DEC 1982 ::::: Saginaw, MI, USA - Saginaw Civic Center: Wendler Arena 25 FEB 1983 ::::: East Lansing, MI, USA - MSU Auditorium 27 FEB 1983 ::::: Ann Arbor, MI, USA - Crisler Arena 13 MAR 1983 ::::: Kalamazoo, MI, USA - Wings Stadium 08 APR 1983 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Joe Louis Arena Purple Rain Tour 04 NOV 1984 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Joe Louis Arena 05 NOV 1984 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Joe Louis Arena 07 NOV 1984 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Joe Louis Arena 08 NOV 1984 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Joe Louis Arena 09 NOV 1984 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Joe Louis Arena 11 NOV 1984 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Joe Louis Arena 12 NOV 1984 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Joe Louis Arena One off shows, no tour 06 JUN, 1986 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Masonic Temple Auditorium 07 JUN, 1986 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Cobo Arena Love Sexy Tour 30 OCT 1988 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Joe Louis Arena 31 OCT 1988 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Joe Louis Arena Act I Tour 01 APR 1993 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Fox Theatre 02 APR 1993 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Fox Theatre Love 4 One Another Charities Tour 13 JAN 1997 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - State Theater Jam of the Year Tour 21 JUL 1997 ::::: Clarkston, MI, USA - Pine Knob Music Center 18 DEC 1997 ::::: Grand Rapids, MI, USA - Van Andel Arena 27 DEC 1997 ::::: Auburn Hills, MI, USA - The Palace of Auburn Hills New Power Soul Festival Tour 24 OCT 1998 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Joe Louis Arena Hit n Run Tour 14 NOV 2000 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - The State Theatre 19 NOV 2000 ::::: Grand Rapids, MI, USA - Van Andel Arena Prince Celebration Tour 23 JUN 2001 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Joe Louis Arena One Night Alone Tour 01 MAR 2002 ::::: Saginaw, MI, USA - Heritage Theater 06 MAR 2002 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Detroit Opera House Musicology Tour 20 JUN 2004 ::::: Auburn Hills, MI, USA - The Palace of Auburn Hills 21 JUN 2004 ::::: Auburn Hills, MI, USA - The Palace of Auburn Hills 30 JUL 2004 ::::: Detroit, MI, USA - Joe Louis Arena 31 JUL 2004 ::::: Auburn Hills, MI, USA - The Palace of Auburn Hills 01 AUG 2004 ::::: Grand Rapids, MI, USA - Van Andel Arena HitnRun Tour 09 APR 2015 :::: Detroit, MI, USA - The Fox Theatre (Most tour dates taken from this listing of Prince's tour history.) Jessica Webster covers life and culture for MLive, and will be listening to her Prince records all night tonight. Reach her at JessicaWebster@mlive.com. You also can follow her on Twitter and on Google+. [April 21, 2016] Wave Launches Residential Gigabit Internet Service in Portland Wave (www.wavebroadband.com), a gigabit fiber and broadband services company, today announced the launch of its Wave G gigabit service in Portland, part of an accelerated expansion of Wave's fiber network. Wave G symmetrical (upload as fast as download) gigabit internet service is now live and available at Portland's Ladd Apartments, a 332-unit residential tower in downtown Portland's Cultural District; three Pearl District properties in Block 17 (281 units), Asa Flats and Lofts (212 units) and The Parker (177 units); as well as Ella (199 units) in the city's Southwest Waterfront area. Wave has also reached agreements to further expand its fiber network and gigabit service to other properties in and around downtown Portland, including: Block 37 (270 units), NV (285 units) and Rivage Apartments (260 units), all scheduled to come online this spring and summer. The company has provided gigabit service since 2008 to thousands of Seattle-area residents under the CondoInternet brand and recently expanded its gigabit offerings to other markets such as San rancisco and Everett, WA. Wave plans to continue extending its gigabit service to other areas in and around Portland. Wave's symmetrical gigabit internet is available for $80 per month, and its 100Mbps symmetrical connection is just $60 per month. The company recently announced $130 million in financing to accelerate the expansion of its fiber network in Oregon, California, and Washington. Wave has invested heavily in expanding its gigabit service by building out its fiber network, hiring additional staff and taking other measures to improve and expand its infrastructure. "Portland is a growing, vibrant market and we are excited to introduce Wave's gigabit service to the city," said Harold Zeitz, Wave's President and COO. "Wave has delivered robust and reliable gigabit service for the past six years and we will continue to expand its availability as we grow our fiber network. Wave G provides a great customer experience and gives multi-unit buildings a compelling offering for both current and prospective residents." Portland-area property managers, developers and residents can register their interest in gigabit internet service on the Wave G website (http://gowaveg.com/our-buildings/new-building-request/). About Wave Wave is a gigabit fiber and broadband services company, providing true high-speed internet service and a variety of related products and options for business and residential customers in key areas of Washington, Oregon and California. The company is headquartered in Kirkland, Washington. For more information, visit www.wavebroadband.com. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160421005401/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] By Kwamina Tandoh, GNA Accra, April 20, GNA - Government would protect Ghana's exports within the framework of the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), Dr Ekow Spio-Garbrah, Minister of Trade and Industry, has assured Ghanaian exporters to the European Union (EU). He said the Trade Ministry is currently seeking cabinet's input and support on options available to Ghana in the wake of the October 1, 2016 deadline under the current EU regulation granting market access to Ghana. Dr Spio-Grabrah said this when a delegation of major exporting companies in Ghana paid a courtesy call on him in Accra, to express their concerns over a possible curtailment of market access into the EU by the October 1 deadline. He said: 'In the coming weeks, hopefully in May, government will announce its position on the EPA. 'Let me, however, assure all exporters and their employees that government has much interest in ensuring economic growth, increase in employment as well as an expansion in export trade and industry and will do whatever it takes to protect Ghanaian exports into the EU', Dr Spio-Grabrah said. Mr George Kporye, Corporate Affairs and Administration Manager of Golden Exotics Limited, said stakeholders, customers and staffs of the various companies are getting nervous at the prospect of losing their investments and jobs hence the appeal to the Minister to intervene. Mr Anthony Nyame Baafi, Director of Foreign Relations at the Ministry of Trade and Industry, said with the exception of Nigeria, the Gambia and Mauritania, 13 of the 16 ECOWAS countries have signed the EPA. 'Unfortunately in order to ratify the EPA, all the West Africa countries need to have signed in line with the modalities in the EPA negotiations before its implementation could commence,' he said. Mr Baafi said there were four policy options opened to Ghana under the current circumstance which included seeking an extension of the current EU regulation granting market access to Ghana and other Interim EPA (IEPA) eligible countries from October 1, 2016 to October 1, 2017. He said the second option would be for Ghana to request for the IEPA to include the favourable terms in the ECOWAS EPA since the latter has more favourable terms for both parties and promotes regional integration which Ghana has been an avid advocate in the region. Mr Baafi said the third option is for Ghana to expedite action to sign and ratify the IEPA which was initialed in December 2007 to secure and also guarantee uninterrupted market access for its exporters. The last option would be for Ghana to draw up compensation mechanisms for companies exporting to the EU, especially for non-traditional exports before the end of August 2016. Some of the companies present at the meeting were Bomark Farms Ltd., Barry Callebaut, Golden Exotics, Volta River Estates Ltd., Pineapple Exporters Association, Ghafco Company Ltd and the Federation of Ghanaian Exporters. GNA Baga Sola (Chad) (AFP) - Sitting on a mat in the shade cradling a six-month baby, Falmata Marara touches her mouth, her stomach, and then her mouth and stomach again. The message couldn't be clearer, she's hungry. A gold ring in her nose and wearing a vibrantly coloured scarf and dress, Marara, a member of the Bodoma people, five months ago fled her Lake Chad island home after an attack by Nigeria's feared Boko Haram Islamists. Fougo, her home island, is one of 85 scattered across Lake Chad that have been emptied of people since Boko Haram's six-year campaign of terror began, said UN humanitarian affairs officer Florent Mehaule. Some 110,000 people displaced by the violence live in makeshift camps around the immense waterway straddling Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria that supplies millions of people with water, Mehaule added. But if safe for now, all live in fear of fresh Boko Haram terror -- and most suffer from hunger. "I've run out of sorghum" or cereal, mumbles mother of six Marara, whose baby is feverish after a bout of diarrhoea and who had walked that day to Baga Sola from her reed hut refuge to a mobile clinic run by Doctors Without Borders (MSF). - Body searches - Set up not far from the invisible underwater border separating the four Lake Chad nations, the clinic deals daily with a stream of people with malaria or respiratory problems, but also reports a spike in cases linked to malnutrition. Fear of Boko Haram runs high in Baga Sola where a triple suicide attack in October killed 41 people. MSF is taking no risks. Because the extremists are increasingly resorting to female suicide bombers, women seeking medical help first are body-searched in an area well away from the mobile MSF centre. They're then submitted five by five to a second search before being allowed into the waiting room -- a carpet thrown on the ground. Some 10 kilometres (six miles) away across parched and sandy terrain, MSF runs a tiny mental health centre to help those displaced overcome the trauma of rape, violence and flight. - 'Acute paranoia' - "Some people become anorexic and no longer eat, others just close up on themselves," said Charlot Serferbe Dabo, a clinical psychologist. "Depression can be immediate or surface months later," he added. One patient suffered from acute paranoia, convinced he was being hunted night and day by Boko Haram fighters. The doctor said he believed he was also taking a powerful painkiller called Tramadol which is widely sold to addicts on the black market. Nigeria-based Boko Haram has left thousands dead and 2.6 million homeless in that country alone since 2009. Moving back and forth across Lake Chad it has brought its war to set up an Islamic state across the borders as well. Now the four border nations as well as neighbouring Benin have banded together to rout the Islamists and cut supply lines. Among the refugees around the lake are fishermen deprived of food and income after the authorities banned fishing in a bid to flush out and starve the Islamists. - 'Throats slit' - "Many have returned home to their islands, despite the threat of Boko Haram attacks," said an MSF doctor. "They say they'd rather risk being killed on a full stomach than dying of hunger bit by bit. But recently, three of them had their throats slit on their return." Around Baga Sola, local civilian vigilante groups keep a watchful eye on comings and goings, specially on market day. Crowded mosques and markets are favoured targets for Boko Haram, though nowadays, with traffic stopped across Lake Chad, there's little for sale at the stalls. There are no fresh fish, no Chad beef in Nigeria and no dried Nigerian fish in Chad. "The security situation is a little better," said Ocha's Mehaule. "But people are still not going home which indicates there is still a risk." Techne Summit (www.TechneSummit.com), the renowned international entrepreneurship technology event that acts as a platform by including the main global players in the technology industry, will launch this year once again in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, Egypt from 7th to 8thMay 2016. Carrying the same slogan of TECHNOLOGY.INNOVATION.TALENT on which the event concept is built, the two-day summit will act as a platform including the main global players in the technology industry, namely: industry professionals as speakers, technology businesses, entrepreneurs and startups, investors, users and media representatives. Techne Summit 2016 will be under the auspicious of The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology where Minister H.E. Eng. Yasser El Kady, will be leading the event's opening ceremony. Techne Summit will also be under the auspicious of The Federation of the Egyptian Chambers of Commerce, The Information Technology Industry Development Agency, The Federation of the Egyptian Chambers of Commerce and The General Division for The Computer and Software. Techne Summit 2016 will build on the success of Techne Summit 2015 held back in October 2015 where it was the first of its kind event in the region. This year the event will continue with the same philosophy of capitalizing on the crucial role of the technology and communications sectors in the development of nations, and fostering innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship to serve the development process. Techne Summit will present international speakers with the opportunity to share their experience with professionals, enthusiasts in the industry, as well as network with others in the technology field from around the world. Techne Summit will be an opportunity for startups to grow in the Middle East &North Africa region by connecting with investors and distributers by showcasing their products and acquiring funding for their businesses as well as foster the exchange of ideas and experience across various regions worldwide. Techne Summit aims to create a platform where booming startups in the technology market are able to showcase their latest innovations, granting their products or services greater visibility among industry professionals and enthusiasts. Similarly participants will have access to the latest innovations and recent business trends, therefore gaining exposure and increased knowledge in the field. Similarly investors will be able explore new areas of potential business collaboration and success, paving the way to mutual business growth for all participating parties. The event aims to ultimately develop the technology industry by fostering the mindset of decentralization within the field and building bridges of informational and cultural exchange between regions. An important goal of Techne Summit is to also grow the contribution of conference tourism to the city of Alexandria and in turn Egypt. Markade Agency event organizers, along with organizing partners Innovideas, revealed on the Techne Summit website the astounding speaker line-up from around the world who will be sharing their experience and expertise at this year's event. Says Tarek El Kady, Managing Director Markade, Last year Techne Summit 2015 was a great success. This year with Techne Summit 2016 we are building on that success and catering to the feedback that we received from both participants and speakers alike to present an unprecedented technology event experience to the region. El Kady adds, Our 2015 event presented networking opportunities between what was close to 48 speakers, 900 attendees, 39 Startups and 100 volunteers, from 12 countries worldwide. Techne Summit has definitely established itself as a leading event in the technology industry in the region and our aim along with our partners is to continue to foster that success. For Techne Summit 2016 we are working with double the speakers' figure of that of Techne Summit 2015, four times the startup one and triple the attendance, while reaching out to more countries in the region. Techne Summit 2016 offers a variety of new additions to the previous year's event. For the first time Techne Summit will feature the field of Medical Technology. Acclaimed speakers will discuss how technological innovations can contribute to the diagnosis, monitoring or treatment of diseases and medical conditions, ultimately having a positive impact on individuals' quality of life. Techne Summit 2016 also has also announced that this year's event will feature a wide array of elite competitions for startups that extend throughout the two-day event and present shining startups with opportunities to pitch and in turn fund their businesses. Among the highlighted competitions is The SeedStars Alexandria 2016 Competition, which aims to support tech or tech-enabled startups with prizes of over $1,000,000 in value. The competition is powered by SeedStarsWorld, a Swiss based startup competition that takes place in emerging markets with the goal of reducing unemployment in those markets through the promotion of and investment in entrepreneurship. The top 10 startups will be invited to pitch in front of an investment panel and compete for the title of Most Promising Seed-stage Startup of Seedstars Alexandria 2016. The winning startup will join the global Seedstars Family and take part in the regional and global Seedstars Summits that include the boot camp and investor forums, while earning one flight ticket to Switzerland to compete for competition's investment prizes. At Techne Summit 2016 Aramex sponsors the Aramex Techne Summit Startups Competition, a competition that encourages promising businesses by offering Plantinum, Gold and Silver Winner packages to the top three startups selected. The prize packages support startups to operate both swiftly and economically by presenting varying discountson Aramex cash rates for international inbound and outbound express services, membership offers for Aramex Shop&Ship services as well as mentorship prizes. El Kady concludes, With Techne Summit 2015 we are excited and hopeful. With Techne Summit 2016 our enthusiasm has transformed into passion and our hope into confidence. We are confidently optimistic that the event will be one that produces a highly positive impact on the technology industry in the region. Techne Summit 2016 will take place in the monumental Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a symbol of innovation and development built as to represent the ancient Library of Alexandria that was lost in antiquity in the Egyptian city of Alexandria founded in 331 BC by Alexander The Great. Tickets to Techne Summit 2016 are available online at www.TechneSummit.com or at Alef Bookstore outlets and co-working spaces M3mal,Villa 307 and AlMaqarr. Visit the Techne Summit (www.TechneSummit.com) or SeedStars websites to apply for SeedStars Alexandria 2016 Competition. For further information please visit Techne Summit:www.TechneSummit.com or contact [email protected] https://technesummit.com/#/contactus www.facebook.com/technesummit About Markade Agency Markade Agency is a marketing communications agency specializing in event creation and management, corporate events, conference and seminar organization as well as advertising, graphic design, branding, indoor and outdoor signage, BTL material production and TV and radioproduction. Markade Agency has a vast array of clientele across international markets that range in markets from technology to retail, FMCG, construction, medical and pharmaceuticals. For more information contact [email protected] ACCRA, Ghana, 20 April 2016 - Continental Tire is embarking on a growth strategy in Sub-Saharan Africa with the official launch of a new legal entity in Ghana. The new division, Continental Tire West Africa, focuses the company's efforts on developing the local market and maximising its exposure across the region. "The launch of the new West Africa legal entity is driven by our African Dawn initiative, which recognises the growing economic importance of African on a global scale," says Shaun Uys, Managing Director of Continental Tire Sub-Saharan Africa. "As one of the world's top three tyre manufacturers, Continental has an important role to play in developing the industry across the continent by expanding our footprint, increasing the range of products and delivering improved customer service and support. "The new division will enable us to achieve this by expanding our distribution channels and the number of retail outlets, targeting new business opportunities in the fleet, rental, government, ports and mining sectors, and having a dedicated team based in Ghana to drive this process," Uys says. Continental Tire has an existing presence in Ghana, through a long-term partnership with Rainbow Motors. The local company has a warehouse and ContiPartner dealer in Accra, as well as a network of independent dealers across the country. "Following the successful model that is used in the highly competitive South African market, the new legal entity will enable us to involve existing and new partners to further expand our reach across the region, thus accessing a far broader market with top-quality products and fitment services," says Johann Liebenberg, Continental's General Sales Manager for Passenger & Light Truck Tyres Replacement SSA. "The footprint growth relies on expanding the ContiPartner network and investing in the growth of this retail channel across the region," Liebenberg states. "Additionally, we will be working with new partners to develop our ContiPartner Express stores in fuel stations and other environments. This includes supporting resellers and street market dealers who have the potential to grow into formal retail outlets." The German tyre company will also support independent branded dealers with their Continental Associate Program (CAP) stores, which are supplied with certain signage elements and preferential pricing in exchange for tyre purchases from its official distribution channel - a process that ensures optimal product quality and efficiency of all related services. Extensive product range Continental Tire West Africa's expanding retail presence is backed up by an extensive product portfolio covering all the major sectors. This includes passenger car, 4x4, SUV, pick-up, truck, commercial and specialty applications. It will also target fleet, government, lease and rental business opportunities in Ghana, as well as growing its port and mining product base in these crucial commercial sectors. Continental is the company's premium product range, providing class-leading performance, safety and braking. It has a high level of original equipment (OE) fitment amongst the world's top automotive manufacturers and has a large and diverse line-up that covers virtually every industry. General Tire is a trusted, legendary American brand with a proud heritage. It matches proven quality and reliability with superb value-for-money. In the interests of affordability, Matador is offered as the company's budget contender, which is available at highly competitive price points, while offering dependable performance. Continental will roll out its proven truck tyre business in Ghana too. The Conti360 Fleet Services division caters for commercial customers, providing a range of services designed to achieve maximum efficiency and the lowest overall driving costs. From the selection of tyres through to the correct fitting, ongoing monitoring and reporting, fast response in the event of a tyre breakdown to the proper handling of worn tyres, Conti360 is an exclusive all-round service that keeps the wheels of commerce and industry turning. Accra , April 20, GNA - Government could save much money if it takes the bold step to pay workers on its payroll via the e-zwich platform, Mr. Archie Hesse, CEO of the Ghana Inter-bank Payment and Settlement System (GhIPSS) has said. He said the biometric features of the e-zwich card make it impossible for multiple payment of salaries to people and non-existent persons since a live finger is required to authenticate payment onto the e-zwich card. Mr Hesse said apart from fighting payroll fraud, paying public sector workers through the biometric payments system would also play a big role in promoting a cash-lite regime and also pave the way into an electronic payment regime in the country. He cited as example the National Service Secretariat which was able to save about GHa 140 million Ghana within a year after it signed onto the e-zwich platform as a means of paying national service personnel. The Acting Executive Director of the National Service Scheme (NSS), Dr Michael Kpessa-Whyte, who spoke on the usefulness of the e-zwich platform, said through the biometric e-zwich platform the NSS was able to weed out about 35,000 duplicated and non-existent personnel names on the scheme. He told a user group forum organised by global technology company, EDAPT and the GhIPSS that the Scheme had benefitted greatly from the use of the platform. 'We have on the average saved about GH12.2 million a month and within one year, we have saved over GH140 million. 'On the average, the scheme is paying about 75,000 service personnel a month, currently we are paying on the average, 40,000 personnel a month, and we couldn't have done this without the GhIPSS platform,' he said. He said through the biometric feature the scheme was able to strike out the names of people who had become perpetual service personnel. 'We even saw some individuals in the system like 15 times, same user name but with different pictures, but of course the finger prints cannot be different in the system. 'We have blocked all of them and what we intend to do is to write their names and submit to the security agencies because as far as we are concerned they are cheating the state,' he said. GNA 21.04.2016 LISTEN Yams produced in the country, which boast unparalleled premium quality in both ECOWAS and international commodities markets, is faced with unsatisfied demand due largely to lack of required policy interventions, private sector investment and the non-existence of a value chain. In recent years, the economic value of the countrys yam industry has grown rapidly with its foreign exchange earnings shooting up to the third position among the non-traditional export commodities. The export volumes for 2014 stood at US$18.8million, while 2013 export figure increased to US$20million whiles demand for the commodity in both fresh and processed forms is increasing in new markets both abroad and local. The yam export trade which employs over one million workforce is the third largest producer in West Africa after Nigeria and Cote dIvoire, but it is the leading exporter of crop accounting for over 94 percent of total yam exports in West Africa. About 90 percent of Ghanas yams are exported to the US, Canada, UK and Europe. According to a research conducted by Monitoring African Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) between 2005 and 2010, yam production in the country contributed about 16 percent to the countrys agricultural gross domestic product (GDP), accounting for 11 percent of total consumption in 2007. From 2005 to 2010, yam production accounted for about 24 percent of total roots and tubers production in the country (MoFA 2010). Mr. Kwabena Taylor, Executive Secretary, Ghana Root Crops and Tubers Exporters Union in an interview, explained that the industry faces tremendous opportunities as well as challenges and requires support policies, private sector investment, and to become organized as a whole value chain. He explained that the yam export strategy is aimed at increasing the export volumes from the current 35,000 metric tonnes to as high as 400,000 metric tonnes and with an expected revenue of about US$5billion by the next five years. He proposed value addition to the root crop which will position the commodity to be competitive in the international market. We are thinking of value addition from the processing of yam from the pharmaceutical industry. We need to get ourselves competitive and meet international standards. The new strategy, he said, will certainly provide the opportunity to market fresh yam effectively, grow existing markets and expand into new markets, i.e. beyond the West African and West Indian communities. We are working on geographical expansion of distribution of yams in the U. S market which holds about 17 percent of the market share and we think that we can increase that. We are also working to export to Japan. He proposed the need to work on the right application of fertilizers to be able maximize the use of land, adding that farmers practice fallow system which is not too good. We should be able to use same land over and over again by the right application of fertilizers. Major industry challenges Last year, out of a possible 100,000 tonnes of yam available to exporters per annum only about 25,000 to 35,000 tonnes get exported, as factors like excessive use of chemicals by farmers, poor handling, and delays at the ports caused the produce perish at a faster rate. The country thus earns less than a billion dollars from exporting the root tuber, which is supposed to be the third-largest foreign exchange earner among the non-traditional export commodities. The target, meanwhile, is to do US$5billion dollars of exports by the fifth year of a National Yam Development Strategy that was outdoored in October 2013. The Yam Development Strategy has five key milestones, including a plan to increase the export of fresh yam. Practical challenges of the sector and scarcity of funds are hampering the growth of the industry. The practical challenges can be overcome when the country have the right infrastructure and does the right things in terms of monitoring the quality of the yield through its cultivation. The Yam Development Council is considering introducing to food processors innovations like yam-wine, yam-powder and slicing up the fresh yam and vacuum packing it for export, and even domestic consumption and if the plans materialise, slices of packaged yam could be purchased in supermarkets and sent home to be cooked. The Yam Development Strategy document is structured that between now and the next five years it is expected to see some key changes in the way the commodity is handled with the yam and the businesses around it. The strategy envisions making Ghana the leading source of premium quality yam products with global penetration and contributing to an improved Ghanaian economy and livelihoods. One of the objectives of the strategy is to develop commercially-driven research and development as well as capacity building in the yam value chain, the Council said. 21.04.2016 LISTEN The 2012 batch of Dabala Senior High Technical School (Dastech) returns home this weekend with lots of engaging events for students. The 2012 batch of the school are set to storm the school with a two day event to commemorate the homecoming event under the theme Making Education My Priority Whilst Still in School. This homecoming event has been scheduled to come off this Friday, 22nd and Saturday 23rd April, 2016. Speaking to the Senior Prefect for the year group, Mr Emmanuel Tordzro he revealed to the media that they deem it fit to help the school in diverse ways but for now, through the purchase of a stand-by generator and also empowering the students as well as sharing experiences with them. This event will be a historical event since it the first time a year group have returned home in a short time period of four years to at least mingle with their younger ones. Meanwhile, the Member of Parliament for the South Tongu Constituency, Hon. Kobla Mensah Woyomeh has endorsed this homecoming stating that having the mindset to even go back to your school is a sign of responsibility. "This shows that when you get, you will give back society". The MP opined. On preparations, the Senior Prefect, Mr Tordzro mentioned that they are far ready for the event even though the monetary aspect is not moving as expected. He was however optimistic that with regards to organization, I may say we are on track The activities for the event have been listed as Debate, Motivational Speeches from guest speakers, Drama and song ministrations as well for the first day. The second day according activities are games and refreshment. Mr Tordzro is therefore calling on all old Students of Dabala Senior High Technical School and all interested parties from far and near to join in making this history on this coming Friday and Saturday. Dabala Senior High Technical School is one of the vibrant second-cycle institutions located in the South Tongu Constituency of the Volta Region in Ghana. It was established some 25 years ago to help in the educational of the citizenry in that part of the country. 21.04.2016 LISTEN What Africa? Africa has thousands of social economic and political ecosystems. This has made some people to refrain from discussing the continent as one. What about Europe, China, India and the United States of America? How homogeneous are they? Africas position in geopolitics has one common denominator: minimal proactivity in geopolitical affairs and reacting to what is thrown at it. According to the just concluded 14th Eastern Africa Media Forum organized by the Inter Region Economic Network (IREN), nothing is innocent when it comes to Africa in geopolitics. That soap opera you watch on your television set; your favorite teams in the English Premier League; fashion and your favorite economic theory are just but parts of the many moving pieces world powers deploy to influence the world view. Why is it important to discuss Africa in geopolitics? Public intellectuals on the continent have churned out lots of literature on the impact of the Washington Consensus. When the Washington Consensus market based approach to public policy hit the continents shores, it dramatically changed the economic ecosystems. State run economic platforms either collapsed or were privatized. Benefits ranged from individuals gaining more access to a variety of goods and lifestyles. The flipside was destruction of production capabilities in poor countries, eviction of thousands of people from their economic livelihoods and or enriching of few political elites who gobbled up what was initially publicly owned outfits. The high waves of the Beijing Consensus that promotes pragmatic state owned enterprises are on the horizon. Will African outfits adopted from the Washington Consensus withstand the new wave? Naive about how the world works, nation-states and regional organizations such as the African Union appear to have a firm belief that external sources are altruistic and keen to assist Africa. Geopolitics is generally defined as a given states power to control territory, shape international policy and shape other states foreign policy. Such states use a variety of approaches to shape both international policy and other states foreign policy. Art is one such approach that is commonly deployed in still images, motion pictures (movies), theatre and music. For example, Shakespeare may not be as innocent as we think. The Economist (March 19, 2016) asked: Was Shakespeare part of a universal human culture which belongs to everyone, or an extension of colonial power? The power of images has influenced African elites to adopt the lifestyles that they watch in movies. For instance, one would courageously plunder public coffers to live just like a movie star. In the Media forum mentioned above, Ms. Rasna Warah discussed how aid and financial systems are used to shape Africas engagement with the rest of the World. She shared shocking revelation of how France controls Francophone Africas financial system by literally banking money for African countries. Dr. Onyango Oketchs iconoclastic images had everyone on the edge. Think of the popular image of the last supper with bearded Africans and a nude African woman at the center! According to Dr. Oketch, no image is innocent. Could it be the reason cartoonists have of late been on the receiving end from political elites and media houses? Think of the images that words imprint on your mind. Visualize, for example, Dr. David Ndiis opinion that Kenya is a cruel marriage; its time to talk divorce (Saturday Nation, March 26, 2016). The furious reaction by Kenyas public intellectual gatekeepers tells it all. Mr. Edward Wanyonyi discussed the rise of politico military diplomacy that has stifled information from the unstable Somalia. Censorship in the name of patriotism is likely to prolong Somalia woes as no solutions can be found in the absence of honest discourse on whats actually bedeviling the country. Mr. Churchill Otieno decried Africas lack of international wire services (for news gathering) and inability to utilize the new media to drive its own content. In this not so innocent world, Africa still surrenders to the other to shape it world view. In geopolitics, Africa paints an image of a continent that simply reacts to external maneuvers but is too lazy to dare and move. The bubbly Kenyan politics and how opponents deploy to contain each other shows innate possibility for Africans to be proactive in geopolitics. So each time you are out there watching your favorite European premier league, Hollywood movie or reading that best seller novel, remember that you are imbibing one of the many moving pieces in geopolitics. Can we adopt domestic approaches, upgrade them and deploy African pieces globally? James Shikwati The author is Founder Director of Inter Region Economic Network [email protected] 21.04.2016 LISTEN It are the RR Rolls-Royce of Human values, birth-Right and Responsibility. Someone born into a certain country is not by his own choice but assignment. Once given, he has to take responsibility for the welfare of his native country to ensure happiness finds its grounds everywhere in it. Foreigners with good intentions should be welcomed, while opposition must be employed against any unwanted intruders even when losing life is the price to pay for. Before the star over Bethlehem was seen by the three wise man, in Mali sciences were at its peak to the extent that Pharaohs asked Doctors from Mali to heal them. Books in Malis archives are witnesses of this glorious times till today. The first written Law Book was carved 800 B.C. in Baghdad in stone while in Europe people were unable to read and write and sciences not known. After the death of Peter in Rome the Catholic Church widened its base and structure. Cardinals were installed. The Popes, for several generations not only were married or had children, were living anything but a Christian Life of that kind we demand of a Pope today. During the Holy Roman Empire of German Descent covering most of continental Europe, the Pope was elected and installed by the German Kaiser. When the time came Kaiser Barbarossa had to beg the Pope for forgiveness to have opposed him and underwent the famous Walk to Canossa to be left standing in front of the Gate of the Castle the Pope used for his safety, it became clear that the times of human development began to change drastically. The time was there no longer for Royals of Europe to determine a Pope to their taste, which would ultimately crown them and give their reign godly blessings with legitimacy, but a time in which Church and Christian Believe started to play a vital moral role in Europe, while Royals were forced into their more limited position in their societies lives. Along the development of Christianity in Europe, Sciences emerged among Moncks to better the world and have it under control of the Church in Rome. Doctors and Pharmacist, Inventors to build better ships, movements of cargo and humans sprung up all over Europe financed by the Church. When Royals saw the position the Church is moving in, they themselves started the concept of Invention and Sciences to stand along the Church on firm and solid grounds. The competition between the Heavenly and Earthly world began. While Nights of the Cross and Templer went into Jerusalem to strike most Unbelievers they found on their way to the grave of Jesus Christ, Royals of Europe build vast ships armadas to set sail for Africa, the Americas, India and China. Based on their modern technology invented in centuries past, they found in Africa people that have not developed far but got stuck in their own history. What was once a Highlight of Human Development and Humanity was compared to the Representatives of Europe of very low standard. Corrupt members of Royal Families in Africa were easily to be convinced to let the White Man rule in their country and finally mess them up seen so well during Colonial times of Africa and beyond. To take control over a country effectively takes always to parties, an aggressor and the locals that are not united but allow this to happen. If the Africans in each single state would have continued progressively where Mali and other countries like Egypt once stood, no White Man would have ever had the chance to exploit the African continent. While Europe was going the way of Christianity and Sciences, Africa was engaging in Witch-Craft and Wizards to take control of their spirit and daily life. Family curses are the main problem of Humans; prominent in African societies. They are equipped with the bad intentions for someone wanting to be the star in his family and stand out having the ability to support the poorer side of it, to rather pull the talented family member down to continue the poverty cycle the family is tied in of generations past and to come (Quotation: Prophet Emmanuel Badu Kobi, Glorious Wave Church Int., Sakumono, Ghana). As long as Witches and Wizards in Africa are not defeated forever and Christianity has not found its rightful place in all hearts, spirits and minds, Africans will find it difficult to move ahead and even overtake the White Man. No problem will exist forever, which gives hope for Africans to stand out in History once again as the birthplace of Humanity. It is a long way ahead, but when someone is willing to fight daily, he stands a very good chance to win daily and ultimately create a better form of Humanity than ever know before to Man Kind. The last will eventually be the first over time and with strong perseverance. Africa: If you want it, you can do it! Author: Dipl.-Pol. Karl-Heinz Heerde, Sakumono Estate, Block D10, Aprt. 9, Tema West, Ghana, phone +233(0)265078287, [email protected] , 00.00.2016 A top university lecturer and researcher Dr. Stella Nyanzi of Makerere University Institute of Social Sciences and Research (MISER) stripped naked in front of the media, accusing her Boss professor Mahmood Mamdan of mistreating her and for the police to be corrupt. This happened at Makerere University in Uganda, when a female researcher stripped naked before the media and police. You police you are corrupt, you dont care for the oppressed, I will not open for any one, I want my office back these were some of the words from a female researcher who locked herself inside the Center after finding her office premise closed with orders from her Boss Professor Mamdan. According to Dr Stellah, this last resort drama did not happen un knowingly, she has been planning it for quite some time. Am not insane, am normal, am ready to be called anywhere to answer for this act, I have been planning for this day, I solely taken over the whole building, you can see how serious I am a stern Dr Nyanzi said. I am not a lecturer, am a researcher, I must not be treated like this. The seemingly irritated female researcher shouted. This came about when the nonsense professor Mamdan ordered the Dr Stellah to vacate her offices and find another place where she can operate. The Dr Stella shackled herself, gummed her lips, and painted her body and the walls in protest. She said that according to her culture if you are annoyed, and have no one to help, you can strip to show your dismay, and this is a strong weapon for a mother of twins who has nowhere to run to. In African Culture for example in Uganda, a Mother of Twins is highly respected and given special treatment, respect and title Nalongo. The Baganda tribe one of the most influential in that East African nation, call her Nalongo and the Man Ssalongo. Nalongo must not be wronged because according to their beliefs, if she can strip for you, it is a curse and you can die or have bad lack for the rest of your life. The controversial Professor Mamdan was not available for comment however, the University Vice Chancellor Prof Ddumba Ssentamu, condemned the act , and has instituted a committee to find out what really went wrong. The Ugandas Minister of Ethics and Integrity Dr. Father Lukoda, has called for the arrest of the embattled Dr Stellah for her act. In Uganda pornography or any other illicit behaviors are punishable by over ten years in prison once the culprit is found guilty. What Dr Stella has done at Makerere one of the oldest and reputable Institution in Africa, has received mixed reactions from the local people and beyond the borders, some are in support and others against the act. The Minister is being accused for partiality, saying why he didnt arrest the disgruntled community in the north of the country that did the same illicit act last year. Elderly mothers stripped naked before the late Internal Minister General Aronda Nyakairima and Land affairs Minister Daudi Migereko crying for their ancestral land which some un known people wanted to steal. Few months later the internal affairs minister passed on while coming back from South Korea and some superstitious Africans attributed Arondas death to what the elderly mothers did. The researcher also accused the police that was called to evict her, saying that it is corrupt and does not care for oppressed. Talking in her local lingual the grieved researcher said, I have showed him my Pu** and my clitoris, he must f**k off, shouted the disgruntled Researcher before the media, referring to her Boss Professor Mahmood Mamdan. Professor Mamdan a respected intellectual is a Ugandan born of Asian ancestry, he has lectured in many Universities around the globe, namely University of Cape Town, Columbia University in the United States, and now he heads the Institute for Research (MISER) at Makerere University in Kampala Uganda. Stripping especially for women to show dissatisfaction, one can argue and say that, it is a natural thing though inhuman however, this dubious, un ethical act if I can call it so, can not only be attributed to Africas culture. I remember some years back, a group of white English women stripped before the Birmingham palace, protesting against the Kingdom. [email protected] The Northern Regional Police Command have intercepted 320 AK47 ammunitions and two sets of empty magazines concealed in a Bolgatanga to Kumasi bound bus at Savelugu near Tamale in the Northern Region. The police also arrested one suspect, Yussif Salifu, 28, in connection with the intercepted ammunitions. The Savelugu Police Commander, Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP), Mr Kwadjo Tawiah, confirmed the incident to the Daily Graphic in an interview. He said the incident occurred on Sunday evening, April 17, 2016 at about 10:00 pm. He said a commercial bus from Bolgatanga, the Upper East Regional capital which was heading towards Kumasi on reaching the Savelugu police barrier was stopped and checked. According to ASP Tawiah, when the police conducted a check on the bus, they found 320 AK47 ammunitions and two sets of empty magazines in one of the passenger's bag. He said the owner of the bag, Yussif Salifu was arrested and sent to the Northern Regional Police crime office in Tamale for further interrogation. When contacted, the Northern Regional Police Public Relations Officer (PRO), Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP), Mr Ebenezer Tetteh, said the suspect was in the police custody assisting with investigation. He said the suspect said during interrogation that he bought the ammunitions from someone in Bawku in the Upper East Region and was transporting them to Kumasi to sell. 21.04.2016 LISTEN Last week, the Small Arms Survey and Armament Research Services (ARES) released a new study of online weapons trafficking in Libya. The results show how social media is mobilising the trade of black market weapons across North Africa. Most concerning are the whereabouts of Gaddafis stockpile of Soviet-made SA-7 surface-to-air missiles. How does the online availability of these weapons underline the terrorist threat to civilian aircraft? ARESs dataset of online transactions serves up a valuable insight into the types of weapons which are freely changing hands in Libya. It is unsurprising that small arms pistols, rifles, and other hand-held weapons are the most prevalent weapons type traded online. More significant are the findings on light weapons, or portable anti-aircraft, anti-tank, or heavy machine guns. With these weapons trading at higher costs (from US$5,900 for heavy machine guns, to US$62,000 for a ZPU-2 14.5mm anti-aircraft system) only better resourced militants are likely to be able to acquire them. Among the sales of light weapons documented, the unguided shoulder-held RPG-7 was the most common rocket-launcher traded. ARES also uncovered sales of five types of anti-tank guided weapons (ATGWs), in addition to Russian and Swiss-manufactured hand-held grenade launchers. But most concerning of all, ARES uncovered two man-portable air-defence systems (MANPADS) claimed by the sellers to be complete, as well as a small number of missile tubes and gripstocks sold without the remaining systems. MANPADs are essentially shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles. They can be used to target low-flying civilian aircraft or helicopters, or indeed any aircraft at the vulnerable points of take-off and landing. The findings come at a time when Islamic State (IS) and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb are competing against one another for regional influence. Both groups are known to be working hard to acquire weapons. Competition often leads to escalating one-upmanship, with tit-for-tat terror attacks designed to attract local recruits. Some of these have included spectacular recent attacks on foreign targets in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Ivory Coast. Given their size and mobility, functioning MANPADS would be a highly effective weapon for a terrorist group such as IS, which routinely targets civilians as part of its military and propaganda strategy. Targets in civil aviation are frequently referenced in terrorist propaganda material, underlining their prestige. To date, IS-linked groups have not yet succeeded in downing a civilian aircraft using a guided rocket (though they have succeeded in this goal through smuggling explosives into an airliners hold). And, only a few instances of guided missile attacks by terrorists on aircraft have been recently recorded in North Africa. A caveat to this threat concerns the motives behind some of these sales. In some cases arms traders may want to dispose of obsolete or unwanted arms. IS- and Al Qaeda-linked militants may be able to purchase the weapons online with ease, but whether these would be fit for use is not guaranteed. Indeed, starting from $2,900, the MANPADS components appear to have been advertised relatively cheaply. It might be reasonable to expect higher prices given the prestige attached to successful aircraft attacks and the expected levels of demand. There are a number of reasons why many MANPADS from Gaddafis stockpiles may now be unusable. Even before the NATO bombing of Libyan weapons stores in 2011, UN and US officials believed many of Gaddafis poorly maintained missiles to have fallen into disrepair. After the regime fell, the US military located and destroyed 5,000 shells from among the stockpile. Would the leftover weapons have been better maintained by their traffickers? Still, the Algerian governments weekly seizures of smuggled weapons caches (including a number of single-barrel ZPU 14.5mm heavy machine guns over recent weeks) demonstrate the continued scale of cross-border arms trafficking in North Africa. There is a distinct possibility that at least some guided missiles will have fallen into the wrong hands and remain intact. The levels of light and small arms trading remains a serious security risk for businesses and personnel operating locally - and a particular concern for Western firms and citizens, who have been the repeated targets of recent attacks . Online arms acquisitions particularly MANPADs - are likely to continue to be embraced by terrorist actors, parallel to these groups exploitation of social and online media more generally. The world is made up of different groups of people with diverse beliefs. That is why, recent terror groups hiding behind religious causes must not be allowed to change the way we live. The truth is that these groups have used terrorism to suddenly change the world, making it different from the one we used to know. No wonder, Indias Prime Minister Narendra Modi has expressed worry that, every year, we spend over $100 billion on securing the world from terrorism; money that should have been spent on building the lives of the poor. Prime Minister Modi said, the impact cannot be fully captured in statistics alone. It is changing the way we live, adding that, there are forces that are instruments of state policy and design. There are others recruited to the cause in misguided belief. Last year, he said, over 90 countries experienced terrorist attacks. Parents in 100 countries live with the daily pain of their children lost to the battlefields of Syria. And in a globally mobile world, one accident can claim citizens of many nations, he added. Though history has produced many terrorist groups, whose leaders have always claimed to be fighting for one cause or the other, what has made recent groups in West Africa, the Maghreb, the Middle East and across Europe as well as the US different and worrying, is the religious cause for which they claim to be fighting. Boko Haram, Al Qaida and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levan (ISIL) all claim to be engaged in fights with religious agenda. In the process, many lives have been lost and one wonders if in pushing a religious agenda, so much blood must be spilt. Last March 22, another terrorist attack cast dark clouds over the world. On that day, the world woke up again to terrorist attacks in Belgium which killed about 30 people with a dozen more injured in attacks at Brussels international airport and a city metro station. Media reports said, there were twin blasts that hit Zaventem Airport at about 07:00 GMT which killed eleven people. Another explosion was reported at Maelbeek metro station near the European Union headquarters and this time, 20 people were reported dead. These attacks have all been attributed to terror groups that have claimed responsibility. This would not have happened if there was love as the Burundian proverbs says - where there is love, there is no darkness. Prime Minister Modi, whose spoke at the Sufi Forum just days before the attack on Belgium said, terrorism uses diverse motivation and causes, none of which can be justified. No wonder he believes that, terrorists distort a religion whose causes (none of which can be justified) or cause, the terrorists themselves cannot support. These terrorists he said, kill and destroy more in their own land and among their own people than they do elsewhere, adding that, they are putting entire regions to peril and making the world more insecure and violent. Prime Minister Modi said, the Islamic civilization that reached great heights by the 15th century encouraged the study of science, medicine, literature, art architecture and commerce. Thus, for those who now hide behind Islam to spread fear and panic; they are not doing any service to the religion. Across the world, some Sufis have condemned the use of terror as a way of propagating a religion. Internet sources say, Some scholars say, Sufi or Sufism or tasawwuf, as it is called in Arabic, is generally understood by scholars and Sufis to be the inner, mystical, or psycho-spiritual dimension of Islam. It is claimed that, many Muslims and non-Muslims believe that Sufism is outside the sphere of Islam. Nevertheless, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, one of the foremost scholars of Islam, in his article The Interior Life in Islam contends that "Sufism is simply the name for the inner or esoteric dimension of Islam. Prime Minister Modi told delegates at the Sufi Forum that, the dark shadow of violence is becoming longer, and said, Sufis have become the light of hope, adding that, when young laughter is silenced by guns in the streets Sufis were the voice that heal. He said, Islam throughout the ages had added to the civilisation of the world and said, it is through openness and enquiry, engagement and accommodation, and respect for diversity that humanity advances, nations progress and the world prospers. Prime Minister Modi said, the message of Sufism which is one of the greatest contributions of Islam to the world had its origins in Egypt and West Asim and travelled to distant lands holding aloft the banner of faith and the flag of human values, learning from spiritual thoughts of other civilisations, and attracting people with the life and message of its saints. He said, Sufism is a celebration of diversity and pluralism, which is expressed in the thoughts of some of its leading scholars that every people has its own path of truth, beliefs and focus of reverence, adding that, these words reflect the divine message to the Holy Prophet that there is no compulsion in religion: And also that every people have appointed ways of worship which they observe. Against this background, Prime Minister Modi said, the fight against terrorism is not a confrontation against any religion, it is a struggle between the values of humanism and the forces of inhumanity. It is not a conflict to be fought through military, intelligence or diplomatic means. It is also a battle that must be won through the strength of our values and the real message of religions. We need just not constitutional provisions or legal safeguard, but also social values to build an inclusive and peaceful society, in which everyone belongs, secure about his rights and confident of her future, he said adding that in many parts of the world, there is uncertainty about the future, and how to deal with its as nations and societies. Therefore, Prime Minister Modi said, the global community must be more vigilant than ever before and counter the forces of darkness with the radiant light of human values, which he said, is imbedded in the Holy Quran that said, if anyone slew one innocent person, it would be as if he slew a whole people; if anyone saved one life, it would be as if he saved a whole people. May we also be reminded by the Somalian proverb that says, If you cant resolve your problems in peace, you cant solve it with war. Bamako (AFP) - Islamist group Ansar Dine said Thursday it was holding three Red Cross workers captured in northeastern Mali last weekend and called for the release of a jihadist arrested by French troops for their safe return. "We have three people who work for the Red Cross. We want Barkhane (French force) to free Miyatene Ag Mayaris before we will release them," Nourredine Ag Mohamed, a senior Islamist Dine militant, told AFP. 21.04.2016 LISTEN The New Patriotic Party (NPP) led by their so-called Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo have been loading it on President John Mahama that he is an incompetent leader who does not deserve a second-term, therefore Ghanaians should try him. Should Ghanaians try Akufo-Addo? Ha-ha! A competent person is known to have the necessary ability, knowledge, or skill to do something successfully. Akufo-Addo who has never managed anything successfully in life moves from place to place, funeral stops to church gatherings and festivals, and accuses President Mahama of having done nothing since he assumed the highest office of the land. This false propaganda is trumpeted daily by the NPP folks, both on television, NPP rented newspapers notably Daily Guide and radio stations with the view to weakening President Mahama and making him beatable in the November polls. But anytime President Mahama attempts to demonstrate that he is indeed on the ground working very hard to improve the lives of the ordinary Ghanaians by visiting the regions and highlighting the projects, he had undertaking, NPP always take issue with that by again accusing him of abusing his incumbency. Nana Akufo-Addo wants Ghanaians to entrust the reins of government in his care. Perfect idea! But can this man really make the centre hold in this country? We have Akufo-Addo today parading in the country with a masquerading squad whose sole aim is to silence anybody within the NPP who questions anything from his leadership style to how hes managing the finances of the NPP. Remember what has befallen Paul Afoko, Kwabena Agyepong and Crabbe and many regional and constituency executives. That is what Akufo-Addo is very competent at, silencing critics in his own party. You are chased out of the party, banned, threatened, or have untruth dirt splashed on you if you dare criticise Akufo-Addo. This is what Akufo-Addo is very competent at doing. Akufo-Addo is indeed a smooth operator, who secretly works behind the scene by using heavy-handed tactics to whip everybody to tow his line. Even journalists who write stories unfavourably to him do not escape Akufo-Addos terrorist tactics. Indeed, he has become the Monarch of all that he surveys. In Akufo-Addos world, he considers himself as a king, who must be obeyed. Therefore, just imagine how Ghana will become if Ghanaians make the mistake of voting Akufo-Addo into power come November 2016. Imagine what will befall people within the NPP who oppose Akufo-Addo before we even consider other Ghanaians. Akufo-Addo leaves traces of chaos behind everywhere he goes. He does not love Ghana one bit. Akufo-Addo has never cared about Ghana. All what he cares is to lead the country so that he can get even with his critics notably people in the NDC and the NPP faction considered as belonging to ex-President Kufuor. Nana Akufo-Addo cannot even bring the NPP together. Akufo-Addo has divided the NPP, and only goes with those who go to his fathers house at Nina, Accra, to bow to him daily. But we have such a character that cannot bring his own party members together calling somebody incompetent. Does Akufo-Addo understand the word, incompetent? Indeed Ghanaians must read between the lines. All what the NPP spearheaded by Akufo-Addo is seeking to do is to come to power and rape the country. They have nothing good to offer Ghana. The fact that you are highly educated does not necessarily make you a good leader. Good leaders know how to bring people together. Good and competent leaders reach out to people. They are able to talk and bring those who even oppose them to their side. They do not adopt Akufo-Addos style of leadership, my way, or the highway. If competence is all about divide and rule, Akufo-Addo would have won the 2008 election easily. But this man who has the tendency of not learning anything from his past mistakes continues to dream that politics is all about flattening those who oppose you, and not try to bring everybody on board. Ghana will burn; I repeat Ghana will burn if Akufo-Addo becomes the next Commander in Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces. He will not spare anybody who had ever opposed him or opposes him. Akufo-Addo never forgives. He is much worse than his friend and pal Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings who after stealing over 700 acres of land from the people of Adoagyiri in the Eastern Region has now turned round to accuse the NDC of corruption. Akufo-Addo is not competent, and will never be. A competent person accounts to people, but Akufo-Addo who wants to rule Ghana accounts to nobody. How come he has never answered any questions concerning his education? How come the so-called competent Akufo-Addo has surrounded himself with relatives and friends with shady characters? Once again, how come Akufo-Addo who claims he is competent to lead Ghana does not want to render accounts to his own party members? If we make the mistake and bring this incompetent Akufo-Addo to rule Ghana, the whole country will burn with drugs, drug barons, thievery, persecutions, witch hunting, and unnecessary arrests. That is what Akufo-Addo is good at. magja[email protected] http://majjacks80.blogspot.com 21.04.2016 LISTEN Continental Tire has embarked on a growth strategy in sub-Saharan Africa as the company officially launches a new entity in Ghana, Wednesday. The new division, Continental Tire West Africa, will focus on the companys efforts on developing the local market and getting the most out of its exposure across the region. The launch of the new division is driven by our African Dawn initiative recognizes the growing economic importance of African on a global scale," says Shaun Uys, the managing director of Continental Tire Sub-Saharan Africa. Uys says, The new division will enable us to achieve this by expanding our distribution channels and the number of retail outlets, targeting new business opportunities in the fleet, rental, government, ports and mining sectors, and having a dedicated team based in Ghana to drive this process. Founded in Hanover, Germany, in 1871, the automotive supplier and industrial partner, the Company present solutions that help keep people safer and healthier. Continental Tire has an existing presence in Ghana, through a long-term corporation in the company of Rainbow Motors. The local company has a warehouse and ContiPartner dealer in Accra, as well as a network of independent dealers across the country. Following the successful model that is used in the highly competitive South African market, the new legal entity will enable us to involve existing and new partners to further expand our reach across the region, thus accessing a far broader market with top-quality products and fitment services, says Johann Liebenberg, Continentals General Sales Manager for Passenger & Light Truck Tyres Replacement SSA. It currently employs more than 208,000 people in 55 countries. 21.04.2016 LISTEN INTRODUCTION Refined petroleum products are an important resource in every country. Various governments impose taxes on fuel to generate revenue that finances essential public goods and services for the benefit of the citizenry. Governments also provide a boost to targeted sectors of the economy or help the needy by way of fuel subsidies. An unintended effect is that the price differentials created by these taxes and/or subsidies produce a financial incentive for unscrupulous individuals and businesses to engage in several forms of fuel fraud. These include: smuggling, adulteration and dilution of fuels, transit fuel diversion and round-tripping as well as outright theft. Moreover, fuel fraud is not just an in-country problem but can cross borders where cheaper, inferior products are smuggled in as adulterants or subsidized fuels are smuggled out to neighbouring countries where they sell at higher prices. Smuggling of unwanted adulterants into Philippines fuel supply chain, for instance, has been estimated to cost the country as high as $750 million annually in tax revenue. [2] This money could certainly have done a lot for the Philippines. This makes one wonder how much African countries are losing annually due to fuel fraud. The situation could be worse for African countries that simultaneously tax certain petroleum products and subsidize others. This is because not only is the expected tax revenue not realized but the subsidies are also wasted as they are diverted from the targeted recipients to criminals. The government loses twice when crooked businesses dilute taxed fuel with the cheaper subsidized products. Attempts have been made in the past to mark or identify various fuel products in order to prevent fraud. For example, fuel marking with dyes has been in use since the 1950s but can be easily defeated using cheap and simple methods to launder out the dye. However, newer technologies using molecular markers as part of an overall fuel supply chain protection program have proven to reduce existing criminal activities and deter others. The impact of fuel fraud, how fuel marking programs operate and the results of some current African programs are presented here to support the further adoption of this technology across the continent. Impact on Government Revenue A report by the World Bank (2001) on petroleum taxation stressed that taxes on petroleum products are a critical source of government revenue. The report further explains, .taxing fuel is one of the easiest ways to get revenue: collecting fuel taxes is relatively straightforward, and the consumption of fuels as a group is relatively price inelastic and income elastic, ensuring buoyant revenue as income rises and tax rates are increased. [3] In other words, because petroleum products cannot easily be replaced by close substitutes, taxing them is less distortionary: the decrease in demand due to the tax-inclusive price will not be that large. Additionally, as personal incomes increase, individuals are more likely to increase fuel consumption, making fuel tax revenue vital to the government. Where fuel fraud is prevalent, a large amount of the anticipated tax revenue will not be collected. Tax evasion occurs when taxed fuels are diluted with products that have lower taxes or no taxes, such as: fuels smuggled in from other countries; subsidized petroleum products; duty-free transit fuels; stolen petroleum products; inferior products such as solvents, waste oils and others. Fuel fraud takes place in many countries, including even advanced countries in Europe. Bloomberg news reported that fuel fraud costs the EU about $4 billion annually in tax revenue. [4] Elsewhere in Africa, Algeria lost approximately $1.3 billion to fuel fraud in 2013. [5] These figures are indeed alarming especially for African countries that rely heavily on foreign aid to support a large percentage of their budgets annually. Failure to collect taxes due to fuel fraud could lead to unnecessary fiscal deficits and aid dependency. The government of Ghana has for some time been riddled with a heavy debt burden despite the discovery and subsequent production of crude oil (in commercial quantities) in 2011. Driven in part by an IMF fiscal reform and credit facility, the country adopted a modern fuel- marking program, using the expected increase in revenue to close the fiscal gap. The results include over 100% Return on Investment (ROI) and an estimated increase of about $11 million in tax excise collection per annum. [6] The fuel marking programme has helped the government to raise more revenue from the taxed petroleum products without having to increase the tax rates. The Ghana National Petroleum Agencys (NPA) program is based on the technology and best practices of US-based Authentix, Inc. Governments that implement fuel marking programs can generate virtually all the expected revenue to fund vital goods and services, creating a good governance environment for businesses to thrive, the economy to grow and ultimately improve the living standards of the people. Impact on Subsidy-Targets Another crucial issue for governments is subsidy abuse. Various governments provide subsidies to boost industries such as farming and fishing, help provide a social safety net for the needy as well as distribute the benefits of discovered abundant natural resources. A common subsidy is the provision of lower taxes or no taxes for kerosene so that poorer families can have access to affordable cooking and heating fuel. There may also be subsidies provided for marine premix fuel and off-road diesel with the overall objective of increasing economic growth. The lower price of subsidized products provides an incentive to use it as an adulterant in more expensive or fully-taxed fuels. Subsidy abuse also occurs when subsidized fuels are smuggled out to higher-priced markets in typically the neighbouring countries to lower transportation costs. There is also the issue of round-tripping of imports notable in Nigeria. Although Nigeria exports crude oil, refined petroleum products are usually imported and subsidized. After these products are imported and the subsidy is paid, some criminals take them out of the country and bring them in again to double the subsidy. [7] In Niger, round-tripping of exports also exists. The immediate effect is that subsidy funds are diverted from the intended beneficiaries to criminals and may well be used to finance other criminal activities. There are several impacts of subsidy abuse. The economic growth goals for the targeted sectors are not achieved. The government also loses twice when these subsidized fuels are mixed with the fully taxed ones, losing the tax revenue and the investment in the subsidies. Increases in subsidy expenditures due to diversion could culminate in the depreciation of the countrys currency and its credit rating [8] . Subsidy diversion is a problem for many countries. 5 Fuel marking programs can help combat subsidy abuse by marking the low- and no-tax fuels at concentrations in the low parts per billion levels and testing for the marker in the higher taxed fuel. Once marked, even when added at low quantities, the presence of the subsidized fuels can be detected using special analysers at the border or within the country catching both smuggling and adulteration of high taxed fuels. Ghana, for instance, has seen a 78% reduction in adulteration as a result of the program. Serbia also recorded a significant decline in the sales of base oils (known as diesel adulterants) by seven times. Similar fuel marking programs would enable African governments to obtain a large proportion of the fuel revenue due to them and also ensure that the subsidies reach predetermined beneficiaries. Other relevant impacts Apart from tax evasion and subsidy abuse due to fuel fraud, there are also other negative effects which the fuel marking programs could help address. When fuel is adulterated with cheaper or inferior products, the quality of fuel suffers and typically does combust completely in machines or vehicles. This could lead to a quicker rate of depreciation of various machines or vehicles. This means that money which could have been used for profitable investments would be spent on maintenance instead. This could discourage Foreign Direct Investment if investors lose confidence in the profitability of their ventures due to this challenge. Fuel marking programs can reduce the rate of adulteration quite quickly, helping to ensure that citizens get value for money and removing some barriers to foreign investment. Additionally, dilution of fuels with waste oils could have a serious detrimental impact on the environment. With greenhouse gas emission and climate change as a global concern, this effect cannot be overlooked. Fuel marking programs provide the evidence to help remove polluting adulterants from the fuel supply chain hence improving the environment. A fuel marking program would culminate in the supply and sale of more environment-friendly petroleum products by reducing adulteration and maintaining high quality. Some Key Prerequisites of a Successful Fuel Integrity Program There are some other essential factors to consider so that African governments can implement successful programs in their countries. First, a government should seek out a partner with a proven track record of excellence in fuel marking programs with the state-of-the-art molecular fuel -marking technology. The partner should conduct a situational analysis to identify the problem(s) particular to the country, designing a technical and operational solution for the program that specifically addresses those problems. Often a multi-layered approach is used with a field test to screen for diversion or dilution problems. If a field test fails, further lab tests are conducted with sophisticated analysers that provide high quality evidence in support of enforcement actions or legal proceedings. To ensure that the program is meeting its objectives, the government should insist that regular procedural performance and marker inventory audits be included in the program design and costs. Although it may appear as a good idea to give different parts of the fuel marking program to different companies in order to create competition and efficiency, this may lead to a lack of accountability. Best practice would be to partner with a company that will have the sole responsibility for the program, while potentially using local subcontractors for some operational aspects in order to create employment locally. Second, legislation is critical to the success of the program. The government and other relevant institutions must cooperate with the partner to pass legislation and/or clear any ambiguities in existing legislation to ensure that culprits caught and arrested could be prosecuted. Without legislation and cooperation, the program cannot succeed in curbing tax evasion and subsidy abuse. Cooperation by the Government of Ghana and the NPA with Authentix yielded positive revenue results for Ghana. It is no surprise therefore that the NPA and its Chief Executive, Mr Moses Asaga, recently received two awards from the prestigious Socrates Committee of the Europe Business Assembly in Cannes, France. The NPA received the International Prize for Best Enterprise for 2015 award, while Mr Asaga was honoured with the Best Manager award for 2015. [9] Last but not least, legislation should be paired with strong enforcement of punitive measures. If culprits caught are not punished, the law will be seen as harmless. This does not create the strong deterrent effect necessary to reduce fuel fraud. Punishments such as fines, immediate bans and imprisonment should be meted out to culpable entities in order to ensure that the program delivers desired results. In Ghana, the deterrent effect culminated in a substantial reduction in the amount of fuel product dilution from 34% to 7% within just 6 months of the program.6 CONCLUSION Fuel fraud via tax evasion has robbed African governments of millions of US dollars in tax revenue annually. Subsidy expenditures from the remaining scarce resources also find their way to various criminals instead of intended beneficiaries such as the poor in the country. The fuel marking programs that use modern marker technology is an innovative way of curbing these illicit activities and ensuring that individuals and firms get value for money spent on fuel. Despite calls from economists such as Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Christine Lagarde at the recently held World Economic forum in Davos for a new measure of economic progress other than GDP growth, GDP growth still remains crucial (for the time being). African governments have for too long focused solely on capital (investment) and labour to stimulate economic growth while relatively neglecting total factor productivity typically from technological advancement and innovation. Meanwhile, studies show that total factor productivity could account for about 60% of a countrys economic growth. [10] It is high time governments of African countries leveraged the technology used in these programs to boost economic growth and generate revenue internally rather than depend heavily on foreign aid and borrowing to finance essential public goods and services. This paper was authored by Hubert Nii-Aponsah, IMANI Africas Deputy Head for the Center for Political and Economic Affairs. For comments and enquiries, please email [email protected] [1] Asian Development Bank. (2015). Fuel-Marking Programs: Helping Governments Raise Revenue, Combat Smuggling, and Improve the Environment. Issue 24, The Governance Brief. References [2] Philippine Daily Inquirer. (6thMarch, 2014). With Oil Smuggled in, Government Waves Tax Revenues Goodbye. [3] Robert Bacon. (2001). Petroleum Taxes Public Policy for the Private Sector. The World Bank. [4] Konstantim Rozhnov and Marek Strzelecki. (27th August, 2013). Fuel Fraud Costing Europe More Than $4 Billion in Lost Taxes, Bloomberg news. [5] Shoaib-ur-Rehman Siddiqui. (28thSeptember, 2013). Algeria smuggling crackdown cuts fuel line to Morocco. Business Recorder. [6] Asian Development Bank. (2015). Fuel-Marking Programs: Helping Governments Raise Revenue, Combat Smuggling, and Improve the Environment. Issue 24, The Governance Brief. [7] Citifmonline. (17th March , 2016). Buhari battles to clean up Nigerias oil industry. Retrieved from http://citifmonline.com/2016/03/17/buhari-battles-to-clean-up-nigerias-oil-industry/ [8] Biman Mukherii, Sudeep Jain and Saurabh Chaturvedi. (28th August, 2013). Subsidies, Oil Prices to Put Pressure on Indias Rupee, Fiscal Gap, India News. [9] Business World. (12th October, 2015). NPA, Asaga win awards. Retrieved from file:///C:/Users/Otoson/Desktop/fuel%20paper/NPA,%20Asaga%20win%20awards%20-%20Business%20World%20Ghana.html [10] William Easterly and Ross Levine. (2001). "It's Not Factor Accumulation: Stylized Facts and Growth Models". The World Bank Economic Review, Vol. 15, No. 2 177219 Al Jazeera is celebrating winning eleven Gold World Medals, six Silver and two Bronze medals at the prestigious New York Festivals awards. This includes a Bronze in the Community Portraits category for My Nigeria, the six-part Al Jazeera documentary series showing six stories of six Nigerians, including stand-up comedian Basketmouth, fashion designer Deola Sagoe and Nollywood star turned politician Kate Henshaw. Al Jazeera's Investigation Unit also picked up a finalist certificate in the Current Affairs category for Inside Kenyas Death Squads, in which officers from four units of Kenyas counter-terrorism apparatus admitted the police assassinate suspects on government orders. Commenting on the success, Giles Trendle, acting managing director of Al Jazeera English, said: Al Jazeera English is delighted to have won a series of Gold and Silver medals at the New York International TV & Film Awards." Al Jazeeras interactive documentary Life On Hold won Gold in the Online News category as well as the UNDPI medal, a special award decided by a United Nations jury. "We are pleased with the two Gold medals won for our innovative web documentary project, Life on Hold, that tells the personal and poignant stories of some of the Syrian refugees in Lebanon in an engaging and non-linear manner, says Trendle. 101 East won five Golds medals overall. Afghanistans Billion Dollar Drug War won two Golds as Best Investigative Report and for the Human Concerns category; Myanmar's Jade Curse won a Gold medal in the National/International Affairs category; and Murder in Malaysia won a Gold medal for the Best Current Affairs programme. 101 East presenter Steve Chao won his second consecutive Gold medal for Best News Reporter/Correspondent. 101 East also won three Silver World Medals for the episodes Murder in Malaysia, Myanmar's Jade Curse and Becoming Pacquiao. "The five Gold medals won by our weekly 101 East strand are a testament to the quality of our journalism and the importance of our mission to tell compelling stories from around the world, says Trendle. Faultlines, which was a joint Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera America programme, won three Gold World Medals for Mexico's Disappeared and Death of Aging, while Ferguson: Race and Justice in the U.S won a Silver World Medal. Faultines also picked up a Bronze medal for Forgotten Youth: Inside America's Prisons. Al Jazeera English news was awarded a Silver World Medal for Best Coverage of a Continuing News Story for Desperate Journeys, which covered the refugee crisis in Europe. "The silver medal for our Desperate Journeys news coverage on the refugee story highlights how we have set the news agenda on one of the defining stories of our time, says Trendle. Broken Dreams: The Boeing 787 won Gold Medal Awards in Current Affairs and a Silver World Medal in the Business and Finance categories. Broken Dreams: The Boeing 787 was a hard-hitting programme made by Al Jazeera's Investigation Unit, which revealed the deeply-held safety concerns of current and former Boeing engineers, while allegations were uncovered of on-the-job drug use, quality control problems and poor workmanship. Phil Rees, the manager of the Al Jazeera Investigation Unit, said: It is fantastic for the Al Jazeera Investigative Unit to be recognised once again for dealing with this commercially sensitive subject with such persistence and bravery. In the tradition of the finest investigative journalism, the production team spoke truth to one of the worlds most powerful corporations. Al Jazeera English also picked up eight finalist certificates for a variety of programmes from Faultlines, 101 East, Women Make Change and People and Power. The New York Festival's World's Best TV & Films competition honours programming in all lengths and forms from over 50 countries. Dedicated to both the television and film industries, categories mirror today's global trends and encourage the next generation of story-tellers and talent. Watch and embed: My Nigeria Basketmouth: Trash Talking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kba2pzJgN0 My Nigeria Kate Henshaw: Playing a Part https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrvyV9Vc8Mk My Nigeria Gbenga Sesan: Connecting A Million https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3sEcKexrdA My Nigeria Sandra Aguebor: Lady Mechanic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4otavrlO3Zc My Nigeria Femi Bamigboye: Local Man https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vq0aqGsYzE My Nigeria Deola Sagoe: Top Drawer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDRGKnaCj2I Al Jazeera Investigates Inside Kenyas Death Squads https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUjOdjdH8Uk About Al Jazeera Media Network Al Jazeera strives to deliver content that captivates, informs, inspires and entertains. Launched in 1996, Al Jazeera was the first independent news channel in the Arab world dedicated to providing comprehensive news and live debate. It challenged established narratives and gave a global audience an alternative voice - one that put the human being back at the centre of the news agenda - quickly making it one of the worlds most influential news networks. Since then, its added new channels and services, with more than 70 bureaus around the world and a reach into 270 million homes worldwide. Al Jazeera Media Network maintains the independent and pioneering spirit that defined its character. Each subsidiary follows the same principles - values that inspire it to be challenging and bold, and provide a voice for the voiceless in some of the most underreported places on the planet. AL JAZEERA ARABIC AL JAZEERA ENGLISH AL JAZEERA DOCUMENTARY AL JAZEERA MUBASHER AL JAZEERA BALKANS AL JAZEERA TURK AL JAZEERA CENTRE FOR STUDIES AL JAZEERA MEDIA TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT CENTRE AJ+ 21.04.2016 LISTEN Commonsense with Daniel Dugan On set with a beautiful presenter of BTA, as part of the recent Independence Day celebration, she asked, Ghana is fifty-nine years, and next year she will be pensioned. What has the youth gained or have to show? It is based on this statement that I present this article. Once again, adopting the US journalistic approach of show-me-the-skyscrapers-and-magnificent-infrastructures-and-I-will-show-the-slums-and-where-the-tramps-sleep, I will concede that in a way the youth have achieved something, however, there are more to be done. Today's article takes a look at the youth in the retail and service industries. Anytime you drive into a filling station to buy fuel, or walk into its mart to pick an item or more and you see those cheerful attendants going over themselves to make you feel at home, please do not be deceived, for those warm smiles are actually masks covering faces of desperation and disappointment for working for slave wages. The normal day's work should begin in most stations at six in the morning and end at six the following morning. Then they are supposed to have full twenty-four hours off and report the day after. By the simple principle of if-more-less-divide, it means the attendant at the pump or mart works on average 360 hours a month, and gets paid only GH 300, a tidy sum of eighty-three Ghana pesewas an hour. Her counterpart working an eight to five shift for five days a week or 180 hours a month can get paid not less than GH 500 a month, a tidy sum of GH2.77 an hour. Interpreting this into mathematical language will be as confusing and as mysterious as which came first, the egg or the chicken. In plain and simple cartoon language, we have a situation where someone works half the hours, and yet, gets paid almost twice those who work twice as much. But folks, that is not the true picture here, for it is the case of the projected and the actual. The truth here is that after closing at six, there must be stocktaking, which would normally end at nine, before the attendant can go home and have some rest. In some cases, as and when demands, the attendant in the mart will be asked to go and shop for goods, and that will mean closing at about two in the afternoon. Meanwhile, she must report back at work the following morning by six. Let us look at the reality and find out what happens. It will mean that the attendant works twenty-seven hours a day, with twenty-one hours off. That works out to be 405 hours a month on GH300, a tidy sum of seventy-four Ghanaian pesewas an hour. So, while our lady at the mart earns GH19.98 on a working day, her counterpart earns GH24.93 working only a third the number of hours. That is not the end of the troubles for our filling station mart attendant. Whenever there is some shortage it will be deducted from her wages. Let us not try to work out the possible deductions or else this dark picture will become gloomier. On the average, she can make sales of not less than GH 2,500 a work-day, and so in a month, we are talking about at least GH37,500. For the sale of fuel, there is an average sale of GH5,000 per pump on any good day. So what is in it for the attendant? The fuel pump attendant also receives GH300 a day for the same working hours of the shopping mart attendant. In the case of the pump attendant where the station has 24 hr. service, it means that he or she will have to sleep by the pump in case a vehicle drives in on ungodly hours to buy fuel. The shopping mart attendant will be locked up safely in the shop and sleep for the night. Pump attendants who work in stations that shut for the night sleep in the offices. It is mandatory for all attendants to sleep at the work place, so that they could be available for the next shift to take over after stocktaking the next morning. If one asks these young men and women about their ambitions in life, the answers speak of good dreams nursing, business, military, police, continuation of education to university level, etc., etc. The problem is always money, and one young lady attendant at a filling station at Osu, told me she is able to save GH50 a month towards a course that will collect GH2,000 a semester. She would need to save for forty months to pay for only a semester. In the event that the course is three years of two semesters each, it will mean that all-things-being-equal, she will work for twenty years to be able to pay her way through education. What future lies ahead for such youth who only want to do something decent for a living? The current minimum wage of GH8 a day on a (9hr -1hr break) work schedule means nothing to them, and while their counterparts earn overtime after normal working hours, they do not have that privilege. Under normal circumstances, any average worker working under that condition will take nothing less than GH1,000 to atone for those long hours of work. If she were to earn that much, our filling station mart attendant could gladly save at least GH500 a month, and in two years, enroll for a course of her choice and walk into the business world with a wealth of experience. At the moment, she only hopes that whenever someone buys something, he or she would say keep the change, so that she could have more to save. With luck, some Prince Charming would come and sweep her of her feet and land her in wonderland, owning some shops or businesses herself. But what if, indeed, all that glitters is not gold, and she is unfortunate to land into a marriage with problems? She would wish she was back in the shop smiling at every customer and hoping for the best. The sad thing is that she has ambitions, but for the moment, they are only dreams which look far from being materialised. If only the owners of such filling stations could work out something to bring relief to the pump and mart attendants. In fact, if only government can work out some relief for the youth that will capture those young women and men doing genuine and decent jobs at the pumps and in the shops. The men could go robbing people at night, but they are either at the filling station or sleeping at home praying for Moses to lift up his arms in the sky once more to stop the sun from moving on, so that day will not break. The ladies could go soliciting men at night and warming their bellies, but like their male colleagues, they are also either at work or sleeping at home and praying that the sun, which is shining at the other side of the earth, would take at least some few hours rest before continuing its routine journey across the sky. Another group of youth who do genuine jobs but get paid minimal are those in the private security service. The private security firms would charge up to the sky for giving you a guard or two to watch over you and your property. But, comparatively, what they receive as monthly pay is nothing to write home about. So it is, that it is alleged that some of security guards collaborate with thugs to rob the very premises they are protecting. This is certainly not ideal. They need to be paid well, and that could make them feel secure in their lives, so that they can also make someone feel secure in theirs. These are also the youth completely lost in wonder and looking on hopelessly as Ghana soon attains pension age. Another group of youth who work in those big shops belonging to expatriates also have problems to talk about. Almost on the same scale as our filling station pump and mart attendants, these Ghanaian ladies have another danger to tackle. In some cases, the Asian shop owners or their sons will like to have a bite of the cherry. Even though they may sell fruits, including cherry, they will prefer to use any of the decent Ghanaian girls to satisfy their libido. So work-place sex becomes a convention, and you either agree, or you walk out of the job. I remember this decent and beautiful lady working in a phone shop who refused advances. She was the manager. Unfortunately, when another one agreed to the request of the bosses, this lady was kicked out. Later, when things were not going well professionally, she was called to take her job back. She politely turned down the offer. No where cool! For on one hand you want to make a decent living, but there is no living wage to see you through the month. What has Ghana got for the youth? This is not only a problem for the government to solve. Business owners must be ready to come out with a well laid out plan to help the youth. For someone works over 400 hours a month, but gets paid a little more than half what someone who works 180 hours a month gets. The government must find ways of spreading the tax net, charging very affordable tax rates and reaping in more funds to expand the economy, so that the business owners can also pay the youth worker very well. 21.04.2016 LISTEN About seven years ago, I wrote an article that was published by the then Campus Newspaper of the University of Cape Coast. The article was titled, God is not proud of Africans. In that article, I articulated how Africans have failed to follow the divine high call to exercise dominion over the world. I expressed how Africans, though blessed abundantly with potential resources, are the poorest in the world. In Africa, Bob Marley is right, In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty. I have never ceased to wonder why we Africans continue to behave the way we do. In their justification of slavery and later colonialism, the Europeans and Arabs projected Africans as sub-human beings. In the logic of social evolution, Africans were pegged at the base of the racial hierarchy. Africans were robbed of their contributions to world civilization, however difficult such an expression is. In response, Africans and people of African descent, such as Cheikh Anta Diop, George James, and W.E.B. DuBois, have written copiously to show that Africans did not only contribute to civilization, but Africa was the best place for the emergence of all forms of human ingenuity. Another scholar, Martin Bernal, a non-African, in his book, The Black Athena has demonstrated how several sources intersect and converge to prove that Africans gave the world its knowledge in science, mathematics, philosophy, agriculture, engineering, and architecture. Mary Lefkowitz has provided a scathing critique of Martin Bernal. She argues that Greeks, who are believed to have provided the foundation for European civilization, never borrowed from Africa, particularly ancient Egypt, as argued by Martin Bernal. In recent scholarship, Molefi Kete Asante, who popularized Afrocentrism, has written amply to celebrate Africas blazing the trail in human history. Other scholars, such as John Henrik Clarke, have even argued that the notion of monotheism, which is the foundation and fulcrum of the so-called Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, could be traced to ancient Egypt. The centrality of Egypt in the narrative on African civilisation has prompted some scholars to develop the notion of Egyptian exceptionalism. The invocation of ancient Egypt as the birthplace of world civilization, and the concern on the part of some Eurocentric writers to deny Africans of any contributions to civilization has resulted in the popularization of what is known in scholarship as the Hamitic Hypothesis. The Hamitic Hypothesis attributes anything of worth in Africa to have been engineered by foreigners. Consequently, using the Hamitic Hypothesis, some scholars have dismissed ancient Egyptian civilization as the brainchild of Africans. Others who are also interested in claiming that civilization did not spring from Africa have questioned Egyptian origin of civilization. They have interrogated the perceived non-transferability of ancient Egyptian civilization to other parts of Africa. The question that is asked, especially by Yaacov Shavit, to this effect is that: If Egypt was the foundational home of world civilization, why didnt other African states experience the lustre and glory of ancient Egypt? Afrocentric scholars have responded to this question by making reference to other late civilizations in Africa such as the Great Monomotapa and the Western Sudanese Empires. And very recent ones such as the Asante Empire, Buganda Empire etc have been mentioned to explain the widespread nature of African civilization. All the minuses and pluses considered, I still would want to ask the question about what has happened to Africans. During the slave trade and colonialism, Africans suffered much humiliation: their dignity was thrown to the pigs. There was a mental transmogrification of Africans from humanity to the level of animals. Africans, of course, with the support of fellows Africans, were bundled and sold into slavery as chattels. While slavery predated Arabs and Europeans in Africa, the type of slavery that was introduced by the Arabs and Europeans was overwhelmingly dehumanizing. Akosua Adoma Perbi, a don of history at the University of Ghana, has documented explicitly the nature of premodern slavery in Ghana. While premodern slavery in Africa did not dehumanize the slave, the type of slavery introduced by the Arabs and Europeans undermined completely the humanity of the African. The Arabs were, perhaps very brutish. They castrated African slaves that they both captured and bought. And that, according to John Azumah, who has documented the legacy of Arab-Islam on Africa, explains why there are less Africans in the Arab world compared to Europe and America. But common to both Europeans and the Arabs who traded in Africans is the fact that both groups de-culturalised the African and deepened the social Darwinist theory that Africans are a little above beasts of burden. As if the humiliation of the enslavement of Africans was not enough, just after the Europeans had reluctantly abandoned slavery, the Arabs continued with slavery to the extent that it was only in the 1960s that some Arab countries abolished slavery. The end of slavery paved way for what was called legitimate trade. Here, the robustness of the industrial revolution marked new demands raw materials and market for finished product. Europeans decided to keep Africans on the continent to work to produce raw materials to feed nascent industries in Europe, and to also consume the surplus of what was produced in Europe. This marked the beginning of what Ali A. Mazrui refers to as, Africans consuming what they dont produce, and producing what they dont consume. Again, colonialism did not die: it metamorphosed into what Nkrumah and Nyerere have called neo-colonialism. Neocolonialism is said to be more dangerous than colonialism, because it is subtle, but real in manipulating Africans. It is a diplomatic way of plunging the resources of Africa. The challenge of slavery and colonialism did not end the status of Africans as the whipping boys of other races. Recently, we have had some expatriates maltreating Ghanaians, and it appears Ghanaians have lost the sense of their dignity and energy in protecting their humanity. My late dad used to tell me that in the early days of Nkrumahs regime, Ghanaians could not be tampered with anywhere in the world. Those were the days when Ghanaians walked with their heads up. But alas, what happened to our balls? Foreigners have had the temerity to maltreat Ghanaians in their (Ghanaians) own homeland. If you dare complain, you are said to be either a xenophobic or racist. It is politically incorrect to voice against injustice especially injustice that involve foreigners. Foreigners have been emboldened by the challenges the continent of Africa is facing to treat Africans like apes, the so-called grandparents of humanity. Africans have also not been able to extricate themselves from the chains and apron strings of the colonialists. Our inability to restructure the education system that we inherited from the colonisers to suit our daily needs as a people is emblematic of how we have failed ourselves. Yesterday, on BBC, it was reported that the Liberian government is thinking of liberalizing and privatizing the education system. As I listened to the news, the question I asked myself was: Has privatization, since it was heralded by the Bretton Woods institutions in the form of Structural Adjustment Programmes in the 1980s, ever inured to the best interest of Third World countries? At the opening of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, in October 1963, Nkrumah was clear: our education system should reflect the cultural and historical background of Africans. Our education system should cohere with our aspirations as a people. Our education system should be connected to the lived-experiences of Ghanaians. In connecting what happens in the ivory tower to the society, Nkrumah said, The GOWN must come to Town. As I write, I ask myself whether the gown has indeed gone to town. Most of our academics today are so arrogant that they think they are better because of their western education than others who have not had western education. They are so egoistic, arrogant and pompous that they would not want to even speak their native language with their children! As I write, I am reminded of Okot pBiteks, Song of Lawino. The western education we receive often de-culturalises us. Just after I had finished my first degree, I decided to visit my paternal uncle in Takoradi. When he heard I was visiting, he was so happy, because he thought I was an academic genius, since I had had an impressive class. Little did I know that he was going to test the level of knowledge about myself. Of course, I had learnt so much about Americans, Europeans, and very little about Africans, especially Akan people of Ghana. Though an Akan, I had not learned anything about the Akan people, especially their culture. I had read briefly in my history class about the historicity of the Akan. But in terms of cultural norms and ethos, I was very illiterate. My uncle, who had basic western education, put my brain to test. He engaged me: Kofi, I am happy you have graduated from the university. I am happy to see you, because I am told you have discovered the magic of the Whitemans language and knowledge. But Kofi, please tell me, what is the name of your clan? I was quick to answer: Bretuo. He responded: Good. What is your appellation? Hmmm, I started scratching my hair as if a bee had stung me. He saw how I was sweating, and said, Ok, enough. Now, tell me, what is the meaning of your name, Charles? I was quick to answer: Strong, bold, courageous etc. He said to me, Good. Now, tell me what is the socio-religious significance of your names: Kofi, Nomafo, and Prempeh? I was found wanting. I could not give any answer. Right away, he told me, Kofi, I think you need to come home for another degree from me. I was embarrassed and walked away. I cursed my teachers for not teaching me my traditions, and blamed my parents for not bringing me up in the village, where I could have sucked from the breast of my grandmother [abrewa], who is deeply respected for her superb knowledge. Among the Akan, for example, when epistemological conjunctures come to a crossroad, it is the abrewa, who is consulted. As I write, I am aware of the debates over the medium of instruction in our schools. It is as if we dont know that children learn their L2 well and with ease if they specialized in their L1. I have a challenge with the L1 language policy in our country. About four years ago, I used to provide teaching assistance at the Kanda Estate 2 Primary School, Accra. And I noticed that the children were compelled to learn to write and speak Ga. I was concerned and worried, because I saw the exercise as very fruitless: fruitless in the sense that most of the pupils come from communities, Maamobi Ruga, Four Four One, and Nima etc, where Hausa is the lingua franca. Why wont the government encourage the pupils from these communities to learn Hausa and master the language both in written and speech instead of Ga, which is linguistically very far from them? I proposed that Hausa should be taught to these pupils, because, while Hausa is not originally a Ghanaian language, the language is widely spoken in virtually all Zongo communities in Ghana. The language has economic and religious significance. There is a market in Nima (Kasoa Lariba), also known as ECOWAS market, because on Wednesday, which is the market day, the market attract traders from other West African countries, including Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Togo, and Benin. And when most of these traders meet, it is the Hausa language that serves as the medium of instruction. It is the Hausa language that binds these traders from different countries in the West African region. Hausa is also important religiously. It is one language that most Muslim clerics use to spread the Islamic faith. As a Zongo young man, I know of some Muslim clerics who purposely travel to Northern Nigeria and Niger to better their proficiency in Hausa. Hausa is the Kiswahili of West Africa. It is one language that is spoken in several West African countries. During the colonial period in Gold Coast, now Ghana, the colonialists deliberately encouraged the speaking of Hausa among the lower rank members of the police and later the army. These lower rank officers were recruited from the Savanna regions, extending from todays Northern Ghana to Nigeria. I never learnt Hausa in school, but I speak the Ghanaian variety of Hausa with great competence. Meanwhile, I learned Ga in school from primary to junior high school, and yet I still cannot speak Ga. This is because, I dont live in the Ga language community. I suggest we think through the language policy again, and make it possible for Zongo children to study Hausa language in communities like Maamobi and Nima. There is now a radio station, Maraba FM, which runs programmes in Hausa. I think that if we encourage the study of Hausa, we would benefit in twofold: one, we would be able to connect with other West Africans, and two, those who study the language could be employed to teach and also work with social medias in the country. Africans should be encouraged to brace themselves to undo the colonial legacy of underdevelopment, characterized by widespread poverty, poor squalid conditions, illiteracy, diseases, and political instability. Africans should also end the mis-education of their children. Our education system should be about ourselves, even as we learn about others. This is imperative because until we know ourselves, we cannot make any headway. As I conclude, I want to challenge all of us to see the continent as having a prospect to emerge as a giant. We must change the narrative that places us at the base of the social hierarchy. Satyagraha!! Charles Prempeh ( [email protected] ), Makerere Institute of Social Research, Makerere University, Uganda The Executive Director of the Media Foundation for West Africa, Sulemana Braimah, has been appointed the Secretary General of a newly-established ECOWAS civil society platform on transparency and accountability in governance. The new platform, known as the ECOWAS Civil Society Organisations Platform on Transparency and Accountability in Governance (ECSOPTAG) was formally launched at the ECOWAS Commission in Abuja, Nigeria, on April 20 after a two-day meeting of civil society organisations from 11 ECOWAS member states. The meeting was opened by the Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace and Security of the ECOWAS Commission, Mrs. Halima Ahmed. In her opening address, the Commissioner said the ECOWAS recognises the important role Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) can play in governance processes in member states particularly in the area of what she termed integrity governance. The President of the National Anti-Corruption Institutions in West Africa (NACIWA), Mr. Issoufou Boureima, who chaired the plenary sessions emphasised the critical role of Civil Society Organisations in supporting anti- corruption institutions in the fight against corruption and ensuring good governance. The Principal Programme Officer for Gender, Youth and Civil Society Organisations at the ECOWAS Commission, Mrs. Violet Ukpayan in her remarks urged civil society organisations to support national and regional efforts to promote good governance within the ECOWAS region. The meeting featured presentations by experts on several topics including regional, continental and international frameworks on anti-corruption; the roles and responsibilities of CSOs in promoting transparency and accountability in governance; a mapping of transparency and accountability in the ECOWAS region; as well as the governance framework and rules of procedure of the ECSOPTAG. The Principal Programme Officer for Democracy and Good Governance at the ECOWAS Commission, Mr. Eyesan Okorodudu, highlighted efforts being made by the Commission to strengthen good governance and democracy in the region. He therefore called on CSOs in member states to support these efforts by ECOWAS. At the end of the two day meeting, participants appointed a three-member Executive that will steer the affairs of the platform. Mr. Sulemana Braimah was appointed the Secretary General of the platform with Mr. Assah Gustave, Director of Social Watch in Benin as Advocacy and Communications Sectretary and Mrs. Ana Museuta Ture, Director of Guinean Organisation for Development based in Guinea Bissau as the Financial Controller. There is a common denominator among successful human development projects, be they in the field of education, health, economic growth, cultural preservation or the environment, namely that the project beneficiaries themselves participated in their design, management and overall control. After decades - centuries even - of development interventions and the implementation of strategies to promote human services, the mountain of evidence accumulated worldwide clearly points to popular participation as the primary determinant of successful sustainable development. The definition of sustainability itself has evolved since its original conception in the late 1980s. Rather than merely emphasizing untenable levels of consumption of natural resources, it has expanded to include a multiplicity of factors - economic, political, cultural, technical, financial, historic, climatic, and more - that bear on the longevity of development projects. Participatory methodology is an inclusive approach, not only by virtue of its facilitation with local communities so that they may identify and determine projects and create action plans for their implementation, but also since it enables the consideration of the wide range of factors mentioned above. Key strategies employed enable the broad-based catalyzing of community meetings in rural and urban settings. Fundamentally, it should be recognized that facilitators of community dialogue are essential in order to ensure that (a) local meetings are widely attended (b) all voices have the opportunity to be expressed and heard and (c) the community data thus generated is organized and made available to local people so that they may make the most informed decisions possible. Without facilitators, the vital community meetings and in situ prioritization and implementation of projects will be virtually impossible. Given that sustainability requires participation and participation requires facilitation, the following recommendations seek to create bottom-up, grassroots participatory development movements, driven by community-owned projects and diverse partnerships. 1. Facilitators of participatory community planning may be literally anyone who has the opportunity to interact with community members and who is accepted in turn in that intermediary or third party role. Facilitators may be - among others - schoolteachers, civil society organizers, local government technicians, locally elected representatives, dedicated women and youth, cooperative members, private sector workers, village leaders or volunteers from the Peace Corps or other organizations. The effectiveness of facilitators is enhanced greatly when they participate in capacity building workshops involving experiential learning in community settings. 2. Community-driven development that is intended to be launched and supported across municipalities, provinces and regions will thrive to the utmost in a context of decentralization. Morocco should be lauded for its exceptional decentralization initiative.Nevertheless, the long-term challenges remaining to its becoming a fluid, fully functioning system within the Kingdom should be borne in mind. a.Decentralization is a state of mind. Even as subnational-level officials may well have the right to dedicate resources to local human development, the habit of decades of referring to Rabat has become so deeply engrained that very often they do not exercise the power they possess. b.Decentralization could also have the effect of increasing inequality at the local level if the precondition of full community participation, which ensures a level social playing field, is not in place and implemented. c.Finally, decentralization could simply become a structure promulgating and regurgitating antiquated and unhelpful thinking if not accompanied by workshops focusing on self-reliant empowerment and free, creative thinking. 3. Power ought to be transferred as close to the people as possible in Morocco this is the municipal level. The Kingdom also created a fine example in the form of its 2010 amendment of the national municipal charter, with its requirement for locally elected representatives of the people to create municipal development plans based on direct popular participation. (The activities and aims of these representatives should be focused towards genuine popular needs, as expressed in community meetings, rather than biased in favor of narrow interest groups). Even as this legal requirement is highly progressive, unfortunately it has not been accompanied by the necessary training in order for local representatives to fulfill this important obligation. Therefore, innumerable municipal development plans have been created without awareness of intended beneficiaries or consideration of local particularities. Without essential experiential training in the application of participatory methodology at government level therefore, both effective decentralization and the creation of workable municipal development plans will remain elusive. It would be helpful to see that the implementation of community projects resulting from a participatory process not only advances the goals of the Post-2015 Agenda but also helps construct a decentralized system of decision-making and management. Local communities come together to assess their needs and follow through on projects that achieve the results that are most important to them, doing so by way of diverse partnerships. In the process, they also create productive relationships and channels of communication that can and should be revisited continuously in order to advance development. These subnational pathways producing measurable benefits for local people thus constitute the decentralized system itself. Furthermore, requiring the municipal level closest to the people to create participatory plans helps form the dynamic structure and processes of decentralization. In sum, for the Post-2015 Agenda to achieve its full potential in terms of human development and social change, it must unleash the power of the millions of villages and urban neighborhoods in our world, requiring the granting of authority to them. It necessitates the applied learning of facilitators so that they may convene community meetings and most of all it requires the funding and fulfillment of the countless plans of action that local people construct to improve their lives. Decentralize. Train in participatory methodology. Finance community-determined projects. Know that time is of the essence! Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir is a sociologist and president of the High Atlas Foundation, a U.S.-Moroccan international development organization. Mass slaughter of hundreds of men, women and children by soldiers in Zaria and the attempted cover-up of this crime demonstrates an utter contempt for human life and accountability, said Amnesty International as it publishes evidence gathered on the ground revealing how the Nigerian military burned people alive, razed buildings and dumped victims' bodies in mass graves. The report, Unearthing the truth: Unlawful killings and mass cover-up in Zaria, contains shocking eyewitness testimony of large-scale unlawful killings by the Nigerian military and exposes a crude attempt by the authorities to destroy and conceal evidence. The true horror of what happened over those two days in Zaria is only now coming to light. Bodies were left littered in the streets and piled outside the mortuary. Some of the injured were burned alive, said Netsanet Belay, Amnesty International's Research and Advocacy Director for Africa. Our research, based on witness testimonies and analysis of satellite images, has located one possible mass grave. It is time now for the military to come clean and admit where it secretly buried hundreds of bodies. More than 350 people are believed to have been unlawfully killed by the military between 12 and 14 December, following a confrontation between members of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) and soldiers in Zaria, Kaduna state. IMN supporters - some armed with batons, knives, and machetes - had refused to clear the road near their headquarters, the Hussainiyya, for a military convoy to pass. The army has claimed that IMN supporters attacked the convoy in an attempt to assassinate the Chief of Army Staff. IMN members deny this. Following an initial confrontation the military surrounded other locations where IMN supporters had gathered, notably at the residential compound of IMN leader Ibrahim Al-Zakzaky. Some people were killed as a result of indiscriminate fire. Others appeared to have been deliberately targeted. All available information indicates that the deaths of protestors were the consequence of excessive, and arguably, unnecessary use of force. Children injured and killed Zainab, a 16-year-old schoolgirl, told Amnesty International: We were in our school uniforms. My friend Nusaiba Abdullahi was shot in her forehead. We took her to a house where they treated the injured but, before reaching the house, she already died. A 10-year-old boy who was shot in the leg told Amnesty International how his older brother was shot in the head as they tried to leave the compound. We went out to try to shelter in a nearby house but we got shot. Shot and burned alive On 13 December, two buildings within Ibrahim Al-Zakzaky's compound, one of which was being used as a makeshift medical facility and mortuary, were attacked by soldiers. Alyyu, a 22-year-old student, told Amnesty International that he was shot in the chest outside the compound and was taken inside for treatment: There were lots of injured people in several rooms. There were dead bodies in a room and also in the courtyard. Around 12-1pm soldiers outside called on people to come out, but people were too scared to go out. We knew they would kill us. Soldiers threw grenades inside the compound. I saw one soldier on the wall of the courtyard shooting inside. One mother described a phone conversation with one of her 19-year-old sons before he was killed alongside his twin brother and their step brother and sister in the compound. They are shooting those injured one by one, he told her. As soldiers set fire to the makeshift medical facility in the compound that afternoon, Yusuf managed to escape despite serious gunshot wounds: Those who were badly injured and could not escape were burned alive, he told Amnesty International. I managed to get away from the fire by crawling on my knees until I reached a nearby house where I was able to hide until the following day. I don't know how many of the wounded were burned to death. Tens and tens of them. Footage believed to have been shot on mobile phone by IMN supporters after the incident shows bodies with gunshot wounds as well as charred bodies strewn around the compound. Cover-up After the incident the military sealed off the areas around al-Zakzaky's compound, the Hussainiyya and other locations. Bodies were taken away, sites were razed to the ground, the rubble removed, bloodstains washed off, and bullets and spent cartridge removed from the streets. Witnesses saw piles of bodies outside the morgue of Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital in Zaria. The hospital's Chief Medical Officer told Amnesty International that the military sealed off the area around the morgue for two days. During that time he saw army vehicles coming and going. A witness described to Amnesty International what he saw outside the hospital mortuary on the evening of 14 December: It was dark and from far I could only see a big mound but when I got closer I saw it was a huge pile of corpses on top of each other. I have never seen so many dead bodies. I got very scared and run away. It was a terrible sight and I can't get it out of my mind. Another witness told the organisation how he had seen diggers excavating holes at the site of the suspected mass grave: There were five or six large trucks and several smaller military vehicles and they spent hours digging and unloading the trucks' cargo into the hole they dug and then covered it again with the earth they had dug out. They were there from about 1 or 2 am until about 5 am. I don't know what they buried. It looked like bodies, but I could not get near. Amnesty International identified and visited the location of a possible mass grave near Mando. Satellite images of the site taken on 2 November and 24 December 2015 show disturbed earth spanning an area of approximately 1000 square metres. Satellite pictures also show the complete destruction of buildings and mosques. It is clear that the military not only used unlawful and excessive force against men, women and children, unlawfully killing hundreds, but then made considerable efforts to try to cover-up these crimes, said Netsanet Belay. Four months after the massacre the families of the missing are still awaiting news of their loved ones. A full independent forensic investigation is long overdue. The bodies must be exhumed, the incident must be impartially and independently investigated and those responsible must be held to account. BACKGROUND On Monday 25 April, the military are expected to give evidence to the Judicial Commission of Inquiry established by the Kaduna State Government in January 2016. On 11 April, a Kaduna State government official told the Judicial Commission of Inquiry that the bodies of 347 members of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) were collected from the hospital mortuary and an army depot in Zaria and buried secretly in a mass grave near Mando (outside the town of Kaduna) on the night of 14-15 December. The IMN claim a further 350 people who went missing during the incidents in Zaria remain unaccounted for. During field research carried out in Kaduna state and Federal Capital Territory (FCT) in February 2016, Amnesty International delegates interviewed 92 people, including victims and their relatives, eyewitnesses, lawyers and medical personnel. Attempts were made to interview members of the military. IMN leader Al-Zakzaky and his wife Zeinat Al-Zakzaky were arrested and held incommunicado. They were only allowed access to their lawyer for the first time on 1 April 2015, three and a half months after their arrest. Amnesty International has not had access to those who remain in detention but has received information from medical sources that some of the detainees were not allowed access to necessary medical care for several weeks after their arrest. Amnesty International is calling for those IMN supporters charged in connection with this incident to be tried promptly and fairly and for those still held in detention without charge to be either immediately charged or released. 21.04.2016 LISTEN I bring you warm greetings inside my humble and blessed abode. Indeed, its been a while since my good readers and followers read from me. All the same, I have been busy with other equally important assignments. However, my long silence did not stop me from reading and listening whiles following events going on in my motherland especially our political arena. In fact, this month of April, 2016 has been hot in the political scope of Ghana. From the "Baamu ya da" demonstration in Kumasi, the arrival of Jake's mortal remains, WASSCE examinations leakage, J.B Danquah's funeral against President Mahama's "accounting to the peoples" tour amongst other issues were all keenly followed. In all the issues, you may permit me to offer a piece of advice to the New Patriotic Party and other opposition parties seeking to wrestle power from the incumbent John Mahama led National Democratic Congress. I am not a political scientist but my utmost desire and zeal to follow contemporary Ghanaian politics will help shape my views and opinions in this article to every well meaning Ghanaian except those reading from a political spectacles. After the election petition of 2012, many especially those belonging to the NPP has called for a change in the way and manner we handle elections on this country. One of their major concern was a what they called "a new credible voters' register". As per my little understanding of free and fair elections, we ought too vote with a credible register. Yes, it has to be credible! But the biggest question is that; Is the current voter register credible? A big NO is the answer. As I continue with my piece, your doubts as to why its a no will be answered. The E.C which is the only mandatory institution in Ghana empowered by the constitution of the land to conduct elections and any other electoral processes is also on the contrary to the NPP's concerns. They say the current register is though faulty but still a credible one to be used in 2016 general elections. The EC's own five member committee attested to the fact that, the current book is faulty. After the committee brought its report and haven accepted that the current register is faulty, I was thinking that it was fair enough to end the cry for a new register but this same committee recommended otherwise. What a country? Maybe, the survival of the fittest is the key! All this while, I have learnt one thing about the Electoral Commission of Ghana. The EC is not consistent with issues pertaining to election 2016 and this attitude is crucial for Ghana's democracy. My observations has thought me that, the Charlotte Osei led Electoral Commission is playing with the issues of national concern. Earlier in her office as the commissioner of E.C, Madam Charlotte Osei told the whole world that, all smaller parties which do not meet the requirements of her outfit shall be flashed out but up till now, people are still registering similar political parties. The alleged over 200 thousand ghost names in Ashanti region alone comment by Madam Osei which she later retracted should tell any Ghanaian that, our electoral referee has not been consistent. This same EC who calls itself as an independent body is reported to have written letters to all political parties to bring their proposals towards the cleansing of the faulty but credible register. So I ask, if the register is credible as the EC holds, why should we then waste resources in cleaning it? My advice to the NPP and other opposition parties is that, they should honestly forget about the EC and its request for proposal towards cleaning the register and channel their attention and energies to the election day. The NPP especially should forget about the EC and lay down strategic plans to ensure the get a lot of their people to register and open an opportunity for them to come out and vote. Like Dr Afari Gyan said during the supreme court case, "elections are won at the polling center". This is a serious statement the NPP must reflect on it and map out a boot- for - boot mechanism to face the EC and the incumbent NDC. It is better to start preparations earlier in training all electoral stakeholders within the NPP and other opposition parties. I am a living witness to some happenings during the 2012 elections in Ashanti region especially. My brother who is a senior journalist with a radio station in Kumasi told me, "Rich, I have so far monitored about 30 polling stations in this constituency (name with-held) and I have not met either the MP or any constituency executive there....are your people really serious of winning this election"?. In a similar relations, he reported that, the polling agents for the NPP in a certain voting center had left the election center to buy food whiles the elections were still in progress. But one cannot blame these agents much because they needed to eat to do a proper work over there but their only mistake was that, one of them could have gone to buy the food on behalf of the other. At an instant, I also thought, some forces might have been at work to facilitate the departure of the duo from the polling agents. There are confirmed reports where the NDC tried to bribe some NPP agents to leave the work for them to do their election manipulations. So these guys could have fallen victims to such devilish plans? The NPP needs to train, empower and motivate their polling station agents very well to enable them do a diligent work on the election day. ...I was at Ahenema Kokoben SDA polling station when NDC served their agents with Breakfast, Lunch and Supper in the evening in 2012 but the NPP agents had nothing. Whiles the NDC were paying Ghc 250 for their agents, the NPP paid Ghc 20 in some constituencies. Even with this, many agents could not have their monies. In short, the NPP and other opposition parties must stop taking consolidations from the fact that, they are opposition parties and does not have monies and resources to motivate their grassroots and polling agents. It is not by force to take part in elections as a political party; if they are not ready, they should forget and lets continue to leave Ghana for the NDC. The so-called big men in the NPP are somehow stingy. They have left the party to suffer but they are the same persons who will rise from nowhere to fight over positions and appointments when the victory comes. Again, some parliamentary candidates ought to be serious for once. Especially in Ashanti region, the NPP parliamentarians are too lackadaisical in ensuring party victory. They are too arrogant and selfish though a few are good.They only think about their seats and if they win, they see that as enough for themselves. They do not think the party first. The party must put up measures that will compel every parliamentary candidate to work hard in realizing victory 2016. To my best of knowledge, the party must have an oversight body which will monitor the day-to-day activities of every parliamentary candidate especially in the strongholds of the party. The party (NPP) can also compel every parliamentarian to as a matter of fact, officially commission every developmental projects the respective MPs have put up in their various constituencies to enable the party and its constituents know what the need is and why they should vote for the party. After all, the so-called "accounting to the people" tour has a similar aim. I have also said this long ago and I will say it again. An MP or PC is the face of the political party it is representing in their constituencies, so the parties must have an interest in everything they do with the little monies that comes to them. For instance, if I am a floating voter who has come to appreciate the developmental projects of my MP even with the little funds s/he gets, it would not be very difficult for me to trust his/her presidential candidate when it is time to vote. The NPP must stop hiding at the back of being an opposition party and start working. They must compel their MPs to work hard before, during and after elections. I know an MP who has done much for his constituents but almost less than a quarter of his people know what he has done. The parties must be serious on such people. They must force them to bring their works to lights so that people can appreciate. When all these are done, wether a new register or not, the opposition parties can face the incumbent in the battle for power. Like I said, the EC is not ready for any change of register. I doubt if they will even follow the recommendations by the supreme court but whether good or bad, it is the only body mandated to handle our elections. I as a Ghanaian have lost confidence in our electoral body, not only during Madam Charlotte Osei's regime but since 2004. I have reserved my reasons to myself. Like I said, Charlotte Osei and her team of commissioners have been very inconsistent and economical with the truth when it comes to certain issues...no one can convince me that our electoral body isn't in bed with the ruling government. After all, it has been the trend since the inception of the forth republic. I have heard the EC saying on countless times that, it has abolished what we call "the strong room" counting of results but I am again advising the opposition parties led by the NPP to discredit this deceit because until it has happen, they cannot trust our EC.The EC has been inconsistent! They should train their people very well that, whatever result counted at the various polling centers are not by any means altered because stealing is part and a sibling to electoral victory. From polling station to constituency offices to regional offices and finally to the EC headquarters, every vote must count and counted very well. This may sound funny but the NPP must also make provisions for stand-by means of lighting system. It can be rechargeable lamps. I know what I have seen and heard before. They cannot trust the NDC-controlled security and lightening systems. Every coalition center must have rechargeable lamps. It would have been wise for the EC to do so since she knows our energy problem as a nation but again, I cannot trust the EC. The shout for reforms and changes are nothing...wether a new register or not, the opposition parties must work harder than they are doing. Trusting and laughing an electoral remote-controlled body can be dangerous. I rest my case. "A word to a wise is enough". Thank you. The author: Richard Sarpong (An agriculturalist and Entrepreneur) Email: [email protected] 21.04.2016 LISTEN By George-Ramsey Benamba, GNA Accra, April 20, GNA - The agricultural development bank (adb), has presented a fully furnished three-bedroom house to the 2014 National Best Farmer in Manso Nkwanta in the Ashanti Region. Mr Daniel Asiedu, the Managing Director of adb in a speech read on his behalf pledged the bank's commitment towards supporting farming in the country. "For more than a decade that we pledged our support to the National Farmers' day event, we have not reneged on our promise. "And we are witnesses to today's function where we are providing the 2014 best farmer, Mr George Amankwah with a fully furnished state of the art three- bedroom house valued at $1,000.00." He said the bank has shown support to farmers by providing them with loans that has helped them grow their agri businesses. Alhaji Mohammed -Muniru Limuna, Minister of Food and Agriculture, commended adb for the kind gesture. He said, government has put in place mechanisms to ensure the development of the agricultural sector despite the numerous challenges facing it. Alhaji Limuna said the sector has witnessed a growth of over three per cent in the third quarter of 2015 and expressed optimism that there would be higher growth by the end of the year. Mr John Alexander Ackon , Ashanti Regional Minister, commended Mr Amankwah for his hard work of over 18 years, which has yielded the results of he being crowned the 2014 national best farmer. "I wish to congratulate the 2014 national best farmer for a career well built and urge him to mentor other young ones to emulate him" The 2014 national best farmer, George Amankwah, thanked the bank and the Ministry for the kind gesture and indicated he was pleased with the work done. GNA 21.04.2016 LISTEN They Will Lash Him Ahhh And Then The Stick Will Break And They Go For Different Ones, And Then The Soldiers Will Sit And Smoke Wee And Then Continue The Beating. From Edmond Gyebi, Tamale The tortured 16 year old boy, Christopher Bama. Air Vice Marshal Michael Samson-Oje, Chief of Defence Staff (inset) He was accused of stealing a mobile phone belonging to a soldier. With guns pointed at his head, he still tried to prove his innocence by denying any knowledge about the said mobile phone. But his accusers, two soldiers, would not want to hear any denial of a sort, but an outright admission. For failing to admit the wrong he said he never committed, a 16 year old boy in Tamale, Christopher Bama, is currently in critical condition at the Nsawam Government Hospital, after he was cruelly subjected to severe beatings and torture by two soldiers from the Tamale Airborne Force. Christopher, who was accused of stealing a TECNO mobile phone, was said to have been handcuffed and hanged on top of a mango tree by the two soldiers, Corporal Sampson Atuahene (owner of the mobile phone) and Collins Agyei Boamah (accomplice). With his legs not touching the ground, the 16 year old boy, believed to be a long-standing errand boy for Corporal Sampson Atuahene, was beaten till he fell unconscious, and yet the soldiers would not show any mercy. To further press on the boy to produce the missing phone he claimed he never took, the two soldiers, according to an eyewitness, melted plastic material (polythene bags) and dropped them on Christopher's naked body until he regained consciousness. According to a Senior Sister of Christopher Bama by name Patience Bama, Christopher went to the military quarters at Shishegu to fetch water with someone's motorbike. Later, the soldiers called him to come back to the quarters, where they accused him of stealing the mobile phone. The soldiers seized the motorbike and asked him to produce the phone, but when he told them he had not seen any phone, they pounced on him and brutally assaulted him. She said that the two soldiers, after beating her brother with sticks, also threatened to shoot him if he did not produce the phone. She alleged that three other soldiers who came to visit Corporal Atuahene also joined the two to assault Christopher the more. Christopher Bama I got to the scene where the soldiers were beating my brother, and, in fact, it was unbelievable. Nobody could go to my brother's rescue. Whenever I tried to plead with them, they turned their anger on me and pushed me down, and I also fainted. My mother also came there, and when she saw the condition of my brother, she could not also bear it, and suddenly also fainted. So some of the people came to our rescue, but for my brother, nobody could go near him. These soldiers were still beating him, using their boots to step on his abdomen and hitting him in the head. My brother's skin was full of blood and burns, yet he was hanging up there. She accused the two soldiers of smoking wee (Indian hemp) at the scene whilst they were beating her brother. They will lash him ahhh and then the stick will break, and they go for different ones, and then the soldiers will sit and smoke wee, and then continue the beating. According to Patience Bama, the beating and the torture lasted for over five hours (started around 9:00am and continued till 2:30pm). She asserted that the two soldiers, Corporal Sampson Atuahene and Collins Agyei Boamah, threatened to send Christopher to the military barracks and kill him there, if he did not produce the phone. Under such duress and torture, she said that the victim still denied taking the phone. After insisting on the soldiers to allow him call the owner of the motorbike, they concluded that he had given the phone to that guy. That boy too was brought to the scene and was also assaulted heavily, but he also denied any knowledge about the phone, and was later released by the soldiers, Patience said. Patience Bama told The Chronicle that upon realising that her brother's life was in extreme danger, she decided to involve the police. She, therefore, ran to the Tamale Metro Police Station and complained to the Crime Officer, who, eventually, informed the Military High Command in the Northern Region to intervene. Corporal Sampson Atuahene Corporal Sampson Atuahene and Kwaku Collins, according to Patience Bama, then took the seriously injured Christopher to the Lamashegu Police Station and lodged a complaint. The police at Lamashegu quickly directed the soldiers to take Christopher to the hospital first, looking at his condition at the time. The police told me to take a lead to the Tamale Teaching Hospital and obtain a folder for my brother before they bring him for treatment, and I did just that, according to the victim's sister. But, to her dismay, after she had left, the police rather allowed the soldiers to take her brother away and ended up at the Tamale Military Hospital at Kamina, where he was handcuffed on a hospital bed without any treatment. I waited at the teaching hospital for several hours, and they were not coming. When we later heard that he was at the Kamina hospital, we rushed there and saw him in a very bad condition. His face and the entire body were swollen, and he could not speak. He wanted to urinate, but the nurses insisted that he urinate on the bed. In fact, the treatment was bad and I could not bear it, so we insisted and we took him to God Cares Community Hospital. Air Vice Marshal Michael Samson-Oje, Chief of Defence Staff In an interview with The Chronicle, the Chief Executive Officer of God Cares Community Hospital, Dr. Richard Opoku, described Christopher's condition as very critical, and that he required advanced medical examination at a higher facility to save him. He said the patient had started behaving abnormally and was persistently vomiting, which, he said, was a sign of intracranial injury (head injury). His condition, according to Doctor Opoku, was not getting better as further medical examination revealed that he had started discharging some fluid in the abdomen, and that they could not readily determine whether it was blood or peritoneal fluid. Christopher could not pass urine, and was, therefore, given a foley catheter to aid his urination. Foley Catheter is a soft thin rubber tube with a balloon at the tip, which is inserted through the urethra to the bladder to drain urine. The CEO of God Cares Community Hospital told the paper that the suspected head or brain injury, and the abnormal behaviour of the patient, compelled the facility to refer the case to the Tamale Teaching Hospital for a Computerised Tomography (CT) Scan. But the Tamale Teaching Hospital could not admit Christopher, because their two CT scan machines had broken down for months without repairs. He was then referred to the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital. Collins Agyei Boamah But the family of Christopher, when contacted, said that Korle Bu could not also admit the patient, because they did not also have the CT scan machine, and eventually referred him to the Nsawam Government Hospital, where he is currently receiving treatment. Dr. Richard Opoku could not comprehend why a law enforcing officer could subject a fellow Ghanaian to such huge suffering or pain, where one could see multiple assault marks on a person. He said apart from the vomiting, the patient was also in severe pain, with contusions, to the extent that a little touch on the body causes pain. In an interview with Corporal Sampson Atuahene he refused to give any detailed account of the incident, but admitted the brutal assault on Christopher and described it as an act of the devil. Meanwhile, the two soldiers are still walking freely, and are allegedly still demanding that the victim's family pay for the missing phone. The Chronicle's investigations are still ongoing, and we shall bring the detailed report on the accounts of the police in Tamale, and the actions being taken by the office of the Commanding Officer of the Airborne Force in Tamale in subsequent publications. 21.04.2016 LISTEN By: Chris Twum ([email protected]) Friends of Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings (FONKAR) and the National Democratic Party (NDP) have accused the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) of plotting to assassinate Mrs. Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings -flagbearer of the party. According to the two bodies, the very existence of the NDP and its flagbearer has always been a threat to the Mahama-led government, to the extent that members of the NDC are determined to go every length to get them out of the way. Speaking at a joint press conference organized by the two bodies in Accra yesterday, Joseph Bediako -National Operations Director of the NDP expressed worry over the attitude of members of the NDC against the party (NDP) and its flagbearer. Series of attempts have been made against Konadu. The first was on 17th September, 2011, at the Cape Coast Town Hall. Mrs. Rawlings was nearly attacked by some thugs alleged to have been hired by the former Central Regional Minister and her agents, he explained. He elucidated that some heavily built young men stormed the premises rented for the Thank You Tour programme, ostensibly to cause mayhem. They later resorted to insults on radio and other media platforms and it became a competition that, those who were able to insult the more were given ministerial appointments and juicy portfolios, the NDP National Operations Director added. Continuing, Mr. Bediako noted: In January this year, a man who hails from Tumu in the Sissala East District of the Upper West Region visited the former first lady, disguised himself as an insane person, hovering around the office premises. Luckily, this supposed mad man never got the chance to deliver whatever venom he was carrying, he posited, adding Last week, this supposed madman visited again and he was prevented from entering the premises. Mr. Bediako said having failed in their earlier madman decoy, they changed the tactics and introduced a new person to act sane, and he succeeded in finding his way to the office of the former first lady, and insisted on having a tetea-tete with her. But we stood our grounds and did not allow him to see Madam because we suspected him of some negative intentions. When persuasions failed, he then left the office and when I was seeing him off to his car, he pulled a pistol from his suit and dropped it in his unregistered VW vehicle, Mr. Bediako added. Explaining further, he said the gentleman mentioned he came to visit the former first lady, but denied that he had any negative intention of killing the NDP flagbearer. He said the NDC has done everything possible to frustrate the former first lady by ensuring that anytime Mrs. Konadu Agyeman Rawlings decided to go out to engage members of the general public, especially the youth, they try to scuttle her efforts. Having failed in all these, the NDC have resorted to frustrating Mrs. Rawlings in her attempt in engaging the public, particularly the youth, most recent is what happened at Legon last Friday, he noted. Mr. Bediako concluded: What we are seeing now is that they have lost touch with the people and they see anyone propagating message for a change as an enemy and they are going to any length to shut those people up. Welcome to Line Danci Read more [...] 21.04.2016 LISTEN From Issah Alhassan, Kumasi THE HEAD of Security details of Nana Addo Dankwah Akufo Addo, the New Patriotic Party(NPP) Presidential Candidate, Captain Edmund Koda (RTD) has finally broken his silence over recent controversies surrounding his arrest and detention by the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) in connection with the alleged invitation of three South African security experts into the country. Captain Edmund Koda cautioned that the party will not be intimidated by the recent harassments from the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) and the National Security. The retired army officer says the party would not in any way review security arrangements put in place to protect the flag bearer, Nana Addo Dankwah Akufo Addo, despite covert moves by state security agencies to intimidate them. Captain Koda assured that the NPP would continue to do everything within its power to safeguard the lives of the Presidential candidate, as well as its running mate, Dr. Mahamadu Bawumia, ahead of the crucial November 7 elections. We want to assure Ghanaians and supporters of the NPP in the Ashanti Region that, we are not leaving anything to chance in ensuring maximum protection for Nana Addo, we will solidly protect him and ensure that he becomes President in January 2017, Captain Koda assured. The ex-Soldier and Head of Nana Addos security made the statements in separate interviews with HELLO and ASHH FM in Kumasi yesterday. His comments followed the brief arrest and detention of personal photographer and bodyguard of the 2016 presidential candidate of the NPP by the BNI on Tuesday. The two were said to have accompanied Captain Edmund Koda to the premises of the security outlet to retrieve some items, which were seized from him few weeks ago when personnel of the BNI raided his house, as part of investigations connected to the invitation of three South Africans into the country. The two persons were detained after they failed to comply with instructions from officials of the BNI to fill a profile form indicating some personal details before being allowed to enter the premises. Captain Koda narrated in the interview that about a week ago, he received a call from the BNI to come and retrieve the items, which were taken from his residence during the raid a few weeks ago. He said he then asked the two, Nana Kwadwo Kyeremeh and Malik Neequaye, who acted as witnesses at the time the BNI seized the items from his residence, to accompany him. The ex-soldier said when they arrived at the BNI office, he was given automatic entry but the two witnesses were asked to fill the Personality Profile said to be reserved for only suspects, to which the two refused and demanded to consult their lawyers before. As a result of this development, the BNI refused to hand over the items to us, so we left and came to see our lawyers who instructed us not to fill the forms, since it was a requirement for only suspects, Captain Koda maintained. He, however, said on Tuesday, which was exactly a week since their visit, they decided to go to the BNI office again to take delivery of the items, but the officials insisted that until the two filled the forms, he would not be given the items. After some minutes, an order came from above that since the two witnesses had refused to fill the forms, they should be arrested and detained overnight, Nana Addos Security Head noted, adding that the two were then hauled into a room and detained until 11:30 pm on Tuesday, when he got a call from the BNI Office to come and pick them up. UNLAWFUL DETENTION Captain Koda indicated that he was very surprised at the lawless behaviour of the personnel of the BNI, which he described as appalling. According to him, the BNI was gradually turning the county into a lawless state, where rules do not apply. Captain Koda argued that there was no need for the detention of the witnesses, since they committed no crime. We all know that the Personality Profile is filed by suspects. I was treated as a suspect so I had no problem filling the forms, but the two witnesses had done nothing wrong to be subjected to that treatment. If the BNI insists that filling of the Personality Profile is a routine activity, I want to ask them if they have ever asked a lawyer to fill such forms when they come there to see their clients? he asked. He said if care is not taken, Ghanaians would wake up and confront a situation where the police and other security agencies would just engage in arbitrary arrests without recourse to the law. They call this democracy but we need to be careful, otherwise we will have a situation whereby you will be walking on the street and the police will just meet you and start taking details of your mother and your father, he warned. LET THEM TRY Nana Addos Head of Security, however, pledged that his outfit will never be cowed into changing its security arrangements, cautioning that they will not hesitate to meet the BNI and its surrogates boot for boot, should they try anything funny. We want to tell them that we will never kowtow to their intimidations; if they are ready, we too we are ready. Let them dare and we will show them that we are ready; we are sick and tired of them! What do they want from us? Captain Koda ranted. POLICE PROTECTION On the decision by the Ghana Police Service to provide security for all presidential candidates competing in the November 7 elections, Captain Koda expressed reservations, indicating that they cannot rely on the police for maximum protection. Have you noticed President Mahamas security details? Have you seen any police close to him, it is not the duty of the police to provide close protection to a presidential candidate, he observed. Captain Koda, however, insisted that the deportation of the three South African expatriates will not affect the training scheme of the party. We will continue to train them because they need it. Even teachers attend refresher courses at a certain point in time, he pointed out. Cape Town (AFP) - A South African judicial inquiry clearing all government officials of corruption over a multi-billion dollar arms deal was greeted with scorn on Thursday by critics of President Jacob Zuma. "It's a whitewash," leading anti-arms-deal campaigner Terry Crawford-Browne told AFP. "It is very much as expected." The opposition Democratic Alliance party called the commission's report "a massive disappointment because those who were implicated in arms deal corruption have effectively been let off the hook". The four-year inquiry into the scandal, in which Zuma was a suspect, found that there was no evidence to support widespread allegations of bribery, fraud and corruption, the president said Thursday. Zuma summarised the findings of the commission in a statement in which he said he had received the three-volume report at the end of last year and was now making it public. Critics have long charged that the government-appointed inquiry was toothless and was being used in an attempt to put the issue to rest. Paul Hoffman, a lawyer representing anti-arms-deal activists, likened the inquiry to "a farce". The commission suffered a series of resignations of officials involved, including the departure of one of the three original judges. - Scandal-hit president - "The commission states that the widespread allegations of bribery, corruption and fraud in the arms procurement process... have found no support or corroboration in the evidence," Zuma's statement said. "Any findings pointing to wrongdoing should be given to law enforcement agencies for further action. There are no such findings and the commission does not make any recommendations." The $4.8 billion arms deal saw the government acquire a vast range of military equipment, including fighter jets, helicopters, warships and submarines from countries including Britain, France and Sweden. The commission's report comes as a High Court challenge is under way to reinstate more than 700 charges of corruption against Zuma which were dropped in 2009, shortly before he became president. The charges, which relate to the arms deal signed in 1999 when Zuma was deputy president, were dropped allegedly because of interference in the prosecution case by his political opponents. Zuma was accused of having accepted bribes from international arms manufacturers. Zuma's advisor, Schabir Shaik, was jailed for 15 years on related charges in 2005, with the judge saying there was "overwhelming" evidence of a corrupt relationship between the two. Shaik was released on medical parole in 2009, the year Zuma was elected president. Zuma set up the commission, headed by Judge Willie Seriti, after Crawford-Browne launched a case for an inquiry in the Constitutional Court. The president unveiled its conclusions after months of separate corruption controversies that have weakened his position within the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party. A court ruled last month that Zuma had violated the constitution over spending on his private residence, and he has been beset by allegations that a wealthy family had such influence over him that it could decide ministerial appointments. Former president Thabo Mbeki, who was in power when the arms deal was signed, was among witnesses who testified at the commission. Mbeki defended the decision to spend billions on arms despite dire poverty in a country emerging from the apartheid era. He said the government wanted to reclaim the defence force from the white-minority regime ousted by Nelson Mandela and the ANC in 1994. The commission found that the purchase of the weapons was "necessary". The Minister in the Presidency, Jeff Radebe, denied the commission was a whitewash, saying: "We trust these findings will bring final closure to this long drawn-out process." Crawford-Browne said activists would consider taking the case back to the Constitutional Court. A sunset is one of those intangible things that make us upbeat in our connections. It is often associated with romance and in other instances with the end of something. It is a ray of hope, that todays worries are gone and a brighter tomorrow awaits us. For Mattie Stepanek, Sunset is still my favorite color, and rainbow is second. Jovago.com , Africas leading online hotel booking website, assorts 5 beautiful sunsets in Africa (in no particular order) that will leave you in awe. Cape Town, South Africa Credit: SMCT Imagine stumbling into this view on the shores of the beautiful Cape Town in South Africa. Chances are that the hypnotizing effect is likely to make you forget you were en route to some other place. Kenya Credit: all4desktop.com Even the birds of the air enjoy this heavenly sunset that is a mixture of orange and red, giving it a sweltering look. What then would stop you from enjoying such a rare sight? Bojo Beach, Ghana Credit: Bell Africana Digest After a days hard work, there is nothing more comforting for a fisherman in Bojo Beach, Ghana, than to row their boat under the reflection of a beautiful sunset. Then, they would forget their weariness and anticipate a relaxed evening, enjoying their hard earned meal. Madagascar Credit: pixabay.com You probably have watched Madagascar; I am talking about the cartoon. The beautiful sunsets in this country are probably one of the many reasons this animation was shot in the island nation off the southeast coast of Africa. Combined with leisurely beaches and reefs, the feeling of infinity is what you will no doubt get here. Zambia Credit: www.ianplant.com Indulge yourself in this breathtaking view of a sunset flowing into the blissful blue of Victoria Falls in Zambia. There is nothing better than watching this with your significant other; it will get you lost in the world of wild romance and adventure, leaving an unforgettable memory to cherish forever. Kwaku Agyemang-Manu,Chairman of the Public Account Committee 21.04.2016 LISTEN Journalists belonging to the Parliamentary Press Corp had rude shock of their lives on Thursday Morning when they were turned away from covering the Public Account Committee Sitting which was to meet the Judicial Service. The PAC is reviewing the 2011, 2012 and 2013 editions of the Auditor Generals report on the Judicial Service, but according to some peeved and bewildered journalists, for some strange reasons, the PAC members disallowed them from entering the auditorium to report the proceedings. This is quite unusual because in the past few days, the same journalists were allowed to cover the proceedings on other departments and agencies mentioned in the report but on this occasion, they have been prevented from covering that of the judicial service said Parliamentary correspondent, Yesmeen Abubakar Tetteh, of Accra Based Top Fm. She also alleged that Police personnel who were stationed at the venue of the committee sitting have manhandled some journalists who attempted entering the auditorium to listen to the proceedings. Member of the PAC revealed to me that the journalists were prevented because the report on the judicial service is stinking, therefore, media publications on it will further diminish the public trust and confidence in the judiciary he said. Meanwhile in a quick response on Ghana Dadwen on Onua Fm, Vice Secretary of the Parliamentary Press Corp Jeorge Wilson Kingson told the host Bright Kwesi Asempa that the claims by Yesmeen Abubakar Tetteh was factually inaccurate and must be disregarded. Jeorge Wilson Kingson added that there was a prior notice to the Press Corp informing them of change of venue and why it would not be possible for the media to cover Thursdays proceedings, saying there was a precedent. However the Chairman of the Public Account Committee who is MP for Dormaa Central constituency, Brong Ahafo Hon. Kwaku Agyemang-Manu explained to journalists after the sitting that, due to some sensitive issues, the PAC decided to have a closed door sitting. there are some sensitive issues involve that we dont think should be put into the public domain, judicial service is a sensitive are Article 103 (3) of the constitution says Committees of Parliament will be charged with such functions, including the investigation and inquiry into the activities and administration of ministries and departments as Parliament may determine and such investigation and inquiries may extend to proposals for legislation. Standing Order 165 of Parliament assigns to the Public Accounts Committee, the examination of the audited accounts showing the appropriation of funds granted by Parliament to the government. Chairman of the Peoples National Convention (PNC) Bernard Mornah says he is 100 percent behind the legalisation of marijuana in the country. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in an article in February urged countries to legalize marijuana as a way to combat the menace of drug abuse and illegal trafficking. He argued, Drugs are dangerous, but current narcotics policies are an even bigger threat because punishment is given a greater priority than health and human rights. In Ghana, persons who trade or abuse the substance are made to face the full rigor of the law. Just yesterday, Wednesday April 20, a man was arrested by the police in the Northern Region for possessing dried leaves suspected to be marijuana, locally referred to as wee. Sharing his thought on the issue on 3FMs Sunrise Morning Show hosted by Winston Amoah Thursday, Mr. Mornah, a prospective law maker, described the issue as an economic war. Its an economic war that has been waged on us as Africans for so many years and its time for us to overcome this. Alcohol has been legalized but not all of us take alcohol and so many other things have been legalized and not all of us take it. A product that has so much value, medicinal, economic and what have you is being criminalized and in the secret, most people are doing it. I think its important for us to broaden the debate so that our security agencies must appreciate that the historical reasons for which wee or Indian hemp has come to be seen as something that we should not deal with has everything to do with economic empowerment and not because it has so many dangers on human beings. When you go to Bolivia, the President Evo Morales has stamped the world and gone ahead to legalise the production of cocaine in the country and its generating a lot of wealth and its ensuring that the people are active and continue to be in business so as Ghanaians and Africans, I think that we should take a look at it. Mr. Mornah also compared the benefits of legalizing wee with the side effects of cigarettes which is even imported into the country. You know that the side effects of cigarettes are more devastating than wee, yet we allow the exportation and importation of cigarettes and we cannot come to terms with wee which a lot of us know has a lot of medicinal purposes such as surgeries, gynecological problems, cosmetics and what have you. So if you enhance the production you will see that you will enhance cosmetic production in your country and there will be chain of industries that will flow out of it with people earning income and we will increase our GDP as a country. I am saying that let's find the good uses of it and use it for those purposes and Im calling for the economic value for which we must legalise it and not just the inhaling of it. By George-Ramsey Benamba, GNA Avatime (VR), April 21, GNA - President John Dramani Mahama on Thursday stated that government would not renege on its promise to provide socio-economic infrastructure in the country. He said the provision of such projects would facilitate movement internally and enhance integration of Ghana with her neighbours in the West African sub-region. President Mahama stated this when he inaugurated the Ho-Vane-Fume road at Avatime in the Ho West District of the Volta Region as part of his three-day Volta Regional "Accounting to the people tour". The GHa 54.7 million 18.4 kilometre road, which has been completed would reduce travelling time and facilitate the movement of goods and services in the enclave and beyond. It is the third road project President Mahama has inaugurated after the Dodo-Pepesu-Nkwanta, Jasikan-Worawora-Dambai roads. President Mahama commended communities in the Ho West District for their peaceful co-existence although they have 16 different paramountcies. He urged them to translate that peaceful co-existence into communal programmes that would speed up the development of their areas. The President said although it is incumbent on government to provide development projects, it is also necessary for the communities to initiate some of the projects locally with other development partners. Responding to the chiefs' request to broaden their mandate in national policies, President Mahama urged them to deliberate at regional and national levels and make recommendations for approval. He explained that those issues could only be carried out after constitutional amendment, indicating that government would be ready to make changes if necessary and for the betterment of Ghanaians if their recommendations are cogent. President Mahama warned Ghanaians against multiple registrations in the forthcoming limited registration, adding that it is a criminal to do so. Osie Adza Tikpor VII, the Paramount Chief of Avatime commended President Mahama for the road and expansion of school projects throughout the region. He appealed to President Mahama to provide the Avatime Senior High School with a bus to facilitate the movement of staff and students. Alhaji Inusah Fuseini, Minister of Roads and Highways, gave the assurance that government would complete on schedule all the roads that it has embarked on. He said the road project is wholly funded by the Government and supervised by the Ghana Highways Authority. GNA We attempted to send a notification to your email address but we were unable to verify that you provided a valid email address. Please click here to update your email address if you wish to receive notifications. Otherwise, you may click here to disable notifications and hide this message. business Duty-free gold to help improve working cap, int costs: Gitanjali The move will help the gold exporters to reduce their working capital by 11 percent as well as the save on the interest cost, says Sanjeev Agarwal of Gitanjli Exports. you are here: business Seeing order pick-up from power utilities: Transformer India Roll out of tenders by Power Grid, NTPC and various utilities have also gone up, says Jitendra Mamtora, Chairman of Transformers and Rectifiers (India). business Stone India to work towards 20-25% margins on bio-toilets order Goenka says that due to immense amount of competition in the bio-toilets segment, they have had to sacrifise on their margins. He did not disclose the margins expected from the win. Forty Chattanooga area businesses, nonprofits and organizations will employ HCDE high school students this summer through the STEP-UP Chattanooga paid summer internship program. The students who are applying to be STEP-UP Chattanooga paid summer interns will be doing mock interviews Thursday evening with Chattanooga area business leaders to help them prepare for the work they will be doing this summer. In collaboration with partners and funders, Public Education Foundation and Hamilton County Department of Education launched STEP-UP Chattanooga in January, an internship program for high school juniors and seniors in Hamilton County public schools designed to address the challenges faced by both businesses and students in a global economy. BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee Health Foundation, Inc. committed $300,000 and Benwood Foundation contributed $200,000 for the first two years of the program which serves underrepresented students from low-income backgrounds, those most at risk for joblessness and lack of higher education. The City of Chattanooga and Hamilton County are also founding partners.STEP-UP Chattanooga has recruited local high school students and is providing work readiness training designed to help them be successful in interviews and professional settings. One hundred students will be hired by area businesses, nonprofit agencies, and public institutions where they will complete assignments this summer. Throughout the experience, students will receive support and feedback from STEP-UP staff and supervisors at their place of employment.The following businesses, nonprofits and organizations have signed up to hire STEP-UP Chattanooga paid interns this summer: Application Researchers, ASA Engineering & Consulting, Inc., Benwood Foundation, Bessie Smith Cultural Center, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, Booker T. Washington State Park, Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority (CARTA), Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce, Chattanooga Florist, Chattanooga Gas Company, Chattanooga Public Library, Chattanooga Lookouts, Chattanooga News Chronicle, Chattanooga State Community College, Chattanooga Renaissance Fund, Chattanooga Times Free Press, Chattanooga Zoo, Chattem, City of Chattanooga, The Company Lab (CO.LAB), Creative Discovery Museum, The Enterprise Center, EPB of Chattanooga, Greenspaces, Lamp Post Group, The Links, Incorporated-Chattanooga Chapter, Northside Neighborhood House, Public Education Foundation, River City Company, SmartBank, 2nds Building Materials (Southeastern Salvage, Home Emporium, Discount Building Materials), Southtree, SunTrust Bank, TechTown Foundation, Inc., Tennessee Aquarium, United Way of Greater Chattanooga, Vision Hospitality Group, Warren and Griffin Law Firm, WRCB-TV and WTCI-TV.Research from the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce indicates there are currently 15,000 jobs that cannot be filled by Hamilton County residents based on educational requirements. Additionally, the Harvard Graduate School of Education found that a major reason students fail to complete a two- or four-year college program is that too many cant see a clear, transparent connection between their program of study and tangible opportunities in the labor market."Organizations hosting STEP-UP interns will build relationships with a pool of talented, diverse future employees while filling job vacancies and demonstrating a commitment to improving the lives of at-risk youth. Students will have opportunities to explore careers while developing work skills, as well as to network with adult professionals who can help them achieve educational and professional goals," officials said.STEP-UP Chattanooga is modeled after the nationally-recognized STEP-UP Minneapolis program, which has served over 20,000 students since 2004. Ninety-six percent of STEP-UP Minneapolis supervisors reported that interns made a valuable contribution to the workplace and the program was a success at their companies.STEP-UP Chattanooga complements PEFs other College Access & Success initiatives, including Camp College, Passport Scholars, support for Hamilton Countys College Access & Career Advisers, and community education.For more information on becoming a business partner, visit stepupchattanooga.org The Lookout Farmers Market opens its third year as a weekly Friday market at the Incline in St. Elmo. New this year will be a street market held on the last Friday of every month in front of the Incline across from 1885 in the charming village of St. Elmo. Markets on the Street Last Friday of each month 4-9 p.m. - May 27 - Oct. 28 Live Local Music - Sponsored by MetroTone Health & Wellness Tent - Sponsored by Erlanger Childrens Activity Tent - Sponsored by TVFCU Community Outreach Tent - Sponsored by TN American Water Food Demo Tent - Sponsored by Lodge Alternative Health Tent - Sponsored by Centered Health Local Food Trucks Local Beer Garden Markets on the Grass Each Friday 4-7 p.m. (No markets on Holidays) April 22 - Oct. 23 Fresh Savings Program - Double Up on SNAP Other market locations and days are: Mondays, starting 4/25 Red Bank United Methodist Tuesdays, starting 4/26 E. Brainerd Audubon Acres The Lookout Farmers Market strives to be accessible to everyone in the economically and culturally diverse St Elmo/Southside community. VISA, MasterCard, and EBT/ transactions will be accepted. The Market is accepting SNAP/EBT cards to make organic fresh produce more affordable for low-income families. The US app Acorns helps thousands of people invest small amounts of money (which they call acorns). And their investments, over time, turn into thousands (or large trees). Why do investors lose money? There are lots of reasons why we lose money and no one is immune to it. I would chalk up a majority of capital losses to emotional discomfort. Let say youre investing in company A. The company looks great, and their financials seem solid. However, the market theyre in isnt getting a lot of attention. In fact, this market is getting bad publicity if anything. Analysts are telling everyday punters to get out of the market, causing share prices to fall. I would wager that most investors who are playing with sums they can afford to lose will also sell. Why? Because they dont like seeing their portfolios go into the red. And this could very well be the best thing to do. Generally, market wisdom suggests you should sell your losers and keep your winners. But as soon as you sell out, you find company As share price has jumped; it goes on to climb even higher over the next year. You dont bother getting back in because you had already made a loss, believing its too late to get back in. This situation happens too often to count. Market noise will scare investors from the market, ensuring they lose money when they could have made substantial gains. When I was an intra-day trader the same thing happened. But, instead of it taking place on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, I experienced this on a second-to-minute basis. Price action was rapidly changing, and the fear of losing more or missing out sometimes seemed too great. I learnt the hard way that, trading even with small amounts, emotions still cause us to make irrational decisions. Now, imagine if you had an app that invested for you. Not big sums, but small sums of $30 dollars a month. It would be a pure set and forget investment. Well this app already exists. The US app Acorns helps thousands of people invest small amounts of money (which they call acorns). And their investments, over time, turn into thousands (or large trees). Acorns provide five smart portfolios, ranging from conservative to aggressive. The app has received nearly 70,000 downloads in just over two months, beating its own expectations. Acorns symbolises the rising Australian interest from overseas financial technology players. Australias alternative finance lending market (valued at $348 million) is the third-largest in Asia-Pacific. In 2015, the market grew 320%, according to research by accounting firm KPMG. The market potential is very, very significant in Australia, said Cath Rogers, investment director at Sydney-based AirTree Ventures, which invests in Fintech companies. The government is supportive: it wants to develop Sydney as a FinTech hub. They hope Sydney might become Australias answer to Silicon Valley. Theyve also announced tax breaks for early-stage investments, as well as a visa scheme for entrepreneurs to attract talent. But this move towards FinTech could pose a threat to Australias biggest lenders the banks. However, it seems these tech start-ups are planning to play nice with our Big Four lenders. Rogers firm is backing a Sydney-based online lending business called Prospa. Prospa has a referral tie-up with Australias third-biggest lender, Westpac Banking Corporation [ASX:WBC]. And, earlier this year, US online lending firm On Deck Capital [NYSE:ONDK] entered into an exclusive partnership with Australias second-biggest lender, Commonwealth Bank of Australia [ASX:CBA]. So while there are market commentators saying that banks need to adopt a digital culture, banks may already be in the process. The increased use of FinTech could bring about a new dynamic to how we think about investing. Harje Ronngard, Junior Analyst, Money Morning PS: Have you ever wondered what the best investments are for your money? You might be weighing up the pros and cons between real estate and stocks, for instance. Money Mornings Publisher, Kris Sayce, has written a report that answers this question. In Kris report, The Three Best Investments in Australia for 2015 and Beyond, youll learn why it might be the time to start loading up on one of Australias most-hated markets Kris will also show you how to buy property on the Aussie stock market, at a time when physical real estate is stagnating. To get your free report, click here. During a hearing on Wednesday on fixing the federal budget process, Senator Bob Corker said Congress should be ashamed of the way it handles the American peoples money. Our budget process is the biggest hoax cast upon the American people, Senator Corker said. To vote for a budget challenges ones integrity and certainly ones intellect. It is a shame that the American people even believe there is a budget process that has something to do with fiscal discipline. Currently, the federal budget does not carry the force of law. Senator Corker questioned whether making the budget a law would force members of Congress on both sides of the aisle to finally work together to address our nations fiscal challenges. Theres no forcing mechanism right now. None, he said. The fact is we spend money we dont have We should be ashamed, ashamed (by) the way we deal with Americans money. New listings in the Chattanooga region decreased 1.6 percent to 1,332 during March, the Chattanooga Association of Realtors reported. Pending sales were up 22.5 percent to 991. Inventory levels shrank 19.1 percent to 3,599 units. Officials said prices continued to gain traction. The Median Sales Price increased 1.4 percent to $147,000. Days on Market was down 27.7 percent to 73 days. CAR officials said, "Sellers were encouraged as Months Supply of Inventory was down 27 percent to 4.6 months. "Employment figures are positive, wages are going up and employers are hiring. Consumers are holding for the right deal, even in the face of extremely low mortgage rates. As seller and builder confidence increases, we should see more activity in Q2 2016. "The second quarter tends to rank as the best time to list a home for sale. But if inventory stays low, it will be difficult to sustain sales increases in year-over-year comparisons. Prices are seemingly not so high as to stall the market completely. Demand is present but an abundance of choice is not, and therein lies the rub. "Negative housing headlines should be read with calm or skepticism, not alarm. National housing trends, like the steady rise in home prices and decline in inventory, should certainly be observed with care, but tracking wider economic conditions is also necessary. Buyers want to get into the market, but unlike the rising-price sales environment of 10 years ago, people are not diving headlong into risky mortgages or uncomfortable situations. This carefulness should be celebrated, not feared." April 21, 2016 When Media Shill For Saudi Money A timely Washington Post piece looks at how the Saudis bribe left, right and center: Saudi government has vast network of PR, lobby firms in U.S. The Saudi government and its affiliates have spent millions of dollars on U.S. law, lobby and public relations firms to raise the countrys visibility in the United States and before the United Nations at a crucial time. ... Five lobby and PR firms were hired in 2015 alone, signaling a stepped-up focus on ties with Washington. The firms have been coordinating meetings between Saudi officials and business leaders and U.S. media, ... The Saudis are getting some bang for their money. And just today these three well-paid-for pieces appeared. Notice how they have a common, lobby induced theme: They may have promoted al Qaedas poisonous ideology. But Saudi Arabia is too valuable an ally against todays terrorism to allow ordinary Americans to make the kingdom pay. Foreign Policy - Saudi Arabia Is a Great American Ally While Tehran continues to sow anti-American terrorism across the Middle East, Riyadh holds the key to regional stability. This is not the time to back away from the House of Saud. CBS News - Saudi officials give Obama chilly reception in Riyadh The Saudis are particularly angry about the Iran nuclear deal, and they believe that only the next U.S. president -- whether it's Hillary Clinton or even Donald Trump -- will be able to restore Saudi Arabia's status as America's key ally in the Middle East. The biggest sellout yet is Bloomberg which whored out the May issue of Businessweek, including the cover, to a Saudi prince: The $2 Trillion Project to Get Saudi Arabias Economy Off Oil - Eight unprecedented hours with Mr. Everything, Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In Prince Mohammed, the U.S. may find a sympathetic long-term ally in a chaotic region. The Saudi mafia clan is not just itself corrupt. It is massively corrupting others. It bribes them to do take part in their crimes, no matter how nefarious. Just consider this, mentioned in the WaPo lobby piece above: In 2014, consultants at the PR firm Qorvis developed content for the Saudi Arabia embassys YouTube and Twitter pages, and ran the Twitter account for the Syrian Opposition Coalition. The Saudis are the major money behind the war on Syria. They are building ISIS and Al-Qaeda not only in Syria but also in Yemen and elsewhere. A former Saudi foreign minister, quoted in in yesterdays Financial Times (see here), admitted such: Saud al-Feisal, the respected Saudi foreign minister, remonstrated with John Kerry, U.S. secretary of state, that "Daesh [ISIS] is our [Sunni] response to your support for the Da'wa" - the Tehran aligned Shia Islamist ruling party of Iraq. Whoever shills for the Saudis should be considered adhering to enemies. Posted by b on April 21, 2016 at 15:19 UTC | Permalink Comments VALDESE A second public input meeting was held in Valdese on Tuesday day evening to discuss a possible property rate tax increase for the towns residents in the 2016-17 budget year. At a recent budget retreat, Town Manager Seth Eckard proposed that the town council increase the tax rate 6 cents, going from 48 . 5 cents to 54 . 5 cents , according to information from the town. For every cent on the tax rate, $33,000 is made in revenue, which totals $198,000 when adjusted to the 6 cent proposed increase, town officials said. P resentations were given by Brian Duckworth, director of public works for the town, and Charlie Watts, fire chief of the Valdese Fire Department. Duckworth spoke on the services that Public Works offers Valdese residents, the road and street condition study and the capital equipment replacement needs. Watts brought up how the fire department was in need of a new ladder fire truck and the need to hire part-time personnel. Out of the two public input meetings , a total of five people from the public attended, said Town Manager Seth Eckard. We feel that the citizens who wanted to provide input in the budgeting process came out to voice their concerns, he said. We think that 's because the town has been transparent with information presented to the public and that most citizens are aware of the towns need s and how we plan to address those needs. Of those who attended the meetings, many of them wanted to know exactly how the revenue would be spent, he said. Once we explained in detail what the funds are to be used for, most people in the audience understood the need, Eckard said. I cant speak to how an individual elected official will use information presented to him or her, but they have listened to the citizens closely and whatever decision they make will be carefully thought out. Eckard said that council members have been speaking with business owners and neighbors to gather more information for the meetings, he said. Public meetings are just part of the equation, he said. No decisions will be made by the Valdese Town Council until June 27, he said. Those who were not able to attend the meeting can still voice their opinions by attending any Valdese Town Council meeting or by calling any elected official in the upcoming months. To view dates of upcoming Valdese Town Council meetings, visit bit.ly/1WeCblo. For more information on the proposed tax increase, visit bit.ly/1XJim4w or call 828-879-2120 Staff Writer Jonelle Bobak can be reached at jbobak@morganton.com or 828-432-8907. 10:30 a.m. Sunday Middle Valley Church of God announced that Pastor Mitch McClure will speak on the topic, "What Do You Do When You Don't Know What To Do?" in theservice on This is part of a new sermon series titled "Alive In And Through Christ." This sermon series will focus on the source of strength and power for the Christian as it is derived through the resurrection power of Jesus Christ.. Residents of Chattanooga, Hamilton County and surrounding areas are invited to a preview of plans for the new Tennessee State Museum. Earlier this month, Gov. Bill Haslam was joined by legislative leaders, museum officials and Jon Meacham, Pulitzer prize winner and New York Times bestselling author, to break ground on the new facility in Nashville. The states history, however, is shaped by communities from Memphis to Mountain City, so the statewide tour is planned to ensure that Tennesseans are aware of the project and have an opportunity to learn more about it in its early stages. The public is invited to attend a presentation on Tuesday from 5:30-6:30 p.m. in the Barry Auditorium of the Health Science Center at Chattanooga State Community College located at 4501 Amnicola Hwy. in Chattanooga. Members of the museum project and design team will be on hand to discuss the vision for the museum and to share early plans and renderings with the audience. About the New Tennessee State Museum In 2015, the governor proposed and the Tennessee General Assembly approved $120 million in the FY-2015-16 budget to build a new home for the Tennessee State Museum on the Bicentennial Mall to maximize the states rich history by creating a state-of-the-art educational asset and tourist attraction for the state. The governor also announced that $40 million would be raised in private funds for the project. The Tennessee State Museum was established by statute in 1937 to bring together the various collections of articles, specimens, and relics now owned by the State under one divisional head, and to provide for a transfer of exhibits wherever they may be. Today, the Tennessee State Museum is housed in the James K. Polk building in downtown Nashville, where it has been for nearly 35 years. A 137,000 square foot facility will be built on the northwest corner of the Bicentennial Mall at the corner of Rosa L. Parks Boulevard and Jefferson Street. It is being designed to bring history to life and allow visitors to become part of the states history. Showcasing one-of-a-kind artifacts, historical documents and art, the museum will tell Tennessees story in a new, interactive and engaging way. A Tennessee Time Tunnel will serve as the backbone feature of the museum in providing a chronological and experiential journey through Tennessees history. The new Tennessee State Museum is scheduled to open in 2018. The B.C.-based franchising company Charlwood Pacific Group (CPG) has been granted the Hall of Fame Award by the Canadian Franchise Association (CFA), in recognition of its practices that have given its franchisees much acclaim and success. In the award presentation during the CFA National Convention last Monday (April 18), CPG founder U. Gary Charlwood reaffirmed his companys commitment to the further development of its franchisees. Im incredibly honoured to receive this award on behalf of my sons Chris and Martin, all of our staff and members whose personal determination has led to our collective success, Charlwood stated during the awarding and induction ceremony. We treat our franchisees and their teams like family. Thats why its in our DNA to do everything we can to support the success of their businesses from providing the latest tools and technology, to personally answering their call when they need advice, Charlwood said. As the only CFA member in the mortgage industry space, our CENTUM family is incredibly proud of what the Charlwood Pacific Group has contributed to Canadian franchising, CENTUM Financial Group vice president of operations Paul Therien said. Their innovative business practices have driven franchisee success and helped us successfully deliver the best mortgage rates for tens of thousands of satisfied clients for nearly a decade, Therien added. CPG is the master franchise holder of the CENTUM Financial Group and the CENTURY 21 brand in Canada and Asia-Pacific regions, as well as Real Property Management in Canada and UNIGLOBE Travel International. It operates in 67 countries, with 1,857 franchise locations and over 24,000 support personnel under its name. Vancouver and Toronto have continuously shown exceptional performance over the past two years, making Canada one of the most attractive and dynamic real estate markets globally. However, an assortment of market imbalances is increasing the likelihood of a housing bubble burst, according to an observer. Analyst and author Hilliard MacBeth counselled would-be buyers to remain extremely careful not to get sucked into the purchasing whirlwind that characterizes Canadas most in-demand cities, adding that the current situation has notable similarities with the conditions prior to the 90s dot-com crash. The original premise of the bubble is the fact that housing prices have gone up two-and-a-half to three times, pretty much all across Canada, MacBeth said, as quoted by RCI. [The] outrageous levels of Vancouver are a little bit more stretched, but really not that much different from Regina, Saskatchewan, for example, in terms of the pace of growth in the house prices, but wages have not. MacBeth added that the lopsided performance in Canadas housing sector, where the best performing markets account for a massive portion of national real estate growth, has sown the seeds of later failure. Because housing is bought out of wages and salaries theres a point which is reached eventually where the household budget just cant stretch anymore and were at that point in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and we will be at that point across Canada very soon, he explained. MacBeth pointed at another area of imbalancenamely, demographic debtas a potential trigger for the long-feared bubble burst. There is so much debt involved that there are going to be some very, very difficult circumstances for families, including personal bankruptcy and that sort of thing, the analyst said. One of the things that the boomers are doing, which is very worrisome, is theyre going deeper into debt, faster than any other age group in Canada. MacBeth warned against complacency on the real estate industrys part, and advised would-be market participants to not put all of their eggs in this particular basket. The interesting thing about bubbles and booms is when youre in the middle of them you can never see that they are bubbles, it always feels like its normal, he concluded. As many of you know, this past July I took on the role of Executive Director for FilmDayton. What you may not know is that also meant taking classes to learn how to run a film commission. I got my certification and today FilmDayton announced we are officially becoming The Greater Dayton Region Film Commission. Weve been doing that work unofficially for years, and now we are a certified Film Commission, through the Association of Film Commissioners International. We celebrate tonight with a special screening of Miles Ahead, the Don Cheadle film about legendary musician Miles Davis. As this invite only screening at The Neon, well have an audience of crew that worked on the motion picture, with FilmDayton supporters. Weve chosen the debut of this film, which had scenes shot at the Dayton Jail and ReFraze Studio in Kettering, to announce our new focus. We are confident FilmDayton will continue to showcase our regions talent and resources to local and out-of-state companies seeking assistance with film and television production. Well continue offering location assistance and coordination with crew and services. The Ohio Motion Picture Tax Credit has generated more than $400 million in economic impact to the state since its inception. For every $1 invested, there has been a return of $2.01*. But most of that business has gone to Cleveland and Cincinnati. Without a film commission, Dayton hasnt even been at the table to try to recruit productions to the region. Now FilmDayton will promote and market the nine county region, in order to recruit and facilitate the production of film, television, commercials, corporate videos, music videos, and documentaries, as well as emerging forms of media. Film Commissioner Lisa Grigsby explains, in simple terms, the film commission acts as a concierge service for productions interested in using the Greater Dayton region as a backdrop. Its been a long time coming, but as FilmDayton Board President Shaunn Baker shares, the commission has been a goal since the organization started in 2008, and Im glad weve finally made it happen. The state tax credit that is doing so much to bring films to Ohio has used up this years rebate money, but look for a flurry of activity this summer, as the states new fiscal year replenishes the $20 million dollar fund for filmmakers. Sara Kunnemann, art teacher at Lake Forest Middle School in Cleveland, said her students created some "amazing" work after she was awarded an Allied Arts Council Cleveland/Bradley Chamber of Commerce Arts in Education Grant. The funds from the grant went towards digital cameras, memory cards, film developing and art supplies to create 'Landscape Sculptures' in the style of Artist Andy Goldsworthy. Kunnemann said, "As a class we studied the artist Andy Goldsworthy who creates nature, landscape sculptures using no man-made tools or materials. My students collaborated in groups to create their project outside around campus using the materials they found. Ms.Kunnemann said, "As a class we studied the artist Andy Goldsworthy who creates nature, landscape sculptures using no man-made tools or materials. My students collaborated in groups to create their project outside around campus using the materials they found. "We began our lesson by watching parts of Andy Goldsworthy's documentary 'Rivers and Tides: Working with Time'. Through watching the documentary and discussion students learned that Goldsworthy's Art starts from nature and ends up returning to nature. Because of this we also learned about photography and photographed our sculptures to have a memory of the sculptures we created, knowing they wouldn't last. "My students did amazing on this project. I have been teaching for eight years and this is the first time I have been able to do this project (I have always dreamed of doing it) and that is because of the generous grant I received from the Allied Arts Council Cleveland/Bradley Chamber of Commerce." SAN ANTONIO (AP) A San Antonio police officer's radio on her gun belt has stopped a bullet fired during an alleged road-rage incident as she drove to work. The officer wasn't hurt. A suspect has been arrested. A dispute over properties in the Texas Panhandle is entering Midlands 385th State District Court. Texas-based Apollo Exploration LLC, along with Oklahoma-based Cogent Exploration Ltd. Co. and SellmoCO LLC are suing Apache Corp. over a 2011 agreement involving certain purchase and sale agreements, mineral leases and mutual interest agreements concerning properties located in Hartley, Moore, Potter and Oldham counties. David Lauritzen, Bradley Bains and Joe Baker of Midlands Cotton Bledsoe Tighe & Dawson law firm filed the original lawsuit and will continue to represent the companies. They have been joined by Zona Jones and Michael Havard of Provost Umphrey Law Firm; Louis K. Bonham of Osha Liang LLP; and Patrick Zummo of the Law Offices of Patrick Zummo. We were hired as additional counsel to come and work on the case. That sometimes happens, said Jones in a telephone interview. He said the plaintiffs have not stated a maximum amount of damages but in their pleadings have said damages exceeded $500 million. This is not a new lawsuit and was referenced in our 2015 10-K, as well as our 2014 public filings, Apache said in a statement provided to the Reporter-Telegram. Apache believes the plaintiffs claims lack merit, and further that plaintiffs alleged damages are grossly inflated. Apache is vigorously opposing the claims. Moreover, the plaintiffs recently filed an amended petition that drastically reduces their claimed damages. The $1.1 billion previously mentioned no longer represents the amount claimed. Even with the plaintiffs reduced claim, the lawsuit lacks merit and plaintiffs revised damages remain grossly inflated. The plaintiffs attorneys said Apaches Securities and Exchange Commission filings indicate the case involved potential damages of more than $1.1 billion. Jones said he and the other lawyers new to the case will work with Lauritzen, Bains and Baker as the case proceeds. Plaintiffs have requested a jury trial. We will be asking the court to set a trial date along with the entry of a case management order that sets deadlines by which certain discovery matters are to be completed, Jones said. Since we just entered the case, I do not expect this to happen for another three to four weeks. The dispute centers on contracts the four companies signed in 2011 covering the oil and gas leases in an area known as the Bivins Ranch and Tascosa Dome areas. Under the contracts, the three companies were entitled to reclaim up to one-third of the interests they sold to Apache. However, the oil and gas companies say Apache never provided the required documents for 2012 and 2013. The plaintiffs are asking the court to order Apache to provide a proper accounting of the drilling and payout records associated with their contracts since they say Apache has failed to provide proper documentation from the start. In addition to the requested accounting and the allegations of breach of contract and fraud, the lawsuit also includes claims against Apache for breach of fiduciary duty, negligence, gross negligence and conversion, among others. Obviously, this is a significant field, and the potential for economic harm and loss is big, Jones said. Delving into the various factors that impact rural economies, the House Agriculture Committee recently examined the interplay between oil and gas production and rural America. I, along with many other members of this committee have often stated that agriculture is the backbone of rural America, said U.S. Rep. Mike Conaway, who represents Texas District 11, as he opened an April 13 hearing on the subject that was streamed live online. However, as the committee with responsibility for all of rural America, it is vitally important that we acknowledge other industries that provide a significant number of jobs and revenue for our rural communities. Todays hearing begins that discussion as we review how oil and gas production impacts the rural economy. Energy, and the price of energy, has an obvious direct impact on inputs for farmers and ranchers. Not quite as intuitively, the energy sector provides income and revenue for rural residents and their local communities in the form of salaries, royalty payments, and tax revenues, he said. Many of the jobs created by the oil and gas industry are in rural areas, he said. Those revenues allow rural communities to retain their young residents with new opportunities, attract new residents and make investments that improve quality of life. We all recognize that the oil and gas industry today is more bust than boom. That is why todays hearing is even more important. Too often, I believe the general public only views this industry as executives running large oil companies and charging too much for a gallon of gasoline, Conaway said. U.S. Rep. Collin Peterson, the committees ranking member and a Democrat from Minnesota, said his state doesnt have any oil and gas production, but weve felt the impact of the North Dakota boom by having increased job opportunities in my district. Oil and gas production has helped farmers in rural communities weather the recent downfall in commodity prices and illustrates the value of diversifying rural economies and the role value-added systems can play in keeping those economies afloat. Like oil and gas, Peterson said agriculture is no stranger to fluctuations in commodity prices and the extreme highs and lows can impact everyone from farmers to land and business owners. Thats why we need to keep a strong safety net. Among those testifying before the committee was Angie Sims of Kermit, president and chief executive officer of Busters Well Service, founded by her grandfather, Alex Buster Crabtree in 1963. She also testified on behalf of the Association of Energy Service Cos. She detailed for committee members how a thriving oil and gas industry had allowed her county to build a 19-bed state-of-the-art clinic in 2006 and in 2015 a new clinic staffed by five providers. Two new schools were built as enrollment in Kermit Independent School District enrollment rose by 243 students and the Wink-Loving Independent School District enrolled 51 more students from 2010 to 2014. Retail sales and use taxes collected locally rose by 110 percent during that time. Martin Causer, a member of Pennsylvanias House of Representative pointed out that his state has been home to oil and gas production for more than 150 years, since the drilling of the first oil well in Titusville. The advent of unconventional drilling in the Marcellus, and later the Utica, has brought more job opportunities, spending and significant tax revenues at both the state and community level, he told the committee. The state enacted an impact fee amid the booming activity, which has generated $855 million from the oil and gas industry since 2011. Approximately 60 percent is returned to affected communities for road, bridge and infrastructure construction or maintenance; water, storm water and sewer system construction or maintenance; emergency preparedness housing; and reclamation projects. The remainder goes to the state for regulatory enforcement, public safety training related to natural gas drilling and state-level environmental protection initiatives. More importantly, Causer told the committee, drilling in the Marcellus and Utica has generated significant economic benefits for Pennsylvania farmers. He said many have leased portions of their land for drilling, using the royalties to reinvest in their farming operations. For some, it has meant investing in a piece of equipment to enhance the farm, rather than struggling to repair something thats on its last legs. For others, the money allowed them to expand their operations. Still others were able to retire but keep their land in production by renting it out to others looking to be a part of the agriculture industry, he said. Jackie Root, board member of the National Association of Royalty Owners and president of the Pennsylvania state chapter, told committee members royalties from oil and gas production are sent to royalty owners in all 50 states. Between 8.5 million and 12 million Americans receive royalties from the production of oil and gas on their property. She said a survey indicates the average royalty recipient is 60, widowed and receives less than $500 in royalty income each month. Sharing her personal experiences with the committee, Root said she and her husband are first-generation farmers who for 24 years mowed, planted and harvested around a steel pipe marking an abandoned gas well drilled in 1948. In 2000 they were approached about leasing the land for drilling a Marcellus well. The well was drilled in 2008 and from 2009 to 2010, 31 more wells were drilled on 20 pads within the township. I estimate over 700 royalty owners receive checks each month just in our township, she said. Those royalty owners range from farmers to retirees, widows to young couples, businesses, churches, municipalities and cemeteries. Like many farmers we have used that income to pay off debt, change enterprises, help with college expenses, fund retirement accounts, catch up on travel and maybe buy a horse or two, she said. The constant stress of fluctuating commodity prices and unpredictable weather is softened a bit with additional income from leasing, royalties and pipeline right of way. Over the long term, I believe natural gas development will actually preserve our precious open space: Successful farmers will farm the land rather than subdivide it. The three witnesses told committee members that the benefits to rural America from oil and gas production are threatened not just by an industry suffering from low oil and gas prices but from regulation. In terms of environmental regulation, there are few people who are more committed to protecting our environment than the people who live in our community, Sims said. Our company and members of the AESC are committed to operating in a safe and efficient manner that preserves our environment for ourselves and our families for generations to come. As small businesses, compliance with ever-changing regulations can be a challenge, and a costly one at that. Causer said that in addition to the market decline, producers are facing an increasingly unreasonable regulatory environment ... and that is placing thousands of good, solid, family-supporting-wage jobs at risk. In regions like the one I represent, good jobs like these are not easily replaced. The oil and gas industry is a cornerstone of the economies of many rural communities across Pennsylvania and the nation. As the industry has struggled in recent years, it has had a notable impact on local revenues and jobs. He encouraged working together at all levels of government. That mostly means we need to stay out of the way by ensuring environmental regulations are not overly restrictive but instead reasonable and relevant to these operations. And it means facilitating unique opportunities, such as the Royal Dutch Shell cracker plant and gas-powered electrical plants, which help grow the domestic market for our oil and natural gas reserves. We are not opposed to regulations that protect our environment and our workforce, Sims said. In fact, we often are the first to address these issues locally. She said an example of industry-government collaboration is the association helping to train OSHA inspectors. This helps ensure compliance with standards that keep our people safe and ensure that the regulator understands the real-life operating situations they are entrusted with supervising, she said. This kind of early engagement and collaboration can be beneficial to all parties. We just need to make sure the benefits from some of these regulations actually do benefit the environment and the workforce and dont unnecessarily harm rural economies, Sims said. Root told committee members, The hardship that reduced commodity prices have placed on the oil and gas industry, service industries, federal, state and local tax collections and private royalty owners are a result of the free market system that we NARO members believe strongly in. We, therefore, ask this committee to please keep us in mind when considering what could become harmful federal policies like removal of the percentage depletion tax deduction that royalty owners have used since the 1920s. We further point out that there are those who would deny our private property right to develop our private property mineral estate, as they have stated all fossil fuels should be left in the ground. We are continually bombarded with activists operating in our states and communities seeking to prevent or deny the development of our private property without just compensation that the U.S. Constitution guarantees, she said. The cable television industry is changing fast. With consumers demanding less bloat and lower bills, and with some cutting the cord altogether, it might seem like now is the wrong time to get into the industry. Upstart Umio isnt concerned. I think a lot of the conversation right now is about less less content; less features but I think people want more, Eric Kuhn, who is involved with Umios business and marketing operations, said Wednesday at an event in Midland to introduce the product. Umio pronounced YOO-me-oh and which is a play on the words you and me aims to change the TV-watching experience by offering more features in a smaller footprint. The box combines the TV tuner, DVR and Internet modem and router in one package and adds features such as social media portals and access to YouTube and thats only whats available now. Kuhn and fellow business developer Michael Taylor said new features are being added all the time, with voice commands and home automation in the works. Midland is playing a critical role in the products development. Umio, which is powered by Denver-based Layer3 TV's technology, chose Midland as one of two places in the nation to fine-tune the product before marketing to the masses. Its also being tested in Kingwood, near Houston. Taylor said Midlands entrepreneurial spirit was one of the main drivers for testing in the Tall City, which has been ongoing for the past six to eight months. We want this to be a conversation with the community that were in and build it together, Kuhn said about the development process. He said Umio has spent a lot of time in Midland and has been involved in the community, such as participating in Shotguns and Stilettos, Commemorative Air Force AirSho and taking part in a ceremonial first pitch at a recent RockHounds game. (Kuhn got the ball over the plate.) Kuhn said being part of the community is very important for the development of the product, which aims to simplify all aspects of cable-television subscription. Umio is a next-generation cable company, Kuhn said. What separates Umio from competitors is its ability to streamline and tidy-up service. Gone is the need for several specialty boxes, such as modems, routers, TV tuners and, eventually, the need for so-called over-the-top set-top boxes like Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire and Chromecast. Also gone are the tangle of wires that become dust-bunny magnets and can be playthings for curious pet paws. Whats required is a single gateway box and as many companion boxes as necessary. The gateway box, which can be connected directly to a TV or placed elsewhere, accepts an Internet feed and can beam it wirelessly to companion boxes, each connected via HDMI to individual televisions. And it uses cutting-edge technology. Right now, were using the latest video compression, which is H.265, Taylor said. Were using the latest video distribution, which is HEVC, or highly efficient video codec. No one else in the industry is using that today. Were bringing out 4K video where available. As for the wireless connection, Its the highest throughput of signal allowed by law, he said. The price at this point is competitive in the long-term, Kuhn said. Billing is simple at a flat $99 per month, plus tax, and the figure includes all of the necessary FCC fees and other extraneous charges that come with being a TV company. There are no surprise fees, no contracts, and customers can cancel at any time on the phone or online. While Umio realizes it wont capture 100 percent of the market, its not worried about losing customers. We feel that if we keep the customer happy, theyre going to keep subscribing every month, Taylor said. Taylor and Kuhn stressed the quality of Umios customer service. We dont believe in unplug, re-plug, Kuhn said. We will actually work with you. Customer service can be contacted via phone, text or email whichever method the customer prefers. Umio requires a high-speed broadband connection, which Taylor says has distinct advantage over traditional cable delivery because its not affected by bottlenecks. We send one (channel) at a time so we have the highest quality, Taylor said. This is opposed to traditional cable, which sends all channels simultaneously, thus forcing it to perform rate shaping, which degrades image quality. A major feature is the users experience. The more a customer uses the box, the more the box learns about the customer. A sophisticated algorithm predicts what the user wants to watch. The data stays in the box and isnt sold to third-party clients. Like Trevor on Facebook and follow him on Twitter at @HowdyHawes. *** Correction/clarification Layer3 TV and cable TV company Umio are separate companies, and Umio uses Layer3 TVs technology. In a story published in Fridays edition, it was incorrectly stated that Layer3 TV is the parent company. The Reporter-Telegram regrets the error. Umio requires a high-speed broadband connection serviced by companies with which it partners. In Midland, Umio is only available through Suddenlink broadband. Before televisions Modern Family, there was Broadways. And 33 years after its stage debut, the musical La Cage aux Folles may be more poignant and relevant today. With both heart and spectacle, Midland Community Theatres production, which opened Friday at the Yucca, was a winning mix. Issues such as civil rights and discrimination were apparent in the show and perhaps more so because of the current election season. But under Carl Beery Moores direction, the show was fearless. From its risque drag performers Les Cagelles to its innuendo-filled dialogue, the show held nothing back in its brazen storytelling. The modern family here is Georges (Bill Kersh), the gay nightclub owner whose partner is Albin (Mitchell Smith), who also stars as Zaza, the clubs most famous drag performer. Georges son, Jean-Michel (Aiden Bonacci) has returned home to announce his engagement to Anne (Victoria Gonzales). Anne is the daughter of a local conservative politician, M. Edouard Dindon (Andy Salcedo), who is intent on closing all venues he has classified immoral. The families are set to meet but at Jean-Michels request, the flamboyant Albin would have to make concessions. There was a lovely chemistry between Kersh and Smith that genuinely reflected their characters 20-year relationship as well as their relationship with Jean-Michel. Kersh mixed a charming personality with a strong backbone that counterbalanced Smiths affability and humor. As their butler, Michael Fields Jacob was a riot who has stage dreams of his own. In a role designed to be ostentatious, Fields ran far with the laughs and melodrama while in some pretty impressive heels. Salcedo was properly self-righteous and sour-faced. As his oppressed wife Marie, Caroline Englestad played defeated well and grew into a blooming flower of self-realization -- all with a dash of elegance. Of course, the big draw of La Cage are the musical performances and the drag. Dressed by Micheal Wilhelm-Waid, the Cagelles were sparkly visions of color. With individual costumes that recalled operatic Vikings, Egyptian queens and whip-cracking mistresses, Wilhelm-Waids work was appropriately and wonderfully grand, as was Jena Tumlins makeup. Ironically, Smiths Zaza costumes belied the characters star power and verged on the matronly side with some unflattering lines. The shows five-piece orchestra led by Scott Aycock was solid. During more tender scenes, underlying music sometimes drowned out the dialogue, but for the big numbers, the orchestra matched the scenes with big sounds. Lauren Lusks set truly transformed the Yucca, which was enhanced by Edward Taylors lighting. With humor and heart, MCTs La Cage was a glorious romp that allowed the audience to laugh, maybe cry a little and take away a deeper message of acceptance even under layers and layers of makeup and tulle. La Cage aux Folles runs through April 30. The Yucca, 208 N Colorado St. $28. For ages 12 and older due to language. mctmidland.org. Germans Do It Differently Brenda Rudiger finds a namesake street in Germany. While Brenda Rudiger was on a Fulbright scholarship in Germany last fall, the executive director of alumni relations at Michigan Technological University learned some surprising things. For example, in Germany, students must decide in middle school whether they plan to attend a university or a vocational school. Once the decision has been made, it is very difficult to change. Rudiger travelled to Germany on a Fullbright International Education Administration Seminar Scholarship this past October. She was there two weeks. While in Germany, Rudiger, along with 19 other higher education administrators, visited various facilities including the Institute for German Language and Culture at Martin Luther University. German Universities There is not a lot of hand-holding, Rudiger said about the German universities. Student activities are organized by the students, she explained. Rudiger said that compared to US universities, which offer students benefits such as career and counseling services, Germany has just a few student services. Another fact she found interesting is that residence and dining halls are operated by a central administration for the whole country. Rudiger said there were several schools offering higher-level education engineering courses in English. This could make studying in France or Germany more attractive to some of our engineering students, she observed. German Culture Of course it was not all work, Rudiger and her group did get the opportunity to take in some of the culture of Germany, including a performance of Beethovens Ninth Symphony performed by the Berlin Philharmonic. This Fulbright program provided an incredible opportunity to get a comprehensive overview of the German education system and the countrys rich culture, Rudiger said. I especially appreciated the chance to get to meet so many wonderful people in Berlin, Wittenberg, Bayreuth and Strasbourg. I am continuing my German language studies in preparation for a return visit! Michigan Technological University is a public research university founded in 1885 in Houghton, Michigan, and is home to more than 7,000 students from 55 countries around the world. Consistently ranked among the best universities in the country for return on investment, Michigans flagship technological university offers more than 120 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science and technology, engineering, computing, forestry, business and economics, health professions, humanities, mathematics, social sciences, and the arts. The rural campus is situated just miles from Lake Superior in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, offering year-round opportunities for outdoor adventure. Chicago Journalists And Lawyers Annotated All The Police Task Force's Recs By Mae Rice in News on Apr 21, 2016 6:28PM By Aaron Cynic/Chicagoist A team of Chicago journalists, lawyers and educators has used Genius to annotate the almost 200 recommendations laid out in the Police Accountability Task Force report released last week. Titled Task Force Tracker, their project was published Thursday, and its open to the publicanyone can add an annotation now. Task Force Tracker was a group effort between civic tech firm Smart Chicago, South Side journalism collective City Bureau, and lawyers from self-described journalistic production company the Invisible Institute. Darryl Holliday, the journalist and City Bureau leader who managed the project, told Chicagoist that the goal of the annotation, as initially published, was to contextualize the report. How would executing all these recommendations work? Would it even be possible? Overall I think its hitting on the right points, Holliday said, adding that the reports explicit focus on race was long overdue. The biggest question, he said, was whether the city would execute the recommendations. Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced Wednesday that he would implement some of them, but put off the most substantial recommended changes. Chicago has a history, Holliday noted, of soliciting task force feedback on its police department. Even in the report, the task force talks about how they are the sixth task force to propose recommendations to reform CPD, he said. The earliest such report is from 1898, and Holliday said many reform recommendations have stayed consistent, report to report, for more than a century. Still, theres reason to think this particular task force report could be higher-impact than its predecessors. This is a time of expansive attention to institutional problems within CPD, Holliday said. The department is under scrutiny not only from the task forcewhich Emanuel created in December, days after the video of the Laquan McDonald shooting was releasedbut also from the Department of Justice. As the annotation process unfolded, Holliday said, the team found that some recommendations were simpler to put into practice than others. Some, of course, Mayor Emanuel is already implementing. Another reform Holliday said was viable "right now" is lifting Illinois' requirement that civilians submit a sworn affidavit along with any complaint against a police officer. The affidavit is a legally binding oath that the complaint is true, and submitting one is more complicated than it seems, Holliday said; it has to be done in person. According to the task force report, 58 percent of IPRA complaints havent been investigated because they lacked an affidavit. its a barrier to the complaint process, Holliday, said, and could removed relatively promptly if a bill currently moving through Illinois government passes. (On Wednesday, as detailed in this statement, Emanuel committed to making an affidavit override possible in select cases, but the affidavit requirement remains.) Other recommendations in the report would take longer, Holliday said Tuesday, citing the exact shifts Emanuel put off in his Wednesday announcement: replacing IPRA with a "fully transparent" civilian oversight committee, and reforming the city's contract with the Fraternal Order of Police, the police union, which doesn't expire until June of 2017. I know the mayor has basically put his trust into IPRA," Holliday said, "so ... I assume that any move to dismantle it for the time being would not get past the Mayors office." The full annotation, the first project of City Bureas Community Documenters program, is worth exploring in full; you can check it out, and add your own annotations, here. Correction, 7 p.m.: The passage about sworn affidavits was updated to clarify that affidavits are required at a state level, not a city level, and that while the affidavit requirement could not be "easily" lifted, as we previously said, it could be lifted relatively promptly by a proposed bill. 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 Lakeview Dog Lounge Will Host Events For Dogs And Their Humans Photo via Nina Buday on Shutterstock Move over, cats: You may have won the internet, but the lounge scene is still open territory. (Territory pun intended.) Chicago approved an ordinance for a cat cafA last month, but it probably wont open until the middle of the year; meanwhile, SIT Chicago will open its first Dog Lounge (called SIT Social) in Lakeview on May 14. The lounge, which will be located at 3920 N. Ashland Ave., will be the place to be for BYOB events for humans and dogs. (The BYOB part is for humans only, though, obviously.) They'll host Doggie Singles Nights, for instance, where uncoupled dog owners can mix, mingle, and play icebreaker games with their dogs in tow. As SIT owner Victoria Elena Nones put it, Dogs are the best icebreaker there is, right? Nones didn't meet her own boyfriend with a dog in tow actually, neither of them currently owns a dog at all. "We foster. That's how we contribute to the community. We watch them until they are ready to be adopted, and then we let them go," Nones said. They're currently looking after a pup named Mabel. Nones' boyfriend, Ian Sherwin, also rents the art gallery next door to the SIT Chicago space. (It's no coincidencethey share the lease.) Sherwin will open up his gallery to Nones' clientele, too, for a series of planned "Paint Your Pets" nights. Visitors can leave their dogs in Nones' space, then paint in Sherwin'sfor a fee, they can even get their pet pre-outlined on their canvas. Nones stressed that painters aren't confined to dog pictures, either. They can paint any pet they choose. This is the one event where cats are welcomedat least in spirit. Other events in the works include a Yappy Hour, for local business owners and entrepreneurs who want to network with their dogs; Puppy Showers, private events for expectant puppy-havers-to-be; Dogprov, Chicago improvisers doing comedy with dogs; and Dog Birthdays, private events to celebrate your canine's special day. During the day, SIT Chicago will also be a "boutique" doggie daycare." Its a space for dogs to hang out, socialize, go on the treadmill, and be in a laid back environment, Nones said. (Yes, you read that correctly: Theres a treadmill. Nones said that dogs typically love treadmills. "You'd be surprised.") Nones has been working in Lakeview as a dog walker for yearsthough without a brick-and-mortar locationso SIT Social already has a number of dog walking and pet-sitting clients. She's also excited to add new dogs to her roster. In order to bring a dog to SIT, though, clients need to have a new client meeting and a behavioral evaluation (no Hounds of Hell allowed). SIT's launch party is planned for May 14 at 7:30 p.m. at 3920 North Ashland Avenue. Like all of SIT Social's evening events, it's B.Y.O.B. (The last B is for both booze and border collie.) Rahm Puts Off The Two Biggest Police Task Force Recommendations By Sophie Lucido Johnson in News on Apr 21, 2016 3:32PM (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) A week after his Police Accountability Task Force released its scathing 183-page report on the Chicago Police Department (CPD), Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced he would implement some of the reports recommended reformsbut not the two most substantial ones. The 25 changes announced by the mayor Wednesday did not include disbanding the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA), or reopening the citys police union contracts. Fraternal Order of Police President Dean Angelo rejected the idea of altering the contract between the police unions and the city before it expires on June 30, 2017. The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Emanuel would rather fall in line with Angelo than further alienate Chicago police officers. Emanuel didnt say that the abolition of the IPRA was impossible, but for now, he is giving the agencys new executive director, Sharon Fairley, an opportunity to rebuild from within. The task forces report emphasized that the IPRA;has wrongfully overlooked years of misconduct. Emanuel also suggested that he would not dismantle IPRA until the Justice Department could be consulted. If youre going to make changes, you dont want the Justice Department coming and saying, "You got that wrong. Now, do it again,'" Emanuel told the Sun-Times in an interview. The Justice Department has been investigating the CPD since December, just after the video of slain teenager Laquan McDonald was released. Emanue emphasized that he was adopting task force recommendations, though. Hel told the Chicago Tribune that he had adopted about a third of the recommendations. He e has agreed to focus more on police trainingespecially regarding mental health cases. He also agreed to create an early warning system to flag any police officers generating a large number of citizen complaints; to accelerate internal investigations of cops; and to create a third-party hotline for police officers to report misconduct. Other changes that have been initially adopted include creating a system for reviewing officer discipline histories and misconduct patterns in order to open new misconduct investigations; meeting more frequently with minority community members; and allowing IPRA and Internal Affairs to conduct investigations regardless of any other state or federal investigations that might be ongoing. These new changes will begin being implemented Thursday. Other changessuch as an increase of the use of body cameras and Tasershave already begun rolling out. Police Board President Lori Lightfoot, who co-chaired the task force, called the mayors motions encouraging, but added that much more needs to be done, according to the Sun-Times. Another recommendation the mayor has not yet implemented is to create and introduce a reconciliation process. The task forces report emphasized the importance of a formal acknowledgement of the CPDs history of racism, which they added should be followed by a series of regular meetings on the subject. As of yet, he has not create the recommended position of deputy chief of diversity, either. Someone should sue the President for ... Photo taken on Jan. 11, 2016 shows a portrait of the leading role Edgar Parks Snow in a television series "Red Star Over China". "Red Star Over China" is a Chinese television series based on American journalist Edgar Parks Snow (July.17, 1905-Feb. 15, 1972) who witnessed great changes of China during his stay in China from 1928 to 1941. Edgar Snow was the first Western journalist giving a full account of the history of the Communist Party of China following the Long March, and interviewing many of its leaders, including Mao Zedong. He was best known for his book "Red Star Over China", on the basis of what he saw and heard while reporting the Chinese revolution from the northwest China revolutionary base area with Yan'an as the heart in the 1930s. The book was first published in England in 1937. In the show, Edgar Snow is portrayed by George Christopher Tronsrue (U.S.), his wife Helen Foster Snow by Elyse Ribbons (U.S.), Mao Zedong by Huang Haibing (China) and Soong Ching-ling by Deng Ying (China). The show started filming on Jan. 17, 2016 and is expected to be aired on CCTV (China Central Television) channel 1 in October, to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the Long March. (Xinhua) Sacramento, CA California voters will likely be asked this November whether to extend the Proposition 30 tax increases. Prop 30 was approved by voters in 2012, at the urging of Governor Jerry Brown, to help the state fund schools during the recession. The ballot measure increased the sales tax rate from 7.25% to 7.5%. In addition, income tax rates were increased for earners making over $250,000. Proposition 30 is scheduled to expire at the end of this year. A new Public Policy Institute of California Poll finds that 62% of likely voters support extending the tax increases. Related to state spending on schools, 60% say the current level of funding is insufficient. The results vary by political party, as 73% of Democrats and 65% of Independents hold this view, while only 42% of Republicans. Naturalist John Muir sitting by sugar pine tree in Calaveras County View Photos Sacramento, CA The state celebrates an environmental philosopher legend that was quoted as saying, The mountains are calling and I must go. Governor Jerry Brown has issued a proclamation declaring Thursday, April 21 as John Muir Day in California. Brown called Muir a giant of a man who in addition to his scientific discoveries, engineering innovations and writings still inspire society today. The Governor also noted that Muir was instrumental in the creation of the National Park System. Muir helped found the Sierra Club and National Audubon Society. Muir woods, a redwood forest near San Francisco, was named in his honor. The National Park Service notes that when Muir learned of this recognition he declared, This is the best tree-lovers monument that could possibly be found in all the forests of the world. Muir is pictured in the left-hand image box by the oldest sugar pine tree in Dorrington in Calaveras County had to be cut down in 2014 as previously reported. Additionally, another one of his famous quotes sums up his love of the forest stating, In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. To view Browns entire proclamation, click here. Governor Brown Issues Proclamation Declaring John Muir Day China will provide more financing support and other favorable policies to build up foreign trade so as to promote a balanced and steady development of its economy. "Foreign trade is an important part of the national economy. To stabilize foreign trade and make it stronger is important to ensure the economy runs smoothly and upgrade," according to a statement issued after a State Council executive meeting chaired by Premier Li. Containers pile up at Waigaoqiao Port in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone. [Photo/Xinhua] Sluggish global demand and slowing domestic economy have dealt a blow to China's foreign trade. It fell 7 percent year on year in 2015, with exports down 1.8 percent and imports down 13.2 percent. However, the March data provided some relief. Exports last month surged 18.7 percent year on year, the first increase since December, compared with falls of 20.6 percent in February and 6.6 percent in January. Imports dipped 1.7 percent, an improvement from February's 8-percent drop. According to Wednesday's statement, several measures are in the pipelines to prop up foreign trade. Financial institutions are encouraged to increase financial support for foreign trade enterprises that are "making profits and receiving orders." The tax rebate rate for some mechanical and electrical products will be increased. The statement did not specify what products it was referring to. There will be more cross-border e-commerce pilots to support Chinese companies in increasing their overseas presence. "Proactive import policies" will be implemented, with extra support for the import of advanced equipment and technologies, the statement read. The meeting also pointed out that improvement in transportation infrastructure is badly needed in old revolutionary bases, ethnic minority areas, border areas and poverty-stricken areas. Strengthening the construction of transport infrastructure is key to lifting the underdeveloped areas out of poverty and promoting balanced development among regions, according to the statement. China will accelerate the construction and upgrading of rural roads, expressways, rails and airports over the next five years to benefit its people, said the statement. The meeting set a batch of innovation and entrepreneurship demonstration bases in provincial-level regions to draw innovators throughout the country and promote the development of the new economy. The demonstration bases should run trials on creating a level playing field, talent flow, and collaborative innovation, among others, according to the statement. China is aggressive in encouraging innovation in manufacturing compared with other countries as 62 percent of Chinese executives said their companies would pump more money into innovative research and development, a KPMG survey revealed. Ahead of the release of the auditing firms 2016 global manufacturing outlook next month, KPMG said 62 percent of the 36 Chinese manufacturing executives said they would put over 6 percent of revenue into innovation, up from 36 percent who said so last year. But no one is as aggressive as China, said Douglas K. Gates, global chair in charge of industrial and manufacturing of KPMG. Nowadays China does not stop at processing goods from global markets; Chinese companies are more competitive in product innovation. Gates added: Chinese products are taking over the global market, but nowadays they are more innovative. Chinas gross export value in March grew 18.7 percent year on year to 1.05 trillion yuan (US$162 billion), and a trade surplus of 195 billion yuan was achieved. The Chinese economy has been guided by public entrepreneurship and innovation, which was raised by Premier Li Keqiang in September 2014. Huawei Technologies Co last year spent US$9.2 billion on research and development, up almost 23-fold from US$389 million in 2003. GET OUR APP Our Spectrum News app is the most convenient way to get the stories that matter to you. Download it here. On Wednesday night, people living in Orlandos Parramore district held a stop the violence event at a local church. This comes after a series of violent and deadly shootings. Community event to help stop violence Event was planned in January, before six people were shot on Saturday Police working to find suspect who shot Orlando mentor Gino Nicholas Orlando Police Chief John Mina and Orange County Commissioner Regina Hill made their presence known at the event held at the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church. The event was planned in January before six people were shot Saturday night. About a dozen Orlando City police officers came together with the community to pray and sing during a time of violence. Mina said he wants police officers to build trust and relationships in the community. Gino Nicholas, 24, was shot and killed outside an apartment complex on Conley Street Saturday night. Another person is still in the hospital. Four others were also hit, but theyre doing OK. There is no trend or specific thing going on. Its very tragic event. Our homicide detectives are working around the clock to bring that case to closure and help get the killer, said Mina. Commissioner Hill said she is tired of the bloodshed. We are here, not just in a time like this, but I apologize Im still slightly emotional, said Hill. Commissioner Hill also said Gino fought against violence in the community and worked as a mentor with Orlandos My Brothers Keeper program. In September, I had to bury a child and that pain doesnt go away, said Hill. There is a $5,000 reward for anyone who has information on the deadly shooting. You can contact Crimeline at 1-800-423-TIPS (8477). People in one part of Seminole County say dogs are attacking, and even killing, animals on their property. At least three Geneva residents report attacks on their livestock in the last month 1 family said surveillance video shows dogs coming onto their property Seminole County Animals Services picked up 1 stray dog, returned it to an owner Families in Geneva say they are sleeping in alternating shifts so that someone can keep watch over their livestock around the clock. I love these with all my heart, theyre like my children, said Connor Compton of his goats and sheep. Compton says his animals have been under attack lately. He says in just the last month something has killed three of his goats, a sheep and left several other sheep seriously injured. Compton believes a stray dog, or dogs are to blame. Comptons family has even captured pictures and video from their home surveillance system of dogs coming onto their property. I feel these dogs were trained to attack, not necessarily animals, but maybe people. They were trained to attack something, said Compton. The Compton family isnt alone. At least two of their Geneva neighbors have reported attacks on their livestock in the last month as well. Seminole County Animal Services is now investigating, and their officers are conducting surveillance in the area. Were told officers recently picked up one stray dog, but they eventually returned it to an owner who claimed the dog. They say they havent been able to tie that dog to the attacks, and theyre still not sure where the dogs are coming from. The attacks have cost Comptons family thousands of dollars. Connor Compton says hes worked tirelessly to get his animals ready for 4-H competitions. I dont know if Im going to be able to come back from this, or show again at all, said Compton. Seminole County Animal Services is encouraging residents that have problems to call them immediately so they can try to stop the problem. For 27-year-old Hu Juyuan, time has really flown by during the past five years. Hu Juyuan takes a picture with the Canadian national flag. [China.org.cn] In 2011, Hu made up his mind to leave his hometown and start a life of studying abroad. After graduating from university in Thunder Bay in 2014, he began working in Toronto. "Five years ago, I graduated from college and came to Canada accompanied only by my two bags. My English was poor then, and I had to think over a sentence several times before saying it aloud," said Hu. For the then 22-year-old Hu, the reality of studying abroad alone was much more difficult than he'd imagined. Besides finishing assignment and papers, he had to do almost everything by himself in order to make his life convenient and comfortable. "The most difficult task for a foreigner is how to deal with loneliness," Hu said. "During the past five years, I have gone through a lot of anxiety, hesitation, confusion and self-negation. But all of these have made my heart stronger." Hu also said that after leaving his homeland and family, he began paying more attention to traditional Chinese culture and cherished friendship and kinship more. After three years of education, Hu didn't return to China immediately, because he thought his life on campus was not enough to help him understand a country. "Life in society is more complex than that on campus. A sentence or a word, even an improper tone can bring you trouble." said Hu. "For example, you have to notice 'would you like to have a cup of tea' is much better than 'do you want a cup of tea'." In addition to oral English, Hu said that he also had to learn how to make friends, get along with colleagues and how to relax after work, so as to make his life more positive and healthy. Although he has no plan to return to homeland anytime soon, Hu is still concerned about the ongoing development and change in China and his hometown. "China's e-commerce industry has grown vigorously these past years, which has impressed me a lot," Hu said. "On last year's single's day (Nov. 11), e-commerce giant Alibaba saw sales worth 91.2 billion yuan (US$14.3 billion). That was incredible." Hu is also interested in China's Belt and Road Initiative. He said, "I think the project is beneficial to a range of countries, since it plans to expand and deepen communication and cooperation on infrastructure, trade, finance and culture among related countries." "I believe China's explosive power and vitality will continue to inject new momentum into world economy and make Chinese people in foreign countries like me more proud and confident," said Hu. Follow China.org.cn on Twitter and Facebook to join the conversation. The Marion County Sheriffs Office is launching an independent internal investigation in the wake of two former deputies' testimony that excessive and unlawful force have been happening within the department for years. 2014 video showed Marion County deputies beating unarmed man 4 deputies were sentenced to federal prison 1 deputy was acquitted of civil rights charges The allegations came to light during the federal trial of four former Marion deputies who were sentenced to federal prison Wednesday for civil rights and other violations stemming from an August 2014 beating captured on video. The Sheriffs Office said the deputies were assisting with a drug-related search warrant when the incident happened. In the video, deputies can be seen repeatedly striking and kicking an unarmed man, Derrick Price, in the neck, head and shoulder. The former deputies involved were Jesse Terrell, Trevor Fitzgerald, Cody Hoppel, James Amidei and Adam Crawford. Fitzgerald, Hoppel, Amidei and Crawford resigned from the agency and Terrell was terminated. Fitzgerald, Hoppel, Amidei and Crawford pleaded guilty to civil rights and other violations in federal court; Terrell was acquitted of civil rights charges by a federal jury in April. But during Terrells trial, additional allegations of excessive use of force were made to federal authorities by Crawford and Hoppel. Hoppel said he used excessive force against defendant Dustin Heathman during his arrest in 2014. Crawford also made statements in federal court during the Terrell trial that he was involved in several unlawful use-of-force incidents during his nine years at the Sheriffs Office. Marion Sheriff Chris Blair is asking the Brevard County Sheriffs Office to lead the investigation. Henry Brown, the Seminole County man who killed his wife, two children and himself this week, was supposed to surrender his handgun and shotgun when a judge granted an injunction of protection for his wife. On Wednesday, the Seminole County Sheriffs Office said he never surrendered his weapons, and no one followed up to make sure he did. Henry Brown, 30, stabbed and ran over his estranged wife, then killed kids Chericia Brown, 31; Henry Brown, 4; Aleah Brown, 1; all killed Judge ruled Brown was to stay away from his wife and surrender firearms Seminole County Sheriff's Office says Brown didn't surrender guns In a Seminole courtroom, Judge Melanie Chase determined that Chericia Brown and her children could be in immediate danger. She could very easily be in danger of domestic violence, Chase said. On Jan. 8, 2016, Henry Brown was ordered to stay away from his wife for one year and could only see their two small children with her permission. He was also ordered to surrender any firearms and ammunition. He simply did not do it, former state prosecutor John Gihon said. Gihon said this violation is too common in domestic violence cases. He was in violation of multiple state and federal laws the minute he didnt turn over those firearms, Gihon said. So the laws are there, but enforcing them is always the problem. He said the burden normally falls on the victim to try to enforce the law by reporting any problems, but that may not be an easy task if the victim is no longer living with her abuser or is staying at a shelter. She doesnt know if he has turned over his firearms or not, Gihon said. And thats why he thinks changes need to come from the legislature to fix the cracks in the system. We have to come up with some sort of structure where we require our local Sheriffs Office to proactively enforce these injunctions, if not for any other purpose than to prevent tragedies like this and to take firearms away from dangerous people, Gihon said. Criminals arent going to follow the law. He added that legal papers werent enough to prevent Henry Brown from stabbing his wife, shooting his two children and taking his own life. Seminoles Child Protective Services unit released their in-home investigation report following a domestic-violence call in December. After interviewing both parents about an altercation that took place in front of their children, they closed the case, citing no substantial findings of family violence threatening the children. If you or someone you know is the victim of domestic abuse: Banners are seen in front of the Capitol during a rally against Money Politics in Washington D.C., the United States, on April 17, 2016. [Xinhua/Yin Bogu] Hillary Clinton's victory over Bernie Sanders in the New York Democratic Party primary held Tuesday, April 18, makes her bid to become the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party a near certainty. This is a devastating blow to supporters of Sanders. However, nearly 7 million people have donated an average of $27 to his campaign and these small contributions continue to rise regardless of whether he wins or loses states. His rallies attract tens of thousands of young people, sometimes at a few hours' notice. This is a movement for change with time on its side. So how will the political revolution that Sanders initiated come about? The Sanders campaign turned a spotlight on the murky world of corporate sponsorship of politics and grotesque inequality in society. Sanders advocates the following: breaking up the big banks; a minimum wage of $15 an hour; free tuition fees for university students; and healthcare for all. In doing so, he has not only won mass support, his campaign has offered community, labor, student, socialist and green activists the chance to speak to the people and to mobilize and organize them. The politics of the United States is unique amongst advanced industrialized countries because it has no party based on the working class. By contrast Europe has Labor parties, Social-Democratic parties, Communist parties and other socialist coalitions with strong roots within the working class. Consequently, when these parties took office big reforms could be introduced. Many of these reforms became anchored within the structure of society in a way that made them difficult to eliminate. For example, free, or very low-cost, university education not only benefits students - it also provides society and private business with an educated workforce paid for at public expense. This permits medium to long-term strategic planning by government and business, which can be designed to foster economic and social objectives. Perhaps somewhat strangely many of the most oppressed people in the U.S. are the most politically conservative. Many poor white workers support Donald Trump and many poor black workers support Hillary Clinton rather than Bernie Sanders. However, the support for Clinton within the black population represents a passive political stance that is based on older and more conservative sections of their community. The effective interlinking of social unrest with political organization was never going to come from the Democratic Party itself, which is, and has always been, a capitalist party. Time is a great educator and experience is the best teacher. The disintegration of the American Dream is palpable and evident in the fate of millions of workers who have lost their jobs, homes, and hopes since 2008. And the economic foundations of social peace under capitalism have withered away as wages have fallen. Today the living standards of the younger generation are lower than those of their parents. An important element of this process has been the decline of the middle classes, as a large part of the middle class has sunken into the working class. Eventually a workers' party will emerge that captures and channels the anger of the masses into a new political organization. A protest movement against the corrupting influence of money over the political process escalated this week when hundreds of different community and activist groups mobilized protests outside Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. Similarly, independently organized protests against Donald Trump's rallies have been well publicized and attracted thousands of young people to demonstrate. Indeed, each specific issue that Sanders has addressed will become a campaign in its own right. In the long-term a socialist political party that adopts all of these demands and has strong roots in working class communities will be needed to bring about a fundamental transformation of the social system. Bernie Sanders galvanized the movement for change by addressing inequality, the corruption of politics by big money, and the way that economics serves a tiny minority. But Sanders is just one honest man inside a corrupt political system dominated by private capitalist interests. As the Greek philosopher Archimedes once said: "Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the world." Sanders has shown the validity of this ancient wisdom, as his campaign for the Democratic Party nomination is the focus of an awakening socialist consciousness. It is the younger generation's duty to take up his baton and stamp their own mark on society, creating organs of popular representation, and formulating policies that can break the oligarchic political and economic power of capitalism. The idea of socialism is back, and we can hear its cry, loud and clear, from inside the belly of the beast. Heiko Khoo is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit: http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/heikokhoo.htm Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn. SAN ANTONIO -- Wrestling fans worldwide are mourning the death of WWE wrestling star Chyna, who was 46. That includes plenty of fans in and around San Antonio, who looked up to the self-proclaimed "9th Wonder of the World" as a truly dynamic inspiration. Chyna, whose real name is Joan Marie Laurer, visited San Antonio just last year as one of many celebrity guests at Alamo City Comic Con. Flash Ecuador continued its recovery efforts amid strong afterschocks on Wednesday, after a powerful 7.8-magnitude quake on Saturday devastated several coastal provinces. Spanish and Colombian rescuers carry the body of a victim in Canoa, province of Manabi, Ecuador, on April 19, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua] A magnitude-6.1 aftershock rattled residents along the coast Wednesday. But rescuers still pulled out three people who had been trapped by rubble in the town of Pedernales, the epicenter of the quake. The death toll stands at 525, but is expected to rise as 163 remained missing, while the number of injured has reached 5,733, according to state news agency Andes. As part of efforts to facilitate the recovery efforts, the Ecuadorian government set up a website and a toll-free telephone number for those who want to make a donation: www.ecuadorlistoysolidario.com or 1-800-002-002. Both provide information for making donations from anywhere in the world and in any currency. Donations can also be made to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), which said it delivered a 60-ton cargo of aid to Ecuador on Wednesday via a chartered plane, or directly to the Ecuadorian Red Cross: www.ammado.com/nonprofit/172557/donate. "We are working on a very big operation in six provinces that are among the most affected," the IFRC's regional director for the Americas, Walter Cotte, said in a press release. "The Ecuadorian Red Cross will focus its response in rural and remote areas and on providing support to vulnerable groups, wound management and psychosocial support," Cotte added. The Red Cross aid included 6,000 blankets, 3,000 tarpaulins, 1,500 tents, 1,000 hygiene kits, 1,000 cleaning kits, and 600 household kits. International response to what Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa described as the country's "biggest emergency in almost 70 years," has been notable, Andes said. Some 942 rescue workers from 20 countries were taking part in the recovery efforts, alongside Ecuadorian police and armed forces. Where: 1150 S. Alamo St., 210-265-5292, hotdogscoldbeer.com On the menu: Artisan sausages, $7-$16; daily dogs, $5.25-$5.50; salads, sides, vegetarian items, $5.95-$10.95; fries, $5.95-$13.95; extras, $4.25-$8; desserts and shakes, $1.50-$8. Fast facts: This shrine to the best of the noble wurst combines house-blended sausages with craft beer and a full bar in what was originally Alamo Methodist Church. The building later became the Alamo Street Restaurant & Theatre and was Casbeers at the Church until 2011. Owners Daniel Northcutt and Geoff Peveto have aimed to keep the feel of the church and its early 1900s style intact while making the building welcoming for diners. This is the second location for the restaurant, with the original a favorite in Austin. Impressions: When our group added a giant pretzel to our order, our server warned us that it was big and more than enough for several of us to enjoy. But not only was it huge, it was also really good, with a crisp crust and tender interior. It went great with the beer cheese and India Pale Ale-infused mustard. It wasnt a traditional pretzel, but our group didnt care. The Texalina (rhymes with Carolina) brought the feel of North Carolina flavors with a Texas accent with a pork and beef sausage, grilled horseradish coleslaw, honey-mustard barbecue sauce and white cheddar. For all the elements on that dog, the flavors didnt taste muddled; they blended nicely. Our wedge salad offered nice flavors, but needed more dressing. With all the stoner combinations on this menu, dont overlook the simple but satisfying mac and cheese. Its good. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate TROY, N.Y. The Sage Colleges found itself thrust into the national debate around transgender rights when scores of students bared their breasts Wednesday outside the Troy campus to protest police treatment of a student who was ordered to put on a shirt while sunbathing. Dozens of students gathered in a public park that fronts the campus, shedding their shirts and donning body paint, covering their breasts with colorful flowers, vines and slogans. The protest stemmed from an incident Sunday in the park when student Cedar Brock was sunbathing topless. A school security officer approached and asked if Brock, who identifies as androgynous, was "a boy or a girl." Troy police soon showed up and insisted Brock put on a shirt, citing a city law that forbids women from going topless in public. More for you NWS predicts isolated strong, severe storms possibly on Monday State law, however, does not prohibit anyone from baring their breasts in public. And on Wednesday afternoon, Sage students did just that in hopes of raising awareness around transgender rights and sensitivity on campus and beyond. "I was lying topless in the park reading a book," Brock said. "I don't believe I was hurting anybody. I don't believe I was bothering anybody." While Brock eventually put a shirt on at the police officer's insistence, the friends who witnessed the incident were so appalled they decided to organize a topless rally in a show of support. On Wednesday, dozens more students kept their clothes on, but held small posters with messages like "I stand with Cedar," "Free the nipple" and "My body, my rules." Emily Taylor and Kelly Shanahan, the friends who organized the rally, said they've never viewed their campus as a transphobic place. Indeed, Sunday's incident was the first like it, students said Wednesday. "I was absolutely appalled by the actions of our public safety officer and by the Troy police," said Shanahan, who witnessed the incident. "I thought there had to be more diplomacy in that situation. But I think most people who are in law enforcement, or even members of the community, don't really know how to speak to the trans community. That's something that we'll have to learn." The Sage Colleges comprises three colleges, including a women's college in Troy (Russell Sage), a coeducational college in Albany (Sage College of Albany) and a graduate school in both cities (Sage Graduate School). The rally Wednesday was held at the women's college, which has grappled with how best to be inclusive of not just women who are cisgender (those whose biological sex aligns with their gender identity) but women who are transgender, as well (or those who were born with male anatomy but identify and live as women). Brock identifies as androgynous someone with the physical characteristics of both men and women. "I've struggled with my gender identity for quite a bit of my life, and there are times when I wonder whether or not I am a man or whether I am a woman," Brock said. "But for the most part, I have maintained androgyny and I'm very comfortable with it." The college administration said they are using the incident as a "teachable moment" and will begin looking at sensitivity training for public safety officers, faculty, staff and other members of the campus community. Over the last year, a grassroots collection of students and faculty have been researching and reviewing transgender policies at colleges and universities across the nation in hopes of bringing one to Sage. Deb Lawrence, the academic dean, said the college is open to discussing a policy, especially in light of a new transgender bathroom law in North Carolina that has propelled the rights of transgender and gender non-conforming individuals into national discussion. "I think today is a perfect demonstration that here we all are and we support our students and what they're doing to express their voices and voice their support, and we certainly will stand behind our students with that," she said. Campus security supervised Wednesday's rally without incident. A heckler who drove by yelled at students to "put some clothes on and go back inside," but otherwise the rally was a low-key affair. A renowned San Antonio sculptor pleaded guilty Thursday to a federal misdemeanor for failing to file his income tax forms for four years, and agreed he owes more than $400,000. Carlos Cortes, who has been commissioned by area businesses and the city of San Antonio and was featured by Martha Stewart on national television, entered the plea during a hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge John Primomo. Cortes faces a maximum of one year in jail and a $100,000 fine when hes sentenced June 21. A South Texas man charged with prostitution after police arrested him during a sting operation last week runs a Christian family retreat program, according to a news report. RELATED: Police: 12 men, 2 women arrested in South Texas prostitution sting The McAllen Monitor reported that Astolfo Cantu Gracia, a 51-year-old Mercedes man, runs a Christian family retreat program in Weslaco associated with the Catholic Diocese of Brownsville. Gracia told the Monitor that he hasn't told church officials about the allegations, but called the Class B misdemeanor charge "an injustice against me." He said he plans to fight the charge. "What (the police) said happened isn't what went on," Gracia told the Monitor. "I wasn't going to be with anybody, but that's the way they saw it." Dioscese spokesperson Brenda Riojas told the newspaper that the diocese will take disciplinary action against Gracia, who is a volunteer and not a paid employee of the diocese. RELATED: Police: South Texas woman found boyfriend with another woman, high-speed chase and shooting ensued The McAllen Police Department announced Monday that officers had arrested two women and a dozen men, including Gracia, during a two-day sting last week. Brunilda Vallejo, 57, and Michelle Lynn Johnson, 41, were arrested April 13 and charged with prostitution third or more, a state jail felony, the McAllen Police Department said in a news release. All 12 men, whose ages range from 21 to 66, were arrested April 14 and charged with Class B misdemeanor prostitution, facing a maximum 180-day jail sentence upon conviction. RELATED: Police: 3 South Texas volunteer firefighters wanted to fight fire, so they started one Scroll through the slideshow to see booking photos for all 14 suspects from this sting and mugshots from past stings in South Texas. jfechter@mySA.com Twitter: @JFreports A Mexican police officer was suspended recently after a photo surfaced of her exposing her bare breasts while working in uniform in her police vehicle, according to Mexican media outlets. Nidia Garcia was suspended from her post in Monterrey after the NSFW photo made the social media rounds and was brought to the attention of her supervisors, according to El Norte, the city's largest newspaper. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate An Alabama teen who married a high school teacher charged with having sex with her must testify against her husband in court, a judge ruled Tuesday. RELATED: Married teachers at Alabama private school accused of having sex with different students Amy Nicole Cox, 18, and Matthew Shane Wester a 38-year-old former teacher at Cleveland High School in Blount County married in June 2015, ostensibly to prevent Cox from having to testify against Wester when he goes to trial later this month. Wester was indicted in January 2015 on a charge of being a school employee and having sexual contact with a student under the age of 19. Cox is allegedly the student involved in both cases. Alabama Circuit Judge Dennis Odell ruled Tuesday that Cox is not protected by spousal privilege, AL.com reported. Cox, now 18, graduated from Cleveland High School in May 2015. RELATED: Police: Texas high school employee accused of playground sex admits to relationship with 2nd student Prosecutors had called the marriage a "sham." In a court filing obtained by AL.com, Blount County District Attorney Pamela Casey claims that Alabama's law against compelling spouses to testify against one another doesn't apply in this case because Cox is Wester's victim. Wester was married when he was indicted in February 2015, but had filed for divorce in January 2015, Casey said. The divorce was approved in April. "On June 13, 2015, just 67 days following the divorce from 'wife No. 1,' and less than five months prior to the initial trial setting in this matter, the defendant married the student whom he subjected to sexual contact while he was a teacher and she was student,'' Casey wrote, according to AL.com. "It is the state's position that the marriage to the student is a sham by the defendant to prevent the student from testifying against him." RELATED: Police: Wisconsin high school teacher had sex with student during fiance's bachelor party Wester's trial is scheduled to begin on April 25, according to AL.com. jfechter@mySA.com Twitter: @JFreports Francisco "Frank" Castillo, who started his own steel fabricating business out of his garage with $1,000 in 1980, died April 12 at 74. Born in Monterrey, Mexico, Castillo, the second youngest of nine children, came to San Antonio with his family when he was 12, speaking only Spanish. Attending Holy Rosary Catholic School, Castillo caught up quickly. Working at his parents bakery, Castillo decided to attend Louis W. Fox Vocational and Technical School, learning steel fabrication. More for you NWS predicts isolated strong, severe storms possibly on Monday After graduation, Castillo honed his skills first at Friedrich Air Conditioning Co. and later at Steel Technologies, Inc., in which he was part owner. He started his own business, Casteel Manufacturing Inc., in 1980. More Information Francisco "Frank" Castillo Born: Feb. 7, 1942, Monterrey, Mexico Died: April 12, 2016, San Antonio Preceded by: Parents Epifanio and Maria Castillo; three siblings. Survived by: Wife Maria A. Castillo; daughter Patty Castillo; sons Alex Castillo and daughter-in-law Cindy; Carlos Castillo and daughter-in-law Sylvia; stepsons Frankie Contreras, and Marco Contreras and stepdaughter-in-law Ede; 12 grandchildren; two brothers; three sisters; a brother-in-law. Services: Funeral was April 16. See More Collapse When he started his company, I did his books at home, said longtime friend and assistant Suzanne Walker. It was a one-man shop; then I came on to work full-time in 1989, after Castillo had expanded into a shop he had built in the Southwest Side. Building his business on a strong work ethic and fanatical customer service, Castillo guided the company through various changes in the economy over 35 years. Probably 99.9 percent of this business is repeat business, Alex Castillo said. Its a niche product that they create when a need arises; its word of mouth, and theyd come back to my dad. Employing up to 30 employees at his busiest, Castillo generally had 12 people working full time, many who stayed with him for more than a decade. For being a small business, he made sure they had benefits insurance and vacation time, his son Alex Castillo said. Although generally easy-going, Castillo was very business oriented, always, Alex Castillo said. I wasnt allowed to call him Dad at the office, I had to call him Frank. He didnt want to show favoritism. Choosing his employees carefully, Castillo didnt always go with the person with the biggest, thickest resume, Alex Castillo said. Hed go with his gut. Castillo also believed in second chances, a fact his son knew only too well after being fired three times one summer for horse-playing in the workshop. I was only 12 or 13, Alex Castillo said. Castillo was killed in an automobile accident while traveling for work. He had no plans to retire at the time. He was always concerned about other people, his daughter Patty Castillo said. When urged by his children to think about retiring, Castillo told them, I have other families to think about my employees. mheidbrink@express-news.net On this day, 180 years ago, General Sidney Shermans men led the left wing of Sam Houstons Army into battle against Mexican Dictator Santa Annas troops at San Jacinto. These men carried the only banner the Texans had that day as they rushed to meet their fate in a life-or-death struggle for liberty. The bedraggled volunteers had been outnumbered and on the run from Santa Annas army of trained soldiers for weeks after the massacres at Goliad and the Alamo. Their surprise attack on the Mexican Army shortly after 3:30 p.m. during siesta lasted just 18 minutes, but gave birth to the Republic of Texas. The banner they carried into battle now hangs behind the speakers platform in the Texas House of Representatives. It was a gift from the Galveston Chapter of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. Preserving the history of the men who fought to create Texas that day, and honoring their heroic struggles, has been the core mission of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas from the very start. Texas won its independence that day, and set into motion events that led to the United States acquisition of New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Utah, parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas and Oklahoma. The Battle of San Jacinto changed world history. But it would be 37 years until the men who fought for their freedom that day would meet in Houston and form the Texas Veterans Association to pass their story along. The DRT didnt exist yet, but the 300 aging soldiers there took special effort to thank the women who forged Texas in the form of a resolution: Resolved that the surviving pioneer women of the period we commemorate who were joint sharers in the trials and privations of that period, and whose patriotism was equal to the occasion, we tender our kindest regards and remembrances. The Daughters of the Republic of Texas was organized until 56 years after the battle, when they began to meet jointly with the few remaining members of the Texas Veterans Association. The legacy of the old soldiers had been passed along, and was in good hands. The story of Texas, and the story of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, have been intertwined from the beginning. We didnt just save the Alamo. Texas acquired and preserved the San Jacinto Battlefield at the Daughters insistence. In 1902, the Daughters toured the battleground with a group of legislators and a San Jacinto battle survivor. They placed temporary, improvised monuments in a dozen locations, including the camp where Gen. Houston lay wounded under a tree on the bayou, the same spot where Santa Anna was delivered to him as a captive. The San Jacinto Monument was raised with the help of the Daughters in 1939. At 567 feet, the monument remains the tallest masonry column in the world, and 12 feet taller than the Washington Monument. The story of Texas independence is a story known around the world. It is the story of the men who fought for liberty 180 years ago today at San Jacinto. The Daughters of the Republic of Texas exist still today to tell their story. The hours, days and years of unfolding time shall never dim the spirit of liberty kindled on this field of battle, reads the inscription of a sundial placed at the battlefield by the San Jacinto Chapter. Keep that spirit of liberty kindled today, and fly your Texas Flag proudly every April 21 in remembrance. Betty J. Edwards is the 45th president general of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. There is so much about the Craig Follins saga at Alamo Colleges that doesnt add up. After just 20 months on the job, Follins was fired as president of Northeast Lakeview College last fall. Somehow, though, Follins still makes his $205,000 salary in a nebulous new gig with the Alamo Colleges, the parent of Northeast Lakeview. Follins has argued that whatever he did to get reassigned is private and potentially embarrassing information. The kind of skinny that could keep him from landing another fat job. He has fought records requests from this newspaper and The Ranger, the excellent student newspaper at San Antonio College. Attorney General Ken Paxtons office disagreed with Follins, issuing an opinion that says these records should be released. Usually an AGs opinion is the end of the line. But these records remain sealed. There are some basic questions Follins and Alamo Colleges have been unwilling to answer: What did he do as president of Northeast Lakeview College that led to his firing? Why is he still making $205,000 a year? Those questions represent the nuts and bolts of the matter. The who, what, where, when, why and how of basic journalism. The lack of answers is its own message. Alamo Colleges administrators are saying, loud and clear, the schools image trumps the students and public it serves. Of course, thats not exactly how school officials have put it. Alamo Colleges spokesmen have said officials hands are tied when it comes to releasing these documents. True, but thats only because officials tied their own hands. First, they didnt release records because of an inexplicable confidentiality agreement between the school and Follins. After the AGs office issued its opinion Feb. 24 that the records were public Upon review we find none of the submitted information at issue is highly intimate or embarrassing information and of no legitimate public interest Alamo Colleges dragged its feet, deliberating an appeal. That was enough time for Follins to sue Alamo Colleges and Paxton over the release of the records in March, seeking more than $1 million in damages and an injunction to keep the records private. Earlier this month, a judge in Travis County granted a temporary injunction, saying the release of the records would undercut Follins opportunity to make an argument. Everyone deserves their day in court, but for Follins that day is set for Nov. 21, which is a long time from now. By then Follins could very well have put San Antonio in his rearview mirror, and this story will be as cold as a paleta in a December ice storm. In his lawsuit, Follins nibbles around the edges, asserting that many administrative employees had become lacksidaisical (sic) and indifferent towards (sic) performing their duties. ... He began to set performance goals for the employees. Their response to his program was to accuse him of being insulting and abusive towards (sic) them. Releasing the records, he said repeatedly in his lawsuit, would ruin him. There is a likelihood the plaintiff will become unemployable as a college administrator, his suit says. The plaintiff is a highly compensated individual. The destruction of his reputation and thus his career will have a negative pecuniary impact on the plaintiff and his family. Its an interesting argument because it highlights a certain Catch-22. Follins doesnt want the records public because he believes they could ruin his career and keep him from landing a job elsewhere. But if thats true, if the records are really that bad, why does he continue to work for Alamo Colleges? Isnt that exactly the kind of information the public, here and elsewhere, deserves to know? Maybe the records arent so damning. We just dont know. There is one more layer to this story, and thats Alamo Colleges relationship with the students at The Ranger. The Rangers diligent reporting on the Follins saga is the kind of work that should make the colleges administration proud. Instead, officials have circled the wagons. Its an unfortunate message to the students, but it does make for some outstanding professional training. This is usually what happens when people start asking why something went wrong. jbrodesky@express-news.net When the government wants to search your home during an investigation, it generally gets a warrant and serves you. When it wants to search your personal and business information, increasingly it is serving that order on technology companies that store the information on their servers for you. Its in the cloud. Its your data your property but if the judge who approved the search also applies a gag order on the company, you are unaware that the government has just gone through your stuff. Microsoft has sued to stop this practice, claiming the federal statute that allows it violates the Fourth Amendment rights of its customers to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. It also argues that the statute violates the companys First Amendment rights by barring it from communicating with its customers. Microsoft is correct in suing. Other technology companies, including San Antonios own Rackspace, should sign on. In its civil suit against the government filed in Seattle Microsoft discloses that federal courts issued 2,600 gag orders on it in the past 18 months and that more than two-thirds had no fixed end date. One wonders what that number looks like when the orders on Apple and Google are counted. The government should be able to keep searches secret in certain cases. But the lack of time limits on when companies such as Microsoft can inform its customers of these searches and the low bar judges are using to issue the secrecy orders arguably make these searches unconstitutional. You dont have to be a legal scholar to recognize the danger in allowing the government to take your information without telling you. If the criminal probe hits pay dirt, youd presumably know at some point. Too late, but youd know. What if the suspicions of illegality are not borne out? Microsofts suspicion is that the judges issuing these gag orders with indefinite time limits are doing so because prosecutors invoke a low standard they have reason to believe that informing the object of the search will hinder an investigation. Judges should demand more. Congress neednt wait for a court ruling to address the issue. It is considering a change to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 that would impose a maximum of a six-month delay in notifying a customer. If that doesnt happen, judges should impose a higher standard on when they issue gag orders, and impose a time limit as well. NEW YORK Shoppers could get a few extra seconds of their lives back at the checkout. Visa announced this week that it is launching software that could trim the time it takes for a chip card to make a payment. Visas Quick Chip specification is available free-of-charge to payment processors, acquiring banks and other payment networks to offer to merchants. The upgrade streamlines the processing of chip card transactions to enable customers to dip and remove their EMV chip card from the terminal, typically in two seconds or less, without waiting for the transaction to be finalized. The enhancement requires a software update to the merchants card terminal or POS system. Visa is advancing a streamlined approach to chip transactions to make them faster and more efficient, while still providing a safe and secure experience, said Mark Nelsen, senior vice president of Risk Products and Business Intelligence, at Visa Inc. Visa says that Quick Chip helps facilitate the payment industrys transition to EMV in the United States, noting that so far, more than 265 million Visa credit and debit chip cards have been issued to cardholders. In addition, more than one million merchants have chip-enabled terminals, or roughly 20% of all merchant locations. Merchants interested in implementing Quick Chip should contact their payment processor or acquiring bank. Additional technical documentation is available at www.visachip.com. In the retail arena, Walmart also announced that it is taking steps to speed up the transaction time for customers using chip cards. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer has lopped off 11 seconds from the chip-card transaction time at checkout. For one, the company has eliminated the prompt asking customers to confirm the transaction amount. The news source notes that the changes by Visa and Walmart are a reflection of the widespread consternation that has greeted the new [EMV] cards, which offer better security than the older ones but require more technology that slows transaction speeds. The speed delays at checkout have also slowed merchants ability to move customers quickly and efficiently through the checkout. Overall, there was some merchant dissatisfaction with how long it was taking to process the transaction, Ellen Richey, Visas vice chairman of risk and public policy, told the news source. The Wall Street Journal references a JDA Software Group Inc. study, which found that using a chip card typically added 8 to 12 seconds per checkout. Its reasonable to think the machine is adding about 4 to 6 seconds, Marty Reynolds, vice president of retail solutions for JDA, told the news source. Although Freedom of Information battles are sadly pretty routine in the world of big league journalism, a reader flagged a Boston Globe fight with the MBTA pension fund as a bigger-stakes version of some of the arm-wrestling weve done with CalPERS. The lesson here, is that defending the incumbents in the organization is depicted as being the same as advancing its mission, when that is just about never the case. The backstory is that the MBTA pension fund lost $25 million in a hedge fund investment recommended by a former head of the pension fund. Even though the trust is private, the Globe sought records, including board minutes, related to the investment, arguing it was still subject to Massachusetts disclosure laws as a result of a 2013 amendment. Judge Kenneth Salinger ruled in favor of the Globe, but is giving the pension system another go at making a case against releasing the records. The Globe report clearly comes from internal dissenters, presumably on the board, who opposed the pensions continued fight to keep the records under wraps. From the article: The judge has already dismissed several arguments against disclosure, including one that providing documents would amount to the unconstitutional taking of property without just compensation. Salinger said the pension board can charge reasonable fees to search and copy documents, as other entities subject to public records do. The pension boards lawyer has argued that disclosure could have a chilling effect on communications between the fund and its members. The judge said application of the public records law does not appear to violate either partys free speech. The pension board also wants to exempt what it considers trades secrets, such as records including details of its investments and deals with financial advisers. The judge indicated the fund could guard such records from the public under the same exemption the larger retirement system for state and local government employees enjoys. The details of its investments are trade secrets argument is one weve debunked repeatedly as far as private equity is concerned. The same logic applies to hedge funds. The sort of information contained in fund agreements, to the extent there is anything of competitive value, is the complicated tax language. Even then, only a handful of law firms write these contracts and devise the tax strategies, so there is nothing unique. For something to rise to the level of being a trade secret it has to be so valuable that disclosing it would result in irreparable damage. And its really laughable in the case of a money-losing investor. If he has anything unique, it is not putting him in an advantaged position. Similarly, the other documents the pension fund presumably wants to keep hidden, such as financial statements and notices, dont have any competitive value either. But do the Globes lawyers have the financial acumen to persuade the judge these arguments are nonsense? Lets hope so. The article got a good number of comments, and the readers are not buying what the pension fund is selling, so the Globe is winning the PR battle, regardless of how it fares in the legal fight. So it has made some progress whether or not it scores a solid win. By Gerald Friedman, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Orthodox macroeconomics has become a place where visions die and hopes are banished, for both liberals and conservatives When I conducted an assessment of Senator Bernie Sanders economic proposals and found that they could produce robust growth, the negative reaction among powerful liberal economists was swift and vehement. How much, I wondered, did this reflect personal disappointment being rationalized into a political economy of despair? Professional economists tend to embrace an economic theory that government can do little more than fuss around the edges. From that stance, what do they have to offer ordinary people for whom the economy is not working? Not a whole lot. How Gerald Friedmans assessment of Bernie Sanders economic proposals prompted a rare public political spat among economists It has certainly been a rough seven years for the liberal economists in the Obama Administration. Economic recovery has been slow, the slowest in the post-World War II era. Ambitious programs for reform of social insurance programs (such as unemployment insurance) and for public investment have been scaled back, and back. Yes, there is much that these economists who served Obama can be proud of: more people have health insurance, and the economy did not collapse. But the constant slog must have taken a toll. Having experienced so many compromises and disappointments, perhaps it is easier to say to those who expect more that it just cant happen. There is comfort in the Thatcherite phrase: There Is No Alternative (TINA). The angry reaction to my report revealed that by some combination of rationalization and the dominance of neoclassical microeconomics since the 1970s, liberal economists have virtually abandoned Keynesian economics, which supported the notion that governments can and must intervene in the economy to ensure the best results for society. These economists went back to pre-Keynesian thinking, where price fluctuations are supposed to equilibrate supply and demand at full employment with an optimal distribution of good and services. The very suggestion that government action can result in increases in growth rates or wages is now taken to be obviously wrong. Adopting the language of neoclassical micro welfare economics, everything is already as good as can be all that government can do is to make it worse. Criticisms of the orthodox model and its policies are deemed worthy of scorn, to be dismissed tout court because they are obviously at variance not only with textbook economics, but with what we need to believe to rationalize failure. The Closing of the Economists Mind The reaction to my paper the casual and precipitous conclusion that it must be wrong because it projects a sharply higher rate of GDP growth comes from the assumption that the economy is already at full employment and capacity output. It is assumed that were output significantly below full employment, then prices would fall to equilibrate the two. This is the political counsel of despair. It is based on classical economic theory and the underlying acceptance of Says Law of Markets (named for the great Classical economist Jean-Baptiste Say), which says that total supply of goods and services and the total demand for goods and services will always be equal. The shoe market creates the right amount of demand for shoes it works out so neatly that the true measure of the supply of shoes, of potential output, can be taken by measuring actual output. This concept is used as a justification for laissez-faire economics, and the view that the market mechanism finds a harmonious equilibrium. It explains why even in the depths of the economic crisis, Christina Romer, former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration, who was always skeptical of fiscal policy and Keynesian economics, and why Jared Bernstein, former Chief Economist and Economic Adviser to Vice President Joseph Biden under Obama, who should have known better, wrote that the economy would return on its own to full employment. They predicted, quite wrongly, that the proposed Obama stimulus would accelerate this recovery by 6 months. The return of Says Law has distorted the way liberal policy elites view the economy. Consider the Congressional Budget Offices (CBO) decision in 2014 to explain away years of slow growth by dramatically revising downwards its estimate of potential output. No longer do we have an output gap of 9 percent; instead the gap was redefined as only 2 percent because the real level of capacity is reevaluated as the level actually produced on the assumption that we must be at full employment. And how do we know that we are at full employment? Because we are producing the capacity level of output. CBO has similarly downgraded estimates of potential GDP growth with historically low rates of labor force growth and slow productivity growth; instead of the 3 percent average annual growth of the 1959-2007 period, or the 4 percent growth 1947-73, we are to expect no more than 2 percent growth. While there is some referencing of demographic changes, these estimates conveniently align future growth projections with the otherwise-disappointing recent growth performance. This reevaluation says to policy elites, Hey, we are doing as well as can be expected. To the general public it says, Sorry, nothing more can be done for you. TINA. The Economics and Politics of Despair There is, of course, a politics as well as a psychology to this economic theory. If nothing much can be done, if things are as good as they can be, it is irresponsible even to suggest to the general public that we try to do something about our economic ills. The role of economists and other policy elites (Paul Krugman is fond of the term wonks) is to explain to the general public why they should be reconciled with stagnant incomes, and to rebuke those, like myself, who say otherwise before we raise false hopes that can only be disappointed. But this approach leaves liberals like Hillary Clinton with few policy options to offer in response to the siren call of demagogues like Donald Trump. And it makes the work of self-proclaimed responsible elite economists that much more pressing. They have to work even harder to persuade the public that nothing can be done to head off the challenge of Trump and other irresponsible politicians who capitalize on the electorates appetite for change. They have to slap down critics like myself. Responsible elite economists have to keep the party of good arithmetic from overpromising at all costs. Were the orthodox classical economists correct, then of course their politics would follow. But what if they are wrong? What if government action could, in fact, raise growth rates or narrow disparities? What would be the expected value of a higher GDP growth rate? Would it be worth some academic debate, even if it leaked into the public realm? Might this debate even serve a socially useful function by giving voters an alternative to the xenophobic political economy of Donald Trump? Many Americans believe that government action can improve economic conditions, especially for workers, and many of these support Trump because they see him as the only candidate who is even willing to consider government action to help working Americans. These voters can look long and hard at the responsible Clinton platform for some policy, for any policy to raise growth rates and narrow income disparities. But they wont find it, because policy elites have closed their minds to the possibility of change. An Agenda for Further Research? I admit that I have always lived surrounded by people who agree with me. At Columbia, Harvard, and now Amherst, Massachusetts, I have sought friends and colleagues who largely agree with me. While I enjoy the comfort that comes from an affirming community, it may be that I was not well served by the homogeneity of views. While I knew intellectually that the mainstream had abandoned Keynes and reembraced Says Law, I didnt take this shift seriously. It seemed too absurd to me; honestly, I thought they were only kidding. Since I have spent most of my life refuting classical economics, and since my colleagues and friends agreed with me, I assumed that everyone did. Had I included some mainstream economists in my narrow social circle, then I would have been better prepared for the substantive reaction to my report. On the other hand, as an intellectual activity, I was well served by the debate because it forced me to deal with ideas that I had previously rejected only too casually. I was helped in this by some of the orthodox folks who expressed second thoughts about my work (such as Kevin Drum). I am grateful to the Christina Romer and her husband David Romer, and to Justin Wolfers because, while they remain firmly opposed to my work, they took the time to explain their approach and helped me to articulate my own views more clearly. Our respectful exchanges allowed me to help them to understand the points of divergence in our models and gave me insight into the nature of my own approach. This engagement of alternative visions could be a useful basis for the type of rethinking of macroeconomics favored even by some who remain in the orthodox camp, such as Olivier Blanchard, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund,. The debate has identified certain areas for empirical investigation that might help us not only to choose between the models but perhaps to find times and places where one or the other approach may be more useful. At a minimum, we have a research agenda for many graduate student papers and dissertations. The strength of Verdoorns Law associating productivity growth with economic growth rates and the level of labor shortage. The impact of pro-growth government investment policies including investment in Research and Development as well as investments in roads, bridges, and other public utilities. The investment accelerator and its role in fiscal stimulus, or in theories of secular stagnation. The determinants of changes in labor force participation and the effect of increasing employment opportunities. Responsiveness of immigration, especially undocumented, to labor demand. The sensitivity of US imports to economic growth, an issue complicated by the international role of the dollar. Restoring Controversy to Economics Controversy reflects the disagreements and uncertainty that alone can lead to intellectual progress. It is time to inject some of these into orthodox macroeconomics. We have been ill-served by a smugly sure macroeconomics both in imagination and policy. Amazingly, the crisis of 2007-9 has left intact the dominant pseudo-Keynesian orthodoxy; maybe the kerfuffle around my report will help to open some space for constructive dialog in a profession that has clearly grown too complacent. The RT video below, due no doubt to time limits, gives a very short recap of Greg Palasts important work on how the 2000 election was stolen. Worse, his account was published in the UK while the hanging chads fight was on, when his work showed that the voters illegally removed from voter rolls in Florida swamped the number of votes at issue in the recount. Even more telling: no US media outlet picked it up when it mattered, as in when the election results were in play. As Palast remarked later, it was the Michael Moore book, Stupid White Men, which broke the story in the US, IIRC in April, and then the Washington Post deigned to pick it up. His initial estimate was that at least 90,000 and probably more like 180,000 legal black voters were removed from voter lists, using the excuse in Florida that convicted felons can not vote in that state. Jeb Bush awarded the contract to the firm that submitted the higher bid. It scrubbed the voter rolls names that were clearly black (first name Jamail or Kinesha for instance), that bore an arguable resemblance to a felons name. Just use Palasts low estimate. 90,000 black voters x 30% turnout x 90% propensity to vote Democrat = 24,300 Democrat votes scrubbed the 2,700 10% that would have voted Republican = 21,600 net Democratic votes. By contrast, the disputed ballots were on the order of 2,000 to the low 3,000s. Palast also wrote at his site about problems with the New York election, and I suspect hell have more in relatively short order: Francesca Rheannon, whom you may know as the host of Writers Voice radio, did the civic thing by volunteering to work the polls in a town east of New York City. I just got off my 17 hour shift as an election official. In my election district, out of 166 Democratic voters, 39 were forced to file affidavit ballots. The last [election] I worked in, exactly ONE voter needed an affidavit ballot. Thats nearly one of four voters. Why? Their names had gone missing from the voter rolls. An affidavit ballot (called a provisional ballot in most other states) is a kind of placebo ballot. You get to pretend to vote but the chance it will actually be counted is well, good luck. If your name is wrongly removed, kiss your vote affidavit or notgoodbye. Rheannons experience was hardly unique. In Brooklyn alone, over 125,000 names were quietly scrubbed from the voter rolls in the five months leading up to the primary. To put it in prospective, the number of voters purged equals about half of the number who got to vote. Scott Stringer, the New York City Comptroller will now audit the Elections Boardnow that the election is over. Hey thanks, Scott. Neal Rosenstein, the lead voting rights attorney for the New York Public Interest Research Group, which plans legal action, notes that part of the problem is that partisan hacks sit on the Elections board in New Yorkhacks from both parties. Brooklyn is under the control of the Kings County Democratic Party, one of the last of the big city machines. Would they attack their opponents voter registrations? I dont have to guess: in my wasted younger days, I was in the Brooklyn County elections office with the hacks where we were assigned by the Party to challenge voters signatures en masse. (I wouldnt and nearly lost my state job.) Am I saying the machine fixed the election for Hillary Clinton? Without further investigation, it would be irresponsible for me to pronounce judgment. Some of the purged may have moved, some have died. But those who waited in line only to fill out affidavit ballots are unlikely to be deceased. If the Machine had been aware of the mass purge underway, would they have stopped it? As they say in Brooklyn, Fahgeddabouddit. Hear Palast describe the rationale and methods for deep-sixing registered voters in the segment below: I can tell some of you are bummed. I got markedly fewer link suggestions via e-mail than usual. Maybe we can figure out a place to which we can emigrate (although be warned, getting permanent residence is much harder than you thinks plus there are very few countries that accept people over 45). Or maybe there is a town with cheap and pretty good housing stock and not terrible weather we can all colonize. New Yorkers Cower As Clinton Victory Speech Reverberates Across Entire State Onion (David L) London gets its first naked restaurant, waiting list already at 5,000 Independent Creativity Is Much More Than 10,000 Hours of Deliberate Practice Scientific American Choosing to Skip the Upgrade and Care for the Gadget Youve Got New York Times (furzy) How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get? Ramez Naam Large Hadron Collider Anomaly Inspires a Zoo of Theories Scientific American How to Explain Mansplaining New York Times. I interrupt men on the phone regularly. And most of the time, when they speak again there is more tension in their voice. So yes, women get the disapproval message pretty quickly. 2.2 billion in at risk Zika areas BBC Prescription meds get trapped in disturbing pee-to-food-to-pee loop ars technica Mossack Fonseca China? Instagrams White Savior Barbie neatly captures whats wrong with voluntourism in Africa Quartz ECB Brexit? Syraqistan Imperial Collapse Watch 2016 Elizabeth Warren chides Goldman Sachs, Northern Trust over Teamsters pensions MarketWatch US ranks 41 out of 180 in global press freedom, thanks to our War On Whistleblowers Boing Boing VW to pay US customers $5,000 in Dieselgate settlement DW Nebraska just abolished civil forfeiture Boing Boing (resilc) Why the Big Banks Cant Imagine Their Own Demises New Yorker Crude Oil Is About To Drop 30% Again Forbes Oil bounces on stockpile data as the dollar gains Reuters What Will Come After Payday Lending? Atlantic (resilc) We cant save the economy unless we fix our debt addiction Michael Hudson, Washington Post Guillotine Watch Class Warfare Antidote du jour (martha r): See yesterdays Links and Antidote du Jour here. The contrarian dance of DNA (Nanowerk News) Put more scientifically, a piece of DNAs movements are often counterintuitive to those of objects in our everyday grasp. Take a rod of rubber, for example. Bend it until its ends meet, and you can count on the elastic tension to snap it back straight when you let go, said biological physicist Harold Kim. That doesnt always work that way with a piece of DNA. When you bend it into a loop, the elastic energy more often than not wants to bend the chain further in instead of pushing it back out, said Kim, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. At the School of Physics, Kim is fine-tuning the observation of how biopolymers behave, in particular DNA at short lengths. He published his latest results on Force distribution in a semiflexible loop in the journal Physical Review E on April 18, 2016 ("Force distribution in a semiflexible loop"). The research is funded by National Institutes of Health. Georgia Techs James T. Waters coauthored the research paper. An artist's depiction of a section of DNA. In complex simulations, Kim studied the motions of DNA chains at lengths where they still have springy qualities, in order to understand their mechanochemical properties, or how they work as microscopic objects. In particular, he has illuminated the forces acting upon DNA bound up in short loops. Thats a common and important shape that keeps DNA from expressing when it shouldnt and then possibly messing up cell functioning. Kims most significant counterintuitive find could improve understanding of how DNA snaps free from the proteins that bind them into those loops. He has observed that looped DNA, though on average very gentle in its motions, is beset by moments of unusually high force. It would be a little like a chaotic spring drawn up to a loop making pretty even jumbly movements then suddenly whipping out violently, Kim said. The range of observed forces on DNA loops breaks the bounds of what thermodynamics predicts. Even though the mean of the force distribution does indeed equal the thermodynamic force, the distribution of forces pushes past the anticipated norm, falling broadly outside a Gaussian distribution on both ends. Thats a key determination. It could help scientists in various disciplines predict the lifespans of many DNA loops and understand the frequency and likelihood of their undoing. The forces contributing to those momentary jerks and snaps work on the whole contrary to one another. While that elastic energy works on DNA pieces in its ways, the forces of entropy push hard in their own ways. Reflective of the universe overall, in Kims observations of springy DNA loops, entropy, here too, wins. Entropic forces slightly outdo the elastic forces. And they, too, defy intuition. To understand how, lets take a look back at that rubber bar. When a short DNA chain is not looped but only bent, it acts more like the rubber bar. The elastic force dominates and mostly wants to push it back straight, while entropy mostly wants to keep it curvy. Then, as the DNA chain lengthens a bit and loops: That relation starkly turns on its head. The elastic force then pulls inward with vehemence, and the entropic force then pushes the chain outward with even more vigor. The length of a DNA loop appears to contribute strongly to how likely these intermittent extreme forces are to destabilize its bond with the protein holding it shut. That, incidentally, plays right into many scientists current discussions on other biopolymers. Theres a lot of speculation right now that the kinds of force-peaks we observed actually regulate the length of some biopolymers, so, in an interesting way, our observations and methods may help colleagues explore this idea more closely, Kim said. Kims group augmented thermodynamic calculations with a novel simulation method, phase-space sampling. It not only establishes the positon of molecular components in space but also their momentum at a given time. This took into account the constant bombardment by water molecules, i.e. the heat bath. New method enlists electricity for easier, cheaper, greener chemistry (Nanowerk News) Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found a new and better way to achieve a chemical reaction that is used widely in the pharmaceutical as well as flavor and fragrance industries. Traditional methods of "allylic oxidation" typically employ toxic and/or expensive reagents such as chromium, ruthenium or selenium. That largely prevents the reaction from being used at industrial scales, for example to manufacture pharmaceuticals. By contrast, the TSRI chemists' new method is easily scalable: It uses only inexpensive, safe chemicals, along with old-fashioned electrochemistry--driving a reaction with an electric current. "Turns out one of the best reagents you can buy is sitting in your wall socket," said principal investigator Phil Baran, the Darlene Shiley Professor of Chemistry at TSRI. Scripps Research Institute chemists Phil Baran (left) and Evan Horn pose in front of an electric car, whose principles of sustainable transport pertain to the sustainable chemistry in the Baran lab's new electrochemical allylic oxidation reaction, which eliminates toxic chemicals from a widely employed chemical process. (Image courtesy of The Scripps Research Institute) In collaboration with pharmaceutical chemists at Bristol-Myers Squibb and China-based Asymchem Life Science, Baran and his team demonstrated the value of the new technique by using it to make more than 40 sought-after compounds--much more cheaply, cleanly and scalable than existing methods allow. "The scope of the reaction is just phenomenal, it's super easy to do, and the overall improvement in environmental sustainability is dramatic," said Baran. The work was published April 20, 2016, in the journal Nature ("Scalable, Sustainable Electrochemical Allylic C-H Oxidation"). Just a Little Oxygen Allylic oxidation reactions essentially attach an oxygen to a carbon within a cluster of atoms called an allyl group--a common feature on organic molecules. The addition of that one oxygen atom can bring about a major change in the properties of the overall molecule, and thus allylic oxidation is used throughout chemistry, sometimes to improve the properties of an existing compound and sometimes to enable the synthesis of a compound otherwise obtainable only from plants. Because the vast majority of previously published allylic oxidation reactions employ reagents that are either toxic or expensive, or both, they have been almost entirely restricted to small-scale applications for which the toxic waste load is easily manageable. Several years ago, Baran and his laboratory set out to find a cheaper and more environmentally friendly way to perform allylic oxidations, so they could be useful on larger scales. The team's initial literature search led them to a relatively obscure electrochemistry-based method published by Japanese researchers in 1985. That method had far too low a yield to be useful on its own, but it pointed the way to a better method, for it didn't require as many of the problematic reagents used in other allylic oxidations. Current from a Simple Battery After extensive experimentation, Baran and his colleagues, including co-lead authors Research Associate Evan J. Horn and graduate student Brandon R. Rosen, developed a new electrochemistry-based method in which all the reagents and other setup details are relatively simple, inexpensive and environmentally friendly. The electrodes used to transmit current through the reaction vessel are made of vitreous carbon and cost just a few dollars each. The oxygen source is not pure O2 gas--which tends to create a fire/explosion hazard at industrial scales--but a widely available liquid oxidant, tert-butyl hydroperoxide. The base and solvent are pyridine and acetone, both cheap and ubiquitous in chemistry labs. The electrochemical mediator, which assists in removing hydrogen atoms from the original molecules to make way for oxygens, is derived in one step from a non-toxic, cheap and widely available flame retardant. The electric current is regulated by a potentiostat, which in turn can be controlled by a laptop; the current source is a simple battery. "You could use a lantern battery or even a car battery if you wanted," Baran said. Baran and his colleagues initially demonstrated the new method by employing allylic oxidations to modify several compounds of interest to Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), which has an ongoing research collaboration with the Baran laboratory. He and his TSRI team then demonstrated the method on more than a dozen compounds broadly known as terpenes--of great interest to chemists in the pharma industry and elsewhere. "Among other things we used the method to make some terpene natural products," said Horn. "A few of these related to medicinal chemistry, but we also made some compounds that are important for the flavor and fragrance industry--stuff that smells real nice." One reaction yielded the hard-to-obtain nootkatone, a natural compound that helps give grapefruits their flavor and also appears to be a safe insecticide. Striking Improvements In nearly all of these demonstrations, the new method's advantages over prior methods--better yields, safer and cheaper reagents--were striking. "For one oxidation, the prior method required a chromium reagent in a 15 to one ratio with the compound to be oxidized, yet we were able to accomplish the same transformation with electricity and a cheap, safe, industrial oxidant and no chromium," said Rosen. Chemists at Asymchem Life Science, a process-oriented contract research organization with an interest in electrochemistry, performed one demonstration reaction at a medium, 100-gram scale and proved its simplicity and robustness by using a simple hardware-store bucket for their reaction vessel. "Doing that with a traditional chromium or ruthenium reagent would have generated far too much toxic waste," Baran said. Baran and his group at TSRI are following up this research by exploring possible fragrance- and flavor-related applications, and are also collaborating with BMS and Asymchem to develop electrochemistry-based methods for reactions beyond allylic oxidation. SHARE There have been a few local cases lately where owners have sued their homeowners' associations (HOAs) for loss or injury to the owners as a result of perpetrators committing crimes at their home (such as assault, battery and theft) by entering their community through alleged lax security at the gate or compromised boundaries such as broken down fences or walls. Historically in Florida, there typically was no liability for such losses or injuries on behalf of the HOAs as such crimes were usually not foreseeable (unless there were previous crimes committed within the community which were not reported to the owners), gated communities were not viewed as providing "security" to their residents (unless the communities advertised and held themselves out as providing security lending owners to believe that the community was actually providing them security), and as long as maintenance of "known" breaches of the communities perimeter boundaries were taken care of in the normal course of business. However, in the recent Supreme Court of Florida case of Sanders v. ERP Operating Limited Partnership (ERP), decided on Feb. 25, 2015, liability may attach to a HOA if it fails to maintain its existing perimeter infrastructure even if the victims of the crime living in the community apparently knows the criminal perpetrators and let them into their home. In the Sanders case, two young adults moved into an apartment complex marketed as a "gated community" with a gated front entrance. Water surrounded about 75 percent of the complex with a wall or fence surrounding the remainder. The complex had reasonable lighting, locks and peepholes, and residents could activate alarm systems in their units. A year after they moved in, the victims were shot to death by unknown assailants inside their apartment. Stolen from the apartment was an engagement ring, cash, credit cards and a computer modem. There was no sign of forced entry. The entrance gate to the community was broken for approximately two months before the murders. Three years before the murders, twice the entry gate was broken and perpetrators followed the residents onto the premises resulting in one armed robbery and an assault. ERP was a national company owning about 100 properties, including the complex, had a manual providing that notice to residents is recommended when "a significant crime" occurs on the property, especially a violent crime or forced entry burglary. The manual recommended that the residents should be provided notice of the crime on the same day management became aware of the incident and notice forms were provided. No notices were sent to the residents of 20 criminal incidents that occurred three years before the murders. The criminal incidents included seven apartment burglaries, two robberies and 10 motor vehicle thefts. The personal representative of the deceased filed the complaint against ERP alleging that ERP's negligence was the proximate cause of the deaths as ERP did not maintain the premises in a reasonably safe condition by failing to: maintain the front gate, have adequate security, prevent dangerous people from gaining access to the premises and fail to protect and warn residents of dangerous conditions and criminal acts. Ruled inadmissible at trial as hearsay was testimony from a boyfriend of one of the deceased who said that he called the decedent before 11 o'clock in the evening and the decedent told the boyfriend that two people known to the defendant were at the door and then got off the phone. When the boyfriend called back, no one answered. The jury found ERP 40 percent negligent and awarded damages of $4.5 million. The 4th District Court of Appeals reversed the trial court's ruling stating that "without proof of how the assailants gained entry into the apartment, Sanders simply could not prove causation." Sanders appealed the Fourth District Court's ruling to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said that "whether or not proximate causation exists is a question of fact, involving an inquiry into whether the respondent's breach of duty foreseeably and substantially contributed to the plaintiff's injuries. The Supreme Court overruled the Fourth District Court first stating that "whether or not it was foreseeable that the residents were in danger of harm because of criminals being allowed on the premises and the ERP's failure to limit the unauthorized access caused the deaths of the decedents was an issue of fact for the jury to decide. The court said that Sanders raised a reasonable inference that the landlord's breach on the outside of the apartment, the inoperable gate, may have contributed to what happened inside the apartment. The jury should have been able to consider testimony of whether the decedents opened the door for their assailants in determining comparative negligence. Last, the court said that the gate was purposed to limit access to the premises only to those authorized to be on the grounds. "A reasonable jury could have determined that ERP's failure to maintain the security gate and failure to have the courtesy officer visible probably allowed the assailant(s) to get to the decedents' door more easily without being detected." Finally the court said that Sanders presented evidence that could support a finding that ERP more likely than not substantially contributed to the deaths in this case and therefore quashed the Fourth DCA's opinion and remanded the case for further proceedings. What an HOA community can take away from this decision to reduce its liability exposure is that the HOA should make sure its perimeter gates, fences and walls are well maintained, promptly inform residents of crimes that occur within the community, and let owners know that the HOA is not guaranteeing or providing residents with "security" just because it is a gated community. If the HOA is telling its residents that it is providing particular security services, it needs to keep those services up and operating in good condition. Rob Samouce, a principal attorney in the Naples law firm of Samouce & Gal, P.A., concentrates his practice in the areas of community associations including representing condominium, cooperative and homeowners' associations in all their legal needs including the procedural governance of their associations, covenant enforcement, assessment collections, contract negotiations and contract litigation, real estate transactions, general business law, construction defect litigation and other general civil litigation matters. This column is not based on specific legal advice to anyone and is based on principles subject to change from time to time. If you have any questions about the column, Rob can be reached at www.SandGlawfirm.com. Claire Babrowski, a retired executive who volunteers for Habitat Collier as part of Marco Island's Hideaway Beach Club, works on the roof of a Habitat home. Submitted SHARE By Submitted With their dilapidated trailer falling apart around them and the floor rotting out under their feet, the family was living in some of the worst conditions in Collier County. But with the help of a group of Marco Islanders from Hideaway Beach Club, this family escaped the mildew-infested trailer where they stood on boards to take a shower, and were launched into a new life and a new home. Other families are struggling to survive in small trailers, in neighborhoods where drug sales happen outside their front door and in filthy conditions where they try to raise their families. Some face incredible hurdles from health woes to family crises. With the help of Habitat Collier and valuable partners such as Hideaway Beach Club, their lives are now better. They have invested in themselves and their community with a Habitat for Humanity interest-free mortgage. Habitat for Humanity of Collier County partners with the residents of Hideaway Beach Club to make homeownership possible for hardworking, deserving families in the community. With rents reaching the $1,300 per month level and affordable housing at a minimum for working families in our county, this partnership is critical. For the second year, Hideaway's participation in the Community Contribution Tax Credit Program will make the American dream possible by helping to fund and build homes for two deserving, local families. This state- funded initiative encourages businesses that collect and remit state sales tax to partner with those who provide affordable housing. Businesses commit to volunteer hours and to funding the construction materials for each home, providing a critical revenue stream as Habitat Collier struggles to address the escalating need in our community. Club member Ernie Stevens has led the effort on behalf of Hideaway to partner with Habitat and address the affordable housing crisis that now grips the county. Recently, the Hideaway supporters picked up hammers and paint brushes to work on a Habitat Collier job site. Currently, 25 Marco Island businesses employ 75 Habitat homeowners making the Island an important partner with Habitat Collier. These families struggled to find affordable, safe housing accessible to their work before purchasing their Habitat homes. During the last five years, each year eight families working on the Island partnered with Habitat to make their dream of homeownership come true. "Hideaway Beach Club recognizes the dilemma faced by service industry workers supporting Marco Island businesses,'' said Claire Babrowski, a retired executive who volunteers on Habitat Collier projects. "These workers support year-round and seasonal residents as well as tourism in this beautiful setting but struggle to find safe and decent housing." Applicant families undergo an exhaustive application process before being selected to partner with Habitat. After investing 500 hours of "sweat equity," each family will purchase their home with a no-interest loan held by Habitat. The hard work of the families, as well as the investment of our Hideaway Beach partners, paid off. They take classes about home maintenance and financial management. "We are so grateful for partners such as Hideaway Beach Club and their members who make this investment in the lives of their neighbors," said Lisa Lefkow, executive director of Habitat Collier. "Marco is truly making a difference." To learn about Habitat for Humanity of Collier County or the Community Contribution Tax Credit Program, contact us at 239-775-0036 or visit HabitatCollier.org. SHARE By Carrie Kerskie Scammers are well aware of the fact that people are prone to typographical errors. Our inability or unwillingness to proofread what we type could lead to great harm. Not physical harm. Harm to our privacy. All due to typosquatting. Typosquatting occurs when someone intentionally registers the misspelling of popular web addresses with the intent to profit from typographical errors. Typosquatting is done to confuse the consumer. The confusion could be intentional or unintentional. Typosquatting can also occur to the right of the company name. Instead of .com it may say .co, .cm or .om. The intent again is to make you think you are on the legitimate website. This is also a common technique used for the sending email address of phishing emails. If you wish to learn more about phishing emails please see my previous article titled "Is there a way to detect a phishing email?" The article can be found onNaplesNews.com. To better illustrate typosquatting here are a few examples of previously known typosquatted websites. Twitter vs Twtter Just in case you missed it go back and read this section title. Did you notice that one of them is missing the letter i? The Twtter website was created to look exactly like the Twitter website. It even had advertising for contests to win iPads or MacBooks. Unfortunately those individuals that fell for the fake website and entered the contest ended up exposing their credit card and sensitive information. Apple vs Appl Apple.com is the legitimate website to buy Apple products. However, appl.com sells fake Apple products. If you had purchased from this site what you thought was a genuine MacBook Pro ended up being junk. The site also had a link to iTunes but instead of registering for an iTunes account you would have ended up registering for a service that would send SMS messages to your cellphone. Passport application Imagine applying for a U.S. passport online only to discover that you were on the wrong website the entire time. There are numerous fake websites that appear to be the official online passport application website. Their intent is to obtain your credit card and sensitive information for identity theft or other types of fraud. Just remember that websites for government agencies end in .gov. If you are on a .com website you should call the governmental agency to verify if that is a valid web address. Microsoft vs MikeRoweSoft Microsoft Corporation sued a Canadian teenager by the name of Mike Rowe. The teenager had a part-time web designer business and wanted to create a website to advertise his business. The teenager stated that since his name was Mike Rowe he thought it would be funny to add the word "soft" to the end of it. Unfortunately for him Microsoft did not see the humor in his actions. Microsoft offered him $10 for the domain. This is the average fee to register a web domain. Mike Rowe decided that $10,000 would be a fair price. Because he intended to profit from selling the domain to Microsoft he was determined to be cybersquatting which is similar to typosquatting. Mr. Rowe was promptly handed a cease-and-desist order by WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization. Malicious xites Recently it was announced that the .om versions of 300 popular websites, such as Netflix and Citibank, were registered in Oman. These purpose of these websites was to install malware, software with malicious intent, onto your computer or device. The malicious typosquatted websites would redirect several times before reaching a page displaying an Adobe Flash update announcement. If the user accepted the update the malware was installed. This malware installed was a simple adware program. Adware is advertising supported software that displays advertisements to generate revenue for its author. So the next time you type in a URL make sure you end up on the correct website. Take your time to proofread the web address before entering your sensitive information. Otherwise, you too could become the victim of a scam. Carrie Kerskie is a sought-after speaker, trainer and consultant on identity theft and data privacy. She is the author of "Your Public Identity: Because Nothing is Private Anymore." Kerskie is the director of the Identity Fraud Institute at Hodges University and president of Kerskie Group Inc. You can contact her at 239-435-9111 or ckerskie@hodges.edu. Follow her on Twitter@CarrieKerskie.com. Though his jaw is wired partially shut, Cpl. Kevin Hennings, 35, was able to share the state of his recovery and just what caused the Sept. 21 jet ski accident near Cannon Island that nearly cost him his life and left a young woman injured. Nearly a month since the accident, it seems Hennings just wants to return to work more than anything else. Hennings has been with the Marco Island Police Department since 2000 and was among about 250 applicants who vied for the position of Marco Island police chief, which has since been filled by Thom Carr. Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation is investigating the accident. FWC spokesman Jorge Pino, said everything including alcohol use has been looked into, but information cannot yet be released as the investigation is still ongoing. Hennings told the story of his off-duty accident and how he came to give Jennifer Rousseau, 23, of Marco Island, a ride on a friend's jet ski. Riding with Rousseau on back wasn't something planned, he said. Rather he was out with friends and his two sons when Rousseau asked for a ride. Hennings said he just finished giving one of his sons a ride, and agreed to give Rousseau a short ride. His sons remained in the boat with friends. Hennings said he followed another jet ski because he wasn't sure how to get where Rousseau was headed. 'I wasn't hot-dogging or doing anything crazy,' Hennings said, adding that he was not drinking. 'She may have been drinking, but I wasn't. I didn't have anything to drink,' he added. He explained the cause of the accident, saying Rousseau was beginning to slip off the jet ski. He helped pull her up and her life jacket, which he said was a little too big, caught on the handle bars, increasing the throttle and causing him to lose control. Jason Berning who was leading Hennings didn't immediately notice that the officer was no longer directly behind him. 'They had a hard time finding us because we were hidden by the mangroves,' Hennings said. It was about an hour before help arrived. 'I was in shock. I lost a lot of blood,' he added. Berning eventually found Hennings and Rousseau and called 911 from his cell phone. The two were rescued by Marco and Isles of Capri fire officials and taken by boat to the Isles of Capri fire station. Rousseau was then taken to Naples Community Hospital where she was listed in stable condition. She is doing well, recovering from relatively minor bumps and bruises, Hennings said, adding that he talks to her periodically. Due to his condition, Hennings was airlifted to Lee Memorial Hospital and remained in an intensive care unit for five days. 'A good part of my face was off,' he said. Hennings has since gone through multiple surgeries and is expected to go through more. 'It's a long road to recovery, but it's better than the alternative,' he said. Hennings suffered a broken jaw, nose and left arm. He has no sensation on the left side of his face. When asked about the pain he is experiencing, Hennings described it as 'manageable.' 'My nose doesn't work, so it's hard to breathe,' he said. He estimates that he will be able to return to work in about a month after getting the wires taken out of his jaw. He said he also plans to space out the upcoming three or four surgeries so that he can work in between them. Hennings is currently using up his vacation time earned from his eight years with the Marco Island Police Department. He said his family came to stay with him and helped him at home, but he is now gaining independence on the home front. 'This is just a bump in the road,' he said and added that the experience has increased his appreciation of things. Not working has made him a bit 'stir crazy,' he said. 'Soon I'll be back like I didn't miss a beat.' FILE - In this Nov. 22, 2015 file photo, Prince presents the award for favorite album - soul/R&B at the American Music Awards in Los Angeles. Authorities are investigating a death at Paisley Park, where pop superstar Prince has his recording studios. Jason Kamerud, Carver County chief sheriff's deputy, tells the Minneapolis Star Tribune that the investigation began on Thursday morning, April 21, 2016. (Photo by Matt Sayles/Invision/AP, File) By NEKESA MUMBI MOODY, HILLEL ITALIE and JEFF BAENEN, Associated Press CHANHASSEN, Minn. (AP) Prince, one of the most inventive and influential musicians of modern times with hits including "Little Red Corvette," ''Let's Go Crazy" and "When Doves Cry," was found dead at his home on Thursday in suburban Minneapolis. He was 57. His publicist, Yvette Noel-Schure, told The Associated Press that the superstar "died at his home this morning at Paisley Park." The local sheriff said deputies found Prince unresponsive in an elevator late Thursday morning after being summoned to his home, but that first-responders couldn't revive him. No details about what may have caused his death have been released. Prince postponed a concert in Atlanta on April 7, after coming down with the flu, and he apologized to fans during a makeup concert last week. President Barack Obama released a statement Thursday saying he and his wife "joined millions of fans from around the world" in mourning Prince's sudden death. "Few artists have influenced the sound and trajectory of popular music more distinctly, or touched quite so many people with their talent," said Obama, for whom Prince was a White House guest last year. "'A strong spirit transcends rules,' Prince once said and nobody's spirit was stronger, bolder, or more creative." Related: The dazzlingly talented and charismatic singer, songwriter, arranger and instrumentalist drew upon musicians ranging from James Brown to Jimi Hendrix to the Beatles, creating a widely imitated blend of rock, funk and soul. The Minneapolis native broke through in the late 1970s with the hits "Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?" and "I Wanna Be Your Lover," and soared over the following decade with such albums as "1999" and "Purple Rain." The title song from "1999" includes one of the most quoted refrains of popular culture: "Tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999." Born Prince Rogers Nelson, he stood just 5 feet, 2 inches yet made a powerful visual impact at the dawn of MTV, from his wispy moustache and tall pompadour to his colorful and suggestive outfits. He was equally powerful musically, summoning original and compelling sounds at will, whether playing guitar in a flamboyant style that drew on Jimi Hendrix, switching his vocals from a nasally scream to an erotic falsetto, or turning out album after album of stunningly original material. Among his other notable releases: "Sign O' the Times," ''Graffiti Bridge" and "The Black Album." He was also fiercely protective of his independence, battling his record company over control of his material and even his name, for a time insisting that he be called "TAFKAP," or The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, and identified with a key-like symbol. Prince once wrote "slave" on his face in protest of not owning his work and famously fought and then departed his label, Warner Bros., before returning a few years ago. "What's happening now is the position that I've always wanted to be in," Prince told the AP in 2014. "I was just trying to get here." In 2004, Prince was inducted into the Rock and Roll of Fame, which hailed him as a musical and social trailblazer. "He rewrote the rulebook, forging a synthesis of black funk and white rock that served as a blueprint for cutting-edge music in the Eighties," reads the Hall's dedication. "Prince made dance music that rocked and rock music that had a bristling, funky backbone. From the beginning, Prince and his music were androgynous, sly, sexy and provocative." Music was in his blood. Prince's father played in a jazz band in Minneapolis, under the name "Prince Rogers," and his mother was the singer. The precocious young Prince taught himself to play the piano at age 7, the guitar at 13 and the drums at 14. In 1978, the year he turned 20, Prince debuted with the album "For You." It was a declaration, if nothing else, that he could do anything: He wrote and sang the material, and served as his own one-man band on guitar, bass, drums, synthesizers, chimes and assorted other instruments. Rarely lacking in confidence, Prince effortlessly absorbed the music of others and made it sound like Prince, whether the James Brown guitar riff on "Kiss" or the Beatle-esque, psychedelic pop of "Raspberry Beret." He also proved a source of hits for others, from Sinead O'Connor's "Nothing Compares 2 U" to Cyndi Lauper's "When You Were Mine" to "Manic Monday" for the Bangles. Prince had been touring and recording right up until his death, releasing four albums in the last 18 months, including two on the Tidal streaming service last year. He performed in Atlanta last week as part of his "Piano and a Microphone" tour, a stripped-down show that has featured a mix of his hits like "Purple Rain" or "Little Red Corvette," and some B-sides from his extensive library. Prince debuted the intimate format at his Paisley Park studios in January, treating fans to a performance that was personal and both playful and emotional at times. The musician had seemed to be shedding his reclusive reputation. He hosted several late-night jam sessions where he serenaded Madonna, celebrated the Minnesota Lynx's WNBA championship and showcased his latest protege, singer Judith Hill. Ever surprising, he announced on stage in New York City last month that he was writing his memoir. "The Beautiful Ones" was expected to be released in the fall of 2017 by publishing house Spiegel & Grau. The publishing house has not yet commented on status of the book, but a press release about the memoir said: "Prince will take readers on an unconventional and poetic journey through his life and creative work." It says the book will include stories about Prince's music and "the family that shaped him and the people, places, and ideas that fired his creative imagination." A small group of fans quickly gathered in the rain Thursday outside Paisley Park, his home and music studio, where Prince's gold records are on the walls and the purple motorcycle he rode in his 1984 breakout movie, "Purple Rain," is on display. The sprawling white, stone building is surrounded by a fence in Chanhassen, about 20 miles southwest of Minneapolis. Steven Scott, 32, of Eden Prairie, said he was at Paisley Park last Saturday for Prince's dance party. He called Prince "a beautiful person" whose message was that people should love one another. "He brought people together for the right reasons," Scott said. ___ Moody and Italie reported from New York. Associated Press writers David Bauder in New York, Paul Newberry in Atlanta, and Steve Karnowski in Chanhassen also contributed to this report. SHARE The lawsuits, filed in Collier Circuit Court, allege that Pacific Tomato Growers Ltd., Collier Fresh Co. and ATG Holding Co. ignored warnings on pesticides and used six known to cause birth defects By Aisling Swift The lawsuits filed by mothers of children that were allegedly born with birth defects due to exposure to pesticides say the defendants ? Pacific Tomato Growers Ltd. of Palmetto, Pacific Collier Fresh Co. of Immokalee, and ATG Holding Co. of Palmetto ? were negligent because: ? The pesticide labels contained a statement indicating how soon after the last application a crop could be harvested, but those warnings were violated; ? A sufficient amount of time was specified during which workers should not have been allowed to enter areas recently treated with toxic pesticides, but that was violated; ? Disposal of pesticide containers violated protocol; ? Personal protective equipment wasn't provided; ? Workers were ordered to spray pesticides even though such pesticides were known to be toxic and there were workers in the field in close proximity to areas being sprayed; ? Supervisors directed workers to continue working during spraying; ? They failed to properly train the employees spraying the pesticides; ? They used 18 pesticides on its tomato crops, six of which the United States Environmental Protection Agency classifies as among the most dangerous to workers and the environment; ? Allowed workers who handled pesticides to do so without properly training them and using unqualified trainers who showed unapproved videos; ? Allowing tractors to spray fields without warning; ? And allowing Dalia's and Juan's mothers to be sprayed directly while working, when they also were subjected to chemical drift. Maria Pedro and Christina Matias picked tomatoes in Immokalee fields before and after they became pregnant. As they worked, they say, pesticide containers burned next to the fields and crops were sprayed with toxic pesticides burned their skin. They also said they inhaled the chemicals used to kill harmful organisms. When their babies were born, they had severe birth defects. Both mothers contend those defects were caused by the toxic pesticides, which had clearly labeled warnings. But attorneys say those warnings were ignored so the companies could make more profits. Matias, the mother of 3-year-old Juan Yovanni Matias Pascual, filed a lawsuit last month in Collier Circuit Court against three interrelated companies: Pacific Tomato Growers Ltd. of Palmetto, Pacific Collier Fresh Co. of Immokalee, and ATG Holding Co. of Palmetto. The lawsuit says Juan was born on July 17, 2005, with numerous birth defects, including brain damage and a cleft palate that makes him nearly mute. Pedro, the mother of 4-year-old Dalia Estefani Domingo Pedro, sued the same defendants on Dec. 31, alleging that Dalia was born on Jan. 4, 2005, without a left ear and only a partial liver, ending in her having to undergo a liver transplant and weekly treatments. Both mothers say their children will suffer future problems and continue to undergo treatments for their birth defects. "Their lives will never be the same," said attorney Seth Miles of Grossman Roth PA in Coral Gables, who filed the lawsuits with co-counsel Andrew Yaffa, who works in the firm's Fort Lauderdale office. "These literally are the most vulnerable human beings on the planet," he said of migrant farmworkers, who don't complain for fear of losing their jobs. "These are two tragic examples of companies taking advantage of the most vulnerable members of our society to make a profit." The children won't be able to get the medical care they need, he said, because their families don't have the means. Medicaid doesn't cover some treatments, he said, and repairing a cleft palate often is considered cosmetic surgery by many insurance companies, not a necessity. "Obviously, they can't afford to get first-rate treatment," Miles said. "That's what this is all about. When a company does these types of things and causes innocent children to have horrific consequences, the least they can do is to make sure the children get the medical care they deserve." A woman who answered the phone at Pacific Collier Fresh Co., said the company had no comment. All the companies are interrelated, according to state corporation records that show many of the same officers and directors, including Billy Heller Jr., Harvey Heller, Joseph and Nathan Esformes, and Harry Falk. Among officers listed for Pacific Collier Fresh is Barron Collier III. This month, Yaffa filed a lawsuit for another mother, Nazaria Francisco, in Hillsborough Circuit Court, against Plant City-based tomato grower Ag-Mart Produce Inc., which grows grape and heirloom tomatoes in Florida, North Carolina, New Jersey and Mexico. Last March, Yaffa settled another lawsuit filed in Hillsborough Circuit Court involving an Immokalee farm-worker couple whose baby was born without limbs after the mother worked in Ag-Mart tomato fields in Immokalee and North Carolina. The settlement was confidential. Francisca Herrera and Abraham Candelario sued Ag-Mart in February 2006, saying the company's poor pesticide practices caused severe birth defects in their son, Carlos Herrera-Candelario, who is known as Carlitos. He was born Dec. 17, 2004, with tetra-amelia, a rare disorder that left him without arms and legs; he also has spinal and lung deformities. The period the women worked in the Collier County cases was around the same time. Yaffa has said Carlitos' birth prompted changes in the industry, which stopped using five of the six pesticides known to cause birth defects. The lawsuits say the women noticed that before they became pregnant, there was a change in the way the defendants sprayed the fields. They were sprayed before and during the time they picked tomatoes. "The workers could smell the fumes of the pesticides, which also affected their skin," the lawsuits say. The lawsuits say the defendants breached their duty of care to the pregnant women by failing to heed the pesticide labels' cautions and warnings and not taking measures to prevent pesticide exposure on unborn fetuses, when they knew or should have known many of its workers were pregnant. The lawsuits say the defendants should have known the dangers due to the label warnings and because of fines they already had been subjected to by authorities. "They were doing it for a profit," Miles said of spraying while farmworkers picked tomatoes. "Obviously, if they're in the sidelines and not working while they spray, the companies are not making money." The lawsuits seek damages for injuries, pain and suffering, disability, disfigurement, loss of capacity for the enjoyment of life, aggravation of pre-existing conditions, medical and hospital care and expenses, loss of earnings, loss of wages and the ability to earn in the future, rehabilitation expenses, and mental anguish. Miles said both women no longer work because they must care for their children. Both cases have been assigned to Circuit Judge Cynthia Pivacek. According to the testimony of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers before the Inter-American Commission in 2005, immediate reactions to pesticide exposure include nausea, vomiting, dizziness, headaches, and rashes. The coalition testified pregnant women and developing fetuses are particularly vulnerable to the harmful effects of pesticides, which can cause spontaneous abortion, growth retardation, structural birth defects, or functional deficits. By Jacob Carpenter of the Naples Daily News The lead investigator in Mark Sievers murder case confirmed Thursday that Sievers longtime friend has flipped on him, telling investigators that Sievers offered to pay him money from life insurance policies in exchange for killing his wife. Testifying at a motion to reduce Sievers bond which was denied Lee County sheriffs Sgt. Michael Downs said co-defendant Curtis Wayne Wright Jr. has confessed to taking part in the murder-for-hire plot to kill Sievers wife, Teresa. Sievers planned to pay Wright using money from $4.43 million worth of life insurance policies taken out over a several-year period, Downs said. The life insurance money was the motivation, Downs said, for Sievers to employ Wright and another man, Jimmy Rodgers, to have his wife killed at the couples Bonita Springs home in June. She was found bludgeoned to death while Mark Sievers was in Connecticut with the couples two children. Prosecutors had previously said Wright agreed to provide substantial cooperation as part of a plea agreement, but Thursdays testimony from Downs was the first detailed public statement on the na-ture of Wrights cooperation. Wright pleaded guilty to a second-degree murder charge days before Sievers arrest. He will receive a 25-year prison sentence in exchange for his cooperation. Money has long been suspected to be a motivating factor in the killing of Teresa Sievers, 40, a popular Bonita Springs doctor. In an investigative summary released a few months after her death, detectives noted the existence of five life insurance policies in Teresa Sievers name, as well as other evidence of financial and marital turmoil. Asked about Wrights confession, Sievers lawyer, Michael Mummert, said Wrights statement was made by a convicted felon in the interest of self-preservation. Wright has served time on drug-related charges in Missouri. He faced as much as life in prison if convicted of murder. Downs testimony came amid Sievers unsuccessful request to have his bond on a second-degree murder charge reduced from $4.43 million equal to the maximum life insurance payouts to $250,000. In response to questions from his lawyer and Assistant State Attorney Hamid Hunter, Sievers testified that he has few assets and cant afford the $4.43 million bond, but his family could help him post a $250,000 surety bond. I would rely on my family to pool their resources and see what they can come up with, Sievers said. Mummert argued that Sievers wouldnt be able to receive any life insurance money or use his house as an asset until the completion of his criminal case. But Hunter argued Sievers could indirectly receive funds from payouts made to other family members. Hunter also noted that Sievers has ties to Missouri, where he still owns a condominium, and that the bond is reasonable in light of the facts of the case. Lee Circuit Judge Bruce Kyle agreed with prosecutors, citing the nature of the case as a primary reason for denying the request. Mummert conceded that Thursdays ruling will make it more difficult for Sievers to retain temporary custody of his two daughters, ages 9 and 11. Florida Department of Children and Families officials have moved to have the children temporarily removed from Sievers custody, in large part due to Sievers inability to care for his daughters while hes incarcerated. He has a very close relationship with (his daughters), and really my heart goes out to them, Mummert said. Sievers daughters are living with their maternal grandmother, whos seeking to retain custody for the duration of the criminal case. Mark Sievers mother is also seeking temporary custody. A hearing to hash out the dueling requests is set for May 11. Sievers next criminal court hearing is a case management conference scheduled for May 18. Rodgers case is also pending. Bonita Springs City Council meeting on April 20, 2016. (Patrick Riley/Staff) SHARE By Patrick Riley of the Naples Daily News Nearly a century has passed since the heyday of freight and passenger trains in Southwest Florida, but Bonita Springs on Wednesday took a step that could lead to a revival of the 37-mile long, north-south railroad corridor. City council unanimously moved forward with policy changes that support preservation of the railroad corridor and encourage the Florida Department of Transportation to purchase land along the tracks. Councilman Greg DeWitt was absent and did not vote. The comprehensive plan additions have to go through public hearings with the local planning agency and city council, said Assistant City Manager Arleen Hunter. Comprehensive plans guide a local government's decision-making related to the physical development of the municipality. If city council approves the changes, the new comprehensive plan language is sent to the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity for review. The amended plan, including possible comments from the state, then comes back before city council for adoption. Wednesday's vote followed a presentation by planning consultant Bill Spikowski. Lee County Metropolitan Planning Organization and the Southwest Regional Planning Council hired Spikowski to help local governments prepare the railroad amendments. In 2013, the Lee County MPO conducted a study to determine whether the railroad corridor could be used for public transportation, like commuter or light rail, and bike and pedestrian paths and trails. The study concluded that the corridor is "a unique asset" that would be "nearly impossible to recreate" today. It could be used for freight service, passenger transit, multiuse pathways or a combination of those. Spikowski said the corridor could become an alternative to highways and roads. "Up to now we've been able to build roads pretty much to keep up with things," he said. "We're losing our ability to keep building roads to keep up with growth." With other Lee municipalities, such as Estero and Fort Myers, also set to adopt the policy changes, the county as a collective is sending signals to FDOT that the railway corridor is a priority, Spikowski said. "Florida DOT would be willing to buy this," he said. "(But) if you're not interested, they're not interested. They don't want to fight you." Some residents Wednesday voiced their support for the plan. "Don't abandon the rail," said former Councilwoman Martha Simons. "That's an incredible asset for our community." In other action, councilors unanimously moved forward with an ordinance brought forward by a freshman councilman. Following concerns from residents unable to speak at city council zoning hearings if they did not speak at the corresponding zoning board hearing, Deputy Mayor Peter O'Flinn proposed to change the rule. O'Flinn said Bonita Springs was an "outlier" with respect to prohibiting citizens from participating in public comment if they didn't speak before the zoning board first. "I think we should allow our residents to speak," he said. The ordinance comes before the local planning agency May 12, with public hearings before council on May 4 and May 18. A U.S. Army soldier from Immokalee was killed in Afghanistan on Saturday, according to family and news reports from the country. Sgt. Linda L. Pierre, 28, died in a suicide bomb attack committed by an Afghan soldier she was helping train, family members reported on Monday when reached by phone. 'She was my backbone. She was everything to me and my family,' Pierre's sister, Cindy Watson, said. The Immokalee native's body has been flown to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware from Afghanistan, where Pierre's parents were to identify it on Monday afternoon, according to the Associated Press. Family members said Pierre will be buried with military honors at Lee Memorial Park Funeral Home & Cemetery in Fort Myers. The Department of Defense had not confirmed Pierre's death as of Monday afternoon, limiting official details about Pierre's position and the cause of her death. Her cousin, Will-Rose Etienne said Pierre, a human resource specialist who served in the 101st Infantry Sustainment Brigade, was one of five U.S. soldiers killed in a Saturday suicide bomb attack by an Afghan soldier. She said the soldier threw several grenades. Her account largely matches Saturday news reports from the Associated Press and The New York Times, which reported a suicide bomb attack that killed five NATO soldiers and four Afghan soldiers at Forward Operating Base Gamberi on the border of Laghman and Nangarhar Provinces in eastern Afghanistan. According to the Times, the bomber used an Afghan uniform to approach his target. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attacks. Pierre, a 2001 Immokalee High School graduate, served in the Army since 2004. She joined at age 21, after attending Edison State College in Lee County for two years. Those who knew Pierre described her as both kind and generous and a reliable and positive person. Etienne said she'll miss her cousin's smile. 'She was proud and loved what she did,' she said. 'She brought the best in everyone,' said Marjorie Claude, a friend of 15 years, said. Claude, of Lehigh Acres, said she is still having a hard time dealing with the news of her friend's death. 'It is gut-wrenching,' she said. A funeral date has not been set for Pierre. Connect with Tracy X. Miguel at www.naplesnews.com/staff/tracy_x_miguel/ Florida Gov. Rick Scott gestures as he speaks during a luncheon at the Republican National Committee Spring Meeting, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Hollywood, Fla. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee) SHARE Florida Gov. Rick Scott delivers his state of the state address during a joint session, Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2016, in Tallahassee, Fla. (AP Photo/Steve Cannon) By Arek Sarkissian of the Naples Daily News TALLAHASSEE Gov. Rick Scott drew on his own nightmare as a parent to explain Thursday why he supports a new law that will speed the testing sexual assault kits. Scott said one of his two daughters called him on a Sunday morning during her first year at college in Dallas to say someone had put a drug in her drink. "Fortunately for her, she was not raped," Scott said in an interview Thursday. "But, of course, she ended up in the hospital. That's scary for any parent." Scott told that story during a Thursday morning news conference in Tampa to highlight why Florida needs to test sexual assault kits faster. The bill he ceremoniously signed during the conference was passed by the Legislature and requires rape kits to be tested within 120 days of submission to a state crime lab. Scott and legislators last month approved an $82 billion state budget that includes $10.7 million to also update the labs. "That will give women some closure," Scott said. The state budget that will go into effect July 1 will increase the base salary for Florida Department of Law Enforcement crime lab analyst supervisors to $72,000. Current lab analysts also will receive raises of up to $12,000, according to the budget. The raises should slow an exodus of state lab analysts who undergo rigorous FDLE training and then leave after two years for higher-paying positions with the federal government or in the private sector. FLDE Commissioner Rick Swearingen said he spent this year's state legislative session showing lawmakers a study conducted by state Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater's office that showed his lab analysts were paid $10,000 less than the industry standard. "The big push here during the session was getting more money for those analysts," Swearingen said. "That's going to help us out with the rape kits coming into the agency over the long term." Swearingen said the raises he wanted for the lab analysts had also received the support of the Florida Cabinet, and they were included in Scott's budget. A report released by the FDLE in January revealed: 13,435 rape kits taken throughout the state were in a holding pattern; 41 percent of the untested kits cases never were turned over to FDLE for testing, because the person thought to be a victim did not want prosecution; an additional 31 percent did not move forward because prosecutors declined to file criminal charges. The FDLE report was compiled with the help of a survey that included input from 279 law enforcement agencies in the state. Contact Daily News reporter arek.sarkissian@naplesnews.com or 850-559-7620. By June Sochen Naples and Evanston, IL What does the American Dream mean today? Given the uncertain economic conditions, a contentious presidential campaign and the high cost of a college education, it is difficult to know how the traditional definition of the Dream can be applied for the younger generation. Indeed, all future generations may have to reinterpret the Dream. Answering the question looking backward is easier than looking forward. For the generation that fought to free the American colonies from Great Britain, it meant freedom of religion and speech and the liberty to pursue your own path. Contrary to the experience of most people across the Atlantic in the 1700s, Americans looked to a bright future. Children benefited from public school education, hardworking parents, and seemingly endless land to be purchased and cultivated. If things were not favorable for you in Boston, you could pack your belongings, hitch your wagon, and take your family to the West. The English, Scottish, Irish, Scandinavians, and the Germans booked passage for the New World. The popular press and penny novels heralded the "rags to riches" stories of ordinary Americans. This country could fulfill both the ideals and the material aspirations of all newcomers, or so the rhetoric promised. For much of the 19th Century, upward mobility became a constant theme in all political pronouncements, sermons, and business proposals. If you worked hard, you could achieve the American Dream of more education than your parents, greater economic success than your parents, and a larger home than your parents. There were enough measurable examples of success to make most Americans believe that the American Dream was attainable for them. There was little government on any level to help or hinder individual accomplishment. Though the Civil War surely set back the hopes and plans of a generation, the post-war generation looked forward to a brighter future. The 20th Century, though promising much of the same, had more obstacles in its path. Two world wars, the worst depression in American history, the Cold War, Korea and Vietnam all slowed down the belief, and the actuality, of inevitable progress toward everyone's fulfillment of the American Dream. Indeed, the seeming certainty that each generation would do better than the last one, has been dashed in recent years. The 21st Century started with a new threat: September 11, 2001 and the attack on the World Trade Center. International terrorism became a new concern. The dot.com bubble burst early in the century followed by the Great Recession of 2007; though the recession is formally over, it has left us five years later with high unemployment and great uncertainty about the future. The divide between the generations is dramatic. Workers over 50 who lost their jobs may never recover the earnings and positions they once had. Recent college graduates find their career hopes unrealized in the current job market. Wages have stagnated in the last 30 years with manufacturing and service industries going overseas. Only a small segment of the economy the banks and insurance companies, for example seem to be thriving. But the American Dream continues to live. This country remains a desirable destination for immigrants from all over the world. Just as new immigrants believe in the American Dream, most Americans, according to the polls, also appreciate the multiple benefits offered by this country and have no desire to live elsewhere. The current economic troubles are seen as challenges to overcome, not as insuperable obstacles. Home ownership remains a goal as does job security. Despite our troubles, the original meaning of the Dream, the ideological portion, remains vibrant while the material promises are harder to obtain. The freedoms enjoyed in this country cannot be taken for granted as there are still many places on the globe where repression describes daily life for many people. Though surely the material aspect of the Dream continues to be a goal a home (that is not "under water''), a yearly vacation, and a job that pays all the bills preserving the ideals of the American Dream is more important than ever before. Protecting the rights of all, including minorities, and respecting the environment creates the firm foundation for the enactment of all aspects of the American Dream. Everyone should look into the eager eyes of newcomers who remain believers in America and draw inspiration from the vision. SHARE Richard LeBer President and CEO Harry Chapin Food Bank of Southwest Florida By Richard Leber, President and CEO, Harry Chapin Food Bank of Southwest Florida Guest commentary I moved to Southwest Florida in February to lead the Harry Chapin Food Bank. This is a wonderful community: energetic, prosperous, civic-minded and friendly. We are blessed with an incredible climate, fantastic scenery and abundant wildlife. In many ways, it feels like paradise. I'm excited to be here, and excited about the future of my new home. Remarkable as this community is, there's more we can do. With all the success of our community, it's easy to forget that its blessings are not equally enjoyed by all of our neighbors. As we're building our paradise, let's remember that we need people of every background, skill and calling to build a community that is sustainable, which retains its unique air of ease and grace, and which we can be proud to call our home. As Southwest Florida grows and prospers, that means that we need to keep working on making it an affordable and livable place not only for the wealthiest of us, but for all the people who live here and make this paradise work. This is why hunger matters so much to me, and why I believe it should matter to us all. Hunger is widespread here: More than 40,000 Collier County residents do not always know where their next meal is coming from. Often, they do without. The reasons are primarily economic: It's expensive to live here, and many have limited incomes. They are hungry because they struggle to balance their budget; they often trade off paying for food instead of medical expenses, transportation or rent. Solving hunger will take all of us working together. That's why I am so excited that the Harry Chapin Food Bank is part of the Satisfy the Hunger program, sponsored by the Naples Daily News, the Community Foundation of Collier County, the United Way of Collier County and the Richard M. Schulze Foundation. It's a great example of what we can do together to make our community prosper for every one of its residents. Hunger is a silent epidemic. Nobody likes to admit they can't feed their family. Last year, Harry Chapin Food Bank distributed enough food for 2.6 million meals in Collier County through more than 25 local agencies such as the Salvation Army, Grace Place for Children and Families, and St. Matthew's House. Those agencies fed people of all kinds: more than 60 percent of students in our area are on free and reduced lunch, and 15 percent of the people we serve are seniors. Some are below the poverty line, but many are not they are working hard, but struggling to make ends meet in our increasingly expensive community. I have been pursuing a calling to feed people for more than 15 years now, beginning at the Atlanta Community Food Bank, and it has transformed my life. We all know from personal experience how much the personal bonds of friendship and family are forged through feeding one another and eating together. This has been true for me. I believe that it is equally true of communities. Food transforms bodies. It transforms the spirit, and it can transform communities. The converse is also true. Where people are not fed, communities suffer. Hunger breeds stress and conflict. Hungry children lack the energy and focus to learn. Hungry adults find it hard to be productive members of society. Hungry seniors struggle to pass on their wisdom to the young. Hunger divides us and undermines our efforts to build a stronger community together. We can win this struggle if we work together. I have seen many examples of it. I have seen how the food we provide to St. Matthew's House helps its staff transform lives by feeding people, loving them and helping them build a new life. I have seen the smile on the face of an elderly woman at one of our mobile pantry distributions: She arrived slowly, painfully shuffling from her car, and was overwhelmed as our volunteers helped her return with bags overflowing with food. When we help our neighbors, we lift them up, so they can overcome their challenges and become stronger members of a stronger community. My wish is that we continue to come together to realize the potential of this paradise, by harnessing the transformation that only food can bring. Satisfy the Hunger The Daily News is hosting several Satisfy the Hunger events at its headquarters, 1100 Immokalee Road, North Naples, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. for the following: Friday: Community Baby Shower April 29: Snacks for Kids May 6: Spring Cleaning May 13: Take Care of Yourself May 20: Wake Up Call June 3: School's Out for Summer Another event is scheduled at participating Publix stores from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. May 7. More information: www.naplesnews.com/satisfy It was a big night for Hodges University as the Fisher School of Technology dean and a professor were both honored for their work in technology at the Southwest Florida Regional Technology Partnership (SWFRTP) Awards Dinner in Fort Myers on April 13. Dr. Al Ball, dean of the Fisher School of Technology, won the Partnership Award, and Professor Tracey Lanham, program chair of the computer information technology department, received the Woman in Technology Award. The Woman in Technology Award recognizes, through professional expertise and leadership, the success and contributions of a woman in the technology industry of Southwest Florida. It was quite an honor to win this award from the Southwest Florida Regional Technology Partnership. My intrinsic passion is to encourage more girls and women to take part in technology pathways as they pursue their education and careers, said Lanham. It is so important that we provide the opportunities for them to get engaged and involved from an early point in their educational curriculum. The fact that I was awarded for following this passion and making a difference in our community really shows me that our community members are behind these initiatives and that they are ready to support a much higher level of diversity and inclusion in the technology sector. Recipient of the Partnership Award, which recognizes an individual who has truly forwarded the mission of the organization, Ball remarked, I have long admired and respected the work the partnership does in Southwest Florida, and I do consider it a privilege to be a part of it. I try to spread the word about the partnership as much as possible. Southwest Florida Regional Technology Partnership, Inc. is a nonprofit organization chartered in 2008. Comprised of technology companies and users, economic development groups and institutions of higher education, the SWFRTP Awards Gala is recognized as Southwest Floridas longest running, high profile Excellence in Technology event. Key players in 2022-23 Silly Season Can you hear it? Just listen. That is the sound of the NASCAR rumor mill starting up, and there are plenty of questions to answer for 2023. One of Cashel's most vibrant clubs is gearing up to celebrate ten years in existence. Cashel Toastmasters was first set up early in 2006 and next month will hold a celebration dinner to mark the special occassion. Planning is already well under way and tickets are printed and onsale for the event. It is hoped that those who were invovled at any time over the last ten years will join in the celebration to catch up with old friends and to mark the good times they had together, as the club sets its sights on the future. The first meeting to set up Cashel Toastmasters was held in Gleesons Pub on the evening of Jauary 19, 2006. 65 people were in attendance that night, proving there was definitely a demand for a local club! Since then membership has risen and fallen with the times, especially seeing a drop during the recession when many younger people left the area in seek of work. From it's foundation in 2006, the Cashel group has received great support from the other Toastmaster groups in the county - Clonmel, Thurles, Nenagh, Roscrea and Ballina. The members of these groups are also welcome to join in the anniversary celerations. Many of the founder members of the Cashel club are still invovled - Tom Russel, Nell Cooney, Pat Buckley, Fidelma Collins, Deirdre Maguire, Irene Gerety and Pat Foley. New members are always very welcome to come along. For the first two meetings you are considered a guest. There is never any pressure on somone to speak and, reassuringly for anyone consiering joining, everyone admits to being nervous when they first join, but accoring to Nell Cooney not only do members become more comfortable but they grow in confidence. Pat Buckely explained he first joined out of curiosity; Nell joined get more confidence in public speaking; and Tom said he was asked to join by a friend and found the club interesting so stayed. I was no good at public speaking when I joined but I got better, Tom told The Nationalist. Infact in his years as a member of Toastmasters Tom has progressed from being a complete novice to attainging the club's highest skill level of 'DTM' - Distinguished Toast Master. He said some people can hardly speak when they first join but you can see them grow in confidence in the first couple of months. The more you speak the more confidence you have - you don't find it as terrifying! Pat agreed. Nell reassured potential members that everyone is nervous at first. She also pointed out that the club has a lovely social side for members. Anyone can become a member. One of the Cashel members joined to be able to speak at his own wedding, and enjoyed it so much he stayed on afterwards and has become a very good speaker. There are Toastmasters Clubs all over the world. The organisation was first set up in California by Ralph Smedley in the 1920s. The club structure sees the Cashel club as part of an Area; Areas join together to make up the Division; Divisions come together to form a District. Ireland and the UK make up the 'local' District. Competitions run on the same lines, with winners progressing on to the larger section with each step of the competition. Divisional winners compete in America. Local people have done well in these competitions. Pat progressed to the Divisional final on several occassions. There is no obligation on members to take part in any competition. However they can work towards milestones of personal achievement through local workshops on speachcraft, gaining certificates, a pin and aiming for the hightest level of DTM. ALong with Tom another DTM holder locally is Pat Foley and Nell is working on hers. In the meantime Nell, who is Area Governor this year, is working hard on the tenth anniversary celebration. It takes place in the Brian Boru, Cashel, on May 27 at 7pm. Tickets are 25 and can be bought from Nell (contact 0876729851) or any member of Cashel Toastmasters. A special welcome is extended to former members to come along on the night. A well-known GAA referee is swopping his whistle for a bicycle to take part in the nationwide Cycle Against Suicide. Keith Delahunty from Ballinboher, Powerstown, Clonmel is one of the local people taking part in the 1,400 kilometres cycle, which begins in Dublin on this Sunday, April 24 and continues until May 7. There will be an overnight stop in Tipperary town on Tuesday May 3 before a stop for lunch in Clonmel on the following day, Wednesday, with a shorter break also planned for Cahir earlier that day. "I did two days of the cycle last year and after the great atmosphere that everyone experienced, and the superb welcome we received in Clonmel, I decided to do the full route this time", says Keith. He will be joined by his sister Sabina and his daughter Danni for the Tipperary to Waterford leg of the cycle. Keith is raising funds for Cycle Against Suicide and C-SAW, the Community Suicide Awareness workers in South Tipperary whose welcoming and spacious headquarters are based at 24 William Street in Clonmel. "Both organisations are doing great work to highlight the issue of mental health awareness", he says. "Nobody knows what's going on inside a person's head and something can just click. Men especially don't talk about their problems or worries but it's important for everyone to keep communicating with each other". Now entering its fourth year, Cycle Against Suicide is an initiative started by Irish entrepreneur Jim Breen, as a result of his appearance on RTEs The Secret Millionaire programme. The main objective of the cycle is to raise awareness of the considerable help and supports that are available for anyone battling depression, self-harm, at risk of suicide or those bereaved by suicide. Over 800 people die by suicide on the island of Ireland each year. That's 800 families and communities devastated; 800 lives cut short. Cycle Against Suicide aims to change this by beginning a conversation about mental health and getting the message that its okay not to feel okay and its absolutely okay to ask for help into schools, businesses and communities throughout the country. Keith Delahunty has been greatly encouraged by the support he has so far received for his participation in the cycle, which will travel around 100 kilometres (or 60 miles) each day. Anyone who wishes to sponsor Keith may do so by contacting him on 087-6876926 or on the Facebook pages of Danni Delahunty or Sabina Caffrey. Keith and all the other cyclists are wished all the very best on the Cycle Against Suicide. C-SAW, meanwhile, may be contacted at 052-6172477. DAVID KELLY retraces the early struggles of the Civic Guard and ponders what the future may hold for An Garda Siochana, as the force gets ready to celebrate 90 years this spring. DAVID KELLY retraces the early struggles of the Civic Guard and ponders what the future may hold for An Garda Siochana, as the force gets ready to celebrate 90 years this spring. THE BLACK AND TANS revved up the lights on the Crossley Tender as a firing squad forced the teen against the gable wall and prepared to take aim. 22-year-old Charlie McGroarty had been out on manoeuvres with the local Irish Volunteer movement in Clonmany that night. His mother pleaded for mercy on the family doorstep, her cries echoing round the townland of Cooley, Moville, heartland of the Inishowen peninsula. The commanding officer relented as the thugs raided the house of all foodstuffs - a small price to pay for the safety of her eldest son. Charlie joined the Civic Guard a year later in 1922, but his problems didnt end there, recalls his son John, himself a former Garda Detective Chief Superintendent and operational garda for four decades. Blue blood passed from father to son and also encapsulated Johns brother, Neil, albeit in different eras. When he went away to join the Civic Guard in 1922, his old unit sent word to his home that he should not be seen around here again. They had seen him as abandoning the principles that they thought had bound them together in the region, said John. After his initial training, Charlie was deliberately stationed down south to break the connection with his former colleagues in Donegal and to keep him out of harms way. It was a tough and trying period for him. For seven years he didnt go home. He went home in the autumn of 1929, and before going back, he wrote in the summer of that year to his mother. He was feeling homesick and he asked would she make a few enquiries. She went to the parish priest and he said, I dont know, you better leave it with me. He came back to her a few days later and said there wouldnt be a hand raised against him. He went home and he told me he helped bring in the harvest in the autumn of that year. John notes that this is one of the reasons why you will find names like McDaid, McGinley, and McGroarty, which are essentially northern names, scattered through Munster and various places. Despite his name, John is a proud Tipperary man from the town of Clonmel. (The ultimate sacrifice) Sergeant Paul Maher of the Garda Museum, Dublin Castle, and Sergeant John Reynolds, who set up the Garda College Museum in 2002, paint a picture of turbulent times in the formative years of the force. Those early decades were ones in which ambushes, violent armed robberies, attacks on garda stations and members themselves were commonplace. We were founded during a civil war, coming out of a very violent guerrilla war. I think throughout the past, particularly the 70s and 80s when we had terrorism, we have proved to be adaptable and our approval rating is still very high. We are there to serve the public and thats the bottom line, added Sgt Reynolds. People have to remember that there was a lack of trust towards the new force. Removing the political barrier and keeping the force unarmed to the present day worked in its favour, remarks archivist Paul Maher. Only 166 RIC men came into An Garda Siochana. It was mostly made up of members of the Volunteers or close to some significant player during the revolution. The other RIC men got their Dear John letters, added Mr Maher. Commissioner of the Civic Guard Michael Staines said in September 1922: The Garda Siochana will succeed not by force of arms or numbers, but on their moral authority as servants of the people. However, this was undermined as members of An Garda Siochana increasingly found themselves in the firing line. Attacks and ambushes increased throughout the decades with the 1920s and 1940s being particularly notorious. The I.R.A. robbed banks in order to fund their campaign in Northern Ireland, and organised crime increased. Nowhere is this is more evident than on the Garda Role of Honour, which has the names of 85 members who lost their lives in the line of duty or active service. Two names were added in 2011. People sometimes forget those who were killed while off duty. 25 year-old Wicklow native Ciaran Jones died tragically in October last year while helping motorists at a flooded bridge. Family tradition John McGroarty joined An Garda Siochana at the age of 21. It was 1960. I followed in his (my fathers) footsteps in 1960 and I trained in the old depot in the Phoenix Park. I was in one of the last batches of garda recruits to do so. When I joined the guards I decided it was a good career opportunity. There was talk at the time that the force was going to get bigger and better, and that we would be doing new things in the future as Ireland began to expand. Charlie passed away two years later. Cathy went on to survive more years as a widow than she had known in married life. John speaks movingly of a comment made to him at the time of his mothers death by the then Assistant Commissioner, Pat Byrne. Assistant Commissioner Byrne had stepped aside to sympathise with me on the death of my mother, and when I said that the local stations garda motorcyclist had drawn glowing comments from our family, having led the funeral procession from the Mater Hospital and helped us to cope with the traffic along North Circular Road in their sadness and we were grateful for that. Mr Byrne quickly responded: Wasnt that a small cost in tribute to a woman who had through her husband and two sons given 100 years of service to the State via An Garda Siochana? Those wonderful words sustained me for many a day, adds John. John made himself a solemn promise from day one. He set about making his choice a lifelong career and worked diligently to maintain law and order. He worked tirelessly throughout the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, eventually retiring in 1999. Mr McGroarty believes his first seven years at Store Street set him up for life in blue. I served in Store Street, the busiest station in Ireland, and certainly if you survive seven years as an active and committed policeman there, there is not a lot that would trouble you. I spent five years in Special Branch and towards the end of that time drugs were coming on the scene. I began to study the situation and became friendly with Denis Mullins, who dealt with the first and early drug cases. Drugs were a relatively new phenomenon in Ireland, they were seen as alien. Firstly, Special Branch was tasked with drug crime because drugs were believed to be subversive and could potentially provide a threat to the Irish state. This soon fell under the scope of the Drugs Squad. John has worked in various capacities with Europol and Interpol (international police organisations). He also trained with the FBI and Scotland Yard. So what does he see as the biggest challenge or threat to An Garda Siochana? Organised crime poses a massive threat and its going to take a tremendous effort to keep it in check. There is no way of eradicating drugs and organised crime, the task of the police force is to keep it in check, thats about as much as we can hope for. Mr McGroarty pinpoints the Larry Dunne investigation as one of his personal highlights. Heavy drugs were introduced to Ireland and Dublin in the autumn of 1979 by the Dunne family from Rialto. The story of the time in the media and the public was that these guys couldnt be caught. Bit by bit we concentrated on them, put surveillance in place and gathered intelligence. At one time we had all the brothers in jail. One guy went to England and he was a model citizen, reared his family there. Despite the jury being rigged in the first Dunne trial, the State Solicitor managed to get a retrial. Larry Dunne was sentenced to 14 years. He served 11. The Tipperary native also states that the force would stand up to any police unit in Europe. I subscribe to the idea in life that we learn more from our failures than from our successes. An Garda Siochana is well regarded in Europe. John and his Longford wife, Maura, have four children of their own. They are all grown up now. Three of them are abroad, two in England and one in Australia. None followed their fathers footsteps into the force. However, Johns niece, Aine McGroarty, is stationed in Howth - thus ensuring the McGroarty family name is synonymous with Irish policing well into the 21st century. He gets a great kick out of mentioning Cathal. Hes married to an Aussie in Melbourne and works for NAB (National Australia Bank). John thinks thats a brilliant name for a bank, but perhaps CAB is better? John chuckles. Time will tell whether the McGroarty family tree continues to have its roots steeped in blue. From Donegal to Tipperary and Dublin, its survived the good, the bad and the ugly. There must be something in the soil round those parts. Had he not joined An Garda Siochana, John feels that he would have left Irish shores for North America, Australia, or even New Zealand. Instead, history will show that the McGroartys of Donegal continue to pass on the baton and buckle up the belt, all in the name of the thin Blue Line. Sergeant Paul Maher is the outgoing Garda Museum archivist at Dublin Castle. He is organising a series of lectures at the Garda Museum to mark the 90th anniversary. There will also be a lecture by Senan Molony in May, entitled Phoenix Park Murders and a possible lecture by The Hon. Mr. Justice Adrian Hardiman on Crime and Justice in Joycean Dublin (TBC). Sergeant John Reynolds is a former PULSE instructor and member of the Continuous Professional Development (CPD) department at the Garda College, Templemore. He set up the Garda College Museum in 2002 to promote the history of the barracks and policing in Ireland. John is undertaking a PhD at the University of Limerick on the IRA campaign against the Royal Irish Constabulary in Tipperary, 1919-1922. A brief outline of his study states: Between 1919 and 1922, 493 members of the RIC were killed, and thousands more injured. When the conflict ended the RIC was disbanded and thousands of former policemen were forced to emigrate. Nationalist historiography in Ireland has been overwhelmingly negative about the RIC, and this study sets out to look beyond this stereotype and examine and analyse the role of the RIC in county Tipperary from 1916-23. Forty five policemen died in the county, and as the second most violent county in Ireland during the war, Tipperary saw atrocities committed by both sides, with propaganda being skilfully used by both sides. The reality of the conflict was often far from the heroic struggle for self-determination subsequently portrayed. John McGroarty is a former Garda Detective Superintendent and currently works for Risk Management International (RMI) as a Special Services Manager. He also helped to establish WhistleBlower Confidential. The Garda Roll of Honour is available at: http://www.garda.ie/honour/default.aspx (Moments of significance) The Garda College also has a number of significant anniversaries coming up in the next few years. 2013 will mark the 200th anniversary of the opening of the barracks, which is significant because it means it is a lot older than Garda HQ and other buildings in the country, said Sgt Reynolds. 2014 will mark 100 years since the German prisoners were interned in Richmond Barracks, Templemore. In 1914, the barracks was used to keep German prisoners of war, both civilian and people who had been detained when war broke out, but also those who had been living here and military prisoners. The military prisoners got moved out in 1915 because the republicans were desperately hoping that the German government would invade Ireland. The republicans came up with a plan to break the prisoners out of here, arm them and they might side with them in the event of a rebellion. Once word came out about that, they got moved almost overnight to England, added Mr Reynolds. John is hoping that some relatives of those that were here will attend the anniversary. Ive actually managed to contact some of the relatives. We are hoping that they might come over. It also marks 100 years since World War 1 began. This barracks was hugely important because when the Germans left, it was a training barracks for the Munster and Leinsters. Thousands of men trained here and went to the trenches. Some never made it back. It will culminate with the centennial anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. Reinforcements were sent from Templemore to Dublin. Then we have the War of Independence and the Irish Civil War. You could really say we are looking at ten years of anniversaries. The NATO Charity Bazaar ASBL is a non-profit organisation made up of members from 41 nations. It raises money each year for Belgian and international charities through the annual NATO Charity Bazaar, sponsorships, bake sales and other events. In 2015, it donated over EUR 212,000 to 29 charities. Applications from charities for project support can be made until 1 May 2016. A maximum of EUR 10,000 can be donated to each charity, depending on the needs of the project. If you are associated with an ASBL or VZW in Belgium, or the non-profit equivalent from another NATO or partner nation, please visit www.natocharitybazaar.org to see if you are eligible to receive funding. Speaking at the press point following the NATO-Russia Council today (20 April), NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg underlined that political dialogue among nations that share the same Euro-Atlantic area is both necessary and useful, especially in times of tension as we experience now. However, this does not mean that we are back to business as usual. During the meeting of the NATO-Russia Council, NATO Allies made clear that they stand firm in their support for Ukraines sovereignty and territorial integrity. Allies do not recognize Russias illegal annexation of Crimea. We stressed that the increase in ceasefire violations in eastern Ukraine in recent days is deeply disturbing. As are the recent incident targeting OSCE monitors, Mr. Stoltenberg said. The NATO Secretary General added that All 29 members of the NATO- Russia Council agreed today on the need for a full and rapid implementation of the Minsk agreements. Transparency and risk reduction was also a topic of discussion in the NATO-Russia Council. NATO Allies expressed concern about last weeks incidents in the Baltic region involving Russian military aircraft. It is important to consider what steps we can all take to increase transparency and predictability. In the OSCE, all NATO Allies and Russia have agreed on rules governing military activities in Europe, including the observation and notification of exercises. Those rules must be respected, the NATO Secretary General said. Mr. Stoltenberg said that a number of NATO nations have tabled concrete proposals on how to modernise the Vienna Document on military transparency. It is important that everyone participates constructively in that work. More military transparency can contribute to more security in Europe. This is in both NATOs and Russias interest, he added. The third item on the NATO-Russia Council agenda was Afghanistan. Mr. Stoltenberg highlighted that NATO remains committed to supporting the Afghan security forces. All nations should do their part to support Afghanistan in reaching its goal of stability and security, he said. The NATO Secretary General underlined that NATO and Russia have profound and persistent disagreements and todays meeting did not change that. He also stressed that NATO Allies remain firm that there can be no return to practical cooperation until Russia returns to the respect of international law. But we will keep channels of communication open. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg visited FGS BONN, the German flagship of Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 (SNMG2), on Thursday (21 April) as the ship continues to conduct reconnaissance, monitoring and surveillance of illegal crossings in the Aegean Sea. The Secretary General thanked the crew for their important work and stressed that NATOs deployment in the Aegean is making a difference in the international efforts to deal with the greatest refugee and migrant crisis facing Europe since World War Two. Mr. Stoltenberg underscored that NATO ships were deployed to the Aegean within hours, following a joint request by Greece, Turkey and Germany. He noted that they are providing critical information on a daily basis to help Turkey, Greece and the EUs border agency, Frontex, in cutting the lines of human trafficking and illegal migration in the Aegean. The Secretary General outlined areas where NATO has made important progress since its Aegean deployment began in February. He highlighted that the information collected by NATO ships have enabled Greece, Turkey and Frontex to take more effective action to break the business model of human traffickers. He added that NATO is providing an additional platform for cooperation between Greece, Turkey and the European Union to deal with the refugee and migrant crisis. During the visit, the Secretary General also met with Rear Admiral Jorg Klein, Commander, SNMG2 to discuss BONNs current activities. He spoke with SNMG2 staff and Greek and Turkish liaison officers on board the BONN. He also observed the maneuvers of three frigates, TCG GOKOVA, HS SPETSAI and HNLMS VAN AMSTEL, currently operating in the same area as BONN. NATO and partner air forces completed two days of exercises in the Baltic region on Wednesday (20 April 2016), practising emergency responses and sharpening their cooperation. Hosted at Amari Air Base in Estonia, Exercise Ramstein Alloy brought together seven Allies Estonia, Lithuania, Belgium, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States with long-standing NATO partners Finland and Sweden. In one scenario, a Lithuanian transport aircraft simulated losing contact with air traffic control while in international airspace over the Baltic Sea. Two Finnish F-18 jets scrambled to intercept the plane, later handing it over to two Belgian F-16s, which escorted the aircraft safely back to Estonia. Other practice scenarios included search and rescue operations, air-to-air training and refuelling, and diversions to Baltic airfields. NATOs Baltic Air Policing assets were actively involved: in addition to the Belgian F-16 jets currently based at Amari, Spanish Eurofighters flew in from Siauliai, Lithuania to participate. A NATO E-3A Early Warning and Control aircraft also flew in from Geilenkirchen, Germany, to support the exercises media event. The training was overseen by the Control and Reporting Post at Amari Air Base, NATOs Combined Air Operations Centre in Uedem, Germany, and by an airborne United Kingdom E-3D Early Warning and Control aircraft. NATOs air policing responds to military and civilian aircraft that approach Alliance borders without prior notification, as well as aircraft not following international flight regulations. This is designed to minimise risks, and ensure the safety and integrity of Allies airspace. Since 2004, when Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined NATO, Allies have patrolled the skies over the three nations on a 24/7 basis. Brigadier General Roberto di Marco, Deputy Commander of NATOs Deployable Air Command and Control Centre, welcomed the successful conduct of the exercise. Ramstein Alloy has been another big opportunity to see our Allies and partners cooperate, and to reinforce our visibility here in the Baltic States, he said. 'You almost feel forgotten about' 'Huge waiting list' for psychiatric services (NaturalNews) There is such a dramatic increase in the prescribing of antidepressants for children in the West, that the World Health Organization (WHO) is taking a closer look and is becoming concerned.As reported by the BBC, the increases are sizable: 60 percent in Denmark; 49 percent in Germany; 26 percent in the United States; and 17 percent in the Netherlands, between 2005 and 2012, a new study shows.After a warning was issued about the drugs in 2004, based on concerns that some of them were leading to suicidal behavior, usage fell. But as new research indicates, the numbers are back up, in fact.WHO director of mental health, Dr. Shekhar Saxena, said that the new study, published in the, raised some serious questions."Anti-depressant use amongst young people is and has been a matter of concern because of two reasons," he told the BBC."One, are more people being prescribed anti-depressants without sufficient reason? And second, can anti-depressants do any major harm ?"In addition to those concerns, WHO officials are also anxious about the rising prevalence of off-label prescriptions , where kids are given drugs that are not licensed or approved for use by anyone under 18."These are medicines which have not been tried amongst young people, have no justification for being used widely in young people," Saxena said. "There are legal regulations and professional guidelines and off-label use of drugs many times crosses both of them. That's something the World Health Organization is very concerned about."The traditional medical community recognizes antidepressants as being one treatment for depression in children, but guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) state that they should not be given initially for symptoms of mild depression (though too often they are). And even in more serious cases, antidepressants are only to be used with additional psychological therapies.Some adults who were given antidepressants as children say that they had a negative overall effect on them. One example is George Watkins, 20. The BBC reported that he was prescribed antidepressants at age 15, and no other forms of treatment were made available to him."My doctor put me on the anti-depressants really after a five-minute consultation," he said. "I wasn't offered counselling or anything like that, it was straight in."Five years later, he is still taking antidepressants , despite concerns about how they are impacting him."I was terrified; I still am terrified of medication, because of how bad it has made me feel," he said. "You almost feel forgotten about."The English government's mental health champion, Natasha Devon, told the news service that there is a genuine problem with providing access for young people to "talking therapies.""The problem is, of course, is that there is a huge waiting list," she said. (Britain has socialized medicine via its National Health Service, or NHS.) "It's eight weeks if you're lucky, it's far more likely to run into months, so during that interim period all you have are these anti-depressants."For the record, wait times in Canada, another government-run, single-payer system, are also substantial Part of Devon's work is to visit schools in the country. She says that she's become aware of the rising number of kids who have been prescribed antidepressants. She also says that she is concerned that "they can only ever treat the symptoms, they don't get to the root cause of the issue."The BBC noted further that Prof. Mark Baker, director of clinical practice at NICE, a health watchdog group, understands that assessing child and adolescent mental health services is increasingly challenging."This may have led to more severe cases of depression in young people being managed in primary care for longer," he said. Hormone-disrupting chemical damages immune system? Why you should avoid all plastic (NaturalNews) Bisphenol-A (BPA) the hormone-disrupting chemical most notorious for its presence in plastic water bottles and food cans may also cause autoimmune diseases such as Type 1 diabetes , warns Nathan Ravi, a physician and former chemical engineer.Studies have found BPA in the bodies of 90 percent of people tested . The chemical is known to mimic the effects of estrogen, at least one male sex hormone, and thyroid hormones, thereby disrupting nearly every bodily system. It has been linked with reproductive problems, developmental problems, brain and behavioral damage, and cancer.And alarmingly, many of the products now marketed as "BPA free," contain chemicals that are just as bad, or even more dangerous.The FDA continues to uphold the safety of BPA.In the 1970s, before scientists became aware of the health risks of BPA, Ravi was a chemical engineer working for a biotech company in Virginia. He worked regularly with chemicals in the bisphenol family, including BPA, researching consumer and industrial uses for them. When he was 28 years old he developed Type 1 diabetes, though he had previously been in excellent health.Type 1 diabetes normally strikes children, typically due to defects present at birth. It is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the pancreas, the organ in the body that produces insulin.In 1988, Ravi switched careers, becoming a doctor. His career change was largely driven by the mystery of his adult-onset Type 1 diabetes . He learned that two of his former coworkers from the biotech factory had also developed Type 1 diabetes later in life. Like him, they had worked with many endocrine-disruption chemicals, including bisphenols. There was no other seeming similarity between their three cases.When news started to emerge about the health risks of BPA, Ravi felt certain that the chemical was behind his and his coworkers' conditions.Ravi now gives public talks warning about the dangers of BPA and advising people on how to limit their exposure. He has given talks as far afield as India and the United Arab Emirates.The main behavior change Ravi encourages is the avoidance of all flexible plastics, in particular for food and drink consumption. In particular, food should never be heated up or microwaved in plastic, because this can accelerate the leaching of BPA into the food."Use glass or ceramic whenever possible," he said. "Every flexible plastic has an endocrine disruptor."Ravi warns that the effects of small exposures add up over time."I'm trying to come up with a movement to get plastic out of day-to-day activities," he said.Although Canada and the European Union have banned the use of BPA in baby bottles, and the U.S. industry has voluntarily ended such uses, the chemical is still found in a wide variety of consumer and industrial products, including food and beverage cans, fragrances and cosmetics.And while Ravi says he finds the prevalence of "BPA free" products encouraging, many such products continue to be made with other bisphenols. In fact, as many as 12 different bisphenol chemicals are still used in flexible consumer plastics.At least one of these chemicals bisphenol S (BPS), the most common BPA substitute used in "BPA-free" products has been shown to be just as dangerous as BPA, if not more so. Like BPA, it has been linked with endocrine disruption, hyperactivity and cardiac arrhythmia."BPS, termed the safe alternative to BPA, may be equally as harmful to developing brains," said Deborah Kurrasch of the University of Calgary. Kurrasch was lead researcher on a study into the dangers of BPS, presented at the joint meeting of the International Society of Endocrinology and the Endocrine Society in 2014."Society must place increased pressure on decision makers to remove all bisphenol compounds from manufacturing processes." What are the risks to wild tigers? But numbers of wild tigers are increasing? (NaturalNews) Great news for the wild tiger after almost 100 years of constant decline, global populations of this magnificent creature are thought to be on the rise, as reported by. According to the most recent data by the World Wildlife Fund, there are approximately 3,890 tigers in the wild today compared with an estimated 3,200 in 2010.Populations of wild tigers are estimated using national surveys which have recently been improved this improvement in methods is thought to be part of the reason why the estimated minimum number has increased. Rising populations in India, Russia, Nepal and Bhutan are thought to also be due to enhanced protection of the amazing species , according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).Quick facts about wild tigers, as stated by the WWF: They are the largest of all Asian big cats They depend on sight and sound more than smell A tiger can eat up to 88 pounds of meat at one time Each tiger can give birth to two or three cubs every two years Males can weigh up to 660 poundsAt the start of the 20th century, there were more than 100,000 tigers in the world, according to a report by Caroline Fraser for. Today there are fewer than 4,000.Tigers face a wide variety of threats, some of which are due to growing human populations which have caused habitat loss and greater exposure to people, as tigers are forced to compete for space. Habitat loss and the increasing amount of fragmentation of the tiger's ideal environment mean that the tiger has to travel farther for food and safety and that there is an increasing number of conflicts with people, including farmers and their livestock.According to, tigers are also killed by poachers who will sell their body parts, including skin, on the black market to be used as decoration, rugs or in traditional Chinese medicine. Poaching will continue to be a threat for tigers as long as the demand for tiger products exists in China.Poaching is a problem for a range of species all over the world and has been declared a "national disaster" in Kenya, according to. An increase in wealth throughout Asia continues to contribute to the illegal poaching of animals , such as the killing of rhinos for their valuable horns.The findings are being praisethat have wild populations of tigers in 2010 to double their numbers worldwide by 2022. The increase has been driven by these political commitments and efforts by relevant countries the latest report shows that tiger populations are indeed heading in the right direction, as a result of better protection.It seems that tiger populations are able to rebound fairly promptly if left alone, which has proven to be the case in Nepal, where there numbers have increased by 63% over the last five years, as reported byAccording to Ginette Hemley, senior vice president of wildlife conservation at WWF, "This is a pivotal step in the recovery of one of the world's most endangered and iconic species. Together with governments, local communities, philanthropists, and other NGOs, we've begun to reverse the trend in the century-long decline of tigers. But much more work and investment is needed if we are to reach our goal of doubling wild tiger numbers by 2022."The WWF adds however that every "part of the tigerfrom whisker to tailis traded in illegal wildlife markets, feeding a multi-billion dollar criminal network," and this means that they are still today a prime target for poachers. Hormone replacement therapy at heart of rise? Earlier research links IVF to other cancers (NaturalNews) New evidence appears to substantiate previous studies that those undergoing In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) likely have a higher chance of developing some cancers.According to research published in the journal Breast Cancer Research , a study involving 43,313 women found that those who underwent controlled ovarian stimulation, which is a key component of IVF treatments, are more likely to develop dense breast tissue. Dense tissue is known to be one of the strongest risk factors associated with breast cancer development; women with highly dense breasts are up to six times more likely to develop cancer, the UK'sreported.As further reported by"The results from our study indicate that infertile women, especially those who undergo COS, might represent a group with an increased breast cancer risk," said Frida Lundberg, lead author of the study. "While we believe it is important to continue monitoring these women , the observed difference in breast tissue volume is relatively small and has only been linked to a modest increase in breast cancer risk in previous studies."Researchers note that breast tissue is comprised of two types: dense, fibroglandular and non-dense, fatty tissue. Women who have extremely dense breasts are between four and six times more likely to develop breast cancer than women with less-dense breast tissue, prior studies have shown.In the latest IVF study, women who have a history of infertility were found to have higher absolute dense volume that is, denser fibroglandular tissue than non-fertile women . Infertile women who have undergone COS had higher absolute dense volume than those who had not undergone any hormone treatment.Hormone replacement therapy like COS boosts progesterone and estrogen levels and is also believed to increase the risk of developing breast cancer . But this is the first population-based study to examine the effect of infertility and hormone stimulation on mammographic density that could be a useful marker regarding the effects of hormonal fertility treatment on breast cancer risk, especially on females below the age breast cancers are usually diagnosed around 50 years and older.The women in the study were all aged between 40 and 69. All had mammograms as part of the university's study, between 2010 and 2013. In addition, all of the women responded to a questionnaire that included inquiries about their age, height, whether or not they smoked and drank alcohol (and if so, how much), any history of infertility, and family history of breast cancer. Of the 8,963 women who reported fertility problems, 1,576 had undergone COS, while 1,429 had been given hormonal stimulation without COS, and 5,948 had received no fertility treatment at all.Asreported further:Thenoted that previous research conducted by University College London, and presented to a major fertility conference in the fall, suggested that IVF could also increase the risk of ovarian cancer by about one-third."These findings are plausible but, nonetheless it would be irresponsible in the extreme to frighten women who have been subfertile and had treatment to think that they would be at higher risk of breast cancer," said Prof. Alastair Sutcliffe of UCL, who led that study, adding that such research is still at an early stage. Putting the figures in context 24.5 times more likely to die from a doc than a gun (NaturalNews) There is a little-known fact about one of the top treatments for cancer, and it is this: It is so deadly that not even warfare has managed to top its body count.Since 2000, according to the tracking site Pharma Death Clock , more than 16.3 million people have died from chemotherapy more than wars, terrorism and suicide, combined."While drug companies profit billions, people are dying by the millions," the site notes.In addition to chemotherapy, there are scores of other deaths that were all caused by modern medicine, like hospital errors (as of this writing 7,176,929), medical error (1,598,497), hospital infections (1,223,340) and surgery-related death (521,958), among others.What's more, aseditor Mike Adams, author of Food Forensics , science lab director of CWCLabs.com , editor of NaturalNews.com and creator of Medicine.news noted in 2013, doctors in the U.S. are far more likely to cause death and dismemberment than firearms."Everyone agrees the Sandy Hook shooting was a tragedy. Lots of people subsequently exploited the deaths of those children to push a political agenda of disarming Americans by claiming 'guns kill people,'" he wrote "But compared to what? Swimming pools kill people. Horseback riding kills people. And yes, even childbirth kills people. (Does that mean we should criminalize getting pregnant?)"He went on to note that putting firearms deaths into proper context was important because doing so is necessary to refute the sort of "doomsday scenarios" put forth by anti-gun proponents . For example, he noted, doctors kill 2,450 percent more Americans each year than do firearms (and especially guns that are used by someone against someone else, instead of in suicides, the latter occurring far more often)."Doctors, comparatively, kill 783,936 people each year, which is 64 times higher than 12,174. Doctors shoot you not with bullets, but with vaccines, chemotherapy and pharmaceuticals... all of which turn out to be FAR more deadly than guns," Adams noted.In a July 2014 press release, current Democratic presidential contender Sen. Bernie Sanders said that medical errors were the"Medical harm is a major cause of suffering, disability, and death as well as a huge financial cost to our nation," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said at the outset of a hearing by the Senate Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging, a panel he chaired at the time. "This is a problem that has not received anywhere near the attention that it deserves and today I hope that we can focus a spotlight on this matter of such grave consequence."He said that only heart disease and, yes, cancer, killed more people According to, cancer in particular is big business. And as for chemotherapy itself, the treatment rarely works and instead actually hastens death, turning a patient's last days into a living nightmare of pain, loss of cognitive function and discomfort not to mention the lasting mental effects such deterioration has on family members.In fact, chemotherapy "lays waste to your immune system, which is your first line of defense against cancer,"Adams noted that you are 24.5 more likely to be killed by your doctor than by a firearm, and yet there is "absolutely no call in the media for 'doctor control.'"Also, he pointed out, "there's no discussion of the fact that psychiatric drugsviolent shootings as we've seen over and over again across America." Giving chemo and false hope to end-of-life patients and their families In late December ... we wanted to quit chemo. Dr. Fata ushered us right away into his private office. ... He told us ... in quitting the chemo we should prepare for end of life care! My Mother-in-law ... decided to continue with the chemo ... Feb 4th. ... The doctors at HFM told us that they had never seen such high levels of ... chemo in one person, that it was off the charts! ... she ... passed away ... not even 24 hours later. ... I believe that she could have had a passing more on her own terms without all the suffering from chemo. (Rene and Robert Beaupre, Daughter-in-law/Son of Patient). My mother ... was a patient of Farid Fata. He diagnosed her with cancer and offered her and the family false hope that she would be able to survive it. He diagnosed and treated her for ovarian and pancreatic cancer. ... He said she can survive this. ... She sat through countless hours of chemotherapy and several visits ... in the hospital due to the dosage of chemotherapy. Fata had convinced her that it would cure her. ... Farid Fata stole from my mother her ability to make the final decisions regarding her life by offering a false hope of a cure. ... It was indeed pancreatic cancer [not ovarian cancer]. ... After [she was informed that her pancreatic cancer was inoperable] she quickly deteriorated. ... Farid Fata shortened [my] mother's life and took away her choices by misleading her to believe she had a curable cancer. (Wendy Lukianoff, Daughter-in-law of Patient) When my mom saw Fata he told her that she had cancer, but not to worry because he was ... utilizing technologies that other doctors didn't even know about ... if she went through treatment with him, she had an excellent chance of being cured. ... A surgeon who had to operate on my mom, numerous times, as a result of Fata's incorrect "treatments" told us that she needed to stop chemo because it was killing her. But Fata would come into the hospital, and lie to us, telling us chemo was her only hope, that it was actually shrinking her tumor, and that she HAD to start treatment back up as soon as she was released from the hospital if she wanted to live. ... My mom wanted to live so badly ... and believed Fata was trying to help her. (Writer Requested Anonymity, Family Member of Patient) (NaturalNews) For years, Dr. Farid Fata of Detroit, Michigan, gave patients harmful and painful cancer treatments they did not need , all so he could bill insurance companies for the services, and in turn, put more money in his pocket. No one knows for sure how many people he tortured and killed in this way, but Fata was ultimately sentenced to 45 years in federal prison for violating the trust of more than 550 patients, and stealing $17 million from the government via fraudulent billings, according to the Fata told people that they had cancer when they didn't, and in some instances, subjected them to years of needless chemotherapy and radiation. He also continued prescribing those same harmful treatments to patients he knew weren't going to survive anyway.His scam, which is described as one of the most egregious cases of medical fraud in history, only came to an end after one of his many physician's assistants noticed something was very wrong about Fata's practice, eventually discovering that the doctor had wrongfully and purposefully diagnosed a patient with cancer.It's been nearly a year since Fata was locked up, and his family allowed to leave the U.S. But the suffering he caused still continues. A report released by the U.S. Department of Justice includes Victim Impact Statements detailing their horrifying experiences as a result of Fata's crimes. The writers of the statements were given the choice to include their full names, initials, or neither.The following are just a handful of testimonies given by victims or their familiesStay tuned ascontinues to post more statements from Fata's victims and their families. Males express increased Aire in human and mouse thymus Males are protected from the development of multiple autoimmune diseases compared with females17. Since Aire plays a critical role in protecting from autoimmunity, we hypothesized that increased androgen in males may upregulate Aire expression to contribute to this protection. To test this, we first compared thymic Aire expression in male versus female subjects, using human thymus tissue removed from infants (<6 months of age) during the course of cardiac surgery. Human infants in the first 6 months of life undergo mini-puberty, with high circulating androgen levels in male infants18,19. Thus, thymus tissue in male infants during this period is exposed to high androgen levels. Relative Aire messenger RNA (mRNA) expression was determine by quantitative PCR with reverse transcription (RTPCR) and normalized to cytokeratin 5 (KRT) 5, a housekeeping gene expressed by thymic medulla. On average, male thymus expressed higher levels of Aire mRNA compared with female thymus (Fig. 1a). When human subjects were paired by age, Aire expression was consistently higher in the male thymus samples (Fig. 1b). In parallel, we flow-sorted mTECs from male and female thymus of 6-week-old adult mice and compared Aire mRNA expression. mTECs from male mice expressed higher mRNA levels of Aire (Fig. 1c). These differences were not due to gross alterations in thymic epithelial numbers, since absolute numbers and frequency of mTECs by flow cytometry were unchanged between males and females (Fig. 1d). To compare Aire protein expression, we performed immunofluorescent staining of thymic sections from male and female mice. Male thymic sections showed a modest but significant increase in Aire-expressing (Aire+) cells per KRT5+ thymic medullary area (Fig. 1e). Because Aire is expressed largely in differentiated mTECs that express high levels of MHCII (mTEChi; (ref. 20)), this increase could be either due to an increased proportion of mTECs that are mature (and therefore express Aire) or to an increased Aire expression per mature mTEC. To distinguish between these two possibilities, we compared the frequency of mTEChi cells by flow cytometry. No differences in mTEChi frequencies were noted between males and females (Fig. 1f). Together, these findings suggest increased Aire expression per mTEC at the mRNA and protein level. Figure 1: Male thymus expresses increased Aire in humans and mice. (a) Relative Aire mRNA expression in human thymus of male and female infants (<6 months of age). Relative expression was measured by quantitative RTPCR relative to cytokeratin 5, a thymic medulla marker. n=6 for each group. Error bars represent s.d. (b) Relative Aire mRNA expression in a displayed as age-matched malefemale pairs. Ages are indicated at the right of each pair. (c) Relative mRNA expression of Aire in sorted mTECs from male versus female thymi of 6-week-old mice. A total of 410 mice were pooled per sample. Data shown are representative of four independent experiments. Error bars represent s.d. (d) Top: absolute numbers of total mTECs (CD45 MHCII+, Ly51low) by flow cytometry in 8-week-old male versus female mice. Bottom: frequency of total mTECs within CD45 MHCII+ stromal cells. Thymi from pools of 4 mice per group were used in each replicate, with three replicates total. (e) Left: representative immunofluorescent images of 8-week-old male and female thymus sections stained with anti-Aire (green) and anti-cytokeratin 5 (K5) antibodies. Right: quantification of Aire+ cells per K5+ area for females and males. n=4 mice per group. Error bars represent s.e.m. (f) Ratio of mTEChi (CD45 MHCIIhigh, Ly51low) to mTEClo (CD45 MHCIIlow, Ly51low) in males versus females. n=3 for each group. Error bars represent s.e.m. For all data sets, unpaired Students t-test was used for comparisons except in b, in which paired Students t-test was used. *P<0.05. NS, not significant. Full size image In addition, mTECs from male mice expressed higher mRNA levels of Aire-regulated TSAs. We utilized RNA sequencing to obtain a global representation of the mTEC transcriptome in 68-week-old male versus female mice. Among the 2,760 Aire-upregulated transcripts with detectable transcripts in our samples21, 1,721 (63%) were higher in mTECs from males compared with females (Fig. 2a). In addition, log 2 fold change of male over female expression levels was higher for Aire-upregulated genes21 compared with Aire-independent genes (P=3.17e15; unpaired Students t-test; Fig. 2b), which suggests that male gender has a generally positive impact on the Aire-regulated transcripts. Of the top, seven genes induced in males (false discovery rate <0.05), four genes were located on the Y chromosome, which provided internal validation for this comparison between the genders. Of the remaining genes, all three have been reported to be Aire regulated21,22 (Fig. 2c). We next utilized quantitative RTPCR to compare expression levels of specific Aire-regulated TSAs. Quantitative RTPCR analysis of the Aire-regulated TSAs insulin, tyrosinase, TRP-1, Spt-1, Reg3b and OBP1a showed higher TSA expression in male mTECs6,23,24 (Fig. 2d), whereas expression of the Aire-independent TSAs Silver, Krt10, Csn2, Gad1, FABP9 and Resp18 (refs 23, 24, 25) was similar between male and female mTECs (Fig. 2e). Figure 2: Male thymus expresses increased Aire-regulated TSAs in mice. (a) Heatmap of Aire-upregulated genes. Extreme left and right columns: expression of genes (log 2 RPKM) shown to be upregulated in Aire wild-type (WT, left) compared with Aire knockout mTECs (right) in ref. 21. Middle two columns: expression of Aire-upregulated genes in mTECs of males (left) compared with females (right). Left bar demarcates Aire-upregulated genes that are increased in male mTECs (63%). (b) Box plot of average fold change (male over female) for expression of Aire-independent versus Aire-dependent genes in which message was detected. *P=3.17e15. (c) List of top seven genes upregulated in males (FDR <0.05). RNA for sequencing was obtained from flow-sorted mTECs from male and female mice. Ten mice were pooled per replicate with two replicates per group. (d,e) Relative mRNA expression of TSAs in sorted mouse mTECs from male versus female thymic stroma. Six Aire-dependent TSAs ((d) insulin, Spt-1, tyrosinase, TRP-1, Reg3b and Obp1a) and six Aire-independent TSAs ((e) Silver, Krt10, Csn2, Gad1, Fabp9 and Resp18) were tested. A total of 410 mice were pooled per sample. Data shown are representative of two independent experiments. (f) Relative Aire mRNA expression in thymic stromal cells from castrated versus unmanipulated (intact) male mice measured by quantitative RTPCR. (g,h) Relative Aire (g) and TSA (h) (insulin, Spt-1 and Silver) mRNA expression in isolated thymic stroma from AR-deficient testicular feminized ARTfm/Y (Tfm) mice or WT male littermate controls measured by quantitative RTPCR. For (fh), three mice were pooled for each sample, and representative of two independent experiments are shown. Thymic stromal cells were used as starting material. For (dh), unpaired Students t-test was used for comparisons. For (dh), error bars represent s.d. *P<0.05. FDR, false discovery rate; NS, not significant. Full size image Multiple factors may contribute to the gender difference in Aire expression, including chromosomal, environmental and hormonal factors5. We chose to focus on the potential effects of androgen on Aire expression because of the strong existing evidence that androgen is protective against autoimmunity5. To test the possibility that testicular androgen may contribute to increased male Aire expression, we castrated 2-week-old C57BL/6 wild-type (WT) male mice and measured Aire expression levels 2 weeks later. Castration decreased Aire mRNA expression in thymic stromal cells compared with intact, age-matched males (Fig. 2f), suggesting that testicular androgen increases Aire expression in males. In addition, we compared Aire mRNA levels in thymic stroma of testicular feminized (ARTfm/Y) mice versus WT male littermate controls. ARTfm/Y mice have a spontaneously occurring, inactivating AR mutation, and therefore are insensitive to androgen. Aire mRNA levels were lower in thymic stroma of ARTfm/Y mice compared with WT male littermate controls (Fig. 2g), suggesting that AR is important in increasing Aire expression in male mice. In addition, mRNA levels of two Aire-regulated TSAs, insulin and Spt-1 (ref. 6), were also lower in thymic stromal cells of ARTfm/Y mice (Fig. 2h). AR effect was specific to Aire-regulated TSAs, since expression of Silver, an Aire-independent TSA23, was unchanged between the two strains. Together, these findings suggest that AR-dependent testicular androgen action is important in increasing Aire expression in male mice. DHT increases Aire expression in mouse and human thymus Intrigued by these findings, we tested whether androgen upregulates Aire expression in vitro. We compared Aire expression in primary thymic stromal cells cultured for 6 h with dihydrotestosterone (DHT), a potent testosterone metabolite that is not subject to conversion to oestradiol, or vehicle control. DHT induced a significant increase in Aire mRNA expression in human thymic stromal cells from both male and female subjects (Fig. 3a), with a larger effect in cells of males compared with females. Similar increases in Aire mRNA expression were seen with mouse thymic stromal cells, with a more pronounced effect with male cells (Fig. 3b). Finally, the addition of flutamide, an AR antagonist, blocked DHT induction of Aire in thymic stromal cells of male mice, which suggests that DHT upregulation of Aire expression was AR dependent (Supplementary Fig. 1). Figure 3: Androgen enhances Aire transcription, TSA expression and negative selection of self-reactive T cells. (a) Relative AIRE mRNA expression levels in male and female thymic stromal cells incubated with 10 nM DHT or vehicle control () for 6 h. Cells were from <1-week-old paired human subjects. Data shown are representative of at least three representative experiments. (b) Relative Aire mRNA expression levels in thymic stroma of 6-week-old male and female mice incubated with 10 nM DHT or vehicle control () for 6 h. Four mice were pooled per group, and data shown are representative of at least two independent experiments. (c) Relative Aire mRNA expression in LNCaP cells pretreated with indicated concentrations of 5-Aza and 100 ng ml1 trichostatin in the presence of 10 nM DHT (gray bars) or vehicle control (black bars) for 8 h. Data shown are representative of two independent experiments. (d,e) Relative Aire (d) and TSA (e) (Spt-1 and TRP-1) mRNA expression in isolated thymic stroma from mice treated with DHT pellets or sham implant procedure. (f) Two-week-old TRP-1 TCR Tg RAG/ male mice were treated with 20 mg kg1 acyline to minimize endogenous androgen production and implanted with DHT pellets or sham treated for 4 weeks total. Representative flow cytometry plots of thymocytes with frequencies of CD4 single-positive (CD4SP), double-positive (DP), CD8 single-positive (CD8SP) and double-negative (DN; clockwise, starting from left) populations shown in DHT-treated versus sham-operated male mice. (g) Average frequencies (top) and absolute numbers (bottom) of thymocyte subpopualtions as indicated for DHT-treated (n=4) and sham-operated (n=6) male mice. (h) Flow cytometric analysis of annexin V levels in CD4 single-positive thymocytes. Representative flow plot (left) and cumulative data (right) are shown. For all data sets, unpaired Students t-test was used for comparisons. Error bars represent s.e.m. *P<0.05. NS, not significant. Full size image In addition, we determined the effect of androgen on LNCaP cells, an epithelial cell line that expresses endogenous AR. LNCaP cells do not express Aire at baseline but can be induced to express Aire with 5-aza-2-deoxycitidine (5-Aza), a demethylating agent, and trichostatin, a histone deacetylase inhibitor (Supplementary Fig. 2), as previously described26,27. Addition of 10 nM DHT further increased Aire mRNA expression (Fig. 3c), suggesting that androgen promotes Aire transcription in this cell line. To determine the androgen effects on Aire expression in vivo, we implanted 2-week-old male C57BL/6 WT mice with DHT pellets for 2 weeks or subjected mice to a sham implantation. By quantitative RTPCR analysis, DHT treatment increased Aire mRNA expression of thymic stromal cells compared with sham treatment (Fig. 3d). Furthermore, DHT treatment also increased mRNA expression of two Aire-regulated TSAs, Spt-1 and TRP-1 (refs 6, 23; Fig. 3e). Because Aire expression was compared using thymic stromal cells, DHT could either be increasing the proportion of mature mTECs that express Aire or directly increasing Aire expression within mature mTECs. To resolve whether DHT might be altering thymic epithelial cell (TEC) subset numbers, we subjected 3-week-old male mice to sham procedure or DHT pellet insertion and determined the frequency and absolute number of thymic epithelial subsets by flow cytometry 13 weeks later. No differences were seen in the frequency of mTECs (%CD45 MHCII+ Ly51low), cortical TECs (%CD45 MHCII+ Ly51high), mTEChi (%CD45 MHCIIhigh Ly51low) or mTEClo (%CD45 MHCIIlow Ly51low; Supplementary Fig. 3a,b). Furthermore, the ratio of mTEChi to mTEClo was unchanged in sham- and DHT-treated mice (Supplementary Fig. 3c), suggesting that DHT is not increasing the proportion of mature MHCIIhi mTECs. Of note, the absolute numbers of mTEChi and cortical TEC populations were significantly decreased with DHT treatment, and similar trends were seen with total mTEC and mTEClo populations, although these differences did not quite reach statistical significance (Supplementary Fig. 3d). Together, these findings suggest that DHT treatment has a global effect on stromal cell numbers, without disproportionately affecting a particular subpopulation. Thus, it is unlikely that the increased Aire expression seen in DHT-treated mice is due to an increased frequency of the differentiated mTEC subset but instead is due to increased Aire expression in mTECs. In line with this, DHT treatment increased Aire and Spt-1 mRNA expression in sorted mTEChi cells (Supplementary Fig. 4). Together, these findings provide evidence that DHT increases Aire and TSA expression in mTECs. Given the increased TRP-1 expression in DHT-treated males, we asked whether DHT treatment would result in more efficient negative selection of TRP-1-reactive T cells. We utilized TRP-1 T-cell receptor (TCR) transgenic (Tg) mice to test this, since CD4 single-positive (SP) thymocytes in these mice normally undergo Aire-dependent negative selection23,28,29. Two-week-old TRP-1 TCR Tg male mice were treated with acyline, a gonadotropin-releasing hormone antagonist, to minimize endogenous androgen production30, then implanted with DHT pellets for 4 weeks or subjected to sham implantation. Representative flow plots with the frequencies of CD4SP, double-positive, CD8SP and double-negative cells among thymocytes are shown in Fig. 3f. With sham treatment, 1.88% of thymocytes were CD4SP cells in Aire-sufficient (WT) mice. This low frequency reflects Aire-dependent TRP-1 TCR Tg thymocyte negative selection without the addition of exogenous DHT. With DHT treatment, the CD4SP frequency further decreased to 0.54% suggesting that DHT enhances Aire-mediated negative selection. Quantification of frequency of CD4SP cells (n=4 for sham, n=6 for DHT treated) is shown in Fig. 3g. DHT treatment also decreased the absolute numbers of CD4SP cells. No significant differences were seen in double-negative, double-positive and CD8SP subpopulations (Fig. 3f,g). Consistent with increased clonal deletion, increased frequency of apoptotic, annexin V-positive CD4SP thymocytes was seen in DHT-treated mice (Fig. 3h). An alternative explanation to consider is that DHT is directly toxic to thymocytes. This possibility was tested by incubating thymocytes for 6 h in either vehicle control or 10 nM DHT. The frequency of annexin V+ cells was not different in the two groups, which suggests that DHT is not acting directly on thymocytes (Supplementary Fig. 5). A caveat to this experiment, however, is that apoptosis was compared in a short-term in vitro culture system, which may not reflect the thymocyte environment in vivo. Additional evidence that DHT is not directly acting on thymocytes is provided by a previous report utilizing haematopoietic chimeras in which AR is expressed only on haematopoetic cells and not in the non-haematopoietic cells, such as TECs31. DHT treatment of these chimeras did not alter the frequencies of thymocytes subsets, suggesting that AR expression on thymocytes does not affect thymocyte development. Together, these data suggest that androgen enhances Aire expression in mTECs, with subsequent increase in TSA expression and T-cell negative selection. Androgen activation targets AR to the Aire promoter We next sought to determine the molecular mechanism by which androgen increases Aire expression in the thymus. AR is expressed in the thymus, with highest levels in TECs31,32. More specifically, AR is expressed in multiple TEC subsets, including the MHCIIhigh mTEC (mTEChi) population33. As noted above, mTEChi cells are of special interest because Aire-expressing (Aire+) mTECs are highly enriched in this subset20. To verify that AR protein is expressed by Aire+ cells, we performed immunofluorescent staining of mouse thymic tissue for AR and Aire. As expected, Aire was restricted to the nucleus of thymic medullary cells (Fig. 4a). AR was present in the nucleus as well as the cytoplasm of thymic medullary cells (Fig. 4a), and most Aire+ cells co-expressed AR (Fig. 4a,b). A high degree of AR and Aire co-expression was noted in thymic medulla of male and female mice (Fig. 4b). Given these data (Fig. 4a; ref. 33), we hypothesized that androgen/AR complexes may directly regulate Aire transcription through their interaction with the Aire promoter. Figure 4: Androgen activates AR to target to the Aire promoter. (a) Top: representative immunofluorescence staining of frozen thymic section from an 8-week-old male mouse. Slides were scanned at 20 magnification, with cortex and medulla delineated by a white dotted line. Bottom: expansion of bracketed area to focus on Aire (green), AR (red) and 4,6-diamidino-2-phenylindole nuclear (blue) staining. Arrows indicate cells co-expressing Aire and AR. (b) Top: quantification of cells per thymic medulla area that are Aire+ (green) and Aire++AR+ positive (yellow). DAPI delineates cell nuclei. Bottom: quantification of AR co-expression within Aire+ cells in males and females. Data shown are averages+s.d. of four 0.04-mm2 areas. (c) Schematic diagram of 14 predicted AR-binding sites (rectangles; numbers indicate position relative to Aire translational start site) within a 2.8-kb human AIRE gene 5 flanking region. (d) AR chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) in LNCaP cells pretreated with 5 M 5-Aza and 100 ng ml1 trichostatin. Cells were treated with 10 nM DHT (+) or vehicle control (). Quantitative PCR for AR or IgG control ChIP was performed over two positive control regions (prostate-specific antigen promoter and enhancer)and two negative control regions (1,575 to 1,275 region upstream of Aire translational start site (1) and Aire exon (2)). Three Aire 5 flanking regions containing predicted AR-binding sites were tested for AR accumulation. Numbers indicate base pairs upstream of Aire translational start site. Data shown are representative of three independent experiments performed. (e) AIRE promoter activity measured by luciferase. HEK293T cells were transiently transfected with pAP1235 human AIRE promoterluciferase reporter plasmid and/or pCMV-AR in the presence of the indicated DHT concentrations for 24 h. Data shown are representative of two independent experiments. (f) AIRE promoter activity, as in e, but with four mutant AIRE promoterluciferase constructs (Mut1, Mut2, Mut3 and Del) that alter predicted AR-binding sites in the 5 AIRE flanking region (Supplementary Table 1). AR expression vector pCMV-AR538614 with a deletion of the AR DNA-binding domain (binding Mut) was also tested. For all data sets, unpaired Students t-test was used for comparisons. Error bars represent s.e.m. *P<0.05. NS, not significant. Full size image Analysis of the human AIRE gene 5 flanking region using PROMO software revealed 14 potential AR-binding elements in a 2.8-kb region (Fig. 4c). To determine whether androgen/AR complex accumulates at Aire promoter regions, we performed AR chromatin immunoprecipitation in LNCaP cells. As described previously (Fig. 3c), LNCaP cells endogenously express AR and can be induced to express Aire with 5-Aza and trichostatin26,27. In the presence of DHT, AR was selectively enriched at three Aire promoter regions that were predicted to contain AR-binding sites (position 2,916 to 2,643, 1,130 to 867 and 383 to 164; Fig. 4d). These findings suggest that androgen activation results in AR accumulation at the Aire promoter. We next utilized a reporter system in human embryonic kidney 293T (HEK293T) epithelial cells to delineate further how androgen interacts with the Aire promoter. HEK293T cells were transfected with pAP1235, an Aire reporter construct comprised of a human AIRE gene 5 flanking region (position 1,235 to +1 relative to translational start) in front of luciferase26. This 5 flanking region is sufficient to drive Aire transcriptional activity28 and contains nine predicted AR-binding elements (Fig. 4e). An AR expression construct was also transfected into HEK293T cells because HEK293T cells do not express endogenous AR34. In co-transfected HEK293T cells, DHT strongly induced AIRE promoter activity in a dose-dependent manner (Fig. 4e). Importantly, mutagenesis of predicted AR-binding sites in the Aire 5 flanking promoter region abolished AIRE promoter activity (Fig. 4f; Supplementary Table 1). These findings suggest that androgen/AR-mediated Aire upregulation requires the presence of AR-binding sites. Moreover, transfection of a mutant AR construct (AR538614)35 in which ARs DNA-binding region is deleted also abolished AIRE promoter activity. Thus, ARs DNA-binding region is required to promote Aire expression. Together, these findings suggest that androgen/AR complexes may directly interact with the Aire promoter to upregulate Aire transcription. Androgen decreases EAE severity in an Aire-dependent manner Since DHT upregulates Aire expression, we tested whether androgen upregulation of Aire may protect against autoimmune disease. We utilized the experimental autoimmune encephalitis (EAE) mouse model of multiple sclerosis that can be induced by active immunization with Myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein (MOG) 3555 peptide. MOG EAE was attractive as an experimental system because androgen administration has been shown to ameliorate the severity of MOG EAE4. Whether the protective effect of androgen is dependent on Aire, however, is not known. We hypothesized that androgen protects from MOG EAE by upregulating Aire expression, which subsequently increases thymic MOG expression to enforce deletion of MOG-reactive T cells. To test this hypothesis, we first verified that Aire regulates MOG antigen expression in the thymus by comparing MOG expression in sorted mTECs from Aire-deficient versus WT mice. Aire-deficient mice, harbouring a dominant Aire G228W mutation (AireGW/+ mice)12, expressed less MOG in mTECs than WT controls (Fig. 5a). This finding confirmed a previous report that Aire controls MOG expression in the thymus36. Furthermore, incubation of thymic stroma from WT male mice in 10 nM DHT induced MOG mRNA expression (Supplementary Fig. 6). Figure 5: Androgen protects against EAE in an Aire-dependent manner. (a) Relative MOG mRNA expression in sorted WT and Aire-deficient (AireGW/+) mTECs was determined by quantitative RTPCR. Four mice were pooled per group, and data shown are representative of at least two independent experiments. (b) Average clinical EAE scores of WT (left) or AireGW/+ (right) male mice implanted with DHT pellets or sham operated following immunization with MOG 3555 peptide. n=5 in each group. Shown is representative of three independent experiments. (c) Representative Luxol Fast Blue-PAS-stained lumbar spinal cord sections from WT (top panels) or Aire-deficient AireGW/+ (bottom panels) mice treated with placebo (sham) or DHT pellet collected 35 days after MOG immunizations (n5 for each group). Box in 4 image indicates area shown in 10 image. Arrows indicate inflammatory foci with demyelination. Scale bar, 200 m ( 4); 100 m ( 10). (d) Mean numbers of inflammatory foci and demyelinated area in WT and AireGW/+ mice treated with placebo () or DHT pellet. (e) Concentrations of IL-2 and IL-17 cytokine in supernatants of splenocytes cultured in the presence of increasing amounts of MOG 3555 peptide. Splenocytes were isolated from WT or AireGW/+ mice treated with DHT or sham at day 35 after EAE induction. Unpaired Students t-test was used in all data sets, except for survival curves in which MannWhitney U-test was utilized. Error bars represent s.e.m. *P<0.05. NS, not significant. Full size image To test whether androgen protection is Aire dependent, we treated male WT and AireGW/+ mice with DHT or vehicle control for 4 weeks before immunization with MOG 3555 peptide. As expected4, DHT-treated WT mice had milder clinical disease than sham-treated controls (Fig. 5b, left; Supplementary Table 2). In contrast, no differences in clinical EAE severity were seen in DHT-treated or sham-treated AireGW/+ mice (Fig. 5b, right; Supplementary Table 2), suggesting that the protective effect of androgen is Aire dependent. In WT mice, DHT administration was associated with decreased inflammatory foci and demyelination in the lumbar spine (Fig. 5c,d, top panels); in AireGW/+ mice, on the other hand, DHT treatment did not have an effect (Fig. 5c,d, bottom panels). In addition, DHT administration decreased splenocyte interleukin-2 (IL-2) and IL-17 inflammatory cytokine secretion in WT mice (Fig. 5e). In contrast, DHT treatment did not have an effect in AireGW/+ mice (Fig. 5e). Together, these findings suggest that the protective effect of DHT on MOG-induced EAE requires Aire. Of note, our data does not rule out that androgen decreases EAE severity through an indirect, Aire-mediated mechanism. For instance, since Aire affects thymic regulatory T-cell (Treg) development8, androgen may promote Treg suppressive function in WT (Aire sufficient) mice without affecting thymic Tregs in Aire-deficient mice. Male gender protects against EAE in an Aire-dependent manner Our data suggest that male gender is associated with increased Aire and TSA expression in the mouse thymus (Figs 1c and 2ac). In line with this, sorted mTECs from male C57BL/6 WT mice expressed increased MOG mRNA compared with female mice (Fig. 6a). Given this increased MOG expression in male versus female thymus, we next asked whether male gender also protects against EAE in an Aire-dependent manner. In WT mice, clinical disease was more severe in females compared with males (Fig. 6b, left; Supplementary Table 3). In Aire-deficient (AireGW/+) mice, on the other hand, clinical disease was not different between the two groups (Fig. 6b, right; Supplementary Table 3), suggesting that amelioration of autoimmunity in males required Aire. Figure 6: Male gender protects against EAE in an Aire-dependent manner. (a) Relative MOG mRNA expression amounts in sorted mTECs from female and male wild-type (WT) mice by quantitative RTPCR. Four mice were pooled per group, and data shown are representative of at least two independent experiments. (b) Mean clinical EAE scores of male versus female WT or Aire-deficient (AireGW/+) mice following immunization with MOG 3555 peptide. (c) Representative Luxol Fast Blue-PAS-stained lumbar spinal cord sections from male versus female WT (top panels) or AireGW/+ (bottom panels) mice collected 35 days after MOG immunizations (n5 for each group). Box in 4 image indicates area shown in 10 image. Arrows indicate inflammatory foci with demyelination. Scale bar, 200 m ( 4) and 100 m ( 10). (d) Mean numbers of inflammatory foci and demyelinated area in male versus female WT and AireGW/+ mice. (e) Concentrations of IL-2 and IL-17 cytokine in the supernatants of splenocytes cultured in the presence of increasing amounts of MOG 3555 peptide. Splenocytes were isolated from male and female WT or AireGW/+ mice at day 35 after EAE induction. Unpaired Students t-test was used in all data sets, except for survival curves in which MannWhitney U-test was utilized. Error bars represent s.e.m. *P<0.05. NS, not significant. Full size image In WT mice, male gender was associated with decreased the numbers of inflammatory foci and the areas of demyelination in the lumbar spine (Fig. 6c,d, top). In AireGW/+ mice, in contrast, these differences were not seen. Finally, male gender was associated with decreased splenocyte inflammatory cytokine production in WT mice (Fig. 6e). These differences were abolished in Aire-deficient AireGW/+ mice (Fig. 6e). Together, these results suggest that male gender is protective against MOG-induced EAE and that this protection is dependent on Aire. Some lawmakers, politicians and interest groups, particularly those that like to perpetuate self-serving narratives about systemic sexism, say April 12 was a special day: Equal Pay Day. It symbolizes how far a woman must work into the next year to earn the same annual salary as a man. Bluntly, its the day Americans are supposed to acknowledge the so-called wage gap by repeating misleading talking points ad nauseam until fearful women are convinced they are victims of massive wage discrimination. Foundational to Equal Pay Day is the Labor Department statistic that women make only 79 cents for every $1 earned by men. Unfortunately for true believers, that data point has been largely debunked. Even The Washington Posts fact checker has given the number two Pinocchios on more than one occasion. Thats because the statistic is calculated by simply looking at the median salaries for men and women without accounting for any of the numerous factors that could result in such a disparity. And as the Posts Glenn Kessler points out, the 21-cent gap substantially closes when one looks at weekly or hourly wages. The scurrilous statistic further implodes when other important facts are considered, like the average woman has less work experience than the average man, often because women take time away from the workforce to give birth to and raise children. Women also tend to seek jobs with more flexible hours to accommodate family life and tend to work more weeks of part-time hours than full-time hours. According to Kessler, government labor data show that women who forgo marriage and children have virtually no wage gap; they earn 95 cents for every dollar a man makes. There are other inconvenient realities like the fact that women tend to choose professions that pay less. Teaching, for example, social work and counseling psychology are fields dominated by women. All are far less lucrative than the professions dominated by men, which include petroleum engineering, chemical engineering, and mathematics and computer science. In many cases, jobs performed by males also tend to be more labor-intensive and dangerous. Women may self-select professions that require less physical strain or risk, but that risk carries a price tag. Men, usually by choice, reap the benefits. All of this results in what the Washington Examiners Ashe Schow refers to as not a wage gap but an earnings gap. Indeed, for the reasons explained above, over the course of the average womans lifetime she will earn less income than her male counterpart. And most of that gap can be explained by her individual choices, not some insidious patriarchical scheme to cheat women out of their due. Some feminists argue that womens choices arent really their own that staying home to have and raise children is forced upon them by society and that Americas insufficient paid maternity leave and child-care programs drive women out of the workforce against their will. But even that appeal to victimhood loses steam when comparing America with nations that have generous leave policies. American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers reviewed a study by two Cornell economists who found that in Sweden, where parents can take up to 16 months off work for the birth of a child and may then work part time (at a reduced salary) until that child is 8 years old, women not men are more likely to take advantage of this law. Further, women never find their way back to full-time or high-level employment. And such generous family-friendly policies ultimately make all women less attractive to competitive and high-paying employers. Unfortunately, the one element of this issue that never seems to enter the conversation is the fact that the work of having and raising children is not without value. In fact, its so valuable that its worth cannot be quantified. Perhaps it would benefit women to steer the conversation to ways in which society can better recognize the remarkable role they play in family life, rather than peddling irresponsible statistics about their perpetual victimhood. Ecuador was hit by a 6.2 magnitude earthquake early Wednesday, a few days after a major earthquake battered the country and killed nearly 500 people. According to the U.S Geological Survey, the latest earthquake hit 25 km (15 miles) off Muisne on the northwest Pacific coast at a depth of 15 km, which was not far from the epicenter of the 7.8 magnitude quake that devastated Ecuador on Saturday. The 6.2 magnitude quake hit at 3:33 a.m. local time and was followed by a series of aftershocks, Ecuador's Geophysical Institute said. However, there was no tsunami warning. In a statement, Ecuador's Foreign Minister said the catastrophe is the worst tragedy Ecuador has experienced in 60 years. The earthquake is the deadliest to hit Ecuador since the 1979 temblor left hundreds of homes destroyed and thousands of people fearing for their lives. A report by CNN said that the weeekend quake hit coastal Manabi Province the hardest, where about 200 people died. It also added that tourists destinations such as Manta, Portoviejo and Pedernales, saw the most devastation. The quake is seen as a great setback to an already weak economy. The estimated financial cost of the weekend quake has been pegged between $2 to $3 Billion, reports Associated Press, about three percent of gross domestic product. Recovery would not only cost large sums, but also take years. President Rafael Correa, who supervised the rescue and monitoring, called on Ecuadoreans to stay strong while authorities supervise events. As of this writing, some 20,500 people were left sleeping in shelters struggling with water, food and power while more than 200 are still missing. Mitsubishi Motors Corporation (MMC) admitted to falsifying fuel consumption tests for several of their vehicles. They admitted to manipulating fuel economy data for four mini-car models: two for their own brand (eK Wagon, ek Space) and two produced for Nissan Motor (Dayz, Dayz Roox). In a press release, the Japanese automaker apologized and owned up to the outrage. "In connection with the certification process for the mini-cars manufactured by MMC, we found that with respect to the fuel consumption testing data submitted to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT), MMC conducted testing improperly to present better fuel consumption rates than the actual rates; and that the testing method was also different from the one required by Japanese law. We express deep apologies to all of our customers and stakeholders for this issue," their official statement read. The official statement also revealed that it was Nissan who noticed the irregularity of the data and who initiated to conduct in-house testers. After the internal probe, it was ascertained that there was an obvious incongruity between the cars' promised fuel efficiency data, and the actual results. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that inaccurate tests involved 157,000 of its own brand light passenger cars and 468,000 vehicles of the latter. "Nissan Motor (NM) requested Mitsubishi Materials Corporation (MMC) to review the running resistance value set by MMC during tests by MMC. In the course of our internal investigation upon this request, MMC learned of the improper conduct that MMC used the running resistance value for testing which provided more advantageous fuel consumption rates than the actual rates," announced Mitsubishi. The data was said to be manipulated to make fuel economy performance appear more efficient. "The wrongdoing was intentional. It is clear the falsification was done to make the mileage look better. But why they would resort to fraud to do this is still unclear," company president Tetsuro Aikawa told the Associated Press. After the news broke, shares in Mitsubishi declined more than 15 percent, "slashing off $1.2 billion from the company's market value," The Verge notes. Conquering Mars, also known as the Red Planet, is the latest objective of international space agencies including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), European Space Agency (ESA) and China National Space Administration (CNSA). Because of its proximity to earth, Mars is the most plausible candidate for space exploration to mankind. It also exhibits some earthlike properties, leading experts to think that life may possibly thrive on the Red Planet. And because of that, ESA, NASA and CNSA are all working towards reaching Mars in the near future. Because of their common interests, it can't be denied that there might be competition going on among the high profile space exploration agencies. NASA is set to launch their Journey to Mars in 2030, but have been working tirelessly on the expedition for years. According to NASA, their interest with the Red Planet stems from evidence that it may have been suitable for life in the past. And among all known planets, Mars is the most possible venue to cater to humans. NASA is currently engaging their full resources to aid their astronauts in the 2030 expedition. They partnered with developers to make possible habitations in Mars, aerojet propulsions to make the journey and even studying identical astronaut twins Mark and Scott Kelly (Twin Study) to understand long-term effects of living in space on the human body. Currently, they are building an aerojet propulsion system which cost about $67 million. Meanwhile, the military-led China National Space Administration also has their eyes on Mars. Although China is very discreet when it comes to the details of their preparations, they already announced that they are indeed working on their own Mars exploration program. Wu Weiren, Head Designer of CNSA Lunar and Mars Mission in an interview with BBC said that CNSA's goal is to reach Mars by 2021. To manifest their capability to do so, Jade Rabbit, CNSA's lunar rover and lander, released public photos of the lunar surface, at par with NASA's high definition images. They wanted to be the first to fully scour the surface of Mars, and it looks like CNSA is well-equipped and capable of bringing their goal to reality. But the Europeans will not get left behind, the European Space Agency together with the Russian Federal Space Agency in a joint mission, also announced their interest to reach the Red Planet. Their exploration is called ExoMars. To be able to do this, they are developing the ExoMars Orbiter. According to the Albany Daily Star, ExoMars, an unmanned mission to the red planet will be tasked to "hunt for gases, like methane, that we associate with the presence of life on our own planet." This expedition is the first collaboration between ESA and Russian counterpart Roscosmos. In the same report, Paolo Ferri, ESA's head of mission operations said the orbiter will analyze gases in the Martian atmosphere to fully understand its origins. In terms of funding, the ESA and the Russian counterpart Roscosmos allotted about 1.3 Billion Euros ($1.44 billion). Because this expedition is unmanned, ExoMars have a distinctive purpose compared to the ones launched by NASA and CNSA. The same report said their rover will contain 10,000 pounds of gas-sniffing orbiter modules called "Schiaparelli". And because of the European and Russian background in space explorations, there's no doubt about the positive outcome of their mission as well. With all the funding and science and technology looking to reach the same goal, is it safe to assume the three major Mars exploration projects are in opposition? Well, there's no proof in that. Daily Mail even reported that there's a possibility for NASA and CNSA to collaborate in the future. As per ESA and Roscosmos, their mission to Mars is slightly different than the ones from NASA and ESA, thus there's no imminent conflict exhibited by parties involved. Instead of competition, the world of Science should rejoice because of the achievements of mankind in their efforts to reach the Red Planet. If any one of them succeeds, it will be a success for all mankind, regardless of which agency they belong to. For the past years, the drone flying industry has proven that it can be of use to many. From delivery systems to aerial photography, today, even scientists are interested in what these technological advancements can offer. In Malawi in Africa, researchers are testing the use of drones to speed up the process of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) testing for babies. Unicef Malawi tests first #drone flights for HIV early infant diagnosis:https://t.co/6HKOt2ZWJS pic.twitter.com/HRDYlN4Dzz Monty Munford (@montymunford) March 29, 2016 Due to restrictions in modes of transportation, high cost of mobile transport, poor road conditions and other debilitating factors, HIV testing in Africa is way too slow and often delayed in providing quick results to babies in need. That's why, according to Science Daily, the scientists there have completed their very first drone flight to deliver samples along a 1 kilometer route. In a video produced by Reuters, they said that UNICEF is testing the drones in Malawi with the hope of reducing testing time for HIV results. Experts say that if this technology is effective it will definitely alleviate the problem of delayed HIV testing in the remote areas in Africa. The drones can carry about 250 test samples at once. According to a news report by Reuters, almost ten percent of the Malawi population is HIV positive. It is a serious problem. Angela Travis, Chief of Communication for UNICEF Malawi said in an interview with Africa News, "This programme started with the context we have in Malawi which is a country that still has 10 percent of its population HIV positive. That also extends to children, especially infants. Now for infants it is really critical that if they are HIV positive, they are put on treatment straight away." Judith Sherman, Head of Malawi UNICEF Aids Program said that there are only 8 laboratories nationwide and that the babies need medical attention within two months once found positive of HIV. The drones will help make sure that HIV results and tests are delivered and executed on time so that the babies can receive medical treatment immediately. Meanwhile, the government have also committed to support UNICEF in this project to help the Malawi community in their fight against HIV. It may not be too much of an improvement for first world countries who have been using drones for a while now, but for mothers of HIV positive babies in Africa, these drones can make a lot of difference in the lives of their children and possibly help increase the rate of survival of HIV positive babies in Africa. On April 20, six years ago, the world watched in shock as the largest oil spill in U.S. history unfolded before our very eyes. Disaster struck as the BP Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank, resulting to 11 people missing and never found and barrels of oil spilling for 87 days before it was finally capped in June. Six years after the tragedy, a new study reveals that the negative impact of the largest accidental marine oil spill is worse than scientists originally thought. With the report published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin, the new findings showed a 19-percent increase of affected shorelines from previously published estimates, as reported by the National Geographic. Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), along with private researchers, discovered 1,313 miles (2,113 kilometers) out of 5,930 miles (9,545 kilometers) of surveyed shoreline affected by the spill. By length of shoreline damage, this makes the BP oil spill the largest and most extensive. While some oil were recovered or burned at sea, some washed up on the shores of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama and Texas. Louisiana shorelines are most affected by the oil spill, particularly its coastal wetlands. In particular, wetlands were mostly affected, along with beaches. But not only are shorelines severely affected by the oil spill. Even after six years, its negative impact still shows on the ecosystems relying on the Gulf of Mexico, particularly marine and avian wildlife, and even on communities relying on the coastal areas for their residence and livelihood. For instance, studies showed links between the BP oil spill and the deaths of dolphins in the Gulf, as per US News. Researchers said from 2010 to 2013, there was a rise of stranded stillborn and young dolphins in the shorelines of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, leading them to believe that the dolphins' mothers suffered chronic illnesses after their exposure to the spill. Since the disaster, the NOAA also reported more than 1,400 dead whales and dolphins washed up on the Gulf's shores, calling it an "unusual mortality event" that continues to happen. The spike in the deaths of Kemp's ridley sea turtles -- the world's most endangered sea turtles -- are also being linked to the oil spill, having most likely affected their nesting areas, as reported by WUFT.org. But not only are marine animals affected. Birds, particularly pelicans, were severely affected by the oil spill too, as they are usually on the surface of the water to feed. Not only were they terribly oiled during the disaster, but the loss of marine ecosystem also badly affected their feeding habits. The negative impact continues up the feeding chain. Humans, particularly those relying on the Gulf for their fishing industries, are also feeling the negative impact of the spill, even six years after. SunHerald reported a protest by members of the Mississippi Coast fishing industry, done to remember the disaster that took away their livelihood. East Biloxi, according to fishing activist Thao Vu, used to be the world's fresh seafood capitol. But the BP oil spill has taken that away and people are still reeling from the intergenerational impact that the tragedy will continue to have. In October last year, BP confirmed a settlement of $20.8 billion, the largest pollution penalty in the nation's history. But it looks like even after six years, it may take a much longer time for the U.S. and the world to fully recover from this ecological disaster. An East Bay man accused of burning a rainbow flag has been arrested on suspicion of a hate crime, police said. The alleged hate crime occurred at the Clayton Valley Presbyterian Church and is part of recent vandalism surrounding the Rainbow flag. "I am surprised and angry as I can be, while keeping a Christian attitude about the whole thing," parishioner Dale Scovill said. Scovill said the flag has been taken down eight times in the past six months, including three times this week. On Tuesday, the flag was taken down and burned, according to Pastor Barbara Barkley. A note written in Spanish was also found during the suspected hate crime. Barkley said the message said "all evil will be eradicated." It is a message she said is filled with hate, but her church is about forgiveness. "We are a church that professes openness and inclusion," Barkley said. "We will continue to be so." Police were called on Tuesday after someone noticed a man taking down the flag. Police said they arrested Concord-resident John James Hurst a block away from the church. Hurst is being charged with a hate crime, two counts of arson, petty theft and vandalism, police said. An investigation is ongoing. Bay Area drivers were nervous Wednesday after a 28-year-old man was shot dead while he was behind the wheel, causing his car to careen off Highway 4. Tuesday night's incident was the 18th shooting on a local freeway, according to the California Highway Patrol. Officers believe that the Antioch man, who was driving a Chevy Impala when he was struck by multiple bullets around 8:20 p.m., was targeted. The victim's car launched off the roadway, barreled through a fence and landed within Pittsburg city limits on California Avenue. The CHP's assurance that the public is not in danger didn't lessen driver Deandre Chriss' anxiety, though. "I'm always traveling on Highway 4," he said. "I go back and forth on BART and we shouldn't have to be worried about people shooting on the freeway." Officers issued a Sig-alert and blocked all westbound lanes on Highway 4 at Loveridge Road around 9 p.m. "You're afraid to be out anytime," driver Ana Miranda said. "It could happen during daytime, nighttime it's very dangerous here." Investigators flocked to the scene and traffic was allowed through around 1 a.m., officers said. Bishop Carl Smith of Pittsburg's New Birth Church plans to meet with police and Contra Costa County leaders to find out what's being done about the violence. "To have 18 shooting in the Bay Area and most in East County is very alarming for those who drive in traffic everyday" as well as people who live in the area, he said. Smith continued: "It's like there's no line they won't cross over. They're doing whatever, whenever." Over 700,000 websites were breached between June 2014 and July 2015, according to a new study by Google and the University of California, Berkeley, which aims to improve web security. The research showed that "miscreants" had routinely hijacked thousands of vulnerable web servers for "cheap hosting and traffic acquisition." Google recorded 760,935 "hijacking incidents" within the period but said that its direct communication with webmasters had curbed the amount of breaches, NBC News reported. Google's Safe Browsing Alerts work by sending notifications to network administrators when harmful URLs are detected on their networks. It said that these had increased the likelihood of a "cleanup" by over 50 percent and reduced "infection lengths" by at least 62 percent. Attacks were primarily conducted on websites run in English, with attacks on Chinese, German, Japanese and Russian language websites following closely behind. Whole Foods Market is launching at least two of its new 365 branded grocery stores in the Bay Area by 2017. One store will be located at 1600 Jackson Street in San Francisco and the other at Diamond Blvd and Galaxy Way in Concord. The grocery chain spin-off will adhere to Whole Foods traditional healthy, organic food but at a more affordable price. According to their website, 365 by Whole Foods Market was created with new ideas to serve the modern shopper. In an effort to cater to younger millennial shoppers, online ordering and delivery services will be provided. The first 365 store will open next month in Los Angeles in the Silver Lake neighborhood. San Francisco police on Thursday released new evidence and made an emotional plea to the public to help find a missing two-year-old whose mother was found dead and buried in a San Francisco park two weeks ago. Investigators, including FBI agents, are currently investigating over 30,000 pieces of information to solve the case. "Its very rare to see a case like this, SFPD Commander Greg McEachern said. Hopefully anyone out there who has information on an innocent two-year-old will come forward and help bring her back home. Arianna Fitts' mother, Nicole Fitts, was last seen on April 1, when she was summoned by a person known to her, police said, without giving out any more information at a press conference they had called Thursday to release new evidence on the case. Fitts, who worked at the Best Buy store on Harrison Street, is believed to have taken public transportation on the Third Street corridor around 9:45 p.m., wearing a bright blue Best Buy uniform shirt underneath her jacket. Fitts wasn't reported missing until April 5. Her family alerted police that her daughter was also missing around the same time. Fitts' body was found on the morning of April 8 by park employees at McLaren Park. The 32-year-old mother was found in a hastily-dug shallow grave, curled up in a fetal position and covered with a plywood board, police said. "The plywood has markings on it we hope someone will recognize," McEachern said. "It is our belief that the person who buried her brought the board with them." At Thursday's press conference, police displayed photos of the blue t-shirt, the hole in which Fitts was buried and the plywood they said was used to bury her. Police have executed search warrants and seized evidence in Oakland, Emeryville and Daily City, all places where Arianna is believed to have been staying. Arianna was last seen in February, and police said it was believed she was staying with friends of babysitters. Police have also interviewed several people in connection with the case but have yet to name any suspects or persons of interest in the case. Police said that Arianna Fitts' family continues to believe that the little girl is still alive. "I will never be able to understand how anyone could be capable of hurting Nicki she would do anything for her daughter, her family, Nicole Fitts' sister Contessa said in a statement to San Francisco police Thursday. Anyone who knows anything about her murder, or Arianna, please come forward ... That is what Nickie would want, for Arianna to be home with her family." The head of Chicago Police Accountability Task Force says she takes the mayor at his word, when he calls a series of reforms announced Thursday, only a down payment on what needs to be done to increase accountability and legitimacy in the wounded relationship between the public and Chicago Police. We drafted the recommendations so they would fit together as a mosaic, said Task Force chief Lori Lightfoot. Its an encouraging step, but theres a lot more that needs to be done. The changes announced by mayor Rahm Emanuel amount to about a third of the recommendations made in last weeks scathing report on Chicago Police. Among the reforms announced Thursday, intensified training to address bias and cultural differences, expanded use of Tasers and body cameras, and a new effort to expedite internal investigations. The mayor emphasized that more changes are coming, but that he had to move carefully because of an ongoing Justice Department investigation of Chicago Police. Within four and a half days, were already implementing a third, Emanuel told NBC5. Were open to all of it, and I just want to make sure that the Department of Justice, that were not going a direction that theyre not comfortable with. The recommendations do not include a key finding of the Task Force reportthat the Independent Police Review Authority should be replaced with a new civilian accountability agency. But Emanuel emphasized that his reforms are a work in progress, and he noted that changes were announced last week, allowing IPRA greater latitude in investigations, and giving the Bureau of Internal Affairs the ability to move with greater speed. The worst thing to do would be to do something and then six months later, hit the chop button again and change it, Emanuel said. I have to, as mayor, be conscious of the fact that we are working with the Department of Justice, and when you make those changes, you want to do them right. Emanuel pointedly noted that his administration had moved quickly to counter the evils of the John Burge years, where recent investigations have revealed that suspects were routinely tortured by a group of officers under Burges command. Not only did we have reparations, he said, we had benefits for the family members of the victims, and then I, as mayor, personally apologized. Acknowledging where youre wrong, is the first step of where youve got to go right, he said. Of the larger reforms, Emanuel insisted, this is not going to gather dust. Lightfoot says she believes that. But she also suggested that concerns about moving before Justice completes its work are unnecessary. We wrote the report in a way it couldnt be ignored, and frankly I dont think its going to be ignored, she said. The change is going to come, and the question is whether we embrace that change now, we do the things that we believe we need to do to get us headed in the right direction, or do we wait for the Department of Justice to impose that change on us? The Task Force Report, a blistering assessment of race relations, policing, and accountability in Chicago, warned that a painful but necessary reckoning is upon us. The report found that while the issues surrounding the 2014 shooting of teenager Laquan McDonald constituted a tipping point in police relations, that issues of racism had been allowed to fester for decades in the city. The report insisted that true reconciliation would only begin through a public admission by the Superintendent that his department had a history of racial disparity and discrimination. It called for a new Inspector General for Public Safety, and the replacement of the Independent Police Review Authority with a new Civilian Police Investigative Agency. The mayor said he was committed to those concepts, but the changes were not included in Thursdays recommendations. The expectations on the part of the public have been raised, said Lightfoot. Theyre looking for deep, substantive, systemic change, and so are we. That said, she quickly added, Were looking forward to see what of those substantive changes are actually adopted. Lightfoot said she was encouraged by Emanuels promise of quarterly progress reports, and that she saw that as evidence that he has an expectation that there is more to be done. The mayor has to do what the mayor believes is in the best interest of the city, she said. Certainly were all going to be judged by whether weve taken the bold steps. For his part, newly appointed Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson seized on the reconciliation piece Thursday, saying I think for CPD it would be silly of us not to acknowledge that some segments of the city have been treated differently than others. Acknowledging it, recognizing it, and putting something in place to guarantee that it doesnt continue happening moving forward, is where we have to be, he said. Changes are going to come, and sometimes its going to hurt a little bit. But its going to come. It appears the most beautiful church in the country is in Chicago. According to a recent report by the Art and Liturgy blog, run by Patrick Murray, a projects consultant for the Granda Liturgical Arts, the citys St. John Cantius church was voted as the most beautiful in America. The title was given to the church in a contest dubbed Church Madness 2016, a March Madness-style bracket challenge featuring 64 churches across the U.S. In total, 16,363 votes were cast, and St. John Cantius Church topped Salt Lake Citys Cathedral of the Madeleine. Murray said he started the competition not expecting much more than his typical 10 views per day, but the contest quickly took off and he was instead generating thousands of views per day. I never expected this thing to take off the way it did, but in hindsight, maybe I should have, Murray wrote. Our culture is starved for beauty. The very authentic and emotional response to all of these beautiful churches has been amazing, but not surprising. The church, in Chicagos River West neighborhood, said it was honored by the recognition it received. So many people to thank, the church tweeted. A real heartfelt thank you to to [sic] all of you who gave us such support. The Diocese of Salt Lake City also responded to the final results. What a fun contest and a great opportunity for outreach! they tweeted. Looking forward to next year. Murray plans to hold a Church Madness 2017 on March 19 next year. Prince was active on his Twitter feed until April 18 three days before his death despite fighting the flu, sending out social media missives about his "Piano & a Microphone" tour and his support for Record Store Day. His love for music, life, musicians and his friends are obvious from his prolific tweets, which he also used to interact with his fans, for whom he was nothing less than the coolest person in the galaxy. One of the last tweets from Princes Twitter account was an April 18 link to his personal curation of tracks; his Purple Pick of the Week was Black Sweat, an unreleased live version of his Grammy-nominated song from his 2006 album, 3121. On April 17, he tweeted out a photo of a Wrecka Stow Dress, saying With Fam Like this, you cant miss. Wrecka Stow was used by Prince to describe record stores in his directorial debut "Under The Cherry Moon." On April 16, Record Store Day, Prince tweeted out a photo of people enjoying a Paisley Park After Dark dance party at his recording studios at Paisley Park, Minnesota, the same place he was found dead Thursday. To give thanks for the good weather and for all the love and support, his tweet said. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that he made a less-than-5-minute appearance at the party to prove that he was doing fine, and at one point even summoned security to deal with a fan who took his picture. The fan was allowed to stay. His last tweet on 18th contained only a picture from his "Piano & a Microphone" tour and a link to the Electric Fetus, a Minneapolis record store. Fans, especially those in the Bay Area, loved Prince on Twitter, too. When he attended a March 4 Warriors game at the Oracle Arena in Oakland, many in the crowd tweeted out photos of the pop icon donning dark sunglasses, holding a cane and smiling from the sidelines. The pop music legend was in Oakland and San Francisco, first in February to perform at a pair of sold-out concerts at the Paramount Theatre, and then again for a surprise show at the Oracle Arena in March. He also showed up unannounced at the 1015 nightclub in San Francisco. But Prince wasn't simply to be held to express himself in 140 characters. About a month ago, Prince announced that he was going to publish a memoir, with the working title The Beautiful Ones, after a performance at a nightclub in New York City. "You all still read books, right?" he asked the crowd at the Manhattan club Avenue."We're starting right at the beginning from my first memory, and hopefully we can move all the way to the Super Bowl. We just started, we're going as quick as we can, working tirelessly." Twelve people have been wounded in shootings Wednesday on the South and West sides. The most recent attack happened about 5:15 p.m. in the South Austin neighborhood. A 19-year-old man was standing outside in the 200 block of South Lavergne when a light-colored van pulled up and several people got out with weapons, shooting the man in the foot as he tried to run away. He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where his condition was stabilized, police said. Half an hour earlier, a 27-year-old man was shot in the right knee while getting out of a vehicle in the 13100 block of South Champlain in the Riverdale neighborhood. He took himself to MetroSouth Medical Center in Blue Island, where he was listed in good condition, police said. At 4 p.m., two men, ages 19 and 22, were in the Austin neighborhoods 4900 block of West Walton when they each were shot in the buttocks. They showed up at West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park, where their conditions were stabilized, but they werent cooperating with investigators, police said. About 3:30 p.m., an 18-year-old man was on the Near West Side. He heard shots and felt pain in the arm in the 300 block of South Western Avenue, and then took himself to Mount Sinai, where he was listed in good condition, police said. Just after 3 p.m., two men were shot in West Englewood. The 20- and 25-year-old were on the front porch of a home in the 5600 block of South Wolcott when someone opened fire from a dark-colored car, police said. The older man was shot in the face and left leg, and the younger in the right leg. Both were taken to Stroger Hospital, where their conditions were stabilized, police said. About noon in Park Manor, a 24-year-old man walking in the 400 block of East 71st Street was shot by someone who jumped out of a gold vehicle and fired three shots, according to Chicago Police. The victim was shot in the left leg and taken to St. Bernard Hospital, where his condition was stabilized, police said. Two and a half hours earlier, another man was shot in the leg in the West Pullman neighborhood. The 23-year-old was shot in the left leg in the 500 block of West 119th Street at 9:18 a.m., police said. His condition was stabilized at the scene. About 7:15 a.m., a man was discovered shot in his vehicle in the Washington Heights neighborhood. A neighbor found the 45-year-old with a gunshot wound to the neck in the 9500 block of South Green Street, police said. He was taken in serious condition to Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn. The victim told investigators he had been shot the night before by an armed suspect during a robbery sometime the night before. About the same time, a 24-year-old man was shot in the leg in the North Lawndale neighborhood in the 1300 block of South Christiana, police said. He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where his condition stabilized. Wednesdays first shooting happened at 3:05 a.m. in the Marquette Park neighborhood on the Southwest Side. A 33-year-old man was standing on the corner in the 6300 block of South Richmond when someone opened fire from a passing vehicle, police said. He was shot in the arm and taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where his condition stabilized. Your vehicles air conditioner is supposed to keep you comfortable on demand. But a local driver said his car rides were getting warmer than usual. And he said the automaker refused to help until NBC 5 Responds got involved. Larry Necheles spends a lot of time behind the wheel of his 2013 Volkswagen Jetta. Necheles is an attorney who said he drives from his home in Pontiac to courts across the Chicago area at least three days a week. I put about 35,000 miles a year on the car, Necheles said. But Necheles said he did not expect his cars A/C to have problems so soon. It did not work at stoplights or at stop signs or when my foot was off the gas pedal, Necheles said. Necheles said his Jettas air conditioner only blasted cold air at highway speeds. He said he took his car to two VW dealers three times and that one of the quotes to replace the air conditioner compressor was close to $1000. However, Necheles said one of the mechanics suggested he may not be the only one experiencing the problem. He told me that he has been replacing compressors on Jettas on a regular basis, Necheles recalled. A Volkswagen spokesperson said there has been no recall or service campaign for 2013 Jetta air compressors. According to Necheles, he contacted Volkswagen corporate and offered a compromise. He said if VW supplied the part, he would pay the labor. They told me that they werent going to do anything for me, that the car had too many miles on it and that it was out of warranty, Necheles said. NBC 5 Responds asked VW what Necheles options would be. We also asked what the options would be for other consumers who bought used Jettas experiencing the same issue. Thats when VW agreed to replace Necheles air conditioner compressor at no charge, which they said has a value of about $800. The automaker said the retail cost might have been a couple hundred dollars more. Despite the vehicle having significantly higher mileage than average, weve extended goodwill to Mr. Necheles to cover the full cost of the AC compressor replacement, a spokesperson wrote to NBC 5 Responds. The repair means Necheles could drive in cool comfort, just in time for the warmer months. I get my new air conditioning compressor and I can see the breath in the air conditioning vents now, Necheles said. You guys fixed it for me. An automotive expert at Kelley Blue Book told NBC 5 Responds A/C compressors are designed to last the life of the vehicle. He said broken compressors could be leaking Freon or other lubricants. He urges consumers experiencing similar issues with newer cars to be honest with their car dealers and if need be, work their way up the corporate chain to try to get the item replaced. A young boy suffered an injury to his hand while running for cover Wednesday evening after shots were fired in his direction on Chicago's West Side, according to police. The incident occurred in the 1500 block of S Trumbull Ave in the city's Lawndale neighborhood around 7 p.m, police said. The 6-year-old child suffered a "small laceration" on his finger after an offender in a light-colored SUV exited the vehicle and fired shots in the boy's direction, according to police. Authorities say he was not shot, but was treated and released on the scene, according to a statement from Chicago Police. The suspect fled in an unknown direction, and no one is in custody as police continue to investigate. A Chicago city worker and deacon was brutally beaten while trying to help a woman being attacked by two men in the citys South Shore neighborhood. Police said the incident happened around noon Tuesday in the 7400 block of South Shore Drive. The 59-year-old man, Tony Gibson, was beaten by the womans alleged attackers, his leg broken in three places. He was helping a young lady who was getting jumped by some young men, said Gibsons wife Andrea. He got out of his car to help her and in the process he got injured himself. Andrea Gibson said the men were stomping her husband. He was only trying to help a young lady who was being robbed or whatever, she said. Tony Gibson, a Chicago city worker who has served as deacon at his church for 15 years, was in surgery Wednesday at a Harvey hospital. Police said they were still searching for his attackers. Gibsons family says he has a long road to recovery and will be unable to work for up to 6 months. They are searching for anyone who may have seen the attack or been involved in it to come forward. This is someones father, husband, grandfather, Andrea Gibson said. It could be anyone else. Details on the woman's condition was not immediately known. Interstate 57 was closed for several hours Thursday morning after another expressway shooting, this time claiming the life of a 39-year-old man. Illinois State Police said the driver was traveling southbound on I-57 in a Ford Fusion just before 10:30 p.m. when another car pulled up and someone inside opened fire. The man was shot in the head and lost control of the vehicle, causing the car to bounce against the concrete barrier on the right side of the road before spinning across all lanes of traffic before hitting the left side concrete barrier on the opposite end. No other passengers were in the vehicle at the time, police said. The driver was pronounced dead on the scene. State police have been ramping up patrols because of the escalating number of expressway shootings in recent years and the immediate danger they are to the public. The motive of the shooting is still unknown. No one is in custody. Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his new superintendent Eddie Johnson are preparing will outline a plan to reform the city's police department Thursday. Just days after getting a 190-page report from the accountability task force he appointed, Emanuel says he will put about 25 reforms in place immediately. Changes include holding more meetings with minority communities, expanding crisis intervention training for police officers on how to help those with mental illness, and conducting faster investigations into police wrongdoing, the Chicago Tribune reports. Mayor Emanuel has agreed to take immediate action on about one-third of the recommendations put together by a task force he assembled after the fallout from Laquan McDonalds shooting death at the hands of a Chicago police officer, according to the mayors office. Several reforms were previously announced, such as mandated Taser training for all responding officers by June 1, and expanding the departments use of body cameras. There are some of the task forces recommendations though that the mayor has no plans to act on, including getting rid of the independent police review authority, which is the agency that investigates police-involved shootings. It started with a woman in disguise demanding money at the counter of a Wolcott gas station, but ended with the clerk holding her down to the ground until police arrived. She tried to rob me once, youre not going anywhere, 26-year-old Mohamed Aburkhis said. Im gonna catch you and give you to the police. Wolcott Police are crediting Aburkhis, a clerk at the Shell gas station on Wolcott Road, with helping them arrest a robbery suspect Tuesday night. At first, Aburkhis said he was not alarmed when the robber in a hooded sweatshirt with her face covered walked into the store around 6:30 p.m. Not even paying attention to her, get out of here, he said, Until she started yelling. You cant tell its a woman anyways the way she was yelling. But then, Aburkhis said she made a gesture in her pocket like she was potentially armed with a gun. A store surveillance camera also captured the robber handing over a plastic bag. She said, give me all the money, all the money you have, Aburkhis said. But he did not turn over any cash. After the robber exited the store, Aburkhis chased her behind the store and tackled her to the ground. Moments after the takedown, a passerby called Wolcotts 911. Behind the Shell gas station, I need someone here now, the frantic caller said. I have someone pinned on the ground. The only time I was able to let her go was when police came in, she was fighting the whole time, kicking me, just trying to run away, Aburkhis said. Police identified the robbery suspect as 36-year-old Seana Malone. She is charged with first degree robbery, sixth degree criminal attempt at larceny and second degree breach of peace. Police say she has a criminal history. Were very lucky here, Wolcott Police Chief Edward Stephens said. If that in fact was a gun, wed talk about a different story here. I do not advise it, it did work out this time and we got the bad guy, nobody else got hurt. Now, other robbers know not to mess with the clerk at the Shell gas station on Wolcott Road. Why did you have that instinct to go after her? NBC Connecticut asked. I dont know, she tried to do that, Aburkhis said, I dont want her to go somewhere else. Turns out Aburkhis was actually armed with a gun the whole time, he said. Aburkhis' bond was set at $25,000. Donald Trump will be back in Connecticut this weekend. The Republican presidential candidate will be at the Crosby High School in Waterbury at 10 a.m. on Saturday. Doors will open at 7 a.m. Then, he is heading to Bridgeport on Saturday afternoon. He will be at the Klein Memorial Auditorium on Fairfield Avenue from 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m., city officials said. Thousands gathered last Friday in Hartford when Trump held a campaign rally. Fellow Republican candidate, Gov. John Kasich will be in Glastonbury on Friday, prior to Trump's visit. Hillary Clinton made her own campaign stop in Hartford today, where she discussed gun violence. She is also expected to come back to the state this weekend and visit Bridgeport. Bridgeport city officials said she will be attending a church service on Sunday morning, but no information was available on when or exactly where. Former president Bill Clinton might be going to Bridgeport on Friday night or Saturday, but no information was available on exactly when or where. According to the New Haven mayor, Bernie Sanders' campaign has reached out to the city about setting up a rally in the city, but nothing has been scheduled. Connecticut's primary is on April 26. Parents and teachers are in a panic after hearing that Bristol schools may close. "Our kids aren't going to get the education that they need. They're just going to get lost in the shuffle," said Danielle Holton. Holton's two kids attend Edgewood School, one of two the Board of Education discussed closing. The other school is Northeast Middle School. "I know you can't get blood from a stone. You can't get money from somewhere there isn't money to get, but I know there are other avenues," said Holton. While no layoffs have been specifically mentioned, the superintendent said if it becomes necessary, it would hopefully be through attrition, and that they're looking at all options to reduce costs. "We do have a list of teachers who are retiring this year. We hope when we're able to fill those positions, we fill them with new and recent graduates who have come out of our colleges and universities in Connecticut at perhaps a lower cost," said Superintendent Ellen Solek. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think I was going to hear schools were going to close, and that just can't happen guys," said Bristol Board of Finance Chair Cheryl Thibeault to the BOE during Wednesday night's special meeting. Parents and teachers packed the meeting to hear the back and forth between the two groups. The BOE says it's facing a $3.2 million shortfall and that without help, it may come down to gutting programs or consolidating schools. Mayor Ken Cockayne says he's not buying it. "It's a bully tactic. Let's get everyone amped up and scared, and all that did really was upset the teachers, parents, and students. Nothing productive came out of that," said the Mayor. BOE members disagreed with that assessment saying that they've cut as much as they can over the years. They say they've been underfunded for years, and the teachers' union agrees. "We are 192 out of 200 districts when it comes to being ranked for per pupil funding, so we're right near the bottom," said Bristol Federation of Teachers President David Hayes. While the answers will be far from easy, at the end of Wednesday night's meeting, many left optimistic that middle ground can be found and no schools will be closed. "I was very glad [the Board of Finance] alluded to meeting in the middle, to coming closer for what is a fairly significant funding gap," said Superintendent Solek. "I'm a father. I have a son in the school system. No one wants to see the school closed, and as the mayor, I'm not going to let a school close," said Mayor Cockayne. The original timetable to adopt the city budget was May 16th, but it seems likely that will get pushed back. The next Board of Finance meeting is Tuesday and the public will have time to comment. On Friday, Police identified the victim as 16 year-old Amy Joyner-Francis Students at a Wilmington, Delaware high school will return to school in mourning on Friday after a fight in a school bathroom left a 16-year-old student dead Thursday morning. The teen, a sophomore from New Castle whose name has not been released, was involved in a fight with two fellow students Howard High School of Technology, which is part of the New Castle County Vocational Technical School District, about 8:15 a.m. that morning, school officials said. She suffered injuries serious enough that she had to be airlifted to a nearby hospital, where she later died with her parents by her side. Students from the school have said that they believe the fight was over a boy. "A lot of families were destroyed today," Wilmington Mayor Dennis Williams said. City spokeswoman Alexandra Coppadge said there was a confrontation in the women's restroom at Howard High. "Several female students were involved in a physical altercation at approximately 8:15 a.m. this morning, in a main floor girls bathroom, just at the time classes began for the day," the school district said in a statement hours after the attack. Police said in a statement that officers were called to the high school around 8:20 a.m. Later Thursday afternoon, police said a school resource officer called EMS at 8:18 a.m. for a student with head and stomach pain, and within minutes, the call became a CPR in progress. Police said the girl had been flown to A.I. DuPont Children's Hospital in critical condition. An autopsy will be performed Friday and the investigation into the cause of death remains open. Students who knew about the fight said it stemmed from a dispute over a boy. Shauntea Bellamy cried as he sat outside the school after learning of the student's death. He worked with her as part of youth outreach programs and said she was set to volunteer in a summer program he organizes. "It hurts when you know her personally and she's not one of my students who are out there in the streets like that," he said. Williams said police were interviewing suspects Thursday evening, but didn't elaborate about whether arrests would be made. State agencies will help provide support for those affected by the tragedy, Gov. Jack Markell said in a statement. Students were surprised to hear about the girl's death saying the school is not known for being a trouble spot. Records show there have been 14 reported fights there last school year. Williams called the fight an isolated incident. School was dismissed Thursday and officials had not determined yet whether classes would be held Friday, officials said. Friends of the girl held a vigil in her memory outside the school Thursday night. Friends of a high school sophomore who died suddenly after a fight inside a Wilmington, Delaware high school gathered outside the school Thursday night to mourn her death. A mayoral debate on public safety scheduled to take place at the school Thursday night was canceled. Students will return to school on Friday. Ted Cruz probably wishes he missed the phone call. Jimmy Fallon brought back his Donald Trump impression Thursday night on "The Tonight Show" and decided to give his opponent, Cruz, a little bit of help ahead of the Canadian-born politician's visit to the late-night series. Little did Trump know that he would be interrupting Cruz while he was relaxing with his favorite movie. "I'm watching 'The Princess Bride' for the 843rd time," Cruz told Trump. But the real estate mogul decided he wanted to help his political enemy out by giving him some test questions that he felt host Fallon might ask. "Thank you for being the bigger man," Cruz said. "Oh I'm the bigger man with bigger hands," Trump responded, pausing to look down at his private parts. "You can't see me, but I'm pointing at my Trump Tower." Fallon's "Trump" first asked Cruz how he managed to win all the delegates from Colorado without having a primary. "I think the people of Colorado did vote, but they were so high they completely forgot, and let's face it, anyone that high definitely voted for me," Trump said in response to Cruz's explanation. "Let's face it, I won Colorado." The next topic the two politicos tackled was immigration. Cruz said he wanted to "end" President Barack Obama's amnesty and secure the border once and for all, or, as Trump said, "Once and for wall." He continued, "Law spelled backwards is wal." Afterwards they discussed Cruz's infamous comment about "New York values," which left a bad taste in many New Yorkers' mouths. "I'm not going to pander to New Yorkers. I love New York City. It's the greatest city in the world," Cruz explained to Trump, "so when I said 'New York values' I was merely trying to say that I value New York. Except I was saying it backwards the way Yoda would say it." "I love Yoda," Trump shared. "I watch her every morning with Kathie Lee [Gifford]. It's fantastic." "And they loving whining almost as much as you do, Donald," Cruz joked, referencing Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee's penchant for wine. Finally, Trump decided to give Cruz some tips and asked him to get a pen so he could write them down. Instead of grabbing a pen, however, Cruz grabbed an alcoholic beverage. Watch the clip to find out just how Cruz and Trump ended their friendly phone call. (E! and NBC are both part of the NBCUniversal family.) PHOTOS: Donald Trump cameos in movies and on TV PHOTOS: Celebs name their 2016 presidential race picks Dallas leaders are promoting burglar bar safety after the fire death of a neighborhood political leader on her own front porch. Johnnye Hughes died April 6, locked behind the bars she had for crime protection. Neighbors in the 2300 block of Blue Creek Drive said they could hear her screaming for help but could not reach her in the heavy flames and smoke. "Many people not just in that area, throughout the city still have those burglar bars," said Dallas City Councilman Casey Thomas. The councilman set up a burglar bar safety meeting to be held Wednesday night. "We're going to have a community conversation about what we can do to be proactive so we don't have another situation like Ms. Johnnye Hughes," Thomas said. Dallas Police, Fire and code enforcement officials will attend the meeting with information about modern burglar bar escape features that allow emergency exit. "People have to feel safe, and if that's what it takes for them to feel safe, I can understand that. But what we want to do, we want to partner," Thomas said. The councilman said city officials will promote neighborhood watch and other police crime prevention programs to boost security. "Let's have them partner with the police department to make them feel safe to where they don't feel the need to have those burglar bars," he said. The meeting is from 6 to 8 p.m. Wednesday at Zumwalt Middle School, 2445 East Ledbetter Drive, around the corner from the fire scene. WASHINGTON Visiting justices from Canadas high court sat in on Mondays immigration arguments before the Supreme Court and after their 90-minute education in the current state of American jurisprudence, our neighbors to the north would be forgiven if they had fantasies of building a border wall of their own. The Senates refusal to confirm a replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia has left the U.S. high court evenly split and increasingly paralyzed. As the justices heard arguments about President Obamas executive actions on illegal immigration, there were really only two possible results: chaos or more chaos. A divided Congress couldnt agree on legislation to deal with the 11 million immigrants here illegally. Obama tried to do something on his own use his executive authority to defer deportation of parents of children who are American citizens and the rift grew deeper. Texas, supported by 25 other states, most led by Republican governors, sued. Sixteen other states and the District of Columbia filed briefs on the other side. The GOP-led U.S. House sued as well, but 186 members of the House and 39 senators (virtually the entire Democratic caucus) filed opposing briefs. Now the Supreme Court has to rule on Obamas DAPA policy (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans). But with no expectation that the justices can reach agreement on the merits of the case, that leaves two options: Chief Justice John Roberts joins the liberals in dismissing the case on a technicality that Texas doesnt have standing in court. This would leave it unclear whether DAPA is legal and set off confusion in the country as other entities try to file suit and the administration tries to enforce its legally ambiguous policy. Or, the justices come to a 4-to-4 tie on the merits of the case, and even greater chaos ensues. An appellate ruling invalidating the law stands, at least in part of the country. Cases will be brought in other circuits, probably causing different views of the law to arise in different parts of the country. With either of these two possibilities you have chaos about whether DAPA is legal or not, says Neal Katyal, the Supreme Court litigator with Hogan Lovells who filed a brief in the case from former immigration officials supporting the administration. The current confusion, following the 4-to-4 split in an important labor case, is another indication that the Supreme Court is struggling to function. The justices have granted only three cases since Scalia died, according to a list kept by the court, a figure Supreme Court watchers say is extraordinarily low. Theyre tending away from deciding much, and when they do reach decision, it is often a very narrow ruling, Katyal tells me. On Monday, the justices seemed split down the middle, both on the merits of the case and the question of standing. Roberts said Texas position, that it would lose money because it would have to issue drivers licenses to those aided by Obamas order, was the classic case for standing, and he accused the administration of putting Texas in a Catch-22. Justice Anthony Kennedy, too, said that the policy was being done backwards and upside down and that the decision should be a legislative, not an executive, act. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor ridiculed the claim that the executive orders would have a negative economic impact on Texas. Those nearly 11 million unauthorized aliens are here in the shadows they are affecting the economy whether we want to or not, she said. If Congress really wanted not to have an economic impact, it would allot the amount of money necessary to deport them, but it hasnt. Nobody disputed that the administration has the discretion to defer action on certain illegal immigrants. What disturbed lawyers for the House and for Texas was that those who receive such deferred action are, under long-standing federal law, eligible to apply for authorization to work based on economic need, even though they dont have legal status. Erin Murphy, representing the House, said flatly that Congress has passed a statute that says if you are living in this country without legal authority, you cannot work. But Donald Verrilli, the administrations solicitor general, pointed out that, even without DAPA, there are millions of people who dont have legal status but legally work in the United States. They would be out of luck and out of work under the law as the House Republican majority would like it to be interpreted. Tossing millions from their jobs would cause chaos. But chaos is what you get when you sideline the Supreme Court. A two-alarm apartment fire Thursday afternoon in northeast Dallas started when rice was accidentally left unattended, fire investigators say.[[376626371,R]] Dallas Fire Rescue was called shortly before 3 p.m. to a fire at the Ivanhoe Apartments on the 8800 block of Park Lane, west of the intersection with Abrams Road. By then, the fire had spread to several residences on the second floor, fire officials say. Officials said a resident left rice cooking on the stove when he received an urgent phone call and left home, forgetting about the food. No injuries were reported in the fire. About 38 people were displaced due to the smoke and water damage, as well as the need for electricity to the building to be shut off. The American Red Cross has been notified to assist those people. A search warrant released by the Midlothian Police Department Thursday says fitness instructor Missy Bevers died of a head wound. Meanwhile, investigators in the North Texas city have seized her pickup truck in hopes of finding a clue that leads to her killer. Terri "Missy" Bevers, 45, arrived at the Creekside Christian Church at about 4 a.m. Monday to prepare for her early-morning Camp Gladiator fitness class. When her students arrived at 5 a.m., they found her unresponsive. Officials later declared her dead after finding signs of a struggle and evidence of forced entry, police began investigating her death as a homicide. A review of surveillance video recorded inside the church revealed the presence of another person inside an hour before Bevers' arrival. The person was described as wearing black, police-like clothing. Police originally thought the person was a man, but backed away from that assertion Tuesday afternoon. In the search warrant dated April 18, police said Bevers was "deceased from a head wound" and that the person in the video "used an unknown instrument to cause the death of Terri Bevers at this location." The Dallas County medical examiner completed an autopsy on Bevers Tuesday, but police are not releasing her specific cause of death citing the ongoing investigation. By withholding that information, police said they retain a strategic advantage in the investigation. The warrant instructed police to take custody of Bevers' 2012 Ford F-150 pickup truck. Inside the vehicle, police said they could see Bevers' purse, an iPad and other personal effects. Police said they hope to find clues inside the truck that lead them to the woman's killer. On Wednesday, Midlothian police said their investigation was being assissted by the Texas Rangers, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Search Warrant [[376598621,C]] NBC 5's Jocelyn Lockwood contributed to this report. Police and Dallas city leaders joined hip hop music artists and community leaders at City Hall Wednesday to launch #ThinkB4UThug. Hip Hop artist Terrance Watkins, who uses the stage name T Cash, said he came up with the idea of a #ThinkB4UThug campaign in response to the recent surge in Dallas murder and violent crime. Weve got to think this out, and this is the beginning of making thinking cool again, Watkins said. Police officers attended the City Hall press conference along with City Council Members Erik Wilson and Casey Thomas. The mother of a recent Dallas murder victim praised the community based effort to avoid future tragedies. Shokee Clay said her 21-yearold son Taydren Young was killed March 17th in a double murder on Forest Lane in Dallas. Young Family Photos Clay said police have arrested one suspect but more people were involved. Im not going to stop until they are all arrested, she said. Im not going to be quiet, and Im not going to stop. Watkins said hip hop music sometimes glamorizes violence and sends a bad message. Thats why weve got an alternative to whats going on. Weve got positive music and music that has a high vibration, Watkins said. Watkins said his group is promoting accountability for personal action and not blaming others. You look in the mirror and you can make that change, and say think before you thug. Before we make our move, we get up in the morning, were thinking better. Youre making better decisions. Thats what this is about. Think before you thug, he said. Dallas Police will help promote #ThinkB4UThug with upcoming community events. More: T Case on Facebook A line intense thunderstorms moved through North Texas early Thursday, bringing heavy rain, high wind and lightning. The storm moved east into the area at about 2 a.m., landing in Fort Worth at about 3 a.m. By 5:30 a.m., the strongest storms had passed through the area. Flooding and high water were reported in several areas and the National Weather Service issued a Flood Warning for most of North Texas until Friday. Johnson County officials say overnight storms had little effect on the roads Thursday. Despite the overnight storms, Johnson County Emergency Management officials said there were no new road closures due to rain. As of late Wednesday night, 16 roads were still closed due to high water. Officials also said they only had one high-water rescue all week. Oncor reported 336 Dallas County customers and 482 Tarrant County customers without power as of 8 a.m. Overnight rain adds to flooding issues in Wise County, where drivers have been affected by high water since Wednesday. Thursday morning's storm should be the last batch in the area until Sunday night, according to NBC 5 Chief Meteorologist David Finfrock. Whenever active weather moves into DFW, you can keep up with it by downloading the NBC DFW APP! S Band Radar & Maps | Forecast | Weather Alerts Traffic | Send Us a Photo/Video | Live Cams The North Texas mother whose body was found inside a parked SUV days after she was reported missing died from suicide, officials say. The Collin County Medical Examiner's Office said Christine Woo died due to an overdose. Woo, 39, was found dead March 31 in her 2011 Honda Pilot in the parking lot of the Target store on the 8900 block of Texas 121 at Custer Road. She and her children had been reported missing three days prior. Frisco police determined there was no deliberate plan by Woo to harm her three children, who were found alive in the vehicle. Authorities have said the children ages 1, 3 and 5 were examined at a hospital and appeared to be well. Further information on their condition was not released. Texas Child Protective Services is involved in the case, according to Frisco police. Hundreds of people contact NBC 5 Responds for consumer help each week and, so far, we have gotten more than $87,000 back for our viewers. Many of the complaints concern residential service companies, which provide home warranties. Francine Willard wrote us because her home warranty company refused to repair or replace her broken microwave. After NBC 5 Responds contacted the company, Willard received a check for $350. Lisa Trotter also was having trouble with her residential service company after her air conditioner stopped working. "We were sitting in the house, and my husband goes, 'This air is not blowing cold,'" she said. Trotter had an issue with a different home warranty company that refused to fix her air conditioner. After NBC 5 Responds contacted the company, they promised to make it right. Two weeks later, the company paid for a new air conditioner and installation worth $3,576.00. If you have an issue with a residential service company, you can reach out to the Texas Real Estate Commission the agency that regulates them at 512-936-3000 or www.trec.state.tx.us. The commission has a special ombudsman who you can reach at 512-936-3049 or information@trec.texas.gov. They typically respond within 12 to 24 hours. The ombudsman will reach out to the companies for you before you file a complaint. You can also file a complaint with the commission. The commission also has a wealth of information about companies, and FAQs you should know before choosing one. Amidst mounting criticism for child deaths in the state, the head of Family and Protective Services in Texas took hours of questioning from a State Senate committee, Wednesday. Commissioner John Specia Jr. went before the Health and Human Services committee to discuss what needs to be done to better serve families and improve Child Protective Services (CPS). Frustrated workers leave, said Specia. If you can't go home and sleep at night because you're worried about people on your case load, then you find something else to do. According to Specia, CPS has struggled to attract and retain case workers who are willing to take on high workloads while making low salaries. In Texas, a case worker earns approximately $32,000, while a case investigator makes $36,000. My job is hard, Specia told lawmakers. It's not anywhere close to as hard as any worker out there doing investigations in child abuse. Due to the turnover, many employees are juggling more cases than is typically recommended. CPS recently came under intense scrutiny following the death Leiliana Wright, 4, from Grand Prairie. Wright died in March from blunt force trauma at the hands of her mother and a boyfriend, according to police. An internal review prompted a special investigator with the agency to resign, while two other employees were fired. According to The Dallas Morning News, one of the case workers on Wrights case was dealing with approximately 70 cases when he was assigned to Wright. "I have to admit I'm stunned that we don't know how long it takes to handle an 'average case,'" said Sen. Van Taylor, R-District 8. Specia explained they are studying the issue at the agency. He believes the recommended case load would likely range between 12-16 cases per person. You have funding for new cases workers. It's just that you cannot recruit them and maintain them, said committee chairman, Sen. Charles Schwertner, R-District 5. Over the last two legislative sessions, Specia agreed that the lawmakers had allocated significantly more funding for the agency. However, the financial support does not diminish the number of cases agency workers are being required to maintain. Specia argued that is leading to turnover rates, which are as high as 54 percent in North Texas. In some ways, the demands of the workers keep growing, Specia said, But the number of workers don't. We fail them when their case loads are too high, and we don't give them the resources to do their job. Training a CPS case worker costs the state approximately $54,000. Given how many end up leaving the agency, Sen. Carlos Uresti suggested they consider raising the salary to entice workers to stay. It's millions of dollars we're spending every year to train these caseworkers. Even if we lower that turnover rate by 5 percent, 7 percent, we will save money, said Uresti. And more importantly, we will save kids' lives. Specia will be retiring from his position May 1. Lawmakers thanked him for his service to children in the state, a cause Specia said he will continue even after his departure. The commissioner is one of five people overseeing and working for the agency who have announced plans to retire or resign in recent weeks. A 14-year-old boy is in custody after allegedly trying to sexually assault a jewelry store employee Wednesday, Dallas police say. The teen entered the Jewelry Galore store in the 9200 block of E.R.L. Thornton Freeway, near Buckner Boulevard, just after 11 a.m., police said. He then wrapped his arm around the female employee's neck and threatened her with a large kitchen knife while attempting to sexually assault her, according to police. She pleaded for him not to and offered him money from the register. The teen stole the money and fled the store, police said. The employee was not injured in the attack. Officers spotted the teen walking nearby with a gun which turned out to be a BB gun in his hand. The teen was arrested and charged with aggravated robbery of a business and attempted sexual assault. Police said they searched the teen's backpack and found a second BB gun, the large kitchen knife, money from the store and a roll of duct tape. Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump said Thursday that abolitionist Harriet Tubman is "fantastic" but she shouldn't replace former President Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill. He cited "pure political correctness" for the Treasury Department's decision to feature the African-American abolitionist who was born into slavery and led the Underground Railroad instead of the nation's seventh president, a slave owner. Speaking on NBC's "Today" show, Trump said Tubman's likeness should go on a different denomination. "Well Andrew Jackson had a great history and I think it's very rough when you take somebody off the bill," Trump said. "Andrew Jackson had a history of tremendous success for the country." He suggested that "maybe we do the $2 bill" or something else for Tubman. The currency redesign announced Wednesday by Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, marks two historic milestones: Tubman will become the first African-American on U.S. currency and the first woman to be depicted on paper money in 100 years. "This gesture sends a powerful message, because of the tendency in American history, the background of excluding women and marginalizing them as national symbols," Riche Richardson, associate professor in the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University told The Associated Press. "So even the symbolic significance of this cannot be overstated." Jeremiah Trotter (54) during the game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Houston Texans at Reliant Stadium in Houston, Texas on Sunday, September 10th, 2006. (Photo by Hunter Martin/NFLPhotoLibrary) Lew also settled a backlash that had erupted after he had announced an initial plan to remove Alexander Hamilton from the $10 bill in order to honor a woman on the bill. Trump echoed others who have said the Broadway show "Hamilton" saved the nation's first treasury secretary from being booted from that bill. Instead, the Treasury building on the back of the bill will be changed to commemorate a 1913 march that ended on the steps of the building. It will also feature suffragette leaders Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Alice Paul. The back of the $20, which now shows the White House, will be redesigned to include the White House and Jackson, whose statute stands across the street in Lafayette Park. [NATL] Highlights From the 2016 Campaign Trail The $5 bill will also undergo change: The illustration of the Lincoln Memorial on the back will be redesigned to honor "events at the Lincoln Memorial that helped to shape our history and our democracy." The back of the bill will include civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., along with Marian Anderson and Eleanor Roosevelt. Wednesday's announcement helped mark a decades-long decline in the reputation of Jackson, once a pillar of the modern Democratic Party but now often defined by his ownership of slaves and the "Trail of Tears" saga that forcibly removed American Indians from their land. Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Bill John Baker said in a statement that the currency move was a "small but meaningful vindication" for Native Americans. [NATL] Top News Photos: Pope Visits Japan, and More The last woman featured on U.S. paper money was Martha Washington, who was on a dollar silver certificate from 1891 to 1896. The only other woman ever featured on U.S. paper money was Pocahontas, from 1865 to 1869. Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea are on dollar coins. Catholic school children in Los Angeles are stepping up to help those devastated by a massive earthquake that killed more than 500 people in Ecuador on Saturday. The Missionary Childhood Association, part of the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese, kicked off their "Aid for Ecuador" campaign in the Westlake District on Thursday. Students at Our Lady of Loretto Elementary School challenged kids across Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties to help raise money for the earthquake relief effort in Ecuador. The magnitude-7.8 quake struck Ecuador's Pacific coastline Saturday. The government put the death toll at 553 on Wednesday but officials expected more bodies to be found. At least 100 people remain missing and another 4,600 injured. Students at Lorreto said they want to be an example for other kids to show that they can help their brothers and sisters many miles away. "We're trying to raise enough money for Ecuador, " said 6th grader Jada Badareen. "For the people who have died and lost their families, rebuild their houses, give them money to continue to live." The "Aid for Ecuador" fund-raising campaign, organized by the Archdiocese's Mission Office, is expected to include about 80,000 Catholic elementary and secondary school children and religious education students through May 6. An anonymous donor has offered to match each dollar raised up to $100,000 in the campaign. Click here to find out how you can help quake victims in Ecuador. The following editorial appeared in the Washington Post: We usually do not complain when a commonly used consumer item gets cheaper, but first-class postage presents a bit of a special case. The sudden 2-cent drop in price, from 49 cents to 47 cents, makes a mockery of the Forever label on the stamps many people bought at the higher price, thinking their indefinite validity would hedge against future price hikes. Little did they know! More important for the stability of the already distressed U.S. Postal Service, the price cut represents a financial blow, estimated at $2 billion per year. Stamps went up to 49 cents in January 2014, pursuant to a Postal Regulatory Commission ruling intended to help the Postal Service recover from the Great Recession. However, the increase was considered exigent and thus temporary large-scale postal customers had lobbied heavily against it and it could be made permanent only by an act of Congress. A bill to do that, as well as relieve some of USPSs structural health care cost burden and change its pricing system, is pending in a Senate committee. On a deeper level, this setback to the Postal Service is a vivid reminder of the institutional dysfunction that led to its predicament. USPS, we are often told, is supposed to run like a business. How many businesses have to go through a federal commission, or Congress, for permission to set prices on their bread-and-butter product, which is what first-class mail is for the Postal Service? Tied down like Gulliver by regulators and congressional barons, relentlessly lobbied by everyone from the greeting card industry to rural newspapers, contractually hamstrung by powerful labor unions, the Postal Services management lacks the autonomy necessary to run the system efficiently. It is a classic case of responsibility without authority.... Unable to do much of anything else, USPS has asked the regulatory commission to clarify how broad its upcoming mandatory review of the pricing system will be. The obvious implication is that USPS needs a complete overhaul if it is to survive. As Postmaster General Megan J. Brennan said in February, the current system is unworkable and should be replaced with a system that provides greater pricing flexibility and better reflects the economic challenges facing the Postal Service. We wish we could be more optimistic about the chances that this eminently sensible appeal will bear fruit. Former WWE star Chyna was found dead in her Redondo Beach, California, home on Wednesday, her manager confirmed to NBC4. Joan Marie Laurer, known by her stage name Chyna and described as the "Ninth Wonder of the World," died at the age of 46, her manager Anthony Anzaldo said. A friend arrived at Laurer's home in Redondo Beach and called 911 after she found that she was not breathing, Redondo Beach police said. Laurer's friend said she went to her apartment to check on her because she had not answered her phone in a few days. Police said it appeared that Laurer was dead before her friend arrived, according to preliminary investigation. "There are no indications or signs that the death was a result of foul play," the Redondo Beach Police Department said in a statement. Her death was still under investigation. An autopsy is scheduled for sometime in the next few days. The 6-foot tall star rose to fame in 1997 as the WWE's "Ninth Wonder of the World." She broke barriers wrestling against male competitors. "She was truly a pioneer in our industry, and she will be missed," Stephanie McMahon, wner and executive with WWE, tweeted. Laurer wasn't afraid to "blaze her own trail and create a path for those who would follow," Triple H, whose real name is Paul Levesque, said on Twitter. "A pioneer whose star shined bright. (hash)RIPChyna." Laurer was a native of Rochester, New York, and graduated from the University of Tampa in Florida in 1992 before taking up wrestling after a series of different jobs. She was born Dec. 27, 1969, and online biographies that listed her age as 45 were incorrect, her manager told NBC. She joins a long list of WWE professional wrestlers who have died relatively young, including Rick Rude, Curt "Mr. Perfect" Hennig, the Ultimate Warrior and Owen Hart. After leaving the WWE in 2001, Laurer posed for Playboy and appeared in adult films and on reality TV, including the shows "The Surreal Life" and "Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew." She was also was an avid animal rights advocate. The WWE, meanwhile, posted a statement saying the organization was saddened to learn of her passing. "A physically striking and talented performer, Chyna was a true sports-entertainment pioneer. Not only was the Superstar dubbed 'The Ninth Wonder of the World' a founding member of the groundbreaking faction D-Generation X, but she also holds the distinction of being the first woman to enter the Royal Rumble Match and the first and only woman to win the Intercontinental Championship," the statement said. The news was also shared on Chyna's official Twitter account. I just heard the tragic news that @ChynaJoanLaurer has passed. She was truly a pioneer in our industry, and she will be missed. #RIPChyna Stephanie McMahon (@StephMcMahon) April 21, 2016 Devastated over Chyna passing,she dated Brutus years before wrestling,such a beautiful soul and so kind to my children,rip Joanie love u. HH Hulk Hogan (@HulkHogan) April 21, 2016 Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly listed Laurer's age when she died. A deaf man from Los Angeles is accused of orchestrating a "confidence scheme" to swindle three other deaf people out of nearly half a million dollars, leading to his arrest and a search for more possible victims, police said Thursday. A victim came forward to police last week claiming Hussein Ibrahaim Dheini had borrowed money for a business venture but never paid it back, and pressured him for even more cash, the Los Angeles Police Department said in a news release. Two additional victims came forward with similar stories about Dheini, though the sum of their losses was smaller than the first victim's, police said. LAPD Det. Tracey Angeles said in the release that Dheini, who is fluent in American Sign Language, "preyed on fellow deaf persons" by taking "advantage of their trust and goodwill" to scam them out of almost half a million dollars. Dheini, 37, was arrested Wednesday when detectives served a search warrant at his home in the 9400 block of Corbin Avenue in Northridge. He was booked on a robbery charge because he allegedly put the first victim under duress and fear. His bail was set at $50,000. According to police, Dheini is a Lebanese national in the U.S. on an expired student visa. Police ask potential victims or anyone else with information to call LAPD robbery detectives at 818-374-7740. For more than 28 years, Sing Yam has worked seven days a week, 365 days a year and nearly 24 hours straight to keep her little doughnut shop in West Covina afloat. But as she sees it, the might of a national chain could change everything. "Like a big lion come and bite the little one," she says of her personal story of David and Goliath, as she looks across her counter and into a now empty parking lot. It's is in that lot in 2017 that Dunkin Donuts plans to open its newest Southern California location. "My heart dropped," she says. "I cried. I literally cried and couldn't sleep." She says she's seen customers grow into adults and families grow, too. "They're going to school now, they're graduating from high school, going to college, have their own kids and they bring their own kids over," she says. West Covina City Manager Chris Freeland says the Rainbow Donut shop makes up one of the majority of businesses in the city. "Small businesses are actually our bread and butter," Freeland says. "We have 2,300 business in West Covina, 2,200 are classified as small businesses." But Freeland says the city doesn't have the right to tell businesses where to operate. He says the city makes available to prospective businesses a booklet of potential locations. "We gave them a list of every single shopping center in West Covina," he says. Dunkin' Donuts chose the South Hills Plaza, across the parking lot from Yam's Rainbow Donuts. In a statement from Dunkin Donuts, the company says it works hard with local franchise owners to find the perfect location that can succeed for their business. Daniele Natola sent the following statement to NBC4 on the upcoming opening of the store along with Baskin Robbins: "We're looking forward to the opening of the new Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins restaurant in West Covina, which will be owned and operated by our franchisees Danny and Coby Sonenshine, brothers who are local businesspeople based in Southern California. The new restaurant will serve all of the delicious menu items guests know and love from Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins, including hot and iced coffee, lattes, sandwiches, doughnuts and ice cream, all with our brands' signature fast and friendly service. Danny and Coby are looking forward to serving the West Covina community, and we hope the new restaurant becomes an important part of the daily lives of the people who live and work there. We work closely with our local franchisees to select the best sites for their restaurants, taking into account a range of factors including local demographics, traffic and the proximity to places where residents live, work and shop." City officials say the company and the property managers are responsible for the plan to bring in the doughnut chain. The property was recently purchased by Hong Kong-based LT Global Investment in 2014. A representative of the company says they renegotiated Rainbow Donut's lease earlier this year and has been in constant contact with the shop about what's to come in the future. The full statement from the property manager is attributed to Wei Huang, vice president of LTG South Hills Plaza: "We're passionate about the success of all of our tenants and are committed to helping them grow. Our goal is to provide spaces that attract quality businesses that benefit the local community. That's why we believe there is market demand for both of these restaurants to thrive as each offers a unique customer experience. We've listened intently to Rainbow's concerns and will continue to help them and all tenants attract new customers. We have also worked with the family-owned franchisee of the Dunkin Donuts to understand their goals when they open about one year from now. Following these discussions, it's clear to us that both can bring value and benefit to the local community." But Yam isn't as optimistic about what the future holds with two doughnut shops in one shopping center that is nearly half-empty of its businesses. "That's why more and more small businesses get chased out of the shopping center, because they cannot survive," she says. Her customers have come to support her. Dozens filed through in the late morning Wednesday to sign a petition to the city in the hopes plans to move forward could be reconsidered. The City Manager says there could still be time as Dunkin Donuts has yet to submit its plan for the new building. And when that happens, residents will have a chance to voice their opposition during planning commission meetings. In the meantime, an NBC4 viewer tweeted a response to our story to point out that the Dunkin Donuts location in Whittier is also in the same parking lot of a smaller, local doughnut shop called JK Donuts. An employee at JK says they have not been affected by the chain shop saying, "We aren't worried because our doughnuts are better." A 23-year veteran postal carrier was pepper-sprayed in what Pasadena police were calling a possible road rage attack Wednesday. Police were searching for the woman who attacked her. YWCA workers came to the woman's aid after what she called an unprovoked attack as she delivered mail at 10:30 a.m. on Lake Street. "We started hearing shouting out on the front street," Jessica Kubel, who works at the YWCA, said. "The shouting got louder and more aggressive with a lot of really awful racial slurs." Kubel said she went out to the patio area of the YWCA, and was shocked. "She's covered with something and she's burning and we are all starting to cough all of a sudden. She's saying, 'she sprayed me,'" Kubel said. Kubel and fellow co-workers acted quickly to help the postal worker. "We have some milk in our youth room for after school we used to rinse the pepper spray out of her face, and called 911," Kubel said. Kubel managed to snap a few pictures of the car the accused attacker was driving in before the woman took off. "While we were out there, the woman who pepper sprayed her was still yelling and screaming at us," Kubel said. She handed the photos over to the police, who are now looking for a late-model white pickup truck and the woman in her 50s with dark-colored hair and wearing a black shirt or blouse. Police said the woman suspected in the attack followed the 55-year-old female carrier after she felt the postal worker "cut her off" at the intersection of Mar Vista Avenue and Claremont Street. She followed her to the 1000 block of Lake Avenue, in front of the YWCA, to confront her about the traffic incident, and began yelling at the postal worker. The US Post Service released a statement, reminding the public that assault on a postal worker is a federal crime. "The safety and well-being of its employees is paramount to the U.S. Postal Service," the agency said in a statement about the incident. Pasadena Police and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, a federal law enforcement agency, are investigating. "As a woman who works for an organization that is all about eliminating racism and empowering women it is pretty shocking to have this happen in front of our building," Kubel said. "Hopefully they catch the woman who did this to her." Police on Wednesday were searching for the gunmen involved in car-to-car shooting that left two dead in San Bernardino. The driver of a car was fatally shot at 3:30 p.m. and crashed into a shed at a home at 29th Street and Pershing. A second person died at a hospital. Investigators say someone in another car began shooting at another car. It's unclear if anyone in that car fired back. Residents are angry and frightened because they were homicides number 21 and 22 since the beginning of the year. "Everybody is tired of this," said Jesse Alcantar. The Louis Armstrong House Museum has acquired the only known film footage of the great jazz musician in a recording studio following its discovery in a storage facility. The 33-minute, 16mm film captures Armstrong recording his 1959 album "Satchmo Plays King Oliver" in Los Angeles for Audio Fidelity. The record producer, Sid Frey, had the film professionally shot but wound up not doing anything with it or telling anyone about it. Michael Cogswell, the museum's executive director, called it "a groundbreaking discovery." The museum announced the acquisition Wednesday. "The film has spent the past six decades in private hands or in a storage locker. Not even the most diligent Armstrong researchers knew it existed," he said. Frey's daughter, Andrea Bass, who helped the museum acquire the film, said she first learned about its existence in a chat room discussion of her father's company. Frey, the founder and president of Audio Fidelity, was known in the industry as "Mr. Stereo" for being the first to release a commercially distributed stereo recording, she said. He died in 1968. Bass said that after their mother passed in 2005, her sister placed the Audio Fidelity tapes, films, albums and personal family items in a storage facility unbeknownst to her. "People were always asking me where the masters were," said Bass, a former marketing director. "I went on one of these message boards about Audio Fidelity and someone said 'I have the masters.'" It turned out to be a person who buys the contents of abandoned storage facilities. Bass said she was unable at that time to purchase the Louis Armstrong material, but the man contacted her again six months ago, and this time they struck a deal. The film's recording session was made just after Armstrong appeared on Bing Crosby's television special. It shows a relaxed Armstrong in a short-sleeved plaid shirt and shorts blowing his trumpet and singing with his All Stars band. He looks healthy despite a heart attack a few months earlier. The film opens with two complete takes of "I Ain't Got Nobody." After the first attempt, Armstrong signals for "one more," and then approvingly winks at his bandmates after the second master take. Much of the film focuses on Armstrong and the All Stars working out a routine for "I Ain't Gonna Give Nobody None of My Jelly Roll." Armstrong didn't have sheet music for the song so he improvised each take with "a new vocal made up of a mixture of dazzling scat singing," the museum said. The film ends with a complete take of "Jelly Roll Blues," a tribute to jazz composer Jelly Roll Morton. The museum has also acquired Frey's master reel-to-reel tapes for "Louie and the Dukes of Dixieland," which Armstrong recorded in 1960 for Audio Fidelity at Webster Hall in New York City. The album's numbers include "Limehouse Blues" and "Avalon." "Capturing Louis in the act of recording is a unique and welcome discovery augmenting what we know about his artistry in an invaluable manner, proving that he was a leader in the true musical sense of that word," said Dan Morgenstern, the former longtime director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. For now, the museum will post one complete song on its website and social media. It plans to show the complete film at a future date. The museum is housed in Corona, Queens, in the modest brick building where Armstrong lived for 28 years and died in 1971. It has the largest publicly held archival collection devoted to a jazz musician in the world. An armed man wearing a dress is one of two suspects being sought in a robbery at a Hollywood business, police said. The robbery happened the afternoon of April 2 at Jackson Arms at 2421 Hollywood Boulevard, police said Thursday. Police said the man in a dress and another man entered the business through the back door and demanded money from a female employee before fleeing. A third suspect acted as a lookout. One of the suspects, 33-year-old Rickie Shawn Floyd, was later caught and charged with armed robbery and possession of a weapon by a convicted felon. Investigators confirmed they have reason to believe this was an inside job by someone who had recently been fired and threatened that he would make the business pay. Police are asking anyone with information to call Broward Crime Stoppers at 954-493-TIPS. The search to find the killer of a South Florida law enforcement officer is heating up as his family is speaking out amid an increase in the reward in the case. It was at the end of January when corrections officer Daveon Hall was killed, shot in the chest at his apartment in Pembroke Pines. "I would hope that by now something would come forward but unfortunately it has not," mother Barbara Drummond said Thursday. "That's one of the things I am pondering upon. That's one of the things that I don't know, don't know who, don't know why, have no idea." Almost three months have passed since Drummond found her son killed inside his apartment. The 15-year veteran with the Miami-Dade Corrections Department didn't report for work and his mother went to see why. "It really has brought on a stress, a strain," she said. Crime Stoppers has now boosted the reward money from $3,000 to $10,000 in the case. "My biggest hope is that someone will come forward," Drummond said. Hall's co-workers and the head of the Organization of Minority Correction Officers, which does not officially represent the corrections department, want police to intensify their outreach. "We'd like to see more public outreach to the degree that maybe we get something going in the public, we can start asking questions to the public, anybody have having knowledge this incident," organization member Corporal Corey Barney said. Drummond's son went into law enforcement because his own father was murdered. "And he thought that the best thing to do is to go to law enforcement so more than likely he would be eliminated from that kind of tragedy and unfortunately this is the same thing that he faced," she said. Drummond said that Pembroke Pines Police share with her what they can. Police chose not to talk with NBC 6 on camera about the case Thursday saying that it continues its investigation. If you have any information about what happened to Hall contact Crime Stoppers at 954-493-TIPS. If youre looking for a delicious way to cool off today, Carvel is offering free ice cream cones to their guests! Carvel has teamed up with the Red Cross to honor the Red Cross National Day of Giving. Both Giving Day and Free Cone Day are Thursday, April 21st. Guests who visit a Carvel between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. will be given a free junior cone with their choice of vanilla, chocolate or OREO cookie. Since Carvel is giving you a free ice cream, theyre hoping you give to the Red Cross, by purchasing a $1 coupon, which include tons of savings. All proceeds from the book will go towards a $20,000 donation to the Red Cross. Carvel has been working with the American Red Cross for five years. So far, over $145,000 has been donated to the Red Cross. A North Miami man who is a charter school employee is facing sexual battery on a minor charges but his mother is speaking out to deny the claims. Clenol Arnold Jean, 23, was arrested on five counts of Sexual battery on a minor Wednesday. He appeared in court Thursday where he was ordered held without bond. His attorney said Jean has no criminal history and should not be held without bond. The attorney said he'll be heading back to court to seek Jean's release on bond. "He will never ever do such a thing," Jean's mother, who didn't want to be identified, told NBC 6 Thursday. "This is a Christian boy who never ever go out. All he does is do his music and go preach." The mother said that as a favor, her family would take care of some kids from their church, including the alleged victim, a 4-year-old girl. The girl told her mother she was touched on her privates by Jean while attending an unlicensed daycare run by Jean's grandmother in the 1500 block of Northeast 142nd Street, according to a police report. The child said the incident happened five times, the report said. Jean denied touching the child in a sexual manner, the report said. Renaissance Charter School at Plantation confirmed Thursday that Jean has been employed at the school for a very short time and said they are cooperating with authorities. "Our highest priority is the safety and security of our students. All who are hired must undergo a thorough background check prior to employment at our school. If a person is cleared, that means that person does not have any prior history that prevents them from being employed," school officials said in a statement. "As we are sure you can appreciate, we are not at liberty to discuss any personnel issues." Neighbor Carol Genty said she's known Jean since he was a baby and was stunned by the allegations. "It's not fair...I think it's a lie, a lie about him," Genty said. "I trust him." Meanwhile, Jean's mother is hoping her son will be cleared of the charges, saying she "wants justice." "He's a wonderful boy, he's a great boy who works very hard and somebody is trying to destroy him," she said. Miami Police detectives are asking for the public's help in identifying a burglar who broke into a home Tuesday afternoon. It happened around noon in the 1400 block of Southwest 23rd Street in the Silver Bluff neighborhood while the homeowners were at work. According to detectives, the homeowners' internal surveillance camera was up and running when it captured the images of a prowler inside their home, rummaging through their personal belongings and tossing them into several bags and pillow cases. Within minutes, police said the burglar took off with the stolen items. He is described as heavyset and possibly 20-30 years of age. He last seen wearing a long sleeve plaid shirt, blue jeans and an earring. Anyone with information on the suspect or this crime is urged to contact Crime Stoppers at (305) 471-TIPS. Ted Cruz is conceding he cannot win the Republican presidential nomination before the party's national convention this summer. But the Texas senator insists that GOP front-runner Donald Trump can't clinch the nomination before the convention either. Cruz addressed reporters on Wednesday at the site of the Republican National Committee's spring meeting in Florida. He said, "What's clear today is that we are headed to a contested convention." Party leaders are convening this week to discuss the rules governing the messy nomination process. Trump is accusing GOP leaders of a rigged system that's allowing Cruz to collect delegates even though he's losing the popular vote in some states. Cruz says the nomination will ultimately be decided at the party's national convention in July. "I believe we have a tremendous advantage in that battle," he said. Trump's win Tuesday night in New York gave him a 285 delegate lead against Cruz. But that hasn't stopped Cruz from zeroing in on the GOP frontrunner, claiming Trump can't win the majority needed to get the nomination. "The reason Donald has been complaining so incessantly and the reason why his media surrogates repeat those complaints, because he's losing at the ballot box. He has a hard ceiling of 35-40 percent, outside his home state he has a very difficult time breaking," Cruz said. The RNC Spring Meeting will begin on Thursday in Hollywood. Police are investigating after a three-year-old was found dead in Coconut Creek Thursday morning under unknown circumstances. According to Coconut Creek Police, the mother found the toddler dead before 9 a.m. at a home in the 4100 block of Northwest 63rd Street. The cause of death is under investigation. No further details were immediately available. Stay with NBC 6 for updates on this developing story. A dangerous dater was back in bond court Wednesday. The suspected thief is facing more charges and being accused of drugging men to nab their pricey belongings. The cases are piling up against Liliana Vanegas: two alleged victims in February and three in March. Another victim came forward saying Vanegas put something in his drink, he passed out and his expensive watch disappeared. "There's a lot of victims out there," Judge Mindy Glazer said during the hearing in Miami-Dade. Prosecutors said Vanegas met her latest victim at Club Mynt in Miami Beach. They later left for the victim's apartment. Vanegas prepared a drink for her date and according to the arrest report, after drinking it, the victim passed out. He woke up with a missing watch worth $10,000. "She's a danger to the community," the prosecutor said. "She's a danger to the males in the community, single men in the community," Judge Glazer added. Vanegas has four open cases, all with the same allegations: drinking, passing out and missing jewelry. The incidents reportedly happened in Miami, Miami Beach and possibly in other states. "We've actually received calls from other agencies, not only here in South Florida but across the country," said Ernesto Rodriguez with Miami Beach Police. For now, Vanegas remains on house arrest but her bond continues to increase, and could potentially get higher as more victims come forward. San Francisco has become the first major city in the country to require solar panels on new residential and commercial buildings of under 10 stories. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed the legislation on Tuesday. Supervisor Scott Wiener, who drafted the measure, said it's the first of its kind in a major U.S. city. California already mandates that new buildings with 10 floors or less make at least 15 percent of their rooftop areas "solar ready." Now, San Francisco requires solar panels to be installed in these areas starting in 2017. It can take the form of either solar photovoltaic or solar water panels, both of which supply 100 percent renewable energy, his office said. Larger buildings are exempt for now. Wiener said the legislation will help move San Francisco toward its goal of meeting 100 percent of the citys electricity demand with renewable energy. "By increasing our use of solar power, San Francisco is once again leading the nation in the fight against climate change and the reduction of our reliance on fossil fuels," Wiener said in a statement. "Activating underutilized roof space is a smart and efficient way to promote the use of solar energy and improve our environment. We need to continue to pursue aggressive renewable energy policies to ensure a sustainable future for our city and our region." It would affect roughly 200 building currently in the works, Wiener's representative told NBC Bay Area. San Francisco isn't the first California city to push for solar panels. In 2008, Berkeley launched a special financing program for those using renewable and solar panels. And in 2014, Palo Alto passed a resolution to increase the installation of local solar photovoltaic facilities in order to provide four percent of the citys total energy needs by 2023. Sheldon Silver's wife cited his prostate cancer diagnosis in a letter to a federal judge seeking sentencing leniency for the disgraced former New York State Assembly speaker. In the letter to judge Valarie Caproni, Rosa Silver asked for "as lenient a sentence as possible" and said that his father and brother both died from the same kind of cancer he was recently diagnosed with. "I am afraid he will be sick, and even worse, alone," she said. The letter comes weeks before Silver is expected to be sentenced on corruption charges for bartering his power to earn $5 million. Prosecutors on Wednesday urged Caproni to set an example by sending the 72-year-old to prison for more than a decade and noted that federal sentencing guidelines call for prison stints of roughly 22 to 27 years. Silver, in his own letter to Caproni, said that he "failed the people of New York. There is no question about it." "As I will continue to do every day, I apologize to the court, the people of the state of New York, and most of all my family that has stood beside me always," he said. Silver's career in politics began in 1976 when he was first elected to the New York State Assembly. He still lives on Manhattan's Lower East Side. During a hearing Wednesday, Silver's lawyers noted that his legislative district included the site of the World Trade Center. They cited letters praising his work on behalf of constituents after the 9/11 attacks and after Sandy devastated the region in 2012. They also said Silver was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer and that court papers unsealed last week in which the government accused Silver of abusing his office to improperly aid two women with whom he had extramarital affairs had taken a heavy toll. NBC 4 New York and the New York Times filed a lawsuit to have those documents unsealed. "The horse is now out of the barn," the lawyers wrote. "The punishment in the court of public opinion has simply been devastating not only for Mr. Silver and the individuals involved, but also for the totally innocent members of Mr. Silver's family." New York's top prosecutor has opened an investigation into the New York City Board of Elections, a day after scores of voters in the five boroughs complained of voting irregularities and problems. Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced the investigation into the beleaguered board in the wake of widespread issues faced by voters in New York City. The announcement a day after the city Comptroller's Office said it would conduct an audit of the board after it was revealed that more than 126,000 Democratic voters were removed from the rolls in Brooklyn between November and state's presidential primaries on Tuesday. "Voting is the cornerstone of our democracy, and if any New Yorker was illegally prevented from voting, I will do everything in my power to make their vote count and ensure that it never happens again," Schneiderman said. Schneiderman's office said Wednesday that its voter hotline had received more than 1,000 calls and emails on primary day, with complaints ranging from issues with participating in a party primary to unclear instructions and accessibility issues. It's not clear how many of those complaints came from New York City voters. The number of complaints is the most the Attorney General's Office has ever received, dwarfing the 150 messages the office received during the 2012 general elections. Voters across the city documented issues at the polls. Several precincts in Brooklyn told voters to come back later or vote via affidavit because roll books hadn't arrived to polling location. Other people, meanwhile, were told that they weren't shown among party ranks, even though they claimed to have registered years ago. One voter alleged that poll workers were trying to trick Democrats into casting ballots for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. The city Board of Elections said it was investigating that claim. Board of Elections Executive Director Michael Ryan told NBC 4 New York that "people are responding to a lack of complete information." The body said that 126,000 Democrats were removed from rolls in Brooklyn, but it was because they moved, died, or changed registration. Another 63,000 were added to the rolls before the election, meanwhile. "We want to make sure that people who belong on the rolls stay on the rolls and those who have to come off come off," he said. New York City comptroller Scott Stringer called for an audit of the body on Tuesday and said that "the people of New York City have lost confidence that the Board of Elections can effectively administer elections and we intend to find out why the BOE is so consistently disorganized, chaotic and inefficient." Ryan said the Board of Elections will cooperate with the audit and that "at the conclusion of this process, there's really not going to be much of a story." Hundreds of UW-Madison students and professors marched through the university Thursday, protesting the recent arrest of a black student and racist incidents on campus, and accusing UW officials of doing more to protect the institutions image than they have to solve long-festering problems with its racial climate. Up to 400 people gathered at the top of Bascom Hill at 11:30 a.m. Thursday, about the time one week earlier when a UW-Madison police officer entered a classroom to talk with Denzel McDonald, a senior who police say spray-painted several buildings with anti-racist messages. McDonald was later arrested on vandalism charges. The arrest became another flashpoint for students and professors near the end of a semester in which the university was rocked by several high-profile, racially charged incidents. Like their peers at colleges across the country, minority students at UW-Madison have pushed administrators in recent months for changes to improve their experiences on the predominantly white campus. They have also shared examples of racism they have encountered on social media under the hashtag #TheRealUW. How many times do we have to do this? graduate student Michael Davis said at the start of the demonstration Thursday. The university wants us to believe that this is weird, its rare, Davis said of racist incidents. Its been happening since the inception of UW-Madison. At Thursdays protest, students taped a list of demands to the statue of Abraham Lincoln at the heart of campus, calling for McDonald not to face criminal charges, for the officers who arrested him to resign and for students and faculty to wield control over the UW Police Departments hiring and firing decisions. The last demand echoes calls from local activists, some of whom helped organize Thursdays protest, for community control over police in the city of Madison. Students also marched down Bascom Hill behind a Black Lives Matter banner, occupied College Library for about 45 minutes and shut down several intersections before ending their demonstration at the spot on Library Mall where McDonald was arrested last week. Several wrote messages of support for McDonald in chalk on the sidewalk. Some of the students held signs repeating a message McDonald is accused of writing on a university building: Racizm in the air. Dont breathe. Chancellor Rebecca Blank acknowledged in a statement after the demonstration that this has been a difficult and exhausting semester for our communities of color, and said she understands people are frustrated that changes havent come more quickly. But Blank also pushed back against the students demands. Embedded in the student demands are requests for actions that I do not believe are reasonable, or even lawful, for me to take, Blank said. A UW-Madison spokesman said that included the students call for McDonald not to face criminal charges and for the UWPD officers to resign. No decision on vandalism charges Several speakers at Thursdays protest said they believed police went after McDonald more aggressively than they have other students involved in a string of high-profile incidents that have made news on the campus this semester, such as an Asian student who spat on and pushed a black student and her friends in a campus dorm in March. That student, Matthew Hsieh, was not charged criminally for the incident but received citations for underage drinking and disorderly conduct. UW police have apologized for interrupting McDonalds class to make contact with him last week, but said his graffiti caused more than $4,000 in damage and officers had tried several times to contact him through other means before going to the class. Police have recommended McDonald face 11 criminal charges for the graffiti, as well as a charge of disorderly conduct for threatening a bystander who tried to stop him from spray-painting. The Dane County District Attorneys Office said Thursday that prosecutors have not made a decision on charges against McDonald, but said he has been tentatively scheduled to make an initial appearance in court on May 12. Action or just talk? Blank also defended the steps she said UW administrators have taken to improve the racial climate on campus. Officials plan to require cultural competency training for all new students starting next fall and will fund more mental health support services for minority students. UWMadison is committed to fostering a campus environment where every student can learn, feels safe and valued and is able to thrive, Blank said. We have not sat idly by as these problems have grown more difficult. But many students at Thursdays protest criticized UW administrators including Blank, Dean of Students Lori Berquam and UW Police Chief Sue Riseling for what they describe as a tepid response to problems on campus that has prioritized the universitys public image over real changes. They love to put us on brochures, they love to put students of color (and) black students on the webpage, Davis said. But when we ask for student power there is no response. The steps UW officials have announced are a good start, said African-American studies professor Michael Thornton, but the measure of the universitys commitment will be whether administrators commit to funding programs that tackle long-standing problems with race. Weve had this conversation for the last 20, 30 years, Thornton said. Whats disheartening, especially for students, is that the university talks a good game, but it really doesnt follow up on it. The Lower East Side bar owners behind Will Ferrell-themed pub "Stay Classy" are reportedly at it again, this time with a Tim Burton-themed restaurant and bar in the East Village. According to a report in EV Grieve, "Beetle House NYC" is slated to open by the end of April on East Sixth Street between First and Second avenues. The website for the new themed restaurant and bar says diners will be accepted by reservation only, but specific dishes will be available for delivery. The cocktail list on the website includes concoctions like the "Bio-exorcist," "Edwards lemonade" and a "Chocolate factory martini." EV Grieve reports the Beetle House NYC will open in the space that formerly housed the bar Confessional, which has since relocated. Police say a man who was shot and wounded by officers when he pulled a gun on them in Brooklyn has been arrested on menacing and criminal possession of a weapon charges. Police identified the suspect as Zaquan Footman, of Brooklyn. Information on his lawyer was not immediately available. The shooting happened Tuesday afternoon at a public housing complex when officers tried to arrest the suspect's friend for a low-level warrant. Police say Footman pulled a gun out of his waistband. That's when three of the officers discharged their weapons. Footman was shot in the hand and ran into an apartment building where he was later taken into custody. The officers were not injured. The wanted man was also arrested. The man who was stabbed over 20 times during a fight with his friend on a Hudson Valley street, then managed to walk seven blocks for help after he lay bleeding for an hour, could have died if he tried to walk any further, he says doctors told him. Two weeks ago, 21-year-old Thomas Metcalf was hanging out with his friend, 20-year-old Jonathan Rizzo, on Idlewild Avenue in the village of Cornwall-on-Hudson when the two got into a petty argument about Rizzo's ex-girlfriend. Rizzo punched Metcalf. "When he hit me, I guess I had blanked out," he said. "He knocked me out. And then proceeded to do what he did. But when I had woken up, I didn't even know. I was just really cold." Police said Rizzo repeatedly stabbed his friend in the head and torso 23 times. Metcalf got up off the ground, freezing, and walked seven blocks to a friend's house, still unaware he had been stabbed. But when the friend's mother opened the door, she knew she had to call 911. The brutal attack left Metcalf with a fractured skull, a broken middle finger and 23 stab wounds. State Police Maj. Joseph Tripodo previously said of Metcalf, "How the victim didn't die is a miracle." Metcalf agreed. "To know that I was bleeding out for an hour laying down, then woke up, walked seven blocks... they said if I tried to walk any further I probably would have died," he said. It's still a mystery to Metcalf why Rizzo lost control. He said they were barely arguing. Rizzo has been charged with attempted murder, but Metcalf said he hopes he gets help. And he says he wants to turn his own life around, too, by getting his GED and going to college. "I just take it as a second chance. I take it as, live life as it is," he said. "Move forward from it and see what else I can do instead of just being a kid now." Rizzo was being held in jail and attorney information wasn't clear. Four Middletown men have been missing for 10 days and police there are hunting for clues into their disappearance. Middletown police released photos of three of the men on Thursday. The men were last seen in a 2010 Chevrolet Equinox, which police recovered on April 11 in the parking lot of the Chester Diner in the Village of Chester, investigators said. Police identified the missing men as: Martin Santos-Luna, 41, Miguel Sosa-Luna, 25, Urbano Morales-Santiago, 35, and Hector Gutierrez, 32. A family member talked to Sosa-Luna by phone on April 11, but the men haven't been heard from since then, police said. Anyone with information about their whereabouts is asked to contact the Middletown Police Department. Republican Party leaders turned aside an effort Thursday to change the rules at their national convention to make it harder for the GOP to choose a fresh presidential candidate, a prelude to what may be sharper battles ahead. The showdown, which pitted the top echelons of the Republican National Committee against a renegade party committeeman from Oregon, came at a time when many in the GOP believe that top presidential contenders Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz are likely losers in this November's general election. Some have been hoping a new candidate will emerge at the party's gathering in Cleveland, a scenario that has drawn the wrath of Trump and Cruz backers and many of the party's grassroots conservatives. Though the party's 56-member rules committee rejected the proposal by voice vote, Thursday's showdown was likely a mere skirmish compared to the battles that may occur in Cleveland over the bylaws the party will to choose its standard-bearer in this fall's elections. The RNC and its rules committee can recommend changes in the processes the 2,472 convention delegates will use to crown a nominee. But only the delegates themselves can approve which rules they will use a decision they won't make till they gather in July. Solomon Yue, the RNC committeeman from Oregon, said the House of Representatives rules that the party has long used at its presidential conventions give the presiding officer too much power. Yue proposed instead using Roberts Rules of Order, which he said would enable a majority of the delegates to block an effort by the presiding officer to open the proceedings to fresh nominations. Yue said that 2016 has been "a politically supercharged year" and warned that efforts by party leaders to dictate events in Cleveland "would blow up the convention and cause us to lose in November the White House fight." Party leaders worked to defeat the plan, saying that by making any rules changes, they would be accused of trying to unfairly help a presidential hopeful. Trump has repeatedly clashed with RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, saying his party's rules for collecting delegates are "rigged." "Our making a change of this magnitude at this point is the worst possible thing that we could do to inspire the confidence of the delegates in our home states that we are not putting our finger on the scale for any candidate," said Enid Mickelsen, an RNC committeewoman from Utah. Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney has issued a ban on all publicly funded and non-essential travel for city employees to Mississippi and North Carolina. A spokeswoman for the Mayors Office confirmed with NBC10 the travel ban is in response to controversial laws from the two states which limit anti-discrimination protections for lesbian, gay and transgender people. The North Carolina law directs transgender people to use public toilets corresponding to the sex listed on their birth certificate. The law also excludes LGBT people from state anti-discrimination protections, blocks local governments from expanding LGBT protections, and bars all types of workplace discrimination lawsuits from state courts. In Mississippi, legislation taking effect this summer will allow certain workers, including some in private businesses, to cite religious beliefs in denying services to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. Kenneys spokeswoman did not have details regarding how much the ban would impact Philadelphias travel budget or if any previously scheduled trips were canceled as a result. Earlier this month, Kenney joined a coalition group consisting of several other mayors across the country called Mayors Against Discrimination. The group vowed to ban official travel to any states that enacted anti-LGBT laws. Today, Im proud to count myself among the coalition of mayors taking a stand against discriminatory policies targeting LGBT individuals and families, Kenney said in a press release about the coalition. Our city was founded on the ideals of freedom and equality, and we will continue to pursue those ideals in fighting for a fair and inclusive city and government that serves all Philadelphians. In addition to Kenneys travel ban, SEPTA also canceled its participation in the American Public Transportation Conference scheduled to take place in Charlotte, North Carolina from May 15 through May 18. Officials say SEPTAs decision not to participate isnt connected to Kenneys decision but rather SEPTAs own internal discussion on the issue. Thursday night is like a music lover's dream come true, if only you could be in more than one place at a time. Alas, you can't so be realistic with your expectations. Tonight, you can catch Parachute's return to House of Blues, or catch Haunted Summer at Soda Bar. Euro-dance god Parov Stelar is at the Observatory and there are still a handful of tickets to Deafheaven at the Casbah. My money is on Unknown Mortal Orchestra, however. The band is amazing live, and to be honest, I always thought they would be the ones where Tame Impala is today. But maybe soon. There are still some tickets to the show, but not many, so grab them online or via phone before you head to Solana Beach. Thursday, April 21 Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Vinyl Williams@ Belly Up Deafheaven, Youth Code @ Casbah Parov Stelar, Stelartronic & Anduze @ The Observatory North Park Haunted Summer, the Lulls, Annie Girl and the Flight, Garden Echo @ Soda Bar Parachute: The Wide Awake Tour, Jon McLaughlin @ House of Blues DJ Ikah Love @ Bar Pink Anakin Records Presents: Anarkia, Sies N Linea, Sergio Limon @ Music Box Tempora Infernalia-Doom at the Ken Club feat. Demon Eye, Disenchanter, Mojave Green, Desert Suns @ Ken Club The Dustbowl Revival @ The Hideout Duping the Public, Tom Lord @ Sycamore Den Subtropics, Sick Balloons, Parade of Horribles @ The Pour House (Oceanside) Thursday Night Market with the Gloomies, Told @ Quartyard Mike James @ Lestat's Zero To Billy @ Java Joe's DJ Mike White @ Salvation Alley, House of Blues Rude Dog '80s Night @ The Merrow Darkwave Garden @ The Bancroft R:Tyme @ Humphrey's Backstage Live Karaoke @ Tower Bar Open Jam Session @ Winston's (6-9 p.m.) Dead Winter Carpenters @ Winston's (9 p.m.) The Tighten Ups with AIDA, DJ Mane, Kid Wonder @ El Dorado Chocolate Puma @ Omnia Rock Out Karaoke @ Tin Roof Astrojump (Kill Quanti DJs) @ Whistle Stop Acid Varsity @ Kava Lounge Mercedes Moore @ Tio Leo's Maka Roots @ Gallagher's Irish Pub Liquid Courage Karaoke @ 710 Beach Club Catherine Martinelli-Banks has a confession to make. She is a much better veteran than she ever was an active-duty Marine. "That's absolutely true," Martinelli-Banks said. "I kept my company gunny and first sergeant busy," during her time in the Marine Corps in the late 1980's and early 1990's. If Martinelli-Banks' superiors could see here now, though, they would some someone doing an exemplary job helping other veterans. Martinelli-Banks, who works in the mortgage industry, spends untold hours of her free time doing what she can to help those who have served their country. From organizing financial seminars, to administering private Facebook groups, to lobbying in Washington, DC, Martinelli-Banks is non-stop. Her latest venture is an attempt to raise $150,000 to help make the home of a Marine who lost both his arms and legs to an IED in Afghanistan in 2010 more accessible. "Why? I don't know. I just have to," Martinelli-Banks says. "I won't feel complete if I don't reach out and see if there is anything I can do." It is a far cry from who Martinelli-Banks says used to be. In the early 2000's, more than a decade after her service, Martinelli-Banks described herself as a single woman "living in Orange County, driving an Escalade, and shopping at Nordstroms every day." So what changed? Well, is started with a single phone call from Soledad Jackson in 2004. Jackson, also a Marine, had been Martinelli-Banks' roommate while at Camp Pendleton in the late 1980's. Unlike Martinelli-Banks, tough, Jackson was still active duty when the Iraq War began. She was told she would be deployed to the war zone for up to one year. Though the two had only spoken sporadically over the years, Jackson had a big favor to ask of Martinelli-Banks. "I asked her if she could come to North Carolina from San Diego to look after my kids while I was gone," Jackson said. It was a mission Martinelli-Banks could not refuse. "I had two cats at the time, so I packed the car and the three of us drove out." Martinelli-Banks spent the next eight months caring for Jackson's two children, and eight-year-old girl and a seven-year-old girl. Jackson says can still not thank Martinelli-Banks enough for what she did, giving her peace of mind while fighting a war. Martinelli-Banks, tough, believes she got just as much out of the experience. It is helping that one fellow Marine that sparked in her desire to do even more. "Soledad says that I've helped her and it's like, I think you really saved my life and it was and just from doing that it gave me just a whole new purpose." Nine schools in the San Diego Unified School District were among the best 500 in the nation, according to the annual U.S. News and World Reports ranking. The schools that took top honors include the School of International Studies at San Diego High School, La Jolla High School and Scripps Ranch High School. The ranking examined students college readiness, graduation rates and performance on state assessments. Also mentioned as being high performing schools in a broader part of the report: University City High School, Point Loma High School, Serra High School, San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts, Patrick Henry High School, Kearny High School of Science Connections and Technology, Mission Bay High School, Clairemont High School, San Diego Early/Middle College, Mira Mesa High School and the School of Science and Technology at San Diego High. The report evaluated 28,561 high schools and only 6,000 schools received honors. A San Diego man was arrested Wednesday after he flashed two knives at a bar in downtown San Diego and stole a beer from the bartender, police said. The San Diego Police Department (SDPD) said the bizarre incident started around 4:15 p.m. at the Chee-Chee Club located at 929 Broadway. Suspect Brian Villa walked into the bar and brandished two knives in front of the bartender. He then ordered the bartender to give him a beer. Employees called 911 to report the theft. When police officers arrived at the business, the bartender pointed out Villa as the person who robbed her. The suspect was arrested at the bar and the stolen beer was recovered, police said. No one was harmed. Villa is facing two counts of first-degree robbery stemming from the alleged beer theft. He was booked into San Diego Central Jail and is scheduled to appear in court Friday. A man accused of setting a homeless man on fire in San Diego's Oak Park neighborhood was held without bail at his arraignment Wednesday as the man he ignited fights for his life at a hospital. Jose R. Garibay, 26, pleaded not guilty to attempted murder with premeditation and deliberation and aggrevated mayhem and torture at his Wednesday arraignment. A judge ordered the press to tilize his face due to identity issues as the investigation continues. SDPD officers say Garibay lured 39-year-old Julio Caesar Edeza to his truck without warning, doused him in a flammable liquid and lit him on fire. The incident happened at noon Sunday on Pentecost Way in San Diego's Oak Park neighborhood near a Rite Aid, just north of State Route 94, officers said. Garibay fled the scene, but he was later arrested in his car on Estrella Avenue after police put out a composite sketch of the suspect and a photo of his truck. Edeza's aunt, Irma Aguilera, who was in court Wednesday, said only a person full of hate would set someone on fire like that. Detectives believe the crime was random, as it doesn't appear Garibay and Edeza knew one another. "For this to happen to him, was just horrible," Aguilera said after the court appearance. Edeza's family, including his two sisters, have been with him at the hospital. They said he is a loving, funny, generous man and although he didn't have much he shared what he could. Edeza suffered life-threatening injuries and was taken to UC San Diego's Burn Center, police said. Edeza has third-degree burns to 85 percent of his body and is in a medically-induced coma according to his family. Police say he is not expected to survive. "We're having faith in God that he will go through this," she said, tearing up. "He's just there, trying to fight for his life." Aguilera said her nephew may have been homeless from time-to-time, but he has a family that loves him and cares for him. She thanked law enforcement and the public for helping catch the suspect so quickly. Edeza's cousin and niece said Edeza has a 14-year old son and family was the most important thing to him. He's a religious man and loves to cook and has a culinary certification. If convicted, Garibay faces a life sentence. Should the victim die, it could become a death penalty case with the special circumstance of torture. Anyone with any information on the location or possible owner of this vehicle can notify the San Diego Police Department (619) 531-2000, Homicide Team 5. Witnesses with information wishing to remain anonymous can also contact Crime Stoppers at (888) 580-8477. Dozens of cases were not prosecuted by the San Diego City Attorney's Office because a deputy attorney missed the deadline to file charges. According to a memo released Wednesday by City Attorney Jan Goldsmith, 19 of the 98 cases could have been issued. Click here to read a December memo to Assistant City Attorney John Hemmerling discussing the cases. They included 15 misdemeanor domestic violence cases, two indecent exposure cases (one of which had no victim), one case of a sex offender who didnt register on time, and one case of theft from an elder. Goldsmith says his office checked to see if suspects were involved in other new crimes, none were. Goldsmith says the office was able to file charges in four cases. Three of the four resulted in guilty pleas, the other an arrest warrant. Through the California Public Records Act, NBC 7 Investigates learned, the charges included assault with a deadly weapon, willful infliction of corporal injury, failure to register as a sex offender, battery and false imprisonment. In the memo Goldsmith said, in part, "there is no justification for what happened in this situation. it is inexcusable to allow the statute of limitation to expire, as it did in these cases." Click here to read the memo. Top prosecutors Miriam Milstein and the former head of the criminal division Marlea Dell' Anno left the City Attorney's office late last year, according to several City Hall sources. NBC7 has been asking questions about Dell'Anno's departure since November, but the request for information has been denied citing personnel exemptions. "Under the law, there's some right of privacy and personnel issues so we have to respect that but this is different because it also has an element of how this public office is running so I'm not going to name folks that were involved but I am going to explain what we found and how we operate our office," Goldsmith said. NBC7 spoke with Attorney Chris Morris who ran the Criminal division immediately before Dell'Anno. "It never should have happened under Goldsmith's watch, at all. I know that he's been more focused on the civil side of things, but you can't just let the criminal side run on its own," Morris said. "He has to be more involved in the day-to-day operations of the criminal operation. What's even more troubling though is when this came to light, he had no idea and they kept it from him? That to me shows a real lack of internal controls." Goldsmith said he was "outraged" over the ordeal. Click here to see data on how often charges are filed by the City Attorney's Office in domestic violence cases. "I was very upset and outraged when I saw it," he said. "We took steps forthright and we dealt with it. I know the public's just learning of it, but we dealt with it in November." High five, San Diego! Our fair city has once again been entered into the Guinness World Record books. San Diego Charger Jason Verrett joined 300 people at Qualcomm Stadium Friday in their effort to complete the most high fives in one minute. Verrett made the first two attempts but organizers say he ran too fast (44 seconds) for cameras to receive an accurate count. So a Kaiser Permanente Assistant Medical Group Administrator named Dave Horton made the groups third and final attempt. He beat the current record of 277 but successfully completing 290 high fives, according to a Kaiser Permanente spokesperson. The health care provider put together the event to inspire more people to adopt healthy eating and active lifestyles. What constitutes an official high five according to the Guinness World Record rules? The leading candidates vying for Marylands coveted U.S. Senate seat tried to rally support from union workers Wednesday. Rep. Donna Edwards (D-4th District) and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-8th District) participated in a rally in Silver Spring. The Communications Workers of America are on strike against Verizon. I always stand on the side of American workers and always stand on the side of organized workers and always stand people who want to build jobs, opportunity and the middle class for all of our families, Edwards said. When the company is doing well, workers should be doing well, Van Hollen said. But the profits from that worker productivity, where are they going? They're not going to increased wages and benefits for workers, they're just going to increase bonuses for the CEO and executives at the very top, he said. Both candidates are counting on labor to turn out the vote in Tuesdays primary. I was standing with CWA and have been standing with workers always and I'm proud to have the support of the vast majority of organized labor here in the great state of Maryland and across the country, Edwards said. Van Hollen said he won the endorsement of the Service Employees International Union, which previously backed Edwards. When Congresswoman Edwards was first running for office, they were a major force behind her campaign, and they've said that they're backing me in this race because I've actually been there. Three young children ran away from a man who tried to lure them into his truck Tuesday evening in Arlington, Virginia, police and the mother of one of the children said. The mother of one of the children, who all were age 8 to 11, said she was "very, very" proud her son remembered what she taught him about "stranger danger." A man driving a dark-colored Chevrolet pickup truck rolled up to the children in the Yorkville neighborhood, Arlington County police said. The children were playing hide-and-go-seek about 7 p.m. with their parents nearby when the man approached two little girls at N. Florida Street and 30th Street, Deputy Chief Daniel Murray said. All of a sudden, a, older model Chevy pickup truck stopped for about 30 seconds and kept waving two of these little girls over," he said. The little girls ran off. Just a few feet away, the man drove next to a little boy. "He said, 'Hey, get in and I'll get you home faster,'" Murray said. "Once again, this little boy ran back to where all the parents were and reported it." The little boy's mother, who asked News4 not to identify her, said she glad her son remembered what she taught him about strangers. "I was very, very proud of him," she said. "He was very shooken up, but he was very proud of himself." "I remember you told me 'Stranger danger, never get in a car,'" the woman said the child told her. Neighbor Debbie Turner, who grew up in the neighborhood, said the attempted abductions are a reminder of the need to stay vigilant. "You think, 'Oh, it cant happen to me,' but it can," she said. Tips on what to teach children about strangers are available on the National Crime Prevention Council's website. Police are on the lookout for a dark-colored Chevrolet pickup with a dent on one side, a ladder on the roof and tools in the bed of the truck. Call police if you see this vehicle. Anyone who has information is asked to call police at 703-558-2222 or 703-228-4052. Tips can be submitted anonymously at 1-866-411-TIPS. A 63-year-old man whose body was discovered after a fire at a Gaithersburg, Maryland, townhouse last month was murdered, police say. Steven Skalabrin was found dead in the basement after about 100 firefighters battled a two-alarm fire in the 1800 block of Windjammer Way the night of Tuesday, March 29. On Wednesday, police said the Chief Medical Examiner ruled the death Skalabrin's death a homicide and he had multiple injuries to his body. Police said earlier this month they were investigating his death as suspicious. Firefighters initially thought the fire was being fueled by gas. Two other men living in the home got out safely and told firefighters that Skalabrin, a roommate, lived in the basement and may still be inside the home, police said. Skalabrin was a jeweler who made custom pieces. Friends said he had a history of drug abuse but had cleaned up his life and recently been baptized in the Mormon church. Police are still investigating and ask that anyone with more information call (240) 773-5070. Those who wish to stay anonymous can call Crime Solvers at 1 (866) 411-8477. Police are offering a reward of up to $10,000 for information that leads to an arrest. American Family Association Launches #BoycottTarget Initiative After Company Publicizes Bathroom Policy MEDIA ADVISORY, April 21, 2016 / "Corporate America must stop bullying people who disagree with the radical left agenda to remake society into their progressive image," said AFA President Tim Wildmon. "Target's harmful policy poses a danger to women and children. We think many customers will agree." Target announced this week, "[W]e welcome transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity. Everyone deserves to feel like they belong." AFA pointed to the danger posed by predators and voyeurs who would take advantage of the policy to prey on those who are vulnerable. "We want to make it very clear that AFA does not believe the transgender community poses this danger to the wider public," Wildmon said. "Rather, this misguided and reckless policy provides a possible gateway for predators who are out there." AFA also criticized the policy for ignoring the millions of customers who are simply uncomfortable with the presence of strangers of the opposite sex in a personal setting. "When Target claims that 'everyone deserves to feel like they belong,' did they ask customers who don't want to use a bathroom with an opposite-sex stranger?" Wildmon asked. "Why doesn't 'everyone' actually mean everyone at Target?" Wildmon offered what he called a "common-sense approach and a reasonable solution" to the issue of transgender customers: a unisex option. "Target should keep separate facilities for men and women," he said, "but for the transgender community and for those who simply like using the bathroom alone, a single-occupancy, unisex option could be provided." Wildmon said that risking the ire of customers was odd, considering that some estimate the transgender community at 1/10th of a percent of the general population. He said he also realizes a unisex bathroom option would be an additional cost for Target. "But so will a boycott," Wildmon said. "If Target is truly committed to a solid policy that's good for businessfor everyoneand if they're truly committed to the transgender community, the company will spend the money for a unisex compromise. Anything else smacks of an agenda-driven publicity stunt that stands in complete disregard for people who reject the policy." Share Tweet Contact: Deborah Hamilton, Hamilton Strategies, 215-815-7716, Media@HamiltonStrategies.com MEDIA ADVISORY, April 21, 2016 / Christian Newswire / -- American Family Association (AFA, www.afa.net ) is calling for a boycott of Target after the retail giant publicized its policy to allow transgender individuals access to opposite-sex store bathrooms and fitting rooms."Corporate America must stop bullying people who disagree with the radical left agenda to remake society into their progressive image," said AFA President Tim Wildmon. "Target's harmful policy poses a danger to women and children. We think many customers will agree."Target announced this week, "[W]e welcome transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity. Everyone deserves to feel like they belong."AFA pointed to the danger posed by predators and voyeurs who would take advantage of the policy to prey on those who are vulnerable."We want to make it very clear that AFA does not believe the transgender community poses this danger to the wider public," Wildmon said. "Rather, this misguided and reckless policy provides a possible gateway for predators who are out there."AFA also criticized the policy for ignoring the millions of customers who are simply uncomfortable with the presence of strangers of the opposite sex in a personal setting."When Target claims that 'everyone deserves to feel like they belong,' did they ask customers who don't want to use a bathroom with an opposite-sex stranger?" Wildmon asked. "Why doesn't 'everyone' actually mean everyone at Target?"Wildmon offered what he called a "common-sense approach and a reasonable solution" to the issue of transgender customers: a unisex option."Target should keep separate facilities for men and women," he said, "but for the transgender community and for those who simply like using the bathroom alone, a single-occupancy, unisex option could be provided."Wildmon said that risking the ire of customers was odd, considering that some estimate the transgender community at 1/10th of a percent of the general population. He said he also realizes a unisex bathroom option would be an additional cost for Target."But so will a boycott," Wildmon said. "If Target is truly committed to a solid policy that's good for businessfor everyoneand if they're truly committed to the transgender community, the company will spend the money for a unisex compromise. Anything else smacks of an agenda-driven publicity stunt that stands in complete disregard for people who reject the policy." Pop legend Prince, who died Thursday, leaves behind legions of fans in D.C., Maryland and Virginia. The legendary musician played in the past year at the White House and in Baltimore in the wake of Freddie Gray's death. The "When Doves Cry" singer played at a "Rally 4 Peace" concert in May 2015 at Royal Farms Arena in Baltimore, weeks after the protests that followed Gray's death after his arrest. Prince debuted a song he wrote for the city, "Baltimore," that addressed "socio-political issues around the country in the wake of a slew of killings of young black men, a spokeswoman said at the time. Dressed in gray, Prince said, "For those who have lost loved ones, we're here for you tonight." He then launched into a set that included his biggest hits. Donnie Simpson, host of the The Donnie Simpson Show on Majic 102.3 FM in D.C., knew Prince personally and said he was shocked by his death. D.C. loves him just like everybody else around the world does, because his music was different, Simpson told News4's Tracee Wilkins. When he brought that whole Minneapolis sound to the world along with his boys, The Time, it changed music ... He was just always evolving into something else, just always different. Just a guy, just like David Bowie, who refused to be put in a box. Trailblazer, innovator, visionary, an inspiration to multiple genres of music ... there are few words to describe the kind of talent Prince had, said Hot 99.5s Kane, host of The Kane Show. I think thats one of the things that a lot of people, including a generation that grew up on songs, are really mourning today. Prince played a private concert at the White House in June 2015 for about 500 people. President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama paid for the performance themselves, The Washington Post reported. The Purple One played a two-hour show that included "Kiss" and "Purple Rain," according to news reports. Celebrities in attendance reportedly included Angela Bassett, Tyler Perry, Russell Wilson, Ciara and Tracee Ellis Ross. President Obama released a statement Thursday about the passing of Prince. Few artists have influenced the sound and trajectory of popular music more distinctly, or touched quite so many people with their talent, Obama said in the statement. He was a virtuoso instrumentalist, a brilliant bandleader and an electrifying performer ... A strong spirit transcends rules, Prince once said -- and nobodys spirit was stronger, bolder or more creative. Prince also played two sold-out concerts at the Warner Theatre in June 2015, performing for hours and amazing crowds with his energy and soul, news reports said. Prince was found dead at his home in suburban Minneapolis on Thursday, his publicist said. "It is with profound sadness that I am confirming that the legendary, iconic performer, Prince Rogers Nelson, has died at his Paisley Park residence this morning at the age of 57," spokeswoman Yvette Noel-Schure said. Deputies found the singer unresponsive in an elevator after they were called to his compound. The musician had fought the flu for several weeks. His plane made an emergency landing last week because he was ill. Prince fans planned to gather Thursday night at 8433 Georgia Ave. in Silver Spring, Maryland, near the Majic 102.3 FM studio. The station invited fans to listen to the star's music and share stories. A 16-year-old girl died Wednesday after she was found unresponsive in a bathroom inside her high school in Fairfax County, Virginia, police said. Brenda Carina Soto was found in a restroom at Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Virginia, Fairfax County Police said. Officers responded about 6 p.m. and found the teenager unresponsive. She was rushed to Inova Fairfax Hospital, where she was pronounced dead. "There is no apparent threat to public safety and no overtly suspicious circumstances associated with Ms. Sotos death," police said in a statement issued Thursday. Police did not release any additional information on the circumstances of the teenager's death. Crisis counselors were available to students and staff. The school principal sent parents an email about the student's death and how to help teens dealing with grief. "I am writing with a heavy heart to inform you of the unexpected death of one of our students," Principal David F. Thomas wrote. "Our thoughts and support go out to the students family and friends at this very difficult time." Soto's cause of death had not been determined as of Friday afternoon. Detectives are asking the public for any information that may help. Police can be reached by calling 1-866-411-TIPS or 703-691-2131, sending a text message with TIP187 to CRIMES or visiting www.fairfaxcrimesolvers.org. After serving overseas and in combat, a group of military veterans in Virginia is learning to farm on land that was cultivated by George Washington when he retired from the Army. Non-profit organization Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food and Agriculutre provides agricultural training to 12 veterans at the Woodlawn Estate in Alexandria, Virginia. The land near Fort Belvoir was once part of Washington's Mount Vernon Estate. "This is awesome. You get to work with other veterans, working on land that was first developed and put into production by another veteran, George Washington," said Sr. Chief Tom Snowdy, a veteran of the U.S. Navy Reserves. In the days when Washington owned this land, most soldiers returned to farms after war. Veterans at Arcadia are following in those footsteps. One veteran even works in the fields while wearing his combat boots. "I've always wanted to do farming," said U.S. Army veteran Evans Appiah. "Be my own boss and open my own farm and take charge from there." "Hopefully, I would like to work on maybe a couple more farms before I go back home and try to start my own farm," said former U.S. Army Sgt. Laron Murrell. Arcadia trains the veterans about sustainable farming through two programs, the Veteran Farm Fellowship and the Veteran Farmer Reserve Program. In the Veteran Farm Fellowship, the veterans study and work full time at Arcadia Farm for at least one year. Veterans in the reserve program meet one weekend each month to visit farms and take classes. Arcadia said the veterans already have almost everything they need to learn from their training in the military. "Absolutely, getting up at the crack of dawn, coming on time, working hard until the job is done. Not just seeing, you know, one task and getting through it, but continuously working and getting through the day. But also just the skills that they were doing in the military from small engine repair to carpentry, all sorts of really valuable skills," Arcadia farmer Anita Adalja said. But there is one thing still missing from the farm that Arcadia said the veterans need to complete their training: a tractor. "Currently, we're borrowing tractors weekly from Mount Vernon who've been super generous with their equipment, but it won't be sustainable for them or for us to keep doing that," said Katherine Collins, with the Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food and Agriculture. Arcadia said having a tractor is essential for these veterans to be skilled and ready for farms of their own. "I've done a couple on farm interviews for part-time work on a farm and one of the jobs I didn't get cause I don't know how to drive a tractor," Snowdy said. Arcadia is trying to raise $20,000 on Wednesday to purchase a tractor, farm tools and other supplies. As of 5:30 p.m., Arcadia has raised more than $16,600. Click here to donate to the cause and click here for more information about Aracadia's Veteran Farmer Program. Amid national controversy over gender-specific bathrooms, Target is encouraging store employees and customers to use the restrooms and fitting rooms that align with their gender identities. "We believe that everyoneevery team member, every guest, and every communitydeserves to be protected from discrimination, and treated equally," Target said in a news release dated April 19. "Most relevant for the conversations currently underway, we welcome transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity," the company said. Last September, Target voiced its support for the federal Equality Act, which would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to encompass gender identity and sexual orientation. Introduced in 2015, the Equality Act would expand protections for transgender and LGBT individuals in employment, housing and other public accommodations. Gender-specific bathrooms have been thrust into the national spotlight, with North Carolina passing a controversial law that requires people to use public restrooms that correspond to their genders at birth. High courts overturned similar legislation in Tennessee and Virginia, and South Dakota's governor vetoed a transgender bathroom bill last month. Legislation taking effect this summer in Mississippi will allow certain workers including some in private businesses to cite religious beliefs in denying services to gay lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. "We regularly assess issues and consider many factors such as impact to our business, guests and team members," Target said in Tuesday's announcement. "Given the specific questions these legislative proposals raised about how we manage our fitting rooms and restrooms, we felt it was important to state our position." Hillary Clinton, the nearly unstoppable Democrat, and Republican front-runner Donald Trump accelerated Wednesday toward Northeast primaries on an increasingly direct path to presidential nominations after trouncing party challengers in New York. Clinton, now 81 percent of the way toward clinching the Democratic nomination that eluded her eight years ago, can lose every remaining contest and still prevail. Her sweeping victory in the New York primary called into question the durability of Bernie Sanders' rival campaign and left him with severely limited options for overtaking her. While Trump strengthened his hand, he is still far from in the clear. Trump is focused heavily on clinching the Republican nomination through voters' balloting in state primaries, thus avoiding a contested national convention in Cleveland in July. The businessman's win in his home state keeps him on a path to securing the 1,237 delegates he needs, though he'll have to perform well in the round of primaries in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware on Tuesday and in California's huge contest on June 7. His chief rival, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, has no mathematical path to getting the nomination through primary voting. But he sees a window to snatch the nomination from Trump at the convention, and his campaign is working feverishly to line up delegates who would support him if Trump fails to prevail on a first ballot. The side-by-side GOP efforts at this late stage with Trump amassing primary victories while Cruz digs for the support of delegates who could settle the nomination are unprecedented in recent presidential campaigns and add to the deeply uncertain nature of the race. Trump basked in the glow of his victory at a rally in Indianapolis, where he drew several thousand people to a packed building at the Indiana State Fairgrounds. He railed against the Republican nominating system, pointing to Louisiana, where he was outmaneuvered by Cruz in the fight for delegates, and Pennsylvania, where the statewide winner gets 17 delegates outright and the rest "are up for grabs." "They can take the delegates, they can put 'em in airplanes and fly 'em to resorts, they can have dinners with them, they can put them in hotels. Essentially what they're saying is they can buy the election," Trump said. Indiana votes on May 3. Cruz campaigned in Hershey, Pennsylvania, trying to brush off his Tuesday shellacking in New York, where he failed to pick up a single delegate. With trademark sarcasm, he played down Trump's win, saying the mogul hoped to convince people that "Pennsylvania is a suburb of Manhattan." "Donald, with a characteristic display of humility, declared this race is over," Cruz said. "Manhattan has spoken. And if the rest of the voters would quietly go home now and allow him to give the general election to Hillary, all would be better." Later, Cruz conceded to reporters covering the Republican National Committee's spring meeting in Florida that he cannot win the GOP nomination before the convention but insisted Trump couldn't either. He said it was clear "that we are headed to a contested convention." While the messy nomination fight will be a focus of the RNC meeting, party leaders are painfully aware that any rule changes could fuel Trump's charges of an unfair system. Party chairman Reince Priebus has discouraged such action this week. Clinton's win in New York, a state she represented in the Senate for eight years, halted Sanders' recent string of victories and put her in a stronger position heading into the next contests. She could lose them all and still win the nomination if she does well enough to win some delegates. Sanders' advisers offered no signs of giving up before the Democrats' Philadelphia convention. Sanders decamped to his home in Vermont but planned to campaign in Pennsylvania on Thursday and Friday. Clinton held events in the Philadelphia area, joining former Attorney General Eric Holder at a forum in which she pointed to her differences with Sanders on measures to curb gun violence. On the Republican side, many party leaders are torn. Trump is seen by some as a threat to the GOP's very existence. Others fear the party would implode anyway if Cruz were to overtake Trump through a bitter and complicated delegate struggle in Cleveland. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, the only other Republican left in the race, picked up at least three New York delegates but still has only one primary win his home state. Trump's campaign has struggled to keep up with Cruz in working the delegate system, deepening the urgency around his team's efforts to clinch the nomination before the July convention. Mindful of a need to avoid errors like the ones that plagued his campaign in recent weeks, Trump has hired a more professional political staff, been more careful on social media and infused his victory remarks in New York with flashes of policy proposals. Firefighters are working to contain a wildfire that has burned four days and spread across 5,600 acres of Shenandoah National Park. The fire in the south district of the park, on Rocky Mount, had grown to approximately 2,094 acres as of Monday night. By Wednesday afternoon, the size of the blaze had more than doubled, the National Park Service said. A portion of the Appalachian Trail was closed, from Doyles River Overlook (mile 82) to Powell Gap (mile 70). Skyline Drive was closed from Swift Run Gap (mile 65) to Loft Mountain (mile 79). Multiple trails were closed. For the full list, see the Facebook page for the park. The cause of the fire reported Saturday is under investigation and was likely caused by humans, according to the National Wildfire Coordinating Group. More than 200 firefighters, two helicopters, eight fire engines and another aircraft were battling the blaze, including personnel from the National Park Service, Virginia Department of Forestry and USDA Forest Service. Additional firefighters and equipment were en route Wednesday night. Most forest fires in Virginia are caused by human actions and can be prevented, the Virginia Department of Forestry says. The department has these tips on preventing fires: Do not leave a campfire fire unattended. If a fire does escape, call 911 immediately Keep a supply of water and a rake or shovel near the fire Start fires only when the wind is calm Report any acts of arson immediately and note a description of the suspect and their vehicle Teach children about how to safely set and put out a campfire About 30 miles north of the wildfire, the search continues for a Fairfax County firefighter, Nicole Mittendorff, who was reported missing Friday. Hundreds of Verizon workers on Thursday will hold a march and a rally in Boston. They will be joined by elected leaders and community supporters to protest the company's failure to settle a contract that saves middle class jobs for nearly 40,000 employees. Verizon executives have been pushing to offshore jobs in the Philippines, Mexico and other locations to outsource work to low-wage contractors. This will take place at 5 p.m. in Copley Square followed by a march to the Verizon Destination Store at 745 Boylston St. Verizon workers, represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), have been working without a contract since Aug. 1, 2015. Harriet Tubman is replacing Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, and a Massachusetts fourth grader played a role in the change. Sofia was just 9 when she wrote to President Obama two years ago. She wanted to know why no women were on any U.S. currency. She even suggested a list of names. The president wrote back. Now, her dream has come true. "When I sent the letter to the president, I didn't think it would do anything," Sofia said Wednesday. "when I heard the call today, I was like, 'Well, I guess something big did happen.'" Sofia spoke to the Treasury Department Wednesday, getting the news that Tubman would be the face of the bill. And Sofia is credited with getting the movement going. The girl's mother, Kim, couldnt be prouder of her daughter's accomplishments. "It's mind-blowing, it's really amazing to think that a little girl could make this big of a difference in the world," she said. Forced to live in a Mozambique orphanage after AIDS killed their parents, Afonso Slater and Kelvin Lewis didn't have much growing up but they always had each other. Their strong bond endured as the boys were, coincidentally, both adopted by families in the same Phoenix suburb. Now the best friends are set to create even more memories together: They're going to the same college next year, NBC News reported. Slater and Lewis are high school seniors in Gilbert, Arizona, and will attend Brigham Young University in Utah in the fall. Their families, who adopted them separately and months apart in 2008, believe it was a "miracle" the boys ended up in the same town. "It's almost impossible that two little boys out of 1.5 million orphans in Mozambique would land in Gilbert, Arizona, a mile apart from each other," said Lacinda Lewis, Kelvin's adoptive mom. A mother kept her 26-year-old daughter locked up in a small room in Rosenheim, Germany, "possibly for years," police said Tuesday. She was discovered living in "shocking circumstances" in a trash-filled apartment after her 54-year-old mother plunged several stories down the building's stairwell and was seriously hurt. Investigators believe the older woman, who was about to be evicted, was attempting suicide. A police spokesman told NBC News that officers discovered the woman's daughter behind a locked door in the rundown apartment. The younger woman is believed to have autism. One Year After Earthquake in Nepal: Malteser International Americas Saved Lives with Nepal Earthquake Relief Fund Vulnerability of the affected population was reduced through access to life saving medical services and the provision of urgently needed relief goods Contact: Jill Watson, Communications Manager, Malteser International, 305-448-5111, 305-590-1818, jill.watson@malteser-international.org MIAMI, April 21, 2016 /Christian Newswire/ -- Last weekend's earthquake in Ecuador has again focused attention on the mounting need for emergency relief and disaster preparedness measures in the Americas and around the globe. Malteser International Americas, the Miami-based affiliate of the global humanitarian organization, Malteser International, is using their expert knowledge and resources to help survivors in Ecuador. And one year ago they answered the call for help following the two earthquakes in Nepal. One Nepalese survivor helped because of American support is Dhana Bahadur Shrestha, a former soldier in the Nepalese army. The devastating earthquake not only injured him physically, but also threatened to destroy his livelihood. "During a disaster, Malteser International Americas is committed to helping people like Dhana in their greatest time of need. Earthquake survivors, whether it is in Nepal, Ecuador or Haiti, all need one things and that is life-saving relief to ensure their livelihood during this critical period," said Ravi Tripptrap, Executive Director, Malteser International Americas. "Our reach in North America, Latin America and the Caribbean allows us to provide the resources and funding needed during devastating disasters throughout the world." Following the Nepal earthquakes, Malteser International Americas rolled out the Nepal Earthquake Relief program to save lives as well as to reduce the vulnerability of people affected by the earthquake. The main goal was to ensure that the vulnerability of the affected population was reduced through access to life saving medical services and the provision of urgently needed relief goods. Malteser International Americas was able to support Malteser International by securing private foundation funding. These resources help to provide more than 18,000 survivors with emergency health, hygiene, shelter and family and food kits. In Nepal, Malteser International Americas was able to: provide lifesaving medical intervention through a small technical health team and local health provider provide essential medical equipment and supplies distribute relief goods such as food baskets and hygiene kits provide temporary shelter to help prevent disease outbreaks and prevent further vulnerability including winterization and engineering support. Please click to view a short film on the work Malteser International Americas has helped support in Nepal. Nepal will need several more years of intensive international aid in order to make a full recovery. As a first step in this process, Malteser International is developing a comprehensive rebuilding program for the coming three years. As well as the reconstruction of houses, its focus will be on providing health, clean water, and protection from future disasters. "Nepal is the poorest country in South Asia. The people in the mountain regions especially, where in some cases almost 95 percent of all houses were destroyed, have little or no money to make a new beginning. They are still living in tents and temporary shelters, with extremely limited facilities," said Arno Coerver, Malteser International's Country Coordinator in Nepal. The humanitarian organization will continue working in the districts of Sindhupalchok, Kavre and Nuwakot north and east of Kathmandu, where it is planning to build three health posts in remote and isolated areas. One of these will be a bricks and mortar replacement for the tent-based Basic Health Unit, or BHU, that the organization established at Lamosanghu, near to the Chinese border, in cooperation with the Kathmandu University teaching hospital at Dhulikhel. "Since the earthquake, the BHU has treated almost 9,000 patients, and it has become an indispensable asset to the local community," said Coerver. "Immediately after the earthquake, we were treating patients with injuries, or sicknesses caused by the disaster and its effects, and the people are still coming to us with their problems even now." The need for relief continues. The mental trauma caused by the earthquake continues to be amongst the most serious of these problems. "As a rule, between 30-50 per cent of the people affected by a disaster like this develop severe trauma. Official estimates suggest that less than a third of those people suffering from trauma in Nepal have received psychological help," said Arno Coerver. Malteser International has helped more than 92,000 people to make a new beginning after the earthquake. More than 70,000 people have received aid material including food, hygiene kits, and tarpaulins, as well as winter relief material like clothing, stoves and insulation material. Almost 12,000 people have been able to build temporary shelters using building material provided by Malteser International, while around 800 people without the ability to build a shelter for themselves including the old and the sick received a new house constructed by Malteser International. Malteser International has been active in Nepal since 2012. Its staff were en route to the disaster zone within hours of the devastating earthquake on April 25th 2015, which cost 8,699 people their lives, wounded more than 22,000 and left around 2.8 million homeless. Malteser International Americas is a global humanitarian organization with a mission of supporting the vulnerable and marginalized so that they may live a healthy life with dignity. Through our U.S. headquarters, Malteser International Americas provides immediate disaster response and preparedness as well as vital healthcare and nutrition to vulnerable people in North America, Latin America and the Caribbean. We are part of Malteser International, the humanitarian relief agency of the Order of Malta. With more than 100 projects annually in some 25 countries worldwide, we provide emergency relief after disasters and support recovery efforts, bridging the gap between humanitarian aid and sustainable development. For nearly 60 years, we have been standing by those affected by poverty, disease, conflict and disaster. One man is dead and another seriously injured in a crash in Casco, Maine. The Cumberland County Sheriff's Office say the driver of a box truck swerved into the path of an oncoming vehicle on Route 302 Tuesday afternoon. The box truck went down a small embankment and rolled onto its side. The driver of the other vehicle, 29-year-old Adam Perron of Harrison, Maine, was pronounced dead at the scene. The driver of the truck suffered serious injuries after being ejected from the vehicle and pinned underneath it. Police say he was airlifted to Maine Medical Center with serious injuries. Authorities say the cause of the crash is under investigation. Four students and a bus driver were injured in a school bus crash in New Hampshire Thursday afternoon. Firefighters in Nashua confirm the crash involving a Broad Street School school bus and a Chevrolet SUV happened just before 3 p.m. at the corner of Sycamore Lane and Wheaton Drive. The victims' injuries were all described as minor and non-life threatening; they were all taken to local hospitals to be evaluated. The bus driver's child wasn't injured, but rode along with their parent in an ambulance to the hospital, according to fire officials. Nashua police say the investigation is ongoing, and they would not comment if there would be charges against the SUV driver or the bus driver. The SUV's driver wasn't injured in the crash. Parents of the injured children were notified by the school district, and the two remaining children on the bus who were not injured were picked up by another school bus and taken home. The suspect in the hit-and-run of a Brockton, Massachusetts, teenager has been held on $750,000. Christopher Jansky, 39, was arrested Wednesday night without incident in Abington. Jansky, a Las Vegas resident, hid behind his attorney Thursday as he was arraigned on charges of leaving the scene of an accident and driving on a suspended license. The boy, who has been identified as Elias Lebon, was thrown nearly 60 feet by the impact of the crash, according to police. "He's just a really nice kid, would never hurt anybody," said Lebon's neighbor, Darlene Croteau. "The family's lovely." Lebon was transported to Boston Children's Hospital in serious condition. He is recovering from a head injury, an arm injury and a broken leg. Police were able to track the suspect's car down to his girlfriend's mother's apartment on Chatham West Drive in Brockton. She told necn the couple told her about the accident and that they were packing bags to go to Vegas. "I'm devastated. I don't know what they were thinking," said Denise Sommer. "I feel bad for the little boy, and I'm very sorry." But before Jansky and his girlfriend Suzanne Sommer could leave the state, police tracked them down to his mother's apartment in Abington and arrested him. "He was scared to death when he found out a little kid got hurt," said the suspect's mother, Myrna Jansky. "He started to cry." Investigators say Christopher Jansky had actually been in court shortly before the accident for a 2014 breaking and entering case, and allegedly took off because he didn't want to get in trouble again. "I feel so sorry that happened, it should never have happened," Myrna Jansky said through tears. "He should have got out of that car, he should have got out and made sure the kid was alright." Jansky has a lengthy record that includes several motor vehicles infractions. He is being held on $750,000 bail. Jansky is due back in court May 20. The state's highest court says former Massachusetts House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi is entitled to the money he contributed into the state's retirement system, plus interest, before his conviction on corruption charges. But the Supreme Judicial Court on Thursday rejected arguments from DiMasi's attorneys that he should have continued to receive his state pension from the time he was sentenced in 2011 until all his appeals were exhausted in 2014. The justices said the state retirement board was wrong to withhold from the Boston Democrat the $127,000 he paid into the pension system during his time as a lawmaker. The money must now be repaid with interest. A federal jury convicted DiMasi of using his clout as speaker to steer two state contracts to a software firm in exchange for payments. Firefighters are battling a 2-alarm blaze in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood, the second fire in the city on Thursday. Boston Fire said they responded at 3:55 p.m. to 21 Stockwell St. in Dorchester for a fire in a 3-story building. Heavy fire was showing on arrival, and a second alarm was ordered. No injuries have been reported, and firefighters are continuing to work to extinguish the fire. The Dorchester fire is the second that Boston firefighters have responded to on Thursday. At 12:55 p.m., firefighters were called to a fire in a 2-story building at 42 Blue Hill Ave. in Roxbury. Smoke was showing from the second floor on arrival but the blaze was quickly extinguished. One adult male was treated and transported to a hospital with minor burns. Damage to the building was estimated at $50,000. The Massachusetts Department of Transportation has completed manhole inspections on Route 1 after a state trooper spotted a loose manhole cover in Saugus. A state subcontractor working on this section of road has been suspended, and MassDOT says the cover was likely loosened during work associated with a repaving project. MassDOT says no other manhole covers were found to be dislodged. It was just over two months ago when teacher Caitlin Clavette was killed when a manhole cover on I-93 in Boston became dislodged and slammed into her windshield. Authorities say they immediately responded to the Saugus location Wednesday morning and welded the cover to the frame. The Massachusetts Department of Transportation wants a full report from Tango Construction to try to figure out what happened. Tango Construction of Fitchburg declined to talk about the incident. Months after a teacher was killed by a flying manhole cover on a Massachusetts highway, there is renewed concern after another was discovered to be loose. Early Wednesday morning, a driver spotted the loose cover on Route 1 in Saugus and called police. A state subcontractor working on the section of road has been suspended by state officials. The Massachusetts Department of Transportation wants a full report from Tango Construction to try to figure out what happened. "MassDOT believes this cover may have loosened during work associated with a repaving project," the department told necn in a statement. "I guess I'm too trusting because I don't really think a lot about it," said Lori Rezendes, a mother in town. "But I do have three precious kids in cargo, so I'm hoping that they do take care of these things more often than it seems they have lately." It was just over two months ago when Caitlin Clavette was killed when a manhole cover on I-93 in Boston became dislodged and slammed into her windshield. In the wake of the tragic accident, state officials inspected hundreds of manhole covers in the area. Authorities say they immediately responded to the Saugus location Wednesday morning and welded the cover to the frame. Wednesday night, the state says, "MassDOT is inspecting other manhole cover sites in construction zones on Route 1 to ensure the covers are properly seated." Tango Construction of Fitchburg declined to talk about the incident. A Grafton, Massachusetts, man whose wife was found dead in a bedroom of their home is now facing a murder charge. Michael Sugarman was held without bail after a plea of not guilty was entered on his behalf at his arraignment Thursday. His wife, 36-year-old Kelly Sugarman, was found dead on April 12 after the couple's 5-year-old daughter was seen wandering around the neighborhood in her pajamas and saying her mom was sick. Michael Sugarman was also found in the home with a knife in his neck. The 42-year-old man was initially charged with assault and battery. His lawyer, Janice Bassil, says her client is severely mentally ill and incompetent to stand trial. She says jail officials have asked that he be transferred to a state hospital for the mentally ill. Authorities say a Providence, Rhode Island, police officer was injured when his cruiser was sideswiped by a stolen vehicle that was trying to evade police. Lt. Roger Aspinall says firefighters needed to extricate the injured officer from his car after the crash on Wednesday night. He was taken to a hospital with neck and back injuries that police say aren't life-threatening. Aspinall says the officer saw the stolen vehicle but lost sight of it and parked his cruiser. That's when he says the stolen car sideswiped him and drove away, before striking another car. The driver was arrested at the second crash. Police say he'll be charged with possession of a stolen vehicle, leaving the scene of an accident and related offenses. Authorities didn't immediately identify the suspect. For full functionality of this site it is necessary to enable JavaScript. Here are the instructions how to enable JavaScript in your web browser It's summer, so many restaurants have begun to open their patio seating for outdoor dining. Here are some of our favorite spots: Barcelona Wine Bar- Brookline, Massachusetts This restaurant offers a large tapas menu, small Spanish cuisine appetizers or snacks. They patio is located right on Beacon Street. Besito- Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts If you're in the mood for a margarita or some tableside guacamole this restaurant is the place to go. Located right on Route 9, this restaurant is easy to get to and worth the trip. Cask 'n Flagon- Boston, Massachusetts This bar is on Yawkey Way, next to America's Most Beloved Ballpark, Fenway Park. This restaurant is perfect for warm summer days whether the Red Sox are in town or not. Cinquecento Boston- Boston, Massachusetts Located in the South End, this restaurant features fine Italian dining, and a great selection of handcrafted cocktails and wines. Legal Harborside- Boston, Massachusetts Legal's Seaport location has plenty of outdoor seating, including a third-story roof deck. Great cocktails, appetizers and entrees. Lookout Rooftop and Bar, Envoy Hotel- Boston, Massachusetts It may be best known for it's igloos during the winter, but the Lookout Rooftop and Bar is recognized as one of the best rooftop bars in the country. Grab a cocktail, a glass of wine, or a craft beer. MET Back Bay- Boston, Massachusetts Located right on Newbury Street, this restaurant offers brunch, lunch, and dinner and has a large drink menu with craft cocktails. M.T's Local Kitchen and Winebar- Nashua, New Hampshire In the mood for pizza? This restaurant has a wine bar and sidewalk seating, perfect for grabbing a slice when it's nice out. Poco's- Portsmouth, New Hampshire There's nothing better than nachos overlooking the beach. This Mexican restaurant is located right next to the Piscataqua River and has two outdoor dining decks. The Porthole- Portland, Maine This pub is located on the waterfront and has live music and a great seafood menu. It's also the largest waterfront deck in Portland! Don't see your favorite on the list? Send your favorite patio to us at shareit@www.necn.com or share it online using #BestPatios. A Boston woman is adding the MBTA as a defendant in a civil rights lawsuit she brought against two Transit Police officers. Mary Holmes says the two officers beat her and used pepper spray on her at the Dudley Square Station in 2014. In the suit, Holmes accuses Officers Alfred Trinh and Jennifer Amyot-Garvey of police brutality and violating her right to free speech. Amyot-Garvey pleaded not guilty to criminal charges. She no longer works for the transit police. Carl Williams, an attorney for the ACLU of Massachusetts, is representing Holmes. In a statement he says, "Our client, Mary Holmes, has added the MBTA itself to this lawsuit in hopes of ensuring that no one needs to endure what she did - abuse at the hands of the very officers who have the duty to protect people." An MBTA spokesman tells the Boston Globe that they do not comment on pending litigation. As Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are celebrating after big wins in New York, their rivals are considering their next steps. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders spent a rare day back home in Vermont, seen around noon leaving his Burlington home with his brother Larry. He returned to "recharge" before next Tuesday's round of primaries. "There are five primaries next week," Sanders told reporters after returning late Tuesday night. "We think we're going to do well, and we have a path toward victory, which we are going to fight to maintain." Earlier Wednesday, a group called "Rights and Democracy" delivered a 5000 signature petition to the Vermont federal building calling on the states superdelegates, including Sen. Patrick Leahy and Gov. Peter Shumlin to switch their allegiance from Clinton to represent the will of the 86 percent of Vermonters who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary. Massachusetts superdelegate Steve Grossman defended the process. "These are the rules that were created some time ago," he said. "If the party leaders would like to get together and discuss/debate those rules for 2020 and beyond, I wouldn't have any problem doing that. That's what change is all about." Grossman, a Clinton supporter, is a former Democratic national committee chair, making him a superdelegate for life. He was called by a Sanders supporter recently asking if he'd switch his allegiance. Grossman believes superdelegates have the right to switch their votes, but he thinks it is unlikely to happen, "particularly because Hillary Clinton has received more popular votes and has more elected delegates by a margin of about 250 than Bernie Sanders does." Grossman doesn't think the nomination will come down to superdelegates, but if it does, he says he feels comfortable with their wisdom and their judgement - which was the purpose behind the creating of the superdelegates in the first place. Donald Trump touted his victory over John Kasich and Ted Cruz as he and his team project a message of inevitability. As for the Republicans, Trump is back on the campaign trail following his big win in Tuesday's New York primary. Campaigning in Indianapolis, Trump touted his victory over John Kasich and Ted Cruz as he and his team project a message of inevitability. "I consider the primary win last night in New York to be the end of the campaign for the nomination and the beginning of the campaign now for November," said Geoff Diehl, the co-chairman of Trump's campaign in Massachusetts. Diehl says, given the five northeastern states coming up next Tuesday, there is no path for Ted Cruz to catch up to Trump. But campaigning in Pennsylvania, Cruz insists, the race will go to a contested convention this summer. "You may have heard there was an election yesterday. And as the media are breathlessly reporting, Donald Trump won his home state. Truly a remarkable achievement," said Cruz. Diehl believes Trump will have the necessary 1,237 delegates at the convention. But if not, he says, "I think that's when you start seeing negotiations between he and John Kasich or another - Marco Rubio potentially - to cobble together that number." Meanwhile, some of Trump's most ardent opponents are starting to notice a change. "Last night we saw a measured sort of thoughtful guy, for Trump, OK, who acted more presidential," said Republican political consultant Pat Griffin, a Trump opponent. "He's still Donald Trump, but there was no reference to "lyin Ted." Griffin thinks Trump is finally listening to someone - that his new convention manager, Paul Manafort, is successfully getting the candidate to tone down his rhetoric. According to Griffin, Trump will end up being the nominee. But he says Trump has alienated too many groups of people - women, Latinos, African-Americans - to beat Clinton in a general election. NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE, Nev. For the seventh year in a row, the 14th Testing Squadron, an operational testing squadron that partners with the U.S. Air Force Warfare Center here, participated in the gathering of both industry and governments combined known as the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association Cyberspace Symposium. The AFCEA Cyberspace Symposium, held in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in the month of February is an annual event geared towards bringing together a broad range of people in the technological arena in order to discuss and solve problems that exist in their field. Forums like the Cyberspace Symposium give an opportunity for governments and industry to come together in a professional environment and discuss problems and potential solutions, said Dean Hullings, 2016 vice program chairman of the Cyberspace Symposium. Its a networking and technology sharing forum, the annual event in the month of February broadens the scope and bring together lots of people. With each passing year Rocky Mountain Chapter of AFCEA choses new topics to highlight and discuss that pertain to the ever changing landscape of cyberspace technology. Every year we have a different theme, and we bring in different speakers and panelists that talk to those themes, said Hullings. In 2015, our theme was about sending cyberspace and how it needs more than technology, it needed policy changes and acquisition changes and solutions. This year, the theme was wrapped around managing risk. This theme of managing risk stems from the concept that not all things can be shielded in cyberspace, so taking an intelligent approach and safeguarding what is vital is a necessity. You cant block everything in cyberspace, so we have to take more of a risk based assessment of whats happening on our network and protect the things that are important to us and focus our attention there, said Hullings. The 14th TS took this premise and portrayed it in the four booths, two more than were presented last year, at the Cyberspace Symposium. The point of the 14TS booth is to demonstrate to attendees how easy cyber exploitation is, and to share advice on how to counter some of the more common threats, said Maj. Marc J. Weber, 14th TS technical director. Fitting with the 2016 theme of managing risk, the 14th TS hosted a Cyber Exploitation booth with live demonstrations of various hacking techniques including, radio-frequency identification skimming, where a handheld copier was used to duplicate badges and access locks, home exploitation, where different techniques were used to hack into common home Wi-Fi routers, A live malicious hotspot, where fake malicious hotspots were setup and would warn the user of the dangers of connecting to unknown hotspots, and Windows 7 hacking, where devices were used to compromise and control a standard desktop. You cant block everything in cyberspace, so we have to take more of a risk based assessment of whats happening on our network and protect the things that are important to us and focus our attention there, said Hullings. The 14th TS offers a unique view to all that attended the symposium of how the Air Force runs their cyber systems. Having a unit like the 14th Test Squadron presenting real vulnerabilities and how they could potentially be hacked provide the attendees of the CYBERSPACE Symposium a behind-the-curtain look at how the Air Force assesses their space systems, Maj. Andrew Heo, Regional Young AFCEA vice president. No longer can we be reactive to events in cyber; we have people on the ground who are being proactive and finding serious flaws in our systems. The unique venue in which the AFCEA Cyberspace Symposium provides allows the 14th a perfect atmosphere in order to show liabilities in many different forms of platforms with in the cyberspace arena. The cyberspace symposium is a great venue for the squadron to demonstrate vulnerabilities to military, U.S. government, and civilian professionals who work in the cyberspace domain, said Lt. Col. Rob Jackson, 14th TS Commander. When we think of cyberspace threats, we typically focus on our Personal Computers and networks, but cyberspace threats exist everywhere in todays electronic world. Even something as simple as a radio frequency identification access card or a common power strip can be used for cyberspace exploitation. This event gives us an opportunity to provide helpful suggestions on how to mitigate those threats. I am proud of this years team as they have worked very hard to add more demonstrations to highlight current exploitation tactics and techniques. This symposium continues to be a great forum for the squadron to represent the 926th Wing and Air Force Reserve Command and I look forward to the squadron participating in next years event. With the partnership of the 14th TS and the AFECA being a mutually beneficial one its apparent that both are excited for the next years symposium to share more advancements in their field. The business of bug hunting is a potentially lucrative one for both seasoned security researchers and amateurs with an interest in hacking. Its an area thats gaining legitimacy thanks to official bug bounty programs and hacking contests, but theres still a seedy underbelly that unscrupulous bounty hunters can take advantage of if they successfully identify a vulnerability. The average cost of a data breach is $3.8 million, according to research by the Ponemon Institute. Its not hard to understand why so many companies are now stumping up bounties. It can also be very difficult, time consuming and expensive to root out bugs and flaws internally. Turning to the wider security community for help makes a lot of sense, and where theres need theres a market. Lets take a closer look at how the market works. White market for bugs Assuming you are a law-abiding, morally upright citizen, you have three options when you identify a serious flaw: Submit directly to the vendor Submit to a third-party bug-bounty program Submit to a hacking contest Big players such as Google, Samsung and Facebook all offer bounty programs. Back in 2014, Facebook fixed 61 high-severity flaws through its bug bounty program. Since its bug bounty program began in 2011, the social media giant has doled out more than $4.3 million to more than 800 researchers after receiving in excess of 2,400 valid submissions, according to its 2015 Highlights report. A lot of flaws can earn a lot of money Were also seeing the rise of many third-party platforms, such as Bugcrowd. These companies allow clients to list applications they want tested and offer bounties that crowdsourced security talent compete for. Tesla, Western Union, Pinterest and many other companies are customers. Founded in 2012, Bugcrowd boasts that more than 27,000 researchers have identified more than 53,000 vulnerabilities for more than 250 companies since it started trading. Hacking contests such as Pwn2Own are another option. Hackers demonstrated 21 new vulnerabilities in attacks on browsers and operating systems this year. There are sometimes large cash prizes, and job offers are likely to follow for anyone who finds a big vulnerability that doesnt involve jumping through too many hoops. Sometimes companies, including Google and Microsoft, run their own hacking competitions. The dark side of bug bounty hunting Beyond the white market, theres also a gray market, with questionable legality. Security researchers can sell vulnerabilities to private brokers with policies about only selling to ethical and approved sources. In that case, the vulnerability may end up being used to spy on private citizens suspected of crimes or used to shut down a terrorist organization, according to Hewlett Packard Enterprises Cyber Risk Report 2016. However, its often unclear, and sellers can only guess at how the vulnerability may have been used. In the black market, which is unquestionably illegal, buyers simply sell to the highest bidder. It might be sold to a cybercriminal or network of criminals. It might also be used for corporate spying or even national spying. The seller generally has no insight into how the vulnerability will be used, but its a safe bet that someone is going to end up at a disadvantage. Slow to respond Finding vulnerabilities is just the beginning. Far too many developers are slow to act to patch those flaws. This can lead the researchers who uncover them to disclose flaws publicly, piling on the pressure for the vendor to take action. They might lose out on a potential bounty, but theyll still be able to discuss the flaw and benefit from making their discovery of it public. Even when the developer does patch an exploit or vulnerability, far too many companies are even slower to remediate. You might think that known solutions would be enacted immediately, but thats simply not the case. Known vulnerabilities often persist much longer than they should, allowing cybercriminals to continue exploiting them long after theyve been revealed. For example, hundreds of cloud apps were still vulnerable to DROWN weeks after it was unveiled. Offering bounties can be cost-effective for businesses, and it may go some way towards persuading researchers or hackers to aim for the white market, rather than the gray or black. But they have to act quickly to deal with vulnerabilities and protect their customers. The longer it takes to deal with flaws, the greater the risk that would-be attackers will weaponize them. Aiming for the good white-hat-wearing side even further, a smart approach can entail using systems development lifecycle (SDLC) and Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) programming standards. Also, a well-thought-out vulnerability management program that includes application penetration testing will go a long way in securing any and all applications. The opinions expressed in this Blog are those of Michelle Drolet and do not necessarily represent those of the IDG Communications, Inc., its parent, subsidiary or affiliated companies. A second demonstration of mega-venture Magic Leaps virtual reality technology indicates that head-tracking has been added and possibly hand-tracking. Head-tracking, which wasnt shown in the only other demonstration that happened over a year ago, lets a person move around a hologram to see it from different sides. Hand-tracking, which is a mouse-like metaphor interface that lets people interact with virtual objects using hand movements, also seems to have been added. The report also hints at the principals behind how Magic Leaps virtual reality works. Wired reported on Kevin Kellys visit to Magic Leap in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to experience the second public demonstration of the companys version of virtual reality that it calls mixed reality (MR). A comparison of the Wired story with one written by Rachel Metz over a year ago for the MIT Technology Review measures Magic Leaps progress. Theres only about a page or two about Magic Leaps technology out of 41 in the Wired story. Its really an explainer of augmented reality, mixed reality and virtual reality technology and the universe of competitors. Anyone wanting to learn about the market should read this well-executed story. The specifics about the technical progress of this $1.4 billion venture have been extracted from the stories and summarized below. A year of progress Since the Tech Review report, Magic Leap has made progress. A year ago, the MR apparatus wasnt really wearable. This may have been due to the sheer size of the prototype hardware, or the software that adjusts the illusion for head movement and changes in perspective may not have been completed. The complexity of the mathematics of this head-tracking applied to the complexity of the mathematics of Magic Leaps proprietary light-field chip may have required more development time. The Wired report of Kellys experience indicates the prototype headset he tested is now wearable, perhaps untethered from a high-powered graphics-rendering computer used by the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Kelly describes his observation of a realistic 8-in. steampunk drone projected in front of him that he could walk around looking at from every angle. It seems that since Metz checked in on Magic Leap founder and CEO Rony Abovitz and his team last year, the headset has been reduced in size to be wearable and head-tracking has been implemented. Kellys report raises the question: Could Magic Leap have implement hand-tracking, too? He writes, When I raise a hand, it approaches and extends a glowing appendage to touch my fingertip. If the projection of the drone is programmed to interact with his hand, the relative coordinates in space of the hand need to be understood and movement of the hand tracked to trigger the software rendering the virtual drone to respond by extending the glowing appendage. That one sentence by Kelly leaves so many questions about how this was implemented. Was he wearing a VR glove? Did Magic Leap partner with Leapmotion? Or did the company implement its own proprietary technology? We wont know until Magic Leaps next disclosure. The remainder of what Kevin saw is consistent with what Metz saw, but the subject matter changed a bit. Kevin saw very high-resolution holograms: human-sized robots that walk through walls, and miniature humans wrestle each other on a real tabletop, almost like a Star Wars holographic chess game. The concept of MR is mutually reinforced by Kevins account and a new Youtube video released yesterday that depicts holograms of a tabletop Mount Everest, a sneaker and a jellyfish floating across the ceiling. Most interesting, though, is the Wired story included the first image of the light-field chip ever published. Magic Leaps solution is an optical system that creates the illusion of depth in such a way that your eyes focus far for far things, and near for near, and will converge or diverge at the correct distances, Kelly writes. And he compares it to the fixed focus length between the eye and the LCD screen of stereoscopic VR headset technology used by almost every competitor. Stereoscopic VR uses the principals of stereoscopic photography invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1838 in which two photographs taken from slightly different angles are focused through lenses in an apparatus of fixed focal length to create the illusion of three dimensions (3D). Stereoscopic VR employs the same method, dividing an LCD screen mounted in front of the users eyes projecting two slightly different moving images focused into the eyes with lenses to create the illusion of 3D full motion VR. Its a neat trick that counts on the gullible human brain to generate a consistent sensible world view from what its senses have been given. Magic Leap contends that it doesnt trick the brain. Rather it shoots photons into the eye that stimulate the cones and rods as if the hologram were real, or according to founder Rony Abovitz, neurologically true. The image of the light-field chip hints that Magic Leap may be using a very promising technology called silicon photonics. Bending and switching light Over the past few decades the need for increased communications speeds attracted huge investments to shift technologies from slow error-prone copper wires to fiber optics. Challenges such as converting electrons used in computers to photons that travel at the speed of light across optical fiber and bending light that would prefer to beam straight ahead around corners were solved. It has required a lot of expensive hardware to make the conversion back and forth between photons and electrons that silicon photonics will change into a commodity. The idea behind silicon photonics (aka nanophotonics) that has also attracted huge investment from Intel and IBM is simple: take the worlds fastest communication technology (photons), and build it directly into semiconductor chips using well-known and massively scalable production processes. With scale comes multiple orders of magnitude in production cost reduction. Perhaps Magic Leap has applied all the research of bending and switching light to shoot photons across the light-field chip that forms the headset lenses, turning it into the retina at the point where the photons would be overlaid on reality to create the hologram. Its just a speculation about how neurologically true has been achieved. Yesterday, the European Union launched an inquiry into Androids dominant 80% share of the smartphone market. The Antitrust Commission announced it will investigate the connection between Google Play services and Google apps. Any smartphone supplier can run the Android Open Source Project (OASP,) a free and available as an open source project. Chinas Xiaomi, for instance, takes the Android OASP and repackages it with a UI that looks like iPhones UI. Xaomi doesnt opt in to the Play Store for its apps, but relies on its own app store. Most hardware OEMs opt in to Google Play services because they want access to the million plus apps on the Play Store and Androids security services. Security is a more subtle point but an important part of the Android operating systems architecture that is built on Play Services. Every app uploaded to the Play store is inspected for malware using automated code scanners and machine learning. Security scanning extends beyond inspection of apps within the Play Store, but Play Services scans the on-device behavior of apps to determine if the apps behavior is potentially harmful. A hardware OEM opting out of Play Services would not only need to invest in sourcing apps elsewhere, but also in security. Building an app store and security services that match the quality and scale of Play Services would be too expensive for most OEMs, except maybe Samsung. OEMs in China dont use Play Services because Alphabet and China have a long-standing disagreement over Internet censorship and unfair trade practices by the Chinese government favoring Chinese internet companies. Most of Googles products arent available in China, including Play Services. Chinese users have paid the price of six times the number of potentially harmful apps on their Android devices, according to last years Android Security Year in Review Report (PDF.) OEMs opting into Play Services must sign the Mobile Application Distribution Agreement requiring that Googles ecosystem of services, such as search, mail and maps are installed and displayed in a folder on the home screen. Unless Microsoft drops Windows for Android theres really no incentive for another OEM to mix and match applications. Bing and Yahoo Search, Microsoft Outlook and HERE maps are available, so no-one is prevented from installing and using alternatives. The present situation is different than the Steve Ballmer strong arm days when Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with the Windows OS and actively tried to prevent competitors browsers from being installed. The EU Antitrust Commission investigation into Microsoft Internet Explorer bundling was resolved by letting users choose from a list of twelve browsers during set up. Alphabet could and can be expected to argue that Play Services is not an obstacle to choice but a vehicle to which any non-harmful app can be added to the Play Store and downloaded with play services that increase users options and security. Kennet School hosts take-off of national science and engineering project A RACE to find the engineers of the future was launched at Thatchams Kennet School this week. The national Bloodhound Project sets pupils aged from 11 to 16 to work together to make a rocket-powered foam car and pit it against rival teams. Pupils have to test their programming skills with a BBC micro:bit device to capture and analyse real-time data to tweak their design and improve performance. Teams from Kennet School researched, designed and tested their cars on Monday. Hitting a top speed of 64.7mph and outpacing the Army and Microsoft were team Dobby Doodles Year 7 pupils Mackenzie Myers and Finlay Pollington and Year 12 pupils Natan Goren and Matthew OCallaghan. Mackenzie said the team was not expecting to win, but it felt awesome that they had. He said: We were thinking of making our car different to every other car and thought about what every other person would do and pushed over the boundaries. We cut off some areas of our car to make it lighter. Head of IT at Kennet School, Mel Poyda, said the launch had been amazing and the pupils had enjoyed the experience. Its been about problem-solving, engaging and being creative. These kids are the future of these businesses and if we dont push them down that path now what are they going to have in the future? They are investing in their own future. With the 1,000mph landspeed record attempt by Bloodhound SSC as its inspiration, Microsoft and the Army are using the project to encourage pupils to take up Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Senior audience marketing manager for students at Microsoft, Andrew Webber, said: Kennet is a large secondary school and they have a teacher who is passionate about coding and computing, so it was the perfect choice for us. He said the company wanted to play a part in equipping the next generation with the digital skills they need for the future, which will be shaped by computing. Jules Tipler from Bloodhound said the project was designed to encourage pupils into STEM subjects. The Army and Microsoft need engineers and they hope that children will be bitten by the bug by doing projects like this, he said. The fastest cars will compete at the Santa Pod raceway in Bedfordshire on June 30, where the top three fastest teams will win a cash prize for their school. The overall winners will travel to Newquay to watch a rocket launch. Headteacher at Kennet, Paul Dick, said it had been a huge pleasure to host the event and he hoped his pupils had shown what they were capable of. Champaign, IL (61820) Today Mostly clear this evening then becoming cloudy after midnight. Low 61F. Winds S at 10 to 20 mph.. Tonight Mostly clear this evening then becoming cloudy after midnight. Low 61F. Winds S at 10 to 20 mph. NOTICE: This Consumer Medicine Information (CMI) is intended for persons living in Australia. Consumer Medicine Information (CMI) summary The full CMI on the next page has more details. If you are worried about using this medicine, speak to your doctor or pharmacist. WARNING: Important safety information is provided in a boxed warning in the Important safety information is provided in a boxed warning in the full CMI . Read before using this medicine. Why am I taking Zolpidem Sandoz? Zolpidem Sandoz contains the active ingredient zolpidem tartrate. Zolpidem Sandoz is used to initiate and maintain sleep in those with sleeping difficulties, also called insomnia in patients over 18 years of age. For more information, see Section 1. Why am I taking Zolpidem Sandoz? in the full CMI. What should I know before I take Zolpidem Sandoz? Do not use if you have ever had an allergic reaction to Zolpidem Sandoz or any of the ingredients listed at the end of the CMI. Talk to your doctor if you have any other medical conditions, have been drinking alcohol, take any other medicines, or are pregnant or plan to become pregnant or are breastfeeding. For more information, see Section For more information, see Section 2. What should I know before I take Zolpidem Sandoz? in the full CMI. What if I am taking other medicines? Some medicines may interfere with Zolpidem Sandoz and affect how it works. A list of these medicines is in Section 3. What if I am taking other medicines? in the full CMI. How do I take Zolpidem Sandoz? In Adults: Usual dose is one 10 mg tablet taken just before bedtime. In people over 65 years of age: The dose is one 5 mg tablet taken just before bedtime. More instructions can be found in Section 4. How do I take Zolpidem Sandoz? in the full CMI. What should I know while taking Zolpidem Sandoz? Things you should do Remind any doctor, dentist or pharmacist you visit that you are using Zolpidem Sandoz. If you become pregnant or suspect that you are pregnant while you are taking this medicine, stop taking it and tell your doctor or pharmacist immediately. Things you should not do Do not take Zolpidem Sandoz if you have sleep apnoea, myasthenia gravis, severe liver problems, acute and / or severe lung problems or if you have previously experienced complex sleep behaviours such as sleep walking. Do not give Zolpidem Sandoz to a child or adolescent Driving or using machines You should not operate dangerous machinery or drive motor vehicles for 8 hours after you take it. You should also be careful the next morning when you wake up. Drinking alcohol You should not drink alcohol while you are taking Zolpidem Sandoz. Looking after your medicine Keep the medicine in a cool, dry place where the temperature stays below 30C. For more information, see Section 5. What should I know while using Zolpidem Sandoz? in the full CMI. Are there any side effects? Common side effects are: drowsiness, dizziness, headache, fatigue, worsened insomnia, hallucinations, delirium, nightmares, agitation, depression, abdominal pain, diarrhoea, nausea and vomiting, back pain, infections of the nose, throat and chest and loss of memory. If any of the following happen, stop taking this medicine and tell your doctor immediately, or go to Accident and Emergency at your nearest hospital: swelling of the face, lips, mouth or throat, which may cause difficulty in swallowing or breathing, hives, fainting. Sleep walking, driving motor vehicles and other unusual, and on some occasions dangerous, behaviours whilst apparently asleep may also occur. For more information, including what to do if you have any side effects, see Section 6. Are there any side effects? in the full CMI. WARNING: ZOLPIDEM MAY BE ASSOCIATED WITH UNUSUAL AND POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS BEHAVIOURS WHILST APPARENTLY ASLEEP. THESE HAVE INCLUDED SLEEP WALKING, DRIVING MOTOR VEHICLES AND OTHER BIZARRE BEHAVIOURS. SOME MEDICINES MAY INTERACT WITH ZOLPIDEM AND PARTICULAR CAUTION IS NEEDED WITH OTHER DRUGS THAT MAY ALSO ACT ON THE BRAIN; BEFORE YOU TAKE ZOLPIDEM REFER TO THE "TAKING OTHER MEDICINES" SECTION BELOW OR ASK YOUR DOCTOR OR PHARMACIST. YOU MUST NOT DRINK ALCOHOL WHEN YOU TAKE ZOLPIDEM. DO NOT TAKE ZOLPIDEM FOR MORE THAN 4 WEEKS. IF YOUR SLEEP PROBLEMS CONTINUE, CONSULT YOUR DOCTOR. Why am I taking Zolpidem Sandoz? Zolpidem Sandoz contains the active ingredient zolpidem tartrate. Zolpidem Sandoz is used to initiate and maintain sleep in those with sleeping difficulties, also called insomnia in patients over 18 years of age. It is not recommended for use for more than 4 weeks at a time. Zolpidem Sandoz has a different chemical structure to other sleeping tablets. Zolpidem Sandoz works by binding to special sites in the brain which produce sleep. Your doctor, however, may prescribe Zolpidem Sandoz for another purpose. What should I know before I take Zolpidem Sandoz? Warnings Do not take Zolpidem Sandoz if: you are allergic to zolpidem tartrate, or any of the ingredients listed at the end of this leaflet. Always check the ingredients to make sure you can use this medicine. you have been drinking alcohol or you believe that you may have alcohol in your bloodstream. you have sleep apnoea (a condition where you temporarily stop breathing while you sleep). you have myasthenia gravis (a condition in which the muscles become weak and tire easily). you have severe liver problems you have acute and/or severe lung problems you have previously experienced complex sleep behaviours after taking this medicine including sleepwalking, sleep-driving, and/or engaging in other activities while not fully awake. Do not give Zolpidem Sandoz to a child or adolescent under 18 years of age. There is no experience with its use in children or adolescents under 18 years of age. Check with your doctor if you: have any problems with your breathing or if you often snore while you are asleep. have ever been addicted to alcohol or any drug or medicine or if you have ever suffered from a mental illness. If you have, you may be at risk of getting into a regular pattern or habit of taking Zolpidem Sandoz. have or have had any other medical conditions especially the following: problems with your heart, liver, kidneys or lungs, epilepsy, depression, mental illness, for example, schizophrenia. plan to have surgery. have allergies to any of the ingredients listed at the end of this leaflet. take any medicines for any other condition. Talk to your doctor or pharmacist if you have ever had a mental disorder or have abused or have been dependent on alcohol or drugs During treatment, you may be at risk of developing certain side effects. It is important you understand these risks and how to monitor for them. See additional information under Section 6. Are there any side effects Pregnancy and breastfeeding Check with your doctor if you are pregnant, suspect that you are pregnant, or intend to become pregnant. Like most medicines of this kind, Zolpidem Sandoz is not recommended to be used during pregnancy. Your doctor will discuss the risks and benefits of taking it if you are pregnant. Talk to your doctor if you are breastfeeding or intend to breastfeed. Zolpidem Sandoz can pass into breast milk. Your doctor will discuss the risks and benefits of using it if you are breast-feeding or planning to breast-feed. Do not take it after the expiry date (EXP) printed on the pack. Do not take it if the packaging is damaged or shows signs of tampering. Contains sugars (as lactose). What if I am taking other medicines? Tell your doctor or pharmacist if you are taking any other medicines, including any medicines, vitamins or supplements that you buy without a prescription from your pharmacy, supermarket or health food shop. Some medicines may interfere with Zolpidem Sandoz and affect how it works. Medicines that may increase the effect of Zolpidem Sandoz include: alcohol medicines to treat depression, anxiety and mental illness medicine used to produce calmness or to help you sleep medicines to treat epilepsy pain relievers muscle relaxants antihistamines ciprofloxacin a medicine used to treat infections ketoconazole, a medicine to treat antifungal infections opioids These medicines may increase drowsiness. This may affect your ability to drive a car or operate dangerous machinery. You may need to use different amounts of your medicine, or take different medicines. Your doctor will advise you. Medicines that may reduce the effect of Zolpidem Sandoz include: St John's Wort (also known as Hypericum), a herbal remedy used to treat depression rifampicin a medicine used to treat infection Check with your doctor or pharmacist if you are not sure about what medicines, vitamins or supplements you are taking and if these affect Zolpidem Sandoz. How do I take Zolpidem Sandoz? How much to take The usual adult dose of Zolpidem Sandoz is one tablet (10 mg) taken just before you go to bed. If you are over 65 years of age the dose is half a Zolpidem Sandoz tablet (5 mg) taken just before you go to bed. If you have a liver problem, the usual recommended dose is half a Zolpidem Sandoz tablet (5 mg). Do not take Zolpidem Sandoz if you have a severe liver problem. Your doctor may have prescribed a different dose. The lowest effective daily dose should be used and must not exceed 10 mg. Follow the instructions provided and use Zolpidem Sandoz until your doctor tells you to stop. If you take the wrong dose, Zolpidem Sandoz may not work as well. If you take too much your consciousness may be impaired (see 'If you take too much Zolpidem Sandoz below). Ask your doctor if you are unsure of the correct dose for you. They will tell you exactly how much to take. When to take Zolpidem Sandoz Take Zolpidem Sandoz immediately before you go to bed or while you are in bed Zolpidem Sandoz should only be taken when you are able to get a full night's sleep (7 to 8 hours) before you need to be active again. It should be taken in one dose and not be re-administered during the same night. How long to take it Usually, Zolpidem Sandoz or any other medicines to treat sleeping disorders should only be used for short periods (e.g. 2 to 4 weeks). Continuous long term use is not recommended unless advised by your doctor. Ask your doctor or pharmacist if you are not sure how long to take the medicine for. How to take Zolpidem Sandoz Swallow the tablet whole with a full glass of water unless your doctor has told you take half a tablet. If you take Zolpidem Sandoz on an empty stomach it may work more quickly If you forget to take Zolpidem Sandoz If you forget to take the tablet before you go to bed, and you wake up late in the night or very early in the morning, do not take it. You may have trouble waking at your normal time. If you are not sure what to do, ask your doctor. If you take too much Zolpidem Sandoz If you think that you have used too much Zolpidem Sandoz, you may need urgent medical attention. You should immediately: phone the Poisons Information Centre (by calling 13 11 26), or contact your doctor, or go to the Emergency Department at your nearest hospital. You should do this even if there are no signs of discomfort or poisoning. You may need urgent medical attention. If you take too much your consciousness may be impaired ranging from drowsiness to light coma. What should I know while taking Zolpidem Sandoz? Things you should do Tell all the doctors, dentists and pharmacists who are treating you that you are taking Zolpidem Sandoz. If you are about to be started on any new medicine, tell your doctor and pharmacist that you are taking Zolpidem Sandoz. If you plan to have surgery that needs a general anaesthetic, tell your doctor or dentist that you are taking this medicine. If you become pregnant or suspect that you are pregnant while you are taking this medicine, stop taking it and tell your doctor or pharmacist immediately. Call your doctor straight away if you: have any of the serious side effects listed in section 6 Remind any doctor, dentist or pharmacist you visit that you are taking Zolpidem Sandoz. Things you must not do Do not take more than the recommended dose unless your doctor tells you to. This can increase the risk of side effects. Do not give this medicine to anyone else, even if they have the same condition as you. Do not use this medicine to treat any other complaints unless your doctor tells you to. Do not drink alcohol before or after taking this medicine. This can increase the risk of side effects or the effects of alcohol could be made worse while taking Zolpidem Sandoz. Things to be careful of: If you are over 65 and unwell or taking other medicines. You may be more sensitive to some of the side effects of Zolpidem Sandoz. Some patients may be particularly susceptible to the sedative effects of the medication, which may increase the possibility of a fall. After taking Zolpidem Sandoz Sleep medicines should in most cases, be used only for short periods of time. If your sleep problems continue, consult your doctor. Some medicines can cause dependence, especially when they are used regularly for longer than a few weeks. People who have been dependent on alcohol or other drugs in the past may have a higher chance of becoming addicted to sleep medicines. If you have been addicted to alcohol or drugs in the past, it is important to tell your doctor before starting Zolpidem Sandoz. Sometimes when medicines are stopped suddenly, after being used for a long time, withdrawal symptoms may occur. Symptoms of withdrawal may include abdominal and muscle cramps, vomiting and sweating. In some cases your insomnia may appear worse for a short time which may be accompanied with other reactions including mood changes, anxiety and restlessness; speak to your doctor if this occurs. Patients taking part in trials have not had any problems when they stopped taking Zolpidem Sandoz. However, let your doctor know if you have any problems when you stop taking Zolpidem Sandoz. Driving or using machines Because Zolpidem Sandoz will make you sleepy, you should not operate dangerous machinery or drive motor vehicles for 8 hours after you take it. You should also be careful the next morning when you wake up. Make sure you know how you react to Zolpidem Sandoz before you drive a car or operate machinery. This is very important if you are taking other drugs that also make you drowsy. Drinking alcohol You should not drink alcohol while you are taking Zolpidem Sandoz. Tell your doctor if you drink alcohol. Alcohol may increase the risk of side effects or the effects of alcohol could be made worse while taking Zolpidem Sandoz. Looking after your medicine Keep your tablets in the blister pack until it is time to take them. If you take the tablets out of the box or the blister pack they may not keep well. Keep the medicine in a cool, dry place where the temperature stays below 30C. Follow the instructions in the carton on how to take care of your medicine properly. Store it in a cool dry place away from moisture, heat or sunlight; for example, do not store it: in the bathroom or near a sink, or in the car or on window sills. Keep it where young children cannot reach it. Getting rid of any unwanted medicine If you no longer need to use this medicine or it is out of date, take it to any pharmacy for safe disposal. Do not use this medicine after the expiry date. Are there any side effects? All medicines can have side effects. If you do experience any side effects, most of them are minor and temporary. However, some side effects may need medical attention. See the information below and, if you need to, ask your doctor or pharmacist if you have any further questions about side effects. Tell your doctor as soon as possible if you do not feel well while you are taking Zolpidem Sandoz. Less serious side effects Less serious side effects What to do Head and neurology related: drowsiness dizziness headache fatigue anxiety nightmares poor attention and concentration memory impairment and loss unexpected changes in behaviour. These have included rage reactions, worsened insomnia, confusion, agitation, depression, hallucinations, delirium, and other forms of unwanted behaviour Gastrointestinal related: diarrhoea, nausea and vomiting abdominal pain Musculoskeletal related: muscle weakness back pain Infection related: infections of the nose, throat and chest Although these side effects can occur at the usual recommended doses, the risk of these behaviours occurring may also be increased if you take more than the recommended dose. Speak to your doctor if you have any of these less serious side effects and they worry you. Serious side effects Serious side effects What to do Allergic reactions: swelling of the face, lips, mouth or throat, which may cause difficulty in swallowing or breathing hives fainting Sleepwalking and associated behaviours: sleep walking, driving motor vehicles and other unusual, and on some occasions dangerous, behaviours whilst apparently asleep. These have also included preparing and eating food, making phone calls or having sexual intercourse. People experiencing these effects have had no memory of the events. Call your doctor straight away, or go straight to the Emergency Department at your nearest hospital if you notice any of these serious side effects. Alcohol can increase the risk of sleep walking and other related behaviours. These side effects can also occur without the presence of alcohol. Although these side effects can occur at the usual recommended doses, the risk of these behaviours occurring may also be increased if you take more than the recommended dose. Some sleep medicines may cause a short-term memory loss. When this occurs, a person may not remember what has happened for several hours after taking the medicine. This is usually not a problem since most people fall asleep after taking the medicine. Tell your doctor or pharmacist if you notice anything else that may be making you feel unwell. Other side effects not listed here may occur in some people. Do not be alarmed by this list of possible side effects. You may not experience any of them. Ask your doctor or pharmacist to answer any questions you may have. Reporting side effects After you have received medical advice for any side effects you experience, you can report side effects to the Therapeutic Goods Administration online at www.tga.gov.au/reporting-problems . By reporting side effects, you can help provide more information on the safety of this medicine. Always make sure you speak to your doctor or pharmacist before you decide to stop taking any of your medicines. Product details This medicine is only available with a doctor's prescription. What Zolpidem Sandoz contains Active ingredient (main ingredient) zolpidem 10mg Other ingredients (inactive ingredients) microcrystalline cellulose hypromellose sodium starch glycollate magnesium stearate titanium dioxide macrogol 400 Potential allergens lactose monohydrate Zolpidem Sandoz does not contain gluten. What Zolpidem Sandoz looks like Zolpidem Sandoz 10mg - white, oblong breakable tablet, marked "SN10" Zolpidem Sandoz 10mg tablets are available in boxes of 7 and 14 tablets. As Angola grapples with its worst yellow fever outbreak in decades, the Ministry of Health, with the support of the World Health Organization (WHO) and partners have extended the vaccination campaign beyond the capital Luanda into Huambo and Benguela 2 of the other 5 provinces reporting local transmission. Since the outbreak began in December 2015, 1908 suspected cases of yellow fever have been reported (617 laboratory confirmed) and 250 deaths have been reported. The majority of the cases are concentrated in Luanda and in two other provinces, namely, Huambo and Huila. In order to contain the outbreak outside the capital, nearly 2.15 million people will be vaccinated in 5 densely populated urban districts in Huambo and Benguela provinces over the coming weeks. Around 1 million people in the 2 provinces have been vaccinated thus far. This targeted vaccination is critical to protect those most at risk countrywide and to stop the further spread of infection by making the best use of available global vaccine supplies, said Dr Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa. Since 2 February 2016, close to 6 million people in Luanda have benefited from a large-scale vaccination campaign using vaccines made available from the yellow fever vaccine emergency stockpile made available through the International Coordinating Group (ICG) for Vaccine Provision, with support from Gavi (the Vaccine Alliance); the UN Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) and a vaccine donation from Brazil. Along with the vaccination campaign, the Ministry of Health, WHO and partners are working to strengthen disease surveillance and diagnostic capacity, both within Angola and neighbouring countries, and enhance vector control, including using community-led public health education campaigns. The immediate concern is that the virus might spread to other urban centres in Angola and other countries. WHO urges all countries, especially those that border Angola, to increase disease surveillance and strengthen vector control as well as ensuring that all those travelling to Angola are vaccinated, says Dr Bruce Aylward, Executive Director a.i., Outbreaks and Health Emergencies, WHO. Vaccine supply Angolas outbreak has stretched existing yellow fever vaccine supplies. During outbreaks, available vaccine are prioritized for the emergency response. At the end of March 2016, thanks to ICG partners, including UNICEF, the yellow fever emergency vaccine stockpile was replenished and approximately 10 million doses of the vaccine are now available. Concerns exist that if yellow fever should spread to other countries in Africa and Asia there would be a need to further prioritize vaccine supplies, which would interrupt routine immunization programmes in some countries. Stockpiling yellow fever vaccines has proved critical in combatting the current resurgence of the disease, says Dr Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. With 6 million doses of the vaccine per year, in addition to 3 million doses co-financed by Angola, Gavi is the single biggest contributor to the emergency yellow fever stockpile. The current situation is a reminder of the importance of investing in strong and sustainable routine immunization programmes to prevent such outbreaks and protect populations health. Strengthening international surveillance Yellow fever cases in people who travelled from Angola have been reported in 3 countries China (11 cases), Democratic Republic of Congo (10 cases with 1 in Kinshasa) and Kenya (2 cases). Three yellow fever cases have been reported in the south of Uganda. The patients had no travel history to Angola. WHO is working with neighbouring countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Namibia and Zambia to bolster cross-border surveillance with Angola and information sharing to prevent and reduce the spread of infection. Travel advice Vaccination is the single most important measure for preventing yellow fever. The vaccine is safe and highly effective and a single dose provides lifelong immunity. The Government of Angola requires all travellers older than 9 months of age to show proof of yellow fever vaccination upon arrival. People who are traveling to Angola must ensure that they get vaccinated against yellow fever at least 10 days prior to travel. WHO advises travellers going to and from Angola and other countries where yellow fever occurs to get vaccinated and carry their certificate of vaccination when travelling. By Lynda Williams A third of patients with advanced or metastatic melanoma will achieve an objective response to treatment with the programmed cell death protein (PD-1) inhibitor pembrolizumab, suggest KEYNOTE-001 findings, regardless of whether they have previously been treated with ipilimumab. Describing the study's objective response rate as "clinically meaningful", Antoni Ribas, from University of California-Los Angeles in the USA, and co-investigators write in JAMA: "Results of the progression-free survival analysis also support the durability of the clinical benefit associated with pembrolizumab. "Collectively, these data suggest that the majority of patients with melanoma treated with pembrolizumab will experience lasting objective responses." The open-label phase Ib trial includes 665 patients enrolled in randomised or nonrandomised study groups and treated with pembrolizumab 10 mg/kg every 2 weeks, 10 mg/kg every 3 weeks or 2 mg/kg every 3 weeks until disease progression, intolerable toxicity or investigator decision. A RECIST v1.1 objective response was achieved by 33% of 581 patients who had measurable disease at baseline, with a complete response reported in 8% and a disease control rate of 51%. The researchers note that responses were ongoing in 74% of 205 patients at the time of data cutoff, after a median of 21 months, with 79% achieving a response for at least 6 months and 44% for a least a year. Subgroup analysis gave an objective response rate of 29% for 304 patients who had previously been treated with the cytotoxic T lymphocyte-associated protein-4 (CTLA-4) inhibitor ipilimumab and 39% for 107 ipilimumab-naive patients. And for 133 patients with no prior treatment for advanced disease, a RECIST objective response was achieved by 45%, a complete response by 14% and disease control in 61%. Twelve-month progression-free survival (PFS) was achieved by 35% of patients, rising to 52% for treatment-naive patients. And median overall survival was 23 months with 66% achieving 12 months and 49% 2 years. In the treatment-naive patients, these values were 31 months, 73% and 60%, respectively. The researchers note that 14% of the 665 patients had at least one grade 3 or 4 adverse event and 4% discontinued treatment because of side effects. There were serious treatment-related adverse events in 9% of patients. In an accompanying editorial, Shailender Bhatia and John Thompson, from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, USA, write: "Approximately 50% of all patients were alive at the 24-month time point, which is noteworthy considering that the median overall survival in most previous clinical trials involving patients with metastatic melanoma was consistently less than 12 months." However, the editorialists caution that the 12-month PFS rate of 35% "suggests failure of the host immune system to adequately control melanoma tumours in two-thirds of all patients within the first year." Nevertheless, they conclude: "Although most patients may not experience the ideal outcome of durable complete remission with current regimens, these immune checkpoint-blocking agents provide hope for patients and represent a solid foundation for future research." medwireNews is an independent medical news service provided by Springer Healthcare Limited. Springer Healthcare Ltd; 2016 Licensed from medwireNews with permission from Springer Healthcare Ltd. Springer Healthcare Ltd. All rights reserved. Neither of these parties endorse or recommend any commercial products, services, or equipment. VIRUSES specifically designed to battle superbugs are being trialled in a South Australian hospital. Flinders University scientists are looking to bacteriophages highly specific viruses - as the as the best way to attack antibiotic-resistant bacterial superbug infections. The already proven phage-based therapies could help treat numerous infectious diseases including staphylococcus aureus (Golden Staph) and typhoid fever. The South Australian scientists have been working with AmpliPhi Biosciences to research phage-based treatments and began human trials at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital earlier this year. Flinders University researcher Peter Speck said the need to find an alternative to antibiotics was of vital importance, forcing scientists to revisit solutions to infectious diseases that pre-dated antibiotics. There is now a problem with antibiotics becoming less and less effective in treating bacteria and infections, Dr Speck said. In view of the looming crisis of antimicrobial resistant bacteria, all possibilities for the use of phage therapy must be contemplated. Superbugs are strains of bacteria that have developed immunity to antibiotics and account for about 700,000 deaths a year worldwide. World health authorities are forecasting that antibiotic resistance will cause more deaths per year than cancer by 2050, with one estimate at 10 million by 2050 compared to eight million for cancer. Dr Speck said bacteriophages or phages were viruses that attacked bacterial cells and disrupted bacterial metabolism. He said that phage-therapy could be applied intravenously and attack bacterial infections like Golden staph. Lab Diagnostics & Automation eBook Compilation of the top interviews, articles, and news in the last year. Download a copy today We have been working on this for some years and I think it is the most advanced clinical trial of bacteriophage in the world today, Dr Speck said. At the moment we are trialling phage-therapy on sinus infections, but if you look back in the literature you see that in the 1940s they were very effectively used. Bacteriophage is highly species specific so a phage directed against golden staph would only kill golden staph. Dr Speck said the use of bacteriophages to treat infectious diseases was an old method that was discontinued after the rise of antibiotics in the 1950s. Phage-therapy trials are underway at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital in South Australias capital Adelaide earlier this year. Dr Speck said he hoped to expand the research and look at other infectious diseases. Another big potential area where phages could be used is in infections where bacteria in the blood are a threat, so intravenous phage use could deliver a benefit, he said. The potential objections to the IV use of phages must be viewed in the context of the high mortality associated with certain severe infectious diseases such as typhoid and SA bacteraemia, both of which are reportedly treatable though IV phage therapy. Dr Speck said he hoped the trial results would demand more attention from governments. The research was based on Dr Specks article Safety and efficacy of phage therapy via the intravenous route that was published in the Oxford Journals Federation of European Microbiological Society Microbiology Letters. A USC co-author of the study says the genetic variants could also be significant for studies on schizophrenia, anxiety, and bipolar disorder. An international group of more than 190 scientists who analyzed the genomes of 298,420 individuals have found genetic variants that may influence our sense of wellbeing, depression and neuroticism. The study, published Monday, April 18, by the journal Nature Genetics, is one of the largest genomic studies to date on behavioral genetics. We have known for a long time that these traits have a genetic component, but until now, we had identified only a few specific genetic variants related to these traits, said Daniel Benjamin, corresponding author and an associate professor of the Center for Economic and Social Research in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Benjamin said that the genetic variants do not determine whether someone develops depressive symptoms, neuroticism or have a poor sense of wellbeing. Psychological well-being is jointly influenced by genes and environment, he said. The genetic variants that we found account for a small fraction of these genetic associations. The scientists found three genetic variants associated with subjective wellbeing how happy or satisfied a person reports feeling about his or her life based on an analysis of roughly 300,000 people. The researchers also found two genetic variants associated with depressive symptoms, based on an analysis of nearly 180,000 people, and 11 genetic variants associated with neuroticism, based on an analysis of 170,000 people. The depression results were replicated through an analysis of another sample of nearly 370,000 people. We found that most of the genetic variants associated with depressive symptoms and/or neuroticism also were linked to subjective well-being, and vice-versa, Benjamin said. When examined individually, each genetic variant explains very little about these traits. But when taken together, these findings imply that the genetic influences on depression, neuroticism and subjective wellbeing result from the cumulative effects of at least thousands, if not millions, of different variants. Genetics & Genomics eBook Compilation of the top interviews, articles, and news in the last year. Download a copy today The study also found that subjective wellbeing, neuroticism and depression are predominantly influenced by the same set of genes. The scientists said this finding indicates that researchers may want to consider studying these traits jointly for future work. Overlap The interdisciplinary team which included medical researchers and psychologists -- also studied whether the genetic variants that they had identified overlap with genetic variants associated with other diseases and disorders, including Alzheimers disease, anxiety disorders, autism spectrum disorder, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The strongest link was with anxiety disorders. The researchers also found the genetic variants tied to subjective wellbeing, depression and neuroticism moderately overlap with the variants that are associated with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Because the study has found some of the first genetic variants associated with wellbeing, depression and neuroticism, it is too soon to draw conclusions about how the genes affect biological mechanisms, Benjamin said. Limitations The scientists issued several cautions for interpreting the results of their study. Genetics is only one factor that influences these psychological traits. The environment is at least as important and it interacts with the genetic effects, Benjamin said. The study was led by the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium, which was co-founded by Benjamin, David Cesarini of New York University and Phillip Koellinger of the University of Amsterdam. The consortium investigates the influence of genetics on human behavior, well-being and social science-related outcomes through large-scale studies of human genomes. New Delhi: Real estate firm Amrapali on Wednesday promised its residents for the redressal of all issues, including pending constructions. The move comes after Amrapali residents demanded answers from builder's former ambassador MS Dhoni for pending work. A complaint against the real estate company has also been filed with the government's Noida Development Authority. After the complaint, Noida authority has finally cracked the whip on Amrapali builders. In a meeting between Noida Authority Chairman & Amrapali officials, the builder has been asked to complete the pending work in flat 2 months. Apart from that, a team from Noida development Authority will inspect all Amrapali projects every week. The team will also oversee the construction progress and report to the authority Chairman for the same. New Delhi: Environmentalist RK Pachauri, who has been accused of sexual harassment by his former women colleagues, on Thursday stepped down as a member of the Governing Council of TERI. Pachauri said he was exiting TERI "to get engaged in other interests". This comes a month after Delhi Police filed a chargesheet against Pachauri for allegedly sexually harassing a former woman colleague. A TERI spokesperson did not confirm the media report, but said, "The Governing Council of TERI met on April 18, 2016. Several decisions were taken in the meeting. The minutes of the meeting are currently awaiting approval Pachauri, however, maintained his term as a member of The Energy and Resources Institute's (TERI) Governing Council ended on March 31, 2016. "Time for me to move away and get engaged in other interests which I have harboured over the past few years for activities at the global level," he said. "I have had the good fortune of leading TERI for three decades and a half and have received priceless contribution from thousands of colleagues over the years in building up this Institute to the level of an outstanding organisation." "I began with TERI as the articulation of my dream and humanity's call for a major intellectual resource, which has now grown to a size and spread straddling the whole world, with a staff strength of around 1200 professionals and world class infrastructure and expertise," he said. Pachauri is accused of committing offences punishable under Sections 354 (assault or criminal force to woman with intent to outrage her modesty), 354 A (sexual harassment), 354 D (stalking), 506 (criminal intimidation) and 509 (word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman) of IPC. (With PTI Inputs) New Delhi: The Supreme Court's landmark judgement in the SR Bommai vs Union Of India (1994) case sharply limited the constitutional power vested in the Central Government to dismiss a State government. The verdict overturned the tradition that use of Article 356 was not subject to review by courts. Here are the highlights from that verdict: -There is no dispute that the Proclamation issued under Article 356 is subject to judicial review. -It can be challenged on the limited ground that the action is mala fide or ultra vires of Article 356 itself -Objective material must exist showing the governance of the state cannot be carried on in accordance with provisions of the Constitution -A wide literal construction of Article 356(1), will reduce the constitutional distribution of powers between the Union and the States to a licence dependent on the pleasure of the Union Executive. -Wide construction will enable the Union Executive to cut at the root of the democratic parliamentary form of Government in the State -Article 356 has a vital bearing on the democratic parliamentary form of government and the autonomy of the States under the federal constitution that we have adopted -The Supreme Court or the High Court can strike down the Proclamation if it is found to be mala fide or based on wholly irrelevant or extraneous grounds. Bengaluru: In a new populist move, Karnataka government has decided to introduce reservation in public tender works. A total of 24.10% of the public works under Rs 50 lakh would be reserved for the SC/STs. Karnataka Law, Parliamentary Affairs and Higher Education Minister TB Jayachandra said a suitable amendment to the Karnataka Transparency in Public Procurement Act, 1999 would be brought in to provide reservation to the SC/STs in tenders below Rs 50 lakh. He said as much as 17.15% of the tenders would be reserved for the SCs and 6.95% for the STs. The figures were arrived at based on the population of the two communities. Jayachandra said the government would come out with a list of the departments that would provide reservation for the SC/STs in the tendering process. According to a report in Deccan Herald these works would be directly allotted to the SC/STs and they would not have to go through the tendering process. The only clause is that the work should not exceed Rs 50 lakh. The Trimbakeshwar Devasthan Trust in Maharashtra on Thursday allowed both men and women to enter inner sanctum of the temple. This significant development came just few days after women were permitted entry to the Shani Shingnapur temple in Ahmednagar district. Bhumata Brigade activist Trupti Desai, who started the campaign for women's entry to all places of worship in January, said, "This is an another big win for women. We are not only going to enter but we will worship in a traditional way on Friday in the temple." Earlier, the Trimbakeshwar Devasthan Trust had decided to allow women into the temple's sanctum sanctorum for an hour everyday, but with a rider that they must wear wet cotton or silk clothes while offering prayers in the core area. The women activists had refused to abide by the condition and had lodged a complaint with police against the trust members and local people for purposely obstructing their entry into the temple. The ancient temple, located 30 kms from Nashik, is a major Lord Shiva shrine of the country, which has one of the 12 'jyotirlingas', drawing devotees from far and wide. Kolkata: Union Minister and BJP MP from Asansol Babul Supriyo on Thursday manhandled allegedly by TMC workers when he along with his parents went to cast their vote at a polling booth in Kolkata. The Union Minister of state for Urban development was allegedly heckled for attracting crowd. Some protesters alleged that Babul was not a voter of the constituency. "I came here to vote as a common man, not as a minister. There was not a single security person with me, nor any BJP worker. But, these people started protesting on something which was absolutely not needed," Babul said. The Union Minister also alleged there were no police personnel present at the polling booth. The Uttarakhand High Court on Thursday set aside President's rule in the state causing a major embarrassment to the Centre. The order means it would be a status quo ante and that the Harish Rawat government would be called upon to prove its majority on the floor of the Assembly on April 29. Before issuing the order the HC made scathing observations on the Centre's decision to impose President's rule under Article 356. The court said there was no basis for President's rule in Uttarakhand and there was nothing in the letter sent by the Governor which suggested a breakdown of constitutional machinery in the state. The HC also told the Centre that Article 356 should be used only as a last resort. The Centre is likely to move the Supreme Court against this order on Friday. President's rule was imposed in the state on March 27 just ahead of a floor test by the Harish Rawat government which was facing a crisis over a revolt by nine Congress MLAs. Bedford County firefighters battled blazes Wednesday night that destroyed two homes but injured no one, the county Fire Marshal's Office said Thursday morning. A fire on Montevideo Road demolished a 3,000-square-foot home that was at least 187 years old and had exterior walls made entirely from hand-hewn logs, the Fire Marshal's Office said in a news release. County records show the house was built in 1829, but the owner believes it was built in the mid-1700s. Montevideo Road sits off Virginia 43, south of the town of Bedford. The fire was reported just before 10 p.m. When fire crews arrived 11 minutes later, "the entire structure was on fire," the news release said. Crews from the Bedford, Huddleston, Forest and Moneta fire departments responded to the blaze and spent hours trying to extinguish it. Firefighters had to get water from the Bedford County Landfill to battle the flames. The home was a total loss. Authorities still are investigating what caused that fire. Another fire was reported at 8 p.m. at a mobile home on Dearing Lane, in the Stewartsville area. It caused $40,000 in damage and rendered the home uninhabitable. "Investigators determined that this fire started at a propane grill in use on the porch," the release said. Units from the Stewartsville-Chamblissburg, Hardy and Shady Grove fire departments responded to that fire. The Red Cross is assisting residents of both homes, the Fire Marshal's Office said. On Tuesday, a fire tore through a home in the 100 block of View Drive in Goodview, displacing three people. House fire in Goodview displaces three people Three people are displaced after a fire ripped through their Bedford County home Tuesday. EARLIER: Fire destroyed a structure in Bedford County late Wednesday night. When crews arrived at the house at the end of Montevideo Road the porch was completely engulfed by flames. Montevideo Road sits off Virginia 43, south of the town of Bedford. Crews from at least three volunteer fire departments responded to the blaze and spent hours trying to extinguish it. Firefighters had to get water from the Bedford County Landfill to battle the flames. By late Wednesday, all that remained of the house were two chimneys. This has been a breaking news alert. A nearly 16-mile section of the Blue Ridge Parkway north of Roanoke to Peaks of Otter will be closed for five weeks beginning Monday so paving repairs can be made to the road and overlooks. The closure will stretch from U.S. 221/460 at parkway milepost 105.8 in Botetourt County north to milepost 90 at Virginia 43 and Bearwallow Gap. Both lanes of the parkway will be closed to all traffic, including vehicles, bicycles and hikers, for the first month of the project, according to a news release from the National Park Service. After May 25, the full closure will end and parkway users can expect one-lane closures through September. To reach Peaks of Otter from the south during the closure, travelers should use Virginia 43 out of Buchanan on the west or Bedford on the east side of the mountains. Realigning the Montvale S-curve on U.S. 460 sometimes called Dead Mans Curve is one of the projects recommended by the Commonwealth Transportation Board. The work is part of $1.68 billion in transportation spending the board has directed staff to put together under legislation known as HB2, which dramatically has altered how Virginia evaluates and pays for road projects. The Commonwealth Transportation Board, which meets at various locations throughout the state during the year, met in Lynchburg on Tuesday and Wednesday. Changes to what is known as the six-year plan still could come before the board officially votes on the plan for fiscal years 2017 to 2022 in June, after the public comment period closes May 27. At a cost of $18.8 million, the project between Thaxton and Montvale originally was not scored high enough under a data-driven formula to make the cut this year. After receiving local input, Salem District board member William Fralin worked with Lynchburg District representative Shannon Valentine to get the project on the list to receive funding. Transportation board to recommend $1.68B in spending The Commonwealth Transportation Board is expected to vote today on recommendations for spend The S-curve has been the site of several severe crashes through the years that often involve tractor-trailers hauling goods to or from the region, including one in 2012 that killed the driver and spilled 7,000 gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel. For safety reasons, its obviously important but also as an economic development factor making sure that we protect 460 as an asset is also equally important, Valentine said. The project would realign the eastbound lanes to parallel the existing westbound lanes with a grassy median separating lanes and improved crossovers in between, according to a breakdown of the project on virginiahb2.org. According an article in The News & Advance after the 2012 tanker crash, plans to redesign the S-curve began in 2009, but money has not been made available. U.S. 460 tanker spill kills Lynchburg man; cleanup could take weeks Traffic along a nearly mile-long section of U.S. 460 in Bedford County has been reduced to o While HB2 and subsequent legislation are meant to minimize the role politics play in rehabbing Virginias roadways, appointed board members still get a say and act as liaisons with the public. Under HB2, localities submit projects to the Commonwealth Transportation Board. Staff uses criteria such as congestion relief, safety and economic development to determine priorities to the state, regions and localities. We still use our brains and our experience, and what we understand from the public, Fralin said. Fralin and Valentine named the Blue Ridge Economic Coalition mostly business people, government staff and elected representatives as a catalyst in focusing on that project. Fralin said the tradeoff included using less expensive safety improvements on S-curves on Interstate 81 in Arcadia, in Botetourt County. According to Jason Bond, Salem District spokesman, crashes on the U.S. 460 segment often have involved tractor-trailers. He said Bedford County has made the S-curve a priority for a long time. On May 28, 2012, 31-year-old Adam Henry died after the petroleum truck he was driving flipped on the curve. That night, about 50 residents were temporarily evacuated from their homes. Because of the nature of the crash, oil spill and engineering, lanes were closed for four months as crews cleared and repaired the site. Three of the four Republican candidates running for outgoing Rep. Robert Hurts 5th Congressional District seat debated hot-button issues Wednesday evening in Charlottesville. Before about 250 spectators in Lane Auditorium at the Albemarle County Office Building, Jim McKelvey, Michael Del Rosso and Joe Whited talked national security, taxes, health care and the federal debt. State Sen. Tom Garrett Jr. was in Richmond for a legislative session, where Republicans were trying to override Gov. Terry McAuliffes vetoes on several measures, including a restriction on funding for abortion providers. Garretts chief of staff, Kevin Reynolds, said the lawmaker was needed in Richmond. Hes not going to be here tonight, but its for the right reasons, Reynolds said. In separate questions on the Islamic State and the Syrian refugee crisis, Del Rosso a Charlottesville-based technology company executive took hard-line stances on Islam and refugees from Muslim countries. Del Rosso said the U.S. is locked in a battle against a global movement of Islamic extremism and the Islamic State is only one tentacle of that movement. Del Rosso also said he supports halting Muslim immigration until it can be determined whether such immigrants are an operational threat, echoing a pledge made by Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump. But Del Rosso went a step further and said Islamic law currently mandates war against non-Muslims. Unless it changes, Del Rosso said, they will always pose a threat to national security. Theres only one definition of jihad, and thats violent kinetic warfare against non-believers, he said. It means funding it, it means supporting it and it means lying about it. Whited said slamming the door on refugees and Muslim immigration in general could provide fuel for Islamic extremists. Instead, he advocates directing the flow of Syrian refugees toward moderate Arab allies, such as Jordan, and allowing some refugees to come to the U.S. after a vetting process. I think we need the right balance, Whited said. Del Rossos bluntness and colorful language garnered cheers from the audience throughout the debate, as he called Social Security a scam and Planned Parenthood a chop shop, and said public television and radio should be auctioned off to the highest bidder. McKelvey and Del Rosso both proposed major illegal immigration crackdowns, with Del Rosso saying hed also go after employers who hire illegal workers. McKelvey said hed work to cut off money transfers from illegal immigrants in the U.S. to their home countries and cut benefits, as well. I can assure you these people will find their way home, he said. Whited, the U.S. Navy veteran-turned-congressional staffer, said he would like a way to bring illegal immigrants out of the shadows and make them pay for the system theyre taking advantage of. Each of the candidates said they favor dramatically lowering corporate tax rates, dramatically cutting the budgets of federal agencies and repealing the Affordable Care Act. Each candidate said they are open to the possibility of legalizing medical marijuana depending on what scientific research uncovers on long-term effects but taking a slow, incremental approach. McKelvey said recreational marijuana use has a long-term cognitive effect on users, and said he wouldnt want his employees or children using it for non-medicinal purposes. As an employer, that scares me to death, he said. This election cycle is a turning point for the 5th District, as newcomers scramble for the seat left vacant by Hurts retirement. In addition to the GOP candidates, former Albemarle County Supervisor Jane Dittmar is running opposed for the Democratic nomination and independent Yale Landsberg and Libertarian Party candidate Stephen Harmon also are running for the seat. The districts Republicans will hold a convention to decide their nominee May 14. Pharmacies that supply Virginia with lethal injection drugs soon will be shielded from public scrutiny after the General Assembly voted Wednesday to accept a proposal from Gov. Terry McAuliffe to exempt such contractors from open-records laws and state regulations. The bill offered as a substitute to legislation that would have required prisoners to die in the electric chair if no drugs were available put McAuliffe at odds with many of his Democratic colleagues in the legislature. In the Senate and House of Delegates, the proposal passed with mostly Republican backing. My amendments offered legislators a choice between a practical approach to moving forward with Virginias death penalty law or a moratorium on executions in our commonwealth, McAuliffe said in a prepared statement Wednesday night. Their final decision will allow the Virginia Department of Corrections to continue to enforce the law without resorting to barbaric measures like the electric chair. Critics said the bill, the most controversial piece of unfinished business dealt with in Wednesdays veto session, would shroud an uncomfortable government act in secrecy to solve a drug crisis that may not be as pressing as its made out to be. If this becomes law, the commonwealth of Virginia ... the legislature, our citizens, would be more certain about the chemical composition of the asphalt that VDOT buys to put on our roads than we would about the drugs that we put in the veins of someone we want to execute, said Del. James M. LeMunyon, R-Fairfax. This bill will shield one little part of our government from transparency, said Sen. Scott A. Surovell, D-Fairfax. Mistakes happen the most when we put a shadow over things. Backers of the governors plan called it a way to preserve capital punishment for heinous crimes as lethal drugs become more difficult to acquire. Sen. Mark D. Obenshain, R-Rockingham, called the death penalty an important tool that the state has. As long as we have it, we need to be able to carry it out in the most humane means possible, Obenshain said. This allows that to take place. The Republican-dominated House initially voted down the governors amendments, 47-51. On a second try, 13 more Republicans joined the yes column, putting the final tally at 59-40. Six Republicans opposed the secrecy bill, along with the chambers 34 Democrats. The vote in the Senate was 22-16, with four Democrats joining Republicans to accept the governors substitute. A similar execution secrecy measure failed in the legislature last year because of bipartisan concerns about government transparency. The secrecy provision this year was framed as a more palatable alternative to the electric-chair bill, which would have allowed the state to electrocute inmates who wished to die by lethal injection. McAuliffe had said he would veto the electric-chair bill if it came back to him unchanged and characterized the vote as a referendum on the death penalty. Del. Jackson H. Miller, R-Manassas, said between House votes that some of his colleagues were confused and didnt know the full consequences of voting against the governors recommendation. The governor was very clear and I believe him in his statements that if these amendments are not passed that the death penalty in Virginia will be stopped. Period. No questions asked, said Miller, who sponsored the electric-chair bill. Del. Robert B. Bell, R-Albemarle, read the names of the victims of the seven inmates currently on Virginias death row. One prisoner scheduled to die in the near future is Ricky Javon Gray, who was convicted in the 2006 murder of Richmonds Harvey family. Virginia and other states are dealing with a shortage of lethal drugs partly because of the private sectors unease with producing chemicals used to carry out death sentences. One of 31 states that still use the death penalty, Virginia offers prisoners a choice between lethal injection and the electric chair. Since the choice was made available in 1995, 80 inmates have been executed by injection. Seven picked the chair. Similar secrecy laws passed by other states are facing legal challenges by inmates. In a statement, ACLU of Virginia Executive Director Claire Guthrie Gastanaga called Wednesdays outcome an unfortunate result that will likely mean lengthy litigation. In a 13-page legal opinion issued late Tuesday night, Attorney General Mark R. Herring said the bill would not violate federal law and would not impermissibly obstruct prisoners ability to obtain evidence about the drugs in court proceedings. Some lawmakers were skeptical of the argument that the death penalty would come to a halt without the secrecy provision, which would allow the state to shield the identities of pharmacies and compounding facilities producing drugs for the state. Del. Marcus B. Simon, D-Fairfax, said the Department of Corrections is free to study alternative drug protocols and acquire drugs as it has in the past. They can still do it, Simon said. They just cant do it in secret. Simon and other opponents said McAuliffes latest recommendation is worse than the bill lawmakers rejected last year by providing no oversight or ability to investigate a botched execution. If you didnt like this bill last year ... you really, really shouldnt like these amendments, Simon said. Senate Minority Leader Richard L. Saslaw, D-Fairfax, who sponsored the secrecy bill last year, was perhaps the most vocal proponent of McAuliffes amendments and the death penalty in general. So the guy suffers for two or three minutes. Let me tell you something when you kill seven people, when you shoot a cop three times in the back of the head, when you hire somebody to slit your girlfriends throat in front of your children I really could care less how damn long you suffer, Saslaw said. Saslaw also imagined a world in which criminals were executed in the manner of their crimes. Under that system, he said, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh might be taken to a field and blown up. Do you honestly think that any of your constituents would care where we got the dynamite? Saslaw said. Give me a break. Being in the legislative minority means General Assembly Democrats did not have the chance to pass the partisan bills they wanted in the legislative session that concluded last March. But in Wednesdays reconvened session, the 18 Democrats in the Virginia Senate and 34 Democrats in the House of Delegates were sufficient to keep Republicans from overriding Gov. Terry McAuliffes vetoes. The General Assembly sustained all of McAuliffes 32 vetoes of legislation passed during the 2016 session. Among votes of note Wednesday, the Republican majority was unable to override the governors vetoes of bills that would have: protected ministers and religious entities from civil liabilities and penalties stemming from their opposition to gay marriage; authorized millions in coal tax credits; prohibited localities from removing Confederate monuments; allowed home-schooled students to participate in public high school athletics; allowed parents to opt out their children from instructional material identified as sexually explicit; and placed additional restrictions on funding for abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood. The vetoes I submitted to the legislature for their consideration today honored the promise I made in the State of the Commonwealth (address) to reject legislation that divides Virginians, makes them less safe, or sends a negative message about the climate we offer to families or businesses that may want to locate here, McAuliffe said in a statement. The controversies we are watching in other states underscore the need to reject legislation that divides or distracts us from the work Virginians elected us to do. McAuliffe said he is proud that the legislature has not overridden any of the 68 vetoes he has submitted in his first three years as governor. He said lawmakers on Wednesday also accepted his proposed amendments to 40 of 45 bills he sought to change. It takes only a majority vote in both chambers to adopt or reject a governors amendments to legislation. Lawmakers put the finishing touches on a revised version of the economic development program, GO Virginia. They also adopted amended capital outlay legislation that incorporates the demolition of the existing General Assembly Building and construction of a new building to house lawmaker offices, and meeting space. But legislators rejected amendments McAuliffe proposed to recently passed ethics reform legislation. Legislators in 2015 passed a measure to put a $100 cap on gifts. McAuliffe sought to counter legislation that passed this year that exempts food and drinks worth less than $20 from counting against the cap. The governor must now decide whether to sign the measure into law without his proposed changes. McAuliffe said he did not seek significant changes to the state budget, but that lawmakers accepted 57 percent of the budget amendments he proposed. An override of a veto would have required 67 votes in the House and 26 votes in the Senate, which was only at 39 members Wednesday due to the recent death of Sen. John C. Miller, D-Newport News. Im proud that we have sustained every veto to come before the Senate since the start of Gov. McAuliffes term but these bills should never have been introduced in the first place, said Senate Minority Leader Richard L. Saslaw, D-Fairfax. House Majority Leader M. Kirkland Cox, R-Colonial Heights, criticized the governor. Instead of highlighting our common ground for the last six weeks, hes spent time, to me, dividing Virginians, Cox said. Unfortunately, this is often how this administration, to me, has worked over the last four years. On many issues, they tend to be fairly disengaged throughout the session, but after the session too quick to be in front of the cameras with the veto pen. On March 30, McAuliffe vetoed the Republican-backed legislation that would have protected ministers and religious entities from facing government-imposed penalties or civil liability over opposition to same-sex marriage. McAuliffe called it unconstitutional and discriminatory. The legislation was an attempt to protect pastors from having to go against things that are deeply held religious beliefs, said Sen. Charles W. Carrico Sr., R-Grayson. Sen. Adam P. Ebbin, D-Alexandria, said the bill was a license to discriminate against same-sex couples and families not just in religious settings but in schools and hospitals. Lt. Gov. Ralph S. Northam, a Democrat, said in a statement: The anti-LGBT legislation would have dealt a significant blow to our economy and sent the absolute wrong message to prospective and current businesses who want their employees to live in a welcoming and inclusive commonwealth. The Senate also fell short of overriding McAuliffes veto of a bill that would bar law enforcement officials from releasing inmates if they are suspected of violating U.S. immigration laws. The Senate did not join the House of Delegates in voting to override the governors veto of a measure to extend coal tax credits. Sen. A. Benton Chafin Jr., R-Russell, said McAuliffe and the Obama administration want to kill coal and warned fellow senators that he might not be as cooperative on future legislation that is designed to protect regional interests given the tax credit vote and its impact on Southwest Virginia. It doesnt save jobs, said Sen. Janet D. Howell, D-Fairfax. It doesnt create jobs. Its just throwing money down the coal mine, she said, referring to a study by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission that found the credits were not effective. The Senate also refused to join a House effort to override McAuliffes veto of a bill that would prevent Virginia localities from taking down monuments to the Confederacy and other war-related memorials. McAuliffe said it would prohibit communities from making their own decisions about controversial symbols. Sen. William M. Stanley Jr., R-Franklin County, spoke in favor of the bill, arguing that monuments are moments of history good history or bad history whether we like it or not. Removing a monument because you think it has a (negative) history to it is censorship of the highest order, he said. Amid the votes Wednesday, senators took time out to honor Miller, who died April 4 at age 68. Colleagues remembered Miller, first elected in 2007, as a kind and gentle man, who sought to improve the lives of Virginians in areas of education and childhood obesity. Its a big loss to this institution, Saslaw said. He did things for the right reason, said Sen. George L. Barker, D-Fairfax. Millers desk in the Senate was shrouded in a blue drape during the veto session. CHATHAM A group of citizens who filed a Freedom of Information Act petition against a county board last year was left holding the bag after the other side did not show up for the case Wednesday morning in Pittsylvania County Circuit Court. The Virginia Court Cases information website listed the case as scheduled for 9 a.m. Wednesday in circuit court in Chatham, but no one told the citizens that there would be no hearing that day. Karen Maute, Deborah Dix and Phillip Lovelace as well as their attorney, Barbara Hudson entered the courtroom around 8:45 a.m. However, no one from the Pittsylvania County Agricultural Development Board whom they filed the FOIA petition against was in attendance, and neither was an attorney for the board. Hudson said no one told her or her clients the case would not be heard Wednesday. How did everybody know that this was not a hearing date? Hudson asked during an interview Wednesday morning after a court official told them earlier the case would not be heard. Hudson said this has never happened to her during her many years as an attorney. Ive never had this experience, Hudson said. Evidently, the other side knew because they did not show up, she added. Why didnt they contact us? Hudson said. Messages left for the ag boards attorney, Jim Guynn, were not returned by Wednesday afternoon. Pittsylvania County Circuit Court Clerk Mark Scarce said dates for criminal and civil court cases are set by the courts administrative assistant and coordinated with the attorneys involved. The courts administrative assistant told the Danville Register & Bee that Wednesday was just the docketing day so the court would know to reset the date for the case. Wednesday was six months after Judge James J. Reynolds declined on Oct. 20 to issue a writ of mandamus against the ag board and placed the matter under advisement for six months. The court is in the process of setting a date for the case, the administrative assistant said. Reynolds declined to rule against the ag board on the FOIA lawsuit appeal filed by the group of citizens. Calling the case political, Judge Reynolds said he would not issue a writ of mandamus against the board but would hold the matter under advisement for the next six months. However, he did find the board violated FOIA by not giving proper notice of going into and coming out of closed session during its meeting April 8, 2015. The judge also said if the board committed more FOIA violations during those six months, the court will take immediate action. The court will dismiss the writ of mandamus if there are no violations in that period, he said in October. Reynolds also took under advisement the citizens request for payment of their attorneys fees, which were up to $8,000 last October. In the case, Dix, Maute and Lovelace appealed a judges June 23 dismissal of their FOIA petition filed against the board. The three residents had requested that the court find the boards treatment of Dix and Lovelace willful on a number of allegations, including when board members escorted them out of an April 8, 2015, board meeting and locked them out of the meeting during a thunderstorm. The group stated in their appeal they were not allowed to speak during the June 23, 2015, hearing in which General District Court Judge Larry J. Palmer dismissed their petition for writ of mandamus against the board. The ag board had implemented a corrective action plan. Palmer had ordered their attorneys fees totaling at that time less than $4,000 be reimbursed. The group claimed that the April 8, 2015, meeting location was not disclosed and it could be accessed through an unmarked, windowless locked door. Also, the closed meeting to discuss a personnel matter and other issues was not on the agenda, the group argued. CULPEPER Search efforts resumed for the fifth consecutive day Wednesday for the Woodbridge woman whose abandoned car was found Saturday in the parking lot of Whiteoak Canyon Trail in the Madison County portion of Shenandoah National Park. A Fairfax County firefighter-paramedic, Nicole Mittendorff, 31, last had contact with her family on April 13. The U.S. Park Service, Virginia State Police, Virginia Department of Emergency Management and numerous local and volunteer search and rescue teams continued by land and by air to look for her until sundown amid the steep and rugged terrain of the national park. Virginia State Police are still saying there is no evidence of foul play in the disappearance of Mittendorff, an athlete who may have been training on the mountain trail, according to her family. Her car is a cream-colored 2009 Mini Cooper with a black roof. Anyone with information is asked to call the state police at (703) 803-0026 or #77 on a cellphone, or email questions@vsp.virgina.gov. According to the Find Nicole Facebook page set up by her family, the last contact they had with her was a text message at about 11 a.m. April 13 near Warrenton. The family would like to express its deepest appreciation to the many agencies that have dedicated their resources to the search, a Wednesday post said. We hope and pray for a safe resolution in the near future. Various trails in the search area remain closed, including those at Whiteoak, Cedar Run, Cedar Run Link, Limberlost, Crescent Rocks and Skyland to Big Meadows Horse Trail. GamesRadar+ is supported by its audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Heres why you can trust us. Going for the upgrade Moodys gave the country a negative outlook premised on what they considered are two main drivers. First, Moodys argued that low oil and gas prices will negatively and materially undermine the countrys economic and government financial strength at least throughout 2018 even though there has been fiscal consolidation by the government. Second, Moodys holds the view that there is a high likelihood that the policy response to the commodity price shock will not be as timely and effective as required, due to a lack of macroeconomic data and weak policy execution capacity. Moodys contends that the negative outlook also takes into consideration two issues: one, the lack of visibility on how effective fiscal consolidation efforts will ultimately be and the extent to which fiscal consolidation will have to rely on one-off measures in the coming 1 to 2 years, and two, the negative outlook which captures the possibility that government support in the form of loan guarantees to Petroleum Company of Trinidad and Tobago (Parroting, Ba3) could be higher than is currently assumed. What underpins this assessment made by Moodys? Why should we be concerned? What does the country need to focus on to prevent a further downgrade that takes us out of investment grade? These are perhaps the three questions we need to look at. Moodys argues that our economy is very dependent on the hydrocarbon sector - oil, gas and petrochemical sectors account for 91% of total exports and 35% of GDP. This dependence has led to falling oil and gas taxes and royalties from 15.4% of GDP in fiscal year 2013/2014 to 10.9% of GDP in 2014/2015, and in fiscal year 2015/2016, they are expected to fall to 3% of GDP. Moodys expects fiscal consolidation efforts would have to be at least equivalent to 6% of GDP according to their estimates. They also expect governments loans guarantee to Petrotrin to be close to 4.5 percent of GDP. In addition, Moodys keeps emphasizing the absence of key macroeconomic data and the low quality of the statistical information as shortcomings relative to Baa-rated peers. We have to put in short term corrective measures now to deal with the Central Statistical Office (CSO) rather than wait for the long term solutions to be recommended by the task force charged with re-engineering the CSO. Moodys continues to highlight that the governments lack of a rigorous medium-term fiscal strategy and a clear debt financing strategy makes it difficult to know what is going to happen beyond one fiscal year. This is a major concern. Being downgraded can have a big impact on our ability to borrow money on the markets. Investors see it as a riskier bet and demand higher returns to lend to governments. A literature review reveals that there is also decrease in investment and leverage of firms. Firms may be required to hold more capital against their sovereign debt. As a countrys rating gets downgraded and moves out of investment grade, investors see more risk and the government will be left with fewer options to rescue the economy. These possible outcomes must be worrisome to us especially at a time when we need higher levels of investment to grow the economy as well as to borrow to close the gap between government revenue and expenditure. In this circumstance there is very little room, if any, for mis-steps. Would this and any future downgrades negatively impact the strategy proposed by the government to build upon and fully utilize the International Financial Centre? It is necessary for the firms to assess sovereign exposure and identify how this might negatively impact their financial position. It is incumbent on the authorities to act with haste to address the issues raised by the rating agency since we are located at the last notch in the investment grade grouping. We need to stabilise the economy and get it growing once more. Such, according to Moodys, together with revenues from the energy sector would put positive pressure on the rating. Moodys also argued that there was the need for institutional and policy changes to enhance resilience to future price shocks which can place upward pressure on the rating. We need to reverse the deteriorating fiscal performance and the steady rise in government debt as quickly as possible. BOOT CAMP FOR BULLIES Parliamentarians yesterday got a little help in their quest to solve the daunting problems facing the education system as for the first time in history, students appeared before a Parliament committee to answer questions and provide solutions on school violence, Nine students from primary and secondary schools appeared before the Joint Select Committee on Social Services and Public Administration. The hearing lasted almost three hours. The kids had their say. Mishael Henry, 11, a student of Laventille Boys Government Primary, called for a boot camp for bullies and for the army to be brought into the classroom, BULLY BOOT CAMP Times have changed, Mishael told committee members at the International Waterfront Centre, Wrightson Road, Port-of-Spain, And now that times have changed we have to think out of the box, Bullies always try to get small children: they would not get someone who is bigger than them. So lets try to see what the bullies fear, Some bullies fear big and strong people. So lets bring in the police, army into the school so the bully will feel how it feels for their prey. Mishael continued, You could even send them to boot camp, Real boot camp. Not no petty boot camp. Chairman of the committee, Independent Senator Dhanayshar Mahabir welcomed this advice. Very good recommendation, Mahabir said. Excellent recommendation, thank you. Rennie Nicholas, 11, a student of Moruga Anglican (Holy Cross) Primary, supported his fellow students recommendation. Kareem Spears, 11, a student of the Carenage Boys Government Primary, lamented the impact bullying had on students. There are students that are being bullied and the bullies are taking their money, Kareem said. Rennie said bullying made him sad, and he knew of someone who had been bullied, Minister of Public Utilities Ancil Antoine suggested the committee consider enlisting retired members of the Defence Force, Antoine, a retired Brigadier General, noted many members of the Defence Force retire between the ages of 40 and 60. Maybe this is a time to do a recruitment drive, Antoine said, Also appearing before the committee were secondary school students including: MiKiyah Joseph, 17, a Form 4 student of the Russel Latapy High School; Raoul Kunjah, 15, a Form 4 student of the ASJA Boys College Charlieville; Leonardo Brutus, 17, a Form 5 student of Barataria South Secondary; Danielle Seunarine, 18, an Upper 6 student of Naparima Girls High School; Charlene Charles, 17, a Form 5 student at Chaguanas South Secondary and Tarick Boodoo, 17, of Presentation College Chaguanas. The schools were selected using data supplied to the committee by the Ministry of Education, TAXING LIKE IMBERT Tarick told the committee that the practice of taxing was now common. There would be an older student and they would choose a younger student to take advantage of, the Lower Six student said, Its a form of dominance over them, a form of control. Charlene said some students dont even bother to go into classrooms to tax, They just sit outside, she said, The students are so small they could push them around. Raoul said, students are taxing other students. I have seen it happen before. The remarks led Mahabir to state, No one should have the authority to tax except the Minister of Finance. It seems the students are taking it upon themselves to replicate the role of the Minister of Finance. Charlene said there was a need for laws on cyber-bullying, cyber- stalking and cat-fishing (luring someone into a relationship using a fictional persona). She also said flaming (online defamation of someones character) was common, Mishael said bullying was as prevalent as smoking weed. The students were accompanied by principals. One dean, from Brazil Secondary, also appeared before the committee, As the students were helping the adults, the consensus among the adults was that parents were failing students. Parenting is the problem, said Lance Mottley, principal of the Carenage Boys Government Primary. Poor parenting is one of the major factors contributing to indiscipline. Daniel Sahadeo, principal of Canaan Presbyterian Primary, said, There is a serious disconnect between the parents and the school. Eric Floyd, principal of the Moruga Anglican (Holy Cross) Primary, said, We have children making children and people who are my age I am in my 40s are grandparents. Some adults fail children, Mishael said, 1 student charged, another suspended The video was uploaded to social media websites and has gone viral. At a press conference at the Ministry of Education head office in St Clair, Minister Garcia said he received a report from the School Supervisor III of the district of Port-of-Spain and environs, in which the names and schools they attend, were mentioned. Both students have been suspended for seven days and arrangements are being made to extend the suspension to ensure proper investigations could be carried out, Garcia said. Although the police have charged one of the students, Garcia said, the other student cannot be found at this time. The ministry has instructed the School Supervisor III, to contact the parents of the two students and arrange a meeting with them, the principals of the two schools and senior officials of the ministry. Our feeling, he said, is that these students need to be taken out of these schools and placed in one of our learning enhancement centres, because that conduct that was displayed was totally unacceptable. If taken out of the schools, Garcia said, we will be placing them in one of our learning resources centres where they can be rehabilitated. TT Unified Teachers Association (TTUTA) president Davanand Sinanan said it was disturbing to receive reports of students engaging in disorderly conduct in which they were brave and comfortable enough, to not only challenge teachers, but were prepared to challenge law enforcement officers charged with protecting people. Asked if the Charlotte Street incident meant that violence among the school population was increasing, Garcia said, the incident was an isolated one and it did not occur in the school. Noting that behaviour was monitored in the schools, he said, We are pleased to note that so far for the term, the incidence of indiscipline and violence are on the low.00 I never ordered 9 pm lockdown These are malicious rumours and I want to emphasise that the primary function of the police is the provision of safety and security for citizens, inclusive of Central Division and in particular Enterprise. And as such our usual policing methods of partnering with the population, having patrols both mobile and foot detecting crime and other infractions of the law will continue. Forde said he is quite aware of fear being expressed by law-abiding citizens in Enterprise over recent incidents but maintained the role of police is to protect and serve and not institute anything illegal such as informing persons they could be charged with loitering after 9 pm. The information is that there are different factions who have differences in that particular area but we are adequately policing the area to bring peace and quiet to citizens so that citizens can go about their lawful business. We have a zero tolerance on crime, criminal activities in Central Division and this Division will allow no one to engage in any type of criminal activities, if that occurs and we have the evidence those persons can expect to be arrested and taken before the Courts of law to be dealt with. Newsday reported yesterday that residents of Enterprise, Chaguanas were advised by police to get to their homes by nine oclock every night or face being arrested and charged for loitering This unofficial curfew was to have started on Tuesday night. In the story, a senior police source from Central Division reiterated to Newsday that this was not a police-enforced curfew but rather a strategy being employed by the Divisions Task Force and Chaguanas 500 Patrol Unit. The strategy was reportedly put in place to deal with shootings and other serious crimes in the Enterprise area, however other senior officers said yesterday that this strategy if it was ever used is illegal. Cyber-bullying a growing concern There is bullying taking place and we are very concerned about the level of cyber-bullying taking place, Gary Ribeiro, principal of Presentation College Chaguanas told Parliaments Joint Select Committee on Social Services and Public Administration. Danielle Seunarine, a student of Naparima Girls High School, who also appeared before the committee, said the Ministry of Educations Code of Conduct, while well-structured, does not adequately address cyber issues. Our battlefield has moved from the school ground to the online world, the student said. She said flaming (online defamation); cyber- bullying; cyber-stalking and cat-fishing occur. She agreed with a suggestion by committee chairman Independent Senator Dhanayshar Mahabir who called for laws on the issue. The Governments legislative agenda released last Friday states the Cabinet plans to bring a cyber crime bill to Parliament before 2017. Ribeiro said over a six-year period, nine suspensions were issued at Presentation College Chaguanas. On the other hand, Sharlene Hicks-Raeburn, principal of Barataria South Secondary, told the committee her school issues in excess of 100 suspensions per month. Its total population is about 850. But not even the total student population could be stated with certainty. Its difficult to pin down the number at times, she said, citing drop-outs and drop-ins. Lance Mottley, principal at the Carenage Boys Government Primary, said some students continue to terrorise. He said guidance officers are in the school once per term. Even when Police Youth Clubs get involved in schools, there are problems. The Police Youth Club has actually put out children, he said. The committee heard many recommendations. These included calls for: work holidays to allow parents to attend school meetings; the introduction of suspension centres; bully boot camps; awareness campaigns; annual conferences for principals; smaller classes; removing automatic student promotion; less dependence on suspension and life skills. Falling blackboard injures students The blackboard fell on the girls pinning them to the ground. Frantic teachers who were alerted to the screams of the injured students ran to the students and removed the fallen blackboard from the floor of the classroom. One of the students suffered a cut to the head while two others suffered injuries to their shoulders while a fourth child complained of body pains. They were rushed to Hospital by teachers and their parents were contacted. A parent of one of the injured children told Newsday he does not blame the school for the incident and has since reprimanded his daughter, advising her of the dangers of playing games near a blackboard. The parent said he was relieved the injuries were not life-threatening and thanked teachers and hospital staff for their prompt action. Tears, prayers for Felicia Marcelin said when one looks at the news, it is obvious that mens hearts have grown cold to the point where human life is no longer valued. So that people are used and destroyed and anger builds up and all we want to do is destroy, she said, stressing that vengeance belongs to God and not man. Marcelin, who said she shared a personal relationship with Persad, referred to her affectionately as Baby Girl, throughout her homily, also observed that family life was under siege. There are young people crying out for help, families going through turmoil, she said. Noting that God was absent in many schools, homes and communities, Marcelin declared: The only person to protect us is God and it is time he take his rightful place in homes and communities. The pastor said Persads death murder must not be in vain. Persad, 29, a store clerk, left her home at Oropouche Road, Sangre Grande on April 2, bound for her place of work, but never returned. It is alleged Persad disappeared hours before she was to have gone to court to petition for a protection order against a man with whom she was romantically involved. However, her decomposing body, bound, gagged and wrapped in plastic, was found last Friday, snagged in a mangrove tree in the Mitan River, Manzanilla. An autopsy by forensic pathologist Dr Eslyn Mc Donald Burris at the Forensic Sciences Centre, St James on Monday, was inconclusive but revealed Persads body did not contain any blood. Investigations are continuing. Yesterday, the young woman, hailed for her generosity, thoughtfulness and free spirit, received a sombre send-off, punctuated by lusty singing and glowing tributes to the fashion- conscious beauty. Her brother, special reserve police officer Felix Persad, in a brief but touching reflection toward the end of the closed-casket service, expressed hope her killers will be brought to justice. The people who committed this act, I just want them to know that my God is real and I will get justice, he said. However, Persad said his sisters death must be a reality check for people to, put your house in order. There is nothing I can say to bring her back but I could talk to who living to say we are just passing through. So you have to prepare yourself, he said. Persad was cremated at Allens Crematorium, Eastern Main Road, Guaico, Sangre Grande. Fire leaves 9 homeless Among the homeless are three children. According to reports, at about 2.30 am, the family was asleep in their two-storey wooden and concrete house at Fifth Company when Christian Darsoo was awakened by the smell of smoke emanating from the living room. He alerted his sister Rea, 25, a mother of two and together they attempted to extinguish the flames which spread quickly from the living room curtains to the walls and wooden furniture. Darsoo suffered burns to his right arm, face and back while attempting to break down a door for family members to escape a fiery death. He was taken to the Princes Town District health facility for treatment. Other family members which include Reas children Sapphire Ali, two, and Shemiah Ali, five, and her younger sister Kaydee Darsoo, three, had to be passed through a window during the evacuation. Danile Darsoo, 15, who attends Princes Town West Secondary school and his parents Ryan Darsoo, 45, and wife, Rosann, 43, also escaped. Rea said she had to stand on an old washing machine while her father handed her the three children through the broken window. She said the front door was blocked from the outside, which suggests to her that the fire may have been deliberate. We could all have died here. Adults and children... we could have all been burnt to death, she cried. Lengua/Indian Walk councillor Haniff Slamat has since made arrangements through the Ministry of Social Development to secure rented accommodations for the family over a three-month period. He said the Ministry of Housing would also be contacted through the Member of Parliament for Moruga/Tableland Lovell Francis for a housing unit to be made available to the family. Imam: Lift this Enterprise curfew He said the imposing of any curfew would be a grave mistake as it can disrupt the lives of innocent villagers within the area. Speaking to Newsday during an interview at his home, Lynch said, Robberies and killings take place mostly in the day in Enterprise, so a nine pm curfew would be of no effect. Criminals are sleeping in the night, these are not like long time criminals we are dealing with, he said. Lynch said that these criminals strike mostly in the day with or without the presence of police officers or CCTV cameras. They dont care, they just come out to kill and that is it, he said. Lynch lamented that police officers need to pursue different strategies to curb crime in the area. We need an Intelligence Unit in the area, where police are able to go undercover and mingle among residents to get information and then make moves to arrest persons based on intelligence. Everybody wants to be a leader in the drug trade here and this problem will be ongoing because there are also police officers involved. These police officers know who are the ones dealing with the drugs, but they cannot say anything because they are getting paid from drug dealers, the Imam alleged. Adding, he said if police officers refrain from corrupt behaviours and perform their jobs as honest law officers, there could be a reduction in crime in the community. How can we go forward when the law is corrupted, he asked. In the latest incident of violence in Enterprise, during the early hours of Monday morning, arsonists struck by setting fire to and destroying a Southern Main Road, Enterprise family-run businessplace. When Newsday visited several areas within the Enterprise community, many residents were afraid to speak and expressed fear for their lives if seen by the gangsters, conversing with reporters. The few who spoke, said the curfew was a case of Peter pay for all. I am a single mother of five, every night I leave home to go to work and I dont have a car. I travel to San Fernando to make an honest living. I am hoping I would be given some sort of pass to go to work, a woman said. San Francisco Was Going to Spend $1.7M on Single-Toilet Public Restroom in case you missed it advertisement Poor Reviews Don't Slow Black Adam box office Believe It or Not, Some World Leaders Lasted Just Minutes in case you missed it advertisement Missing Michigan Family Seen at UP Gas Station updated 'Centurion Livers' May Shift Thinking on Donors in case you missed it advertisement Charges Dropped Against Man Paralyzed in Police Van UPDATED advertisement Alarming Discovery at Mo. School 'Takes Your Breath From You' IN CASE YOU MISSED IT advertisement Mom Rescues Herself, Her Kids With Pocket Dial IN CASE YOU MISSED IT A Penniless Baroness Sits in a Hospital Bed in NYC longform advertisement This Gone Girl Cruise Was Weirder Than You Could Imagine longform College Wrestler Tries to Pull Grizzly Off Teammate, Gets Attacked IN CASE YOU MISSED IT advertisement It's quite ironic how the world's largest search engine giant labels its own URL, Google.com as 'partially dangerous' as shown in transparency report generated on Google's 'Safe Browsing' section on Tuesday morning. For some, the news is an odd-mix of laudable candor and embarrassing gaffe. The 'Safe Browsing' is Google's means of reviewing billions of URLs on a daily in search for unsafe websites that potentially contain harmful malwares. "Some pages on google.com contain deceptive content right now," explains the automated report on the website's status as quoted by The Guardian. The report further noted, "Attackers on this site might try to trick you to download software or steal your information (for example passwords, messages, or credit card information)." While the warning sounds frantically insane, the report does have a logical explanation for the unsavory categorization of Google's own URL noting, "Users sometimes post bad content on websites that are normally safe. Safe Browsing will update the safety status once the webmaster has cleaned up the bad content," according to a Fortune Magazine report. While the news is doing rounds in various online media circles, Google haven't issued any official statement on the issue. Nevertheless, some Google employees explain that "some people have used Google services to host or link to something malicious, so the tool is flagging the whole domain as a little risky," Washington Post reported. Actually, it's not just Google.com that was scanned with some bad apples in it. Apparently, other known URLs like 'tumblr.com' and code sharing site 'github.com' are being tagged as such. While majority of content posted are fine, user-generated content may have been red-flagged by the Safe Browsing tool. As of press time, Google has already stopped branding its own URL as 'partially dangerous'. The webmaster may have already sorted and cleaned all the bad apples in the basket. We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form Fairbanks, AK (99707) Today Snow showers this evening. Breaks in the overcast later. Low 19F. Winds light and variable. Chance of snow 50%.. Tonight Snow showers this evening. Breaks in the overcast later. Low 19F. Winds light and variable. Chance of snow 50%. Mumbai: Police today claimed to have foiled a bid on the life of a businessman by arresting three suspected members of Chhota Shakeel gang in suburban Jogeshwari. Acting on a tip-off that three gangsters were to meet at a hotel in suburban Jogeshwari, the Anti-Extortion Cell sleuths yesterday laid a trap and nabbed the trio from there, a senior police officer said today. The gangsters were identified as Michael John Dsoza (42), Naeem Khan (40) and Nitin Gurav (28). Arms, ammunition and other material were also seized from their possession. During the interrogation, the trio revealed a plot to kill a businessman, based in a western suburb, on the direction of Chhota Shakeel, a key aide and lieutenant of underworld don Dawood Ibrahim. The trio were booked under appropriate sections of IPC, besides the provisions of Arms Act, the officer said, adding, further investigations are on. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Mumbai: Priyanka Chopra may be flying high in Hollywood but the actress is also a strong emotional and physical support to her cousin Meera Chopra back in Bollywood. Priyanka is a great emotional and physical support for me in the industry. She has said, whatever happens, I am always there. This industry can be very scary for a newcomer but if you have someone like her, who will take care of you, it is a huge support, Meera told PTI. Because of her I take a lot of liberties which a newcomer might not take because I know at the end of the day somebody is there to take care of it, she added. Meera made her Bollywood debut with Gang of Ghosts and will be next seen in 1920 London, a horror film opposite Sharman Joshi. The actress, who has worked in many South Indian films, did not take any acting advice from Priyanka but was touched when the Bajirao Mastani star called her and said she was proud of her. Priyanka saw the trailer of 1920 London and said, this is the first Hindi film trailer she found really scary. She said she is really proud of me. Priyanka has always told me dont do something I will not be proud of. I wish she was here, I could show her the movie. Directed by Tinu Suresh Desai, 1920 London is the third instalment in the 1920 horror franchise. It is slated to release on May 6. On being quizzed that Meera can star with Priyanka and her other cousin, Parineeti Chopra, in a film, the actress quipped that Priyanka will not come to India for the next two years. I think that is very difficult because Priyanka wont even come to India for the next two years. Honestly, I feel she will be very successful in Hollywood because I know how she is. She is very aggressive in her work and confident. In the next two years she will be conquering Hollywood. Priyanaka is currently shooting in Los Angeles for her Hollywood film Baywatch and was recently in India to receive Padma Shri award. Meera said it has become a routine for the 33-year-old actress to bag honours. Riyadh: One year after receiving them at Camp David, US President Barack Obama meets Gulf leaders again today, hoping they can more strongly commit to the fight against jihadists. At the same time, with nine months left in his term, the president must again seek to reassure his Sunni allies upset over American overtures to their regional rival, Shiite Iran. Obama attends the Gulf Cooperation Council summit in the Saudi capital after reporting progress in recent months against the Islamic State group of Sunni extremists who seized large parts of Iraq and Syria. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations belong to the US-led coalition which carries out air strikes against IS. Around 4,000 American troops are in Iraq as part of that mission which trains and assists local forces fighting the militants. The research group IHS said on Monday that Islamic State had lost about 22 percent of its territory in the past 15 months. In a bid to accelerate gains against the jihadists, Defence Secretary Ashton Carterin Riyadh with Obama announced on Monday that the US will send more troops and Apache attack helicopters to Iraq. Washington also wants to emphasise the reconstruction of cities taken back from IS. On Wednesday, Carter pleaded for greater Gulf financial and political involvement in Iraq, which is battling an economic crisis as well as the extremists. Carter made the comments after meeting his GCC counterparts. I encourage our GCC partners to do more, not only militarily as the Saudis, as the UAE have been doing... but also politically and economically, Carter said. Sunni support for multisectarian governance and reconstruction in Shiite-majority Iraq will be critical to ensuring the defeat of IS, the Pentagon chief said. But Gulf leaders are offended by Obamas perceived reluctance to get involved in the regions problems, and in particular his tilt towards Iran, their rival which they accuse of widespread regional interference. They worry that Iran will be further emboldened after the lifting this year of international sanctions against it under a US-supported international deal to curb Tehrans nuclear programme. Riyadh leads an Arab military coalition that for 13 months has supported Yemens government in its battle against Iran-backed Shiite Huthi rebels. Obama adviser Rob Malley said it is important to settle the regional conflicts in Yemen and Syria not only because of their devastating humanitarian consequences. For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Jaipur: An audio clip has gone viral in Rajasthan in which a BJP MLA is purportedly heard threatening a Block Development Officer of her constituency for not visiting her after taking over. The MLA allegedly called the local BDO asking him why he did not visit her after taking charge and scolded him for relieving a particular employee whom she called our man. In the audio, she is purportedly heard threatening the official that she would meet the Chief Minister and will get him transfered elsewhere. When contacted, the MLA said it was doctored clip and that she has asked the Superintendent of Police to investigate the matter. I believe this is a fake audio. I have asked the SP for an investigation and I will be able to say anything clearly only after the investigation gets over, she said. The SP said the MLA had telephonically informed him about the matter but did not give any written complaint regarding the matter. Congress condemned it and demanded action against the MLA. This is not the first time when a ruling party MLA has threatened an administrative officer. Earlier, the party MLAs were involved in threatening and pressurizing officers. This affects the morale of the government machinery and public representatives should be responsible in dealing with the officers, PCC vice president Archana Sharma said. She said the party should take disciplinary action against the MLA. For all the Latest Viral News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: The 20-year-old engineering student Divyanshu Kumar alias Golu who had allegedly hacked RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadavs Facebook account has been arrested. Golu was arrested on the charges of hacking Yadavs account and posting objectionable material on it. Divyanshu, expelled by college was arrested from his village Mehmadabad in Vaishali district by Bihar Police's Economic Offences Unit on Wednesday. The Economic Offences Unit of Bihar Police nabbed him and also seized two Samsung mobile phones which he is said to have used for hacking the FB account. IG (EOU) JS Gangwar said, Action will be taken in that regard also. The police will soon file a chargesheet against him. Lalus son and Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Prasad Yadav had lodged an FIR after removing the malicious content from RJD chiefs account. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Berlin: Scientists have warned that the sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean may shrink this summer to the record low which was seen in 2012. The warning came following the evaluation of satellite data about the thickness of the ice cover. The data show that the arctic sea ice was already extraordinarily thin in the summer of 2015. Comparably little new ice formed during the past winter. Predicting the summer extent of the arctic sea ice several months in advance is one of the great challenges facing contemporary polar research. Until the end of the melting season, the fate of the ice is ultimately determined by the wind conditions and air and water temperatures during the summer months. Foundations are laid during the preceding winter, however. This spring, they are as disheartening as they were in the negative record year of 2012. Back then, the sea ice surface of the Arctic shrunk to a record low of 3.4 million square kilometres. If we compare the ice thickness map of the previous winter with that of 2012, we can see that the current ice conditions are similar to those of the spring of 2012 - in some places, the ice is even thinner, said Marcel Nicolaus, from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Germany. Researchers evaluated the sea ice thickness measurements taken over the past five winters by the CyroSat-2 satellite for their sea ice projection. Seven autonomous snow buoys, which the AWI researchers had placed on floes (sheets of floating ice) last year, supplied additional important clues. In addition to the thickness of the snow cover on top of the sea ice, the buoys also measure the air temperature and air pressure. A comparison of their temperature data with the long-term measurements showed that the temperature in the central Arctic in February this year exceeded average temperatures by up to 8 degrees Celsius. This warmth did not result in the thinning of the sea ice cover in some regions over the course of the winter. According to our buoy data from the spring, the warm winter air was not sufficient to melt the layer of snow covering the sea ice, let alone the ice itself, Nicolaus said. During the past winter, the growth of the arctic sea ice was significantly slower than the scientists had expected. In previously ice-rich areas such as the Beaufort Gyre off the Alaskan coast or the region south of Spitsbergen, the sea ice is considerably thinner now than it normally is during the spring, researchers said. While the landfast ice north of Alaska usually has a thickness of 1.5 metres, our US colleagues are currently reporting measurements of less than one metre. Such thin ice will not survive the summer sun for long, said Stefan Hendricks, AWI sea ice physicist. For all the Latest Science News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Mumbai: Seeking to give a Marathi angle to the replacement of Shilpa Shinde with another actress on a popular show, the cine wing of the Raj Thackeray-led MNS today said they will take action against those producers and channels who will not let the TV star work in the state. Shilpa, best known for her role as Angoori Bhabi on Bhabi Ji Ghar Par Hai, had sparked a controversy when she announced that she had quit the popular series and accused the makers of mentally torturing her. CINTAA (Cine & TV Artistes Association) then sent the actress a letter asking her to bear the cost of financial loss incurred by the producer or channels. Ameya Khopkar, President of Maharashtra Navnirman Chitrapat Karmachari Sena, said they will take action in their own way if anyone tries to stop Shilpa from working in Maharashtra. We dont value these federation(s). Nobody can stop Shilpa Shinde. If anyone stops her from working in Maharashtra, we will take action against the producers and channels in our own way. If they feel this is a threat, so be it, Khopkar told reporters here. According to Shilpa, the problem started when the makers wanted her to sign a contract which would bar her from doing other shows. On the other hand, the makers had alleged unprofessional behaviour on Shilpas part and said the actress had demanded a pay hike and wanted her own designers on the show. Shilpa said it was a legal matter between her and the producers and the federation should not have come in between. They (producers) bad mouthed me saying I used to throw tantrums. CINTAA didnt ban me but the letter states that unless I pay the damages to the producers, I wont be allowed to work. This is happening to an artist in Maharashtra. The matter is first legal. The federation shouldnt have come in between. If I have signed a contract and crossed that, why bring the federation... I am going through legal process because I have been wronged, Shilpa said. Well-known television actress Shubhangi Atre will now essay the character of Shilpa on the sitcom. Shilpa was approached by the makers of The Kapil Sharma Show but the actress said she has not signed the show yet. Beijing: President Xi Jinping has assumed a new title of Commander in Chief of Chinas new joint forces battle command centre, in his latest move to exert greater control over the worlds largest army and consolidate his status as Chinas most powerful leader in decades. 62-year-old Xi is already General Secretary of the ruling Communist Party and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, which manages the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA). Xi is now Commander in Chief of the militarys Joint Operations Command Centre, state media reported, showing him visiting the centre wearing camouflage fatigues. The Xinhua news agency and the state broadcaster CCTV both carried reports referring to Xi by the description for the first time after he visited the command centre on Wednesday. The current situation requires battle command to be highly strategic, coordinated, timely, professional and accurate, Xi said, urging staff at joint battle command centers at both CMC and theater command levels to bear in mind a sense of crisis and adapt to the strategic demands of national security. Xi told the officers to closely follow the trends of global military revolution and strive to build a joint battle command system that meets the need of fighting and winning an informationised war. All must be done with the ultimate goal of improving battle command capacities and measured by the standards of being able to fight and win wars, Xi said, urging a focus on solving conflicts and problems limiting joint battle command. Xi also called for extraordinary methods to foster joint battle command talent, stressing that a major breakthrough should be achieved as soon as possible. The command centre was set up as part of a major revamp of Chinas military structure, which also included the creation of a strategic rocket force to operate its missiles. Chinas foreign policy has become increasingly assertive in recent years, especially on its claims to disputed territories in the resource-rich and strategic South China Sea. However, analysts say his new title indicates he wants to be seen as a leader capable of commanding the military directly. During his visit to the centre on Wednesday, which was widely publicised in state media, he said the armed forces should be absolutely loyal and capable of winning wars. Experts say his appearance in military fatigues may also be a display of strength aimed at Chinas rivals. China and several of its neighbours are locked in a territorial dispute over the South China Sea, which Beijing claims almost in its entirety. The PLA is the worlds largest military force, with a strength of approximately 2,285,000 personnel. For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. London: Britain today celebrated Queen Elizabeth IIs 90th birthday with gun salutes, musical bands and church services across the country, as Prime Minister David Cameron led the nation in paying tributes to the UKs oldest and longest-serving monarch calling her a rock of strength for the country and the Commonwealth. The monarch was at one of her palaces outside London in Windsor Castle for her big day, where she and husband Prince Philip took a round of the town in an open top royal vehicle, waving at cheering crowds of thousands of her subjects lined up on the streets. She sliced into a three-tier birthday cake created by Bangladeshi-origin British chef Nadiya Hussein, winner of the Great British Bake Off show, especially for the 90th celebrations as the crowds sang Happy Birthday. Thanks you for the lovely warm wishes on The Queens 90th Birthday, Buckingham Palace said in a statement. The Queen, dressed in a spring green outfit, remarked that it was a lovely day as she unveiled a plaque marking The Queens Walkway at the foot of Castle Hill during a walkabout the town of Windsor. The Walkway was designed by the UKs Outdoor Trust to symbolically recognise the moment that Elizabeth II became Britains longest reigning monarch on September 9, 2015 after more than 63 years on the throne, linking 63 significant points in Windsor. Prime Minister David Cameron led the tributes by referring to the Queen as a Rock of strength while Prince Charles, the Queens heir, recorded a special birthday message for his mother in which he reads an edited passage from William Shakespeares Henry VIII for radio broadcast during the day. To mark the queens birthday, gun salutes of 21 shots, the standard royal gun salute, rang out at locations including Hillsborough Castle, Cardiff Castle, and Edinburgh Castle. In London, the Kings Troop Royal Horse Artillery staged a 41-gun salute at midday in Hyde Park. The Honourable Artillery Company fired a 62-gun salute across the Thames from the Tower of London at an hour later. After the Queen lights the first beacon in Windsor, more than 900 beacons across the UK and the Commonwealth will be lit up to mark her birthday. Members of the UKs Army cadet force will take beacons to the top of the highest peaks of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In an address to the House of Commons to mark the occasion, Cameron said the queen had been steadfast, a rock of strength for our nation, for our Commonwealth and on many occasions for the whole world. He said Britain was uniquely blessed to have her and praised the Queens unshakeable sense of duty. A photograph of the monarch with young Royal Family members has been released. The image, one of three taken by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, shows the Queen surrounded by her five great-grandchildren and her two youngest grandchildren. For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: The Centre on Friday moved the Supreme Court challenging the Uttarakhand High Court verdict quashing imposition of President's rule in the state. Attorney General (AG) Mukul Rohatgi mentioned the appeal before a bench comprising Justices Dipak Misra and Shiva Kirti Singh, which asked him to approach the Registry for listing it for hearing today itself. The bench said that the Registry will seek permission from Chief Justice of India (CJI) T S Thakur for listing of the appeal before an appropriate bench. At the outset, the AG said that the Special Leave Petition (SLP) has been filed today morning but "we don't have the copy of the judgement" as it was not declared and only a speaking order was passed. A bench headed by Justice Misra was sitting in the CJI's court as the CJI was at a scheduled conference of High Court Chief Justices and judges in the national capital. Justice Misra said in view of the non-availability of the CJI, some arrangement has to be done for its listing. The AG said there was a need for an urgent hearing in view of the apparent problem likely to occur between today and Monday. I want to press for the stay today itself, Rohatgi said. A petition was also filed by nine Congress rebel MLAs who were disqualified by the Speaker and they have challenged the HC verdict keeping them away from participating in the floor test scheduled for April 29. The AG, who was flanked by Additional Solicitors General (ASG) Maninder Singh and Tushar Mehta and senior advocate Harish Salve who had appeared for Uttarakhand in the HC, said an SLP has been filed today morning challenging the verdict of the HC pronounced yesterday by which Presidents proclamation under Article 356 has been quashed. Senior advocates Kapil Sibal, Abhishek Manu Singhvi and Vivek Tankha were present on behalf of the Congress party. Coming down heavily on the Centre for the March 27 proclamation under Art 356, the High Court had yesterday quashed the imposition of Presidents rule in Uttarakhand and restored the dismissed Congress government while castigating the Centre for uprooting a democratically-elected government. The HC had said the imposition of Presidents rule was contrary to the law laid down by the Supreme Court. Directing revival of the Harish Rawat government, which was dismissed by the Centre on March 27, the High Court had ordered that he should seek a vote of confidence in the Assembly on April 29. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Rattled by the Uttarakhand High Courts order, BJP chief Amit Shah and senior ministers today went into a huddle and decided that the government will move the Supreme Court tomorrow challenging the judgement quashing the proclamation of Presidents rule. After the meeting, Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi, who was present in the meeting, said he will mention the matter before the bench of Chief Justice T S Thakur in the morning tomorrow and seek a stay on the HC verdict. Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, a legal luminary himself, Nripendra Mishra, Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi, besides Rohatgi met at Shahs house and deliberated on the implications of the HC order and the options before the party and the government. Source said that Jaitley, who returned from the US earlier in the day, and others felt that there were enough grounds to challenge the order which is being seen as a big blow to the Modi government. They said the Centre will tell the Supreme Court that failure of the Appropriation Bill to get approval of the Uttarakhand Assembly and disqualification of nine rebel Congress MLAs arbitrarily were some of the grounds to impose Presidents rule in the hill state. The government is also expected to submit that Governor K K Pauls four subsequent reports had given enough grounds for proclamation of Presidents rule. Even though the lengthy order of the division bench of the High Court is likely to be available only early next week, the central government armed with the operating part of the directive will seek a stay, official sources said. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate DANBURY For hours Wednesday night, dozens of local Ecuadorians packed boxes full of donated supplies to send to the South American nation crippled by a deadly earthquake last week. Among them was 9-year-old Emily Siguenza, who went to the Ecuadorian Civic Center of Greater Danbury to drop off items badly needed items like diapers and Band-Aids. Emily, who lives in Tarrytown, N.Y., said she felt obligated to help those desperately in need after the 7.8-magnitude quake left more than 500 people dead and tens of thousands homeless. I have family over there, Emily said. I need to help others. As Ecuadorian authorities worked to clear debris and restore electricity, the earth continued to move. A magnitude-6.1 aftershock before dawn Wednesday sent nervous residents pouring into the streets. Local seismologists had recorded more than 550 aftershocks, some felt 105 miles away in the capital of Quito. In Danbury, a constant stream of people went in out and out of the civic center on West Street. They carried armfuls of food, diapers, paper towels, cases of water and more. Inside, dozens of people, including children like Emily, helped pack the donated items into brown cardboard boxes. Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton stopped by and spoke with the centers president, Milton Pauta. Ecuadorians are one of the largest immigrant groups in greater Danbury. Wilson Vivar, 31, stood outside of the center on Wednesday night, helping a group load the boxes into a U-Haul. Within an hour, it was almost completely full. Its my people, said Vivar, who has lived in Danbury for about eight years. They need me. His wife was in Ecuador visiting her mother when the earthquake hit. Both were unharmed, but the mothers home was destroyed, so they had to sleep in the streets that night, Vivar said. The volunteers worked late into the night. Pauta said he didnt leave until 2 a.m. on Thursday. The donations will be flown to Quito on Friday. An organization there will distribute the supplies to the areas in need. Im very happy about how the area Ecuadorians have responded in this situation, but its not just the Ecuadorians, its been the whole community, Pauta said. The Associated Press contributed to this article. mrigg@newstimes.com; @mackrigg A few months ago, our kids school district, one of the largest in South Carolina, was hit with a virus that spread "ransomware," a malicious software designed to block computer systems by encrypting the data in which the attackers gain access. Unlike other types of malware that attempt to steal data, ransomware is unique in that it simply blocks access to systems or files until a ransom is paid. Networks typically become compromised because of poor cyber security practices and phishing scams, where an attacker tricks a user into opening a phishing email and visiting a phishing website. Once done, the user unknowingly downloads a piece of malware software, and the attacker expands from there to explore resources and, in enterprises, may attempt to move laterally to explore the network and encrypt shared and network drives. Related: Ready, Set, Hack: Pentagon Invites Hackers to Break Into its Computer Systems Eventually, our school district capitulated to the demands of the attackers and paid the ransom demands of $10,000, and all data was returned and restored -- albeit with a heightened sense of security and importance. Our school district got off cheap compared to other organizations, however, such as a New Jersey school district that recently had its network system infected with ransomware with the demand of $124,000 in Bitcoins. I can tell you with a high level of certainty that my high school grades were never worth that much. According to numerous industry reports, ransomware attacks are becoming more common every day, doubling in number between 2014 and 2015 according the Symantec Internet Threat Report. And the trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future, and moreover, authorities have no solid strategy for stopping them. In fact, currently the FBI recommends companies to pay the ransom if they ever want their data restored. The future in this regard does not look bright when the FBI throws its arms up in defeat. Making the matter worse is the evolving sophistication in these attacks, as a new and emerging innovation called "ransomware-as-a-service" (RaaS) starts to take root. According to Business Insider, "(RaaS) is a variant of ransomware designed to be user-friendly and... deployed by anyone with little cyber know-how. These agents simply download the virus either for free or a nominal fee, set a ransom and payment deadline and attempt to trick someone into infecting his or her computer. If the victim pays up, the original software author gets a cut -- around five to 20 percent -- and the rest goes to the party who deployed the attack (called the 'script kiddie'). In January 2016, researchers identified a new RaaS called Ransomware32, complete with a user-friendly dashboard to track income statistics and manage individual attacks while also removing most of the the upfront costs and technical barriers. This kind of RaaS trend is making ransomware accessible to the least technical hackers. As terrible as RaaS sounds, it still sounds better than multi-level marketing. Unfortunately, many enterprise IT teams focus on efficient management of networks and privileges rather than designing networks that can contain the damage of a breach or ransomware attack. And while any technique an enterprise uses to avoid phishing scams will help avoid getting ransomware, there is no way to guarantee that an enterprise can avoid infection altogether. WEI is one company that has been studying the evolution of ransomware and providing cutting-edge technology tools to businesses. They suggest that, as an additional prevention, every enterprise consider how to contain, rather than just prevent, a ransomware breach with network segmentation in addition to other strategies. Related: Adobe Issues Emergency Update to Flash After Ransomware Attacks In part, network segmentation limits the volume of resources that an attacker can access by logically grouping network assets, resources and applications together into compartmentalized areas called segments and allowing only approved types of communication in and out of the segment. Segments that are physically separated from other segments and have no established link to allow interaction are known as segregated. For example, devices involved with financial transactions should be fully segregated both logically and physically from devices that can surf the web. The objective with security-minded network segmentation is to ensure that attackers have access to as few digital resources as possible. This technique will also help contain the potential damage from other types of cyber attacks. Since departments and teams have different access needs, an enterprise should divide a network into segments and then controls each segments communication to the outside world. In addition, the enterprise should control communication between segments of the same network. With limited access between segments, an attackers movement to another segment is either stopped or slowed enough to allow monitoring tools to alert enterprise staff to the intrusion before massive harm is done. To secure a segment containing sensitive information or data, an enterprise would simply prevent all communication and physical access, including but not limited to emails, websites, file sharing, cloud services and any external devices such as storage or mobile devices that have both external access and access to the network. Failing to segment properly creates what is described as an "egg network," or a network that, like an egg, has a "strong perimeter surrounded by their soft, gooey, defenseless (data) yolks." Such organizations have false confidence in outward facing firewalls and other tools that protect the network's external perimeter while liberally allowing internal communication between network segments. An attacker who stumbles into such liberal access would be able to block and ransom large volumes of enterprise electronic resources. Enterprise IT teams should also consider their network backup strategy. "The best line of defense against any ransomware is to have backed up your machines yesterday," says Kaspersky Labs. "Some ransomware variants are smart enough to also encrypt every backup they are able to locate, including those residing on network shares. That is why it is important to make 'cold' backups (read and write only, no delete / full control access) that cannot be deleted by the ransomware." Related: 1 in 5 Companies Had a Security Breach, New Study Says In the end, enterprises should ensure that their approach to network management reaches beyond efficiency and considers how best to leverage segmentation to thwart attackers and limit damage. Enterprises should confirm that staff members who are responsible for segmentation truly understand the security implications of the segmentation architecture. And business areas that are responsible for selecting software should draw security and IT resources into the decision-making process before a solution is selected and ensure that the vendor's implementation team has a strong background in the security of the software being purchased. Related: Copyright 2016 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved TORONTO, April 21, 2016 /CNW/ - The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) promises to have a modest impact on Canada, according to ground breaking research from the C.D. Howe Institute. In "Better in than Out? Canada and the Trans-Pacific Partnership," authors Dan Ciuriak, Ali Dadkhah, and Jingliang Xiao, find that some sectors will benefit from the TPP, while for others, the TPP will not go far enough. However, Canada would forgo any gains, and experience additional modest losses from not ratifying the TPP. "Canada, along with Malaysia and New Zealand, make tangible gains in terms of exports resulting from the TPP," state the authors. "However, as a trade deal, the TPP mainly benefits the United States, Vietnam, and Japan. These three parties account for about 87 percent of intra-TPP export and 91 percent of intra-TPP import gains," they add. For the remaining parties, which notably include all the Latin American parties, the deal is essentially a wash in trade terms. Through implementing a ground-breaking methodology, the report analyses elements of the TPP that can be measured with reasonable precision. It finds that, if ratified, the TPP would: Boost Canadian household income by C$485 million in 2018, measured in 2016 dollars , rising to about C$3 billion , in 2035, when the full impacts of the TPP have been realized. in 2018, measured in , rising to about , in 2035, when the full impacts of the TPP have been realized. Increase real GDP by about 0.02 percent in 2018, rising to about 0.08 percent in 2035, driven by an increase in two-way trade with TPP partners of about C$4.3 billion as of 2035. as of 2035. Increase foreign direct investment by about C$1.3 billion by 2035, driven mainly by the TPP's income effects as the agreement implies minimal change to an already highly open investment regime. by 2035, driven mainly by the TPP's income effects as the agreement implies minimal change to an already highly open investment regime. Result in major gains in trade for agricultural produce, meat products (mainly pork and beef), and downstream food products. Affect Canada's trade sensitive sectors, the dairy and automotive sectors: both experience a relatively large decline in total shipments, although these are small in terms of the total percentage of shipments of each sector. trade sensitive sectors, the dairy and automotive sectors: both experience a relatively large decline in total shipments, although these are small in terms of the total percentage of shipments of each sector. Negatively impact industrial sectors, including textiles and apparel, the chemicals-plastics-rubber complex, and metal products. Wood products and transport equipment buck this trend and make gains. Produce gains in business and financial services in TPP export markets, although the major expansion in services is in the non-traded sectors through indirect income effects. The authors also test the implications if Canada does not ratify the agreement. They find that: The welfare cost to Canada would be minor in the short term about C$290 million in the first year of implementation but would rise to about C$1.7 billion by 2035 when the full impacts of the TPP would have been realized. would be minor in the short term about in the first year of implementation but would rise to about by 2035 when the full impacts of the TPP would have been realized. The real GDP impact would be a negligible -0.006 percent in the first year, rising to about -0.026 percent in 2035. The main sectors that would lose in trade terms would be beef and canola crushing, as well as the financial services and business services sectors, which would see exports to the TPP partners reduced. For a number of sectors, such as automobiles, the losses predicted under the TPP cannot be avoided by Canada staying out. "The question we put to the TPP text is: show us the money. There is some money in the TPP for Canada but the trade gains are relatively modest and the income and welfare impacts are commensurately modest as well," state the authors, adding, "What our analysis suggests is that even ambitious, so-called deep and comprehensive agreements like the TPP have limited traction in what is an already highly open global economy, which features many parallel processes chipping away at irritants to trade and investment." For the report go to: https://www.cdhowe.org/public-policy-research/better-out-canada-and-trans-pacific-partnership The C.D. Howe Institute is an independent not-for-profit research institute whose mission is to raise living standards by fostering economically sound public policies. Widely considered to be Canada's most influential think tank, the Institute is a trusted source of essential policy intelligence, distinguished by research that is nonpartisan, evidence-based and subject to definitive expert review. SOURCE C.D. Howe Institute For further information: Dan Ciuriak, Director and Principal, Ciuriak Consulting Inc.; or Daniel Schwanen, Vice-President Research, C.D. Howe Institute, at 416-865-1904; E-mail: [email protected] QUEBEC CITY, April 21, 2016 /CNW Telbec/ - iA Financial Group (Industrial Alliance Insurance and Financial Services Inc.) (TSX: IAG) will disclose its earnings results for the first quarter of 2016 on Thursday, May 5, 2016. Management will discuss the results during a conference call to be held at 11:30 a.m. (ET), followed by the company' Annual Meeting at 2:00 p.m. First Quarter 2016 Earnings Results The conference call will be held at 11:30 a.m. on Thursday, May 5, 2016. The conference call can be accessed by calling 1-800-681-1621 (toll-free). Please note that the question and answer period following will be reserved for financial analysts. A webcast of the conference call (in listen-only mode) will be available on the iA Financial Group website at www.ia.ca. A replay of the conference call will be available for a one-week period starting at 2:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 5, 2016, until midnight on May 12, 2016. To listen to the replay, call 18005585253 (tollfree) and enter access code 21807897. A transcript of the conference call will be posted the week following the conference call on the company's website at www.ia.ca, under About iA, in the Investor Relations/Financial Reports section. All documents related to iA Financial Group's first quarter earnings results will be published on the company's website at www.ia.ca, under About iA, in the Investor Relations/Financial Reports section, at around 9:00 am (ET) on Thursday, May 5, 2016. Annual Meeting Mr. John LeBoutillier, Chairman of the Board, and Mr. Yvon Charest, President and CEO, invite the media to attend the iA Financial Group Annual Meeting, which will be held on Thursday, May 5, 2016, at 2:00 p.m. (ET), at the Quebec City Convention Centre, 1000 Rene-Levesque Boulevard East, in Quebec City. A webcast and a videoconference of the Annual Meeting will be available on the company's website at www.ia.ca under About iA, in the Investor Relations/Events and Presentations section. Mr. Charest will be available after the Annual Meeting to meet with media. Journalists who cannot attend the press conference and who would like to schedule an interview with Mr. Charest are asked to contact Pierre Picard, Public Relations Manager, at 418-684-5000, extension 1660. SOURCE Industrial Alliance Insurance and Financial Services Inc. For further information: Investor Relations: Grace Pollock, Office: 418-780-5945, Email: [email protected]; Public Relations: Pierre Picard, Office: 418-684-5000, ext. 1-1660, Email: [email protected] MONTREAL, April 21, 2016 /CNW Telbec/ - The Honourable Jean-Yves Duclos, Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, the Honourable Denis Coderre, Mayor of Montreal, and Mr. Didier Deramond, Deputy Chief of the Service de Police de la Ville de Montreal, today highlighted New Horizons for Seniors Program funding of $700,000 for a pan-Canadian actionresearch project against elder abuse. The funding recipient, the Universite de Sherbrooke's Research Chair on Mistreatment of Older Adults, has worked with the Service de Police de la Ville de Montreal (SPVM) to develop the model called L'intervention policiere aupres des aines maltraites (IPAM). This unique and innovative project will enable the SPVM to standardize its police practice model for combatting elder abuse incidents, in partnership with workers from the Centres d'aide aux victimes d'actes criminels (CAVAC), the Centres integres universitaires de sante et de services sociaux (CIUSSS) and other workers in the field. The announcement was made at Montreal City Hall. The Government of Canada is committed to promoting the well-being of seniors by ensuring their economic and social security. Budget 2016 delivers on the Government's agenda to empower all Canadians to build better lives for themselves and to enable them to contribute to, and share in, the prosperity of the country. The Government recognizes the remarkable contribution that seniors have made over the years and continues to take measures to ensure they enjoy the dignified and secure life they deserve. The Government is working with organizations like the Universite de Sherbrooke to safeguard seniors at risk and to prevent elder abuse. The strength of the network Starting May 5, officers from all SPVM stations and investigation centres will apply the IPAM model, which is based on the results of a large-scale actionresearch project. This will better equip officers to prevent, detect and report cases of elder abuse, intervene and ensure follow-ups with victims and refer them to appropriate resources or accompany them through the legal process. Under this new approach, police will handle all cases of elder abuse, whether or not they are criminal in nature. Thanks to collaboration with workers in the field, elder victims will come under the care of the public and community health and social services network. An exportable operational structure Since May 2015, the IPAM model has been progressively established in the SPVM. In less than a year, there have been many successes on the ground. Compared to other Canadian police services' practices, Montreal's model proposes the development of an organizational culture to combat elder abuse across the entire service, with no need to establish a specialized unit. Moreover, this model can be used in other police services, or for other social issues requiring a concerted effort from various players, such as mental health and domestic violence. For this reason, the Research Chair and the SPVM plan to share the IPAM model with the scientific community and other police corps, both in Canada and internationally. Moreover, it should be noted that the IPAM model appeared in the World Health Organization's World Report on Ageing and Health in 2015. It is cited as an example of initiatives from Quebec in the chapter entitled Next Steps. From research to action The IPAM model stems from 10 data collection exercises done in 2013 and 2014 on existing successful police practices (in Quebec, in Canada and around the world), the SPVM's current practices and the needs they identified. The research team analyzed 160 scientific articles and government publications. It also consulted 46 police services, 32 partners and 807 SPVM officers. Using the results of this broad study, the SPVM developed tools such as training modules, operational methods, a procedure for intervening with elders and a reference guide for patrol officers and responders to help them detect cases of elder abuse and refer victims to available resources. The tools will mainly be used to guide police work and help them respond as effectively as possible to situations of elder abuse. Quotes "The Government of Canada will continue to focus its efforts on fostering a prosperous future for seniors across Canada. Our aim is to help improve elder abuse detection, prevention and follow-up measures. I applaud the coordinated efforts of the Universite de Sherbrooke's Research Chair on Mistreatment of Older Adults and the Service de Police de la Ville de Montreal for their model that will better identify, promote prevention of and help put a stop to cases of elder abuse." The Honourable Jean-Yves Duclos, Minister of Families, Children and Social Development "The Intervention policiere aupres des a aines maltraites (IPAM) model that the SPVM has implemented is a great example of partnership between research (Research Chair on Mistreatment of Older Adults and the Research and Strategic Planning Division of the SPVM) and practice (SPVM) supported by a federal funding program. Thanks to a three-year actionresearch program, the model was developed, launched as a pilot and evaluated to produce a long-term model of police practice that can be adapted for other police services." Professor Marie Beaulieu, Ph.D., Research Chair on Mistreatment of Older Adults "The World Health Organization considers the IPAM model, which is the result of a cross-sectorial actionresearch project, as an inspiring model for the future. This means Montreal is leaving its mark on the world in the field of preventing elder abuse. For such a resilient city as Montreal, the partnership and cross-sectorial collaboration that this model supports can also act as a catalyst for many other projects in health, senior security and better community living. Montreal's model also helps police officers and their partners to better understand the needs of seniors. This is also very inspiring for a senior-friendly city such as Montreal." The Honourable Denis Coderre, Mayor of Montreal "Workers in the field and police officers can offer a service that is better aligned with the needs of seniors. Everyone works within their field of expertise to complement each other and help victims. Together, they strengthen the public safety network for victims of elder abuse. This tight-knit network improves interventions and follow-ups." Didier Deramond, Deputy Chief of the Service de Police de la Ville de Montreal Associated Links Follow us on Twitter Like us on Facebook SOURCE Employment and Social Development Canada For further information: Contacts: Media Relations Office, Employment and Social Development Canada, 819-994-5559, [email protected]; Universite de Sherbrooke Research Chair on Mistreatment of Older Adults - IPAM Model: Marie Beaulieu, 819-780-2220, extension 45270, or cell: 819-674-5501; Communications and Media Relations, SPVM, 514-280-2015; City of Montreal, Catherine Maurice, press Secretary, Office of the Mayor and Executive Committee, 514 346-7598 BATON ROUGE, LA, April 21, 2016 /CNW/ - Louisiana Public Broadcasting, CODOFIL (Council for the Development of French in Louisiana) and Groupe Media TFO (Television francaise de l'Ontario), the leader in French educational content in North America, announced the premiere of French language kids programming on LPB2 for Francophones and future Francophones in Louisiana. The announcement was made today in the Ellender Room at the Louisiana State Capitol. Groupe Media TFO (a public educational media enterprise funded by the Ontario Government in Canada) is the premium destination for audiences seeking educational and cultural content in French across Ontario and all of Canada. Members of the Acadiana Delegation in the House of Representatives recognized special guests from Groupe Media TFO, including its President and CEO, Glenn O'Farrell. "We are delighted to be able to contribute to the growth and fulfillment of Louisiana's Francophone communities with this first French-language educational content partnership between Louisiana Public Broadcasting and Groupe Media TFO. By teaming up with Louisiana's public broadcaster to bring our high-quality French-language educational and cultural content to the state's Francophone communities, we are celebrating the presence and the recognition of French in North America." The award-winning TFO educational content for ages 2-8 year-olds premiered on LPB2 on Monday, April 18, and consists of 14 hours a week of French-language kids programming. During this initial 18-month partnership children will be able to watch, discover, and learn en francais in the comfort of their own homes. This partnership is an international, educational and pioneering initiative that brings French language and cultural based programming to Louisiana. "We are pleased to offer French-language children's programming from Group Media TFO to complement our award-winning PBS Kids content on LPB2. This groundbreaking initiative will provide pre-school and school-age children the opportunity to reinforce their French language skills and strengthens our common mission with CODOFIL," said Beth Courtney, President and CEO of Louisiana Public Broadcasting. CODOFIL President, Dr. William Arceneaux, who was involved in the negotiations between TFO and LPB, attributed the success of this international initiative to the leadership of CEO Beth Courtney of LPB, and the technical skills and hard work of the programming and engineering staffs of both networks. Arceneaux observed that "these children's educational programs will provide a powerful, hitherto unavailable instructional tool for our French teachers and a delightful and fun learning experience for our French immersion students." LPB's Director of Programming & Content Jason Viso added that this groundbreaking initiative was a shared desire with CODOFIL to expand LPB's ongoing mission to offer one-of-a-kind quality programming to its viewers. "We are excited about this partnership and believe that Mini TFO and other programs featured in our French language block will be a great addition to LPB's network of channels. Glenn and his team at TFO have been wonderful partners to work with." CODOFIL's Executive Director Charles Larroque sees the collaboration as another step in preserving Louisiana's French language heritage. "CODOFIL's mission is to spare no efforts to accomplish the development, utilization and preservation of the French language as found in Louisiana," says Larroque. "We work closely with our schools, where nearly 4,500 students go to primary and secondary French immersion programs. We are making history by bringing educational content in French to personal screens. Today, we are writing a new chapter in the revitalization of French in Louisiana - this time among our youngest stakeholders." About Goupe Media TFO Groupe Media TFO is a premium destination for audiences seeking educational and cultural content in French. It offers stimulating experiences and award-winning content, always at the forefront of digital learning. TFO serves 2 million students and 30,000 teachers across Ontario and Canada. It operates the number one French-language YouTube Channel in Canada. TFO has received awards and accolades from Austin and Amsterdam (Kidscreen Awards, Gemeaux, Cassies, IBC Awards, SXSW Film Design Awards and more) About Louisiana Public Broadcasting Since 1975, Louisiana Public Broadcasting has been the public television network for the state of Louisiana with stations in Alexandria, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Lake Charles, Monroe and Shreveport. LPB is also affiliated with WLAE-TV in New Orleans. In addition to its award-winning documentaries about the history and people of Louisiana, LPB is dedicated to helping children throughout the state develop their literacy, math and science skills through its numerous educational outreach programs. SOURCE Louisiana Public Broadcasting Video with caption: "Video: Louisiana Public Broadcasting Launches French Language Childrens Programming with Groupe Media TFO". Video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN9CsV1KuZU&feature=youtu.be For further information: Margaret Schlaudecker, LPB, 225-767-4276, [email protected]; Katherine Scherer, LPB, 225-767-4274, [email protected] Company well-positioned for the recreational market TORONTO, April 21, 2016 /CNW/ - Canada's Minister of Health Jane Philpott announced yesterday that legislation to legalize marijuana in Canada will be introduced in spring 2017. Mettrum Health Corp. ("Mettrum" or the "Company") (TSXV:MT), a vertically integrated producer of cannabis products, looks forward to being a leading brand and distributor of a dynamic line of retail offerings. "Mettrum is excited to lead the way into this exciting and long-awaited category," said George Scorsis, president of Mettrum. "The Company will leverage best practices in research and development, production, and consumer packaged goods marketing to solidify its leadership position in the recreational market." Mettrum was the first company to simplify the strain selection process and create a dialogue around medical cannabis based on the strength and ratio of THC to CBD. "Just as we have done for our medical brand, we will continue to bring innovation to the adult-use market, and look forward to pursuing an aggressive retail strategy once changes in legislation at the federal level are implemented." Scorsis continued. Mettrum has three production facilities already licensed by Health Canada , with a production capacity of 12,000 kg per year and the opportunity to further increase capacity at its flagship facility in Bowmanville, Ontario. "As one of Canada's largest producers and sellers of medical cannabis, we're exceptionally well-positioned to meet the increased demand and participate in the legalized cannabis market," said Michael Haines, CEO of Mettrum. Mettrum's "Live Your Way" campaign is a commitment to provide its clients with ongoing access to all things cannabis, whether through the Mettrum Spectrum line of medical cannabis products or its healthy line of hemp-based functional foods, Mettrum Originals. The Company believes that its mission to help people live their way will resonate as the company enters into new legal markets. About Mettrum Health Corp Mettrum Health Corp. is a Tier 1 Industry Issuer listed on TSX Venture Exchange. Mettrum Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of the Company, is a Toronto-based company and a licensed producer of medical cannabis under the Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations (Canada) issued pursuant to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (Canada) (the "MMPR"), which came into effect on October 1, 2013. Mettrum received its first license from Health Canada under the MMPR on November 1, 2013 and began production of medical cannabis at its first production facility in Bowmanville, Ontario. Mettrum received its second license from Health Canada under the MMPR on December 11, 2014 for its Mettrum Creemore facility in Clearview, Ontario. Mettrum received its third license from Health Canada under the MMPR on December 17, 2015 for its new 60,000 square foot production and distribution facility in Bowmanville, Ontario. With the Company's three licenses, Mettrum is a leading producer and vendor of medical cannabis under the MMPR system. In addition, through its wholly owned subsidiary Mettrum Hempworks, Mettrum also is a licensed producer and distribution of industrial cannabis (hemp) products, including Mettrum's functional food line, Mettrum Originals, under the Industrial Hemp Regulations (Canada) issued pursuant to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (Canada). CAUTIONARY STATEMENT REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION: This news release includes certain "forward-looking statements" under applicable Canadian securities legislation, including, without limitation, the anticipated legalization of marijuana, the nature of the legalized and regulatory regime, the scope and functioning of the recreational and retail markets, as well as the Company's capacity, strategy and participation in any such market. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, which may cause the actual results and future events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to: general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties; delay or failure to receive board, shareholder or regulatory approvals; and the results of operations. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law Neither the Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release. SOURCE Mettrum Health Corp. For further information: Joanne D'Souza, Argyle Public Relationships, 416-968-7311 x236, [email protected] TORONTO, April 20, 2016 /CNW/ - Jon Ruiz, President and CEO of PharmaCielo Ltd., a global company privately held and headquartered in Canada, with a focus on processing and supplying all natural, medicinal-grade cannabis oil throughout the world, made the following statement today: "On behalf of PharmaCielo Ltd. I commend Canada's Minister of Health, the Hon. Jane Philpott for representing the Government of Canada at the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on the World Drug Problem (UNGASS 2016) and for taking a prominent leadership role in the global effort to eradicate the cannabis black market. The Minister of Health's commitment to keep the profits from the cannabis market out of the hands of criminals and ending the black market in Canada, has put the country at the forefront of this important international policy discussion. This legalization of cannabis is a complex endeavor and Canada's Prime Minister should be commended for demonstrating leadership on the eradication of the black market and working towards implementing a responsible plan to move forward. With countries around the world being ravaged by the drug war, it is time for leaders to take the necessary steps to end the prohibition of cannabis and open the door to examine the best practices to supply consumers with the safest, highest quality product at an accessible cost to the public. PharmaCielo Ltd. is committed to offering high-quality, medicinal-grade cannabis oil extracts and we look forward to working with the Government of Canada during the ongoing consultation process." About PharmaCielo: PharmaCielo Ltd., is a global company privately held and headquartered in Canada. Wholly owned subsidiary PharmaCielo Colombia Holdings S.A.S maintains operations in Rionegro, Colombia and has applied for licenses from the Colombian government with a focus on processing and supplying all natural, medicinal-grade cannabis oil extracts and related products to large channel distributors of standardized medical cannabis products, finished goods producers, research organizations and pharmaceutical companies. The board of directors and executive team of PharmaCielo Ltd. are comprised of a diversely talented group of international business executives and specialists with expertise in security, quality and plant growth to ensure long-term success. The team recognized the significant role Colombia's ideal location would play in building a sustainable business in the medical cannabis industry and has built a strong business plan focused on supplying the international medical marketplace. For further information: www.pharmacielo.com SOURCE PharmaCielo For further information: Media Relations: David Gordon, Tel: +1 647 259 3258, [email protected]; Investor Inquiries: [email protected] Biography of Stephen Harper wins $25,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize OTTAWA, April 20, 2016 /CNW/ - The Writers' Trust of Canada announced tonight that John Ibbitson has won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for his book Stephen Harper, published by Signal/McClelland & Stewart. The announcement was made at the annual Politics and the Pen Gala at Ottawa's Fairmont Chateau Laurier. The Shaughnessy Cohen Prize is sponsored by Aimia. A jury composed of Canadian military historian Tim Cook, author and Globe and Mail journalist Robyn Doolittle, and McGill University professor and political commentator Antonia Maioni selected the winner. Their citation reads: The many ways in which Canada changed during Stephen Harper's nearly 10 years in power have been well documented. But the man himself has remained a mystery. With impressive access and meticulous research, John Ibbitson writes a remarkable biography that puts us inside Harper's head during some of the most critical moments of his life, providing the definitive picture to date of one of the most significant Prime Ministers in Canadian history. About the Author John Ibbitson is the Globe and Mail's writer-at-large based in the Ottawa bureau. Previously, he was the newspaper's Queen's Park columnist, Ottawa political affairs correspondent, and Washington columnist and correspondent. He is the author of three earlier works of political analysis, including The Polite Revolution: Perfecting the Canadian Dream. He is a past finalist for the Donner Prize, a Governor General's Literary Award, a National Newspaper Award, a Trillium Book Award, the City of Toronto Book Award, and the BC National Award for Canadian Nonfiction. He lives in Ottawa. About the Book Stephen Harper reshaped Canada into a more conservative country; a transformation that his opponents tacitly admit will never be reversed. He made government smaller, justice tougher, and provinces more independent. In this comprehensive biography, John Ibbitson explores the life of the most important Canadian of our times and explains how this shy, closed, introverted loner united a fractured conservative movement, defeated a Liberal hegemony, and set out to reshape the nation. Four finalists for this year's prize received $2,500 each: Greg Donaghy for Grit: The Life and Politics of Paul Martin Sr. , published by UBC Press for , published by UBC Press Norman Hillmer for O.D. Skelton : A Portrait of Canadian Ambition , published by University of Toronto Press for , published by Press Andrew Nikiforuk for Slick Water: Fracking and One Insider's Stand Against the World's Most Powerful Industry , published by Greystone Books /David Suzuki Institute for , published by /David Suzuki Institute Sheila Watt-Cloutier for The Right to Be Cold: One Woman's Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic, and the Whole Planet, published by Allen Lane For more information on this year's finalists and to download images of the nominated authors and their books, visit writerstrust.com. About the Prize Now in its 16th year, the prize is awarded annually for a book of literary nonfiction that captures a political subject of relevance to Canadian readers and has the potential to shape or influence thinking on Canadian political life. The winning work combines compelling new insights with depth of research and is of significant literary merit. The prize particularly values books which provide the general reader with an informed, unique perspective on the practice of Canadian politics, its players, or its principles. The prize was established in honour of Shaughnessy Cohen, the outspoken and popular Member of Parliament from Windsor, Ontario. About Politics and the Pen Politics and the Pen is a highlight of the capital's social calendar and an important annual fundraising event benefiting the Writers' Trust of Canada. Held at the Fairmont Chateau Laurier, the event attracts 500 guests from Canada's political and literary circles. Three platinum sponsors are crucial to the night's success: dinner sponsor Microsoft Canada, reception sponsor CIBC, and prize sponsor Aimia. To date, Politics and the Pen has raised more than $3 million to support the programs of the Writers' Trust. About the Writers' Trust The Writers' Trust of Canada is a charitable organization that seeks to advance, nurture, and celebrate Canadian writers and writing through a portfolio of programs including literary awards, financial grants, scholarships, and a writers' retreat. Writers' Trust programming is designed to champion excellence in Canadian writing, to improve the status of writers, and to create connections between writers and readers. Canada's writers receive more financial support from the Writers' Trust than from any other non-governmental organization or foundation in the country. For further information visit writerstrust.com. SOURCE The Writers' Trust of Canada For further information: For more information and interview opportunities, contact: Becky Toyne (416-871-0502, [email protected]) Up to 500 people died as a large boat went under in the Mediterranean Sea close at an unknown location between Libya and Italy, the United... Up to 500 people died as a large boat went under in the Mediterranean Sea close at an unknown location between Libya and Italy, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has said.A UN refugee agency team confirmed that there were 41 survivors 37 men, three women and a three-year-old child.They were rescued by a merchant ship and taken to Kalamata in the Peloponnese peninsula of Greece on April 16.The agency said the shipwreck could be one of the worst tragedies involving refugees and migrants in one year. Those rescued include 23 Somalis, 11 Ethiopians, six Egyptians and a Sudanese.UNHCR said the survivors told its staff that they had been part of a group of between 100 and 200 people who departed last week from a locality near Tobruk in Libya on a 30-metre-long boat.After several hours at sea, the smugglers in charge of the boat attempted to transfer the passengers to a larger ship carrying hundreds of people in terribly overcrowded conditions, UNHCR said in a statement.At one point during the transfer, the larger boat capsized and sank.UNHCR said 179,552 refugees and migrants had reached Europe by sea across the Mediterranean and Aegean, while at least 761 had died or gone missing along the way.The organisation advocated increased regular pathways for the admission of refugees and asylum-seekers to Europe, including resettlement and humanitarian admission programmes, family reunification, private sponsorship and student and work visas for refugees to prevent smuggling and dangerous irregular journeys. President Muhammadu Buhari has returned the controversy-ridden 2016 budget to the National Assembly, pointing out areas of concern in the... The spokesperson of the House of Representatives, Abdurazaq Namdas, (APC-Adamawa State) confirmed this to journalists on Thursday.I can confirm to you that we are in possession of the letter from the president identifying grey areas, Mr. Namdas said.He said the leadership of the House and that of the Senate as well as their respective relevant committees would meet on the development.He, however, refused to mention the grey areas saying they would be made known to Nigerians in due course.The National Assembly passed the budget on March 23 and later transmitted it to Mr. Buhari for assent.Apparently with the omission of certain projects and addition of others not proposed by the Executive, Mr. Buhari has since withheld his assent.One of such projects is the Lagos-Calabar rail project counted as a critical infrastrucural focus of the administration.It was not captured in the original budget but was brought as a supplementary proposal of the Transport Ministry by its Minister, Rotimi Amaechi, and was approved, Chairman Senate Committee on Land Transport, Gbenga Ashafa, said.However, the Appropriations Committees of the Senate and House of Representatives respectively chaired by Danjuma Goje and Abdulmumin Jibrin, removed the project from the final draft, saying Mr. Amaechi lacked the powers to make budgetary proposal.Last week, while the Senate said Mr. Buhari should sign the budget and, later, send a supplementary proposal to capture the Lagos-Calabar rail project, the House said it had resolved to receive the budget to capture the project before assent. The Chairman, Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT), Danladi Umar, on Thursday rejected the motion filed by Senate President, Bukola Saraki, qu... The Chairman, Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT), Danladi Umar, on Thursday rejected the motion filed by Senate President, Bukola Saraki, querying his (Umar) integrity.The Senate president in the motion urged the CCT chairman to disqualify himself from further presiding over the asset falsification trial.Umar described the motion filed for Sarakis lawyer, Ajibola Oluyede, as rubbish, unmeritorious and a distraction.He described the lawyer as a busy-body and a stranger to proceedings before the court.Saraki filed the motion on Wednesday, questioning Umars integrity and demanding that he withdraw from the trial.He claimed that Umar was being investigated by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), saying he was likely to be manipulated by the EFCC to arrive at a decision favourable for the prosecution.At the commencement of proceedings, Adebayo Adelodun (SAN) who led the defence team, yielded ground for Oluyede to introduce his motion.Oluyede said the motion contained reliefs, including an order asking Umar to disqualify himself from further presiding over the case on the ground that he was being investigated for bribery.Lead prosecution lawyer, Rotimi Jacobs (SAN), interjected and said the application had not received the approval of the lead defence lawyer, Kanu Agabi (SAN), who was initially absent at the proceedings.Jacobs noted that Oluyede was not yet a lawyer in the case, because when he (Oluyede) filed the motion on Wednesday, he was yet to be recognised as a member of the defence team.At that point, the tribunal chairman intervened.He passed a copy of the EFCC letter absolving him of the bribery allegation, on which Oluyede motion was predicated.Umar noted that Oluyede had filed similar application before the Federal High Court, Abuja, in a fundamental rights suit, which Justice Adamu Abdu Kafarati dismissed last Friday as being unmeritorious and constituting an abuse of courts process.As far as this tribunal is concerned, this application (motion) has not been filed. It is rubbish and it is hereby thrown out, Umar declared.He directed Oluyede to sit down to enable the tribunal proceeds with the business of the day, which was the continuation of the cross-examination of the first prosecution witness, Michael Wetkas.Oluyede ignored Umars directive, insisting that he will proceed with his motion. He accused Umar of having too many cloudy relationships with the EFCC, adding that This is part of the reasons we asked you to excuse yourself.Umar interrupted him, threatening to commit the lawyer to prison should he persist to insult the tribunal.When Oluyede refused to sit down, but made attempt to proceed with his argument, Umar ordered the police orderlies in court to take him (the lawyer) away.The policemen were reluctant to carry out Umar directive, following which Jacob intervened and appealed for calm.Jacobs urged Umar to be patient, noting that the EFCC had since March 15 cleared him of the allegations.My lord be patient, we will handle the application as we effectively did at the Federal High Court. We will expose the frivolity of the application even to the person who filed it, Jacobs said. There was mild drama at the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) on Thursday, as the CCT Chairman, Danladi Umar, refused to hear the motion file... There was mild drama at the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) on Thursday, as the CCT Chairman, Danladi Umar, refused to hear the motion filed by counsel of the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, on his (Umar) alleged bias.Umar dismissed the application asking him to disqualify himself from the case.That motion as far as the tribunal is concerned is of no consequence; not worthy to be entertained and is hereby thrown away, said Mr. Umar.Mr. Raphael Oluyede, Sarakis lawyer, brought to the attention of the court, a motion filed on Wednesday, April 20th, 2016, seeking the CCT boss to disqualify himself from participating in the trial based on bias.The motion contended that the continued presence of Umar on the panel of Tribunal offended the provisions of Section 36(1) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, which prescribes that In the determination of his civil rights and obligations, including any question or determination by or against any government or authority, a person shall be entitled to a fair hearing within a reasonable time by a court or other tribunal established by law and constituted in such manner as to secure its independence and impartiality.However, when Oluyede attempted to bring up the motion, Justice Umar repeatedly yelled at him to Sit down.After Oluyede demanded to be heard, Umar, upset by the revelations, called for police officers to throw out the counsel to the Senate President. However, Oluyede sat down on arrival of the police officers and maintained that he would not be intimidatedHowever, prosecution counsel, Rotimi Jacobs, intervened and pleaded with Mr. Danladi to calm the situation. Ex-Minister of State for Finance Bashir Yuguda has applied to the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) in Maitama, Abuja, fo... Ex-Minister of State for Finance Bashir Yuguda has applied to the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) in Maitama, Abuja, for permission to travel abroad for medical treatment.Yuguda, also a former ambassador to the United Arab Emirate (UAE), is being tried with ex-National Security Adviser (NSA) Sambo Dasuki; ex-Sokoto State Governor Attahiru Dalhatu Bafara; his son, Sagir Dalhatu and two others on money laundering charges.Yesterday, his lawyer, O. Obeya, informed the court about his clients application to travel to Dubai, UAE, for an appointment with his doctor, Georgie Thomas, cardiologist with Burjeel Hospital, Dubai.Yuguda is said to be suffering from diabetes, hypertension and cardiac malfunction, symptoms he developed while serving as the countrys ambassador in the UAE.Although prosecution lawyer Oluwaleke Atolagbe did not object to the application, Justice Peter Affen declined to grant it on the grounds that it was incompetent.The judge noted that although Obeya claimed Yuguda had a pre-scheduled medical appointment, he (Obeya) failed to produce evidence to that effect.Justice Affen, who earlier noted that the first relief in the application, as couched by Obeya, was vague and allowed him to effect oral alteration to the prayer, however, observed that it would be wrong for the court to exercise discretion in vacuum where an applicant failed to provide the necessary materials.Following intervention from lawyers to Dasuki and Bafarawa, Ahmed Raji (SAN) and Hakeem Afolabi (SAN), the judge agreed to allow Obeya withdrew the defective application and refile on a later date.Following the withdrawal, Justice Affen struck it out and ordered Obeya to file a fresh one containing evidence that his client had a prior medical appointment with a foreign physician.The judge adjourned till today to enable Obeya bring the application.He ordered that the defendants need not be produced in court for todays proceedings.The judge earlier granted a similar application to Bafarawa, who was allowed to travel to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment. Edo Governor Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State has commenced the construction of a 30-feet deep underground drainage project which will bring a lasting solution to the problem of flooding in the area.He also said his administration is determined to complete the on-going road and drainage projects at the Second East Circular and Sokponba areas of the state capital. Already sections of the dual carriageway road on Second East has been asphalted.Speaking during an inspection of projects at the Second East Circular and Sokponba Roads in Benin City, Governor Oshiomhole said, the government is doing everything possible to ensure completion of the projects before the full rainy season.He said: before the rain starts, we want to finish that Second Circular so that if you are coming from New Lagos Road, you pass through Akpakpava, straight you pass through Sokponba to Sapele Road. We are re-doing this drainage so that the water coming from that side can flow across. We are going to remove that old drainage and make it wider so that it can take all the water to the moat, so that the flooding problem is solved once and for all.Accompanied by the Commissioners for Works, Hon Osarodion Ogie and his Information and Orientation counterpart, Prince Kassim Afegbua, and other aides, the Governor said: I want to thank you for your support; I thank you for your prayers; I thank you for your love. I want to assure you as we are winding down, my tenure is coming to an end, but my determination is not coming to an end. We will ensure that the next governor will continue from where we will stop so that the progress of this State will never reverse again.An elated resident of the area who could not hide his joy, Mr. Vincent Onaghise told the Governor, this road has been bad for twelve years even before you came, from New Benin to Sapele Road. Now, whoever is going to Lagos from Warri can take here to Lagos. Its not only this road. I went to Egor, Upper Mission, Queen Ede. So, we have seen it all. There is no way someone will buy my vote for two thousand naira or five thousand naira and then I will now suffer afterwards. Other residents of the area poured encomiums on Governor Adams Oshiomhole for his landmark achievements and assured him of their continued support for his administration. The Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Mr. Ibrahim Magu, on Friday said the agency will be steadfast in it... The Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Mr. Ibrahim Magu, on Friday said the agency will be steadfast in its war against corruption despite the fact that some of those being prosecuted are fighting back.He said all Nigerians have a duty to kill corruption because of its negative impacts even on the unborn generation.Magu, who made the submissions while receiving a delegation of the Nigeria Labour Congress, led by its President, Comrade Ayuba Wabba, asked the labour to support EFCC.He said: The negative impact of corruption affects the whole country, including our children and the unborn generation, and so we need your support more than ever before.Corruption is fighting back as many of those being prosecuted for corrupt practices have the wealth to throw about. We have resolved to remain steadfast in executing the war against corruption.All of us have the duty to kill corruption.On his part: Wabba said there as need to form a united front in confronting the monster called corruption.He said: Corruption is a monster that has done more harm to our country than any other thing, because it is the cause of the crises in the various sectors of Nigeria be it power, health or housing.He said it was time to renew the affiliation and unity between NLC and EFCC because corruption is now fighting back. Senator Ben Murray Bruce has said he will not accept the 35.6million SUV bought by Senate for members. In a tweet on his twitter handl... Senator Ben Murray Bruce has said he will not accept the 35.6million SUV bought by Senate for members.In a tweet on his twitter handle,Bruce said he will accept only SUV made in Nigeria.For the avoidance of doubt, I did not and will not accept any SUV. The only SUV I will accept is a made in Nigeria car, he wrote.The decision of the Senate to buy SUV for some of its members considering the economic situation in the country has been faulted by Labour unions and other members of the public.The Senate has however justified its decision saying the vehicles were needed for official assignments by members. President Muhammadu Buhari has described the number of all Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and Nigerian refugees as frightening. President Muhammadu Buhari has described the number of all Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and Nigerian refugees as frightening. He however said that his administration has begun the process of comprehensive compilation of their data to speed up their resettlement. The president spoke on Thursday when he received the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Samantha Power, at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.He added that the compilation of the IDPs and refugees was being done by designated Federal Government agencies, the military and other security agencies. We have frightening indices of the number of people and the situation in the IDP camps across the country. And in spite of the governments efforts and the hospitality of individuals and organizations, the situation needs better handling.A large segment of the IDPs are mostly women and children. Some of the children are orphaned and dont know where they came from. Now we are working on getting a comprehensive data of all the people in the camps so that the government and NGOs will be properly briefed on where and how to support them, he said.The President said that IDPs, who were into farming before they were displaced by the Boko Haram, would be mobilized and assisted by the Ministry of Agriculture to return to their farms. A statement by the presidential spokesperson, Mr. Femi Adesina stated that Ambassador Power commended the Federal Government for always being the first and highest responder to the IDPs in various camps in the country.Power, who had earlier visited Nigerian refugees in Cameroun, said the situation in the camps could be improved with more information on the number of people in the camps and their areas of need. Ex-President Goodluck Jonathan on Wednesday met with the founder of The Walk Free Foundation, a prominent anti-modern slavery body, Andr... Ex-President Goodluck Jonathan on Wednesday met with the founder of The Walk Free Foundation, a prominent anti-modern slavery body, Andrew Forrest, in efforts to promote liberty in Africa and other parts of the world.The foundation, which publishes Global Slavery Index to increase awareness of the problem of modern slavery, is active in helping people caught up in modern slavery achieve their freedom.Mr. Jonathan met with Mr. Forrest and his daughter, Grace, in New Jersey where he also endorsed their work in a video message.The former president is chairman of the Goodluck Jonathan Foundation, which is committed to spreading democracy and freedom throughout Africa. Officials from Malaysia, Australia and China are meeting in June to discuss how to proceed with the search for disappeared flight MH370.... Officials from Malaysia, Australia and China are meeting in June to discuss how to proceed with the search for disappeared flight MH370.The Malaysian Government said on Thursday in Kuala Lumpur that the three plane parts judged to be from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight two in Mozambique and one on the French island of Reunion had been recovered since the airliner went missing over two years ago.Abdul-Aziz Kaprawi, Malaysias Deputy Transport Minister, said a huge underwater search was ongoing, but that the main body of the plane had yet to be found.Kaprawi also said 103,000 square kilometres of the 120,000-square-kilometre search area in the southern Indian Ocean, where the plane was suspected to have crashed, had been covered, so far.The flight with 239 people aboard, most of them Chinese, disappeared nearly an hour after it took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport on March 8, 2014. A meeting of the Nigeria Governors Forum held on Wednesday to discuss the state of the nations economy ended in a deadlock. A meeting of the Nigeria Governors Forum held on Wednesday to discuss the state of the nations economy ended in a deadlock.The meeting which was held inside the old Banquet Hall of the Presidential Villa, Abuja, ran late into the night.About midnight,the Chairman of the NGF, Alhaji Abdulazeez Yari briefed State House correspondents that the meeting did not reach any conclusion on the discussions on the economy.Yari who is the Zamfara State Governor, noted that the forum will reconvene next Thursday to continue further discussion.He said he would not be able to give details of the discussion until after the next meeting.The governor said, We met as Nigeria Governors Forum. At the executive session, we discussed a lot of economic issues.The meeting is not yet concluded. We are continuing next week. Therefore, by next week Thursday, we will be able to give you a recap of what was discussed and the agreement reached. The Police Special Fraud Unit, Ikoyi, has arrested a 42-year-old Lebanese man, Rami El Masri, for alleged forgery and attempting to decei... The Police Special Fraud Unit, Ikoyi, has arrested a 42-year-old Lebanese man, Rami El Masri, for alleged forgery and attempting to deceive a Chief Superintendent of Police (CSP) that he was a Nigerian citizen.El Masri, who it was learnt, owns two construction companies on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, is accused of forging a confirmation letter representing himself as a Nigerian citizen by birth.He was arraigned yesterday before Mrs. Joy Ugbomiko of Lagos State Magistrates Court in Igbosere, on a three-count charge of conspiracy, forgery and uttering.Prosecuting Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Susan Ezema told the court that Masri committed the alleged offences on December 15, 2008 and November 19, 2014, at No. 6, Oniru Street, Apapa, and No. 13, Milverton Road, Ikoyi, Lagos.She alleged that the defendant and others still at large conspired and forged a Letter of Confirmation of Nigerian citizenship with Reference No. MIA/NAT 382/1 dated December 15, 2008.Ezema said: The letter was forged on December 15, 2008 and the defendant fraudulently presented himself as a Nigerian citizen, a representation he knew to be false, with intent that it be acted upon as genuine in Nigeria.On November 19, 2014, at the Police Special Fraud Unit at No. 13, Milverton Road, Ikoyi, the defendant knowingly and fraudulently uttered the aforesaid false letter of confirmation as if it is genuine to Chief Superintendent of Police (CSP) Martin Nwogoh, as if it was a genuine document.According to the prosecutor, the defendant presented the letter to CSP Nwogoh, who is attached to the Special Fraud Unit, with the intention that it be acted upon as genuine in Nigeria.The offences, she added, contravened Sections 363 (3), 363 (4) and 409 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State, 2011.The defendant denied the charge.Magistrate Ugbomiko granted him bail in the sum of N200, 000 with two sureties each in the like sum. Both sureties must be gainfully employed and be company directors or have property anywhere in Lagos State, while their addresses and places of business must also be verified.The case was adjourned till June 16 for mention. The Nigerian Army on Thursday cautioned individuals and groups organizing rallies to celebrate its successes against Boko Haram terrorist... The Nigerian Army on Thursday cautioned individuals and groups organizing rallies to celebrate its successes against Boko Haram terrorists in the North East.This was contained in a statement signed by the acting Director, Army Public Relations, Col. Sani Usman, and made available to newsmen in Maiduguri.The attention of the Nigerian Army has been drawn to a number of groups and individuals celebrating the routing out and decimation of Boko Haram terrorists on our soil.So much as we thank them for that, it is imperative to state that we do not begrudge such persons their desire to identify and associate themselves with this success.However, the Nigerian Army wishes to disassociate itself from such celebrations and solidarity rallies, Usman said.He said: we also would like to advise that they should tread with caution as this could be distractive to us.The public are please informed that the terrorists are surreptitiously fanning out of their last enclaves in Sambisa to cause havoc or seek refuge elsewhere.Usman advised members of the public to remain vigilant, as remnants of the terrorists were fleeing in all directions.Therefore, there is need for all to be more vigilant and security conscious to enable us clear the remnants of these terrorists wherever they might flee.We would like to reassure the public that we will remain professional and focused in clearing the remnants of these criminals on the Nigerian soil, he said. The United States President, Barack Obama, has sent a 42-member high-power delegation to Nigeria in support of the three priority areas of... The United States President, Barack Obama, has sent a 42-member high-power delegation to Nigeria in support of the three priority areas of President Muhammadu Buharis administration.Leader of the delegation, Ms Samantha Power, said on Thursday in Abuja that the three areas security, economy and governance remain the focus of the delegations visit to Nigeria.Power at a joint press conference with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, said Nigeria remains a strategic partner to the U.S. not only in Africa but globally.As you (Onyeama) indicated, Obama has sent me and members of his cabinet to lead an inter-agency delegation to Nigeria, she said.Power, who is U.S. Permanent Representative to the UN, said the delegation would reflect on the three pillars of the present administration which are security, economy and governance.She explained that the partnership is so much bigger and would bear fruits to include other aspects of our partnership.It will include dealing with Boko Haram, trade, economic development, the strengthening of institutions and the fight that you the country is waging against corruption.All of these are intrinsically central for the people of Nigeria who want to live in a secured environment and dignity and have maximum opportunity.According to her, all the other aspects that the visit will cover include focus on critical areas for dealing with the emergency situation, caused by the Boko Haram insurgency in the northeast.She also said the Nigeria-U.S Bi-National Commission meeting, which held in Washington in March, had started yielding fruitful results.Its been a very fruitful dialogue and I think there is a lot of homework that has come out of it.And there are a number of issues which I look forward to discussing with you; thats how we move forward in stronger ways, she said. The Kaduna State Chapter of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria, on Tuesday, said the over 5,000 pastors in the PFN would rather obe... The Kaduna State Chapter of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria, on Tuesday, said the over 5,000 pastors in the PFN would rather obey God than obey the proposed preaching bill currently before the state House of Assembly when passed into law.The state PFN chairman, Prof. Femi Ehinmidu, who spoke at a stakeholders roundtable conference in Kaduna, expressed concern on the bill being sponsored by the state government.Ehinmidu told the state government to be ready to jail the over 5,000 pastors in the states PFN if the government believed it could muzzle the citizens to pass the bill into law.He argued that the bill remained a recipe for crisis in the state when passed into law.Ehinmidu pointed out that unless the government carried out wider consultations among critical stakeholders, the bill, which he claimed started on a faulty note, was bound to fail.The Kaduna State Governor, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, has, however, cautioned religious leaders against politicising the bill before the Assembly.El-Rufai told the stakeholders that the preaching bill he sent to the state Assembly had no intention of banning evangelism in the state but aimed at curbing emerging religious extremism.Speaking at the Roundtable Forum, organised by a non-governmental organisation, Carefronting Nigeria, with the support of the Canadian High Commission, el-Rufai, who was represented by his Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Mr. Samuel Aruwan, said the bill was informed by the governments concern for security of lives and property.The forum was tagged Kaduna State Religious Preaching Regulation Bill: Intention and Perception.The governor said the government had no ill feeling towards the views of the Christian Association of Nigeria, the Jamaatul Nasril Islam and other critical stakeholders, who had made genuine positions on the matter.He added that some people had started politicising the good intention of government to restore peace in the state.He explained that the bill, when passed into law, would allow the Christian Association of Nigeria and the Jamaatu Nasir Islam to check strange ideological beliefs that were not in tandem with Christianity and Islam. The American and African forces sent to Cameroon to fight Boko Haram have, on several occasions, located clusters of Chibok schoolgirl... The American and African forces sent to Cameroon to fight Boko Haram have, on several occasions, located clusters of Chibok schoolgirls kidnapped by the militant group two years ago, United States officials have said.Rescue operations have not been carried out, the officials said, because of fears that any ensuing battle with Boko Haram fighters would put the captives at risk, or incite some form of retaliation against hostages still being held in other areas, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.American officials said a combination of local intelligence, intercepted communications and drone footage had been used to locate groups of the 276 girls abducted from the Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State while some of the girls have since been tracked to the Sambisa Forest.The American officials however insist that efforts to free the girls have not been abandoned, saying a major concern is the hundreds of other women and girls who are often sexually assaulted, forced into marriages with their tormentors, and sometimes killed by Boko Haram fighters.Youre not just looking for 200 girls, said Gen. Carter Ham, the retired head of the United States militarys Africa Command.There are many, many others who have been taken hostage, and more thousands killed, and two and a half million people displaced.Senior American military officials joined Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, in Cameroon this week to speak with the countrys military and civilian leaders about the fight against Boko Haram and information gleaned by American intelligence.The talks took place not far from where American Special Operations forces and hundreds of surveillance drone operators are based. Despite the proximity of the troops, Boko Harams attacks continued.On Monday night, three Cameroonian soldiers were killed and five were wounded after Boko Haram fighters ambushed a military convoy near Dabanga, a town in the countrys north, Cameroonian military officials said. The ambush followed intense fighting on the Nigerian side of the border, where Boko militants attacked an army base, wounding 22 soldiers.US military officials said that intelligence reports show that the girls have been divided into smaller groups.Gen. David Rodriguez, the head of the militarys Africa Command, told reporters at the Pentagon that the Chibok girls had been moved to some very isolated places, noting that locating them is not an exact science.Meanwhile, the Director- General of the Department of State Services, Mr. Lawan Daura, and the Inspector-General of Police, Solomon Arase, have reportedly told the Senate on Wednesday that they did not have concrete clue on the whereabouts of the Chibok girls.The security chiefs, according to a senator who craved anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the issue, stated this at a closed-session with the federal lawmakers on Wednesday.The senator said both Daura and Arase said that there was no clue yet on the whereabouts of the abducted girls who have already spent two years in the custody of the dreaded Boko Haram.Daura said that the government did not really know where the girls were being kept and that a recent attempt to rescue 20 of the girls failed because the insurgents reneged on their promises.The senator also said that security chiefs explained that the recent attempt at rescuing the girls was as a result of interactions between the government and supposed representatives of the insurgents.He said that the security chiefs also told the senators that the Boko Haram members had demanded that five of their senior hands, already arrested by the government should be freed in exchange for 20 of the girls.He said, The security operatives revealed that the supposed negotiators asked the security men to bring the 20 girls to a location in Maiduguri and that 10 of them will be exchanged for five Boko Haram militants in government custody.They said that the government agents were to drop the five insurgents in a location where they would pick 10 of the girls while they would locate the second batch of 10 in another location.The security chiefs said that though the five Boko Haram insurgents in government custody were taken to Maiduguri as planned, the deal failed to sail through as the Boko Haram failed to produce the girls.The Chief of Army Staff, his counterpart in the Navy and that of Air Force, did not turn up for the briefing on their efforts to rescue the 219 Chibok schoolgirls abducted from their school since April 14, 2014.However, Arase and Lawal Daura, briefed the senators on their efforts behind closed doors.Both Arase and Daura did not speak with journalists after the one and half hours closed-session. Real Madrid star Cristiano Ronaldo wants to return to Manchester United, according to reports.Spanish outlet Don Balon say that Ronaldo has asked agent Jorge Mendes about the possibility to a return to Old Trafford.It means that Manchester United would have a free run at the Portuguese ace if he decides to leave Real this summer.French paper La Parisien reported that the Real Madrid forward had secretly met with Paris St-Germain's chairman Nasser Al-Khelaifi last week.But Ronaldo's camp have since denied those claims.Don Balon report that Ronaldo has no intention of joining the French champions due to the low standard of Ligue 1.Mendes was apparently keen to get Ronaldo to Paris for financial reasons but the player still wants to compete at the top level which he doesn't think PSG can offer.There is still the possibility of Ronaldo staying at Madrid but with his advancing age and contract running down they may decide to cash in on the three-times Ballon d'Or winner. Swansea City wants Brendan Rodgers to succeed Francesco Guidolin as manager of the club.The Mirror says Rodgers wants assurances about his budget before taking the Swansea job.Former Liverpool boss Rodgers is in line to make a sensational return to the Swans after being targeted as the Welsh club's first choice to be their next boss.Rodgers is in pole position and the Swansea players believe he is likely to come back this summer, four years after leaving for Anfield.But the 43-year-old is anxious about the extent of his control and ability to bring in players he believes can improve the team and lift a club that has flirted with relegation this season. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, has vowed to deal with EFCC official that fallaciously named Deputy Senate President,... The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, has vowed to deal with EFCC official that fallaciously named Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, as the corruption ambassador of the Economic and financial crimes commission (EFCC) as well as dissociated itself from claims that Ekweremadu was now its anti-corruption ambassador.EFCC National Assembly Liaison Officer, Suleiman Bakari, had on Tuesday said he was honouring Ekweremadu with the position, on behalf of the Acting Chairman, Ibrahim Magu, as a token of the commissions appreciation to his person and office, and as a symbol of the institutional partnership between the EFCC and the National Assembly. But Ekweremadu, in a swift reaction, described the EFCC stance as contradictory, saying the former chairman of the commission, Malam Nuhu Ribadu, had once conferred some Nigerians with honours.However, the EFCC in a statement, yesterday, by its spokesman, Wilson Uwujaren, denied the claim, describing the development as a manifestation of corruption fight back. The statement read: The EFCC totally dissociates itself from the purported action of Bakari as he acted entirely on his own and clearly outside his liaison officer brief as he was never instructed by the acting chairman nor mandated by the management and staff of the commission to decorate Ekweremadu or any officer of the National Assembly as Anti- Corruption Ambassador.The commission views this highly unprofessional conduct of the officer as yet another manifestation of Corruption Fighting Back. This leg of the despicable campaign, which is unfortunately being carried out by a staff of the commission, had been foreshadowed in recent weeks by other questionable acts. For instance, all through last week, some courts issued a string of anti-EFCC rulings looking like calculated attempts to derail the anti-corruption war, even as there were indications of the capture of a prominent section of the media by dark forces.The picture of organized corruption marshaling its evil forces to launch a sustained fight-back becomes clearer, if cognizance is taken of the bewildering insistence of the Senate to carry on with the ill-advised amendment of the Code of Conduct Bureau and Code of Conduct Tribunal Act as well as the inexplicable provisions proposed for amendment of the Anti-Money Laundering Act.Let it be underscored that the statutory mandate of the EFCC is the investigation and prosecution of all economic and financial crimes cases, which does not include phoney decoration of any individual as Anti-corruption Ambassador. That award and title are unknown to the EFCC and could not have been invested as purported on behalf of the acting Chairman, Management and staff of the EFCC.Further, the commission is not in the habit of awarding titles to individuals. Those who seek titles for reasons of waging a counter-onslaught against the war on corruption, in addition to massaging inflated sense of influence, know the quarters to approach for such dubious honours, not the EFCC Members of the public and stakeholders in the fight against corruption are enjoined to disregard the so-called decoration, while stern administrative action is being taken on the clearly misdirected officer who acted entirely without authorization.Meanwhile, Senator Ekweremadu has described as contradictory the EFCCs claim that it had never honoured any Nigerian in its existence, saying he did not ask for it. Ekweremadu, in a statement signed by his Media Adviser, Uche Anichukwu, said: As for the purported claim by the EFCC spokesperson that the agency has never and could not have decorated anybody as an Anti-Corruption Ambassador, since, according to him, the commission is not in the habit of awarding titles to individuals, we wish to refer him to December 7, 2007, when the Nuhu Ribadu-led EFCC conferred the Role Model Award in the fight against corruption, on certain persons, including a former President of the Senate, a taxi driver, and a former Justice of the Federal High Court at the Musa YarAdua Centre, Abuja.That the said denial by the EFCC is coming in two different statements all within a few hours is, therefore, baffling, inexplicable, and contradictory. Taking cognisance of the command structure of the agency, we also wonder whether Mr. Bakari could have acted on his own or read from a prepared text without recourse to the commission which he represents, especially as the visit and decoration were never solicited for in the first place. We leave the rest to discerning members of the public to read in-between the lines and make their own judgments. -- Fire crews doused a blaze that spread to a residence after the flames sparked on a back deck Thursday afternoon on Howard Street, authorities said. One firefighter from Hillsdale was treated for heat exhaustion, police said. There were no other injuries reported. The homeowner also escaped unharmed. Paramus, Emerson, Woodcliff Lake, Westwood, Hillsdale, Oradell and Ho-Ho-Kus volunteer fire crews assisted Washington Township firefighters. Westwood and Hillsdale emergency medical units also responded with the township's volunteer squad. Noah Cohen may be reached at ncohen@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @noahyc. Find NJ.com on Facebook. ELMWOOD PARK -- Borough school board member Gladys Gryskiewicz has faced a chorus of calls for her to step down after anti-Muslim posts on her Facebook account became public. The latest statement came from state Sen. Nellie Pou, who said Gryskiewicz should step down. "There is no place in our schools for the type of discriminatory and hateful remarks made by Ms. Gryskiewicz," Pou said. "Her comments are inappropriate and offensive, and for an individual who serves in a leadership role in the school district, they are unacceptable. At a time when we need to be teaching acceptance and understanding to our students, her conduct sends the exact wrong message." The posts on Gryskiewicz's personal Facebook account included one message that said Muslims should "(s)tay in your desserts [sic] and follow your religion in your own countries," a news release from the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said. Assemblyman Gary Schaer and Assemblyman Benjie E. Wimberly have also issued statements urging Gryskiewicz to leave her elected position. Gryskiewicz did not respond to a request for comment. She previously said she would not step down. Readers have also reacted on NJ.com. A comment from littleblueharedcatladyofNJ said: "Whatever happened to FREE speech? Why should her personal FB page, or anyone's FB pg for that matter, be censored? She has a right to her beliefs in her private life, as unpopular as they may be." Meanwhile, NJ.com reader bospherus offered this response: "Perhaps this school board member better re-read the founding principle documents of our country. Our fore-fathers left their lands to escape religious persecution and tyranny. We should welcome those current humans trying to do the same." On the NJ.com Facebook page, one user had another suggestion for handling the issue: What do you think? Vote in the poll below: -- A masked man apparently planned to rob a Franklin Lakes Road bank, but left when he saw the tellers were behind security glass, police said Thursday. The man showed up at the Chase Bank branch around 3:30 p.m. Wednesday wearing a medical glove on one hand and what appeared to be a mask, according to a statement from Lt. John Bakelaar. "He had run into the bank, looked around and after seeing that the tellers were all behind security glass, left the scene," Bakelaar said. Authorities described the would-be robber as white, about 6-foot tall with black jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt. Wyckoff officers and the Bergen County Sheriff's Office responded to assist Franklin Lakes police. Noah Cohen may be reached at ncohen@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @noahyc. Find NJ.com on Facebook. A Millville man was arrested for a drive-by shooting in Fairfield Township that injured a 50-year-old woman, according to New Jersey State Police. Jarred Brown, 23, of Millville, was charged Tuesday with attempted murder, aggravated assault, unlawful possession of a weapon, possession of a weapon for unlawful purpose and certain persons not to have a weapon. The shooting occurred Tuesday on King Drive in Fairfield Township around 2 a.m. Shots were fired at the residence and one of the bullets struck a 50-year-old King Drive woman in the hip. Authorities flew her to Cooper University Hospital for non-life-threatening injuries. Investigators were able to link Brown to the handgun and the car used in the shooting. Brown was held in the Cumberland County Jail in lieu of $750,000 bail. The shooting is still under investigation. According to state police, the shooting does not appear to be linked to another King Drive shooting on April 7 when 22-year-old Rickie Harris Jr. was killed. Don E. Woods may be reached at dwoods@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @donewoods1. Find NJ.com on Facebook. TRENTON -- When New Jersey scrapped its old standardized tests in favor of the new PARCC exam given on computer, education officials said the online tests would be less costly and easier to score than the old paper-and-pencil exams. But Wednesday, state education officials experienced the downside of online testing when a computer glitch left students across the state staring at blank screens. New Jersey was forced to postpone testing in grades 3 through 11 for the day as its testing vendor scrambled to figure out what went wrong with PARCC, short for the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. State Education Commissioner David Hespe called the technical error "totally unacceptable" and blamed Pearson, the company that oversees the testing. Pearson officials apologized and said the glitch was caused by human error after the company's workers tried to make upgrades to the computer system the night before the New Jersey test. Critics of PARCC and other standardized testing say New Jersey is the latest in a growing list of states forced to postpone or abandon tests due to computer errors. Alaska, Texas and Tennessee have all had technical problems with their standardized tests in recent weeks. "State officials rushed computerized exams into place. Their timetables were based on unrealistic expectations and vendor lobbying. They ignored the judgment of education and technology experts. Too often, the new systems were not ready for prime time," Bob Schaeffer, public education director for the anti-testing group FairTest, said last week. Among the recent problems: Tennessee's new online standardized test, called TNReady, crashed on the first day of testing in February. State education officials called off the test and said they would return to paper-and-pencil exams. Measurement Inc., the North Carolina-based company that developed the test, scrambled to print and ship versions of the test to schools. Alaska canceled its computerized statewide exams for grades 3 through 10 earlier this month after schools said the online connection to the tests were interrupted and students said they lost answers. State officials said some of the problems stemmed from a construction worker who accidently cut a fiber optic cable in Kansas near the offices of the Achievement & Assessment Institute, the testing company that oversees Alaska's exams. Texas students in several of the state's largest school districts said they had problems logging in to statewide computerized assessment tests in March. Others said they lost answers when a computer glitch logged them out of the system in the middle of the test. Educational Testing Service, the New Jersey-based testing company that oversees the Texas exam, said it was investigating the problem. Nevada received a $1.3 million settlement from its testing company last year after computer servers repeatedly crashed while its new exams were being administered. Measured Progress, the New Hampshire-based company overseeing the test, agreed to refund part of its fee to the state and supply other tests for free. Minnesota, Kansas and Virginia are among the other states that have also experienced problems with statewide online exams. Pearson confirmed Wednesday afternoon that the problems with New Jersey's tests were caused by an employee attempting to make changes to the exam's administrative system the night before the test. Though PARCC is administered in other states, New Jersey was the only state affected Wednesday. "While our internal review into what went wrong is not yet complete, we've been able to ascertain that this was a technical glitch introduced by a Pearson employee -- not a problem with server capacity or the student testing system," said Laura Howe, a Pearson spokeswoman. New Jersey officials said the rest of the PARCC testing had gone smoothly. There was no mention of returning to pencil-and-paper exams, as Tennesee education officials did earlier this year after their testing system crashed. Neither Pearson nor state officials publicly mentioned whether the company would refund the state for the lost testing day. Several schools that hired substitutes to cover classes during the testing said the postponed exam will be a financial hit for their districts. Under its contract with Pearson, New Jersey could pay as much as $108 million over four years for the PARCC exam. Last year, New Jersey spent about $22 million on the exam, or about $25.50 per student. About 98 percent of New Jersey students took the PARCC tests online last year, which helped cut the costs by about $3 a student compared to previous pencil-and-paper exams, state officials said. Kelly Heyboer may be reached at kheyboer@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @KellyHeyboer. Find NJ.com on Facebook. meddler-sarandon-left-byrne-tub-spc.jpeg Susan Sarandon, left, and Rose Byrne play a maybe-too-close mother and daughter in 'The Meddler' (SONY PICTURES CLASSICS) Lori Minervini is a successful television writer. Except she's also a failure, because she's 30-something, still single and living alone with two dogs. At least, that's what her mother, Marnie, thinks. And because her mother only wants what's best for her, mom becomes "The Meddler." It feels a little on the nose - the comedy about the adult child cringing every time the parent barges in, insisting she only wants to help. We've seen it before, in comedies from Albert Brooks (and Debbie Reynolds), Seth Rogen (and Barbra Streisand). But there's a difference here. First, we're talking about a daughter, not a son - something that immediately changes the dynamic, adding a layer of subconscious criticism and competition. Second, the filmmaker is Lorene Scafaria - a smart Jersey girl whose select filmography (the script for "Nick and Norah's Ultimate Playlist," the screenplay for and direction of "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World") shows a taste for subtle strangeness. "The Meddler" is smaller and sweeter than those movies; while it shares their taste for offbeat characters and unexpected sideshows, there are no detours quite as wild as the point when "Looking for a Friend..." takes us into an orgy at a TGIF knockoff. Still there's something obviously very personal to Lorene Scafaria about Lori Minervini, and something real in the relationship between the two women - which the daughter finds frustrating, and the mother finds unfulfilling but neither ever thinks of discontinuing. Perhaps because they both realize it's about trying to distract themselves from what they don't have and can't get back - Marnie's husband, and Lori's dad. And Scafaria, whose fondness for good actors may be surpassed only for her appreciation of Herb Alpert tunes on the soundtrack, does a nice job of filling out her cast, bringing in J.K. Simmons as a playful Harley rider, Michael McKean to play an unwelcome but persistent suitor and in smaller, but still memorable parts, Lucy Punch and Cecily Strong. Scafaria never builds her situations to a major crisis, and so there's no terribly dramatic resolution - Lori and Marnie push each other's buttons until they don't, neither can really move forward in life until they do. It's a quiet, even somewhat pokey movie. But a gentle, generous one too - and one which, like Marnie, you know only wants the best for you. So sit. Watch a little. Ratings note: The film contains strong language and substance abuse. 'The Meddler' (PG-13) Sony Pictures Classics (100 min.) Directed by Lorene Scafaria. With Susan Sarandon, Rose Byrne, J.K. Simmons. Now playing in New Jersey/York. Stephen Whitty may be reached at stephenjwhitty@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @stephenwhitty. Find him on Facebook. NEWARK -- A phalanx of taxi cabs gathered on Broad Street early Wednesday night to protest a deal that would allow car service Uber to continue operating in the city, a deal intended to end months of sparring between the city and the company. The drivers later gathered at the public entrance of city hall to attend Wednesday night's meeting of the council, when the proposal was to be discussed by officials. But the several dozen drivers, as well as media, were barred from entering, although Council President Mildred Crump came out to address the drivers. Mayor Ras Baraka was seen driving off to jeers of "corruption" from the crowd. Cab drivers are upset over a tentative deal between the city and Baraka's administration announced Friday, which would allow Uber to continue operating in the city and its airport in exchange for a $10 million fee over 10 years. The company would also be required to provide liability coverage of up to $1.5 million for its drivers and would stipulate background checks for its drivers. The deal marked a turn away from a proposed ordinance that would have forced Uber drivers to pay annual licensing fees of $1,500 to operate in the city and at its airport - which sparked a public war of words between Baraka and Uber. On Wednesday, the City Council honored a request to return that legislation to the administration, which said it was engaged in separate negotiations with the Newark Cab Association and the Communication Workers of America, which represents local taxi drivers, to improve conditions for cabbies. "We are in negotiations, of course, with trying to get a contract with Uber," said Corporation Counsel Willie Parker. "At the very same time we want to try to continue negotiations with (taxi groups) so that we can create a more business-friendly environment for them, and so we can create a more competitive environment with what they believe are Uber's advantages." The council's move sparked no reaction from the dozens of cab drivers gathered inside the meeting, but many of those who protested outside said they felt betrayed by Baraka and others who had vowed to protect their interests. "He changed his word," said Tarik Ibrahim, who has been driving a taxi in the city for the last 35 years. "We don't have enough business....most of these people struggling to make a living and now the mayor gives us a hard time to add Uber in the city of Newark, which is not right." Opening statements in Tina Lunney trial Tina Lunney appears in court in May 2013 for her trial on charges of killing her 81-year-old mother in 2009 at their Fairfield home. Lunney was later convicted of murder and weapons offenses, and sentenced to 40 years in state prison. (John O'Boyle/The Star-Ledger) NEWARK -- A state appellate panel on Thursday upheld the murder conviction of a woman for strangling her elderly mother to death with a necktie in 2009 at their Fairfield home and then staging the scene to look like a suicide. Citing "significant, admissible incriminating evidence," the appeals court rejected Tina Lunney's bid to overturn her conviction on murder and weapons offenses in the July 22, 2009 killing of her 81-year-old mother, Marie Zoppi. Lunney, 48, was convicted at her trial on May 24, 2013 and she was sentenced on Aug. 13, 2013 to 40 years in state prison. She will be eligible for parole in July 2043, when she will be 75 years old. One of the key pieces of evidence in the case was Lunney's videotaped confession to the police. In that statement - which Lunney gave after waiving her Miranda rights - she said she was applying cream to her mother's neck on the morning of July 22, 2009 when she grabbed a tie and started strangling her, according to the appellate decision. Lunney said she left her mother's body in the home and went to work, the decision states. Later that day, authorities said Lunney used her mother's credit card to pay PSE&G, debts with a collection agency, and for a vacation to North Carolina's Outer Banks. Lunney told police that, the morning after the murder, she wrote a note on her mother's stationary to suggest Zoppi had committed suicide, the decision states. The note read, "tell the kids I love them, you don't need me," according to the decision. After placing the note on a couch, Lunney said she released the necktie from her mother's neck and placed a blanket over the body, the decision states. Lunney said she then called her husband and told him to come home, the decision states. When her husband arrived, Lunney said she told him her mother had "passed away" and she showed him the suicide note, the decision states. He called 911, and the couple gave statements to the police later that day, the decision states. On July 24, 2009, Lunney said she fled the area, hitchhiking and taking a bus to the Bloomfield Shopping Center and later to Atlantic City, the decision states. Three days later, Lunney's neighbor reported to police that Lunney was walking near her home, the decision states. Lunney was picked up by police and later gave her confession, the decision states. Zoppi lived with Lunney, Lunney's husband and the couple's two children for 14 years, authorities said. At her trial, a psychiatrist testifying for the defense said Lunney suffered from "bipolar I disorder, with psychosis," and claimed she did not voluntarily waive her Miranda rights, the decision states. Another psychiatrist testified for the state about how Lunney "exhibited no symptoms of psychosis," and voluntarily waived her rights, the decision states. As part of her appeal, Lunney argued a Superior Court judge should not have permitted her statement to be used as evidence at the trial, saying her mental illness led her to involuntarily waive her Miranda rights and provide a false confession. She also claimed police coerced her during the interview, according to the decision. Marie Zoppi, in this undated photo, was killed in July 2009. A jury today found her daughter, Tina Lunney, guilty of strangling the elderly woman with a necktie. But the appellate panel affirmed the judge's findings that Lunney's waiver was knowing, intelligent and voluntary, and the panel said there was no evidence of coercion. "The record does not indicate that the police employed coercive or improper tactics," the decision states. "Defendant has not adduced credible evidence of specific police conduct rendering her statement involuntary." The appellate judges rejected Lunney's assertion that the trial judge improperly allowed evidence at the trial that she had been considering an insanity defense, saying there is "no reasonable possibility that the evidence concerning defendant's consideration of an insanity defense 'might have contributed to the conviction.'" Lunney also challenged the admissibility at the trial of a letter she wrote to her husband from the Essex County jail, the decision states. In that letter, Lunney said she confessed "everything" to the police and expressed feeling suicidal after killing her mother, the decision states. But the panel found that letter was properly admitted as evidence. "Her statements regarding her post-crime thoughts of committing suicide and feeling remorseful for what she had done demonstrated consciousness of guilt," the decision states. "Also in the letter, defendant said she had confessed everything to the police, which suggested she had not given a false confession. The letter included defendant's internal debate about whether she experienced temporary insanity or diminished capacity at the time she killed her mother, which was also probative to the central issue in the case of whether she actually had committed the murder. We, therefore, conclude the admission of the letter was not in error." Bill Wichert may be reached at bwichert@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @BillWichertNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook. NEWARK -- A man serving a 35-year state prison sentence has lost an appeal of his conviction on charges related to the 2003 kidnapping and gang rape of a flight attendant in Newark. A state appellate panel on Thursday upheld Jamie Guaman's conviction at a 2006 trial on kidnapping, aggravated sexual assault and related offenses, and rejected his arguments of receiving ineffective legal assistance. The panel affirmed a 2014 order denying Guaman's petition for post-conviction relief. At the time of the Feb. 24, 2003 incident, the victim was attacked shortly after midnight as she was coming home from the Grammy Awards in New York City, authorities said. After leaving Newark Penn Station, the woman was walking home when Guaman and his two co-conspirators - Antonio Ochoa and Edgar Yepezmorocho - forced her into a van near Ferry Street, authorities said. The attackers then drove to a desolate location on Amsterdam Avenue in Newark, where they sexually assaulted the victim for 90 minutes, authorities said. When city police officers were in the area on an unrelated assignment and came upon the van, the victim ran out half-naked and screamed that she was raped, authorities said. The officers drew their weapons and arrested the three suspects, authorities said. The three men, who were all illegal aliens, were later released on bail and fled to Ecuador, authorities said. Yepezmorocho, who remains at large, was convicted in absentia in January 2004, authorities said. Guaman was arrested in Los Angeles in November 2004, authorities said. Following his conviction in January 2006, Guaman was sentenced in June 2006 to 35 years in state prison. He will be eligible for parole in August 2034. Ochoa, who was arrested in Spain in November 2009, pleaded guilty in October 2011 to aggravated sexual assault and conspiracy charges and he was sentenced in February 2012 to a 10-year state prison sentence. At Guaman's trial, he claimed the victim voluntarily entered the van, drank beer with him and the two other men, and agreed to have consensual sex with them in exchange for $100, according to the appellate decision. In his appeal, Guaman argued his trial attorney was ineffective for failing to secure beer bottles from the van as evidence, the decision states. Guaman asserted that DNA testing of the bottles would support his version of events, the decision states. But the appellate judges rejected Guaman's argument, saying his attorney "vigorously advocated for defendant's theory of the case at trial," the decision states. "Rather than recovering three-year-old beer bottles and perform testing, which may or may not have revealed the victim's DNA, defendant's counsel chose to cast doubt on the credibility of the investigation," the decision states. "During cross-examination of one of the police officers involved with the investigation, defense counsel elicited testimony revealing that the police failed to complete any investigation or analysis of the beer bottles at all." The panel said "this line of questioning, as well as the decision not to secure the beer bottles, are matters of trial strategy, and should be accorded great deference on review." The panel also rejected Guaman's assertion that his attorney failed to conduct an adequate pretrial investigation, because Guaman did not provide any evidence to support that claim. Bill Wichert may be reached at bwichert@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @BillWichertNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Manischewitz hasn't been playing by the rules governing kosher foods, a rabbi alleges in a lawsuit. Rabbi Yaakov Horowitz, who was a kosher supervisor for the Newark-based maker of matzo, wine and other foods, alleges the company stopped being as rigid about what was and wasn't kosher around 2009, according to NYDailyNews.com. The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, which is enlisted to certify the foods produced by Manischewitz meet kosher guidelines, didn't enforce the bylaws because it feared the New Jersey company would stop working with it. Horowitz inspected food for the union for more than 20 years, according to NYPost.com. He said he had to take a long leave of absence after being pressured to help the Union stay on Manischewitz's good side "even if this meant compromising his personal religious principles." Horowitz's complaints are outlined in a lawsuit filed in New York State Supreme Court in Lower Manhattan. "The allegations in this suspiciously-timed lawsuit are entirely without merit, and we will contest this matter vigorously," the Orthodox Union Kosher Division said in a statement emailed to NJ Advance Media. "We certify that the Kashrut of Manischewitz is today, and has always been, at the highest level. Consumers can confidently rely upon the integrity of the Kashrut this Passover and throughout the year." Passover begins at sunset Friday. NJ Advance Media also sent requests for comment to a spokeswoman for Manischewitz. Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook. EXCESS 8 ADDIS Hospice social worker Kenneth Hicken, left, and hospice nurse Bill Memmott, center, meet with patient Bill Roggman, right, who has colon cancer, at Roggman's home in West Valley City, Utah in this file photo. I Noah Addis |The Star-Ledger) TRENTON -- Barbara Figge Fox doesn't just miss her mother, who died ten years ago. Fox said she is "haunted" by how her 96-year-old mother died -- in a nursing home three days after leaving the hospital. A rushed conversation in the intensive care unit with a doctor trumped her mother's wish to die at home, she said. "She never had a chance to consult with a palliative care doctor," said Fox, a retired journalist from Princeton. "You lie awake nights. Could I have done it differently?" Five years ago, New Jersey began offering terminally ill patients and doctors a way to work together to make sure patients' end-of-life wishes are met. Gov. Chris Christie signed a law in 2011 that created the POLST (Practitioner Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatments) form, which allows patients to spell out what kind treatments they are willing to accept in their final months, weeks or days. The one-page form completed by a doctor or nurse practitioner with the patient's help is legally binding, unlike a living will or advanced directive which are often done before the onset of a terminal illness. The form accompanies a patient's medical records and is kept at the bedside. It is used if the patient is unable to communicate. When a close relative faced a terminal cancer diagnosis two years ago, Fox, her caregiver, said the experience couldn't have been more different than that of her mother. A doctor met with them over the course of a week while she was at Princeton at Plainsboro Medical Center, Fox said. "Because there was a palliative care expert at her bedside who did not tell her what to do and just asked her questions, she was able to come to the conclusion that what she wanted was not more treatment. She wanted to rest comfortably at home," Fox said. Following the POLST form, Fox's 82-year-old relative died at home two weeks later. She declined to identify her loved one to protect her privacy. Fox said the law is "a blessing." However, few people seem to be aware of the law and and have used the form, said David Barile, a palliative care physician at Princeton hospital who served on a committee formed by the New Jersey Hospital Association, which adapted the form from other states to create a version for the state. Barile is also the founder and CEO of New Jersey Goals of Care, a nonprofit organization that educates medical providers, patients and their caregivers on how to approach these decisions. "This is about planning for our lives. One mechanism for that is POLST form," he said. New Jersey has the dubious distinction of spending more money on end-of life care than any other state, according to the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, a national study of Medicare patient treatment data. "We are really in an awful spot because care is so fragmented" with no one looking at the whole patient and asking what he or she wants, Barile said. "The hardest part for the medical community is sharing information about the prognosis. We are klutzy about that. We'll say the prognosis is poor but what does that mean?" Barile said, who counseled and signed off on Fox's relative's POLST form. "We are trained to cure -- this is how we are wired. We don't learn this stuff in medical school." A series of six short videos, sponsored by Bridgeway Care and Rehabilitation Centers, Care Associates Network and the Health Care Association of New Jersey, walks patients and caregivers through the soul-searching process of what kind of care they want. Barile said the discussion breaks down to four parts: The diagnosis; the prognosis of how much time is left and what will that time be like; the patient's personal goals of care; and the treatments that can achieve these goals. One patient's goal was to live long enough to attend her grandson's bar mitzvah; another patient wanted to deliver a book manuscript to a publishing house, Barile said. Both achieved their goals before they died, he said. The form asks patients to check a box indicating their willingness to receive interventions like artificial nutrition; CPR; and full treatment, just enough to ease pain, or something in between. One question -- what Barile calls "the Gov. Christie section" asks patients, if they become incapacitated, whether their next-of-kin or other surrogate decision-maker may change the content of the form. More information about the POLST form may be found at the state Health Department's website, the hospital association website and goalsofcare.org. Susan K. Livio may be reached at slivio@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @SusanKLivio. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook. BAYONNE -- The cause and origin of a three-alarm fire on Monday that destroyed a Bayonne home are still under investigation, city Fire Chief Keith Weaver said yesterday. The early morning blaze ravaged the 2.5-story building at 124 West 26th St., which has since been demolished, and permanently displaced the nine people living there, according to Weaver. Three firefighters who were sent to Bayonne Medical Center in the course of battling the blaze suffered non-life-threatening injuries and have since been released, the fire chief said. Asked if residents were able to recover any of their belongings, Weaver said firefighters managed to obtain identification papers. "It was difficult to recover a lot, but we did make an effort to get their important documents ... as much as it was possible," he said. In addition to the residents at 124 West 26th St. who were displaced, 11 other people from an adjacent home were displaced while the burnt building underwent demolition, the fire chief said. Weaver said the Red Cross assisted those 11 people and they have since returned to their homes. The Red Cross also assisted four of the nine residents of 124 West 26th St., though that figure was initially five, he said. Argentina and Humberto Valdez earlier this week told The Jersey Journal's photographer, Reena Rose Sibayan, that they owned the now-destroyed home for 15 years. Weaver has said a total of nine people were displaced -- including two who lived in the attic -- but Humberto Valdez has said only seven live in the home and one person resides on the upper level. Jonathan Lin may be reached at jlin@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @jlin_jj. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook. BelovED Middle School A rendering of the design of BelovED Community Charter School's planned middle school on Grand Street in Jersey City. Provided by Peter Wilk Marketing. A Jersey City charter school has purchased a half-acre parcel of land on Grand Street to make room for its new $12 million middle school. The BelovED Community Charter School's new school building at 535 Grand St. will be 40,000 square feet and serve 240 students in sixth through ninth grades, according to Bret Schundler, a former Jersey City mayor and the Commissioner of Education for New Jersey who serves as chairman of the BelovED Community Charter School Foundation. The acquisition of the land came from the school entering an agreement with the Jersey City Housing Authority. The original BelovED school sits across the street from the acquired site at 508 Grand St, and serves 720 kindergarten to fifth grade students. "The upcoming middle school is another BelovED contribution in support of Jersey City's and the Jersey City Housing Authority's balanced development effort to create quality affordable housing and neighborhoods, in addition to luxury multi-family properties prevalent in Jersey City," Schundler said in a statement. "The BelovED campus is located within a moderate and affordable housing section of the city and serves children from local families." The new school building will feature an open first floor with outdoor recreational facilities, a two-story cafeteria that doubles as an auditorium with 300 seats, and an orchestra-influenced music room. Marty Stein, the executive director of Urbahn Architects, the New York City-based architectural and planning firm for the school's planned middle school and also its elementary school, said the music room will be crafted in accordance to the school's dedication to musical education. The 1,250-square-foot room will have a 16-foot high ceiling and will be outfitted with sound-proof mahogany wood walls so the students can play their instruments without having to compete with the sounds of Grand Street, he told the Jersey Journal. "What we really wanted to do was create a music room that was wonderful (for the students)," Stein said. The building will also have 15 general classrooms, four half-classrooms, two science rooms, two art rooms, a gymnasium and a dividable multi-purpose room, as well as administrative offices. The non-profit group Friends of the BelovED Charter School is supporting the development of the school and will take out a mortgage. According to Schundler, the school is expected to open in September 2018. With her 3.8 grade point average and long list of academic and extra-curricular achievements, it'd be easy to think that success just always came easy for 17-year-old Ferris High School senior Binta Sakho. About three years ago though, Sakho could barely communicate with her Jersey City peers, and six years ago, she and her family were forced to flee their home country because of the violence and unrest of a military coup d'etat. Sakho managed to overcome that adversity and more, and she credits much of her success to her time spent at the Hudson County Boys and Girls club. Recently, the club recognized her growth, character, and volunteer contributions by naming her their 2016 Youth of the Year. Born to Guinean immigrants in Maryland, Sakho and her family moved back to their home country when she was just three months old. There, Sahko grew up speaking French and Susu, the language of her ethnic group. In 2009, the family moved again, this time to France to escape the violence of Guinea's military uprising. Eventually the family found their way to Jersey City when Sahko's father got a job in the Guinean embassy in New York about three years ago. When she first returned to the U.S, her limited grasp of the English language combined with her classmates' slang made communicating at school seem almost impossible at times. About two months into her return, Sakho joined the Boys and Girls Club after a suggestion from her uncle. She said they helped her and accepted her as a friend immediately. "Everybody was so open to talk to," said Sakho. "Even if I didn't know how to answer something, they would try to understand me and actually take the time to let me speak instead of saying 'she doesn't understand, let's go.' They talked to me and were open to learn about me, so I was open to talking to them. I actually improved my speaking of English." Through the Girls and Boys Club, Sakho says she's received everything from tutoring, to opportunities to visit colleges, to being able to speak with career professionals. After originally struggling with academics because of shyness and communication issues, she's now ranked 11th in her class of 290 students, and she's a member of the National Honor Society, as well as the student council. Now in the club, she serves as a junior staff member, where she tutors younger students in subjects like coding, and is part of the Keystone Griffin Club that introduced a bill to the state senate to improve teens access to mental healthcare. That bill was recently approved and signed by Gov. Chris Christie, making it the first and only state legislation in the nation that was introduced by a group of teenagers. Sahko was also recently was awarded the 2016 Willie Flood Youth Community Service Award by Hudson County during Women's History Month in March. "When I go back and remember that just two and a half years ago, I couldn't even speak my mind, it's just really mind blowing," she said. "It makes me think about all the help that I got to get me where I am now." Sakho says what truly drives her to achieve is her goal of becoming a neurosurgeon to open a clinic back in Guinea. She was inspired to do so when her aunt died after not receiving timely brain trauma treatment after a car accident. Because there were no neurosurgeons in Guinea at the time of the accident, her aunt had to wait 48 hours to be airlifted to Morocco, and by the time she finally received surgery, it was too late. Sakho will take the next step in achieving that goal this fall when she will start her first semester at Rutgers University. "I know I have the opportunity to make a huge change," she said. "So I work really hard to get the grades I need to get into the right college to provide the foundation I need to become a great doctor in the future." As far the staff and kids at Hudson County Boy's and Girls Club are concerned, the sky's the limit for Sakho. "I think she embodies everything that we want young people to be," said Janet Wallach, the director of program development and teen services at the Boys and Girls Club. "We want them to be achievers we want them to have the strength of character to overcome obstacles. We want them to reach out and help people who are less fortunate than they are. She sets that example every day." JERSEY CITY -- The man who fell 50 feet to his death yesterday afternoon at a Division Street Construction site had only been on the job for two days, according to a police report. Javier Regalado, 25, of Plainfield, lost his balance as he was working on an elevator shaft, causing a piece of plywood he was using for support to break, police said. At about 2:55 p.m., one of the workers was handing Regalado pieces of equipment to install in an elevator shaft at 25 Division St., the report says. After he lost his balance, Regalado landed on a concrete floor with the metal pieces he was working with crashing on top of him, according to the report. Workers at the construction site went rushing to Regalado to help, according to the report. The workers told police Regalado was unresponsive, but they kept trying to "wake him up," the report states. The owner of LaTorre Construction of Bayonne told police he had sub-contracted Regalado to work on the elevator, and he had only been on the site for two days, according to a police report. Police said a proper banister was not installed for the type of construction work that was being performed. Calls to the LaTorre construction were not returned. After the fall, police said they spoke with the owner of the construction company but then could not locate him after the initial conversation, according to the report. The owner's nephew pointed to his uncle's car, but police said he was not in the vehicle, according to the report. The owner then came back to the scene, and police questioned why he would leave after an employee had died, according to the report. The owner said he was in his car the entire time, the report states. A spokeswoman for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration said they are investigating the incident. Voters hit the polls for North Bergen school board elections on April 23, 2014 A voter is seen during the 2014 school board elections in a file photo. (Molly J. Smith | The Jersey Journal) (Molly J. Smith | The Jersey Journal) NORTH BERGEN -- About 4,500 people voted in the school board elections in North Bergen and Weehawken, the only two school districts in Hudson County still holding April elections, according to the county board of elections. The overall voter turnout was about 11 percent, and the elections were both uncontested. In North Bergen, the new, incoming board members are Patricia Bartoli (3,776 votes), Luis Rabelo (3,686 votes), and Sai Rao (3,649 votes). The budget was not approved, with 2,319 people (82.15 percent) voting against it. According to North Bergen officials, the budget has not passed a public vote in over 10 years, so it has had to be revised and voted on later by the commissioners. In Weehawken, the winning board members were all incumbents: Julian Brian Mera (368 votes), Susan Morales Jennings (365 votes), and Francis Pizzuta (370 votes). The budget passed with 305 votes (77.81 percent). The other districts in Hudson County have transitioned to holding their school board elections in November, to save money and time. One trade-off is that members of the public cannot vote on the school budget in the fall, since budgets are submitted to the county in the spring. The state gave districts the option to switch elections to November in 2012. Laura Herzog may be reached at lherzog@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @LauraHerzogL. Find NJ.com on Facebook. HOBOKEN -- With hundreds of people out strolling on last Sunday's sunny afternoon, a woman was walking with a friend on Washington Street in Hoboken, when police said a stranger ran up and punched her in the side of the head, then fled. "The victim and her friend were walking down Washington Street, very casually, and a person runs right by her, curses at her, and punches her in the side of her face, by the ear, and runs away," Sgt. Edgardo Cruz, a spokesman for the Hoboken Police Department. "She did not know this person." The woman suffered a bruise and declined medical treatment, Cruz said. She described the assailant as a white male of indeterminate age, who had a full beard and was wearing a San Francisco 49ers hat. Cruz said the incident took place on the sidewalk on Washington Street, near 6th Street. Cruz said the man shouted the f-word at the victim, a woman in her 30's accompanied by a female friend. He said the man did not say anything to directly imply he was acting out of a bias against the victim's gender or any other trait, or that he knew her somehow. "If I had to guess, I would say it was someone who was drunk," Cruz said. He said the case did not fit the profile of a typical "knockout game" incident, in which the assailant is accompanied by others who observe the incident, approaches a stranger in a remote or isolated location, and delivers a blow intended to knock the unsuspecting victim unconscious. Just such an incident occurred in Hoboken on Sept. 10, 2013, with fatal consequences. The victim in that case, 46-year-old Eric Ralph Santiago died after investigators concluded he broke his neck when falling against an iron fence after being punched by a 14-year-old boy accompanied by two 13-year-olds. Cruz, who was working as a patrol officer at the time and was the first one on the scene, said the incident took place in a quiet location near the Clock Towers apartment complex at Third and Jefferson Streets. The boy who delivered the fatal blow pleaded guilty in family court and was sentenced to six years of juvenile detention. The other two pleaded guilty to lesser charges and received probationary sentences. In contrast to the 2012 incident, Sunday's punch was thrown on Hoboken's busy main drag, where hundreds of people were out strolling and enjoying the beautiful weather. The assailant also appeared to be unaccompanied, Cruz said. Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveStrunsky. Find NJ.com on Facebook. The Bayonne Fire Department will host a community blood drive at the City Hall Firehouse on Monday, city officials announced. The blood drive will be open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday and all blood donors will receive complimentary cholesterol and glucose screenings. The firehouse is located at 27th Street and Avenue C. This blood drive is being held in conjunction with Community Blood Services, which provides blood and blood products to hospitals and medical centers in New Jersey and New York. Officials said donors, who must weigh at least 110 pounds, should be 18 to 75 years old, but 16- and 17-year-olds may donate blood in New Jersey with a parental consent form provided by Community Blood Services. Juveniles must provide proof of age. Donors over age 75 must present a signed document from their medical doctor stating that they can give blood. Medications taken frequently by healthy individuals, such as aspirin, thyroid, diabetic, and blood pressure medications, are not reasons for deferral. All medications will be evaluated with the blood center staff prior to donating. Donors must show a form of photo identification, such as a driver's license, or a signed bank or debit card. Donors should eat a good meal and drink plenty of fluids before donating. For more information about blood donation, call Community Blood Services at 201-444-3900. To schedule an appointment, call 201-251-3703. TRENTON -- In November 1994, about a month before the new Route 129 opened to traffic, South Ward residents met with local and state officials and peppered them with questions about the highway, as many would have to cross it on foot. Most were from the South Village senior apartments on Lalor Street at Route 129, where the meeting was held, and they were concerned. They depend on the shopping center across Lalor Street and they wanted safety precautions. Now, another meeting is on the horizon, following the death Monday of 56-year-old crossing guard Antonio Wiley, who was struck by a northbound pickup truck at Lalor Street. A memorial to crossing guard Antonio Wiley, who was struck and killed on Route 129 at Lalor Street Monday. (Kevin Shea | NJ Advance Media) Mayor Eric Jackson on Thursday sent a letter to the state's transportation commissioner asking for a public meeting for residents to convey their concerns and discuss possible solutions concerning Route 129 safety. For the past 22 years, there have been several other meetings, calls for action and worry from South Ward residents. At the 1994 meeting, residents presented a ''wish list'' of requests: a crossing guard at the intersection of Route 129 and Lalor Street; posting signs that warn motorists of pedestrians; adding a protected island in the middle of the highway; and eventually building a pedestrian walkway-type overpass. The pedestrian signage exists and anyone walking across the highway can stop in the median. And the crossing guard post at Lalor Street has been a fixture for years during daylight hours - although the city and state have at times squabbled over who should pay for the position. The city currently picks up the tab, at a cost of over $50,000 per year, a city spokesman said. But the overpass idea at Lalor Street never got off the ground. After Wiley's death, some people took to social media to vent - and to ask why there is still no pedestrian walkway at the intersection. Jackson's letter did not specifically mention pedestrian walkways. "The safety of pedestrians crossing all three intersections of Route 129 - Lalor Street, Cass Street and Hamilton Avenue (near the Sun Bank Arena) - is a profound concern to me and the residents of South Trenton," Jackson wrote. "The history of this stretch of highway is marked by numerous accidents and several fatalities over the last several years," the mayor wrote. Robin Lord does call for walkways, bluntly. The Trenton attorney is currently litigating a lawsuit for the family of a 3-year-old girl killed on Route 129 at Hamilton Avenue in 2009. "How many people will die on the highway before they build pedestrian footbridges?" she asked. "This is one of the deadliest highways in Mercer County, and possibly the state," Lord said. Kevin Israel, a spokesman for the state Department of Transportation (DOT), said the agency sends their condolences to Wiley's family. "The safety of pedestrians is always one of the department's primary concerns," Israel said. "We are dispatching our Bike and Pedestrian unit to assess the intersection next week and determine what, if anything, can be done to improve safety." "Once the investigation is complete we will discuss our findings and determinations with the city," Israel said. Lalor Street is often the focus of the safety issues along Route 129, since it's the first intersection motorists approach driving into the city and they are coming from highway speeds to a 40-mile per house stretch. But at Cass Street, residents are often joined by groups of state corrections officers from the state prison at the intersection, who park across the highway. And the Hamilton Avenue crossing is at the Sun Bank Arena - which usually employs a police officer during concert and shows. A police officer was on duty in February 2009 when a city fire engine and another vehicle collided at the intersection, sending the vehicle careening into the Moreland family - Lord's client. I'Asia Moreland was holding her 3-year-old daughter I'Maya's hand in the median waiting to cross to the arena to see Disney on Ice when the girl was struck. The mother felt her daughter's hand ripped away, Lord said. Lord is suing several agencies on behalf of the family, alleging they did not adequately protect them as they walked to the show. The Hamilton Avenue intersection, though, was the one that almost got an elevated pedestrian walkway, Lord notes. The builders of New Jersey Transit's River Line had plans for one at the intersection to link light rail passengers to the arena. It was designed to look like a suspension bridge as a tribute to the former John A. Roebling's Sons Co. nearby, whose workers spun wire rope for the George Washington, Brooklyn and Golden Gate bridges, a March 2002 Times of Trenton story describes. Lord said her research in the Moreland suit found the walkway was scrapped during a feud over who would maintain it. "How much would that have cost a year?" she said. When it opened in December 1994, state transportation officials heralded Route 129 as a key to connecting the city's downtown with a $400 million state project called the Trenton Complex, which linked interstates 195, 295 and Route 29. City officials, though, had fought the state on several details, mainly safety issues. The late and former Trenton Police Chief Ernie Williams told The Times of Trenton in 2001 - after a series of serious crashes - that he sat in numerous meetings they city had with state officials in the 1990s opposing almost everything about the impending highway. In January 1995, the highway had its first fatality, when a Bristol, Pa. man - who police said was likely confused - was broadsided by a northbound truck at Lalor Street that was entering the city. Every two to three years after it opened, a series of bad crashes or a fatality put the 2 1/2-mile swath of pavement back into the headlines. In the early 2000s, South Village residents said they had just learned to live with the crossing dangers. On Thursday, Dennis Keenan, the city's former fire chief and public safety director, also said he recalled all the meetings to oppose how Route 129 cut through South Trenton. Keenan, who replied to some Facebook comments earlier this week defending the city's role in pushing for safety enhancements years ago, said Thursday that at one point the city suggested Route 129 go under the cross streets. "We pushed for an underpass at Lalor street, from a public safety point. And the state said they didn't have the money to do an underpass," Keenan said. Keenan said that in the early planning stages, people did mention that elderly residents - maybe some who push shopping carts across the highway - might not use an elevated walkway. "We figured that might be the case all along," he said. "The crossing guard has helped, but there's still pedestrian deaths at that intersection and there's been vehicle deaths too," Keenan said. "I don't know what the answer is now." Kevin Shea may be reached at kshea@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @kevintshea. Find NJ.com on Facebook. So who's it going to be? Four Middlesex County Democrats say they would pursue a seat likely to be left vacant in the state Assembly's 18th Legislative District following the nomination of state Sen. Peter Barnes III (D-Middlesex County) to the state Superior Court on Thursday. And curiosity has arisen about who the Middlesex County Democratic Organization would ultimately tap to fill the seat. Barnes, a former Edison councilman and assemblyman, was scheduled to appear for his nomination in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. It's widely believed that state Assemblyman Patrick Diegnan Jr. (D-South Plainfield) would fill Barnes' seat upon his leave. Even Barnes himself seemed fairly sure that's how it would play out. "I don't believe anyone is (challenging) him," Barnes confidently said Wednesday evening. But who would fill Diegnan's seat in the Assembly? Currently, there are four Democrats from Middlesex County who have thrown their hats in the ring, saying that they would pursue the Assembly vacancy. Three of the candidates are Edison Township Council members Bob Diehl, Rob Karabinchak, and Sapana Shah. The fourth is a councilwoman from Highland Park, Elsie Foster-Dublin. Karabinchak, who runs a general contracting company in Metuchen, felt confident that he would have the Party's backing. "I believe the Party has seen me; they believe in what I can do, not just in Edison, but in the county and New Jersey," Karabinchak said. Diehl said he just hoped the process would be handled fairly. "I think it's important for the committee to decide this," he said, adding but with an objective point of view. A part of Shah's platform is the lack of women representing Middlesex County in Trenton today and bringing "a more progressive and more independent voice on Trenton." Her official campaign flyer cites that only two women currently represent the county in Trenton, and only one represents New Jersey in Congress. Foster-Dublin, who has served on the Highland Park council since 2000 and has served many leadership roles, such as on the Jamaican Organization of New Jersey and United Caribbean American Network of New Jersey, said the demographics in the county have changed, and the representation in Trenton should reflect that change. "But we haven't seen it here in Middlesex County," she said. Barnes said Wednesday that it would be inappropriate for him to endorse any particular candidate, only saying that, "I think you have four good candidates ... and I wish all four goodwill." Because the filing deadline for a special primary election ended on April 4, the selection would be left to the roughly 340 committee members of the Middlesex County Democratic Organization. Shah, who is a private-practice attorney and previously served on the Edison Township school board, said even though she believed some were trying to claim the seat was "already theirs," she said the decision as to who would ultimately fill the vacancy was anything but a "done-deal." Barnes seemed confident he would be nominated on Thursday. He noted that upon his nomination, he would then vacate his current state Senate seat on Monday. Upon officially leaving his role, the Middlesex County Democratic Party boss, Kevin McCabe, would then have seven to 35 days to fill that role. Once that seat is filled, another seven- to 35-day window is granted to fill the vacant Assembly seat. Spencer Kent may be reached at skent@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @SpencerMKent. Find the Find NJ.com on Facebook. WEST LONG BRANCH -- The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey is helping to defend a Donald Trump enthusiast ticketed for flying flags of support of the Republican presidential front-runner in front of his West Long Branch home. The ACLU-NJ has teamed up with the attorney for Joseph Hornick to fight alleged ordinance violations in municipal court next month, the civil rights group announced on Thursday. Hornick was set to appear in municipal court on Wednesday as directed by the ticket he received on March 25 by West Long Branch police, but that court date has been rescheduled to May 18. Hornick, a former Long Branch firefighter, was cited for violating the borough's ordinance prohibiting political lawn signs from being displayed more than 30 days before an election. The two flags flanking his home have been flying since early March but with New Jersey's presidential primary set for June 7, residents are prohibited from displaying lawn signs before May 9. Hornick, who is represented by attorney Eric Sherman of New York, contends the ordinance doesn't apply to him because he is flying flags - not displaying lawn signs. Beyond that, he argues, the ordinance violates his constitutional right to freedom of expression. The ordinance calls for fines of up to $2,000 or 90 days in jail for violations. "There's no ordinance that can overrule the Constitution," said ACLU-NJ Deputy Legal Director Jeanne LoCicero. "It doesn't matter whether it's a lawn sign or a flag - you have the right to express your political beliefs every day of the year, no matter how close it is to Election Day. West Long Branch needs to realize that unless it takes this policy off the books, it's violating the Constitution." The ACLU-NJ had most recently challenged restrictions on the timing of political signs in the past in the case of a Ron Paul supporter in Hawthorne during the 2008 presidential election. The Passaic County community rescinded the lawn-sign ordinance in August 2008 after the resident was ordered to remove his signs in February 2008. Many communities have passed lawn sign ordinances to try to control the proliferation of the signs before and after elections, but the ACLU has said the laws having a chilling effect on free speech. ACLU-NJ Legal Director Ed Barocas said towns should review their sign ordinances to make sure they don't include unlawful restrictions. MaryAnn Spoto may be reached at mspoto@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @MaryAnnSpoto. Find NJ.com on Facebook. -f2dc9d7f3eade43b.JPG ROCKAWAY -- A 27-year-old township man admitted Monday he fatally struck an expectant father while driving under the influence of alcohol, The Daily Record reported. Appearing in Superior Court in Passaic County, Edward George Koloski pled guilty to charges of vehicular homicide and leaving the scene of an accident resulting in death, as well as DWI on Feb. 23, 2014. Prosecutors have recommended a term of 10 years in prison when Koloski is sentenced June 23. His attorney is expected to argue for a sentence of not more than eight years. Javan "Jay" Robinson, 23, was crossing Rt. 46 around midnight when he was hit by Koloski, who had a blood-alcohol level about double the legal limit. Robinson was thrown into the air by the force of the impact and struck Koloski's windshield, investigators said. Koloski left the scene and drove onto I-80, where he called police to report that he had "hit something," authorities also said. Robinson was getting a snack for his girlfriend, Katelyn Kagan, who was pregnant with the couple's child. A few weeks after Robinson died, she gave birth to a son, Jordan Javan Robinson. The case was heard in Passaic County to avoid a possible conflict of interest in Morris County, where Robinson's mother works for the judiciary. Paul Milo may be reached at pmilo@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter@PaulMilo2. Find NJ.com on Facebook. 420.jpg State Police Thang Van, 25, and Tam Le, 29, had 50 pounds of marijuana in their vehicle when troopers approached them at a Turnpike rest stop. (NJSP) TRENTON -- State troopers crashed the party of two men who allegedly had $250,000 worth of marijuana at a New Jersey Turnpike rest stop, authorities said. At 1:15 p.m. Wednesday, a trooper patrolling the Thomas Edison Service Area in Woodbridge saw a man litter from the passenger seat of a parked Lexus, the State Police said in a statement. When the trooper approached, he saw marijuana sitting in the car's center console and arrested the passenger, Thang Van, 25, of Washington, D.C., along with the driver, Tam Le, 29, of Lexington, Va. Inside the car, police later found a duffle bag containing about 50 pounds of marijuana packed in vacuum-sealed bags, the statement said. In a post on their Facebook page, State Police noted the arrest happened on a high holiday for recreational marijuana users -- April 20, or 4/20. "You celebrate #Happy420 your way, and we'll celebrate our way," they wrote. The two were charged with possession of marijuana, distribution of marijuana, and conspiracy to distribute. They are being held at the Middlesex County Jail on $300,000 full cash bail, police said. It was not immediately clear whether they had retained attorneys. In another social media post marking the unofficial holiday, State Police posted an image of one of their drug-sniffing canines. "Just better hope you don't run into one of these pups!" they wrote. Attitudes about marijuana have changed around the country in recent years, though New Jersey's laws remain relatively strict. Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican and former federal prosecutor, has adamantly opposed legalizing the drug here in New Jersey and nationally during his failed run for president. Witnesses at the state's first public hearing on legalizing marijuana last fall, however, were largely in favor of decriminalizing the drug, and legalization advocates held a demonstration on the Statehouse steps in Trenton Wednesday afternoon. As many as 23,000 people are arrested on marijuana charges in New Jersey in a given year, according to the state chapter of the ACLU, which supports legalization. S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook. After that big win in New York Tuesday evening, Donald Trump laid out the battle plan for a fight that could be fatal to the Republican Party's hopes for this fall. "It is really nice to win the delegates with the votes," the Donald said. "Nobody should take delegates and claim victory unless they get those delegates with voters and voting." I suspect most voters would agree with that - for the obvious reason that voters like their votes to count. The leaders of the Grand Old Party disagree. They permit each state to set up its own system for awarding delegates. Consider Indiana. The election there won't be held until next month, yet an anti-Trump slate of delegates has already been chosen. Politico quoted one delegate as saying the only way he'd vote for Trump voluntarily is if his opponent was the devil. "I've always wanted to own a casino," the guy said. "But he couldn't give me a casino and have me vote for him." That's his right, of course - except for one thing: If Trump wins the state, that guy will go to Cleveland as a Trump delegate. But that's only for the first ballot. After that, he's free to vote his own preference rather than the preference of the people whose votes sent him to the convention. The people in the Ted Cruz campaign say they expect to have hundreds of similar delegates in Cleveland. Cruz has systematically recruited a list of what I call "Donald In Name Only" - or "DINO" - delegates who are ready to switch to Cruz if Trump doesn't get the 1,237 delegates needed for a first-ballot victory. On Tuesday, Trump called this "a crooked system" and said, "People won't stand for it." He's probably right about that. If such a massive switcheroo were to succeed, the convention would descend into chaos. There's a way to avoid that, however, and the Republicans here in New Jersey have been holding their elections that way for decades. When Republicans go to the polls here on June 7, they will be voting not just for a candidate but for a slate of delegates handpicked by that candidate. There will be a slate dedicated to Trump and headed by Gov. Chris Christie. A slate dedicated to Cruz will be headed by Christie's old conservative nemesis Steve Lonegan. A third slate is dedicated to Ohio Gov. John Kasich. The candidate who wins gets the delegates he recruited. If the Donald wins, there's no way Lonegan gets to go to Cleveland as a Trump delegate. Conversely if Cruz wins, then there's no way Christie will be going to Cleveland to represent him. There are several other states with systems like New Jersey's. But the national Republican Party has always resisted any move to create uniform rules for each state, said Pat Murray, who directs the Monmouth University Poll. "The Republican Party had prided itself that it does not dictate to the states how they choose their delegates," he said. "They may come to rue that." They may indeed if Trump is deprived of the nomination on the first ballot. At that point Cruz could win with the votes of the DINOs. "This is going to be eye-opening for most Americans," said Murray. "There are threats of violence. None of us have been alive to see something like this." We probably won't see it this summer, said Bill Palatucci, a longtime Christie crony who assembled the slate of 48 Trump delegates. "I believe he arrives in Cleveland one way or the other over and above the 1,237-delegate mark," said Palatucci of Trump. "He's a very persuasive guy and there's a large enough pool of unbound delegates he can persuade to be with him on first ballot." There are more than 200 unbound delegates and Trump probably won't need more than 50 if he performs as expected in the remaining primaries, Palatucci said. As for Cruz, "He's gonna show up in Cleveland with a string of losses with Trump riding a wave of momentum," said Palatucci. In fact, Cruz finished third behind Kasich in New York. He is projected to do the same here in New Jersey, where the latest Rutgers-Eagleton Poll shows Trump beating him 52-18 with Kasich registering 24 percent. A string of such finishes would certainly diminish Cruz's case for winning the nomination. And if things work out that way, then chaos will be averted at the convention. But Trump has performed a valuable service for the National Republican Committee. Till now, they've manipulated those state-by-state rules to push hand-picked candidates such as the talent-free Mitt Romney to the fore. But Trump has shown them that their system is a ticking time bomb. Perhaps before they finish up in Cleveland they should consider a way to defuse it. If so, New Jersey offers its expertise in the field of bomb-disposal. ALSO: Pennsylvania's system for awarding delegates may be the worst in the country. Check this NBC News article and you'll see that 54 of the delegates are not only unbound but unidentified as to their leanings. The voter has no way of knowing whether the delegate supports Trump, Cruz or Kasich. Only 17 delegates are bound to the winner of the state, which is likely to be Trump if the polls are correct. Why have an election if the results are meaningless? If this convention blows up on the knuckleheads who permitted this sort of thing they will have no one to blame but themselves. PLUS: by former Ron Paul campaign official Doug Wead in which he lays out the hypocrisy of those in the stop-Trump movement. "In 2012, the GOP establishment used the Credentials Committee to strip Ron Paul of his duly elected delegates and had them bodily thrown off the floor of the convention. The governor of Maine was so heartbroken for the young people from his state who had worked so hard for a year to get to the RNC that he left with them out of solidarity. The media mostly ignored it." But now the same guy who got those delegates stripped of their votes, former New Hampshire governor and GOP Rules Chairman John Sununu, is trying the exact same stunt to keep Trump from getting the nomination: "Sununu, the poster boy for the GOP establishment, is now trying to run an insurgency against the front-runner, Donald Trump. Sununu made it clear from the beginning that the establishment wanted anybody but Trump. But now, the outsiders are the front-runners and the establishment is using Ron Paul tactics." I realize there's no way a political hack of Sununu's stature would ever approve a system that would level the playing field such as the one I suggest. But the reform is long overdue. For decades now the party has been stuck between systems that empower the bosses such as caucuses and conventions, and systems that empower the voters, such as elections. Their problem is that the guy who gets through that system has to run in the general election. And if recent history is any indication, the party insiders have no idea how to win one. By Catherine Wilson Newark, a city of almost 300,000 residents has an infrastructure crisis; a lead in the infrastructure crisis. Similar to that of Flint, Michigan, Newark has lead in its water stemming from an old infrastructure of pipes in its public schools. As the city celebrates its 350th anniversary this year, the school district is scrambling to find a solution to a very old problem. And, Newark is not unlike many old cities across the country in dire need of tackling this issue. However, with the needs in education and financial stability within our urban centers, oftentimes unseen infrastructure is the last to get attention -- until it can't wait anymore. The students in Newark and other aging cities throughout New Jersey cannot wait anymore. With so much public and private monies spent through government, corporate and private foundations, Newark and other older cities should be the recipient of more national, both federal and private funding due to this aging infrastructure issue. Newark Public School officials shut down the water fountains in 30 of its district schools after it was discovered by their own testing, that there were elevated levels of lead. And last week, they shut down water fountains at an additional eight schools after further testing. As a result, water in the 38 buildings is only used for flushing toilets and washing dishes, with all drinking and cooking water coming from donated bottles of water. And even though the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), local politicians and good Samaritans are trying to find short-term solutions, this is a longer-term problem that needs a bi-partisan solution. Daniel Van Abs, associate professor at Rutgers University School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, acknowledged a NJ Spotlight roundtable on "New Jersey's Hidden Water Crisis" that the greatest issue facing the public infrastructure is the lack of understanding of "how good or bad our systems are." Water is delivered through both public and private systems -- systems the public continues to pay for directly. And with the highest property taxes in the country, residents should be able to send their children to school with the confidence their drinking water is safe. The lead levels in Newark's water ranged from 15.6 parts per billion to 558 ppb -- above the EPA's "so-called" action level of 15 ppb. Students in Newark, already affected by poverty, violence and a lack of general resources did not ask for, nor should they suffer from a lack of clean and safe drinking water during the school day. At United Way, we are urging parents in Newark that while public officials are ensuring them that there is no need to panic, there are steps they can take to ensure their children are safe: First, set up an appointment to get your child tested for lead poisoning. You can call 2-1-1, the Second, sit down and talk to your child about what lead poisoning, and what it is and what it is not. Your child should understand why the water is not safe to drink at school, but not feel fear of drinking or using water at home. Third, if your child is at an affected school, make sure they understand that the water at their specific school is not safe to drink and that they should drink water from bottled water throughout the day. If you have further questions or concerns about lead in the drinking water, I urge you to call 2-1-1 or The Newark Health Department. United Way of Essex and West Hudson's (UWEWH) mission and vision is to support our communities and find solutions to common, critical problems. We have a vested interest in the health and safe well being of our constituents, especially our students. Last month, we launched a national campaign to bring attention to lead crisis at the Newark's Public Schools. UWEWH will support the collection of funds and bottled water for students at the affected schools throughout the city. With funds collected from across the country, UWEWH will purchase bottled water for students and support programs that treat students affected by lead poisoning, such as lead screenings through the Newark Health Department and the lead poisoning program at University Hospital in Newark. Additionally, UWEWH will work with the Newark Health Department to inform all parents and the general public about the need to get screened, early and often for this pollutant. If you are looking for a way to help students in Newark affected by lead in their drinking water, I urge you to take action. Please consider making a donation to United Way to purchase clean water and services needed to address this emergent issue. Catherine Wilson is acting chief executive officer of United Way of Essex and West Hudson. Barbara Wallace.jpg Washington Township Mayor Barbara Wallace speaks during the Memorial Day service held at Franklin G. Atkinson All Veterans Park, May 27, 2013. (South Jersey Times file photo) To the Editor: In Washington Township, a politician and government pensioner named Barbara Wallace wants to be our mayor for another four agonizing years. Facing opposition in all 39 voting districts, she has now decided to attempt a "do-over" of her playbook of how to not run any municipal government. Wallace has just announced plans to lower your municipal government property taxes. Please give me a minute to compose myself. She has raised these taxes for the last four years and squirreled much of the money away, now calling it "surplus." This "surplus" means nothing more than that you previously overpaid your taxes. Residents are embarrassed by her notion of "lowering taxes." Just look around our town. Washington Lake Park is a mess. Roadways are strewn with trash. Routes 42 and 47 have vacant buildings. We have abandoned homes everywhere. The township recently sandblasted or painted over the phrase "Premier Community" on our main water tower. That's fitting under Wallace. We were a town of great pride and accomplishment. Because of her, it has all been lost. Our residents deserve fresh faces. You will rarely find Wallace at the municipal building. Heck; no one answers the phone there anyway. She does not attract any relevant commercial businesses. She should have found real ways to cut taxes during her term. In the June 7 Democrat primary, vote for "non-politician" Joann Gattinelli instead of Wallace for the mayor's nomination. Her husband Sal and their kids have run successful township businesses for decades. Township council candidates Shawnequa Carvalho-Dawson and Thomas Sparacio are running with Gattinelli on a "Regular Democratic Organization of Gloucester County" slate. Carvalho-Dawson, the dean of academics for a neighboring school district, and her husband are also raising a wonderful family here. Sparacio, a cement mason, and his family are also proud to call this place "home." He has vast experience and knowledge in the areas of planning, zoning and economic development. "Fool me once, ... " You know the rest. Jay Jones Sewell OMNIA health plan works for my N.J. company To the Editor: As a business owner in southern New Jersey with fewer than 20 employees, I chose the OMNIA Health Alliance through Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield New Jersey as the health insurance plan for my employees and my family. After a thoughtful review, I found OMNIA would benefit me as an employer and optimally provide for the health care needs of my employees. (While controversial because it excludes some local hospital systems as preferred providers), OMNIA offers a lower-cost option without compromising on quality. I'm confident that my own family and my employees' families can receive excellent care from two key health networks, Inspira and Cooper, which participate in OMNIA. Many of our doctors are already in the OMNIA network, and more are joining. It's unfortunate that the introduction of this plan has received such resistance from New Jersey hospitals that were not asked by Horizon to be part of its alliance at this time. These hospitals, as responsible stewards of their community's health, should be focusing their energy on competing with OMNIA and looking for other unique ways to control costs. My employees benefit from lower premiums and low out-of-pocket expenses if they receive their care from the networks and doctors who are part of the OMNIA Health Alliance. I realize that I may have to change some of my own health-care providers, and I'm sure the same is true for some of my employees. However, it's an attractive feature that no referrals are needed to access the high-quality services offered through Inspira and Cooper. Bottom line, OMNIA is the kind of product we need. It saves my company money and it saves my employees money. We may be trading some choice and convenience for cost, but we are not compromising on the quality of our health care. Michael A. McLaughlin President McLaughlin Asset Management Inc. Haddonfield Editor's note: When this letter was first put online, it was not disclosed that the writer is also the current board chairman of Inspira Health Network, which participates in the OMNIA plan. Send a letter to the editor of South Jersey Times at sjletters@njadvancemedia.com LBGT protestors People protest outside the North Carolina Executive Mansion in Raleigh, N.C. North Carolina passed a law that bans cities and counties from passing anti-discrimination ordinances. (Emery P. Dalesio | Associated Press ) By Payton McGarry When I started college at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro two years ago, I did the kinds of things a lot of guys did. I made friends, joined a fraternity and started taking classes in business and accounting. I had a great time. North Carolina's new bill could change all that. The measure requires all state residents to use bathrooms that match the gender they were assigned at birth. And it strips away local protections that prohibit discrimination against LGTBQ people in housing, employment and public accommodations. This affects me because I'm trans. I started hormone replacement therapy at 18. My face, body and voice all changed substantially in the summer between high school and college. When I started at UNC, my peers were not aware that I was a transgender man until I or one of my close friends told them. I've felt safe and happy, like I was part of the community here. This bill could well make things more difficult. I feel much less safe knowing that my friends or I could lose employment, be denied services or be denied entry to businesses as a result of my gender identity. I also worry about using female bathrooms. In nearly every incident where my gender has been an issue, it has been in a female bathroom. I used the female restroom in high school because many people knew me as female and I didn't want to cause disruptions. I ended up facing opposition anyway, as my outward appearance was male. I have been screamed at, pushed, shoved or even slapped. In high school this became such a problem that I had to speak with a counselor and be approved to use faculty restrooms, where other students would not be allowed so that I could ensure my safety from female students. The thought of doing that again causes me a great deal of stress and anxiety. I'm also scared for my future. I've been denied employment due to my gender identity before. I used to teach high school marching band over the summer. In 2014, one of the teachers found out that I was trans and refused to have me back. It wasn't my performance -- he told me I'd done a great job. Rather, he worried that parents would react badly if they discovered that I was trans. I'm not alone -- according to one study, 55 percent of transgender people have lost jobs because of who they are. Knowing that my accomplishments and professional experience could be deemed null due to a letter on my driver's license or a word on my birth certificate is disheartening. Knowing that my friends or family could be denied employment, access to businesses, or admissions to certain programs based on nothing more than their own identities is nothing short of revolting. It is hurtful to see the government of North Carolina stigmatizing trans people, threatening our privacy and suggesting that my identity as a man is illegitimate. It is embarrassing to know that I live in a state that actually requires the discrimination of myself and people like me. I am excited to stand up with my LGBTQ siblings across the nation to say that enough is enough. I long for a time when our legislators will fight to truly maintain liberty and justice for all. Payton McGarry is a transgender student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He wrote this for The Washington Post. CLIFTON -- Police are investigating an armed robbery that occurred at the 7-Eleven on Main Avenue early Thursday morning. A man in his 20s with a medium build and a large knife allegedly robbed the convenience store at 1:02 a.m. and took money from the register, Detective Sgt. Robert Bracken said. A cashier was injured by the robber's knife during the incident but he declined to go to the hospital, he said. The robber fled on Main Avenue after the hold-up. Anyone with information on this robbery can contact the Clifton Police Department at 973-470-5908. Justin Zaremba may be reached at jzaremba@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinZarembaNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook. SOUTH PLAINFIELD -- Gov. Chris Christie on Thursday made good on his offer to help a Bound Brook teen who'd run into difficulty replacing his damaged learner's permit from state motor vehicles offices. On his monthly radio show Wednesday night, the governor heard from Stacey Pilato, the wife of former Bound Brook mayor Carey Pilato and the mother of 17-year-old Isaac "Ike" Pilato. She told him of her fruitless four-month, seven-visit slog to various state MVC locations to replace Ike's learner's permit after it was damaged in the wash. Around 11:15 a.m. on Thursday, Christie strode into the South Plainfield MVC in suit pants and shirt sleeves, Ike and his mother beside him. A sign warning that "photography and videography is NOT permitted" was cheerfully ignored by the governor's official photographer and videographer following them in, along with an New Jersey 101.5 radio reporter. Four New York TV station cameras sat just outside the fire lane, documenting the executive intervention. After fewer than 10 minutes at window No. 16, Ike had his replacement learner's permit. Christie later said that he was happy to have assisted and hinted that an overhaul to the MVC's approach to customer service might be forthcoming. "Quite frankly, they got frustrated in there and forgot that these people are our customers," the governor said of the staffers who'd rebuffed Pilato's earlier efforts. "Most of our MVC employees are really good and do a really good job," Christie said. "Other times it strikes me that I need to show up to send a bigger message, and that's what today was about." When he was still running for president in January, Christie seemed to have little time or interest in performing such hands-on constituent service. When a questioner at a New Hampshire town hall campaign event pressed him on why he wasn't in New Jersey overseeing the cleanup of nor'easter flooding in North Wildwood, Christie derisively answered, "What do you want me to do, bring a mop?" Asked about the change in approach by a television reporter, Christie said he saw "no change." "The difference there, is when you have a flooding situation, we have a protocol of what we do and how we do it," he said. "That was not an individual problem; that was a bigger systemic issue that we were dealing with and dealing with well ... Sometimes you have to do it yourself, and sometimes you have to assign it to others." Asked if any MVC employees would be disciplined or terminated over the delays, the governor declined to answer specifically. He stressed that his visit was "not about retribution" against any particular MVC employee but about getting "to the bottom of why this happened." Inside the MVC office, young Ike Pilato was asked if he had driven at all in the four months he was without a learner's permit. "I have not," he said dolefully. When asked if he had fully mastered the often nerve-racking art of parallel parking, the teen responded: "Yeah, I can do it." His mom wasn't so sure. "Well, you've done it in driver's ed, right?" she asked. Was he going to drive home today? "No," Ike replied, a little too quickly. "He's a little worked up," said his mother, laughing at his skittishness before the media cavalcade. With that, Mom was off to work. Ike would ride shotgun at least one more time. Claude Brodesser-Akner may be reached at cbrodesser@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @ClaudeBrodesser. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook. SOUTH PLAINFIELD -- Gov. Chris Christie on Thursday said he was "disappointed" former Amtrak Chief Operating Officer William Crosbie decided not to accept the top job at NJ Transit less than two weeks after his hire had been announced, but he stressed it wouldn't affect daily operations of the public transit system. "He'd told me to my face he was going to take the job," said the governor. "So I'm disappointed that he's had a change of heart." Christie added that he was "glad (Crosbie) didn't start" and then quit. On April 6, Crosbie issued a statement that he was "anxious to roll up my sleeves and stand shoulder to shoulder with the men and women of NJ Transit." Acting DOT Commissioner and NJ Transit Chairman Richard Hammer said Crosbie dropped out over a previously undisclosed reservation about relocating his family from Virginia. Christie expressed annoyance at the awkwardness of having a candidate bail out after so much fanfare about his hire and let loose on Crosbie. "When you say you'll accept a job and you look someone in the eye, I think it's important to keep your word," the governor said. "So I'm very disappointed in that, and I think it's probably a warning for anybody else who's interviewing for a job going forward." In the meantime, NJ Transit will reopen its search and go back to some of the finalists that had been in contention, he said. The governor also pooh-poohed the notion of additional fare hike cuts or deep cuts in service coming to NJ Transit in the wake of the new union agreement reached last month that gave workers a 21 percent wage increase over 8 1/2 years. "There's no big problem at NJ Transit," Christie said. "There will be no fare hikes and I don't think there will be any significant service cuts at all." NJ Transit faces a $45 million shortfall in its operating budget, but the governor was unconcerned. "They have deficits every year," he said. "But they have to manage, like every other department in state government has to manage their money ... They have some budget problems, and what they'd like me to do is say, 'Oh, OK. I'll just write you a check. That's not the way we manage this government." Claude Brodesser-Akner may be reached at cbrodesser@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @ClaudeBrodesser. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook. Robert Torricelli Trenton small business.JPG Former U.S. Senator from N.J. Robert Torricelli speaks at the 17th Annual Trenton Small Business Week Kickoff Breakfast held at the Trenton Marriott, in this 2010 file photo. (Martin Griff | The Times) (Martin Griff/The Times) TRENTON -- Former U.S. Sen. Robert Torricelli said if Hillary Clinton is elected president, he "might ask to do something" in her administration, and he described his interest in running for public office as "so-so." The New Jersey Democrat, who abandoned his reelection campaign in 2002 following an ethics investigation, shared these and other thoughts on New Jersey politics at an editorial board meeting with the Asbury Park Press on Wednesday. Torricelli, a real estate developer for about a dozen years, told Star-Ledger columnist Tom Moran in June that he pined for a return to public life after about a dozen years in the real estate world. "There's unfinished business in my life. I've always been a person whose life is about public service and public policy, and I do still think about it as part of my future," he said. Nearly a year later, the man nicknamed "The Torch" appears to be testing the waters. According to Politico NJ, he recently attended the Morris County Democratic convention and reported to the Federal Election Commission he paid $12,300 for "research services" to the New Hampshire-based WayForward Research last year. Torricelli said on Thursday the research was for other candidates and issues and not for himself. He said he intends to "remain politically active" by supporting causes that are meaningful to him, such as the state's economic development. Torricelli said he would be interested in running for the U.S. Senate again if there was ever an opportunity. New Jersey's senior U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez was indicted a year ago for allegedly intervening on behalf of a wealthy friend and campaign donor in exchange for luxurious gifts and vacations. "I have to, for my own protection, preface that there is no Senate seat available. I think Bob Menendez is going to get a fair trial and have a fair chance at getting cleared," Torricelli told the Asbury Park Press. "If Hillary (Clinton) gets elected, I might ask to do something, but only if it was something special, something interesting," Torricelli added. The U.S. Senate Committee on Ethics "severely admonished" Torricelli in 2002 for accepting gifts from businessman David Chang while advocating on Chang's behalf. Torricelli has vehemently denied he broke any laws. Federal prosecutors filed no charges against Torricelli, and the Justice Department took the unusual step of writing a letter stating he had not violated the law. Chang was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for making illegal donations. He died of liver cancer in 2012. Susan K. Livio may be reached at slivio@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @SusanKLivio. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook. 2 MCALLISTER SAPONE Malachy McAllister is seen with supporters in this file photo after avoiding another deportation proceeding in 2003. (File photo) TRENTON -- A former member of a paramilitary group in Northern Ireland who fled to New Jersey has received a temporary reprieve after federal officials sought to deport him. Malachy McAllister is being given "prosecutorial discretion" by the federal Department of Homeland Security that puts off immigration proceedings until March 2017, according to U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-9th Dist.). "This is a big deal for a guy who's paid his dues, came to America with a family after going through an excruciating situation and paid his debt to society," Pascrell said in a telephone interview Thursday. "He's of no threat to the United States whatsoever." McAllister, a stone mason and New York City bar owner who lives in Rutherford, has been seeking political asylum in the United States for two decades, citing his experiences during the tumultuous period of civil strife in Northern Ireland. He had served time in prison for his role in attacks on British police officers by an Irish Republican Army splinter group, the Irish National Liberation Army, in the 1980s. He was later released early on good behavior. He fled Northern Ireland with his family after their home was attacked by pro-British paramilitary forces in 1988, first seeking asylum in Canada. After his request was denied, he came to New Jersey in 1996. The Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in April 2006 turned down McAllister's request for asylum, and he has been fighting deportation ever since with the help of supporters on Capitol Hill, including Pascrell and U.S. Sen. Robert Menedez (D-NJ). Both lawmakers and others had asked Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, a New Jersey native, to intervene in the case. Earlier this month, McAllister was told to report to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in Newark on April 25 so authorities could remove him from the country. Pascrell and Menendez then introduced legislation designed to block ICE officials from removing McAllister, but the DHS decision has bought him time, the lawmakers said. "This was too close of a call, but I am glad that the Department of Homeland Security will not remove Mr. McAllister," Menendez said Thursday, adding that McAllister's family "has gone through enough already." Menendez and Pascrell said they would work with the DHS and McAllisters to find "a long term resolution." Washington correspondent Jonathan D. Salant contributed to this story. S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook. NJ STATEHOUSE Dome.jpg.JPG N.J. POLITICS ROUNDUP A collection of political news from the Statehouse and around New Jersey TRENTON -- Gov. Chris Christie returned to the campaign trail for Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump on Wednesday with a trip to Indiana. Meanwhile, Christie said on his radio show that Trump will clinch the GOP nomination with the New Jersey primary. And a new poll shows Trump and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton lead their rivals in Connecticut. CHRISTIE'S CAMPAIGN DEBT Christie's presidential campaign committee rented out its fundraising list and sold off equipment in an attempt to pay its creditors, according to Federal Election Commission reports. PALADINO'S 'RACCOONS' COMMENT ABOUT TRUMP Supporter and fellow businessman Carl Paladino said Trump is an "exterminator" appealing to voters who are frustrated with government and want "the raccoons out of the basement." MORAN ON TRUMP AND N.J. Star-Ledger columnist Tom Moran examines how New Jersey can stop Trump. EDITORIAL: SANDERS SHOULD STAY The Star-Ledger editorial board writes that Democratic presidential challenger Bernie Sanders should stay in the race. POLICE CAMERA LAW DEEMED UNCONSTITUTIONAL A New Jersey law requiring all new police vehicles be equipped with mobile camera systems has been struck down as unconstitutional by a state panel. NO DEAL ON ATLANTIC CITY State Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) and state Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto (D-Hudson) met about their opposing plans to help financially struggling Atlantic City, but no deal was reached. CHRISTIE: N.J. WON'T HELP WITH REFUGEES The Christie administration has notified the federal government that New Jersey will no longer participate in the refugee resettlement program, leaving it up to nonprofit groups. CHRISTIE'S SUPREME COURT NOMINEE GETS HEARING Christie's latest pick to serve on the state Supreme Court, Walter "Wally" Timpone, will get a hearing before the state Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. HAMILTON STAYS ON $10 BILL Alexander Hamilton, the founder of the city Paterson, will stay on the $10 bill after the U.S. Treasury Department instead said it plans to put abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill and remove President Andrew Jackson on the currency. NJ Advance Media staff writers Matt Arco, Claude Brodesser-Akner, Susan K. Livio, Jonathan D. Salant, and S.P. Sullivan contributed to this report. Brent Johnson may be reached at bjohnson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @johnsb01. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook. TRENTON -- Gov. Chris Christie's latest nominee to the state Supreme Court is being grilled Thursday morning in a confirmation hearing before the state Senate's judiciary committee -- the first hurdle before he can serve on New Jersey's highest court. Walter "Wally" Timpone -- a Democrat whom the Republican governor has picked to fill a six-year vacancy on the bench -- would need to be approved by the panel before the full Senate votes to confirm him. The committee is set to vote later in the day, and the Senate is scheduled to hold its hearing Tuesday. Timpone told the panel it is a "humbling honor" to be considered for the job. "I believe I am well prepared for the enormous responsibilities," said Timpone, a lawyer and former assistant U.S. attorney in New Jersey. But Timpone, also a member of the state Election Law Enforcement Commission, has already faced repeated questions about his decision to recuse himself on a controversial vote by the commission last year. ELEC was considering a complaint that alleged Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo, a Christie ally and leading north Jersey Democrat, violated campaign finance rules. Timpone's decision to sit on the sidelines, however, caused the investigation to ground to a halt. Timpone explained Thursday that years ago, he asked DiVincenzo to give his nephew -- then a recent college graduate with an interest in politics -- a job, which he did. After two years of working for DiVincenzo, Timpone said, his nephew had a falling out with the executive and resigned. Timpone told the committee that he should recuse himself when the complaint against DiVincenzo surfaced. "You're kind of darned if you do and darned if you don't," he said. "If I voted for the complaint, I was doing it out of malice because of my nephew's resignation. And if I voted against it, I was doing it because I owed him a favor." "I didn't want to damage my personal ethics or the reputation of ELEC," Timpone added. State Sen. Gerald Cardinale (R-Bergen) said "the effect of you withdrawing was essentially to give that person a pass." "Did that go through you mind?" Cardinale asked. Timpone replied that his "ethical obligation overpowered any of that." Meanwhile, Sen. Nia Gill (D-Essex) criticized how quickly Timpone was appearing before the committee. Christie nominated Timpone less than two weeks ago, and Gill said she received the nominee's questionnaire only Wednesday. She said she'd prefer more time to "vet" Timpone. The seat has been vacant since Christie ousted Justice John Wallace, a Democrat, from the Supreme Court in 2010. The governor had vowed to reshape the court in a more conservative fashion. Since then, state Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) led the effort to block five of Christie's nominees, and the governor ousted another justice. But the two broke the stalemate earlier this month when Christie nominated Timpone -- who despite being a Democrat is a longtime friend who even donated $2,700 to the governor's unsuccessful presidential bid in August, according to filings. At the time of his nomination, Timpone was also a partner in the Morristown office of the law firm of McElroy, Deutsch, Mulvaney & Carpenter -- a politically connected firm with close ties to Christie that received more than $8.1 million from the state since the governor took office through the end of last year. If confirmed, Timpone would bring the makeup of the court to three Democrats, three Republicans and one independent. Follow NJ.com/Politics for an update on the committee's vote. Brent Johnson may be reached at bjohnson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @johnsb01. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook. Peter Barnes State Sen. Peter Barnes III (right) shakes the hand of state Senate President Stephen Sweeney after he was unanimously approved by the Senate's judiciary committee Thursday. (Aristide Economopoulos | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com) TRENTON -- A state Senate committee signed off Thursday on one of its colleagues becoming a judge in New Jersey's Superior Court system -- a move that, if finalized, would cause a minor shakeup in the state Legislature. The house's judiciary committed voted unanimously, 13-0, to approve state Sen. Peter Barnes III for the judgeship in Middlesex County. Barnes, 59, of Edison, must now be confirmed by the full Senate. A vote is set for Monday. State Sen. Bob Smith (D-Middlesex) praised Barnes -- the son of former state Assemblyman Peter Barnes Jr. -- for having "great DNA and experience." Smith also noted that Barnes III (also D-Middlesex) would need to step down from the Senate to serve on the bench. "It's bittersweet," Smith said. "We are so happy to see you achieve your life's ambitions. But we are rally going to miss you here in the Senate." "You're going to be a fantastic judge," Smith added. The Middlesex County Democratic Organization is tasked with appointing a replacement for Barnes in the Senate. It's expected the group will pick Assemblyman Patrick Diegnan, a fellow Democrat who also represents Middlesex County's 18th legislative district. But that would also leave a vacancy in the Assembly, which the county Democratic organization would also fill. NJ Advance Media reported Thursday that four people have thrown their names into the running. Three are Edison Township Council members: Bob Diehl, Rob Karabinchak, and Sapana Shah. The fourth is Highland Park councilwoman Elsie Foster-Dublin. Barnes is himself a former Edison councilman. He then served in the Assembly from 2007 to 2014, when was elected to the Senate. Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, nominated Barnes to the Superior Court earlier this month. Brent Johnson may be reached at bjohnson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @johnsb01. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook. MADISON -- At an event at Fairleigh Dickinson University on Wednesday, New Jersey Supreme Court Chief Justice Stuart Rabner told students and faculty the story about what the mobster said on a wire back in 1973. Simone "Sam The Plumber" DeCavalcante, who later did time on extortion charges, was discussing with his cohorts "which public officials they could buy," Rabner recalled. The choices seemed endless. "But there's one guy, this prosecutor, Byrne, that we can't buy," DeCavalcante said on the tape. Rabner was speaking at the university's inaugural Governor Brendan T. Byrne Annual Lecture, named in honor of the 92-year-old former county prosecutor, judge and New Jersey governor, who was in attendance at the event titled, "Courage and Ethics in Government." U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman, the keynote speaker, later recalled Byrne's tenure as a Superior Court judge, when he ruled New Jersey's former death penalty statute unconstitutional. "The opinion was not only controversial, it was extremely unpopular in many corners," Fishman said. The decision was upheld by the state Supreme Court, and Byrne later vetoed two death penalty bills during his tenure as governor. In a wide-ranging speech about the hard choices made by those in government, Fishman frequently referenced current tensions between police officers and the communities they serve, including his own office's recently announced consent decree with the Newark Police Department. The program, more than a decade in the making, will allow federal officials to monitor the department after several investigations uncovered a pattern of unconstitutional practices including improper searches and stops, racial imbalance in arrests and excessive use of force. Fishman, the state's top federal law enforcement official, said the majority of police officers performing their jobs honorably have to answer for those who betray the badge. "This is a hard time to be a cop," he said. "It was never easy, not if you're the kind of law enforcement officer who cares. But it's even harder now. Every cop -- and there are almost 700,000 sworn officers across the country -- every one of them is viewed in some way as responsible for what every other cop does everywhere else." S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook. TRENTON -- Gov. Chris Christie says he'll "never say 'never'" to the vice presidency, but he doesn't expect that Donald Trump will pick him as his running mate. Appearing on his monthly call-in radio show "Ask the Governor" on New Jersey 101.5-FM on Wednesday evening, Christie was asked by moderator Eric Scott: "Do you want to be in Washington in some capacity?" The New Jersey governor answered that "I ran for the job I wanted," referencing to his failed presidential bid, which collapsed after a sixth place showing in the New Hampshire primary in February. Two weeks later, he endorsed Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination. "The way I think about these things, you never say 'never,'" said Christie, "When we talked about Mitt Romney vetting me for vice president four years ago, I said I didn't really want to be vice-president. But you would never say 'never' if the nominee of your party calls you up and asks you to consider something." The governor paused. "I say never say 'never' because I love my country," he said. "But I absolutely believe that what will happen is that I'll serve the full eight years of my term (as governor) and then in January of 2018, I'll be getting, hopefully, a well-paid position in the private sector. It's time for me to make some money." For years, the governor has maintained that he didn't mind earning less than First Lady Mary Pat Christie, a Wall Street bond trader. "My family's made a lot of sacrifices, financial and otherwise," Christie said. "It's certainly Mary Pat's desire that I go out and finally out-earn her." The Christies have not released their 2015 tax returns, filing an extension with the IRS earlier this week. However, in 2014, the Christie family earned close to a million dollars, most of it coming from First Lady Mary Pat Christie's job at specialty trading firm Angelo, Gordon. That puts them easily in the top 1 percent of income earners in the U.S. In 2014, her bonus alone eclipsed the governor's $175,000 salary, but the First Lady has been on a hiatus for the better part of a year now. Asked if he would had a burning desire to become the U.S. Attorney General, or the Secretary of Homeland Security, the governor shook his head and answered simply, "I had a burning desire to be President." Claude Brodesser-Akner may be reached at cbrodesser@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @ClaudeBrodesser. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook. PHILADELPHIA -- While homebuyers looking to move to Philadelphia face climbing real estate prices overall, a change of zip code within the city limits dramatically alters the market. Philadelphia experienced the largest increase in real estate prices in the region in the first three months of this year, according to the quarterly Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Fox & Roach, Realtors HomExpert Market report, with the median sales price climbing nearly 13 percent throughout the city compared to the same time last year. The report found that 3,395 homes were sold in Philadelphia in the first quarter of 2016. The median price -- meaning half sold for more and half sold for less -- of those homes was $158,000, up from $139,900 in the first quarter of 2015. But that citywide price may soar or plunge depending on the neighborhood. In a zip code that includes Old City, the median sales price for the nearly 60 homes sold in the first three months of this year was $426,612, the report found In struggling sections of North Philadelphia, however, the median sales price of homes reached as low as $21,250. The report, which was released on Friday, offers up a breakdown by zip code of the real estate market in Philadelphia in the first quarter of this year. See what the median home price in 10 Philadelphia neighborhoods affords potential homebuyers in the gallery above. Erin O'Neill may be reached at eoneill@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @LedgerErin. Find NJ.com on Facebook. CARNEYS POINT TWP. -- Authorities were able to locate a stolen tablet after pinging the device's location and arresting a South Jersey man. Carneys Point Police traced the stolen tablet to the area of North Broadway in the township. Authorities recovered the stolen tablet at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday and arrested Robert Hayward, 44, of Penns Grove. Hayward was charged with receiving stolen property and was released pending further court action. The tablet was returned to the owner. Brittany Wehner may be reached at bwehner@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @brittanymwehner. Find NJ.com on Facebook. PITTSGROVE TWP. -- A 46-year-old South Jersey man has been charged with aggravated assault after hitting his neighbor in the head with a shovel, according to New Jersey State Police. Stacey Marciano Stacey Marciano, of Pittsgrove Township, was arrested Wednesday afternoon on charges of aggravated assault and weapon possession for an unlawful purpose. Authorities and emergency personnel responded to a property located off Jesse Bridge Road for reports of an assault at 2:30 p.m. Marciano allegedly struck his neighbor in the head with the shovel because of an ongoing dispute. The neighbor, a 68-year-old man, was flown to Cooper University Hospital, where he is listed in stable condition, according to police. Marciano was processed and held at the Salem County Correctional Facility, in Mannington, in default of $30,000 bail. Brittany Wehner may be reached at bwehner@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @brittanymwehner. Find NJ.com on Facebook. dog2.jpg Fito Irribarra of Hillsborough and his 6-pound Maltese, Angleo, who would lick him when his glucose level was high. (Courtesy of Rhona Lava-Irribarra) HILLSBOROUGH -- The reward for the return of Angelo, a beloved 6-pound Matese who alerted his owner when his glucose level was high by licking his arm or ear, has been increased from $300 to $900 by his owners. Fito Irribarra and his wife, Rhona Lava-Irribarra of Hillsborough, announced the increase Wednesday. The pair continue to search for their dog since he was stolen from the cab of Irribarra's truck during a delivery in the Bronx last Thursday. Fito Irribarra, 58, is an independent trucker. He took Angelo along with him for a furniture delivery on Jerome Avenue. While he was making the delivery, somebody snatched the little white dog from the cab of the truck he was driving. Irribarra has gone to the Bronx neighborhood nearly every day since Angelo was stolen but has come up empty. A detective from the 46th Precinct in the Bronx is handling the investigation, said Rhona Lava-Irribarra. "We're still looking and praying that he comes," said Rhona Lava-Irrbarra. "I think more than anything, my husband misses his best buddy so much." Rhona Lava-Irribarra said that police have received a few calls and a couple of people have reached out with information on websites but the leads haven't led to Angelo coming home. "There are some amazing people out there," said an emotional Rhona Lava-Irribarra. "Some have offered to help with the reward. It has really restored our faith in humanity after having something like this so negatively affect our lives. It's been difficult. We want to thank everybody." Though Angelo looks like a puppy, he's actually 14 months old and fully grown. Like Irribarra, Angelo was born in Chile, and was brought to United States in July by Irribarra's sister. Dave Hutchinson may be reached at dhutchinson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @DHutch_SL. Find NJ.com on Facebook. PHILADELPHIA -- A Philadelphia father who says cannabis oil helped save his young child's life launched an online campaign on Wednesday hoping to raise $3,000 to finish a film about his now two-year-old son's experience following a 2014 cancer diagnosis. By Thursday morning, nearly 200 people had contributed more than twice that amount toward "Waldo on Weed: A Documentary." Brian Dwyer, one of the founders of Pizza Brain, wrote that Waldo became violently sick after beginning chemotherapy for a rare form of eye cancer and the then six-month-old stopped crawling, laughing and eating. "Basically everything we knew about Waldo started to disappear," Dwyer says in a video posted on his GoFundMe page. Though it was against the law in Pennsylvania, Dwyer said his family decided to start giving his son cannabis oil and "we were absolutely floored by the results." Dwyer said Waldo stopped puking and stopped losing weight. Waldo is now tumor free and Dwyer wrote that "cannabis oil was one of the biggest contributing factors" to his son's success. The 31-year-old told PhillyVoice that "in tandem with chemotherapy, it was wonderful. It was like a one-two punch." Though Pennsylvania recently legalized the use of medical marijuana in the state, Dwyer told PhillyVoice the bill doesn't go far enough. Dwyer plans to move to Oregon, Metro Philly reported, to ensure his family has access to cannabis oil. Erin O'Neill may be reached at eoneill@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @LedgerErin. Find NJ.com on Facebook. The Presbyterian Church in Westfield (PCW) invites the community to a Fish 'n Chips Dinner on Friday, May 6, at 5:30-7:15 pm. The event will be held in the handicap accessible Assembly Hall, located at 140 Mountain Ave. Famed vendor Argyle Restaurant of Kearny will be serving their renowned Scottish Style Fish 'n Chips complete with malt vinegar and coleslaw. Dine in or drive through pick up are available. Desserts and beverages are available for dine-in only. Also offered are chicken tenders and baked cod. Adult meals are $16 and children's meals are $8. Proceeds will support the Westfield church's sister congregation in Livingstone, Zambia. During this dinner four members from the Zambia church will be joining us. Zambian jewelry and handcrafts will be offered for sale during the dinner. Please PRE-ORDER your meals by May 4 with the church office. The order form may be downloaded at http://www.westfieldpc.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2016FlyerOrderForm2.pdf or call the church office at 908-233-0301, or stop by the church office at 140 Mountain Ave. Checks should be made payable to "PCW", memo: Fish n Chips. This item was submitted by St. Agnes Church in Clark. WANTAGE -- The woman who owned the township home where a decomposed and partially skeletonized body was found Sunday suffers from "significant mental health issues," authorities said. State Police responded to the home on Sunday evening when a farmer working in a nearby field reported an unresponsive woman on the porch of the home. The woman, whose name hasn't been released, was disoriented and wasn't able to communicate with officers. She was taken to Newton Medical Center where she was still receiving treatment as of Thursday. State Police troopers found a man's severely decomposed body in one of the bedrooms when they conducted a check of the home. A dead cat was also found in the back seat of a car parked in the driveway. Sussex County First Assistant Prosecutor Greg Mueller said Thursday the medical examiner hasn't yet been able to provide an official opinion regarding the date of death. The man's identity hasn't yet been confirmed and is not being released at this time, he said. State Police have only received one previous call for assistance from this residence, Mueller said. That call, which occurred in 2008, did not require police intervention. Troopers investigating the scene on Sunday noted the home was littered with debris and garbage and had no electricity. State Police initially said the home was declared structurally unsafe, but Mueller said Thursday the residence hasn't been declared uninhabitable. Anyone with information about this incident can call the Sussex County Prosecutor's Office at 973-383-1570, or the New Jersey State Police at 973-383-1514. Justin Zaremba may be reached at jzaremba@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinZarembaNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook. ELIZABETH -- From September of last year through this past January, Westfield resident Christine Chansky wrote prescriptions for painkillers and anti-anxiety medication, despite having no license to practice medicine, authorities say. On Wednesday, Chansky was issued a summons charging her with three counts of third-degree distribution of drugs, acting Union County Prosecutor Grace Park said in a statement. Chansky also faces a single count each of third-degree unauthorized practice of medicine and third-degree obtaining a controlled dangerous substance by fraud, Park said. Chansky is accused of distributing the drugs by illegally writing prescriptions for a friend and a family member, as well as by writing prescriptions to nonexistent patients, even though she was unlicensed to practice medicine in New Jersey, the prosecutor said. Westfield police and investigators from the prosecutor's office discovered through a three-month long investigation that Chansky had distributed nearly 1,400 pills of the anti-insomnia medicine zolpidem, an opioid painkiller, tramadol, and an anti-anxiety medication, lprazolam, authorities said. They said Chansky previously had a New York State medical license, but that it was suspended in May 2015, and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) suspended her from writing prescriptions in any state in September 2015. Authorities are asking that anyone with information about Chansky's activities to call Westfield police detectives Dennis DaSilva or Baron Chambliss at (908) 789-4000. Third-degree crimes carry a maximum sentence of five years in prison upon conviction. Attempts to reach Chansky for a comment were unsuccessful. Tom Haydon may be reached at thaydon@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @Tom_HaydonSL. Find NJ.com on Facebook. You have permission to edit this article. Edit Close Former longtime north shore District Attorney Walter Reed eaves the federal courthouse after pleading not guilty to federal corruption charges in New Orleans federal court Monday, May 4, 2015.. His son, Steven Reed, also pleaded not guilty. (Photo by David Grunfeld, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune) New computer modeling shows land expected to be built by two sediment diversions on the Mississippi River below New Orleans through 2070. Only known film of Louis Armstrong in studio lands at New York museum 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. Community Its now easier than ever to connect and chat with others in your local area. You can connect with your community by asking general questions, give area updates and recommendations and even let your community know about local events that are taking place. The confirmed team changes and injury news heading into the eighth round of the 2016 NRL Telstra Premiership. Draw Widget - Round 8 - Broncos vs Rabbitohs Broncos: Alex Glenn has been ruled out with a hip injury, with Sam Thaiday to start in the back row and Herman Ese'ese to join the bench for his Broncos debut. Rabbitohs: Dane Nielsen and Cody Walker have travelled with the team to Brisbane, with Nielsen in particular rated a chance of playing his first game for South Sydney, while Alex Johnston hasn't travelled and remains sidelined with a hamstring injury. Draw Widget - Round 8 - Bulldogs vs Titans Bulldogs: No changes expected for the Bulldogs. Titans: Rookie half Cameron Cullen is on standby for Ashley Taylor, who is rated as highly unlikely to play after being hospitalised with abdominal pains this week. Draw Widget - Round 8 - Raiders vs Wests Tigers Raiders: No changes expected at this stage, with Blake Austin definitely out with a hamstring injury. Wests Tigers: No changes to the team named on Tuesday, with Sauaso Sue confirmed to make his return from concussion. Draw Widget - Round 8 - Cowboys vs Eels Cowboys: No changes expected, with John Asiata again expected to be left out of the 17. Eels: Tepai Moeroa and Junior Paulo have shaken off injury concerns and are set to play in an unchanged side. Draw Widget - Round 8 - Sharks vs Panthers Sharks: Luke Lewis returns from suspension this week with no other changes likely for Cronulla. Panthers: Sam McKendry is out through suspension, with Jeremy Latimore set to come into the side in jersey 21. Elijah Taylor is likely to drop off the extended bench. James Segeyaro is likely to be another week away despite showing signs of having recovered from his broken arm. Draw Widget - Round 8 - Knights vs Sea Eagles Knights: Mickey Paea could replace Jacob Saifiti on the bench, while last week's concussion concerns Jarrod Mullen, Nathan Ross and Tyler Randell will all play. Co-captain Jeremy Smith returns at lock. Sea Eagles: Brenton Lawrence is confirmed to return from his hip complaint while Matt Parcell is also likely to return after being a late withdrawal with a hamstring injury last week. Draw Widget - Round 8 - Dragons vs Roosters Dragons: Euan Aitken is in doubt with a hamstring injury he picked up last week, with Kurt Mann on standby to return to the Dragons backline. Roosters: Boyd Cordner is keen to make his long-awaited return from a pectoral injury on Monday, but Jared Waerea-Hargreaves is likely to be another week away. Isaac Liu is out suspended. If Cordner returns, 18th man Abraham Papalii is likely to drop out of the side. Draw Widget - Round 8 - Storm vs Warriors Storm: Tim Glasby is in doubt with concussion while Young Tonumaipea will return from a calf injury to replace debutant Suliasi Vunivalu on the wing. Warriors: Manu Vatuvei will return from a hamstring injury as named. 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Ireland Uruguay, Eastern Republic of Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of Viet Nam, Socialist Republic of Wallis and Futuna Islands Western Sahara Yemen Zambia, Republic of Zimbabwe Joyce Russell Porter County Reporter Joyce has been a reporter for nearly 40 years, including 23 years with The Times. She's a native of Merrillville, but has lived in Portage for 39 years. She covers municipal and school government in Porter County. Follow Joyce Russell Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today Since I started this blog last September, I've written a lot about what records can be found online at various pay and free web sites. But there is a treasure trove of information to help local genealogists just a short drive from any place in the Region. I decided I'd start visiting some of the places where we amateur genealogists can get elbow deep into our family histories. My first stop was the Suzanne G. Long Local History Room at the Hammond Public Library, 564 State St. There I found volunteer Amanda Aguilera, a college student working on her masters degree in library science from Syracuse University, with a bright smile and a willingness to help. The room is full of records, books, photographs of times past. Obituaries, said Aguilera, is usually the first place she sends people if they are wanting to find a long lost ancestor with Hammond our Region ties. The obituary data base, with obits from The Times, dates back to the early 1900s. Once a name is found in the index, the microfiche of the newspaper can be found and obit located. The obituaries are only the tip of the iceberg of historical information. Here's a list of other resources within the library: - Biography files of the famous and not so famous natives of Hammond and the surrounding area. Some are hand-written recollections, some files contain newspaper clippings and other items. - Photo collection. The history room has files upon files of old photographs. Some are of streets, some of people, some of buildings. - City directories, not only from Hammond dating back to the late 1800s through the 1980s and 1990s, but also from Lake County beginning in 1999. They also have several directories from neighboring communities, including Gary. - "Over the Teacups" is a collection of columns written by Beatrice Hansen beginning in 1906. It's the closest thing to a local gossip column, telling who had lunch with whom or who threw a party and who attended. But, there are more than 1,000 people listed in the columns -- each a potential hint about our ancestors. - Cemetery indexes of most cemeteries in the Region, including Porter County, telling who is buried where. - Times negatives. There are boxes upon boxes of negatives of photographs that ran in The Times from 1958 to the late 1990s when we moved to digital photography. - Scrapbooks. The history room has become a depository of scrapbooks, primarily completed by various clubs and organizations from the Hammond Women's Club to PEO to Altrusa. - Yearbooks. There are decades worth of yearbooks from each of the Hammond area high schools. - Web resources including access to the Ancestry Library Edition. Accessing Ancestry through the library edition is free of charge and is helpful when trying to find a particular record, such as a census. However, there are fewer records available on the library site than on a personal Ancestry.com subscription. "There is really some pretty amazing stuff here, but you really have to dig," said Agulera. Yes there is, some pretty amazing stuff that a genealogy nerd like myself could get lost for days in. The history room is open from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday; 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Wednesday and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday. Also check out the library's website at hammond.lib.in.us for more information on this valuable resource. Let me know your favorite place to visit to get deep into your family's records by dropping me a line at joyce.russell@nwi.com Raw steel production in the Great Lakes region rose to 639,000 tons last week, after a sharp drop the previous week. Local steel output has been recovering this year after imports grabbed a record-breaking 29 percent of total market share last year. Imports were down to only 24 percent of the market share last month, and Great Lakes production has risen in 11 of the 16 weeks so far this year. Overall U.S. steel output rose by 2.4 percent last week, according to an American Iron and Steel Institute estimate. Most of the raw steel production in the Great Lakes region takes place in the Chicago area, mainly Lake and Porter counties. Indiana, which also has steelmaking operations in Fort Wayne and Crawfordsville, has led the nation in steel production for 35 straight years, largely because of the big local mills on the Lake Michigan shoreline in the Calumet Region. Production in the Southern District, which spans mini-mills across the South, rose to 571,000 tons last week, compared to 552,000 tons a week before. Total U.S. raw steel production last week was about 1.69 million tons, up from 1.65 million tons a week earlier. Nationally, domestic steel mills had a capacity utilization rate of 72.4 percent last week, up from 70.8 a week earlier. The capacity utilization rate had been 69.8 percent at the same time a year earlier, and some industry analysts say it wouldnt be healthy unless it were more than 90 percent. Year-to-date steel output in the United States has been 26.5 million net tons, at a capacity utilization rate of 70.5 percent, according to the American Iron and Steel Institute. Output had been 27.1 million tons at the same time in 2015. Charles Ross is stirring up some fun in the Windy City. Ross, author of "One-Man Star Wars Trilogy," is the star of the otherworldly show, which started Tuesday and runs through April 24, at Broadway Playhouse in Chicago. "I started doing the show in 2001," said Ross, during a recent telephone interview. A native of Canada, the author first performed the show in Toronto. He's also starred in "One-Man Lord of the Rings." The performer said he's long been a "Star Wars" fan. "And over the 15 years I've been doing this show, things have changed (in it). It's always a work in progress." Ross said audiences, through the years, have really brushed up on their "Star Wars" knowledge. "Audiences are very savvy," he added. His "One-Man Star Wars Trilogy" is very much a family show and he has always tried to steer clear of anything not suited for all ages. "It's suitable for the youngest to the oldest of audience members." Within the show, the performer/author said he has fun with the "Star Wars" lore and movies. "I poke fun at the campy (style) of the 1970s version," he added. Fans of the films will find much to enjoy in the show, which has a bit of an interactive feel to it. "Because it's a one-person show and a live show, there's always a (bit of spontaneity) to it." If a cell phone goes off or someone comes in late or makes a comment, Ross can do a bit of improv. "I'm here to play," he said, with a laugh. "You never know what you're going to get with the audience." Ross said watching "Star Wars" as a young kid was a great experience. "The fact that someone could get in a space ship and zoom away and go to the other side of the galaxy was unthinkable," he said, adding he was mesmerized by it all. "Star Wars," Ross said, has great appeal to a mixed bag of audience members. "I see people from every walk of life. Some are complete newbies and some are big fans." Ross said his one-man show was last in Chicago in 2003. This time around, though it pretty much stays the same, fans will definitely notice some new material. The actor encourages theatergoers to "get their nerd on" and check out the production. FYI: "One-Man Star Wars Trilogy" runs through April 24 at Broadway Playhouse at Water Tower Place, Chicago. Tickets are $35 to $65. Call (800) 775-2000 or visit BroadwayInChicago.com. CROWN POINT A Gary man accused of shooting to death his best friend and wounding a woman will stand trial again Oct. 31. Lake County Criminal Judge Salvador Vasquez on Thursday set the case for trial a week after jurors were unable to reach a verdict following eight days of evidence. The jury spent about eight hours deliberating before Vasquez declared a mistrial. Anthony Williams, 30, faces charges of murder, attempted murder, carjacking, aggravated battery, battery committed by means of a deadly weapon, battery resulting in bodily injury to an endangered adult and criminal recklessness. The second trial is expected to last five to seven days. Defense attorney Jamise Perkins filed a motion Thursday asking that Williams be released from custody. He will return to court May 5 for a hearing on the matter. Williams has been held without bail in Lake County Jail since he was arrested days after Damian Reedus was found shot to death inside a van parked in the 1900 block of Pennsylvania Street in Gary. Aja Jester testified she was driving the men home early Dec. 2, 2013, in her van when Williams opened fire on Reedus. She was then shot in the neck. Jester told jurors that Williams pulled her from the drivers seat, threw her on the ground and told her she had to die. He allegedly pointed a gun at her, but it did not go off. Williams privileges at the jail were limited while the case was pending after prosecutors found letters he allegedly wrote asking someone to do whatever they had to do to convince a witness to not testify. EAST CHICAGO Councilman Robert Battle, D-3rd, met the deadline to respond to a petition for removal that was delivered to him at the Porter County Jail on March 31. He remains held there on federal drug charges and is accused of fatally shooting Reimundo Camarillo Jr. on Oct. 12 in East Chicago. Battle had until Monday to respond to the notice that was delivered by City Clerk Adrian Santos on behalf of the City Council on March 31. Santos said an unidentified female delivered Battle's response to the East Chicago city clerk's office late in the afternoon on April 15 and that it was dated April 5. "It was addressed to the entire East Chicago Common Council," Santos said. The statement of charges that gives grounds to remove Battle from the council was drawn up by council attorney Stephen Bower. Bower said it stated that Battle is unable to perform his duties as councilman due to his incarceration. "He has not in fact attended any council meetings or voted since mid-October of last year," Bower said. "A major duty of councilmen is to attend public meetings and vote." After the charges were delivered to Battle, the council waited to see if he would respond or not, or if he might simply resign. Battle's response was in disagreement with the charges. "He simply denied the allegations or facts that were in the notice of removal that was served on him, which is going to trigger the necessity for a special council meeting to have a hearing to consider the petition for removal," Bower said. Bower said it is expected that City Council President Juda S. Parks will call for a special meeting when the council meets at its regular meeting on April 25. At that special meeting, Battle's representative would have an opportunity to respond to the charges. The City Council had a closed meeting scheduled on April 20 to discuss the appointment of an attorney to present evidence to support Battle's removal from the council. After both sides present their evidence in a special meeting, Battle's eight fellow council members would then vote to determine his future. "There has to be six votes to remove," Bower said. LANSING Police are seeking information about a man suspected of robbing restaurants in the village and surrounding communities. The robberies have occurred at local businesses in the past several months, police said. Police on Wednesday released surveillance images of the man, who is described as a light-skinned African-American in his late teens to early 20s. He is 5 foot 5 to 5 foot 7 inches tall and has a slight build. The man has been seen carrying a black backpack and wearing hooded sweatshirts and a mask over his face, police said. The sweatshirts range from all black to gray with a paisley pattern. Anyone with information about the man is asked to call Lansing police at (708) 895-7150. A Gary man was charged Wednesday in connection with allegations he slapped the buttocks of a staff member at a Hobart health care facility three separate times. Bartholomew Eubanks, 59, allegedly told police he slapped the woman's buttocks on one occasion because it aroused him sexually, Lake Criminal Court records say. Hobart police were called April 15 to Sebo's Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, 4410 W. 49th Ave., for a report of sexual battery, an affidavit says. A staff member told police Eubanks slapped her buttocks April 12, 14 and 15. After the alleged battery on April 14, Eubanks was transferred to an East Chicago facility for a psychological evaluation but returned to Sebo's the morning of April 15, the affidavit says. Another employee said staff members had made multiple complaints about Eubanks making sexual comments to them and touching them in sexual ways, court records say. Eubanks faces charges of felony sexual battery and misdemeanor battery. He was not in custody as of Wednesday afternoon and also has a warrant for possession of cocaine, Hobart police Lt. James Gonzales said. Eubanks' last known address is in the 4300 block of East 10th Avenue in Gary's Aetna section, he said. MICHIGAN CITY A 16-year-old boy and a man were wounded in two separate shootings since Sunday, police said. Police responded about 10:44 p.m. Tuesday to the 800 block of Walker Street for reports of shots fired. A short time later, the 16-year-old boy showed up at Franciscan St. Anthony Health hospital in Michigan City for treatment, police said. The boy told police he was a passenger in a vehicle and was helping the driver back up when he heard gunshots and told the driver to take him to the hospital. The boy was later taken by helicopter to a South Bend hospital, police said. On Sunday, a man was taken into custody after shooting another man in the arm, police said. Police responded about 5:30 a.m. to the 400 block of North Woodlawn Avenue after a woman reported a man had been knocking on her windows and yelling. The man left before police arrived. The woman called Dennis Gooch, her boyfriend, who arrived and was talking with the woman when the man returned about 6:45 a.m., police said. The men argued, and Gooch produced a handgun and fired one shot that struck the man in the arm, police said. The man was taken to a South Bend-area hospital. Gooch was taken into custody and later formally charged with Level 5 felony battery, police said. Anyone with information about the shooting of the teenager is asked to call Detective Sgt. Ken Drake at (219) 874-3221, ext. 331. LANSING The residency of a Sunnybrook Elementary District 171 School Board member is being questioned. At Monday's meeting, Jada Curry questioned whether Lance Lape lives within the boundaries of District 171. She said she had been approached by several community members and district staff members regarding Lape's residency. Curry asked Lape to confirm that he does live within the district and not in Crown Point with family members. "I have a legal residence in Lansing, Illinois," Lape said. Lape then stated that open session was not the proper venue to discuss the matter, but Curry disagreed. "The public wants to know," Curry said. "The community votes you in, so they should know." Lape said then board President David Lilly approached him about three months ago regarding residency rumors and that Lape explained that while his children were living in Crown Point, he was in Lansing. He said he provided Lilly with his Lansing address. Lilly said Lape had given him a return label for postage and the address indicated was that of a district secretary. Lape told the board on Monday that he will provide proof of residency prior to next month's board meeting. After the meeting, Curry said she had planned to bring up the question of Lape's residency even before he did not support her advancement to the seat of vice president. Earlier in the meeting, the board held elections of officers. Last May, Curry and Lilly voted no when the board appointed Lape to a two-year term on the board. At that time, Curry said it would be going against board policy to not post the opening and accept applications from the public for the position. Lape has served on the board since 2007 but did not run in the April 2015 election. He said last May that he did not run because he was not certain if he would continue to live within the district. In other district news, the board unanimously approved offering summer school at an approximate cost of $45,000 plus benefits so that 20 students per grade level can attend from June 6 through June 30. District 171 consists of Nathan Hale Elementary and Heritage Middle Schools and serves students from Lansing and Lynwood. The board also accepted resignation letters from Heritage Middle School special education teacher Efrem Haymore and lead lunchroom hostess Shannon Porter, both effective May 27. Michael McGowan was hired as the district's new coordinator of information technology, pending a satisfactory background check. CHESTERTON It's going to be a long and perhaps frustrating summer for motorists trying to navigate highways around the Duneland area. A pair of workers with the Indiana Department of Transportation began dropping large orange and white barrels along Ind. 49 Monday morning, signifying the start of a resurfacing project that is expected to continue through Aug. 15, according to Doug Moats, public information officer with INDOT's Northwest District. Projects are also scheduled this summer along the local stretches of both Interstate 94 and the Indiana Toll Road, he said. State highway officials met Wednesday morning with representatives of the town to address concerns, including emergency vehicles and the rerouting of traffic, said Town Manager Bernie Doyle. "We anticipate conflict," he said. "We anticipate some problems." Local residents will figure out how to avoid the problem areas, Doyle said. His concern lies with inbound traffic and the work's impact on local merchants and on events such as the 4th of July celebrations. Chesterton Street Commissioner John Schnadenberg said while the work along Ind. 49 will cause inconveniences, there has been a need for it for years. "We can't have it both ways," he said of those complaining. "They're here to fix it." He encouraged motorists to seek out the alternative north-south routes either east or west of Ind. 49. Ind. 49 is being resurfaced from Oak Hill Road south to the toll road entrance, Moats said. Portions of that 6.5-mile stretch have already been restricted to one lane in either direction, which is resulting in delays and illegal U-turns during busy travel times. The Ind. 49 project is starting with the inside of the two lanes in both directions, Moats said. Crews have begun the deep patching work where needed, which will be followed by the resurfacing. Once the inside lanes are completed along the entire route, work will switch to the outside lanes, he said. "So there will be some sort of restrictions in place the entire project," Moats said. Chesterton Police Chief David Cincoski encouraged motorists to allow more time for travel through the affected areas and/or seek alternative routes. "Motorists are asked to drive with caution in construction areas by decreasing speeds despite the posted speed limits, leaving extra traveling distance between vehicles, and being aware of the presence of construction workers and equipment," he said. "Motorists are also advised that traffic violations within construction zones can result in the doubling of traffic fines and stiffer criminal penalties." The state highway department is also carrying out repair work this summer along Interstate 94 in the Chesterton area, which will result in lane restrictions, Moats said. The local lanes of the toll road will also be restricted this summer as a result of a two-year resurfacing project from the Ohio to Illinois state lines, he said. The toll road was leased out by the state, which no longer is responsible for the maintenance. The reason so much road work is happening all at once is that additional money has been made available by the state, which accelerated projects already on the books, Moats said. LAPORTE LaPorte County residents asked county officials Wednesday to publicly oppose a proposed rail line. Instead, county commissioners reaffirmed their position to keep an open mind, citing potential for a lot of new jobs. If this would ever happen, why would I take a chance in case it does brings jobs, in case it does bring investments? Why would I take a chance and throw that away? Thats foolish and whoever says that I should say no is a fool, LaPorte County Commission president Dave Decker said. The line from southeast Wisconsin to Kingsbury Industrial Park proposed by the Great Lakes Basin Railroad Corp. is intended to bypass the major rail bottleneck in Chicago to reduce delivery times and save on transportation costs. The line would end at Kingsbury in LaPorte County, where products would be moved to other existing tracks to reach their final destinations. Being so early in the approvals process, the commissioners said they want more information before taking a formal position. They also adopted guidelines the railroad would have to meet to receive their support. One requirement would be not placing the line through any town or community. The rail line would run close to where Steve Johnson resides on County Road 50 South between LaPorte and Westville. Among his fears are lower property values and ruining whats now a quiet, scenic area. Johnson also questioned the railroads claims that many long-term, high-paying jobs would be created. Is there a comprehensive economic study or is one going to be initiated? he said. Decker and other county officials again emphasized that opponents shouldnt panic because the line may never come about and, if it does, itll be five years or even much longer. They also felt the developer may have come out with the project too quickly with a major part of the financing not yet being secured. Commissioner Mike Bohacek, though, said he understands why people are upset so early in the process. Anytime anybody starts talking about a big rail project like this and they draw a map and they put the line through your house, I think I would be very upset and I am upset as a commissioner because I think the developer got a little bit ahead of himself, Bohacek said. Bohacek went on to say that he wants more facts. Just like a lot of the taxpayers are missing a lot of the facts, were missing a lot of them, too, Bohacek said. To be for or against something when we have such limited information would be short sighted. CORYDON, Ind. For the first time in nearly two centuries, the Indiana Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in its original chamber a tiny room on the second floor of the state capitol abandoned in 1824 for Indianapolis. Excluding the video cameras and microphones webcasting the bicentennial event to schools across the state, the setting and legal back-and-forth would have been familiar to the inaugural three-justice court that first heard cases in the square limestone building shortly after Indiana became a state on Dec. 11, 1816. Likewise, the question at issue before the now five-member high court was the timeless debate of what duty a homeowner owes to his or her guests if they are injured while visiting. The case stemmed from a May 8, 2010, Allen County incident where a man died following a fight at a birthday party while the homeowner slept upstairs. The unique setting for the hearing required the justices to squeeze together at a single table stretching nearly the width of the white-paneled room, which also has large windows with gray trim and brown hardwood floors. In addition, the justices were seated at the same level as the attorneys. So when each side stood to present its case the lawyers loomed over the justices; a reversal of the arrangements at the Statehouse, where lawyers must look up to address the court. That did not appear to affect the number or quality of questions asked by the justices, even as the usual red, yellow and green lights discretely indicating when a lawyer should speak were replaced by a person holding up cards that listed the time remaining. Chief Justice Loretta Rush, who spent part of her childhood in Munster, said that's because the justices' role is not altered by where or when the court meets. "While much has changed in the last 200 years, the court's mandate is the same: Carry on our constitutional mission of protecting individual rights and liberties, upholding and interpreting the rule of law and providing fair hearings without delay," Rush said. One major change coming to the court is the retirement of Justice Brent Dickson, a Hobart native, on April 29 after more than 30 years on the bench, the second-longest tenure in state history. The Corydon case was the final oral argument Dickson is participating in. Rush noted that Justice Isaac Blackford, the only person to serve on the Supreme Court longer than Dickson, heard his first case in the same room. Indiana's first Constitution also was written inside and under an elm tree outside the building that now is the Corydon Capitol State Historic Site, located near the Ohio River about 280 miles southeast of the Region. Rush allowed Dickson, who served as chief justice of Indiana from 2012 to 2014, to lead the court proceedings for his final case. He began by explaining to schoolchildren watching remotely how the court works and why it holds oral arguments before deciding a case. "We call it an argument, but it really is not. As you will see, it's more of a discussion with us and the lawyers," Dickson said. That spirit of consensus and the desire to solve, instead of fight about, legal problems has typified Dickson's tenure on the state's high court and provided a sharp contrast to the divisiveness common at the U.S. Supreme Court. In his wake, Dickson's Hoosier colleagues similarly have embraced collegiality as a guiding principle. CHICAGO Illinois State Police are investigating the fatal shooting of a 39-year-old man Wednesday night as he was driving on Interstate 57 near the Cal Sag Channel. Steven Hudson, of Chicago, was southbound on I-57 about 10:25 p.m. when a vehicle pulled up beside him and someone in the vehicle opened fire, police said. Hudson lost control of his car and struck the concrete barrier on the right side of the expressway. The impact forced the vehicle back across all the lanes and into the left concrete median barrier. The vehicle came to rest on the far left shoulder against the median, police said. No one else was in the car and there were no witnesses at the scene, police said. When officers arrived, they found several shots had hit the car but only one had hit Hudson, striking him in the head. He was pronounced dead at the scene. A loaded 9 mm handgun was recovered from the drivers side floor of Hudsons car, police said. All lanes of southbound I-57 were closed from 127th Street until 3:20 a.m. Thursday. CHESTERTON On Saturday, the Duneland Boys & Girls Clubs parking lot will be full of new vehicles thanks to Lake Shore Ford. The club and car dealership are teaming together to host a Drive 4 UR Community event encouraging individuals to take the wheel to help their community or, in this case, to help renovate and enhance the Duneland Club. Drive 4 UR School began in 2007 as a way for Ford to give back to communities across the country. The idea was simple: Test-drive a Ford vehicle from a local dealership; get money for your high school. The success of the school program inspired the launch of Drive 4 UR Community, allowing Ford Dealers to partner with nonprofit organizations as well. Thousands of events and $30 million in donations later, participants are still test-driving for a cause that they - and Ford - are equally passionate about. For Bob Kerr of Lake Shore Ford, his passion is to help build a new Duneland Club for the youth and families of Chesterton. The overwhelming success of Drive 4 UR School inspired Ford to widen its scope and create Drive 4 UR Community. Local Ford Dealerships and community organizations have been partnering since 2012 to generate $20 donations per valid test-drive, up to $6,000, said Bob Kerr of Lake Shore Ford. When I had the opportunity to tour the Duneland Boys & Girls Clubs, I was inspired by all the activities that take place in this afterschool setting. I also was surprised by the need for more space this Club has. It was at this point that I knew Lake Shore Ford would offer the Club an opportunity to partner with us for a Drive 4 UR Community Event." Visit Duneland Boys & Girls Clubs of Porter County between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. Saturday and test-drive a new Ford Vehicle with no sales pressure. A test drive will net the Club $20 each with the goal of raising $6,000 toward the new building. We are extremely fortunate to have businesses like Lake Shore Ford and people like Bob Kerr take a special interest in our clubs and club members. Our Duneland Club will be a destination location for all Chesterton youth and Teens and Lake Shore Ford is helping us to bring our Club one step closer to home. Our kids deserve this building and we are excited about our partnership with Lake Shore Ford, said Ryan Smiley, president of Boys & Girls Clubs of Porter County. For more information on how to test drive a car, call Stephanie Hamilton at (219) 464-7282, ext. 235 or via email at shamilton@bgcpoco.org. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. SPRINGFIELD Several hundred students, employees and supporters from universities and colleges across the state rallied near the Capitol on Wednesday to pressure lawmakers and Gov. Bruce Rauner to reach a compromise to fund higher education. Because of the ongoing standoff between Republican Rauner and the Democrats who control the General Assembly, public universities and community colleges have gone nearly 10 months without any state funding. The state has also failed to fund grants to low-income students through the Monetary Award Program, which has forced colleges -- including private schools -- to choose between fronting the money to students or letting them take on the cost. Speaking to a crowd representing the full spectrum of Illinois higher education community, Mitch Dickey, University of Illinois student body president and a MAP grant recipient, put it bluntly: Its ridiculous. Its tragic. Its pathetic. Were watching our higher education system in one year erode, Dickey said. Catie Witt, an Eastern Illinois University junior who was recently elected student body president, has witnessed that erosion firsthand. Also a MAP grant recipient, Witt has seen her school slash hundreds of jobs and enact other cutbacks to keep its doors open. While the school has covered its students' MAP grants, the future remains uncertain. Im really scared for next year, Witt said after addressing the crowd. The rally came a day after three new proposals to fund higher education emerged at the Statehouse. Rep. Mike Fortner, R-West Chicago, has a plan that would get all public universities one-third of their annual funding and cover one semesters worth of MAP grants, and Rep. Rita Mayfield, D-Waukegan, has a plan that would get full funding to the four universities hardest hit by the impasse: Chicago State, Eastern Illinois, Western Illinois and Northeastern Illinois universities. Neither includes any funding for community colleges. Sen. Dale Righter, R-Mattoon, proposed a plan that would include community colleges, one semesters MAP grants and need-based funding for universities. Also in the mix is a bill sitting on the governors desk that would fund all of higher education, along with social services that also havent received any state money this fiscal year. Rep. Dan Brady, R-Bloomington, who represents Illinois State University and whose daughter is a student there, assured the crowd that conversations are taking place across aisle to come up with a solution. He encouraged them to speak with their legislators at the Capitol. We need your help, Brady said, adding that it will ultimately take agreement from House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, and Rauner to move a plan forward. Speaking later, Brady said rank-and-file lawmakers are working on a plan that would blend Fortners and Mayfields proposals in an effort to win bipartisan support. Janet Hill-Getz, executive director of government relations for Heartland Community College in Normal, attended the rally, which came a day after the schools board voted to cut 23 positions over three years, in part due to the lack of state funding. She said the school supports any solution that includes money for community colleges. Willie Lyles III, a Southern Illinois University law school student, said before the rally that the goal is to get the governors signature on a higher education funding bill thats been approved in the General Assembly. Weve gotten the first part done, Lyles said. We just dont seem to be able to get the governors signature on anything. Rauner has vetoed several higher education funding bills because he says the state doesnt have the money to pay for them. 1. Strong relationships. Many of the happy people interviewed by Get Healthy say their parents were cheerful, optimistic folks who instilled the importance of positivity in them from an early age. So by the time they were adults, that attitude came naturally. Conversely, some also had absent, alcoholic fathers or grew up poor, and say the adversity in their upbringings strengthened their resolve. The majority of the interviewees were also in long-term romantic relationships, their supportive partners providing needed stability. Damian Rico, of Schererville, relayed a chance encounter he had in Las Vegas with Sylvester Stallone. After meeting the actor, Rico witnessed him get into a heated argument with some TV producers. Rico then watched the Rocky star's wife lovingly calm him down, defusing the situation. "That's the woman I want right there, that's the girl I want," Rico told himself. A year later, he met his current wife. 2. Empathy. Tammy Maas, a health care worker from Crown Point, says that when she comes into contact with difficult patients she always thinks about the struggles they're dealing with. Instead of lashing out, she tries to calm them down. "We all put on pants the same way, make feces the same way. Live and let live and be respectful," says Kathy Kasarda, of Porter. "I don't think respect is something you earn. Respect is something you give to everybody. It's everybody's right to be who they are." Louie Gonzalez, of Munster, says that being a good listener means more than just paying attention to someone's words. "I try to listen intently, not only with my ears but my heart," he says. "You can pick up on things that are not being said. When you're at peace or being joyful, people can sense that, that you're giving them your undivided attention and they give you more of themselves and they become more open and honest." 3. Faith. Having faith, or at least living a spiritual life, gives you purpose and a sense that you're part of something greater than yourself, many of the interviewees told us. "A lot of people feel like their life is accidental," says Debbie Wells, of Hammond. "If we feel that way, it's hard to have a foundational anchor in anything else. Once we know who we are, it's a lot easier to deal with life's more difficult issues." 4. Overcoming adversity. For Lisa DeBoer, of Munster, it was brain tumors. For Katy Kletnick, of Munster, seeing a friend die in a motorcycle accident. For Kasarda, a bad car accident. For Wells, her youngest son's neurosurgery. And for Jennifer Young, the death of her mother from cancer. "I think everyone goes through adversity in life," says Young, of DeMotte. "Once that situation occurs, you have a decision to make. You either go left or right. The path less traveled is less easy but it's definitely the better one in the long run, which is to stay positive and thankful for the blessings you do have and what you will learn from that situation." 5. Humor. Anna Brackett-Erb, of Gary, tries to crack up not only others but herself. "When I wake up, I look at myself and say, 'What a hairdo,' and start laughing because my hair be sticking up," she says. "It was in my family. Everybody try to keep humor in their lives." You've got to be able to laugh at yourself. Kasarda says her son jokes with her that she has so many fake joints the only things to survive a nuclear apocalypse will be the cockroachesand her. 6. It takes work. While happiness may appear to come naturally to some people, underneath they're often working overtime to keep the positivity flowing. "Patience is big for me," says Meagan Barrett, of Crown Point. "I have four kids. We have a full gamut of stressors firing off in our house. If I don't choose joy, it would get ugly. It's something I have to work on. It's not something that comes easy." 7. A fulfilling profession. Several of the interviewees work for nonprofits or schools or churches. Rico, the community director for The Times Media Co., says friends sometimes inquire why he works in journalism when he could make more money doing other things; he tells them his story subjects simply inspire him. "People ask me all the time: 'Why do you cut hair when you have a bachelor's degree?" says Kletnick. "I stay where it makes me happy." 8. Surrounding yourself with positive people. Your mood is often determined by the type of people you hang around with, the interviewees say. If they're negative and cynical, their moods will likely rub off on you. The opposite is also true. 9. Making others happy. When Brackett-Erb sees somebody who looks down, she always says hi. Without fail, they smile back, she says. Says Kletnick: "When I walk in and somebody else is in a bad mood, I'm too happy for them to stay that way." 10. Take charge. The only one who can determine your fate, and your attitude, is you, many of the interviewees say. And just because you're a pessimist doesn't mean you can't become more optimistic. Maybe their advice can help get you there. Mayor Bill de Blasio on Wednesday held his first town hall-style meeting on Staten Island, the only borough he didn't win in the 2013 election. NY1's Bobby Cuza filed the following report. It was potentially hostile territory. Mayor Bill de Blasio is not terribly popular on Staten Island, the only borough he lost in the 2013 mayoral election, and Wednesday night's town hall had its moments, like one woman upset about pipes. "They didn't even know that the gas pipe blew, and the pipe is over 100 years old," the woman said. But while the mayor fielded tough and often hyperlocal questions on everything from homelessness to hospitals to water rates, the tone was largely civil, helped in part by the mayor rolling out some good news, like $5.5 million in new city funding to combat the opioid drug abuse epidemic. "I think governments on all levels are just catching up with the totality of this issue," de Blasio said. "We need to move very quickly, very intensely. I know the borough president understands that, the NYPD understands that. We're going to provide the resources to go a lot farther, a lot quicker." While that funding will be used citywide, a pilot program also announced Wednesday will be specific to Staten Island: curbside pickup of electronic waste like old computers and TVs. "It will be up and running by the end of this year," de Blasio said. "It will be borough-wide. It will be on demand. All you have to do is make an appointment, and sanitation will come and pick up your electronics." While the mayor had previously held a number of town halls around the city, including in Washington Heights, Bayside, Bay Ridge and Flatbush, this was the first on Staten Island, a borough that often claims neglect by city government. The mayor seemed be trying to turn that perception around Wednesday. Joined by Republicans borough president James Oddo and Councilman Steven Matteo, as well as other local electeds, the mayor made promises Staten Islanders will no doubt hold him to, including in terms of resources. "Whether it is on that site or on another site, it will be in our budget, and we will bring an indoor swimming pool to the people of Staten Island," the mayor said. Promises were also made for simply more face time. "This is my first town hall meeting on Staten Island, and I'm looking at the cameras. This is my first town hall meeting. This will not be my last town hall meeting on Staten Island. I look forward to more," he said. Thats the way that restitution works, Mr. Petropoulos added, calling it unconscionable that the authorities sat on the trove for two and a half years, particularly because it appeared to be an exceptionally large find. The trail to the artworks, the magazine said, stemmed from an incident in September 2010, when Bavarian customs officials on a train to Germany from Switzerland became suspicious after finding Mr. Gurlitt carrying 9,000, or about $12,150, in crisp 500 notes. The inquiries spurred by the money eventually led investigators to the apartment in Munich, the magazine said, reporting that Mr. Gurlitt had apparently lived there for decades, selling off pictures as needed over the years, to judge by empty frames found in his home. Emma Bahlmann, an employee of the Cologne auction house that sold the Beckmann work, said she went to an apartment with Mr. Gurlitt but saw no evidence of other artworks as she took the Beckmann off the wall. The hundreds of works found in the Munich apartment reported to have been raided by authorities including paintings but also many graphics and even an engraving by Albrecht Durer, the German Renaissance artist were taken to a customs facility near Munich for storage, Focus said. Meike Hoffmann, an art historian at an institute specializing in Nazi-confiscated art at the Free University in Berlin, was engaged to go through the discovered works. Ms. Hoffmann declined to talk to reporters on Sunday or Monday about what she described in an email as this case. But a video of a conference in September, posted on the institutes website, showed her saying that her institute would soon be doing more work associated with Hildebrand Gurlitt, Cornelius Gurlitts father. The elder Mr. Gurlitt had trouble with the Nazis because he was deemed a quarter Jewish under the Nuremberg race laws, and he was dismissed from two museum posts. Yet he was also one of the few Germans granted permission by Joseph Goebbels, Hitlers propaganda chief, to sell confiscated art. Sales to foreign buyers were meant to fill Nazi coffers, but art historians have documented many sales in Germany, as well as proceeds pocketed by the dealers involved. UPDATED: You can now hear this essay read by the actor Joshua Jackson, followed by a conversation with the writer Joshua Fattal, in Modern Love: The Podcast. Look for the play button below. Jenny showed up to my welcome-home party in Philadelphia. Hundreds attended, but my eyes kept finding their way back to hers. It had been three years since we had seen each other, the last two of which I had spent imprisoned, partly in solitary confinement, in Evin Prison in Tehran. On that fateful day more than 26 months earlier, I had been detained with my friends Shane Bauer and Sarah Shourd after we unknowingly hiked over an unmarked border of Iraqi Kurdistan into Iranian Kurdistan. We were old college friends vacationing in that relatively safe region between work assignments abroad, and locals had told us about a beautiful waterfall in the mountains that would make for a suitable day hike. Our mistake was continuing past the waterfall to the ridgeline for the view, where an armed Iranian border guard spotted us and motioned us down to him. First he took us to his border outpost, and then we were loaded into a car and whisked away. The Iranian authorities ultimately charged us with espionage, which was farcical given we had little money, no language skills and no means to sustain ourselves beyond a day hike. We knew we had become political prisoners, our detention reflecting the fraught history between the United States and Iran, a relationship that had soured slowly since the C.I.A.-backed coup in 1953 and its support of the countrys authoritarian king until 1979. Season 4, Episode 6: The Rat The Americans gave us what we wanted on Wednesday night well, what a lot of us wanted, I suspect. The episode, The Rat, was the apotheosis of Martha Hanson. (Until next week, anyway.) The mousy secretary was the most important person onscreen. The F.B.I. sent bulletins across the country because of her while the Rezidentura prepared a sudden exfiltration to Moscow. She was so important, it turned out, that Arkady couldnt even tell his people what shed been doing. (Will the disaffected Oleg get involved, one way or another, in Marthas fate?) Of course, who knows how much longer well have Martha to kick around. The episode ended with her telling Gabriel that if he tried to keep her from leaving the safe house where Philip had brought her, shed scream, And everybody will know youre K.G.B. The pained expression on Gabriels face had the look of a death warrant. Gabriel had just told her that she could trust him, and trust was the oft-repeated theme (it showed up in the script at least five times). Martha trusts Philip, a possibly fatal but not entirely unfounded mistake. When Philip makes the decision to bring in Martha picking her up on the street in broad daylight and taking her to the safe house Gabriel and Elizabeth both suddenly learn that they cant trust Philip as they thought they could. Marthas effectiveness as a mole at the F.B.I. was based on trust, as Stan told Agent Gaad, and Gaads position as her longtime boss was a minor, poignant corollary to Marthas own dire situation. (Has any character outside of a comedy ever been as pathetically, permanently sucker-punched as Agent Gaad?) The best parts of the episode came early, as Philip brought Martha, Gabriel and Elizabeth together and the show managed to intensify the already dense tangle of love, loyalty and expediency surrounding Martha. His two wives were in the same house now though one of them was disguised as Clarks sister Jennifer and neither one was happy. Martha heard K.G.B. for the first time and realized exactly what she was involved in. Elizabeth saw Philip without his Clark wig and realized exactly how attached her husband had grown to his other wife. PHOENIX At the Audiology Now! convention here last week, visitors stood next to blowing electric fans to experience how a new hearing aid could screen out wind noise. They donned goggles to attend a virtual reality dinner party to learn how new technology made it easier to hear conversations around them. But the elephant in the room, as it were, was what was happening outside the convention hall. The consumer electronics industry is encroaching on the hearing aid business, offering products that are far less expensive and available without the involvement of audiologists or other professionals. That is forcing a re-examination of the entire system for providing hearing aids, which critics say is too costly and cumbersome, hindering access to devices vital for the growing legions of older Americans. The audiology profession is obviously scared, for good reason, right now, said Abram Bailey, an audiologist and chief executive of Hearing Tracker, a consumer website. Whether regulations on hearing aids should be relaxed in an effort to lower costs will be the topic of a daylong public workshop being held Thursday by the Food and Drug Administration. A White House advisory group has already recommended that they should be. The National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine is expected to issue its own report in June. On one level, the dispute between Dish Network and Viacom that brought the companies to the brink of a television blackout on Wednesday resembles others that have become relatively routine in the industry and a common annoyance for customers. While such negotiations between TV companies and their cable and satellite distributors used to take place behind closed doors, they have erupted into messy public battles in recent years as the television industry has come under more pressure. Both sides are trying to secure their positions and profit against the backdrop of a rapidly changing television landscape where ratings are in steep decline and cable and satellite companies are battling against a tide of so-called cord cutters. Yet this specific clash is particularly crucial for Viacom. Already, the company is facing significant turbulence. There are major concerns over its leadership, accentuated by a legal battle over the mental competency of its controlling shareholder, Sumner M. Redstone. At the same time, Viacom has reported persistently weak earnings. The threat that Dish could drop Viacom channels from its service has been hanging over Viacom for the last several months. In 2014, more than 60 small cable operators, which account for about two million pay television subscribers in the United States, dropped Viacoms channels, a longtime anchor of cable TV offerings. That stoked fears that larger cable and satellite companies like Dish might follow their lead. He came, he lost, but his rhetoric continues. I am speaking, of course, of Senator Bernie Sanders, who may have ceded the Democratic primary in New York to Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, but who has made a very visible part of the city into the punching bag of the presidential campaign. Put simply: Bankers are having a tough time in the public discourse these days. Mr. Sanders has built a platform on their villainy. Over the weekend, at a block party in Brooklyn, Mrs. Clinton called out the greed and recklessness of Wall Street, and declared, I take a back seat to no one in taking them on. Senator Ted Cruz, the Republican candidate who used a hefty loan from his wifes former employer, Goldman Sachs, to finance his 2012 Senate race, has labeled the institution a hotbed of crony capitalism. And so on. You would think it would be enough to have them whomever this mythic them may be don sackcloth and ashes and sneak around in the shadows so no one could identify them by the uniform of their profession. Which, if you accept the premise that we use our wardrobe to signal our allegiance to a group (personal, political or professional), raises the question: What does it mean to look like a banker in the age of Bernie? After all, the last time the financial world was so loudly derided during the recession of 2008 and 2009 there was a knock-on effect in the mens wear world, and certain obvious totems of Wall Street style (the broad, structured shoulders; the patterned ties; the Ferragamo shoes) fell out of favor. According to a banker at Goldman Sachs, the idea was to play down any signifiers of employment, lest they invite negative repercussions. Mr. Abel told the story in his 1970 memoir, The Confessions of a Hoaxer: In her Jewish dialect, she promised to establish national bingo, self-fluoridation, hang a suggestion box on the White House fence, and print a nude picture of Jane Fonda on postage stamps to ease the Post Office deficit and also give a little pleasure for six cents to those who cant afford Playboy magazine. Mr. Abel then decided to find out if America was ready for a Jewish mother in the White House. He distributed leaflets, sent out press releases and painted National Headquarters for the Best Party on the door of a third-floor storage closet at 507 Fifth Avenue that was always locked. Reporters left their cards under the door, and Mrs. Abel called them back, in character. One of the reporters who called was Ben A. Franklin of The Times. Image Mr. Abels 1970 memoir told the full story of Yetta Bronstein. (Pause here to consider what would happen when Mr. Franklin, whose beat was the Mid-Atlantic States, stayed overnight in Philadelphia. News clerks in our Washington bureau were compelled to telephone the Benjamin Franklin Hotel and say, in all earnestness, This is The New York Times, trying to reach Ben Franklin. Just imagine the response.) Mr. Franklins take was droll but sincere: There appears to be no national consensus for bingo, and Mrs. Bronstein, a New York City housewife, may fail to carry a single precinct. Prescient enough. She was not on any ballot anywhere. Four years later, William H. Honan, a freelance writer who later became The Timess culture editor, seemed to fall a good deal harder for Mrs. Bronsteins candidacy. So did the Sunday Magazine, which ran his article under the headline, If You Dont Like Hubert, Dick or George, How About Lar, Yetta or Eldridge? Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times. In this article, Elias E. Lopez, editorial director of The New York Times en Espanol, explains how his team in Mexico City translates United States politics for a Latin American and Spanish audience. Image A panel of a GIF illustrating the March 1, 2016 New York Times en Espanol article on Super Tuesday. Credit... Pictoline for The New York Times en Espanol MEXICO CITY How do you say caucus in Spanish? The question came up while Albinson Linares, an editor at The New York Times en Espanol, was translating an article about the United States primaries earlier this year. The answer, given the context, was simple: caucus. But that soon led to more questions about the primaries and the American presidential campaign in general: Why is Iowa so important, when its such a small state? Whats the difference between a primary and a caucus? How does the delegate system work? Keep in mind that these are questions that also confound many Americans. Two New York City police detectives have been charged with beating a uniformed Postal Service employee in Queens in October, according to an indictment released on Wednesday. The mail carrier has said that the police have harassed him since 2014, when he gave street directions to a stranger who then killed two police officers. The indictment was handed up by a grand jury that watched surveillance video of the stop and heard a 911 call that appears to contradict the detectives account and shows them kicking, beating and dragging the mail carrier, Karim Baker, 26, who recently testified about his ordeal, his lawyer and law enforcement officials said. The detectives Angelo J. Pampena, 31, and Robert A. Carbone, 29 were charged with felony and misdemeanor assault in an indictment announced on Wednesday by the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, and the police commissioner, William J. Bratton. Detective Pampena, a nine-year veteran, was also charged with perjury, offering a false instrument and official misconduct. Detective Carbone has been with the department for eight years. The detectives pleaded not guilty on Wednesday and were released, the district attorneys office said. Their next court appearance was set for June 27, a spokeswoman for the district attorney said. If convicted, both men face up to seven years in prison. Jahmal Lightfoots suffering did not end with a brutal beating at the hands of Rikers Island correction officers who wanted to teach him a lesson. He was falsely accused of going at the officers with a weapon he had stashed in his waistband, and disregarding their orders to drop it, according to Bronx prosecutors. As punishment, he was sent to the box a section of the jail where inmates were confined to their cells for 23 hours a day for nearly four months. So you were placed for 110 days in lockdown for something you didnt do? Lawrence Piergrossi, a prosecutor, asked Mr. Lightfoot on Wednesday in State Supreme Court in the Bronx. Yes, Mr. Lightfoot, 31, replied. He was testifying for a third day in the criminal trial of nine current and former correction officers who have been charged in what prosecutors have described as an orchestrated beating of Mr. Lightfoot and attempted cover-up in July 2012. A tenth officer, who has medical problems, will be tried separately. The Metropolitan Transportation Authoritys board approved a new version of its long-delayed capital plan on Wednesday, allocating money for system upgrades and expansion projects and restoring funding for the next phase of the Second Avenue subway line. The $29.5 billion spending plan calls for hundreds of new train cars and buses and a new fare-payment system to replace the MetroCard. With ridership booming on New York Citys aging subway system, the authority also devoted funding for station improvements and updated signal systems to allow more trains to operate. The agency promised $1 billion for plans to extend the Second Avenue subway to East Harlem about $500 million more than an earlier proposal set aside. About $2.5 billion would be devoted to the East Side Access project, which would connect the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal. Thomas F. Prendergast, the authoritys chairman, said he was confident that a state review board would approve the revised proposal in the next month. The capital plan will modernize the regions vast transportation network and make sure that it is safe and reliable, he said. The New York State attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, announced on Wednesday that his office was opening an investigation into potential voting irregularities during the presidential primary on Tuesday, when New York Citys Board of Elections found itself besieged by complaints that it had dropped thousands of Democratic voters from the rolls in Brooklyn, among other issues. Mr. Schneidermans office said it had received more than 1,000 complaints from voters across the state, dwarfing the roughly 150 reports it received for the 2012 general election. Many people said they had tried to vote, only to be told that they were not registered the most common complaint, according to Mr. Schneidermans office. Among complaints from New York City, the largest chunk sprang from Brooklyn, where there were reports that the voter-information books in some polling places were missing multiple pages. By most accounts, voters cast their ballots smoothly and successfully, Mr. Schneiderman said in a statement. However, I am deeply troubled by the volume and consistency of voting irregularities. The boards much-maligned Primary Day performance is also being audited by the office of Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, who on Wednesday released an online form for voters to submit information about their experiences. Officials said that Mr. Costanzo, a resident of the Tompkinsville section of Staten Island, had reached a plea agreement with the authorities in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, and as part of that he was expected to plead guilty in a court appearance on Thursday. Mr. Costanzo, 46, also pleaded guilty to charges in Connecticut this week stemming from a 2014 burglary in Farmington. The authorities declined to discuss how much time he was expected to serve under the agreement. His lawyer did not return messages seeking comment. Investigators in New York City were led to Mr. Costanzo after talking to a detective from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., who was looking into a similar burglary pattern and considered Mr. Costanzo to be the prime suspect. Investigators noticed striking similarities between the two strings of cases. In February, Mr. Costanzo began negotiating an agreement with the authorities in three states. He has been charged on Staten Island for burglaries in 2011, 2013 and 2015. Officials said he had been active from 2005 until last year, but the statute of limitations had expired in many of the cases. Over two days this month, officials said, Mr. Constanzo gave a statement recorded on video in which he described how he operated. The authorities said Mr. Costanzo, who has been a registered sex offender since a rape conviction in 1992, went to work after nightfall. He would dress in black, cover his face, and use a ladder to climb up to balconies and head for master bedrooms. He would look for cash, jewelry and watches; sometimes, if he saw a safe, he would come back. And half the time, the authorities said, he entered while residents were home. ALBANY Democrats awoke on Wednesday tantalizingly close to having a numerical majority in the State Senate, claiming victory in the Long Island district vacated by Dean G. Skelos, the former Republican majority leader convicted of federal corruption charges in December. But because nothing is ever simple in New York State politics, the coronation of a new ruling party in the Senate was delayed, as election officials on Long Island had not yet certified the results. Even if the Democrat, Todd D. Kaminsky, is declared the winner of the special election to succeed Mr. Skelos, officials on both sides of the aisle in Albany said little, if anything, would change between now and November, when the full Senate will be in play. The margin in favor of Mr. Kaminsky, an assemblyman and former federal prosecutor, over Republican Christopher T. McGrath, a personal injury lawyer, stood at 780 votes out of some 68,000 cast by Nassau County residents on the South Shore. The American military has often put a price on the lives of civilians it has killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. By making so-called condolence payments which range from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands commanders have sought to compensate victims families for dead relatives, injuries and damaged property. Sometimes wads of cash have been delivered with an apology. In rare instances, there have also been full accountings of the facts. The Pentagon, having gone through this grim ritual for so many years, might be expected to carry it out with some measure of fairness and diligence. But so far its treatment of the victims of the air attack in October on a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in northern Afghanistan has been wholly inadequate. After more than six months, the Pentagon has yet to fully explain what went wrong the night an American AC-130 gunship repeatedly bombed the hospital in Kunduz, killing 42 people and wounding dozens. Officials have called the airstrike a case of avoidable human error, but they have not said why they struck a facility whose location had been made known to them repeatedly. Earlier this year, the American military offered $6,000 to the families of each person killed and $3,000 to those who were wounded. We think its insulting, Jason Cone, the executive director of Doctors Without Borders, said in an interview. Abdul Ghadir, who lost a 12-year-old daughter in the bombing, described feeling powerless as he took the cash. The money is obviously not enough compared to the life of my daughter, he told Newsweek. I had no other choice but to accept what they gave me. A federal appellate ruling on Tuesday protecting the right of transgender students to use restrooms according to their gender identity is an important marker in a national debate that has prompted battles in courtrooms and legislatures across the country. The Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit is the first federal court to affirm the Obama administrations position on this question. The Department of Education and the Department of Justice have asserted in individual cases that barring transgender students from using restrooms and locker rooms based on their gender identity violates Title IX, a federal civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The current case was brought in 2015 by a male transgender student against the school board in Gloucester County, Va., after it passed a measure barring him from using the boys restroom. Writing for the majority in the 2-to-1 ruling, Judge Henry Franklin Floyd found that the lower court did not give due deference to the federal governments interpretation of Title IX when it ruled against the student, Gavin Grimm. This polished sphere was fashioned from a meteorite that crash-landed into a dry riverbed in Russia. On Wednesday it soared again, not through space but at an auction house, snagging $130,000 nine times its asking price. The meteorite was a part of a cosmic collection put up for sale at Christies in London. But it was one of only a few space rocks to take off. The meteorite encrusted in extraterrestrial gemstones, given a high valuation of $1.1 million, did not sell. Neither did some of the other heavy hitters such as the $639,000 Martian meteorite, a $426,600 chunk of the Chelyabinsk fireball that exploded over Russia in 2013 nor the $355,500 rock that looks like a metallic screaming face. The photographer Pete Voelker has a widely diverse portfolio: Hes shot everything from portraits of musicians to still lifes to reportage, and his most recent work has taken him all over the country documenting political rallies and the presidential campaign trail. Photography acts as a vessel for me, Voelker says. When I was younger, it was the only excuse I had to pack up and drive across the country or go on any sort of aimless adventure to see something new. Taking photographs is always the objective, but the journey to create photographs and the conversations with people along the way are what drive me as a photographer. Voelker, raised in Southern Maryland, first went to rallies during his frequent trips to Washington, D.C. while still in high school. It wasnt until over a decade later, though, after attending marches for Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown in 2014, that he was inspired to shoot political events for both his personal and professional work. Voelkers photographs focus on small, human moments rather than the grand narrative sweep of an election or social movement he elegantly highlights the off-kilter details, as well as the human spirit, that can easily get lost in the madness. I try to look for both the outspoken and the observers, Voelker explains of his process. There is a lot that goes on at political rallies, marches and demonstrations. From the literal production of the event to the organizing of ideas, there are many spinning wheels. I honestly obsessively try to cover everything when Im at an event, but Im most often drawn to the quieter, more ambivalent images in the end. Incumbent Jerry Engdahl is taking on challenger Ron Reilly for the District 6 seat on the Platte County Board of Supervisors. The two Republican candidates from Columbus will be on the ballot for the May 10 primary election. The following questions were emailed to the candidates, who were asked to limit their responses to fewer than 500 total words. Jerry Engdahl Occupation: Realtor with RE/MAX Total Realty; District 6 Platte County Supervisor Age: 73 What are the most important issues facing the county and how should they be addressed? Keeping county expenses under control, while providing the services expected and/or deserved by county residents as well as responding to state mandates. Continue applying pressure to the various state and federal agencies responsible for the design and construction of the East 29th Avenue viaduct, now more than eight years in the planning. NDOR, NDEQ, KM, FHU, FHWA are just a few of the groups we have met with in the last month, along with district highway commissioner, Dave Copples. Construction is now scheduled to begin in 2018. Why should voters support you as a county representative? I have kept my promises to carefully study every issue, to achieve 100 percent attendance at board meetings, and to continue Joe Tooleys ethical, responsive, conservative approach when dealing with our tax dollars. I voted against a $1.1 million expenditure for a bridge to nowhere," against a new $700,000 free-standing building for the Extension department, against a pay raise and new chairs for supervisors, and against the metal detectors in the courthouse entrance. I have encouraged cooperation with city government to reduce costs to both entities, encouraged accepting state prisoners, which brings in thousands of dollars every month, and encouraged county departments to buy locally by requesting bids from Platte County vendors when applicable. Sen. (Paul) Schumacher asked me to testify in Lincoln for passage of LB65, which passed, allowing our county board to levy taxes on Loup Township residents, rather than the entire county paying for their road maintenance. I have been an active chairman of the road and bridge and city/county committees. Are county taxes too high, too low, or about right? Im not aware of anyone who thinks their taxes are too low, but in the case of county taxes, we have reduced the levy three years in a row; the current county levy of 20.4 cents per $100 valuation is less than one half of the 45 cents per $100 allowed by state law. Platte County receives less than 11 percent of the property taxes collected from residents in District 6, which I represent. The majority of those same District 6 residents paid less in county tax dollars in 2015 than they did in 2014, even with increased valuations in some cases. What experience do you have working with budgets? I have been part of the boards comprehensive budget process for the last three years and have suggested we tie any department and/or salary increase considerations to the federal government cost of living adjustment (COLA), which is used to determine changes in social security payments throughout the country. Would you support evening meetings to make the board more transparent/accessible to the public? I am in favor of full disclosure and encourage county residents to attend board meetings; if evening meetings will increase attendance, I have no problem changing the time. I can be reached at jengdahl@neb.rr.com or on my cell phone, 402-276-7223. Ron Reilly Occupation: Retired, was the former postmaster of Columbus from January 1999 to August 2012 Age: 57 What are the most important issues facing the county and how should they be addressed? The safety and health and well-being of county employees is the most important issue. From the sheriffs department, to county road employees, to courthouse personnel; safety cannot be compromised. Additionally, county roads and bridges must be maintained to protect the public and likewise cannot be compromised. An example is the East 29 Avenue viaduct. This project must be expedited to protect the high volume of vehicles utilizing the road. An estimated 3,200 vehicles, many of them semitrailers, travel it daily thats almost one vehicle per minute. A sense of urgency needs to be conveyed to state and federal officials to move this project along. A return on investment to the county stockholders the citizens of Platte County must be realized. The public needs to get the best return on their tax dollars and spending cuts and increasing revenue without burdening the taxpayer is the only solution. A quality of work life issue exists with the condition and location of the county Extension office. I would favor a new facility while partnering with private industry to attain a destination facility for furthering agriculture education in the county and attracting visitors from outside the county. Recruitment and retention of employees especially at the road department and the jail is needed. HR policies must be reviewed and updated to attract and retain employees. Why should voters support you as a county representative? I completed 35 years of work with the Postal Service with the last 26 years in management. As the postmaster in Columbus for nearly 14 years, I was responsible for over 50 employees and more than 11,000 customers served daily. In addition to my postmaster position, I was the discontinuance officer for the Central Plains District, which consists of Nebraska, parts of Iowa and Kansas. These duties included consolidating jobs, closing small post offices, and conducting hundreds of community meetings. I have the out of the box mindset in solving problems and not afraid to make the hard decisions. I am a life-long resident of Columbus and as a homeowner and Platte County agland owner, I understand how taxes are impacting the area. I would be honored to represent District 6 voters. Are county taxes too high, too low, or about right? Taxes are too high. Spending cuts are needed while raising revenues without affecting the taxpayer. Ideas; such as reviewing township board and fire district practices, which have gone untouched for decades, investigating where private industry outperforms construction and maintenance currently completed by county personnel, and investing back into the county utilizing the inheritance tax fund account, which currently has $9.8 million of taxpayer money, are a few items on my list. What experience do you have working with budgets? As postmaster at Columbus, I was responsible for an annual budget of more than $4.5 million, more than 100,000 budgeted work hours, and transportation of nearly half a million miles. Would you support evening meetings to make the board more transparent/accessible to the public? I would support evening meetings or any method or device to generate public accessibility, knowledge and involvement. After a forceful win in New York, Donald Trump has a narrow but real path to 1,237 delegates, the number required to avoid a contested convention. He needs about 390 more delegates to become the Republican presidential nominee. Heres one way he could get them. Pick Up 185 in the Industrial East Mr. Trump is a big favorite in the remaining states of the industrial East, from West Virginia to Rhode Island, so he could garner a commanding haul here. Mr. Trump will probably fall a bit short in places perhaps yield a district or two in Maryland, or lose ground because of the complicated rules in West Virginia. But he might still come away with around 185 of these delegates, covering nearly half of the remaining distance to 1,237. Gather 34 in the West and Midwest Mr. Trump is not particularly popular out in the Mountain West and Plains. Ted Cruz is favored in winner-take-all contests in South Dakota, Montana and Nebraska. But Mr. Trump might still emerge with delegates from Washington, Oregon and New Mexico, which award their delegates proportionally. He might win 34 of these delegates, even if he loses. NEW ENGLAND Massachusetts: Plans for Gas Pipeline Halted Plans to build a $3.3 billion natural gas pipeline from New York into New England through western Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire have been suspended. Kinder Morgan Inc. of Houston announced Wednesday it had decided to stop work on the project, citing a lack of contracts with gas distribution companies. It also said New England states have not established needed regulatory procedures to allow it to move forward. The company said that given the market conditions, continuing to develop the pipeline is an unacceptable use of its shareholder funds. The project has been met with skepticism and opposition, both from residents along the proposed path of the pipeline and from environmental groups that welcomed Wednesdays decision to halt work. (AP) PLAINS Nebraska: Work Licenses Allowed for Immigrants The state will allow thousands of immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children to work in at least 170 professions that require state licenses, including health care and education, after lawmakers overrode Gov. Pete Rickettss veto of the measure on Wednesday. Senators voted 31 to 13 on the last day of their legislative session, five days after Mr. Ricketts, a Republican, called it unfair to immigrants who followed the legal pathway. The law applies to immigrants who received lawful status under President Obamas executive action in 2012 that allowed them to stay. (AP) SOUTH Tennessee: Bible Will Not Be States Book A move to override Gov. Bill Haslams veto of a bill making the Bible the states official book fell seven votes short of the 50 needed in the House on Wednesday. Only 43 members voted in favor of the bill after two hours of spirited and spiritual debate. The Republican governor last week turned back the bill over constitutional concerns and because of concerns the measure trivializes what he considers a sacred text by adding it to a list of official symbols, including a turtle and a catfish. Supporters argued that the measure seeks to honor the economic and historical impact of the Bible in Tennessee history. (AP) WEST California: 6 Arrested After Tunnel Is Found The authorities said Wednesday that they had discovered a cross-border tunnel that ran a half-mile from a Tijuana house equipped with a large elevator to a lot in San Diego that was advertised as a wooden pallet business, resulting in seizures of more than a ton of cocaine and seven tons of marijuana and the arrests of six people. It was the 13th sophisticated secret passage found along Californias border with Mexico since 2006, including three on the same short street in San Diego that runs parallel to a border fence with a densely populated residential area on the Mexican side. (AP) If confirmed, Dr. Hayden, 63, would be the first woman and the first African-American to hold the position. The committee is expected to vote on the nomination in the coming weeks. Should the committee recommend Dr. Haydens nomination to the full Senate, the body would likely vote before its summer recess. Dr. Hayden would be the first new Librarian of Congress since the Reagan administration, inheriting a library whose digital collections and technological capabilities have been outstripped by its peers and raised concerns among its overseers in Congress. That reality provided the backdrop for a hearing that largely centered on Dr. Haydens experience and concerns overa issues like the librarys technological infrastructure and the status of the United States Copyright Office it oversees. The next Librarian of Congress will lead an organization that has really had significant physical and technological limitations and is struggling, really, to adapt to a new century, Mr. Blunt said in his introductory remarks. In her testimony, Dr. Hayden said she was mindful of those concerns and would champion efforts to restore its technological infrastructure. Along the way, she also gave hints of what the library, one of the worlds leading repositories of information and culture, might look like under her leadership, calling for continued private and public partnerships and increased outreach to smaller libraries around the country. WASHINGTON The Senate may be nearing an agreement on emergency funding to respond to the growing threat from the Zika virus, marking a potential reversal by Republicans who had been reluctant to approve more aid. The financing, which is being considered by some members of the Senate Appropriations Committee, would supplement the $510 million the Obama administration recently redirected from fighting Ebola toward Zika, as congressional Republicans had urged. So far, congressional Republicans have said they wanted to address the problem of combating Zika through appropriations and needed more information from administration officials. Some Republicans insisted that the money left over from the Ebola fight would be sufficient. Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Health and Human Services appropriations subcommittee who has been involved in the discussions, said lawmakers were working to reach an agreement that would address Zika, which has been linked to serious birth defects. PEDERNALES, Ecuador President Rafael Correa of Ecuador said Wednesday that the government would temporarily increase some taxes and might issue new bonds on the international market to help fund the multibillion-dollar reconstruction of homes, roads and buildings destroyed by a powerful earthquake. Its hard to imagine the magnitude of the tragedy, Mr. Correa said. Another quake, with a magnitude of 6.2, shook the coast before dawn on Wednesday. It terrified inhabitants and briefly hindered rescuers searching for the dwindling number of survivors from Saturdays bigger 7.8-magnitude quake, which killed at least 525 people, according to a central government tally. Mr. Correa said the disaster had inflicted $2 billion to $3 billion of damage and could knock two to three percentage points off the nations economic growth. Were looking at the possibility of issuing bonds on the international market, but other measures have been planned, a tax reform is being discussed, Mr. Correa said. MEXICO CITY An explosion ripped through a petrochemical plant on the southern coast of the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday, killing three people, injuring dozens and sending flames and a toxin-filled cloud into the air, officials said. The state oil company Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, said 58 people had been hurt in the midafternoon blast in the industrial port city of Coatzacoalcos. Gov. Javier Duarte of Veracruz State told Radio Formula that three people had lost their lives. The blast was felt as far as six miles away, Mr. Duarte said, adding that more than 2,000 people were evacuated from the area as a precaution. By early evening, the fire was reported to be under control, but Pemex still urged people to stay away from the area. Officials canceled Thursdays classes at area schools. In a telephone interview, Mr. Billings recalled how unflappable Mr. Mayer was on the plane as he readied his parachute for the jump and gave a few final directives. Image Mr. Mayer in 2013. Credit... Office of Sen. Jay Rockefeller I was in awe of him, Mr. Billings said. He was born without the fear gene. He feared nothing, and he was able to be whatever he needed to be. Mr. Mayer was born on Oct. 28, 1921, in Freiburg, Germany, on the edge of the Black Forest. Known as a boy as Fritz, he had his bar mitzvah in Germany just as Hitler and the Nazis were rising to power in 1933, but he never considered himself terribly religious. With the Nazis systematic anti-Semitism growing more onerous in the mid-1930s, Fritz and his mother pushed his father, who had a metal-fabricating shop, to flee the country. But his father resisted; he had served in the German Army in World War I, receiving an Iron Cross, and he told his son that the Nazis would never go after a war veteran, even one who was Jewish. The elder Mr. Mayer finally relented in 1938, months before the start of the mass deportations and ultimately the genocide of the European Jews, and the family made its way to Brooklyn when the younger Mr. Mayer was 16. He insisted on being called Fred in his new country; he never answered to Fritz again, saying it reminded him of Nazi Germany. Trained as a mechanic, he enlisted in the Army on Dec. 8, 1941, a day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Early assignments at bases in Arizona, Georgia and Maryland bored him, he said, and when he had the chance to train for covert missions in Italy as a corporal with the O.S.S., he quickly put his hand up. Tattered pages from 19th-century ledger books, which American Indians used to record tribal history in picture form, have been dispersed on the market. With the loose pages no longer in their intended sequences, the graphic narratives of battles, courtships, disease outbreaks, ceremonies and imprisonments have become unintelligible. The artists identities and the tribes depicted have also been obscured. In the last few years dealers, collectors and academics have been trying to restore order to ledger drawing sets by reassembling book pages. When an intact ledger surfaces for sale, said Ross H. Frank, an associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego, market forces will break it up unless theres active intervention from an institution or a collector to keep it whole. The colorful sheets can sell for tens of thousands of dollars each. Mr. Frank runs a website, plainsledgerart.org, that has posted dozens of digitized books and has dozens more in the works. The website lists provenances for the sketches, which were made by Cheyenne, Arapaho, Lakota and Kiowa tribespeople. This article is part of our spring gallery guide. ART has always been used to sugarcoat economic power moves. In Manhattan, the arrival of galleries can help make real estate hot, and for a while, art gains from the cachet. In Brooklyn, gentrification seems to have the opposite effect: It kills off the art that helped inspire it. Not long ago, a wave of start-up art spaces was building in Dumbo and Williamsburg, only to die down once property values rose, a dynamic that may now be underway in Bushwick. Whatever the case there, in a once rent-friendly borough, galleries and artists alike are scrambling, a reality that tends to promote resourcefulness in exhibition options and to give at least some art being shown and produced a political edge. BROOKLYN MUSEUM Ill start with a museum exhibition that has the fluid, improvisatory sprawl of a giant gallery group show. Its an international survey called Agitprop!, in which politics is loud, clear and polyphonic. The show opened in December at a third its present size, then unfolded in three stages, with earlier artists nominating others for inclusion, a process that has brought outstanding figures like Jelili Atiku, from Nigeria; Beatriz Santiago Munoz, from Puerto Rico; and Inder Salim, from India, into the picture. Much of the work is ephemeral, preserved as documentation. But there are some large-scale objects and installations, two of local relevance. One is the four-foot-high bust of the National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward J. Snowden, made by Doyle Trankina and illicitly placed by two other artists, Jeff Greenspan and Andrew Tider, in Fort Greene Park a year ago. The police quickly removed it, but an activist collective called the Illuminator just as quickly replaced it with a photographic projection. With a movie camera, they revisited several places shown in the images Memphis, Chicago and the Arkansas Delta and reimagined them, recreating some of the pictures contours with the help of locals and acquaintances, but zooming in on details barely noticeable in the original images, or using the camera to create new perspectives that float somewhere between fiction and documentation. The results (lingering shots, for example, of the worn pews of the Clayborn Temple in Memphis, headquarters of a 1968 sanitation strike by African-American workers) are often difficult to trace back to their sources, which serve as something like fertile seeds. Our generation thinks about what our responsibility is to that era, and how weve come to understand that era, said Ms. Hewitt, who is African-American, as is Mr. Young. So part of my thinking was: How do we make a visible trace connecting us to that past? She spoke recently while on a break from working on new projects in her modest two-room studio on West 138th Street in Manhattan, not far from where her grandfather worked as a police captain in the 1950s amid a growing force of black officers, many of whom had been born in the South. (Her paternal grandmother left Macon, Ga., in the Great Migration, arriving in New York in the 30s.) The images in Untitled (Structures) which at times seem like projected still photos, except that the people in them breathe and blink and the camera sometimes moves in a sense follow that migration, in which more than six million black Americans left the rural South for the urban North, Midwest and West. Ms. Hewitts work is often made by photographing photographs arranged in layers and presenting the images in large frames so that they appear sculptural. She said that she and Mr. Young talked a lot about the creators of the images in the archive, all of them white men who went south to document, and sometimes to participate in, the civil rights struggle. She stressed that race and gender did not play a large part in her thinking about the photographs The images in the archive are breathtaking in all accounts, she said but such considerations did give her room to move around as an artist. How would a photograph have been different if a black man or a black woman had taken it? What wasnt pictured? Would certain images have been as beautiful and formally poised if they had been taken by someone else? COLUMBUS The weekend is usually a time people look forward to. For some students, though, those two days away from school are a time when they might go without meals they ordinarily receive during the week. Before we had the breakfast program, I would see kids Monday morning tired and hungry. Id ask them if they ate that morning and they would say no. Id ask them if they ate on the weekend and they would say not really, said Daryl Schrunk, whose position as elementary principal at Lakeview Community Schools covers both Shell Creek and Platte Center elementary schools. The district has been serving breakfast for students since 2014. Schrunk said the program has a positive impact on students, especially those who come from families that face food insecurity, meaning they worry about where their next meal will come from. About 18 percent of adults in the East Central District Health Department service area, which includes the counties of Platte, Colfax, Boone and Nance, were food insecure, according to a 2015 Comprehensive Community Health Needs Assessment. The breakfast program is just one way Lakeview has helped address that issue. For the past three years, Shell Creek and Platte Center elementary schools have also incorporated a backpack program that sends food home with children at risk of hunger on the weekend. A total of 40 prepackaged bags of food are confidentially distributed to students at the schools based on need. The food, which includes items like cereal pouches, juice, fruit cups and entrees, is supplied by Food Bank for the Heartland. The program is sponsored by Woodhouse Auto Family. Platte Center Elementary Principal Quentin Witt said the program definitely helps, particularly in the classroom. He doesnt have specific evidence of student performances increasing, but studies have shown students who face food insecurity can struggle with schoolwork. It is my belief that kids cant really learn without their bellies full, Witt said. Schrunk agrees. I can tell you that we have seen kids who are eating are better able to concentrate, he said. Students who receive food assistance are chosen in a similar way at Columbus Public Schools, which utilizes the Food For Thought Weekend Backpack Program. That program was established in Columbus about 3 1/2 years ago by an organization called A Place at the Table. Currently, the program is in all five CPS elementary schools. The middle and high schools were added last year. Typically, students who receive free and reduced-price lunches are considered for the program, but it is also serves families facing a crisis. Heidi Luebbe, a social worker at Columbus Middle School, said she interacts with a lot of families coming from a variety of living situations that affect their ability to purchase nutritious food because they don't have a regular source of income. The causes vary. With one family, the mom had cancer and the dad quit his job to take her to treatment, so they were without an income. Another family moved here to escape a domestic violence situation and the parent hadn't found a job yet. Other families are just struggling financially despite being employed. That can be seen by the growing number of students receiving free and reduced-priced meals at schools. To be eligible for free meals, children have to come from households with incomes at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty level. That number has to be greater than 130 percent but not more than 185 percent for reduced-priced meals. According to the Nebraska Department of Education, the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches in the Lakeview school district rose from 28 percent in 2000-01 to 40 percent in 2014-15. During that same timespan, the percentage at CPS jumped from 27 percent to 51 percent, outpacing the state by about 6 percent. There is also a growing percentage of children in Platte County enrolled in SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). From 2008-12, that number increased from 8 percent to 12 percent, according to the health department's needs assessment. Mindy Vyhnalek, board president with the Food For Thought program, said she was somewhat surprised at the need for food in the community, especially with the low unemployment rate in Columbus, which is about 3.7 percent, according to the Nebraska Department of Labor. But we were just discussing that a lot of the jobs arent living-wage (jobs). Families dont have enough to pay for expenses, Vyhnalek said. The Food For Thought program began with 100 backpacks being distributed to schools. That number has grown to 293. A volunteer crew stuffs bags with nonperishable food once a week during the school year and those bags are given to children on Fridays to take home for the weekend. The food comes from Hy-Vee, Super Saver and Food Bank of the Heartland. The program is funded with grants and donations. About 60 bags are given out at Columbus High School. It has made a tremendous difference for our kids, school nurse Jean Kamrath said of the program. Some students at CHS who receive a bag eat items like granola bars and fruit at school because they dont have enough money in their lunch accounts and arent eligible or signed up to receive free or reduced-priced meals. I have kids who work right after school, so they stop in and get a backpack and have it before work. Some of the kids work nights so they take it with them to their job and eat it during their breaks, Kamrath said. In addition to the backpack programs, a U.S. Department of Agriculture summer lunch program has been in place since 2008 in Columbus. The program offers free meals to any child ages 18 and younger. Adults accompanying a child can eat for $3. The lunch program, which begins June 6, will be offered this summer at Columbus Middle School. Last year, 11,900 lunches were served over 39 days at the middle school and West Park Elementary, an increase from 8,400 meals served in 34 days in 2014. The majority of those served were children. Those involved with the backpack programs and schools try to promote the lunch program because they worry how at-risk children are getting by during the summer. The thing we hope is that they are taking part in the summer lunch program. We hope they are getting at least one meal from that. We are very thankful that we have that summer lunch program, Vyhnalek said. MADRID Two giants of Western literature, William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes, are being honored this weekend in their native countries on the 400th anniversaries of their deaths. But while Britain has gone all out to fete Shakespeare, with a yearlong slate of high-profile events, readings, concerts and stagings of his plays, Spanish officials have been accused of not doing enough to promote Cervantes, whose Don Quixote is considered to be a foundational text of modern fiction. As Spain heads into its fifth month without an elected government, after inconclusive elections in December, the criticism has taken on a distinctly political flavor. A few weeks ago, Juan Luis Cebrian, the chairman of Prisa, the Spanish media group that owns the newspaper El Pais, paid tribute to Cervantes at his shareholders general assembly. But he took a swipe at the absence and anomia of the authorities of our country in terms of everything that relates to this event. Prince, the songwriter, singer, producer, one-man studio band and consummate showman, died on Thursday at his home, Paisley Park, in Chanhassen, Minn. He was 57. His publicist, Yvette Noel-Schure, confirmed his death but did not report a cause. In a statement, the Carver County sheriff, Jim Olson, said that deputies responded to an emergency call at 9:43 a.m. When deputies and medical personnel arrived, he said, they found an unresponsive adult male in the elevator. Emergency medical workers attempted to provide lifesaving CPR, but were unable to revive the victim. He was pronounced deceased at 10:07 a.m. The sheriffs office said it would continue to investigate his death. Last week, responding to news reports that Princes plane had made an emergency landing because of a health scare, Ms. Noel-Schure said Prince was fighting the flu. Prince was a man bursting with music a wildly prolific songwriter, a virtuoso on guitars, keyboards and drums and a master architect of funk, rock, R&B and pop, even as his music defied genres. In a career that lasted from the late 1970s until his solo Piano & a Microphone tour this year, he was acclaimed as a sex symbol, a musical prodigy and an artist who shaped his career his way, often battling with accepted music-business practices. When I first started out in the music industry, I was most concerned with freedom. Freedom to produce, freedom to play all the instruments on my records, freedom to say anything I wanted to, he said when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. In a tribute to George Harrison that night, Prince went on to play a guitar solo in While My Guitar Gently Weeps that left the room floored. A seven-time Grammy winner, Prince had Top 10 hits like Little Red Corvette, When Doves Cry, Lets Go Crazy, Kiss and The Most Beautiful Girl in the World; albums like Dirty Mind, 1999 and Sign O the Times were full-length statements. His songs also became hits for others, among them Nothing Compares 2 U for Sinead OConnor, Manic Monday for the Bangles and I Feel for You for Chaka Khan. With the 1984 film and album Purple Rain, he told a fictionalized version of his own story: biracial (although Princes parents were both African-American), gifted, spectacularly ambitious. Its music won him an Academy Award, and the album sold more than 13 million copies in the United States alone. In a statement, President Obama said, Few artists have influenced the sound and trajectory of popular music more distinctly, or touched quite so many people with their talent. He added, He was a virtuoso instrumentalist, a brilliant bandleader, and an electrifying performer. A strong spirit transcends rules, Prince once said and nobodys spirit was stronger, bolder, or more creative. Id be shocked if Walgreens doesnt have a contractual right to terminate the contract right now, said George Triantis, an expert on contract design and dispute resolution at Stanford Law School. Walgreens declined to comment. Its easy to see why Walgreens would have been so infatuated with Theranos and its revolutionary scientific promises. When the deal was announced, a news release trumpeted Theranoss claim that its kind, minimally invasive collection technology using blood drawn from a tiny finger stick or microsample would revolutionize blood testing and empower consumers, not to mention attract them to Walgreens stores. The Wall Street Journal reported that Walgreens was so eager to cement the relationship that it lent Theranos money, acquired warrants to buy Theranos stock and skipped its usual due diligence when evaluating a pharmacy partner. The report was confirmed by a person involved in the relationship who spoke on the condition that he not be named because of continuing investigations and the likelihood of litigation. Not that Walgreens would have learned much: Theranos was as secretive about its technology with Walgreens as it was with everyone else. Walgreens eventually opened 40 Theranos wellness centers in Arizona in a pilot program, and one in Palo Alto, Calif., close to Theranoss headquarters. The companies sealed their relationship in November 2013 with a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the opening of a Theranos wellness center in Scottsdale, Ariz., attended by Ms. Holmes; Gregory Wasson, chief executive of Walgreens at the time; and Mayor Greg Stanton of Phoenix. Mr. Stanton, too, jumped on the too-good-to-check bandwagon, hailing Theranoss revolutionary lab testing program that makes diagnosis of illnesses fast, inexpensive and convenient. Theranoss claim that it could run the full gamut of blood tests on a microsample from a finger prick using its own breakthrough technology proved to be grossly exaggerated, if not entirely false. At most, Theranos performed a few tests using such technology, and recently has been using tiny samples for only one out of every 240 tests. The accuracy of even those few tests has been questioned. Bankers should be punching the air. Saudi Arabia is close to agreeing to terms on a $10 billion loan with a syndicate of banks including JPMorgan, HSBC and Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi. Normally, getting the nod to lend to Saudi Arabia, the Middle Easts largest holder of crude oil reserves, for the first time in 25 years would be easy money. But banks may be ignoring the risks. Despite running up a 15 percent budget deficit last year, which is expected to grow further in 2016, the Saudi government has found it easy to borrow money. It will probably borrow at 120 basis points over the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, a rate far below the risk implied by its credit-default swaps, according to a Reuters report on April 20. The terms may be in line with recent debt deals secured by its neighbors Qatar and Oman, but the risks associated with the kingdom could be much bigger. Pushed on by its energetic but inexperienced deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom is fighting on four fronts. The prince wants to win a global oil price war that is stretching the kingdoms finances to their breaking point, while opposing Iran in proxy conflicts in Syria and Yemen. To answer that, it helps to go back to the beginning of the story. It started with a Rhode Island company, Scott Brass, which makes brass and copper for all sorts of industries. In 2007, an affiliate of the private equity firm Sun Capital Partners bought Scott Brass, splitting the ownership between two separate Sun Capital funds. A year later, Scott Brass went bankrupt and stopped contributing to its pension fund, run by the New England Teamsters and Trucking Industry Pension Fund. Federal law imposes pension liability on any trade or business that is under common control with Scott Brass. The pension fund argued that Sun Capitals funds met that definition and should be liable for the $4.5 million pension fund debt. In 2013, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit found that one of Suns funds did constitute a trade or business the first time a private equity fund was classified as such. The appeals court sent the case back to a lower court to decide whether Suns other fund was a trade or business as well. On March 28, Judge Woodlock found not only that the other funds activities met the test of being a trade or business, he also found that the two funds served as a partnership in fact one that was under common control with Scott Brass. That made the funds liable for the pension debt. LONDON A frantic bidding war for the French electronics and appliance retailer Darty erupted on Thursday as the French unit of Steinhoff International Holdings and the French retailer Groupe Fnac both announced a series of sweetened offers for the company. The rush to acquire Darty began in March when Steinhoff of South Africa offered to buy the retailer at a price that exceeded the one in a previous merger agreement with Fnac. In November, Fnac had offered to pay 558 million pounds, or about $802 million, for Darty. In March, Steinhoff abandoned its pursuit of the Home Retail Group as it faced a separate and potentially lengthy battle with J Sainsbury, one of Britains largest grocery store chains. It instead agreed to acquire Darty with a cash offer of 125 pence a share, or about 673 million, beating Fnac at the time in a race to acquire the company. Steinhoff wants to combine Darty with Conforama, a French household goods retailer that it bought five years ago. Dish Network wanted its MTV after all. On Thursday morning, Dish, the satellite TV provider, and Viacom announced that they had struck a multiyear agreement for Dish to continue to carry Viacoms bundle of television networks, averting a threatened blackout. Dishs 14 million customers will have uninterrupted access to 18 Viacom channels, including MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central. In addition, select Viacom content will be added to Dishs Sling TV streaming services,which offer a slimmer bundle of networks starting at $20 a month. Add-on packages for specific genres of programming also are available for an additional monthly fee. Specific terms of the deal were not disclosed. Striking the agreement was especially crucial for Viacom, which has faced several business woes in recent months. The company has reported persistently weak earnings and faced questions over its management. The looming threat that Dish could drop Viacom channels from its service added to the uncertainty about the companys fate. TOKYO In most of the world, few consumers even know microcars exist. But in Japan, the tiny vehicles, whose fuel consumption is as small as their price tags, are a crucial battleground for domestic automakers. And for years, Mitsubishi Motors has been losing to its heavyweight competitors. A day after the company admitted it had cheated on fuel economy tests for a line of kei, or ultralight, cars, in the latest scandal to grip the global automobile industry, attention focused on the companys struggles in the brutally competitive Japanese microcar market. Rivals like Suzuki and Daihatsu, an affiliate of Toyota, produce vehicles with significantly better mileage, a crucial selling point for cars designed to appeal to the most budget-conscious buyers. That, specialists said, may have tempted Mitsubishi to cheat. Although the company said it was retesting the affected vehicles to determine their true fuel economy, Mitsubishis president, Tetsuro Aikawa, estimated on Wednesday that improper tests had inflated their ratings 5 percent to 10 percent. Keis are more than a niche in Japan. About 40 percent of new cars sold belong to the category, which is subject to lower taxes that increase their price advantage over full-size vehicles. With engines limited by law to smaller than 0.66 liters smaller than those of many motorcycles some sell for the equivalent of less than $10,000. A public feud between Whole Foods and a customer who accused the store of scrawling an anti-gay slur on his cake escalated this week with dueling lawsuits, inspiring hundreds of online sleuths to debate the clues in security footage and in the hand-lettered icing. The trouble began on April 14, when Jordan Brown, an openly gay pastor, bought a pre-frosted chocolate cake from a Whole Foods in Austin, Tex., and asked an employee to write the words Love Wins in icing on top. It was to be a gift for a member of his congregation. Accounts diverge from there. According to Mr. Brown, 31, as he was driving away from the store he looked down through the clear-top of the cake box and was horrified to see a slur scrawled beneath the Love Wins. He called the store and received an apology, he said. But a short time later, an employee called back and denied that the offensive word was written by anyone at Whole Foods. On Monday, Mr. Brown and his lawyer announced a lawsuit against Whole Foods at a news conference, during which the pastor choked back tears as he described the humiliation of the experience. As Akai Gurley left his girlfriends apartment in a Brooklyn housing project one November night two years ago, he tried to take an elevator to the street, but found that it was broken. Had it been working, Mr. Gurley might never have set foot into the stairwell where he died. It was the kind of freakish detail that pervaded the case of his killer, the former New York City police officer Peter Liang. Not only was the elevator broken, but the lights in the stairwell were out. And Mr. Liang was a rookie, not even a year out of the Police Academy. Moreover, the shot he fired glanced off a wall, caromed randomly and struck Mr. Gurley in the heart. The accidental nature of the killing was noted by many on Tuesday when Mr. Liang was sentenced to probation in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, avoiding a prison term in one of the most divisive police misconduct cases in recent city history. Paul Shechtman, a lawyer for Mr. Liang, argued in court that there had never been a manslaughter case in New York in which the allegations were less egregious and the conduct less blameworthy. Ruling that the shooting had been unintentional, Justice Danny K. Chun, who presided over the case, went so far as to reduce the jurys verdict from manslaughter based on recklessness to the less severe criminally negligent homicide. NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital has agreed to pay a $2.2 million penalty to federal regulators for allowing television crews to film two patients without their consent one who was dying, the other in significant distress. Regulators said on Thursday that the hospital allowed filming to continue even after a medical professional asked that it stop. At the same time, regulators clarified the rules regarding the filming of patients, prohibiting health providers from inviting crews into treatment areas without permission from all patients who are present. That could end popular television shows that capture emergencies and traumas in progress, getting permission from patients only afterward. It is not sufficient for a health care provider to request or require media personnel to mask the identities of patients (using techniques such as blurring, pixelation or voice alteration software) for whom an authorization was not obtained, the Office for Civil Rights with the federal Department of Health and Human Services said in an online post. The Office for Civil Rights oversees the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a federal patient privacy law known as Hipaa. Privacy rules for enforcing the law do not allow media access to patients health information without authorization, the post said. Meanwhile, the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, is actively stirring up trouble and discord in Europe. His annexation of Crimea two years ago was punishment for Ukraines seeking affiliation with the European Union. Russia has courted right-wing and anti-Brussels parties in Europe, and a Russian bank owned by a Kremlin ally supported Ms. Le Pens National Front with a $10 million loan. Russias military has brazenly violated the airspace and territorial waters of Nordic countries, while the Baltic States have also been targeted by Russian-based cyberattacks. For Mr. Putin, the collapse of the European project would be payback for what he views bitterly as Western triumphalism when the Soviet empire dissolved in the early 1990s. The more the European Union frays, the easier it is for Mr. Putin to promote his alternative vision of a Eurasian Union dominated by Moscow. The White House is as determined to shore up the European Union as the Kremlin is to accelerate its demise. Secretary of State John Kerry has said that a strong U.K. staying in a strong E.U. is in American interests. With Mr. Obama perceived as coming to Mr. Camerons aid, the prospect of his visit raised protests from more than a hundred euroskeptic members of Parliament and pro-Brexit commentators. While respecting Britains right to decide, the president will explain Americas stake in the decision. In the first half of the 20th century, nationalism ran amok in Europe, spawning two world wars. The United States intervened decisively in both. In the aftermath of that experience, in 1946, Winston Churchill envisioned a United States of Europe that would depend on American support and protection. The strongest link in the trans-Atlantic chain, he believed, was the special relationship between Britain and the United States. The compact backed by the American-funded Marshall Plan consolidated Western Europe and enabled an extension eastward of a zone of peace, based on democracy, open societies and borders, and a rule-based international order. The union became an example to other parts of the globe. Today, new challenges have stressed that unity to the limits: the Great Recession, the strains in the eurozone, Russia breaking bad and, most recently, the refugee crisis caused largely by Syrias civil war. But even during this troubled period, the strategic rapport between Britain and America has been crucial in achieving joint goals like maintaining European Union sanctions on Iran and Russia. That partnership is at an inflection point. The proliferation of -exit words is a warning that many Europeans are giving up on the progress of the last 70 years. Worse, extreme nationalist and xenophobic movements are grimly reminiscent of the dark decades of Europes past. To the Editor: The decision to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill ($20 Billing: Tubman Is In, Jackson Is Out, front page, April 21) brought tears to my eyes. It felt almost more momentous than the election of Barack Obama: Presidents come and go, but the faces on our dollars are like chips of Mount Rushmore that you carry in your pocket. Yet I wonder: Is it a coincidence that women and African-Americans will make it onto our bills just as paper money is heading for the trash bin of history? Already it is being replaced by cards, chips and smartphone swipes. So, speed it up, Treasury. I want my Tubmans while they still function as real currency and not just an overdue honor. ELIZABETH BASS Manhasset, N.Y. To the Editor: Re The Hamilton Id Put on the $10 Bill (Op-Ed, April 20): Cokie Roberts argues that Alexander Hamilton is undeserving of his place on the front of the $10 bill because he was a philandering liar who left his family penniless after dying in a duel, and the honor should instead be granted to a woman. Notwithstanding the fact that these criteria would disqualify a number of our founding fathers and presidents from being featured on our currency, the real irony of this argument is that without Alexander Hamiltons considerable contributions to our history as, among other things, military tactician, persuasive advocate for federal unity and architect of the national banking system, the face of a woman would grace the face of our currency: Queen Elizabeth II. SHANGHAI When Han Feng returned to her homeland a decade ago, she moved into one of Shanghais most historically significant buildings almost by accident. Days after landing in the city, the financial capital of mainland China, after 20 years spent making a name for herself as a fashion designer in New York, Ms. Han ran into an old friend at a flea market. She suggested I come and be her neighbor at the Jin Jiang Hotel, Ms. Han said. I signed the lease the next day, then left town to go back to New York for three months. After moving to New York in 1985, with little English, Ms. Han began her professional career as a sales assistant at Bloomingdales. She soon started making and selling scarves out of her home and then introduced her own ready-to-wear line, becoming a staple at New York Fashion Week by the mid-1990s. Did the Big Bang blow bubbles? A look at this glistening blue blob floating through the cosmos could give that impression. But what looks like a celestial mix of soap and water is actually something much dirtier: a colossal cloud of dust and gas. An image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, shows the aptly named Bubble Nebula, which is some 8,000 light-years away. Astronomers at NASA and the European Space Agency released the photo on Thursday to celebrate the 26th anniversary of the telescopes launch, which is Sunday. With more than 50 women having flown in space over the last 50 years and the ranks of women astronauts growing, one might assume that a basic physiological question has been answered: Whats the best approach to manage menstrual cycles in space? An analysis published Thursday in the journal npj Microgravity reports that many women astronauts might choose to pause their periods while in space, especially as missions get longer, and discusses ways to do that. Using long-acting contraceptive methods, like implants or intrauterine devices, may be best, the authors say not only for the women but for reasons of convenience and cargo. The authors, Dr. Varsha Jain at Kings College London, who has been described as a space gynecologist, and Virginia E. Wotring at Baylor College of Medicine, who might be considered a space pharmacologist, write that menstruating in space is safe. (The old myth that zero gravity would cause retrograde menstrual flow, causing blood to accumulate in the abdomen and cause infections, has been shown to be baseless.) In a NASA oral history, Dr. Rhea Seddon, an astronaut who flew on three space shuttle missions in the 1980s and 1990s, said, Im not totally sure who had the first period in space, but they came back and said, Period in space, just like period on the ground. Dont worry about it. An airport hangar outside Paris shook with cheers, toasts and foot-stomping in December as diplomats ushered a landmark climate agreement into existence. On Friday morning, world leaders will gather again at the United Nations for a grand ceremony to sign the document. But can they deliver on their promises to fight global warming? After a quarter-century of failed diplomatic efforts, signs are growing that nations have turned a corner in their political willingness to tackle climate change. Many leaders are pushing to make the Paris agreement legally binding years earlier than originally expected. The falling cost of clean energy is providing a powerful tailwind for their efforts. For all the signs of progress and political will, however, new challenges to implementing the accord have arisen just since December. Outside experts also say the countries bare-bones plans are still far from enough to keep global warming to tolerable levels. No country has shared a detailed, credible strategy to achieve what scientists think is necessary: ending the era of fossil-fuel emissions and converting entirely to clean energy no later than the middle of this century. Unless countries develop more ambitious plans, the experts say, the world could ultimately suffer profound consequences, including debilitating heat waves, food shortages and fast-rising seas. Having passed on the 2016 presidential race, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. watches the fight for the Democratic nomination with a mixture of longing and restlessness. He remains neutral in the battle between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, but not between their campaign styles. Hell take Mr. Sanderss aspirational approach over Mrs. Clintons caution any day. I like the idea of saying, We can do much more, because we can, Mr. Biden said in an interview on the Washington-to-Wilmington, Del., Amtrak train he has ridden throughout four decades in national politics. I dont think any Democrats ever won saying, We cant think that big we ought to really downsize here because its not realistic, he said in a mocking tone. Cmon man, this is the Democratic Party! Im not part of the party that says, Well, we cant do it. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, in a contentious battle with Donald J. Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, released a new ad on Thursday that will be broadcast in Pennsylvania ahead of Tuesdays primary. It calls Mr. Trump a rich elite and links him with Hillary Clinton. On Screen A well-worn video clip of Mrs. Clinton saying We came out of the White House not only dead broke but in debt, fills a translucent flat-screen television, with a sweeping vista of New York City swirling in the background. It was not easy, Mrs. Clinton says in the interview. It has not been easy for me, Mr. Trump continues, as the camera cuts to a campaign event featuring the Republican front-runner, before skipping ahead to Mr. Trump recalling how his father gave him a small loan of a million dollars. A narrator proclaims, They just dont get it, as a photograph of the Trumps and the Clintons smiling at Mr. Trumps wedding fills the screen. Ted Cruz does, the narrator continues, rapidly listing major lines of Mr. Cruzs platform like cut taxes, roll back regulation and repeal Obamacare. HOLLYWOOD, Fla. The Republican National Committee is scaling back its financial commitments to some of the most hotly contested states because of flagging fund-raising, the most concrete evidence yet of how the partys divisive and protracted presidential race is threatening the partys entire ticket in November. Committee officials outlined detailed plans in written playbooks distributed this year in the most competitive states about how they intended to assist Republican campaigns up and down the ballot with money and manpower. By July 1, Florida was to have 256 field organizers and Ohio another 176, for example, according to a state party chairman in possession of the strategy books who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. But Sean Spicer, the committees chief strategist, acknowledged this week that the committee had begun informing state parties and statewide campaigns that fulfilling such plans would now be slower. He said the pledges had been made with the assumption that Republicans would have a presumptive presidential nominee by now. Just as revealing, the party is also taking steps to create a separate fund-raising entity dedicated to Senate races, an acknowledgment that many of the wealthiest contributors are increasingly focused on protecting Republican control of Congress rather than on a presidential campaign they fear is lost. Randall Stevenson, whose son served in the Marines in Afghanistans Sangin district in 2010, made a video this month, soon after his son, who was 25, hanged himself with a belt. Six days ago, my son committed suicide after serving in Afghanistan, suffering from survivors guilt, PTSD, depression, Mr. Stevenson said in the video, his voice breaking. Three days ago, we buried him. Please, I dont want this to be you. In the video, the father says that he had surgery on his shoulder, but would give the push-ups his all. After struggling through them, he ended the video with, Save lives. In a telephone interview, Mr. Stevenson said his son had talked to him about combat in Afghanistan. I never felt so afraid in my life. I never felt so alive in my life. I want to go back, he quoted his son as saying. He missed his buddies. There are official and professional lifelines, of course. The Department of Veterans Affairs crisis line has handled more than two million calls since it was started in 2007, and has dispatched emergency services more than 56,000 times. It also has online chat and text services. But some veterans say they steer away from the Veterans Affairs system. They are not sure a doctor who has never seen enemy fire can relate to their experiences. Some also distrust the system because of recent scandals and delays getting appointments. And so they take matters into their own hands. Members of the Second Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment, maintain a Google document of contact information for emergencies. Zachary Ziegel, a former Marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, started a Buddy Check 22 Facebook group after he saw an Illinois television stations Buddy Check 25 campaign promoting reminders for women to check themselves for breast cancer. Within months, his group had five million participants, he said. SEATTLE Amazons new urban headquarters more than 30 office buildings and three towers that, once completed, will dominate a low-slung section of the city are a gleaming symbol of boom times here. The tech giant has added 20,000 new jobs in Seattle and attracted other tech companies that want to rub elbows. Google plans to expand here as well, with four new buildings and perhaps 4,000 workers. Smaller start-ups dot old brick neighborhoods like Pioneer Square, and newer developments like South Lake Union, where Amazon is building. But the surging growth has also driven up rents and home prices, fueling a homeless crisis so severe that last fall, the mayor declared a state of emergency. And Amazons focus on its business interests and growth has made it a target of some residents and politicians, who have criticized it as an insular corporate giant uninterested in addressing the problems of its home city. But this week, Amazon stepped into a new place of civic engagement, and raised hopes, city leaders said, of much more to come. The company, in partnership with a nonprofit group called Marys Place, threw open the doors of an unused building near the heart of its corporate empire, creating one of the largest homeless shelters in Seattle. The 200-bed shelter is taking shape in a former Travelodge that Amazon bought in 2014, a structure that many of the companys employees walk by every day on their way to or from work. The first handful of families who will sleep there started arriving Monday. The city started, in 2003, with North Americas first legal injection facility, InSite, which currently serves around 800 people each day. The addicts bring their own drugs, and InSite provides clean needles and medical supervision. The organization has recorded no fatal overdoses on its premises, and said overdoses near the facility have decreased by 35 percent since 2003, compared with a 9 percent decrease throughout Vancouver. More broadly, a study by the British Columbia Center for Excellence in HIV/AIDS found that people who use safe injection sites are 30 percent more likely to enter detox programs and 70 percent less likely to share needles. Legal injection sites do not, however, address the thefts, prostitution and other criminal behavior that participants often rely on to finance their addiction. And heroin sold on the street is often combined with or surreptitiously replaced by fentanyl, an opioid up to 50 times as potent that was a cause or contributing factor in 655 deaths across Canada from 2009 to 2014, according to the Canadian Center on Substance Abuse. Participants in the Crosstown prescription program do not have to worry about the purity of their drugs. To get a diacetylmorphine prescription from the clinic, patients must have participated in two earlier clinical trials on heroin maintenance, whose eligibility requirements included more than five years of injecting opioids and at least two failed attempts at replacement therapy, one of which with a treatment such as methadone. The first trial, known as the North American Opiate Medication Initiative, followed users from 2005 to 2008, and found that prescribing diacetylmorphine could save an average of $40,000 in lifetime societal costs per person compared with methadone treatment. The second trial, whose results were published this month in The Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry, found that injectable hydromorphone, a licensed pain medication, can be as successful as diacetylmorphine in treating a chronic opioid addiction. She was very religious, very sincere, said Adriana Palma, a friend since childhood. The vigil was being held under the rubble of the bell tower. With the church closed, the only place for the memorial was outside, Ms. Palma said. That night, the damage of the church seemed to weigh on people at the vigil almost as much as the deaths in Montecristi. The cross at the top of the bell tower used to be the first thing people would see when they approached the town from the road, said Ms. Palmas mother. Even sailors could spot the white church against the mountains when they came from sea. It is the pride of this town, said Fabricio Quijije, a neighbor. Times like these were precisely when Montecristi would turn to Our Mother of Monserrate for solace and guidance. According to local legend, the statue was sent to South America by King Charles V of Spain, as part of a pair with a statue called the Virgin of Mercy. The king intended the second statute to remain in Ecuador, while Monserrate was supposed to make its way to the viceroy in Lima. BEIJING Clutching a bouquet of red roses from the auburn-haired foreigner who has also showered her with wine and compliments, Ms. Li thinks to herself, Having a handsome, romantic, talented foreign boyfriend is pretty nice! What Ms. Li, a state employee, does not know is that her foreign Romeo has an ulterior motive: espionage. But the devastating truth is revealed toward the end of a 16-panel cartoon that the Beijing authorities posted in subway stations, streets and residential compounds for Chinas first National Security Education Day last Friday. Caught by security officers after handing her boyfriend a disc of work secrets at his request, Ms. Li sits before two stern officers, handcuffed and sobbing: I didnt know he was a spy. I was used by him! It was unclear why the authorities chose to cast foreign men as possible spies and young Chinese women as their targets in this first public education drive. A person answering the telephone at the propaganda office of the Beijing municipal party committee requested questions by fax. A fax including a question about the poster went unanswered. HONG KONG A camouflage-clad President Xi Jinping appeared on Wednesday at the joint battle command center of Chinas Central Military Commission, where he urged officers to build a command system that was capable of winning wars, according to state news reports. Mr. Xi, who is general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, is also chairman of the Central Military Commission, which runs the countrys armed forces. After his visit on Wednesday, a new title was unveiled in the state and party news media: commander in chief of the joint battle command center. Although predecessors like President Hu Jintao delegated operational responsibilities to professional soldiers, the new title reflects Mr. Xis desire to have a more direct role, said You Ji, who oversees the department of government and public administration at the University of Macau. Iran reacted furiously on Thursday to a United States Supreme Court ruling that Irans central bank must pay nearly $2 billion to American victims of terrorist attacks, calling the ruling thievery and a new threat to any improvement in relations. A spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Hossein Jaberi Ansari, said in a statement quoted by state media that the courts ruling on Wednesday was a mockery of international law and amounts to appropriation of the Islamic Republic of Irans property. Congress enacted a law in 2012 to make it easier for families of Americans killed in terrorist attacks, like the 1983 truck bombing of a Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, to recover damages from Iran. Investigators have concluded that Iran was responsible for that attack, something Iran has long denied. The court ruled 6 to 2 that Congress did not exceed its constitutional role in enacting the law. The ruling will, at least theoretically, allow the families to obtain compensation from Iranian central bank assets that have been impounded. RIYADH, Saudi Arabia President Obama said on Thursday that the United States would continue to enhance security cooperation with its allies in the Persian Gulf, while encouraging them to carry out domestic reforms and bolster their ability to defend themselves. The comments came at the end of a two-day summit meeting here with the leaders of six Persian Gulf nations that was intended to reassure them that the United States remains committed to their security even as it pursues rapprochement with Iran. The meeting came amid growing concerns among Saudi Arabia and its closest allies that the United States is limiting its engagement in the Middle East at a time when Iran has taken advantage of regional turmoil to spread its influence. For their part, American officials have said they would like greater commitment from Gulf states in fighting terrorist groups, an effort that has become secondary to their campaign against Iranian-backed militants in Yemen. In a series of closed-door sessions, Mr. Obama and his counterparts discussed a range of issues: the civil wars in Yemen, Syria and Libya, and the struggling efforts to end them; military and economic cooperation; and the fight against terrorist groups like the Islamic State. Two major humanitarian successes provided the lone bright spots in the darkening landscape. In one of the largest evacuations from besieged areas, 515 sick and wounded people were extricated from four blockaded areas two opposition-held towns, Madaya and Zabadani and two government-held towns, Fouaa and Kfarya. Those towns have had more luck in negotiations because they have been treated as a group in talks often involving the governments ally, Iran, and the insurgents Turkish backers. And a United Nations convoy was reported to be on the way to Rastan, in Homs Province, which has not received aid since 2012. Even so, the United Nations special envoy for the Syrian conflict, Staffan de Mistura, said on Thursday that aid was reaching only about 560,000 people, out of the 4.1 million believed to be in need in besieged and hard-to-reach areas. United Nations officials say the Syrian government is not allowing medicines or medical equipment to be included in the aid deliveries. This is not only worrisome, but unacceptable according to international law, Mr. de Mistura said. American officials expressed concern over reports that Russia was moving artillery into place around the divided city of Aleppo to help its ally, the Syrian government, begin a new attempt to retake rebel-held areas there. There are growing fears about an offensive unleashing a new wave of refugees toward the Turkish border. They would join the tens of thousands already marooned on the Syrian side. Those refugees set off a debate Thursday in Brussels over Turkeys request for visa-free travel for its people across most of the region by early summer. Allowing up to 80 million Turks to visit most countries of the European Union is one of the most divisive parts of a deal the bloc signed last month with Ankara. For now, the agreement has stanched the blocs worst migration crisis since World War II by keeping the refugees in Turkey. Tell me what to do, Cindy Sherman said, asking the photographer for guidance as she sat for her portrait. Her words seem almost comic, since she is posing in her own New York studio, staring out at her camera and the mirror she keeps perched beside it, and the one thing she has proved, across a career that turned 40 this year, is that she has known what to do in this setting. She has used that camera and mirror to capture herself playing a vamp and a secretary, a starlet and a matron, a corpse and a clown and other iconic roles our culture has cast women in. Now, after a sabbatical from the studio coming to terms with health issues and getting older, Ms. Sherman, 62, has produced her first new photos in five years. They are more explicitly about herself than ever before images that confront what aging means to a woman. In the series, which starts May 5 at Metro Pictures gallery in New York, she plays the veteran leading ladies of cinemas Golden Age, turning herself into avatars of Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo and others in their twilight years. I relate so much to these women, she said. They look like theyve been through a lot, and theyre survivors. And you can see some of the pain in there, but theyre looking forward and moving on. It cant be great, even for a best-selling author, to find out that a second best-selling author has also written a new novel about a familys obsession with its apple orchard. Think of the potential for confusion. Or all the weak how do you like them apples jokes that might have to be endured at readings. But the latest Tracy Chevalier and Jane Hamilton novels, stylistically distinct, respectively, as plot-heavy historical fiction and leisurely evocative contemporary literature, form a complementary double feature. Paired, they make the case that the beautiful lunacy of trying to earn a living from the land hasnt changed all that much in the last two centuries. They were fighting over apples again is the opening sentence of Chevaliers At the Edge of the Orchard, and for the first third of the book, thats about the extent of what happens. Chevalier (best known for her Vermeer novel, Girl With a Pearl Earring) interweaves the lives of two real people, John Chapman, known as Johnny Appleseed, and the plant collector William Lobb, with that of her fictional characters. The Goodenoughs are introduced living a miserable life in 1838 in the Great Black Swamp of Ohio, where they got stuck in the mud on their way west. James would have happily stayed on his familys farm in Connecticut, where the apple of choice was the Golden Pippin, but his kinsmen were short on land as well as patience for his slatternly wife, Sadie, and now hes desperate to meet the requirement for a settler to claim land, namely cultivating an orchard of 50 fruit trees. James and Sadie disagree on how the goal should be met. He likes eaters, particularly the apples hes grafted with scions of those Golden Pippins. Sadie sides with Chapman on favoring spitters, suitable for making cider and applejack, and when Chapman drops by with more saplings or a jug or two of the good stuff, he and Sadie get drunk and have a fine old time. (At the Edge of the Orchard may be the first novel inspired by Michael Pollan; Chevalier credits his chapter on apples in The Botany of Desire: A Plants-Eye View of the World with providing the seed for this book.) Its something of a narrative mishmash. From Jamess third-person perspective Chevalier succeeds in creating a sympathetic character, even though when it comes to Sadie or his five children (there were 10 in all; five died of swamp fever) he never met a rod he wanted to spare. With Sadie, she takes an unfortunate first-person deep dive into the mind of a younger version of Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies: Id hear new settlers complain bout the mud and think, Theres worse things than mud. Jest you wait. London is a popular destination anytime, but this year there is even more of a reason to visit: the 90th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II. Though her birth date is April 21, the city is celebrating the occasion with events starting in May. Nicola Butler, who owns NoteWorthy, a London travel company specializing in excursions such as watching the changing of the guard from inside the parade grounds, has advice on how to take in the spectacle of the monarchs birthday and what else travelers should see while in town. Here are edited excerpts. Q. What does the queens 90th birthday mean for tourists to London? A. Tourists can partake in the festivities. Most of the celebrations are from May 12 to 15 in Windsor Castle, where there will be performances highlighting the queens love of horses and her involvement with the navy, army and air force. Tickets are sold out, but its fun to be in town when theyre going on because theyll be airing everywhere, including on large screens throughout the city and at every pub and restaurant. Find a spot to watch and youll feel the excitement around you. Low genetic variation can pose a serious threat to survival. When a new threat appears a new disease, for instance some individuals may have the genes to resist it and others lack them. In a population with low genetic variation, none of the animals may have the right genes to survive. Inbred populations also often share mutations that are bad for health, shortening life spans or reducing the number of offspring. Dr. Wayne and his colleagues found that island foxes have many more harmful mutations than gray foxes on the mainland. On the face of it, the island foxes should have vanished long ago. But that hasnt happened to them in thousands of years, Dr. Wayne said. Theyre an exception to the paradigm. Dr. Wayne speculated that island foxes might enjoy some sort of special protection. Its possible, for example, that as top predators on a small island, they didnt have to face the challenges that other inbred animals do. Or perhaps the people who lived on the islands helped them survive. Or, while the genes of island foxes may be almost entirely identical, maybe they are activated in the animals in varying patterns. Experiences early in life can program genes to switch on and off, a phenomenon called epigenetics. It might also be some combination of all of the above, Dr. Wayne said. Other researchers suggest that island foxes have been protected in more familiar ways. Newly arrived foxes could have rejuvenated the Channel Island gene pool with some fresh variation. Their study has not ruled out occasional immigrants reaching the islands, said Richard Frankham, a geneticist at Macquarie University in Australia. People have been reading a lot about her food, he said. Nobody in Savannah knows who I am. Ms. Bailey spent much of her childhood in Queens; she was born in the Bronx. Returning to New York for a few spring days had energized her. Its a great time of year to come here, she said. Its so bright and beautiful. Theres tons of people on the street, and everybody looks great. It makes me miss it. A few hours before customers poured into Houseman, Mr. Baldwin remembered the day he hired Ms. Bailey at Prune, where he was the chef de cuisine. Out front, Prune has long vertical windows that open up. Arriving for the meeting, Ms. Bailey walked in through a window instead of the front door. China China, the worlds largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has pledged to have its emissions of carbon dioxide reach a plateau or decline around 2030, and many experts believe it is on track to meet that target. And by that year, 20 percent of energy in China would come from nonfossil fuel sources, the government said. China also committed recently to strictly controlling public investment flowing into projects with high pollution and carbon emissions both domestically and internationally. Climate experts see this as a significant promise, since state-owned enterprises are by far the biggest consumers of coal, and because state-owned enterprises, backed by state loans, are building dozens of coal-fired power plants abroad. But those companies are deeply embedded in the Communist Party system, and officials trying to control them often encounter obstacles. China has also pledged to set up a national market for greenhouse gas quotas by 2017, commonly called a cap and trade system, though experts have expressed skepticism about whether China will be able to meet that deadline, or whether the market would be effective. There are no vocal climate change denialists among top Chinese officials, and President Xi Jinping has been consistent in saying China must help global efforts to limit climate change. EDWARD WONG Attorneys for indicted Alabama Speaker of the House Mike Hubbard Wednesday asked a Lee County judge to delay the Auburn Republicans trial until sometime in August. Hubbards case, which encompasses 23 felony ethics charges of the speaker using his political position for personal gain, is currently slated to begin in mid-May. Defense attorneys Bill Baxley and Lance Bell at a pretrial hearing Wednesday told Lee County Circuit Court Judge Jacob A. Walker III that theres no way Hubbards counsel will be prepared for trial next month. Baxley made an oral motion to delay the trial and set a certain date in August. We just cannot be ready for this May 9th day, said Baxley. Bell told Walker he has only gotten through 60-70 percent of discovery and that the defense still has new discovery coming in a case that involves about two million documents. Theres no way if it goes to trial in May that we can effectively represent Speaker Hubbard, Bell said. Prosecutors opposed a delay in the trial, but asked that opening arguments not begin prior to May 16 due to the states subpoena of several out-of-state witnesses. Walker did not issue a ruling on the request or any other motions at the hearing. Later Wednesday afternoon, Walker ordered Hubbard's attorneys to file a written motion to continue by Friday, April 22 at 12 p.m. The state must file a response to the defense's motion by Tuesday, April 26, Walker wrote. Attorneys also discussed the states April 8 404(b) motion to introduce other crimes, wrongs or acts into evidence when the case goes to trial. The filing lists descriptions of 11 alleged offenses, which reflect the 23 ethics charges Hubbard currently faces. Baxley took issue that the state didnt file the motion under seal, calling it frivolous and claiming that the document is aimed only at tarnishing the jury pool and slandering Hubbard, as attorneys are under a gag order and cannot address allegations in the media. Walker said he didnt see how the document could be filed under seal. I dont really see how to possibly rule on it, he said of the motion, explaining that implications of the filing as written would be confusing to jurors for various reasons and it is too vague. Walker said the prosecution could re-file the motion with more specific information. You can always file the names under seal, he said. A series of motions in limine filed by the state last Wednesday seeking to limit arguments Hubbards defense can make at trial were also a topic of discussion at the pretrial conference. Walker said the states motion to exclude improper sentencing evidence or argument was standard. However, the rest of the arguments, he said, which include motions to exclude evidence or argument from the defense regarding other candidates use of Craftmaster Printing Company or Auburn Network, post-indictment election results, prosecutorial misconduct, selective prosecution, grand jury abuse, or a "political witch hunt," alleged "customs" or "habits" of other public officials, improper argument about the ethics laws and specific acts of Hubbard's good conduct or specific acts of bad conduct by the state's witnesses, I dont know. Walker asked prosecutors why the rest of the motions, which appeared to him to be filed based on anticipation, couldnt be handled as evidentiary matters during trial. Special Prosecutor Matt Hart responded that certain matters, particularly those relating to alleged prosecutorial misconduct, should not be brought up during trial because Walker already rejected the defenses motion to dismiss based on prosecutorial misconduct last month and further debate would deter jurors attention from addressing Hubbards guilt or innocence. Hart said he does not want jurors to be informed of the defenses allegations about prosecutorial misconduct. We dont want to invite notification, Hart said. "We don't want to have to convince this jury we're not criminals." Bell told Walker that Hart is on the defenses witness list and he intends to call him. I am hesitant to grant a motion in limine that might cut off a potential defense, said Walker. A motion hearing is scheduled for Friday, April 29 at 9 a.m. Hubbard has maintained his innocence and has continued to serve as Speaker of the House during the 2016 Alabama legislative session. I was serving in the Assembly 10 years ago when we debated Assembly Bill 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act. Other than the economic impact of the proposed regulations, there were two provisions of the measure that caused me and many of my colleagues concern: First, a fee that the Air Resources Board could implement to cover its costs under the measure, and, second, the allowance of a market-based compliance mechanism whereby companies could trade emission allowances among each other. Fast forward to 2016, and we find ARB has perverted these provisions into grotesque scheme that will extract up to $45 billion from California businesses and consumers to spend on many things that do not meet the requirements of AB32. It has become, in fact, a huge tax without the benefit of the required two-thirds vote of the Legislature. The objective of the law was very clear: reducing the states greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by the year 2020. And ARB was tasked with creating programs to meet that target. Under its cap-and-trade program, ARB is forbidding companies from emitting greenhouse gases unless they have bought an allowance at required auctions. What was originally thought to be a market where low emitters would benefit by selling allowances to higher emitters became also a way for ARB to extract huge sums of money by selling allowances it created from whole cloth. So how is all of this money being spent? To further the objectives of AB32? Not exactly. In the current legislative session, there have already been at least 35 measures collectively spending more than $7.5 billion in cap-and-trade revenue, many having little or nothing to do with AB32. Many divert these AB32 funds to a variety of appropriations typically funded by taxes, like social programs, parks and recreation, housing and even mosquito abatement. Spending this money on general-fund expenditures unrelated to AB32 makes these cap-and-trade extractions a tax. The state Constitution requires a two-thirds vote of the Legislature or a vote of the people to approve a new tax. AB32 was passed by just a simple majority of the Legislature. We have a clear constitutional violation here, putting in jeopardy all of the revenue raised and expenditures made. In its defense, ARB actually says that cap-and-trade funds are merely a byproduct of its regulatory function and this shouldnt be subject to any of the rules governing taxes or fees. This is a novel spin that would set a radical and dangerous precedent. It would allow any unelected regulator to levy new taxes on a business or a private citizen without legislative approval or a public vote merely if the regulator deems it to be incidental to its regulatory responsibility. Even the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst issued a report in January advising the Legislature to first approve ARBs byproduct revenue by a two-thirds vote before spending any more of it. I did not vote for AB32, because I believed the efforts to reduce greenhouse gases would have too negative an impact on Californias economy. But I never considered that ARB would devise a huge illegal tax on top of some burdensome regulatory requirements. If ARBs money train continues, it will erode critical taxpayer protections under Proposition 13, making a mockery of the voters wishes for a two-thirds threshold. Further, the whole scheme destroys any credibility of Californias climate change programs that proponents of AB32 desire, reducing the legislation to not much more than an illegal money grab. The Legislature can fix both problems. It can approve the revenue by a two-thirds vote and then spend the money on programs with measurable, transparent, cost-effective and relevant results. Or it can direct ARB to cease the illegal tax. Roger Niello served in the state Assembly from from 2004-10, representing the Sacramento area. LAKE FOREST Organizers of the recall campaign to oust three of the five City Council members submitted more signatures than required to the city, just before the deadline Wednesday. Leah Basile and her team of volunteers turned in 8,245 signatures requesting the recall of Mayor Andrew Hamilton, 8,238 for Councilman Dwight Robinson and 8,183 for Mayor Pro Tem Scott Voigts, city spokeswoman Hannah Shin-Heydorn said. City staff counted the signatures Wednesday night to make sure they exceeded the minimum 7,882 per official being recalled, Shin-Heydorn said. The city will deliver the petitions Thursday to the Orange County Registrar of Voters to get the signatures verified, she said. Recall supporters, who accuse Voigts, Hamilton and Robinson of corruption and cronyism, have been gathering signatures in store parking lots, at community events and going door-to-door since December. It was almost like four months of struggle and hard work all paid off, Basile, a Portola Hills resident whos spearheading the recall, said Thursday. Many of the people we talked to were not happy with the direction the citys headed, so it was not difficult to get them to sign. The three council members being targeted for recall deny the allegations, saying the effort is an overreaction based on misleading information, and is being promoted by rival councilmen Jim Gardner and Adam Nick. Recall opponents argue that a special election, which could cost the city as much as $200,000, would waste taxpayer money. The city pays $3.40 per signature checked by the Registrar of Voters. Unlike regularly scheduled elections, the city would be on the hook for the entire cost. I think the communitys just tired of hearing all this, Robinson said. Regardless of what happens in the next few weeks or months, I hope we can concentrate on solving issues for the residents of Lake Forest. The first recall campaign in the citys 25-year history began in October when the response Hamilton, Voigts and Robinson gave to a road project gone awry upset Basile and others. Basile said she learned the three men had received campaign contributions from developers before approving their housing projects, and from other businesses that contract with the city. Lake Forest has no campaign contribution limits and does not bar officials from taking donations from city contractors. To Basile and her supporters, the contributions were further evidence that the council members were beholden to other interests, rather than to residents. Some also joined the effort because Hamilton, Voigts and Robinson voted in favor of keeping the citys contract with OC Animal Care, which has been criticized for its dilapidated animal shelter and high kill rate. Robinson and Hamilton said they feel optimistic that recall organizers dont have enough valid signatures. The California secretary of state recommends recall petitioners turn in 50 percent more signatures than required to account for invalid signatures that will be eliminated during the review process. The signature verification by the Registrar of Voters can take up to 30 days, excluding weekends and holidays. The city must then finalize the certification of signatures at a regularly scheduled City Council meeting and hold an election within 88 to 125 days. At this point, the earliest possible date for a special recall election is Sept. 17, Shin-Heydorn said. Contact the writer: 949-445-6397 or tshimura@ocregister.com BUENA PARK A local nonprofit will send two shipping containers of aid to Ecuador in the wake of Saturdays magnitude 7.8 earthquake that killed at least 550 people and left more than 21,000 people without shelter. At least two Orange County churches also plan on providing aid to Ecuador and Japan which had two large earthquakes last week that left thousands homeless. They are waiting to hear from missionaries on the ground in both countries about what they should send. And another nonprofit is in Ecuador to distribute fuel. Giving Children Hope, which provides food, water, clothing and other items to vulnerable communities worldwide, reached out to contacts in Ecuador after hearing about the earthquake and outlined to help. The Buena Park nonprofit is asking for donations on its website and trying to line up toothbrushes and toothpaste, diapers, mosquito nets and insect repellent and clothing to help about 8,000 people. It plans to ship the two large cargo containers out of the Long Beach port by the middle of next week. The containers will take about eight days to reach the port in Guayaquil, 180 miles from the quakes epicenter. Orange County is stepping up to the plate, said Carly Visbal, a spokeswoman for Giving Children Hope. We just pray and hope people rally behind the cause. Cypress Church, an Evangelical worship center on Ball Road, and Cavalry Chapel in Santa Ana also plan on providing aid in the next couple of weeks. Mike McKay, the lead pastor of Cypress Church, said he is waiting to hear back from his contacts in Japan and Ecuador, and until then wont know what kind of help his church will provide. Typically it would send money to churches or missionaries and have them buy water and food. We like to come in when the original support starts to ebb, McKay said. We like to provide another wave of help. Mike Welles, a pastor at Cavalry, said in the past the church has provided money, food, clothing and other supplies. Cavalry also has a group of retired people who help rebuild towns. We might not be the best at immediate response, he said. But we want to have a longer-term relationship. We believe that has a higher value. Another nonprofit, Fuel Relief Fund, sent volunteers to Ecuador on Wednesday to buy fuel and distribute it to those in the disaster area to power lights, generators or vehicles. Fuel Relief Fund is based in Riverside and its executive director, Melisa Lindros, works out of Costa Mesa. Her organization is trying to raise at least $50,000 to buy fuel in Ecuador. Fuel is needed for everything, Lindros said. Power, lights, water. Nothing really happens without fuel. Contact the writer: 717-796-6979 or chaire@ocregister.com If you want to know about the tone of Elvis & Nixon, if you want to have an idea of its comedy, just look at the casting of Michaiel Shannon as Elvis Presley. Heres an actor more suited to playing Lurch on The Addams Family than The King. Hes tall and menacing. He has a cold stare. Hes not charming, but alarming, all of which makes him ideal for this movie, which is more like an absurdist lampoon than a straight account. In real life, when Elvis told President Nixon that he wanted to become an undercover agent, he probably just seemed silly. When Shannon says it, he seems downright insane, and were it not for the historical record, we might fear for Nixons safety, especially the fairly sympathetic Nixon we find here, played by Kevin Spacey. This Nixon is practically being held hostage by a lunatic, and the situation is definitely rich enough for a terrific sketch on Saturday Night Live. But for an 86 minute feature film, its a stretch. Written by Joey and Hanala Sagal, as well as actor Cary Elwes (Robin Hood: Men in Tights), Elvis & Nixon is based on the real-life meeting of two titans at the summit of power, each destined for a dramatic fall. In December 1970, Elvis showed up at the White House, unexpectedly, with a letter for President Nixon and a request for a meeting. Alarmed at the direction of a youth culture that was growing away from him, Elvis wanted to work as an agent at large for the Drug Enforcement Agency. Freud might theorize that Elvis felt angry at the decline of his cultural relevancy, and so he acted on an unconscious impulse to arrest and punish people for no longer being his fans. Moreover, he wanted to attribute their disaffection, not to movies like Clambake, but to the influence of narcotics. That he fantasized about working undercover speaks to the extent to which he felt outside of things. In any case, the Nixon administration colossally out of touch thought that a photo of the president with Elvis might speak to Americas youth. (This is, by the way, just seven months after the shootings at Kent State.) And so they granted the meeting. But in the film, nothing happens right away. Basically, anything worth watching in Elvis & Nixon either involves Elvis, or Nixon, or both of them. But there isnt enough material for a whole movie, so everything must be stretched. When stretching isnt enough, the movie must find yet another source for drama outside of Elvis and Nixon. And so it finds one in the dilemma of Jerry Schilling (Alex Pettyfer), a former member of Elvis inner circle, who is recruited by Elvis to accompany him to Washington. Jerry is torn. He feels affection for Elvis, and he is drawn to the Elvis way of life. But he has a fiancee, and on the day the movie takes place, he is expected back in Los Angeles at night for an important dinner with the girlfriends parents. Hes going to ask if he could marry her. You see the problem, dont you? Jerrys dilemma is very small, and even worse, in a movie about Elvis and Nixon, hes not Elvis or Nixon. Theres something else, too. Jerrys loyalty for Elvis was predicated on Elvis actually being recognizably human, as he certainly was in real life. But Shannons Elvis is a farcical figure, an intentionally comic creation, ideal for the scenes with Nixon, but not someone to inspire devotion in an underling. In this way, the two strains of the movie the Schilling strain and the White House meeting are in conflict. What were left with is a film that has some good comic moments, but also dull stretches in which viewers may find themselves checking out or unexpectedly fighting fatigue. Shannon is worth seeing, and so is Spacey hunched over, doing a funny impression of Nixons voice and body language. But this time the actors are better than the material. New flights continue to boost passenger traffic through John Wayne Airport, which reported a 9 percent uptick in March compared with the previous year. The airport served 907,005 passengers in March. Commercial aircraft operations increased 12.4 percent and total aircraft operations, or takeoffs and landings, increased 9.6 percent. In March, Alaska Airlines launched new flights from JWA to Santa Rosa/Sonoma County and Reno/Tahoe. In October, the airline added flights to Puerto Vallarta and Los Cabos, Mexico. Last summer, Southwest added flights to Seattle, Portland, Ore., Chicago, Austin, Texas, and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Southwest also added two nonstop routes to Kansas City and St. Louis on Nov. 22. JWA saw record numbers in 2015 as traffic topped 10 million passengers, an 8.5 percent increase over 2014. The record numbers in 2015 were attributed to new flights offered by Southwest and Alaska Airlines. Contact the writer: hmadans@ocregister.com or Twitter: @HannahMadans Bills that would outlaw the possession of large-capacity ammunition magazines and assault rifles with detachable magazines such as those used in the San Bernardino terror attack won approval from a California Senate committee this week. In party-line votes Tuesday, April 19, the Senate Public Safety Committee also gave the go-ahead to other gun control legislation, including bills that would require homemade guns to be registered and gun owners to report the loss or theft of a firearm to law enforcement. Its not clear when the bills might go the Senate floor for a vote. Current law already prohibits the manufacture of large-capacity magazines, defined as devices that can hold more than 10 rounds. But its still legal to possess them. SB 1446, authored by Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, would change that and impose fines for possessing the magazines. It would not matter when the magazines were acquired. High capacity magazines are not designed for hunting or target shooting, read a statement from Hancock included in the bill analysis. They are designed for one purpose only to allow a shooter to fire a large number of bullets in a short period of time. The San Bernardino shooters used high-capacity magazines when they killed 14 and wounded 22 at the Inland Regional Center. The magazines also were used in mass shootings in Chattanooga, Tenn., and Charleston, South Carolina, according to the bill analysis. The rifles used in San Bernardino by Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, also had special buttons that, when pressed by a special tool, ejects the magazine. See a bigger version of the graphic here. http://cdn.thinglink.me/jse/embed.js A number of tools and devices, some of which are legal, have been devised to either modify the button or make it work more quickly. One such set of illegal devices was allegedly purchased by Enrique Marquez Jr., who is charged with conspiracy to aid terrorists in the Dec. 2 attack. SB 880, sponsored by Sen. Isadore Hall, D-Compton, seeks to outlaw bullet button firearms. For years, gun owners have been able to circumvent Californias assault weapon laws by using a small tool to quickly eject and reload ammunition magazines, read a news release from Halls office. These types of modifications have no legitimate use for sport hunters or competitive shooters. They are designed only to facilitate the maximum destruction of human life. None of the bills have Inland sponsors. Sen. Jeff Stone, R-Temecula, who sits on the Public Safety Committee, voted against all of the bills. The fear of Second Amendment rights advocates has certainly come home to roost in Sacramento today as we witness a new form of eminent domain on gun owners, he said. At least with eminent domain you get paid for your property. But the government takes your property now and not even compensates you for it. Stone added: We want to do everything we can to stop the horrific mass shootings that weve seen at schools and certainly, the incident in San Bernardino. But we have to remember that criminals dont follow the law. Other bills approved by the seven-member Public Safety Committee include: SB 894, sponsored by Sen. Hannah Beth Jackson, D-Santa Barbara, which would require firearm owners to report the loss or theft of a gun to law enforcement within five days of discovering the gun is missing. The governor vetoed a similar bill in 2013. With gun owners not required to report lost or stolen weapons, law enforcement efforts to investigate gun crimes are significantly hindered, Jackson wrote in the bills analysis. SB 1006, sponsored by Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, seeks to establish a firearms violence research center at the University of California. Sen. Connie Leyva, D-Chino, supported the bill when it was before the Senate Education Committee, which she sits on. (Levya) believes that having research-based data and information is critical to making public policy decisions, the senators spokesman said. SB 1235, sponsored by Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, tightens the legal definition of ammunition to address court concerns. SB 1407, also sponsored by de Leon, requires homemade guns, also called ghost guns, to be apply to the state Department of Justice for a serial number and background check. Theres a black market for privately assembled ghost guns because criminals and those with bad intentions can acquire them without background checks, serial numbers and other gun-related laws and regulations, de Leon said in a news release. Because there is no sales record, serial number or other identifiers no one knows they exist until theyre used in a crime. Brown vetoed a similar measure in 2014. Sen. Mike Morrell, R-Rancho Cucamonga, whose district includes San Bernardino, said no one asked for his opinion on the gun control bills. I strongly support the Second Amendment and I strongly believe that our emphasis shouldnt be on guns but rather on criminals, he said. If you do a crime and you use a gun, you should be punished severely for that. Gun rights advocates and Inland gun dealers also were dismayed by the proposed legislation. As a gun owner, I dont like any government intervention, said John Danforth, who has owned Danforth Gunsmithing in Riverside for 15 years. None of these laws will provide any kind of safety from criminal actions. Every time there is an incident (involving firearms) there is a knee-jerk reaction (in Sacramento) that goes way overboard. Its knee-jerk politics. Sam Paredes, executive director of Gun Owners of California, said: We believe most of these laws are unconstitutional and we will challenge them in court, if they make it that far. Staff Writers Richard K. De Atley and Jim Steinberg contributed to this report. Contact the writer: 951-368-9547 or jhorseman@pressenterprise.com Prince wanted a dog collar. He was in his Purple Rain persona back in 1984, and when the Purple One wanted to wear a dog collar, he got a dog collar. So Cynthia Vargas Sieloff, clothes designer for Donna Summer, Chaka Khan, Chicago, Earth Wind and Fire and others, made it happen. The dog collar was five inches wide, said Vargas Sieloff, who lives in Laguna Niguel. He wanted leather. Thats what he wanted, so thats what I made him. Vargas Sieloff was devastated Thursday by Princes death. During this interview, she was driving, crying as she listened to When Doves Cry. She met him in 1979 and worked with him for about a year in the mid-1980s, designing outfits for his concerts and the photo shoot for his iconic album Purple Rain. She just saw him in February at the Life Celebration Ceremony after the death of Princes former girlfriend Denise Matthews, known as Vanity. Vargas Sieloff said Prince was mobbed by selfie-seeking fans. He sat in the church balcony and left before the service ended. He looked very frail, she said. He had been sick. He should have been in bed. I think he worked himself to death. Vargas Sieloff met Prince through her best friend, Jamie Shoop, who was his manager for 11 years. She kept telling me he was going to be a big artist, Vargas Sieloff said. She remembers Prince from 1979 very specifically. In concert, he wasnt yet Purple. He wore thigh-high black boots, a G-string, beads and scarves. She remembers his big Afro. I was a clothes designer, and he didnt wear costumes, she said. When she hung out at Shoops house, Vargas Sieloff would hear Prince practicing his guitar. I would hear it all night. WAAAAAA. We listened to his raw guitar tracks. Oh my God, it was so loud. The first time they worked together, she designed a black suit for his concert at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. This was during the Dirty Minds tour of 1981. She stitched up an Elvis collar, and the pants buttoned up the side. She also made a silver suit that Morris Day, the opening performer, would wear later in the tour. In 1984, just before the start of the Purple Rain tour, she got a plane ticket to Minnesota in the mail with a note Bring your machine. She assumed that meant sewing machine. The problem was that she missed the flight. A few days later, a gold limousine pulled up in front of her home with Prince inside. He escorted her to the airport. On the flight, Prince sketched outfits while she wondered how she was going to make these incredible designs. He wanted a purple trench coat. He wanted puffy shirts. He had one rule, she said. He was the only one who could wear purple. I had to dress his band and The Time (his opening act) in some other colors, she said. Minnesota, where Prince lived, is not known for being fashion-forward, she said. Trying to design a purple trench coat, Vargas couldnt find any purple fabric except plaid. Prince didnt want plaid. So he flew her back to Los Angeles, where she bought $10,000 worth of purple material to make the suit he wore in the photo shoot for Purple Rain. He had another request: gloves. She explained that gloves took expertise that she didnt have. But her problem was solved when her mother, who hadnt been excited about her daughter skipping college to work with rock stars, found three pairs of lacy, small gloves (beige, black and gray). The gloves fit. Prince wore the gray gloves for the photo shoot, and that picture was sold on albums around the world. When my mother saw that photo, I never heard about college again, Vargas said. After opening its first two California restaurants in 2014, iconic burger chain Steak n Shake is unveiling its first Orange County restaurant next month. (5/23 update: Steak n Shake opens today, chain officials confirmed) The first two restaurants opened in late 2014 in Santa Monica and Victorville. A third opened later in Burbank. The Aliso Viejo restaurant will be Steak n Shakes fourth California restaurant. The openings are part of the chains expansion into the West, which is picking up steam this year. Another restaurant is slated to open this summer in Riverside, said Jim Flaniken, senior vice president of marketing at Steak Steak n Shake. There are several other California locations likely to open in the second half of 2016, Flaniken said. Owned by Texas-based Biglari Holdings, Steak n Shakes reputation back East rivals that of In-N-Out. The first restaurant opened in 1934 in Illinois, selling a menu of house-ground steak burgers and hand-spun shakes. It now operates hundreds of restaurants across the East Coast, Midwest and Southern regions of the U.S. The menu includes ground steak burgers, hand-cut fries and milkshakes. The throwback dining rooms feature black and white floors, and red chairs and barstools. The hybrid-style restaurant is a full service diner inside, but also operates with a drive-through lane. It is often described as a cross between In-N-Out and Rubys Diner. During the Great Recession, Steak n Shake sales and customer traffic tanked. The chain was losing nearly $100,000 per day, according to a 2015 regulatory filing. By 2010, sales began to turnaround after new leadership was installed. In 2015, the company generated $1 billion in sales at its 561 domestic and international locations, according to market research firm Technomic in Chicago. Thats up from $786 million in 2010. Average annual sales at each restaurant is $1.9 million, Technomic reported. The Aliso Viejo restaurant, slated to open in mid-May, represents our classic, dine-in with drive-thru concept, Flaniken said in a statement to the Register. The hours will be 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily. Address: 27002 La Paz Road. The Riverside location is at 6231 Valley Springs Parkway. Contact the writer: nluna@ocregister.com An Orange County woman says she paid $875,000 for a painting by one of the founders of French impressionism, Alfred Sisley, only to learn that the work isnt authentic. In a lawsuit filed Friday, Karen Rabe said she bought a signed Sisley titled Branches darbes (sic) au bord du Loing (Tree Branches on the Banks of the Loing) from international art dealer Guy Wildenstein and his New York-based Wildenstein & Co. Inc. But when she tried to sell the painting in 2013 through Sothebys auction house, she received a letter from the Comite Alfred Sisley, an organization that tracks works by Sisley, saying her painting was not authentic, the lawsuit says. Wildenstein, 70, is head of a family-owned art dealership that has been operating in New York and Paris for generations. A representative of the Wildenstein Co. could not be reached Wednesday for comment. Rabe, in the lawsuit, said she initially planned to display the painting in her home and that she believed the painting was authentic in part because of Wildenstein & Co.s reputation. The sale also included a handwritten note of authenticity, dated 1989, from Francois Daulte, a well-known art expert, who was preparing a catalog with the official collection of works by Alfred Sisley, according to the lawsuit. Daulte died in 1999. Rabe could not be reached for comment, and her attorneys, at Newmeyer & Dillion in Newport Beach, declined to comment. The paintings value now isnt clear. In a letter to Rabe, the Comite Alfred Sisley said that because it believes the work is not authentic it will not be included in the Catalogue Raisonne, a comprehensive listing of all the known works of an artist. Paintings by Sisley have sold for more than $2.8 million, and his work which includes about 900 oil paintings gained in value at a rate of about 3 percent a year from 1995 through 2014, according to a survey by artNews. The case is pending in Orange County Superior Court. Contact the writer: kpuente@ocregister.com TALIA OPENS AT SHOPS at MISSION VIEJO Aliso Viejo resident Talia Hancock Petersen opened a retail store at the Shops at Mission Viejo this month featuring her fashion line, Talia. Her clothing store, which includes items designed in California and made in Peru, took over the spot formerly occupied by Cathy Jean. Hancock will celebrate with a grand opening and ribbon-cutting ceremony at 5 p.m. May 7. The event will feature champagne, raffles and giveaways. Designs can be viewed at weartalia.com. CHAMBER to WELCOME FROZEN TREATs Shop The Lake Forest Chamber of Commerce is celebrating Shaved Ice Ice Baby with a ribbon-cutting at 1 p.m. on April 29. The frozen treats shop, at 22641 Lake Forest Drive, specializes in Asian-style shaved ice that tastes like frozen cotton candy and has a fluffy, velvety texture. It is created from ice blocks infused with flavors, then finely shaved, creating a powdery, snowlike consistency. Owners Tom Meadows and Somaly Chhay created it from an old family recipe and gave it an American twist with toppings like chocolate chips, Capn Crunch and fresh-cut fruits. Meadows has a background in the automobile industry, and Cchay comes from the mortgage industry. The couple also own a mobile photo booth business. They hope to expand their frozen treats shop with more locations in the future. SPORT CHALET CLOSing SOUTH COUNTY stores Sport Chalet is in the process of closing all its stores, including three in South Orange County. That means the stores at 27080 Alicia Parkway in Laguna Niguel, 27551 Puerta Real in Mission Viejo and 26532 Towne Centre Drive in Lake Forest. Sport Chalet gift cards will be honored in stores through April 29, and customers need to pick up equipment that has been repaired in stores by the same date. T.J. MAXX openS NEW STORE IN SAN CLEMENTE Discount retailer T.J. Maxx is launching a new 25,500-square-feet store at Camino De Estrella Plaza in San Clemente on Sunday. A ribbon-cutting will begin at 7:30 a.m. at the new location, and the first 1,000 shoppers will receive reusable bags. The new shop, which will create about 60 full and part-time jobs in the area, will donate $5,000 to Goodwill of Orange County as a way to give back to the community. Contact the writer: marieek@hotmail.com Lifeguard Danika Thompson was nowhere near the ocean on March 18 when a blood-curdling scream sent her on the rescue of her career. The 23-year-old San Clemente resident had hiked to the top of Yosemite Falls with her boyfriend. It was the final day of a five-day camping trip. On the way down, her boyfriend scurried ahead of her to capture a photo of the falls displaying rainbow colors in afternoon light. So Thompson was hiking alone when a sound that she said could have come from a horror movie jolted her backward, running back up the trail around two rocky switchbacks. I saw this guy, she said. His body was like all contorted. I thought gosh, I hope he didnt break his spine. On most any other Friday afternoon, Thompson might have been playing her violin, maybe learning a new tune for her next gig as a solo artist at private parties, weddings or specialty events. Or playing impromptu on the San Clemente Pier. Or preparing to enroll in August for a two-year program at Belmont Universitys School of Music in Nashville, Tenn. A 2010 graduate of San Clemente High School, she began playing the violin at age 9, the same year she took up water polo. I actually didnt play my violin in high school, she said, because the way the classes were, I had to choose my sport. So I quit the violin for four years and just played water polo, which was good because that got me into lifeguarding. That has been an amazing job. On that day at Yosemite, Thompson put her training to the test. A man in his 30s had been hiking down the trail alone, talking on his cellphone, she said, and he took a wrong step. He cried out in agony so incessantly, she said, that she couldnt even ask him about his injuries. She dialed 911. The operator asked her to stay by his side. Multiple hikers walked by and kept going, ignoring the mans screams, she said. She checked his vitals, tried to calm him, prevent shock, and eventually discovered a fractured ankle. She shed her outer clothing and placed it over the shivering man in rapidly falling temperatures. After 45 minutes, an emergency medical technician showed up her boyfriend, Camden Holden, San Clementes 2015 Lifeguard of the Year. He had worried something had happened to her on the trail and ran back up to find her. They attended to the patient. Then two fortuitous hikers doctors appeared. This guy was lucky, Thompson said. He had me and Lifeguard of the Year and two doctors. The first in a team from Yosemite Search and Rescue then arrived, clearing Thompson and Holden to leave. I was really thankful for all my training, Thompson said. That was the first time I was the only one on scene. I didnt have any of my big bosses there to back me up. Usually they roll in and take it all over. That was the first time it was just me. I was doing everything. Every year, they make us go through scenarios as if that would happen. On a Sunday this month Thompson stood in a courtyard at the Outlets at San Clemente, entertaining shoppers with soothing sounds from her violin. Passersby paused to listen, to applaud. Others sat transfixed on benches or at tables, caught up in harmonics. Parents sent children forward to place dollar bills into an urn. Memories of an agonizing episode at Yosemite were swept away with each pizzicato, each sweep of the bow. I used to play with a guitarist, said Thompson, who returned to the violin at age 19. Now I do my own thing. A lifeguard for San Clemente city and state beaches since 2010 and an off-and-on Saddleback College student, Thompson will again lifeguard this summer at state parks until she departs for Tennessee to major in commercial music and study violin. That will give me opportunities to do anything from being in a country band to learning all of the tricks and trades of working a recording studio or even being manager of a band, she said. My emphasis is probably going to be in performance or songwriting. Thompson said she was impressed with how the Yosemite Search and Rescue first-responder had to race up the switchback trail, followed by others loaded with gear. They actually have to run up the trail with all their equipment, she said. Theyre just jogging up all these switchbacks. They have to be in such good shape. This, coming from a lifeguard who last May won the Alcatraz Classic, swimming from San Francisco Bays notorious former prison island to shore in 59-degree water. I got 5th place overall, 1st place female and 1st place skin, meaning I was the first one to complete it wearing just a swimsuit no wetsuit, she said via e-mail. My time was 34:26, a minute and a half behind the first-place finisher. The swim is 1.5 miles in torrential current. Contact the writer: fswegles@ocregister.com or 949-492-5127 FULLERTON The Muckenthaler Cultural Center is starting a $12 million fundraising campaign to add space for exhibits and education and restore the 92-year-old mansion to its original charm. The Muck, as it is affectionately called, draws 10,000 people annually to its gallery exhibits and 13,000 to its concerts, Executive Director Zoot Velasco said. Its staff provides arts education programs on site and at 45 schools in 11 north Orange County cities, serving 15,500 mostly low-income children each year, Velasco said. In recent years, staff members have gone into two California prisons to do art programs with inmates. But most of the cultural centers offerings and administrative functions have to take place within the 18-room mansion, Velasco said, detracting from its charm. Built by Walter and Adella Muckenthaler in 1924, the home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was donated to the city by their only son, Harold, in 1965 under the condition that it be used as a cultural center. At some point, a small, one-story building was added to the back, as was an outdoor amphitheater. The buildings here are not adequate for what we are doing, Velasco said. As we expand and grow, they get less adequate. The expansion project will be tackled in phases. Offices, now filling upstairs rooms of the mansion, and classrooms will relocate to a second new building in the rear of the property. Exhibits and arts classes will be moved to a new building that will surround the amphitheater. The grounds of the 8.5-acre property will get a makeover. With all of those uses moved out of the mansion, it will be restored and become a museum. Well make it look exactly like it did when the Muckenthalers lived here, Velasco said. The City Council on Tuesday approved the Muckenthalers expansion plan, clearing the cultural center to start fundraising. The city owns the property, but most of the museums $1.2 million annual budget comes from fundraising. I look forward to seeing this be a bigger gem than it already is, Mayor Jennifer Fitzgerald said. The next two years will be focused on raising money, Velasco said, with most expected from donations and grants. Hopefully, he said, at that point construction work can start while fundraising continues. Once building begins, the project should take about five years, he said. If wed be able to do a ribbon-cutting around 2024, that would be the 100th anniversary, Velasco said. (We will) celebrate 100 years of the past and looking forward to the future by hosting more programs. After moving to Fullerton from Kansas, Walter Muckenthaler married Adella Kraemer of Placentia in 1918. In the early 1920s, Muckenthaler bought 80 acres of land in north-central Fullerton with groves of lemon, avocado and walnut trees. In 1924, he built the mansion. In 1999, it was added to the national registry. Contact the writer: SANTA ANA Police are searching for a woman who they say ran a red light early Wednesday before hitting and severely injuring a 26-year-old marching band instructor in a crosswalk and fleeing. Witnesses saw a woman in a black, four-door BMW with paper plates around 2:15 a.m. driving northbound on South Bristol Street before running a red light at West Central Avenue in the left lane, police Cpl. Anthony Bertagna said. The victim, Christopher Chavez of Santa Ana, was walking in the crosswalk of Bristol to go eat at a Dennys restaurant near his home when the woman ran the red light and struck him. The woman got out of the vehicle, walked up to the victim, an unknown person on a skateboard ran to the accident scene and told her not to touch him and that he was going to go to South Coast Global Medical Center to get help, Bertagna said. He goes there all the time, said his sister, Rachel Chavez, 21, of San Diego. Hes a night owl, so its not that unusual for him to be out at that time going to get something to eat. Once the skateboarder left, the woman got back into the BMW and fled. A witness followed her on northbound South Bristol Street to eastbound West Warner Avenue before losing sight of the BMW. Another witness took a photo of the woman before she fled. Chavez was taken to Orange County Global Medical Center with serious injuries, Bertagna said. Hes had separate surgeries for a broken left leg and bleeding and swelling in his brain, his sister said. His other injuries include a broken right leg and arm, a broken shoulder and road rash on his back, she said. Chavez, a drum line instructor at Saddleback High School in Santa Ana, is studying to become an emergency medical technician at Orange Coast Community College. The 2008 Saddleback graduate played in school bands drum line all four years. He began volunteering with the band after graduating and was hired on several years ago. Drums have always been a passion of his, Chavez said. He was doing well yesterday, she said. As long as everything was cleared, he was going to go into surgery to repair the right leg and right arm today, but he took a turn for the worse. We were told theres about a 50/50 chance of him surviving. Rachel Chavez said her family was told by doctors her brother could be blind and lose some motor skills if he pulls through. Police are asking for anyone who knows the woman to call the Santa Ana Police Departments traffic bureau at 714-245-8200. For her to not only hit him, but leave him, is what breaks my heart, Chavez said. Anonymous tips can also be given to the Orange County Crime Stoppers at 1-855-TIP-OCCS. Contact the writer: 714-796-7802 or aduranty@ocregister.com In a bid to make their workouts more exciting, German fitness enthusiasts in Berlin have come up with Beer Yoga or boga a new form of yoga that integrates beer bottles into standard poses. Participants are welcome to use the bottles in any way they like, including holding it in their hands, balancing it on their heads, or even taking a sip in between poses! Some of the students who have indulged in beer drinking during yoga class say that its fun at first, but becomes quite difficult after the second or third bottle. That isnt stopping people from attending these classes, which are often described as highly amusing and interesting. Sure, yoga and beer dont exactly go hand in hand, but yoga instructor Jhula, the inventor of boga, says she knew a lot of people who loved both yoga and drinking beer, so combining the two did make some sense. Jhula, who conducts her beer yoga classes in a Berlin pub, admits that many of the participants are not regulars, but curious pub crawlers who are more concerned with drinking the beer than practicing yoga. But shes ok with that, since the classes are more about having fun than mastering the Indian art. Pregnant women are also welcome to take part in Jhulas boga sessions, but they are advised to indulge in non-alcoholic beer. Beer yoga may be gaining among Berlins youth, but health experts arent crazy about it, arguing that the mix of alcohol and exercise is a very bad idea. Alcohol clouds perception, hinders muscle control, impairs balance and restricts endurance, said Dr. Ingo Froboese, from the German Sporting School in Cologne. He also added that the alcohol could restrict peoples recovery phase, and that they should stick to drinking water for several hours after an exercise session. Wheres the fun in that? Photos: Bieryoga/Facebook via T-Online As bizarre as it sounds, smoking scorpions is not unheard of in South Asian countries, but according to regional media, the practice has recently been gaining popularity in several parts of Pakistan. The scorpion venom can apparently put the smoker on an intense high, becoming highly addictive with time. So how does one smoke a scorpion, anyway? Its a simple yet effective process a dead scorpion is dried in sunlight for several hours or a live one is burnt on coal until it dies. The dried carcass is then lit on fire and the smoke is inhaled. Since its the tail that contains the poison addicts seek, some smokers prefer to crush the dried tail and mix it with hashish and tobacco, smoking it in the form of a cigarette. In his 2007 book Drugs in Afghanistan, sociologist David MacDonald provides the account of a friend who witnessed first-hand the effects of scorpion smoke on an addict. The effect was instantaneous with the mans face and eyes becoming very red, much more than a hashish smoker. He also seemed very intoxicated but awake and alert, although he stumbled and fell over when he tried to rise from a sitting position the smoke tasted sweeter than that of hashish, although it smelled foul, and the intoxicating effect lasted much longer, the book suggested. The high, it seems, lasts for as long as 10 hours. The first six are said to be painful as the body adjusts to the substance, but the feeling slowly eases into enjoyment and later, intense pleasure. Everything appears like it is dancing, recalled Sohbat Khan, a 74-year-old former scorpion smoker. The roads, the vehicles, everything in front of me. Sohbat was addicted to scorpion smoke as a young man in his 20s he would purchase the arachnid for one or two rupees apiece from a vendor, who got his stash from Peshawars Matani area, rich in scorpions because of the hot weather. At the height of his addiction, he would scour the land of his village, hunting for scorpions to smoke. When the need was overwhelming and there were none to be found, he would actually travel all the way to Peshawar, in Afghanistan, to get some. It was the worst form of addiction, he said. Experts agree that scorpion venom is highly dangerous for the human brain, far more so than other drugs, especially when inhaled. Scorpion smoking causes short and long term memory loss, explained Dr. Azaz Jamal, a medical officer at the Khyber Teaching Hospital. Smoking causes hallucination, the state where people have perception of something which is not present. He added that prolonged exposure to scorpion smoke could cause sleep and appetite disorders, and eventually lead to permanent delusion. But the addiction is hard to fight on a national level in Pakistan, mainly because there are no official statistics and very little research available on the subject. A few reports suggest that the habit is gaining popularity in Pakistans Khyber Pakhtunwala (KP) region, where it is certainly not just a rare indulgence. We need laws in place to stop the killing of scorpions, said Azeemullah, a former official at KPs narcotics control department, pointing out that their use needs to be regulated because scorpion addiction hinders the availability of the arachnid for medical research and therapy. While scorpion smoking is still rare on a global level, it serves as a cheap, easy thrill among the youth of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and some parts of India. Because of our successful drives against the sellers and addicts of alcohol, opium, cough syrup, and heroin in urban areas, young people are flocking on the highways to try the new craze of scorpion stings, a police officer in the city of Bharuch said. Meanwhile, Umer Gul, a young man who threw his life away to scorpion smoking, wanders aimlessly on the streets of Karak in KP, often stopping to stare at nothing while mumbling to himself. Umer used to be a clerk in the army, his brother Mohammed Younas said. He would smoke a little hashish now and then with his friends, but I never thought that it was a big deal. But he soon started smoking scorpions and lost his mental health to the habit. He left his job and started indulging in unusual habits. Scorpions are highly toxic. That is why my brother is like this. He spends most of his time aimlessly walking around. In some parts of India, addicts prefer a much more direct and more painful method to get their scorpion fix they get stung, paying anywhere between 100 and 150 Indian rupees per sting. Others turn to the common house lizard for their daily fix, roasting it and grinding it to a fine powder, and mixing it with opium to use as a drug. The powdered lizard is believed to improve the sedating effects of opium, leading to superior intoxication. Sources: DAWN, Suburra, The Express Tribune The OECD Observer online archive takes you on a journey through half a century of public policy and world progress. Since November 1962, the OECDs experts and leading guests offer insights on the questions facing our member countries with concise and authoritative analysis, and provide our audiences with an excellent opportunity to understand policy debates and consider solutions. Each edition of the OECD Observer reports on a core theme of the OECDs on-going work, from economics and society through governance, finance, and the environment, and articles are bolstered by tables and graphs. Loading... OilVoice will be with you shortly... The pickup truck that crashed into a ravine earlier this month near 180th and Blondo Streets, killing its three occupants, was traveling at 100 mph when it left the roadway, officials said Wednesday. The Douglas County Sheriffs Office released autopsy results of the three people who were killed Robert Baker III, 22, Jonathan Rodriguez, 24, and Patricia Padron, 21. All three died as a result of blunt-force trauma injuries, the Sheriff's Office said. Officials said Baker had THC the psychoactive substance in marijuana in his system and a blood-alcohol level of .268. The Chevy Silverado that Baker was driving had been southbound on 180th Street. It left the roadway and ended up 350 feet south of Blondo Street in a ravine. Rodriguez and Padron, who were dating, were wearing their seat belts. Baker was not, officials have said. All three were sitting in the front seat. Before the crash, the three had spent time at various bars late April 2 and early April 3 in Omaha and western Iowa. Baker's girlfriend reported them missing on April 3. An Omaha police helicopter spotted the pickup on the afternoon of April 5 after a police detective assigned to Bakers missing-person case asked the pilot to search in the area. Baker lived in the Elkhorn area. The truck was spotted about 4 miles from Bakers home. Union Pacific executives said Thursday that they have trimmed the payroll by 11 percent in the past year and that they expect company workers to be even more efficient in the face of plummeting demand for freight hauling. Wall Street approved. Shares of the company, which had declined 22 percent in the 12 months that ended Wednesday, rose 4.1 percent on news of the personnel reductions and efficiency charge. The share momentum came even as Omaha-based Union Pacific, the second-largest U.S. railroad behind Berkshire Hathaway-owned BNSF, said Thursday that first-quarter freight volumes fell for a fifth straight quarter. Reduced demand from shippers sent volumes at U.P. down 8 percent in the quarter, with shipments falling or breaking even in five of the six main freight-hauling categories. While the company had a profit of almost $1 billion in the quarter, the dim outlook for shipping demand means that more will be expected from less at U.P. We will continue to squeeze out productivity, Chief Financial Officer Rob Knight said on a conference call with analysts and investors. We are challenging the entire organization, even administrative groups, to turn over every stone for additional opportunities to be more efficient. Shares climbed $3.45 to close at $87.32 in New York Stock Exchange trading. The company has already reduced payrolls. The employer of 8,000 Nebraskans said Thursday that it employed an average of 43,655 people in the first quarter, down from 48,830 a year earlier. Union Pacific said it has about 3,800 train, engine and yard union workers on temporary layoff or other alternative work status. Earlier in the quarter, the company had about 4,100 of such workers on furlough or other work status. Plus, 600 workers in engineering and locomotive and rail car repair also are on furlough or other work status, U.P. said Thursday. Chief Executive Lance Fritz declined to forecast what might be ahead for U.P. workers, handicapping their job prospects at the operator of 32,000 miles of track in 23 Western states. Fritz said in an interview that the company will use methods other than outright job cuts not replacing retirees, for example to the limit possible. The reduction in furloughs among train and yard union workers is attributable to recalling those laid off to replace retirees or others who left the company, Fritz said. Last year, the company cut several hundred office jobs, and Fritz said he cant predict where additional savings might be found. This isnt about indiscriminate job reductions, he said. Everyone is being affected. Logan Purk, a transportation industry analyst at wealth adviser Edward Jones, said, I think there is opportunity for some additional reductions, but efficiency going forward will be more of a function of asset utilization such as train length, locomotives in use and the idle time trains spend in terminals. I believe the current freight demand environment is largely outside of their control. Demand woes aside, the company is solidly profitable. First-quarter profit, Union Pacific said, fell 15 percent. Net income was $979 million, or $1.16 a share, down from $1.2 billion, or $1.30 a share, a year earlier. Operating revenue fell 14 percent to $4.8 billion. The earnings per share beat the estimate of $1.12 from Wall Street analysts polled by Bloomberg. Union Pacific volumes are consistent with those of the industry. This week, the Association of American Railroads reported that U.S. railroad freight volume fell 7.3 percent during the first 15 weeks of 2016 compared with last year. The drop comes as U.S. railroads struggle with a worsening transportation economy beset by declining shipments from the producers of food, fuel and fiber, who are facing a supply glut and the low prices that follow such a scenario. Freight revenue fell in every category: vehicles and vehicle parts, down 1 percent chemicals, down 2 percent, with crude oil off 32 percent on low prices and curtailed North American drilling from shale formations agricultural products, down 6 percent, with grain exports falling 26 percent intermodal, or freight that moves by rail, truck and ship, down 9 percent industrial products, down 18 percent coal, down 43 percent, as the fossil fuel cedes market share at electric utilities to cleaner and cheaper natural gas Joseph Schwieterman, a transportation industry professor at DePaul University in Chicago, said slow intermodal traffic many retail goods imported from Asia move in such a fashion coupled with reports this week of slumping business travel lead him to call the economy far weaker than many. Its a shame for the Union Pacific workers who built the business up in recent years, Schwieterman said. But it does appear the transportation bears who first began talking about this earlier in the year are proving to be correct. CEO Fritz differed, saying the company and industry are facing only an energy recession in coal and oil markets and muted U.S. retail demand affecting intermodal freight. Fritz said Union Pacifics problems are largely contained to those sectors, with what he termed slow growth in construction materials, industrial chemicals, grain for domestic use and vehicles and vehicle parts. Contact the writer: 402-444-3197, russell.hubbard@owh.com Karnataka to strengthen ATS and up the number of prisons All but garment factory workers in Bengaluru get credit for EPF rules roll back Bengaluru oi-Vicky Bengaluru, April 21: It is quite ironical that everyone expect the garment factory workers are getting credit for the roll back of the EPF rules which had tightened withdrawal norms. It was the garment factory workers numbering around Rs 1.25 lakh who decided to protest against the EPF rules. A protest meant to be a silent march turned violent thanks some anti social elements. Now with the EPF notification being withdrawn, everyone has claimed credit for the same. The workers who initiated the protest are just left with the blame of staging a violent protest. The reality is that they did not turn violent. Credit for all, blame for the workers: Posters have already come up in which the credit has been claimed for the roll back of the EPF rules. Some BJP leaders from Karnataka have met with the garment factory workers and told that them they had been misguided on the issue. In some parts congratulatory messages for Union Minister Ananth Kumar can be found. The messages thank him for resolving the issue. In fact when the protests had turned violent, he did address a press conference informing about the relaxation of the norms. Posters of Satish Reddy, BJP MLA were also found along with Ananth Kumar. There were other leaders too who met with the garment factory workers and tried claiming credit. However the garment factory workers did not pay much attention to these claims. It is back to work now: The garment factory workers have gone back to work. They are happy that the new rules were rolled back. However, many of them are disgruntled due to the violence which they have stating since yesterday they did not initiate. The police too say that the factory workers left the spot once the local PF commissioner informed them that the norms had been withdrawn. The police say that violent scenes took place after the workers had left the venue. There was a group of 15 persons from Bommanhalli who initiated the violence and we have identified these persons, the police also say. The factory workers say that everyone is seeking credit for the roll back and all we are left with is the blame for something that we did not do. OneIndia News Tamil Nadu: Light to moderate rain in the next few days Tamil Nadu: Check the list of special trains operating from Chennai this Diwali TN Poll 2016: Stalin takes dig at how AIADMK leaders behave in front of Jayalalithaa Chennai oi-Preeti Patna, April 21: As Tamil Nadu assembly polls are less than a month away, political parties are gearing up for the D-Day and campaigns are going in full swing. DMK treasurer M K Stalin, who is all set to contest from Kolathur constituency in North Chennai, on Thursday took a dig at the state chief minister AND and AIADMK supremo J Jayalalithaa. 63-year-old Stalin went on to enact how AIADMK leaders behave in front of Jayalalithaa and termed their gesture as slavery and not slavery. Stalin also hit out at the way finance minister O Panneerselvam sits at ground while CM is seated on a chair. He also invoked a famous proverb-- "Stand with your head high if you are a 'Tamilian'" and said "Leaders are often seen stooping down to Jayalalithaa while at DMK they approach each other in a more dignified manner,", while adding "this shows the lack of self-respect for these leaders." Stalin appealed voters to vote for DMK and to make M Karunanidhi the chief minister in this election. OneIndia News For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Thursday, April 21, 2016, 17:32 [IST] India believes there is urgent need for major reforms in WHO: Harsh Vardhan Harsh Vardhan applauds 'White coat warriors' for going beyond call of duty to attend to patients From Prasad, Javadekar to Harsh Vardhan: List of ministers who have resigned Dr. Harsh Vardhan at the Nagaland Science & Technology Council Feature oi-Lisa By Lisa The Union minister of Science & Technology and Earth Sciences, Dr. Harsh Vardhan, while expressing happiness over his maiden visit to Nagaland, launched the Twinning Network Programme on Chemical Ecology of North Eastern Region (NER) at the Nagaland Science & Technology Council (NASTEC), Kohima. This programme is the first of its kind in the country and is expected to bring about huge impact for the North-East researchers. It is a Twinning Network Programme that would link institutes from the North-East with Bangalore-based scientists. The programme is envisaged for human capacity building for the North-East region, especially in Chemical ecology. It is expected to produce at least 15 PhDs from the North-East region at the end of the 5 year programme. Dr. Harsh Vardhan at the event: Talking of our great scientists like Dr. Sir C.V. Raman and Dr. Jagdish Chandra Bose, Dr. Harsh Vardhan challenged the young researchers and scientist to work towards the benefits of the society rather than only for personal achievements. He stated that the Twinning Network Programme, like this one on Chemical ecology, should be promoted and replicated even in other areas of study so as to strengthen the knowledge resource sharing. He also added that the scientific community should work more in co-ordination for better knowledge resource linkages within a subject area through utilization of the latest communication technologies at hand. Dr. Harsh Vardhan on PM's dream for NE: Dr. Vardhan also highlighted that the Prime Minister of India, Mr. Narendra Modi, has an exceptional concern to uplift the North-East Region, not only at par with the rest of the country but even higher. In his speech, he highlighted the potential of natural resources in Nagaland for research and development, which is rich biodiversity, Indigenous Traditional Knowledge systems and its scope for invention collaborating with modern Scientific research and development. The Union minister emphasised upon the up-scaling of the Nagaland state Science & Technology Council besides focusing upon other Science and Technology related problems of the state. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Thursday, April 21, 2016, 16:59 [IST] Make in India for Indian Air Force Feature oi-Lisa By Lisa Make in India has been powered by an in-depth overhaul of processes and policies, which in turn has been made possible by the hard work of thousands of government and private sector agencies. Make in India has yielded significant dividends and has ensured that there is huge increase in the confidence of investors and collaborators. Government of India doesn't want the momentum gained by Make in India to slow down and so various events are organised now and then to keep momentum going on for Make in India. One such programme was hosted at Subroto Park in New Delhi in collaboration with CII. The one day seminar on 'Make in India for Indian Air Force' was attended by Minister of State Defence, Mr. Rao Inderjit Singh. (1/2) Delivered keynote address at Seminar 'Make in India for Indian Air Force through innovation & Indigenisation'. pic.twitter.com/GLDOlsDBRZ Rao Inderjit Singh (@Rao_InderjitS) April 19, 2016 (2/2).@makeinindia has now transformed into a Global brand; truly an idea whose time has come. #TransformingIndia pic.twitter.com/vVwlVQ4d43 Rao Inderjit Singh (@Rao_InderjitS) April 19, 2016 Mr. Singh at the seminar: Mr. Singh who was the chief guest of the event in his keynote address said that, "A number of measures have been taken by the Government of india to promote indigenous development and manufacture of defence equipment. The DPP 2016, revised offset policy and enhanced FDI in defence sector are some such measures which offer several; incentives to the private industry to participate in defence production". Mr. Singh further added that, "I am glad that this seminar is being held and the Indian Air Force and CII has come together to participate in the same platform. The Indian Air Force has prepared its indigenisation requirements for future technologies and new weapon system capabilities that they plan to induct, in the form of this form of a booklet". Before the release of the booklet on "Indigenisation Roadmap for the Indian Air Force" he said that "It would provide useful inputs to the industry to map their potential with the requirements of the Indian Air Force". Chief of Air Staff Arup Raha at the seminar: The Chief of the Air Staff (CAS) Air Chief Marshal Arup Raha gave the inaugural address. While delivering the address the CAS said that, "IAF is in the process of modernising and expanding its inventory to keep up with the changing geo-political scenario and emerging threat perception. There exists a huge potential for indigenisation in the manufacturing of capital equipment and their maintenance spares. Economical and optimal exploitation of such a potential by the Indian Industry would lead to greater self reliance". Various session of the day: The morning sessions: Indigenisation of Capital Equipment Indigenisation for Maintenance and Sustenance of Aircraft Fleets and systems The afternoon sessions: Quality Assurance and Certification of Indigenous Equipment MRO in Military Aviation : IAF perspective and Industry Capability For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Thursday, April 21, 2016, 11:17 [IST] Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation offers support to Karnataka Feature oi-Lisa By Lisa A team of senior officers of the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation led by the Secretary, Mr. Parameswaran Iyer, visited the State of Karnataka and met with State officials to evaluate the water crisis and sanitation situation in the State. A meeting was held with the Minister of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj Mr. H K Patil, followed by meetings with the Chief Secretary and Additional Chief Secretary of the State. The Chief Secretary and Secretary also spoke to the District Collectors of the State via video conference. Support offered: The Secretary assured the senior officials of support from the Centre to combat the drought situation prevalent in parts of the State. A detailed discussion was held around possible drought management techniques and technologies, especially those dealing with water recharge and conservation. A key highlight of the meeting was a presentation made by a team of water experts from Latur district, who spoke about the "Shirpur Pattern" of watershed work that has been successful in many parts of Maharashtra. Efforts are being made to replicate and scale this technique, and a pilot of the technique is being planned in North Karnataka to help the drinking water situation in the region. Support for Sanitation: In the review meeting with Karnataka District Collectors on sanitation, a commitment was made by the officers to make seven districts of Karnataka Open Defecation Free (ODF) in 2016-17. Of these, it is targeted that four districts will become ODF by October 2nd, 2016 - the second anniversary of the launch of the Swachh Bharat Mission. It is also targeted that every district of Karnataka will have at least some blocks or Gram Panchayats or villages that are ODF by October 2, 2016, for which a participatory celebration will be organised by the State. The Chief Secretary said that ODF movement has to be taken up as a community movement, and the involvement of the people is a must to make it a success. Involving non-governmental sectors: As part of the continuing efforts of the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation to involve the non-governmental sector in scaling up Swachh Bharat Mission, the Secretary also held a discussion with the organisation 'Arghyam' to discuss their experiences with sanitation. He also visited the Indian Institute for Human Settlements to discuss monitoring and evaluation of Swachh Bharat Mission and other technical issues related to the programme. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Thursday, April 21, 2016, 11:38 [IST] British queen's 97-yr-old husband gives up driving licence after car crash What happens after the Queen's death? UK to observe a minutes silence the night before Queen's State Funeral Funeral of Queen Elizabeth II to take place at Westminster Abbey on Monday Pics: Queen Elizabeth II celebrates her 90th birthday Feature oi-Jagriti New Delhi, Apr 21: President Pranab Mukherjee on Wednesday greeted Queen Elizabeth II of Britain on her 90th birthday which falls on Thursday. A four-day extravaganza to mark Queen Elizabeth II's 90th birthday will take place from May 12 to 15 at Home Park in Windsor and involve performances by musicians, dancers and choirs, as well as well-known actors and artists. Here are pics of Queen Elizabeth II who turned 90 today: Queen Elizabeth II turns 90 today Queen Elizabeth II, the longest reigning monarch in British history turns 90. Queen Elizabeth II turns 90 The longest reigning monarch in British history turned 90 today. Queen Elizabeth II turns 90 A four-day extravaganza will be organised to markQueen Elizabeth II birthday. Queen Elizabeth II turns 90 Elizabeth was born on April 21, 1926 in London. Queen Elizabeth II turns 90 A four-day extravaganza to mark Queen Elizabeth II's 90th birthday will take place from May 12 to 15 at Home Park in Windsor. Queen Elizabeth II turns 90 Queen Elizabeth born in 1926 turned 90 today. The whole country will want to wish the Queen well today. She has been a rock of strength to our nation https://t.co/1QNlHRBHZo David Cameron (@David_Cameron) April 21, 2016 Prakash Javadekar in New York to Sign Paris Agreement Feature oi-Lisa By Lisa India has urged the developed world to declare its enhanced action plan for the second period of Kyoto Protocol. Tomorrow being International Earth Day, nations of the world are to sig Paris Climate Change Agreement. Speaking on the eve of his departure for New York for the signing of Paris Climate Change Agreement, Minister of State (Independent Charge) of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Mr. Prakash Javadekar, said that mobilising $100 billion is still at the stage of discussion and no concrete action plan has been laid out. Mr. Javadekar will also attend the meeting of Major Economies Forum on April 23-24, 2016. On raising $100 billion: Mr. Javadekar said that India has levied a Clean Environment Cess of $6 (Rs. 400) per tonne on coal. The Minister added that if the developed world follows India in taxing its coal production, $100 billion can be raised. He also said that the developed world must provide technological support to the developing nations in the fight against Climate Change. Measures undertaken by India: The Minister highlighted that India is leading by example on mitigation and adaptation. Laying out the details of India's action on Climate Change after the Paris Agreement, Mr. Javadekar said that 175 GigaWatt of Renewable Energy has been targeted by 2022, out of which 40 GW Renewable Energy capacity has been achieved by March 2016. He pointed out that the Government has decided to leapfrog from Bharat Stage IV (BS-IV) to Bharat Stage VI (BS-VI) emission norms by April 1, 2020, thereby skipping BS-V emission norms altogether. "The Government has taken a decision to promote blending of ethanol with petrol and its use as an alternative fuel and has also taken a decision to tax SUVs and diesel vehicles", Mr. Javadekar added. Mr. Javadekar also said that 93 million LED bulbs have been distributed till April 12, 2016. This has resulted in energy savings of more than 33.3 million kWh every day. Emphasising the initiatives taken by the government on adaptation front, the Minister stated that farmers can get their inefficient agricultural pumps sets free of cost replaced with energy efficient pumps. Some of the other initiatives taken by the Government include - Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana to improve water use efficiency, sustainable agriculture and efficient water use. The Environment Minister said that the recommendations of the Standing Committee on Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority Bill have been received. Some of the suggestions have been incorporated and the Bill will be placed in the Parliament in the next session. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Thursday, April 21, 2016, 16:39 [IST] We Need Earth Day Everyday Feature oi-Lisa By Lisa Earth Day is celebrated on every 22nd of April to mark the beginning of the modern environment movement. The idea of celebrating a national day to focus on the environment came to Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson who was then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin. The idea came to him after witnessing the ravages of the 1969 massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. Since then Earth Day has been celebrated each year. Earth Day 2016: The main highlight of the Earth Day 2016 will be US signing the historic Paris Agreement of the Climate Protection Treaty which was adopted by 195 nations at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. The U.S. and China who are the world's two largest emitters, will both sign the agreement along with 120 plus other countries. The Paris Agreement of the Climate Protection Treaty is binding and universal agreement. It calls for action against climate change, with focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero by the year 2050. Importance of Earth Day for India: Certain numbers is all that is needed to figure out the importance of Earth Day for India: India has the world's highest number of people (76 million) without access to clean drinking water. Six of the world's ten most polluted cities are in India. Indian citizens in some polluted cities are breathing air that is up to 15 times more polluted than what is considered healthy. The poor who have contributed least to the pollution that are the worst affected. Twenty-one countries in this world have proven that it is possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and as yet not slow down the economic development of the country, unfortunately India is not one of the 21 countries. What you can do on this Earth Day: Plant trees: As per www.earthday.org, "An estimated 18 million acres (7.3 million hectares) of forest-an area roughly the size of the country of Panama-are lost to deforestation each year. That loss is responsible for up to 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions". So one thing that you can definitely do this Earth Day is, plant if not more at least one tree. Protect endangered species: It is really a good reason to celebrate that after many a decades of showing decline, for the first time tiger population has shown an increase. However, there are many more species of animals, birds and plants that are dangerously close to extinction. You can vow this Earth Day that you will help protect endangered species and stop habitat encroachment too for whales, Asian elephants, rhinoceroses, and many more. This is more important as "we are entering a sixth mass extinction brought on by human activities around the world (www.earthday.org)". Opt for green cities: Rapid urbanisation and ever increasing strain on the cities has made it mandatory that we make sure that we do not worsen the climate change situation. Presently more than half of the world's population lives in cities. We need to ensure that our cities remain clean and green. We need to use more energy efficient products and use more of renewable energy. We also need to rebuild our cities so that we can fasten the pace of transition to cleaner, healthier and environmentally more viable places to dwell in. Find local solutions: The best thing one can do is to work locally and find solutions that are workable for their region and there by increase the confidence of other to solve climate change issues. India is training Women Panchayat Leaders who in turn educate female leaders on how to take decisions that promote eco-friendly policies which are geared towards the sustained interests of their villages. Such programmes can go a long way in finding easy solution to climate change problem. Make a school green: Children are the future and it is our duty to ensure that we provide green and eco friendly school to the children to study in. Children should also be taught how to conserve water and power. They should also be informed about the ill effects of climate change and how to combat climate change. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Thursday, April 21, 2016, 15:54 [IST] Alamzeb Afridi: One terror accused, multiple cases India oi-Vicky New Delhi, April 21: Here is an accused who is wanted in almost all cases of terrorism. Alamzeb Afridi for the investigators was a prized catch for investigators as they hope to close nearly half a dozen cases in which they suspect he is involved. Be it the Wagmon terror camp in Kerala, the attack on the Israeli visa centre at Bengaluru, the Ahmedabad serial blasts, the patna blasts, Afridi is a wanted in all these cases. It may be recalled that he was arrested by the police in January 2016 at Bengaluru and while attempting to evade arrest, he had attacked a police personnel with a knife. One accused many cases: Police officials say that he is a key operative. Although it sounds quite far fetched that one man could evade the law since 2006 and carry out so many attacks, the police state that he has had a hand in all these incidents. In fact recently his name had also cropped up in the Bengaluru Church Street blasts and the NIA had said that they finally managed to get the bomber. According to the police Afridi had attended the Wagmon terror camp in Kerala. It was from there his alleged journey into the world of terror began. An AC mechanic by profession, it is still not clear how journey began into the world of terror. Officials however say that he became a full fledged operative after attending the camp in Kerala. His name has cropped up in the Ahmedabad serial blasts of 2008 in which 50 persons were killed. Following this name once again cropped up during the Patna serial blasts of 2014. Further the police also suspected that he had a hand in the attack on the Israeli visa centre at Bengaluru in 2015. It was the Hyderabad police which finally nabbed him at Bengaluru. This was the same time that there was a nation wide crack down on an alleged ISIS module in which over 20 persons were arrested. After his arrest he was taken to Hyderabad and a few days later the police claimed that he had confessed to his role in the Church Street blasts. The NIA immediately came into the picture as the Church Street blasts was being handled by this agency. After questioning him even the NIA confirmed that with the arrest of Afridi, the case had been solved. Currently Afridi is on a transit remand and has been taken to Gujarat. OneIndia news For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Thursday, April 21, 2016, 10:49 [IST] Karnataka to strengthen ATS and up the number of prisons Filing appeal against acquittal of Yeddyurappa not vendetta says, legal advisor to Kar govt India oi-Vicky Bengaluru, Apr 21: A week after B S Yeddyurappa took over as the president of the Karnataka BJP, the Congress government has decided to file an appeal against his acquittal in 15 cases related to corruption. The High Court had struck down 15 cases filed against Yeddyurappa giving him a major reprieve. Now with the Congress government deciding to file the appeal in all these cases before the Supreme Court, the BJP has cried foul and have termed it as a political vendetta. However the legal advisor to the government of Karnataka, Brijesh Kalappa says that they would have filed the appeal even if Yeddyurappa was not made state BJP president. Process of law cannot be blocked Kalappa tells OneIndia that they are planning on moving the Supreme Court by next week. The process was already underway. Just because he has become the president of the BJP, the due process of law cannot be blocked. He has been named as the president of the party and this does not give him the immunity. Merely because the BJP has put him in that position it does not mean that the law cannot take its own course. The BJP saying that this is a political agenda is a bad argument in the first place according to me, Kalappa says. Nothing prevents us from taking the natural course of action. The High Court while striking down the FIRs had said that the same could not be filed on the basis of a CAG report. What I would like to point out here is that both the 2G and the Coal gate cases were on the basis of a similar report. How can the law be different in different cases, Kalappa also asks. OneIndia News Ghazwa-e-Hind in Assam: NIA roped in as Islamists plan destruction of India Assam: Woman brutally kills man trying to rape her daughter India oi-Preeti Dispur, April 21: A man who allegedly tried to rape a girl and her mother was brutally killed by the victim's mother in Assam. The act happened in self-defence. The shocking incident took place in Bharajuli village in Biswanath Chariali district of Assam. According to reports, Rita Orang, the tribal woman first chopped off the genitals of the accused Krishna Bhumij, hacked him to death with an axe and later buried his body in a crematorium. Fortnight ago, Bhumij's family had registered his missing complaint to the police. During the search investigation, police came to know that Bhumij was murdered. On Tuesday, April 19, his body was exhumed and was sent for autopsy. Police said that Bhumij had a criminal record and was wanted in two cases. After cracking his murder case, police arrested Rita, who said that Bhumij tried to rape her and her daughter on April 4. Rita also confessed that she buried his body with the help of seven other women in the village. OneIndia News For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Thursday, April 21, 2016, 12:31 [IST] We cannot wait longer now: SC to hear Vijay Mallyas contempt case in January for final disposal Banks have no right to seek information about my assets, says Mallya in SC India oi-Vicky New Delhi, Apr 21: Former Chairman of the UB group, Vijay Mallya today filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court stating that the banks have no right to access information on his assets. In the affidavit he said he would submit in a sealed cover details of his assets by June 26. The Supreme Court is hearing a petition filed by the consortium of banks that sought a stay on Mallya leaving the country in the wake of him owing them nearly Rs 8,500 crore in loans. On the last date of hearing the Supreme Court had directed Mallya to submit details of his assets. When the matter came up for hearing today, Mallya said that while he would share details of his assets with the Supreme Court, the banks however should not be permitted to access the same. Banks have no right The banks have no right to access details of the foreign assets held by me or my family members he submitted. He said that the loan given to Kingfisher Airlines was not on the basis of his foreign assets. He also stated that the Kingfisher Airlines was a genuine business failure. He said he could make an additional payment of Rs 1,398 crore which was withheld by the Karnataka High Court. On the last date he had offered to pay Rs 4,000 crore. He further said that the token money could be paid only if the Supreme Court intervenes in the matter. I cannot pay the amount until the court allows the sale of shares that have been stuck in litigation. It may also be recalled that the banks had on the last date of hearing rejected Mallya's offer to pay Rs 4,000 crore towards the loan amount. The banks told the court that a substantial amount needs to be paid and only then negotiations could take place. Mallya had sought time to come up with a fresh proposal. ED seeks deportation Meanwhile the Enforcement Directorate which had obtained a non-bailable warrant against Mallya from a Mumbai court has written to the Ministry of External Affairs seeking to commence the process to have Mallya deported. The ED had moved the court earlier this month seeking a non-bailable warrant against Mallya. The ED had contended that he has dodged summons more than thrice and hence a non bailable warrant be issued. The Ministry of External Affairs too is awaiting a response from Mallya after his diplomatic passport had been suspended. He is required to reply by tomorrow failing which action would be taken to either impound or revoke his passport. OneIndia News Karnataka to strengthen ATS and up the number of prisons Bengaluru journalists condemn attack against TV scribe Gurikar India oi-Shreyas Bengaluru, Apr 21: Journalists from IT city on Thursday carried out a protest condemning police brutality unleashed against a TV journalist Sharan Gurikar while he was reporting furious EPF protest by Garment workers. Scribes from diverse media houses gathered at Bengaluru Press Club to stage the protest. Journalists, however for a week display symbolic agitation by wearing a black band around their hands. It could be recalled that on Tuesday, Apr 19 an Inspector from Hulimavu jurisdiction and his subordinates allegedly assaulted a TV channel reporter Sharan Gurikar for reporting EPF protest. [B'luru: I am a rowdy if I remove uniform, says an Inspector before thrashing a TV journalist] Press Club President R Shridhar and Secretary, S Shivaprasad said the opinion generated from the gathering will be passed on to Chief Minister Siddaramaiah. A stern action against the offenders will also be sought from the CM. Many journalism associations present at the venue condemned the dastardly act. OneIndia News For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Thursday, April 21, 2016, 15:49 [IST] BJP happy with Bommais performance, to be CM candidate in poll-bound Karnataka Prashant Kishor claims Nitish Kumar in touch with BJP says don't be surprised if he joins hands with it again Tamil Nadu: BJP promises Jallikattu, implementation of prohibition India pti-PTI Chennai, Apr 21: Conducting the bull taming sport of Jallikattu in Tamil Nadu from next year, implementation of prohibition and waiver of all loans availed by farmers are among BJP's promises in its election manifesto released here today. Toeing the line of Dravidian majors AIADMK and DMK, the party promised imposition of prohibition and freebies of eight gram gold to eligible women in Below Poverty Line category for marriage. Taking a cue apparently from DMK, the party said it would waive "all loans availed by farmers" and assured a separate budget for agriculture and Lokayukta to end graft. Ramadoss-led PMK for a long time has been advocating a separate farm budget. Union Minister and senior BJP leader Nitin Gadkari today released the party manifesto, labelled as "Vision Document", in the presence of state leaders led by Tamil Nadu party chief Tamilisai Soundararajan. The saffron party's pet themes like cow protection and a law to stop forced religious conversions also featured in the manifesto. The party also promised quality education on par with CBSE standards in government-run schools and linking of all intra-state rivers. BJP is fighting polls in alliance with smaller parties like IJK. PTI BJP's Sambhara Samvadam in Kerala: A marriage of politics and culture India oi-Vicky Thiruvananthapuram, Apr 21:A group of Bengaluru based volunteers came together and pieced together an idea for the Kerala Assembly Elections. Chai or tea may have been key for the BJP's campaign during the Lok Sabha elections, but in Kerala it is a different cup of tea. These volunteers decided to spice things up. The Sambhara Samvadam or a discussion over buttermilk is the mantra of the BJP in Kerala ahead of the May 16 poll. Sambharam or buttermilk is a traditional drink in Kerala. Jineesh who was one of the volunteers behind this idea tells OneIndia that the response has been very good so far and the idea is to discuss about the achievements of the Narendra Modi government over a cup of buttermilk. Discussion over a cup of buttermilk Jineesh explains that the team from Bengaluru comprising Binu, Sanju, Jayshankar, Rasita and several others is headed by senior BJP leader, B L Santhosh. Around 2 months back when the Kerala's BJP chief Kummanam had come to Bengaluru to hold discussions with the social media team, all of us floated this idea. They decided that they would organise this programme under the banner of I support Kummanam. There were 200 of us present and many of us had worked with with the Chai pe Charcha programme as well. Since buttermilk is a traditional drink in Kerala, we felt that this idea would click like how chai pe charcha did. During that meeting we also came up with a website called keralacircle.org which would highlight the achievements of the Modi government as people in Kerala often ask where is the ache din (good days)? The response has been positive and the first event. We get a crowd of nearly 200 to 300 during each event. The first event was inaugurated by BJP, MP Nalin Kumar Kateel at Aranmula. The second one was held at Irinjalakkuda and inaugurated by BJP leader Meenakshi Lekhi. A marriage of culture and politics In Kerala, people are very emotive about their culture and politics. It was keeping this in mind that the idea of having a discussion over buttermilk was concerned. When asked why the tender coconut which is also symbolic of Kerala's culture was not chosen, Jineesh laughs while stating that it could have been that too. However the buttermilk is as much part of a Kerala tradition like the tender coconut. So far it is has been good start and we hope that the number of people attending the events will increase. This is a programme that runs parallel to the BJP's campaign in Kerala. That campaign would be an independent one and we are not interfering in it. Our programme is basically to create an awareness about the BJP's achievements and with a cup of buttermilk in the hand we are aiming at a meaningful discussion, Jineesh also adds. OneIndia News Woman, her two children mowed down by train; Suicide not ruled out Suspicious bird with rings on its legs caught near India-Pakistan border CAF jawan killed in IED blast in Chhattisgarh India oi-PTI Jaipur, Apr 21: A Chhattisgarh Armed Force (CAF) jawan was today killed in a pressure IED (improvised explosive device) blast, allegedly laid by Naxals, in the state's insurgency-hit Sukma district. The incident took place near Dharampenta village under Kistaram police station limits when a team of security personnel was patrolling in the region to ensure security to an under-construction culvert, Sukma Superintendent of Police D Shravan told PTI. The culvert is being constructed on Gulab nullah near Dharampenta, located around 500 km from the state capital Raipur. While the security personnel were cordoning off the spot, constable Dinesh Baghel, belonging to CAF's sixth battalion, inadvertently stepped over a pressure landmine triggering the explosion injuring him critically, the SP said. He was immediately taken to a nearby hospital where he succumbed to his wounds, Shravan said, adding a combing operation has been launched to trace the assailants. PTI Cong will emerge in aggressive avatar with Bharat Jodo Yatra, will not be taken for granted: Jairam Ramesh Campaign to curb use of polythene bags in UP India oi-PTI Kanpur, April 21: In order to curb the use of polythene, the district administration will launch a campaign in the district on Thursday, April 21. Officials of the Municipal Corporation, Pollution Control Department and Food and Drugs department will also participate in the campaign. Despite the ban by the government and the court, the use and manufacturing of the polythene has not stopped in the district. According to district administration, strict action will be taken against the manufacturers as well as users of poly bags under the campaign. A team led by City Magistrate will conduct raids at shops and will impose fine on the violators. PTI With AQI of 259, Delhi's air on day before Diwali least polluted in 7 years Giriraj Singh wants 2-child law for all religions India oi-Sandra New Delhi, Apr 21: Union Minister Giriraj Singh has said that India needs to bring into place a law for population control or else 'our daughters will not be safe.' The BJP MP from Nawada expressed his concern and said: "Hindu population decline is worrying, a law is needed on population control for all religions." He went on to add that if such a law was not in place then "like Pakistan we too will have to keep our daughters under the veil." According to a report in The Indian Express, Singh is quoted saying: "Hindu ka do beta ho aur Musalmaan ko bhi do hi beta hone chahiye. Hamari abadi ghat rahi hai (Hindus should have two sons and Muslims also should have two sons. Our population is declining). Speaking to ANI he also said: "Population control law should be made, all must have 1-2 children. Those who don't follow, their voting rights should be revoked," Singh said. Hindu population decline is worrying,law needed on population control,for all religions-Giriraj Singh,Union Minister pic.twitter.com/XkGC2XvkMT ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 In the past Singh has courted controversy several times. In the run up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Singh had said that those criticising Narendra Modi should be sent to Pakistan. OneIndia News For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Thursday, April 21, 2016, 12:36 [IST] J-K: Terrorists cordoned off in Kupwara, encounter underway India oi-Pallavi Kupwara, April 21: A group of terrorists who are believed to be hiding in the Lolab area of Kupwara district, in the Puthshahi area have been cordoned off. One terrorist is reported to have been gunned down, while 2-3 are still said to be in hiding. Encounter between the terrorists and the security forces underway. The action was triggered on specific information about militant activity in Putshai area of Lolab in the district. The security forces cordoned off the area and began a search operation on Thursday, said an army official. According to the police, the joint party of army and special operations group of police launched the operation in Gujarpati Potushai after receiving inputs about presence of militants. A police official said, "The militants present in the woods opened fire on the forces triggering a gun fight." The officials said that the identity of the slain militant was not immediately known. OneIndia News Mamata replies to EC notice for model code violation India oi-PTI Kolkata, Apr 20: West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee today replied to the show cause notice issued to her for violating the Model Code of Conduct by the the Election Commission. The contents of the reply was, however, not known. "Today our party supremo has replied to the show cause notice issued to her by the EC in the capacity as TMC head. The reply has been sent to the EC, but we are not divulging the details," a senior TMC leader told PTI on condition of anonymity. "The party maintains that the decision to carve out a new Asansol district was taken at a cabinet meeting held in December 2015 and was nothing new," the leader said. Taking exception yesterday, the EC had rejected the response of West Bengal Chief Secretary Basudeb Banerjee to its show cause notice issued to Banerjee for prima facie violating the model code. The poll panel gave her a three-day deadline to respond personally. Questioning the way Basudeb Banerjee had "defended" the action of the CM in promising a new district when the model code is in force, the EC told him the use of the words "by order of the Chief Minister" in the response was "avoidable" and hoped he will not use such language in future. The West Bengal Chief Secretary had written to the Commission on behalf of the Trinamool Congress chief, who was served with a show cause notice last week for announcing creation of a new district in the state where elections are being held. PTI There is no 'one-size-fits-all' to curb poverty Skeletons from the past: Kin of missing women approach cops after human sacrifice case COVID-19 responsible for pregnancy-related deaths in the US With these 5 changes, breast cancer survivors can live longer, healthier Naari Shakti: Women to serve on select naval warships soon News oi-Oneindia By OneIndia Defence Bureau New Delhi, April 21: Taking Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Naari Shakti mission a notch higher, the Indian Navy has granted Permanent Commission to seven women officers. The Navy also announced that a policy is being formulated for women officers to serve on select warships that have appropriate facilities for women. Indian Navy's decision follows a move by Indian Air Force (IAF) last year to permit in combat flying roles. The IAF's women pilots are set to be commissioned on flying roles June this year. Four pilots are already undergoing training at Air Force Academy in Hyderabad. The Indian Army has already granted Permanent Commission to women officers in select few branches. More opportunities for women in uniform The Navy's decision will throw open more opportunities to young women who always wanted to undertake challenging missions like their male counterparts. Navy now says seven women officers from the batch of Short Service Commission (SSC) officers of the Education Branch and Naval Constructor cadre, who joined in 2008-09, would now been granted Permanent Commission. "Several progressive and first-time initiatives have been taken by the Indian Navy in the last few months towards empowering women officers. Navy recognizes the importance of providing equal opportunities to women officers," says a Navy Spokesperson. Navy says additional avenues for employment of women officers have also been opened up. Naval air arm too opens its doors for women Starting in 2017, women officers can choose to join as Pilots of Maritime Reconnaissance planes including P8I, Dornier and the like. Women can also join the Naval Armament Inspectorate cadre. "A total of eight branches and cadres would be opened for women officers in the Navy now," says the spokesperson. As reported by OneIndia earlier, a crew of six naval women officers is currently undergoing rigorous training for the first, all-women, circumnavigation of the world mission nex year. The team would be sailing on the homegrown vessel, Mhadei II. "The Navy's decision to throw open more avenues is really inspiring. This is the beginning of a new era in Indian Navy that's sure to propel the dreams of thousands of women aspirants. We would have loved to get the same opportunity, but we are proud that we are serving the Indian Navy now in different roles," says a naval woman officer, who had participated during the 2016 R-Day Parade. "I would love to see my daughter taking up this opportunity," she tells OneIndia. OneIndia News The joy of our lives: Sushma Swaraj's husband warm birthday wishes for late leader Remembering Sushma Swaraj on her death anniversary: Facts about Iron Lady of India Nurse murdered in Oman: Sushma Swaraj calls for report India oi-PTI New Delhi, Apr 21: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj today said an Indian national working as a nurse in Oman was murdered and has asked the Indian Ambassador there for a report on the matter. "I am sorry to know about the murder of Ms.Chikku Robert - an Indian national from Kerala working as a nurse in Oman. "I have asked Indian Ambassador to ascertain all the facts and report. My heartfelt condolences to the bereaved family," Swaraj tweeted. I am sorry to know about the murder of Ms.Chikku Robert - an Indian national from Kerala working as a nurse in Oman. /1 Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) April 21, 2016 I have asked Indian Ambassador to ascertain all the facts and report. My heartfelt condolences to the bereaved family. /2 Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) April 21, 2016 According to reports, Robert (25) was stabbed to death while resisting a robbery bid. PTI CBI arrests one of the two absconders in WB's Bogtui killings One dead as violence mars third phase of Bengal polls India oi-IANS By Ians English Kolkata, April 21: Amid escalating violence that left one person dead and several others injured and the sweltering heat, nearly 40 percent turnout was recorded in the first four hours for the third phase of the West Bengal assembly elections involving 62 constituencies on Thursday. Twenty-two constituencies in Murshidabad, 17 in Nadia and 16 in Burdwan districts and seven in north Kolkata are up for grabs. Thursday marks the second and final round of voting in Burdwan, where nine constituencies went to the hustings on April 11. "Till 11.00 a.m., overall 39.76 percent polling was recorded. The turnout in Murshidabad was 42.99 percent, Nadia 40.78 percent, Burdwan 37.33 percent, and Kolkata 32.71 percent," said an Election Commission (EC) official. The EC officials also received over 1,000 complaints, including those of violence, voter intimidation, and disruption to poll process, during the ballotting so far. Incidents of violence in Murshidabad, Nadia and Burdwan districts left one dead and several others injured. In Domkal of Murshidabad district, Tahidul Islam, a Communist Party of India-Marxist activist was killed when crude bombs were hurled at him. While the EC has sought a report over the incident, CPI-M leader Anisur Rahaman blamed the Trinamool Congress for the killing, but the ruling party denied the charges. Trinamool's Domkal nominee Soumik Hossain claimed the death was a result of a clash between the CPI-M and the Congress. Besides the killing of Islam, at least four others were attacked in Domkal allegedly for casting their votes. "Last night, some people threatened me not to vote but I chose to ignore that. When I was returning after casting my vote, I was attacked," alleged one of the injured undergoing treatment at a hospital. Whistle-blower former Indian Police Service officer Nazrul Islam, who too is contesting from Domkal, accused the EC of being "intentionally incompetent". "The EC has chosen to be intentionally incompetent, the reason being a tacit understanding between ruling parties at the Centre (BJP) and the state (Trinamool)," added Islam, who is a candidate of the Mulnibasi Party floated by him. Reports of violence were also received from Ketugram in Burdwan district where three people were injured after crude bombs were thrown near a booth. Several crude bombs were also recovered from near a booth at Saguna in Nadia district. Voters in Chakdaha in Nadia district alleged they were "prevented from voting by Trinamool goons". In the city's Beliaghata, complaints of voter intimidation were received. Police had to intervene and detained several people. Both the CPI-M and the Congress alleged their polling agents were assaulted and driven out in several booths. Booth-capturing and voter intimidation took place in a number of areas, they said. Over 1.37 crore (1,37,42,000) voters are eligible to elect their legislators across 16,461 polling stations, including 10 auxiliary booths, from a field of 418 candidates -- 34 of them female. In the assembly polls in the 62 constituencies five years back, then allies Trinamool and Congress captured 45 seats, with the Trinamool taking 29 and the Congress 16. Among the Left Front partners, the CPI-M had won 14, and the Revolutionary Socialist Party, Samajwadi Party and All India Forward Bloc one each. The ruling Trinamool and the BJP are contesting in all the 62 constituencies in this phase. The Left Front-Congress alliance is also in the fray for all the 62 constituencies. But the Congress nominees are also clashing with those from the Left Front in 11 seats -- 10 in Murshidabad and one in Nadia. In this phase, Ranaghat South in Nadia is the largest constituency electorate-wise, and Ausgram in Burdwan district the biggest in terms of area. Shyampukar constituency in Kolkata North has the least number of voters. Among the major candidates in this phase are state ministers and Trinamool contestants Rabiranjan Chattopadhyay, Sashi Panja, Sadhan Pandey, former state minister and CPI-M candidates Anisur Rahaman and Debesh Das, Congress legislature party leader Md. Sohrab and former state party president Somendranath Mitra, and BJP national secretary Rahul Sinha. Of the 418 candidates in the fray, 61 are crorepatis, 80 have criminal cases against them, of whom 65 have declared serious criminal offences like murder and rape against their name. So far, voters in 105 of the state's total 294 constituencies have exercised their right to franchise on three dates -- April 4, 11 and 17 -- in the first two phases. West Bengal is having a staggered six-phase election. Polling for the remaining phases will be held on April 25, 30 and May 5. IANS State officials have locked down Fonner Park after three horses tested positive for equine herpes myeloencephalopathy, a form of herpes virus. One horse has been euthanized. Two others that showed symptoms of the disease are getting better and are being closely monitored, according to a news release from the Nebraska Department of Agriculture. Blood samples and nasal swabs from three horses were evaluated by the USDA's National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa. The 750 to 850 horses in Fonner Park's 16 barns right now will not be allowed to leave until the quarantine -- 21 days minimum -- is lifted, Fonner CEO Bruce Swihart said. The virus is a danger only to horses. While it cannot spread to humans or other animals, it can be transferred to other horses via clothes, boots, buckets, feed or tack, etc. It is of utmost importance that horse owners and facility managers take appropriate precautions to prevent the spread of this disease, Nebraska State Veterinarian Dennis Hughes said in a news release. Vigilance is especially important in situations where horses can come into contact with each other. There can be a high susceptibility to the disease where we have horses co-mingling from different regions or states. Fonner will continue to run races through May 7, although the 150 or so horses that were housed in the same barn as the three that tested positive will not be allowed to race. Swihart said horses will be allowed into the park to race but will not be able to leave until after the quarantine is lifted. The equine herpes virus has caused problems at several tracks during the past year. Most recently, four horses died at Parx Racing in Pennsylvania. Sunland Park in New Mexico was forced to halt racing for more than a month after an outbreak there in January. Horses also were quarantined at Turf Paradise in Arizona and training facilities in Texas. Swihart said Fonner accepted horses that had been in Arizona, but the quarantine there had been lifted and those horses vaccinated. Fonner Park forbids horses coming from racetracks that are under quarantine or from adjacent counties to those that are quarantined. Fonner Park officials became aware of the sickness Sunday evening. The three horses that tested positive for the virus were in trainer David Andersons stable, Swihart said. He said he doesn't know how the horses contracted the virus. They had been at Fonner for a couple of months. Prairie Meadows Race Track in Altoona, Iowa, has quarantined horses that arrived from Fonner Park within the past week and are closely monitoring the animals and any other horses that have come in contact with them. The horses at Prairie Meadows have not shown any clinical signs of the disease, according to Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship spokesman Dustin Vande Hoef. Its unknown yet whether the situation will affect the five days of racing planned at Horsemens Park in Omaha, which are set to run May 20-22 and July 29-30, said Horsemens General Manager Mike Newlin. Lincoln Race Course's one day of live racing this year hasn't been set. Columbus runs Aug. 5-Sept. 5. Symptoms of the disease include fever, decreased coordination, nasal discharge, urine dribbling, loss of tail tone, hind limb weakness, leaning against a wall or fence to maintain balance, lethargy and the inability to rise. Nebraska Horse Racing Commission Director Tom Sage declined to comment. PM Modi, Amit Shah must apologise for 'trampling' democracy: Congress on U'khand HC verdict India oi-PTI New Delhi, April 21: The Uttarakhand High Court's verdict setting aside imposition of President's rule in the state today spurred an elated Congress to attack the BJP, demanding an apology from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah for "trampling" democracy and "murdering" constitution. The verdict is a slap on face of BJP for trying to dislodge an elected government, it said. Terming the court's verdict as a victory of people of Uttarakhand, democracy and constitutional norms, AICC Incharge Communications Randeep Singh Surjewala said Prime Minister Modi and Amit Shah should learn a lesson from this "decisive and resounding verdict. "This is a victory for the people of Uttarakhand, democracy and constitutional norms. This is also a slap on the face of those in BJP who sought to dislodge an elected government, elected with the mandate of people in Uttarakhand. "Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah will be well advised to now tender an unconditional apology to the nation and also to people of Uttarakhand for trampling upon democracy, murdering constitution norms and subjugating the will of people to their blind quest to dislodge Congress governments. We welcome the verdict," Surjewala said. He said that it proves the full majority which Congress enjoys and the "sinister conspiracies" which are being hatched from Arunanchal Pradesh to Uttarakhand and many other states to dislodge elected governments by "foul means, use of money and muscle power" should now at least come to an end. "Prime Minister Modi and Amit Shah should learn a lesson from this decisive and resounding verdict," he said. Putting up a brave front, BJP claimed the Harish Rawat government in Uttarakhand is in minority and that this will be proved on April 29. The kind of observations the state High Court has been making for last three days, we are not surprised by its order, BJP General Secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya said. Union Minister and BJP leader Kiren Rijiju said that blaming the central government for something which was a creation of the Congress is "unfortunate". "We all respect the court verdict. I have nothing to comment on it but just to blame the central government for a particular situation which has been created by Congress party, that is unfortunate. It is congress party's creation, not ours (BJP)," he said. Dealing a major blow to Modi government, the Uttarakhand High Court today quashed the imposition of President' rule in the state and revived the Congress government headed by Harish Rawat, who has been asked to prove his majority on April 29. PTI 6 stranded fishermen rescued by Coast Guard in TN India oi-PTI Chennai, April 21: Coast Guard has rescued six fishermen who were stranded in mid-sea off Tuticorin coast in Tamil Nadu for three days after their boat's engine failed. Acting on a message from the state Fisheries department about a missing boat with the fishermen, Coast Guard Eastern Region authorities deployed their vessel 'ICGS Abhiraj' to search for it. The ship located the boat stranded in the sea 11 nautical miles off Tuticorin last night, a Coast Guard release said. The fishermen were found highly dehydrated due to lack of proper intake for three days and were given medical aid immediately, it said. The ICGS 'Abhiraj' technical team found that the engine of the fishermen's boat failed due to a snag and towed it to Mandapam near Rameswaram where it was handed over to the department, it said. PTI Students protest at film institute in Bengaluru; why is media silent? India oi-Oneindia By Maitreyee Boruah Bengaluru, April 21: The Government Film and Television Institute (GFTI) in Hesaraghatta, Bengaluru, has produced some of the finest filmmakers of the country, including ace-cinematographer and Dadasaheb Phalke award winner Late VK Murthy and well-known director Govind Nihalani. Unfortunately, when the students of the institute are protesting against the alleged "dictatorial" attitude of their principal for the last 10-days, media did not care to report their cause. The protest started after the administration of the institute issued a notice to conduct exams from April 12. However, the students wanted their syllabi to be completed and lectures to take place before they actually attended exams. The students' demands irked the principal, Renuka Naidu, and she barred 24 students from attending the exams. Experts say media is biased in reporting student-related issues. The entire Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) row was well-documented in the media as the issue broke out in the national capital. "Take for instance the case of University of Hyderabad. The media initially reported the case after the suicide of Rohith Vemula, followed by intense students' agitation. Now, there is no media coverage about the issue, even though students are demanding the removal of vice-chancellor Appa Rao Podile and promulgation of Rohith Act to end discrimination against Dalit students. The media needs to take a holistic approach and focus on real issues," says Stalin K, media consultant. The social media too has ignored the plight of the students of the GFTI. However, a Facebook post of a student of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, Ajayan Adat, reads, "For the past few years, the GFTI has become a white elephant where a few non-teaching teachers are sucking the blood and essence of that great place. It doesn't have a syllabus for cinema. Cinematography and Sound students are forced to learn subjects like basic management skills and the Indian constitution. Still they want to make it a factory which produces some "broiler" technicians for the film industry." "Cinema is an art form and it needs to be treated so. The students of GFTI are leading a historical struggle for a proper syllabus, infrastructure and more than anything their dignity. They can't lose this battle, because this is their last hope. We, the film students-practitioners, need to support the students for their rights and protest against government's irresponsible and criminal attitude towards education across the country," he adds. OneIndia News For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Thursday, April 21, 2016, 14:27 [IST] AIADMK dispute: OPS sits on Dy Oppn Leader's chair as EPS skips first day of TN Assembly Session Tamil nadu polls: Brahmin Association to support AIADMK India oi-PTI Chennai, April 21: Thamizhnadu Brahmin Association, known as 'Thambraas', on Thursday, April 21 said it would support the ruling AIADMK in the May 16 Assembly polls. In a press release, State President of Thambraas, N Narayanan said the "association has decided to support the AIADMK candidates and its alliance candidates in election to the TN State Assembly." He said the association's district units and branches across the state would work for the victory of the AIADMK. Earlier this month, another Brahmin outfit, Tamil Nadu Brahmins Welfare Sangam had extended support to the DMK. DMK had said Sangam functionaries called on DMK treasurer MK Stalin and extended support. PTI Central team roped in as dengue cases in Bihar rise to over 5000 Tejaswi Yadav backs Lalu's support to Nitish as PM India oi-PTI Patna, Apr 21: Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Tejaswi Yadav on Wednesday, April 20 supported RJD chief Lalu Prasad's backing of Nitish Kumar as Prime Ministerial candidate but evaded a direct reply when asked who would be better choice for the post between Kumar and Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi. Asked to comment that his father and RJD President Lalu Prasad has supported Nitish Kumar for the PM post, Tejaswi Yadav told reporters "Why not? He is honest and has a clean image." Besides, being Chief Minister for five times he (Kumar) has been a minister at the Centre too, younger son of Prasad said. "Why cannot a man with such a vast experience and a vision for the country be considered as 'PM material'?" he asked. When asked as to who would be a better Prime Ministerial candidate among Nitish Kumar and Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi, Tejaswi Yadav evaded a direct answer and said the country would decide this. Prodded as to whom would RJD back for the PM post in future among the two, he said "a decision would be taken when time for it comes." "Why to make this an issue now...when time for it will come a detailed discussion would be held and a decision taken by the party," the Bihar Deputy CM said. RJD President had yesterday supported Nitish Kumar's call for "sangh-mukt" country and appeal to non-BJP and RSS parties to unite. Prasad had also backed Kumar for PM post. Tejaswi Yadav refuted BJP's allegation that Lalu Prasad was backing Nitish Kumar for PM post solely with an intent to pave way for him (Tejaswi) to become the Chief Minister. "It's baseless assertion. We have got a huge mandate in Bihar to which the government is committed and hence we can not be diverted through such issues," Tejaswi Yadav, who is also RJD Legislature party leader in the state Assembly, added. Asked if the efforts of merger of old Janata Parivar splinter parties would be revived, Tejaswi Yadav said party would decide such things as he was not authorised for it. "It's an issue of future. First, secular parties should come on one platform," he said. "RJD and JD(U) approach and ideology is one and we are happy over the coalition we have today," he said. Tejaswi Yadav rubbished specution of "tussle" between RJD and JD(U) due to which he did not attend Cabinet meeting recently. "Besides, participating in Cabinet meetings we sat together during recently concluded budget session of Assembly," he added. PTI For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Thursday, April 21, 2016, 15:25 [IST] TERI: RK Pachauri removed from Council and organisation India oi-Pallavi New Delhi, April 21: The Governing Council of the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) has decided to remove R K Pachauri from its council with immediate effect. In a meeting held on Monday, the Governing Council, which is headed by the new Chairman Ashok Chawla, ex-finance secretary, has decided to pay the rest of the contract amount till July 2017. TERI has also decided not to renew Pachauri's membership as the Governing Council member of TERI. According to inside sources, Pachauri remained a member of the Governing Council for over 25 years. His membership ended on March 31 this year. The members of the council, however, said that they did not want him on the council as things were getting 'messier'. Pachauri, who is currently travelling abroad, was not invited to the meeting as his membership had expired on March 31. Pachauri was initially promoted to the post of Executive Vice-Chairman of the Governing Council before Ashok Chawla was appointed the new Chairman. Pachauri will be formally informed soon. Pachauri was booked by the Delhi Police on Feb 18, 2015 on charges of sexual harassment, criminal intimidation and stalking on a 29-year old research analyst. Later, two more women (one European) had released their statements last month accusing Pachauri of sexual harassment at workplace. OneIndia News For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Thursday, April 21, 2016, 13:08 [IST] Terror funding: Punjab's drug mafia alone is worth Rs 60,000 crore India oi-Vicky New Delhi, April 21: Finance Minister of India, Arun Jaitley in his special address to the United Nations spoke about the drug mafia and terrorist nexus. He said that there is an urgent need to disrupt the financial flow and there is a clear nexus between the drug mafia and the terrorist groups. It is a well known fact that terrorist groups survive on the money earned through drug trade. Dawood Ibrahim in fact has to compulsorily cough up a portion of his income from the drug trade to fund terrorist networks in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The money that is earned by the drug mafia is obscene. In Punjab alone it is worth Rs 60,000 crore. A report by the UN states that the total potential value of Afghanistan's 2006 opium harvest accruiing to farmers, laboratory owners and Afghan traffickers reached about $US3.1 billion. The drug mafia- terror nexus: One of the leaders of the drug mafia is Dawood Ibrahim. He was cornered by the ISI to cough up a portion of his income earned from the drug trade. Dawood had no option but to give in as a majority of the drugs he smuggles are routed from Afghanistan to Pakistan and then the rest of the world. The drug mafia in Punjab too operates similarly. They have a lot of reliance on the drugs produced in Afghanistan. Unless and until they share their proceeds with Pakistan and their agents, the drugs will not flow out of Afghanistan. Historically, Afghanistan has been a major source of heroin throughout the world. Recently, al-Qaeda and Sunni extremists have been associated through a number of investigations with drug trafficking. Elements of the Taliban shipping and selling illegal drugs into the US. A joint FBI and DEA investigation resulted in the arrests of 16 Afghan and Pakistani subjects for involvement in a drug ring that was possibly linked to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The investigation determined that heroin, grown and processed in Afghanistan and Pakistan, was being shipped to the U.S. Profits from the sale of the heroin were laundered through Afghan and Pakistani owned businesses and then sent back to associates of terrorist organizations. The report by the UN: According to the UN's World Drug Report 2007, the total potential value of Afghanistan's 2006 opium harvest accruiing to farmers, laboratory owners and Afghan traffickers reached about $US3.1 billion. In addition, it is reported that in 2004, some 400 tons of cocaine was exported from one Latin American country, with an estimated domestic value of US$ 2 billion. How much of this money is used for perpetrating acts of terrorism? Estimates vary. But even a small percentage would be more than sufficient for some individuals or groups to plan, finance and carry out terrorist acts. Indeeed drug trafficking has provided funding for insurgency and those who use terrorist violence in various regions throughout the world, including in transit regions. In some cases, drugs have even been the currency used in the commission of terrorist attacks, as was the case in the Madrid bombings. Effective tools do however, exist which can chip away at - and eventually contribute to breaking - the links. For example, at the international level there is a common legal framework consisting of 16 universal anti-terrorist instruments, as well as relevant UN Security Council resolutions. Included in the latter is a series of UN resolutions imposing sanctions - such as the freezing of assets, a travel ban and an arms embargo, on members of the Taliban, Al-Qaida and their associates. There are currently 124 entities and 226 individuals on this list. OneIndia News For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Thursday, April 21, 2016, 12:46 [IST] Pratyusha Banerjee suicide: Should case be handed over to CBI?Sign online petition if you support Pratyusha Banerjee suicide: Boyfriend Rahul reveals, we mutually decided to abort the child India oi-Reetu New Delhi, April 21: After confirmation of television actress Pratyusha Banerjee's pregnancy, her boyfriend Rahul Raj Singh had told the police that he knew about her pregnancy. According to Bollywood Life.com, in an interview with Bombay Times, he was quoted as saying, "After she told me that she had missed her periods, we went to the doctor for the pregnancy test. However, we mutually decided to abort it since we were not married and only living in together. I went with her to the doctor for the abortion, but since there was a long waiting, she told me to leave. I, in fact, went the following day to the same doctor to get medicines prescribed for her. We decided to terminate the pregnancy thinking about our future as we were planning to get married in November." Meanwhile, observing that the city police was conducting a "fair and proper" investigation into the alleged suicide of TV star Pratyusha Banerjee, the Bombay High Court today refused to transfer probe to Mumbai Police Crime Branch as sought by the popular actress' mother Shoma Banerjee. OneIndia News For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Thursday, April 21, 2016, 23:22 [IST] What does the US actually want in Syria? US warns of links between Islamic State, Boko Haram India oi-PTI N'Djamena, Apr 21: At "Ground Zero" in Africa's counterterrorism fight, senior US officials warned of deepening links between the Islamic State and Boko Haram and prodded Chad's ruling strongman to introduce reforms for the sake of long-term stability. But in a rare appearance before foreign journalists at his presidential palace, Chadian President Idriss Deby indicated he wouldn't help in the US-backed effort to install a unity government in Libya, his country's northern neighbor, a former foe and an incubator for Muslim extremist groups. The visit to Chad by America's UN envoy, Samantha Power, and top US military officials such as Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, commander of special operations in Africa, highlights the country's precarious position dealing with a multitude of hostile militant groups and unstable neighboring governments. It also underscores the impoverished, land-locked country's growing geopolitical value. Boko Haram has launched attacks on Chad's territory from its base in Nigeria to the southwest. The Islamic State and al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb lurk in chaotic and lawless Libya to the north. To the east is Sudan's Darfur region; to the south is the Central African Republic, still recovering from years of interethnic conflict The Boko Haram-IS nexus may pose the greatest immediate threat. Although Boko Haram pledged its allegiance to the Islamic State last year, the operational connection has been unclear. Bolduc said the groups clearly share "tactics, techniques and procedures," from the way they conduct complex ambushes and set improvised explosive devices like roadside bombs, to how they undertake high-profile attacks on hotels. Barack Obama hopes Mosul would be retaken from ISIS 'eventually' Suggesting the relationship is expanding, he said Chad on April 7 intercepted a "large cache of different types of weapons" sent from Libya and intended for the Lake Chad region. These included small arms, machine guns and rifles. "You can, I think, draw a conclusion," Bolduc told reporters. The implication was that the weapons were sent by the Islamic State, which has established a foothold along Libya's Mediterranean coast, near the city of Sirte. AP Use MNREGA to help the people of India, writes Sonia Gandhi Use MGNREGA money for water harvesting: PM Modi India oi-IANS By Ians English New Delhi, April 21: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday, April 21 said money allocated for MGNREGA should be used for "water harvesting" to battle drought. Speaking at the 10th Civil Services Day awards ceremony, Modi also called for a "spirit of healthy competition" among district administrations to foster an atmosphere conducive for positive change. "Everyone wants to change life in the villages. So much of money is being spent on MGNREGA," the prime minister said, referring to the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act. "I know about the drought situation in the country. There is a shortage of water. But it is also true that a good monsoon is predicted. "Why can't we use the MGNREGA money to run a campaign for harvesting water in the months of April, May and June? "Why can't we do desilting, dig new ponds and clean canals and use these for water harvesting? This will help in making ends meet even if there is no rain," Modi said. "Initiatives have succeeded when 'Jan Bhagidari' is embraced. Engaging with civil society is very important," he added. The government on Tuesday conceded in the Supreme Court that 256 districts with a population of about 33 crore spread over 12 states were affected by drought. Modi also said: "There should be healthy competition among the district administrations in the country in the discharge of duties. "If their districts lag behind and don't get noticed for good work, then those heading them must ask themselves why." The prime minister said the district administrations must try to win the trust of the people and be proactive. "Only being an administrator and controller is not enough. Everybody at every level has to become an agent of change. Let us create an atmosphere where everyone can contribute. The energy of 125 crore Indians will take the nation ahead," he said. The prime minister urged people to view every hurdle as an opportunity. "Only those people will be able to prosper in life who don't get worn out and take every hurdle as an opportunity," said Modi. IANS Vijayakanth slams DMK chief for aspiring to be CM at 92 India oi-PTI Kulithalai (TN), Apr 20: In a hard hitting broadside against DMK president Karunandihi, DMDK chief Vijayakanth today mocked at him for aspiring to be Tamil Nadu's Chief Minister for the sixth time. Stating that people of Kulithalai are good, he said they had elected Karunanidhi decades ago with hopes. Karunanidhi was first elected from here in 1957. "Kulithalai has a history and this place was the springboard of Kalaignar (as Karunanidhi is referred to) and you elected him as you believed him to be good," he said. He then made a remark and added, "What can be done?" Mocking the nonagenarian DMK leader, "See, he wants to be Chief Minister for the sixth time even at this age (92)... see his desire." Alleging that illegal sand mining was rampant in the area, he said, "You know who is behind it" and referred to the name of an opposition party leader. Attacking AIADMK chief Jayalalithaa, he said though the ruling party had "money power", the DMDK-PWF combine had the support of people with "strong hearts". "This is not an election. This is a war between the good and bad. We six parties (DMDK, MDMK, CPI(M), CPI, VCK, TMC) represent the good and the other two parties (AIADMK and DMK) represent bad," he said. He also said this was a "war between dharma and adharma" and urged the people to support the DMDK-PWF combine. "For me, cadres are important and they are my strength. They and I will forgive enemies, but not betrayers," he said in an apparent reference to rebel DMDK leaders who were allotted three constituencies by the DMK. Former DMDK functionaries led by V C Chandrakumar were expelled from the party after they nudged the leadership to ally with DMK. They later founded the "Makkal DMDK," and were given seats by DMK. In an election meeting in Bodinayakanur, Vijayakanth's wife Premalatha said the DMDK-PWF front is now the prime contender for power and people have "accepted" the combine to ensure the development for Tamil Nadu. Once the DMDK-led front is voted to power, "sand mining which is (allegedly) rampant will be ended", she said. The party, meanwhile, announced a change of candidate in Kanchipuram constituency replacing Shanmugasundaram with C Ekambaram. PTI CBI arrests one of the two absconders in WB's Bogtui killings In a midnight crackdown, police detains TET candidates; BJP says WB or Hitler's Germany? News flash: 3 passengers detained at Mumbai airport for misbehaving with air-hostess India oi-Oneindia By Oneindia Staff Writer Bengaluru, Apr 21: Prime Minister Narendra Modi to address rallies in West Bengal's Basirhat and Howrah today. [West Bengal poll Phase 3 Live] Get all the news updates of the day: 10.00 pm: Hand grenade lobbed inside Lamphel Police Station in Imphal (Manipur). No report of any casualty. 9.45 pm: A forest guard of forest Dept of Delhi govt has been arrested by ACB in a bribery case: Mukesh Meena, ACB Chief 9.30 pm: Delhi: CBI arrests a Project Manager of National Buildings Construction Corporation (NBCC) for demanding and accepting a bribe of Rs. 25,000. 8.45 pm: 3 passengers detained by Mumbai airport police for misbehaving (making video) with Indigo Air hostesses in Kolkata-Mumbai flight. Police is registering case against 4 accused for misbehaving with Indigo Air hostesses. One accused is missing. ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 8.35 pm: It only suggests that 'Didi' (WB CM Mamata Banerjee) has already accepted her defeat: PM Modi in Howrah (WB) 8.30 pm: Whenever any election ends in nation we hear news that polls were conducted in a peaceful manner. But in WB after all 3 phases we heard news of how many were beaten up, what is all this?: PM Modi in Howrah 8.23 pm: Modiji while you attack Constitution, destroy institutions & undermine Democracy. Please remember people of U'khand & country are watching: Rahul Gandhi 8.16 pm: TMC leader Anwar Khan was found to be provoking the party supporters against ECI official. FIR was lodged and he was later arrested: ECI 8.15 pm: A case has been registered against ex-MP Mannan Hossain for violation of model code of conduct: Election Commission 8.10 pm: Election Commission ordered to file FIR against TMC's Razzak Molla over his derogatory remarks against BJP's Roopa Ganguly. 8.05 pm: A case has been registered against Mannan Hossain, ex-MP for violation of model code of conduct: Election Commission 7.50 pm: This is a very important verdict, what was done in Uttarakhand was against the constitution: Nitish Kumar, Bihar CM. Dusre dal ka shasan inhe bardasht nahi hai, ye uss sarkar ko samapt karne ke liye kuch bhi kar sakte hain: Nitish Kumar ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 7.40 pm: We're filing an appeal (challenging Uttarakhand HC order), appeal is being prepared, it will be lodged in SC on Friday: AG Mukul Rohatgi. 7.31 pm: 79.22% voter turnout recorded in third phase of West Bengal assembly polls at 5 pm: ECI. 7.30 pm: We've nothing to do with disqualified MLAs, we're only concerned with the Presidential notification, says Mukul Rohatgi,AG. Felt it ws time for me to move away & engage in other interests which I've harboured ovr past few yrs fr activities at global level-Pachauri ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 7.22 pm: Centre to move Supreme court against Uttarakhand HC's order tomorrow at 10:30AM: Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi to ANI. 7.21 pm: Few cases of throwing of crude bombs were also reported. FIRs have been lodged against culprits in all cases: ECI. 7.18 pm: In third phase of West Bengal assembly polls, there were some instances of clashes among the political workers, says Sandeep Saxena, ECI. 7.17 pm: RK Pachauri removed from TERI's Governing council and the organisation. 7.16 pm: Mallya to SC: Unseemly haste in suspending passport even before issuing a showcause notice and issuing a NBW are part of unfair media trial. 7.15 pm: Madhya Pradesh Govt directs all liquor shops in Ujjain be closed for a month during Simhastha Kumbh Mela 2016 (22nd April to 21st May). 7.14 pm: Cong gives notice under rule 267 in RS for 25th April for resolution to condemn Modi Govt over its attempt to destabilise Uttarakhand Govt. 6.21 pm: 27 Naxals including 3 women surrender before 45th and 46th Bn of ITBP and Police in Chhattisgarh's Narayanpur. 6.20 pm: Four custom inspectors of ICD convicted and sentenced to 6 years imprisonment and total fine of RS 10 lakh for fictitious payment to a firm. 6.01 pm: Dehradun: Harish Rawat arrives at Raj Bhavan to meet Governor. 5.33 pm: I will share details of the assets with the Supreme Court. However please do not share it with the banks, Mallya tells Supreme Court. 5.31 pm: The loans to Kingfisher airlines were not given on the basis of my assets. 5.30 pm: Vijay Mallya tells court that banks have no right to ask for details of his assets. 5.27 pm: TMC workers allege that Babul Supriyo entered the poll booth with a large group of people. 5.15 pm: The place was crowded so I was just asking the women to move fast,baseless allegation, says Babulal Gaur,MP Home Minister. 5.00 pm: Anticipating that Centre would move to Supreme Court against Uttarakhand HC verdict, Harish Rawat files caveat in SC. 4.57 pm: Congress leader S M Hidayathullah quits party stating that he has not been given ticket to contest in upcoming Tamil Nadu assembly election 4.56 pm: Paris suspect Abdeslam charged over Brussels shootout 4.45 pm: This judgement teaches and reminds us that those eyeing Himachal or Manipur must learn to control their greed, says Congress. 4.33 pm: Congress is proud of judicial system to whom alone and aggrieved citizen of country can turn for relief in times of stress, says AM Singhvi on Uttarakhand row. 4.15 pm: The verdict of Uttarakhand High Court is not just a victory for the Congress party but a victory for democracy, says Ahmed Patel, Congress. 4.00 pm: HC restored the position of Harish Rawat as on March 27 whn President's rule was imposed, says KC Kaushik,H Rawat's lawyer. 3.59 pm: On 29th April during floor test it will be proved that Harish Rawat is in minority: Kailash Vijayvargiya,BJP General Secretary on Uttarakhand row. 3.58 pm: Attorney General and Solicitor General were unprepared,we should appoint new people-Subramanian Swamy,BJP on Uttarakhand row. 3.33 pm: MeT department report for Telangana: Heat wave conditions likely to prevail over isolated places in Adilabad,Nizamabad, Karimnagar Hyderabad, Ranga Reddy, Medak and Warangal in next 48 hours. 3.25 pm: BJP General Secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya's meeting with party spokespersons underway at BJP headquarters in Delhi over Uttarakhand row. 3.17 pm:Uttarakhand assembly floor test to be conducted on April 29 3.00 pm: Salute judiciary for upholding truth and law, says Indira Hridayesh,Congress on President's rule set aside in Uttarakhand. 2.59 pm: Hemant Karkare's investigation clearly showed involvement of Pragya Thakur,Sunil Joshi and others, says Digvijaya Singh. 2.45 pm: Central BJP leadership waiting for verdict of Uttarakhand court,they will assess and then decide.Will claim to prove majority, says Sources. 2.30 pm: Fire break out in the bushes near ISBT (Kashmere Gate) in Delhi. Fire tenders working to douse flames. 2.16 pm: Congress summons all its Uttarakhand MLAs to Dehradun in Uttarakhand Political crisis 2.15 pm: 56.08% voting in the third phase of polling in West Bengal till 1pm. 2.03 pm: He brought an accused to office for questioning last night, he killed my husband and fled from spot: Deceased policeman's wife Damini. 2.02 pm: Fake currency worth 30 crores recovered in India in last one year. 2.01 pm: Gujarat: Policeman murdered at crime branch office in Ahmedabad 2.00 pm: Haryana: 1000 litres of water used for preparing helipad for CM Manohar Lal Khattar's chopper in Yamunanagar. 1.59 pm: Bombay HC refuses to transfer Pratyusha Banerjee case to Crime branch, asked police to report progress of probe to HC,next hearing on May 4. 1.53 pm: Nasik: Women enter and pray inside the inner sanctum of Trimbakeshwar Temple(Early morning visuals). 1.52 pm: 3rd phase of West Bengal poll: Police team visits a polling booth in North Kolkata after complaint of booth capture. 1.51 pm: Reply of Ms Mamata Banerjee to the commission's notice for violation of model code of conduct has been received,is being examined: EC. 1.50 pm: AG appearing for TRAI to SC 'Telecos earn 250 cr/day from calls,while impact of call drop penalty to be is just 0.4% of telcos revenue. 1.48 pm: Compensation for call drop matter:AG appearing for TRAI to SC 'Service providers don't care abt money loss to subscribers due to call drops'. 1.47 pm: Compensation for call drop matter: AG appearing for TRAI to SC '4-5 service providers running a cartel of billion subscribers'. 1.35 pm: Encounter between security forces & terrorists underway in J&K's Pulwama. 1.13 pm: Shoma Banerjee's lawyer K T Thomas in Bombay HC says that Rahul Raj withdrew money from Pratyusha's account, he was having her debit cards. 1.05 pm: Encounter between security forces and terrorists underway in Hakripora area of Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama. 1.02 pm: Fire breaks out at Lady Harding hospital in Panchkuian Road (Delhi). 5 fire tenders present at the spot. 1.00 pm: I don't have time to respond to such useless things, says Rupa Ganguly,BJP on TMC's Rezzak Mollah's remarks against her. 12.45 pm: Maharashtra Government lawyer opposes the transfer of the Pratyusha Banerjee case to Mumbai Police Crime branch, citing previous HC orders. 12.31 pm: Two convicts of 2002-03 Mumbai blasts case, Atif Mulla and Hasib Mulla have filed appeals in Bombay High Court against their conviction. 12.15 pm: Enforcement Directorate writes to MEA seeking assistance in bringing back Vijay Mallya to India through diplomatic channels, says Sources. 12.07 pm: Dilip Kumar discharged from Lilavati Hospital in Mumbai. 11.55 am: Delhi-Simla Air connectivity matter:Supreme Court directs DGCA to consult with Airline operators to ensure that Shimla is connected to Delhi. 11.45 am: We have agreed on increased interaction and better management on borders, says Manohar Parrikar on his China visit. 11.33 am: Women activists enter Trimbakeshwar Temple and break 300-year-old tradition. 11.08 am: Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaking at the 10th Civil Services Day awards ceremony. Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaking at the 10th Civil Services Day awards ceremony. pic.twitter.com/2U7MGvI8pI ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 10.55 am: Income Tax dept starts process of recovery of Rs 750 crore from Asaram Bapu and Narayan Sai. 10.35 am: Chandigarh admin to review and revise its new policy on regulation nightlife. This comes after a ban on short skirts in discos. 10.07 am: BJP MP Anurag Thakur will raise the Ishrat Jahan issue in the forthcoming Parliament session. 9.55 am: India's golden girl Dipa Karmakar arrives at Delhi, 1st Indian woman gymnast to qualify for Olympics. 9.25 am: Income Tax Department seizes Rs.1 crore 34 lakhs from two persons in Coimbatore (TN) travelling to Kerala in a bus. Both being questioned. 8.50 am: Delhi Police issues 3 notifications of alert in the Capital after inputs from IB and MHA. The alert will be effective for 60 days. 8.32 am: 1 CPI(M) worker dies after a crude bomb was allegedly hurled by TMC workers in Murshidabad district, WB. 8.25 am: Encounter in Kupwara: 2 terrorists neutralised, more terrorists holed up. 8.00 am: People in large numbers outside a polling booth in Murshidabad for voting in the third phase of West Bengal election. People in large numbers outside a polling booth in Murshidabad for voting in the third phase of West Bengal election pic.twitter.com/8GiHmnEdOP ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 OneIndia News Dilma Rousseff to attend UN ceremony in New York International oi-IANS By Ians English Brasilia, April 21 : Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is set arrive in New York on Friday for the signing ceremony of the UN Paris Agreement on climate change. During Rousseff's trip, Vice President Michel Temer, who has been pushing for Rousseff's impeachment, will temporarily assume presidency, her office announced on Wednesday. [Brazil's lower house votes for Rousseff impeachment] On Sunday night, the Chamber of Deputies voted 367-146 to endorse impeachment against Rousseff, passing the matter to the Senate. Should the Senate decide within 24 days to begin an impeachment trial, Rousseff will have to step aside for 180 days for the trial to proceed. Vice President Temer will then take over as interim president. Rousseff will use her platform at the UN to address the impeachment process against her, which she describes as a coup attempt, Xinhua news agency reported. She will have five minutes to speak at the ceremony, during which she is expected to slam the "coup" and remind the world of Brazil's contributions to the climate change agreement, the office said. Rousseff has expressed reservations about leaving Brazil and allowing Temer to take over, but local media reports said her supporters shave advised her to inform attendees at the UN about the truth of the political crisis in the country. A day before the announcement of Rousseff's trip to New York, Temer sent Senator Aloysio Nunes, one of his loyalists, to meet in Washington with Thomas Shannon, the US under secretary of state for political affairs and a former American ambassador to Brazil, in order to present their side of the impeachment debate. Adopted by the 196 Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Paris Agreement sets a target of curbing the global average rise in temperature below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and preferably below 1.5 degrees. The agreement will be officially signed at the UN headquarters in New York on Friday. IANS Israeli PM to meet Putin in Moscow International oi-IANS By Ians English Jerusalem, April 21: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu left for Moscow on Thursday to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Israeli Prime Minister's Office said. Netanyahu, expected to return on Thursday itself, is to discuss the situation in Syria and weapons sales between Russia and Iran with the Russian President, Xinhua news agency reported. This is the third time that both leaders have met in the past six months. Israeli and Russian military officials have met repeatedly in the past few months to coordinate the two countries' actions around Syria's territory. According to the Israeli Prime Minister's Office, the two will talk about the coordination between Israeli and remaining Russian forces in neighbouring Syria, in order to prevent accidents, as well as the efforts to sustain a truce in Syria. Netanyahu had said Israel must make sure its security interests are kept intact following any truce agreement in Syria, fearing that militants remain near the Israeli border. Another topic which may be discussed is the sale of S-300 surface-to-air missile systems by Russia to Iran. Netanyahu said Iran poses an "existential threat" to Israel, and opposed the nuclear deal signed between the country and the international community in last July. Russian President Vladimir Putin extended the invitation to Netanyahu amid a visit by Israeli President Reuven Rivlin to Russia last month, which came several days after the Kremlin said Russia had pulled most of its military forces from Syria, who were deployed there since September 2015. IANS My party-BJP have different ideologies but common aim of uplifting poor: Nepal ex-PM Prachanda Nepal's 1st billionaire success story in English memoir International oi-PTI New Delhi, April 22: High ambition, organisation building, market awareness and keeping oneself updated about trends are among the mantras that Nepal's first billionaire industrialist Binod Chaudhary spells out for entrepreneurial success. In his autobiography "Making it Big" (Penguin Random House), the 61-year-old Nepali businessman of Indian origin talks about banking on his experiences to "make decisions that even a Harvard professor would recoil from without several rounds of surveys". The chairperson of Chaudhary Group (CG), a conglomerate of 122 companies that include banking, insurance, finance, hotels, food, real estate, retail and electronics and has collaboration among others with the Taj Group, is famed for creating the Wai Wai brand of instant noodles, which has expanded into India. The story of Wai Wai, says Chaudhary began around 35 years ago when a friend noticed large quantities of the noodles arriving on the Bangkok-Kathmandu flights into a market that imported a large quantity of Nestle India Limited's Maggi. Chaudhary ventured into the market and grew into a company that has "sold more than a billion packets in India" and sells in over 35 countries. The baron writes about how he used a four-pronged approach to fight challenges by launching many cheaper brands, producing creative advertisements and creative programmes and changing the organisational structure to include more locals to create a company with an annual turnover of Rs 250 crore. The creation of his first multinational venture Taj Asia and the struggles in his partnership with the Taj Group are also detailed. There is also mention of the part played by Chaudhary in reuniting Nepali migrant boy Jeet Bahadur with his family in Nepal in 2012. In the memoir, Chaudhary also traces the origins of his family, particularly his grandfather who was born in Shekhawati in Rajasthan and who moved to Nepal when he was less than 20 years old to open a textile store. Chaudhary's father set up Nepal's first department store and Chaudhary joined the business at age 18 and went on to be listed in the Forbes's list of billionaires. PTI The persecution of Hindus in Pakistan continues with a Hindu girl forcibly converted and married Pakistan is afraid of Chotoo, here is big story of Chotoo gang International oi-Jagriti New Delhi, Apr 21: The Pakistani security forces faced tough time while fighting with the dreaded Chotoo gang became a nightmare in the country. The violent stand-off came to an end after, Ghulam Rasool alias 'Chotoo' the leader of the notorious gang surrendered unconditionally before the Pakistan Army along with his gangsters in Rajanpur area in Punjab province. This was announced on Wednesday. At least seven policemen, mostly Elite Force commandos, and as many gangsters, were killed in the shootout while 22 others were taken hostage by the gang during a police raid to clear their island hideout as the criminals demanded safe passage in exchange for their release. Here are some facts you need to know about Chotoo and his gang Ghulam Rasool alias Chotoo, who worked as security guard of an MP for 3-5 years, is the leader of the Chotoo gang. He also had long association with Punjab police. He used to serve as informer for police till 2007. Chotoo who belongs to Bakrani clan of Mazari tribe set up his own gang after he developed differences with police over unknown reasons. The riverine area of Kachi Jamal in Rajanpur is considered as a stronghold of the Chotoo gang. Chooto never carried out any criminal activity in his stronghold rather he is known for helping the locals. Police conducted biggest operation against him in 2010 which lasted for three months. The last operation was conducted in 2013. OneIndia News 'Russia to ink Ka-226 helicopter manufacturing deal with India' International oi-IANS By Ians English Kuala Lumpur, April 21: Russia will sign a joint manufacturing contract for 200 Ka-226T light utility multirole helicopters with India before the end of the year, a top official of Russian conglomerate Rostec has said. "So far we have an intergovernmental agreement, but we hope to draft and sign a contract with India before the end of the year. Accordingly, practical work on site will start from the beginning of 2017," Viktor Kladov, the head of the Russian state technology corporation Rostec's international cooperation department, told RIA Novosti on Thursday. He specified that the agreement, signed during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's December 24 visit to Russia, details the production of at least 200 helicopters, Sputnik News reported. "We are ready to transfer to the Indian side all that India is able to manufacture domestically. The first batch of helicopters will be made in Russia, and the next will be assembled in India with a strong degree of localization," Kladov added. Introduced in 2002, the Ka-226 series of helicopters are designed by the Kamov Design Bureau, part of the Russian Helicopters company. The Ka-226T model is fitted with updated navigation and automatic control equipment, as well as an interchangeable mission pod, which allows for flexible equipment configurations. Kladov noted that the helicopter's design allows it perform a variety of functions, including reconnaissance and target designation, search and rescue, as well as medical missions. IANS MP: Cops books Muslim man who impersonated as Hindu and raped woman Woman, her two children mowed down by train; Suicide not ruled out Court sentences woman and her paramour for killing husband 3 years ago DCW issues notice to police for Nirbhaya-like gang-rape case in Ghaziabad Woman, her daughter-in-law killed in a bike-truck crash in Ballia Video: Woman puts her life into danger, jumps into tiger's enclosure: Here is why International oi-Jagriti Toronto, Apr 21: A woman landed herself into danger by jumping into enclosure of a tiger in a zoo in Canada, media reported. The bizarre incident took place on April 16 at Toronto Zoo. The onlookers were shocked when an unidentified woman jumped into the Sumatran tiger enclosure just to get her hat. The tiger appeared to lunge at the woman, but a second fence kept them separated. She jumped between the interior and exterior fence and was separated from the Sumatran tiger byjust a thin layer of braided wire. A probe into the incident has been initiated. A man in his early 20s was killed by an endangered tiger after he allegedly jumped into its moat zoo in Delhi in September 2014. OneIndia News Bengal polls 2016: Left booth agent killed in violence in Murshidabad Kolkata oi-Shubham Domkol (Murshidabad), April 21: The Assembly election in West Bengal claimed its first life when Tahidul Islam---a CPI(M) booth agent---was killed during clashes. Islam was killed during bombing and firing outside booth No. 173 in Sirpara area of the constituency which is known for poll violence. Assembly Polls 2016 Full Coverage; Bengal poll Phase 3 updates The Election Commission sought a report on the incident from the district administration. The poll panel was, however, accused of not taking adequate measures to prevent violence in politically volatile Murshidabad district. A huge police force and poll observers reached the spot after the incident. The local people were, however, unhappy with the role of the central forces and police personnel. Election procedure was disrupted in the constituency following this incident. Domkol's Left candidate and sitting MLA Anisur Rahman blamed the TMC for Islam's death and said the central forces were not visible in the area. His TMC opponent Shoumik Hossain put the blame on the Congress, saying the TMC never believes in politics of murder. He said the Left and Congress have always clashed in this constituency and the latest death was also a result of their rivalry. Oneindia News Bengal polls 2016: Part of CPI(M) supporter's ear chopped off in Burdwan Kolkata oi-Shubham Ketugram (West Bengal), April 21: Four persons were arrested on Thursday (April 21) on charges of beating up a CPI(M) worker, breaking his leg and even chopping off a part of his ear while the latter was going to cast his ballot. The accused belonged to the Trinamool Congress (TMC), it was alleged. Assembly Polls 2016 Full Coverage; Bengal poll Phase 3 updates The third phase of the West Bengal Assembly election was held on Thursday. It was said that the victim, Lal Chowdhury, was going to the polling booth with his mother when he was attacked. The attackers even threatened to hurl bomb at him when some local people rushed to his rescue. The assailants fled as a result and Chowdhury was rushed to the local block hospital. He was undergoing treatment there. [CPI(M) supporter killed in poll violence in Domkol] Twelve companies of central forces were deployed in the constituency area and the Opposition criticised the central forces for not being able to prevent such an incident yet. Section 144 was imposed in the area after the incident. [When Mamata regretted her birth in Bengal] In another incident, a crude bomb was hurled at the voters' queue in another booth in the same constituency. Three persons were injured in the attack. In Khandaghosh constituency in the same district, a CPI(M) supporter had a fractured head after he was allegedly targeted by members of the ruling TMC. Meanwhile, four TMC supporters were injured in a clash with the Opposition cadres in Sinut in Mangalkot constituency in Nurdwan district. TMC candidate from the seat Siddikullah Chowdhury threatened to conduct a sit-in demonstration till the guilty were not arrested. Oneindia News WB CM on 4-day visit to north Bengal from today Kolkata: NIA files FIR in the Ekbalpur clash between communities In a midnight crackdown, police detains TET candidates; BJP says WB or Hitler's Germany? Violence marks Bengal poll phase 3; final turnout 82.28% Kolkata oi-Shubham Kolkata, April 21: Sixty-two constituencies in four districts of West Bengal went to polls in the third phase of the ongoing Assembly election on Thursday, April 21. End of updates. 7.25 pm: Turnout till 5 pm: 79.22% District-wise: Kolkata 57.05%, Nadia 81.62%, Burdwan 78.26%, Murshidabad 79.29% 7.15 pm: The EC has received 2,777 complaints and action has been taken in 2,322 of them. 6.57 pm: PM Modi lambasts Mamata Banerjee administration over deaths in poll violence at a rally in Howrah which will go to polling on April 25. 6.50 pm: EC orders filing of FIR against TMC candidate Abdur Rezzaq Mollah for his objectionable remark against BJP actor candidate Roopa Ganguly. [What Mollah said about Roopa Ganguly] 6.40 pm: Polling has concluded for phase 3. Final turnout results awaited. 5.30 pm: Whatever ECI is doing is not enough, polling at 30-40% places is not free and fair, says Babul Supriyo. WATCH: Verbal spat between Union Minister Babul Supriyo and a Police officer in Kolkata #WestBengalPollshttps://t.co/9xTS7D2fo3 ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 5.15 pm: TMC workers allege that Babul Supriyo entered the poll booth with a large group of people. Union Minister Babul Supriyo heckled by TMC workers in Kolkata during 3rd phase of #westbengalpolls pic.twitter.com/dQNeJOhMZH ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 4.45 pm: Trinamool Congress has nothing to do with the Domkol incident, says Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. 4.36 pm: Union minister Babul Supriyo faces protest by TMC men while going to cast his vote in Jorashanko constituency in north Kolkata. 4.35 pm: Turnout till 3 pm: 67.55% District-wise: Kolkata 49.43%, Nadia 68.62%, Burdwan 70.55%, Murshidabad 70.32% 4.26 pm: Temperature now in the four districts going to polls: Kolkata - 37 degree Celsius, Nadia - 38 degree. Murshidabad - 37 degree, Burdwan - 37 degree 4.25 pm: PM Narendra Modi slams Mamata Banerjee at a rally in Basirhat in North 24 Parganas district, which will go to polls on April 25. 3.37 pm: TMC leader who asked his supporters to hit EC with a shoe on its face gets arrested from Dum Dum 7 Tanks Road area. He was declared absconding after the police failed to trace him. The EC gave strict orders against him after he made the remark. 3.25 pm: Complaint lodged against 20 people in connection to the killing of a CPI(M) supporter in Domkol. 3.00 pm: Central force personnel stop man who allegedly tried to cast his ballot twice; latter injured in scuffle. This happened in Jamalpur constituency in Burdwan district. 3rd phase of #WestBengal poll: Police team visits a polling booth in North Kolkata after complaint of booth capture pic.twitter.com/0DE4FWV3PU ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 2.35 pm: Turnout till 1 pm: 57.21% District-wise: Kolkata 44.14%, Nadia 60.07%, Burdwan 58.74%, Murshidabad 58.06% 2.20 pm: Deputy Election Commissioner Sandeep Saxena calls up Bengal CEO Sunil Gupta to know about poll proceedings. He asked about the murder in Domkol and the absconding of a TMC leader in Kolkata. 2.05 pm: The EC has received over 1,500 complaints in today's phase so far. 1.55 pm: A total of 47 people have been arrested in Kolkata owing to poll-related offence today, according to Kolkata Police. 1.54 pm: Violence erupts in Mangalkot constituency of Burdwan; 4 TMC workers injured. The CPI(M) won this seat in 2011 by just 126 votes. [When Mamata regretted her birth in Bengal] 1.12 pm: TMC leader Anwar Khan who openly challenged EC today morning declared absconding after police fail to arrest him; cases have been filed. The police failed to get hold of Khan even after visiting his house. 1.07 pm: Media personnel attacked in various constituencies of Kolkata; the TMC has been accused. The blood of martyr Tahidul Islam will not go in vain. People will oust Trinamool. pic.twitter.com/buVPHu8BQ8 Left for Bengal (@leftforbengal) April 21, 2016 12.47 pm: Temperature in four districts going to polls today: Kolkata - 37 degree C; Nadia - 37 degrees; Murshidabad - 38 degrees, Burdwan - 39 degrees 12.37 pm: Turnout till 11 am: 39.76% District-wise: Kolkata 37.71%, Nadia 40.78%, Burdwan 37.33%, Murshidabad 42.99% 12.20 pm: Big police force under DC North and OC of Kashipur PC arrrives for TMC leader Anwar Khan's preventive arrest. The EC gave the order after Khan, who was under watch, asked his workers to hit the EC with a shoe. [Hit EC on its face with a shoe, says TMC leader under watch] 12.08 pm: More violence erupts in Domkol where one CPI(M) supporter was killed in the morning. Three supporters, two of the CPI(M) and one of the TMC, were shot at. [Mamata distances herself from tainted MLAs but backs accused MP] 11.25 am: The Murshidabad district authorities submit their report on the murder of Tahidul Islam in Domkol constituency in Murshidabad district. It has been said that Islam was neither a CPI(M) agent and nor was he killed in bombing or firing as his body bore weapon injury marks. 10.42 am: TMC and CPI(M) candidates meet at a booth in Entally constituency in Kolkata. It's a peaceful election, says TMC's candidate and sitting MLA Swarnakamal Das. To this, Left candidate Debesh Das said if you drive the Opposition out, no wonder it will be peaceful. Saha, however, assured that he would personally look into the allegations of poll manipulation by the ruling party. 10.36 am: Turnout till 9 am: 18.29% District-wise: Kolkata 14.71%, Nadia 18.09%, Burdwan 17.01%, Murshidabad 20.53% 10.27 am: Eleven people arrested in Beleghata constituency in Kolkata for trying to influence voters. 10.18 am: Goons found openly brandishing weapons during polling in Burdwan district. Goons seen brandishing pistols in Burdwan as third phase of polling is underway in West Bengal pic.twitter.com/aAzRstlHP0 ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 10.15 am: Three voters were injured in bombing and clashes in Ketugram constituency in Burdwan. Five persons were detained. 10.14 am: One of two TMC leaders kept under vigilance by the EC found openly challenging the panel. "Humiliate the EC and bring out voters," he was seen instructing somebody on phone. 10.00 am: TMC accused of chopping off voter's ear in booth No. 78 in Ketugram constituency in Burdwan constituency, say TV reports. 9.55 am: Mercury is expected to shoot up to 40 degrees Celsius in Kolkata around 2 pm. 9.48 am: Central personnel and Kolkata police officers remove outsiders from a booth in Jorasanko constituency in Kolkata. Voting resumes. 9.45 am: Daughter of murdered CPI(M) booth agent in Murshidabad is seen crying and asking: "Where is my father?" 9.27 am: EC has received over 200 complaints during the first two hours. However, it is yet not known what steps the panel has taken in the wake of the murder of a CPI(M) supporter in Murshidabad district. People of West Bengal who are voting today in Phase 3 of the Assembly Polls, I urge them to vote in large numbers. Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) April 21, 2016 8.55 am: EC seeks report on the death of Tahidul Islam in Domkol in Murshidabad. It is still not confirmed whether Islam was killed in bombing or bullet. 8.38 am: Congress lodges complaint after TMC goons were accused of abducting two of its supporters in Hariharpara constituency in Murshidabad. 8.33 am: One CPI(M) booth agent has been killed in clashes in Domkol, Murshidabad. The victim was identified as Tahidul Islam. He was killed during bombing in a clash. The CPI(M) has lodged a complaint. [Bengal poll claims first life] 8.30 am: CPI(M) candidate of Domkol Anisur Rahaman accused of seeking votes on election day, say television reports. 8.12 am: Met office asks voters to cast ballots early; temperature is expected to shoot up in four districts going to polls today. 8.05 am: Media accuses central forces of stopping it from covering election procedure in Mangalkot in Burdwan district. In the previous phases, the media had shown the central force personnel engaged in other activities even as the ruling party cadres were accused of rigging election procedure. 8.00 am: TMC accused of beating up Congress supporters in Hariharpara constituency in Murshidabad. One injured Congress supporter admitted in hospital. 7.54 am: Voting hasn't yet started in Galsi constituency in Burdwan. The Opposition accuses the TMC of not allowing its polling agent. 7.50 am: Presiding officer falls ill in a booth in Beleghata. He has been replaced by another official. A differently abled person arrives to cast his vote in North Kolkata's St.Paul's Cathedral College #westbengalpolls pic.twitter.com/pPbpVDSmno ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 7.45 am: EVM in booth No. 32 in Jorashanko constituency in Kolkata develops snag. Voting has stopped. Former BJP president Rahul Sinha is contesting against TMC's Smita Bakshi in this constituency. Congress leader Somen Mitra casts his vote in North Kolkata's St.Paul's Cathedral College #westbengalpolls pic.twitter.com/88Zllwipdh ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 7.41 am: Heavyweight Congress leader and candidate from Chowringhee Somen Mitra casts his vote. #AlternativeBengal State's progress in IT/ITeS stopped after 2011.Lost Infosys,Wipro.No new investment, employment.We shall reverse d trend. Surjya Kanta Mishra (@SurjyaKMishra) April 20, 2016 #AlternativeBengal State's progress in IT/ITeS stopped after 2011.Lost Infosys,Wipro.No new investment, employment.We shall reverse d trend. Surjya Kanta Mishra (@SurjyaKMishra) April 20, 2016 Look closely.Hands chopped off in 1991 by Communists for voting Congress' hand symbol. Today Cong-CPIM ?#BengalPolls pic.twitter.com/UJcX40H1tQ Derek O'Brien (@quizderek) April 20, 2016 7.30 am: Temperature in the districts going to polls now: Kolkata - 30 degrees C, Nadia - 33 degrees, Murshidabad - 33 degrees, Burdwan - 34 degrees. Vote without any fear tomorrow. Reject TMC & defeat the secret TMC-BJP plot. West Bengal, Best Bengal! #LalSalaam pic.twitter.com/C5p6900Mis Sitaram Yechury (@SitaramYechury) April 20, 2016 7.22 am: Ruling TMC accused of stopping Left agents from entering the polling booth in Beleghata constituency in Kolkata. 7.20 am: Major candidates in this phase are state ministers and Trinamool contestants Rabiranjan Chattopadhyay, Sashi Panja, Sadhan Pandey, Subrata Saha, former state minister and CPI(M) candidates Anisur Rahaman and Debesh Das, Congress legislature party leader Md. Sohrab and former state party president Somen Mitra and Ritesh Tiwari from the BJP. 7.00 am: Polling begins. Oneindia News Partial Solar Eclipse 2022: City-wise timings, when and where to watch With AQI of 259, Delhi's air on day before Diwali least polluted in 7 years IRCTC update: 190 trains cancelled on October 24; here is the complete list Power has gone to Kejriwal's head: Congress New Delhi oi-PTI New Delhi, Apr 21: Congress on Thursday attacked Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal for cautioning bureaucrats against playing politics, saying "power has gone to his head". Party's chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala compared Kejriwal with former Haryana chief minister Om Prakash Chautala, alleging Chautala would also threaten bureaucrats and it was a sign of disaster awaiting him. "Vinash kale vipreet buddhi (destructive thinking in times of downfall)," he said, citing a Sanskrit proverb to attack Kejriwal. He said both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Kejriwal have similar traits as they believed in "concentrating all power". "Threatening bureaucrats is not decorous. Power has gone to his head," he said. PTI 2008-2022 One News Page Ltd. All rights reserved. One News is a registered trademark of One News Page Ltd. by Graham Pierrepoint The internet has become part of our everyday routines even quicker than we give it credit for after all, it was only becoming mainstream a little around twenty years ago, and even now there are still people who are yet to become fully immersed in the world wide web. However, while the internet has brought positive change to our society on a global scale, as well as having created millions of jobs and billions in profit, there is sadly a dark side to such worldwide connectivity. As many children now grow up having access to the net from an early age, the playground bullying of old has spread online and so has stalking and harassment of many adults the world over. Sometimes erroneously referred to as trolling which in fact refers to a specific type of online provoking internet bullying has been at the forefront of public concern for considerable years now, having caught steam some time ago when the internet first seeped into mainstream use. Governments, politicians and law enforcement the world over have different ways to tackle the problem, while social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have offered privacy and support options for those who need them with Twitter in particular having mentioned in recent times that they intend to curb the use of the microblogging site for malicious activity. However, the debate has flared up once more in the UK, where it is currently being discussed whether or not people of all ages are being given appropriate support. British MP Stella Creasy a Labour Party representative and herself a victim of online abuse in a case where the perpetrator was given jail time has stated that laws against online bullying must look at the underlying factors of inequality and misogyny that propels much abuse via social media channels, along with the factor of harassment as that bullying online does not necessarily have to be a malicious communication alone. Creasy has called for a change in culture and the way in which online platforms such as Twitter handles cases of harassment and abuse, stating that ignoring opportunities to tackle the problem could harm their business. Creasys comments come as senior government MP Maria Miller called for an overhaul of internet legislation. While the internet is mostly used for good, it will sadly be used as a platform for bullying and abuse only if its perpetrators are able to meaning that it is perhaps time for law to bring itself into the 21st century and analyse how it can better protect its citizens. Eurasia Review 11 Oct 2022 By Kevin Duffy* During the late 1980s, Japan had the Midas touch. In the eyes of the mainstream media, Wall Street.. Venezuela, officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, is a country on the northern coast of South America, consisting of a continental landmass and many islands and islets in the Caribbean Sea. It has a territorial extension of 916,445 km2 (353,841 sq mi), and its population was estimated at 29 million in 2022. The capital and largest urban agglomeration is the city of Caracas. By Olanrewaju Adesanya Islamic clerics and major players in the political frameworks of the society have charged Nigerians to be alive to their civic responsibilities and speaking truth to power, describing it as the most important factor in building a peaceful and virile nation. At the10th Annual Ramadan Lecture and Special Prayers for the nation organised by Abdulwahid Islamic Foundation in Lagos,the clerics harped on the need for faithful and other members of the society to play active role in politics. The event tagged The Roles of Muslims in Nation Building had in attendance several clerics and Muslims faithful who took turns to pray for the nation,stressing that refusal to get involved in politics paves way for the emergence of public office holders who care less about peoples welfare. The Guest Speaker Fadeelat Sheikh Ibraheem Olawunmi (Mudeer,Daarul Inshad Wal-isad of Nig.) while delivering the lecture stressed the need for faithful to value education and acquire necessary knowledge needed for nation building as well as to cultivate the habit of empowerment and giving. He noted that qualitative education will help proffer probable solutions to the myriads of problems confronting the world today, adding that early Muslims blaze the trail for nation building. The cleric also charged well meaning Nigerians, to do more in the area of empowerment with which they can help to shift many away from the poverty line and debar depressive tendencys leading to suicides. He also speak to the importance of tolerance and neighbourliness. Mayor Dele Oshinowo, the Exeutive Chairman of Agboyi-Ketu Local Council Development Area (LCDA), who was also a guest of honour at the event implore cleric never to stop speaking truth to power,as that remains the pruning tool for office holders. According to him, if Nigerian clerics, as leaders of religions, have done the expected in being frank with the truth when they meet with politicians, the nation would have moved forward. I believe that the clerics should support the government in policy formulation. They should help shape both the executive and legislative and judicial positions by advising and telling them the truth. Clerics are very important and we see them as people representing God. They should be able to, without fear, advise us toward the development of the state, he said. The council boss urged the people to get involved in policy making, stressing that leaving political office holders alone would spell doom for the ordinary people. He noted that holding such lecture was significant for all faith,especially when it had to do with Nation building, prayers for the country as well as informing the people to be involved in decision making process. Oshinowo added: They should not leave us alone, lets know what we do right and wrong. Nation building is a collective responsibility of all irrespective of the religious affiliation. It is because of my perseverance that I became a chairman, if we all stayed back nothing positive can happen. If we distance ourself from politics and criticise what they do, no positive impact would be seen. Advisory role is important, when you speak out we will do better. You can change the tide when you keep counselling us, especially the Imam. Your role is to check our excesses as well. The council boss enjoins clerics to enhance enduring peace and security of lives and property through their sermons and helping to change the narratives by framing the mindset of youths in more beneficial roles,taking their minds off social vices. Now, in Nigeria, clerics must come out enmass and denounce killings and kidnappings. They need to talk more about security and protection of lives and property, Oshinowo said. Alhaji. Sharaphandeen Idowu, the Chairman, Board of Trustees of the foundation urged Nigerians, especially Muslims to be compassionate on the poor masses and show mercy. Idowu, a legal practitioner, urged Nigerians leaders to desist from selfishness and corruption but be considerate and compassionate on the suffering masses and cater for the people. As Muslims, we should be compassionate, patient and persevere. We must engage in doing good. My message to Nigerian leaders is to be good, just, considerate, visionary, and feel peoples suffering, he said. Sheikh Abdul Rofii Muh.-Awwal, the Chief Imam, Arrifatul Islamiyyat Central Mosque urged clerics to do good and serve the masses by alleviating their suffering. Muh. Awwal, who urged politicians to be committed to building a just and fair nation, said that clerics should seek good governance and should not shy way from speaking the truth to the politicians. The Imam said that clerics should commend politicians if they did well and reprimand them whenever they failed to prioritise peoples interests. Another Islamic scholar, Mr Abdulrahman Lekki urged Muslims in the corridor of power to remember they were responsible to God and the people, hence the need to serve the people. Lekki said: Anybody who finds himself in the position of authority owes the people a duty to serve and the responsibility is upon them to do everything to the utmost of their ability to serve them well. They are also an ambassador of themselves, of the people and the country, so at all times they must endeavour to rule or lead the people with conscience and ensure they do it to the best of their ability. They must not join the bandwagon of those milking the country dry it is not a culture of Islam, Lekki, the President, Zero Interest Multipurpose Cooperative Society Ltd, said. According to him, Muslims should arise and make themselves valuable for nation building, standing against evils and encouraging the good as directed by the Quran. It is important we take active interest in governance because if we refuse to be involved in governance, then the worse people will govern and we will all be affected. The President of the foundation, Mr Ishaq Alabi said that Muslim, as integral part of Nigeria, must play their roles in National building and to contribute their quotas in building a nation that is just for all. We want our leaders to be just and fair. The disparity between the rich and the poor in Nigeria is growing wider and wider. Nigerian leaders must bridge this gap, he said. The event, which had in attendance several Islamic clerics and Muslims faithful, witnessed a prayer session for national peace and security. N.B Pix two is that of the council boss Agboyi Ketu LCDA THURSDAY, April 21, 2016 (HealthDay News) -- Although aging may mean more physical problems, retirement can help people lead healthier lives, a new study from Australia suggests. Researchers found that when folks retire they tend to increase their physical activity, sit less and sleep more soundly. "Our study paints a positive picture of retirement," said lead researcher Dr. Melody Ding, a senior research fellow at the University of Sydney's School of Public Health. "Retirees [in the study] were acquiring a healthier lifestyle. Factors that may have contributed to this include availability of time to be physically active and removal from sedentary jobs and work-related stress." Whether or not these results would be the same in the United States isn't clear. "Retirement and the health benefits of retirement could be very context-specific," she said. "Life expectancy in Australia -- 82.1 years -- is a few years longer than that in the United States -- 78.7, and there are also different social welfare and health care systems," Ding said. "All of these factors may limit the 'generalizability' of our findings to the U.S." The study tracked about 25,000 Australians. The average age of those still working was just over 54. During slightly more than three years of follow-up, about 3,100 of the study participants retired. After retirement, study participants reported increased physical activity levels of about an hour and half a week. Retirees also sat around less -- cutting their sedentary time down by just over an hour each day. And, compared to when they were working, those who retired slept an average of 11 minutes more each day, the research revealed. The study authors also noted that about half of the women smokers quit after retirement. No significant link was found between retirement status and alcohol use or eating fruit and vegetables. The average age for retirement in the United States is 62, according to a 2014 Gallup poll. Ding said the average retirement age in Australia is just over 63 years. "I think it is important to plan for retired life with a positive mindset," she said. "Some people get anxious about retirement because they may lose a sense of purpose." Ding recommended pursuing hobbies, volunteering or spending time with loved ones as ways to keep a sense of purpose. She added that retirees might incorporate a social component into a healthy lifestyle, such as catching up with a friend during a walk. One study participant -- a 89-year-old retired bank manager -- told the researchers, "I have more time in my retirement and I am happily busy. I keep fit by dancing four times a week and walking." To keep his mind active, this retiree teaches computer skills. The message on his answering machine: "I am out enjoying my retirement." Rachel Johnson is a professor of nutrition at the University of Vermont. "It was encouraging that many of the retirees in this study opted to spend time being more physically active," said Johnson, who is also chair of the American Heart Association Nutrition Committee. "Being active is important to preventing heart disease and stroke." The American Heart Association recommends at least 150 minutes per week of moderate exercise or 75 minutes per week of vigorous exercise (or a combination of moderate and vigorous activity) to improve overall heart health. Older adults will also experience benefits if they divide their exercise time into two or three segments of 10 to 15 minutes a day, Johnson said. She also suggested that older people try these tips to get and keep active: Walk a dog. Walk at the mall when the weather is too hot or too cold. Walk, jog in place or use the treadmill at a gym while you watch your favorite 30-minute show. Park the car far from your destination and walk. Take the stairs. Dance. Trade after-dinner dessert for an after-dinner walk. Ding added that retirement is a good time for doctors to talk to their patients about making positive lifestyle changes that could add years to their life. The study findings were published recently in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. More information For more on how older people can stay fit, visit the American Heart Association. Bailey McCann, Opalesque New York: Kenneth Griffin's Citadel is hiring Richard Schimel, former head of Diamondback Capital to lead the firm's new equity hedge fund strategy. $24 billion Citadel has increased its commitment to equities strategies over the past year. Schimel's unit could grow to as many as 70 people and will cover all major equities sectors, according to a spokesperson for the firm. In addition to Schimel's group, which will be based in Connecticut, Citadel has also launched Ravelin Capital in San Francisco. ...................... To view our full article Click here Markus Thielen Benedicte Gravrand, Opalesque Geneva for New Managers: Markus Thielen left his London job last year to start a global macro hedge fund in Hong Kong, where he first moved in 2004. He is now the chief investment officer of Jomon Investment Management, and his first fund is due to launch on 2 May. Not long ago, he traded a global macro portfolio for Millennium Capital Partners, the London-based branch of Millennium Management, the New York-based hedge fund firm with $32.7bn under management. Before that, he worked for J.P. Morgan as a global macro portfolio manager for the chief investment office. The Jomon Global Macro Fund pursues a combination of macro (economic and policy change) and relative value (market distortions) strategies across liquid assets. The investment team focuses on thematic equity macro, currencies and commodities. Depending on market opportunities, up to 25% of the portfolio VaR is allocated towards the firms systematic macro strategies, exploiting market inefficiencies. It mostly trades futures, options, ETFs and cash products on the currency side, Thielen tells Opalesque. The trades are global, but with an Asia bias around 60% of the portfolio is in Asia, 20% in Europe and 20% in the US. "We wanted to build our own firm, as some investors wanted to allocate to us directly. We thought we ...................... To view our full article Click here The many high level officials in the Democratic Party, including super delegates, who strongly support Hillary Clinton, are extremely confident that she will become their party's nominee and then win in the general election. But they would be wise to hold off on their celebrations because dark, menacing clouds continue to loom over her candidacy. Sure, she was a big winner in New York but her huge disapproval rating still represents a major liability; far too many Americans just don't like or trust her. So even if she beats Sanders, which might be a safe bet at this point, she will, thereafter, come under a withering, relentless attack in the general election when Republicans take aim at her political baggage and the many skeletons in her closet. Those Establishment backers of Hillary who dismiss Sanders' chances are ignoring those dark clouds and don't realize how easily things could unravel for Hillary. They need to pay attention to the succession of polls which measure how the current candidates of each party would do against each other in the general election. They consistently indicate that Sanders would beat any of the three Republicans quite handily. Conversely, Hillary's margins over Trump and Cruz are far slimmer than those of Sanders and, of great significance, there are solid indications that she could very well lose to Kasich. These ongoing poll conclusions should be setting off the alarms in the Democratic hierarchy and should call for more in depth consideration of which of these two candidates gives Democrats the best chance of winning. The mainstream media is using its power to convince the public that Hillary is invincible and make Sanders look like a loser, in order to shape the outcome. This media has been giving the lion's share of the primary reporting to Trump and Clinton, since those who call the shots know that a race between those two will give them the highest ratings in the upcoming election. So Sanders has largely been shoved to the side, getting minimal coverage. We don't know for certain how these primaries on either side will end and who will come out on top but, in this analysis, let's say that Clinton does become the Democratic nominee, most probably facing off against Trump. What then? Well, we will, no doubt, see the bloodiest fight in presidential election history. While the Republicans will be the underdogs they will turn into attack dogs, doing exactly what they do best. They will utilize strategies designed to destroy Clinton, concentrating on the issues and reasons underlying her unfavorable rating of 56%; which makes her the most unpopular democratic presidential candidate in the history of Gallup's presidential polling. Here are the key issues that I think that the GOP will address to show her as untrustworthy and lacking credibility, as a means to try to take her down. *A ticking time bomb; Hillary's speeches to Wall Street: if she becomes the Democratic nominee the Republicans will make a big issue out of the fact that she refuses to publish the transcripts of those speeches, in particular the ones to Goldman Sachs. That she stubbornly refuses to present them to the public is an indication that they may contain damaging information that would further add to her reputation of being closely tied to Wall Street and its interests. Even though the GOP itself is guilty of strongly backing Wall St. manipulators it will connect her with them to discredit her in front of many of her supporters who find that situation very troubling. *Hillary's email server: not only are the transcripts of Hillary's speeches a huge problem but questions remain about the use of her personal email server to store sensitive government documents. The FBI continues to pursue this case to determine if she committed some federal crime; it won't be long before the investigation is concluded. Just recently we've heard that a federal judge will shortly decide if lawyers from Judicial Watch will be allowed to initiate a lawsuit over this issue and depose Clinton's top aides. So if this situation is not resolved before the start of the general election it will remain a thorn in her side. *Benghazi all over again: everyone may be tired of hearing about the Benghazi attack on the U.S. embassy but we can look forward to the GOP to continue to beat those drums and accuse Clinton of gross incompetence as well as ignoring clear signs that something really bad was about to happen. They will beat the issue to death. *Hillary the war hawk and Libya: Clinton is coming under attack by an increasing number of critics, including Republicans and many progressive Democrats, who believe that she acted irresponsibly when she planned and facilitated the attack on Libya that accomplished nothing positive and, instead, devastated that country. Next Page 1 | 2 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. In our part of the world, it's not often that potential "collateral damage" speaks, but it happened last week. A Pakistani tribal leader, Malik Jalal, flew to England to plead in a newspaper piece he wrote and in media interviews to be taken off the Obama White House's "kill list." ("I am in England this week because I decided that if Westerners wanted to kill me without bothering to come to speak with me first, perhaps I should come to speak to them instead.") Jalal, who lives in Pakistan's tribal borderlands, is a local leader and part of a peace committee sanctioned by the Pakistani government that is trying to tamp down the violence in the region. He believes that he's been targeted for assassination by Washington. (Four drone missiles, he claims, have just missed him or his car.) His family, he says, is traumatized by the drones. "I don't want to end up a 'Bugsplat' -- the ugly word that is used for what remains of a human being after being blown up by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone," he writes. "More importantly, I don't want my family to become victims, or even to live with the droning engines overhead, knowing that at any moment they could be vaporized." Normally, what "they" do to us, or our European counterparts (think: Brussels, Paris, or San Bernardino), preoccupies us 24/7. What we do to "them" -- and them turns out to be far more than groups of terrorists -- seldom touches our world at all. As TomDispatch readers know, this website has paid careful attention to the almost 300 wedding celebrants killed by U.S. air power between late 2001 and the end of 2013 -- eight wedding parties eviscerated in three countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen). These are deaths that, unlike the 14 Americans murdered in San Bernardino, the 32 Belgians and others killed in Brussels, and the 130 French and others slaughtered in Paris, have caused not even a ripple here (though imagine for a second the reaction if even a single wedding, no less eight of them and hundreds of revelers, had been wiped out by a terror attack in the U.S. in these years). Any sense of sadness or regret for Washington's actions, when it comes to the many killed, wounded, or traumatized in its never-ending, implacable, and remarkably unsuccessful war on terror, is notable mainly for its absence from our world. So it's an extraordinary moment when any Americans -- no less a group that has been deeply involved in prosecuting the drone war on terror -- publicly expresses empathy for the "collateral damage" inflicted in that ongoing conflict. That's why TomDispatchregular Pratap Chatterjee brings genuine news today from the heart of America's drone wars, from those who should best be able to assess the grim reality of just what Washington has been doing in our name. Tom Drone Whistleblowers Step Out of the Shadows In Washington's Drone Wars, Collateral Damage Comes Home By Pratap Chatterjee In a trio of recent action-packed movies, good guys watch terrorists mingling with innocent women and children via real-time video feeds from halfway across the world. A clock ticks and we, the audience, are let in on the secret that mayhem is going to break loose. After much agonized soul-searching about possible collateral damage, the good guys call in a missile strike from a U.S. drone to try to save the day by taking out a set of terrorists. Such is the premise of Gavin Hood's Eye in the Sky, Andrew Niccol's Good Kill, and Rick Rosenthal's Drones. In reality, in Washington's drone wars neither the "good guys" nor the helpless, endangered villagers under those robotic aircraft actually survive the not-so secret drone war that the Obama administration has been waging relentlessly across the Greater Middle East -- not, at least, without some kind of collateral damage. In addition to those they kill, Washington's drones turn out to wound (in ways both physical and psychological) their own operators and the populations who live under their constant surveillance. They leave behind very real victims with all-too-real damage, often in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder on opposite sides of the globe. "Sometimes I am so sad that my heart wants to explode," an Afghan man says, speaking directly into the camera. "When your body is intact, your mind is different. You are content. But the moment you are wounded, your soul gets damaged. When your leg is torn off and your gait slows, it also burdens your spirit." The speaker is an unnamed victim of a February 2010 drone strike in Uruzgan, Afghanistan, but he could just as easily be an Iraqi, a Pakistani, a Somali, or a Yemeni. He appears in National Bird, a haunting new documentary film by Sonia Kennebeck about the unexpected and largely unrecorded devastation Washington's drone wars leave in their wake. In it, the audience hears directly from both drone personnel and their victims. "I Was Under the Impression That America Was Saving the World" "When we are in our darkest places and we have a lot to worry about and we feel guilty about our past actions, it's really tough to describe what that feeling is like," says Daniel, a whistleblower who took part in drone operations and whose last name is not revealed in National Bird. Speaking of the suicidal feelings that sometimes plagued him while he was involved in killing halfway across the planet, he adds, "Having the image in your head of taking your own life is not a good feeling." National Bird is not the first muckraking documentary on Washington's drone wars. Robert Greenwald's Unmanned, Tonje Schei's Drone, and Madiha Tahrir's Wounds of Waziristan have already shone much-needed light on how drone warfare really works. But as Kennebeck told me, when she set out to make a film about the wages of the newest form of war known to humanity, she wanted those doing the targeting, as well as those they were targeting, to speak for themselves. She wanted them to reveal the psychological impact of sending robot assassins, often operated by "pilots" halfway around the world, into the Greater Middle East to fight Washington's war on terror. In her film, there's no narrator, nor experts in suits working for think tanks in Washington, nor retired generals debating the value of drone strikes when it comes to defeating terrorism. Instead, what you see is far less commonplace: low-level recruits in President Obama's never-ending drone wars, those Air Force personnel who remotely direct the robotic vehicles to their targets, analyze the information they send back, and relay that information to the pilots who unleash Hellfire missiles that will devastate distant villages. If recent history is any guide, these drones do not just kill terrorists; in their target areas, they also create anxiety, upset, and a desire for revenge in a larger population and so have proven a powerful weapon in spreading terror movements across the Greater Middle East. These previously faceless but distinctly non-robotic Air Force recruits are the cannon fodder of America's drone wars. You meet two twenty-somethings: Daniel, a self-described down-and-out homeless kid, every male member of whose family has been in jail on petty charges of one kind or another, and Heather, a small town high school graduate trying to escape rural Pennsylvania. You also meet Lisa, a former Army nurse from California, who initially saw the military as a path to a more meaningful life. The three of them worked on Air Force bases scattered around the country from California to Virginia. The equipment they handled hovered above war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Pakistan and Yemen (where the U.S. Air Force was supporting assassination missions on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency). "That is so cool, unmanned aircraft. That's really bad-ass." So Heather thought when she first saw recruitment posters for the drone program. "I was under the impression," she told Kennebeck, "that America was saving the world, like that we were Big Brother and we were helping everyone out." Initially, Lisa felt similarly: "When I first got into the military, I mean I was thinking it was a win-win. It was a force for good in the world. I thought I was going to be on the right side of history." 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). Progressive Content Not Found Sometimes, authors delete their progressive content after publishing. To see if the progressive content was renamed or re-published, please click here. WIT Sponsors the 3rd Annual End Homelessness Now 5k/10k Run www.witinc.com Troy, Michigan April 20, 2016 WIT today announced that it has signed on as a Race Support Sponsor of the 3rd annual End Homelessness Now 5k/10k run/walk to benefit South Oakland Shelter (SOS). The proceeds from the race will help to support the homeless individuals and families who are served by SOS.Last year, 350 individuals participated in the race, and raised nearly $50,000 to help support SOSs programs. This years race will be held on Sunday, August 7, 2016, starting and finishing at St. Davids Episcopal Church in Southfield, Michigan. The family-friendly event will kick off with a 1 mile fun run at 8 a.m. followed by the 5k/10k race at 8:30 a.m., and a pancake breakfast at the completion of the race.Over the last few years WIT has continued to support South Oakland Shelter in its mission to aid members of our community who are in need of assistance, said Quaid Saifee, President of WIT. We are excited to once again sponsor the End Homelessness Now 5k/10k run/walk, and to have the opportunity to help raise money for a noble cause.Registration for the race is now open. The current early bird registration fee is $20, with the fee increasing to $35 on the day of the event. Participants are encouraged to register in advance to receive the best discounted rate. To learn more about the event and to register, please visit endhomelessness.southoaklandshelter.org.About WITWIT is a business analytics consulting firm founded in 1996. We help our clients achieve superior performance by fully realizing the potential of analytics and business intelligence technology and processes, whether its through executive dashboards, data discovery, big data, enterprise reporting, or data in the cloud. Clients range from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies across all major industries. For more information, please visit###900 Tower Dr.Suite 325Troy, MI 48098 R. K. Redding Construction Celebrates 25th Anniversary R.K. Redding 25th Anniversary West Georgia-based construction firm honored by Haralson County and the City of Bremen by proclaiming April 21 as R.K. Redding Construction DayBremen, GA (April 21, 2016) When Randall Redding decided to make a difference in his hometown of Bremen, Ga., he might have been the only one who imagined 25 years later that the construction firm he founded R.K. Redding Construction, Inc. (RKR) would grow to employ 50 people with more than $50 million in annual revenue. Haralson County and the City of Bremen are honoring the firm on April 21 as R.K. Redding Construction Day.We wanted to honor RKR's community leadership, community contributions, and the overall economic impact made by this exemplary organization, said Eric McDonald, President and CEO of Greater Haralson Chamber of Commerce. This resolution is designed to thank Randall Redding and his team for running a business of such integrity and for paving the way for further economic growth in Haralson County and the City of Bremen.RKR has prospered under Reddings guiding philosophy of putting customer service above all else. Today, the company is an established general contractor and construction management firm that works throughout the southeast.Its truly a blessing to have had an opportunity to make a difference during the past 25 years, said Redding. The most important part to me has been the countless friends Ive made along this journey and the solid reputation our entire team has built not only with our clients, but within the industry.Active in many markets, including education, medical, religious facilities, cultural, governmental, industrial and office/retail, RKR delivers comprehensive construction services and solutions to its clients. Some landmark projects built include the Trinka Davis Veterans Village, West Georgia Technical College Allied Health, Georgia Tech Boggs NRE Lab Renovation and numerous facilities for Tanner Health System and University of West Georgia, as well as multiple K-12 projects for systems including City of Bremen, Paulding, Polk and Haralson County School Systems.RKRs philosophy is based on honesty, quality and integrity with the ultimate goal of gaining customer trust and satisfaction. This goal is evidenced by Inc. Magazine, Atlanta Business Chronicle and Georgia Trend naming the firm as one of the fastest growing companies in 2010. Redding is also the immediate past-President of Associated General Contractors of Georgia.Currently, RKR is licensed in six southeastern states: Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Alabama. In addition, the company has won countless awards throughout the years, including 10 Associated General Contractor Awards for excellence.As the economy continues to grow, R.K. Redding Construction looks forward to being a part of building the future.CO & P Integrated Marketing500 Bishop StreetAtlanta, GA 30318Rob Kremerrkremer@co-p.com404-218-3077 An opportunity to learn about Nicaragua's real estate market first hand! http://nicainvestments.com/investors-come-investigate-nicaraguas-real-estate-market-first-hand/ http://nicainvestments.com Granada, Nicaragua, April 20, 2016 - Nicaragua is the most lucrative, yet most affordable real estate investment market in all of the Americas. Unfortunately there's a great deal of incorrect, outdated or outright misleading information in circulation. To remedy this, Nica Investments has joined forces with Experience Nica Tours to offer real estate investors an opportunity to spend 5 days in Nicaragua to learn, first hand, the truth about the country's robust real estate market.Nica Investments is a Canadian owned, land acquisition and development consultancy operating in Granada, Nicaragua. Len Bowcott, CEO of Nica Investments assists foreign investors in identifying properties to fill the client's needs that are able to be purchased. Not all real estate in Nicaragua is transferable, although it is often offered for sale. Bowcott also consults individuals and companies acquiring operational businesses in Nicaragua, as well assist in setting up new businesses. In the case of both land and business acquisitions, Bowcott also negotiates the best possible purchase price, terms and conditions. This is not an easy undertaking in a country lacking a central data base such as the Multiple Listing Services (MLS) American and Canadian real estate agents and purchasers are used to referring to.Experience Nica Tours is a Canadian owned inbound tour agency. Anna Bandrabur, the Ontario, Canada based proprietor will coordinate inland travel, accommodations, meals and organize the locations where Nicaraguan real estate industry professionals will speak.This fist of its kind tour is set for June 26 through to June 30, 2016. Participants will spend part of each day visiting exceptional real estate opportunities in the hottest property markets in Nicaragua, Granada, Rivas, San Juan del Sur, Laguna de Apoyo and Managua. Speakers are both corporate law lawyers and lawyers involved in immigration matters, architects, tax accountants, real estate professionals, and government spokespersons from ProNicaragua and INTUR. ProNicaragua is the government agency responsible for fostering inbound foreign investment while INTUR is the government tourism agency. Both spokespersons will outline the investment incentives their agencies are able to provide foreign investors or retirees immigrating to Nicaragua.For more information visitor contact Len Bowcott at email address len@nicainvestments.com or telephone +505 7868 1549.Nica Investments is a Granada, Nicaragua based consultancy specializing in assisting foreign corporate or individual investors in acquiring, developing and/or managing real estate investments in Nicaragua. The company also assists foreign investors in acquiring Nicaraguan businesses or establishing a new businesses in the country.c/o Casa Amalia, Calle CuiscomaGranada, NicaraguaEmail: len@nicainvestments.comTel: +505 7868 1549Website: Strategic Analysis on Global Neuropathic Pain Market Forecast to 2020 This report provides comprehensive information on the therapeutic development for Neuropathic Pain, complete with comparative analysis at various stages, therapeutics assessment by drug target, mechanism of action (MoA), route of administration (RoA) and molecule type, along with latest updates, and featured news and press releases. It also reviews key players involved in the therapeutic development for Neuropathic Pain and special features on late-stage and discontinued projects.Report features investigational drugs from across globe covering over 20 therapy areas and nearly 3,000 indications. The report is built using data and information sourced from MarketIntelReports proprietary databases, Company/University websites, SEC filings, investor presentations and featured press releases from company/university sites and industry-specific third party sources, put together by MarketIntelReports team. Drug profiles/records featured in the report undergoes periodic updation following a stringent set of processes that ensures that all the profiles are updated with the latest set of information. Additionally, processes including live news & deals tracking, browser based alert-box and clinical trials registries tracking ensure that the most recent developments are captured on a real time basis.The report enhances decision making capabilities and help to create effective counter strategies to gain competitive advantage. It strengthens R&D pipelines by identifying new targets and MOAs to produce first-in-class and best-in-class products.Note*: Certain sections in the report may be removed or altered based on the availability and relevance of data for the indicated disease.ScopeThe report provides a snapshot of the global therapeutic landscape of Neuropathic Pain MarketThe report reviews key pipeline products under drug profile section which includes, product description, MoA and R&D brief, licensing and collaboration details & other developmental activitiesThe report reviews key players involved in the therapeutics development for Neuropathic Pain and enlists all their major and minor projectsThe report summarizes all the dormant and discontinued pipeline projectsA review of the Neuropathic Pain products under development by companies and universities/research institutes based on information derived from company and industry-specific sourcesPipeline products coverage based on various stages of development ranging from pre-registration till discovery and undisclosed stagesA detailed assessment of monotherapy and combination therapy pipeline projectsCoverage of the Neuropathic Pain pipeline on the basis of target, MoA, route of administration and molecule typeLatest news and deals relating related to pipeline productsReasons to buyProvides strategically significant competitor information, analysis, and insights to formulate effective R&D development strategiesIdentify emerging players with potentially strong product portfolio and create effective counter-strategies to gain competitive advantageDevelop strategic initiatives by understanding the focus areas of leading companiesIdentify and understand important and diverse types of therapeutics under development for Neuropathic Pain MarketPlan mergers and acquisitions effectively by identifying key players of the most promising pipelineDevise corrective measures for pipeline projects by understanding Neuropathic Pain pipeline depth and focus of Indication therapeuticsDevelop and design in-licensing and out-licensing strategies by identifying prospective partners with the most attractive projects to enhance and expand business potential and scopeModify the therapeutic portfolio by identifying discontinued projects and understanding the factors that drove them from pipelineContact us:Mayur SSales Manager2711 Centerville Road, Suite 400,Wilmington,Delaware,19808United Statessales@marketintelreports.comTelephone: 1-302-684-6088About us:MarketIntelReports (MIR) aim to empower our clients to successfully manage and outperform in their business decisions, we do this by providing Premium Market Intelligence, Strategic Insights and Databases from a range of Global Publishers.A group of industry veterans who are well experienced in reputed international consulting firms after identifying the sourcing needs of MNCs for market intelligence, have together started this business savior MarketIntelReports.MIR intends to be a one-stop shop with an intuitive design, exhaustive database, expert assistance, secure cart checkout and data privacy integrated. It curates the list of reports, publishers and studies to ensure that the database is constantly updated to dynamically meet the targeted, specific needs of our clients.MarketIntelReports currently has more than 10,000 plus titles and 35+ publishers on our platform and growing consistently to fill the Global Intelligence Demand Supply Gap. We cover more than 15 industry verticals being: Automotive, Electronics, Manufacturing, Pharmaceuticals, Healthcare, Chemicals, Building & Construction, Agriculture, Food & Beverages, Banking & Finance, Media and Government, Public Sector Studies.2711 Centerville Road, Suite 400 Cloud Services Market: Global Industry Analysis and Forecast 2015 - 2021 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/6667 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com Cloud services are those services that are offered to users via the Internet from the server of cloud computing service provider. Such services provide scalable and easy access to various resources and applications, and are entirely managed by the cloud service providers. The examples of cloud services include web-based e-mail services, online backup solutions and data storage, document collaboration services, technical support services, and database processing among others. Cloud service providers supply the necessary software and hardware required for cloud service, thereby eliminating the need for organizations to deploy their own resources for managing networked services. The other advantage of cloud services over the traditional methods of providing infrastructure is faster deployment of services and reduction in in-house maintenance costs.On the basis of mode of delivery, the cloud services market is segmented into Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). The SaaS mode of delivery is further segmented into SMB and mobile corporate SaaS cloud services, corporate SaaS cloud services, SMB SaaS cloud services and others. North America is the largest contributor to the cloud services market due to the high penetration of internet in this region. This region is followed by Europe, Asia-Pacific and Rest of the World (RoW).Interested in report: Please follow the below the links to meet your requirements; Request for the Report Brochure:Major benefits offered by cloud services are driving business organizations in implementing the use of cloud services. Cloud services maximize the effectiveness of shared resources and ensure the business organizations higher returns and faster paybacks. In addition, cloud services offer scalable solutions to growing business organizations at low cost of ownership. This drives business organizations to invest in such services that allow them to generate higher revenues by optimizing the available resources. However, the data security issues are the roadblocks that are adversely affecting the growth of this market. The increasing data hacking incidences using sophisticated tools result in loss of sensitive data, causing serious dents in the business revenues. Also, there are constant evolutions of new security threats that are affecting the quality of cloud services. Further, the small and medium businesses find it difficult to repeatedly invest in the customized solutions available for cloud services security. Due to such factors, the business organizations are reluctant in investing in the cloud services and prefer to carry on with conventional methods of network infrastructure.Some of the major players in the market are improving their existing services by adding new and innovative features. This helps them in staying competitively ahead in the market. For instance, Akamai Technologies, Inc., one of the leading cloud services providers, recently added Zone Apex Mapping feature to its Ion network acceleration technology. This feature reduces DNS resolution time and avoids HTTP redirects. Other major players in the market include VMware, Inc., (U.S.), Taleo Corporation (Ireland), Oracle Corporation, (U.S.), NetSuite Inc., (U.S.), Microsoft Corporation (U.S.), Joyent Inc., (U.S.), International Business Machines Corporation (U.S.), Hewlett-Packard (U.S.), Flexiant Limited (United Kingdom), ENKI Consulting (U.S.), Etelos Inc.,(U.S.), Citrix Systems Inc., (U.S.), Cisco Systems Inc., (U.S.), CA Technologies, Inc., (U.S.), and SAP AG (Germany).About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated research, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Consumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.PMR stands committed to bringing more accuracy and speed to clients business decisions. From ready-to-purchase market research reports to customized research solutions, PMRs engagement models are highly flexible without compromising on its deep-seated research values.ContactPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Attorney Derek Merman Represents Victim of Attack at Houston Nursing Home Derek Merman of the Merman Law Firm, in Houston, Texas, filed suit on behalf of a resident who was beaten to death by his roommate at a Houston area nursing home. Correa removed the armrest of his wheelchair and viciously beat both of his roommates to death while they slept the nursing home staff did not discover the incident until they found Correa attempting to leave the facility. As the nurse returned Correa to his room, she found the room covered in blood and brain matter. Correa had a long history of mental illness including depression, psychosis, and hallucinations that was ignored by the facility and the psychological service providers at the site. Correa exhibited severe paranoia and delusions for years - first that the staff was poisoning his food and later that his roommates were plotting against him. Both of his roommates and their families expressed concerns about Correa to the staff, but those fears were also ignored. Lexington Place Nursing and Rehabilitation was investigated by the Texas Department of Aging and Disability Services (DADS) and was reprimanded over the incident for failing to properly train its staff, failing to meet professional standards and failing to protect its residents from mistreatment and neglect. DADS found, in addition to these violations, that the cameras in the facility did not work and that the nursing staff was ordered to alter records during the investigation. Despite the documented evidence of neglect, which culminated in the brutal killing of two residents, the Administrator refused to admit fault or apologize. Mr. Lopezs estate filed a civil suit against Pinnacle Health Facilities, the owners of the Lexington Place Nursing and Rehabilitation, as well as the two psychological services groups that provided treatment to Correa and Mr. Lopez. Mr. Merman, the lawyer in charge, stressed that the suit was brought to raise awareness of nursing home neglect and not merely for financial gain. As our greatest generation reaches the age when independent living is more difficult, we all must be vigilant against this type of neglect. Unfortunately, explains Merman, government agencies are understaffed and cannot adequately monitor all facilities. We have to make mistakes like this expensive, because sadly, the bottom line seems to be the only thing these facilities care about. As long as the mistakes have no cost, these facilities will keep neglecting our loved ones. Tort reform has made nursing home cases both expensive and difficult. And because of caps on damages in these lawsuits, few lawyers are willing to take cases of nursing home neglect. The result is thousands of elderly and disabled residents neglected and mistreated without hope of remedy or vindication. The Merman Law Firm takes on cases that are important regardless of the cost or potential award because it is the right thing to do. The Merman Law Firm specializes in personal injury trial law. Mr. Merman attended law school at the University of Houston Law Center where he graduated cum laude in 2004. As a practicing lawyer, Mr. Merman has been the lead attorney in dozens of trials and has won two verdicts in excess of $10,000,000 in the last five years. Press Contact: Derek Merman (713) 351.0679 info@mermanlawfirm.com www.mermanlawfirm.com This release was published on openPR. Permanent link to this press release: Copy Please set a link in the press area of your homepage to this press release on openPR. openPR disclaims liability for any content contained in this release. Food Blender and Mixer Market set to expand and become organized during 2016-24 Food Blender and Mixer Market http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/food-blender-mixer-market.html http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=10406 http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com Food Blender and Mixer Market: OverviewThe consumption of processed food and beverages has considerably increased globally, giving impetus to the market for food blenders and mixers. With demand rising from industries such as dairy, bakery, and beverages, the global food blender and mixer market is anticipated to witness growth at an impressive rate between 2016 and 2024. The rising disposable income of consumers, favorable government initiatives promoting the consumption of various food ingredients, and increasing trade of these food ingredients will also help the market report significant growth.Browse the full report at:The last five years have been extremely favorable for manufacturers in the processed food industry in terms of sales figures. This has had a positive effect on the global food blender and mixer industry, which simultaneously has witnessed a significant rise in demand. Besides this, the advent of new technologies has led to innovation of new products for food and beverage processing, presenting lucrative opportunities for the companies operating in the market to capitalize on.Developing countries also present an opportunity-rich market for manufacturers, as these regions boast an abundant availability of raw materials. Furthermore, the rise in the disposable income of the middle-class population living in emerging nations also fuels demand from the food blender and mixer market.The report provides a comprehensive overview of the various factors influencing the growth trajectory of the global market for food blender and mixer. In order to study the prevailing competition in the market, the most prominent companies operating therein are profiled. Using SWOT analysis, the strengths and weaknesses of these countries are weighed out and the threats and opportunities that they are likely to impact these companies. Information thus obtained is then presented in a coherent chapter-wise format interspersed with graphs, tables, and infographics.Food Blender and Mixer Market: Key Trends and OpportunitiesThe global market for food blenders and mixers has been significantly stimulated by the booming processed food industry. Apart from this, the rising disposable income of people living in emerging nations, coupled with the growing demand for convenience food due to hectic lifestyles, has been driving the market for food blenders and mixers. Due to the rising consumption of beverages, confectionaries, and bakery products, the demand for food blenders and mixers is anticipated to increase substantially in the near future. Additionally, increasing health-consciousness among consumers is also fuelling the demand for processed food products, which in turn is giving momentum to the global food blender and mixer market.Enquiry before Buying@Regionally, Europe has emerged as the most lucrative market for food blenders and mixers due to the considerable growth witnessed by its processed food industry, which has resulted in higher consumption of food products such as snacks, dairy products, and baked goods. The market is also poised to witness a surge in demand from the Asia Pacific and RoW regions as well.Food Blender and Mixer Market: Competitive LandscapeIn order to gain competitive advantage, enterprises operating in the food blender and mixer market are increasingly investing in expansion and acquisition strategies. These companies are focusing on exploring the untapped markets, acquiring local players, and building a new consumer base aimed at maintaining long-term client relationships. This has helped key players in the market not only expand their operations, but also reinforce their market positions by gaining a substantial share in terms of product portfolio and revenue. The strategies thus adopted by these enterprises have positively impacted the global food blender and mixer market.Even small-to-medium players are leveraging similar strategies to expand their business globally. These companies are looking forward to investing in new manufacturing facilities in various regions.For the purposes of the study, the report profiles the leading players operating in the market such as GEA Group AG (Germany), SPX Corporation (the U.S.), and Buhler Holding AG (Switzerland).This research report analyzes this market on the basis of its market segments, major geographies, and current market trends. Geographies analyzed under this research report includeNorth AmericaAsia PacificEuropeMiddle East and AfricaLatin AmericaThis report provides comprehensive analysis ofMarket growth driversFactors limiting market growthCurrent market trendsMarket structureMarket projections for upcoming yearsThis report is a complete study of current trends in the market, industry growth drivers, and restraints. It provides market projections for the coming years. It includes analysis of recent developments in technology, Porters five force model analysis and detailed profiles of top industry players. The report also includes a review of micro and macro factors essential for the existing market players and new entrants along with detailed value chain analysis.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.ContactMr. Sudip S90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Agricultural Equipment Market Latest Innovations, Drivers, Restraints, Challenges by 2020 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/3151 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/3151 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com Agriculture equipment is any type of machinery that is used on farm for farming purpose. Agriculture equipment market is increasing with the introduction of novel technology in the field of agriculture. It helps in making harvest season simpler and more profitable. Increasing global population boost the demand of food grain and rising per capita calorie intake increasing pressure on agriculture sector to become more productive and highly efficient. This leads to drive the demand for agricultural equipment market all across the globe.Agricultural equipment contains wide range of machinery and tools, which help in various farming processes in order to improve the output and to enhance the overall quality of crops. Various agricultural equipments include seed driller, transplanters, threshers, sprayer, tillers, balers, rotavators and reaper. Agriculture equipment industry is not only growing at a swift pace, but it also plays an important role in growth of global economy. Increasing sophisticated technology in agriculture equipment leads to reduce the overall cost farming. Growth of such technology and investment on research and development in agriculture equipment plays a key role in the growth of global agriculture equipment market.Asia Pacific region accounted the largest agricultural equipment market around the world. China and India are the two largest growing markets. Growing large population in these two countries increased the overall demand of food. China alone holds one-third market of global agriculture equipment. To get significant gains in terms of efficiency and larger production of food the demand of harvesting machinery is growing in India. Farm tractors are largest product segment in agricultural equipment market. Developing nations across the world get substantial funds and assistance for the betterment of their agricultural productivity through farming process automation. This helps in rise if global agriculture equipment market.Request Brochure of this Report:Major companies operating in global agricultural equipment market are John Deere, AGCO Corporation, CNH Global NV, CLAAS KGAA MBH, GROUPE EXEL INDUSTRIES SA, MTD PRODUCTS AG., Alamo Group, Bucher Industries, Caterpillar Incorporated, Daedong Industrial Company, Escorts Limited, Fiat SpA, Iseki & Company, Kubota Corporation, Kverneland ASA, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, YTO Group, Tractors and Farm Equipment and Same Deutz-Fahr.Request to view TOC:About Us:Persistence Market Research (PMR) is an innovative provider of market research reports and consulting services. The three PMR pillars of strength that have helped us win clients for years are: Quality Research, Quick Research, and In-depth Research.PMRs team of seasoned analysts and consultants are experts in their domain. At PMR, we process complex, exhaustive primary and secondary research data into valuable insight. We Understand that each client has a unique problem statement, and address it with our strengths.Contact:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: +1 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Baby Apparel Market Trend, Growth, Size, Share, Analysis and Resaerch Report 2016 http://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=706612 http://www.researchmoz.us/global-baby-clothing-sets-consumption-industry-2016-market-research-report-report.html Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Baby Apparel Market 2016" to its huge collection of research reports.Global Baby Clothing Sets Consumption Industry 2016 Market Research ReportThe Global Baby Clothing Sets Consumption 2016 Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Baby Clothing Sets market.First, the report provides a basic overview of the Baby Clothing Sets industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. And development policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and cost structures.Secondly, the report states the global Baby Clothing Sets market size (volume and value), and the segment markets by regions, types, applications and companies are also discussed.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Browse Detail Report With TOC @Global Baby Sleepwear Consumption Industry 2016 Market Research ReportThe Global Baby Sleepwear Consumption 2016 Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Baby Sleepwear market.First, the report provides a basic overview of the Baby Sleepwear industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. And development policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and cost structures.Secondly, the report states the global Baby Sleepwear market size (volume and value), and the segment markets by regions, types, applications and companies are also discussed.Global Baby T-Shirts Consumption Industry 2016 Market Research ReportThe Global Baby T-Shirts Consumption 2016 Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Baby T-Shirts market.First, the report provides a basic overview of the Baby T-Shirts industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. And development policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and cost structures.Secondly, the report states the global Baby T-Shirts market size (volume and value), and the segment markets by regions, types, applications and companies are also discussed.Global Baby Dresses Consumption Industry 2016 Market Research ReportThe Global Baby Dresses Consumption 2016 Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Baby Dresses market.First, the report provides a basic overview of the Baby Dresses industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. And development policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and cost structures.Secondly, the report states the global Baby Dresses market size (volume and value), and the segment markets by regions, types, applications and companies are also discussed.Global Baby Jackets & Coats Consumption Industry 2016 Market Research ReportThe Global Baby Jackets & Coats Consumption 2016 Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Baby Jackets & Coats market.First, the report provides a basic overview of the Baby Jackets & Coats industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. And development policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and cost structures.Secondly, the report states the global Baby Jackets & Coats market size (volume and value), and the segment markets by regions, types, applications and companies are also discussed.About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.For More Information Kindly Contact:ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.us Automatic Fire Sprinkler Systems Market: Historical, Current and Projected industry size and Recent Industry Trends by 2020 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/3152 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/3152 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com Fire sprinkler system is used as one of fire protection measure. Fire sprinkler system consists of water supply system, providing required pressure and flow to the water distribution piping system where the fire sprinklers are connected. Sprinklers systems are majorly installed on building codes or on the recommendation of the insurance company to reduce loss of property or potential business damage. Buildings having more than 100 people or place where people stay for overnight such as hotels, nursing homes, dormitories and hospitals are equipped with automatic fire sprinkler system under local building codes.In the past automatic fire sprinkler system were only used in commercial building or factories to protect properties or potential business loss. Recently, automatic fire sprinkler system has gained its important in hotels, motels, residential buildings and other similar institution. According to working system automatic fire sprinkler system can be bifurcated into wet (used in residential buildings), dry (used in the cold weather region), deluge and pre-action sprinklers systems. Commercial and residential are the major end-users of automatic fire sprinklers systems. Other end-users include hotels, motels, nursing homes, dormitories, hospitals and other similar institutions.North America has the largest market share for automatic fire sprinklers system, followed by Europe and Asia-Pacific. North America is expected to maintain its dominance in the forecasted period. The U.S. market alone holds the largest market globally accounting for more than one third of global market. Asia-pacific region is expected to witness double digit growth in coming future. Developing countries such as India and China may boost the Asian automatic fire sprinklers systems market.Increasing number of fire related deaths and loss of property is driving the global automatic fire sprinklers system market. Additionally, government regulations coupled with insurance company recommendation to equipped commercial, residential or other similar building with proper fire security system to protect loss of property is driving the global market to some extent. In 1990 the U.S. government passed an act The Hotel and Motel Safety Act which requires that any hotel, motels, meeting hall and similar places which receives federal monetary benefits (government travelers overnight stay or for a conference) must meet the required fire and other safety measures. Since then automatic fire sprinklers systems demand has increased in major developed countries. Also, multinational companies who have started their operation in the developing countries such as India and China might demand better fire security system. This may further increase the demand for automatic fire sprinklers system.Request Brochure of this Report:Some of the major companies operating in the global automatic fire sprinklers system are APi Group, Cosco Fire Protection, Tyco International, Adams Fire Protection, Heiser Logistics, Koorsen Fire and Security and American Fire Technologies.Request to view TOC:About Us:Persistence Market Research (PMR) is an innovative provider of market research reports and consulting services. The three PMR pillars of strength that have helped us win clients for years are: Quality Research, Quick Research, and In-depth Research.PMRs team of seasoned analysts and consultants are experts in their domain. At PMR, we process complex, exhaustive primary and secondary research data into valuable insight. We Understand that each client has a unique problem statement, and address it with our strengths.Contact:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: +1 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Smart Home Appliances Market Trends, and Forecast 2016 - 2024 http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=10433 http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com Smart Home Appliances Market: OverviewSmart home appliances are the class of next-generation connected equipment that are designed to be controlled with the help of commands from a central system or communicate with other appliances in a network and make certain decisions for the owner. The concept of connected devices, which allow the user to manage everyday home appliances, such as ovens, refrigerators, stoves, air conditioners, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, etc. from any corner of the house, with the use of a mobile computing device, a simple app, and some kind of network that connects the user with the devices, is highly fascinating.The promise of added convenience when using these devices, the amount of time saved as compared to when manually operating them, and the reduction in power and energy achieved are some of the major factors leading to the increased popularity of smart home appliances on a global scale. Over the reports forecast period, the market for smart home appliances is projected to flourish.Some of the major product types in the global smart home appliances market that currently have smart connectivity features are washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, microwave ovens, air conditioners, coffee makers, lighting systems, television sets, sound systems, garage doors, hot water systems, and gates.The major connectivity platforms used in the market include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, ZigBee, and Z-Wave.Get More Information:Smart Home Appliances Market: Key Trends and OpportunitiesThe global market for smart home appliances is driven by factors such as the rising adoption of mobile devices and technologically advanced products worldwide; the expanding network of high-speed Internet; the energy-efficient nature of smart home appliances; technological advancements in the fields of connectivity mediums, sensors, microchips, and hardware products; and the declining prices of connectivity modules.As the tech-savvy and connected consumer of the present day becomes more receptive to connected technologies and the new functionalities that the technology is bringing, device manufacturers are also increasingly shifting their focus to the smart appliances segment. Though the prices of these products are currently higher than traditional nonsmart appliances, the market will soon feature economic products as more device manufactures challenge themselves to include connectivity features in their appliances.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.Mr.Sudip S90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Image Recognition Market: Size & Forecast to 2014-2020 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/3210 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/3210 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com Image recognition is a technique for acquiring, processing, scrutinize, and sympathizing images. It gathers high-dimensional data from the real world in order to generate numerical or symbolic information. Image recognition uses disentangling of representational information from image data using replica created with the help of geometry, physics, statistics, and learning theory.Image recognition (biometric-based recognition) technique has emerged as the most promising alternative of card based recognition for identifying individuals in recent past. Image recognition is used for verification (one to one matching) and identification (one to many matching) of individuals.Image recognition technologies include identification based on physiological distinctiveness of the people such as facial patterns recognition, fingerprints recognition, hand geometry recognition, hand veins pattern recognition, finger geometry recognition, palm recognition, iris recognition, retina recognition, and voice recognition. Image recognition also identify the behavioral uniqueness of the individuals such as gait, signature and keystroke dynamicsThe recognition based on passwords and PINs are trailing in popularity mainly due to the fact that they are hard to remember and cannot be stolen, duplicated by the intruders. Moreover the risk associated with misplacing of cards, tokens, keys and the like is also lend a hand in wide acceptance of image recognition as an alternative of traditional access control systems.On the basis of technology the global image recognition market can be broadly categories in five different market variants namely, optical character recognition (Ocr), pattern and gradient matching, object recognition, barcode/Qr code recognition and facial recognition.On the basis of the different component use in the image recognition equipment the overall market can be broadly categorized in three segments namely, hardware, software, and services.Based on the end user application the image recognition market can be further categories in eight different classes namely, government and defense, banking, financial services and insurance, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing or industrial, consumer goods and retail, information technology and telecommunications, transport and logistics and others.The growing use of face recognition technology in smart phones, tablets and personal computer owing to the advancement in size and accuracy is propelling the market for face recognition technology. Moreover increasing governmental budget towards homeland security and defense is further driving the market in developing countries such as India, China, and Russia. Increasing use of facial recognition access system over card based access system in industries and residence is providing new market opportunities for the facial recognition technology.North America is the largest market for facial recognition in the world. It is then followed by Europe and Asia Pacific. The U.S. is the largest market for facial recognition in the North America. Chinese and Japanese are the major user of image recognition technology in Asia Pacific. Asia Pacific is one of the rapid growing markets of image recognition where the market is growing in double digit. High threat prospective from terrorist attack couples with trend towards e-governance is contributing to the high growth rate in this region.Request Brochure of this Report:Some of the major companies operating in global image recognition market include, Catchoom, Honeywell, LTU Technologies, Panasonic Corporation, Toshiba, Hitachi Ltd, Itraff Technology, NEC Corporation, Qualcomm Technologies, and Wikitude GmbhRequest to view TOC:About Us:Persistence Market Research (PMR) is an innovative provider of market research reports and consulting services. The three PMR pillars of strength that have helped us win clients for years are: Quality Research, Quick Research, and In-depth Research.PMRs team of seasoned analysts and consultants are experts in their domain. At PMR, we process complex, exhaustive primary and secondary research data into valuable insight. We Understand that each client has a unique problem statement, and address it with our strengths.Contact:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA - Canada Toll Free: +1 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Interactive Background Removal Announced in PhotoScissors 3 http://www.photoscissors.com/ http://www.photoscissors.com/download.html TeoreX releases PhotoScissors 3, automatic image background removal software. The update brings in interactive image processing accomplished invisibly while the user keeps working, cool new image editing options and the support for Intel RealSense camera.PhotoScissors 3 is a new version of the well-acclaimed background removal application. With this tool users can instantly remove bad or unwanted backgrounds or replace them. The biggest advantage of PhotoScissors is extremely steep learning curve and intuitive mechanics. The user simply needs to paint a few rough strokes on the photo with a special marker to tell the program where the background and foreground and the tool does the rest automatically.The major update of PhotoScissors introduces major changes. The biggest of them is interactive processing of photographs. Now, every stroke the user paints is processed by the program without a pause and in the main window, so the user sees the result in real time, while still being able to continue working with the image. Needless to say, how easier it gets to receive a perfect result when the program displays it almost instantly.Among other novelties PhotoScissors 3 has brought are new filters for background and foreground for eye-catching special effects and unusual artistic look; manual changing of the image mask for precise fine-tuning of the cut-out image and a lot of new options including the Aspect Ratio and Feathering Radius options, and the truly unique option to move objects across the original photo. Interestingly enough, the program automatically fills the hole left in the background after the object has moved with matching textures and backgrounds.Finally, the update features the support for Intel RealSense camera, the device capable of telling apart background from foreground in real time while taking shots. The user can load the image directly from the camera to PhotoScissors and replace the background with a click.Pricing and availabilityThe price for a single license of PhotoScissors is $19.99. PhotoScissors is available both for Windows Vista or higher and for Mac OS X 10.7 or higher.LinksProduct page link:Download link:TeoreX develops easy to use graphics software solutions since 2011. Each tool released by the company usually performs just one operation - background removal, retouching, content aware resizing - and does this exceptionally well. The product line of the company so far includes Inpaint, PhotoScissors, FolderIco, DuplicateHunter, iResizer.Company: TeoreXContact: Max GapchenkoTitle: CEOE-Mail: support@theinpaint.comMoscow, Russia Global Tungsten Hexafluoride Market 2016 Size, Key Trends, Demand, Growth, Size, Review, Share, Analysis to 2021 http://goo.gl/OwtYhv http://goo.gl/b5Cvdh http://www.intenseresearch.com/ The 'Global and Chinese Tungsten Hexafluoride Market, 2011-2021 Market Research Report' is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the global Tungsten Hexafluoride industry with a focus on the Chinese market. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the Tungsten Hexafluoride manufacturers and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the industry.Get Free Sample Report of Tungsten Hexafluoride Market:Firstly, the report provides a basic overview of the industry including its definition, applications and manufacturing technology. Then, the report explores the international and Chinese major industry players in detail. In this part, the report presents the company profile, product specifications, capacity, production value, and 2011-2016 market shares for each company. Through the statistical analysis, the report depicts the global and Chinese total market of Tungsten Hexafluoride industry including capacity, production, production value, cost/profit, supply/demand and Chinese import/export. The total market is further divided by company, by country, and by application/type for the competitive landscape analysis.The report then estimates 2016-2021 market development trends of Tungsten Hexafluoride industry. Analysis of upstream raw materials, downstream demand, and current market dynamics is also carried out. In the end, the report makes some important proposals for a new project of Tungsten Hexafluoride Industry before evaluating its feasibility. Overall, the report provides an in-depth insight of 2011-2021 global and Chinese Tungsten Hexafluoride industry covering all important parameters.Get Full Table Of Content (Index) Of Tungsten Hexafluoride Market:Table Of Content Of Tungsten Hexafluoride Market:Chapter One Introduction of Tungsten Hexafluoride Industry1.1 Brief Introduction of Tungsten Hexafluoride1.2 Development of Tungsten Hexafluoride Industry1.3 Status of Tungsten Hexafluoride IndustryChapter Two Manufacturing Technology of Tungsten Hexafluoride2.1 Development of Tungsten Hexafluoride Manufacturing Technology2.2 Analysis of Tungsten Hexafluoride Manufacturing Technology2.3 Trends of Tungsten Hexafluoride Manufacturing TechnologyChapter Three Analysis of Global Key Manufacturers3.1 Company A3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Product Information3.1.3 2011-2016 Production Information3.1.4 Contact Information3.2 Company B3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Product Information3.2.3 2011-2016 Production Information3.2.4 Contact Information3.3 Company C3.2.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Product Information3.3.3 2011-2016 Production Information3.3.4 Contact Information3.4 Company D3.4.1 Company Profile3.4.2 Product Information3.4.3 2011-2016 Production Information3.4.4 Contact Information3.5 Company E3.5.1 Company Profile3.5.2 Product Information3.5.3 2011-2016 Production Information3.5.4 Contact Information3.6 Company F3.6.1 Company Profile3.6.2 Product Information3.5.3 2011-2016 Production Information3.6.4 Contact Information3.7 Company G3.7.1 Company Profile3.7.2 Product Information3.7.3 2011-2016 Production Information3.7.4 Contact Information3.8 Company H3.8.1 Company Profile3.8.2 Product Information3.8.3 2011-2016 Production Information3.8.4 Contact InformationIntense Research provides a range of marketing and business research solutions designed for our clients specific needs based on our expert resources. The business scopes of Intense Research cover more than 30 industries includsing energy, new materials, transportation, daily consumer goods, chemicals, etc. We provide our clients with one-stop solution for all the research requirements.Joel John3422 SW 15 Street, Suit #8138,Deerfield Beach, Florida 33442,United StatesTel: +1-386-310-3803GMT Tel: +49-322 210 92714USA/Canada Toll Free No. 1-855-465-4651Email: sales@intenseresearch.comWeb: Global Artificial Lift System Market 2016-2020: Industry Size, Growth, Demands and Research Report http://www.marketresearchstore.com/report/global-atm-market-49106 http://goo.gl/78hto3 http://www.marketresearchstore.com/ Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) were introduced in developed countries during the late 1970s. A decade ago, ATM machines were mere cash dispensers through which customers could only withdraw cash and receive details of their bank accounts. The breakthrough in availability of 24*7 transactional services provided by the banks across multiple locations (offsite ATM machines), completely revolutionized the ATM market. The Smart ATM, which is presently generating considerable revenue in developing countries, is the result of a recent technological advancement which enables financial transactions over wireless devices (smart phones). This in turn contributes to growth of the global ATM market. However, the advancements in ATM technology also give rise to some major risks and security threats. Some of the major risks associated with ATM machines such as thefts, online frauds, connectivity and operational issues limit the growth of the ATM markets.Visit Complete Report @The global ATM market is witnessing a progressive growth in developing countries whilst indicating an evolved life cycle in the developed countries. The introduction of novel ATMs such as Solar ATMs and Smart ATMs, in emerging markets, is enhancing the growth of the ATM market. In addition to this, numerous market players are collaborating with other companies to provide better services to customers and are expanding their geographical presence. Diebold, for instance, launched the worlds first Smart ATM machine in 2013, for the Asia Pacific region followed by Fujitsu, launching a Smart ATM for European retail banking, in April 2014. Singapore, however, is one of the first Asian countries to offer Smart Gold ATMs that dispense gold bars, coins and ingots. Novel innovations in ATM technology are also increasing across developed countries in order to meet the rising consumer demands.The analysis of the global ATM market, is based on the solution, type and geography. The Solutions chapter emphasizes on deployment solutions i.e., Onsite ATMs, Offsite ATMs, Worksite ATMs & Mobile ATMs and managed services. Offsite ATMs are witnessing rapid growth in recent years amongst all. Further, in terms of type, the ATM market is segmented into conventional/bank ATMS, brown label ATMs, white label ATMs, smart ATMs and cash dispensers. Geographically, the report also provides a detailed analysis of key countries such as US, Canada, China, India, UK, Spain, South Africa and Middle East.Do Inquiry For Samlpe Report @KEY BENEFITSThis study highlights the current scenario of the global ATM market along with its scope and identifies the ongoing trend of wireless communicating devices to forage the prominent investment pockets of the marketMarket analysis unveils the dominant aspects, viz. upsurge in demand of automated systems and development of security standards for ATM usage, which drives the global ATM market.Trends of the global market are outlined to determine the overall attractiveness and single out market trends to gain a stronger foothold in the marketMicroscopic analysis of segments is conducted to gauge the potential of the market. These segments highlight favorable conditions for growth of the global ATM marketPorters five forces model helps in analyzing the potential of buyers & suppliers with a competitive sketch of the market, which help market players in making better decisions.The Value chain analysis of the industry provides a clear view of key intermediaries involved and elaborates their roles and value addition at every stage in the chain.KEY SEGMNENTSATM Market by SolutionsDeployment SolutionsOnsite ATMOffsite ATMWorksite ATMMobile ATMManaged ServicesATM Market by TypeConventional/ Bank ATMsBrown Label ATMsWhite Label ATMsSmart ATMsCash dispensersATM Market by GeographyNorth AmericaUSMexicoCanadaOthersEuropeUKSpainFranceOthersAsia PacificIndiaChinaJapanOthersLAMEASouth AfricaBrazilUAEOthersAbout Market Research StoreMarket Research Store is a single destination for all the industry, company and country reports. We feature large repository of latest industry reports, leading and niche company profiles, and market statistics released by reputed private publishers and public organizations.Contact UsJoel John3422 SW 15 Street, Suit #8138,Deerfield Beach, Florida 33442,United StatesTel: +1-386-310-3803GMT Tel: +49-322 210 92714USA/Canada Toll Free No. 1-855-465-4651Email: sales@marketresearchstore.comWeb: For The First Time Design Agency Enters European Fintech Awards as TOP3 Innovative Banking Company http://www.uxdesignagency.com This year, 413 European companies were nominated for European Fintech Awards TOP100 that was held April 14 at the ABN AMRO Head Office in Amsterdam. For the first time boutique design agency - UX Design Agency entered TOP3 in category of Innovative Banking Software, and was exclusively selected to present their approach at Fintech Awards 2016.In the world there is a technological revolution, and financial industry is no exception. World's economy is rapidly increasing volume of electronic payments, which already is dominating. Major European banks HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Lloyds Bank, DNB, Banco Santander, Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays during the last month announced plans to close more than 1,000 branches.Experts predict that by 2030 Sweden becomes the first country to completely become cashless economy. Therefore, to identify Europe's most advanced and innovative technology companies in finance industry European Fintech Awards was established.In 2016 for European Fintech Awards TOP100 were nominated 413 companies. 30% of all nominees were from the UK. On the basis of votes, from over 55.000 FinTech enthusiasts and judge decisions, TOP100 most interesting fintech companies in Europe by 9 categories were selected.UX Design Agency on the results of public voting and jury decision was included in the TOP3 of European companies in the category - Innovative Banking Software, competing more than 40 other fintech companies. UX Design Agency, is the first and leading boutique agency delivering user experience design for online financial services: banking, fintech, insurance, trading, payments, etc.The innovative approach of UX Design Agency takes into account business and technological opportunities and focuses on the needs and behavioral patterns of users. As a result, company makes digital banking interfaces and other financial startups customer-centred and frictionless. UX Design Agency service is in demand among banks and fintech startups from Europe and the United States.UX Design Agency (uxdesignagency.com) is leading boutique agency for financial interface design. UX Design Agency helping online banks and fintech startups to engage their customers with delightful user experience through user-centred design.UXDA combine design with scientific approach based on cognitive psychology to ensure solutions that delight customers and solve their problems. UX design firm provide worldwide solutions, for financial services operating in Silicon Valley, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Tel Aviv, London, Chicago, Seattle, Berlin, Singapore, Paris, Moscow, Amsterdam, Stockholm, San Francisco, Tokyo, etc.UXDA team would be happy to make your online service design simple and clear. UXDA professionals are experienced in digital banking, fintech, payments, forex, CFD, fast loans and charity. UX design company service includes usability/business/customers research, information architecting, ux strategy, ux consulting, ux architecting, user journey mapping, web ui design, mobile ui app design, tablet ui design, wearable ui design, ui prototyping, testing.UX Design AgencyLatvia, RigaMaskavas 6, LV 1050Aex Kregerinfo@uxdesignagency.com Global and China Holter monitor Market 2016: Segment, Trends, Growth, Demand, Developments and Forecast Report 2021 http://www.mrsresearchgroup.com/market-analysis/global-holter-monitor-market-2016-industry-trends-analysis.html http://www.mrsresearchgroup.com/report/48219#request-sample Global and China Holter monitor Market 2016-2021 Market Research ReportThe report on the Global and China Holter monitor Market 2016 Industry meticulously addresses the various drivers, restraints, and opportunities that exist in this space. Compiled by a team of expert analysts, the report offers an overview of the all the key performance indicators of the Global and China Holter monitor Market 2016 Industry.Complete report With TOC available:The study analyzes the Global and China Holter monitor Market 2016 Industry in terms of revenue and volume, where applicable. By doing so, the team of authors working on this report have been able to offer a complete and realistic picture of the future course that the Global and China Holter monitor Market 2016 is expected to adopt.All internal and external factors influencing the growth trajectory of the Global and China Holter monitor Market 2016 Industry are taken into account. With a firm focus on the companies that compete for a share of revenues within the Global and China Holter monitor Market 2016 Industry, the report is a valuable resource that supports competition mapping and strategy development.Get Sample:Besides the drivers and restraints that will be conspicuous by their presence over the next few years, the Global and China Holter monitor Market 2016 Industry report also conducts a detailed analysis of the trends and opportunities that currently prevail. The report doesnt stop at listing the various opportunitiesit also picks out threats, growth pockets as well as white spaces that exist therein.MRS Research group provides a range of marketing and business research solutions designed for our clients specific needs based on our expert resources. The business scopes of Prof Research cover more than 30 industries including energy, new materials, transportation, daily consumer goods, chemicals, etc. We provide our clients with one-stop solution for all the research requirements.3422 SW 15 Street,Suit #8138,Deerfield Beach,Florida 33442 Hydrogen Bromide Market : Global Industry Analysis and Forecast 2016 - 2022 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/10157 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/10157 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com Hydrogen Bromide (HBr), is a water soluble gas also available in the form of aqueous solution, which can be produced by the chemical reaction between bromine and hydrogen. It is used as a catalyst in reactions and as a reducing agent. Hydrogen Bromide when mixed with water forms hydrobromic acid, it is a strong acid which is mainly used for industrial uses. Hydrobromic acid is used to add desirable properties in any chemical compound, it is also used in the production of terephthalic acid, inorganic bromides, organobromines and bromides of Zinc, Sodium and Calcium. Global hydrogen bromide market is anticipated to witness a single digit CAGR growth rate in the forecast period because of its applications in the industries like automotive, construction, Electronics Etc. . . .The Global hydrogen Bromide market is expected to boost in near future owing to the favourable regulations on the use of bromine, due to its harmless nature in the atmosphere. Hydrogen bromide finds its application in the activities of oil and gas drilling, so the growing oil and gas industry is expected to increase the global hydrogen bromide market. The major application of hydrogen bromide is in flame retardant segment and in biocide, both of these segments are anticipated to have a modest growth in the forecasted period leading to significant growth in global hydrogen bromide market.Interested in report: Please follow the below links to meet your requirements;Request for the Report Brochure:Hydrobromic acid is a strong acid and needs to be handled carefully, also there are chances of occupational hazards which can hamper the global hydrogen bromide market. The transportation of hydrobromic acid is expensive owing to its strong acidic nature and caution needed to handle the acid, which hinders the global hydrogen bromide market. Heating of hydrogen bromide increases the pressure and leads to bursting, also on contact with metal there is a risk of explosion and fire due to the formation of hydrogen, all these factors can affect the global hydrogen bromide market.Request TOC (table of content), Figures and Tables of the Report:On the basis of available form, the global hydrogen bromide market is segmented as:GasVaporLiquidOn the basis of applications, the global hydrogen bromide market is segmented as:BiocidesFlame retardantsCatalystOil and gas drillingPolysilicon EtchingOthersOn the basis of end use industries, the global hydrogen bromide market is segmented as:AutomotiveWater treatmentElectronicsConstructionAgricultureOthers (Textile, Ship building).The global hydrogen bromide market can be divided into seven regions, namely North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific, Japan and Middle East and Africa. Asia pacific is having a maximum share in the global hydrogen bromide market and is growing at a significant rate. India and China are the countries in Asia Pacific region witnessing booming market of flame retardant, which leads to the increase of market share in global hydrogen bromide market of Asia Pacific region. North America is anticipated to be the next big player in global hydrogen bromide market owing to its recovering construction segment due to the turnaround in its economy. Europe is an emerging region in global hydrogen bromide market because of the established automotive sector in this region. Middle East and Africa, Latin America are at a nascent stage and are expected to have a good market size in near future.Some of the key players in global hydrogen bromide market are Albermarle Corporation, Tosoh Corporation, Gulf Resources, Inc., Tata Chemicals Ltd., Triveni Interchem Pvt. Ltd, SONTARA ORGANO INDUSTRIES, Bhavika Chemicals Corporation.The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to market segments such as geography, technology and applications.The report covers exhaustive analysis on:Hydrogen Bromide Market SegmentsHydrogen Bromide Market DynamicsHistorical Actual Market Size, 2012 - 2014Hydrogen Bromide Market Size & Forecast 2015 to 2025Supply & Demand Value ChainHydrogen Bromide Market Current Trends/Issues/ChallengesCompetition & Companies involvedTechnologyValue ChainHydrogen Bromide Market Drivers and RestraintsRegional analysis for Hydrogen Bromide Market includesNorth AmericaLatin AmericaEuropeAsia Pacific & JapanThe Middle East and AfricaReport Highlights:Shifting Industry dynamicsIn-depth market segmentationHistorical, current and projected industry size Recent industry trendsKey Competition landscapeStrategies of key players and product offeringsPotential and niche segments/regions exhibiting promising growthA neutral perspective towards market performanceAbout UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated research, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Consumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.PMR stands committed to bringing more accuracy and speed to clients business decisions. From ready-to-purchase market research reports to customized research solutions, PMRs engagement models are highly flexible without compromising on its deep-seated research values.ContactPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United StatesUSA - Canada Toll Free: +1 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Global BYOD Security Market 2016-2020: Industry Size, Growth, Demands and Research Report http://www.marketresearchstore.com/report/global-byod-security-market-49163 http://goo.gl/lNBgG8 http://www.marketresearchstore.com/ The market for BYOD has significantly evolved in regions such as North America and Europe. Rise in the productivity of the organizations has led to the BYOD adoption across varied industry verticals. This ultimately helps the market to grow at a rapid pace. As BYOD concept is gaining popularity across various regions, implementation of BYOD security solutions has become highly important. These BYOD security solutions allow remote management of mobile devices used for business purposes viz., smartphones, tablets and laptops. To protect the important corporate data over the mobile devices, BYOD security policies play an important role and support the use of employees own devices at their work places. Increasing adoption of BYOD concept across emerging markets is one of the key drivers for BYOD security market.Visit Complete Report @The vendors presently are manufacturing mobile devices that are integrated with security solutions. These in-built security policies allow employees to access both their personal and corporate data from a single device and from various access points. Additionally, the vendors in the market are acquiring and collaborating with the top companies in the market to enhance their product portfolio. For instance, on 26 January, 2014, VMware acquired AirWatch, which is a leader in delivering secure and enterprise-mobile management solutions, for $1.175 billion. This acquisition has helped VMware to boost mobile security offerings to the customers. Similarly, In August, 2014, SAP in collaboration with VMware has developed a mobile security software platform for mobile applications, which offers simplified user experience for all mobile applications. Key players in the market are SAP, Symantec, VMware, Citrix systems, Mobile Iron, Good Technology, Trend Micro, IBM, Alcatel Lucent and Cisco Systems.The global BYOD security market is segmented based on the type of device used for business purposes, BYOD solution required for the implementation of BYOD in enterprises, security software, end users and geography. Smartphones, tablets and laptop are usually preferred by the employees at their workplaces. Solution segment is classified as mobile device management, mobile application management, mobile content management and mobile identity management. The segment of security software is classified as mobile data security, mobile device security and network security. The end users for the BYOD security market are large enterprises, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and government organizations. The microscopic analysis of the market has been performed by examining various regions such as North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and LAMEA.Request For Sample Report @Key BenefitsThe analysis of the global market provides an overview of the global BYOD security market with special reference to market trends, market structure, limiting factors and opportunitiesThe global market has been analyzed in a comprehensive manner to help the stakeholders identify the key market opportunitiesQuantitative analysis of the current market and estimations through 2013-2020 would determine the financial caliber of the marketPorters five forces model has been used to analyze the potential of buyers and suppliers, and the competitive structure of the market, to guide the market players in developing effective strategiesValue chain analysis provides a systematic study on the key intermediaries involved, which would in turn help the stakeholders to make appropriate strategiesKEY MARKET SEGMENTSThe market is segmented on the basis of device type, solutions, security software, end user and geography.MARKET BY DEVICE TYPESmartphoneTabletLaptopMARKET BY SOLUTIONMobile Device Management (MDM)Mobile Application Management (MAM)Mobile Content Management (MCM)Mobile Identity Management (MIM)MARKET BY SECURITY SOFTWAREMobile data securityMobile device securityNetwork securityMARKET BY END USERSLarge enterprisesSmall and medium Enterprises (SMEs)Government organizationsMARKET BY GEOGRAPHYNorth AmericaEuropeAsia-PacificLAMEAKEY MARKET PLAYERSSymantecVMwareCitrix systemsMobile IronGood TechnologySAPTrend MicroIBMAlcatel LucentCisco SystemsAbout Market Research StoreMarket Research Store is a single destination for all the industry, company and country reports. We feature large repository of latest industry reports, leading and niche company profiles, and market statistics released by reputed private publishers and public organizations.Contact UsJoel John3422 SW 15 Street, Suit #8138,Deerfield Beach, Florida 33442,United StatesTel: +1-386-310-3803GMT Tel: +49-322 210 92714USA/Canada Toll Free No. 1-855-465-4651Email: sales@marketresearchstore.comWeb: Matrix to showcase its innovative Security solutions at SECUREX, South Africa (24th 26th May) http://www.MatrixComSec.com Matrix, a leading telecom and security service provider, will be demonstrating its well-engineered Access Control and Time-Attendance Solutions at SECUREX 2016, South Africa from 24th May to 26th May. Our products and solutions have been specifically designed to enhance security and productivity of SME, SOHO and large enterprises.Under the Time-Attendance and Access Control domain, Matrix will showcase COSEC ARC a unique IP based access control panel having multiple benefits over conventional access control panel. Being PoE based, it eliminates complex wiring and local power requirements. Furthermore, it provides functionality to integrate any third party Wiegand readers. Its din rail and wall mount option gives flexibility to mount even where the space is a constraint. Apart from COSEC ARC, Matrix will also showcase its standalone access control solution for a single location. The solution eliminates server cost and has capability to configure 255 doors and 25,000 users. Matrix will launch its Job Processing and Costing Module which helps in planning and executing projects, based on creating and assigning the jobs to individuals.During this exhibition, we will also be demonstrating our enterprise grade Time-Attendance solution with real-time features said Jatin Desai, Product Manager for Time-Attendance and Access Control solutions.Under the video surveillance domain, Matrix is launching an Enterprise video management solution SATATYA SAMAS which offers much more than just security. This comprehensive, intelligent and reliable solution is designed to offer enhanced security of physical assets, safety of employees, improved productivity & discipline, centralized control with more visibility and real-time preventive security with quick investigation.Matrix cordially invites you to visit us at Stall No. C05, SECUREX 2016, South Africa from 24th to 26th May 2016 and see how our cutting-edge security solutions can meet your stringent, mission critical needs.About MatrixEstablished in 1991, Matrix is a leader in Telecom and Security solutions for modern businesses and enterprises. An innovative, technology driven and customer focused organization; Matrix is committed to keep pace with the revolutions in the telecom and security industries. With more than 40% of its human resources dedicated to the development of new products, Matrix has launched cutting-edge products like Video Surveillance solutions, Access Control, Time-Attendance, IP-PBX, Universal Gateways, Terminals, Convergence solution, VoIP Gateways and GSM Gateways. These solutions are feature-rich, reliable and conform to the international standards. Having global foot-prints in Asia, Europe, North America, South America and Africa through an extensive network of more than 500 channel partners, Matrix ensures that the products serve the needs of its customers faster and longer. Matrix has gained trust and admiration of customers representing the entire spectrum of industries. Matrix has won many international awards for its innovative products. Visit the company website,Matrix Comsec394 GIDC, Makarpura, Vadodara -390010 Italy: Broadband Initiatives and Enhancement of Service and Content Offerings Are Key to Driving Revenue Growth http://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=708818 http://www.researchmoz.us/italy-broadband-initiatives-and-enhancement-of-service-and-content-offerings-are-key-to-driving-revenue-growth-report.html Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Italy: Broadband Initiatives and Enhancement of Service and Content Offerings Are Key to Driving Revenue Growth" to its huge collection of research reports.The telecommunications market in Italy will generate $26.6bn (25.3bn) in service revenue in 2016. Telecom service revenue is expected to grow at a CAGR of 2.1% during 2015-2020, driven by growth in mobile data, fixed VoIP, fixed broadband and pay-TV. Mobile data will be the fastest-growing segment, registering a CAGR of 8.1% over 2015-2020, followed by fixed broadband (7.4%). To offset the decline in traditional fixed and mobile voice and messaging services, operators are focusing on increasing broadband penetration and mobile data, which will be driven by increasing adoption of mobile broadband services, paving the way for potential growth areas including M2M and mobile payment services. Going forward, operators should focus on fixed/mobile convergence to retain customers and increase spend per household. Increasing investments by operators on high-speed networks will offer opportunities for network and equipment vendors. Increasing consolidation in the market will further intensify competition, unlocking new revenue streams for operators.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Key FindingsThe overall telecom service revenue in Italy will decline by 6.1% over 2015-2016 to reach $26.6bn (25.3bn) in 2016. From 2015 to 2020, the telecommunications market in Italy will see service revenue grow at a CAGR of 2.1%, boosted mainly by mobile and fixed data segments.Mobile revenue will account for 56.9% of total telecom revenue in 2020. Mobile data will be an important driver behind this trend, as it will expand at a CAGR of 8.1% during 2015-2020.We expect the contribution of Internet access to fixed services revenue to reach 46.4% in 2016 and increase to 58.3% in 2020.The Italian telecom market will be dominated by Telecom Italia as the leading mobile and fixed line operator, followed by Vodafone Italy and WIND Italy. The presence of alternate operators and M&A activity in the country will further intensify competition.SynopsisItaly: Broadband Initiatives and Enhancement of Service and Content Offerings Are Key to Driving Revenue Growth provides an executive-level overview of the telecommunications market in Italy today, with detailed forecasts of key indicators up to 2020. It delivers deep quantitative and qualitative insight into the Italian telecom market, analyzing key trends, evaluating near-term opportunities and assessing risk factors, based on proprietary data from Pyramid Researchs databases.The Country Intelligence Report provides in-depth analysis of the following:Regional context: Telecom market size and trends in Italy compared with other countries in the Western European region.Economic, demographic and political context in Italy.The regulatory environment and trends: a review of the regulatory setting and agenda for the next 18-24 months as well as relevant developments pertaining to spectrum licensing, national broadband plans, number portability and more.A demand profile: analysis as well as historical figures and forecasts of service revenue from the fixed telephony, fixed Internet, mobile voice and mobile data and pay-TV.Service evolution: a look at changes in the breakdown of overall revenue between the fixed and mobile sectors and between voice, data and video from 2013 to 2020.The competitive landscape: an examination of key trends in competition and in the performance, revenue market shares and expected moves of service providers over the next 18-24 months.In-depth sector analysis of fixed telephony, broadband, mobile voice and mobile data services: a quantitative analysis of service adoption trends by network technology and by operator, as well as of average revenue per line/subscription and service revenue through the end of the forecast period.Main opportunities: this section details the near-term opportunities for operators, vendors and investors in Italys telecommunications market.Browse Detail Report With TOC @Reasons To BuyGain in-depth analysis of current strategies and future trends of the telecommunications market in Italy, service providers and key opportunities in a concise format, to build proactive and profitable growth strategies.Understand the factors behind ongoing and upcoming trends in Italys mobile communications, fixed telephony, broadband markets and pay-TV markets, including the evolution of service provider market shares, to align product offerings and strategies to meet customers demand.Leverage the graphical information (more than 20 charts and tables in the report based on the Pyramid Research forecast products), to gain an overview of the telecom market in Italy.Analysis of key telecom players in the markets and major business strategies being adopted by them, to identify the opportunities to improve the market share.Explore novel opportunities to align your product strategies and offerings to meet the requirements and succeed in the challenging telecommunications market in Italy.Table of ContentsExecutive summaryMarket and competitor overviewRegional contextEconomic, demographic and political contextRegulatory environmentDemand profileService evolutionCompetitive landscapeMajor market playersSegment analysisMobile servicesFixed servicesPay-TVIdentifying opportunitiesOverall market opportunitiesAbout ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.For More Information Kindly Contact:ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.us United States Robot Controllers Industry Analysis and Trend 2016 Market Research Report http://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=663952 http://www.researchmoz.us/united-states-robot-controllers-industry-2016-market-research-report-report.html Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "United States Robot Controllers Industry 2016 Market Research Report" to its huge collection of research reports.The United States Robot Controllers Industry 2016 Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Robot Controllers industry.The report provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The Robot Controllers market analysis is provided for the United States markets including development trends, competitive landscape analysis, and key regions development status.Development policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and Bill of Materials cost structures are also analyzed. This report also states import/export consumption, supply and demand Figures, cost, price, revenue and gross margins.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @The report focuses on United States major leading industry players providing information such as company profiles, product picture and specification, capacity, production, price, cost, revenue and contact information. Upstream raw materials and equipment and downstream demand analysis is also carried out. The Robot Controllers industry development trends and marketing channels are analyzed. Finally the feasibility of new investment projects are assessed and overall research conclusions offered.With 153 tables and figures the report provides key statistics on the state of the industry and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the market.Table of Contents1 Industry Overview1.1 Definition and Specifications of Robot Controllers1.2 Classification of Robot Controllers1.3 Applications of Robot Controllers1.4 Industry Chain Structure of Robot Controllers1.5 Industry Overview of Robot Controllers1.6 Industry Policy Analysis of Robot Controllers1.7 Industry News Analysis of Robot ControllersBrowse Detail Report With TOC @2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Robot Controllers2.1 Bill of Materials (BOM) of Robot Controllers2.2 BOM Price Analysis of Robot Controllers2.3 Labor Cost Analysis of Robot Controllers2.4 Depreciation Cost Analysis of Robot Controllers2.5 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Robot Controllers2.6 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Robot Controllers2.7 United States Price, Cost and Gross of Robot Controllers 2011-20163 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis3.1 Capacity and Commercial Production Date of United States Key Manufacturers in 20153.2 Manufacturing Plants Distribution of United States Key Robot Controllers Manufacturers in 20153.3 R&D Status and Technology Source of United States Robot Controllers Key Manufacturers in 20153.4 Raw Materials Sources Analysis of United States Robot Controllers Key Manufacturers in 20154 Production Analysis of Robot Controllers by Regions, Type, and Applications4.1 United States Production of Robot Controllers by Regions 2011-20164.2 United States Production of Robot Controllers by Type 2011-20164.3 United States Sales of Robot Controllers by Applications 2011-20164.4 Price Analysis of United States Robot Controllers Key Manufacturers in 20154.5 United States Capacity, Production, Import, Export, Sales, Price, Cost and Revenue of Robot Controllers 2011-20165 Consumption Volume and Consumption Value Analysis of Robot Controllers by Regions5.1 United States Consumption Volume of Robot Controllers by Regions 2011-20165.2 United States Consumption Value of Robot Controllers by Regions 2011-20165.3 United States Consumption Price Analysis of Robot Controllers by Regions 2011-20166 Analysis of Robot Controllers Production, Supply, Sales and Market Status 2011-20166.1 Capacity, Production, Sales, and Revenue of Robot Controllers 2011-20166.2 Production Market Share and Sales Market Share Analysis of Robot Controllers 2014-20156.3 Sales Overview of Robot Controllers 2011-20166.4 Supply, Consumption and Gap of Robot Controllers 2011-20166.5 Import, Export and Consumption of Robot Controllers 2011-20166.6 Cost, Price, Revenue and Gross Margin of Robot Controllers 2011-2016About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.For More Information Kindly Contact:ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.us Global and China Vanadium iron Industry 2016: Market Size, Share, Trends, Analysis, Segmentation and Forecast 2021 http://www.marketresearchstore.com/report/market-and-development-of-chinese-vanadium-iron-industry-52986 http://goo.gl/2RsRVc http://goo.gl/OjUepL http://www.marketresearchstore.com/publisher/askci-consulting-co-ltd-42 http://www.marketresearchstore.com/ The Global and China Vanadium iron Industry 2016-2020 Market. Starting with a broad overview, the report narrows down to offer an overview of the Vanadium iron Industry 2016-2020 Market globally as well as with a specific focus on China. By conducting a check of the current status of the Vanadium iron Industry 2016-2020 Market, the report is able to then delve deeper into the various forces that directly and indirectly impact the Industry.Access Full Report With TOC:Given the ever-shifting and ever-evolving nature of the technologies that enable the products and services contributing to the growth of the Vanadium iron Industry 2016-2020 Market, the report conducts a detailed analysis of the technological trends and developments. This report then moves ahead to focus on the various global and China-based players in the Vanadium iron Industry 2016-2020 Market. In order to obtain specific information about the Industry participants, the report focuses on the following key aspects: Company Profiles, product/services information, contact information, as well as production/revenues.The report then delves deeper by segmenting the global and Chinese Industry for Vanadium iron Industry 2016-2020 into sections, based on parameters such as applications, end-users, geographical regions, or product/technology, where applicable. The degree of competition that exists in the Vanadium iron Industry 2016-2020 Market in the context of both China and the world, is studied in detail.Request For Sample:1)The Aim of this reportTo provide readers with comprehensive & indepth understanding of China Vanadium iron Industry 2016-2020 Market;To disclose market size of China Vanadium iron Industry 2016-2020 Market;To understand position of China Vanadium iron Industry 2016-2020 in the world;To predict what future of China Vanadium iron Industry 2016-2020 Market will be;To analyze major Vanadium iron Industry 2016-2020 producers in China;To find out the key strengths and weakness of China Vanadium iron Industry 2016-2020 producers, and the threats and opportunities they face;To reveal opportunities in Chinese Vanadium iron Industry 2016-2020 Market.2)Benefit from the reportObtain latest info of Vanadium iron Industry 2016-2020 Market, such as market size, status in the world, hotspots and so on;Evaluate the financial performance and growth strategies of top 20 Vanadium iron Industry 2016-2020 producers in China Vanadium iron Industry 2016-2020 Market;Identify key trends and opportunities in China Vanadium iron Industry 2016-2020 Market;Understand what are the drivers and barriers of China Vanadium iron Industry 2016-2020 producers.3)DeliverablesWordformat report, with around 3050 pages;Excelformat database of key Vanadium iron Industry 2016-2020 producers;Excelformat market data of Vanadium iron Industry 2016-2020 Market;Inquiry Before Buying Report Here @:More Reports Under Same Publisher @:MRS Research Store provides a range of marketing and business research solutions designed for our clients specific needs based on our expert resources. The business scopes of Prof Research cover more than 30 industries including energy, new materials, transportation, daily consumer goods, chemicals, etc. We provide our clients with one-stop solution for all the research requirements.Joel John3422 SW 15 Street,Suit #8138Deerfield Beach,Florida 33442United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 FREE (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803 FREEEmail: sales@marketresearchstore.comWebsite: Maetrics discusses the ROI of compliance in event with ABHI http://www.maetrics.co.uk/ Global life sciences consulting firm leads seminar in partnership with the Association of British Healthcare Industries (ABHI)London, UK 21 April 2016 This week, in London, Maetrics (), leading international consulting firm focused on the life sciences sector, partnered with the ABHI (Association of British Healthcare Industries) to host a highly informative seminar on The ROI of good quality and compliance.The aim of the seminar was to provide regulatory executives and leaders in the medical device industry a variety of viewpoints on how to successfully integrate quality management and corporate compliance in order to achieve the best Return On Investment (ROI). This is an especially challenging task given that the regulatory landscape both in the EU and the US is rapidly changing especially with the introduction of the new Medical Device Regulation (MDR). The seminar featured presentations from a variety of speakers including industry and Notified Body representatives as well as Peter Rose, European Managing Director for Maetrics.Fulfilling its objective to be an informative session, the seminar highlighted the importance of integrating quality and compliance not just for ROI but ultimately to avoid typical costly pitfalls associated with poor quality management and non-compliance.The presentations and speakers included: Changing Regulations in EU & US for Medical Devices Peter Rose (Managing Director Europe, Maetrics) The new MDR, a Notified Body Perspective Martin Penver (Operation & Technical Manager at LRQA Notified Body) Integrating quality with corporate compliance to provide the greatest return Seth Whitelaw (President & CEO Whitelaw Compliance Group) The impact of good quality management system Carl Dover (VP Quality Strategy and Process Improvement at DePuy Synthes, a Johnson and Johnson company The costliest problems and why they are continually repeated Adrian Toutoungi (Commercial Partner, Eversheds)Steve Cottrell at Maetrics said: It was a successful morning with some very thought provoking and engaging presentations from some of the best industry leaders. It is great to partner up with an association like the ABHI and help executives in the industry improve their compliance strategies but also to help them achieve greater ROI.--- end ---About MaetricsFounded in 1984, Maetrics is a global consulting firm dedicated to guiding life sciences companies through the challenges related to quality, regulatory, and compliance. Our comprehensive solutions allow clients to reach new efficiencies and achieve compliance objectives. Maetrics is currently present in the US (5 offices), the UK and Switzerland.MaetricsBioCity NottinghamPennyfoot StreetNottingham NG1 1GF+44 115 921 6200Emma Ramsayeuropemedia@maetrics.com Detailed Research On Life Insurance in Iran, Key Trends and Opportunities to 2019 Published By :MarketResearchReports.biz http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/sample/483781 http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/ MarketResearchReports.Biz announces addition of new report Life Insurance in Iran, Key Trends and Opportunities to 2019 to its database.DescriptionLife Insurance in Iran, Key Trends and Opportunities to 2019SynopsisTimetrics 'Life Insurance in Iran, Key Trends and Opportunities to 2019' report provides detailed analysis of the market trends, drivers and challenges in the Iranian life insurance segment.It provides key performance indicators such as written premium, incurred loss, loss ratio, commissions and expenses, total assets, total investment income and retentions during the review period (20102014) and forecast period (20142019).The report also analyzes distribution channels operating in the segment, gives a comprehensive overview of the Iranian economy and demographics, and provides detailed information on the competitive landscape in the country.The report brings together Timetrics research, modeling and analysis expertise, giving insurers access to information on segment dynamics and competitive advantages, and profiles of insurers operating in the country. The report also includes details of insurance regulations, and recent changes in the regulatory structure.SummaryTimetrics ' Life Insurance in Iran, Key Trends and Opportunities to 2019' report provides in-depth market analysis, information and insights into the Iranian life insurance segment, including:The Iranian life insurance segments growth prospects by life insurance categoryKey trends, drivers and challenges for the life insurance segmentA comprehensive overview of the Iranian economy and demographicsThe various distribution channels in the Iranian life insurance segmentDetails of the competitive landscape in the life insurance segment in IranDetails of regulatory policy applicable to the Iranian insurance industryDownload Full Version PDF report at:ScopeThis report provides a comprehensive analysis of the life insurance segment in Iran:It provides historical values for the Iranian life insurance segment for the reports 20102014 review period, and projected figures for the 20142019 forecast period.It offers a detailed analysis of the key categories in the Iranian life insurance segment, and market forecasts to 2019.It analyzes the various distribution channels for life insurance products in Iran.It profiles the top life insurance companies in Iran and outlines the key regulations affecting them.Reasons To BuyMake strategic business decisions using in-depth historic and forecast market data related to the Iranian life insurance segment, and each category within it.Understand the demand-side dynamics, key market trends and growth opportunities in the Iranian life insurance segment.Assess the competitive dynamics in the life insurance segment.Identify growth opportunities and market dynamics in key product categories.Gain insights into key regulations governing the Iranian insurance industry, and their impact on companies and the industry's future.Key HighlightsThe life segment accounted for 10.9% of the Iranian insurance gross written premium in 2014.The life insurance gross written premium is projected to post a forecast-period CAGR of 39.3%.The life segments penetration rose from 0.10% in 2010 to 0.21% in 2014. The low penetration rate offers an opportunity for life insurers to grow in Iran.Iranian insurers are focusing on additional training programs for agents and field employees.Growth in the segment is the result of initiatives such as introduction of Sanhab system, and training and development of human resources.About usMarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports.MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients.We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated researchreports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and typesof companies spanning across various industries.ContactMr. NachiketState Tower90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-621-2074Website:E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz Global Copolymer Polypropylene Wax Market 2015 Size, Forecast And Growth To 2019 http://www.9dresearchgroup.com/market-analysis/copolymer-polypropylene-wax-market-2015-global-industry-size.html http://www.9dresearchgroup.com/report/41300/inquiry-for-buying The Global Copolymer Polypropylene Wax Industry report presents an executive-level overview of the Global Copolymer Polypropylene Wax market. The Global Copolymer Polypropylene Wax market is expected to demonstrate a positive growth trend in the coming years. The market forces that will shape the growth of this market have been scrutinized in detail in this report.Get full report with TOC @Comprehensive data related to the market trends has been included in this report. The market drivers that will fuel the growth of the market during the forecast period are mentioned in this report. Furthermore, the regulatory environment in the Global Copolymer Polypropylene Wax market and its impact on the Global Copolymer Polypropylene Wax industry performance has been assessed in this report. The restraining factors that will result in decline in popularity of certain product segments have also been covered in this report. The potential opportunities and their impact on the Global Copolymer Polypropylene Wax market is also evaluated in the report.The key players are expected to tap onto these market opportunities to penetrate the market. Furthermore, the untapped opportunities in emerging economies will provide a considerable impetus to the small, medium, and large companies operating in the Global Copolymer Polypropylene Wax market. These opportunities in turn are projected to have positive impact on the Global Copolymer Polypropylene Wax market. Players in the market are focusing on innovation, which has resulted in a lot of mergers, acquisitions, collaborations, and partnerships. The prominent market players are also focusing to offer a broader range of products. Competitors often are competing on the basis of the cost of the products in the Global Copolymer Polypropylene Wax market.Inquiry for buying reportAround the world, industries are focusing on incorporating green practices in their manufacturing processes. Moreover, products that are manufactured using these green practices or include more eco-friendly ingredients are popular among consumers. This consumer preference will help companies operating in the Global Copolymer Polypropylene Wax market to include greener products and services to their offering.Chem Gadgets is a single destination for all the industry, company and country reports. We feature large repository of latest industry reports, leading and niche company profiles, and market statistics released by reputed private publishers and public organizations.Joel John3422 SW 15 Street, Suit #8138,Deerfield Beach, Florida 33442,United StatesTel: +1-386-310-3803GMT Tel: +49-322 210 92714USA/Canada Toll Free No. 1-855-465-4651 Europe Offshore Wind Turbines Industry Report 2016 Global QY Research http://globalqyresearch.com/europe-offshore-wind-turbines-industry-2016 http://globalqyresearch.com/download-sample/45294 The recently published report titled Europe Offshore Wind Turbines Industry 2016 Market Research Report is an in depth study providing complete analysis of the industry for the period 2016 2021. It provides complete overview of Europe Offshore Wind Turbines market considering all the major industry trends, market dynamics and competitive scenario.The Europe Offshore Wind Turbines Industry Report 2016 is an in depth study analyzing the current state of the Europe Offshore Wind Turbines market. It provides brief overview of the market focusing on definitions, market segmentation, end-use applications and industry chain analysis. The study on Europe Offshore Wind Turbines market provides analysis of China market covering the industry trends, recent developments in the market and competitive landscape. Competitive analysis includes competitive information of leading players in China market, their company profiles, product portfolio, capacity, production, and company financials. In addition, report also provides upstream raw material analysis and downstream demand analysis along with the key development trends and sales channel analysis. Research study on Europe Offshore Wind Turbines market also discusses the opportunity areas for investors.View Full Report With Complete TOC, List Of Figure and Table:With153 tables and figures, the report provides key statistics on the state of the industry and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the market.7 Analysis of Offshore Wind Turbines Industry Key Manufacturers7.1 Vestas7.1.1 Company Profile7.1.2 Product Picture and Specifications7.1.2.1 Type I7.1.2.2 Type II7.1.2.3 Type III7.1.3 Capacity, Production, Price, Cost, Gross and Revenue7.1.4 Contact Information7.2 Siemens7.2.1 Company Profile7.2.2 Product Picture and Specifications7.2.2.1 Type I7.2.2.2 Type II7.2.2.3 Type III7.2.3 Capacity, Production, Price, Cost, Gross and Revenue7.2.4 Contact Information7.3 GE Energy7.3.1 Company Profile7.3.2 Product Picture and Specifications7.3.2.1 Type I7.3.2.2 Type II7.3.2.3 Type III7.3.3 Capacity, Production, Price, Cost, Gross and Revenue7.3.4 Contact Information7.4 Senvion7.4.1 Company Profile7.4.2 Product Picture and Specifications7.4.2.1 Type I7.4.2.2 Type II7.4.2.3 Type III7.4.3 Capacity, Production, Price, Cost, Gross and Revenue7.4.4 Contact Information7.5 Alstom7.5.1 Company Profile7.5.2 Product Picture and Specifications7.5.2.1 Type I7.5.2.2 Type II7.5.2.3 Type III7.5.3 Capacity, Production, Price, Cost, Gross and Revenue7.5.4 Contact Information7.6 Areva7.6.1 Company Profile7.6.2 Product Picture and Specifications7.6.2.1 Type I7.6.2.2 Type II7.6.2.3 Type III7.6.3 Capacity, Production, Price, Cost, Gross and Revenue7.6.4 Contact Information7.7 Clipper Windpower7.7.1 Company Profile7.7.2 Product Picture and Specifications7.7.2.1 Type I7.7.2.2 Type II7.7.2.3 Type III7.7.3 Capacity, Production, Price, Cost, Gross and Revenue7.7.4 Contact Information7.8 Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction7.8.1 Company Profile7.8.2 Product Picture and Specifications7.8.2.1 Type I7.8.2.2 Type II7.8.2.3 Type III7.8.3 Capacity, Production, Price, Cost, Gross and Revenue7.8.4 Contact Information7.9 Gamesa Technology7.9.1 Company Profile7.9.2 Product Picture and Specifications7.9.2.1 Type I7.9.2.2 Type II7.9.2.3 Type III7.9.3 Capacity, Production, Price, Cost, Gross and Revenue7.9.4 Contact Information7.10 CGN wind energy7.10.1 Company Profile7.10.2 Product Picture and Specifications7.10.2.1 Type I7.10.2.2 Type II7.10.2.3 Type III7.10.3 Capacity, Production, Price, Cost, Gross and Revenue7.10.4 Contact Information7.11 Nordex7.11.1 Company Profile7.11.2 Product Picture and Specifications7.11.2.1 Type I7.11.2.2 Type II7.11.2.3 Type III7.11.3 Capacity, Production, Price, Cost, Gross and Revenue7.11.4 Contact Information7.12 Dajin7.12.1 Company Profile7.12.2 Product Picture and Specifications7.12.2.1 Type I7.12.2.2 Type II7.12.2.3 Type III7.12.3 Capacity, Production, Price, Cost, Gross and Revenue7.12.4 Contact Information7.13 Sinovel7.13.1 Company Profile7.13.2 Product Picture and Specifications7.13.2.1 Type I7.13.2.2 Type II7.13.2.3 Type III7.13.3 Capacity, Production, Price, Cost, Gross and Revenue7.13.4 Contact Information7.14 Gold Wind7.14.1 Company Profile7.14.2 Product Picture and Specifications7.14.2.1 Type I7.14.2.2 Type II7.14.2.3 Type III7.14.3 Capacity, Production, Price, Cost, Gross and Revenue7.14.4 Contact Information7.15 United Power7.15.1 Company Profile7.15.2 Product Picture and Specifications7.15.2.1 Type I7.15.2.2 Type II7.15.2.3 Type III7.15.3 Capacity, Production, Price, Cost, Gross and Revenue7.15.4 Contact Information7.16 Sany7.16.1 Company Profile7.16.2 Product Picture and Specifications7.16.2.1 Type I7.16.2.2 Type II7.16.2.3 Type III7.16.3 Capacity, Production, Price, Cost, Gross and Revenue7.16.4 Contact Information7.17 XEMC7.17.1 Company Profile7.17.2 Product Picture and Specifications7.17.2.1 Type I7.17.2.2 Type II7.17.2.3 Type III7.17.3 Capacity, Production, Price, Cost, Gross and Revenue7.17.4 Contact Information7.18 Mingyang7.18.1 Company Profile7.18.2 Product Picture and Specifications7.18.2.1 Type I7.18.2.2 Type II7.18.2.3 Type III7.18.3 Capacity, Production, Price, Cost, Gross and Revenue7.18.4 Contact Information7.19 Zhejiang Windey Co.,Ltd7.19.1 Company Profile7.19.2 Product Picture and Specifications7.19.2.1 Type I7.19.2.2 Type II7.19.2.3 Type III7.19.3 Capacity, Production, Price, Cost, Gross and Revenue7.19.4 Contact Information7.20 Shanghai-electric7.20.1 Company Profile7.20.2 Product Picture and Specifications7.20.2.1 Type I7.20.2.2 Type II7.20.2.3 Type III7.20.3 Capacity, Production, Price, Cost, Gross and Revenue7.20.4 Contact Information7.21 Yinhe7.21.1 Company Profile7.21.2 Product Picture and Specifications7.21.2.1 Type I7.21.2.2 Type II7.21.2.3 Type III7.21.3 Capacity, Production, Price, Cost, Gross and Revenue7.21.4 Contact InformationDownload Sample this Report:Global QY Research is the one spot destination for all your research needs. Global QY Research holds the repository of quality research reports from numerous publishers across the globe. Our inventory of research reports caters to various industry verticals including Healthcare, Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Technology and Media, Chemicals, Materials, Energy, Heavy Industry, etc. With the complete information about the publishers and the industries they cater to for developing market research reports, we help our clients in making purchase decision by understanding their requirements and suggesting best possible collection matching their needs.Unit1, 26 Cleveland Road, South Woodford, London, E182AN, United KingdomEmail: sales@globalqyresearch.com According to the recent study the fluorosurfactant market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 9%from 2019 to 2024. Growth in this market is primarily driven by growing use of fluorosurfactant as wetting, leveling, and oil repelling agents in various industries. Browse XX figures / charts and XX tables in this 150 -page report to understand trends, opportunities and forecast in fluorosurfactant market by product type (nonionic, anionic, amphoteric, and Matrix successfully concluded its maiden solution conference, Insight held in Indonesia on 13th September 2018. Our solutions experts were approached by several of the attendees for details on our solutions. We were also able to get in touch with some prominent system integrators and end customers at the event. Matrix has been successfully conducting its solution conference Insight across various geographical locations. Our aim is to endorse our solutions in Biddeford-Saco-OOB Courier The board earmarked $1.54 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funds for the dredge, designed to keep channels open and supply sand to nourish eroding beaches up and down the York County coast and beyond. Prchard Parks Maya Clinard Orchard Parks Maya Clinard, far right, took runner-up in singles at this past weekends Section VI Girls Tennis Championships at... Boys soccer peaking into sectionals It was not an ideal start to the 2022 season for the Orchard Park boys soccer team, dropping its first... They said Dan Hart was crazy. They said he'd never make it. Nice guy, they said, but nope, not gonna work. German beers?? Maybe in Seattle, where Hart's partner, Chris Navarra, had opened a small chain of beer bars. But not in Portland. This is an IPA town, they told him. You know, our signature beer - big, bold, hoppy Northwest IPAs, the more bitter the better. Lagers? No, we don't do lagers. "It was a shock to the system for a lot of people," says Hart, a 36-year-old North Portland resident who grew up in Eugene. "They didn't understand we weren't going to serve IPA or PBR." But Hart knew what they had - beer of such "high quality that it sells itself." So he and Navarra opened German beer pubs - Prost! on North Mississippi Avenue in 2009 and Stammtisch in Northeast Portland in 2014 - to seize on what they felt was a growing desire for an alternative. The gamble appears to be paying off, as Hart says the bars are thriving, as are others in Portland. Beyond pub owners, German-style breweries seized the opportunity as well and began popping up -- from Heater Allen in McMinnville, to Zoiglhaus in Southeast Portland, to Occidental in North Portland. Where once German options were limited to the likes of Spaten or Bitburger at classic restaurants or bars like the Rheinlander and Berlin Inn, the past few years have seen a surge of bars pouring harder-to-find imports, and many breweries offering a German-style pilsner or other European-inspired alternative. That surge in popularity coincides with a significant historical moment: Saturday marks the 500th anniversary of "Reinheitsgebot," the German Beer Purity law adopted in 1516. The law, which dictated that water, hops and barley were the only three ingredients allowed in beer, governed and continues to influence brewing in the nation that traditionally led the world in beer production. Prost! and Stammtisch will throw celebrations Saturday to mark the 500th anniversary of April 23, 1516. At Prost!, the party will include roasting a whole pig, German music, rare beers, and taking over the Mississippi Marketplace food cart pod. Another pub that's seizing the moment is Stein Haus in Southeast Portland. Co-owner Jeremy Lewis will throw a festival Saturday showcasing beers adhering to Reinheitsgebot, and they'll tap a couple special brews as well. He and his partner opened Stein Haus in 2014 to "celebrate German beers, but we have such a great tradition here in Oregon of German-style beers that we wanted to celebrate that as well." The law began in Bavaria in 1516. Among the reasons for it, the government wanted to set the price of beer, which was a focal point of everyday life, so it would remain affordable, available and safe. Keeping wheat and rye out of beer would also keep those ingredients available for bakers and keep bread affordable. The result was centuries of refining and perfecting processes that results in today's German beers, made by breweries that have been around hundreds of years, dating back to the oldest existing brewery in the world, Weihenstephaner, started in 1040. Those centuries produced beer that Hart, a former bartender and one of the Portland area's foremost German beer experts, fell in love with from his first sip. He and Navarra believed there was a market in Portland for a lighter, crisper style. A market that pushed back on what some saw as Portland's own self-enforced version of Reinheitsgebot - that all beers must be adhere to the hoppy IPA code. "Just because it's clear doesn't mean it's not good," says Hart, adding that brewers from across the city are regular patrons at his bars. "With so many IPAs on the market, to be able to create a 'river beer' that was good - I really thought that could work. I thought that would be big." Brewers like Occidental's Dan Engler and Heater Allen's Rick Allen took a chance as well. Allen, who started Heater Allen Brewing in 2007 in McMinnville, says he was nervous about whether German-style beers would be popular in Oregon, but he didn't see anyone else doing it so he spent a lot of homebrewing time trying to re-create what he had tasted in Europe. Turns out, he didn't need to worry. He can't come close to keeping up with demand, he says. "I think that the surge in German-style brewing is related to the surge in the number of craft breweries in Oregon. Everyone is looking for a niche, or a flagship beer, and it's hard to compete with some of the excellent beers made in Oregon in more popular styles," Allen says. "I like to think that we helped prove that German-style beers had a following in the Portland market and the style has room to grow." Like Hart, Engler said that when he started out, brewers told him the style would never work in Portland. But it was during what he calls the "hops arms race," when many breweries were trying to make the hoppiest beer in town. He had no interest in that, and sensed the time was right for an alternative. "The market has grown to have 'German-style' craft brews be as crafty as any other beer," says Engler, who opened Occidental in the shadow of the St. Johns Bridge next to Cathedral Park in 2011. "For 15 to 20 years, craft beer was all in the English style, then Belgian styles crept in, but there was a backlash against it, where people confused lagers with Budweiser or something." Double Mountain Brewery co-founder Charlie Devereaux says he has grown enamored of lagers over recent years, and a trip to Germany and the Czech Republic cemented that part of his palate. The result is his latest endeavor - Wayfinder - which will open in inner Southeast Portland by early summer. Devereaux says Wayfinder is "gonna flip the script a little bit," with the goal to brew half its beers as lagers and the other half ales. "There are times when you want to be punched in the face with hops, and there are other times when you want a different experience, and lagers provide that," Devereaux said this week. "Not to say you can't make hoppy lagers, we're going to do that, too. For all of the tradition and excellence, however, the whole benefit of Reinheitsgebot isn't always so cut and dried. Its detractors say the law stifled the industry and restricted development of more creative brewing. Reinheitsgebot law, which flexed over time to add ingredients such as yeast, was chipped away further in the past 25 years as outside influences changed market demands in Germany. The law remains in place but is easily sidestepped, being used to uphold tradition and as a marketing tool. The brewers at Southeast Portland's Baerlic Brewing are onboard with that anti-establishment thinking. To that end, they're celebrating the anniversary by throwing "Reinheitsge-NOT," a beerfest showcasing the basic ingredients - and pretty much anything brewers want to throw in there. Coffee? Spices? Fruit? Into the kettle. Co-owners and brewers Rik Hall and Ben Parsons, who started Baerlic near Ladd's Addition in 2014, have invited 13 other breweries to develop beers for Reinheitsge-NOT. They'll tap those Saturday, promoting the idea of creativity and rule-breaking. "We're not trying to have a wacky beerfest, but we just want to see what can be done," Parsons said last week while taking a break from brewing. "Everyone in the industry knows what the Reinheitsgebot is, but we do creative things to break it. Baerlic is representative of breweries across Portland pushing the boundaries with new recipes. They'll add basics ingredients to change things a bit - oats, rice, all kinds of sugars, even yogurt, Hall said. It's not that they don't respect Reinheitsgebot, it's just that at Baerlic - which means "of barley" in old English -- they don't like rules. "It's a way to have fun with it," Parsons says of Reinheitsge-NOT. None of that discourages Hart. In fact, he embraces Portland's creative beer culture. But his passion lies in the heart of the German tradition. And the celebrations Saturday aren't just about festivities -- he says Reinheitsgebot has cultural relevance today. "This anniversary is a moment in time - it's such a huge moment in history," the owner of Prost! says. "Not only for us, but for a city like Portland, which takes such pride in its beer and food culture. Something like Reinheitsgebot gives us a sense of context. It justifies the art of brewing in history. "That's why everyone should have this date marked on their calendar." -- Andre Meunier 503-221-8444 German beers are enjoying a surge in popularity in Portland and the Northwest, as some beer drinkers look for an alternative to the big, hoppy IPAs that have dominated our palates for years. That means more people are becoming familiar with Reinheitsgebot, the German Beer Purity laws that for 500 years have governed brewing in the nation that is the world's beer capital. The laws, which have their anniversary Saturday, originally dictated that breweries could only use three ingredients for beer: water, hops and barley, though changes have been made over time. That produced the clean, crisp, light style for which German beers are known. And while it might be easy to drink German beers and understand Reinheitsgebot, it's not so easy to say. Reinwhatsaboat? Reinhiresamoat? So before you watch the video above, try it for yourself and see what you come up with. Then see what a few patrons of our local beer bars offered up as they looked at "Reinheitsgebot" written on paper for two seconds, then gave it their best try. For more on Reinheitsgebot: Reinheitsge-NOT Reinheitsgebot Find it in the Portland area -- Andre Meunier 503-221-8444 Five hundred years ago, the Duke of Bavaria issued the Reinheitsgebot, the German Beer Purity Law of 1516. Several Portland bars are celebrating it in their own ways. Party at Prost!: This popular North Portland German beer joint will honor the Reinheitsgebot with a party both at the bar and the adjoining Mississippi Marketplace. On tap will be special German beers released specifically for the anniversary and in the style typical of German beers from 1516, according to a press release. These beers will be available at Prost! this month and are the highlight of the party Saturday, April 23, when there will be a ceremonial keg at 2 p.m. But what's German beer without German food? Graham Chaney, chef at Prost's sister bar, Stammtisch, will roast a pig and serving it with the traditional dishes and trimmings of the early 16th century. Happy Hans will play German music throughout the day. Reinheitsgebot 500th anniversary party, noon-10 p.m. at Prost and the Mississippi Marketplace, 4237 N. Mississippi Ave. Free. Eat like it's 1516: At Stammtisch, chef Chaney will feature food specials all month inspired by what people of the 1500s were eating eisbein, fried potatoes and sauteed cabbage; blutwurst, blood sausage with kraut and mashers and labskaus, browned onions, corned beef, potatoes, rollmops (pickled herring fillets), egg and pickled beets. The Reinheitsgebot beer lineup at both Stammtisch and Prost! includes Weihenstephaner 1516, Radeberger Zwickl and Andechs Bergbock. They'll also be getting the Warsteiner Braumeister, but it may be after April 23. Reinheitsgebot 500th anniversary, Stammtisch, 401 N.E. 28th Ave. Be an iconoclast: Having a little fun with the anniversary is Reinheitsge-NOT, a celebration that honors the rules by breaking them. It's hosted by Baerlic Brewing, which invited some rule-breaking fellow beer makers. More than 13 breweries are on board. Check out the list and what they're bringing. Here's the event page. Reinheitsge-NOT party, noon-5 p.m., Saturday, April 23, Baerlic Brewing Co., 2235 S.E. 11th Ave. Tickets $20 lightbar A 35-year-old Oregon City man is at the intensive care unit in a hospital after Clackamas County sheriff's deputies said he ingested drugs during a high speed chase Thursday morning in a rural area. (The Oregonian/OregonLive/file) A 35-year-old Oregon City man is at a hospital's intensive care unit after Clackamas County sheriff's deputies believe he ingested drugs during a high speed chase Thursday morning. At 4:40 a.m., Clackamas County deputies attempted to stop a 1997 Honda Accord that had license plates belonging to a 1992 Toyota Camry on Southeast McLoughlin Boulevard near Concord Road, said Sgt. Brian Jensen, spokesman. A chase ensued for about 12 minutes with speeds reaching up to 75 miles per hour, until the vehicle stopped on its own, he said in a brief statement. Deputies arrested James R. Williams, but shortly after, he began sweating and then began to convulse, Jensen said. Emergency crews rushed Williams to St. Vincent Hospital where he was last known to be in the intensive care unit. If arrested, he will be accused of possession of a controlled substance (meth), reckless driving, attempting to elude a police officer and felony parole violation. -- The Oregonian Is cheap chicken worth the way we get it, asks Nicholas Kristof in one of his latest columns. The Oregon-born New York Times writer wrote about a report from an animal rights group, Compassion in Wold Farming, that highlights the stories of a few chicken farmers. The premise is similar to John Oliver's segment for his HBO show Last Week Tonight on large-scale chicken farming that went viral. Kristof quotes one of the farmers, who says the system is working exactly as it is supposed to. "'I wouldn't say it is dysfunctional,' Weaver told me. 'More like it is functioning very well for the companies and their executives only, and very poorly for farmers and consumers.'" However, seeing how mass chicken farming is done freaks out a lot of consumers. To eat as much chicken as the world does, as cheaply as it does, farmers contend that this is the system consumers want. "Today's business model is infinitely more efficient, but it also raises environmental concerns such as antibiotic overuse and is fundamentally oppressive for animals and farmers alike," Kristof said. After years of working side-by-side in Northeast Portland, Hale Pele's Blair Reynolds and Coco Donuts' partner Ian Christopher opened their own space together earlier this month in the Burnside 26 apartment building. Americano, their coffee-bar-by-day, cocktail-bar-by-night concept, opened April 1 with all-day hours, a daily brunch menu and a lengthy list of long-drinking cocktails. In the mornings, Americano serves a short menu of coffees, cocktails and brunch from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. every day. Look for dishes like grits and grillades, a New Orleans classic, potato waffles with smoked salmon, hash brown poutine and more from Chris DeBarr, a New Orleans chef with stints at Commander's Palace, Delachaise Wine Bar and Green Goddess. Rotating pastries and cakes are from Fleur de Lis Bakery. At night, the space switches over to a European-inspired cocktail bar influenced by the Americano, an Italian cafe cocktail made with Campari, sweet vermouth and club soda. Expect cocktails that are amaro-driven and low-alcohol, like the aperitif press pots -- fortified with vermouths and seasonal herbs and fruits -- vermouth flights, boozy coffee sippers and more from bar manager Kate Bolton, the former bar director at Maven in San Francisco. Americano is located at 2605 E. Burnside St. They are open from 7 a.m. to midnight daily. -- Samantha Bakall sbakall@oregonian.com Follow @sambakall Portland sons and daughters, it is time to think about Mother's Day. And what better way to celebrate Mom's special day in Portland than by jumping into our city's storied brunch scene. But what are Portland's best brunch spots? This is an important consideration as you plan your holiday celebration (hint: Mother's Day is May 8). When you're ready for that classic weekend midday dining experience, what restaurants always come to mind? Nominate them in our survey below. The Oregonian/OregonLive restaurant critics Samantha Bakall and Michael Russell have made their picks for Portland's 10 best brunches. What do you think of their choices? 10. Milk Glass mkt, 2150 N. Killingsworth St. 9. Pho Oregon, 2518 N.E. 82nd Ave. 8. Roost, 1403 S.E. Belmont St. 7. Pure Spice, 2446 S.E. 87th Ave. 6. Han Oak, 511 N.E. 24th Ave. 5. The Big Egg, 3039 N.E. Alberta St. 4. Coquine, 6839 S.E. Belmont St. 3. Tasty N Sons, 580 S.W. 12th Ave. 2. Sweedeedee, 5202 N. Albina Ave. 1. Muscadine, 1465 N.E. Prescott St. Now it's time to determine the People's Choice for Portland's best brunch spots. We've started a menu of choices in the poll below. Vote for 10 and feel free to write in any locations we might have missed. Any restaurant known for its brunch in Clackamas, Multnomah or Washington county qualifies. The winning restaurant will receive a "Best of Oregon" badge for all to see. (See full terms and conditions.) Here's the voting schedule: April 21-26: Nominations accepted in the poll below April 28-May 3: Final vote from People's Choice finalists May 4: People's Choice winner will be announced. Last, and this is important, tell us in the comments why you recommend the restaurants you've nominated. Or, send me an email to kgabrielson@oregonian.com explaining what's so great about your favorite brunch spots. Now it's time. Nominate your favorite brunch spots below and tell us: What are Portland's best brunches. -- Kjerstin Gabrielson, kgabrielson@oregonian.com LifeWise Health Plan of Oregon is pulling out of the state's competitive insurance market. The company, headquartered in a Seattle suburb, will continue covering its individual customers through the end of the year and will eliminate group plans at the end of their term this year or in 2017. The decision follows years losses, including $36 million in 2015, and a shrinking customer base. "We have been losing money over a number of years," said Melanie Coon, a company spokeswoman. "We've been thinking about this for a while." In 2004, LifeWise served 163,000 customers but now has 50,000 patients on individual and group plans. It's struggled to compete in Oregon with more than a dozen carriers. "Oregon is a relatively small state with quite a few carriers," said Jake Sunderland, spokesman for the Oregon Insurance Division. "It's a very competitive market." LifeWise's customer base represents 2 percent of the total market, according to the state's Department of Consumer and Business Services. LifeWise will continue to serve customers in Washington state and Alaska, Coon said. -- Lynne Terry A local musician admitted Wednesday in Washington County Circuit Court to sexually abusing two young girls several years ago. Shaun A. Toman, 33, of Cornelius, pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree sexual abuse and one count of using a child in display of sexually explicit conduct before Judge Suzanne Upton. As part of a plea deal, Toman faces 20 years in prison at his sentencing next week, Senior Deputy District Attorney Kevin Barton told the court. Toman, represented by John Tyner, will also be charged with luring a minor, an allegation that involves a third girl. Toman was a guitarist for local rockabilly band, The Twangshifters, and was arrested in November after a months-long police investigation. The Hillsboro Police Department initially said that Toman, a guitar teacher, had abused some of his students. On Wednesday, Barton said he didn't know whether the two victims had taken lessons from him. They knew one another because they all lived in the same neighborhood, the prosecutor said. Police started investigating Toman last May after one of the girls disclosed the abuse to her parents, Barton said. They, in turn, consulted neighbors about Toman and eventually a woman came forward and said she'd been abused as a teenager. One of the parents then alerted police. One of the girls disclosed that, in 2010, when she was 11 years old and her father was deployed in Afghanistan, Toman often visited her house, Barton said. He was 28 years old. During one visit, Toman fixed a computer at the girl's home, and she was delighted that the machine was working again. But Toman told the child that if she wanted to use the computer she needed to do him a favor, Barton said. Toman instructed the girl to kneel on the kitchen floor and close her eyes. Barton said he then touched the girl's face with his penis. Afterward, the girl didn't tell anyone what happened, according to the prosecutor. During a police interview, Toman denied abusing the girl but recalled accidentally exposing himself to her after using the restroom one day, Barton said. Toman told police he reported that encounter to the girl's parents. Barton told the court that Toman also sexually abused the second girl in the neighborhood over the course of several years. The abuse started in 2002, when the girl was 13 and Toman was 20, and continued until 2007. Toman admitted to recording sex acts with the girl during an interview with detectives, according to the prosecutor. He'd also shown a neighbor a photo of the girl performing a sex act on him, but she did not report it to police at the time, Barton said. Police discovered two other girls whom Toman possibly tried to lure, Barton said, but the state will not move forward with those cases under the terms of the plea agreement. Toman is scheduled to be back in court for sentencing Tuesday afternoon. -- Rebecca Woolington 503-294-4049; @rwoolington Portland's Morrison Bridge will light up in purple tonight to honor the legendary and influential musician Prince, who died on Thursday. Minnesotans turned out to honor their hometown hero with memorials in Minneapolis, and at Paisley Park Studios, where Prince lived and recorded. Similar tributes were seen in Cleveland and New York. The MultCoBridges twitter account shared plans to light up the bridge in response to a inquiry. @rsadowsky @trimet In fact, YES. Morrison will be lit purple tonight in honor of Prince. MultCo Bridges (@MultCoBridges) April 21, 2016 Multnomah County Chairwoman Deborah Kafoury also spread the word. Tonight, the Morrison Bridge lights will glow in purple in honor of Prince. @MultCoBridges @multco Deborah Kafoury (@dkafoury) April 21, 2016 Prince, 57, was found dead at his home in Chanhassen, Minnesota. A seven-time Grammy winner, he's known for many hits including his iconic album, "Purple Rain." The album went diamond when released in 1984 and Prince won an Oscar for original song score for his movie by the same title. See our full coverage of Prince's death here. The bridge isn't the only local tribute to the musician. Portland's Voodoo Doughnuts created tribute doughnuts and is also selling Prince-themed raspberry-filled confections. --Laura Frazier lfrazier@oregonian.com 503-294-4035 @frazier_laura For as long as I can remember - heck, since Hillary Clinton last lived in the White House - the wrangling over the cleanup of the Portland harbor has been as infuriating and intractable as a rush-hour rendezvous with the Ross Island Bridge. After 16 years of gridlock, however, the Environmental Protection Agency is almost ready for your closing remarks. Your advocacy. Your frustration. Your perspective on how to finally begin the rescue operation on a river that's hell on carp and bass and anything, or anyone, in the food chain that eats them. As Cami Grandinetti, the agency's regional cleanup manager, told the Portland City Council in February, "We expect there will be substantial comments." For much of the 20th century, an 11-mile stretch of the Willamette was a dumping ground for every toxic byproduct of the city's riverfront industries. For all of this century, EPA and the "potentially responsible parties" for the Superfund contamination - including our very own city of quirks - have bickered over how to police the carcinogenic mess. "In my view," city Commissioner Nick Fish says, "Superfund is the most significant environmental, regulatory, public health and jobs issue facing the city of Portland today and for the next decade." Come May, the EPA will finally ask the rest of us to weigh in on a cleanup proposal that may cost $1.5 billion or more. You can write in, or storm one of the as-yet-unscheduled public meetings. But, for God's sake, step up and say something. You might argue, as Vigor Industrial's Alan Sprott does, that the feds' "draconian liability scheme" threatens jobs and economic investment on the waterfront. You might agree with Bob Sallinger at the Audubon Society, who contends that the Lower Willamette Group - a coalition of polluters that counts the city and the Port of Portland as members - has prolonged the debate with inept feasibility studies and endless document requests. Or you might ruminate with city Commissioner Steve Novick that an expensive cleanup would not "transform" the city as dramatically as a similar investment in bike paths and affordable housing. But once the EPA unfurls that first draft of its historic proposal, you best get up to speed in a hurry. "The public is going to have 60 days to read this document and absorb it," Sallinger notes. "The Environmental Protection Agency and potential responsible parties have had 16 years to discuss and negotiate and haggle over the process." As Grandinetti concedes, "This is a complicated river," and the cleanup of the contaminated sediment is further complicated by the fact that the Superfund is broke. Yes, federal law still requires that those responsible for the pollution pay for the river's restoration. But to date, the bill for this wrangling over what restoration means -- $62 million and counting - has largely been passed on to city ratepayers on their sewer-and-water bills. Once upon a time, the state was charged with the harbor cleanup. Mike Rosen, then with the Department of Environmental Quality, recalls the meeting in the late 1990s when Environmental Protection Agency officials arrived in Portland to announce they would take command and complete the cleanup in three years. "It's the only time in my career that I literally saw jaws drop," says Rosen, now on the Portland School Board. Since the harbor was designated a Superfund site in 2000, all manner of things have come unhinged. EPA has been underfunded, maligned and outmaneuvered. The agency desperately wants a record of decision before President Barack Obama leaves office, and the politics have only grown more intense as the deadline looms. Rep. Kurt Schrader has hammered EPA for hurting "economic development in our region." And because the city and major local employers are on the hook for a sizable chunk of the cleanup costs, Novick challenged Grandinetti at a council work session on how dramatically the effort will reduce cancer risks for city residents. "All of his questions came straight from the talking points of corporate polluters," Sallinger says. "I thought that was very disappointing." "I think dirty diesel vehicles are the biggest local environmental health threat," Novick wrote to me in a subsequent email. "We aren't spending lots of money on that." If much about the proposed cleanup remains in doubt - especially the crucial balance between dredging and "natural recovery" - Fish insists no one should question the city's resolve. "Some of the polluters may think they can drag this out for another 20 years in the courts," Fish says. "Some of the environmentalists may think they'll get a better deal with the new administration. "Whatever the logic, I reject it. We want a plan." Fishermen, kayakers, shipbuilders, ratepayers, provocateurs, gather round: At long last, the Environmental Protection Agency is asking what you want. Will your comment, your questions, your passion count for anything? A lot more than your silence will. -- Steve Duin stephen.b.duin@gmail.com Hillary5.JPG Flanked by supporters, Hillary Clinton, second from left, celebrates after winning the New York primary election on Tuesday. (AP Photo) By the editors of Bloomberg View Imagine if states prohibited some citizens from voting based on their political beliefs. The reaction, justifiably, would be outrage. Yet about a dozen states already do exactly that, with hardly a word of protest. Much of the current national debate over voting rights has centered on overly stringent voter identification laws. But the single largest impediment to voter participation is a system that barely arouses notice: closed primaries that exclude anyone who declines to join a political party. In the most recent presidential primary election, New York's on Tuesday, about 1 in 4 voters were prohibited from casting ballots because they do not belong to either major political party. On April 26, the same fate will befall independent voters in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania. Democrats and Republicans alike have tended to defend or discount the wholesale disenfranchisement of independent voters in closed primaries, arguing that it's their choice not to join a party. But membership in a party should not be a prerequisite for equal access to the polls when the election is paid for by the public and administered by the state. More than a dozen states require voters to join a party in advance of primary day. New York sets the most egregious deadline: People must sign up by October of the previous year to vote in a primary. This year, New York will hold three separate primaries: one for president (April), one for Congress (June) and one for state offices (September) -- at a cost to taxpayers of about $25 million each. Some states with closed primaries and caucuses (including Iowa and New Hampshire) permit independents to declare a party affiliation on the day of voting, then allow them to revert to their independent status after casting their ballots. This practice at least ensures that no voter is turned away because of his or her political beliefs. Nationally, more than 40 percent of voters identify as independents. Compared to party regulars, they are more likely to back outsider candidates and those who buck the party line, which is precisely why many party leaders and ideological activists prefer to exclude them. This year, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are doing well among independents, who helped propel Barack Obama and John McCain to the general election in 2008. Of course, requiring open primaries may lead some state parties to switch to caucuses, which have lower turnout and tend to favor partisans over independents. But parties may find that abandoning primaries backfires on them, by making it even harder to reverse their membership declines and fueling support for outsider candidates. If parties wish to take on the expense of running their nominating process, as they do with caucuses, they are free to set their own rules concerning participation. But when they act in official partnership with state and local governments, and taxpayers spend millions of dollars to administer the nominating contests, then all registered voters should have equal access to the ballot box. (c) 2016, Bloomberg View Presidential candidates: All the discussions since Brian Doyle's April 8 op-ed reviewing candidate Trump's qualifications for the presidency have missed an important point that will endanger this republic: Four of the five candidates still standing are too old to actually do the job! Look at the last three presidents, who each served 8 years; they were 46 (Bill Clinton), 54 (George W. Bush) and 47 (Barack Obama) when they were first inaugurated. Compare photos of their first inauguration to photos near the end of their presidency. You can see how the stress of that office physically wore them down and accelerated the normal aging process. Candidates Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and John Kasich are already decades older at 74, 69, 68, and 63, respectively. This group will not have the stamina required to effect their agendas, no matter the philosophy. Worse, their administration would be filled with long-term colleagues who are likely equally past their "best by" dates, rendering their governance sclerotic at best. These four candidates already take "breaks" from the rigors of campaigning with various excuses, such as "strategizing sessions," but the 21st century United States presidency will not give them that kind of time off. We citizens dare not make any of them our leader. Dennis Medley Hillsboro * Presidential candidates: Like many Americans, I am evaluating the 2016 presidential candidates. I have made it my goal to find positive, constructive and helpful media pieces. My conclusion: This election, its candidates, party committees, platforms, money, media coverage, caucus rules and even the street level supporters are dividing us. I feel I have come to understand the positive merits of each candidate. I'm not blind; I can see the negatives of each, but that's too easy. We get the negative thrown at us constantly. It divides us. Divided we can't see that we need to bring fiscal conservatism and social tolerance under one banner. It must happen! The two-party chokehold on American politics, with its great national divide between Democrats and Republicans, is killing us. We need a bridge across America -- and that bridge is the Libertarian Party. Specifically its presidential candidate (and former New Mexico governor), Gary Johnson. You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I have changed my party affiliation. I have registered to vote Libertarian. In my opinion, a vote cast with a clear conscience is not a wasted vote. Furthermore, Gov. Johnson is an executive-caliber candidate. We don't have to choose between the lesser of two evils from the dominant parties, and in this political environment that truly is revolutionary. I challenge you: Don't just change the face -- change the system. Be Libertarian with me. Scott Scrimshaw Hood River * A 'tyrannical' Northwest?: In Scott Holland's April 18 letter, he declares that "governments in the Pacific Northwest (are) becoming increasingly tyrannical." I wish he had given some specifics, since I think most of us have noticed no dramatic change. Holland blames this tyranny on the Democratic National Committee. The DNC and the Republican National Committee are not government agencies; they are both private entities, and their power consists of controlling the campaigns and election of their members. Holland calls the Democrats "toxic" because of the recent acrimonious debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Then he says he's voting for Donald Trump. Did he miss all the Republican debates? Jan Brady Tigard By Linda Bentz My family has lived and worked in southeast Oregon since the 1800s. We are people of the land and for the land. Our businesses have worked hand-in-hand with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and Oregon Department of State Lands to care for this land since the agencies were created. With our intimate knowledge of the lands, we assist in reporting, locating and fighting rangeland fires and helping with search and rescues missions. Our goal for our own land and the public's land is to maintain a healthy, viable sagebrush ecosystem in the high desert of southeast Oregon. Now, all of this may come to an end. An outdoor clothing corporation and special interest groups have proclaimed 2.5 million acres in southeast Oregon "unprotected" in their campaign to pressure President Obama to turn the land into a monument. To call this public land "unprotected" is like saying the land in downtown Portland has no zoning code. The Owyhee Canyonlands along the Oregon-Idaho-Nevada border and the water and wildlife that run through it enjoy protections from more than seven layers of local, state and federal government and are actively managed by professional resource managers employed by the three state or federal agencies. The protections include at least five federal acts (Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968, Endangered Species Act of 1973, Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 and Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979) and three land-use plans (Federal Land Policy and Management Act, Southeastern Oregon Resource Management Plan of 2002 and Oregon Greater Sage-Grouse Approved Resource Management Plan of 2015). When likely Oregon voters were told in a recent poll about the existing protections and plans in place for these lands, 61 percent said the Owyhee Canyonlands has enough protection. This monument declaration doesn't offer further protection. It's more an act of exclusion. Once a monument is declared, public lands become less accessible, not more. It would restrict road maintenance, and that would inhibit search and rescue and firefighting operations. It would also restrict ranchers' ability to care for the land under their grazing permits, limiting our ability to maintain water sources and reservoirs that benefit all wildlife. The monument would limit access for people who are not aggressive hikers, especially the elderly, handicapped and veterans. Those who enjoy hunting, fishing, rafting and viewing birds, wildlife and wildflowers in the Canyonlands area will also be greatly restricted. Special interest groups are urging President Obama to act alone under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to cut Congress and our community out of this decision. But their agenda runs counter to the voice of Oregonians across the state, from Malheur County to Multnomah County. At the ballot in March, 90 percent of Malheur County voters opposed the idea. In the poll of likely Multnomah County voters, 69 percent agreed that Congress should get a voice in the decision. Polls show the feeling is the same in urban and rural Oregon. This land belongs to everyone -- not just members of select interest groups. We all deserve a voice in the future of our land. This is an extreme overreach of presidential power. The people of the Oregon need to stand and be heard from Malheur County to Multnomah County. It is our land and our voice. * Rancher Linda Bentz lives in Juntura and is a sixth-generation rancher in the Owyhee Canyonlands. She is a member of the Owyhee Basin Stewardship Coalition. potholes.JPG A city of Portland street maintenance crew led fixes potholes on Swan Island in 2009. (Stephanie Yao/Staff) A couple of years ago, Portland Mayor Charlie Hales and Commissioner Steve Novick struggled mightily, and clumsily, to raise money for road maintenance. The increasingly desperate process dragged on for months until January 2015, when the mayor suspended the effort in order to give legislators a "clean shot" to negotiate a statewide transportation funding package. After the funding effort in Salem fizzled, City Council proposed a local gas tax of 10 cents per gallon. Portlanders will vote on that tax in May, and they should say "no." As they do so, however, they should give Novick and his colleagues credit for learning from their earlier missteps and proposing a simple and temporary funding mechanism. Voters also should hold out hope that City Council will come back, if necessary, with a better-focused proposal after the 2017 legislative session, when lawmakers again will consider a statewide transportation package. Oregonian editorials reflect the collective opinion of The Oregonian editorial board, which operates independently of the newsroom. are Helen Jung, Erik Lukens, Steve Moss and Len Reed. To respond to this editorial: Post your comment below, submit a , or write a . If you have questions about the opinion section, contact Erik Lukens, editorial and commentary editor, at or 503-221-8142. No one seriously questions the need for Portland to spend more on roads. The city's maintenance backlog surpassed $1 billion last year, according to a report by the Portland Bureau of Transportation, which Novick oversees. To meet pavement-condition benchmarks, the report estimated, Portland would have to spend about $119 million per year for a decade. The city doesn't spend anywhere near that much, which is one reason the backlog keeps growing. It was $916 million a year earlier. Failing to maintain pavement, meanwhile, has widely understood consequences, which range from an unpleasant ride to added public expense. It's axiomatic that roads are far less expensive to maintain than they are to rehabilitate for lack of maintenance. Why, then, oppose a 10-cent hike in the local gas tax (Multnomah County already taxes fuel at 3 cents per gallon)? Because much of the revenue wouldn't be used to fix the core problem: maintenance-starved pavement. The tax would raise about $16 million per year for four years, at which point voters would have to renew it. Of that annual $16 million, City Council has proposed to use only $9 million -- or 56 percent -- on street repairs. The other 44 percent would be used for a variety of other transportation projects, including traffic calming, sidewalk construction, crosswalk improvements and bicycle routes. City Council deserves credit for proposing a straightforward gas tax rather than a household fee or a complex and progressive mechanism of the sort Novick considered shortly before last year's brainstorming hiatus. The city also deserves credit for putting the matter before voters and for ensuring accountability by requiring a renewal vote after a few years. But when you're proposing to raise $16 million as a way to address a $119 million annual street maintenance crisis, doesn't it make sense to spend all, or nearly all, of the revenue on pavement? That isn't to say that sidewalk construction, crosswalk improvements and the like are unimportant. That couldn't be further from the truth, and commissioners should seek to pay for such projects to the extent that they can without using money generated by a citywide gas tax. The city, recall, maneuvered itself into today's crisis by failing to prioritize maintenance in years past even as transportation revenues rose, the city auditor's office explained in 2013. Portland could have maintained its roads better, but chose instead to spend money on other things -- "streetcar operations, downtown marketing, and transit mall upkeep." It's time, finally, to treat the city's crumbling pavement as a priority, and the proposed gas tax does not do that. To raise 56 cents for road repairs, motorists are expected to spend 44 cents on other things. No, thanks. Saying "no" to this proposal may have a pair of beneficial effects, beginning in next year's legislative session. Lawmakers are expected to consider, once again, a funding package that would involve a hike in the state gas tax. Oregon needs such a funding package, and to that end boosting the state gas tax will be a lot easier if residents of Oregon's biggest city aren't paying 10 cents per gallon more at the pump than they are now. Let's hope, meanwhile, that Portland city councilors will take failure in May as an argument not to repeat the spread-the-revenue approach should they ask voters to approve a local gas tax once again. Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Richard Fleming, a resident of Mount Pleasant, will sign copies of his book at 7:30 a.m. April 29 Book Signing Event WHEN: 2016-04-29 TIME: 7:30 a.m. WHERE: Saginaw Sunrise Rotary Club, 4599 Towne Centre Rd, Saginaw, MI 48604 WHAT: Fleming, a resident of Mt Pleasant, MI, will be available to sign copies of his book, Wetzel Who in the west has not heard of Wetzel, the daring borderer the Boone of North-Western Virginia. ---Wills de Hass, 1851 Lewis Wetzel came of age near the end of the Revolutionary War and was an important participant in the twenty-year war between the woodland Indian Nations and the settlers of western Pennsylvania, western Virginia, and Kentucky. The novel, although classified as historical fiction, traces Wetzels life over a period of more than twenty years, featuring events and the rich history that occurred in the upper Ohio River Valley, Kentucky, Ohio, and down the Mississippi to New Orleans. According to de Hass, a historian in the mid-nineteenth century, Wetzels efforts were without parallel in border warfare. ### For more information, contact Michelle Whitman at michelle@keymgc.com April 21-22, 26 MMCC Community Theatre will present Escanaba in Da Moonlight in the Harrison campus auditorium. Tickets are $10. Call (989) 386-6640 or (989) 802-1771 for information and tickets. April 22-24 Bay City Players will present Crazy for You at the players, 1214 Columbus Ave., Bay City. For ticket info, www.baycityplayers.com. Friday, April 22 There will be a Full Moon Stroll at 8 p.m. at the Chippewa Nature Center. For more info, www.chippewanaturecenter.org. Saturday, April 23 Chippewa Nature Center will host Experience Earth Day at 10 a.m. featuring stewardship activities that benefit the planet. For more info, www.chippewanaturecenter.org. Monday, April 25 The Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum at Saginaw Valley State University will host a flash mob for International Sculpture Day. Participants are invited to bring a few pieces of material to add to a public sculpture. For more info, (989) 964-2032. Wednesday, April 27 Center Stage Youth Choirs will present Music of the British Isles at 7 p.m. at the Midland Center for the Arts. For more info, www.mcfta.org. Historian Scott Seeburger shares the story of Tim McCoy, Michigans Great Cowboy at 7 p.m. at Creative 360. Registration is required. For more info, www.becreative360.org. The Michigan Small Business Development Center will offer a How to Buy and Sell a Business workshop on Thursday, April 28, from 9 a.m.-1 p.m. at Mid Michigan Community College in Mount Pleasant, Community Rooms 186 and 187. The cost is $25 to attend (boxed lunch provided). Payment may be completed online or charged by phone by calling SBDC West Michigan at (616) 331-7370. Professor Susan Masten came to the Midland Center for the Arts Saturday afternoon with one thing on her mind: educating those who attended her presentation about the chemistry of water and how it led to the crisis in Flint. The presentation was sponsored by the American Chemical Society and the MCFTA. Masten, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Michigan State University, was asked in October by a former student if she would like to help attack the problem that arose when the Flint City Council, Emergency Manager Ed Kurtz and Michigan Treasurer Andy Dillon decided to switch Flints water intake from Detroits treated Lake Huron water to the Flint River, despite warnings from the Flint water quality supervisor that the city wasnt ready for the change. Masten pointed out that the issue in Flint is a complicated one, and that it is not an isolated case in the United States, perhaps just the most studied one. Without getting too deep into the weeds of the nearly two-hour presentation on how chemistry played a part in creating the lead crisis in Flint, Masten concluded that the problem itself is multifaceted, and that the answer to the crisis, too, is complex. The answer, she said, is not as simple as it is portrayed in the media that is that simply adding phosphates to the water would have, and still would, solve the problem. Phosphate should have been added to control corrosion. We do not know whether or not simply adding phosphate would have been sufficient to prevent the corrosion in Flint, given the other changes that occurred in the water chemistry, she said. So what have we learned? If nothing else, weve learned how important water chemistry is, she said. The whole corrosion issue is dependent on the chemistry of the water and not maintaining control of that chemistry can have significant detrimental effects on your distribution system. Your distribution system is a chemical reactor, 600 miles of chemical reactor. Shes learned that data measuring corrosion was not used, a problem she is working on now. We need to be looking beyond simply meeting regulations, she said. Our job is to protect public health. Masten took her audience through a history lesson on the Flint water system, as well as a detailed description of how the water gets from the Flint River, through the treatment system and into homes. And how, in Flints case, that the mixture of chemicals used actually corroded the protective coating in the water lines in the distribution system. Soon after the switch, city residents reported problems with the water coming from their taps. They included problems with rashes, color, odor and taste, she said. The water was being treated in a newly renovated water treatment plant, but the chemicals added solved some of the problems, such as softening the water and eliminating microbials. However, it caused other, unforeseen, complications. The initial complaints were about rashes. Then there were, as I have mentioned before, color, odor. By August 2014, there were three boil water alerts in a 22-day time period for exceedences for E. coli, she said. By November, it was known to the city and the state that there were exceedences of trihalomenthane, a byproduct of the disinfectant that was used to treat microbials. So with the city and DEQ focusing on regulations, the lost sight of the bigger picture, looking at the water system holistically and protecting public health. And that bigger picture was about to erupt nationally. It was in February 2015 when LeeAnne Walters approached the city with a video showing rashes on her twins, and with concerns about the growth patterns of them. The city tested the water in her home and found elevated levels of lead. They did nothing. Walters then approached Environmental Protection Agencys Miguel Del Toral, who, in February 2015, expressed concern about the lead levels. Nothing was done there either. It wasnt until Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech college engineering professor, issued a study showing that excessive lead levels in tested children nearly tripled that the national media took notice. Edwards is the professor who took on the federal government over lead level in the nations capital, and won, proving the Centers for Disease Control lied to the public when it falsely claimed lead levels in the water had not posed a health risk to D.C. residents. Masten said Flint is not alone. Lead was used in all of the major cities. It was the material of choice. ... Its the water chemistry. Columbus, Ohio, had a lead problem for a time. They changed their water chemistry. They changed their coagulant. They actually saw a spike in their lead levels. ... And they changed back. Its not just Flint, she said. Finally, Flints water system is sized for a city of 200,000 people, so the citys downsizing to about 100,000 people is causing the water to sit in distribution lines longer, picking up more contaminants. And worse, since the crisis developed, water usage has dropped dramatically, a problem the DEQ is working on, she said. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Charles Skiff Sanford wasnt at his own 200th birthday party Wednesday, but more than 100 of his decedents were, including great-great-grandchildren and great-great-great-grandchildren. Its really nice to find relatives, said Rick Goodwin of the Sanford Historical Society. We bump into lots of people in the neighborhood and never have an idea they are direct decedents. This is quite a celebration. Sanford platted the village in 1864 when he purchased 1,000 acres of pine land in Midland County along with 213 acres where the present day Sanford Village sits. On June 23, 1871, a post office opened under the name of Sanfordville and on July 13, 1871, officials in Washington, D.C., changed the name to Sanford. Sanford, born April 27, 1816, fathered seven children with his first wife, Eliza Button Sanford. She died in 1877 and Charles remarried later that year to Sarah, who had two daughters of her own. Sanford later adopted the girls. He died on Oct. 23, 1907. During his life in Sanford, Charles Sanford owned the Sanford Hotel, operated an 80-acre hay farm, lumbered and continued being a shoemaker. He was also the Hay Township Clerk for three terms, justice of the peace for 19 years and helped organize Jerome Township. Sanfords great-great-great-granddaughter Janice Wallace Northrup, of Sturgis, became interested in genealogy with the encouragement of her cousin, Sue Blake, of Midland County (Blake is Sanfords great-great-great-great-granddaughter). This led Northrup to find many relatives and information about her family. Later Northrup wanted to join the Daughters of the Revolution, but couldnt find information on her great-great grandfather, William Sanford, Charles Sanfords second son, who died in 1900. So Northrup called the Sanford Historical Society and talked to Goodwin. The pair brainstormed and Northrup received help from Goodwin to get her into the DAR. Then she realized that Charles Sanfords birthday was a few months away. Thats kind of how it all started, Northrup said of the birthday party. It led Northrup to look up many old newspapers articles, spending countless hours in the library and doing other research to get the information together about Charles Sanford. The clan kept the birthday celebration between family, allowing them to get to know each other and celebrate the man they were decedents of, Northrup said. This is my family; I wouldnt want to be anywhere else, said Holly Dyer, lifetime Sanford resident. Dyers mother, Cheryl Newcomb, also a lifetime resident, is a manager at Sanford Lake Bar and Grill. Her boss didnt know Newcomb was the great-great-great-granddaughter of the towns founder until Newcomb asked for the day off. Im excited and proud to be here and to be one of his decedents, Newcomb said. As the group gathered in the Sanford Centennial Museum, Newcomb looked at all the faces and said she knew every face. For Northrup, who grew up in Edenville and left in 1984, the party was a chance to reconnect with relatives she hadnt seen since she moved away while meeting others for the first time. Cape Coral, Fla., Councilwoman Rana Erbrick, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Charles Sanford, flew in for the party. Im starting to put faces with names, said Erbrick, who grew up in Flint and moved to Florida in 2005. Erbrick said she remembers her great-grandmother Adela Sanford, talking about a town being named after Erbricks great-great-great-grandfather. I didnt fully understand the magnitude, Erbrick said. Now that Im in government myself, this is a big deal. The Sanford Village Council and Jerome Township Board recently passed resolutions declaring April 27, 2016 Charles S. Sanford Day in both areas. James Watt of Midland was stunned to learn that he needed heart surgery, and his first thought was to go out of town for care. Instead, he decided on MidMichigan Medical Center - Midland. After my experience at MidMichigan, I dont believe I could find better care anywhere else on the planet, he said. Watt had retired as a detective after 26 years with the Michigan State Police and was wrapping up his second career, with Michigan Health and Human Services, when he began having extreme fatigue and other symptoms. A group of us at work used to walk after lunch, and I began having a hard time keeping up, he said. At home, I could no longer mow the whole lawn in one day. I thought about getting a riding mower. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I would wake up aching from my waist to my toes. Watt wondered if he might have diabetes, high blood pressure or a back problem. After one scary episode, he stopped speculating, saw his family doctor and took a stress test. The results prompted a visit to Interventional Cardiologist Andrzej Boguszewski, M.D., known to many of his patients as Dr. B. I was scared, but from the minute my wife, Jeanne, and I met Dr. B, we liked everything about him, Watt said. He is friendly, with a calm and deliberate manner that helped me be logical and less anxious. I felt like hed been my doctor my whole life. The next step was an angiogram at the catheterization lab at MidMichigan Medical Center - Midland to look inside the arteries and Watts heart for plaque. If a lot of plaque was blocking his arteries, he would need surgery to increase the supply of blood to his heart. I was thinking it would turn out to be a blockage or two and, with a little luck, Dr. B could eliminate my problem with an angioplasty and stents, Watt said. The more serious option was coronary artery bypass grafting, which would take healthy blood vessels from his legs and graft them into the area around his heart. The test went well, but the results were a shock. I had so many blockages, and they were so severe, Watt said. I kind of put the brakes on. He told Boguszewski that he wanted to get a second opinion and didnt think he wanted to have the surgery in Midland. He was reassured when the doctor was not the least put off or defensive. Instead, Watt said, they calmly talked through his concerns and options in a friendly and deliberate manner. He asked me where else I would consider going, and I told him, Watt said. As they talked more, Boguszewski told him about Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgeon Robert Jones, M.D., and the open heart surgery program at the medical center in Midland. He spoke about Dr. Jones expertise, his team and all the capabilities there. He said he would give me a referral elsewhere if I wanted one, but that Dr. Jones and his team were very capable of doing what I needed right here, Watt said. After considering Boguszewskis advice and meeting with Dr. Jones, he decided to have the coronary artery bypass grafting procedure in Midland. Watt recovered in the medical centers cardiac intensive care unit. The medical center is the only hospital in the region where patients spend their entire stay in one spacious private room, where family members can be with them as much as they like. I had so many lines and tubes in me, he said, but day-by-day they were taken out. I couldnt have had any better treatment and care. The medical staff came to see me every day. The nurses in particular were out-of-this-world good. They were always checking on me. If I ever needed anything, they were right there. He started walking the day after surgery and made good progress. Jones told him that, as long as there wasnt any kind of setback, he could be discharged a day earlier than planned. At home, visiting nurses came for Watts post-surgery care three times a week, and five weeks later he started cardiac rehabilitation at the medical center. After he completed that program, both he and his wife decided to join the fitness center thats located on the campus of the hospital. I am the best champion for the way Midland deals with cardiac patients, Watt said. I feel that Dr. B did everything just right. He embraced my fears and anxieties and understood them. Having him for my cardiologist, and Dr. Jones and his staff was the best possible card that I could have been dealt. Ill tell anybody who asks that cardiac care at our hospital in Midland is second to none. What started as a small idea to honor an ancestor turned into a large celebration in Sanford on Wednesday when more than 100 decedents of village founder Charles Skiff Sanford gathered together. The party celebrated Charles Sanfords 200th birthday. It is a wonderful example of the desire to know more about where we come from, and the power of family. The event spanned many generations and brought families together who might not have even realized they had a common relative. People came from near and far, with lifelong residents of the village joining relatives from as far away as Florida who flew to Michigan to attend the birthday celebration. Its really nice to find relatives, said Rick Goodwin of the Sanford Historical Society. We bump into lots of people in the neighborhood and never have an idea they are direct decedents. This is quite a celebration. Charles Sanford platted the village in 1864 when he purchased 1,000 acres of pine land in Midland County along with 213 acres where the present day Sanford Village sits. On June 23, 1871, a post office opened under the name of Sanfordville and on July 13, 1871, officials in Washington, D.C., changed the villages name to Sanford. Charles Sanford fathered seven children with his first wife, Eliza Button Sanford, and later adopted his second wife Sarahs two daughters. The family has grown from there. Janice Wallace Northrup, of Sturgis, became interested in genealogy and was researching her family to join the Daughters of the Revolution when she realized Charles Sanford was born on April 27, 1816 200 years ago on Wednesday. His great-great-great-granddaughter thought the occasion was worthy of celebration. So, happy birthday, Charles Sanford. Your village remains as a legacy, as does your growing family. The following list includes recent reports from the Midland County Sheriffs Office and the Midland Police Department. Wednesday, April 20 12:27 a.m. Police were called to the 700 block of Townsend Street to investigate a case of prowling. 2:33 a.m. Officers investigated a sex offender registry violation in the 600 block of East Haley Street. Tuesday, April 19 9:35 a.m. A motorist was arrested at West Main Street and West Sugnet Road for driving without insurance and cited for unregistered vehicle. 1:05 p.m. A deputy assisted Child Protective Services in investigating a report of drug use at a Midland Township home. The home was searched and nothing illegal was found. 2:25 p.m. Officers were sent to a domestic assault at a North Saginaw Road address. 4:10 p.m. A deputy was sent to a report of a breaking and entering, and learned the location is in Bay County. The case was passed to Bay County officials to investigate. 7:46 p.m. Police were called to a report of domestic violence at a Haley Street address. 7:52 p.m. A deputy was called to Larkin Township for a report of a man hitchhiking. The man was not found. 8:28 p.m. A deputy was sent to Edenville Township for a report of a 13-year-old boy bullying his neighbor and cousin, a 9-year-old girl. The guardians of both children were spoken with and agreed to handle the problem. Monday, April 18 3:18 a.m. Police were called to an animal complaint at Washington Street and Adams Drive. 4:45 a.m. Police assisted state police troopers in the 3900 block of Holland Drive. 9:42 a.m. Property was stolen from the 600 block of Hollybrook Drive. 3:32 a.m. Property in the 1900 block of Airport Road was damaged. 4:31 a.m. Property in the 7200 block of Jefferson Avenue was damaged. 10:54 a.m. A motorist was arrested at East Lyon Road and Bayliss Street for driving without insurance. 11:24 a.m. Police were called to a hit and run traffic crash in the 2800 block of Ashman Street. 2:48 p.m. Officers investigated a case of fraud in the 3300 block of Dartmouth Drive. 3:27 p.m. Police investigated a hit and run traffic crash in the 6100 block of Eastman Avenue. 4:07 p.m. Officers investigated a home invasion in the 4400 block of Bay City Road. 4:25 p.m. Police were called to the 200 block of West Ellsworth Street for a probation violation. Sunday, April 17 11:27 p.m. Police made arrests for driving without insurance and on a warrant at Joe Mann Boulevard and T Moore Drive. Midland Police continue to investigate recent damage to a number of parked vehicles in the city. Officers were called to various locations throughout the city on Sunday for reports of objects being used to smash windows of parked vehicles. Media log entries track 12 cases, at addresses on Vine Street, Wanetah Drive, Swede Avenue, East Sugnet Road, Dawn Drive, Oakridge Drive, Dilloway Drive, Wildflower Lane, East Chapel Drive, East St. Andrews Road, Heathermoor Drive and Tyler Street. The incidents were reported between 1:40 a.m. and 11:49 a.m. Police have received anonymous tips regarding the vandalism and detectives are following up. U.S. Embassy Manila donated a newly-refurbished building at the Sulu Training Center, Camp Kasim, Jolo, Sulu to the Philippine National Police (PNP). The construction of the barracks began in early 2015 by the U.S. Pacific Command's Joint Interagency Task Force West, and was completed on April 4, 2016 at a cost of P16.9 million ($375,000). The building will serve as barracks for PNP officers who are receiving U.S.-sponsored training at Camp Kasim and in Jolo City. PNP personnel from all over the island of Jolo will be able to utilize the barracks during training sessions. The ground floor of the new barracks consists of a conference room, International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance training office, and two private offices, while the top floor consists of both male and female barracks areas. The barracks can support 36 students. WASHINGTON (Army News Service, April 19, 2016) - This summer, for the first time, a Pacific Pathways iteration will involve bringing nations from the Pacific region to the United States to engage in exercises Tiger Balm, Arctic Anvil, and Rising Thunder. "We now have 'reverse Pathways,'" said Lt. Gen. Stephen Lanza, who serves as commander of I Corps at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington. "So now we have countries coming to train with us at home station." During Pacific Pathways 16-3, for instance, Singaporeans will come to Hawaii for Tiger Balm in July, he said. Canadians will go to Alaska for Arctic Anvil, also in July. And the Japanese will go to Washington State for Rising Thunder in September. Pacific Pathways kicked off its first iteration in 2014, putting existing exercises with partner nations in the Pacific region under one banner and converting them from independent stand-alone exercises into a series of single, lengthy operations, each of which requires more participants, at more levels of command, to practice and demonstrate a much broader set of skills and capabilities than would normally be required during a single, stand-alone exercise. Lanza characterizes Pacific Pathways as an operation that includes multiple units participating in multiple exercises over several months. A Pacific Pathways iteration, he said, is more valuable to participants than the sum of the exercises it includes -- which independently were aimed at building relationships and the tactical skills of those involved. A Pathways operation is more than a unit moving from the United States to one nation, and then home again. Instead, a participating unit deploys from the United States to another nation, then to another nation, and then possibly to another nation as well, over the course of several months. They bring their gear and equipment with them, then move into and out of a nation's ports, and conduct reception, staging, onward-movement and integration operations. They must understand port operations, frequency management, requirements for live fire, and how to move ammunition from the port to the training area. "All of those things have to be worked through," Lanza said. On top of that, the level of command to conduct a Pacific Pathways operation is deeper than what would be required for a single exercise, he said. "We are also executing mission command, our ability to command and control at multiple echelons," he said. "From the theater all the way down to the tactical unit, we have expeditionary mission command -- and we also tie this back to the Army Operating Concept." Lanza said that during a Pacific Pathways iteration, units might be training in Indonesia and Malaysia, while the command post is in the Philippines. The breadth of what Pacific Pathways provides enriches participant experience and greatly enhances the ability for the entirety of I Corps to train, all the way up to corps level. It has pushed the value of individual exercises beyond development of familiarity between partner nations, Lanza said. "We are beyond relationships. We're now getting after readiness, both ours and theirs, in an operational environment," he said. "Pacific Pathways has helped not only our own operational readiness, but has built operational readiness at echelon, from the theater all the way down to the platoons that operate. It's built joint readiness, and it's enhanced our mission-essential task readiness. "What we found from Pathways is that every echelon of readiness has increased. We build readiness at home station, as we do more training at home station now because of our Decisive Action Training Environment rotations. We've added complexity to our home-station training; we've added changing conditions to home station. And then we take that readiness we built at home station and the combat training centers, and we have additive readiness that is built during that Pathway, not just from the training we do in the countries, but for the entire operation." TOTAL FORCE Lanza said that Pacific Pathways will grow in other ways too. Total force involvement has grown inside the Pacific Pathways operations. Army National Guard and Army Reserve involvement has increased. But that's not the only way I Corps is growing its relationship with the Guard and Reserve. "What we have been able to do at JBLM and I Corps, is we have been able to partner with the Guard and Reserve on leader development, training conferences, and bringing them in, in terms of how we build requirements," he said. "We have been able to take their requirements and bring those forward so that we have been able to take Reserve/Guard requirements and link them to our training." I Corps is already training with Guard and Reserve forces at home station, at the Joint Readiness Training Center and at the National Training Center, as well as on Pacific Pathways operations. But now, as part of the Army's recently-announces "Associated Units" pilot program, a formal relationship has been established between regular Army units and reserve-component units. As part of that pilot program, three Guard and Reserve units will be partnered with three units under I Corps: -- The 81st Armored Brigade Combat Team, Washington Army National Guard, will be associated with the 7th Infantry Division stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington. -- The Hawaii-based 100th Battalion, 442 Infantry Regiment, U.S. Army Reserve, will be associated with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division stationed at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. -- The 1st Battalion, 151st Infantry Regiment from the Indiana Army National Guard will be associated with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division stationed at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. A conference in May, at U.S. Army Forces Command, will work out exactly how those relationships will happen, but Lanza said he imagines "we're going to train together, we'll have training guidance, we'll have exchanges of officers and capabilities. But we will train together; the question will be how we are going to do that. So anytime you can get the Guard and Reserve and active component to train together, you optimize the time they do have to train, and it optimizes our ability to build that relationship." Will that associated Guard or Reserve unit necessarily deploy with the active unit to a combat zone? Lanza said he thinks so, but that and other questions will be worked out in May at FORSCOM. "I think this initiative to associate Guard and Reserve units with active units, that we train together and build readiness together, is exactly what's needed for the future," he said. GROWING RELATIONSHIP WITH INDIA Gen. Dalbir Singh, who serves as chief of staff of India's army, recently toured the Army inside the United States, and during that trip, he visited JBLM to meet with Lanza. "I Corps has benefited from USARPAC's growing relationship with the Indian Army," said Lanza. "Our Soldiers routinely conduct military-to-military engagements which achieve consistent progress and build readiness in both forces. Exercises such as Yudh Ahbyas and Varja Prahar foremost build personal relationships and trust with our partners which then makes for a more professional force in both armies. We have a lot of experiences to share and more opportunities for partnership will benefit our two countries as well as the Indo-Asia-Pacific region." Lanza said I Corps is looking forward to increased partnerships with India in the Pacific. One example is the desire to expand the Yudh Ahbyas exercise with India. In 2015, that exercise was held for the first time inside the United States at JBLM. About 150 soldiers from the Indian army came to the U.S. to participate. He said the Americans and Indians have a lot to learn from each other in such exercises. "I think as we do this with the Indians, it's more than just tactical training," he said. "We're building relationships with them where we're sharing lessons learned. There is a lot we can learn from the Indians on counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations." Lanza said the Indians operate in a hugely diverse range of environments: high-mountain environments, desert environments, and jungle environments, for instance. "We pick up a lot of how the Indians operate in those different environments," he said. "When those Mountain Soldiers came to train with us from their 9th Division, they were exceptionally well trained, exceptionally disciplined and motivated. We learned a lot from them." Lanza said the Indian Army is interested also in lessons the U.S. learned during operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are also interested, he said, in U.S. weapons systems, including M777 Howitzers, and Apache helicopters, "they are looking at our capabilities to see where they can leverage that," he said. Developing further relationships with India, the largest democracy in the world by population, Lanza said, is critical to security in the Pacific. "Anytime you can build partner capacity with a partner in the Pacific, and any time you can build trust with our partners and allies, that enhances security," he said. "These opportunities to partner with India are extremely important in the Pacific. What we want to do in the Pacific is avoid miscalculation and de-escalate conflict. I think India provides a tremendous opportunity to partner with them on a military basis." SAN DIEGO (NNS) -- Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers USS Spruance (DDG 111) and USS Decatur (DDG 73), with embarked Destroyer Squadron 31 staff, departed their homeport of San Diego, April 19. The destroyers will join Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Momsen (DDG 92) in the waters off Southern California before heading to the Western Pacific as the Pacific Surface Action Group, or (PAC SAG). Momsen departed her homeport in Naval Station Everett, Washington, April 15. The ships deployed with the "Devil Fish" and "Warbirds" detachments of embarked Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron (HSM) 49. U.S. 3rd Fleet ships, aircraft, and submarines operate regularly and routinely throughout the Western Pacific in accordance with international law. Unlike previous deployments of 3rd Fleet units, the 3rd Fleet commander will maintain operational control for the entirety of the PAC SAG deployment as part of a new Pacific Fleet initiative called 3rd Fleet Forward. By maintaining operational control, the 3rd Fleet commander will direct ship movements and activities. Historically, the U.S. 7th Fleet commander would assume control of ships that cross the international date line into the Western Pacific. The initiative provides more operational flexibility to the combatant commander by applying the command and control capabilities of both numbered fleets based on specific missions rather than geographic areas. As more units deploy as part of this initiative, 3rd Fleet and 7th Fleet forces will complement one another seamlessly in support of security, stability and prosperity in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region. The PAC SAG will conduct routine patrols, maritime security operations and theater security cooperation activities to enhance regional security and stability. It also expected to also participate in the Oceania Maritime Security Initiative (OMSI). OMSI is a Secretary of Defense program leveraging Department of Defense assets transiting the region to increase the Coast Guard's maritime domain awareness, ultimately supporting its maritime law enforcement operations in Oceania. U.S. 3rd Fleet leads naval forces in the Pacific and provides the realistic, relevant training necessary for an effective global Navy. BLOOMINGTON The largely vacant, former Colonial Plaza shopping center has a new name Empire Crossing and several national brand stores, including PetSmart, opening later this year to mark what officials see as its retail rebirth. PetSmart officials have confirmed the company plans to open a store in the long-shuttered former Circuit City store, a 23,000-square-foot site at 1606 E. Empire St. that has remained vacant since early 2009. "Currently, we have a store planned in Bloomington, slated to open later this year," PetSmart spokeswoman Melissa Wenzel said in an email Wednesday. Wenzel said she could not confirm further details about the store until closer to its grand opening later this year. Currently, PetSmart has 60 stores in Illinois, but none in the Twin Cities. The adjacent, 88,797-square-foot former Kmart store, which closed in January 2015, also is being remodeled to house Dick's Sporting Goods, Home Goods, Five Below and Carter's Oshkosh B'gosh. "They're all going to open between mid-August and Oct. 31," said Michael Markman, president of BET Investments, which manages the shopping center on Empire Street near Veterans Parkway. DSW-Designer Shoe Warehouse, which also signed a letter of intent or lease for a space in the shopping center, won't open until April 2017, he added. The shopping center is being renamed Empire Crossing, Bloomington Economic Development Coordinator Austin Grammer said Wednesday. "It's something we've worked on with the city," said Markman. "They thought it would be a good idea to rebrand it and rename it to kind of reflect the location." Innovative Construction Solutions Inc. of Brookfield, Wis., was issued a city building permit Monday for a $1 million remodel of the former Circuit City store. The owner/developer of that building is Chris Sotos of Chicago-based Key Development Partners, who could not be reached for comment. "It's great to see a long-vacant building be filled with a quality tenant such as PetSmart," said Bloomington Assistant City Manager Steve Rasmussen. "The $1 million is a great piece of this, but it is actually a small part of the whole picture," said Mayor Tari Renner. BT Bloomington owns the Kmart building and shopping center, which had a 77 percent vacancy rate last year when the company committed to a $10 million renovation for Dick's, which is moving from its smaller Normal location. In exchange, the city established in February a tax increment financing redevelopment project area that includes the shopping center and covers over 82 acres of taxable property, including the Towanda Plaza shopping center on Towanda Avenue. "It shows we're getting our act together on economic development and job creation in Bloomington," said Renner. "Bloomington is flexing its economic muscles, and that is a good thing. I am proud to be mayor as we are moving forward with things like this." In the past two months the city issued building permits to Eilersom Development Corp., Midlothian, Va., for $159,000 in asbestos and lead abatement and demolition, and exterior alteration of the old Kmart store; and $98,000 for the remodel of space for the Five Below store. Markman said his company continues efforts to fill other vacancies in the shopping center. "We're actively negotiating letters of intent and leases with other national retailers," said Markman. "Those will probably be announced over the next three months." Sixteen years ago, Hal Holbrook left Mark Twain in the dust. He did it by finally out-lapping the man of letters who's been the dominant creative force in his life for more than six decades. When Twain departed this mortal coil in 1910, on the tail of Halley's Comet, he was 75. When Holbrook brings the longest-running one-man show in U.S. theater history to town Tuesday night, via the BCPA, he'll be two months into his 91st year. Which makes Holbrook and his Mark Twain Tonight double record-holders: longest-running play, oldest touring actor. With five Emmys, one Tony and a recent (2008) Oscar nomination to his name, Holbrook has nothing to prove but plenty still to talk about. GO: You were here eight years ago with the show did you think then, at age 83, that you'd still be doing this at 91? HH: Yes if I was alive. GO: You've broken our past record-holder for eldest live performer: George Burns, 88 ... also with cigar in hand, a la your Twain. Is that the secret to long-term stamina? HH: A cigar is probably better than a crutch. GO: Did the two of you ever cross paths during your performing careers? HH: Once. At the Jewish country club in Beverly Hills. I was introduced to him and was so awed by his presence and that I was actually meeting him, I couldnt say anything and he finally recognized I was a numbskull, puffed his cigar and left. GO: If age is a just state of mind, how old would you say you are in that regard? HH: Somewhere around Methuselah. GO: You once told us it took four hours as a young man to transform yourself into Twain. How long these days? HH: It takes about two hours to do the basic makeup and get into costume, etc. I dont need a wig anymore, my hair is white like his, so I curl it ... quicker than gluing on the wig. GO: Last time you were here, in 2008, your show had to be rescheduled after a health scare that sent you to the Mayo Clinic. HH: Yes. What sent me to the Mayo in 2007 was that I was dying from a kidney disease called microscopic polyangiitis ... and did not know it. I was doing the Stage Manager in "Our Town at Hartford Stage. We were ready to open the show and I did not want to stop until after we opened. When the doctor checked me out he told me I had only 15 percent of my kidneys working and sent me to the hospital. My wife, Dixie Carter, called the Mayo Clinic. They saved my life. I go back there for a check-up every year or two and so far they call me their poster boy. GO: If you compared the script of Mark Twain Tonight from 1956 to the one you'll be presenting here, what would the differences, if any, be? HH: The major differences would be the actual material. I have over 16 hours. The plotting of the show, its construction is basically the same. Two acts now. The first act is mostly laughable stuff and I always get the guns out when it comes to talking about politicians and Congress. Im ending Act One these days with a meditation of Twains, wondering when the monarchy should replace the republic in America. GO: And then? HH: Act Two always starts out with something troublesome for people who dont like to think. Like his dissertation on our behavior as Christians. Then there is always a Huck number I have five now and after that I can go in several directions, ruminating how we present ourselves as members of the human race. What Mark Twain is trying to do, as far as my show is concerned, is to let us look into the mirror and see ourselves as we really are. This is not always the choice of many people. We know that from just looking at the television set or reading the paper. Politicians lie. Its their stock in trade. Just listen to them now running for election. Its not a joke. Its what we are making of America. We deceive ourselves. Twain helps lift the curtain on that if we have the guts to face it. GO: What would Twain have to say about the current state of politics in America's election year? Would he even believe it? HH: The answer to that is yes. He would believe it. The state of politics in his lifetime, beginning in the 1870s, with the establishment of great corporations run by millionaires like Rockefeller and Carnegie and their use of poor people, mostly immigrants from Europe, to do the actual work at low wages for the rich folks that has not changed as far as I can see. We are still in love with making money in any way we choose and it doesnt matter how much other people suffer. Morality as expressed in the Bible and our Declaration of Independence has very little to do with how we behave today. GO: In a past interview you told us I go out and don't know what the first word will be. Still true? HH: It is not true anymore, I think, that I ad lib the programming. Most of this is due to the fact that the major proportion of my engagements, like this one in Bloomington, are return engagements. The audience has seen the show in other manifestations before and I have to change the material so what they see will be new to them. The show you will see in Bloomington this time is probably 80 percent or more different from the one in 2008. GO: You also told us you keep copious notes of each show you give, along with information on how the audience reacted. HH: Yes, I have a report on every show Ive ever done, quite complete, noting the audiences reaction and the material done that night. GO: Are those reactions the same today as they were in the '50s or the '60s? HH: I would say that is true. I am often dealing with hot stuff in the major part of the show, with subject matter that the audience recognizes as something happening today and Twain is talking about it more than 100 years ago. We have not changed anything. We are just repeating the same foolish mistakes we have just made, and done it with the curious idea that it is something new. In other words, we are just as dumb today as we were 100 years ago. Look at Donald Trump. GO: Are you worried that young people may stop reading Twain one day? HH: Yes. Young people are interested in toys. The cellphone. I do worry that people will stop reading everything worthwhile. Especially the younger people as you mention. Books do not interest them. They like instant info in our little iPhone tool. They are fascinated by toys just the way children are. The idea of exploring a subject with your mind by reading a book, such as Doris Kearns Goodwins "The Bully Pulpit," is too much effort for them. What they want to do is get a quick answer to big subjects and remain as hopeless about solving them as we ever were. We are heading toward a race of mechanical people. GO: Bette Davis once had a pillow embroidered with the phrase, Old age isn't for sissies agreed? HH: Yes. Bette Davis was right. It aint for sissies. It requires courage to get up and move and keep going and keep trying to find out what in hell is going to happen to this nutcase world we have created. GO: What's your secret for dealing with it on its own terms? HH: To get mad about it, get out of bed and try to knock it down. GO: At the end of the day, Twain's best line for you, and the ages is ...? HH: I wonder if God invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey. SonicAire Announces New Executive Leadership April 20, 2016 - SonicAire, formerly known as Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES), announces new executive leadership. Jordan Newton has transitioned to become the Vice President of Innovation and Engineering overseeing SonicAire fan design and engineering. John Sanders, former head of sales for the Northeast region, has become the Vice President of Sales and Marketing responsible for SonicAire sales teams and marketing efforts. Newton will oversee the development of our products, ensuring that SonicAire fans continue to comply with U.S. and international standards, said Brad Carr, President of SonicAire. Newton's creative approach to engineering procedures promotes an environment of ingenuity and entrepreneurship, as we strive to remain on the cutting edge of providing innovative solutions for our clients. Sanders will manage and support sales functions, coordinating sales efforts with marketing strategies and directives. With a wealth of skills and leadership experience that equip him to take SonicAire to the next level, Sanders has a proven track record in communicating our brand identity in the marketplace, Carr said. Newton is a Professional Engineer with experience in forensic engineering from Accident Reconstruction Analysis and experience as a project engineer from Underwriters Laboratories. Newton joined SonicAire in 2010, advancing to become Vice President of Engineering and Sales. Sanders began his twenty-nine year career with Andersen Windows in sales, rising to serve in executive sales and management roles. In 2010, Sanders founded and became co-owner of Portco Automation & Marine. Sanders joined SonicAire as the head of Northeast sales in 2014. SonicAire is a progressive, air engineering firm located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina (USA). SonicAire produces the world's only engineered solution to eliminating overhead combustible dust, SonicAire fans. To learn more, please visit: iesclean.com SOURCE: SonicAire Primary schools in England are now in hot water as they are being accused of discrimination. In a report made by Sutton Trust, it claimed some schools found it more favorable to prefer well-off kids from rich families rather than the poor ones. Filtering Students According to The Independent, Sutton Trust learned almost all of renowned primary schools, especially faith schools, have disapproving standards when it comes to receiving students. It looks like some schools are being picky by filtering the rich students over the poor kids and choosing the former over the latter. "There are some parts of the country where many schools are accepting some children ahead of others," Dr. Rebecca Allen, co-author of the report by Sutton Trust, said. "What we found is that those children had a social profile that was more affluent than the neighborhoods that they were recruiting from." In fact, there are about 1,500 primary schools in England has been indicated with "social segregation." The said number of schools are disapproving less fortunate students and preferring richer kids that belong to families that have high incomes. Equality In Every School Hence, the study from Sutton Trust brings up the issue of the need for fairness in every school. The being selective of primary schools over the low-income pupils are making them incompetent to be part of the popular state schools. BBC News reported underprivileged families have a smaller chance of sending their children to well-known schools, as per a separate analysis by Teach First. Apparently, students from poor household ended up to be in "weaker primary schools." The study by Teach First revealed that Blackpool in England doesn't have its own "outstanding school" while the Isle of Wight and Thurrock only have one each. Teach First suggested primary schools have to hire more high qualified teachers and school leaders in poor areas to help stop the lack of right education for poor students. What do you think of the deprivation of education for poor students? Share us your thoughts. Write your comments below! A mother in New York City has been awarded a sum of $50 million after a jury found substantial evidence to incriminate a doctor who mistreated while she was giving birth. The woman is currently suffering damage to her reporductive organs as a result of the medical malpractice. The Bronx Supreme Court bestowed the cash aid to Llaulin Cruz, 38, so she could cope with future pain and suffering caused by her traumatizing delivery. Cruz's horrendous ordeal happened in 2009 at the hands of Dr. Michael Ihemaguba, an obstetrician at St. Barnabas Hospital. Medical Lapses In The Delivery Room According to NY Daily News, Ihemaguba urged Cruz to push further even though her newborn daughter's head was already out. The doctor also performed an episiotomy, a surgical cut between the vagina and anus to widen the vaginal opening. Cruz's camp insisted that the procedure, which left her severely scarred, was absolutely unnecessary. Additionally, Ihemaguba allegedly did not inform Cruz of what he had done. Cruz was still oblivious to her condition when she became pregnant with her son in 2010. The Bronx native decided to deliver her baby boy through a midwife. Unaware of Cruz's condition, the midwife delivered the baby vaginally, worsening Cruz's tissue tears in the process. In the years leading up to the formal complaint, Cruz claimed she had undergone several surgeries to try and repair the tissue damage. None of which alleviated her pain. "Most of the time I'm having sharp pain in my private area,' said Cruz during a press conference filmed by NBC. "I'm always going to be in pain, always have a problem going to the bathroom. Be like that the rest of my life." Doctor Says Cruz Was Amenable To The Procedure In his defense, Ihemaguba maintained that he had done nothing wrong. He claimed to have repaired the tear immediately after Cruz's daughter was born. He also had medical records showing Cruz had no complaints after the delivery. He criticized the jury for basing their decision on emotion, not hard facts. The jury Wednesday found that Ihemaguba was 90% at fault for Cruz's condition while 10% of the blame was attributed to the midwife. Ihemaguba said he is still a licensed medical practitioner, but he has been away from the profession the last few years due to spinal problems. "Princess Diaries" director Garry Marshall confirmed that he's in talks with Disney for the development of the movie's third offering. The wheels are finally turning at the studio, following Marshall's statements in March that he and "Princes Diaries" star, Anne Hathaway, want to make "Princess Diaries 3" happen. Garry Marshall essentially established that Disney has already greenlit "Princess Diaries 3." However, while he also said that the studio would want to make the official announcement, he did not resist revealing some details to E! Online. He shared the exclusive to the news outlet as he was promoting his latest film, "Mother's Day." Garry Marshall says he's "talking" with Disney about Princess Diaries 3: https://t.co/ntxhSm9LHH pic.twitter.com/5NNry0dRHm E! Online (@eonline) April 19, 2016 After confirming that he's talking with Disney in developing "Princess Diaries 3," Garry Marshall also said that the timing is just right to do the follow-up. This is since Anne Hathaway, 33, has already given birth to her first child. Anne Hathaway has also already proven her capabilities with several prestigious awards, like an Academy Award, a SAG Award, and a Golden Globe, among many others. The director hinted that all the successful stars he has worked with go through the same passage as they experience different milestones. "[They] come back to me and say, 'I'd like to do something my child could see,'" Garry Marshall told E! "And I'm very good and making things your child could see and the whole family!" "Princess Diaries" was the movie that ushered Anne Hathaway's rise to fame in her 20s. It launched her career as a young superstar in 2001, as well as the career of her co-star and leading man, Chris Pine. Seventeen reports that Pine expressed he'd like to be in "Princess Diaries 3" too, if it does happen. Look who's on my screen?! A young Anne Hathaway and Chris Pine pic.twitter.com/2i1i6XK4g8 Leena (@oncefutureangel) March 1, 2015 Meanwhile, since her pregnancy, Anne Hathaway has been taking it slow at work. She has only two projects for this year - "Colossal" and "Alice Through the Looking Glass" - and these are just waiting for a theater release. With her new baby and no future projects line up so far, a light feel-good flick like "Princess Diaries 3," might just be the most appropriate comeback movie. For now, she's enjoying every minute of being a new mom and has taken to breastfeeding her son, Jonathan, Parent Herald previously reported. A toddler was intentionally left by his parents inside a shopping mall in Brazil. The 2-year-old kid was said to have been abandoned after his mother and father had a fight. Closed circuit television (CCTV) footage of the incident showed a man with a backpack carrying a small boy entering the Rio Sul Shopping Center in Rio de Janeiro. After getting inside the mall through a sliding door, the man was seen bringing down the child and leaving him in an instant. Daily Star said the woman, who was seen behind the doors, was the mother of the child. It explained that the child even tried to follow his mother who rushed outside and did not mind about her son. It was a good thing that a man sitting beside the entrance door stopped the little boy from going outside the mall and wandering around the streets. Security officers of the shopping mall took the child into custody and transferred him to a nearby child-care center. According to Daily Mail, the father of the abandoned kid was later identified as a waiter that works in a restaurant inside the mall. He was taken into custody by the authorities but blamed his wife for leaving their son. "The man who claims to be the father is saying he argued with the mum before going off to work," said police spokesperson Barbara Lomba. "He says he thought the child had stayed with the mum and as he didn't look back he wasn't aware the mum had gone off in the opposite direction and the youngster had been left alone." However, police claimed that until know the man has not yet provided them with proof that he is really the father. Daily Star said investigation still ongoing but once proven guilty of child abandonment, both parents could be jailed for six months to three years. Teaching kids to have a better sleep habit will not just benefit their health, but also their brain. In a recent study published in Sleep Medicine, it found that 20 minutes more of snooze time can actually improve their grades in school as well. "Sleep should not be negotiated every night, and there should be a consistent bedtime every night. Teach kids that sleep is a priority," Reut Gruber, director of Attention Behavior and Sleep Lab and professor at McGill University, said. "Make sure kids go to bed at a time that allows them sufficient sleep duration," Gruber continued. "Even in the presence of competing activities and priorities." Study On Sleeping Habits According to Huffington Post, the author of the study -- published in the journal, Sleep Medicine -- advised parents to give their kids' sleep proper attention and make sure they are having the right amount. Today reported that the research was conducted with two groups of elementary school students in Montreal via a six-week sleep education. Kids who applied the "healthier sleep habits" added 18.2 minutes of sleep every night, the study found. In fact, children's performance in their Math and English subjects improved by about two percent, while their physical education grades increased marginally. Parents Should Set Priorities The Washington Post cited parents today are not prioritizing their kids' sleep and the amount they needed to perform well. Children are lacking sleep because of the things that interests them like, TV and playing, late dinners also interrupt their usual bedtime. One in every four guardians thinks their kids need lesser sleep than what is recommended while one in every five believes children must have more sleep than advised. "Children who have insufficient sleep are more likely to have difficulties with their attention, mood, learning, health and behavior at home and at school," explained Philippa McDowall, lead author of a study done at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Inducing Proper Sleeping Habits To make sure kids have proper sleep, guardians should remove all the things that obstruct their bedtime like, electronic media. Using tablets, laptops and smartphones before children hit the sack lessen their melatonin that helps regulate sleep. What do you think of the new findings about the additional 20 minutes of sleep for kids? Share us your thoughts. Write your comments below! PlayStation 4.5 (PS4.5), Xbox 1.5 and Nintendo NX could have a huge showdown in the market when the new consoles arrive in the fall. The buzz around its potential releases is making gamers both excited and undecided. But which buzz is actually true and which of these powerful machines would be the best buy for families to enjoy? Here's a roundup of the specifications and features of the consoles that's been making rounds among gaming communities: Nintendo NX Specs, Feature, Price And Release Date Forbes reports that of the three tech companies, it is only Nintendo that has confirmed and acknowledged it's working on a new console. In fact, developers have been sharing information about the unit anonymously. Parent Herald previously reported on the leaks. The Nintendo NX is said to be designed as a hybrid console that will have a detachable pad that allows a player to use the machine remotely. It's supposed to be featured with the AMD 14NM GPU support, well as Vulkan support, based on discussions from NeoGaf. The assumption is it will be at twice as powerful as the rumored PS 4.5 system. Game Rant reports that its potential release date is in July. However, with the dates drawing closer and with Nintendo saying nothing else, it's likely that gamers could find the Nintendo Nx in stores in the fall. Tech Radar reports the Nintendo NX's price might fall between $150 and $250, as its consoles are usually cheaper than Sony and Microsoft. New versions of "Legend of Zelda" or "Super Mario" games could also come with the release. As far as family-friendly gaming goes, Nintendo has always had this distinction. Sony PS4.5 Specs, Feature, Price And Release Date Sony is still earning millions from its PlayStation 4, which was released in 2013. However, with the coming of the PlayStation Virtual Reality (PSVR) headset, it's been hinted that the company is planning to have an upgraded PS4.5. Eurogamer reports that the PS4.5 might carry the official name of PS Neo and it will be a slimmer hardware with the following specs: - CPU Eight Jaguar cores, 2.1GHz - GPU 36 GCN compute units, 911MHz - Memory 8GB GDDR5, 218GB/s The biggest improvement to this system is its support for a 4K resolution output that's meant to render VR games better. The upgraded console is reportedly going to hit stores in time for the Christmas holidays. Previous reports have pegged its price at $400, which is the same price as the PS4. However, given that Sony's current console is still relatively powerful, the reaction to this rumored console from the gaming community has been lukewarm so far, especially if gamers already have a PS4. Microsoft Xbox 1.5 Specs, Feature, Price And Release Date Microsoft has denied that it would be coming out with an upgraded version of its Xbox One, as Parent Herald previously reported. However, there have been indications that the company is working on a new console, but it's not likely going to be released in the next two years, per Forbes. What the company is pushing is cross-console gameplay, which means gamers can play against each other regardless of what machine they're using. However, developers have yet to start adopting to this system. Despite improvements, the state of California has the most polluted air in the U.S., according to a new report. Based on 2012-2014 readings, 52.1% of Americans inhabit areas with detrimental ozone or particle pollution. "California is making tremendous progress," said Bonnie Holmes-Gen, senior director of air quality and climate change at the American Lung Association in California. "But we have a lot more work to do," Holmes-Gen told the Associated Press. California Cities Packing Most Air Pollution The American Lung Association's 2016 State of the Air report found that Bakersfield City has the worst air in America from pollution due to highway traffic, farm equipment and fireplaces, AP reported. Los Angeles heads the pack for ozone pollution from car tailpipes that emit smog. The 2016 State of the Air Report also showed that eight out of 10 California residents equivalent to 32 million people are living in counties with harmful levels of ozone or particle pollution at some point during a year. It was based on data from the US Environmental Protection Agency. Los Angeles, Long Beach, Riverside Worst Areas Notwithstanding improvements, the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside region was the leading ozone polluted area in the USA, according to a report from the Press-Telegram. The counties of San Bernardino, Los Angeles and Orange Counties received "F" grades for ozone pollution. On the other hand, some metropolitan areas showed the best ozone or particle pollution readings in years, including Los Angeles. Los Angeles recorded the lowest air pollution levels in 17 years, Olivia J. Diaz-Lapham, president and CEO of the American Lung Association, said in a news conference. Health Hazards From Air Pollution The report noted a continued improvement in air quality in the USA, despite 166 million citizens living in air pollution. These people were said to be up for numerous health hazards such as premature death, lung cancer, asthma, cardiovascular damage and developmental and reproductive harm. The report uses three measures of air pollution, namely, ozone, short-term and year-round particle pollution. "There are still nearly 20 million people in the United States that live with unhealthful levels of all three measures of air pollution the report tracks," Harold P. Wimmer, American Lung Association National President and CEO said in a news release via the American Lung Association. Sex abuse accusations have been spoiling the names of schools that have been implicated about the issue. Sex assaults in students have been considered as a "national terror." It seems as though the crisis isn't getting any better either, as shown by statistical data. Sexual Assault In Public Schools According to the New York Times, 9.6 percent of students in public schools encountered sexual abuse in public schools, as per a 2004 analysis from Education Week. Pupils from kindergarten to grade 12 experienced it from some educators that range from their erotic behaviors, nasty comments to rape. The data, too, can be compared to the victims of boarding schools as revealed by Peter W. Upham, executive director of the Association of Boarding Schools. He said sex assaults by the educators can be called "a national scourge." Sex Assault In Boarding Schools Boarding schools are often deemed as high-profile institutions with influential students. Hence, it faced more severe public scrutiny whenever sexual issues happened inside their premises. However, the number of sexual allegations and negative publicity are starting to affect schools and bring some action. Schools nowadays are trying their best to prevent sexual assaults and be more responsive to victims and students that are finally speaking up. Sexual Assault In Different Educational Institutions Sexual assault can happen in different schools, whether public or private. In fact, some educators revealed that it occurs frequently and the complaints are increasing in different educational institutions. In the U.K., on the other hand, The Women and Equalities Committee are set to analyze who is exactly doing sexual assault, who are the victims often and if the occurrence is rising. In a BBC News report, it unveiled there were 5,500 sexual abused in U.K. schools recorded between 2011 and 2014. The research group claimed "sexualized behavior" amongst the students is a social norm, another article from BBC News reported. Hence, school heads boasted their schools and colleges have safer environments, making their students more secure. What can you say about the sexual abuse happening in schools? Share us your thoughts. Write your comments below. Posting a selfie that shows the reality of motherhood, an award-winning news anchor for WHO-TV, was bombarded with callous comments about her appearance. Not someone to back down easily, the Erin Kiernan from Iowa had the perfect response for all the nasty remarks. When she first posted a picture of herself without make-up together with her newborn son, people were fast to comment. The picture's caption reads, "I used to think I knew what exhausted was. Hilarious." While there were many who stated their support, there were also many who left snide remarks, People reports. One remark says,"This doesn't even look like the same person!" So, in response, she posted a side by side comparison of how she looked like when the camera is rolling and how she looked like when she's taking care of her baby. The caption goes like this: "Snarky message...'This doesn't even look like the same person!' Etc, etc...mean, nasty, hateful comments...Newsflash! These ARE NOT pictures of the same person. The woman on the left is well rested, spent two hours on her hair and makeup, had a professional photographer take her picture (and photoshop it, I'm sure), and is in the 'glowing' second trimester of pregnancy. The woman on the right got two hours of sleep (maybe), hadn't looked in the mirror, took a selfie, did not put a filter on it and is covered with spit up and drool from a teething and very crabby baby. You are an idiot if you think these are pictures of the same woman," Parenting quoted. The follow-up post has reached 14,000 likes as of writing. That picture of Kiernan was particularly special as she had been battling infertility for eight years. She had undergone a series of IVF and artificial insemination before she finally got pregnant, Babble reports. An empowering message from Kiernan salutes all women who have a full-time job being a mother and more so, the working ones who manage both career and motherhood. Check out the video for more inspiration: A new study in Australia suggests that pregnant women who receive a flu shot are more likely to not experience stillbirth. This research started making rounds online on April 18. The Globe And Mail wrote that stillbirth might be prevented if an expecting mother has taken a seasonal flu shot. Scientists sampled around 53,000 pregnant women who didn't receive the said vaccine and another 5,100 who did. Results showed that women who underwent inoculation during pregnancy have a 51 percent chance of being spared from stillbirth. A photo posted by @danixcalifornia on Apr 20, 2016 at 4:16pm PDT According to Babycentre.com, stillbirth means the birth of a child who died inside the mother's womb after surviving 24 weeks. It could be due to late pregnancy, also known as intrauterine death. Stillbirth could also occur while the mother was going through labor known as intrapartum death. This type of birth is not common on the other hand it is not exactly rare. One in every 200 experience stillbirth in the United Kingdom alone. With the help of flu vaccines, that number has decreased that scientists noted just 6.5 were stillborn out of 1000 births. In an email sent by the lead author of this study, Annette Regan, she strongly advised pregnant women to have those flu shots. This could ease their mind knowing that their baby would be safe and alive. There were rumors about flu vaccines causing more risk to unborn babies, which is something that expecting mothers should no longer believe after this study has been published. Researchers didn't indicate how flu shots could prevent stillbirths, as they still have no idea about it. They just said that since flu during pregnancy is linked to stillborn babies, chances are high that flu vaccines could lower the risk of infection brought by flu to mothers. Do you think vaccines could really help solve stillbirths or do you think it could just cause other complications? Share us your thoughts in the comments section below. Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux have been plagued with several divorce rumors lately. Now, new reports are claiming that Jennifer Aniston must finally be a mother - either pregnant or adopting a child -- after being proclaimed as People's Most Beautiful Woman 2016. Jennifer Aniston, Justin Theroux pregnant or adopting? Celeb Dirty Laundry shared that gracing People's Most Beautiful Woman 2016 cover might be hinting that Justin Theroux and Jennifer Aniston are either pregnant or adopting a child very soon. While it seems impossible for her to bear a child of her own at 47, the rumor mills have been spreading that the "Cake" actress and "Tropic Thunder" actor are adopting very soon. Though Brad Pitt's ex have been very vocal about not wanting a kid, Jennifer Aniston revealed last year that she and Justin Theroux are now working on having a child since they tied the know in August 2015. However, the adoption rumors died down shortly after it was divulged that Justin Theroux had been talking to his ex Heide Bivens. Despite this, Jennifer Aniston has reportedly been busy having a nursery built inside their home for the adoption of twins. However, up until now, no one can confirm these reports. Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux are heading to a divorce If the adoption rumors are proven untrue, some fans believe that this could be the end for Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux. Parent Herald previously reported that the "Wanderlust" actor and "Friends" actress have been facing financial insecurity for quite some time after Justin Theroux failed to entice moviegoers to watch his latest film. Adding to the "Zoolander 2" catastrophe in the box-office arena, Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux are also worried after "The Leftovers" is cancelled. For now, recent reports claimed that Justin Theroux has been very dependent on Jennifer Aniston's income. As a matter of fact, Jennifer Aniston reportedly called some good friends of her in Hollywood to help her husband save his dying showbiz career. However, both Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux have yet to comment on these reports. Do you think Jennifer Aniston is going to be a mother very soon? What can you say about the reports of Justin Theroux and Jennifer Aniston divorcing? Share to us your thoughts in the comment section below. Automotive manufacturer Mitsubishi Motors has admitted to cheating on the fuel-economy tests of the minicars introduced in Japan three years ago. High-ranking officials have apologized for the manipulation. Mitsubshi Cheats On Tests The New York Times reported that the company has confirmed the manipulated evaluations done by its engineers on the 620,000 ultrafast cars sold in Japan. Mitsubishi president Tetsuro Aikawa also revealed that the same testing method was utilized for the other models of the company. "It has become clear that improper testing methods were used to improve the appearance of fuel efficiency," Mr. Aikawa explained. He also said that that the testing process did not follow standards in the country set in 2002. Reason Behind The Move According to Sydney Morning Herald, Mitsubishi was financially hurt by the issue, which came more than 10 years after it had bailout done when defects were found on some of its models. "Since the cover-up of recalls in the 2000s, we have tried to reinforce compliance within the company, but a compliance sense still hasn't penetrated to every employee," Aikawa said tagging the recent incident as shameful. Because of the cheating issue, the shares of Mitsubishi Motors reportedly fell by as much as 15 percent, which is considered to be its biggest decline in about a decade. Automaker analyst Michelle Krebs told Sydney Morning Herald that this has also affected the credibility of the company. "This has left a cloud over the auto industry that suggests it isn't honest," Michelle Krebs said. "It leads consumers and regulators to be suspicious." Fuel Efficiency And Air Pollution Aside from these concerns, the manipulation of fuel-economy tests could also potentially aid to the worsening air pollution problem brought by traffic. Parent Herald reported that pollution caused by emissions from cars and factories increases cases of premature births in the United States. BrokenSidewalk said that three percent of the premature births for 2010 was blamed to pollution. This has also brought a total medical cost of $760 milion for the country. The 7.8 earthquake that struck Ecuador Saturday, April 16, has claimed over 500 lives and injured over 4,000 people. Defense Minister Ricardo Patino said that the country is experiencing its "worst tragedy in 60 years," as rescue and recovery efforts continue. The death toll is still climbing and many are still missing. "It's going to take us years to recover from this," Patino told reporters via CNN. As rescue workers scour through the rubbles, the government said that they are likely to find more bodies and discover more damages. President Rafael Correa assessed that the damage could rise up to $3 billion, which will be a huge blow to the country's struggling economy. "It's going to be a long battle," he said, per The Guardian. The last time Ecuador experienced a tragedy of this magnitude was in 1987 when a 7.2 earthquake left 1,000 dead. Reconstruimos una vez Manabi y lo volveremos a hacer. Grande es la tragedia pero mas grande el valor del pueblo ecuatoriano. Rafael Correa (@MashiRafael) April 19, 2016 Foreign Aid Pour For Ecuador Earthquake Victims Ecuador has been experiencing aftershocks, but rescue and recovery efforts still continue, particularly in the Manabi province. The coastal tourist town is believed to have the most casualties and hundreds of establishments have collapsed. ABC reports that 11 foreigners have been confirmed dead. Other countries have pledged to help Ecuador as thousands are left without home and food. Neighboring South American countries have already dispatched rescuers, while the United States pledged to deploy medical and disaster experts, including supplies, per the US Aid. The United Nations has also committed to a major airlift of supplies and provisions, especially in refugee sites, per its press release. Ecuador Earthquake Affects 150,000 Children UNICEF reports that the aftermath of the Ecuador earthquake will be worst for 150,000 children. The organization is concerned that many will be without proper water and sanitation as recovery is taking place. The situation could be detrimental to the children's health, especially for those living in the coastal areas. UNICEF is also worried of a potential outbreak as this South American region is a hotspot for mosquito-borne diseases like Dengue, Chikungya, Malaria and Zika. "We are in a race against time to protect children from disease and other risks common in such emergencies," UNICEF's Grant Leaity said. Below is the UNICEF video of the rescue efforts in Ecuador: The once lush coral beds of Australia's Great Barrier Reef have turned white, thanks to coral bleaching. Ninety-three percent of the corals turned white due to high temperatures and scientists fear that 50 percent of them will die a natural death. Ars Technica said that the present that Australia's Great Barrier Reef, a World Heritage site, is suffering its worst coral bleaching case in history. Due to this catastrophic phenomenon, the other side of the country's reefs is at risk of facing the same carnage. 93 pct of Aussie #GreatBarrierReef affected by bleaching, worst in recorded history https://t.co/hLcDmXNrZ3 pic.twitter.com/BLTJFjmyd4 China Xinhua News (@XHNews) April 20, 2016 Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies released a report stating that only seven percent of the world's largest 1400-mile coral reef system is unaffected by coral bleaching. This finding appalls researchers as they have never seen coral bleaching with the same magnitude as what's happening in the Great Barrier Reef. "Almost without exception, every reef we flew across showed consistently high levels of bleaching, from the reef slope right up onto the top of the reef," said Terry Hughes, a member of the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce. In a report from CNN, Hughes likened the coral bleaching destruction to that of "10 cyclones have come ashore all at once." The survey shows the huge extent of the damage, with the worst hitting the northern area, and one of Australia's most important tourist sites. Andrew Baird from James Cook University said that they are measuring about almost 50 percent mortality of corals affected. Baird also mentioned that some reefs are more likely to endure a mortality exceeding 90 percent. He described the Australian Great Barrier Reef coral bleaching as severe, which would eventually affect almost all species, including those that take decades to regrow. New post: Coral bleaching event severe https://t.co/NFgnNbqxcD Great Barrier Reef (@BarrierReefOrg) April 12, 2016 According to the National Ocean Service, coral bleaching occurs when corals are stressed by environmental conditions. Changes in temperature, nutrients or light, result in the expulsion of the algae living in them, causing them to turn white. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the UN said that coral bleaching is "the most widespread and conspicuous impact of climate change." What's happening in the Australian Great Barrier Reef is one of the impacts that scientists have forewarned and feared. U.S. Presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, is proposing free education all over America should he win for office. He said it is possible through the tax payment coming from Wall Street. Counterpunch.org posted this report about Bernie Sander's proposition that is promising to all Americans who are hoping to get their education for free. It has been an issue ever since how Americans struggle in this department. Although they have student loans, the problem is them drowning in debt after they graduate and started working. Imagine if you are studying at Harvard with a tuition worth almost $100,000 a year. No doubt that your student loan could help pay for it gradually, but it would appear that you would be in debt to the organization for the rest of your life. This is something that Bernie Sanders would like to change. It is a huge statement to claim that he could make this happen, but it looks like his plans and platforms are feasible enough to push through. A photo posted by Nape Phasha Jnr (@napephasha) on Oct 22, 2015 at 5:44am PDT USNews.com reported that lots of people are still skeptical about it since they doubt that the U.S. government could afford to provide free education. Many are even saying that it doesn't seem like a good and realistic idea. But Bernie Sanders has more than just one plan to make it work. Aside from funds coming from Wall Street, he proposes that all U.S. citizen starts working at the age of 18 for one year for the government. They will be working for a year with Bernie Sanders' proposed minimum wage of $15 per hour. Their employers paying for them would have their salary go to the government since they would be under that government program. This may all sound far-fetched as of the moment, especially when the election is not yet over. What do you think about this? Would you vote for Bernie Sanders for his proposition towards free education? Stephen Hawking gave a lecture at Harvard University on Monday. The physicist talked about black holes and its potential benefit to the people. The "A Brief History Of Time" author believes black holes can work as a portal to another universe. Talking About Black Holes According to the Boston Globe, Stephen Hawking visited the university to start a research center about black holes. The cosmologist described that black holes aren't an "eternal prison" like what people thought it is. "Things can get out of a black hole, both from the outside and possibly though another universe," Stephen Hawking told about 1000 students at Harvard. "So if you feel you're in a black hole, don't give up. There's a way out." Stephen Hawking explained it took him quite a while to find black holes do "exist" and release elements. In fact, Albert Einsten was apprehensive behind the reality of black holes. Black Holes As Part Of Science "Black holes are stranger than anything dreamed up by science fiction writers, but they are firmly matters of science fact," Stephen Hawking noted. He even asserted black holes don't gobble up everything that reach its surface. Stephen Hawking said it is like putting an encyclopedia on fire. However, the information inscribed into it won't be lost if one store its ashes but, it will be definitely hard to read. Daily Express reported Dejan Stojkovic, an associate professor of physics at the University of Buffalo, also disclosed the same claim by Stephen Hawking about black holes last year. "According to our work, information isn't lost once it enters a black hole. It doesn't just disappear." Effects Of Black Holes Earlier this year, Stephen Hawking claimed people could the ability to control the whole society by employing the energy of black holes. However, it could be too dangerous if they failed to control black holes, Mirror noted. Black holes can go downward into the center of the Earth and devour all the human beings. Also, black holes can consume the whole planet and the entire solar system. What do you think of Stephen Hawking's idea about black holes? Share us your thoughts. Write your comments below. Since marijuana has been legalized in Colorado in 2012, a lot of people assumed that more kids would be the ones caught smoking weed. But according to recent reports, cannabis is more enjoyed by the older demographics. Leafly.com reported that most of the people in Colorado who smoke weed these days are the older siblings of kids and their parents. Unlike other states in the U.S., Colorado has an approved 2012 recreational marijuana law and it is a surprise that the numbers of kids using it went low since it was legalized. The proof was based on the state's report regarding all arrests, including the use of cannabis. Surveys are also saying that the rate of kids from middle school and high school, who were caught using weed went significantly low after years that the marijuana law was passed in 2012. A photo posted by Equals Three (@equalsthree) on Apr 20, 2016 at 9:04pm PDT The law applies to people of legal age, which means 21 and above. Anyone caught using marijuana in Colorado under the allowed age are still going to be in trouble and it would appear permanently in their personal government records. As for penalties, the state's official website said, that it could range from paying a fine to facing jail time. Schools and universities have also the right to expel or suspend students who are caught smoking pot or selling it when they are on school property. But the question here is how come kids were no longer smoking pot more these days after marijuana has been legalized by the state. No report was released regarding its reason, but dualism could play a huge role in this case. This simply means that restriction breeds rebellion while freedom gives chances for obedience. What is your opinion about marijuana being legal and do you think it should be applied to all states in America? Feel free to comment below. This service applies to you if your subscription has not yet expired on our old site. You will have continued access until your subscription expires; then you will need to purchase an ongoing subscription through our new system. Please contact the Parsons Sun office at (620) 421-2000 if you have any questions Most beer styles are steeped in hundreds of years of history, but black IPA is a distinctly American, distinctly contradictory, uniquely divisive exception to multiple rules. Since becoming widespread in American craft beer at the end of the 2000s, it has engendered a lot of debates, including arguments over the legitimacy of the style and plenty of disagreement over what it should be calledsee our new Lets Talk Beer Styles: Black IPA feature for more information on the history and modern role of the style. But suffice to say, people have some strong feelings about black IPAs, and their role in the beer community is nebulous. They dont tend to be anyones favorite style, and many brewery owners will express a certain resentment for the fact that even the best examples dont sell particularly well. Just look no further than Stone as an examplethey made the very well-regarded Sublimely Self-Righteous from 2007 onward, and that was a damn fine black IPA. And yet, the brewery ended up discontinuing it last year, presumably to focus on the new black version of Enjoy By IPAa savvy way of connecting a new black IPA to a Stone brand (Enjoy By) that has already proven quite popular. Sensible move, but presumably not one that would be made if Sublimely Self-Righteous was the #1 seller. What, then, actually makes for a great black IPA? That, like so many other aspects of craft beer, is a matter of taste. Some are looking for beers that emphasize the black in the name, albeit with an added shot of American hops. Others are looking for hop bombs that could probably pass for regular IPAs if you were tasting with a blindfold on. Still others, ourselves included, are looking for a hard-to-achieve balance between delicate roast and expressive American hop character. The ideal black IPA, tasted blind should be obviously an American black IPAnot a porter or stout with hops, and not an IPA with a touch of color. Its all about the synthesis. Here, then, are 21 black IPAs, blind-tasted and ranked. A Note on Black IPA Acquisition Putting together a large field of black IPAs proved significantly more difficult than we were anticipating this time around. Perhaps this speaks to the fickle nature of the style, or the fact that theres no defined season for black IPAsbreweries put them out in the summer, in the winter, and every season in between. Many of those are seasonal or otherwise limited releases, which imposes a limit on us. Perhaps it also indicates that black IPA, as a style, has already sailed well past its zenith and is now receding. Regardless, something we couldnt help but notice is that the samples we were able to put together came from a very strong crop of breweries. There arent many year-round black IPAs out there, but many of the ones we received are from breweries that are near and dear to our hearts, including the likes of Firestone Walker, Maine Beer Co. and Ohios The Brew Kettle. I dont think weve ever had so many great breweries represented in so small a field. Rules and Procedure - We accepted anything sent to us, as long as it involved black IPA or India in the description. Some of them, like Dogfish Heads Indian Brown ale, were essentially pioneers of this style before the black IPA term even existed, so yeahthey get a pass. - There was a limit of two black IPAs per brewery, which was totally unnecessary. The beers were separated into daily blind tastings that approximated a sample size of the entire field. - Choosing an ABV limit was difficult, as this style tends to ignore distinctions between IPA and DIPA. Firestone Walkers Wookey Jack, for instance, is regarded as a prototypical American example of black IPA, and its 8.3% ABVeasily in DIPA territory. Could we really accept that one and not one at 9% ABV? Ultimately we just accepted them all. - Tasters included professional beer writers, brewery owners and beer reps. Awesome, style-appropriate glassware is from Spiegelau. - Beers were judged completely blind by how enjoyable they were as individual experiences and given scores of 1-100, which were then averaged. Entries were judged by how much we enjoyed them for whatever reason. The Rankings In most of the recent tastings, weve only ranked the top portion of the results, simply listing the rest of the entries alphabetically in The Field, totally unranked. However, with this smaller sample size, coupled with the fact that we enjoyed pretty much all of these beers, we decided to rank the entire group. Were sorry that someone has to end up in the lowest position, but thats the nature of the beast. It doesnt mean theyre bad beersjust that they potentially got overlooked. City: Ipswich, MA ABV: 7% The verdict: There really arent that many year-round black IPAs on the market, so I knew we couldnt miss this longstanding one from Clown Shoes. Unfortunately, the bottles we were able to find in our area werent exactly the freshest, and that showed in the final product, as it didnt have the punch we usually associate with Clown Shoes IPAs. Noticeable oxidation and time had cut down on the hops somewhat, also imparting a bit of mustiness to a malt body that comes off more nutty than outright roasty. Search hard enough and you can also uncover some tropical fruit notes, but this one simply felt like it had been sitting under the fluorescent lights a little bit too long. City: Minneapolis, MN ABV: 6.5% The verdict: Weve quite liked some of the beers from Minneapolis Indeed Brewing Co., including the pale ale Day Tripper, which performed well in our recent pale ale blind tasting, but the brewerys black IPA seemed less well-balanced than the previous example. Most tasters primarily noted the roast and a touch of dark chocolate flavors, but at the expense of most of the hop character. What does come through is mostly hop-derived bitterness, which combines with the roast to create a dry, ashy flavor profile that you do see in a lot of American black IPAs these days. Most of our tasters, on the other hand, are hoping for either more expressive American hop flavors or a slightly higher level of residual sugar to counteract the dual bitterness of dark malt and alpha acid-derived bitterness. This is still perfectly drinkable, but the best examples of the style are more vivacious. City: San Leandro, CA ABV: 6.8% The verdict: Were honestly surprised to see that this one reaches 6.8% ABV, because it drinks much lighter. Very mellow, especially in comparison to some of the other behemoth black IPAs that were on the table during each day of tastings, it suffered a bit in comparison simply because it was more restrained. Its significantly thinner of body than most, with a good balance of light, coffee-like roast and classically piney American hopsa profile that we saw in a lot of these individual black IPAs, which made it harder for that subset to stand out. If you amplified this one a bit, the ranking might go higher. City: Buellton, CA ABV: 6.5% The verdict: This beer is pretty close to a template of what black IPA has come to mean in the American craft beer marketit hits the style definition right in the center of the bullseye, albeit perhaps with a bit more malt than some of the other examples. Cocoa powder and bitter dark chocolate edge it toward an American stout-like profile, but theres also some pleasantly resinous pine notes on the palate as well. In execution, its really rather similar to the beer that precedes it on this list, but simply with a mouthfeel that is a bit fuller, despite being slightly lower in ABV. In truth, there were quite a few black IPAs that fit more or less into this sort of profile, but our favorites tended to be the ones that either did something unexpected or simply found a way of presenting these flavors in a way that was simultaneously more assertive but still balanced. City: Salt Lake City, UT ABV: 9.2% The verdict: There were definitely a few big boys in the tasting, and Dubhe has the assertiveness of an imperial black IPA. The hops do announce themselves this time, with a burst of clean citrus in particular, counterbalanced by dried fruit, raisin-like maltiness, caramel and a wave of roast that turns slightly acrid. To quote one score sheet: Yum. Grassy and citrus hops hit you quick, then roast. Huge body. That pretty much says it all. Its hard to say if we overall enjoyed the higher or lower ABV examples of this style moreits perhaps more accurate to say that our favorite examples of black IPA were equally likely to be anywhere from 6-10% ABV. City: Gary, IN ABV: 8.5% The verdict: We have no idea why this black IPA is simply named Seven, but we unabashedly love the funky, blaxploitation-themed can. This offering stood out among others in its days tasting for some really beautiful malt flavors in particulartheres a firm roastiness and a touch of smoke and possibly anise-like licorice that is rich and characterful without being acrid or bitter. What doesnt show up as strongly is the hops, which are perceived more through the tactile sensation of bitterness than on the nose or the palate. As is, in a completely blind tasting we would probably be more likely to categorize this beer as an American stout than a true black IPA. But for lovers of clean, roasty flavors its one to seek out. City: Clifton Park, NY ABV: 7% The verdict: The name implies this beers story, brewed by Shmaltz (the makers of the HeBrew line of Jewish-themed beers) to celebrate the transition into their own brewery after a long 17 years of contract brewing. The black IPA they chose to celebrate the occasion is well-balanced and appreciably complex, if not particularly assertive. Piney and especially floral hops are what most of the tasters detected here, supported by gently nutty malt without much in the way of true roastmore American brown ale in character than stout-like. Bready and nutty on the palate, with more floral hops, its a slightly reserved but well-executed spin on the style that tactfully finds a balance between hops and malt. City: Sawyer, MI ABV: 7.6% The verdict: Anger is a year-round offering from southern Michigan brewery Greenbush, which has stealthily built a solid reputation for itself as an up-and-comer, only a short drive from the breweries of Chicago. It is likewise a solid example of black IPAa bit lighter of body than some of the others on the table despite a 7.6% ABV, with a very ripe grapefruit citrus nose, chased by pine sap. Light cocoa maltiness is present, and medium level of bitterness that falls right in the middle of the examples we tasted. Its not the flashiest beer on the table, but the balance is there and its sessionable enough that drinkers might actually reach for more than one, which is more than a lot of these black IPAs could say. City: Victor, ID ABV: 8.5% The verdict: This beer has been around for going on 6 years now, and I remember it being one of a few examples that helped establish my own expectations of the style back in 2010, along with Averys New World Porter. Tasting it blind against this lineup, it doesnt quite pack the hop punch I remember, but tasters enjoyed it nevertheless. Rather, its the malt that shines with complexityclassic base malt flavors of bread and more toasted impressions of nuts and baking cocoa adding richness and moderate residual sweetness, which is probably amplified a bit by the higher ABV. Hops are piney, woodsy and reflective of the pine woods you find in the region. It would probably make a great accompaniment to a pan-seared trout like the one on the label. City: Bloomington, IN ABV: 6.5% The verdict: Upland is an interesting brewery, with a sour program in particular that is not afraid to take risks. Some of those work out, and some dontwe never know quite what were going to get from these guys. The Komodo Dragonfly makes use of a unique ingredient in lavender flowers, but this time the novelty is for a very subtle effect, creating an x-factor of earthiness and subtle floral tones that nicely complement its fruit-forward hops. Subtle in general, with lower bitterness than most of the other examples, it takes a little digging to really get at the flavors. The black portion doesnt come through quite as strongly as in most of these other black IPAs, meaning this might be a more suitable option for those who like a less robust roast presence in the style. This too would likely be a very food-friendly black IPA thanks to the lack of scorching roast or hop-derived bitterness. City: Stratford, CT ABV: 7.5% The verdict: Theres a lot of things going on here at once, in a beer that punches somewhere above its weight class. Two Roads offering is very clean, with distinct malt and hop flavors that you can note one at a time. Citrus and floral hops pleasantly make their presence felt in both the flavor department and via moderate-to-high bitterness. Malt presence runs the gamut from lighter nuttiness to deeper, darker, more bitter chocolate, and theres even a bit of dark fruitiness in there as well. Its hard to say if its more a dark beer with hop presence or an IPA with darker malt, but that debate is what we like to see in this style. From this point on, all of the beers are pretty excellent. Next: The top 10 black IPAs! City: Boulder, CO ABV: 8.7% The verdict: Okay, I have to admit: I used this black IPA tasting as a way for us to experiment with a few things. We knew the overall number of entries would be more limited than usual, so I acquired a few I wouldnt have otherwise included, for one reason or another. As an India brown ale, this one comes close enough in terms of style guidelines, but there was a big but this beer was bottled in mid-2014. Which is to say, its a 2-year-old hop-forward beer, but I couldnt help being curious how it would do, and I figured Avery would appreciate there being one less bottle of it still on store shelves. And guess what? Its still quite solid all that time later, presumably helped on by the 8.7% ABV. The hops have unsurprisingly faded, but what youre left with is a solid, complex imperial brown ale or stout, combining biscuity malt, notable booze and dark fruitiness with whatever piney hops remain. It may be two years old, but wed still be happy to drink another bottle. City: Paso Robles, CA ABV: 8.3% The verdict: Firestone Walkers black IPA has become, to many, the absolute defining example of this style, and its perhaps the highest-rated example of it to be nationally available on a regular basis. In terms of balance, it definitely leans more heavily on the IPA portion of the style name, with assertive, resinous and grassy hops that project dank, weed-like aromatics that also include grapefruit citrus. The dark character isnt as assertive or well-defined, with the rye in the malt bill giving the beer a bit of spiciness but not much in the way of char or roast. Its a great black IPA for the hopheads in the audience, but there were a few examples of similar execution that most of the tasters ultimately preferred. City: Freeport, ME ABV: 7.2% The verdict: Maine Beer Co. has been a goliath in our blind-tasting series for just about every style theyve ever entered, from IPA to stout, and their black IPA is only slightly less world-beating. Weez is significantly lighter of body than most of the other black IPAs on the table, with a fairly prominent roast component that is nevertheless different in character than otherslight coffee, and with a crispness and lack of bitterness that reminds one more of the roast flavors you might find in a schwarzbier than a stout. Hops are also assertively present, with some pleasantly grassy, resinous and floral notes, and a touch of lemon citrus. Its a well-balanced, drinkable black IPA that only lost points with a few tasters because there were some real flavor bombs up near the top of the rankings. City: Milton, DE ABV: 7.2% The verdict: Make way for a real trailblazer of this style. Dogfish Heads nearly black IPA may be the oldest good example of this beer on the market today that is produced as a year-rounder: Indian Brown Ale dates all the way back to 1999, a decade before the term even came into widespread use. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it stands out as noticeably different in a blind tasting, not necessarily by sight (although it is slightly lighter) but moreso in terms of flavor. Rather than classic American roastiness, you get more biscuit and nutty flavors, reminiscent of the maltiness of say, a German dunkel. Hops are also a bit unusual, on the herbal side with some additional citrus and almost a berry-like fruitiness. In a style where theres a lot of similarities between the average entries, its funny to think that such an longstanding beer actually represents a pleasant change of pace, as long as you choose to include it. City: Strongsville, OH ABV: 6.8% The verdict: This is definitely one we were excited to try, given that The Brew Kettles White Rajah IPA was the grand champion of our 116 IPA blind tasting; a beer that really came totally out of left field and floored the judges. The dark variant, Black Rajah, is nearly as gooddistinctive enough, by the way, that at least one taster was able to correctly identify the same hop profile as the single IPA original. Like the White Rajah, it blasts the taste buds with resiny, sticky hop oils, with strong pine and orangey citrus flavors. If you ever describe your favorite hop flavors as green, then this is the kind of beer youre looking for. The roastiness is restrained but firm, with good bitter coffee flavors that make one think of French roast or espresso. Its unbalanced in favor of the drank, citrusy hops, but we have no complaint. It actually reminds us quite a bit of Firestone Walkers Wookey Jack in that respect. City: Atlanta, GA ABV: 8.8% The verdict: Alright, so heres another beer I included as an experiment and to prove a point about the intangibility of the black IPA style guidelines. SweetWater refers to Happy Ending as either an American stout or an imperial stout, but they could just as easily label the beer as a black IPA if they wanted to, much the same as Averys New World Porter. I included it, wondering if it would actually stand out as more stout-like than the pack, and although it did somewhat, it wasnt the biggest or richest beer in the full tasting. What it was, though, was quite delicious. Assertive and very flavorful, its stoutness comes through via density and a full mouthfeel, but I still imagine I would identify it as a black IPA in a totally blind setting. Dank, resinous hops are a signature, as they are in so many SweetWater beers, cutting a clean swath of hoppy flavors and hop-derived bitterness through ashy roast. Its actually quite well-balancedif it favors the malt, then it leans that way only slightly. City: Bellaire, MI ABV: 9% The verdict: Ive always had a feeling that Shorts, the underrepresented all-star brewery of far-northern Michigan, was going to place really high in one of these tastings at some point, and it looks like black IPA was their time. This beer is the reason why SweetWater Happy Ending isnt the most stout-like of the group, because this beer truly feels and tastes massive like an imperial black IPA/imperial stout/barleywine hybrid, if thats possible. Cocoa is assertive on the nose, but what really jumps out at you is dark fruit, distinct booziness and a thick, luscious mouthfeel that is positively milkshake-like. Hops come through more in hop-derived bitterness than overt hoppy flavors, but tasters were still taken with how decadent a drinking experience it is. If were measuring all the beers in this tasting by sheer volume of flavor, this one might be the winner. City: Grand Rapids, MI ABV: 8.9% The verdict: Dark Penance is a pretty classic American black IPA profile that has simply been turned up to 11. The hops are expressive and classica combination of citrus, pine and pleasant florals that pop without being overwhelming. Caramel sweetness is pronounced, giving the beer a sizeable body and heft, and coming close to balancing the charge of hops. Roast, meanwhile, is dialed back somewhat, certainly not as prominent as in the Shorts beer above. Its a bit like taking one of the other solid, archetypal American black IPAs on the list and inflating its stature, all the more impressive considering that these bottles were actually on the older side. Its one of those examples where if you tasted it with a blindfold on, you would invariably come to the conclusion that this was black IPAit truly fits the definition of the style. City: Atlanta, GA ABV: 8% The verdict: Weve been enjoying the draft-only offerings of Atlantas Wrecking Bar Brewpub for a long time, but weve never had any of them bottled for a blind tasting before. After receiving this one, we can understand why they waited for black IPA to spring bottles on us. Its an exceptionally flavorful and fruity take on the style, with a hop-forward nose that features a melange of hard-to-place tropical and citrus notes, along with some herbal character. The hops are nicely complemented by a nicely dry, roasty malt profile with light coffee flavors and firm, medium-strength bitterness. Its a well-balanced black IPA that incorporates some hop flavors we didnt see in too many of the other entrants in a fresh, complex way, while still holding on to a bit of malt complexity as well. City: Escondido, CA ABV: 9.4% The verdict: Its a little mind-blowing for me to think that this is actually the highest-ABV beer in the entire tasting, because it certainly doesnt seem like it would be. Like most hopheads, weve enjoyed Stones regular Enjoy By IPA ever since its first release, but it was a pleasant surprise to try this beer and come to a realization: Enjoy By Black may have surpassed its original inspiration. This offering is seriously hoppy, which gives it perhaps the best overall nose on any of the beers in the tasting. A plethora of fruit notes explode from the glasstropical fruit in particular, but also a delightful stone fruit character that reminded some tasters of apricot. Its admittedly lighter on the black side of the equationdark brownish red in color, really, rather than true blackand this is reflected in the malt flavors, which are more like the stage for hops to dance upon. Search enough, though, and youll find just enough cocoa and nutty malt impressions on the back end that you would realize this wasnt simply an IPA, drinking it blindfolded. Its also remarkable how well that ABV is hidden. There were beers on the table in the 7% ABV range that tasted boozier than this 9.4% offering. The nose on this beer is a beautiful thingwe may like this hop profile even more than the one in the original version of Enjoy By. It reminds us that in the end, black IPA is a style that each brewery essentially gets to define for itselfits malleable to the personal style of a brewmaster, and theres no right answer. Whatever you want to call it, were happy to refer to it as our new favorite black IPA. Jim Vorel is Pastes news editor. You can follow him on Twitter. For many new bands, choosing a proper name can be more challenging than making good music. To finally arrive at that revelatory moment and settle on the perfect moniker, many groups go for a boring but memorable one-word brand (Nirvana), others choose a downright ridiculous title (Limp Bizkit, Diarrhea Planet) and some, who strive for shock value, get mired in controversy right away. Case in pointthe band formerly known as Viet Cong, who today announced it will henceforth be called Preoccupations. Here are five bands that should take Viet Congs cue and change their controversial names. Pissing people off is a major part of being a good punk rocker, but theres a way to do it constructively. The Queers dont really understand this. The longtime New Jersey punk rock band, led by Joe King (aka Joe Queer), has made it a point to publicly provoke certain sects of the punk subculture they should be harmoniously rocking out with. Obviously, certain songs irk people. Ursula Finally Has Tits is about wanting to have sex with an underage girl. My Cunts a Cunt off last years Beyond the Valley Revisited needs no explanation. But Kings comments supporting Darren Wilson, the cop who shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., have basically exiled him and his band from the punk rock community. Its about time for some heartfelt apologies and a name change, eh Joe? Why would an all-white, all-male band call itself Black Pussy? Lets just say its not because the band loves black cats. Rather, its hybrid of psychedelia and stoner rock is so boring, it requires a wild name just to spark interest (or outrage, for that matter). Last March, feminist activists, especially African-American ones, lashed out at the Portland, Ore. quintet for its rude name, saying they were racist and sexist. A petition was even started to force the group to change its moniker or face a boycott. It got just under 2,500 signatures. Black Pussy defended itself with a video of stand-up comedian Doug Stanhope, of all things. In it, the comic basically tells anyone who is offended by words (or distasteful band names) that theyre idiots. Nice comeback, Black Pussy. Fuck Buttons are a badass British electronica duo, but its name isnt as cool as its music. The name sounds like a phrase some randy middle school boy might utter to his friends during their sex education class for a cheap laugh. Like other artists who drop the f-bomb in their name (like Holy Fuck and Fucked Up), Fuck Buttons has to deal with a lot of censorship. On Facebook, for example, Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power actually have to list themselves as F Buttons. Changing the name after 12 years would surely be a hassle for the band, but they can always think about what could have beena moniker that doesnt push so many buttons. This all-female garage rock band from Atlanta was originally going to be called Abortion Rules or Levitating, thats so David Blaine, and frankly, they should have stuck with either of those titles. According to the darkest chapters of history, many women attempted self-induced abortions using wire coat hangers. Now, though, the closet accessories have become a symbol for making abortion legal, albeit a really messed up one. No matter how passionate pro-lifers or pro-choice people are about their cause, they might be too disgusted to debate when such a word is uttered. Hearing it is similar to witnessing Morrisseys Meat is Murder video: You want to argue for or against it afterward, but only after the wave of nausea passes. This San Diego punk outfit desecrated one of Americas living musical legends, John Cougar Mellencamp, while simultaneously bringing up the Holocaust. Nearly 17 million people, including six million Jews, were killed by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945, with most sent to horrific concentration camps. So, to respectfully disagree with this previous list, Jon Cougar Concentration Camp is not one of The 100 Best Band Names of All Time; its actually one of the worst. 1. Force Publique This is the name of an awesome Portland, Ore. darkwave band. Its also the alias of a Dutch military group that hacked off the hands of rubber slaves in the Congo. 2. Cephalic Carnage These Denver metal heads should get an award for having one gnarly title. It either refers to head trauma or a really messed up childbirth. 3. Leftover Crack It seems like this New York City punk outfit doesnt care about how many African-American communities were destroyed by the 1980s crack epidemic, as long as it has a cool name. 4. The Brian Jonestown Massacre These zany psychedelic rockers figured out how to bring up a dead rock star and a cults gut-wrenching mass suicide all within one name. 5. Bosnian Rainbows This El Paso, Texas experimental group (fronted by Omar Rodriguez-Lopez from At the Drive-In and the Mars Volta) should know there are no rainbows in Bosnia. From 1992-1995, the country was ravaged by a war that brought mass rape and genocide. Its been recovering ever since. At a press event today in New York, Acer unveiled its newest Windows desktop and laptops, including a new liquid cooling 2-in-1 laptop to take on Microsofts Surface Pro. The Switch Alpha 12 laptop/tablet combo has some clear similarities to the Surface Pro in its design. Its stand out feature though is its fanless liquid cooling system. Acer claims the 2-in-1 device is its most silent yet along with a 12-inch Quad HD screen and a resolution of 2,160 1,440. And unlike the Surface Pro though, the Switch Alpha 12 comes with a keyboard cover as standard. On the traditional laptop front, Acer showed off two new computersthe S13 and the R15. The S13 is a 13-inch screen laptop with a 1,920 1,080 display, starting at $699. The company claims it has a battery life of up to 13 hours. A touchscreen model will also be available at a higher price tag. The R15 a 15.6-inch convertible laptop, again with a 1,920 1,080 display, but with In-Plane Switching (IPS), and is powered by Intel Skylake processors and a NVIDIA GeForce 940MX graphics card. For gamers, Acer launched two new Predator gaming PCs and a new monitor. Firstly the 17-inch screen Predators 17x laptop with a triple-fan cooling system and secondly is the Predator G1 desktop with its Intel Core processor, NVIDIA GeForce GTX graphics, and 6GB of DDR4 RAM. Finally for gamers, is the companys first curved gaming monitor, the Predator Z1 at 27 and powered by NVIDIAa G-Sync. Also for the consumer marketplace, Acer updated its current line of laptops. This includes the F15, E14, E15, and E17, all with Skylake processors, NVIDIA GeForce GTX950M graphics and DDR4 RAM. Lastly, Acer unveiled the Chromebook 14 for Work, a notebook designed for the on-the-go worker. It has 14-inch display with Corning Gorilla Glass with Intel Core i processors under the hood. Acer claims it has 12 hours of battery life, which is longer than its consumer version Chromebook. All devices will be available for pre-order soon according to Acer. Soon, Paste will be running a feature on why former U.S. president Andrew Jackson was a pretty awful guy, and why its awesome that Harriet Tubman will be the new front face of the $20 bill (contrary to earlier reports Jacksons image will remain on the reverse side). That is not the purpose of this post, so Jackson haters be warnedthis post is about the time he killed a man in a duel, and how f***ing crazy it was. I came across this story last night while doing some cursory research on Jackson, who I always vaguely knew was kind of a dick, but who also stood up to the big banks and can be seen as an economic predecessor to future, less dickish presidents like FDR. None of that matters now, because like a good American journalist, I was immediately distracted by a story that I still cant quite believethe May 1806 duel between Andrew Jackson and Charles Dickinson. For those who arent familiar with dueling culture, the practice was a tried-and-true method of resolving disputes of honor. Basically, if you pissed someone off, he could challenge you to a duel, at which point you could choose the weapon, and the two of you would meet with a bunch of assistants called seconds, stand a few feet apart, and shoot at each other with pistols, or have a sword fight, or something. Sometimes the duel was mostly symbolic, and both parties would shoot their guns into the air, and everyone would go home happy. Other times, they killed each other. You knowbasic brutal madness. The most famous duel in American history, of course, was between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Those two men, lifelong political rivals, went to New Jersey (where authorities still turned a blind eye to dueling), and Hamilton intentionally fired a shot over Burrs head. Burr, apparently thinking Hamilton had aimed at his head, shot and killed Hamilton in response. Andrew Jacksons duel with Charles Dickinson didnt result from a serious political conflict, but from a weird argument about a horse race. The details are byzantine, but basically Jacksona Tennessee plantation owner and horse breeder still 23 years away from the presidency, at the timeand a man named Joseph Erwin got into a small fight about a forfeit fee theyd negotiated when a horse was unable to race. As it happens, Erwin was Dickinsons father-in-law, and when Dickinson heard a friend of Jacksons insult Erwin, he became furious and started a fight that quickly involved Jackson. Insults were exchanged, and Dickinson eventually published a piece in the Nashville Review calling Jackson a poultroon (sick old-timey insult) and a coward. (This was apparently a time in U.S. history when newspapers would print your insulting letters just for the hell of it.) He also insulted Jackson to his face by calling his wife a bigamist, which was a sore spot with Jackson because it was truewithout knowing it, he had married his wife before she had divorced her old husband, and back then this was a big deal that threatened to hurt Jackson professionally and politically. He spent a good amount of time defending her honor, and suffering the consequences. So, Jackson did the only thing he could think ofhe challenged Dickinson to a duel, writing: Your conduct and expressions relative to me of late have been of such a nature and so insulting that requires, and shall have my noticeI hope Sir your courage will be an ample security to me, that I will obtain speedily that satisfaction due me for the insults offered. Dickinson quickly accepted, and chose pistols as fighting weapon. This will only illustrate how nuts Jackson was: Dickinson, a lawyer, was considered an expert marksman, probably one of the best in the state. At age 26, one source claims that he had already killed 26 people in duels. Jackson, on the other hand, was considered a terrible marksman and had never killed anyone in a duel. And let me remind you, Jackson was the one who challenged Dickinson, which by rule allowed Dickinson to choose his favorite weapon! The whole challenge was essentially suicide, and the only kind of person who would issue such a challenge and expect to live is a ridiculous force of nature whose explosive, righteous fury overrules all sense of self-preservation. Such a man was Andrew Jackson. If youre going to fight a seasoned murderer on his own turf, you might as well have a plan, right? Jackson knew he was pretty much boned from the start, so he and his seconds hit on a strategy that only a batshit person who didnt care if he lived or died would ever conceive: Let Dicksinson shoot him first. Yup! Jacksons big plan was to wear a huge overcoat that disguised his body, let Dickinson fire first in the duel, and hope that in his haste, he missed his shot. Again, this was the best shooter in the state, standing 24 feet away. Spoiler: Not a good plan. It was essentially like pouring out a glass of water and hoping it doesnt hit the ground. On the banks of the Red River in Kentucky on the morning of May 6dueling was illegal in Tennessee, so they had to cross the borderthey paced 20 feet away, and waited for one of the seconds to yell Fire! Dickinson shot first, andremember how he was an excellent marskman?hit Jackson right in the damn chest, inches from his heart. Which should have ended the duel, because again, the dude got hit with a bullet in the chest. Nope! You forgot one thingAndrew Jackson was a certified lunatic. In fact, he didnt even fall over. He just stood up straight, gasping with the pain of two broken ribs, with smoke actually coming out of his chest, to the point that Dickinson said, My God! Have I missed him? The bullet was so close to his heart, in fact, that doctors thought it was too dangerous to operate on, and so it stayed in Jacksons chest for the rest of his life. It caused serious health issues, including abscesses and lung issues that had him coughing up blood in his later years. By dueling rules, Dickinson now had to stand there while Jackson slowly took aim and attempted to kill him. Jackson fired once, but the hammer malfunctioned, so he got to try again (this may have been cheatingsources are in disagreement). This time, he took careful aim and hit Dickinson in the abdomen. Dickinson fell, and died that night from blood loss. Haha! Good one! Oh, you bet. When a doctor expressed surprise that he had managed to stay on his feet and fire the fatal shot, here was Jacksons reply: I would have stood up long enough to kill him if he had put a bullet in my brain. Haha! Again with the jokes! Jackson fought more than 100 duels in his life, and almost died when he got shot twice in the arm, rupturing an artery, when he tried to horsewhip a man who later became his good friend and top ally in the Senate. And at this point, that sentence shouldnt surprise you at all. What did we learn today? That history is really strange, and Andrew Jackson was a raving maniac who allowed himself to get shot by the 1806 equivalent of a military sniper because of an insult about a horse, and then killed the guy with a bullet in his chest. And while Im fully in support of him getting the boot from the $20 bill in favor of Harriet Tubman, I still feel like this one event in his life deserves a certain amount of awe. Not respect, not approval, but just a quiet acknowledgement that this was an extreme mind we cant begin to comprehend, and which can only be summed up with the words, damn, dudedamn. The Starz television adaptation of Neil Gaimans fantasy novel American Gods appears to have finally rounded out its cast, according to a report from Deadline. Cloris Leachman, Peter Stormare, Chris Obi and Mousa Kraish will all star as ancient deities in the 10-episode series, which will focus on a brewing war between old and new gods in America. Leachman, known for her work in The Last Picture Show, various 1970s Mel Brooks films and Malcolm in the Middle, will play Zorya Vechernyaya, one of three sisters who watches over the constellations. Stormare, who played John Abruzzi in Prison Break and put Steve Buscemi through a wood chipper in Fargo, will star as Czernobog, a Slavic god of evil and darkness. Obi and Kraish play Anubis, the Egyptian god of enbalming, and The Jinn, a mythical fire deity, respectively. They join Ricky Whittle and Ian McShane, who play protagonist Shadow Moon and the mysterious Mr. Wednesday, in a solid cast that began shooting the series this week. Neil Gaiman, in addition to penning American Gods, is also noted for his work in the world of comics. You can read our interview with him about his work on The Sandman here. The first trailer for Antoine Fuquas take on The Magnificent Seven is here, and if it cant jolt you awake this Wednesday morning, nothing can. The action-packed clip is anchored by stars Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt, but also shows off the films deep bench, featuring the likes of Ethan Hawke, Vincent DOnofrio, Byung-Hun Lee, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and Martin Sensmeier as the rest of the Seven, Haley Bennett as the widow who hires them and Peter Sarsgaard as the flicks biggest bad. Washington, Pratt and company play a band of gunslinging mercenaries who agree to protect the town of Rose Creek from a group of bandits led by malicious industrialist Bartholomew Bogue (Saarsgard). Weve been excited about this film for quite a while now, and the shoot-em-up trailer does nothing to deter that. Fuquas remake has the look of a full-fledged popcorn flick, rather than a straight Western like John Sturges 1960 original, which starred Steve McQueen, Yul Brynner and Charles Bronson, and itself was a remake of Akira Kurosawas Seven Samurai. Bring on the boom. The Magnificent Seven is out in theaters Sept. 23. Watch the trailer above. Yesterday, we reported that Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew had decided to throw a wrench into progress by demoting women to the back of the $10 bill after the Broadway play Hamilton had revived interest in the first US Treasury Secretary. Today, some better news: slaveholder and former President Andrew Jackson will be replaced on the $20 bill by Harriet Tubman, a former slave who ushered hundreds of slaves to freedom using her Underground Railroad. As The New York Times reports, the new currency designs, from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, will be made public in 2020in time for the centennial of womans suffrage and the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. Images of women will also grace the back of the new $20 bill, with Tubman in a place of prominence on the front. What was basically inevitable after the March 15 primaries, when Hillary Clinton won all five contested states, is now all but official: Bernie Sanders, progressive insurgent candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, has lost. New York was the death knellhe needed to win the state, and he lost handily. Only the die-hards are still professing belief now, and that belief has crossed the line from optimistic to delusional. Theres only one way Bernie Sanders wins this thing, and thats if one of Hillarys dozens of scandals actually materializes into something disastrous. But the Clintons have been playing damage control on scandals for their entire political lives, and the odds that theyll falter now, at the most critical hour, seem very, very small. Barring that sort of collapse, Bernie is buriedhes too far behind in the popular vote and pledged delegate counts, and its about to get worse next week when Clinton runs the table (or comes very close) in the rest of the northeastern states. So, theres the elegy for his campaign straight from the mouth of a fervent supporter. I felt discouraged after March 15, but knew that if he won New York, the entire picture could change. He didnt win. He didnt come close. He didnt even meet his soft target of 45 percent. Black voters destroyed him in the city, just as they destroyed him in the southeast at the start of the primary season, and Hillarys coalition of minorities and women and old people held strong, while the young people that give Sanders his edge didnt turn out in the huge numbers needed to reverse the outcome. This is an acknowledgement of defeat. That being said, Bernie Sanders needs to stay in the race. Even with no hope of overall victory, he must march on through California. And the reason is simple: For the first time in decades, the American people have a chance to vote for a progressive politician, and to be at the vanguard of what hopefully becomes a lasting movement. Bernie skeptics have often said that his campaign is more about an idea than a candidate, and while I believe that his success refuted that point for some timeyou dont win 16 states and counting without posing a real threat to the frontrunnerits now factually true. The Sanders campaign has ceased to be about the 2016 presidential election, and is now about the future of the progressive movement. There have been calls in some corners for Sanders to abandon the race, endorse Hillary, and unite the Democratic party ahead of the general election. This type of demand inevitably comes from those who never understood the Sanders campaign in the first place, and vaguely resented his ideals, and who tend to say things like, from a policy perspective, theres no difference between the two! Which is so agonizingly wrong. There are plenty who disagree, but for those of us who know in our hearts that Clinton is a free-trade war-hawk corporatist who co-opted enough of Bernies views to neutralize him in the primary but who will drop them like hot garbage the minute its expedient, this false equivalency is essentially heresy. Im not going to get into the argument on a deeper level, since anyone who follows politics closely from either side has already been convinced, but believe me when I say that the Sanders coalition doesnt now, and wont ever, believe that the two candidates are the same. Voters in all 50 states deserve the chance to vote for a progressive future. Sure, that vote is now symbolic. But they wont have the chance to do it in November, and as the figurehead of progressivism, Bernie owes them that chance. He owes the Democratic party, which has done its best to screw him over from the start, absolutely nothing. And even if he did, its not within his power to unite us. His campaign has been about revealing the deep hypocrisy of the so-called peoples party, and now that its been laid bare, there is no going back. The Clintons have taken to the trenches to beat him, and he fought back (too late and too tepidly, in my opinion), and the idea of rapprochement is absurd. These people hate each other, and guess what? They should! Their policies are in diametric opposition. After Hillary Clinton loses the general election, or wins and plods through a miserable four-year term, the time will come when progressive candidates have a real chance to win. The local and state races wont feature huge national celebrities, or identity politics, or the machinations of the party elite and a pro-establishment media. As Bernie himself has said, real change has to come from the ground up, and when looked at from this perspective, his candidacy has always been about shining a light on the alternative path. He was never going to change things from the top down, and perhaps in time his supporters will understand that a Sanders victory wouldnt have been good for the movement. If progressivism is going to sweep the country, it has to start at the grassroots. What Bernie has done, in a candidacy that is headed toward a loss, is to paint the possibilities. The democratic-socialist ideas hes been advocating no longer seem so far-fetched, and thats a profound change of perspective for a country that has been embroiled in conservatism for 40 years. We needed to see thiswe still need to see this, in all 50 states. And thats why Bernie must press on to the bitter end. Theres a famous Greek proverb that says, a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. Sometimes its hard to see a persons true purpose in the heat of battle, when everything becomes about wins and losses, but Bernie has been planting those seeds from the beginning. He may never see the fruits of his labor, but he knows whats coming, and its his job now to spread the message to every corner of this country. His legacy, and the legacy of his ideas, belong to the future. That is a more important mission by far than uniting a broken party of the past. Lets Talk Beer Styles is a monthly feature that accompanies Pastes large-scale blind craft beer style tastings/rankings. The first month covered the history and modern role of American pale ale. This month, were covering black IPA, of which we just blind-tasted 21 examples. Almost every beer style familiar to the American craft beer drinker has hundreds of years of history and evolution behind it. Whether theyre pale ales stretching all the way back to the invention of precisely kilned malt in England or pilsners that date back to the soft water characteristics of their native Czech Republic, were talking about a matter of centuries. This holds true for almost any major beer stylebut not for black IPA. This contentious style is a thoroughly American invention, at least as weve come to understand it, and a still-recent one at that. The type of beer typically labeled as black IPA in 2016 didnt truly become common and codified on a national scale until roughly 2009 or 2010, making it a unique footnote in the history of American brewing. The Origin of Black IPA 2009 may have been the first year that beers labeled as black IPA began showing up with regularity on store shelves, but it was hardly the first time that significant breweries had produced hop-forward beers that happened to be black. Trying to nail down an absolute here is nebulous and probably pointlessthe law of brewing averages suggests that at SOME point, there was probably a highly hopped British stock ale in 1800s England that also happened to be a few shades darker than usual. Lets instead focus on the American market. Here in the U.S.A., most writers point toward the early 90s as the first period where anyone was regularly brewing beers that we would today identify as black IPAs. In particular, a beer produced by the late Greg Noonan, a well-known beer author and brewer for Vermont Pub and Brewery, is cited as perhaps the first well-documented example in 1992 or 1993. One has to wonder how the Vermont drinkers reacted to the seeming oxymoron of a dark, hop-forward beer at the time. Still, that would have been a taproom exclusive beer that was never packaged. The earliest packaged example I can find of what we would think of as black IPA wasnt actually labeled as suchAvery Brewing Co.s New World Porter, which was first produced in 1997. The New World name was a reference to its heavy dose of American hops, but it lacked the black IPA term because it simply hadnt been coined yet. More recent releases of this seasonal Avery beer have even included the phrase a pioneering black IPA in reference to the fact that the brewery was essentially bottling a great example of the style before the style officially existed. Other pioneering examples from larger regional breweries can include Dogfish Heads Indian Brown Ale, first released in 1999, and Rogues Skull Splitter, a black version of their Brutal Bitter IPA, first released in 2003. Still, thats a pretty long, slow acceptance period before the black IPA term flared into more universal existence at the end of the 2000s. Eventually, though, a general consensus developed on how the style is usually presented. ABV is moderate to high, with mild to moderate roastiness that is sometimes derived via debittered black malts such as Carafa, lending a crisper edge and the type of dry, coffee-like flavor you find in the German black lager style, schwarzbier. Hop presence runs the gamut from mild to intense depending on the source, and likewise can represent any family of hop flavors, although the Pacific Northwest combo of pine and citrus is probably the most common. The style has at least developed enough to have a pretty good idea of what any given black IPA might taste like. The only problemno one could decide on what the styles name should actually be. The Style Name Controversy No American craft beer style has ever generated more contentious debate than black IPA, when it comes to nomenclature. From the moment that people starting calling this style anything, theres never been consensus on what exactly they should be called. The most common label is of course the one Ive been using all throughout this articleblack IPA. Its a simple descriptor that recognizes the style as a twist on the existing style of American IPAits an India pale ale, except black. The oxymoron, of course, is that this results in the beer being described as both pale and black within one phrase, which is less than desirable for these names need to make sense purists. That argument is at the root of most of the other titles that have been advocated for, from India black ale to American-style black ale, which is the term currently used by judging organizations such as the BJCP and user rating sites such as Beer Advocate. Of course, as Stones Greg Koch points out in this well-written piece, those titles have just as many problems, from the use of India to mean hoppy, 300 years after that word had any actual significance in the brewing world, to the similar use of American to automatically convey the idea of hops. Obviously, as in the case of American-style wheat beer, this isnt the case. Those who advocate for India black ale or American-style black ale because black IPA doesnt make sense simply choose not to acknowledge that the alternatives are no more logical. And then theres Cascadian dark ale, the most niche of the alternative black IPA titles, and one that you only really see advocated for by people who live in the Northwest. It has its defenders, but Ill be frank: I dislike this title. Its incorrect on most levels, first by implying that the style originates in the Cascade Mountains, when weve already addressed that the first verified version was from Vermont. Its also more confusing to the consumerdo you really think that a drinker in Florida has any idea what Cascadian dark ale means? Its ironic that proponents of this title will call black IPA confusing because of its oxymoron but not acknowledge that an obscure regional reference is asking far more of an average drinker to understand. Of course, at this point that debate is mostly academic or historical, brief as that history may be. If there ever was any question of what the styles ultimate name would be, its clear in 2016 that black IPA is the winner. Despite the efforts of breweries, beer organizations and those with influence in the industry, none of the other names have stuck. The Great American Beer Fest can continue to call its category American-style black ale, but how many beers do you see on the shelves of your package store labeled as such? In the end, its the consumers who decide, and theyve roundly ignored other names and continued to simply call this style black IPA. And thats undoubtedly how it will remain. The Role of Black IPA in American Craft Beer In terms of its current role in the American craft beer market, black IPA seems to be in a bit of a weird position. Six to seven years ago, the style had just come into the vogue, and was springing up at seemingly every hop-forward brewery overnight. We all know how faddish the craft beer industry can be, whether its a new style or a new hop variety that springs into popularity (2016: The year of Vic Secret?). We saw it in the last few years with the sudden adoption of American-style gose, to note a more recent example. But with black IPA, the initial flare seems to have reduced to a more niche appreciation. Since that initial boom, weve seen some of those black IPAs ebb away, for a variety of reasons. For one, although a well-executed black IPA can be a thing of beauty, theyve seemingly never turned into a particularly hot-selling style. Ask a professional brewer or package store owner about black IPAs and theyll be happy to tell you that all too often they end up sitting on the shelf. Perhaps it has something to do with seasonality, and the fact that no one season is specifically associated with black IPAs, many of which are seasonal or limited releases. By extension, we can also extrapolate that although many drinkers appreciate black IPA, it is almost never anyones favorite style. Even its ratings are universally lower on the big beer rating sites. You can see it for yourself when you compare the top 100 rated American IPAs to the top 100 black IPAs via a site like BeerAdvocate. The top IPAs are so much higher rated on average that Firestone Walkers Wookey Jack (the #3 black IPA in the world, according to BA), is the only regularly produced black IPA in the world that would find a place on the top 100 American IPAs list. It also explains why there are essentially no whales in the black IPA stylethey simply dont have a ton of value as trade bait, in the eyes of the most voracious beer geeks. Still, Im certainly willing to go to bat for a good black IPA. As our own blind tasting just showed, its a style more limited in total numbers, but one where the average entrant was coming from breweries we liked and respect. It says a lot that in a tasting of only 21 beers, there were offerings from Firestone Walker, Maine Beer Co., The Brew Kettle, Stone, Founders and more. Three Essential Black IPAs You Need to Try Avery Brewing Co. New World Porter This seasonally released porter dates back to 1997, and it might very well be the first beer I ever sampled that Id later come to think of as a black IPA. I remember drinking one during my initial craft beer exploration phase in a central Illinois bar and enjoying the solid cocoa and caramel flavors I expected from a porter but then, whats this? Why is my porter also this grassy and citrusy? Id never even heard the phrase black IPA yet, so I had no point of reference, and apparently the brewery didnt either. One gets the sense that if the same beer was crafted for the first time today, they simply would have called it a black IPA, given that in recent years the label has born the phrase a pioneering black IPA in small print. Regardless, it remains a historical touchstone of the style. Firestone Walker Wookey Jack Wookey Jack is close to a modern template of where the black IPA style has gone since its inception. Turning the wheel a bit more in the direction of IPA than black, it packs a good charge of green, resinous and citric hops that you expect from the West Coast. When you ask a craft beer geek to describe what a black IPA would taste like, the flavor profile of Wookey Jack is one of the best illustrations available. Stone Enjoy By Black IPA The black variant of Stones regular Enjoy By IPA may very well be a window of where black IPA is going as it continues to evolve. Extremely hop-forward, and reflective of current trends in IPA that favor fruitier, juicier hop profiles, its awash with tropical flavors, while still managing to maintain a little bit of roastiness and drink way, way easier than it should, given the ABV. In a style where there can sometimes seem to be a lack of variation, Enjoy By Black shows that theres still plenty of room to break away and explore new ground. Jim Vorel is Pastes news editor, and hes looking forward to the next two entries: Belgian quad and classic pilsner. You can follow him on Twitter. In a not entirely surprising turn of events, outspoken artist M.I.A. told Londons Evening Standard, Its interesting that in America the problem youre allowed to talk about is Black Lives Matter. Its not a new thing to me its what Lauryn Hill was saying in the 1990s, or Public Enemy in the 1980s. Is Beyonce or Kendrick Lamar going to say Muslim Lives Matter? Or Syrian Lives Matter? Or this kid in Pakistan matters? Thats a more interesting question. She continued,You cant ask it on a song thats on Apple, you cannot ask it on an American TV programme, you cannot create that tag on Twitter, Michelle Obama is not going to hump you back. So is M.I.A. joining the ranks of All Lives Matter? M.I.A. clarified her statements in a series of Tweets: A#blacklivesmatter B#Muslimlivesmatter. I'm not Muslim . My criticism wasn't about Beyonce. It's how u can say A not B right now in 2016. M.I.A (@MIAuniverse) April 21, 2016 My question was,on American platforms what do they allow you to stand up for in 2016. This has been the number 1 question for me. M.I.A (@MIAuniverse) April 21, 2016 DeRay Mckesson and Johnetta Elzie, two activists who are prominently associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, have responded to M.I.A.'s comments: .@MIAuniverse, I'm not sure "allow" is the right word here. Remember, we were teargassed for standing up. https://t.co/b8hUBlU0Kc deray mckesson (@deray) April 21, 2016 MIA really has no clue. America didn't "allow" black folks to talk about anything. Aug 9, local news barely even cared about Mike Brown. Johnetta Elzie (@Nettaaaaaaaa) April 21, 2016 MIA ain't tryna discuss the obsession with property, now that black people aren't slaves (property to be sold, tortured, raped, killed). Johnetta Elzie (@Nettaaaaaaaa) April 21, 2016 Okay, some of these cheap flights to Europe are getting ridiculous. First, WOW Air brought mystical $99 flights from the U.S. to Iceland. And then Ryanair wanted to offer $15 transatlantic flights. And then that didnt happen. Now, Norwegian Airlines is trying to pave the way to permanently cheap flights, after winning the approval to offer even more low-cost flights between the U.S. and Europe. Norwegian just won the approval from the Department of Transportation to offer additional discounted fares out of the country already, the airline offers budget flights to London, Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm. The new provisions allow the airline to organize flights from other EU nations (Norway is not a member) namely Ireland, in this case to serve as a starting point for new subsidiaries throughout Europe. So why does this matter? It will bring down flight prices to Ryanair levels, something that Norwegians CEO envisioned last year. For example, the first service would see flights between Boston and Cork, Ireland costing as little as $150 one-way. Though this is great news for budget-conscious jetsetters, thats not the case for those in the industry. The recent passage has already irked many U.S. airlines, who see this as an attempt by Norwegian to skirt U.S. labor laws and outsource flight crews from Asia at lower wages. Such Walmartification is illegal in the U.S., surprisingly, but would be legal in Ireland. That said, during negotiations last year, the airline pledged to hire only American or European crews on any new transatlantic flight. So its now turning into a he-said-she-said kerfuffle. Furthermore, according to USA Today, organizations like The Air Line Pilots Association complain that the passage would give Norwegian an unfair advantage over U.S. airlines on transatlantic routes. Or is the unfair advantage just capitalism being a bitch? DOT said it investigated all of these claims and found no legal basis to deny the airline nonstop flights from the U.S. to its Irish subsidiary in Cork. But vested parties still have until May 6 to respond to the ruling. This battle may have only just begun, but hopefully itll end in the coming weeks. Tom is a travel writer, part-time hitchhiker, and hes currently trying to imitate Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? but with more sunscreen and jorts. People put all kinds of sentimental bric-a-brac in their time capsules: ticket stubs, blueprints to their homes, the bouquet from their wedding, selections of poetry, newspaper clippings from a specific date, records, trading cards, birth certificates, photographs. They may write letters to whom it may concern on the day the capsule is meant to be uncorked, perhaps their children or their childrens children, perhaps their siblings. For filmmaker, writer and erstwhile musician John Carney, the movies are time capsules, and Carney loads his movies with distillations of himself, with Dublin, and in his latest, Sing Street, with memories of the 1980s. This isnt a nostalgic movie, though. Its a movie that peers through nostalgia like harsh light through a sheer curtain. Sing Street spins art out of history, but you might mistake it for pop sensationalism at first glance. If so, youre forgiven. In sharp contrast to Carneys breakout movie, 2007s sterling adult musical Once, or even his most recent effort, 2013s Begin Again, Sing Street aims to please crowds and overburden tear ducts. Theres a sugary surface buoyancy to the film that helps the darkness clouding beneath its exterior go down more easily. Here, look at the plot synopsis: A teenage boy living in Dublins inner city in 1985 moves to a new school, falls in love with a girl, and forms a band for the sole purpose of winning her over. If the period Carney uses as his storytelling backdrop doesnt make Sing Street an 80s movie, then the mechanics of its story certainly do. You may walk into the film expecting to be delighted and amused. The film wont let you down in either regard, but itll rob you of your breath, too. The boy is Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo). The girl is Raphina (Lucy Boynton). Conor is the youngest child of three, including his older brother Brendan (Jack Reynor), in a family whose patriarch and matriarch (Aidan Gillen, Maria Doyle Kennedy) have fallen on hard times in life and with each other. Raphina is aloof, a model in training with designs on getting the hell out of Dublin and hightailing it to London, just as two-hundred-some-odd-thousand of young Irish folks did throughout the decade. This is a recurring theme of Carneys work: exodus, specifically from Ireland, a place his cinema views through multifaceted lenses. Sometimes Carneys Ireland looks beautiful, even magical. Other times it looks downturned and hopelessly backward, a set of iron socioeconomic jaws that chew its citizens up and spit them back out. Cheery, right? Dont worry: Sing Street isnt all doom and gloom. It is more often than not neither of these, because Carneys vision of his characters, his setting and his era is complex in the way that only real life can be. Its heartbreaking for sure, and brutal on occasion, but its also sweet and often unexpectedly hilarious. The film typically operates in the mode of a low-key but charming high school romp as Conor sets about writing, rehearsing and playing songs with his band members, chiefly Eamon (Mark McKenna), a quietly awkward type who happens to be versed in every instrument a good 80s rock band could possibly need. Better still, he owns those instruments, which is the films ultimate convenience. Eamons assemblage of gear sets up Sing Streets musicality, leading into scenes of the gang shooting music videos in the style of the day (including an extremely convincing riff on Duran Duran) and simply getting into the groove of playing together. This is where Sing Street is at its most jubilant: in the way it depicts the connective joy of performance. (An early sequence that begins with Conor and Eamon workshopping a song and ends with the whole band playing it in unison is particularly affecting.) Music is the films lifeblood, after all, much in the same way that it is Carneys. Dont forget that once upon a time, Carney played bass in The Frames, whose frontman, Glen Hansard, starred in the aforementioned Once. If you do, youll end up losing sight of Sing Streets personal touches, or the perception of its personal touches. How much Carney drew on his own experiences to form the stuff of Sing Street is questionable. What isnt is the effect the films authenticity has on its appeals to its audiences emotions. Rather than coy manipulation, Carney chooses to stay genuine. Maybe that explains the casting of unknowns like Walsh-Peelo and McKenna, who know how to sing and how to jam for realsies. If that isnt enough to justify their casting, then maybe the ease with which they bond on screen is, though Carneys cast is well considered all around: Reynor and Boynton are especially dazzling, he by virtue of his booming, sly charisma, she because of her understated fortitude and talent for making deflection transparent. (A second act reveal about her characters upbringing is a subtle jaw-dropper.) They all labor to cover their wounds, inner or otherwise, and to find happiness through sadness by realizing their dreams, however small those dreams may seem at a distance. Sing Street is endlessly charming, a truly uplifting gem, but it earns its charms and uplift through the desperation of failure. When youre building a time capsule, maybe those are the elements that need to be included most. Director: John Carney Writer: John Carney Starring: Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Jack Reynor, Lucy Boynton, Mark McKenna, Aidan Gillen, Mary Doyle Kennedy Release Date: April 15, 2016 (NY/LA); April 22, 2016 (wide) Boston-based critic Andy Crump has been writing about film online since 2009, and has been contributing to Paste Magazine since 2013. He also writes for Screen Rant, Movie Mezzanine, and Birth. Movies. Death., and is a member of the Online Film Critics Society and the Boston Online Film Critics Association. You can follow him on Twitter and find his find his collected writing at his personal blog. He is composed of roughly 65 percent craft beer. Naming a country isnt like naming a baby; there isnt some giant book of suggestions from which the parents (in this case, the population of a sovereign nation) can hunt for the absolutely perfect word to describe their new child. As a result, when a country gets a new name, theres basically no way everyone is going to like it. This is what the Czech Republic, which announced last week its new name of Czechia last week, is starting to realize. As it turns out, many of the 10.5 million parents living in the country are not fans of the change. The new name is meant to be the solution to a problem that has existed since Slovakia the Czech Republic formed out of the previously unified Czechoslovakia in 1993. In the 23 years since the countrys formation, it has yet to select an official nickname, which is something that little known fact basically every other country in the world has. For example, the UK can be officially referred to by its formal name of The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, or its informal short name, simply The United Kingdom. Regardless of the necessity of the issue, the name Czechia isnt going over too well. For example, a 2013 poll found that 73% of the countrys residents opposed the name. Additionally, the Czech Republics minister of regional development has criticized the name for sounding too much like Chechnya, the semiautonomous Russian Republic. Government officials are also being criticized for how quickly the name was selected, as allegedly the only experts consulted on the matter were in the field of public relations. This doesnt mean there wasnt a great deal of thought put into the new name though. Some proposed and ultimately rejected names excluded the cultural identity of certain regions, or brought about territorial designations set during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Also, a group promoting the name Czechia through advertising and social media has been slowly gaining a following since 1997, so its not as though Czech citizens werent aware of the name as an option. Although opposition will likely remain for some time, anyone who has a problem with Czechia can still use the countrys formal name, although now that may feel a little bit like saying Mr. Czech Republic. Dillon Thompson is a travel intern with Paste and a student at the University of Georgia. Whether youre looking for a bedazzled harness, a fluffy bed, or a cute carrier, consider the company youre supporting before you purchase. You can put your money to good use by shopping pet brands that give back to the very market they supply. These pet apparel and accessory brands will spoil your furry friend while giving back to animals in need. Photo via Instagram/@ernaldbostonator KONG has helped chew-happy dogsand their ownersall over the world for 36 years. Their famed natural rubber toy can be stuffed with treats and keep pets busy for hours on end. And thats not all they do. The company donates to animal shelters, police/military K-9 organizations, pet-related nonprofits and natural disaster/emergency efforts. Photo via Instagram/@kurgo The brand that sells everything from booster seats to bandanas to bedsfor dogsalso gives back to nonprofits. Kurgo donates food, toys and supplies to animal rescues, and founded the Kurgo Foundation, which assists in animal disaster relief. The organization sends funds and items to local nonprofits during a disaster. Photo via Instagram/@russellrescue_tn The shirt that helps curb dogs anxietyand boost their lookalso helps adoption organizations. ThunderShirt contributes to charitable events and donates ThunderShirts to anxious and fearful dogs in shelters. Photo via Instagram/@petmatepetproducts Petmate sells grooming, travel and everyday accessories for dogs, cats, and birds. So, whether you need a snakeskin collar, a kitty kat condo or a game of tic tac toe for your bird, Petmate has you covered. The brand also supports Pilots and Paws, which transports pets from overcrowded shelters to other rescues, saving animals from euthanization due to space limitations. Photo via Instagram/@foundmyanimal Found My Animal is known for their trendy rope leashes made in Brooklyn, but their main focus is animal adoption. They feature animals in need of homes on their website and support animal rescue organizations. Photo via Instagram/@dogisgood Dog is Good is an apparel company for animal lovers, but they also sell pet products like cat toys and super cute/clever/customizable ID tags. They also help raise funds for and donate money to pet-related nonprofits, including animal welfare and service dog organizations. Qualcomm Inc., the world's largest maker of chips that go inside smartphones, indicated on an earnings call Wednesday that it may be losing some orders from Apple for modem chips that link the iPhone to the web. Qualcomm Chief Executive Officer Steve Mollenkopf told analysts he is "assuming" that a major customer will give orders to a rival, indicating a potential loss of business for the company. According to Bloomberg, Mollenkopf made the comments in the context of assuring analysts that the company can deliver profit at the levels it has predicted even if its largest customers give some orders to other suppliers. Any switch Apple makes to suppliers that provide the components inside its devices can send ripples across the industry. Qualcomm's stock fell in extended trading after Mollenkopf made his comments. Analysts including Tim Arcuri at Cowen & Co. have speculated that Apple may be partnering with Intel Corp. for the modem chip inside the iPhone." Last year we posted a report talking about Intel burning the midnight oil to get a new LTE modem ready for a future iPhone with speculation that it could be ready for the iPhone 7. The timing of Qualcomm's comments could support the coming shift. On the flip-side, we learned back in February that Johny Srouji, Apple's senior VP for hardware technologies in Israel hinted that Apple may actually be working on a future in-house designed iPhone modem. In an interview with Bloomberg, Srouji admitted that Apple lags behind Samsung in some areas of chip development, such as adding a modem to the central processor to conserve space and power, yet he hinted that it might not be forever. It's clear that one of these scenarios could now be in play with the latter likely being a longer term plan. In the shorter term, Intel's CEO Brian Krzanich cut 12,000 jobs on Tuesday noting that the restructuring of Intel would force them to reinvent their business. The report noted that "While making the company more efficient, Intel plans to increase investments in the products and technologies that that will fuel revenue growth, and drive more profitable mobile and PC businesses. Through this comprehensive initiative, the company plans to increase investments in its data center, IoT, memory and connectivity businesses, as well as growing client segments such as 2-in-1s, gaming and home gateways." Intel's "connectivity business" translates directly into advanced modems. A win here for Intel with Apple's next generation of iOS devices would certainly help to invigorate Intel's new focus. About Making Comments on our Site: Patently Apple reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit any comments. Patna: Deputy Chief Minister and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Tejaswi Yadav, at a press conference in Patna on Wednesday, gave the 'PM Material' certificate to Chief Minister Nitish Kumar while denying rumors that he was gunning for the CM's post in Bihar once Nitish was elected the Prime Minister of India. "There is no doubt Chief Minister Nitish Kumar is a PM material and a lot of us would support his candidacy should he decide to run for the post in future. However, I am not in the Chief Minister race as suggested by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Sushil Kumar Modi," Yadav said in reference to Modi's Tuesday statement that Nitish Kumar had abandoned Bihar in his quest for Prime Minister's post and should put the power in Tejaswi or Tej Pratap Yadav's hand and pursue his dream of becoming the Prime Minister of India full time so Bihar does not suffer due to his absence from his current job. Calling Modi's suggestion 'baseless', Yadav, the younger son of former Chief Ministers Lalu Prasad Yadav and Rabri Devi, said that Nitish Kumar was a hard-working visionary and an honest man who wanted to see India progress. "The question is why not? He (Nitish Kumar) is a proven leader who would make a great Prime Minister. Mr. Modi is only trying to divert the topic. If he must offer his advice, it should be on development issues and I will be more than happy to listen to him," the Deputy CM said. Yadav, who is also the Road Construction Minister of Bihar, however, evaded a question when asked who would be a better PM - Nitish Kumar or Congress leader Rahul Gandhi. "That's not up to me but for the people to decide," he said. Rest of Yadav's press conference was made up of the usual talking points of the RJD and JD-U as to how the RSS was dividing the nation on communal lines and how youths like Rohith Vemula and Kanhaiya Kumar were being targeted by the saffron party. US High Court Awards $2B in Damages for Iran-Sponsored Terrorism 04/21/16 By Ken Bredemeier, VOA The U.S. Supreme Court says Iran must pay nearly $2 billion in frozen assets to American families of people killed by Tehran-sponsored terrorism. In a 6-2 ruling Wednesday, the court upheld a 2012 law concerning the distribution of the funds. It awarded damages to the relatives of 241 Marines killed in a 1983 terrorist attack in Beirut, 19 U.S. military troops killed in the 1996 Khobar Towers truck bombing in Saudi Arabia, and other attacks. Iran's Bank Markazi argued that congressional passage of the law specifically directing the damages be awarded to victims' families intruded on U.S. courts that were already considering the damage claims. U.S. courts have ruled in favor of victims of Iranian-sponsored terrorism, but Iran has refused to comply with the judgments, leading lawyers for the victims to search for Iranian assets in the United States. The State Department said Wednesday that the high court's ruling was not unexpected and that the administration had long supported compensation for the families in the case. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the court majority, said the law "does not transgress restraints placed on Congress and the president by the Constitution." More than 1,300 people were awarded damages in the case. The victims accused Iran of providing support to Hezbollah, the Tehran-backed Shi'ite Islamist political and military group that carried out the truck bomb attack at the U.S. Marine compound in Beirut. VOA's Nike Ching contributed to this report. Iranians May Soon Be Able to Make International Online Transactions 04/21/16 Source: International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran Denials Raise Questions Over Whether Deal Will Go Through A global payment service provider based in the U.S. has announced that it has made its platform available to Iranians, enabling them to make international online transactions, which was previously almost impossible. But a representative from the Central Bank of Iran reportedly denied the announcement, raising questions over whether the deal would be completed. Two days after the initial press release was posted on Paymentwalls website on April 13, 2016, it was deleted and followed by another press release published on April 15 stating that the digital commerce solutions provider had teamed up with an Iranian company, Shetab, so International businesses could accept credit and debit card payments in the rial, Irans currency. With nuclear sanctions lifted from Iran, Paymentwall integrated Shetab (interbank information transfer network system), said the press release. Shetab is a unified, electronic clearance system for the entire Iranian banking operations that allows it to facilitate transactions from credit cards, ATMs and point-of-sale (POS) terminals. International businesses will soon be able to accept credit and debit card payments in Iranian rial (IRR) through Shetab, noted the press release. Though the integration is complete, Paymentwall will ensure first that it complies with the most up-to-date regulations from the U.S. Department of the Treasury before it moves forward with Shetab, added the announcement. But the potentially historic news was quickly denied by Davoud Mohammad Beigi, the manager of payment systems of the Central Bank of Iran, according to a report by the semi-official Mehr News Agency. ...The Central Bank has not held any negotiations with Paymentwall over this issue, said the Mehr report on April 18, 2016, which did not include any direct quotes from Beigi. Managers of other companies active in electronic banking also said the connection of Shetab to Paymentwall cannot happen without coordination with the Central Bank, and this needs to be pursued at a macro level by officials at the Central Bank of Iran, continued the Mehr News report. Paymentwall has not responded to a request for comment from the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, but a story published on another website following the initial April 13 press release, which was later removed, was updated with a comment from Paymentwall. We integrated Shetab as a new payment partner, allowing users to pay, but we are not connected to the Iranian banking system, said Paymentwall, according to an article published on the Banking Technology website on April 13, 2016. We will allow users from Iran to pay with Shetab, but we still cant work with Iranian businesses as of now, it added. We do not cater to [the] Iranian Finance Market yet, said Paymentwall on April 13, in response to questions on its official Facebook page. Although we [will] look in to this as one of our plans in the future. We have postponed the launching of our services in Iran to make sure we are compliant with the regulations in your country, added Paymentwall on April 17, 2016, in response to another question citing the Paymentwall press release saying it would soon be catering to the Iranian market. The fact that Paymentwall has not updated or removed its April 15 press release to address the reported Iranian denials suggests that the deal may have run into domestic Iranian politics, but hasnt completely fallen through as of yet. As foreign businesses enter Iran, domestic providers will be forced to deal with a new form of competition that could wipe them out. Various domestic actors with stakes and interests in the Iranian market are expected to attempt to block foreign businesses from entering the market. Following its implementation, Paymentwalls service would essentially connect Iranians to the global online market while allowing purchases in the rial. Domestic electronic banking services have been available for Iranians since 2002 through Shaparak, an Iranian company. The service enables customers to make electronic and online purchases and cash withdrawals with credit and debit cards issued by local banks. But U.S. economic sanctions imposed on Iran due to its nuclear program in 2010 made it next to impossible for Iranians to make online transactions outside the country. Prior to that time, Iranians couldnt obtain internationally recognized credit cards, so online transactions were never easy. With Paymentwall, which supports 130 types of credit cards and payment methods in 180 countries, Iranian businesses would also be able to buy and sell goods and services internationally. Exactly when Iranians will be able to use the service is unclear. In addition to domestic Iranian politics that could delay the deal, worries about violating remaining U.S. sanctions on Iran have also resulted in foreign businesses waiting to initiate or slowing down deals to ensure compliance. Our company is based in the U.S., and following the regulations of the U.S. Department of the Treasury is important to us, said Honor Gunday, CEO of Paymentwall. With a highly-educated population, we believe that Iran has a strong business potential, and hopefully we will be able to go live with Shetab soon. Former French embassy employee held in solitary in Tehran's Evin prison 04/21/16 Source: Radio Zamaneh Nazak Afshar, a former staff member of the French Embassy in Tehran who was arrested upon returning to Iran last March for a visit, is reportedly being held in solitary confinement for questioning in Evin Prison. Nazak Afshar The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran reports that Afshar has been transferred from the women's ward to Section 2A of the prison, which is under the supervision of the Revolutionary Guards. Afshar has been subjected to hours-long bouts of daily interrogations for the past five days. She reportedly passed out during one session and had to be transferred to hospital. Afshar, who holds dual Iranian and French citizenship and is currently working for the French foreign ministry, was arrested during the election protests of 2009 and charged with "harbouring vandals and rioters in the French Embassy". She was later released without being indicted and left Iran. She was arrested upon her return to Iran last March to visit her ailing mother. Online broadcaster said to have been arrested in Iran Sabri Hassanpour, the executive and host of the online network "Simay-e Rahayi" (Vision of Liberation), has reportedly been arrested in Iran. Sabri Hassanpour Hassanpour, who currently resides in the Netherlands, had reportedly travelled to Iran to visit relatives. Jahan News reports that during his stay, he travelled to Tehran, Isfahan, Ahwaz and Karaj. Hassanpour reportedly had anti-Islamic Republic programs on his online network. He is also reportedly a member of the National Iranian Congress to Save Iran, which purportedly aims to establish a shadow government and parliament in exile for Iranians and in its manifesto claims to be against any form of foreign and military intervention in Iran. The best 2-in-1 laptop 2022: our picks of the best convertible laptops These are the best 2-in-1 laptops you can buy right now The smell of coffee beans, sugary treats and delicious sandwiches permeates the air in Amara Coffee and Chocolate, the tiny shop on South Raymond Avenue in Pasadena bathed in calming brown and earth tones. By far, Amara serves some of the smoothest, nuttiest and most flavorful coffee in the PCC area. Within two blocks of campus sit two Starbucks locations; an obvious choice for a college community, familiar, quick and a well-known hangout. But if youre looking for something a bit more sophisticated, something made with hand pulled espresso and real smooth chocolate, Amara is far and away the best choice. A family-owned and run business, Amara Barroeta, the proprietor, takes pride in running her shop every single day. Barroeta is a former Miss Venezuela contestant with a degree in chemical engineering and a background as a TV host and voice-over artist. I was first runner up in 2002 and then I started a career in media as TV host in Venezuela. I always had a dream of opening my own shop and having something of my own, Barroeta said. After I finished my degree I came to the US to pursue a masters in business at UCLA. I saw there was a need in the market because there were no chocolate and coffee shops using real ingredients. Barroeta said she noticed the tendency in southern California for using natural products so she saw it as an opportunity. A year and a half ago she opened Amara Chocolate & Coffee where she serves delicate handmade pastries, desserts, truffles and a deliciously sweet assortment of chocolate drinks with imported Venezuelan chocolate. The artwork that hangs on the walls are photographs that represent popular coffee plantations in her home country. Some paintings are gifts from friends, while one in particular is an interpretation of the logo for the brand of white corn that is used in their arepas. I liked that piece because it kind of reflected the Venezuelan mix of races which are really beautiful, Barroeta said. One of the most delicious dishes at Amaras is the Llanera Cachapa. The patron has their choice of beef, chicken with black beans, sweet plantains and queso fresco. The Cachapa with beef boasts a wonderful flavor of the tender meat mixed with the right amount of sweetness from the fried plantain to create a perfect sugary and savory mix. All of this is piled on top of a house made yellow corn crepe that melts in your mouth. Amaras has a wide variety of sweet treats from chocolate and guava croissants as well as their signature house made chocolate truffles. Perhaps their tastiest treats are the churros with dipping sauce. Their churros are made fresh every single day and come with your choice of chocolate, Nutella, dulce de leche or guava dipping sauces. They can also be ordered as a full dessert plate stacked with ice cream, fresh seasonal fruit or baked apple cinnamon slices. Were very well known for our churro, its really hard in LA to find places with churros a made to order, Barroeta said. Everybody talks about churros but almost nobody has them freshly made. Barroetas churros are also made from a Spanish recipe with no dairy, so her churros are vegan as are their dipping sauces. The clear standout in terms of the beverage selection are the signature espresso lattes made with coffee from Pasadenas Jones Coffee Roasters, which Barroeta remarked was a really great partnership for her. Even a drink as simple as the double macchiato is a step up from the mass produced fare of more commercial coffee shops. If youre in the mood for something sweeter with your coffee, the affogato is a delicious treat of ice cream, nuts and dulce de leche in a glass with your espresso on the side to pour over top to suit your taste. Amaras stainless steel La Marzocco GB5 manual espresso machine is the centerpiece to crafting their signature drinks. A manual system to grind their coffee, tamp and hand pull the shots means more control over the quality and taste of their coffee, which Barroeta knows makes all the difference. When it comes to coffee, the water you get, the milk you use, the coffee you use, the grinder all of those are really important, Barroeta said. One thing patrons will notice, which may not always go over well, are the signs on the tables signaling that laptops and computers are not allowed at those seats. While this may be a deal breaker for the high number of students who love to sit in a cafe with their coffee and spend hours on their computer, Barroeta has a reason for this rule. Because we are a really small cafe, most people come and sit down and enjoy their food, but if someone just locked down a table it doesnt give other people the opportunity to come in and try us out, she said. We not only offer coffee but also we have food and we want people to experience what theyre eating and enjoying and nowadays its a tendency where people go to cafes and make their own offices, and at the same time, when you do food and put so much attention and care into it, you do want people to enjoy it. The Amara clientele is a diverse group from parents with their children, employees who work nearby to students from the area including the college of music. On Friday nights, some of those music students will play gigs at the cafe to give customers some live music to enjoy with their meals. On the weekends people commute from everywhere to Pasadena to hang out and put Amara on their list of things to do. When asked what dish or item Barroeta would recommend her customers try out, she spoke of the house made churros as well as the arepas, but didnt pass up the opportunity to mention her hand made chocolates. Our handmade chocolates are delicious, and its exciting to see people enjoy them, Barroeta said. I try to combine different ingredients that convey a message about what I love and places Ive been so that our food tells a story and thats what we want to offer in Pasadena. Minerva Ochoas parents didnt go to college, but that didnt stop her from pursuing an education at Pasadena City College. What was once a pipe dream for the young woman from the city of Calexico is now a reality. This summer, Ochoa will join fellow students Jenny Chang and Bernadette Sebastian in an exchange program with another country. Offered by the Pasadena Sister Cities Committee (PSCC), the exchange program offers students a stipend during their stay in their host country. The program also provides students with a host family to stay with and a chance to work. The only thing that students have to pay for is a ticket for the airplane. This semester, after a vigorous application process, Ochoa and Chang will be traveling to Germany while Sebastian will be going to Japan. All three students were ecstatic when they found out they were selected for the exchange program. [My parents] were super excited, said Ochoa. Just because your parents didnt go to college doesnt mean that their kids cant achieve their dreams. Ochoa has been learning German at PCC, but she knew that the classes could only take her so far. According to Ochoa, the opportunity to be in an environment where everyone speaks German will help her hone her own language skills. Ochoa is also taking advantage of being in Europe by traveling to London after her stay in Germany. Like Ochoa, Chang will also be going to Germany. However the California State University Fullerton alumna almost missed out on her chance to travel to another country. At the time I couldnt actually apply because the age limit was 25, said Chang, who is 28 years old. Chang had an ally, though, in Olivia Bueno, the president of the Germania Culture Club, who relentlessly worked to make sure that the age limit was raised to 30. The decision was made because although PCC students below the age of 25 couldnt apply for the exchange program, the German students who came through the exchange program to America were often older than the previous age limit. I was limited by the age group, Chang said. And then to apply and get in was just it was pretty surreal. Chang learned German when she was at Fullerton, but what rekindled her passion to relearn the language was when Chang was visiting Korea. At a water park she overheard two men speaking German. I was trying to talk to them and I was like, Oh my gosh, Chang said. I had forgotten everything. For a while, Chang tried to study herself, but realized that she needed the help of others to really grasp the language. Thats when she decided to enroll at PCC. I just wanted to take classes to improve the German that I knew and I started looking for opportunities, Chang said Chang attributes her participation in the exchange program to the German professors shes had at PCC and to Bueno. I think that this journey, it definitely wouldnt have been possible without the Germania Club president, Chang said. She cares so much about people. Sebastian, like Chang and Ochoa, applied for Germany. They only choose two candidates per country, Sebastian said, who applied to go to Germany because she has an associates degree in German. Sebastian also wanted to travel to the country because shes a dance major and she wanted to explore Germanys rich dance culture. However, she was chosen to go to Japan instead. I put Japan as my second option not knowing thats where they would want me to go, Sebastian said. Sebastian was a little bit disappointed since that was not where she had originally wanted to go, but her perspective about the situation has changed. Sebastian is uncertain about her upcoming trip to Japan, but is eager for a chance to, according to her, dive in cold water. Ironically, Sebastian has a sister that is studying Japanese and is picking up a few phrases from her sibling to use when she is in her host country. Sebastian plans to explore her environment when she is in Japan. She wants to visit Mt. Fuji, see the Sakura blossoms and eat a lot of sushi. Like Ochoa and Chang, Sebastian is also a part of the Germania Culture Club and, like Chang, Sebastian has found Bueno to be a positive influence in her time at PCC. I love the movie nights that they do, Sebastian said. It kind of trains my German a little bit since theres no one speaking it at home. Bueno deserves the praise by her fellow club members. When she became the president of the Germania Culture Club she realized what a resource the PSCC would be for students. With that in mind, she approached the PSCC and got involved. Besides being an excellent resource for students looking to travel abroad, Bueno was impressed with how long the PSCC has worked on making sure that exchanges between the U.S. and other countries were fostered. This relationship with the Pasadena Sister Cities has been going on since 1948, Bueno said. After World War II the citizens of Pasadena prepared care packages that they sent to Germany to help the citizens whose homes were obliterated in the war. In the process, the Pasadena residents wrote their names on the care packages and messages to the Germans who would be receiving their contributions. The citizens of Germany replied to the messages and a committee was formed to strengthen ties between the two countries. Were talking about two countries that were enemies and our citizens opened their hearts to help them, Bueno said. In 1991, the exchange program was formed to make sure that younger generations would also learn about cultures. Bueno is still fascinated by the exchange program and not just because students get to travel to another country. Bueno is amazed that there are families in the host countries willing to open their doors and their homes to PCC students for four to six weeks. In that way students do not need to pay for a hotel or lodging or food, Bueno said. Bueno is adamant that students learn about cultures and is delighted that Chang, Ochoa and Bernadette were chosen to travel to another country. They could have spent their summer here, but no they are going abroad, Bueno said. After successfully launching a version of its browser that offered ad blocking, Opera just wont quit. On Wednesday night, the company released a free VPN service with unlimited bandwidth, built right into its latest beta. The Opera release is developer edition version 38.0.2204.0 for the Mac and the PC. Opera also wont make you pay for the amount of bandwidth that you route through the VPNwhich would normally cost you about $48 per year. A virtual private network spoofs your IP address, pretending that your PC is actually physically located in London, for example, when its actually sitting in Los Angeles. That offers all sorts of possibilities: It helps hide your identity when surfing, or allows you access to a website that you normally wouldnt be able to see. VPNs are also common in countries like China, whose so-called Great Firewall insulates the Chinese Internet from the rest of the world. Opera Note the blue VPN button to the left of the URL, highlighting that youre protected. Of course, a VPN may also enable illicit activities. For years, international users watched Netflix via VPN so they could see movies that werent available in their countryuntil Netflix cracked down. And, of, course, people use VPNs to evade the prying eyes of government watchdogs when downloading data via BitTorrent. Why this matters: Free, unlimited VPN is an enormous coup for Opera. There are two major questions that Opera will need to answer, though: First, what are the terms of service of the VPN, and the acceptable use policy? Unlimited services rarely are. Second: What will the performance of the VPN network (and the browser, too) be under load? No surprise to Opera watchers The integrated VPN may not be that surprising if youve been watching Opera for long. About a year ago, Opera bought SurfEasy, a Canadian VPN provider whose network Opera is apparently using as the backbone of its services. (A few days ago, SurfEasy promised to protect BitTorrent downloads, possibly preparing for the Opera launch.) This is what youll normally pay for the SurfEasy services. Today, you can take advantage of SurfEasys network through downloadable plugins from Chrome and the release version of Opera. Just by signing up with an email address, youll receive 500MB of secured data per month, for free. Confirm your email, and youll receive 250MB more. Follow them on Twitter, and its 100MB more, and so on. Normally, SurfEasys unlimited VPN service costs $3.99 per month and includes support for up to five devicesincluding Mac and Android devices. Now that the service has been integrated into the developer edition of the Opera browser, however, all of those limitations have apparently gone away. How can Opera get away with paying for all of that user bandwidth? We know its expensive but we have a great advantage of scalability due to our hosting of Opera Mini, Krystian Kolondra, the senior vice president responsible for new products, said in an email. We realized early this year that browsers were not paying proper attention to what people really need in 2016, Kolondra added. Hundreds of millions of people are using VPN and ad blocking software, but still the browsers have only supported such things through, often half baked, extensions. We decided to build features people really need in 2016. This is the sound of a beta crashing Unfortunately, I had one heck of a time getting the developer editionwhich, obviously, is far less stable than the release versionto work. Normally, if you use the SurfEasy interface for Opera or Chrome, this is the interface youll see. Opera provided me with a test build of the browser, which downloaded and installed just fine. To enable the VPN function, click the Opera (O) menu, then scroll down to Settings. Under Privacy & Security, youll need to click the checkbox to enable the VPN function. When I did so, I didnt notice any differencesthough I hadnt tried to surf anywhere yet. I then turned off the ads using the native ad blocker that Opera had installed in a previous edition of the browser, and tested everything on PCWorlds homepage. I didnt notice anything within the interface that signaled whether the VPN service was working. (A popup window in the ad-blocking edition, on the other hand, alerted me that the feature was there, and how and why to take advantage of it.) I closed and restarted the browser. Unfortunately, that was a mistake. I havent been able to open it since, as it promptly crashes on launch. I tried uninstalling it, and received error messages. I tried manually cleaning out the files, removing most of them. After re-downloading and re-installing the browser, though, I still experienced the crash-on-launch bug. What Opera tells me, however, is that the VPN encrypts data with 256-bit encryption, hiding your actual IP address behind a virtual one. You can select an IP address in the United States, Canada, or Germany. More location options will be available as Opera rolls out this feature in release form. I did download the SurfEasy VPN plugin for Chrome, and I can report that the service works as advertised, though slowly. Dont expect to be able to watch an overseas version of Netflix, though: The service reportedly uses rotating IP addresses, and though I was able to log into Netflix UK, only one of three shows actually began playing. (Otherwise, Netflix kindly informed me I was using a VPN, and to cut it out.) The movie that did play was somewhere below 1080p resolution, though the audio was perfectly acceptable. Kolondra said that Opera will leave the SurfEasy VPN plugins for Chrome and Opera in place, as its a more full-featured service for more than just the browser. And it appears that Opera is determined to give users all the VPN bandwidth they need. The best part? It wont cost you a dime to find out. Updated at 9:36 AM with additional comments from Operas Kolondra. Aleksandr Andreevich Panin, the Russian developer of the SpyEye botnet creation kit, and an associate were on Wednesday sentenced to prison terms by a court in Atlanta, Georgia, for their role in developing and distributing malware that is said to have caused millions of dollars in losses to the financial sector. Panin, who set out to develop SpyEye as a successor to the Zeus malware that affected financial institutions since 2009, was sentenced by the court to nine and half years in prison, while his Algerian associate Hamza Bendelladj got a 15-year term, according to the Department of Justice. After infecting victims computers, cybercriminals were able to remotely control these compromised computers through command-and-control servers, and steal the victims personal and financial information using techniques such as Web injects that introduce malicious code into a victims browser, keystroke loggers that record keyboard activity and credit card grabbers. The information sent to the servers was then used to steal money from the financial accounts of the victims. A Northern District of Georgia grand jury returned in December 2011 a 23-count indictment against Panin, who had yet to be fully identified, and Bendelladj. Panin pleaded guilty in 2014 to one count of conspiring to commit wire and bank fraud for his role as primary developer and distributor of the malware, while Bendelladj pleaded guilty in 2015 to a number of counts relating to conspiring to wire and computer fraud and abuse. Operating from Russia from 2009 to 2011, Panin was charged with conspiring with others, including Bendelladj, also known as Bx1, to develop, market and sell various versions of SpyEye and component parts on the Internet, the DOJ had alleged. In July 2011, Panin negotiated and agreed to sell SpyEye online to a federal undercover law enforcement officer, according to a filing by the DOJ in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, Atlanta division. He uploaded a version of the toolkit on file delivery service Sendspace.com after receiving the payment. Before that, Panin and Bendelladj had been found trying to promote the kit online on the Darkode.com criminal Web forum that was dismantled last year. Bendelladj even advertised his own version of SpyEye on YouTube, according to the government. The DOJ has described SpyEye as a preeminent malware banking Trojan from 2010 to 2012, which was used by a global cybercrime syndicate to infect over 50 million computers and cause close to US$1 billion in financial harm. Panin is said to have received in 2010 the source code and rights to sell Zeus from Evginy Bogachev, also known as Slavik, and included many components of it into SpyEye. Bogachev, who is the FBIs most wanted cybercriminal, remains at large. Panin was planning to release a new version of SpyEye, called SpyEye 2.0, which would have been one of the most prolific and undetectable botnets distributed to date if it had been released, according to a statement by the DOJ. Panin was arrested by U.S. authorities in 2013, when flying through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, while Bendelladj was extradited from Thailand in the same year after he was apprehended while in transit at an airport in Bangkok. Reykjavik, IcelandIt took three long years, but CCPs space dogfighter EVE Valkyrie finally released alongside the Oculus Rift last month, and its coming to the HTC Vive later this year (with cross-platform multiplayer, to boot). Its one of the most polished built-for-VR games, and still one of my favorites even after all this time. But its just the beginning for Valkyrie. CCP referred to it as an Early Access game during EVE: Fanfest 2016 on Thursday, which I think is a bit of a stretchits not being sold as an Early Access game on the Oculus Store, as far as I know. Theres quite a bit of content coming, nevertheless. First up is a new map, Crossroads, which we got a look at during Fanfest. Its full of your usual collection of asteroids and a massive, spire-shaped space station. Its gorgeous, but not too dissimilar from existing Valkyrie maps. The bigger addition is a new Carrier Assault game mode. Unfortunately there was no hands-on with Carrier Assault at Fanfest, but CCP did show off a short trailer. Think: Death Star. Carriers, which in normal matches just sort of hang out looking scary, are central to the new mode. Teams need to capture control points in order to bring down the opposing Carriers shields. Next up, strafing runs to destroy surface turrets. And then the coup de grace: Flying into the central corridor of the Carrier to blow up the ships core from the inside, at which point the entire ship explodes. As I said, I have no idea how it plays yet, but it looks damn cool, giving me those Millennium-Falcon-barely-escaping-the-exhaust-vent chills. CCP says to expect the content update sometime this summerhopefully early summer, as I do think Valkyrie could use a better objective-based mode. Then again, its probably more important for Oculus to figure out the Rift shipment snafu first so people can actually play. Patent trolls are a big enough problem that theyve attracted the attention of the White House, but theres little consensus on how to stop them. A new tool from artist and engineer Alexander Reben looks to algorithms for help. Patent trolls are companies that buy up patents with the primary goal of pursuing infringement claims in court, while doing little or no technology development of their own. The practice has been a particularly big problem in the world of software, but Reben a graduate of the MIT Media Lab has developed a system he thinks could help. Tapping the concept of prior art which is simply evidence that an invention is not original, putting a damper on its patentability Rebens All Prior Art project mines text from the entire public database of U.S.-issued and published patents. From there, it mashes up random sentences and phrases to create entirely new potential inventions and creates prior art for them. If someone later were to try to patent those ideas, theyd find themselves out of luck thanks to the prior art Rebens algorithms have created. Thats the thinking, anyway. Many of the projects inventions are a little wacky, Reben acknowledges. One describes a ventilation system for footwear that includes a shoe and a ventilation device. Another describes a retractable speed bump; yet another, an apparatus and mechanism for fileting fish. The site has created and published roughly 4.2 million ideas so far, but even if most of them come to nothing, Reben isnt worried. The cost to computationally create and publish millions of ideas is nearly zero, which allows for a higher probability of possible valid prior art, his website explains. Finding prior art is one of the biggest problems when it comes to fighting off patent trolls, said Jim Burger, a partner with Thompson Coburn LLP who focuses on intellectual property in the tech industry. If Rebens system contains even 20,000 or 30,000 good examples, that could be a great help, Burger said. The bigger issue, though, is making sure theyre easy to find. The golden chalice is search, he said. Otherwise, thats 4.2 million more documents that no one is ever going to look at. Assuming Rebens prior art can be found by those who need it, Burger sees no reason courts would object simply because it was generated by algorithms. Its always about publication, he said. Thomas Edison tried thousands of different filaments before he came upon the right one for his lightbulb, Burger noted. It isnt necessarily genius its that you created a new way of doing something, he said. Theres all this stuff waiting to be discovered maybe by genius, or maybe by a computer program. Descriptions of All Prior Arts ideas are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License to prevent commercial use of the text along with restricting derivatives. The intent isnt to prevent truly innovative patents from being filed, Reben hastens to say; its to take the obvious and easily automated ideas out-of-play. If an idea is truly creative and innovative, a computer should have difficulty coming up with it. Reben hopes others will pick up his work and run with it. At least in theory, a large institution could dedicate multiple servers and tap technologies like deep learning to flood the prior art space even further, Reben suggests. It is not unforeseeable with current technology (along with sufficient cash for fees) to flood the actual patent application process itself with sufficiently advanced patent applications based on this concept. He invites others who want to do something interesting with this data to contact him if the Creative Commons license he chose is a problem. In the meantime, Reben is attempting a similar feat in the claims arena with a sister website dubbed All The Claims. The Pennsylvania Public Service Utility Commission has voted to fine Uber US $11.4 million for operating without its authority and failing to comply with data requests for an investigation. The PUCs vote on Thursday reduced the fine from the $49.9 million that administrative law judges had recommended last year. The PUC had accused the ride-hailing service of operating without a PUC license from February to August 2014. The PUC reduced the fine because Uber has modified its internal practices to comply with the commissions conditions. The company has not had significant compliance problems since the PUC granted it authority to operate, Commissioner John Coleman Jr. said in a statement. The final fine is necessary to deter Uber and other companies from future violations, Coleman said. Uber said it was shocked at the size of the fine after competitor Lyft paid a $250,000 settlement to the PUC to resolve a similar complaint last July. There was no actual harm to Pennsylvanians, and the Commission subsequently approved the same operations, Uber said in a statement. Two of the PUCs five commissioners voted against the fine. The penalty was egregious compared with more serious cases, some of which involved serious injuries or fatalities, Commissioner Pamela Witmer said in a statement. Uber launched in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, in February 2014, without getting commission authority to operate a taxi-like service. The company filed an application for two-year, experimental authority in April of that year, and the commission granted the application in July, about three weeks after its administrative law judges issued a cease-and-desist order. A lawsuit challenging Jurupa Valleys ban on masks at city council meetings has been settled out court. Terms of the settlement agreement, which was released in response to a California Public Records Act request by The Press-Enterprise, show that Jurupa Valley agreed to pay resident Justin Martinez $30,000. In January 2015, Martinez wore a Guy Fawkes mask while addressing the city council. Thompson Advocacy, the law firm that represented Martinez, received $25,000 of that amount, the agreement shows. Martinez said Wednesday, April 20, that he agreed to drop the lawsuit because the city had revised its ordinance to ban masks only if they disrupt the meeting and included exemptions for masks worn for religious or medical reasons. The city had admitted defeat, Martinez said. They created an ordinance then they revised it after I filed a lawsuit. I didnt see the need to go to court and drag something out when they already admitted by revising their ordinance that they were wrong, he said. City Manager Gary Thompson said the city was following its insurance carriers advice. In reality, it was cheaper for the city to do this instead of going to trial to prove we were right to begin with, Thompson said. We believe we would have prevailed in court. The Jurupa Valley City Council passed its ordinance after Martinez, a frequent council critic, wore the Fawkes mask. Though the settlement, signed in October, resulted in the lawsuits dismissal, it did not ease tensions between Martinez and the city. On Feb. 4, Martinez showed up at a city council meeting wearing a black mask he calls Infamous and berated council members for failing to post stop signs he had requested on his street. Thompson said Martinez was not asked to remove the mask because no one had complained about it. Martinez said he plans to self publish a book called Infamous: How to Protest and Walk Away. He said he will be moving to a rural area of Pennsylvania later this month. Contact the writer: 951-368-9647 or sstokley@pressenterprise.com A child who was found at the bottom of a Moreno Valley pool suffered only minor injuries from the near drowning on Wednesday, April 20, authorities say. The 8-year-old was found not breathing in the pool about 5:35 p.m. in the 15000 block of La Casa Drive, Cal Fire/Riverside County Fire officials said in a news release. Firefighters arrived quickly, but in the meantime an off-duty police officer performed CPR on the child while a dispatcher gave instructions, fire officials said in the release. The child was taken to a nearby hospital with only minor injuries, the release said. Responding to a heightened number of mail theft complaints, Riverside Police livestreamed a question-answer session for the first time on Facebook at 10 a.m. Thursday, April 21. The session will address measures folks can take to prevent mail theft as well as frequently-asked questions about the matter. Rep. Mark Takano, D-Riverside hopes President Barack Obama will make a special stop when he visits Japan next month for a summit of economic powers. In an open letter, Takano asked Obama to becoming the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, where the atomic bomb was used for the first time. The 1945 bombing, which killed an estimated 90,000 to 146,000, help end World War II. Takano, who is of Japanese descent, visited Hiroshima in 2002 with a relative who survived the bombing. In his letter, he wrote that after his visit, the atomic bomb in Hiroshima ceased to be a distant, abstract fact of history I had a concrete and personal connection to it. Every leader who has the capacity to order the use of atomic weapons should have that same experience and feel that same connection. Letter from Rep. Mark Takano, D-Riverside, to President Barack Obama. Touring Hiroshima is not an apology on Americas behalf, Takano wrote. Instead, it is a signal that the Commander in Chief of the largest military in the world and commander of the worlds largest arsenal of nuclear weapons recognizes the awesomeness of their destructive power. It also sets a precedent for other world leaders to follow in your footsteps. Takano also took to the House of Representatives floor to encourage the president to visit Hiroshima. When Banning police arrived at the scene of a homicide last week, they found the mobile home ransacked, blood all over, and the 78-year-old victim on a bedroom floor with bruising on her neck and a possible defensive wound on her hand. The oven was on, and inside were a revolver, a bullet and a kerosene lamp with fuel. The following morning, the victims granddaughter was discovered hanging from a tree about 200 yards away from her grandmothers car, which had been abandoned on the side of Gilman Springs Road some 16 miles away. Those details were laid out in an affidavit written by Banning police Sgt. Robert Fisher seeking a warrant to search the car, a red 2012 Ford Fiesta. The affidavit also identified both grandmother and granddaughter: Roberta Joan Waddle, 78, and Megan Kelley, 24. Authorities had not publicly released their names after they were found dead on April 10 and 11. Police also have not said whether they consider Kelley a potential victim or suspect, and the court documents say nothing about why they think either woman died. The affidavit did say police believed the weapon used against Waddle might be inside the car. The search might be necessary to prove what led to and caused her injuries, and may circumstantially identify the perpetrator of the crime, Fisher wrote. In addition to weapons, the affidavit asked to search the car for a cutting instrument, electronic storage devices, cellphones, computers and other communication devices. The car was searched April 13. Items collected included a California identification card, fingerprints, possible blood and DNA evidence, $22 in cash, a wallet and a purse. Records do not indicate any weapon was found. Banning police did not respond Wednesday to a request for an update on the investigations status. The affidavit revealed Waddles body was found April 10 by her daughter and Kelleys mother, Jena Waddle of Phelan, inside a mobile home in the 4100 block of West Wilson Street. Jena Waddle told a detective that she had dropped her daughter off there for a visit the previous afternoon. On April 10, she was not able to reach her mother by phone, she said, so she drove back to Banning to check if she was OK and to pick up her daughter. Waddle noticed her mothers car was missing and the back door was open. She said she went inside and found her mothers body. Her daughter wasnt there, and didnt answer her phone, Waddle told the detective. Medical personnel and police, called out just before 5 p.m., were met by a violent crime scene. Blood was found on Roberta Waddles left hand and a nearby photo frame. In the room where she was found, her purse and its contents were strewn atop a bed. Another bedroom had been ransacked, and blood was on the bedding and floor. A trail of blood led from that room to a bathroom, where more blood was on the floor and wall. A back entryway and the living room also were bloody. The bruising on Waddles neck suggested she might have been choked, while the blood on her left hand indicated she might have tried to defend herself against a sharp instrument, the affidavit stated. Her right cheek had a small cut. Waddles neighbor, Marion Adrian, told a reporter that she told Banning police she heard noises like somebody throwing things around in Waddles home the morning of April 9, the day before Waddles body was found. She said she heard no screaming or people noises. Adrian also heard what she said sounded like a cars trunk and doors slamming open and shut. Her interview with police was not mentioned in the affidavit seeking the search warrant for the car. Adrian said Kelley previously had lived with Waddle whom Adrian knew as Bobby though not since late last summer. Adrian described both grandmother and granddaughter as low-key and sweet, and the younger woman as dedicated to her grandmother. Contact the writer: jblodgett@pressenterprise.com, 951-368-9093 RELATED: 78-year-old woman found dead; granddaughter missing Body identified as dead Banning womans missing granddaughter A rainy season that began with much El Nino-fueled promise is speeding to a dry and disappointing end. And now the blame game is beginning as weather experts try to figure out what went wrong at least in Southern California. This week, the National Weather Service posted a 17-minute video addressing the question of why the mysterious climate phenomenon marked by unusually warm water in the Pacific Ocean didnt deliver drenching rain to the region, as expected. Alex Tardy, a warning coordination meteorologist for the Weather Service in San Diego who narrated the video, said it would be a mistake to point the finger at the climate condition itself. We cant blame it on El Nino directly because El Nino was there, and it was massive, Tardy said. In fact, it set (ocean temperature) records. In that sense, the weather condition that was enthusiastically declared a Godzilla or monster El Nino at the outset lived up to expectations. The large pool of water in the equatorial Pacific was a record 5.5 degrees above average one week during the winter, Tardy said. And for a three-month period, the ocean surface in the tropics was as warm as it was during the folkloric winter of 1997-98 that turned out to be one of the wettest on record. Bill Patzert, a climate scientist at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, said El Nino did not fail. No, it didnt rain much here. But Patzert noted it rained and snowed a lot to the north, enough to nearly fill the states crucial drinking-water reservoirs. And the phenomenon messed with weather all over the globe. Those torrential rains in Houston this week? El Nino, he said, deserves credit for those or blame, as the case may be. Dont think that this was not Godzilla El Nino because it didnt deliver in Southern California, Patzert said. That means youre taking El Nino too personally. Youve got to look at the big picture. Just because it was a gecko in Riverside doesnt mean it wasnt a Godzilla elsewhere, he said. But it has been a wimpy rainy season locally, and weather experts have been struggling to explain why. According to the National Weather Service presentation, the answer may be up in the air. Weve got to look more at the atmosphere if were going to blame anything, Tardy said. During the last two big El Ninos of 1982-83 and 1997-98, sweeping jet streams stretching from west to east across the Pacific drove storms straight into Southern California. But this season, the jet was pointed in a different direction. While it was present and it was unusually strong, bringing significant storms north of Hawaii, it turned and split as it got to our region here, Tardy said. And it channeled most storms into Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, he said. Tardy said the jet stream was influenced by the location of abnormally warm water. In past El Ninos, the pool of warm water was concentrated in the eastern Pacific near South America. This year, it was focused in an area more than 1,000 miles to the west, he said in a telephone interview. Richard Minnich, a UC Riverside earth sciences professor, said the theory sounds like a good one. Minnich said the location of warmest ocean water was well documented. It was too far west, he said. Patzert said hes not sure the Weather Service has it right, but its an interesting hypothesis. The bottom line was, we just had a lot of high pressure that deflected storms farther north, Patzert said. As far as he is concerned, no one knows why the high pressure dominated our weather. The larger background of global warming might have been in play here, Patzert said. One of the scenarios of global warming is a warmer and drier American Southwest, which is what we saw for the past winter. If nothing else, he said, the winter taught us this: In the El Nino forecasting business, there is no sure thing. Contact the writer: 951-368-9699 or ddowney@pressenterprise.com UPDATE (Friday, April 22): Memorial set for Jack Yeager Construction magnate Jacques Jack Yeager, a lifelong Riverside resident whose family business helped shape the modern Inland area, died Wednesday, April 20. He was 94. Yeager Construction Co., which Yeagers father founded in 1919, built or expanded many Inland freeways and interchanges and graded the land so UC Riverside could be built in the 1950s. Friends and family also remembered Yeager as a philanthropist and volunteer who served on boards, led fundraising campaigns for community projects and advocated for the Inland area in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. Anything he could do to push the Inland Empire, that was his pride and joy, his son Jacques Jock Yeager Jr. said. He wanted to do the right thing for his community and his business and his family. Yeager Jr. said his father died at home of natural causes. RELATED Share remembrances of Inland builder Jacques Jack Yeager COMMUNITY BUILDING Jack Yeager was born in Riverside in 1921 and attended local schools, graduating from Poly High School in 1939. He left his studies at UC Berkeley to train for the military and serve with the U.S. Navy Seabees, building airports in the South Pacific during World War II, according to information from his family and UC Riverside. After the war he returned to college, graduating with a bachelors degree in civil engineering in 1947. Yeager returned to Riverside and joined the family business, E. L. Yeager Construction Co., along with his brothers, Dick and Gene. In 1948, Jack Yeager married kindergarten teacher Mary Barbara Gibbs, and the couple had two sons and three daughters. She died in 1990. Five years later he married Helen Hays, who died in 2009. Over the years, the Yeager brothers built the company into a construction powerhouse that left a permanent mark on the Inland region. The company graded the land that would become the UC Riverside campus and, with help from Yeager family members, created the iconic C on Box Springs Mountain behind UCR. He would constantly talk about it, how they poured concrete and how they brought things up the hill to make the C, said Reza Abbaschian, dean of UCRs Bourns College of Engineering. He was very proud of that. The Yeagers helped turn the 91 into a freeway and worked on numerous Inland road projects, as commemorated by the 2011 dedication of the Highway 60/Interstate 15 interchange in honor of Jack Yeagers father. LOCAL GIANT Yeager sold his interest in the construction business in 1995, but friends said he continued his tireless efforts to improve the community. I cant think of anything he wasnt involved in, said Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Corona. If he had something that he was passionate about, hed call me up and tell me what I ought to be doing. Some of Yeagers efforts went to UCR, where he headed fundraising campaigns to create the Anderson Graduate School of Management and the UCR/California Museum of Photography and donated to the Center for Environmental Research & Technology, known as CE-CERT. Cindy Roth, president of the Greater Riverside Chambers of Commerce, said that, in addition to endowments that bear his name, Yeager often made donations to local causes anonymously. He also used his influence to back political candidates and issues such as Riverside Countys half-cent sales tax first approved by voters in 1988 that pays for transportation projects. Ultimately, friends and family said they remember Yeager as a happy, optimistic person who never said no when asked for help and no matter how successful he became, had the good of his community at heart. Former Riverside Mayor Ron Loveridge called Yeager a giant in the history of this city and added, He didnt take his money and head for the coast or the mountains. He stayed in Riverside. Yeager is survived by two sons, three daughters, 14 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Information on memorial services was not available Wednesday. Do you have any memories of Yeager? Share them in the comments below. Staff writers Fielding Buck and Richard K. DeAtley contributed to this report. Contact the writer: 951-368-9461 or arobinson@pressenterprise.com The life of Riverside resident Jacques Jack Yeager, whose family construction business built Inland freeways and other projects, will be celebrated at 11 a.m. Friday, April 29, at All Saints Episcopal Church, 3847 Terracina Dr., Riverside. Yeager died Wednesday, April 20, at 94. Beyond the work of the powerhouse E. L. Yeager Construction Co., Yeager was known for helping raise money for local institutions such as UC Riverside and volunteering for charitable causes. RELATED RIVERSIDE: Share remembrances of Inland builder Jacques Jack Yeager Contact the writer: 951-368-9461 or arobinson@pressenterprise.com The Australians implicated in the kidnapping case in Lebanon have been released from prison after a deal was struck, with both Sally Faulkner and the 60 Minutes crew heading home to Australia. Reports indicate that the father of the children Ali al-Amin agreed to drop charges both against the crew and his ex-wife. However, judge Rami Abdullah said he had not made a decision as to whether he would refer the case to another court, which would mean that they would have to return to Lebanon for another hearing. Amin claims that he did not receive any money to drop the charges, despite reports to the contrary. More details have cropped up about how the arrest took place. Amin knew about his wifes plans to bring back the children because he still had access to her email via his mobile device, but revelations have emerged that Lebanese intelligence services also knew what was going down. This all comes after the suggestion that Amin did not want to make any kind of deal, as he did not want the 60 Minutes crew to escape prosecution. But theyre out of Lebanon now. Lawyer Ghassan Moghabghab had this to say: Everyone is relieved that this is all over. There will be some sort of arrangement on custody later on. For now, Sally is free to return to Australia. Source: The Guardian. Image: Channel 9. Heard of Alibaba? You might not have but its an absolute titan, and Chinas biggest Internet company. Its an internet shopping portal/eBay style auction site which handled $US149 billion in transactions in the December quarter alone. And now theyre opening an office in Australia. Which they announced last week. As the Australian Financial Review reports, this announcement barely registered in the media here, even though theyd go positively wild if it was a big American tech firm opening up shop here. Theyre basically wanting to offer support for Australian businesses who want to enter the astoundingly lucrative Chinese online shopping market. Turns out businesses like Woolworths, Bellamys, Blackmores and Chemist Warehouse are already mad keen to get onboard. Does it mean that Aussies will be able to buy and sell on the market? Probably at some point, yeah. We see a lot of potential in the Australian market as Alibaba continues its globalisation efforts, the company told the AFR via email. The business already faced a bit of controversy among mums online after the baby formula debacle where sellers were using Alibaba to sell bulk baby formula bought form Australian supermarkets into the Chinese market. If anything, it proves the enormous power of the site, seeing as it created baby formula shortages here. We might be seeing a lot more about Alibaba very soon. Source: Australian Financial Review. Photo: Getty Images / VCG. Hooo boy. Ali Elamine, father of the two children at the centre of the recent 60 Minutes ordeal, has spoken to The Project about his estranged wife Sally Faulkner and the circumstances surrounding the child rescue/abduction attempt. Before todays court appearance, Elamine spoke from his car, telling Waleed Aly and Carrie Bickmore about suddenly showing leniency to Faulkner and the Channel 9 crew; he said she is the mother of our children. I have nothing against her. I know what she did is a bit heavy, but she is a mother, and mothers will do anything. He later claimed the choice to drop charges against the Channel 9 crew was partly motivated by empathy, after speaking to one of the cameramen involved who is a father himself. As for the kids themselves? Well, according to Elamine, they dont know whats happening. The first thing when they say me was why are mums friends so tough and rough? and I said maybe they just work out. Theyre big guys and they work out, and they didnt mean to hurt you, theyre just trying to surprise you.' I never told them what went on. I just told them mummy had to get on a plane and head back home, because she had work. I never told them she went to gaol, and I would never do that. Of course, Faulkner and the crew are returning to Australia at time of publication, and their release itself is a reversal of the narrative that things were looking very, very bleak legally for all involved. This entire situation is far from over, and it seems every sentence from anyone involved in the ordeal adds just as many questions as it does answers, but collating all these viewpoints might make sense of it all. Watch: We spoke to Ali Elamine, the father at the centre of the #60mins saga about his side of the story #TheProjectTV https://t.co/qHnY8FMkgd #TheProjectTV (@theprojecttv) April 21, 2016 Source and photo: The Project / Twitter. Lillis-Corinne.jpg Corinne Lillis will make her WGAL Traffic Anchor debut on Friday, April 22. (WGAL) WGAL will have a new traffic anchor beginning tomorrow: Corinne Lillis will make her debut with the local NBC affiliate on April 22 with the NBC affiliate. Lillis is no stranger to our area, as she is a native of Chester County and graduate of Millersville University, and during her time with the university she served as an intern with WGAL in 2013. Following her graduation, Lillis worked in broadcasting in Philadelphia and Atlanta. "Interning at WGAL was one of the main highlights of my college career," said Lillis in a press release. "I knew then that I would love to be a permanent member of the team one day. I am thrilled to be a part of this community and to work along some of the best in the business." For more information, visit the WGAL website. With Pennsylvania-produced medical marijuana at least 18 months away, a state senator is asking district attorneys not to prosecute people who possess marijuana for medical use. But Cumberland County David Freed called it political "grandstanding," and said the request should have gone to the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association before being released to the media. State Sen. Daylin Leach, D-Montgomery County, made the request Thursday in an open letter to the state's 67 county district attorneys. It comes less than a week after Gov. Tom Wolf signed into law the bill that allowing medical marijuana to be used to treat 17 conditions, including epilepsy, chronic pain, autism, glaucoma, post traumatic stress disorder and assorted gastrointestinal and neurological conditions. It's expected to take up to two years to get the program running and providing Pennsylvania-produced medical marijuana to patients. Leach's letter said in part, "Act 16 received the bipartisan support of 42 Senators, 149 Representatives, and Governor Wolf. Through their elected officials, the people of Pennsylvania said, resoundingly and with one voice, that sick Pennsylvanians deserve medicine, not prosecution." Freed said releasing the letter to the media before taking it up with the association is "totally unproductive and unprofessional and this is why no one in law enforcement wants to work with him." Leach responded, "Mr. Freed can insult me all he wants, but he really owes it to the people of Pennsylvania to answer the actual question. Is he going to prosecute the parents of sick children, cancer patients, and veterans with PTSD for taking medicine or not?" Freed said he typically weighs assorted factors when deciding to prosecute someone for marijuana possession and sometimes decides not to prosecute. He said he considers it unlikely that a district attorney would prosecute, say, a chemotherapy patient who had a need for marijuana. But he also said prosecutors routinely "hear excuses, and we have to cut through to see what's legitimate and what not." Richard Long, the executive director of the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association, stressed that district attorneys are responsible to the citizens of their counties. "They are well aware of the issues at play. It's going to be up to each individual DA to handle this situation in the manner they deem appropriate. They have to answer to the people of their individual counties," he said. It's an open secret that many of the people who led the push for medical marijuana in Pennsylvania have already been using medical marijuana for themselves or for children with a severe kind of seizures. The legalization bill includes "safe haven" provisions to allow people with the state-approved conditions to possess medical marijuana obtained from states where it's legal. They kick in within a month for parents of children in need of medical marijuana, and after six months for other adults. Here is Leach's letter in full: April 21, 2016 To Pennsylvania's 67 District Attorneys: On Sunday Governor Tom Wolf enacted Act 16 of 2016, which creates a protocol that enables Pennsylvanians with specific medical conditions to acquire medical marijuana. Thousands of sick people will finally get the help they need. Before patients can begin getting medical marijuana under the new protocol, regulations need to be written and the industry needs to grow. I expect that process to take between 18 and 24 months. In the meantime, parents whose children are suffering from devastating seizure disorders, veterans suffering from PTSD, and cancer patients being ravaged by the side effects of chemotherapy, among others, are facing a choice between three bad options. They must endure unspeakable and unnecessary suffering; or they must move to a more accommodating state, leaving behind their families and careers; or they must risk arrest and prosecution by procuring medical marijuana in another state and bringing it back to Pennsylvania. Act 16 received the bipartisan support of 42 Senators, 149 Representatives, and Governor Wolf. Through their elected officials, the people of Pennsylvania said, resoundingly and with one voice, that sick Pennsylvanians deserve medicine, not prosecution. I ask that, in the next 18-24 months, you honor that voice. Consider announcing to the public that you will use your prosecutorial discretion to forgo prosecution of any person for possession of marijuana if he or she can demonstrate that he or she is using the marijuana for medical purposes. To those of you who have already done this: thank you. I am very grateful for your consideration of this matter. If you wish to discuss it further, please feel free to contact me at any time. Very Truly Yours, Daylin Leach State Senator 17th District Note: this article was revised to include comments from Richard Long, the executive director of the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association. frein 2.JPG Eric Frein, 32, is led out of the Pike County Courthouse Tuesday. He accused of shooting two state police troopers, killing one of them and injuring the other, in September 2014. A pretrial hearing was held Tuesday, and another is set for Thursday to determine if statements he made to the police can be used at trial. (Steve Marroni/PennLive) On Tuesday, Pike County Judge Gregory H. Chelak ordered that a suppression hearing in which those statements would be reviewed would be held in closed court due, in part, to the amount of media attention this case garnered. But television station WNEP filed an objection to that ruling, asking that the recording be played in open court. A hearing on the television station's objection was set for Thursday, with the suppression hearing scheduled for Friday. But on Thursday, the judge granted a defense request for a continuance, making the hearing on whether or not to open it to the public moot. The judge did say he expects most future proceedings to be open, but he said the court will give notice on upcoming hearing dates, giving media attorneys another chance to file objections should he choose again to close the suppression hearing - which could come as late as the start of trial. "I think the judge's decision today is to weigh the particular options that the court may have in holding open proceedings in the future," District Attorney Tonkin said. "What we really want to do is move this case forward to trial." Tonkin said he has no position on whether the suppression hearing should be held in open or closed court. Michael Weinstein, who is one of Frein's attorneys, pointed out that he did not object to or request the judge's original order to close the hearing. "Whatever he decides, that's the way we're going to try this case," he said after the hearing. He added his motion today was simply to continue the hearing. This motion surprised Mike Genello, the attorney representing WNEP, but he said he'll be ready to argue against a closed session should one arise in the future. The next hearing is set for June 3 on a defense motion to move Frein's trial out of Pike County. No date has been set for another suppression hearing or for trial. Frein is facing the death penalty on charges that include first-degree murder. He was charged with shooting and killing Cpl. Bryon Dickson and seriously wounding Trooper Alex Douglass after an ambush outside the Blooming Grove barracks in September 2014. HARRISBURG- Two men showed up at the Heinz-Menaker Senior Center in Harrisburg Wednesday afternoon and asked Director Les Ford if they could look around. "They just said they had heard about the center and were interested in it," Ford said. The men were cryptic, causing Ford to grow suspicious. He snapped a photo of their license plate number outside the center at 1824 North Fourth Street, just in case. Before the men left, they asked Ford for his phone number, which he provided. Later that night, one of the men called and revealed himself as an advance agent for former President Bill Clinton. He apologized profusely for their mysterious behavior. He asked if Clinton could visit on Thursday before a 12:30 p.m. voter rally at the Capitol Complex for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. The agents swore Ford to secrecy and mapped out a plan for the visit. But when Clinton showed up Thursday as the seniors were eating lunch, all bets were off, Ford said. "It didn't turn out to be anything like what I thought," he said. "I was planning to introduce him and everything, but (Clinton) just walked in the room and immediately took over. He owned the room." Clinton greeted veterans, including a Marine who served during the Cuban missle crisis. The Marine said Clinton was the fourth President with whom he had shaken hands. "I always say, every American should have the right to shake hands with one president in their lifetime," Clinton said. "If you're up to four, you're doing good." Clinton hugged residents, posed for photos and told stories. After meeting a 103-year-old resident, Clinton told a story about meeting a woman of the same age on her birthday when he was a young Arkansas governor. "I told her, 'You look beautiful today' and she said, 'Don't you come courting me. I'm not looking for another husband,'" Clinton said. "That's the great thing about being 103. You can say what you want." Earlier on Thursday, Clinton visited Little Amps Coffee Roasters at 133 State Street in downtown Harrisburg. But there was no advance notice of the presidential visit or security sweeps, said Manager Kenneth Limppo. Instead, Limppo said one of the employees saw news of the impending visit on Twitter. Reporters who were with Clinton's entourage let it slip where Clinton was headed. Still, Limppo wasn't certain if Clinton would actually show up_ until a dozen reporters and camera operators stormed the corner coffee shop. Clinton greeted what seemed like hundreds of people outside of the shop, cheerfully posed for dozens of selfies, then made his way inside. "Great place!" he said as he examined the store's brick interior with reclaimed wood. He chatted up a table of customers about the March of Dimes, because one of them worked on behalf of the charitable organization. He ordered a decaf Americano and talked to other customers about the Clinton Foundation and prescription drug abuse reduction. Clinton talked to Limppo about records and Thelonious Munk. "He was definitely up to chat," Limppo said. Album signed by Bill Clinton The coffee shop manager asked Clinton to sign a copy of a Fleetwood Mac vinyl album entitled, Rumours. "My friend, don't stop," Clinton wrote on the cover, before signing his name. The album is now displayed in the shop, Limppo said. Clinton had initially intended to stop by three local establishments before the voter rally, but ran out of time. A planned visit to the Front Street Diner was scrapped. After the rally, Clinton reportedly asked his secret service agents if they had time to stop by the Midtown Scholar bookstore, owned by Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse. The stop wasn't on Clinton's itinerary but the former president told the mayor at the rally that he would love to see his store so Papenfuse figured he had a 50-50 chance. Papenfuse said he was thrilled when the former president's motorcade pulled up. Clinton strolled into the store and spent about 30 minutes browsing the shelves with Papenfuse as they chatted about books. "He's very well read," Papenfuse said. "He chose a diverse selection of books, including some children's books, possibly for his grandchildren." A group of Camp Hill High School students on a field trip happened to be inside and were stunned to see Clinton, said Catherine Lawrence, who owns the store with her husband, Papenfuse. "His visit caught them completely by surprise," she said. The students' teacher, April Tichenor-Holtzman, said the group attended a student regional art show and stopped by the bookstore "for any last purchase of art books. "My kids got to meet his security agents and got plenty of selfies. It was so amazing," she said. Secret Service agents allowed customers who were already inside to stay inside, but did not allow additional customers to enter during his visit. A crowd swelled at the doors, prepared to greet Clinton when he departed. Clinton approached Terrence "Angel" Rhymes inside the bookstore, as he sat in a leather chair with his laptop. "He walked up and said, 'What's up man?'" said Rhymes, who formerly lived in Harrisburg but now lives in New York. "He was cool. I wasn't expecting to see a president today." UPDATE: This story was updated with information from Tichenor-Holtzman. With only a few days left before the Pennsylvania primary election, Gov. John Kasich held a town hall meeting Thursday in Delaware County as he battles with other candidates to win the nomination. Kasich, the governor of Ohio, faces an uphill struggle as he faces off with more popular candidates -- Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz. All leading Republican and Democratic candidates have scheduled events in Pennsylvania ahead of Tuesday's primary election. WILLIAMSPORT - A Susquehanna Health official said he was pleased with the outcome of a mass casualty exercise that took place Thursday, replicating a drone attack on a crowded stadium at the Little League World Series. "It went really well," Jim Slotterback, the health system's emergency preparedness coordinator, said Thursday. "I am confident we could respond to a mass casualty event." Approximately 140 people were "injured" when drones dispersed a chemical agent and others dropped improvised explosive devices on a large crowd of people. The scenario called for the first drones to disperse a chemical agent and a second wave to drop explosive devices as spectators were leaving the stadium. The "patients" were treated for a variety of injuries ranging from burns to severe trauma. The health system's decontamination facility was included in the exercise. Members of the National Guard retrieved a "chemical-dispersing drone" that came down on the roof of a building, analyzed the agent and reported findings through the Lycoming County emergency operations center. Some law enforcement became first responders and one officer went through the decontamination process with his weapon. "I feel our staff benefitted from this [exercise]," Slotterback said. It was a good test of the process that would be used in case of the real thing, he said. Everyone worked well together, said South Williamsport Police Chief Robert Hetner, who helps coordinate security at the world series each August in the borough. Events like this show what needs to be tweaked in case an actual mass casualty incident occurs, he said. Little League was involved in the planning but did not have anyone present for the exercise that took place on land adjacent to the Williamsport Regional Medical Center in Williamsport. This year's world series is scheduled to run from Aug. 18-28. Tokyo Kitasuna Little League (Tokyo, Japan), which beat Red Land in last year's title game, is the defending champion. Did Mike Regan call teachers terrorists? That's the accusation levied at the state representative, who's one of four men vying for the 31st District senate seat which covers parts of Cumberland and York counties. Brice Arndt, Scott Harper and Jon Ritchie are also running for the seat. At issue are comments Regan made during a debate Tuesday. Regan, in taking aim at donations made to fellow candidate Jon Ritchie's campaign by unions, made the following statement: "It's like Al-Qaeda saying they back George Bush," Regan said, according to the York Dispatch. The Pennsylvania State Education Association issued a statement saying that these comments take aim at teachers, comparing them to terrorists. PSEA has endorsed Ritchie in the 31st race. "Any elected official who compares teachers to terrorists owes every educator in Pennsylvania an apology. Mike Regan should know better than to make such a ridiculous and outlandish claim," PSEA president Jerry Oleksiak said. "I'm sure the people who live in the 31st district are as disgusted by this as I am. It's an insult, an outrage, and another example of why political discourse has sunk to an all-time low." PSEA-retired member and Navy veteran Paul Wade, who worked in the Cumberland Valley School District, also offered his thoughts in the PSEA release: "This is the kind of politics that we should all reject. Al Qaeda is a brutal, murderous terrorist organization," Wade said. "Using their name to score political points cheapens the sacrifices made by America's veterans, including my son, a Marine who served two tours in Afghanistan. Mike Regan owes me, every teacher I know, and every veteran I've ever served with an apology." Regan countered that the calls for apologies from PSEA were taken out of context. "Another day, another liberal attack on me," Regan said. "Jon Ritchie and his union boss allies latest attacks include taking what I said the other night out of context. I was a teacher, I am proud of the support I have among teachers, and I'll always stand up to the union bosses who try to control our educators. In the last two days, I have been subjected to attacks from AFSCME, the AFL-CIO, and now the PSEA. Does Jon Ritchie have any Republican supporters?" The AFL-CIO also endorsed Ritchie. Regan has the support of several unions and organizations, including: Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry, Pennsylvania Realtors Association, Pennsylvania Bankers Association, Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association, Pennsylvania State Nurses Association, Pennsylvania Medical Society, Pennsylvania State Troopers Association and Pennsylvania State Correctional Officers Association. Ritchie weighed in, noting Regan's endorsements from unions as well, and calling Regan's debate comments "outrageous." "Rep. Mike Regan sadly continues to display obvious hypocrisy and a total lack of transparency and honesty," he said. "Demonizing me for having the support of teachers is outrageous. I learn something new and inaccurate about myself every day when I read one of Regan's mailers or watch one of his dishonest commercials." For his part, Regan admits he could have used better wording, but he stands by the point he was trying to make -- against his competitor's campaign, and not teachers. "I certainly did not compare PSEA to Al Qaeda," Regan said. "I did, however, use hyperbole to say the liberal union bosses support of a 'conservative' Republican in a Republican Primary election is akin to Al Qaeda supporting George W. Bush, as in it would never happen. In retrospect, I probably should have chosen better words. The Ritchie campaign attempting to turn an innocuous statement into a criticism of teachers is desperate and disingenuous." Rob Teplitz and Alvin Q. Taylor.jpg Sen. Rob Teplitz and Alvin Q. Taylor, a minister and clergy consultant, are running for the Democratic nomination for the 15th state Senate District seat on Tuesday. (Provided photos) Democratic state Sen. Rob Teplitz on Tuesday will face the first hurdle to retaining his seat. Alvin Q. Taylor, a minister and clergy consultant, is challenging the freshman state senator -- marking the second time the two have gone head-to-head in a Democratic primary for the 15th state Senate District. Taylor narrowly lost to Teplitz, 45, of Susquehanna Township in the 2012 Democratic primary election. Back then, the voters didn't have "all the facts," Taylor said, but they do now. Taylor, 62, of Lower Paxton Township said voters should have a choice as they go to the polls on Tuesday, and he'll be "happy with whatever the voters decide." While there's a bit of a rematch afoot, the 15th state Senate District has changed since the last election. Previously, it included most of Dauphin County and northern York County, but following redistricting, the district shifted to include Perry County and northern Dauphin County. While Teplitz isn't taking anything for granted, he said he felt confident going into the primary as he's received endorsements from the Dauphin County and Perry County Democratic committees; labor, environmental, and business organizations; and groups "advocating for working families and women and teachers." The Dauphin County Democratic Committee did not endorse Taylor, a Lower Paxton Township Democratic committeeman, and Teplitz claimed that Taylor "couldn't even get a second for his nomination." Taylor said he hasn't received any endorsements, but he also hasn't sought them. "The people endorse with their votes. I look for that." Taylor said. "... I'm not running to get endorsements. I want to make a difference in the community." When asked why he's a better candidate than Teplitz, Taylor said he's not a professional politician, but a "self-funded candidate" who likes advocating for and working in the community. Whether or not you see funding as a metric of support, Taylor is well behind his incumbent challenger in raising money. As of Thursday, Taylor's political committee raised only $2,859 in 2016, according to campaign finances reports. In comparison, Teplitz's political committee raised more than $130,000 in 2016. Teplitz said he has the experience and temperament to continue serving as state senator. "I believe the three and a half years I've served, so far, in this position make me the strongest candidate, " Teplitz said. "... I've probably done more as a freshman in the minority party in the last three and a half years than other senators or other legislators have done in their entire careers." Teplitz said one of the highlights of his tenure was serving on the Basic Education Funding Commission where the group worked to develop a formula to more fairly distribute funding to school districts in the state. Tepliz counts education among his "core issues," which include good jobs, government reform and getting the city of Harrisburg "back on track." Teplitz said there have been hearings related to "making the link between schools and jobs," and he has been involved in the issue of workforce development. "We've been doing a tremendous amount of work on trying to make sure that investments are made in economic development to create jobs in a way that actually strengthens the community by investing locally," Teplitz said. "Not just the state giving big checks to companies from out of state to come into Pennsylvania for a couple of years before they leave, but to grow minority-owned business, women-owned businesses, veterans-owned businesses to make sure they have the ability to compete, make sure that they are included in projects that are done by majority-type businesses." Taylor said education and jobs go hand in hand, and that he'd push for more funding for education. But he also wanted to look into the way education is funded and taught to see if the state should be taking a different paradigm into consideration. The education system isn't "addressing real world issues," Taylor said. "The job market is changing," Taylor said. "We have a lot of Amazon warehouses around here. We have federal facilities around here. We have county jobs, state jobs. We're a hub for jobs, but as [it's] been said so often, we can't find people with the skills for these jobs. It goes back to education." To further address the jobs issue, Taylor said he would advocate partnering with Chambers of Commerce. He also supports increasing the minimum wage. 104th district race.jpg Nate Curtis, (left) a political newcomer, is facing off against 10-year House veteran Sue Helm in the Republican primary race for the 104th District. The Republican primary race for the 104th District pits a political newcomer against a 10-year-veteran in a matchup that will determine how much value voters put on experience. Sue Helm touts her decade in the Legislature and her position on the appropriations committee as assets but Nate Curtis said she's gotten too comfortable and out of touch with her constituents. In fact, Curtis decided to enter the race to represent parts of Dauphin and Lebanon counties after calling Helm's office in December and getting blown off, he said. As a combat veteran, he was seeking a meeting with her regarding veterans' issues. But his call came during the budget crisis and a staff member told him that Helm did not have time to meet with constituents. Helm, however, made time to attend Republican fundraisers, Curtis said, and ran a campaign for delegate in the presidential primary during that same timeframe. "I know how to work hard for people," he said. "I will answer constituent calls and respond to their needs." For her part, Helms admits the handling of Curtis' phone call wasn't ideal. She said her staff member asked Curtis to follow-up with her office if the issue was time-sensitive, but he did not. "I didn't know he called until he ran against me," she said. "I'm sorry it happened. I don't like it that he wasn't called back a second time." Helm said the veterans in her district know that she cares deeply about veteran issues. She holds an annual appreciation lunch for them as well. But Curtis said he felt compelled to run after the way he was treated. "I needed to step up and do something about it," he said. "It's time for comfortable politicians to move on." Helm cited property tax elimination and pension reform among the top issues in the district. She said high pension costs are the main reason school districts are struggling, which creates pressure for more property taxes. If the state could stop the pension bleeding, which she's fighting to do, then schools wouldn't need to seek more property taxes, she said. Curtis cited pension reform as the top concern of constituents along with lack of legislative leadership and property tax elimination. The three-tour military veteran said his leadership skills from overseas would translate well into the Legislature. He noted his campaign supporters are family friends, neighbors, church members and co-workers, not political-interest groups. Curtis said he believes property taxes could be eliminated without raising sales or income taxes. Instead, he would search for money from "fraud, waste and abuse," with like-minded legislators. Helm, meanwhile, said her experience has earned her a coveted spot on the appropriations committee, which allows her to advocate for funding for projects in her district. She noted positions are offered based on seniority. "It's still good to be involved in the system," she said, "or you don't know how things work." The two candidates will square off at the ballot box next Tuesday. presidential-candidates From top left: Hillary Clinton (D), Donald Trump (R), Ted Cruz (R), Bernie Sanders (D) and John Kasich (R). (PennLive.com/file) Thursday is shaping up to be a busy day on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania, with three presidential candidates and one former president planning appearances around the Keystone State. GOP frontrunner Donald Trump will make just his first campaign stop in Harrisburg -- his second of the campaign in Pennsylvania -- when he appears at a rally at the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex at 7 p.m. Doors for the event open at 4 p.m. If you're interested in attending, register at this site. Hours earlier, Democrat Bernie Sanders will begin a long day of campaigning with a town hall meeting that's scheduled for noon. The event, to be held at the Scranton Cultural Center at the Masonic Temple, 420 N. Washington Aven., Scranton, is free. You can register to attend here. Sanders will continue with a town hall meeting in Reading at 4 p.m., and one in Montgomery County at 7:30 p.m. The Reading event will be at the Santander Performing Arts Center, 130 N. Sixth St. Anyone wishing to attend the free event can register here. Register here to attend Sanders' final appearance of the day at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center, 100 Station Ave, Oaks. Ohio Gov. and GOP presidential candidate John Kasich will make two appearances in Pennsylvania Thursday. The first will be a town hall at the Penn State-Brandywine Campus at 2:30 p.m. Anyone wishing to attend the free event may register here. The event will be in the Commons Building at 25 Yearsley Mill Road in Media. His second appearance will be a less public event -- the Chester County GOP Spring Reception, where he will make some remarks. That event is being held at the Valley Forge Casino Resort in King of Prussia. And former President Bill Clinton will be in Harrisburg to campaign for his wife at 12:30 p.m. at an event at the Keystone Building, 400 North Street, in the state Capitol complex. Want to go? RSVP here. All the presidential candidates will have spent time in Pennsylvania before the week is out. GOP candidate Ted Cruz made his second central Pennsylvania appearance Wednesday with a town hall at the Antique Automobile Club of America near Hershey. And Hillary Clinton, who has campaigned previously in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia areas was back again yesterday with a meeting about violence, followed by a rally at The Fillmore in Philadelphia. Donald Trump Republican presidential primary candidate Donald Trump sued the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board in 2008 after it rejected his application for a casino license two years prior. The lawsuit was dismissed. He will deliver a speech during a campaign stop at the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex and Expo Center Thursday night. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast) Donald Trump is no stranger to Harrisburg. When he campaigns in the capital city Thursday, he plans to deliver a speech in a building owned by the state, the same state he sued in 2008 after the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board denied him a license to develop a casino in Philadelphia two years prior. It's unclear whether the frontrunner in the Republican presidential primary race will mention the lawsuit when he delivers his campaign speech at the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex and Expo Center at 7 p.m. Thursday. But here's what happened: Trump filed the lawsuit against the gaming control board in federal court in Harrisburg in 2008, claiming the board violated his constitutional right to equal protection and interstate commerce. The U.S. Court of Appeals dismissed the case entirely in 2011. But that wasn't the only way Trump tried to circumvent the gaming control board. More than two years after the board denied his application, Trump tried to take another group's license because the developer needed more time to open its casino in Philadelphia. However, the gaming control board denied Trump's request to "intervene." And upon appeal, the Commonwealth Court also denied him the right to take the license 2010. Donald Trump never did build a casino in Pennsylvania. Muaz Mahmud, 25, from Ethiopia, right, speaks and Mowlid Isman, 28, from Somalia looks on during a press conference organized by non-governmental organizations in Athens, Thursday, April 21, 2016. The two men say they are survivors from a shipwreck last week in the Mediterranean Sea that international groups say left as many as 500 people feared dead. (AP Photo/Theodora Tongas) brightcove.createExperiences(); Vacation is starting unexpectedly early for Kelly Ripa after the bombshell news that that her Live! cohost Michael Strahan is leaving their morning talk show for Good Morning America. Ripa surprised viewers by not appearing on Wednesdays broadcast, and sources have confirmed to PEOPLE that she will not be returning the rest of the week, as she heads to Turks and Caicos for a vacation with her family . The host was already scheduled to be off the air on Friday and Monday to go on a long-planned 20th anniversary trip with husband Mark Consuelos, a source tells PEOPLE. Its fortuitous that she had this trip planned with her husband, the source says. A second source adds that Ripa, 41, will definitely return to the show, but its unclear when. Shes being very mature about this and choosing not to talk a lot and to wait and see how this plays out, says the source, who adds that she feels blindsided by not being given a heads up about Strahans departure. Shes dedicated everything to the program, it was the primary focus in her career, she has been dedicated to maintaining the show for both the staff and viewers and then all of a sudden the entire program is changed without them being decent enough to give her any notice. Strahan, meanwhile, did not attend a hunger benefit for Food Bank For New York City that he originally was expected at, appearing via a video message to apologize for missing the event. A source close to Strahan says he was not scheduled to attend the event because he was shooting his game show, Pyramid, and knew that two weeks ago. I wish we could be there as originally planned for this fantastic evening. I love it. I think its one of the best evenings in all of New York, he told the crowd in the video message. A source previously told PEOPLE that Ripa is already eyeing potential replacements for Strahan, including longtime friends Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen. Live! With Kelly and Michael airs weekdays (check local listings). Election Q&A: Meet the candidates for Emmet County Commission The first, third, fourth, fifth and sixth districts are all contested races on Nov. 8. JavaScript . JavaScript . A Shippensburg University student faces charges of sexual assault after university police said he assaulted a girl in his dormitory room in February. Charges were filed Monday against Charles L. Thompson Jr., 19, of Philadelphia. He faces felony sexual assault, misdemeanor indecent assault forcible compulsion and indecent assault without consent. Shippensburg University Police in an affidavit of probable cause said the charges stem from an incident on Feb. 24 in which another student said she was assaulted in his room at McCune Hall. The woman reported that she met Thompson, an acquaintance she knew as CJ, and followed him back to his room after he invited her, court documents said. She said she initially showed some resistance when he started to fondle her and said they should stop, but he insisted they continue with oral sex and eventually sexual intercourse, the affidavit said. When he said he wanted round two, the woman was putting her clothes on and said she wanted to leave, court documents said. He pushed her back on the bed, and she repeatedly told him to stop, blocking him from assaulting her, the affidavit said. She said he then repositioned her so that he could assault her despite her protests, court documents said. After she left to go to a class, she texted him asking him Why didnt you stop when I asked you to? and Why didnt you listen? and he replied Im sorry, That wasnt okay and But I guess its in the past now, according to the affidavit. The woman went to the campus police with her mother and an official with the Shippensburg University Womens Center, and she later went to Chambersburg Hospital for a rape kit. On Feb. 29, university police said they developed a suspect from the housing roster, and she was able to identify Thompson from a photo lineup in five seconds, court documents said. Thompson was arraigned Thursday morning, where bail was set at $10,000 cash, which he posted. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for 2 p.m. May 23 in front of Magisterial District Judge H. Anthony Adams. HARRISBURG Little Amps coffee shop on State Street had a surprise visitor Thursday. In walks President Bill Clinton and we got to talk to him. It was really good, Casey Peltier of Harrisburg said. Former President Bill Clinton posed for lots of pictures, shook hands and stopped to chat. He signed a Fleetwood Mac record and ordered a cold brew coffee, the house special at Little Amps. The former president then made his way to the Heinz-Menaker Senior Center where he continued to drum up support for his wife, Hillary. He wrapped things up with a rally at the Keystone Building. About 1,000 people gathered in the lobby. He told the crowd Hillary Clinton is the only qualified candidate left in the presidential race. She has consistently been the best change maker I have ever known, and when you get to be President all the blaming stops, all the talking stops. You have to stand, deliver, and make change, he said. If you want a change maker to be president, bring her home. Polls show Hillary Clinton is leading Democratic rival Bernie Sanders in the Pennsylvania primary on April 26. Sanders on Friday will host a town hall event at Gettysburg College and a rally at Millersville University. While still a student, my early responsibilities included assisting in the maturation of the Integrated Master Schedule (IMS), and managing the OCAMS requirements. After graduating with my mechanical engineering degree, I was given the opportunity to remain on the project as a full-time engineer. Obviously, I was ecstatic. How many people get the chance to start their career with their dream job, RIGHT? As grateful as I was, my role rapidly evolved. My requirements role quickly turned into the responsibility to design a verification program that could be used to validate the 2,000 mission requirements levied upon the OCAMS instrument, its subsystems, and its components. Once you know how to verify that the right system was built and that it was built correctly, you then have to design an integration and test program. The goal was to incrementally satisfy these requirements while the three OCAMS cameras and control electronics were being built, thus buying down risk that large problems would occur later. This included working with vendors of critical parts, subsystems, and assemblies to ensure that the requirements in the statement of work were verified prior to their delivery to OCAMS. Again, a unique experience emerged. I was thrown into the OCAMS cleanroom (not literallyyou have to properly suit up first to protect the spaceflight hardware from contamination risks) to execute many of the procedures I had authored. From running performance tests in the thermal vacuum chamber to performing functional tests on electronics and cameras after coming off the vibe table (and trust me there are no good vibes about itwatching an instrument youve spent endless hours and weekends building and perfecting be strapped to a violently shaking table is terrifying). Prior to that, I worked side by side with our mechanical assemblers to verify that our mechanical interfaces met spec before the final torqueing and staking of fasteners. You dont want to get to the spacecraft and realize that your instrument doesnt fit the footprint allocated by the spacecraft. One of the key tests I shepherded through the OCAMS environmental test program was the Electromagnetic Interference and Compatibility test (EMI-EMC for short). I worked with the RF experts at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center to identify the proper standardized test setups for our mission, and then conveyed those requirements to the vendor to itemize contract deliverables. Negotiating statements of work may sound dull and exhausting, but you obviously havent spent much time in an anechoic chamber. This is where EMI/EMC testing occurs. The chamber is designed to be non-reflective and completely silent to noise, from either external sounds or internal electromagnetic waves (so good luck getting a wifi signal in there). Through our testing, we determined that there were no excessive emissions by the OCAMS instrument, especially in the frequency band that the spacecraft uses to communicate. We also verified that the OCAMS camera performance is not susceptible to any of the emissions we may experience during operations near and around the asteroid Bennu. Recently, I also had the chance to support the same testing but at the vehicle (spacecraft) level. The difference with this test was that all of the payloads (instruments) were on the spacecraft and were actively and concurrently producing science data. This test validated our instrument level results and provided the verification necessary to prove there would be no impact to the launch vehicle (an Atlas V rocket) or the spacecraft during launch activities. David Malka Wins Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown High Roller for $658,000 April 21, 2016 Donnie Peters The $25,000 High Roller at the 2016 Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown crowned its champion on Thursday morning, shortly after the clock ticked past midnight in South Florida. Walking away with the title and $658,000 was American David Malka, who defeated a field of 94 entries and a tough final table. Prior to this event, Malka's career best score in a live event was only a couple times the buy-in for this one, $70,355, and he boasted $354,132 in total live tournament earnings. Both of those numbers now pale in comparison to the new ones on his resume thanks to this victory. Final Table Results Place Player Prize 1 David Malka $658,000 2 Sylvain Loosli $481,750 3 Tim West $298,450 4 Nick Petrangelo $206,800 5 Nick Yunis $133,950 6 Yevgeniy Timoshenko $101,050 7 Brian Benderoff $82,250 8 Steffen Sontheimer $70,500 9 Lazaro Hernandez $68,150 The top six spots were all filled with known names in the poker world, but when the dust had settled this title was all Malka's. He began the final table of nine in last chip position, but quickly worked his way up from the bottom such that he held more chips than Lazaro Hernandez. That positioning played a big role in the clash the two had on a flop of , as, according to the live updates, the two found all the money in the middle with Malka holding the for trips and Hernandez the for two pair. After the hit the turn and the on the river, Hernandez was gone in ninth. Steffen Sontheimer was next to go in eighth, and then Malka busted Brian Benderoff in seventh. To bust Benderoff, Malka's held up against a short stacked Benderoff's . Yevgeniy Timoshenko went out sixth, Nick Yunis busted fifth, and Nick Petrangelo fell in fourth. Both Yunis and Petrangelo were busted by Malka. Sylvain Loosli, who is most famous for reaching the 2013 World Series of Poker Main Event final table and finishing fourth, then busted Tim West in third place to set up the heads-up duel with Malka. Heading into it, Loosli was at a severe disadvantage with 1.985 million in chips to Malka's 7.415 million nearly 4-1. From there, it didn't take too long for Malka to seal the deal. With the blinds up to 30,000/60,000/10,000 in Level 23, Malka opened on the button to 135,000. Loosli reraised to 345,000 from the big blind, and Malka jammed all in. Loosli called to put himself at risk for just over 2 million with the . Malka had the for a flip. The flop and turn kept Loosli in the lead with his sixes, but the was a dirty one for the Frenchman on the river because it delivered Malka with the win. For his effort, Loosli earned $481,750 and the third largest score of his career. *Image courtesy of SeminoleHardRockPokerOpen.com. Want to stay atop all the latest in the poker world? If so, make sure to get PokerNews updates on your social media outlets. Follow us on Twitter and find us on both Facebook and Google+! Pennsylvanias primary election day is less than one week away. In most places, the primary is where Democrats and Republicans each choose their candidates who will then square off in the November general election. In Pennsylvania, in most instances, the primary is the election. In many districts across the commonwealth, the minority party wont even field a candidate for the fall. Critics blame it on gerrymandered districts that were, well, creatively created. Congressman Lou Barlettas seat runs from almost New York to almost Maryland, splitting Carlisle in Cumberland County. Congressman Pat Meehans runs from the Delaware River in Philadelphia nearly to the Susquehanna River in Lancaster County. Walt Disney might like the artistry involved. We call it the Donald kicking Goofy District, joked Barry Kauffman of Common Cause Pennsylvania, which has advocated for years for an independent commission to draw political boundaries. In the abstract, the district does look like a few Disney characters kicking each other. Critics call the process Mickey Mouse. The way we redistrict now pretty much guarantees that one party will control the outcome of the general election before the first vote is cast, Kauffman said. In the last election, more voters pulled levers for Democrats, but Republicans pull the levers on the process, so 13 of the 18 districts are GOP red. Kauffman said that if Democrats were in control, using the same data, they couldve reversed the map and made 13 Democrat seats and five Republican. Thats why weve got to fix this problem, so that we dont have politicians picking the voters, Kauffman said. We need to have voters picking the politicians. And its not just a problem in the congressional districts, which are drawn and voted upon by the state Legislature. Its also an issue in state House districts, which are basically created behind closed doors and approved, or not, by the Supreme Court. Kauffman calls it a conflict of interest that elected officials have a hand in drawing up the districts theyll represent. It is absolutely ridiculous, said Rick Rovegno, a former Cumberland County commissioner who has joined the chorus calling for redistricting reform. Rovegno lives in the Carlisle area and showed ABC27 a situation in the parking lot of Lowes. He pointed to a row of houses on one side. Residents have Rep. Will Tallman, who lives in Adams County, and Sen. Pat Vance, who lives in Cumberland. Directly across the street, Rovegno pointed to another row of homes. Those residents have Rep. Steve Bloom from Cumberland County, but Sen. John Eichelberger, who lives in Blair County. They dont live here, Rovegno said with emphasis. They dont live anywhere near here. The state senator, again, lives in Hollidaysburg. Throw in a congressman from Hazelton, Barletta, and Rovegno insists the districts interests are not being fully represented by the folks who are supposed to be representing Carlisle in D.C. and Harrisburg.Rovegno concedes there are always going to be lines when political boundaries are drawn. But should they be running right through the center of core communities? Should they be breaking apart communities that have socioeconomic, religious, cultural, and school ties? There are other consequences, analysts say. Since the primary is the election, theres likelihood that candidates on the far right and far left win among the more partisan primary voters. And then they fail in D.C. and Harrisburg. They cant talk to one another, Kauffman said. They cant negotiate, they cannot come together to make public policy in the interest of the people because theyve catered to the far wings of the party. Many say youll never completely remove politics from the process, but states like Iowa, with its sanely drawn little squares, prove Pennsylvania can do a whole lot better. I could take any high school student, give them 30 minutes, and they could have a better redistricting map than the reapportionment panel and Legislature designed with a year of time, Rovegno said. Rovegno suggests an independent commission could draw up three different maps and then let the Legislature choose the best one without being able to make changes. Kauffman says non-political bureaucrats with computers could do the job, too. Common Cause Pennsylvania has been advocating for change for years and Kauffman is optimistic it could happen soon. Why? He calls it enlightened self-interest. There is a heavily Republican Legislature and a heavily Democratic Supreme Court, which has a role in the process. It might behoove the GOP to pass a law changing the boundary-drawing system, Kauffman theorizes, or risk having a map favorable to Democrats. Ryan Gregor Wins HPT Kansas City for $111,696 April 20, 2016 Mo Nuwwarah Editor Ryan Gregor won the Heartland Poker Tour Kansas City $1,650 Main Event for $111,696 on Monday, defeating a final table that included 2008 bracelet winner Grant Hinkle. It's just the second live cash recorded by Gregor, after an eighth-place finish in a 2009 World Series of Poker Circuit event in Tunica for $1,596. Final Table Results Place Player Hometown Prize 1 Ryan Gregor Kansas City, MO $111,696 2 Jason Darland Overland Park, KS $70,709 3 Jeff Wigh Olathe, KS $47,350 4 Robert Castiore Cecilia, KY $33,024 5 Mike Vanier Lincoln, NE $24,768 6 Jay McVeigh Shawnee, KS $19,426 7 Si Vo St. Louis, MO $16,415 8 Grant Hinkle Overland Park, KS $13,598 9 Deborah Phillips Ozark, MO $11,704 The tournament drew 342 entrants and 36 received payouts. Jeff Bryan (36th), Cash Carpenter (30th), Yash Mudireddy (29th), Craig Casino (19th), Jeff Fielder (17th), and 2004 WSOP Main Event champ Greg Raymer (16th) were among those making the money. According to the live updates, Gregor entered the final table as the massive chip leader with nearly 100 big blinds, almost double second-place Hinkle. Hinkle was in a prime position but slipped up early on, handing out two doubles to Nebraska-based cash grinder Mike Vanier. Down to his last 409,000 at 15,000/30,000/4,000, Hinkle shoved all in over an open with only to have Jason Darland wake up with behind him. The board ran out dead for both players after Hinkle flopped an open-ender, and he was done in eighth. Si Vo followed him out in seventh after falling to the flush draw of Jeff Wigh, and that left Wigh nearly on par with Gregor stack-wise. Jay McVeigh and Vanier then busted, the latter after a series of doubles enabled him to ladder up despite working with a short stack at the final table. Gregor had made little headway and fallen to the short stack with about 20 big blinds, but he soon picked up the four-handed and called the three-bet shove of Robert Castiore. The board ran out dead and Gregor was back in business He surged back into the lead by dinner break but it was Darland eliminating Wigh to take a 2-1 lead into heads-up play. Gregor moved into the lead in the match and finished things when he opened the and called the shove of Darland, who held the . A board later, and it was all over in favor of Gregor. *Image courtesy of the HPT. Want to stay atop all the latest in the poker world? If so, make sure to get PokerNews updates on your social media outlets. Follow us on Twitter and find us on both Facebook and Google+! The Los Angeles City Council agreed Tuesday to fund LAPD's body camera deployment. However, at least one councilman is requesting a formal review of the process to determine whether the Police Department selected the best product at the best price. Councilman Mitch Englander's motion took a step back from his call last week for the LAPD to restart the vendor selection process and accept new bids. That proposal prompted an awkward back-and-forth between Englander and other city officials, including the mayor and police commissioners, who said they feared a new bidding process would push the completed rollout of the 7,000 cameras back at least another year a delay Mayor Eric Garcetti called "unacceptable." Instead, Englander's motion calls for the Police Department and other city agencies to look at other large contracts for cameras by departments around the country to determine whether the LAPD used the best process to select its camera vendor. The motion also seeks a review of the body camera market as well as an analysis of how much the cameras could save the city in costly police-related litigation or investigations of complaints against officers. Englander said his goal was to formally answer outstanding questions from his fellow council members, who he worried might reject the body camera initiative, the Los Angeles Times reports. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Print Senate Republicans forced a vote on an amendment today that would have denied federal aid to the poisoned children of Flint, Michigan. What is even more deplorable is that 47 Senate Republicans voted not to help lead poisoned children. The Coates Amendment to the Energy and Water Agencies Appropriations Act failed by a vote of 48-49. All Senate Democrats, with the exception of Sen. Claire McCaskill (MO) voted against the amendment. Five Republicans Sens. Lisa Murkowski (AK), Bill Cassidy (LA), Rob Portman (OH), Lamar Alexander (TN) and Dean Heller (NV) joined with Democrats in voting against the amendment, but 47 Senate Republicans voted not to provide federal aid for children that were poisoned by the decisions of Michigans Republican governor. Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid blistered Republicans for their vote: Three of the four Republican cosponsors of legislation to help the people of Flint voted to eliminate the funding source today. It is a disturbing trend that Senate Republicans are regularly unable to fulfill their commitments. The Senate cannot function if senators do not keep their word. Republicans have proven once again that they are willing to turn their backs on the people of Flint. Every time the Senate comes close to a bipartisan compromise to help children suffering from lead poisoning, Republicans find an excuse to back away. Today, Republicans voted to remove a funding source for legislation to tackle Flints water crisis without offering a single dime to clean their poisoned water. More than 100,000 people including 9,000 children under the age of six have been poisoned in the city of Flint, and it is unconscionable that Republicans would attempt to deny them the support they desperately need. Sadly, Republicans are happy to attack clean energy programs to please the Koch brothers, but they remain unwilling to lift a finger to help the people of Flint. I call on Republicans to end this unwarranted obstruction and protect the people of Flint and millions throughout the nation. The 47 Senate Republicans who voted for this amendment displayed a basic contempt for the American people that is proof of why Republicans should be voted out of the majority in November. It doesnt get any lower than voting against helping poisoned children. Democrats should keep the actions of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and the 46 Republicans who voted for this amendment in mind the next time one of these Republicans demands federal aid after a flood, fire, or hurricane. Senate Republicans have prioritized the Kochs over kids, which is why they should not be trusted with power in the United States Senate. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Print Upon the sad news that music legend Prince had died, Sen Al Franken (D-MN) released a statement calling Prince an unparalleled presence. Prince got his start in a Minneapolis jazz band and went on to share his talent throughout Minnesota and the entire world, Sen. Franken said. His artistry, innovation, and unparalleled presence inspiredand will continue to inspiremillions of people. To say hell be missed is an understatement. My thoughts are with his loved ones. There is no way to understand the impact that Prince had on generations of his musicians and fans. From his mainstream success with his backup band The Revolution to his 90s move to a brassier funkier sound with The New Power Generation, Prince was a constantly evolving artist. He is credited with pioneering the Minneapolis sound. Prince won seven Grammys and had released 15 albums in the last 15 years. Prince was hospitalized last week when his private plane made an emergency landing in Illinois while returning from concerts in Georgia. A relentless creative force has ceased and created a unique hole in the music landscape that may never again be filled. Listen to Princes When Doves Cry here, an appropriate song for this sad day: Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Print While campaigning in Pennsylvania, Sen. Bernie Sanders appeared to shift back to focusing on the issues with a speech that emphasized his own positions and virtually eliminated his previous angry criticisms of Hillary Clinton. Video: https://youtu.be/Ba6G-q7QQPg?t=23m51s At a rally in Reading, PA, Sen. Sanders delivered his criticism of trade agreements, and US trade policy in a fiery way, but what was missing from this section of his stump speech his strong language on Clinton and trade. Sanders said that he and Clinton had a difference on trade policy and that she has supported almost of these disastrous trade agreements. Sanders called out Verizon and railed against a corporate culture. Sen. Sanders talked about income inequality and returned to talking about the Walton family and Walmart. Sanders said, I say to the Walton family. Get off of welfare and pay your workers a living wage. Sanders said that his campaign is about thinking outside of TV, radio, and newspapers tell you. Sen. Sanders tone was completely different at the Reading rally. Sanders has returned to discussing the issues that the corporate media completely ignore. Sanders talked with passion and conviction about income inequality and laid out how the economy must work for everyone, not just the people on top. What made the Sanders campaign so great was his focus on the issues, and belief that the American people can come together and make the government work for the people. Sen. Sanders talked about Flint, Michigan and said, This is the United States of America. We should have clean drinking water. Sanders framed his difference with on fracking as a disagreement. What was missing was his previous language that painted Clinton as owned by the fossil fuel industry. Sanders left in his lines about Sec. of State Clintons speeches to Wall Street, but the bite was missing from the zinger. The speech was similar, but the tone was different. Bernie Sanders isnt going after Hillary Clinton anymore. Sen. Sanders is pointing out his differences with Sec. of State Clinton in a gentle way. The anger towards Clinton was gone from his speech. Sen. Sanders was focused on the message that made his campaign great, and the result was one of his best speeches in weeks. Bernie Sanders is still working hard for votes but after weeks of growing bitterness in the Democratic campaign, Sen. Sanders has gone back to emphasizing his own message on the issues over anger directed at his opponent. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Print Sarah Palin showed that there was nothing that she cant and wont blame President Obama for by blaming the President Of The United States for ESPNs decision to fire Curt Schilling. Here is what Palin posted from her Facebook bunker: ESPN finally pulled the trigger on firing Schilling after he posted an ugly and hateful tirade against transgender people on Facebook. Schilling shared an anti-transgender meme and then commented, A man is a man no matter what they call themselves. I dont care what they are, who they sleep with, mens room was designed for the penis, womens not so much. Now you need laws telling us differently? Pathetic. The only surprise here is that ESPN actually fired Schilling this time. Schilling has not been shy about sharing his hateful extremist right wing views. Schilling said that he wanted Hillary Clinton buried under a prison somewhere. Earlier, Schilling compared Muslim extremists to Nazis. ESPN finally got up the guts to what they should have done long ago by sending Curt Schillings hatred and bigotry packing. President Obama had nothing to do with Schillings firing, but in the mind of the bitter and obsessed Obama stalker Sarah Palin, President Obama is responsible for everything that she doesnt like. Ill bet that when Taco Bell gets her order wrong at the drive thru, Palin blames Obama. The reality is that hatemongers like Sarah Palin and Curt Schilling have only themselves to blame for their bigotry. The problem here isnt Barack Obama. The problem here is the intolerance towards others that drives Sarah Palins irrational hatred of President Obama. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Print Oh yes, were there. Fox News Greta Van Susteren was practically beside herself over the Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill decision, accusing President Obama of dividing our country again. Its not Tubman or feminists that Van Susteren has a problem with, she tells viewers. Its just that Obama should have given Tubman a NEW bill instead of booting Andrew Jackson off the $20 bill and thus (cover your ears, the dog whistle is a comin) dividing the nation. Watch Gretas Off the Record comment here: Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com Van Susteren opened with the obvious Fox News link everything negative to Obama tactic and pretend Obama is stupid, The Obama administration went stupid again and went stupid for no reason! Rather than dividing our country between those who happen to like the tradition of our currency and want President Andrew Jackson to stay put and those who want to put a woman on a bill, Van Susteren said, setting the racial stage for her audience, using tradition to mean white presidents, as tradition always means white straight person on Fox News. Its so easy to keep everyone happy! We could put a woman on a bill, Tubman, acknowledge her courage but give Tubman her own bill like a $25 bill. We could use a $25 bill. Put her picture on that and we could all celebrate. Thats the smart and easy thing to do, Van Susteren announced smugly. But of course, Obama is stupid and would rather divide the nation, Van Susteren tells her viewers who love nothing better than to feel smarter than the black man in the White House even though he is actually a brilliant Constitutional scholar, But noooo Some people dont think, would rather gratuitously stir up conflict in the nation. That is so awful and yes, dumb. Yes its true, some people dont think. Ill just leave that here as a general reminder before we take this apart. Van Susteren would rather the government make a new bill than dare to put the first woman and first black person on a bill that a white man was on. Although she uses words Obama administration to mean smear Obama, the choice to put a woman on a bill wasnt just President Obamas whim. In June of 2015 Business Insider reported: The push to put a woman on the printed US currency has been in progress for some time. In March, the organization Women on 20s began asking the public to vote for top female candidates to replace President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill. Among the 15 women included in the vote were Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt, Clara Barton, and Harriet Tubman. In May it was revealed that Tubman edged out Roosevelt with almost 34% of the vote. Yes, people voted. Also known as dividing the nation. And more on that almost 34% vote for Tubman from a separate Business Insider article (my bold) in which its clear that Treasury Jacob Lew is the person being persuaded to do this: More than 350,000 people cast their votes during the final round last week, and with almost 34% of the vote, Harriet Tubman edged out former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt as the peoples choice for Andrew Jacksons replacement. If Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew agrees to the replacement, Tubman would be the first woman and the first black person to be the face of an American paper currency. Lewis and Clark expedition guide Sacagawea and womens suffrage advocate Susan B. Anthony have been featured on the relatively unpopular US dollar coins. This is Obama dividing the nation by giving women and black people a piece of a pie that a white person had. If women and black people want pie, Van Susteren thinks they need their own pie. They dont get any of the white mans pie. You divide the nation when you attempt to share the nations resources with those who are not systemically at the top of the power chain. The diving the nation dog whistle is so old, as is blaming the first black President for dividing the nation just because some white people have a problem sharing the pie. Who is dividing the nation? Hint: The people so full of Obama hate that they are this upset about his administration taking votes into account to pick who they put on a bill. Some people dont think, would rather gratuitously stir up conflict in the nation. That is so awful and yes, dumb. I know, right? It is so awful that some people would rather gratuitously stir up conflict in this nation. Awful and dumb. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Print * The following is an opinion column by R Muse * Throughout the last couple of years there has been nothing but bad economic news coming out of Kansas that just continues getting more distressing. Of course it began in 2011 when then newly-elected Governor Sam Brownback conspired with trickle-down economist Arthur Laffer to create a conservative economic Utopia founded on tax cuts for the rich and corporations. Laffer guaranteed that cutting government to the bone and giving unfunded tax cuts to the rich would engender increased economic growth, deliver more revenue, and create jobs as a model for the entire nation to envy. By now its really old news that Brownback and Laffers tax cut mania was, and still is, a catastrophic failure, but it is unfair to place all the blame on the governor. The Republican majority state legislature was fully behind Brownbacks trickle down cuts from the start; not so much to grow the economy and create jobs, but to cut government down to a size they could drown in a bathtub. Now, however, there is a monumental rift between Brownback and Republicans in the legislature who are in open revolt over Brownbacks tax cuts during an election year. The legislatures Republicans are openly refusing to help Brownback slash any more government spending just so he can avoid rolling back even one of his signature tax measures. Apparently, the Republicans arent kidding either. They are saying, loudly and very publicly, that If Brownback wont reconsider any of the tax cuts, he will have to figure out for himself how to balance the budget in the face of disappointing revenue. When lawmakers return from a paid vacation (recess) later this month, if trickle down Sam refuses to rescind some of his precious tax cuts, the Republicans will follow through on their threat, adjourn and forget the budget, and leave the governor with the full authority to slash and burn education, transportation spending, government agencies, and wipe out social services as is his wont. The Kansas Senates President Susan Wagle, a strong conservative Republican from Wichita, said that while most Republican legislators still support low taxes, they want to see some real solutions coming from the governors office. Were growing weary. Another one-time Brownback acolyte, Republican Representative Mark Hutton said, Let him own it. Its his policy that put us there. And, one of Brownbacks fiercest conservative supporters and trickle down allies, Republican Senator Jim Denning, is now a critic and claims this years-long budget turmoil has been just amateurish. Im not happy with how things played out. It is noteworthy that the same Republicans were in a state of thrall over the devastating tax cuts and slashing government services as recently as a few months ago. One suspects there is more electoral self-preservation and posturing going on with Kansas Republicans than regard for the state of Kansas economy or its residents. Remember, Kansas Republicans supported Brownbacks economy-destroying tax cuts since trickle-down Sam started pushing them as Kansas salvation in 2011, and they have had no problem making drastic government cuts to preserve them. The likely scenario is that Republicans are worried about approving any further social services, transportation, government and education cuts during an election year. Every Senate and House seat is on the ballot in November and the voters are well aware it has been Brownback and Republicans destroying the state to preserve tax cuts for the privileged few. One thing is certain; Brownback is not worried and could not care less about an election because his only concern is preserving tax cuts for the rich and corporations. Sam Brownback will not have his name on the ballot again before leaving office in January 2019. Unless he is recalled or impeached, Brownback will not face any repercussions, electoral or otherwise, like Republicans in the legislature who are as guilty as the governor of destroying Kansas economy over trickle down tax cuts. Brownback still will not acknowledge that the only reason Kansas tax revenue vanished is because the state cut the source of tax revenue; taxes. Of course he is well aware of why the state is lacking in revenue, but as is par for accountability driven Republicans, Brownback blames everything else; its not his or the Republican legislatures fault. As is his trickle down habit, Brownback continued his normal response to calls for fiscal sanity, this time from his one-time supporters. It is no surprise that as he has reliably rejected earlier calls from Democrats to at the very least scale back the tax cuts to save the state, he is not about to change gears now. It was reported that Brownback blew off a chance to explain his response to the lawmakers unusual demand and threat until new revenue projections are released; even though he knows they will be just as devastating as they have been since he cut revenue. The governors spokeswoman, Eileen Hawley said Brownback will release his proposals for balancing the budget sometime later, but she assured anyone within earshot that a plan to raise taxes on businesses or anyone else will not be among them. In typical Republican fashion, instead of taking responsibility for the devastating revenue drops due to his trickle down tax cuts, Brownback blamed the states economic catastrophe on everything but tax cuts. He claims Kansas is starving for revenue not because of tax cuts, but because of slumps in agriculture, energy production and aircraft manufacturing. And some global issues that are going on that we have absolutely no control over. Brownback is a slimy cretin and one wonders how stupid or isolated from reality he thinks Kansas voters really are. The nation as a whole is and has been experiencing steady economic growth throughout the duration of Brownbacks Kansas disaster despite the global issues he blames. And, in a Democratic-controlled state like California that depends on agriculture, energy production and aircraft manufacturing, the economy is simply thriving and providing yearly budget surpluses; despite the same global issues Brownback says are decimating poor lowly Kansas economy. This is the second time in less than a week that a Republican governor thumbed his nose at his own Republican legislature. Just this week Florida Governor Rick Scott vetoed a unanimously-passed Republican bill because it helped the poor. And now, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback is refusing to even consider appeals from his own Republican legislature to roll back some of the trickle down tax cuts that are driving the state into bankruptcy. It will be interesting to follow the Kansas Republicans open revolt against Brownback, but it seems reasonable that the day after the November general election, the rebellion will cease and Republicans will support any cuts to programs and taxes their hero trickle down Sam demands; all because Kansas voters are ignorant, inordinately religious, and susceptible to Kansas Republicans not-so-secret October surprise; the fetus. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Print This is why Democrats have nothing to fear from a potential Ted Cruz presidential nomination. Ted Cruz has managed to make Donald Trump look like the fair, reasonable guy on latest issue to inflame conservatives; transgender bathroom laws. This is not a winning strategy, just ask North Carolina. Even businesses dont want to be seen hanging with bigoted haters. So naturally this is what Ted Cruz (R-TX) made an issue today after Republican front-runner Donald Trump said during a town hall on NBCs Today show that North Carolina was paying a big price for its bathroom birth gender law. Ted Cruz will ride the narrow tent bigot train, thanks! He fired off some tweets to make sure everyone knew where he stood. Heres one of them: We shouldn't be facilitating putting little girls alone in a bathroom w/ grown men. That's just a bad, bad, bad idea https://t.co/fpj3vUjKuF Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 21, 2016 Cruz appeared on Glenn Becks radio show to sell his irrational bathroom fears to Becks audience, which is probably a super good fit for Cruz and this is exactly why he cant win in a national election but right now, when hes desperate to pander to Republican primary voters, Cruz will take any hate love he can get. Then at a rally in Frederick, Maryland, where he is polling third, the Republican Senator attacked Donald Trump for Making PC Great Again. And he said he thought men should be able to go into the girls bathroom if they want, Cruz trolled. Now let me ask you, have we going stark raving nuts? This is the political correctness. This is basic common sense. Have we gone stark raving nuts, have we? Cruz put the button on the fear-mongering with, Here is basic common sense. Grown adult men, strangers, should not be alone in a bathrooms with little girls. Yes, its better to leave little girls with non-strangers in a bathroom, since non-strangers commit an estimated 60% of sexual abuse of children: An estimated 60% of perpetrators of sexual abuse are known to the child but are not family members, e.g., family friends, babysitters, child care providers, neighbors. About 30% of perpetrators of child sexual abuse are family members. Only about 10% of perpetrators of child sexual abuse are strangers to the child. What next, will Cruz outlaw families and friends? If he wont then his concern over the bathroom issue seems disingenuous. A sidebar to note that Republicans have been very callous on the issue of rape and sexual abuse, from refusing to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act for a good year to creating an alternative that was dubbed the pro-violence against women act, to too often trying to cut access to a safe abortion even in the case of rape and incest. So the concern for little girls seems less than authentic. If Republicans cared about little girls so much, wouldnt they also care about the epidemic of rape against teenage girls and girls in colleges? Proving that the Cruz people want everyone to know that the Republican is a bigot, Jason Miller, Senior Communications Advisor for Cruz for President, proudly tweeted an article titled Ted Cruz slams Donald Trumps PC stance on transgender public bathrooms: Ted Cruz slams Donald Trumps PC stance on transgender public bathrooms: https://t.co/4oNLdQqjQm via @washtimes Jason Miller (@JasonMillerinDC) April 21, 2016 The problem with being a Republican in a national primary is a person has to be the biggest hater and bigot to win, but in a general election the country doesnt want the biggest hater and bigot in the White House. So this is a losing strategy. Its such a loser that one need only look at North Carolina to see that it is not flying there, they are paying a big price for their religious freedom/ aka Bigoted Bathroom law. The same businesses that dont want to hang in North Carolina lest they be seen as bigots will not want to get behind a presidential candidate who is pushing bigotry. In just a few words, Ted Cruz flushed his White House dreams down the toilet of bigotry. Portfolio English Edition's premium content is available only for subscribers Learn about the hottest news of the day, along with immediate follow-up analyses and 1000's of exclusive articles with full access to the premium content. Register and apply for a 14 days free trial period. AUSTIN Hormel Foods Corp. recently honored 87 suppliers with Spirit of Excellence Awards for their roles in the company's ongoing process improvements. The award recognizes suppliers that exceed expectations within the company, according to a news release. Additionally, suppliers compete for the Hormel No. 1 Award every five years. This spring, the company will announce No. 1 award recipients, and honor suppliers that have provided long-term, consistent and superior performance from 2011 to 2015. Among the No. 1 Award criteria is receiving a Spirit of Excellence Award in four out of the five years. A special event will be held this summer to honor the Hormel No. 1 Award recipients. "We're honored to partner with these outstanding suppliers," said Tyler L. Hulsebus, director of purchasing at Hormel Foods. ADVERTISEMENT Suppliers that qualified for the Spirit of Excellence award maintained a minimum supplier rating index score of 92 throughout a 12-month period. The score is determined by a universal measurement system to ensure each supplier upholds the same standards. Award criteria include meeting performance requirements, making on-time deliveries and providing high level customer support. Contractors (24) A.J. Lysne Contracting Corporation Allweather Roof Avure Technologies, Inc. Busch, LLC ADVERTISEMENT Cybertrol Engineering, LLC East Penn Manufacturing Environmental Land Management, LLC Evapco, Inc. Fehr Solutions, LLC Fox Electric Gleeson Constructors & Engineers, LLC Hybrid Mechanical, LLC ADVERTISEMENT Hyster Company Jasper Engineering Kestner Electric KOFAB Lou Rich, Inc. Multivac, Inc. Rockwell Automation The Dupps Company The Joseph Company, Inc. Weber, Inc. Werner Electric Wolf-Tec Inc. Procurement (30) Country Pork LLP Darren Schweiger Daryl Muilenburg David Schultz Donley Farms Inc. Gary Anderson H&K Livestock Haverkamp Bros Honeysuckle Farms, LLC HUFCO, LLC Hufford Brothers Jerlyn Spronk Josie's Pork Farm Inc. K & B Farms, LLC KBQ INC Lake Country Pork LLC LB Pork Marketing, LLC Lizard Creek Acres Lorraine and Josh Pinkelman Lynn Thate Lynn's Farm Inc. New Fashion Pork, LLP Proline Protein Inc. Rebco Pork Inc. Roe Farms Inc. Sperr Brothers Spring Valley Farms, LLP Spronk Brothers III, LLP Stan Schaefer Wayne Maloney Provisions (3) Fieldale Farms Corporation Koch Foods Kustom Pak Foods Purchasing (27) Airlite Plastics Co. Ball Metal Food Container, LLC. Bemis North America Birdsong Peanuts Bunzl Processor Division Crown Cork & Seal USA, Inc. Dickson Industries, Inc. DXP Enterprises Inc Flatout, Inc. Gamer Packaging, Inc. Hydrite Chemical Co. Menasha Packaging Company, LLC Meyers Minnesota Corrugated Box, Inc. Multisorb Technologies Newly Weds Foods ProAmpac Progressive Packaging, Inc. Red Arrow Sargento Foods Inc Sealed Air - Food Care Div. Silgan Containers LLC Silgan Plastic Food Containers Smyth Companies, LLC Veritiv Walter G. Anderson Inc. Winpack Ltd. To encourage collaboration to solve local problems, Mayo Clinic announced a new $30,000 annual grant at its community luncheon event Wednesday. Martha Cashman, Mayo Clinic's director of community relations, told the invited crowd of almost 200 about the new Mayo Clinic Shared Value Award. She explained that the grant is designed to support partnerships of three or more local groups coming together to address "a complex social challenge impacting health and vibrancy in Olmsted County." The groups must include at least one tax-exempt organization to serve as fiscal agent for the project. Specifically, the proposed project should "directly or indirectly" help with problems listed as priorities in the Olmsted County Health Needs Assessment. That includes mental health issues, obesity, diabetes, homelessness/poverty and vaccine-preventable diseases. The deadline to apply to Mayo Clinic for this year's Shared Value Award is June 30. The award recipient will be announced in November. ADVERTISEMENT The new grant was announced at Mayo Clinic's "refresh" of its annual community gathering. For more than 20 years, Mayo Clinic has hosted an invitation-only community breakfast on its campus to discuss its progress. It shifted to a more open and accessible event this year. Mayo Clinic Chief Executive Officer and President John Noseworthy told the gathered crowd in the Historic Chateau Theater that the change from a breakfast to a lunch event just makes sense. "We bring out trustees to Mayo Clinic four times a year. It took us a while to figure out that the summer meeting should be in Rochester and winter ones should be in Scottsdale and Jacksonville," he said with a chuckle. "Likewise, it took us a while to figure out that lunch is better than breakfast. Better late than never." Cashman explained earlier that moving the event from early morning to noon made it easier for community groups to attend. Mayo Clinic also added a community expo feature to the event. After the formal presentation to the invited local leaders, the doors were opened to the general public for the expo. During his time at the podium, Noseworthy discussed Destination Medical Center as well as Mayo Clinic's 2015 numbers. "We are bullish about DMC. You know that. I'm not bringing up 47 states ever again," he said referencing previous controversial statements he made as the Minnesota legislature debated DMC. He said other states would be "eager" to have Mayo Clinic's project. Noseworthy quickly followed his "47 states" quip by saying, "We are pleased to be in Minnesota. We are pleased to be in Rochester." He also mentioned DMC's progress, which some have criticized as being slow to happen. ADVERTISEMENT "I wish I could tell you some of things I know that are about to happen, but I can't. Trust in the process," said Noseworthy. "Everything is on schedule." Mayo Clinic has invested about 85 percent of the $152 million required by the DMC legislation, he added. Noseworthy also said that Mayo Clinic is spending $1.5 billion on its electronic health records project, much of it with Wisconsin-based Epic Systems. "This is the largest technology project we've done at Mayo Clinic. That's very expensive, but we'll be fine," he said. The barbershop. It was the original male sanctuary. The prototypical man cave. The first true safe space. As veteran clip artist Eddie ( Cedric the Entertainer) succinctly put it in the 2002 original, "You can talk about whoever and whatever, whenever, you want to in a barbershop." Fourteen years later, the South Side tonsorium Calvin ( Ice Cube) inherited from his father is still grooming the neighborhood napes, offering customers of both genders a place to, err, let their hair down. " Barbershop: The Next Cut" is the third installment in Calvin's reluctant journey to put the well-being of his Chicago neighborhood ahead of his ambitions and accept his inevitable destiny (see sidebar). But to borrow the vernacular of the urban friseur, the scissors are getting a little rusty. Whereas the original introduced an amazing array of original and nuanced characters, like the troubled but essentially stand-up Ricky ( Michael Ealy) and white gangsta Isaac ( Troy Garity), the best "Barbershop 3" can do is reunite a few of the original ensemble, crossing its fingers the vibe is still there. Some of it is. Anthony Anderson'sscheming J.D. is back, this time operating a specious nonprofit food truck. Other co-stars include Sean Patrick Thomas, returning, and Nicki Minaj. Things are more real this time around as the opening sequence quickly transforms from the wistfulness of a Chicago Obama rally to the harsh reality of the city's record shootings, the latter Calvin plans to escape by moving north after he learns his son ( Michael Rainey Jr.) is throwing in with a neighborhood gang. ADVERTISEMENT Calvin comes around and mediates a 48-hour cease fire, during which free haircuts! The run-up is cliche. "Politicians," he says, "don't care. We can't expect someone to come in here and fix this. We have to fix our problems." Most of the gags land, as usual, thanks to Cedric the Entertainer. "Tell Ouisie I said 'hey,'" he tells a boy whose mother instructed him to give the troublemaker a mini-George Jefferson, a nod to last year's haircut shaming phenomenon. Otherwise, this one is highly subjective, but I am a huge fan of the franchise so I cut it some slack. 3 Honks "The Next Cut" is not the best film in the franchise, but give it credit for going nearly two hours without a lame Donald Trump hair joke. Here's a quick look at the others in the "Barbershop" series and dont even think about drinking Terris apple juice. "Barbershop" (2002) In the original film, Calvin (Ice Cube) inherits the shop but sees it as only a barrier to his real love: music. A B-plot has Anthony Anderson trying to break into a stolen ATM machines he is carting around the city. Best of the series. ADVERTISEMENT "Barbershop 2: Back in Business" (2004) Gentrification threatens the neighborhood and a competing shop Nappy Cutz threatens Calvins. Preserves much of the original cast. "Beauty Shop" (2005) Queen Latifah stars in this franchise spin-off about a single mom (Latifah) who moves to Chicago and teases her way to the top. Co-stars Kevin Bacon, Alicia Silverstone and Octavia Spencer. AUSTIN An Austin police officer shot a man who rammed a police car after leading law enforcement on a high-speed chase Wednesday night through Austin. The Minnesota Department of Public Safety Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is investigating what it's calling an officer-involved shooting incident. The case began when two Austin Police Department officers and a Mower County sheriff's deputy responded to a 911 call about 8:10 p.m. about an erratic driving incident. Officers spotted the vehicle driving on the 1900 block of Oakland Avenue East. The subject fled in the vehicle when he spotted law enforcement, and a pursuit began. According to the preliminary investigation, two police officers and one sheriff's deputy pursued the suspect's vehicle through Austin at speeds reaching in excess of 70 miles per hour. The subject's vehicle, which was driving on a rim after a tire was flattened, stopped about three minutes into the pursuit at Fifth Avenue Northeast and 19th Street Northeast. When the three squads stopped behind it, the man put his vehicle into reverse, ramming one of the Austin police officers' vehicles. That officer fired at the suspect, striking him. ADVERTISEMENT The subject again attempted to flee but was stopped near Fourth Avenue Northeast and 19th Street Northeast when the county squad purposely bumped the suspect's car, causing it to spin out, ending up in the front yard of a home. The suspect was taken by ambulance to Mayo Clinic Hospital in Austin, then to Mayo Clinic Hospital-Saint Marys Campus in Rochester, where he's being treated for an injury described as nonlife-threatening. No officers were injured during the incident. The Austin Police Department officer who fired his weapon is on standard administrative leave. BCA crime scene personnel are collecting evidence at the scene. Investigators are conducting interviews with those involved and with witnesses to the incident and are reviewing evidence, including squad car videos. Additional information about the officers and the suspect will be released once the initial round of interviews is complete. The BCA is conducting the investigation at the request of the Austin Police Department. When the investigation is complete, the BCA will turn its findings over to the Olmsted County Attorney's Office for review. A Dodge Center man accused of using his work computer to download child pornography has been sentenced to 30 days in jail and placed on probation for five years. Daniel Raymond Anderson, 32, was charged in July in Olmsted County District Court with 10 felony counts of possession of pornographic work. He pleaded guilty in March to three counts; in exchange, the remaining charges were dismissed at Monday's sentencing. In addition to the jail time, Anderson was ordered to attend a sex offender program and complete 100 hours of community work service. The investigation began July 23, when an employee at a Rochester business called law enforcement. The employee told investigators Anderson was on vacation, so the person had used Anderson's computer. According to the criminal complaint, Anderson was the only person with access to the computer prior to his vacation; when he left, the employee got Anderson's password to use the computer while he was gone. ADVERTISEMENT The business gave investigators permission to conduct a forensic examination of the computer's hard drive; several files containing child pornography were allegedly found. Anderson admitted to using the computer to view child pornography, court documents say; he said he'd deleted files in the past but had never shared the pornography with anyone else. RED WING The body of a woman was found in a wooded area in Red Wing on Monday, according to Capt. Gordon Rohr of the Red Wing Police Department. Red Wing police received a call at 10:23 a.m. Monday about a suspicious vehicle at a parking lot along the Cannon River near U.S. Highway 61 and Green Spring Road. Officers ran the vehicle's license plate and found an alert from the Minneapolis Police Department concerning the vehicle. The vehicle was unoccupied, so Red Wing police, assisted by Goodhue County Sheriff's deputies, began searching the woods nearby. Rohr said Red Wing Police also were assisted by Minneapolis police, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. By mid-afternoon, officers had discovered a deceased person, Rohr said. "The investigation is continuing," he said. "There's no reason to believe there is any danger to public." Europe becomes worlds first region to end malaria: WHO Published: April 21, 2016 Europe has become the worlds first region to wipe out Malaria, a mosquito-borne vetor disease with zero cases reported in the year 2015. It was revealed by the World Health Organization (WHO) in its World Malaria Report 2015. Particular region or country is declared Malaria free by WHO after it has zero locally acquired malaria cases for at least three consecutive years. Key Highlights of Report The number of malaria cases fell to zero from 90,712 between 1995 and 2015 in the countries of European region. Only 179 cases of malaria were reported in six countries in 2010. The last cases of malaria were reported in Tajikistan in 2014. The region was able to wipe out the deadly disease because of strong political commitment, improved detection and surveillance, mosquito control, cross-border collaboration. Until the end of World War II, the spread of Malaria was common in southern Europe, including Portugal, Italy, the Balkans and Greece. But the region was declared malaria free in 1975. In the year 2015, there were 214 million cases of the malaria across the world and it had killed around 438,000 people, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. It should be noted that World leaders have committed to end the malaria epidemic by 2030 as one the goal of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Month: Current Affairs - April, 2016 Topics: Diseases Europe International Malaria Public health UPSC WHO Latest E-Books Dear Answer Man, I saw on Facebook that the business Old Abe's Coffee is not being permitted to sell at the Rochester Downtown Farmers Market this year. This business was at the market last year and also at the winter market. It sounds like the business owner has not been able to get any answers about why this decision was made. Is this the type of thing you could look into for your column in the paper? -- C.Z. What a question! I'll look into anything for this column -- and if you read me religiously, you know I like odd questions, such as, " What's that mysterious humming in southeast Rochester? " Regarding Old Abe , I've read some of that chatter on Facebook also. One of my legions of researchers contacted "Old" Abe Sauer, who's not old at all, and he confirmed that he's apparently personna non grata at the market this year. "What I can tell you is that I reached out to all board members individually and received zero answers or even a single response. I told them I would wait and see what happens before I mentioned publicly and I waited well over a week with still zero response from the board. I told them people would be very upset and I think they simply did not believe me." He later said one board member responded to him and said she was supportive of him, but that's it. ADVERTISEMENT According to the Old Abe Coffee Facebook page, Sauer says, "Old Abe has been refused entry to Rochester's Saturday summer Farmers Market starting in May. This decision was a shock to us and was made at a meeting of the market board. We were not at the meeting and do not know the exact details. We have been waiting to see if there was an explanation and have reached out to each individual board member and received no responses." He also says that "other concessions will be allowed." So I went to David Kotsonas , manager of the farmers market, and his email response was, "Hi, Answer Man, I don't wish to comment at the present moment, except to say that the Market has an appeal process that works and is just. We are currently in that process." So, stay tuned for more java jive. Prosecutor in police shooting to enter alcohol program MINNEAPOLIS The prosecutor whose office won a recent conviction in the high-profile case of a Minneapolis police officer who killed an unarmed woman says he will be entering a treatment program for alcohol issues. Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman issued a statement Friday saying he was evaluated for alcohol issues and agrees he needs treatment. Hell be entering a program Monday. Freeman announced last week that he was taking a medical leave, but didnt say why. His Friday statement says he has also worked to stabilize his "unacceptably high blood pressure." He says hes determined to reclaim his health and hopes to be back to work in mid-June. ADVERTISEMENT Last month, a jury convicted Mohamed Noor of murder in the 2017 fatal shooting of Justine Ruszczyk Damond, a dual citizen of the U.S. and Australia who called 911 to report a possible crime. Minnesota seeks to add Purdue Pharma owners to opioid suit ST. PAUL Minnesotas attorney general is asking a state court for permission to add the owners of drugmaker Purdue Pharma to a lawsuit that seeks to hold the company responsible for the opioid addiction crisis. Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma makes OxyContin and has been the subject of legal action in nearly every state. Attorney General Keith Ellison wants to add eight members of the Sackler family to Minnesotas lawsuit. He says the Sacklers, who own and operate Purdue, were involved in deceptive marketing tactics and strategies to sell more opioids, despite knowing the risks. If a judge approves, Minnesota would become at least the 11th state to take legal action against one or more members of the Sackler family. A family spokeswoman issued a statement denying the allegations, calling the lawsuit a misguided attempt to place blame where it doesnt belong. Man holed up in hotel surrenders to police ADVERTISEMENT BROOKLYN PARK Authorities say a standoff at a Brooklyn Park hotel ended after more than six hours when a man suspected of assaulting his girlfriend surrendered to police. SWAT officers and crisis negotiators were called to the La Quinta Inn early Friday after a woman reported she was being assaulted by her boyfriend and threatened with a gun. Police say the standoff began at 3:30 a.m. and ended when the man was arrested at about 9:50 a.m. Authorities say the woman was taken to a hospital with minor injuries. Police say the 31-year-old suspect was not carry9ing a gun but it was unclear if there were any weapons in the room. The suspect, who has not been formally charged, has previous convictions for drug possession, motor vehicle theft, aggravated robbery, making terroristic threats, drunken driving and burglary. Jail inmate accused of running prostitution ring MORA An inmate at the Kanabec County Jail is charged with running a prostitution ring from his cell. Thirty-eight-year-old Daniel Ellington is charged in Washington County District Court with two counts of sex trafficking and two counts of promotion of prostitution. Prosecutors say Ellington communicated with a prostitute by text and "promoted and profited" from her activities in Woodbury last month. ADVERTISEMENT East Metro Sex Trafficking Task Force director Imran Ali says Ellington was 100 miles away and incarcerated, yet was promoting prostitution and profiting from it. The task force began investigating after a Woodbury detective found an online ad entitled "Blonde Bombshell." The St. Paul Pioneer Press reports Kanabec County Sheriff Brian Smith says Ellington used a jail-issued iPod to text and paid a certain price for each message. Associated Press In the next two decades, Rochester leaders will face the largest public infrastructure decisions in the city's history. In tandem with the Destination Medical Center initiative, about $1.8 billion in infrastructure projects are on the city's near horizon. Of the estimated $1.8 billion in infrastructure identified in the DMC Development Plan, about $720 million is targeted to create 16,000 new structure parking spaces; $348 million is envisioned to create a downtown transit circulator; and $112 million is planned for other transit, streets and city loop improvements, according to city documents. Assistant City Administrator Gary Neumann laid out the projects and the onerous local and federal planning efforts that would be required in a report to the DMC Corporation Board of Directors at a Monday meeting. The DMCC board will, in partnership with the city and Olmsted County, be responsible for aligning these infrastructure projects with available revenues. State General Infrastructure Aid included in DMC legislation will provide $327 million, to be matched with $128 million in local contributions. Private funds will be responsible for many of the expenditures included in the whopping $1.8 billion vision, Neumann said. ADVERTISEMENT Even including private, state and federal funds, local contributions will represent historic infrastructure investments in the city. "Obviously with these sizes of expenditures, these are about the largest public infrastructure decisions that will be faced by the city of Rochester," Neumann said Monday. In the past 30 years, the city's largest infrastructure expenditures have been the Highway 52 reconstruction at $200 million and the city's flood control improvements at $125 million. The city in October contracted SRF Consulting as its Transportation and Infrastructure Program Management Consultant and agreed to a fee of $695,661 for services in 2015 and 2016, paid from city and county DMC sources. The consultant's work so far has coordinate the planning work that must occur before the city and DMCC can move forward on infrastructure projects, said Ken Holte, an SRF principal. SRF in early March gathered seven other engineering firms the same firms that had applied to be the city's infrastructure program manager for a planning meeting that focused on coordinating all key components of the city's infrastructure goals. The meeting was a "huge milestone" in the work so far, Holte said. Based on feedback from the planning session, SRF issued a request for statements of qualifications from firms that could engage in Rochester's infrastructure projects. Seven firms had applied by the end of March. ADVERTISEMENT SRF and the city have met as recently as last week to discuss selection of firms for a handful of studies. Core areas include: transportation management; parking; transit; streets; and bike and pedestrian facilities. The studies are expected to result in assessments of operation, engineering and financial aspects of the infrastructure projects; public engagement; environmental assessments; and organizational issues, Holte explained Monday. "We think we've got an opportunity now to move forward into the scoping and the budgeting to get these studies rolling and get the consultants rolling and underway," Holte said. DMCC board member Susan Rani asked how the process is working to meet women- and minority-owned business participation requirements, mandated by DMC legislation. "All of the contractors that get some of this work, and there are a lot of large firms, they all will all be required to meet the women and minority participation guidelines, both on the contractor basis and on the employment basis," Neumann replied. Rani pushed for more inclusion of women and minority businesses early in the planning processes, not as an "add-on" to be considered later in the process. "I think it should be viewed holistically that quality, schedule and budget and (women and minority business) participation are all key factors, equal key factors, to our success," she said. Neumann said he and city staff would set up a meeting to discuss women and minority business participation in more detail. ADVERTISEMENT Major infrastructure projects, like a downtown transit circulator, could still be years away; projects that receive federal funding typically undergo a process that lasts five or more years, according to a graphic Holte showed. CHANHASSEN, Minn. (AP) Prince, one of the most inventive and influential musicians of modern times with hits including "Little Red Corvette," ''Let's Go Crazy" and "When Doves Cry," was found dead at his home on Thursday in suburban Minneapolis. He was 57. His publicist, Yvette Noel-Schure, told The Associated Press that the pop music superstar "died at his home this morning at Paisley Park," but that no details were immediately available. The singer postponed a concert in Atlanta on April 7, after coming down with the flu, and he apologized to fans for the cancellation during a makeup concert last week. The dazzlingly talented and charismatic singer, songwriter, arranger and instrumentalist drew upon musicians ranging from James Brown to Jimi Hendrix to the Beatles, creating a widely imitated blend of rock, funk and soul. The Minneapolis native broke through in the late 1970s with the hits "Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?" and "I Wanna Be Your Lover," and soared over the following decade with such albums as "1999" and "Purple Rain." The title song from "1999" includes one of the most quoted refrains of popular culture: "Tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999." Born Prince Rogers Nelson, he stood just 5 feet, 2 inches yet made a powerful visual impact at the dawn of MTV, from his wispy moustache and tall pompadour to his colorful and suggestive outfits. ADVERTISEMENT He was equally powerful musically, summoning original and compelling sounds at will, whether playing guitar in a flamboyant style that drew on Jimi Hendrix, switching his vocals from a nasally scream to an erotic falsetto, or turning out album after album stunningly original material. Among his other notable releases: "Sign O' the Times," ''Graffiti Bridge" and "The Black Album." He was also fiercely protective of his independence, battling his record company over control of his material and even his name, for a time insisting that he be called as "TAFKAP," or The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, and identified with a key-like symbol. Prince once wrote "slave" on his face in protest of not owning his work and famously fought and then departed his label, Warner Bros., before returning a few years ago. "What's happening now is the position that I've always wanted to be in," Prince told the AP in 2014. "I was just trying to get here." In 2004, Prince was inducted into the Rock and Roll of Fame, which hailed him as a musical and social trailblazer. "He rewrote the rulebook, forging a synthesis of black funk and white rock that served as a blueprint for cutting-edge music in the Eighties," reads the Hall's dedication. "Prince made dance music that rocked and rock music that had a bristling, funky backbone. From the beginning, Prince and his music were androgynous, sly, sexy and provocative." Music was in his blood. Prince's father played in a jazz band in Minneapolis, under the name "Prince Rogers," and his mother was the singer. The precocious young Prince taught himself to play the piano at age 7, the guitar at 13 and the drums at 14. In 1978, the year he turned 20, Prince debuted with the album "For You." It was a declaration, if nothing else, that he could do anything: He wrote and sang the material, and served as his own one-man band on guitar, bass, drums, synthesizers, chimes and assorted other instruments. Rarely lacking in confidence, Prince effortlessly absorbed the music of others and made it sound like Prince, whether the James Brown guitar riff on "Kiss" or the Beatle-esque, psychedelic pop of "Raspberry Beret." He also proved a source of hits for others, from Sinead O'Connor's "Nothing Compares 2 U" to Cyndi Lauper's "When You Were Mine" to "Manic Monday" for the Bangles. Prince had been touring and recording right up until his death, releasing four albums in the last 18 months, including two on the Tidal streaming service last year. He performed in Atlanta last week as part of his "Piano and a Microphone" tour, a stripped down show that has featured a mix of his hits like "Purple Rain" or "Little Red Corvette," and some B-sides from his extensive library. ADVERTISEMENT Prince debuted the intimate format at his Paisley Park studios in January, treating fans to a performance that was personal and both playful and emotional at times. The musician had seemed to be shedding his reclusive reputation. He hosted several late-night jam sessions where he serenaded Madonna, celebrated the Minnesota Lynx's WNBA championship and showcased his latest protege, singer Judith Hill. Ever surprising, he announced on stage New York City last month that he was writing his memoir. "The Beautiful Ones" was expected to be released in the fall of 2017 by publishing house Spiegel & Grau. The publishing house has not yet commented on status of book, but a press release about the memoir said: "Prince will take readers on an unconventional and poetic journey through his life and creative work." It says the book will include stories about Prince's music and "the family that shaped him and the people, places, and ideas that fired his creative imagination." A small group of fans quickly gathered in the rain Thursday outside his music studio, Paisley Park, where Prince's gold records are on the walls and the purple motorcycle he rode in his 1984 breakout movie, "Purple Rain," is on display. The white building surrounded by a fence in Chanhassen, about 20 miles southwest of Minneapolis. Steven Scott, 32, of Eden Prairie, said he was at Paisley Park last Saturday for Prince's dance party. He called Prince "a beautiful person" whose message was that people should love one another. "He brought people together for the right reasons," Scott said. Union Cabinet gives nod to expansion of India-Chile Preferential Trade Agreement Published: April 21, 2016 The Union Cabinet has given its approval for expansion of India-Chile Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) between both countries. Decision in this regard was taken by the Union Cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi. Key facts Under the expanded PTA, India has offered concessions to Chile on 1031 tariff lines at 8-digit level with Margin of Preference (MoP) ranging from 10 to 100%. While, Chile has offered concessions to India on 1798 tariff lines with MoP ranging from 30 to 100%. Under it, 86% of Indias exports to Chile will get covered with concessions, which is likely to result in doubling of its exports in the near future. Expanded PTA would also immensely benefit India, keeping in view the wide variety of tariff lines offered by Chile as Indias export basket has diversified with Chile. Background The Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) between India and Chile was signed in March 2006 and it came into force with effect from August 2007. Since then the trade dynamics have changed between both countries after the PTA came into force. Bilateral trade between both countries has registered a growth of 58.49% from 2006-07 to 2014-15. During 2014-15, the bilateral trade stood at US 3.65 billion dollars with exports at US 0.57 billion dollars and imports at US 3.08 billion dollars respectively. Comment The expansion PTA would be an important landmark in India-Chile relations as both countries have friendly relations. It would help to enhance the trade and economic relations between the two countries and also help India to consolidate the traditional fraternal relations that have existed with Latin American Countries (LAC). Month: Current Affairs - April, 2016 Topics: Business Cabinet Decisions Economy India-Chile India-International Relations National Trade UPSC Latest E-Books Our Divisions Copyright 2022-23 DB Corp ltd., All Rights Reserved This website follows the DNPA Code of Ethics. The Bismarck R-5 Board of Education met in regular session Thursday night to certify results from the April 5 election and swear in incumbent Brad Brown and newcomer Michelle (Sadler) Mork for two-year terms. Mork had garnered the most votes of four candidates vying for two open seats on the board finishing the race with a total of 238 votes. Incumbent Brad Brown won re-election to the board with 137 votes over incumbent Wendell Jarvis with 130 votes and Amy (Wiley) Cooper who received a total of 125 votes. Following the ceremony, the boards office succession plan was announced by Superintendent Chuck Hasty. Our vice president from last year becomes president, he said. That means Mr. Brown takes over as president, Mr. [Steve] Barton becomes vice president, Mr. [Matt] Dunn is now secretary and Ms. [Melinda] Dugal is the new treasurer. Elementary Principal Randy Crites next recognized Owen McFarland as the schools student of the month. If youve never met this young man, youve not been blessed, he said. Ill tell you, this man is full of charisma and he doesnt know a stranger. Everybody who meets him loves him. High school Principal Jason King recognized Haley Anderson as the schools student of the month. Our staff voted for Haley over everyone else for student of the month, said King. Some of the things I heard were that Haley is selfless, that she looks for ways to help people and that shes a great role model for others. Haley, I just want to second that. Were proud of you. Youre not the kind of person who goes out fishing for comments, but were sure glad youre ours for a little while longer. Were real proud of the person you are and the example you set for everyone else. In his monthly report, Hasty informed the board about the school districts latest enrollment figures. We continue to see a decline in overall enrollment, he said. We started the year in August with 538 and then a high in October with 543. As of yesterday were 517, so were down about 20 kids from the initial enrollment. Im not sure what that means for next year. Its hard to predict. Hasty announced that the Missouri Association of Student Councils had sent a letter to him regarding Bismarck Schools student council under the direction of teacher Kate Martinez and supported by Principal King. It was a real nice letter we received from them bragging on our students, he said. The student council is really great association and our kids get to do a lot of tremendous things through their involvement. Its really a big deal. Hasty next moved to a letter recently received by the schools food services department. It regards some of the implications of failure to follow rules with the USDA, he said. It suggests that if you dont follow USDA guidelines [for the National School Lunch Program, the School Breakfast Program and the Summer Food Service Program] theres a chance you could be fined. The first fine would be 1 percent of the total for reimbursed lunches. The second fine would be 5 percent and a final fine of 10 percent. I guess their emphasis on the word final may mean they arent going to fine anymore, theyre just going to not give you any more money. Thats out there. I just wanted to make you aware. It hasnt been finalized yet. The letter says that the new regulation will be available for public comment for the next 60 days. Id be shocked if it didnt take place, though. In other action by the board the annual report on Professional Development Program and the Certified/Classified Retirement Incentive were approved. Approval was also given for the school district to apply for the 21st Century Grant. After hours of searching for Doyle Jones, 58, of Desloge, he was found dead Wednesday at approximately 11:45 a.m. in a storage area at the Pine View Apartments where he lived. Desloge Police Chief James Bullock said Jones brothers, for whatever reason, decided they were going to look in the empty apartments at the apartment complex to make sure he wasnt in there. Then they decided they needed to look in that storage area, which was locked. They got the key, went in and found him, said Bullock. With what the EMS and the coroner says, they cannot give a cause of death at this time, so there will be an autopsy performed. Jones had reportedly gone mushroom hunting Monday afternoon and was last seen at 2 p.m. in a gray T-shirt, cutoff blue jean shorts and sneakers leaving his house off North Washington Street in Desloge. It wasnt until Jones didnt come home that night that family began to worry. The Desloge Police Department was contacted at 11 a.m. Tuesday and at 5:17 p.m. that evening the Big River, Bonne Terre and Desloge Fire Departments were dispatched to the area of Old Bonne Terre Road near Wildwood Acres to search for Jones. His phone was pinged several times. At first it started pinging behind Leadbelt Materials, then it pinged over on Harry Jr. Street and then it pinged over in the area behind the Elks Lodge. Firefighters, police, family, friends and volunteers were searching until well after midnight. On Wednesday morning, Jones' family gathered as many volunteers as they could and set out in two separate directions in hopes of locating him. Kelly French, Jones niece was out walking door to door on Harry Jr. Street talking to residents who were home and leaving flyers for those who werent. They combed the woods on foot in the areas he was believed to be last seen and where his phone pinged from. French wanted to thank everyone. She added there were people she didnt even know, people who didnt know her uncle. She wanted to thank all the businesses who have donated food, water and ice. Everyone has taken time, thank you, said French. I really want to thank all the searchers who were here (Tuesday night) until 1 or 2 a.m. searching and those who have been out since 6 a.m. Wednesday morning. I know our local area has been doing everything they can to help us find him and I definitely want to thank the searchers. During the past decade, our nation has experienced a dramatic and alarming rise in courthouse violence. A recent report from the National Center for State Courts identified a nearly five-fold increase in the number of violent acts in courthouses across the country between 2005 and 2012. This data tracked a wide array of violent incidents, including shootings, bombings, arson attacks and incidents of stabbings, assaults, murder-for-hire and bomb plots and other violence. Minnesota has not been immune to courthouse violence. This includes a deadly shooting outside a Hennepin County courtroom in 2003, the taking of 10 hostages by a lone gunman at the Morrison County Government Center in Little Falls in 2008 and the tragic triple-shooting in the Cook County Courthouse in Grand Marais in 2011. It also includes other incidents, such as bomb threats closing down courthouses, physical attacks on public defenders in courthouses, knives and other weapons being found in courthouses or collected at screening stations and the delivery of mysterious white powders at multiple court facilities. Despite the growing threat of courthouse violence, Minnesota has fallen behind several other states that have adopted a statewide approach to enhancing courthouse security. Instead, Minnesota has left it up to each county to fund its own courthouse security needs. This has left many counties struggling to fund security assessments, staffing and critical equipment, resulting in significant disparities in security from courthouse to courthouse across the state. Here in Minnesota's Third Judicial District, comprised of the 11 counties in the southeast corner of the state, we see the full spectrum of courthouse security from facilities that feature advanced point-of-entry weapons screening to those with little to no security equipment. Minnesota has already learned courthouse violence can strike anywhere, at any time. In the interest of public safety, our state needs to take a more comprehensive approach to securing these important public buildings. ADVERTISEMENT This is not just a concern for the public officials and employees who work in these buildings. County courthouses connect citizens to their government and their court system. Every day, thousands of Minnesotans walk into county courthouses to participate in a court proceeding, attend a public hearing, meet with their elected officials, or access their government services. The ultimate goal of effective courthouse security is to make sure that all Minnesotans are protected when entering these public buildings. That is why we are asking the Minnesota Legislature to make public safety a priority this legislative session by passing the Safe and Secure Courthouse Initiative. This proposal was developed by a statewide group of court, county and law enforcement officials who spent two years studying Minnesota's current courthouse security infrastructure. The workgroup identified significant security needs at the state's courthouses and recommended the state develop a statewide grant program that would allow individual counties to get financial support in order to afford needed security improvements. The courthouse security grant program would be funded by using a small portion of the state's current budget surplus. Counties would seek funding through a competitive process, and a statewide group of security experts would review grant applications to ensure the funds are being used to maximize the safety of Minnesotans. There would be no mandate on counties, and all spending decisions would stay in the hands of local elected officials. This investment would have a real impact on the safety of our county courthouses across the state. Funding could fill a variety of security needs, from conducting top-to-bottom security assessments and emergency response training to adding additional security staff and installing security equipment such as duress alarms, bullet proof glass or weapons screening. Every single dollar allocated toward this fund would go toward the safety of the state's courthouses, and the Minnesotans who enter and work in those buildings every day. We are grateful to Gov. Mark Dayton for his support of this proposal and hope the Legislature will give serious consideration to investing in courthouse safety. The Safe and Secure Courthouse Initiative is a worthy investment that will serve to better protect Minnesotans, and strengthen the relationship between state government and our local communities. Jodi L. Williamson is an assistant chief judge for the Third Judicial District in Dodge County, and Scott Rose is the Dodge County sheriff ADVERTISEMENT As Gov. Mark Dayton starts to wind up Water Action Week, it's worth noting he had planned to dedicate time today to visit one of only four Minnesota counties without a natural lake. Mower County along with Olmsted, Pipestone and Rock counties may not have natural lakes in a state known for them, but that doesn't make access to quality water any less important. While the governor's tour of Austin's water treatment plant was canceled due to illness, it's still worth noting a plan to replace the facility could be eligible for state funds under Dayton's clean water infrastructure proposal, which includes as much as $220 million in state bonding. Dayton has also planned a Mower County farm visit to discuss buffer strips, another of his priorities when it comes to protecting the state's water. Whether for drinking or recreation, maintaining access to clean water is crucial for the state. In the wake of contamination found in Flint, Mich., Dayton has found a topic that resonates. By ending Water Action Week on Earth Day, he's doubling down on the message. The problem cannot be ignored. ADVERTISEMENT According to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, more than 40 percent of the state's waters are considered impaired, and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources reports invasive species have infested more than 550 lakes statewide. At the same time, water treatment plants and other water systems need work that smaller communities cannot afford. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates Minnesota is $11 billion behind in maintaining its water treatment and delivery systems for the next 20 years. Findings like these fuel concern when we see Minnesota House Republicans propose slashing the governor's proposed $1.4 billion bonding bill to about $600 million. It's hard to imagine the $220 million sought for water-quality initiatives will remain intact after such a cut, especially with the state's surplus dollars already being eyed for potential tax reform and other state spending. Maintaining quality water standards isn't only about healthy drinking water, which should be enough to inspire aggressive action. Protecting our waterways is also about ensuring future economic growth in the region. The quality of our water has an enormous impact on the quality of life in our region and state, even in counties without natural lakes. Regardless of how they were formed, our lakes, rivers and streams provide countless recreational activities that attract short-term visitors, but they also help encourage others to consider the state and region as home. With a growing workforce shortage, it's important to consider all efforts that can help make Minnesota a destination for visitors, as well as those seeking quality jobs and a quality way of life. Protecting our water quality needs to be one of those efforts. Hillary Clinton has the Democratic presidential nomination locked up. Any remaining suspense associated with the run-up to the convention centers around (1) whether, or to what extent, she will continue to tack to the left and (2) the identity of her running mate. As to the second matter, Clintons campaign has let it be known that she will consider selecting a female VP candidate. Indeed, we are told that her team is intrigued by the idea of an all-female ticket. Its easy to dismiss this information as part tease, part ploy, and thats basically how I perceive it. However, James Hohmann of the Washington Post identifies Elizabeth Warren as a female who might enhance the Democratic ticket politically, not because of her gender but because of her leftism. As Hohmann explains: Clinton would never choose Sanders as her running mate, but Warren might be able to activate many of his core supporters. If the former Secretary of State remains soft with liberals come summer, she might look leftward. But Hohmann finds the factors weighing against Warrens selection to be substantial: [Warrens] repeated refusal to endorse Hillary matters. She is the only female Democratic senator to stay on the sidelines. The Clintons are well known for placing a premium on loyalty. As West Wing veterans, they can surely envision the kinds of headaches that a Vice President Warren might cause for them. The Republican governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker, would get to pick Warrens replacement until a special election is held, which could take 145 to 160 days. Hillary will be reluctant to do anything that could stop Democrats from re-taking the Senate and undermine her ability to push an ambitious agenda during her first 100 days. Picking a liberal former law professor from Harvard could theoretically help Hillary play the populism card but it would also make it easier for Republicans to caricature her as an out-of-touch and an out-of-the-mainstream elitist. Warren is really not that tested. She struggled more than she should have in 2012 against Scott Brown, only defeating him by 8 points (even as President Obama beat Mitt Romney in the state where he had been governor by 23 points.) In my view, Clinton would have to be desperate to choose Warren. If the Republicans nominate Donald Trump, Im pretty sure she will not feel desperate. Nominating Ted Cruz wont necessarily create a sense of desperation in Clintons camp either. And Cruzs strong conservatism will probably cause Team Clinton to take the Sanders-Warren wing of her party for granted in the general election, thus eliminating any need to consider Warren as a running mate. Mary Missy Hogan, a National Park Service employee who gives guided tours of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, stunned a group of tourists this week by telling them that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were the product of class elites who were just out to protect their privileged status. Christian Adams has the details at PJ Media. Hogan isnt just a park ranger. Shes the chief of Operations for Interpretations and Visitor Services at Independence Hall, the birthplace of our Constitution. Hogan is also a fount of left-wing propaganda. In addition to parroting the long-discredited economic interpretation of the Constitution, she informed her tour group that the Founders knew that when they left this room, what they had written wouldnt matter very much, according to Adams. The most important part of the Constitution written at Independence Hall was the ability to change it, she explained. Hogan even offered an apology for King George III. She claimed that he paid more attention to Parliament than the colonists because they were right there and could remove him from office. But in fact, as Adams points out, Parliament did not possess the power to remove the king from office in the 1770s, and still doesnt. Do other rangers who lead tours of Independence Hall similarly slander Americas Founders, apologize for King George III, and advocate a living Constitution? I dont know, but apparently they are free to do so. Hogan has said that the story of Independence Hall is the story of Independence Hall, it doesnt really change. Thus, the rangers give them same information but the way they tell it is going to be different; everyone has a different and interesting slant. Translation: Once we tell the folks when Independence Hall was constructed, what it was used for, and how many rooms it has, we can spout whatever rubbish we picked up from our lefty college professors. Chidi Odinkalu, the former chairman of National Human Rights Commission, NHRC, discusses his ambition to lead the Unity Schools Old Students Association, USOSA, with PREMIUM TIMES Samuel Ogundipe. Excerpts: PT: Why do you think you are the appropriate person for the position youre vying for in USOSA? Odinkalu: Leadership is a privilege. I have no right to lead any entity, least of all such a highly enlightened network like the Unity Schools Old Students Association. The leadership of USOSA is elective and, for the first time, we have a genuine contest over where or how the Association should go. One vision argues that we should concentrate on building an organization or society of well-educated people. My view is that is not enough. We can only build such an entity if it presents a mission of compelling social good that is feasible and credible. What I present, therefore, is a platform, a passion and a vision to elevate the gaze of our network and persuade it as to why we need to take on a mission bigger than nostalgia for good old times. My hope is that my colleagues and peers choose to be persuaded when the voting takes place on 23 April. PT: Youre currently engaged with a lot of things, why are you leaving those to lead USOSA? Odinkalu: I am not leaving anything to do USOSA. You make time for what you are passionate about. I am passionate about education, violence and climate change. But education is really the centre-piece of my passions. Without enlightenment, we are toast. But its also an exciting time to build social movements around education. Modern ICTs have given us new possibilities. And if you look at the new sustainable development goals, there is a goal (Goal 4 around education). It requires us to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education. We cant achieve this without public education. But our problem is more than fulfilling SDGs Goal 4. It is about whether or not Nigeria survives into the future. We will not without investment in public education. The reason I wish to lead USOSA is to help build a movement that can lead the fight for transforming public education in Nigeria. Its really that simple. PT: What is the benefit of USOSA as an organisation? What does it stand for? Odinaklu: USOSA is arguably the biggest network of enlightenment in Nigeria and perhaps the only network of Nigerians left. The country is endangered. Our diversity that should be our biggest asset has become a huge source of troubles to us. Insecurity is rife and amidst our ongoing hardships, our very existence as a country is challenged. USOSA stands for coexistence founded on enlightenment. We all in USOSA grew up as children who learnt and lived coexistence with colleagues from different cultures and backgrounds from all over Nigeria. Today, insecurity and poor leadership means this educational experience is no longer available to most children around the country. But we can find ways to mitigate the difficulties and constraints we face. USOSA brings reach, footprint and leverage. Were from and in every village, ward, LGA, constituency, zone, division, state, industry and all over the county. USOSA is a market place, catalyst, kinetizer, partner, network and lots more. But USOSA can also represent the core of a civic movement to drive the reform of public education in Nigeria. That is the direction in which it needs to and must evolve. PT: You said USOSA is no longer living up to its founding ideals, what are those ideals and how do you intend to turn things around? Odinaklu: I have not quite said USOSA isnt living up to its founding ideals. The point I have made is the following. First, knowledge is a privilege and good education comes with responsibility. The Unity Schools in their prime gave us very good foundations. But we cant live our lives harking back to nostalgia rather than using that foundation to better our future. Second, USOSAs founding ideals need to be tailored to the challenges confronting us: the challenge of creating a new country built on knowledge. As Charles Steinmetz, the Jewish scientist forced by persecution to flee Nazi Germany to Palestine, predicted there will come about an age of small and independent nations whose first line of defence will be knowledge. That age is upon us in Nigeria. We are small relative to our potentials. We can be big if we invest in education. Look at India! PT: Many people hold the belief that the unity schools can no longer be revived, and were hearing that plans are already underway by the FG to sell them off, whats your position on this? Odinkalu: Let me be clear: If this were just about Unity Schools, Ill not be interested. No. Our issue is about the future of public education in Nigeria. We have to force issues on that. Given our present context our position is that Nigeria cant be sustained without addressing supply, quality, access to and adequacy of public education. No country can be built on private provision of education. We already have as a country the biggest cohort of out of school children in the world, despite the requirement of the UBEC Act to the contrary. Over the next 14 years, our population will grow by over 67%. Government is not building new schools anywhere nor providing for new inputs. Investments in education are stagnated or falling. There is this market fundamentalism that somehow all the labourers in the informal sector will send all their kids to school. But education is first and foremost a public good not necessarily a commodity. It is also an inter-generational investment in competitiveness, productivity and the survival of our country. The market will not deliver supply of education on the scale needed to guarantee our survival and sustainability. Im prepared to discuss models. We are unwilling to concede that we will survive without public education. We cant. The sense of urgency is missing in our politicians and policy makers. That is why you say we can no longer revive our schools. That is not an option. If we dont, Nigeria will not survive. PT: Lawrence Wilbert, your opponent in this race, is considered highly formidable, what do you have to say about him and the campaign landscape at large? Odinakalu: We got good educational foundations at the Unity Schools, so you should not be surprised that the candidates are considered to use your words highly formidable. It is fitting that we have a contest between candidates offering a competitive vision of how a voluntary organization of educated people can help rebuild education in Nigeria. Turkey said keeping in line with a UN Security Council decision, it has frozen the assets of Yemens former president, Ali Saleh. The UN Security Council had in November 2014 imposed sanctions on Saleh and rebel leaders, accusing them of destabilising the country. The government said in its official gazette on Thursday in Istanbul that Mr. Salehs assets remained frozen until February 26, 2017. It said in a statement that the measure also applied to Mr. Salehs son, Ahmed Saleh, and rebel commanders. It did not provide the value of his assets in Turkey, but stressed that in February 2015, a UN report said Mr. Saleh had allegedly amassed assets estimated at 32 billion dollars to 60 billion dollars during his 33 years in power. The UN experts estimated that Mr. Saleh made nearly 2 billion dollars a year for more than three decades. They said the assets took the form of property, cash, shares, gold and other valuables. It added that a report by a panel of experts for the UN Security Council said Saleh transferred most of his assets to some 20 countries under false names or the names of others holding the assets on his behalf. Mr. Saleh ruled North Yemen from 1979 and united Yemen from 1994. He stepped down in 2012 under a Gulf-sponsored deal after months of street protests against his rule. Yemen has been in turmoil since September 2014, when the mainly Shiite Houthi rebels and troops loyal to Saleh overran the capital, Sanaa. Mr. Saleh, now 74, has not been seen much in public since Saudi Arabia and its allies started an air campaign against the Iran-backed rebels in March 2015. He is believed to be living in rebel-held Sanaa. (dpa/NAN) Things were looking up for William Obio when he decided to invest more in his logging business. For the first time in years, his nine children and three brothers were eating well, and he could support his over half-a-dozen team of machine operators, saw men, scouts, and wood carriers. Such success, rare in Owai, a heavily forested and impoverished community less than 20 kilometres from Nigerias southern border with Cameroon, emboldened Mr. Obio. He took a chance and purchased a small cassava crushing machine and got more saws. God answered our prayers; things really changed, said the part-time pastor. Everything indeed changed in 2008, Mr. Obio said, when the Cross River government imposed a sweeping ban on forest use in the states 18 local government areas, including Mr. Obios Akamkpa where Owai is located. Governor Liyel Imoke had said wealthy merchants, mostly from outside the state, were taking advantage of lax laws to deplete the states forest cover. The site of more than half of Nigerias remaining rainforest, the governor warned, Cross River needed to save its green stock to boost investment and tourism. Under this plan, the state would become Nigerias pilot site for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), a United Nations climate change mitigation programme that offers payment to states and communities for conserving their forest. For a state that had lost monthly federal payments to oil producing states, following the ceding of oil-rich Bakassi peninsula to Cameroon in 2008, the proposal drew wide support. Besides, Cross Rivers forest cover had declined from 7,920 to 6,102 square kilometres between 1991 and 2008, according to figures from Nigerias Ministry of Environment. In the years that followed, the government fiercely enforced the embargo and chased out local traders like Obio, seized wood, and raided timber markets. Officials also stopped locals from hunting game and fetching bush mango and afang popular delicacies in the region. As the new policy disrupted traditional livelihoods many forest communities relied on, the government failed to provide alternative means of support, despite making clear that promised benefits from REDD+ payments would take years to come. Michael Eraye, Cross River States Commissioner of Environment told PREMIUM TIMES that the government did make efforts to equip those affected with new skills, but poor funding affected the plans. He said the government built roads in affected areas, as part of its compensation plans. Salisu Dahiru, Nigerias UN-REDD Coordinator, said efforts to find affected communities and determine how their livelihoods are linked to the forest, were ongoing. But he acknowledged that training programmes had yet to commence nearly eight years after the first ban, and four years after the start of the REDD+ programme. Meanwhile, only a few years after the REDD+ initiative got underway in Cross River State, Governor Imoke, who had once championed the programme, quietly began to back away even as the ban continued. In May 2015, days before leaving office after eight years as governor, Mr. Imoke told shocked officials that REDD+ did not return on investment. I got to the point when I felt that it was not worth my effort, Mr. Imoke said, according to the UN-REDD National Programme Semi-Annual Report January to June 2015 edition. Two senior officials who attended the meeting confirmed the former governor made those remarks. They said the governor directed his comments at Odigha Odigha, head of the state forestry commission at the time. The report said months before the meeting, state officials demonstrated diminishing interest in REDD+, and the ambitious programme began to stall. The first phase, known as the Readiness Phase, is now set to end in December 2016, nearly two years later than originally intended. Local communities will have to wait much longer for REDD+ resource-based payments, if they ever come. While they wait, little to no help has come from the state. A PREMIUM TIMES examination of Cross River States anti-deforestation and climate change mitigation programme, which began in 2008, shows how the implementation of an otherwise well-intentioned policy deprived forest-dependent communities of their primary source of livelihood. It also provides a glimpse into the abuse and policy missteps that characterised the governments execution of the programme. For this report, this newspaper reviewed relevant documents on the project and interviewed several state and national officials, community members and leaders, traders, civil society members, and officials of the United Nations REDD programme over a period of three months. Living off the forest Forests play an integral role in regulating the amount of carbon emissions in the atmosphere. When present, they absorb carbon emitted by human activityan estimated 25 per cent of these emissions over the past four decadesand help moderate the effects of climate change. When lost through deforestation, they release carbon back into the atmosphere and are responsible for up to 20 per cent of global manmade carbon dioxide emissions. REDD+ is a global mechanism designed to reward governments in developing nations for preserving forests and constraining the impacts of climate change. To date, REDD+ has pledged nearly US$ 10 billion to developing countries, with $4 million allocated for Nigerias National Programme, of which Cross River State is a pilot model. The first formal steps taken by the Governor Imoke administration toward monetizing Cross River States vast forest resources began in October 2009, a year after the forest embargo went into effect. Mr. Imoke worked with the then Minister of the Environment, John Odey, a Cross River native, to apply to be part of REDD+. In addition to joining the Governors Climate and Forest Task Force, based in the United States, Mr. Imoke attended COP 15 in Copenhagen later that year, where he announced efforts to protect Cross Rivers tropical forests. In April 2010, Nigeria became a UN-REDD partner country, and from then, followed through with a series of REDD+ programmes. Despite such efforts, the government failed to provide economic relief for the local population and did not fully engage with them before and after the ban, those interviewed told PREMIUM TIMES. Tony Attah, in charge of the Cross River forestry commissions outreach programmes, acknowledged that the ban and initial phase of REDD+ were not well communicated. Despite initial missteps, he said that extensive community engagements were carried out by the state between January and August 2014. Many environmentalists who support forest conservation, however, have taken issue with the REDD+ programme, blaming it for loss of indigenous land rights and branding it as property colonisation by developed nations. They also argue that the programme lacks mechanisms to ensure pledged payments reach affected people and are not pocketed by greedy politicians or other representatives. They argue that forest-dependent communities like Mr. Obios Owai, who have yet to receive any payments years after the forest ban went into place, are made to pay more than their fair share for environmental clean-up, and for the pollution caused by developed countries. REDD is a dangerous eco-business, said the NGO group, Environmental Rights Action, as Cross River State entered the early stages of preparing to implement the programme. It enriches polluters and impoverishes forest community people who have conserved the forests over the years. Uncertain futures The Cross River timber union has said thousands of its members and affiliate workers, lost their livelihoodsome, allegedly, even their livesafter the ban. They include timber dealers, machine operators, saw men, scouts, and carriers. Our members lost out when the ban started, some died of shock. Many lost everything they had, said David Essien, the head of Akim Timber Market union, the biggest timber market in the state. Reliable statistics depicting such damage are hard to come by in the state, but studies conducted in the area paint a gloomy picture. The Social Development Integrated Centre, a Port Harcourt-based policy analysis group, in a 2014 report on the impact of REDD in Cross River, concluded that the move towards REDD has been made without any clear community development programme that addresses livelihoods and income generation alternatives for forest dependent communities. Before 2008, to harvest timber in Cross River, the state required loggers to pay between N20, 000 (US$102) and N50, 000 (US$254)of which 70 per cent went to communities as royalty. Dealers were also required to plant five seedlings as replacement, and be cleared or stamped by forestry commission officials that harvested timber was mature. The ban stopped the royalty and kept communities from harvesting wood even to build their homes, said Oyi Akama, the village head of Owai. Importantly, it kept many youth out of work. Stephen Mbeh, head of nearby Oban town, told PREMIUM TIMES how a government task force twice seized timber he harvested to construct a home. He succeeded the third time after young people in the town helped ward off the enforcers. This is our own oil. This is all we have, and even to cut mango at your backyard, we could not, he said. Mr. Obio began his lumber business in Owai, a small community with no access road, electricity or potable water, in 1998. His mother, the familys breadwinner, had died five years earlier. After getting clearance from the government to harvest from areas with mature timber, Obio logged at least once a week and sold to buyers from distant towns. We were beginning to do well a little. I even paid fees for my brothers, he said. By the time the ban came into force, Mr. Obios business was booming. He purchased six sawing machines and had broken ground on a block family homea rarity in Owai where the majority of people live in mud houses. He initially brushed off the news as rumour when he heard about the ban on the radioas many others didin August 2008. Two days later, he says, he saw members of the state anti-deforestation task force rounding up a man who frequently bought timber from him. The operatives confiscated the logs and forced the man to drive to Calabar, the state capital. That was when I knew it was serious, Mr. Obio said. In the days that followed, a brutal crackdown unfolded. The taskforce barred Obio and others from removing harvested wood from the forests. This claim was echoed by other timber dealers PREMIUM TIMES interviewed in the region. Anietie Bassey, vice president of a timber market in Calabar, said the task force not only seized his timber, but also seven of his sawing machines during a raid in 2010. Mr. Bassey suffered a stroke shortly after the incident, an ailment he says was brought on by the loss of his business. He is yet to fully recover. I am a dead mana dead man! Mr. Bassey said repeatedly during an interview recently. What can I do? Mr. Obio said he lost four of his six sawing machines in a similar raid. A lawless task-force Seized machines and timber were never recovered. Those arrested were freed after the payment of fines ranging between N150, 000 to N1 million, dealers said. Those interviewed, including government officials, community leaders, timber traders and activists, accused the armed taskforce of violating peoples rightseven attacking dealers with supplies from outside the stateand arbitrarily detaining people and seizing their equipment for years after the ban went into effect. The head of the taskforce at the time, Peter Jenkins, told PREMIUM TIMES he could not immediately respond to the claims without knowledge of where they originated from. The communities, he said, initially told the government they needed roads and some were indeed provided. Though he defended the governments policy, he acknowledged that more could have been done to ease the impact of the ban. Asked about allegations of highhandedness, Odigha Odigha, the former chairman of Cross Rivers forestry commission, told PREMIUM TIMES that the taskforce refused to submit to his supervision. He said Mr. Jenkins repeatedly told him, Odigha you know I dont report to you, I report to the governor. Two senior forestry commission officials in Calabar, who asked not to be named, told PREMIUM TIMES that they believed both the ban and its implementation were flawed. The ban on logging was wrong, but its implementation was worse. The anti-deforestation task force was supposed to be under the forestry commission, but it was lawless, reporting directly to the governor, the first official said. REDD did not say dont cut down trees, it is a wrong perception. You cant say dont cut down the forest without alternatives, said the second. She also spoke of a lawless taskforce. Edem Edem, the programme coordinator of Green Concern for Development, an environmental advocacy group in Abuja, said he initially supported the ban until they started violating peoples rights. That was when I backed off, Mr. Edem said. Dangote gets concession, communities dont Initial funding for the $4 million project was meant to finance preliminary REDD+ processes like preparing an action plan, training officials, providing environmental and social safeguards, and others. The money was not meant for the communities. Mr. Edem said the state spent much of its budget organising endless workshops and seminars. Regarding community engagement, the Nigerian National Programmes Annual UN-REDD Report for 2014 said, few initiatives exist, yet they are dispersed, with no guidelines and no funding for community REDD+ projects and for REDD+ pilots. Bridget Nkor, the state coordinator of REDD+, told PREMIUM TIMES that the state was worried about not providing alternatives for the affected communities. That is one area that raised a lot of concerns, she said. Due to the structure of the REDD+ programme, its likely that any economic benefit for affected people could take years to materialise. But Mr. Dahiru, the national coordinator for the programme, used the example of a charcoal vendor to illustrate the impacts that REDD+ programs can have on local communities. Instead of continuing to use woodwhich destroys the forestREDD will support the person with needed skills to grow bamboo, he said. The bamboo can mature in one year, and reach full maturity to give you charcoal in three years, Mr. Dahiru said. And bamboo, once planted, will continue to grow. When you harvest this year, the other offshoot will continue to grow, and there is almost no limit to what you can do to the bamboo. The only problem is that the REDD+ programme would not directly support the funding needs of such initiatives. Though it could help those trained receive support from donors at the later Investment Phase, this third stage could take five or more years to attain. Such trainings in Cross River State are currently targeted at only 30 pilot communities. Even so, they remain mere proposals seven years after the first ban started. An October 2015 UN-REDD progress report said proposals had been submitted and approved, but implementation would not start until late 2016, four years after the REDD+ project started. Activists say a rapid response should come from the state government, which so far has done little in support of the communities. Despite the ban on community use of the forest, the state government under Mr. Imoke granted bigger business interests access to the same land, and allowed it to harvest and sell timber to local dealers. One firm given such a concession is Dansa Allied Agro, a subsidiary of the Dangote Group that is owned by Aliko Dangote, Africas richest man. The company secured over 75,000 hectares of land at Oban community for its pineapple farm, used as the fruit base for the popular Dansa beverage. Tons of timber sourced from the land during clearing process were sold to local dealers, for months under the protection of the government taskforce, PREMIUM TIMES confirmed from several government officials and traders. Dansa Company did not deny it sold timber, when contacted. Pressed on the propriety of such deal when locals had been barred with no alternatives, a senior Dangote group official told PREMIUM TIMES that the company has helped the community in many other ways, like providing jobs and palm seedlings to farmers. The company promised a formal response to our questions, but never followed up. The forestry commission explained the concession, saying that despite the ban, the Ministries of Land and Agriculture retained the right to licence promising investors. The Dangote group got the sprawling property with a promise to provide 10,000 jobs to locals, build a five-star hotel, roads, schools, and a mini market. The company has yet to make good on many of its promises. At an elaborate event March 2014, Governor Imoke praised Dansa Allied Agro for donating 8,000 palm oil seedlings to host communities and constructing a bridge to link Oban, Okarara, Ekong Anaku, Neghe, and Ekpene Eki communities. Mr. Dangotes brother, Sani Dangote, who runs the Dansa affiliate, promised that the company would provide more oil palm seedlings and said Dansa was planting five trees for every one harvested during the clearing. Not worth my effort Overall, steps that could have quickened the delivery of REDD+ benefits to the communities and the state faced delays and haphazard implementation due to dwindling political will, according to the UNs 2015 progress report. An earlier progress report in 2014 noted that the programme has suffered an important delay in delivery of outputs and finance, due to a mix of factors, some internal and some external. One senior official said part of the problem was because the forestry commission had serious leadership problems. For example, a politician was named as head of the REDD board, and when the board was dissolved, there was no replacement, the official told PREMIUM TIMES. Nearly two years would pass before the state finally reconstituted the REDD+ board in October 2015. As Governor Imoke prepared to leave office in May 2015, he issued a scathing criticism of the states REDD+ programme. The time it would take to receive results-based payments was ridiculously long for anybody to earn anything, said Mr. Imoke during his handover remarks before top level civil servants and his successor, Ben Ayade. Alluding to the violation of the states deforestation ban by large corporations, Mr. Imoke said although there was an opening for sustainable management within the framework of REDD+, the forestry commission lacked the capacity to manage sustainable logging in the face of corporations [that] come in with so much money they can corrupt anyone. Sources say the governor admitted that he got to the point when I felt that its not worth my effortI wont insist on sustaining it to the incoming governor, because its not giving any return. Mr. Odigha, the former forestry commission chairman, whom officials said was the focus of the governors criticisms during the meeting, told PREMIUM TIMES that everyone involved in the programme had been well advised that the REDD+ programme takes years to yield benefits. When asked about claims that he might have misadvised the governor, Mr. Odigha said that anyone saying that does not know how REDD works. All over the world, REDD is not implemented as a stand-alone. The UN report for October 2015 supported the notion that senior forestry commission staff also became detached from the programmeostensibly following the governors example. Despite participation in various one-off training and workshop events, only a handful of FC staff understand the fundamentals of REDD+ and fewer have shown interest in the programme, the report noted. Mr. Imoke did not respond to multiple calls for comments. He requested questions to be sent via text message, but he ultimately did not respond to our enquiry. On shaky ground Mr. Imokes successor, Ben Ayade, only agreed to continue with REDD+ after the national coordinator, Salisu Dahiru, intervened. The new governor initially relaxed the ban and replaced the anti-deforestation task force with the green police, which was made up of members from all local government areas of the state. He left coordination of the partial ban to the forestry commission. Since taking over, Mr. Ayade also named a ministry in charge of climate change the only state in Nigeria to do so. The commissioner in charge of that ministry, Alice Eku, did not also respond to request for comment. Despite the relaxed embargo, Obio William told PREMIUM TIMES that he would never return to timber trading, as the government could always reinstate a full ban. I dont want to die, he said. He foresaw tomorrow. About two weeks after we interviewed him, the Ayade administration reinstated a full ban on forest use in late October 2015 after a five-month hiatus. Mr. Ayade courted additional controversy with a plan to build a 260 kilometre superhighway through the protected forests. Initial plans to construct the highway straight through Cross River National Park, however, were changed after President Muhammadu Buhari learned that a required environmental impact assessment had not been filed. The new route will come within seven kilometres from the border of the park, which some environmentalists say still poses risk. The governor has also revoked the occupancy rights of thousands of more forest dependent villagers on ancestral lands on either side of the six lane 260 kilometre super highway. Mr. Odigha, who now runs a nongovernmental environment advocacy, warned that the governments superhighway could deny the state carbon credit under the REDD+ programme. The REDD Programme had $12 million dollars for carbon credit paid to any country and community that meets its requirements for reducing carbon emission through forest conservation, he was quoted by the News Agency of Nigeria as saying on March 12, 2016. Even the rural people would benefit from this carbon credit, and it would serve as means of their livelihood. In Owai, Mr. Obiowho said he could barely feed himself and family after the ban in 2008now sells pepper, salt and other food ingredients. He depends on Ekum Obio, his brother he helped train, to send his children to school. Outside where he lives sits a rundown cassava grating machine he bought before the ban. The machine became useless after he could no longer replace parts. Nearby, the block house he had proudly started constructing at the height of his timber business sits unfinished and overgrown with weeds. Ubong Edet contributed reporting to this investigation, which was done with support from Internews. The Code of Conduct Tribunal has dismissed an application filed by a counsel to the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, asking the tribunals chairman, Danladi Umar to disqualify himself from the case. Mr. Saraki is standing trial for alleged false and anticipatory asset declaration. On Thursday, one of his counsels, Rapheal Oluyede, who was appearing for the second time at the tribunal, rose up shortly after appearances were announced and attempted to introduce a motion which he said had been communicated to the tribunal on Wednesday. The prosecution counsel, Rotimi Jacobs, objected strongly to the motion, and interrupted Mr. Oluyede. The tribunal chairman dismissed the motion swiftly. That motion as far as the tribunal is concerned is of no consequence; not worthy to be entertained and is hereby thrown away, said Mr. Umar. The tribunal soon became rowdy as the counsel holding brief for Kanu Agabi, Mr. Sarakis lead counsel, insisted they be heard. After making his point, Mr. Oluyede got into a fierce argument with Mr. Danladi and was almost escorted out of the tribunal by the police, following the order of the tribunal chairman, before Mr. Jacobs intervened and pleaded with Mr. Danladi to calm the situation. The Kaduna State Government on Thursday asked a Kaduna High Court to sentence 50 Shiite members to death for allegedly causing the death of a soldier. The government had filed a five-count charge against the accused before Justice David Wyom. It accused them of criminal conspiracy, unlawful assembly, culpable homicide, disturbance of public peace and wrongful restrain. In the petition, the counsel to the government, Bayero Diri, said the offences are punishable under Sections 97, 221, 102, 106 and 225 of the Penal Code Law, Laws of Kaduna State 1991. The government said the offence was committed between December 12 and 14, 2015 in Zaria. It alleged that the suspects among other things shot dead Yakubu Dankaduna, a corporal of the Nigerian Army with a gun when he alighted from the convoy to disperse the IMN members.. The prosecution told the court that they intend to present 39 witnesses. The plea of the accused persons was not taken as the judge adjourned sitting till May 16. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) gathered that the 50 suspects were among the 265 persons currently in custody, who were arrested during the Shiites clash with the Army on Dec. 12 and Dec. 14, 2015. (NAN) President Muhammadu Buhari has returned the controversy-ridden 2016 budget to the National Assembly, pointing out areas of concern in the document and demanding adjustment. The spokesperson of the House of Representatives, Abdurazaq Namdas, (APC-Adamawa State) confirmed this to journalists on Thursday. I can confirm to you that we are in possession of the letter from the president identifying grey areas, Mr. Namdas said. He said the leadership of the House and that of the Senate as well as their respective relevant committees would meet on the development. He, however, refused to mention the grey areas saying they would be made known to Nigerians in due course. The National Assembly passed the budget on March 23 and later transmitted it to Mr. Buhari for assent. Apparently with the omission of certain projects and addition of others not proposed by the Executive, Mr. Buhari has since withheld his assent. One of such projects is the Lagos-Calabar rail project counted as a critical infrastrucural focus of the administration. It was not captured in the original budget but was brought as a supplementary proposal of the Transport Ministry by its Minister, Rotimi Amaechi, and was approved, Chairman Senate Committee on Land Transport, Gbenga Ashafa, said. However, the Appropriations Committees of the Senate and House of Representatives respectively chaired by Danjuma Goje and Abdulmumin Jibrin, removed the project from the final draft, saying Mr. Amaechi lacked the powers to make budgetary proposal. Last week, while the Senate said Mr. Buhari should sign the budget and, later, send a supplementary proposal to capture the Lagos-Calabar rail project, the House said it had resolved to receive the budget to capture the project before assent. A suspected phone thief rained punches on a plain-clothed police officer whom he tried to rob of his Tecno Y5 mobile phone in Lagos. Idowu Nojeem, 32, beat the officer attached to the states Rapid Response Squad black and blue after the police Sergeant attempted to arrest him, the police said in a statement Thursday. The operative, Sergeant Oladipo Adetumbi, who was on a surveillance mission around Ikeja Under Bridge, made a frantic effort to arrest the suspect despite receiving several punches on his face, according to the statement. I was with the policeman when the suspect forcefully removed the phone from the operatives front pocket, the police quoted an eye witness as saying. The policeman was on a surveillance mission in the area but was not in uniform. I saw a man moving towards the sergeant but he never knew he was a policeman because the man was not in uniform. As he moved closer to him, he stylishly covered his face with a newspaper, and removed the phone from his pocket. As I stood beside him when the incident occurred, we were all shocked that someone could have such an effrontery to rob while many passers-by were moving. The eye witness said immediately the police officer suspected that his phone had been removed, he pulled the suspect by his shirt but the suspect said he should forget his phone that its gone. He started beating the policeman before we could separate them, the witness said. The police officer really showed doggedness never to allow the suspect escape because as the fight was ongoing, he still held him tight with his trousers. When it was obvious that he was gaining an upper hand, the traffic warden and other policemen close by stepped in to separate them. Then, the operative now dragged him to other RRS operatives stationed at the Under Bridge, Ikeja. While the suspect was held at Ikeja Under Bridge, a lady walked up to the police and accused him stealing her phone few hours earlier. According to Nneka Adoh, whose phones were allegedly stolen by the same man, she was trying to board a bus to Ogba when she noticed the suspect and two other men walking behind her. The suspect was intermittently drawing my bag from behind but I held my bag tight with me, said Ms. Adoh, an accountant. But I didnt know he has used a razor blade to cut the bag and took all my two phones (Tecno F5 and P5). Immediately I turned and checked my bag, my phones were gone. One of the passersby, who saw the suspect when he was removing my phones, pointed at him for stealing my phone. Truly, I saw the two phones with him from afar but I was too afraid to confront him. I was still standing there hoping for help to come. Fortunately for me, I saw a crowd at under bridge looking at somebody. When I moved closer to know what was going on, I saw the same man (suspect) being handcuffed by the police for stealing an RRS operatives phone. While confirming the arrest of the suspect, the state Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), Dolapo Badmus, said the police would not condone any act of criminal activity, promising that efforts are on to arrest other members of the syndicate. The police said the suspect had been charged to court. Former President Goodluck Jonathan on Wednesday met with the founder of The Walk Free Foundation, a prominent anti-modern slavery body, Andrew Forrest, in efforts to promote liberty in Africa and other parts of the world. The foundation, which publishes Global Slavery Index to increase awareness of the problem of modern slavery, is active in helping people caught up in modern slavery achieve their freedom. Mr. Jonathan met with Mr. Forrest and his daughter, Grace, in New Jersey where he also endorsed their work in a video message. The former president is chairman of the Goodluck Jonathan Foundation, which is committed to spreading democracy and freedom throughout Africa. The Nigeria Army says it has nothing to do with a proposed solidarity rally being organised by some civil groups to celebrate the successes being achieved over Boko Haram in the ongoing counterinsurgency operations in North East Nigeria. The Army said though the initiative could be borne out of sheer patriotism, the show of solidarity could be dangerous as it is capable of distracting the soldiers and the Army authority. It thereby advised the group to be cautious with the plan. The spokesman of the Nigerian Army, Sani Usman, said in a statement that the public should rather remain more vigilant at this crucial stage of the battle. His statement reads: The attention of the Nigerian Army has been drawn to a number of groups and individuals celebrating the routing out and decimation of Boko Haram terrorists on our soil. So much as we thank them for that, it is imperative to state that we do not begrudge such persons (and) their desire to identify and associate themselves with this success. However, the Nigerian Army wishes to disassociate itself from such celebrations and solidarity rallies. We also would like to advice that they should tread with caution as this could be distractive to us. The public are please informed that the terrorists are surreptitiously fanning out of their last enclaves in Sambisa to cause havoc or seek refuge elsewhere. Therefore, there is need for all to be more vigilant and security conscious to enable us clear the remnants of these terrorists wherever they might flee. We would like to reassure the public that we will remain professional and focused in clearing the remnants of these criminals on the Nigerian soil. A group that identified itself as North East Coalition Against Terrorism (NECAT) had recently disclosed that it has concluded plans to hold a solidarity march in support of the soldiers . The National Coordinator of the group, Yusuf Mshelizza, had written a letter, dated Wednesday, April 20, 2016, to President Muhammadu Buhari and the Chief of Army Staff, stating their resolve to hold a solidaity march in appreciation to the government and the Nigerian Army for returning peace to North Eastern States. We will forever appreciate the Nigerian Army; we lost almost everything including our homes, properties and lives due to the incessant killings and destruction of properties by Boko Haram insurgents in the last few years, Mr. Mshelizza said. The bad blood between officers of the Nigerian Navy and the Nigerian Merchant Navy resurfaced in Lagos Monday with the former accusing the latter of impersonation. Three officers of the Nigerian Navy, Western Command, B-Croft, trailed some members of the Nigerian Merchant Navy to Apapa where they allegedly attacked them. Allen Edema, the Director General of the Nigerian Merchant Navy, was reportedly stripped naked during the incident which occurred between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. According to a petition by the Network of Police Reforms in Nigeria (NOPRIN), the naval officers threatened to capture Mr. Edema dead or alive. Three members of the Nigerian Merchant Navy who had just left their DG at his hotel at Okun-Owa, Apapa, were accosted by three men who claimed to be Nigerian Navy officers, stated the petition signed by Okechukwu Nwanguma, National Coordinator, NOPRIN, and addressed to the Office of the Chief of Defence Staff. The three Nigerian Navy officers attacked the three Nigerian Merchant Navy officers, accusing them of impersonating the Nigerian Navy, added the petition, which was also copied to the Chief of Naval Staff, the Inspector General of Police, and the Minister of Transport. The Nigerian Merchant Navy, Coast Guard, Seafarers, Maritime and Petroleum Security and Safety Corps were registered with ranks, uniforms, and kits by the Federal Ministry of Commerce and Industry. Attempts by the Merchant Navy officers to explain who they were to the Nigerian Navy officers reportedly fell on deaf ears. As the three members of the Nigerian Navy continued to drag the NMN officers, their DG who had just come out to buy some drugs at a nearby Pharmacy met his men being attacked. As soon as his members called his attention, the NN officers turned to him and shouted Oh you are the Edema our FOC (Flag Officer Commanding) has been looking for. They immediately pounced on him, assaulted him and rendered him naked. To defend their boss, the Merchant Navy officers fought back. While two other Nigerian Navy Officers fled, Ahmed Eddy (one of the naval officers) was dragged by members of the NMN to the nearest police station Tolu Police Station, Apapa, where they incidented a report of assault against him and others, NOPRIN stated. To their shock, instead of impartially investigating the complaint, the Divisional Crime Officer (DCO) of Tolu Station released Ahmed Eddy, the Nigerian Navy Officer, and instead, detained the DG of the NMN, Commodore Edema. Ever since Mr. Edemas detention, according to NOPRIN, officers of the Nigerian Navy Western Command continued to mobilize and lay ambush for Mr. Edema and his men, threatening openly that their FOC wants them dead or alive. Mr. Edema had already made a statement to the police station alleging the plot by naval FOC and his men to kidnap him and his members. On Tuesday, barely 24 hours after the clash, some officers of the Nigerian Navy operating with two OP-MESA Hilux Vans allegedly invaded the residence of one of the members of the NMN, Joseph Ekimbe, residing in Apapa. He (Mr. Ekimbe) was fortunate not to be around when they came, stated NOPRIN. The Nigerian Navy officers also invaded the hotel where Edema was lodging. They also went to the police station asking the police to release him to them. A history of bad blood The Nigerian Navy and the Nigerian Merchant Navy have a history of face-offs ever since the latters establishment. A source knowledgeable about the relationship between the two organizations told PREMIUM TIMES that the merchant navy was not a registered body. And even if they want to register as an association, they should not be using navy uniform. Navy is a military outfit, said the source who did not want to be named. And using their uniforms, ranks, and their badges, thats impersonation. You are impersonating the navy. Even in Corporate Affairs Commission, if you are registering, you cannot be using the same logo or item with another company. In 2014, then Transport Minister, Idris Umar, stated that the Nigerian Merchant Navy Corps remained an illegal organization. The Nigerian Merchant Navy Corps and two other organizations had been proscribed by the Federal Republic of Nigeria official Gazette No. 68 volume 100, Mr. Idris had said. Recently, the Senate Committee on Navy headed by Bode Olajumoke, summoned the Nigerian Navy high Command and the DG of the NMN and asked both to go and maintain peace. NOPRIN argued that the Merchant Navy remained a legal organization and not a criminal organization as claimed by the Nigerian Navy, Western Command. Recently, the Chief of Naval Staff granted an interview acknowledging that the Nigerian Navy and the Nigerian Merchant Navy should collaborate in issues of maritime security, said Mr. Nwanguma. Therefore, we wonder why officers at Western Naval Command are fixated with hatred for the Nigerian Merchant Navy. Sometime in 2004, a High Court in Lagos gave an Order that the Nigerian Western Naval Command, B-Croft, Apapa, should desist from further violating the rights of members of the Nigerian Merchant Navy. But they have continued to do this. Abdulkadir Abdulkadir, Public Relations Officer, Western Naval Command, told PREMIUM TIMES he was not aware of the clash. We are at the Command level, we are to receive directives from higher up, said Mr. Abdulkadir, a Lieutenant Commodore. Anything like that goes to Abuja, then if there is any issue they will now direct the Command to act. Phone calls to the Naval Headquarters in Abuja were not answered. A prosecution witness on Thursday said the Senate president, Bukola Saraki, was never interrogated by the Code of Conduct Bureau before the commencement of his trial at the Code of Conduct Tribunal. Mr. Saraki is standing trial for alleged false and anticipatory declaration of assets. The prosecution witness, Micheal Wetkas, said the Senate president was not invited when a team of three EFCC investigators met with the CCB regarding his case. As the time the enlarged team met with the CCB, Mr. Saraki was not interrogated, said Mr. Wetkas. He however said the only time he was aware Mr. Saraki made a statement was during the investigation by the EFCC and that the statement was made before two of his team members, Usman Iman and Musa Sunday. He added that he got to know about the interrogation through the team members. He made statements regarding those things I am referring to before other team members. I know my larger team asked him questions relating to his properties and about the asset declaration that he made before the CCB, as well as the companies he has interest in; both local and international, among other things, Mr. Wetkas stated. Asked if Mr. Sarakis statement was tendered before the tribunal, Mr. Wetkas said he was not aware of that. Not to the best of my knowledge, Mr. Wetkas replied. Mr. Wetkas further said his team members stumbled upon information regarding Mr. Sarakis assets and loans, while other team members got information regarding Mr. Sarakis properties. He added that there was no account number on the telex used for the said transfer of funds by Mr. Saraki from the GTB to American Express Service, New York. The card account number is not on the telexes, said Mr. Wetkas. Speaking on the relationship between the credit card and the alleged account, Mr. Wetkas said Guarantee Trust bank was in the best position to explain the process of international transactions. The bank is more competent to talk on international transfers. Every transaction in the company is specialised and that is why the head of the National Funds Transfer of GTB is listed as a witness in this case, he said. He gave the name of the said witness from the GTBank as Amazu Nwachuku. Mr. Wetkas also said the investigation was principally based on Mr. Sarakis statement of account, saying the findings of his team revealed a clear transfer to the American Express through the GTB. He however said he was unaware of any other institution besides banks that gives credit cards to their customers. Asked whether Mr. Saraki was interrogated with regards to the American Express Bank, he said he is not sure. Following a request by the defence counsel, the trial was adjourned till Wednesday, April 27. The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, has described as completely false a widely circulated report that its Group Managing Director, Ibe Kachikwu, has been relieved of his job by President Muhammadu Buhari, saying the Minister of State for Petroleum is still carrying out his duties as assigned to him by the president. An unconfirmed report announcing the purported dismissal of Mr. Kachikwu had suddenly emerged on the Internet on Thursday afternoon. The report, which did not cite any official sources, also said Mr. Buhari had named Maikanti Baru, NNPC Group Executive Director, as Mr. Kachikwus replacement as head of the countrys oil company. But in a telephone interview with PREMIUM TIMES on Thursday evening, the Group General Manager, Public Affairs Division of the NNPC, Garba-deen Mohammed, said the news is untrue. The story is completely false, Mr. Mohammed said. It should be ignored by all Nigerians. The minister is currently in his office and has continued to function in the roles assigned to him by the president. Also, a top official in the presidency who asked not to be named because he was not authorised to speak on the matter said Mr. Kachikwu remained the Minister of Petroleum and the GMD of NNPC and urged Nigerians to disregard the news of his sack. Lai Mohammed, the Minister of Information and Culture, told PREMIUM TIMES he could not immediately comment as he was in Cote dIvoire attending the conference of all African ministers of tourism. The House of Representatives Adhoc Committee on Kogi Assembly Crisis on Thursday quizzed the Inspector-General of Police, Solomon Arase, over the re-opening of Kogi House of Assembly complex. The House had through a resolution directed Mr. Arase to seal off the Kogi legislature until a peaceful resolution of the crisis that trailed the impeachment of Speaker Lawal Momoh-Jimoh was achieved. The speaker was impeached by five out of 20 lawmakers on February 16. The lawmakers subsequently chose Umar Imam as the new speaker. Following the National Assemblys directive, five members who allegedly impeached the speaker convened and conducted legislative activities within the chamber in disregard of its resolution. The committee, chaired by the Majority Leader, Femi Gbajabiamila, however described the failure of the police boss to comply with the resolution as breach of the Nigerian Constitution and undue interference on the activities of the legislature. He also frowned at the absence of Abubakar Malami, the Attorney General of the Federation, at the meeting. The committee, however, resolved that the AGF should appear in person on Monday, April 22, by 2 p.m. Speaking on the outcome of the investigative hearing conducted behind closed door, Mr. Gbajabiamila said It was straight to the point; all the House wanted to know was why the resolution of the NASS was disobeyed. And also why the State Assembly was reopened. The IG gave his explanation, saying he had sought the advice of the Attorney General and the Attorney General gave him his advice. I think we are making good steady progress and I think we would put this matter to a conclusion next week, he said. While reacting to inquiry on whether the inspector-general was going to close down the Assembly, the majority leader said We are not there yet, as you know the hearing is a process. This is the first day and there are several sides to it. We have taken the deposition of the IG, the Attorney General will be with us on Monday. The resolution of the House was not to go back to status quo. The resolution of the House was to conduct a hearing to find out why it hasnt happened and we are getting there, he said. Also speaking after the meeting, Mr. Arase apologised to the leadership of the House, pledged allegiance to the Presidency, explaining that he solicited the advice of the AGF mainly on administrative issues. Mr. Arase, who spoke at the end of the public hearing, assured that the matter would be addressed. He noted that there was a breakdown in communication. It went very well; we were able to understand ourselves that there was a communication breakdown. I wouldnt do anything to breach the constitution. I am a law abiding officer. I am sworn to the constitution to obey the constitution. There was a break down somewhere but we will resolve it, Mr. Arase said. (NAN) The U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, on Thursday promised that the U.S Embassy in Nigeria would offer technical assistance to help Nigeria solve its lingering challenge of fuel scarcity. Ms. Power made the promise on Thursday in Abuja while fielding questions from journalists during her visit to the minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama. Just last night when I was coming from the airport, I saw long lines at petrol stations here in Nigeria. And I really feel for the people of this country, who are going through this difficult economic time. And I think this is something the embassy has promised to offer whatever technical advice, counsel and technical assistance that we can offer. But we know that some of the best minds in Nigeria are thinking about that, including the ministers in this government, she said. Ms. Power said the U.S would discuss with Nigeria on diversification of its economy. She said the drop in oil prices had caused hardship for countries that are oil dependent. The envoy, who had earlier met with some civil society organisations, said the meeting deliberated on the deteriorating condition in Northern Nigeria due to the threat posed by Boko Haram insurgency. She attributed the poor condition in the North-Eastern part of Nigeria to economic hardship exacerbated by the insurgency since inter-city trade had been hampered. In terms of our meeting with civil society, Nigerian civil society is one of the most vibrant, articulate and rigorous in the world. What we heard a lot about was the questions of how the conditions in the north are deteriorating because of the threat posed by Boko Haram. The economic hardship in the region has been exacerbated by the presence of Boko Haram and trade across the border has now come to virtual standstill. We heard about very difficult humanitarian conditions in Northern Nigeria and we will travel to Northern Nigeria tomorrow (Friday) and we will try to get a feel of it for first hand, she said. The envoy said the meeting with civil society organizations also focused on what more could be done on abductions and kidnappings, particularly of Chibok girls. She said the issue would be discussed with the federal government by sharing whatever information at the disposal of the US government in a timely manner. (NAN) President Muhammadu Buhari has granted states relief from deductions from their monthly allocations to repay their salary assistance loans totalling N999.5 billion. The relief is only for April but the president has promised to review the situation of the states on continuous basis. The Finance Minister, Kemi Adeosun, disclosed this at Thursdays meeting of the National Economic Council in Abuja, a report of the meeting made available by the Office of the Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, stated. Mr. Osinbajo chairs the NEC and the report of its Thursdays meeting was signed the VPs media aide, Laolu Akande. At the meeting, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele, said the Federal Government had disbursed N689.5 billion as salary assistance loan to States and additional N310 billion disbursed as Excess Crude Account-backed loans to states. According to the report, Regarding the salary assistance loans, the Finance Minister informed Council that President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the suspension of monthly deduction at source for this month, and no such deductions would be made this month from the FAAC allocations to the States. This is meant by the President to give the States some financial relief at a time the FAAC allocations are dwindling due to the drop in oil prices. The Vice President, Prof. Osinbajo added that the President will continue to review the situation of the States on an ongoing basis and take appropriate relief measures as necessary and possible. Deductions from the allocations of states had grounded many states, leaving them with little funds to pay workers salaries and finance capital projects. Excess Crude Proceeds Mrs. Adeosun told the Council that Nigerias Excess Crude Account stood at $2.3 billion. Mrs Adeosun gave an update to the Council on the progress regarding the constitution of the Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority Board. The minister told the Council that nominees had been selected to form a Search Committee that will bring up names of potential Board members of the NSIA. Also, Mr. Osinbajo informed the Council of the reconstitution process of the Niger Delta Power Holding Company, NDPHC, with representatives from states based on the six geo-political zones. According to the report, Federal Road Safety Corps Marshall, Boboye Oyeyemi, was also in attendance to present the Nigeria Road Safety Strategy Document (NRSS 2014-2018) to the Council. The document serves to address current overlaps, streamline the role and responsibilities of all participants in order to maximize the benefits of investment in road safety management activities. It was endorsed by the Council. The Nigerian government shared N299.75 billion with 36 states and local government areas of the federation for the month of March the lowest total revenue for the three tiers since global oil price began to decline late 2014. The allocation was N39.12 billion less than the N338.77 billion shared in February. The Accountant General of the Federation, Ahmed Idris, said in his secretariat report at the end of the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee, FAAC meeting in Abuja on Thursday that gross statutory revenue received for the month was about N232.62 billion, against N270.5 billion received in the previous month. Although the usual problem of disruption of oil production continued as a result of shut-ins and shut-down of oil facilities for repairs and routine maintenance during the month, Mr. Idris said there was slight increase in output, resulting in a marginal income due to a 10 per cent drop in crude oil price. He said the drop in average price of crude oil from $43.40 in November to $39.04 in December 2015 accounted for about $22.55 million loss in revenue for the month. Besides, he said there was a significant drop in revenue from the petroleum profit tax, PPT, from the multi-national oil companies and the corporate income tax, CIT. The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, paid the refund of N6.33 billion to the federal government in respect of the N450 billion revenue indebtedness to FAAC, which also realized an exchange gain of N2.9 billion to be distributed among the three tiers of government. The balance in the excess crude revenue account grew marginally from $2.26 billion to $2.3 billion. The stark reality of the decline in global oil prices continued to stare in the faces of the states, with most of them continuing to struggle to meet basic obligations to their workers and provision of social services with reduced allocations. Details from the meeting showed that the federal government, which collected about N127.2 billion in February as 52.68 per cent of the total revenue, would have to make do with a reduced ration of N109.11 billion for the month. Equally, states, entitled to 26.72 per cent, would collect only N55.34 billion this month, as against the N64.52 billion they collected the previous month, while local governments, which took N49.4 billion in February for 20.6 per cent of the total revenue would share only N42.67 billion for the month. The nine oil producing states would share only N19.75 billion as 13 per cent derivation for the month as against the N22.78 billion went received in February. Out of a total additional earning from the value added tax, VAT of N61.67 billion, the federal government got N9.25 billion, or 15 per cent; states N30.83 billion, or 50 per cent, and local government N21.58 billion, or 35 per cent. Latest report by the National Bureau of Statistics, NBS showed that states of the federation were not finding life easy, with the impact of the declining global oil prices putting increasing pressure on their purses. The report said out of the 36 states, only 11 were able to realize improved internally generated revenue, IGR, in 2015 to boost their effort to provide service to their people. While Ogun, Anambra, Borno, Edo, Bauchi, Abia, Kogi, Nasarawa, Niger, Taraba and Sokoto states were the only states that bettered their 2014 records of IGR generation performance in 2015, 24 others performed poorly. They included Kwara, Imo, Bayelsa, Adamawa, Akwa Ibom, Benue, Cross River, Delta, Ekiti, Enugu, Gombe, Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsian, Kebbi, Lagos, Ondo, Osun, Oyo, Plateau, Rivers, Yobe, and Zamfara. Ebonyi state was the only state whose IGR records were not available. Motorists are expected to pay the lowest gas prices in 12 years this summer, and more people will travel because of it, according to a survey released Thursday by AAA. Of those surveyed, 55 percent said lower prices make them more likely to take a road trip this year. Although gasoline prices in New Jersey increased 25 cents in the past month, prices are still 40 cents lower than a year ago, according to AAAs Daily Fuel Gauge report. With gas prices lower than normal this year, were going to see a lot more people on the roads this summer, said Tracy Noble, spokeswoman for AAA Mid-Atlantic, which includes New Jersey. The AAA survey said more than 35 percent of families will take a vacation 50 miles or more away from home in the next 12 months. The release said AAA estimates drivers have saved nearly $12 billion on gas so far this year compared to the same period in 2015. Diane Wieland, director of tourism for Cape May County, said gas prices, along with other factors, are leading people to travel more. Disposable income is a little better, the cost of gas for traveling is down, but also people have saved all year, which helps with planning for vacation, Wieland said. We always complained about not having an airport, but the drive market is good. Wieland said she expects a 2 percent to 3 percent increase in economic impact from tourism for 2016. Were a $6.01 billion industry. I expect it again this year, Wieland said. Contact: 609-272-7258 PLEASE BE ADVISED: Soon we will no longer integrate with Facebook for story comments. The commenting option is not going away, however, readers will need to register for a FREE site account to continue sharing their thoughts and feedback on stories. If you already have an account (i.e. current subscribers, posting in obituary guestbooks, for submitting community events), you may use that login, otherwise, you will be prompted to create a new account. 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. GREENWICH, Connecticut, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Expands capabilities in discovery to include high throughput screening and other early discovery services - Aptuit, LLC today announced that it has acquired Exquiron Biotech AG to meet customer demand for fully integrated outsourced discovery services. Exquiron is a leading specialist Contract Research Organization dedicated to early phase drug discovery solutions. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150709/234432LOGO ) Located near Basel, Switzerland, Exquiron offers industry leading expertise in assay development for hit finding and profiling purposes, high throughput screening, selectivity testing and hit characterization. These services are complemented by an extensive library collection of lead like compounds, as well as deep scientific knowledge in compound selection and Structure Activity Relationship (SAR) expansion across a broad range of targets in multiple therapeutic areas. Dr. Jonathan Goldman, Chief Executive Officer of Aptuit stated, "Aptuit specializes in the discovery of small molecules across a wide range of therapeutic areas including neuroscience, oncology, infectious disease, inflammation, respiratory and others. The acquisition of Exquiron broadens our scientific excellence in advanced integrated discovery by incorporating capabilities in early discovery. In particular, we are thrilled to enhance our hit identification, validation, and expansion services. We can now offer uninterrupted and very high quality delivery of a research program from target to high quality candidate nomination. We expect our customers to benefit from improved probability of candidate nomination, with reductions in time and cost. Customers value our unique capabilities in integrated discovery and integrated development. We are delighted to combine our core scientific expertise in discovery with the early discovery capabilities of our Exquiron colleagues." Dr. Goldman explained that Aptuit's best in class integrated discovery solutions are unique in the marketplace. "Our company is experiencing increased demand for integrated services from gene up to candidate nomination, and from candidate to IND. We are delighted to respond by expanding our capabilities". Dr. Stephan Fasler, CEO and founder of Exquiron added, "We are excited to join Aptuit, a highly respected leader in the discovery and development CRO sector. Our customers can now combine our expertise in assay development and high throughput screening with the ability to translate seamlessly to candidate nomination and IND filing. Exquiron and Aptuit share a culture and commitment to scientific excellence, making this a very good fit." About Aptuit, LLC Aptuit, LLC provides the most complete set of integrated early discovery to mid-phase drug development services in the pharmaceutical industry including Drug Design & Discovery, API Development and Manufacture, Solid State Chemistry, CMC, Preclinical and IND enabling GLP/GMP programs. Fully integrated drug discovery & development services are available from our facilities in the UK, Italy, and now Switzerland. Aptuit, LLC is partnered with Welsh, Carson, and Anderson & Stowe, one of the world's leading private equity investors. For more information, please visit http://www.aptuit.com. About Exquiron Biotech AG Exquiron was founded in 2013 and is dedicated to state-of-the-art hit identification and validation services for its customers. With a combined team track record of over 60 years in early stage drug discovery and a high level of expertise and flexibility, they help their customers advance their programs and generate added value in the areas of pharmaceutical drug discovery and nutraceuticals. For more information, please visit http://www.exquiron.com SOURCE Aptuit, LLC The answers by PR Newswire's Small Business PR Toolkit contributing author Phillip Thune NEW YORK, April 20, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Small businesses are continually looking to grow their company and improve their revenue, but is outsourcing their marketing considered an essential aspect to their growth strategy? Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110831/NY59180LOGO It's no surprise that companies frequently downsize and expand, and outsourcing can be a cost-effective way to gain access to expertise at a fraction of the cost. Outsourcing certain marketing efforts can also alleviate your staff's bandwidth so they can focus on what they do best. When weighing the pros and cons of outsourcing your marketing responsibilities, consider the following when making your decision: Strategy stagnation. If you're disseminating the same marketing messages and utilizing the same channels but not seeing any results, now may be the time to include a fresh perspective into your strategy. If you're disseminating the same marketing messages and utilizing the same channels but not seeing any results, now may be the time to include a fresh perspective into your strategy. No mind for marketing. With many small business owners tackling the marketing responsibility out of financial necessity, there needs to be a deep understanding of the industry in order to see success from your marketing efforts. You may recoup the money spent on hiring an expert by having more time to focus on developing the quality of your business. For further discussion on the remaining reasons your company may benefit from outsourcing, read the latest PR Toolkit post here: http://bit.ly/1NlrH20 PR Newswire's Small Business PR Toolkit is a comprehensive resource that provides small businesses and entrepreneurs the tools to develop an affordable public relations and marketing plan that helps generate interest from potential customers, engage with key audiences and grow their businesses. The toolkit features relevant content such as informative white papers, interactive webinars and how-to articles and premium access to educational resources, as well as the opportunity to take advantage of special offers designed specifically for small businesses. To request information on how PR Newswire can help your small business, click here. You can receive updates on new Small Business PR Toolkit content by following @prnsmallbiz on Twitter. About PR Newswire PR Newswire (www.prnewswire.com) is the premier global provider of multimedia platforms that enable marketers, corporate communicators, sustainability officers, public affairs and investor relations officers to leverage content to engage with all their key audiences. Having pioneered the commercial news distribution industry over 60 years ago, PR Newswire today provides end-to-end solutions to produce, optimize and target content -- from rich media to online video to multimedia -- and then distribute content and measure results across traditional, digital, mobile and social channels. Combining the world's largest multi-channel, multi-cultural content distribution and optimization network with comprehensive workflow tools and platforms, PR Newswire enables the world's enterprises to engage opportunity everywhere it exists. PR Newswire serves tens of thousands of clients from offices in the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, and is a UBM plc company. Contact: Amanda Eldridge Director, Strategic Channels +1 201-360-6906 Amanda.eldridge@prnewswire.com Related Links http://www.prnewswire.com SOURCE PR Newswire Association LLC MILAN, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Banzai ends 1Q16 with a GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) up 29% and revenues up 20% GMV up 29.0% YoY in 1Q16 ( Euro 67.0 million vs Euro 51.9 million in 1Q15): +19.7% revenue growth driven by both divisions; +19.6% increase in e-Commerce revenues driven by core categorie s (+21.2% YoY) with a particularly significant performance of E lectronic G oods and D omestic A ppliances at + 27.7% vs 1Q15. +19.8% revenue growth in the Vertical Content area also driven by mobile advertising (AdKaora) ePRICE is launching a range of new customized services for delivery and installation of large domestic appliances . Outlook 2016 reiterated. Today the Board of Directors of Banzai, the first Italian e-Commerce platform and one of the main digital publishers in Italy, listed on the STAR segment of the Italian Stock Exchange, has approved the preliminary revenues as of 31st March 2016. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150720/238307LOGO ) "In the first quarter of 2016, Banzai has continued increasing its market share also through the contribution of the Marketplace," said Pietro Scott Jovane, Chief Executive Officer at Banzai. "The positive trend in the overall spend of our customers (GMV) in the first quarter confirms the leadership of ePRICE in the online market of Electronic Goods and in particular of Major Domestic Appliances in. In 2016 we continue to focus on customer service, as we launch a new range of delivery and installation services enabled by our mobile proprietary ePRICE Home Service platform. Service enhancement is important for our strategy, which is also based on proximity to customers, thanks to our 200 certified professionals, on our network of over 106 Pick&Pay points and 312 automatic lockers, on the Marketplace and on a catalogue with over 1.3 million high-tech products." 1Q16 performance shows a growth in both absolute and relative terms compared with the market. The growing contribution of the Marketplace enabled the group to achieve, in the quarter, a GMV growth of 29.0% YoY, posting 67.0 million euros, up from 51.9 million euro of 2015. Group revenues amounted to 59.5 million euros posting an increase of +19.7% compared with 49.7 million euros in the 1Q15 (and +21.2% growth in the e-Commerce core categories), despite a slightly unfavorable comparison on service revenues compared with the rest of the year, and the slower activity related to the Easter holidays. SOURCE Banzai SpA PARIS, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- New manufacturing plant in Misamis Oriental will serve construction customers in the high growth Mindanao and Visayas regions Bostik, the specialty adhesives business line of Arkema, has expanded its cementitious powder production capacities, based on its world-class Polymer Modified Binder (PMB) technology, with the opening of a new plant in the Philippines. As a leading global adhesive specialist for construction, consumer and industrial markets, Bostik will be able to serve construction customers in the high growth Mindanao and Visayas regions with a new manufacturing plant in Misamis Oriental. (Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160415/355956 ) The facility is Bostik's latest plant opening in South East Asia and will manufacture products including tile adhesives, wall finishing products and other construction systems. Production is based on Bostik's world-class Polymer Modified Binder (PMB) technology which remains a focus of its ongoing innovation, research and development activities. Speaking at an official opening ceremony on 18 March, Bostik's Senior Vice President of Asia, Jeffrey Merkt, said "We are pleased to continue Bostik's expansion in the Philippines with the opening of this new plant. Development in high growth geographic regions is one of the central components of our growth strategy and this new facility will enable us to significantly grow our construction business in this important market." Bostik has been active in the Philippines since 2005. This new facility represents the latest development in its international expansion following recent plant openings in Mexico, the United States, India, Brazil and Malaysia. About Bostik, an Arkema company Bostik is a leading global adhesive specialist in construction, consumer and industrial markets. For more than a century, it has been developing innovative adhesive solutions that are smarter and more adaptive to the forces that shape daily lives. From cradle to grave, from home to office, Bostik's smart adhesives can be found everywhere. With annual sales of 1.6 billion, the company employs 4,800 people and has a presence in more than 50 countries. For the latest information, visit http://www.bostik.com . About Arkema A designer of materials and innovative solutions, Arkema shapes materials and creates new uses that accelerate customer performance. Our balanced business portfolio spans high-performance materials, industrial specialties and coating solutions. Our globally recognized brands are ranked among the leaders in the markets we serve. Reporting annual sales of 7.7 billion in 2015, we employ approximately 19,000 people worldwide and operate in close to 50 countries. We are committed to active engagement with all our stakeholders. Our research centers in North America, France and Asia concentrate on advances in bio-based products, new energies, water management, electronic solutions, lightweight materials and design, home efficiency and insulation. For the latest, visit http://www.arkema.com . SOURCE Bostik DUBAI, UAE, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- - Ethica Institute of Islamic Finance in Dubai launches the ACIFE in Financial Analysis and the ACIFE in Takaful "Comparing An AAOIFI-Compliant Sukuk With A Non AAOIFI- Compliant Sukuk"; "How To Structure Mudarabah Deposit Accounts"; "Profit Calculation Framework For Deposit Products" (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150504/742909 ) Not your average Islamic finance training topics. And certainly not ones weighed down by theory. Ethica Institute of Islamic Finance, the global leader in Islamic finance training and certification, prepares to launch two major advanced certificates to its offering: the Advanced Certified Islamic Finance Executive (ACIFE) in Financial Analysis and the ACIFE in Takaful. The 4-month, 100% online ACIFEs are AAOIFI-compliant and cover the most commonly practiced calculations and Takaful (Islamic insurance) structures used in actual Islamic banks. AAOIFI is the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions, the leading standard-setting body in the Islamic finance industry. "Many countries are now approving Islamic banking licenses. Ethica wanted to respond to the industry's need for a training and certification program that could quickly bring bankers up to speed on more advanced Shariah-compliant practices," said Ethica's spokesperson. The ACIFE in Financial Analysis launches this month and the ACIFE in Takaful launches later in the year. Contact: Sameer Hasan - Tel: +9714-455-8690 - Email: contact@ethicainstitute.com SOURCE Ethica Institute of Islamic Finance DUBLIN, April 22, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Healthcare Integration Market - Global Forecast to 2021" report to their offering. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160330/349511LOGO ) The global healthcare integration market is estimated to reach USD 3.73 Billion by 2021, growing at a CAGR of 10.2% during the forecast period of 2016 to 2021. Growth in this market is majorly driven by factors such as rising healthcare costs, strong government support and initiatives to curtail rising healthcare costs, the growing need to integrate healthcare systems, and efforts from healthcare providers to maximize their returns on investment. However, various interoperability issues, a fragmented end-users market, and the high cost of implementation still remain some of the challenges for greater adoption of integration tools within the healthcare industry, thus restraining the healthcare IT integration market growth. In this report, the healthcare IT integration market is segmented based on solutions, applications, and regions. Based on solutions, the market is segmented into products and services. The healthcare integration products market is further bifurcated into interface/integration engines, medical device integration software, media integration solutions, and other integration tools. On the basis of services, the market is segmented into implementation services, support and maintenance services, and training services. During the forecast period, the interface/integration engines segment will continue to dominate the healthcare IT integration market. By 2021, North America is expected to account for the largest share of the global healthcare IT integration market, followed by Europe, Asia-Pacific, and RoW. However, markets in developed geographies like North America and Europe are expected to grow at lower CAGRs as compared to Asia-Pacific. This is because the Asia-Pacific region is characterized by favorable factors for market growth, such as rising healthcare awareness, presence of less stringent regulations, improving healthcare infrastructure, and increasing demand for quality healthcare at low costs. Key Topics Covered: 1 Introduction 2 Research Methodology 3 Executive Summary 4 Premium Insights 5 Market Overview 6 Industry Insights 7 Global Healthcare It Integration Solutions Market, By Type 8 Healthcare It Integration Market, By Application 9 Global Healthcare It Integration Solutions Market, By Region 10 Competitive Landscape 11 Company Profiles Companies Mentioned: Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, Inc. Cerner Corporation Corepoint Health Epic Systems Corporation Ibm Infor, Inc. Interfaceware Intersystems Corporation Oracle Corporation Orion Health Quality Systems, Inc. Summit Healthcare Services, Inc. For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/bps7k9/healthcare Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager press@researchandmarkets.com For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets SOUTHFIELD, Michigan, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Lear Corporation (NYSE: LEA), a leading global supplier of automotive seating and electrical distribution systems, today held the official opening of its new leather cutting plant in Szolnok, Hungary. Szolnok Mayor Mr. Szalay and Mr. Mihaly Varga Minister of National Economy represented the Government and Lear was represented by Kent Maas (Vice President, Global Manufacturing) and John Staines (European Operations Director). Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110307/DE59731LOGO The new plant was completed in December 2015 and is located in the Szolnok industrial park opposite an existing leather production facility which was built in 2004. The construction of this new facility represents an investment of $20 million Euros and with an area of 16,000 square meters, it doubles the production space available. As part of the Eagle Ottawa division of Lear, it supplies leather parts to many premium automotive manufacturers in Europe. Both plants combined employ over 2,000 people and is the largest private employer in the region. "As the global leader in automotive performance and luxury seating, Lear continues to build upon our unique industry-leading capabilities and emphasis on world-class craftsmanship. With our continued growth, We are pleased to invest and expand our production capacity in Szolnok, Hungary. I would like to thank the people who worked on this complex project. I am very proud of our dedicated team and the support we receive from the local Government and community," said Lear's Ray Scott (Executive Vice President and President, Seating). Created in 1865, the Eagle Ottawa division of Lear has a longstanding heritage of blending traditional craftsmanship and innovative technology. Eagle Ottawa designs, engineers and manufactures genuine leather solutions for all automotive interior applications and vehicle market segments. Eagle Ottawa's leather capabilities include design, research & development, product validation and manufacturing (finishing, cutting and sewing). With the completion in January 2015 of the acquisition of Eagle Ottawa, Lear Corporation is the world's leading supplier of premium automotive leather, with enhanced global seating capabilities in the areas of craftsmanship, design options and overall value. Lear Corporation (NYSE: LEA) is one of the world's leading suppliers of automotive seating and electrical distribution systems. Lear serves every major automaker in the world, and Lear content can be found on more than 350 vehicle nameplates. Lear's world-class products are designed, engineered and manufactured by a diverse team of approximately 136,000 employees located in 36 countries. Lear currently ranks #174 on the Fortune 500. Lear's headquarters are in Southfield, Michigan. Further information about Lear is available at http://www.lear.com. Related Links http://www.lear.com SOURCE Lear Corporation CAPE TOWN, South Africa, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- MiX Telematics, a leading global provider of fleet and mobile asset management solutions, is proud to announce the extension of its MiX Hours of Service Solution - adapted specifically to suit fleet operators aiming to monitor and manage non-regulated driving hours, electronically, and reduce fatigue-related incidents. The solution - which integrates with the company's flagship MiX Fleet Manager and MiX SafeDrive solutions - makes it easy for fleet operators to set their own driving hours rules, measure driving hours activity, intervene when necessary, and report on driving hours. "Managing driving hours means safer drivers - and safer drivers mean better business. This is what it boils down to," says Catherine Lewis, VP of Technology at MiX Telematics. "Operators have their own safety standards and policies to uphold, and reducing fatigue-related incidents should be high on the priority list across all industries. Lowering risk, liability and associated costs is always good for business," adds Lewis. MiX Hours of Service offers comprehensive country and organisation-specific rule-set capability. Other attractive features of the solution include electronic logging, real-time alerts, centralised driver management, log viewing and editing, and an engaging interface. The solution is built primarily for customers who want to prevent driving-related fatigue, and does so without the need for any driver input. However, additional driver-input functionality is available should a fleet manager want to manage working, off-duty/rest hours as well. MiX Telematics has a number of solution adaptations to suit driving hours regulatory and organisational policy compliance in different parts of the world. These include tachograph compatibility in Europe and support for the upcoming ELD legislation in the US. Although, Lewis explains that currently Africa, the Middle East and Asia are focus areas for the extended MiX Hours of Service solution, due to an increasing trend to monitor driving hours in these regions. For more information about MiX Hours of Service, please visit www.mixtelematics.co.za/hours-of-service. About MiX Telematics: MiX Telematics is a leading global provider of fleet and mobile asset management solutions delivered as SaaS to more than 550,000 subscribers in over 120 countries. The company's products and services provide enterprise fleets, small fleets and consumers with solutions for efficiency, safety, compliance and security. MiX Telematics was founded in 1996 and has offices in South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, Uganda, Brazil, Australia and the United Arab Emirates as well as a network of more than 130 fleet partners worldwide. MiX Telematics shares are publicly traded on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE: MIX) and on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: MIXT). For more information, visit: http://www.mixtelematics.com. Contact Information Leanne Jory Marketing Communications Manager MiX Telematics (International) E-mail: leanne.jory@mixtelematics.com Tel: +27 21 880 5601 SOURCE MiX Telematics JAKARTA, Indonesia, SINGAPORE and ISTANBUL, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Telkomsel, the leading operator of cellular telecommunications services in Indonesia, utilized uSONTM, centralized Self-Organizing Networks(SON) solution offered by P.I. Works. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160220/335479LOGO ) P.I. Works technology leading, vendor agnostic, uSONTM product has become the top choice of operators around the world for improving network quality and capacity, along with reducing capital expenditures required for capacity increase of cell sites. The project was performed in Sumatra Island with our Local Partner Telkom Infra, where Telkomsel had been previously conducting "Strategic Optimization". During the trial, a total of 44,000 automated closed-loop actions were performed, and an action has only taken an impressive 8 minutes. 33% improvement was realized in both PS and CS accessibility immediately in Telkomsel network. "We're very impressed with P.I. Works solutions, which brought significant quantifiable improvements to our network, in terms of accessibility and coverage optimization. In particular, we are excited to see how uSONTM can help us defer our CapEx substantially, while reducing our OpEx greatly. We're looking forward to expanding our partnership with P.I. Works" said Mr. Akhmad, General Manager Radio Access Network Quality, Telkomsel. "We have proven one more time how our product, uSONTM, can make the difference in a highly invested and optimized network such as Telkomsel's, and help manage network capacity and coverage challenges most effectively. The results of this trial have shown direct impact of uSONTM in improving subscriber experience" said Tuna Toker, General Manager Asia Pacific, P.I. Works. About Telkomsel PT. Telkomsel is Indonesia's largest mobile operator with more than 140 million subscribers. To serve customers all over Indonesia, including in remote areas, outer islands and border areas. PT. Telkomsel has consistently implemented a technology roadmap of 3G, HSDPA, HSPA +, as well as being the first mobile operator in Indonesia to commercially launch the 4G LTE services. About Telkominfra PT. Telkominfra is a PT. Telkom Indonesia subsidiary company whose main business is in Managed Services and Power solution including submarine optical cable maintenance. The main customer is PT. Telkomsel as trusted/independent partner for Network Performance and Optimization for 2G, 3G & LTE. About P.I. Works P.I. Works is a leading provider in the area of network performance management and SON solutions deployed by 38 operators in 27 countries. Our solutions enable mobile operators to improve their network quality and subscriber experience. P.I. Works is a member of the ETSI, driving standardization process in the 3GPP SON forum. For more information visit http://www.piworks.net/ Media Contacts E-mail: marketing@piworks.net SOURCE P.I. Works PicsArt will use funds to accelerate growth of its creative community with a renewed focus in Japan and China SAN FRANCISCO, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- PicsArt, a leading photo editing, collage and drawing app with a rapidly growing global community of creatives, announced $20 million in new funding today from DCM Ventures and Siguler Guff & Company. The company will use the funds to build new features, continue to grow its thriving community (now approaching 75M monthly active users) and to expand operations in Japan and China. PicsArt is a new kind of mobile creativity app and community that goes beyond traditional 'crop and filter' features by offering professional quality image editing tools so anyone -- from a beginner to an accomplished mobile artist -- can design and create beautiful original art. PicsArt builds on this creativity to connect you with a community of millions of people worldwide -- where you can exchange your images, collaborate with others and find inspiration. "PicsArt is connecting the world with creativity while establishing a new global platform where people can express their creative identity," said Osuke Honda, General Partner at DCM Ventures. "The mobile phone has caught up with desktop, and consumers want and need to be more creative with images on their phones. PicsArt is at the forefront of this huge trend and poised for massive global growth. We look forward to working with them as they continue to expand their presence in Asia, where we have a big footprint, and beyond." "PicsArt is experiencing major user growth in Asia and throughout the world and our plan is to keep that momentum going," said Wilson Kriegel, general manager and Chief Business Development Officer at PicsArt. "Both DCM and Siguler Guff have a big presence in Asia and with their help, we're primed to build the very best creative mobile experience for the PicsArt community in Asia and worldwide." A pioneer in the collaborative editing space, PicsArt has built its service with a focus on community, creativity and content. As a result, the company has grown a global creative community who may have initially joined the platform for the powerful photo editing tools, but have stayed for the opportunity to explore and learn from artists worldwide. The company most recently released its 5.19 feature suite that includes a collage-maker, animated videos and .gifs and photography blending and enhancement tools to master today's latest photography trends. Download PicsArt today on the App Store, Google Play, or Windows. To learn more, go to www.PicsArt.com. About PicsArt PicsArt combines a powerful set of photo editing, collage, and drawing tools with a vibrant artistic community that, together, help you express your creative identity with the world. It's a new kind of mobile creativity experience that combines thousands of image editing tools with a global community where you can exchange your creations and collaborate with others. The company's headquarters is in San Francisco, California and PicsArt now has more than 200 employees. For more, please visit www.picsart.com or download the app from the App Store, Google Play or the Windows Store. James Christopherson VSC for PicsArt VSC (650) 269-8666 james@vscpr.com This release was issued through WebWire(R). For more information, visit http://www.webwire.com. Related Links http://www.PicsArt.com SOURCE PicsArt The organizer posted a record 380,000 entry scans, 216,784 professional visitors and more than 55,000 exhibiting staff to the venue over four days. In preparation of the large concentration of visitors, the city of Shanghai initiated its municipal level security mechanism and increased the frequency of the subway to divert the large crowds and dense traffic to the venue. Hotels were also fully booked in Shanghai during the event period. Only in its second edition, tHIS has already been firmly established as the world's largest health industry event with over 330,000 square meters of exhibition space and 107 individual conferences. Key events include China's three top medical equipment and pharmaceutical exhibitions (CMEF, PHARMCHINA and API China) and the leading healthcare investment forum - Healthcare China 2016. This year's investment forum was co-organised by Reed Sinopharm, JP Morgan Asset management, CICC and Sinopharm Capital and was attended by more than 700 selected investors and institutions. The exhibition featured the entire industry value chain and presented some of the latest cutting edge technology including genetic diagnostics, rehabilitation robotics, wearable tech, 3D printing and more. 6,900 exhibiting companies from 30 countries were at the show presenting tens of thousands of products and services. Well-known healthcare equipment giants like GE, United Imaging, Siemens , Philips and Mindray as well as major pharmaceutical groups in China like Sinopharm, Shanghai Pharma and CR Pharmaceuticals were in attendance with major stand presence. Natural Health and Nutrition Expo were among the fastest growing segments in the portfolio, helped by the expected population boom in light of the reversal of the single child policy as well as a growing health conscious middle class in China. With the start of China's 13th Five-year plan in 2016, the "Health China 2020" program focusing on the co-development of healthcare, pharmaceutical production and health insurance has put the health industry among the top priorities for development in China and part of the national strategy. Companies in China not traditionally associated with healthcare have also shifted major investment and resources into the sector, many renaming their company in the process to reflect this focus in industry coverage. International giants with the likes Alibaba, Lenovo, Fosun and Wanda Group have all taken a foothold into key segments of the industry in anticipation of major opportunities in the future. The Health Industry Summit is organized by Reed Sinopharm, a joint venture between the world's leading event organizer Reed Exhibitions and China's leading state-owned pharmaceutical group Sinopharm. Its next edition will be held in May 2017 in Shanghai. SOURCE Reed Sinopharm Exhibitions AMSTERDAM, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Inspiring Fifty announced their nominations on April 15th 2016, and Savision is proud to announce that Savision CEO Diana Krieger has been nominated. This is the second time Diana has been nominated for this award. Inspiring Fifty is a pan-European program that identifies, encourages, develops and showcases women in leadership positions in the technology sector. Many high profile women in tech are already known worldwide, like Vice-President of the European Commission Neelie Kroes, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer. "I am honored to be recognized with this nomination in the technology industry - and as importantly - next to so many other inspirational women," says Diana. "At Savision, our Management Team consists of five experts of which two are also inspiring women with a strong track record in several markets; CSO Stefanie Richheimer and CFO Denise Riedstra" With a background in a variety of industries including Monster Worldwide and TDC Lighthouse Internet, Diana earned a degree in Business Economics and is a certified Marketer (NIMA C). She defines, implements and executes Savision's growth acceleration strategy. "It is an exciting time at Savision and 2016 is a strategic one in terms of product innovation and market expansion," adds Diana. Savision recently launched Live Maps v8 to connect IT and the business so all stakeholders can speak the same language. The market leader of IT Operations Intelligence and Business Service Management solutions offers additional at-a-glance insights and impact analysis to predict how your various services will be affected by IT incidents. "We are working hard to innovate and will soon launch a new, disruptive multi-platform Business Service Intelligence solution which will open up the total IT operations market for Savision," says Diana. It will let organizations aggregate data from their ITSM and multiple monitoring systems, analyze data and provide you with a holistic view for your IT, help desk and business teams so they can solve problems faster and predict outages. The first launch will support Microsoft System Center, Nagios, SolarWinds, Microsoft Azure and ServiceNow. "As I become immersed in all our exciting new initiatives, it gives me added energy to be recognized in the tech industry," says Diana. "I hope that many other women will join this exciting field and enjoy it as much as I do." About Savision Savision is the market leader in Business Service Intelligence solutions. We provide your IT, help desk and business teams the service intelligence they need allowing them to become business partners. With our solutions you can prevent problems and reduce downtime. Since our start in 2006 in the Netherlands, we have helped over 800 customers optimize their IT service delivery. This includes clients from the public sector to Fortune 500 companies worldwide. Media Contacts Contact person: Isidora Katanic Telephone: +31 (0) 20 2170 792 Email: isidora.katanic@savision.com http://www.savision.com/press-room SOURCE Savision Country Afghanistan Albania, People's Socialist Republic of Algeria, People's Democratic Republic of American Samoa Andorra, Principality of Angola, Republic of Anguilla Antarctica (the territory South of 60 deg S) Antigua and Barbuda Argentina, Argentine Republic Armenia Aruba Australia, Commonwealth of Austria, Republic of Azerbaijan, Republic of Bahamas, Commonwealth of the Bahrain, Kingdom of Bangladesh, People's Republic of Barbados Belarus Belgium, Kingdom of Belize Benin, People's Republic of Bermuda Bhutan, Kingdom of Bolivia, Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana, Republic of Bouvet Island (Bouvetoya) Brazil, Federative Republic of British Indian Ocean Territory (Chagos Archipelago) British Virgin Islands Brunei Darussalam Bulgaria, People's Republic of Burkina Faso Burundi, Republic of Cambodia, Kingdom of 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Rwandese Republic Samoa, Independent State of San Marino, Republic of Sao Tome and Principe, Democratic Republic of Saudi Arabia, Kingdom of Senegal, Republic of Serbia and Montenegro Seychelles, Republic of Sierra Leone, Republic of Singapore, Republic of Slovakia (Slovak Republic) Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia, Somali Republic South Africa, Republic of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands Spain, Spanish State Sri Lanka, Democratic Socialist Republic of St. Helena St. Kitts and Nevis St. Lucia St. Pierre and Miquelon St. Vincent and the Grenadines Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Suriname, Republic of Svalbard & Jan Mayen Islands Swaziland, Kingdom of Sweden, Kingdom of Switzerland, Swiss Confederation Syrian Arab Republic Taiwan, Province of China Tajikistan Tanzania, United Republic of Thailand, Kingdom of Timor-Leste, Democratic Republic of Togo, Togolese Republic Tokelau (Tokelau Islands) Tonga, Kingdom of Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Tunisia, Republic of Turkey, Republic of Turkmenistan Turks and Caicos Islands Tuvalu US Virgin Islands Uganda, Republic of Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom of Great Britain & N. Ireland United States Minor Outlying Islands United States of America Uruguay, Eastern Republic of Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of Viet Nam, Socialist Republic of Wallis and Futuna Islands Western Sahara Yemen Zambia, Republic of Zimbabwe First and only peripheral deploy venous stent system for accuracy in landing peripheral stents in patients suffering from Post Thrombotic Syndrome associated with venous outflow obstruction FREMONT, California and ST. LOUIS, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- VENITI, Inc., the leader in the advancement of treatment for venous disease, announced today the successful treatment of the first patient suffering from Post Thrombotic Syndrome associated with venous outflow obstruction with the VICI VERTO VENOUS STENT System. This innovative stent delivery system allows the physician to deploy a venous stent beginning at the peripheral end of the common femoral vein. The stent system received CE Marking on April 1, 2016. The announcement comes ahead of next week's Charing Cross Symposium in London UK, where the company will preview the product, along with the already-released VICI VENOUS STENT. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160421/358440LOGO "Frequently, in patients with extensive venous outflow obstruction causing Post Thrombotic Syndrome, it is necessary to extend the stents below the inguinal ligament to cover the entirety of the common femoral vein. In these cases, accurate stent placement is essential to maintain inflow to the stent system from both the profunda and femoral veins," said Mr. Stephen Black, Consultant Vascular Surgeon, Guy's and St. Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, London U.K., who performed the procedure. "It is encouraging to see the team at VENITI and others in industry working with physicians to develop new products like the VICI VERTO VENOUS STENT which address the specific needs of the physicians treating venous disease." Post Thrombotic Syndrome is a complication of deep vein thrombosis, which affects more than 1.4 MM people across the United States and Western Europe each year1. It is estimated that 20-50% of the people who have had a deep vein thrombosis will develop Post Thrombotic Syndrome2. Post Thrombotic Syndrome can have devastating, long-term consequences affecting the quality of life for the thousands of people who suffer from the condition. Symptoms include progressive leg pain and swelling, leg heaviness and skin changes. Physicians treat the obstructive component of Post Thrombotic Syndrome through minimally-invasive endovascular stenting procedures. The VIRTUS Trial is being performed under a U.S. Food and Drug Administration Investigational Device Exemption to evaluate the safety and efficacy of the VICI VENOUS STENT for the treatment of chronic iliofemoral venous outflow obstruction. "Completing our first case of the novel VICI VERTO VENOUS STENT System by Mr. Black is a very significant milestone for VENITI. This new concept, which is used to deliver and implant the VICI VENOUS STENT, is designed for accurate deployment at the lower or peripheral iliofemoral vein landing zones and is the first of its kind in our field," said Jeff Elkins, President and CEO of VENITI, Inc. "This technology represents a major step in advancing treatment options for vascular interventionalists who address the tremendous problem of venous outflow obstruction relating to Post Thrombotic Syndrome and highlights our dedication to advancing the treatment of venous disease overall." About VENITI, Inc. VENITI, Inc. is dedicated to advancing the treatment of venous disease through clinical research and innovative technology and solutions. VENITI partners with leading physicians in the development and training for therapies to care for the millions of patients suffering from venous disease. The VICI VENOUS STENT and VICI VERTO VENOUS STENT were developed specifically for the challenges of treating iliofemoral venous outflow obstruction. VENITI was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in St. Louis, MO, with technical operations in Fremont, CA. The VICI VENOUS STENT and VICI VERTO VENOUS STENT are CE marked under the European Medical Devices Directive (93/42/EEC) and commercially available in Europe. The VICI VENOUS STENT is approved by the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration and commercially available in Australia. CAUTION: Investigational device. Limited by United States law to investigational use. The VICI VERTO VENOUS STENT is not approved for sale in the United States. VENITI and VICI VENOUS STENT are registered trademarks of VENITI, Inc. VICI VERTO VENOUS STENT is a trademark of VENITI, Inc. 2016 VENITI, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Produced in the U.S. Learn more about VENITI and its products at www.veniti.com Roumen-Klappe EM, den Heijer M, Janssen MC, et al. The post-thrombotic syndrome: incidence and prognostic value of non-invasive venous examinations in a six-year follow-up study. Thromb Haemost. Oct 2005 ;94(4):825-830. Baldwin MJ, Moore HM, Rudarakanchana N, et al. Post-thrombotic syndrome: a clinical review. J Thromb Haemost. May 2013 ;11(5):795-805. Investor Contact: Jeff Elkins +1 (408) 464-2789 jelkins@veniti.com Media Contact: Rodney Marcy +1 (303) 885-7546 rmarcy@veniti.com MKT-099 Related Links http://www.veniti.com SOURCE VENITI, Inc. BANGALORE, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Infosys to Manage the Procurement and Delivery of all ICT Services for the Fourth-largest Company in Wales, Covering Everything From Data Centers to Telephony Infosys (NYSE: INFY), a global leader in consulting, technology, outsourcing and next-generation services, today announced it has been selected by Welsh Water to manage substantial elements of its IT estate in a transformative deal lasting up to 10 years, one of the largest IT deals in the UK water utility sector. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130122/589162) The deal will see Infosys take responsibility for setup, migration and execution of data center facilities and services, managing critical network links and business applications, server and storage management, together with transforming and managing internal network communications and IP telephony services and infrastructure. The deal extends beyond running core IT infrastructure to include managing essential projects in the IT ecosystem including virtualization, operating system strategy, database platforms and more. Infosys will partner with Vodafone to deliver communications services over the infrastructure being managed. Welsh Water is the sixth-largest of the 10 water and sewerage companies in England and Wales, serving 1.4 million homes and businesses, three million people and supplying 828 million litres of water every day. Today, it is the fourth largest company in Wales. Central to Infosys being selected to undertake IT services for Welsh Water was its AiKiDo next generation services framework. AiKiDo is designed to help clients address three key aspects of their business: a non-disruptive renewal and simplification of their existing IT landscapes; introduction of new IT offerings and business models in a dynamic business environment; and creating a culture of IT innovation in their organizations. All three aspects are key to Welsh Water's growth and transformation plans, that have seen it invest 1.5 billion in the last five years alone. Welsh Water also visited Infosys' utility customers and the heart of its operations so they could see first-hand how Design Thinking works, and to become more integrated with the company as a trusted partner. The selection of Infosys follows an intensive two-year competitive tendering process and builds on Welsh Water's 15-year heritage of external IT provision and management that has allowed the company to focus on its core operations of water delivery, safety, sewage provision and water infrastructure management. Quotes: Rajesh K. Murthy, Executive Vice President and Global Head of Energy, Communications and Services, Infosys "Ensuring near 100% uptime, quality of service and product requires extensive infrastructure and trusted partners such as Infosys that understand and have a track record of supporting utility providers in delivering unwavering dependability. Infosys will support Welsh Water's day-to-day operations and deliver business change through technology innovation and best-of-breed services. This will allow Welsh Water to concentrate on maintaining and delivering front line service to the people of Wales." About Infosys Ltd Infosys is a global leader in consulting, technology, outsourcing and next-generation services. We enable clients, in more than 50 countries, to stay a step ahead of emerging business trends and outperform the competition. We help them transform and thrive in a changing world by co-creating breakthrough solutions that combine strategic insights and execution excellence. Visit http://www.infosys.com to see how Infosys (NYSE: INFY), with US$ 9.5 billion in LTM revenues and 194,000+ employees, is helping enterprises renew themselves while also creating new avenues to generate value. Safe Harbor Certain statements in this press release concerning our future growth prospects are forward-looking statements regarding our future business expectations intended to qualify for the 'safe harbor' under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding fluctuations in earnings, fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, our ability to manage growth, intense competition in IT services including those factors which may affect our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, time and cost overruns on fixed-price, fixed-time frame contracts, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, industry segment concentration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks or system failures, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which Infosys has made strategic investments, withdrawal or expiration of governmental fiscal incentives, political instability and regional conflicts, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, and unauthorized use of our intellectual property and general economic conditions affecting our industry. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our United States Securities and Exchange Commission filings including our Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2015. These filings are available at http://www.sec.gov. Infosys may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. In addition, please note that the date of this press release is April 15, 2016, and any forward-looking statements contained herein are based on assumptions that we believe to be reasonable as of this date. The company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that may be made from time to time by or on behalf of the company unless it is required by law. SOURCE Infosys ALBERT LEA, Minn., April 20, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Named 2016 Retirement Plan Adviser Mega Team of the Year by PLANSPONSOR, ABGFS provides retirement consulting services to companies and individuals throughout the Midwest. Their team resides in three separate locations - Albert Lea, MN (Headquarters); Eden Prairie, MN; and Leawood, KS. Every service ABGFS provides to their clients is designed with one overarching goal in mind helping the American worker achieve a sustainable financial future. ABGFS supports clients in achieving this goal by designing innovative and customized solutions that help participants be both financially fit today, and retirement-ready tomorrow. "Helping participants achieve a sustainable retirement must go beyond the traditional means many plan sponsors, providers and consultants have attempted. A successful strategy must encompass overall financial wellness along with an understanding of behavioral science in order to achieve real and measurable positive actions by plan participants," explains Brad Arends, CEO of ABGFS. Since its launch in 2005, the PLANSPONSOR Retirement Plan Adviser of the Year award has grown and now includes four winners across four categories (individual, small team, large team and mega team) who have demonstrated leadership and a commitment to excellence for their retirement plan sponsor clients and participants. ABGFS was awarded Adviser Mega Team of the Year for their employment of industry best practices across a number of areas, including the implementation of auto enrollment, auto escalation, entire plan re-enrollment, a commitment to financial wellness, and most importantly with robust onsite education and advice offered to plan participant on a one-on-one basis. "The dedication of our clients to their employees is what truly enabled this achievement. Our commitment has been, and will continue to be to help our clients protect and care for their most valuable asset their employees," stated Grant Arends, President Consulting Services of ABGFS. This is the third consecutive national award for ABGFS and their retirement practice. In 2014, Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. ("Schwab") presented the firm with the inaugural Best-in-Retirement Business Impact Award as part of Schwab's annual IMPACT Awards program. Following that honor, Fidelity Clearing & Custody, the division of Fidelity providing clearing and custody to RIAs, retirement recordkeepers, broker-dealer firms, banks and insurance companies, awarded ABGFS as winner of the inaugural 2015 Be Greater Awards which recognize RIAs and retirement advisors or recordkeepers that are taking their practices to the next level. About Alliance Benefit Group Financial Services, Corp. Alliance Benefit Group Financial Services, Corp. (ABGFS) is a privately owned full-service employee benefits consulting firm. ABG Investment Services, Inc. is an affiliate investment advisory firm. Offices for both entities are located in Albert Lea, MN (HQ); Eden Prairie, MN; and Leawood, KS. ABGFS works closely with plan sponsor clients to design effective retirement plans and employee education campaigns, using unique decision-support tools to help enhance the retirement readiness of all participants. With more than $2.6 billion in assets under advisement, the company has approximately 30 employees who serve more than 200 corporate clients and 36,000 plan participants. In addition to retirement plan services, the firm provides Group Insurance and Individual Wealth Management Services for their clientele. About PLANSPONSOR Plan Adviser of the Year Award PLANSPONSOR launched the award in 2005 and has grown to now include 20 practices: 16 finalists and four winners across four categories (individual, small team, large team and mega team). Judges look for advisory practices that employ industry best practices across a number of areas, including the implementation of auto enrollment, auto escalation and reenrollment, especially at higher levels than the industry norms. Advisers that are successful in the award program need to demonstrate a commitment to outcomes-based measurement and encourage plan sponsor clients to create plans not that are just in the best interest of the company but are in the best interest of participants. Securities offered through Investors Capital Corp. Member FINRA/SIPC. Investment advice offered through ABG Investment Services, Inc. ("ABGIS"), a registered investment advisor and separate entity from Investors Capital Corp. This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. For more info visit: http://www.newswire.com SOURCE Alliance Benefit Group WEST LONG BRANCH, N.J., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The ACLU of New Jersey and Eric D. Sherman, a partner with New York-based law firm Pryor Cashman, have teamed up to defend the rights of a man who was ticketed under an unconstitutional West Long Branch ordinance for flying flags supporting Donald Trump. Joseph Hornick was cited under a policy that forbids the display of political signs until 30 days before an election. Hornick's flags read, "Trump Make America Great Again!" "I am a proud, passionate Donald Trump supporter, and I would be willing to pay any fine in exchange for my free speech, or even serve jail time if it comes to that but as an American, I shouldn't have to pay that kind of price for expressing my beliefs," said Joseph Hornick, a longtime West Long Branch resident. "I shouldn't be punished for exercising my constitutional right to free speech. I'm not breaking the law by flying my Trump flags; rather, the borough is breaking the law by having this unconstitutional ordinance on the books." "My Trump flags are not coming down. And now, I'm even more determined to keep them flying," Hornick added. West Long Branch, in Monmouth County, first ticketed Hornick on March 25 for flying his Trump flags after Hornick had communicated with the police department about theft and vandalism of his banners. When police officers arrived, they cited Hornick under an ordinance restricting when political signs can be displayed. Generally, the First Amendment does not allow blanket bans on certain types of speech, even for limited durations, especially when it's based on content. "There's no ordinance that can overrule the Constitution," said ACLU-NJ Deputy Legal Director Jeanne LoCicero. "It doesn't matter whether it's a lawn sign or a flag you have the right to express your political beliefs every day of the year, no matter how close it is to Election Day. West Long Branch needs to realize that unless it takes this policy off the books, it's violating the Constitution." New Jersey holds its primary election for the presidential nomination on June 7, which means that West Long Branch's unconstitutional policy would ban the display of political signs until May 9. Violating the ordinance, according to the town, could carry a $2,000 fine or 90 days in jail. "Joe Hornick has every right to fly his Trump flags, and West Long Branch has every responsibility to let him," said attorney Eric D. Sherman, who represents Hornick. "We should not let stand those laws that restrict free speech, especially political speech in an election year. Such laws violate the Constitution and offend our notions of what it means to be an American." Hornick has a municipal court appearance that is now scheduled for May 18. "Year after year, we are informed of unlawful sign restrictions, and we need to threaten suit to get towns to act," said ACLU-NJ Legal Director Ed Barocas. "Towns throughout New Jersey need to review their sign ordinances to make sure they don't include unlawful restrictions. It is time to make our ordinances constitutional again." The ACLU-NJ has successfully challenged restrictions on the timing of political signs in the past, including through the representation of a Ron Paul supporter who was prohibited from displaying his sign by the Borough of Hawthorne, in Bergen County, in 2008. Visit the ACLU-NJ website to read more about previous sign-restriction advocacy in Hawthorne (Bergen County), Shrewsbury (Monmouth County), and Wyckoff (Bergen County). Media Contact: Allison Peltzman, ACLU-NJ Acting Communications Director, 973-854-1711 Michelle Samuels, [email protected], 917-975-1280 SOURCE Pryor Cashman LLP Related Links http://www.pryorcashman.com SEATTLE, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Financial Highlights: Reported record first quarter net income, excluding special items, of $183 million , a 23% increase over the first quarter of 2015. Adjusted diluted earnings per share of $1.45 was a 29% increase over the first quarter of 2015. This quarter's results exceed First Call analyst consensus estimate of $1.42 per share. , a 23% increase over the first quarter of 2015. Adjusted diluted earnings per share of was a 29% increase over the first quarter of 2015. This quarter's results exceed First Call analyst consensus estimate of per share. Reported net income for the first quarter under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) of $184 million or $1.46 per diluted share, compared to net income of $149 million , or $1.12 per diluted share in 2015. or per diluted share, compared to net income of , or per diluted share in 2015. Paid $0.275 per-share quarterly cash dividend in the first quarter, a 38% increase over the dividend paid in the first quarter of 2015. per-share quarterly cash dividend in the first quarter, a 38% increase over the dividend paid in the first quarter of 2015. Repurchased 1.7 million shares of common stock for an average price of $74 during the first quarter of 2016 for $127 million . during the first quarter of 2016 for . Generated approximately $530 million of operating cash flow and $410 million of free cash flow in the first quarter of 2016. of operating cash flow and of free cash flow in the first quarter of 2016. Grew passenger revenues by 4% compared to the first quarter of 2015. Achieved return on invested capital of 25.6% for the twelve-month period ending March 31, 2016 , compared to 20.1% for the twelve-month period ending March 31, 2015 . , compared to 20.1% for the twelve-month period ending . Lowered adjusted debt-to-capitalization ratio to 26% as of March 31, 2016 . . Held $1.6 billion in unrestricted cash and marketable securities as of March 31, 2016 . in unrestricted cash and marketable securities as of . Placed an order on April 12, 2016 , for 30 Embraer E175s with the option to purchase an additional 33 E175s. The E175s will be flown by Horizon Air beginning in 2017. Planned Acquisition of Virgin America: Announced an agreement on April 4, 2016 , to acquire the outstanding common stock of Virgin America, Inc. (Virgin America) for $2.6 billion in cash. The transaction is expected to close late this year or early 2017, pending Virgin America shareholder and regulatory approval. Operational Highlights: Held the No. 1 spot in U.S. Department of Transportation on-time performance among the six largest U.S. airlines for the 12-months ended February 2016 . . Recognized by Air Transport World as the Airline Market Leader for strong financial performance and outstanding customer service. Increased Visa Signature affinity cardholders by 12% compared to the prior year. Began offering Mileage Plan members the ability to redeem award miles for flights with Hainan Airlines. Announced the formation of McGee Air Services, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alaska Airlines, which will provide ground handling, aircraft cleaning and airport mobility services. New routes launched and announced in the first quarter are as follows: New Non-Stop Routes Launched in Q1 New Non-Stop Routes Announced (Launch Dates) Reno, Nevada to Orange County, California San Diego, California to San Jose, California (6/8/16) Orange County, California to Santa Rosa, California Bellingham, Washington to Kona, Hawaii (11/12/16) Alaska Air Group, Inc., (NYSE: ALK) today reported first quarter 2016 GAAP net income of $184 million, or $1.46 per diluted share, compared to $149 million, or $1.12 per diluted share in the first quarter of 2015. Excluding the impact of mark-to-market fuel hedge adjustments, the company reported record adjusted net income of $183 million, or $1.45 per diluted share, compared to adjusted net income of $149 million, or $1.12 per diluted share, in 2015. "We are proud to report record first quarter results," said CEO Brad Tilden. "These results are due to the efforts of employees at Alaska and Horizon who share a common sense of mission and a focus on low fares, operational reliability, and delivering a level of genuine and caring service that sets us apart. We see many of these same qualities in Virgin America, and we're very excited about our proposed combination. We are looking forward to the integration process and are confident that our team has what it takes to build the premier airline for people living on the West Coast." The following table reconciles the company's reported GAAP net income and earnings per diluted share (Diluted EPS) during the first quarters of 2016 and 2015 to adjusted amounts: Three Months Ended March 31, 2016 2015 (in millions, except per-share amounts) Dollars Diluted EPS Dollars Diluted EPS Reported GAAP net income $ 184 $ 1.46 $ 149 $ 1.12 Mark-to-market fuel hedge adjustments, net of tax (1) (0.01) Non-GAAP adjusted income and per-share amounts $ 183 $ 1.45 $ 149 $ 1.12 Statistical data, as well as a reconciliation of the reported non-GAAP financial measures, can be found in the accompanying tables. A glossary of financial terms can be found on the last page of this release. A conference call regarding the first quarter results will be simulcast via the Internet at 8:30 a.m. Pacific time on April 21, 2016. It can be accessed through the company's website at www.alaskaair.com/investors. For those unable to listen to the live broadcast, a replay will be available after the conclusion of the call. Additional Information About the Merger and Where to Find It This communication may be deemed to be solicitation material in respect of the merger of Virgin America, Inc. (" Virgin America ") with a wholly owned subsidiary of Alaska Air Group. Virgin America intends to file relevant materials with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the " SEC "), including a proxy statement in preliminary and definitive form, in connection with the solicitation of proxies for the merger. The definitive proxy statement will contain important information about the proposed merger and related matters. BEFORE MAKING A VOTING DECISION, STOCKHOLDERS OF VIRGIN AMERICA ARE URGED TO READ THE DEFINITIVE PROXY STATEMENT AND OTHER RELEVANT MATERIALS CAREFULLY AND IN THEIR ENTIRETY WHEN THEY BECOME AVAILABLE BECAUSE THEY WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT VIRGIN AMERICA AND THE MERGER. Stockholders will be able to obtain copies of the proxy statement and other relevant materials (when they become available) and any other documents filed by Virgin America with the SEC for no charge at the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. In addition, stockholders will be able to obtain free copies of the proxy statement from Virgin America by contacting Virgin America's Investor Relations Department by telephone at (650) 762-7000, by mail to Virgin America Inc., Attention: Investor Relations Department, 555 Airport Boulevard, Burlingame, California 94010, or by going to Virgin America's Investor Relations page on its corporate website at http://ir.virginamerica.com. Participants in the Solicitation Alaska Air Group, Virgin America and certain of their respective directors, executive officers and other employees may be deemed to be participants in the solicitation of proxies from Virgin America's stockholders in respect of the merger. Information concerning the ownership of Virgin America securities by Virgin America's directors and executive officers is included in their SEC filings on Forms 3, 4, and 5, and additional information about Virgin America's directors and executive officers is also available in Virgin America's proxy statement for its 2016 annual meeting of stockholders filed with the SEC on March 25, 2016, and is supplemented by other public filings made, and to be made, with the SEC by Virgin America. Information concerning Alaska Air Group's directors and executive officers is available in Alaska Air Group's proxy statement for its 2016 annual meeting of stockholders filed with the SEC on April 1, 2016. Other information regarding persons who may be deemed participants in the proxy solicitation, including their respective interests by security holdings or otherwise, will be set forth in the definitive proxy statement that Virgin America intends to file with the SEC. These documents can be obtained free of charge from the sources indicated above. Forward-Looking Statements This communication contains forward-looking statements, within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. These statements relate to future events, Alaska Air Group and the proposed merger of Virgin America with a wholly owned subsidiary of Alaska Air Group. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts. These statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "believe," " expect," "may," "likely," "should," "project," "could," "plan," "goal," "potential," "pro forma," "seek," "estimate," "intend" or "anticipate" or the negative thereof or comparable terminology, and include discussions of strategy, financial projections, guidance and estimates (including their underlying assumptions), statements regarding plans, objectives, expectations or consequences of announced transactions, and statements about the future performance, operations and services of Alaska Air Group. Alaska Air Group cautions readers not to place undue reliance on these statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties. Consequently, actual results and experience may materially differ from those contained in any forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include the following: the failure to obtain Virgin America stockholder approval of the proposed merger; the possibility that the closing conditions to the proposed merger may not be satisfied or waived, including that a governmental entity may prohibit, delay or refuse to grant a necessary regulatory approval; delay in closing the merger or the possibility of non-consummation of the merger; the occurrence of any event that could give rise to termination of the merger agreement; the risk that stockholder litigation in connection with the contemplated merger may affect the timing or occurrence of the contemplated merger or result in significant costs of defense, indemnification and liability; risks inherent in the achievement of anticipated synergies and the timing thereof; risks related to the disruption of the merger to Virgin America and its management; the effect of the announcement of the merger on Virgin America's ability to retain and hire key personnel and maintain relationships with suppliers and other third parties; labor costs and relations; general economic conditions; increases in operating costs including fuel; competition; inability to meet cost reduction goals; seasonal fluctuations in our financial results; an aircraft accident; and changes in laws and regulations. These risks and others relating to Alaska Air Group are described in greater detail in Alaska Air Group's SEC filings, including Alaska Air Group's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended Dec. 31, 2015, as well as in other documents filed by Alaska Air Group with the SEC after the date thereof. Alaska Air Group makes no commitment to revise or update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect events or circumstances occurring or existing after the date any forward-looking statement is made. Alaska Airlines, a subsidiary of Alaska Air Group (NYSE: ALK), together with its partner regional airlines, serves nearly 100 cities through an expansive network in the United States, Canada and Mexico. For reservations, visit https://www.alaskaair.com. For more news and information, visit the Alaska Airlines Newsroom at www.alaskaair.com/newsroom. CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF OPERATIONS (unaudited) Alaska Air Group, Inc. Three Months Ended March 31, (in millions, except per-share amounts) 2016 2015 Change Operating Revenues: Passenger Mainline $ 927 $ 901 3 % Regional 206 186 11 % Total passenger revenue 1,133 1,087 4 % Freight and mail 24 23 4 % Other - net 190 159 19 % Total Operating Revenues 1,347 1,269 6 % Operating Expenses: Wages and benefits 336 306 10 % Variable incentive pay 32 26 23 % Aircraft fuel, including hedging gains and losses 167 235 (29) % Aircraft maintenance 68 63 8 % Aircraft rent 29 26 12 % Landing fees and other rentals 80 71 13 % Contracted services 60 52 15 % Selling expenses 49 53 (8) % Depreciation and amortization 88 76 16 % Food and beverage service 31 25 24 % Other 94 83 13 % Third-party regional carrier expense 23 15 53 % Total Operating Expenses 1,057 1,031 3 % Operating Income 290 238 22 % Nonoperating Income (Expense): Interest income 6 5 Interest expense (13) (11) Interest capitalized 8 8 Other - net 1 Total Nonoperating Income (Expense) 2 2 Income Before Income Tax 292 240 Income tax expense 108 91 Net Income $ 184 $ 149 Basic Earnings Per Share: $ 1.47 $ 1.13 Diluted Earnings Per Share: $ 1.46 $ 1.12 Shares Used for Computation: Basic 124.550 131.120 Diluted 125.328 132.230 Cash dividend declared per share: $ 0.275 $ 0.20 CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS (unaudited) Alaska Air Group, Inc. (in millions) March 31, 2016 December 31, 2015 Cash and marketable securities $ 1,564 $ 1,328 Total current assets 1,923 1,663 Property and equipment-net 4,830 4,802 Other assets 76 65 Total assets 6,829 6,530 Air traffic liability 868 669 Current portion of long-term debt 116 114 Other current liabilities 1,085 1,022 Current liabilities 2,069 1,805 Long-term debt 531 569 Other liabilities and credits 1,774 1,745 Shareholders' equity 2,455 2,411 Total liabilities and shareholders' equity $ 6,829 $ 6,530 Debt-to-capitalization ratio, adjusted for operating leases(a) 26%:74% 27%:73% Number of common shares outstanding 123.913 125.175 (a) Calculated using the present value of remaining aircraft lease payments. OPERATING STATISTICS SUMMARY (unaudited) Alaska Air Group, Inc. Three Months Ended March 31, 2016 2015 Change Consolidated Operating Statistics:(a) Revenue passengers (000) 7,835 7,316 7.1% RPMs (000,000) "traffic" 8,571 7,723 11.0% ASMs (000,000) "capacity" 10,453 9,257 12.9% Load factor 82.0% 83.4% (1.4)pts Yield 13.22 14.08 (6.1)% PRASM 10.84 11.74 (7.7)% RASM 12.88 13.71 (6.1)% CASM excluding fuel(b) 8.51 8.61 (1.2)% Economic fuel cost per gallon(b) $1.29 $1.98 (34.8)% Fuel gallons (000,000) 132 119 10.9% ASM's per gallon 79.2 77.8 1.8% Average number of full-time equivalent employees (FTE) 14,357 13,274 8.2% Mainline Operating Statistics: Revenue passengers (000) 5,642 5,236 7.8% RPMs (000,000) "traffic" 7,716 6,994 10.3% ASMs (000,000) "capacity" 9,354 8,347 12.1% Load factor 82.5% 83.8% (1.3)pts Yield 12.01 12.88 (6.8)% PRASM 9.91 10.79 (8.2)% RASM 11.99 12.75 (6.0)% CASM excluding fuel(b) 7.49 7.66 (2.2)% Economic fuel cost per gallon(b) $1.28 $1.97 (35.0)% Fuel gallons (000,000) 113 103 9.7% ASM's per gallon 82.8 81.0 2.2% Average number of FTE's 11,123 10,380 7.2% Aircraft utilization 10.6 10.6 % Average aircraft stage length 1,237 1,199 3.2% Operating fleet 152 137 15 a/c Regional Operating Statistics:(c) Revenue passengers (000) 2,192 2,080 5.4% RPMs (000,000) "traffic" 855 728 17.4% ASMs (000,000) "capacity" 1,100 910 20.9% Load factor 77.7% 80.0% (2.3)pts Yield 24.09 25.58 (5.8)% PRASM 18.72 20.46 (8.5)% Operating fleet 67 60 7 a/c (a) Except for full-time equivalent employees, data includes information related to third-party regional capacity purchase flying arrangements. (b) See a reconciliation of operating expenses excluding fuel, a reconciliation of economic fuel costs, and Note A in the accompanying pages, for a discussion of why these measures may be important to investors. (c) Data presented includes information related to flights operated by Horizon Air and third-party carriers. OPERATING SEGMENTS (unaudited) Alaska Air Group, Inc. Three Months Ended March 31, 2016 Alaska (in millions) Mainline Regional Horizon Consolidating Air Group Adjusted(a) Special Items(b) Consolidated Operating revenues Passenger Mainline $ 927 $ $ $ $ 927 $ $ 927 Regional 206 206 206 Total passenger revenues 927 206 1,133 1,133 CPA revenues 103 (103) Freight and mail 23 1 24 24 Other-net 172 17 1 190 190 Total operating revenues 1,122 224 104 (103) 1,347 1,347 Operating expenses Operating expenses, excluding fuel 701 186 105 (102) 890 890 Economic fuel 144 25 169 (2) 167 Total operating expenses 845 211 105 (102) 1,059 (2) 1,057 Nonoperating income (expense) Interest income 6 6 6 Interest expense (12) (1) (13) (13) Other 7 2 9 9 Total Nonoperating income (expense) 1 (1) 2 2 2 Income (loss) before income tax $ 278 $ 13 $ (2) $ 1 $ 290 $ 2 $ 292 Three Months Ended March 31, 2015 Alaska (in millions) Mainline Regional Horizon Consolidating Air Group Adjusted(a) Special Items(b) Consolidated Operating revenues Passenger Mainline $ 901 $ $ $ $ 901 $ $ 901 Regional 186 186 186 Total passenger revenues 901 186 1,087 1,087 CPA revenues 99 (99) Freight and mail 22 1 23 23 Other-net 142 16 1 159 159 Total operating revenues 1,065 203 100 (99) 1,269 1,269 Operating expenses Operating expenses, excluding fuel 639 164 91 (98) 796 796 Economic fuel 203 32 235 235 Total operating expenses 842 196 91 (98) 1,031 1,031 Nonoperating income (expense) Interest income 5 5 5 Interest expense (7) (4) (11) (11) Other 7 1 8 8 Total Nonoperating income (expense) 5 (3) 2 2 Income (loss) before income tax $ 228 $ 7 $ 6 $ (1) $ 240 $ $ 240 (a) The adjusted column represents the financial information that is reviewed by management to assess performance of operations and determine capital allocations and does not include certain charges. See Note A in the accompanying pages for further information. (b) Includes mark-to-market fuel-hedge accounting adjustments. Alaska Air Group, Inc. CASM EXCLUDING FUEL RECONCILIATION (unaudited) Three Months Ended March 31, (in cents) 2016 2015 Consolidated: CASM 10.11 11.14 Less the following components: Aircraft fuel, including hedging gains and losses 1.60 2.53 CASM excluding fuel 8.51 8.61 Mainline: CASM 9.01 10.09 Less the following components: Aircraft fuel, including hedging gains and losses 1.52 2.43 CASM excluding fuel 7.49 7.66 FUEL RECONCILIATIONS (unaudited) Three Months Ended March 31, 2016 2015 (in millions, except for per-gallon amounts) Dollars Cost/Gallon Dollars Cost/Gallon Raw or "into-plane" fuel cost $ 165 $ 1.26 $ 229 $ 1.93 Losses on settled hedges 4 0.03 6 0.05 Consolidated economic fuel expense 169 1.29 235 1.98 Mark-to-market fuel hedge adjustment (2) (0.02) GAAP fuel expense $ 167 $ 1.27 $ 235 $ 1.98 Fuel gallons 132 119 Note A: Pursuant to Regulation G, we have provided reconciliation of reported non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable financial measures reported on a GAAP basis. We believe that consideration of these non-GAAP financial measures may be important to investors for the following reasons: By eliminating fuel expense and certain special items from our unit metrics, we believe that we have better visibility into the results of operations and our non-fuel cost-reduction initiatives. Our industry is highly competitive and is characterized by high fixed costs, so even a small reduction in non-fuel operating costs can result in a significant improvement in operating results. In addition, we believe that all domestic carriers are similarly impacted by changes in jet fuel costs over the long term, so it is important for management (and thus investors) to understand the impact of (and trends in) company-specific cost drivers such as labor rates and productivity, airport costs, maintenance costs, etc., which are more controllable by management. Cost per ASM (CASM) excluding fuel and certain special items is one of the most important measures used by management and by the Air Group Board of Directors in assessing quarterly and annual cost performance. Adjusted Income before income tax and CASM excluding fuel (and other items as specified in our plan documents) are important metrics for the employee incentive plan that covers all Air Group employees. CASM excluding fuel and certain special items is a measure commonly used by industry analysts, and we believe it is the basis by which they compare our airlines to others in the industry. The measure is also the subject of frequent questions from investors. Disclosure of the individual impact of certain noted items provides investors the ability to measure and monitor performance both with and without these special items. We believe that disclosing the impact of certain items, such as mark-to-market hedging adjustments or special revenues, is important because it provides information on significant items that are not necessarily indicative of future performance. Industry analysts and investors consistently measure our performance without these items for better comparability between periods and among other airlines. Although we disclose our passenger unit revenues, we do not (nor are we able to) evaluate unit revenues excluding the impact that changes in fuel costs have had on ticket prices. Fuel expense represents a large percentage of our total operating expenses. Fluctuations in fuel prices often drive changes in unit revenues in the mid-to-long term. Although we believe it is useful to evaluate non-fuel unit costs for the reasons noted above, we would caution readers of these financial statements not to place undue reliance on unit costs excluding fuel as a measure or predictor of future profitability because of the significant impact of fuel costs on our business. Note B: Air Group has two operating airlines - Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air. Each is a regulated airline with separate management teams primarily in operational roles. To manage the two operating airlines, management views the business in three operating segments. Alaska operates a fleet of passenger jets (Alaska Mainline) and contracts with Horizon, SkyWest Airlines, Inc. (SkyWest), and Peninsula Airways, Inc. (PenAir) for regional capacity under which Alaska receives all passenger revenue from those flights (Alaska Regional). Horizon operates a fleet of turboprop aircraft and sells all of its capacity to Alaska pursuant to a capacity purchase arrangement (Horizon). The Company believes the amounts paid by Alaska to Horizon approximate current market rates received by other regional carriers for similar flying and are available to pay for various Horizon operating expenses such as crew expenses, maintenance, and aircraft ownership costs. All inter-company revenues and expenses between Alaska and Horizon are eliminated in consolidation. Glossary of Terms Aircraft Utilization - block hours per day; this represents the average number of hours our aircraft are flying Aircraft Stage Length - represents the average miles flown per aircraft departure ASMs - available seat miles, or "capacity"; represents total seats available across the fleet multiplied by the number of miles flown CASM - operating costs per ASM, or "unit cost"; represents all operating expenses including fuel and special items CASMex - operating costs excluding fuel and special items per ASM; this metric is used to help track progress toward reduction of non-fuel operating costs since fuel is largely out of our control Debt-to-capitalization ratio - represents adjusted debt (long-term debt plus the present value of future operating lease payments) divided by total equity plus adjusted debt Diluted Earnings per Share - represents earnings per share using fully diluted shares outstanding Diluted Shares - represents the total number of shares that would be outstanding if all possible sources of conversion, such as stock options, were exercised Economic Fuel - best estimate of the cash cost of fuel, net of the impact of our fuel-hedging program Free Cash Flow - total operating cash flow generated less cash paid for capital expenditures Load Factor - RPMs as a percentage of ASMs; represents the number of available seats that were filled with paying passengers Mainline - represents flying Boeing 737 jets and all associated revenues and costs PRASM - passenger revenue per ASM; commonly called "passenger unit revenue" Productivity - number of revenue passengers per full-time equivalent employee RASM - operating revenue per ASMs, or "unit revenue"; operating revenue includes all passenger revenue, freight & mail, Mileage Plan, and other ancillary revenue; represents the average total revenue for flying one seat one mile Regional - represents capacity purchased by Alaska from Horizon, SkyWest, and PenAir. In this segment, Alaska Regional records actual on-board passenger revenue, less costs such as fuel, distribution costs, and payments made to Horizon, SkyWest and PenAir under the respective capacity purchased arrangement (CPAs). Additionally, Alaska Regional includes an allocation of corporate overhead such as IT, finance, other administrative costs incurred by Alaska and on behalf of Horizon. RPMs - revenue passenger miles, or "traffic"; represents the number of seats that were filled with paying passengers; one passenger traveling one mile is one RPM Yield - passenger revenue per RPM; represents the average revenue for flying one passenger one mile SOURCE Alaska Air Group Related Links https://www.alaskaair.com DALLAS, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Attorney Alex Brauer, co-founder of the complex litigation boutique Bailey Brauer PLLC, has been named to D Magazine's exclusive list of the Best Lawyers in Dallas for 2016 based on his work for clients in commercial litigation. Mr. Brauer's broad commercial litigation practice includes representing clients in a wide range of industries. His current representations include, among others, an investment fund that was defrauded out of millions of dollars; a telecom company based in China involved in a dispute with a Brazilian supplier; and a commercial real estate brokerage firm in a tortious interference and breach of contract lawsuit. "I'm thankful to my peers and colleagues who voted for me," says Mr. Brauer. "To be named among the city's top lawyers is particularly gratifying when you consider the many excellent attorneys who are being recognized." In addition to the recent D Magazine honors, Mr. Brauer has earned selection on the Texas Rising Stars list published by Thomson Reuters each year since 2010. A cum laude graduate of Florida State University, he completed his law degree at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he served as a law journal executive editor. To learn more about Mr. Brauer and his background, click here: http://baileybrauer.com/index.php/alexander-brauer/. To compile the annual list of the top lawyers in Dallas, D Magazine editors solicited nominations from lawyers across North Texas. A handpicked panel of attorneys then worked with the magazine's staff to determine the final list, which includes attorneys involved in a wide range of practice areas. The complete list is featured in the May 2016 edition of D Magazine and is available online at www.dmagazine.com. Bailey Brauer PLLC provides battle-tested, sophisticated courtroom experience in high-stakes litigation matters. Led by experienced trial and appellate lawyers Clayton Bailey and Alex Brauer, the firm focuses on complex commercial litigation, agribusiness, appeals, and class and collective actions. For more information, please contact Bailey Brauer today or visit the firm's website at http://www.baileybrauer.com. For more information on the recent honors for Mr. Brauer, contact Amy Hunt at [email protected] or 800-559-4534. SOURCE Bailey Brauer PLLC Related Links http://www.baileybrauer.com PLANO, Texas, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- At Home, the home decor superstore, announces the opening of the Wichita Falls, Texas, location on Thursday, April 21. The more than 92,000 square-foot store, located at 3111 Midwestern Parkway #200 in Wichita Falls, Texas, marks the ninth store in North Texas for the big-box specialty retailer of home decor products. Following the store opening, the Wichita Falls location will host a grand opening ribbon-cutting Friday, April 29, at 9 a.m. with the Wichita Falls Chamber of Commerce. At Home will offer a mystery gift card to the first 200 customers who visit the store Saturday, April 30. With patio season already here, At Home gives shoppers everything they need to create an outdoor oasis to enjoy the weather before the heat of summer. At Home allows customers to express their personal style by choosing from an expansive selection of more than 50,000 itemsincluding seasonal and holiday decor, patio furniture, home furnishings, wall art and decorative accents, rugs and housewares. Employing an everyday low pricing model, At Home is dedicated to allowing customers to affordably make their house into a home. This new location brings 25 jobs to Wichita Falls and surrounding communities. Including the Wichita Falls location, At Home currently operates more than 100 stores across 28 states. ABOUT AT HOME: At Home, the home decor superstore, is focused on providing customers with the broadest assortment of home decor products to suit any style, at any budget, for any reason to redecorate. With a wide assortment of 50,000 items throughout our stores, At Home enables customers to express themselves and create a home that reflects their personality and style, in ways big and small. At Home is headquartered in Plano, Texas. For more information, visit the company on http://www.athome.com or find us on Facebook (AtHomeStores), Instagram (AtHomeStores) or Pinterest (AtHomeStores). Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150904/263908LOGO SOURCE At Home Related Links http://www.athome.com NEW YORK, April 12, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The global aviation cyber security market is expected to grow from USD 39.59 billion in 2015 to USD 61.85 billion by 2020, at a CAGR of 9.34% from 2015 to 2020. Factors influencing the growth of this market include rise in malicious cyber-attack & cybercrimes and increase in digitization of operations in the aerospace and defense sector. These factors are also compelling the aerospace and defense organizations to invest in high-end and technologically advanced cyber security solutions. ''On-cloud deployment to lead the global aviation cyber security'' The on-cloud deployment market is projected to hold the highest share in terms of value by 2020. On the basis of component, the solution segment is expected to dominate the aviation cyber security market. The report also includes industry value chain, market size, and Porters' five forces analysis for the aviation cyber security market. It provides a general overview of companies, products, services, financial analysis, and key developments of major players in this market. All percentage shares, splits, and breakdowns are determined using secondary sources and have been verified through primary sources. This report also concentrates on various drivers and restraints currently influencing the market, challenges obstructing the market growth, and opportunities promoting the growth of the market. ''The aviation cyber security market in Latin America is projected to grow at a rapid pace during the forecast period'' According to Civil Air Navigation Services Organization (CANSO), the air traffic in this region is growing at a rate of 7% per year. This growth is propelled by air traffic management that ensures effective handling of airport operations, by delivering safe and secured cyber solutions. It has further resulted in creating attractive market opportunities for the aviation cyber security service and solution providers, during the forecast period. Following is the break-up of primary interviews conducted for the research study: - By Company Type - Tier 1 35%, Tier 2 45%, and Tier 3 20% - By Designation C level 35%, Director level 25%, and Others 40% - By Region North America - 45%, Europe 30%, APAC 20%, RoW 5% The key players operating in the global aviation cyber security include Cisco Systems, Inc., International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Raytheon Company, Northrop Grumman Corporation, and BAE Systems plc. Agreements and contracts are two major growth strategies adopted by major players to strengthen their positions and enhance their product offerings. Reasons to Buy the Report: From an insight perspective, this research report has focused on various levels of analysisindustry analysis (industry trends and PEST analysis), market share analysis of top players, value chain analysis, and company profiles, which together comprise and discuss the basic views on the competitive landscape; emerging and high-growth segments of the aviation cyber security market; high-growth regions and countries and their respective regulatory policies; government initiatives; and market drivers, restraints, and opportunities. The report provides insights on the following pointers: - Market Penetration: Comprehensive information on cyber security offered by the top 11 players in the global aviation cyber security market - Product Development/Innovation: Detailed insights on upcoming technologies, research & development activities, and new product launches in the aviation cyber security market - Market Development: Comprehensive information about lucrative emerging markets - the report analyzes the markets for aviation cyber security across regions - Market Diversification: Exhaustive information about new products, untapped geographies, recent developments, and investments in the global aviation cyber security market - Competitive Assessment: In-depth assessment of market shares, strategies, products, and manufacturing capabilities of leading players in the global aviation cyber security market Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p03559463-summary/view-report.html About Reportlinker ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place. http://www.reportlinker.com __________________________ Contact Clare: [email protected] US: (339)-368-6001 Intl: +1 339-368-6001 SOURCE Reportlinker Related Links http://www.reportlinker.com WELLESLEY, Mass., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Babson College has introduced a nine-month full-time Master of Science in Finance (MSF) program, and will be enrolling students to start in fall 2016. Babson College has introduced a nine-month full-time Master of Science in Finance (MSF) program, and will be enrolling students to start in fall 2016. The Master of Science in Finance at Babson is a nine-month program that provides deep financial and quantitative acumen, combined with sophisticated problem-solving, practical application, ethical judgment, and professional development and communication skills. The Babson curriculum offers a unique blend of theory and practice taught by the same award-winning faculty who teach the top-ranked undergraduate and MBA programs. Babson's MSF program is designed to allow students to customize their focus, allowing for flexibility in class choice. They will enjoy the benefits of dedicated core courses with MSF peers, while also having the opportunity to learn alongside MBA candidates in an array of elective courses. In addition to the flexibility of the program, students will have access to the resources, databases, and connections of the Stephen D. Cutler Center for Investments and Finance, and the mentoring of the Babson finance division faculty. "MSF degrees allow students to gain a deeper understanding of the industry," said Babson College Professor and MSF Faculty Director Michael Goldstein. "With one-on-one student mentoring, our unique finance data set and practice course, the resources of our Stephen D. Cutler Center for Investments and Finance, and a customizable curriculum to match student's interests and career paths, Babson's new MSF program will prepare students with the skills desired by today's employers, and help them hit the ground running as finance professionals." The program is open to candidates from all undergraduate backgrounds, yet each should have a demonstrated educational or practical foundation in financial accounting, finance, statistics, and microeconomics. The program is targeted to applicants with 0-2 years of work experience so in addition to the GMAT or GRE, SAT and ACT scores will be accepted. "As a leading institution for business education worldwide, Babson is proud to offer a specialized degree for aspiring and early-career finance professionals," said Babson College Graduate School Dean William B. Lamb. "We recognize the demand for sophisticated financial skills in a global economy that is continuously evolving, and are proud to have designed a program that will offer students the benefit of our finance faculty's deep expertise combined with connection to our network of more than 9,000 alumni in the financial services sector." Babson's location near Boston, Massachusetts, one of the major financial centers of the United States and one of the money management centers of the world, provides many opportunities for interaction with finance professionals. Babson students are routinely placed with such companies as Fidelity Investments, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Barclays Capital, EMC, Staples, Johnson & Johnson, and Raytheon Company. About Babson College Babson College is the educator, convener, and thought leader for Entrepreneurship of All Kinds. The top-ranked college for entrepreneurship education, Babson is a dynamic living and learning laboratory where students, faculty, and staff work together to address the real-world problems of business and society. We prepare the entrepreneurial leaders our world needs most: those with strong functional knowledge and the skills and vision to navigate change, accommodate ambiguity, surmount complexity, and motivate teams in a common purpose to make a difference in the world, and have an impact on organizations of all sizes and types. As we have for nearly a half-century, Babson continues to advance Entrepreneurial Thought & Action as the most positive force on the planet for generating sustainable economic and social value. Contact: Michael Chmura, 781 239 4549, [email protected] Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160421/358354 SOURCE Babson College Related Links http://www.babson.edu WHIPPANY, N.J., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Shirell A. Gross, Esq., of Bayer Corporation, has been recognized as one of the Top Blacks in Healthcare by BlackDoctor.org (BDO) and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions. BDO is the leading online health destination for African Americans. Shirell Gross of Bayer Corporation is named one of BlackDoctor.org's Top Blacks In Healthcare As a Vice President and Chief Legal Counsel at Bayer, Shirell is responsible for the Radiology business across the Americas region. Shirell is one of 24 honorees who will receive the award tonight at the 3rd Annual BlackDoctor.org Top Blacks In Healthcare Awards Gala in Baltimore. The award honors some of the nation's most accomplished healthcare leaders whose work, often behind the scenes, has created access to healthcare for many African Americans living in underserved communities. "We at Bayer are proud of Shirell and congratulate her on this prestigious award," said Michael McDonald Vice President & Assistant General Counsel at Bayer Corporation. "Not only is Shirell an accomplished professional, she is a kind and generous person who is an invaluable member of our company. We congratulate Shirell on her outstanding contributions to medicine and health." A graduate of Hofstra School of Law, Shirell has been with Bayer since 2005, when she joined the company as Senior Counsel for Bayer's Diabetes Care business. Shirell accelerated through the Diabetes business, later serving as Global Chief Counsel before moving to the Radiology Business. She is also a member of the African American/Hispanic American Affinity Group at Bayer, and other professional organizations including AdvaMed, Women Unlimited Alumnae, and Corporate Counsel Women of Color. About Bayer Corporation Bayer: Science For A Better Life Bayer is a global enterprise with core competencies in the Life Science fields of health care and agriculture. Its products and services are designed to benefit people and improve their quality of life. At the same time, the Group aims to create value through innovation, growth and high earning power. Bayer is committed to the principles of sustainable development and to its social and ethical responsibilities as a corporate citizen. In fiscal 2015, the Group employed around 117,000 people and had sales of EUR 46.3 billion. Capital expenditures amounted to EUR 2.6 billion, R&D expenses to EUR 4.3 billion. These figures include those for the high-tech polymers business, which was floated on the stock market as an independent company named Covestro on October 6, 2015. For more information, go to www.bayer.us. Social Media Channels: Facebook: facebook.com/Bayer Twitter: twitter.com/BayerUS YouTube: youtube.com/BayerChannel #ScienceForABetterLife Bayer and the Bayer Cross are registered trademarks of Bayer. About BlackDoctor.org BlackDoctor.org (BDO) is the world's most comprehensive online health resource for black consumers. With a monthly total audience reach of 24 million, BDO is the leading producer of targeted, culturally and clinically accurate health and editorial content on African Americans. BDO's users appreciate receiving health information in an environment they trust and in a language and context they understand. BDO also boasts the largest online database of black physicians and dentists as part of its free doctor search tool, and a medical expert panel including many of the most respected and accomplished experts in their field. Learn more about BlackDoctor.org at http://www.BlackDoctor.org and follow us on Twitter @BlackDoctor, and Facebook at facebook.com/BlackDoctor.org. About Johns Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions The Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions (HCHDS) was established in October 2002 and brings together the health research and program development resources of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutes (Schools of Public Health, Medicine, and Nursing) to demonstrate the efficacy of public health, social science and medical science in mitigating health disparities. HCHDS does this through efforts in research, training and community outreach. The Center has a national focus, but much of its work takes place in the local Baltimore community. The HCHDS is designated as a National Comprehensive Center of Excellence in Health Disparities by the NIMHD of the National Institutes of Health. Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160420/357986 Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140312/NY79226LOGO SOURCE Bayer Corporation Related Links http://www.bayerus.com "In the past 24-36 hours, the severe floods have devastated the homes and property of thousands of Houstonians many of them our own customers and employees and we want to do what we can to support them during this difficult time," said BBVA Compass Houston CEO Mark Montgomery. "We want to do what we can to help rebuild their homes and their lives." The latest cost assessment from the American Red Cross to provide its disaster relief and recovery operations is more than $5 million and growing in the region. The BBVA Compass Foundation's donation to the American Red Cross will help support overall response and relief efforts, including shelters' meals, social services, financial assistance for affected families, neighborhood cleanups, and ongoing counseling and casework efforts to determine how many residents have lost their homes. BBVA Compass is also making limited-time offers available to consumer and small business clients, among them special loan and payment deferral programs, waived late fees and penalty-free CD withdrawals. The offers are available in the nine counties declared a state of disaster by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, including Austin, Bastrop, Colorado, Fort Bend, Grimes, Harris, Montgomery, Waller and Wharton. Components of the disaster-relief program, available in the affected areas, include: Special rates and terms on consumer and small business loans Discounted rates on auto loans Discounted rates on home equity, construction and renovation loans and lines of credit Deferred payments on existing consumer and small business loans and credit cards Waived late fees Penalty-free CD withdrawals, for withdrawals made after the first seven days of account origination For more information on these offers, those affected should contact their local BBVA Compass branch. Applications for the limited-time offers may be submitted through June 30, 2016, unless otherwise stated. All loans and lines of credit are subject to approval, including credit approval. Compass Bank, member FDIC, and an Equal Housing Lender Follow @BBVACompassNews on Twitter About BBVA Group BBVA Compass is a subsidiary of BBVA Compass Bancshares Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of BBVA (NYSE: BBVA) (MAD: BBVA). BBVA is a customer-centric global financial services group founded in 1857. The Group has a solid position in Spain, is the largest financial institution in Mexico and has leading franchises in South America and the Sunbelt region of the United States. Its diversified business is geared toward high-growth markets and relies on technology as a key sustainable competitive advantage. Corporate responsibility is at the core of its business model. BBVA fosters financial education and inclusion, and supports scientific research and culture. It operates with the highest integrity, a long-term vision and applies the best practices. The Group is present in the main sustainability indexes. More information about the BBVA Group can be found at bbva.com. About BBVA Compass BBVA Compass is a Sunbelt-based financial institution that operates 666 branches, including 340 in Texas, 89 in Alabama, 73 in Arizona, 61 in California, 45 in Florida, 38 in Colorado and 20 in New Mexico, and commercial and private client offices throughout the U.S. BBVA Compass ranks among the top 25 largest U.S. commercial banks based on deposit market share and ranks among the largest banks in Alabama (2nd), Texas (4th) and Arizona (4th). BBVA Compass recently earned top nods for best mobile app and best regional bank in the South & West in Money magazine's annual list of the Best Banks in America. Additional information about BBVA Compass can be found at bbvacompass.com, by following @BBVACompassNews on Twitter or visiting newsroom.bbvacompass.com. Editor's Note: BBVA Compass is a trade name of Compass Bank. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140825/139263 SOURCE BBVA Compass Related Links http://www.bbva.com LA JOLLA, Calif., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- International Bipolar Foundation (IBPF) will host Behind the Mask: Carnevale di Venezia, a Venetian themed gala, auction and awards dinner to support programs designed to educate, erase stigma, and fund research for those living with bipolar disorder. Held at the Hyatt Regency La Jolla at Aventine on Saturday, May 7, 2016 from 6:00 to 11:00 p.m., 2016 IBPF award winner, Paul Dalio, the producer of the currently released Spike Lee film, Touched With Fire starring Katie Holmes, Luke Kirby and Christine Lahti will be present to accept the award. The IMAGINE award is given to individuals who have bipolar disorder and can imagine a future free of barriers and discrimination. Dalio traveled with IBPF to speak at a pre-World Bipolar Day press conference in Washington, D.C. and assisted in the acceptance of a Congressional Resolution. Co-founded by IBPF, World Bipolar Day is held on March 30, the birth date of Vincent Van Gogh who is identified as living with bipolar disorder. A HOPE Award will also be given to an honoree whose efforts improve care, support and access to treatment. Founder and Chairman Muffy Walker, of Zurich, Switzerland, will recognize Honorary Gala Chairs Roy and Joanie Polatchek for their work at IBPF. "We look forward to a evening of discovery, relationship building and fun. When we take off our masks and shed light on this mental health issue, we give hope to others," said Lori Butler, Executive Director and mental health advocate. A mask making party will take place at IBPF's office on May 4 from 1-3 p.m. at 8755 Aero Drive #310, San Diego, CA, 92123. Guests will make their own Venetian-style masks with materials from Venice, Italy. Tickets are available by contacting Debbie Brown at [email protected] or 858-598-5967. For more information, please visit http://conta.cc/1Sh6imG. About International Bipolar Foundation International Bipolar Foundation (IBPF) is a 501c3 nonprofit organization founded in June 2007 in San Diego, California by four parents with children affected by bipolar disorder. The mission of IBPF is to improve understanding and treatment of bipolar disorder through research; to promote care and support resources for individuals and caregivers; and to erase stigma through education. For more information about IBPF, please visit their website at www.ibpf.org. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160223/336694LOGO Contact: Lori Butler, Executive Director International Bipolar Foundation 858-598-5967 [email protected] http://conta.cc/1Sh6imG SOURCE International Bipolar Foundation MADISON HEIGHTS, Mich., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- As part of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago's Money Smart Week 2016, BetterInvesting is inviting the public to attend online and in-person general investing sessions at any of the organization's local chapters listed below. Money Smart Week is a public awareness campaign created by the Chicago Fed in 2002 to help consumers better manage their personal finances. These events are free and open to the public. Guests attending a general session will have the opportunity to learn about topics such as the basics of stock investing, how to start an investment club, outsmarting investment fraud and retirement planning. Click on the chapter website link below in your area to see what's available. Arizona Phoenix Chapter www.betterinvesting.org/phoenix Georgia Georgia Chapter www.betterinvesting.org/georgia Illinois Chicagoland Chapter www.betterinvesting.org/chicagoland Iowa Heartland Chapter www.betterinvesting.org/heartland Louisiana/Mississippi LA/MS Chapter www.betterinvesting.org/lams Michigan Capital Area Chapter www.betterinvesting.org/capcity Western Michigan Chapter www.betterinvesting.org/westmich Oklahoma Heart of Oklahoma Chapter www.betterinvesting.org/oklahoma Pennsylvania Philadelphia Area Chapter www.betterinvesting.org/philly Pittsburgh Chapter www.betterinvesting.org/pgh Texas West Texas Chapter www.betterinvesting.org/westtex Washington Puget Sound Chapter www.betterinvesting.org/puget Wisconsin Wisconsin Chapter www.betterinvesting.org/milwaukee About BetterInvesting BetterInvesting is a national nonprofit organization that has been empowering individual investors since 1951. Founded in Detroit, the association (formerly known as National Association of Investors Corporation) was borne out of the conviction that anyone can become a successful long-term investor by following commonsense investing practices. BetterInvesting has helped more than 5 million people become better, more informed investors by providing webinars, in-person events, easy-to-use online tools for analyzing stocks, a monthly magazine and a community of volunteers and like-minded investors. For more information about BetterInvesting, visit its website at www.betterinvesting.org or call toll-free 877-275-6242. SOURCE BetterInvesting Related Links http://www.betterinvesting.org HAMILTON, N.J., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Billtrust, the leader in Payment Cycle Management, has been awarded "Best Places to Work in New Jersey" for the third consecutive year. This year, Billtrust moved up on the list 7 spots and landed within the top 25 companies in the large employer category. The program, managed by Best Companies Group, identifies top performing companies located in New Jersey based on a thorough assessment of the company through employee satisfaction feedback. The award recognizes and honors the top businesses as places of employment in New Jersey that benefit the state's economy, and most importantly, its workforce. This year it named 70 small/medium employer companies ranging from 15-249 employees, as well as 30 large employer companies consisting of 250 or more employees. "Employee engagement is one of our top priorities at Billtrust," said Jeanne O'Connor, VP Human Resources at Billtrust. "We want our employees to look forward to coming into work every day by making Billtrust a remarkable place to work." Billtrust is known for pioneering initiatives such as a "No Meeting Tuesday," open PTO policy, and parental leave for employees. With headquarters in New Jersey, Billtrust has grown to over 350 employees and has offices in Denver, Chicago, and Orange County, CA. "As we continue to grow, we want our employee culture to grow with us," explained Flint Lane, CEO at Billtrust. "There is often a stigma with large or growing companies that it can't be a fun place to work. At Billtrust we believe that growth is a positive for not only the business we do but for our employees as well." Within the company, many attribute the unique culture to the mission and core value statements placed around the offices by Billtrust leadership. "With signs in each Billtrust office that read 'There are no sacred cows' and 'You were not put on earth to work and make money,' our employees are reminded of our mission and values on a daily basis," stated O'Connor. Best Places to Work in New Jersey unveiled the 2016 recipients at an award ceremony on April 19, 2016. Learn more about at bestplacestoworkinNJ.com. About Billtrust : Billtrust is the premier provider of Payment Cycle Management solutions, helping businesses accelerate invoice-to-cash. By integrating the three key areas of the payment cycle: invoice presentment, invoice payment, and cash application, Billtrust is committed to delivering a flexible solution to improve buyer satisfaction and DSO. Billtrust's invoice-to-cash solution processes over $500 billion in receivables for leading companies. SOURCE Billtrust Related Links http://www.billtrust.com BOSTON, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Boston Beer Company, Inc. (NYSE: SAM) reported first quarter 2016 net revenue of $188.8 million, a decrease of $10.7 million or 5% from the same period last year, mainly due to a decline in core shipments of 6%, partially offset by price increases. Net income for the first quarter was $7.0 million, or $0.53 per diluted share, a decrease of $6.7 million or $0.47 per diluted share from the first quarter of 2015. This decrease was primarily due to decreases in net revenue, a decrease in gross margin and increased general and administrative expenses. Highlights of this release include: Depletions decreased 5% from the comparable 13-week period in 2015. First quarter gross margin was 48.5% compared to 50.0% in the first quarter of 2015 and the Company now estimates a full year gross margin target of between 51% and 53%, a decrease in the range from the previously communicated estimate of between 52% and 54%. The 2016 fiscal year includes 53 weeks compared to the 2015 fiscal year which included only 52 weeks. Full-year 2016 depletion and shipment change is now estimated at between minus 4% and plus 2%, a decrease in the range from the previously communicated estimate of growth of mid-single digits. Full-year 2016 earnings per diluted share are now estimated at $6.50 to $7.30 , a decrease in the range from the previously communicated estimate of $7.60 to $8.00 . , a decrease in the range from the previously communicated estimate of . Full-year 2016 capital spending is now estimated to be between $50 million and $70 million , a decrease in the range from the previously communicated estimate of $60 million to $80 million . Jim Koch, Chairman and Founder of the Company, commented, "Our total company depletion trends declined in the first quarter, even as the better beer and craft categories appear healthy. We believe Samuel Adams has lost share due to the increased competition and continued growth of drinker interest in variety and innovation. During the quarter, we rolled out new beers, including Samuel Adams Nitro White Ale, Samuel Adams Nitro IPA, Samuel Adams Nitro Coffee Stout and Samuel Adams Rebel Grapefruit IPA. These beers have started slowly, but their momentum continues to build. We believe that we are well positioned to meet the longer term challenges of this competitive environment, through the quality of our beers, our innovation capability and our sales execution strength, coupled with our strong financial position that enables us to invest in growing our brands." Martin Roper, the Company's President and CEO stated, "In the first quarter, our depletions volume was significantly below our expectations, as the declines in our existing styles of our Samuel Adams and Angry Orchard brands were not offset by our new styles or the growth of the rest of our brand portfolio. The lower volume combined with the higher planned spending and excess brewery capacity significantly impacted our financial results for the quarter. We are focused on adjusting our cost structure, based on our lower volume expectations, and on driving efficiencies throughout the organization, so that we direct funds to the highest growth initiatives. While we are prioritizing these efforts, some of the adjustments will benefit this year and others may take more than a year to fully implement. As we pursue and achieve cost savings through improved efficiencies and more effective processes, we plan to invest part of these savings into strengthening our brands and our sales force and in new beer and cider development capabilities, so that we can react quickly to any opportunities that emerge. We remain prepared to forsake short term earnings, as we strive to return to long term profitable growth." Mr. Roper went on to say, "Our depletions decline in the first quarter was primarily due to decreases in our Samuel Adams and Angry Orchard brands that were only partially offset by increases in our Twisted Tea and Coney Island brands. The Angry Orchard decline appears largely due to softness across the cider category, as casual cider drinkers are testing hard sodas and other new alternative beverage options. We are working hard to improve the Samuel Adams brand trends through continued innovation, executional focus on our core styles and a full review of our brand messaging and packaging, which we hope to complete during the second half of the year. We are also developing programs to reverse the cider category decline that began in late 2015 after several years of high growth. We believe the recent declines are not indicative of long term cider category potential and are happy that Angry Orchard has maintained a very high share level. The trends for larger craft beer brands and the cider category are very difficult to predict and we have therefore broadened our guidance on full year depletion volumes and earnings while reducing our target commensurate with current trends." 1st Quarter 2016 Summary of Results Depletions declined 5% from the comparable 13-week period in the prior year, reflecting decreases in the Company's Samuel Adams and Angry Orchard brands, partially offset by increases in its Twisted Tea and Coney Island brands. Core shipment volume was approximately 830,000 barrels, a 6% decrease from the first quarter of 2015. The Company believes distributor inventory at March 26, 2016 was at an appropriate level. Inventory at March 26, 2016 at distributors participating in the Freshest Beer Program decreased slightly in terms of days of inventory on hand when compared to March 28, 2015. The Company has approximately 73% of its volume on the Freshest Beer Program. Gross margin at 48.5% decreased from the 50.0% margin realized in the first quarter of 2015, primarily due to increased brewery processing costs per barrel and product mix effects, partially offset by price increases. Advertising, promotional and selling expenses decreased $1.0 million compared to the first quarter of 2015, primarily due to decreases in freight to distributors due to lower volume and lower freight rates, partially offset by increases in point of sale and salaries and benefits. General and administrative expenses increased by $3.8 million from the first quarter of 2015, primarily due to increases in stock compensation, salaries and benefits and facilities costs. The Company expects that its March 26, 2016 cash balance of $51.1 million, together with its future operating cash flows and its available $150.0 million line of credit, will be sufficient to fund future cash requirements. During the first quarter and the period from March 26, 2016 through April 15, 2016, the Company repurchased approximately 415,000 shares of its Class A Common Stock for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $75.7 million. As of April 15, 2016 the Company had approximately $53.2 million remaining on the $575.0 million share buyback expenditure limit set by the Board of Directors. Depletion estimates Year-to-date depletions through the fifteen weeks ended April 9, 2016 are estimated by the Company to have decreased approximately 5% from the comparable period in 2015. Fiscal 2016 Outlook The Company currently projects full year 2016 earnings per diluted share to be between $6.50 and $7.30. The Company's actual 2016 earnings per share could vary significantly from the current projection. The 2016 fiscal year includes 53 weeks compared to the 2015 fiscal year which included only 52 weeks. Underlying the Company's current 2016 projection are the following 53-week full-year estimates and targets: Depletions and shipments percentage change at between minus 4% and plus 2%. Price increases of between 1% and 2%. Gross margin of between 51% and 53%. Increased investment in advertising, promotional and selling expenses of between zero and $10 million , a decrease from the previously communicated estimate of between $10 million and $20 million . This estimate does not include any increases or decreases in freight costs for the shipment of products to the Company's distributors. , a decrease from the previously communicated estimate of between . This estimate does not include any increases or decreases in freight costs for the shipment of products to the Company's distributors. Effective tax rate of approximately 37%. Estimated capital spending of between $50 million and $70 million , which will be mostly spent in our breweries to support future growth and product innovation and to drive efficiencies and cost reductions. About the Company The Boston Beer Company, Inc. (NYSE: SAM) began in 1984 and today brews more than 60 styles of Samuel Adams beer. Our portfolio of brands also includes Angry Orchard Hard Cider and Twisted Tea, as well as several other craft beer brands brewed by Alchemy & Science, our craft beer incubator. For more information, please visit our investor relations website at www.bostonbeer.com, which includes links to all of our respective brand websites. Forward-Looking Statements Statements made in this press release that state the Company's or management's intentions, hopes, beliefs, expectations or predictions of the future are forward-looking statements. It is important to note that the Company's actual results could differ materially from those projected in such forward-looking statements. Additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements is contained from time to time in the Company's SEC filings, including, but not limited to, the Company's report on Form 10-K for the years ended December 26, 2015 and December 27, 2014. Copies of these documents may be found on the Company's website, www.bostonbeer.com, or obtained by contacting the Company or the SEC. THE BOSTON BEER COMPANY, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF COMPREHENSIVE INCOME (in thousands, except per share data) (unaudited) Thirteen weeks ended March 26, March 28, 2016 2015 Barrels sold 834 889 Revenue $ 202,009 $ 212,834 Less excise taxes 13,182 13,331 Net revenue 188,827 199,503 Cost of goods sold 97,296 99,888 Gross profit 91,531 99,615 Operating expenses: Advertising, promotional and selling expenses 59,249 60,247 General and administrative expenses 21,045 17,230 Total operating expenses 80,294 77,477 Operating income 11,237 22,138 Other income (expense), net: Interest income (expense), net 23 (3) Other income (expense), net (219) (325) Total other income (expense), net (196) (328) Income before income tax provision 11,041 21,810 Provision for income taxes 4,009 8,067 Net income $ 7,032 $ 13,743 Net income per common share - basic $ 0.55 $ 1.04 Net income per common share - diluted $ 0.53 $ 1.00 Weighted-average number of common shares - Class A basic 9,375 9,598 Weighted-average number of common shares - Class B basic 3,367 3,617 Weighted-average number of common shares - diluted 13,088 13,633 Net income $ 7,032 $ 13,743 Other comprehensive income, net of tax: Foreign currency translation adjustment (4) 6 Comprehensive income $ 7,028 $ 13,749 THE BOSTON BEER COMPANY, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS (in thousands, except share data) (unaudited) March 26, December 26, 2016 2015 Assets Current Assets: Cash and cash equivalents $ 51,128 $ 94,193 Accounts receivable, net of allowance for doubtful accounts of $211 and $244 as of March 26, 2016 and December 26, 2015, respectively 45,183 38,984 Inventories 61,737 56,462 Prepaid expenses and other current assets 12,499 12,053 Income tax receivable 5,029 14,928 Deferred income taxes 6,919 6,983 Total current assets 182,495 223,603 Property, plant and equipment, net 412,301 409,926 Other assets 9,352 8,188 Goodwill 3,683 3,683 Total assets $ 607,831 $ 645,400 Liabilities and Stockholders' Equity Current Liabilities: Accounts payable $ 45,171 $ 42,718 Current portion of debt and capital lease obligations 60 58 Accrued expenses and other current liabilities 56,290 68,384 Total current liabilities 101,521 111,160 Deferred income taxes 56,288 56,001 Debt and capital lease obligations, less current portion 411 471 Other liabilities 14,264 16,547 Total liabilities 172,484 184,179 Commitments and Contingencies Stockholders' Equity: Class A Common Stock, $.01 par value; 22,700,000 shares authorized; 9,293,632 and 9,389,005 issued and outstanding as of March 26, 2016 and December 26, 2015, respectively 93 94 Class B Common Stock, $.01 par value; 4,200,000 shares authorized; 3,367,355 and 3,367,355 issued and outstanding as of March 26, 2016 34 34 and December 26, 2015, respectively Additional paid-in capital 317,967 290,096 Accumulated other comprehensive loss, net of tax (955) (951) Retained earnings 118,208 171,948 Total stockholders' equity 435,347 461,221 Total liabilities and stockholders' equity $ 607,831 $ 645,400 THE BOSTON BEER COMPANY, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF CASHFLOWS (in thousands) (unaudited) Thirteen weeks ended March 26, March 28, 2016 2015 Cash flows provided by operating activities: Net income $ 7,032 $ 13,743 Adjustments to reconcile net income to net cash provided by operating activities: Depreciation and amortization 12,029 10,312 Loss on disposal of property, plant and equipment 303 335 Bad debt recovery (33) (42) Stock-based compensation expense 2,686 1,621 Excess tax benefit from stock-based compensation arrangements (3,839) (12,538) Deferred income taxes 351 (5) Changes in operating assets and liabilities: Accounts receivable (6,166) (7,444) Inventories (5,275) (4,489) Prepaid expenses, income tax receivable and other assets 8,165 29,535 Accounts payable 825 2,138 Accrued expenses and other current liabilities (8,282) (12,108) Other liabilities (1,529) 167 Net cash provided by operating activities 6,267 21,225 Cash flows used in investing activities: Purchases of property, plant and equipment (13,011) (18,688) Cash paid for acquisition of intangible assets - (100) Decrease in restricted cash 56 57 Net cash used in investing activities (12,955) (18,731) Cash flows (used in) provided by financing activities: Repurchase of Class A Common Stock (60,775) (9,490) Proceeds from exercise of stock options 20,347 39,745 Cash paid on note payable (58) (54) Excess tax benefit from stock-based compensation arrangements 3,839 12,538 Net proceeds from sale of investment shares 270 521 Net cash (used in) provided by financing activities (36,377) 43,260 Change in cash and cash equivalents (43,065) 45,754 Cash and cash equivalents at beginning of year 94,193 76,402 Cash and cash equivalents at end of period $ 51,128 $ 122,156 Supplemental disclosure of cash flow information: Income taxes paid $ 1,963 $ 417 Income taxes refunded $ 12,000 $ 17,252 Increase in accounts payable for purchase of property, plant and equipment $ 1,628 $ 1,647 Copies of The Boston Beer Company's press releases, including quarterly financial results, are available on the Internet at www.bostonbeer.com SOURCE The Boston Beer Company, Inc. Related Links http://www.samueladams.com GREENVILLE, S.C., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- ChartSpan Medical Technologies, Inc. is pleased to announce plans to bring 300 new healthcare jobs to downtown Greenville, South Carolina. Following the recent closure of $3,200,000 in venture funding, ChartSpan has signed a lease for nearly 100,000 square feet of office space at 2 North Main Street. The company will run its clinical support operations from this location, making ChartSpan one of the largest employers in the downtown area. ChartSpan's technology platform empowers patients to manage their healthcare records and information easily and efficiently from their iPhone or iPad. The three year old technology start-up helps doctors and patients engage with each other through portals, mobile apps and chronic care services. The healthcare company came to Greenville from Texas as one of ten businesses accepted to the Iron Yard Ventures Healthcare Accelerator Program in 2013. Upon exiting the accelerator program, NEXT and the Greenville Area Development Corporation (GADC) assisted the company in their effort to make Greenville its headquarters. A series of tax and job incentives from the South Carolina Department of Commerce and the GADC aided ChartSpan's decision to stay. During the past two years, ChartSpan has grown into one of the leading patient engagement companies in healthcare. ChartSpan's patient technologies have become the most downloaded medical app in America. The company released its new patient engagement product suite on March 1st and has already signed more than $9,000,000 in customer contracts. "This is an unbelievably exciting moment in ChartSpan's evolution," said ChartSpan CEO and Cofounder Jon-Michial Carter. "We have a deep love and affinity for Greenville. The State Department of Commerce, the Greenville Department of Economic Development, NEXT and Greenville city leaders have helped us every step of the way. Our ability to expand in the downtown area of Greenville is a reflection of a remarkably strong and collaborative partnership established for businesses by NEXT and supported by the City of Greenville and the Greenville Area Development Corporation." "ChartSpan's $3.2 million investment, and the 300 new jobs it will create, will have a huge impact in Greenville and across the state," said South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. "We couldn't be more excited to continue this partnership and watch them succeed here for a very long time." ABOUT CHARTSPAN ChartSpan is a healthcare company, specializing in patient engagement technology and medical managed services. We help doctors and patients engage with each other, beyond the clinical encounter. ChartSpan offers a mobile consumer health platform for patients and an innovative "Engagement-as-a-Service" platform for clinics, hospitals and health systems. Our customers depend on ChartSpan to help them achieve Meaningful Use compliance and deliver exceptional chronic care management results. In addition to being the #1 most downloaded medical app in the U.S., ChartSpan is proud to have been named one of the 2015 Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in America. For more information, visit www.chartspan.com/. CONTACT Ashley Swann | Smoak Public Relations [email protected] 864.235.8330 Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160421/358474LOGO SOURCE ChartSpan Medical Technologies Related Links http://www.chartspan.com ELK GROVE VILLAGE, Ill., April 12, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Porte Brown LLC, www.PorteBrown.com, a Chicagoland accounting firm providing accounting, audit, tax, technology and wealth management services, is pleased to announce it has been recognized as one of the Fastest-Growing US Firms in the 2016 issue of Accounting Today's Top 100 Firms and Regional Leaders. With a significant revenue growth rate of 23.30%, Porte Brown ranked 14th overall in the recently published fastest-growing list. More than 400 firms participate in the annual survey process, which ranks U.S.-based firms by their net revenue (Y/E 2015). Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160412/354175LOGO Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160412/354293 In addition, Porte Brown has been named a Great Lakes Regional Leader for the second consecutive year. The Great Lakes region is now the second largest growth segment for U.S. accounting firms and includes the states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio. "In recent years we have seen an increased interest in specific service areas such as wealth management, accounting consulting/technology and business valuations/succession planning," said Bruce Jones, Managing Partner. "As our clients and their businesses mature we try to anticipate the next level of service they will expect," Jones continued. "This year marks our 70th anniversary and as we continue to grow both organically and strategically, we appreciate the feedback we receive from our clients and look forward to the next 70 years together!" The full Top 100 Firms report is available at this link: http://www.accountingtoday.com/gallery/photos/the-fastest-growing-firms-in-the-us-77409-1.html About Porte Brown Porte Brown LLC is a full service accounting and consulting firm headquartered in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village, Illinois. For more than 70 years, Porte Brown has focused on providing the highest level of service to individuals, businesses and organizations throughout the region. In addition to the traditional accounting services such as tax planning and preparation, audit, business valuations, and retirement plan administration. Porte Brown also provides strategic consulting and leading-edge technology implementation for clients in cloud and non-cloud environments. Wealth management services provided by Porte Brown Wealth Management LLC.* Porte Brown serves accounting and consulting clients from offices in Illinois, Indiana, Florida and Texas. For more information, visit www.portebrown.com or call 847-956-1040. *Securities offered through 1st Global Capital Corp., Member FINRA, SIPC. Investment advisory services offered through 1st Global Advisors, Inc. Insurance services offered through 1st Global Insurance Services, Inc. Contact: Pam Metzger, Email 847-956-1040 www.portebrown.com SOURCE Porte Brown LLC Related Links http://www.portebrown.com CHICAGO, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Local communities throughout Chicagoland are joining forces with physicians to keep kids safe at skate parks this spring. The 'Skate Safe' initiative, sponsored by community park districts and Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush (MOR), aims to help reduce the number of skateboard injuries, which peak in spring and summer months. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, there was a 23 percent jump in reported skateboard injuries for kids younger than age 15 between 2013 and 2015. (figures for 2016 not out yet) Experts agree that injuries have increased with the skyrocketing popularity of skateboarding, which is often referred to as the "No. 1 Extreme Sport" in the US. "While we are concerned about all injuries, especially concussions, we typically see a large number of finger, wrist, forearm and elbow fractures," says Dr. Robert Wysocki of the MOR Hand, Wrist & Elbow Institute. "And, it's a shame because many of these are preventable." "While we want skateboarders to enjoy the park and have fun, we want to keep them safe from the dangers associated with the sport," explains Larry Piekarz, Park District of Forest Park Director. Besides Forest Park, Illinois park districts adopting "Skate Safe" include: Hinsdale, Glen Ellyn, Westmont, Wheaton, Naperville and Oak Park. Munster, Indiana, is also on board. The park districts have posted injury prevention signs and are hosting semi-pro skateboarder demonstrations over the summer months (see a full list at www.skatesafer.org). While taking precautions to avoid injury may not feel cool to all skateboarders yet, MOR physicians and staff have put together these simple steps that can go a long way toward staying out of the doctor's office: Wear a helmet, wrist guards, knee and elbow pads Pay attention to other skateboarders and watch for hazardous obstacles Avoid dangerous conditions like wet ground or places with loose objects on the ground Keep your skateboard, wheels and parts in good condition; inspect it before every ride Don't ride with others who are either much older or younger or of a very different skill level If you have pain or are injured, seek attention from a physician Do not use headphones while skateboarding. More tips and tricks on how to be safe while skateboarding are available at skatesafer.org. SOURCE Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush Related Links http://www.rushortho.com "At Church's, we love, respect and value the communities we call home, and have been demonstrating that since our inception in 1952," said Mark Snyder, Chief Marketing Officer for Church's Chicken. "Our ' Church's Loves Communities' campaign provides a platform to showcase the essence of key cities and neighborhoods we serve and our team members who add great value to both our restaurants and these areas. As the original hometown of our brand, it was natural to put the spotlight on San Antonio, especially during our anniversary." The "Church's Loves San Antonio" documentary is the second installment of the series. Church's first film cast the spotlight on Compton, CA earlier this year. Each documentary tackles issues and elements of progress within the cultural makeup of the community. The San Antonio short features the issue of immigration. As the U.S. city with the largest Hispanic population, it generated topics of immigration in conjunction with family, work ethic and Mexican-American culture. This latest film takes viewers on this journey from the perspective of a 19-year-old Church's Employee Scholar who resides in the greater San Antonio area. In addition to working full-time at her local Church's restaurant, she is also enrolled at Coastal Bend College. "Church's has long been a community brand," said Snyder. "We have established ourselves and our locations in neighborhoods, where we have become contributing members of the community. This has allowed us to build strong connections and loyalty that help us connect better with our guests and the residents of our communities." Additional cities are being considered for the "Church's Loves Community" campaign. To follow this program or for more information, visit Churchs.com. About Church's Chicken Founded in San Antonio, TX in 1952 by George W. Church, Church's Chicken is one of the largest quick service restaurant chicken chains in the world. Church's specializes in Original and Spicy Chicken freshly prepared throughout the day in small batches that are hand-battered and double-breaded, Tender Strips, sandwiches, honey-butter biscuits made from scratch and freshly baked, and classic, home-style sides all for a great value. Church's (along with its sister brand Texas Chicken outside the Americas) has more than 1,650 locations in 25 countries and international territories and system-wide sales of more than $1 billion. For more information, visit www.churchs.com. Follow Church's on Facebook at www.facebook.com/churchschicken and Twitter at www.twitter.com/churchschicken. Contact: Alexandria Autry 866.252.1750, x129 [email protected] Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160420/358025 SOURCE Church's Chicken Related Links http://www.churchs.com CHICAGO, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --This year's crop of college graduates will find welcoming conditions as they enter the entry-level job market. According to a new survey from CareerBuilder, 67 percent of employers say they plan to hire recent college graduates this year, up from 65 percent last year and the highest outlook since 2007. More than a third (37 percent) plan to offer recent college graduates higher pay than last year, and 27 percent of employers hiring recent college graduates this year will pay a starting salary of $50,000 or more. The national survey was conducted online by Harris Poll on behalf of CareerBuilder between February 10 and March 17, 2016, and included a representative sample of 2,186 hiring managers and human resource professionals in the private sector across industries and company sizes. "In addition to an improving economy, we are beginning to see a rising number of retirements, which is creating more room for advancement and creating opportunities for entry-level candidates," said Rosemary Haefner, chief human resources officer for CareerBuilder. "But just because there are vacancies doesn't mean college students are always ready to fill them." While prospects appear better, some employers are concerned that new college grads may not be ready for the real world. Twenty-four percent do not feel academic institutions are adequately preparing students for roles needed within their organizations, an increase from 21 percent last year. When asked where academic institutions fall short, these employers cited the following concerns: Too much emphasis on book learning instead of real-world learning: 47 percent I need workers with a blend of technical skills and those skills gained from liberal arts: 39 percent Entry-level roles within my organization are more complex today: 25 percent Not enough focus on internships: 13 percent Technology is changing too quickly for an academic environment to keep up: 13 percent Not enough students are graduating with the degrees my company needs: 11 percent When asked to name which skills they think recent college graduates lack for the workplace, most of these employers cited interpersonal or people (52 percent) or problem-solving skills (48 percent). Other skills these employers stated include: Leadership: 42 percent Teamwork: 39 percent Written communication: 37 percent Oral communication: 37 percent Creative thinking: 35 percent Project management: 27 percent Research and analysis: 17 percent Math: 15 percent Computer and technical: 14 percent College Majors That Will Get You a Job Demand for students with business and technical majors continues to be high among employers with employers stating the following majors are the most in-demand at their firms: Business 35 percent Computer and Information Sciences 23 percent Engineering 18 percent Math and Statistics 15 percent Health Professions and Related Clinical Sciences 14 percent Communications Technologies 11 percent Engineering Technologies 11 percent Communication and Journalism 8 percent Liberal Arts and Sciences, General Studies and Humanities 7 percent Science Technologies 7 percent Social Sciences 6 percent Biological and Biomedical Sciences 6 percent Architecture and Planning 6 percent Education 5 percent Information technology (27 percent) and customer service jobs (26 percent) top the list of position types for which employers hiring recent college grads are recruiting. Opportunities also abound in finance/accounting (19 percent), business development (19 percent) and sales (17 percent). What the Average Grad Makes Right Out of College When it comes to pay, more than a third of employers who plan to hire recent college graduates this year (37 percent) will offer higher starting salaries than they did last year. Fifty-three percent expect no change in salary offers, and 11 percent expect a decrease in starting salaries. More than half of these employers (52 percent) say they will make offers to students before they graduate. Expected starting salaries for recent graduates break down as follows: Under $30,000 : 25 percent : 25 percent $30,000 to less than $40,000 : 28 percent to less than : 28 percent $40,000 to less than $50,000 : 20 percent to less than : 20 percent $50,000 and higher: 27 percent These numbers are subject to change: The majority of employers (67 percent) say they are willing to negotiate salary offers when extending a job offer to a recent college graduate. The New Graduate's Guide to Job Searching If you want to land a full-time gig so you won't have to move back in with mom and dad, try following these tips for a successful first-time job search: Check out your school's career services office: Career Services offices typically are little used by students, except as a place to meet recruiters for interviews. But they have much more to offer, including research materials, advice on job training and connections to local companies. Join a company's talent network: Talent networks keep you automatically informed of new positions opening up that may be a fit for your skills and interests. Make social a priority: Follow companies you like on social media and engage with them. Consider starting a blog that is related to your career interests. While on social channels, make sure you clean up your own digital dirt. Nothing is truly private on the Web, and it would be a shame to miss out on a job opportunity because of some embarrassing photos from years ago. Also make sure your profile is relevant. Think through the eyes of a recruiter and keep your employment history and education updated. Join professional associations: Look for local chapters of professional associations dedicated to the occupations and areas in which you majored or completed studies. Not only are professional associations a great networking opportunity, they may also have an exclusive job posting board or a directory of member companies you can access. Most associations also offer student discounts or discounts for the unemployed. Stay connected with alumni: Find your alma mater's local alumni association and join it. Use your alumni network to gain information or access to hiring managers in departments of your target companies to give you the widest reach. Keep your eye on job boards: Job boards have opportunities for all experience levels, including recent grads, and if you're serious about landing a good job, you need to dedicate time to the search. Make a list of the locations and companies where you'd like to work. Then expand your search to include other related job titles in those companies and locations. CareerBuilder recently created two features Application View Notification and Resume View Notification to give job seekers registered on CareerBuilder.com more transparency into the job search process. With Application View Notification, you can check application views by logging on to their account and viewing their Competition Report. You will also receive an email whenever an employer views your application, so you know in real-time when companies are taking notice of your materials. With Resume View Notification, when you navigate to your homepage you can see the number of times your resumes has been viewed, the frequency in which your resumes has come up in company searches, and the amount of jobs you've applied to and saved. Attend job-hunting events: Even if you do not see any specific employers that excite you in an upcoming career fair on campus, attend it anyway to practice your elevator speech and gain confidence in speaking with recruiters. A career fair may also lend itself to developing additional networking contacts. Survey Methodology This survey was conducted online within the U.S. by Harris Poll on behalf of CareerBuilder among 2,186 hiring and human resource managers ages 18 and over (employed full-time, not self-employed, non-government) between February 10 and March 17, 2016 (percentages for some questions are based on a subset, based on their responses to certain questions). With a pure probability sample of 2,186, one could say with a 95 percent probability that the overall results have a sampling error of +/- 2.10 percentage points. Sampling error for data from sub-samples is higher and varies. About CareerBuilder As the global leader in human capital solutions, CareerBuilder specializes in cutting-edge HR software as a service to help companies with every step of the recruitment process from acquire to hire. CareerBuilder works with top employers across industries, providing job distribution, sourcing, workflow, CRM, data and analytics in one pre-hire platform. It also operates leading job sites around the world. Owned by TEGNA Inc. (NYSE:TGNA), Tribune Media (NYSE:TRCO) and The McClatchy Company (NYSE:MNI), CareerBuilder and its subsidiaries operate in the United States, Europe, South America, Canada and Asia. For more information, visit www.careerbuilder.com. Media Contact Ladan Nikravan 312.698.0538 x70538 [email protected] http://www.twitter.com/CareerBuilderPR SOURCE CareerBuilder Related Links http://www.careerbuilder.com NORTH OLMSTED, Ohio, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- CommutAir announced three executive appointments to its Maintenance & Technical Operations organization as it establishes the platform to triple the size of its fleet and expand its flying footprint when it inducts 40 Embraer 145 aircraft under the previously announced United Express agreement. ROBERT DEGRIE joins as Director of Technical Services. Mr. DeGrie will be responsible for the Fleet Engineering, Engineering & Programs, Production Planning, Materials, and and Maintenance Technology functions. joins as Director of Technical Services. Mr. DeGrie will be responsible for the Fleet Engineering, Engineering & Programs, Production Planning, Materials, and and Maintenance Technology functions. LON ZIEGLER joins as Director of Maintenance. Mr. Ziegler will be responsible for all production functions and have responsibility for in-house and 3 rd party station and base maintenance operations. He will also be nominated as CommutAir's Director of Maintenance (DOM) under 14 CFR part 119 regulations. joins as Director of Maintenance. Mr. Ziegler will be responsible for all production functions and have responsibility for in-house and 3 party station and base maintenance operations. He will also be nominated as CommutAir's Director of Maintenance (DOM) under 14 CFR part 119 regulations. RON CRUZ , joins as Manager of Dulles (IAD). Mr. Cruz will be responsible for maintenance operations at CommutAir's largest aircraft base Robert DeGrie and Lon Ziegler will report to CommutAir's Vice President of Maintenance, James W Page II. Ron Cruz will report to Lon Ziegler. "I am proud that we were able to attract operations executives of the caliber of Robert, Lon and Ron to CommutAir, and I am grateful for their confidence in our team and our growth story" commented Subodh Karnik, President & CEO. "And I am glad that, like most of us at CommutAir, they see the thrill in helping transform our platform to support our huge Embraer jet growth plan". Mr. DeGrie joins CommutAir from Silver Airways, where he served as Director of Engineering and managed the Engineering, Maintenance Programs, Maintenance Training, Production Planning, and CASS functions. His two decades in the airline industry, includes tenures at Silver Airways, Avantair, Republic, Continental, Midway, and Triad. At Avantair, Robert facilitated a double-digit increase in dispatch availability; at Republic, his focus was on improving heavy check work flows; at Continental, he led the material planning component of the Boeing 777 entry and developed the ~$1 Bill inventory plan; and at Midway Airlines, he authored maintenance planning policies, procedures, and programs, including those that drove the early certification and induction of the A320. Robert has an MS in Aviation Science from Everglades University and a BS in Aerospace Administration from Middle Tennessee State University. Mr. Lon Ziegler joins CommutAir from Expressjet Airlines where he was the Director of Maintenance with full oversight of the airline's Part 119 certificate with more than 400 aircraft and 1,300 technical operations employees. Lon joined Bar Harbor Airlines, in 1985, as an A&P mechanic, after leaving the Air Force and rapidly progressed to Director of Maintenance, with stints as QC Instructor, QC Supervisor and Maintenance Manager. During that time, his fleet included Beech 99, C-99, 1900c, EMB 110, CV-600, Saab 340, ATR-42, and Cessna 402 aircraft. He became Continental Express' Regional Director after it merged with Bar Harbor and rose to Director of Maintenance of its ExpressJet incarnation over the next decade. He is one of the world's authorities of the ERJ145 platform. Lon received an AAT in Aviation Technology and his A&P License from Williamsport Area Community College in 1985. Mr. Ron Cruz joins CommutAir from Flightcheck Commercial Aviation Services where he established and ran its successful Dulles operation. He has been a Station Manager, Instructor, Quality Inspector, Supervisor and Technician at Airbus, Vision, Mesa Air, Gemini, Colgan, Independence, Swissport, Atlantic Coast, Gulfstream Aerospace, and the Norfolk Naval Air Station. His experience included Airbus, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas aircraft, most Bombardier and Embraer jets, as well as BAE Jetstream, Gulfstream, Grumman, Saab, and Beech turboprops. His powerplant experience is of similar breadth. Ron graduated from Tidewater Community College in Virginia Beach, VA CommutAir, based near Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, operates as United Express and is majority owned by Champlain Enterprises, Inc, an airline holding company founded in the 1980s. Today, CommutAir operates a large fleet of Bombardier Q200/Q300 aircraft with more than 650 weekly flights to 29 airports. CommutAir's 500+ employees are well known in the industry for fostering a family culture and friendly work environment. Click www.commutair.com or contact us at [email protected] or Laura Prince at +1 (440) 779-4588 x 312. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160218/335030LOGO SOURCE CommutAir Related Links http://www.commutair.com Just in time for summer travel, the new site is highly visual, content rich and entirely mobile responsive. Leveraging the latest interactive technologies, it features: Information on 4,000+ tourism attractions, accommodations and restaurants more than double the number of listings offered on the previous website more than double the number of listings offered on the previous website Intuitive navigation that organizes information based on types of activities (Do), styles of accommodations (Stay) and options for dining (Eat) that organizes information based on types of activities (Do), styles of accommodations (Stay) and options for dining (Eat) Suggested getaway itineraries and travel stories for visitors looking for Ideas based on the type of experiences they enjoy for visitors looking for Ideas based on the type of experiences they enjoy Calendar of events that can be filtered by date range, type of event or region and a special "what to do this weekend" feature that can be filtered by date range, type of event or region and a special "what to do this weekend" feature Regional site views which provide visitors with an in-depth opportunity to explore the unique offerings in each region of the state which provide visitors with an in-depth opportunity to explore the unique offerings in each region of the state Individual pages highlighting each destination , which are free to the businesses and allow them to showcase photos, videos, upcoming events, travel deals and can even automatically bring in their social media feeds and TripAdvisor ratings , which are free to the businesses and allow them to showcase photos, videos, upcoming events, travel deals and can even automatically bring in their social media feeds and TripAdvisor ratings "While You're in the Neighborhood" feature which serves up suggestions and directions for other attractions, hotels and restaurants that are close by the destination you're viewing "Connecticut now has a state-of-the-art website to support our $14 billion tourism industry, which supports 80,000 direct jobs," said Catherine Smith, Commissioner, Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development. "The new site, a key component of our still revolutionary Connecticut marketing efforts, makes it easy for visitors to find and explore our state's rich array of destinations, which will help keep tourism a thriving industry in Connecticut." Nearly a year in the making, this new site was a collaborative effort involving the state's many different kinds of tourism businesses, local associations and other Connecticut state agencies. "In our research, we learned that potential visitors, even our own residents, wanted more specific ideas of things to do in Connecticut. So we designed the new CTvisit.com to bring our state's dynamic blend of offerings to life using lots of great imagery, engaging content and streamlined navigation," said Randy Fiveash, Director, Connecticut Office of Tourism. Regional tourism districts also worked closely with the state's tourism office to enhance content and aggregate listings so that visitors could enjoy a seamless experience of all Connecticut has to offer. "The new site gives the tourism regions the best tools we've had in years to market not only destinations and experiences in our own footprints, but also to build interest and exposure for events and attractions a short drive away," said Ed Dombroskas, Executive Director, Eastern Connecticut Regional Tourism District. "The whole state benefits," he added. At every key milestone in the process from identifying what the site should do to evaluating how it should look the team reached out for quantitative and qualitative feedback from consumers (both in-state residents and out-of-state travelers) as well as from tourism business partners across the state. This research guided every phase of the site development process. "This has truly been a team effort involving tourism businesses from all across the state, the Connecticut Office of Tourism, the regional tourism districts, the regional visitors' bureaus and many local organizations," said Andrew Wood, SVP, External Relations, Mystic Aquarium. "We couldn't be happier with the process and the result. Potential visitors to Connecticut now have such a breadth and depth of information and inspiration at their fingertips." The site is also built on a Content Management System (CMS) that empowers tourism partners to manage their own free feature page. They can edit their information, post events, add deals, update imagery making it easier to keep the entire site's content fresh. "It's exciting to see it all come together," said Matt Fleury, President and CEO of the Connecticut Science Center. "This has been a research-driven, inclusive process. Since the first input session last year, we've all been focused on one key objective: to provide potential visitors and our residents with a great online experience one that inspires them, maybe even surprises them, and ultimately motivates them to explore more of Connecticut." About The Connecticut Office of Tourism The Connecticut Office of Tourism, a division of the State of Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD), created the Connecticut still revolutionary strategic marketing initiative to build pride among residents and bolster the state's reputation as a tourism and business destination. Connecticut offers such a diverse mix of activities and attractions, all in such close proximity to each other, that visitors can enjoy multi-dimensional experiences within a short drive from the exciting and relaxing to the historic and innovative to the culture and nature-focused. For more information, visit www.CTvisit.com and join the Connecticut still revolutionary community on social media on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and Instagram. Video - http://youtu.be/9x7NjDyEu_g Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160421/358463 SOURCE The Connecticut Office of Tourism Related Links http://www.ctvisit.com LANSDOWNE, Va., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation today announced $150,000 in Good Neighbor Grants to seven nonprofit organizations that provide academic and arts enrichment programs serving more than 3,600 students in Northern Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. The one-time grants range from $10,000 to $35,000 each. "These grants will benefit bright young people from low-income and moderate-income families in the Washington metropolitan area, including Loudon County, where the Cooke Foundation is headquartered," said Cooke Foundation Executive Director Harold O. Levy. "Programs we are funding will provide high-quality learning experiences to students from elementary school through high school, helping them reach a new level of academic and artistic excellence and better preparing them for college." The grant recipients were selected from 148 organizations that applied for Good Neighbor Grants. They are: 826DC (Washington, D.C.) A $20,000 grant will support the Young Authors' Book Project, which provides an intensive, one-year writing and publishing opportunity to approximately 50 students in grades 5-12. Through rigorous workshops, students learn about voice, form and theme, create and refine their original works and participate in all aspects of publishing. Audubon Naturalist Society (Montgomery County, Maryland) A $15,000 grant will enable 24 low- and moderate-income high school students from Washington, D.C. who have an interest in science careers to attend the Stream Science Academy. The academy is a 10-week hands-on, project-based, enrichment program in stream monitoring and conservation. Students will conduct independent research using ANS' proprietary Creek Critters smartphone application to identify threats to local water quality and create action plans to educate fellow students on best practices for protecting our waterways. The Bluemont Concert Series (Clarke, Fauquier and Loudoun Counties in Virginia) A $20,000 grant will enable Bluemont's Artists-in-Education Project to bring high-quality cultural and environmental enrichment programing to more than 3,500 K-12 students in the region. Folklorists, historians, musicians, storytellers and authors will collaborate with schools to present programs that enhance curriculum and bring excitement into the classroom. First Star, Inc. (Fairfax County in Virginia; Prince George's County in Maryland; and Washington, D.C.) A $25,000 grant will support year-round enrichment and college access programming for approximately 23 highly motivated foster youth beginning in 8th grade. Students benefit from a four-week residential summer immersion program at George Washington University, where they participate in college-level classes and attend seminars on financial planning, independent living and the college application process. KIPP DC (Washington, D.C.) A $35,000 grant will give 20 high-achieving seniors at KIPP DC College Preparatory the opportunity to participate in college-level English classes through the school's unique Dual Enrollment program at Trinity Washington University. Taught by full-time Trinity professors over the course of the academic year, the course enhances college readiness and provides exposure to a college campus environment. Loudoun Youth (Loudoun County, Virginia) A $10,000 grant will provide 20 scholarships to outstanding low-income students in grades 10 to 12, enabling them to attend Leadership Loudoun Youth. During the one-week summer program, students enhance their skills in leadership, goal-setting and public speaking, and meet and learn from business and community leaders in the region. Traveling Players Ensemble (Arlington, Loudoun, Fairfax and Prince William Counties in Virginia; Montgomery and Prince George's Counties in Maryland; and Washington, D.C.) A $25,000 grant will provide up to 20 scholarships for low- and moderate-income students in grades 5 through 12 to participate in an award-winning classical theater summer camp and winter classes. The rigorous curriculum allows students to participate in all aspects of theater, from set to stage, and includes plays by Shakespeare, Moliere and the ancient Greeks. The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation is dedicated to advancing the education of exceptionally promising students who have financial need. It offers the largest scholarships in the U.S., comprehensive counseling and other support services to students from 8th grade to graduate school. Since 2000 it has awarded about $147 million in scholarships to more than 2,000 students and $90 million in grants to organizations that serve outstanding low-income students. www.jkcf.org Media Contact: David Egner 202-779-1743 [email protected] SOURCE Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Related Links http://www.jkcf.org BROOMFIELD, Colo., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- CraftWorks Restaurants & Breweries, Inc., the largest craft brewery restaurant operator in the country, announced today Mark Belanger has joined its executive team as vice president of global franchise operations and development. In his new role, Belanger will be responsible for leading the national franchise growth efforts for casual dining leader Old Chicago Pizza & Taproom, as well as growing the presence of the company's other brands Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurants, Rock Bottom Restaurants & Breweries and ChopHouse & Brewery nationwide. He will also oversee day-to-day franchisee and license development domestically and abroad. "Following a very successful year, it's time to aggressively expand our brands' visibility nationwide, specifically Old Chicago's growth within the franchise space," said Srinivas Kumar, Chief Executive Officer of CraftWorks Restaurants & Breweries. "With Mark's vast experience in franchising and ability to cultivate strong, long-lasting partnerships, we are confident that he will carry out our franchise expansion goals for Old Chicago, and growth for our key brands." While his efforts will span across CraftWorks' primary brands, Belanger will be leveraging his expertise to specifically accelerate Old Chicago Pizza & Taproom's momentum in 2016, following a year of unprecedented growth. He will lead the company's development strategy, which focuses on catapulting Old Chicago's presence even further by growing the brand in existing markets and identifying new markets to target for franchise expansion. An industry veteran with nearly three decades of experience in the franchise, foodservice and retail space, Belanger most recently served as chief executive officer of ProFab Holdings, Inc. and president/managing principal of MAB Consulting Group, where he and his team provided franchisees with effective ways to save time and money when opening new locations. Prior to consulting, Belanger held various positions at several leading brands including vice president of El Pollo Loco Holdings, Inc., director of business development for Service Master Brands, Inc. and vice president of Barnes & Noble, Inc. "The rate at which the CraftWorks brands are expanding is truly impressive, and there's tremendous opportunity to keep the momentum going," said Belanger. "With a focus on further developing Old Chicago's franchise presence in key markets, I look forward to creating partnerships with a new generation of franchisees and fostering the existing relationships in our system." Old Chicago experienced record-breaking success in 2015, achieving $254 million in system-wide revenue and 20 consecutive months of positive comp sales, and launching its new restaurant prototype a 5,000 square feet build with an additional 1,000 1,200 square feet of outdoor patio space. To fuel franchise growth, the company is seeking multi-unit operators with business, management and foodservice and/or restaurant experience, and a passion for and commitment to exceptional customer service. About Old Chicago Old Chicago Pizza & Taproom (Old Chicago) is a traditional, casual dining restaurant specializing in Chicago-style pizzas, taproom classics and craft beer. Founded in 1976, Old Chicago operates in 24 states with more than 100 restaurants. With over 30 craft beers on tap, Old Chicago is also the home of the World Beer Tour, which rewards members for enjoying 110 of the best craft beers from across the globe. Visit www.oldchicago.com to learn more and to find the restaurant nearest you. For information about franchise opportunities, visit www.ocfranchising.com. About CraftWorks CraftWorks Restaurants & Breweries, Inc. is the largest craft brewery restaurant operator in the country with nearly 200 franchised and company-owned restaurants primarily operating under the Old Chicago Pizza & Taproom, Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurants and Rock Bottom Restaurants & Breweries brands. As a leader in the craft beer focused casual dining segment, CraftWorks also operates strong regional brands, and employs more than 12,000 people throughout the U.S. All of CraftWorks' restaurant brands have innovative menus with made-from-scratch food and a vast selection of unique craft beer, as well as unbeatable service and loyalty programs with over a million active members. Based in Broomfield, Colo., CraftWorks is not only committed to serving its loyal guests, but also the communities in which its restaurants operate. The CraftWorks Foundation has contributed millions of dollars, positively impacting communities throughout the country. For additional information about CraftWorks, the Foundation, and its restaurant brands, please visit www.craftworksrestaurants.com. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150821/260162LOGO CONTACT: Andie Biederman Fish Consulting 954-893-9150 [email protected] SOURCE CraftWorks Restaurants & Breweries, Inc. Related Links http://www.craftworksrestaurants.com "When our customers arrive at Terminal E, they will certainly notice significant progress and activity as a result of our TRIP renovations," said Khaled Naja, DFW Airport's executive vice president of Airport Development and Planning. "Our focus has been on delivering a superior customer experience from easily finding a parking space with our parking guidance system to convenient check-in processing and a variety of concession options before boarding." A pre-security concession, Southwest News, near baggage claim E13/14 opened today, and new gate amenities include upgraded seating and charging tables for passengers. In addition, passengers now have more choices in food, beverage, retail and service offerings with the following concessions: E11 Love Shack (Chef Tim Love's Fort Worth Burger Joint) (Chef Fort Worth Burger Joint) E12 Marshall-Rousso (Retail - Women's Accessories) E13 Sonny Bryan's (Dallas Smokehouse Barbecue) (Dallas Smokehouse Barbecue) E15 Texas Marketplace ( Texas themed gifts) themed gifts) E16 InMotion Entertainment (Retail Electronics) Phase four of the renovation work at Terminal E begins next month, renewing gates E2 through E10, adding more concessions and enhancing an additional section of terminal parking. This final phase of construction is expected to be complete late 2017. During construction, DFW Airport is recommending passengers departing from Terminal E to arrive early and to review available Airport parking options and terminal navigation before arriving onsite. The portion of the parking garage directly across from gates E18 through E32 has closed for renovations and will reopen in 2017. Onsite parking will remain available in the garage across from gates E2 through E10 and serve as overflow. Passengers parking in this lot will need to use an outdoor walkway to enter the terminal at E14. Additional Terminal Link shuttles also will be available to mitigate construction efforts and deliver passengers to operational sections of Terminal E. The Airport offers a variety of parking services, including valet at Terminal E and Express Parking with shuttle pickup and convenient drop off at terminal entrances. "We understand renovations can sometimes cause inconvenience for our customers, so we're working to help ease this transition while work continues on terminal enhancements, new concessions, amenities and parking facilities," Naja said. "With the completion of TRIP, DFW Airport customers will enjoy some of the most convenient, enhanced airport terminals in the world." About Dallas Fort Worth International Airport: Dallas Fort Worth International (DFW) Airport warmly welcomes more than 64 million customers along their journey every year, elevating DFW to a status as one of the most frequently visited superhub airports in the world. DFW Airport customers can choose among 154 domestic and 56 international nonstop destinations worldwide. DFW is elevating the customer experience with modernized facilities and updated amenities, as well as through a $2.7 billion Terminal Renewal and Improvement Program to renovate its four original terminal buildings. Centered between its owner cities of Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, DFW Airport also serves as a major economic generator for the North Texas region, producing over $37 billion in economic impact each year by connecting people through business and leisure travel. For more information, visit the DFW website, download the new DFW App for iOS and Android devices, or follow DFW on social media. Follow Dallas Fort Worth International Airport On: Twitter.com | YouTube.com | Facebook.com Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160421/358619 Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20151013/276597LOGO SOURCE DFW International Airport Related Links https://www.dfwairport.com/ DUBLIN, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- DMS Offshore Investment Services Ltd. (DMS), the world's largest fund governance firm, and Arena Capital Advisors (Arena) have announced the launch of the Arena Short Duration High Income Fund hosted on DMS UCITS ICAV platform. UCITS has created a regulatory passport for investment managers to access European investors. DMS has developed a proprietary UCITS V compliant ICAV platform to provide investment managers with solutions for their UCITS requirements to support the regulatory and fund governance challenges that UCITS presents for U.S. and international investment managers doing business in Europe. UCITS V, which came into force on March 18, 2016, strengthens the protection of UCITS investors. The regulation harmonizes the UCITS depositary regime, remuneration rules and sanctions regime broadly in line with AIFMD and its delegated acts. By providing a fully supported platform with top-tier service providers, DMS can assist with the fund structuring, establishment, regulatory, compliance, distribution, directorship, and reporting requirements of a UCITS allowing our clients to concentrate on their expertise. "DMS is very pleased to have partnered with a manager of the caliber of Arena Capital to facilitate their European fund and distribution strategy. This demonstrates their commitment and confidence in DMS's products and people and we look forward to a successful and long standing relationship," stated Derek Delaney, Managing Director of DMS Europe. Sanije Perrett, President of Arena Capital, commented: "The expansion of our UCITS product offerings reinforces Arena's dedication to European investors. We are excited by the growth potential of our new UCITS Fund, the Arena Short Duration High Income Fund, and are delighted to be partnering with DMS with their proven track record and unique focus in this area." ABOUT DMS DMS Offshore Investment Services Ltd. (DMS) is the worldwide leader in fund governance with more than 225 professionals representing leading investment funds with assets under management exceeding $330 billion. DMS provides trusted and comprehensive Fund Governance, FATCA, AIFMD + UCITS, Banking + Custody, Trust, Corporate and Outsourcing solutions that support investments across a range of structures, and diverse investment strategies. [email protected] ABOUT ARENA CAPITAL Arena Capital Advisors, LLC is a registered investment adviser with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Established in 2013, Arena Capital Advisors, LLC has approximately EUR 600 million under management as at 31 October 2015 and specializes in high yield fixed income, focusing primarily on short duration corporate bonds and leveraged loans. The investment objective of the Arena Short Duration High Income Fund is to generate superior risk adjusted returns through a portfolio of short duration investments. The investments in the firm's short duration high yield strategy consist primarily of short duration high yield securities and corporate loans. [email protected] Media contact: Kate Bohner Managing Director/Chief Marketing & Communications Officer DMS Offshore Investment Services (p) +1.212.403.2783 | (c) +1.917.863.5310 E: [email protected] SOURCE DMS Offshore Investment Services Ltd. Related Links http://www.dmsoffshore.com CHICAGO, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Two new STEM programs that will reach thousands of young children in Chicago were honored Thursday by The White House as it kicked off an Early Learning STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) symposium. Erikson Institute, the nation's premier graduate school in child development impacts young children and families through research, service and advocacy, was the only Chicago-based organization recognized for its commitment to "promoting STEM learning across the country." "It is an honor for Erikson Institute to receive this important national recognition for our efforts to advance STEM for young children," said Geoffrey A. Nagle, Ph. D., Erikson's president and CEO. "Through research, education and empowering parents and teachers, we are deepening our commitment to early STEM learning with a particular focus on technology and math." The White House highlighted the new programs offered through Erikson's Early Math Collaborative and the Technology in Early Childhood Center. Leaders of both Erikson initiatives were invited to Washington, D.C., to participate in the symposium and share ideas. Erikson's programs include: The Technology in Early Childhood Center will launch an online repository for STEM learning plans that align to early childhood development goals; organize a conference on teaching STEM to children with developmental and learning disabilities; develop a technology integration approach that supports early STEM learning; and, in collaboration with the national Association of Children's Museums and the Association for Library Services to Children, deliver STEM professional development to library and museum educators across the country. The Early Math Collaborative, in partnership with the City of Chicago and with support from the National Science Foundation, will launch Collaborative Math, a new professional development model designed to establish excellence in early math teaching in early childhood programs. The Early Math Collaborative will implement the new model at 28 Head Start sites in Chicago . In his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Barack Obama challenged the country to provide every student with authentic STEM experiences to learn subjects like science, math and computer science. Along with the Center for Elementary Mathematics and Science Education at the University of Chicago, Erikson leads the Early Childhood STEM Working Group, which will make a set of achievable recommendations to educational leaders and policymakers to promote research, practice and advocacy that will lead to high-quality STEM experiences for all young children. Media Contact: Kate Schott 312.893.7160 [email protected] SOURCE Erikson Institute Related Links http://www.erikson.edu PUNE, India, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- According to a new market research report, "Field Service Management Market by Solution (Schedule and Dispatch, Work Order Management, Mobile Field Execution), Service (Implementation, Training, Consulting), Deployment Type, User Type, Industry Vertical, & by Region - Global Forecast to 2020", published by MarketsandMarkets, the FSM Market size is estimated to grow from USD 1.97 Billion in 2015 to USD 5.11 Billion by 2020, at an estimated CAGR of 21.0% from 2015 to 2020. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160303/792302 ) Browse 71 market data Tables and 72 Figures spread through 187 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Field Service Management Market" http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/field-service-management-market-209977425.html Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report. The need for a centralized system for the management of field services and the ever-evolving demand for increasing operational efficiency and reducing operational costs are the important driving factors fueling the growth of the FSM Market. Schedule and dispatch is expected to be the largest contributor in the solution segment The market for schedule and dispatch is expected to be the largest as it helps field workers to conduct smart scheduling of tasks, routes, and daily processes. Moreover, a streamlined dispatch process makes managing calls easier for field engineers and technicians, and hence, the market for schedule and dispatch is expected to be the largest in the coming years. Furthermore, due to low costs and scalability features of the cloud deployment type, FSM customers are expected to be more receptive toward cloud than on-premises. The field service companies are also turning toward consulting services to deploy the right FSM solution as per their business objectives. Request for Sample @ http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/requestsample.asp?id=209977425 The North American region is expected to contribute the maximum market share to the overall FSM Market Among the regions, North America is expected to be the highest contributor followed by Europe. The market is in the emerging stage in the regions of Asia-Pacific (APAC), Europe, Middle-East and Africa (MEA), and Latin America. Therefore, these regions exhibit immense scope for adoption of FSM solutions. Moreover, there is huge return on investment in the FSM Market; however, a lack of awareness about the benefits of FSM solutions in these regions is the major restraining factor for the wide adoption of FSM solutions. Additionally, the growing technological developments in the field of cloud, analytics, and the emergence of BYOD have led to the high adoption of FSM in North America and Europe. The major vendors in the FSM Market include SAP SE, Oracle, IBM, ClickSoftware Technologies, Astea International, ServicePower Technologies, Trimble Navigation, IFS, PTC, and Infor. RapidValue, FieldAware, and Coresystems are identified as the key innovators in the market. The Field Service Management Market has been segmented into solutions, services, deployment types, user types, industry verticals, and regions. Various FSM solutions include schedule & dispatch, work order management, mobile field execution, customer management, reporting and dashboards, billing & invoicing, inventory management, and tracking & performance management. Services offered in the FSM Market are implementation, training & support, and consulting. Deployment types are segmented into cloud and on-premises. User types are classified as small & medium enterprises and large enterprises. Various industry verticals considered are oil & gas, construction, residential & commercial, manufacturing, security & alarm, transportation, energy & utilities, healthcare, telecom, insurance and various others. Finally, the FSM Market is segmented on the basis of regions into North America, Europe, APAC, MEA, and Latin America. Browse Related Reports:- Enterprise Asset Management Market by Software Applications (Linear Assets, Non-Linear Assets, Field Service Management, Assets MRO), by Services, by Organization Size, by Verticals (Government & Utilities, Oil & Gas, Healthcare and Others) - Global forecast to 2020 http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/enterprise-asset-management-market-54576143.html Fleet Management Market by Solutions (Operations & Asset Management, Fleet Analytics, Routing & Navigation, Vehicle Maintenance & Leasing, Driver Information Systems), by Connectivity Technology, Industry Verticals, Services - Global Forecast to 2020 http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/fleet-management-systems-market-1020.html About MarketsandMarkets MarketsandMarkets is the world's No. 2 firm in terms of annually published premium market research reports. Serving 1700 global fortune enterprises with more than 1200 premium studies in a year, M&M is catering to a multitude of clients across 8 different industrial verticals. We specialize in consulting assignments and business research across high growth markets, cutting edge technologies and newer applications. Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model - GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors. M&M's flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "RT" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. The new included chapters on Methodology and Benchmarking presented with high quality analytical infographics in our reports gives complete visibility of how the numbers have been arrived and defend the accuracy of the numbers. We at MarketsandMarkets are inspired to help our clients grow by providing apt business insight with our huge market intelligence repository. Contact: Mr. Rohan Markets and Markets UNIT no 802, Tower no. 7, SEZ Magarpatta city, Hadapsar Pune, Maharashtra -411013, India 1-888-600-6441 Email: [email protected] Visit MarketsandMarkets Blog @ http://www.marketsandmarketsblog.com/market-reports/telecom-it Connect with us on LinkedIn @ http://www.linkedin.com/company/marketsandmarkets SOURCE MarketsandMarkets NASHVILLE, Tenn., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- As the racing industry prepares for the 100th Running of the Indianapolis 500 on May 29, Firestone, a leading tire brand offered by Bridgestone Americas, Inc. (Bridgestone) and the official tire of the Verizon IndyCar Series, is giving fans an opportunity to compete against racing legend Mario Andretti. The competition is part of a six-week online sweepstakes that will result in one grand prize winner receiving an all-expenses-paid trip for two people to "the Greatest Spectacle in Racing" the 100th Running of the Indy 500. The grand prize winner also will have an opportunity to meet Andretti, the first driver to win Indy car races in four different decades. The Race Andretti sweepstakes, which launched on April 17, invites participants to outrace Andretti while performing everyday, household tasks. The first challenge is to see how quickly participants can peel an orange. A new challenge will be revealed each week through May 15. An additional bonus challenge will be launched on May 15, offering participants the chance to win a milk bottle autographed by Andretti and the winning driver of the 2016 Indy 500. The sweepstakes concludes on May 30. "Mario Andretti is a champion as legendary as the Indy 500 itself," said Philip Dobbs, chief marketing officer, Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations. "At Firestone, we've been making champions on the racetrack for decades. The Race Andretti sweepstakes is a fun way for us to involve fans in the 100th Running and help them experience what it means to compete like a champion, too." To enter the sweepstakes fans must visit www.RaceAndretti.com to register and access Andretti's challenge videos before posting their own videos to the site or Twitter, using the hashtag #RaceAndrettiSweepstakes. At the end of each challenge week, Firestone will post Andretti's full video showing his official finish time. Each week, one contestant will be selected to receive a $500 gift card redeemable at any Firestone Complete Auto Care store nationwide, as well as a Firestone Racing hat signed by the racing legend himself. Winning submissions will be featured side-by-side in a video with Mario Andretti competing in that week's task. One grand prize winner will be selected from the pool of weekly winners and announced on May 15. The grand prize winner will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to the 100th Running of the Indianapolis 500 and the opportunity to meet Andretti. The Race Andretti sweepstakes and creative were developed in partnership with Leo Burnett Chicago. "The Firestone brand has an historic relationship with the Indy car racing. And this year they're celebrating the 100th Running of the Indy 500 by giving people a chance to race Mario Andretti," said Leo Burnett SVP, Creative Director Mikal Pittman. "Who gets to say they've done that?" For additional information about the sweepstakes or to enter, visit www.RaceAndretti.com. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. Sweepstakes begins 4/17/16 at 12:00:01 AM CT. Ends 5/30/16 at 11:59:59 PM CT. Grand Prize Entry for trip to Indy 500 ends 5/14/16 at 11:59:59 PM CT. Open to legal residents of U.S. and DC, 18 or older. Void in AK, HI and where prohibited. Indy 500 Trip must be taken 5/27-30/16. Subject to Official Rules available at raceandretti.com/rules. See Rules for complete details, eligibility, restrictions, prize information, ARVs, odds and how to participate without purchase or making a video. Sponsor: Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations, LLC, Nashville, TN. Trademarks of Brickyard Trademarks, Inc. are used with permission. About Bridgestone Americas, Inc.: Nashville, Tennessee-based Bridgestone Americas, Inc. (BSAM) is the U.S. subsidiary of Bridgestone Corporation, the world's largest tire and rubber company. BSAM and its subsidiaries develop, manufacture and market a wide range of Bridgestone, Firestone and associate brand tires to address the needs of a broad range of customers, including consumers, automotive and commercial vehicle original equipment manufacturers, and those in the agricultural, forestry and mining industries. The companies are also engaged in retreading operations throughout the Western Hemisphere and produce air springs, roofing materials, and industrial fibers and textiles. The BSAM family of companies also operates the world's largest chain of automotive tire and service centers. Guided by its One Team, One Planet message, the company is dedicated to achieving a positive environmental impact in all of the communities it calls home. About Leo Burnett: Leo Burnett Worldwide believes in using creativity to drive dynamic business change for its clients. Through a HumanKind approach to marketing, the agency puts a brand's purpose at the center of communications to transform human behavior. Part of Publicis Communications and the Publicis Groupe, Leo Burnett Worldwide works with some of the world's most valued brands including Coca-Cola, Fiat, Kellogg's, Kraft, McDonald's, Nintendo, P&G and Samsung, among others. For the past six years, Leo Burnett has been ranked #1 in "New World Thinking" by The Gunn Report and was named an Agency to Watch on Advertising Age's 2015 A-List. To learn more about Leo Burnett Worldwide and its rich, 80-year history of creating iconic brands, visit our site, Facebook page and follow us via @leoburnett. SOURCE Bridgestone Americas, Inc. Related Links http://www.RaceAndretti.com SACRAMENTO, Calif., April 20, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In light of the massive recent gas leak at Aliso Canyon, the role of energy storage solutions in diversifying the grid's power resources and increasing electricity reliability has magnified and become more urgent. Four complementary energy storage bills are poised to advance through the California legislature this week. These bills will collectively ensure that energy storage solutions are poised to help California improve reliability and achieve its renewable energy and greenhouse gas emission reduction goals. Through these bills, the California Legislature is rising to the challenge of creating a more affordable, cleaner electric grid for all Californians. The California Energy Storage Alliance (CESA) strongly supports these four bills. How the bills work together : Addressing Permitting Challenges AB 2713 (Chiu and Mullin) helps cities and counties safely and efficiently permit customer-located energy storage projects through the creation of a handbook of best practices. Smoothing Interconnection to the Grid AB 2861 (Ting) establishes a process to ensure customer-located energy resources including energy storage can plug into the grid in a timely manner and without unreasonable costs. This bill allows disputes on interconnections to be resolved through a fast, independent review. Saving Customers Money AB 2868 (Gatto) directs the major electric utilities to help homes and businesses install energy storage systems that save money on their electric bills and support a reliable electric grid. This bill focuses first on low-income, commercial and industrial customers, all of whom are heavily affected by rising electricity costs. Moving Towards More Green Power SB 886 (Pavley) directs longer-term planning with an eye towards energy storage, reducing reliance on natural gas and using energy storage to capture renewable energy sources, which will account for 50% of grid resources in 2030. Importantly, this bill supports energy storage deployments through customer-focused actions and establishment of a new utility storage procurement goal for 2030, building on the 2020 goal initiated by AB 2514 (Skinner) in 2010. Janice Lin, Executive Director of CESA, notes, "These four bills will work together to prepare California for a cleaner, more reliable, affordable and resilient energy future. Adding energy storage to the grid supports renewable energy and electric vehicle integration, reduces greenhouse gas emissions and helps customers manage their electricity costs. These bills are yet another way in which California is leading the way in fostering advanced energy solutions." About The California Energy Storage Alliance (CESA) The California Energy Storage Alliance (CESA) is a 501c(6) non-profit committed to advancing the role of energy storage in the electric power sector through policy, education, outreach, and research. CESA's mission is to make energy storage a mainstream resource to promote a cleaner, more efficient, reliable, affordable and secure electric power system. SOURCE CESA (California Energy Storage Alliance) Related Links www.storagealliance.org SAN FRANCISCO, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/-- Forter, the first fraud prevention company to offer an automated, real-time Decision as a Service solution for online merchants, announced today that the company has closed $32 million in Series C funding led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from previous investors Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Along with the addition of Scale Venture Partners' Rory O'Driscoll to Forter's Board of Directors, the new funding will be a driving force behind Forter's continued rapid growth and overall expansion throughout the U.S., as well as the acceleration of the company's innovative and award-winning fully automated fraud prevention platform and company vision of delivering a fraud-free e-commerce ecosystem. Since launching in February of 2014, Forter has received a total of $50 million in funding and has tripled in size, helping create a global market platform that merchants use to ensure that fraud prevention is consumer-centric, contributing to frictionless checkout and smooth customer experience. The funds will also be used to ensure Forter's continued mission of combating and eliminating e-commerce fraud. The Global Fraud Attack Index reported that online fraud attacks grew 215 percent over the course of 2015, and as fraudsters around the world continue to evolve their methods of attack, the new investment will strongly aid Forter in their never-ending mission to reduce e-commerce-related fraud while improving customer experience and driving sales. "In today's world of growing fraud attacks, we want to completely remove the fear of fraud from eCommerce and help retailers capture more sales," said Michael Reitblat, CEO of Forter. "We are very excited to have Scale Venture Partners join Sequoia Capital and NEA as our partners." Forter is known for its real-time Decision as a Service technology that emphasizes high approvals and stops fraudulent shoppers at the moment of checkout with an instant response, something that is made possible by the fully automated nature of the system. Forter's system is so accurate that the company provides retailers with a 100% guarantee against fraud chargebacks. Forter is dedicated to helping merchants grow sales by approving more orders and streamlining the shopping experience by removing friction, for smoother checkout and faster fulfillment. Ultimately, Forter also aims to help merchants create a smarter and safer global marketplace within which they fight fraud together, instead of having retailers working alone and unprotected. "The e-commerce fraud ecosystem is constantly evolving, growing and becoming more complex," said Rory O'Driscoll, General Partner at Scale Venture Partners. "Forter's intelligent, fully automated antifraud solution is unique. Combine real-time, automated fraud prevention decisions with a seasoned executive team and dedicated emphasis on research, and you get a company which is squarely in position to lead the change that online retailers need. Forter is an exciting addition to the Scale portfolio and we look forward to working with Michael and his team." About Forter: Forter provides new generation fraud prevention to meet the challenges faced by modern enterprise e-commerce. Only Forter provides fully automated, real-time Decision as a Service fraud prevention, backed by a 100% fraud chargeback guarantee instant, guaranteed approve/decline decisions for every transaction. The system eliminates the need for rules, scores or manual reviews, making fraud prevention friction-free. The result is fraud prevention that is invisible to buyers and empowers merchants with increased approvals, smoother checkout and the near elimination of false positives - meaning more sales and happier customers. Behind the scenes, Forter's machine learning technology combines advanced cyber intelligence with behavioral and identity analysis to create a multi-layered fraud detection mechanism. The result is best for online merchants, and best for online customers. SOURCE Forter Among these innovations is a new thermal imaging camera (TIC) that is part of the self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) itself. Introduced as a concept just one year ago, MSA's integrated thermal imaging camera has since been submitted for regulatory approval and is now available for pre-order. An industry first, the G1 Integrated TIC now makes the concept of personal thermal imaging a reality. "The G1 SCBA is the single largest new product development effort in MSA's history," said Steven Blanco, Vice President and General Manager of MSA's business in the U.S. and Canada. "But we are certainly not done, and this integrated TIC is evidence of that commitment. Our brand promise to firefighters When you go inWe go in with you is what drives us. And it's consistent with MSA's long-standing mission to protect people in the workplace. In that spirit, our vision is to continually raise the bar to protect workers with technology that, in this case, has the potential to genuinely change the way fires are fought." Compatible with any G1 SCBA, via factory installation or a simple field upgrade, the G1 Integrated TIC is patent-pending and takes advantage of the only full-color display control module available on the market today. With five user-selectable color palettes, it represents a concept that just ten years ago was considered out of reach by many in the fire service industry, Mr. Blanco commented. In addition to the new TIC option, MSA unveiled three new and patent-pending concepts that likewise leverage the flexibility of the G1 SCBA platform. These include a fall detection system, a breathing rate detection system and a firefighter ranging system, all of which have the potential to take firefighter safety to the next level. "While the these three new technologies are still in prototype form, showcasing them at FDIC allows our product designers to gain important, first-hand feedback from the fire service community," explained Jason Traynor, Global Product Business Director for Respiratory Protection and Fire Helmets. Falls are recognized as the number one cause for "MAYDAY" emergencies on the fire ground, Mr. Traynor explained. Taking advantage of existing hardware within the G1 SCBA, MSA's fall detection concept triggers an audible alarm that sounds well before a conventional PASS (Personal Alert Safety System) alarm would indicate a lack of firefighter movement. The result is a significantly shortened response time for a downed firefighter. "Every second counts in a rapid intervention situation," said Mr. Traynor. "Our goal is to give firefighters those extra critical seconds that could literally mean the difference between life and death." Also capitalizing on the G1's versatile design, MSA introduced a breathing rate monitor that provides firefighters with increased awareness of their exertion levels, enabling them to take immediate action to avoid overexertion, another leading health and safety concern throughout the fire service. In keeping with this "information is king" focus, MSA also showcased a firefighter ranging system that provides direction, distance and elevation data for firefighters at the scene. Displayed directly on the full-color control module of the G1 SCBA, with one glance firefighters can know of the whereabouts of fellow firefighters, thereby saving time should an emergency rescue situation occur. Each of the innovations unveiled by MSA are designed to work hand-in-hand with the G1 SCBA telemetry system, thereby allowing incident command to remotely monitor potentially dangerous conditions on the fire ground. "The G1 SCBA was developed with the promise of providing firefighters with the latest technology, as it becomes available, to help protect them when lives are on the line. These innovations demonstrate that vision in action," Mr. Traynor said. "Equally important, it represents the next step in our goal to provide a truly unique and versatile SCBA platform that can keep up with the rapid pace of technological change." Other MSA activities at FDIC include the company's official sponsorship of the conference's firefighter training classes and exercises, where participants will use MSA Evolution 6000 thermal imaging cameras. MSA is also a key sponsor of the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation (NFFF) 2016 Stair Climb. Because of the role MSA played in the days immediately following the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the company is also making a $10,000 donation to the NFFF in honor of the fifteenth anniversary of that fateful day. Interested parties not in attendance at FDIC in Indianapolis can keep up to date with the latest happenings from the exhibition hall by visiting MSA's Facebook page. About MSA Established in 1914, MSA Safety Incorporated is the global leader in the development, manufacture and supply of safety products that protect people and facility infrastructures. Many MSA products integrate a combination of electronics, mechanical systems and advanced materials to protect users against hazardous or life-threatening situations. The company's comprehensive line of products is used by workers around the world in a broad range of markets, including the oil, gas and petrochemical industry, the fire service, the construction industry, mining and the military. MSA's core products include self-contained breathing apparatus, fixed gas and flame detection systems, portable gas detection instruments, industrial head protection products, fire and rescue helmets, and fall protection devices. With 2015 revenues of $1.1 billion, MSA employs approximately 4,600 people worldwide. The company is headquartered north of Pittsburgh in Cranberry Township, Pa., and has manufacturing operations in the United States, Europe, Asia and Latin America. With more than 40 international locations, MSA realizes approximately half of its revenue from outside North America. For more information visit MSA's web site at www.MSAsafety.com. Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160418/356450 SOURCE MSA Related Links http://www.msasafety.com WASHINGTON, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Dr. Christina Back, Vice President, Nuclear Technologies and Materials for General Atomics and lead physicist responsible for the Energy Multiplier Module (EM2), an advanced reactor concept, today testified before the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Energy on the efforts to modernize the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to best jumpstart research into advanced nuclear reactors. "The following four core principles should guide the design of an 'advanced reactor' to ensure commercial success. It must produce cost-competitive clean electricity, be safer, produce significantly less waste, and reduce proliferation risk," Dr. Back testified. "We believe every worthy advanced reactor concept must address these four core principles jointly. It is not sufficient to excel at one with disregard to the others," continued Back. EM2 is an advanced reactor concept designed to meet the needs of the twenty-first century United States electrical grid. EM2 is a passively safe, helium-cooled, convert-and-burn reactor with a net power of 265 MWe. It embodies significant advances in plant safety, operability, economics, resource utilization and security. EM2 capabilities are the result of bold innovations in reactor physics, core materials, safety system design, and power conversion technology. "If this Committee's objective is to stimulate the development of new advanced reactors, hopefully defined as we've outlined here, we would suggest that it is in this early phase that it would be relatively inexpensive to involve the NRC for early consultations with potentially very high impact," concluded Dr. Back. Dr. Back's complete written testimony is available here. For more information on General Atomics' EM2 project or to speak with Dr. Christina Back please contact Zabrina Johal at (858) 455-4004. About General Atomics: San Diego-based General Atomics and its affiliated companies now constitute one of the world's leading resources for high-technology systems ranging from the nuclear fuel cycle to electromagnetic systems, remotely operated surveillance aircraft, airborne sensors, and advanced electronic, wireless and laser technologies. Contact: Zabrina Johal (858) 455-4004 SOURCE General Atomics Genpact OpenWealth provides an efficient end-to-end platform for wealth managers, allowing them to focus on raising assets and managing investor relationships, while delegating non-core administrative processing. Genpact's OpenWealth solution leverages Bravura's next generation wealth technology Sonata, providing a functionally rich and intuitive, scalable and interoperable system. Genpact's OpenWealth services are delivered from its U.K. center of excellence in Glasgow. "This partnership with Genpact will help deliver enhanced and innovative services for our customers and advisers," said Nick Turner, Sales and Agency Director at NFU Mutual. "We chose Genpact for a variety of reasons: deep expertise in U.K. wealth administration, use of next generation technology, strong operational culture, an ability to incorporate advanced technologies into its end-to-end processes, stability and security." "We are excited to form a long-term partnership with an organization of the caliber of NFU Mutual, one of the U.K.'s oldest and most successful mutual companies and a top retail financial services brand," said Scott Lee, Genpact Head of OpenWealth, Europe. "The combination of our strong platform, domain expertise, financial strength, and heritage as a service provider positions us well to support NFU Mutual's strategy. In addition, our values are strongly aligned and we look forward to enabling the continuation of NFU Mutual's first class customer service." NFU Mutual focuses on the financial needs of the farming and rural community. Operating primarily through a local network of agents and financial planners, NFU Mutual provides financial planning services to over 950,000 of its customers throughout the United Kingdom. Genpact's OpenWealth business provides end-to-end business process as a service, including technology and process execution support for account opening, transfers, portfolio construction, rebalancing, trading, product administration, accounting and controls, customer, business and regulatory reporting, and compliance management. Based on a flexible and open architecture, its core technology platform for the U.K. market features a single chassis for all asset types, the ability to administer a client-centric view for all accounts and tax wrappers, and highly configurable support for multiple engagement types. More information about Genpact OpenWealth is available at www.genpact.com/home/industries/banking-financial-services/retail-banking/wealth-management. About NFU Mutual Insurance Society For more about NFU Mutual visit: www.nfumutual.co.uk. About Genpact Genpact (NYSE: G) stands for "generating business impact." We are a global leader in digitally-powered business process management and services. We architect the Lean DigitalSM enterprise through our patented Smart Enterprise Processes (SEPSM) framework that reimagines our clients' operating models end-to-end, including the middle and back offices. This creates Intelligent OperationsSM that we help design, transform, and run. The impact on our clients is a high return on transformation investments through growth, efficiency, and business agility. For two decades, first as a General Electric division and later as an independent company, we have been passionately serving our clients. Today, we generate impact for a few hundred strategic clients, including approximately one-fifth of the Fortune Global 500, and have grown to over 70,000 people in 25 countries, with key offices in New York City. The resulting business process and industry domain expertise and experience running complex operations are a unique heritage and focus that help us drive the best choices across technology, analytics, and organizational design. For additional information, visit www.genpact.com. Follow Genpact on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. For more information: Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140627/122419 SOURCE Genpact Related Links http://www.genpact.com DALLAS, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Texas trial and appellate law firm, GODWIN PC is pleased to announce that firm Chairman and CEO Donald E. Godwin has been named to D Magazine's 2016 list of The Best Lawyers in Dallas. The 2016 selection marks the ninth time Mr. Godwin has earned selection to D Magazine's list of the city's best lawyers in recognition for his work in commercial litigation. "Dallas is home to some of the finest attorneys I have worked with, and some of the best I have faced in litigation," says Mr. Godwin. "I am both gratified and humbled to once again be included among such an accomplished group of lawyers." Mr. Godwin is one of the most respected trial lawyers in the United States. Recognized by Chambers USA for his work in Commercial Litigation, he has also been honored by selection to the Lawdragon 500 Leading Lawyers in America, and named among the "50 Lions of the Texas Bar" by Texas Lawbook, recognizing the most influential veteran attorneys in the state. Mr. Godwin has been listed since 2012 among The Best Lawyers in America by Woodward-White and has also earned five-time selection to the American City Business Journals' "Who's Who in Energy" listing. He has been named seven times to the list of Top 100 in Lawyers in Texas by Thomson Reuters, and to its exclusive Texas Super Lawyers list each year since its inception in 2003. D Magazine's 2016 listing of the top attorneys in Dallas was determined through a peer-review voting process and ballots submitted by thousands of area lawyers. Those casting ballots could only nominate others within their own practice area. The final list was compiled by an independent panel of distinguished attorneys that worked in conjunction with the magazine's editors. The complete list will be included in the May 2016 edition of D Magazine and is available online at www.dmagazine.com. Founded in 1980, GODWIN PC is a mid-sized trial and appellate firm with a national practice. With offices in Dallas and Houston, Texas, GODWIN PC represents Fortune 500 and middle-market industry leaders in Mission Critical Litigation throughout the United States. The firm is known for handling some of the biggest business litigation cases in Texas and elsewhere, including its successful representation of Halliburton in the landmark environmental litigation stemming from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. To learn more, visit the Firm's website at http://www.GODWINLaw.com. For more information on recent honors for Mr. Godwin or for further information on GODWIN PC, please contact Ed Sothcott at 214-939-8626 or [email protected] SOURCE GODWIN PC Related Links http://www.godwinlaw.com WASHINGTON, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Two national groups representing over 200,000 business nationwide submitted comments today in support of the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) proposed regulations of methane from natural gas operations on public lands. The Green America Business Network (GBN) and American Sustainable Business Council (ASBC) are encouraging BLM to further limit venting, flaring and leaks from natural gas production on federal and tribal lands. GBN and ASBC comments highlighted the risks to businesses nationwide from climate change. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and recent research from Harvard demonstrates that methane emissions in the central U.S. increased by more than 30 percent between 2002 and 2014. These methane emissions are significantly undermining the reductions the US has achieved in CO2 emissions and are worsening global warming. Small businesses in general are vulnerable to climate change, and have less resources to adapt to it. Impacts include disrupting distribution, interrupting farming and production, and rising healthcare costs for employees. "Climate change represents a huge risk to small businesses nationwide," said Todd Larsen, executive co-director of Green America. "Currently, the oil and gas industry allows enormous amounts of methane to be wasted each year on public lands. Those methane leaks contribute directly to global warming at a time. Small business leaders nationwide are calling for a reduction in emissions to protect the economy and create businesses opportunities over the next decade." "We already see the risks to businesses from climate change," said Richard Eidlin, vice president of Policy and Campaigns of ASBC. "At the same time, businesses are at the forefront of companies providing methane mitigation. The BLM's rules will help to spur clean energy innovation and jobs in the United States, while helping to protect the environment and economy for decades to come. That's good for business." The groups also called on BLM to strengthen its proposal, including: improving leak detection and repair requirements; enacting better standards for production equipment and strengthening flaring regulation; and ensuring enforcement, transparency, and accountability (including increased ability for public comment for ongoing issues). Green America is the nation's leading green economy organization. Founded in 1982, Green America (formerly Co-op America) provides the economic strategies, organizing power and practical tools for businesses and individuals to solve today's social and environmental problems. The Green Business Network represents over 3,000 businesses nationwide and is home to both rising social and eco enterprises and the most established green businesses around. The Network provide the tools, information, and consumer base to help businesses thrive in today's competitive green marketplace. The American Sustainable Business Council asbcouncil.org advocates for policy change and informs business owners and the public about the need and opportunities for building a vibrant, sustainable economy. Through its national member network it represents more than 200,000 businesses and more than 325,000 entrepreneurs, executives, managers and investors. SOURCE Green America, Washington, D.C. CHICAGO, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Grubhub Inc. (NYSE: GRUB), the nation's leading online and mobile food-ordering and delivery platform, today announced that it will host a conference call to discuss its first quarter financial results on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2016, at 9:00 a.m. Central Time, following the release of the Company's financial results. Matt Maloney, CEO, and Adam DeWitt, CFO will host the webcast. The live webcast of the conference call will be available on the investor relations section of the Grubhub website at http://investors.grubhub.com/. Following completion of the call, a recorded replay of the webcast will be available on the website. About Grubhub Grubhub (NYSE: GRUB) is the nation's leading online and mobile food-ordering company. Dedicated to moving eating forward and connecting diners with the food they love from their favorite local restaurants, the company's platforms and services strive to elevate food ordering through innovative restaurant technology, easy-to-use platforms and an improved delivery experience. Grubhub is proud to work with more than 40,000 restaurant partners in over 1,000 U.S. cities and London. The Grubhub portfolio of brands includes Grubhub, Seamless, AllMenus, MenuPages, Restaurants on the Run, DiningIn and Delivered Dish. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20151014/276973LOGO SOURCE Grubhub Related Links http://investors.grubhub.com HOUSTON, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Gulf Winds International joyfully celebrates 20 years of service to the logistics industry this April. Founded in 1996, Gulf Winds has established itself as the leading provider of port and rail logistics solutions in the Gulf region. "We are incredibly thankful for the support of our clients, vendors, owner operators, consultants, and employees that have enabled us to live out our mission and vision over the last 20 years! Consider the reality that we were birthed out of a layoff, with the support of one customer, in one location, and backed by middle class 401K money," said Todd Stewart, President of Gulf Winds International. "Our company is truly an amazing story of God's providence and faithfulness to take any situation and turn it for good! We are grateful for the past, excited about the present, and hopeful for the future!" Stewart is the President of Gulf Winds International, a Texas-based third party logistics (3PL) provider offering industry-leading container drayage, transloading, and warehousing, local and long-haul transportation. About Gulf Winds International: Gulf Winds International (www.gwii.com), is a third party logistics (3PL) provider, offering industry-leading container drayage, transloading, and domestic transportation services. Gulf Winds is the largest supplier of container drayage, intermodal, and transloading services in the Gulf region with over 300 trucks, 900 owned chassis, and 2.4 million sq ft of port related warehouse space. For more information about Gulf Winds International, please contact Patrick Maher [email protected] or visit the company's website at http://www.gwii.com SOURCE Gulf Winds International Related Links http://www.gwii.com NEW YORK, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/-- Handshake, the emerging leader in B2B Commerce technology for manufacturers and distributors, today announced the introduction of Handshake Direct Mobile, a dedicated mobile commerce app that is the latest addition to the company's B2B Commerce platform. Handshake Direct Mobile is designed for shelf-side ordering making it easy for retailers to keep their stores fully stocked with the right products. Buyers and store staff can instantly place orders, explore product catalogs with HD images and review their order history, bringing the shopping experience of leading consumer eCommerce apps to B2B. Handshake Direct Mobile is part of Handshake Direct, the Company's omnichannel B2B eCommerce product family that addresses the needs of global manufacturers and distributors by providing their customers with an on-demand buying experience. As the mobile extension, Handshake Direct Mobile delivers several technologies that are critical to fast and accurate retailer ordering, including barcode scanning using the camera or a Bluetooth scanner. In order to maximize the app's reach, Handshake Direct Mobile continues to work offline, allowing businesses to prepare their orders in common "dead zones" like store floors and stockrooms. Orders submit automatically when devices reconnect. Handshake Direct Mobile is now publicly available to all companies. Early adopters of the technology include Peavey Electronics, one of the largest audio equipment manufacturers in the world; Pet Food Experts, an independently owned and operated pet food and supplies distributor; and Cooper-Booth Wholesale a full-line, full-service wholesale distributor for convenience stores. During their adoption periods, customers reported increases in both order volume and order frequency. "Peavey wants to empower dealers with direct access to information on products and promotions. Mobile commerce is becoming one of the basics for doing business in the 21st century," said Fred Poole, General Manager, Product Development & North American Sales, Peavey Electronics. "In conversations with Handshake, I knew that they understood our end vision for what we could do with mobile technology. It was also very easy to use, and it could be implemented quickly." "Cooper-Booth prides itself on the added value and service we provide to our customers through technology," said Lori Homsher, Vice President, Information Technology, Cooper-Booth Wholesale Company. "Stores using Handshake Direct Mobile are placing orders more frequently and minimizing empty shelves because it is so easy to quickly place an order once they see stock levels getting low." "More and more business is being done on mobile devices, with some estimates suggesting 50% of commerce will be done on mobile within a few years," said Glen Coates, CEO, Handshake. "The consumerization of business technology helps stores do their ordering faster, so they can spend more time servicing customers, maintaining their storefronts, and can focus on providing their customers with the best in-store experience possible. Leading manufacturers and distributors are recognizing that the future is enabling anywhere, anytime commerce for their customers." About Handshake Founded in 2010, Handshake is the B2B Commerce platform that helps manufacturers and distributors grow their business by making it easy for their customers to order the right products from them, in-person and online. Handshake Rep is a mobile order entry app that allows sales reps to write orders faster and gives them the product and customer information they need to have more strategic customer conversations. Handshake Direct is an omnichannel B2B eCommerce solution that complements field sales reps by giving buyers the convenience of 24x7 ordering and product education through a custom B2B eCommerce portal and B2B mobile commerce app. For more information, visit https://www.handshake.com/. Media Contact: North 6th Agency, Inc. (For Handshake) 212-334-9753, [email protected] SOURCE Handshake Related Links https://www.handshake.com ANNAPOLIS, Md., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Hannon Armstrong Sustainable Infrastructure Capital, Inc. ("Hannon Armstrong" or the "Company;") (NYSE: HASI), a leading provider of debt and equity financing to the efficiency, wind and solar markets, today announced that the Company will be ringing the closing bell following today's trading session on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), on the eve of Earth Day. The Company was listed and began trading on the NYSE on April 18, 2013. As of December 31, 2015, the company had approximately $1.35 billion invested in over 105 different projects. "By taking our 30 year old business public three years ago, we offer public shareholders a way to invest in the future of energy," said Jeffrey Eckel, President & CEO of Hannon Armstrong. "We went public because we saw financing as a critical component of addressing climate change as well as a large market opportunity. Our total return in excess of 100% since the IPO confirms both the market opportunity and investors' support for our strategy." Earth Day marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970 and is now celebrated by more than a billion people globally. Earth Day 2016 is when the Paris Climate Agreement, an agreement to address climate change with a goal of limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (C), is expected to be signed by over 130 countries. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates, to meet the 2C goal, the required expenditure in new renewable energy electric power generation averages about $500 billion annually over the next 25 years. "Hannon Armstrong's commitment to investing only in assets that are neutral to negative on incremental carbon emissions is a trailblazing example of the corporate dedication required to meaningfully invest in a cleaner infrastructure," said Denis Hayes, principal organizer of the first Earth Day in 1970. "I commend the thoughtful awareness they bring to this important issue by embedding sustainability into the foundation of their business strategy and calculating the impact they are making with each investment." Eckel further stated, "Ringing the Closing Bell at the New York Stock Exchange is an exciting opportunity and a great way to celebrate the past and future success of Hannon Armstrong. I'm honored to share such a special occasion with our clients, investors and employees. I want thank them all for their continued support and dedication to help make the Company what it is today." Mr. Eckel will be joined on the podium by members of the Hannon Armstrong team at 4:00pm EST on April 21, 2016. A live feed of the NYSE Closing Bell can be found at http://livestream.com/NYSE. Photos and video of the NYSE bell ringing ceremony will also be available, courtesy of the NYSE, on Facebook (NYSE) and Twitter (@NYSE). A copy of Hannon Armstrong's 2015 Annual Report and Sustainability Report Card can be found at: http://www.hannonarmstrong.com. About Hannon Armstrong Hannon Armstrong (NYSE: HASI) provides debt and equity financing to the energy efficiency and renewable energy markets. We focus on providing preferred or senior level capital to established sponsors and high credit quality obligors for assets that generate long-term, recurring and predictable cash flows. We are based in Annapolis, Maryland. Forward-Looking Statements Some of the information contained in this press release are forward-looking statements and within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. When used in this press release, the words such as "believe," "expect, "anticipate," "estimate," "plan," "continue," "intend," "should," "may," or similar expressions, are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are subject to significant risks and uncertainties. Investors are cautioned against placing undue reliance on such statements. Actual results may differ materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements include those discussed under the caption "Risk Factors" included in the Company's 2015 report on Form 10-K that was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), as well as in other reports that the Company files with the SEC. Forward-looking statements are based on beliefs, assumptions and expectations as of the date of this press release. The Company disclaims any obligation to publicly release the results of any revisions to these forward-looking statements reflecting new estimates, events or circumstances after the date of this press release. Total shareholder return is calculated from the closing price on April 18, 2013 (our first day of trading) and assumes that all dividends were reinvested without the payment of any commissions. Investor Relations Contact (410) 571-6189 [email protected] Media Contacts For Hannon Armstrong Sustainable Infrastructure Capital, Inc. Sard Verbinnen & Co. Nikki Ritchie/Kevin FitzGerald (212) 687-8080 [email protected] Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160203/329541LOGO SOURCE Hannon Armstrong Sustainable Infrastructure Capital, Inc. Related Links http://www.hannonarmstrong.com TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- A path for sustained economic growth is being set in Honduras and the progress achieved to date has been endorsed by the international financial community and by international development organizations. News surrounding Honduras' economic progress has been overwhelmingly positive. From a dramatic 12-spot climb in the 2015-2016 World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Index, more than any other Latin American country, to a recent endorsement by the International Monetary Fund of the country's economic performance having entered a "virtuous cycle." Additionally, continued GDP growth projections above 3.5 percent and the second-highest level of Foreign Direct Investment in Central America are positive indicators for growth. In this context, the recent approval by the National Congress of a national development plan dubbed "Honduras 20/20" may be the most ambitious move yet to build on recent achievements. The plan, developed as a joint initiative of the public and private sectors with strategic support from international consulting firm McKinsey, seeks to generate 600,000 jobs during a five-year period (2016 2020), by promoting four key sectors where Honduras has a strong competitive advantage: tourism, textiles, intermediate manufacturing and business process outsourcing (BPOs). By positioning Honduras as the leading beach destination in Central America, the plan expects to create approximately 255,000 new jobs in the tourism sector in the next five years, while generating an investment of USD $850 million. Meanwhile, as the textiles industry is restructured to become one of the leading exporters to the United States and Europe, the plan seeks to generate approximately 200,000 jobs with a potential to create USD $ 4.2 billion in exports. In terms of the intermediate manufacturing industry, through the development of the fastest-growing auto-parts and electrical equipment manufacturing cluster in the continent, the plan expects to create 95,000 jobs and generate exports for an estimated USD $ 2.83 billion. In addition, the BPO sector aims to focus on developing and training the country's bilingual youth to generate 50,000 jobs and an estimated USD $ 1.45 billion, by focusing on the latest trends in business processing and information technology. "The implementation of the Honduras 20/20 plan alongside international consulting firm McKinsey and in close collaboration between the country's public and private sectors will be an important step to continue building upon our important economic achievements," said Ebal Diaz, executive secretary of the Council of Ministers. "By focusing on these four key areas of tourism, textiles, intermediate manufacturing and BPO we will be able to generate jobs and unprecedented levels of growth and development in Honduras." McKinsey has supported the implementation of similar national development programs in dozens of countries throughout the world with a great success rate. One example was the firm's support for Colombia's national development plan that contributed to shaping an important economic transformation in the South American nation and positioning it as one of the fastest-growing and most investment-friendly countries in Latin America. Honduras 20/20 by the Numbers Jobs to be created: 600,000 Implementation period: Five years Projected impact in exports: USD $9 billion Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20151014/276980LOGO SOURCE Honduras Presidency "I am extremely pleased to win these two highly-coveted nursing awards," Beaver said. "I am truly dedicated to this profession and it's an honor to be acknowledged for a career that I am passionate about. Nothing is more important to me than the patients I have the privilege to care for at Karmanos. And I am humbled to be recognized by my peers." Beaver received the AOCN national award in the areas of consultation and research. She also is being recognized for demonstrating a commitment to leadership, quality care, innovation, teamwork and advocacy with OU's nursing award. She was nominated in the advanced practice nursing category. Pam Laszewski, R.N., clinical leader of Radiation at Karmanos, nominated Beaver for the AOCN award, and she competed against nurses across the country for the award. Morris Magnan, clinical nurse specialist in Ambulatory Care at Karmanos, nominated Beaver for the Nightingale award. The Oncology Nursing Certification Corporation award recognizes an outstanding advanced oncology certified nurse, advanced oncology certified nurse practitioner, or advanced oncology certified nurse specialist who has made significant contributions to the advanced oncology nursing practice and oncology service and who has supported and promoted the oncology nursing certification. "Clara brings energy and enthusiasm to her job and is able to deftly transition from manager, to friend, to expert consultant and patient advocate," said Dr. Magnan. "Her strongest attribute is her ability to advocate for safe, compassionate care for oncology patients and to encourage this behavior in others." Nominees must demonstrate accomplishments in promoting the oncology nursing certification; the oncology nursing service and practice; and clinical practices, education, or research. Beaver will receive a crystal award and a $1,000 honorarium April 29 at the Recognition Breakfast for Oncology Certified Nurses at the Oncology Nursing Society Annual Congress in San Antonio, Texas. She will receive the Nightingale nursing award at the 28th Annual Nightingale Awards for Nursing Excellence. The event is hosted by Oakland University's School of Nursing and its Board of Visitors and will be held on May 5, 2016 at the San Marino Club in Troy. The Nightingale Awards ceremony is the only event of its kind in the state, and the awards were created to promote nursing's critical role in health care and the array of ways that nurses care for patients. More than 500 nurses, physicians and administrators, as well as family members and supporters, will attend this year's awards ceremony. Each of ten winning recipients receives a check for $1,000, a bronze statue of Florence Nightingale and a pin. The eleven runners up each receive a plaque and a pin. Nominees were nominated by their peers and supervisors for their superior service and contributions in one of ten areas of expertise. Winners were selected from more than 100 nominations collected from across Michigan. Beaver is a resident of Taylor and has been with Karmanos for 10 years. About the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute Located in mid-town Detroit, Michigan, the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, a subsidiary of McLaren Health Care, is one of 45 National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer centers in the United States. Karmanos is among the nation's best cancer centers. Through the commitment of 1,000 staff, including nearly 300 physicians and researchers on faculty at the Wayne State University School of Medicine, and supported by thousands of volunteer and financial donors, Karmanos strives to prevent, detect and eradicate all forms of cancer. Its long-term partnership with the WSU School of Medicine enhances the collaboration of critical research and academics related to cancer care. Gerold Bepler, M.D., Ph.D., is the Institute's president and chief executive officer. For more information call 1-800-KARMANOS or go to www.karmanos.org. Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160420/358125 Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20151221/317651LOGO SOURCE Karmanos Cancer Institute Related Links http://www.karmanos.org The main color of this season, pearl white, champagne gold and pale pink, coupled with a print design brings a romantic feeling. The new collection reinterprets tassels, three-dimensional flowers, sparkling rhinestones and other fashion elements from the Hollywood's golden age. Vintage elements remain compelling The vintage element embodied an oriental style remains popular in fashion. The fitting shoulder lines, bell-shaped cloaks and tulip-shaped skirt hems embody a noble and elegant woman, which is reflective of LANYU's focus on femininity. The shawls adorned with transparent laces and neat skirts, combining with exquisite bud skirts and over-sized coats, are transformed into modern womenswear. By adding practical elements, the design provides women with ideal daywear options for formal occasions. Luxury, delicate and perfect LANYU is widely recognized for its selection of high quality, luxurious and delicate fabrics. The Dream collection combines traditional tapestry satin with high quality heavy-weight silk. The imported sparkling sequin decorations bedecked with soft and transparent muslins highlight the quality of the collection. The iconic laces studded with tassels and three-dimensional flowers interpret the elegance of women, delivering an illusion of dreamland to wearers. Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160419/356995 Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160419/356996 Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160419/356997 Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160419/356999 Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160419/357000 SOURCE LANYU SOUTHFIELD, Mich., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Lear Corporation (NYSE: LEA), a leading global supplier of automotive seating and electrical distribution systems, today held the official opening of its new leather cutting plant in Szolnok, Hungary. Szolnok Mayor Mr. Szalay and Mr. Mihaly Varga Minister of National Economy represented the Government and Lear was represented by Kent Maas (Vice President, Global Manufacturing) and John Staines (European Operations Director). The new plant was completed in December 2015 and is located in the Szolnok industrial park opposite an existing leather production facility which was built in 2004. The construction of this new facility represents an investment of $20 million Euros and with an area of 16,000 square meters, it doubles the production space available. As part of the Eagle Ottawa division of Lear, it supplies leather parts to many premium automotive manufacturers in Europe. Both plants combined employ over 2,000 people and is the largest private employer in the region. "As the global leader in automotive performance and luxury seating, Lear continues to build upon our unique industry-leading capabilities and emphasis on world-class craftsmanship. With our continued growth, We are pleased to invest and expand our production capacity in Szolnok, Hungary. I would like to thank the people who worked on this complex project. I am very proud of our dedicated team and the support we receive from the local Government and community," said Lear's Ray Scott (Executive Vice President and President, Seating). Created in 1865, the Eagle Ottawa division of Lear has a longstanding heritage of blending traditional craftsmanship and innovative technology. Eagle Ottawa designs, engineers and manufactures genuine leather solutions for all automotive interior applications and vehicle market segments. Eagle Ottawa's leather capabilities include design, research & development, product validation and manufacturing (finishing, cutting and sewing). With the completion in January 2015 of the acquisition of Eagle Ottawa, Lear Corporation is the world's leading supplier of premium automotive leather, with enhanced global seating capabilities in the areas of craftsmanship, design options and overall value. Lear Corporation (NYSE: LEA) is one of the world's leading suppliers of automotive seating and electrical distribution systems. Lear serves every major automaker in the world, and Lear content can be found on more than 350 vehicle nameplates. Lear's world-class products are designed, engineered and manufactured by a diverse team of approximately 136,000 employees located in 36 countries. Lear currently ranks #174 on the Fortune 500. Lear's headquarters are in Southfield, Michigan. Further information about Lear is available at http://www.lear.com. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110307/DE59731LOGO SOURCE Lear Corporation Related Links http://www.lear.com Sanborn joined Lending Club as Chief Marketing Officer in 2010 and was promoted to Chief Operating and Marketing Officer in 2013. In his new role, Sanborn will oversee the company's product lines (personal loans, small business and patient and education financing) as well as marketing and product development. "Scott and Sameer are world-class executives who have proven their effectiveness in building and managing high-performing teams," Laplanche said. "They both embrace Lending Club's mission of making credit more affordable and investing more rewarding, and are both passionate about using technology and better processes to design and deliver products that change people's lives. We are fortunate to be able promote Scott and hire Sameer into these two new roles in the company." Gulati has more than a decade of experience advising global and emerging financial services institutions on topics in retail banking, consumer credit, digital payments, and risk management. Prior to that, he spent several years in technology roles implementing solutions for financial services players. He holds an MBA in strategy and entrepreneurship from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a B. Tech. in chemical engineering and computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi. About Lending Club Lending Club's mission is to transform the banking system to make credit more affordable and investing more rewarding. The company's technology platform enables it to deliver innovative solutions to borrowers and investors. Since launching in 2007, the Lending Club platform has facilitated $16.0 billion in consumer loans and has more than doubled annual loan volume each year. We operate at a lower cost than traditional bank lending programs, so we're able to pass the savings on to borrowers in the form of lower rates and to investors in the form of solid returns. Lending Club is based in San Francisco, California. More information is available at https://www.lendingclub.com. Currently only residents of the following states may invest in Lending Club notes: AL, AR, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DC, DE, FL, GA, HI, IA, ID, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MA, ME, MD, MI, MN, MO, MS, MT, ND, NE, NH, NJ, NV, NY, OK, OR, RI, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, VT, WA, WI, WV, or WY. All loans made by WebBank, a Utah-chartered Industrial Bank, Member FDIC. Lending Club Notes are offered by prospectus filed with the SEC. Please consider the risks of investing. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140417/76307 SOURCE Lending Club Related Links http://www.lendingclub.com CORAL SPRINGS, Florida, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- As lithium sector enjoys increased demand for lithium to fuel such industries as electric car and the power storage revolution, the window of opportunity for mining companies leads to new mining projects, mergers and acquisitions as well as expansion of current operations. Mining companies in the markets today with current developments of note are Nevada Energy Metals Inc. (OTC: SSMLF) (TSX-V:BFF), Albemarle Corporation (NYSE: ALB), FMC Corporation (NYSE: FMC), Pure Energy Minerals Limited (OTCQB: HMGLF) (TSX-V: PE) and Galaxy Resources Limited (OTC: GALXF) Nevada Energy Metals Inc. "the Company" (TSX-V:BFF) (OTC: SSMLF) is pleased to announce that the Company has expanded its Clayton Valley holdings by acquiring an additional 27 claims to its lithium brine exploration project at Silver Peak, Esmeralda County, Nevada. The BFF-1 project now comprises 87 claims with an area encompassing 1,740 acres /704 hectares and directly abutting the region of brine production of Rockwood Lithium, a subsidiary of Albermare Resources (NYSE: ALB) in the northern portion of Clayton Valley. The claims cover an area of playa, including the Goat Island graben (inferred from gravity inversion; Quantec, 2008; Petrick, 2008), that encompasses a portion of a deep-circulation geothermal system beneath basin-fill sediments locally blanketed with travertine in north-western Clayton Valley. The Goat Island graben segments Clayton Valley into a northerly-trending, 1-2 km-wide sub-basin with a distinct escarpment on each side. Geological modeling and assessment of historical drilling results by J.B. Hulen, PG, (July 31, 2008 report) concluded that both shallow thermal-gradient and lithium-exploration drilling demonstrates that the northern portion of Clayton Valley contains the valley's highest subsurface temperatures and that these temperatures may be localized in the Goat Island graben and its structural projections to the northeast and south. Read the full Nevada Energy Metals (SSMLF, BFF.V) Press Release at http://www.financialnewsmedia.com/profiles/ssmlf.html Significantly, within the graben and within the boundary of the claim block, a drill hole by Western Geothermal Partners 2007 logged as WGP#2 reported as follows:' From 280 - to 305 ft., fine grained green sand and silt logged as volcanic ash was encountered. This unit may be correlative to the Main Ash Aquifer, which is a marker bed in other areas of the Clayton Valley Basin." J.B. Hulen, PG, (July 31, 2008.) Nevada Energy Metals is planning a detailed summer/fall exploration program on the BFF-1 project. The property was acquired for cost of staking with no overriding royalties. In other sector developments in the Lithium space: Nevada Sunrise Gold Corporation announced an update on its current drilling program at the Neptune Lithium Project ("Neptune", or the "Project") located in the southern Clayton Valley of Nevada, USA . Neptune consists of 316 unpatented 20-acre placer claims totaling approximately 6,320 acres (2,557 hectares) and is located in an active area of lithium exploration and mining. The Silver Peak lithium mine operation, acquired by Albemarle Corporation (NYSE: ALB) in 2015, has extracted lithium minerals from brines continuously since 1966 and is located approximately 10 miles (15 kilometres) to the north of Neptune. FMC Corporation (NYSE: FMC) recently announced that Paul Graves, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, will speak at the Wells Fargo Securities Industrial and Construction Conference in New York City, on Wednesday, May 11, 2016 at 1:55 p.m. ET. A live webcast will be available on the FMC Investor Relations website. For more than a century, FMC Corporation has served the global agricultural, industrial and consumer markets with innovative solutions, applications and quality products. FMC acquired Cheminova in April 2015. Revenue totaled approximately $3.3 billion in 2015. FMC employs approximately 6,000 people throughout the world and operates its businesses in three segments: FMC Agricultural Solutions, FMC Health and Nutrition and FMC Lithium. Pure Energy Minerals Limited (OTCQB: HMGLF) (TSX.V: PE) announced recently that a core drill is once again turning at its Clayton Valley South ("CVS") Lithium Brine Project, located near Silver Peak, Nevada (the "Project"). Based on their successful track record during the phase 2 drill program at CVS, Harris Exploration Drilling and Associates Inc. remains the primary drill contractor on the Project. The drillers collared the new well (CV-3) approximately 200 metres (660 ft) southeast of CV-1. Drilled in the first phase of Pure Energy drilling at Clayton Valley, CV-1 was completed to only 275 metres (900 ft). The Company expects to drill CV-3 to a depth of up to 500 metres (1,640 ft) before completing its construction with appropriate gravel pack, bentonite, and screening. Dajin Resources Corp. (OTC: DJIFF) & Galaxy Resources Limited (OTC: GALXF) are two other mining companies with recent developments in the Lithium sector to keep an eye on. GALXF traded over 960,000 shares on Wednesday closing up over 9% at $0.39. DJIFF realized a heavy trading day on Wednesday as well closing up over 13% on over 3.08Million shares traded by the market close. 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FNMG's market updates, news alerts and corporate profiles are NOT a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell or hold securities. The material in this release is intended to be strictly informational and is NEVER to be construed or interpreted as research material. All readers are strongly urged to perform research and due diligence on their own and consult a licensed financial professional before considering any level of investing in stocks. All material included herein is republished content and details which were previously disseminated by the companies mentioned in this release. FNMG is not liable for any investment decisions by its readers or subscribers. Investors are cautioned that they may lose all or a portion of their investment when investing in stocks. For current services performed FNMG has been compensated three thousand two hundred dollars for news coverage of the current press release issued by Nevada Energy Metals Inc. by a non-affiliated third party. 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Contact Information: Company: FN Media Group, LLC Contact email: [email protected] U.S. Phone: +1-954-345-0611 URL: http://www.financialnewsmedia.com SOURCE FN Media Group LLC BATON ROUGE, LA, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ - Louisiana Public Broadcasting, CODOFIL (Council for the Development of French in Louisiana) and Groupe Media TFO (Television francaise de l'Ontario), the leader in French educational content in North America, announced the premiere of French language kids programming on LPB2 for Francophones and future Francophones in Louisiana. The announcement was made today in the Ellender Room at the Louisiana State Capitol. Groupe Media TFO (a public educational media enterprise funded by the Ontario Government in Canada) is the premium destination for audiences seeking educational and cultural content in French across Ontario and all of Canada. Members of the Acadiana Delegation in the House of Representatives recognized special guests from Groupe Media TFO, including its President and CEO, Glenn O'Farrell. "We are delighted to be able to contribute to the growth and fulfillment of Louisiana's Francophone communities with this first French-language educational content partnership between Louisiana Public Broadcasting and Groupe Media TFO. By teaming up with Louisiana's public broadcaster to bring our high-quality French-language educational and cultural content to the state's Francophone communities, we are celebrating the presence and the recognition of French in North America." The award-winning TFO educational content for ages 2-8 year-olds premiered on LPB2 on Monday, April 18, and consists of 14 hours a week of French-language kids programming. During this initial 18-month partnership children will be able to watch, discover, and learn en francais in the comfort of their own homes. This partnership is an international, educational and pioneering initiative that brings French language and cultural based programming to Louisiana. "We are pleased to offer French-language children's programming from Group Media TFO to complement our award-winning PBS Kids content on LPB2. This groundbreaking initiative will provide pre-school and school-age children the opportunity to reinforce their French language skills and strengthens our common mission with CODOFIL," said Beth Courtney, President and CEO of Louisiana Public Broadcasting. CODOFIL President, Dr. William Arceneaux, who was involved in the negotiations between TFO and LPB, attributed the success of this international initiative to the leadership of CEO Beth Courtney of LPB, and the technical skills and hard work of the programming and engineering staffs of both networks. Arceneaux observed that "these children's educational programs will provide a powerful, hitherto unavailable instructional tool for our French teachers and a delightful and fun learning experience for our French immersion students." LPB's Director of Programming & Content Jason Viso added that this groundbreaking initiative was a shared desire with CODOFIL to expand LPB's ongoing mission to offer one-of-a-kind quality programming to its viewers. "We are excited about this partnership and believe that Mini TFO and other programs featured in our French language block will be a great addition to LPB's network of channels. Glenn and his team at TFO have been wonderful partners to work with." CODOFIL's Executive Director Charles Larroque sees the collaboration as another step in preserving Louisiana's French language heritage. "CODOFIL's mission is to spare no efforts to accomplish the development, utilization and preservation of the French language as found in Louisiana," says Larroque. "We work closely with our schools, where nearly 4,500 students go to primary and secondary French immersion programs. We are making history by bringing educational content in French to personal screens. Today, we are writing a new chapter in the revitalization of French in Louisiana - this time among our youngest stakeholders." About Goupe Media TFO Groupe Media TFO is a premium destination for audiences seeking educational and cultural content in French. It offers stimulating experiences and award-winning content, always at the forefront of digital learning. TFO serves 2 million students and 30,000 teachers across Ontario and Canada. It operates the number one French-language YouTube Channel in Canada. TFO has received awards and accolades from Austin and Amsterdam (Kidscreen Awards, Gemeaux, Cassies, IBC Awards, SXSW Film Design Awards and more) About Louisiana Public Broadcasting Since 1975, Louisiana Public Broadcasting has been the public television network for the state of Louisiana with stations in Alexandria, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Lake Charles, Monroe and Shreveport. LPB is also affiliated with WLAE-TV in New Orleans. In addition to its award-winning documentaries about the history and people of Louisiana, LPB is dedicated to helping children throughout the state develop their literacy, math and science skills through its numerous educational outreach programs. SOURCE Louisiana Public Broadcasting Tmall exceeded 91.2 Billion Yuan, a new sales record on Alibaba Double 11 (Singles' Day), China's biggest online shopping carnival last year. Throughout the whole of 2015, the total transaction of China's e-commerce hit 162 thousand billion RMB, which made China the world's top on-line trading marketplace. With a spectacular rise over the years, more transparent circulation channels and price wars have led to squeezing and even negative profits for high trading volume. The numerous challenges are triggers to fake commodities in the Chinese e-commerce industry, which is also bringing an impression that Made-in-China is synonymous with terrible quality. Mainiway C2M business model is actively helping to solve the situation. It aims to shape a reliable e-commerce platform via industrial cloud, Big Data and IOT, making the channel transparent and process traceable, and saving traditional intermediary cost. To Trace the Whole Process by Big Data and Industrial Cloud Platform Analyzing consumers' demand enables searches of qualified manufacturers under the same cost, in which all manufacturers will be listed in an on-line credit rating system for the calculation of each transaction. Once the manufacturer breaks the rule, its activity will be counted as low credit rating and will be restricted from more opportunities. "Let's use buying a bicycle on the C2M on-line platform as an example," said Mr. Bin LIU, Marketing Director of Mainiway, "Big Data and Industrial Cloud will select 8 high-credit rating vendors and target the top-tier ones. It allows you to check the whole process, including the processing status, manufacturer's vendor qualification, operating worker's name and even the source of each accessory. In other words, you can definitely follow the whole process like its being handled right in front of you." To Fulfill the Precise Manufacturing in Intelligent Workshops The seemingly heavy and big-sized robots with an over 2-meter wingspan can stably grab an egg-sized accessory. Each specific action is well designed for welding, fitting, testing and smoothly finish the whole manufacturing process. It benefits manufacturers with more efficient volume production and avoiding man-made accidents or careless mistakes. Mainiway C2M platform is to optimize the circulation channel to solve the production problems of manufacturers, and most importantly, to keep consumers from purchasing fake commodities by tracking the totally transparent manufacturing process. Regarding Mainiway C2M Mainiway C2M provides a one-stop service model with a focus of "Internet plus" operation, manufacturing and selling, which will accelerate the upgrade of a customized, intelligent, service oriented and environment friendly manufacturing industry. It has established sound partnerships with many leading enterprises in luxury goods, new energy vehicles and manufacturing industries. Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJUV8Q0NAPA SOURCE Mainiway NEW YORK, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Markets Group's Private Wealth Ohio Forum is the leading networking and peer-to-peer education channel for family offices and RIAs servicing America's eighth largest HNW state community. The meeting will take place on May 3rd, in Cleveland, and will bring together over 200 RIAs, private banks, and family offices for a series of high-level panel discussions and networking sessions that cover alternative investments, asset protection and succession planning, amongst other pressing topics facing managers operating in the region. To request the agenda click here: Private Wealth Ohio Forum. 30+ Speakers Include: John Augustine, Chief Investment Officer, Huntington Wealth & Investment Management Paul Bodnar, Partner and Investment Specialist, CM Wealth Advisors Richard Alt, Chief Investment Officer, Carnegie Investment Counsel Albert LaCava, President & Chief Investment Officer, Assurance Investment Management Andrew Connors, Partner & Senior Advisor, Fairport Asset Management Michael Novak, Managing Director, Wellspring Financial Advisors, LLC Glen Johnson, Managing Director, Mirador Family Wealth Advisors Jeffrey Malbasa, President & Chief Investment Officer, Spero-Smith Investment Advisers, Inc. James Blue, President, Private Harbour Investment Management & Counsel, LLC Peter Franz, Chief Investment Officer, Beacon Financial Partners Satricia Rice, Senior Managing Director, Hartland Darian Chen, Chief Investment Officer, Ariel Capital Advisors, LLC Donald Ross, Chief Investment Officer, Alpha-Squared Capital Management If your firm is interested in reserving a place at the meeting, please contact Karishna Perez at [email protected] or +1 646-216-8581. Contributing Partners: BlackRock, Diamond Hill Capital Management, First Quadrant, First Trust, Mercury Capital Advisors, Prudential, Shaker Investments, Vanguard and Vorys Legal Counsel. About Markets Group: Markets Group is an executive forum organizer with a track record of 175+ conferences in over 20 countries. Founded in 2009 in New York, NY, Markets Group has grown into one of the largest and most successful conference organizers in the Americas, with over 65 professionals operating out of our headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. We have successfully executed events in North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Additionally, Markets Group was recently named one of America's 5000 fastest-growing private companies by Inc. Magazine and distinguished us as the #1 conference organizer and #1 financial services firm based in NYC. SOURCE Markets Group Related Links https://www.marketsgroup.org SAN ANTONIO, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Massage Heights, a leader of professional, affordable and convenient therapeutic massage and facial services, announced today that it is refreshing its brand platform as part of the company's commitment to provide its guests with a consistently elevated experience. Massage Heights' new brand strategy will include a newly designed corporate website and Retreat design. "Our goal with the new branding is simple to build a platform dedicated to the well-being of the people we serve," said Shane Evans, co-founder and president of Massage Heights, which currently operates more than 140 Retreats across the U.S. and in Canada. "Recent studies indicate that consumers are taking a more proactive approach to health and wellness. We see a really great opportunity to reach people who are using massage to help them feel better and live better, and it is our mission to better align ourselves with this trend so that we can meet the growing demand of massage as a lifestyle choice." Massage Heights enlisted LOOMIS, an award-winning advertising agency, to lead the brand refresh effort, which included new brand messaging and a revitalized visual identity. The new brand elements will roll out across all platforms in-store and online, including Massage Heights' corporate website, which was designed by Giles-Parscale. The refresh aligns with the company's mission to reinforce the relevancy of massage as a long-term health and wellness benefit. "When we asked guests why they come to Massage Heights, they consistently told us they are using massage for its long-term benefits throughout their lives," explained Alice O'Donnell, vice president of marketing at Massage Heights. "Through our research, we realized that's what makes Massage Heights different. We're part of our customers' daily lives, not just when they're stressed or are having temporary pain. We're an integral part of their overall health and wellness." Massage Heights' new Retreat prototype will feature new renovations created to evolve the company into the next phase of life, including new waiting and shopping areas, guest-friendly massage rooms, a designated space for quick treatments and a new design that will make for a more serene atmosphere, among other elements. The company will roll out the new look and feel through 2016, with the goal of completing the transition by next year. Massage Heights is on target to open 40 locations this year and aims to have 300 Retreats open by the end of 2018. As part of its accelerated growth strategy, the brand plans to develop franchised locations in cities like Denver, Kansas City, Tampa-St. Petersburg, San Diego, Nashville, Knoxville and Las Vegas in 2016. Additionally, Massage Heights is seeking area developers to grow the brand in Sacramento, Los Angeles, Northern Virginia, Nashville, Tampa-St. Petersburg and Salt Lake City. As part of its nationwide expansion plans, Massage Heights is seeking qualified franchisees and area developers to join its growing brand. Prospective single- and multi-unit franchisees should have $175,000 in liquid assets and minimum $400,000 net worth per location, as well as experience in sales or retail management and managing hourly wage employees. Prospective area representatives should have $375,000 in liquid assets and minimum $600,000 net worth, as well as previous experience in franchising, sales, marketing and operating multiple sites, preferably in the retail, restaurant, hospitality or customer services industries. In March 2016, Massage Heights announced it established a new brand management and development company, Elevated Brands. In addition to managing and developing Massage Heights, Elevated Brands formed a relationship with the first ultra-premium men's grooming and lifestyle club, The Gents Place, to grow the brand nationally through franchising. For more information about opening your own Massage Heights franchise, please visit http://www.massageheightsfranchise.com. About Massage Heights Massage Heights is a family owned, membership-based therapeutic services franchise company that provides Members and Guests convenient, professional, affordable resort-quality massage and facial services that help people achieve a balanced and healthy lifestyle, in an upscale Retreat environment. Regular massage and skin therapy services help people look and feel better from the inside out by aiding in the reduction of stress, pain management and increased relaxation, all resulting in the ability to tackle daily life with a higher level of vitality and positivity, truly elevating the everyday. About Elevated Brands Elevated Brands is the brand management and development company established by the principals of Massage Heights, the membership-based, therapeutic services franchise company. The company provides emerging lifestyle concepts with the tools and strategic planning needed to grow their brands through the franchising model. Through its leadership team's deep franchise experience in the health and wellness space, Elevated Brands is on track to build a family of lifestyle brands that are dedicated to the well-being of those they serve. Its current portfolio includes Massage Heights Franchising, Summit Franchise Supply and The Gents Place. MEDIA CONTACT: Fish Consulting Jessi Nunez [email protected] 954-893-9150 Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160210/331830LOGO SOURCE Massage Heights Related Links http://www.massageheights.com The Mayor and the College have collaborated on innovative initiatives such as C-Town Tech, a program at Charlestown High School through which high school students can earn credits toward a degree in information technology at BHCC. In addition, the Mayor's Office of Workforce Development recently engaged BHCC as a Greater Boston American Apprenticeship Initiative Partner to expand apprenticeship opportunities in construction and hospitality through a $3M federal grant. Walsh was sworn in as Boston's 54th mayor on January 6, 2014. His work has brought the city an array of awards and honors including the C40 Cities Climate Leadership GroupSmart Cities and Smart Community Engagement award and the Society of Professional Journalists' National Historic Site in Journalism award. Last year his leadership earned Boston the City Livability Award from the U.S. Conference of Mayors. In 2014 he received the Woods College of Advancing Studies first Distinguished Alumnus Award from Boston College. A life-long Bostonian, Walsh was born and raised in Dorchester. He earned a degree in political science at Boston College while working full-time as a legislator. He served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1997 to 2013, representing Boston's 13th Suffolk District. Beginning in Laborers Local 223 in Boston, Walsh rose to head the Building and Construction Trades Council of the Metropolitan District from 2011 to 2013. Media Contact: Karen M. Norton, Executive Director of Integrated Marketing and Communications Bunker Hill Community College, Boston, MA 02129 Phone: 617-228-2177; Email: [email protected] Bunker Hill Community College is the largest community college in Massachusetts. The College enrolls more than 14,000 students on two campuses and at three satellite locations. BHCC is one of the most diverse institutions of higher education in Massachusetts. Sixty-four percent of the students are people of color and more than half of BHCC's students are women. The College also enrolls more than 900 international students who come from approximately 100 countries and speak more than 75 languages. Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160421/358342 SOURCE Bunker Hill Community College Related Links http://www.bhcc.mass.edu DALLAS, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Mimi's, the popular neighborhood cafe offering French-inspired American comfort food, is showing Mom and her family twice the love this Mother's Day. On Sunday, May 8 Mother's Day in America - Mimi's will celebrate Mom and those special to her by pampering her like they do in France, with a three-course menu, free pastry, gifts and a relaxing time with loved ones. Moms will receive a French Herb Heart-Shaped Palmier (French pastry) in every bread basket, a take-home muffin square to enjoy later and a Mimi's French herb seed packet with the French Herb Palmier recipe on the back. And the celebration isn't over yet. To celebrate Mom again, Mimi's will invite guests back to celebrate through May 29, Mother's Day in France, with a free entree. Explains Stewart Slocum, CMO of Mimi's, "Honoring our French heritage and love of Mothers everywhere, Mimi's gives a reason to celebrate with the Moms in our lives twice by welcoming our Mother's Day celebrants back to enjoy a free entree through Fete des Meres (Mother's Day) in France, May 29." For Mother's Day beginning at 11 a.m., Mimi's offers a three-course celebration menu for $16.99. Mimi's guests will start with choice of cup of soup (French Onion, Corn Chowder or Tomato Basil), House salad or Caesar salad before moving onto the main entree, which includes a choice of: Quiche Florentine with fresh spinach, tomatoes, aged Parmesan and Swiss, with mixed fruit with fresh spinach, tomatoes, aged Parmesan and Swiss, with mixed fruit Mushroom Brie Burger with sauteed whole cap mushrooms, caramelized onions and melted Brie on grilled sourdough with sauteed whole cap mushrooms, caramelized onions and melted Brie on grilled sourdough Hand-carved Slow-Roasted Turkey with mashed potatoes, gravy, cornbread dressing, fresh vegetables and orange-apple cranberry relish with mashed potatoes, gravy, cornbread dressing, fresh vegetables and orange-apple cranberry relish Chicken Tillamook Cheddar Mac with pulled chicken in a rich Tillamook Creamery cheddar sauce with crumbled bacon, penne pasta and Parmesan crust with pulled chicken in a rich Tillamook Creamery cheddar sauce with crumbled bacon, penne pasta and Parmesan crust Chicken Chop Salad with a slow-roasted chicken breast, red & green bell peppers, mandarin oranges, basil, cilantro, chopped cabbage and romaine lettuce tossed in sesame dressing with fried wontons and sesame seeds with a slow-roasted chicken breast, red & green bell peppers, mandarin oranges, basil, cilantro, chopped cabbage and romaine lettuce tossed in sesame dressing with fried wontons and sesame seeds Grilled Atlantic Salmon with a light Chardonnay Dijon sauce, sauteed garlic spinach and roasted potatoes (add $1 ) Dessert course includes Chocolate Chip Croissant Bread Pudding with all-butter and almond croissants with chocolate chips, salted caramel and whipped cream. Or, for $1 more, guests can enjoy Strawberry Shortcake Crepe Cake or Key Lime Slab Pie. Mimi's will offer its signature "Mimi-Mosa" with fresh-squeezed orange juice with a Tangerine burst and Korbel California Champagne, along with three other Mimosa flavor choices, including Triple Berry, Mango and White Peach for $5 per glass. Glasses of wine, red or white from France, are $5 and bottles are $20. Guests are encouraged to make reservations and call their neighborhood Mimi's for additional details. Mimi's offer of a free entree upon return visit through May 29 is with purchase of an entree and two beverages. About Mimi's Cafe Founded in 1978 by Arthur Simms, who was stationed in France during World War II, Mimi's Cafe is a neighborhood cafe offering French Inspired American comfort food. In February 2013 Mimi's Cafe was purchased by Le Duff America, Inc., the North American subsidiary of Groupe Le Duff, a global bakery and restaurant company headquartered in Rennes, France. Since then, the team has launched new dishes reflecting the culinary traditions of fresh ingredients, bistro classics, and American comfort food. There are currently 98 Mimi's Cafe locations throughout 18 states in the U.S. SOURCE Mimis Cafe VANCOUVER, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ - Nevsun Resources Ltd. (TSX:NSU)(NYSE MKT:NSU) (Nevsun or the Company) is pleased to report its financial and operating results for the three months ended March 31, 2016. Unless otherwise noted, with the exception of earnings per share and realized price and cost per pound figures, all financial results are in millions of US dollars. First quarter 2016 highlights Continued first quartile safety performance at Bisha Produced 34 million pounds of copper at C1 cash costs (1) of $1.12 per payable pound sold of per payable pound sold Sold 20,000 gold equivalent ounces from stockpiles Generated earnings per share of $0.04 and $33 million in operating income and in operating income Ended period with working capital of $483 million , including $438 million of cash , including of cash Paid quarterly dividend of $0.04 per share Financial Review Q1 2016 Q1 2015 Revenue (millions) $ 92.4 $ 117.2 Operating income (millions) 32.9 42.6 Net income (millions) 15.6 23.0 Net income attributable to Nevsun shareholders (millions) 7.5 12.6 Basic earnings per share attributable to Nevsun shareholders 0.04 0.06 Working capital (millions) 483.3 517.0 Copper price realized, per payable pound sold 2.20 2.49 C1 cash cost per payable pound sold(1) $ 1.12 $ 1.23 "We've concluded another successful and profitable quarter," stated Cliff Davis, President and CEO of Nevsun. "Nevsun earned $15.6 million during Q1 2016 ($7.5 million attributable to Nevsun shareholders) or $0.04 per share. We are pleased to see the impact of our cost reduction efforts in our $1.12 C1 cash cost per payable pound sold. The zinc expansion project continues to progress well with hot ore commissioning scheduled for late Q2 2016. The project will be completed on time and well under budget. We still have not committed any of our zinc off-take so as to take advantage of the expected tightening zinc concentrate supply." Operations Review Q1 2016 Q1 2015 Ore mined, tonnes(1) 1,337,000 657,000 Waste mined, tonnes 2,028,000 3,517,000 Strip ratio, (using tonnes) 1.5 5.4 Ore milled tonnes 584,000 441,000 Copper feed grade, % 3.1 4.7 Recovery, % of copper 87.0 83.8 Copper concentrate grade, % 23.0 24.8 Copper in concentrate produced, millions of pounds 34.2 38.0 Copper in concentrate produced, tonnes 15,500 17,200 Payable copper in concentrate sold, millions of pounds(1) 34.9 47.4 Payable copper in concentrate sold, tonnes(1) 15,900 21,500 Payable gold in concentrate sold, ounces 6,000 6,900 Payable silver in concentrate sold, ounces 226,000 369,000 (1) Ore tonnes mined for the three months ended March 31, 2016 included no oxide ore (three months ended March 31, 2015 11,000 tonnes), 732,000 tonnes of supergene ore (three months ended March 31, 2015 518,000) and 605,000 tonnes of primary ore (three months ended March 31, 2015 128,000). Cliff Davis continued, "We are off to a great start to 2016 with supergene production ahead of guidance and strong demand for our gold equivalent ounces from stockpiles. The precious metal stockpiles sales confirm the marketability of this material at more favourable commercial terms than originally expected. With the strong gold and silver prices, we will prioritize shipping precious metal stockpile material over zinc concentrate to maximize earnings and cash flow." Conference call details The Company will hold a conference call on Friday, April 22, 2016, at 8AM Vancouver / 11AM Toronto, New York / 4PM London, to discuss the Q1 2016 results. Please call in at least five minutes prior to the conference call start time to ensure prompt access to the conference. Dial in details are as follows: North America: 1 888-390-0546 / +1 416-764-8688 / +1 778-383-7413 UK: 0800 652 2435 (toll free) Other International: +1 416-764-8688 / +1 778-383-7413 The conference call will be available for replay until May 8, 2016, by calling 1 888-390-0541 / +1 416-764-8677 and entering passcode 486448. About Nevsun Resources Ltd. Nevsun Resources Ltd. is a Vancouver-based mining company with an operating mine in Eritrea. Nevsun's 60%-owned Bisha Mine ranks as one of the highest grade open pit copper mines in the world. Nevsun has a strong balance sheet and future cash flows to grow shareholder value through exploration at Bisha and acquisition of additional mining assets. Forward Looking Statements The above contains forward-looking statements or forward-looking information within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, and applicable Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking statements are frequently, but not always, identified by words such as "expects," "anticipates," "believes," "intends," "estimated," "potential," "possible" and similar expressions, or statements that events, conditions or results "will," "may," "could" or "should" occur or be achieved. Forward-looking statements are statements concerning the Company's current beliefs, plans and expectations about the future including but not limited to commercial production, future production of copper and related cash flows and are inherently uncertain. The actual achievements of the Company or other future events or conditions may differ materially from those reflected in the forward-looking statements due to a variety of risks, uncertainties and other factors, including, without limitation, the risks that: (i) any of the assumptions in the historical resource estimates turn out to be incorrect, incomplete, or flawed in any respect; (ii) the methodologies and models used to prepare the resource and reserve estimates either underestimate or overestimate the resources or reserves due to hidden or unknown conditions, (iii) exploration activities or the mine operations are disrupted or suspended due to acts of god, internal conflicts in the country of Eritrea, unforeseen government actions or other events; (iv) the Company experiences the loss of key personnel; (v) the Company's operations or exploration activities are adversely affected by other political or military, or terrorist activities; (vi) the Company becomes involved in any material disputes with any of its key business partners, suppliers or customers; (vii) the Company is subjected to any hostile takeover or other unsolicited attempts to acquire control of the Company; (viii) the Company is subject to any adverse ruling in any of the pending litigation to which it is a party; (ix) the Company incurs unanticipated power interruptions or failures due to electrical circuit failures or inadequate fuel quality or supply required to effectively operate power generators for the plant or otherwise or unexpected costs or repairs to the plant; * the Company incurs unanticipated costs as a result of the transition from the supergene ore phase of the Bisha mine to the primary ore phase or experiences challenges with copper mineralogy or host pyrite minerals that impacts metallurgical recoveries and concentrate grades in the transition zone; or (xi) are associated with the speculative nature of exploration activities, periodic interruptions to exploration, failure of drilling, processing and mining equipment, the interpretation of drill results and the estimation of mineral resources and reserves, changes to exploration and project plans and parameters and other risks are more fully described in the Company's Annual Information Form for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2015, which is incorporated herein by reference. The Company's forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs, expectations and opinions of management on the date the statements are made and the Company assumes no obligation to update such forward-looking statements in the future, except as required by law. For the reasons set forth above, investors should not place undue reliance on the Company's forward-looking statements. Further information concerning risks and uncertainties associated with these forward-looking statements and our business can be found in our Annual Information Form for the year ended December 31, 2015 which is available on the Company's website (www.nevsun.com), filed under our profile on SEDAR (www.sedar.com) and on EDGAR (www.sec.gov) under cover of Form 40-F. NEVSUN RESOURCES LTD. "Cliff T. Davis" Cliff T. Davis President & Chief Executive Officer SOURCE Nevsun Resources Ltd. CALI, Colombia, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- New Colombia Resources, Inc. (OTC: NEWC), a U.S. company with natural resource assets in Colombia is pleased to announce that its subsidiary, Sannabis SAS, has received a multi-million-peso purchase order from doctors of a well-known hospital foundation in Medellin, Colombia. This 100-year-old foundation has a University Hospital, Children's hospital, and an Institute of Medical Technology. These doctors will offer medical service visits introducing Sannabis products direct to patient's homes. Medellin's urban area is Colombia's second largest with a population of over 3.5 Million people. Sannabis products are well accepted in Medellin therefore the company is focusing a strong sales effort in this region and plans to open addition distribution points. Sannabis is very pleased with the testimonials for their Climax female lubricant product which they private labeled for a distributor in Colombia. We congratulate the distributor with the success they've had in creating a niche market for this lubricant made with our 100% organic cannabis sativa extract and coconut oil. According to this article in Colombia's leading newspaper, El Pais, the distributor surveyed 50 women that used the product with favorable results, which is evidenced by their re-order. Sannabis has received a second bulk order from this distributor.http://www.elpais.com.co/elpais/cali/noticias/spray-sube-deseo-sexual In addition to their original Sannabis brand products, and due to Sannabis' position as the only legal mass producer of medical cannabis based products in Colombia, the company is working with entrepreneurs that want to develop brands and market medical cannabis products. This is in line with their plan of being mass producers of high quality 100% organic cannabis extract, while maintaining the top brand in the industry, Sannabis. Although the media gives the distributor credit for developing the product, it was developed, produced, and bottled by Sannabis. Sannabis is working with an in-house distributor that will mass market the Sannabis Climax brand female lubricant spray to a different demographic with different price points and presentation so as to not directly compete with private label partners. To view or buy Sannabis products visit http://www.sannabis.co . Follow Sannabis on Facebook for photos and testimonials at https://www.facebook.com/sannabis.cannamedicinal New Colombia Resources, Inc. New Colombia Resources, Inc. is focused on the acquisition and development of high-quality metallurgical coal properties and other available resources in the Republic of Colombia. They expect to have several revenue producing businesses including; metallurgical coal mining and rock quarry aggregates for domestic Colombian highway and railroad building projects. The Company owns 100% of La Tabaquera metallurgical coal mine in Colombia with an estimated 15-17 million tonnes of reserves. They have another pending acquisition for 390 ha and a solicitation contract for 184 ha metallurgical coal concession. New Colombia Resources also holds a significant position in Sannabis SAS which legally produces medical marijuana products in the Republic of Colombia, visit http://www.sannabis.co . For more information on the Company visit http://www.newcolombiaresources.com. Forward Looking Statements Forward Looking Statements; This Press Release includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Act of 1934. A statement containing works such as "anticipate," "seek," intend," "believe," "plan," "estimate," "expect," "project," "plan," or similar phrases may be deemed "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Some or all of the events or results anticipated by these forward-looking statements might not occur. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include financing, the future U.S. and global economies, the impact of competition, and the Company's reliance on existing regulations. New Colombia Resources, Inc. does not undertake any duty nor does it intend to update the results of these forward-looking statements. Company Contact: New Colombia Resources, Inc. John Campo President/Chairman +1-410-236-8200 USA [email protected] [email protected] Sannabis SAS http://www.sannabis.co SOURCE New Colombia Resources, Inc. ALEXANDRIA, Virginia, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Obstacle course organizer, Navy SEAL Adventure Racing, and protectors of police, soldiers and homes, Hesco Group, join forces to launch HESCO BONEFROG, the ultimate Obstacle Course Race (OCR). Created by Navy SEALs in 2012, this OCR is designed to challenge and inspire participants to become better athletes and recognize that they can do anything they set their minds to, while enjoying the camaraderie and teamwork usually reserved for active duty Navy SEALs. As Platinum Sponsor, Hesco is ideally suited to promote the high energy OCR to the military and federal audiences that use HESCO Products to protect lives and assets around the world. Brian Carney, Founder and CEO of BONEFROG Challenge, welcomes the partnership with Hesco; "HESCO BONEFROG is truly a unique experience which will challenge even the highest calibre athletes as well as be welcoming to new OCR racers. With our 3 course options we truly have something for every racer and our Navy SEAL-style obstacles are the best in obstacle course racing. As SEALs, we have used HESCO Products in Iraq and Afghanistan countless times and these products have even saved some of our lives. Sharing the same fearless attitudes there is no better company for BONEFROG to partner with other than Hesco Group." For what will hopefully be a long lasting relationship the HESCO BONEFROG partnership will expand the number of challenges around the United States, with 16 races planned over the next 24 months. The first challenge will be held in New England on May 21st 2016 for Armed Forced Day and raising awareness for incredibly worthy charities. About HESCO BONEFROG HESCO BONEFROG events include Sprint, Challenge and TIER-1 races. Sprint races include 15+ Navy SEAL style obstacles spread across a 3 to 4 mile course, Challenge races includes 36+ Navy SEAL style obstacles spread across 9 miles, and TIER-1 races includes 56+ Navy SEAL style obstacles spread across a 12 mile course. With countless years of experience in military obstacle courses HESCO BONEFROG presents an Obstacle Course Race like no other you will be pushed to the limit, and you'll want to do it again. Based in the UK and the US, Hesco Group is a leader in rapidly deployable, earth-filled barrier systems. Renowned for their military force protection and flood defence capabilities, Hesco recently launched ultra-light body armor for protecting first responders. For more information hescobonefrog.com www.hesco.com Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160421/358280 Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140211/668231-a SOURCE Hesco Group Related Links http://www.hesco.com WASHINGTON, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Argentum Capital Partners of New York, New York and GMB Mezzanine Capital of Minneapolis, Minnesota were the two winning firms of the 2016 SBIC of the Year award by the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA). These winners, along with other national winners and finalists for the National Small Business Person of the Year, have been invited to a recognition ceremony as part of National Small Business Week in Washington, D.C. on May 1-2. SBA Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet will be presenting all awards. The SBA's Office of Investment and Innovation administers the SBIC Program, a multi-billion dollar, zero-subsidy government-sponsored investment fund created in 1958 to bridge the gap between entrepreneurs' need for capital and traditional sources of financing. SBA invests long-term capital in privately owned and managed investment firms licensed as Small Business Investment Companies (SBIC). For every $1 an SBIC raises from a private investor, the SBA can provide up to $3 of debt capital, subject to a cap of $150 million per fund. Once capitalized, SBICs make debt and equity investments in some of America's most promising small businesses, helping them grow. At the close of FY 2015, 303 SBIC funds were participating in the program with $25 billion assets under management. For FY 2015, 1,210 small businesses were financed by SBICs; one-fourth of these companies are woman, minority or veteran led, and one-fourth were companies less than two years old at the time of financing. Some of today's iconic brands were financed by SBICs companies like Apple, Amgen, Intel, Federal Express, Tesla, AOL, Adaptec, and Hewlett Packard. To learn more about the SBIC program, please visit www.sba.gov/sbic. Information for the SBIC winners is listed below: Small Business Investment Company (SBIC) Awardees Argentum Capital Partners Walter H. Barandiaran, Managing Partner New York, New York Argentum Capital Partners supports small, rapidly growing service-based businesses by providing them with growth equity capital and valuable strategic guidance through active board level participation. Since the licensing of its first SBIC fund in 1990, Argentum has invested almost $160 million in 74 small businesses and smaller enterprises across the U.S. Argentum's second fund, Argentum Capital Partners II, LP, invested more than $110 million in 40 small businesses. Subsequent to the fund's initial investment, revenues for these 40 companies grew by eight times and the employee base increased five-fold, creating or sustaining nearly 16,000 jobs. The Principals of Argentum Capital Partners are Walter H. Barandiaran, Daniel Raynor and Steve Berman. GMB Mezzanine Capital Carleton J. Olmanson, Managing Principal Minneapolis, Minnesota GMB Mezzanine Capital provides small businesses with capital and support for intelligent and successful growth. GMB manages three SBIC funds, the first licensed in 2005 and the most recent launched in 2015. These funds have raised over $275 million private capital and have been awarded $330 million in SBA leverage and commitments; they have invested nearly $590 million subordinated debt and equity in 75 U.S. small businesses. During GMB's hold period, these companies grew employment by 19 percent, creating or sustaining more than 16,600 jobs. While GMB actively supports investments in the Midwest, GMB funds have invested in small businesses across 24 U.S. states. The principals of GMB Mezzanine Capital are Carlton L. Olmanson, Michael D. McHugh and Daniel J. Hemiadan. National Small Business Week is an annual event organized by SBA to recognize the achievements of the top small businesses in the nation. Since 1963, the president of the United States has issued a proclamation calling for the celebration of National Small Business Week. This year National Small Business Week will be recognized from May 1-7 with national events planned in Washington, D.C., New York, Denver, Phoenix, Oakland and San Jose, Calif. Events throughout the week will be live-streamed on SBA's website at www.sba.gov. Make sure to check in during the event for live social media engagement, using the hashtag #DreamSmallBiz. For more information on the national events please visit: www.sba.gov/smallbusinessweek. About the Small Business Administration The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) was created in 1953 and since January 13, 2012 has served as a Cabinet-level agency of the federal government to aid, counsel, assist and protect the interests of small business concerns, to preserve free competitive enterprise and to maintain and strengthen the overall economy of our nation. The SBA helps Americans start, build and grow businesses. Through an extensive network of field offices and partnerships with public and private organizations, the SBA delivers its services to people throughout the United States, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Guam. www.sba.gov Cosponsorship Authorization #SBW2016 SBA's participation in this cosponsored activity is not an endorsement of the views, opinions, products or services of any Cosponsor or other person or entity. All SBA/SCORE programs and services are extended to the public on a nondiscriminatory basis. Reasonable arrangements for persons with disabilities will be made if requested at least two weeks in advance. Contact: [email protected]. SCORE is partially funded by SBA Cooperative Agreement No. SBAHQ-14-S-0001. National Small Business Week 2016 sponsors include: Chase for Business, SCORE, ADP, Colonial Life, Intuit, Sam's Club, Square, YP, ESET, Facebook, Instagram, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, National Association of Government Guaranteed Lenders (NAGGL) and VEDC Release Number: 16-30 Contact: Tiffani S. Clements, 202-401-0035 Internet Address: http://www.sba.gov/news Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110909/DC65875LOGO SOURCE U.S. Small Business Administration Related Links http://www.sba.gov THE WOODLANDS, Texas, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Newpark Resources, Inc. (NYSE: NR) today announced the retirement of Jeff Juergens. Mr. Juergens has served as Corporate Vice President and President of the Mats and Integrated Services business since October 2010. His retirement will be effective immediately. Concurrent with Mr. Juergens' retirement, the Company appointed Matthew Lanigan to the role of Corporate Vice President and President of the Mats and Integrated Services business. Mr. Lanigan joins Newpark with over 20 years of global experience, serving in a variety of industries and capacities. For the past 16 years, Mr. Lanigan held various positions within General Electric's Plastics and Capital divisions, including leadership roles in operations, sales and marketing. Mr. Lanigan began his professional career at ExxonMobil in Australia, working as a Drilling & Completions Engineer, and Offshore Production Engineer. Mr. Lanigan received his Bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and his MBA from the Melbourne Business School at the University of Melbourne. "We would like to thank Jeff Juergens for his many contributions to our Mats business over the past five years, and we wish him well in retirement," stated Paul Howes, Newpark's President and Chief Executive Officer. "At the same time, we welcome Matthew Lanigan to the Company, and look forward to his leadership and contributions, as we continue to transform our industry-leading mats business, expanding into new end-user markets around the world. The diversity of Mr. Lanigan's experiences makes him uniquely qualified to lead our Mats & Integrated Services business." Newpark Resources, Inc. is a worldwide provider of value-added drilling fluids systems and composite matting systems used in oilfield and other commercial markets. For more information, visit our website at www.newpark.com. Contacts: Brian Feldott Director, Investor Relations Newpark Resources, Inc. Newpark Resources, Inc. [email protected] 281-362-6800 SOURCE Newpark Resources, Inc. Related Links http://www.newpark.com DALLAS, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- NexPoint Capital, Inc. (the "Company"), a non-traded publicly registered business development company and affiliate of Highland Capital Management, L.P., today announced that it intends to declare ordinary distributions on a weekly basis effective May 1, 2016. Please note that such distributions will continue to be paid on a monthly basis. According to its updated distribution schedule, the Company intends to set Monday as the record date for each weekly ordinary distribution and pay ordinary distributions on the date two (2) business days after the last declared ordinary distribution of the month. The Company has adopted an "opt in" distribution reinvestment plan ("DRIP") for its shareholders, as described in the Company's registration statement. As a result, if the Company makes an ordinary distribution, shareholders will receive the distribution in cash unless they specifically "opt in" to the DRIP so as to have their distributions reinvested in additional shares of the Company's common stock. Pursuant to the amended schedule, DRIP Shareholders will accrue dividends on a weekly basis, and the number of shares issued pursuant to the DRIP will be determined by dividing the total dollar amount of the accrued distribution payable to DRIP shareholders by an amount equal to 92% of the price at which common shares are sold in the offering at the last weekly closing of the month. Any questions regarding the change to the Company's distribution schedule can be directed to the Company's Tender Agent, DST Systems, Inc., at (844) 485-9167. The Company's current offering price for its common stock, $9.83 per share as of April 20, 2016, as well as other information, including information about management and the healthcare-focused investment strategy, are available at http://nexpointcapital.com. The information on or accessible through http://nexpointcapital.com is not incorporated by reference herein. About NexPoint Advisors and NexPoint Capital, Inc. NexPoint Capital, Inc. is a healthcare-focused business development company sponsored by Highland Capital Management, L.P. and managed by NexPoint Advisors, L.P., an affiliate of Highland Capital Management, L.P. NexPoint Advisors, L.P., is an SEC-registered investment advisor to the closed end fund, NexPoint Credit Strategies Fund. About Highland Capital Management, L.P. Highland Capital Management, L.P. is an SEC-registered investment adviser which, together with our affiliates, has approximately $17 billion of assets under management. Founded in 1993 by Jim Dondero and Mark Okada, Highland is one of the largest and most experienced global alternative credit managers. Highland specializes in credit strategies, such as credit hedge funds, long only funds and separate accounts, distressed and special situation private equity, and collateralized loan obligations (CLOs). Highland also offers alternative investments, including emerging markets, long/short equities, and natural resources. Highland's diversified client base includes public pension plans, foundations, endowments, corporations, financial institutions, fund of funds, governments, and high net-worth individuals. Highland is headquartered in Dallas, Texas and maintains offices in New York, Sao Paolo, Singapore, and Seoul. Except for the historical information and discussions contained herein, statements contained in this news release constitute forward-looking statements. These statements may involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, including the performance of financial markets, the investment performance of NexPoint Advisors, L.P.'s or Highland Capital Management L.P.'s sponsored investment products, general economic conditions, future acquisitions, competitive conditions and government regulations, including changes in tax laws. Readers should carefully consider such factors. Further, such forward-looking statements speak only on the date at which such statements are made. NexPoint Advisors, L.P. and Highland Capital Management L.P. undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of such statement. This material has been distributed for informational purposes only and should not be considered as investment advice or a recommendation of any particular security, strategy or investment product. Neither the Company, nor the Company's Board of Directors, nor NexPoint Advisors, L.P., makes any recommendation as to whether to tender or not to tender any Shares in the Tender Offer. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form, or referred to in any other publication, without express written permission. For information: Financial Advisors: 855-498-1580 Shareholders: 844-485-9167 Highland Media Relations: 972-419-6272 SOURCE NexPoint Capital, Inc. Next on the To-Do List: Ikigai Many moons ago, I worked as a career counselor, first for a college and then for a nonprofit in a... Voters need a third option at the polls I ran for a public office a few years ago. After winning a battle with Genesee County Parks the NRA... Wendy Wolcott best choice for Mott College We have a very special candidate running for Mott Community College Board of Trustees in Wendy Wolcott. Mrs. Wolcott is... Smith and Goyette are not fine men I am responding to Tamara Carlones editorial regarding Davison School Board members Matthew Smith and Nicholas Goyette. I disagree with... NORFOLK, Va., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- FIRST-QUARTER 2016 RESULTS Railway operating revenues totaled $2.4 billion , down 6 percent year-over-year. , down 6 percent year-over-year. Railway operating expenses were $1.7 billion , down 13 percent year-over-year on the 2 percent reduction in traffic volumes. , down 13 percent year-over-year on the 2 percent reduction in traffic volumes. Income from railway operations was $723 million , up 19 percent year-over-year. , up 19 percent year-over-year. Net income was $387 million , up 25 percent year-over-year. , up 25 percent year-over-year. Diluted earnings per share were $1.29 , up 29 percent year-over-year. , up 29 percent year-over-year. Railway operating ratio was 70.1 percent, an improvement of 8 percent over the prior year and a Norfolk Southern first-quarter record. Norfolk Southern Corporation (NYSE: NSC) today reported financial results for first-quarter 2016. Net income for the quarter was $387 million, 25 percent higher compared with $310 million during the same period of 2015. Diluted earnings per share were $1.29, up 29 percent compared with $1.00 diluted earnings per share in the first quarter last year. "Our strong first-quarter results demonstrate the significant progress we are making in line with our strategic plan," said Chairman, President, and CEO James A. Squires. "Since I became CEO in June, our team has been committed to streamlining operations, reducing expenses and maintaining superior customer service levels. Our focus on strengthening Norfolk Southern is yielding results, and the company is now on track to achieve productivity savings of about $200 million and an operating ratio below 70 in 2016. We are confident the continued execution of our strategic plan will deliver superior shareholder value by best positioning Norfolk Southern to succeed while ensuring the company is prepared to capture revenue and volume growth opportunities in 2016 and beyond." As previously announced, Norfolk Southern is implementing a strategic plan to reduce costs, drive profitability, and enhance value for all Norfolk Southern shareholders. Through this plan, the company expects to achieve annual productivity savings of more than $650 million by 2020 and an operating ratio below 65 percent by 2020. FIRST-QUARTER SUMMARY Railway operating revenues were $2.4 billion , 6 percent lower compared with the first quarter of 2015. Volume declined 2 percent, the result of lower coal volumes. Average revenue per unit decreased 3 percent as the effects of higher rates were more than offset by a $114 million , or 70 percent, decline in fuel surcharge revenues. , 6 percent lower compared with the first quarter of 2015. Volume declined 2 percent, the result of lower coal volumes. Average revenue per unit decreased 3 percent as the effects of higher rates were more than offset by a , or 70 percent, decline in fuel surcharge revenues. Merchandise revenues were $1.5 billion , 2 percent higher than the same period last year. Led by an 18 percent increase in automotive traffic, volume grew in all business groups except chemicals, which was impacted by fewer crude oil shipments due to low oil prices. The five merchandise commodity groups reported the following year-over-year revenue results: Chemicals: $419 million , down 3 percent Agriculture: $386 million , up 3 percent Metals/Construction: $300 million , down 3 percent Automotive: $254 million , up 16 percent Paper/Forest: $190 million , up 3 percent , 2 percent higher than the same period last year. Led by an 18 percent increase in automotive traffic, volume grew in all business groups except chemicals, which was impacted by fewer crude oil shipments due to low oil prices. The five merchandise commodity groups reported the following year-over-year revenue results: Intermodal revenues were $522 million , down 12 percent compared with first quarter 2015. Volume was even for the quarter as growth in international volumes was offset by lower domestic volumes due to the restructuring of the company's Triple Crown Services subsidiary. , down 12 percent compared with first quarter 2015. Volume was even for the quarter as growth in international volumes was offset by lower domestic volumes due to the restructuring of the company's Triple Crown Services subsidiary. Coal revenues were $349 million , 23 percent lower compared with first quarter of 2015. Mild winter temperatures, low natural gas prices, and a weak global export market combined to decrease volume by 23 percent year-over-year. , 23 percent lower compared with first quarter of 2015. Mild winter temperatures, low natural gas prices, and a weak global export market combined to decrease volume by 23 percent year-over-year. Railway operating expenses decreased $264 million , or 13 percent, to $1.7 billion compared with same period of 2015, due to lower fuel costs and targeted expense reduction initiatives. , or 13 percent, to compared with same period of 2015, due to lower fuel costs and targeted expense reduction initiatives. Income from railway operations was $723 million , 19 percent higher compared with the same period in 2015. , 19 percent higher compared with the same period in 2015. The operating ratio, or operating expenses as a percentage of revenues, was 70.1 percent, a first-quarter record, and an 8 percent improvement compared with first-quarter 2015. About Norfolk Southern Norfolk Southern Corporation (NYSE: NSC) is one of the nation's premier transportation companies. Its Norfolk Southern Railway subsidiary operates approximately 20,000 route miles in 22 states and the District of Columbia, serves every major container port in the eastern United States, and provides efficient connections to other rail carriers. Norfolk Southern operates the most extensive intermodal network in the East and is a major transporter of coal, automotive, and industrial products. http://www.norfolksouthern.com Norfolk Southern Corporation and Subsidiaries Consolidated Statements of Income (Unaudited) First Quarter 2016 2015 ($ in millions, except per share amounts) Railway operating revenues Merchandise $ 1,549 $ 1,520 Intermodal 522 592 Coal 349 455 Total railway operating revenues 2,420 2,567 Railway operating expenses Compensation and benefits 723 783 Purchased services and rents 379 423 Fuel 149 264 Depreciation 252 245 Materials and other 194 246 Total railway operating expenses 1,697 1,961 Income from railway operations 723 606 Other income net 16 21 Interest expense on debt 139 132 Income before income taxes 600 495 Provision for income taxes Current 169 173 Deferred 44 12 Total income taxes 213 185 Net income $ 387 $ 310 Earnings per share Basic $ 1.30 $ 1.01 Diluted 1.29 1.00 Weighted average shares outstanding (note 1) Basic 297.2 306.8 Diluted 298.9 309.6 See accompanying notes to consolidated financial statements. Norfolk Southern Corporation and Subsidiaries Consolidated Statements of Comprehensive Income (Unaudited) First Quarter 2016 2015 ($ in millions) Net income $ 387 $ 310 Other comprehensive income, before tax: Pension and other postretirement benefits 7 10 Other comprehensive loss of equity investees (1) (4) Other comprehensive income, before tax 6 6 Income tax expense related to items of other comprehensive income (3) (3) Other comprehensive income, net of tax 3 3 Total comprehensive income $ 390 $ 313 See accompanying notes to consolidated financial statements. Norfolk Southern Corporation and Subsidiaries Consolidated Balance Sheets (Unaudited) March 31, December 31, 2016 2015 ($ in millions) Assets Current assets: Cash and cash equivalents $ 589 $ 1,101 Accounts receivable net 961 946 Materials and supplies 315 271 Other current assets 101 194 Total current assets (note 2) 1,966 2,512 Investments 2,617 2,572 Properties less accumulated depreciation of $11,520 and $11,478, respectively 29,135 28,992 Other assets 67 63 Total assets $ 33,785 $ 34,139 Liabilities and stockholders' equity Current liabilities: Accounts payable $ 1,119 $ 1,091 Short-term debt 100 200 Income and other taxes 299 203 Other current liabilities 313 237 Current maturities of long-term debt 500 Total current liabilities 1,831 2,231 Long-term debt 9,398 9,393 Other liabilities 1,344 1,385 Deferred income taxes (note 2) 8,989 8,942 Total liabilities 21,562 21,951 Stockholders' equity: Common stock $1.00 per share par value, 1,350,000,000 shares authorized; outstanding 295,737,821 and 297,795,016 shares, respectively, net of treasury shares 297 299 Additional paid-in capital 2,147 2,143 Accumulated other comprehensive loss (442 ) (445 ) Retained income 10,221 10,191 Total stockholders' equity 12,223 12,188 Total liabilities and stockholders' equity $ 33,785 $ 34,139 See accompanying notes to consolidated financial statements. Norfolk Southern Corporation and Subsidiaries Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows (Unaudited) First Quarter 2016 2015 ($ in millions) Cash flows from operating activities Net income $ 387 $ 310 Reconciliation of net income to net cash provided by operating activities: Depreciation 253 246 Deferred income taxes 44 12 Gains and losses on properties (2) (5) Changes in assets and liabilities affecting operations: Accounts receivable (15) 23 Materials and supplies (44) (32) Other current assets 84 176 Current liabilities other than debt (note 3) 200 (71) Other net (28) (28) Net cash provided by operating activities 879 631 Cash flows from investing activities Property additions (398) (392) Property sales and other transactions 12 16 Investment purchases (23) (3) Investment sales and other transactions 1 1 Net cash used in investing activities (408) (378) Cash flows from financing activities Dividends (176) (181) Common stock transactions (note 3) (7) (5) Purchase and retirement of common stock (note 1) (200) (415) Debt repayments (600) (101) Net cash used in financing activities (983) (702) Net decrease in cash and cash equivalents (512) (449) Cash and cash equivalents At beginning of year 1,101 973 At end of period $ 589 $ 524 Supplemental disclosures of cash flow information Cash paid during the period for: Interest (net of amounts capitalized) $ 70 $ 71 Income taxes (net of refunds) 2 12 See accompanying notes to consolidated financial statements. NOTES TO CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS: 1. Stock Repurchase Program We repurchased 2.6 million and 3.9 million shares of common stock in the first quarters of 2016 and 2015, respectively, at a cost of $200 million and $415 million, respectively. We have remaining authorization from our Board of Directors to repurchase up to 21.3 million shares through December 31, 2017. The timing and volume of purchases is guided by our assessment of market conditions and other pertinent factors. Any near-term share repurchases are expected to be made with internally generated cash, cash on hand, or proceeds from borrowings. Since the beginning of 2006, we have repurchased and retired 153.7 million shares at a total cost of $9.7 billion. 2. New Accounting Pronouncement In November 2015, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) issued Accounting Standards Update (ASU) No. 2015-17, "Balance Sheet Classification of Deferred Taxes." This update requires that deferred tax liabilities and assets be classified as noncurrent on the balance sheet rather than as separate current and noncurrent amounts. We adopted the provisions of this ASU during the first quarter of 2016 and applied it retrospectively. The adoption of ASU 2015-17 resulted in the presentation of $86 million of current deferred income tax assets as a reduction of "Deferred income taxes" in the long-term liabilities section of the Consolidated Balance Sheet at March 31, 2016. We retrospectively presented the December 31, 2015 Consolidated Balance Sheet and related disclosures to reflect the reclassification of $121 million of deferred income tax assets from "Deferred income taxes" in the current assets section of the balance sheet to "Deferred income taxes" in the long-term liabilities section of the balance sheet. There was no other impact on our consolidated financial statements or related disclosures from the adoption of ASU 2015-17. 3. Stock-Based Compensation In March 2016, the FASB issued ASU No. 2016-09, "Improvements to Employee Share-Based Payment Accounting." We adopted the provisions of this ASU during the first quarter of 2016. This update principally affects the recognition of excess tax benefits and deficiencies and the cash flow classification of share-based compensation-related transactions. The classification requirements on the Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows for the adoption of ASU 2016-09 resulted in a $21 million increase in "Current liabilities other than debt" within the operating activities section and a corresponding decrease in "Common stock transactions" within the financing activities section for the first quarter of 2016. We retrospectively presented the Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows for the first quarter of 2015 to reflect a $26 million increase in "Current liabilities other than debt" within the operating activities section and a corresponding decrease in "Common stock transactions" within the financing activities section. ASU 2016-09 did not have a material effect on our consolidated financial statements or related disclosures. SOURCE Norfolk Southern Corporation Related Links http://www.nscorp.com BURLINGAME, Calif., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Obeo Health introduces the world's first technology to serve as a full-scale healthcare finance management tool for both companies and their workers and offers the only suite of cloud-based tools combining health data analytics, clinical expertise and employee education. Why choose Obeo Health? Picking the most effective health plan is complicated, and most employees fail to select the one that's best for them. Obeo Health eases this dilemma by creating applications that compare benefit plans and increase their health literacy. Better choices can save money. The typical U.S. employee spends $3,000 to $12,000 each year on healthcare. "For the average American, healthcare is one of the biggest line item costs they have, yet people have no idea how they are spending these dollars, where they are spending them and how to budget," said Obeo Health's Chief Executive Officer, Naveen Saxena. "Obeo's suite of secure and HIPAA-compliant tools allows people to understand health plans, budget their healthcare dollars and minimize their out-of-pocket expenses." Annual premiums for employer-sponsored family health coverage reached $17,545 this year, up 4 percent from last year, with workers on average paying $4,955 towards the cost of their coverage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research & Education Trust 2015 Employer Health Benefits Survey. "Medical plans have become increasingly complex in an effort to control rising costs. Employees have largely been left with little to no tools or support in making important health care decisions," said Nate Randall, President of Ursa Major Consulting and former Head of Benefits at Tesla Motors. "Obeo Health's unbiased presentation of personalized medical costs provides the critical support employees and their families need during Annual Open Enrollment and throughout the year." For employees, Obeo Health creates better healthcare literacy by offering data-driven tools such as My Open Enrollment Assistant and My Health Manager. Learn more about how Obeo Health can save companies money and improve healthcare financial management at http://www.obeohealth.com/press-releases/. About Obeo Health Obeo Health is a healthcare technology leader changing how employees engage with their healthcare choices. Our platform combines advanced prescriptive analytics and personal health data to give more transparency and control. Contact us today for a free demonstration at http://www.obeohealth.com/request-demo/ SOURCE Obeo Health Related Links http://www.obeohealth.com SAO PAULO and MORRISTOWN, N.J., March 24, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- P3 Group, a leading global consulting, engineering and testing services company, today announced it is expanding its telecommunications services in Latin America with a new office in Sao Paulo to support exploding growth in Brazil's R$234 billion telecommunications market. Located in the Sao Jose dos Campos area of Sao Paulo, the P3 team will target the growing testing and network optimization needs of Brazil's mobile operators and device manufacturers. The office will be supported by experienced device, network and application engineers who conduct functional and performance tests of wireless devices from development to launch. They will travel extensively throughout Latin America in specialized test vehicles, and on foot in key business and public venues, to evaluate device function, service quality and usability from the end user's perspective. "Sao Paulo is one of the leading technology and research centers in Latin America and an important hub for serving all of Brazil," said Dirk Bernhardt, CEO of P3 communications, Inc. "With the Summer Olympic Games less than five months away, Brazil's mobile network operators are challenged to prepare for the onslaught of athletes, organizers and media who will expect reliable connections and 4G speeds. Developing and implementing innovative solutions to complex technology challenges is what we do best." P3 has more than a decade of experience in testing wireless devices, network quality and service performance around the globe and is recognized worldwide as the completely neutral authority on network quality. It provides a broad portfolio of independent technical and management consulting services including device testing and certification, engineering and optimization, interference mitigation and cutting-edge network intelligence. In addition to wireless carriers and device manufacturers, P3's telecommunications clients include infrastructure vendors, public safety organizations and regulatory authorities. "Our comprehensive approach combined with our suite of proprietary and certified diagnostic tools can help Latin American operators streamline network deployments and optimize service performance," Bernhardt said. The P3 communications professionals will join a team of P3 Group engineers and consultants, led by Managing Director Erick Monfrinatti Cogliandro, already providing solutions to one of Latin America's biggest aircraft manufactures as well to the automotive industry. In addition to Sao Paulo, P3 office hubs in the Americas include Morristown, N.J.; Dallas, Texas; Detroit, Mich.; Greenville, S.C.; Los Angeles and San Jose, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; Mexico City and Mississauga and Montreal, Canada. As in all locations, P3 will provide its full portfolio of services from the Sao Paulo office. "We continue to grow at a rapid pace and are excited about expanding our Latin American team," Bernhardt said. "We are strategically positioned for success and look forward to contributing to the development of next generation mobile broadband services in Brazil." P3 will join Latin American mobile operators and global thought leaders next month as an exhibitor at LTE Latin America in Rio de Janeiro, April 6 -7, 2016. (Pod #2 in the POD ZONE) For more information about P3 visit http://www.p3-group.com. About P3 P3 is a global consulting, engineering and testing services company, with a rapidly growing team of more than 3,000 consultants and engineers working to develop and implement innovative solutions to today's complex technology challenges. Offering a broad portfolio of services and proprietary tools to the automotive, aerospace, telecommunications and energy industries, P3 adds tangible value that helps clients succeed at every stage, from innovation to implementation. For more information please visit http://www.p3-group.com. CONTACT: Lynette Viviani 973-534-1004 [email protected] SOURCE P3 Group Related Links http://www.p3-group.com Delivering the keynote address at the monthly Wings Club meeting, Mr Hogan said: "Global air travel is a business with incredibly high barriers to entry not just in terms of cost, but in market access, infrastructure requirements and the challenge of competing against such entrenched mega-carriers. "The highest barrier is network. You can't build a global network overnight in fact, you'd need decades, and billions of dollars, to build networks that could compete against the major airline groups. "That's where partnership comes in. From day one, we've taken an open partnership approach, working with scores of airlines on codeshare agreements. Then we took that a step further with minority equity investments in strategically important airlines. "Together, we have been able to create a new competitive choice for air travelers in key markets around the world. That's good for consumers, good for tourism and good for trade." Mr Hogan said Etihad Airway's equity investment strategy was a key element of that approach. "We have a two-pronged approach. From a strategic level, we are looking for the equity partners to bring network connectivity, generate additional revenues and create economies of scale. All our partners are delivering on this level. "That has helped to create the seventh largest airline group in the world and is delivering hundreds of millions of dollars to our business. "Each partner then has its own business plan, which is the responsibility of their own management and Boards of Directors. Many of these, such as Air Serbia, Air Seychelles, Jet Airways and Virgin Australia, are now delivering on this level too. We are supporting the restructuring of businesses that require it, such as Alitalia and airberlin." Mr Hogan said Etihad Airways' entry into the United States market had also brought major benefits to the country. "We are a tiny player in the US air travel market, with less than 0.01 per cent of daily international departures. However, we have been able to offer major benefits to the United States. "We connect the US, through our hub in Abu Dhabi, with scores of markets which are simply not served by other carriers. That means we are feeding hundreds of thousands of travelers, leisure and business, into the US. Hundreds of thousands of those get fed onto the US carriers. "We've also been a close business partner with US corporations most obviously with Boeing and other aerospace suppliers, but we've also created major partnerships with Sabre, Honeywell, IBM, Adobe and many others. "Our total impact on the US economy is more than US$ 440 million a year." Mr Hogan said he believed much of the issues raised about Etihad Airways by the Open Skies campaign stemmed from a lack of understanding of the airline's business model. "There are many myths about our business. But the truth is that we run as a commercial organization, with a shareholder that demands a clear return on its investment. We get no subsidies or state support. We have a well remunerated, highly satisfied workforce. "What we have had is the investment required to compete in such a capital-intensive business. That's a smart investment when you consider the many advantages Abu Dhabi offers as the focus for a global network airline as long as there is a return. That's where our unique partnership model comes in." About Etihad Airways Etihad Airways began operations in 2003, and in 2015 carried 17.4 million passengers. From its Abu Dhabi base, Etihad Airways flies to, or has announced plans to serve, 116 passenger and cargo destinations in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas. The airline has a fleet of 120 Airbus and Boeing aircraft, with 204 aircraft on firm order, including 71 Boeing 787s, 25 Boeing 777Xs, 62 Airbus A350s and 10 Airbus A380s. Etihad Airways holds equity investments in airberlin, Air Serbia, Air Seychelles, Alitalia, Jet Airways, Virgin Australia, and Swiss-based Darwin Airline, trading as Etihad Regional. Etihad Airways, along with airberlin, Air Serbia, Air Seychelles, Alitalia, Etihad Regional, Jet Airways and NIKI, also participate in Etihad Airways Partners, a brand that brings together partner airlines to offer customers more choice through improved networks and schedules and enhanced frequent flyer benefits. For more information, please visit: www.etihad.com Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160421/358590 Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160421/358591 Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160421/358602 SOURCE Etihad Airways Related Links http://www.etihad.com Please call 1-866-376-8058 (US) or 1-412-542-4131 (international) and reference Pfenex to access the call. A replay of the conference call will be available approximately one hour after the call until May 16, 2016. To access the teleconference replay please call 1-877-344-7529 (US) or 1-412-317-0088 (international) and enter the passcode 10085142. The conference call will also be available as a webcast. To access the webcast link please log on to www.pfenex.com . Pfenex investors and others should note that we announce material information to the public about the Company through a variety of means, including our website (http://www.pfenex.com/), our investor relations website (http://pfenex.investorroom.com/), press releases, SEC filings, public conference calls, corporate Twitter account (https://twitter.com/pfenex), Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/Pfenex-Inc-105908276167776/timeline/), and LinkedIn page (https://www.linkedin.com/company/pfenex-inc) in order to achieve broad, non-exclusionary distribution of information to the public and to comply with our disclosure obligations under Regulation FD. We encourage our investors and others to monitor and review the information we make public in these locations as such information could be deemed to be material information. Please note that this list may be updated from time to time. About Pfenex Inc. Pfenex Inc. is a clinical-stage biotechnology company engaged in the development of biosimilar therapeutics and high-value and difficult to manufacture proteins. The company's lead product candidate is PF582, a biosimilar candidate to Lucentis (ranibizumab), for the potential treatment of patients with retinal diseases. Pfenex has leveraged its Pfenex Expression Technology platform to build a pipeline of product candidates and preclinical products under development including other biosimilars, as well as vaccines, generics and next generation biologics. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140715/127348 SOURCE Pfenex Inc. Related Links http://www.pfenex.com JAKARTA, Indonesia, SINGAPORE and ISTANBUL, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Telkomsel, the leading operator of cellular telecommunications services in Indonesia, utilized uSONTM, centralized Self-Organizing Networks(SON) solution offered by P.I. Works. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160220/335479LOGO ) P.I. Works technology leading, vendor agnostic, uSONTM product has become the top choice of operators around the world for improving network quality and capacity, along with reducing capital expenditures required for capacity increase of cell sites. The project was performed in Sumatra Island with our Local Partner Telkom Infra, where Telkomsel had been previously conducting "Strategic Optimization". During the trial, a total of 44,000 automated closed-loop actions were performed, and an action has only taken an impressive 8 minutes. 33% improvement was realized in both PS and CS accessibility immediately in Telkomsel network. "We're very impressed with P.I. Works solutions, which brought significant quantifiable improvements to our network, in terms of accessibility and coverage optimization. In particular, we are excited to see how uSONTM can help us defer our CapEx substantially, while reducing our OpEx greatly. We're looking forward to expanding our partnership with P.I. Works" said Mr. Akhmad, General Manager Radio Access Network Quality, Telkomsel. "We have proven one more time how our product, uSONTM, can make the difference in a highly invested and optimized network such as Telkomsel's, and help manage network capacity and coverage challenges most effectively. The results of this trial have shown direct impact of uSONTM in improving subscriber experience" said Tuna Toker, General Manager Asia Pacific, P.I. Works. About Telkomsel PT. Telkomsel is Indonesia's largest mobile operator with more than 140 million subscribers. To serve customers all over Indonesia, including in remote areas, outer islands and border areas. PT. Telkomsel has consistently implemented a technology roadmap of 3G, HSDPA, HSPA +, as well as being the first mobile operator in Indonesia to commercially launch the 4G LTE services. About Telkominfra PT. Telkominfra is a PT. Telkom Indonesia subsidiary company whose main business is in Managed Services and Power solution including submarine optical cable maintenance. The main customer is PT. Telkomsel as trusted/independent partner for Network Performance and Optimization for 2G, 3G & LTE. About P.I. Works P.I. Works is a leading provider in the area of network performance management and SON solutions deployed by 38 operators in 27 countries. Our solutions enable mobile operators to improve their network quality and subscriber experience. P.I. Works is a member of the ETSI, driving standardization process in the 3GPP SON forum. For more information visit http://www.piworks.net/ Media Contacts E-mail: [email protected] SOURCE P.I. Works ATLANTA, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Preferred Apartment Communities, Inc. (NYSE: APTS) ("PAC" or the "Company") today announced that on April 20, 2016 it closed on a loan investment of up to approximately $9.4 million. This investment is in connection with Haven Campus Communities, LLC's plans to develop a 556-bed, 140-unit student housing community located near Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. This is the second phase to an existing student housing project that is completing its first lease-up. The second phase will be managed by Preferred Campus Management, LLC, the same company managing the current lease-up in the first phase. Additionally, with this investment, PAC received an option to purchase the student housing community following stabilization at a discounted price to market. "We are excited to continue the growth of investments in student housing assets near world-class universities," said Paul Cullen, Chief Marketing Officer of PAC. About Preferred Apartment Communities, Inc. Preferred Apartment Communities, Inc. is a Maryland corporation formed primarily to acquire and operate multifamily properties in select targeted markets throughout the United States. As part of our business strategy, we may enter into forward purchase contracts or purchase options for to-be-built multifamily communities and we may make real estate related loans, provide deposit arrangements, or provide performance assurances, as may be necessary or appropriate, in connection with the development of multifamily communities and other properties. As a secondary strategy, we may acquire or originate senior mortgage loans, subordinate loans or mezzanine debt secured by interests in multifamily properties, membership or partnership interests in multifamily properties and other multifamily related assets and invest not more than 20% of our assets in other real estate related investments such as grocery-anchored shopping centers, senior mortgage loans, subordinate loans or mezzanine debt secured by interests in grocery-anchored shopping centers, membership or partnership interests in grocery-anchored shopping centers and other grocery-anchored shopping center related assets as determined by our manager as appropriate for us. Preferred Apartment Communities, Inc. has elected to be taxed as a real estate investment trust under the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended, commencing with its tax year ended December 31, 2011. Forward-Looking Statements This press release may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These statements may be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "may", "trend", "will", "expects", "plans", "estimates", "anticipates", "projects", "intends", "believes", "goals", "objectives", "outlook" and similar expressions. Because such statements include risks, uncertainties and contingencies, actual results may differ materially from the expectations, intentions, beliefs, plans or predictions of the future expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These risks, uncertainties and contingencies include, but are not limited to, those disclosed in PAC's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. PAC undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as may be required by law. Additional Information The SEC has declared effective the registration statement (including prospectus) filed by the Company for each of the offerings to which this communication may relate. Before you invest, you should read the final prospectus, and any prospectus supplements, forming a part of the registration statement and other documents the Company has filed with the SEC for more complete information about the Company and the offering to which this communication may relate. In particular, you should carefully read the risk factors described in the final prospectus and in any related prospectus supplement and in the documents incorporated by reference in the final prospectus and any related prospectus supplement to which this communication may relate. You may obtain these documents for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC website at www.sec.gov. Alternatively, the Company or its dealer manager, International Assets Advisory, LLC, with respect to the Follow-On Offering, or its sales agent, MLV, with respect to the ATM Offering, will arrange to send you a prospectus if you request it by calling Leonard A. Silverstein at (770) 818-4100, 3284 Northside Parkway NW, Suite 150, Atlanta, Georgia 30327. The final prospectus for the Follow-On Offering, dated October 11, 2013, can be accessed through the following link: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1481832/000148183213000128/a424b3prospectus900m.htm The final prospectus and prospectus supplement for the ATM Offering, dated July 19, 2013 and February 28, 2014, respectively, can be accessed through the following link: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1481832/000148183214000015/prospectussupplementatm-20.htm Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20151105/284364LOGO SOURCE Preferred Apartment Communities, Inc. LONDON, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Synopsis The report provides detailed market analysis, information and insights based on over 550 CIC projects in the five major global regions. The report provides detailed metrics on each region's airport construction projects (as tracked by the CIC), split by type and start date by value. Summary This report details the investment in large-scale airport construction projects in the five CIC global regions, based on projects tracked by Timetric's Construction Intelligence Center (CIC). The projects are at various stages of development, from announced to execution, and the report examines in detail the airport construction activity in the main countries of each region. A total of 121 countries are covered, and the combined value of projects tracked was US$638.7 billion as of March 2016. The highest-value project tracked in this report is the US$36.2 billion Istanbul New Airport in Turkey. Scope The report provides analysis based on CIC projects showing value by country and top project listings. Top participants for the sector are also shown. Reasons To Buy Gain an insight into the main drivers of activity and forecasts, and understand key trends. Gain analysis of main project participants by value and by sector, enabling clients to target products and services for each project type. Access top project data for airport construction projects by location, value, stage and start date. Key Highlights CIC Projects analysis shows that airports construction projects for the five global regions is estimated at US$638.7 billion. Asia-Pacific has the highest value of projects, at US$224.1 billion. The US is the leading country with projects valued at US$60.9 billion, followed by the UK with projects valued at US$58.4 billion. The 121 countries in the five regions have 61% of projects, worth a total of US$389.4 billion, at pre-construction stages. Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/3758982/ About Reportbuyer Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers http://www.reportbuyer.com For more information: Sarah Smith Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com Email: [email protected] Tel: +44 208 816 85 48 Website: www.reportbuyer.com SOURCE ReportBuyer Related Links http://www.reportbuyer.com DUBLIN, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Volkswagen is close to reaching an agreement with United States' officials to buy back almost 500,000 2.0-litre diesel cars. The deal, if completed, will include fines from regulators and compensation for owners. It is likely to be announced during a federal court hearing in San Francisco later today. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160330/349511LOGO ) In September, the company confessed to cheating on emission tests for an estimated 11 million vehicles worldwide. This was unfortunate timing for VW, with many US states cracking down on emissions in an attempt to reduce the use of conventional fuels. They are providing incentives to consumers that buy vehicles that run on alternative fuels, and the low emission vehicle market is expected to grow at 5.13% by 2019. VW will pay cash compensation to owners who sell their vehicles back or get them fixed. Owners are expected to get an additional cash payment on top of the estimated value of their vehicles before the emission scandal became public. Some reports have suggested that the deal to settle could involve paying each affected customer $5,000. Vehicle emissions and low operating and manufacturing cost are causing American automakers to turn to electric vehicles. The high performance EV market in the United States is projected to grow at a CAGR of 42.34% by 2020. Emission regulations has also led to considerable growth in the exhaust aftertreatment systems market, which is expected to reach 206,430.46 thousand units by 2020. Owners are expected to have around two years to decide whether to sell back vehicles or have them repaired. For further information on this topic, and a full list of all related documentation, please visit the Carbon Emissions and Capture section at http://www.researchandmarkets.com/rm/NQLK. About Research and Markets Research and Markets is the world's leading source for international market research reports and market data. We provide you with the latest data on international and regional markets, key industries, the top companies, new products and the latest trends. Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-emissions-usa-idUSKCN0XH2CX Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood,Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call 1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call 1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 SOURCE Research and Markets MIAMI, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. (NYSE: RCL) has scheduled a conference call for 10:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, Friday, April 29, 2016, to discuss the company's first quarter 2016 financial results. The call will be available on-line at the company's investor relations website, www.rclinvestor.com. To listen to the call by phone, please dial (877) 663-9606 in the US and Canada. International phone calls should be made to (706) 758-4628. There is no passcode or meeting number. A replay of the webcast will be available at the same site for a month following the call. Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. (NYSE: RCL) is a global cruise vacation company that owns Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises, Pullmantur, Azamara Club Cruises and CDF Croisieres de France, as well as TUI Cruises through a 50 percent joint venture. Together, these six brands operate a combined total of 44 ships with an additional ten on order. They operate diverse itineraries around the world that call on approximately 490 destinations on all seven continents. Additional information can be found on www.royalcaribbean.com, www.celebritycruises.com, www.pullmantur.es, www.azamaraclubcruises.com, www.cdfcroisieresdefrance.com, www.tuicruises.com or www.rclinvestor.com. SOURCE Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. Related Links http://www.royalcaribbean.com LONDON, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Royal Dutch Shell plc (the "Company")(NYSE:RDS.A) (NYSE: RDS.B) announces that its 2016 Annual General Meeting (the "AGM") will be held at the Circustheater, Circusstraat 4, 2586 CW The Hague, The Netherlands at 10:00 (Dutch time) on Tuesday May 24, 2016. The Notice of Annual General Meeting (the "Notice") can be viewed and downloaded from http://www.shell.com/agm. The AGM will be webcast on the day so shareholders unable to attend in person can still follow proceedings. More information about the webcast arrangements can be found in the Notice and via the website referred to above. SHAREHOLDER PRESENTATION, LONDON A presentation has been arranged for shareholders at 11:00 (UK time) on Thursday May 26, 2016 (two days after the AGM) at Central Hall Westminster, Storey's Gate, Westminster, London, SW1H 9NH, United Kingdom. The Chairman, the Chief Executive Officer, the Chief Financial Officer and the Company Secretary will be present. This presentation is not part of the AGM. Further details can be found in the Notice of Annual General Meeting. NATIONAL STORAGE MECHANISM In accordance with the Listing Rules, a copy of each of the documents below will be submitted to the National Storage Mechanism and available for inspection at: http://www.morningstar.co.uk/uk/nsm. Annual Report and Form 20-F for the year ended December 31, 2015 Notice of the 2016 Annual General Meeting Notice of Availability of Shareholder Documents PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP Statement of Reasons Proxy Form relating to the 2016 Annual General Meeting The Annual Report and Form 20-F for the year ended December 31, 2015 can also be viewed and downloaded from the Company's website: http://www.shell.com/annualreport. Printed copies of the Notice and associated documents have been despatched to shareholders. April 21, 2016 Mark Edwards Deputy Company Secretary ENQUIRIES MEDIA International: +44(0)207-934-5550 USA: +1-713-241-4544 INVESTOR RELATIONS International: + 31(0)70-377-4540 North America: +1-832-337-2034 SOURCE Royal Dutch Shell plc SHARON, Pa., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Secretary of Education Pedro A. Rivera today traveled to Mercer County to meet with teachers, administrators, and officials at Sharon High School and discuss ways increased education funding and equity can help schools across the commonwealth achieve their goals. "For the past several years, many schools have found themselves in the unique situation of having to do more with less, and many of those schools have overcome the challenges they faced despite those funding difficulties," Rivera said. "It is my aim to put those challenges in the past and ensure that schools in Pennsylvania do not have to make those tough decisions again. Moving forward, we must continue to make a fair and appropriate investment in our schools, so that they can focus on educating students rather than worry about dwindling resources." During the visit, Rivera heard from participants about Sharon High School's priorities, achievements and challenges. Also present was state Representative Mark Longietti (D-Mercer), who represents the school district and agrees with the need for robust and comprehensive education funding. "Governor Wolf and Secretary Rivera are committed to restoring critical funding for our school children, which was cut under the Corbett Administration," Longietti said. "Sharon schools lost more than $1,000 per student, one of the largest cuts in the state. Restoring that funding not only means smaller class sizes, which improves learning, but it also reduces the burden on local property tax payers." The 2016-17 budget plan includes a $200 million increase to basic education funding (BEF) that would be distributed using the Fair Funding Formula created and unanimously adopted by the bipartisan Basic Education Funding Commission in June 2015. The new proposal would also add $50 million for Special Education, $60 million to expand Pre-K Counts and Head Start Supplemental Programs, as well as investments to modernize Career and Technical Education programs, and bolster funding to the state higher education institutions to lessen the reliance on tuition hikes and fee increases. Michael J. Calla, Superintendent of Sharon City School District, specified just how a comprehensive investment in the commonwealth's schools could help the district better serve its students and teachers. "The Sharon City School District is honored to have hosted Secretary Pedro Rivera's visit to the Sharon Middle/High School campus. The Sharon schools have a proud tradition of providing high quality educational experiences to each of our children and we are pleased to be able to share our successes and our challenges with the Secretary," Mr. Calla said. "Mr. Rivera's visit provided a wonderful opportunity for the members of the Board of Education, the Administrative team and the Instructional staff to discuss the Governor's focus on fair and equitable funding, the commonwealth's vision for career and college readiness and the needs of urban and socioeconomically distressed districts such as Sharon City. The Secretary's experiences as an educational leader in both the Lancaster and City of Philadelphia School Districts provide him with a unique background to speak to the current state of urban education across the commonwealth." Today's visit to Sharon City School District is the most recent stop on the Schools That Teach tour. Rivera has also made stops at Career and Technical Centers (CTCs) and colleges to discuss the 2016-17 budget proposal that Governor Tom Wolf unveiled in February. MEDIA CONTACT: Nicole Reigelman, 717-783-9802. SOURCE Pennsylvania Department of Education Related Links http://www.state.pa.us BURLINGAME, Calif., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Proterra, the market leader of zero-emission, battery-electric buses in North America, today announced that SEPTA, Foothill Transit and King County Metro have won Federal Transit Administration (FTA) Low or No Emission Vehicle Deployment Grants. The Low-No grant winners will use their funds to purchase 33 Catalyst buses and charging infrastructure, bringing Proterra's total number of orders to 155 vehicles from 16 transit agencies across the United States. Proterra customers won 33 of the 55 buses awarded under this program. With new and existing Proterra customers building their zero-emission vehicle fleets, this announcement underscores the rising demand for Proterra zero-emission battery-electric buses and highlights that the electric bus market is going mainstream. As one of the largest transit agencies in the United States, serving 3.9 million people in five counties in and around Philadelphia, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) will receive $2,585,075 from FTA and use the funds to purchase 25 Proterra Catalyst buses and five overhead chargers. SEPTA will be procuring more zero-emission vehicles with less Low-No funding than any other grant recipient, which is a testament to SEPTA's electric vehicle vision and state of the EV bus market. Proterra zero-emission buses will be deployed on Routes 29 and 79 in South Philadelphia. "SEPTA is excited to be able to move forward with the purchase of 25 emission-free electric buses from Proterra," said SEPTA Board Chairman Pasquale T. Deon. "SEPTA already has one of the greenest bus fleets in the nation, with over half of our vehicles operating diesel-electric hybrids. The addition of electric buses furthers our commitment to a sustainable future for our riders and local residents." On the heels of completing one of the most rigorous performance tests in the industry, King County Metro Transit, serving the greater area of Seattle Washington, will now be able to fully electrify two routes using new funds from FTA's Low-No Program for eight additional Proterra Catalyst vehicles. This award will increase KCM's battery-electric fleet to 11 Catalyst vehicles. Proterra's first customer and the first agency in the U.S. to operate EV buses in revenue service, Foothill Transit, also received Low-No grant funding that will go towards electric charging facilities and support the transit agency's ongoing electric bus program. Foothill Transit, which serves more than 14 million customers in Los Angeles County, will be getting 13 Proterra Catalyst buses from a previous order this year, bringing Foothill's all-electric fleet to nearly 10 percent of the transit agency's total. "This award is a big win for Proterra and the industry alike because it signals continued market demand for zero-emission vehicles," said Ryan Popple, CEO of Proterra. "We are pleased to be supporting SEPTA, Foothill Transit and King County Metro in their electrification efforts and are committed to designing and manufacturing state-of-the-art, zero-emission buses that ultimately save our customers time and money." About Proterra: Proterra is a leader in the design and manufacture of zero-emission vehicles that enable bus fleet operators to significantly reduce operating costs while delivering clean, quiet transportation to the community. Proterra has sold more than 155 vehicles to 16 different transit agencies throughout North America. Proterra's configurable EV platform, battery and charging options make its buses well-suited for a wide range of transit and campus routes. With unmatched durability and energy efficiency based on rigorous U.S. certification testing, Proterra products are proudly designed, engineered and manufactured in America, with offices in Silicon Valley and South Carolina. For more information visit: http://www.proterra.com/ and follow us on Twitter @Proterra_Inc. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20151009/275882LOGO SOURCE Proterra BALA CYNWYD, Pa., April 20, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Law office of Brodsky & Smith, LLC announces that it is investigating potential claims against the Board of Directors of Lexmark International, Inc. ("Lexmark" or "the Company") (NYSE- LXK-News) for possible breaches of fiduciary duty and other violations of state law in connection with the sale of the Company to Apex Technology Co., Ltd. and PAG Asia Capital ("Apex"). Click here to learn more about the investigation http://brodsky-smith.com/1064-lxk-lexmark-international-inc.html, or call: 877-534-2590. There is no cost or obligation to you. Under the terms of the transaction, Lexmark shareholders will receive only $40.50 in cash for each share of Lexmark stock they own. The investigation concerns whether the Board of Lexmark breached their fiduciary duties to shareholders and whether Apex is underpaying for the Company. The transaction may undervalue the Company and would result in a substantial loss for long term Lexmark shareholders. For example, Lexmark stock traded at $51.7 per share on August 14, 2014 and traded at $47.32 per share on January 20, 2015. If you own shares of Lexmark and wish to discuss the legal ramifications of the investigation, or have any questions, you may e-mail or call the law office of Brodsky & Smith, LLC who will, without obligation or cost to you, attempt to answer your questions. You may contact Jason L. Brodsky, Esquire or Evan J. Smith, Esquire at Brodsky & Smith, LLC, Two Bala Plaza, Suite 510, Bala Cynwyd, PA 19004, by visiting http://brodsky-smith.com/1064-lxk-lexmark-international-inc.html, or calling toll free 877-LEGAL-90. Brodsky & Smith, LLC is a litigation law firm with extensive expertise representing shareholders throughout the nation in securities and class action lawsuits. The attorneys at Brodsky & Smith have been appointed by numerous courts throughout the country to serve as lead counsel in class actions and have successfully recovered millions of dollars for our clients and shareholders. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. SOURCE Brodsky & Smith, LLC Related Links http://www.brodsky-smith.com NEW YORK, April 20, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Pomerantz LLP is investigating claims on behalf of investors of NRG Yield, Inc. ("NRG Yield" or the "Company") (NYSE: NYLD). Such investors are advised to contact Robert S. Willoughby at [email protected] or 888-476-6529, ext. 9980. The investigation concerns whether NRG Yield and certain of its officers and/or directors have violated Sections 10(b) and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. On June 29, 2015, NRG sold just under 28.2 million shares of stock at $22.00 per share in its Class C Common Stock Offering (the "Offering"), raising $600 million in new capital. On August 4, 2015, the Company presented its Q2 2015 earnings results, disclosing material facts and trends concerning "historically low wind speeds" during the second quarter of 2015, including that the resulting poor wind production would have a significant adverse impact on NYLD's performance and results for the second quarter of 2015." On April 20, 2016, NRG's stock closed at $14.71, a decline of 33.14% since the Offering. The Pomerantz Firm, with offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Florida, is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, the Pomerantz Firm pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 80 years later, the Pomerantz Firm continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered numerous multimillion-dollar damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomerantzlaw.com. CONTACT: Robert S. Willoughby Pomerantz LLP [email protected] SOURCE Pomerantz LLP Related Links http://www.pomerantzlaw.com PLEASANTON, Calif., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Simpson Manufacturing Co., Inc. (the "Company") (NYSE: SSD) today announced its first quarter 2016 results. Results of Operations for the Three Months Ended March 31, 2016, Compared with the Three Months Ended March 31, 2015. Unless otherwise stated, the results announced below, when providing comparisons (which are generally indicated by words such as "increased," "decreased" "remained" or "compared to"), compare the results of operations for the three months ended March 31, 2016, against the results of operations for the three months ended March 31, 2015. Overview Net sales increased 13% to $199.5 million from $176.5 million. The Company had net income of $16.3 million compared to $10.1 million. Diluted net income per common share was $0.34 compared to $0.20. Net sales The Company's net sales increased in both the North America and Europe segments. Segment net sales: North America Net sales increased 16% due to increased unit sales volumes in the United States on improved economic activity, partly offset by a slight decrease in average sales prices. Canada's net sales were negatively affected by the Canadian dollar weakening against the United States dollar. Europe Net sales increased 4%, mostly due to increased unit sales volumes, partly offset by a decrease in average sales prices. Europe's net sales were negatively affected by the European currencies weakening against the United States dollar. Asia/Pacific -Net sales decreased 59%, primarily due to the closing of sales offices in China , Thailand and Dubai late in the first quarter of 2015, which accounted for approximately a $2.2 million decrease in consolidated net sales. Consolidated net sales channels and product groups: Net sales to dealer distributors, lumber dealers, contractor distributors and home centers increased, primarily due to increased home construction activity. Wood construction product net sales, including sales of connectors, truss plates, fastening systems, fasteners and shearwalls, represented 86% of total Company net sales in the first quarters of both 2016 and 2015. Concrete construction product net sales, including sales of adhesives, chemicals, mechanical anchors, powder actuated tools and reinforcing fiber materials, represented 14% of total Company net sales in the first quarters of both 2016 and 2015. Gross profit Gross profit increased to $92.5 million from $77.5 million. Gross profit as a percentage of net sales increased to 46% from 44%. Based on current information and subject to future events and circumstances, the Company estimates that its full-year 2016 gross profit margin will be between approximately 46% and 47%. North America Gross profit margin increased to 48% from 46%, primarily as a result of a decrease in factory overhead (on increased production volumes) and a small reduction in material costs, both as a percentage of net sales. Gross profit margin increased to 48% from 46%, primarily as a result of a decrease in factory overhead (on increased production volumes) and a small reduction in material costs, both as a percentage of net sales. Europe Gross profit margin decreased to 36% from 38%, as a result of increases in material, labor and shipping costs, all as a percentage of sales, partly offset by decrease in factory costs (on increased production volumes), as a percentage of sales. Gross profit margin decreased to 36% from 38%, as a result of increases in material, labor and shipping costs, all as a percentage of sales, partly offset by decrease in factory costs (on increased production volumes), as a percentage of sales. Product mix The gross profit margin differential between wood construction products and concrete construction products, which have lower gross profit margins, decreased to 15% from 17%. Steel prices The market prices for steel increased during the first quarter of 2016. The Company currently anticipates that, subject to changing economic conditions, it is likely that steel prices will rise during the second quarter of 2016. Research and development and engineering expense Research and development and engineering expense increased 12% to $11.4 million from $10.2 million, primarily due to increases of $0.6 million in cash profit sharing expense on increased profits, $0.2 million in personnel costs and $0.2 million in computer costs, all of which occurred in the North America segment. Selling expense Selling expense increased 11% to $25.2 million from $22.6 million, primarily due to increases of $1.7 million in personnel costs and $1.1 million in cash profit sharing and sales commission expenses, partly offset by a decrease of $0.2 million in donation expense. North America Selling expense increased $2.6 million , primarily due to increases of $1.9 million in personnel costs, mostly related to the addition of staff and pay rate increases instituted on January 1, 2016 , and $1.2 million in cash profit sharing and sales commission expense, partly offset by a decrease of $0.2 million in donation expense. Selling expense increased , primarily due to increases of in personnel costs, mostly related to the addition of staff and pay rate increases instituted on , and in cash profit sharing and sales commission expense, partly offset by a decrease of in donation expense. Europe Selling expense increased $0.9 million , primarily due to increases of $0.4 million in personnel costs mostly related to the addition of staff. Selling expense increased , primarily due to increases of in personnel costs mostly related to the addition of staff. Asia/Pacific - Selling expense decreased $0.9 million , primarily due to a decrease of $0.7 million in personnel costs, related to closing three sales offices and downsizing one sales office in 2015. General and administrative expense General and administrative expense increased 3% to $29.3 million from $28.4 million, primarily due to an increase of $1.8 million in cash profit sharing expense, partly offset by a net decrease of $0.6 million in foreign currency losses. North America General and administrative expense increased $1.1 million , primarily due to an increase of $1.5 million in cash profit sharing expense. General and administrative expense increased , primarily due to an increase of in cash profit sharing expense. Europe General and administrative expense decreased by $1.0 million , primarily due to a net decrease of $1.2 million in unrealized foreign currency losses. General and administrative expense decreased by , primarily due to a net decrease of in unrealized foreign currency losses. Administrative and Other General and administrative expense increased by $1.0 million , primarily due to an increase of $0.4 million in cash profit sharing expense, as well as a net increase in foreign currency losses of $0.3 million . Income taxes The Company's effective income tax rate remained 38%. Based on current information and subject to future events and circumstances, the Company estimates that its full-year 2016 effective tax rate will be between 37% and 39%. Additional information At its meeting on April 20, 2016, the Company's Board of Directors declared a cash dividend of $0.18 per share. This is an increase of $0.02 per share, or 12.5%, over the amount of the last dividend declared by the Company in February 2016. The record date for the dividend will be on July 7, 2016, and it will be paid on July 28, 2016. For the three months ended March 31, 2016, the Company repurchased 106,347 shares of the Company's shares for $3.5 million, at an average price of $32.93 per share. The repurchases were part of the $50.0 million that the Company's Board of Directors authorized for 2016. Investors, analysts and other interested parties are invited to join the Company's conference call on Friday, April 22, 2016, at 6:00 am Pacific Time. To participate, callers may dial 877-876-9177 (international callers may dial 785-424-1666). The call will be webcast simultaneously as well as being available for one month through a link on the Company's website at www.simpsonmfg.com. This document contains forward-looking statements, based on numerous assumptions and subject to risks and uncertainties, such as statements above regarding anticipated or estimated steel prices, gross profit margin, and effective tax rate. Although the Company believes that the forward-looking statements are reasonable, it does not and cannot give any assurance that its beliefs and expectations will prove to be correct. Many factors could significantly affect the Company's operations and cause the Company's actual results to differ substantially from the Company's expectations. Those factors include, but are not limited to: (i) general business cycles and construction business conditions; (ii) customer acceptance of the Company's products; (iii) product liability claims, contractual liability, engineering and design liability and similar liabilities or claims, (iv) relationships with key customers; (v) materials and manufacturing costs; (vi) the financial condition of customers, competitors and suppliers; (vii) technological developments including software development; (viii) increased competition; (ix) changes in industry practices or regulations; (x) litigation risks, (xi) changes in capital and credit market conditions; (xii) governmental and business conditions in countries where the Company's products are manufactured and sold; (xiii) changes in trade regulations; (xiv) the effect of acquisition activity; (xv) changes in the Company's plans, strategies, objectives, expectations or intentions; and (xvi) other risks and uncertainties indicated from time to time in the Company's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission including most recently the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K under the heading "Item 1A - Risk Factors." Actual results might differ materially from results suggested by any forward-looking statements in this document. The Company does not have an obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of the receipt of new information, the occurrence of future events or otherwise. The financial information set forth herein is presented on a preliminary unreviewed basis; reviewed data will be included in the Company's Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the period ended March 31, 2016, when filed. The Company's results of operations (unaudited) for the three months ended March 31, 2016 and 2015, were as follows: Three Months Ended March 31, (Amounts in thousands, except per share data) 2016 2015 Net sales $ 199,523 $ 176,491 Cost of sales 107,000 98,993 Gross profit 92,523 77,498 Research and development and engineering expenses 11,423 10,197 Selling expenses 25,187 22,607 General and administrative expenses 29,298 28,433 Gain on disposal of assets (26) (16) Income from operations 26,641 16,277 Interest expense, net (235) (35) Income before taxes 26,406 16,242 Provision for income taxes 10,063 6,191 Net income $ 16,343 $ 10,051 Earnings per common share: Basic $ 0.34 $ 0.20 Diluted $ 0.34 $ 0.20 Weighted average shares outstanding: Basic 48,297 49,208 Diluted 48,450 49,408 Other data: Depreciation and amortization $ 7,437 $ 7,418 Pre-tax equity-based compensation expense 2,750 3,295 Cash dividend declared per common share $ 0.16 $ 0.14 The Company's financial position (unaudited) as of March 31, 2016 and 2015, and December 31, 2015 were as follows: March 31, December 31, (Amounts in thousands) 2016 2015 2015 Cash and cash equivalents $ 232,028 $ 233,587 $ 258,825 Trade accounts receivable, net 135,123 117,316 106,011 Inventories 210,787 205,312 195,757 Other current assets 13,284 32,231 28,679 Total current assets 591,222 588,446 589,272 Property, plant and equipment, net 216,660 205,009 213,716 Goodwill 125,614 122,923 123,950 Other noncurrent assets 35,465 36,281 34,371 Total assets $ 968,961 $ 952,659 $ 961,309 Trade accounts payable $ 29,023 $ 21,456 $ 21,309 Other current liabilities 70,523 59,831 73,655 Total current liabilities 99,546 81,287 94,964 Other long-term liabilities 5,159 16,082 16,521 Stockholders' equity 864,256 855,290 849,824 Total liabilities and stockholders' equity $ 968,961 $ 952,659 $ 961,309 Additional financial data of the Company (unaudited) for the three months ended March 31, 2016 and 2015, were as follows: Three Months Ended March 31, % (Amounts in thousands) 2016 2015 change* Net Sales by Reporting Segment North America $ 174,454 $ 150,324 16% Europe 23,698 22,788 4% Asia/Pacific 1,371 3,379 (59)% Total $ 199,523 $ 176,491 13% Net Sales by Product Group** Wood Construction $ 171,777 $ 151,379 13% Concrete Construction 27,745 25,010 11% Other 1 102 N/M Total $ 199,523 $ 176,491 13% Gross Profit (Loss) by Reporting Segment North America $ 83,713 68,707 22% Europe 8,562 8,697 (2)% Asia/Pacific 306 510 (40)% Administrative and all other (58) (416) N/M Total $ 92,523 $ 77,498 19% Income (Loss) from Operations North America $ 30,452 $ 20,466 49% Europe (1,618) (1,632) 1% Asia/Pacific 155 (803) 119% Administrative and all other (2,348) (1,754) (34)% Total $ 26,641 $ 16,277 64% * Unfavorable percentage changes are presented in parenthesis. ** The Company manages its business by geographic segment but is presenting sales by product group as additional information. N/M Statistic is not material or not meaningful. Simpson Manufacturing Co., Inc., headquartered in Pleasanton, California, through its subsidiary, Simpson Strong-Tie Company Inc., designs, engineers and is a leading manufacturer of wood construction products, including connectors, truss plates, fastening systems, fasteners and shearwalls, and concrete construction products, including adhesives, specialty chemicals, mechanical anchors, powder actuated tools and reinforcing fiber materials. The Company's common stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "SSD." For further information, contact Tom Fitzmyers at (925) 560-9030. SOURCE Simpson Manufacturing Co., Inc. Related Links http://www.simpsonmfg.com KENNEBUNK, Maine, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Blue is a genre-busting novel written by pioneering sociologist, Patricia Leavy, Ph.D. Grounded in a decade of interview research with women about their relationships and identities, Blue is scholarship that reads like chick-lit. This is a sociological study intended to be read on a beach or airplane. The goal: empowering female readers to see the possibilities in themselves and that people always have the power to change their lives. Great romantic relationships and friendships are only possible when women have great relationships with themselves. The message has resonated. Sense Publishers announced Blue is the first instant hit for the indie publishing house. Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160418/356421 The beauty of fiction for communicating social research is that authors can show, instead of tell. Readers are more likely to absorb the lessons and relate them to their own lives. In Blue, as the characters' stories unfold, each is forced to confront their life choices or complacency and choose which version of themselves they want to be. Leavy also uses visual art, television and film as signposts throughout the novel, providing a context for how people come to build their sense of self in the world. In this way Leavy shows how the stories of pop culture shape the stories of real people. With a tribute to 1980s pop culture, set against the backdrop of contemporary New York (mostly Soho and Greenwich Village), Blue both celebrates and questions the ever-changing pop culture landscape against which people live their stories, frame by frame. With its feet in both the worlds of fiction and nonfiction, Blue is garnering the attention of educators looking for new ways to reach students. Dr. Jessie Voigts, of Wandering Educators, calls Blue "a treasure" that she "couldn't put down and can't stop thinking about" and explains "it can and should be used in university classrooms, but it is also meant to be read for yourself, or with your book club." Blue has earned high praise from leaders in the academy including Drs. Norman Denzin, Sut Jhally and Laurel Richardson. Ultimately it is women readers of all backgrounds that Leavy hopes to reach with her feel-good tome. Leavy is no stranger to pushing boundaries and has long used her pen to challenge the fiction/nonfiction divide and empower women in the process. An advocate for arts-based research (a field in which academic researchers use the arts to represent their work to broad audiences), Leavy has become a vocal public proponent of scholars turning their research into fiction. Her genre-busting novel Low-Fat Love (2011) became a bestseller for her publisher and is considered a landmark publication in academic publishing (Low-Fat Love was re-released in an expanded anniversary edition in 2015). Blue is a part of the Social Fictions series, the only academic book series that exclusively publishes literary works based on scholarly research. Series creator and editor, Patricia Leavy, Ph.D., an independent sociologist and novelist (formerly associate professor of sociology, chairperson of sociology and criminology, and founding director of gender studies at Stonehill College) started the series because she was frustrated that academic research rarely reaches public audiences. Believing in the unique power of the arts to engage people and fueled by research in literary neuroscience that suggests reading fiction affects readers more deeply than nonfiction, Leavy partnered with the academic press Sense Publishers. The Social Fictions series has become one of their fastest-growing and most successful book series, garnering numerous awards including a 2014 Special Achievement Award from the American Creativity Association. Blue has already been nominated for both several trade and academic book awards. Even those in the beauty industry are impressed with Leavy's approach to literary self-care. Sabbatical Beauty, an independent beauty start-up, is selling one of Leavy's novels as a part of a spring skincare package. Blue is a summer must-read. Women who grew up in the 1980s will love the pop culture references. Contact: www.patricialeavy.com Kennebunk, ME 04043 United States Direct Inquiries to Shalen Lowell, Assistant to Dr. Patricia Leavy, [email protected] This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. For more info visit: http://www.newswire.com. SOURCE Sense Publishers Related Links http://www.i-newswire.com LONDON, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Summary The use of smokeless tobacco in the US continues to expand despite a number of pressures against the use of the product. Since 2006, overall consumption has been growing, despite a marginal decline in 2009 due to the impact of tax driven rises, particularly for chewing tobacco, before recovering from 2010 onwards. In per capita terms, use is high at approximately 192.4g per person. Key Findings - The US tobacco products market is one of the largest in the world but is in decline, with overall consumption having fallen by almost 30% since 2000 - A relatively small number of manufacturers supply smokeless tobacco in the US, but interest in the sector has sparked acquisitions in recent years - Demand for smokeless tobacco is expected to expand between 2014 and 2024, although chewing tobacco use is expected to continue to decline in favor of moist snuff and similar products Synopsis "Smokeless Tobacco in the US" is an analytical report by Canadean that provides extensive and highly detailed current and future market trends in the US' market. What else does this report offer? - Market size and structure and per capita consumption based upon a unique combination of industry research, fieldwork, market sizing analysis, and our in-house expertise - Detailed information such as market shares and recent developments of manufacturers and leading brands, along with company profiles - Regulations, taxation, retail pricing, smoking habits, and the growing health concerns affecting overall production - Prospects and forecasts of overall sales and consumption for 2014 to 2024 Reasons To Buy - Get a detailed understanding of consumption to align your sales and marketing efforts with the latest trends in the market - Identify the areas of growth and opportunities, which will aid effective marketing planning - As consumers' product demands evolve, the dynamics between different countries also change - favoring some countries and leaving others increasingly out of line with demand patterns. As a result, understanding the specific market dynamics of the US market is key to ensuring maximum future sales - Understand the market dynamics and essential data to benchmark your position and identify where to compete in the future Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/3767954/ About Reportbuyer Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers http://www.reportbuyer.com For more information: Sarah Smith Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com Email: [email protected] Tel: +44 208 816 85 48 Website: www.reportbuyer.com SOURCE ReportBuyer Related Links http://www.reportbuyer.com The press conference backdrop will include 515 pairs of shoes placed on the capitol building steps, representing the number of lives lost to suicide in Arkansas in 2014 (the most current release of suicide data from the CDC). This public health crisis is critically important for everyone who lives in the state as laid out by the "Suicide Statistics Among Arkansans from 2009 to 2014" report released in early April 2016 by the Arkansas Department of Health. While the report found that suicide is the leading cause of death in the state, we know that suicide is preventable. Last year, the state had a surplus of almost $200 million dollars. Advocates from AFSP's Arkansas Chapter shared their ideas for using some of that money for suicide prevention and mental health screening programs on college campuses at a luncheon held for legislators earlier this week on April 20. The advocates are part of a larger national contingent of AFSP volunteers who will be visiting various state capitols across the United States in spring 2016 to bring best practices in mental health and suicide prevention to state legislators and their staff. This is the second year advocates visited Little Rock. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention is dedicated to saving lives and bringing hope to those affected by suicide. AFSP creates a culture that's smart about mental health through education and community programs, develops suicide prevention through research and advocacy, and provides support for those affected by suicide. Led by CEO Robert Gebbia and headquartered in New York, and with a public policy office in Washington, D.C., AFSP has local chapters in all 50 states with programs and events nationwide. Learn more about AFSP in its latest Annual Report, and join the conversation on suicide prevention by following AFSP on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160421/358586 SOURCE American Foundation for Suicide Prevention Related Links http://www.afsp.org NEW YORK and MUMBAI, India, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), (BSE: 532540, NSE: TCS), a leading global IT services, consulting and business solutions organization, has received the 2016 SAP Pinnacle Award for 'Run SAP Partner of the Year' for the fourth year in a row, being recognized for its outstanding contributions as an SAP partner. SAP presents these awards annually to the top partners that have excelled in developing and growing their partnership with SAP and helping customers run more effectively. Winners and finalists in 19 categories were chosen based on recommendations from the SAP field, customer feedback and performance indicators in the following umbrella categories: Build, Service and Sell. "It is an honor to be recognized with this prestigious award for Run SAP excellence for four consecutive years. We continue to invest with SAP on the Run SAP methodology and co-innovate with new SAP technologies, being commitment to delivering world-class consulting services," said Akhilesh Tiwari, Global Head of TCS' SAP Practice. "I want to thank our clients who put their trust in us, and our TCS SAP Practice consultants who consistently deliver outstanding work to our customers." In addition to these esteemed SAP accolades, TCS was recently recognized by Gartner as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Worldwide SAP Application Management Service Providers for the third year in a row. TCS is one of the largest and fastest-growing partners of SAP with more than 15,000 dedicated SAP consultants. TCS has more than 550 SAP projects around the world that serve as world-class proof points of the results generated for clients. Kevin Ichhpurani, executive vice president of SAP Strategic Business Development & Global Ecosystem, added, "The SAP Pinnacle Award winners represent the very best in our partner community, and we congratulate TCS for a well-deserved 2016 SAP Pinnacle Award." SAP Pinnacle Awards shine a spotlight on SAP's partners' remarkable contributions, acknowledging their dedication to teamwork, innovative approach and capacity to challenge what is possible to help customers achieve their goals. Award winners will be formally recognized at the SAP Global Partner Summit being held on May 16, in conjunction with SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP's international customer conference being held in Orlando, Fla., May 1719. TCS is proud to be a SAPPHIRE-level sponsor of SAP's flagship conference and the exclusive sponsor of the SAP concert at SAPPHIRE NOW with Coldplay. TCS will present their experiences working with leading companies across industries to implement Run SAP at this years SAPPHIRE NOW sharing results that dramatically improve the finance, manufacturing, distribution, procurement, and other operations of global enterprises, including: Reduced issue resolution time by 38 % (multinational mass media and information company) Reduced daily interface system monitoring efforts by 60% (energy technology provider) Reduced manual monitoring efforts by 60 days per month (leading pharmaceutical provider) Reduced daily monitoring efforts from 120 to 30 minutes (communications provider) About Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. (TCS) Tata Consultancy Services is an IT services, consulting and business solutions organization that delivers real results to global business, ensuring a level of certainty no other firm can match. TCS offers a consulting-led, integrated portfolio of IT, BPS,infrastructure, engineering and assurance services. This is delivered through its unique Global Network Delivery Model, recognised as the benchmark of excellence in software development. A part of the Tata group, India's largest industrial conglomerate, TCS has over 353,000 of the world's best-trained consultants in 46 countries. The company generated consolidated revenues of US $16.5 billion for year ended March 31, 2016 and is listed on the National Stock Exchange and Bombay Stock Exchange in India. For more information, visit us at www.tcs.com. To stay up-to-date on TCS news in North America, follow @TCS_NA. For TCS global news, follow @TCS_News. Subscribe to an RSS Feed of TCS Press Releases. SAP, SAPPHIRE and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE (or an SAP affiliate company) in Germany and other countries. See http://www.sap.com/corporate-en/legal/copyright/index.epx for additional trademark information and notices. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20131002/LA90934LOGO-b SOURCE Tata Consultancy Services Related Links http://www.tcs.com Privacy Overview This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful. DALLAS, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- On April 15, 2016, the Texas Supreme Court ("Supreme Court") in Hallmark Marketing Company, LLC v. Glenn Hegar found that a business is not required to include a net loss in the calculation of its everywhere gross receipts ("everywhere receipts") for franchise tax apportionment purposes. Tex. Tax Code Sec. 171.105 provides that a taxpayer must include in its calculation of everywhere receipts a net gain from a sale of its investments. The inclusion of a net gain increases the denominator used to apportion franchise tax, which may decrease a taxpayer's apportionment percentage and its franchise tax liability. When the Comptroller included Hallmark's net loss in its everywhere receipts, the inclusion increased Hallmark's Texas franchise tax liability. Hallmark argued that the law only requires the inclusion of a net gain, not a net loss and filed suit. The Thirteenth Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the Comptroller, concluding the agency's administrative rule was entitled to deference because "net gain" is ambiguous. The Supreme Court did not agree. In reversing the Thirteenth Court's decision, the Supreme Court explained that it defers to an agency's reasonable interpretation of the law when the statute is ambiguous. An agency's opinion, however, cannot change the plain language of the statute. In this case, the law provides that only the net gains are included in everywhere receipts, and "under no reading can 'net gain' include a net loss." Further, the Comptroller's rule, 34 TAC 3.591, which requires a taxpayer to include a net loss in everywhere receipts, is in conflict with the clear language of the law. Because the plain language of the law only provides for the inclusion of net gains from the sales of investments, Hallmark was not required to include its net loss in everywhere receipts. About Ryan Ryan is an award-winning global tax services firm, with the largest indirect and property tax practices in North America and the seventh largest corporate tax practice in the United States. With global headquarters in Dallas, Texas, the Firm provides a comprehensive range of state, local, federal, and international tax advisory and consulting services on a multi-jurisdictional basis, including audit defense, tax recovery, credits and incentives, tax process improvement and automation, tax appeals, tax compliance, and strategic planning. Ryan is a three-time recipient of the International Service Excellence Award from the Customer Service Institute of America (CSIA) for its commitment to world-class client service. Empowered by the dynamic myRyan work environment, which is widely recognized as the most innovative in the tax services industry, Ryan's multi-disciplinary team of more than 2,100 professionals and associates serves over 12,000 clients in more than 40 countries, including many of the world's most prominent Global 5000 companies. More information about Ryan can be found at ryan.com. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160125/325377LOGO TECHNICAL INFORMATION CONTACTS: Eric L. Stein Principal Ryan 512.476.0022 [email protected] Sandi Farquharson Director Ryan 512.476.0022 [email protected] SOURCE Ryan Related Links http://www.ryan.com First International Agreement: Groupe Media TFO's Educational Content to Be Distributed by Louisiana Public Broadcasting TORONTO, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ - Groupe Media TFO has signed its first agreement, in Baton Rouge, to kick off its international venture. At a press conference earlier today at the Louisiana State Capitol, Groupe Media TFO announced the signing of its first partnership agreement with Louisiana Public Broadcasting, a Corporation for Public Broadcasting (PBS) member station, to distribute its productions and content in the state. This initiative is truly a turning point for the visibility of Ontario's Francophonie. "Louisiana Public Broadcasting will be offering the French-language educational content we produce in our Toronto studios, along with content created by our production partners," said Glenn O'Farrell, Groupe Media TFO President and CEO. "As a Canadian public media organization that makes educational content in a minority Francophone environment, we are honoured to see our content distributed in the United States. Groupe Media TFO is a unique, ever-evolving digital media company, and this distribution agreement is a testament to the vitality and creative force of our vision." April 21, 2016, will bring Louisiana Francophones aged two to eight a wealth of relevant educational content. The distribution agreement with Louisiana Public Broadcasting covers a period of 18 months, with 14 hours of weekly content. "Our government is proud of Groupe Media TFO's leadership in French-language educational content", said Kathleen Wynne, Premier of Ontario. "I am delighted that TFO's partnership with Louisiana Public Broadcasting will give Francophone children in Louisiana access to this wonderful content and help build up the state's Francophone community." TFO's Children and Youth programming has received extensive recognition for its high-quality content, focused on child development. Recent accolades include 11 nominations for the Youth Media Alliance Awards and, in the context of the Best Mobile App Awards, the Best App for Children Silver Award for its Chansons traditionnelles application. Louisiana's young Francophones will now share with young Canadians the privilege of watching quality educational content, tailored to Louisiana Public Broadcasting and its viewers. "Being able to enjoy educational programming in French on the small screen right here at home is nothing short of historic," said Charles Larroque, CODOFIL Executive Director. Today, we are writing a new chapter in the revitalization of French in Louisianathis time among our youngest stakeholders." Young audiences in Louisiana can now discover and revel in popular children's shows. Little ones are sure to love Mini TFO, TFO's in-house production, which will represent half of the programming grid. Motel Monstre (Slalom), Boum C'est Canon (Trio Orange), Devine Qui Vient Jouer (Productions Point de Mire) and Sam Chicotte (Productions Point de Mire) will also be added to the mix. This new partnership with LPB is in perfect alignment with Groupe Media TFO's vision to bring high-quality educational content to Francophone communities in Ontario, in Canada, and beyond. "With this new stage in our development, Groupe Media TFO reaches new heights by opening up fresh opportunities and contributing to strengthening the French fact in North America," concluded O'Farrell. "Over the past several years, TFO has been recognized for its vision of education beyond traditional models by exploring the avenues of the digital world to better serve audiences from Ontario and abroad. I applaud TFO's efforts to bring people together by encouraging Francophones in Louisiana to discover Ontario and to listen, discuss, debate, share, and continue to wonder in French", said Madeleine Meilleur, Minister Responsible for Francophone Affairs, Ontario. About Groupe Media TFO Groupe Media TFO is a premium destination for audiences seeking educational and cultural content in French. It offers stimulating experiences and award-winning content, always in the forefront of digital learning. TFO serves 2 million students and 30 000 teachers across Ontario and Canada. It operates the number one French-language Youtube Channel in Canada. TFO has received awards and accolades from Austin to Amsterdam (Kidscreen Awards, Gemeaux, Caissies, IBC Awards, SXSW Film Design Awards and more). SOURCE Groupe Media TFO LITTLETON, Colo., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- On April 23, Paulaner USA, the US importer of the legendary Paulaner and Hacker-Pschorr brands, will be celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Reinheitsgebot, Germany's Beer Purity Law, with four parties across the country and four pieces of original art. The Reinheitsgebot protects the purity and quality of beer by allowing only four ingredients in the brewing process: hops, malt, yeast and water. To commemorate the anniversary, each party will feature a local artist who will reveal a unique piece of artwork honoring the Reinheitsgebot's four ingredients. In addition, they are competing for an all-expenses paid trip to Bavaria, Germany where the Reinheitsgebot originated. "The Reinheitsgebot has played an important role in the way the beer industry has evolved over the past 500 years, and its importance is being rediscovered today by consumers who are seeking cleaner foods with simpler ingredient statements," says Steve Hauser, president and CEO of Paulaner USA. "Abiding by the Purity Law has been part of the Paulaner and Hacker-Pschorr's mandate since the beginning, but it seems that this standard is right in line with a very contemporary consumer movement. As such we expect even stronger appeal and growth for our brands". While laws require manufacturers to disclose ingredients on food labels, the same does not apply to alcoholic beverages, such as beer, in which "exempt" ingredients like artificial sugar, corn syrup and glyceryl monostearate (foam enhancer) are commonly used unbeknownst to the consumer to mask defects or increase production efficiency. Contrary to this, Reinheitsgebot-compliant beer is only brewed with four pure ingredients; as a result, consumers know they are getting the highest quality beer, free of adjuncts, artificial coloring, flavoring and added chemicals. Adhering to the Reinheitsgebot requires a true mastery of the brewing process. Both Paulaner and Hacker-Pschorr offer a wide array of beer styles, all created using a handful of select, high quality ingredients. The brewmasters of both legendary brands use craftsmanship and brewing methods passed down by generations of brewmasters before them, and perfected over hundreds of years. This allows them to create bold and unique flavors that appeal to all types of palates, while still adhering to the same laws and principles their predecessors have followed for centuries. In honor of the four ingredients of the Reinheitsgebot, Paulaner USA is hosting four parties in: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boulder, CO. Each local artist, will be on-hand to personally unveil their unique pieces of artwork at each location and stands a chance to have their piece permanently displayed at the brewery in Munich. The events will unfold as follows: New York City ARTIST: Ross Chirico WHERE: Studio Kraut ADDRESS: 160 8th Ave, New York, NY 10011 DATE: April 23, 2016 TIME: 6pm-10pm EDT Chicago ARTIST: Nora Kate Balayti WHERE: Prost! ADDRESS: 2556 N. Lincoln Avenue, Chicago, IL 60614 DATE: April 23, 2016 TIME: 6pm to 9pm CDT Boulder, CO ARTIST: Joe Tari WHERE: Bohemian Biergarten ADDRESS: 2017 13th Street, Boulder, CO 80302 DATE: April 23, 2016 TIME: 8pm to 12am MDT Los Angeles, CA ARTIST: Lee Rupp WHERE: Red Lion Tavern ADDRESS: 2366 Glendale Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90039 DATE: April 23, 2016 TIME: 1pm-5pm PDT To vote for your favorite artist, visit www.PurityLawArt.com between 8pm EDT on April 23rd and 8pm EDT on April 30th. The winner will be announced on Paulaner and Hacker-Pschorr's Facebook pages on May 2nd. Paulaner USA Facebook: www.facebook.com/paulanerusa Hacker-Pschorr Facebook: www.facebook.com/HackerPschorrUSA SOURCE Paulaner USA NEW YORK, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Treato's Autoimmune Diseases Community Ranking Today Treato, the single largest source of online consumer insights on healthcare, announced its first annual list of top online communities for autoimmune diseases. This list debuts alongside the company's new online health community ranking section on its website, which is a patient resource for which conditions are being discussed the most frequently within each community. Online healthcare communities have become a trusted go-to source of information for patients affected by a disease. To date Treato has identified and indexed more than 3,000 of these online healthcare communities. According to the National Library of Medicine, there are more than 80 types of autoimmune diseases, which occur when the body's immune system starts attacking its healthy cells. Out of all autoimmune online communities, HealthUnlocked.com took the number one spot based on total volume of all autoimmune related conversations happening over the past year. Within each top autoimmune online community, Treato has identified the most frequently discussed autoimmune diseases by patients within each community. Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is the most popularly discussed autoimmune disease as it is among a top discussed condition in every online community. Treato Top Online Autoimmune Communities: HealthUnlocked Most Frequently Discussed Diseases: Lupus RA Hashimoto's Celiac Graves Healing Well Most Frequently Discussed Diseases: Ulcerative Colitis Crohn's IBD Lupus RA Patient.info Most Frequently Discussed Diseases: RA Crohn's Ulcerative Colitis Lupus Celiac Daily Strength Most Frequently Discussed Diseases: RA Lupus Fibromyalgia Hashimoto's Sjogren's MyFitnessPal Most Frequently Discussed Diseases: Celiac Hashimoto's Crohn's Type 1 Diabetes RA "Autoimmune diseases can be especially frustrating for patients as they are hard to diagnose and are often misdiagnosed," says Ido Hadari, CEO of Treato. "We hope this ranking helps guide patients to find the online community that's best for them." Find out more about Treato's autoimmune community ranking: Methodology: TreatoVoice is a unique data asset that continuously collects and analyzes more than two and a half billion patient and caregiver conversations happening across the Internet in real-time to understand what patients are saying about their experiences with their conditions and treatments. For this analysis Treato collected and analyzed more than 370,000 online discussions about autoimmune diseases across 3,000 communities over the past year. About Treato: Treato, the leading source of health insights from millions of real health consumers, uses patented analytics and big data technology to turn billions of disparate online conversations into meaningful social intelligence. With more than two billion posts analyzed and continuously expanding, Treato has partnered with 9 out of the world's top 10 pharma companies as well as numerous other multi-national pharmaceutical companies and healthcare organizations. Treato.com, its consumer website, helps millions of visitors each month. Treato is privately held with offices in Israel, New York and Princeton, NJ. Investors include Reed Elsevier Ventures, OrbiMed Partners and New Leaf Venture Partners, among others. For more information please visit https://treato.com/ Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160419/357608-INFO SOURCE Treato PFLUGERVILLE, Texas, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- TrackingPoint announced today a Charity Shootout Challenge. Expected to raise $25,000 for the Chris Kyle Frog Foundation, the shootout is an invitation only event. TrackingPoint is inviting Mr. Todd Hodnett and Sergeant Major (Retired) Pete Gould to compete against two TrackingPoint employees. Mr. Hodnett and Sergeant Major (SGM) Gould are professional shooting teachers who provide their expertise to a variety of military snipers. "Mr. Hodnett and SGM Gould are widely respected by the top military snipers," said John McHale, TrackingPoint CEO. "To have them compete against TrackingPoint's weapons for such an important cause would benefit both military shooters and the families supported by the Chris Kyle Frog Foundation." Shootout Format Should they accept, Mr. Hodnett and SGM Gould would compete as a two-man team against a two-person male/female TrackingPoint team. The TrackingPoint team will use TrackingPoint weapons while Mr. Hodnett and SGM Gould will shoot legacy weapons currently used by our military. If they miss with the military weapons, they will have an option to re-engage the missed target with TrackingPoint Precision-Guided Firearms without penalty. The competition will be set up to closely replicate the random nature of war. Targets will be at unknown distances, of unknown sizes and will move at unknown velocities. The shooting positions offer the same challenges often seen in war. Shootout Details The date for the Shootout will be set at the convenience of Mr. Hodnett and SGM Gould. The event will be open to the public and local and national press will be in attendance. The event will be live-streamed on the Internet. About Todd Hodnett Todd Hodnett, President of Accuracy 1st, is considered one of the most respected and sought after instructors in the entire world. With 20 years experience, Todd has traveled the world training soldiers in the art of precision shooting. His determination, knowledge and vision has provided guidance for products to improve the accuracy and function of the sniper. About Pete Gould Retired Sergeant Major Pete Gould is an instructor for Accuracy 1st and is heavily involved in training our military on how to shoot at long distances. SGM Gould is a Special Forces Soldier who retired from the Army as Sergeant Major for Company D, 2nd Battalion, 1st Special Warfare Training Group, which conducts advanced shooter training for Army Special Operation Forces. During 25 years as a Green Beret, he conducted a variety of SF missions and combat tours spanning three continents. Sergeant Major Gould graduated from the Special Operations Target Interdiction Course in 1990 as the distinguished honor graduate and was subsequently assigned as a SOTIC instructor. About the Chris Kyle Frog Foundation The mission of the Chris Kyle Frog Foundation is to serve those who serve us by providing meaningful, interactive experiences that enrich family relationships. The CKFF achieves this through experiences that provide time and space to reconnect after deployment, without the distractions of everyday life, power to return to the "family unit," and new common ground after military involvement. For more information, visit www.chriskylefrogfoundation.org About TrackingPoint TrackingPoint, based in Austin, Texas, builds extreme weapons for an extreme world to supercharge the Infantry Soldier. Based on fighter jet technology, the company's Precision-Guided Firearms deliver mission dominance, force multiplication, and remarkable battle overmatch in the war on radical Islamic terrorism. To learn more, visit www.tracking-point.com. SOURCE TrackingPoint Related Links http://www.tracking-point.com The groundbreaking SkyBEAM (Building Envelope Aerial Mapping) UAV flies around buildings and uses high-definition (HD) video and thermographic (infrared) cameras to locate where they may have energy leaks, rooftop damage, deteriorating facades, safety issues and other potential problems. SkyBEAM's thermographic camera shows temperature variations around a building that indicate problems, such as poor or missing window sealing or wet rooftop insulation, that can lead to significant capital expenses, increased operating costs, occupant discomfort and other issues. Infrared scanning is most effective at night, when the sun is not warming the building. Traditional infrared scans require technicians to traverse rooftops at night, while facade inspections dictate working from scaffolding or cranes. SkyBEAM is safer, faster, more cost effective and more accurate than conventional methods of mapping buildings. In addition to its infrared scanning capability, SkyBEAM has an exceptionally high resolution video camera that can easily read the fine print on a warranty from 50 feet. This camera can map potential building problems, such as gaps or tears in the roof, tiny cracks or movement in the facade, deteriorating concrete and the need for appropriate rooftop safety equipment. "Using SkyBEAM to gather building data is the best solution overall," said Tremco Roofing Vice President of Sales Paul Sheehy. "We program the UAV to fly to a precise height, do the mapping and return. We can now map buildings without the time and expense of using tools such as scaffolding. SkyBEAM enables us to find problems for our customers that would have been virtually impossible to detect before, and without risking people's safety." Technicians can then safely mark problem areas during the day for removal and replacement, or further analysis if necessary. A highly trained two-person crew, including a licensed pilot, operates the UAV safely on the ground. SkyBEAM can fly horizontally across roofs, or vertically up to 400 feet (approximately 40 stories). It can reach speeds of 25 mph and retain its flight path in winds of up to 25 mph and gusts reaching 50 mph. Toronto-based Industrial SkyWorks (ISW), a leader in aerial building inspections using unmanned technologies, developed SkyBEAM in partnership with Tremco Roofing. ISW has been operating Tremco Roofing SkyBEAM drones in Canada over the past 18 months to great success. The FAA has approved ISW to operate SkyBEAM commercially in the U.S; SkyBEAM is available to Tremco Roofing's customers through our exclusive relationship with ISW. SkyBEAM is ideal for low-slope roofing and facade diagnostics on multi-building campuses such as educational institutions and healthcare facilities. It is being supported by the 200-plus Tremco Roofing sales representatives across the country, as well as more than 600 field technicians in Tremco's WTI (Weatherproofing Technologies Inc.) subsidiary. Facade inspection ordinances have become increasingly common as cities such as New York, Chicago and numerous others seek to ensure public safety. "We are extremely pleased with the FAA's support to help address this growing regulatory need," said Sheehy. "SkyBEAM provides a dramatic leap forward, improving safety, efficiency and analysis. We look forward to working with the FAA, our industry partners and building owners to make further improvements to the facade inspection process." Interactive reporting clearly shows the building's condition SkyBEAM's software consolidates infrared scans and HD video images into a comprehensive, interactive, easy-to-understand report that facility owners and managers, and technicians, access through a cloud-based application. The report clearly and accurately shows problem areas, helping decision makers determine their plan of action. A virtual model of the building is created in 2D and 3D and can be viewed from any angle. The model allows users to overlay thermal images to their exact location on the building. Photographs, comments and other data can be added in real time through a tablet, including when technicians are on site, to ensure that work can be verified and that the report always has the latest information. Data can also be transmitted down to those on the roof. Through geo-positioning, technicians can always see their exact location in relation to problem areas. As they walk across the roof, the scan moves with them so they can precisely locate where work needs to take place. From the success that SkyBEAM has seen in Canada, Sheehy believes that it will revolutionize the industry. "There is nothing like SkyBEAM, and we're delighted to bring its many benefits to our customers in the U.S.," he said. "It gives decision makers visual evidence of where their building is losing energy, especially from areas that were difficult to scan before. SkyBEAM will help them improve their facility maintenance planning and budgeting, is the safest way to conduct nighttime infrared scanning, and is a huge benefit to our field technicians and contractors who need to locate and repair rooftop and facade damage." About Tremco Roofing and Building Maintenance Headquartered in Beachwood, Ohio, Tremco Roofing and Building Maintenance helps manage building life cycles for customers in education, healthcare, government, manufacturing and many other industries. Tremco Roofing and Building Maintenance is a division of Tremco Incorporated, which has been in business since 1928. Tremco Roofing works closely with Tremco Incorporated subsidiary WTI, which provides general contracting and roofing services, and Canam Building Envelope Specialists, which provides air barrier analysis and solutions. To learn more, visit www.tremcoroofing.com or call toll-free at 800-562-6013 in the United States or 800-668-9879 in Canada. About Industrial SkyWorks Industrial SkyWorks is a Toronto-based commercial unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and data solutions company. We serve industrial and commercial markets worldwide, providing UAV data and image collection, technical analysis and advanced image modeling services. Industrial SkyWorks brings the strength of IT to unmanned aerial systems (UAS), by deploying our own proprietary applications and working with our in-house GIS and IT professionals to build custom state-of-the-art solutions for our clients. Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160421/358580 SOURCE Tremco Roofing and Building Maintenance Related Links http://www.tremcoroofing.com SEATTLE, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Trupanion, Inc. (NYSE: TRUP), a leading provider of medical insurance for cats and dogs, will host its Annual Meeting of Stockholders on Tuesday, May 31, 2016, at 10:00 am Pacific Time. The company will hold a virtual annual meeting of shareholders through an interactive webcast online. Trupanion Chief Executive Officer, Darryl Rawlings, will provide a brief business and financial update. Stockholders of record of Trupanion's common stock on the close of business on April 11, 2016, are entitled to participate, vote and ask questions during the virtual meeting. A live audio webcast of the meeting will be available on the Investor Relations section of the Company's corporate website at http://investors.trupanion.com or directly via www.virtualshareholdermeeting.com/TRUP. The virtual meeting portal will include a forum that allows stockholders of record to submit questions in advance, to be addressed during the meeting. Trupanion's Annual Report and Proxy Statement are available at www.trupanion.com/annual-proxy and all SEC filings for the company can be found at www.trupanion.com/sec-filings. Trupanion stockholders may obtain hard copies of these proxy materials at no charge by following the instructions provided on the Trupanion Investor Relations website or in the "Notice of Internet Availability of Proxy Materials" that has been mailed to stockholders. About Trupanion Trupanion is a leading provider of medical insurance for cats and dogs throughout the United States and Canada. For almost two decades, Trupanion has given pet owners peace of mind so they can focus on their pet's recovery, not financial stress. Trupanion is committed to providing pet owners with the highest value in pet medical insurance. Trupanion is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "TRUP". The company was founded in 2000 and is headquartered in Seattle, WA. Trupanion policies are issued, in the United States, by its wholly-owned insurance entity American Pet Insurance Company and, in Canada, by Omega General Insurance Company. For more information please visit Trupanion.com. Contacts: Investors Laura Bainbridge, Addo Communications [email protected] 310.829.5400 Media Britta Gidican, Director, Public Relations [email protected] 206.607.1930 Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140306/SF78009LOGO SOURCE Trupanion, Inc. Related Links http://Trupanion.com The 30,000 square foot, $14.5 million project is located within a completely renovated 325-foot-long passageway leading from 57th Street and Eighth Avenue to the A, B, C, D and No. 1 train platforms at 59th Street, Columbus Circle. TurnStyle features 39 retail and food vendors including 12 boutique shoppes, 20 gourmet eateries, and a series of pop-up vendor kiosks offering everything from hats to flowers, dumplings to doughnuts, cell phone cases to sunglasses, and much more in between. "We bring choice, convenience and modern, clean design to the 90,000 daily commuters who use this Midtown hub," explained Susan Fine, TurnStyle's developer and principal of OasesRE. "TurnStyle is leading the movement to make urban public space more dynamic and engaging. Our vision was to reimagine the subway experience by bringing Main Street underground, and make TurnStyle a destination in its own right and become a new part of the fabric of this neighborhood." TurnStyle vendors include three organic restaurants, gift and novelty shops, grab n' go food options, and even an internet startup experimenting with brick and mortar. The stores include: Grab n' Go: Blossom du Jour, By Suzette, Doughnuttery, Dylan's Candy Bar , Fika Espresso, Georgia's Bakery, Pressed Juicery, Starbucks, The Nut Box, Gastronomie Shop: Flower Girl, Dog &Co, Arth Hats, Kit's Underground Wine & Spirits, Lush, Papyrus, Specs New York, Spectre & Co., Studio Manhattan, Cellairis, Project No. 8, The New Stand, Bombas, Marc Tetro , R. Nichols , Elma Blint , SDV Design s s Sample and Dine: The Pizza, Bosie Tea Parlor, Ellary's Greens, Casa Toscana, Bolivian Llama Party, MeltKraft, Semsom Eatery, 2 Beans, and Yong Kang Street Sixteen interactive digital screens provided by OUTFRONT Media Inc. will feature curated information from TurnStyle's vendors. Live performances will entertain shoppers and diners each day. TurnStyle's hours of operation are 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily Visit http://www.turn-style.com/ for more information about the unexpected choices provided by TurnStyle's array of vendors -- most of which are independent, New York City-based small businesses. "The transformation of this corridor into a vibrant dining and retail destination is just another way the MTA is looking at each and every aspect of our operation to deliver better service for our customers," New York City Transit President Veronique "Ronnie" Hakim said. "Last year, more than 23 million people used this station. It is heavy traffic for the lucky businesses opening up shop here today and it is great for our customers because we can reinvest this corridor's rental revenues right back into our system." TurnStyle breaks ground as the MTA's first commercial development funded completely by the private sector without any public subsidy. Ms. Fine and the Goldman Sachs Urban Investment Group led the financing team for the project, which establishes a new model for retail development for the nation's largest transit system. Goldman Sachs made an $8.7 million construction loan and a $3.6 million equity investment in the TurnStyle project. "Renovating this unique space into a lively retail corridor for all New Yorkers and visitors alike will not only enhance the experience of riding the subway but has also created an opportunity for job creating small businesses to expand their footprints," said Margaret Anadu, Managing Director in the Goldman Sachs Urban Investment Group. "This innovative public-private partnership is consistent with the Urban Investment Group's strategy to promote job growth and revitalizationeven underground!" Ms. Fine and her design team led by project architects, Architecture Outfit, brought "Main Street underground" by incorporating street-level urban elements such as varying store front depths, diversity of tenants, and a patterned floor that mimics a town square. They replaced old subway tile, signs and fixtures with engaging features including a mosaic wall and interactive digital columns. The result is a dynamic environment, a boulevard of light and color that creates a dramatically different experience for the 23 million pedestrians who pass through the concourse annually. "We were highly mindful of TurnStyle's contribution to the infrastructure of the city. We wanted to create a valuable public space that echoes the vitality of a real New York streetscape, turning a commute into an opportunity to shop and dine in comfort amid colorful and attractive surroundings," said Ms. Fine, who also conceived and implemented the redevelopment of Grand Central Terminal. About TurnStyle Opening in April 2016 at the 59th Street Columbus Circle subway concourse, TurnStyle is a lively underground marketplace featuring 32 food, beverage, and retail shops. Leading the movement to make urban public space dynamic and engaging, TurnStyle brings choice, convenience and a modern, clean design to the 90,000+ daily commuters who frequent this Midtown Manhattan hub. Spearheaded by project developer Susan Fine of Oases RE and Columbus Development LLC, TurnStyle features a mix of local small businesses and nationally recognized brands in its 27,000 square foot space. From organic coffee shops and a local artisan cheese company to healthy lunch and dinner options and artfully curated gifts, TurnStyle brings a unique and accessible selection to change the commuting experience. To further embrace the community, the space will also host rotating pop-ups featuring artists, local food vendors and artisans. About Susan Fine Susan Fine, principal of OasesRE, has more than 30 years of experience in New York City real estate, working and collaborating with the most respected companies in the industry. An innovator and recognized leader in the field of retail development, she has built numerous projects in New York City from the ground up (and sometimes below grade), coordinating every step of the process including financing, leasing, construction, and management. Ms. Fine has left her mark on some of the world's most prestigious properties including the World Financial Center, Rockefeller Center, and Grant Central Terminal where she conceived and implemented the universally hailed renovation of the landmark hub. She is the developer of TurnStyle, the first ever private development inside a New York City subway station. Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160421/358349 SOURCE TurnStyle HOUSTON, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Twenty-five student teams from across the country will brave the depths of the world's largest swimming pool April-June to test their research in simulated microgravity as part of NASA's Micro-g Neutral Buoyancy Experiment Design Teams (Micro-g NExT) activity. The Micro-g NExT activity challenges undergraduate students to design build, and test a tool or simulant that addresses an authentic, current space exploration problem related to NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission. The overall experience includes hands-on engineering design, test operations, and educational/public outreach. Student teams will travel to Houston with their prototypes for the test operations portion of the program at NASA Johnson Space Center's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) -- a 6.2-million gallon indoor pool used to train NASA astronauts for spacewalks. Professional divers will test the tools and students will direct the divers from the Test Conductor Room of the NBL facility. Test sessions will be April 25-28, May 23-26 and June 6-9. The schools participating during the first test week, April 25-28, are: -Art Institute of Seattle in Seattle, Washington -Boise State University in Boise, Idaho -Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia -University of Alabama Tuscaloosa in Tuscaloosa, Alabama -University of California San Diego in San Diego, California -University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida -Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia Media are invited to observe the student testing from the pool deck at 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. CDT on Tuesday, April 26. Media will not be permitted to put filming equipment underwater but will have the ability to request NASA video files of the underwater views during testing. Media representatives who wish to attend should contact Hayley Fick at 281-483-5111 or [email protected], by 5 p.m. Monday, April 25. Media must arrive at JSC's main gate no later than 7:30 a.m. for the Tuesday testing. Additional media availabilities will be announced for the second and third test weeks. The second test week, May 23 26, will feature teams from: -Columbia University in New York, New York -Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla, Missouri -Purdue University West Lafayette, Indiana -Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York -University of Maryland College Park in College Park, Maryland -University of Texas Dallas in Dallas, Texas -University of Texas El Paso in El Paso, Texas -University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in Edinburg, Texas -West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia The third test week, June 6 9, will feature teams from: -Cornell University in Ithaca, New York -Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida -Los Medanos College in Pittsburg, California -North Lake College in Irving, Texas -Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma -University of Alabama Tuscaloosa in Tuscaloosa, Alabama -University of Illinois Urbana Champaign in Urbana, Illinois -University of Nebraska Lincoln in Lincoln, Nebraska For more information, about the Micro-g NExT program, visit: https://microgravityuniversity.jsc.nasa.gov/ For more information, about NASA's education programs, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/education For more information, about NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/asteroids/initiative/index.html NASA Johnson Space Center news releases and other information are available automatically by sending an Internet electronic mail message to [email protected] In the body of the message (not the subject line) users should type "subscribe hsfnews" (no quotes). This will add the email address that sent the subscribe message to the news release distribution list. The system will reply with a confirmation via E-mail of each subscription. Once you have subscribed you will receive future news releases via e-mail. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO SOURCE NASA Related Links http://www.nasa.gov The Global Partnership Award recognizes the exemplary work of one partnership that has demonstrated leadership, innovation and has significantly contributed to the sustainable development of hospice and palliative care through their Global Partners in Care partnership. The award winner is selected based on creativity in fundraising, partner collaboration, staff contribution and commitment, and community outreach and involvement. "At Susquehanna Health, we are honored and thrilled to receive this award," says Susquehanna Medical Director, Dr. Alexander R. Nesbitt. "The partnership with Shirati has helped us to be inspired and motivated in what we do and to think differently about healthcare, community, and community wide collaboration. It has also allowed us to engage many in our community in the importance of hospice and palliative care work here and around the world." "When we were seeking a partnership through Global Partners in Care, we requested to be joined with a program similar to ours one that served a rural area and was faith based," says Susquehanna Medical Social Worker, Allison R. Brion. "As soon as we learned of Shirati, we knew the partnership was meant to be." Shirati Hospital Palliative Care will receive a $500 award in addition to public recognition. "We would like to congratulate Susquehanna Health Home Care & Hospice and Shirati Hospital Palliative Care for creating, building, and sustaining a successful partnership," says John Mastrojohn, executive director of Global Partners in Care. "Both organizations have shown great commitment to their partnership and are doing phenomenal work increasing access to hospice and palliative care where the need is so great." Global Partners in Care's innovative partnership initiative provides opportunities for U.S. hospice and palliative care organizations to make a commitment to support a hospice and palliative care organization in a developing country. A large percentage of the global need for palliative care is in low and middle income countries. At this time Global Partners in Care has hospice and palliative care organizations within Africa as well as other countries throughout the world waiting to be partnered with an organization in the U.S. To learn more about international partnership opportunities and other ways to support Global Partners in Care, please visit the website at www.globalpartnersincare.org. Contact: Anita Brikman Senior Vice President, Strategic Communications [email protected] 703-837-3154 Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160420/357688 Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160420/357687LOGO Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110105/DC25260LOGO SOURCE National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization Related Links http://www.nhpco.org ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Valpak, a leader in local print and digital coupons, announced today it is looking to further grow its brand in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The company is seeking a sales-driven entrepreneur to invest in the franchise opportunity and continue to strengthen its market presence. There are as many as 150,000 households in Albuquerque that are currently receiving the consumer savings Valpak brings to the area. As the largest city in the state and New Mexico's main economic region, Albuquerque boasts an impressive amount of diverse economic activity, making the location a target market for Valpak. Additionally, the city continues to earn national recognition, such as a 2015 Forbes.com ranking for Best Places for Business and Careers. "Albuquerque is poised for even greater business growth in the coming years, and we know that a Valpak franchisee will enjoy taking advantage of that growth," said Greg Courchane, Valpak's director of franchise sales. "Valpak is known for its array of coupons offered by local business owners, and we look forward to reaching even more consumers across the country through our innovative technology and affordable digital marketing services like website design, SEO, pay per click services and much more." A leader in cooperative direct mail, Valpak mails coupons to nearly 39 million demographically targeted households per month in 45 states and four Canadian provinces. Today, in addition to its flagship Blue Envelope, Valpak offers its advertisers an impressive portfolio of digital advertising products including valpak.com, Smartphone apps, Google partnerships, website development, mobile web optimization and reputation management. With more than 25 million Americans using couponing apps each month, Valpak's digital offerings have been a big draw for new franchisees. Digital coupon use is on the rise, and ample gains are projected in 2016. In the past year, Valpak's print offerings have also expanded with on-envelope advertising and circulars. Ideal candidates for Valpak franchise ownership should possess a desire to join a trusted, industry-leading brand, work within a proven franchise system, develop relationships with local businesses and have a comfort level with selling new, digital technologies. Franchisees should also possess a minimum liquidity of $75,000, and a minimum net worth of $150,000. For more information on Valpak franchise opportunities, please contact Greg Courchane at [email protected] or 727-399-3091 or visit www.valpakfranchising.com. About Valpak Based in St. Petersburg, FL, Valpak is one of the leading direct marketing companies in the U.S. and Canada. We provide print and digital advertising through a network of 160 local franchises. From mailbox to mobile phone, Valpak brings exciting local business offers and opportunities to millions of consumers. Each month, our well-known Blue Envelope of savings is mailed to about 39 million demographically targeted households in 45 states and in four Canadian provinces. Our digital suite of products, including valpak.com, reaches more than 110 million users. Founded in 1968, Valpak is owned by Cox Target Media, a subsidiary of Cox Media Group in Atlanta. CONTACT: Samantha Rego Valpak 727-399-3139 [email protected] Sloane Fistel Fish Consulting (954) 893-9150 [email protected] Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150212/175295LOGO SOURCE Valpak Related Links https://www.valpak.com ATLANTA, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- International management consulting firm Venetia Partners LLC announces Louis Pahountis as Senior Partner to lead the firm's strategy and operational excellence practice. Pahountis will also join the Executive Committee of the company. In this role, Pahountis will be responsible for enhancing the firm's strategy and operational excellence capabilities, while maintaining sharp focus on creating value for clients. He brings a hands-on operational and leadership expertise to organizations facing complex market and supply chain challenges. Pahountis brings 20 years of experience in management and business consulting, and nearly 10 years of experience in corporate executive management positions. Beyond his expertise in business performance improvement, Lou Pahountis has held senior executive corporate roles in operations and supply chain, most recently VP Global Supply Chain at Novelis Inc., a world leading producer of aluminum. Pahountis has spearheaded many challenging acquisition integration, supply chain, and new business launch efforts for several global corporations over the years, including new automotive product launches, composite aircraft business launches, and multi-billion dollar mergers/acquisitions. Louis has also led operations and improvement efforts ranging from large-scale global interregional logistics in metals to reducing hundreds of millions in global inventories to generate cash for businesses. In the management consulting industry, he held leadership roles at Alvarez and Marsal, Perot Systems Corporation (Dell Services), and Accenture. "We're thrilled to welcome Lou to Venetia Partners; he brings an entrepreneurial and strategic operations mindset combined with a successful track record of delivering significant results and outcomes for global manufacturing and distribution companies," said Mark Miller, Venetia Partners CEO. "His experience builds upon our current business integration, supply chain and digital transformation capabilities, and under his leadership, I'm confident that he'll further develop and expand our outcomes-based consulting capabilities for our Private Equity and C-suite customers." "Venetia Partners is known for its exclusively seasoned senior business operators, each having superior tools, methods and analytics skills, a know-how that's inherent in driving significant value for manufacturing and distribution companies. I look forward to building on the strong foundation already in place, while growing our strategy, integration and performance improvement capabilities," said Lou Pahountis. Louis Pahountis holds a bachelors and master-of-science degree in Civil Engineering, as well as a master-of- business-administration from the University of Pittsburgh. About Venetia Partners Venetia Partners, an international boutique rm of operational solutions experts, drives rapid performance improvement, real outcomes and an immediate impact on the bottom line. Its' no nonsense approach to fix, build or transform operational challenges often associated with the supply chain makes it sought after by large manufacturing and distribution companies and private equity rms. Venetia Partners operates out of nine major markets including Atlanta, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Milan. For more information on the company and its services, visit www.venetiapartners.com and connect with us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. For more info visit: http://www.newswire.com. SOURCE Venetia Partners Related Links http://www.venetiapartners.com ORLANDO, Fla., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Year-round warm weather, no state income tax and the theme park capital of the world just a short drive away are among the advantages of living in Florida. Visit Orlando, the official tourism association for the destination, launched new perks for Florida residents with exclusive deals on spring travel to Orlando. From April 25 through June 15, Florida Residents can take advantage of more than 50 theme park and attraction offers; discounted hotel rates; dining deals and more gathered at VisitOrlando.com/Florida, offering savings up to 50%. A selection of offers includes: Theme Parks SeaWorld Orlando Save $30 on a 2-Park Combo Ticket for SeaWorld and Aquatica Save on a 2-Park Combo Ticket for SeaWorld and Aquatica Universal Orlando Resort Save over $45 off gate prices on select multi-day tickets Save over off gate prices on select multi-day tickets Walt Disney World Resort Specially priced 3- , 4- day base tickets and annual passes are available for Florida residents Other Attractions Orlando Balloon Rides $50 off for adults, $20 off for children off for adults, off for children Wild Florida 50% off all tickets plus free souvenir shot glass 50% off all tickets plus free souvenir shot glass SKELETONS: Animals Unveiled Buy adult entry and get child entry free Accommodations Wyndham Orlando Resort International Drive 30% off best available rate; free parking and internet; plus no resort fee on stays of two nights or more 30% off best available rate; free parking and internet; plus no resort fee on stays of two nights or more CoCo Key Hotel and Water Resort Orlando 25% off; rates from $69 25% off; rates from Lake Buena Vista Resort Village & Spa 20% off standard rates and any spa service Dining/Nightlife Black Fire Brazilian Steakhouse All-you-can-eat meat, buffet and drinks for $34.95 All-you-can-eat meat, buffet and drinks for Senor Frog's Orlando Free cover every Friday; 20% off food and retail items and 2-for-1 10 oz. signature drinks Free cover every Friday; 20% off food and retail items and 2-for-1 10 oz. signature drinks Cuba Libre Restaurant & Rum Bar Complimentary dessert or Mojito Orlando's Must-See Special Events This Spring Orlando celebrates spring through music, art and fabulous food. Florida residents can complement their spring Orlando itinerary with a variety of special events, including: The Epcot International Flower & Garden Festival at Walt Disney World Resort unites all the best things about spring, from fresh flavors, world-class concerts, blooming works of art and more. The festival runs now through May 30 . . Viva La Musica at SeaWorld Orlando is a celebration of Hispanic music, food and culture. Included in regular park admission, April 23 , May 7 and 14. , and 14. 25th Annual Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival is a celebration of theater, art and music. Fringe runs May 18-30 and encompasses hundreds of shows, the Visual Fringe, outdoor concerts and "The Kids Fringe Tour." Visitors can access the full list of exclusive Florida resident offers, plus insider tips, a full events calendar and updates at VisitOrlando.com/Florida. SOURCE Visit Orlando Related Links www.visitorlando.com/media NEPTUNE, N.J., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- WorkWave (www.workwave.com), a leading provider of cloud-based software solutions for the field service and "last mile" delivery industries, announced today its 16th consecutive year of profitability and growth. For the company's fiscal year ending in December 2015, core recurring revenue (subscription revenue) increased by 54 percent compared with revenue for the full year ended December 31, 2014 -- a significant increase over its 2014's 30 percent growth rate. Core recurring revenue now makes up over 85 percent of total revenue, an increase from 76 percent in 2014. Also in 2015, WorkWave added more than 2,400 new cloud customers, over 14,000 cloud users, as well as an additional 80 employees. In addition to its noteworthy financial performance, WorkWave added several new products to its platform and received numerous accolades in 2015: Re-branded Marathon Data Systems as WorkWave to better reflect the company's value proposition and market offerings. Launched WorkWave Route Manager, its next-generation route planning solution that allows planners and dispatchers to plan, track and analyze routes from a unified platform. Completed two strategic acquisitions, RefGo and ContactUs, which added key marketing functionality in the areas of reviews, marketing automation and lead management to the WorkWave platform. Launched WorkWave Service, its next generation field-service management platform, initially focused on providing a powerful and intuitive cloud solution for landscaping, pest control and cleaning companies. Enhanced PestPac, its market-leading cloud solution for pest control companies, launched an initiative to open access to PestPac via an API platform, as well as integrated online customer reviews and GPS modules. Strengthened its leadership team by promoting Shawn Cantor to chief operating officer and adding Mike Profit , vice president of product management, and Bill Fahrbach , senior vice president of finance, to its senior management team. to chief operating officer and adding , vice president of product management, and , senior vice president of finance, to its senior management team. Garnered a host of industry and business awards, including the SmartCEO Future 50, Corporate Culture and Circle of Excellence Awards, as well as the Best in Biz Best Places to Work. "Our focus on identifying and solving key customer pain points in each of our end markets continues to be rewarded, resulting in strong growth and an ever expanding set of solutions delivered through the WorkWave platform," said Chris Sullens, CEO and president of WorkWave. "By continuing to invest heavily in people, product and process, we expect 2016 to expand on our trend of strong, profitable growth." Visit www.workwave.com for more information about WorkWave. About WorkWave WorkWave is a fast growing leader in field service and "last mile" delivery software a $45+ billion market worldwide. The company connects all aspects of its clients' business through its tightly integrated, mobile-first suite of software solutions, which include PestPac, WorkWave Service, ServiceCEO, WorkWave Fleet, WorkWave GPS, WorkWave Marketing and ContactUs. WorkWave's solutions provide its 9,000+ clients with an unprecedented level of business insight and information, enabling them to increase revenue per employee and provide a five-star customer experience. Founded in 1984, WorkWave has been recognized with multiple awards for its outstanding growth and culture, including the Inc. 5000, SmartCEO Future 50, and Best Places to Work in New Jersey. For more information, visit www.workwave.com. Contact Danielle Panichi Email [email protected] Phone 800-792-6067 Website https://www.workwave.com Agency Airfoil Group Contact Rachel Talaska [email protected] 248-304-1465 SOURCE WorkWave Related Links http://www.workwave.com LONDON and NEW YORK, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- XL Catlin today announced it has appointed Dan Riordan as President, Global Political Risk & Trade Credit (PRTC), reporting to Neil Robertson, XL Catlin's Chief Executive, Global Specialty, Insurance. Commenting, Mr. Robertson said: "Dan is highly respected in the PRTC market. He brings a wealth of experience to this newly created role, which will see him take responsibility for the strategic leadership of the global PRTC business." The appointment also marks a structural change at XL Catlin with PRTC becoming a separate underwriting unit, having previously been under the umbrella of Crisis Management, led by Stephan Ashwell. Joe Blenkinsopp will continue in his role as Global Chief Underwriting Officer reporting to Mr. Riordan. Commenting further, Mr. Robertson said: "We have appointed Dan and made changes to our structure because we want to fully focus on developing our share of this significantly growing market. Global geopolitical tensions and economic uncertainty has led to an increase in demand and over time we will be looking to add further resources in our key underwriting regions to respond to this growth opportunity." Mr. Riordan has held senior positions at Zurich between 1997 and 2015, most recently serving as CEO of Global Corporate in North America and previously as President of Specialty Products. He has had a long association with the Berne Union, holding the position of President between 2013 and 2015. He joins XL Catlin on May 2nd, based in the US. About XL Catlin's Insurance Operations The XL Catlin insurance companies offer property, casualty, professional, financial lines and specialty insurance products globally. Businesses that are moving the world forward choose XL Catlin as their partner. To learn more, visit xlcatlin.com. About XL Catlin XL Catlin is the global brand used by XL Group plc's (NYSE: XL) insurance and reinsurance companies which provide property, casualty, professional and specialty products to industrial, commercial and professional firms, insurance companies and other enterprises throughout the world. Clients look to XL Catlin for answers to their most complex risks and to help move their world forward. To learn more, visit xlcatlin.com . SOURCE XL Catlin Related Links http://xlcatlin.com LOS ANGELES, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Zenlayer, a global network and service provider of SDN technology, has doubled its Mainland China data centers to 20 with a total China network capacity of 800 Gbps. Zenlayer now has data centers in all seven geographic regions of China. In addition to multiple data centers in Shanghai, Nanjing and Shenyang, Zenlayer also has locations in Beijing, Chengdu, Chongqing, Foshan, Guangzhou, Jinan, Shijiazhuang, Tianjin, Wenzhou, Wuhan, Wuxi, Xi'an and Zhuhai. Zenlayer's China data centers Due to infrastructural and political constraints, the key to fast delivery of digital content to Chinese consumers is locating physical servers inside China. Zenlayer's substantial expansion in China signifies its commitment to facilitating the entry of global companies into the world's most populous country. In addition to its China data centers, Zenlayer has more than 30 data centers worldwide covering six continents, with a total network capacity of 1.4 Tbps. Zenlayer will soon be offering SDN based connectivity services between the U.S. and China as well. Zenlayer will be attending ITW (International Telecoms Week) May 8th 11th in Chicago. Solutions Managers will be on hand to discuss Zenlayer's latest network expansions and new product offerings. To learn more about how Zenlayer can optimize your global IT infrastructure, please contact [email protected] to schedule a meeting at ITW. About Zenlayer (http://www.zenlayer.com) Zenlayer, a global network and service provider of SDN based technology, is headquartered in Los Angeles with offices in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing. Enterprises utilize Zenlayer's platform to quickly deploy and manage global IT resources and are able to globalize their business within minutes. Zenlayer's flagship Network as a Service (NaaS) platform, built upon its global SDN network, is automated, on-demand and carrier-neutral. Zenlayer has also deployed more than 50 data centers worldwide, covering the Americas, Europe, Asia, Middle East and Africa. Media contact Dalerie Wu [email protected] 1.909.718.3558 (x1111) Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160420/358131 Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160314/343934LOGO SOURCE Zenlayer Related Links http://www.zenlayer.com If you were looking for the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee website and ended up here, try this Got news tips, gossip, suggestions, complaints?E-mail us: progressivecharlestown@gmail.com We strive to avoid errors in our articles. Our correction policy can be found here Washington, April 16 : Tensions between the Republican Party and its own front-runner erupted into a full-blown public battle as top party officials rebuked Donald Trump on Friday for alleging that the GOP primary system was "rigged" against him. The dispute, which has been simmering for days, centres on Trump's failure to win any delegates last weekend in Colorado, which selected its 34 delegates at a party convention rather than a primary attended by voters. All went to Trump's chief rival, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, The Washington Post reported. The outcome prompted a daily stream of complaints and allegations this week from Trump, who wrote in an op-ed published in Friday's Wall Street Journal that the "system is being rigged by party operatives with 'double-agent' delegates who reject the decisions of voters." A senior Republican National Committee official fired back with a thinly veiled response, writing in a Friday memo to reporters that "each process is easy to understand for those willing to learn it." "It ultimately falls on the campaigns to be up to speed on these delegate rules," wrote RNC communications director Sean Spicer. "Campaigns have to know when absentee ballots are due, how long early voting lasts in certain states, or the deadlines for voter registration; the delegate rules are no different." The fight again pits Trump against a Republican establishment that is still broadly opposed to his candidacy and struggling to reconcile with the possibility that he could be the GOP presidential nominee in November. Veterans of past presidential campaigns warned that the feuding could have an adverse effect on down-ballot races and on the ability to defeat Hillary Clinton, seen as the likely Democratic nominee, in the fall. "Traditionally, this is the time that the party and front-runner come together and make the plans necessary to defeat the Democratic candidate in the fall," said Michael Steel, who was an aide for Jeb Bush's campaign and previously worked on the Mitt Romney campaign in 2012 and as spokesman for John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) when he was house speaker. "That's clearly not happening, and it's going to make it tougher to beat Secretary Clinton." One of the keys to Trump's success until now has been his willingness to harshly criticise the party establishment, but he will need the support of the RNC in fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts if he wins the nomination. This has left Trump boomeranging between fighting the party and trying to embrace it. Early this week, for example, Trump used Twitter and his rally speeches to call the nomination process "corrupt", "rigged" and one that rewards candidates who "play dirty tricks in order to pick up delegates." In an interview with The Hill on Tuesday, Trump said RNC Chairman Reince Priebus "should be ashamed of himself because he knows what's going on." Priebus responded on Twitter: "Nomination process known for a year + beyond. It's the responsibility of the campaigns to understand it. Complaints now? Give us all a break." At the same time, Trump's campaign staff was finalising plans to send representatives to the RNC's upcoming spring meeting in Florida and to open an office in Washington. On Wednesday, the real estate mogul had lunch at Trump Tower in Manhattan with Megyn Kelly of Fox News, a longtime target of Trump's who has come to symbolize his ongoing fight with the party establishment. Later that day, Trump announced he had hired GOP strategist Rick Wiley, who has a long history at the RNC. Thursday night, the journal op-ed under Trump's name went online, reigniting the fires. The fresh tension comes just as the party heads into another busy period of delegate allocation and selection. This weekend, seven states will hold meetings to select at least some of their delegates. Republicans will gather in Georgia, Kansas, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Virginia for meetings in congressional districts to award their delegates. And in Wyoming, Republicans are hosting a convention similar to the one held in Colorado, and Trump's team concedes that they are again poised to lose to Cruz. Washington, April 17 : US presidential hopeful and Texas Senator Ted Cruz won all the 14 Republican National Convention delegates up for grabs in the Wyoming state. The final Wyoming delegate total is Cruz at 23 and front-runner Donald Trump at just one, NBC News reported. Cruz was the only candidate to address the convention in person on Saturday night, urging the assembled crowd to back Cruz supporters for the delegate slate in order to stop both Trump and Democrat front-runner Hillary Clinton. "If you don't want to see Donald Trump as the nominee, if you don't want to hand the general (election) to Hillary Clinton, which is what a Trump nomination does, then I ask you to please support the men and women on this slate," Cruz said, holding up a piece of paper of 14 recommended delegates. "We had a tremendous show of grassroots support that resulted in a critical victory at today's Wyoming Republican Convention," he said "Republicans overwhelmingly elected delegates who will support us at the national convention and nominate us to take on Clinton," he added. Meanwhile, Trump started calling foul well before votes were cast, saying on "Fox and Friends" on Saturday morning that states like Wyoming and Colorado show the system is not fair. "I don't want to waste millions of dollars going out to Wyoming many months before to wine and dine and to essentially pay off all these people because a lot of it's a pay-off," Trump said. "I mean the whole thing's a big pay-off, has nothing to do with democracy," he added. However, the Republican National Committee shot back, and said each state develops its own process to select delegates. So far in the Republican race, Trump is leading with 758 delegates, Cruz is at second place with 553 and Ohio Governor John Kasich at 145. They need a total 1,237 delegates to become the party's presidential nominee who will go on to fight the election for the White House on November 8. Washington, April 19 : Texas state Governor Greg Abbott has declared a state of disaster in nine counties of the state due to heavy rainfall. Abbott addressed the media in Austin on Monday, which was one of several areas in the state hit by heavy storms. The state of emergency was declared in Austin, Bastrop, Colorado, Fort Bend, Harris, Grimes, Montgomery, Waller and Wharton, the Dallas Morning Post reported. "There will be parts of Texas that will continue to see rain over the next few days," Abbott said. Parts of Central and South Texas were hammered with rain on Sunday and Monday. Many streets in Houston were flooded after 16 inches of rain in 24 hours. A TV reporter made news in Bayou city when he helped a man out of a sinking car. Images of horses fighting for survival spread across the internet. Several shelters were established for people forced from their homes. At least 100 people taken from apartment complexes in the north part of the city were being sheltered at a shopping mall. Shimla, April 21 : The fate of a 500 MW offsite thermal power plant of the Himachal Pradesh government's joint venture with a West Bengal-based company is in limbo eight years and Rs.3.98 crore ($600,000) down the line, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) has found. Interestingly the joint venture, Himachal EMTA Power Ltd, is embroiled in the improper allocation of coal blocks that the Supreme Court had scrapped in 2014. A special CBI judge had, in February, issued summons to HEPL, its two directors Ujjal Kumar Upadhaya and Bikash Mukherjee, and its senior official N.C. Chakraborty. This followed a charge-sheet filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation after observing that sufficient evidence existed against the accused for the offences of cheating and criminal conspiracy. The CBI said in its charge sheet that accused directors Upadhaya and Mukherjee had submitted false information to the ministry of coal for the allocation of Gourangdih ABC coal block in West Bengal - that was to feed the proposed thermal plant - in favour of their company. The investment in the pithead thermal plant without a feasibility study, coupled with the selection of Eastern Minerals and Trading Agency (EMTA) as the joint venture partner for execution of the plant in spite of the fact it lacked technical competence, resulted in wasteful expenditure, the CAG said in a report recently tabled in the state assembly. The memorandum of understanding between state-run Himachal Pradesh Power Corporation Ltd and EMTA for executing the thermal plant at the Ranigunj coalfield in Burdwan district was signed in January 2007. (The state cabinet on June 30, 2010, gave the nod to the joint venture company, Himachal EMTA Power Ltd, headed by the state chief secretary, to set up the thermal power plant.) The auditor slammed the government for signing a pact with EMTA without settling the power purchase modalities with state utility Himachal Pradesh State Electricity Board Ltd. Both parties agreed to contribute equity in the ratio of 50:50 for generation of coal-based thermal power and development of coal mine on captive basis. The project was to be commissioned within 48 months from the date the pact was signed. The central government allotted the Gourangdih ABC coal block to EMTA jointly with JSW Steel Ltd. A revised joint venture agreement between EMTA and JSW Steel was signed in May 2009 to exploit coal from the mine. However, the central government deallocated the Gourangdih ABC mine in November 2012. Official sources told IANS that besides the cancellation of the allotment by the inter-ministerial group, which was scrutinising blocks awarded to private parties that were given show-cause notices for delays in development, also approved the deduction of bank guarantees of EMTA and JSW Steel. Picking holes in allocating the project, the auditor observed that there was no evidence on record to show as to whether any feasibility study was ever conducted to assess the commercial viability of the project. EMTA has no experience in thermal power generation, the CAG observed. Though Himachal Pradesh Power Corporation Ltd had an option to realise the development security of Rs.2 crore from EMTA in case of delay beyond 48 months, no action has been initiated so far. Not only this, the corporation also released a share capital of Rs.60.50 lakh to EMTA after December 13, 2012, when the board of directors of EMTA had already decided not to invest further on this project, said the auditor. Even the state distribution utility expressed its unwillingness in March last year to purchase power from the proposed plant due to imposition of a ban on purchase of thermal power by the state electricity regulator. (Vishal Gulati can be contacted at vishal.g@ians.in) Guwahati, April 21 : They make the most unlikely allies but the BJP and the AIUDF of Maulana Badruddin Ajmal are exploring the possibility of forming a coalition government if Assam gets a hung assembly. "That may be like going back on everything the two parties have said during the election campaign, but that is politics," said a senior leader of the All India United Democratic Front. The leader said AIUDF chief Ajmal had been approached by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). "BJP leader Himanta Biswa Sarma has had a few rounds of discussions with Ajmal and it looks like Ajmal has decided to go with the BJP if the Congress doesn't win enough seats to merit a coalition," the source said. Ajmal has told the media: "All depends on how many seats goes to who. That will influence our decision whom to support." But he dodged questions on whether he will insist on not supporting the BJP come what may. Before the two-phase assembly elections began in Assam, Ajmal had said there was no question of supporting the BJP and that the Congress could be backed if they dropped Tarun Gogoi as chief minister. "Gogoi is a failure," said Ajmal, reviving the personal feud that erupted in 2006 when Gogoi said "Ajmal kaun hai?" (Who is Ajmal?) The BJP leadership is confident that the alliance it leads will emerge as the single largest block in the 126-member assembly even if it doesn't get a clear majority. "Our first choice will be to win over the independents, some of whom may win. But if we still need some support, the only party we can go to is the AIUDF," said a top BJP leader. Not everyone feels this can happen. "The BJP is out to detect and deport illegal migrants from Bangladesh, at least that is their main poll plank, while the AIUDF is seen as a party of those very illegal migrants," said Samir Purkayastha, a political analyst who has written extensively on Assam. Purkayastha says the AIUDF is not keen on an alliance with the Congress because they see a competition between them for the minority support base. Ajmal is also known for his close relations with Himanta Biswa Sarma from the latter's days in the Gogoi cabinet. Sarma could well be trying to use his friendship with Ajmal and Bodo leader Hangrama Mohilary to outgun BJP's declared chief minister candidate Sarbananda Sonowal. Sonowal is hugely popular amongst ethnic Assamese and tribals for his spirited legal challenge that led to the scrapping of the IMDT act of 1983 that was seen as protective of illegal migrants. Political analyst Amarjyoti Bora says that if the BJP-led alliance falls short of the majority, Sarma will use his clout with alliance partners AGP and Bodoland Peoples Front for the numero uno position, more so if the BJP has to lean on the AIUDF to take power. "Ajmal may not agree to go with the BJP if it sticks with Sonowal as chief minister. So Sarma may be the compromise candidate," said Purkayastha. Sarma and Ajmal reportedly started their confabulations immediately after the Assam polls ended on April 11. "If they don't win a majority, the BJP is looking at a Kashmir-type situation. The only difference is that in Assam the BJP will be the senior partner and the AIUDF the junior partner," said analyst Bora. AIUDF founder Hafiz Rashid Chowdhury, now with the Samata Party, says if Ajmal goes with the BJP, he will "betray the basic spirit of minority politics in Assam". Many in AIUDF don't agree. "If we have an alliance with a party which is in power in the Centre, Assam will get a lot of development funds," says AIUDF activist Abu Sufian. That could well be Ajmal's selling point if he seeks to ally with the BJP. For the BJP, shaking hands with AIUDF will be a drop from the high cloud of anti-migrant rhetoric to the more mundane talk of governance. The Congress is also keen on an alliance with the AIUDF but it will be in business only if it gets close to 50 seats and the AIUDF manages a 15-plus score. Bhubaneswar, April 21 : At 60,654 acres, Lord Jagannath could be the richest landlord among India's deities. About 395 acres of it is now being sold to create a Rs.1,000 crore maintenance corpus for the 12th century shrine here in the Lord's name, an official said. This is even as land sharks have grabbed vast patches of the 60,259 acres of Jagannath temple land across 23 districts in Odisha. The balance 395 acres is in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and West Bengal. Of these states, West Bengal has the maximum - 322 acres - owned by the temple. "The state government is in the process of selling temple land outside the state," Shree Jagannath Temple Administration (SJTA) chief Suresh Mohapatra told IANS. Besides, the government has also written a letter to the district collector of Nainital in Uttarakhand to pay the market value of a 52-year-old building owned by the temple. The owner of the two-storeyed building had donated the ground floor to the Jagannath temple on April 26, 1964, and it has been rented out as a post office. There is, however, a huge catch: the state government does not have land records or 'pattas' for a whopping 27,331 acres spread across 111 tehsils in 23 districts. "Out of 60,259 acres of Jagannath's land identified by the SJTA, the state has record of rights (ROR) of only 32,927 acres. The balance 27,331 acres have no record of rights," Law Minister Arun Sahu told the state assembly recently. He also said that 340 cases have been filed against the land encroachers under the Sri Jagannath Temple Act 1955. Sources said committees have been formed under the collectors of the districts concerned to collect details on the temple land and expedite the process of acquiring revised records. The government had also planned to auction part of the temple land to boost the shrine's revenues. The Bhubaneswar Development Authority (BDA) has been asked to sell the land on plotting basis since it has expertise in land transactions. However, the government's move has hit a roadblock as several villagers in the Jatani area of Khurdha district have moved the Orissa High Court. "They have managed to get a stay order from Orissa High Court. We are trying to get the stay order vacated so that about 125 acres can be sold," Mohapatra said. (Chinmaya Dehury can be contacted at shinmaya.d@ians.in) Nashik, April 21 : Heralding a major change, three women were on Thursday allowed to enter the Trimbakeshwar temple, one of the 12 'Jyotirlingas' in the country, here even as locals observed a protest shutdown. Seven women activists led by the Swarajya Mahila Sanghatana (SMS) president Vanita Gutte were permitted entry amid tight security provided by police. Three of them stepped inside the sanctum sanctorum and offered prayers, signalling a tectonic shift in the temple policy. "This historic, milestone development took place at dawn today. Henceforth, women shall be permitted inside the temple every morning for an hour from 6 to 7 a.m.," a beaming Gutte told the media later. Bhumata Ranragini Brigade president Trupti Desai, who started the campaign for women's entry to all places of worship in January, welcomed the development and announced she will visit the temple on Friday. The SMS activists had assembled at the temple door five minutes before it opened at 6.10 a.m. and devotees were let in. Barely five minutes later, accompanied by police officials, the three women entered the temple and prayed at the sanctum sanctorum. "In deference to the Bombay High Court orders, we provided security to the women who wanted to pray," Nashik Additional Superintendent of Police Prashant Mohite said. This happened 13 days after women were permitted entry into the Shani Shingnapur temple in Ahmednagar district on April 8 -- for the first time in over four centuries. On Wednesday, angry villagers had stopped the women's groups from attempting to barge inside the temple, leading to fisticuffs in which a few activists were injured. The police lodged cases of rioting and violence against at least 150 villagers including four temple trustees. On Thursday, the villagers observed a shutdown to protest against the move to permit women inside the temple. Dewas, April 21 : Seven people, among them two children, were killed on Thursday when the car in which they were travelling collided with an oncoming truck in this district of Madhya Pradesh, a police officer said. Those killed were in a wedding party and travelling in a car from Indore district to Rajgarh district, J.P. Chokse, in-charge of Tonk Khurd police station in Dewas, told IANS. While overtaking a truck on Dewas-Maksi road, their car collided with another truck coming from the opposite direction, he said. The accident resulted in the death of two men, three women and two children on the spot, he said. Kolkata, April 21 : Jyotirmoyee Sikdar won laurels aplenty for the country back in the days when she was a middle-distance runner. Now the golden girl is eyeing victory in another race - the assembly contest - armed with her past experience in the electoral fray and hoping to exploit to the hilt the Saradha scam and the raging Narada videotape controversy against West Bengal's ruling Trinamool Congress. The 46-year-old is fighting on a Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) ticket from the Sonarpur North constituency on the city's southern outskirts. Criss-crossing the constituency with great speed, Sikdar is bringing up other issues as well, like last month's Vivekananda Road flyover collapse in North Kolkata, farmers' suicides, unemployment and the closure of factories. "I am getting tired of saying all these things and this government has done it all in a span of just five years," Sikdar told IANS in an interview. Around 243,374 voters are eligible to press the EVM button on April 30 when the constituency goes to the hustings. Sikdar, who won the women's 800m and 1500m golds at the 1998 Busan Asian Games, says she is confident of clinching it. But results in the recent past and the Trinamool's organisational might make it look like an uphill task for Sikdar, who is up against sitting legislator Firdousi Begum of the Trinamool and Satyabrata Dutta of the Bharatiya Janata Party in an eight-cornered fight. In 2011, Firdausi had humbled the CPI-M's Shaymal Naskar in the then newly-created constituency by over 26,000 votes. Three years later, Sugato Bose, the Trinamool's candidate from the Jadavpur Lok Sabha seat got a 16,000-plus lead from the assembly segment. The Congress nominee had then bagged a mere 4,792 votes, which Jyotirmoyee now expects to corner because of the CPI-M-led Left Front's tie-up with the Congress in this election. The decider could be the over 24,000 votes that the BJP had polled from the assembly segment in 2014. With all opinion polls indicating a downswing in the BJP's fortunes, it remains to be seen who gains the most from the likely drop in the saffron party's vote percentage. "I am going to win, there is very little doubt in it. People have grown tired of the Trinamool in just five years. Others don't stand a chance," said Sikdar, a recipient of the Padma Shri, India's third highest civilian honour, and the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna, the highest award for a sportsperson. Sikdar's confidence stems from her experience of serving a stint as a Lok Sabha member representing Krishnanagar between 2004 and 2009. Asked about her plans for the constituency if she wins the May 19 vote count, Sikdar said: "First and foremost is improvement in the law and order, so that everyone lives in peace. "Now, everyone's living in fear. Women are not safe. We went to Kamalgaji bridge the other day and heard that hooligans riding bikes are threatening women and eve-teasing. There is absolutely no law and order here." "Then comes development, infrastructural development. We need to focus on how to build new roads. Here people also have problems relating to drinking water. "There are also water-logging blues. There are practically no roads in the village areas. During Trinamool rule, there have been cases of forcible takeover of land. I first want these things to stop." The former athlete says she is still very fit and the gruelling election campaign has not taken a toll on her. "I am walking 25 to 30 km every day. But some of my workers are unable to keep pace with me due to the extreme heat. Being a former runner is helping me now. And I am used to this gruelling schedule, Jyotirmoyee concluded. (Debdoot Das can be contacted at debdoot.d@ians.in) Srinagar, April 21 : Three guerrillas belonging to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) outfit were arrested here on Thursday. The arrests took place in Lal Mandi area, a police officer said. One of the three was identified as Ubaid. The officer said the development was a major success as their questioning could lead to arrests of more militants. Kuala Lumpur, April 21 : Malaysia has been given green light to search for more possible debris of the missing Malaysia Airline flight MH370 in waters near Mozambique and South Africa, officials said on Thursday. Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said the Mozambique and South African governments have agreed to further search efforts, according to the state news agency Bernama, Xinhua reported. The two countries will send teams to search for the debris and notify Malaysia if there are any new discoveries, before Malaysia sends in its own team. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) on Wednesday released a Technical Examination Report which has said definitively two pieces of debris found in Mozambique originated from the missing flight. Liow said the latest verification results confirmed the theory that the Boeing 777 had ended in the south Indian Ocean where the international search efforts are ongoing in an area of 120,000 sq. km. The main body of the plane is yet to be found. The discovery of more debris may help experts to analyse and resolve the mystery of the missing plane, Liow added. 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. Beijing, April 21 : China and South Korea will hold talks on maritime demarcation in Beijing on Friday. The talks, the first round between working groups of the two countries, is the first to be held following delegations from the two countries reaching a consensus in Seoul in December, according to Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying, Xinhua news agency reported. Hua told a press briefing that a reasonable and fair solution between China and South Korea through negotiation and consultation is of great importance to the peace and stability of the waters between them, as well as their friendly and cooperative relations. "This also embodies China's consistent stance to solve disputes through negotiation with directly related countries, on the basis of historical facts and in accordance with international laws," Hua added. She noted that China hoped to have a reasonable and fair settlement of the overlap of maritime rights and interests with South Korea through friendly negotiations, and hoped such practice would set a good example for regional countries to handle similar issues. Johannesburg, April 21 : The probe into a controversial arms deal has found no evidence that there were any improper motives in the deal, South African President Jacob Zuma said on Thursday. "There was also no basis whatsoever for disbelieving the evidence submitted by the members of the Inter-Ministerial Committee in this regard," Xinhua news agency reported quoting Zuma. The Commission of Inquiry concluded that there was no room for it to draw adverse inferences, inconsistent with the direct, credible evidence presented to it, in respect of all material aspects of the Terms of Reference, Zuma said. He was speaking on the release of the report of the Commission of Inquiry into allegations of fraud, corruption, impropriety or irregularity in the Strategic Defence Procurement Package. Zuma has been haunted by the Strategic Defence Procurement Package, known as the arms deal, for years. He set up a commission in 2011 to investigate the multi-billion-rand arms deal of the late 1990s, when Thabo Mbeki was deputy president and later president. The arms deal, initially estimated to cost about $3 million (43 million rands) , is believed to have escalated to billions of dollars now to buy military equipment from Europe. Jerusalem, April 21 : Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu left for Moscow on Thursday to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Israeli Prime Minister's Office said. Netanyahu, expected to return on Thursday itself, is to discuss the situation in Syria and weapons sales between Russia and Iran with the Russian President, Xinhua news agency reported. This is the third time that both leaders have met in the past six months. Israeli and Russian military officials have met repeatedly in the past few months to coordinate the two countries' actions around Syria's territory. According to the Israeli Prime Minister's Office, the two will talk about the coordination between Israeli and remaining Russian forces in neighbouring Syria, in order to prevent accidents, as well as the efforts to sustain a truce in Syria. Netanyahu had said Israel must make sure its security interests are kept intact following any truce agreement in Syria, fearing that militants remain near the Israeli border. Another topic which may be discussed is the sale of S-300 surface-to-air missile systems by Russia to Iran. Netanyahu said Iran poses an "existential threat" to Israel, and opposed the nuclear deal signed between the country and the international community in last July. Russian President Vladimir Putin extended the invitation to Netanyahu amid a visit by Israeli President Reuven Rivlin to Russia last month, which came several days after the Kremlin said Russia had pulled most of its military forces from Syria, who were deployed there since September 2015. Patna, April 21 : This is one marriage in Bihar that could not have gone more green. The bride and the groom planted saplings of fruit trees, as did the rest of the wedding party. The marquee was heavily green-themed with leaves being liberally spread around. The dinner was served on plates made of green leaves and water provided in earthen mugs. And, "an hour before the marriage was solemnised, a special discussion took place on how to save the environment and increase the green cover, a rare thing at a marriage function", green activist Sujit Bhagat said of the event on Wednesday night at Ramchanderpur Dashhara village under Mohanpur block near Patori in Samastipur district. All this to spread awareness about the need to protect the environment. The bride, Soni Kumari, and the groom, Dilip Kumar, planted the fruit tree saplings after their marriage was solemnized, as did all the guests of the bride's family. "My family gifted saplings to each member of the marriage party," said Krishna Kumar Rai, the bride's father and a school teacher, who was encouraged by Bhagat to go for a green marriage. "The bride's parents offered the saplings to their daughter in a ritual just before she left for the ceremony to spread the message to increase the green cover in her sasural (in-laws' house) also," Bhagat said. "We served dinner (bhoj) in plates made of green leaves and used earthen mugs for drinking water to promote environment-friendly practices," Rai said. The green wedding couldn't have come sooner. Last month, ignoring numerous appeals and warnings against pruning or cutting down green trees to collect firewood for bonfires on Holi eve, hundreds of trees in Bihar were badly damaged by the people, particularly youths, in the name of an age-old tradition. Hundreds of trees became soft targets for the Holi bonfires that symbolise the destruction of evil. Forest officials say Bihar lost most of its green cover when Jharkhand was carved out of it in 2000. Undivided Bihar had 17 percent forest cover that is now down to 10 percent. Some years ago, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar launched a green drive to increase the forest cover to 35 percent. (Imran Khan can be contacted at imran.k@ians.in Kolkata, April 21 : Amid allegations of widespread violence including the death of a Marxist activist, polling came to end for the third phase of the West Bengal assembly polls in 62 seats spread across four districts on Thursday. However, there were still many people in the queues outside polling booths in a large majority of the areas at 6 p.m. - the scheduled time for close. The constituencies that went to polls included 22 in Murshidabad, 17 in Nadia, 16 in Burdwan districts and seven in north Kolkata. As per the Election Commission, over 67 per cent turnout was recorded till 3 pm. Tahidul Islam, a CPI-M activist was allegedly killed after being "attacked with bombs by Trinamool Congress goons near a polling booth in Domkal in Murshidabad district. The administration, however, claimed Islam did not "die in any clash or bomb blast" but was murdered by unknown assailants and the body thrown near the booth. Kolkata, April 21 : The Congress and the Left Front on Thursday demanded repoll in 15 polling booths of Domkol constituency in West Bengal's Murshidabad district, accusing the ruling Trinamool Congress of indulging in "massive rigging" and booth-capturing there. LF spearhead Communist Party of India-Marxist state secretary Surjya Kanta Mishra said there were disturbances in six-seven of the 62 constituencies which went to the hustings in phase three of the assembly polls. "We think there should be repoll in 15 polling booths of Domkol constituency. One person died and two others were injured in violence perpetrated by the Trinamool Congress in Domkol. In rest of the Murshidabad district, there were no reports of any serious incidents," he said. In Nadia district, there were disturbances in the municipal areas of Gayeshpur and Chakdah, he said. "However, the maximum violence happened in Kolkata, the capital city. Four constituencies including Entally, Beleghta, Kashipur-Belgachia were affected," he said. "The trouble erupted in a number of booths. We have registered complaints with the Election Commission. The steps which should have been taken in Kolkata were not taken," he added. However, he expressed overall satisfaction over the role of the Election Commission in the third phase. "EC has tried to discharge its responsibilities. But the real credit goes to the people, for the way they put up resistance." State Congress president Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury also demanded repoll in the 15 polling booths of Domkol. However, he said The Trinamool would not be able to win any of the 22 seats in Mushidabad. Chowdhury predicted the Congress-Left Front will win 65-70 percent of the 62 seats where polling took place during the day. Ranchi, April 21 : Former union minister and BJP leader Yashwant Sinha on Thursday demanded an NIA probe into the communal violence in Jharkhand's Hazaribagh district during Ram Navami in which four people died. The curfew imposed on Sunday night by the district administration was relaxed for nine hours on Thursday. The district administration will decide on its lifting on Friday. "There seems to an outside hand in the violence. There seems to be a hand of cross-border terrorists. The National Investigation Agency should probe the entire incident," Sinha told reporters in Hazaribagh. Sinha earlier represented Hazaribagh in the Lok Sabha. Now his son Jayant Sinha, a minister in the Narendra Modi government, is a parliamentarian from there. The violence began when a Ram Navami procession was stopped and members of a community objected to the use of loudspeakers. It led to clashes between two groups in which many people, including policemen, were injured. Over a dozen shops and several vehicles were set ablaze by the mobs. Police have registered 10 FIRs and named 137 people as accused. Meanwhile, police sources said five people preparing petrol bombs in Habibnagar colony were killed when the bomb exploded in their house. The sources said the bodies were buried in secret by residents to hide the evidence, but police managed to exhume one body and were trying to locate the others. Hazaribagh in the past had also witnessed terrorist activity. Two terrorists accused of attacking the American consulate in Kolkata in 2002 had taken shelter in Hazaribagh. They were later killed in a gun battle with security forces. Islamabad, April 21 : Pakistan on Thursday termed the "hype" created by the Indian media over its envoy's statement in New Delhi as "neither warranted nor required" and said it would be ready to talk "when India is ready". Pakistan Foreign Office Spokesperson Nafees Zakaria, in his briefing, said in answer to a question that "Pakistan and India are two neighbours which must live in peace and harmony. The hype created by the Indian media over Mr. (Abdul) Basit's remarks was neither warranted nor required. "Our media has been sober and shown maturity. This question has been repeatedly asked and I will only add to what has been said earlier is that Pakistan will be ready to talk when India is ready. I would not enter into the debate of what words were used by both sides." Basit, during a talk in New Delhi earlier this month, had kicked up a controversy when he said that the "peace process with India is suspended" - a remark that was contradicted by the Pakistan foreign office which said that both sides were in talks over when to hold the talks. The Foreign Secretaries of both sides are yet to meet to work out the modalities over the resumed bilateral dialogue, that has been stalled ever since the January 2 terror attack on the Pathankot air base by Pakistan-based terrorists. To a question on when the Indian probe team, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) would be going to Pakistan regarding the Pathankot probe, the official said that he is not aware of any official request from India in this regard. On the "NIA team's visit to Pakistan, which has been the subject of much media speculation in India. I am not aware of any official request in this regard," Zakaria said. To a question on the outcome of the Pakistani Joint Investigation Team's visit to India on the Pathankot probe, he said that "Once the investigations have been completed and a report compiled, we will share with you the shareable information". To another question on India voicing its disappointment over blocking of a move to ban Jaish-e-Mohamed chief and Pathankot attack mastermind Masood Azhar in the UN, the spokesperson said that the "listing on the UN sanctions is done according to set procedures and that procedure I believe is on course. Attempts to politicize this process is regrettable". Asked about the NIA clearing Lt. Col Prasad Purohit of all charges in the Samjhauta Express bombing, the spokesperson said that Pakistan's "requirement and request of sharing details of the Samjhauta Express terrorist attack investigations is pending with the Indian government". "Despite promises, the investigations have not been shared. Let's see when will they get back to us about the outcome of the investigations of this incident in which a lot of innocent Pakistanis lost their lives." Kolkata, April 21 : Amid high drama, Trinamool Congress leader Anwar Ali was arrested on Thursday from the city for making offensive remarks against the Election Commission. "Anwar Ali has been arrested for publicly making offensive and intimidating remarks against the EC," said Additional Director General of Police Anuj Sharma. Put under strict monitoring by the EC for the ongoing assembly polls, Ali in the morning asked party men to "to hit the poll panel with shoes". "The EC is not allowing me to come out of my house. So hit the EC with shoes by getting more votes polled. Blacken the EC's face by ensuring more votes," Ali was seen saying in a video. Soon after the TV news channels started beaming Ali's controversial remarks, the EC swung into action asking police to arrest him. A police team rushed to his residence in the city's Cossipore area but found him missing. He was finally arrested Afew hours later from the city's Seven Tanks' area. Bengaluru, April 21 : British liquor major Diageo plc on Thursday contested the Debt Recovery Tribunal's jurisdiction to attach the $75 million deal it signed with industrialist Vijay Mallya his exiting its Indian arm United Spirits Ltd (USL). "The tribunal has no jurisdiction to attach the $75 million deal (Rs.515 crore) signed outside the country and its payment terms as part of the severance package," Diageo said in its objections filed against the tribunal's order, legal sources privy to the case told IANS after the hearing was adjourned to April 29. Tribunal's presiding officer R. Benkanahalli on March 7 directed Diageo not to pay Mallya till it disposed of the State Bank of India's March 2 interlocutory application (IA) and ordered attachment of the deal amount. Diageo, however, confirmed to IANS on March 9 that it had paid Mallya $40 million (Rs.275 crore) on February 25 as part of the package, with the balance $35 million to be paid in equal instalments over the next five years. As part of the sweetheart deal, Mallya resigned as chairman and director of USL and agreed not to compete with Diageo in spirits business the world over for the next five years and not to interfere in its Indian arm's business matters. Diageo also objected to the SBI's April 13 petition for tribunal's direction to deposit the $40 million it transferred to Mallya's bank account outside the country. "The bank cannot ask a tribunal to order depositing the amount paid to Mallya outside the country. The balance amount payment in future is subject to Mallya fulfilling the deal's terms and it (payment) is not guaranteed if they (terms) are not met," it said Though SBI rushed to the tribunal a day after the agreement on February 26 to advance hearing on its original application (OA) filed in June 2013 for recovery of loans it and 16 other state-run and private banks advanced to Mallya's now defunct Kingfisher Airlines between 2004-12, it was not "aware" of Diageo's part payment to the 60-year-old liquor baron. As a lead bank of the consortium of 17 banks to which Kingfisher owes Rs.9,091.39 crore as combined loans with interest, the SBI filed four IAs before the tribunal on March 2 after CBI director Anil Sinha expressed concern over its delay in acting against Mallya. Meanwhile Diageo also argued that since it was not a party to the SBI's OA against Mallya, Kingfisher and United Breweries Holding Company, it cannot be made party to the IA for attaching the latter's property or assets. In a related development, SBI counsel sought time to get clarity from his client on attaching sale proceeds of Mallya's private jet through auction on May 12-13 by the service tax department, as ordered by the Bombay High Court. The SBI had also earlier sought the amount from the sale of Mallya's aircraft by the department to recover a part of the Rs.1,600 crore it had advanced to Kingfisher. New Delhi, April 21 : A court here has sentenced a man convicted of rape to seven years rigorous imprisonment, stating that a rapist leaves a scar on a woman's cherished possessions like dignity, honour, reputation and chastity. Additional Sessions Judge Anuradha Shukla Bhardwaj also slapped a fine of Rs.50,000 on Uttar Pradesh resident Rahul Tomar, 22, after holding him guilty of sexually assaulting a 20-year-old woman. The court said that "undue sympathy to impose inadequate sentence would do more harm to the justice system to undermine the public confidence in the efficacy of law and society could not long endure under such serious threats". Noting "protection of society and deterring the criminal is the avowed object of law", it said: "Sexual violence apart from being a dehumanizing act is an unlawful intrusion on the right of privacy and sanctity of a female. "It is a serious blow to her supreme honour and offends her self-esteem and dignity. "It degrades and humiliates the victim and leaves behind a traumatic experience. A rapist not only causes physical injuries but more indelibly leaves a scar on the most cherished possession of a woman i.e. her dignity, honour, reputation and not the least her chastity," the court said in its order delivered Tuesday, but released on Thursday. Turning down Tomar's plea for leniency, it said: "To him, the pain of bearing a child and giving birth has become a nullity after the death of the child. There is nothing in the prosecutrix (victim) having lost her virginity and consequentially prospects of marriage. "Not only the prosecutrix suffered unwarranted physical assault committed by convict, she also lost her child, which would have definitely caused her mental trauma," the court said. The crime occurred in west Delhi in November 22 when Tomar followed the woman when she was going back after filling water to her house, and asked her to give him water. He then forced himself in, bolted the door from inside and thereafter raped her, police said. As Tomar threatened the victim, she remained quiet but after three months, found that she was pregnant, police said. Later, she gave birth to a child who died after few days. Subsequently, she complained to police and a first information report was registered in February 2013 in west Delhi's Nihal Vihar police station. Lucknow, April 22 : Countering Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'Chai pe Charcha', Congressmen coined the new 'Chane pe Charcha' in Amethi as party vice president Rahul Gandhi interacted with party workers over 'laiyya-chana' - a staple snack in this part of Uttar Pradesh. Gandhi, who arrived in his parliamentary constituency late on Wednesday, interacted with party workers on Thursday and visited the homes of some party loyalists to express his condolences on death of their near and dear ones. Maintaining distance from the media following him, he refused to comment on any issue, including the developments in neighbouring Uttarakhand where the high court struck down president's rule and restored the Congress government. Later in the day, Gandhi visited the district party office and held parleys with them on various issues and local problems. It was after a gap of two years that such a meeting was held at the district HQ, a leader told IANS. The last time a meeting of this sort took place was after the 2014 Lok Sabha debacle. Party leaders, while circumspect about the party's future in the state, however conceded that Gandhi had become more accessible than before and gave them a patient hearing. He will also spend Friday in Amethi where he has a string of engagements. On the same day, election strategist Prashant Kishore, lined up to revive party's fortunes, held a meeting with office bearers of various frontal organisations in the state capital. Students celebrate their with GCF School Supply Kits. "We were able to deliver the supplies directly to the students while celebrating them and the importance of an education to their lives, says Rev. Dennis McLain, president, GCF. Goodwill Community Foundation recently completed its annual Winter school supply kit give away events for students across eastern North Carolina. From January through March, the non-profit donated more than 5,000 GCF school supply kits comprised of composition notebooks, pencils, pencil sharpener, crayons, erasers, hand sanitizer and scissors essential tools that will support learning. This was an increase of 3,000 kits from last winter when 2,370 kits were distributed. GCF is slated to give away a total of 10,000 kits during 2016 with the second donation coming before the Fall semester that starts in August. The GCF School Supply Kits were given to students in grades kindergarten through eighth during education celebration events at schools, community centers, and housing authorities in some of the most economically-distressed counties in eastern North Carolina, including Edgecombe, Martin, Washington, Halifax, Bertie, Pitt and Northhampton. This is a demonstration of the GCF mission to create opportunities for a better life through supporting the academic success of children in eastern North Carolina, especially those living at or near poverty. During these assemblies, we were able to deliver the supplies directly to the students while celebrating them and the importance of an education to their lives, says Rev. Dennis McLain, president, GCF. Since 2011, GCF has assembled and distributed school supply kits with the help of community volunteers. While some organizations only provide supplies at the beginning of the school year each August, GCF also reaches out during critical times of the year when resources are low and the pressure on the students to succeed is higher due to end-of-grade testing. This also helps parents by saving them money and shopping time. Meeting this need assures that a child has the essential tools necessary to succeed in school, says McLain. Not only does this resource provide financial relief, but it also saves parents the time and transportation costs associated with purchasing these items. For more information about GCF and how it supports students, families and the people of eastern North Carolina, please visit http://www.GCFGlobal.org or call 919-941-9600. About Goodwill Community Foundation (GCF) Goodwill Community Foundation (GCF) continues to be a leader in an era of change by providing the training required for the emerging world where technology is integrated into everyday life. The mission of GCF is to create and provide education, employment and life enrichment opportunities regionally, nationally and internationally for people who desire to improve the quality of their lives. The GCF Community Foundation, a Durham-based tax-exempt organization, provides employment, fresh produce and volunteer opportunities, family services for parents with children with disabilities and free accounting services to youth programs across eastern North Carolina. GCFLearnFree.org and GCFAprendeLibre.org have provided free lessons for people in North Carolina since 2010 to improve their technology, math and English skills. All GCF programs are funded from the value of salable clothing and household items donated at the 39 GCF donation centers located throughout eastern North Carolina. GCF employs more than 400 people who earn an average of $20 per hour with benefits at these stores. For more information on GCF, visit http://www.GCFGlobal.org. UK based specialist diagnostic manufacturer, The Binding Site Group Ltd, is pleased to announce that it has entered into an exclusive, definitive agreement with Rockland Immunochemicals, Inc., of Limerick, PA, to grant Rockland global distribution rights for Binding Sites line of animal-focused radial immunodiffusion (RID) test kits. The availability of this unique range of products exclusively through Rockland will benefit the needs of laboratory professionals conducting basic, applied, and clinical research in the veterinary, biomedical, life-science, genomics, and drug discovery fields. Radial immunodiffusion is a robust assay used to determine the concentration of an antigen, or protein, in a biological sample. The estimated $75 billion monocolonal antibody market combined with the growing number of biosimilars is driving increased demand for critical testing reagents, kits and assays. The RID Immunoassay kits are easy to use and incorporate monospecific antibodies in an agarose gel, to provide accurate quantitation. Terri Poole, Chief Commercial Officer at Rockland Immunochemicals, Inc., states, Our customers trust that Rockland will provide the most relevant products for their research. These RID kits are a perfect addition to our constantly expanding product portfolio and will benefit our clientele across the life science industry. Julia Nisbet-Fahy, Binding Sites Global Business Manager for their Immunologicals Group, commenting on the Agreement, remarks; "A proven track record, industry knowledge, and technical expertise in the research market were the primary motivators in our selection of Rockland to adopt and distribute these products. The combined goal of our partnership is to provide customers accurate and reliable products. Binding Site is confident of our joint success." Binding Sites Immunologicals Group serves the in-vitro diagnostic (IVD) manufacturing and clinical/life-science research markets with a comprehensive line of innovative products. For additional information, contact The Binding Site, Inc. at 6730 Mesa Ridge Road San Diego, CA 92121 USA. Phone: 800-633-4484; FAX: 858-453-9189; Email: info(at)thebindingsite(dot)com. Please visit our website at http://www.thebindingsite.com. # # # TO THE EDITOR: With its origins in the Medical School of Birmingham University, Binding Site is now one of the largest independent providers of in vitro diagnostic tests and equipment in the industry. Exporting over 90% of its products overseas from the UK, it is the world leader in special protein testing. Today it employs more than 650 people and maintains offices in the United States and Europe, including a manufacturing and research facility, operating under GMP and ISO Quality Standards, located in Birmingham, England. Please refer any requests for additional information directly to: Ms. Celina Pradis Marketing Assistant Binding Site Inc. 6730 Mesa Ridge Road San Diego, CA 92121 USA Phone: 800-633-4484 Fax: 858-453-9189 Email: celina.pradis(at)thebindingsite(dot)com Rockland Immunochemicals, Inc. supports the academic, biopharma, and diagnostic industries with antibodies and antibody based tools used in basic research, assay development, and preclinical studies. With facilities in Pennsylvania for over 50 years, Rockland manufactures products ideally suited for integration into critical assays such as western blotting, immunohistochemistry (IHC), immunofluorescence microscopy (IF), ELISA and flow cytometry. Additional information about Rocklands life science tools and services can be found on Rocklands website at http://www.rockland-inc.com. Dana Dever Marketing Manager Rockland Immunochemicals, Inc. Phone: 484.791.3823 Email: dana.dever(at)rockland-inc(dot)com 2016 NABE Achievement Award winner, Mister B This 2016 NABE award winner, Mister B, in the category of memoir, is a nice Father's Day gift and for parents and grandparents on their special day, The humorous, aerospace memoir, Mister B, at 350 pages (soft cover), has received the North American Booksellers Exchange Pinnacle Achievement Award in the category of Memoir. Mister B, is also available in cloth with dust jacket, offering 25 autographed photographs from the old mans cache. It can be found in the grumpy ol mens section at Barnes & Nobel, and local libraries, because it is classified for being a book about aging older men, relegated to the tiniest section of the shelf, at the back. "I am hard-pressed to find another success story that gives such hope to poor children of Polish immigrants," reports Denver retired teacher and mentor Susan Summers. "It charms the bejeebies out of the Greatest Generation, and Lockheed Martin. M-i-s-t-e-r B, born in 1916, is the Rhode Island son of non-English speaking immigrants. His aerospace memoirs capture tales from hand-me-down-baggy-pants-poverty to becoming a self-made man. Joseph Byk begins school as a disruptive and uninterested student. By the end of his senior year at Woonsocket High, the joke's on him! He regrets his missing geometry lessons. Why? Because suddenly, he aspires to design vehicles that defy gravity." The story begins, however, in the reticent voice of the woman who is about to lose her home in foreclosure. She finds herself becoming cook and chauffeur to the cranky old man who tries her patience in every way. She tries to convert the scientist to Christianity, throughout the tale, to woeful ends. Thrust together, the unlucky duo discovers that each of them still matter. In 1932, the tale turns on a dime when Joe Byks high school counselor helps him enroll in Auburn University-(Alabama Polytechnic) to hone up on his math deficiency and proceed to the University of Alabama. These were inexpensive land grant colleges for children of poor means. Turns out after graduation, Mister Bs career begins with his childhood paper boy credentials. He is given a recommendation on the back of a Rhode Island Newspapermans business card. With that reference, young Byk traverses to Vultee, in Downey, California, where he helps to engineer basic trainer war planes. When, at the beginning of WWII, he transfers to the Glen Martin Company in Baltimore, Maryland, he continues to perform stress analysis on space craft throughout the cold war. If you can waft through the myriad of autographed photos and believe the story, Byk eventually helps to design the space shuttle Gemini, the tripod for the first moon landing gear of the Viking Lander and the beginnings of Google Earth. He helps to design the BT-13, the Vibrator, the repairs to the broken FDR carrier, and the first man-rated spacecraft capsule and dome. "This NABE award winner, Mister B, in the category of memoir, is a nice Father's Day gift and for parents and grandparents on their special day," nods Sue Lockwood Summers, who is the author Get Them Thinking! and Changing the World through Media Education. "I took it traveling with me and was enthralled to the end. With aging couched in the pillows of wit and kindness, MISTER B exudes inspiration from history. He encouraged me to give a little more to family relationships, and to seek scientific answers to lifes little perplexities." A key finding of the study was a 19% decline in comprehension-based silent reading efficiency in todays 12th graders as compared to their peers in 1960. "This study demonstrates that as long as structured silent reading instruction is neglected in this country, the literacy problem is likely to continue. Mark Taylor, CEO of Reading Plus The Spring (April/May/June 2016) issue of the highly regarded "Reading Research Quarterly" (RRQ), published by the International Literacy Association, features a comprehensive study that compares data from a 1960 study to data garnered in a 2011 study measuring the comprehension-based silent reading efficiency of US students. Among the key findings was a 19% decline in comprehension-based silent reading rates in todays 12th graders as compared to their peers in 1960. According to the study, Overall reading rates were about 24 wpm lower in 2011 than in 1960...The resultssuggest that present-day students are less efficient readers than their 1960 counterparts By grade 12, students in 2011 were reading at an average rate of 192 wpm, 45 wpm more slowly than grade 11 students did in 1960. This represents a 19% decline in comprehension-based silent reading rate. Industry leaders note that this provides another data point demonstrating that high school graduates often do not acquire the reading proficiency needed to efficiently read and comprehend more complex texts such as those they are likely to encounter in college and career settings. What we know and the data in this study underscore is that for many students, the progression to efficient silent reading does not develop naturally. Many students need structured instruction focused on silent reading proficiency, explains Mark Taylor, CEO of Reading Plus, a web-based silent reading program for schools. Effective reading instruction must integrate fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension practice tailored to meet each students unique needs. This study demonstrates that as long as structured silent reading instruction is neglected in this country, the literacy problem is likely to continue. The article titled The Decline of Comprehension-Based Silent Reading Efficiency in the United States: A Comparison of Current Data with Performance in 1960 by six authorities in literacy education, reviews and draws conclusions by comparing data from a 2011 student sample to that from a study conducted in 1960. The reports authors are Alexandra N. Spichtig (corresponding author), chief research officer at Reading Plus, Winooski, Vermont, USA, Elfrieda H. Hiebert the president and CEO of TextProject and a research associate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA, Christian Vorstius, senior lecturer in the Division of General and Biological Psychology of the School of Human and Social Sciences at Bergische Universitat Wuppertal, NRW, Germany, Jeffrey P. Pascoe, research scientist at Reading Plus, Winooski, Vermont, USA, P. David Pearson, a professor in the Language and Literacy and Human Development programs in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, USA and Ralph Radach, professor of general and biological psychology in the School of Human and Social Sciences at Bergische Universitat Wuppertal, NRW, Germany. Reading Plus is a web-based reading intervention program appropriate for students in grade 3 and higher. Reading Plus changes the way students read silently so that they can make the leap from learning to read to reading to learn. Our individualized reading instruction bridges the gap between foundational reading skills and reading proficiency, dramatically improving comprehension, vocabulary, and reading rate. Media Inquiries: Elizabeth Davis edavis(at)boardmandavis(dot)com 802-598-7155 Prometheans (employees) celebrate the company's recognition as one of the Bay Area Best Places to Work three years in a row. "The credit for this award goes to our Prometheans (employees); they have built the culture here in every way," said Jackie Safier, President of Prometheus Real Estate Group. Prometheus Real Estate Group, the largest private owner of multifamily properties in the San Francisco Bay Area, today announced that, for the third year in a row, it was named one of the Bay Areas best places to work. Prometheus landed in the 7th spot in the large companies category on the San Francisco Business Times and Silicon Valley Business Journals 2016 Bay Area Best Places to Work list. "The credit for this award goes to our Prometheans (employees); they have built the culture here in every way," said Jackie Safier, President of Prometheus Real Estate Group. This year, Prometheus also began investing a portion of its profits to cover 100% of the medical, dental and vision premiums for every Promethean and their families. Prometheus is the only multifamily firm to make this type of investment, and one of the few companies in any industry in the United States to do so. Prometheus has garnered more than 82 awards over its 51-year history, including seven awards in 2015. Recognitions include three years as the NAHB Pillars of the Industry Property Management Company of the Year (more than any other firm in history), the 2013 Property Management Company of the Year MHN Excellence Award, and the 2013 VolunteerMatch Champions of the Year for the companys POrCH employee outreach program. To learn more about working at Prometheus, please visit iamhomeatwork.com or http://www.linkedin.com/company/prometheus-real-estate-group. ### Prometheus Real Estate Group, Inc. is the largest private owner of multifamily properties in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a growing portfolio of more than 12,000 metropolitan-area apartments in the Bay Area, Seattle and Portland. Since its inception in 1965, Prometheus has specialized in the acquisition, development and management of high-quality residential and commercial properties throughout the western United States. Prometheus has a long history of award-winning approaches to development, management and general excellence. Its philosophy is centered on making the apartment experience more fun and interesting while providing a true sense of home. For more information, visit prometheusreg.com. The 12th Annual ETF Global Awards Dinner and Workshop brings together the most progressive industry experts to discuss trends and key developments of the ETP marketplace. This half-day workshop targets the issues and challenges that currently affect the ETP marketplace. Some of the topics include maximizing returns with Smart Beta and Actively-managed ETFs, liquidity using fixed income ETFs, the evolution of the ETP Marketplace, new developments in the indexing landscape, trading strategies, efficient portfolio construction, developments in Emerging and Commodities markets and more. The Workshop concludes with a cocktail reception that will be held before the Awards dinner. This year Robert J. Shiller, Sterling Professor of Economics Yale University and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Science will be present at the event. The awards provide an opportunity for industry professionals worldwide to be recognized for their contributions to the growth of the ETF marketplace. Winners are selected by votes cast by ETF industry entities worldwide. Additionally, a series of awards are determined by analysis of statistical data. Award categories include Greatest Contribution to the ETF Industry, Best Research, Largest Growth of Assets Under Management, Most Innovative ETF or ETP product among others. Registration is open to all industry professionals, academia and members of the press. Complimentary registration is available to qualified investment professionals. Please visit http://www.globaletfawards.com for complete agenda and registration. The lead sponsor of the 12th Annual Global ETF Awards Dinner and Workshop is BNY MELLON Asset Services. Platinum Sponsors include: Flow Traders and ISE ETF Ventures. STOXX will host the cocktail reception. Gold Sponsors include U.S. Bancorp Fund Services. Dinner sponsor firms include ETF Managers Group, Jane Street and Syntax. Speakers include: David Abner, Director, Head of Capital Markets, WisdomTree Asset Management, Inc., Mike Castino, ETF and UIT Business Development, U.S. BanCorp Fund Services, LLC, Kathy Cuocolo, CPA, President, Syntax LLC, Bryce A. Doty, CFA, Senior Vice President - Senior Fixed Income Manager, SIT Investment Associates, Chris Hempstead, Head of ETF Sales, KCG, Jay Jacobs, CFA, Director of Research, Global X, Rod Jones, Head of Sales North America, Managing Director, STOXX, Kevin Kelly, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer, Recon Capital Partners, Dodd Kittsley, CFA, Director, Head of ETF Strategy , Deutsche Asset Management, Phil Nanof, Vice President, State Street Global Services, Peter R. Kohli, CEO & CIO, DMS Funds, Blue Diamond Fund, Robert Michaud, Chief Investment Officer, NEW FRONTIER, Maarten van den Muijsenberg, Head of Trading, FLOW TRADERS US, LLC, Steven Schoenfeld, Founder and Chief Investment Officer, BLUESTAR INDEXES, Corey Villani, Senior Product Development Specialist, ISE ETF Ventures, Rowland O. Wilhelm, Jr., Vice President, Director of Sales and Marketing, Reaves Asset Management, among others About the Global Awards; The 12th Global ETF Awards recognizes achievements in the ETF Industry. The winners were selected from voting forms sent to ETF industry entities worldwide and tabulation of statistical information. The exciting evening includes award presentations in 20 categories including the Nate Most Award- Greatest Contributor to the ETF Industry, Most Recognized Brand, Most Innovative ETF , ETF Strategist-Best Insight among other categories. Exchangetradedfunds.com, a US-based information website is the host. The event coordinator is The Optimal Networking Event . Against a background of pay-back and retaliation, these narratives of hope seem to tap into a deep public need for alternative and peaceful responses to violence. On Tuesday, April 26, The Forgiveness Project will lead a discussion at Barnes & Noble Union Square, challenging the audience to explore the transformative power of forgiveness a conversation among some of todays most relevant voices. The Forgiveness Project uses the real stories of victims and perpetrators to explore concepts of forgiveness, and to encourage people to consider alternatives to resentment, retaliation and revenge. The event celebrates the US paperback publication of The Forgiveness Project: Stories for a Vengeful Age a book of personal narratives and insight by The Forgiveness Projects founder and journalist, Marina Cantacuzino. This important conversation will include four people who will discuss their own personal, extraordinary journeys of transformation. Panelists include: Phyllis Rodriguez: Ever since her son Greg was killed in the World Trade Center attacks of 2001, Phyllis Rodriguez has chosen reconciliation and nonviolence over hatred and vengeance. The film In Our Sons Name, released last year, revealed an intimate portrait of Phyllis and her husband Orlando in their search for meaning as they re-consider conventional concepts of justice and healing. Scarlett Lewis 6-year-old son was one of 20 children murdered by Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Since then, Scarlett has founded the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement to help children choose a life without fear and hate. In 2013, she published Nurturing Healing Love. Matthew Shurka: In 2004 when Matthew Shurka was 16, his father took him to a licensed therapist who claimed he could make gay people straight. As a result, the relationship between father and son broke down. Matthew is now a prominent activist working to end conversion therapy as the Ambassador to the #BornPerfect campaign. Father Michael Lapsley is an Anglican priest who in his struggle against apartheid, opened a letter bomb that nearly killed him. Fr. Lapsley founded The Institute for Healing of Memories, drawing on his own experience of trauma to promote the healing of others. His memoir Redeeming the Past: My Journey from Freedom Fighter to Healer was published by in 2013. Heres a link to the event: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/can-forgiveness-heal-this-vengeful-age-panel-discussion-and-book-signing-tickets-23820729443 Learn more about The Forgiveness Project at http://www.theforgivenessproject.com. Tuesday, April 26, 6:30 p.m. Barnes & Noble, Union Square 33 East 17th Street, New York, NY 10003 Ms. Sweatte will be our voice, standing up to correct the record and promote our industrys efforts to ensure peoples rights to protect their families Poway Weapons & Gear (PWG), one of the nations largest indoor gun ranges and Californias only 5-star rated range, has brought Natasha Sweatte on board to create a voice for the company that will not only help represent PWG throughout social media but also adds a significant voice to representing the firearms industry and the peoples right to self-protection. For more information, please visit http://www.weaponsandgearrange.com. Ms. Sweatte brings over a decade in the broadcast news industry and will utilize her talents and experience of storytelling to help convey a message rarely told. Every day there are efforts to portray firearm use in a negative light, and PWG is making the commitment to have the talent who will be able to stand up and be a voice for those who believe that the right to bear arms and protect their families is a God-given right. John Phillips, Founder and President of Poway Weapons & Gear, summarized his vision and excitement at the addition of Ms. Sweatte to the PWG team: Our industry is represented by national non-profit organizations, politicians and pundits, many of whom have never actually worked in the firearms industry. We as owners and operators need to have our own voice, capable of not only encouraging and promoting how we help empower people in protecting their families but to be able to speak up and stand toe-to-toe with those in the public domain who are making accusations that are unfounded and frankly, misleading. Ms. Sweatte will be our voice, standing up to correct the record and promote our industrys efforts to ensure peoples rights to protect their families. Sweatte adds, Im looking forward to empowering women and men alike who didnt grow up around guns. We all have a story to tell and we all have a right to do so. I cant wait to uncover more gun-related situations you wouldnt normally hear on the airwaves. I embrace the chance to open up the conversation and look forward to speaking to the media about the significance of public safety. The stigma around guns continues to linger, and I hope we can help separate fact from fiction. Even Sweatte has a story to tell. She opens up about why shes a huge proponent of the Second Amendment because once upon a time, her right to personal safety was taken away from her, and the police were unable and unwilling to do anything about it. For Sweatte, it wasnt a choice she ever wanted to make, but now, by sharing her story, shes hoping to help others feel confident in knowing they have the right to protect themselves and their families or loved ones against victimization. Click here for the Natasha Sweattes full story: http://weaponsandgearrange.com/PR_NNS/ In the telemedicine industry, bluetooth stethoscopes require software to connect over the internet. The bluetooth stethoscope met the needs of many physicians looking to diagnose at a distance. Existing solutions proved to be problematic, as yearly software fees became increasingly expensive and no longer affordable to our customers in existing telehealth programs. Salus Telehealth partnered with Covenant Technology Group to develop StethConnect, an innovative solution, offering physicians high quality audio at a lower cost. About us: SALUS Telehealth, http://www.salustelehealth.com, is an experienced telehealth company that provides its customers with a complete and comprehensive telehealth platform and the equipment resources needed to successfully implement an e-clinical model of care in any healthcare environment. Salus experience in implementing telemedicine programs includes many different domains such as hospitals, primary and specialty physician clinics, urgent care clinics, nursing homes, stroke assessments, school clinics, correctional facilities, Emergency Departments, ICU's, educational, and child advocacy centers. For example, a hospital can contract with us directly to provide a comprehensive telemedicine program in telestroke, telepsychiatry, and numerous others healthcare specialties. We also have strategic partners that can provide additional services as needed. Our relationships with our customers are ongoing, with continued program support from our account managers and 24/7 IT support team.The SALUS services platform includes Needs Assessment,Telehealth Consultations,Onboarding and Operations Support,Program Support, Customer Service and 24/7 IT Support,Scheduling and Credentialing,Training and Education Covenant Technology Group, http://www.ctgconnect.com, Covenant Technology Group, was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Savannah, Georgia. While originally providing outsourced CIO expertise to regional healthcare organizations, we evolved to develop niche solutions not widely available in the marketplace. We listen carefully to our customers to understand the problem. Then we work to innovate effective solutions that are simple to implement. All of our solutions are delivered as a subscription service or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), meaning zero software to load and/or maintain - users need only a current browser and an internet connection. Some of our other solutions include scheduling and credentialing software. - Tim Osako, CEO Covenant Technology Group Briana Serna, Mellow Mushroom Art Experience Mellow has a longstanding commitment to supporting artists, the community we serve and sustainability initiatives, so the Mellow Mushroom Art Experience is the perfect way to bring it all together in a fun, interactive way with the 420 Fest guests. For the second year in a row, Mellow Mushroom will have an art experience at the Sweetwater 420 Fest at Centennial Park in Atlanta, GA, from Friday, April 22, till Sunday, April 24. Mellow invites guests to come in to take part in a community art project called the Mellow Mushroom Art Experience. This year, guests can watch artists hand paint rain barrels, which will be auctioned off at an upcoming event, with proceeds donated to the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper organization. Guests can also help color in a Community Coloring Book, a triptych of panels designed by artist Ben Boling; the fully colored adult coloring book panel will also be auctioned off for charity. VP of Brand Development Annica Kreider says, Mellow has a longstanding commitment to supporting artists, the community we serve and sustainability initiatives, so the Mellow Mushroom Art Experience is the perfect way to bring it all together in a fun, interactive way with the 420 Fest guests. Featured rain barrel artists include Patrick Stacey, Briana Serna, Steven Sams, Dirk Hays, Kate Emery, Erin Plew and Corey Barksdale. The artists hail from all over Georgia as well as Kentucky and Florida. Festival goers who come by the Art Experience will also receive details on how to get a $4.20 small cheese pizza at Mellow Mushroom restaurant locations. Guests can follow the creativity on Snapchat by friending MELLOWHQ. Chattahoochee Riverkeeper (CRK) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and preserving the Chattahoochee River, its lakes and tributaries for the people, fish and wildlife that depend upon them. Learn more about Chattahoochee Riverkeeper at https://chattahoochee.org/. Founded 12 years ago as an Earth Day environmental celebration, SweetWater 420 Fests eco-friendly focus grows stronger each year. Get tickets for the Sweetwater 420 Fest by visiting http://www.sweetwater420fest.com/. Mellow Mushrooms menu showcases natural flavors and the freshest of ingredients in a creative menu, featuring an assortment of pizzas, hoagies, salads, calzones and appetizers, as well as vegetarian and vegan options. A gluten free crust and a kids menu are also available. Apparel was the cornerstone of Mellows marketing when the restaurant began in 1974 in Atlanta, Georgia. ### About Mellow Mushroom Pizza Bakers Mellow Mushroom Pizza Bakers (http://www.mellowmushroom.com) was founded in 1974 in Atlanta, Georgia. This franchise, operated under Home-Grown Industries of Georgia, Inc., is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. For 41 years, Mellow Mushroom Pizza Bakers has been serving up fresh, stone-baked pizzas to order in an eclectic, art-filled, and family-friendly environment. Each Mellow is locally owned and operated and provides a unique feel focused around great customer service and high-quality food. For more information on Mellow Mushroom Pizza Bakers, like us on Facebook at http://facebook.com/mellowmushroom, follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MellowMushroom and follow us on Pinterest at https://pinterest.com/mellowmushroom. South Floridas outdoor lifestyle, multilingual workforce, and world-class amenities had an impactful presence at the worlds largest commercial real estate exhibition, according to the MIAMI Association of REALTORS (MIAMI). In partnership with the National Association of Realtors (NAR), MIAMI leaders and members promoted South Florida at the 27th annual MIPIM International Real Estate Show in Cannes, France. Miami a world-class destination with top-tier amenities, 84 miles of Atlantic Ocean coastline, a multicultural population and investment opportunities had one of the most popular booths. Representing our commercial members on this world stage was an unforgettable honor, said Maria G. Juncadella, the 2016 MIAMI commercial president and the co-broker and co-principal at Fairchild Partners in Coral Gables. The keen interest in Miami from real estate professionals around the world was a confirmation of South Floridas universal appeal. I particularly enjoyed taking part in the Women Networking Cocktail, held for the first time in the conference and expos history. In addition to Juncadella, the following MIAMI leaders attended: 2016 MIAMI Chairman of the Board Mark Sadek of the Keyes Company, 2017 Chairman of the Board Christopher Zoller of EWM Realty International, 2015 Chairman of the Board John Dohm of Infinity Commercial Real Estate, 2016 Residential President Carlos Gutierrez of Gutierrez Group Miami Real Estate Keller Williams, former Commercial President Jose. I. Juncadella, SIOR of Fairchild Partners, 2017 Commercial President Jose Maria Serrano of New Miami Realty, 2016 Broward President Donna Reid of Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate, and 2016 MIAMI Corporate Board Director Francisco Angulo of Coldwell Banker Residential who is the 2016 Chairman of the Global Business and Alliances Committee of NAR. MIAMI members Vivianne Swietelsky of Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate and Marcela Gillman of Luxury Properties and Rentals also attended. MIAMI Leaders Make MIPIM Presentations MIAMI leaders made four, 30-minute presentations. A South Florida market overview, an update on the regions growing number of international home buyers and investors and commercial/investment opportunities and specific market spotlights were among the topics discussed. MIPIM offered so many opportunities to connect with global business professionals and to let folks from around the world know how great Miami is, Gutierrez said. In South Florida, foreign real estate buyers accounted for 36 percent or $6.1 billion of total sales volume last year, according to the 2015 Profile of International Home Buyers in Miami Association of Realtors Business Areas, conducted by MIAMI and NAR. Almost 90 Countries Participated at MIPIM Some 21,000 leading real estate executives from 89 countries, including more than 4,800 investors, traveled to Cannes, for the four-day annual gathering of the global real estate industry. The event brought together investors, developers, occupiers, architects, hotel groups, public authorities, city mayors and property associations from around the world. MIAMI produced and distributed a 12-page South Florida real estate informational brochure to MIPIM participants. The brochure is available for download here. The brochure detailed the growth of Florida and Miamis global business hubs, South Floridas vibrant commercial market, Miamis record trade, tourism and more. The booklet is available for co-branding to MIAMI members. In addition to Miami, U.S. markets featured at the MIPIM USA pavilion included the states of Florida, Illinois, Missouri and Nevada, and the metro areas of San Diego, Las Vegas and Scottsdale, Ariz. The CCIM Institute and the Institute of Real Estate Management were also featured. In my years of attending numerous real estate events, I can truly share that my MIPIM experience was just that: an experience, Sadek said. MIPIM broadened my knowledge of the markets worldwide and expanded my expectations from consumers wanting to learn about Miami and its surrounding areas. Miami: A World-Class Global City Miamis emerging technological industry that could one day rival Silicon Valley, an expanding global art scene, a $2 billion port infrastructure upgrade, Miami International Airports $6.4 billion in planned renovations, and the states lowest commercial real estate vacancy rates have played roles in turning South Florida into a global destination. Being at MIPIM was the opportunity of a lifetime, Reid said. It allowed us the ability to have a platform to promote our Miami market to the world. MIAMI leaders and members discussed South Floridas diversified economy with investors, developers, brokers, engineers, architects, and other commercial industry professionals at MIPIM. Even though I had been told to expect a top-notch convention, to experience it in person gave me a new perspective on the global industry, the current pulse of investments and the incredible advances in technology, Jose I. Juncadella said. About the MIAMI Association of REALTORS The MIAMI Association of REALTORS was chartered by the National Association of Realtors in 1920 and is celebrating 96 years of service to Realtors, the buying and selling public, and the communities in South Florida. Comprised of six organizations, the Residential Association, the Realtors Commercial Alliance, the Broward Council, the Jupiter Tequesta Hobe Sound (JTHS) Council, the Young Professionals Network (YPN) Council and the award-winning International Council, it represents more than 42,000 real estate professionals in all aspects of real estate sales, marketing, and brokerage. It is the largest local Realtor association in the U.S., and has official partnerships with 136 international organizations worldwide. MIAMIs official website is http://www.miamire.com ### Since the time of our initial investment Noribachi has reported significant growth in revenues and has achieved sixteen consecutive periods of quarter-over-quarter revenue growth. HCAP Partners (formerly Huntington Capital), a California-based mezzanine debt and private equity firm, today announced that it has led a follow-on round of investment in Noribachi with participation from new investors including the Northwest Area Foundation. Noribachi is a U.S.-based manufacturer of high-output commercial and industrial LED lighting solutions. The Company, founded by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Farzad and Rhonda Dibachi, applies a Bespoke Engineered and Specifically Tailored (BEST) methodology to deliver custom engineered LED lighting products that are highly efficient, flexible, cost-effective, and energy saving. As a result of this custom engineering approach, Noribachi was named to the Inc. 500, Forbes List of Americas Most Promising Companies, Deloitte Technology Fast 500 List, Los Angeles Business Journals 100 Fastest-Growing Private Companies List, and Entrepreneur Magazines Entrepreneur 360. In 2015, Noribachi reported 100% growth in revenues, and created over 70 new jobs in Los Angeles. The Company proudly hosted Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcettis third State of the City Address on April 14th, 2016. A recording of the address and videos on Noribachis work can be accessed via the City of Los Angeles website http://lamayor.org/SOTC2016. Farzad Dibachi, co-founder and CEO of Noribachi, stated, We are pleased to be partnering with HCAP Partners. This investment helps Noribachi expand the manufacturing of our Bespoke Engineered and Specifically Tailored (BEST) LED lighting solutions to support our growing customer base and global sales channels with the highest quality LED products. Tim Bubnack, Managing Partner, and Hope Mago, Principal led the transaction for HCAP Partners. Tim Bubnack commented, Since the time of our initial investment Noribachi has reported significant growth in revenues and has achieved sixteen consecutive periods of quarter-over-quarter revenue growth. Farzad and Rhonda have also added executive management with extensive experience in managing growth-oriented businesses and introduced next generation products including the Pulse wireless controller. The follow-on funding with participation from our Limited Partner Northwest Area Foundation will allow Noribachi to continue accelerating its growth in 2016 and beyond. Amy Jensen, Investment Director at Northwest Area Foundation stated, Noribachi is significantly aligned with the values and vision of the Northwest Area Foundation. The companys programs, including the provision of a broad-based wealth creation mechanism and partnership with the Los Angeles Conservation Corps to provide jobs to at-risk youth in Los Angeles, reflect the types of programs and activities the Foundation seeks to advance. As part of the investment Tim Bubnack will join the board of Noribachi. About Noribachi U.S.-based Noribachi is a leading custom LED manufacturer for high output commercial and industrial solutions. Noribachi applies a Bespoke Engineered & Specifically Tailored (BEST) methodology to deliver unlimited LED lighting applications. Noribachi is dedicated to improving the lighting industry by incorporating design and technology to its BEST lighting solutions. For more information, visit http://www.noribachi.com. About HCAP Partners HCAP Partners (formerly Huntington Capital) was founded in 2000 and is a provider of mezzanine debt and private equity for underserved, lower-middle market companies throughout California and the Western United States. HCAP Partners invests $2 million to $9 million in established businesses in the healthcare, technology, services, and manufacturing industries generating between $10 million and $75 million in revenues. The firm has invested in over 50 companies since it was founded and proactively works with its portfolio companies to achieve favorable financial outcomes and measurable impact value creation. Partners Tim Bubnack, Morgan Miller, Frank Mora, and Hope Mago lead HCAP Partners management team. For more information, please visit http://www.hcapllc.com or call (858) 259-7654. About Northwest Area Foundation The Northwest Area Foundation supports organizations that drive proven approaches and promising innovations to help people build assets through good jobs and financial capability. It provides support for this through targeted grantmaking and mission investments that help hardworking people and families overcome crises today so they can establish good credit, launch small businesses, save, and begin to feel secure and hopeful about tomorrow. The organizations it supports are champions of change who reflect the diverse cultural strengths of its region, which includes the eight states of Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon, and more than 75 Native nations. The Foundation was established in 1934 and is based in St. Paul, Minnesota. For more information, please visit http://www.nwaf.org. Encana Chaplain Crew discusses problems in Canada "One of the things I have seen in my (workplace) career is no matter where people work or what they do, people have challenges in life," Chaplain Seeon Smith. Marketplace Chaplains Canada Experiences Unprecedented Growth, Hires Full-time Leader Marketplace Chaplains, North Americas largest and original workplace chaplaincy organization, continues its aggressive Canadian growth strategy as it expands into multiple cities and provinces. Seeon Smith, a five-year workplace chaplain veteran for Marketplace Chaplains Canada who has served since 2011, has been hired full-time to oversee this unique, growing workplace chaplaincy service in the country. Marketplace Chaplains Canada provides a personalized and proactive employee care service through the use of care teams assigned to help employees with personal problems and crisis events 24/7. There is a tremendous growth opportunity for Canada, said Smith. One thing I have seen in my career is that no matter where people work or what they do, people have challenges in their life. Currently, Marketplace Chaplains through its Canadian operations, is serving 17 companies spread across 87 locations in scores of cities and 4 provinces with a fifth one coming on board soon. Marketplace Canada operations were opened in 2009 when $150,000 was donated to launch the work in this sprawling country. Today, Smith, located in Edmonton, is leading, directing, and overseeing the service for Marketplace Canadas largest client across three provinces. This significant company is Cashco Financial with headquarters in Edmonton, Alberta. It has three subsidiary companies employing 425 workers in 59 locations throughout Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Ontario. Chaplain Smith said Cashco is one of the fastest expanding corporations in Canada with the company planning to have 250 locations in the next 4 years. This is a great day for Marketplace Chaplains Canada and our service in that marvelous country, said C.G. Maclin, President of Marketplace Chaplains International. Seeon Smith is one of our finest chaplains and laborers. We are pleased he has accepted this new position and trust him in mighty ways to share care and concern for all. Smith has been a nationalized Canadian citizen for 29 years, after immigrating in 1987 from British Guyana in South America. He has been married to his wife Debbrah since 1995, and they have four children, three boys and one girl. He and Debbrah met in church and they have been serving together for decades now. This chaplain is a graduate of Northeast Bible College, now Vanguard College, in Edmonton, Alberta. He is well rounded with secular work experience in retail, insurance, and management. I worked at Sears Canada and many other places in my business career and I know having someone neutral I could talk to about my problems would have been very nice, Smith said. Often I felt very frustrated in my job because I had nobody to talk to. Others that use Marketplace Chaplains are Troyer Ventures and many other companies scattered across Western Canada. Having a chaplains presence and someone our employees can talk with on a caring, confidential basis has been a huge help to our companies, said Steve Troyer, President of Troyer Ventures. Its been one of the best business decisions I have made. Canada is Marketplaces largest location outside the USA and has more chaplains serving employees in companies than in any other foreign country. While needs in the workplace are worldwide, Canada and many visionary CEOs represent a growth opportunity for this unique service, said Doug Fagerstrom, Executive President and CEO for Marketplace Chaplains. Marketplace Chaplains was founded in 1984 in Dallas, Texas, and has since spread to 46 states in the US, along with locations in Canada, the UK, Mexico, Puerto Rico, China and Korea. For more information on this unique employee benefit which has been featured with Marketplace Chaplains on CNN, NBC Nightly News, and in the Washington Post, the New York Times and Bloomberg BusinessWeek, visit http://www.mchap.ca. About Marketplace Chaplains To arrange an interview with a Marketplace Chaplain, contact Art Stricklin, Vice President Public Relations, at artstricklin(at)mchapusa(dot)com or call 1-800-775-4400. Awareness Technologies Inc. ("ATI"), the only provider of Complete Insider Threat Security On-Demand, announced today that it has signed a strategic marketing agreement with Fine Tec Inc., the leading distributor of network security and data integrity solutions. As part of the new alliance, ATI will work closely with Fine Tec to market its On-Demand Insider Security services including Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Web Filtering, Employee Monitoring and Laptop Recovery, all of which are available through one agent download and one control console to the distributors growing base of IT services and IT solution providers in the U.S. and Canada. This new alliance with Fine Tec validates our commitment to the channel and will bring greater awareness to the value proposition our services deliver to MSPs and solution providers, said Brad Miller, Chief Executive Officer of Awareness Technologies. Our solution is ideally architected for the channel as a result of its ease of implementation for end-customers with a few mouse clicks as well as the ability for our partners to white label the control console with their brand." To effectively deal with the cost and complexity of deploying Insider Threat Security, ATI has built the only complete solution that deploys in minutes and does not require any hardware. Leveraging endpoint deployment and a cloud-based architecture, ATI has created the industry's most effective solution that works both on and off network. About Awareness Technologies Awareness Technologies develops award winning monitoring software that records and controls all end user activity on all PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod, Android phones and tablets, and blackberry mobile devices. As the pioneer for Unified Insider Threat Prevention, Awareness Technologies' SaaS-based service is easily available and affordable for businesses of any size - especially the SMB market. Architected at the endpoint, clients can access 4 technologies including DLP (Data Loss Prevention), Web Filtering, Employee Monitoring and Laptop Recovery, through one agent download and one control console. Awareness Technologies has over 10,000 businesses world-wide currently depending on its solutions to protect their data from insider threats, and has been named on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500, Inc. 5000 and Software 500. In addition to running seamlessly in a local OS environment, Awareness Technologies' products are also Citrix and VMware ready. Our solutions allow businesses insight and provide details regarding employee activities on and off the network to make certain they are staying in alignment with the guidelines of company policies and procedures in a comprehensive, yet easy to manage cloud based environment. http://www.awarenesstechnologies.com About Fine Tec The business priorities of vendors, resellers and customers seldom align. When priorities clash, someone must step in to keep business transactions flowing smoothly. That someone is Fine Tec. Starting as a value added distributor (VAD) in the year 2000, Fine Tec has become the heart of an ecosystem comprised of leading and emerging technology vendors who provide network-security and data-integrity solutions for our broad network of resellers across North America. We've done this by maximizing sales opportunities for our partners while removing the hurdles that impede business transactions from before the sale to after the deployment. In addition to our agile distribution services, we maintain certifications to help our partners comply with government and business procurement requirements. http://www.finetec.com NASAs Apollo program ignited a fire of passion, innovation and ingenuity that propelled the United States into space and culminated in the US being first to step foot on the moon in 1969. Before the lunar landing though, came all the other firsts first to fly the Saturn V, first to leave Earth orbit, first to orbit another celestial body, those firsts were achieved in 1968 by Apollo 8 crewmen Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders. Imagine hearing the story of the Apollo 8 mission from the men who flew it On May 14, 2016, the Apollo 8 astronauts will reunite for An Evening with Apollo 8 at the Heritage Flight Museum, located at Skagit Regional Airport in Burlington, WA. This once in a lifetime opportunity is a fundraising event to support HFMs mission to honor veterans and keep history alive. Event attendees will spend this intimate evening with Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders. The evening will also include a reception and four course meal. This is indeed a rare opportunity to be a part of history, and see and hear these explorers discuss the Apollo mission that was instrumental in our landing on the moon. Tickets range in price from $1000 per person up to $10,000 per couple. Head table seating includes dining with one of the astronauts, Flight Directors, or our MC. Tickets are available online at http://www.aneveningwithapollo8.eventbrite.com. The event will be available to watch live on Ustream for $19.95, as well as on demand at a later date. An Evening with Apollo 8 is intended to be produced as a documentary. To learn more about how to sign up for the live stream, purchase tickets to this event, or learn about the museum, visit HFMs website at http://www.heritageflight.org. Were thrilled to be able to bring this kind of international attention to our new location in the Skagit Valley, said Greg Anders, Executive Director. Having these remarkable men willing to gather to support this museum, founded by one of the Apollo 8 crew members, Bill Anders, and share their story here at our new home, is a tremendous opportunity and we are truly grateful. As for the live streaming of the event, he said, We have never done this before, but this is such an important event, we felt a big reach in expanding our capabilities was what we needed to do. We look forward to bringing this event to a world-wide audience. The Heritage Flight Museum, founded 1996 by Bill and Valerie Anders, is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to the preservation and flying of historic military aircraft. Visitors can get an up-close look at the selection of flying World War II, Korean and Vietnam era aircraft. For more information about the Heritage Flight Museum, visit their web site at http://www.heritageflight.org. HFM is also on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/heritageflightmuseum) and Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/heritagefltmus). InterDev has long put security at the forefront of IT planning for all of our customers from both the public and private sector, said InterDev CEO Gary Nichols. InterDev, an Atlanta-area provider of information technology and security services, announced today that they are the gold sponsor of the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) 2016 Cyber Security Simulation event. This years event, organized by TAGs Information Security Society, will focus on how business leaders can leverage so-called Smart Cities to improve their businesses while still maintaining an effective response to cyber attacks. The event will be hosted on May 18 at Kennesaw State University. InterDev has long put security at the forefront of IT planning for all of our customers from both the public and private sector, said InterDev CEO Gary Nichols. Creating more real-time opportunities for businesses to experience the potential threats of a cyber-attack is critical to helping them prepare. Were thrilled to align with TAG in support of this important initiative. The TAG 2016 Cyber Security Simulation event is an all-day, open business continuity simulation: a role playing event where C-Level executives, senior management and security practitioners come together and react to a staged business-impacting cyber attack. The focus of the 2016 event will be how business leaders can leverage Smart Cities to improve our businesses while still maintaining an effective response to cyber-attacks. The attack on critical infrastructure, will challenge participants and showcase the attack impacting the business, technical and legal response. Attendees will experience realistic cyber-attack scenarios without the risk associated with an actual event. The specific attacks will be against a fictional company but attendees will come away with plenty of lessons and best practices learned that you can bring back to your company to improve your security. Registration and additional information is available http://www.tagonline.org/events/cybersecurity-simulation/ About The Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) TAG is the leading technology industry association in the state, serving more than 30,000 members through regional chapters in Metro Atlanta, Athens, Augusta, Columbus, Macon/Middle Georgia, and Savannah. TAGs mission is to educate, promote, and unite Georgias technology community to foster an innovative and connected marketplace that stimulates and enhances a tech-based economy. The association provides networking and educational programs; celebrates Georgias technology leaders and companies; and advocates for legislative action that enhances the states economic climate for technology. TAG hosts over 200 events each year and serves as an umbrella organization for 34 professional societies. For more information visit the TAG website at http://www.tagonline.org/. About InterDev InterDev has been providing information technology (IT) support and security services to corporations, non-profit and educational organizations and public-sector entities for more than three decades. In addition to managing and hosting IT operations for its valued clients, InterDev also provides leading edge IT security solutions -- based on technologies from Palo Alto Networks, Extreme Networks and Dell SecureWorks -- as well as telecommunications consulting including VoIP phone systems, and voice and data circuits. InterDev is a proud Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and Barracuda Networks Certified Diamond Partner. InterDev serves customers from offices in Atlanta, Beaufort (SC) and Chicago. For more information, visit http://www.interdev.com. Napa Valley Yoga Teacher Training Drishti Yoga International Teacher Training has been training Yoga Teachers around the Globe offering 200 hour Yoga Alliance approved courses since 2012. Today they announced that they will now take their trainings to the next level offering more advanced and in depth modules. Sarah Walsh, Co- Founder of Drishti Yoga Teacher Training, explains We are very proud of our 200 hour curriculum and feel confident our graduates are able to teach after completion, however, it is always important to continue your education in this field and there is plenty more to learn to enhance your skills as a teacher. This 50 hour module will have a focus on Yin and Restorative Yoga which are great supplements to certified Vinyasa Teachers. The Yoga teaching world is increasingly competitive and to have more tools to offer only increases your value and thus opportunities. "We are looking forward to holding our first 50 hour advance module in spectacular setting of the Mayacamas Mountains in Napa Valley, California in the summer of 2016" Beams Co-Founder Carri Uranga. "We held a Wine and Yoga Retreat there over Labor Day weekend in 2015 and are eager to return for a longer stay." The course is for those who have already completed their 200 hour Yoga Teacher Training at another school or from Drishti and looking to work towards their 500 hr. accreditation or simply to further their education. The 50 hour Advanced Yoga Teacher Training runs from August 26th until September 2nd 2016 in Napa Valley, California at Mayacamas Ranch. The course is a 50 hour Advanced Yoga Alliance Vinyasa Teacher Training intensive with foundations in Ashtanga Yoga and a focus on Yin and Restorative Yoga. About Drishti Yoga Teacher Training Discover the impact of intimate personal attention combined with focused training in exotic locations with Drishti Yoga Teacher Training. Combine your passion for Yoga and your love of travel to create a transformative experience on and off the mat. Upcoming trainings will be held in Portugal from July 4th- July 17th 2016, Greece from July 17th - August 10th, Napa Valley, California from August 26th- September 2nd 2016. For detailed information on these trainings and to find how else Drishti is making a ripple effect in the Global Yoga Community visit us at DrishtiyogaTeacherTraining.com. Matt's [Hes] dedicated to our clients success, not only by aiding their business development objectives, but also by keeping them abreast of important international and foreign exchange issues and trends Pacific Coast Bankers Bank (PCBB), a national financial services leader supporting community banks, announced today a key addition to its International Services team. Matt Helsing, Vice President of International Services, will be working with community banks to expand their international services capabilities. Helsing brings 20 years of business development experience to PCBB, including 10 years as a foreign exchange (FX) services specialist. Leveraging his expertise, Helsing has trained and educated corporate and community banking clients in the areas of FX risk management, foreign exchange policy development, FX hedge accounting, and regulatory and compliance issues. Matts proven ability to develop relationships with C-level executives mirrors PCBBs core mission to support the success of community banks, said Patricio Morillo, SVP and International Services Manager. He continued, Hes dedicated to our clients success, not only by aiding their business development objectives, but also by keeping them abreast of important international and foreign exchange issues and trends. PCBB was founded by community bankers to help community banks build stronger institutions by offering services that level the playing field with the largest banks. Unlike many correspondent banks, our community bank ownership also means PCBB does not compete with our customer banks. Today, PCBB provides community banks across the nation with comprehensive solutions and services, including traditional correspondent banking, as well as a host of performance, lending and consulting solutions. For more information about PCBB, please visit http://www.pcbb.com. About PCBB PCBB (Pacific Coast Bankers Bank) was founded in 1997 by community bankers and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pacific Coast Bankers Bancshares. PCBB is a state-chartered, FDIC-insured member of the Federal Reserve System, serving the needs of community based financial institutions. PCBB solutions include loan sales and purchases, loan participations, international, hedging and correspondent services. Consulting services include online risk adjusted loan pricing, relationship profitability and risk management. PCBB also has a subsidiary, PCBB Capital Markets, which offers broker dealer services. Wagner & Winick On the Law, a nationally syndicated law-focused talk radio program broadcast on the BizTalk Radio Network (http://www.biztalkradio.com) and the VoiceAmerica.com Business Channel (http://www.voiceamerica.com) announces that law professor and attorney Michael Cohen will be joining the program in May 2016 to produce and host a special bi-weekly program segment called International Crossroads. Cohen is a partner in Sheppard Mullin, a global law firm with more than six hundred lawyers serving businesses without borders across the world's continents in complex transactions, advocacy and regulatory matters. Cohen is also a Constitutional Law and Business Law Professor at Monterey College of Law in Seaside, CA. It is a rare week that doesnt have an international business incident headlining the world news, said Cohen. Many of these stories present fascinating legal issues that have impact and influence on American businesses and consumers. I am excited about the opportunity to join Wagner & Winick On the Law to host a program segment that shines a light on these issues, said Cohen. Mitch [Winick] and Stephen [Wagner] have developed an audience on the BizTalk Radio Network and VoiceAmerica.com Business Channel that I think will be very interested in these issues. Stephen Wagner and I are simply thrilled to have a lawyer of Michaels experience join our radio program who can bring so much depth to our international business law topic discussions, said program co-host Mitchel Winick. Michael brings the unique perspective and understanding of someone who has actually lived and worked in many of the international business centers across the globe. After beginning his career in law enforcement as an assistant special prosecutor, Cohen has represented multinational clients for more than two decades. Cohens practice includes representing clients in high tech, software, oil and gas, heavy manufacturing, transportation, food processing, broadcast, digital media, and healthcare industries. Wagner & Winick On the Law is a weekly law-themed talk show co-hosted by Monterey and San Luis Obispo Colleges of Law Dean Mitchel Winick and law professor and trial attorney Stephen Wagner. The co-hosts select a current law-related topic each week and invite an expert guest on-air to help discuss the issues with a focus on how they relate to the general public. The special International Crossroads segment will air twice a month on the program. Wagner & Winick On the Law can be heard Thursdays at 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. (Pacific) and on-demand on the VoiceAmerica.com business channel at: http://www.voiceamerica.com/show/2550/wagner-and-winick-on-the-law. It can also be heard live on Saturday afternoons from 4:00 5:00 p.m. (Pacific) nationally on http://www.biztalkradio.com and locally on KSCO AM 1080 (Santa Cruz/Monterey/Salinas) and KVEC AM 920 (San Luis Obispo/Paso Robles). The program is also replayed Sunday mornings at 7:00 a.m. on KSMX AM 1140 (Santa Maria/Santa Barbara). For more information about the program, go to: http://www.wagnerandwinick.com. On-Demand In-House Counsel We are entering the Southern California market at a time of incredible growth for emerging companies. Outside GC LLC, the leading provider of on-demand, in-house legal counsel services, today announced the launch of its Southern California practice, expanding its reach to include the burgeoning growth-stage business markets in Southern California. Along with Outside GCs co-founders Bill Stone and Jon Levitt, Outside GCs operations in Southern California will be led by David Blackwood, an accomplished business attorney with nearly 25 years of experience as general counsel to companies in a variety of industries. Most recently, David has served as part-time general counsel to a range of technology and other fast-growth companies in Southern California, including Technologent, an Orange County-based enterprise technology company. David will leverage his substantial expertise and business-focused approach to help bring Outside GCs value-driven model to the West Coast. We are entering the Southern California market at a time of incredible growth for emerging companies, explained Bill Stone, co-founder and managing partner of Outside GC. We are thrilled to have David leading our efforts here given his considerable in-house background, as well as his skilled understanding of what drives our on-demand legal services model and its compelling value-add for clients. Im excited to join Outside GC and lead its westward expansion, stated David Blackwood, managing partner of Outside GCs Southern California practice. The greater Los Angeles area and Orange County, have become hubs for fast-growing, growth-stage technology and new media companies, and the greater San Diego area continues to be a hotbed for leading players in the life sciences industry, noted Blackwood. We anticipate a robust response from companies in these markets looking for strategic business and legal advice provided by seasoned attorneys at highly competitive rates. We also expect to serve mature companies, providing on-demand overflow support to in-house legal teams looking to remain responsive and nimble while keeping control over headcount. Blackwood further added, Our California-based team will be able to leverage the range of experience of the entire Outside GC team, as well as the on-demand patent and trademark services of our sister firm, Patent GC, delivering best-in-class service, a depth of bench, a practical business focus, and a cost efficiency that other firms simply cannot match. I look forward to growing our local team and serving a range of clients in Southern California. About Outside GC LLC Outside GC provides senior in-house legal counsel on an on-demand basis to emerging and large companies alike, at highly competitive rates. With clients in the US and Europe across a broad range of industries, the companys offerings include negotiating and drafting customer, vendor and distribution agreements; debt and equity financing transactions; employee matters; immigration services; pre-litigation dispute resolution; intellectual property protection, and mergers and acquisitions. Together with its sister company, Patent GC LLC, which provides on-demand patent and trademark legal services, the firm has over 50 senior business attorneys in New England, greater New York, the Washington D.C area, and Colorado. For more information, please visit http://www.outsidegc.com or http://www.linkedin.com/company/outside-gc-llc, or call (617) 737-5000. The ORLocate HScanner "The new SPD solution provides customers with greater flexibility to accommodate the system to their needs" said Ilan Kadosh-Tamari, CEO of Haldor. Haldor Advanced Technologies announced today the release of a new version of the ORLocate SPD Solution. ORLocate SPD workstations are equipped with one or more of Haldors proprietary devices, optimized for the relevant use-cases and the sterile processing lifecycle. The ORLocate Workflow Designer enables our solution specialists to tailor the deployment to each hospitals requirements, ranging from a small site using set level tracking up to a group of hospitals and clinics served by several sterile processing departments. The inherent modularity of the ORLocate System facilitates every budgetary constraint and organizational growth strategy. Customers can tailor their implementation to Sterilization Machine Integration, Biological Indicator Module, Loan Sets, Maintenance Cycle, Endoscope Processing Management, Scheduling Integration, Reporting & Analytics, or full Item Level Intraoperative Tracking. A new ORLocate CheckPoint workstation provides hospitals with the ability to associate sterilized sets and instruments to a patient (case ID) at every point of care including usage of disposables. Every SPD workstation utilizes the HScanner, a proprietary new wireless multi-reader designed and optimized for track and trace of surgical items in the SPD and the ORs. Sites that implement instrument level tracing are also equipped with the revolutionary HoveRead that counts over 100 instruments in seconds. The new SPD solution provides customers with greater flexibility to accommodate the system to their needs: Meeting regulatory requirements, improving patient safety, and reducing cost of ownership were always part of our mission statement and are now better served with the new SPD solution, said Ilan Kadosh-Tamari, CEO of Haldor. Haldor is committed to providing a full line of RFID enabled products, custom designed and optimized for the lifecycle of surgical items within and outside the sterilization area, added Kadosh-Tamari. The New SPD Solution will be shown at upcoming International Association of Healthcare Central Service Materiel Management (IAHCSMM) annual event in San Antonio, TX, next week. Visit us at booth #419. About Haldor Advanced Technologies Haldor Advanced Technologies is a privately held company that specializes in developing solutions for the healthcare industry. The company's flagship product, ORLocate, is an automated RFID based system that is designed to help hospitals improve patient safety, reduce costs, and improve operational efficiency in both the operating room and the sterile processing department. ORLocate is the only commercially available solution that monitors and tracks surgical instruments and consumables, including sponges, on an individual basis before, during, and at the conclusion of a surgical procedure. ORLocate offers an advanced solution for inventory tracking and asset and life-cycle management of surgical instruments and sponges. Headquartered in Hod-Hasharon, Israel, Haldor has offices in Europe, the Middle East, and North America alongside a network of partners in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Were seeing upward movement in the labor market and the economy as a whole...which means companies are hiring. [StayReadyPro ACCESS helps to] find that elusive right fit without investing massive amounts of time or money. At the start of April, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said that the labor market and U.S. economy have demonstrated tremendous progress in the wake of the financial crisis and the Great Recession. Yellen went on to say the country is nearing its goal-level of maximum employment as she spoke in New York on a panel of three Reserve Chair predecessors. According to Yellen, based on most measures of unemployment, the labor market is vastly improved. The unemployment rate has been at or below 5% since October 2015, down from a peak of 10% in October 2009. Yellen also said most members of the Federal Open Market Committee believe unemployment will continue to go lower. As a result, the Labor Department recently reported the people re-entering the job market grew in March, a strong indicator of confidence in the direction of the economy. A representative from StayReadyPro, a Texas-based career platform, believes these trends will continue and as a result StayReadyPro ACCESS was launched. ACCESS is a unique way to simplify the recruiting and job search process for both HR professionals and potential employees. It works by offering potential recruits and job applicants the chance to view video Career Profiles highlighting the ins and outs of available positions from real employees in these positions. Its advantageous for HR professionals because it allows them to narrow their candidate search to only those applicants who are serious and have a real understanding of what an open position entails. The result is a streamlined hiring process that reduces turnover and problems associated with disengaged employees. At the same time, its ideal for job seekers because it gives them a real world day-in-the-life glimpse of job openings, so there isnt a discrepancy between expectations and what they encounter when hired. Now is a really exciting time to launch ACCESS, said Marcus Jordan with StayReadyPro. Were seeing upward movement in the labor market and the economy as a whole, and were finally returning to pre-Recession levels, which means companies are hiring. Theyre looking for top talent and ACCESS offers them an element to sift through applicants and find that elusive right fit without investing massive amounts of time or money. About Stay Ready Professional Stay Ready Professional is a Texas-based career platform which helps develop more informed Candidates by communicating real-life demands and duties of Employers open positions through video Career Profiles. ##### We are honored to be recognized by these leaders and innovators within the retail community, but especially by our customers, for the quality of our product and price intelligence, and our service. Ottawa, Canada: 360pi, the leader in product and price intelligence, is pleased to announce strong and accelerating traction within the retail community including recognition from key media, and commendations from the companys own customers. For the third consecutive year, 360pi remains the only product and price intelligence vendor to place on the prestigious RIS LeaderBoard, with 21 top 10 rankings, including two #1 rankings. For reference, placement on the LeaderBoard is determined by third party surveys of a vendors own customers. As well, 360pi earned a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 60 among its strategic accounts, placing the company in the same league as world-class brands like Apple iPhone (63), YouTube (59), and Zappos (57) in terms of customer loyalty and satisfaction. 360pi also continues to enjoy strong retail analyst and media coverage. 360pi was listed as a representative vendor in Gartners 2016 Market Guide for Unified Price, Promotion and Markdown Optimization Applications. As well, the companys product and pricing insights are regularly cited by both mainstream media and top retail trade media, such as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, CNBC, RIS News, and Internet Retailer. Plus, 360pi continues to be a regular contributor to Bains highly respected annual holiday newsletter series, with 2015 being the third consecutive year. We are honored to be recognized by these leaders and innovators within the retail community, but especially by our customers, for the quality of our product and price intelligence, and our service, said Alexander Rink, CEO, 360pi. We look forward to continuing to drive value for our customers and serve this community with excellence. About 360pi 360pi derives profitable insights from product and pricing big data to help leading omnichannel retailers, etailers, and brand manufacturers compete and win with shoppers. 360pis customer base accounts for over $US200 billion in annual product sales and includes Ace Hardware, Build.com, and Overstock.com, along with several Fortune 500 consumer products companies. With the majority of in-store purchases being influenced online, 360pi helps retailers and brands successfully navigate the multi-channel landscape with real-time insight into who is selling what, where, when, why and for how much. Ultimately, 360pi customers make smarter decisions faster to drive increased revenues and margins across all channels. The RIS LeaderBoard is a highly rigorous evaluation of software vendors from the people who know them best actual retail customers. It ranks technology vendors based on customer satisfaction across a wide range of criteria, serving as an objective guide to help retailers find the vendors and solutions they need. Pioneered by Bain & Company, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is premised on the extent to which a customer would be willing to refer a vendor to a friend or colleague. The NPS system is used by the worlds most respected companies and identifies those organizations firmly committed to delivering value to their clients. Gartner, Market Guide for Unified Price, Promotion and Markdown Optimization Applications, Robert Hetu, 22 February 2016. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Radixweb at COMEX 2016 MS Dynamics CRM Implementations, Field Service Management, HRM & Recruitment Solutions from Radixweb caught the eye of COMEX 2016 attendees After an exciting week, COMEX 2016 closed its doors on 16th of April, 2016. COMEX Oman 2016 has been thriving with great excitement. Radixweb, a global IT Outsourcing and Software Development Company successfully showcased its cutting-edge technologies and novel solutions which help business foresee the future and redefines the way it is being operated. This years exhibition was a smashing success for the company. It is attributable to the latest technologies and industry expertise that were showcased at its exhibition booth #517 that received an immense response and a great interest by show attendees. MS Dynamics CRM Implementations, Field Service Management, HRM & Recruitment Solutions from Radixweb caught the eye of COMEX attendees. With the theme of Internet of Things COMEX 2016 has displayed that when business and technologies meet in a vibrant and collaborative platform, the output is outstanding and beneficial. The COMEX 2016 attendees showed an interest in IoT, Mobility, and Business Transformation. Team Radixweb rich experience and deep expertise attracted top industry experts, leaders and key decision makers to show genuine interest in Radixweb Field Service Management, HR & Recruitment, Enterprise Mobility and MS Dynamics CRM expertise and offerings. IT strategies, business transformation, future development plans were discussed. It was great to see the visitors who have secured a slot for one-on-one discussion even before the event, showing interest in a detail discussion. Many large entities grabbed the opportunities to interact with Radixweb team and know more about its wide range of IT offerings. Companys representatives delightfully demonstrated the competencies of Radixweb novel solutions and outsourcing services have to offer. COMEX 2016 brought us fruitful business opportunities to engage and interact with key prospects, customers and thought leaders. It was great to see visitors interest in our offerings, sharing our past successful projects, discussing their business ideas and offering the best match technology strategy, said Maitray Gadhavi, Business Development Manager, Radixweb. We have made many successful business deals, which is exceedingly positive response than what we had set as a goal for the show. It was a pleasure to meet our middle-east region customers, got an opportunity to strengthen our relationship and a closer look at customer needs, talking about the show success, Jay Patadiya, Business Development Manager, Radixweb commented. About Radixweb Established in 2000, Radixweb is a leading software product development and IT Outsourcing services provider. The company delivers a complete range of IT services and enterprise-class solutions to clients from SMEs to fortune 500 companies across the globe. Radixweb key Service offerings include Bespoke Software Development, Embedded Software Development, Software Product Development, Web & Desktop Application Development, Application Performance Optimization and more. Due to consistent and reliable service delivery, the company earned credentials like Microsoft Gold Partner, Kentico Bronze Partner, nopCommerce Partner, ISO Certification for quality processes and Adobe Solutions Partner. For details, please visit http://simplified-it-outsourcing.com I called it Wine Without Walls because it does really deconstruct the way weve been drinking wine in the past three decades. The fact that Vinitaly brought an outsider world inside the walls is just revolutionary On April 1 in Verona, Vinitaly held its first ever competition for natural wines; though the term carries no legal definition, it generally denotes wines made from organic or biodynamic viticulture, with minimal technological or chemical intervention. The competition broke with convention not only for the wines involved, but for the judging process; instead of receiving points, the wines were evaluated on whether they expressed eight characteristics: liveliness, evolution in the glass, balance, drinkability, emotional impact, savoriness, transparency, and sense of place. Wines that expressed six or more of those qualities were selected for recognition. The international panel of judges chaired by Alice Feiring - a world-renowned author, journalist, wine consultant and authority on natural wine included Mike Bennie (Australia), Pietro Vergano (Italy), Diego Sorba (Italy), and Pascaline Lepeltier (USA). Out of 76 samples submitted, the judges selected 17 wines. In the category of wines without sulfites, Emilian winery Ca De Noci took two awards for their 2014 Emilia IGT Bianco Frizzante Le Rose and 2013 Emilia IGT Bianco Notte di Luna; German winery Bernhard Volker won for the 2Naturkinder Heimat Silvaner. Fourteen wines were recognized in the category of wines made with sulfites totaling no more than 40 mg/L. Acclaimed Abruzzese winemaker Emidio Pepe performed well with both their 2007 Trebbiano DAbruzzo DOC and 2001 Montepulciano DAbruzzo DOC. A number of Georgian wines were among those selected, including Pheasants Tears 2014 Mtsvane, Ramaz Nikoladze and Iagos Wine; the list of winners including producers from Italy, Slovenia, Georgia, France, and Chile can be found at: http://www.vinitaly.com/globalassets/pdf/concorsi-enologici/free-wine/standings-wine-without-walls.pdf. The competition took place concurrently with 5 Star Wines, Vinitalys International wine award, spearheaded by Managing Director of Vinitaly International Stevie Kim and Scientific Director of the Vinitaly International Academy Ian DAgata. It was time to create a completely different competition, and so we naturally turned to Alice Feiring, because she is such an internationally recognized expert on natural wine, explains Stevie Kim. There is a growing number of producers of these wines probably more than we realize, because many of them may be producing wines naturally but dont want to be labelled as such. But the market is there now, especially among the younger generation, and its time we embrace it because we need to create additional means to reach that market. The fact that this particular wine award is being given at such a venerable institution like Vinitaly is a message to all of the other wine festivals all around the world, that this movement of natural wine is gaining strength that it is now a force thats undeniable, explains Alice Feiring. I called it Wine Without Walls because it does really deconstruct the way weve been drinking wine in the past three decades. The fact that Vinitaly brought an outsider world inside the walls is just revolutionary. The panel of judges praised the establishment of this new competition, as well as the innovation in the evaluation criteria. The new evaluation method we used in this tasting is much more interesting than seeing just numbers or votes or medals, says Pietro Vergano, co-founder of Consorzio Restaurant in Turin. To evaluate the drinkability, the acidity, the connection to the land thats much more interesting. For us its revolutionary, and I hope it catches on for other competitions. I think its very important that finally the world of natural wine is starting to be recognized at an international level, because its not a category that can be ignored anymore, observes Pascaline Lepeltier, Master Sommelier and Beverage Director for Rouge Tomate in New York. It was great that Alice offered an alternative way of assessing the quality of this wine it creates a new way of reading, appreciating, and giving feedback to the winery and to the consumer. Vinitaly took a risk, and I think its a great challenge. Its an extraordinary opportunity to look at a breadth of esoteric, artisanal wines from around the world that wouldnt make it into most international competitions, agrees Mike Bennie, wine writer and co-founder of Rootstock Sydney wine and food festival. The fact that theres this diversity of style is a great credit to this organization, and the competition has a loyal following that people are interested in investing in. The participating producers likewise found the new competition a suitable evaluation of their unconventional wines and production styles. My family always felt that judging wine with scores was too reductive and did not do justice to natural wines that truly express their terroir, says Chiara De lulis Pepe of the winning Emidio Pepe winery. Most classic competitions dont allow enough time for natural wines to express themselves properly. Wine Without Walls was a real revolution in the wine competition world and for Vinitaly in particular. It's great to have people thinking more about terroir and emotional impact when they judge wines rather than the level of acidity or the color of the wine - all characteristics resulting from winemaking techniques, not from nature. About: Veronafiere is the leading organizer of trade shows in Italy including Vinitaly (http://www.vinitaly.com), the largest wine and spirits fair in the world. During its 49th edition Vinitaly counted some 4,000 exhibitors on a 100,000 square meter area and 150,000 visitors including 2,600 journalists from 46 different countries. The next edition of the fair will take place on 10 - 13 April 2016. The premier event to Vinitaly, OperaWine (http://www.vinitalyinternational.com) Finest Italian Wines: 100 Great Producers, will unite international wine professionals on April 9th in the heart of Verona, offering them the unique opportunity to discover and taste the wines of the 100 Best Italian Producers, as selected by Wine Spectator. Since 1998 Vinitaly International travels to several countries such as Russia, China, USA and Hong Kong thanks to its strategic arm abroad, Vinitaly International. In February 2014 Vinitaly International launched an educational project, the Vinitaly International Academy (VIA) with the aim of divulging and broadcasting the excellence and diversity of Italian wine around the globe. VIA has now also organized its very first Certification Course with the aim of creating new Ambassadors of Italian Wine in the World. # # # The new website (www.selflube.eu) will focus on four of SelfLube's component categories: wear plates, wear strips, bushings and gibs. The objective for this new website is to get the SelfLube name into different areas of the world and increase brand awareness. The website is our first step and we look forward to the next few years. SelfLube recently launched a new website for it's European audience. The company has been working with IBT Partners, a website localization company, since early February and has been taking steps to brand the SelfLube name throughout Germany and the United Kingdom. The site (http://www.selflube.eu) will target tool builders that are in the mold, die, and special machine sectors. The site will be a slimmed down version of SelfLube's current website and will provide information on its products as well as information on how to contact a member of the SelfLube staff directly. The components that will be listed include wear plates, wear strips, bushings and gibs. These components are available with or without self-lubricating graphite in a variety of inch and metric sizes. "We are very pleased to be adding the new website for our European customers. Though we are a smaller company, we are continuously growing. The objective for this new website is to get the SelfLube name into different areas of the world and increase brand awareness. The website is our first step and we look forward to the next few years," explains SelfLube's Marketing Specialist, Jordan Fifelski. Developed with the latest technology and the user in mind, the site is compatible with mobile devices and tablets. Visitors who need more detailed information about the product are able to connect directly to the main SelfLube website (http://www.selflube.com). There, visitors will have full access to free downloadable CAD models as well as the rest of the SelfLube line. Visitors can also request the link to SelfLube's E-catalog which is available in a PDF version. SelfLube is the leading U.S. manufacturer of mold and die components. The company manufactures both conventional and self-lubricating components used in molds, dies and special machines. As an ISO 9001:2008 registered company with seven successive audits with zero non-conformances, SelfLube is well positioned to supply the component needs of the tooling industry. PayScale, Inc. today announces the inaugural recipients of their Women in STEM Scholarship. After reviewing more than 7,000 applications, PayScale has awarded a $2,000 scholarship to two exceptional young women to help them pursue their STEM (science, technology, engineering or math) education and follow their dreams. PayScale's educational outcomes data has shown time and time again that a STEM education offers a consistently high return on investment and sets students up for lifelong career success. However, there are fewer women entering and staying in STEM jobs, even though there is more attention on the subject than ever before. Because of this, we were inspired to create a scholarship that is exclusively for women heading into STEM fields who plan to pursue a meaningful career in a STEM-related field, says Aubrey Bach, Head of Alumni Analytics at PayScale. Here is a brief bio of each winner: Mariam Verich, 18, Houston, Texas Mariam Verichs application rose to the top of the high school student category because of her incredible drive to impact the world using a degree in Biomedical Engineering. Verich, who was the only woman on her school's state-champion robotics team, will be the first person in her family to attend college. She aspires to a professional career conducting research and finding cures for diseases like rare cancers. Verich is motivated by her community and the drive to give back. Says Verich: Im hell-bent on destroying the notion that women cant be successful in the STEM field, and I have to prove a point to all the people who doubted me solely based on the fact that I am a woman. Han Ngo, 20, Los Angeles, California Ngo is currently a student at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she is pursuing a degree in biochemistry. In high school, Ngo excelled in STEM classes like AP chemistry and discovered that she was genuinely interested in the subject. Now Ngo wants to use her knowledge to carry out research that will better the lives of those around her, specifically those who suffer from forms of diabetes. After earning her Bachelor of Science at UCLA, she plans to go on to graduate school to prepare for a career in research. Says Ngo: To my women out there who are interested in STEM fields but are held back by the negative stereotypes, be brave and do what you love. Dont let other people steer you or pressure you into doing something you dont like. Believe in your own ability, and consistently remind yourself that you can do it. Finally, remember that there are many support groups and services out there like PayScale that are designed to help STEM women like us. Youre never alone! Were all in this together! Adds Bach: Han and Mariam are 110 percent correct and they represent the future for how women will participate and lead in the STEM fields. We need more women going into STEM. We need more diversity. And we needed it yesterday. Less than 25 percent of STEM jobs are held by women. But we can rest easier knowing that there are young women like Mariam and Han who are paving the way for other women to enter these subjects and making women in STEM a reality. About PayScale Cloud software, crowd sourced data and unique algorithms power the worlds largest real-time database of rich salary profiles giving PayScale the unique ability to provide employees and employers alike immediate visibility into the right pay for any position. PayScales cloud compensation software is used by more than 3,500 customers including Bloomberg BNA, Cummins, Warby Parker, Clemson University and Signature HealthCARE. For more information, please visit: http://www.payscale.com or follow PayScale on Twitter: http://twitter.com/payscale. The Quanta team The Queens Award is the UKs highest official accolade for business success and it is a great honour for the team at Quanta to receive this prestigious title We are delighted to announce that Quanta has received a Queens Award for Enterprise for International Trade 2016. The Queens Award is the UKs highest official accolade for business success and it is a great honour for the team at Quanta to receive this prestigious title. The Queens Awards for Enterprise recognises outstanding achievement in UK businesses across three categories: innovation, international trade and sustainable development. As a winner, Quanta will also enjoy a reception at Buckingham Palace hosted by Her Majesty the Queen on 14 July 2016. Founded in 1992, Quanta has been successfully recruiting in the life sciences and renewable energy sectors. Now operating in over 20 countries from headquarters in Berkhamsted, their strategy has always been focused on establishing a strong UK base and developing a high performing multilingual team to service their clients. This has really paid off with year on year growth for the business and now a Queens Award for International trade. This approach, combined with a positive company culture and commitment to One Team, has enabled them to maintain an extremely high quality of service based on solid expertise within their specialist sectors. In 2010, they commenced a language training policy and now offer fully funded German and French language training to all employees. They also provide English tuition to international employees to continue their professional development. Quantas commitment to recruitment excellence has not gone unnoticed within the industry. They have been recognised as One of 1000 companies to inspire Britain for the past three years running and are a current holder of the 2016 Best UK Staffing Firms to Work For. Quanta CEO and Founder Stephen Trigg is thrilled with the announcement. This is a significant milestone in the development of the companys business strategy and a great accolade for all the employees of Quanta who put in such a tremendous amount of effort every working day of the year. Quanta will continue to build upon the successes achieved to date, seeking further opportunities to enhance their growth and reputation within the international arena. Notes for Editors ST Math is among 100 fnalists for the 2016 Classy Awards Its very special to be recognized like this for our large-scale impact and innovation in addressing Americas math education crisis. MIND Research Institutes ST Math program has been selected as one of 100 finalists in the 6th annual Classy Awards, recognizing the most innovative nonprofits and social enterprises of the year. More than 1,300 programs were submitted to this years competition, spanning categories including animal & wildlife welfare, disaster relief & public safety, education advancement, and poverty & hunger relief. All applications were put through a rigorous four-phase vetting and evaluation process to assess each organizations potential to solve a problem through its innovative solution. The Classy Awards team spends a year extensively researching social innovations from around the world. We've been fortunate to discover some incredible organizations over the past few years, but this year's pool of nominees is one of the strongest we've ever seen! said Pat Walsh, Co-Founder and CIO of Classy.org. We're honored to play a role in convening leaders throughout the sector to recognize their efforts. ST Math is among the 17% of Classy Award finalists focused on improving education.ST Math uses a unique visual method that provides students a strong foundation in math to foster their future academic achievement, and college and career success. Rather than relying on language processing and rote memorization, ST Math teaches math visually, promoting a deep, conceptual understanding of the subject. ST Math also shifts the old paradigm of teaching by telling to a learning by doing approach, which ensures that students' learn to creatively and persistently apply their problem-solving skills to real-world challenges and problems. MIND Research Institute is honored to be among the finalists for the Classy Awards, said Matthew Peterson, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of MIND Research. Each day, we are gratified to see students experience success in math, but its very special to be recognized like this for our large-scale impact and innovation in addressing Americas math education crisis. ST Math currently reaches more than 1 million students, and has repeatedly proven in districts across the country to double and even triple growth in math proficiency. Developed by neuroscientists, the ST Math provides visual, computer-based math games designed to support deep understanding of math concepts. Students use ST Math on computers or tablets, with teacher facilitation and in a blended learning environment. As a social benefit organization, MIND partners with foundations and corporate donors to help bring its unique learning program to high-need schools. Some of MINDs philanthropic partners include PwC Charitable Foundation, Hyundai Motor USA, Boeing, OneWest, Phillips 66, Verizon, Cisco Foundation, John Deere Foundation and Fluor Corporation. Finalists will be evaluated by Classys Leadership Council based on judging criteria of scale, scope and leadership expertise of the problem being addressed, innovative approach, ability to solve the problem, and organizational effectiveness and resource management. Ten Classy Award winners will be announced on June 16 at the Collaborative, three-day event in Boston that brings together top social innovators from around the world. MIND Research Institute MIND Research Institute is a neuroscience and education social benefit organization, dedicated to ensuring that all students are mathematically equipped to solve the worlds most challenging problems. MIND's distinctive visual approach to math and problem-solving is the basis of its innovative, research-proven ST Math programs for elementary and secondary schools. The visually-based ST Math program has been shown to double or triple schools growth rates in math proficiency. Through its MathMINDs movement, MIND engages the community in hands-on mathematical experiences outside of the classroom in an effort to shift the cultural perception of math from being scary and frustrating to exciting and essential. MIND's programs currently reach one million students and 39,000 teachers at 3,100 schools in 43 states and the District of Columbia. For more information, visit http://www.mindresearch.org. Kent Wellish, M.D. The Wellish Vision Institute, with Principal Investigator, Kent L. Wellish, M.D. is excited to announce the FDA approval of a new device for the treatment of keratoconus using Corneal Collagen Cross-Linking, which can slow or even stop the progression of keratoconus. Avedro, Inc., an ophthalmic pharmaceutical and medical device company, has recently received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Photrexa Viscous, Photrexa and the KXL Collagen Cross-Linking System. Dr. Kent Wellish, medical director of the Wellish Vision Institute, is proud to have been part of a nationwide team involved in the Avedro study, which resulted in the FDA approval of this new device and treatment. Dr. Wellish has been performing Collagen Cross-Linking, since 2013, as part of the ACOS Study, and is the first to bring this treatment to Las Vegas. He is excited to now be able to offer this technology to more Las Vegas area patients. About Keratoconus and Corneal Collagen Cross-Linking Keratoconus is an eye disease that causes the normally round cornea to become thin and bulge into a cone-like shape. In its advanced stages; this disease can severely affect vision and make simple everyday tasks such as driving a car, reading a book or watching television difficult or impossible. Many patients are commonly diagnosed with mild astigmatism at the onset of puberty, and are later diagnosed with keratoconus in their teens or early 20s. Since keratoconus can be progressive (gets worse with time) its important to have an early diagnosis so eye doctors have the opportunity to properly treat the disease. In the past, many patients with keratoconus had to undergo a cornea transplant if the disease continued to progress. However, with advancements in treatment options such as Collagen Cross-Linking (CXL), modern medicine may be able to slow or stop the progression of the keratoconus. CXL uses ultraviolet light, combined with riboflavin to cause a change in the collagen fibers at the molecular level. This increases collagen bonds, or cross-links, that can make the cornea stronger. Strengthening the cornea slows, and for many patients stops, progressive keratoconus and corneal ectasia. Collagen Cross-Linking Benefits Slows or Halts Progressive Keratoconus Requires A Single One-Hour Treatment Zero Injections Zero Stitches Zero Incisions Fast Recovery To learn more about Corneal Collagen Cross-Linking; please call Wellish Vision Institute at 702-733-2020 to make an appointment. About Wellish Vision Institute Since 1994, Wellish Vision Institute has been at the forefront of ophthalmology. Our commitment to patient care has led us to create a practice where our patients receive top-notch, individualized treatment. We have assembled a diverse staff of highly trained and experienced professionals in all areas of eye care, and we are confident that no matter what your needs are, we can help. Its founder, Dr. Kent Wellish is the #1 choice for LASIK in Las Vegas, more than any other LASIK practice in Las Vegas. He is Nevadas First Laser Vision Surgeon, since 1994. He has a flawless track record with the FDA and is one of the few Keratoconus specialists in the country to be named a Castle Connelly Top Doc, chosen by his peers. East Location 2110 East Flamingo Road, Suite 210 & 211 Las Vegas, NV 89119 West Location 2555 Box Canyon Dr. Las Vegas, NV 89128 http://www.wellishvision.com For more information please call our patient information line at 702-733-2020. CONTACT: KCN.Wellish(at)gmail(dot)com Walk MS at Pasadena Rose Bowl On Sunday, April 17, 2016, the team at Southwest Legal Group participated in the Walk MS at Pasadena Rose Bowl. Together with many others, we were able to fundraise for research to help find a cure for this serious and debilitating condition. Attorney Gelly Valero of SWLG has a deep connection with the cause as his sister, Imelda Noss, has multiple sclerosis. He made the following statement after the walk, I have a personal connection with this debilitating disease. My sister, Imelda Noss, has been battling MS for 11 years. When I participate in these walks its not just to help my sister, but to help all those who have been stricken with this disease. This cant be done alone, nor can one person find a cure. It takes a team, it takes communities, it takes awareness, and most importantly, it takes money for research. I walk not just for my sister, but for everyone who is affected by MS. Together, I know that we will find a cure and get rid of this disease once and for all. I am honored and proud to be a part of the walk for a cure! Southwest Legal Group is a personal injury firm with offices in California, Oregon, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas, Washington, and Utah. Whether through community outreach or legal assistance, the team is dedicated to protecting individuals with serious and debilitating injuries or physical and mental conditions. To learn more about the firm, call (855) 232-5470 or visit their website at http://www.swlegalgrp.com/. Miami-Dade County residential properties registered nearly $1 billion in sales in March as existing single-family homes posted robust price gains, according to a new report by the MIAMI Association of REALTORS (MIAMI) and Multiple Listing Service (MLS) system. The median sales price for single-family existing homes rose 7.7 percent year-over-year in March 2016, from $260,000 to $280,000. The median sales price for existing condominiums decreased 2.6 percent to $209,500 from $215,000. Miami-Dade County existing condo prices have risen in 56 of the last 58 months. Miami prices remain at 2004 levels despite four years of increases. After five years of record sales activity, the Miami real estate market continues to post strong sales in key price points, said Mark Sadek, a Coral Springs Realtor and the 2016 MIAMI Chairman of the Board. Existing single-family homes and condominiums in the mid-price ranges registered double-digit sale increases in March. Almost 50 percent of all Miami transactions continue to be all-cash, a sign home buyers are committed and invested in the market. Total Sales Finish in Line with Miami Historical Averages Total existing Miami-Dade County residential sales which posted a record year in 2013 and near record years in 2014 and 2015 decreased 8.9 percent year-over-year from 2,706 to 2,465 last month. Miami-Dade County single-family home transactions decreased 5.8 percent in March, from 1,240 to 1,168. Existing condominium sales which declined 11.5 percent, from 1,466 to 1,297 are competing with a robust new construction market, which continues to add inventory. An 8.5 percent drop in distressed sales also contributed to the lower sales activity. Only 19.5 percent of all closed residential sales in Miami were distressed last month, including REO (bank-owned properties) and short sales, compared to 28.0 percent in March 2015. In 2009, distressed sales comprised nearly 70 percent of Miami sales. Short sales and REOs accounted for 3.2 and 16.2 percent, respectively, of total Miami sales in March 2016. Short sale transactions dropped 47.0 percent year-over-year while REOs fell 34.1 percent. Nationally, distressed sales fell to 8 percent in March, down from 10 percent a year ago, according to the National Association of REALTORS (NAR). Total Miami residential properties combined for $996.5 million in total sales volume in March 2016, about 15.1 percent lower than the $1.173 billion sold during the same month last year. The aforementioned sales volume does not include the strong new construction condo sales figures. The single-family market registered an 8.6-percent decrease in total dollar volume in March 2016, posting $537 million in sales compared to $587.8 million last year. Existing condominiums posted $459.5 million in total dollar sales, a 21.6 percent decline from $586 million in March 2015 but does not include new construction condo sales figures. Transactions in Popular Price Points Rise Significantly Middle-market Miami homes are seeing a spike in the number of sales. Single-family homes priced between $200,000 and $600,000 saw a 9.6 percent year-over-year increase in March, growing from 644 to 706. The sector represented 60.4 percent of total Miami single-family home sales in March 2016. Existing condos priced between $150,000 and $250,000 saw a 14.0 percent-rise in sales in March, increasing from 363 transactions to 414. This sector represented 31.9 percent of total existing Miami condo home sales in March 2016. Miami real estate remains a bargain worldwide. A 120-square meter condo in Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Miami Beach cost $149,900 on average, according to NAR. Prices for the same condo in London ($960,840), Hong Kong ($776,280), and New York ($1.6 million) are at least five times higher. Historic-low mortgage rates should continue to attract future buyers. According to Freddie Mac, the average commitment rate for a 30-year, conventional, fixed-rate mortgage was 3.69 percent in March, the eighth consecutive month below 4 percent. Miami Real Estate Selling Faster and Close to List Price The median number of days between the listing and contract dates for Miami single-family home sales fell 18.4 percent year-over-year to 62 days. The median number of days between the listing date and closing date for single-family properties dropped 12.2 percent to 115 days. For condos, the median time to contract decreased 12.8 percent year-over-year to 68 days. The median number of days between the listing date and closing date decreased 4.9 percent to 117 days. Miami real estate is selling close to listing price. The median percent of original list price received for single-family homes was 95.1 percent in March 2016, an increase of 0.3 percent. The median percent of original list price received for existing condominiums was 93.8 percent, the same as last year. New Policy Should Qualify More South Florida Condo Buildings for FHA Loans In addition to competing sales from new construction units, the lack of access to mortgage loans is also impacting existing condominiums. Of the 8,523 condominium buildings in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties, only 23 are approved for Federal Housing Administration loans, down from 29 last year, according to statistics from the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation and FHA. A new FHA policy should qualify more South Florida condo buildings. On Nov. 12, the FHA announced plans to streamline the condominium recertification process, expand its definition of acceptable owner-occupied units to include second homes not owned by investors and change the way it views co-insurance clauses. The government affairs team of the MIAMI Association of REALTORS advocated for the changes and continues to monitor and support increased condominium recertification. National and State Statistics Nationally, sales of existing single-family homes, townhomes, condominiums, and co-ops jumped 5.1 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.33 million in March from a downwardly revised 5.07 million in February, according to NAR. Statewide, closed sales of existing single-family homes totaled 23,758, remaining relatively the same (down 0.6 percent) from March 2015, according to Florida Realtors. Floridas condominium sales totaled 10,076 last month, down 7.1 percent compared to March 2015. The national median existing-home price for all housing types in March 2016 was $222,700, up 5.7 percent from March 2015 ($210,700). March's price increase marks the 49th consecutive month of year-over-year gains. The statewide median sales price for single-family existing homes last month was $209,500, up 10.3 percent from the previous year, according to Florida Realtors. The statewide median price for townhouse-condo properties in March was $155,000, up 3.3 percent over the year-ago figure. Miamis Cash Buyers Still Represent About Twice the National Average Miami cash transactions comprised 48.6 percent of March total closed sales, compared to 54.0 percent last year. Miami cash transactions remain about double the national average of 25 percent. Miamis high percentage of cash sales reflects South Floridas ability to attract a diverse number of international home buyers, who tend to purchase properties in all cash. Condominiums comprise a large portion of Miamis cash purchases as 64.1 percent of condo closings were made in cash in March compared to 31.4 percent of single-family home sales. Sellers Market for Single-Family Homes, Buyers Market for Condos Inventory of single-family homes increased 8.2 percent in March from 6,004 active listings last year to 6,494 last month. Condominium inventory increased 15.9 percent to 13,952 from 12,042 listings during the same period in 2015. There is a 5.7-month supply of Miami single-family homes, an increase of 9.6 percent from March 2015, which indicates a sellers market. There is a 10.8-month supply of condominium inventory, a year-over-year increase of 21.3 percent, which indicates a buyers market. A balanced market between buyers and sellers offers between six and nine months supply of inventory. Total active listings at the end of March increased 13.3 percent year-over-year, from 18,046 to 20,446. Active listings remain about 60 percent below 2008 levels when sales bottomed. New listings of Miami single-family homes increased 6.5 percent from 1,823 in March of last year to 1,942 last month. New listings of condominiums decreased 1.6 percent to 2,683 last month, compared to 2,726 during the same time period in 2015. Nationally, total housing inventory at the end of March increased 5.9 percent to 1.98 million existing homes available for sale, but is still 1.5 percent lower than a year ago (2.01 million). Unsold inventory is at a 4.5-month supply at the current sales pace, up from 4.4 months in February. New Construction Market Update Miamis preconstruction condo market is in a better position today compared to the previous boom. Today, most Miami preconstruction condo developers require a 50-percent cash deposit on new units. The deposit is not only one of the highest in the United States but is significantly higher than the 20 percent required during the last real estate cycle. The large all-cash deposits are a strong sign home buyers are committed to the Miami market. Developers are also being cautious not to overbuild. About 85 percent of condos under construction in downtown Miami are sold, according to Integra Realty Resources and the Miami Downtown Development Authority. Downtown Miami has about 7,200 units under construction, a considerably smaller number than the 18,500 the area had under construction in 2006. Strong sales in the Miami preconstruction condominium market east of Interstate 95 continue to reflect significant demand for new properties, according to a March 21 report from preconstruction condo projects website Cranespotters.com and MIAMI. Forty towers with 719 floors and 3,770 units have been completed in Miami-Dade County east of I-95 in the five years since 2011. There are 79 towers with 1,829 floors and 11,726 units under construction in Miami east of I-95. About 53 towers with 1,252 floors and 7,331 units are planned, but have not begun development. To access March 2016 Miami-Dade Statistical Reports, visit http://www.SFMarketIntel.com Note: Statistics in this news release may vary depending on reporting dates. MIAMI reports exact statistics directly from its MLS system. About the MIAMI Association of REALTORS The MIAMI Association of REALTORS was chartered by the National Association of Realtors in 1920 and is celebrating 96 years of service to Realtors, the buying and selling public, and the communities in South Florida. Comprised of six organizations, the Residential Association, the Realtors Commercial Alliance, the Broward Council, the Jupiter Tequesta Hobe Sound (JTHS) Council, the Young Professionals Network (YPN) Council and the award-winning International Council, it represents more than 42,000 real estate professionals in all aspects of real estate sales, marketing, and brokerage. It is the largest local Realtor association in the U.S., and has official partnerships with 136 international organizations worldwide. MIAMIs official website is http://www.miamire.com ### Authoritative, interactive, live online neurology CME programs In the past decade, the MS treatment landscape has advanced dramatically and continues to rapidly evolve. An increasing number of disease-modifying therapies (DMTs) slow disease progression by preventing acute exacerbations and new lesion formation. This years annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology (AAN), to be held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, April 15-21, 2016, is the premier meeting for clinicians and researchers in neurology and a key meeting for those involved in MS care and research. The 2016 AAN meeting will attract nearly 14,000 attendees and will include nearly 700 abstracts in this area. This seminal meeting is of the utmost importance to clinicians because of its coverage on MS diagnosis and disease evaluation, underlying pathophysiology, current and emerging therapies, and other management strategies. Expert commentary on key presentations from AAN will be presented live-online, affording clinicians a live Q&A with the experts immediately following the meeting. Fred Lublin, MD, Saunders Family Professor of Neurology from the Mount Sinai Hospital, and Patricia K Coyle, MD, Professor and Acting Chair, Department of Neurology from Stony Brook University, will review the biggest stories in MS from the 2016 AAN conference in a one-hour online CME program hosted by NeuroSerieslive.com. Attendees will receive MS updates from AAN to better be able to: evaluate recent clinical trial data and efficacy of current and emerging DMTs for MS; apply appropriate treatment selection their MS patients; and develop individualized, evidence-based treatment plans for MS patients based on the most up-to-date, expert-recommended therapy selection strategies including when and how to advance MS therapy, and managing actively or aggressive progressing disease. We recommend this CME program neurologists, neurology nurses, nurse practitioners and physician assistants, as well as primary care clinicians who manage patients with multiple sclerosis. The complimentary, online CME session will take place Tuesday, April 26th, 2016 1:00 PM 2:00 PM EST at NeuroSeriesLive.com. This activity is supported by educational grants from Genentech. CEO Robert Rosenbloom said, Providing up-to-date, expert guidance on whats new in MS cant be done without covering the most important annual Neurology event in the world. Were excited to provide clinicians the insights and online platform to get answers quickly that will help improve treatment options for their patients in the coming year. NeuroSeries Live delivers neurologists and other clinicians treating patients with neurological diseases a unique online learning platform that empowers clinical learners to questions and get immediate answers from experts about MS. The neurology channel of PlatformQ Health, NeuroSeries Live designs all its programs to be interactive throughout, so the physicians will be replying to questions throughout the presentation. Attendees can also give their opinion on best medical practices via in-session polls throughout the session. The activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center and PlatformQ Health Education, LLC. The Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians. Liberty Universitys 2016 Baccalaureate Service will feature a message from evangelist Tim Lee, a veteran Marine and recipient of the Purple Heart. The service begins at 6 p.m. on Friday, May 13, inside Libertys Vines Center in Lynchburg, Va. President Jerry Falwell told the Liberty Champion, the universitys student-run newspaper, that Lee was selected due to his sacrifice for this nation and the freedoms we all enjoy every day, and because of Tims determination to continue to preach the Gospel and never quit in the face of adversity. Tim has been a loyal friend to Liberty University and to the Falwell family for many years and we are honored by his dedication to Liberty since he joined the Board of Trustees in 1994, Falwell said. Lee joined the Marine Corps in 1969 and, in March of 1971, he lost both of his legs in a land mine explosion in Quang Nam Province, Vietnam. After returning home, Lee made the critical decision to use his platform to speak out about his faith in God. He served for five years as a pastor in Southern Illinois before transitioning to full-time ministry as an evangelist in 1979. Today, Lee is the president of Tim Lee Ministries based out of Garland, Texas. He speaks in a variety of venues from patriotic rallies to radio and television. At the request of President Reagan, Lee served on the Bicentennial Committee for the 200th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution. He has been honored by the United States Marine Corps, The Department of the Army, The Department of the Navy, numerous state legislatures, and cities of all sizes. He has received scores of other awards and recognitions over the past four decades. Lee serves as the co-chair of the national committee of Veterans For Cruz. He serves on the Liberty University Board of Trustees as well as on the Trinity Baptist College Board of Directors in Jacksonville, Fla. Lee, a regular guest speaker at Liberty, most recently spoke at the university for Convocation during Military Emphasis Week last November. In 2012, Liberty awarded Lee the George Rogers Champion of Freedom Award, given annually to a veteran who has displayed extraordinary heroism while serving. Tim Lee has been married to his wife, Connie, for 44 years. They live in Rowlett, Texas, and have three children and six grandchildren. The Baccalaureate is a longstanding tradition at Liberty, demonstrating the universitys commitment to the Great Commission and the Great Commandment. About Liberty University Liberty University, founded in 1971, is the largest private, nonprofit university in the nation, the largest university in Virginia, and the largest Christian university in the world. Located near the Blue Ridge Mountains on more than 7,000 acres in Lynchburg, Va., Liberty offers more than 500 unique programs of study from the certificate to the doctoral level. More than 200 programs are offered online. Libertys mission is to train Champions for Christ with the values, knowledge, and skills essential for impacting tomorrows world. Wi-Tronix Violet "[Violet] will only continue to get smarter. As technology advances, Violet advances with it." -Chad Jasmin, Vice President Customer Strategy, Wi-Tronix Violet, a new advanced Locomotive Data Acquisition Recording System (LDARS) from Wi-Tronix, has industry executives and thought leaders abuzz. Violet is unlike anything the railroad industry has seen: it is the first smart LDARS. The advanced capabilities of Violet are revolutionary. Borrowing a term from the automotive industry, Violet is fully loaded and its various features are seamlessly integrated into a single, all-in-one solution. The solution offers: Digital Video Recorder Event Recorder PTC Event Recorder Fuel Monitoring Crash-Hardened Memory Module Even more features will be announced at the Wi-Tronix Chicago Conference on May 17. Most impressive, Violet is a platform for the future. Wi-Tronix will expand and grow Violet. Its been built from the ground up by the worlds experts in event recorders and locomotive systems integration. It will only continue to get smarter, says Chad Jasmin, Wi-Tronix Vice President Customer Strategy. As technology advances, Violet advances with it. Michael Heilmann, Executive Vice President at Wi-Tronix sees the solution as a must-have tool for the companys rail customers. He says, Violet is a game-changer providing railroads with a unique, competitive edge. Wi-Tronix hosts its annual conference in Chicago on May 17, where Violet will be formally introduced. The conference covers topics of interest to the industry outside of Violet as well. The conference is attended by CEOs, Operations, and IT professionals as well as industry media, thought leaders, and government policy makers. Wi-Tronix executives will present and detail Violets advanced systems, and orders for Violet will be accepted at the conference. Wi-Tronix is now accepting conference reservations for customers. About Wi-Tronix, LLC Wi-Tronix is a leading provider of remote monitoring solutions for high-value mobile assets used in the rail, marine and mining markets, and in other commercial and industrial operations. As an innovative leader in the transportation industry, Wi-Tronix monitors 10,000 locomotives worldwide. Since 2005 Wi-Tronix has been working with businesses to improve the operational efficiency, service reliability, and safety of their high-value assets. Wi-Tronix corporate headquarters are located in Bolingbrook, Ill. For more information visit wi-tronix.com or follow Wi-Tronix on Twitter at @WiTronix. We always look for ways to be connected with our neighbors and our partnership with Tyler School of Art is a prime example of The Independents commitment to celebrate local arts. Our guests appreciate the integration of the student artwork in the hotel. The Independent Hotel, located at the corner of 13th and Locust Streets in Center City Philadelphia, is hosting a reception on Wednesday, April 27 from 6:00 to 7:30 PM to celebrate the Spring Exhibit of works by the talented MFA students at Temple Universitys Tyler School of Art. This exhibit marks the sixth in the collaboration between the hotel and the top-rated art school. We enjoy changing the look and feel of the lobby of The Independent and the artwork is a great way to invigorate the lobby and add to the neighborhood character of the hotel. said John Barsoum, general manager of The Independent Hotel. We always look for ways to be connected with our neighbors and our partnership with Tyler School of Art is a prime example of The Independents commitment to celebrate local arts. Our guests appreciate the integration of the student artwork in the hotel. Located in the heart of Philadelphia, the 24-room hotel is located in a fully restored Georgian Revival building that was formerly a printing press. Exuding neighborhood charm throughout, The Independent Hotels interiors have a residential-feeling with spacious guestrooms and unique features in each guestroom, including exposed brick and high loft-like ceilings. The lobby recently refreshed has a gallery-like feel, serving as a distinguished backdrop for exhibiting the artwork by the MFA students. The hotel began its partnership with Tyler School of Art in 2013 and rotates the art biannually, opening the exhibition to guests and the public. On April 27, locals, guests and students are invited to a reception to celebrate the works and toast the artists. All artwork included in the spring exhibition is available for purchase and features works by Tyler students: Yu Chen, Matt Coombs, Jon DeDecker, Bryant Girsch, Natasha Gusta, Sarah Heyward, Destiny S. Palmer and Bianca Schreiber. This year, The Independent Hotel is thrilled to bring another local partner, Ocean Prime, who will support the event through their catering services. RSVPs are required and can be sent to events(at)independentcollection(dot)com. For more information about The Independent Hotel, please visit http://www.theindependenthotel.com. V-Ray for NUKE has opened up a new horizon in creative possibilities. Today, Chaos Group, a worldwide leader in computer graphics, releases the most powerful renderer currently available for NUKE, NUKEX, and NUKE STUDIO. V-Ray 3.3 for NUKE brings the first node-based VR system, GPU rendering speeds, and 200+ 3.x updates also available in V-Ray for 3ds Max and Maya, to artists around the world. Already being used in production on franchises like James Bond, V-Ray for NUKE allows compositors to alter any 3D asset. Before, a lighting issue meant going backwards in the pipeline. Now, compositors have all the lighting, shading and rendering elements they need to do the job themselves. "V-Ray for NUKE has opened up a new horizon in creative possibilities, said William Bartlett, Executive Creative Director, Integrated Advertising at Framestore. Whether you are generating detailed renders for pitches and treatments, or combining 2D and 3D in interesting new ways like we did on the "Spectre" titles, these tools stand out. We couldn't be more excited and pleased with the implementation. NUKEs first VR system arrives via two new cameras, covering spherical and stereo cube maps. With VR exploding into the mainstream, studios finally have an easy way to access this lucrative market. V-Ray Standalone brings real-time, GPU-accelerated rendering to film and broadcast projects, including full access to the entire V-Ray line-up (bucket, progressive and V-Ray RT). The addition of a V-Ray VRscene node will help teams transmit full render-ready assets from V-Ray for 3ds Max and Maya to NUKE artists (or vice versa) with perfect parity. Users can preview, instance, transform and control V-Ray scene files with 100% consistency, no matter where they are in the pipeline. When people think of NUKE, they usually dont think of rendering, said Vlado Koylazov, CTO of Chaos Group. Now artists can create a 3D scene using the same nodal workflow used throughout NUKE. For a full feature list, please visit: http://www.v-ray.com/nuke/features/sp3/. Pricing and Availability V-Ray for NUKE is available now through select resellers for $1,040. For a limited time, artists can also purchase V-Ray 3.3 for NUKE and a copy of either V-Ray 3.3 for 3ds Max or Maya for $1,500. To take advantage of this promotion, please contact: sales(at)chaosgroup(dot)com. About Chaos Group Chaos Group is a worldwide leader in computer graphics technology, helping artists and designers create photoreal imagery and animation for design, television, and feature films. Chaos Groups physically based lighting and rendering software V-Ray is used daily by top design studios, architectural firms, advertising agencies, and visual effects companies around the globe. Today, the company's research and development in cloud rendering, material scanning, and virtual reality is shaping the future of creative storytelling and digital design. Founded in 1997, Chaos Group is privately owned with offices in Sofia, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Seoul, and Tokyo. For more information, visit: chaosgroup.com. It is time to ensure we really consider issues about sustainability, livability and wellness, inclusiveness, and equity in city planning. April is American City Quality Month, and city leaders and planners are asking Presidential Candidates, Whats your plan for Americas cities? In a joint statement, The Honorable Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake, Mayor, City of Baltimore, Maryland and President of the U.S. Conference of Mayors; The Honorable Melodee Colbert-Kean, City Councilmember, City of Joplin, Missouri and President of the National League of Cities; and the American City Planning Directors Council of the American City Quality Foundation specifically ask: What is the candidates vision for the future development of Americas cities and regions? How do we accommodate the U.S. Census projection of 23 million additional citizens by the year 2025 and 36 million by 2030? This is the equivalent of building 12 cities the size of Chicago. Is their vision business as usual, enabling continued urban sprawl, higher government operating expenses and taxes? Or is it development that is more concentrated to create more livable, walkable, inclusive and sustainable communities linked by improved public transit? What is the federal role? How can land use, housing and transportation systems be better coordinated? How can we better link public sector goals with private sector implementation? How will infrastructure, housing, public facilities and utilities be funded? Will we ensure there is a real cash-on-cash return on public investments that can be used for infrastructure operations and maintenance and re-investment similar to a private investment? The questions are submitted on behalf of the nations city planning directors to urge continued support for the preparation, adoption, funding, implementation and coordination of urban and regional Better Quality Communities Plans. In conjunction with this outreach, the Council has sent a letter to the U.S. Congress, state governors, and state legislators asking the respective leaders to immediately commit to preparing, adopting and implementing the nationwide and regional physical development plans to support economic and social development and environmental protection policies. The plans must: 1. Be a coordinated intergovernmental and private sector commitment for better quality city planning, re-development and development of our nations cities and surrounding regions. 2. Be comprehensive and address all federal/state and local policies and programs impacting physical development. 3. Involve developing and adopting better quality federal, state and local land use patterns, economic development zones, pedestrian-oriented civic centers and neighborhoods, affordable housing, public transportation (including passenger rail service), inter-regional high-speed rail facilities, airports and harbors, renewable energy facilities, prime agricultural lands protection, recreational/open space/conservation land, air quality, water supply quality and conservation, public schools, public safety and related facilities and utility systems, and overall urban design and beautification. 4. Ensure taxpayers receive an actual financial return on their investment, just like a private sector investment, and lower governmental operating expenses and taxes. The commitment is sought as part of the 28th annual, month-long national American City Quality Month program. This years theme is Planning for Smart Growth is Planning for Quality Communities. City planners across the country are urging everyone to be engaged. Public support is needed to adopt plans, implementation programs, and ordinances to achieve results. Some work has been started to comprehensively coordinate intergovernmental and private sector investments and actions affecting physical development to achieve better quality and sustainable urban and regional communities. The inter-department cooperation between HUD, DOT, EPA, DOC-Economic Development, USDA, HHS and others has been terrific. However, more Congressional support and funding is required, along with plan adoption and implementation to guide billions of dollars in infrastructure investments and create millions of new jobs. Business as usual policies that continue urban sprawl and higher government operating expenses and taxes are unacceptable, said Gerald R. Mylroie, AICP, Chairman of the American City Planning Directors Council and the American City Quality Foundation. Urban and regional planning policies affecting physical development must be viewed differently; they must be comprehensively and collaboratively coordinated. Revenues must be shared among cooperating jurisdictions. Mylroie added, It is time we actually link transportation with land use decisions and obtain real cash-on-cash returns on investments for citizens from publicly-funded infrastructure projects. It is time to ensure we really consider issues about sustainability, livability and wellness, inclusiveness, and equity in city planning. About American City Quality Month April has been designated as American City Quality Month by the National League of Cities, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, American City Planning Directors Council and American City Quality Foundation. Other sponsors include Urban Land Institute, National Building Museum, and International City / County Management Association and others. The purpose is to annually focus national and local public attention on the status and future of Americas cities, and to promote better city planning, decisions, design, development, management, and action to improve cities. During American City Quality Month, cities across the country will be expressing appreciation for the mostly voluntary time contributed by city planning board members to improve city quality. Also they will be conducting be conducting public meetings, passing proclamations, holding events, displaying educational exhibits, and conducting teach-ins at local schools. Topics that local city planners and officials will be discussing include changing demographics, local economic and social development opportunities, land use, transportation, affordable housing, climate change implications, and urban sprawl. For more information, see http://www.cityquality.org or contact your city planning director or the American City Planning Directors Council at ACQF(at)aol(dot)com. American City Quality - What is it? Quality means consistently achieving a higher standard. City quality means consistently achieving higher standards for development, education, security, social conduct, environmental protection and other factors that influence urban life. These standards evolve from the needs and expectations of citizens. A quality city knows the needs and expectations of its citizens, sets goals and standards, then acts to achieve them. Also, a quality city will monitor its performance and take corrective action if it is not able to meet these standards. But, what are the standards? How are they identified, set and achieved? This is a continuing process. City planners, as well as others, play a critical role in this process. They help identify needs, set vision or plans and standards, and help meet them. But this is difficult given competing interests and time and resource limitations. Thus, increased public awareness is needed. American City Quality Month (ACQM) will spark debate about standards for our cities. Given the current condition of many cities, we need new vision, new plans, new standards and actions to achieve them, and increase American City Quality. This is the fundamental objective of American City Quality Month. In April, events will focus on the current and emerging city issues; provide opportunities to formulate plans for solutions and put these plans in motion. While the concept seems simple, achieving a quality city is not easy. Commitment is vital. Elected officials, government employees, business and residents must support a citys standards. Technical assistance and a reward or recognition program are also critical if a city is to improve. Participants/Activities/Events City planning directors, in conjunction with other public and private sector civic leaders will be conducting a variety of events to raise public awareness. These include: City officials are encouraged to hold public meetings to discuss city planning and development issues; sponsoring exhibits on new plans and programs for community revitalization; and discussing urban issues and opportunities with local school students. Corporations are urged to sponsor public national advertisements describing what they are doing to help improve the quality of Americas cities. Local city planning and other civic organizations are urged to hold meetings and initiate projects to improve cities. Schools are encouraged to develop educational programs on cities and how they can be improved (e.g., build models, write essays, and draw pictures). Universities offering degrees in City Planning and other agencies are urged to initiate teaching programs and activities to raise public awareness. Local and national media are encouraged to report and/or publish articles on the status and future of cities and how they can be improved. For more information, see http://www.cityquality.org or contact your city planning director or the American City Planning Directors Council at ACQF(at)aol(dot)com. ### By combining external data with internal business performance analytics, Prevederes ability to power more accurate forecasting is transforming the way global businesses predict sales and demand. Prevedere, a leader in business performance forecasting, today named technology pioneer Ken Coleman, chairman at Saama Technologies and advisor to Andreessen Horowitz, to its board. Coleman joins Prevederes existing board members, who guide the companys go-to-market strategy and positioning as an innovative predictive analytics provider that is re-inventing enterprise business forecasting. By combining external data with internal business performance analytics, Prevederes ability to power more accurate forecasting is transforming the way global businesses predict sales and demand, said Coleman. With more than 30 years of technology experience, Coleman will leverage his product development expertise to provide strategic guidance as Prevedere expands its enterprise client base. Coleman spent more than 13 years as an executive at a high-growth computer hardware and software manufacturer, Silicon Graphics, Inc. He has also served as chairman of ITM Software (which later sold to BMC Software), MIPS, a semiconductor IP company, and Accelrys, a scientific enterprise software provider for chemical, materials and bioscience research. He has been named one of the most influential African Americans in the San Francisco Bay area and was appointed to a special government advisory group on U.S./India Trade Policy in 2010. I am proud to welcome Ken Coleman to our board, said Rich Wagner, president & CEO at Prevedere. His experience in enterprise management will help take Prevedere to the next level in business performance forecasting and enterprise software innovation. Coleman joins Prevederes existing board of directors and advisors: Dan Fishback, Don Fowler, Pete Thomas, John Christman, Joseph Ellis, Kevin McGuire, Chris LaBruna and Jack Noonan. ### About Prevedere Prevedere offers executives an unprecedented view of business performance, empowering smarter, more profitable decisions. By allowing companies to look beyond their own walls for key external drivers of business performance, such as macroeconomic factors, manufacturing activity, consumer behavior, online and weather data, Prevederes clients improve performance with more reliable forecasts of future demand, reducing forecast error by greater than 50 percent. Prevederes software quickly and easily integrates with existing financial and supply chain planning platforms to ensure companies are looking at the right factors that drive business. Selected as a Gartner Cool Vendor in Information Innovation and named Innovation Enterprises FP&A Innovation Awards winner in Forecasting and Planning, Prevedere solves a critical void in business planning. To learn more, visit prevederesoftware.com and follow @Prevedere on Twitter. While traditional student transfers occur between academic years, this report shows that students frequently move among institutions even within a single year, stated Dr. Doug Shapiro, Executive Research Director of the Research Center. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center today released the Postsecondary Student One-Year Mobility Snapshot Report for all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The report shows that nationally, 9.4 percent of all college students, across all levels of study, enrolled in more than one institution within the 2014-15 academic year. The one-year mobility rate underscores the need for institutions to facilitate smooth transitions for college students, both within and across state lines. It also provides a current indicator of the likely double-counting of institution-based annual enrollment reporting. While traditional student transfers occur between academic years, this report shows that students frequently move among institutions even within a single year, stated Dr. Doug Shapiro, Executive Research Director of the Research Center. In order for states and institutions to better support todays non-traditional students, they need a better understanding of the types of transitions that students navigate, not just over the long term, but every single year. Other key one-year mobility findings include: In 2014-15, nearly 21 percent of all mobile students attended institutions in more than one state. In each year, nearly 75 percent of all mobile students had at least one enrollment at a two-year public institution. Top five states with the highest percentage of students attending multiple institutions in a single academic year are: North Dakota (17.1 percent) Kansas (15.9 percent) Vermont (15.3 percent) Texas (15.1 percent) Iowa (14.2 percent) Top five states with the highest percentage of students crossing state lines while attending multiple institutions in a single academic year are: Vermont (11.4 percent) North Dakota (10.6 percent) District of Columbia (9.0 percent) Delaware (8.0 percent) West Virginia (7.7 percent) New Hampshire (7.7 percent) The postsecondary one-year mobility rate is the percentage of students, across all levels of study, who enrolled in more than one institution within a single academic year, including summer, online, and concurrent enrollments. This view of student mobility differs from the longitudinal view taken in the Research Centers Signature Report 9 on Transfer and Mobility, published last July, which found that 37 percent of all students enroll in more than one institution during their undergraduate careers. However, much of that mobility occurs from one year to the next. About the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center is the research arm of the National Student Clearinghouse. The Research Center collaborates with higher education institutions, states, school districts, high schools, and educational organizations as part of a national effort to better inform education leaders and policymakers. Through accurate longitudinal data outcomes reporting, the Research Center enables better educational policy decisions leading to improved student outcomes. To learn more, visit https://nscresearchcenter.org/. ### John Nothdurft, Director of Government Relations, The Heartland Institute Vapor products are having a positive impact on public health, but they could have an even greater one if government gets out of the way. On Tuesday, the House Appropriations Committee passed an amendment to its fiscal year 2017 agricultural appropriations bill that changes the predicate date for vapor products to the effective date of the Food and Drug Administrations (FDA) final rule. The amendment passed by a 3119 bipartisan vote. FDA, which is poised to soon propose regulation of electronic cigarettes, had previously planned to force every e-cigarette product that came on the market after February 15, 2007 the predicate date to go through the onerous and expensive Pre-Market Tobacco Application process. The following statements from vaping and electronic cigarette experts at The Heartland Institute a free-market think tank may be used for attribution. For more comments, refer to the contact information below. To book a Heartland guest on your program, please contact New Media Specialist Donald Kendal at dkendal(at)heartland(dot)org and 312/377-4000 or (cell) 847/877-9100. Vapor products are having a positive impact on public health, but they could have an even greater one if government gets out of the way. Having a reasonable grandfather date for products based on the date the final FDA regulations are filed rather than a date set before most vapor products were even on the market is one of the most important policy decisions Congress can make regarding the regulation of vapor products. Without changing the grandfather date, very few, if any, vapor products would be able to stay on the market. It would be cost-prohibitive for the overwhelming majority of these products to go through FDAs approval process. John Nothdurft Director of Government Relations The Heartland Institute jnothdurft(at)heartland(dot)org 312/377-4000 Finally, the government is acknowledging how the vaping market is helping thousands of people quit smoking cigarettes. The move to healthier options, without overzealous government intervention, will surely have a positive effect on Americans health in the future. Lindsey Stroud Government Relations Coordinator The Heartland Institute lstroud(at)heartland(dot)org 312/377-4000 This is an important, albeit small, step in the right direction. What is most impressive and promising going forward is that this vote for harm reduction garnered bipartisan sponsorship and support. The regulation would have the effect, intended or not, of taking e-cigarettes away from former smokers who quit smoking by using these less-harmful alternatives. This is exactly the opposite of what government should be doing, which is to create a regulatory environment that encourages smokers to switch to e-cigarettes, the dramatically less harmful way to get nicotine. Jeff Stier Senior Fellow, National Center for Public Policy Research Policy Advisor, The Heartland Institute jeffstier(at)gmail(dot)com 312/377-4000 This amendment represents a much-needed reprieve for Americas public health, which has been so cynically corrupted over the past six years by those ostensibly providing leadership. But with all due respect to Rep. Tom Cole and so many other true health advocates, even if enacted, it is merely a stopgap, a finger in the dike that is still slated to be inundated by FDAs proposed regulations. Gilbert L. Ross, M.D. Policy Advisor The Heartland Institute media(at)heartland(dot)org 312/377-4000 Without changing the predicate date, most of these innovative products will never be able to make their way to the marketplace, leaving those who are looking for a less-harmful alternative to smoking with limited options. Vaping is not the same as smoking tobacco products, and many smokers use e-cigarettes to stop smoking, thereby reducing the likelihood of suffering in the future from serious tobacco-related illnesses, such as lung cancer. E-cigarettes and other vaping devices have far fewer negative consequences for vapers and bystanders, and they should not be treated the same as tobacco products. Matthew Glans Senior Policy Analyst The Heartland Institute mglans(at)heartland(dot)org 312/377-4000 The Heartland Institute is a 32-year-old national nonprofit organization headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our Web site or call 312/377-4000. "As always, we are very glad to be able to go to such an event and ADVOCATE is looking forward to seeing everyone in Colorado." ADVOCATE, the largest radiology-only, revenue cycle management (RCM) company in the nation, will be exhibiting at the Radiology Business Management Association (RBMA) Summit at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The summit will be taking place April 24th-26th and will give ADVOCATE the opportunity to display its industry-leading RCM solutions to potential clients and network with peers. Through their Gold Sponsorship with the RBMA, ADVOCATE will be able to showcase their unique billing engine which allows the company to collect more revenue from insurance companies in an increasingly complex healthcare system. Radiology professionals will get a chance to learn about ADVOCATEs highly specialized billing approach that offers radiologists a fully integrated billing service which maximizes the revenue cycle of their practices and provides unmatched business intelligence. In addition, attendees of this event will be able to enter to win an Apple Watch when they stop by ADVOCATEs booth. As always, we are very glad to be able to go to such an event and ADVOCATE is looking forward to seeing everyone in Colorado. The RBMA Summit gives us an opportunity to showcase our latest, most advanced technologies and RCM solutions. Through events like these, we can more easily demonstrate the unique services we provide in an educational and consultative approach, said Kirk Reinitz, President & CEO of ADVOCATE. What: 100% Radiology RCM solution demonstrations, RBMA 2016 Radiology Summit Where: The Broadmoor Colorado Springs, CO Booth Number: 310 When: April 24 26, 2016 About ADVOCATE ADVOCATE is the leading radiology reimbursement services company that offers a complete and integrated approach to business issues. ADVOCATE operates nationwide with clients in all 50 states providing our unique Experience Based Technology (EBT) suite of services to thousands of radiologists. With our seasoned staff of professionals, we focus on addressing the unique needs of todays practicing radiology physicians. With proven management, business processes and advanced technology to support our operations, ADVOCATE has the people and infrastructure to manage the business of radiology effectively and efficiently. With over 20 years of radiology billing experience, and proven measurable results, ADVOCATE works as a trusted and stable business partner to provide clients with a reliable, trouble-free implementation, increased cash flow, training, and support. For ADVOCATE inquiries contact: Paulo E. Santos, Chief Business Development Officer 303-517-3210 paulo.santos(at)radadvocate(dot)com The Triumph Peace Mural on the Watsonville ArtWall Watsonville, in the center of the Monterey Bay's $2.1 billion global tourist industry, is an ideal place to make such a huge public statement! Today, The Art Wall Company, run by Peter and Lisa Mackeonis, announced the creation of 'Triumph,' a 4,000 square foot 'peace mural' on the Monterey Bay's community-based Watsonville Art Wall, by volunteer artists Paul De Worken and Jaime Sanchez (founders of Monterey Bay Murals) dedicated in support of Lord Michael Bates' 3,000 km, "Walk for Peace," from Buenos Aires to Rio de Janiero, in anticipation of the upcoming 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. 'Triumph', a highly expressive mural, designed by Jaime Sanchez, pays homage to Pablo Picasso's 'Guernica' and Henri Matisse's 'La Dance' and dramatically draws attention to the conflicts around the world, and supports Lord Bates' cause, which focuses on UN Resolution A/RES/48/11, calling for the cease of world conflicts during the Olympic games. This unanimously signed, and unanimously ignored, resolution of 1993 Urged all Member States to take the initiative to abide by the Truce, individually and collectively, and to pursue in conformity with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations the peaceful settlement of all international conflicts. Through his 3,000 mile trek, Lord Michael Bates is calling for all countries participating in the upcoming Olympics, to lay down their weapons during the summer games, in accordance with this resolution. Lord Michael Bates / "Walk for Truce 2012" Michael Bates was born May 26,1961 in Gateshead, England, and is a Conservative Party politician in the United Kingdom and Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party. He was awarded a life peerage on June 30, 2008. This is not Lord Bates' first walk for peace, in support of the ignored UN resolution. In 2012, artists CODE FC and Jack Haslehurst, created a mural on the Mackeonis' iconic London, Shoreditch Art Wall, for Lord Bates' 3,200 km "Walk for Truce" for the 2012 London Olympics, in which he met with world leaders along the way, calling for peace during those games. Unfortunately, his call was ignored and countries at war continued their operations as usual. The Watsonville Art Wall (WAW) WAW was created to be part of Watsonville's Revitalization Program, to help elevate the city through creative and rotating murals and art installations. This 125 ft. by 30 ft. wall located on the Petroutsas' family building at 347 Main Street, across from the plaza, within the grassy park in historic downtown Watsonville, will feature a new and massive mural every 3 to 4 months. Donations Paul and Jaime donated their time, the paint for 'Triumph' was kindly donated by Bill King of 'King's Paint and Paper' in Soquel, California and Manuel Rodrigues of 'Ace Hardware' in Watsonville, California. The lifts were graciously donated by Robert Pedersen of 'A Tool Shed' in Santa Cruz, California. Contacts: Watsonville Art Wall Peter Mackeonis peter[at]watsonvilleartwall.com 831.840.3729. tel. Monterey Bay Murals Paul De Worken / http://www.montereybaymurals.com i Watsonville, CA "Walk for Truce" 2016 / http://www.walkfortruce.org/contact/ # # # Electrical engineering comes alive at iD Tech with SparkFun Arduino products 'Through our summer STEM programs, we ignite a childs future, inspiring the next generation of technology visionaries.' - Pete Ingram-Cauchi CEO, iD Tech Riding the popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT), iD Tech, the leading summer educational STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) program, sees a 46% increase in enrollment in its electrical engineering courses for kids and teens. Internet of Things (IoT) is a term that is becoming increasingly well known as more items collect and transmit data over the Internet. For example the wearable devices market grew 223% in 2015, according to best-selling author, Bernard Marr. There were 3.6 million Apple watches sold and 4.4 million Fitbits shipped. With this fast growing industry, an estimated $10-$15 trillion dollars will be added to the GDP over the next 2 decades. This equates to many opportunities. This Internet of Things trend is reflected in the increased enrollment of the five iD Tech electrical engineering courses. iD Tech students learn how to design electrical engineering products using Arduino, an open-source circuit board provided by their partner, SparkFun. The Arduino is a programmable circuit board that takes input from sensors and controls motors, lights, and other devices. Through our summer STEM programs, we ignite a childs future, inspiring the next generation of technology visionaries, said Pete Ingram-Cauchi, CEO, iD Tech, We are pleased to partner with SparkFun, combining their innovative engineering products with our engaging curriculum. As the demand for STEM professionals increases, STEM education is a critical component in preparing young people for entry into an evolving workforce, said Nathan Seidle, founder and CEO of SparkFun. Working with iD Tech, electronics can get kids excited about the endless possibilities of electrical engineering, which is so important in todays technologically focused world. In addition to electrical engineering courses, iD Tech students ages 6-18 learn programming, build robots, design video games, and create hands-on tech projects. These summer programs provide a fun learning environment where students express their creativity through technology. They see firsthand how an interest can turn into a college degree and compelling career. This experience inspires them to keep learning, giving them a competitive advantage for school, college, and life. Programs are held at over 150 prestigious campuses nationwide, including Stanford, Harvard, Caltech, and other locations. Who knows, perhaps a future IoT breakthrough will come from an iD Tech student. To learn more, visit http://www.iDTech.com. Download Assets here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B11e9sFqcAN4TzRxLTlySjVhOVk # # # About iD Tech (http://www.iDTech.com) iD Tech is the leader in summer STEM education programs for students ages 6-18, with over 235,000 students who have attended iD Tech since 1999. Students solve engineering challenges, learn programming, code apps, build robots, design video games, and more. Programs are held at over 130 prestigious campuses nationwide, including the University of Washington, Stanford, Rice, Caltech, Yale, Princeton, and many others. In addition to Alexa Cafe, there are 4 other iD Tech summer STEM programs held nationwide: iD Tech Camps (weeklong, all-girls, ages 7-17), iD Tech Mini (weeklong, co-ed, half-day options, ages 6-9) as well as teen academies iD Programming Academy and iD Game Design & Development Academy (2-week, pre-college, co-ed, ages 13-18). About SparkFun Electronics (http://www.SparkFun.com) SparkFun Electronics understands that connecting learners with the spirit of innovation will lead to a generation of thinkers, innovators who can shape the world with powerful ideas and solutions and solve real-world problems with technology. Electronics is more than a hobby, but a creative medium for advancing teaching and learning. SparkFun is a firm believer in the ideology of open source technology which encourages innovation and creativity, while helping empower individuals to build the projects they want. Press Contacts: iD Tech Karen Thurm Safran 408-666-8353 karen(at)iDTech(dot)com SparkFun Electronics Jahnell Pereira 303-284-0979, ext 800 jahnell(dot)pereira(at)sparkfun(dot)com Twelve education foundation executives from 10 states are the first to be nationally certified as leaders in one of philanthropys fastest-growing fields. The National School Foundation Association (NSFA), the recognized leader of the Pre K-12 education foundation movement in the United States, developed the program in collaboration with National University and its Sanford Institute of Philanthropy. The graduates are being honored during the associations 11th annual National Conference (April 18-20) in St. Louis. The new certification program, believed to be the only program of its type anywhere in the world, incorporates the unique expertise of San Diego-based National Universitys Sanford Institute of Philanthropy, a provider of innovative cause leadership, cause sales and fundraising strategies for nonprofits that was created with the support of philanthropist T. Denny Sanford. A certificate of completion is issued from National University, the second-largest private nonprofit university in California, and the formal certification through the NSFA. We congratulate the first graduates of this program, and are pleased to be collaborating with the NSFA to help train a new generation of foundation leaders in education, said Dr. Lena Rodriguez, endowed director of the Sanford Institute of Philanthropy at National University, which is leading a national initiative to expand the Institutes approaches through affiliations with organizations and other universities. The NSFA certification program sets the gold standard for quality education foundation leadership through an emphasis on cause leadership skillsone of the cornerstones of the Sanford Institute of Philanthropy and integrates elements of organizational management, fundraising and donor relations. NSFA comprises leaders of 1,000 of the nations nearly 5,000 local foundations, which supplement traditional school funding for activities and programs ranging from math to music. The program recognizes a growing need to address funding gaps for the nations Pre K-12 schools through a formalized professional development process. By strengthening the leadership of our nations education foundations, we can improve the investments were making for the future by starting with this generation of students, said NSFA executive director Nina Menis. The program emphasizes skills and knowledge required to effectively lead education foundations, with fundraising elements integrated throughout the program. Areas of focus include: Building and sustaining a well-connected and engaged board of directors; Efficient organizational planning and development; Key financial management techniques; Establishing effective and cooperative relationships with school districts and other community stakeholders; Key legal requirements and comprehensive resource and marketing strategies. School foundations are needed now, more than ever. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan economic research organization, states are providing less per-pupil funding for kindergarten through 12th grade than they did six years ago. Yet, the average amount raised by most school foundations is just about 0.3 percent of a typical district's budget. Newly-certified Education Foundation Leader Traci Skalberg, executive director of the Grand Island (NE) Public Schools Foundation, found the program highly relevant to her own background running an organization for 13 years. Every course gave me strategic insight into what I was doing about things that matterfrom strengthening the board and organizational planning to legal issues, resource development, and educational collaboration, she said. Being able to network is another bonus, say participants. Sharing experiences, documents, and strategies has created a network between us that I think will be a huge asset well beyond the course end date," says Gail Rothman, executive director of the Decatur Education Foundation in Decatur, GA. Additional information and registration information for the Education Foundation Leadership Program can be found at http://sanfordeducationcenter.org/sanford-nfsa-certificate.cfm About the National School Foundation Association. NSFA is a recognized leader of the Pre K-12 education foundation movement in the United States, providing training and support for foundation development and the quest to increase student achievement through strategic philanthropic investment and involvement. Supported in the early stages with a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, the mission of the NSFA is to provide support, training, and resources to education foundations and their leaders to maximize their success. This mission is accomplished through State Affiliate Organizations (Florida, Indiana, Iowa, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Utah), individual memberships throughout the United States, and with the support of partners, business leaders, education leaders, and government officials who share our passion for quality educational programs for our nations schools. For more information, go to http://www.SchoolFoundations.org. About National Universitys Sanford Institute of Philanthropy. Founded in 1971, National University is the second-largest private, nonprofit institution of higher education in California and home of the flagship Sanford Institute of Philanthropy. The Institute offers education programs with an emphasis on cause sales, cause leadership and fundraising developed by the Universitys School of Business and Management and Division of Extended Learning. The Institutes unique Cause Sales approach toward fundraising and donor relationships blends the passion of philanthropy with an emphasis on proven business principles. Based on the vision of philanthropist and entrepreneur T. Denny Sanford, the Sanford Institute of Philanthropy initiative, based out of National University, is growing to include affiliate Institutes at other universities and partnerships with organizations to create customizable programming that serve the unique needs of nonprofits and their local communities. http://sanfordeducationcenter.org/instituteofphilanthropy.cfm As the demand for STEM professionals increases, STEM education is a critical component in preparing young people for entry into an evolving workforce Riding the popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT), iD Tech, the leading summer educational STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) program, sees a 46% increase in enrollment in its electrical engineering courses for kids and teens and expands relationship with SparkFun Electronics to provide engaging electronics kits and materials. Internet of Things (IoT) is a term that is becoming increasingly well known as more items collect and transmit data over the Internet. For example the wearable devices market grew 223% in 2015, according to best-selling author, Bernard Marr. There were 3.6 million Apple watches sold and 4.4 million Fitbits shipped. With this fast growing industry, an estimated $10-$15 trillion dollars will be added to the GDP over the next 2 decades. This equates to many opportunities. This Internet of Things trend is reflected in the increased enrollment of the five iD Tech electrical engineering courses. iD Tech students learn how to design electrical engineering products using Arduino, an open-source circuit board provided by SparkFun. The Arduino is a programmable circuit board that takes input from sensors and controls motors, lights, and other devices. Through our summer STEM programs, we ignite a childs future, inspiring the next generation of technology visionaries, said Pete Ingram-Cauchi, CEO, iD Tech, We are pleased to partner with SparkFun, combining their innovative engineering products with our engaging curriculum. As the demand for STEM professionals increases, STEM education is a critical component in preparing young people for entry into an evolving workforce, said Nathan Seidle, founder and CEO of SparkFun. Working with iD Tech, electronics can get kids excited about the endless possibilities of electrical engineering, which is so important in todays technologically focused world. In addition to electrical engineering courses, iD Tech students ages 6-18 learn programming, build robots, design video games, and create hands-on tech projects. These summer programs provide a fun learning environment where students express their creativity through technology. They see firsthand how an interest can turn into a college degree and compelling career. This experience inspires them to keep learning, giving them a competitive advantage for school, college, and life. Programs are held at over 150 prestigious campuses nationwide, including Stanford, Harvard, Caltech, and other locations. Who knows, perhaps a future IoT breakthrough will come from an iD Tech student. To learn more about ID Tech visit iDTech.com. To learn more about SparkFun Education visit http://learn.sparkfun.com/about. # # # ABOUT SPARKFUN ELECTRONICS (http://learn.sparkfun.com/about) SparkFun Electronics understands that connecting learners with the spirit of innovation will lead to a generation of thinkers. Innovators who can shape the world with powerful ideas and solutions and solve real-world problems with technology. Electronics is more than a hobby, but a creative medium for advancing teaching and learning. SparkFun is a firm believer in the ideology of open source technology which encourages innovation and creativity, while helping empower individuals to build the projects they want. ABOUT iD TECH (http://www.iDTech.com) iD Tech is the leader in summer STEM education programs for students ages 6-18, with over 235,000 students who have attended iD Tech since 1999. Students solve engineering challenges, learn programming, code apps, build robots, design video games, and more. Programs are held at over 130 prestigious campuses nationwide, including the University of Washington, Stanford, Rice, Caltech, Yale, Princeton, and many others. In addition to Alexa Cafe, there are 4 other iD Tech summer STEM programs held nationwide: iD Tech Camps (weeklong, all-girls, ages 7-17), iD Tech Mini (weeklong, co-ed, half-day options, ages 6-9) as well as teen academies iD Programming Academy and iD Game Design & Development Academy (2-week, pre-college, co-ed, ages 13-18). Functional fashion accessory company, Maria Shireen (http://www.mariashireen.com) - makers of the popular b+sweet, bittersweet and signature by Maria Shireen collections of patent-pending hair tie bracelets today launches its Charity Ties initiative. Under this initiative, the company will offer hair tie bracelets with #BANDOFSTRENGTH engraved on them, and will include a corresponding hair tie in a color that represents the specific cause. For each bracelet sold, ten dollars ($10) will be donated to a related organization dedicated to making a positive difference. Moving forward, the company expects to benefit three to four social good causes per year. This month, Maria Shireen kicks off its first campaign with a hair tie bracelet dedicated to postpartum awareness and support. The bracelet (http://www.mariashireen.com/products/charity-ties) retails for $45 and includes a white hair band as well as the #BANDOFSTRENGTH engraving. As a new mom, Maria Shireen Co-Founder and CEO Shireen Thor experienced first-hand the difficult and challenging effects of postpartum depression following the birth of her son in 2015. As someone who has come through the experience and launched a successful accessories business in the process, she and her husband, Maria Shireen co-Founder Arni Thor, aim to support women through programs that address postpartum symptoms and experiences as well as through furthering research into the solutions for postpartum. With a background in engineering and medical device product development, this campaign is a perfect example of her continued dedication towards easing the challenges of others. We believe in the power of compassion and in the strength that is created when we band together in support of a common cause, said Thor. We know there are many causes that are close to the hearts of our customers, and we believe that by being able to wear a positive reminder every day of the community and friendship around us, we will feel more connected and supported as we journey onwards. Since Maria Shireens debut in April 2015, its hair tie bracelets have been featured in leading print and online media outlets, on national television shows and has created many retail partnerships. With over 110,000 bracelets sold around the world to date to customers in 40 countries, the company will be expanding in 2016-2017 into mass retail and television shopping networks. Maria Shireens portfolio currently includes products aimed at both the luxury and mass retail markets, and is available for all ages. To learn more about b+sweet, bittersweet and signature by Maria Shireen, please visit http://www.mariashireen.com. Find us on Facebook and Instagram at https://www.facebook.com/MariaShireenBracelet/ and https://instagram.com/maria_shireen/ About Maria Shireen: Founded by design engineers, Shireen and Arni Thor, Maria Shireen is a functional fashion accessories company serving the $2.3 billion global fashion accessories marketplace. The company currently designs, produces and markets its patent-pending hair tie bracelet under its b+sweet, bittersweet, and signature by Maria Shireen brands. The company is based in San Diego, California the twentieth largest bracelet accessory market in the world. Media Contact: Shaila Arora Arora PR shaila(at)arorapr(dot)com 310.717.8255 Sophia Paliov Arora PR sophia(at)arorapr(dot)com 949.525.5022 6S Marketing, a leading international digital agency, is furthering their expansion in Toronto with two new team members. Already established in Vancouver and New York, 6S Marketing recently hired Kareem Perez and Aaron Carlson to join their downtown Toronto office on Adelaide Street West, a new space acquired after the company rapidly expanded their clientele in Eastern Canada this year. A skilled campaign leader, Kareem Perez joins 6S Marketing as Senior Account Manager. Formerly Account Director at the agency Search Engine People, Perez brings lengthy experience in digital strategy, analytics, and campaign management to 6S. He specializes in creating digital tactics, which boost brand authority and trust. A graduate of Ryerson University's Business Management Program, Perez has attained both agency and personal consultation experience. In his new role, he plans to focus on results-oriented digital marketing strategies, emphasizing measurable development above all. With six years of SEM, SEO, and ecommerce analytics experience, Aaron Carlson has been appointed Senior PPC Specialist. Carlson comes to 6S with a background in managing search marketing and web analytics teams, with previous experience attained as Marketing Analyst at Cymax. His skills in remarketing and conversion optimization are uniquely specialized to large-scale ecommerce campaigns. Carlson will be employing these skills to facilitate the success of 6S Marketing's major ecommerce clients. Perez and Carlson will play a vital role in serving 6S Marketing's expanding Toronto client roster, which currently includes Queens University, Seneca College, OpenFarm, and Staples. A trusted Google Partner and award-winning Top Employer, 6S Marketing is excited to welcome their new team members and facilitate further expansion in Eastern Canada. About 6S Marketing 6S Marketing is a global digital agency that transforms businesses for the digital age. For over 15 years, the company has been helping clients embrace the digital world and the technological change that is revolutionizing their businesses by connecting data and storytelling to help make brands profitable, shareable, and ultimately more valuable. 6S Marketing provides distribution of advertising creative via such paid campaigns across multiple digital channels as Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, WeChat, Weibo and Baidu. 6S is more than a digital agencytheyre a trusted partner and collaborator. Over the course of my career, I have never before witnessed a rate of change and disruption anywhere close to what we are now experiencing. Using experience gained over three decades and her passion for helping hospital and health system laboratories compete with Quest Diagnostics and Laboratory Corporation of America, Dr. Kathleen Murphy, former CEO and owner of Chi Solutions (Chi), now an Accumen Company, has released an engaging book titled The Profit Machine in the Hospital Basement: Turning Your Lab Into an Economic Engine. Murphy will launch her book and serve as faculty at the 21st Annual Executive War College Conference on Laboratory & Pathology Management to be held April 26-27, 2016, in New Orleans. In her book, Murphy debunks the common outreach myths and makes a strong case for laboratory as a hidden profit machine. The book provides insight into the rationale, strategy and improved financial outcomes that come from leveraging the spare capacity in the facilities, equipment and staff in every hospital laboratory. Murphys book also provides the hospital c-suite with valuable information about the history of the industry, clinical laboratory outreach myths, strategy, structure and infrastructure, sales, and financial considerations. Over the course of my career, I have never before witnessed a rate of change and disruption anywhere close to what we are now experiencing. Outreach brings material new revenues and margins to hospitals looking for ways to offset decreasing reimbursement from traditional service lines. The secret is in the structure, funding, and execution as a serious business entity, says Murphy. Murphy now serves as Senior Growth Advisor to Accumen and has held leadership roles at Chi for more than 22 years, overseeing complex engagements involving strategic options development, operations optimization, consolidation, and outreach program implementation. She is a noted speaker and author on laboratory outreach. Under her leadership, Chi has continued its legacy of helping hospitals compete with national laboratories through regionalization and outreach. As an Accumen company, Chi will continue to focus on the untapped value in hospital and health system laboratories and Accelerate Breakthrough Performance. Accumen CEO, Jeff Osborne showed his excitement about the book release and partnering with Murphy and the team at Chi. We see them as equally passionate about the opportunities in the lab industry and offering a powerful combination of talented expertise that complements Accumens mission to profoundly impact healthcare. Murphy has also been instrumental in directing the annual performance and publication of Chis widely regarded and referenced Comprehensive National Laboratory Outreach Survey. Before joining Chi, she directed laboratory and radiology operations at two of the top academic medical centers in Boston. Murphy obtained her PhD in microbiology and immunology from the University of North Dakota and has completed executive education coursework at Dartmouth and Harvard Business School. About Accumen Inc. Accumen is a healthcare transformation company. Using a proven blueprint, innovative customized approach and proprietary technology, Accumen partners with health systems to set new standards of performance in the clinical lab - driving higher quality, better service and unprecedented value. Accumen delivers proven results in Clinical Laboratory Operations and Patient Blood Management with solutions that are designed to help clients create healthier labs, healthier hospitals and ultimately, healthier communities. Accumen Accelerating Breakthrough Performance Find more information at http://www.accumen.com. About Chi Solutions, Inc. Chi Solutions, Inc. (Chi) is a nationally-recognized clinical laboratory consulting and management firm focused on delivering revenue growth, cost savings, and optimized operations for hospitals, health systems, and hospital-owned independent laboratories. Chis expertise and specialty is transforming laboratories into economic engines. Chi offers the broadest service offerings in the industry including strategic options; laboratory management; outreach growth and management; consolidation and integration; performance enhancement; advisory support in finance, operations, and outreach; benchmarking (Chi IQ); and RVU tools. Find more information, please visit http://www.hospitalprofitmachine.com or http://www.accumen-chi.com. Disclaimer: Accumen has no authority, responsibility or liability with respect to any clinical decisions made by - or in connection with - a providers laboratory, patient blood management, or other operations. Nothing herein and no aspect of any services provided by Accumen is intended - or shall be deemed - to subordinate, usurp or otherwise diminish any providers sole authority and discretion with respect to all clinical decision-making for its patients. Enacted in 1986, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program has been one of the most enduring and effective tools for financing the development and preservation of affordable rental housing. Over the past 30 years, the LIHTC has produced more than 2.8 million affordable rental homes for veterans, seniors, homeless people, people with special needs, working families and other low- and moderate-income Americans. Ben Metcalf, director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development, will share his vision on how the LIHTC can continue to address the nations affordable housing crisis during his keynote speech May 26 at the Novogradac 2016 Affordable Housing Conference in San Francisco. Were honored that Ben Metcalf will speak to the affordable housing community at our conference next month, said Molly ODell, CPA, conference chairwoman and partner of Novogradac & Company LLPs San Francisco office. He is an innovative leader who not only understands the need for more affordable housing, but who has first-hand experience using important state and federal incentives that can make affordable housing developments feasible. Before his appointment as director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development, Metcalf was the deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Multifamily Housing Programs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Metcalf served previously at HUD as senior advisor to the commissioner and assistant secretary of housing and as senior advisor to the deputy assistant secretary for Multifamily Housing Programs. Before joining HUD, Metcalf was a project manager at BRIDGE Housing Corporation, a research associate at the Center for Court Innovation and a development associate at Common Ground Community. The Novogradac 2016 Affordable Housing Conference will be at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco, May 26-27. The two-day event will feature a multi-track agenda that is tailored to attendees level of expertise, including a beyond basics track, a technical track and a hot topics track. Panel topics include the developer-syndicator relationship, LIHTC eligible basis issues, LIHTC acquisition/rehabilitation issues, affordable housing debt products, combining LIHTC and Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) transactions and more. In addition, there will be three pre-conference workshops May 25LIHTC 101: The Basics, LIHTC 202: Year 15 Overview and LIHTC 301: Advanced LIHTC Financing. The conference is co-hosted by Dentons and Richmac Funding LLC, a Richman Group Company. Sponsors include Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP; Prudential; Squire Patton Boggs; Hunt Mortgage Group; City Real Estate Advisors; Alden Torch Financial; Berkadia; ARA A Newmark Company; Candeur Group; Enterprise and Bellwether Enterprise; JLL; Love Funding; R4 Capital; Wentwood Capital Advisors; WNC & Associates; Deutsche Bank; Low Income Housing Corp.; Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Incorporated; and SVN Affordable | Levental Realty. Exhibitors include Century Housing, RightSource Compliance and CMR Risk & Insurance Services Inc. Conference details and the complete conference agenda can be found at http://www.novoco.com/events/conferences/lihtc/2016/san_francisco/index.php About Novogradac & Company LLP Novogradac began operations in 1989 and has since grown to more than 500 employees and partners with offices in San Francisco, Walnut Creek and Long Beach, Calif.; Dover, Columbus and Cleveland, Ohio; St. Louis; Boston; New York; Chicago; Austin, Texas; Portland, Ore.; Naples, Fla., Raleigh, N.C.; Iselin, N.J.; and the greater metropolitan areas of Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta; Detroit; Kansas City, Mo.; and Seattle. Specialty practice areas include tax, audit and consulting services for tax-credit-assisted affordable housing, community revitalization, rehabilitation of historic properties and renewable energy. Other areas of expertise include business valuation, preparation and analysis of market studies and appraisals of multifamily housing investments and renewable energy tax credits. For more information about the Novogradac 2016 Affordable Housing Conference, please contact Alex Bernard at (415) 356-7970 or by email at events(at)novoco(dot)com. The successful launch of the ETRM system helps us to become future-ready, said Subba Nishtala, Director, APS Fuels and Business Support. OATI is pleased to announce APS successfully deployed the comprehensive OATI Energy Trading and Risk Management (ETRM) software solution in April 2016. The OATI ETRM solution provides APS with deal capture, scheduling, accounting, and risk management capabilities for power, natural gas, and emissions. By utilizing a single solution for their resource operations, APS, the largest electric utility in Arizona, will gain operational efficiency and transparency, as well as the ability for multiple business units within the organization to access the same data at the same time. APS implemented OATI webRisk, a comprehensive market and credit risk solution for assessing, hedging, and modeling risk, to assure accuracy and transparency of energy trading portfolios. Based on a two-factor price mean reverting model with an added seasonality function, OATI webRisk is designed specifically for the energy trading market. The solution also features OATI webTrader, a streamlined energy trading platform, and OATI webCTRM, a tool for managing forward exposure in financially-oriented commodity markets. These integrated applications equip APS with a full ETRM system that covers front, middle, and back office needs. The APS and OATI Project Teams collaborated on defining and deploying solutions to meet challenging business needs, forming a partnership approach throughout the duration of the project, said Jerry Dempsey, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at OATI. The breadth of the OATI solution provides APS with efficiency gains to aid in their business moving forward well into the future. APS, Arizonas largest and longest-serving electricity utility, provides retail electricity service to nearly 1.2 million homes and businesses in 11 of the states 15 counties. The successful launch of the ETRM system helps us to become future-ready, said Subba Nishtala, Director, APS Fuels and Business Support, This foundational system is a key piece of the solutions we are putting in place to position our company for a dynamic operating environment. About OATI OATI provides innovative software solutions that simplify, streamline, and empower the operational tasks required in todays energy commerce and Smart Grid. With more than 1,600 customers in North America, OATI successfully deploys large, complicated, and diverse mission-critical applications committed to industry standards and stringent NERC CIP guidelines. OATI (http://www.oati.com/solution/trading-risk-management) is a leading provider of Smart Grid, Energy Trading and Risk Management, Transmission Scheduling, Congestion Management, and Market Management products and services. OATI is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with an office in Redwood City, California. For more information, please contact communications(at)oati(dot)net. SMARTtill Intelligent Cash Drawer wins the Queens Awards for Enterprise in Innovation 2016 A Queen's Award is the highest honour that can be bestowed on a UK company. I am delighted that Cash Bases has received this internationally renowned and highly sought after award in recognition of its contribution to British enterprise. Cash Bases Limited, established in 1981, has won the Queens Awards for Enterprise in Innovation 2016 for its SMARTtill Intelligent Cash Drawer. The award signifies another great accolade in the history of this company. A global provider of cash management solutions, Cash Bases designs and manufactures a wide range of innovative products for its customers that enhance security and efficiency at the point of sale. The Queen's Awards for Enterprise are made each year by Her Majesty the Queen, on the advice of the British Prime Minister, who is assisted by an Advisory Committee that includes representatives of Government, industry and commerce, and the trade unions. The Awards are given solely on merit and competition is fierce. The number of Awards presented each year is not pre-set and depends on the quality of the applications received. Phil Stone, Managing Director at Cash Bases said: A Queen's Award is the highest honour that can be bestowed on a UK company. I am delighted that Cash Bases has received this internationally renowned and highly sought after award in recognition of its contribution to British enterprise. This award has been achieved through the sustained effort of our staff, who have continued to drive business forward by cultivating cutting-edge solutions for our customers. We won our first Queen's Award in 1995 for Export Achievement and another in 2000 for Enterprise International Trade. We will continue to fly the flag for Britain with our commitment to global product innovation and manufacturing excellence. A Cash Bases employee commented: "The Queen is the most recognisable woman in the world and, on her 90th birthday, there can be no greater honour than to receive an award in her name. This will be a story for all of us to share with our children and grandchildren for years to come." As well as attending the celebratory reception at Buckingham Palace, Cash Bases will also be visited by a Royal representative, so that the whole workforce can join in with the celebration, and will be presented with a crystal bowl to mark the achievement. The award winning innovation The award is a consequence of Cash Bases dedication and determination to lead the field in ground breaking cash drawer technology and cash management solutions. Cash Bases drew on over 30 years of experience to develop the innovative SMARTtill Technology; which has been designed to combat the ever-present problem of cash loss and reduce the costs associated with managing the cash in a variety of retail and hospitality outlets. The pioneering SMARTtill Solution is the first intelligent cash drawer in the market that automatically counts the contents of the drawer and reconciles the value of cash held to the sales made; enabling businesses to track every coin and note in their cash drawer. It also generates alerts when there is not enough or, in some cases, too much cash in the till. Retailers that use the SMARTtill Solution are able to eliminate the need to regularly count the cash in the till and utilise the labour hours it saves to increase sales by providing a better customer experience. Other benefits includes the early identification of cash discrepancies; businesses now have a deterrent and tool with which to significantly reduce the cost of cash losses. The new technology was first embraced by Tesco UK in a roll-out into its Tesco Extra and Superstore's outlets and now many retailers in Europe are looking to adopt the solution. The innovation has helped Cash Bases Limited to grow both financially and in staff numbers, and has led to high profile orders from Tesco. In August 2015 Cash Bases merged with APG Cash Drawer of Minneapolis Minnesota, USA. The new combined entity is taking the SMARTtill Solution into the United States retail markets. About Cash Bases Cash Bases and US based APG Cash Drawer both have over 30 years of experience of designing and manufacturing a wide range of highly durable and reliable cash drawers that are delivered quickly to the marketplace. APG/Cash Bases have built a reputation as the supplier of choice for cash management solutions for retail, grocery, hospitality, and fast foods for thousands of customers throughout the world. Whether its our general application cash drawers, custom designed solutions, or the SMARTtill Intelligent Cash Drawer, our products and brand are differentiated by our ability to deliver innovative technologies that globally enhance efficiency and security at the point of sale. To learn more about Cash Bases products, visit http://www.cashbases.net or call + 44 (0) 1273 616300. Media Contact: Judit Ruckes (Cash Bases) judit.ruckes(at)eu(dot)cashdrawer(dot)com +44 (0) 1273 616384 SolveForce.com continues their 2015 expansion offering TV, Internet & VoIP phone (http://www.solveforce.com/) services throughout the Boston region. When setting up a small business, anyone should consider business phone and Internet bundles instead of trying to manage business services from different companies. Bundling for small businesses provides many advantages, including one lower monthly bill, ease of integration and use, and may even provide additional services, such as web hosting and security. Quality providers, like SolveForce, offer attractive TV, Internet & VoIP phone (http://www.solveforce.com/) packages for small companies that combine high-speed Internet with a business-grade phone system, with the added benefit of a dependable Cloud network. Here are the main benefits of phone and Internet bundles and how they can benefit your small business. Phone and Internet companies often provide low-cost bundling solutions, making it more expensive to purchase phone and Internet services separately. The employees wont have to deal with the headache of managing bills for several companies because keeping track of single monthly bill is a much simpler task. However, remember to check any potential hidden costs before buying a package. These can include activation fees, hardware needs, and any other additional services. To learn more about SolveForce's TV, Internet & VoIP phone (http://www.solveforce.com/services) services, visit SolveForce.com. About SolveForce We are committed to your company in every aspect of the customer relationship. If your company needs to contact us for any reason, please don't hesitate to call or email us at the earliest convenience. By Phone: (888) 765-8301 By Email: ron(at)SolveForce(dot)com By Website: http://www.solveforce.com We are excited to be a part of the first-ever USA Partner Country presence at Hannover Messe and look forward to debuting our vehicles and making the most of this unique opportunity. Neil S. Roth, president of Xtreme Green Electric Vehicles. Xtreme Green Electric Vehicles announced it has joined the largest-ever U.S. delegation to Hannover Messe, the worlds foremost trade fair for industrial technology, taking place April 25-29, in Hannover, Germany. For the first time in the Fairs history, the United States will be the Partner Country, a status that provides the more than 390 businesses and organizations in the U.S. delegation an unprecedented opportunity to be prominently featured throughout the event. President Obama will also participate in this years event, themed, "Integrated Industry-Discover Solutions." Xtreme Green Electric Vehicles is a manufacturer of 100 percent electric specialty vehicles including, ATVs (all-terrain vehicles), UTVs (utility-terrain vehicles) and PMVs (police mobility vehicles). XGEV vehicles are designed with the latest technology and the most advanced energy management and electric propulsion systems. Each vehicle has the power and ability of vehicles with internal combustion engines, without the pollution, noise, heat or carbon footprint. Xtreme Green Electric Vehicles is the first company in the world to manufacture a full line of zero-emission lithium ion iron phosphate battery powered vehicles. When I look at our electric vehicles, I am extremely proud of the achievements we have made, which has solidified XGEV as a brand defined by reliable, efficient and sustainable products, said Neil S. Roth, president and chief operations officer of Xtreme Green Electric Vehicles. We are excited to be a part of the first-ever USA Partner Country presence at Hannover Messe and look forward to debuting our vehicles and making the most of this unique opportunity. Xtreme Green Electric Vehicles will exhibit in the U.S. Mobilitec Pavilion, Hall 27-Stand G50, at the show. Hannover Messe hosts more than 200,000 attendees from more than 70 countries, including global investors, buyers, distributors, resellers and government officials. SoundView Financial Credit Union Home Page Congratulations to the LKCS team for the great job in bringing our website a fresh new look. They made the process manageable by working with us, taking our ideas and running with them. We are quite pleased with the outcome of the website. The Horizon Interactive Awards has recognized SoundView Financial Credit Union (https://www.soundviewfcu.org/) for having one of the best designed banking and financial websites of 2015. Horizon Interactive Awards is one of the most prestigious awards in the interactive and creative media field. In this, its 14th season, it received over 1,100 entries from 21 countries around the world. The awards are not just given to anyone. The judging process is a rigorous process involving a volunteer panel consisting of industry professionals from around the world. The judges look for entries that have a blend of creativity and functionality, examining websites for elements like technical merit and solution creativity and originality. The award has earned its reputation as one of the most prestigious awards in the field of interactive creative media due in part to this fierce scrutiny. The fact that SoundView FCU has earned such a respected award demonstrates a dedication to being the best. Not only have they earned recognition amongst other financial institutions, they have earned recognition on an international stage. Additionally, this award has given them an edge on competition as well as increased respect and trust from their members. SoundView FCU has not received this honor without merit. They engaged LKCS to create and launch a new website that better meets the needs of their members. The award winning design was created with the goals of mobile responsivity, increased user comprehension, and improved navigation. These goals culminated into an improved design that has since garnered deserved recognition. Congratulations to the LKCS team for the great job in bringing our website a fresh new look. They made the process manageable by working with us, taking our ideas and running with them, says Jo-Ann Palladino. We are quite pleased with the outcome of the website and so are our members! About SoundView Financial Credit Union Founded in 1980, SoundView Financial Credit Union has been serving the community for over 35 years. The need to serve the community has not disappeared in that time. They not only assist their members, but the community as a whole, supporting charities and local events. Located in Bethel and Danbury, CT, as well as Boston, MA, they have a large community to serve. They certainly put their members first as their slogan demonstrates, Financially sound with a view toward you. About LKCS Based in Peru, Illinois, LKCS is the leader in providing end-to-end marketing, graphic design, commercial printing, direct mail, web development, and statement processing services to financial institutions. Combined with over 50 years of financial marketing expertise, LKCS leverages the latest technologies and techniques to improve marketing results and return on investment for our clients. We do that. Additional information about LKCS can be found at http://www.lk-cs.com. Rolltape Radio Rolltape is one-part messaging and one-part personal podcasts packaged in five-minute personalized audio messages, said Jessica Taylor, Rolltapes co-founder and CEO. Rolltape, a mobile messaging app for creating personalized audio messages for friends and family, unveiled its public Rolltape Radio feature today. The new functionality allows anyone to make and broadcast a "Rolltape" within the app as well as anywhere on the web. People can share links to Rolltape Radio on social networks and other web properties including Facebook timelines, Twitter feeds, blogs, websites, and online newsletters. Now bloggers, influencers, artists, public figures, celebrities, gurus, and subject matter experts can easily expand their audience with followers and fans using an intimate and increasingly popular personal podcasting format. Rolltape Radio gives creatives a new channel to engage and interact with their audience, since followers can upvote, and comment on content. Rolltapes broadcast functionality allows audio messages to be conveniently shared with social media and webpages, turning up the volume on viewer engagement. Fans, followers, and visitors can access Rolltape Radio with a simple click to listen to the message. Public Rolltape messages can be made for a variety of use cases from sharing a personal update, to telling a story, to performing a comedy routine, to introducing a new musical riff, to calling out a special product promotion, etc. And creators can even unpublish tapes from Rolltape Radio just in case they want to revise a message to their readers, fans or followers. Rolltape is one-part messaging and one-part personal podcasts packaged in five-minute personalized audio messages, said Jessica Taylor, Rolltapes Co-founder and CEO. Since Rolltape is positioned at the intersection of messaging and social networking, we know our users and their networks will benefit from sharing Rolltape Radio tapes publicly. Were delighted to offer the Rolltape community a full-spectrum of private and public communication options. Rolltape lowers existing technology barriers, enabling anybody to quickly create and share original content with their followers, delivered in a novel podcasting format. Messaging apps recently surpassed social networks in monthly active users, fueled by their higher retention and usage rates. With the renaissance of podcasting, people are consuming more audio storytelling. According to Edison Researchs The Infinite Dial 2016, 21% of Americans above age 12 (57 million people) have listened to a podcast in the past month, demonstrating 24% year-over-year growth last year. Interested parties can download the free app from Apples App Store here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rolltape-personal-voice-messages/id994664291?ls=1&mt=8 About Rolltape Founded in 2015, Rolltape Inc. is a female-founded mobile development startup. The privately-held company is based in San Francisco, California. Its namesake platform, Rolltape, is a free mobile app available for iOS devices in the U.S. and Canada. Rolltape lets people create user generated content by making short, five-minute audiograms to share stories from their lives, update friends and family and keep relationships stronger. Creators can personalize their messages with mood music and custom images the perfect way to send festive, fun, memorable, and heartfelt greetings to loved ones. Interested parties can visit http://www.rolltape.com for more information about the app. Follow or connect with Rolltape via the following channels: Listen to a Rolltape Radio greeting: http://bit.ly/1qXJ4fo Download Rolltape on the App Store: http://apple.co/1n2ZukI Rolltape is now available to English speakers worldwide. Rolltape Radio: http://rolltape.fm Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RolltapeApp Twitter: @RolltapeApp Editors Note: Artwork available upon request. Mya's data from the PetPace smart collar resulted in an early diagnosis, effective treatment and a good outcome. The data provided by the PetPace collar was what prompted us to thoroughly examine a presumably healthy cat. It enabled a timely diagnosis of a serious disease and turned my staff into believers in this innovative technology. PetPace, the provider of an innovative IoT collar for remote real-time monitoring and analysis of pet vital signs and activity, today released the findings of a new medical case study. The feline hyperthyroidism case study, available for download here, documents in detail how the PetPace collar facilitated an early diagnosis and contributed to a favorable outcome of hyperthyroidism in a completely asymptomatic cat. Mya, a 14-year-old spayed female weighing 13lb, is an indoor-only, domestic shorthair cat who had no known medical problems. A routine screening initiated by Myas owner a pet healthcare professional - showed values that raised concern. These included elevated pulse levels (average 182; Max 231; Min 130) and low HRV (VVTI 8.2). This finding prompted a thorough veterinary exam, which identified hyperthyroidism. Specifically, Myas bloodwork showed marked elevation of thyroid hormone (T4-12.4; normal range 0.8-4.7), and an elevated Red Blood Cell count (RBC-11.6; normal range 7.12-11.4). No other symptoms or problems were detected. Hyperthyroidism is a hormonal disorder caused by excess production of thyroid hormones by the thyroid gland, which is located in the neck. It is a relatively common disease in older cats. Since thyroid hormones regulate metabolism and a wide variety of processes in the body, almost any organ can be affected and clinical signs vary. The disease is insidiously progressive, and is often detected and diagnosed only after serious alterations occur, such as weight loss and damage to internal organs. Following the detection of abnormal vitals by the PetPace collar and her veterinarians diagnosis, Mya was started on a course of oral medications, which effectively reduced her excess thyroid hormone levels. A 24-hour follow-up with the PetPace collar approximately three months later showed significant improvements in all parameters. PetPace Enabled a Timely Diagnosis In Myas case, data from the PetPace smart IoT collar resulted in an early diagnosis, effective treatment and a good outcome. PetPace provides early indications of changes in individual health status and alerts pet owners. This enables owners to consult their veterinarian to determine the root of the problem and provide timely relief before major complications develop. Many chronic diseases, including hyperthyroidism, progress slowly and insidiously over time. Symptoms are typically detected relatively late in the course of the disease, even by the most dedicated and astute owners. Early detection of chronic diseases is facilitated by non-specific changes in trends data and the analytics provided by PetPace. Dr. Cari Bowlin, Medical Director at Southern Tier Veterinary Associates noted: The data provided by the PetPace collar was what prompted us to thoroughly examine a presumably healthy cat. It enabled a timely diagnosis of a serious disease and turned my staff into believers in this innovative technology. Dr. Asaf Dagan, DVM, Diplomate ABVP (Canine and Feline practice), and PetPaces Chief Veterinarian, added, The PetPace collar enables clinics to run routine periodic screening of their clients, for example as part of an annual work-up. This can be invaluable in early detection of chronic diseases and - as exemplified in this case can dramatically improve pet health. About PetPace PetPace was founded in 2012 to bring peace of mind to pet owners and prevent unnecessary pain and suffering for dogs and cats through improved pet health and quality of life. PetPace specializes in the remote monitoring of pet vital signs by utilizing advanced analytical methods and alerting models. The companys low power, wireless collar is fitted with an array of sensors that report abnormal vital signs within established physiological and behavioral parameters. Once an abnormal sign or behavior is detected, a sophisticated cloud-based analytical engine evaluates the signs and if needed, sends an immediate alert regarding any suspected condition. This allows the owner or the vet to take preemptive action to protect the pets health. For more information about PetPace real-time pet health monitoring, visit http://PetPace.com. 20% of the worlds population, or 1.2 billion people, lack access to safe drinking water PCI (Project Concern International) is raising awareness about the global water crisis by hosting its annual Walk for Water 5K this Sunday at Tecolote Shores. Participants are invited to experience the journey millions of women and children around the world make every day to provide clean water for their families by walking up to 5 kilometers with buckets of water. As San Diego struggles with its own water crisis, this event highlights the global crisis of clean water, and water used in the Walk will be taken and returned to the Bay. Rachel Church and Arya Tayebi are serving as the chair of this years Walk for Water and Mark Mullen from NBC 7 San Diego will serve as the Master of Ceremonies. Funds raised will support PCIs water and sanitation programs and efforts to end poverty worldwide. This event is open to the press, and interested reporters and outlets must RSVP. What: PCIs annual Walk for Water 5K to raise awareness about the global water crisis. Who: Rachel Church, Senior high school student, La Jolla Country Day School Arya Tayebi, Senior high school student, The Bishops School George Guimaraes, President and CEO, PCI Mark ODonnell, Chief Operating Officer, PCI When: April 24, 2016 9:00 a.m. 11:00 a.m. Where: Tecolote Shores at Mission Bay Park 1600 E Mission Bay Dr. San Diego, CA 92109 About PCI: PCIs mission is to empower people to enhance health, end hunger and overcome hardship. PCIs vision is the most vulnerable people in the world will have the power to lift themselves out of poverty and to create vital, healthy lives for their families and communities now and for the future. For more information, visit http://www.pciglobal.org. ### If you are new to iQ you can schedule a demo and learn more about this opportunity. PSFK iQ - Where Innovators Turn for Research. Our professional-grade research platform is designed specifically for Retail and CX leaders who want to know whats next. Whether youre staying current on trends or need a real-time research partner to help you get ahead, count on PSFK iQ to deliver the info you need to make your next move. News From Bulgaria IAEA Mission Sees Improved Nuclear and Radiation Safety Regulation in Bulgaria Staff retention was one of the areas that need improvement, the IAEA said following a 7-day mission in Bulgaria AUTHOR: publics.bg BNRA An International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) team of experts said Bulgarias nuclear safety regulatory system has improved significantly in recent years, but added that the regulatory bodys high staff turnover remained a concern. The Integrated Regulatory Review Service (IRRS) team concluded 18 a seven-day follow-up mission to assess the regulatory framework for nuclear and radiation safety in Bulgaria, reviewing developments since a previous mission in 2013. The Bulgarian Nuclear Regulatory Authority (BNRA) followed up on the earlier mission with a comprehensive action plan that led to significant progress in all areas. Among improvements are a clearer division of responsibilities between BNRA and the Ministry of Health, said team leader Marta Ziakova, Chair of Slovakias Nuclear Regulatory Authority. We also noted that more work is needed in some areas, such as staff retention. The IRRS team noted that the improved division of responsibilities as well as strengthened coordination and cooperation between the regulatory body and the Health Ministry reduced the risk of duplication or gaps in regulatory work. It also found that the BNRA has strengthened its inspection process, upgraded its management system and substantially improved emergency planning arrangements, including by establishing systematic emergency training. The team of experts made suggestions to the regulatory body and the Government to help them continue their work to strengthen Bulgarias regulatory framework and functions in line with IAEA safety standards. The nine-member IRRS team comprised experts from Germany, Greece, Norway, Pakistan, Slovakia and Slovenia, as well as three IAEA staff members. The mission provided two new suggestions for improvements: BNRA should continue negotiations with relevant authorities for sufficient financial resources that would allow for competitive salaries to reduce staff turnover. The Health Ministry should consider developing a systematic programme to ensure that all areas it regulates are covered by inspections within a given period. The final mission report will be provided to the Government of Bulgaria in about three months. IRRS missions are designed to strengthen the effectiveness of the national nuclear regulatory safety infrastructure, while recognizing the responsibility of each State to ensure nuclear and radiation safety. Amazon has struck a major deal with the New York City public school district, the country's largest, to provide e-books to its students. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the deal, worth $30 million, will see the e-tailer selling titles through an internal marketplace. The agreement will not see students using Amazon's hardware, such as its suite of Kindle devices. There are over 1 million students in the New York City public school system and now, with the Department of Education having signed the three-year agreement, Amazon could make upwards of $34.5 million on the contract, which also has the option of a two-year extension. Although Amazon has been edging into the education market, this deal represents its most significant foray to date, especially in the high school market. In the college market, where Amazon has been slightly more active, the company has established a handful of co-branded (with the university) online storefronts. In 2015, at Purdue University, Amazon set up its first bricks and mortar college store. For the e-book purchases from the New York City schools, Amazon will earn a commission between 10%-15%. The school system estimated that it plans to make $4.3 million in e-book purchases during the first year of the agreement, which takes effect in the forthcoming school year, and ramp up to $17.2 million in the third year. At a time when print sales of Christian fiction have been steadily declining and some houses have stopped doing fiction altogether, several Christian publishing veterans are launching a new Christian fiction publishing house. Gilead Publishing LLC opened its doors on April 18, in a rented conference room at a hotel in a Chicago suburb. President and publisher Dan Balow and CEO Bill Giarratana are co-owners of the company that will soon have offices in Wheaton, Ill., and Grand Rapids, Mich. Balow was head of marketing for the Left Behind series for Tyndale and, for the last three years, a literary agent with The Steve Laube Agency. Giarratana has worked in marketing and in ministry fundraising at the American Bible Society and Biblica. Gilead execsand many in the publishing worldhave seen a pendulum swing in Christian fiction publishing over the last few years, with less room for midlist authors as publishers chase big names and guaranteed bestsellers. The shrinking midlist is where Gilead aims to do most of its business. Balow said Gileads mix of titles wont be too far off the beaten path of what people expect from Christian publishers. Gilead will stick to the traditional publishing model of paying authors advances and royalties, and will focus on off-set print runs instead of print-on-demand (e-book editions of titles will be available), and growing a stable of midlist and debut authors. Balow forecasts publishing 100 titles a year within five years. We want to offer really good midlist authors a place to grow their careers, said Balow. Were able to keep costs low, grow authors over time, and make a profit at levels the larger companies cant. Gilead plans to release their first half dozen books in Fall 2016, with 40-50 titles in 2017, and are only accepting agented submissions. Details about the houses first list will be announced soon, along with distribution arrangements. Susan Brower, formerly executive editor for fiction at Zondervan and Harper Collins Christian Publishing and a former literary agent, has been named v-p of editorial and will manage acquisitions. Kristen Gearhart, formerly managing editor at Keys for Kids Ministries, has been named managing editor. Both will work out of Grand Rapids. Update: On Friday, April 22, Gilead Publishing acquired science fiction and fantasy publisher Enclave Publishing, forming a new imprint, Enclave. Publisher at Enclave Steve Laube will oversee the new imprint, which is set to release eight titles for summer and fall 2016. Publishers in the easternmost province of Newfoundland and Labrador are upset after learning that books will no longer be exempt from the harmonized sales tax (HST). Beginning in 2017, the tax on books in the region will jump from 5% to 15%, leaving a number of local publishers worried that the increase could negatively impact their bottom lines. The news came as an unexpected addition to the provinces 2016 budget, presented by provincial finance minister Cathy Bennett last week. The budget also included planned raises in personal income tax and dozens of new fees. Consumers in Newfoundland and Labrador, a small province of about 500,000 people, currently pay the 5% federal tax on books that is standard across the country. By removing the tax exemption for books, the province is the first in Canada to charge the full HST, which the new provincial budget has raised from 13% to 15%. Local publishers have expressed concern that the extra tax could lead to fewer books being sold in the short term, and even fewer books being published in the long term. If publishers are taking in less revenue, then they have to make decisions as to how many books they can afford to publish per year, said Donna Francis, editor and marketing manager at Creative Book Publishers in St. Johns, the capital city. [Fewer] book published by us means fewer Newfoundland writers who are getting out there, fewer Newfoundland stories. Jim Cormier, Atlantic director of the Retail Council of Canada, is working on an appeal about reversing the decision. Youre talking about the cultural heartbeat of this province, said Cormier. I can forgive [the government] to an extent, as they were dealing with so many other issues with this budget. But now its time for them to understand that this is a problem, and the amount of tax theyre going to get out of this is negligible versus the huge financial challenges that they have. This isnt the first time a Canadian province has fought to keep this tax exemption in place. The Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association successfully prevented the same thing from happening in Nova Scotia last year, and in Prince Edward Island in 2012. Now the APMA is helping organize a campaign against the tax. It will have a detrimental effect on the whole industry and on literacy, said APMA executive director Carolyn Guy. The industry has enough challenges without having to deal with an increase of that magnitude. WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. Purdue University President Mitch Daniels announced Wednesday (April 20) that Purdue plans to hold tuition flat on the West Lafayette campus for a fifth consecutive year, which would extend Purdues tuition freeze through the 2017-2018 academic year. Chart showing resident tuition and fees since 1998-99. Download Photo Tuition and fees through 2017-18 at the West Lafayette campus will remain virtually the same as they were in 2012-13 with resident students paying $10,002, out-of-state students paying $28,804 and international paying $30,804. With the additional year of flat tuition, three graduating classes (2016, 2017 and 2018) will have gone through Purdue without ever experiencing a tuition increase. In addition to tuition and fees, Purdue has continued to hold flat or lower the cost of room and board with rates lower through 2016-17 than they were in 2012-13. Combined with the potential of lower cost books due to Purdues contract with Amazon, students are paying less for the overall cost of college education than their predecessors did in 2012-13. Overall, by not raising tuition by the average national rate each year, Purdue has saved students $134 million over the first three years of the freeze. By reducing room and board rates instead of raising them at the Big Ten average, Purdue students have saved an additional $26 million since 2012. Purdue President Mitch Daniels on Wednesday (April 20) announces during the Purdue Student Government meeting the university's plans to hold tuition flat on the West Lafayette campus for a fifth consecutive year. (Purdue University photo/Mark Simons) Download Photo One of our most important goals continues to be affordability, Daniels said. The total cost of attendance at Purdue University is going down thanks to the efforts of all members of the Purdue family faculty, staff and alumni who are committed to keeping a world-class education within the reach of all students. While we cannot commit to zero increases indefinitely, our policy will always be to protect students family budgets, continue investing in our employees and our vital mission of delivering higher education at the highest proven value. Daniels announced the continued freeze at a Purdue Student Government meeting in front of a group of students, those who entered in fall 2012 or later, who have never seen a tuition increase at Purdue. Mike Young, Purdue Student Government president, said, The tuition freeze is having a massive, positive impact on the lives of Purdue students, and were very grateful for the work that has gone in to extending the freeze for another year. Purdue will continue its investment in teaching and research excellence and in programs that enhance the academic experience, Daniels said. Through effective fundraising, increasing sponsored research support and attention to efficient operations, Purdue has hired more faculty and funded 10 strategic initiatives, including $250 million for the Pillars of Excellence in the Life Sciences. Purdue also continues to invest in transformative projects such as the Active Learning Center, where students will experience the best new classroom teaching and learning methods; and the soon-to-open Purdue Honors College and Residences, where young scholars will come together in an intellectual and residential community designed to increase student success. In addition, in 2015 Purdue provided a 3.5 percent pool for merit pay increases for Purdue employees, among the highest percentage increase in the country for a university, and in 2016, Daniels announced that Purdue will be able to offer a merit pool of 2.5 percent for employees. Chart showing undergraduate student loan debt since 2004-05. Download Photo In addition to the freeze and other cost-cutting measures, the university has worked to bolster affordability initiatives to help reduce student debt. Financial literacy efforts combined with the other savings have helped result in a $50 million reduction in student loans (2012-2015); and, for 2015 graduates, the average debt of the 48 percent of students who graduated with debt was $27,711, about 20 percent below the national average of around $35,000. "In short, while the tuition freeze has generated a lot of attention and rightfully so it's only one part of the much larger picture of increasing affordability, reducing debt and being strategic about where put our resources, Daniels said. Source: Mitch Daniels, president@purdue.edu -- What: "The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged)." -- When: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday (plus April 29-30), and 3 p.m. Sunday (plus May 1). -- Where: QC Theatre Workshop, 1730 Wilkes Ave., Davenport. -- Tickets: Pay what it's worth; 563-650-2396, qctheatreworkshop.org. I literally was the cat's meow on the Quad City Theatre Workshop stage last Saturday night. During the wacky, sweetly sacrilegious "Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged)," pairs of audience members are brought to the bare stage to become animals on Noah's Ark. Each with a small, wearable prop, we made the appropriate creature noise (along with the tune of "Old McDonald Had a Farm"). My wife and I got to be two felines, and escaped the "flood" (a super soaker sprayed into the crowd). The fun, fearless actors Jeremy Mahr, Brent Tubbs and James Fairchild take us on a wild, bumpy ride through (much of) The Bible in just 90 minutes, with an intermission dividing the Old and New Testament. The fast-paced, supremely silly sketch comedy originally was produced by the Reduced Shakespeare Company -- which specializes in spoofing epic topics in a short time frame (including the complete works of Shakespeare and complete history of America). Mr. Tubbs, who directs these biblical shenanigans, is an RSC veteran (having toured in Europe) and is a frequent Q-C improv and sketch comedy performer. His "Bible" talents include a few turns at a keyboard, taking on a number of female roles, and very cute, funny "Pilate" wordlessly joshing with the audience as a fighter pilot with "flowing" scarf. All three guys (Mr. Mahr and Mr. Fairchild are QCTW veterans) are confident, energetic improv performers, and they incredibly juggle some 200 props, with wigs and costume changes. From a stark, spotlit "Adam and Eve" (and Steve?) and "In the Beginning Blues" to a closing, chipper "That's Armageddon," the show -- with several off-topic, contemporary jokes -- attempts to cover all 66 books of The Bible. That's a stretch. But I saw that it was good. A Scott County judge has denied a motion by prosecutors seeking to try an Arkansas teen in adult court for a string of burglaries he allegedly committed in Bettendorf while on the run. In an order signed Wednesday, District Associate Judge Mark Fowler ruled juvenile court was better suited to "provide more meaningful treatment, rehabilitation and punishment" for Ashton Chance Armstrong, 17, of Benton, Ark. Mr. Chance will turn 18 in December. The judge noted the teen had no prior criminal complaints in Scott County or his home state; that the allegations all dealt with property crimes; and the available rehabilitation services in Arkansas. It was in the best interest of Mr. Armstrong and the community that he remain under the jurisdiction of juvenile court, Judge Fowler wrote, in denying the state's motion. Mr. Armstrong is charged in Scott County with five counts of second-degree burglary, eight counts of third-degree burglary, one count of carrying a weapon and one count of credit card fraud. Prosecutors previously filed a motion seeking to try Mr. Armstrong as an adult, saying the "severity" of the alleged offenses, in connection with the "grandiose scheme," required "extensive rehabilitation." Assistant Scott County Attorney Noah Poppelreiter wrote in court records that Mr. Armstrong "convinced" his alleged co-defendant Heidi M. Shipp, 15, of Fort Polk, La., to participate in a multistate crime spree, "all while living a fantasy to be a modern day youthful 'Bonnie and Clyde.'" Mr. Poppelreiter wrote Mr. Armstrong was alleged to have committed car and garage burglaries between late March 16 and early March 17 in northeast Bettendorf while the property owners were inside their homes. "To exacerbate this, he endangered not only the lives of others but his own life by committing these crimes while two firearms were present in the vehicle he used as transportation to and from these crimes," the prosecutor wrote. Ms. Shipp pleaded guilty earlier this month to second-degree theft, credit card fraud and carrying weapons. She was released into the care of her mother and will be under supervised probation by Scott County's juvenile court services until she turns 18 or the court determines otherwise. DAVENPORT -- A police chase in the area of West 13th Street and Ripley Street Wednesday afternoon resulted in an officer being injured, two people being arrested and Jefferson Elementary School being placed on lock down for a short time. Montell Reed, 27 of Davenport, is charged with eluding, felon in possession of a firearm, assault while displaying a dangerous weapon, possession of a controlled substance and having no driver's license. Danarease Lawless, 28, of Davenport, is charged with felon in possession of a firearm, assault while displaying a dangerous weapon, assault on police officer, Interference with offficial acts causing bodily injury and harassment of a public official. A police news release stated that, at 12:59 p.m. Wednesday, officers responded to a call of a man pointing a gun at a victim before leaving in a black vehicle. Officers located the vehicle and tried to stop it, but the vehicle continued to the intersection of West 13th Street and Marquette Street where its occupants took off on foot, police said. They later were apprehended in the surrounding area, according to a police department news release. Police also said a K-9 unit found a hand gun in the area and that one officer suffered a shoulder injury while trying to apprehend a person. The officer was transported for medical treatment, according to the news release. Jefferson Elementary School was placed on lock down due to the proximity of the incident, police said, but there was no threat to staff or students during the incident. More than 1,000 people teachers, retirees, union members and activists from Chicago and elsewhere marched from the Capitol to highlight a 10-month budget standoff that's forced higher education layoffs and the anticipated closure of Chicago State University. They called for support of a proposal to replace Illinois' flat income tax with one to make the wealthiest residents pay more, saying the revenue will help universities and social services operating without state money. In Chicago, CTU President Karen Lewis blasted the first-term Republican governor for his role in the standoff and moves to curb union influence, comments that come as the union is locked in contentious contract negotiations with nation's third-largest school district. "Rauner is the new ISIS recruit," she said referring to the Islamic State group, during a City Club of Chicago speech. "Because the things he's doing looks like acts of terror on poor and working-class people." Rauner's office immediately objected to the comments. "This kind of rhetoric has no place in American public discourse and sets a terrible example for our kids," Rauner spokeswoman Catherine Kelly said in a statement. Rauner and legislative Democrats are deadlocked over a budget for the fiscal year that began in July. Rauner wants pro-business reforms. Democrats, who want a tax increase, object to Rauner's ideas such as collective bargaining changes. Rauner, who last year approved money for public schools, says his proposed spending plan would allocate $120 million more for them next year. However, under his blueprint universities are expected to see cuts and CPS could lose $74 million while experiencing a $1 billion deficit, which Chicago district officials rallied against Tuesday. Meanwhile, lawmakers are also considering Democrat-backed proposals for a graduated income tax and an overhaul of Illinois' outdated school funding formula. Lewis said teachers are preparing for a strike as early as May. On Saturday, CTU rejected a neutral arbitrator's recommendation that it accept a district contract, which started a 30-day clock for when the union can give notice of a strike. The issues include pension payments and raises. Chicago schools CEO Forrest Claypool asked Lewis on Wednesday to use binding arbitration in lieu of a strike, which CTU officials dismissed as a "publicity stunt." ROCK ISLAND -- Illinois overpaid local governments an estimated $168 million in 2014 and 2015 from a personal property tax replacement fund. Now the state wants the money back -- including more than $4.6 million from Quad-Cities area schools, cities, townships and other governmental units -- according to figures released by the Illinois Department of Revenue. The alleged overpayments were the result of an "error" during the administration of former Gov. Pat Quinn that recently was discovered, according to a news release from the revenue department. According to state revenue department figures, the Rock Island School District was overpaid $584,000 and the Moline School District $597,000. Moline was overpaid $301,000, the city of Rock Island was overpaid $333,000 and Rock Island County was overpaid $300,208. The state now is working on a plan to get the money back. We are certainly sensitive to the impact recouping these funds will have on some of our taxing districts, said Illinois Department of Revenue Director Connie Beard. We will be working with the impacted taxing districts to establish a plan to recapture the funds over an extended period of time." MetroLINK, dozens of local townships and fire protection districts and Black Hawk Community College also reportedly received more money than they should. East Moline was overpaid $168,000 from the personal property replacement tax fund, the state estimates. But East Moline Mayor John Thodos noted the state owes his city $500,000 in sewer and water fees for East Moline Correctional Center -- unpaid because Illinois has been without a budget for 10 months. "Just when I thought the state couldn't come up with any more surprises, this happens," Mayor Thodos said. "It's amazing. I don't know if this is a tragedy or a comedy." The discovery also comes at a time when Gov. Bruce Rauner has been traveling the state, saying he wants to increase funding to school districts. "It's a mess," said United Township High School Superintendent Dr. Jay Morrow. The issue, he said, adds another layer of uncertainty about funding for school districts, who are waiting to see if state lawmakers and the governor can agree on a budget to allow them to open for the new school year in August. The $168 million in overpayments came out of $1.37 billion in personal property taxes distributed to taxing districts in 2014 and $1.43 billion in 2015. In a statement, Ms. Beard said the miscalculation in corporate property replacement taxes occurred because of changes in certain forms used by the department. Replacement taxes were created to replace monies to local governments lost after the new Illinois constitution, enacted in 1970, took away their powers to impose personal property taxes on businesses. The replacement taxes -- paid by corporations, partnerships, trusts and public utilities -- are basically corporate income taxes. Corporations pay a 2.5 percent tax on income as their replacement tax, and other business entities pay the tax at lower rates. The state collects the money and then distributes to taxing districts. An estimated 6,500 taxing districts have been affected by the overpayments that began in 2014. For 5,291 of those districts, the total overpayment is more than $10,000, according to a state news release. Ten taxing districts received overpayment of $1 million or more. Illinois Overpayments State officials want about 6,500 taxing districts in Illinois to repay a total of $168 million they were overpaid in 2014 and 2015. Local impact includes $170,546 by Black Hawk College and: -- Rock Island County Rock Island County, $300,208 Rock Island County Forest Preserve, $24,057 City of Moline, $301,774 Moline School District, $597,195 City of Rock Island, $333,060 Rock Island School District, $584,609 City of East Moline, $168,351 East Moline Elementary School District, $276,464 Riverdale School District, $36,927 United Township High School, $270,141 Rockridge School District, $42,482 MetroLINK, $22,636 Village of Milan, $31,485 -- Henry County Geneseo School District, $59,138 City of Geneseo, $6,669 Kewanee School District, $58,349 City of Kewanee, $40,559 Henry County, $47,760 Annawan School District, $20,758 Cambridge School District, $10,003 Alwood School District, $21,464 Colona Elementary School District, $9,213 -- Mercer County Mercer County School District $101,807 Mercer County, $36,680 City of Aledo, $14,837 Source: Illinois Department of Revenue And Officer Peter Liang's sentencing this week to probation and community service after a judge downgraded his manslaughter conviction left dismay and questions on all sides, particularly among police accountability activists who had seen the case as a sign of progress. Liang was the first New York City officer convicted in an on-duty shooting since 2005. "We're never going to be satisfied if we're looking for societal justice in a criminal prosecution," said Peter Moskos, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice sociology professor. "The jury or the judge is not supposed to be judging society." Lang's 2014 shooting of Akai Gurley came just months after the deaths of Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York prompted protests and a nationwide discussion of police killings. After grand juries declined to indict the white officers who killed Brown and Garner, activists demanding accountability looked to Liang's trial. But Liang's case was different in significant ways. Liang is himself a minority who didn't see his victim. He was a rookie patrolling a pitch-dark stairwell with his gun drawn while Gurley, 28, headed down to the lobby. Liang said he was startled by a noise, fired accidentally and didn't immediately realize his bullet had hit someone. "How can you raise a claim that this is emblematic of police officers gunning down black people without warrant?" said David Klinger, a University of Missouri-St. Louis criminal justice professor. Prosecutors argued Liang was reckless with his weapon and callous afterward: He didn't try to revive Gurley, standing by while Gurley's girlfriend frantically did. Liang, 28, later explained he thought it better to wait for professional help. A jury convicted him of manslaughter, but Brooklyn state Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun said prosecutors hadn't proven key elements of that charge and reduced it to criminally negligent homicide, a lowest-level felony, and there was no need for prison "to have a just sentence in this case." While Chun announced his decision, Liang and Gurley supporters waited outside the courthouse, on opposite sides of a street and separated by police barriers, in a sign of the divisive outpouring the case has aroused. "By escaping jail time, Peter Liang faces no meaningful legal accountability for killing Akai," Gurley's mother, Sylvia Palmer, said in a statement Wednesday. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund called for "an examination of the deference and privileges afforded to police officers that are not extended to other defendants." But Liang's supporters felt he was unfairly singled out for prosecution to make a political point. "If Peter should get charged, then his partner should get charged, too," said Jerry Chan, 43, who was among organizers of large demonstrations protesting Liang's conviction this winter. Liang's partner wasn't charged and testified during the trial. Like Liang, he was fired after the verdict. The activism around the case split along complicated fault lines, pointing up its complexities. Few police officers who often come to court en masse to support accused officers appeared in the audience at Liang's trial. And while 10,000 mostly Chinese-Americans rallied in New York and elsewhere to support Liang, other Asian-Americans said they were taking on the wrong fight by supporting an officer who killed an innocent man. The sentencing may not be the last word in the case: Liang is appealing his conviction, and prosecutors plan to appeal its reduction. Meanwhile, Gurley's family is pursuing a wrongful death lawsuit. Gurley's domestic partner, Kim Ballinger, said the most difficult question the case has left for her is how to explain it to their 3-year-old daughter. "How do I tell her the man who killed your father was never really punished for it?" she asked. A breakaway faction of the Pakistani Taliban that calls itself Jamat-ul-Ahrar claimed responsibility for the attack later Wednesday. The slain officers had been deployed to protect health workers administering polio vaccinations. No health workers were harmed in the attacks in Karachi, the capital of southern Sindh province, local police official Mohammad Ijaz said. Another senior police officer, Feroze Shah, said authorities had no plans to suspend the polio campaign despite the attacks. Earlier, provincial Home Minister Suhail Anwar told the Pakistani Geo news network that the attacks that killed the seven officers were minutes apart. He said the attackers targeted police deployed in the city for the campaign to vaccinate children. Hours later, Ahsanullah Ahsan, a spokesman for the Jamat-ul-Ahrar militant group, claimed responsibility for the attack. In an email to reporters, he said Wednesday's attack in Karachi was part of the group's campaign against security forces. However, Islamic militants have in the past targeted vaccination efforts both in Pakistan and in neighboring Afghanistan, based on conspiracy theories that they are a cover for a Western-led sterilization campaign. The Pakistani military has launched multiple offensives against militant hideouts in the tribal regions and elsewhere, but the insurgents have proven resilient. Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif strongly condemned Wednesday's "terrorist attack" Karachi. In a statement, he said police officers sacrificed their lives to secure the future of our coming generation. Polio, which can cause paralysis and death, remains endemic in Pakistan. Also Wednesday, the Pakistani army said troops had freed 24 police officers captured by a criminal gang earlier this month in the eastern Punjab province. Army spokesman Lt. Gen. Asim Saleem Bajwa said the gang leader and his men surrendered during the police operation in Rajanpur district. The development came days after a notorious criminal gang, the Chutto, killed six policemen when police raided its hideout. Meng Brings NASA Astronaut To Queens On October 17, U.S. Rep. Grace Meng (D-Queens) brought NASA astronaut Dr. Jonny Kim to Queens where he met and spoke with students at Francis... Celebrating Columbus The Federation of Italian-American Organizations of Queens (FIAO) held their annual Columbus Day parade in Astoria, on Saturday, October 8, during Italian Heritage Month. The... Russo-Elling Mourned More than 300 first responders lined up on Thursday night to honor FDNY EMT Lt. Alison Russo-Elling, as her body was placed into a waiting... The calamity has also affected the economic activity in the region which hosts a number of manufacturers, including several automobile players. A severe earthquake struck southern Japan this weekend, killing and injuring hundreds. The calamity has also affected the economic activity in the region which hosts a number of manufacturers, including several automobile players. Toyota , Honda, and Nissan have reportedly suspended production at their plants in the country. Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC), the world's largest-selling automaker, said it would stop production in most of its plants across Japan this week due to the shortage of parts. We are unable to source parts from some of our suppliers, said TMC. One of its key suppliers, Aisin Seiki, has been affected badly by the earthquake that occurred on Saturday. The company has stopped producing doors, engines and other parts at its facility in the Kumamoto prefecture, as the area is still experiencing aftershocks. Also, it is now planning to shift production temporarily to other facilities at home and abroad. Honda Motor Co. also issued a statement to report the production seize at its motorcycle facility near the quake-hit city of Kumamoto in the southern part of the country. Nissan, on the other hand, said it would resume operations at its plants north of the epicentre from Monday onwards. Now, the way these companies recover from the latest quakes will likely show how robust efforts were made during the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami, which killed thousands and dented their output severely. Source: CarDekho.com Mr Gottfried Eymer, CEO of DBCS, told delegates at the SmartRail Europe conference in Amsterdam on April 19 that equipping the company's fleet of 30 electric locomotives (two types from two different suppliers) at a cost of almost 900,000 apiece risks "killing the business" and that an exit from the market is "one of the scenarios" now under consideration. Eymer argues that the "low level of maturity and stability" in ERTMS makes it impossible for rail freight operators to invest in equipping their locomotives. The earliest the industry can deliver a first-in-class prototype for DBCS's Bombardier class 185 Traxx locomotives is mid-2020 and Eymer says it is unclear whether Alstom will be able to deliver equipment to the required baseline (SRS 3.4.0 or 3.5.0), which means SRS 3.3.0 could ultimately be used. "High costs are driven by the small fleet size, ability to retrofit different locomotive types, and the monopolistic behaviour of suppliers, who do not grant access to their specific train control system or specific national features," Eymer says. "Onboard equipment for 30 locomotives is a problem - you need to equip 1000 locomotives before you achieve economies of scale." DBCS is also critical of Danish infrastructure manager Banedanmark and its Swedish counterpart Trafikverket for what it perceives as a failure to harmonise ERTMS deployment plans. The entire Danish network is due to be equipped with ERTMS by 2021, but in Sweden the legacy signalling system will remain in operation on the main international freight artery from Malmo towards Stockholm and central Sweden until 2023. Specific Transition Modules (STM) on DBCS's locomotives will need to be upgraded because of the retention of the legacy system in Sweden and because Banedanmark plans to remove the class B ATC signalling system as it rolls out ETCS on a section-by-section basis. With the phased nature of the rollout, each locomotive will need to be fitted with German signalling equipment, ETCS and a Danish STM for a 400km trip. Eymer argues that this situation penalises current freight operators. "Anyone who enters the market from the early 2020s onwards will not be faced with the costs of transition," he says. "If you do everything you can to increase the costs of the rail system, there will be no customers left to pay for it." Funding The European Union can only provide limited funding for equipping the locomotives. The Connecting Europe Facility will only fund up to 50% of the 250,000 eligible cost set by the EU as the upper limit for onboard ETCS equipment. The Danish funding programme for ETCS onboard equipment has not yet been finalised, but state support is likely to be capped at 50% of the total cost for freight locomotives, compared with 100% for passenger vehicles. Eymer is calling on the Danish government to delay full implementation of the ERTMS programme until suppliers can provide "tested and homologated" baseline 3 release 2 (SRS 3.5.0) equipment to limit the technical and financial risk to operators. He also advocates the retention of the legacy signalling system until 2021, harmonisation of implementation plans with Sweden to avoid STM costs, and forcing suppliers to cooperate to reduce costs. The so-called "bridge toll" model is also put forward for funding onboard equipment through increased track access charges, which would enable freight operators to spread the cost of ETCS over a longer period. There is an important vote in the UK soon and it's not the EU Referendum. Elections for Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) will be taking place on May 5th. PCCs are comprised of directly elected officials who oversee local policing and crime and were first introduced across England and Wales in 2012. The first elections drew the lowest ever turnout in British electoral history: 15 per cent on average. At the time, the UK media presented this as one of the most serious failures of the policy. A report (PDF) for the Police Foundation discussed some of the main reasons for this poor turnout. Reasons included poor timing, voter dissatisfaction (i.e., concern about mixing politics and policing), a lack of information (i.e., limited advertising from central government) and under-resourced campaigns (i.e., limited funds available to candidates). Although these issues are likely to remain, voter turnout is expected to improve in the second set of elections, as this will be aligned with voting in the local elections in the UK. But the evidence suggests that public awareness remains low. Almost two years after the first elections, one survey commissioned by the Committee on Standards in Public Life found that 68 per cent of people had heard of PCCs, but less than half knew that they were elected into their role by the public. There has been very little research examining what has happened in the four years since PCCs were elected. However, my Ph.D thesis, completed in 2015, focused on the introduction and implementation of PCC policy in England and Wales. It attempted to find out more about the work that PCCs were doing and the relationships they were building with local stakeholders. The research found that there were a number of challenges for PCCs. Some of these included balancing the need to engage local communities against maintaining a broad strategic role across the police force, as well as managing sometimes difficult relationships with chief constables and police and crime panels (bodies of local councillors who scrutinise PCCs). While PCCs approached the role in different ways, they all shared the same aims of cutting crime and delivering an effective and efficient local police service, with some being involved in a number of innovative crime prevention measures in English and Welsh regions. Despite all the work happening behind the scenes, the poor voter turnouts in the election and apparent remoteness between PCCs and the public mean that both the government and prospective PCCs still have a lot of work to do to enthuse their electorate. So why should the public care about the PCC elections this time round? PCCs Have Significant Powers That Affect Everyone PCCs have a number of powers within their local police areas, including powers to set local police priorities, appoint and dismiss chief constables and direct police and crime reduction budgets. They are also responsible for large sums of public money and have the power to affect how much council tax goes to the police. The Powers of PCCs Are Expanding The PCC role is still in development. Following consultation, the government has announced that it is taking forward legislation to enable PCCs to hold their local fire and rescue services to account part of a broader move to establish closer collaboration between the police, fire and rescue and NHS ambulance services. Some PCCs have sought to extend their role even further. For example, Adam Simmonds, PCC for Northamptonshire, has commissioned a free school with a 'crime focus' for troubled youths, an initiative that has attracted support from the UK's Home Secretary Theresa May. These are indications that PCCs will play an increasingly prominent role across local government, beyond simply policing and crime. PCCs Are Here to Stay Although both Labour and the Liberal Democrats parties in the UK proposed scrapping PCCs in their 2015 general election manifestos, the election of the Conservative government meant that PCCs will remain in place for at least the next eight years. However, as PCCs become more ingrained in the local political landscape particularly if they are given further powers they are likely to prove difficult to remove. Their position is also supported by the increasingly powerful Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC), which affords PCCs the chance to coalesce around key issues in policing and crime, and also gives them a strong political voice. PCCs are clearly a work in progress and their role is in development, both by government and PCCs themselves. Together with their local stakeholders, such as Chief Constables and Police and Crime Panels, they are learning how to best work together to forge effective and accountable relationships. However, perhaps the most important relationship of all is with their local electorates. The upcoming elections will be a barometer of this, but of more importance will be the work they do thereafter. Both the government and PCCs will need to engage in a widespread public awareness campaign before and after the elections. This should inform the public about PCCs and their role in society, and make use of objective, evidence-based research to clearly show the contributions that they have made to the region through the initiatives and programmes that they have introduced. Only then will the UK public start to care about PCCs and understand why their votes matter. Matthew Davies is an associate analyst at RAND Europe. He holds a Ph.D. in criminology from the University of Oxford, where he completed a thesis on Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) policy in England and Wales, which involved interviewing 32 out of 41 PCCs across England and Wales. Commentary gives RAND researchers a platform to convey insights based on their professional expertise and often on their peer-reviewed research and analysis. Shira Efron has been named a special advisor on Israel at the RAND Corporation Center for Middle East Public Policy (CMEPP). CMEPP brings together analytic excellence and regional expertise from across RAND, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization, to address the most critical political, social, and economic challenges facing the Middle East today. Efron is expected to help RAND continue to develop relationships with Israeli institutions and attract support for further Israel-related public policy research at RAND. The new role is supported by gifts from the Guilford and Diane Glazer Fund and the Y & S Nazarian Family Foundation. Both foundations have a history of supporting RAND public policy work for Israel. In addition to her new role, Efron is an associate policy researcher at RAND. Efron has conducted research on geopolitical trends in the Middle East, as well as domestic policies in Israel. Along with her Middle East expertise, Efron's research focuses on food security in Africa, technology adoption and commercial drones. We are delighted to have Shira expand RAND's already impressive portfolio of public policy research related to Israel. I can't think of a more qualified analyst to take on this exciting new role, said Dalia Dassa Kaye, director of CMEPP. Efron hopes to further expand RAND's research portfolio in Israel through multiple channels, including collaboration with nonpartisan Israeli institutions. Prior to joining RAND, Efron was the policy director and country representative of the Institute for Inclusive Security in Israel. She also was a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, where she edited the Middle East Bulletin. In addition, Efron served as a research analyst at a hedge fund in New York, as an editor at the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz and as a reporter in the Israeli Defense Forces. Efron has a Ph.D. in policy analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School, an M.A. in international relations/international business from New York University and a B.Sc. in biology and computer science from Tel Aviv University. Philanthropic contributions have allowed RAND to conduct studies about Israeli police reform, Israel's energy futures and the costs of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and to provide analysis for Israel's National Economic Council within the Prime Minister's Office. The latter project, led by RAND senior economist Steven Popper, recommended how to improve the processes for long-term socioeconomic strategy within the Israeli government. RAND studies have proven essential to long-term planning in Israel and are influencing policy reforms. Since Syria's civil war began in 2011, half of the country's 23 million people have been displaced; nearly 7 million are displaced within Syria, and nearly 5 million registered Syrian refugees live outside of the country, mainly in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. Approximately 1.5 million Syrian refugees are school-age children. While safe imminently, these children now face a slew of struggles not the least of which is the lack of education that they need to move forward in life. I recently visited a school for Syrian refugee children in eastern Turkey. The school's principal, a refugee himself, is a remarkable man. He had been a math teacher in Syria before fleeing across the border with his family after the outbreak of the civil war. When he first arrived in the Turkish village, he noticed that many of the local Syrian children were not enrolled in school and decided to take action. Walking door-to-door throughout all of the nearby villages, he surveyed households and made a list of Syrian children that were, at that time, not attending a formal educational program. After months of collecting data, the man submitted his findings to the local governor and appealed for the funding needed to provide the Syrian refugee children with education. The Turkish government and the United Nations complied and pledged the financial support necessary to build a prefabricated school. He set up a Facebook page to hire teachers, and even though there was no money for salaries, refugees who were formerly teachers in Syria volunteered to educate the children in their community. I visited the school during its first week of operation and was humbled to see children who were truly excited to be there. They wanted to learn. This is only one of many stories illustrating the resourcefulness, determination, creativity, and high capacity levels found among Syrian refugees. Traditional refugee responses rely mainly on U.N. agencies and non-governmental organizations to implement programs. But other propitious untapped resources such as social media and technology companies, other private sector actors, and the refugees themselves also have the capacity to deliver needed solutions to social problems such as education. Refugee education is one area where these untapped resources stand to make a significant impact. There are immense challenges to providing education to Syrian refugees, beginning with the sheer enormity of the situation. Half of the 1.5 million refugee children are in school, thanks to the efforts of host governments, the U.N., and non-governmental organizations. Yet 700,000 (PDF) of these children currently do not attend formal school and have not for several years. This is in stark contrast to the access afforded to Syrian children in their middle-income homeland prior to the outbreak of the civil war. Because 90 percent of the refugees live in cities, suburbs, villages, and other non-camp settings, efforts to provide access to education cannot be easily concentrated in a single location. Though these challenges are significant, they are not insurmountable. Our 2015 RAND Corporation study of Syrian refugee education in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan offered a number of recommendations for improving access to and quality of education. The report identified strategies that rely on untapped resources in the private sector, other technology or media companies, and the refugees themselves. The first of such strategies involves creating school spaces. Lebanon and Jordan opened their public schools to Syrian refugees, often accommodating the additional children by instituting second shifts in the school day. In Turkey, UNICEF and the refugees themselves have opened up schools. However, despite these efforts, schools in all host countries are still forced to turn away children due to a lack of space. One way to create more school spaces is to design inexpensive schools that can be built quickly. These schools could be funded through public-private partnerships, where private firms finance the construction of new school buildings, which are then rented to host governments upon completion. Another strategy is to use distribution mapping and geospatial information systems to identify buildings that could be repurposed as schools within urban locations that suffer from overcrowded classrooms. These information systems could also identify less densely populated schools that can bear additional enrollment. Transportation to distant schools, however, is not always safe for children traveling alone, and it is cost prohibitive to families struggling to rebuild their lives. Increasing the competency of teachers is also necessary to educating refugee children. To staff new schools and new shifts, administrators quickly hire inexperienced individuals to teach. Those responsible for teaching refugee children, however, must have an exceptional skill set to connect with and instruct their students, who are often traumatized and may have been outside of the school environment for several years. Thus, teachers must be trained to attend to children with additional needs. One possible strategy to do so could potentially involve providing training to teachers online, on smartphones, or via television programming. The issue of staffing could also be addressed by taking advantage of the many experienced teachers among the Syrian refugees themselves. Donor commitments to pay for teacher salaries and policy changes in Jordan and Lebanon to permit the hiring of Syrians as teachers could easily add to the pool of capability. Language barriers pose additional challenges to educating Syrian refugees. Because Syrians speak Arabic and Turkey's public schools teach in Turkish, Syrian students cannot easily enter Turkish schools. Although the community of Syrian refugees in Turkey created schools of their own using a version of the Syrian curriculum, the number of schools is insufficient, and such an approach perpetuates segregation between the refugees and their host nation. To address this challenge, effective and inexpensive language training for students and their parents is needed. Some refugee children have unique learning needs, after having missed several years of school following the outbreak of violence in Syria. Given that extensive gains in physical and emotional maturity occur during each year of childhood, placing refugees into classrooms where the rest of the children are much younger would be disruptive to both the refugee children and host country children. While alternative education programs exist, they are too few in number and not tied to educational pathways that lead to certified degrees. One strategy for addressing this challenge is online education for children who have missed a substantial amount of school. However, many refugees live in crowded conditions and under significant stress, potentially making online learning difficult. Finally, Syrian families need better access to information about schooling in their host nations. As demonstrated by the principal whose ambitions gave birth to a new school for the children in his community, Syrian refugees have immense potential themselves. Yet, when refugee parents lack access to information about the opportunities related to education for their children (such as schools with available space or nearby NGOs that offer educational support), they have no realistic avenue for helping their children succeed. Although innovative information and data tools were developed for and by aid workers, no such tools exist to communicate with or get information from refugees despite the fact that many have access to smartphones, television, radio, and sometimes computers. Exploring options for interactive communication with the refugees' parents or guardians would be key. The U.N. estimates that in protracted refugee crises, the time to return home averages about 25 years meaning that it will likely be several decades before the Syrians can return to Syria. However, the international community and the Syrian children cannot wait for a resolution to Syria's internal strife, before addressing the large educational gaps that today exist. Medium-term solutions at scale, like those listed above, must be implemented with the knowledge that an investment in education is an investment in the future. Investing in education is important not only for the individuals involved, but also for the sustainable development, economies, and stability of both host countries and Syria in the long-term. Only through such efforts will Syrian refugee children be prepared to be the leaders of the generation to come. Shelly Culbertson is a policy analyst at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation, and the author of The Fires of Spring: A Post-Arab Spring Journey Through the Tumultuous New Middle East (St. Martin's Press). This commentary originally appeared on Georgetown Journal of International Affairs on April 18, 2016. Commentary gives RAND researchers a platform to convey insights based on their professional expertise and often on their peer-reviewed research and analysis. Last week, the Taliban announced the opening of its annual spring offensive. The year ahead is going to be a difficult one for the Afghan government and the small cadre of American and NATO troops that remain in country. For the past several years, the United States and its NATO allies have been scaling back their military commitment in Afghanistan. The Taliban, in response, have been scaling up their operations, inflicting unprecedented heavy casualties on Afghan government forces and gaining increased control over much of the countryside. Last year, the Taliban briefly overran and occupied Kunduz, a provincial capital in the north of the country. More recently, they have been threatening the capital of Helmand province in the South. The coalition government in Kabul headed by President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Officer Abdullah Abdullah is riven by factional infighting, complicating its relations with the Parliament and slowing the appointment of key officials. Despite a slowdown in the economy, however, the government has been able to sharply increase revenue by cutting corruption and increasing efficiency within the financial and customs bureaucracy. Nevertheless, the governing coalition remains vulnerable to the sort of shocks the Taliban might be able to deliver. The Taliban has its own problems. The revelation that its former leader, Mullah Omar had been dead for more than two years led to recriminations over the cover-up by his chief lieutenant and a jockeying among possible successors. Omar's principal deputy, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour was able, with Pakistani support, to assume the reins of leadership, but he does not enjoy the same degree of unquestioned loyalty as did his predecessor. In addition to internal dissent, Mansour must also deal with a direct challenge from the Islamic State, which has opened a branch in Afghanistan, recruited dissident Taliban elements, and begun to battle both the government and the mainline Taliban. The United States, China, and Pakistan have been working with President Ghani and his government in an effort to promote peace talks with the Taliban. Pakistan, which hosts the Taliban leadership and some of its deadliest operatives, is key to this effort. Pakistani military and intelligence officials are encouraging the Taliban to open such talks but so far have not been willing to employ all the leverage at their disposal. Pakistan regards the Taliban both as an asset for influencing events in Afghanistan and as a potential enemy. The Pakistani military has consequently not been ready to arrest or expel those Taliban elements that do not join peace talks and negotiate seriously. Until it does so, there seems little reason to look for early progress or even the opening of talks. President Barack Obama had hoped to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan during his term of office. The rise of the Islamic State in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere has put paid to that aspiration. Recognizing the fragility of the Afghan government and the mounting military pressure it is under, Obama has agreed to extend the American military presence there into 2017, leaving his successor to determine what comes thereafter. It seems likely that Obama will also step back from his currently stated intention to cut remaining American troops strength, now around 10,000 in country, by almost half by year's end. The next president will be advised by top military, intelligence, and diplomatic officials that the withdrawal of remaining American support would plunge Afghanistan into a much wider civil war, opening up opportunities for both al Qaeda and the Islamic State to consolidate their presence and organize attacks on the United States and its allies. James Dobbins, a veteran diplomat who most recently served as the State Department's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, is a senior fellow at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation. This commentary originally appeared on The Cipher Brief on April 21, 2016. Commentary gives RAND researchers a platform to convey insights based on their professional expertise and often on their peer-reviewed research and analysis. New Delhi: Edible oil industry body SEA is approaching food safety regulator FSSAI as well as advertising industry watchdog ASCI against yoga guru Ramdev promoted Patanjali alleging that its ads for mustard oil are "false and misleading". Stating that it doesn't "appreciate derogatory remark for other edible oils", Solvent Extractors Association of India (SEA) claims that Patanjali's advertisement of its 'kacchi ghani mustard oil' is "not in good taste". Patanjali, however, insisted that its present commercial was "based on facts, findings and research. We do not intend or mislead any one". The company's advertisement had claimed that kacchi ghani mustard oil of other brands are "adulterated". SEA has taken exception to such claims. "Recent advertisement on Kacchi Ghani Mustard oil published by Patanjali Ayurved Ltd is not in good taste. In this advertisement, there are misleading and false statements about the solvent extracted oils," Mumbai-based SEA said in a statement. SEA has sent a detailed memorandum with documentary evidence to Patanjali drawing its attention and requested to withdraw the misleading statement made in the advertisement against solvent extracted oils, it said. "Unfortunately, Patanjali continued the advertisement both in print and electronic media and therefore the Association has decided to approach Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) as well as Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) to direct the Patanjali to withdraw the said advertisement with misleading facts," SEA added. The association also asked its members producing 'kacchi ghani mustard oil' to register their complain with FSSAI as well as ASCI on this issue. When contacted, Patanjali Ayurved spokesman said, "Our present commercial is based on facts and research. We do not intend or mislead any one. We believe in educating the mass and promote quality products." The company has been working in 'Kacchi Ghani mustard oil' from over four years. The response of the consumer is very good and the people are now getting aware of the health benefit of the mustard oil, hence it is on the pace of fast growth, the official added. Commentary The U.S. drone strike that killed al Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan took out one of the last remaining key figures behind the 9/11 terror attacks. But it also highlighted how little the United States got out of its 2020 bargain with the Taliban, and raised questions about the U.S. ability to adequately monitor the developing threat from this quarter going forward. The US$30 million television adaptation of John Le Carres spy thriller The Night Manager, which launched in the US this week, has been acquired by the Alibaba-owned online platform Youku Tudou. The six-part British-American drama, which aired on the BBC in February and March to average overnight audiences of 6.3 million per episode, stars Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie.As well as the new deal with Youku Tudou, producer The Ink Factory and its agents at WME-IMG said FranceTV has also recently picked up the thrillers rights in France.The Night Manager has already been sold to Tele Munchen Gruppe for German-speaking Europe, C More and TV4 for the Nordic countries, DR in Denmark, Sky Italia in Italy, BBC First and SBS for Australia, TV3 for New Zealand and AMC International for Iberia, Eastern Europe, Russia, Asia (excluding Japan), Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.We are thrilled to see the incredible global response to The Night Manager, which has now been sold to networks covering over 188 countries, said Simon Cornwall, co-founder of The Ink Factory and the son of John Le Carre.It has been wonderful working with IMG to ensure that this internationally resonant series is seen and enjoyed by audiences the world over, and we are proud to have built such a strong group of broadcast partners.WME-IMG partner Chris Rice added: The Night Manager has captured the imagination of broadcasters around the world, and we are delighted to have secured deals in these key territories with Youku Tudou as our partner in China and the French broadcast network FranceTV. These partnerships underscore the power of our worldwide sales force as we continue to explore all platforms to bring this fantastic series to the widest audience possible. MOSCOW, April 21 (RAPSI, Diana Gutsul) The Presnensky District Court of Moscow has given Yekaterina Smetanova, one of the main defendants in the case on embezzlement at the Defense Ministrys subsidiary Oboronservis, a 4-year suspended sentence with a 5-year probation period, the courts spokesperson Nina Yurkova told RAPSI on Thursday. Smetanova was also fined 6,499, 655 rubles ($98,425), the sum equal to single total of commercial bribery. Smetanova has been charged with embezzlement and commercial bribery. She has pleaded guilty to the crimes of which she has been accused, and provided detailed and consistent testimony exposing the other individuals involved in the crime. She has been released under restriction notice. Case against her was singled out and considered separately. The corruption scandal broke out at the Defense Ministry in 2012 and led to the resignation of then Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov and Yevgeniya Vasilyeva. Serdyukov was charged with negligence. Investigators claimed that his actions or inactions resulted in damages to the state estimated at 56 million rubles (about $848,000) by ordering army personnel to build a private road to a Caspian Sea resort owned by his brother-in-law. However, the Russian media reported in late December 2013 that the criminal probe into Serdyukovs actions was closed. Serdyukov's lawyer Genrikh Padva said later that his client was pardoned under an amnesty program. On May 8, 2015 the Presnensky District Court of Moscow sentenced Yevgeniya Vasilyeva, an aide to Serdyukov, to five years in prison for her involvement in corruption cases at the Defense Ministry. In late August, a court in the Vladimir Region released Vasilyeva on parole. US court sentences Russian national to 9.5 years for cyber fraud - report MOSCOW, April 21 (RAPSI) Russian citizen Alexander Panin has been sentenced to 9.5 years in prison by a court in the U.S. state of Georgia for cyber fraud, Associated Press has reported. According to Associated Press, earlier Panin pleaded guilty to one of 23 charges. Prosecutions documents read that Panin, also known as Gribodemon, was the main creator of malicious malware known as SpyEye which has infected 50 million computers in the U.S. Between 2009 and 2011, Panin and others conspired to advertise and develop different versions of the program. He was able to sell the malware to upwards of 150 individuals, each of whom paid a sum ranging between $500 and $10,000 for different versions of the program, Associated Press has reported. According to the prosecutors, the grand total damage from thefts conducted using SpyEye runs up to $1,000,000,000, Associated Press has reported. Algerian national Hamza Bendelladj was sentenced to 15 years in prison for selling various versions of the malware. According to Associated Press, an investigation into Panin began in 2011 when FBI agents confiscated a server with operational SpyEye system from Bendelladj who was later arrested in Bangkok in 2013. Panin was arrested by the US authorities in Georgia, in July 2013. In January 2014 he pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit wire and bank fraud. After the FBI investigation, four Panins accomplices from Bulgaria and UK were arrested. The US authorities earlier motioned to the Court of Northern District of Georgia to allow for releasing the information about hundreds of thousands of possible victims of Panins fraud. The motion stated that the sheer number of potential victims, their diverse points of origin and lack of any information beside the IP address hampered their identification and the ability to notify them that their computers have been compromised. Legislative curb on foreign law firms in Russian courts Context Foreign lawyers could be prohibited from practicing in Russian courts MOSCOW, April 21 (RAPSI, Alexander Panfilov) There is nothing unusual in a legislative initiative aimed at limiting participation of foreign law firms in civil proceedings in Russian courts as numerous attempts to normalize the situation were made earlier, says Gennady Sharov, Vice-President of the Federal Chamber of Lawyers. Legislation amendments were proposed by Denis Voronenkov, a lawmaker in the State Duma, Russias lower house of parliament. He submitted a bill On introduction of amendments to Article 60 of the Commercial Procedure Code of the Russian Federation and Article 51 of the Civil Procedure Code of the Russian Federation. According to the bill, a foreign state, an international organization, as well as an organization under their control, a foreign legal entity, a Russian legal entity with foreign investments, as well as employees thereof, foreign citizen should be banned from representing parties in civil proceedings and commercial courts. However, under the bill exemptions should be made in accordance with paragraph 4 of Article 59 of the Commercial Procedure Code of the Russian Federation, paragraph 2 of Article 48 of the Civil Code. According to Sharov, earlier attempts to normalize the situation were of scholastic, selective nature, whereas problems encountered in the sphere of provision of professional legal assistance need to be settled as a single set. First of all, lawyers should be granted an exclusive right for legal representation in court. The Federal Chamber of Lawyers has stated the necessity of this step more than 10 years ago. This proposal was taken into account in the Concept of Regulation of Professional Legal Assistance Market developed in the framework of implementation of state program Justice, the adoption of which unfortunately was delayed, according to Sharov. He also noted that legal representation is only a small part of activities carried out by foreign law firms, whereas cases are handled mostly by Russian lawyers. Sharov also added that foreign citizens are allowed to work as lawyers in Russia. The explanatory note to the bill clarifies that it is aimed to stimulate the development of national legal representation. The author of the draft points out that the idea of putting a cap on participation of foreign law firms in court proceedings has been applied in China, India, Brazil, and Germany as national legal representation has become a priority there. The explanatory note also says that the necessity to introduce limits on foreign law firms activities has been ripe due to sanctions imposed on Russia by a large number of foreign states and negative macroeconomic climate. Participation of foreign law firms as consultants and counsels to Russian business raises risks of harm to the national economic security, since access to commercial secrets and analytical data is granted to persons potentially affiliated with foreign intelligence agencies, according to the author of the bill. The bill specifies that the limits should be applied only in terms of participation of foreign law firms in court proceedings, since taking into account the observance of rights of business entities to competent legal assistance, it seems reasonable to retain the opportunity to provide advisory services in the sphere of international legislation for foreign law firms. The author of the bill expects a reduction in capital flight from the Russian economy as a result of the proposed amendments. The draft law was brought before the State Duma Committee on Civil, Criminal, Arbitration, and Procedural Legislation on April 15, 2016. As we see a surge in inflation globally, it is now critical that everyone is aware of the implications this will have along every step of the insurance and reinsurance value chain. Mumbai: Diageo on Thursday appealed before the Debt Recovery Tribunal (DRT) that an amount of USD 40 million as part of the sweetheart deal between the company and Vijay Mallya, was paid outside India and does not fall within the DRTs jurisdiction. "The amount of USD 40 million, which is a part of USD 75million payout package between Mallya and us, was paid outside India and hence the DRT does not have power to direct us to attach the money before the tribunal. Such a deal does not fall in the jurisdiction of DRT," Diageo argued. As soon as the proceedings began at the tribunal here, Diageos Counsel submitted the copy of the objections filed against SBI-led Bankers' memo, seeking depositing of USD 40million before the DRT. The consortium led by State Bank of India had filed a memo putting a claim on the payout of USD 40 million to Mallya by Diageo as part of the sweetheart deal. According to the deal, Diageo agreed to pay Mallya USD75million in five instalments in lieu of the liquor baron stepping down from the post of Chairman of United Spirits. An amount of USD 40 million was paid immediately after Mallya quit from chairman's post. Making submissions before DRT Presiding Officer C R. Benakanahalli, Diageo's counsel prayed that the tribunal should reject the bankers' memo for its inconsistent claims on relief. Diageo also argued that USD 40 million was paid to Mallya on February 25, much before DRT's March 7 order, and hence the attempt of the bankers to recreate liability is questionable and untenable. DRT, in its March 7 order had barred Mallya from withdrawing USD 75 million exit payment from Diageo till the disposal of the case over the loan default by his Kingfisher Airlines. It also had restrained Diageo and United Spirits Ltd, owned by the UK-based firm, from temporarily disbursing the amount to Mallya, who worked out the deal under a severance package? Diageo also argued that the remaining USD 35 million to be paid to Mallya was subject to certain conditions, which means it is not a guarantee that it would be transferred to him and hence there does not arise any question of attaching the money before the tribunal. Diageo also contended that DRT will not have any jurisdiction over the transfer of remaining USD 35 million to Mallya because the amount will be paid outside India. The bankers, on the other hand, sought time to consult on the interim order passed by the Bombay High Court, asking the Service Tax Department to attach the sale of proceedings of Mallya's private aircraft parked at Mumbai airport. They had on April 13 filed an application, seeking attachment of the sale proceedings of Mallya's private aircraft by the Service Tax Department, which is going to auction it on May 12 and 13 to recover their dues estimated to be nearly Rs 535 crore. Last month, the department had claimed in a petition to the Bombay High Court that Mallya's total disputed liability in respect of service tax was to the tune of Rs 535 crore. It was also claimed that Mallya had collected a large sum of money as service tax from flyers of the now-grounded Kingfisher Airlines on behalf of the government, but the same was not deposited in the government treasury. Mallya, whose now-defunct group company Kingfisher Airlines owes over Rs 9,000 crore to 17 banks, had left the country on March 2 and is believed to be in the UK. Benakanahalli posted the matter for next hearing on April 29. Noted MIT atmospheric physicist, Richard Lindzen, in order to minimize what he calls the ever more shrill voices of climate alarmists, has clearly described the parameters of the debate. In an excellent online video produced by Prager University, Lindzen defines three groups in the climate debate - two of which are scientists and the third group made up of politicians, environmentalists and the media. The first group of scientists agree with the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) who mostly believe that recent releases of C02 (carbon dioxide) due to mans burning of fossil fuels, might dangerously heat the planet. The second group of scientists, he says, doesnt see this as an especially serious problem and that the climate is a complex natural system impacted by many forces. He would note that these scientists do not see evidence that CO2 emissions are a dominant or controlling factor. It might be surprising to many people but Dr. Lindzen notes that there are many things these two groups of scientists agree on. The climate is always changing. CO2 is a greenhouse gas without which life on earth is not possible, but adding it to the atmosphere should lead to some warming. Atmospheric levels of CO2 have been increasing since the end of the Little Ice Age in the 19th century. Over the past two centuries, the global mean temperature has increased slightly and erratically by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit or one degree Celsius. Given the complexity of climate, no confident prediction about future global mean temperature or its impact can be made. This last point might also be a surprise to many people but the IPCC itself, in spite of the much lauded climate model predictions, acknowledged in its own 2007 report that The long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. Lindzen wonders why so many people are worried, indeed, panic stricken about rising CO2 levels leading to catastrophic changes in the climate since neither group of scientists suggest that the burning of fossil fuels will do so. This leads us to Lindzens third group the politicians, environmentalists, and media who each have their own reasons - money, power, and religious devotion to promote a catastrophic scenario. There is actually a fourth group that Lindzen describes as scientists outside of climate physics who have jumped on the bandwagon, publishing papers blaming global warming for everything from acne to the Syrian civil war. And crony capitalists who have eagerly grabbed for the subsidies mostly for green energy technologies, that governments continue to lavishly provide. The latest skirmish in the war against crony capitalists was waged this past week when a group of renewable-energy advocates attempted to have green tax breaks attached to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Reauthorization bill (H.R. 636) working its way through the Senate. Claiming the provisions were inadvertently left off last years Omnibus spending bill, the tax subsidies were for geothermal heat pumps, clean-energy manufacturing facilities and fuel cells.* These were a perfect illustration of what Lindzen was talking about. Some thirty groups, including the Texas Public Policy Foundation, wrote Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-OR) asking that expiring renewable energy subsidies not be attached to a must-pass reauthorization of the FAA. Our letter argued that "green pork provisions were not germane to the authorization bill, and favorable tax treatment had already been extended to renewable energy producers in the past. In the end, the provisions were dropped from the bill. Energy production in America should be based on the free market, not artificially propped up in ways that mask the real cost to the consumer and the taxpayer. With the countrys national debt topping $19.2 trillion, it is unconscionable that the President will soon sign the UN Framework on Climate Change negotiated in Paris last December. A key provision of this agreement is providing $100 billion a year in climate finance for developing countries by 2020, with a commitment to increase funding in the future. Spending money we have to borrow is another form of international cronyism. In this case, it is money down the drain. Xenia Wickett is Head of the US and the Americas programme at Chatham House. This piece has been published in collaboration with Chatham House. The views expressed are the author's own. This piece was also published at the Chatham House website. The U.S.-U.K. Special Relationship is in decline, and a British decision to leave the European Union would hasten its demise. As Great Britain increasingly becomes just one of America's many strategic relationships, Brexit would speed the transfer of U.S. attention and energy from the United Kingdom to the continent. This, however, does not need to be inevitable. The necessary ingredient to reverse this decline is stronger British leadership internationally. The U.S. government has made it abundantly clear that its preference is to see Britain remain in the European Union. In January 2013, when British Prime Minister David Cameron had not yet committed to a referendum on Britain's EU membership, Phil Gordon, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European affairs, bluntly stated that it is in the American interest for the United States "to see a strong British voice in that European Union." The fact that a senior U.S. official would go so far - to be seen to intervene so early in a divisive domestic political issue - spoke volumes about how important this is to America. This week, U.S. President Barack Obama will visit the United Kingdom to send an equally firm, if polite, message to the British public. Why does the U.S. want the U.K. to remain in Europe? From the U.S. perspective, there are three principal elements that the United Kingdom brings to the table in the bilateral relationship. The first stems from Britain's capabilities, particularly in the military and intelligence arenas. US-U.K. intelligence sharing - each country is the other's closest partner - has a long history dating back to the Second World War. For good or ill, the United Kingdom has been among America's leading allies in every major conflict the United States has been involved in for the last quarter of a century - in the Gulf War, Bosnia and Kosovo, Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, and the interventions in Libya, as well as current operations against ISIS in Iraq and, belatedly, Syria. The second relates to the political value of having a reliable partner in international engagements - and thereby avoiding the perception of acting unilaterally. Shared history and values, and thus often perspectives (as well as capabilities) have ensured that the United Kingdom has long been the first port of call for the United States when Washington seeks to solve international problems or build coalitions. At the same time, Britain's historical global reach and diplomatic experience around the world (not least in areas of current concern such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, and Iraq) have provided American policy-makers with valuable input on foreign policy issues that has contributed to their own internal decision making. The third area of added value for the United States is Britain's place in the European Union. While British and U.S. policy preferences may at times diverge, as they have recently on the Israel-Palestine issue, for example, their common outlooks and interests mean that Britain is the closest thing that the United States has to having a voice in the European Union. At the same time, the United States also sees Britain as the country most likely to support an open trade and investment agenda and a more proactive approach to dealing with the challenges in Europe's neighbourhood, policies that leaders in both countries agree are necessary to make the European Union a more effective actor and a better partner to the United States on the international scene. The transition from U.S.-U.K. ties to U.S.-European ties In recent years, however, the United States has begun to diversify its relationships within Europe, in part as Britain has become unable or unwilling to step up and fulfill these three elements of paramount importance to the US. Defense and intelligence With regards to defense capabilities, it is no longer the United Kingdom that the United States inevitably looks to first. In Libya, the operation that started with the defense of Benghazi from Moammar Gadhafi's forces in March 2012 (which eventually came to remove Gadhafi himself) was jointly led by the French and the British, although then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy appeared to be the driving force. More recently, it was the French with whom the United States partnered in responding to the terrorist activities in Mali, and Paris was first to support the United States in action in Syria. (This followed a British parliamentary vote to stay out in August 2013, and a belated vote to act in December 2015.) But in recent years others have worked more closely with the United States militarily as well, including in particular Poland and Denmark - although with the new government in Poland, the relationship might wither again. This trend toward more diversified military engagement with other European states looks set to continue in the near term. Despite taking a tough position in the 2014 NATO Summit to reinforce the commitment of NATO countries to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense, the Cameron government came very close to falling below this line in 2015, after five years of real defense cuts. The eventual decision to commit to meet this target, along with the newly released Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), have somewhat reassured American policymakers of the United Kingdom's continued ambition and capabilities. But there remains a lack of U.S. confidence, a feeling that this is only a temporary uptick in British attention to defense. Meanwhile, America will continue to expand its horizons. The story on intelligence sharing is slightly different, but here too obstacles have arisen in the close U.S.-U.K. exchange of information. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States and United Kingdom have been part of the Five Eyes alliance - with Australia, New Zealand, and Canada - that allows its members to closely share intelligence. And arguably, within the Five Eyes, the links between Washington and London are the closest of all. However, more recently, tensions have emerged. Over the past five or so years, the British judicial system in particular has pushed back on U.S. confidentiality rules in ways that make the U.S. intelligence services nervous of continuing to share information; given the current close relationship, this could be more of an obstacle than it is for other countries sharing intel with the United States. KYIV, Ukraine - Invoking Yogi Berra's overused quote may seem cliche, but for Kyiv watchers, it seems a bit like "deja vu all over again." A continued stalemate and infighting between the president and prime minister caused the latter to resign. Corruption and a dysfunctional political system hinder the implementation of badly needed reforms. Russian pressure and exploitation of a broken post-Soviet system further erodes political capacity in Kyiv and divides interests in the regions. And while this story may sound familiar, this is not the mid-2000s and I am not talking about the Orange Revolution. To start, for many in Ukraine the political situation today is existential. To understand the difference, it is critical to underscore how much Russia's action has catalyzed this change. This must start with dispelling a mistake often made in many analyses of the Maidan revolution - chiefly in the thinking that the protests were all that pro-Western in nature. Rather, they comprised a conglomeration of pro-Ukrainian, pro-EU, anti-Russian constituencies united in their opposition to the government of Viktor Yanukovych's handling of the Accession Agreement negotiations and the political status quo. The tragic events of early 2014 solidified these identities and infused pro-Ukrainian, pro-Western, and anti-Russian sentiments more widely across the anti-status quo movement. The shooting of Maidan protesters, Moscow's annexation of Crimea, and the Kremlin's continued driver-seat role in the destabilization of Eastern Ukraine have given staying power to reform-oriented forces in Ukraine despite Kyiv's persistent political shortcomings. This is an important departure from the Orange Revolution script. During a visit to Odessa with the Heinrich Boll Foundation North America, one activist that had also participated in the Orange Revolution demonstrations told me that the difference today is that there is no other choice. Because of Russia's actions, Ukrainians do not have a "status quo" to return to. This was not the case during the mid-2000s. Many urged reform, yet Ukraine's oligarchic interests and the tensions of its multi-vector tendencies outlasted these ambitions. The voices of reform faded. It is clear that many of the same challenges that plagued the Yushchenko government are persisting in the post-Maidan era today, but it does not seem the voices of the Maidan will soon fade. Secondly, it is simply no longer possible for Ukraine to pursue a multi-vector foreign policy in the current political context given the existential threat facing Kyiv and the elements of the Maidan movement throughout society. Moreover, Ukraine's diplomatic exposure to European and U.S. attention has skyrocketed with politicians often jet-setting to Kyiv and providing political support, while also reiterating the need for reforms and conveying growing impatience. Discussions about Ukraine and the EU are ever-present; NATO has also gained more support among the wider population. A poll last summer showed that 53 percent of Ukrainians favored joining NATO. In 2010, that number was only 28 percent. Lastly, ongoing violence and the flow of internally displaced persons has had a broad-reaching impact on society. A significant volunteer culture has appeared in Ukraine, particularly among the youth. An evident catalyst has been their desire to help fundraising for the government-dubbed "Anti-Terrorist Operation Zone" participants. And with the failures of the Ukrainian military after the start of conflict in the Donbas, many members of the Ukrainian population have privately donated to Ukraine's military to help fill the gap left by government. This is not to paint a rosy picture for the government in Kyiv or the road ahead. The political challenges are as difficult as they have ever been. The change in prime minister, the saga of Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin's resignation, the Panama Paper revelations, and the continued consolidated financial (and effectively political) power in the hands of a select few indicate that Ukraine has a long way to go. Yet, the political class remains under pressure internally and externally to push through reforms, address corruption, and government failures. With many persistent obstacles, the most difficult reality for Ukraine's political class to deal with is that the dissatisfactions of the Maidan movement are not likely to go away. Given this, newly appointed Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman's recommitment to IMF reforms is encouraging. But, time will tell. There is significant room for greater frustration across the population beyond what already exists. And while the peaceful protests of late 2013 and early 2014 were an inspiration to the international community, growing disenchantment and populist sentiments spreading throughout all of Europe could possibly push the next Maidan in a different direction. New Delhi: The inter-ministerial panel Telecom Commission will take up for discussion, at its meeting scheduled for April 30, the plans for upcoming spectrum auction. According to official sources, the meeting, to be chaired by Telecom Secretary JS Deepak on April 30, will discuss spectrum base price, usage charge and other modalities related to the next round of spectrum auction. Telecom regulator TRAI has recommended to the government a mega spectrum plan that could fetch the Exchequer about Rs 5.36 lakh crore. Telecom Commission last month sought clarification on various points recommended by the regulator including pricing methodology, spectrum usage charges, partial auction of premium 700 mhz band. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has reiterated that the entire spectrum available in 700 Mhz band should be auctioned in the upcoming sale as non-utilisation would result into irreversible loss to the government. It has recommended a record high base price of Rs 11,485 crore per megahertz for the 700 Mhz band, which would be auctioned for the first time. Department of Telecom (DoT) had asked TRAI to reconsider whether all available spectrum in the 700 MHz band should be put up for auction or split in two phases. TRAI said it is of the opinion that the entire spectrum in the 700 MHz band is required to be made available for commercial use without delay and reiterated its earlier recommendation that entire available spectrum (2x35MHz) in the band should be put up in the upcoming auction. TRAI also reiterated its proposal regarding the pricing of 700 MHz band, for which it had proposed a base price that is four times of 1800 MHz band. Find a great selection of commercial real estate, manufactured homes, timeshares and more for Sale Buy real estate. Find a great selection of commercial real estate, manufactured homes, timeshares and more for Sale in US and Canada. Search Real Estate Talking about the Darjeeling schedule, Ranbir Kapoor said, "I as Jagga attended school in Darjeeling, hence we are here for the shoot. Photo: Twitter/RanbirKapoorFC Anurag Basu, whose last film, the highly acclaimed and successful 'Barfi!' came fours years ago, is shooting for his film 'Jagga Jasoos' with Ranbir Kapoor. After shooting several parts of the film in South Africa and Mumbai, the team has now moved to Darjeeling. Talking about the schedule, Ranbir said, "Dada (Anurag Basu) has a strong connection with Darjeeling. Whichever film he makes Darjeeling occupies an important part. I as Jagga attended school in Darjeeling, hence we are here for the shoot. When questioned whether Darjeeling was lucky for the duo, Ranbir replied, Luck is an unknown thing hence it cannot be attributed to luck. I would say that it is love for Darjeeling that makes us come back." He further added, It is calm, beautiful and with friendly people. It is also a great visual palate. The weather is excellent and I am looking forward to the shoot here. Ranbir will be sharing screen space with ex-flame Katrina Kaif. The two were first cast together in 2009's 'Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani'. Katrina, who was last seen in 'Fitoor' is also gearing up for the release of 'Baar Baar Dekho' opposite Sidharth Malhotra. On the other hand, Ranbir was last seen in 2015's 'Tamasha' co-starring Deepika Padukone. Watch the video here. Videos Sorry, there are no recent results for popular videos. Student has gun pulled on him while driving A student reported to University police that a male pulled a gun on him and pointed it at him while driving on Epps Bridge Parkway Monday evening. The Georgia Department of Revenue Alcohol and Tobacco Division raided downtown Athens pubs and bars Feb. 5 and 6, looking for underage drinkers. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives assisted with the operation as agents entered Flanagans, General Beauregards and 24 other businesses and locations carding students. Today, the University of Georgia will implement a change to its Responsible Action Protocol which will grant amnesty to students who overdose on alcohol or drugs, according to a Student Government Association press release. Celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Christina Applegate have influenced women by sharing their stories of breast cancer. (File Photo) Washington D.C.: A new study says that an increase in women with breast cancer choosing double mastectomy may be influenced by media coverage of celebrities. From 2000 to 2012, 17 celebrities publicly disclosed their breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. Researchers from the University of Michigan analyzed 727 articles from major U.S. print publications that covered these celebrity diagnoses. Four celebrities underwent double mastectomy, and 45 percent of the media coverage about their diagnoses mentioned that. Of the 10 celebrities who had a single mastectomy or breast conserving therapy, 26 percent of the media coverage discussed it. During that time, the number of women with breast cancer who underwent double mastectomy at the University of Michigan rose nearly five-fold. When actress Christina Applegate was diagnosed with breast cancer, a family history and BRCA mutation influenced her decision to have a double mastectomy. The BRCA mutation meant she had a high risk of cancer returning in one breast or a new cancer developing in the other breast. It's a detail that only a small proportion of media coverage included. Then, in 2013, Angelina Jolie wrote in the New York Times that she had both breasts removed because a BRCA mutation put her at high risk of breast cancer. While many refer to the "Angeline Jolie effect" as influencing the rise in double mastectomy, it began earlier than that. It's not uncommon for celebrities to influence health trends. Following Jolie's announcement, more people sought genetic testing. After Katie Couric underwent a colonoscopy on the Today Show, colonoscopy rates increased. In 1987, after Nancy Reagan chose a mastectomy over breast conserving therapy, rates of breast conservation dropped 20 percent. The concern, the authors write, is that women today are choosing double mastectomy based on inaccurate information about the risks and benefits. And because they are coming to their surgeon with their mind made up, there's less opportunity for surgeons to educate. The study has been published in Annals of Surgical Oncology. After protests and lobbying from both sides, celebrities and politicians fighting for and against it, and student groups advocating for their views on campus, Georgia House Bill 859, better known as the Campus Carry bill, died May 3 with a veto from Gov. Nathan Deal. FRIDAY Run For the River What: Part of Earth Week, this 3-mile running tour of streams on campus is hosted by Watershed UGA and the Office of Sustainability Where: Intersection of Hull Street and Baxter Street When: Noon Price: Free Enjoy a blast from the past at the annual Project HOPE 5K on April 23. Students will be grabbing their favorite 90s outfit, cartoon costume and preparing for the finish line water-balloon fight to support this student-run organization that serves as a connection between the UGA community and Pinewoods, an in-need community in Athens. SHARE Earnings a record for Plumas Bank Plumas Bank reported earnings of $1.6 million, or 32 cents per share, in the first quarter of 2016, an increase of $358,000 from the same three months a year ago. This represents the highest level of earnings for any first quarter in the history of Plumas Bank, based in Quincy with two branches in Redding. The bank was established in 1980. As of March 31, 2016, the bank's assets increased $41.5 million to $595 million. Total deposits increased $41.5 million to $525 million. Net loans increased $25.7 million to $405 million as of March 31, 2016. Program gets funds for housing help Keep Your Home California has received an additional $383.3 million in funding from the federal government, the state-managed program announced Wednesday. The money will allow the program to help at least 12,000 more homeowners who can receive up to $100,000 in mortgage payment assistance if they qualify. Homeowners seeking more information about Keep Your Home California can call 888-954-5337 from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekdays and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays or go to KeepYourHomeCalifornia.org. Reporter David Benda can be reached at 225-8219 or at david.benda@redding.com. Server Veronica Coots at Cafe Maddalena in Dunsmuir SHARE Grilled prawns over asparagus risotto Tagine of chicken over couscous Braised rabbit in tarragon cream sauce with potatoes, carrots and green beans Layered pistachio meringue dessert By Marc Beauchamp What a gem! wrote Cindy J. of Lagunitas recently about Dunsmuirs Cafe Maddalena on Yelp.com, where the Mediterranean-style bistro earns four and a half out of five stars. I completely agree. We had a wonderful meal there on a beautiful spring-like Friday evening in late March. Chef/co-owner Brett LaMott took our reservation and put us at a table for two next to the window looking out on historic Sacramento Avenue and the forested canyon to the east. LaMott and his wife and business partner, Nancy, have owned Cafe Maddalena since 2003. They offer a seasonal menu that changes every six weeks or so. As much as possible they try to source meat and produce from the North State for example, organic grass-fed beef from Scott River Ranch and vegetables and fruit from Homeward Bounty Farm and Hunter Orchards. The seafood and filet of beef are always popular, Nancy LaMott said, but so are unusual items like crispy frog legs and grilled lamb tongue. (Brett LaMott is a graduate of the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco. Prior to taking over Cafe Maddalena they owned the Trinity Cafe in Mount Shasta.) My wife had the tagine of chicken over couscous and I ordered a couple of appetizers the soup of the day (asparagus) and a delicious Swiss chard and currant empanada and an entree of grilled prawns over Meyer lemon risotto. Our server, Veronica Coots, was extraordinary. For dessert we shared a flourless French chocolate cake and a layered pistachio meringue with Meyer lemon creme. Cafe Maddalena has a loyal clientele of locals and North State residents. Thanks to Yelp.com and other such websites it draws diners from major west coast cities and beyond. Social media, Nancy LaMott observed, is like word of mouth gone gangbusters. The best restaurant in the Shasta and Dunsmuir area, wrote Timothy J. of Mountain View on Yelp. The travel website LonelyPlanet.com declared: "This cafe put Dunsmuir on the foodie map." So true. Cafe Maddalena makes for a delightful, romantic and all things considered reasonably priced getaway. Its open for dinner Thursday through Sunday from 5 to 9 p.m. Just be sure to make a reservation. go now Cafe Maddalena Address: 5801 Sacramento Ave., Dunsmuir Phone: 235-2725 Hours: Thursday - Sunday 5 to 9 p.m. Website: www.cafemaddalena.com Owners: Brett and Nancy LaMott Established: early 1990s Sample menu items: Beet salad $8.50 Crispy frog legs $13.50 Grilled lamb tongue $12 Pizza margherita $15.50 Prawns over asparagus risotto Tagine of chicken $19.50 Braised rabbit $24.50 Beef tenderloin $28.50 President Barack Obama speaks during the awards dinner for Syracuse Universitys Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting at Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, in Washington, Monday, March 28, 2016. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) SHARE By DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer NEW YORK (AP) President Barack Obama's turn as a media critic this week may not have thrilled many journalists, but it has forced a new look at how a media-saturated presidential campaign is being covered. Obama's challenge to reporters to be more probing comes at a time the media is facing two seemingly contradictory strains of criticism for its treatment of Republican front-runner Donald Trump: that it has covered him too much, or not done enough to look into his background and promises. Obama, speaking Monday night at a Syracuse University awards ceremony honoring the late political journalist Robin Toner, said he's not the only one dismayed by the tone of the campaign to succeed him. "I was going to call it a 'carnival atmosphere,' but that implies fun," he said. He said he always believed there was a price to pay if a politician said one thing and did another and wondered "in the current atmosphere, is that still true?" For reporters, he said "a job well done is about more than just handing someone a microphone." The billions of dollars in free media should come with "serious accountability, especially when politicians issue unworkable plans or make promises they can't keep," he said. Steve Capus, executive producer of the "CBS Evening News" and a former NBC News president, said Tuesday that he's wary of politicians who become media critics. Lumping all of the media together is neither fair nor accurate, he said. "When he calls for holding people accountable and talks about the role of the press in a free society, we would agree," Capus said. "I kind of think that's part of our marching orders on a daily basis." Obama's criticism fell flat on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." Host Joe Scarborough and Politico founder Jim VandeHei said that while Obama is urging the press to do better, he's had his own challenges running an open government. Much of the criticism seems directed at cable news networks, which have been covering the campaign virtually nonstop for the past several months. They've been rewarded financially: Fox News Channel reported Tuesday that it will finish the first three months as the top-rated network in all of cable TV, the first such quarterly victory in the network's history. CNN's chief executive Jeff Zucker has refined the strategy of "flooding the zone," or staying on one big story nearly exclusively while it's hot, and driven the use of town hall meetings with candidates to feed the political interest. Since the beginning of 2016, CNN has averaged 1.62 million viewers in prime time on weeknights, the Nielsen company said. Last year, CNN had 572,000 viewers during the same period. None of the cable networks would make executives available to talk about Obama's remarks. "A lot of people in the media have begun to wonder if this is kind of an orgy of Trump coverage," said Jane Hall, a journalism professor at American University in Washington. Networks have broadcast Trump news conferences or rallies in full, something rarely done in the past for candidates. Not only do they draw high ratings, there's always the potential Trump could say something outrageous or be interrupted by a demonstration. Still, it's inaccurate to say reporters haven't put difficult questions to Trump. Recently, he's submitted to sharply specific probing by editorial boards at The Washington Post and The New York Times, and his responses have gotten wide coverage. It's precisely because of reporting that people have learned of the shakiness of some of Trump's proposals, Capus said. Trump's critics overlook the fact that voters in primary and caucus states have put him where he is, he said. "That's why he's the front-runner," Capus said. "Not because of the media coverage." There's no available accounting of how much time the cable news networks have spent on Trump, but a study of broadcast network evening newscasts illustrates how he has dominated coverage. During the campaign through last Friday, Trump was the focus of 536 minutes of coverage on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts, according to news consultant Andrew Tyndall. Hillary Clinton was second with 191 minutes. Ted Cruz had 72 minutes, Bernie Sanders had 67 minutes and John Kasich had six minutes. Tyndall's accounting does not include specific accounting for primary or caucus coverage. It's fair to ask whether the news media has both overhyped Trump and overlooked Sanders' ascendancy during the same campaign, Hall said. Hall said, however, that she senses a new seriousness in the Trump coverage since it has become apparent he is the probable Republican nominee. Journalists appear engaged in a mid-campaign evaluation of how their work is being done even before Obama gave attention to the issue, she said. SHARE By DAVID KOENIG, AP Airlines Writer DALLAS (AP) More U.S. flights are arriving on time and airlines are losing fewer bags, yet more consumers are complaining about air travel. Traveler complaints jumped 34 percent last year, to the highest level since 2000. The top frustration is problem flights including cancelations and delays, which is unchanged in 16 years. "Everything is getting better, but they are still unhappy about the same things," says Dean Headley, a marketing professor at Wichita State and co-author of an annual report on airline quality. He thinks passengers resent the growth in extra fees for things like checked baggage and changing or canceling a reservation, and that makes them quicker to complain when something goes wrong with their trip. The annual report by Headley and Brent Bowen, dean of the aviation school at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, was released Monday. The researchers use publicly available information from the U.S. Department of Transportation to rate the airlines for on-time performance, baggage handling, bumping passengers because of oversold flights, and complaints filed with the government. Headley and Bowen named Virgin America the winner followed by JetBlue Airways and Delta Air Lines. The honor for Virgin came the same day that the boutique carrier announced it was being sold to Alaska Airlines. The report ranked Spirit Airlines last, just ahead of Envoy, Frontier and American Airlines. Among the other findings in this year's report: ON TIME: The percentage of flights that arrived on time rose to 79.9 percent last year from 76.2 percent in 2014. LOST BAGS: The rate of bags being lost, stolen or delayed bags dropped 10 percent in 2015. GETTING BUMPED: Fewer passengers were bumped off oversold flights; the rate dropped by 17 percent last year. That doesn't count people who voluntarily gave up their seats for money or a travel voucher. MORE COMPLAINTS: Airline customers filed more than 15,000 complaints with the Transportation Department last year, up from about 11,000 in 2014. Spirit Airlines and Frontier Airlines, budget carriers that charge lots of fees and had poor on-time records, had the worst complaint rates. It was the fifth increase in complaints in six years. Still, more than 670 million people flew on U.S. carriers last year, so only a tiny slice bothered to complain to the government. Many more gripe directly to the airline. Frontier CEO Barry Biffle has said that his airline gets about 30 complaints for every one filed with the Transportation Department and it used to be a 90-to-1 ratio. Complaints to the government topped 20,000 in 2000 but dropped sharply after the terror attacks of September 2001, which resulted in fewer people flying. Complaints didn't start rising again until 2004. There are serious students of the airline industry who dismiss reports like the one from Wichita State and Embry-Riddle. Brett Snyder, who writes the Cranky Flier blog, says the overall rankings don't tell travelers whether an airline is good or bad at what matters to them. "It lumps everything together in a way that doesn't make sense for most travelers," Snyder says. "You should research what matters to you. If you're flying a specific route, you can look at on-time performance on that route." Each month the Transportation Department lists flights that are chronically delayed and provides on-time figures for each airline at specific airports. But there are shortcomings to the government figures. For one thing, problems on regional outfits such as American Eagle, Delta Connection and United Express show up under the contractors that operate the flights unfamiliar names such as Envoy, SkyWest and ExpressJet instead of American, Delta and United, which sell tickets on those flights to consumers. Rachana Rimel, left, and Dhuha Jasim make nepalese dumplings in New York, Tuesday, March 29, 2016. A food delivery service is offering New Yorkers the chance to try some food cooked by some unusual chefs. All seven employees at Eat Offbeat are either refugees or asylum-seekers who fled their home countries. Theyre cooking foods from those places, including Iraq and Nepal. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig) SHARE By DEEPTI HAJELA, Associated Press NEW YORK (AP) The kitchen hums with activity. Rachana Rimal is at one table, making momos, the traditional dumplings from her native Nepal. Next to her, Iraqi immigrant Dhuha Jasif mixes some pureed eggplant for baba ghanouj. Containers of adas, a lentil stew from the East African nation of Eritrea, sit on a counter. The unusual mix of cuisines is how it works at Eat Offbeat, a Queens-based food delivery service. All seven employees are refugees or asylum seekers who fled their home countries. None had any professional cooking experience before coming to work for the startup, which launched in November. The company has committed to hiring refugees and teaching them culinary skills, partly for altruistic reasons and partly as a business strategy. In a city filled with good ethnic food, it is a way for the cuisine to stand out. "We are really focusing on these new and off-the-beaten-path cuisines," said Manal Kahi, who founded the company with her brother, Wissam Kahi. "Refugees are coming from countries that have cuisines we don't really know. ... It's not cuisines that you find at every corner." A Lebanese immigrant who came to New York for graduate school, Manal Kahi started thinking about a food business in 2014 after getting rave reviews from friends for the hummus she made from her grandmother's recipe. At the time refugees were also on her mind, since many Syrians had started fleeing their war-torn home for next-door Lebanon. "I was feeling very hopeless about it," Kahi said. "When I got this idea of making hummus, I thought maybe Syrian refugees could be making" it. As the idea for the scope of the company grew, the thought of employing refugees stuck. "We thought they were more in need than any other immigrants," she said. She and her brother partnered with Juan Suarez de Lezo, a chef who has worked in high-profile restaurants around the world, and contacted the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian organization that helps resettle refugees and asylees. Rimal was one of their first hires. The 52-year-old was granted asylum after coming to the U.S. in 2006, at the time leaving behind her husband and two of her three children. She was reunited with most of her family in recent years, but her son is still in Nepal, making her reluctant to talk about what drove her to seek asylum. When she left, an armed conflict between the Nepal government and the Communist Party of Nepal had been going on for 10 years, leaving at least 13,000 dead. She's been a cooking aficionado her entire life, having learned from her mother and grandmother. When the opportunity came from Eat Offbeat, she jumped at it. Since then, momos have become a standard offering on the company's menu, and she's taught the other women how to make them. Another favorite is her cauliflower Manchurian, which comes in a spicy sauce. Rimal has had to change her recipes somewhat to accommodate an American palate, and she's often tired from the work, but "I'm so happy to be here," she said. Kahi said the company is making close to 200 meals per week now out of the professional kitchen they rent in Queens. They offer food delivery to groups of at least five people, with hopes of growing to the point where individual meal delivery becomes economically feasible. If someone leaves, as the Eritrean refugee who brought the recipe for adas to the company did, Eat Offbeat is likely to take their dish out of circulation even though the other employees would have learned how to make it, Kahi said. That's because it's not just about the food, but also the people making it, she said. "We want to keep it tied to them." SHARE Robert "Buzz" Loring By Jim Schultz of the Redding Record Searchlight Redding's Robert "Buz" Loring, who established Buz's Crab Stand in 1968 and later went on to become a successful Shasta County developer, died Wednesday while on vacation in Alaska, a close family friend who ran his business office for about 25 years said Friday. He was 70. Loring, who sold Buz's Crab Stand in 1974, is credited with building, among other projects, the Mary Lake subdivision in Redding and the Ravenwood subdivision in Anderson. An astute businessman, Loring, who was a commercial fisherman in the early 1960s, saw a need for fresh fish in Redding and transported the saltwater fish that he had caught off the coast of Eureka and sold it from the back of his pickup off Eureka Way in Redding, said friend and Three Seasons Development business-office manager Linda Trotter. He eventually went on to open Buz's Crab Stand, but later sold it to George Santilena as he became interested in developing affordable, high-quality homes, she said. "He was a brilliant man," Trotter said. Loring never lost his love for fishing. He was an avid sportsman and world traveler, who especially loved to fish in Alaska's waters, she said. "But he liked fishing no matter where he was," Trotter said. In 2008, Loring was honored by the California Waterfowl Association for his work creating a 350-acre wetland marsh in the Upper Butte Basin and for his "exemplary efforts" in waterfowl resource management. Trotter, who said Loring had been in excellent health, was stunned to hear of his death, which she said was heart-related. "He was not ready to go," she said. Anderson Deputy Public Works Director Kevin Kidd said Friday that Loring was a well-respected builder. "He was good to work with," Kidd said. "You always knew where you stood with him. He was a straight shooter." A Valparaiso, Ind., native, Loring, who moved to Arcata as a young boy, loved animals, people and working, Trotter said. He was in the midst of developing the Pleasant Hill subdivision west of the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Anderson at the time of his death and was instrumental in putting together a funding group for a water pumping substation to provide water to his subdivision development. That pumping station is to also provide water to the nearby and unrelated The Vineyards subdivision, where construction was halted about two years ago due to a lack of drinking water. "He was the most active man," Trotter said. "He had a real sense of providing affordable housing. His mind was always going." Loring is survived by his wife, Cheryl; a son, Mark of Redding; two daughters, Kerry Scott and Jennifer Sunde, both of Redding; and three grandchildren, Trotter said. Reporter Jim Schultz can be reached at 225-8223 or at jschultz@redding.com. Until malaria is eradicated globally, people travelling to and from malaria-endemic countries can import the disease to Europe, WHO experts warn. (Photo: Pixabay) Europe has become the world's first region to wipe out malaria, with zero cases reported last year, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday. The number of indigenous malaria cases dropped to zero in 2015 from 90,712 in 1995, and the last cases were reported in Tajikistan in 2014, it said. "This is a major milestone in Europe's public health history and in the efforts to eliminate malaria globally," said Zsuzsanna Jakab, WHO regional director for Europe. Strong political commitment, improved detection and surveillance of malaria cases, mosquito control, cross-border collaboration all contributed to the wiping out of the mosquito-borne disease, the UN agency said. "Until malaria is eradicated globally, people travelling to and from malaria-endemic countries can import the disease to Europe, and we have to keep up the good work to prevent its reintroduction," Jakab said. World leaders committed to ending the epidemic by 2030 when they adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in September. Great news! Europe is the first #malaria-free region of the world 1995: 90k cases 2015: 0https://t.co/sNL4qzTkAM pic.twitter.com/vemvTIr1pw WHO (@WHO) April 20, 2016 In 2015, there were 214 million cases of the disease, and it killed 438,000 people, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. When a country has zero locally acquired malaria cases for at least three consecutive years, it is eligible for official certification of malaria elimination by the WHO. "The European Region has been declared malaria free on the basis of the present situation and the likelihood that elimination can be maintained," said Nedret Emiroglu, director of communicable diseases and health security, WHO Regional Office for Europe. "Experience shows that malaria can spread rapidly and, if Europe's countries are not vigilant and responsive, a single imported case can result in resurgence of malaria," she said. Until the end of World War Two, malaria was endemic throughout much of southern Europe. The Balkans, Italy, Greece and Portugal were particularly affected. Europe was declared malaria free in 1975, but the disease later re-emerged in the Caucasus, Central Asian republics, the Russian Federation and Turkey. UPDATE: One northbound lane of I-5 open after big rig crash near Lakehead A crash north of Lakehead has forced officials to close all northbound lanes of traffic on Interstate 5. SHARE A Redding man, who previously admitted on television to sexually assaulting children "hundreds" of times, has received a 14-year sentence today for having child pornography, said a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's office. Nicholas Torrieri, 43, had been arrested after federal agens found more than 600 photos and 240 videos of child pornography on his digital devices, said Lauren Horwood, spokeswoman for the Office of the United States Attorney in the Eastern District of California. Beginning in 2014, Law enforcement agents twice found a computer with Torrieri's unique internet protocol address offering child pornography on a file sharing network, Horwood said. On Feb. 11, 2015, they raided his home and searched his digital devices and found the pornography, she said. They also unearthed a video of him on a television talk show from 1998 in which he admitted to "hundreds of incidents of victimizing children, including both encouraging minors to expose themselves and actual molestation," Horwood said. United States Distrcit Court Judge Kimberly Mueller sentenced him to 14 years, saying he has "a compulsion that he has been unable to control," Horwood said. He must register as a sex offender when he is released and will be supervised for the rest of his life, she said. Will Cooper, 13, picks out books Wednesday at the Redding Library. Cooper will visit Spain with his dad before representing the North State in May at the Scripps National Spelling Bee. SHARE By Alayna Shulman of the Redding Record Searchlight Will Cooper, 13, is in luck that the Scripps National Spelling Bee next month includes foreign-language words if any of them turn out to be in Spanish, that is. Will, regional champion for the national competition, is leaving Saturday to spend two months in Spain with his father, who teaches the Romance language at Shasta College. That means the Sequoia Middle School seventh-grader is flying first to Spain, then to D.C. to represent the North State in the bee. "We didn't really expect this," mom Alex Stephens said with a laugh. It'll be Will's first time out of the country, so he said he's going to enjoy that time rather than spend too much of it studying. "I barely get out of the state," Will said. Stephens said she expects being in Spain will help his language skills naturally, though. Either way, Will isn't worried about how he'll do in fact, Will is "expecting to do pretty badly," he said nonchalantly, since he's not as serious about the bee as some students and there are many of them to compete against. "It's more a love than a job," Stephens said of Will's spelling. Indeed, rather than cramming much in the first place, Will said he seemed to benefit the most from his frequent reading. He beat out around 30 other students by correctly spelling the color "taupe" in the regional bee last month. "A lot of it was I knew a lot of the words before because I read a lot," he explained. "I read lots of diverse genres." His family is also "hyper-literate," Will said. The national bee is May 22-27. Redding fire investigators are treating a blaze that destroyed a 1992 Geo Tracker on Wednesday as an arson case. SHARE Fire that burns SUV considered arson Redding fire investigators are treating a blaze that destroyed a mini sport utility vehicle Wednesday as an arson case. Firefighters found the 1992 Geo Tracker engulfed in flames after getting the report at 1:50 p.m. at 963 West St. The blaze was under control by 2:05 p.m., firefighters said. Crews quickly extinguished the fire, which was near a single-story apartment complex. At the time of the fire, the firefighters said the owner told them the vehicle had been vandalized before. They estimated the loss at about $2,500 to $3,500. Also damaged in the fire was a plastic trash bin. Anyone with information is encouraged to call the Redding Fire Department at 225-4534 or 225-4141. State of emergency declared in Trinity Gov. Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency in 11 counties, including Trinity, due to damage from high winds and heavy rain this past winter. In his proclamation, Brown noted "these storms caused dangerous flash flooding, erosion, and substantial mud and debris flows." In Trinity County, much of the flooding occurred in areas where forest fires burned last summer. The declaration qualifies the counties for federal and state assistance in repairing and cleaning up damage from the storms. Woman rescued after getting lost A 24-year-old San Francisco woman spent a night in the forest before she and her dog were found by search and rescue volunteers Wednesday. Doris Vidas called 911 about 8 p.m. to say she was lost near the Cabin Creek trailhead in northern Shasta County. Deputy Dave Eoff of the Shasta County sheriff's office talked with Vidas by cellphone, which was about to lose its battery power. Vidas told Eoff she became lost after going off the trail, but was prepared to spend the night. Eoff went to the area where he found her car, but didn't find her. On Wednesday morning, search and rescue volunteers, U.S. Forest Service fire personnel and a California Highway Patrol helicopter started looking for her. The volunteers found Vidas and her dog about 11:15 a.m. She didn't need medical aid and was given a ride back to her vehicle. Vidas said she was in Shasta County for a three-day vacation and went hiking about 10 a.m. Tuesday. She realized she was lost after 2:30 p.m. and was unable to find her way back. She said she heard the helicopter Wednesday, but didn't see it. She heard rescuers yelling for her and also called out to them. Vidas said she decided to stay in her same location to help searchers find her. Man sentenced for pot trafficking John James Kash, 53, of Redding, was sentenced to six and a half years in prison for his role in a marijuana trafficking operation that funneled marijuana from California to Pennsylvania. U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller handed down the sentence Wednesday in the Eastern District Court of California. Kash was convicted in November on charges related to the marijuana operation that operated from 2009 to 2013. Kash was arrested in 2013 in a warehouse in Redding that had been converted into an indoor grow. The building had four grow areas that allowed for year-round production. Kash and three others shipped marijuana to Pittsburgh, where Kash was originally from. Kash recruited friends and family members to help conceal the cash. Investigators found that between August 2010 and April 2011, Kash tried to launder $382,000 in drug proceeds through credit unions in Pittsburgh and Redding. U.S. officials ultimately seized $1 million in drug proceeds from various bank accounts and other assets Kash and the others involved in the operation controlled. Kash is the last of four defendants tried and sentenced in the case. The others were Glen Meyers, sentenced to eight years; James Massery, sentenced to six years; and Aimee Burgess, sentenced to five years. Multiple agencies worked on the case, including the Internal Revenue Service, Pennsylvania State Police, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations, and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Man gets 14 years in child porn case A Redding man, who previously admitted on television to sexually assaulting children "hundreds" of times, received a 14-year sentence Wednesday for having child pornography, said a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office. Nicholas Torrieri, 43, was arrested after federal agents found more than 600 photos and 240 videos of child pornography on his digital devices, said Lauren Horwood, spokeswoman for the Office of the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of California. Beginning in 2014, law enforcement agents twice found a computer with Torrieri's Internet protocol address offering child pornography on a file-sharing network, Horwood said. On Feb. 11, 2015, they raided his home and searched his digital devices and found the pornography, she said. They also unearthed a video of him on a television talk show from 1998 in which he admitted to "hundreds of incidents of victimizing children, including both encouraging minors to expose themselves and actual molestation," Horwood said. U.S. District Court Judge Kimberly Mueller sentenced him to 14 years, saying he has "a compulsion that he has been unable to control," Horwood said. He must register as a sex offender when he is released and will be supervised for the rest of his life, she said. One arrested in probation sweep Authorities say they arrested a man who tried to stop them from searching his home to check on a registered sex offender. Bobby Jack Scott, 59, of Shingletown, was arrested on suspicion of obstructing a peace officer because he wouldn't let deputies into his home, where registered sex offender David Scott lives, and got into a fight with deputies, said Lt. Pat Kropholler of the Shasta County Sheriff's Office. The search was part of a sweep of sex offenders in eastern Shasta County to check their addresses and compliance with the terms of their probation or parole, he said. The SAFE (Sexual Assault Felony Enforcement) operation made 30 attempts to confirm sex offenders' addresses, of which 21 were successful, he said. When they went to Bobby Scott's home, in the 27000 block of Camino Real in Shingletown, to check on David Scott, Bobby Scott was confrontational, Kropholler said. Bobby Scott refused to allow deputies into his home and eventually got in a fight with them, Kropholler said. Bobby Scott was quickly subdued and arrested, Kropholler said. No one injured as big rig hits cars A big rig truck slammed into four cars parked at a traffic light at Highway 273 and Caterpillar Road shortly after noon Wednesday in north Redding. No one was injured in the crash, but North Market Street (Highway 273) was closed from Twin View Boulevard to Caterpillar Road as crews cleaned up the wreckage. Shortly before 1:30 p.m., the California Department of Transportation tweeted that the roadway had reopened. Police: Woman held in bank robbery Red Bluff authorities chased and captured a bank robbery suspect Tuesday after she crashed into a parked car and tried to run away. Red Bluff police were told about 11:30 a.m. Tuesday that a robbery was in progress at Rabobank at 500 Luther Road. The robbery suspect, later identified as Sara Beth Natho, 29, of Red Bluff, ran from the bank with an undisclosed amount of money, police said. An investigator from the Tehama County District Attorney's Office found a woman matching the bank robber's description sitting in a parked vehicle in the area of Kirsten Court. When the investigator approached the woman, she drove off in her vehicle with authorities following in pursuit, going west on Kimball Road at speeds up to 75 mph. The chase ended at Donita Drive and Crosspoint Way when the driver crashed into the parked car. Natho was apprehended and booked into Tehama County Jail on suspicion of robbery. SHARE John James Kash, 53, of Redding, was sentenced to six and a half years in prison for his role in a marijuana trafficking operation that funneled marijuana from California to Pennsylvania. U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller handed down the sentence on Wednesday in the Eastern District Court of California. Kash was convicted in November on charges related to the marijuana operation that operated from 2009 to 2013. Kash was arrested in 2013 in a warehouse in Redding that had been converted into an indoor grow. The building had four grow areas that allowed for year-round production. Kash and three others shipped marijuana to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Kash was originally from. Kash recruited friends and family members to help conceal the cash. Investigators found that between August 2010 and April 2011, Kash tried to launder $382,000 in drug proceeds through credit unions in Pittsburgh and Redding. U.S. officials ultimately seized $1 million in drug proceeds from various bank accounts and other assets Kash and the others involved in the operation controlled. Kash is the last of four defendants tried and sentenced in the case. The others were Glen Meyers, sentenced to eight years; James Massery, sentenced to six years; and Aimee Burgess, sentenced to five years. Multiple agencies worked on the case, including the IRS, Pennsylvania State Police, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations and the DEA. SHARE A 29-year-old Siskiyou County woman pleaded guilty today in U.S. District Court in Sacramento to aggravated identity theft in connection with her participation in a bank fraud and identity theft scheme, the U.S. Attorneys Office announced this afternoon. Stacy Miranda Phillips, 29, of Montague worked with others in Siskiyou County from September 2015 to December 2015 to execute a scheme to steal from banks and merchants in the Siskiyou County, a spokeswoman for the office said. Phillips admitted that as part of her scheme she stole mail and other personal property of local residents. According to court documents, Phillips and her associates targeted certain victims, postal customers and mail boxes used by those victims. She used checks, credit or debit cards, account numbers, names, PIN numbers and signatures found in the stolen mail to obtain cash and purchase items, the documents said. Phillips, who stole mail from post offices in Hornbrook, Grenada and Montague, also attempted to open a line of credit in the name of a Weed person, according to the documents. She is scheduled to be sentenced on July 28 and faces at least two years in prison and a $250,000 fine. SHARE A 24-year-old San Francisco woman spent a night in the forest before she and her dog were found by search-and-rescue volunteers Wednesday. Doris Vidas called 911 about 8 p.m. to say she was lost near the Cabin Creek trailhead in northern Shasta County. Deputy Dave Eoff of the Shasta County sheriffs office talked with Vidas by cell phone, which was about to lose its battery power. Vidas told Eoff she became lost after going off the trail, but was prepared to spend the night. Eoff went to the area where he found her car, but didnt find her. On Wednesday morning, search-and-rescue volunteers, U.S. Forest Service fire personnel and a California Highway Patrol helicopter started looking for her. The volunteers found Vidas and her dog about 11:15 a.m. She didnt need medical aid and was given a ride back to her vehicle. Vidas said she was in Shasta County for a three-day vacation and went hiking about 10 a.m. Tuesday. She realized she was lost after 2:30 p.m. and was unable to find her way back. She said she heard the helicopter Wednesday, but didnt see it. She heard rescuers yelling for her and also called out to them. Vidas said she decided to stay in her same location to help searchers find her. Cubs starting pitcher Jake Arrieta delivers to the Brewers in the first inning of a game at Wrigley Field on Aug. 11, 2021. (Chris Sweda / Chicago Tribune) CINCINNATI Jake Arrieta advanced his career in 2015 with a 22-6 record and was rewarded with the National League Cy Young Award. But Arrieta is involved in another mission. The Chicago Cubs ace, who will try to improve to 4-0 Thursday night when he faces the Cincinnati Reds at Great American Ballpark, is involved in the "Step Up Your Game" campaign by Mizzen+Main. Advertisement Arrieta is featured on a recently released video. Menswear company Mizzen+Main features Cubs pitcher Jake Arrieta in their "Step Up Your Game" campaign. (Mizzen+Main/Chicago Tribune) "The first time I put the shirt on I knew that this was something I wanted to wear for the rest of my adult life," Arrieta said on the company's website. "Something that was tailored to athletes. Something that allows you to move around and be mobile." Advertisement Arrieta joins Houston Texans All-Pro defensive end J.J. Watt in endorsing the men's clothing company. 'China knows the best way of twisting the knife in its dealings with India: By launching a major incursion into Indian territory,' says Rajeev Sharma. IMAGE: Chinese President Xi Jinping greets Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in Beijing. India seems to have run into the Great China Wall in its diplomatic attempts to talk China out of backing its all-weather friend Pakistan on the terror issue. Indications are that China will continue to rebuff India every now and then on matters pertaining to Pakistan. This is a worrying sign for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government which will complete two years in office on May 26. The Chinese have heard strong pitches made by two key Indian ministers on New Delhi's reservations about the Chinese policy of bailing out Pakistan on the issue of terror before world bodies like the United Nations, but have not held out any assurances to the Indians, thus giving important signals that this Chinese policy would continue. Two Cabinet ministers have taken up with China in the past three days the issue of the Chinese 'hidden veto' before the United Nations Sanctions Committee in blocking the Indian move seeking action against Pakistan-based terrorist Masood Azhar. While External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj took up the issue with her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Moscow on the sidelines of the RIC foreign ministers' trilateral meeting, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar broached the subject with his Chinese counterpart Chang Wanquan during his maiden visit to China. Another important Indian official, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, who is in China and has just held the 19th round of Special Representatives-level talks with his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi, is inevitably set to discuss the Azhar issue with his Chinese interlocutors even more substantively even though official versions may downplay it. Doval is also scheduled to have a strategic dialogue with his Chinese interlocutors as he is visiting China not merely as SR, but in a much more exalted position as Prime Minister Modi's special envoy. Doval's strategic dialogue with the Chinese, being held after a gap of over one year, will feature an in-depth discussion on the China-Pakistan relationship which has a direct impact on India-China ties. IMAGE: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj holds talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Moscow, April 18, 2016. Photograph: MEAphotogallery on Flickr. While top Chinese officials have talked about India and the need to have the best relations with India in glowing terms at their meetings with Swaraj and Parrikar, they have not held out any assurance to the Indians that they would reconsider their pro-Pakistan stance not only on the terror issue, but also on anything else that impinges on the 'sweeter than honey, higher than the mountains and deeper than the oceans' strategic partnership between China and Pakistan. The signal from China to India is clear: Beijing is in no mood to recalibrate its relations with Pakistan and accommodate India's interests even on the terror issue. Thus, the bottomline of China's foreign policy in specific context of India and Pakistan is this: The Great Wall of China seems insurmountable for the Indians. These are the signals emanating from China for the Modi government. It should be made clear that these are merely straws in the winds, not an officially articulated policy of China with respect to the India-Pakistan conundrum. But the straws in the winds are enough. After all, the Chinese have been running with the hare and hunting with the hound when it comes to Pakistan's sins of omission and commission on the terror issue. They have always sweet-talked India whenever any India-initiated move of exposing Pakistan before the international community on the terror issue comes up. But in the end, the Chinese have always bailed out Pakistan as they did recently by blocking the Indian move before the UN Sanctions Committee for seeking UN action against Masood Azhar. The India-Pakistan-China triangle is predicated on India's relations with the West, particularly the United States. The more the Modi government pushes India closer to the American camp, the more backlash it will have from China. The current India-China relationship seems free from flashpoints. But this may change in the foreseeable future. China knows the best way of twisting the knife in its dealings with India: By launching a major incursion into Indian territory. The Chinese have already done it to the Manmohan Singh government when its troops made a 16-km-deep incursion inside Indian territory in the Depsang valley in Ladakh and repeated a similar provocation to the Modi government when it was barely 100 days old. The Modi government is lucky that the Chinese have not launched any major incursion for the last one-and-a-half years. But the Chinese may not extend this concession for long. Rajeev Sharma is an independent journalist and strategic analyst who tweets @Kishkindha 'I had told the government that if they could not take care of Shaktiman, I would take care of him.' IMAGE: Shaktiman, the Uttarakhand police horse, died April 20. The horse's leg was amputated after he was injured during a protest march in Dehra Dun last month. Photograph: PTI Photo Bharatiya Janata Party MLA Ganesh Joshi, who was accused of assaulting Shaktiman, the Uttarakhand police horse that died on Wednesday, April 20, says he is "saddened" by the horse's death. Shaktimaan, the 13-year-old horse, was badly injured in Uttarakhand last month after Joshi, the Mussoorie MLA, during a BJP protest, allegedly attacked him. Defending himself then to Rediff.com, Joshi claimed he had not assaulted the animal. Joshi now tells Syed Firdaus Ashraf/Rediff.com that Shaktiman's death was due to a political conspiracy. How did you react when you heard of Shaktiman's death? People are indulging in politics about Shaktiman's death. It is not right, it does not look good. People blame you for the horse's death. This blame game is wrong. Every news channel has shown that this incident was for political mileage. Now that the animal is gone, people want to take political mileage. I don't think that is right. Do you think the Uttarakhand government did not treat Shaktiman well? Everyone knows that gangrene does not occur so soon. Gangrene spreading so fast, in two days' time, is not true. This does not happen. Shaktiman's leg was amputated due to a political conspiracy. And that was the cause of his death. Do you know Shaktiman had multiple fractures? No, I didn't know that. Yes. And they amputated his leg, put a rod and made him stand. It was a simple solution; they had to plaster his leg. When a man is injured, the doctor plasters the leg. And this poor horse's leg was amputated and a rod was put instead. But the state government got doctors from America to treat Shaktiman, isn't it? They came, but Shaktiman was treated by local doctors. And ultimately, the poor horse died. It is sad. You have been consistently saying that you were not involved in the assault on Shaktiman. Everyone knows that. There were two videos, which the Congress party edited so as to show that I hit Shaktiman, which is not true. They arrested me on the day when there was a vote in the assembly (on the appropriation bill; the BJP insists the assembly voted against the bill, which eventually led to Congress chief minister Harish Rawat's government being dismissed and President's Rule imposed in Uttarakhand). They knew that one vote would be reduced if I was sent to jail. But, you see, God is just. The Congress government fell as their own members rebelled. Do you feel Shaktiman's demise will affect your chances in the election as people may not support you? The people of my constituency know that I was not involved in any way in this incident. It is only outsiders who don't know the truth. They doctored the video of Shaktiman getting injured to defame me. Local people know this fact, but if you are in Mumbai or Chennai, you will not know the truth. Harish Rawat went to see Shaktiman for the initial four days and then did not go. And yesterday when he died, he rushed to the spot immediately. So, all this is politically motivated and now this matter has reached the court too. You also issued a statement that you are ready to amputate your foot if you are proven guilty. Yes, I did say that. I don't think one should stoop so low in politics over this issue. Shaktiman was a shaheed (martyr) horse and therefore all political parties should have been called for his funeral. But Harish Rawat did not do that. They did not inform other parties about the funeral. Then they told the press that we did not bother to attend Shaktiman's funeral. (Note: Rawat is no longer chief minister; Governor K K Paul is in charge of the state administration.) It was only later that we were able to pay our shraddhanjali (respects). Do you feel Shaktiman was not taken care of properly and therefore died? I had told the government that if they could not take care of Shaktiman, I would take care of him. I was told I could not do that. I had offered to do so and so did the state BJP president. Many doctors now say that gangrene does not spread so soon. Hyderabad: Two women, who claimed to be fortune tellers and spiritual healers, entered a house in Khairatabad and stole Rs 70,000 after diverting the attention of a housewife. Police released CCTV grabs of the women and have started a search for them. Police said the women, who spoke Telugu, went to the house of Swarnalatha and told her that they can solve all her family problems. "They asked her to give Rs 51 and two kg rice for a ritual. Later, they asked her to put Rs 101 and bring two more kg rice. After a while, they made her bring Rs 20,000 and then Rs 50,000 more. They asked her to put the money in the rice and did some rituals. They put the rice near her wardrobe and asked her to check it after taking bath. They promised that her health problems and that of her husband and other family problems would be solved," said an officer from the Panjagutta police station. "When the victim went to take bath the women escaped with the money," said the officer. Police booked a case following a complaint from Swarnalatha. 'The tiger is the epitome of evolution.' 'Every tiger has a stripe pattern that is unique. Each tiger is unique.' 'Tigers are very elusive. It is said a tiger sees you nine times when you see it once.' Dr Yadvendra Jhala wanted to be a zookeeper as a child and ended as one of India's prominent field biologists and wildlife experts. With a PhD from Virginia Polytechnic, a post doctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian, USA and a master's in zoology from Bombay University, Dr Jhala is a scientist at the Wildlife Institute of India. He spoke to Archana Masih/Rediff.com about India's successes in saving the tiger, and the challenges ahead. When did you spot your first tiger? In my college days in Bandhavgarh. I was 11 when I probably participated in a tiger hunt. It was a pathetic sight to see a tiger being shot. It was revolting to see such a majestic animal being killed. I always wanted a career in wildlife since I was a kid. I didn't know there were careers in wildlife at that time. The closest I knew was a zoo. I thought of becoming a zookeeper as a child. A career in wildlife is a romance with nature for a lifetime. What is it that makes the tiger so unique? It is the largest carnivore. It's so majestic. It is the epitome of evolution. Every tiger has a stripe pattern that is unique. Each tiger is unique. In relation to other countries, what has India done well that has resulted in the increase in the tiger numbers? The Indian attitude towards life forms and conservation in general. Our culture does not take life, but promotes it. That attitude of the people is primarily responsible for what wildlife and biodiversity India has today. The government's investment in Project Tiger has paid dividends. In the early 1970s there was good leadership in the country under Mrs Indira Gandhi who saw the importance of saving an iconic and flagship species and used it to conserve the entire biodiversity. That project has paid dividends after 30 years. It went through a tide, going up and down, but it is on track. We need more projects like this. The second most important thing that happened under this project was the incentivised, voluntary, relocation of people from protected areas. That has cleared up a lot of forest landscapes which were meant for biodiversity conservation because people -- us, tribals, local communities -- are the problem for wildlife. Since we evolved on this planet, we are causing extinctions. So good or bad, people need to move if you have to conserve biodiversity. The government pays 10 lakh rupees (Rs 1 million) per adult in the family to relocate. In fact the government is having a shortage of funds because people are more willing to go out of protected areas. That is a very important contribution that the government has made. Outside the protected areas, where can tigers be found in the wild? Uttarakhand has a lot many. Sighting tigers in Corbett is also difficult even though it has the highest density in the world. It is a thick grassland mixed with Sal forest where you don't see animals easily. The culture in Madhya Pradesh where elephants were used to track tigers and then tourists would see them doesn't exist in Uttarakhand. Tigers are very elusive. It is said a tiger sees you nine times when you see it once. And it's also shy animal. Yes, and it avoids people. In many tourism zones, tigers have become used to humans. They don't mind showing themselves to you. In areas like Ranthambore, Kanha, Bandhavgarh, you see them more often. As a conservationist, do you have a favourite forest/national park? Each one is unique. Corbett is lovely because it has its own natural landscape, a combination of mountains, rivers, forests, hills. It is one of the most picturesque parks we have today. Central India has a lot of animals to be seen. Which are the other countries with tiger populations of consequence? Russia has close to 400 tigers. Nepal, Bangladesh, Thailand. Except Nepal, Bangladesh and India, none of the other countries have a proper assessment of their population, so we really don't know how many tigers there are. What are some of the successes India has had? We are one of the leading countries where wildlife conservation is concerned. In spite of the burgeoning human population, the economic growth and the pressures that are on the land, we have not lost many species to extinction like many other countries. We have populations that are viable. Most of them are doing reasonably well in protected areas, but there is a lot that needs to be done. If we don't continue with the implementation of what has happened in conservation in the last 30 years, then the future is bleak. These efforts that have been invested have to be continued and in fact increased because the pressures are increasing. What are the issues that concern you? The major issues that biodiversity and wildlife conservation in India faces is lack of area because of the large human population. Is there anything that has been done differently at Corbett that has contributed to its success and which is being followed by other national parks? The Corbett landscape is itself endowed with natural barriers on both sides. The Himalayas are on one side; the Shivaliks on the other and the forest in the Doon Valley. It is very productive breeding ground for tigers and is a large enough reserve. All it requires is protection and because of the lay of the land, it is easier to protect than other parks. The Uttarakhand Forest Department has done a good job to control poaching and that is sufficient to make the tigers bounce back and re-populate the entire state. Whatever tiger habitat was there, except west of the Ganga, all of it is occupied today. Hopefully now that Rajaji has been declared as a national park, tigers will probably be rehabilitated in the western side of the Ganga where the corridor is severed due to the township of Hardwar and Rishikesh. Tigers are not crossing the Ganga to come to the western side of Rajaji and that should be rectified by moving tigers artificially from Corbett to Rajaji. You have said before that Uttarkhand itself could not accommodate 100 additional tigers. The protected areas are very small. Because of the size itself, viable populations of low density animals cannot be maintained by themselves. These protected areas need to be connected, so that there is gene flow between them, especially of large carnivores which occur in low densities. If those corridors go, then the future of these protected areas and their objectives remains questionable. These corridors are important. They are not legally protected today. Though many of these are eco sensitive areas and several of them get lost because of developmental projects. Development can happen without hurting conservation if mitigation measures are rightly implemented, provided in time and there is no compromise. What kind of cooperation do you get from state governments in establishing these corridors? It is a mixed bag. Sometimes the agencies implementing them are really helpful and once you sensitise them, they go all out to help you. Others just don't want to listen. Even that few dollars or rupees of investment which is an insignificant cost compared to the project cost, people don't want to invest and that's a major concern. Certain projects in the same state get different responses. So it would appear that Karnataka and Uttarakhand are doing something right as far as conservation goes. The landscapes of Karnataka and Uttarakhand and the inherent biological properties that they have is greatly helpful in allowing the tiger numbers to have increased. The forested areas in Karnataka and Uttarakhand are large, contiguous and that is advantageous to the state. Not that the states are extremely sensitive to developmental projects. Karnataka has done exceptionally well in the past five years. They have declared several protected areas in the adjoining boundaries of Goa and Maharashtra. I would not weigh Uttarakhand and Karnataka in the same balance. They have done much better in terms of the state's role in conservation. Is a clampdown on poaching a big factor in the increased tiger numbers? Poaching is a major threat to wildlife conservation in India. One is organised, commercial poaching for tiger parts and bones though it is not consumed in India, but outside. There is a huge market out there. Second, is the subsistence level poaching -- where people actually eat bushmeat. This is a pernicious, chronic problem in India. If you look at the tribal forests, in the Northeast forests or in the Central Indian landscape on the eastern side, there is hardly any wildlife. The forests are intact, but people have eaten the wildlife, though it is illegal. It is poaching, not hunting. But people are poor and depend on bushmeat as a source of protein. Unless we improve their livelihoods, give them alternative sources of food and nutrients, they will continue to poach. It is not in the realm of the forest department to tackle that problem. It has to be poverty alleviation and a concerted effort of the upliftment of tribals. So poaching still is the number one threat to the tiger? Oh yes! Whatever we have achieved, if we are negligent about the control of poaching, we can lose that in a few years. You were the principal investigator in collating the tiger numbers last year. Was that the best news you had heard in a long time? We were not expecting those numbers (30% increase in four years). They were much beyond our expectations. It showed that whatever we were doing was something right. It consisted of around 80,000 forest staff working for 10 days and we have a team of 70 trained biologists, a consortium of wildlife conservations organisations -- all working together to do camera tracking. A huge effort that took 1 to 1.5 years and another 1.5 years to analyse the information. It was a 2.5 to 3 year process to get the information. What kind of sensitisation is needed towards animals and wildlife? It is very important to sensitise children and college kids in conservation. I think a national effort towards involving them in an exercise like the tiger count would go a long way. So it becomes a citizen science and people start owning the forest and the resources. Once you actually walk around in a natural setting, you fall in love with it. Urban kids don't have that exposure. There's a wonderful opportunity to give that exposure to them. Bittu Sehgal and many NGOs are doing a good job in educating the kids. Forest departments have nature camps in many of their parks. We need to do more of that. It's not enough. Your research has also been on wolves and hyenas. How are those species faring? Unfortunately, unlike tigers, these animals are not doing very well. The wolf population is dwindling in India. They don't live in protected areas. They mostly live in agro-pastoral landscapes where the lifestyle of people is changing very rapidly. Pastoralism is dying out in our country especially of sheep, goats and in the places where it is practiced, people are not tolerant to losses so they start poisoning the animals even if they have lost 1 or 2 animals. The use of poison is extremely dangerous for small carnivores like wolves, jackals, foxes, hyenas. IMAGE: A majestic tiger at the Pench National Park in Madhya Pradesh. Photograph: Srinath S. The Modi minister, known for his controversial statements, dropped another bombshell on Thursday. M I Khan reports. Giriraj Singh, a member of Narendra Modi's council of ministers, now has a peeve against IITians. "Aaj samaj mein jo bachche gir gaye hain ha, gau maans kha rahein hain. Padhe likhe dus log jo gau maans kha rahein hain unmein se nau IITs ke hain (People who have fallen in society eat beef. Out of 10 educated people who eat beef, 9 are from IITs)," Singh, the Bharatiya Janata Party MP from Nawada, Bihar, said on April 21. Earlier, Singh demanded that the voting rights of couples with more than two children be revoked, to develop the nation. "If Malaysia and Indonesia can make such a law, why can't we?" the minister asked, adding, "The nation won't progress without population control." "There must be a balance. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians -- all must have at least one to two children. Those who don't follow, their voting rights must be revoked," Singh declared. "A law is needed on population control for all religions if development is required," he added. On Wednesday, Singh said if India did not change its population policy and enforce a two-child norm for all religions, then the nation's daughters would not be safe and may have to wear a veil as they do in Pakistan. Speaking at a cultural yatra in West Champaran's Bagaha town, Singh was apparently referring to Bihar districts Araria and Kishanganj, where the Muslim population has increased faster than the Hindu population. Besides the border question, India and China discussed issues related to counter-terrorism including Beijing's blocking of India's bid in the United Nations to ban Pakistan-based JeM chief Masood Azhar, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval said on Thursday. Doval, who wrapped up the 19th round of the two-day boundary talks called on Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in Beijing and discussed the outcome of the discussion with his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi. Welcoming Doval, Li recalled his meeting with Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar two days ago during which the both sides discussed the progress in bilateral ties. "These meetings show smooth communication and close engagement between our two countries in political and security affairs. It also shows how both sides attach great deal of importance to ensure steady growth of China-India relations," Li said. Later in a brief chat with PTI, Doval said that in the border talks with Yang, the two sides discussed the boundary question and other issues like counter-terrorism. Asked whether Masood Azhar issue figured, he said: "Yes, obviously when terrorism is discussed". India in recent weeks was vocal about criticising China for putting a "technical hold" on India's recent bid in the UN to bring about a ban on Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammad chief Azhar for his involvement in the Pathankot terror attack. Regarding Azhar, India's UN Permanent Representative Syed Akbaruddin spoke of "hidden veto" at a meeting at an open debate in the United Nations Security Council on 'Threats to International Peace and Security Caused by Terrorist Acts' in New York on April 16, while External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar called for a review of China's decision to strike a common stand against terrorism in their meetings this week with their Chinese counterparts. For its part, China continued to stick to its stand, saying that its decision is based on facts and fairness. On the talks over boundary, Doval said both sides want peace and tranquillity at the borders. About India's emphasis that 3,488 km-long Line of Actual Control be demarcated to prevent tensions between troops on both sides patrolling the area aggressively, Doval said New Delhi's stand is the same for quite some time. There is nothing new about the suggestions, he said. Ahead of the talks, Parrikar told his Chinese counterpart Chang Wanquan that clarity over the LAC will bring down tensions between the troops on both sides which aggressively patrol the areas to assert their control. "We are insisting it should be done in order to really ensure a very stable border as all the issues take place because of perception," he said. Marking the LAC is "one of the preconditions of smooth border operations. Without that everything goes by perceptions, which has caused problems sometimes", Parrikar said. This was highlighted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi both during the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to India in 2014 and his own trip in Beijing last year. But China was averse to accept it and for its part suggested a code of conduct. About the border talks, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement that both countries have agreed to adhere to "peaceful negotiations" to settle the vexed border issue and reach a "fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution". Both Doval and Yang had an "extensive, deep and candid" discussion on the LAC. Both sides agreed to adhere to "peaceful negotiations to settle the boundary question". They will make efforts to reach a "fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution", it said. Besides the border issue, Doval and Yang, the designated Special Representatives, also have a larger mandate to discuss all contentious bilateral, regional and international matters of mutual concern. On the border dispute, officials on both sides say the protracted boundary talks made progress and that they also made attempts to avert tensions along the disputed border. While China says that the boundary dispute is confined to 2,000 kms, mainly in Arunachal Pradesh in eastern sector which it claims as part of southern Tibet, India asserts that the dispute covered the whole of the LAC including the Aksai Chin occupied by China during the 1962 war. When the Special Representatives were appointed in 2003, the two sides set off a three-stage process. The two countries first reached an agreement on the guiding principles and setting political parameters for the settlement in 2005. Officials say the two sides are currently in the second stage which focusses on working out a framework of settlement to be followed by final step drawing the boundary line based on framework agreement. Doval and Yang are also reported to have discussed a range of issues including India's concern over $46 billion trade deficit with China in about $70 billion bilateral trade. A day after Bharatiya Janata Party claimed the Rafale aircraft deal with France has been finalised at $8.8 billion (Rs 59,000 crore), Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on Thursday said it is not complete as yet but at an advanced stage and the intention is to close it quite soon. IMAGE: The post concerning the Rafale deal, put up by the BJP on their Facebook page. Photograph: BJP4India/Facebook In a lighter vein, he told reporters that the BJP tweet only indicates that journalists write stories very convincingly. BJP had on Wednesday tweeted a graphic, saying that the Rafale combat aircraft deal has been finalised and the Narendra Modi government had saved over Rs 21,000 crore in the re-negotiation with the French government. Defence ministry sources had earlier said the deal was at an advanced stage and both India and France had narrowed down their differences over the pricing issue. I can only tell you this much that while the deal is in quite an advanced stage, and we intent to close it quite soon, I still cant say that negotiations are totally cleared until we sign the deal or at least the deal is forwarded to the Cabinet for approval, Parrikar told reporters. The deal is expected to be finalised by May end. India has been bargaining hard with France over the pricing of the 36 fighter planes, a deal that was announced first by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in April last year. The cost of the 36 Rafales, as per the earlier tender while keeping the cost escalation into account, comes to around Rs 65,000 crore. India has been bargaining for a price that is less than 8 billion Euro (Rs 59,000 crore). The deal to buy 36 state-of-the-art Rafale aircraft from France at 12 billion dollar (Rs 80000 crore) was re-negotiated and finalised at $8.8 billion (around Rs 59000 crore),the BJP tweet had said. The government saved public money and the deal resulted in gain of technological knowledge and strengthening the air power to defend the border, it had said. The ordeal for the 16-year-old girl, whose allegation of being molested by an army man sparked violent clashes in Jammu and Kashmirs Handwara, is far from over. The teenager, it is reported, is facing stiff hostility from her classmates in school after she recanted her statement in front of the chief judicial magistrate following which two locals were arrested for allegedly assaulting her on her way back from a toilet. Schools opened in the troubled area on Wednesday, but attendance was poor with only 20 students attending of the 1,150 enrolled. According to a report by the NDTV, classmates said that most would not mingle with her if she returns as she suppressed reality. The principal of the school, however, said: We will support her fully we would like her to continue her studies in this institution despite all the odds. Meanwhile, the girl remains in the protective custody with her father and aunt. Last week, the police released a recorded statement of the girl, in which she said that it was not a soldier, but a shopkeeper and another youth who tried to assault her as she came out of a public toilet on her way home from school. Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on Thursday said that he has asked the army to provide Lt Col Prasad Purohit with all the documents he has sought to prove his innocence in the Malegaon blasts case, with paras inimical to national security redacted. Maintaining that the matter was in court and he cannot decide on the merit of the case, Parrikar said he has told the army to give all information sought by Purohit, one of the main accused in the Malegaon 2008 blasts case. "Except for words of people and names of countries, whatever document he wants, except when directly it impacts security of the nation or it involves names of some other officers, that can be blacked out, the info has to be given to him," Parrikar told reporters in New Delhi. He said it should help Purohit prove his innocence based on what he is saying. "The final decision has to be that of the court," he said. Purohit had earlier this month written to Parrikar requesting restoration of his honour by way of rank. In his letter dated April 4, he claimed that he has been falsely implicated in the case and has been behind the bars for more than seven years now. "I have been robbed of honour, dignity and rank and punished for serving the nation," he said. Purohit claimed he had infiltrated groups like the Students Islamic Movement of India and Naxals as a military intelligence operative and added that he had shared every detail of his operations with his seniors. This is not the first time that Purohit has written to Parrikar. In November 2015, he had written to him requesting for copies of the Court of Inquiry against him by the Army. He finally got copies of the CoI proceedings following court's intervention. "It remains a matter of fact, which one may care to pursue from the CoI papers, now with the sessions court in Mumbai, that as many as 14 reports were initiated by me during my tenure in Maharashtra after successfully infiltrating SIMI, IM and Naxals operating in Northern Maharashtra," he had said. Two explosions had ripped through powerloom town of Malegaon in Maharashtra in September 2008 killing seven people. The Indian Navy granted permanent commission to seven women officers of the Short Service Commission batch of 2008-09 Breaking the gender barrier, seven women officers of Short Service Commission batch of 2008-09 have been granted permanent commission by Indian Navy. Navy is the last of the three wings of the armed forces in the country to allow permanent commission for women. While the army and air force allow permanent commission for them, the navy had limited women officers only to short service commission of 14 years. Recognising the importance of providing equal opportunities to women officers, seven women officers from the batch of Short Service Commission officers of the Education branch and Naval Constructor cadre, who joined in 2008-09, have been granted permanent commission, a statement issued by the navy said. It added that the navy is also finalising a policy for women officers to serve on select warships that have appropriate facilities for women. Defence sources said the women officers will have to meet four main conditions for permanent commission, including being medically fit and having a good annual confidential report, besides the vacancy available for the post. The women officers will have to also opt for permanent commission as this will not be an automatic route. Based on a government order in 2008, the navy had decided to grant such commission only to women who joined after that year and that too only in the education, law and naval architecture branches. A separate case is on in the Supreme Court, filed by a group of women who had retired after their Short Service Commission ended in 2006. The navy had in October filed a Special Leave Petition in the apex court challenging an order of the Delhi high court asking it to grant permanent commission to 17 women officers. Meanwhile, the navy has written to three retired women naval officers asking them to come for a medical check-up for reinstatement. The other officers are awaiting further hearing on the matter in the Supreme Court. The navy in the statement said additional avenues for employment of women officers have also been opened up. Starting in 2017, women officers can choose to join as pilots of maritime reconnaissance planes as also in the Naval Armament Inspectorate cadre. Thus, a total of eight branches or cadres will be opened for women officers in the navy. A crew of six naval women officers including the skipper, is meticulously preparing for the first, all-women, circumnavigation of the world in 2017 by an Indian team, in an indigenously-built ocean sailing vessel, Mhadei II. Image: The all-women contingent of the Indian Navy marches during the full dress rehearsal for the Republic Day parade at Rajpath in New Delhi. Here's a collection of some of the best photos from around the world shot in the last 24 hours. Britain's Prince William (right) tries a light sabre against his brother Prince Harry during a visit to the Star Wars film set at Pinewood Studios near Iver Heath, west of London, Britain. Prince William and Prince Harry are touring Pinewood to visit the production workshops and meet the creative teams working behind the scenes on the Star Wars films. Photograph: Reuters/Pool Sumo wrestlers compete during the annual 'Honozumo' ceremonial sumo tournament dedicated to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, Japan. Photograph: Yuya Shino/Reuters Native Brazilians sing and dance, during the Indigenous Youth Games of Pataxos nation in Santa Cruz de Cabralia, Bahia state, Brazil. Photograph: Roosevelt Cassio/Reuters A young man dives into the water at Salthill beach in Galway, Ireland. Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters And here is Britain's Prince William being hugged by Chewbacca as British actor John Boyega smiles during a tour of the Star Wars sets at Pinewood studios in Iver Heath, west of London, Britain. Photograph: Reuters/Pool A fish jumps over a net as a boy works in a fish farm at Htantapin township, outside Yangon, Myanmar. One in five children in Myanmar aged 10-17 go to work instead of school, according to figures from a census report on employment published last month, and the opening up of the economy since 2011 has triggered a spike in demand for labour. Many children work in fish farming and processing. At Yangon's San Pya fish market, the country's largest, girls and boys as young as nine clean and process fish and unload boats and trucks during 12-hour overnight shifts. Photograph: Soe Zeya Tun/Reuters Chancellor Angela Merkel and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas leave a news conference at the Chancellery in Berlin, Germany. Photograph: Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters Windmills are seen at dusk in Campo de Criptana, Spain, April 4, 2016. Locals believe that Miguel de Cervantes drew inspiration from the windmills of Campo de Criptana to narrate the battle between Don Quixote and the windmills he mistook for giants. Photohraph: Susana Vera/Reuters Breakfast is seen in a tea shop after a suicide car bomb attack on a government security building nearby, in Kabul, Afghanistan. Photograph: Mohammad Ismail/Reuters A woman fills out her ballot in a voting booth in the New York U.S. presidential primary election as her young son looks, at the GrafflinSchool in Chappaqua, New York. Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters Queen Elizabeth II, the longest-reigning monarch in British history, has reached a milestone birthday. As the Queen celebrates her 90th birthday, and a grateful Britain will honor a woman who through seven decades has remained gloriously and relentlessly enigmatic yet unmistakably regal. So to celebrate her entrance into the select elite of nonagenarians, Rediff.com has chosen the highlights of her reign -- from her Coronation right up to the present day. Happy Birthday Liz! LONG LIVE THE QUEEN: The Coronation ceremony of Queen Elizabeth in 1952 is considered one of the most iconic days in the history of the world. LIZ THE TRUCKER: An 18-year-old Princess Elizabeth, who trained as a truck driver, stands next to a medical transport vehicle during a photograph clicked during the Second World War. JUST LIKE ROSIE THE RIVETER: During World War II, 18-year-old Princess Elizabeth, who trained as a mechanic and truck driver and continues to be the only female member of the royal family to have entered the armed forces. A WRENCH IN THE WORKS: The then Princess Elizabeth hard at work repairing a military-use truck during her time with the armed forces. LOVE IS IN THE AIR: A photograph of Elizabeth and husband Philip clicked during their honeymoon. The Queen met her future husband Philip Mountbatten at the mere age of 13 and it was, apparently, love at first sight. The pair began writing letters and, after getting secretly engaged in 1946, told the world following Elizabeth's 21st birthday. They were married a year later on 20th November 1947 in Westminster Abbey. LOVE IS STILL IN THE AIR: Nearly seven decades later this photograph bears witness to the couple's continuing romance! CLICKITY CLICK: The Queen, a keen photographer, seen teaching a young Prince Charles, how to use a camera. Photograph: Getty Images BURNING THE AIRWAVES: Princess Elizabeth makes her first broadcast, accompanied by her younger sister Princess Margaret Rose October 12, 1940 in London. Photograph: Getty Images SHAKEN NOT STIRRED: The Queen is joined by Daniel 'James Bond' Craig who was on her majesty's secret service as part of the introduction to the 2012 London Olympics THE DAM BUSTERS MARCH: Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, inspecting the Guard of Honor at the Kenya Regiment Headquarters, February 3rd 1952. Photograph: Chris Ware/Getty Images FACE TO FACE: What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? They chat! As did Queen Elizabeth and Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1969. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images BALLROOM BALLERINA: Putting her best foot forward was a talent for Queen Elizabeth II, who is seen her dancing with Air Marshal Sir John Baldwin, colonel of the 8th Hussars, at a ball held at the Hyde Park Hotel, London, November 26, 1954. The ball was to celebrate the centenary of the Battle of Balaclava. Photograph: Dennis Oulds/Getty Images CAUGHT BETWEEN KILTS: Dressing in Scottish kilts will not help one outdo the style and grace of the Queen as is fully evinced by this picture of Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles during a Highland Games Gathering in Scotland. Photograph: Russell Cheyne/Reuters The QUEEN IN 3D: Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh wear 3 D glasses to watch a display and pilot a JCB digger, during a visit to the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research centre, in Sheffield, England. Photograph: John Giles/Getty Images Images THE QUEEN AKA ROBIN HOOD: Queen Elizabeth reminds us that she can easily pass off as that green hooded rogue of British legend. Is Hollywood paying any attention yet? Photograph: Max Mumby/Getty Images GRUMPY OLD GAL: The Queen gives a royal horse the ultimate death stare. Where's the bookies! The Queen shelters from the rain at the Newbury racecourse in Greenham. Photograph: Getty Images HOLY MOLEY: Britain Queen Elizabeth II, accompanied by her husband The Duke of Edinburgh views the sculpture of a Dung Beetle atop a giant ball of facsimile dung. Photograph: Reuters WHO'S THE BEST DRESSED OF THEM ALL: Managing to look graceful and stylish while standing next to pantomimes is a tall order. Does the Queen do the job well? Heck yeah. Photograph: Reuters YOU TALKIN' TO ME: Looking just as majestic as she was at the time of her coronation, the Queen is study in poise and presentability in this picture. Photograph: Getty Images An upbeat Harish Rawat on Thursday made it clear that his government does not want to pursue a confrontationist path with the "mighty, powerful and broad-chested" centre, asking it to work in a spirit of cooperative federalism. Hailing the Uttarakhand high court verdict setting aside President's rule in the state and restoring his government, Rawat said that the Modi government should forget the recent developments and cooperate. His colleagues have been told to let go off the bitterness and work together to take the state forward on the path of development, Rawat said. "We don't want to fight...they are powerful, mighty and broad chested. We do not talk of fighting, but talk of cooperation. I would request the centre to forget the past and work in the spirit of cooperative federalism," he said addressing a press conference at his residence in Dehradun. Welcoming the HC order restoring his government, he said, "Uttarakhand has got justice... This is a victory of people of Uttarakhand. We welcome the verdict. The whole country knows who was behind the political instability in the state." He also said, "I would like to thank the court on behalf of all democratic and progressive forces." Rawat urged the centre to let the state do its work and said this is not the time of celebrate but to fulfill his duties towards the state. He said that the centre's act of imposing President's rule just ahead of the vote of confidence inflicted "four deep wounds" on Uttarakhand. Listing them out, he said, "Defection was caused with the use of coercive measures, when with governor's permission we were a few steps away from proving our majority and President's rule was imposed by the centre." He added, "The poor man's budget was ordered to be thrown in the dustbin and welfare schemes went haywire at a time when all schemes lined up were to be fine-tuned towards the end of financial year." The crucial time when the momentum of the budget spending was to take place has now gone and now "we have to strive to compensate for the loss suffered during the last two months". "All our plans have gone haywire and we will once again try to put them together," he said. Rawat said people of the state suffered a lot due to the political instability in the past two months and its developmental schemes have also suffered. Rawat said he would still request the centre to support Uttarakhand in its development as his government was ready to forget the past and move forward together. Terming the court's verdict as a victory of people of Uttarakhand, democracy and constitutional norms, All India Congress Committee Incharge Communications Randeep Singh Surjewala said Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Amit Shah should learn a lesson from this "decisive and resounding verdict. "This is a victory for the people of Uttarakhand, democracy and constitutional norms. This is also a slap on the face of those in BJP who sought to dislodge an elected government, elected with the mandate of people in Uttarakhand. "Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah will be well advised to now tender an unconditional apology to the nation and also to people of Uttarakhand for trampling upon democracy, murdering constitution norms and subjugating the will of people to their blind quest to dislodge the Congress governments. We welcome the verdict," Surjewala said. He said that it proves the full majority which Congress enjoys and the "sinister conspiracies" which are being hatched from Arunanchal Pradesh to Uttarakhand and many other states to dislodge elected governments by "foul means, use of money and muscle power" should now at least come to an end. "Prime Minister Modi and Amit Shah should learn a lesson from this decisive and resounding verdict," he said. Meanwhile, Uttarakhand Speaker Govind Singh Kunjwal has termed the HC's decision as a "historic" verdict, and said it was a "slap" on the face of the centre for trying to dislodge an elected government. The court's decision will set a precedent for the country in future, he said. "This historic decision is a slap in the face of the centre which, in a dictatorial manner, tried to overthrow an elected government," Kunjwal said. Asked whether the nine disqualified rebel Congress MLAs would be allowed to vote during floor test, the speaker said he would be able to comment only after going through the high court's order. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal also took potshot at the Prime Minister and said that he should stop "interfering with elected governments and respect democracy". "This is a huge embarrassment to Modi Govt. He shud stop interfering wid elected govts and respect democracy (sic)," Kejriwal tweeted. Senior Aam Aadami Party leader Sanjay Singh said the high court order was a "befitting reply" to the centre's decision of imposing President's rule. "The centre needs to think over it (the imposition of Uttarkhand) after the high court judgment. They tried to do a similar thing in Arunachal Pradesh. But the high court gave its judgment against a dictatorial government. "The country also needs to think whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi has become a threat to the world's largest democracy," Singh said. Singh also raised concerns over a possible horse-trading ahead of floor test on April 29. Coming down heavily on the centre for the March 27 proclamation issued under Art 356, a division bench of the high court headed by Chief Justice K M Joseph said the imposition of the President's rule was contrary to the law laid down by the Supreme Court. Image: Harish Rawat addresses a press conference. Photograph: ANI_News/Twitter Officials said the three Maoists, identified as Bissu, Manish and Maun, were apprehended by a joint squad of forces led by paramilitary ITBP along with state police. (Photo: Twitter/ANI) Raipur: Security forces have apprehended three suspected Naxals along with some arms and explosives from Rajnandgaon district of Chhattisgarh. Officials said the three Maoists, identified as Bissu, Manish and Maun, were apprehended by a joint squad of forces led by paramilitary ITBP along with state police from the Kohkatola area of the said district. They said three tiffin bombs, two small rifles, an improvised explosive device and few other electric triggers and wires were recovered after the operation led by ITBP's 18th battalion deployed in the area. The three men and the seized items have been handed over to local police. They are ascertaining the identities of the people held, they said. What's in a name? Quite a lot apparently. For although the Haryana govt claims the rechristening of Mewat was done for administrative purposes, the Opposition alleges a more insidious agenda at work. Archis Mohan reports. Haryanas Bharatiya Janata Party government, helmed by Chief Minister Manohar Lal, a one-time Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh pracharak, has been ridiculed for renaming Gurgaon as Gurugram. Yet, a more intriguing decision has been to rename the district of Mewat as Nuh. Incidentally, the renaming comes within weeks of the Centre for Policy Studies, an RSS-supported think tank, issuing a study about the growing population of Muslims in the Mewat region. Issued on March 24, it argued, Muslims of Mewat have numerically flourished in the period following Independence. And, they seem to be in the process of establishing an exclusively Muslim pocket in the near future. The local Congress leadership believes the renaming is the first step in the larger agenda of the Sangh to stoke communal polarisation in an area that has largely remained peaceful since the communal riots during the 1947 partition. Mewat has water scarcity. It needs education. There is joblessness. The government has offered us a name change, says Aftab Ahmed, a Mewat-based Congress leader. He says the RSS has issues with the separate identity of the peaceful and proud Meos and is trying to economically and politically subjugate them. On Sunday, the chief minister tried to reach out to the people of Mewat. In a well-attended public rally in Chanddaka village of the district, he stated the official reason for renaming: People might try to politicise it but the reason behind the change of name is to demarcate areas in the state from those in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. He said the renaming was part of the governments development plan (for the region) and promised new schools and better irrigation for the arid region. The Mewat region stretches from Alwar and Bharatpur in Rajasthan to parts of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. It derives its name from the Meos, the numerically dominant caste of Muslim peasants. Mewat district, now renamed Nuh, was carved out of areas of Gurgaon and Faridabad by the Bhupinder Hooda-led Congress government in 2005. Nuh, a tehsil, was made the district headquarters. The Meos, the CM reminded those who attended the rally on Sunday, didnt vote for his BJP in either the Lok Sabha or the Haryana assembly elections of 2014. You may not have chosen the BJP but you are an integral part of the state and close to my heart. This is the reason behind my fifth tour to the district since assuming charge as the CM, he said. The Congress says its not so innocuous. Party spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala, who hails from Haryana, says: The BJP government has no comprehension of the sacrifice, valour and nationalistic fervour of the Mewatis. Their divisive politics seeks to undo even this. Ahmed says it is important to appreciate the characteristics of the Meos to understand why the deeper agenda is to scrub their identity. According to research by academician Yoginder Sikand, the peasant caste continues to celebrate many Hindu traditions to this day. The caste traces its origins to upper caste Rajputs but was more likely to have converted to Islam from such castes as the Meenas, Jats and Gujars. Sikand researched the influence of the Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamic revivalist movement, among Meos since the 1920s. It had resulted in the peasants moving towards a more orthodox Islam. However, the youth were increasingly rejecting such religious-based teaching, in favour of more modern education. Locals like Ahmed point to the history of the Meos of fighting the rulers of the Delhi Sultanate and later the Mughals. According to historians, the peasants rebelled against their exploitative Hindu rulers of Bharatpur and Alwar in the 1930s and were crushed. They also bore the brunt of communal riots during partition. The study by the CPS concedes the Meo Muslims were hit by the partition riots but slams social scientists for ignoring how the community had risen to dominate the region numerically, economically and politically. Basing its study on 2011 Census data, it says the Meo population is increasing at a faster rate than Hindus in the region. It even hints at economic rivalry for the rapid growth of Muslims in the towns of Mewat district being a consequence of Meo Muslims opening small shops in these towns to counter the monopoly of Hindus in small trade of the region. A social activist working among the Meos, who didnt want to be named, said the rate of population growth among Meos had actually shown a declining trend. Most people here are extremely poor. Agriculture productivity is low. The region needs more primary schools. Instead of spreading hate between communities, these are the issues that need to be addressed. The renaming, he said, was an attempt to scrub the history of a proud people and eventually weaken their economic and political clout. 12 people and injured 27 others in blast between December 2002 and March 2003. (Photo: PTI) Mumbai: Two convicts of 2002-03 Mumbai blast case, Atif Mulla and Hasib Mulla filed appeals on Thursday against their conviction in the Bombay High Court. They also filed bail applications. The Bombay High Court admitted the pleas for hearing and issued notices to the Government of Maharashtra and others on bail pleas of the two blasts case convicts. The notices are returnable in two weeks. Both Atif Mulla and Hasib Mulla are sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment in the case. A Special Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) court on April 6 awarded life imprisonment to three of the 10 convicts in the 2002-2003 Mumbai blasts that killed 12 people and injured 27 others between December 2002 and March 2003. Four convicts, including key accused Saquib Nachan, were sentenced to 10 years of rigorous imprisonment. Three other convicts, who have already served around eight years in jail, got two years of simple imprisonment. There were three explosions in Mumbai in four months starting with the first blast on December 6, 2002 at the McDonald's at Mumbai Central Railway Station. The second blast occurred on January 27, 2003 at Vile Parle East market and the third blast took place in a local train at the Mulund Railway Station on March 13, 2003. New Delhi: Days after Beijing blocked India's bid to have Pathankot terror attack mastermind Masood Azhar designated as a terrorist by the UN, India on Thursday told China clearly that there cannot be any differentiation among terrorists as all are the same. Read: India slams 'hidden veto' at UN after China blocks bid to ban Masood Azhar Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar's comment came a day after he arrived in New Delhi from his five-day visit to China during which he also raised India's concerns about the presence of Chinese troops in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), besides discussing crucial matters like boundary issues and setting up of a military hotline between DGMOs (Director Generals of Military Operations) of the two countries. "I have expressed very clearly to them that there cannot be differentiation in terrorists. All terrorists are the same and they should be dealt with the same principle, including the issue they had obstructed at the UN. They should also deal with it in the same manner," he told reporters here. He underlined that External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had raised the issue in a more detailed manner in her interaction with her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi. Earlier this month, China had stopped UN sanctions committee from designating Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Azhar as terrorist, maintaining that the case "did not meet the requirements" of the Security Council. Read: China sticks to its guns on blocking India's bid to ban JeM chief Azhar Parrikar said that India did not shy away from expressing its concerns to China in a clear and firm manner. "Issue was also raised and India's concerns were presented in a clear manner. May be for the first time, it was raised clearly and firmly. Of course, they have their own justification...We did not shy away from raising our issues," he said. He said the most important takeaways from the trip were the joint decision for continuous interaction, exchanges, more talks between the armed services of both countries so that there are reduced chances of any "unwanted, undesirable" incident happening. Read: Masood Azhar issue discussed with China: Ajit Doval Parrikar said that an "improved" version of the MoU on defence, signed in May 2006, is being exchanged for finalisation. Asked if China had raised the issue of India's decision to sign a logistics agreement with the US, Parrikar said, "Yes." "They mentioned it but not with the intensity as some of the media was thinking. They definitely mentioned it and we have been very clear that India's stand on various foreign policies, including this one, is an autonomous stand and India takes these decisions based on strategic and security interest of the country," the minister said. UPDATE (3 p.m. Thursday): The Texas Classroom Teachers Association also filed suit against Morath in Travis County on Wednesday, likewise citing education code in its argument against the proposed changes. Clearly the commissioner has the authority to establish a state model appraisal system, which he has done, said TCTA General Counsel Lonnie F. Hollingsworth Jr. However, his authority does not extend to dictating terms for locally developed appraisal systems, the process for which is outlined for districts in state law. UPDATE (2:45 p.m. Thursday): In a statement Thursday, Texans for Education Reform, a bipartisan, non-profit organization of educational, business and civic leaders, expressed support for T-TESS, Education Commissioner Mike Morath and the Texas Education Agency following a pair of lawsuits brought by Texas teacher associations Wednesday. "We at Texans for Education Reform hope the proponents of this lawsuit will re-think their decision to sue and remember that research clearly shows the quality of a students teacher is the strongest school-based factor in student learning, TER Chairman Doug Foshee said in the statement. "We commend Commissioner Morath and the Texas Education Agency in their decision to design tools that provide teachers with meaningful feedback they can use to increase their effectiveness in the class room and expand their professional skills. "T-TESS is a vast improvement from its two decade year old predecessor. It was designed in collaboration with teachers and should not be abandoned. If we are serious about our commitment to increase student achievement, we must have policies in place that are designed to attract, engage, develop, and reward talented teachers, (which) includes meaningful professional evaluation." ORIGINAL STORY: The Texas State Teachers Association filed a lawsuit against Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath, seeking to invalidate an element of teacher evaluations which allegedly violates state law, according to a news release from the group. Filed in Travis County on Wednesday, the suit asks for a declaratory judgment to block the upcoming implementation of the Texas Teacher Evaluation and Support System, T-TESS, scheduled to take effect July 1. "Teachers are not robots, and their performance should be evaluated by an easily understood, transparent system that helps them perfect their job performance," TSTA President Noel Candelaria said in the release. "Let's be clear: Educators' compensation and jobs are potentially on the line here, and their work must be evaluated fairly and legally." A spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency told the Texas Tribune on Wednesday that neither Morath nor the agency could comment on the lawsuit because they had not yet been served with it. T-TESS will replace the state's current system for evaluating teachers, the Professional Development Appraisal System, that has been in place since 1997. Though it is not required, as districts are allowed to develop their own appraisal systems, a number of districts do adopt the state model to remain in compliance with state and federal mandates. In the Abilene Independent School District, TSTA chapter President Mark Grose said T-TESS violates the new Every Student Succeeds Act, the federal law that replaced No Child Left Behind and returned control of most education matters to the state and local levels. Grose, a teacher of the deaf at Madison Middle School, added the model created by T-TESS through value added measures does not show how well or poorly a teacher is doing in the classroom. "With 20 percent of VAM being part of T-TESS, there shouldn't be a single test tied to a teacher's effectiveness nor should it determine a student's success," he said. Once in place, the new model will require at least 20 percent of a teacher's evaluation come from items pertaining to student growth, which includes, but is not limited to, standardized test scores like the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness. TSTA is concerned, according to the release, that student growth could be calculated through "value added measures," which uses a complicated formula comparing actual student test scores to scores predicted by a mathematical target based on the scores of similar student populations. It's this model, TSTA said, that violates Texas Education Code requiring the appraisal system to be based on "observable, job related behavior." But a VAM model is not "observable" and is not even available to teachers and others who wish to understand the basis for their evaluations, TSTA said. Section 21.352 of the Texas Education Code sets the same "observable, job-related behavior" requirement for school districts that choose to create their own appraisal systems. "Tying teacher evaluations to test scores will raise the stakes on STAAR testing even higher for children who already are over-tested, much to the anger of a growing number of Texas parents who understand real education is more than a test score," Candelaria said. Taylor County could remodel courthouse and keep gun ban Taylor County officials have long thought about moving non-court offices out of the courthouse, and now may be a good time to start planning. That is what McLennan County will do to keep its "no weapons" signs at the county courthouse in an agreement the county made with the Texas Attorney General's Office, the Waco Tribune-Herald reported. McLennan County will move its district attorney's office pretrial services and hot check department to an administrative area in the old sheriff's office, according to the Tribune-Herald. Licensed carriers will not be allowed to carry in the courthouse but can in the old sheriff's office facility. Taylor County could face a similar dilemma because it followed McLennan County's model in banning firearms in the multipurpose courthouse on Oak Street. But the county has not received word from the Attorney General's Office, said County Judge Downing Bolls. The judge received a letter of complaint in January from the leader of a gun lobby group about the sign posted at the courthouse's entrance that prohibits firearms, claiming it violates the state's new open carry laws. Attorney General Ken Paxton issued an opinion stating that handguns should be permitted in courthouses that contain offices unrelated to the court's operations, but not in areas deemed essential to the court, which is determined by the judge. Taylor County judges signed an order stating the entire courthouse is essential to the operation of the court. Attorney General representatives visited the McLennan County Courthouse on April 13 to tour the building, the Tribune-Herald reported. The visit came after a letter from the Attorney General's Office ordering the county to remove the signs at courthouse entrances or face penalties. The Attorney General's Office did not give McLennan County a time frame to implement these changes, which Bolls said was "interesting." Public agencies that unlawfully post signs banning the open carry of handguns can be fined between $1,000 and $1,500 for the first offense and between $10,000 and $15,000 for each subsequent violation, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety website. Like McLennan County, Taylor County has tentative plans to remodel the courthouse into a "true courts building," Bolls said. He said the idea had been talked about since before he was elected. The county has considered renovating the courthouse and moving administrative offices, such as the treasurer's and auditor's office, out of the courthouse and into the county plaza building across the street, Boll said. "It's on the table," he said. The major hindrance to these renovations is money. Bolls said the changes could cost between $3-$4 million. Gov. Greg Abbott is releasing a first book May 17 that follows the time-honored practice of slamming the federal government if you're interested in trying to head it. Abbott tells the story of an oak tree falling on him and crushing his back while he was jogging in Houston in 1984, and relearning life confined to a wheelchair. He combines that with the perseverance to carry on with his legal and political career, which has taken him to the Texas Supreme Court, 12 years as attorney general and now the governor's office. An April 4 press announcement said Abbott's book 'Broken But Unbowed: The Fight to Fix a Broken America' 'details his story of overcoming personal adversity and casts a vision of how, as a nation, we can restore the Constitution and address many of the problems our country faces today.' Abbott, who half-jokingly described his job as attorney general as going to the office, suing the Obama administration and going home, also half-jokes about his broken back. He often says, unlike some politicians, he has 'literally, a spine of steel' since his accident. The timing of the book is interesting. Abbott plans to tour with the book in Texas and nationally, including around the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July. Governors and U.S. senators usually are the two pools that produce candidates for president, and are selected as vice presidential running mates. Although Abbott's protege and former solicitor general, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, is in the finals for the Republican presidential nomination, it's possible that another nominee might pick as a vice presidential sidekick a guy in a wheelchair who is governor of a big state. Or, it could be that Abbott is working to raise his national profile that might lead to being on a national ticket in 2020, if Democrats retain the White House this year. Or, it could put him on track to be chosen as U.S. attorney general, or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. It is almost a rite of passage for someone who'd like to be president to write a book first. Abbott's two immediate predecessors as governor Republicans George W. Bush and Rick Perry both wrote books in advance of running for president. Bush published 'A Charge to Keep' in 1999, while running for the presidency in 2000. He won then, and again in 2004. Perry published 'On My Honor: Why the American Values of the Boy Scouts Are Worth Fighting for' in 2008, and 'Fed Up!: Our Fight to Save America from Washington' in 2010. The first book decried leftist values challenging traditional American values. 'Fed Up!' called for returning power from the federal government to the states. Perry ran for the Republican nomination in 2012 and 2016. Much of Abbott's book deals with his ambitious proposal for a national convention to amend the U.S. Constitution, to debate and pass nine amendments that he has proposed. They include requiring a balanced budget, prohibiting congress from regulating any activity that is wholly within one state which some say includes marriage and gun use and letting states override some federal laws and decisions by the Supreme Court. Abbott also would require a vote of seven of the nine Supreme Court members, instead of the usual five, to overturn any law passed by state legislatures or Congress. Article V of the Constitution allows for two-thirds of the states now 34 to call for a constitutional convention to amend it. That would then have to be ratified by three-fourths of the states 38 to become part of the document. That process has been attempted a few times, but never got far. All of the amendments since the 10 in the Bill of Rights have come from Congress, with the states ratifying them. Abbott had unveiled his proposal in a Jan. 8 speech to the right-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation in January. He also had a 92-page handout outlining his proposal. Pre-orders of the book are available at www.gregabbott.com/book. All proceeds from the book will be donated to Operation FINALLY HOME, a nonprofit headquartered in Texas that provides custom-built, mortgage-free homes to wounded, ill or injured veterans and widows and their families. One letter-writer to the Austin American-Statesman recently said if the governor really wants to help veterans, he should agree to the expansion of Medicaid financed by the federal government. Doing so, he said, would make medical care much more available in more rural areas of Texas, where there aren't veterans' hospitals. Email Dave McNeely at davemcneely111@gmail.com. Today in history: On April 21, 1836, Sam Houston and his band of Texians launch a surprise attack on the Mexican army led by Gen. Santa Anna near the San Jacinto River. The army is routed and hundreds are taken prisoner, including the general himself. The victory comes after the stirring stand at the Alamo and the massacre at Goliad. The Battle of San Jacinto, or what battle there was, successfully ended the bid for independence, which Texas received in exchange for Santa Anna. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below This just in... The Modi-led goverment is trying to push for the promotion of Hindi language in schools across India. (Photo: PTI) Hyderabad: The Centre on Thursday favoured making mother tongue Medium of Instruction (MoI) up to high school even as it underlined the need for promotion of Hindi. "Medium of instruction should be the mother tongue up to a particular class. The country has to evolve a consensus and all the state governments should work in that direction of making it mandatory to have mother tongue up to at least high school," Union Urban Development and Parliamentary Affairs Minister M Venkaiah Naidu said here. Reviewing the progress made in the use of Hindi in official work at the meeting of the Hindi Advisory Committee (Hindi Salahkar Samiti) of the Ministry of Urban Development, Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation here today, Naidu emphasised the need for encouraging Hindi because "Hindi is our 'rajbhasha'." The Minister stressed the need for promotion of Hindi language in official work. "Hindi Ko Protsahan Dena Chahiye kyonki woh Rajbhasha hain. (Hindi should be promoted because it is our national language). Though, there is no question of imposing or forcing it (Hindi) on anyone," he told reporters after the meeting. He said that at the same time, every state government should encourage mother tongue as well and local jobs should be linked to the (local) language. "Then only the language will get encouraged or else it will not". "Language is related to culture and protection of language is protection of culture, he observed. At national level Hindi has been given the status of official Language and that's why it also has to be promoted. There is no objection in learning English but there should not be English mentality", Naidu said. "It is a serious matter that mother tongue is being forgotten. The new generation is getting attracted towards English. We are not against English. Children should also be encouraged to learn Hindi as without Hindi you cannot excel at national level. Learning Hindi is very necessary," he said. "While learning English, people should also be proficient in their mother tongue," Naidu said. "We have a three-language formula and Government is committed to that and there is no question of thrusting any language on anybody. At the same time we should see to it that our national and native languages are encouraged and protected." Features The character dates all the way back to A New Hope. Berhampore: A 35-year-old CPI(M) supporter was killed on Thursday and his body was found lying outside a polling booth at Shibapara area under Domkal Assembly seat in Murshidabad district where polling for the third phase is underway. CPI(M) candidate and former minister Anisur Rahman said that the man identified as Tahidur Islam was killed when bombs were hurled outside the polling booth. Murshidabad Superintendent of police C Sudhakar, however, said the murder was not related to polls. Tahidur was stabbed somewhere else and his body was dumped near the booth, the SP said. Rahman also alleged jamming of booths by Trinamool Congress supporters. Congress candidate of Hariharpara Assembly seat in the same district Mir Alam Gir alleged that two party supporters were beaten up allegedly by Trinamool Congress workers at Hosseinpur. Read: CPI(M) accuses TMC of unleashing terror, lashes out at EC Trinamool Congress, however, denied the charges. Polling is being held in 22 Assembly constituencies of the district out of the total 62 seats, where polling is underway. In Burdwan district where third phase Assembly election is on in 16 seats, four persons were injured in separate incidents in polling booths under Ketugram Assembly constituency. Read: West Bengal: Photographs of candidates displayed in polling booths The ear of a CPI(M) worker identified as Seltu Sheikh was slashed and leg of another CPI(M) man was fractured after an altercation led to a scuffle in front of booth no 78. Both the injured were rushed to Ketugram Block Primary Health Centre. District returning officer Soumitra Mohan said four persons have been arrested in this connection. In another incident, two CPI(M) workers were injured at booth no 48 under Ketugram Assembly seat when bombs were allegedly hurled. The injured were taken to Ketugram Block Primary Health Centre. While CPI(M) alleged that Trinamool Congress supporters were involved in the incident, the latter denied the charge. In a separate incident, Central Forces obstructed Trinamool Congress candidate in Purbasthali Uttar seat of the district, Tapan Chattopadhyay, from entering booth no 20 due to a "communication gap". He was later allowed to enter after he showed valid papers. Two EVM machines were replaced after it started malfunctioning at a polling booth under ward no 3 of Katwa Assembly seat. Polling was delayed by 45 minutes as a result of this, district election official said. Leng Ouch is the 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize winner for Asia. Sometimes called the Green Nobel the prize honors grassroots environmental heroes from the worlds six inhabited continental regions. It recognizes individuals for sustained and significant efforts to protect and enhance the natural environment, often at great personal risk. Few people embody the spirit of the prize like Leng Ouch. Born to a poor family, he worked his way through school eventually became an attorney working with human rights organizations. Recalling the forests that sustained his family and countless others, he founded the Cambodia Human Rights Task Forces (CHRTF). Seeking to expose its role in illegal logging to the international community, he went undercover to gather evidence of illegal logging activities, posing as a laborer, timber dealer, driver, tourist, and even as a cook. He publicly released the photos and video footage he gathered, revealing how economic land concessions were used as a cover for illegal logging and exposing criminal collusion between timber companies and government officials. His outspoken criticism of the government put him at enormous risk, in a country where environmental activism is dangeroussometimes even deadly. He spoke to reporter Vuthy Huot in RFAs studios in Washington on Thursday. RFA: We would like to congratulate you for this big win. How do you feel about this? Leng Ouch: It is a great honor. It exceeds my dreams, and it is unbelievable for me that among the 189 countries they chose me as a worlds environmental hero. It is great, great honor. I am excited and the government should be proud of me that the world has chosen to be a hero protecting the environment. RFA: As far as I know there are 6 winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize and each has just received the amount of $175,000. What will you do with the amount of money? Leng Ouch: We will use the money to continue to protect the forests. Although I know that the government is not happy with me, and we know that my work [forced me to] face danger and receive death threats, I still struggle to protect the forests that are left. We will use the money to appeal to the government as well as international organizations to intervene with the government to stop [illegal wood] factory trades and close all [illegal] timber factories as well as the wood processing businesses which are the major causes of destruction of the forests in Cambodia. And we will appeal to the people as well as students and relevant authorities to participate together in forest protection because the forest is very important. We are left with very little nowabout less than 20 percentwhich makes us worry about the loss of the forests in the last recent years. RFA: Is this something that Cambodia can do on its own? Leng Ouch: China and Vietnam seem to be the masters of Cambodia as they come to invest in Cambodia and they collect the natural resources as well as cut the forests and export raw materials back to their countries to become rich. That leaves the Cambodian people to suffer the impact of losing forests, and it makes their livelihood become worse and worse from one year to another. RFA: What you have just mentioned, the government now seems committed to measures like the ones you advocate. Did you collaborate with the government and how? And how effective do you think the measures are? Leng Ouch: We as a civil society organization dont have enough protection. We will collaborate with the government, but in reality the government considers those who protect the forests and protect the environment as their enemy. For example, my brother Chhut Vuthy [also known as Chut Wutty] was shot dead during his work investigating the natural forests in Koh Kong province. I will appeal to the international community to push the government to protect the forests seriously, rather than practice their actions only on paper and promise to various donors as well as to the people to just gain popularity and votes. This is the reality, and it is not aimed at criticizing the government. RFA: You said that the governments measures are taken only on paper, but we have seen various reports that Prime Minister Hun Sen assigned Sao Sokha to combat the forest crimes, and that they have confiscated a lot of logs and timber, and warrants have been issued to the suspected traders. Do you think that the government produced any positive results so far? Leng Ouch: It seems that there were no positive signs regarding this matter. Because the prime minister promised in 2002 that he would cut his head off or resign if he could not protect the forests. Since then, we have not seen anything realistic. RFA: Youre in the United States today. Does that mean anything other than coming to pick up an award? Leng Ouch: We come to foreign countries to appeal to their people and report to the world to help protect the little forest that is left after the illegal logging and trading activities that are run by the rich and the powerful in Cambodia, by the Oknhas [powerful Cambodian businessmen] who are allowed to illegally log in the protected forests. This allows them to look down on Cambodias laws regarding forest protection. When the Oknhas want to buy a license to operate businesses, they allow them to have the licenses and them they can operate their logging and trading businesses, and export the logs and wood. RFA: So, when you went to the White House, who did you meet and what did you do there? What was the message from the White House to Cambodian officials about the forest protection? And what was your message? Leng Ouch: Yesterday, I met with White House officials, and today, I will meet with U.S. senators, congressmen and women, and some leaders from the world who came to San Francisco and Washington, D.C. that welcomed me. I sent important messages to them, to all the countries to help push the government of Cambodia to stop all illegal logging activities and wood or timber factories and wood processing factories. The government has to stop its officials from doing that kind of business. Otherwise the governments measures wont be effective. Chinese President Xi Jinping has awarded himself a new military title this weekcommander-in-chief of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) Joint Battle Commandsparking concerns that he is well on the way to a strongman style of leadership unseen in China since the death of supreme leader Deng Xiaoping. Chinese state media showed photos and footage of Xi, clad from head to foot in battle-khaki and inspecting the newly inaugurated command center's troops on Wednesday. Xi told the PLA that the Joint Battle Command should be "absolutely loyal, resourceful in fighting, efficient in commanding, and courageous and capable of winning wars," according to state broadcast China Central Television (CCTV). Xi is already head of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, President of the People's Republic of China and chairman of the Central Military Commission, a party body that controls the PLA. The new role is much closer to the PLA's operations than the CMC leadership, however, and shows that Xi is backing a fully modernized PLA, according to state media. However, the media coverage also shows the president burnishing his image as the charismatic "savior" of the Chinese people, Shaanxi-based media commentator Ma Xiaoming told RFA. "This move by Xi Jinping is characteristic of the imperialist thinking that portrays him as the savior of the nation," Ma said. "[That thinking] is also one of the biggest reasons for his rise to power." Personality cult Xi's impeccable revolutionary credentials, as son of the late Communist Party general Xi Zhongxun, have sparked something of a personality cult around the president within the ranks of the party. "A lot of organizations within the party have been writing songs in praise of Xi, as well as taking care of the grave of Xi Zhongxun," Ma said. "Publishing houses are printing his writings, while all the places where Xi once lived, worked or studied are starting to turn into places where one pays one's respects." "Some people are treating the place where Xi's mother Qi Xin once worked as holy ground," he said. Political commentator Wei Pu said Xi's apparent move towards a more hands-on military role has more to do with consolidating his power within party ranks since taking over from predecessor Hu Jintao in 2012. "Xi Jinping has managed to set up his own dictatorship by increasing his own personal authority and consolidating power in his own hands," Wei wrote in a commentary on RFA's Cantonese Service. "Xi holds the highest power in the land, alone, and he rules personally," Wei said. "Under Hu ... we saw one party rule, in accordance with the collective leadership that was Deng Xiaoping's idea." "Thus, we have a system in which a single person wields power that isn't subject to the limits of law or any checks and balances." Anti-corruption campaigns A current affairs commentator who gave only his surname Wu said the setting up of the PLA Battle Command could also be seen as a conciliatory gesture to the military, which has been hard-hit by the president's anti-corruption campaign in recent years. "Corruption is very serious in the military ... and the anti-corruption campaigns are very popular with the general public," Wu said. He said it is still unclear how far Xi is willing to go in tackling graft in the ranks of the PLA, in spite of having criticized the military for engaging in widespread and hugely lucrative business ventures. "We will have to wait for the 19th Party Congress before we find out exactly what his ideological line is going to be [on the military]," Wu said. One thing is sure, according to Wei Pu. Xi Jinping tolerates no challenge to his personal power or attacks on his public image. "Any individuals who try and challenge him are wiped out or suppressed by the huge power of the state machinery, whether they are in China or overseas," Wei wrote. Recent articles comparing "Daddy Xi" with late supreme leaders like Deng or Mao Zedong in the Western media have been quickly deleted and the offending websites firmly blocked in China, he said. Reported by Xin Lin for RFA's Mandarin Service, and by the Cantonese Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie. The farmers are not able to find fodder for their milch cattle and are selling them off unable to see them starve to death. (Representational image) Warangal: Extreme heat conditions are taking a toll on the cattle in the district. Already due to crop failure, the farmers are not able to find fodder for their milch cattle and are selling them off unable to see them starve to death. This way, the farmers are also losing the income they get by selling milk from the cattle. Currently, due to drought conditions, there is acute shortage of fodder for the cattle. Telangana Shepherds Association district president Jatangi Srisailam said the state government should take the initiative to help the farmers and shepherds save their cattle. Every day hundreds of cattle are dying due to lack of fodder and the heat wave. If initiatives like digging water holes near tanks are taken, the sheep and goats would not have to go through this ordeal. There are lakhs of families dependent on breeding cattle. The government needs to take immediate steps to help them, he said. Senior BJP leader Narahari Venugopal Reddy said even though, the Central government is giving sufficient funds, the state government has failed to take any preventive steps for tackling such issues in summer. He said the cattle are dying due to lack of fodder in many villages. This situation would usually arise in May but this time we are seeing it in April itself, said Mr Reddy adding that this situation should be considered as a natural disaster and steps should be taken urgently. TRS government has no foresight. The Central government has given funds of Rs 7,500 crore so far but the state government failed to take up any relief measures. Apart from projects like Mission Bhagiratha and Mission Kakatiya, they have nothing for the people. Andhra Pradesh government is providing fodder to the farmers and they have taken up summer relief measures in large numbers. Our own CM does not care. Who is taking care of the state now? he questioned. A court in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong on Thursday began the subversion trial of another rights activist who supported the 2014 pro-democracy movement in neighboring Hong Kong. Su Changlan pleaded not guilty at the Intermediate People's Court in her hometown of Foshan to charges of "incitement to subvert state power," her lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan told RFA. Liu said that while none of Su's actions amount to incitement to subversion, he fears she could receive a hefty jail term nonetheless. "She had no intention in that direction, and the case basically rested on a few articles she wrote," he said. But he added: "I'm not too optimistic about the outcome of this case; I'm worried she'll get a heavy sentence." Su, 45, has also rejected the charges against her, Liu said. "She doesn't believe she has done anything that amounts to a crime," he said. Incitement to subvert state power carries a maximum jail term of five years in less serious cases, and a minimum jail term of five years in cases deemed more serious, or where the suspect is regarded as a "ringleader." Jailed Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo is currently serving a 13-year sentence on the same charge. In poor health Su's detention in October 2014 by Foshan police came after she took part in activities supporting Hong Kong's Occupy Central pro-democracy movement, which China's state media described as an illegal protest backed by "hostile foreign forces." Once a volunteer for the New York-based Women's Rights in China group, Su is in poor health, amid concerns from her family that she is being neglected while in the police-run detention center. Su's husband Chen Dequan, who attended the trial along with her brother Su Shangwei, said she seemed in poor health during her appearance in court, the first time he has seen his wife face-to-face in 18 months. She was allowed 10 minutes to meet with her relatives on the sidelines of the trial, he said. "I don't think these charges stand up, because we are just talking about a few complaints [that she wrote]. I don't think that can be considered incitement to subvert state power," Chen said. "Nobody retweeted what she wrote, or hit 'like,' which means basically that nobody read them," he said. "Nobody commented on them, either." Security was tight outside the court buildings on Thursday, and police detained five out of a dozen of Su's fellow activists gathered in support. Activists Luo Jianhua from Foshan, Li Weiguo from Guangzhou, Zhen Jianghua from Zhuhai, and Qin Ba and Zhang Qiang were detained outside the gates of the court buildings, according to the Human Rights Campaign in China website. Reported by Hai Nan for RFA's Cantonese Service, and by Yang Fan for the Mandarin Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie. Locals examine the front of a Chinese passenger bus that was shot by unidentified gunmen in northern Laos, March 23, 2016. Military and police officials in central Laos Vientiane province have arrested 30 people suspected of being involved in a bus shooting last month that left one Chinese national dead and six others wounded, a local resident with knowledge of the situation said Thursday. The arrests occurred on April 7 along a road between Nanhiew and Nakangpa villages in the provinces Met district after a truck the suspects were traveling in ran out of gas, the source who witnessed the arrests said. They robbed some road construction workers at gunpoint and knife-point to get money for petrol, but one of the workers called the police, who, along with military officers, were able to apprehend the men, he said. The suspects were brutally beaten by the police and military officials, said the local resident who declined to be named. The villagers who saw the incident dare not talk publicly about it. A Met district police officer who gave his name as Poy told RFA that local authorities had the situation under control, but could not give any information about it. There is no problem, and the situation is peaceful," he said. We cannot tell any outsiders because it is an internal affair. He declined to say if the 30 suspects had been arrested in Vientiane district. Long list of shootings Unknown attackers referred to as bandits have been involved in other shooting incidences in both Vientiane and north-central Xaysomboun province since last November. During that month, an exchange of gunfire between a Lao anti-government resistance group and local troops in Xaysomboun left three government soldiers dead and some others injured. A month later, 15 attackers shot two motorcyclists in the provinces Anouvong district, killing one and injuring the other. The alleged bandits shot at a truck transporting beer in the district three days later, injuring two people in the vehicle. On Jan. 14, a midnight attack on a public bus traveling along Route 13 North in Vientiane provinces Kasy district, injured one of about a dozen passengers, but caused no deaths. A shooting in Phoukhoun district of Luang Prabang province on March 1 killed a Chinese man and injured three other Chinese nationals who were working for a logging company clearing land for the Nam Ngum 3 hydropower dam project. On the same day as the shooting near the dam, bandits mounted two separate attacks on a public bus and a truck traveling along Route 13 North in Phoukhoun, injuring five people. As for arrests in the other shootings, a retired soldier who is close to a high-ranking official in the Lao Ministry of National Defense told RFA on Wednesday that authorities in Xaysomboun province have arrested 50 suspects in the attacks that occurred there late last year. Although unrest in the mountainous provinces of central Laos is nothing new, the shootings have made it difficult for the government to ignore them because of the effects on local development and the lives of area residents. Reported by RFAs Lao Service. Translated by Ounkeo Souksavanh. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. Ongoing clashes between Myanmar army soldiers and an armed ethnic group have forced about 300 villagers in Buthidaung township to flee their homes in western Myanmars war-ravaged Rakhine state, a local government official said. About 30 children and senior citizens are among those who left the area during the latest army offensive against the Arakan Army (AA), said Shwe Kyaw Aung, director of Buthidaungs development committee. The refugees have sought shelter in the townships Sithaung village, according to local media reports. Township administrators, members of parliament, and some civil society organizations are helping them find food and a place to stay, he told RFAs Myanmar Service. We have placed them at the villages middle school. The villagers survive off the surrounding mountains and nearby forests where they grow crops and collect firewood, but they cant go there now because of the fighting in those areas, he said. They will suffer if they cant go to work for a long time, Shwe Kyaw Aung said. We can help them only for a short time. We need peace and stability in this area to ensure their long-term survival. Those who have fled the violence join hundreds of other villagers who escaped fighting that erupted in late December and January in Rakhines Kyauktaw township. The fresh clashes broke out on Sunday in the area occurred in Buthidaung and Rathedaung. A battalion commander and 20 soldiers from the government army were killed after launching two ambush attacks against AA forces in Ponnagyun and Rathedaung townships. Army abducts villagers Government army troops on Wednesday abducted five residents from Yasoechaung village of Rathedaung township in Rakhine state, only three miles (4.8 kilometers) from the current fighting, said a relative of one of the abductees. The five are Nga Htaung Che, Than Tun, Kyein Kyan Aung, Lu Phyu Che and Tun Aye Thein, said Khine Mya San, daughter of Kyein Kyan Aung. They brought my father from the farm, she said. We dont know where he is or whether he was asked to perform hard labor. Some displaced villagers told the online journal The Irrawaddy that their relatives have been forced to serve as porters for the Myanmar forces. We are very worried about him because he is getting old, Khine Mya San said. My mother cries all the time for him. Peace negotiations In a related development, a peace negotiator from the Myanmar army said he will hold unofficial discussions next month with armed ethnic groups that did not sign a nationwide cease-fire agreement (NCA) last October, in keeping with a pledge by the new government to seek permanent peace and reconciliation. Retired Lieutenant General Khin Zaw Oo told RFA on Wednesday that he will meet with members of the AA, Kokang, and Taang National Liberation Army (TNLA) in early May in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The meeting will also include leaders of the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC), an alliance of nine ethnic armed groups that did not sign the NCA with the previous government under Thein Sein, he said. We have received an offer to hold discussions with army negotiators unofficially, although we will not discuss the matter as part of the UNFC, said Naing Han Thar, deputy leader of the UNFC, who is also a senior official of the New Mon State Party. We have been standing by three groups which the previous government and army didnt include in the NCA, he said. Eight of more than 20 of Myanmars armed rebel organizations signed the October peace accord. Others, including the AA, Kokang and TNLA, were excluded by the government because of ongoing hostilities with the Myanmar army or opted not to sign. UNFC meeting The UNFC ended a three-day meeting on Thursday in Chiang Mai about its future plans and negotiations with the new government led by the National League for Democracy, local media reported. President Htin Kyaw and State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi have made peace and reconciliation the main goal of their administration and pledged to create a democratic federal union that includes all ethnic groups. The participants discussed what its negotiation group has done to end a conflict between the Restoration Council of Shan State/Shan State Army-South (RCSS/SSA-S) and the TNLA/Palaung State Liberation Front (PSLF), The Irrawaddy reported. The hostilities between the two armed ethnic groups, which began last November in northern Myanmars Shan state, have displaced thousands of people. The meeting participants also discussed the state of a merger between the United League for Arakan/Arakan Army (ULA/AA) and the political framework agreed upon by Thein Seins government and armed ethnic groups that signed the NCA, The Irrawaddy said. By Kyaw Thu, Min Thein Aung and Aung Moe Myint for RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Khet Mar. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. Indonesian officials said Thursday they had turned down a request from the Chinese government to exchange a fugitive Indonesian banker captured in China for four Uyghur prisoners serving terrorism-related sentences in Indonesia. Indonesian Attorney General Agung M. Prasetyo told parliament that the government had refused the Chinese request for a four-for-one swap of prisoners, but that the Chinese had agreed to deport the Indonesian fugitive, Samadikun Hartono. They finally understood, and tonight we will receive and process Samadikun, Prasetyo said. Meanwhile, an anonymous Indonesian official told RFA that, in exchange for Samadikun, the Indonesians had agreed to give Chinese officials unprecedented access to question the Uyghurs imprisoned in Indonesia. Elsewhere, Luhut Binsar Panjaitan, Indonesias coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs, briefed reporters in Jakarta about why Indonesia had declined to exchange the four Uyghurs for Samadikun, a former banker. We told them [the Chinese government], its not that easy to do that, because they were tried on different charges linked to different cases, Luhut said at his office in Jakarta. Any transfer of Uyghur prisoners should be discussed separately, he added. He pointed out that Samadikun and the four Uyghurs had committed their crimes in Indonesia, not on Chinese soil. Beijing had asked Jakarta to trade the four Uyghurs, who were convicted last year on charges of attempting to join the Eastern Indonesia Mujahideen (MIT), a militant group based in Central Sulawesi province and led by Santoso, Indonesias most wanted militant, for Samadikun. The same as killing them In July, a West Jakarta court sentenced each of the Uyghurs Ahmed Bozoglan, Ahmet Mahmud, Abdul Basit and Altinci Bayram to six years in prison. They were arrested in Central Sulawesi in September 2014, after using fake Turkish passports and visas to enter the country. Uyghurs are a Muslim minority who mostly live in Xinjiang, a province in northwestern China, but they are also spread across Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkey. Rights groups have accused China of persecuting Uyghurs. During the trial of the four Uyghurs, their defense lawyers argued that they were Turkish citizens who should not be deported to China a move that Indonesian authorities were considering then. An Indonesian official who requested anonymity said Indonesia would face international pressure if the country had agreed to deport the Uyghur prisoners to China. Giving Uyghurs back to China is the same as killing them. Most probably, the Chinese government will execute them instantly, the official told RFA. Because China agreed to return Samadikun, the government would grant the Chinese government access to the Uyghur convicts in Indonesia, the official said, noting that such access had never been granted before. On the run for 13 years Samadikun fled his country 13 years ago after being charged with corruption, but was caught by the Chinese authorities on April 14. The charges against him were tied to the Bank Indonesia liquidity support (BLBI) case. In 2002, Indonesian president Megawati Sukarnoputri issued a decree freeing recipients from paying full shares of their portion of debts totaling 702 trillion rupiah (U.S. $53 billion). Samadikun was a former CEO of Bank Modern, whose debt totaled 169.4 billion rupiah (U.S. $12.8 million). He escaped in 2003 after being convicted and sentenced to four years in prison. Samadikuns arrest in China resulted from cooperation between Chinese authorities and the Indonesias national intelligence agency, Indonesian officials said. Reported by RFA. To many outside Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic is still "the butcher of the Balkans," a man accused of organizing and overseeing genocide and other crimes during the 1990s wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo. Inside Serbia, however, the picture is more complicated. A decade after he passed away in a detention cell in The Hague, former Serbian leader Milosevic remains a brand name among a certain segment of voters in Serbia. The country holds parliamentary elections on April 24 and Milosevic's former party, the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), is hoping his ghost will help them improve on the 13 percent they polled in the 2014 vote. The fact that Milosevic left this world before The Hague tribunal could deliver a verdict is seen by his supporters as proof of his innocence. The SPS has never dissociated itself from Milosevic, although in the past it has played down the link with the party's founder. No longer. Milosevic's 17-year-old grandson, Marko, and his daughter-in-law, Milica, were guests of honor at the SPS convention in Belgrade on April 10. Party leader Ivica Dacic, who is also foreign minister, said that, although he invited Milosevic's relatives, it should not be taken as a sign his party supports the policies of the 1990s. But many people aren't convinced. This is how cartoonist Predrag Koraksic Corax depicts Dacic's relationship to the ghosts of Serbia's past: Dacic's hope that Milosevic's legacy can boost his campaign might be an indication of his despair. In an interview with RFE/RL's Belgrade bureau on April 16, Dacic said he will resign if his party gets less than 10 percent. Asked if his association with Milosevic's relatives is an indication of his attitude toward the former leader, Dacic gave a telling answer: "There is nothing to pardon him for. He was never convicted. What's more, even if [the charges against Milosevic] were true, they have nothing to do with his grandson. And one more thing, he was the president of the Socialist Party of Serbia, and he is part of the history of our party. My position is quite delicate. If I do not mention Milosevic, I am accused of distancing myself from him. If I do mention him, I am accused of misusing him [to gain votes]." In accordance with Serbia's "middle-road" policy, Dacic has been equally pro-European and pro-Russian. Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic's Serbian Progressive Party is expected to win the elections again. But it will be interesting to see how much Milosevic's ghost is able to help Dacic and how far he will go in summoning the spirits of the past. Earlier this week, Investigative Committee chief Aleksandr Bastrykin put forth a chilling manifesto for Russia's future. It was based on paranoia and called for ramped up repression, censorship, surveillance, and political indoctrination. It's a plan that would have made Yury Andropov smile. Yesterday, former Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin offered a very different vision. In announcing that he has accepted an offer to chair the Kremlin's top economics think tank, the Center for Strategic Reform, Kudrin called for a fundamental modernization and restructuring of Russia's economy. But Kudrin added that such a restructuring would be contingent on establishing a more pluralistic and accountable political system -- as well as a more impartial and less arbitrary judicial system. He actually used the word Perestroika. And that may have made Mikhail Gorbachev smile. Vladimir Puin's regime seems to be finally realizing that the status quo is unsustainable. And Bastrykin and Kudrin have offered two competing blueprints for the future. But here's the thing. As much as Kudrin's vision may please the West and appeal to foreign investors, it doesn't have a ghost of a chance in the Putin system -- which is based on corruption, rent-seeking, and arbitrary centralized rule. Implementing Kudrin's plan would mean regime change. Bastrykin's vision, on the other hand, is not only consistent with the Putin system -- it's the system's most logical outcome. Keep telling me what you think in our comments section, on The Power Vertical's Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page. Iran has denounced as "theft" a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that Tehran must pay nearly $2 billion in frozen assets to victims and families of those killed in Iran-sponsored terrorist attacks. The court on April 20 ruled 6-2 in favor of relatives of the 241 Marines who died in a 1983 terrorist attack in Beirut and victims of other attacks that U.S. courts have linked to the Islamic republic. "This is totally rejected. It is theft ... it is like stealing Iran's money and we condemn it," Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossein Jaber Ansari was quoted as saying by state television. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has rejected claims by Iran's central bank that Congress was intruding into the business of federal courts when it passed a 2012 law that specifically directs that the banks' assets in the United States be paid to the families. Iran has refused to comply with the rulings. Based on reporting by Reuters and AFP Iraq's influential Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called for renewed protests and international intervention after powerful factions in parliament once against blocked a government reform effort. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has been seeking to overhaul the government and rid it of corruption, having offered a new cabinet of technocrats earlier this month to replace officials who obtained their positions through political patronage. But entrenched interests have used parliamentary tactics to block those and other changes, delaying installation of the new government past a deadline of April 19 laid down by the cleric. That led Sadr on April 20 to call for "continuing peaceful protests in the same intensity and even more...to pressure the politicians and the lovers of corruption." He also warned Abadi not to restrict a resumption of protests in Baghdad's Tahrir Square. "Nobody has the right to stop it, otherwise the revolution will take another turn," he said. And Sadr appealed for international aid. "We call upon the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the United Nations to interfere to get the Iraqi people out of their ordeal and to correct the political process, even through holding early elections." Based on reporting by Reuters and AP Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka has called on Russians not to consider his country as their "lackey." "I want Russians, especially the Russian leadership, to understand that we will never be lackeys," Lukashenka said on April 21 in his annual address to the nation and parliament. "We are a separate, sovereign state that lives along with you in one house but we have our own apartment, which is small, not big, but ours." Lukashenka said Russia was a leading strategic partner for Belarus, but added that the West was also very important for his country. Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia will always be living in a "common Slavic space," he also said. The president also called for a reformation and modernization of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Based on reporting by Eurasia Daily and Interfax Macedonia's opposition said it will not join talks on resolving the country's political crisis until the government postpones elections and withdraws a controversial amnesty for politicians suspected of corruption. Zoran Zaev, leader of the main Social Democrats (SDSM) opposition party, said on April 20 that President Gjorge Ivanov "has to withdraw the shameful decision on amnesty" for dozens of public figures embroiled in a wiretapping scandal that he announced on April 12 because it violates the constitution. And "the parliament has to annul the June 5 date for elections," postponing the ballot "until conditions for a democratic, fair, and credible vote are met," he added. "Otherwise, the SDSM will not participate at the meeting in Vienna" on April 22 that the European Union had offered to host in a bid to resolve the Balkan nation's political standoff, he said. The ruling VMRO-DPMNE conservative party has already accepted the EU's invitation to join negotiations. After Macedonia last week announced snap elections for June 5, the opposition said it would boycott the vote on grounds that it did not provide enough time to ensure free and fair polling -- a contention backed by the EU and the United States. The VMRO-DPMNE party has refused to accede to demands to further postpone the elections, however, which were originally set for April 24. Parliamentary Speaker Trako Veljanosli said on April 20 that it is legally impossible to reconvene the now-dissolved legislature to change the election date. Zaev charged the ruling party with "burying" an agreement brokered by the EU last year which was aimed at resolving the Balkan country's two-year political crisis. In particular, Ivanov's amnesty move reneged on a pledge by the government to abide by a special prosecutor investigation into allegations of corruption in a wiretapping scandal which was a key part of the 2015 agreement. Ivanov's decision touched off a series of street protests featuring young people calling for his resignation. The protests continued on April 20, with thousands of people taking to the streets of Skopje and other Macedonian towns once again to show their support for the opposition. More protests are planned for April 21, when the ruling party's supporters are also expected to rally on the capital's streets. Brussels and Washington have also condemned Ivanov's decision to end the wiretapping probe. Observers said it raised questions about the rule of law in Macedonia and damaged the country's ambitions to draw closer to the EU. The former Yugoslav republic has been a candidate for EU membership since 2005, but has yet to open accession talks. It has also been a candidate to join NATO since 2009. With reporting by AFP and dpa Salem/Chennai: Expressing deep grief at the demise of two party persons at the Salem rally, the AIADMK leader Ms Jayalalithaa conveyed her deep condolence to the family of the deceased. As the model code of conduct for political parties was in force now, after the Assembly elections, solatium from the party's family welfare fund will be given to the kin of the deceased, she added. Thousands of cadres waited for a long time from 11 am on Wednesday to hear the Chief Minister at Magudanchavadi. As the meeting came to an end around 5 pm, two party cadres S.Pachiannan, aged 55 and R.Periasamy, 70, died at the venue due to exhaustion. Pachiannan from Kuppandipalayam, who was waiting at the venue from afternoon, swooned as soon as the meeting got over. He died on way to Salem GH. Periasamy from Gangavalli had come out of the venue when he drank water and swooned immediately. Family members took his body home. Four other party men A. Anjuham, 47, A. Palanisamy, 47, R. Panchami, 50 and M. Venkatesan, 48, also swooned. They were rushed to Salem GH. On Wednesday, Salem district recorded 107.3 degree F. The United States has expressed concern about reports that Russia is moving more military materiel into Syria. "We think it would be negative for Russia to move additional military equipment or personnel into Syria," Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama, said on April 21. "We believe that our efforts are best focused on supporting the diplomatic process." He was speaking in Saudi Arabia, where Obama was attending a summit with Gulf Arab leaders to discuss regional security issues. Earlier the same day in Ankara, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Russia has kept a "considerable" military presence in Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assads regime. Stoltenberg made the comments at a joint press conference with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in Ankara. On March 14, President Vladimir Putin ordered the "main part" of Russian forces to pull out of Syria, less than six months after the beginning of an air campaign. Stoltenberg also said the number of migrants crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey into Europe was "now going significantly down." Turkey and the EU last month sealed an accord that aims to end the flow of migrants, most fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, after more than a million reached Europe last year. NATO's naval back-up in the Aegean Sea has helped to stop people smugglers and reduced the flows. Based on reporting by AFP and Reuters The new chief of the Russian Election Commission has responded to allegations of fraud in an election in a Moscow suburb and called off the vote. Ella Pamfilova cited concern about widespread early voting in the legislative election in the village of Barvikha, although she stopped short of calling it fraud. Hours after her announcement on April 20, local authorities officially canceled the election originally scheduled for April 24. The decision came a day after four candidates who are associates of anticorruption crusader Aleksei Navalny announced they were withdrawing from the election because of fraud during early voting. The candidates documented hundreds of people with recent voter registration who were bused to the village to vote. The number of people who turned out to vote could be equivalent to 30 percent of the possible turnout, they said. Navalny welcomed the election commission's decision, which he said was a result of his allies' boycott. "It was a right political decision to demand the election be scrapped," he said on his blog. "No one believed it would be possible except us, and our guys did it." Navalny's candidates got registered to run after Pamfilova, a former presidential human rights ombudsman, was appointed last month in a possible sign of the Kremlin's willingness to clean up elections. They said their goal was to test whether she would be willing to prevent election fraud. Alleged vote rigging in the 2011 parliamentary elections under the previous commission chairman Vladimir Churov triggered the biggest antigovernment protests in a decade. Under Churov, seemingly clear cases of election fraud often were accompanied by authorities refusing to register independent candidates for spurious reasons. With reporting by AP and Interfax Pakistani officials say six high-ranking army officers have been sacked amid corruption allegations. Earlier reports said at least 11 officers were dismissed on April 21. The six officers include a lieutenant general, a major general, three brigadiers, and a colonel. They were reportedly allowed to go home after being stripping of all military benefits, except for medical and pension benefits. There has been no official confirmation. The move came two days after army chief General Raheel Sharif said corruption had to be uprooted to win the war against terror. "Across the board, accountability is necessary for the solidarity, integrity, and prosperity of Pakistan," he also said. It also came as Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif faces pressure over revelations made in the Panama Papers leak linking his family to a number of offshore companies. Based on reporting by Dawn and AP The last few months have seen considerable change in the struggle against Islamic-extremist terrorism. On the battlefields in Syria, forces supporting President Bashar al-Assad recaptured the historic city of Palmyra from Islamic State (IS) fighters. In Iraq, IS was pushed from the city of Ramadi in late January, and the key northern city of Mosul is the next target for the U.S.-backed coalition. The area that IS terrorists physically govern in Iraq and "Sham," or greater Syria, is shrinking. And it's the prevailing wisdom that militarily, IS is weakening. But while the territory controlled by IS bears many of the hallmarks of an actual state, the "caliphate" that IS wishes to establish is not just physical. One of its goals is to conduct terrorism outside of the Middle East. If the memory of November's horrible terrorist attack in Paris was fading into memory, the March 22 airport and subway bombings in Brussels were a devastating reminder that IS is capable of striking areas far from its strongholds in Syria and Iraq. It remains to be seen whether the terrorist cell (or cells) that conducted this attack have been effectively disrupted, and no one can be certain that there are not more IS sleeper cells within Europe. Furthermore, defeating IS on the battlefield may or may not discourage copycat IS-inspired attacks like the shooting in San Bernardino, California, in December. In other words, it's not clear whether IS is being defeated militarily, but it's even less clear whether the extremist group's other power -- the power of its ideology -- has suffered setbacks. Nowhere is this tension more evident than on the pages of Dabiq, the highly polished magazine published at irregular intervals by the terrorist organization. At its core, Dabiq is a publication aimed at those sympathetic to IS who live in the West. Its message follows a careful ideological construct -- that "the Islamic State" is a real location, but also a religious and spiritual reality that exists beyond its physical borders. Muslims who live in the West can be citizens of the Islamic State, then, by traveling to its strongholds in the Middle East, by creating terrorist cells abroad, or even by conducting suicide attacks on their own. Previous episodes have, for instance, underscored that it is easy to acquire a gun and serve the ends of IS without leaving one's country. The magazine is also an intimidation tactic -- the professional pages, surprising readability, and the global message are designed to give the impression that IS is powerful, legitimate, and operating everywhere all at once. The latest issue of Dabiq is titled The Murtadd Brotherhood -- "murtadd" meaning "apostate." The main theme is the definition of that term. The authors define true Islam as the path that has brought about Islamic State, and they also name many enemies of that ideology. Most of this issue is dedicated to the Muslims who resist this ideological radicalism -- those the terrorist group considers the true apostates because, in its eyes, they have betrayed their religion. The cover story is focused on Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, setting the ideological stage for IS's battle against the Egyptian government, which is ongoing. One article lists a large number of Muslim leaders, many of whom live in the West, by name. These leaders preach a peaceful version of Islam, one that condemns the violence of IS. Since Dabiq's purpose is to convince Western Muslims to conduct terrorist attacks, these leaders are portrayed by the magazine as the worst kinds of traitors. Dabiq is laying out one key fact that is often missed by Western media coverage -- the majority of those fighting against IS on the battlefield, and arguably the most important ideological voices countering the message of IS, are Muslims. The latest issue, which was published last week, is an interesting case study in how IS propaganda deals with both its achievements and its defeats. The most obvious trend in Dabiq is the frequency of publication. The magazine was first published in July 2014, arguably as IS's military success in Iraq and Syria was approaching its height. The second issue came out just 22 days later, while subsequent issues were published roughly every 30-50 days. That is, until late 2015, when more than 100 days passed between the August and November issues, then another 62 days before the January publication. And this latest issue came out on April 13 after an 85-day lapse. Why the sudden long gaps? Simply put, IS fighters have been losing ground in both Syria and Iraq, and it's been harder to spin the bad news. IS lost Ramadi in December, U.S. raids have captured or killed several high-ranking members of the organization, Kurdish YPG rebels have made inroads against the terror group in northern Syria, the U.S.-backed coalition is closing in on Mosul, and -- most recently -- the Syrian government coalition recaptured Palmyra in March. It's no coincidence then that the November issue was released just days after the attacks in Paris and April issue just three weeks after the Brussels bombings. Analyzing the content of the latest installment of Dabiq provides a clue as to how its publishers are changing their marketing strategy. November's issue, titled Just Terror, was published less than a week after the Paris attacks and was heavily focused on the incident. By contrast, this latest edition praises the perpetrators of the Brussels bombings, was published three weeks later, and it largely buries the incident in other articles that discuss IS ideology more broadly. The Brussels attack is listed as just one of the terrorist organizations many battles and accomplishments. The effect on the reader is that as big as the Brussels attack was in the Western media, the bigger story of IS's activities is not being accurately portrayed. IS may also be downplaying expectations, since the Paris and Brussels cell that conducted these attacks may have been largely or completely depleted in both the attacks and subsequent arrests. Even in the biographies of the Brussels attackers, titled The Knights Of [Shahada (Martyrdom] In Belgium, Dabiq stressed their battlefield accomplishments in the Middle East, particularly Syria, more than the European attack. For instance, here is part of what they wrote about one of the Brussels attackers, Najm al-Ashrawi (Abu Idris al-Baljiki). Note how their fight is put in ideological context. The Assad government is not mentioned, but is instead called "the Nusayri regime," a derisive term for Shi'ite Muslims. The Free Syrian Army (FSA) is "apostates," traitors of Islam. The Al-Qaeda affiliate, the Al-Nusra Front (Jabhat al-Nusra) is instead called "Jabhat al-Jawlani," a reference to its leader, Abu Muhammad al-Julani, whom IS considered to be an enemy (this issue seems to again close the door to any possible merger of the two groups.) In this framing, Paris and Brussels were only two "battles" among many that Abu Idris al-Baljiki fought against ideologies that are a threat to IS. "He participated in several battles against the Nusayri regime before the FSA apostates started to fight the mujahidin. Proving himself steadfast during the sahwah in Sham, he fought them until the order came to withdraw to ar-Raqqah. He continued to participate in raids until he suffered a bullet wound to his leg in a raid against Jabhat al-Jawlani in alKhay," it says. "After healing for several months, he began to train in order to realize his dream of returning to Europe to avenge the Muslims of Iraq and Sham for the constant bombing by crusader warplanes. Upon completing his training, he traveled the long road to France to execute his operation. It was Abu Idris who prepared the explosives for the two raids in Paris and Brussels." One section is a description of battles fought by IS fighters or terrorists, "battles" being broadly defined to that they include terrorist attacks -- a key theme is that, according to Dabiq, killing civilians in Paris or opponents in Syria is all part of the same struggle. The section gives the impression that IS fighters who have been killed died to achieve Allah's goals and took out plenty of "apostates" in the process. This is an important theme, since the next section, "affliction and faith," which features a photograph of an air-dropped bomb falling somewhere in the Middle East, focuses on struggle (or, in a word Dabiq would never use, defeat). No direct reference to the many recent military defeats IS terrorists have suffered is given, but the article no doubt was designed to restore confidence in the terrorist organization that is failing to make headway in either Iraq or Syria at the moment. The military defeats of IS extremists have been many, but it's not yet clear if they will be permanent. Last week I argued that Russia and Assad cannot be relied upon to wage war against terrorism. It's been nearly a month since Palmyra fell to the pro-Assad coalition, but Assad and his allies have not pushed further toward the IS strongholds in eastern Syria and show no signs of doing so. IS has regained momentum in northern Syria near the Turkish border, and it's not clear whether the U.S. coalition is gaining or losing momentum near Mosul in Iraq. But IS has gained new strength in Libya, and Boko Haram has recently pledged allegiance to the terror group. Dabiq wants its readers to ignore some of the details. Its message is that Islamic State is both a literal state and a state of spiritual being, and both are under siege -- by Muslim "apostates" and foreign "crusaders." Every battle counts if it leads to the deaths of nonbelievers, and there's plenty of death -- in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Paris, Brussels, and San Bernardino -- to go around. The unanswered question is whether Dabiq and the message of terrorist propaganda will have an impact if the perception in the media is that the terrorists are losing the war. One thing is clear, though: as long as IS can successfully conduct terror attacks, and as long as it controls large amounts of territory in the Middle East, IS will at least be able to convince some impressionable and disillusioned people to join its cause. Clearly, defeating terrorism at home and abroad, then, is vital. But Dabiq has another strategy -- ideological fundamentalism. Its brand of Islam is simple -- nonbelievers need to be killed, believers who refuse to do that work are traitors and apostates and need to be killed. And since dying is part of the plan of this ideology, killing terrorists alone will not defeat this radical and dangerous death cult. IS's message must also be countered through ideological battles, a war that has proven at least as difficult to fight as the literal battles in the Middle East. The Russian military said on April 21 that it had completed the demining of the ancient part of the Syrian city of Palmyra, recaptured by Russia-backed Syrian government forces in March from Islamic State militants. "As of today, the task of demining the architectural and historical part of Palmyra has been fully completed," Yuri Stavitski, the commander of Russia's military engineers, told President Vladimir Putin via video link from Palmyra. He said Russian troops would continue demining Palmyra's residential area. Syrian troops with the support of Russian air strikes regained control of Palmyra from the IS group in late March. IS militants blew up some of the archaeological site's most prominent monuments and executed a well-known archaeological expert who defended the site on the ruins after it seized control of the city last year. Based on reporting by Reuters and AFP In a further indication that the Kremlin is systematically curtailing the vast powers accumulated over the past decade by Chechen Republic head Ramzan Kadyrov, the Russian civil-aviation authority, Rosaviatsia, has suspended the right of Chechen carrier Grozny Avia to conduct international flights. That decision, if not reversed, could spell financial ruin for the airline, which reportedly last turned a profit in 2010. It could also jeopardize Kadyrov's stated ambition of transforming Grozny's airport, which was designated an international one only after the lifting seven years ago of the permanent counterterror restrictions imposed during the 1999-2000 war, into a major transit hub for both north-south and east-west flights. Grozny Avia was established in 2007, the year that Russian President Vladimir Putin first appointed Kadyrov Chechen leader, by the Regional Charitable Fund named after Kadyrov's late father, Akhmad-hadzhi Kadyrov -- the workings of which are shrouded in mystery. The Chechen government currently owns a 99 percent stake in Grozny Avia. Initially, Grozny Avia was the sole carrier operating flights between Grozny and Moscow, which were launched in June 2008. It gradually expanded its network to include other Russian cities (Yekaterinburg, Tyumen, Rostov-on-Don) and also Kyiv, Astana, Almaty, Bishkek, and Baku, as well as destinations in Europe, Turkey, and the Near East. In August 2013, it launched a service between Nalchik, the capital of the Kabardino-Balkaria Republic, and Moscow. And following Russia's annexation of Crimea in early 2014, Grozny Avia acquired basing rights in Simferopol, from where it intended to fly to Yerevan. Those plans were apparently thwarted by the Armenian Directorate of Civil Aviation. The airline did, however, launch in the summer of 2014 a service between Simferopol and Istanbul. Insofar as Grozny Avia had a coherent business plan, it appears to have been to charge the maximum price for tickets while investing the minimum in infrastructure. Plans to purchase eight Sukhoi Superjet-100 aircraft were announced in August 2013 but came to nothing: the company still operates only a fleet of eight Soviet-era YaK-42 aircraft. Talks in April 2014, by which time Grozny Avia was reportedly in serious financial difficulties, on a possible merger with Turkey's Pegasus Air likewise went nowhere. In October, Grozny Avia announced the temporary suspension of all services, after other Russian budget airlines such as Red Wings and YutAIR, using more modern aircraft and offering superior service, launched a price war on the Moscow-Grozny route, which reportedly accounted for 60 percent of Grozny Avia's business. More recently, however, Grozny Avia announced plans for flights to China, and between the Russian city of Bryansk and Yerevan, starting on May 1. The suspension of Grozny Avia's license for international flights was reportedly made on the basis of a statement by the airline on April 14. But it fits neatly into a pattern of recent criticism of Kadyrov's leadership style by President Putin, his erstwhile patron and protector, and the move to resubordinate Kadyrov's private army, estimated by Russian oppositionist Ilya Yashin to number upward of 10,000 men to the new National Guard, which will answer directly to the federal Interior Ministry. When Putin gave his tacit approval in late March for Kadyrov's reelection for a third term as republic head, he simultaneously warned that "as the future leader of the republic, you should do everything to ensure full compliance with Russian laws in all spheres of our life -- I want to stress this, in all spheres of our life." Two weeks later, during his annual televised phone-in, Putin commented negatively on Kadyrov's recent verbal attacks on Russian opposition politicians, whom he collectively branded "enemies of the people." Putin admitted that he was remiss in not reining Kadyrov in earlier and warned federation subject heads not to undermine political stability. A Russian pilot jailed in America for drug dealing will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a U.S. appeals court verdict against him, attorneys for Konstantin Yaroshenko said. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on April 20 rejected defense arguments, backed by the Russian government, and upheld a lower court's sentencing of Yaroshenko to 20 years in prison on drug charges. "We consider this decision baseless, and will seek to overturn it, even if it requires complaining to the U.S. Supreme Court," defense attorney Aleksei Tarasov told Rossiya-24 television. Yaroshenko was arrested in Liberia on May 28, 2010, on the charge of planning to transport a large amount of cocaine. He was deported to the United States, where on September 7, 2011, a court sentenced him to 20 years in prison. Based on reporting by Interfax and TASS 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 An ethnic Tatar man in Russia's Tatarstan region has been sentenced to six years and three months in a maximum security prison for killing an ethnic Russian doctor. The Chally City Court found Misbakh Sakhabutdinov, 86, guilty of premeditated murder on April 21 and sentenced him the same day. Sakhabutdinov pleaded guilty to killing Andrei Zheleznov with a homemade firearm concealed in his walking stick. Sakhabetdinov's relatives told RFE/RL that several years ago, when the elderly man came to Zheleznov's clinic with a severely cut finger, the doctor ordered him to put off his tubetei, a traditional Tatar hat. When Sakhabetdinov refused and said he could not due to his Islamic faith, Zheleznov refused to treat him and security guards forced him out of the clinic. According to Sakhabetdinov's relatives, the old man was deeply offended and decided to seek revenge. Hyderabad: Union minister M. Venkaiah Naidu on Wednesday said that politics should be limited to elections and all parties should work in tandem after the polls with development as the common goal. Ideologically, BJP and TRS may be different, but we will work together in the interest of the country and the state. We will also work with the Chandrababu Naidu government in AP, Mr Venkaiah Naidu said, addressing the Gram Kisan Sabha held as part of the Gram Uday Se Bharat Uday Abhiyan at Bowrampet village in Ranga Reddy district. Stating that Prime Minister Narendra Modi believes that the country would develop only through development of its villages, the Union minister said that the Centre would give a fillip to development of villages and agriculture in the country. We have made huge allocations to these sectors to accelerate development. The Centre too has taken several steps to overcome the agrarian crisis and help farmers, he added. Mr Naidu said that the Centre will distribute Soil Health Cards to all 14 crore farmers in the country by March 2017, as part of the soil health management scheme. Under the scheme, `362 crore has been allotted as compared to `142 crore in 2015-2016, a hike of 155 per cent, he said. We have set a target of collecting 104 lakh soil samples and test them for issuing the soil health cards to farmers. To strengthen panchayati raj in villages and ensure social harmony, the PM launched the Gram Uday Se Bharat Uday Abhiyan, Mr Venkaiah Naidu said, reeling out various welfare and developmental schemes launched by the Modi government, Budgetary allocations to core sectors etc. He said that the PMs address from Jamshedpur would be telecast live on April 24 to all Gram Sabhas. ON MY MIND You have to wonder what drives people like Aleksei Kudrin and Ella Pamfilova. Both were in the news this week. Kudrin accepted an offer to chair the Kremlin's top economics think tank, the Center for Strategic Reform, and called for a fundamental restructuring of Russia's economy and political system. And Pamfilova, who was recently appointed head of the Election Commission, raised eyebrows by canceling elections in the Moscow suburb of Barvikha after four opposition candidates complained of fraud. Pamfilova says she will resign if there is fraud in September's elections to the State Duma. Call me cynical (although I don't think I am), but I just don't think the kind of economic reforms Kudrin is proposing are possible under the current regime. At best, he'll be allowed to tinker on the margins. And call me cynical again (and again, I don't think I am), but I don't expect September's election to be clean. Regime liberals like Kudrin and Pamfilova remain convinced that the Putin regime can be reformed and changed from within. It can't. Because reforming this regime would mean undermining its corrupt foundations, which would lead to its fall. And this is not what Putin has in mind. IN THE NEWS Former Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin has agreed to head the Kremlin-affiliated Center for Strategic Reform. Russia has announced anti-doping reforms in bid to avoid Rio Olympics ban Vladimir Putin meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Moscow today. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov visits Armenia today amid tensions over Nagorno-Karabakh. The Central Election Commission has ordered the cancelation of an April 24 local election in a Moscow suburb election after four candidates affiliated with opposition leader Aleksei Navalny filed protests about vote fraud. Election Commission head Ella Pamfilova has proposed returning video cameras to voting booths and has vowed to resign in the event of vote fraud in September's parliamentary elections. The United States and Russia sparred at yesterday's NATO-Russia Council meeting over an encounter between a U.S. Navy vessel and Russian warplanes in the Baltic Sea. The European Commission has formally proposed visa-free travel for Ukrainians. WHAT I'M READING The Fall of the House of Putin? NIkolai Petrov has a new report for the European Council on Foreign Relations, Putin's Downfall: The Coming Crisis Of The Russian Regime. "Russia's current regime will not last long. The tumultuous events in Ukraine in 2014 reduced the country's possible trajectories to a single one -- a path that will quickly lead to the collapse of the Putin government if there is no radical change in its course," Petrov writes. The Battle of the Narratives The European Leadership Network has a new report, Competing Western And Russian Narratives On The European Order: Is There Common Ground? Kudrinism vs. Putinism In an editorial, the Russian daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta argues that the reforms former Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin is proposing are the antithesis of Putinism. The Perils of a Multipolar World In a compelling piece in Slon.ru, Dangerous Equality: Why Multipolar Worlds Lead to World Wars, economist and political commentator Vladislav Inozemtsev argues that Russia's desire for a divided Europe and a multipolar world are misguided. The Moscow-Belgrade Axis Serbia's pro-Moscow far right is resurgent in advance of Sunday's election. The Yukos Saga Continues Time Magazine's veteran Russia hand, Simon Shuster, explains why a Dutch court's ruling has made Putin very happy. Tough Love For Ukraine Writing in Foreign Policy, former U.S. State Department official Josh Cohen argues that it is time to give Ukraine a dose of "tough love." Ukraine's Privatization Paradox Writing on his blog, Eric Hontz of the Center for International Private Enterprise notes that "Ukraine needs to privatize its state-owned companies -- but rushing it would repeat the mistakes of the past." A Bridge Too Far? In his column for Bloomberg View, political commentator Leonid Bershidsky looks at Russia's efforts to build a bridge over the Kerch Strait, linking the annexed Crimean Peninsula to the Russian mainland. Russia's Hip-Hop Generation Meduza takes a look at the viral websites popular with Russia's youth. And in a sign the Kremlin is going after the hip-hop generation, Gazprom Media has acquired the popular music channel A-One Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has signed legislation banning all Russian films made after January 1, 2014. Legislation signed by President Petro Poroshenko on April 20 also bans movies produced by Russia after 1991 if they "glorify the work of government bodies" of Russia. "The legislation will help raise the level of protection of Ukraine's national security, reduce separatist sentiments in society, and strengthen the government's authority," a parliamentary description of the bill was quoted as saying. Russian films and television series have long dominated the Ukrainian market where an overwhelming majority of the population is bilingual. Ukrainian and Russian TV channels have also been engaged in a partnership to coproduce movies and series. Relations between Ukraine and Russia soured after street protests in Kyiv toppled President Viktor Yanukovych, a Kremlin ally, in February 2014. Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March 2014 and threw its support behind separatists in the countrys east. Based on reporting by AP and dpa Amnesty International is accusing Moscow of "lending a helping hand" to torture in Uzbekistan by aiding in the forcible returns of hundreds of Uzbek nationals from Russia. In a new report released on April 21, the rights watchdog says hundreds of asylum seekers, refugees, and migrant workers have been deported or abducted in forced returns to Uzbekistan, where they have been subjected to torture by Uzbek authorities. The group says Russia has cooperated despite the "clear risks" of torture upon these individuals' return. In the report, Fast-Track To Torture: Abductions And Forcible Returns From Russia To Uzbekistan, Amnesty says that in the rare cases when Moscow denied Tashkent's extradition requests, Uzbek security forces were allowed to abduct wanted Uzbek nationals from Russia. John Dalhuisen, Amnesty's director for Europe and Central Asia, called on Moscow to put an end to such "abductions and deportations, which violate its human rights obligations." Dalhuisen said Russia must ensure that no one at risk of torture is returned to Uzbekistan. "Every pressure must be put on Uzbekistan to stop the use of torture and other ill-treatment and ensure that all trials are conducted fairly and fully meet international standards," he said. The rights group said Uzbek authorities seek to justify their prosecution of political opponents, critics, and alleged followers of Islamic groups as a campaign against terrorism. It said Moscow denied a 2013 request by Tashkent to extradite Mirsobir Khamidkariev, a film producer and businessman accused by Uzbekistan of setting up an illegal Islamist group. According to Amnesty International, the charge against Khamidkariev stemmed from his comments at an informal gathering where he expressed his support for the hijab, the Islamic head scarf for women. In 2014, Khamidkariev was abducted in Moscow and handed over by Russian security officers to Uzbek authorities who forcibly returned him to Uzbekistan, Amnesty said. The rights group said that in Uzbek custody Khamidkariev was beaten repeatedly, suffered two broken ribs, and had seven of his teeth knocked out by security forces who obtained his "confession." Khamidkariev was subsequently convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison. Brother Tortured For 'Terror' Conviction The rights watchdog also condemns what it describes as Uzbekistan's common practice of harassing and threatening family members to incriminate a relative. It says Artur Avakian, an ethnic Armenian, was detained for weeks in January 2016 and subjected to torture -- including so much electric shock "his tongue stuck to his gums" -- until he implicated his brother, Aramais Avakian, in "terrorist" acts. Aramais Avakian was later jailed for seven years on charges of supporting the Islamic State extremist group, in a case relatives say was engineered to let local officials take over his successful fish farm. Aramais Avakian, who was brought into court on a stretcher, told the Jizzakh regional court that he, too, was tortured during nearly five months of pretrial detention. Amnesty says there are many other similar cases in Uzbekistan, where the victims have faced unfair trials with confessions obtained under duress. Uzbek security forces threaten the relatives that if they turn to human rights organizations for help, conditions for their detained loved ones will be made worse, the rights watchdog said. In the past three years, the European Court of Human Rights has issued at least 17 judgments denouncing what it described as the forcible transfer of individuals to Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan has long been criticized by rights groups and Western governments for its abysmal human rights record. Maisy Weicherding, the main author of Amnesty International's latest report, told RFE/RL on April 20 that such criticism, along with reports documenting Uzbekistan's human rights violations, have a direct impact. "For example, Amnesty's report last year -- Secrets And Lies: Forced Confessions Under Torture In Uzbekistan -- was used extensively by the European Court of Human Rights as well as by the Constitutional Court in Turkey," she said, leading Turkey to stop the extradition of Uzbek asylum seekers back to Uzbekistan. The Amnesty researcher for Central Asia said that while researching the latest report, "it became obvious to us that both Russian and Uzbek authorities blatantly disregard their human rights obligations." Weicherding reiterated Amnesty's call on Uzbekistan and Russia to "put an immediate stop to torture and abductions, and bring all perpetrators to justice for these abhorrent human-rights violations." Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. BJP president B.S. Yeddyurappa and former minister R. Ashok at an event in Bengaluru on Wednesday Bengaluru: In a move which smacks of a witch-hunt, the state government announced on Wednesday that a Special Leave Petition (SLP) would be filed in the Supreme Court against the Karnataka high courts decision to quash 16 cases of denotification of land involving former chief minister and newly appointed BJP state president B.S. Yeddyurappa. Law minister T.B. Jayachandra told the media here that Karnataka Lokayukta had filed 16 cases against Mr Yeddyurappa based on a report submitted by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG). The high court, however, quashed 16 of the total 18 cases. The Lokayukta had recommended that an appeal be filed in the apex court against the high court's order. Based on such a recommendation, the state home department too had favoured a SLP in the Supreme Court. Accordingly, the government had decided to file the SLP through its advocate, Mr Aristotle, in the apex court, Mr Jayachandra added. The law ministers recent statement that the government was ready to extend all help to any individual or organisation to file an appeal in the Supreme Court against Mr Yeddyurappa for his alleged involvement in cases of de-notification of land, had attracted caustic criticism from opposition parties, in particular the BJP. The saffron party has already given enough hints that Yeddyurappa will be its chief ministerial candidate for the 2018 polls. News that Harriet Tubman will be the new face of the $20 bill was cheered locally both for the historical significance of her choice and because it finally will return a woman to U.S. paper money. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew will replace the portrait of Andrew Jackson, the nations seventh president, with that of the 19th-century abolitionist and a leader of the Underground Railroad. She is the first African-American and first woman in more than a century to appear on paper money. Richmond-area educators, historians, business leaders and activists agreed Wednesday that not only was putting a womans face on U.S. money the right thing to do, but also that Tubman was the logical choice. *** He had a good run; now its time for us to put somebody else on, Christy Coleman, co-CEO of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, said of Jackson being replaced. Weve done it with our quarters, weve done it with our silver dollars, weve done it with our half-dollars. Weve done it with our monetary systems before. I think whats significant is that this is the first time that a woman of color will be featured on American (paper) currency. While known for leading the Underground Railroad, Tubman was also a nurse, led a military campaign in South Carolina and advocated for womens rights. Shes just an extraordinary character who has only been given this little piece of history when really her contributions to the American narrative are significant, Coleman said. I think its a remarkable thing. I really do. To me, its not necessarily about replacing; its about recognizing that everything in our society moves, changes with our changing ideas and what we want to think about and honor. *** Lynetta Thompson, president of the Richmond branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, called placing Tubman on the bill wonderful and definitely overdue. Especially when were talking about women womens struggles, women being behind, womens equality, she said. Thompson believes this is a good step toward recognizing historical figures who have helped move the country forward but arent typically celebrated. She said the decision to put Tubman on the $20 bill is significant because more people have access to it than other bills, since $20s are more common than $50 or $100 bills. I think Harriet Tubman is the right choice, especially as a first move, Thompson said. When you talk about the Underground Railroad ... everyone that came through that was freed. *** For J.B. Bryan, a Richmond-area financial adviser, putting Tubman on the $20 helps recognize the role that African-Americans have played in the U.S. economy and focuses attention to wealth disparities that have resulted from slavery and racial discrimination. I feel that putting a black person, especially a freedom fighter like Harriet Tubman, on the currency of our country is a huge tribute to the financial contributions that black people make to the U.S. economy, said Bryan, president of J.B. Bryan Financial Group, an investment advisory firm in Henrico County. Bryan is the author of the book AfroEconomics: Our Black Wealth Matters. She also hosts workshops on strategies for building wealth in the African-American community. To see this only as a (symbolic) expression of a historical figure is to leave out the reasons that Harriet Tubman was trying to free slaves, she said. She was freeing slaves so they could be free financially, not just physically. She was bringing them to freedom so they could be free to make choices, be free to have their own homes and land, and be free to vote and be participants in the United States economy. *** Lauranett Lee, curator of African-American history at the Virginia Historical Society, said that it is wonderful to be able to have some diversity in depictions on our currency. Its long overdue, she said. She has done so much in her life as someone who really stepped out on freedom. Not only for herself but so many others. Lee said she believes that beyond the historical importance of honoring Tubman, putting her face on money could help educators teach young people financial literacy. Its so important for ... particularly young people to be aware of what money means, what it can do, how it can change ones life, she said. Harriet Tubman was one of those that really was able to make a way out of no way, literally walking toward her freedom and helping others walk towards theirs, she said. Maybe in this way she can help people walk toward financial well-being. I know thats a long shot, but youve got to have hope. *** I have to say, I think its a great first step, but I also find it a little bit, almost, symbolic of the larger problem that women are having a huge fight over which woman is going to represent women on money, said Eileen Davis, co-founder of the rights organization Women-Matter. Davis was referring to the monthslong discussion about which woman should go on the face of a bill. A campaign by Women on 20s, a group that has led the charge to feature a woman on U.S. currency, offered several candidates in addition to Tubman, including Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt and Betty Friedan. Davis said now that the first woman has been chosen, attention needs to be paid to what happens next. The focus needs to be on telling womens stories and making sure their contributions are properly recognized. Harriet Tubman is the perfect person to begin recognizing the accomplishments and contributions of women to the narrative of the American story. She was an incredibly brave woman who took on a lot of risks and saved a lot of people, Davis said. Maria Cuenca was attending Mass on Saturday evening when her cellphone began to buzz. She ignored it at first, not wanting to pull a phone out of her purse in church. But when she reached in to get money for the offering, she saw a text message from her oldest son: Call your mother, theres been a terrible earthquake in Ecuador. Cuenca ran out of church and remained glued to her phone until early the next morning. She is one of hundreds of Ecuadoreans living in the Richmond area who are trying to go about their daily lives as their families back home deal with the devastation from the magnitude-7.8 earthquake that struck Saturday. Another earthquake, with a magnitude of 6.1, struck the area again early Wednesday. On Wednesday, the National Prosecutors Office in Ecuador said the death toll from Saturdays earthquake had topped 500. Officials say the final toll could surpass casualties from earthquakes in Chile and Peru in the past decade. The office said most of the dead were found in the Manta, Portoviejo and Pedernales areas. Cuencas family lives in Pedernales. Cuenca is joining others in the Richmond area trying to help those in their homeland. Were trying to see how we can help our people, she said. Honestly, there are places where, two, three days after it happened, help hasnt arrived. There are so many people crying out for help. Thats what hurts us here. Cuenca, whose family lives along the Ecuadorean coast where the earthquake did the most damage, said communication with relatives has been spotty but shes been able to get word, through two- or three-minute conversations, that her mother, a son and other relatives are safe but have lost much. The one person she knows little about is her niece, who is seven months pregnant. Cuenca said her sister-in-law left a message overnight Saturday letting her know the familys home was destroyed and that her niece was headed to the hospital. No one in the family has heard from them since. I know she survived because of that message, but we dont know what happened to them, she said. Cuenca keeps calling but has not been able to reach anyone. Its been rough. Veronica Correra, a University of Virginia graduate and a former intern at the Chesterfield County-based Virginia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said the quake has brought the country together like shes never seen before. Correra lives in Ecuadors capital, Quito, about 100 miles from the earthquakes epicenter. She felt the quake and has friends who have lost family members or have relatives still missing. She said supermarket shelves have been emptied by people buying supplies to send to stricken areas, social media sites are filled with updates informing people how to help, and dozens of organizations are collecting donations and organizing volunteer groups. But this all comes as the country is dealing with a financial crisis thats brought high unemployment and has slowed economic growth, Correra said. Now with thousands of people who have lost everything they owned their houses, businesses and personal belongings it is going to be very hard to recover, she said. In Richmond, meanwhile, a group of Ecuadoreans has finalized plans to gather supplies to send home. Lucio Valverde said there are about 100 Ecuadorean families that gather socially for special events and holidays. Many got together Tuesday night to come up with a list of needed supplies and to figure out how to collect donations. The biggest needs, based on what theyre hearing from family in Ecuador, include cereal, soap, towels, disposable gloves, diapers and toothbrushes. To help collect these items, the families have secured three locations where the public can drop off donations Saturday. We want to see how we can help, especially the relatives close to the friends we have in Richmond. Some of them, unfortunately, lost relatives and some lost property, Valverde said. My intention is get help to them first of all and then (collect) for the rest of the country and the people. Kristen Hatfield, communications officer for the American Red Cross Virginia Region, said the Ecuador Red Cross is leading the overall relief effort. Teams from the Ecuador Red Cross have been on site and working around the clock providing trauma care, first aid, food, water and comfort to people affected by the earthquake. Hatfield said relief workers in Ecuador will make specific requests to their American counterparts once they know exactly whats needed. For now, anyone looking to help should send monetary donations to the relief effort rather than sending materials, she said. The Red Cross isnt equipped to handle a large influx of donations such as household items, clothing or food that may or may not be useful to victims, she said. Plus the financial donations allow us to be flexible in the help that we provide and ensure that we can give people what they need most. The Hispanic chamber, which has several members with family living in Ecuador, is not organizing a relief effort but is guiding members and others toward where they can make donations. Michel Zajur, president and CEO of the Hispanic chamber, said he finds its better to leave fundraising efforts to organizations, like the Red Cross, better equipped to make sure funds are directed to the proper channels. The chamber is pointing anyone who wants to donate to a fundraising page set up on Generosity.com that will use proceeds for food, water, clothes, mattresses and medicine. I feel like we are doing as much as we can, but in a disaster like this, it is not enough to bring relief to everyone who is affected, Correra said. Hyderabad: By staging a protest in front of the Raj Bhavan against the TRS government inducting Talasani Srinivas Yadav into the TS Cabinet, TS TD leaders have inadvertently landed their partys national president and AP Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu in a rather piquant situation. Mr Naidus discomfiture stems from the fact that he has promised at least some YSR Congress MLAs who had defected to the TD in AP that he would accommodate them into the Cabinet. The TS TD leaders protest, and allegations that Governor E.S.L. Narasimhan had failed to discharge his duties, may prompt the latter to object to the AP government inducting YSRC MLAs into the Cabinet, fear senior TD leaders. The TS TD protest has left very few options before Mr Narasimhan; he has to avoid a similar protest this time by the AP YSRC. Recently a bunch of YSRC MLAs joined in the AP TD, and sources insist that Mr Naidu had assured some of them berths in the Cabinet. If Mr Narasimhan objects, as many believe he would, the defector-MLAs would have to face disappointment, even as AP TD MLAs, who had been aspiring for Cabinet berths themselves, will be rubbing their hands in glee. There have been instances earlier that have led to political circles believing that inducting defectors into the Cabinet may become problematic for Mr Naidu. Earlier, the AP government had sent a file constituting the State Election Commission to the Governor for his approval, but Mr Narasimhan, instead of accepting the proposed names, had forwarded the file to the Centre. A few days earlier, the Governor had approved a similar proposal by the TS government. Later, the AP government had proposed the name of retired IAS officer Chittaranjan Das Biswal for appointment as AP State Election Commissioner, but the Governor rejected it on technical grounds. In this backdrop, TS TD leaders had staged a dharna in front of the Raj Bhavan against induction of Mr Srinvas Yadav into the TS Cabinet. After submitting a memorandum requesting the Governor to take action, the TS TD leaders had criticised him in front of the Raj Bhavan itself. The Governor had several times expressed displeasure at their action. The former boyfriend of Altria executive Leyla Namiranian charged with her murder repeatedly changed his story during a three-plus-hour police interrogation and was caught lying about his whereabouts after Namiranian disappeared. But he adamantly denied killing her under intense questioning from detectives. The third day of Michael Anthony Edwards murder trial in Chesterfield Circuit Court centered on an interview with police detectives from Chesterfield and Henrico counties, who grilled Edwards, 56, about his movements on April 5, 2012, the day Namiranian went missing. The videotaped interview played for jurors also provided some insight from Edwards perspective of his relationship with Namiranian, 41. He said that they were intimate and that she frequently took him to dinner, to church and on trips; gave him $1,000 in cash; and bought him various gifts, such as cellphones, a snowsuit and jewelry. In return, Edwards a dock worker and forklift driver said he bought Namiranian a $500 diamond necklace and meals, in addition to cutting her grass, shoveling her driveway, painting her house, shampooing her carpets and doing other odd jobs. I had magnificent fun with her, Edwards told detectives at one point during the April 6, 2012, interview. Later, he added, Leyla was a beautiful woman. She was a good person. Im not mad at her. Shes cool. He repeated variations of those sentiments throughout the interview and rejected repeated attempts by detectives to have him admit his involvement in her disappearance and presumed death. Her body has never been found. Im not going to do nothing stupid, Edwards told detectives when they pressed him to confess. Im not that damn crazy. When asked why they broke up, Edwards paused and said, I wasnt her class, I think. I dont know, man. She make top dollar, I dont. Edwards also vigorously denied choking Namiranian on Feb. 18. Namiranian had immediately reported the incident to her best friend and also noted it in her journal that later was found by police. She said being choked was the catalyst for the breakup. Edwards told investigators that he grabbed Namiranian on her shirt but didnt choke her to calm her during an argument. In a portion of her diary that Chesterfield police Sgt. Brad Conner read aloud to the jury Wednesday, Namiranian wrote that when Edwards choked her, I was never so scared. I broke up with Mike the fourth and last time yesterday, she said in the Feb. 19 entry, adding that Edwards wouldnt stop calling me ... thinking we could get back together again. I dont care what she say in her diary, Edwards told detectives. She calls me every ... day. Detectives suggested to Edwards that he killed Namiranian out of jealousy because he became aware of other men she was seeing. But Edwards questioned why he would be jealous, since he had other women he saw. Ive got four different girlfriends, man I cant keep up with all that, said Edwards, who at the time of the interview said he also had been married to his wife for 27 years. But Edwards was apparently aware of some of the other men in Namiranians life, and during the course of the interview he mentioned two men by their race one white, the other black but couldnt recall their names. As the interview progressed, Edwards periodically changed his story, seemingly to fit various facts presented to him by the detectives. He also was caught lying about his whereabouts, but Edwards shrugged it off. Edwards initially denied being around Namiranians home on April 4 the evening before she disappeared after having dinner at her home with a retired Altria executive or April 5, when she was reported missing. But after detectives showed him copies of cellphone records tied to his phone, Edwards backtracked. The records, the detectives explained, showed he was near Namiranians home for five hours during the morning of April 5, because his cellphone repeatedly pinged off a cellphone tower within a mile of the missing womans residence. At first, Edwards suggested that was impossible. Then he said he left his car parked in Namiranians neighborhood with his cellphone inside as he accompanied a friend to his home near Chippenham Parkway and Hopkins Road to collect on a debt. Edwards then changed his story again, admitting he parked 1 or 2 miles from Namiranians Normandstone Drive house but dozed off as he sat in his car waiting to see if she would drive by. Edwards said he wanted to see Namiranian, but they had an arrangement where he would wait for her to call before coming to her house. I did not go over to her house period, Edwards said repeatedly. Edwards also provided two different times for when he arrived for work April 5 at his job at Vitran Express in Ashland. He initially told detectives he arrived about 12:45 p.m. the shift usually began at 1 but then said he punched in early, about 10 a.m. Justin Toomy, Edwards boss at the time, testified he had asked Edwards to come in early on April 5 at 10 a.m. but Edwards didnt show up until hours later, sometime after lunch. He was upset, Toomy said of Edwards demeanor. In other testimony Wednesday, a DNA expert with the Virginia Department of Forensic Science essentially said she was unable to develop any DNA mixture profiles that implicated Edwards among a number of items police sent to the state lab for testing. The forensic scientist developed a DNA mixture profile from a stain found in the trunk lining of Edwards Cadillac, but that profile excluded Namiranian as being a person who contributed to the DNA mixture. Edwards, however, cannot be excluded. Prosecutors have theorized that Namiranian was placed in the trunk of Edwards car. A trained cadaver dog that was used to search Edwards car three days after Namiranian disappeared alerted on the odor of human remains in the vehicles trunk, the dogs handler testified. But based on the DNA experts earlier testimony, it is unlikely the remains were those of Namiranian, defense attorney Greg Sheldon said. One of Namiranians cellphones that was found discarded in a wood line along Interstate 95 in Hanover County also was tested, but no DNA mixture profile could be developed, and Edwards fingerprints were not recovered from the phone. Levar Stoney, a former aide to Gov. Terry McAuliffe, formally announced his campaign for Richmond mayor Thursday, saying City Hall needs new energy, new ideas and a new approach. Im running for mayor because Richmond is on the rise. But we are at a crossroads, Stoney, 35, said during a news conference near Battery Park in the citys North Side. And frankly, I think we just cant accept more of the same in City Hall. Stoney, who became Virginias first African-American secretary of the commonwealth in 2014 after McAuliffe took office, is expected to be a strong competitor in a crowded mayoral field. His ties to McAuliffe, the states top Democrat and a close ally of Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, could put Stoney in the top tier in November. He resigned from his state post responsible for appointments to state boards and commissions late last week. His campaign rollout organized with the help of staffers who previously worked on former Maryland Gov. Martin OMalleys presidential campaign came in a brief meeting with reporters as Stoney knocked on doors gathering petition signatures. Responding Thursday to questions about his lack of experience in city government, Stoney said that working with McAuliffe has shown him what a government looks like when firing on all cylinders. Im not going to worry about what my opponents might say, Stoney said. He cited the citys low-performing schools as a major priority, adding that he was the first in his family to graduate high school. If it wasnt for that ladder of opportunity and that foundation for success, I would never be here today announcing my candidacy for mayor of Richmond, said Stoney, a native of Hampton Roads who lives in downtown Richmond. In a news release, he pledged to be a visible and transparent mayor and said he would conduct a review and audit of all city departments within his first 100 days in office. He also highlighted his work to restore the civil and voting rights of roughly 18,000 ex-offenders. A former student-body president at James Madison University, Stoney started his career in Democratic politics as a fellow under former Gov. Mark R. Warner. In 2008, he became executive director of the Democratic Party of Virginia, and he went on to work for McAuliffes 2013 gubernatorial campaign. Stoney joins a crowded mayoral field that dropped by one late Wednesday night as City Councilman Chris A. Hilbert announced he will seek re-election to his 3rd District Council seat rather than run for mayor. Stoney said Richmond is headed in the right direction, but city government hasnt kept pace. Henrico County police have identified the man found dead behind a home on East Laburnum Avenue two days ago and his cause of death. Corey Benjamin Jones, 28, of Richmond was shot multiple times, according to Henrico police. Jones' body was found by police Tuesday about 2 p.m. near where East Laburnum Avenue meets Pilots Lane, close to the Richmond city line. Police were initially called to the location for a "firearm violation." Police are investigating his death as a homicide. An Orange County circuit judge set a $100,000 bond Thursday for a woman charged with multiple counts of animal cruelty and embezzlement in the operation of an Orange County horse farm. The bond is related to 13 counts of felony embezzlement against Anne Shumate Williams, who is accused of misusing funds donated to a now-defunct animal rescue operation in Somerset called Peaceable Farms. A grand jury indicted her on March 28. Williams legal troubles started on Oct. 27, when she was arrested on the misdemeanor animal cruelty charges after authorities found dozens of dead, dying and emaciated animals on her Peaceable Farms property. That case is playing out in General District Court. After so much heat and anger surrounding the debate over transgender individuals, its helpful to have a calm and dispassionate look at the issue. On Tuesday, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals delivered one. The case concerns Gavin Grimm, a student at Gloucester High School in Virginias Middle Peninsula. Grimm is biologically female but identifies as a male. The school system accommodated his requests until some members of the community objected to his use of the boys lavatory. At that point, the system required transgender students to use either the bathroom assigned to their biological sex, or a private unisex bathroom. Grimm sued, claiming a violation of Title IX part of a 1972 federal law governing education and sought an injunction to let him use the boys bathroom while the case proceeds. A lower court said no to the injunction, and the appeals court has now reversed that decision. The Fourth Circuits divided ruling boils down to a dispute over how to interpret that law, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. When Title IX was written, transgenderism was not part of the cultural landscape. Last January the Education Department spelled out policy on the question: Schools generally must treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity, not their anatomical or biological sex. The majority on the court concluded that, consistent with standards established through precedent in other cases, the judiciary should defer to the executive agency: Answering questions of policy . . . is a task committed to the agency, not the courts. This is judicial deference, which is often a good thing, and the opposite of the judicial activism that conservatives properly deplore. Which is not to say that dissenting Judge Paul Niemeyer contributed nothing of value to the discussion. To the contrary, he raises some sharp points. He notes, for instance, that Grimm finds it intolerable to use the girls bathroom because doing so causes him severe psychological distress thanks to the way girls reacted negatively to his presence. But if the Education Departments policy prevails, then biologically male transgender students will want to use girls bathrooms. When they do, it is reasonable to expect that the other girls in the bathroom will react negatively to their presence too. (It also is reasonable to expect that some boys will react negatively to having a biological female transgender student in their bathroom. Teenagers can be acutely self-conscious and privacy-seeking.) Thus transgender students will endure psychological distress no matter what policy prevails. Niemeyer also notes that the Education Departments guidance letter encourages the use of gender-neutral, individual-user facilities to any student who does not want to use shared sex-segregated facilities. If Title IX encourages private unisex bathrooms when they are a transgender students first choice, then its discordant to contend Title IX forbids them outright when they are not. Other arguments for Gloucesters policy carry less force. For instance, the county contends it is treating all students equally: Any student can use either the bathroom that coincides with his or her biological sex, or a private unisex bathroom. But this resembles Virginias defense of law against interracial marriage. That prohibition treated everyone equally too, the commonwealth argued, because it forbade both blacks and whites alike from marrying outside their race. While the appellate majority thinks Grimm stands a good chance of prevailing on the merits of his case, its own ruling is limited to a much narrower question: what policy should apply during litigation. So while it sends a signal the right one about the fate of laws like North Carolinas HB2, it does not bring the debate to an end. Legitimate concerns exist about, e.g., predatory males exploiting transgender accommodations to invade womens shower and locker facilities. All of this might seem like much sturm und drang over an extremely small cohort. Precise figures are elusive, but reasonable estimates suggest transgender individuals account for less than one-third of 1 percent of the population. Given the amount of press coverage devoted to transgender issues recently, many Americans could be forgiven for thinking the percentage is much higher. Kolkata: A Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader was arrested in the city on Thursday for allegedly abusing the Election Commission during polls. TMC leader Anwar Khan from the Cossipore area was caught on camera allegedly speaking to partymen over his mobile phone and asking them to "hit the EC on its face with a shoe" Thursday morning. Following this, Chief Electoral Officer Sunil Gupta called up Kolkata Police Commissioner Soumen Mitra to arrest Khan, who was already under police surveillance owing to his "influence" in the Cossipore-Belgachia constituency where polling was held. The TMC leader had, however, managed to flee. A team of police, led by DC North Subhankar Singha Sarkar, went to Cossipore and led a search operation at several places, including his house but failed to arrest him which forced Kolkata Police to announce him as "absconding". Later, acting on a tip-off police finally nabbed Khan from Dumdum area, which is close to his residence. This ones for John. Hes a reader who took issue with my recent column arguing that conservatism has become an angry and incoherent mess. John was particularly upset that I described conservatives as resistant to social change. Wrote John: (sic) Tell that to the right side of the aisle who signed in the civil rights voting act in 1965. Which party resisted that? ... Who resisted the proclamation that freed the slaves? Southern democrat party of course and who was its military arm during reconstruction? The KKK. Today that organization is tied into the liberalism more than conservatism. ... Your party, the liberals who now call themselves progressives, are the party of Strom thurmond, Robert Byrd, Lester Maddox, George wallace and ... Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Please note what John did there. He responded to a critique of social conservatism by mounting a defense of the Republican Party, as if the two were synonymous. Granted, they are now, but in the eras John mentions? Not so much. Indeed, when Abraham Lincoln issued that proclamation John is so proud of, it was considered an act not of conservatism, but of radical extremism. And those Republicans who voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were moderates, i.e., the kind of people who have been driven out of a harshly conservative party that now considers moderation apostasy. The truth, as any first-year history student could tell you, is that Republicans were the more socially liberal party and Democrats the more socially conservative for at least seven decades after Lincoln. But in the years since then, they have essentially swapped ideologies. The reason John engages in this linguistic shell game, the reason he defends the party that wasnt attacked instead of the ideology that was, is simple: The ideology is indefensible, at least where civil rights is concerned. You must be a liar, a fool or an ignoramus of Brobdingnagian proportions to suggest social conservatives have ever supported African-American interests. They didnt do it a century ago when conservative meant Democrats. They dont do it now. Sadly for John, pretending otherwise requires him to twist logic like a birthday-party clown making balloon animals. How addlepated must you be to see common ground between the segregationist Lester Maddox and civil-rights activist Al Sharpton? How cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs are you when you consider the Ku Klux Klan and Strom Thurmond liberal? And yes, you may think this a lot of energy to lavish on one man. But it isnt one man. I hear Johns reasoning literally a hundred times a year from conservative readers. Indeed, a few weeks ago on CNN, a Donald Trump apologist pimp-slapped reality by branding the Klan a leftist group. So John is hardly the only one. These people must lie about history in order to exonerate conscience. Yet the truth is what the truth is. John need not take my word for what conservative means. Merriam-Webster backs me up. He need not even take my word for the history. A hundred history books back me up. But honest, grown-up Republicans, assuming there are any left, may want to take my word for this: They cannot achieve their stated goal of a more-welcoming and inclusive party while clinging to an ideology whose entire raison detre is exclusion. You see, social conservatism only works for those who have something to lose, those who have an investment in status quo. Im reminded of an anecdote about a Howard University professor who visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s. He explained to his hosts that some Negroes were politically conservative. They were astonished. Why? asked one. What do they have to conserve? It looks like nothing was found at this location. Maybe try a search? Search for: Search A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind. Hyderabad: The Third Special Magistrates Court of Hyderabad City on Wednesday found Vijay Mallya, former chairman of United Spirits, guilty in a cheque bounce case and issued a warrant to produce him before the court on May 5 to hear his version before pronouncing sentence. Special Magistrate M. Krishna Rao found Mallya guilty in the case moved by the GMR group which accused the businessman of issuing two cheques worth Rs 50 lakh to pay dues for using its services at the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport for his Kingfisher Airlines. Ashok Reddy, counsel for GMR, said that Mallya owed Rs 25 crore for using the international airport for his Kingfisher Airlines. After an agreement that he would pay Rs 22 crore, the GMR group withdrew the cases lodged against the accused. Mallya had then given the GMR group 45 cheques. Some of these cheques had bounced, forcing the company to seek solace under the Negotiable Instruments Act. Will appoint JNAFAU V-C by June end: Telangana govt Making it clear that it will not allow administration of Jawaharlal Nehru Architecture and Fine Arts University to continue with an in-charge Vice-Chancellor for much longer, the Hyderabad High Court on Wednesday closed a PIL after recording the statement of the TS government that it would appoint a regular V-C by the end of June. A division bench comprising Acting Chief Justice Dilip B. Bhosale and Justice P. Naveen Rao was dealing with a PIL by TS Federation of University Teachers seeking a direction to the state government to appoint the V-C, constitute the executive council and other statutory bodies while framing regulations. Kroger has donated approximately $44,000 of unsold clothing to Feeding America Southwest Virginia. The clothes are from Krogers Marketplace stores in other areas of Virginia and are primarily unsold merchandise from the fall and winter seasons. Kroger is recognized as the grocer and pharmacy in southwest Virginia, said Allison McGee, spokesperson for the mid-Atlantic division. But we also sell clothing in some stores in other areas, and were delighted to be giving it to the people of Southwest Virginia through the regional food bank. Clothing will be in all sizes for children and adults and will include shoes, undergarments, work and everyday wear, and outerwear including brand names and private labels. There also are some shoes. We have enjoyed an excellent relationship with Feeding America Southwest Virginia for years, McGee continued, and weve been assured the food bank has the means of distributing clothes so they will be received by those in need in southwest Virginia. Pamela Irvine, president & CEO Feeding America Southwest Virginia, said the food bank has received small amounts of clothing and personal care products from retailers in the past. This is the largest donation of clothing weve ever received, she said, and were truly grateful to Kroger for choosing us to distribute the clothing. Kroger continues to be a premier donor partner in our work. Irvine said the clothing is a basic need that many of our clients struggle to obtain. The apparel primarily will be distributed to clothes closets run by food pantries served through our distribution center in Salem. Anyone needing clothes should contact the food pantry in their community. Last year Kroger donated more than 400,000 pounds of perishable food, enough to provide 340,000 nutritious meals valued at $700,000 to Feeding America Southwest Virginia. The food bank serves a 26-county region of southwest Virginia. Kroger operates 24 stores in southwest Virginia from Roanoke to Bristol. Submitted by John Lambert All that remains standing of an almost 200-year-old farm house is its three chimneys after a blaze ripped though the structure Wednesday night. The home that once served as hospital during the Civil War was uninsured, said the homeowners' son, Nathan Tumas. The blaze at 1972 Montevideo Road, just south of the town of Bedford off Virginia 43, leveled the two-story home built in 1829, the Bedford County Fire Marshals Office said in a news release. Firefighters from Bedford, Huddleston, Forest and Moneta battled the blaze for hours, shuttling water from the Bedford County Landfill, just more than a mile and half from the property, the news release said. Bedford County Fire Marshal Jeff Pauley said Thursday dispatch records show the call to 911 came just before 10 p.m. The first engine, from Bedford Fire Department, arrived at 10:09 p.m. The second truck, also with the Bedford Fire Department, arrived two minutes later. Huddlestons truck followed at 10:19 p.m., Pauley said. The scene was deemed unsafe by the fire chief at 10:21 p.m. and firefighters were told to get out of the house. Tumas, son of homeowners Jewel and Donald Tumas, said his parents initially thought the blaze was a small electrical fire on the porch. Thats why they didnt save anything, he said. They had one electrical fire several years ago that was easily put out. Capt. Matt Scott, of the Bedford Fire Department, said he was the first to arrive on the scene. I can say with 100 percent certainty that it was not just a deck on fire, he said. Scott described the scene as a heavy fire. When crews arrived, he said the blaze had spread into the floors and walls, with the hand-hewn logs that comprised the exterior walls acting as kindling. A fire engine was the first to arrive, equipped with 750 gallons of water standard for the department, Scott said. Crews ran two lines from the truck toward the house. The first line we used to start knocking down the fire, Scott said. The second line we ran to cool down a propane tank that was smoking in the yard. If we didnt get that to stop smoking, we would have had a crater. The propane tank stored 500 gallons of fuel and sat 15 feet from the home, Scott said. We used 25,000 to 30,000 gallons of water during the duration of the event, Scott said. Tumas said his father begged for firefighters to use the 10,000-gallon pool in the backyard, but they did not. Pauley said the owner was insistent with firefighters and hindering their operations. After asking him multiple times to calm down, Pauley said crews threatened him with arrest. Tumas said at that point, his father backed off. Scott said the pool was inaccessible to the massive trucks due to a fence and a steep drop-off, adding, those trucks arent made to off-road. The house was once used as a Civil War hospital and during some excavations of the property, the family found musket balls and oil bottles dating back to that era, Tumas said. According to county records, the Tumases purchased the property in 2002. The home and land are valued at $386,200, the records indicate. The cause of the blaze remains under investigation. Pauley said Thursday evening the area remained too hot to examine. The cause may be difficult to determine because of the extent of the damage, he said. The homeowners are staying with family. A CrowdRise page has been set up in the familys name to help them recover. The Montevideo Road home was the second home destroyed by fire Wednesday in Bedford County. Firefighters responded to a blaze at a mobile home on Dearing Lane in Stewartsville. That fire was started by a propane grill in use on the porch, according to a news release. The estimated cost of the damage is $40,000 and the home is uninhabitable. A nearly 16-mile section of the Blue Ridge Parkway north of Roanoke to Peaks of Otter will be closed for five weeks beginning Monday so paving repairs can be made to the road and overlooks. The closure will stretch from U.S. 221/460 at parkway milepost 105.8 in Botetourt County north to milepost 90 at Virginia 43 and Bearwallow Gap. Both lanes of the parkway will be closed to all traffic, including motor vehicles, bicycles and hikers, for the first month of the project, according to a news release from the National Park Service. After May 25, the full closure will end and parkway users can expect one-lane closures through September. To reach Peaks of Otter from the south during the closure, travelers should use Virginia 43 out of Buchanan on the west or Bedford on the east side of the mountains. RICHMOND Virginias coal mine tax credit will sunset this year after efforts to extend it fizzled Wednesday, but the politically contentious debate over the program may be far from over. Well be back next year and fight it out, said Del. Terry Kilgore, R-Scott, sponsor of the House bill that sought to extend the life of the industry credit by five years. The House of Delegates narrowly mustered enough votes Wednesday to override Gov. Terry McAuliffes veto of the tax credit extension. But it went onto die in the Senate where it fell two votes shy of the override trigger. The tax credit for coal mine operators will now expire Dec. 31. The veto doesnt affect a second tax credit offered for coal-buying power companies. The coal tax credit has been controversial and spurred a bitter political debate in the Senate earlier this year amid accusations that some tried to barter the bill in exchange for Republican votes on the contested Supreme Court judgeship. This is the second time McAuliffe has vetoed efforts to extend the tax credit. He and other detractors criticize the program as ineffective and maintain its time to shift resources into more promising economic development initiatives for Southwest Virginia. Coal production and mining jobs have plummeted over the nearly three decades the state has been offering coal tax credits. In 1988, Virginia had over 11,000 coal mining jobs, according to state data. Today, that figure is just under 3,000. Supporters acknowledge the industrys woes, but maintain the tax credit has helped staunch the bleeding for a regional economy still reliant on coal. The Virginia Coal & Energy Alliance informally estimates that up to 1,000 jobs are bolstered by the tax credit. Money for the credit wont immediately stop flowing when the program expires. Tax credits already earned by eligible coal mine operators can be redeemed over the next three years. But no new credits can be accrued after this year. Southwest legislators said Wednesday theyll continue exploring ways to revive the program. Sen. Bill Carrico, R-Grayson, sponsor of the Senate version of the extension bill, said he remained concerned that even a temporary end to the coal tax credits will do harm. Is that gap something that is going to be too costly, said Carrico, adding hell be working with industry representatives to better gauge the impact. The coal tax credit extension was one of only two bills that cleared an initial override vote during Wednesdays one-day veto session. The other was a measure, sponsored by Del. Charles Poindexter, R-Franklin County, that sought to protect Confederate monuments and other war memorials. The bill was a response to a court ruling that concluded an already existing protection law only applied to monuments erected after the law was enacted in 1998. Poindexter resisted attempts to focus the debate on Civil War monuments, noting the law also protects memorials concerning Virginia events from 1622. History shouldnt be expunged based on shifting political winds, he argued, adding it seemed particularly inappropriate and ungrateful to take down memorials to war veterans. Others argued the law could bar even moderate changes like adding signage to tell a more balanced story about the states history. The state is forming a task force on the issue, and lawmakers commented that action should wait . The House narrowly voted to override McAuliffes veto of the bill, but it again died in the Senate. Vetoes of other bills sponsored by Del. Chris Head, R-Botetourt County, and Sen. David Suetterlein, R-Roanoke County, were sustained on party-line votes. Heads bill stipulated that employees of a franchisee wouldnt be considered employees of the larger franchising company under state law. The proposal was an effort to push back against a major National Labor Relations Board ruling last year that revamped how those relationships are defined. Suetterleins bill would have allowed candidates for local office to be identified by party on the ballot for the first time in state history. RICHMOND Pharmacies that supply Virginia with lethal injection drugs will soon be shielded from public scrutiny after the General Assembly voted Wednesday to accept a proposal from Gov. Terry McAuliffe to exempt such contractors from open-records laws and state regulations. The bill offered as a substitute to legislation that would have required prisoners to die in the electric chair if no drugs were available put McAuliffe at odds with many of his Democratic colleagues in the legislature. In both the Senate and House of Delegates, the proposal passed on narrow votes with mostly Republican backing. My amendments offered legislators a choice between a practical approach to moving forward with Virginias death penalty law or a moratorium on executions in our commonwealth, McAuliffe said in a statement Wednesday night. Their final decision will allow the Virginia Department of Corrections to continue to enforce the law without resorting to barbaric measures like the electric chair. Critics said the bill, the most controversial piece of unfinished business dealt with in Wednesdays veto session, would shroud an uncomfortable government act in secrecy to solve a drug crisis that may not be as pressing as its made out to be. If this becomes law, the commonwealth of Virginia ... the legislature, our citizens, would be more certain about the chemical composition of the asphalt that VDOT buys to put on our roads than we would about the drugs that we put in the veins of someone we want to execute, said Del. James LeMunyon, R-Fairfax. This bill will shield one little part of our government from transparency, said Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax. Mistakes happen the most when we put a shadow over things. Backers of the governors plan called it a way to preserve capital punishment for heinous crimes as lethal drugs become more difficult to acquire. Sen. Mark Obenshain, R-Harrisonburg, called the death penalty an important tool that the state has. As long as we have it, we need to be able to carry it out in the most humane means possible, Obenshain said. This allows that to take place. The Republican-dominated House initially voted the governors amendments down by a 47-51 vote. On a second try, 13 more Republicans joined the yes column, putting the final tally at 59-40. Six Republicans opposed the secrecy bill, along with the chambers 34 Democrats. The vote in the Senate was 22-16, with four Democrats joining Republicans to accept the governors substitute. A similar execution secrecy measure failed in the legislature last year due to bipartisan concerns about government transparency. The secrecy provision this year was framed as a more palatable alternative to the electric-chair bill, which would have allowed the state to electrocute inmates who wished to die by lethal injection. McAuliffe had said he would veto the electric-chair bill if it came back to him unchanged and characterized the vote as a referendum on the death penalty. Del. Jackson Miller, R-Manassas, said between House votes that some of his colleagues were confused and didnt know the full consequences of voting against the governors recommendation. The governor was very clear and I believe him in his statements that if these amendments are not passed that the death penalty in Virginia will be stopped. Period. No questions asked, said Miller, who sponsored the electric-chair bill. Virginia and other states are dealing with a shortage of lethal drugs partly due to the private sectors unease with producing chemicals used to carry out death sentences. One of 31 states that still use the death penalty, Virginia offers prisoners a choice between lethal injection and the electric chair. Since the choice was made available in 1995, 80 inmates have been executed by injection. Seven picked the chair. Similar secrecy laws passed by other states are facing legal challenges by inmates. In a statement, ACLU of Virginia Executive Director Claire Guthrie Gastanaga called Wednesdays outcome an unfortunate result that will likely mean lengthy litigation. In a 13-page legal opinion issued late Tuesday night, Attorney General Mark Herring said the bill would not violate federal law and would not impermissibly obstruct prisoners ability to obtain evidence about the drugs in court proceedings. Nashik: A day after they were allegedly manhandled while trying to enter into the sanctum sanctorum of the famous Trimbakeshwar temple, the four women activists on Thursday offered prayers to the the deity amid police protection. The activists, led by Vanita Gutte of Pune-based Swarajya Mahila Sanghatana, offered prayers inside the Lord Shiva temple's 'garbha griha' (sanctum sactorum) at around 6 am Thursday, accompanied by police personnel, Trimbakeshwar Police Station in-charge H P Kolhe said. "We are happy that we offered prayer inside the garbhagrih. We arrived in the dress code - wearing wet cotton and silk saris - and were treated well by the trustees," Gutte told reporters. A team of police personnel were deployed at the temple premises ahead of the scheduled visit today, Kolhe said. Dedicated to Lord Shiva, the Trimbakeshwar temple is one of the 12 'Jyotirlingas' situated in the country. Yesterday, as many as 200 persons, including the former municipal president of Trimbakeshwar, were booked under relevant IPC sections for allegedly manhandling with the activists in their bid to enter the temple's core area. On April 14, based on a complaint by Gutte that they were being obstructed from entering the temple, police had registered offences against nearly 250 people, including members of the temple trust, some local priests, and temple workers. Meanwhile, a bandh was observed in the city today after locals gave a call last night opposing police action against some villagers for allegedly obstructing the activists. Most of the shops, restaurants remained shut. Earlier, the Trimbakeshwar Devasthan Trust decided to allow women into the famous Lord Shiva temple's 'garbha griha' for an hour everyday, but with a rider that they must wear wet cotton or silk clothes while offering prayers in the core area. The development is significant as it comes 13 days after women were permitted entry to the Shani Shingnapur temple in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra on April 8. It came to national attention in January when hundreds of women activists attempted to storm into the Shani Shingnapur temple. After months of protests, and the Bombay high court observing that entering a temple was a fundamental right of every person, the temple trust finally decided to allow women on Arpil 8. The decision opens the doors for women to contest similar bans at other temples. Search teams working in Shenandoah National Park on Thursday discovered a body believed to be that of a Fairfax County firefighter whose car was found in the park on Saturday. Virginia State Police did not immediately confirm that the body was that of Nicole K. Mittendorff, 31, of Woodbridge, but they said the search for her had been suspended, and her family said in a statement that they believed the remains were Mittendorff's. The discovery followed six days of intensive searching for the woman in a heavily forested area. Virginia State Police said in a news release that the remains were discovered in a remote location a little more than a mile from the Whiteoak Canyon Trail parking area where Mittendorff's Mini Cooper was parked. Virginia State Police and National Park Service personnel discovered the body about 2 p.m. some 330 yards from the trail in treacherous rocky terrain, officials said. Investigators were still processing the scene on Thursday evening. Mittendorff's family wrote in a statement that they were devastated. "Our hearts are broken," the statement read. "We believe that Nicole has been found and is finally coming home, however not in the way we anticipated. This is not the positive outcome that we continued to hope and pray for over the past week." Mittendorff was last in touch with her family a little over a week ago. Virginia State Police said Wednesday that physical and digital evidence they have collected has been critical in focusing the search operations in recent days. Mittendorff's family had previously said files on her cellphone that were given to law enforcement officials Wednesday might provide key evidence to locate her. State police have declined to comment on what that evidence is, and the family would not discuss it. The body was being transported to the Office of the Medical Examiner in Manassas for autopsy and positive ID, Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said in an email Thursday night. "The physical and digital evidence collected during the course of this investigation - to include a note recovered from her car - leads to believe there was no foul play involved in her death," Geller said. The discovery of the body came a day after family members and colleagues held a vigil in Burke at Fire Station 32, where Mittendorff worked as a firefighter and paramedic. "I, along with the men and women of the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department, are profoundly saddened to learn that the body found earlier today ... is thought to be that " of Mittendorff, said Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department chief Richard Bowers. "We continue to extend our thoughts and prayers to Nicole's friends and family." Relatives said they last had contact with her via a text message shortly before 11 a.m. on April 13. Fairfax County fire department officials said she called in sick that day. Mittendorff was officially reported missing when she failed to show up for work last Friday. A park ranger found her car on Saturday night, and the searches for her began in the park. They involved aircraft, dogs and trained search teams. Mittendorff's family surmised that she may have traveled to the Shenandoah to train because she is an avid runner and triathlete. Mittendorff's disappearance drew an outpouring of support from her colleagues. Mittendorff's husband is a Virginia State Police trooper, and her brother-in-law is a firefighter in Fairfax County. virginia-woman-2ndld-writethru _____ Keywords: Nicole Mittendorfff, missing firefighter, fairfax, death, va, shenandoah Washington Post News Service (DC) 4/21/2016 10:32:38 PM Central Daylight Time New Delhi: In a huge political embarrassment to the Centre and the BJP, the Uttarakhand High Court on Thursday struck down Presidents Rule in the state, imposed on March 27. Observing that the proclamation of March 27 stands quashed, the court also directed reinstated Congress Chief Minister Harish Rawat to prove his majority in the House on April 29. While the Centre is to move the Supreme Court against the order on Friday, the High Court decision has come as a major setback to both the Centre and the ruling BJP, which had openly been backing the rebel MLAs against the states Congress chief minister. The Centre also intends to challenge the disqualification of the nine rebel Congress MLAs in the Supreme Court. After the courts order, BJP president Amit Shah and senior ministers went into a huddle and decided that the government would move the Supreme Court on Friday challenging the judgement quashing the proclamation of Presidents Rule. While saffron leaders and spokespersons were struggling to put up a brave front, celebrations broke out at Congress headquarters and outside Mr Rawats residence in Dehradun. Appearing humble, Mr Rawat said that instead of celebrating, we need to focus on development. Adopting a conciliatory tone, Mr Rawat also urged the Centre to pursue the path of cooperative federalism and let the state government work. Then came his sting: Woh mahabali hain, woh log shaktishali hain, woh chaure seene wale hain (They are powerful and have broad chests)... how can I fight them... I request them to let us work, Mr Rawat said. Speculation was also rife that Baba Ramdev had been parleying with the dissident Uttarakhand Congress MLAs. Fishing in troubled waters, the BJP top brass reportedly set off a game plan to poach the dissident Congress MLAs. Sources revealed that a deal was struck and the nine Congress rebels who plunged Uttarakhand into a political crisis were likely to join the BJP and contest next years Assembly polls as its candidates. As per the purported deal, four of the rebel candidates were assured ministerial berths if the BJP won the elections. Former CM Vijay Bahuguna, who was leading the rebellion, had reportedly bargained for a Rajya Sabha ticket with the BJPs backing. The BJP, which was struggling to strengthen its organisation in Uttarakhand, was also keen to accept Mr Bahugunas demand that his two sons, Saket and Saurabh, be given party tickets to contest the Assembly and Lok Sabha elections. The saffron camp then went on to release a sting video showing CM Harish Rawat bargaining with rebel party MLAs and offering them money to win their support during the floor test in the Assembly on March 28. The CM had described the video as fake. As for the BJP master strategists, they argued that if the high court quashed their disqualification, the nine rebels would vote for the BJP in case of a floor test. The BJP strategists were so confident that they had even begun the exercise of government formation. Mr Vijayvargiya, who is also the party leader in charge of the West Bengal polls, held meetings with probable CM candidates for the party, which included Satpal Maharaj and Bhagat Singh Koshiyari. Mr Vijayvargiya was quoted in a daily as saying that the BJP was not averse to forming an alternate government if the court ordered a trial of strength. "Rising Threats/Shrinking Military" is a must-see documentary on Fox News hosted by Bret Baier. My eyes were opened seeing what the Obama Administration has done to the state of our military in eight years. His deep cuts in our defense have weakened what used to be a very strong force, and his decisions throughout his presidency have led to some of the havoc going on in the world today. This in turn has given more power to Russia, China, Iran and North Korea...and that's scary. It baffles me to see what our commander-in-chief has done to weaken our nation through his deep cuts in our military expenses at a time when world violence is at an all time high, and threats are knocking on our door. Yet our Armed Forces is shrinking right before our eyes under this administration. Even in this documentary, several of his former Secretaries of Defense were bewildered by the cuts and decisions he made regarding our national defense. They state that Barack Obama has often refused to listen to military experts that work with our Armed Forces every day. He consistently acts arrogant in believing he has the answers, yet his policies have created instability in the world. Even George Washington knew this: "There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well-prepared to meet an enemy." Just the realization of a strong U.S. military force could be enough to deter some of the chaos going on in the world today. Our men and women that volunteer for our armed forces have sacrificed their time and service to train and to be a premier fighting force, and they are up for the task when and if they are needed. They deserve to have support in numbers, to have support with up-to-date equipment, and to have strong leadership from the top. History has proven that when the United States leads the way, the world is a much safer place for all of us. Let's place someone in the White House in November that truly supports our military. LESLIE HAYDEN VINTON Register for more free articles. Sign up for our newsletter to keep reading. Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! Already a Subscriber? Already a Subscriber? Sign in Terms of Service Privacy Policy New Delhi: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India told the Supreme Court that while telecom companies annual revenue was a staggering Rs 1.42 lakh crore, they would have to pay a mere Rs 256 crore as compensation for dropped calls which was not even their one day revenue. Making this submissions on behalf of Trai, Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi rejected the claim of the companies that the compensation would run into Rs 4,000 crore a year. The cellular operators are liable to compensate the loss suffered by subscribers due to call drops, Trai submitted. The AG told a bench of Justices Kurian Joseph and Rohinton Nariman that the problem of call drops was due to cellular service providers greed for profit without making commensurate investments for upgrading technology. He said India and China had almost the same number cell phone users, but telecom companies in that country had invested 10 times more than their counterparts in India had done here. This was largely due to cartelisation of cellular service providers who numbered just four or five. He justified the Delhi High Court verdict upholding the orders of TRAI that service providers must compensate subscribers for call drops. Mobile towers are obsolete, says A-G The AG told the Supreme Court that while the entire West and even some tiny countries had replaced cell-phone towers with better technology equipment that was neither obtrusive nor an eyesore, the companies in India were still using such towers as they did not want to invest and the regulator was duty-bound to ensure that the telecom players provided quality service at reasonable rates. The Bench wanted to know as to why the companies should pay compensation since call drops did not result in extra expenditure for the users or additional income for the service providers as call charges were mostly based on pulse rates or the total duration of the calls, rather than per call. The AG said the regulator would have to ensure that the user was not put to inconvenience or delays arising from call drops. While dismissing the petitions by COAI and others challenging the telecom regulators order, the Delhi HC had held that there was no dispute that the penalty was meant for ensuring quality of services which was the responsibility of TRAI. Notified on October 16, 2015, the penalty was to be paid from January 1, 2016. New Delhi: For the BJPs master strategists, yet another bit of adventurism blew up in its face. While the Uttarakhand unit of the BJP continued to caution the partys central leadership not to get involved in the politics of the Congress rebels, some heavyweights in the party decided to overrule them. As in Delhi and Bihar, the Central leadership yet again chose to ignore the local leaders. Not did the Central leadership overrule the local leaders, it also ignored Governor Krishan Kant Paul, who apparently never recommended the dismissal of the Harish Rawat-led government in his report. BJP general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya, had criticised the Governor for giving Mr Rawat time till March 28. I think the Governor should not give so much time to the Chief Minister to prove his majority, so much so that the Speaker gets an opportunity to disqualify the MLAs. The Governor should have issued directions that status quo be maintained and no action be taken against the MLAs until the trust vote. I cannot say that the governor is helping them (the Congress), but we are at a loss, he had reportedly told the media. Congress notice For destabilising Rawat In an indication that the coming Parliament Ses-sion would be stormy, Congress on Thursday gave a notice to Rajya Sabha Chairman Hamid Ansari seeking passage of a resolution condemning the Modi government for destabilistion of the Uttarakhand government and imposition of Presidents Rule in the state. The BJP-led NDA government is in a minority in the Upper House. Congress deputy leader in the Rajya Sabha Anand Sharma gave the notice to Rajya Sabha Chairman Hamid Ansari under Rule 267 for taking up the resolution after suspending all business. NASHIK: Women were finally allowed entry into the sanctum sanctorum of the Trimbakeshwar temple here on Thursday amid tight bandobast and a protest shutdown by the locals. Pune-based Swarajya Mahila Sanghatna president Vanita Gatte, who led a three-member team into the sanctum of the temple, said they offered prayers at about 6.05 am. This was a shift from the temples policy of restricting womens entry to the inner sanctum, which has been the norm since the temple was built by the Peshwas in the mid-18th century. Scared of police action, the trustees, priests and villagers did not offer resistance, but local merchants and villagers protested the darshan by women and obser-ved a complete bandh in Trimbakeshwar. We feel dhanya (blessed) to have taken darshan. We had to contest bitterly for this right and were even physically assaulted yesterday but this is a victory of stree shakti (womens power), Ms Gatte said. THE government is willing to take a 25 per cent stake in a rescue deal to save jobs at Tata Steels UK operations. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said it would make a support package worth hundreds of millions available to potential buyers. It said it was ready to support a credible private buyer and offer finance on commercial terms to deliver long-term investment in the future of Tata. Business secretary Sajid Javid said: This government is committed to supporting the steel industry to secure a long-term viable future and we are working closely with Tata Steel UK on its process to find a credible buyer. The detail of our commercial funding offer is clear evidence of the extent of that commitment. Ministers have visited Tata Steel sites across the country and the pride and dedication of the highly-skilled men and women working there is obvious to see. We have already delivered on energy compensation, on tackling unfair trading practices and on procurement of British steel, and we will keep on going further to support this vital industry. Three potential deals are on the table to save the companys UK plants including those in Rotherham. A management buyout plan by Port Talbot plant boss Steve Wilkie and other staff emerged on Wednesday. Mr Wilkie was previously behind a survival proposal rejected in March by Tatas board in India. Meanwhile, the Financial Times reported that representatives from investor Greybull Capital had visited Rotherham last week. In addition to taking a minority stake, the UK and Welsh government said they are also willing to consider additional grant funding support, for example to support the development of power plant infrastructure, energy efficiency and environmental protection measures, R&D and training. The government also said it was working with the pension scheme trustees of Tata Steel and British Steel to minimise any pension impact on the purchaser. Chris Williamson, Rotherhams Community union branch secretary, said: This announcement is obviously great news. We still need the government to work with us and our union officials because until the deal is done we cant take anything for granted. But obviously, the government can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Its taken that black cloud away in some respected but theres still a long way to go. They have said they will provide pensions and commercial help as part of the package which is a great incentive to anybody wanting to come in. John Healey, MP for Wentworth and Dearne, said: "I welcome this announcement by the Government as it shows that, after weeks of dragging its feet, it has finally recognised how vital this industry is to the UK economy. "Anything that makes the chance of a deal more likely is good for workers and their families who are living through a period of intolerable uncertainty about their future. "The offers on the table for Rotherham and Stocksbridge have come as no surprise to people in the region given the high quality of South Yorkshire specialty steel. "What we need to see now from Government is swift action to ensure that UK steel gets the long-term investment needed to protect jobs and communities." The Steinmetz Groups (BSGR) dodgy dealings such as the undervaluing of diamonds had been costing Sierra Leone tax payments, a media report has claimed. Times Media reports that leaked data from a Panama-based offshore fiduciary Mossack Fonseca, shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and Germanys Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, revealed the internal financial structures created by BSGR to camouflage Octeas financial activities. Beny Steinmetz left the Steinmetz Groups diamond business, Diacore, but kept a business in Sierra Leone diamonds through the British Virgin Islands-based entity Octea, the report alleged. Incomplete diamond export data allegedly show that during some months from 2012 to 2015, Octea exported more than $330 million in rough diamonds. However, while Octeas rough diamonds average $350 per carat, the company was alleged to be more than $150 million in the red, Times Media reports. Dozens of creditors are waiting to be paid, including the government of Sierra Leone and Standard Chartered Bank. If these debts are not paid, the company could lose its license, it noted. But some say this could be by design. Sources close to the company said its strategy was to exploit alluvial diamonds, feign financial struggles and leave creditors high and dry. The data leak allegedly confirmed a secretive financial structure connecting Koidu Holdings and Octea to wholly owned Steinmetz entities in Liechtenstein, the British Virgin Islands and Switzerland. Despite active diamond mines and money in its parent companies, Koidu Holdings was said to owe more than $150 million in outstanding loans to Tiffany & Co. and Standard Chartered bank. Despite media reports, BSGR claimed it had not defaulted on the loans to either party. Times Media further noted that the company also failed to pay outstanding fees to the government of Sierra Leone - a situation that has threatened closure of the mine and contributed to the resignation of Octea CEO Brett Richards. The mayor of Koidu city, Saa Emerson Lamina, said that Octea owed $700,000 in outstanding property tax. There is not a single iota of corporate responsibility, he was quoted as saying. In exchange for reduced taxes, the company pledged to provide a 5 percent profit-sharing agreement to the local community, and 1 percent of annual profits to the community development fund. However, none of this, said Lamina, had come to pass. During some months between 2012 and 2015, 987,000 carats were documented as exports by Koidu at a value of more than $335 million, stated Times Media. An analysis of Octeas exports show the company as producing 50 percent or more of Sierra Leones annual exports. Times Media further alleged that unlike other companies, taxes for Koidu were never documented on available sources from 2012-2015. During September 2015, for instance, taxes were registered under all exporters except for Koidu, which exported about half ($9.5 million) of all exports ($19.5 million), it claimed. The previous month, Koidus exports accounted for $7 million of a total $9 million in exports; again, with no taxes documented. The company declined to answer questions about its financial practices, threatening legal action over issues it claimed were confidential, Times Media alleged. Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau, Rough&Polished The Indian government on April 19 said that it would make all possible efforts to bring back the Kohinoor diamond in an amicable manner, while emphasising that it had achieved the return of several artefacts, according to a Times of India report. On April 18, however, the Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar appearing for the government had told the Supreme Court that India should not stake claim to the famed US $200 million Kohinoor diamond as "it was neither stolen nor forcibly taken away. A day after solicitor generals comment, the Indian government rushed to clarify that the law officer's remarks could not be interpreted as the government's stand. The ministry added, The solicitor general informed the court about the history of the diamond and gave an oral statement on the basis of the existing references. The government said it would make its final submission on the issue of getting back the Kohinoor diamond in the Supreme Court in six weeks. Aruna Gaitonde, Editor-in-Chief of Asian Bureau, Rough&Polished The role and empowerment of women in the Latin American jewelry industry will be the focus of a special meeting that will take place on the trading floor of the Panama Diamond Exchange during the Second Latin American Diamond and Jewelry Week, at the World Jewelry Hub in Panama City, June 21 to 23, 2016. The venue for the meeting is particularly appropriate, because the Panama Diamond Exchange has bucked the industry trend, appointing women to two of the four positions in its senior management team - Ali Pastorini, PDE Senior Vice President and Judy Meana, PDE Vice President. Latin America's single diamond exchange is also the only diamond bourse worldwide to have proportionally as large a representation of women executives, PDE reported . "We want to look how more women in more influential positions will serve the development of an ethical and transparent jewelry and gemstone business, enahancing consumer confidence," said Ms. Pastorini. A jeweler herself, before joining the Panama Diamond Exchange Ms. Pastorini, established her own brand with a female partner in her native Brazil, and today its jewelry is sold at multiple sites in North America and Dubai, as well as in Latin America. Ms. Meana is a communications specialist, having started out at a journalist and becoming one of Panama's most well-known television news anchors, and later serving as the spokesperson for the Panamanian President and Government. "In organizing this meeting during the Second Latin American Diamond and Jewelry Week we plan to do a lot more than just pay lip service to the subject. "We want this to be a first step in developing a concrete strategy for raising the involvement of women in our industry, along with an action ," Ms. Meana said. The Second Latin American Diamond and Jewelry Week will be a commercial and networking event that is specifically designed to bring together players from both the regional and global trades. The week will also spotlight the growing role of Panama in the jewelry and gemstone business, and will feature a social and educational program that looks at challenges and opportunities facing the industry. Alex Shishlo, Editor of the Rough&Polished European Bureau in Brussels Diamond brand Hearts On Fire has appointed Stephane Barraque, a former executive at luxury groups Richemont and LVMH, to a newly-created role of global chief revenue officer. With more than 25 years experience under his belt, Barraque is tasked with developing the Hearts On Fire brand and making it more global. He will also be responsible for managing the brands sales team as well as retail stores. Barraque previously spent 17 years at Richemont, starting out with marketing of Cartiers watches and then leading the international development of Baume & Mercier. In 2008, he joined the LVMH Group as the president of Dior Timepieces for the Americas. Hearts On Fire is a designer, manufacturer and marketer of luxury-branded diamonds and diamond jewelry. In 2014, Hong Kong-based jeweler Chow Tai Fook acquired the company, which was set up in 1996. In their rush to make the most of the situation, those involved in the tanker business sink borewells at will, caring little that they are dangerously depleting the citys groundwater table in the process. Come summer, as the borewells dry up, the private water tanker industry is out to make a killing. Doubtless, the tankers serve some three lakh apartments and an even higher number of individual homes in the newly added areas of the city, where Cauvery water hasnt reached yet. Whats at issue, however, is the quality of the water supplied and its price. Its an unregulated business run by a powerful lobby of tanker owners. Needless to say, the risk is all the consumers. Visit Sarjapur road between 6 am and 9 am and you see hundreds of water tankers lined up on it. They are waiting to be booked so they can begin supplying water to people in the area, charging anywhere from Rs 600 to Rs 700 for a load and often leaving consumers like Poornima K with a bill of about Rs 1500 to Rs 2000 a month. While the government claims there is no shortage of water this summer, the tankers still manage to make a killing this time of the year with over three lakh apartments and several lakh individual houses in the newly added areas of Bengaluru dependant on fast drying up borewell water. In their rush to make the most of the situation, those involved in the tanker business sink borewells at will, caring little that they are dangerously depleting the citys groundwater table in the process. We charge between Rs 600 and Rs 700 for a tanker supplying 6000 litres of water, but if the distance is big we charge more, says a water supplier, who caters to about 10 consumers a day. While not everyone can afford this, there is no bargaining about the price and nor are any questions asked about where the water is sourced from. No one cares to demand a certification for the quality of the water supplied either . With no big brother watching, the tanker business is brisk in summer and brings in huge moolah. Warning about the health consequences of such unfettered freedom for the tankers, former environment secretary and concerned ecologist, Dr A N Yellappa Reddy, says over 90 percent of the water they extract is fossil or over 1, 500 years old. Once they go deeper chemicals like fluoride, arsenic and many dissolved heavy metals are found mixed in the water. There is no mechanism to remove such contaminants as most of the filters are not equipped to do the job, he explains, also regretting that most tankers dont even maintain basic hygiene. Sadly there is no authority to regulate this industry, he observes. The former bureaucrat warns that lead, chromium, cobalt and other metals present in the water are deadly as they can harm the kidneys and the digestive system. Nano particles, salmonella, ecoli, are all found here.. Tapeworms, roundworms, and hookworms can enter the human system through such borewell water and cannot be detected easily . They can harm the brain as they keep multiplying , growing to as much as 8 to 10 feet in length in the human body, he adds, making a strong case for monitoring the water supplied through tankers in the interest of peoples health. The city may be sweltering under a high 37.8 degree Celsius, but there isnt likely to be any water shortage this summer,claims the Bengaluru Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB). Says a BWSSB official, We have enough water till the monsoon arrives. We are presently supplying 1350 MLD of water and an additional 50 MLD taking into account the summer, from the Cauvery and this will continue. The Krishna Raja Sagar dam, which the city relies on for most of its water supply, had 80.72 ft of water on Wednesday as against its storage capacity of 124.80 ft, the official noted, adding that the water was sufficient for both Mysuru and Bengaluru. BWSSB supplies water to 8, 70, 000 connections, which include both domestic and industrial. No regulator yet for groundwater A draft Karnataka Ground Water (Regulation and Control of Development and Management) Bill prepared by the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru in 2006 to regulate and control the development and management of groundwater in the city remains in cold storage. The state government is sleeping over this important issue while Rajasthan, has already brought in a water use policy and implemented it, regrets former environment secretary, Dr A. N. Yellappa Reddy. Environmentalist Leo F. Saldanha , warns the situation will only get worse unless the government wakes up and does the needful . I live in a neighbourhood which has four pipelines carrying Cauvery water passing through it. But we dont get any of this water. Some years ago, deeply annoyed by this, some locals decided to take the law into their own hands as they had no water in their wells or borewells. Of course there were several private tanker suppliers who could have provided them water, but they couldn't afford this. So they blew holes into the massive pipes supplying Cauvery water to other neighbourhoods and were arrested, he recounts, pointing out that half the population of Bengaluru depends on groundwater as Cauvery cannot meet everyones needs. The Cauvery water is over extracted already and there isn't any more left for the city The growing reality is that the groundwater table is falling and getting more toxic. To top it, it is getting very expensive to hire tankers to supply water. And the government looks the other way as several suppliers finance elections and political parties, he regrets. His solution is rain water harvesting. There is enough rain in the city for a small family to harvest and survive for at least eight months. And it comes free. Find out how to do this. It's really simple, he suggests. A shock absorber! Did you know that the groundwater in the static and fossil zone acts as a shock absorber during earthquakes? Water in the static and fossil zone acts as a shock observer during earthquakes and when it dries up, it exposes the city to mild shocks. Bengaluru experiences such mild shocks two or three times a year already. So aggressive extraction of water from borewells must be limited, emphasises former senior bureaucrat, Dr A N Yellappa Reddy, adding that drawing water from less than 60 to 70 feet in the ground, which is described as the dynamic zone, is safest as it is recharged during the monsoon. ALROSA reports Q1 2016 production and preliminary trading performance 21 april 2016 News ALROSAs Q1 2016 diamond production totalled 8.2 million carats, down 2% y-o-y, driven by the following factors: increase in ore processing at Mir underground mine and decrease in ore processing at International underground mine; partial replacement of ore processed from Udachny pipe with ore processed from Zarnitsa pipe due to the termination of open-pit mining at Udachny pipe. Indicatively, in Q1 2016 ALROSA sold 12.1 million carats of diamonds, including 8.9 million carats of gem-quality diamonds at an average price of USD 146 per carat and 3.2 million carats of industrial diamonds at an average price of USD 7 per carat. Revenue from rough diamond sales amounted to at least USD 1.3 billion. The Republic of Panama has signed an agreement with the Japanese government valued at US$2.6 billion to fund the construction of Line 3 of Panama's Metro, the largest project in Panama since the expansion of the Panama Canal. The monorail system will be the first to use Japanese technology in the Americas. The agreement, in addition to funding the Metro construction, will include non-refundable technical cooperation up to US$350,000 to hire a project manager. The funding granted today by Japan is a recognition of Panamas credibility, stability and strength, Panama President Juan Carlos Varela said. Todays announcement proves that our economy is sustained by solid foundations. This is a great project. It will benefit hundreds of thousands of Panamanians that have to commute every day to the west side of Panama City and will allow us to showcase Japanese technology to everyone in the region. President Varela and Japan Prime Minister Japan Shinzo Abe were witnesses to the exchange of notes and documentation between the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) on behalf of the Japanese government and Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Luis Miguel Hincapie, Minister of Economy and Finance Dulcidio De La Guardia and President of the Metro Roberto Roy on behalf of the government of Panama. The funding granted by JICA is a loan with soft financial terms and conditions. It has a 20-year term, which includes 14 years of amortization, six years of grace period and three years for disbursement. The project manager will support the Metro of Panama in the implementation of the project for Line 3, overseeing the preliminary design of Line 3 and together with the team from Metro of Panama developing the conditions for the public bidding for the construction and supervising the bidding and the evaluation of the proposal. Additionally, the project manager will manage the overall execution of Project Line 3, including the integration of the monorail system with the fourth bridge over the Panama Canal. The company that will execute the project will be chosen through a process of international public bidding. Line 3 of the Panama Metro will be 26.75 kilometers (17 miles) long with 14 passenger stations. The line starts with a connection with Line 1 in Albrook station before heading to the Balboa area and crossing the Canal over the superstructure of the fourth bridge, running beside the Pan-American Road before heading to the Special Economic Zone Panama Pacific and continuing through the center of Arraijan City. From Arraijan, it continues through the Pan-American Road with a few stops before the end in Ciudad del Futuro, where the line will have its maintenance and storage facilities. The first phase of Project Line 3 will be built to facilitate phase two which will reach La Chorrera. The first phase of Line 3 will meet the demand of 20,000 daily commuters in rush hour in 2020. With the second phase, Line 3 will benefit 31,862 commuters in 2050. The project will begin in 2017 and its operations are estimated to begin in the end of 2021. Swiss biopharmaceutical company Actelion Ltd. (ALIOF.PK) reported Thursday that its first-quarter net income increased 12 percent to 178 million Swiss francs from last year's 159 million francs. Earnings per share increased 19 percent to 1.64 francs from 1.38 francs last year. Core net income was 215 million francs, compared to 185 million francs a year ago. Core earnings per share were 1.98 francs, compared to 1.61 francs. Net revenue increased 14 percent to 590 million francs from 515 million francs last year. ON a constant exchange rate, revenues grew 11 percent. Actelion said the results were driven by the continued successful uptake of Opsumit, a very strong Uptravi launch, consistently strong recruitment of new PAH patients across , and ERA market expansion due to increased combination therapy with PDE-5 inhibitors. Looking ahead, for fiscal 2016, the company now expects high single-digit percentage core operating income growth, at constant exchange rates and barring unforeseen events. The company was expecting core operating income, at constant exchange rates, to grow in the low single-digit percentage range. Andre Muller, Chief Financial Officer, said, "The strong start to 2016, along with some more clarity on a number of factors - including the strong Opsumit and Uptravi launch dynamics and stable pricing in Japan for Opsumit and Tracleer - enables us to increase the outlook for the full year." For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News Novartis AG (NVS) reported that its net income from continuing operations for the first-quarter 2016 dropped 13 percent $2.01 billion from the prior year's $2.31 billion, with earnings per share declining to $0.85 from $0.96 last year. Joseph Jimenez, CEO of Novartis, said, "I am pleased we were able to show sales growth in constant currencies despite the entry of a generic version of Gleevec in the US. As expected, our results reflect additional investments behind our new launches and Alcon. We are on track with the plan we outlined in January to further focus our divisions, drive greater innovation and significant synergies and productivity. I remain confident in our long-term growth prospects, underpinned by our strong pipeline and the talent leading our Research and Development functions." Net income for the first-quarter fell to $2.0 billion from $13.0 billion in the prior year period. Basic earnings per share decreased to $0.85 from $5.40. The decrease was due to the income from discontinued operations, which in the prior-year period included $12.8 billion exceptional divestment gains from the portfolio transformation transactions and $0.5 billion additional transaction related expenses. Core earnings per share were $1.17, down $1.33 last year. Net sales from continuing operations dropped 3% to $11.60 billion from $11.94 billion in the prior year, while it was up 1% at Constant currencies. The company confirmed its outlook as presented at the beginning of 2016. Group net sales and core operating income are expected to be broadly in line with the prior year (cc), after absorbing the impact of generic competition. Generic competition impact on sales is expected to be as much as $3.2 billion compared to $2.2 billion in 2015. If March average exchange rates prevail for the remainder of 2016, the currency impact for the year would be negative 2% on sales and negative 3% on core operating income. This currency impact versus 2015 results from the continued strength of the US dollar against most currencies. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News McDonald's Corp. (MCD) is currently testing two new versions of its iconic Big Mac sandwich, Mac Jr. and Grand Mac, in Central Ohio and Dallas/Fort Worth regions. The company is also backing the products with a television advertising campaign. The fast food giant is testing a bigger Big Mac called the Grand Mac, composed of a third-pound of beef split between two patties, two slices of American cheese, lettuce, minced onions and pickles on a larger sesame seed bun. It's priced at $4.89. Meanwhile, the Mac Jr. cuts the Big Mac to one layer intended to be easily eaten on the go, and priced between $2.39 and $2.59. The classic Big Mac has one fifth pound of beef. The test, which started on Tuesday, is being conducted in around 130 restaurants across Central Ohio and in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. The limited-time offer lasts through June 6 in Central Ohio. McDonald's has always encouraged its local to make menu suggestions. The company reportedly has offered variations on the Big Mac in Korea, Japan, Germany, Australia and France. Commenting on McDonald's Big Mac testing, brokerage firm Nomura said the tests are a sign of the company's evolving willingness to have no untouchables on the menu. It suggested that the fast-food chain do the same with its french fries. The analysts rated McDonald's shares at Buy with a price target of $138. The company is also testing Johnsonville Brats for a limited time in 125 restaurants in Milwaukee. Brats, served with mustard and ketchup on a bratwurst bun, will be available until May 22. Earlier this year, McDonald's had tested the Chicken McGriddle breakfast sandwich. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News SABMiller Plc. (SBMRY.PK,SAB.L), reported Thursday that its group net producer revenue or NPR for the full year a reported basis declined by 8 percent, due to the adverse translational impact on the company's results of the depreciation of its key operating currencies against the U.S. dollar. However, group NPR, on an organic, constant currency basis grew by 5 percent. The company said that the growth in group NPR includes beverage volume growth of 2 percent, and price and mix realisation of 3 percent. Lager volumes grew by 1 percent for the full year. Group NPR for the full year on Premium lager brand volumes grew by 6 percent, with good performances across many of its key , supported by global lager brands volume growth of 9 percent. Soft drinks volumes grew by 6 percent for the full year, with growth in Africa held back somewhat by a more subdued performance in Latin America. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday asked civil servants not to work in silos but as a team and act as an agent of change for welfare of the people and development of the country. Addressing bureaucrats on Civil Services Day here, he asked them to experiment to bring in change besides increasing engagement with the people for greater results. "Some people work in silos. We get more results working in team than in isolation. We need to come out of silos and work together as a team for nation building," Modi said. He said the role of civil services was earlier of a regulator. Then after some time, the role changed to that of an administrator and then controller. "When time further changed, you (civil servants) must have thought of acquiring managerial skills. Time is changing. Only being an administrator and controller is not enough. It is the need of the hour that everybody, at every level, has to be an agent of change," the Prime Minister said. He said, "We need to bring in changes. When we sit at one place we forget to experiment. If we do not experiment then how do we bring changes. There is no experiment without risk. And if we don't experiment, then it becomes merely a job". "I always reward experiments. People who do work differently and experiment, they get a different satisfaction," the Prime Minister said. In his about 45-minute long pep talk to a large gathering of bureaucrats from the Centre and states, Modi asked senior officials to benefit from the knowledge of their juniors, who are of a different generation and probably know better ways to do a task. He said that his mantra of "reform to transform" should be interpreted by civil servants as "reform to perform to transform". Modi said if civil servants were able to perform, the transformation on the ground would be evident. Modi asked seniors to combine their experience with knowledge and skill sets of juniors and asserted there would be nothing which cannot be done. The Prime Minister said there should not be any "tiredness" while they are working as it will create obstacles. "Rukavat samasya paida nahin karti hai, thakavat karti hai (Obstacles do not create problems but tiredness do)", he said asking the civil servants to be energetic and to keep away weariness from their attitude. The Prime Minister said that 'jan bhagidari' or public participation is the key to success. "Initiatives have succeeded when 'jan bhagidari' is embraced. Engaging with civil society is very important," he said. Modi asked bureaucrats to engage with the people, so that the government's schemes and initiatives can be better implemented on the ground. Referring to the Committees of Secretaries which had been formed at his initiative to look into key areas of governance, he said that officials worked on these tasks voluntarily after office hours and on holidays. Modi said these teams had "successfully broken silos", and presented fresh ideas and suggestions. They had devoted 10,000 man-hours to this work. "Let us create an atmosphere where everyone can contribute. The energy of 125 crore Indians will take the nation ahead," the Prime Minister said. British company Smiths Group plc (SMIN.L) announced Thursday that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Morpho Detection, a California-based detection and security solutions company, from French technology firm Safran (0IU8.L,SAFRF.PK) for an enterprise value of $710 million or 493 million pounds. The closing of the acquisition is subject to customary conditions, including regulatory approvals. Completion of the Acquisition is expected to take place in early 2017. Upon closing, Morpho Detection will be merged with Smiths Group's Detection division, whose products and services detect a wide range of threats, including explosive, chemical and radioactive materials, and contraband. Morpho Detection manufactures and supplies detection systems and services to improve mission-critical security at airports, borders and other high-risk critical infrastructure sites. Morpho Detection had total revenues of $320 million in 2015 with an operating margin of 18%. The company's expected annual cost synergies of about $30 million will be delivered by the third full year following closing. The company expects mid-single digit earnings per share accretion in the first full year of ownership. In the event that regulatory clearances are not obtained, Smiths can terminate the acquisition agreement and, in this case, will be required to pay a termination fee of $40 million to Safran. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News UK Commercial Property Trust Limited (UKCM.L) said that its net profit for the year ended 31 December 2015 declined to 87.64 million pounds from 172.71 million pounds in the prior year. Earnings per share were 6.74 pence, down from 13.96 pence, last year. Rental income for the year declined to 69.56 million pounds from 70.58 million pounds in the prior year. Total income was 120.10 million pounds, lower than last year's 195.80 million pounds. Christopher Hill, Chairman of UKCPT, said he has decided to step down at the company's annual general meeting in June 2016. The company's board intends to appoint Andrew Wilson, currently the company's Senior Independent Director, to become chairman upon Hill's departure. The company also said that Michael Ayre has been appointed to the Board since the year end, taking the number of directors up to six for a short time. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News Swiss drug maker Novartis AG (NVS) Thursday reported a sharp decline in the first-quarter net profit, that reflected the absence of prior year's hefty asset disposal gain. Drop in net sales also hurt profit mainly due to loss of exclusivity for its cancer drug Gleevec/Glivec in the US. Looking forward, the company still expects flat net sales and core operating income for fiscal 2016. Net income for the first quarter fell to $2.0 billion from $13.0 billion in the prior year. Earnings per share decreased to $0.85 from $5.40. The prior year results were benefited by $12.8 billion exceptional divestment gains from the portfolio transformation transactions and $0.5 billion additional transaction related expenses. On a continuing operations basis, net income dropped 13 percent to $2.01 billion from the prior year's $2.31 billion, with earnings per share declining 11 percent to $0.85 from $0.96 last year. Core net income was $2.78 billion or $1.17 per share versus prior year's $3.20 billion or $1.33 per share. On average, three analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected earnings of $1.19 per share. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items. Core operating income declined 11 percent from last year to $3.26 billion. Net sales from continuing operations dropped 3 percent to $11.60 billion from $11.94 billion in the prior year, while analysts were looking for $11.90 billion. At constant currencies, net sales were up 1 percent as strong growth in Growth Products offset Gleevec impact. Growth Products, an indicator of the ongoing rejuvenation of the company's portfolio, contributed $3.9 billion in sales, or 34 percent of total net sales, and were 24 percent higher than last year. Pharmaceuticals net sales were $7.7 billion, down 3 percent due to generic competition and weak pricing. Sandoz net sales were flat as volume growth of 11 percentage points more than offset 7 percentage points of price erosion. Alcon net sales fell 7 percent. In Emerging Growth Markets, which comprise all except the US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, net sales grew 5 percent at constant currency, led by Brazil and Turkey. Looking ahead for fiscal 2016, Novartis continues to expect group net sales and core operating income to be broadly in line with the prior year at constant currencies, after absorbing the impact of generic competition. Generic competition impact on sales is expected to be as much as $3.2 billion compared to $2.2 billion in 2015. The anticipated currency impact for the year is negative 2 percent on sales and negative 3 percent on core operating income. Novartis shares were trading at 74.50 Swiss francs, up 0.61 percent. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News Spain's foreign trade deficit narrowed in February from a year ago, as exports grew faster than imports, figures from the Economy Ministry showed Thursday. The trade deficit fell to EUR 1.76 billion in February from EUR 2.04 billion in the corresponding month last year. Exports climbed 2.7 percent year-over-year in February to EUR 20.39 billion in February. Imports rose 1.2 percent to EUR 22.15 billion. During the first two months of the year, total trade deficit of the country was EUR 4.14 billion against EUR 4.63 billion the same period of 2015. Both exports and imports increased by 2.4 percent and 1.0 percent, respectively. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Economic News What parts of the world are seeing the best (and worst) economic performances lately? Click here to check out our Econ Scorecard and find out! See up-to-the-moment rankings for the best and worst performers in GDP, unemployment rate, inflation and much more. The U.S. Air Force's B-52 Stratofortress bomber, which was deployed for strikes against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria earlier this month, conducted its first mission Monday. It targeted an ISIL weapons storage facility in Qayyarah, Iraq, said Col. Steve Warren, the spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, in a teleconference with Pentagon reporters from Baghdad Wednesday. The B-52 will conduct the "same type of precision strikes that we've seen for the last 20 months here in this theater," the spokesman said. Vetted Syrian opposition forces continue to clash with ISIL along the Mara Line, Warren said. He described the situation as a "shoving match" over the Manbij pocket. "We will continue to pressure ISIL but we expect them to fight hard to hold their ground," he said. Warren said the area is strategically important, explaining that sealing it off will cut ISIL's final line of communication and supply line between Turkey and Syria. The situation in the area has become a "fairly fluid and dynamic fight," according to Warren. Warren commended the actions of U.S. Army Capt. Bradley Grimm, who is assigned to Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve in Iraq. Grimm provided actionable intelligence about a bomb threat against a school in Denmark, Warren said. For his exceptional actions, Denmark honored the officer with the Danish Defense Medal for Special Meritorious Effort. "The information he provided helped to foil the plot and resulted in an arrest and the confiscation of explosives," Warren said, adding that "Brad's work likely saved the lives of Danish citizens." For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Political News A federal judge has ruled that the victims of a data breach last year at hook-up service site AshleyMadison.com must reveal their identities to file a class action lawsuit. In July 2015, hackers stole large amounts of user information from hook-up service site AshleyMadison.com and released the data regarding millions of Ashley Madison users to the Internet. The information released include the users' real names and their credit card details. Dozens of the users filed suit and planned to pool their litigation into a proposed class action suit against Avid Life Media, a Toronto-based company that runs AshleyMadison with a slogan - "Life is short. Have an affair. A district court in Missouri ordered the plaintiffs to submit a class action complaint by June 3. However, Judge John Ross denied the use of pseudonyms by the would-be plaintiffs and ruled that the plaintiffs have to use their real names. In his ruling, the judge said, "...there is a compelling public interest in open court proceedings, particularly in the context of a class action, where a plaintiff seeks to represent a class of consumers who have a personal stake in the case and a heightened interest in knowing who purports to represent their interests in the litigation." Forty two plaintiffs had filed under pseudonyms such as John Doe, "to reduce the risk of potentially catastrophic personal and professional consequences that could befall them and their families," should they be publicly identified as someone whose sensitive personal information was contained in Avid's database. Avid Life had also opposed the use of fake names by the plaintiffs, noting that anonymous lawsuits are only permitted in "rare and exceptional circumstances." One of the plaintiffs has already withdrawn his lawsuit following the ruling. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News Volkswagen AG (VKW.L,VLKAF.PK,VOW.BE) has reached a deal with the US federal government and attorney generals for the German automaker to buy back or fix the nearly 600,000 diesel cars that violated emissions standards. San Francisco Federal Judge Charles Breyer said that the deal also includes "substantial compensation" for the car owners on top of the option of having Volkswagen buyback car or fix it free for them. The financial details of the offer, which is still being finalized, were not disclosed. According to reports, Volkswagen would spend just over $1 billion to compensate owners. Volkswagen were sued by car owners and the U.S. DoJ after the company in September acknowledged that it cars had failed emissions tests and it intentionally launched those cars on roads. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News President Barack Obama highlighted the level of cooperation between the U.S. and its Gulf Arab allies during his visit to Saudi Arabia but acknowledged tactical differences with respect to Iran. Speaking to the press after a session of the U.S.-Gulf Cooperation Council Summit on Thursday, Obama said the countries agree on the need to deter Iranian provocations but noted there have been concerns about the U.S. negotiating with the Iranian government. "And what I've said to them is we have to have a dual track," Obama said. "We have to be effective in our defenses and hold Iran to account where it is acting in ways that are contrary to international rules and norms." "But we also have to have the capacity to enter into a dialogue to reduce tensions and to identify ways in which the more reasonable forces inside of Iran can negotiate with the countries in the region, with its neighbors, so that we don't see an escalation of proxy fights across the region," he added. Obama noted that both Democratic and Republican presidents negotiated with the Soviet Union even during the height of the Cold War. "Even as Iran is calling us 'The Great Satan,' we were able to get a deal done where they got rid of their nuclear stockpiles, and that makes us safer," the president said. "That's not a sign of weakness, that's a sign of strength." The president's remarks came as he wrapped up his trip to Riyadh that was partly seen as an effort to ease tensions with Saudi Arabia, which has expressed deep skepticism about the nuclear deal with Iran. Obama said the summit had allowed the U.S. and its Gulf Arab allies to reach a common vision on how to move forward in key areas. The fight against the terrorist group known as ISIS as well as conflicts in Syria and Yemen were major topics of discussion during the summit. Given the ongoing threats in the region, Obama said the U.S. would continue to increase security cooperation with its GCC partners, including helping them improve their own capacity to defend themselves. Obama said the U.S. and the GCC will also launch a new high-level economic dialogue with a focus on adjusting to lower oil prices, increasing economic ties and supporting reforms. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News The Boston Beer Company, Inc. (SAM) announced the company currently projects full year 2016 earnings per share to be between $6.50 and $7.30, a decrease in the range from the previously communicated estimate of $7.60 to $8.00. The company noted that its actual 2016 earnings per share could vary significantly from the current projection. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect the company to report profit per share of $7.77. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items. Full-year 2016 depletion and shipment change is now estimated at between minus 4% and plus 2%, a decrease in the range from the previously communicated estimate of growth of mid-single digits. Full-year 2016 capital spending is now estimated to be between $50 million and $70 million, a decrease in the range from the previously communicated estimate of $60 million to $80 million. Gross margin is projected to be between 51% and 53%,, a decrease in the range from the previously communicated estimate of between 52% and 54%. Boston Beer reported net income for the first quarter of $7.0 million, or $0.53 per share, a decrease of $6.7 million or $0.47 per share from the first quarter of 2015. On average, eight analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected the company to report profit per share of $0.96 for the quarter. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items. Net revenue was $188.83 million compared to $199.50 million, a year ago. Analysts expected revenue of $198.42 million for the quarter. Depletions declined 5% from the comparable 13-week period in the prior year, reflecting decreases in the Samuel Adams and Angry Orchard brands, partially offset by increases in Twisted Tea and Coney Island brands. Core shipment volume was approximately 830,000 barrels, a 6% decrease from the first quarter of 2015. Shares of The Boston Beer Company were down more than 11% after hours. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News American Electric Power (AEP) announced two decisions from the Ohio Supreme Court upheld capacity cost charges for the company's AEP Ohio utility unit, but rejected a part of AEP Ohio's retail stability rider competitive transition charge. The company expects the net financial result will be minimal. "Although the Supreme Court's decision rejected one part of the retail stability rider, the Court found that the amount of the energy credit used to reduce our capacity costs was not appropriately determined. We believe that when we present information about our actual capacity costs in the remand proceedings, our cost-based price will increase and yield a small net impact when combined with the deferral reduction from the RSR decision," said Nicholas Akins, AEP CEO. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News New Delhi: In the second major step towards enabling women officers in the armed forces to serve in combat roles in the past few months, it was the Navys turn on Wednesday to announce that it is finalising a policy for women officers to serve on select warships that have appropriate facilities for women. In a path-breaking decision, the Navy also announced that seven women officers from the batch of Short Service Commission officers of the education branch and naval constructor cadre, who joined in 2008-09, have been granted permanent commission in service. The Navy also announced that starting in 2017, women officers can choose to join as pilots of maritime reconnaissance planes Boeing P8I, Dornier, etc. as also in the Naval Armament Inspectorate cadre, and that a total of eight branches/cadres will be opened for women officers in the Navy. IAF chief Air Chief Marshal Arup Raha had recently announced that the first batch of Indian women fighter pilots, comprising three cadets, will be inducted in the Indian Air Force on June 18. This marks a change in the positions of at least two of the three armed services compared to the positions they took about a decade ago. A report submitted by the Chiefs of Staff Committee (COSC) comprising the then service chiefs to the government in 2006-07 had recommended exclusion of women from combat roles in the armed forces. The report was submitted then after a study was conducted by the COSC on all aspects related to women officers in the armed forces, including induction in combat roles. The study had recommended exclusion of women officers for the present in close combat roles where chances of physical contact with the enemy are high. But the outlook seems to have changed rather drastically in the past decade. In a statement on Wednesday, the Navy said, In order to demonstrate that women are second to none in tough adventure activities, a crew of six naval women officers, including the skipper, is meticulously preparing for the first all-women circumnavigation of the world in 2017 by an Indian team in an indigenously built ocean sailing vessel, Mhadei II. Naval sources had said a few months ago that naval women officers may also be posted on warships in the next few months and that warships being built are being configured such that they have separate accommodation quarters for women officers. This is the second major step towards enabling women officers to serve in combat roles after the IAF and ministry of defence (MoD) decided last year to allow women IAF officers to serve as fighter pilots. Air Chief Marshal Arup Raha had recently said, We inducted women as pilots in 1991, but on only helicopter and transport (planes). I must thank the defence minister for having approved the IAFs proposal to induct women as fighter pilots. Very soon...On June 18, the Air Force will get women fighter pilots. ... As of now three women trainees have volunteered to join the fighter stream. They are under the second phase of their training. Once they complete their training... They are on par with their male colleagues and the passing out parade is scheduled on June 18. The three women IAF cadets are Bhawana Kanth, Avani Chaturvedi and Mohana Singh. The three are expected to undergo advanced training for a year after they are inducted and are likely to be eligible to fly fighter aircraft from June, 2017. Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu offers cake to a physically-challenged girl who greeted him on his birthday, at NAC Kalyana Mandapam in Vijayawada on Wednesday. (Photo: Ch. Narayana Rao) Vijayawada: AP Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu today said there was need to promote population in the country keeping in tune with the changing trends. Launching the Chandranna Samchara Chikitsa mobile vans here on Wednesday, the CM said countries like Japan and China were facing problems as a majority of their populations was filled with old people. Hitherto, our focus was on population control. But now we have to promote population. The trend has changed, Mr Naidu said at the event. Countries like Japan and China are facing problems because of aging population. Now they are also going for population promotion. The trend has changed, so we too should promote population, the CM said. He added that the Infant Mortality Rate and Maternal Mortality Rate were showing steady decline in the state. In 2014, AP topped the southern states in IMR and MMR but now we are on top in the country in terms of decline in these two parameters, he said. Mr Naidu said that his government was trying to develop AP as a healthcare hub. The UK is setting up a world-class hospital in our new capital Amaravati. AP will also have a world-class medical college. AIIMS is also coming up at Mangalagiri with modern facilities, he added. The CM launched Chandranna Samchara Chikitsa', a mobile health service facility for rural areas. About 275 mobile medical units would go round 13,000 villages twice a month to provide healthcare services to people. Each mobile unit would have a doctor, nurse, pharmacist and a lab technician and will be equipped with latest medicare facilities. Mr Naidu also launched the Rota Virus vaccination and Inactivated Polio virus Vaccine immunisation programmes on the occasion. A free CT scan facility in government hospitals in Tekkali, Chirala, Gudur and Proddutur on a pilot basis were also launched by Naidu. Union Civil Aviation Minister P. Ashok Gajapati Raju, state health minister Kamineni Srinivas and other ministers and officials were also present at the event. Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu travels by a local train from Currey Road to CST in Mumbai on Thursday. (Photo: PTI) Mumbai: Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu on Thursday travelled in a 'local' train, interacted with commuters and also got invited to a wedding by a passenger. Prabhu, who attended an event at the Central Railway's prestigious Matunga Workshop, boarded the local train at Currey Road station and alighted at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST). Today MR @sureshpprabhu traveled in a local train from Currey Road to CST and interacted with commuters pic.twitter.com/MKzv4bYQNq Ministry of Railways (@RailMinIndia) April 21, 2016 Prabhu interacted with commuters during the journey. A commuter gave him a wedding invitation and requested the minister to accept it. The Minister later left for Mantralaya (state secretariat), where he, along with Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, briefed media on upcoming rail projects in the state. I give my consent to Sakshi Post to be in touch with me via email for the purpose of event marketing and corporate communications. Privacy Policy Hyderabad: Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao has been invited by the Governor of California to attend a meet on clean energy. Edmond G Brown Jr, Governor of California, has invited Rao to the 'Sub-continental Clean Energy Ministerial' to be held in San Francisco in June, an official release said here today. US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, Nisha Biswal handed over the invite to K T Rama Rao, IT Minister and son of the CM, during her visit to the city today. "Both Telangana and California are facing similar challenges in terms of rainfall shortage and reduced green cover in their respective states. In this context both the states should work jointly to overcome these challenges," the release said, quoting Brown in the invite. Meanwhile, Rama Rao explained to the visiting US official about the initiatives being taken by the Telangana government for the promotion of industrial growth in the state. The third phase of West Bengal assembly polls testified a voter turnout of 40 per cent in four hours. (Photo: PTI) Kolkata: Violence on Thursday claimed the life of a CPI(M) polling agent in Murshidabad district during the third phase of Assembly elections in West Bengal. The third phase saw a voter turnout of 40 per cent till afternoon. In Domkal Assembly seat of Murshidabad, the body of a 35-year-old CPI(M) polling agent was found lying outside a polling booth at Shibapara area. CPI(M) candidate and former minister Anisur Rahman said the man identified as Tahidur Islam was killed when bombs were hurled outside the polling booth. Read: West Bengal: Photographs of candidates displayed in polling booths District SP C Sudhakar, however, said the murder was not related to polls. Left parties blamed the killing on ruling Trinamool Congress alleging that they have unleashed a reign of terror to intimidate voters. The Trinamool Congress said the death was a fallout of infighting between the alliance partners of Congress and Left Front. Four persons were injured in separate incidents in polling booths in Ketugram constituency. The ear of a CPI(M) worker was slashed and leg of another party supporter was fractured in a scuffle in front of booth no 78. Another two CPI(M) workers were injured at booth no 48 when bombs were reportedly hurled at them. District Returning officer Soumitra Mohan said four persons have been arrested in this connection. In Beleghata Assembly seat in Kolkata, there were complaints of voter intimidation outside poll booths after which seven people were detained by the police, officials said. Meanwhile, the highest voter turnout of 42.99 per cent was recorded in the 22 seats of Murshidabad district while the lowest of 32.71 per cent was recorded in the metropolis till 11 AM. Read: CPI(M) worker killed in clash as West Bengal votes in Assembly polls The voting percentage in 17 seats of Nadia district was 40.78 while in 16 seats of Burdwan it was 37.33. The overall average was 39.76 per cent. Amidst a tight security cover by one lakh security personnel deployed to look after law and order, polling which began at 7 AM in 16,461 polling stations will go on till 6 PM. Over 1.37 voters are eligible to exercise their franchise in this phase to elect their legislators from among 418 candidates, including 34 women, spread over Murshidabad, Burdwan and Nadia districts and north Kolkata. Key candidates in this phase include Trinamool ministers Shashi Panja and Sadhan Pande, BJP national secretary Rahul Sinha, five-time Congress MLA Md Sohrab, CPI-M MLA Anisur Rahman and retired IPS officer Nazrul Islam. The Election Commission has identified 3,401 hamlets in this phase as vulnerable. Reports from Burdwan district said four persons were injured in separate incidents in polling booths under Ketugram Assembly constituency. The ear of a CPI(M) worker identified as Seltu Sheikh was slashed and leg of another CPI(M) man was fractured after a scuffle in front of booth no 78. Both the injured were rushed to Ketugram Block Primary Health Centre. District Returning officer Soumitra Mohan said four persons have been arrested in this connection. In another incident, two CPI(M) workers were injured at booth no 48 under Ketugram Assembly seat when bombs were reportedly hurled at them. In a separate incident, Central Forces obstructed Trinamool Congress candidate in Purbasthali Uttar seat of the district, Tapan Chattopadhyay, from entering booth no. 20 due to a "communication gap". He was later allowed to enter after he showed valid papers. Polling was delayed for some time at a polling booth under ward no 3 of Katwa Assembly seat after two EVM machines were replaced when it started malfunctioning, officials said. Two persons who were trying to vote for a second time were detained from a polling station in Kalyani constituency of Nadia district, police said. The two were waiting in queues in separate booths of Adarsha Shikkhyatan school in Gayespur area.They were picked up by central force personnel as ink marks were visible on their fingers, police said. CPI(M) district secretary Sumit Dey alleged that party supporters were obstructed by Trinamool Congress activists and agents were beaten up in some places of Gayespur in Nadia district. The Congregational Christian Church of Samoa in Christchurch, New Zealand celebrated their 50th anniversary last week. The church service on Sunday, 17th of April 1966 saw the official opening of the first Congregational Christian Church in the South Island; which was the 5th in New Zealand. The officiating leader of the opening ceremony in 1966 was Rev. Siaosi Ieriko, the Elder Minister from Auckland, and the sermon was delivered by Rev. Siataga Tuiataga from Samoa. The brief history of the church saw 5 families-with 28 or more peoplw, responsible for the inception of the said congregation on that Sunday. That initial ceremony was conducted at a venue formerly known at the time as the Friendly Hall at Hastings Street in the area known as Sydenham, Christchurch. The deacons Aoga Timai and Afioga Mafola Timaloa-were representatives of the E.F.K.S from Auckland, whilst the deacon Aoga Taavao Pulepule Aiono, represented the E.F.K.S from Wellington. This ceremony also saw the ordination of Nasdau Fuimaono and his wife Lima; Soisoi Manu and Loimata as well as Anetone Simanu and Sina-as deacons of the congregation. It also dealt with the official recognition once again of the appointment of deacon of the orator Feaunati and his wife Atoalii from Samoa. These deacons were responsible for the work in its initial stages. The first ever pastor of the E.F.K.S. in Christchurch was Sekone loane and his wife Avaee. Sekone and Avaee had signed an agreement with the congregation in October 1967. It has been revealed these were the hardest times of Gods work in this city. However, God has been very supportive of the pastor and his wife. The year, 1974 saw Sekone and Avaee leave after serving for (8) years to be in line with the decision of the Church. The second in line was Tepa Faletoese and May. He entered into contract with the congregation in September 1974. Rev. Tepa and May were also appointed the Elder Pastor of the Church in the South Island. The time of Tepa and May in the congregation saw the purchase of the church building and the hall at the Colombo corner and Brougham Streets to be the personal property of the E.F.K.S. These properties were blessed on the 23rd April 1977. The church was named: The Cross of Victory", whilst hall was christened The Abode of Rest". These names are still maintained for the existing church and the hall. However, when Tepa and May retired on the 14th of May 1980, the Elder and his wife did not return to continue their work. They have moved to Australia to stay. Rev. Tepa and May also established the first E.F.K.S church in Sydney. Temo Pati and his wife Faafeai was the third pastor. He entered into agreement with the congregation in Christchurch on Saturday 25 April 1981 and left the church in 1984. The fourth and the current pastor is Rev. Tumama and Elisapeta, they had an agreement with the church on the 5th February in 1985 and theyre still with the them until today. A Masters thesis which examines Pacific mothers discussions of child support in New Zealand, was presented to the National University of Samoa library yesterday. Moeata Moore said she was both overwhelmed and humbled to be adding her thesis, Family, Family obligations and money. Pacific mothers discussions of child support to the collection had in Samoa, where her academic journey started and where she had completed all of her primary and secondary school education. In his welcome, Chief Librarian, Avalogo Togi Tunupopo expressed his gratitude for the valuable gift which he said will be added to their library collection. He offered the use of the library facilities for Moore on future visits back home to Samoa. Moore is a wife and mother of two children, a multiple scholarship winner, a University of Auckland graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree, a Bachelor of Arts Honours degree in Sociology (with First Class Honours) and a Masters degree also with First Class Honours. She is about to undertake her PhD and she is a lecturer in the University of Aucklands Sociology department. Moving to N.Z, Moore said she had the drive to study, but didnt find her passion until she took her very first Sociology paper. My position as a Pacific person or Pacific woman - living in N.Z brought many of the sociological concepts and theories that I learnt in class to life and doing my Bachelors degree taught me what to think and how to think sociologically. But after completing my Bachelors, I noticed an absence of any engagement with Pacific literature in most of my courses as well as a lack of any Pacific presence in the sociological literature all the theoretical ideas and positions that were taught to me were largely Western ideas based on Eurocentric norms and values so in essence I was being taught how to think sociologically through a predominantly Eurocentric lens. Moore said she never wanted to be a token Pacific person researching Pacific issues, but the truth, she said, lies in the fact that if Pacific people dont do this research, they will remain largely invisible in the published sociological literature. I knew that my thesis would have a Pacific-focus, and I was particularly interested in the way that family obligations for care and money were organised and negotiated in post-separation Pacific families in NZ. I was particularly interested in how responsive child support policies were to familial norms and values in Pacific communities in NZ. After reading Peter Dunnes NZs Minister of Revenue child support discussion document, a discussion document which outlined the proposed changes to child support legislation in N.Z, I was surprised by the way he framed the changing nature of families in N.Z. My surprise was in the fact that when he talked about the changing nature of family structures and family relations he failed to incorporate the differential ways that Pacific families are organised and negotiated instead it was a one size fits all approach to family. So I couldnt help but wonder, if policy initiatives in N.Z. are based on Eurocentric ideals and norms, what does this mean for Pacific people and communities in N.Z? So my thesis attempts to answer this question, said Moore. In a question and answer section of the presentation to library and academic staff of the Faculty of Art, Professor Sina Vaai, agreed with Moeata about the lack of Pacific literature used in the Auckland University in a city with a high Pacific population. She said that in conversations with Auckland University lecturer Dr Selina Tusitala Marsh, she had noted that there had been a shift to Western and Asian Pacific literature after the departure from the university of Professor Albert Wendt. In answer to a question from Head of Department and Senior Lecturer Amituanai Vernetta Heem about quantitative rather than qualitative statistics, Moeata said she had been constrained by the structure and requirements of a thesis. I was only able to interview less than 10 mothers, she explained. However for her PhD, she said she planned to interview between 50-60 women. N.U.S. Sociology lecturer Mailo Helen Tanielu who is also an Auckland graduate, congratulated Moeata and said it was inspiring for her looking at young Samoan women. This is a real success story; one of the few that has come out, she said. When Rodger McCutcheon decided to move with his business from Tonga to the Samoan Archipelago about one year ago, the first person he met was Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi. He was very encouraging about the idea to found a helicopter rescue service in Samoa. But I said all along I didnt want any financial support for my company, because it is meant to be a fully private operation. With this step, Mr. McCutcheon not only tried to establish a rescue service in Samoa, his helicopter is also used for purposes concerning tourism in the country. Most of the incoming bookings we receive are made on Facebook and include requests for weddings, scenic flights or transfers. However, the companys main goal, which is to serve for the country as a rescue service, is still held up by a lack of publicity for the company. We could absolutely do a rescue mission right now. If somebody would call now, we could lift off immediately, there is no problem with that. But the people in Samoa do not quite know yet about the opportunity to pick up the phone and call a helicopter if its needed. To improve the cooperation with the local hospital, Mr. McCutcheon also has a concrete vision, which includes the formation of a trust for his company. My passion is to form the Samoa helicopter trust. This is a standard operation that is done all around the world, which would give us the opportunity to work with trusted people. Any funding or donation that we would receive goes straight into that trust and therefore we can ensure that our rescue service will be available at any time and for any person that needs our help. According to Mr. McCutcheon, a plan to set up such a trust for his service in Samoa is already in the works. If we develop this trust in the same way it is done in Australia or New Zealand, we cant fail. I am already in touch with people involved in the trust over there and hopefully, we can form one here as well. With this in the works, Mr. McCutcheon already has some plans for the future of Samoa Helicopters in mind, which include the expansion of the fleet. Currently we use only one helicopter for both businesses, tourism and rescue service. Our main focus certainly is to use one additional helicopter which would then be used for rescue purposes only, he explains. The helicopter he speaks about, the Eurocopter AS 350, is described by Mr. McCutcheon as probably the most versatile and world recognized tourism and rescue helicopter. This model has saved over twenty thousand lives in Australia and New Zealand and speaking of our helicopter here in particular, it is approved and certified by the civil air division here in Samoa as well as in Australia. Mr. McCutcheon also spoke out about the recent tragedy that happened in Apia with the explosion of a fuel tank at the citys main wharf, where one worker lost his life. First I have to explain that from a helicopters angle, it is possible to see things in a way that otherwise is not available. From emergencys point of view, the helicopter could have been used to estimate the danger or at least to provide footage for the local media. But because of the heat that was generated by the fire, the helicopter wouldnt have done any good. The best decision was to get the fire service trucks out, which they did. Samoa Helicopters can be reached at the emergency number 7288228. The Ministry of Health has issued a warning about a potentially deadly disease spread through the urine of infected animals. The warning is contained in a public notice signed by the Frances Brebner, the Acting Chief Executive Officer of the Ministry of Health. The Ministry of Health wishes to warn the public of an infectious disease spread through the urine of infected animals which carry these bacteria, it reads. These animals include pigs, cats, dogs and rodents such as rats. The disease may lead to death. According to the Ministry, humans can become infected through contact with water, soil or food contaminated with the urine of infected animals. It is advised that the public take preventive measures to minimize the risks of becoming infected by; Keeping all food and water for consumption covered securely to prevent risks of contamination. Ensuring that protective clothing, gloves and foot ware are always worn by those exposed to risks of infection through contaminated water or soil. Washing hands with soap and water before preparing food and after working outside. Ensuring that all drinking water is boiled. Avoiding swimming in rivers or areas where recent flooding has occurred. Ensuring proper rubbish and waste water disposal to avoid rat and other rodent infestations. Asked if there are already cases where people have been diagnosed with the disease, Dr. Saine Vaai said yes. There are cases but I cant go further on that point at this time, she said, adding that the Ministry would call a Media conference to address the issue. A tropical depression sitting to the North North-West of Wallis and Futuna has turned into a cyclone. The Fiji Met service is monitoring Cyclone Amos which is moving in a north-west direction at around 10 knots. Forecaster Misaeli Funaki said it did not pose any direct threat to cyclone-weary Fiji. He said it was moving away from Wallis and Futuna but was expected to make a u-turn and head towards Samoa over the coming days. "But I've been told that the authorities in Samoa are also aware of it and they're anticipating its gradual turn. There is a high possibility that it will develop into a tropical cyclone and we are monitoring its development very closely." Misaeli Funaki said the Met Service was issuing warnings for it. For more details http://www.samet.gov.ws/index.php/forecasting-services/public-forecast A five percent tariff increase across the board at the Samoa Ports Authority (S.P.A) is set to raise shipping-related costs in Samoa. The increase becomes effective next month. The raise, which was approved in 2014 by the government, is part of a plan to increase the cost of services by 25 percent to boost the governments coffers. According to S.P.A. General Manager, Aiganalaavasa Asofa Fereti, the 25 per cent increase is too high to implement at one time. So the decision was reached to raise it by 5 per cent per year. The first increase was in 2014. Next months raise is the second one. The second increase should have been implemented in October last year, recalled the General Manager. It was delayed by the then Minister (Manualesagalala Enokati Posala) because of its impact on the general public and it was signed to be effective this year. Its the second increase for the 25percent which it will be 10percent. Its been allocated like this in fraction because it will gravely impact the public if we go ahead with 25percent straight. Aiga explained that the approved increase was done to help the authority in terms of revenue and developments. Those developments he referred to include the extension of the Matautu wharf. Although the project is planned to be funded by Japan, Aiga said money is needed for maintenance work. The General Manager was also asked how much the authority has gained since the increase in 2014. In response, he said he does not have the details but from what he has seen the flow of money appears to be good and the initiative is working. The increase is levied on export and imported goods entering the wharf amongst other ports related costs. In 2013, the former Opposition Leader, Palusalue Faapo II raised alarm bells over the huge proposed rise from S.P.A. Palusalue had urged Cabinet to reconsider passing the proposal because companies affected will pass on the extra expenses to the public and cause the cost of living to shoot upwards. He blamed the authority for its reckless spending. S.P.A. owes an estimated $200m incurred through reckless spending especially on such ill advised projects like the revival of Satitoa wharf at Aleipata, he said. Some $50million was poured into the wharf which to date has not returned a sene of incomethey now function through overdraft cheques require bank. At the time, the then Tautua Whip who is now the Associate Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Lealailepule Rimoni Aiafi was equally concerned. He pointed out that the increase will be paid by you and me. Ninety percent of goods that enter the country do so via the wharves, he said. Inter island ferry fares are bound to increase. The last of the six petitions before the Supreme Court was withdrawn yesterday. Brought by Ale Vena against his rival, Lealailepule Rimoni Aiafi, the petition questioned the qualification of more than 400 voters in Faleata West. Yesterday, Ale, a former Member of Parliament asked for the petition to be withdrawn. In doing so, it means the Associate Minister of Communications and Information Technology will serve out the rest of his five years in Parliament. The petitioners lawyer, Maiava Visekota Peteru, advised the Court about her clients decision to withdraw the petition. Neither Sarona Ponifasio who is representing Lealailepule nor Muriel Lui who is representing the Electoral Office objected. Justice Vui Clarence Nelson accepted the application. He ordered a notice of withdrawal be published in todays Samoa Observer. The matter will be recalled after 14 days of publication on 5th May for a formal withdrawal to take place in Court. Justice Vui also noted that there was no objection from the respondents and counter allegations against the petitioner were also withdrawn. These matters are never easy, Justice Vui told the Court filled with constituents from Faleata West. The Court does not take these matters lightly and the Court will also advise the government to look into the legislation in the matters raised on how to deal with it. It doesnt mean that the petition was of no use but it is very useful in moving forward for general elections. In response, Ale thanked the Court for considering his argument and taking it into account. Outside Court, the former M.P for Faleata West said after the hearing on Tuesday he saw that his argument was not in line with what was defined in the legislation. It appears that amendments are needed in the legislation to enable only the descendants of Faleata West to elect their own M.P, Ale explained. I felt it was no use to argue the case when its not in the same interpretation of the law. I decided it was best to withdraw it and make submissions before parliament just like what the Judge says to advise them on the legislation. Ale added Leala has gotten away this time but he will catch him again. On the other hand, Leala thanked God for the outcome of the case. The Associate Minister said he forgives Ale and claiming that there were people behind him pushing for the petition. Now we all know that Leala and his committee did not do anything wrong during the election, said Leala. Ales argument is valid and it calls for what I had always been urging in Parliament to allow another additional seat for Faleata West considering its increasing electoral roll...but Im still the champion. Leala also suggested for Prime Minister and government to reconsider petitions after elections saying there must be a better way of going through it. He acknowledged his constituency for their support. In his evidence on Tuesday, Ale told the Court that people who are not direct descendants of Faleata, should not have the right to elect an M.P. for the constituency. I believe that a person who is a resident of Vaitele should have a connection (piitaga) to Faleata, said Ale. If not, there is an urban seat to register in rather than voting for our constituency where they have no blood relationship. Kinship as I interpret it as an heir (suli). In my own belief everyone that resides in Vaitele and other parts of Faleata who has no blood relationship or is a direct descendant, should register in an urban area. The European Union is broadening its battle with Google, alleging that the technology giant rigs the global market for mobile apps by making its Android operating system give preferential treatment to its own products. "Google's behavior denies consumers a wider choice of mobile apps and services and stands in the way of innovation," EU Antitrust Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said Wednesday. The Android operating system is designed to feature Google's search engine, maps, Gmail, YouTube video service and other products that give the company more opportunities to sell digital ads. Device makers don't have to use Android as Google sets it up, but European regulators are looking into complaints that the company penalizes those that deviate from Google's favored design. Vestager kicked off what is likely to be a protracted legal battle with a so-called Statement of Objections accusing Google it uses its high market share to force its apps on customers. Vestager said Wednesday's move in no way prejudges the outcome of its investigation. "It is an interim step and not the end of the road," said Vestager. Google strongly denied the charges and its General Council Kent Walker said the company is looking "forward to working with the European Commission to demonstrate that Android is good for competition and good for consumers." The 28-nation EU also has other investigations against Google, with the biggest centering on its search services. The EU filed a complaint a year ago alleging that Google has been improperly favoring its own shopping comparison service in its own search results. Google has adamantly denied those allegations too. If it's determined Google broke the EU's antitrust laws, the company will face a fine of up to 10 percent of its revenue in addition to potential overhaul of how it distributes Android. That would translate into a penalty of $7.5 billion, based on Google's revenue last year. Vestager noted that Google had shares of over 90 percent in Europe in the markets for general Internet search services, licensable smart mobile operating systems and app stores for the Android operating system. Her view is "that Google has abused its dominant positions in these three markets." Four out of every five smartphones and tablets globally, and in the European market, use Android. Google has stormed the market since it began eight years ago to give away its Android software for free to manufacturers to counter the runaway success of Apple's iPhone. The EU's case could turn into a major blow to Google if it results in changes that undercut the company's growth in the mobile ad market. As people becoming increasingly tethered to their smartphones, Google eventually expects to make more money from mobile devices than it does from the traffic it gets on personal computers. This year, Google's worldwide revenue from mobile ads is expected to total $34 billion, more than doubling from $16 billion two years ago, according to the research firm eMarketer. Google gets a big chunk of that money from ads on Apple's iPhones, but Android commands a larger audience. Android powers billions of mobile devices throughout the world, largely because it doesn't cost phone and tablet makers anything to use the software. "Dominant companies have a responsibility not to abuse their position," said Vestager. "Google has abused its dominant position." Investors, evidently, aren't too worried about the EU cases damaging Google. Shares in Alphabet Inc., Google's holding company, dipped by just $1.33 to $774.92 Wednesday. While Vestager complains about Android's "restrictive licensing practices," Google's Walker emphasized that the company's agreements allow its partners to use and modify the software at will. The EU charges come a day after Canadian competition authorities cleared Google of some of the same issues that the EU is objecting to, said the CCIA global group of computer, communications and Internet companies. Google, based in Mountain View, California, now has 12 weeks to respond to Vestager's objections. -AP Think a minuteIn 1919, just after World War I, the cholera disease broke out all over Europe killing many thousands of people. The British government sent doctors all over the world to find a cure for cholera. These doctors later came back and said that the Chinese did not get cholera because they boiled their water before they used it. Soon all the radios and newspapers in England were telling everyone to boil their water before they drink it. They even sent this message to the Pacific Islands since they had British soldiers there. Yet later, they heard that the cholera disease had still broken out in the islands killing many thousands of Islanders. The British leaders questioned the people in the island villages and asked them if they were boiling their water? The Islanders answered yes, they definitely were boiling their water to drink. But this is how they did it. They boiled just a small amount of water and put it in a bottle. Then only once or twice a day, they would get the bottle and drink a small teaspoon of the boiled water, like taking medicine. Then they would put the bottle away again and the rest of the day they drank unboiled, dirty water. No wonder people still got cholera and died! Yet many of us do that with Jesus Christ. We dont want to live Jesus way every day, so we go to church one day a week to feel better about ourselves. Then we go back to living our own way the other 6 days of the week. Or, if were not religious church people, we think that if were a good, kind person, then God will accept us into heaven after we die. But just like 1 teaspoon of clean water a day will not keep you healthy, only 1 day a week of living for Jesus Christ, or just trying to be a good person, is not even close to our Makers standard of pure goodness. The only kind of goodness God can live together with is perfect, pure goodness of all our thoughts, motives, words, and actions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Think a Minute Chennai: Continuing its tirade against the ruling AIADMK and the opposition DMK, the BJP lashed out at the state government for claiming credit to the subsidised schemes while questioning DMK treasurer M.K. Stalins silence on the granite scam. The party took strong exception to the alleged silence of Mr Stalin on the granite scam that rocked the state, during his election campaign in Madurai. The BJP also questioned the double standards of the DMKs first family on Hindu religion. The saffron party launched the scathing attack on both the Dravidian majors with renewed vigor on its social media. All our slogans and memes have been approved by our party high command and we hope to reach the young voters and those desiring non-corrupt governance, through our campaign in Tamil, a senior BJP leader said. The campaign will be intensified in the coming days and in addition the party would also promote its candidates on Twitter and Facebook, he added. The party is extensively using the speeches of its national chief Amit Shah and Union Minister Prakash Javadekar in targeting the AIADMK. It ridiculed the ruling AIADMK government for not giving the due credit to the Narendra Modi government for the successful implementation of the subsidised schemes, especially the free rice scheme. The response to our social media campaign from the public has been encouraging. Apart from our party members, our sites have been attracting scores of likeminded persons, a senior leader said about the response to the partys official Twitter and Facebook accounts. A nearly half-mile-long tunnel leading from Mexico to San Diego was discovered and more than a ton of cocaine and seven tons of marijuana was seized, the U.S. attorney's office said Wednesday. Six people were arrested. The tunnel extends 300 yards from a house in Tijuana, Mexico, to the border and then 500 yards on the U.S. side to a fenced lot in a San Diego industrial area. The tunnel was equipped with a rail system, ventilation, lights and a large elevator, officials said. The exit on the U.S. side is about 3 feet wide and was covered by a trash bin. The six people arrested in San Diego on Friday were charged with crimes involving drugs and construction of the tunnel. The discovery demonstrates the enduring appeal of tunnels to smugglers, despite the significant time and money required to build one. Dozens of tunnels have been found along the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years, some equipped with hydraulic lifts and electric rail cars. Most of the tunnels found were in California and Arizona, many of them incomplete. The San Diego-Tijuana region is popular because its clay-like soil is relatively easy to dig with shovels and pneumatic tools, and both sides of the border have warehouses that provide cover for trucks and heavy equipment. -AP Dear Editor, Re: Health warning issued Ive just looked up the disease with no name that the Ministry of Health had warned the public about. The disease is called leptospirosis and weils disease. In most people they get flu like symptoms for a few days and make a full recovery. It is easily treated with antibiotics. Rarely is it fatal unless someone has a compromised immune system. What is all the death scare about? Seems like a bit of an over reaction to me. Unless of course the government still hasnt paid their bill for the antibiotics the hospital needed before or maybe the antibiotics are still sitting at the wharf and what they are really worried about is not having the antibiotics that would easily cure this disease because of their own negligence. This sounds more like it to me. The government is afraid of people dying from a simple disease that antibiotics would most surely cure. W.W Without a lot of fanfare, the Ministry of Prime Minister and Cabinet discreetly congratulated their Minister in their own subtle way, behind closed doors. Said M.P.M.C Chief Executive, Agafili Shem Leo;Although our modest Minister did not expect his staff to present him with gifts to welcome him back and show our appreciation, we felt it would be amiss not to pay homage to the most distinguish, prolific and longest serving Prime Minister in our countrys history. And the Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi has appreciated the gesture complementing the M.P.M.C staff for their hard work and dedication. He is also mindful of the constructive and not so constructive scrutiny of his long years of leadership, but he remains steadfast that Samoa is enjoying his administrations hard labor of love. Compare our country now to where it was some 30 years ago. Let us not forget that we live in a world where finding fault in others seems to be the favorite blood sport, said Tuilaepa. It has long been the basis of political campaign and it sells newspaper. But I have invested the best part of my political life in building up this our country and government. And I am far from perfect but I do think I am able, through the media, to deliver a good, simple, understandable message. Tuilaepa debut in the political arena in 1980 when he won the bi-election to represent the electoral constituency of Lepa. And since then he has retained the Lepa seat for 25 consecutive years. He served as finance minister in the Tofilau government of 1991 and 1996. In 1996, he was appointed Deputy Prime Minister. And two years later in 1998, Tuilaepa succeeded the late Prime Minister Tofilau Eti Alesana who retired from parliament due to ill health, becoming the 6th Prime Minister of Samoa. He has successfully led his H.R.P.P party to re-election in the 2001, 2006, 2011 and 2016 general elections. And as they say, the rest is history The family of a young woman claiming to be carrying the marks of Jesus Christs suffering has rubbished a number of reports going around about her. Toaipuapuaga Opapos father, Reverend Opapo, said there are so many stories being spread on social media about his daughter but none of them is true. People have been saying on social media that she has been in hospital for two weeks and that our family is looking for blood because she has lost so much blood, he said. None of these reports is true, my daughter is well and she is nowhere near the hospital. I heard about those rumors and I read about them as well. I told my children not to reply to any of those comments. Rev. Opapo said his daughter continues to carry the marks on her hands, feet and forehead. As a father, he said it hurts him when he sees what people are saying about his daughter. I got an advice from some people that its time for justice to be served but I dont want to, just let them talk, he added. My daughter is busy preparing their papers because we are planning to leave for New Zealand to attend to my daughters graduation and because our families there requested for her to come over. Rev. Opapo said Toa has remained strong throughout the ordeal and she continues to pray for Samoa. Since she made national and international headlines, Toa has received many requests from different churches for her to speak there. Last Sunday evening for example, she honoured an invitation from the Fagaloa Catholic Church who asked her to retell her story. If people still dont believe, thats their right, he said. Yesterday, she was at Savalalo Primary School where she addressed students and teachers during a special assembly. She is scheduled to attend Samataus Divine Mercy Service tonight. This weekend, she was scheduled to speak at the Gagaifo Congregational Church but that has since been cancelled due to a family funeral in Savaii. Besides, our family in Savaii are asking us to bring her along because they want to see and meet her. When she was approached by the Samoa Observer for a comment, Toa declined. Theres no need to comment, she said. Let them say what they want to say, I just continue my work that I was sent to do. Two weeks ago, the Archbishop of the Catholic Church in Samoa, Alapati Lui Mataeliga, cautioned against drawing conclusions against Toa. We know from the history of the church that its normally Catholics who have this, Archbishop Mataeliga said. Personally, to have something like this happen to a young Samoan lady whose parents belong to the E.F.K.S, to me that is a blessing. It tells us that God doesnt differentiate between people. He is a God for everyone and he chooses whoever he wants to use to send us a message. And God often chooses the lowly, the weak and humble, he said. If you observe this young lady carefully, she is very humble. She is someone who carries herself with so much humility. Archbishop Mataeliga added that such cases are not new in the Catholic Church. And with Toa being a member of the E.F.K.S, the Catholic Church has only become involved to offer support. Asked about people criticizing Toa, the Archbishop said this is disappointing. People are free to choose but I think its important to take our time, hear her out and not be quick to judge her. So even in the Catholic Church, we are not rushing into anything Ive spoken with her father and he said they are waiting for their Annual General meeting and so were happy to offer prayers and wait. Lets try and work out what God is telling us. Im not pointing the finger at anybody in particular but to me the miracle in all this is a mans heart, whether they receive it or reject it. If we receive it, there must be a change in our lives. So its not about pointing the finger and judging, its about hearing out what the message really is for us. Cyclone Amos continues to develop in the Pacific but members of the public in Samoa are asked not to panic. The message comes from the Chairman of the Disaster Advisory Committee, Suluimalo Amataga Penaia, who yesterday said members of the public must stay alert and be aware of possible flooding due to the developing cyclone. Suluimalo confirmed that Samoa is in the path of Cyclone Amos and the Meteorology Office is likely to start issuing warnings about it today. As of yesterday though, he said the cyclone had just started to form and there was no need to issue a cyclone alert at the time as the cyclone was far from Samoa. So at this moment we are only issuing normal weather forecasts, he said. We are warning the public about heavy rain and strong winds. From the models we have seen, the tropical cyclone is moving between Samoa and Tonga and straight to Niue Islands." If it affects Samoa, the country is likely to start experiencing strong winds tomorrow, with the cyclone predicted to be a category 2 by then. Suluimalo predicted that the southern coast of Savaii is likely to be the first part of the country to be affected. At this stage a tropical Cyclone is still category 1, said Suluimalo yesterday. Cyclone Amos is moving at a speed of 10 to 15 kilometers per hour but its outside of Samoas open waters about 500kilometers. As of 7pm last night, Amos was located at 12.6S 179.5W or approximately 406nm (751km) to the West of Asau or about 457nm (847km) west of Apia. Cyclone Amos is moving Northeast at a speed of 02mph (very slow moving) and intensifying with sustained winds of 40mph closed to the centre, increasing to 60mph within the next 24 hours. Based on its forecast track, Tropical Cyclone Amos continues to move eastward and intensify to a Cat 2 before curving Southeast just to the Southwest of Savaii island. Expected fresh to strong winds may affect most of Savaii island by 221800UTC or Saturday morning local time and gale force winds towards the evening when the system is at its closest to Savaii. Wave watch models indicates developing northwest swells of 6-8 feet and may peak around a damaging 18 feet by Sunday morning. A small craft advisory has been issued and high surf may cause flooding for low lying coastal areas as TC Amos nears the Samoa islands. The Assistant Chief Executive Officer of the Meteorology Division, Mulipola Ausetalia Titimaea, said his team is working around the clock to monitor the situation. In the meantime, members of the public are asked to listen to Radio 2AP and the local radio stations for updates. They are also encouraged to log on to the Disaster Manager Offices Facebook page for the latest updates. The World President of the Seventh-day-Adventist Church, Elder Ted Wilson, met with the Head of State, His Highness Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Efi yesterday morning. The meeting was arranged during a special prayer breakfast attended by His Highness Tui Atua, the Masiofo, Her Highness Filifilia Tamasese, deputy Prime Minister, Fiame Naomi Mataafa and several church leaders. The meeting was one of the last activities for Elder Wilson and his wife Nancy before they left the country. The breakfast presented the chance for the World President to address the leadership of Samoa as well as pray for the nation. The most important asset for all of us is prayer, he said. It starts in the morning when we wake up we go to God in prayer to be with us in all that we do. Even during the day, we need to pray. We dont have to be on our knees we just need to whisper to him and ask him to help us all if we feel like we are down. We need to spend time with Jesus on our own and seek for his blessings upon our lives. He reminded that every one has a purpose in life. We are walking the earth with a purpose to serve the Lord, he said. Dont depend on yesterdays experience to lead you today but depend on God to guide you throughout the way. Donald Trump's chief lieutenants pushed skeptical Republican leaders Thursday to embrace him as their likely presidential nominee, declaring he can deliver big electoral gains this fall despite his contentious ways. Even as his team pressed Trump's case, the billionaire raised fresh concern among some conservatives by speaking against North Carolina's "bathroom law," which directs transgender people to use the bathroom that matches the sex on their birth certificates. Trump also came out against the government's plan to replace President Andrew Jackson with the civil-rights figure Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. The developments came as the Republicans' messy fight for the White House spilled into a seaside resort in south Florida. While candidates in both parties fanned out across the country before important primary contests in the Northeast, Hollywood's Diplomat Resort & Spa was transformed into a palm-treed political battleground. There were new signs of frustration among members of the Republican National Committee, who are eager for the divisive primary season to end. "I want to see Mr. Trump begin to bring us together," said Henry Barbour, a committeeman from Mississippi. "And I haven't seen it. It's not good enough to do it for 30 minutes one day and then the other hours of the day try to divide." On one side in the long-running battle, Ted Cruz's team warned party elders in private briefings that only the Texas senator could expand the Republican party and heal deepening intraparty divisions. On the other, Trump's revamped inner circle quietly courted RNC members who openly questioned the front-runner's tone and party loyalty. "People have expressed concerns about that," said Paul Manafort, tapped by Trump earlier in the month to lead the remainder of his primary election strategy. "We hear them." "We're here letting people know that know we're starting to pivot toward the inevitability of the nomination," Manafort told The Associated Press. "We want to start opening doors and building relationships because we are committed to running a traditional united party." There was evidence of a rift on the Democratic side as well. Prominent Southern Democrats urged Bernie Sanders to stop dismissing Hillary Clinton's landslide primary wins across the South, where the front-runner's popularity among non-whites has helped fuel her success. Sanders said the results in the South "distort reality" because they came from the country's "most conservative region." Don Fowler of South Carolina, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and other Clinton supporters told Sanders in a letter that "our national Democratic leaders" should "invest in our races and causes to amplify our voices, not diminish them." Yet as Clinton's grasp on the Democratic nomination tightens, Trump's overwhelming Republican delegate lead has done little to calm concerns from Republican leaders, gathered at the resort for the party's meeting. As Trump continues to rail against "a rigged" nomination process, he sent Manafort and his newly hired political director, Rick Wiley, to help improve relationships with party officials at the meeting. The aides were to deliver a private briefing to RNC members Thursday evening aimed at "dispelling the notion out there right now" that Trump's current unpopularity among key general election constituencies women and minorities, for example would trigger a general election disaster, Wiley said. Trump's team planned to draw on political history to make the case. Wiley cited polls that found Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush struggling in presidential campaigns before they won. Wiley also said Trump could compete and even win in Democratic strongholds such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and even deeper-blue states such as New Jersey, Oregon and Washington. Trump is increasingly optimistic about his chances in five states holding primary contests Tuesday: Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. He is now the only Republican candidate who can possibly collect the 1,237 delegate majority needed to claim the nomination before the party's July convention. But Cruz hopes Trump will fall short of a nomination-clinching delegate majority so that he can turn enough delegates to his side at the convention to give him the prize. -AP New Delhi: The Centre would move the Supreme Court tomorrow challenging the Uttarakhand High Court order quashing the proclamation of President's rule in the state Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi said on Thursday. He said he will mention the matter before the bench of Chief Justice TS Thakur on Friday morning seeking a stay on the verdict, which has revived the Congress government headed by Harish Rawat. Read: Setback for Centre: Uttarakhand HC strikes down Presidents Rule in state "The High Court was wrong in quashing the Presidential notification. The Presidential notification is based on relevant material," he said said referring to the some of the important grounds for challenge to the High Court judgement. The Attorney General also said that the Centre had nothing to do with disqualified MLAs and it was only concerned with the Presidential notification. Read: Uttarakhand: Rawat seeks Centre's cooperation as HC quashes Prez Rule Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, a legal luminary himself, Nripendra Mishra, Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi, besides Rohatgi met at Shah's house and deliberated on the implications of the HC order and the options before the party and the government. Source said that Jaitley, who returned from the US earlier in the day, and others felt that there were enough grounds to challenge the order which is being seen as a big blow to the Modi government. The High Court said the imposition of President's rule under Article 356 of the Constitution was contrary to the law laid down by the apex court. "The Appropriation Bill, passed on March 18, was actually not passed and despite that the Speaker certified it which really means the government has fallen. By Speaker's order minority government was allowed to continue," Rohatgi said. Meanwhile, Harish Rawat termed the Uttarakhand High Court verdict as 'peoples' victory'. "This is a victory of people of Uttarakhand. We welcome the verdict. The whole country knows who was behind the political instability in the state," Rawat said. Read: High Court verdict victory for people of Uttarakhand: Harish Rawat Responding to the judgement, BJP said, The Harish Rawat government in Uttarakhand is in minority and this will be proved on April 29. "The kind of observations the state High Court has been making for last three days, we are not surprised by its order," said BJP General Secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya. Read: Uttarakhand crisis: PM, Amit Shah must apologise for 'trampling' democracy, says Cong The Courts decision came just hours after it came down heavily on the Centre for imposing the Presidents Rule and then mulling on revoking it. A woman in drought-hit Tarihal village, located on the outskirts of Belagavi lowers herself into a well using a rope to fetch a pot of water. Bengaluru: AICC general secretary, Digvijay Singh has reportedly issued instructions to Congress MLAs, ministers and Chief Minister, Siddaramaiah to be followed while fighting the drought in the state. Apparently, Mr Singh gave these instructions to Mr Siddaramaiah and his colleagues as well as MLAs, when he had come here to take part in the 125th birth anniversary celebration of Dr Ambedkar last week in the city. Speaking to Deccan Chronicle, a senior legislator who was part of a MLAs delegation, said Mr Singh directed MLAs to be stationed in their respective constituencies and monitor the drought situation periodically. "According to Mr Singh who had gathered information on the drought through his sources, the situation in Karnataka is not so bad as Maharashtra, where in Latur, water had to be supplied in a train, a source said. The Congress leader felt that if MLAs constantly monitor their constituencies, the chances of the situation going out of control are less. The source further claimed that Mr Singh, a two-time Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, suggested that the MLAs should get people's support for sharing water in wells and borewells. "He even advised us to take the help of philanthropists and pontiffs to convince people on the need to share water. Singapore -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/21/2016 -- The website http://www.bankssingapore.com/ provides a comprehensive list of all the banks in Singapore to make the lives of the people simpler for those who are searching for banks in and around their vicinity. Apart from providing information on the banks, the website also provides information on all the Singapore insurance companies. As per the website, there are several Singapore banks which include Deutsche Bank Singapore, Far Eastern Bank Limited, Development Bank of Singapore, Post Office Savings Bank, Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation, Standard Chartered Bank, United Overseas Bank, HSBC Singapore, Citibank, Bank of America Singapore, Barclays Bank, State Bank of India, American Express, Bank of China Singapore, RHB Bank Bhd, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Limited, Malayan Banking Berhad, ABN Amro Bank, BNP Paribas Singapore, Bank of East Asia Ltd, Indian Overseas Bank, UCO Bank and Commonwealth Bank Singapore. The website not only provides the list of the banks that are present in Singapore but also provide the services offered by each of these banks. The site also provides information on the most visited branches and also ATMs. It provides all the locations in Singapore, where there is a facility to draw money through ATM. As per the website, there are many insurance companies in Singapore which include AIA Singapore Private Limited, HSBC Insurance Singapore, The Overseas Assurance Corporation, NTUC Income Insurance Cooperative, AVIVA Ltd, Prudential Assurance Company, Singapore, Great Eastern Life Assurance, Tokio Marine Life Insurance, Manulife Insurance, Asia Capital Reinsurance Group, Everest Reinsurance Company, Swiss Life Singapore, AXA Life Insurance Singapore and Allianz Se, Singapore. The site provides all the required information like the address of the bank or insurance company, contact information, working hours, telephone number, fax number and the website link on the bank or insurance's website. A brief insight about the type of the bank is also provided against the name of the bank. As per the site, Deutsche Bank Singapore is a major bank in Singapore that has foreign bank full qualifying privileges. It operates in 1 city and has 1 major branch. It offers Asset & Wealth Management, Global Transaction banking, Corporate Banking & Securities. Far Eastern Bank Ltd is a fully chartered domestic bank that offers personal and corporate banking services. It also offers wealth creation and management services, insurance, loans and consumer deposits. The same pattern is followed to describe about the other banks and insurance companies to enable the people to get an idea on which one would suit them better and which would be the best insurance in Singapore. About bankssingapore.com The website bankssingapore.com provides a complete list of all the banks in Singapore along with the services they offer. Media Contact URL: http://www.bankssingapore.com/ New York, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/21/2016 -- Commodity chemicals (bulk chemicals) are a group of chemicals that are made on a very large scale and act as intermediates to produce other chemicals, which, in turn are used to produce a extensive range of end-user products including construction materials, adhesives, plastics, apparel and tires. Commodity chemicals are the largest sub-segment of the chemical industry. Commodity chemicals are commonly traded under broad categories such as organics, inorganics, plastics resins, synthetic rubbers, fibers, films, explosives and petrochemicals. These broad categories include chemicals such as, acetic acid, acetone, acrylate esters, adipic acid, acrylonitrate, benzene, bisphenol, butadiene, butanediol, butyl acetate, hexane, melamine, polyvinyl chloride, propylene, methanol, methyl, glycol and glycerines. These chemical are very low in product differentiation, and hence making price the dominant economic factor in purchasing decisions for the end users. The commodity chemical industry is highly fragmented and served with large number of local or regional players. Asia Pacific is by far the largest market for commodity chemicals accounting almost half of the total market. It is followed by North America and Europe. The growth prospective is still high in Asia Pacific attributed to the growing economy and ongoing trend and support for manufacturing sector in the developing countries such as India, China, and Indonesia. Bulk availability of crude oil and natural gas from gulf countries such as Saudi Arabian, Iran, Iraq and Syria is helping the commodity chemical industries in Asia Pacific. Interested in report: Please follow the below the links to meet your requirements; Request for the Report Brochure: http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/2787 Commodity chemicals serve a wide range of industries ranging from personal care products to aerospace industries. It has its application either directly or indirectly in almost all manufacturing industries. The economy growth and increasing Gross domestic product (GDP) of developed and developing countries around the world is boosting the overall market of commodity chemicals. However the stiff regulation of the governments around the world regarding the health and environment side effect of chemicals and fluctuating prices of crude oil and natural gas are posing significant challenge for the industry. Request TOC (table of content), Figures and Tables of the Report: http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/2787 Some of the major players in commodity chemicals market include, BASF SE, Bayer AG, The Dow Chemical Company, Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Corporation, PPG industries, Linde Group, Akzo Nobel, LyondellBasell Industries, Asahi Kasei, Sumitomo chemicals, Evonik Industries, INEOS Group Holding and Chem China. Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/persistence-market-research-&-consulting Key points covered in the report 1) Report segments the market on the basis of types, application, products, technology, etc (as applicable) 2) The report covers geographic segmentation North America Europe Asia RoW 3) The report provides the market size and forecast for the different segments and geographies for the period of 2010 to 2020 4) The report provides company profiles of some of the leading companies operating in the market 5) The report also provides porters five forces analysis of the market. About Persistence Market Research Persistence Market Research (PMR) is a full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated research, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Consumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients' business needs. PMR stands committed to bringing more accuracy and speed to clients' business decisions. From ready-to-purchase market research reports to customized research solutions, PMR's engagement models are highly flexible without compromising on its deep-seated research values. Boston, MA -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/21/2016 -- Cigar and cigarillo consumption in Belgium and Luxembourg is in steady decline, with per capita consumption contracting by over a third over 2005-2015, and expected to decline further over the next decade. The UEBL Cigars and Cigarillos market is dominated by cigarillos. For both exports and imports, significant trade takes place in part-finished cigars and cigarillos between subsidiary companies based in Belgium, the Netherlands, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, as well as the Caribbean and Central America. Key Findings Get More Details on this Report and a Full Table of Contents at Cigars and Cigarillos in Belgium and Luxembourg, 2015 -Overall, the total Cigars and Cigarillos market contracted by a third by volume over 2005-2015. -Both the Luxembourg and Belgium Cigars and Cigarillo markets are led by Scandinavian Tobacco Group (STG). -Luxembourg has the lowest Cigars and Cigarillos VAT in Europe -The Netherlands and France are major export destinations, accounting for over 80% of export volumes Synopsis "Cigars and Cigarillos in Belgium and Luxembourg", is an analytical report by Canadean which provides extensive and highly detailed current and future market trends in Belgium's and Luxembourg's markets. What else does this report offer? -Market size and structure of the overall and per capita consumption based upon a unique combination of industry research, fieldwork, market sizing analysis and our in-house expertise. -Detailed information such as market shares and recent developments of the manufacturers, leading brands along with company profiles. -Regulations, taxation, retail pricing, smoking habit and the growing health concerns affecting overall production. -Prospects and forecasts of overall sales and consumption for 2014 to 2024. Reasons to Get This Report -Get a detailed understanding of consumption to align your sales and marketing efforts with the latest trends in the market. -Identify the areas of growth and opportunities, which will aid effective marketing planning. -As consumers' product demands evolve, the dynamics between different countries also change - favoring some countries and leaving others increasingly out of line with demand patterns. As a result, understanding the specific market dynamics of Belgium's and Luxembourg's markets is key to ensuring maximum future sales. -The differing growth rates in regional product sales drive fundamental shifts in the market. This report provides detailed, authoritative data on these changes -prime intelligence for marketers. -Understand the market dynamics and essential data to benchmark your position and to identify where to compete in the future. Companies Mentioned in this Report: Agio Cigars, J Cortes Cigars NV, Scandinavian Tobacco Group Benelux NV About Fast Market Research Fast Market Research is a leading distributor of market research and business information. Representing the world's top research publishers and analysts, we provide quick and easy access to the best competitive intelligence available. Our unbiased, expert staff is always available to help you find the right research to fit your requirements and your budget. For more information about these or related research reports, please visit our website at http://www.fastmr.com or call us at 1.800.844.8156. Browse all Consumer Goods research reports at Fast Market Research You may also be interested in these related reports: -Cigars and Cigarillos in Netherlands, 2015 -Cigars and Cigarillos in Australia, 2015 -Cigars and Cigarillos in France, 2015 -Cigars and Cigarillos in Demark, 2015 -Cigars and Cigarillos in the USA, 2015 Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/21/2016 -- Hydroponic growing is rapidly being hailed as the future of sustainable food production due to its numerous benefits. Hydroponic growing involves the growth of plants using artificial light in a nutrient packed, water based solution without the need for soil. This means that hydroponics can be set up anywhere to effectively and efficiently produce and supply food. Tomatosphere is an initiative which has evolved into a regular component of the science curriculum in the United States and Canada and is operated by a consortium with First the Seed Foundation and Let's Talk Science. Pupils study the effects on the growth of food having been in space conditions with the enquiry to support humans traveling to space in the future. Over 600,000 tomatosphere seeds were launched into space to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2015 to spend 5 weeks in space. Upon their return to earth, the seeds were distributed to around 18,000 classrooms across Canada and the States for pupils to be able to study the effects of a space environment on food production. Each classroom is delivered two packets of tomato seeds, one which has been in space and one control packet which has not. The aim of the experiment will be to compare the germination rates of the space seeds to the control. The pupils and teachers do not know which packet is which until germination is complete and the results have been finalized in order to carry out an effective blind test experiment. A spokesperson for Grown Up Hydroponics said "Tomatosphere is an incredible initiative and it's a shame we don't have access to it here in the United Kingdom. The initiative highlights the benefits of hydroponic growing as a sustainable yet incredibly practical method for growing any food and we hope to see more innovative uses for hydroponics in the future". About Grown Up Hydroponics Grown Up Hydroponics is an industry leading supplier of an extensive selection of quality hydroponics equipment for all types of requirements. For more information, please visit their website: http://www.grownuphydroponics.com/ Media Contact: Grown Up Hydroponics Contact: Mark Tayler Email: mark@grownuphydroponics.com Address: 51 Edison Rd Aylesbury HP19 8TE Tel: 0800 084 2843 Url: http://www.grownuphydroponics.com/ Fossils of a 13-million-year-old extinct gavialoid crocodilian from the Peruvian Amazon suggest that South American and Indian gavialoids evolved separately to acquire protruding, telescoped eyes, according to an international team of paleontologists from France, Peru and the United States. The teams study, published online in the journal PLoS ONE, provides a long-sought insight about gavialoids a diversified group of mostly extinct long-snouted crocodilian species that are represented today by just one living species, the Indian gharial (Gavialis gangeticus). The scientists, led by Dr. Rodolfo Salas-Gismondi from the University of Montpellier in France and the Natural History Museum in Peru, examined fossils from the 13-million-year-old (Miocene epoch) gavialoid crocodilian, the oldest known gavialoid from the Amazon. They named the new species Gryposuchus pachakamue after Pachakamue, a pre-Hispanic South American storyteller god thought to have knowledge about the origins of South American life. The fossils came from the Pebas Formation in northeastern Peru, which was likely made up of swampy waterways, suggesting that the crocodilian had a river-dwelling lifestyle. It had only slightly telescoped eyes. Gryposuchus pachakamue was distinct from all the other crocodiles living in the vast Pebas Mega-Wetlands of northern South America, Dr. Salas-Gismondi said. It was the only long-snouted species within a hyper-diverse crocodile community dominated by blunt-snouted, clam-eating caimans. Dr. Salas-Gismondi and his colleagues conducted phylogenetic and morphometric analysis to assess the likely evolutionary development of the protruding telescoped eyes of Indian and South American species. Their analysis suggested that Gryposuchus pachakamue represents the ancestral condition from which the South American lineage evolved telescoped eyes. The eyes therefore evolved in parallel in South American and Indian lineages, at first showing partial telescoping as in Gryposuchus pachakamue, and eventually becoming fully telescoped as seen in later-evolving species. Both South American and Indian gavialoids adopted a river-dwelling lifestyle, and it is likely that telescoped eyes were adaptive, helping them to catch fish in these habitats. _____ Salas-Gismondi R. et al. 2016. A New 13 Million Year Old Gavialoid Crocodylian from Proto-Amazonian Mega-Wetlands Reveals Parallel Evolutionary Trends in Skull Shape Linked to Longirostry. PLoS ONE 11 (4): e0152453; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0152453 Often its the smallest details that have the greatest power to shock. Disaster statistics can bewilder, dehumanise and widen gaps between victim and non-victim, but a human detail can give meaning to numbers, create empathy and so, the logic goes, effect change. The 2015 photograph of the body of three-year-old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi lying on a Turkish shore is a well-known example but attempts to humanise disaster have been a feature of catastrophe throughout history. Rarer, though, are instances where a small scientific detail can bring the enormity of a human crisis into sharp focus. At a meeting on the humanitarian and public health crisis in Gaza, held at the United Kingdoms Royal Society of Medicine on 15 April, there were many such details. But one in particular stood out in its capacity to shock and reveal how much damage in one aspect of Gazan life exacerbates and destabilises another. One speaker, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon who regularly works in Gaza for a medical charity, was describing limb reconstruction in the Gaza Strip. Post-traumatic limb reconstruction is complex and time-consuming at the best of times, demanding surgery, anaesthesia, physiotherapy and psychotherapy over months, sometimes years, she said. All too quickly, people forget about these things but this goes on every single day in Gaza and the West Bank. Babulal Sethia, Royal Society of Medicine But in a volatile, conflict-prone region where an eight-year trade and travel blockade means clinics lack budgets and equipment as well as reliable electricity it is deeply challenging. Not only this, but even when clinics receive new surgical instruments, these are swiftly destroyed by factors far outside the control of Gazan surgeons. This is because the water supply in Gaza is so contaminated that many clinics rely on sea water to clean surgical instruments and this just corrodes it all, the surgeon said. To me, this small detail about the impact of Gazas chronic water problem underlined the enormity of the crisis, and the grotesqueness of the global communitys failure to do anything about it. It is well-known that Gaza has a chronic water problem, but the corrosion of equipment is the kind of detail that most outside the public health space would never think about. It rams home just how little most of us know about the ways different humanitarian crises in Gaza intersect, disrupt and affect every aspect of life there. Ninety per cent of all water in Gaza is classified as unsuitable for human consumption and is contaminated by human faeces spewing from a bombed-out sewage system, fertilisers and pesticides, heavy metals and solid waste. The coastal aquifer is insufficient for Gazas growing population of nearly two million, and increasingly contaminated by Mediterranean sea water. Desalination plants exist, but they produce water of vastly variable quality and the journey from plant to household includes numerous opportunities for contamination. Water contamination causes 25 per cent of diseases in Gaza, including diarrhoea, skin disease, eye problems and gastroenteritis. Researchers at the meeting also spoke of congenital deformities, cerebral palsy, foetal abnormalities and miscarriage. The blockade makes it very difficult to do rigorous research on these issues and so many others. But what we do know is profoundly shocking not least because, as Babulal Sethia, president of the Royal Society of Medicine, said: All too quickly, people forget about these things but this goes on every single day in Gaza and the West Bank. Chennai: Faced with dissent in some districts over choice of candidates for the May 16 Assembly polls, DMK President M Karunanidhi on Thursday appealed for unity in ranks saying that change of candidates in some places had been effective in overthrowing AIADMK government. The party patriarch also urged such "disgruntled" elements to put the party ahead and consider that Karunanidhi himself was contesting from all 234 seats. In a letter to partymen, Karunanidhi said there could have been disappointments over not nominating a particular individual or changing the candidature of another. He urged them to "not mind" the disappointments as there was no other option. "You should understand that changes are being effected only to ensure that the Jayalalithaa government is unseated... if it is made clear that Karunanidhi is fighting from every constituency, there will be no room for regret for candidates who were changed for a common purpose," he said. The party workers should work with the intention of promoting DMK in all seats, he said. The DMK chief said senior leaders like Arcot N Veerasamy, a former Minister, and L Ganesan, had sought seats for their sons, but the party could not accommodate them. "But these (leaders) and many others like them work for the party's welfare irrespective of whether they get those (desired) opportunities," he said. Karunanidhi appealed as an "elder brother" that all the party workers should collectively strive for DMK's win the May 16 Assembly polls. DMK has been jolted by open dissent over the high command's choice of candidates for many constituencies and protests are being held in different parts. The party has also revised its candidates list thrice so far. Five years ago, 33-year-old activist Andries Tatane joined thousands of others on a peaceful protest against poor public services in Ficksburg, South Africa. A few hours later he was dead, after being blasted by police water cannon, beaten by batons and shot by rubber bullets. Despite witness testimony and video footage, seven police officers were acquitted of his murder. Tatane was a victim of crowd-control weapons (CCWs): non-lethal or less lethal weaponry developed for the military but used by police against civilians whether its rubber bullets in South Africa, tear gas in Tahrir Square in Egypt or Skunk spray in Gaza. Last month, the NGO Physicians for Human Rights released a report documenting the growing use and health impacts of CCWs. [1] I rang the coauthor, Rohini Haar, to talk about what the findings suggest about disability. There is evidence of all CCWs causing permanent damage, from sound cannon causing deafness to water cannon causing blindness, she tells me. All have the potential for causing permanent disability. The report lists nearly 2,000 people who suffered injuries, of whom 53 died and 294 were left with disabilities It is based on official medical reports from the past 25 years across 12 countries. We wanted to make sure that every case we reported on was real, Haar explains, but the trade-off is that we are grossly underestimating the number of injuries. How [CCWs] are used is as important as what exactly is used, Haar adds. For example, kinetic impact projectiles, such as rubber-coated metal bullets, are meant to disperse crowds by inflicting pain and incapacitating people without penetrating flesh. But they can cause huge damage if used incorrectly when fired at close range, for example and depending on the type of projectile and launcher used. If they hit the eyes, then youre almost certainly going to lose your eye. And when they hit any part of the face, the bones in the face are so delicate then youll probably have some sort of damage, says Haar. Chemical irritants also cause physical damage, particularly if used inappropriately: at the wrong concentration, in confined spaces, on children or in the same neighbourhoods day after day, she says. CCW use is escalating, says Haar. Whereas 30 or so years ago, just a few Western countries produced and used them, now they are cheap and diffusing into global markets. The report also reveals growing government clampdown on protest and the militarisation of the police. So what can be done? Steps to regulate crowd-control weapons The UN should draw up and enforce legislation on CCW manufacture and use Manufacturers should do rigorous premarket research and testing on the health impacts of CCW Governments need to independently test weapons and police trained in their use Limit the use of CCW and at the very least monitor them More research on impacts and ethics of their use First, she says, the UN should draw up and enforce legislation on CCW manufacture and use. Second, manufacturers should do rigorous premarket research and testing on their health impacts, draw up proper protocols for their use and track buyers. We tried really hard to look into who manufactures what, how much [they make], who they sell it to, but this information isnt public and its really hard to find, Haar explains. Third, governments need to independently test weapons before buying them, and police need proper training on both their use and human rights standards. Fourth, states need to limit the use of CCW and at the very least monitor them as they do conventional weapons: how many bullets are used, which person fired that weapon, which gun it came from things like that. And lastly, there is a need for far more research on the health impacts and ethics of their use. Imogen Mathers is producer/assistant editor at SciDev.Net. You can reach her on @ImogenMathers A mobile app being piloted in South Africa aims to boost the small-scale fishing sector, writes Sarah Wild. David Shoshola, a traditional fisher in Lamberts Bay, South Africa, holds a list containing 116 names. These are fishers in Lambert's Bay who have been allocated interim relief by the countrys Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. In 2007, a South African court ordered that marginalised fishers be immediately granted interim relief through access to marine resources. However, government, non-governmental organisations and the community unanimously say that this process has been problematic. When you're looking at a sector that size, you need to use technology that can get information quickly. Craig Smith, Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, South Africa Shoshola says that there are about 50 active fishers on the list, with others selling their allocation to companies or marketers for companies. This is why interim relief is a mess, he says. South Africa's traditional and artisanal fishers have been consistently marginalised both during apartheid and in democratic South Africa, according to the court ruling. But through a new small-scale fisheries policy, almost nine years in the making, government and researchers are attempting to redress the situation. An app for fishers Access to data and co-management of South Africa's resources remain key foundations of the policy. An app for smartphones and tablets that fisher people can download freely created in partnership with academic institutions, government, civil society and fishers could be the lynchpin in government's efforts to roll out a small-scale fishing industry in South Africa. The app, known as Abalobi which is an isiXhosa word for fisher, will be the information management system for the small-scale fisheries industry, says Craig Smith, director of small-scale fisheries management within the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. In South Africa, living marine resources are allocated through permits, but there have traditionally been only three recognised groups: commercial, recreational and subsistence fishers. [Traditional fishers] never really got legal rights to fish marine resources in their own name, or in terms of their own right, Smith says. Traditional fishers, who straddle the divide between commercial and subsistence, were not recognised until the 2007 ruling, which found that the government through its failure to recognise this group and allocate appropriate fishing rights to them had violated their constitutional rights. [1] Importance of fisheries sector According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the importance of small-scale fisheries cannot be overemphasised. While no definitive statistics exist, it is thought that the sector employs 50 [million] of the world's 51 million fishers mostly from developing countries producing nearly half of world fish production and supplying most of the fish consumed in the developed world, it says. [2] Government officials say the number of these traditional fishers range from 30,000 through to 100,000. But there is no verified data as to how many small-scale fishers are on South Africa's coastlines, which span four provinces. A verification module is being included in Abalobi, says Smith. The verification process is for us to go into the communities [and] assess whether [people who claim to be fishers] meet the criteria of a small-scale fisher. It's a one-stop shop, right from the [verification] of fishers through to the management of small-scale [fishing]. Abalobi is the management tool that will be used for information management, he says. Originally designed in 2012 and 2013 for desktop computers by the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fishers and the University of Cape Town, with 180,000 South African rand (US$12,320) seed funding from the Vodacom Foundation in 2014, researchers have further developed it into open source app. This was supplemented by about US$6,800 research grant from South Africa's National Research Foundation in 2015. The draft Abalobi app was presented to government in February 2015. Using Abalobi to generate evidence With the data collected via Abalobi, fishers can prove that they make their living from the sea, says Nico Waldeck, a traditional fisher who recently joined the Abalobi project team. What's critical is that the fishers own their data and then they decide who they want to share them with. Serge Raemaekers, University of Cape Town Proof is an important aspect of Abalobi, as fishers and academics who spoke to SciDev.Net and the Mail & Guardian newspaper in South Africa say that the government does not believe them. For instance, Shoshola says that scientists come once a year to the pilot site in Lamberts Bay and decide on the stock assessments in an area, while the traditional fishers' experience and catches are not included in such activities. Serge Raemaekers the South Africa-based University of Cape Town researcher who began the project with Waldeck and Abongile Ngqongwa of the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, says: Government has no way of knowing what the catch per unit effort is of these fishers, because they have very little data. They have a little information from the monitors [government employees who are based at the harbour and take note of the fishers' catches], but that's a small percentage of what's actually going on out there. Ngqongwa, deputy-director of small-scale fisheries management unit, agrees that there is a data gap. From the simple sample that we've done, it showed that the majority of the resource that we are monitoring on our side, as the department, is not even recorded, he says. Currently, for now, we're still at a stage of developing the app itself, Ngqongwa says. We still need to address some finer details such as, for example, who is going to own the data itself, and how are we going to access the data that is going to be generated by fishers. That is why we are currently having these pilots in these areas. There are five pilot studies in Port Nolleth, Hondeklip Bay, Lamberts Bay, Kleinmond and Struisbaai in the Northern and Western Cape. More pilot studies are planned, Ngqongwa says. Raemaekers add that apart from allocating rights, which is probably the first step, the fisheries policy requires many considerations such as generating data including type of fish, how they are caught and how much income fishers make per round. Others include how to encourage small-scale fishers to form co-operatives and how to develop local economies around this small-scale fishing policy. It's the whole value chain, Raemaekers says. This is why the policys roll-out needs Abalobi. When you're looking at a sector that size, you need to use technology that can get information quickly We need to get data from the ground, and sometimes in very rural parts of South Africa to a centralised point so we can analyse it, Smith explains. Abalobi for mending relations Perhaps one of the most important functions for the app will be to mend relations between government and fisher communities. After years of litigation, as well as the long delays in the roll-out of the small-scale policy, there are tensions and mistrust between different stakeholders. This is why it is necessary for fishers to own their own data, says Raemaekers. What's critical is that the fishers own their data and then they decide who they want to share them with. It's sort of the development of a trust-building, relationship-building exercise. Disclaimer: This piece was co-produced by SciDev.Nets Sub-Saharan Africa English desk and the Mail & Guardian newspaper in South Africa, as part of a science journalism capacity building initiative, funded by the Wellcome Trust. [ACCRA] A new project that aims to provide farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa with stress-tolerant maize varieties has been launched to help the region boost food security. The Stress Tolerant Maize for Africa (STMA) project will apply conventional breeding techniques to develop maize varieties and hybrids capable of resisting environmental shocks, including drought, low soil fertility, heat, pests and diseases. Twelve Sub-Sahara Africa countries Benin, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Uganda, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe will benefit from the project, which also seeks to enhance sustainable maize research and development systems in the focus countries. The project also seeks to increase commercialisation of improved multiple stress-tolerant maize varieties with gender-preferred traits. Tsedeke Abate, CIMMYT The STMA project to be run by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), is being funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development. The four-year project (2016-2019) launched last month (March 21) is expected to increase maize productivity by 30-50 per cent and provide 5.5 million smallholder farmers with improved maize varieties. The project follows the success of a drought-tolerant maize project that was implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa by CIMMYT and the IITA from 2007 to 2015. It helped improve food and income security of smallholder farmers by developing and disseminating more than 250 drought-tolerant, well-adapted maize varieties, says CIMMYT. According to CIMMYT, more than 35 million hectares of cultivated maize in Sub-Saharan Africa rely on the rain, thus making environmental shocks such as drought have major impact on smallholders whose livelihoods depend on the crop. Tsedeke Abate, the STMA project leader at CIMMYT, says the project seeks to provide innovative breeding tools and techniques applied for increasing the rate of genetic gain in the maize breeding pipeline. The project also seeks to increase commercialisation of improved multiple stress-tolerant maize varieties with gender-preferred traits by the Sub-Saharan African seed sector and increase seed availability and farmer uptake of stress-tolerant maize varieties, Abate tells SciDev.Net. According to Abate, the project will work with private and public seed companies and national agricultural research systems to facilitate uptake of the new technologies. Rinn Self, a programme officer at the US-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, says maize production is increasingly threatened by climate change and worsening environmental conditions, including droughts, floods and poor soil. "The improved seeds in the hands of both smallholder farmers, many of whom are women, as well as small and medium enterprises, which produce, market and sell seeds and other inputs, play a critical part in the agricultural value chain, Self notes.Aboubacar Toure, programme officer, crop improvement and variety adoption at Kenya-headquartered Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), calls for incentives to help plant breeders develop new technologies and produce seed varieties that can adapt to climate change.Toure also urges African governments to scale up the improved technology so that many farmers can be reached with high-yielding cereal varieties.This piece was produced by SciDev.Nets Sub-Saharan Africa English desk. A slight space-time ripple was detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) on September 14, 2015. Upon analyzing the signal, physicists came to the conclusion that these gravitational waves were caused by the merging of a black hole, around 1.3 billion light-years away. The event was called "GW150914." Gamma-ray bursts have been detected near the gravitational wave source! https://t.co/hy8GwreuTI pic.twitter.com/09E3khWCE7 Science Channel (@ScienceChannel) April 19, 2016 According to Discovery News, the observation confirmed one of the last of Einstein's predictions about general relativity, showing the human race that black holes really do exist. This detection is the first view of astronomy that can change the way humans see the universe in the future. NASA announced that the space-based gamma-ray observatory was able to detect a faint signal near the predicted wave source, and provided a breathtaking insight regarding the black hole merger. A NASA news release noted that when black holes collide, they are assumed to do so "cleanly," not leaving behind any kind of electromagnetic trace. However, a gamma-ray burst (GRB) happened less than a second after LIGO registered the gravitational waves, which means that the two signals may have been related to the same event. It seems likely, after all, that there is only a 0.2 percent chance that they occurred in the same patch of sky at the same time but belonged to different high-energy phenomena. But why is this detection so important? Luis Lehner from the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics in Ontario said that the discovery is important in three ways: first is the confirmation of the existence of gravitational waves. Second is the existence of the binary black hole system. Finally, he said that short of sending someone into it, this is a direct evidence of the existence of black holes. That is not all. According to LIGO physicist and spokesperson Gabriela Gonzalez, this is also the birth of a new era: welcome to the field of gravitational astronomy. It is a known fact that every city has its own set of distinguished characteristics; however, a new report suggests that each of them also has a distinct microbial community. Researchers observed microbes gathered over the duration of a year from offices based in three different cities, namely, Toronto, San Diego and Flagstaff in Arizona. A study published in the journal mSystems, the microbes brought under the scanner included microscopic fungi, viruses and bacteria. Incidentally, the Flagstaff office had richer microbial communities compared to those in Toronto or San Diego. However, the cause for the difference has still not been discovered. According to the researchers, it was especially interesting to note that each of the three cities had its own unique and separate set of microbial communities. "Even within each city, the offices we studied differed from each other in terms of size, usage patterns and ventilation systems, suggesting that geography is more important than any of these features in driving the bacterial community composition of the offices within the ranges that we studied," said J. Gregory Caporaso, assistant director at Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics (MGGen) at Northern Arizona University (NAU). Caporaso also thinks future research efforts will have a further impact on the study, due to a better comprehension of the microbiology of the built environment and regular checks of microbial communities to observe changes that may have an effect on human health. Apart from this, the researchers also discovered that one of the major sources of office microbes happens to be the human skin. Furthermore, office floors were found to have more microbes than ceilings and walls, possibly because of microbes being carried through shoes. The researchers also found that human skin is a major source of office microbes and that office floors have more microbes than walls or ceilings, likely due to materials carried in on workers' shoes, based on a report from the U.S. National Library of Medicine. A 6.2-magnitude earthquake hit 44 miles off the Pacific coast town Esmeraldas in Ecuador last Wednesday, days after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake on Saturday that killed almost 500 people. News Daily reports that the latest earthquake terrified the inhabitants again; rescuers have stopped searching for possible survivors from the bigger earthquake. "You can't imagine what a fright it was. 'Not again!' I thought," said Maria Quinones from Pedernales town. The 6.2-magnitude earthquake that hit the area at around 3:33 a.m. local time was followed by series of aftershocks, according to Ecuador's Geophysical Institute. On the other hand, no tsunami warning was issued. President Rafael Correa said that the first earthquake caused $2 billion to $3 billion in damages, according to New York Daily News. Ecuador has an oil-dependent economy. It has lower oil revenue, making 16 million people face a non-zero growth and lower investment. President Correa said that they are looking at the possibility of issuing bonds in the international market; tax reform is also being discussed. During a nationally televised address on Wednesday night, the president also announced some short-term tax changes to help Ecuador recover. The value added tax (VAT) is currently 12 percent. Meanwhile, after the bigger earthquake, some communities, especially in isolated areas, were struggling without power, water and transport, despite the help coming in. The roads were destroyed, slowing down the delivery of supplies. The stadiums became aid distribution area centers and morgues. You will see children holding placards with the message such as "Food, please." Many experts and foreign aid workers helped the victims of the tragic calamity. There is also 14,000 security personnel keeping the place in order; no looting is reported. On the other hand, the rescuers were losing hope of finding other survivors even though some people are begging to find their missing relatives. A stop sign seems to have made an appearance as a crater on Ceres. The unusual form may be a warning for spacecraft not to land on the dwarf planet's surface. The rim of the crater Haulani -- named after Hawaiian goddess of plants -- is composed of straight lines, giving it the appearance of a stop sign. The photos captured by NASA's Dawn Probe showed the crater with a polygonal look, which is extremely unusual considering that most of them that are seen on many planetary bodies, including earth, are usually circular. NASA noted that the straight edges of the Ceres crater may have been the result of pre-existing stress patterns and faults beneath the planet's surface. Dawn has been orbiting the body since March 2015, and over the past 13 months, it was able to study Ceres in a series of closer-in orbits. The probe was able to reach the final orbit, which was positioned just 240 miles from the dwarf planet's surface in December. Christian Science Monitor noted that the newly released images were captured from this particular low altitude, and was snapped just 916 miles from the surface. The photos showed Haulani with a straight-edge nature, and in an enhanced color view, bluish material has been ejected from the recent impact that created such strange shape. False-colored photos showed that bright material on the floor of the The crater, which according to CNet has a 21-mile diameter, also showed landslides rolling off its rim. The theory that Haulani was created only recently is clear upon studying its properties -- the crater's floor is clear of impacts and contrasts sharply in color from other parts of the surface, which are considerably older. Dawn was noted as the only probe to ever orbit a dwarf planet, not to mention it is the only one to have orbited two celestial bodies other than the earth and moon's systems. The health of the world's biggest living ecosystem, the Australian's Great Barrier Reef, is going bleak. Half of it is "dead or dying," according to scientists. Only about seven percent of the Great Barrier Reef has been unaffected by mass bleaching, according to News Daily. The bleaching happens when the water is too warm. This makes the coral eject living algae that cause the coral to harden and turn white. If the temperature drops, the coral can recover. On the other hand, if the temperature rises, the coral may die. The Australian ministers said that the climate change is threatening the existence of the reef, according to Independent. "We've never seen anything like this scale of bleaching before. In the north Great Barrier, it's like 10 cyclones have come ashore all at once," said Professor Hughes, conveyor of the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce. He further said that their estimate is that about 50 percent of the coral is already dead or dying. Greg Hunt, the Environment Minister, said that this is a significant event and that they take it seriously. Meanwhile, Australia is considered one of the largest carbon emitters capita due to its dependence on coal-fired power plants for electricity. Though the nation pledged to cut carbon emissions, it continued to back up fossil fuel projects. These include the Adani Enterprises Ltd.'s proposed A$10 billion ($7.7 billion) Carmichael coal project in western Queensland. Shani Tager, a Greenpeace campaigner, said that it is not good enough that they say they care about the reef but they keep on supporting the coal industry. The Great Barrier Reef is situated in the Coral Sea in the off coast of Queensland, Australia. It is the world's largest coral reef system. It is composed of more than 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands that are stretching for more than 2,300 kilometers over an area of nearly 344,400 square kilometers. It was declared as a World Heritage Site in 1981, and the CNN considered it as one of the seven natural wonders of the world. Americans do not think global warming is a major threat, according to a new study. On the contrary, the citizens of the U.S. feel that climate change has made the weather more pleasant for them, an opinion which is not shared by scientists and the rest of the world. A study published in the Nature journal states that Americans' perception of global warming will soon be outweighed when they start experiencing more oppressive summer heat along with the milder winters they are enjoying at the moment. "Americans are getting the wrong signal from year-round weather about whether they should be concerned about climate change," said author Patrick Egan, study lead author from New York University (NYU). "They're getting the good parts and haven't had to pay the price of the bad part." However, if heat-trapping gases are not controlled, then approximately nine out of 10 Americans will experience worse weather during summers by the end of the century. Based on past studies that looked into choices of living areas, employment, relocation and other factors, Egan and his colleague created a weather preference index for Americans. The goal of the research was to find out why Americans were so reluctant to address the problem of climate change. According to the research, it was found out that the average person in the U.S. prefers warm winters and summers that are less hot and humid. Phoenix, San Diego and Miami emerged on the top of the new index and the lowest positions were taken by Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Based on the finding, it was observed that the weather in the U.S. had trended closer to Miami than Pittsburgh, which meant that the daily weather had gotten closer to their preferences. Climate scientist Michael Mann feels this phenomenon may have made Americans complacent and nonchalant towards the effects of climate change. A report in Wall Street Journal suggests that the study was met with criticisms as many scientists feel that the considering factors, such as, where people choose to live, are not good indicators of what weather they prefer, making it a flawed theory. The research also doesn't deal with extreme weather conditions, according to opponents of the study findings. Meanwhile, Egan and his colleague feel that scientists should talk more about the extreme weather than average temperatures, according to the report. Millions of Californians inhabit places with dirty air according to an annual report card released by the American Lung Association on Wednesday. Two major urban regions in the sunny state ranked as the nation's most polluted area. As per the report made by American Lung Association's State of the Air 2016, Bakersfield is right on the top of the list as far as having the unhealthiest days is concerned, owing to its high content of airborne particles emitted from fireplaces, farm equipment, diesel trucks and highway traffic. According to the report, Los Angeles remains on the forefront as a city with the most harmful ozone pollution in the country, due to the smog emitted from car tailpipes. Incidentally, air pollution can lead to lung cancer and heart attacks, trigger asthma and also cause premature death. The report, which was made using U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data for three years ending in 2014, revealed that eight out of 10 Californians live in counties that have unhealthy levels of particle and ozone pollution. The finding means that an approximate population of 32 million is exposed to bad air. Bakersfield and several communities in Central Valley are trying to fight the effects of the bowl-shaped topography which is outlined by mountain ranges. High temperatures and drought are adding on to the bad quality of the air that has become even more stagnant in the last couple of years according to officials. However, all is not bleak, according to Bonnie Holmes-Gen, senior director of air quality and climate change at the American Lung Association in California. She feels that despite the poor quality of air reported, California has been making progress, though there is still a lot more that needs to be done. Air pollution control officer from San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District, Seyed Sadredin, adds that about $40 billion has been spent by local businesses since 1992 to curb air pollution, and there has been a nearly 80 percent reduction in it since the 1980s. New Delhi: Maintaining that the question, as to whether former union home minister P. Chidambaram had signed the affidavits in the Ishrat Jahan case is already in the public domain, Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju on Wednesday trained his guns on the Congress and alleged that there could be more people involved in it. Rijiju said the basic question that arises is how a home minister could absolve a terrorist on his own. "Chidambaram Saheb was the home minister, who was responsible for India's security. And if the home minister starts playing with the country's security, what will happen to the nation. I am asking how can a home minister absolve a terrorist on his own, there must be a grand design behind that, in which more people will be involved. A responsible home minister can't play such a big game with the nation's security," Rijiju said. "I want to say that the planned manner in which the Congress Party coined and used the term 'Bhagwa Atankwaad' (Saffron Terror) and the way Chidambarm acted as the home minister, they appear to be connected," he added. Rijiju accused the Congress Party of playing with the nation's security. "We too did not trust it initially, but as things unfolded before us we have come to know that they have played a big game with the country's security. We are looking into it and will take action, but the Congress Party should answer," Rijiju said. "It has become clear from Home Minister Rajnath Singh's statement in Parliament and what we have seen in the Home Ministry that the previous government, especially former home minister P. Chidambaram, used position (power) in a very wrong manner," he added. Responding to allegations that the Ishrat encounter was 'fake', he said: "It's a different issue. When Osama-bin -Laden was killed by America's special force in Pakistan, did anybody question that the encounter was wrong or was not according to law. Whatever happens with terrorism is a different issue." Meanwhile, BJP has questioned the Congress Party's silence over reports claiming that Chidambaram had signed the first affidavit in the Ishrat case, and accused the grand old party of hatching a conspiracy against the people of India with a political agenda. "Latest revelation on Ishrat Jahan has actually nailed Chidambaram and the Congress because of the dubious way with which they wanted to implicate Narendra Modi. They have done great disservice to the country," Javadekar told ANI. "It is a conspiracy against the people of India. This needs to be taken to its logical conclusion. And I am wondering why Chidambaram and Rahul Gandhi are silent. This was a conspiracy with a political agenda," he added. Media reports revealed that Chidambaram had in fact signed the first affidavit, which declared Ishrat and three others as terrorists, but gave all four a clean chit a month later as serious amendments were made in the second affidavit also signed by him. The first affidavit in the encounter case stated that Ishrat was a LeT operative, who was part of a plot to assassinate the then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi. Chidambaram had initially claimed that the first affidavit declaring Ishrat and three others as terrorists was filed in the court without his approval, adding that he had made some editorial changes to avoid misinterpretation when the matter was brought to his notice. Chidambaram, however, completely altered his stance in the second affidavit, saying that intelligence inputs on Ishrat and the three others did not constitute conclusive proof and favoured a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe in the encounter. COLUMBIA, S.C. -- South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson announced the arrest of a Greenville man on numerous charges connected to the sexual exploitation of minors. According to a release from the Attorney General's Office, Timothy Lawrence Collier, 35, was arrested on Wednesday, April 20. Investigators say Collier was involved in sharing child pornography through a file-sharing network online. Collier was charged with ten counts of second degree sexual exploitation of a minor, a felony offense punishable by up to 10 years of prison on each count. The case will be prosecuted by the Attorney General's Office. A member of the Greenville County Sheriffs Office Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force made the arrest. The Florence County Sheriffs Office, also a member of the ICAC Task Force, assisted in the investigation. Hopla, who coordinates the Family Nurse Practitioner track at FMU and is an active nurse practitioner herself, earned the award for her work on two pieces of South Carolina legislation pertaining to practice changes in the nurse practitioner field (H3078 and S246). The award was also given for her work to create a tax credit for clinical preceptors of medical, nurse practitioner and physician assistant students (H4832). Hopla lobbied for the legislation and earlier this winter, she took a group of health policy students to the S.C. State House in Columbia to meet with legislators to discuss advance practice nursing issues. The exhibits at the new Florence County Museum facility have been designed to address the past, present and future of Florence County, its unique relationships with the Pee Dee, the state of South Carolina and the world. FIRST FLOOR Community Gallery This 1,300-square-foot gallery is designed to serve three primary purposes: To introduce visitors to the history of the museum and the diversity of its collections. These subjects and their accompanying artifacts will be presented in a central glass enclosure. To showcase the history and diversity of the city and county of Florence and its incorporated municipalities. Each municipality will be recognized on a wall that features interpretive graphics, text and wall-mounted display vitrines. To exhibit and interpret the lives, stories and accomplishments of significant past and present citizens of Florence County and members of its communities. The Community Gallery also will be adjacent to and connected with the Childrens Gallery. This gallery is intended to flexibly accommodate small exhibits curated by the museums full-time educational staff. SECOND FLOOR Permanent Collections Gallery and History Hall This is the largest gallery space in the facility, comprising 3,300 square feet of exhibit space. The Permanent Collections Gallery and History Hall occupies the entirety of the second-floor, east wing of the building. All exhibits were conceptualized and coordinated by Florence County Museum staff and designed by project partner Haley Sharpe Design. The exhibits contained in this gallery will guide visitors through approximately 100 million years of the history of the Pee Dee using a diversity of exhibit design strategies and material components. Its main narrative will be expressed in three thematic arcs: rivers, rails and roads. These themes will be further subdivided into 10 chronological periods: Pre-history Natives cultures Colonial period Antebellum period The American Civil War Reconstruction & the founding of Florence County Early 20th century World War I, World War II & the interim years The 1950s-60s 1970 today Highlights Recently excavated Cretaceous period reptile material from the Stokes Sand and Gravel Quarry site, Darlington County. An 18-foot tall ancient Bald Cypress trunk sub-fossil specimen recovered from Lynches River, estimated to be 100,000 years old. Native American and Colonial period artifacts from the Kolb archaeological dig site in the Welsh Neck section of the Great Pee Dee River in Darlington County. Civil War artifacts from the Florence Stockade prison camp and Confederate Naval Yard at Mars Bluff, as well as objects from the Francis Lord Collection. Artifacts related to the life and career of former FBI agent and Florence County native Melvin Purvis (recently donated by the Purvis family). Material representing the WWII-era Florence Army Air Field, including military uniforms and memorabilia of the German POW encampment at that facility. Fragments of the Mark VI bomb, which was accidentally dropped by a military aircraft on the Mars Bluff community in 1958. The body of an Upstate Marine will arrive at Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport on Friday, according to his obituary. Sgt. Jeffrey Allan Sempler, 22, died in a collision between two CH-53E Super Stallion helicopters on Jan. 14 in Hawaii, the obituary said. He was the crew chief and weapons and tactics instructor in the HMH-463 Squadron Unit. He was well-loved and described as a quick learner in his obituary. "Jeffrey was also very loved by his family," his family said in the obituary. "His smile will be missed as will his wonderful sense of humor. His loss will be difficult, but God needs him in heaven now. We look forward to seeing you again, you will forever be our sunshine, watching over each and every one of us." Sempler's body will arrive at 6:11 p.m. Friday with military detail. A motorcade procession will follow from the airport to Forest Hills Funeral Home, 6995 Highway 101 N. Those who wish to pay their respects publicly may do so from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Main Street in Woodruff. Sempler's family will receive friends from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at Forest Hills Funeral Home. The funeral is scheduled for 4 p.m. Saturday in The Stribling Memorial Chapel. In lieu of flowers, make donations to the Fisher House Foundation. Dehradun: The Uttarakhand High Court on Thursday quashed the President's Rule that was imposed by the Centre in March this year in the state. The court also ordered a floor test on April 29 for ousted Chief Minister Harish Rawat after he challenged the imposition of President's Rule. Coming down heavily on the Centre for the March 27 proclamation under Art 356, a division bench of the high court headed by Chief Justice K M Joseph said the imposition of the President's Rule was contrary to the law laid down by the Supreme Court. "Centre acted in 'blatant falsehood' and also accused Uttarakhand Speaker of 'double standards'," the court said. It also added that Article 356 was imposed in Uttarakhand contrary to law laid down by the Supreme Court. Upholding the disqualification of nine dissident Congress MLAs, the court said they have to pay the price of committing the "Constitutional sin" of defection by being disqualified. Harish Rawat termed the Uttarakhand High Court verdict as 'peoples' victory'. "This is a victory of people of Uttarakhand. We welcome the verdict. The whole country knows who was behind the political instability in the state," Rawat said. Read: High Court verdict victory for people of Uttarakhand: Harish Rawat Responding to the judgement, BJP said, The Harish Rawat government in Uttarakhand is in minority and this will be proved on April 29. "The kind of observations the state High Court has been making for last three days, we are not surprised by its order," said BJP General Secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya. The Courts decision came just hours after it came down heavily on the Centre for imposing the Presidents Rule and then mulling on revoking it. Read: Hopefully Centre will not provoke us, warns Uttarakhand HC The strong words of the court came after the Centre's counsel said it was not in a position to give an assurance that the government would consider putting on hold the recall of its order imposing President's Rule for a week. It gave the government's counsel some time to take instructions. Otherwise you can do this in every state. Impose Presidents Rule for 10-15 days and then ask someone else to take oath. More than angry, we are pained that you are behaving like this. That the highest authority -- the Government of India -- behaves like this. How can you think of playing with the court, the bench had observed. Read: Uttarakhand crisis: HC raps Centre, says even the President can go wrong What if we allow the petition? Then things would go back to what it was prior to the Presidents Rule and the state government will only have to prove majority by way of floor test. Can you take exception to that also? the bench asked the Centre. Read: Uttarakhand row: Centre inducting chaos, says High Court On March 27, President Pranab Mukherjee signed the proclamation under Article 356 of the Constitution dismissing the Congress government headed by Harish Rawat and placing the Assembly under suspended animation on recommendation of the Union Cabinet. Political crisis struck Uttarakhand after nine Congress MLAs, including former chief minister Vijay Bahuguna, revolted against the chief minister and turned to the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for support. The rebel Congress MLAs had alleged they were offered bribe by Harish Rawat for support during the floor test and released a video of a sting operation purportedly showing the CM, who called it fake. The Congress alleged the dirty tricks department of BJP president Amit Shah was at work, while the saffron outfit demanded immediate dismissal of the Rawat government. DMDK president Vijayakanth folds his tongue and raises his hand as if to assault media personnel in Salem on Wednesday. (Photo: DC) Salem: The DMDK leader and chief ministerial candidate of PWA-DMDK alliance Captain Vijayakanth lost his cool yet again with journalists in Salem on Wednesday. Soon after he alighted from the car to participate in a consultative meet with his party candidates for the upcoming assembly polls, journalists gathered around him to ask questions. A visibly upset, Vijayakanth, folded his tongue and raised his hand as if to assault the media personnel. He then angrily gestured by waving his hands around to make way for him. Further, a security guard, who was walking alongside while taking the stairs also was at the receiving end, as captain nudged him without any clear signs of provocation. The visuals repeatedly aired in television channels, show the security guard trying to help out Vijayakanth by holding him, when he slipped on the stairs. This is not the first incident that Captain has been losing his tempers, as he had behaved in an unruly manner with the media several times in the past too. On December 29 last year, Vijayakanth flew into a rage, when a journalist asked him if the ruling AIADMK would capture power in next assembly elections. Hurling abuses at the journalists, he dared them to ask similar questions to Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa and also spat at them. Since then, Vijayakanth avoids interacting with journalists to keep away from controversies over the last three months. Exactly at this time last year, the DMDK leader lost his cool as he gestured to fling a micro phone at a scribe and tried to walk out of the press conference, while addressing media along with representatives of various parties after meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His impulsive approach towards media also came to the fore a few years ago at the Chennai airport, when he angrily broke into a quarrel with a scribe, who sought to know his reaction on some of his MLAs aligning with AIADMK dissatisfied with his partys performance. Known for his nature of courting controversies with media, Vijayakanth, is now testing his electoral prospects from Ullundurpet in the May 16 Assembly polls. EoM. New Delhi: The Uttarakhand High Court's verdict setting aside imposition of President's rule in the state Thursday spurred an elated Congress to attack the BJP, demanding an apology from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah for "trampling" democracy and "murdering" constitution. The verdict is a slap on face of BJP for trying to dislodge an elected government, it said. Terming the court's verdict as a victory of people of Uttarakhand, democracy and constitutional norms, AICC Incharge Communications Randeep Singh Surjewala said Prime Minister Modi and Amit Shah should learn a lesson from this "decisive and resounding verdict. "This is a victory for the people of Uttarakhand, democracy and constitutional norms. This is also a slap on the face of those in BJP who sought to dislodge an elected government, elected with the mandate of people in Uttarakhand. "Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah will be well advised to now tender an unconditional apology to the nation and also to people of Uttarakhand for trampling upon democracy, murdering constitution norms and subjugating the will of people to their blind quest to dislodge Congress governments. We welcome the verdict," Surjewala said. He said that it proves the full majority which Congress enjoys and the "sinister conspiracies" which are being hatched from Arunanchal Pradesh to Uttarakhand and many other states to dislodge elected governments by "foul means, use of money and muscle power" should now at least come to an end. "Prime Minister Modi and Amit Shah should learn a lesson from this decisive and resounding verdict," he said. Putting up a brave front, BJP claimed the Harish Rawat government in Uttarakhand is in minority and that this will be proved on April 29. The kind of observations the state High Court has been making for last three days, we are not surprised by its order, BJP General Secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya said. Union Minister and BJP leader Kiren Rijiju said that blaming the central government for something which was a creation of the Congress is "unfortunate". "We all respect the court verdict. I have nothing to comment on it but just to blame the central government for a particular situation which has been created by Congress party, that is unfortunate. It is congress party's creation, not ours (BJP)," he said. Dealing a major blow to Modi government, the Uttarakhand High Court today quashed the imposition of President' rule in the state and revived the Congress government headed by Harish Rawat, who has been asked to prove his majority on April 29. Hyderabad: Stating that there has been a decrease in public sector recruitments, senior Congress MP V. Hanumantha Rao has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking reservations in the private sector and also in the Judiciary. Mr Rao wrote that he had written several times earlier and had even made an appeal by personally meeting the PM, but nothing visible has been done in this respect. Revealing details of his letter to the media at the Gandhi Bhavan on Wednesday, the MP said if one goes into the nitty-gritty of the appointment of judges, so far 43 Chief Justices of Supreme Court had worked since Independence and except for one instance each, there has been no CJI from OBCs and SCs, he wrote. Similarly, among the 219 Supreme Court judges appointed so far, there were only five OBCs and four SCs. As per a survey report, 850 judges were appointed in 21 High Courts in the country. While there were 31 judges from the SC community in seven High Courts, in the remaining 14 High Courts, there was no representation by SCs. Even in respect of Private Corporate Boards, of the 9,052 directors, 8,387 are from upper castes, Mr Rao said, adding that he, along with other leaders, will start a nation-wide agitation demanding reservations for suppressed sections of the society in all the private and judiciary appointments. Congress seniors sore over panels Congress senior leaders are making known their displeasure at the goings-on in the party these days. Recently, senior MP V. Hanumantha Rao had complained about the oversized 31-member Telangana Congress Coordination Panel, and on Wednesday, another senior leader, MLC Ponguleti Sudhakar Reddy spoke out over the absence of leaders from Khammam district in the PCC Executive. Mr Sudhakar Reddy met TPCC chief N. Uttam Kumar Reddy and senior leaders K. Jana Reddy and Shabbir Ali, and threatened that he would resign over the way the party committees were constituted without seniors being consulted. It is learnt Mr Uttam Kumar Reddy told him that even he was not consulted over the composition of the committees, though a few senior leaders were summoned to Delhi and their suggestions sought. At one stage, Mr Sudhakar Reddy alleged that he had information that Mr Uttam Kumar Reddy spoke to the Chief Minister on allocating some projects to YSR Congress MP Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy. Mr Uttam Kumar Reddy challenged the MLC to prove his allegation and if done, he would quit politics permanently. This forced Mr Sudhakar Reddy to withdraw his allegation, saying that someone fed him with wrong information. The MLC deplored the way former minister V. Venkateswara Rao was excluded from the list ostensibly at the behest of MP Renuka Chowdary and TPCC working president Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka. Without these seniors, how can I continue in the party post? How would I be able to work? he asked. The TPCC chief assured him that he would take up the matter with high command. Some days ago, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar floated the idea of Sangh-mukt Bharat. The slogan was a clever spin on Prime Minister Narendra Modis slogan of Congress-mukt Bharat for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. But, while Mr Modi did not seek support from other political parties to push the Congress Party into irrelevance, the Bihar chief minister formally requested all non-Bharatiya Janata Party parties to form a united platform to challenge the saffron party. In politics, any slogan that either replicates an earlier successful one or is a parody of a previous catchphrase does not have the same impact on people. Moreover, Mr Kumars invitation to other non-BJP parties evoked lukewarm response. It did not remotely enthuse parties whose politics is based on Sangh (or BJP) baiting, because in any united front against the BJP, no party or leader is willing to concede the primary position to the other. In Mr Kumars call for a broad anti-BJP front to keep the party out of power in 2019, the unstated declaration was not missed by anyone that Mr Kumar was imagining himself as the leader of this front. That Mr Kumar harbours ambitions beyond the chief ministership of Bihar has never been a secret. The Janata Dal (United) parted ways with the BJP because of intense personal rivalry between Mr Modi and Mr Kumar dating back to the early years of the last decade. This competition arose because Mr Kumar recognised Mr Modis potential not just for his charisma but as a consensus was slowly forming in the Sangh Parivar that Mr Modi was the Parivars lead player and the only one who could lead the BJP to power. In contrast, Mr Kumar headed a rump of a party and, as a satrap, his chances of becoming Prime Minister depended completely on Indian politics remaining fragmented, where uneasy coalitions were necessary to form governments. The 2014 election was transformative. The era of a single party majority returned because of Mr Modis charisma and not because the BJPs social base expanded. Despite the Modi wave, the BJPs vote was just 31 per cent and its victory was possible because of a handful of strategically cobbled alliances and division of anti-BJP votes. For instance, in Bihar, the BJP forged significant alliances with Ram Vilas Paswan and Upendra Kushwahas parties. On the other hand, the anti-BJP votes were divided between JD(U), Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Congress. The verdict of 2014 demonstrated that a low index of Opposition unity will ensure the largest party winning seats in excess of its vote share. But non-BJP parties knew that when they pooled resources, they had a real chance at winning. When this strategy was adopted for the Bihar Assembly elections, its overwhelming success established that Mr Modi was not invincible. Initially a Bihar-type grand alliance appeared to be a possibility in Assam, but this move collapsed in the face of refusal of the Congress and All Assam United Front. In contrast, the BJP opted for strategic alliances and this appears to have paid off. Mr Kumar was the originator of the grand alliance theory in Assam. But when the Congress did not bite the bait, he should have realised that he required to go slow in attempts to form a nationwide anti-BJP alliance with himself at its helm. The Congress may have been dealt a humiliating blow in 2014, but it still remains the only nationwide Opposition party. The party is unlikely to allow the emergence of a national anti-BJP alliance with another party at its helm. Mr Kumar needs to accept that anti-BJP formulations will work best in states till the next parliamentary polls. The attempt should, therefore, be on forging state-level alliances and pacts. Mr Kumar attempted to do this in Uttar Pradesh and a merger with Ajit Singh-led Rashtriya Lok Dal seemed to be on the cards. But the pause button appears to have been hit for now. Alliances between parties must benefit all. The JD(U) does not yet have anything significant to offer Mr Singh and with the Congress Party deploying the ideologically agnostic strategist-cum-campaign-manager, Prashant Kishore, leaders like Mr Singh may wish to delay making any commitment to strike a better deal later. Mr Kumar has clearly jumped the gun by attempting to forge an anti-BJP front and itll be a while before he recovers from the embarrassment. But behind Mr Kumars call and the factor that led to formation of the mahagathbandhan in Bihar lies the inescapable reality of the rise of the BJP as the most dominant pole of Indian politics. After Independence, the Indian political system was characterised by Rajni Kothari as one-hich exhibited one party dominance (OPD) or the Congress system. The coalition era which took firm roots from 1989 onward, exited emphatically in 2014, though Opposition did not accept this and portrayed the landmark verdict as a fluke victory for the BJP. Mr Kumars call for Sangh-mukt Bharat signals his acceptance of the return of OPD, but this time it will be labelled BJP system. The sooner other parties admit this, the easier it will be for them to devise strategy to get out of the morass. Because ties between the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh are cordial in this regime as opposed to frequent hostility during the Vajpayee-led regime, Mr Kumar is politically correct for calling for a Sangh-mukt Bharat and not a BJP-mukt Bharat. India is technically still a multi-party system with regional parties representing a significant block. But the political ethos and the manner in which the national discourse is cast make national issues distinct from local ones. Consequently, while the BJP may show evidence of slipping in certain parts, Mr Modi still retains his lead over others as the most preferred leader. Whenever non-BJP parties form a united front either under the Congress, Mr Kumar or another satrap, the bonding slogan shall be Sangh-mukt Bharat. The Bihar chief minister may have failed in his goal for the moment, but he has been successful in introducing a new concept in Indias political lexicon. History has been made with the Uttarakhand High Court on Wednesday quashing the proclamation of Presidents Rule under Article 356 of the Constitution made on March 27 this year in respect of the state, restoring the government of chief minister Harish Rawat, and tendering salutary constitutional counsel to the highest in the land. The division bench of Chief Justice K.M. Joseph and V.K. Bisht pulled no punches and made it quite clear that the President of India had gone terribly wrong in sanctioning Central rule when the material before him to do so was thin. It was found wanting in the words of the court, meaning sufficient grounds for the proclamation did not exist. Mr Rawat has been directed to test his majority on the floor of the state Assembly on April 29. In political terms this may not prove relatively difficult as the HC sustained the direction of the Speaker to disqualify the nine Congress MLAs, who apparently defied their party whip and voted against the government on the Appropriation Bill, for defection. Be you ever so high, the law is above you is a dictum people in exalted positions will do well to remember, and this appears to have particular resonance in this case. Law is the recourse ordinary people have in confronting those wielding power, otherwise they will be helpless before authority even in a democracy. In the Uttarakhand case, a duly elected government had been sought to be pulled down by Central authority in a manner that just didnt seem right. If the Union government recommends Central Rule for a state, the President eventually has no choice but to go along, but before appending his signature the first citizen is entitled to ask questions, offer appropriate counsel, and receive clarification. Apparently this was not done in the Uttarakhand case, although it was plain that the Centre was blatantly in disregard of the state governors direction to chief minister Rawat to take a floor test on March 28, and pushed through its notification for dismissal of his government just a day prior. For the High Court, this amounted to cutting at the root of democracy and the government introducing chaos. The division bench reminded the Centre that the imposition of Presidents Rule in Uttarakhand was contrary to the law laid down by the Supreme Court. It also underlined that bringing a state under Central Rule ought to be an exception. The Modi government is going in appeal to the Supreme Court. After the pusillanimity shown in the case of the imposition of Presidents Rule in Arunachal Pradesh in February, it is to be hoped that the top court will not interfere with the governors direction for a floor test, which has been upheld by the high court. We use cookies to ensure we provide you with the best user experience. If you continue without changing your settings, we'll assume that you are happy to receive cookies from our site. Learn more. Amrit or nectar, in Gurbani, refers to the recitation of naam. Shabad, the word or naam simran, is the true amrit that leads to the ultimate state of bliss. The Guru says, Your Name, O Transcendent Lord, is ambrosial nectar; whoever meditates on it, lives. Amritnaam or amrit chakna, in Sikh religion, refers to the baptismal ceremony or the Khande di Pahul, transforming the Sikh into a sant-sipahi the perfect state of saint-soldier. Khanda is the emblem of the Khalsa consisting of a two-edged sword symbolising disintegration of false pride and false boundaries of caste, class and regional differences. In 1699, Guru Gobind Singh had created amrit for the sole purpose of forming the Khalsa brotherhood. An ideal Sikh is a saint-soldier who has realised the true aim of life naam simran, while defending the true cause at the same time. All the virtues of the heart and the excellence of the mind: These are the natural qualities of the Khalsa. This is to be a new and unique type of man, who bears arms and constantly lives in the presence of God, who strives and fights against evil with his gaze riveted to the stars. Such is the goal to be achieved which the Khalsa has been ordained. And lo, it is a well-armed and well integrated man. The Guru also gave a unique and distinct identity to the Khalsa. There were five emblems of purity and courage known as five Kakars or simply five Ks. These symbols, along with the bana, are to be worn by both men and women. The first Kakar kesh or unshorn hair is a sign of spiritual devotion. A turban protects the kesh as well as guards the dasam dwar, the 10th gate of spiritual consciousness. Kangha is a symbol of cleanliness. It is a small wooden comb worn in the hair. Kara is an iron bangle, a constant reminder to the Sikhs to do everything in accordance with the dharma. The kara symbolises God as the ultimate truth, with no beginning and no end. By wearing a kara a Sikh is reminded of the supreme truth and its hukam or will prevailing in the world. Kachha or drawers shows a life based on ethical conduct. Kirpan or sword is used as a symbol rather than a real weapon. Kirpan is a destroyer of illusion illusion of false ego, pride and power. It is to be used to protect the weak and maintain dharma. Guru Gobind Singh, after the first baptism ceremony of the five Sikhs, had asked these Sikhs to baptise him as well. No distinction was left between the creator and the creation between the guru and the disciple. All those who received amrit were infused with the spirit of courage and strength to sacrifice. I will create my Khalsa of such courage and vigour that he will take on armies of the enemy, he will stand up for the poor and the downtrodden. One Sikh will confront a lakh and a quarter of the enemy. It is when I make sparrows fight hawks that I am called Gobind Singh. Guru Gobind Singh established the Khalsa Panth the order of the pure ones. The awards will be held on 16 November 2015 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, Hong Kong. Individuals and corporates have until 31 July 2015 to submit their entries and nominations to Seatrade to shout about their achievements in the 12 different competitive award categories. For the first time, the awards scheme has introduced a new competitive category the Maritime Logistics Award. Judging criteria in this new category include achievements in areas such as productivity improvements and level of value-added services. All entries and nominations in the 12 competitive award categories will be adjudicated by an independent panel of judges who are all industry stalwarts with decades of trade experience. In addition to the competitive categories, Seatrade will be presenting the Young Person of the Year, Personality of the Year, Contribution to the Development of the Maritime Cluster in Hong Kong, and Lifetime Achievement Awards in recognition of exceptional contributions by luminaries in the regions maritime industry. Past recipients include influential industry heavy-weights like Tan Sri Frank Tsao of IMC Group and CC Tung of Orient Overseas (International) Limited (OOIL). Marcus Hand, Seatrade Maritime Review Asia Editor and Chairman of the Seatrade Maritime Awards Asia Judging Panel, commented: We are really excited that the Seatrade Maritime Awards Asia are returning to Hong Kong as part of the Hong Kong Logistics and Maritime Week. Winning an award is a testament of excellence and success and will position the winners in the forefront of the regions maritime industry. Widely acknowledged as one of the region's most prestigious industry awards, the Seatrade Maritime Awards Asia is a partner event of the Asian Logistics Maritime Conference (ALMC) and supported by the Hong Kong Shipowners Association and the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC). The black tie gala dinner is expected to be attended by over 400 leading industry executives. Seatrade Maritime Awards Asia 2015 Award Categories 1. Environment Protection Award 2. Technical Innovation Award 3. Corporate Social Responsibility Award 4. Safety Award 5. Ship Manager Award 6. Ship Owner/Operator Award 7. Emerging Terminal Operator Award 8. Maritime Logistics Award 9. Maritime Law Award 10. Ship Finance Award* 11. Shipbuilding & Repair Yard Award 12. Deal of the Year 13. Contribution to the Development of the Maritime Cluster in Hong Kong** 14. Young Person of the Year** 15. Personality of the Year** 16. Seatrade Lifetime Achievement Award** *Open to ship finance lawyers ** Not open for nominations Judging panel: Chairman: Marcus Hand, Editor, Seatrade Maritime News The judges: Gerardo Borromeo, Vice Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, Philippine Transmarine Carriers, Inc Arthur Bowring, Managing Director, Hong Kong Shipowners Association Peter Cremers, Chief Executive Officer, Anglo Eastern Group Sunny Ho, Executive Director, Hong Kong Shippers Council Esben Poulsson, Vice Chairman, International Chamber of Shipping Torgeir Sterri, Vice President and Regional Manager for Region Greater China, DNV GL Noboru Ueda, Chairman and President, ClassNK Tim Wilkins, Regional Manager, Asia Pacific, Intertanko Asia Visit http://www.seatradeasiaawards.com for more details. Ron Mathison, managing director of SPO, noted that even if stakeholders wish to exit the OSV business due to the present recession, the low scrap value has erected a barrier to exit. Apart from the flat scrap value due to lower steel content for resale, the depreciated value of the elderly vessels, which are the potential candidates for scrap, has added on to the reluctance of owners, banks and other stakeholders to dispose of and take a negative impact on their earnings. These are the resistance in the industry and that is why we are not seeing much scrapping. Unlike the airline industry, it is much easier to park a plane in the desert when utilisation is low, so there is more flexibility in terms of managing the asset, explained Mathison, who spent 24 years with Cathay Pacific Airways before joining SPO in 2015. The large number of underutilised OSVs will continue to get stacked up, be it cold- or warm-stacking, as against heading to the demolition yard, he told Seatrade Maritime News at the sidelines of the Sea Asia Offshore Marine Forum held this week in Singapore. Offshore players have publicly spoken out on the need to demolish idled and elderly OSVs in order to bring the supply-heavy market back to balance. There are unduly concerns that if the laid-up ships are not recycled, their return when the market eventually picks up would again throw the supply-demand off balance. However the laid-up OSVs may not all necessarily return to the market in the same form, Mathison pointed out. The offshore vessel operator market is so broad and diverse that they [OSVs] could reappear in the salvage or tug capacity as opposed to, say, a fully-fledged anchor handler or a platform supply vessel. We are already seeing some vessels being picked up on the cheap by other types of operators such as salvage. But clearly the big issue is how is the industry going to manage through this overcapacity because even if the oil price recovers, it is going to take several years for the overcapacity to work its way through, he said. The boatman Lam Tat Fei had conspired with cargo officer and colleague Jason Choo Soo Beng to falsely over-declare the amount of fuel pumped into the ship, with the excess amount sold back to the bunker supplier, local media reported. Out of the officially agreed 2,700 metric tonnes of fuel to be supplied to vessel Front Splendour by supplier Sea Hub Energy on 20 January 2013, only 2,542 metric tonnes were actually delivered. Choo, together with marine surveyor Victor Loh Tuck Seng, falsified documents to declare that 2,662 metric tonnes were delivered instead. Antonov Sergey, the receiving vessels chief engineer, was bribed and paid $8,400 out of a $18,000 sum which he agreed to so-called sell back the excess fuel for. Sergey was jailed for two weeks, fined SGD30,000 and ordered to pay a SGD8,434 penalty. Marine surveyor Loh was jailed two weeks and fined SGD25,000. Choo was jailed for eight weeks. Lam had denied three counts of corruption before he was convicted by a Singapore district court last Wednesday. In a separate case, another chief engineer Pittis Stavros was found guilty last month for shortchanging his oil tanker of 200 metric tonnes of bunker fuel using similar scam tactics. Speaking on a panel at the BNP Paribas Moore Stephens Singapore Shipping Forum 2016, John DAncona, director dry analysts for Clarksons Platou said it was difficult for the market to get any worse, but the issue is weve had a very difficult time in dry bulk. It could be at the bottom, but how long does it stay at this level? A poll of the audience as to which markets had hit bottom showed that 51% thought that dry bulk has had hit that point. The Baltic Dry Index hit an all time low of 290 points in February, but in recent weeks has rebounded to 669 points, although this is still below operating cost levels. Robert Stenvik, chairman and senior partner of Via Mar agreed that the market was at a low point with capesizes at below operating costs. However, while the market would enjoy a seasonal boost in the second half of 2016, in the first half of 2017 the market could plateau and end up at levels as bad as today. As a result it would take till the second half of 2017 for real market recovery as steel demand picks-up. Both DAncona and Stenvik urged the industry to continue scrapping more vessels. As to whether it was the time to buy dry bulk ships a question mark remains. Anthony Zolotas, group ceo of Eurofin Group said: Obviously the Greeks would buy as prices are at a very low level, but whether they are right is another question. DAncona said he was optimistic about dry bulk, but it needed to be defined what a good market was compared to the past. We need to be more realistic in what we expect. He also warned, There is still a huge amount of risk in dry bulk. Citing a possible example of such risks Stenvik said there was the possibility that China could decide to ban all imports of coal. The Greek government is understood to be using the occasion of Posidonia 2014 to arrange a meeting with Chinese investors, including leaders of the shipbuilding industry, in an effort to generate their interest in investing in Greek shipyards. Several Greek ministries are involved and plan to meet a Chinese delegation a few days before the 2 June opening of the week-long Posidonia exhibition. Greeks are leading clients of the Chinese yards, and over 70 Chinese shipyard-related companies will have a presence at the exhibition. The meeting will not be the first between Greek officials and Chinese investors, especially the shipyard sector. Seatrade Global understands at least one of the Chinese principals has been looking at shipyard rivals in the region, with particular attention being paid to Turkeys Tuzla, to get a feel of the competition. The Greek side will play on the success of the concession agreement Cosco Pacific has to run two container terminals in Piraeus. This success will no doubt also bring more Chinese ships into the region, which could use Greek shiprepair facilities. Greeces Hellenic Shipyards, one of the largest yards in the Mediterranean has been virtually closed for months, while Elefsis Shipyards has had limited activity, and once thriving Perama Repair Zone is near death. Courting of the Chinese shipyard men comes as Cosco Pacific establishes itself as the frontrunner in bidding to buy control of Piraeus port, though some of the world's most prominent terminal operators have declared interest in the majority stake in Greece's largest port. The Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund (TAIPED), the agency leading the countrys privatisation programme, says industry terminal specialists APM Terminals and Cosco (Hong Kong) Group, along with Philippines-based port operator International Container Terminal Services (ICTS) and Ports America Group Holdings, the biggest terminal operator and stevedore in the US, the Peter Yu-led Cartesian Capital Group and UK-listed investment company Utilico Emerging Markets, are the parties to express interest. At stake is the states 67% holding in Piraeus Port Authority which is listed on the Athens Stock Exchange and has a market capitalisation of about Euro 460m ($635.7m). Coscos Piraeus Container Terminal handles the lions share of the ports 3.164m teu container traffic, under a 35-year concession lease agreed in 2009 and became operable in 2010. However, while the government is desperate to have a deal in place by the end of the year, opposition is growing and includes the administrative leadership of the port, municipal authorities, shipowners, members of the Piraeus cluster and the international cruise sector. The much-delayed bunkering terminal, built at a cost of $95m, will start with an initial capacity of 55,000 metric tonnes. We will start before 15 June. Everything is tested and we are getting the first parcel most probably in the first week of June, Priyath Wickrama, chairman of Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA), told Reuters. We are starting from zero. So the first year is going to be a promotional year. We will give (bunkering services) at the lowest possible rate in the Indian subcontinent, Wickrama was quoted as saying. Currently, Sri Lankas main bunkering port Colombo is selling the 380 cst bunker fuel grade at around $632 per metric tonne, higher compared to Indias Mumbai 380 cst at $622 per metric tonne, according to data from Ship & Bunker. Colombo port, which has fuel storage capacity of around 33,000 metric tonnes a month, is facing huge constraints of storage space, according to local bunker suppliers. Every ship has to wait 2-3 hours outside Colombo port. Instead of waiting, they can get bunkers from Hambantota. We will monitor the Indian subcontinent bunker price and always we will maintain a price below that, Wickrama was reported saying. He added that the initial 55,000 metric tonnes of capacity from Hambantotas eight tankers is expected to add a further 100,000 metric tonnes in a second phase, before further expanding to 650,000 metric tonnes depending on demand. SLPA is targeting 300,000-400,000 metric tonnes of bunker sales in the first year, and possibly 1m metric tonnes within five years. The bunkering terminal is part of a $1.5bn Hambantota port development plan to capture transhipment activities and container shipping along the East-West route. Wickrama said the ports business activities will pick up with bunkering and eight new berths in the second phase, which is expected to be completed by 2015. Normal computers work either with power going through a wire or not, a one or a zero. Theyre binary systems. What quantum states allow for is much more complex information to be encoded into a single bit. A regular computer bit is either a one or a zero, on or off. A quantum state could be much more complex than that, because, as we know, things can be both, a particle and a wave at the same time, and the uncertainty around quantum states allows us to encode more information into a much smaller computer. So thats whats exciting about quantum computing. Some physicists have applauded the speaker for his understanding and clarity of expression. Other computer nerds said that the speaker has not got it completely right. But most people have been utterly wowed. Because almost no one in the world, it seems, expects a politician to know anything at all anymore, forget about also being able to actually articulate it. It could be the fault of the worldwide dissemination of words of wisdom from former US President George W. Bush, whose protestations that people should not misunderestimate him did not stop anyone from giggling sadly and cynically when he said, Well, I think if you say youre going to do something and you dont do it, thats trustworthiness. Or maybe it is the US presidential hopeful Donald Trump whose racist, misogynistic and insensitive language and behaviour may have made him into a folk hero for the boorish but has lowered standards for politicians everywhere. Or maybe it is Russias Vladimir Putin and his strange desire to release bare-chested photos of himself grappling with wild animals or jumping onto aeroplanes or whatever other bizarre things he does? Or is it revelations that British Prime Minister David Cameron had some unsavoury connection with a dead pig during his college years? Or our own Prime Minister who has told us that Lord Ganeshas elephant head proved that plastic surgery was practised in ancient times and, moreover, that the science of in vitro fertilisation was known in Vedic times. And so much like Mr Putin, comic books tell us that Narendra Modi also had some close encounters with crocodiles when he was a little boy. Instead, heres Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada. He was elected in 2015 and took the Liberal Party from 36 to 184 seats the biggest such jump in Canada. Mr Trudeau is 44, does yoga including a mean Mayurasana which is no easy feat and is a liberal, feminist, non-racist, open-minded, multi-cultural, compassionate, forward-looking politician. Plus, he can also talk about quantum computing when he needs to. Either hes too good to be true or, in these bizarre political times, we are just overjoyed when a politician who is an elected head of state can actually sound and behave like a human being. Mr Trudeau is not just young (hes 44, but in politician-age thats about 14), there is a refreshing realness about him. And he seems to be bucking the trend of a world turning increasingly Rightwing and/or fascist by defeating a conservative government. He is a liberal and proudly so. He has not yet obfuscated on issues. He has not yet shown his trustworthiness in Dubya fashion. He has not yet revealed that everything he promised was a jumla in our own homegrown Amit Shah manner. Sadly though, the cynic in one refuses to die or even shut up. Many felt that US President Barack Obama would magically fix everything in America and the world. He even won the Nobel Peace Prize before he did anything at all. After eight years of Mr Obama who at least still makes sense when he talks here is America unleashing Donald Trump on the world. Whether or not Mr Trump even wins the Republican nomination, the damage has been done: hope has been battered by buffoonery. Long ago in India, some people had some hopes from Rajiv Gandhi when he became Prime Minister after his mothers assassination in 1984. But Gandhi came to the throne tainted by the riots that started with his mothers death and his family legacy. And all too soon, his dreams of changing India were destroyed by stalwarts within his own party and by the end of his tenure we were giggling every time he mixed up his Hindi with statements like Hum jeetenge or losenge. Mr Trudeau also comes with a family history his parents, Pierre and Margaret, were quite the highfliers of their time. His father was Prime Minister of Canada twice from 1968 to 1979 and again, from 1980 to 1984. But Justin Trudeau appears for now to have forged his own path. And unlike Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, he is not an old-school socialist who appeals to the young in spite of looking like Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future. For us in India, even as the Trudeau government prepares to apologise for the terrible Komagata Maru incident, we know that Mr Trudeaus Cabinet is more representative of Canadas ethnic diversity than our government is representative of Indias minorities. He has more Sikhs (four) in his Cabinet than Mr Modi, as Mr Trudeau pointed out to Mr Modi and to the world. Thus proving, wonders of wonders, that he has a sense of humour with a bit of a sting and he is not afraid to show it. The tragedy of politics is that all too often it corrupts. People become caricatures of themselves as they scramble to stay in the same place, to cover up with bumptiousness their failures and shortcomings. They urge us to misunderestimate them as they tell us some random and boring thoughts of their mind while ignoring burning issues all around them. Maybe it wont happen. And until then, we have the miracle of Justin Trudeau, fitting into the zeitgeist without succumbing to the pasts pitfalls. Not a binary of 1 and 0 but a power that is much, much more. For now hes a quantum of solace. Okay, forgive me. He asked for it. Narayanan Shankar joins as senior vice president of business development of the classification society based in Singapore, and will co-direct business development and strategy with IRClass coo Anil Devli. Meanwhile Praveen Kumar Mishra has been appointed as vice president of IRClass in London. He is also the member of the Statutory Panel (Environment) of IACS and the Chairman of the Ballast Water Management working group of the Association of Asian Classification Societies. I am pleased to have professionals of this calibre on board with IRClass and I believe that with their years of experience and expertise; they will help us move forward as we internationalise and embrace new markets, said Devli. In a tearful television address on Monday President Park Geun-hye took ultimate responsibility for the South Koreas worst maritime accident in 20 years. "I apologise to the nation for the pain and suffering that everyone felt, as the president who should have been responsible for the safety and lives of the people," she said. The ferry with 476 onboard, capsized killing at least 286 with 18 still missing. Only 176 survived including most of the vessels crew abandoned ship. In her address Park singled out the role of the coastguard. "Had there been an immediate and proactive rescue operation after the accident, we would have been able to reduce the casualties," Park said. "I have decided to dismantle the coastguard." The investigative duties of the coastguard will be handed over to the police while its maritime patrol operations will be given to a newly-created Ministry of National Safety. Colombo port is mainly a transhipment hub with 80% of throughput coming from transhipment, Wickramasinghe told delegates at the TOC Asia conference held as part of the Singapore Maritime Week 2016. In 2013-14, Colombo ports throughput grew by 15%. In 2014-15 volumes were up by 6% and this year we expect a 10% increase, he said. In 2015, the port moved around 5.1m teu. The Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) is currently looking to grow its container handling volumes by developing the East Terminal, which is scheduled to come on stream by April 2017. According to Asian Development Bank, which supported the port upgrade project with a $300m loan, made a bold projection that Colombo port will handle 10m teu by 2020. While box throughput is on the rise, Wickramasinghe raised concerns over the increasing size of containerships, going as big as 18,000 teu that would put pressure on port infrastructure in catering to these mega-ships. From the terminal operator perspective, there is a huge impact from these mega-ships. Every shipping line wants the same weekly berthing window during the week, and that is the biggest worry on our part, he said. The deepwater port of Colombo has allowed it to accommodate 18,000-teu containerships, contributing to its climbing throughput but at the same time giving rise to issues of adequately allocating berthing slots. The Cemfjord capsized in the Pentland Firth on 3 January 2015 in what the MAIB described as an extraordinarily violent sea. The vessel sank so quickly there was not time to send a distress call and the alarm was not raised for 25 hours until the upturned hull was spotted by a passing ferry. All eight crew died in the accident and their bodies were not recovered despite an extensive search. The MAIB investigation found that Cemfjord capsized in extraordinarily violent sea conditions; a fatal hazard that was predictable and could have been avoided, said Steve Clinch, chief inspector of marine accidents, MAIB. The decision to enter the Pentland Firth, rather than seek shelter, was almost certainly a result of poor passage planning, an underestimation of the severity of the conditions and perceived or actual commercial pressure to press ahead with the voyage. The unwillingness to alter course was also underpinned by the shift in a cement cargo in heavy seas three months earlier. The appalling conditions and rapid nature of the capsize denied the crew an opportunity to issue a distress message or to escape from their ship, he said. Following the accident the MAIB said the vessels manager Brise Bereederungs has implemented several changes and initiatives aimed at improving the safe operation of its cement carrying vessels and the safety culture of its crews. This tragic accident is a stark reminder of the hazards faced by mariners at sea and the factors that can influence decision making in such treacherous circumstances, Clinch concluded. The thrust of the port's growth came from 2.4m teu in container throughput, an 8% increase on the first quarter 2013, with similar growth in both import and export volumes. For Hamburg's narrow slice of general cargoes besides containers, around 2% of total general cargo, a 5.9% improvement to 461,000 t reversed declines over the past couple of years. Throughput of bulk cargoes was up 3.5% in the quarter to a total of 10.4m t, with a mixed performance across Hamburg's three segments. Suction goods recorded the highest growth at 24.2% to 2.2m t on the back of strong grain imports and exports. Bulk liquids throughput was up 4.2% to 3.5m t, while grab cargoes fell 4.4% to 4.7m t. "In the first quarter of 2014 we in the Port of Hamburg succeeded in maintaining the previous year's positive growth trend. Our outstanding growth rate of 8.6% enabled us to further extend our very sound competitive position in comparison to Northern Europe's other major seaports." said Axel Mattern, ceo of Port of Hamburg Marketing. Out of the 500 job cuts, 270 will be in Finland, concentrating on the engine related R&D activities in the country with the aim of reducing development cycles. The latest retrenchment follows the July 2015 announcement of the 600 job cuts from Wartsilas marine solutions business, which was earlier called ship power division. The effect of the anticipated annual savings of EUR50m will materialise gradually starting from the second quarter of 2016, and will take full effect by end-2017, Wartsila announced. The company lamented that the marine market outlook continues to be challenging due to the combined effect of overcapacity of merchant ships and a continued lack of demand in the offshore segment. In addition, there are risks related to shipowners negotiating extensions to existing delivery contracts. These unfortunate capacity adjustments have to be made to maintain our competitive position in the global market. We will do our utmost to provide support for those individuals whose jobs will be affected by the streamlining, said Jaakko Eskola, president and ceo of Wartsila. Currently, Wartsila Marine Solutions employs 6,681 people globally and Wartsila Energy Solutions employs 958 people globally. Over the last year, Saudi Arabia has been experiencing a series of crises that have strained its economy, jeopardised its security and threatened its leadership of the Arab and Islamic world. The kingdom has recently responded to these challenges with a series of deft moves that could redefine the regional strategic architecture. Sensing the rising tide of Iranian influence across West Asia after the Arab Spring, Saudi Arabia, since 2011, gave up its traditional accommodative posture in regional affairs and decided to challenge Iran in its traditional bastions. In Syria, it backed the Islamist militia to secure regime change, while in Yemen it directly involved itself in military action against the Iran-backed Houthi militia. However, with the conflicts grinding to a stalemate on both battlefronts, Saudi Arabia has not shied away from peace processes. In Syria, it has been supportive of the US-Russian initiative that has achieved a cessation of hostilities and pulled the contending parties to the Geneva-III conference, and in Yemen the Saudis have created a divide between the Houthis and former President Ali Abdullah Saleh by entering into secret negotiations with the former. Amidst these challenges, the Saudis are most disturbed by the US interaction with Iran and its accommodation of Iran on the nuclear question. In response to what it sees as the US abandonment of the Arab world, the kingdom has shaped the Salman doctrine, named after Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz, whereby, in the candid words of Saudi commentator Nawaf Obaid, it will not allow Iran to give its minority Shia sect the upper hand in worldwide Islam (which would) disrupt 1,400 years of majority Sunni domination. Accordingly, in order to obtain a new balance of power in West Asia, Saudi Arabia is seeking to put together an Islamic Nato. This has emerged from the month-long Thunder of the North military exercises conducted in February 2016, which brought together about 150,000 troops from 21 largely Muslim countries in a new Islamic military coalition. This force is to be directed at terrorist groups, such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Al Qaeda and Shia militia, which are sponsored by Iran and which Saudi Arabia sees as backing Bashar al-Assad and promoting Iranian interests in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. Details relating to this force remain unclear, with suggestions that the coalition might just be a coordinator rather than a well-defined joint force. There is no such ambiguity in the ties that the kingdom is shaping with its traditional partner, Egypt. Overcoming differences with General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on both Syria and Yemen (where al-Sisi has opposed regime change and military intervention, respectively), King Salman, in a landmark visit in early April, secured a strategic partnership on the basis of the return of two islands in the Red Sea to the kingdom, the agreement to set up a bridge from the Saudi border to the Sinai, thus linking Asia with Africa, and a significant increase of Saudi investment in the ailing Egyptian economy. The two islands, Tiran and Sanafir, are located at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba; they thus have considerable geo-strategic value since both Israeli and Jordanian shipping, from Eilat and Aqaba respectively, crosses these islands before entering the Red Sea. Reports from Israel indicate that discussions on the islands handover had been going on for several months and that Israel was kept in the picture. The Saudi-Egypt bridge, to be named King Salman Bridge, is expected to have great significance: Besides binding the countries in a solid strategic embrace, it will boost both commerce and tourism. It could also open up the backward and neglected Sinai through a network of roads and tourism development projects. In the economic arena, the agreements signed during the kings visit have a total value of about $25 billion, and include Saudi investment for the development of an industrial zone at the Suez Canal and the setting up of a joint investment fund valued at $16 billion. These dramatic initiatives have their fair share of sceptics and detractors. The Islamic Nato has generated doubt about the efficacy of a coalition hastily put together as a show of force against Iran; few countries share the kingdoms uncompromising sectarian agenda. Nor do many see it as an effective force against Al Qaeda and the ISIS, since any credible action would require fighting on the ground, which would need the active involvement of Iran, Iraq and the Assad regime. In Egypt, there has been widespread opposition to the handover of the two islands, which are generally seen as integral parts of the Egyptian homeland, which al-Sisi does not have the mandate to barter away. But, al-Sisis urgent need for Saudi largesse could encourage him to uphold his agreement with Riyadh. The one capital where the initiatives discussed above have received fulsome welcome is Tel Aviv: Israelis are delighted with the Sunni military coalition against Iran and Hezbollah. They have been happy to back the handover of the two islands to Saudi Arabia, seeing this as strengthening their ties with the moderate Arabs represented by Egypt and Saudi Arabia. They believe that their support, with that of Saudi Arabia, will keep al-Sisi in power and the Muslim Brotherhood at bay, with al-Sisi obliging them by placing curbs on the Hamas in Gaza. Finally, as Israeli writer Ben Caspit has noted, once the principle of territorial transfer has been conceded by the Arab majors in the region, the day is not far away when Israel and the regional powers could together find territorial spaces for the Palestinians in Egypt and Jordan, allowing Israel to retain most of the West Bank. The Saudi-Egypt-Israel axis, already active in the shadows for some time, could define the future strategic shape of West Asia, end all hope of realising Palestinian aspirations and doom the region to ever-lasting conflict. Users in Jammu and Kashmir will now have to first apply for a license to start a WhatsApp news group. Mumbai: According to a recent circular by the government of Jammu and Kashmir, creating a WhatsApp group will now require a compulsory license. The move aims at keeping rumours to spread via social media apps like WhatsApp Messenger, that can create unrest in valley. The new rule was issued after five people were killed in Handwara protest, and internet services were suspended for three days following the incidence. The rule demands WhatsApp group administrators to get themselves registered with the authorities within ten days of the announcement of notice. Also, users in Jammu and Kashmir will now have to first apply for a license to start a WhatsApp news group. Registration will also mean that the administrators can be held responsible for all the content posted on these group chats. Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter. Press Release April 20, 2016 Keynote Speech of Senator Loren Legarda Breakfast Meeting of Climate Vulnerable Forum Members 20 April 2016 | UN Headquarters, New York Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, Good morning. We come together this morning against the backdrop of a historic gathering of nations to bring the global community a step closer to unleashing actions towards a low carbon, resilient and sustainable future. One hundred ninety-five (195) nations have come to agreement in Paris. It is time we bring this agreement into action. Looking back, the last time we were together was during the Sherpa Senior Officers Meeting in Manila when we all agreed that the Paris Agreement should go for the 1.5C warming limit. Our appeal did not go unheeded given the Paris Agreement's aim to keep a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius and to drive efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The end result may not have been the ideal outcome we had hoped to achieve, but the accord, as a whole, represents a considerable leap forward. For that, I congratulate everyone who worked hard and endured the grueling days of the negotiations and the months before that. Two days from now, representatives of nations will assemble once again, this time, to take us closer to delivering meaningful action on climate change. Our advocacies will not stop in New York; but rather, our efforts will need to ramp up as we strive to achieve the ratification by at least 55 countries representing 55% of global greenhouse gas emissions. It is only then that the Paris Agreement will enter into force. This only means that there can be no hesitation. We cannot relent in our efforts. This Agreement is vital because national actions will be driven by the countries' ambitions and plans for carbon reduction. The members of this Forum are put in a unique leadership position in that our commitments and actions should inspire action from others, such as in the areas of energy efficiency, renewable energy deployment, and forest protection. I have written my fellow parliamentarians from CVF member countries to ensure the early entry into force of the Agreement. I laud Fiji, Palau, Marshall Islands and Maldives for having ratified the Paris Agreement ahead of this gathering in New York. Your swift and decisive action underscores the great urgency of putting this Agreement into action. As we await the action of other governments, we need to remain optimistic. There will be challenges, and for that, we need to sustain our campaign for firm and urgent climate action by all countries. Regrettably, ratification may take longer for some countries. Others are going through a political transition, including my own. Congress is currently in recess as we are in the midst of an election period. There is no telling how much more we have to wait before we reach the numbers needed for the Agreement's entry into force, but I hope it would not be as long as the years we had to endure before this Paris Agreement was achieved. We must unite to rally our governments, and all other nations to make this treaty work. Procrastination has already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. It is time to bring the era of inaction to a close. Farmers are restless, including in my country, as lands are drying up, making it impossible for them to grow anything. They seek subsidies. Others seek food. Is it not ironic and sheer paradoxical that the very people who till the land so that others may have their share of rice on their tables are now begging for food? We seek climate justice for them and for other victims of extreme weather events who are at the receiving end of the global climate crisis. Justice, to a certain extent, will be served, once we have all parties to this Agreement, take significant climate action. We cannot afford delays in carrying out our commitments because the more we stall action, the faster we reach the dangerous 2C mark, which could cause 20 percent decline in water availability; 15 to 20 percent decrease in crop yield; sea-level rise of 70 centimeters; and increased acidification of the oceans and reduced farm fish yield by 90 percent, among others. These scenarios can happen in our lifetime; and the bitter part of it is that our countries will be at the forefront of these impacts due to our natural vulnerabilities. In fact, we have already been experiencing the severe impacts of climate change even before warming exceeded the 1 degree Celsius mark above pre-industrial levels. The 20 nations[1] that first joined the CVF have recorded, collectively, an average of more than 50,000 deaths per year since 2010, a number expected to increase exponentially by 2030. We have also experienced escalating annual losses of at least 2.5% of our GDP potential per year, estimated at US$45 ?billion since 2010. This is expected to increase to close to US$400 billion in the next 20 years.[2] The number of extremely hot days and hot nights has doubled in the last 50 years and extreme weather events have increased and have become more frequent, like typhoons with wind speeds that are around 10% stronger as my country had experienced during Supertyphoon Haiyan. I call on my fellow parliamentarians in the CVF and beyond, my fellow legislators in the Women in Parliaments Global Forum, my fellow policy-makers in GLOBE International, and everyone who values life and our future -- let us continue to rally our networks, organizations, and civil society in ensuring that our governments keep the promises they delivered in Paris. Within our respective economies and among us vulnerable nations, we must adapt and mitigate. We need to strengthen the capacities of our governments and apply the whole-of-society approach in integrating responses to climate change within national to local policy frameworks and programs of actions. In the Philippines, our government has started climate-tagging expenditure for climate change adaptation and mitigation and will prioritize funding for adaptation to reduce the vulnerability and address the climate risks to our communities. In our national budget for this year, we have mainstreamed provisions that ensure that the implementation of government programs would contribute towards building resilience and achieving the goals under the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Sustainable Development Goals, and the country's Intended Nationally-Determined Contributions. We are also preparing to mobilize the People's Survival Fund, the product of a law I sponsored in the Philippine Senate that complements our Climate Change Law, to fund climate adaptation programs of local governments and community organizations. The Fund supports the improvement of the monitoring, controlling and prevention of diseases triggered by climate change; establishment of forecasting and early warning systems; and strengthening institutional development, for local governments, for preventive measures, planning, preparedness and management of impacts relating to climate change. The Philippine Government has also taken an active role in the CVF, initiating the establishment of the Vulnerable Twenty Group of Ministers of Finance or V20, a high-level policy dialogue and action group that hopes to address the critical challenge of climate change more assertively through innovative financing and technology. Finally, I wish to share with you a novel and revolutionary movement that was hatched recently by a group of deeply committed environmental thinkers and doers. This movement will seek an advisory opinion before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the question: "Under international law, what are the duties of States to protect humankind of the present and future generations from the climate crisis?" The legal action will not be adversarial; but would seek the advice of the world's court on a question of law. The challenge, however, rests in getting the UN General Assembly to issue a resolution, requesting the ICJ to issue an advisory opinion on this question. Should plans materialize, I enjoin your support in mobilizing your communities to support this initiative. Excellencies, Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen, Creative approaches are needed for the problems we have at hand. The situation we are in requires urgent, massive, and effective action. Let us not just live with the risks, but deal with it. Let us take the necessary action now! Thank you and good morning. ________________________________________ [1]The first 20 CVF Member States: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Barbados, Bhutan, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Kiribati, Madagascar, Maldives, Nepal, Philippines, Rwanda, Saint Lucia, Tanzania, Timor-Leste, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and Vietnam [2] V20 Communique; Climate shocks - Vulnerable Twenty Group of Ministers of Finance, 8 October 2015 POE, CHIZ BRING 'GOBYERNONG MAY PUSO' TO NEGROS OCCIDENTAL, PALAWAN VOTERS Sen. Grace Poe and running mate Sen. Chiz Escudero are set to return to Negros Occidental on April 21, and offer to Negrense voters the programs of action under their "Gobyernong May Puso" campaign platform that centers on eradicating poverty. The Partido Galing at Puso candidates barnstormed the province last month to thank the people, including local government officials, who threw their support behind their political bid. Poe and Escudero will lead an early morning motorcade that will pass through Bacolod City, Silay City and throughout Victorias City, where a dialogue with Negrense barangay leaders is scheduled. In her earlier visit to the province, Poe vowed to build an airport in San Carlos City if she gets the mandate of the people on May 9. The tandem will then proceed to Puerto Princesa in the afternoon to meet with local officials and supporters. The culmination of the campaign activities in Palawan is a political rally in the evening. Poe's main campaign theme is premised on declaring an all-out war against poverty, which she described as the cause of most major problems of the country, like the rise in criminality and insurgency. She vowed to put an end to "endo" or contractualization, which is a system of employment that she described as oppressive and discriminatory. CHIZ NAMED 'GREENEST' VP BET For having a good track record and stand on environmental issues, Sen. Francis "Chiz" Escudero has been declared the "greenest" vice-presidential candidate by various environmental groups behind a campaign to educate voters about the environmental record of national candidates for the May 9 elections. Escudero bested five other candidates vying for the second highest post in the land after scoring 29 points overall in the evaluation conducted by 14 "green" groups behind the initiative called "Luntiang Bayan: Boto para sa Tao, Hayop at Kalikasan." Trailing behind Escudero are Senators Gregorio Honasan (21 points), Ferdinand Marcos Jr. (9 points), Alan Peter Cayetano (4 points); Antonio Trillanes IV (3 points) and Camarines Sur Rep. Leni Robredo (2 points). The candidates were rated based on their performance on seven environmental issues, namely: animal welfare and wildlife protection; biodiversity and ecosystems protection; adaption to climate change/disaster preparedness and mitigation; food security; sustainable development; solid waste management; and environmental justice. In a statement, Luntiang Bayan convenors said Escudero scored the highest on environment justice "because of his statements on the dumping of Canadian trash, the rehabilitation efforts in Yolanda-affected areas, and support for farmers who are suffering from the El Nino weather phenomenon." The convenors include Earth Island Institute Philippines, Nilad, Miriam College Environmental Studies Institute, Philippine Animal Welfare Society, Save Philippine Seas, Wild Bird Club of the Philippines, Ecowaste Coalition, Save Freedom Island Movement, Pull OutCOALition, Save Laguna Lake Movement, Piglas, UP Green League, Miriam Environmental Planning Organization, and UP Minggan. Escudero, who currently the chairs the Senate Committee on Environment and Natural Resources, was also recently named "Clean Air Champion" by the Coalition of Clean Air Advocates Philippines, which also endorsed his candidacy for vice-president. The coalition recognized Escudero for his personal commitment to advocacies geared toward achieving better air quality and sustainable development for the Filipino people. Press Release April 21, 2016 Legarda: Paris Agreement is Our Gift to Mother Earth, Legacy to Our Children As world leaders converge at the United Nations Headquarters in New York to sign the Paris Agreement on Earth Day (April 22), Senator Loren Legarda, Co-Head of the Philippine Delegation, stressed the importance of the accord to both humanity and the planet. "The most important thing we can bequeath to our children is a livable planet; and if there is one gift of gratitude we can give to Mother Earth, it should be to heal the planet," said Legarda. "Our generation has been given the golden opportunity to leave a legacy that will benefit our children and a multitude of generations. In the Paris Agreement, we said we must not go beyond 2 degrees Celsius global temperature rise this century and we must do everything we can to even limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. We must deliver on our promises," she added. Legarda, UNISDR Global Champion for Resilience, said that this year's Earth Day celebration could be the most meaningful because of the Paris Agreement signing, but maintained that the treaty's early entry into force must be ensured. The Agreement will come into effect and be legally binding once 55 parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) representing at least 55% of global greenhouse gas emissions sign and ratify the treaty. "This Agreement is vital because national actions will be driven by the countries' ambitions and plans for carbon reduction, which should include energy efficiency, renewable energy deployment, and forest protection," said Legarda. 2016 Earth Day Theme: Trees for the Earth Moreover, the Senator said that protecting the planet does not only rely in the hands of global and national leaders, but also in the collective effort of individuals and communities. This year's Earth Day celebration also encourages individuals to do their share in protecting the planet through tree growing activities. "We need to look at tree planting as serious business. We need trees not just for production but also as a way to mitigate climate change, to offset the carbon we emit on a daily basis," said Legarda. With the theme Trees for the Earth, the UN sets the goal of planting 7.8 billion trees over the next five years. It highlights the importance of trees in combatting climate change and achieving long-term economic and environmental sustainability, among others. In conclusion, Legarda said, "It does not need a superhero to save the world. The Earth only needs all of humanity to do their fair share to keep the planet healthy and livable." Press Release April 21, 2016 BONGBONG MARCOS CALLS ON COMELEC TO LAY DOWN RULES ON VOTE RECEIPT DISCREPANCIES Vice Presidential candidate Senator Ferdinand "Bongbong" R. Marcos Jr. today called on the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) to lay down the rules in cases where there are discrepancies in the vote receipts from the actual votes cast. Marcos made the call in the light of mounting reports over alleged discrepancies in vote receipts in the ongoing Overseas Absentee Voting. The Senator urged the Comelec to explain the process that voters should undertake in case of disparity between what was written in the ballots and the entries in the receipts. "If a voter says the content of the receipt is wrong, what shall he or she do? How will he or she make the complaint? What's the procedure? Kailangan gumawa ng hakbang ang Comelec para pagpasok ng botante sa mga presinto ay alam na nila ang gagawin kung sakaling magkaroon ng ganitong problema," he said. Marcos pointed out that he has met quite a number of people in his campaign sorties who expressed concern over vote receipt discrepancies. He also mentioned a video which went viral over social media where an Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) was complaining that her voter receipt did reflect Marcos as her candidate for vice president but another candidate's name appeared instead. "The OFW, who is from Laoag City, said she complained to the election officer but she was told that a voter is only entitled to one ballot." "This is a very serious matter which the Comelec should look into. And if this is happening in OAV, how can we be sure that it will not happen on May 9? It is therefore important that the Comelec releases clear guidelines if the same problem occurs on election day," Marcos concluded. Press Release April 21, 2016 POE WANTS INCENTIVES FOR VOLUNTEERS TO CURB DYNAMITE FISHING To curb unregulated fishing in the country's waters, Sen. Grace Poe wants to incentivize community-based volunteer groups that keep watch on Philippine coastal waters. The independent presidential candidate said she is counting on a participatory approach to help salvage the dismal condition of the fisheries industry, which employs 1.4 million Filipinos. "Our waters are gravely exploited. Our fishermen are almost left with no fish to catch. We must empower civilian sea patrol forces so that the livelihood of our fisherfolk could be protected," Poe said. Data from the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) show that fish production has been steadily declining over the past five years. Around 10,000 incidents of dynamite fishing are still being recorded every day. Among the incentives Poe proposed for volunteers is giving them allowance and social insurance coverage such as membership in the Social Security System and Philippine Health Insurance Corp. The senator is also pushing for a modernized monitoring, control and surveillance services for BFAR to effectively suppress illegal fishing and enforce Amended Fisheries Code. The amendments carry stiffer penalties for violators and require fishing vessels to install a monitoring device to ensure that fishermen stay within the right fishing zones. "Municipal waters should be reserved for municipal fisherfolk, but commercial fishing vessel operations in municipal waters have become more rampant," Poe noted. She said the lack of government support for the fishing industry has contributed to the fact that fishermen are the poorest sector in the country. Government statistics reveal that poverty incidence among fisherfolk is 40 percent, much higher than the national average of 25 percent. According to the Asian Development Bank, 51 percent of the total Philippine population live in coastal areas. "The Philippines is an archipelagic country with more water than land. The fact that our fishermen remain the poorest is unacceptable. We should transform the industry, empower our fisherfolk and protect them from uncertainties and vulnerabilities," Poe said. In 2013, the Philippines ranked seventh among the top fish producing countries in the world, contributing 4.7 metric tons or 2.5 percent of the total world production. However, according to the BFAR, 10 out of 13 fishing grounds in the country are already heavily exploited. Press Release April 21, 2016 POE CALLS FOR CAP ON COAL IN PH ENERGY MIX Sen. Grace Poe said the government should put a cap on energy sourced from coal-fired power plants to direct the county's energy development towards renewable energy sources. Poe, who cited the development of renewable energy sources in her 20-point priority agenda, said the Philippines should start to focus on tapping cleaner and more sustainable energy sources. "We will put a cap on coal in our energy mix. Such mix will be determined through consultations, taking into account our commitment to reduce carbon emissions under the Paris Agreement," the independent presidential candidate said. The Department of Energy (DOE) estimates that the Philippines will need 13,167 megawatts of additional power capacity by 2030. Of this, 8,548 MW are expected to be generated by baseload power plants or facilities that produce energy at a constant rate to meet the continuous energy demand. Coal-fired power plants are the dominant energy producing technology in the country today because it is deemed cheaper and easier to build. There are 23 coal-fired power plants in the Philippines providing 5,632 megawatts of power or 34.2 percent of dependable power capacity as of December 2015. However, the cost of building coal plants does not consider the external costs of coal such as pollution and health impacts, the World Bank said, and if these were taken into account, coal would be among the most expensive forms of power generation. "'Yung coal, siyempre, alam natin may mga environmental impacts 'yon. Ako, 'pag ako'y naging pangulo, talagang prayoridad ko 'yung clean and alternative sources of energy," Poe told media in an interview in Iligan City, Wednesday night. Poe noted that the total committed and indicative coal-fired power plants built between 2012 and 2030 can already deliver 11,992 megawatts, exceeding the country's baseload capacity requirement of 8,400 MW, as indicated in the Philippine Energy Plan. "Ang importante magkaroon tayo ng mas maraming supply ng kuryente at sana patungo na rin sa renewable energy. 'Yan ang dapat agenda ng bagong pangulo," she said. Along with developing renewable energy sources, Poe said she wants to make sure that power becomes more affordable to Filipinos, who are paying one of the highest electricity rates in the world. To do this, the DOE should create an environment that would open up the energy market to more players. Setting up one-stop shops to facilitate the process of doing business for investors, especially those involved in renewable energy, would help, Poe said. "Kung maraming supply, mas mababa ang singil. Kaya sisiguraduhin ko na maraming supply para hindi tayo nagbabayad ng napakataas para sa kuryente," said the senator. The Philippines has one of the highest electricity rates in Asia. According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, electricity accounted for 4.5 percent of a Filipino household's expenditures in 2012. Press Release April 21, 2016 To deter scams, 'presidential action center' needed in NAIA The next administration should "plant a presidential action and complaint desk" at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) as a "one-stop, on-the-spot troubleshooting center" for OFWs and other travellers, Sen. Ralph Recto said today after another case of tanim-bala was reported the other day. "You put up a Malacanang-attached office there and it will lead to better service and passenger care. It will also be a deterrent against scams," Recto said. With 36 million passengers using the four NAIA terminals annually, "it is a large constituency which can neither be ignored, nor denied of service, and one that deserves an office directly under the OP (Office of the President)," Recto said. "Kung mayroon mang dapat itanim sa NAIA ngayon, 'yan marahil ang isang detachment nang pinakamataas na opisina ng bansa na tatanggap ng puna at papuri mula sa mga pasahero," Recto said. Recto said there is an existing Palace office--the Presidential Action Center (PACE)--which has the mandate to establish an office such as "a detachment" at NAIA and other international airports. In its Citizen's Charter, PACE describes "the OP (as in) the best position to serve as the command center" for requests for assistance and redress of grievances by the general public. "Kaya kung command center pala, e di magtayo ang PACE ng extension office sa NAIA," Recto said. PACE is the "key frontline team that can effectively bridge and ensure delivery of services to the general public," the agency claims in a statement linked to the OP website. The low-key PACE holds office in one of the buildings near Malacanang, but Recto wants it to set up a satellite office in NAIA and "for it to anchor a one-stop public assistance kiosk manned by government agencies." "The idea is to pool together all agencies which have something to do with OFWs and travel," Recto said. "Puwede mong tawagin 'yang isang mini-national government center sa NAIA. It can also serve as a place where travellers can lodge complaints for bad service and give commendations for good ones," Recto said. He said offices involved in OFWs affairs such as OWWA, DOLE, MARINA, POEA, Commission on Overseas Filipinos should join the PACE-run airport kiosk. Other offices which must be there are the Commission on Human Rights and the Public Attorney's Office. "So that when an OFW, for example, cries that a bullet has been planted in his luggage, there is an office he can seek assistance from," he said. "O kung may minor na papunta sana sa Hong Kong Disneyland pero nakalimutan ang clearance from the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), doon mismo matutulungan ng naka-duty na taga-DSWD," he said. "Kung nabiktima ka naman ng taxi na mabilis ang metro, doon mismo pwede kang mag-sampa ng reklamo," he said. Recto said the maintenance of a "presidential action, assistance and complaints desk" is an honored and unbroken Malacanang tradition. "Lahat nang naging presidente meron nito. Yung iba pa nga nagkaroon ng designated 'People's Day'", Recto said. "If airport travellers can no longer come to Malacanang, then Malacanang must go to them," he said. "Through its gates pass the OFWs who send back P1.3 trillion pesos annually. The presence of a Malacanang desk in NAIA is one way for the highest office in the land to tell OFWs that 'I have your back,'" he said. Recto said such desk can serve as a "deterrent to the commission of scams and a reminder to render excellent service." As to the funding of the "Malacanang detachment" in NAIA, Recto said it can be accommodated in the P2.5 billion budget of the OP for 2016. "It can also be drawn from the P4 billion Contingent Fund." Government also collected P9.3 billion from NAIA passengers and airlines in 2014, netting P5.25 billion. "NAIA is also a major collection point of the travel tax," Recto said. In an email to The Associated Press, Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said that the standard renewal process is just about complete for the plane. (Photo: AP) Washington: One of Donald Trump's jets has been flying for months with an expired registration, Federal Aviation Administration records showed Tuesday. The Republican presidential candidate's airplane lost its registered status in January after failure to pay a $5 fee to the FAA. The aircraft in violation is not Trump's Boeing 757, the renovated commercial jet that the billionaire sometimes uses as a backdrop for his rallies. Instead, it is a 1997 Cessna Citation X, a far smaller plane which Trump has used to visit smaller airports. Citation jets of a similar vintage sell for around $3 million, according to aviation brokerage firms' current listings. The FAA declined to comment beyond confirming the registration was expired. In an email to The Associated Press, Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said that the standard renewal process is just about complete for the plane. The owner of record for the Cessna is a limited liability corporation whose sole member is Trump. The New York Times, which first reported the expiration on Tuesday, said the registration lapse could ground the jet for days. Plane registrations are supposed to be renewed every 36 months. If the FAA learns that a registration has expired but the plane is still being flown, the agency typically sends a warning letter to the owner, according to aircraft operators who asked not to be named because they didn't want to be associated with the Trump case. Fines are also common. FAA regulations permit the agency to impose total civil fines up to $27,500 for the lapsed registration. The agency also has the option of seeking up to $250,000 in criminal fines and imprisonment of up to 3 years. The news emerged as voters in Trump's home state of New York cast their ballots Tuesday in the state's crucial presidential primary. Back in 1898, it must have seemed like a good idea to name a Long Beach elementary school after Confederate General Robert E. Lee. And for 118 years, the name has stuck. But with historical hindsight, such monikers have increasingly come under fire not only in Long Beach but in recent flareups in Palo Alto, where parents are fighting to strip schools of the names of eugenics supporters, and Berkeley, where the community is debating an elementary school titled for a famed scientist, conservationist and slave owner. The controversy over the names of schools and other institutions exploded in June after a white supremacist who waved the Confederate flag massacred nine people in a black church in South Carolina. But the fallout in the Bay Area has gone beyond the Civil War, forcing a complex reconsidering of flawed icons of many stripes. In Palo Alto, the school board voted this month to create an advisory committee to look at the districts school names, a decision prompted by student and parent outrage that Jordan Middle School paid homage to eugenicist David Starr Jordan, who believed in selective breeding and sterilization to improve the human race. Brittany Murphy/The Chronicle An influential racist Jordan was a giant in many ways the founding president of Stanford University, a longtime director of the Sierra Club, and a defense expert in the Scopes Trial on evolution. He has several schools, a lake, a bacteria and a federal research ship named after him. Yet all of his accomplishments are overshadowed by the darker side to Jordan, said Avery Pearson, a junior at Palo Alto High School and a former Jordan Middle School student, in remarks to the school board on Feb. 9. Keeping his name is effectively advocating the belief that some kids are born incompetent and no amount of education can change that, Avery said. He wasnt only a racist. He was an influential racist. Palo Alto is among many districts in the state weighing the issue, among them Salinas, San Diego and Los Angeles, and the decisions even in the case of Robert E. Lee arent easily reached. A generational nostalgia can accompany school names, with yellowed report cards and signature-filled yearbooks recalling Lee Elementary or Jefferson Davis High School. While some see a clear duty to send a message to young people by wiping the slate clean, others caution about forgetting the ugly parts of the past. Critics of name changes say history cant always be interpreted through a lens of modern values, or note that many icons were arguably both historic villains and influential achievers. Engaging students in debate Thomas Jefferson, for example, was both a founding father and a slave owner. President Woodrow Wilson, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the League of Nations, supported resegregation of the federal workforce, with separate restrooms and cafeterias for black workers. Each community has to think and feel its way through its choice, said Lincoln Caplan, a senior research scholar at Yale Law School, where a name debate rages over Calhoun College, honoring the early American statesman and Vice President John Calhoun, who strongly supported slavery. Whats the standard? Where do you draw the line? In Palo Alto, students have engaged in the debate. Averys English teacher, Erin Angell, said her students researched Jordan, trying to understand who he was and the world in which he lived. They interrogated history, Angell said, then took the findings to elected officials, who voiced support for the name changes. The students are advocating for a name change at a second middle school, the namesake of educational psychologist Lewis Terman, who also supported eugenics. The names of our schools are not primarily for the people that theyre named after, Palo Alto school board member Ken Dauber said during the Feb. 9 meeting. Theyre for our current students and our community, and so they should reflect the values we currently hold for education, and certainly primarily among that is a belief in the potential of every child. These things matter, said board President Heidi Emberling. I dont want any child to feel marginalized in our community. The debate in Palo Alto, and in communities across the country, raises the possibility that more recently selected school names will fail to hold up to future interrogation. So far, Richard Nixon Elementary in Yorba Linda (Orange County) lacks controversy, despite the former presidents resignation under scandal. Future generations may make calls based on their own values, perhaps reflecting, for example, an increasing support for gay rights. Lesson in relevance Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, though, opposed same-sex marriage before supporting it. And Martin Luther King Jr. believed homosexuality was an acquired trait, one that needed a good psychiatrist, according to an Ebony magazine advice column he penned in 1958. Schools are named after each of them. 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. The heart of the matter is that if youre going to make a serious choice about keeping a name or taking it off, then you owe the community serious consideration of what a person accomplished in the first place to deserve the honor, Caplan said. That in itself is such a powerful lesson for students. That lesson could come soon in Berkeley, where the crosshairs are on LeConte Elementary, named after Joseph LeConte, a celebrated physician, geologist and conservationist who co-founded the Sierra Club with John Muir. He has a waterfall, canyon, glacier and mountain named after him in addition to schools and university buildings, including one at UC Berkeley. Yet he was not only a slave owner but a munitions supplier to the Confederacy. Playing it safe Berkeley parents have voiced concern about the LeConte name, though the school board hasnt taken up the issue yet. The last time the community railed against a school name, in 2005, the board voted against a change, and Thomas Jefferson Elementary is still on Ada Street. Elsewhere, Los Angeles school officials are looking at D.W. Griffith Middle School, named after the film pioneer who made The Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan. And in Salinas, district officials decided in January to rename Tiburcio Vasquez Elementary School, rather than continue to honor the outlaw rustler and convicted murderer, who was also considered by some to be a revolutionary fighter against the Anglo invasion of the region. The school board played it safe with the replacement name, choosing Monte Bello. Thats Italian for pretty mountain. Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate On one side of the world, Jonathan Kos-Read is a famous movie and television actor, where fans shout his name when they spy him and clamor for selfies and autographs. On the other side, hes just another guy on the street, another dad picking up his daughter from a local public school unknown and inconspicuous. In China, where he lived for nearly 20 years, hes a celebrity. In Oakland, where he decided to settle with his family last year, hes a relative nobody. Both places suit him just fine. I live in Oakland. I work in China, he said. Its a long commute. Kos-Read, 43, is the go-to white guy for Chinese soap operas, war movies, romantic comedies and even zombie flicks. He is, by some accounts, the most famous American actor in China, where hes known as Cao Cao (pronounced tsau tsau), a name he chose in honor of a Han Dynasty warlord he admired. Hes the quintessential character actor: the cheesy Russian lounge lizard named Dick, the free-spirited hip-hop dancer, the French mafia fashion designer. Hes been a lawyer named Mark who turns into a zombie in Mojin: The Lost Legend a movie starring the Chinese equivalent of George Clooney, he said. Courtesy of Jonathan Kos-Read Finding his calling Kos-Read is fluent in Mandarin but often speaks English in the roles, sometimes with French or Russian accents and with Chinese subtitles scrolling during his dialogue. Born in Torrance (Los Angeles County), Kos-Read stumbled into the career in a postcollege quest for adventure and idiosyncrasy. I had this image of myself living life like a character in a novel, he said. When he arrived in Beijing in 1997, after graduating with a degree in microbiology from New York University, he had little money in his pockets and no idea what he would do there. With one year of college Mandarin on his resume, he didnt quite speak the language but was determined to learn. He thought hed stay a couple of years. I just wanted to go do something interesting, and then I never left, he said. He taught English, tutored expat kids in biology and history, and interned at CNN. And he started paying attention to the white American actors in Chinese television shows and big-screen cinema. At some point he realized three things: They werent great actors, their Mandarin was terrible, and they werent very good-looking. Losing to Tyson Kos-Read had studied acting at NYU before switching to biology, his Mandarin was really good, and he wasnt ugly he figured he had them beat on all three fronts. And sure enough, he started getting roles not long after he decided to audition. His family isnt surprised by his career choice or his success at it. His father is a renowned geriatric psychiatrist and elder abuse expert witness. His mother is a prominent painter. His brother, Isaac Kos-Read, is the communications director of the Oakland Unified Schools and a competitive Cuban salsa dancer. We come with these two very different perspectives of life, Isaac Kos-Read said. Theres no doubt that my brother is a confident guy whos really thought through what he wants out of life and how to go about getting it. Kos-Read didnt, however, get the role he really wanted in his most recent film, Ip Man 3, part of a movie franchise about Bruce Lees martial arts teacher. Instead, he was cast as the corrupt British police officer, a part with noticeably fewer scenes than the other English-speaking role. I was a little miffed, he said. I went (to the set) with an attitude. Then he showed up and saw who beat him out: former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson. He figured he could live with the smaller role. And, he said, Honestly, Mike Tyson was the nicest guy. Back home in Oakland, Kos-Read strolled through Chinatown one recent afternoon, chatting with wide-eyed shopkeepers more stunned by his fluent Mandarin than his role in the movies they carried on their shelves. After wandering for a while, he ducked into his favorite restaurant for a Mandarin hot pot meal, with floating jujubes (the fruit, not the candy), tofu, intestines and thinly sliced beef. Despite the comfort food, Oaklands Chinatown still seemed a bit foreign, he said. The culture and language there are more representative of the rural south rather than Beijing, where he lived, and Shanghai, where he often films. Leah Millis/The Chronicle Roles become more nuanced Still, Oakland already is starting to feel like home for Kos-Read and for his wife, Gia Li, whom he met in China, and their two daughters, ages 9 and 3. His brother is here, and his parents are moving to the city as well. Theres a vibe in Oakland of art, culture, change thats growing on him. His career, though, will presumably stay rooted in China. I would love to do a movie here, he said. But I have a specific skill set I can speak Chinese really well. With his language skills and his Hollywood good looks, hes carved a deep niche in Chinas film industry. Hes already scheduled to shoot three more films in the coming months. Kos-Read has faced criticism for some of his roles, which reinforce stereotypes of the stupid American or the cocky French guy. The Japanese actors typically play the bad guys, he noted, a reflection of the often violent historical interactions between the two countries. While he has turned down some roles, hes also played his share of brash World War II American soldiers, dumb foreigners or hapless cohorts. 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. As a minority actor, you run into this, he said. You can say, I would never do anything like that, and then you never work. Hes noticed that as China has increasingly opened its borders to outsiders, the roles have started to shift. Hes not always just the arrogant American, for example, but complex characters that, while still foreign, are more than just a white-faced stereotype. Case in point: In his next film a science fiction Home Alone set in Beijing he plays a kidnapper with Hulk-like superhero powers. But he wont be green. Im like a purple Hulk, he said. Though the roles are improving, Kos-Read noted that hes still cast as the non-Chinese sidekick rather than the leading man. Hes the character actor who never gets the girl. Actually, thats not entirely true. Sometimes I get the girl, but only under specific circumstances, he said. One, shes a prostitute. Two, she lives the rest of her life in regret and opportunity lost. Three, she dies. Oh, and one more, he said, laughing. Shes old. Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker US is in contact with civil society groups and the government to share their views of our global policy on LGBT rights. (Photo: Representational Image/PTI) Washington: The US is watching with "great interest" the outcome of an ongoing court case with regard to the LGBT community and their rights, a senior Obama administration official has said. "We of course are watching the outcome of the court case with great interest. We remain in contact with civil society groups and the government to share our views of our global policy on LGBT rights," Special US Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBT Persons Randy Berry told reporters on Wednesday. About a year ago, Secretary of State John Kerry had created this one of its kind position in the US Government. Taking over the position in April last year, Berry has travelled to 42 countries around the world including Jamaica, Turkey, Uganda, Indonesia, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Holy See and Israel among others. "I have not had a chance to travel to India yet. But I would characterise from the reports we received from not just from India, but from the region, is that the global progression that we see is a very, very uniform in some ways, that I believe that there is a more open public dialogue. "One thing that is interesting is of the countries that I visited over this first year, there is not a single one that I would single out as saying that they are somehow either immune from what I believe is truly a global movement," he said. "That is not because we are doing anything particularly to make it so. I think it is happening quite organically. Nor do I think there is any place that necessarily it is impossible to have a conversation on these grounds. I think it can be delicate," he said. Berry said the American diplomatic mission in India certainly does engage with the government and with civil society groups there. "I think we have to proceed with great care and make sure that oftentimes that we are making sure that we are conducting our diplomacy with our counterparts in government and not necessarily through the press as an opening salvo", says Berry. "I think that those conversations are entirely possible. I think they carry the capacity of being fundamentally productive, as long as we engage in a careful and reasoned way; that I really think that there is great value in a constructive conversation that talks about issues of basic humanity, freedom from discrimination and violence. I think that is a very hard proposition to argue with in almost any country," Berry added. In February, the Supreme Court held an open court and referred to a five-judge bench a curative petition challenging its verdict criminalising homosexuality in India. In October, San Francisco Supervisor Katy Tang held a community meeting in the Sunset District to discuss building new housing that would be affordable to middle-income families. It did not go well. They were ready to tar and feather her, says political analyst David Latterman. Tang was pushing Mayor Ed Lees affordable housing bonus program, which would allow developers to build more affordable housing by bypassing some zoning rules. But area residents werent having it. The west side supports nothing, Latterman said. They dont want affordable. They dont want anything. It was the same story at a January Planning Commission meeting in City Hall on the mayors plan. The nine-hour session was full of angry, doomsday rhetoric from no-growth advocates. One speaker, claiming the plan to create middle-income housing would oust low-income people of color in rent-controlled housing, said the mayors plan would amount to ethnic cleansing. So it goes in San Francisco. Ardent low-income housing activists, opposed to the building of anything but low-income housing, have formed an alliance with older, gray-haired NIMBYs to try to stop most construction. The Sunset District has been virtually a no-build zone. According to the Planning Department, between 2005 and 2014 only 43 units of housing have been built, the fewest in the city by over 200 units. The debate about the mayors affordable housing bonus program is long and complicated and a topic for another column. But theres a groundswell for more housing in the city from an unexpected source 20- and 30-year-old middle-income residents meaning someone making up to $95,000. Typically, young people tend to back progressive values, but housing may be the exception. Middle-income option Weve got a lot of young folks who are pro-density, says Jeff Buckley, the mayors housing policy adviser. With so many people coming to the region, theres a broad swath not being addressed. We need to create some middle-income option. Take someone like Justin Jones, who is 30 and about to get married. He works at a health care company, makes a reasonable salary and cant even think about owning a house. Renting isnt much better. He recently lost his apartment in San Francisco and had to find another at a significantly higher rent. Im in that weird conundrum where I make too much to qualify for low-income housing, but I cant afford to buy anything, said Jones. I feel stuck in the middle. Almost abandoned. I was talking to a friend the other day. Shes living in a dining room. People are getting angry. Jones and others like him are beginning to speak up. A former leader in the local Young Democrats, he founded the Robert F. Kennedy Club for pro-building Democrats in March and has a paid membership of over 50 and a 1,600-member mailing list. Latterman, who tracks political trends, is encouraged to see building-friendly groups like the RFK Club or GrowSF. Real, local movement Theres a building synergy among young Democrats in the city, he said. It is a real, grassroots, home-grown movement of people in their late 20s and early 30s. They look to the horizon and they dont see a future. And older homeowners may be rethinking their no-building stance. Chris Eldred is campaign manager for Joel Engardio, who is running for supervisor in District Seven, an affluent, conservative area in the southwestern part of the city. When they hold campaign events, Eldred says, they get lots of typical gray-haired, longtime residents. Some of them may have purchased in the 1960s, when the single-family home market was depressed. Now that home values have skyrocketed, theyre sitting on a gold mine. But what theyre now experiencing, Eldred says, is the housing pinch on their children and grandchildren. 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. A lot of these people have kids and grandkids who cant afford to stay in the city, he said. They dont want to trek to the East Bay to see their kids. The same, Latterman says, is true of longtime Sunset residents. At some point these people on the west side need to wake up and realize they are hosing the next generation, he said. If they want their kids and grandkids to live nearby, they have to do something. Eldred also says hes hearing older residents say they are tired of going up and down their steep, West Portal home stairs. Some of them, he says, are thinking they might like to live in a multiunit building with an elevator, near a transit corridor. Now, lets dont kid ourselves. San Francisco has a long history of discouraging new building and an extremely active NIMBY tradition. A few young Democrats and some concerned grandparents arent going to turn this around. But at least theres another voice in the conversation. So far, however, the Board of Supervisors hasnt heard it. The board has not felt the presence of this group, he said. Those folks are going to have to come out and advocate. I think we are at a generational moment. We have a real housing need and we need to find a way to make it equitable. And that means being as committed and outspoken as the activists. It means lobbying City Hall, addressing committees and campaigning for candidates. Buckley puts it in simpler terms. They have got to show up, he said. C.W. Nevius is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His columns appear Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Email: cwnevius@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @cwnevius We get it. Some people in San Francisco are mad as hell at the police. And, frankly, it isnt entirely unreasonable. No sooner had the furor about the fatal shooting of Mario Woods begun to settle into a low roar than police shot and killed Luis Gongora last week. Both of those shootings have some very sketchy elements. It appeared from video that officers cut off Woods as he paced the street, setting up a confrontation. And, as documented on a private citizens video, officers opened fire on Gongora in a matter of seconds. We need a hard look at how both of those events happened. But heres the question: Now what? Because right now this whole protest is just an endless sound bite, repeated over and over. It is the same people, chanting the same things, says political consultant David Latterman. And you just get more entrenched. Wednesday was a full day of protests. There was a morning rally on the steps of City Hall at 11, a town hall meeting that began at noon in the Mission and then the regular Police Commission meeting that evening. Liz Hafalia/The Chronicle Thats three opportunities to chant, Fire Chief Suhr, which has been going on since the mayors inauguration back in January. Its catchy, and it would probably be satisfying to some of the protesters if he left. What were hearing at these demonstrations is that it is a cultural problem in the department. The racist and homophobic text messages discovered on officers phones certainly didnt help. The protesters say officers need to rethink that, and how they confront suspects, especially if they are armed with a knife. But nearly everyone is on board. Police Chief Greg Suhr and Mayor Ed Lee have agreed to revising and restating the use-of-force rules. They have stepped up the conflict-resolution training for officers. (Although, it has to be said, some officers in both the Woods and Gongora shooting had the training, so it seems to be a work in progress at best.) No one is claiming theres not a problem. Not good enough, the protesters say. They want a thorough investigation. But as Suhr said at the town hall meeting, three investigations are going on: from SFPD homicide, the district attorneys office and the Office of Citizen Complaints. Still not good enough, the critics say. They want more. At the rally, Public Defender Jeff Adachi called on state Attorney General Kamala Harris to get involved. He said Harris office should investigate, issue a report and create a consent decree, which is a settlement to resolve a dispute. Not to speak for Harris, but Id say the chances of that happening are zero. Its a local issue, the attorney general rarely gets involved in these types of disputes, and as Adachi said at the rally, she is running for Senate and would probably not want to get into this no-win mess. And, by the way, it is pretty clear that these advocates will accept only one conclusion: guilty, guilty, guilty. We all know bad cops pull some fast ones to justify their actions. The position now is that whatever Suhr is saying is untrue. Witnesses said Gongora didnt speak English and didnt understand the officers commands to put his 13-inch knife down. Suhr said commands were given in English and Spanish. Witnesses said Gongora never made a move toward the officers. Suhr said his officers testified that the man stood up and ran at them. For now, theres no way to tell if that happened because Gongora is out of the video frame. Are those conflicting statements or just outright lies? Call me crazy, but I think with some thoughtful, transparent examination, we can figure that out. If, that is, we could actually have a dialogue. 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. Doesnt it seem that, if the volume were turned down, there would be genuine points of compromise? Tasers are back on the table. The same people who are railing against the police shootings are opposed to Tasers. Isnt there a common ground somewhere, like Suhrs idea for a pilot program for a small group of Taser-trained officers? Isnt a use-of-force alternative worth a try? How about mandatory body cameras for cops? Wouldnt critics support that? At the very least youd think local politicians, schooled in the art of compromise, could find a way to give something to both sides to reach a level of accountability. Because this just in were still going to have a police force when this is over. It would be great if it was one we could trust and believe. But thats not where this is headed. Were kind of done with creative policy solutions, trust and compromise, Latterman said. We seem to have lost the ability to sit down and talk it through. And actually, one of the politicians at the City Hall rally said something very similar. Holding protests means nothing, said Supervisor Malia Cohen, if it doesnt produce results. Amen. C.W. Nevius is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His columns appear Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Email: cwnevius@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @cwnevius This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate The closure of Doctors Medical Center in San Pablo a year ago has left many living in the western part of Contra Costa County struggling to find new ways to get care, as the carcass of the building sits dormant on a concrete landscape. The center, originally known as Brookside Hospital, had served the 250,000 residents between Berkeley and Vallejo for more than 60 years. It closed on April 21, 2015, after a protracted battle to keep it open. Additional ambulance hours, a new urgent-care clinic and other services have helped fill some of the void, but no one argues that can replace a full-scale acute-care hospital. An entire hospital was lost. We dont have any ability with ambulances to replace a hospital, said Patricia Frost, director of emergency medical services for Contra Costa County. At the time of closure, the 189-bed hospital, also a certified cardiac and stroke center, had been losing about $18 million a year. The hospital, which wasnt affiliated with a larger network, served primarily the poor and elderly in that part of the county and received about 80 percent of its payments from government programs such as Medi-Cal and Medicare, which reimburse far less than private health insurance. From 2008 to 2010, nearby hospitals including Kaiser, Alta Bates Summit Medical Center and the John Muir Health System chipped in $17 million to keep the medical center operating. In spring 2014 voters, after supporting two previous parcel-tax measures, failed to approve a third. The hospitals emergency department stopped accepting ambulance traffic in August, and after a number of last-ditch efforts failed, the hospital ran out of time. LifeLong Medical Care, an urgent-care clinic across the street from the closed hospital, opened the same day the medical center closed and is staffed by some of the hospitals veteran emergency physicians. The county also set up a 24-hour advice line and added 1,200 ambulance hours per month. There were extraordinary measures over the last three or four years to do everything possible to save this hospital, Frost said. We were all very disappointed the hospital could not continue, but we have adjusted and we have done everything we can to reduce the risk to the community. About 80 percent of Doctors emergency visits could have been cared for in a less acute setting, she believes. Still, residents experiencing heart attacks or strokes, where speedy treatment can make a critical difference in outcomes, now have to travel longer distances for care. Longer trips Ambulances originating from San Pablo and nearby areas now have to travel highly trafficked roads and freeways to Kaiser Richmond, Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley, Contra Costa Regional Medical Center in Martinez or John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek. The closest emergency department, Kaisers Richmond hospital, went from receiving 31 percentof all ambulance transports before Doctors closed to ambulances to now accepting 52 percent of that traffic. Other East Bay hospitals have also seen increased volume. Ambulance response times to the scene have held fairly steady, but the time from receiving the call to actually arriving at the hospital has increased, according to data provided by the county. In San Pablo, it took ambulances an average of 32 minutes and 49 seconds from receiving the initial call to treating and transporting the patient to the hospital, according to county emergency services data from September 2013. By September 2015, that interval had increased to 42 minutes and 55 seconds. There are certain conditions where every second counts, said Dr. Laurel Hodgson, a longtime Doctors Medical Center emergency physician who now works at LifeLongs urgent-care clinic. Hodgson, speaking between patient visits one afternoon last week, said she had already called 911 that day to transport a patient who needed emergency care. Michael Macor/The Chronicle Weaker capacity Dr. Desmond Carson, a former emergency physician at Doctors who now serves as clinical lead at LifeLong, said a six-room clinic cant replace a 22-room emergency department. Carson said the hospitals loss was just the latest blow to health care access in the western part of the county, which lost Doctors Hospital Pinole in 2006 as well as hospitals in Richmond and Albany in the 1980s. Wealthier communities, meanwhile, have kept their hospitals. The best way to ensure access to health care is to live near a Nordstrom, he said. Jody Beavers, a longtime San Pablo resident who was waiting for her niece to be treated at LifeLong, said she drove herself to the county hospital in Martinez to be treated for pneumonia in November. You can go to Kaiser, but Kaiser is just going to ship you somewhere else, said Beavers, 57, who is not a Kaiser member. Marelena Loera, of Rodeo, used to volunteer at Doctors Medical Center and has been hospitalized there in the past. Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes By the time you get to Martinez, you dont know if youre going to make it, said Loera, 38, who had come to the urgent care center for neck spasms. Harvard Medical School researchers published a study last year that found no increased patient mortality rates in areas affected by hospital closures. The researchers relied on Medicare data and studied 195 hospital closures nationwide between 2003 and 2011. But a 2014 study that looked at California emergency department closures between 1999 and 2010 did find that patients who lived near a closed emergency department and were later admitted had a 5 percent higher chance of dying in the hospital than those who did not live near a closure. We know longer emergency department wait times are associated with poorer outcomes, said Dr. Renee Hsia, one of the studys authors and an associate professor in UCSFs department of emergency medicine. Hsia and other health experts said the impact on residents in west Contra Costa County need to continue to be tracked because the full impact of losing the hospital may not be felt for years. Rebecca Rozen, regional vice president of the Hospital Council of Northern and Central California, said county data tracking the closure has yet to show any unusual occurrences or deaths related to the closure. It takes a long time to see changes, she said. A deal is now pending to sell the hospital building, which sits adjacent to the Lytton San Pablo Casino, to Royal Guest Hotels for $13.5 million. Officials from the West Contra Costa Healthcare District, which owns the hospital, said they need the money to pay off retiree health benefits, workers compensation, pensions and other debt. We sold pretty much everything but the kitchen equipment, said Eric Zell, chairman of the districts board of directors. Now were selling the kitchen equipment. Victoria Colliver is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: vcolliver@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @vcolliver Theres a new four-letter expletive in the tech industry, and its spelled u-n-i-c-o-r-n. Not so long ago, companies would die to join the unicorn club private startups supposedly worth $1 billion or more. The name not only conveyed a sense of exclusivity but also served as a useful marketing tool to woo investors and employees. In fact, a public relations company last year sent me an email breathlessly announcing that a tech firm had just become half of a unicorn. (Which half, they didnt say.) Today, fair or not, unicorns mean something entirely different: over-valued, over-hyped, bloated. The symbol of a yet another bubble born from Silicon Valley excess. And with good reason. Square, once valued at $6 billion, lowered its November IPO price to $9 per share from the original range of $11 to $13, cutting its valuation. Its market capitalization now stands at $4.4 billion. Gilt Groupe, which valued itself at $1 billion three years ago, was sold to Hudsons Bay Co. for $250 million. Since January 2015, seven unicorns have seen or are in danger of seeing their valuations dramatically fall, according to data from CB Insights research firm. Being a unicorn is really an albatross, famed venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers told a tech conference in San Francisco in December. Being a unicorn can also imply something worse like fraud or criminal activity. Federal prosecutors are investigating Theranos for misleading investors about its diagnostic technology. Founded by Elizabeth Holmes, investors had valued the medical device startup at $9 billion. Zenefits, once valued at $4.5 billion, is under fire from regulators for not making sure its employees were properly licensed to sell insurance. Unicorns have particularly attracted the notice of Mary Jo White, the chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Beyond the hype and the headlines, our collective challenge is to look past the eye-popping valuations and carefully examine the implications of this trend for investors, including employees of these companies, who are typically paid, in part, in stock and options, White told a conference in March. These are areas of concern for the SEC and, I hope, an important focus for entrepreneurs, their advisers, as well as investors. Companies with a $1 billion or more valuation are still relatively rare: CB Insights estimates a startup has a 1.28 percent chance of hitting that milestone. But ever since Cowboy Ventures founder Aileen Lee first used unicorn to describe these startups in 2013, the once-exclusive club has expanded to over 150 companies around the world. In other words, unicorns have lost a good deal of what made them special in the first place. Unicorns are supposed to be rare and seldom seen, MuleSoft CEO Greg Schott told me. When you have hundreds of unicorns, they are by definition not really unicorns anymore. In an interview, Lee said she believes her original analysis behind coining the phrase remains a useful way to think about companies with such enormous valuations. But the term had unexpectedly morphed into a marketing buzz word, much to her dismay. She recalls a company asking her to organize a dinner for The Unicorn Club. That was pretty crass, Lee said. Plus unicorns are not equal. The top 10 unicorns, including Uber, Snapchat and Airbnb, account for nearly half of the total valuation of all unicorns combined, CB Insights said. So it doesnt seem particularly useful to lump MuleSoft, valued at $1.5 billion, with companies like Uber, worth $50 billion. Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes Schott said he never liked the unicorn label because it focuses peoples attention on a fluctuating number rather the actual business. MuleSoft generated more than $100 million in revenue last year, a 92 percent jump from 2014. Schott wants MuleSoft to hit $1 billion in revenue in the near future, so he doesnt want any unnecessary distractions. People say congratulations, but to me, a point-in-time valuation is nothing to be congratulated about, Schott said. You should be congratulated on building a great company. I think its not helpful. If companies are benchmarking themselves against are we or are we not a unicorn, then they are barking up the wrong tree. Schott has every reason to keep MuleSoft employees and investors focused on the long term. The demand for tech IPOs has all but dried up, which means MuleSoft, which makes enterprise software, will probably not go public for a while now. Unicorns imply that people will make money, and Schott needs to keep employees happy. Last year, the company agreed to buy back some stock from employees. In any case, unicorns have become a horribly homogenous (and passe) way to describe companies. We really need to start organizing these startups into new categories, each named after a mythical being. May I suggest pegasuses, centaurs and hobbits? Thomas Lee is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: tlee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ByTomLee Pescadero farmer Jered Lawson of Pie Ranch stops his pickup truck and surveys his latest field of dreams. At Ano Nuevo, this new plot of 75 acres of leased farmland across the highway from Pie Ranch, some might simply see tidy rows of peas, fava beans, chard, kale and other greens. Or they might note wheat and barley swaying in a gentle breeze on this picturesque coastal property, formerly a flower farm for more than four decades. Or they might see cows and chickens grazing on pasture, playing their part to improve the soil. Thats not all Lawson sees. In this pilot project, entering its third growing season, Lawson sees an opportunity to reach a diverse group of consumers hungry for local food, especially those who struggle to find access to nourishing, fresh options. And he sees a way to honor a legacy of farming on the California coast; about a dozen former flower farm crew workers have stayed on to help run this new undertaking. To make it an economic reality, he is partnering with big companies such as Google, educational institutions like Stanford University and startups like Airbnb all to test out a model he hopes to eventually take into school and hospital settings. Hes dubbed this endeavor CSA 2.0. More for you Recipe: Pie Ranch Strawberry Rhubarb Pie We are a small, nonprofit, food-justice-certified educational farm with a focus on making a more equitable food system, says Lawson, co-founder of 10-year-old Pie Ranch, known for its youth education programming as well as its monthly community work day and barn dance. Oh, and its farm stand, where the farms produce and pies are available for sale. Through strategic partnerships in our larger community we have the capacity to impact the greater good by feeding people well at work, school and home, Lawson says. What exactly is CSA 2.0? First, a quick primer on CSAs. A Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program involves a joint partnership between local farmers and individual consumers. Members agree to financially commit up front to a farm in return for a steady supply of seasonal produce throughout the year. This arrangement offers farmers economic security while they grow crops; meanwhile, consumers can know where their fruits and vegetables come from, who grew it and how. Plus: seasonal, fresh food tastes best, duh. Like a lot of Golden State small-scale farms, Pie Ranch has a CSA program. It serves about 60 customers and has been running for about seven years. CSAs have proven a popular way to encourage consumers to eat farm-fresh goods even if some grumble about a lack of variety in winter (all those root vegetables and dark leafy greens) or wonder what to do with less common produce, such as rutabaga or celery root. In a CSA 2.0 model, institutions replace individuals: Farms commit to crops destined for dining facilities on corporate and college campuses. Lawson would not share specific financial details of these relationships, but its safe to say these contracts provide a significant economic infusion, which in turn allows Pie Ranch to scale up and reach more people. James Tensuan/Special to The Chronicle Google, which has around 20,000 employees at its Mountain View headquarters, has partnered with Pie Ranch since 2014. In a video announcing the launch of the collaboration, Google Foods director Michiel Bakker explains that when companies like Google help with cash flow, farmers dont have to worry about paying their bills while waiting to harvest produce. Stanford Dining, which serves over 12,000 meals a day, according to its website, came on board in 2015. Palo Alto technology company Palantir signed up this year. (Google, Stanford and Palantir declined comment for this story.) Airbnb, which serves its 1,300 employees three meals a day from its South of Market office cafeteria, recently agreed to a contract, too. According to Airbnb produce buyer Scott Bradsby, they buy in bulk on a weekly basis. The past few months have included fennel, potatoes, broccoli, kale, chard and a ton of kalettes a very interesting hybrid (of) kale and Brussels sprouts, he says. The company has direct relationships with 10 farm vendors and also works with farm aggregators such as FEED Sonoma, Capay Valley Farm Shop and Alba Organics. One of Airbnb's core values is entrepreneurship, says Airbnb food program manager Meghan Shellenberg. When we find forward-thinking companies, we like to encourage it and look for ways to evolve the relationship beyond a transactional nature. James Tensuan / Special to The Chronicle 2016 Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more. In some ways, the CSA 2.0 idea is not unlike the crowdsourcing Kickstarter model, where the consumer shoulders some of the risk by prepaying and the return on investment may not necessarily be financial, adds Bo Wright, Airbnbs food and finance analyst. But just as important is creating community and supporting a healthy food system. Looking ahead, Lawson and his partner Nancy Vail want to take the fledgling program a step further. Hed like to see individuals at these institutions participate in a meal-based CSA 2.0 model. Thats unlikely to fly at Airbnb, where the workforce demographic skews young and many staffers eat three meals a day on-site, says Shellenberg. (Traditional CSAs, she notes, have not proven popular with Airbnb employees.) James Tensuan / Special to The Chronicle 2016 Thats an obstacle Lawson wants to address. Given the growing market for ready-to-cook meal kits popularized by such programs as Blue Apron, Din and SunBasket Lawson believes theres a market for the idea. This is not some anonymous box employees would get a meal kit from a farm whose food they already know from their cafeteria, he says. Im up for the challenge of getting these employees to cook one meal a week at home for themselves and their loved ones. A family-focused meal-kit for schools concept is also in its infancy. Though there are many hurdles to overcome before these dreams become realities, the Pie Ranch farmers are on a mission to find ways to make sure everyone gets a slice of the pie. Workplaces, colleges, schools these are natural hubs where institutional food programs are already happening, Lawson said at a recent local food-movement panel. I think well see more support for local food and ensure access for a more diverse group of eaters if we take these ideas into institutions. Sarah Henry is a Bay Area freelance writer and the author of Farmsteads of the California Coast (Yellow Pear Press, $24.95). Pie Ranch is one of a dozen farms featured in her new book. Find her @lettuceeatkale and sarahhenrywriter.com. Email: food@sfchronicle.com In the first seconds of A Hologram for a King, Tom Tykwer flings the audience into a surreal sequence, in which Tom Hanks is performing a version of the old Talking Heads song Once in a Lifetime. As Hanks advances on the camera, asking himself how he happened to get his beautiful house and his beautiful wife, each vanishes into blue smoke. And then, just as were getting used to this rock video approach and enjoying it, Tykwer breaks it off and shows Hanks on an airplane, getting startled awake by the Muslim call to prayer. Its a great opening. Tykwer, oozing directorial confidence, prepares his audience for the unconventional, all the while conveying two important pieces of information one in terms of story, the other, theme: This is about an American traveling to the Middle East on business. And this is the story of a man who finds himself at midlife wondering about his path, asking the big life questions and not having a clue. A Hologram for the King has great energy, and also a languorous, lived-in quality. Adapted by Tykwer from the Dave Eggers novel, the movie locates us in a place Saudi Arabia and without seeming to be trying, makes us want to stay. It finds a rhythm and engages us in the struggle of the central character, such that it feels as if we might happily keep watching for three hours, not just 97 minutes. It becomes a kind of world, and were glad to be in it. Its the story of a decent man who needs to put over a deal. An IT specialist, he has been invited by the government of Saudi Arabia to show his companys hologram technology to the king. If he makes the sale and gets the commission, everything will be OK. But for now, his boss doubts him; his divorce is costing him money; and his devoted daughter had to temporarily leave college because he couldnt pay the tuition. Because Tykwer is a smart director and because Hanks is one of the best screen actors in the world, Hanks doesnt do the obvious thing here. He doesnt play the characters desperation, not for one second. Rather he plays the professionalism of an executive salesman. He plays a fellow whose job is to conceal his worries and make sure nobody else worries, not the boss above him nor the employees below him. He plays someone who knows the value of a sunny attitude, of a crisp white shirt and of always remembering the other fellows name. He also plays the discombobulation and irritation that comes of realizing that all his assets of personality and disposition might not help one bit. Its one businessmans story, but its bigger than that. Theres the sense that this is the story of the American businessman, competing in a global climate thats cold to the persuasive charm of American cheerfulness and interested in money entirely and in quality not at all. Alan (Hanks), we are told, previously worked for Schwinn bicycles, a once-great company that relocated its factories overseas and eventually was sold off to the Chinese. Tykwer, in a deft touch that makes up perhaps just one second of screen time, flashes back to something in Alans memory, the moment in which he stood before the workers in Schwinns American plant and told them that their jobs were gone. That one second replicates the way the mind works, how pictures you cant forget and dont want to remember have a way of presenting themselves in brief bursts, immediately suppressed. Such touches throughout Hologram indicate a director in harmony with his subject and free in his inspiration, who has access to everything in his arsenal and knows what to use and when. Hanks is ideal for the central role, both in his essence and his skill. With Hanks, you dont have to explain to the audience that this is a good guy and you need to care about him. His casting does that automatically. Hanks does the rest, finding a dignity in disappointment that comes out of the simple assumption that people have value, that lives are bigger than deals. Everyone else is up to his level, from the mysterious Saudi businessmen to the two women who cross his path, a Danish woman working in the kingdom (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and a Saudi doctor (Sarita Choudhury) with Western tendencies. Its a strange thing: A Hologram for the King is mostly about a series of nuisances, annoyances and stresses, and yet its a pleasure from beginning to end. Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicles movie critic. Email: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@MickLaSalle A Hologram for the King Drama. Starring Tom Hanks, Sarita Choudhury and Sidse Babett Knudsen. Directed by Tom Tykwer. (R. 97 minutes.) To view a trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW4OE1egbHs. Data show strikes by unmanned aircraft accounted for 56 percent of weapons deployed by the Air Force in Afghanistan in 2015. (Photo: AFP) Kandahar: Drones fired more weapons than conventional warplanes for the first time in Afghanistan last year and the ratio is rising, previously unreported U.S. Air Force data show, underlining how reliant the military has become on unmanned aircraft. The trend may give clues to the U.S. military's strategy as it considers withdrawing more troops from the country, while at the same time shoring up local forces who have struggled to stem a worsening Taliban insurgency. U.S. President Barack Obama said in 2013 that the Afghan drawdown after 2014 and progress against al Qaeda would "reduce the need for unmanned strikes", amid concerns from human rights groups and some foreign governments over civilian casualties. On one level, that has played out; the number of missiles and bombs dropped by drones in Afghanistan actually fell last year, largely because the U.S.-led NATO mission ceased combat operations at the end of 2014 and is now a fraction of the size. Yet as the force has shrunk, it has leant on unmanned aircraft more than ever, the Air Force data reveal, with drone strikes accounting for at least 61 percent of weapons deployed in the first quarter of this year. "In recent months it's definitely flowed more," Lieutenant Colonel Michael Navicky, commander of the Air Force's 62nd Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron, said of the tempo of both drone strikes and surveillance operations. "We've seen increased weapons deployment in the past few months, and the demand is insatiable," he told at the operations centre of a U.S. air base in the southern city of Kandahar . The longer term shift towards drones has gone largely unnoticed amid the large conventional air campaign. Data show strikes by unmanned aircraft accounted for 56 percent of weapons deployed by the Air Force in Afghanistan in 2015, up dramatically from 5 percent in 2011. The role of drones is likely to form a key part of a review underway by U.S. General John Nicholson, head of NATO troops in Afghanistan , as he prepares to report to Washington in June on how many soldiers he thinks should stay on. Nicholson declined to discuss details of the review in a recent interview with Reuters. The current plan is to roughly halve the U.S. presence to 5,500 troops by 2017, most involved in counter-terrorism operations. The training and advising mission would be largely wound down. US military reversed course In 2015, drones released around 530 bombs and missiles in Afghanistan , half the number in 2014 when weapons dropped by unmanned aircraft peaked. The 2015 total is, however, almost double the number of bombs and missiles released by drones at the height of the "surge", when the NATO mission expanded to well over 100,000 troops after 2009, mainly Americans. Like much of the U.S military machine in Afghanistan , the drone operation had been winding down in line with plans for further withdrawals, Navicky said. At the end of 2015, however, military commanders "hit the brakes and reversed course" on the drone reduction, and have since ordered more air strikes, especially against Islamic State militants who pose a threat in the east, he said. The Taliban have also forged closer links with al Qaeda, Nicholson said, potentially blurring the lines between what is a legitimate target and what is not, while the Taliban themselves have made gains in the north and south. Around 300 weapons were deployed by the Air Force in the first quarter of the year, with drones accounting for 61 percent. The data cover strikes conducted by the Air Force, which handles the majority of Afghan air operations. The CIA, U.S. Army, and special operations units also have smaller fleets of drones and other aircraft, so the Air Force data may reflect a redistribution among different organisations, although they tend to coordinate closely on missions. Blind spot for drone analysis Because the Islamist militant Taliban movement, the main threat to security in Afghanistan , is not designated a terrorist outfit by the U.S. government, the bulk of armed drone attacks are aimed at other jihadi networks like al Qaeda. But Taliban insurgents are gaining territory, and, in extreme circumstances, U.S. raids have been conducted against them. Expanding the authority of U.S. forces to attack the Taliban is currently under review by Nicholson. Afghanistan 's own air force, meanwhile, is being built from scratch and will need support for years to come, officials say. Drone missions are secretive and have been widely criticised in Afghanistan and Pakistan , where locals and officials have blamed them for unnecessary loss of civilian life. In the latest instance, residents in Paktika province complained that a series of air strikes in April, which locals said were from drones, killed nearly 20 civilians. The U.S. military said it was still looking into the incident. Activists and investigators have focused on covert air operations in places like Pakistan and Yemen , leaving Afghanistan as "really a blind spot for drone analysis," said Sarah Kreps, a professor at Cornell University who studies unmanned aircraft. "The strikes in Afghanistan are one of the most under-reported aspects of drones." Despite resources being sent to battle Islamic State in Syria and Iraq , the mission in Afghanistan is still significant, accounting for nearly 20 percent of the 60 armed drone missions the Air Force can have in the air in the world at any one time, officials said. In a time of troop limits imposed by leaders in Washington , the drone squadron is especially useful as only about 200 of nearly 1,000 personnel who support and operate the aircraft are deployed to Afghanistan , Navicky said. "Remotely piloted aircraft mean more flexibility with fewer people and aircraft," he said. "Because they are unmanned, sometimes you can accept more risk. All that is always going to be valuable." Back in 2008, San Francisco voters overwhelmingly approved a wise but nonbinding fiscal policy: Future ballot measures should not be allowed to lock in funding for a particular program unless they included a revenue source, limited annual increases to no more than 2 percent and did not extend more than 10 years. Now comes a big test of whether city voters will follow their sound advice. Proposition B is the type of feel-good issue that might tempt voters to break that pledge of fiscal responsibility. It would guarantee that the Recreation and Park Department general fund budget, now at $64 million a year, would grow by $3 million annually for the next decade and keep pace with the citys growth in discretionary revenues for 20 years beyond that. It also would extend a voter-approved set-aside from property taxes for parks, recreation and open space (2 cents for every $100 of assessed valuation) for an additional 15 years. It would have a significant impact on the cost of government, city Controller Ben Rosenfield wrote in his analysis. We readily acknowledge all the proponents arguments for the city to make robust, consistent investments in parks. They enhance our quality of life, they advance public health and safety and they are only going to become more essential to city life as population increases. Theyre not just sweet amenities, said Phil Ginsburg, general manager of Recreation and Park. We empathize with Ginsburgs frustration that he had to make budget cuts during the depths of the Great Recession, and that his budget generally has not kept pace with the growth in city revenues. Still, there is something very wrong with putting such budget guarantees in the city charter for 30 years without a defined revenue source as if those annual increases would drift like magic from the heavens. Its flatly disingenuous for those glossy Prop. B mailers to assure voters in underlined letters that the parks funding would come without raising taxes. They should have added the clause: we hope. The fact is, the money will need to come from somewhere. It takes a huge leap of faith to assume that the next decade, let alone the next 30 years, will not present the city with a crisis that will require spending cutbacks or diversions to urgent priorities. If such a predicament arises whether from an economic downturn, natural disaster, health crisis or terrorism or lord-knows-what else the Recreation and Park budget would remain sacrosanct. Its easy to decide in a vacuum that parks and recreation deserve more money. They do. But public policy involves choices and sometimes those choices require difficult, even excruciating, decisions to meet the challenges of the times. Voter mandates already account for $1.5 billion of San Franciscos $4.6 billion general fund. Dont further tie the hands of our elected officials for the next 30 years. Vote no on Prop. B. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Having a dog bounding along with you on the trail can be one of the most rewarding moments possible in the outdoors. Unless its not your dog. In that case for someone afraid of dogs that moment can become a nightmare. These polar opposite reactions and the differences in how parks are governed have resulted in a patchwork-quilt of rules for dogs at parks, beaches, open spaces and wildlife areas by more than 25 agencies that govern roughly 275 recreation areas in the greater Bay Area. At most of the 65 parks in the East Bay Regional Park District, for instance, dog owners are allowed to let their dogs romp off leash, providing the dog responds quickly to voice commands. But at the 25 state beaches and parks in the Bay Area, dogs are not allowed on the beaches or the trails, for the most part, under any circumstance. Rules at the other parks fill the spectrum. In the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, the issue has become so contentious that there are ongoing proposals, public hearings and lawsuits. At Rancho Coral de Tierra in the coastal hills above Moss Beach, where off-leash dog walks were a common practice before the National Park Service took over the land, a ranger used a stun gun on a resident (with an unleashed dog) when the man refused to provide identification and tried to walk away. Courtesy East Bay Parks / Special to The Chronicle The recent trend is to specify where dogs are permitted, which tends to sharply restrict the number of areas dog owners can take their pets. In addition, it has become a standard practice that dog owners are required to carry bags to pick up and pack out waste (theyd like to see horseback riders do the same). Dog owners should carry papers that show that dogs are up to date on shots, license and tags, and verify the rules before they set foot in a park. A look at whats allowed: Greater Bay Area State parks: Of the 25 state parks in the Bay Area, no dogs are permitted on trails or beaches except in rare cases. Dogs are permitted on paved areas at parks, and at campgrounds when attended, and at night, inside tents or RVs. Contact: State Parks and Recreation, Bay Area District, (707) 769-5652, www.parks.ca.gov. State wildlife areas: In most cases, dogs are required to be leashed and to stay within 10 feet of their handlers in parking lots and when traveling afield. They are permitted off leash during training and retrieving in hunting season. Some periods of time are set aside at most wildlife areas when no dogs are permitted. Contact: State Department of Fish and Wildlife, Bay Area Regional Office, (707) 944-5500, www.wildlife.ca.gov. U.S. wildlife refuges: For the most part, leashed dogs are allowed wherever visitors are allowed. Contact: Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, Newark, (510) 792-0222, www.fws.gov click on find an office or a refuge; Environmental Education Center, Alviso, (408) 262-5513, www.fws.gov/desfbay. San Francisco & Peninsula Golden Gate National Recreation Area: For now, dogs are banned from more than 50 trails. That restriction would become more extreme with the current proposal open to public comment until May 25 that would restrict dogs (usually on a leash) to 22 areas. Contact: Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Pacific West Information Center, Dog Management Line, (415) 561-4728, www.nps.gov/goga. San Francisco parks: San Francisco has designated 28 dog play areas, including off-leash areas. Contact: San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, (415) 831-2700, sfrecpark.org. Mount Sutro Forest: Leashed dogs permitted. Contact: Mount Sutro Forest, mntsutro.com, also www.sutroforest.com and www.sutrotower.org; UCSF, www.ucsf.edu in search box, type Sutro. Midpeninsula Open Space District: Of 26 preserves that span more than 60,000 acres, leashed dogs are allowed in 10. Of those, dogs can be limited to specified trails. No water contact permitted. Contact: Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, (650) 691-1200, www.openspace.org. San Mateo County parks: Of 22 parks, dogs are restricted on leash to seven trails. At most parks with large wildland areas, dogs are not permitted on trails. Contact: San Mateo County Parks (650) 363-4020, http://parks.smcgov.org; Pillar Point Harbor: Pillar Point Harbor, (650) 726-6070. Pacifica beaches: At Linda Mar/Pacifica State Beach, leashed dogs are permitted on the beach, which has proved extremely popular. This is the standard for beach areas governed by Pacifica. Contact: City of Pacifica, (650) 738-7381, www.parks.ca.gov; Pacifica Visitor Center, (650) 355-4122, www.pacificachamber.com. Palo Alto: At Foothills Park (Palo Alto residents only), no dogs are permitted in the park on weekends or holidays, but leashed dogs are permitted on weekdays. At Arastradero Preserve, leashed dogs are permitted on trails. At Palo Alto Baylands, restricted to posted trails. Contact: Foothills Park, city of Palo Alto, (650) 329-2423; www.cityofpaloalto.org. North Bay Point Reyes National Seashore: Across 71,000 acres and 150 miles of trails, dogs are banned from all trails except for the short route to Kehoe Beach. Leashed dogs are allowed at Kehoe Beach, Limantour Beach and North Beach. For the most part, rangers discourage visitors from bringing dogs. Contact: Point Reyes National Seashore, Bear Valley Visitors Center, (415) 464-5100, www.nps.gov/pore. Marin Headlands: Across 12,000 acres at the Marin Headlands, leashed dogs are allowed at portions of four trails: Coast Trail (Hill 88 area), Tennessee Valley, the fire road at Battery Smith-Guthrie and the trail to South Rodeo Beach. Dogs are specifically prohibited from 30 trails. As part of the GGNRA, the Marin Headlands is part of the proposal that further would restrict dogs. Contact: Marin Headlands, Visitors Center, (415) 331-1540, www.nps.gov/goga. Marin Watershed: Across 21,000 acres of watershed lands, leashed dogs are permitted on 130 miles of unpaved roads and trails. Contact: Sky Oaks Ranger Station, (415) 945-1181; Marin Municipal Water District, (415) 945-1195; www.marinwater.org. Marin County parks: Of 38 parks or open-space areas, leashed dogs are permitted at most. In addition, in some open-space areas, dogs can run off leash if under voice command. No dogs at McNears Beach, Paradise Beach and Stafford Lake. Marin County Parks and Open Space, (415) 499-6387, www.marincountyparks.org. East Bay shoreline, hills East Bay parks: Most of the 65 parks in the East Bay Regional Park District allow leashed dogs from parking areas to trails, and in many cases, dogs are then allowed off leash, if under voice command, in the interior of parklands. Point Isabel Regional Shoreline is one of the most dog-friendly parks in California. Contact: East Bay Regional Park District, (888) 327-2757 www.ebparks.org. Contra Costa Water District: No dogs are permitted on lands managed by the water district or at Los Vaqueros Reservoir and watershed. Contact: Los Vaqueros Marina, (925) 371-2628; Contra Costa Water District, watershed information, www.ccwater.com/losvaqueros. East Bay Municipal Utility District: Of 27,000 acres managed by the water district, three trails Oursan Trail, Hampton Trail and Kings Canyon Loop allow leashed dogs. Otherwise, no dogs permitted. Contact: East Bay Municipal Utility District, (866) 403-2683, www.ebmud.com click on recreation. Santa Clara County County parks: Leashed dogs are generally welcome at 28 parks, which include off-leash dog parks at Los Gatos Creek, Levin and Hellyer. About half of the parks in the county have posted trail restrictions. Contact: Santa Clara County Parks Department, (408) 355-2200, www.sccgov.org/sites/parks Others of note San Rafael: San Rafael Parks & Recreation, (415) 485-3333; www.cityofsanrafael.org/comsvcs-home click on Parks & Recreation. Napa: City of Napa Parks & Recreation, (707) 257-9529, www.naparec.com. Solano: Solano County Parks, (707) 784-6765, http://solanocounty.com. Sonoma: Sonoma County Regional Parks, (707), 565-2041, parks.sonomacounty.ca.gov. Santa Cruz Mountains: State Parks and Recreation, Santa Cruz District, (831) 335-6318, www.parks.ca.gov. Felton: Loch Lomond Recreation Area, (831) 335-7424, www.cityofsantacruz.com. Tom Stienstras Outdoor Report can be heard at 7:35 a.m., 9:35 a.m. and 12:35 p.m. Saturdays on KCBS (740 and 106.9). E-mail: tstienstra@sfchronicle.com Gregg Le Blanc, CumulusLight.com/Courtesy Livermore Shakespeare Festival Ales well that ends well as the Livermore Shakespeare Festival celebrates William Shakespeares legacy with ShakesBeer at Eight Bridges Brewing Co. The all-ages affair includes local beers, food, kids games and Drunken Shakespeare, Lisa A. Tromovitchs sketch comedy adaptation of Shakespeares boozy scenes in which his blotto characters take center stage. ShakesBeer is a free event with a portion of food and drink sales going to LSFs education program and Livermore public schools. Drunken Shakespeare is performed twice, at 2 and 5 p.m. Its a new day for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, whose overwhelming wins in New York on Tuesday night will drastically change the tone of a presidential primary season headed into the home stretch. In a single night, the overriding political question has shifted from How? to How many? Instead of pondering how Clinton and Trump were going to stave off their onrushing challengers, voters and the media now must focus on how many delegates the leaders will have when the primaries end in early June and whether that will be enough for a first-ballot victory. I think that when the history of the 2016 nomination is written, the New York presidential primary will be seen as the turning point, said David A. Caputo, president emeritus and a professor of political science at Pace University in New York. The change is more perception than reality. The Republican businessman and the former Democratic secretary of state were comfortably on top going into New York and nothing that happened in the Empire State was going to change that. But with insurgent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders beating Clinton in seven of eight states since March 22 and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz outhustling Trump to take four of five states in that same period, the front-runners were in danger of being painted as struggling candidates desperately clinging to rapidly shrinking leads. Matt Rourke/Associated Press Huge loss for Cruz Not today. With almost all the results final, Trump, a native New Yorker, beat Cruz 60 percent to 14 percent in New York, capturing 89 delegates to zero for his leading opponent. Ohio Gov. John Kasich finished second, collecting four delegates. The landslide win stopped Cruzs momentum cold. The senator, who had touted that string of wins in caucuses, primaries and conventions, now finds himself 25 more delegates behind Trump than when that run started March 22. That makes Trumps confident dismissal of Cruzs chances, which have gathered little press coverage in recent weeks, sound more like prophecy than blind hope. We dont have much of a race anymore, based on what Im seeing on television, Trump said Tuesday in a short, surprisingly focused victory speech. Sen. Cruz is just about mathematically eliminated. And weve won another state. While Trump has never stopped talking about how were going to be really I mean legitimately so great again and how he will be going to the convention as the winner, despite a system thats rigged, a lot more people will now be listening. Its hard to see the New York results as anything but a disaster for Cruz, Caputo said. With any chance of finishing the primaries ahead of Trump in pledged delegates likely gone, Cruz now has to convince voters that the second-place finisher in the primaries deserves to be named the nominee at the July convention in Cleveland. Thats a tough sell when an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll earlier this week found that 62 percent of Republican voters believe the candidate with the most votes in the GOP primaries should be the nominee. And things arent going to get better Tuesday, when five more Eastern states vote. Trump has a double-digit lead in polls taken in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland, with Cruz running third in most of them. Democratic buzz saw The New York loss makes everything different for Cruz, especially since the upcoming primaries dont look good for him, Caputo said. He has to hang on and hope to get to states out west, where things will be better for him. The future looks even grimmer for Sanders, whose narrow path to the Democratic nomination is now almost invisible. Things could not have been better for Sanders in New York: coming in with momentum, a liberal state with a lot of young people, Caputo said. But he ran into a Democratic buzz saw, with party leaders behind Clinton. To pass Clinton in pledged delegates, Sanders needs not just victories, but huge victories. A table prepared by the FiveThirtyEight website suggested that just part of what the senators needs are as unlikely as an 18-percentage-point win in California, 9 percentage points in Pennsylvania and 7 percentage points in Maryland, all states where polls show Clinton with solid leads. There was always a sense there was going to be a point in the calendar when Bernie was going to hit states favorable to him, said Roger Salazar, a California consultant with close ties to Clinton. They thought they would have enough momentum to push through New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and even California, but that always was a bit of wishful thinking. While Sanders has vowed to continue his run for the nomination all the way to the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, the tone has changed a bit. Tad Devine, a senior adviser to Sanders, said Tuesday night, We have to win most of the states. We have to win enough delegates to make up the difference. He said the campaign will see how Sanders does in Tuesdays primaries, and then assess where we are. Clintons 58 percent to 42 percent win enabled her to declare Tuesday night that victory is in sight and, in a nod to Sanders and his supporters, suggest that there is much more that unites us than divides us. Pivot point for Clinton But more important to the future, the New York rout let the former senator and first lady make a long-awaited pivot toward the general election, now focusing more on the Republicans than on her outdistanced Democratic challenger. The November contest may be one of the most consequential elections of our lifetimes, Clinton said, highlighting whats likely to be the ongoing theme of her campaign. Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are pushing a vision for America thats divisive and, frankly, dangerous ... (that will) go against everything America stands for. For Clinton and the Democratic Party Sanders doesnt have to get out of the race, but needs to change the tone of his campaign to recognize the reality of the primary numbers, Salazar said. Sanders should talk positively about the issues he wants to bring to the table, Salazar said, but he needs to start focusing on bringing (Democrats) together for the fall. John Wildermuth is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jwildermuth@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jfwildermuth Kuala Lumpur: Malaysia, Australia and China will hold a ministerial meeting on missing Malaysia Airlines plane MH370 in June end to discuss the next steps to be taken regarding the tracking of the jet mysteriously disappeared over two years ago. The meeting would, among others, discuss whether to proceed with phase 4 of wreckage recovery process or continue with current search efforts led by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), Malaysia's Deputy Transport Minister Ab Aziz Kaprawi said on Thursday. "A total of 103,000 sq km out of the 120,000 sq km of the designated search area at the Southern Indian Ocean have been covered so far. It will take about two more months to complete the whole area," he said. He said Malaysia would also seek assistance from Mozambique, where the debris said to belong to MH370 was found. Malaysia would request for Mozambique authorities advice if there was any further discovery of debris there and to decide on whether it would send its team there, he said. "Other than the flaperon and other debris found so far, there is no new discovery (apart from those mentioned in the report) including the stenciled key words and numbers on the horizontal stabiliser and the wing, which fully matches the font used by Malaysia Airlines," he said. The Joint Agency Coordination Centre MH370 Operational Search in its latest update yesterday stated that the governments have agreed that there will be no further expansion of the search area in the absence of credible new information that leads to the identification of a specific location of the aircraft. The Boeing 777 jetliner vanished from radar screens en route to Beijing after taking off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8 2014 with 239 people, including five Indians, aboard. Australia is leading the underwater search effort to find the plane in the southern Indian Ocean. The setting: Youd almost miss the Hotel Paradox when driving down Ocean Street, passing by the Jack in the Box and lower-rate lodges like the Islander Motel. Amid these, the swanky, contemporary Hotel Paradox stands in a class of its own. The Santa Cruz Boardwalk is a 15-minute walk away; even closer is the energetic Pacific Street thoroughfare, packed with bars and restaurants. The appeal: Paradox is impeccably stylish, with a self-described urban forest aesthetic. Rooms are decorated with natural materials: rustic wood panels for a headboard; lacquered tree stumps as a side table; sliding barn doors fashioned as bathroom barriers. Converted in 2012 from a UC Santa Cruz overflow-housing dormitory, Paradox is still laid out in the outdoor-hallway motel format, and feels even cooler for it. Of the 170 rooms, 42 face the beautiful pool area, which features cabanas (reserve them beforehand) and an enormous hot tub next to a fire pit. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate A blaze broke out and quickly spread between two apartment buildings in the Mission District on Thursday morning, sending smoke and flames through the roofs and prompting evacuations of residents. The first reports of the fire came just after 8:30 a.m. at an apartment complex on the 3500 block of 17th Street near Guerrero Street, said Jonathan Baxter, a spokesman for the San Francisco Fire Department. Crews found a large fire in the rear of the building, and investigators suspect the blaze started between the buildings at 3517 and 3525 17th St. three-story and four-story structures, respectively and quickly spread to the rear of both buildings. Residents of 22 apartment units were displaced by the blaze, officials said. Lisa Geduldig, 54, was in bed in her apartment when she smelled smoke and opened a window to see what was going on. The odor grew stronger and she spotted flames from another window before calling 911 and pulling the buildings fire alarm, which woke a number of other residents. Caitlyn Toombs was one of those awakened by the alarm and rushed out in her bare feet. I was asleep and didnt even have time to get dressed. I didnt even have time to put shoes on, said Toombs, a 29-year-old MBA student at UC Berkeley who stood outside the apartment building in borrowed slippers. Its like your greatest fear. All my stuff is in there and its just stuff, but its all my stuff. David Dobson, 53, who lives on the first floor of 3525 17th St., said his rushed exit was made more complicated by his prosthetic leg. It all happened at once. I had to get out of the way, but I didnt know where to go and I was slowed down by this, he said, pointing to his prosthesis. The fire was brought under control around 9:45 a.m. Baxter said the density of the block, which is packed with residential apartment buildings, made the fire harder to fight and increased its potential to spread. At one point, firefighters were battling flames on all four floors in one of the buildings and two out of three in the other. He commended the efforts of the Fire Department for keeping the damage to two buildings. As always in San Francisco, we have buildings that are neck and neck, Baxter said, noting how tightly packed that block is. They are basically stacked on top of each other. No injuries were reported, and the cause of the blaze was under investigation. Kimberly Veklerov and Kale Williams are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: kveklerov@sfchronicle.com, kwilliams@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kvekerov, @sfkale This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate While confidence in California schools is up, residents say public education needs more money and taxpayers should pony up and pay, according to a statewide survey released Wednesday. The poll, conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California, offered an optimistic picture of the states public schools, with 61 percent of those surveyed saying their local schools were doing an excellent or good job preparing students for college. There is a greater sense of satisfaction with the local schools than we have seen in previous surveys, and in particular fewer people saying that quality of education in K-12 schools is a big problem, said Mark Baldassare, president and chief executive of the institute. It doesnt necessarily translate into the feeling schools are getting adequate funding. The survey also found that while 54 percent of residents approve of Gov. Jerry Browns performance, only 45 percent approve of the way hes handling public education. Across the state, 6 in 10 respondents said state funding for their local schools is inadequate. A solid majority of those surveyed supported ballot measures to boost funding for schools and school construction. Nearly two-thirds of those polled said they would support a proposed 12-year extension of the Proposition 30 tax increase on earnings over $250,000, a recession-era measure set to expire in 2018. Even more residents 76 percent said they support the $9 billion bond measure on the November ballot to upgrade and build school facilities. The results are from the PPICs annual Californians and Education survey, which polled 1,703 adults. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. Just 40 percent of those polled considered the quality of public education to be a major concern, a record low since the question first appeared on the survey 12 years ago. Yet most state residents and in particular African Americans feel a teacher shortage is a big problem, with the greatest concern focused on low-income schools. Nearly 80 percent of African American adults polled said they were very concerned that schools in lower-income areas were more affected by a teacher shortage than wealthier areas. Overall, 91 percent of adults considered the teacher shortage a big problem or somewhat of a problem. Thats something that we had heard about anecdotally, but never asked about in our polling before, Baldassare said. That will be something well be watching going forward. Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker To see the full survey, go to www.ppic.org. Oakland has a new solution for its affordability crisis: Beginning in September, the city will impose impact fees on new housing developments, adopting a mechanism that many Bay Area cities use to generate money for transportation, infrastructure and affordable housing. Its long overdue, said Councilman Dan Kalb, who supported the measure when it went before the City Council on Tuesday, prompting a debate that lasted well into the night. The council approved the fees by a 7-1 vote, with Councilwoman Desley Brooks dissenting. Housing builders will face impact fees of between $750 and $7,000 per market-rate unit this year, depending on what part of the city they build on. By 2020, the fees will rise to between $13,000 and $24,000 per unit. The fees are lower than those in the neighboring cities of Emeryville and Berkeley, which charge $28,000 per market-rate unit. City officials have worked for two years to calculate the fees, which will be applied to every new housing structure, from single-family homes, to town houses, to high-rise apartment buildings. The idea is to prompt developers to include affordable housing in their projects or pay a fee for every market-rate unit they build so the city can build its own affordable housing. While many residents embraced the idea which came before the council just two weeks after Oakland issued a 90-day moratorium on rent increases some said the fees were too low, and that they will be phased in too slowly to prevent displacement. Groups dissatisfied We are very concerned that the city is not acting like there is actually an emergency out there in the community, said Jeffrey Levin, speaking at the council meeting on behalf of East Bay Housing Organizations, a group that for years has pressured Oakland to include more affordable and low-income housing in its zoning plans. Were here tonight with very mixed feelings, Levin said. He and others criticized the council for what they saw as an overly cautious approach, opting to phase the fees in on a graduated scale, so they wont be fully implemented until 2020. Some residents and activists saw the gradual phase-in as a sign that the council is pandering to developers, many of whom have said that any fees at all will hinder the citys economic boom. I want you to do more, and do it faster, said Margaret Cunningham, who has rented in Oakland since 1981. Say, Were going to charge these fees now, and if you dont like Oakland, well get someone else to build here. Taking what they said was a balanced approach, City Council members divided Oakland into three geographic zones. Developers in downtown, Uptown and Lake Merritt will pay $7,000 per market-rate unit starting in September, increasing to $24,000 per unit by July 2018. In West Oakland and parts of North Oakland, impact fees will start at $5,550 per market-rate unit in September, increasing to $19,250 in July 2018. In the area stretching from east of 23rd Avenue and including Coliseum City, fees will start at $750 and increase to $13,000 per market-rate unit by 2020. Developers urge delay Several developers who spoke at the meeting Tuesday asked the council to delay the fees, calling them an aggressive tax that would hinder new construction in the citys downtown corridor. Three years from now, when these fees are permanent, and will be in place for generations, no (high-rises) will ever be built in Oakland, said Alex Ludlum, a Chinatown resident who works in real estate. Other speakers worried that if the council does anything to stifle development, then longtime residents will have to compete with wealthy newcomers for housing. Some speakers reminded the council that, with Uber opening its new global headquarters in Oakland next year, the city may need new housing to accommodate thousands of techies. People coming in who make six-figure salaries will compete with Oakland residents who make $55,000, said Gregory McConnell, a lobbyist representing various Oakland developers. Whos gonna win on that? But Assistant City Administrator Claudia Cappio said she has seen no evidence of impact fees deterring development in other cities. Several council members also rebuffed the claim. Developers will always say it has a chilling effect, no matter what you ask them to do, Councilman Kalb said Wednesday. We have to think of broader needs for the entire city, and not just the developers pocketbooks. Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan The landmark Hearst office building at Third and Market streets, once the home of the San Francisco Examiner, would be converted to a luxury hotel under a plan the owners expect to submit to the city in the next few weeks. The 13-story, 120,000-square-foot building, which is 100 percent occupied mostly by small businesses and nonprofits would be transformed into a 130-room boutique hotel. The property would capitalize on the structures colorful history as one of three newspaper buildings The Chronicle and the Call were the others at the intersection of Third, Kearny and Market streets, once known as the Newspaper Angle. Hearst, which owns The San Francisco Chronicle, informed its tenants of the plan in a letter Tuesday. The media company, which is based in New York and also invests in real estate and ranching, is working on the project with JMA Ventures. A few years ago, JMA Ventures converted another city landmark, Ghirardelli Square, into Fairmont Heritage Place, a mix of a hotel and fractional condos. Kenwood Investments is also a partner in the Hearst Building deal. JMA Ventures partner Todd Chapman said Ghirardelli Square, which has the citys highest hotel room rates, shows that visitors to San Francisco are hungry for accommodations that mix city history with modern amenities. People like to stay in a building with a story to tell, Chapman said. We plan to celebrate the heritage but bring on some modern amenities and flair. We think adaptive reuse bringing the systems up to current standards is something that will be for the good of the building. Tenant gets inspired Chapman said the move toward hospitality was partially inspired by the work of one of the buildings tenants, Future Bars, which operates three businesses in the structure: the Local Edition and Lark bars, as well Cask, a spirits shop. Local Edition, which opened four years ago, has decor that is an homage to the citys newspaper history with displays of vintage newspapers, printing presses, Dictaphones and Linotype machines. Its our busiest bar, said Future Bars partner Brian Sheehy, whose group owns eight drinking establishments. People really latched onto it. They love to be in a building with so much history. Sheehy said he has long-term leases at all three businesses. We are there to stay, he said. In the long run it will be good for business, but well be sorry to see some of our best customers at Cask and Local Edition have to find a new location. Meeting with Kim, union Chapman said the development partners had met with Supervisor Jane Kim as well as representatives from Local 2, which represents hotel workers. He said the hotel would be all union. A historic preservation architect and design team have not been selected yet. The transformation of the building could be bad news for some nonprofits that have long called the structure home and that now face a difficult real estate market. Nonprofit tenants include the California Preservation Foundation, the National Trust for Historic Places, the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation and Death Penalty Focus. Chapman emphasized that the process of getting city approval for the conversion would take several years and that tenants would have plenty of time to seek new locations. The proposal comes as the city is seeing a huge increase in new hotel proposals there are more than a dozen hotel projects containing more than 4,000 rooms. If they all get built, San Francisco would get four new hotels in Mid-Market, three in Mission Bay and six South of Market and in the Transbay neighborhood. Others would be added to the northern waterfront, Fishermans Wharf and the Marina. The influx in new hotel projects is being prompted by a mix of booming tourism, robust business travel, healthy convention business and a development that has added only a handful of major hotels in the past 15 years. Demand, and prices, are high. San Francisco had a record number of visitors in 2015 24.6 million, an increase of 2.7 percent over 2014. Hotel in 19th century If Hearst is successful in converting the building, it will not be the first time a hotel has graced that corner. Before it was purchased by the Hearst family, the southeast corner of Third and Market was home to the Nucleus Hotel. That was knocked down in 1898 to make way for the first Hearst Building, home to the Examiner. That structure was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire and replaced in 1911 by the Spanish revival building there today, with Tennessee pink marble on lower floors a terra-cotta facade. The Examiner moved out in 1965 and it has been an office building since then. In 2000, the Hearst Corp. bought The Chronicle and, after a lawsuit, gave the Examiner to the Fang family, which has since sold the publication. J.K. Dineen is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jkdineen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SFjkdineen California regulators voted to update some rules governing Uber and Lyft on Thursday, but postponed the most controversial topics. The state Public Utilities Commission voted 4-1 to accept Phase II rules drafted by Commissioner Liane Randolph that makes such changes as legalizing the fare splitting involved in the shared-ride services Lyft Line and UberPool; requiring drivers to show company logos on the back as well as front of their cars; and mandating that licensed auto shops perform all car inspections. But they delayed a decision on how to handle leased vehicles. Both Uber and Lyft applauded the vote, which enacted minor updates to the ground-breaking regulations the PUC passed in 2013. California was the first state to legalize the new generation of what it called transportation network companies entities that arrange paid rides from drivers in personal vehicles. Todays decision allows Lyft to continue bringing innovative new features to market in California, such as Lyft Line which allows passengers to share rides for a reduced price, Lyft said. Uber likewise highlighted the update to shared-ride regulations. We are very happy that the Commission endorsed forward-thinking products like UberPool and listened to Californians advocating for programs to allow more drivers to earn money on their own time, it said. After receiving a deluge of emails, regulators said they would delay consideration of whether the definition of personal vehicles should include leased and rented cars, and if so, for what length of time. The draft proposal had said that drivers must have at least a four-month lease to use a rental for Uber or Lyft work. But that would have excluded Lyfts deal with new investor General Motors for renting GM cars for eight weeks or less, as well as an Uber rental program with Enterprise Rent-A-Car. I still dont think personal vehicle means you just run down to Joes Car Lot and pick one up, but there may be some areas we can look at, Randolph said. The top concern is allowing enough time for driver training and vehicle inspections, she said. Uber had asked its drivers to protest the four-month minimum for leases. When your car is in the shop, you wont have a way to make money in the meantime, it emailed them. Ive gotten thousands of emails (on the topic), the majority were robo emails that said the same thing, said Commissioner Carla Peterman. More interesting were the hundreds of personal emails evenly split between preserving flexibility on the definition of personal vehicle and commending regulators for toughening rules. Meanwhile, Assemblyman Mike Gatto, D-Los Angeles, has introduced AB2763, which would allow Uber and Lyft drivers to use rental cars regardless of the lease length. Another hot-button issue, whether driver background checks are sufficient or should be tougher, perhaps with fingerprint checks, had already been moved for future consideration. The commission will take it up in about two months. Thursdays vote mandated driver fingerprint checks for services that primarily transport unaccompanied minors, something all those services already do. Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid Volkswagen has agreed to buy back or repair about 480,000 diesel cars that were rigged to evade emissions tests, in a partial settlement of more than 500 lawsuits by U.S. customers as well as state and federal regulators, a federal judge in San Francisco said Thursday. The tentative agreement announced by U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer did not include any additional financial compensation to owners, beyond the choice of having their vehicles repurchased or repaired. Breyer said the buy-back agreement amounted to substantial compensation. The automaker still faces possible fines of up to $18 billion in a suit by the U.S. government for violating the Clean Air Act, and some state governments have also sued for financial penalties. The settlement represents at least a small step forward for Volkswagen, which is struggling to rebuild its reputation in the wake of a global scandal that has gutted its sales and stock value and forced its top executive to resign. Criminal prosecutions could still await, although no charges have been filed yet. This is a necessary part of the process and, as painful as it may be, VW has to address this (buy-back) issue before it can move forward, said Karl Brauer, a senior analyst at the Kelley Blue Book automotive research service. Blue Book estimated that repurchasing all U.S vehicles covered by the proposed settlement would cost Volkswagen $7.3 billion. Many questions important to Volkswagen owners remain. Breyer on Thursday did not say whether buy-back prices would reflect depreciation or, instead, would give owners enough money to buy a replacement car. He also did not address whether the company would be required to repurchase cars that would be extremely difficult to repair because of their age. Key areas addressed The judge said the settlement would include plans to address excess emissions, establish a fund for appropriate remediation efforts to vehicle owners and commit additional spending by Volkswagen to promote green automotive technology. The proposed settlement covers cars with 2.0-liter diesel engines, including the Jetta sedan and SportWagen, the Golf compact, the Beetle, the Passat and the Audi A3. Breyer said customers must be allowed to fully evaluate the details before choosing between buy-backs and repairs. VW has also agreed to cancel remaining payments on vehicles of those models that were leased, Breyer said. He said settlement terms are still pending on about 90,000 3.0-liter vehicles, including larger Audi models and Porsche SUVs, whose diesel systems were similarly altered. The judge maintained a gag order prohibiting all sides from discussing details of the tentative settlement. He told lawyers for the government and the vehicle owners to post the details in court documents by June 21 to allow for 30 days of public comment before the deal is submitted to Breyer for final approval. The judge scheduled a hearing on approval of the settlement for July 26. After being confronted by U.S. and California officials, the German automaker admitted in September that it had installed defeat device software on 11 million diesel-powered vehicles sold worldwide from 2009 to 2015. The software can tell when an air pollution test is under way and turns on all of the cars pollution-control systems in response. Under normal driving conditions, however, the cars emit far more smog-forming nitrogen oxides than U.S. regulations allow. It was a damaging confession for a company that for years emphasized fuel-efficient clean diesel technology as a way to deal with rising oil prices. While other automakers pushed forward on hybrids or electric cars, Volkswagen largely stuck with diesel. Martin Winterkorn, the companys chief executive officer since 2007, resigned last year after issuing an apologetic statement, saying the newly revealed practices go against everything Volkswagen stands for. He insisted he had no prior knowledge of the deception. Volkwagens lead attorney, Robert Giuffra, told Breyer at Thursdays hearing that the company is committed to winning back the trust of its customers and the public. Expecting to meet deadline Attorney Elizabeth Cabraser, representing Volkswagen owners in the suit, said the parties are on track to have a complete settlement by Breyers June 21 deadline. On behalf of the consumer class of diesel owners and lessees, I am very pleased with our progress with VW and with the federal and California authorities toward a fair, effective and integrated solution for consumers and for the environment, she said. But one environmental advocate was openly skeptical of the announced settlement and Volkwagens commitment to changing its ways. Currently it does not go far enough, said Kathryn Phillips, director of the Sierra Clubs California chapter. Without strict penalties, and without fixing or removing the polluting vehicles, people will continue to breathe dirtier air, consumers will lose faith in watchdog agencies, and manufacturers will believe they can endanger our health without feeling the full consequence. Breyer had set Thursday as the deadline for the company to come up with a solution or face trial in the nationwide lawsuits, which had been consolidated in his court. One aggrieved customer, Joyce Ertel Hulbert of Berkeley, stood in a hallway near the courtroom holding a sign about her purchase of a Golf station wagon for $30,000 a year ago. Worth $00,000 environmentally and financially, the sign declared. Buy it back! Hulbert, an art conservator, said she would reluctantly accept a buy-back offer. Too bad, its a nice car, she said. A polluter. Its safe to say, she told reporters, that her next vehicle wont be a Volkswagen. Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @egelko A man was shot multiple times and died in what appeared to be a targeted drive-by shooting on Highway 4 in Pittsburg, officials said Wednesday. The man, who was not identified, was driving west on the highway near Loveridge Road on Tuesday when around 8:15 p.m. an unidentified assailant opened fire on the vehicle, according to the California Highway Patrol. North Korean defector Lim Il, who worked at a Kuwait City construction site in the late 1990s, speaks with a map of the Korean peninsula during an interview in Seoul, South Korea. (Photo: AP) Seoul: North Korea said on Thursday it wanted to set up a meeting -- in Seoul if necessary -- between a dozen recent defectors and their parents to prove Pyongyang's claim that the former were abducted by South Korea. Twelve women working as staff in a North Korean restaurant in China arrived in the South, along with their manager, earlier this month. Seoul said they came voluntarily, while the North insists they were tricked into defecting by South Korean spies who effectively "kidnapped" them with the connivance of the manager. A spokesman for the North Korean Red Cross said the parents of the 12 staff were demanding "direct contact" with them as early as possible. "We will send the parents to Panmunjom or to Seoul, if necessary, so that they could meet face to face with their daughters," the spokesman said in a statement carried by the North's official KCNA news agency. Panmunjom is the UN truce village situated on the inter-Korean border. "What we want is to let the daughters meet their parents and directly clarify their stand," the statement said. A refusal by Seoul would be tantamount to "self-admitting the group abduction," it added. Nearly 30,000 North Koreans have fled poverty and repression at home to settle in the capitalist South. But group defections are rare, especially by staff who work in the North Korea-themed restaurants overseas that are a key source of hard currency for the regime in Pyongyang. They are generally handpicked from families that are "loyal" to the regime and go through extensive ideological training before being sent abroad. Anyone caught fleeing the country can be subject to harsh punishment, as can the families of those who successfully defect. Relatives are often featured in state propaganda, either making tearful pleas for defectors to return home or berating them for betraying the motherland. The latest defections came at a time of elevated military tensions on the divided Korean peninsula following Pyongyang's nuclear test in January. North Korea is scheduled to hold a rare party congress in May -- aimed at showcasing the country's achievements and fostering a sense of national loyalty and pride. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Prince, the most protean pop star of his generation, has been found dead on his Minneapolis estate at the age of 57. Authorities responded to a medical emergency call Thursday morning at Paisley Park in Minnesota, where the pop superstar has his recording studios. Deputies found the artist unresponsive in an elevator, said Carver County Sheriff Jim Olson. First responders tried CPR but couldn't revive the 57-year-old musician, Olson said, adding that Prince was pronounced dead at 10:07 a.m. Thursday, about half an hour after deputies arrived. Olson says the death is under investigation. An autopsy is scheduled for Friday, according to a report from the Associated Press. RELATED: Listen to the emergency dispatch call to Prince's studio Paisley Park Studios, a large compound in Chanhassen, Minnesota, served as both his record studio and his home. He's recorded several of his hit records at the complex, including "Parade," "Diamonds and Pearls" and "Around the World in a Day." Prince was reported to have been hospitalized in Illinois on Friday on his way back from his final concert in Atlanta. He subsequently appeared at a dance party at Paisley Park. MORE: Things you probably didn't know about Prince President Barack Obama is lamenting the loss of a "creative icon" with the death of rock superstar Prince. In a statement, the president called Prince "one of the most gifted and prolific musicians of our time" and that "nobody's spirit was stronger, bolder or more creative" than Prince's. In videos, movies and innovative, provocative single after single, Prince helped define '80s pop culture with a blend of R&B, slinky funk, hard rock guitar and a fearless embrace of sexuality. The cover of 1980's "Dirty Mind," featuring a bare-chested Prince in black bikini underwear, made that plain. But it was his 1982 album "1999" that put him over the top, with its upbeat title track about partying at the end of the millennium every bit as prophetic as George Orwell's "1984" and the supremely seductive "Little Red Corvette." SEE ALSO: Celebrities react to death of music legend Prince "Purple Rain," the 1984 album and movie about the rise of a Prince-like rock star, secured his place in the pop pantheon. It also made him infamous when Tipper Gore, the wife of Sen. Al Gore, and other founders of the Parents Music Resource Center placed the "Purple Rain" track "Darling Nikki" at the top of their "Filthy Fifteen" list of objectionable songs. Prince, it should be noted, also had a hand in "Filthy Fifteen" songs by Sheena Easton and Vanity. At his peak, Prince seemed to re-create pop music in his image with every new single: "When Doves Cry," "Raspberry Beret," "Kiss," "Sign O the Times." RELATED: 1990s WWE wrestling star Chyna dies in Southern California He also became an advocate for artist's rights in a long, well-publicized struggle with his record label, Warner Bros. For most of the '90s, he replaced his name with a symbol combining elements of male and female; he commonly was referred to as "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince." Prince was not much of a presence on the pop charts in the new millennium, but the party didn't end in 1999. He continued to tour and create, releasing double albums, triple albums, three CDs at once, music via online services and more. His most recent, "HITnRUN: Phase One" and "HITnRUN: Phase Two," were released late last year. SEE MORE: Legendary country singer Merle Haggard dies at 79 Fans of the music superstar gathered outside Paisley Park, as well as the downtown Minneapolis nightclub where much of the movie "Purple Rain" was filmed. About 50 to 60 people were standing on the sidewalk outside First Avenue on Thursday afternoon to mourn the death of the musician, who died hours earlier. Prince received an Academy Award in 1985 for his music from "Purple Rain," the movie in which he starred as a young musician. About a dozen bouquets, some balloons, candles and a guitar were left at the club. Some people stood with their heads bowed, while others quietly chatted about what Prince's music meant to them. One fan, 32-year-old Amy Fox, says she came to the nightclub because it's where Prince began his career. TMZ first reported his death. The Associated Press contributed to this report. twhite@mysa.com The Giants have granted Tim Lincecum permission to throw at their complex in Arizona. Although that alone does not suggest he and the team might remarry, The Chronicle has been told that Lincecums use of the Giants mound is more than a mere courtesy. For now, the throwing sessions remain private, with Lincecums representatives going out of their way keep scouts and team officials away until the 31-year-old free agent is ready to showcase his health and readiness. A major-league source said Lincecum is throwing at other facilities in the Phoenix area as well. Lincecum is attempting a comeback from a hip operation in September. He reportedly planned a showcase in Arizona before spring training, but that has not happened, leading to speculation that he needed more time to regain his velocity and command. Lincecums representatives have said the pitcher wants to show he is ready to join a rotation now. The Giants publicly have said they would keep track of the two-time Cy Young Award winner with possible interest in him as a reliever, though believing that he wants to sign with a team that will place him in its rotation. Whether the Giants early-season rotation struggles have changed their thinking on Lincecum remains unclear, although typically this front office is not that reactionary. Lincecum last appeared in a game June 27, when he was pulled after 12/3 innings against Colorado. He finished 2015 at 7-4 with a 4.13 ERA his fourth consecutive year with an ERA above 4.00 after four consecutive years below 3.50. His surgeon said he believes Lincecum can recover lost velocity and return to his old form now that the torn hip labrum is repaired. Pence sits: Manager Bruce Bochy sat Hunter Pence for the first time in 2016, leaving only one regular who has started all 16 games: Angel Pagan, believe it or not, a sign of his good health after injuries cost him 186 games from 2013-15. Pence said in spring training that he understands the need for days off as he ages and would not fight Bochy as he once did. He goes hard, Bochy said. Hes so intense all nine innings. Hes knows hes going to need a break occasionally. Pence batted .206 in the past six games and was 4-for-24 lifetime against Zack Greinke, so Bochy picked a good spot. Henry Schulman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. On deck Thursday vs. Diamondbacks 12:45 p.m. CSNBA Miller (0-1) vs. Cueto (3-0) Friday vs. Marlins 7:15 p.m. Channel: 11 Cosart (0-0) vs. Samardzjia (1-1) Saturday vs. Marlins 6:05 p.m. CSNBA Fernandez (1-1) vs. Peavy (0-1) Leading off No scoring: The Diamondbacks not only have won 11 of their past 13 games at AT&T Park, but they also have shut out the Giants in six of the wins. Henry Schulman A new college ranking released Tuesday confirms something we already know: UC Berkeley is an excellent school. The East Bay university held the No. 5 spot in the Buffalo Business First ranking of the United States' 477 public colleges meeting its criteria. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate If you were wondering where all the go-go boots in the Bay Area were on Wednesday night, San Francisco City Hall had the run on them at the San Francisco Operas A Nod to Mod Ball. The ball, hosted by the San Francisco Opera Guild, was a celebration of the Operas next general director, Matthew Shilvock, who assumes leadership of the 93 year-old company on Aug. 1 from outgoing General Director David Gockley. Shilvock, 38, is British-born, so the evenings mod theme was planned as a nod to both his heritage and youth. When you think of the mod era the first thing you think of is the British invasion, ball Co-Chair CJ Van Pelt (with Maryam Muduroglu) said of how the guild arrived at the motif. It changed the face of music and brought it to a whole new generation. We thought that it was the perfect match. Matthew is young and vibrant, and we think hes going to do the same thing for the San Francisco Opera. From the unflappable Beefeater guards who stood at attention at City Halls entrance to the modular projections by McCalls (the events caterer and designer) to the Union Jack furniture and swinging 60s fashions, it was indeed a very gab up (well-dressed in mod speak) affair. Ive never been surrounded by so much Britishness in my life, Shilvock joked. After 10 years at the San Francisco Opera working with David, this is such an exciting way to start the next chapter. Among the things hes looking forward to in his first season as general director is the premiere of a new production of Verdis Aida designed by Los Angeles street artist Retna and starring San Francisco Opera favorite Leah Crocetto. The guests took to the evenings mod dress code with enthusiasm. Philanthropist Denise Littlefield Sobel said she was channeling 60s supermodel Twiggy with her silver boots and pop print dress. Her look included the Vogue-ready false eyelashes, not just on her upper lids but on her lower as well, just like her favorite youth-quaker cover girl. Matthew sat at my table at the Opera Ball, and he was very understated, but excited, said Littlefield Sobel, whose family foundation is funding the world premiere of Dream of the Red Chamber in the next season. He brings a great energy to the projects happening this fall. Its just an exciting time for the company, former guild President Karen Kubin offered, mentioning the new pop-up Opera Lab as one project bringing the company new fans. After guests sat down to a meal of British ham and cheddar herb stuffing and trifle verrine for dessert, the Beefeater guards took to the stage for a musical tribute to Shilvock to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivans I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General. He is the very model of a new director general, they sang, to Shilvocks surprise. He understands the music thats both modern and traditional. Shilvock then thanked the attendees, starting with his wife, Kate, whom he met while she was working in the development office at the Opera. My British accent didnt hurt, he joked about how he initially caught her eye, or in this case, ear. Following an auction led by KCBS Foodie Chap and host of Eye on the Bay Liam Mayclem, the mini-skirted birds and Chelsea-booted lads took to the dance floor to twist and shout to the tunes of San Francisco band Notorious. Guild member Linle Froeb shared memories of growing up backstage at the Seattle Opera, where her father, Speight Jenkins, was general director for 31 years. Now Matthew and Kates son and daughter will have that special experience, Froeb said. But its important that all children get exposed to the opera, which is why we do events like this. Funds raised from the ball support the guilds education programs, which it says reaches more than 50,000 children in Northern California. As the night wound down, guests began to leave the dance floor, some to attend a benefactor event upstairs, others to call it an evening. But if Shilvock has anything to say about it, the spirit of mod will continue to linger during his tenure. Mod celebrates the cutting edge, like the San Francisco Opera, he said. Its always put together, always changing directions and expectations. Which is what he intends to do as its new general director. As the mods would have said, what a flash kick of an evening. Tony Bravo is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tbravo@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TonyBravoSF As the frenzied college application season draws to a close, and students across the country mull their choices, many colleges are trumpeting that it was the most selective year ever. But high school guidance counselors and admissions experts say the heightened competition has turned the process into a anxiety-ridden numbers game. Except for those that offer rolling admission, colleges generally mailed out the last of their acceptances for the class of 2020 by April 1. Students must respond by May 1, though since that date falls on a Sunday this year, some institutions may give a grace period until May 2. It will be weeks or more before final data is in, but admissions officers and experts say they see some preliminary trends. For one, the competition is ever more heated. Colleges report receiving record numbers of applications that push up their selectivity numbers and their rankings on lists of top colleges and increase the anxiety for students. Though this years data is still largely anecdotal, applications at more than 70 percent of colleges have increased for 10 of the past 15 years. The number of students using the Common Application an online application that can be submitted to multiple colleges with a single keystroke rose to 920,000 through mid-April, compared with 847,000 at the same time last year, said Aba Blankson, a spokeswoman for the Common Application. Students continue to apply to multiple colleges; the overall average is 4.4 applications, though many students apply to many more, Blankson said. As of 2013, 32 percent of students applied to seven or more schools, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Charter school students in New England submitted the most applications, at nearly seven per student, followed closely by private school students in New England and the Middle States (a category including Washington, D.C., Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands), with more than six applications each, Blankson said. Home schoolers and public school students in the South and Southwest submitted the fewest, about three each. While colleges celebrate their record-setting applicant pools, high school guidance counselors take a dimmer view. Bruce Poch, the dean of admission and executive director of college counseling at Chadwick School, in Palos Verdes Peninsula, Los Angeles County, said admissions had turned into more of a lottery, as students express their fears of rejection by applying to more institutions. It is seen by them as more and more something they cant control, a crapshoot, so they pile them up, Poch said. The multiples are at the, quote, most selective places. But David Hawkins, the executive director for educational content and policy at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, said that to some degree, both colleges and students were overreacting. Colleges do so by engaging in what he called an arms race toward higher selectivity in an effort to improve their rankings, and students by applying to so many colleges. In the end, he said, the average acceptance rate at four-year colleges has remained stable at about 65 percent nationwide. 1 FBI leak: Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane dropped a court motion that accused prosecutors of leaking FBI recordings in her perjury and obstruction case to a newspaper. Kane, a first-term Democrat, is accused of leaking grand jury material to a Philadelphia newspaper to embarrass rivals and then lying about it before a separate grand jury. Kane remains in office but, with her law license suspended, wont seek re-election this year. 2 Bible veto: Tennessee lawmakers failed to override Gov. Bill Haslams veto of a bill to make Tennessee the first state to designate the Bible as its official book. Forty-three members voted to repass the bill, falling short of the 50-vote threshold to turn back to the veto. The Republican governor last week vetoed the bill over constitutional concerns and because of concerns the measure trivializes what he considers a sacred text. Sponsors argued that the measure seeks to honor the economic and historical impact of the Bible in Tennessee history, rather than create a state endorsement of religion. But opponents said it diminishes the significance of the Bible to place it alongside other state symbols like the official reptile or rock. KAPOLEI, Hawaii Two pilots are slowly carving their way into a new future of solar-powered flight as one of them embarks on the latest leg of their around-the-world journey in a plane powered only by the sun. After some uncertainty about the winds, the Solar Impulse team took off from Hawaii early Thursday. The aircraft landed in Hawaii in July but was forced to stay in the islands after the planes battery system sustained heat damage on its trip from Japan. The Swiss-made Solar Impulse 2 is now on course to land in Mountain View, in about three days. The aircraft started its journey in March 2015 from Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, then made stops in Oman, Myanmar, China and Japan. Its on the ninth leg of its circumnavigation. Pilot Bertrand Piccard, who is flying this leg of the trip, said the idea of crossing the ocean in a solar-powered plane a few years ago stressed him out, but Thursday morning he was confident things would go according to plan. Piccard also said the flights destination, in the heart of Silicon Valley, is fitting. He said on his way to the airfield that when the plane lands there, it will land in the middle of the pioneering spirit. Piccards co-pilot, Andre Borschberg, who flew the leg from Japan to Hawaii, told Piccard he greatly admires his dedication and strength. He said the plane represents what we could do on the ground in our communities, in our cities. The team was delayed in Asia, as well. When first attempting to fly from Nanjing, China, to Hawaii, the crew had to end their trip early and divert to Japan because of unfavorable weather and a damaged wing. A month later, when the weather conditions were right, the plane departed from an airport in Nagoya in central Japan for Hawaii. That trans-Pacific leg was the riskiest part of the planes global travels, as there was nowhere for it to land in an emergency. The same is true for the trip from Hawaii to the U.S. mainland. The planes ideal flight speed is about 28 mph, though that can double during the day when the suns rays are strongest. The carbon-fiber aircraft weighs more than 5,000 pounds, or about as much as a minivan or midsize truck. The wings of Solar Impulse 2, which stretch wider than those of a Boeing 747, are equipped with 17,000 solar cells that power propellers and charge batteries. The plane runs on stored energy at night. The crew successfully arrived in Hawaii after completing their longest trip to date, but the planes batteries became too hot on the first day of its trip from Japan to Hawaii. There was no way to cool them down, the team said, and the system required extensive repairs. The company said there was no weakness in the technology, but they didnt anticipate similar temperature fluctuations in a tropical climate. FATETTEVILLE, N.C. Army veteran Joe Aguirre opens a restaurant door, then steps aside to let his golden retriever take point. Clear, Aguirre commands, and 3-year-old Munger pivots right, left, then right again, sweeping the room for potential threats. Hes basically looking for ... anything that would be out of the ordinary. A bag. A particular weapon. People acting erratic, says Aguirre, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder after three tours of duty in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. At the cash register, Aguirre says Block, and the dog places himself perpendicular to his master, creating a buffer to anyone who might approach. Before Munger, a simple outing like this would have been terrifying, if not impossible. Hes put faith back into my way of looking at society, Aguirre says. But do the comfort and security this lovable dog provides come at the expense of true healing from PTSD? Is Munger merely preventing Aguirre from confronting his demons? Since 2002, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has paid veterinary bills to veterans with guide or service dogs for physical disabilities. Now, the agency is in the midst of a $12 million study to gauge the efficacy and costs of using dogs to help those who suffer from post-traumatic stress. Four years in, that research has been plagued by problems. Only about 50 dogs have been placed with veterans, and critics question whether the protocol itself is flawed with the dogs being trained to do things that could reinforce fears. Others worry the animals could become a substitute for the hard work that comes with therapy. You will have the veterans go to more places with the dogs and do more things than they would otherwise do. But they are reliant on the dog, not on their knowledge of ... whether really they are afraid of a ghost, said Dr. Edna Foa, director of the Center for Treatment and Study of Anxiety at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. More than 350,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have sought help from the VA for PTSD. Yet the agency is authorized to pay only for evidence-based therapies such as cognitive processing and prolonged exposure, which involve having veterans confront and analyze traumatic events. In 2010, Congress permitted the VA to study alternative treatments for PTSD, including the therapeutic use of animals. The study began in late 2011 in Tampa, Fla., with three nonprofits contracted to provide up to 200 service dogs for veterans. Critics of the study object most strongly to the tasks the VA is requiring of the dogs sweeping the perimeter of a room before a veteran enters, for example, or protecting the veteran by blocking. Isnt that saying that al Qaeda could be behind the shower curtain? Thats supporting paranoid, pathological thinking, said Meg Daley Olmert, author of a book on how contact with a dog can create a sense of well-being. The minor also confessed that after the rape she slept in the same bed in which her mother slept with her partner. (Representtaional Image) Rockhampton, Queensland: In a horrifying incident, a mother has been convicted for helping her lover rape her daughter, a night before the victim's 15th birthday, according to a report in the News Mail. The incident took place at the woman's home in Rockhampton in Queensland. The 36-year-old accused who is a mother of six children, whispered in her daughter's ear that her partner wanted to have sex with the girl. She then forcibly pinned down her daughter while the man brutally raped the minor. A case had been registered against the duo and the trial had been going on in the court. During the hearing, the court was told that, 'not only did the mother pin her down, but also removed her pants.' "She was resisting and told you to stop," said Judge Shanahan during the trial. The court ruled that the mother was equally responsible for the crime and should get equal share of punishment as the man, describing the woman's actions as 'substantial breach of trust from a mother to her daughter.' The minor also confessed that after the rape she slept in the same bed in which her mother slept with her partner. The victim also told the court that she was threatened to keep quiet. Both the accused have been convicted for rape and have been slapped with seven years of rigorous imprisonment. Earlier in 2014, a couple in Wales was convicted for forcing their daughter into having sex with more than 1,800 unknown men during a satanic sex racket. Describing her horrific torment, the victim penned down her experience in a book titled 'The Devil on The Doorstep: My Escape from a Satanic Sex Cult.' The most popular seafood in US, shrimp, often is imported from Thailand where the workers are treated as virtual slaves, earning low pay for long hours and living in deplorable conditions. (Photo: AP) Brussels: The European Union is maintaining the threat of a seafood import ban on Thailand because the global exporter is still not doing enough to improve its fisheries and labor practices, officials said Thursday. The 28-nation EU is keeping up the pressure because even some Thai legislation enacted last year to curb illegal practices was not sufficiently followed up by action over the past months, two EU officials with knowledge of the ongoing talks told the Associated Press. Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing is seen as a major contributor to dwindling fish stocks across the globe, while in Thailand it has also led to illegal labor practices amounting in some cases to slave labor. Human rights are routinely abused in Samut Sakhon, a coastal Thai province where thousands of migrant children toil in the seafood processing industry. (Photo: AP) "We continue to have serious concerns about the steps taken by the Thai authorities to fight illegal and unregulated fishing activities. This means that further action by the EU Commission cannot be ruled out," said one official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the talks. Thai authorities insist they are working hard to fundamentally change the practices of the past. Thailand, the third-largest global seafood exporter, with a stake of 8.1 percent of global exports, needs the wealthy European market to maintain its seafood prominence. Annual Thai fish exports to the EU are estimated to be worth between 575 million and 730 million euros ($650 million and $825 million). Beyond illegal fishing though, Thailand also faces the slavery issue. The Associated Press has exposed during a two year investigation labor abuses amounting to slavery. In addition to freeing more than 2,000 slaves, the reporting resulted in the arrest of a dozen alleged traffickers-so far eight have been convicted and sentenced-the seizing of millions of dollars' worth of seafood and vessels, several lawsuits, and legal actions by governments and corporations. EU officials have said that the slavery and labor issues are intimately intertwined with the illegal fishing industry, and that a cleanup of the sector will automatically also have an impact on the labor situation. The news that Thailand would continue to work under a so-called yellow card threat came Thursday as the EU Commission was assessing other nations from across the world whether they would be punished for unsustainable fishing that further weakens threatened fish stocks or whether reforms in some nations would result in lifting the threat of sanctions. Thailand was given a yellow card exactly one year ago. EU officials said that dialogue is still proving difficult. "Lately we have been receiving less evidence of reform from them and more evidence from third countries and NGOs" of illegal practices or a lack of enforcement, the official said. Both sides are to meet again next month in Brussels amid hope progress can be made. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate While it seems each year the standards are lowered for which words are added into official dictionaries ("vocal fry," "mankini," and "chillax" are just a few recent examples), Wednesday marked the moment that Merriam-Webster got things so very, very right. Merriam-Webster greeted its Twitter followers with this tweet Wednesday morning: The official definition of "hella" per Merriam-Webster: hella adv. slang : very, extremely Examples: "And though she's excited, she's also hella scared." Mimi Valdes, Vibe, October 2002 "If you need someone to impress kids with a hella loud motorcycle, great." Kase Wickman, MTV News, 17 June 2015 hella adj. slang : a lot of Example: "You've got to keep in mind that the rematch is more money. They're making hella money now, but the rematch is more money, or even a draw of a good fight is more money." Deontay Wilder, quoted in the Dallas Morning News, 3 May 2015 An in-depth breakdown of "hella" and its Bay Area origins can be read here, but it is worth noting that the word was previously added to the Oxford English Dictionary back in 2002. In total, Merriam-Webster said that 2,000 new words were added to the unabridged version of its dictionary, including "athleisure," "dox," "meet-cute," "FOMO" and "TMI." "The new entries and senses offer a kind of snapshot of how exactly our language expands," Emily Brewster, an associate editor at Merriam-Webster, wrote on the site. "It doesn't happen quickly we monitored many of these words for years before they'd met our criteria for entry and it's pushed by various fields and endeavors." Click through the gallery above to see other distinctly Bay Area slang terms that should probably be added to all dictionaries. A study in June 2015 showed that one in three 17-year-olds smoke daily in France. (Photo: Representational Image/AP) Cergy Pontoise, France: A French court ruled Thursday that a high school outside Paris was not allowed to create a smoking zone on its premises, a measure taken by many schools after the jihadist attack on the capital in November. The move by high schools was a bid to stop pupils crowding on pavements to grab a quick smoke between classes, which authorities and some parents feared would make them a target for potential attacks. The Paul Lapie high school in Courbevoie is one of three taken to court by anti-smoking groups, who are up in arms at teenagers being given the right to smoke in schools a decade after it was banned. The administrative court said the school's principal must "ensure the respect of public health laws banning smoking in school establishments." Shortly after the November 13 attacks on Paris nightspots and the national stadium which left 130 dead, the Islamic State group issued threats against French schools. Under the state of emergency imposed after the attacks, a circular signed by both the education ministry and interior ministry was sent to schools urging them to avoid having pupils gather outside their premises. Some schools then sent out letters to parents about new dedicated smoking areas, even specifying that ashtrays would be provided. However the official rules have been clouded with confusion, with conflicting guidelines from the education ministry. Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem said last week that "during this period of heightened security, high school students must simply be asked not to smoke". "According to the minister it is a difficult balance and we must remain pragmatic," a spokeswoman at the education ministry told AFP earlier this week. A study in June 2015 showed that one in three 17-year-olds smoke daily in France. The mother of a 16-year-old boy in the central city of Lyon, who is also a lung specialist, has filed criminal charges against his school in a separate case. She told that security fears were "not a reason to let them smoke inside. We are not going to let them bring a bottle of vodka inside because it is dangerous to drink on the pavement." The group Non-Smokers' Rights (DNF), which filed the complaints against the three schools, slammed schools for "making smoking seem normal again." Three people were injured in the attack that took place in the Gurudwara. Berlin: The dreaded Islamic State terrorgroup may be linked to the explosion at a gurudwara in Germany's western city of Essen, media reports said on Thursday quoting officials investigating the attack. Suspicions of an ISIS involvement in the Saturday blast at the Nanaksar Satsang Sabha Gurdwara, which occurred at the end of a marriage ceremony, have hardened following the arrest of two men in the nearby town of Gensenkirchen last night. Police in Essen today confirmed the arrest of the two men "after an intensive search". One of the two men identified by police as Yusuf T, an ISIS sympathiser, is now treated by investigators as the main suspect in the attack, ARD TV network reported. He is known to the authorities as an activist in the Islamist scene in the Ruhr region of North Rhine Westphalia and has been actively involved in a campaign to distribute free copies of the Quran in the German-speaking region organised by a radical Salafist sect of Islam. WASHINGTON The Senate overwhelmingly approved a far-reaching energy bill Wednesday that reflects significant changes in U.S. oil and natural gas production over the past decade and boosts alternative energy sources such as wind and solar power. The bill also would speed federal approval of projects to export liquefied natural gas to Europe and Asia, where prices are higher than in the U.S. after a yearlong boom in domestic gas production. With its 85-12 vote, the Senate backed its first ambitious energy bill in nearly a decade. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican and chairwoman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the bill represented energy modernization on a broad scale, reflecting almost a decades worth of changes in technologies and markets in the energy sector. Moving forward with this act will help America produce more energy, help Americans save more money and bring us one step closer to becoming a global energy superpower, Murkowski said. The bill would boost renewables such as solar and wind power, as well as hydropower, geothermal energy and even critical minerals such as cobalt, beryllium and lithium that are used in cell phones, computers and other electronics. The bill also would encourage so-called clean-coal technology, including projects to capture carbon dioxide generated by coal-fired power plants, and increase public-private partnerships to develop advanced nuclear technologies. The measure now must be reconciled with a House-passed version that boosts fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas. President Obama has threatened to veto the House measure. Congress last approved broad energy measures in 2005 and 2007, during the George W. Bush administration. Despite the overwhelming vote, the Senate bill drew opposition across the political spectrum. The conservative Heritage Foundation denounced the bill as a continuation of government meddling in the energy economy that would direct federal money toward politically preferred technologies such as wind and solar power and even nuclear energy. The Sierra Club, the nations largest environmental group, said the bill would boost dirty fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas and encourage dangerous nuclear projects while undermining Obamas Clean Power Plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. ISIS began selecting women of Mosul and forced them into marrying its militants, calling it temporary marriage. (Photo: YouTube screen grab) London: The Islamic State, notorious for its brutality, has reportedly executed 250 girls in northern Iraq for refusing to become sex slaves, according to a media report. The girls had been ordered to accept temporary marriages to the terrorists and were murdered, sometimes alongside their families, for their refusal to be sex slaves in Iraq's second largest city of Mosul. ISIS began selecting women of Mosul and forced them into marrying its militants, calling it temporary marriage since it has taken control over Mosul, and the women who refused to submit to this practice would be executed, said Kurdish Democratic Party spokesman Said Mamuzini. Read: ISIS forces birth control pills on girls to keep them 'available for sex' "At least 250 girls have so far been executed by IS for refusing to accept the practice of sexual jihad, and sometimes the families of the girls were also executed for rejecting to submit to IS's request," Mamuzini told London-based Kurdish news agency 'AhlulBayt'. Another official from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) party Ghayas Surchi said that human rights were being widely violated in all IS-held territories, particularly the womens' rights as they're seen as commodities and have no choice in choosing their spouses. Read: IS decides when owners can have sex with their female slaves Surchi said that women were not allowed to go out alone in Mosul and cannot choose their spouses. The executions follows a spate of similar killings that took place last August in which 19 Mosul women were slaughtered for refusing to have sex with ISIS fighters, the report said. Up to 500 Yazidi women and girls were kidnapped and sexually abused by militants in August 2014. In October, more than 500 Yazidi women and young girls were reportedly abducted by the ISIS when they stormed the Sinjar region in northern Iraq. Read: ISIS sex slaves forced to undergo two-finger virginity test: HRW ISIS took control of Mosul in June 2014 after the fall of Iraqi army in the city and since then has been slaughtering its residents for various charges to spread fear. US President Barack Obama said on Monday that he expected Mosul to be retaken from the ISIS "eventually". "My expectation is that by the end of the year, we will have created the conditions whereby Mosul will eventually fall," Obama had said. SF Firefighters 798 A fire in San Francisco's Mission Dolores neighborhood has been upgraded to three alarms, fire officials said. The fire was reported at 8:27 a.m. at 3525 17th St. and also was burning at 3517 17th St., fire officials said. It was quickly upgraded to two alarms and a third alarm was called around 9 a.m. No injuries have been reported in the fire, which was still burning as of shortly after 9 a.m. The president's British stopover - one of a series of international visits during his last year in office - will also include a lunch with Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle on Friday. London: It's springtime in London, but President Barack Obama might sense a chill in the air. The US leader will be welcomed by British Prime Minister David Cameron and wined and dined by the royal family on a three-day visit to the UK that starts late Thursday. But Britain's looming June 23 referendum about whether to stay in the 28-nation European Union has strained the "special relationship," with several senior UK politicians bluntly telling the president to butt out of Britain's debate. They have branded Obama "anti-British" and "unsuccessful" and accused him of meddling for suggesting that the US would be happier if Britain stayed in the bloc. The White House says Obama is willing to speak out on the subject. "If he's asked his view as a friend, he will offer it," US Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said, adding that the American stance was clear. "As the president has said, we support a strong United Kingdom in the European Union." Obama's agenda before he leaves for Germany on Sunday includes talks with Cameron on the global economy, on countering an increasingly assertive Russia and on the fight against the Islamic State group. The president's British stopover - one of a series of international visits during his last year in office - will also include a lunch with Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle on Friday - a day after her 90th birthday - and a dinner hosted by Prince William, his wife Kate and Prince Harry at the younger royals' Kensington Palace home. But for the British media, the visit will be dominated by the debate over an possible EU exit, dubbed "Brexit." Cameron, who is meeting Obama for talks Friday at 10 Downing St., is eager for the president's intervention. Cameron is leading the campaign to stay in the EU, but faces opposition from within his own Conservative government and widespread skepticism among voters about the benefits of membership in the bureaucratic Brussels-based behemoth that is the EU. Backers of the Leave side have lined up to accuse Obama of interfering. Nigel Farage, leader of the anti-immigrant UK Independence Party, called Obama "the most anti-British American president there has ever been." Conservative lawmaker Jacob Rees-Mogg said Britons would not "want to be told what to do by a rather unsuccessful American president who has had one of the least successful foreign policies in modern history." Even London's Conservative mayor, Boris Johnson - born in New York and resolutely pro-American - has accused Obama of hypocrisy for urging Britain to give up some of its sovereignty to a powerful multinational body. "I just think it's paradoxical that the United States, which wouldn't dream of allowing the slightest infringement of its own sovereignty, should be lecturing other countries about the need to enmesh themselves ever deeper in a federal superstate," Johnson said Tuesday. Cameron said Wednesday that British voters will make the final decision about the country's future - but "listening to what our friends say in the world is not a bad idea." "I struggle to find the leader of any friendly country that thinks we should leave," he said. Tim Oliver, an expert in trans-Atlantic relations at the London School of Economics, says Obama is in a no-win situation. "He would be criticised if he didn't say something, and he is criticized for saying something," Oliver said. Obama is not the only American offering his opinion. Eight former US Treasury chiefs said Wednesday in a letter to the Times of London that Brexit could diminish Britain's influence and threaten London's "global primacy" as a financial center. Oliver said many American politicians, policymakers and diplomats regarded the EU referendum as "a bit of an unwanted headache" and believed a Brexit would weaken Britain on the world stage. "From the US perspective, this doesn't serve anyone's interest," he said. "It doesn't make sense for the US It doesn't make sense for NATO. It doesn't make sense for the European Union. It doesn't even make sense for the UK So who does this benefit?" Salah Abdeslam suspected of being involved in the attacks that occurred on November 13 in Paris. Brussels: Key Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam has been charged over a deadly shootout with police in Brussels a week before the suicide bombings in the Belgian capital, his lawyer said Thursday. "He has been charged with attempted murder either alone or jointly" over the gunbattle at an apartment in the Forest district of Brussels on March 15, lawyer Sven Mary said. An Algerian Islamist suspect was killed and four police officers were wounded in the shooutout, which led to Abdeslam's arrest three days later in the Molenbeek area of Brussels after a four-month European manhunt. Abdeslam, 26, is due to be extradited to France in coming days over the November Paris attacks, in which he is believed to be the last surviving member of the terror squad that killed 130 people. But Belgian police have also tried to question him over his links to the three suicide bombers who struck Brussels airport and metro on March 22, killing 32 people and injuring hundreds. The Islamic State group has claimed both attacks. Asked if Abdeslam admitted being present at the Forest shootout, Mary said: "We won't discuss that, I won't comment." Abdeslam will appear before a Belgian court again on April 28 and his extradition to France will come "perhaps two days after his court appearance," Mary added. Abdeslam and alleged Paris accomplice Mohamed Abrini, who has also charged over the Brussels attacks, were moved to different jails in Belgium last week. Abrini, 31, has confessed to being "the man in the hat" caught on video with suicide bombers at Brussels airport. Abrini was also linked to the November 13 Paris massacre after being caught on video at a motorway gas station with Abdeslam. Obama attends the Gulf Cooperation Council summit in the Saudi capital after reporting progress in recent months against the Islamic State group of Sunni extremists who seized large parts of Iraq and Syria. (Photo: AP) Riyadh: One year after receiving them at Camp David, US President Barack Obama meets Gulf leaders again on Thursday, hoping they can more strongly commit to the fight against jihadists. At the same time, with nine months left in his term, the president must again seek to reassure his Sunni allies upset over American overtures to their regional rival, Shiite Iran. Obama attends the Gulf Cooperation Council summit in the Saudi capital after reporting progress in recent months against the Islamic State group of Sunni extremists who seized large parts of Iraq and Syria. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations belong to the US-led coalition which carries out air strikes against IS. Around 4,000 American troops are in Iraq as part of that mission which trains and assists local forces fighting the militants. The research group IHS said on Monday that Islamic State had lost about 22 percent of its territory in the past 15 months. In a bid to accelerate gains against the jihadists, Defence Secretary Ashton Carter -- in Riyadh with Obama announced on Monday that the US will send more troops and Apache attack helicopters to Iraq. Washington also wants to emphasise the reconstruction of cities taken back from IS. On Wednesday, Carter pleaded for greater Gulf financial and political involvement in Iraq, which is battling an economic crisis as well as the extremists. Carter made the comments after meeting his GCC counterparts. "I encourage our GCC partners to do more, not only militarily as the Saudis, as the UAE have been doing... but also politically and economically," Carter said. Sunni support for "multisectarian governance and reconstruction" in Shiite-majority Iraq will be critical to ensuring the defeat of IS, the Pentagon chief said. But Gulf leaders are offended by Obama's perceived reluctance to get involved in the region's problems, and in particular his tilt towards Iran, their rival which they accuse of widespread regional interference. They worry that Iran will be further emboldened after the lifting this year of international sanctions against it under a US-supported international deal to curb Tehran's nuclear programme. Riyadh leads an Arab military coalition that for 13 months has supported Yemen's government in its battle against Iran-backed Shiite Huthi rebels. Obama adviser Rob Malley said it is important to settle the regional conflicts in Yemen and Syria not only because of their devastating humanitarian consequences. Kathmandu: Five Nepalese nationals have been arrested from southern Nepal on charges of trafficking girls to India, police said on Thursday. Sher Bahadur Chepang and his wife were arrested from Madi Municipality in Chitawan district yesterday after the couple handed over a 12-year-old girl to a man to traffic her to Delhi on the pretext of marrying her, they said. However, the girl was rescued with the help of the police and Maiti Nepal, a non-governmental organisation working against girls trafficking, from Kanchanpur district in far- west Nepal. In a separate incident, three other traffickers including Govinda Mahato were arrested on Tuesday from Kaule village of the same district on charges of trafficking a 16-year-old girl to Mumbai. The three had tried to sell the teenage girl to a Mumbai brothel, according to police. Beijing: Besides the border question, India and China discussed issues related to counter-terrorism including Beijing's blocking of India's bid in the UN to ban Pakistan-based JeM chief Masood Azhar, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval said on Thursday. Doval, who wrapped up the 19th round of the two-day boundary talks called on Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in Beijing and discussed the outcome of the discussion with his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi. Read: India slams 'hidden veto' at UN after China blocks bid to ban Masood Azhar Welcoming Doval, Li recalled his meeting with Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar two days ago during which the both sides discussed the progress in bilateral ties. "These meetings show smooth communication and close engagement between our two countries in political and security affairs. It also shows how both sides attach great deal of importance to ensure steady growth of China-India relations," Li said. Read: China sticks to its guns on blocking India's bid to ban JeM chief Azhar Later in a brief chat with PTI, Doval said that in the border talks with Yang, the two sides discussed the boundary question and other issues like counterterrorism. Asked whether Masood Azhar issue figured, he said: "Yes, obviously when terrorism is discussed". Read: All terrorists are same, should not be treated differently: India tells China India in recent weeks was vocal about criticising China for putting a "technical hold" on India's recent bid in the UN to bring about a ban on Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) chief Azhar for his involvement in the Pathankot terror attack. Regarding Azhar, India's UN Permanent Representative Syed Akbaruddin spoke of "hidden veto" at a meeting at an open debate in UNSC on 'Threats to International Peace and Security Caused by Terrorist Acts' in New York on April 16, while External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar called for a review of China's decision to strike a common stand against terrorism in their meetings this week with their Chinese counterparts. For its part, China continued to stick to its stand, saying that its decision is based on facts and fairness. On the talks over boundary, Doval said both sides want peace and tranquillity at the borders. About India's emphasis that 3,488 km-long Line of Actual Control (LAC) be demarcated to prevent tensions between troops on both sides patrolling the area aggressively, Doval said New Delhi's stand is the same for quite some time. There is nothing new about the suggestions, he said. The army chief's call for across-the-board accountability comes after Prime Minister Sharif and his family was named in the explosive Panama Papers for possessing undeclared offshore assets. (Photo: AFP) Islamabad: Pakistan's army has fired several senior officers over corruption charges, senior military sources said on Thursday, in a rare display of accountability by the country's most powerful institution. "I can confirm the sacking of at least six senior officers which include a lieutenant general," said a senior officer based in military headquarters, crediting popular army chief Raheel Sharif with launching the investigation leading to the dismissals. Another source confirmed the sackings. It was unclear when the officers were fired, the precise nature of the charges, or whether they would face criminal proceedings in a civilian court. The move was hailed by commentators because wrongdoings committed by the army, which has ruled Pakistan for around half of its existence and continues to exert control over foreign policy, rarely come to light. "It's an extraordinary development," retired general Talat Masood told AFP. "The military has taken the lead in punishing corrupt officials and has set an excellent example. It will have a very serious impact and very positive impact in the future. Those who are corrupt should be worried now." The news comes as Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif faces pressure over revelations made in the so-called Panama Papers linking his family to a series of offshore companies. Earlier this month he announced the formation of a commission to investigate the allegations in the documents from Panama-based law firm -- Mossack Fonseca -- that have exposed how some of the world's most powerful people secrete their assets offshore. Masood added that the court martials would increase pressure on the prime minister to clamp down on corruption, which has long held back the South Asian economy, in the civilian government. In this age of hypersensitivity, the more trivial an issue is, the more controversy surrounds it. This month, Oaklands City Council voted 5-3 vote to adopt Love Life as the citys motto. Supporters of the new slogan meant well and really who can object to an exhortation to love life? But in an age where everything is over-complicated, the snappy marketing phrase is fraught with potholes and politics. And because its Oaktown racial politics. Love Life is the brainchild of Donald Lacy, whose daughter LoEshe the name means Love Life in a Nigerian language was killed near McClymonds High School in 1997. The 16-year-old died in the sort of senseless random gang-turf shooting that has taken too many young black lives in Oakland. Her father started the LoveLife Foundation to honor his daughters memory; he has been pushing the city to adopt Love Life as its slogan for years. Whos against love? council president and chief slogan backer Lynette Gibson McElhaney mused over the phone. For me, the drawback is that Love Life is too generic; its not specific to Oakland. Its hard to find a single motto that without context is deeply understood, Mayor Libby Schaaf noted. Not long ago, Oaklanders proudly adopted the There campaign; residents unfurled There flags to counter Gertrude Steins famous comment about Oakland. (There is no there there.) McElhaney doesnt give a fig about that objection. Kaiser made the word thrive about them, she countered. Besides, she added, There are so few opportunities in life to be so generous on so little. Schaaf now is committed to implementing the councils policy direction, as is her responsibility. But before the vote, she had sent an email to the City Council that noted potential red flags found by Bloomberg Associates, which has been giving Oakland pro bono marketing advice. To start: The background of how the name was developed actually reinforces the very crime issues that have given Oakland a bad name. True. Enter racial politics. Because Schaaf and some motto foes are white, while McElhaney and some other supporters are black, Love Life fans suggested that opponents lacked empathy for victims of street violence. McElhaney told me she has not experienced any negativity from whites. Yet when we spoke, I felt a racial divide on another front. I asked her if authorities prosecuted LoEshe Lacys killer. McElhaney thought that he was. I had checked. The killer was arrested and prosecuted. For me and my community, its of little solace, McElhaney responded. The systems havent changed. (Me, I blame the shooter.) On the other coast, Rhode Island Gov. Gina M. Raimondo has found out how controversial a new slogan, Rhode Island: Coooler and Warmer, can be. Locals want to know what it even means. Critics fault the states failure to work with the community to craft a motto and marketing campaign that catches on with the public. Wags have lampooned Raimondos choice of a New York design firm over the Rhode Island School of Design and a marketing campaign with video of Reykjavik, Iceland. Schaaf also would have preferred a more robust review process, but McElhaney hears only applause. I have to agree with Schaaf, Oakland should have a motto with Oakland pride. My idea: Be there. As for Rhode Island, Id borrow from former Oakland mayor and current Gov. Jerry Brown, who famously said: Small is beautiful. Debra J. Saunders is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: dsaunders@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @DebraJSaunders Colombo: Britain on Thursday raised concerns over Sri Lanka's human rights record during 2015, days after the US detailed several reported violations from the Tamil-dominated North-East. "Sri Lanka is one of 30 'Human Rights Priority Countries' (HRPCs); countries where the UK has serious human rights concerns and hopes to engage positively to develop human rights performance," said a British Foreign office report. The report commends improvement in the human rights situation in Sri Lanka during 2015, while also noting that some concerns still remain. It recognises the positive steps taken by Lanka during 2015 to improve freedom of expression and freedom of movement, reduce inter-community tensions, and restore the independence of institutions such as the Human Rights Commission. It also notes the government's willingness while stating positive changes are less apparent in the north and east. Human rights defenders continued to report harassment and surveillance in 2015 and incidents of torture, and sexual and gender-based violence. British Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged 6.6 million pounds over the next three years to continue support for reconciliation and human rights. Sri Lanka was ranked alongside Afghanistan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Burma, Burundi, Central African Republic, China, Colombia, Democratic People?s Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Libya, Maldives among UK's 30 human rights priority countries. The US State Department's 2015 Sri Lankan Human Rights report details several reported violations from the Tamil-dominated North-East. "The major human rights problems reported during the year included harassment of civil society activists, journalists, and persons viewed as sympathisers of the banned terrorist group the LTTE as well as arbitrary arrest and detention, torture, rape, and other forms of sexual and gender-based violence committed by police and security forces," it said. As tributes roll in from around the world, the Golden State Warriors paid a simple but thoughtful homage to music great Prince on Thursday. Barely an hour after the shocking announcement that Prince had passed away, the Warriors went with a Prince soundtrack for their morning shootaround in Houston. Monte Poole of CSN reported the playlist included Purple Rain, When Doves Cry and, as specially requested by Klay Thompson, Raspberry Beret. QUITO, Ecuador President Rafael Correa announced Wednesday night that he is raising sales taxes and will charge a one-time levy on millionaires to rebuild cities devastated by Ecuadors worst earthquake in decades. In a televised address, Correa said damages from the 7.8-magnitude quake will probably run into the billions of dollars, adding to already heavy economic hardships in this OPEC nation triggered by the collapse in world oil prices. The task of rebuilding shouldnt fall only to communities along the coast in the quakes path but will require sacrifices from all segments of Ecuadorean society according to their ability to contribute, Correa said. I know were at the most difficult stage right now, but its just the beginning, he said. Using authority granted by the state of emergency he declared after Saturday nights quake, Correa said sales taxes would increase to 14 percent from 12 percent for the coming year. People with more than $1 million in assets will be charged a one-time tax of 0.9 percent on their wealth, while workers earning over $1,000 a month will be forced to contribute a days wages and those earning $5,000 a month the equivalent of five days pay. Taxes on companies will also go up, and Correa said he will look to sell certain state assets that he didnt specify. He is also drawing on $600 million in emergency credits from the World Bank and other multilateral lenders. The tax hikes come as the scale of devastation continues to sink in. A helicopter flyover of the damage zone Wednesday showed entire city blocks in ruins as if they had been bombed. Late Wednesday, the government raised the death toll to 570. Officials listed 163 people as missing while the number of those made homeless climbed over 23,500. The final death toll could surpass casualties from earthquakes in Chile and Peru in the past decade. Even as authorities turn to restoring electricity and clearing debris, the earth continued to move. A magnitude 6.1 aftershock before dawn Wednesday set babies crying and sent nervous residents pouring into the streets. Local seismologists had recorded more than 550 aftershocks, some felt 105 miles away in the capital of Quito. Rescuers said they would keep searching for survivors but cautioned that the likelihood of finding more people alive grew smaller with the passage of every hour. JERUSALEM The grandchildren of one of the earliest Jewish victims of the Nazis are laying claim to a jewel of Israels top museum: the worlds oldest illustrated Passover manuscript. The descendants of a German Jewish lawmaker say the famed Birds Head Haggadah, a medieval copy of the text read around Jewish dinner tables on Passover, was stolen from their family during the Nazi era and sold without the familys consent 70 years ago to the predecessor of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem an act the family calls a long-standing illegal and moral injustice. The medieval manuscript, which tells the biblical tale of the Israelite exodus from Egypt, has long vexed scholars with its peculiar drawings of Jewish figures with bird-like heads. Now, a new page in the manuscripts history is being written, as a high-profile American attorney who restored looted masterpieces by artist Gustav Klimt to their Jewish heir a courtroom drama made famous in the Hollywood film Woman in Gold is taking on the case. The manuscript is now displayed behind glass in a darkened room at the Israel Museum in a special exhibit ahead of the weeklong Passover holiday, which begins Friday night. The family wants the manuscript to remain at the museum, but it demands the museum pay compensation and rename the manuscript after the family, or face a lawsuit. We want a compromise, said Eli Barzilai, 75, who lives in Jerusalem. He is leading the restitution demand in Jerusalem on behalf of his cousins in the United States and Berlin. The Art Newspaper, which first reported the ownership claim, said the family is seeking less than $10 million, but neither Barzilai nor the familys lawyer would cite a figure. Written in southern Germany around 1300 by a scribe identified only as Menahem, the Birds Head Haggadah has long been a riddle. Marc Michael Epstein, a Vassar College professor and author of the book The Medieval Haggadah, called it as mysterious as the Pyramids of Giza, the monoliths of Easter Island or Mona Lisas smile. Barzilai says the 14th century Haggadah was a wedding gift from his grandmothers family to his grandfather, Ludwig Marum, a lawyer from the German town of Karlsruhe who served in Germanys parliament and opposed Hitler. Marum was later killed at the Kislau concentration camp. 1 Taliban attack: The death toll from Tuesdays Taliban attack in Kabul rose sharply overnight from 28 to 64, according to the Afghan Interior Ministry. Gen. Abdul Rahman Rahimi, Kabuls police chief, said Wednesday that two investigative teams have been appointed to investigate the attack in Kabul. He added that most of the casualties were civilians, including women and children. The attackers targeted an agency that provides protection for high-ranking government officials, similar to the U.S. Secret Service. A suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden truck outside the compound, and a pair of gunmen entered the compound in the aftermath before being killed. 2 More quake victims: Searchers found a mans body Wednesday in a landslide-hit area in southern Japan, bringing the death toll to 48 from two powerful earthquakes last week. Three people remain missing. Kumamoto prefecture said another 11 people have died from illnesses believed to be related to the physical stress of evacuation. More than 100,000 people are homeless or have fled their homes as aftershocks continue to shake the area. Many are living in cramped conditions in shelters or even their cars, with limited food and water. SANTIAGO, Chile Patricio Aylwin, who as president of Chile in 1990 led the countrys transition to democracy from the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, died Tuesday at his home here. He was 97. His family announced his death. Mr. Aylwin, a law professor and leader of the centrist Christian Democratic Party for more than half a century, was the first elected civilian president after Pinochets 17-year rule. Chile has lost a great democrat, President Michelle Bachelet said, a man who always knew how to place the unity of democrats above their differences, which helped him build a democratic country. She declared three days of national mourning. Mr. Aylwin took office in March 1990 after Chile held its first democratic elections for president and congress since September 1973, when a military coup toppled Salvador Allende, a democratically elected socialist president. Mr. Aylwin served until 1994. The negotiated terms of the transition to civilian rule placed severe limitations on his government. They included keeping Pinochets authoritarian 1980 constitution in place, albeit with revisions, and allowing Pinochet to remain as the head of the army for eight years. Army opposition Mr. Aylwin was under pressure to reverse Pinochets policies and bring those responsible for human rights crimes to justice. But he was thwarted by the army which still exerted influence over the nascent democratic institutions and made constant threats and by an obstructive new congress, which skewed to the right because of an electoral system that favored Pinochets allies. Perhaps Mr. Aylwins greatest legacy was a truth commission, created during his tenure, that gathered testimony about those who were killed or disappeared during military rule. The commissions Rettig Report, published in February 1991, counted almost 3,200 victims. In a televised speech, Mr. Aylwin, practically in tears, asked for forgiveness from the families of the victims on behalf of the Chilean state. Mr. Aylwin struggled to control the military while promising justice insofar as it is possible, a phrase that human rights groups considered to be synonymous with impunity. Although Mr. Aylwin gave the courts information on the human rights violations laid out in the Rettig Report, years passed before judicial investigations led to any convictions. Cleaning up army He pushed the army high command to weed out hundreds of agents of the CNI, Pinochets repressive secret intelligence agency, who were still active in the army. But attempts to investigate one of Pinochets sons as part of a corruption inquiry were twice met with a military show of force. Patricio Aylwin Azocar was born Nov. 26, 1918, in Vina del Mar, Chile, the son of a Chilean Supreme Court president. He graduated from the University of Chile Law School in 1943. As a senator, Mr. Aylwin led the Christian Democratic Party at the time of the 1973 coup that overthrew Allende. Like the U.S. government, he opposed Allende and his leftist coalition, and the Christian Democrats received covert financing from the CIA for almost a decade. A now-declassified document from July 1975, Agency Covert Action Operations in Chile Since 1962, revealed a large-scale political action program by the United States to prop up the party as an alternative to Allendes government. In April 1964, a CIA group approved the first installment of what developed into a $3 million program to support the Christian Democrats. Allende committed suicide during the coup before troops stormed the presidential palace. Shortly afterward, Mr. Aylwin justified the coup as necessary to prevent a communist tyranny. Weeks into the Pinochet dictatorship, however, his party withdrew its support for the military junta in response to reports of widespread human rights abuses. In the mid-1980s, Mr. Aylwin co-founded an opposition bloc, the Democratic Alliance. Later, as president of the Christian Democratic Party, he was involved in negotiations with the military to reform the constitution and set the terms of Chiles transition to democracy. He was also a founder of a center-left coalition, the Coalition of Parties for Democracy, which triumphed in the December 1989 elections and carried him to the presidency. More than 100 people protesting the ongoing lease of oil and gas mineral rights on federal lands on Wednesday morning at the Marriott Courtyard were invited to watch the auction by livestream in an overflow room. While Bureau of Land Management staff insists this was a well-intended accommodation, organizers say the move shuts the public out of the conversation. "BLM is trying to stifle the voices of the public by separating public interest from the oil and gas lease sale process," says Rebecca Sobel, senior climate and energy campaigner with WildEarth Guardians. "The public will not be silenced, and we will continue to find venues and mediums to have our voices heard and advocate for the only responsible way to address climate change, which is to end the federal fossil fuel leasing program." The move marks the second time the BLM has segregated protesters from the auction itself, according to Sobel. "There's space for 90 in the overflow room and space for 30 in the bidder room, so they knew that participants were going to outnumber those interested in bidding on leases, and still there was no opportunity for us to have our voices heard," she says. "So we stayed in the public domain and engaged the city of Santa Fe." With headcounts numbering between 130 and 180, she says, they wouldn't have all fit in the overflow room. Protesters chose instead to remain on the sidewalk alongside Cerrillos Road, holding massive banners with statements like "BLM: Don't frack our land" and "Protect Chaco," chanting "Keep it in the ground," and singing a song that made those words its refrain. "The industry will do everything it can to shut out the voices of climate justice, which is what they did todaytried to do, and this is why we can't always ask for permission to participate in the discussions that decide our children's fate," says Lyla June, communications director for New Energy Economy. "We have a real opportunity to end fossil fuel extraction on publicly owned lands, and if our voices are not elevated and we don't take the time to elevate them, we will not push this administration to do the right thing. We can no longer allow those with deep pockets to decide the future for the entire planet." The BLM contends there are several options for public comment on leases, and the final auction isn't one of them. "There is no conversation at the auction. It's a live auction. It's not a question-and-answer period. It's not a comment period," says Donna Hummel, chief of the office of communications for the New Mexico BLM office. "Certainly the BLM respects the public's right to assemble and to protest, and today everyone was peaceful, and there was a lot of enthusiasm for the cause. And if Congress or anyone else changes the current rules, which are for BLM to hold quarterly lease sales, we would certainly abide by any change, but the current law is what we are operating under currently." Protesters have been making increasing and increasingly vocal appearances at events surrounding oil and gas development. In March, 200 protesters crowded into the Superdome in New Orleans in an effort to shut down a sale. Their chanting nearly drowned out the official reading of winning bids, Nola.com and The Times-Picayune reported. In February, environmental writer Terry Tempest Williams bid on at least 800 acres in an oil and gas lease auction in Utah after almost 100 protesters were escorted out of the auction when they refused to stop singing, the Associated Press reported. While the BLM has some question about what to do with Williams' lease of those acres, and the two parties are currently exchanging correspondence about the matter, Hummel says, "I don't think any of us really know how it'll all play out." The BLM in Utah also canceled an auction scheduled for November after realizing they didn't have enough room for the many protesters interested in watching. Protested lease sales have also been postponed in Colorado, Wyoming and Washington DC. Climate justice protesters called for an end to federal leasing. (Elizabeth Miller) We dont take a day like today personally, but we really do appreciate the peacefulness and the fact that we were allowed to do the job at todays lease sale that we are authorized under current law to do, Hummel says. So we do appreciate the respect, and we hope we returned that to the people that did choose to come inside. Anyone who wanted to enter the room where bidding was underway at the auction today had to complete the paperwork required to be a bidder, and Hummel says there were 14 bidders in the room, seven of whom were "nontraditional bidders""people who wanted to be in the room and see the process." All bidding for oil and gas leases starts at $2 per acre, and some parcels in Kansas did sell at that rate, according to Hummel. The per-acre price peaked at $65, and one 480-acre parcel secured a leasing bonus for the federal government of $28,800. In total, the BLM secured $51,521 in revenues from the sale of the leases, which were located in Oklahoma and Kansas. About a dozen people made use of the overflow room, which had space for 100 people. Hummel says the room was intended to provide an option for those who wanted to watch the proceedings without filling out the bidder contract, which includes personal information and a commitment to abide by federal rules for mineral leases. "I know some people were hoping for something different, but we had business to take care of, so we wanted to make sure that anyone in the room was really prepared to bid if that was their desire or sign up and observe. But I think that respect and being peaceful is appreciated," Hummel says. "The bottom line is, there's no ill will, there's no disrespect. We tried to accommodate while still getting what we want to get done, done." For those interested, she points to three opportunities for public comment: when the parcels are nominated, when the environmental assessment has been drafted and then a protest period that precedes the lease. The BLM checks those comments for substantive information unknown to the department, and she points to parcels near Socorro for which public comment revealed that the area bisected a big-game migration corridor. Mitigating those concerns could be enough to remove them from lease sale. Parcels in Texas that were slated for auction today were deferred while the BLM analyzes comments on them. The thousands of acres cover municipal water supplies for Dallas-Fort Worth, Denton, Brenham and Corpus Christi, and environmentalists had expressed concerns that fracking under the lakes and reservoirs in that area could contaminate the drinking water supply for millions of people. The deferral doesn't mean those parcels will never be leased; it just means the department wants to take more time with the issues brought forward. With that in mind, Hummel encourages people to get involved earlier in the process. Public input is also taken while the BLM revises resource management plans. The department is currently working on an amendment regarding the Mancos Shale formation for the plan that applies to northwestern New Mexico. That process has been delayed while the BLM searches for staff to fill two vacancies; the timeline is not yet clear. Nationwide, 67 million acres of public lands are already leased to fossil fuel industries. If the known estimated reserves on publicly held lands are leased and burned, they could release 450 billion tons of carbon pollution. In two days, President Obama is set to sign the international climate agreement 195 countries committed to during the talks in Paris in December, which outlines a plan for global action to prevent global warming from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius. The plan calls on governments to make sure global emissions peak soon and rapidly diminish. "We're physically unable to meet climate objectives set forth in the international agreement if we continue with the federal fossil fuel leasing program, which is accountable for a quarter of all US climate emissions," Sobel says. "The only safe place for fossil fuels in the face of rampant climate change is in the ground." "We need to get the word out about global warming, because if we don't make a change soon, the world could be destroyed," 11-year-old Magnificent Farrell, a member of the by-kids, for-kids climate action group Global Warming Express, told SFR. "When I look up at adults, and I see that stuff isn't really getting changed, I just need to realize that if I can maybe do something, if I can maybe convince adults to do something, then we can get this done." In a statement he read before the crowd, Farrell implored, "Do not sell our lands for fossil fuel development. It is the worst thing you can do for yourselves and your children and grandchildren." The next auction is July 20 and includes parcels in Eddy and Lea counties in the southeastern corner of New Mexico. The BLM opened the 30-day lease sale protest period today, and comments can be submitted online. Protests are planned for auctions coming up in Wyoming and Colorado, as well as the July auction in New Mexico. Santa Fe Reporter Chaotic sales channels have been blamed for Chinas latest fake infant formula scandal where 22,600 cans of counterfeit milk powder were sold under the brands of Chinese infant formula maker Beingmate and US-based Abbott Laboratories. Fonterra Cooperative Group has a close association with both it invested in an 18.8 percent stake in Beingmate last year and is jointly developing a new dairy farm hub in China with Abbott. Nine people were arrested over the weekend and charged with making and selling fake products in seven provinces and Chinese media report they were all long-time formula distributors who were familiar with production processes. Wang Dingmian, former director of the Dairy Association of China, was quoted as saying chaotic sales channels in Chinas dairy industry were responsible for the problem whereas in countries like Australia supermarkets usually purchase products directly from manufacturers with no traders involved. The bust has worsened Chinese consumers already fragile trust in domestic infant milk formula following the 2008 melamine scandal involving Fonterras partner Sanlu, in which six babies died. Christina Zhu, Fonterras managing director Greater China, said the government had been clear that the latest case was a criminal issue and the companies involved had taken a responsible approach to it. Although industry experts have absolved the two companies of blame, they have suggested it could cause long-term brand damage to the pair which are among Chinas biggest infant formula brands. We have been monitoring the media and social media commentary carefully and at this stage there is no reason for us to believe there will be any long-term impacts from it, Zhu said. Shenzen-listed Beingmate has already suffered two consecutive years of revenue decline, reporting a 10 percent sales drop last year. However, earnings rose 50 percent, recovering from a 90 percent fall the year before. Its share price is currently 11.91 yuan, significantly below the 18 yuan apiece Fonterra paid for its 18.8 percent stake last year. Zhu, who is on the Beingmate board, said the investments rationale remains, which includes infant formula forecast to rise by 10 to 15 percent following last years relaxation of Chinas one-child policy. Beingmates share price reflects a drop in Chinas capital markets and Zhu said she was more interested in its operational performance. The company had been working hard on a turnaround with the latest results showing a stronger second half performance. Thats no accident, she said. In the final quarter there was a big pick up on the previous quarter. Finalising details of the distribution agreement for Fonterras Anmum brand, which has been in the Chinese market since 2013, and the Darnum joint venture in Australia took longer than expected, she said. Fonterra announced in February, subject to regulatory approvals, the first product destined for Beingmates Chinese customers will roll off the Darnum line in the second half of this year. Beingmate is not just important for Fonterra, this distribution agreement is an important part of the portfolio for Beingmate, she said, because of the Chinese consumer preference for foreign brands. There has been rapid growth of cross-border e-commerce sites, with Chinese consumers preferring to buy overseas-branded formula on the internet rather than from local franchised stores which are viewed as less safe. Chinese authorities had already signalled tighter regulations on infant formula which in the medium to long term is expected to boost larger domestic operators such as Beingmate and foreign brands which mainly rely on offline channels and business-to-consumer flagship stores. Zhu said Beingmate was well-placed to pick up market share once the new regulations are enforced. Morgan Stanley analysts have also named Beingmate and Yashili as potential beneficiaries. The new regulations are two-pronged, relating to cross-border e-commerce and registration. Cross-border e-commerce involves direct parcel delivery, someone bringing the goods in their suitcase, and free-trade or bonded zone importation where an importer brings in a container and then ships out individual parcels to consumers. Previously these models incurred a personal postal articles tax which for food products was 10 percent. Two regulations introduced on April 8 aimed to level the playing field between cross-border e-commerce and the general trade where importers pay import tariffs and value added tax of around 17 percent. For food products, the personal postal articles tax has lifted to 15 percent. The authorities also introduced a new positive list for goods entering free trade zones with value limits on purchases of 2,000 RMB per shipment and 20,000 RMB per person annually. Food items that fall within the value limit attract an 11.9 percent tax but those that go above the value limits will incur the general trades tax of 17 percent. All of Fonterras consumer brands are on the positive list and Zhu said the impact will be minimal given less than one percent of its products are sold through e-commerce channels. Chinese authorities also filed an updated WTO notification in January signalling domestic and imported infant formula will have to be registered by January 2018 with the CFDA (China Food and Drug Administration). Its thought likely it will include those sold through cross-border e-commerce channels. The new regulations mean one company can produce only three brands with nine formulae and proper Chinese labelling is required. Its expected to reduce the number of domestic formula brands on sale from over 2,000 to around 400. Two years ago Chinese authorities slashed the number of foreign infant formula brands that could be sold in the country from more than 800 to about 94. Analysts expect the whole market to suffer in the near term as sellers leaving the market lower prices to shed inventory. Zhu said the timing keeps changing for the release of the detailed regulations which are still being drafted. BusinessDesk.co.nz Comments from our readers No comments yet Add your comment: Your name: Your email: Not displayed to the public Comment: Comments to Sharechat go through an approval process. Comments which are defamatory, abusive or in some way deemed inappropriate will not be approved. It is allowable to use some form of non-de-plume for your name, however we recommend real email addresses are used. Comments from free email addresses such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc may not be approved. Anti-spam verification: Type the text you see in the image into the field below. You are asked to do this in order to verify that this enquiry is not being performed by an automated process. Related News: Mainfreight Investor Day / Market Update GFI - Greenfern - Offer closes 27th Oct MCY - Quarterly Operational Update VCT - Operational performance for the 3 months ended 30 Sept 2022 NZL - Forestry Estate Acquisition October 21st Morning Report Air New Zealand Limited Retail Bond Offer Books Close Spark welcomes C-band spectrum allocation AIA - 2022 Annual Meeting Chair & Chief Executive Addresses MOVE Completes Purchase of Vessel for Trans-Tasman Service BENGALURU: New leaks of Moto G4 Plus by an unknown source reveals that the 4th Gen Motorola Plus would be coming up with a finger print sensor that might be integrated with the home button at front panel, reports NDTV. It seems likely that Motorola will release two versions of the Moto G this year, to be called the Moto G4 and the Moto G4 Plus. A few pictures that supposedly show the next-generation Moto G have also been leaked on NoWhereElse site. The picture suggests the new handset will have a drastic change in its design. The bottom speaker has been shifted in favor of a fingerprint sensor that may also function as a home button. On the back one can see regular camera with flash, however, the new phone has two extra holes that might be for camera sensors or so. According to Twitter user Roland Quandt, the Moto G4 and G4 Plus will feature a 5.5-inch display. He also says that the Moto G Plus will feature a 16MP rear-facing camera; however the Moto G will only have a 13MP sensor. Quandt also gave some info about pricing for the devices, saying that the Moto G will be USD 270 and the Moto G Plus will be USD 315. The devices will start with 16GB of storage, and will be available in either black or white. Lenovo bought Motorola back in January 2014, but didnt take control until October 2014. Now the company is designing the handsets that will be coming into market in the second half of the year 2016. Enthusiasts have to wait for some more time to know about all the specs of Motos new generation smartphones. Also Read: Samsung Gears Up to Launch Next Budget 'Galaxy C' Series Smartphones Sony A6300: The Mirrorless Wonder is Now in India BENGALURU: Back in February, Sony launched a new camera in US; sending photographers all over the world into a meltdown and the device has finally arrived in India. Its the Sony Alpha 6300. Hailed as the successor to the A6000 model, the most popular mirrorless camera ever, the A6300 promises to be in the same line as another mirrorless wonder from Sony, perhaps even better. Whats more, the camera is priced aggressively at 74,990, which includes a 16-50 mm lens. According to Sony, the A6300 has the worlds fastest autofocus (AF) system among APS-C interchangeable cameras at 0.05 seconds. The AF system in the device is similar to the one found in the more advanced A7R II and A7 II cameras, with an astonishing 425 phase detection points. The device features the same 4D AF system seen in the A6000, but more refined and undeniably faster. At the core, the camera has an all new 24.2 megapixels APS-C Exmor CMOS sensor coupled with a BIONZ X image processing engine. Being a tech company, Sonys rise to the top of the camera market has been an amazing achievement. One reason for Sonys growth, as experts point out, is its ability to combine superior still photography along with high quality video shooting capabilities, taking it way ahead of its competition. The A6300 is another camera that supports this statement as it produces sharp 4K videos at a bit rate of 100 Mbps with additional features like super-slow motion 1080p video at 120fps. Built on a full magnesium alloy body, Sony claims the A6300 is resistant to dust and moisture. It has Wi-Fi and NFC compatibility for wireless data transfer and is fully functional with Sony's PlayMemories Mobile application, which is available for Android and iOS platforms. On the downside, the device does not feature touch screen that can be cumbersome for amateur photographers, as it takes time to settle with Sonys menu system. But a mirrorless wonder at 75,000; its a bargain for sure. Read Also: 5 Tablets Ready to Takeover Laptops in the Future Huawei Launches New VR Headset with 360-degree Sound WASHINGTON: A top U.S. think-tank has launched an India-U.S. trade initiative aimed to strengthen economic ties and meet the two countries' bilateral trade target of USD 500 billion. Launched by Atlantic Council yesterday, the initiative has the support of two powerful Senators - John Corny of the Republican Party and Mark Warner of the Democratic Party. The two are also Co-Chairs of Senate India Caucus, the only country specific caucus in the U.S. Senate. "As the largest and oldest democracies in the world, India and the United States share a relationship built on common values. By further increasing trade between our two countries, we have an opportunity to strengthen our unique bond, advance American interests in the region, and grow both economies," Cornyn said. "Bilateral trade between the two countries already exceeds USD 100 billion annually. I hope we continue to work to harness the full potential of US and Indian cooperation to increase bilateral trade and provide more economic opportunities for companies in both the US and India," Warner said. The Atlantic Council US-India Trade Initiative aims to generate American support for continued economic engagement in India and to forge collaboration on issues of trade and commerce, a statement said. In an effort to leverage, sustain, and promote the positive developments in trade relations between the two countries, the Initiative will develop policy briefs and strategy papers, convene US-India trade workshops and host a flagship US-India Trade Conference with policymakers, practitioners and private-sector leaders, it said. The Initiative will address seven of the most crucial areas of the US-India trade relationship, including smart cities, infrastructure, defense, financial institutions, insurance, trade agreements and intellectual property rights, the Council said in a statement. India and the US enjoy a robust and thriving trade relationship which holds tremendous potential for the future in a number of sectors including renewable energy, infrastructure, smart cities, IT services, digital economy, and defense, said Indian Ambassador to the US Arun Singh. "The elevation of the Strategic Dialogue between the two countries to a Strategic and Commercial Dialogue is a testimony to the importance of our trade and commercial ties in strengthening our bilateral partnership," Singh said. Atlantic Council Chairman Jon Huntsman said the US-India bilateral relationship holds immense economic potential for both countries and should be a priority for the incoming administration. "The Atlantic Council is committed to playing an active role in promoting trade relations between the US and India and helping cement a pathway for broader cooperation," he said. Read Also: U.S. Wants To Invest More In India: Nisha Biswal Nasscom Cyber Security Project Embraces over a Million Job Opportunities BENGALURU: Anti-nationalist! Pseudo-Secular! ISI Agent! Pro-Pakistan! These are some common jargons anchors use these days to de-fame an individual! Without any real proof, an individual is framed, just because they belong to a certain community! While the anchors screech without any substantial evidence and show their dominance and authority, the whole point of journalism touches new lows! They scream, they shout, even make a judgment! I am ashamed of you, and I hereby declare you a terrorist they read out their testament in an equitable tone. The question here arises that why are these media-houses, those skilled anchors doing so? Is this true journalism? Recently a study was conducted by Newslaundary.com concluded that the majority of media houses in India are owned by either big-shot corporate or politicians. Well that almost explains everything! The biasness of Indian media was also recently protruded by the latest annual World Press Freedom Index where India was ranked quite low! Read on to know all about World Press Freedom Index, Indias rank, governments stand, and why all this is important. What is World Press Freedom Index? The Press Freedom Index is an annual ranking of countries compiled and published by Reporters Without Borders, a France-based international non-profit, non-governmental organization. The rankings are based upon the organization's assessment of the countries' press freedom records in the previous year. It reflects the degree of freedom that journalists, news organizations, and netizens enjoy in each country, and the efforts made by the authorities to respect and ensure respect for this freedom. Seen as a benchmark throughout the world, the Index ranks 180 countries according to the freedom allowed journalists. It also includes indicators of the level of media freedom violations in each region. Read Also: Global Effort Must To End Nexus of Drugs Money, Terror: India ISRO All Set to Launch Nanosatellite Designed by Bangalore Based PES University Students STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Manfredi Auto Group has agreed to pay $425,000 in restitution to nearly 1,500 customers and fork over $30,000 in penalties for selling credit repair and identity theft protection services without their knowledge when they purchased or leased their cars, the state attorney general announced. Those "after-sale" products and services, provided by a third party, Credit Forget It Inc. (CFI), often tacked on hundreds and even thousands of dollars onto the vehicle's purchase price, said Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman. "Consumers deserve to be treated honestly by car dealerships, and shouldn't be hit with hidden fees that inflate the price of the vehicle," said Schneiderman in a statement. "My office will continue to make it a priority to crack down on these deceptive business practices that target unsuspecting consumers." Schneiderman said he had also reached settlements with three other dealerships - Koeppel Auto Group, Plaza Dealerships and Huntington Honda - which variously have locations in Brooklyn, Queens and Nassau and Westchester counties. In all, the four dealerships will pay nearly $2 million in restitution to almost 5,000 customers, and shell out $174,000 in penalties and costs. Schneiderman said the settlement was reached with Manfredi Auto Group and 10 related entities. Manfredi was not charged with any crime. Joseph Magnotti, Manfredi Auto's lawyer, said his client did not admit any wrongdoing. He said Manfredi Auto entered into the agreement with the attorney general to put the matter behind it. "The family never did anything willfully that was wrong," he said. "They relied on a letter from (another) lawyer, extolling the virtues of the product." "Joe Manfredi was an honest, hard-working man who would never try to hurt anyone," said Magnotti, referring to the late Corrado (Joe) Manfredi, the company founder. Last summer, Island Auto Group, in a multi-million-dollar deal, bought most of the Manfredi dealerships, putting Chrysler-Jeep-Dodge, Subaru, Mazda, Hyundai, Kia, Toyota, Fiat and Mitsubishi under its umbrella. Nick Manfredi, Joe Manfredi's son, retained ownership of Manfredi Chevrolet in New Dorp. Island Auto Group is not a party to the settlement. The attorney general's court filings said Manfredi peddled credit repair and identity theft prevention services provided by CFI, an unrelated third party. According to the A.G.'s legal papers, CFI had no expertise in the services it purported to provide. And its employees were hired without previous experience or training in budget counseling or credit repair and received minimal on-the-job training, Schneiderman contended. In actuality, CFI's credit repair and identity theft protection services "were frequently worthless to consumers, or at best, provided a meager portion of the services that were promised by the contracts and marketing materials provided to consumers," Schneiderman's court papers contend. The A.G. said after-sale items were often bundled into the vehicle sale or lease price and were not separately itemized. In many cases, customers thought the services were free, said Schneiderman. Neither Manfredi nor CFI is authorized to be involved in the credit repair services business, maintained Schneiderman. Schneiderman said he has obtained a consent order that shut down CFI. Besides the cash payouts, the settlements prohibit the dealerships from marketing credit repair and identity theft services in connection with the sale or lease of a vehicle; offering any after-sale product or service unless the price and terms are disclosed verbally and in writing; misrepresenting the vehicle price in lease or sale contacts and failing to clearly and conspicuously itemize each after-sale product or service and its price. Last year, Paragon Honda, a major New York dealership, and two sister stores agreed to a $13.5 million settlement with Schneiderman over similar claims. The company denied any wrongdoing. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. - The babysitter from Concord, accused of fatally torturing a 17-month-old boy, will return to court Thursday for her first conference since her arraignment three weeks ago on a murder indictment. Gloria Fields, 31, has pleaded not guilty to a 12-count indictment, whose top charges include first-degree murder, aggravated murder and second-degree murder, stemming from the Feb. 21 death of Anthony Delgado. She's also accused of manslaughter, assault, aggravated sexual abuse reckless assault of a child, criminal weapon possession and endangering a child's welfare. Prosecutors allege Fields tortured and sexually abused the defenseless toddler over the course of three days before he died on Feb. 21. Among the disturbing allegations, prosecutors said Fields stuck a six-inch crayon up the child's rectum and left it there for almost two days. Fields, who has a child of her own, used that child's crayon in the assault, according to prosecutors. Fields, who had been using heroin and smoking marijuana while the child was in her care, also slammed the child's face onto the floor while he was strapped into his stroller, and struck him on the head numerous times, according to court documents. The incidents occurred at various times inside of 195 Steuben Street, where the defendant and victim lived, and inside Buffalo Exchange, a used clothing store on East 11th Street in Manhattan, said prosecutors. At Fields' arraignment on March 29 in state Supreme Court, St. George, defense lawyer Mario F. Gallucci said he intended to file a written motion seeking a gag order against the district attorney's office. Gallucci said he feared comments made by prosecutors could prejudice a jury against his client. After Fields' arrest, McMahon called the defendant "depraved," saying she "systematically tortured" the victim. Justice Stephen J. Rooney has said he would wait to rule on the request until both sides file written motions. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A federal jury Wednesday convicted a South Beach man of sexually abusing a sleeping female passenger by slathering lotion on her private parts on an international flight six months ago. Nadeem Quraishi, 43, rubbed lotion on the woman's arms, chest, up her legs, on her underwear and in her vaginal area before she woke up during the Emirates Airlines flight from Dubai to New York on Oct. 26, said Brooklyn federal prosecutors. "We're very disappointed in the verdict," said Mark A. Macron, Quraishi's lawyer. "We believe it is against the weight of the evidence as there were no witnesses to any such contact, and the scientific evidence showed there was no DNA of the defendant on her." "None of the hand lotion that the woman said the defendant put on her was found on any part of her body, including her vaginal area, as shown by testing by the FBI lab," Macron said. According to authorities, the passenger had fallen asleep an hour into the flight after taking her anti-anxiety medication. When the 25-year-old woman awoke a few hours later, she alerted the flight crew that she had been violated, said a criminal complaint. When questioned by Emirates flight attendants, Quraishi said he put the lotion on the woman because he thought she needed it, and claimed she liked it because she did not resist, the complaint said. He said he touched her private parts. He later made a videotape statement to authorities in which he said he was hallucinating and thought the woman was his wife, according to a report in the Daily News. Quraishi had been expected in mid-February to plead guilty to sexual abuse, but decided against it. A noncitizen who lives in Staten Island, Quraishi would have faced jail time if he pleaded guilty, but feared being deported to Pakistan as a result of a conviction, according to the Daily News. He is married and the father of three children. About a week later, prosecutors filed a letter in Brooklyn federal court saying the victim's rape-kit test came back negative for the presence of Quraishi's DNA on her body. The jury convicted Quraishi of abusive sexual contact, a felony, and misdemeanor assault. He faces up to two years in prison when sentenced Aug. 12. He also faces deportation. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. - The babysitter from Concord accused of fatally torturing a 17-month-old boy may present an insanity defense. Mario F. Gallucci, the lawyer for Gloria Fields, notified prosecutors at a conference Thursday in state Supreme Court, St. George, he intends to explore the viability of presenting a mental-defect defense when the defendant ultimately goes to trial. Gallucci also said he plans to retain an expert on the issue. Fields, 31, has pleaded not guilty to a 12-count indictment, whose top charges include first-degree murder, aggravated murder and second-degree murder, stemming from the Feb. 21 death of Anthony Delgado. She's also accused of manslaughter, assault, aggravated sexual abuse reckless assault of a child, criminal weapon possession and endangering a child's welfare. Prosecutors allege Fields tortured and sexually abused the defenseless toddler over the course of three days before he died. Among the disturbing allegations, prosecutors said Fields stuck a six-inch crayon up the child's rectum and left it there for almost two days. Fields, who has a child of her own, used that child's crayon in the assault, according to prosecutors. Fields, who had been using heroin and smoking marijuana while the child was in her care, also slammed the child's face onto the floor while he was strapped into his stroller, and struck him on the head numerous times, according to court documents. The incidents occurred at various times inside of 195 Steuben St., where the defendant and victim lived, and inside Buffalo Exchange, a used clothing store on East 11th Street in Manhattan, said prosecutors. At Fields' arraignment on March 29, Gallucci said he was mulling whether to submit a written motion seeking a gag order against the district attorney's office. Gallucci said he feared comments made by prosecutors could prejudice a jury against his client. After Fields' arrest, District Attorney Michael E. McMahon called the defendant "depraved," saying she "systematically tortured" the victim. Gallucci said Thursday he was reconsidering whether to file a motion at all due to recent developments. McMahon has made no further public statements on the case since March 29. The case was adjourned to May 24 for a conference. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Mayor Bill de Blasio is hosting a long-awaited town hall on Staten Island, Wednesday night at PS 48 in Concord. A "Working for Our Neighborhoods" town hall, it will be held from 7 to 9 p.m. and is open to any and all local concerns. The Mid-Island school has enough room for about 250 people to attend the town hall, with another 100 in an overflow area, officials said. Among the Mayor's progressive policies that are not favored by many borough residents are those on law enforcement issues and the city's "Vision Zero" push to eliminate traffic fatalities. Though the city significantly increased funding for road resurfacing and expanded Staten Island Ferry service last year, de Blasio has proposed virtually no new mass transit service for the borough. The administration has also been recently criticized by Oddo -- a Republican who is close with de Blasio -- for the the death of the Kroc Center project. The Town Hall has concluded. Read City Hall reporter Anna Sander's wrap up here: Staten Island gets a pool plus discussion of issues Read Tom Wrobleski commentary: De Blasio, Staten Island rise to the occasion at town hall Watch the livestream here. nws Outerbridge There was no great backup on the Outerbridge Crossing Thursday morning, but local officials gathered nearby to call on the Port Authority to expand capacity. (Staten Island Advance/Rachel Shapiro) Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis, Councilman Joe Borelli and Assemblyman-elect Ron Castorina with Perth Amboy Mayor Wilda Diaz on an overpass just before the Outerbridge Crossing. They are calling on the Port Authority to expand capacity on the bridge. Thursday, April 21, 2016. (Staten Island Advance/Rachel Shapiro) STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. - The traffic and congestion on and around the Outerbridge Crossing is too much for Staten Islanders and New Jersey residents to handle and must be fixed, a group of Island officials and one official from the other side of the bridge argued Thursday. Assemblyman-elect Ron Castorina Jr. (R-South Shore) led the charge, standing on an overpass on Tyrellan Avenue in Richmond Valley, overlooking Korean War Veterans Parkway as it disappears over the bridge. With him was Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis (R-East Shore/Brooklyn), Councilman Joe Borelli (R-South Shore) and Perth Amboy Mayor Wilda Diaz. They are calling on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to begin an Environmental Impact Statement with the hopes of expanding the bridge's capacity in coming years. Bridge traffic "can paralyze the West Shore Expressway and Staten Island Expressway," Castorina said, and Staten Island and New Jersey have some of the worst commute times. Diaz said with congestion an issue both in her city in New Jersey and on Staten Island, "it would be in the best interest of both" to expand the bridge. Malliotakis said the bridge brings in $145 million in tolls annually and spends $27 million on maintenance, leaving a large pot of unspent money that, instead of being funneled to other Port Authority projects, should get invested back in the bridge. "Government has a tendency to wait until it's too late" and then address an issue, Malliotakis said. Borelli gave the Port Authority credit for its projects to raise the Bayonne Bridge and rebuild the Goethals, but knowing how long of a process it is to complete the Environmental Impact Statement process and everything in between before construction can begin, he hopes the agency will get started soon. "The bridge is critical for both of our communities," Borelli said, jesting that Staten Islanders ought to head to New Jersey to get "better Mexican food than Jose Tejas" there. Besides expanding the bridge itself, he wants to see the ramps for the bridge better accommodate traffic. Diaz echoed Malliotakis' sentiment about the $111 million in tolls collected annually. "All we see is congestion," no funding going back into major improvements for the bridge. "It's actually disturbing." In a statement, a Port Authority spokesman said the agency is evaluating priorities for the 2017-2026 capital plan and it welcomes input from elected officials. "The Outerbridge Crossing remains safe and in a state of good repair, due to the integrity of its design and construction as well as regular Port Authority investment in operating and capital maintenance," the spokesman said. "Recent projects include an ongoing contract where we repaved the main span and approach roadways in both directions, and replaced the concrete pavement in the New York plaza. The agency previously removed lead-based paint on the structure, and continues a regular maintenance painting program, along with routine projects to perform steel repairs identified through biennial inspection programs. Facility forces are also in the process of replacing all of the bridge lighting fixtures with high-efficiency LED fixtures, and we recently upgraded the CCTV cameras throughout the facility." While they weren't present Thursday morning, Rep. Daniel Donovan, Borough President James Oddo, state Sen. Andrew Lanza and Council Minority Leader Steven Matteo all joined in the calls to the Port Authority. 04:20 Dangerous: No clear end in sight for Xi Jinpings rule There appears to be no clear end in sight for Chinese President Xi Jinpings rule, says McGrathNicol senior risk advisor Alex Joske. 03:18 Xi Jinping secures third term Chinas President Xi Jinping has secured his place as China's most influential, longest-serving president since revolutionary leader Mao Zedong.... 02:09 Rishi Sunak enters UK leadership contest Former UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak is the front-runner to become the next British Prime Minister, as he formally announced his leadership bid. 01:08 Boris Johnson will not run for UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced he will not run for the leadership of the UK Conservative Party. 04:04 Lismore residents told to prepare for evacuation NSW SES Assistant Commissioner Sean Kearns says Lismore has had more than 100 millimetres of rain in the last 24 hours, with the town currently... 02:09 Rishi Sunak enters UK leadership contest Former UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak is the front-runner to become the next British Prime Minister, as he formally announced his leadership bid. 01:08 Boris Johnson will not run for UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced he will not run for the leadership of the UK Conservative Party. 02:12 Thousands want Elons burnt hair musk Elon Musk has proved his sales skills by getting tens of thousands of people to buy bottles of his 'burnt hair' perfume. 04:18 New Zealand name change presented to parliament A petition to change New Zealand to its Maori name Aotearoa is still awaiting a committee discussion after being presented to parliament. 04:41 Fate of the Amazon rainforest lies in Brazils election In just over a week Brazilians will go to the polls again to choose their next president, with the runoff election deciding the future of the... 03:18 Xi Jinping secures third term as leader of China Xi Jinping has secured his place as China's most powerful and long-serving president since revolutionary leader Mao Zedong. 06:23 China will be more aggressive under Xi China will become more provocative and more aggressive after Xi Jinping secured a third term, says the Australian Strategic Policy Institutes... 05:19 Republicans winning the mid-terms is likely The Australians Adam Creighton says theres a real push toward the Republicans for the upcoming mid-term elections. 03:29 Ukraine attempts to push Russia out of Kherson Many people in Ukraine have been without power as Russian forces continue to strike energy facilities across the country. 06:23 Japan is quite concerned about direct conflict with China Japan is quite concerned about the potential for direct conflict with China, says the Australian Strategic Policy Institutes, Malcolm... 00:27 Bus collision in India kills 15 At least 15 people have been killed and another 40 injured in a highway collision in central India. 06:23 Putin could deploy nuclear weapons in spring, says expert If the Russians lose Crimea it would be the end of Putin, says the Australian Strategic Policy Institutes Malcolm Davis. 00:34 Truss eligible for taxpayer-funded allowance Former UK prime minister Liz Truss is eligible for a taxpayer-funded allowance, capped at $203,000 a year for the rest of her life after just... Ukranians left powerless after Russias massive attack Over a million Ukranians have been left without power after Russian strikes targeted energy facilities across the country which President Volodymyr Zelensky described as a massive attack. 00:33 Giorgia Meloni sworn in as Italys prime minister Italy has sworn in its first female prime minister Giorgia Meloni. 00:24 Thousands march in solidarity with protesters in Iran Thousands are marching in solidarity with protesters in Iran nearly a month after the death of Mahsa Amini. 02:21 Australia and Japan sign security deal Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his Japanese counterpart have signed an updated security pact, aimed at strengthening defence ties between... 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. 02:55 Rishi Sunak front runner in race for new UK PM Rishi Sunak has become the front runner in the race to replace British Prime Minister Liz Truss, following her resignation earlier this week.... By clicking Agree, you consent to Slates Terms of Service and Privacy Policy and the use of technologies such as cookies by Slate and our partners to deliver relevant advertising on our iOS app to personalize content and perform site analytics. Please see our Privacy Policy for more information about our use of data, your rights, and how to withdraw consent. Agree Ammon Bundy faces a variety of charges from the Oregon standoff and from a 2014 armed standoff in Nevada in a long-running dispute over management of public lands. He has pleaded not guilty to some charges and refused to enter pleas in others. On Wednesday, a federal magistrate judge Ammon Bundy and his brother Ryan Bundy were deemed to be a danger to the community and a risk not to return to court like 17 other co-defendants before them, including their father. 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Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 125 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 157 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x5612f0212e78)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 948 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612f02217f0)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/2011159162/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 135 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x5612f0212e78)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1302 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1292 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 955 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612f02217f0)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 135 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x5612f01c2b08)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1300 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1292 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 481 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 481 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 433 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612f02217f0)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612f02217f0)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x5612e71e3138)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x5612f012f828)') called at (eval 592) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x5612f012f828)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0 The West Coast Eagles were quick to blame a young communications staffer for the use of the racially insensitive phrase "yellow peril" on social media over the weekend but it can now be revealed the club's CEO Trevor Nisbett is a prior offender. In a statement attributed to Nisbett on Wednesday, the Eagles admitted the use of the phrase was an error and explained the young staff member had been unaware of the racist connotations to Asian people. Trevor Nisbett's message to members in 2014. That may well be the case but if so the staff member was only repeating a mistake Nisbett apparently himself made in October 2014. A reader on Wednesday evening alerted WAtoday to a "chief executive officer's message" in the club's Eagle Eye magazine, in which Nisbett outlined a voting procedure for the "return the wings" campaign - the push by members and fans to have players predominantly wear West Coast's traditional guernsey. Bonuses paid to bankers for selling mortgages, credit cards or insurance could be overhauled as banks respond to fierce political pressure with a review of conflicted payments. In an attempt to quell public concern over misconduct in finance, the country's big banks have also committed to developing a blacklist of all rogue staff who have broken the law or industry code of conduct across a 150,000-strong workforce. After months of mounting pressure on the banking industry, lenders responded on Thursday with a commitment to review commissions and the sales targets given to frontline bank staff. Sales targets are a key influence on the size of bonuses paid in banks, and have long been slammed by the Finance Sector Union for encouraging a sales culture within finance. BC Iron says it is "considering all of its strategic options" for the future of its mothballed Nullagine joint venture project with Fortescue Metals Group, including offloading its 75 per cent interest in the project. The joint venture partners decided to suspend operations at the Pilbara iron ore mine in December after the iron ore price dived below $US40 a tonne. BC Iron's managing director Morgan Ball says the company is keen on progressing its Buckland project. Credit:Philip Gostelow BC Iron said on Thursday it was considering its options in regards to Nullagine, including "a potential sale of BC Iron's interest or a potential restart of operations". "Any sale would need to be executed with an appropriate party and realise sufficient value for BC Iron's shareholders," the company said. The president of BHP Billiton's Australian operations, Mike Henry, says the nation should not seek to transition away from the resources sector while it grows in others, and has reiterated the company's calls for industrial relations reform. Addressing the Melbourne Mining Club on Thursday, Mr Henry said "Today there is much discussion about the Australian economy being 'in transition'.". "Given the contribution of our industry to the nation and the substantial opportunity that yet lies ahead, this doesn't mean we will transition from resources to something else. It means we will strengthen other aspects of the economy, even as we continue to grow in resources. "It will be resources and medical research, resources and higher education, resources and agribusiness." 195 Lennox Street, Richmond Credit:Cloud 9 Aerial Photography The Casey Lifestyle Centre, on almost 4.4 hectares at 430-440 Princes Highway, but also with frontage to Narre Warren North, includes an 18,070 square metre bulky goods centre occupied by major retailers including Anaconda, Forty Winks and JB Hi Fi. The new owner cannot redevelop the site until 2033. Another site, 1-9 Regency Drive, a vacant two hectare Commercial 1 zoned block opposite the Berwick Business Park, is within a major activity centre. Combined according to sources, the sales are expected to boost council's coffers by eight figures. JLL's Stuart Taylor, Stephen Bolton and Peter Sprekos are the marketing agents. Not far away the City of Monash is expecting to bank about $50 million, source say, selling a 7114 square metre site at 281 Springvale Road, Glen Waverley. A condition of that sale is that any new owner must replace 257 existing car parks with at least that many in a new development. Flagship buys Richmond ex-tobacco factory Developer Flagship Property Group, of which infrastructure developer and fund manager Plenary Group is a major shareholder, is speculated to be paying more than $9 million for Richmond Hill's historic Tas Pickett P/L Tobacco Factory. Built some 90 years ago at 195 Lennox Street, the former industrial property was offloaded by interests associated with the co-founders of diversified adviser, Tract Consulting, which has been based at the Richmond address for decades (now as a tenant). Wulff Projects, directed by Adam Wulff, the son Tract co-founder, Rodney, recently banked $8.6 million selling 243-247 Queens Parade, Fitzroy North to developer Goldfields Group. The 1482 square metre former tobacco factory site was marketed to developers by Colliers International's Jeremy Gruzewski, Peter Bremner and Ted Dwyer. Across town at 3 and 5-15 Shiel Street, North Melbourne, developer Fridcorp is seeking to increase the height of a permitted eight-level apartment proposal it just acquired. That vendor, Spec Property, recently lodged plans to build apartments on Doncaster site it bought last year with only a planning proposal in place. COLLARTS building sold Australian College of the Arts (COLLARTS) administrators will soon send rental cheques to a new landlord, with the double-storey South Melbourne building, home to the educator since 2007, selling for more than $2.7 million. COLLARTS pays annual rent of $164,491 to occupy the 879 square metre building on a 550 square metre block with 18 car parks. The lease expires in 2018, when the purchaser may wish to exploit new planning regulations allowing buildings up to 18 levels. Not far away at 51-59 Thistlethwaite Street and 476-484 City Road, the City of Port Phillip Council approved a 161-unit complex being reviewed by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal at the time. Lemon Baxter's Nick Bade and Ned Kukic sold the COLLARTS building the day after the expressions of interest closed. Thomastown retail fetches $12.9m CoInvest, which administers a service leave scheme for Victorian construction industry members, has -sold a Thomastown showroom for $12.9 million. The 1.1 hectare Dalton Road asset is leased to a variety of bulky good businesses that contribute to the annual rent of $1.125 million. The property, therefore, exchanged on a yield of about 8.7 per cent. Earlier this year, CoInvest banked $26 million selling the Bundoora Square shopping centre, and more than $6 million offloading a Scoresby office. JLL's Stuart Taylor, Stephen Bolton, Andrew O'Connell and Matt Ellis with Charter Keck Cramer's Andrew Grant, marketed CoInvest's portfolio. Another club repurposes inner-city holding The 49-year old Abruzzo Club has repurposed its substantial property holding after recognising that relying on membership from an ageing patronage was no way to a prosperous future. Documented as one of the State's oldest Italian clubs, the society has smashed out the ground level of its brutalist Brunswick East headquarters, opening itself to what is now the thriving Lygon Street retail hub. A new 150-seat restaurant owned by the club, 377 on Lygon, replaces a private function space most passers-by would not have known existed. An enormous 330-seat function venue still operates on the upper level of the 1980 building. The East Brunswick, retail strip is growing as developers add ground level shops to new apartment complexes. Haberdashery retailer Clegs chose to retain its store opposite the Abruzzo Club when it shut its 90-year old Elizabeth Street, city, store, nine months ago. Meanwhile in town, the 129-year old Celtic Club last month listed for sale its historic Queen Street headquarters after obtaining a permit to replace airspace with a 48-level tower. The club hopes to bank $25 million and occupy the lower four levels of the proposed new building. Freemasons Victoria plans to occupy just over 1000 square metres at its East Melbourne holding, which it is redeveloping with Mirvac into a 275-unit apartment complex. The Naval & Military Club is the highest profile Victorian society to recently fail, after plans to redevelop its 27 Little Collins Street site were thwarted by the exclusive Melbourne Club next door. NMC had 1100 members (average age, 63) when it closed in 2009, a quarter the number it had at its 1960s peak. Email: marcpallisco@gmail.com Hundreds of investors who lost money in the collapse of retailer Dick Smith have registered interest in joining a class action suit led by Sydney law firm Bannister Law. Bannister Law is gauging the level of interest in a class action claim against former directors and auditors of Dick Smith, which collapsed in January owing around $400 million to creditors. "Investors are angry and some people have lost a lot of money," Bannister Law chief executive Charles Bannister told Fairfax Media. "If we see merit in the action its possible that findings could be made against officers and related external parties that usually have insurance," Mr Bannister said. This week a record number of more than 130 countries will gather in New York to sign the Paris Climate agreement that was thrashed out last December. In doing so, they are acknowledging that human-induced climate pollution from burning fossil fuels is driving dangerous changes to our climate and they are on board to tackle the problem. Australia will be among those nations gathered in New York but despite seeking to project a perception of credibility on climate, the Turnbull Government is still implementing the retrogressive policies from the Abbott era and that needs to change. The warming ocean has left the Great Barrier Reef in peril. Significant parts of the reef up to 95 per cent in the northern half have already bleached and it's not yet known how much of the deathly whitened coral will survive. Unless pollution trends are reversed, the world's coral reefs are predicted to be gone within 25 years. In the months since the Paris Agreement, successive extreme heat records have been smashed, including the record for the hottest year ever which 2015 won at a canter. Already we have hit the 1 degree of warming threshold and have pumped enough pollution into the atmosphere to reach 400 parts per million edging perilously close to the 450ppm danger zone. The situation in Lebanon where mother Sally Faulkner, alongside a 60 Minutes film crew, made a failed attempt to recover her children from their Lebanese father highlights the difficulties facing separated Australian parents where one or both parents have connections with a country other than Australia. It is not likely to be an isolated case, thanks to the changing make-up of this country. Separation: Sally Faulkner and former husband Ali El Amine. Our large international population has created Australia's valuable cultural diversity and boosted economic growth. It is commonplace for middle-class children to travel internationally with their families, especially where one or both of their parents are born outside of the country. Moving to Australia, however, can lead to isolation for spouses and place stress upon relationships which may result in separation. Dame Leonie was one of the most public female figures of her generation. Credit:Robert Pearce And she emerged as a woman for all seasons, applying her abundant energies to the world of business and public sector organisations. She sat on the boards of the ANZ Banking Group, Western Mining Corporation and Elcom, and was one of the pro-demutualisation directors of the NRMA during its abortive first tilt at listing, in 1995. Just before the turn of the last century, Kramer was a leading player in maintaining the status quo of the constitutional monarchy in Australia. Prime Minister John Howard anointed her as one of the community appointees to the 1998 Constitutional Convention, and she was later appointed to sit on the committee running the federally funded "No" campaign during the republic referendum. Dame Leonie announces her resignation as University of Sydney chancellor in 2001. Credit:Narelle Autio Kramer said she believed Australia was already a republic, in all things but name, and that the existing constitutional arrangements were a "strong system of checks and balances". Said she: "I would certainly vote for constitutional change if it delivered something better than what we have now, but I don't believe the republic will offer that." She won the glittering prizes almost as a matter of routine, and became Australia's most celebrated female academic. From Melbourne University she went to Oxford. In 1952 she married Harold Kramer, a South African doctor, and had two daughters. They came to Australia because Harold refused to return to South Africa under apartheid. She became the first female professor at the University of Sydney in 1968, retiring 21 years later from her post as Professor of Australian Literature the same year she became deputy chancellor. An adroit politician, she became chancellor two years later. Kramer was one of the most public female figures of her generation, and a potent conservative voice in numerous groups and advisory bodies ranging from the chairmanship of Quadrant magazine to the Institute of Public Affairs. Her tenure on Quadrant's management committee was not without its controversy, particularly with the resignation of one of its most successful editors, Robert Manne. But while she exercised much authority in diverse fields of activity she was, equally, the subject of vigorous criticism from some writers, intellectuals and politicians. Patrick White, for example, referred to her as "Killer Kramer". The critic, John Docker, wrote of her "baleful" influence on Australian literature. Occasionally she tripped over her own feet. The most infamous stumble perhaps was in 1995 when, as one of the Miles Franklin award judges, who gave the prize to the eccentric Queenslander Helen Darville-Demidenko for her novel The Hand That Signed the Paper. The decision briefly turned literary criticism into a national joke. British-born Darville-Demidenko tricked herself out in peasant blouse to publicise her book, about a Ukrainian family during the Stalinist purges. But when she won the Franklin, academics and some within the Australian Jewish community attacked the work claiming parts were plagiarised, while others complained the intent of the Franklin was to promote Australian content. Kramer and her fellow judges ran for cover. Concerns emerged that some had not read the novel, and the others had relied on those who perused the book to reach a decision to award Darville-Demidenko the prize. Political opponents thought her Franklin embarrassment great fun but among supporters, her stature remained undented. It was to be another six years before opponents finally took her scalp at the age of 76. But she had been a major public figure for years who had learnt to withstand criticism from those on the left while cosseted and lionised by those whose ideas she shared. Appointed to the ABC by the Fraser government in 1977, she became chair five years later and left no one in any doubt that she regarded herself as a guardian of the highest standards of broadcasting. That year she was also appointed as Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Unsurprisingly, her ABC chairmanship ended prematurely in 1983 after clashes with the Hawke government. However, she was adjudged by some to have got the better of Senator John Button in a 1983 debate when he accused her of not always acting without fear or favour at the ABC. Her interest in the ABC remained undiminished, and in 1991 she strongly criticised the ABC for what she termed "arrogance and ignorance" in its Gulf War coverage. Kramer served as deputy chancellor of the University of Sydney from 1989-91 and chancellor from 1991-2001. He final years were mired by an internecine brawl with a hostile university senate and a student body. In July 2001, a majority of Senate members signed a letter saying they would move the motion over concern about contract details of the vice-chancellor, Professor Gavin Brown. Kramer saw the writing on the wall and retired as chancellor just hours before her fellow academics were scheduled to vote to dump her. If anything she increased her activities outside the university as well as continuing to edit anthologies of Australian poetry and short stories. She did, however, decline an invitation to run on the NSW Liberal Senate ticket, saying she was unwilling to be bound by the articles of faith of a political party. Kramer was born Leonie Judith Gibson to Alfred and Gertrude Gibson in Melbourne on October 1, 1924. After Oxford, where she was a post-graduate student and tutor, she went on to become Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of NSW in 1963. She published books of literary criticism, principally on Henry Handel Richardson, as well as editing several anthologies. Although much of Kramer's critical writing provoked controversy, perhaps the fiercest reaction came in response to her views on Henry Lawson. She was not an admirer of Lawson, feeling that his contribution to Australian literature was less than some academics had supposed. This critical stance drew retaliatory fire. In particular, Frank Hardy accused her of fostering a "conservative elitist approach to literature". Kramer was unmoved and, of course, unashamed of her support for conservative traditions. On education she observed "Perhaps we give our young people an expectation that education should be entertaining and relatively easy". Following its success in 2015, the Australian Tapestry Workshop has announced the second Tapestry Design Prize for Architects. The prize, which might seem obscure at a glance, frames itself as means to re-evaluate and champion the relevance of tapestry and textile art to contemporary architectural design and language. Homage to Carl Emmanuel Bach 2003, a tapestry designed by Jorn Utzon and woven by Cheryl Thornton, Pamela Joyce, Milena Paplinska and Chris Cochius. Credit:John Gollings With entries opening earlier this week, the prize calls for designs and proposals by architects for a site-specific tapestry to be hypothetically located within the Col Madigan-designed National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Last year's competition, which proposed Denton Corker Marshall's new Australian Pavilion at Venice as a hypothetical site, produced joint winners in John Wardle Architects and a collaboration between Kristin Green of KGA Architecture and Michelle Hamer. TMZ says that multiple sources have said that he was rushed to hospital and doctors gave him a "save shot" drugs administered to counteract the effects of an opiate. Prince in concert in Sydney in 2012. It also reports that he went against doctors' advice to stay in hospital for 24 hours, after he was told he could not get a private room. He was reportedly released three hours after arriving at the hospital. Less than a week later, he was pronounced dead at 10.07am local time on Thursday. Prince performs at the Super Bowl halftime show in 2007. Credit:AP News of his death sent shockwaves through the music world, which is already reeling from the death of David Bowie in January. Prince's ex-wife Mayte Garcia told US media she was devastated. Prince's death shocked the world. "I loved him then, I love him now and will love him eternally," Ms Garcia said. "He's with our son now." Prince and Ms Garcia were married in 1996 and had a son, Gregory, who died a week after his birth. "I can't even think of the words of what I'm feeling," she said. "This man was my everything, we had a family. I am beyond deeply saddened and devastated." Actor Russell Crowe seemed to sum up the world's collective shock with his tweet: "Say it isn't so ..." US President Barack Obama said "few artists had influenced the sound and trajectory of popular music more distinctly, or touched quite so many people with their talent". Mr Obama described him as "one of the most gifted and prolific musicians of our time". Though the cause of death has not yet been confirmed, Prince had been unwell for several weeks. His publicist had maintained he was suffering flu. At a party at his Paisley Park estate in Chanhassen on the weekend Prince said of his condition: "Wait a few days before you waste any prayers." Neil Portnow, the president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the industry body responsible for the Grammy Awards, said Prince was "one of the most uniquely gifted artists of all time". "Never one to conform, he redefined and forever changed our musical landscape," Mr Portnow said. "Prince was an original who influenced so many, and his legacy will live on forever. We have lost a true innovator and our sincerest condolences go out to his family, friends, collaborators, and all who have been impacted by his incredible work." MTV said in a statement his death came "so suddenly and so before his time". "Prince was a once-in-a-lifetime artist who transcended every medium and genre he touched and created music with a passion and individuality that inspired multiple generations," MTV's statement said. "Our hearts and prayers go out to his family, friends and millions of fans." Social media lit up in the wake of the news, as celebrities and music industry luminaries including Oprah Winfrey, Paul McCartney, Madonna, Mick Jagger, Chaka Khan, Justin Timberlake, Frank Ocean and Lenny Kravitz expressed their shock and grief. One of the most moving tributes came from the cast of Broadway play The Color Purple, which sang his signature song Purple Rain after its nightly performance, led by a towering Jennifer Hudson. Prince's death seemed to bookend one of his most famous lyrics: "Dearly beloved we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life." We're not in Spring Street anymore. The rumble of trams is here, along with the bleary eyed bustle, but also a pot-bellied drag queen in platform heels clopping down a footpath smeared in dog excrement, past a venue surrounded by hand-pressed greeting card vendors and artisan taco dispensaries. Would-be senator Dr Meredith Doig and the leader of the Australian Sex party Fiona Patten amid the interesting decor of Brunswick Street bar Naked for Satan on Thursday. Credit:Joe Armao Welcome to the Australian Sex Party campaign launch for senate candidate Dr Meredith Doig, held high on the rooftop of Brunswick Street bar Naked for Satan, an establishment named for a Russian immigrant who made bootleg vodka here during the Great Depression (and reportedly stripped during the distillation process as a means of keeping cool against the steamy backdrop of brass burners). Nationals deputy leader Fiona Nash has joined her cabinet colleague Attorney-General George Brandis in claiming the science of climate change is not yet settled. Senator Nash, responsible for regional development, communications and health, told Sky News there were "varying views" on climate science and she was of the opinion it was still up for debate. "I don't think it's necessarily settled but I think we certainly think we should be taking every precaution possible to ensure that the planet is healthy," she said. "I think there's varying views on whether it's settled or not. What I'm really focused on, again as a farmer, is that climate is changing and that we have to be able to adapt." The Australian Tax Office is close to striking a deal with the Federal Court to fast-track large corporate tax cases that have dragged on for years. Tax Commissioner Chris Jordan said the ATO had "hardened its approach" to corporate tax avoidance and was refusing to be "stooged and gamed" by companies that do not deal in good faith. He said the court was receptive to making changes that would speed up significant cases - some worth hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid taxes to the public purse - through the system. The national drug regulator will have to decide whether a nicotine inhaler can be sold over the counter, in a Federal Court decision that could test the government's stance on electronic cigarettes. British American Tobacco subsidiary Nicovations Australia last year applied to register its Voke inhaler - an aerosol can that releases a nicotine vapour - with the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) as an over-the-counter drug. Electronic cigarettes, which are illegal, also release a nicotine vapour, but do so under heat. While nicotine is legally classified as a dangerous poison in Australia, the company argues that its inhaler should be treated differently because it is designed to help people stop smoking tobacco. Nicovations took the TGA and the Secretary of the Department of Health, Martin Bowles, to the Federal Court after the TGA declined to consider the company's application, saying it had incorrectly used the form for an over-the-counter medicine instead of for a prescription medicine. Actor George Clooney cannot believe he found the love of his life at 52. The Ocean's Eleven star tied the knot with British lawyer Amal Alamuddin in a romantic ceremony in Venice, Italy in September, 2014 after a year of dating, and Hollywood's former most eligible bachelor, now 54, is still pinching himself after scoring the wife of his dreams. George Clooney married top barrister Amal Alamuddin on September 27, 2014 in Venice, Italy. "I've never been happier in a relationship by any stretch of the imagination," he told the American edition of Esquire. "At 52, I found the love of my life and I'm really happy." After they were married, Clooney told Access Hollywood he was smitten with Amal about "three days" into their relationship, adding, "I knew when I met her that she was so extraordinary and special. And then I wondered if I'd ever get a chance to date her." British Prime Minister David Cameron led the tributes to the Queen, who is the country's first nonagenarian sovereign. "Her Majesty has been steadfast a rock of strength for our nation, for our Commonwealth and on many occasions for the whole world," he said. Mr Cameron led tributes in the House of Commons to the monarch and her "unshakable sense of duty", pointing out that the Queen had provided counsel to 12 British prime ministers and met a quarter of all the US presidents in history. The Queen "has lived through some extraordinary times", he said, from World War II to the moon landing, the end of the Cold War and the advent of peace in Northern Ireland. The Prime Minister also tweeted a video message: "The whole country will want to wish the Queen a happy birthday today." Jeremy Corbyn, the ardent republican leader of the opposition Labour Party, paid tribute to her "outstanding commitment to public life". "Whatever differing views people across this country have about the institution, the vast majority share an opinion that Her Majesty has served this country ... with a clear sense of public service and public duty," he said. Some, though, were less overawed by the occasion. "Headline polling figures mask what's really happening," said Graham Smith, chief executive of campaign group Republic. "With the republican movement stronger than ever and growing and with the succession looming on the horizon, the monarchy is in a more perilous position than pundits will tell you this week." Celebrations At dusk, the British Parliament building will be lit up in the red, white and blue of the Union Jack. The Queen spent the day at Windsor Castle, leaving to greet well-wishers on a walk through the town west of London. Hundreds had lined up hours beforehand, carrying cakes, cards, balloons and Union Jack flags. "She's phenomenal, she ageless and timeless," said Lynn Lovell, 63, a retired teacher. "She's such a role model to all of us and her energy and enthusiasm for the work she does is an inspiration." "The Queen's just remarkable, a very formidable lady, and certainly the one we all look up to," added Judy Daley, 50, a civilian police worker. The band of the Coldstream Guards played Happy Birthday and royal fans snapped photos as the Queen, clad in pale green, greeted local dignitaries, townspeople and tourists. Fluttering above Windsor Castle's round tower was a huge version of the royal standard used for major celebrations. Later, the Queen will light the first in a chain of 1000 beacons to blaze across Britain and around the world, before attending a private family party at the castle hosted by the Queen's eldest son and heir to the throne, Prince Charles. Elsewhere, the day was marked with an eruption of pomp. Artillery companies fired gun salutes from sites including Hyde Park and the Tower of London, and the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out in celebration. The four members of the 60 Minutes crew who were jailed in Beirut for almost two weeks have arrived back in Australia, with journalist Tara Brown declaring it is "good to be home". The Emirates flight carrying Brown, producer Stephen Rice, cameraman Benjamin Williamson and sound recordist David Ballment touched down just before 10pm. The crew were greeted by a media scrum when they emerged from a VIP area of Sydney's International Airport an hour later. Rice hugged a smiling Brown about her shoulders as the pair were jostled by the crowd of reporters. Dressed up for a night out with a girlfriend at a local pub, Australian Army private Tayla Stahl posted a picture of the pair to one of her social media accounts. "Solid effort last night!" she captioned the Instagram photo on February 8, 2014 seemingly about the night before spent at popular north-western nightspot The Fiddler in Rouse Hill. Tayla Stahl was charged with robbing a bank on the Richmond Air Force Base in 2014. But police allege only hours before that photo was taken the private had carried out a brazen bank robbery at one of the country's largest military bases where she worked. Construction will start within weeks on preliminary work for tunnels and a spaghetti junction of motorway ramps in Sydney's inner west after the Baird government approved the second stage of the $16.8 billion WestConnex road project. In the wake of the decision, the Greens labelled the planning process for Australia's largest motorway project a sham and called for civil disobedience to stop it. "The time for civil disobedience to stop WestConnex is now," the Greens' member for Newtown, Jenny Leong, said. "It's now clear that the planning process has been a sham and that's why we are encouraging the community to step it up." State governments are failing to regulate dangerous air pollution and Queensland is the worst of a bad bunch, an environmental law firm says. Environmental Justice Australia researcher Dr James Whelan said the latest national pollutant figures showed it was time for the Commonwealth to wrest pollution control responsibilities away from the states. PM10 particles mostly come from mechanical activities such as mining. Credit:Robert Rough The National Pollutant Inventory released its latest data on Friday, showing central Queensland was home to nine of the worst 10 mines in Australia for coarse particle pollutants (PM10), which can cause respiratory problems, cancer and leach toxic chemicals into the blood, depending on the source. Dr Whelan raised concerns that in south-east Queensland, despite the closure of several large projects in or before the monitoring period, pollutant levels had remained relatively steady. What started as four surfboards stuffed with reeds has turned into a marvelled Peruvian cultural icon set up in prime position at the Surf World Museum on the Gold Coast. The Gold Coast museum at Currumbin welcomed a board from Peru called the Caballito de Totora on Thursday into their collection of memorabilia to pay respect to what has been named the world's oldest surfboard. The Caballito de Totora, which roughly translates to 'little reed horse' is made out of reeds and is said to have been in Peruvian culture for more than 5000 years. The boat is used by fishermen to help them get out past the breaks to fish while the curve of the board helps them get back to shore. A bird painted on a fake Brett Whiteley painting which sold for $2.5 million looked like a "wet rag", a court has heard. Professor Robyn Sloggett, the director of the University of Melbourne's Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, is a key Crown witness in the fraud case against art dealer Peter Gant and art conservator Mohamed Aman Siddique. Professor Robyn Sloggett is director of the University of Melbourne's Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation. Credit:John Donegan Mr Gant and Mr Siddique are accused of taking part in a joint criminal enterprise to create and sell fake Whiteley paintings. The Blue Lavender Bay painting was sold for $2.5 million to Sydney Swans chairman Andrew Pridham in 2007 and Orange Lavender Bay sold for $1.1 million to Sydney luxury car dealer Steven Nasteski in 2009. For the past 20 years, the group on the front line of supporting victims of homophobic attacks and same-sex domestic violence has been run from its board members' garages and living rooms. The Anti-Violence Project of Victoria does not have an office, so when its leadership team comes together once a month to discuss the charity's future they meet in a Thai cafe in Fitzroy. Greg Adkins. Credit:Simon O'Dwyer Executive director Greg Adkins remembers running an anti-violence campaign from his Melbourne home, with an army of volunteers he hardly knew filling every space except his bedroom. "We're unfunded and we don't have the resources to pay for a roof over our head," he said. "At the moment our resources are spread across six living rooms from Diamond Creek to Ballarat to Geelong." A derelict house is part of an investigation into the abduction and sexual assault of two children in North Perth, police have confirmed. An intensive search is underway for a black-clad middle-aged man who lured the four-year-old girl and five-year-old boy from a holiday school care centre on Fitzgerald Street on Tuesday and sexually abused them before dumping them at nearby Hyde Park. A woman found the distressed children in the park's playground about an hour later and was the first to raise the alarm as the centre had not noticed they were missing. Police say the children were lured away but have not indicated what caused the children to follow the man. The Perth mum who gave birth to quintuplets in January is set to share the story of her pregnancy and life since unexpectedly becoming a mother-of-eight in an exclusive interview with 60 Minutes on Sunday. During the promotional clip for the interview, Kim Tucci, 26, recounts her shock when her doctor counted five heartbeats during an ultrasound. "One, two, three, four, five, and I just said what? There's five heartbeats. What even is that?" she said. "The head doctor said 'that's quintuplets'." WA Police Commissioner Karl O'Callaghan says he makes "no apology" for police using hidden speed cameras to catch motorists driving over the limit. His comments to Radio 6PR on Thursday were in response to police union president George Tilbury's claims on Tuesday that speed cameras were "merely revenue raisers" and were not placed in locations that would deter speeding or save lives. WA Police Commissioner Karl O'Callaghan defends the use of hidden speed cameras. At the time, Mr Tilbury questioned how hiding cameras in bushes to catch mostly "good people" helped improve road safety. Commissioner O'Callaghan said Mr Tilbury's comments ignored research about speed camera placements. Police are still hunting for clues about a child molester who lured two kids from a North Perth child care centre, having released a man they questioned on Wednesday night. Police allege a man, believed to be in his late 40s or 50s, enticed a four-year-old girl and a five-year-old boy from a school holiday child care program on Tuesday around 11am, sexually assaulted them and then dumped them at Hyde Park. A North Perth man has been charged with the sexual assault of two young children. Police spokeswoman Susan Usher said detectives from the child abuse squad were investigating numerous pieces of information they had received through Crime Stoppers. Police were still urging people with any kind of information no matter how small to come forward. Did you know if you go to hospital for fluids or a blood transfusion, you don't have to have that tube in the crook of your arm? You can ask for the cannula to go elsewhere - the back of your hand, for example, which will be less painful and less dangerous, says registered nurse Kate Ryder. There is plenty patients can do to ensure their experiences with the health system are better, says Kate Ryder. Credit:Gabriele Charotte Ms Ryder, who will next week appear at the West Australian Patient Experience Week events series, is the author of An Insider's Guide to Getting the Best out of the Health System and says patients often have bad experiences with cannulas in that location. "Every time you bend the arm it can cause the transfusion to stop and the likelihood they will break or fracture, and leak the drugs into the surrounding tissue, is high," she said. A broken looking Ms Faulkner emerged from the short hearing with her husband Ali Elamine before the judge investigating the failed abduction, for which she was jailed for a fortnight. Beirut: Sally Faulkner is having an emotional reunion with her children after facing her estranged husband in a court hearing over a botched attempt to abduct her children. When Fairfax Media asked Mr Elamine on Wednesday if he would let Ms Faulkner see their children that day he said "yeah, yeah, of course." Sally Faulkner in a mini van shortly after she was released. Credit:Hussein Malla/AP But Ms Faulkner said outside court that didn't happen. "I just love my children, I just want to see my kids," Ms Faulkner told Fairfax Media at Baabda's Palace of Justice. Not long after, it is understood she was given the chance to see her children. The ABC reports the tearful reunion took place at a McDonald's restaurant in Beirut. The crew landed in Sydney just before 10pm on Thursday evening with uncomfortable questions to face over the failed "child retrieval" operation. Nine has promised a "full review" to explore how the network's current affairs flagship "became part of the story". Tara Brown, left, and Australian mother Sally Faulkner, right, leave a women's prison in the Beirut suburb of Baabda. Credit:Diego Ibarra Sanchez/Getty Images A development likely to exacerbate those questions is the emergence of a bank receipt, dated January 22 this year, showing $69,000 was transferred into an account called IPCA Limited. The payment was made from TCN Channel Nine's ANZ bank account, according to the document provided by Mr Whittington's lawyer Joe Karam. Sally Faulkner in a mini van shortly after she was released. Credit:Hussein Malla/AP Nine is still refusing to comment on the subject of the payments because Sally Faulkner remains in Lebanon ahead of a custody hearing with Mr Elamine and their two children before the investigative judge Rami Abdullah at the Palace of Justice. Nine CEO Hugh Marks emailed staff on Thursday morning promising a comprehensive investigation into how the crew became embroiled in the kidnapping plot. Lebanese father Ali Elamine speaks to journalists after dropping charges against his estranged wife and the 60 Minutes crew. Credit:Bilal Hussein "It is important to reiterate that at no stage did anyone from Nine or 60 Minutes intend to act in any way that made them susceptible to charges that they breached the law or to become part of the story that is Sally's story. But we did become part of the story and we shouldn't have," he said. "Nine will conduct a full review that will be headed by Gerald Stone, with David Hurley and General Counsel Rachel Launders, to ascertain what went wrong and why our systems, designed to protect staff, failed to do so in this case." "We will task the review with recommending the necessary actions to ensure that none of our colleagues are put in a similar position in the future." Mr Stone, 60 Minutes' founding executive producer, and retired Nine executive Hurley will question the program's current executive producer, Kirsty Thompson - but the payment of the $69,000 appears to have been made when her predecessor, Tom Malone, was in charge. Sources at Nine say 60 Minutes staffers are concerned that Thompson will be unfairly accused of overseeing the bungled operation, when it's understood it was pushed primarily by Malone before his departure at the start of February. He was promoted to director of sport at the network earlier this year. Malone is regarded as having had a rapid rise at Channel Nine, having started his career as a political reporter for radio station 2UE in Canberra from 2000 to 2002. He was appointed to the current affairs top job in 2012 aged 32, after successfully holding down the EP role for the Today Show during the program's breakfast resurgence. On Monday, the network's Lebanese lawyer insisted Ms Faulkner had already contracted Mr Whittington and approached the network about them paying for her story. But Mr Karam said Channel Nine had behaved unethically as the receipt showed they did not pay solely for Sally Faulkner's story, as claimed. "That shows that they did ask him to provide an investigation in a missing child which is not buying a story, they asked for what happened," he said. The jubilation and tears reported at Nine headquarters over the release of reporter Tara Brown, producer Stephen Rice, cameraman Ben Williamson, sound recordist David Ballment and mother Sally Faulkner from a Lebanese jail, are understandable. But in telling its own story, Channel Nine's flagship current affairs program should take a step back, crisis management expert Mark Rudder argues. In telling other peoples' stories, 60 Minutes prides itself on being on the front foot. The smiles on the faces and the drinks in the hands of the liberated crew on their way home, in a photo tweeted by Channel Nine, are understandable too. Tara Brown and Sally Faulkner leaving the Beirut jail. Credit:Nine Network Those images feed the story of the moment - of how the 60 Minutes crew came to be jailed in Lebanon, with the mother whose children they helped try to abduct. The story has become how they came to be freed, with the mother reportedly agreeing to relinquish custody as a condition for her release. But the story needs to be about the children, Lahala 6, and Noah, 4, said Mr Rudder, founding partner of GRACosway with long experience in providing public relations crisis advice to large corporations, including the late Kerry Packer's PBL. "To me, the central issue here is the rights of children to be safe and to have access to their parents. PHILIPSBURG:--- Prime Minister William Marlin announced on Wednesday that the draft amendments to be made on electoral reform has been completed and it will be sent to the Council of Advice for their perusal. He said the Council of Ministers took the decision to dispatch the draft changes on Wednesday to the Council of Advice then it will be formerly sent to the Council of State for them to prepare their advice for the Kingdom Government. He said if the two main organs approve the draft changes then it will be debated in the Parliament of St. Maarten. Marlin said the current draft deals with how a government could be formed. One being the curbing of ship jumping. He said based on the draft, a government could only be formed by political parties and not individual Members of Parliament while they also have in the amendments the possibility to allow students studying abroad the opportunity to vote. Marlin said students who had to write out of St. Maarten because they had to leave the island to pursue their education in the Netherlands or other countries should be entitled to vote here on St. Maarten since they did not choose to leave St. Maarten and live elsewhere. PHILIPSBURG:--- Sint Maarten The permanent Committee of Parliament for Tourism, Economic Affairs, Transport and Telecommunications (TEATT), will meet on April 22nd with representatives from AVA Airways. The Committee meeting is set for Friday at 10.00 am in the General Assembly Chamber of the House at Wilhelminastraat #1 in Philipsburg. The agenda point is a discussion with representatives from AVA Airways concerning the business plan; the Sint Maarten Aviation Open Sky Policy; the private public partnership proposal with WINAIR; the intension with FAA IASA Cat 2 aviation rating and to bring to the attention of Parliament the circumvention, slanderous statement, discrimination and protecting of a monopoly in Air Transport within the Dutch Caribbean by the Government of Curacao. Members of the public are invited to the House of Parliament to attend parliamentary deliberations. The House of Parliament is located across from the Court House in Philipsburg. The parliamentary session will be carried live on St. Maarten Cable TV Channel 120, via Pearl Radio FM 98.1, the audio via the Internet www.pearlfmradio.com and via www.sxmparliament.org. PHILIPSBURG:--- Every budget over the last ten years and beyond shows that education consumes the greatest part of it. But instead of things getting better our education product is lagging far behind. We have been reading about so many problems within our public educational system that it makes us hold our head and bawl. All indications are that our private schools are being better managed. We are therefore; somewhat surprised that after so many years of talking about it no decision has been made to date to privatize public education. Our largest secondary school if media reports are correct is planning to establish an English curriculum because we are not having sufficient students stream into the Dutch system at that school. No clear cut plans have been established for our students leaving our secondary schools in 2016 to find suitable employment. The installation of solar panels on our schools to cut back on electricity consumption hereby providing the various school boards with tremendous savings that can be used to strengthen our educational programs. Time after time calls have been made to the NA lead government and the UP lead parliament of St. Maarten to reduce the commercial rates that NV GEBE is charging our school boards. These fees are in excess of Nafls 26,000.00 a month. Once again the savings derived from this reduction can be invested to upgrade our much needed educational product. Yet, the two largest established political parties in government the National Alliance and the United People Party lead opposition have seen it fitting to be quarreling in public about a program Education on the Move. Education is a lifetime investment and we expect both the government and the parliament of St. Maarten to come up with programs that will better prepare our students to further their studies and enter the job market. Only the prepared will inherit the future. Within the next couple of months many of our young students will be leaving the secondary schools. Some of them will go on to further their studies abroad while others will remain here to enroll at the USM or NIPA and at the same time seek employment. Unfortunately, all of this will be happening at the end of our 2015/2016 tourist season with many businesses cutting back on employment. These decisions will make it next to impossible for our young people to find employment in the off season. In spite of all these shortcomings, our government both the Council of Ministers and the fifteen members of the Parliament of St. Maarten refused to enact legislation that would put our young people to work during this summer of 2016 and beyond. The One St. Maarten People Party realizing the importance of making sure that our young people find employment had submitted a law that was passed in October of 1989 in the parliament of the former Netherlands Antilles. This law is commonly referred to as the Lei di Bion and would have encouraged the business community to employ young people between the ages of 18 to 25 for one year and received a tax incentive. Unfortunately, the government and parliament of St. Maarten without any exception have turned their back on our young people. They have not adopted this legislation with the proposed changes to fit the needs of the young people of St. Maarten and neither have they presented any type of legislation or programs that would provide our youth with gainful employment. We hope that both these two established political parties the NA and the UP would engage in meaningful debates about issues affecting the lives our people such as the high cost of living, health care for all, improvement of our educational product, a living wage and not starvation wages, an increase in pension for our seniors and much, much more. St. Maarten is in a hurry and we cant afford that type of petty politics from both of those parties any more, says Lenny Priest, leader of the OSPP. We dont need any more fake quarrels. Our people are wiser and they cant be fooled that easily anymore. Cole Bay:--- Lagoonies Bistro and Bar will host Antiguan band Sound Citizens for a fantastic night of free live music on Saturday, April 30th, beginning at 8:30pm. Sound Citizens bring together Brazilian, Caribbean, British and Spanish musical influences to create swunk: their unique, irresistibly danceable fusion of soul-drenched swing, funk, reggae and Brazilian roots music. Their triumphant first album MIA [Made in Antigua] was recorded by renowned sound engineer Stevie Jackson, who has previously worked with Elton John, Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney, and they will be releasing their second album Swunk soon. The free April 30th concert gives island residents and visitors the opportunity to experience the swunk for themselves. Our mission at Lagoonies is to bring new music and musicians to the public, as well as great bistro-style food, explains Olivia Roudon, director of Lagoonies Bistro and Bar, so we're really psyched to welcome Sound Citizens to the island for this show! Roudon and her partner Stephen Winkel are keen supporters of both international and local musicians, and can proudly say that some of St. Martin's outstanding home-grown talent got their start at Lagoonies. They regularly host artists from this island and around the globe, kicking into high gear after last year's hugely successful Orange Grove concert, and are excited to showcase Sound Citizens. It's going to be an unforgettable evening so get ready to dance! says Roudon. The concert starts at 8:30pm, and is free and open to the public. Reservations are recommended for dinner, and can be booked at +1 (721) 544-3703. This event is made possible by Lagoonies' media partner Island 92 and the generous sponsorship of Amstel Bright and Mount Gay. For more information about the event, visit https://www.facebook.com/pages/Lagoonies-Bistro-and-Bar/341082047532, and visit http://soundcitizens.com to learn more about the band. Lagoonies Bistro and Bar is accessible by land or by sea. By land, it's located at Wellington Road 33-35 between ELECTEC and FKG in Cole Bay. By sea, it's located at the Lagoon Marina, on Simpson Bay Lagoon between Budget Marine and Island Water World. IT Consulting Firm Alithya Earns Spot in Top 15 Canadian ICT Growth Companies Branham300 Ranking MONTREAL, QUEBEC (Marketwired) 04/20/16 Alithya, Quebecs largest privately-held strategic consulting and IT services firm, is pleased to announce its 2016 Branham300 rankings, the definitive listing of Canadas top public and private Information and Communication Technology (ICT) companies, as ranked by revenues: We are proud to have been identified as 1 of only 15 Canadian growth companies in our sector and to make both the Top 10 Staffing Ranking and the Top 25 Movers and Shakers. We are equally pleased with the continued climb of our ranking in the Top 25 Canadian ICT Professional Services and Top 250 Canadian ICT Companies listings. This progress is a reflection of our continued revenue growth and stronger leadership position in Quebec and Canada. We will continue to be an agent of change in the industry while supporting our clients in the pursuit of innovation and excellence, stated Paul Raymond, CEO of Alithya. The Branham300, now in its 23rd year, is the most comprehensive and widely referenced listing of Canadas top public and private ICT companies. About Alithya Alithya is Quebecs largest privately-held strategic consulting and IT services firm, with a presence across Canada and in France. Founded in 1992, we have grown by partnering with our clients to provide high-quality strategy and IT consulting services that help them achieve their business objectives. We serve clients mainly in the financial services, telecommunications, transportation, healthcare and government sectors. With 10 offices in Canada and France, our consulting team is now over 1,200 strong. To find out more, visit Contacts: Melanie Tardif, CPA, CMA Vice President, Communications and Marketing 514.285.5552 SGS at AHAM 2016: Best Practices to Achieve Smart Home Appliance Safety Certification BOSTON, MA (Marketwired) 04/21/16 , the worlds leading inspection, verification, testing and certification company, today announced it is a sponsor of the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers (AHAM) annual meeting, . This weeks agenda covers many important topics for Home Appliance Manufacturers and product safety is always an underlying concern. One area of emphasis will be on the ways adding internet connectivity is changing how home appliances are manufactured, purchased and sold. Smart appliances promise to offer a wide range of features such as remote operation and repair that will make their users lives easier and more convenient. This requires manufacturers to develop new policies and procedures to address data privacy and safety requirements. SGS advises Home Appliance Manufacturers on three key best practices to implement before the manufacturing process: 1. Conduct risk assessments for functional safety issues such as unforeseen misuse by the operator. This will enable them to identify and fix issues before submitting products for certification. 2. Ensure materials and components such as plastics, wires, and heating elements are pre-approved. If not, test them to ensure compliance. Discovering you need to get a component certified or find a pre-approved component during crunch time will cause major delays. 3. Check to make sure the overall product rating and supply cords meet the CEC and NEC restrictions. This is a common issue found during construction reviews. As new technologies are added to products, it becomes even more difficult for manufacturers to design for compliance, said Paul Krauss, Certification Manager, SGS North America. We will work with AHAM members to better prepare for the certification testing process. Otherwise, they risk discovering a safety issue after a product leaves the assembly line, and that will cause significant time-to-market delays and be much costlier to fix. SGS is the worlds leading inspection, verification, testing and certification company. SGS is recognized as the global benchmark for quality and integrity. With more than 80,000 employees, SGS operates a network of over 1,650 offices and laboratories around the world. NinthDecimal Selected by AlwaysOn as an OnMedia Top 100 Winner for the Fifth Consecutive Year SAN FRANCISCO, CA (Marketwired) 04/21/16 , the leading mobile audience intelligence company, today announced that it has been chosen by AlwaysOn as one of the winners for the fifth year in a row. Inclusion in the OnMedia 100 signifies leadership amongst its peers and game-changing approaches and technologies that are likely to disrupt existing markets and entrenched players. NinthDecimal was specially selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team and industry experts spanning the globe based on a set of five criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz. Todays mobile first consumer presents marketers with tremendous new opportunities to engage their audience and gain deeper insights about their customers. NinthDecimal uniquely delivers these opportunities by providing the most comprehensive understanding of people by connecting their digital and physical lives. Leveraging its proprietary technology and robust data built upon more than five trillion data points from over one billion devices, NinthDecimal enables marketers to engage their audience and access actionable insights throughout the consumers path-to-purchase. NinthDecimal has been instrumental over the last decade in evolving mobile marketing to deliver on marketers ever-changing needs. This includes being first to market with audience-targeted mobile programmatic and audience-targeted mobile video, as well as launching its , the industrys most precise offline attribution platform, and its rapidly expanding . LCI is at the heart of NinthDecimals groundbreaking , offering the industrys first omni-channel offline measurement and audience insights solution for ZenithOptimedia clients. NinthDecimal continues to leverage mobile audience intelligence in new ways to give marketers visibility into a critical blind spot consumers physical-world behavior, and we are honored to be recognized again by AlwaysOn, said NinthDecimal President David Staas. By providing marketers with a holistic understanding of consumers across their physical and digital lives, we offer them the data intelligence and measurement solutions they need to find and engage consumers. This years OnMedia 100 winners are building on successes in digital media and branching out into new territory, taking advantage of todays advances in cloud computing and other on-demand services, said Tony Perkins, founder and editor of AlwaysOn. Advertising, marketing, and PR companies are using the recent data explosion to break down established practices and bring people what they want exactly when they want it. Innovation in the digital media sector shows no sign of slowing down, and we predict even more growth and positive disruption coming during the next few years. NinthDecimal and the OnMedia Top 100 Companies will be honored at the 2016 OnMedia NYC event in May. Details will be made available soon. AlwaysOn is the leading business media brand connecting and informing the entrepreneurial community in the Global Silicon Valley. Founded by Red Herring founding editor, Tony Perkins in 2003, AlwaysOns mission is to continue to lead the industry by empowering its readers, event participants, sponsors, bloggers, and advertisers like no other media brand. NinthDecimal is the leading omni-channel audience and measurement company, operating at the intersection of the digital and physical worlds. Fortune 500 companies and marquee brands, including American Express, Comcast, Kraft, Microsoft, Starbucks, Target and Toyota, use NinthDecimals data to plan, activate and measure campaigns, while gaining deeper insights into their audience and overall business. By bridging online and offline data, NinthDecimals pioneering Location Graph platform offers the most precise audience solution in the market to understand todays consumer and how to engage them throughout the path-to-purchase. Its is the industrys first offline attribution solution that goes beyond the click to measure physical-world behavior at the point of purchase, and data partnerships with companies like Acxiom, BlueKai, Datalogix, Experian, LiveRamp, Neustar and more provide a comprehensive closed-loop solution. NinthDecimal is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York City, Chicago and Silicon Valley. Follow us on Twitter () and like us on . Learn more at . Brigit Valencia BOCA Communications 360-597-4516 Lumenpulse to Showcase Expanded Range of Product Portfolio at Lightfair 2016 MONTREAL, QUEBEC (Marketwired) 04/21/16 Lumenpulse (TSX: LMP) will showcase the scope and versatility of its newly expanded portfolio at Lightfair 2016, unveiling a number of new products and features, including: a new generation of Lumenalpha LED luminaires; a sample of innovative products from Fluxwerx, including the award-winning Profile suspended LED luminaire; and a sneak peek at the Exenia brand, expected to launch in North America by the end of 2016. This year, we further expanded our toolbox of architectural specification-grade lighting products, giving lighting designers, architects, electrical engineers, and property managers even more options to work with, said Francois-Xavier Souvay, President and CEO of Lumenpulse. With new optical innovations, and by welcoming to the family exciting brands like Fluxwerx and Exenia, were allowing specifiers to unleash their full lighting design creativity. Visitors to the Lumenpulse booth (#1827) will be able to see: The new generation of downlights and spotlights for commercial, retail, and hospitality applications. Lumenalpha Gen 2.0 offers a massive boost in performance, flexibility, and longevity, with eight additional luminaires, higher lumen outputs, increased lumen maintenance of up to 160,000 hours, and new narrow optics (10 degrees, 15 degrees, and a true asymmetric wallwash for even illumination of walls, without protrusions from the ceiling plane). The Lumenalpha family is now also available with Lumenpulses Lumentalk technology. A winner of multiple awards, Lumentalk is a patented power line communication technology that uses existing AC mains as a bi-directional carrier for data. The technology enables easy upgrades to LED and digital controls, allowing the creation of networkable lighting systems without the cost and disruption of having to re-wire for data. Lumentalk was recently named the Controls Product of the Year award at LuxLive Middle East 2016. See the . New narrow, batwing, and asymmetric wallwash optics for the family of linear LED system. Lumenline now offers 5 different optical distributions, lit corners and a choice of colors and controls, allowing the family to cover an even larger variety of applications in commercial and institutional environments. Lumenpulses , which reduces a luminaires color temperature when dimmed, allowing for natural dimming from 2700K to 2200K. Lumenpulse recently introduced the technology across its portfolio, allowing it to be specified for a wider range of indoor and outdoor applications. The first official showcase of the Lumenarea family of street, pole-top, and wall-mount LED luminaires for urban, area, and professional landscape lighting applications. The exhibition will include three new products from the Lumearea Esplanade series of LED bollards and light columns. A preview of the Exenia brand of indoor architectural LED luminaires. Combining refined European design with modern performance and flexibility, offers a range of decorative lighting solutions for hotels, shops, and museums, including suspended and wall-mounted luminaires, downlights, spotlights, and more. A sneak peek at the innovative products and solutions from the recently acquired Fluxwerx, including the award-winning Profile LED luminaire. Profile is a high-performance, suspended LED luminaire that delivers bright, flexible general lighting through a hollow luminous aperture. The luminaire was awarded the . is being held at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego from April 26th to the 28th. For more information, please visit . About Lumenpulse Inc. Founded in 2006, Lumenpulse designs, develops, manufactures and sells a wide range of high performance and sustainable specification-grade LED lighting solutions for commercial, institutional and urban environments. Lumenpulse is a leading pure-play specification-grade LED lighting solutions provider and has earned many awards and recognitions, including several Product Innovation Awards (PIA), three Next Generation Luminaires Design Awards, two Red Dot Product Design Awards and a Lightfair Innovation Award. Lumenpulse now has 584 employees worldwide, with corporate headquarters in Montreal, Canada, and offices in Vancouver, Quebec City, Boston, Paris, Florence, London and Manchester. Lumenpulse is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol LMP. Additional information about Lumenpulse, including its 2015 Annual Information Form, is available at and on the SEDAR website at . Contacts: Salvatore Ciolfi Senior PR and Communications Manager 1 (514) 937-3003 ext. 337 CORRECTION Gopher Protocol Inc. Management to Be Guests on Upcoming K-TALK Radio Show on April 30th, 2016 SAN DIEGO, CA (Marketwired) 04/21/16 In the news release, Gopher Protocol Inc. Management to Be Guests on Upcoming K-TALK Radio Show on April 30th, 2016 issued earlier today by Gopher Protocol Inc. (OTCQB: GOPH), we are advised by the company that the ticker exchange should be OTCQB rather than OTC PINK as originally issued. Complete corrected text follows. SAN DIEGO, CA April 21, 2016 Gopher Protocol Inc. (OTCQB: GOPH) (Gopher and the Company), a development-stage Company developing a real-time, heuristic based, mobile technology, announces to its shareholders and followers that the Companys management team will be featured guests on K-TALK Radio on April 30, 2016. In an in-depth segment to be aired from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. (Mountain Time), Michael Murray, the Companys Chief Executive Officer, and Dr. Danny Rittman Ph.D., its Chief Technology Officer, will discuss Gopher Protocols proprietary mobile tracking licensed technology. K-TALK AM630 is the longest running talk radio station in the State of Utah and the third longest running talk radio station in the country. The Wilkinson Financial Radio Show shares stories and principles of entrepreneurship and business planning, with a goal of inspiring and educating listeners. () The show will cover the history and background of the Company and its technology, the challenges to develop an innovative technology and bring it to market, and lastly, the potential future prospects for the Company. As a component of the Companys licensed technology, the first product that is being developed by the Company is the Guardian Patch, an electronic circuit including a proprietary microchip technology that is within a sticky patch package. Guardian Patch can be affixed to any object, mobile or static, in order to track its location anywhere on earth. It does not require conventional network or GPS for tracking. Dr. Danny Rittman Ph.D., Chief Technology Officer, said, This show provides us with an opportunity to explain in great detail the unique features of Guardian Patch and how this sticky patch can be affixed to any object in order to track it anywhere. The fact that it can work with or without GPS makes it a game-changer. Gopher Protocol Inc. (OTCQB: GOPH) (Gopher and the Company) () is a development-stage company developing a real-time, heuristic based, mobile technology, per license agreement it holds. Upon development, the technology will consist of a smart microchip, mobile application software and supporting software that run on a server. The system contemplates the creation of a global network, worldwide. Gopher believes this will be the first system that is developed using a human, heuristic based analysis engine. Since the core of the system will be its advanced microchip that will be able to be installed any mobile device, worldwide, Gopher expects that this will result in an internal, private network between all mobile devices utilizing the device by providing mobile technology for computing power enhancement, advanced mobile database management/sharing, and additional mobile features. Press page: Consumer and product website for Guardian Patch: . Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors as disclosed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission located at their website (). In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic conditions, and governmental and public policy changes. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Companys views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Companys views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release. Gopher Protocol Inc. Dr. Dan Rittman CTO 888-685-7336 Media: April 20, 2016 Shop for living room furniture, then enjoy lunch in same beautiful complex CAVE CREEK Red Truck Trading Company isnt your typical consignment store. The furniture and accessories that owners Louann Robertson and Mike Seitts receive often come from people with second or third homes in places like Desert Mountain, Scottsdale, Carefree. Its high-end rustic, modern, Tuscan, western, even island. With three showrooms, Red Truck caters to all markets and all tastes. We have art, everything from prints to originals, and prices range from $200 to $2000, Robertson added. April 20, 2016 Sweet Sixteen celebration open house on April 30 CAVE CREEK Its a Sweet Sixteen celebration at Big Bronco Furniture Barn and General Store! The actual anniversary open house will be Saturday, April 30 from 4 to 7 p.m., but owner Faith Weinberg said there will be savings and specials all weekend. This is our time we give back to our customers, she said. There will be food, drink, raffles and live country music. April 20, 2016 CAREFREE - With spring in full swing, its time to revitalize yourself at Revital-AZ Laser and Med Spa. Open since December 2015, the facility has two licensed, experienced and ARRA Laser Certified healthcare professionals - Rosie Andaverde R.N. and Dr. Biliack (medical director) - to keep clients safe, while looking more youthful and feeling more energized! What can Revital-AZ do for you? Medical Aesthetics - Which include Botox, dermal fillers, and a variety of skin resurfacingrejuvenating treatments, as well as Rejuvapen micro-needling to revitalize your skin and boost collagen production. Also, request the Pelleve RF-skin tightening, fine line and wrinkle reduction treatment. April 20, 2016 The Scottsdale Airport terminal area will be redeveloped after the City Council unanimously authorized agreements with private parties whose lease payments will fund construction of the project. The existing airport terminal building and aviation business center will be knocked down, and two large executive-type hangar facilities and a new aviation business center will be built in its place. Construction is anticipated to begin in February 2017. Business to Business AGAVE CREEK WINDOW CLEANING - Is a Clear Choice for Clean Windows. Agave Creek is offering 20% Off with this Ad. In & Out Entire Home. Hurry, this offer expires on 5/31/16. Agave Creek is professional, trustworthy, and punctual. They do Residential and Commercial and very affordable plus honor most credit cards. For Free Estimates call today 480-256-2565. BLACK MOUNTAIN COFFEE SHOP - Visit The Oldest Restaurant in Carefree with a New Look ! Black Mountain Coffee Shop has been remodeled for the comfort of their customers. Offering a great menu for Breakfast and Lunch. A few tasty Breakfast items, Angus Grub Steak & Home Fries, Eggs/Omelets made your way. Pancakes/Freench Toast, Homemade Cinnamon Rolls, Ask about our Daily Breakfast Specials. Great selection of Lunch options, Vienna Roast Beef Sandwiches & Vienna all Beef Hotdogs, Caesar, Kale, Creek Salads. Check out www.BlackMountainCoffeeShop.com for our complete Breakfast & Lunch Menu. Black Mountain Coffee Shop is located in ( Historic Spanish Village ) 7211 E. Ho Road #23 Carefree, Az. 480-488-9261. GALAXY CLEANING SERVICES - Our Service is Out of this World and a Step above the rest. Customer Satisfaction is our #1 Priority! No job is too BIG or too small. We service Mansions, Penthouses, Residential Homes, Motor Homes and Apartments. Affordable, Dependable & Owner Operated. Rates are Weekly, Bi-weekly, Monthly & Move In/Out. We serve Carefree, Cave Creek, Tramonto, Anthem, Desert Hills, Terravita, Troon, Scottsdale & more. 10% Off First Visit. Free quote call Jami 602-944-9000 or visit cleaningbygalaxy.com. PRO - DENTAL CARE - Restore your smile and Relax your Fears. Enhance your overall Health and Wellness. 2016 is here ! Benefits Renew ! Get the smile you deserve ! Pro - Dental is now offering these outstanding specials, $49 Complete Exam, X-Ray & Basic Cleaning for New Patients Only. $650 Same Day All Porcelain Crown new patients only. $1 Emergency Exam includes X-Rays new patients only. All offers expire on 3/31/16. Mikhail Y. Prokopets DDS offers Family Restorative, Root Canals, Implant Services, Orthodontics, Invisalign, All on Four & Same Day Crowns. Pro - Dental is located at 28260 N. Tatum Blvd., Ste A2, Cave Creek, Az. 85331. Call today 480-515-1464 or vist www.pro-dentalcare.com. DREAMING BY DESIGN - The Professiomal Landscaping Service thats family owned & operated for 20+ years that serves the valley and does EVERYTHING ! We have the experts with expertise in Tree Trimming, Pavers, Travertine, Flagstone, Water Features, Lighting, Artifical Grass, Putting Greens, Fire Pits, Out Door Kitchens, BBQs,Custom Gates, Block Fences, Maintenance & much more. You name it, we can do it. Check out Dreaming by Designs ads in the Business Directory of this paper. More info call Dreaming by Design today 602-413-4370 or visit www.dreamingbydesignllc.com. REVITAL AZ Laser & Med Spa - NOW OPEN Offering 25% off on Select Grand Opening Services. Save 25% on Picosure laser treatments, Vectus hair removal, Pelleve RF Skin Tightening & Rejuvapen Microneedling. Other services offered at Grand Opening. Prices are: RF-Skin Tightening, Wrinkle Reduction, Laser Skin Rejuvenation, Medical Aesthetics,Botox, Micro-Needling, Dermal Fillers, IV Vit./ Nutrient Therapy, Laser Tattoo Removal & Laser Hair Reduction. Call today 480-629-5776 or stop by 7401 Easy Street Suite D, Carefree, AZ. (Located in Copper Dome Building Carefree). FOUR SEASONS HOME SERVICES - is locally owned and operated by Kevin & Jessica Morriston, both Arizona Natives. They offer great service with 30+ years experience in Cooling, Heating and Plumbing Repair Services all at reasonable prices. For a limited time only offering a professional A/C Tune up for $59.95. Call today for an appointment, 480-489-3210, or visit www.fourseasonshs.com. OUT WEST FURNITURE & UPHOLSTERY just received a Large Gallery Style Leather shipment including Sofas, Chairs, Sectionals and Loveseats. Also in stock are Leather Headboards, Dining Tables, Cocktail and End Tables all Custom Handmade by local artists in the U.S.A. Out West will pickup, repair and refurbish your furniture. Offering designs by Beverly Sexton and Upholstering by Robert Sexton. Stop by their beautiful showroom at 38252 W. Jacqueline Drive in Cave Creek. Call 480-575-8000 or visit www.outwestinteriors.com. April 20, 2016 Calling all youth to service and leadership PHOENIX The Governors Office of Youth, Faith and Family (GOYFF) is searching for 50 inspiring high school age youth from all fifteen counties to join the Governors Youth Commission (GYC) 2016 2017. Applications are being accepted through May 27, 2016 by 3 p.m. at BeSeenBeHeard.az.gov. The GYC members will be announced in late June 2016. The GYC provides individuals from diverse backgrounds an opportunity to participate in a nationally recognized leadership program, while serving as ambassadors and as leaders in their respective communities. High school sophomores, juniors and seniors who love to lead and have a heart to serve others should apply. The commission was created to elevate the youth voice and to support Governor Doug Duceys vision. The purpose of the GYC is to provide young people the opportunity to engage with other youth through innovative programs, events, and campaigns. This is a remarkable opportunity for teens to lead. Commissioners learn how to serve on a board, participate in committees, plan service projects, gain public speaking skills and build friendships statewide, stated Debbie Moak, GOYFF director. For more information visit https://vimeo.com/161702006. April 20, 2016 Noel Washington was recently announced as the winner of a brand new handmade violin, valued at $5,000, after competing in North Valley Symphony Orchestras annual Summerford Violin Concerto Competition. Noel will perform Mozarts Violin Concerto in D Major, Movement 1, at the May 21 North Valley Symphony Orchestra concert, playing his new violin. Noel is the current viola section leader of the NVSO Youth Orchestra and also plays in the viola section of the NVSO Adult Orchestra. At 20 years old, Noel has been playing violin and viola 15 years, and plans to use his musical abilities as a music therapist. April 20, 2016 Special thanks to St. Gabriel the Archangel Catholic Church, Savers, Desert Storage, Target, Karstens Ace Hardware, Walmart, The Print Shop, Costco, The Home Depot, Frys, Lowes, Sonoran News, and Small Time Moving. We couldnt have done it without your support. To the people of Cave Creek, thank you for your donations, camaraderie and purchases. The funds received will go to patches, books, Campership fund, replenishing supplies, replacing equipment, and patrol boxes for our ever growing Boy Scout Troop 15. Magic happened between the team of Scouts, Scout leadership, and parents by creating poetry in motion from set up to selling to clean-up. Great job! April 20, 2016 The numbers are impressive more than 6,000 volunteers contributed roughly 175,000 hours of service to the Scottsdale community in 2015. That equates to nearly $4 million in savings to taxpayers. Their value to residents and the community, however, goes far beyond money. Volunteers provide guidance and inspiration, support for first responders and serve as role models for our next generation. In short, volunteers are an integral reason why Scottsdale is a great place to live. April 20, 2016 SPRINGERVILLE Gabaldon Horse Campground is closed (Closure Order #01-16-587) due to a number of tree hazards that have made entry unsafe. The closure order will be in effect until the tree hazards are mitigated during a removal project slated for this spring. We are sorry for any inconvenience this project creates, however, hazard tree management is vital in providing safety for forest visitors. April 20, 2016 CAREFREE/CAVE CREEK/N. SCOTTSDALE The Kiwanis Club of Carefree, a non-profit organization, is seeking volunteer assistance for the Kiwanis Marketplace Thrift Store, 6535 E. Cave Creek Road, in Cave Creek. Approaching its second year of operation, the Kiwanis Marketplace is in need of additional volunteers to help staff the popular destination. Store sale profits support Kiwanis Club of Carefree scholarships and other programs for children of the north Valley. By Barbara-Ann Gulotta | April 20, 2016 Lent is a time of self-reflection and hope; a time of preparation for Easter. During this past Lenten Season the members of Desert Foothills Lutheran Church & Pre School (DFLC) together with the Outreach and Assimilation Team began a project to supply our Veterans with Necessity Bags. These Veteran men and women are currently homeless and living on the streets in Phoenix. By Rick Redalen, M.D. | April 20, 2016 How did something as personal as medicine become so impersonal? I first started practicing medicine in 1969 as a family practitioner. I became one of those rare people who by chance had a mentor who was the chief of pathology, urology and general surgery for most of his life at Bethesda Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota. Dr. Arthur Lundholm was at my side and taught me tirelessly in all of those specialties for five years. I guess you could call it the greatest multispecialty residency available. He also taught me how important it was to know your patient. In the early years of my practice it was rare if my partners could not say Hi to a person in the waiting room by their first name and ask about other members of the family. This was true of most other family practitioners I knew. It is immensely helpful in caring for patients; you know their history and what medications they are on. It is much harder to care for a stranger. Have you ever wondered when you go to a clinic why you may end up with a different physician each time you go? Often a large multispecialty clinic does not really care who you see. One reason is that a physician who sees his same patient population all the time and befriends them, is also more likely to take that group of patients with him if he leaves pthat clinic. When HMOs, PPO and large corporations inched their way into the practice of medicine, seeing patients became the numbers game for them. The more patients a physician working for them sees, the more money they will make. Suddenly doctors had quotas. This means a family coming in to see you who lost their child yesterday is given about the same amount of time as someone with poison ivy. This manner of rules and regulations by corporate America does not fit the picture of the kindly old family practitioner. Can this be changed? Maybe with time, but I doubt it. There is simply too much money to be made in medicine. The United States spends more on health care per capita than any other industrialized country in the world. We also are also one of the highest in the world on what percentage of our GDP goes to healthcare. Visit questglobalbenefits.com. Dr. Rick R. Redalens medical career has spanned over forty years in just about all areas of medicine, including family practice, general surgery, obstetrics and emergency medicine. He has spent time teaching surgery in the Department of Family Practice at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Redalen recently formed Quest Global Benefits in response to the failures of the medical system in America. Frustrated by the high cost and poor delivery of medicine, Dr. Redalen has forged a better way for business owners and their valued employees to get the health care benefits they need and deserve with the creation of Quest Global Benefits. Dr. Redalen, founder and formerly CEO and CMO of ExitCare, was instrumental in guiding and mapping out a successful strategy allowing ExitCare to become the premier, best of brand company in the U.S. producing patient education. SPOOF SPACE BY STEELE CODDINGTON | April 20, 2016 Who keeps their eyes on the bad guys? A better title might be "Who keeps their peeps on the creeps?" When government leaders are corrupt or the equivalent of congenital liars, it's reassuring to know there is a courageous nonpartisan entity whose special mission is discovering what the scumbags are hiding. One of the most ethical, reliable sources of information providing a discovery process to penetrate the darkness of current government wrong doing, corruption, concealment and cover-ups is a dogged watchdog called Judicial Watch. It is a privately funded organization that labors incessantly on behalf of the American public, digging out government misconduct and corruption under the legal auspices of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other means available. It bills itself as, "A conservative, nonpartisan American educational foundation that promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law." You can go to their website at www.JudicialWatch.org, and "Learn more ways you can take immediate action to fight against public corruption and for the rule of law." If you become a member you can elect to receive their monthly news bulletin VERDICT. You will be astounded by its disclosures in articles like the recent one entitled, "Congress and President Obama Betray Safety and Security of the American people." It revealed the administration's plan to, "Admit thousands of refugees from the center of the terrorist storm in the Middle East without serious background checks." I know everyone knows that, but Judicial Watch, on your behalf, had to file a federal law suit to free the release of relevant information. "The Obama administration doesn't want Americans to know about how it places refugees from terrorist states in their local communities." I've seen the lists and can only ask, "Why are small towns all over America being screwed by their government?" The Syrian Refugee Program, as more is learned about its dangerous implications, is becoming such a hot potato fellow watchdog Investors Business Daily (IBD) recently published the editorial headline, "GOP Ignores Immigration At Own Peril." And it isn't Hispanics the voters are worried about, it's the unvetted, unrestrained Syrians scheduled to inundate your neighborhood. Starting in 2016 with 10,000, the number will grow to 100,000, followed by floods more, probably to places that need to increase the number of Democrat voters. Just one of Judicial Watch's lawsuits, on Nov, 20, 2015, was filed to obtain the "secrets" of Obama's tax payer funded Muslim transfers fully explained, with all records, costs and locations to where the refugees will be the new proponents of Sharia Law. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Judicial Watch's continuing reports include scary details of activities too numerous to mention here, "Involving serious terrorist threats on the Southern border that have been disputed on the record by various Obama administration officials." Yet Border Patrol agents report the incidents! Investors Business Daily reported the Tuesday, March 5 primaries Exit Polls showed two thirds of Republican voters support temporarily banning non-citizen Muslims from coming to America due to the terrorism threats they may pose. Here's our recommendation for Obama: His lasting legacy of "Fundamental Transformation" would receive a monumental boost if he would redirect the entire mass of Syrian refugees to Cuba for settlement there. Cuba gets to replace its escaping persecuted population. Syrians get peace, with a benevolent leader like Assad under Cuban dictator Castro. And Obama gets more "Change" to brag about but doesn't screw up the United States with swarms of new Jihadists. Guest Editorial By Frosty Wooldridge | April 20, 2016 Hillary Rodham Clinton: An exceptionally dishonest life Hillary Clinton lives a very dishonest life. From the time she enjoyed first lady status as the wife of Governor Bill Clinton in Arkansas, to her time as the presidents wife in the White House---all the way to Secretary of State of our nation Hillary Rodham Clinton told-tells so many lies she thinks lying equates to normality. Beyond her slinging F-words toward her servants in Arkansas to raging F-bombs at Secret Service agents in the White House as documented in a half dozen books, she tolerated-condoned a husband who broke every moral code of marriage and ethics during his tenure of power. She continued(s) her deceptive-dishonest life in order to gain and maintain power at the highest levels of government. Lord Acton, 1834-1901, said, Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men. (The same can be said for such women as Hillary Clinton.) No woman with any moral or ethical fiber within her being would tolerate her husband lying repeatedly over the years, cheating on her over the decades and having sex with 21 year old intern Monica Lewinski in the Oval Office of the White House. At one point as a young lawyer in the Watergate proceedings, she faced discipline for lying and malfeasance, for which Jerry Zeifman, a Democratfired her. This quote comes from FoxNation February 25, 2014: As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying. The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillarys history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther and goes much deeper than anyone realizes. Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedys chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifmans 17-year career. Why? Because she was a liar, Zeifman said in an interview. She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality. (Several fact checks contest the proceedings, but cannot definitely vanquish this event.) In the book Passion & Betrayal by Jennifer Flowers, the blond model described her 12-year affair with Bill Clinton descriptively and compellingly. Historians may read the book for a clearer understanding of the real Bill Clinton. He shared the same dishonest and deceitful life as his wife Hillary. During Hillarys time as Secretary of State, she utilized Muslim Brotherhood female aide Huma Abedin to counsel Hillary and push Abedins Islamic influence into the White House. Today, no less than 13 Muslims aide and direct Barack Hussein Obama including the head of the CIA, John O. Brennan, who converted to Islam. While Secretary of State, she illegally used outside and insecure email servers to carry on our nations highest top secrets of classified information. Thats a direct violation of our laws and punishable by prison. Additionally, in 2012, she ignored calls from Ambassador Stevens as to the dangers facing him and his staff in Libya. She failed to send in Special Forces in the area to protect Stevens life and that of embassy staff. Four perished. She later explained and gave excuses, What difference did it make? Four good men lost their lives leaving their anguished families. Hillary Clinton, like all bureaucrats enjoys 24/7 protection from harm. Additionally, she created a story that a video against Islam caused the attack, which proved totally false. After leaving the White House, she complained about being broke, when in fact, a retiring president commands in excess of $200,000.00 a year for the rest of his life. Right now, investigators could indict her for her lies as to the emails, Benghazi and many of her activities with overseas money known as the Panama Papers. Because she enjoys insider power, many others cover up for her and she covers for them. We may never know the truth about Benghazi, just as we may never know the truth about the how, where and who of Barack Obamas origins. Today, Hillary steps in front of adoring crowds who anticipate her becoming the first female U.S. president. Most dont know about her past, dont care about her lies or her vindictive personal behavior. They expect to vote along party lines with their emotions. She told reporters America needs to inject more than 75,000 Syrian refugees, as if none of them will instigate the next Brussels, Belgium or Paris, France terrorist attacks in America. She neglects to mention African-Americans struggle horribly in todays economy. She neglects the 1.5 million homeless Americans as well as 14 million unemployed, but expects to place all those refugees on welfare. She forgets America suffocates under a $19 trillion debt. She fails to comprehend America imports 1.2 million legal immigrants annually with 91 percent of them subsisting on welfare paid for by struggling Americans. She promises amnesty for 20 to 30 million illegal aliens violating our nations borders. She refuses to secure Americas borders. If a life of deception and dishonesty propels Hillary Rodham Clinton into the White House again, the utter moral, ethical and reasoned foundation of the U.S. Constitution and the American people will flush into the toilet of history. While she dresses nicely, speaks eloquently and dances her dance she cannot out talk, out run or out last her exceptionally dishonest life. By Linda Bentley | April 20, 2016 Council upholds previous vote on Meritage Homes Stating Steve Betts will be coming to council to address the state land, Francia said, It should put some of this fear mongering to rest Larry Wendt CAVE CREEK Buffalo Chip owner Larry Wendt spoke during Monday nights Call to the Public first to thank the town for its support during Bike Week, stating business was very steady throughout the week. Wendt also wanted to update everyone on the rebuild and assured people that it will be coming back as the Buffalo Chip and when they see names like Cowpunchers on applications its just the name of the LLC. He said he is hoping to break ground mid May and despite block construction, the building will look like the Buffalo Chip with all the walls sheathed in reclaimed wood. Hideaway and Roadhouse owner Mark Bradshaw told council he had a very eventful Bike Week and said, Every year it seems to grow. Bradshaw said he was putting together a slide presentation he could bring back to show council. Town Manager Peter Jankowski updated council on the bike lane project and said the slurry sealing should be done by the end of the week and all the striping and landscaping to be done by the end of May. With both Councilman Mark Lipsky and Councilwoman Susan Clancy absent, council voted unanimously to accept Lipskys resignation. Town Attorney Bill Sims said statute requires council to formally accept resignations. Francia said council may submit nominees to Town Clerk Carrie Dyrek by April 25 and she will contact those nominated to see if they have any interest in serving out the remainder of Lipskys term. If so, the nominees will be presented to council for a vote next month. During the April 4 meeting, council voted to reconsider its decision against Meritage Homes rezoning application from Desert Rural to Commercial Buffer. Sims advised council any change, such as consideration of a lesser intense category such as Multi-Family Residential, would have to first be noticed to neighbors and completely vetted by the planning commission. Since the planning commission never considered any other zoning category for the application, Sims said the only options council had was to affirm its prior decision, refer the application back to the planning commission or do nothing, which would fail for lack of a motion. Cheryle Carmitchel During public comment, Cheryle Carmitchel said she was committed to no zoning changes to the parcels and stated they should never have been included in the SAP (Specific Area Plan) in the first place. She said there were many holes in the SAP process with a lack of responsibility on councils part by not listening to its citizens. Carmitchel also said she didnt see an ordinance that fits the proposed project. Kerry Smith said he spoke against the project, which the planning commission opposed by a vote of 7-0, because of the additional water supply it would require. Steve Ogel Steve Ogel said he spoke in opposition to the proposed rezoning at both the planning commission and council meetings. He said the density does not fit the character of the town. Ogel stated the project seemed to be an attempt for developers to profit at the expense of citizens and would be an enclave isolated from the rest of the neighborhood. Calling the rezoning a disservice to those who moved to Cave Creek because of its rural, Western lifestyle, Ogel urged council to uphold its prior vote of denial. Reg Monachino read the vision statement from the general plan that council recently approved to refer to voters for ratification and said the Meritage project does not fit that vision. Reading the section on reasons for reconsideration from Roberts Rules of Order, Anna Marsolo stated council did not make a hasty decision, one that was ill advised, based on erroneous information, or presented with new information. She said, This is a neighborhood, not and intersection, and hoped council would vote to deny. Eileen Wright said she wanted to add on to what Marsolo said and wanted to know what the legal basis was for reconsideration. Lisa Blood asked that council not amend, approve or reconsider the application. Jane Rhodes said council and the planning commission made a good decision when they denied the application. Troy Hill from Meritage Homes said he understands the neighbors concerns and that the density is higher than theyd like. He said water was something they will have to work out with the town but they agreed to reduce the density from 56 to 52 homes. Sims said Marsolos recital of Roberts Rules on reconsideration was pretty accurate as he reiterated councils options. He cautioned council that it could not act on a less intense use because none was considered by the planning commission or properly advertised. Vice Mayor Steve LaMar moved to refer the application back to the planning commission to review for a less intense use. He said when people spoke against the project, it was his impression they didnt want Commercial Buffer zoning and he didnt see anything wrong with sending it back to the planning commission to review. Councilman Ernie Bunch, who seconded the motion, said he wasnt real fond of the project and didnt vote for reconsideration. Vincent Francia Mayor Vincent Francia said he believed the only fair way to deal with the issue was to go along with LaMars motion, which failed by a vote of 2-3. Finance Director Robert Weddingen presented the second reading of the Home Rule alternative budget limitation which he said needs to go to voters every four years. He briefly explained the towns need to have an alternative budget limitation and said the Home Rule option has worked well for the town since 1999. Kerry Smith Kerry Smith questioned whether the town could separate the water and sanitation enterprises from the budget and if that could be an alternative to the Home Rule option. Weddingen said the budget as currently drafted was the clearest way to go and the sanitation enterprise was not feasible at this time to be self-sustaining. Jankowski said the wastewater treatment plant operates at a $1.4 million annual deficit. Marsolo said shes had conversations with Jankowski over the subject and he told her the town would go broke in three years. She said, Under Home Rule weve gotten into a lot of trouble. Council voted unanimously to approve the second reading of the ordinance to send the Home Rule alternative to voters. Council voted unanimously to grant the Cave Creek Museum $10,000. Evelyn Johnson, the museums executive director, told council the museum was just putting the finishing touches on its annual report. She said visitation was up and invited council to the museum to host their next retreat. Marsolo commented the museum serves as the caretakers of our heritage, in support of the grant. Francia asked Jankowski if other nonprofits would be coming to ask for money. Jankowski said no and stated the only items budgeted were the museum and Fiesta Days. LaMar said the town had decided on a policy that it would only fund nonprofits that larger cities and towns provide as services to the community. Noting the last time the library came to council for a grant it was turned down, LaMar said, We shouldnt be picking and choosing without a policy in place. Francia agreed with LaMar and, addressing Jankowski, said if they have criteria to go on, it makes it easier for council and citizens. Council voted unanimously to accept a water line easement for Tractor Supply and Auto Zone. Council also voted unanimously to authorize execution of the Arizona Mutual Aid Compact. Jankowski introduced what he considered a housekeeping item as far as water meters are concerned. He proposed having an account associated with every water meter, even those that are not being used. The account would then be billed the base fee of $50 each month and nothing for usage if not being used. Currently, there are meters, which Jankowski said are owned by the town, at vacant properties that are not being billed. He said if the owner does not wish to establish an account the town will remove the meter at no charge. He said setting up an account would require a two-month deposit of $100 and a $20 setup fee. Council voted unanimously to approve the first reading of the ordinance amending the section on services to be metered. Council also voted to approve the first reading of an ordinance addressing the refund of deposits. Because Jankowski explained it was primarily renters who have had their deposit refunded after 12 months of good payments that subsequently skipped out on paying their last month or twos water bills. The proposed ordinance amended the section on refunds so that the town would retain the deposit and apply it toward the customers final bill before refunding the balance. Marsolo balked at the notion and stated all utilities return deposits after a year. Sims advised council the ordinance could be revised before the second reading and narrowed to apply only to renters. LaMar moved to approve the ordinance with the change to apply only to renters. Francia announced there will be a budget workshop at 6 p.m. on Monday, April 25. He then said a bundle of papers were left at his doorstep recently with a note to read them. Stating Steve Betts will be coming to council to address the state land, Francia said, It should put some of this fear mongering to rest. By Linda Bentley | April 20, 2016 No surprises in Cruz eligibility challenges Williams raised the irregular appointment process by which Masin self-reported that he was recalled to preside over this matter TRENTON, N.J. After Administrative Law Judge Jeff Masin determined last week that Sen. Ted Cruz meets the constitutional requirement of natural born citizen and may remain on the New Jersey ballot, objectors filed briefs with exceptions to his initial decision. Administrative Law Judge Jeff Masin Lt. Gov./Secretary of State Kim Guadagno, who had the final say, whereas she could accept, reject or modify Masins ruling, issued the following statement on April 13: After full consideration of the record, as well as Judge Masin's thorough and well researched initial decision and the exceptions filed with my office, I, Lt. Governor Kim Guadagno, as Secretary of State and chief election official of the State of New Jersey, adopt Judge Masin's initial decision in its entirety. No one should be surprised at either of Masins or Gudagnos decisions, since both made the same determinations in challenges brought against Obamas eligibility. In fact, exceptions filed by objector Victor Williams, an attorney who is running as a write-in candidate in several states, raised the irregular appointment process by which Masin self-reported that he was recalled to preside over this matter, which Williams said seriously taints (if not voids) Masins April 12 decision upon which Guadagno relied. Masin indicated to the court that he was recalled to preside over these consolidated challenges since he presided over the Obama eligibility challenge and was considered to have some expertise in the matter. On April 14 Williams filed a petition for additional administrative or adjudicative relief available from the secretary of state and/or all other executive officers including from Gov. Chris Christie. Williams stated Guadagno relied on a fundamentally flawed decision by Masin and her Final Decision of April 13 was in serious error. He also requested a review of the basis for, and the possible prejudice inherent in, the Office of Administrative Laws reported recall and appointment of Jeff Masin as administrative hearing judge for this consolidated case. Another challenge to Cruzs natural born citizenship status filled in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas by Attorney Newton Boris Schwartz, Sr. was dismissed with prejudice last Wednesday by Judge Gray H. Miller. Schwartz requested a declaratory judgment as to whether or not Cruz meets the eligibility standards of Article II, Section I, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution as a natural born citizen in order to be elected and serve as President of the United States. Cruz filed a motion to dismiss, arguing Schwartz lacked standing to challenge Cruzs eligibility, any challenge to Cruzs eligibility was not yet ripe, the U.S. District Court is not the proper forum for challenging a presidential candidates qualifications, and, in the event the court did not dismiss Schwartzs challenge, Cruz requested the court find he is a natural born citizen and therefore eligible for the office of President of the United States. Miller stated Schwartz did not cite any federal court cases that have held an individual citizen has standing to challenge a candidates eligibility to serve as President, nor could the court locate any such case. On the issue of ripeness, Miller stated, Cruz has not yet been nominated as the Republican Partys candidate and may never be. He has not yet been elected President of the United States and may never be. Therefore, it would be premature for the court to address this issue. Cruz has proclaimed in public forums, despite being born in Canada, because his mother was born an American citizen in Delaware, he was automatically a natural born American citizen and didnt require a Consular Report of Birth Abroad (CRBA). In other words, Cruz basically admitted he doesnt have one. However, it appears his mother may not have been an American citizen at the time of his birth and records indicate she may have been a British subject who subsequently became a Canadian citizen. Cruzs mother and father both appeared on the voter rolls in Canada in 1974, indicating they were Canadian citizens. Records indicate Cruzs father didnt become a naturalized U.S. citizen until 2005. At the time of Cruzs birth in 1970, Canada didnt allow for dual citizenship. With only a Canadian birth certificate and no CRBA, when Cruz, who claimed to have dual American and Canadian citizenship, renounced his Canadian citizenship in 2014, he may be a man without a country. He may have also served illegally in the U.S. Senate as a Canadian citizen. U.S. naturalization laws require a child under 18 who was born outside the United States and lives in the physical and legal custody of a U.S. citizen parent, the parent must apply for naturalization of the child. Maine Gov. Paul LePage questioned Cruzs eligibility to be president. LePage said his two daughters were born in Canada and had to be naturalized as U.S. citizens even though he was born in the United States. LePage said he had already looked into it and his daughters are ineligible for the presidency. Since Cruz is claiming pretty much identical birth circumstances to LePages daughters, although the U.S. citizenship of Cruzs mother at the time is questionable, Cruz is also ineligible. If Cruzs mother, assuming she was a U.S. citizen at the time and met the requirements to confer citizenship, never filed an application for a CRBA before Cruz turned 18, that window of opportunity closes. So far, challenges to candidate eligibility have been dismissed on standing and procedural issues, except for the New Jersey challenges in which Masin has decided and Guadagno has agreed both Obama and Cruz are natural born citizens. And, like Obama, Cruz has sealed all his records and, unless he consents, will not be released under a Freedom of Information Act request. By Linda Bentley | April 20, 2016 Objectors file exceptions after New Jersey ALJ declares Cruz eligible Congress does not have the magical ability to convert Canadian-born Ted Cruz into an American-born Ted Cruz TRENTON, N.J. On Tuesday, New Jersey Administrative Law Judge Jeff Masin declared Sen. Ted Cruz, despite being born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, met the constitutional requirements to be president and could appear on the New Jersey presidential primary ballot. Victor Williams The challenge was brought by Catholic University of America law professor Victor Williams, who is running as a write-in candidate for president in nine states, including New Jersey, and the South Jersey Concerned Citizens Committee. After Masin issued his recommendation/initial decision, Attorney Mario Apuzzo filed exceptions of objectors Fernando Powers, Donna Ward and Bruce Stom to Masins initial decision with the New Jersey Department of State Elections Division. The objectors accepted the part of Masins decision in which he found they had standing and that their objection did not present a political question and is therefore justiciable. However, the objectors rejected the part of his decision dealing with the definition of an Article II natural born citizen and whether Cruz meets that definition. Attorney Mario Apuzzo In his brief, Apuzzo states, ALJ Masin has neither considered nor addressed the historical and legal evidence that objectors provided in their two briefs to the court. He does not address any of the arguments that they made in these briefs. Rather, ALJ Masin relies upon some law professors and commentators and their articles for his decision, without actually analyzing the relevant historical and legal sources cited within those articles. Apuzzo goes on to say the professors and commentators claim in their articles the meaning of natural born citizen isnt clear and therefore tell us what it ought mean. Arguing historical and legal sources tell us what the meaning was and if these writers want to change the meaning, Apuzzo stated, then they should advocate for a constitutional amendment rather than provide some revisionist definition of the clause which then they ask us to adopt as the meaning of the clause. Apuzzo said Masin rejected the original definition of an Article II natural born citizen and simply adopted their revisionist definition. Apuzzo cited various U.S. Supreme Court cases dating from 1875 (Minor v. Happersett) through 1998 (Miller v. Albright) explaining that children born out of the United States by inheritance of citizenship from U.S. citizen parents could be citizens of the United States only through a naturalization Act of Congress, and that without such Act, such children would be aliens. Apuzzo said those cases prove the common law that defined U.S. citizenship never did incorporate English naturalization statutes as providing some different meaning to that common law, a meaning to suggest that a person born out of the United States to one or two U.S. citizen parents could ever be a natural born citizen rather than a naturalized citizen of the United States. He accused Masin of totally ignoring those binding precedents of our U.S. Supreme Court and instead adopting a revisionist definition of natural born citizen. Despite the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court being binding upon Masin, Apuzzo said Masin doesnt feel as though hes bound by them. He also pointed out Masin confuses the fact that states may have adopted statutes from English common law with whether those same laws were adopted by the Framers as national laws. Pointing out numerous issues with how Masin came to his conclusions, such as providing mostly his own conjecture on what John Jay meant by his famous letter to George Washington dated July 1787, Apuzzo said he assigns to John Jay some corrupt motive, to make his own children born out of the United States natural born citizens, while glossing over the significant change made by the Naturalization Act of 1975 in removing the language from the Naturalization Act of 1790, shall be considered as natural citizens and replacing it with shall be considered as citizens of the United States. Apuzzo wrote, He dismissed this elephant in the room by simply saying that the Third Congress did not tell us why they made the change. He ignores that the Third Congress made the change knowing that Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 provides that after the adoption of the Constitution, only a natural born citizen (not sufficient to be a citizen of the United States) was eligible to be President. ALJ Masin ignores this critical fact which dooms Cruzs argument that he is a natural born citizen under the early naturalization Acts. In conclusion, Apuzzo stated, We have demonstrated that Congress naturalized Ted Cruz with a naturalization Act. Ted Cruz is at best a naturalized citizen of the United States at birth. He is not nor can he be a natural born citizen of the United States. The New Jersey Secretary of State should therefore accept ALJ decision on standing and political question and reject that part that defines a natural born citizen and which finds Ted Cruz a natural born citizen under that definition. Rather, she should find, based on all the historical and legal evidence provided by objectors in their briefs, that Ted Cruz is not a natural born citizen and keep his name off the New Jersey primary election ballot. Masin is the same administrative law judge who heard the 2012 challenge to Obamas eligibility to be on the New Jersey primary ballot. Apuzzo represented the plaintiffs in that case as well where oral arguments debated whether Mickey Mouse was eligible to appear on the New Jersey ballot and if Masin had a coffee mug containing an image of Obamas birth certificate. After all was said and done, Masin decided Obama had no obligation to prove his eligibility and ruled children born in the United States to aliens were natural born citizens. Now Masin is somehow stretching that definition to include children born in a foreign country to at least one parent that is not a U.S. citizen to be considered natural born citizens. New Jersey Lt. Governor Kim Guadagno has the final say as to whether Cruz will remain on the ballot and may accept, modify or reject Masins ruling. On Wednesday, April 13, Williams filed his own blistering exceptions to Masins recommendation/initial decision. First, he strongly protested the irregularity of the Office of Administrative Laws recall of Jeff Masin to conduct the hearing rather than following a regular order of a random assignment of the case to a neutral officer, and stated Masin began the hearing acknowledging that he had been recalled and appointed to the case because of his past experience with the natural-born citizen issue. Williams went on to say, To state, as some are doing, that Mr. Masin was cherry-picked for this case would not capture the ethical concern presented. Second, Williams stated, It was telling that Masin also stated at the beginnings of the hearings that he had not read the parties briefs (which had been due and submitted for several days before the hearing); rather Mr. Masin spend the days before the hearing reading a variety of secondary sources. Mr. Masins incredible accomplishment in producing a 26-page, quite detailed recommendation in a one-day time period deserves related note. Because Masin was irregularly recalled for this hearing, Williams stated it was more than just unfortunate in terms of fairness and the perception of objectivity, and said, No public confidence can be had in the resulting recommendation. However, he notes it is the ultimate duty of Guadango to protect the integrity of the New Jersey ballot and enforce the U.S. Constitutions clear and unambiguous eligibility requirements for candidates for the presidency. Third, Williams raised the fact that his request for an extension of time and delay of the ALJs recommendation to allow him adequate time to reply to Cruzs supplemental late-night filing of April 11 was never even addressed. Williams also stated his strong support for the reasoning and arguments filed by Apuzzo on behalf of his objectors while separately emphasizing in the Wong Kim Ark case, the U.S. Supreme Court was required to fully consider the differences between law of the soil vs. citizenship by parentage and the high court ruled that citizenship by place (by soil) was the governing precept in interpreting the Article II, Section I natural born citizen requirement. Again, Williams argued the term natural born citizen was deliberately drafted and knowingly included by the 1787 Federal Conventions final product, sent to the States for ratification, to require all Presidents must be born on the soil. It is a simple soil test just as is the requirement for a President to have been 14 years in residence on the soil. Williams pointed out the well-established interpretive norm that the Constitution does not have surplus words natural purposely modifies born citizen. Although Cruz didnt have to go through the complex naturalization process, if he actually ever went through any process, Cruz, at best, could only be a naturalized citizen, the same exact status as those 650,000 aliens a year who become citizens by more complex processes. Williams said it was clear Masin has not changed his views on these matters. However, he added, neither have the views of Chief Justice John Marshall changed regarding our Republics basic constitutional order. Since John Marshalls opinion in Marbury v. Madison, citizens, lawyers and judges have all known that the U.S. Congress may not alter, tweak, add to or subtract from the clear and unambiguous text of the U.S. Constitution, which may only be altered by the Article V amendment process. Williams asserted, Congress does not have the magical ability to convert Canadian-born Ted Cruz into an American-born Ted Cruz. Claiming to share Cruzs Evangelical born-again faith tradition, Williams stated, But beyond the spiritual, Ted Cruz now claims some type of born again experience that transformed him from Canadian-born to miraculously a natural born [American] citizen. He stated, The time-line for miracles is always important: this claimed miracle only happened after he decided to run for President and to renounce his Canadian citizenship in May 2014. Calling Cruz out as the very intelligent Princeton man, the Harvard trained lawyer, the Supreme Court advocate who preaches textualism, strict-constructionism, Williams said Cruz does not actually believe he is a natural born citizen. Thus, the patent falsity of his New Jersey Certificate of Eligibility and the fraud inherent in the procurement of his Signature Petitions. Making it clear that not only does he have standing, Williams said his standing to challenge Cruzs placement on the ballot is specially as a competitor candidate actively seeking the election in the state of New Jersey and in other states across the nation as a write-in candidate. Last, Williams stated Guadagno has the sworn duty to maintain New Jersey ballot integrity, and to protect, preserve and the defend the U.S. Constitution, by not allowing the ineligible Ted Cruz who has falsely filed a Certification of Eligibility and fraudulently procured signature petitions on the June 7, 2016 primary ballot. By Linda Bentley | April 20, 2016 CAVE CREEK By now, voters should have received their publicity pamphlet for the May 17 special election containing information about Propositions 123 and 124 to amend the Arizona Constitution, along with all the arguments for and against the propositions. Ill start with Prop. 124 because there were no opposition statements filed. Prop. 124 allows modifications to the Public Safety Personnel Retirement System (PSPRS) that allows the legislature to revise the formula for providing pension benefit increases for retirees, survivors and current members of PSPRS. By Linda Bentley | April 20, 2016 Stating Steve Betts will be coming to council to address the state land, Francia said, It should put some of this fear mongering to rest CAVE CREEK In order to run for mayor or council, one must either file a statement of CAVE CREEK Buffalo Chip owner Larry Wendt spoke during Monday nights Call to the Public first to thank the town for its support during Bike Week, stating business was very steady throughout the week. Wendt also wanted to update everyone on the rebuild and assured people that it will be coming back as the Buffalo Chip and when they see names like Cowpunchers on applications its just the name of the LLC. By Linda Bentley | April 20, 2016 Congress does not have the magical ability to convert Canadian-born Ted Cruz into an American-born Ted Cruz TRENTON, N.J. On Tuesday, New Jersey Administrative Law Judge Jeff Masin declared Sen. Ted Cruz, despite being born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, met the constitutional requirements to be president and could appear on the New Jersey presidential primary ballot. By Linda Bentley | April 20, 2016 Williams raised the irregular appointment process by which Masin self-reported that he was recalled to preside over this matter TRENTON, N.J. After Administrative Law Judge Jeff Masin determined last week that Sen. Ted Cruz meets the constitutional requirement of natural born citizen and may remain on the New Jersey ballot, objectors filed briefs with exceptions to his initial decision. April 20, 2016 As a Cave Creek citizen, I have served on the towns budget and water advisory committees and now chair the Planning Commission. I have substantial management experience; my last employment was Deputy Director of the NYS DOH Center for Environmental Protection. April 20, 2016 11th Drug Take-Back announced by DEA Throughout Arizona from 10 a.m. 2 p.m. on Saturday, April 30 The 11th National Prescription Drug Take-Back will take place Saturday, April 30 from 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. local time. As with the previous ten Take-Back events, sites will be set up throughout communities nationwide so local residents can anonymously return their unwanted, unneeded, or expired prescription drugs for safe disposal. (DEA cannot accept liquids, needles or sharps.) Local drop off locations are the Black Mountain precinct of the Phoenix Police Department at 33355 N. Cave Creek Road in Phoenix and MCSO District IV, Cave Creek Station at 37622 N. Cave Creek Road in Cave Creek. April 20, 2016 Carefree mayor Les Peterson has declared his candidacy to continue as the mayor of the town. Les assumed the duties of mayor in the early spring of 2015, when the previous mayor, David Schwan, resigned due to illness. We have made great progress in enhancing downtown Carefree for the enjoyment and utilization of our residents and visitors, Mayor Peterson said. We cant stop now, and the next few years are critical to the towns future. Much remains to be accomplished. My View April 20, 2016 Over the years we have guessed Terry Zerkle was trying to find a way to become the Cave Creek Town Manager. I mentioned in an editorial his resume is as shop worn as an old suit as he sought town manager positions here and there. His tenure as Tempe Town Manager is clouded. He was titled a dark sider years ago from volumes of letters he sent to agencies claiming Cave Creek had done wrong on various projects and actions. In every case I recall, Zerkle was wrong. Guest Editorials: By Frosty Wooldridge | April 20, 2016 Hillary Clinton lives a very dishonest life. From the time she enjoyed first lady status as the wife of Governor Bill Clinton in Arkansas, to her time as the presidents wife in the White House---all the way to Secretary of State of our nation Hillary Rodham Clinton told-tells so many lies she thinks lying equates to normality. By Rick Manning | April 20, 2016 Just read the headlines and you will shake your head in disgust. Border Patrol Agents: Illegal Aliens Walking Out the Front Door, We Dont Know Who Were Releasing So, About Those Non-Violent Drug Offenders That President Obama Pardoned Gallup: Fear Of Crime, Violence Soars To 15-Year High, 53 percent Worry A Great Deal CONCERN ABOUT CRIME SOARS; NON-WHITES MOST CONCERNED Chicagos grim murder trend blamed on light sentencing, misguided reforms And last but now least Senators close to Willie Horton fix in criminal justice bill By Jane M. Orient, M.D. | April 20, 2016 All the presidential candidates have opined about the military, or about warover there. Iraq, Afghanistan, Syriaand now Paris and Brussels. But none have dared mention the subject of defense of American citizens in the event of warover here. Not a terrorist attack or mass shooting that causes dozens or even hundreds of casualties, but war that causes thousands or millions of casualties and levels vast expanses of infrastructure. By Robert Romano | April 20, 2016 Since 2000 labor force participation in the U.S. that is, the percent of people working or looking for work which has been dropping almost every single year, from an unadjusted average annual 67.07 percent in 2000 to 62.65 percent in 2015. The question over that period is whether the drop in participation is benign owing to certain factors, such as the aging workforce, or if it underscores any fundamental weakening of the U.S. economy. Can Chandlers resurrection of one of the most revered preamps of all time help you get that classic Abbey Road sound? Chandler Limiteds close relationship with Abbey Road Studios has generated many delicious hardware products over the last 14 years or so. Mostly derived from EMIs mid-period transistorised equipment, including mic preamps, equalisers, compressors and more, these Chandler products have been recreated with commendable precision and accuracy in the unique electronic circuitry that defined one of the UKs most significant music recording eras. However, Chandler have recently been busy recreating some of EMIs earlier valve-based equipment, starting with the REDD.47 gain stage. This was EMIs first generic valve amplifier module designed exclusively for use in REDD.51 recording consoles (see boxes). In this new REDD.47 Mic Amplifier incarnation, the original EMI design has been cleverly adapted to serve as a stand-alone single-channel mic preamp that meets modern workflow expectations. It is replete with a direct instrument input as well as incorporating facilities that were originally part of the console, rather than the amp module although the revised design has been fully approved by Abbey Road Studios. Its worth noting that, unlike modern console designs, which employ fully integrated active circuitry, the technology in the late 1950s forced EMI to take a rather different approach when designing the REDD consoles. The console itself was essentially a passive device with stud-faders, passive EQ units, resistive mixing and transformer-based Mid-Sides converters. Each section was buffered by identical but independent fixed-gain modules. In the earliest REDD.1 console, these amplifier modules were provided by Siemens and built into a separate six-foot-tall rack, but in later designs they were relocated into base units at each side of the console. Consequently, these generic amplifier modules were employed universally as mic preamplifiers, line-receiving input amplifiers, EQ section drivers, fader gain-stages, output line drivers, talkback amps, and so on. Moreover, every module incorporated input and output balancing transformers with a relatively simple two-valve circuit, the combination naturally contributing significantly to the overall sound character. Although conceptually similar to the Siemens V72S amplifier modules used in earlier REDD consoles, EMIs own REDD.47 designed as a lower-cost alternative to the Siemens modules delivered a recognisably different sound character, generally described as more punchy and aggressive compared with the laid-back timbre of the V72S. The REDD.47 timbre can be heard on pretty much everything recorded in Studio Two at Abbey Road between January 1964 and the summer of 1968, including virtually all the Beatles tracks from this period. Theres no mistaking the REDD.47 Mic Amplifier for having its origins in anything other than a vintage unit! It occupies a large and heavy 2U rackmounting chassis, painted in the traditional industrial battleship grey. The two sizes of black chicken-head knobs have apparently been copied from the original REDD consoles, while the various toggle switches and instrument input socket protrude through milled cut-outs in the front panel. And talking of toggle switches, the mains power switch (with its old-fashioned indicator bulb not an LED behind a red jewelled lens) is arranged in the American up-for-on fashion, while all the others follow the UK standard of down-for-on. The rear panel is somewhat spartan, with just two XLRs for the transformer-balanced input and output, plus an IEC mains inlet and fuse holder. The internal PSU is configured at the factory for a single fixed mains voltage (120 or 220 V AC, as marked on the rear panel). Conforming to the original REDD.47 modules design parameters, and thanks to the use of custom-wound transformers matching EMIs original specifications, the input and output impedances are both 200. This was necessary in the 1950s because of the matched-impedance interface technology that was prevalent at the time, and doesnt sit comfortably in the modern matched-voltage interfaces used today. Specifically, a 200 input impedance is rather low by modern standards, and a little high on the output side. In practice, neither is likely to cause any problems, but the low input impedance will affect the tonality of dynamic microphones, and I wouldnt advise using the REDD.47 in the studio driving a long output cable back to the control room! The front-panel controls are equally simple, starting with an almost comically large chicken-headed rotary switch to set the amplifiers coarse voltage gain. Whereas the original design offered three gain settings (34, 40 or 46 dB), Chandler have expanded the options to a more practical seven, with 6dB increments between 16 and 52 dB. The second over-sized rotary switch provides a 5dB fine trim control, which is also a greatly expanded range compared with the original designs alignment trimmer. However, this is actually far more than just a fine gain trim; the lower end of the range alters the amplifiers operating conditions to give a cleaner tonal character, while higher settings introduce more harmonic distortion (up to about two percent), with a thicker and dirtier timbre, as well as making the amplifier overdrive more easily. With the fine gain Set control at +5dB, the overall maximum preamp gain is 57dB. Four toggle switches arrayed across the panel select the rear XLR input (mic) or front-panel instrument input (DI), a 20dB input pad, output polarity reversal, and 48V phantom power. None of these options were incorporated in the original REDD.47 module, and they are, in my view, essential additions. Theres no warning indicator for phantom power, I presume to retain more of a vintage look, and the instrument input is routed straight into the first-stage EF86 valve in a similar configuration to a similar-period guitar amp like a 1957-vintage Selmer. Two more conventionally sized chicken-head knobs are employed to adjust the tuning of a Rumble filter, and to attenuate the output level. The latter is a conventional potentiometer, scaled from 0 to -10, but actually attenuating the signal all the way down to silence at the minimum position. Again, neither of these features was provided as an operational control on the original module, but a simpler high-pass filter option was available via a circuit board link. In the Chandler recreation, this intriguing filter option has been made accessible and expanded considerably to provide selectable turnover frequencies of 30, 45, 60, 70, 90, 110, 130, 180 Hz, or Out. This filter uses the input transformer as an inductor to form the high-pass circuit and has a relatively gentle slope. The filter Out option is provided because the filter circuitry increases distortion slightly. The styling of the Chandler Limited REDD.47 is classic British retro, borrowing from the simple, but effective, early EMI console layouts. Setting the preamp up for any specific task is trivially simple, while the addition of modern facilities makes this a very versatile design. With a maximum gain of 57dB (or 52dB if you dont want the increased colour afforded by the fine gain trim control), this is not really the ideal preamp for low-output mics, distant placement techniques, or spoken-word applications! However, it is well suited to typical music-studio roles with conventional mics and loud sources, and its actually pretty quiet and clean-sounding for a valve-based vintage design. With high-output mics in front of loud sources a broad range of controllable coloration effects can be achieved through the microphone input, if required, but the REDD.47 also excels when configured as a very clean and detailed preamp, too, with a full low end, a powerful mid-range, and a slightly grainy (almost edgy) high end. Given the revered musical coloration which overdriving this preamp can introduce, many will also want to insert it as a line-level processor across a mix, and this is easily done thanks to the inclusion of a 20dB pad switch and a minimum gain mode of 16dB. The provision of a variable output attenuator ensures sensible output levels even when deliberately overloading the input. That last point is important as the REDD.47s pleasing distortion effects come mostly from overdriving the input stage, rather than increasing the internal voltage gain, and this point was made most obvious to me when trying to dirty up an electric guitar connected via the instrument input. No matter how I adjusted the controls I just couldnt get anything like the effect I was expecting, and certainly nowhere close to the classic Beatles Revolution guitar sound which is so strongly associated with the REDD.51 console. However, I quickly discovered that playing a guitar track recording at line level through the preamp delivered exactly what I was expecting, with a great deal of controllability over exactly how dirty (or clean) the sound should be through adjusting the coarse and fine gain controls. After researching the REDD.47 history (from the outstanding and highly recommended Recording The Beatles tome by Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew: www.recordingthebeatles.com), this made perfect sense: the REDD.47 was designed as a modular gain stage and the inventive Abbey Road engineers apparently used to daisy-chain modules, using one to raise the signal level sufficiently to overdrive the input of another. From a construction point of view, the REDD.47 is very tidy indeed, with two large PCBs separated by a steel screening plate, and mounted on supporting rails across the base of the unit. The linear power supply occupies the right-hand half of the chassis, with the mains transformer mounted on the right-hand wall. There is no internal switch to change the operating voltage. The audio board occupies the left side, with neat wiring looms running to the front-panel switches as well as the rear-panel connectors and the input and output transformer cans. The EF86 and E88CC valves are mounted horizontally, both in metal screening cans, with all other circuit components mounted conventionally via through-holes on the PCB. Measuring the gain through the unit, I found the results to match the panel markings within 0.25dB at all of the different coarse-gain switch positions, although the fine gain switch markings proved a little optimistic. The maximum achievable gain was 54.1dB, rather than the specified 57dB. The pad switch introduced 20dB of attenuation, and the output control offered up to 90dB of attenuation. The frequency response remained consistent with different gain settings, the -3dB points being at 7Hz and 40kHz. The LF roll-off seemed to move up slightly to about 15Hz at the highest gain setting. Minor transformer-related peaks were evident at 12Hz (+1dB) and 25kHz (+3dB) when the output was loaded with 600. With a high-impedance destination, the output level was raised by about 1.5dB overall, and the HF peak increased to +4dB. These peaks both tended to flatten out with increasing gain. The minimum microphone input level for a +4dBu reference output was -50dBu, delivering 0.05 percent THD, rising to 0.15 percent THD with a -34dBu input delivering +20dBu at the output. The maximum input level (with the pad and minimum gain) measured +12dBu for 0.25 percent distortion, rising to three percent THD at +15dBu, delivering +4 and +6 dBu at the output, respectively. This restricted output level seems to be caused by the front end of the amplifier clipping well before the output stage. The maximum instrument input level is about +6dBu before things get really crunchy, while +10dBu gives around two percent THD. The input pad has no effect on the front-panel instrument input. The frequency response extends between 7Hz and 50kHz at the -3dB points. Chandlers REDD.47 is an impressive update on a revered classic. Its almost unique, as there have been precious few hardware incarnations of EMIs first modular amplifier until now. It has a very different character from that of Chandlers other classic EMI preamp, the silicon-transistor TG2 preamp from the 1970s-era TG console. My impression from memory, is that the REDD.47 sounds larger but noticeably softer through the bottom end, whereas the TG2 is much more solid and contained. Both share a dynamic, punchy mid-range character, though, and the REDD adds a subtle but attractive grainy character at the top end. Overall, its vintage valve and transformer sound character is quite evident, and very musically pleasing, yet this is no one-trick pony and its technical performance is perfectly adequate for modern recordings nearly 60 years on: it has the versatility to deliver fine, clean and delicate, or strong and colourful, character equally well. Perhaps this shouldnt come as a surprise: it was, after all, originally designed to be used in consoles employed in Abbey Roads classical Studio One as well as pop sessions in Studio Two! Designer Wade Goekes updates and additions are very sympathetic to the original design, but also enhance it, to make this preamp a relevant tool in modern production situations. So whats not to like? Well, theres the price: quality like this doesnt come cheap. A two-channel stereo unit would have been nice, especially for line-level mix-bus coloration duties, although on such a device a stronger input pad or a tweaked front-end design would be beneficial to cope better with typical high converter or interface output levels. Alternatives Im unaware of any other commercially available REDD.47 preamps, or DIY kits for that matter, and although Drip Electronics offered a PCB for DIY construction, its no longer available. I think the Chandler Limited REDD.47 rates as the second-most expensive single-channel, no-frills preamp currently available (Retro Instruments OP-6 wears the most expensive crown). Everything else at this price level that I can think of offers at least two channels, or a single channel with full channel-strip or EQ facilities. Clearly, a lot of value is placed upon the EMI heritage and the rarity of the design, but it does boast an excellent build quality and a seductively attractive sound character. Siemens V72S Versus REDD Siemens design for the V72 amplifier module was much simpler than the V76 used in the original Burkowitz/CLG consoles, which allowed a much smaller front-panel width. It was transformer-coupled in and out, but employed just two EF804S pentode valves to provide a fixed 34dB of gain (the V76 had three EF804s plus an E83F). However, EMIs REDD consoles required matched 200 impedances between each passive signal path element (such as the stud-faders and EQ circuitry), but the standard V72 amplifier had a 32 output impedance. Although REDDs engineers fixed the impedance mismatch by installing 168 resistors in series with the output of each amplifier module in the consoles wiring, this inevitably also reduced the effective stage gain by about 6dB. So EMI commissioned Siemens to build special 40dB gain modules, designated as the V72S (S for studio the regular models 34dB gain was standardised throughout the German broadcast industry). Around three-hundred V72S modules were manufactured in total. Although V72S modules were used in the REDD.17 and REDD.37 consoles, they had become prohibitively expensive, especially because so many were required in the four-track REDD.37 consoles. Not surprisingly, the REDD engineers designed their own equivalent gain module, which was introduced as the REDD.47 amplifier, and the REDD.37 console was essentially re-engineered as the REDD.51 This new amplifier was housed in a similarly sized case to the V72, and the circuit design still employed balancing transformers on the input and output (this time with the correct 200 output impedance). However, the gain was provided by an EF86 pentode valve followed by an E88CC dual triode, and a front-panel switch (with a separate screwdriver-adjusted fine gain trimmer) allowed 34, 40, or 46 dB of overall gain. Whereas the Siemens V72 modules each had their own internal mains transformer and linear power-supply section, making them useful as stand-alone gain stages, the REDD.47 design made significant costsavings by using a shared 380VDC high tension power rail derived from the consoles master power supply (with a low-voltage AC heater supply). However, although this arrangement reduced manufacturing cost dramatically, and brought a worthwhile improvement in the consoles hum and noise performance, it also made it necessary to power the console down whenever a module had to be replaced. (V72 modules could be hot-swapped without powering down the console.) This might not sound like a big deal, but EMIs engineers apparently underestimated the amount of heat generated by the arrays of REDD.47 modules housed in the consoles side units, which gave reliability and performance problems. Consequently, changing faulty modules was a far more frequent occurrence in the REDD.51 desks, stalling a lot of sessions because the process was much more time-consuming than in the earlier (and more reliable) V72-equipped REDD.37 consoles. While the technical aspects of the REDD.47, such as headroom and signal-to-noise performance, were easily on a par with the V72S, the EMI design had a slightly different sound character which is generally described as being punchier and more assertive or aggressive, compared to the V72s smoother and more rounded almost laid-back timbre. Most of EMIs engineers preferred the more exciting tonality of the REDD.47, and it certainly set the standard through the 1960s. Seeing REDD REDD is an acronym for Recording Engineering Development Department, EMIs original technical design and manufacturing division formed in 1955 and based in Hayes, near Heathrow Airport, London. EMI had started making stereo recordings the year before but really lacked the appropriate electronic equipment, so REDDs first project was a Stereosonic studio mixing console called, logically enough, the REDD.1. This was in the form of a six-foot bay full of valve amplifiers and associated circuitry, controlled from a very basic six-input passive desk called a REDD.8. The latter was built as a stop-gap to make the REDD.1 system usable while a more operationally advanced design was being developed. However, while planning this improved console the REDD team, led by Abbey Roads Technical Engineer Len Page, learned of the work of Peter Burkowitz at the Carl Lindstroem Gesellschaft (CLG) in Germany. CLG was the technical wing of Electrola studios in Cologne EMIs German affiliate and Burkowitz had developed a far more advanced stereo console for the Electrola studios, using Siemens V76 fixed-gain amplifier modules with passive faders and basic equaliser facilities. Consequently, EMI contracted Burkowitz to design a similar console for Abbey Road studios, the first of which was introduced in early 1958 as the REDD.17, replacing the previous REDD.1 desks. Recording technology developed very quickly through the 1950s, and the REDD.17 enjoyed a relatively short life as a studio console. It actually played a more significant and lengthy role as a portable stereo location-recording console, largely because it was self-contained and easily broken down for transport. It was the new generation of four-track tape recorders that drove the requirement for a new type of mixing console just a year after the REDD.17 entered service. Once again, the basis for this new REDD.37 console came from an innovative Burkowitz/CLG design in August 1958. Besides its ability to work with four-track tape recorders, the updated design also featured more versatile plug-in EQ modules identified either as classic or pop with different preset bass and treble turnover frequencies. CLG apparently built one REDD.37 console for EMIs Pathe Marconi studio in France, while the team in Hayes built three more. The original prototype went into Londons Kingsway Hall (with permanent classic EQ settings), while the subsequent two (with the replaceable EQ boxes) went into Abbey Road studios One and Two. It was these consoles that were employed for all of the Beatles recordings up until January 1964. The REDD.37 console provided individual passive LF/HF tone facilities on each channel, with eight passive Painton quadrant stud-faders, panning and routing controls, level attenuators and various other facilities including two dedicated echo send/return paths. Although very simple by modern standards, this was a very powerful and high-quality console in its day, and the roots of all subsequent British mixing consoles really stem from its pioneering design. The necessary gain-stages around the passive signal paths were provided by (slightly modified) Siemens V72 valve amplifier modules, each with a nominal 34dB of fixed gain. Siemens V72 modules had been used previously in the REDD.17 console, and were ideal for the REDD.37 too as they were half the width of the older V76, and thus easier to package in a console that required 31 of them! The virtually contemporaneous successor to the REDD.37 was the REDD.51 an almost identical desk designed at the end of 1958, even before the former consoles were being installed. Strangely though, the first REDD.51 console, while built in 1959, wasnt actually installed until mid-1963 (in Abbey Road Studio Three), while the second desk went into Studio Two in January 1964 and became famous for its use on almost all the subsequent Beatles recordings. A third desk went to EMIs studios in Italy. To the casual eye, its quite hard to tell the REDD.37 and REDD.51 consoles apart, although the latter looks noticeably less industrial, with rounded cabinet casings and generally more pleasing aesthetics. However, although the two designs are essentially identical in terms of facilities, controls, and signal paths, the REDD.51 was far more cost-effective to produce because it employed EMIs newly designed REDD.47 preamp modules in place of the hugely expensive German Siemens V72S units employed in all previous REDD consoles. Not surprisingly, the new amplifier design also brought a new, more assertive sound character, too, which has become indelibly associated with recorded music of that period. The REDD.51 consoles remained in service for the rest of the decade, but today the only known surviving console resides at Mark Knopflers British Grove Studios in London the others appear to have been scrapped. In the mid-60s a cost-saving restructuring within EMI resulted in the short-sighted closure of the REDD division, only to be replaced a few years later by the Central Research Laboratories (CRL). The introduction of eight- and then 16-track tape machines towards the end of the 1960s demanded much more expansive and flexible consoles, and CRL started work designing the TG Series of transistorised consoles in 1967. By 1969, all of the REDD.51 consoles had been replaced with TG-series desks, ending EMIs valve-console era. Pros Thoughtful enhancements to an historic vintage preamp design. Surprisingly versatile sound palette. Useful rumble filter. Attractive retro styling. Cons The price tag! Hot line inputs can be difficult to handle. Instrument input is perhaps not quite what youd expect. Summary The REDD.47 amplifier module was directly responsible for the sonic character of so much British music recorded throughout the 1960s. Chandlers attractive homage cleverly builds on the original design to deliver a versatile microphone preamp with a sublime sound quality. Eve have taken the technology from their existing monitors and shrunk it down to produce these diminutive desktop speakers. In most project studios, twoway monitors tend to have woofers in the five to eightinch diameter range, depending on the room size, but for desktop applications a smaller speaker may be more appropriate. Thats where Eve Audio are aiming the SC203, but despite its small size just 116 x 190 x 134 mm (WDH) it still packs quite a punch, with a maximum SPL capability of 94dB, which is louder than comfortable when they are on the desk right in front of you! A statement on the rear of the cabinet, which has nicely rounded corners and a textured black finish, tells us that final assembly and testing is carried out in Germany, which suggests that much of the parts manufacture is done elsewhere in order to keep costs down. The SC203 is actually a master/slave twoway active system, which means that all the electronic circuitry is housed in one of the speakers (the right speaker is the master), and then connected to the other via a fourcore cable to provide separate feeds to the woofer and tweeter. This is a flat ribbonstyle cable around 1.5 metres long with locking connectors at either end. A 3.5mm stereo mini-jack to dual RCA phono cable is also included for connecting MP3 players and suchlike. Power comes from an external switchmode power supply block, which is equipped with a twopin mains cable. This is my only slight concern, as in a laptopbased system you might find yourself with no mains ground connection whatsoever, which can lead to noise problems when recording electric guitars. Ideally youd find somewhere to attach an earth cable to provide a single grounding point for the system. (Safe grounding mains plugs are available for this purpose, in which only the ground pin is metal and the other two are plastic.) Each speaker comes with an orange rubbery wedge or FlexiPad for mounting and angling the speakers (0 or 15 degrees upward theyre angled 7.5 degrees upwards without the pad) while also decoupling them from the desk surface. Alternatively you can use an optional mounting adaptor to fix them to a standard mic stand with a 3/8inch thread. Theres also a wallmount adaptor kit available. In common with the larger Eve Audio designs, the tweeter is an Air Motion Transducer or AMT, more commonly (but less accurately) referred to as a folded ribbon. The AMT tweeter used in this particular model is a new neodymiumpowered design called the AMT, which has around half the surface area of the AMTs used in Eves larger monitors. Crossed over at 4.8kHz, this feeds an integrated waveguide to match its dispersion pattern to that of the woofer at the crossover frequency. Both drivers are protected by fixed circular metal grilles. With a system such as this one, where the woofer is only three inches or 75mm in diameter, the cone needs to travel over a fair distance to produce a worthwhile SPL at low frequencies. The woofer used here has a oneinch voice coil which is 16mm long (I love the way the audio industry mixes metric and imperial units!), allowing an excursion of 5mm either side of centre. The cone material is a specially developed multilayer, coated paper. A large magnet and a basket designed to allow maximum airflow completes the picture. Rather than use a conventional cabinet port, the SC203 is fitted with a rearmounted passive radiator, which looks rather like a speaker similar in size to the woofer but with no voice coil or magnet. This provides the necessary cabinet tuning, but one advantage of the passive radiator over a conventional port is that at frequencies below that to which the cabinet is tuned, you dont lose the air loading on the woofer cone so it is less likely to sustain damage or to generate excessive distortion from overexcursion. Another benefit is that port wind noise is eliminated. In this case the lower frequency response limit is 62Hz (3dB) an impressively low figure for such a tiny speaker given that the energy peak in most kick drums is in the 70 to 90 Hz range. The upper limit is specified as 21kHz. A feature common to Eves monitors is the use of DSP to handle crossover, voicing and protection duties. Control is via a pushandturn encoder surrounded by tiny orange LEDs, a system also used on the larger Eve monitors, providing access to volume, the high and lowshelf filter settings (3kHz and 300Hz), input source and even how the LEDs behave when the volume setting is being displayed. Though there are four volume display options, I feel quite happy with the default setting where more LEDs light as the volume is increased. Theres also a choice of voicings for desk or console mounting if the flat setting is not appropriate. To change settings you press the knob to step through the options printed around the control, at which point the LED next to that function will flash. Pressing again selects the function for adjustment and the LED remains steady. At that point turning the knob adjusts the selected function, and the orange LEDs show the selection or value as appropriate. It is advisable to keep the manual on hand as some of the options, such as the input source names, are not printed on the front panel so you need the manual to show you which LEDs should be lit. A small laminated card with this info on it wouldnt have gone amiss. On the electronics side, each driver is fed from its own 30 Watt ClassD amplifier, of which there are four in total. The inputs can be analogue on RCA phonos, or digital via optical Toslink or USB (a USB cable is included). Theres also the option to add a subwoofer to extend the range of the system, and Eve have thoughtfully provided a subwoofer output that follows the volume setting on the SC203s. A threebank DIP switch on the back of the master speaker sets the lowend filters to 80Hz for use in a subplussatellite configuration, as well as offering a choice of two input sensitivities and an automatic standby powerdown option that kicks in after 10 minutes of inactivity. Pressing and holding the control knob for around three seconds also enters standby mode via a graceful fade, and then a second press wakes up the speakers and fades the sound back in. Conversion is 24bit at 192kHz using a Cirrus Logic converter chip, and the DSP output drives directly into the ClassD amplifiers. The digital inputs bypass the converter. Starting with an analogue input fed via the RCA inputs, I was genuinely surprised at how mature these little speakers sound. Highs are crisp and opensounding, as expected from this style of tweeter, the mids are clean and lively... and the lows are rather better than I expected! With smaller cabinets, the bass tuning invariably results in a slightly plummy bass sound, and while that is evident here too, its not to an excessive degree. In subjective terms the bass end is fat and warm but it doesnt lose too much definition, as is often the case with less welldesigned small speakers. You dont get the same chestwobbling lows that a large monitor delivers, but at the same time theres no sense that anything important is missing kick drums and bass guitars still sound solid and well defined. Having a choice of inputs also makes sense as the USB connection can be fed directly from a laptop. The SC203s showed up in Logic Pro as an available output device with no need for drivers, and they worked right away. Given that these speakers use digital processing and ClassD power amps, going via USB cuts out an unnecessary stage of A/D conversion, though subjectively I couldnt hear any difference in quality between the analogue and digital inputs. Overall, then, the SC203s are excellent desktop speakers, given their compact format, though such quality comes at a price and for the same money or less you could buy some very capable fiveinch active monitors that would still work well as desktop speakers. If you do need something this compact though, the SC203s have few rivals, other than perhaps the Genelec 6010A models, which are similarly priced. Pros Excellent sound quality for the size. Choice of analogue, digital Toslink or USB inputs. Very compact. Cons Bass extension and overall SPL are necessarily limited, though not by as much as you might expect. No ground connection. A printed card showing some of the unlabelled selection options would be helpful. Summary If a small footprint is essential, the SC203s have much to recommend them, and the choice of inputs allows easy integration with just about any desktop audio system. Digital technology has helped PMCs monitors go from strength to strength and now theyre using it in their subwoofers, too! Few will need an introduction to PMC, the British manufacturers of highly regarded active studio monitoring systems which can be found in a great many mastering rooms, as well as many film and TV dubbing theatres around the world. The companys larger active systems traditionally employ Bryston amplification and active crossovers, but more recent models have adopted ClassD amplification and digital crossover technology. This innovative technology eventually culminated in the large midfield monitor, the IB2SA, and subsequently in the nearfield TwoTwo range, which we have reviewed previously in the pages of Sound On Sound. Although one of the benefits of PMCs unique Advanced Transmission Line (ATL) cabinet technology is a superior lowfrequency extension for a given size of box, there are situations that warrant rather greater bass extension and/or power handling and thats when a subwoofer comes in handy. To that end, PMC have released two new subwoofer units which are designed to integrate with any of the nearfield monitors in the TwoTwo range. PMCs approach to monitor design and a raison detre of the ATL philosophy has always prioritised the minimisation of LF distortion, since unwanted harmonics generated by the bass driver will inherently mask midrange detail. Needless to say, this same philosophy has been applied to the design of the TwoTwo Subwoofers, which are both ultralow distortion designs. Outwardly, the TwoTwo Sub1 and Sub2 appear very similar to the now discontinued active TLE1S and passive SB100 subwoofer models at least in terms of form factor and driver complement. These old subwoofers were designed to partner the equally discontinued but still classic LB1, TB2 and DB1 monitors, and the basic engineering design concepts of both models is well proven. However, the detailed internal construction and the electronics of the new TwoTwo subwoofer versions are completely revised and updated, and both are now fully active, digital designs. In fact, the electronics chassis in both of the TwoTwo subwoofers is identical, with a 400W ClassD power amplifier and a configurable digital crossover system. The difference between the two models essentially comes down to the cabinet size and shape, and the use of different drivers. The Sub1 cabinet measures 200 x 550 x 516 mm (WHD), and weighs a modest 18kg, and it is equipped with a pair of 177mm (seveninch) drivers. So the Sub1s form factor is tall, deep, and relatively narrow not unlike a typical desktop PC cabinet making it a little more elegant aesthetically, and potentially easier to place in a home studio alongside a desk, perhaps. The base of the Sub1 can be fitted either with a set of small spikes or the almost flat Dcup isolator pads, to suit different situations and user preferences. In contrast, the much stockier Sub2 cabinet measures 630 x 510 x 377 mm and employs a single 250mm (9.8inch) driver. This is the same custom carbonfibre Nomex flatpiston design as employed in the IB1 and IB2 monitors. The Sub2s cabinet profile is clearly a lot wider than the Sub1, but it is also much shallower, making it more appropriate for placement flat against a wall. Its also considerably heavier than the Sub1 at 40kg. Both designs have the same effective ATL length of three metres, providing identical usable bandwidths of a nominal 22Hz to 200Hz. All of the connectivity is located at the base of the rear electronics panel, starting with a trio of XLRs accepting left and right balanced analogue inputs, plus an AES3 digital dualchannel input. Each of these inputs also has a corresponding XLR output for onward connection to satellite speakers. In addition, two RJ45 sockets, labelled In and Thru, are provided for a bespoke datalink and digital audio connection via standard Ethernet cables. This can be used to link multiple speakers together, passing both digital audio and commands from an optional remote control unit, if desired. A universal mains power supply is built into the unit (100240 V AC), with an onoff rocker switch and IEC inlet on the rear panel. The two analogue inputs are routed to a 24/96kHz deltasigma AD converter (with a userconfigured lownoise gainoptimisation stage), and the digitised inputs are then passed to the digital signal processor (DSP). It is in this DSP that any required system volume, lowpass filtering, phaseshifting, and room-alignment parametric EQ are performed, along with sophisticated excursionlimiting driver protection. The AES3 (or RJ45) digital input signals are routed through a samplerate converter (accepting any sample rate from 32 to 192 kHz) before being passed to the DSP at 96kHz. Either channel of the digital input, or a mono sum of both channels, can be selected to drive the subwoofer, catering for both 2.1 and 2.2 systems, for example. The DSP section generates three separate twochannel outputs. One set is passed directly to the AES3 and RJ45 output connectors, while the second goes via a DA converter to feed the two analogue outputs. These can be configured to pass fixed or variable level, and fullband or highpass-filtered, signals. The third set of processed outputs is routed through another DA converter, and then to the ClassD amplifier powering the subwoofers own driver(s). All system configuration is performed by a backlit LCD display and a set of four cursor buttons at the top of the rear electronics panel. User settings for the subwoofers lowpass filter allow 50, 80, 120, 150, or 200 Hz turnover frequencies, plus a filter bypass mode, and 6, 12, or 18 dB/octave slope options. If the subwoofers output signals are configured for highpass filtering, the turnover frequency and slope precisely mirror the selected lowpass settings. The recommended starting point when using a TwoTwo subwoofer with any of the TwoTwo monitors is a turnover frequency of 80Hz. To help control severe response anomalies in the listening room (such as response dips caused by console or rearwall reflections), a separate singleband parametric EQ is also provided. The centrefrequency can range between 20 and 150 Hz (in 5Hz increments), and the gain spans (almost) 8dB. The filters bandwidth can also be adjusted between 0.2 and 1.4 octaves (Q between 1 and 8). I was provided with a pair of TwoTwo5 nearfield monitors and a Sub1 for this review, and hooking the system together was trivially simple. The handbook details myriad ways of interconnecting 2.1, 5.1 and 7.1 speaker arrays, with either analogue or AES3 sources, and the flexibility and versatility of the systems connectivity is impressive, using balanced analogue, AES3, or PMCs bespoke RJ45/Ethernet cable system, which also conveys remote control commands. For convenience, I plugged a digital AES3 input into the Sub1, and then used the subwoofers analogue outputs to link the subwoofer to the two TwoTwo6 satellite speakers. After selecting a mono sum signal for the subwoofer, and the analogue inputs on each monitor, I was up and running. Having connected the speakers and got some sound through the system, the next step was to optimise the subwoofers filter settings. I initially set the crossover to 80Hz at 6dB/octave, and then replayed an 80Hz tone to allow the phase to be adjusted, listening for the setting that gave the loudest output at the listening position. Next I adjusted the subwoofers level so that it just took over supporting the low end as the satellite speakers started to give up. Its easy to overcook subwoofer levels, and I always aim for a setting where you only really notice the subwoofers (missing) contribution when its switched off! I set the subwoofers passthrough outputs to be highpass filtered, reducing the demand for LF from the diminutive satellite monitors. Navigating the TwoTwo menu structure is quite logical and straightforward, starting with options to introduce the +10dB gain lift mandated in the Dolby Digital specification, and to adjust the phase (0180 degrees, plus a polarity inversion). The next options are for activating and adjusting the parametric EQ, and to alter the displays backlight time-out duration. Facilities to adjust the analogue input sensitivity and to trim the digital signal level come next, followed by the input source and (digital) channel selection. Next up are options for fixed or variable levels, and fullrange or highpass filtering for the analogue and digital passthrough outputs. The last important menu options cover the subwoofers lowpass filter turnover frequencies and slopes. Pressing the up and down buttons together for more than two seconds resets everything to the factory defaults, and the default configuration display always lists the current system volume level and the filter/slope settings. I am quite wary of subwoofers generally, and especially so in small, untreated rooms, where I fear they often do far more harm than good... Having said that, I do use a TLE1S with my legacy TB2 and DB1 monitors on occasion. When setting up the TwoTwo system, I found the enhanced configuration options in the TwoTwo Sub1 allowed much more precise and seamless integration than is possible with its allanalogue forebear, and I suspect the ability to adjust the filter slopes played a significant part in that, helping to define a more precisely controlled transition between the subwoofer and satellites. Running the 2.1 TwoTwo system alongside my trusty threeway reference IB1 monitors, I was very impressed with the overall integration, and the TwoTwo system sounded very close to a conventional threeway system, rather than a typical 2.1 array. Qualitywise, I have absolutely no complaints. The Sub1 clearly has very low distortion, as switching it on and off didnt change my perception of midrange detail at all, it just gently supported or diminished the lowest octaves which is precisely as it should be. With the Sub1 working in concert with the diminutive TwoTwo5 monitors, this 2.1 configuration delivered a stunning fullbandwidth performance, which was surprisingly capable and easily on a par in most respects with my Brystonpowered threeway IB1 monsters! As subwoofers go, the Sub1 (and, by extension, the Sub2 as well) is an excellent design with a performance and versatility that certainly justifies the relatively high cost. Alternatives There are plenty of selfpowered subwoofers on the market, but few match the ultralow distortion, high power, and musicality of these latest PMC designs. Pros Ultralow distortion, widebandwidth performance. Versatile I/O options. Comprehensive configuration possibilities. Two different form factors to suit different installation requirements. Bespoke Ethernet cable connection system with optional remote control unit. Cons Price. Summary A sophisticated active subwoofer using digital signal processing to optimise system integration and driver protection. Extensive I/O options and a comprehensive menu system make this a very versatile subwoofer. Can't find a certain Sound On Sound article? We finally added the remaining 3,714 past issue articles! We thank you for your patience. Some of the early years are text-only web articles, missing their images (the DAT data backups of which we discovered were lost in a previous office relocation!). Some of the early years are text-only web articles, missing their images (the DAT data backups of which we discovered were lost in a previous office relocation!). This current incarnation of the SOS web site currently hosts 16,005 independent, high quality, in-depth test reviews / techniques / interviews and tutorials plus over 4,200 News stories and 696,000 SOS Forum posts. We add more every month and publish news every day. But what about Sound On Sound issues from November 1985 to December 1993? Well, these can be found on the superb www.muzines.co.uk website (with our full permission), and we're hoping to get the text and images from these articles onto our own website at some point in the future. That's another Herculean task for us to solve! Try our Full Issue PDF (for free - no catch!) Each month, SOS offers a great value Full Issue PDF (FIPDF) containing all articles and adverts, just like the magazine (only better it is zoomable, and searchable). Anyone can buy it and download instantly. It can be viewed on your desktop, smartphone or tablet with Adobe Reader or any equivalent PDF utility (most smartphones have one built in). SOS DIGITAL subscribers get these FIPDFs FREE with their sub, as an added-value bonus! DOWNLOAD free sample Full Issue PDF: [Download UK edition] [Download NORTH AMERICA edition] Please note: we publish the same editorial content in our UK and North America editions, except the advertisements and contacts/pricing information differs. More info... RECORDING TECHNOLOGY: Basics & Beyond Claim your FREE 170-page digital publication from the makers of Sound On Sound CLICK HERE Synth Secrets (63 Episodes: May 1999 to July 2004) All 63 instalments of the classic Synth Secrets series are now on the SOS site. Click to show me all 63 episodes of SYNTH SECRETS SOS Glossary of Technical Terms Check out our regularly updated, indispensable Glossary of technical terms from the fields of Recording, Audio, MIDI, Computers, Music Technology, Electronics and Live Sound: www.soundonsound.com/glossary Letters: My teachers mean a lot to me. Why are they paid so little? Marquette springs upset, Slinger survives in football playoffs The nine Milwaukee-area top-seeded football teams all won Friday night. The results across Level 1 set up some interesting games for the week ahead. Welcome to SwanseaOnline - your home for the best news, sports and what's on coverage of the city. Never miss a Swansea story with our daily newsletter Sign up to comment on our stories here Follow us on Facebook and Twitter | Swansea City news | Ospreys news | InYourArea Artist's impression of LISA Pathfinder, ESA's mission to test technology for future gravitational-wave observatories in space. A NASA scientist working on the mission thinks the spacecraft could also count the number of tiny space rocks that collide with the instrument. A spacecraft built to help search for ripples in space-time could also count up the number of tiny space rocks that pose a potential hazard to satellites and spacecraft that orbit the sun. Micrometeoroids those that are about the size of a pea or smaller regularly pepper satellites and spacecraft that venture off the surface of the Earth. If those bits of space rock or shards of space junk are traveling fast enough (and they can reach speeds of up to 22,000 miles per hour), they can tear through expensive space hardware or even spacesuits. Therefore, some scientists are interested in determining the average number of these micrometeoroid collisions that a spacecraft or astronaut can expect to experience. Though the designers of the Laser Interferometer Space Antennae (LISA) Pathfinder spacecraft never intended their instrument to be used for this purpose, a group of scientists has found a way to get a little extra science out of the experiment. [The Search for Gravity Waves in Images] An experiment in free fall The European Space Agency's LISA Pathfinder probe launched into orbit in December 2015. The spacecraft is testing technologies that will be used on the the full-fledged eLISA mission, which was designed to search for ripples in space (and time) itself, also known as gravitational waves. (eLISA is not scheduled to launch until the mid-2030s). Albert Einstein predicted the existence of these waves a century ago, but scientists only directly detected them for the first time last year, using the ground-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which announced the finding in February. At the heart of LISA Pathfinder (and eLISA) is an instrument that floats in weightlessness, completely undisturbed by outside stimuli. In that peaceful state, it can detect the very slight change in space created by a passing gravitational wave. The exterior of the Pathfinder probe serves as a sort of shell to protect the central instrument. It absorbs and corrects for outside stimuli, such as the gravitational pull of nearby planets or the push from the particle wind that blows off of the sun. Ira Thorpe, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and part of the LISA Pathfinder team, realized that the spacecraft's ability to detect very small forces might make it a good micrometeoroid counter. He spoke about this ancillary application for the spacecraft at the American Physical Society's April meeting on Sunday (April 17) in Salt Lake City. Earlier this year, Thorpe co-authored a scientific paper outlining his idea. "The whole [LISA Pathfinder] system was designed to reject these kinds of noises," Thorpe told Space.com, referring to the movement of the spacecraft created by collisions with micrometeoroids. Typically, Thorpe said, the system would immediately counter micrometeoroid disturbances, and their appearance would just be part of the "noise" that the system tries to reject. But, through some "auxiliary channels," he and a few colleagues think they can pull out the individual micrometeorite events. Micrometeoroids are generally said to be about less than 1 centimeter (0.39 inches) across and/or to weigh less than 1 gram (0.035 ounces), according to NASA. However, there is no exact boundary between a meteoroid and one of its "micro" siblings. The average estimated speed of micrometeoroids is about 6.2 miles per second (10 kilometers per second), according to NASA, or about 22,000 mph (35,405 km/h). These very-fast-moving micrometeoroids can potentially tear through scientific instruments, and modern spacesuits even have a layer built in to protect against micrometeoroids. There are various estimates of how frequently a space-based instrument should expect to be pelted with these space BBs. However, those estimates are based on observations of micrometeoroids in the vicinity of Earth, Thorpe noted, where the gravitational pull of the planet influences their path. LISA Pathfinder is orbiting the sun at a location known as Lagrange Point 2 (or L2 for short), a popular spot for spacecraft that need to remain stable. At L2 (and its sister sites, L1 and L3), the gravitational tug of the various solar system bodies nearly cancel each other out, so a spacecraft can orbit without having to fire thrusters to remain stationary. "[L1 and L2] are becoming regular places to put a spacecraft," he said. "Those places might be better than Earth for measuring how many micrometeoroids are going to hit other instruments." Space debris is a growing problem for machines and humans in space. This image shows large pieces of space debris orbiting the Earth (the size of the objects are enlarged). Even very small bits of space debris (micrometeoroids) can cause damage. (Image credit: NASA Orbital Debris Program Office) Thorpe got the idea to use LISA Pathfinder to count micrometeoroids when he heard that the Gaia space probe was experiencing a much higher rate of micrometeoroid collisions than expected, he said during his talk. Gaia, which is intended to create a 3D map of the Milky Way, among other objectives, orbits at L2. In 2018, NASA plans to send its massive new space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), to L1. It could be helpful to know how often a big, expensive instrument like JWST should expect to encounter these tiny rocks, Thorpe told Space.com. Thorpe said no space agency would ever build an instrument as complex and expensive as LISA Pathfinder just to study micrometeoroids. So, in realizing that the instrument already has the capability to do this, Thorpe has effectively found a freebee. "This is just an example of what one can do when putting a precision measurement instrument in space and get[ting] creative with the data," he said. On Friday (April 22), the world will celebrate Earth Day, and honor the only planet known to host life. But where else in the solar system might life thrive? Our friends at ThinkGeek.com recently asked 2,400 readers this very question, and the results are pretty interesting. ThinkGeek.com asked readers where in the solar system alien life might be found. The results were pretty interesting. (Image credit: ThinkGeek.com) Not surprisingly, Jupiter's moon Europa took the top spot, garnering 47 percent of votes. The 1,900-mile-wide (3,100 kilometers) satellite harbors a huge ocean of liquid water beneath an icy shell, and scientists think this ocean is in contact with Europa's rocky mantle, making possible all sorts of interesting chemical reactions. NASA is planning to launch a mission in the 2020s to gauge Europa's potential to host life. The Europa spacecraft will perform dozens of flybys of the moon from Jupiter orbit, and NASA is investigating the possibility of adding a lander to the mission as well. [Photos: Europa, Mysterious Icy Moon of Jupiter] Jupiters ocean-harboring moon Europa is seen here in a photo by NASAs Galileo spacecraft. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute) Mars came in second, with 23 percent of the vote. Observations by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity and other spacecraft have shown that at least some parts of the Red Planet were habitable billions of years ago. Back then, Mars was relatively warm and wet, with large expanses of liquid water on the surface. Mars has since lost most of its atmosphere to space, and the planet became cold, dry and radiation-blasted as a result. But some researchers think microbial life could still survive beneath the Red Planet's surface today. (The European Space Agency and NASA will launch rovers toward Mars in 2018 and 2020, respectively, to hunt for signs of past and present life.) Mars as seen from orbit by NASAs Viking mission. (Image credit: NASA/JPL) Saturn's huge moon Titan was the choice of 16 percent of respondents. The 3,200-mile-wide (5,150 km) moon is the only world in the solar system apart from Earth known to host stable bodies of liquid on its surface but Titan's seas and lakes are full of hydrocarbons such as ethane rather than water. So if life exists on the Saturn satellite, it's likely to be very different than that of Earth, which is intimately tied to water, researchers have said. NASAs Cassini spacecraft captured this image of Saturn's largest moon Titan, which has a thick atmosphere and is home to vast lakes of liquid methane. These lakes are visible in this image as darker blotches in the moon's upper right. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute) Another Saturn satellite, Enceladus, came in fourth, with just over 9 percent of the votes. Like Europa, Enceladus harbors a global subsurface ocean beneath an icy shell. But Enceladus is much smaller than the Jovian moon, with a diameter of just 310 miles (500 km). Enceladus is famous for the jets of water-ice and organic material that blast into space from the satellite's south polar region. This geyser material likely comes from the moon's ocean, and thus provides a way for a probe to sample this potentially life-friendly environment without even touching down. Several research teams have drawn up mission concepts that would hunt for signs of life in Enceladus' geyser plume, but none of these ideas have yet been approved or funded by NASA. (The agency's Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft has flown through Enceladus' plume multiple times, but that probe does not possess life-detection instruments.) An enhanced-color view of the Saturn moon Enceladus captured by NASAs Cassini spacecraft. This image shows the tiger stripes in the southern hemisphere from which Enceladus geysers erupt. (Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute) About 2.5 percent of people pegged Jupiter itself, rather than Europa or another Jovian satellite, as a promising abode for life. Temperatures are a frosty minus 234 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 145 degrees Celsius) in Jupiter's clouds, beneath which swirls a huge ocean of liquid, metallic hydrogen. So Jupiter life would have to be strange and hardy indeed. This spectacular image by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows Jupiter's trademark Great Red Spot a swirling storm larger than Earth. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center)) Venus came in sixth, with just over 2 percent of the vote. Like Mars, Venus was probably quite habitable in the ancient past. But a runaway greenhouse effect caused the second planet from the sun to get incredibly hot over the eons: Surface temperatures on Venus now hover around 860 degrees Fahrenheit (460 degrees Celsius). That being said, there are some temperate environments left on Venus. Microbial life could theoretically survive 30 miles (50 km) or so above the planet's surface, where temperatures and pressures are quite Earth-like. Indeed, some researchers want to explore the atmosphere of Venus, and have devised plans for airships both robotic and crewed that would cruise the planet's skies. (Again, these ideas remain concepts at the moment, without a path to launch.) Artist's impression of the surface of Venus. (Image credit: ESA) The ThinkGeek survey also asked respondents about how prepared they are to live off of their home planet. The vast majority of respondents were open to the idea; only 13.5 percent said Earth is the only place for them. While this poll is far from a random and representative sampling of the people of Earth, it should provide some encouragement to the entrepreneurs hoping to build private outposts in orbit and on the surface of the moon and Mars. The European Space Agency has been studying what it will take to build a crewed moon outpost, seen here in an artists illustration. (Image credit: ESA/Foster + Partners) Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com. Showers of high energy particles occur when energetic cosmic rays strike the top of the Earth's atmosphere. Most cosmic rays are atomic nuclei: most are hydrogen nuclei, some are helium nuclei, and the rest heavier elements. Although many of the low energy cosmic rays come from our Sun, the origins of the highest energy cosmic rays remains unknown and a topic of much research. This drawing illustrates air showers from very high energy cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are atom fragments that rain down on the Earth from outside of the solar system. They blaze at the speed of light and have been blamed for electronics problems in satellites and other machinery. Discovered in 1912, many things about cosmic rays remain a mystery more than a century later. One prime example is exactly where they are coming from. Most scientists suspect their origins are related to supernovas (star explosions), but the challenge is that for many years cosmic ray origins appeared uniform to observatories examining the entire sky. A large leap forward in cosmic ray science came in 2017, when the Pierre Auger Observatory (which is spread over 3,000 square kilometers, or 1,160 square miles, in western Argentina) studied the arrival trajectories of 30,000 cosmic particles. It concluded that there is a difference in how frequently these cosmic rays arrive, depending on where you look. While their origins are still nebulous, knowing where to look is the first step in learning where they came from, the researchers said. The results were published in Science. Cosmic rays can even be used for applications outside of astronomy. In November 2017, a research team discovered a possible void in the Great Pyramid of Giza, which was built around 2560 B.C., using cosmic rays. The researchers found this cavity using muon tomography, which examines cosmic rays and their penetrations through solid objects. History While cosmic rays were only discovered in the 1900s, scientists knew something mysterious was going on as early as the 1780s. That's when French physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb best known for having a unit of electrical charge named after him observed an electrically charged sphere suddenly and mysteriously not being charged any more. At the time, air was thought to be an insulator and not an electric conductor. With more work, however, scientists discovered that air can conduct electricity if its molecules are charged or ionized. This would most commonly happen when the molecules interact with charged particles or X-rays. But where these charged particles came from was a mystery; even attempts to block the charge with large amounts of lead were coming up empty. On Aug. 7, 1912, physicist Victor Hess flew a high-altitude balloon to 17,400 feet (5,300 meters). He discovered three times more ionizing radiation there than on the ground, which meant the radiation had to be coming from outer space. But tracing cosmic ray "origin stories" took more than a century. In 2013, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope released results from observing two supernova remnants in the Milky Way: IC 433 and W44. Among the products of these star explosions are gamma-ray photons, which (unlike cosmic rays) are not affected by magnetic fields. The gamma-rays studied had the same energy signature as subatomic particles called neutral pions. Pions are produced when protons get stuck in a magnetic field inside the shockwave of the supernova and crash into each other. In other words, the matching energy signatures showed that protons could move at fast enough speeds within supernovas to create cosmic rays. Current science We know today that galactic cosmic rays are atom fragments such as protons (positively charged particles), electrons (negatively charged particles) and atomic nuclei. While we know now they can be created in supernovas, there may be other sources available for cosmic ray creation. It also isn't clear exactly how supernovas are able to make these cosmic rays so fast. Cosmic rays constantly rain down on Earth, and while the high-energy "primary" rays collide with atoms in the Earth's upper atmosphere and rarely make it through to the ground, "secondary" particles are ejected from this collision and do reach us on the ground. But by the time these cosmic rays get to Earth, it's impossible to trace where they came from. That's because their path has been changed as they travelled through multiple magnetic fields (the galaxy's, the solar system's and Earth's itself.) Scientists are trying to trace back cosmic ray origins by looking at what the cosmic rays are made of. Scientists can figure this out by looking at the spectroscopic signature each nucleus gives off in radiation, and also by weighing the different isotopes (types) of elements that hit cosmic ray detectors. The result, NASA adds, shows very common elements in the universe. Roughly 90 percent of cosmic ray nuclei are hydrogen (protons) and 9 percent are helium (alpha particles). Hydrogen and helium are the most abundant elements in the universe and the origin point for stars, galaxies and other large structures. The remaining 1 percent are all elements, and it's from that 1 percent that scientists can best search for rare elements to make comparisons between different types of cosmic rays. The Pierre Auger Observatory collaboration found some variations in the arrival trajectories of cosmic rays in 2017, providing some hints about where the rays could have originated. Scientists can also date the cosmic rays by looking at radioactive nuclei that decrease over time. Measuring the half-life of each nuclei gives an estimate of how long the cosmic ray has been out there in space. In 2016, a NASA spacecraft found most cosmic rays likely come from (relatively) nearby clusters of massive stars. The agency's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft detected cosmic rays with a radioactive form of iron known as iron-60. Since this form of cosmic ray degrades over time, scientists estimate it must have originated no more than 3,000 light-years from Earth the equivalent distance of the width of the local spiral arm in the Milky Way. An experiment called ISS-CREAM (Cosmic Ray Energetics and Mass) launched to the International Space Station in 2017. It is expected to operate for three years, answering questions such as whether supernovas generate most cosmic ray particles, when cosmic ray particles originated, and if all the energy spectra seen for cosmic rays can be explained by a single mechanism. The ISS also hosts the CALorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET), which searches for the highest-energy types of cosmic rays. CALET launched there in 2015. Cosmic rays can also be detected by balloon, such as through the Super Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder (SuperTIGER) experiment that includes participation from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and several universities. It has flown several times, including a record 55-day flight over Antarctica between December 2012 and January 2013. "With the data from this flight we are studying the origin of cosmic rays. Specifically, testing the emerging model of cosmic-ray origins in OB associations, as well as models for determining which particles will be accelerated," the SuperTIGER website said. Citizen scientists can also participate in the search for cosmic rays by registering at the website crayfis.io. There, they will join the CRAYFIS experiment run by the Laboratory of Methods for Big Data Analysis (LAMBDA) at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Russia. Researchers there are examining ultra-high energy cosmic rays using mobile phones. Space radiation concerns Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere shields the planet from 99.9 percent of the radiation from space. However, for people outside the protection of Earth's magnetic field, space radiation becomes a serious hazard. An instrument aboard the Curiosity Mars rover during its 253-day cruise to Mars revealed that the radiation dose received by an astronaut on even the shortest Earth-Mars round trip would be about 0.66 sievert. This amount is like receiving a whole-body CT scan every five or six days. A dose of 1 sievert is associated with a 5.5 percent increase in the risk of fatal cancers. The normal daily radiation dose received by the average person living on Earth is 10 microsieverts (0.00001 sievert). The moon has no atmosphere and a very weak magnetic field. Astronauts living there would have to provide their own protection, for example by burying their habitat underground. Mars has no global magnetic field. Particles from the sun have stripped away most of Mars' atmosphere, resulting in very poor protection against radiation at the surface. The highest air pressure on Mars is equal to an altitude of 22 miles (35 kilometers) above the Earth's surface. At low altitudes, Mars' atmosphere provides slightly better protection from space radiation. In 2017, NASA made some upgrades to its Space Radiation Laboratory (located at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York) to do more studies into how cosmic rays may affect astronauts on long voyages, including to Mars. These upgrades allow researchers to alter types of ions, and the intensity of energy, more easily due to software control. The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2016 - Space Media Network. All websites are published in Australia and are solely subject to Australian law and governed by Fair Use principals for news reporting and research purposes. AFP, UPI and IANS news wire stories are copyright Agence France-Presse, United Press International and Indo-Asia News Service. ESA news reports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. 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The latest offering is DRIVERfighter to update your driver updater. Get complete PC optimization and extend the life of your PC with these must-have software tools. New York, April 21, 2016 (SPS) -The Polisario Front reaffirmed Wednesday in New York its willing to engaging in negotiations with Morocco on the status of Western Sahara and expressed its concern over repetitive blockings from Morocco to undermine the UN political process. In a statement released Wednesday in New York, the Sahrawi coordinator with the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (Minurso) M'hamed Khaddad stressed that the Polisario Front "is ready to engage in negotiations with Morocco as soon as possible and without preconditions, in accordance with the UN Secretary General's statement on 4 November 2015 and resolutions of the Security Council." "The Polisario Front expressed deep concern" over Morocco's repetitive attempts to hinder the UN political process on Western Sahara," he said. The political process on Western Sahara is at "a standstill", denounced Kheddad, adding that this blocking led to a deterioration of the human rights situation in the Sahrawi occupied territories as highlighted in the UN SG's last periodical report, and the plundering of Western Sahara's natural resources," he claimed. "The UN should intensify its effort to hold a self-determination referendum, and deals with serious violations of human rights and plundering of Western Sahara's natural resources," he added. The Sahrawi coordinator with the Minurso called on the UN Security Council to fully assume its responsibilities, reaffirmed in its own resolutions. As for the last report of the UN Secretary General sent last Monday to the Security Council, and in accordance with its recommendations, the Polisario Front called for the renewal of the Minurso mandate, affirming that Morocco's unilateral decision to expel the civilian component "is a serious a threat to the Sahrawi people and a challenge for the UN Security Council." After the dismantling the OF MINURSO, Morocco have not fulfil its commitments. The UN peacekeeping mission for the referendum in Western Sahara has been created in accordance with the Security Council resolution 690 in 1991 and the resolution accepted on 30 August 1988 by Morocco and the Polisario Front, he pointed out. (SPS) 062/090/700 FAIRFIELD Bloomberg Businessweek ranked Fairfield Universitys Dolan School of Business the 43rd best undergraduate program in the country, making it the highest-ranked business school in the state. Fairfields Dolan School had been ranked 58th in last years Bloomberg Businessweek survey. Engraving by J. C. Buttre, after photo by Napoleon Sarony [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate The U.S. Treasury will announce the decision to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, Politico is reporting. Tubman will replace President Andrew Jackson, the website wrote. Tubman, who died in Auburn, N.Y. at the age of 91 in 1913, was in the running to be put on the $10 bill but Alexander Hamilton will remain on that bill. Hamilton's popularity has surged over the last year amid the embrace of "Hamilton," the Broadway smash that just won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Tubman, who was born into slavery in Maryland but escaped, made more than a dozen trips into the slave states to rescue slaves through the Underground Railroad. SEE THE POLITICO STORY It will be the first time someone's face has been retired from the greenback since Jackson replaced President Grover Cleveland on the $20 in 1929. Senator William H. Seward sold land in Auborn to Tubman in 1959. At the time, Auborn was a focal point of the abolitionist movement. The decision follows months of discussion about adding a portrait of a woman to American paper currency. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew has kept details of his decision close to the vest while promising that "we're going to have an exciting set of announcements" soon. Treasury officials refused to comment Monday on a report from CNN that Lew has decided to keep Hamilton as the portrait on the $10 bill, and instead replace Jackson's portrait on the $20 bill with a woman who represents the struggle for racial equality. CNN, quoting a senior government source, said that women will also be honored on the $10 bill, the denomination next up to for redesign, with a mural-style depiction of the suffrage movement that will replace the current drawing of the Treasury building. Lew last week did offer some hints about where the decision may be headed in an interview with CNBC. He stressed that the government would not be just redesigning the $10 bill but also the $5 bill and the $20 bill. "We're not just talking about one bill," Lew said. "We're not just talking about one picture on one bill. We're talking about using the front and the back of the bill to tell an exciting set of stories." Lew suggested that it wouldn't be a woman's portrait on the $10 note. "We're going to have a representation of the contribution women have made to our democracy on the next bill that's issued," he said. Lew announced last summer that the government was going to incorporate a woman on the $10 bill, which would mark the first appearance of a female portrait on U.S. paper currency in 100 years. Treasury received more than 1.5 million responses to Lew's request for suggestions on the currency redesign. That prompted him to delay an announcement, which he had originally said would be made by the end of 2015. An online group, Women on 20s, had been campaigning for a woman on the $20 bill. Jackson's critics say he should not be on U.S. currency because of the part he played in the relocation of Native Americans. Susan Ades Stone, the executive director of Women on 20s, said while her group has been campaigning for the change, it is concerned that the change could delay introduction of a woman on the currency for more than a decade. "We think the projection of 2030 for issuing a new $20 bill is way too long," Ades Stone said in an interview Monday. "We don't understand why Secretary Lew can't fast-track production of the $20." In a poll conducted last year by Women on 20s, Harriet Tubman, an African-American abolitionist and one of the leaders' of the Underground Railroad, was the top vote getter. Lew's initial announcement last year set off a firestorm of protests from supporters of Hamilton. They argued that the founding father had molded the nation's financial architecture and should not be removed from his rightful place on the currency. Hamilton fans got a boost from the interest generated by the hit Broadway musical "Hamilton." Earlier this year, Lew was personally lobbied by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the author and star of "Hamilton," during a meeting at Treasury. After their discussion, Miranda tweeted that Lew had assured him "you're going to be very happy" with the decision. In March of 2013, Team 26 set off on their bikes to pedal the 300 miles from Newtown to Washington, D.C., where they would press Congress to quickly pass new legislation to fix the broken background check system. At this point, just months after 20 beautiful children and six dedicated educators were brutally murdered in Sandy Hook, we all thought that Congress would finally act to close the dangerous loopholes that enable literally anyone to purchase deadly firearms over the internet or at gun shows with no questions asked. Despite broad public support for such commonsense reforms, the Senate failed the American people as a vocal minority blocked the bill from even receiving a vote. Like millions of Americans across the country, the riders of Team 26 were devastated by Washingtons collective heartlessness in the face of these horrific killings. If the violent deaths of 20 innocent little kids and face-to-face meetings with their grieving parents could not inspire Congress to rise above politics and do the right thing, what on earth could? We all came to the same conclusion: relentless public pressure. While we hoped that Congress would quickly pass easy fixes to repair our broken gun laws, we prepared ourselves for a long-term fight to close dangerous loopholes and pass critical reforms that will save lives. And so, Team 26 again rode in 2014, then 2015, and now again, in 2016. Women and men of all ages continue to put their lives on hold and pedal their way to Washington to call attention to congressional inaction and the concrete solutions ready for a vote. As Team 26 completed their fourth ride to Washington last week, the overwhelming majority of Americans still support universal background checks. According to the latest Quinnipiac University poll, 89 percent of Americans favor requiring a background check on all gun sales but the near-universal support is met with silence in Washington. By failing to take a single step to reduce gun violence, Congress has become complicit in these murders. This year, Team 26 rode again because they made a promise to the victims families in Sandy Hook that they would not rest until real action was taken to prevent other families from feeling this pain. The group left Newtown on April 9th to deliver a petition with more than 36,000 signatures calling on Congress to keep deadly weapons off college campuses because schools are a place for learning, not shootouts. When the riders arrived in Washington on April 12th, Newtowns Congresswoman Elizabeth Esty took the petition to the floor of the House of Representatives, and Senators Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy brought it to the Senate. Winning the fight for commonsense gun laws will require a groundswell of ordinary Americans demanding their elected officials do something in the face of this epidemic. The persistence and dedication of the anti-gun-violence activists across Connecticut and the county is inspiring and reassuring. Winning this debate in Washington will take longer than it should, but thanks to the compassion and drive of people like Team 26, we have no doubt that compassion and reason will win in the end. U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy are Democrats representing Connecticut and U.S. Rep. , and Elizabeth Esty is a Democrat representing the 5th District, which includes Newtown. P icture the scene in the weeks after a Leave vote on June 23. The pound is plummeting, as is the FTSE. David Cameron steps down immediately, triggering a leadership campaign in a deeply divided Tory party, ushering in a new Prime Minister and a Cabinet purged of pro-European Union ministers. Nicola Sturgeon, on the back of a clear Remain vote in Scotland, demands another independence referendum. EU leaders, meanwhile, say they respect the decision of the British electorate, will negotiate Britains withdrawal as per the provisions of the Lisbon Treaty, but will not be offering any special trade arrangements for the UK. As the months go by, uncertainty about Britains future weighs ever more heavily. Unemployment rises, triggering rate cuts and more quantitative easing from the Bank of England. All this time, while negotiations on the UKs exit make progress, it becomes increasingly obvious that the rest of the EU is remaining good to its word: full access to the single market is only available in return for free movement of people, something that the Eurosceptic government will not contemplate. Firms, faced with the certainty of being outside the single market, start to announce plans to adapt with foreign-owned banks, in particular, grabbing the headlines as they announce plans to relocate. Meanwhile, opinion polls in Scotland show that the Scottish National Party will overwhelmingly win the referendum, this time with the rest of the EU offering continued membership if Scots do vote to leave the UK, triggering more economic uncertainty, particularly around the large Scotland-based banks. Slowly, it dawns on many of those that were seduced by the goal of greater sovereignty that the economic consequences are much larger than they were led to believe. The polls shift decisively, away from a Government that is presiding over a crumbling country and economy. Prime Minister Boris Johnson falls on his sword and, in a turnaround to end all turnarounds, his replacement George Osborne surrounded by a phalanx of pro-EU Tories, declares without quite saying I told you so that the British people deserve another chance to decide on this most important of questions. The Leave campaign, having had its delusions about what a post-Brexit world looks like cruelly exposed, are defeated heavily the vote is 70%-30% to reverse the previous decision. The question that had first split the Tory party, and then the country, is decisively answered for a generation. But only after the economy has taken a battering. Fanciful Project Fear stuff? Maybe. Maybe not. Certainly, the weight of the economic argument against Brexit is growing by the day. It is already clear that the uncertainty for firms caused by the referendum is hitting economic activity. That will only intensify in the run-up to June 23. The uncertainty primarily revolves around what the post-Brexit trading arrangements with the worlds largest trading bloc will look like. And this is a question that the Brexiteers have been unable to answer coherently. The Canadian, Swiss and Norwegian options are bandied about, while Michael Gove earlier this week suggested that the UK should aspire to the Albanian model. But only the Norwegian model would provide the UK with full membership of the single market. And that would require accepting both free movement of people (unacceptable to most Brexiteers) and the single markets regulations. Oh, and wed still have to pay into the EU budget. All other options are vastly inferior, particularly for the services sector, which inconveniently is precisely what the UK is good at. This was the clear message from this weeks Treasury Paper, which forensically dismantled the arguments of the small coterie of economists that believe leaving the EU would be positive for the economy. Even Switzerland, which has to accept free movement of people and pay into the EUs budget, does not have unfettered access to the EUs single market in financial services. And, no, the UK is not a special case as the Leave camp would have us believe. Indeed, there is no incentive for the rest of the EU to make life easy for the UK outside of the EU they have no interest in making leaving the EU look easy at a time when anti-EU sentiment is high in some countries. At the same time, there are plenty of EU politicians who would love to force trading in euro financial products away from London and into the euro area. Indeed, they have already tried to do exactly that, only to be rebuffed precisely because we are a member of the EU with recourse to the European Court of Justice. So, with the Remain camp holding all the economic argument cards, and with the opinion polls showing that voters remain sensitive to fears of the personal economic costs of leaving, the bookmakers may well be right to have a Remain vote as the clear favourite. But even if the Leave camp wins in June, its victory may well prove pyrrhic as the warnings of Project Fear become reality. The bookies certainly think so theyre quoting 1/5 on a second referendum. Fancy a flutter anyone? Grant Lewis is head of research at Daiwa Capital Markets Europe. The views expressed are the authors and not those of Daiwa Capital Markets. C ould Apple be leaving its UK head office in the West End for a snazzy modern one at Battersea Power Station? Yes, if you believe London property moles. They say the tech giant is eyeing a megaspace of more than 400,000 square feet at the landmark site on which thousands of homes and offices are being built. The iPhone maker has long been on the hunt for a new home and previously looked at Rathbone Place off Oxford Street, where Facebook is now heading. Spinners on both sides are keeping schtum. Spy says watch this space. Di-Stefano fears sting of defeat Probably not, as the Hornets prepare for their biggest game in nearly a decade, an FA Cup semi-final against Crystal Palace at Wembley. Last time Watford made the semis, they were smashed 4-1 by Manchester United, but the trouble with Sundays game is its winnable, which makes it worse if you dont win it, Di-Stefano tells Spy. Youre just thinking of what could have been. Avoid him on Monday morning if they lose... The icing on Angelas cake turns out to be egg on her face N Brown chief Angela Spindler got her timing a little off yesterday, claiming to Spy that this year would be the icing on the cake of the retailers turnaround plan. Approximately 52 minutes later, its shares had tanked 16% as the City focused instead on subdued trading in recent weeks. How stale. H eathrows chief executive has called on the Government to tighten legislation over drone usage, after a British Airways plane was believed to have been struck by one last week. John Holland-Kaye said that while that there had been no confirmation that the plane was hit by a drone, if it made the Government take notice of the issue that was a good thing. It is the right thing for the Government to take action. People need to be more careful when flying heavy objects above peoples heads, he said. He said Heathrows staff had seen a small increase in people using drones near the airports perimeter. Heathrow has seen a strong start to the year with passenger numbers up 2.6% to 16.8 million in the first three months. Revenues climbed 3.2% to 642 million while ebitda was up 7.3% to 367 million. S HARES in Japanese carmaker Mitsubishi were suspended after a flood of investors tried to bail out of the scandal-hit company in the wake of its fuel usage cheating controversy. Offices of the carmaker in Nagoya were also raided by Japanese officials after it admitted rigging fuel economy tests on more than 600,000 mini-cars. Stock market officials at the Nikkei, the Japanese stock exchange where Mitsubishi shares are traded, halted buying and selling in the carmakers shares after a flood of sell orders swamped the market. Sell orders reportedly outnumbered buy orders by ten to one Shares can be suspended if they drop by a certain pre-defined limit. Shares had indicated a 20% drop. They are currently priced at a record low of 583 yen. Yesterday Mitsubishi had its biggest share fall for a decade after the Tokyo-based carmaker said it falsified data on for 625,000 vehicles. About 460,000 of these were made for Nissan. The vehicles affected are the ek Wagon and eK Space by Mitsubishi and the Nissan Dayz and Dayz Roox. None of the cars are sold in the UK. Mitsubishi is the latest carmaker to have admitted cheating on performance tests after German giant VW last year said it rigged emission tests. VW will reportedly buy back half a million diesel cars affected by the rigging from customers in the US because it is cheaper than fixing the fault. It will also pay compensation to car owners. T SB chief Paul Pester hopes the delay to the Competition and Markets Authority report into banking bodes well for his challenger bank. The Big Five still have a stranglehold with 85% of the market, he said. If a delay of three months means the CMA comes up with a result, it will be worth it. We want to see switching made much simpler including allowing people with overdrafts to use the switching service. Meanwhile, we must be the only service industry in this country that does not send its customers a bill at the end of every month. Charges need to be made much clearer. TSB, now owned by Spains Sabadell, saw first-quarter profits surge 75% to 59.9 million as it captured 7.1%, or 116,000, of the new and switched current accounts. Thats well above its own target of 6%. At present, it has a 4.5% share of the market with 4.8 million customers. Savings rose by 8.4% to 26.8 billion and lending was up 28.3% to 27.4 billion. A mancio Ortega, the Spanish billionaire founder of Zara, has seen the value of his sprawling London property empire surge to nearly 1.8 billion, it emerged today. Accounts just filed for the UK arm of his investment vehicle Pontegadea showed the value of the firms properties reached 1.79 billion in 2015, based on a valuation by the agent JLL. The figure was up substantially on the 620 million recorded in the 16 months to December 31, 2014. Pre-tax profit jumped to 47.5 million from 21.3 million. Ortega embarked on a spending spree in the capital last year, which saw Pontegadea snap up a 400 million stretch on Oxford Street including retail space. He also owns Devonshire House opposite the Ritz. So far this year, Pontegadea has forked out around 225 million for an office block in St Jamess called Almack House from Grosvenor Fund Management. The notoriously secretive fashion boss - the son of a railway worker - does not discuss his real estate business. A Conservative canvasser came to my boyfriends door recently. Would we be voting for Zac Goldsmith? When my boyfriend expressed his disquiet about the nastiness of the Tory mayoral campaign, the canvasser looked forlorn. Yeah, I agree, he said, shrugging his shoulders. He isnt the only one who has gone rogue. Even Tories in the party machine have criticised the Goldsmith campaign for what they believe is a focus on Sadiq Khans religion. Baroness Warsi wrote on Twitter: If Sadiq Khan isnt an acceptable enough Muslim to stand for London mayor, which Muslim is? Binita Mehta, Conservative group leader at Watford council, said: This reckless approach needs to be confronted before we compromise our hard work thus far to win over BME voters. Goldsmith says his campaign isnt divisive. He denies using inflammatory language, and notes hes never actually mentioned Khans religion. Of course he hasnt. But it was obvious as early as December when Goldsmith called Khan radical that we were going to have a vicious, dirty, personal Tory campaign. Words arent chosen willy-nilly; they go through focus groups. Few wouldnt know that radical is loaded when used against a Muslim. Then came Goldsmiths targeted leaflets: the British Indian and Tamil editions. British Indians were told Khan wants to tax family jewellery (he doesnt); Tamils that he didnt speak up about Sri Lanka when he was justice minister (he wasnt in the Foreign Office, so that wasnt his brief). Zac Goldsmith mayoral policies explained Now the main line of attack is to tar Khan by association, looking at those he either defended in his career as a human rights lawyer, or has spoken alongside. But defending unsavoury types rather goes with the territory in human rights: by their nature they apply even to those we deem despicable. And yes, I cant say Id be rushing to hang out with Islamic cleric Suliman Gani, whom Khan has shared a platform with (Goldsmith also once posed for a photograph with him). But you dont often vet whom you talk beside, and sharing a platform with someone doesnt mean you share all or indeed any of their views. It would guarantee a pretty dull discussion if you had universal agreement. Khan has always condemned extremism. He also voted in favour of gay marriage, something which resulted in him being condemned by hardline clerics and receiving death threats. But if youre going to drag politics into the gutter you had better make sure you smell of roses. Goldsmith doesnt. Both when he was running to be an MP and just after he was elected, his half-brother Robin Birley made donations to the Richmond Park Tory constituency office. You cant help who youre related to but you can choose whom you take money from. Birley was once a vocal supporter of the former Chilean dictator General Pinochet. Perhaps the difference is that the Islamist chap doesnt run a private members club. Khan, laudably, hasnt been making political capital out of this or of Goldsmith taking money from gambling industry lobbyists Camberton Associates. Even now, he says Zac is a nice guy but that he is being forced by CCHQ into a desperate campaign. Perhaps thats politically savvy of Khan anyway. Goldsmiths campaign doesnt seem to chime with London. This is a city that wants solutions, not smears; a mayor who unites rather than divides. Whats sad for Goldsmith is that if he loses, as the polls suggest he will, he wont even be able to look back and think: At least I didnt play dirty. Bernies still stuck in the dark ages Bernie Ecclestone he of Hitler got things done fame has questioned whether women will ever compete with men in F1. I dont know whether a woman would physically be able to drive an F1 car quickly and they wouldnt be taken seriously, he said at Advertising Week Europe. Whats weird is that women have already driven in F1: not particularly successfully, admittedly, but the tarmac ceiling has been smashed. And Ecclestone himself wanted to get NASCAR star Danica Patrick to race in the series but she declined. Perhaps she was put off by his hilarious 2005 quip about her overalls: Women should be dressed in white like all the other domestic appliances. Popes gesture was all about humanity As a Catholic, I do enjoy others preaching to the Pope about charity. Theres a pattern now: Francis does a good deed, critics pile in. So it has proved with his decision to take three families of Syrian refugees back to the Vatican after he visited Lesbos. More refugees will come now, his critics claimed, even though for Syrians its more a push (the brutality of Islamic State and the Assad regime) than a pull (European prosperity) force bringing them here. The more sophisticated argument against the Pontiff was that we shouldnt rescue the few we need to help the many. Thats right as a general strategy: the focus should be on improving conditions in refugee camps. But it ignores who the Pope is: the spiritual father to one billion. He rescued Muslims, not Catholics, because his message is that we are all Gods children. At a time when hearts are hardening, he reminded Catholics of our common humanity. That inspired at least one of us to donate again to refugees. A headline in The Times yesterday declared: Pope must learn you have to be cruel to be kind. I must have missed that one in Proverbs. * A symptom of Londons rapid gentrification has been the regular re-christening of areas. Thanks to estate agents and locals trying to drive up house prices, we hear about Bellevue Village (Wandsworth), Shad Thames fringes (Bermondsey) and Brook Green (Shepherds Bush). Near the prison doesnt cut it. Local authorities are guilty here too: a fellow journalist in Waltham Forest suddenly found he lived in Markhouse Village part of the councils mini-Holland plan. Sometimes aspirational rebranding goes beyond even the audacity of Foxtons, though. Outside Brixton Tube station, a sign reads South Chelsea School of English. A cab driver told me once that a woman had asked for South Chelsea too. Her house was over the river. In Battersea. M onarchy is a lottery, and quite often over the past millennium Britain has found herself with losing tickets in the shape of feckless, insane or downright tyrannical monarchs who plunged the country into wars, an abdication, insurrections and other such crises. With Queen Elizabeth II, however, this country and the 15 others over which she reigns have won the lottery. If we were setting out a job spec for what we need in our head of state, Her Majesty the Queen not only fulfills every criteria perfectly but she does it with a grace and sense of restrained grandeur and ineffable dignity that is hard to imagine in almost anyone else in public life. Simply considering the checklist is enough to remind us what we all owe this extraordinary woman. We need a head of state who can make us feel proud of being British; Elizabeth II has never once embarrassed us in all the tens of thousands of public appearances she has undertaken over the decades by anything she has said or done. Of how many other nations can that be said? We need someone with a profound sense of honour and duty; Elizabeth II is suffused with both and has for almost the whole postwar period been the perfect personal role model for her subjects. In a period of religious and spiritual upheaval we need a monarch who has a profound moral core, whose sincere belief in the precepts of how the life and words of Jesus Christ can benefit society underpins their entire outlook on life. Elizabeth II is the finest Defender of the Faith anyone could hope for, whose quiet but complete acceptance of her Saviours Way, Truth and Life literally defines her, while she also respects the myriad other faiths of so many of her subjects. We need an extremely hard-working head of state, capable of spending decades undertaking major and sometimes minor public occasions willingly and good-naturedly; in Elizabeth II we have someone who even in her ninth decade and now in her 10th works much harder for us than many younger members of the royal family. How she must sometimes prefer to be at home with her feet up having a gin and tonic and watching the racing on TV but never once has she allowed her personal preferences to outweigh her incredibly powerful sense of duty. She has a Trojan work ethic and is the personification of professionalism. Queen Elizabeth II - In pictures 1 /114 Queen Elizabeth II - In pictures PA Princess Elizabeth waving from the carriage as she drives in London in May 1928 PA The Queen wearing the Imperial State Crown and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh in uniform of Admiral of the Fleet wave from the balcony to the onlooking crowds around the gates of Buckingham Palace after the Coronation in 1953 PA England captain Bobby Moore receives the Jules Rimet Trophy from The Queen after England defeated West Germany in 1966 AP Queen Elizabeth II and Paddington Bear having cream tea at Buckingham Palace PA PA Wire Chris Jackson/Buckingham Palace via Getty Images PA The Queen sitting with her corgis at Virginia Water to watch competitors, including Prince Philip in the Marathon of the European Driving Championship, part of the Royal Windsor Horse Show in 1973 PA The then the Duke and Duchess of York with their daughter Princess Elizabeth at her christening on May 1, 1926. It was not expected that Elizabeth would become Queen PA Princess Elizabeth arriving at Olympia for the Royal Tournament in 1930 PA Two-year-old Princess Margaret with her sister Princess Elizabeth in 1933 PA Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother) with her eldest daughter on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, after the coronation of King George VI in May, 1937 PA Princess Elizabeth after she broadcast on Children's Hour from Buckingham Palace in October 1940 PA Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother) and King George VI with Elizabeth in April 1944, shortly before her 18th birthday PA Elizabeth at the wheel of an Army vehicle when she served during the Second World War in the Auxiliary Territorial Service in January 1945 PA Elizabeth holding her son Prince Charles after his christening ceremony in Buckingham Palace in December 1948 PA Princess Elizabeth and Lt Philip Mountbatten at Buckingham Palace after their wedding ceremony, November 20, 1947 PA And with her baby daughter, Princess Anne, after her christening at Buckingham Palace in October 1950 PA Queen Elizabeth II, in a black mourning outfit, waving as she returns to Clarence House in London the day after she became Queen in February 1952 PA Queen Elizabeth wearing the St Edward Crown and carrying the Sceptre and the Rod after her coronation at Westminster Abbey, June 2 1953 PA Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill bowing to Queen Elizabeth as he welcomes her and the Duke of Edinburgh to 10 Downing Street for dinner in April 1955 PA Her Majesty holds Prince Andrew during an outing in the grounds at Balmoral, Scotland. He was the first child to be born to a reigning monarch for 103 years PA The Queen wearing a leopard-skin coat at a Sandown Park race meeting in March 1962 PA The Royal Family in the grounds of Frogmore House, Windsor, Berkshire. Left to right: Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Anne, Prince Edward, Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles and Prince Andrew in 1968 PA The Queen on a walk-about in Portsmouth during her Silver Jubilee tour of Great Britain in June 1977 PA Her Majesty on a walkabout during a visit to Liberia, Antigua, during her Silver Jubilee tour of the Caribbean in October 1977. The Queen has travelled around the world 42 times, visiting 117 countries according to the official count during her 90 years - and all without a passport PA Queen Elizabeth II with some of her corgis walking the Cross Country course during the second day of the Windsor Horse Trials in 1980 PA Mother Teresa with the Queen in New Delhi, India in 1983 PA The Queen Mother, The Queen, Prince William, Prince Harry and the Prince and Princess of Wales after the christening ceremony of Harry in December 1984 PA Her Majesty takes the salute of the Household Guards regiments during the Trooping of the Colour ceremony in London in June 1985 PA The Queen surveys the scene at following the fire at Windsor Castle in November 1992 PA The Queen surveys the damage caused by the fire inside Windsor Castle in 1992 PA South Africa's President Nelson Mandela greets The Queen as she steps from the royal yacht Britannia in Cape Town at the official start of the her first visit to the country since 1947 PA Nelson Mandela, President of South Africa, and The Queen ride in a carriage along the Mall in 1996 PA The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh viewing the floral tributes to Diana, Princess of Wales, at Buckingham Palace following her death in 1997 PA Members of the Royal Family appear with The Queen Mother during celebrations to mark her 101st birthday in 2001 Getty Images The Queen and Prince Philip ride in the Golden State Carriage at the head of a parade from Buckingham Palace to St Paul's Cathedral celebrating the Queen's Golden Jubilee along The Mall in 2002 Getty Images The Queen waves to the crowd as she rides in the Gold State coach from Buckingham Palace to St Paul's Cathedral for a service of Thanksgiving to celebrate to her Golden Jubilee PA Her Majesty - and Berry the corgi - with the England rugby squad after the 2003 Rugby World Cup win PA The Queen smiles in 2004 during her visit of the Light Cavalry of the Honourable Artillery Company to present a Royal Warrant in Windsor Getty Images Prince of Wales and his new bride Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, with their families (L-R back row) Prince Harry, Prince William, Tom and Laura Parker Bowles (L-R front row) Duke of Edinburgh,The Queen and Camilla's father Major Bruce Shand in the White Drawing Room at Windsor Castle after their wedding ceremony in 2005 Getty Images The Queen in the Regency Room at Buckingham Palace in London looking at some of the cards which have been sent to her for her 80th birthday in April 2006 PA The Queen attends the Royal Windsor Horseshow in 2007 Getty Images The Queen is handed a puck by President of Slovakia Ivan Gasparovic before throwing in the puck to start an ice hockey match between Aqua City Poprad and Guildford Flames in 2008 Getty Images The Queen meets singer Lady Gaga following the Royal Variety Performance in 2009 Getty Images The Queen watches the International Driving Competition at the Royal Windsor Horse Show held in the grounds of Windsor Castle, Berkshire in 2009 PA The Queen studies and re-launches the new layout of the Monarchy Website in 2010 Getty Images The Queen inspects the Grenadier Guards in 2010 before presenting their new colours in the garden of Buckingham Palace Getty Images The Queen and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh wear 3 D glasses to watch a display and pilot a JCB digger, during a visit to the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research centre in 2010 Getty Images The Queen places a wreathe at Ground Zero in 2010 in New York to honor the victims of September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center AFP/Getty Images The Duke of Edinburgh looks on as aThe Queen talks with Pope Benedict XVI exchange gifts during an audience in the Morning Drawing Room at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh in 2010 PA U.S. President Barack Obama, The Queen and First Lady Michelle Obama arrive at Winfield House, the residence of the Ambassador of the United States of America, in Regent's Park in 2011 Getty Images The Queen is escorted by her grandson Prince William during a visit to RAF Valley in 2011 Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II drives her Range Rover as she attends Windsor Horse Show in 2011 Getty Images On stage outside Buckingham Palace in London with Charles, Camilla and a host of pop stars at the Diamond Jubilee concert during celebrations to mark her 60 years as sovereign in 2012 PA Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh, The Queen, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge onboard the Spirit of Chartwell during the Diamond Jubilee Pageant on the River Thames in 2012 Getty Images The Queen appears in cameo role for the opening of the London 2012 Olympic Games The Queen speaks during the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games Getty Images The Queen attends an audience with Pope Francis, during their one-day visit to Rome in 2013 Getty Images The Queen and Prince Charles, Prince of Wales watch the action during the Braemar Highland Games in 2014 Getty Images Queen posts first tweet signed 'Elizabeth R' in 2014 The Queen and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh visit the Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red evolving art installation at the Tower of London in 2014 PA The Queen sitting next to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh looks up during the Queen's Speech in House of Lords at the Palace of Westminster in 2015 Getty Images Her Majesty attends the formal unveiling of the new logo for Crossrail, which is being named the Elizabeth line, at the construction site of the Bond Street station in central London, February 23, 2016 Reuters The Queen sits at a desk in the Regency Room after recording her Christmas Day broadcast to the Commonwealth at Buckingham Palace in 2016 Getty Images Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, Charles, Prince of Wales, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, Princess Charlotte of Cambridge, Prince George of Cambridge, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, The Queen and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh watch a fly past during the Trooping the Colour in 2017 Getty Images The Queen arriving at the National Service of Thanksgiving to mark her 90th birthday at St. Paul's Cathedral Alex Lentati The Queen hands out Maundy money during the Royal Maundy service at Leicester Cathedral in 2017 Reuters The Queen and Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh (C-R) attend the Royal Maundy Service in Leicester Cathedral in 2017 EPA The Queen smiles as she departs after officially re-opening the The National Army Museum in 2017 Getty Images The Queen arrives at Hull Railway Station, during a visit to the city to mark its year as the UK City of Culture PA Service: The Duke of Edinburgh, The Queen and the Duchess of Cornwall observe from a balcony during the annual Remembrance Sunday Service at the Cenotaph in 2017 PA Queen Elizabeth II sits and laughs with Meghan, Duchess of Sussex in 2018 Getty Images The Queen joins Anna Wintour on the front row at London Fashion Week AW18 PA The Queen posts her first ever Instagram message in 2019 @RoyalFamily The Queen smiling during a visit to the headquarters of British Airways at Heathrow Airport, London, to mark their centenary year PA US President Donald Trump, Queen Elizabeth II, Melania Trump, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, during a group photo ahead of the State Banquet at Buckingham Palace, London PA The Queen with keeper Maia Gordon as Olive the duck walks alongside them during a visit to Gorgie City Farm in Edinburgh. PA The Queen talks to guests following the State Opening of Parliament at the Houses of Parliament Getty Images The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh in 2003 (Countess of Wessex/PA) PA Media The Queen sat alone at the Duke of Edinburghs funeral PA Wire The Queen sat alone at the Duke of Edinburghs funeral PA Wire Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh in the quadrangle of Windsor Castle PA Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh in the Oak Room at Windsor Castle, Berkshire, looking at their homemade wedding anniversary card, given to them by their great grandchildren Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, ahead of their 73rd wedding anniversary PA Queen Elizabeth II waits in the Drawing Room before receiving Liz Truss for an audience at Balmoral, Scotland PA We also need a monarch who can impart the wisdom of great age and experience to our political leaders, while treading the incredibly sharp line between advice and interference. Here again, Elizabeth II had proved to be the most astute of constitutional monarchs; not one of her 12 prime ministers since Sir Winston Churchill has failed to acknowledge that they have benefited from her encouragements and warnings over the past 64 years, although of course her exact remarks must remain forever secret. Nor has she ever entered the party political arena, unless her mild (and accurate) remark about how the Scots should think carefully before they destroyed her United Kingdom is counted, which it shouldnt be. We require our head of state to be able to swallow hard on occasion and do things that are politically necessary, however personally distasteful they may seem. We can imagine Elizabeth IIs private feelings on having to shake hands with Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Robert Mugabe, or have the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to stay at Buckingham Palace, but on each occasion she did what the politicians required of her, without betraying the slightest hint of the detestation she must have felt. In our multicultural country we need a monarch who genuinely treats everyone as equal, and sees no difference between people on the grounds of racial background and ethnicity. As someone who believes in the role of the Commonwealth for promoting good in the world, the Queen has no prejudices of any kind, which might be considered remarkable for someone born into the upper classes in 1926, when the foul bacillus of biological racism was rampant. She is able to connect with everyone in society, and embraces all races with an enthusiasm that has proved invaluable in defusing racial tensions in the period of mass New Commonwealth immigration since the Fifties. Seven things you didn't know about the Queen Indeed, throughout the great ructions in British society since she came to the throne in 1952 the Suez Crisis in the Fifties, the permissive society of the Sixties, economic decline in the Seventies, industrial unrest and the Falklands War in the Eighties, the rise of the European superstate in the Nineties, and the War against Terror since 9/11 the Queen has proved a bastion and bulwark in a period of often bewildering stress and change in her country. She has indeed been, as David Cameron described her today, our national rock around whom the swirls and eddies of successive crises can be seen in their proper perspective. This would simply not have happened if we had a different constitutional structure. Monarchy is often criticised for being a lottery but so is an elected presidency, writes the royal biographer William Shawcross. In the past 45 years Ireland has had to vote in seven presidents, few of them memorable, most of them just grazing. It is a good thing for politicians to know that there is always someone above them, someone who commands our loyalty and respect far more than any of them ever could or would. On 9/11 the Queen sent a message of condolence to the American people which included the haunting and beautiful phrase Grief is the price we pay for love. The British people love their Queen and rightly so, and it is marvellous to have an opportunity for us to show her at a time that isnt connected with grief but simply unalloyed happiness. In her we as a nation have won the lottery of monarchy, and we should celebrate our extraordinary luck in having had her as our sovereign for so very long. Professor Andrew Roberts is author of The Royal House of Windsor (Kindle) I s there any better way to see the world than hitting the open road with the windows down and a clear schedule to drive for days? City breaks and resorts can be a great way to unwind, but when it comes to really experiencing the thrill of adventure, nothing quite beats a cross-country road trip. From serene lakes to unspoilt coastlines, some of the most spectacular natural sites are best experienced from the drivers seat proving that often the journey, not the destination, is the best part. A good road trip, when planned and plotted properly, has the gift of showing you the best of the world assuming you know where to look. Whether you fancy cruising around one of Italy's prettiest corners or buckling up for an adventure in Ireland, we've done the hard yards for you, vetting some of the most stunning stretches of road on the planet. Click through our gallery to discover five of the most awe-inspiring drives that will keep you on the edge of your seat, mile after mile. Research by Expedia Finland Follow us on Twitter: @eslifeandstyle A "chubby and polite" flasher who said "excuse me" to a woman before allegedly exposing himself in south-east London is wanted by police. Officers in Lewisham have released an e-fit of a man they would like to speak to in relation to a series of indecent exposures. In the first incident the man approached two separate women and performed a sexual act on himself in Lee Green on March 7. Nearly a week later, on March 15, the same man exposed himself to a woman near Kidbrooke rail station after he "politely asked for directions", police say. On March 31, a woman was walking home from New Eltham railway station when a man called out to her, saying: "Excuse me, can you help me?" When she stopped, she noticed the man exposing himself. Detectives believe the same man, described as white, in his early 20s and of solid or chubby build, may be responsible for all the offences. Anyone with information should contact Lewisham CID via 101 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111. A student at Britains oldest Catholic university kissed and groped two women just minutes apart during drunken Freshers Week celebrations, a court heard. William Kelsey Harrison, 21, allegedly told one of the women Dont be boring as he forced himself on her early in the new term at St Marys University in Twickenham. The first alleged victim, 19, claims Harrison followed her into a bedroom and kissed her, Kingston crown court was told. She said he was decent looking but she did not want to go beyond kissing. He was kissing me down my neck and it was becoming forceful and he bit me and I flinched, she said. She said Harrison molested her and when he started taking off his trousers she fled. The woman told the court she had been drinking while getting to know fellow students. When she fled, she told the other students Youve got to get rid of him, the court heard. But when Harrison and another female, 20, went into a bedroom to get his coat, it is claimed he started trying to kiss her as well. Harrison, from Ely, Cambridgeshire, denies assault by penetration and sexual assault. The trial continues. T aking an aspirin once a day could boost the chances of beating cancer by up to 20 per cent, new research has revealed. Cancer patients can improve their odds of surviving breast, bowel and prostate cancer by as much as a fifth by taking the painkiller, the British study found. The research, carried out at Cardiff University, reviewed almost 50 studies over decades where cancer patients had taken aspirin alongside chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery and other conventional treatments. Aspirin - found in most household bathroom cabinets - is also thought to slow the effectiveness of other cancers. Professor Peter Elwood, who led the research, said everyone over the age of 50 should consider taking the drug. He told The Daily Mail: Our review, based on the available evidence, suggests that low-dose aspirin taken by patients with bowel, breast or prostate cancer, in addition to other treatments, is associated with a reduction in deaths of about 15 to 20 per cent, together with a reduction in the spread of the cancer. But some sceptics have pointed out that aspirin is capable of producing side-effects including bleeds on the stomach. Writing in the journal PLOS ONE, Professor Elwood said: We'd urge patients diagnosed with cancer to speak to their doctor about our findings so they can make an informed decision as to whether they should take a low-dose aspirin as part of their cancer treatment." Q uitting the EU risks damaging London as a global cultural centre, one of the capitals most influential arts bosses warned today. Sir Nicholas Kenyon, managing director of the Barbican Centre, said the EUs free movement of labour had helped Londons theatre, music and other arts to thrive. Writing in the Evening Standard today, he said one of the Barbicans most successful events last year was a new production of the Greek classic Antigone, starring French actress Juliette Binoche, directed by Belgian director Ivo van Hove and in association with Dutch theatre company Toneelgroep Amsterdam. The contribution Europe has made to the arts in London and the UK is very significant, Sir Nicholas added. Free movement of labour makes collaboration between artists and organisations far easier to realise by allowing artists and production teams to tour between countries without being subject to the bureaucracy of individual nations visa systems. He said this made it easier for London to attract a critical mass of creative people from across the EU to maintain its position at the heart of Europes creative economy. He argued that Britain needed to remain an active and engaged member of the EU, ensuring audiences have access to the finest art Europe has to offer. He added that the arts generate more than 4 billion a year for the UK economy. However, Munira Mirza, deputy mayor for education and culture, said this week that Britain should be much more global in our orientation than the EU is currently allowing. T he sound of gunfire rang out across London today to mark the Queen's landmark 90th birthday. At midday, the King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery rode their horses and gun carriages past Buckingham Palace and onwards to Hyde Park to stage a 41 Gun Royal Salute. The Honourable Artillery Company then drove through the city to the Tower of London in their liveried Pinzgauer vehicles from where they fired a 62 gun salute across the River Thames. Large crowds gathered to watch in the park, while others stood on the banks of the river, as the guns were fired to mark the historic occasion. Salute: Guns were fired from Hyde Park The sound of gunfire was accompanied by the chiming of bells, which rang out from Westminster Abbey, where the Queen was married and crowned, from 1pm. Flags were flying across the sunny capital from early this morning, while the Houses of Parliament will later be illuminated in red, white and blue to mark the date. And the military celebrations were not limited to the capital - gun salutes at Edinburgh and Stirling castles were also held at noon. From dusk beacons will be lit the length and breadth of the country, including on Ben Nevis, the UK's highest mountain, with the Queen lighting the Principal Beacon from Windsor Castle. A n inspector who was in charge of police at the east London canal where a teenager downed has insisted he was right not to ask officers to enter the water. Jack Susianta, 17, from Hackney, died after getting into the canal at Walthamstow Marshes in July last year while he was fleeing from police. Acting inspector James Reynolds told Jacks inquest at St Pancras Coroners Court that the Metropolitan Police does not expect people to jump in to the water but does expect them to do a dynamic assessment. Of the response of the police officers who were at the scene, he said: "I was satisfied they were doing all they could do." He said the officers "appreciated the urgency" and were communicating in a "calm manner" to Jack, who had suffered a psychotic episode, smashed through a window at his family home and fled in just a T-shirt, boxer shorts and socks. The teenager's mental state also meant he feared the police were not the real police, the jury previously heard. Insp Reynolds, who was in charge at the scene, had declared Jack a high-risk missing person and believed there were substantial grounds to fear he could come to harm. After he got into the canal, officers threw 82ft (25m) life ropes to Jack as he became submerged, but the teenager did not grab them. Coroner Mary Hassell asked Insp Reynolds if he felt he made the right decision in not asking while he was in the car en route to the scene whether anyone was a strong swimmer. He said: "Yes, the rationale for me is that it felt like there was an effective rescue plan in place and they were carrying out a dynamic risk assessment." He described the water as "dismal" and "really oily, dark and you could not see below the surface". Within minutes of arriving at the scene a police officer had asked to go into the water. Insp Reynolds said that during this "quite frantic" stage he had not stopped anyone from going into the water. Regarding the police officer's request to go into the canal, Insp Reynolds said: "I could not give that authorisation - it is for you to make a risk assessment." The coroner said one interpretation of that comment is that he was not taking responsibility and was stepping back from the situation. Insp Reynolds replied: "I think I answered that in the best way that I can. I answered in a way that people [police officers] could understand." Asked if in retrospect he would have done anything different, Insp Reynolds said: "I did have sleepless nights. I brood about it a lot - it is nothing compared to what Jack's mum has suffered though - but looking back at it, no, I believe not." He also told the inquest he was confident of his ability to do a good job, saying he was well trained and had been in frontline policing throughout his career. The inquest was adjourned until Monday. Additional reporting by Press Association. U S President Barack Obama has arrived in London ahead of his latest UK visit. Air Force One landed at Stansted Airport on Thursday evening as the President and wife Michelle touched down for their latest stay in Britain. On Friday, Mr Obama and the First Lady are due to be hosted by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge as well as Prince Harry at Kensington Palace. He is also expected to have lunch with the Queen and Prince Philip at Windsor Castle His visit comes amid speculation he will intervene the debate over whether Britain should stay or leave the European Union. Before he left for the UK, his deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters in Washington: As the president has said, we support a strong United Kingdom in the European Union. The Presidents presence is likely to provide a significant boost for the In campaign but his expected foray has been labelled "hypocritical" by Boris Johnson, who is spearheading the drive for Britain to exit the EU. Mr Johnson told the Standard: I honestly dont mind the idea of him joining the debate. "Where we do part company, and where I do mind, is that it is plainly hypocritical for America to urge us to sacrifice control of our laws, our sovereignty, our money and our democracy when they would not dream of ever doing the same. L ondon commuters are facing rail chaos this evening after a signalling fault sparked a raft of delayed and cancelled services. South West Trains warned passengers face severe disruption because of signal problems at Barnes. Lines have been blocked affecting trains travelling between Clapham Junction and Richmond or Chiswick, which has caused delays to journeys across the capital. Travellers took to Twitter to describe chaos on the railways. One woman tweeted: Absolute nightmare of a journey! No @SW_Trains to Putney from Waterloo and no one to say when the train will actually move. Fran Perrow wrote: "Meltdown at Waterloo - all lines blocked through Barnes @SW_Trains." Matt Nixon wrote: It's chaos as usual at Waterloo w no info and cancelled trains. Please tell us more so we can act accordingly." While Ioan Williams added: Nothing moving at waterloo. South West Trains said the disruption was likely to last until 8pm. A suspected drone that struck a British Airways jet as it prepared to land at Heathrow Airport could have been a plastic bag, a minister has said. Transport minister Robert Goodwill admitted the object that hit the passenger plane had not been confirmed as a remote-controlled device. On Sunday, a pilot on a BA flight from Geneva told police the aircraft was travelling at about 1,700ft when the front of the plane was struck. Police and the Air Accidents Investigation Branch are investigating. All you need to know to fly a drone Today in front of a House of Lords committee, Mr Goodwill cautioned against overreacting to the incident following safety fears and calls for the Government to tighten legislation against the use of drones. He said: "The reported drone strike on Sunday has not been confirmed it was actually a drone. It was the local police force that tweeted that they had a report of a drone striking an aircraft. "And indeed the early reports of a dent in the front of the plane were not confirmed - there was no actual damage to the plane and there's indeed some speculation that it may have even been a plastic bag or something. "I've not actually landed a 747 at Heathrow but I've landed the simulator and the pilot has a lot of other things to concentrate on so we're not quite sure what they saw so I think we should maybe not overreact too much." Asked what the Government could do to tighten the laws around drone usage, he said: There are already existing laws in place that require the user of drones to maintain direct unaided visual contact with their vehicle and not to recklessly or negligently permit an aircraft to endanger any person or property. "So this instance that we've read about and is alleged were already breaking existing legislation and the Department [of Transport] and the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) are working with a wide range of industry partners across the sector, including manufacturers, airports and airlines to ensure our understanding of potential hazards to aircrafts remains up-to-date." Heathrow chief executive John Holland-Kaye said while there had been no confirmation that the plane was hit by a drone, it was important the Government take notice of the issue. He said: It is the right thing for the Government to take action. People need to be more careful when flying heavy objects above peoples heads." A flagship Tory council today proposed to develop homes in outer London boroughs for its homeless households. Westminster City Council denied it was seeking to dump poorer families in places such as Hounslow by pushing for a relaxation of rules on housing homeless people. It wants to use funds raised for social housing through planning deals with developers to pay for homes, and support for homeless people, beyond its boundaries. But shadow human rights minister Andy Slaughter slammed the proposals, saying: This is social cleansing at its worst. This is appalling behaviour by a local authority trying to off-load poorer residents into outer boroughs. Daniel Astaire, the councils cabinet member for housing, regeneration, business and economic development, told MPs a more London-wide approach was needed to deal with homelessness. He said: There are parts of London, Hounslow for instance, where there are housing zones which we could, if we were able to, buy into and work with. "There are places around the M25 that are also suitable. Its not dumping people in an area, its contributing to a community and growing another community. Mr Astaire told the Commons communities and local government committee there had to be a balance between the social housing provided and the bill for council-tax payers. Homes for homeless families also needed to be sustainable, he added, highlighting the risks of households being forced out of their new homes again due to difficulties paying rent as they rise even higher in some areas. A wait for a four-bedroom social housing home in Westminster is now 25 years, 10 years for a two-bedroom home and three years for a studio flat. Mr Astaire said a significant amount of social housing funds came from section 106 agreements with developers. But he said town halls were hampered by guidance and legislation that meant they had to use this money locally. Westminster has the highest number of rough sleepers in the country. The council said around two thirds were economic migrants in 2014-15, mainly from eastern Europe. W ith Andrew Neil and Camilla Long among others spotted last week at the Waterloo East Theatre, Corbyn: The Musical has been the talk of the town all month. One person, however, has found himself left in the cold and unable to attend the play: Tom Watson. Writing his diary for this weeks New Statesman, Labours deputy leader laments: Ive never been banned from a musical before. The creators of Corbyn: The Musical seemed to go to extraordinary lengths to prevent me from reviewing their play about Islingtons most famous Lefty for the Staggers. Pray tell what is this conspiracy? He continues: First they declined to provide me with a review ticket because I am not a serious theatre critic. Hard to argue with that, The Londoner thinks. Then they pointed out that every paid-for ticket was sold out its good to know that Jeremys popular appeal has not faded. Not to be deterred, this publications resourceful arts editor took to Twitter to ask if anyone who had already bought tickets might be willing to donate a spare. The shows writers then claimed that all tickets were strictly non-transferable. This seems odd as several people on Twitter have been spotted trying to give theirs away. In any case, Watson may not have missed out on much. Anoosh Chakelian and Stephen Bush did review it for said Staggers, and respectively said it doesnt quite manage to reach beyond the ordinary but is no worse than anything David Hare has written since the Iraq War. ----- To the May Fair Hotel last night to celebrate a theatre project bringing Syrian refugees for a summer UK tour.Refuge Productions Queens of Syria weaves 15 womens stories of exile into Euripedes The Trojan Women. One fundraiser was culture minister Ed Vaizey, who told us of the power of culture. On the 400th anniversary of the Bards death, he revealed his favourite Shakespeare play: The Comedy of Errors. He clearly enjoys a good farce. Uncle Sadiq is missing his loyal leader Will Sadiq Khan ever see Jeremy Corbyn again? Islington South MP Emily Thornberry tweeted about campaigning with mayoral contender Uncle Sadiq on Sunday. But Jeremy of Islington North was nowhere to be seen not for the first time when Khan has visited. Corbyns people told The Londoner he was travelling back from Liverpool and that Sadiq wasnt actually in Corbyns constituency. On Jeremy Vines BBC Radio 2 show yesterday, Sadiq sought to clear the air. Anybody who knows me knows that Im not hostile. To paraphrase Michael Jackson in The Girl Is Mine: Im a lover not a fighter. Its not the first time Khan has used pop to express his feelings, telling us that hed wake up with tears on my pillow if he lost the mayoral election at a Kylie Minogue-themed campaign event last month. Why did Corbyn Beat It? ----- It may have a while to go before matching the Queen but the streamers were still out for the fourth birthday party of Spectator Life magazine at Belgraves in Knightsbridge. Guests included actress Charlotte Spencer, right, who played Christine Keeler in the Stephen Ward musical, the magazines editor Toby Young, pictured top right with design critic Stephen Bayley, and journalists Rachel Johnson and Robert Peston, above. Also there was mayoral candidate George Galloway, pictured middle right with his wife Putri Gayatri Pertiwi, harrumphing over the Tories linking Sadiq Khan with extremism. Its dirty politics, he said. Thats what Lynton Crosby does. Maybe he should employ him? I wish I could afford it. ----- The Londoner was certainly well refreshed last night with beer in Borough Market. Sara Barton, of Brewsters, has lined up an all-star team of British beer mavens to create Pankhurst, a delightful number inspired by the suffragettes and brewed with Dr Helen Pankhurst, a descendant of Emmeline. Catherine Mayer of the Womens Equality Party was among those who turned up to toast the feminist brew, which inspires voters in parts other beers cannot reach. They should fly off the shelves much faster than The Order of Yoni, a beer made with vaginal yeast which failed to get off the ground this month. Funny that. Will the pen prove mighty for Vince? Vince Cable, pictured, has written many a tome on economics but could he become the new E L James? The Londoner was at Portcullis House last night for a Brexit debate organised by the Centre for Opposition Studies but was more interested in Cables announcement that hes written his first semi-romantic novel. Its semi-political, he told Richmond magazine last month. Its about two couples and relationships which evolve from an arms contract between Britain and India. They may tell me it is awful and put it in the bin. Has anything happened since? My literary agent liked it, he told The Londoner, and Im desperate to hear from the publisher. The big yes or no is this week. Fingers crossed. Brains behind the beauty An evening of head-scratching last night in Marylebone last night as designer Zoe Jordan hosted a pub quiz at The Larrik to mark her new Knitlab XY collection, compered by cheeky-chappie radio presenter George Lamb. Zoes father, former Formula 1 team boss Eddie Jordan, got into the competitive spirit, and he was joined by Samantha Camerons sister Emily Sheffield and Leah Wood, daughter of Ronnie, who proved handy when it came to answering the Rolling Stones questions. The team led by tailor Patrick Grant were victorious. The Londoner, meanwhile, smashed the picture round but fared worse at real-life facial recognition. Gosh, you could be a model, The Londoner said to a strikingly beautiful woman on our team. Oh, thank you, I am! she replied. Turns out she was Swedish supermodel Caroline Winberg, pictured. S adiq Khan today accused Tory strategist Lynton Crosby of locking away the charming Zac Goldsmith that I knew to unleash a bitterly divisive mayoral election campaign. The Labour frontrunner attacked Sir Lynton after David Cameron criticised Mr Khans judgment for sharing platforms with hardline clerics. Mr Khan said both his Tory rival Mr Goldsmith and the Prime Minister would come to regret the divisive election strategy and accused election guru Sir Lynton of masterminding the negative campaign. The Zac Goldsmith that I knew, the Zac Goldsmith who has been locked away by Crosby, is charming, personable, wants to mix with people of different faiths, understands the importance of unity, celebrates the diversity of London, he said. Sir Lyntons firm is overseeing Mr Goldsmiths campaign, although he is not directly involved. His business partner Mark Fullbrook, a former head of campaigns for the Tories, is campaign director. Mr Khan criticised Mr Camerons attack, which sparked angry scenes in Parliament yesterday and accusations from Labour MPs that the comments were racist. He told a New Statesman event: Im disappointed in what the Prime Minister said. I think what he is doing is getting involved in Zac Goldsmiths campaign which has been very negative. Mr Khan has not denied coming into contact with radical imam Suliman Gani accused by Mr Cameron of supporting Islamic State and other unsavoury individuals. But he has pointed to his past as a human rights lawyer and chair of human rights group Liberty. Mr Goldsmith has described the cleric as one of the most repulsive men in Britain but in embarrassing revelations for the Tories it emerged Mr Gani also attended a political event with Mr Goldsmith and the pair have been photographed together. The imam claimed he had backed Tory candidate Dan Watkins at the last general election against Mr Khan in Tooting and even supplied canvassers for his campaign. He has also been pictured with several other Tory MPs. After the election the Tories asked him for help to find potential local councillors, he claimed, and Mr Watkins invited him to a Conservative Muslim Forum in Tooting meeting last autumn, where he met Mr Goldsmith. Mr Goldsmith said: The thread that runs through every piece of literature that I have put out has been about my action plan for London. I t is a familiar story: a senior Labour figure in a heated election is denounced for sharing platforms with extremists. Amid cries of foul play, he is accused of legitimising vile individuals who seek to divide society, and of sending wrong signals. Did you assume I was describing this weeks Tory attack on Sadiq Khan for having repeatedly attended events alongside people who made repulsive anti-Semitic or homophobic comments, or are linked to terrorist sympathisers? Wrong. The quotes are from Labours former shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, speaking last August about her party leader Jeremy Corbyns almost identical record of sharing platforms with Islamist extremists such as Raed Salah, the so-called blood libel cleric. We have a responsibility not to give them legitimacy warned Ms Cooper. London Mayor Election 2016: Sadiq Khan Curiously, she has suddenly changed her tune now that her friend Mr Khan is coming under the same criticism of his own record from Tory mayoral rival Zac Goldsmith and David Cameron. She turned her guns on Mr Goldsmith for attacking Mr Khans judgment in speaking alongside people like Suliman Gani, who has called women subservient to men, and Azzam Tamimi who was quoted in Parliament as having said Israeli Jews should sail on the sea in ships back to where they came, or drown in it. Ms Cooper now declared: What started as a subtle dog-whistle is becoming a full blown racist scream. She was quickly followed by Chuka Umunna and the Lib-Dem former Cabinet minister Vince Cable who adopted the term Islamophobia to denounce Mr Goldsmith for raising such questions. In the Commons yesterday, the Prime Minister said Labour MPs were shouting down the questions because they dont want to hear the truth. If Mr Cameron was right, it would not be the first time the shout of racism has been used to deter debate and investigation. But with the election for Mayor of London just two weeks away, a choice that will affect the lives of 8.6 million, it is right to ask difficult questions of the candidates without fear or favour. The first question for Mr Khan is why he shared so many platforms before he became an MP in 2005 with so many unpleasant individuals whose unacceptable comments about women, gays, Jews and non-believers perhaps did not deserve what Ms Cooper called the legitimising effect of having a proper mainstream politician alongside? The Tooting MP has a ready answer, which is that he makes no apology for having been a human rights lawyer. But the problem is that the individuals in question were actually not clients of Mr Khan at all. For example, he spoke at a conference alongside Yasser al-Sirri, who claimed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden died an honourable death, and Sajeel Abu Ibrahim, who the Sunday Times reported ran a camp in Pakistan that trained militants including the 7/7 bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan. In neither case was he giving legal advice. Mr Khans office responds that he was invited as a lawyer and as chair of Liberty, and that he used the conference to explain legal cases he had been involved in, reportedly one involving three members of the militant group Hizb-ut-Tahrir. But that begs the question why he lent his reputation as a rising political figure and the name of Liberty to such meetings where speakers who lacked Mr Khans own decent values might grow stronger by association with him. As a partner in the booming legal firm Christian Khan, the future Tooting MP developed a specialism in suing the police and advised that spotting a human rights angle would increase the chances of fees being met from legal aid. Think laterally in looking for human rights issues, he counselled in a how-to guide called Actions Against The Police. Many are not obviously a breach of human rights, but have a human rights angle. He certainly helped families who had suffered injustice, including shocking deaths in custody, but why did he also use his talents to help less deserving individuals? Mr Khan sued the Labour government for banning American firebrand Louis Farrakhan, who once described Jews as bloodsuckers, from entering the UK. The future MP told the BBC: Its outrageous and astonishing that the British government is trying to exclude this man. However, lawyers for David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, pointed out that Farrakhan, who had been barred since 1986 for expressing anti-Semitic and racist views, could endanger public order in exactly the sort of communities Mr Khan grew up in. WHY did the talented legal star fight for such people? Interviewed by this newspaper last week, he argued that like any lawyer he represented both decent and unsavoury clients to the best of his abilities. But it is worth noting that the cab rank principle, which obliged barrister Cherie Blair to represent controversial clients, does not apply to solicitors like Mr Khan who are free to pick and choose who they champion. In 2008, now an MP and a government minister, Mr Khan alarmed Hazel Blears, the Labour Cabinet minister, by attending a controversial conference called Global Peace and Unity (GPU) which was attended by extremists as well as mainstream Muslims. Ms Blears, the Communities Secretary, whose brief included countering the growing menace of extremist propaganda, felt strongly that government ministers should stay away. An insider recalls: There were T-shirts on sale that said slogans like kill the invader and some individuals we deemed politically unacceptable. The argument was that even putting people up to argue against them would backfire by creating a spectrum of acceptability in which they were included. It would give them a platform they do not deserve. That in essence is the fundamental argument against platform-sharing with extremists, the same argument advanced by Ms Cooper last summer. However, Mr Khan went along to GPU as a government minister with civil servants. There are many possible explanations for Mr Khans past behaviour. Did he, like many Labour politicians, simply move from the radical Left to the centre as he grew more experienced? Or was the young Mr Khan carried away by ambition to make a name for himself and build his business? If so, it would be entirely understandable for a lad from a council estate fighting his way to success, and completely forgivable in a capital city whose greatest eminences often had regrettable early episodes in their lives. But Mr Khan cannot explain because he wont even acknowledge there was anything odd about his record of platform-sharing and speaking up for nasty pieces of work, such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian Islamic scholar associated with the Muslim Brotherhood who once said: Oh God, deal with the usurpers and oppressors and tyrannical Jews. Why did Mr Khan deny in evidence to a Commons committee that al-Qaradawi was an extremist? His spokesman says, youve guessed it, he was speaking as a lawyer although, strictly, the Islamist was not actually a client. He was not speaking as Sadiq Khan, he was acting as a lawyer for MCB [Muslim Council of Britain] reflecting his clients views in a quasi-legal setting. Mr Khan was chair of the legal affairs committee of the MCB, giving evidence to a Home Affairs committee inquiry into terrorism and community relations. With questions and attacks flying, it is perhaps fitting to give the last word to Yvette Cooper, who expressed such a very resolute view just eight months ago. I think we have to be very firm about the fact that those who are involved in terrorism, or extremism or anti-Semitic abuse, you shouldnt be legitimising them, she told the Telegraph. I think you have to be very responsible about that. The questions will not simply go away. Londoners deserve proper answers. Watch our head-to-head debate between Zac Goldsmith and Sadiq Khan live on our Facebook page and London Live from 7pm tonight. B ritain's armed forces minister today unleashed a salvo of criticism at American backing for the UK to stay in the EU, just hours before Barack Obama arrives to warn against Brexit. Penny Mordaunt tore into eight former US treasury secretaries who said it would be a risky bet for Britain to leave. They argued it would be difficult for the UK to negotiate trade deals outside of the European grouping. But Ms Mordaunt, who has chaired Conservative Friends of America and been head of foreign press for George W Bush, wrote to them: If you were ever prepared to allow your great nation to give up control of its money and borders, and hand the creation of your laws and the judgments made on them to another power, I will happily re-examine your views. Until then I hope you will reflect on how your attitude and arguments square with the values of the land of the free and the home of the brave. Former US treasury chief Larry Summers, who served under Bill Clinton, said Brexit risked damaging the global influence of the special relationship between Britain and America. He, George Shultz and others also warned that quitting the EU could jeopardise Londons position as a global financial centre. But Ms Mordaunt said prosperity relied on national security, which was being undermined by the EU: Perhaps the greatest threat to peace and security has been the failure of the EU to recognise the needs of its member states what they need to thrive economically and protect themselves from those who wish them ill. The result is civil unrest, the rise of extremism, tensions between states increasing and trust between them diminishing. She accused the European Court of Justice of chipping away at our ability to share intelligence with the US. At a joint press conference with David Cameron in London tomorrow, Mr Obama is expected to lay out his support for Britain staying in the union. Tony Blairs former spin chief Alastair Campbell claimed Brexit would play into the hands of Islamic State terrorists who aim to destabilise Europe. The EU referendum is on June 23. T he family of Fusilier Lee Rigby have slammed right-wing group Britain First over an election broadcast last night which referred to his murder. Candidate for London mayor Paul Golding was filmed in Woolwich, where the soldier was murdered by Islamic extremists in 2013, and complained there was no memorial to him. In an broadcast shown on on BBC and ITV, he said: "We've come here to Woolwich, to the spot where Lee Rigby was butchered and they still haven't put a memorial on this spot to that poot young man. But in a statement, the Rigby family distanced themselves from the party's views. Broadcast: Paul Golding was filmed in Woolwich / Britain First They said: "We understand that Britain First are planning to refer to Lee's death in a party political broadcast to be broadcast tonight on the BBC and ITV and that they filmed close to where he died. "The family have always said that Britain First's views are not what Lee believed in and they have absolutely no support from his family. We have repeatedly asked Britain First and other political parties not to use Lee's name to promote their views. "Britain First also claim that there is no permanent memorial to Lee at the site of his death. There is a permanent memorial to Lee at St George's Chapel in Woolwich, which is what we wanted." Britain First's website said the party had faced "quite a struggle" in getting its broadcast cleared for transmission, blaming "Soviet commissars" at the BBC and ITV for asking for changes before accepting a "heavily santised version". Fusilier Rigby was stabbed to death at the age of 25 in an attack while off duty near the Royal Artillery Barracks. His murderers Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale were sentenced to life imprisonment. Z ac Goldsmith has a mountain to climb to avoid defeat in the race to be Mayor after Sadiq Khan opened up an 11-point lead in first preference votes, according to a new poll. The YouGov survey for the Standard put Conservative Mr Goldsmith on 20 per cent, with Labours Mr Khan on 31 per cent. The gap was seven points in March. A quarter of Londoners are still dont knows, while a further eight per cent would not vote. Pollsters believe many members of these groups in expressing such a view so close to polling day are unlikely to vote. Loading.... Once dont knows and would not vote are excluded, Tooting MP Mr Khans first preference lead extends to 16 points, taking into account likelihood to vote. Ukips Peter Whittle is on seven per cent, Green Sian Berry is six per cent, Liberal Democrat Caroline Pidgeon is on five per cent, while Respects George Galloway is hardly troubling the scorer. Zac Goldsmith mayoral policies explained Mr Khan would be short of a majority on first preferences, on 48 per cent, compared to Mr Goldsmiths 32 per cent. The figures almost mirror headline voting intentions in London, with Conservatives on 30 per cent and Labour 46 per cent. The poll suggests the mayoralty will be decided on second preferences. Once included, without dont knows and would not vote, and weighted by likelihood to vote, the Labour contender is on 60 per cent and the Richmond Park MP on 40 per cent. TODO: define component type apester Laurence Janta-Lipinski, of YouGov, said: Sadiq is on course for victory, built on his partys core vote, while Zac Goldsmith is left with a mountain to climb. Mr Khan is around three times ahead in inner London and narrowly in front in outer London. More Londoners believe the former Labour minister, rather than backbencher Mr Goldsmith, will improve their quality of life, tackle Islamic extremism, keep Londoners safe, improve policing and modernise the transport network. The two are almost level-pegging on who will clean up Londons air, while more people say Mr Goldsmith will cost me more. He is also trailing over being trustworthy, principled, whether he will deliver on promises and cares about people like me, although he is seen as more ambitious. Mr Khan is seen as more likely to change his mind, after a U-turn on support for Heathrow expansion. However, Mr Goldsmith is seen by more people as out of touch, divisive, boring and slippery. YouGov interviewed 1,017 adults in London between April 15 and 19. Watch our head-to-head debate between Zac Goldsmith and Sadiq Khan live on our Facebook page and London Live from 7pm tonight. I n yet another break with tradition, Cadbury has announced plans to ditch the twist-off wrappers from its Roses chocolates, which date back to 1938. The US owners of the the company are also changing the shape of two of the chocolates, the hazel in caramel and the coffee escape. Its tradional twist-off wrappers are to be replaced with more modern tear-off flow wrappers, which are sealed around the chocolate and removed by tearing a jagged edge. The well known crescent shape of the much-loved hazel in caramel is set to be replaced with a rounded square, which the company claims is a better fit for the mouth. New design: they will be replaced with more modern tear-off wrappers / Cadbury Dave Shepherd, head of innovation at Cadbury, said: "Holding the chocolate in your mouth and letting it melt slightly before you bite will allow for maximum flavour and the moment of enjoyment will last even longer. "That's why we've opted for this new design, as the more rounded and smoother shape fits better to the contours of your mouth, creating a better melt in the mouth experience." The new wrapper design will hit the shelves before the end of this year, while the new chocolate shapes will be found in boxes from later this month, in a 3 million brand makeover. Cadbury, a historic British brand, was controversially taken over by American firm Kraft in 201, and is now owned by US firm Mondelez. Marketing manager Claire Low said: "The number one complaint about Cadbury Roses in 2014 was around the issue of poorly wrapped chocolates tainting the flavours of other chocolates in the tub. We wanted to take steps to ensure quality is of the highest standard in every pack. "Although we appreciate there may be some traditionalists who still love the old twist wrap, it is important to us to ensure that we listen to the majority of our customers and address their issues by delivering Cadbury Roses in the highest quality." B eacons across Britain have been lit to celebrate the Queens 90th birthday on a day the country celebrates the monarchs milestone. Her Majesty began the celebrations by lighting the first beacon outside Windsor Castle at 7pm before the rest of the country follows suit. Fires were lit in several areas across London to mark the occasion. The Standard provided a list of places joining the beacon brigade after contacting each London borough but the list was incomplete as some authorities did not answer requests. Queen Elizabeth II's big life moments Earlier today, the sound of gunfire rang out across the capital to mark the monarch's landmark birthday. At midday, the King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery rode their horses and gun carriages past Buckingham Palace and onwards to Hyde Park to stage a 41 Gun Royal Salute. The Honourable Artillery Company then drove through the city to the Tower of London in their liveried Pinzgauer vehicles from where they fired a 62 gun salute across the River Thames. At 1pm, bells were sounded at Westminster Abbey, where the Queen was married and crowned. The Houses of Parliament were illuminated in red, white and blue to mark the date. The Prince of Wales paid tribute to his mother, wishing her the "most special and happiest of birthdays". Charles, at a beacon lighting ceremony at Windsor Castle to mark the Queen's 90th birthday, spoke of the "love and affection" for her throughout the country and the Commonwealth. He called the head of state "Mummy" during his short address - often his introduction for the monarch during royal celebrations. C onsultants at the hospital featured in Channel 4 show 24 Hours In A&E have launched a campaign to reassure patients that full emergency care will be provided during next weeks junior doctors strikes. Senior medics at St Georges, Tooting, set up a stall in the foyer and published messages and a video on social media to allay fears about the impact of the two walkouts, to take place from 8am to 5pm on Tuesday and Wednesday. Consultants at other hospitals including The Royal London, Kings College and Lewisham will also provide full services in urgent care departments. Many have cancelled days off or admin time to be present on the shop floor to support their junior colleagues. Neel Bhanderi, an emergency consultant at St Georges, said 19 consultants would be on duty next Tuesday to fill rota gaps. The hospital has about 60 juniors in A&E. He added: People are coming in on days off or doing a 10-hour shift rather than 8.5 or nine hours. We all support the juniors who support the strike. We want to get the message out that if you are ill, still come to hospital. You are going to get seen by senior people. Its unprecedented the way the whole profession is united. Consultants in maternity wards have also vowed to cover absent juniors. Messages with the hashtag #consultantcover are being posted to reassure patients. Next weeks action, in a dispute over the imposition of unsafe new contracts for junior doctors, will be the first withdrawal of emergency care in NHS history. Last night the 22 medical royal colleges urged Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt to resume talks with the British Medical Association. Yesterday junior doctors took their protest to a hospital site in Canada Water where Secret Cinema is showing horror film 28 Days Later. A McDonalds customer has been charged with robbery after emptying a cup of water and filling it with a fizzy drink at a drive-through restaurant. The restaurant manager called police to report a robbery after three customers walked into the chain in Springdale, Arkansas, allegedly emptied their water cups and filled them with soft drinks. The trio had parked up and entered the restaurant after ordering three large cups of water at the drive-thru window, according to a US news outlet. But once inside the restaurant, police said the manager spotted the three men emptying the cups of water and filling them with fizzy drinks instead. Police said the manager asked them to return the drinks, but one of the men, an 18-year-old, allegedly refused. The suspect then reportedly reversed his car into the restaurant manager as he tried to stop it from leaving the car park. Police said the manager alleged that he was struck on the hand as tried to get the keys out of the ignition and then hit by the vehicle again. Officers arrested the driver after finding his car at a nearby bowling alley and he was later charged with robbery. W restling legend Chyna has been found dead at her LA home, the star's manager has revealed. Anthony Anzaldo told local media the 45-year-old was found yesterday afternoon at her Redondo Beach property. Born Joan Laurer, the actress and occasional reality star shot to fame as a star of WWE in the mid-1990s where she was dubbed "The Ninth Wonder of the World". Police told the Los Angeles Times: "The Redondo Beach Police received a 911 call from a friend of the apartment unit resident that the female inside was not breathing. "The friend told Redondo Beach Police that the female had not answered her phone in a few days, and went to the location to check on her welfare. Officers arrived on scene and discovered a deceased female inside the location." In a statement, her management team said: "It is with deep sadness to inform you today that we lost a true icon, a real life superhero. "Joanie Laurer, aka Chyna, the 9th wonder of the world has passed away. "She will live forever in the memories of her millions of fans and all of us that loved her." WWE Chief Brand Officer Stephanie McMahon said: "She was in our industry, and she will be missed." J ack Dee is to headline a Royal Albert Hall concert to help fund research into Parkinsons. Dee and fellow panellists from Radio 4s Im Sorry I Havent A Clue team are the first act to be confirmed for the return of the Symfunny fundraising show. It was set up by composer James Morgan, who was diagnosed in 2012 at the age of 43, and his soprano wife Juliette Pochin. They staged the first Symfunny in 2014. Now they are being joined as co-curators by Paul Mayhew-Archer, 63, the writer of Mrs Browns Boys and The Vicar Of Dibley, who was diagnosed in 2011. Dee, 54, said: "We are delighted to join the fight against Parkinson's and play silly games in the magnificent setting of the Royal Albert Hall. "This extraordinary creation was of course the brainchild of Prince Albert who decided the country needed a new disease after the Bubonic Plague was eradicated. "There is still no cure for Parkinson's, a much misunderstood condition, so what better show to help the cause than "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue". "As for the Royal Albert Hall, Queen Victoria laid the first stone in 1867 and we are pleased to reveal our very own Samantha laid four more Stones after a concert in the sixties." Tickets for the second show, which will raise funds for Parkinsons UK and will be held on April 19 next year, go on sale today. S uki Waterhouse says her history-mad father is helping to prepare her for a forthcoming role in a major Winston Churchill biopic. The Londoner, 24, who quit formal education to pursue a modelling career aged 16, is taking lessons from her father to make up for her bad schooling. She will star with Stanley Tucci, Brian Cox and Miranda Richardson in the film, Churchill, which begins shooting in June. Waterhouse, who also starred in this years Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, said: Luckily, Ive got my dad. Hes one of the most well-read people. "If you could see our living room weve got masks and Greek and Roman helmets and all this stuff. Pride And Prejudice And Zombies - UK premiere 1 /10 Pride And Prejudice And Zombies - UK premiere Ladies' line-up Bella Heathcote, Millie Brady, Suki Waterhouse, Ellie Bamber, Hermione Corfield and Lily James attend the European Premiere of 'Pride And Prejudice And Zombies Dave Benett Rising star Lily James poses on the red carpet at the premiere Dave Benett Suited and booted Douglas Booth looks dapper at the European opening Dave Benett Meet and greet Lily James signs autographs Dave Benett Trend-setter Suki Waterhouse braves the cold in a sheer dress Dave Benett Star of the moment Lily James on the red carpet Dave Benett Sam Riley and Alexandra Maria Lara attend the premiere Dave Benett Matt Smith ahead of the screening Dave Benett He loves helping me so Ill just do crash courses with him. It makes up for my bad schooling. She also revealed how she had overcome her insecurities about moving from the catwalk to the screen without any formal acting training. She said: Making a movie is like a huge mountain you have to climb at the beginning you meet all these new people and you dont know what they are going to be like. "Its this huge wave you ride. One of my biggest insecurities is that I didnt train, but thats not necessarily the only way. So Im just a bit of a sponge. Ive been really lucky as Ive got to be around some of the best actresses of my age. "Ive got to work with Lily Collins, Shailene Woodley, Lily James and I just worked with Emma Roberts and they were all the leading ladies of the films. Its definitely been invaluable. Waterhouse has been named as the new face of Magnum and was out last night promoting its new ice-cream, the Double. Magnum is calling on people to Release the Beast and Dare to go Double. Get inspired at magnumicecream.com B ritain was shocked by the untimely death of Victoria Wood yesterday, with the beloved comedian, actress, entertainer, and director passing away aged just 62. A 90-minute TV special has been added to the BBC Two schedule at 7.30pm on Thursday April 21 to celebrate Woods life and career. Titled Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV, the episode will feature a variety of sketches, stand-up routines, characters and songs from Woods various projects over the years. The show is also set to feature interviews with the comedians friends and fans, including the likes of Dawn French, Julie Walters, and Roger Moore, as well as the woman herself. Wood, renowned for her TV series including Dinnerladies, As Seen on TV, and Wood and Walters, passed away after a short but brave battle with cancer. Wood received four BAFTA awards during her life, and was appointed a CBE in the 2008 Honours List. Victoria Wood has died aged 62 Victoria Wood - In pictures 1 /22 Victoria Wood - In pictures Priceless comedy Victoria Wood, Julie Walters and Celia Imrie in Acorn Antiques sketch in Victoria Wood's As Seen On TV Donald Maclellan/Getty Images Cooking up some laughs Victoria Wood, Kayvan Novak, Alexa Chung, Chris Moyles star in The Great Comic Relief Bake Off 2015 BBC Entertaing the Audience An Audience With Victoria Wood in 1998 Cuppa time Victoria Wood's Nice Cup of Tea with Matt Smith at Claridge's Laughter has no boundaries Victoria Wood and Julie Walters in Victoria's Midlife Christmas BBC Old school Victoria Wood Associated Newspapers Award winner Victoria Wood attends the BAFTA Television Craft Awards at The Brewery on April 27, 2014 in London Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images Proud moment Comedian Victoria Wood with her C.B.E Investiture at Buckingham Palace Jenny Goodall/Daily Mail Chip off the old block Grace Wood (daughter of) Victoria Wood attend the British Comedy Awards at Fountain Studios on December 16, 2011 in London Stuart Wilson/Getty Images Victoria Wood in Victoria's Empire BBC Dynamic Duo Julie Walters and Victoria Wood at British Comedy Awards 2005 Dave Benett As Seen on TV. Julie Walters pictured as Mrs Overall, with Duncan Preston as Clifford, Victoria Wood as Berta, and Celia Imrie as Babs in Acorn Antiques Dinner Lady Victoria Wood as Brenda in Dinnerladies Silver Stand-Up Victoria Wood in 1987 Housewife, 49 Victoria Wood as Nella Last in Housewife 49 IN 2007 ITV Queen of the keyboard Victoria Wood Presents Angina Monologues Tributes flooded in from the likes of Prime Minister David Cameron, who deemed Wood a national treasure, Ricky Gervais, who praised Wood as so innovative, funny and down to earth, and Julie Walters, who said that she was too heart sore to comment. BBC Two, 7.30pm Capital punishment was repealed in the state of Nebraska nearly a year ago, however, the repeal wont become law until, and unless, Nebraskans vote to retain the repeal. The death penalty has been a source of discussion over the last few years and will continue to be so into November. Western Nebraska Community College hosted a discussion at The Harms Center on the death penalty Wednesday. This discussion was part of a News Election Project series by Nebraska Educational Telecommunications (NET). The series, called Classroom Conversations: Nebraskas Death Penalty Vote will feature a WNCC ethics class taught by WNCC instructor Colin Croft. The special guests at the discussion were Stacy Anderson and Bob Evnen. Anderson served as executive director of Nebraskans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (NADP) from 2011 to 2015 when the Unicameral voted 30-16 to repeal capital punishment in Nebraska. Evnen is an attorney from Lincoln and the co-founder of Nebraskans for the Death Penalty. Evnen is counting on Nebraskans to support the death penalty. Evnen said, One reason is that its morally justified. He went on to explain that if you believe that people should be held morally accountable, then you should support the death penalty. Its also a deterrent, continued Evnen. Strong studies show that the existence of the death penalty works as a deterrent. Citing an example of the riots at Tecumseh State Correctional Institution, where inmates attacked and killed two other inmates, but did not attack the guards. Whats to keep a 'lifer' from killing a prison guard? asked Evnen. Anderson said that she grew up being a supporter of the death penalty until her friend was murdered. She wanted to know more about the death penalty and it changed her position. For every 10 people, we execute we are exonerating one person from death row. She went on to compare that to commercial flights. If we had that sort of ratio every time a plane took off, we would close down the whole thing. We do not have any innocent people on death row in Nebraska, countered Evnen, pointing out that the process to hand down the death penalty is very thorough in Nebraska. To which Anderson replied, All 150 people that were released from death row looked incredibly guilty when they were convicted. There is no way to know for sure that we have the right person. Anderson also described how the multiple appeals with death row cases cost incredible amounts of money, but more importantly, the appeals take a tremendous toll on the families of the victims. Every time the case goes up for appeal, the family has to relive the experience instead of putting it behind them and finding a way to move on. It is a failed, costly government program, said Anderson. Nebraskans are better than that. We dont want to be in the business of executing people. Evnen argued that instead of looking at the costs, we should look at the savings. He gave an example of how a person was charged with first degree murder and was facing the death penalty if convicted. Instead, they pleaded guilty and took life in prison, which saved the county the expense of a murder trial. Evnen stated that if you are worried about the appeals with the death penalty, then we can set limits on appeals. Whatever the answer is, Evnen insisted, The answer is not throwing in the towel. Evnen stated, There is no such thing as life without parole anyway. There is no such thing as life without release. He explained that the pardons board in our state has enormous authority and can commute sentences. Evnen gave an example of a man that had his sentence commuted, he was paroled, and sexually assaulted a young girl. The idea that we can just get rid of the death penalty and keep going is just not the case. Anderson rebutted, Apart from the pardons board, you cant take away a life sentence. She provided an Attorney Generals Opinion, written by Attorney General Doug Peterson. Apart from the pardons board commuting a sentence of life to a term of years, a person cannot come up for parole. What to read next: A new bill passed by the U.S. Senate on April 19 incentivizes carriers to continue to provide service in rural areas. The FAA Reauthorization bill will allow for a reauthorization of funding for the Federal Aviation Administration. The bill means $33.1 billion would be given to the FAA for the different programs, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers. Darwin Skelton, airport manager at Western Nebraska Regional Airport, said that it would allow for the airport to remain a primary airport. As a primary airport, for a project that we need to do that is larger than $1 million its easier to get back into the discretionary pool if you need additional funding for projects, said Skelton. Skelton said he hopes that PenAir will be able to come in during the latter part of 2016 and there will be an increase in boarding numbers. The airport will then be able to remain as a primary airport. The FAA Reauthorization Bill would increase authorized spending for the Airport Improvement Program among other things. The Airport Improvement Program allows for airports to conduct projects to improve the airport. Part of the bill important to rural airports was the Small Airport Regulation Relief Act, co-sponsored by Representative Adrian Smith in 2015. This would also allow the boarding numbers recorded in 2012 in order to receive funds for the Airport Improvement. Those airports who reached 10,000 in enplanements would be able to ensure funding through the year of 2018. Don Overman, chairman of the WNRA Authority Board, said that most of the problems that precipitated what rural airports face today was pilots had to go from 500 hours to 1,500 hours. That has decimated the pilot core, the airport has had a tremendous affect on the rural American airports, said Overman. The FAA bill has been in reauthorization for the past five to seven years and has been a continuing resolution since that time. Overman said that he gives great praise to Senator Fischer on the Commerce Committee who really helped it get pushed through in the Senate. She was a great help to airports all over the country, said Overman. In a statement, Fischer said that Nebraskas rural and small community airports connect Nebraska to the rest of the nation and was proud to advance several provisions that will improve funding for these facilities. Overman was glad to see the bill wont penalize small airports. The airport has plans for buildings and other projects in the next three years. The funding will provide $1 million for each year but also provides use of other monetary mechanisms or other spending sources. The bill will now go on to the House of Representatives, whose version of the bill might lose ground based on the conflict on the privatization of air traffic control operations. It has 90-plus amendments which Overman said might cause it to slow down. If it is passed, it will expire after about 18 months, at the end of fiscal 2017. At the last Airport Authority Board meeting, the members voted to choose PenAir as the carrier of choice for the Essential Air routes from Scottsbluff to Denver. The next step was to get approval from the Department of Transportation for PenAir to take over the EAS contract. Skelton said that the DOT has written an order and is hoping that it will get approved during the first week of May. That will authorize PenAir to provide service for us in November, said Skelton. What to read next: The busy bees of YMCAs preschool received a sweet lesson in honey making today as the classes welcomed in guest speaker and beekeeper Ernie Griffiths. Griffiths came to visit the class and gave the kids, and the seniors group of the YMCA a complete run down on all the buzzing tactics that go into beekeeping and honey making. Topics ranged from three types of bees all hives have, their various purposes, where and how to get the best honey, and the role the queen bees play in their colony. He also brought in his bee keeping suit as well as an empty hive box to show the kids what goes into a daily routine. His time was met with gasps and giggles from the crowd as the kids engaged to learn all they could about these hard working insects. See more photos at www.starherald.com/photos. Director Valerie Smith has been active in having at least one monthly activity where the students go on a field trip, or have a guest speaker come in, as long as it engages their senses to enhance their education. They just enjoy it so much, its a hands on thing they can do so they learn more, other from just teaching them. So when these guests come in giving them something they can touch or see is a huge benefit, said Smith. Its much more effective than even something they would see on the computer or on TV. Smith said that not only does this help engage the kids as they learn, but she also feels the hands on activities are helping with retention. Even our 3- and 4-year-olds are retaining the information, said Smith. We keep hearing stories that they go home and tell their parents things that they learned on these trips, and it amazes us what all they remember. The kids have also done hands on learning like making their own pizza at Dominos, getting a full tour of Coop, and making Christmas crafts for local veterans. This guest speaker was especially popular with the kids. This was largely due to the fact that Griffiths brought various flavors of his homemade honey for the kids to try. Flavors included apple, strawberry, peach and crowd-favorite cinnamon roll. The parents have been telling us that they have been talking about this particular day for awhile, said Smith. The sweet treat at the end made it very fun for them. The other part of the learning experience has been involving the senior group at the YMCA. Smith said it has been a very positive experience combining the classes whenever possible. We try to coordinate something with the seniors at least once a month, said Smith. Even if we are just making things for their parties or having a meal with them, just something combined with them. Next week the YMCA preschoolers will be headed to Bluffs Middle School to attend an art class and learn how to pain with art teacher Nikole Leonard. What to read next: OMAHA, Neb. (AP) An Omaha man who police say killed an unintended victim has been given 40 to 50 years in prison. Douglas County District Judge James Gleason sentenced Kevin Mejia, 23, on Tuesday, the Omaha World-Herald reports. Gleason pleaded guilty to manslaughter and a weapons charge after prosecutors lowered the original homicide charge from second-degree murder. Prosecutors say Mejia and an accomplice, James Vega, 24, drove to an Omaha house in October 2014 because they were angry with someone over a drug deal. Mejia fired twice at the house, and police say the man who was struck in the back of the head, Jose Fabila, 23, wasn't the man Vega and Mejia were upset with. Family members remember Fablia as a loving father of a young daughter. Prosecutors decried the senseless violence in the case. "When people get it in their head they want to commit these drive-by shootings, it has real-world consequences," said Matt Kuhse, deputy Douglas County attorney. "You have no control over where that bullet ends up. You not only ruin someone else's life, you ruin your own." Mejia will serve 20 years in prison before he is eligible for parole. Under state law, he could be released in 25 years, absent parole. Vega also was sentenced Tuesday. He was given three to four years as an accomplice. Charges were dropped last year against a woman who was accused of driving a backup car that night. Another alleged accomplice, Matteo Kundra, 20, awaits trail. The surveillance system of a neighbor recorded the shooting and led police to the suspects. West Nebraska Arts Center is pleased to present Canvases Off Broadway, members-only, the second of a four part series of step-by-step paint and sip classes taught by WNAC Program Manager, Maria Lena Soto, on Friday, April 22, from 6 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Cost for the class is $35. All art supplies are included, along with a glass of wine or a bottle of beer. Additional pours are available for purchase, and students take home the glass and finished work of art at the end of the evening. This is a 21 and over only event and all skill levels are welcome. No painting experience is necessary. The theme of the painting is This Boot is Made for Painting and an example painting is on display in the WNAC gallery and on their website www.thewnac.com. The instructor will guide students through the process of painting a beautiful, colorful Boot on a 16 X 20 canvas. Students will decorate their boot in an array of colors and designs to their liking. Maria Lena Soto is a mixed media artist/instructor living in Gering. She attended Western Nebraska Community College in Scottsbluff, obtaining her Associate of Arts degree in 2002. She is an active member of the North Platte Valley Artist Guild. She participates in the Gering Arts Festival, the Presidents show, Juried Show at Western Nebraska Arts Center, Barn Anews Art in the Courtyard, WNCC John N. Harms Advanced Technology Center Art Gallery show, and is currently a member with the NPVAG. She has taught children in Art Camp and the After School Art program for West Nebraska Arts Center, Lifelink students and Girl Scouts. She has shown work in various local businesses. She teaches classes on handmade books and mixed media art. She teaches art classes and workshops to adults. For more information or to register for the class, contact Maria Lena Soto at 308-632-2226, or lena@thewnac.com or visit the WNAC website at www.thewnac.com. WNAC is located at the corner of 1st Avenue and 18th Street in Scottsbluff, NE. Visit the gallery Tuesday through Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Weekends from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Closed Mondays. Visit our website at www.thewnac.com, or find us on Facebook. Visit www.nebraskaartscouncil.org for more information on how the Nebraska Arts Council can assist your organization, or how you can support the Nebraska Cultural Endowment. She had spent nearly her whole life looking for her birth family. For some 40 years, Susan Rupp, 55, of Scotts Bluff County, searched for her mother and father, brothers and sisters. She was born Shawnee Monroe and, when she was just a little girl, she was adopted by another family in Sidney. Her new family changed her name and kept her hidden. They took a lot of time to hide me, she said. They changed my name, they told me different stories. But her family didnt hide from her that she was adopted, and when she was 16 she started looking for her birth family in earnest. I thought, Ill show them, Ill find them, she said. But not knowing her birth name made it difficult. Over the years, she would try a number of methods. She created a Find My Family Facebook page. Checked county courts in Colorado. Even hired a private investigator. After four decades of searching, she decided to look where she was separated from her family, in Sidney. A few weeks ago she went into the West Nebraska Family Research and History Center in Scottsbluff and the trail got red hot. I come here one day and I find them, she said. Within a half an hour. With the centers help, she was able to learn her mothers full name. She was also helped by accessing her adoption records, and she had her records sent to her from the Sidney court. Workers at the research center helped her piece together more of the story, until they found a woman who called back and, on April 6, she left a message saying, Im your little sister and weve been looking for you. Susan messaged her and called her back. She learned that most of her family was in New York. It turned out that the entire time Susan was looking for her family, her five siblings were searching for her as well, but looking for her in Lincoln. Susan said the family would bake a birthday cake and sing Happy Birthday for her every year on her birthday. She has a little sister in Missouri and a brother in Arizona. Shes asked them a lot of questions so far. The first question I asked was, Do your nails grow long, too? and my sister said, Yes. She plans to meet them this summer. In the meantime, she said they text each other every night. She only has one more to get in contact with. Im excited, she said. Without having a lot of family, now we have family. I was the last one. I was the missing link. They could never find me. She said she knows why she was given up, but she doesnt want to talk about it. Sometimes things arent right, she said. Now shes piecing her history back together. This has helped her understand herself, from genetic health history to the height of her parents. I still am in shock, she said. Doors are opening up. It feels like my life is complete. Floyd Smith, director of the center, said this is the third time theyve helped people like this. Everyone we help is so grateful. Thats what keeps us going. Theres nothing like solving a puzzle, Smith said. This page may have been moved, deleted, or is otherwise unavailable. To help you find what you are looking for: Enter Search Term(s): Still cant find what youre looking for? 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Countries & Areas Search for country or area A Afghanistan Albania Algeria Andorra Angola Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Armenia Australia Austria Azerbaijan B Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Brunei Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burma Burundi C Cabo Verde Cambodia Cameroon Canada Central African Republic Chad Chile China Colombia Comoros Costa Rica Cote dIvoire Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czechia D Democratic Republic of the Congo Denmark Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic E Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Eswatini Ethiopia F Fiji Finland France G Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Greece Grenada Guatemala Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana H Haiti Holy See Honduras Hungary I Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel Italy J Jamaica Japan Jordan K Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Kosovo Kuwait Kyrgyzstan L Laos Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg M Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Marshall Islands Mauritania Mauritius Mexico Micronesia Moldova Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Morocco Mozambique N Namibia Nauru Nepal Netherlands New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria North Korea North Macedonia Norway O Oman P Pakistan Palau Palestinian Territories Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Q Qatar R Republic of the Congo Romania Russia Rwanda S Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa San Marino Sao Tome and Principe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa South Korea South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Sweden Switzerland Syria T Taiwan Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Timor-Leste Togo Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Tuvalu U Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom Uruguay Uzbekistan V Vanuatu Venezuela Vietnam Y Yemen Z Zambia Zimbabwe Thursday, 21 April 2016 22:13:00 (GMT+3) | Sao Paulo Credit rating agency Moodys said Brazil s steel industry should remain under pressure in ongoing year, as the nations poor economic outlook hinders the automotive, construction and capital goods industries. The agency said demand for steel has declined in Latin Americas largest economy, as credit conditions have tightened with rising interest rates and lower disposable incomes. The engineering and homebuilding sectors, which together account for 40 percent of Brazil 's steel consumption, are also facing serious strains. Compounding the issues in the domestic market, the steelmakers also face a challenging international environment, Moodys noted. Moodys said the surplus of steel in the global market should persist for several more years, as Chinese steel production remains high. Credit rating agency Moodys has recently downgraded the ratings of three major Brazilian steelmakers, including Usiminas, Companhia Siderurgica Nacional (CSN) and Gerdau. The agency said the ratings reflect the uncertainty around their ability to execute their plans quickly and at favorable terms. A persistent market downturn without any prospects of recovery would worsen their credit quality, it warned. Thursday, 21 April 2016 11:54:07 (GMT+3) | Shanghai Guangdong Province-based Chinese steelmaker SGIS Songshan Co., Ltd (SGIS Songshan), a subsidiary of Guangdong-based steel producer Shaoguan Iron and Steel Co., Ltd (SGIS), has announced in its annual report that in 2015 it registered an operating revenue of RMB 11.145 billion ($1.72 billion), down 42.84 percent year on year, with a net loss of RMB 2.596 billion ($0.40 billion) compared to the net loss of RMB 1.388 billion recorded in 2014. In 2015, SGIS Songshan produced 5.25 million mt of pig iron, 5.20 million mt of crude steel and 5.04 million mt of finished steel, indicating respective decreases of 15.12 percent, 17.18 percent and 18.05 percent year on year. Thursday, 21 April 2016 17:08:54 (GMT+3) | Istanbul Germany-based plantmaker SMS Group has announced that it will revamp Taiwan 's largest steelmaker China Steel Corporations ( CSC ) continuous slab caster No. 4 at Kaohsiung, Taiwan . The commissioning of the caster is is scheduled for the end of this year. As part of the modernization, SMS Group will also supply a mold monitoring system for temperature monitoring and a breakout prediction system, which will recognize any occurring breakdown at a very early stage, allowing preventive measures to be taken. Thursday, 21 April 2016 13:40:03 (GMT+3) | Istanbul According to the monthly consumer tendency survey released by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK), the consumer confidence index* in Turkey , which stood at 67 points in March, increased by 2.2 percent month on month in April this year to 68.46 points, following the 0.5 percent month-on-month increase in March. According to the indices based on individual questions asked of Turkish consumers concerning the consumer tendency, in April the index for the general current economic situation increased by 2.1 percent month on month to 88.2 points, while the index for the general economic situation in the next 12 months rose by 1.8 percent compared to March to 91 points. Meanwhile, in April the index for whether the present is a good time to purchase durable goods increased by 2.1 percent to 68.4 points, while the index for the probability of buying durable goods in the next 12 months was up by 2.4 percent to 98.7 points, both on month-on-month basis. In April, the probability of buying a car in the next 12 months was up by 2.8 percent to 12.6 points and the index for the probability of buying or building a home in the next 12 months increased by 7.3 percent to 9.4 points, both month on month. *When the index is above 100 it indicates an optimistic outlook, when it is equal to 100 it indicates a neutral outlook and below 100 it points to a pessimistic outlook. Thursday, 21 April 2016 09:32:26 (GMT+3) | Shanghai Jiangxi Province-based Chinese steelmaker Xinyu Iron and Steel Co.(Xinyu Steel) has announced in its annual report that in 2015 it registered an operating revenue of RMB 25.37 billion ($3.92 billion), down 21.62 percent year on year, with a net profit of RMB 60.5596 million ($9.35 million), decreasing by 85.1 percent year on year. Thursday, 21 April 2016 12:26:29 (GMT+3) | Istanbul During the past two weeks, demand in the local Turkish market has remained slack, while merchant bar prices have increased further in the same period due to the rises seen in raw material and semi-finished steel quotations. Domestic merchant bar prices in Turkish market depending on size, thickness and region are at the following levels: Equal Angle Prices: Region Prices (TRY/mt) Price change (TRY/mt) 08.04.2016 Denizli Region (30-100 mm) 1,470-1,490 ($521-528/mt) 60 Karabuk Region (30-100mm) 1,420-1,440 ($504-511/mt) 75 Iskenderun Region (30-100 mm) 1,400-1,440 ($496-511/mt) 90 Izmir Region (30-100 mm) 1,440-1,460 ($511-518/mt) 60 Flat Bar Prices: Region Prices (TRY/mt) Price change (TRY/mt) 08.04.2016 Denizli Region (30-100 mm) 1,500-1,510 ($532-535/mt) 60 Karabuk Region (30-100mm) 1,450-1,470 ($514-521/mt) 75 Iskenderun Region (30-100 mm) 1,430-1,470 ($507-521/mt) 90 Izmir Region (30-100 mm) 1,470-1,490 ($521-528/mt) 60 NPI-NPU Prices: Region Prices (TRY/mt) Price change (TRY/mt) 08.04.2016 Denizli Region (30-100 mm) 1,470-1,490 ($521-528/mt) 60 Karabuk Region (30-100 mm) 1,420-1,440 ($504-511/mt) 75 Iskenderun Region (30-100 mm) 1,400-1,440 ($496-511/mt) 90 Izmir Region (30-50 mm) 1,440-1,460 ($511-518/mt) 60 All prices are ex-works, on actual weight basis, for April shipment and excluding VAT. It should be considered that offers below the prices ranges in question may be available, depending on the buyer and on the method of payment. $1 = TRY 2.82 Thursday, 21 April 2016 10:30:03 (GMT+3) | Istanbul According to market sources, ex-US HMS I/II 80:20 scrap offers to Taiwan are in the range of $270-275/mt CFR. Thursday, 21 April 2016 11:15:16 (GMT+3) | Istanbul According to markets sources, Japanese offers to Vietnam for H2 grade scrap are in the range of $278-280/mt CFR. Culture Minister Vlad Alexandrescu went to the Bucharest National Opera (ONB) on Thursday, where ONB employees had been protesting since Wednesday against the decision to rehire former ad-interim director George Calin and ballet dance Johan Kobborg. After listening for about two hours to the grievances of the protesters, the minister said he would give a lot of serious thought to everything he was informed on. He pointed out that the information presented to him allows him to truly deal with the ongoing issues at ONB. "I hope, for the sake of the National Opera of Bucharest and for the sake of its future, that Mr Vlad Alexandrescu makes the wisest decision," former ONB acting director Tiberiu Soare said at the end of the talks. The protesters said they would wait for the culture minister's decision on the ONB management. The protesters gathered on Wednesday in the ONB's big hall, where they expected Minister Alexandrescu to come for talks. As he didn't show up, the employees cancelled the scheduled show. Tiberiu Soare invited the spectators to the Opera's big hall and warned them that, instead of a show, they would attend a protest. At the request of the attending spectators, ONB artists in the building's big hall joined the ad-hoc protest in singing the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves by Giuseppe Verdi. Agerpres Romania's Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos on Thursday extended a working lunch in honour of visiting Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko. The Government reports in a press statement that the two officials reviewed the latest developments in the bilateral relations between Romania and Ukraine, Ukraine's political and security state, as well as Ukraine's relationship with the European Union. Ciolos is quoted as having said the formation of a new government in Kiev is a new chance for speeding up domestic reforms and stabilisation of Ukraine. He also assured Poroshenko of Romania's support, at a bilateral as well as European level, for reforms and the implementation of Ukraine's European commitments. In his turn, Poroshenko presented the latest developments in Ukraine, giving assurances of the commitment of the new government in Kiev to take all the necessary measures to stabilise the political situation and continue reforms. He also mentioned the main measures for the immediate future, extending thanks to Romania for constant support. Part of the working lunch was the signing of a bilateral agreement on military transportation cooperation and an agreement on joint patrolling at the common borders between Romania and Ukraine. Agerpres Updated at 12:33 p.m. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a firebrand for strong financial regulation, asked on Thursday why securities regulators approved Steve Cohen's new firm as an investment adviser after barring the billionaire from managing other people's money until 2018. In a letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Massachusetts Democrat said the regulator's decision to approve the firm, Stamford Harbor Capital L.P., makes "a mockery of the SEC's core mission to 'protect investors.'" "The Commission has permitted a recidivist hedge fund manager, well-known for his former company's willingness to evade and ignore federal law, to once again profit from and potentially exploit investors," she wrote, calling it "the latest example of an SEC action that fails to appropriately punish guilty parties, deter future wrongdoing, and protect investors." In 2012 Cohen was implicated in an insider trading scandal at a unit of SAC Capital Advisors, a hedge fund he founded. The SEC in January reached a settlement with Cohen prohibiting him from serving in a supervisory role at any broker, dealer, or investment adviser until 2018, addressing charges related to the subsidiary. "As the only law enforcement agency to charge Steven Cohen, the SEC imposed important restrictions, including a supervisory bar plus the additional oversight requirements in the settlement that are even stronger than typical remedies," said Andrew Ceresney, director of the SEC's enforcement division. Mark Herr, a spokesman for Point 72 Asset Management, Cohen's family office that manages his assets, said the conditions in the settlement were clear. "We are not going to manage one dollar of outside money prior to Jan. 1, 2018," he said. Earlier this month the SEC granted registration to the new Stamford Harbor entity, which Cohen owns. At the time, a Stamford Harbor spokesman said Cohen will "not supervise the activities of anyone acting on its behalf," thus allowing him to abide by the agreement. The firm will initially focus on investments in private companies that are illiquid, according to filings. But it could also seek or accept outside capital in the future. Warren said the firm had a "shell management structure" and the SEC should ensure "that future settlement agreements cannot be so easily undermined." She asked for a complete list of "other individuals or firms who, like Mr. Cohen, were barred from managing funds (or barred from other activities by SEC) yet are presently indirectly involved in those activities with SEC-registered entities." (Cohen has emerged as a leading donor to Eric Greitens, a Republican candidate for governor in Missouri. Records show he's contributed $100,000 to the Greitens campaign, the Post-Dispatch reported.) BEIJING Norwegian online browser and advertising firm Opera Software ASA has embedded a tool aimed at circumventing censorship into its latest desktop app, potentially complicating a bid for the company by a consortium from China, which censors the Internet. The consortium, which includes web search and security firm Qihoo 360 Technology Co Ltd. and Beijing Kunlun Tech Co., has offered $1.28 billion for Opera. Qihoo 360 and Kunlun declined to comment when contacted by Reuters on Thursday about whether Opera's new tool might affect its bid. A spokesman for Opera also declined to comment. Opera said on its blog on Thursday the newest version of its desktop Internet browser, targeted at developers, includes a free built-in Virtual Private Network (VPN), a common tool for getting round online censorship, with unlimited data usage. "Everyone deserves to be private online if they want to be," said Krystian Kolondra, a senior vice president at Opera, on the company's official blog. Opera users get "easier access to all their favorite online content no matter where they are," he said. In February, Opera CEO Lars Boilesen told tech news site TechCrunch that selling to the Chinese group was not his decision, but up to Opera's shareholders. Chinese internet companies are required to censor any content that the ruling Communist Party deems unlawful, a sweeping power which has been used to block content that clashes with the official party line. China frequently upgrades its internet censorship mechanism, widely considered the world's most sophisticated and known as the Great Firewall. This has often rendered VPNs impotent in China. It was not immediately clear whether Opera's new tool would be able to circumvent such restrictions. Last week, the Chinese consortium extended its offer for Opera to May 24, the latest deadline possible, as it had received acceptances from shareholders below the required level. The deal also needs to be approved by Chinese and U.S. authorities. BaiKu Sushi Lounge will reopen on Tuesday (April 26), 3 months after structural repairs to its midtown building, the Hotel Ignacio, required its temporary closure. "It's an amazing set of circumstances that we'd have to shut down for structural issues for 100 days," owner Brad Beracha tells Off the Menu. In fact, Beracha originally believed that BaiKu, which opened in September 2014, would only need to close for three weeks. In the end, though, Beracha says, "The timing ended up working out great." Shortly before the closure, in a move that the restaurant did not immediately announce, Beracha hired Eliott Harris to be BaiKu's new sushi chef. Harris had previously worked for Beracha at Miso on Meramec in Clayton; from late 2011 through December of last year, he had operated the sushi-focused food truck Chop Shop. "It allowed us to have plenty of time to make the changes and to sit down and collaborate," Beracha says. Harris isn't the only new sushi chef to join BaiKu, however. Just this week the restaurant hired former Sekisui sushi chef Kenji Nemoto to assist Harris. "We're thrilled to have him on board," Beracha says. Harris and Nemoto won't be making radical changes to BaiKu's menu when it reopens. Instead, Beracha says, the chefs will have an "ongoing conversation" with diners to develop what they offer. Diners will also see some gradual changes to the non-sushi fare prepared in the kitchen that BaiKu shares with its sibling restaurant, Triumph Grill. Chefs Ryan Cooper and Mike Burnau, both veterans of Beracha's former upscale restaurant in Clayton, Araka, will intriduce a few new dishes, including a grilled octopus salad, Singapore-style street noodles and a classic pad Thai. BaiKu will be open for dinner Tuesday through Saturday. Lunch will be served Tuesday through Friday beginning May 3. Why has it taken so long for jazz fans to finally get a Miles Davis movie? Good question. Its not as if the legendary trumpeter and his musical legacy are obscure: Most of his albums are still in print, and his music is constantly being repackaged in boxed sets including unreleased material. Along with such visionary artists as Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane and Bob Marley, who are also reliable sources of posthumous releases, Davis continues to have a high cultural profile. And the Alton native who grew up in East St. Louis and whose sound on trumpet was once described as that of a man walking on eggshells was certainly charismatic enough to be at the center of a big-screen drama. Indeed, Davis has long been considered the personification of cool. Music and life, he was quoted as saying, are all about style. Yet, it took the perseverance of actor-director Don Cheadle to make Miles Ahead which shares a title with one of the trumpeters albums a reality. The film is set in the 1970s, during a period in which Davis was in self-imposed exile from the hot lights of celebrity. And how much you like it probably will depend on how much you know about the artist who inspired it and the people in his circle. At various points in the film, pivotal figures in Davis life pop up including arranger Gil Evans, with whom he recorded a string of well-regarded orchestral albums; pianist Bill Evans, whose contributions were essential to the immensely popular album Kind of Blue; and pianist Herbie Hancock, a key figure in Davis groundbreaking quintet of the 1960s. But their presence seems to be intended for the benefit of the cognoscenti. If youre unaware of who these artists are and what they meant to Davis, theyll barely register. Instead, the film devotes significant screen time to a fictional character: a writer named Dave Braden, played by Ewan McGregor, who functions as Davis reluctant sidekick in a scenario that relegates the trumpeters emergence as a jazz iconoclast to backstory. Perhaps tellingly, the writer is pitching a story about Davis not to Downbeat, the legendary jazz magazine, but to Rolling Stone. On its own terms, Miles Ahead is an entertaining diversion. But you get the sense that the filmmakers were nervous about the subject matter. Movies about rock dont have that problem. But jazz has been marginalized to the point that a film about one of the geniuses of American music has to be compromised. Davis deserves a cinematic portrait on the order of the Mozart biopic Amadeus. Instead, he got a buddy film. Becoming Miles Davis Don Cheadle doesnt just play Miles Davis in Miles Ahead he also directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay with Steven Baigelman (Get On Up). Cheadle, who was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in Hotel Rwanda, really throws himself into the role of the legendary jazz trumpeter, who died in 1991 at age 65. Recently, Cheadle spoke with Go! Magazine about the fictionalized drama that closed last years New York Film Festival and opens Friday in St. Louis. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. What kind of research was involved in preparing for the film? There was a lot of source material documentaries, books, magazine articles. But what was invaluable to me was being able to have (Davis) family in close contact for the whole journey. And still, to this day, we are in communication a lot. Why did you focus on the period from about 1975 to 1979, when Davis dropped out of public view? Its just a very arresting moment. And all of these questions come to mind about how did he get there, and is he going to get out of that and when he gets out of that, whats he going to say, and whats he going to sound like? It was just an intriguing point of departure. The films soundtrack encompasses a wide range of Davis music, from bop to fusion. How did you decide what to include? One of the great things about Miles Davis music, and theres so much of it, is that its inherently cinematic and lends itself very easily to almost any kind of scenario that you would want to have. Why do you think that Davis hadnt been the subject of a major dramatic film prior to Miles Ahead? When you look at the movies that people think of as being potentially niche, its jazz, its period films, its films with African-American stars. Financiers find excuses to say no as opposed to reasons to say yes. Top 5 Miles Davis albums Davis recorded so many fine albums that any attempt to rank them is likely to spark debate. This list should be considered more representative than definitive. Relaxin with the Miles Davis Quintet (1958). With John Coltrane on saxophone, Davis first classic quintet got the most out of tunes including If I Were a Bell and I Could Write a Book. If youre into bop, this album has to be in your collection. Porgy and Bess (1959). Perhaps the most enduring of Davis collaborations with arranger Gil Evans, this reimagining of George Gershwins opera score was the closest the trumpeter came to releasing a classical album, but it is considered a masterpiece that brilliantly transcends musical genres. Kind of Blue (1959). This perennially bestselling album is so iconic that it turns up in music collections that are otherwise devoid of jazz. In a sextet including Coltrane, saxophonist Cannonball Adderley and pianist Bill Evans, Davis conjured a timeless work of art. Miles Smiles (1967). Davis second classic quintet featuring pianist Herbie Hancock, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, drummer Tony Williams and bassist Ron Carter was underappreciated in its time but has come to be recognized for its bold and boundless experimentation within an acoustic context. Bitches Brew (1970). Davis wasnt the first jazz artist to go electric and explore the improvisational possibilities of rock, but he was arguably the most successful. Controversial upon release, Bitches Brew has proved to be influential and has entered the jazz canon. Updated at 8 p.m., with details on evening protest. ST. LOUIS More than two dozen faith leaders and activists joined Thursday morning to remember a 15-year-old who was fatally shot by police in St. Louis earlier this week. Thursday evening, about 50 people gathered for a protest rally. Police say an officer shot Jorevis Scruggs after he pointed a gun at an officer Tuesday. The prayer vigil on Thursday was spearheaded by Rabbi Susan Talve of Central Reform Congregation. The blood of our children calls out from the ground again, Talve said as she spoke Thursday morning near the site where Jorevis died Tuesday. And once again we show up to the place made holy by the blood of our children with our lament to mourn another and to cry and to cry out. Jorevis had been a passenger in a car that police tried to stop Tuesday because it had been reported stolen the night before in a carjacking, police officials said. Officers spotted the car just before noon Tuesday and pursued it for about two minutes. Police said the driver stopped in an alley behind the 3200 block of St. Louis Avenue, between Bacon Street and Garrison Avenue. Jorevis and a back-seat passenger got out and the driver sped off. The two passengers took off in different directions, police said. They said Jorevis pointed a handgun at an officer. One officer shot Jorevis, who ran and collapsed. Another officer used a Taser to subdue the other passenger, a 19-year-old man who has not been publicly identified, officials said. The driver abandoned the car about a mile away. Police said Wednesday that the driver was still at large. At the morning gathering, Talve asked when police killings will stop. This kid was 15 years old, she said. Somebody had to give him a chance. There has to be a better way for police to intervene. A white candle in a tall, thin, glass enclosure was placed at the foot of a makeshift memorial near an electric pole, where a picture of Jorevis was affixed. Another one was placed on the site where he died. The Rev. Rebecca Ragland asked the group to pray for Jorevis family and for the officer who now has this death on his mind and his heart. Ragland is a pastor at Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion. The police officer who fired is a 30-year-old man with about 7 years on the force. Under usual protocol, he has been put on administrative leave. The department has not released his name. Jorevis was last enrolled at Innovative Concept Academy. His mother had reported him missing to the school district Friday. Thursday evening, about 50 people gathered at the site to protest the fatal shooting. They carried signs, including one that read Kids die when cops lie, marched around the neighborhood and chanted slogans, including Black lives matter. Johnny Spiva, 70, was in the neighborhood to meet a friend and stopped to listen to the protesters. Someones got to step up, because if (police) dont stop, it will happen again, he said. But he said he didnt know the full story about the shooting and who was at fault. Both of them could have been wrong, Spiva said. But if he was carrying a pistol, thats on him. Cameron Latham, 43, of St. Louis, is a minister and a tire salesman and was doing business in the neighborhood when he saw the protesters and stopped to listen. If the kid had a gun and he was aiming the gun, the police had to do what they had to do to go home at night, he said. If the police are demonizing these kids because theyre from a certain community, youve got to give people a chance and have fairness. ST. CHARLES COUNTY A jury on Thursday night found a former Wentzville day care provider guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the 2009 death of an 18-month-old boy under her care. The verdict was announced after about six hours of deliberations. The jurors will reconvene Friday morning to consider a sentence. Prosecutors alleged that Lisa West, now 42, caused the head injury suffered by the child, Mason Beach, just minutes after his mother left him at Wests home day care. West has said Mason fell down carpeted stairs. It was a blow to the head that caused this trauma, Philip Groenweghe, an assistant county prosecutor, told jurors in closing arguments. The Beaches ask for only one thing. What they want is truth, what they want is accountability. Wests attorney, Richard Sindel, said its inconceivable to people who know West as a caring, peaceful person that she could have harmed the child whom she had baby-sat for 15 months. If Lisa was about to turn from who she is into the Incredible Hulk, not a single human being who came into the courtroom to support her during the trial would think it remotely possible, he said. Sindel also said West called Masons mother to report the injury just a few minutes after the boy had been dropped off at Wests home. That wasnt enough time to blow up in anger, he said. The cause of death was listed as blunt force trauma, but West wasnt charged with a crime at the time. In 2013, county prosecutors reopened the case and a grand jury in 2014 indicted West, who now lives in Plano, Ill., on a felony child abuse charge. That was changed last month to first-degree involuntary manslaughter. Prosecutors on Thursday repeated that an autopsy carried out by the office of the county medical examiner, Dr. Mary Case, concluded that the boys head injuries including retinal hemorrhaging were caused by striking. Sindel cited what he said were inconsistencies in testimony by Case and others called by prosecutors in the trial, which began last week. Groenweghe said a pediatric physician and child abuse forensics expert at Cardinal Glennon Childrens Medical Center, Dr. Ann DiMaio, concluded initially that Masons injury was due to having been shaken. However, he said that opinion was issued before the autopsy. He said what happened to the boys brain was the same, whether caused by shaking or punching, and a fall down the stairs doesnt come close. In 2012, Masons family won a $707,000 civil suit against West after a jury decided West was negligent in caring for Mason. Rebecca Beach, Masons mother, said the family was unable to collect the money. The involuntary manslaughter charge alleged that West recklessly caused the boys death by striking his head, striking his head against an object, shaking him or a combination thereof. Circuit Judge Rick Zerr told jurors they also had the option of finding West guilty of the lesser crime of second-degree involuntary manslaughter if they determined her to be criminally negligent by failing to be aware of a substantial risk. They opted for the harsher one. Reached after the verdict was announced, Rebecca Beach said the outcome was what Masons family had hoped for. Were just, were glad that shes finally being held accountable for what she did, Beach said. Its definitely been a long time coming and way overdue. Mason was one of the subjects of a 2011-12 Post-Dispatch investigation of unlicensed home day cares in Missouri. Dozens of child deaths from 2007 to 2011 were in unlicensed home day cares where caregivers were not required to have training, insurance or adhere to safety standards. JEFFERSON CITY The Missouri Senate voted Thursday to create the crime of "illegal reentry" in the state. The legislation states that anyone who is deported from the United States for committing a crime, returns and commits an assault or any felony would also be guilty of illegal reentry in Missouri. The offense would be a class C felony. Custody of the person convicted would be transferred to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement "as soon as practical." The Senate voted 26-6 to advance the measure to the House, with Democratic Sens. Scott Sifton of Affton and Jason Holsman of Kansas City siding with the Republican majority. One of the main opponents of the measure was state Sen. Jill Schupp, D-Creve Coeur. She said that the bill is unconstitutional because immigration policy is under the federal government's purview. "We know crime happens, but that doesn't mean we need to put into place laws that are unconstitutional," Schupp said in an interview. "Missourians' taxpayer dollars are going to be going to court fights instead of all the other important needs we have in the state." Republican state Sen. Mike Cunningham of Rogersville, the bill sponsor, said that federal government inaction on immigration policy is what spurred the bill. "Why I filed it was because the federal government wasn't doing their job and it was a chance for the state to stand up," he said. Cunningham said that he's received legal opinions that argue the law is constitutional. Schupp also said that a patchwork of state laws concerning immigration would be problematic. She added the legislation follows other ideas in the Legislature that makes Missouri appear anti-immigrant. Cunningham didn't dispute that the state is unwelcoming at least when it comes to the people his proposal applies to. He used an example out of New Florence, Mo., last month. Pablo Antonio Serrano-Vitorino is a Mexican citizen who was deported in 2004 but later reentered the country illegally. He is accused of killing four men in Kansas City, Kan., before driving to New Florence and killing another man. "Hell yes we're unwelcoming to those people that break the law that abuse," Cunningham said in an interview. "I mean, they've committed felonies before." The measure now heads to the House for consideration. The legislation is Senate Bill 612. The lead plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against online dating website Ashley Madison over a security breach that exposed the personal data of customers must publicly identify themselves to proceed with the case, a federal judge in St. Louis has ruled. Forty-two plaintiffs, seeking to represent users of the website who had their information compromised, had proceeded anonymously against Ashley Madison's Toronto-based parent company Avid Life Media, the ruling released on April 6 showed. The plaintiffs are suing Ashley Madison, a website that facilitates extramarital affairs, for failing to adequately secure their information, marketing a "Full Delete Removal" service that did not work, and using fake female accounts to lure male customers, according to the ruling. Their action comes after hackers who claimed to be unhappy with Avid Life's business practices publicly released Ashley Madison customer data last August. Ashley Madison lawsuit will be handled in St. Louis Lawsuits sparked by the hacking and release of data from the pro-cheating website AshleyMadison.com will be handled in federal court here in St. Louis. Reuters has not independently verified the authenticity of the data, emails or documents. The case is being handled in federal court in St. Louis. Judge John A. Ross wrote in his ruling that being publicly named as an Ashley Madison user amounts to more than common embarrassment, but noted the 42 plaintiffs have special roles in the case that require identification. The plaintiffs are "class representatives" and may need to testify or offer evidence, unlike "class members," those in the lawsuit who do not need participate as actively, Ross wrote. He ruled that the plaintiffs must either identify themselves or proceed as class members, who can remain anonymous. The "class" for the collective lawsuit has not yet been certified, the ruling noted. There are at least 10 plaintiffs who are publicly named. Avid Media did not immediately respond to a request for comment. ST. LOUIS St. Louis musician Olufunsho Adeshina was sentenced on Thursday to 40 months in prison after admitting last year that he filed more than 50 false tax returns and got $734,000 in unearned refunds. Adeshina filed false tax returns in several names and the refunds were sent to various financial accounts, including some of his and some of businesses he controlled, federal prosecutors said. Adeshina admitted he sought more than $3.5 million in refunds but most of the false returns were caught by the IRS, prosecutors said. He was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Rodney W. Sippel for one felony count of theft of government funds. Adeshina, a guitarist, is a native of Nigeria but has permanent resident status in the United States. He has been in federal custody since April 2015, when he was arrested at Atlanta-Hartsfield Airport returning from Nigeria. In addition to the prison term, Adeshina was ordered to repay $753,063 to the IRS. ST. LOUIS A St. Louis police officer is facing criminal charges after police say he crashed his personal car into a deputy fire chief's parked vehicle on April 7. Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce's office charged Jeffrey Trares, 37, Wednesday with driving with excessive blood alcohol content. Court documents show Trares took a breath test at the scene of the crash in the 4600 block of McCausland Avenue at 5:13 a.m. He had a blood alcohol content of 0.146 percent, according to the documents. That is close to twice the legal limit for driving of 0.08 percent. Neighbors heard what sounded like a crash and called police. Officers found Trares behind the wheel of his personal vehicle, which ended up in the yard of a nearby house after striking the deputy fire chief's parked vehicle, according to the documents. The engine was still running and witnesses told police Trares appeared to be in an "impaired condition," according to the documents. Joyce's spokesman George Sells said in a statement that prosecutors pursued the excessive blood alcohol content charge because, "Based on the evidence that was available, prosecutors determined this was the most appropriate charge. The Excessive Blood Alcohol Content charge and DWI are both class B misdemeanors." Police said Trares has worked for the department for almost 14 years. Trares was among more than 40 city officers to be given awards at a police luncheon for 3rd and 4th police districts at the Chase Park Plaza on April 7. Trares was one of two officers named as the July 2015 officers of the month. He was reportedly absent from the luncheon. EDITOR'S NOTE: A previous version of this story incorrectly said Trares was behind the wheel of his police vehicle. He was driving his personal vehicle. CHICAGO Educators amped up the pressure on Illinois leaders on Wednesday for more school and university funding with protests in Springfield and fierce criticism of Gov. Bruce Rauner by the head of the Chicago Teachers Union. More than 1,000 people teachers, retirees, union members and activists from Chicago and elsewhere marched from the Capitol to highlight a 10-month budget standoff thats forced higher education layoffs and the anticipated closure of Chicago State University. They called for support of a proposal to replace Illinois flat income tax with one to make the wealthiest residents pay more, saying the revenue will help universities and social services operating without state money. In Chicago, CTU President Karen Lewis blasted the first-term Republican governor for his role in the standoff and moves to curb union influence, comments that come as the union is locked in contentious contract negotiations with nations third-largest school district. Rauner is the new ISIS recruit, she said referring to the Islamic State group, during a City Club of Chicago speech. Because the things hes doing looks like acts of terror on poor and working-class people. Rauners office immediately objected to the comments. This kind of rhetoric has no place in American public discourse and sets a terrible example for our kids, Rauner spokeswoman Catherine Kelly said in a statement. Rauner and legislative Democrats are deadlocked over a budget for the fiscal year that began in July. Rauner wants pro-business changes. Democrats, who want a tax increase, object to Rauners ideas such as collective bargaining changes. Rauner, who approved money for public schools last year, says his proposed spending plan would allocate $120 million more for them next year. However, under his blueprint universities are expected to see cuts, and Chicago Public Schools could lose $74 million while experiencing a $1 billion deficit, which Chicago district officials rallied against Tuesday. Meanwhile, lawmakers are also considering Democrat-backed proposals for a graduated income tax and an overhaul of Illinois outdated school funding formula. Lewis said teachers were preparing for a strike as early as May. On Saturday, CTU rejected a neutral arbitrators recommendation that it accept a district contract, which started a 30-day clock for when the union can give notice of a strike. The issues include pension payments and raises. Chicago schools CEO Forrest Claypool asked Lewis on Wednesday to use binding arbitration in lieu of a strike, which CTU officials dismissed as a publicity stunt. St. Joan of Arc Catholic School has informed parents of potentially inappropriate behavior by a faculty member. The letter sent by the school Wednesday states that teacher Ryan Storie is alleged to have had inappropriate electronic communications with a female student. The teacher has been placed on administrative leave, pending an investigation by Missouri's Children's Division. A hotline call had been made to the state agency on the alleged incident. According to the letter, the Archdiocese's Code of Ethical Conduct prevent any electronic communication between clergy or teacher and minors unless parent or other adults in the ministry are copied on the communication. ST. LOUIS Both the federal government and the state of Missouri require that when entities spend money to support or oppose political candidates, they must reveal where that money came from. Yet the funding source for a federal political action committee set up to attack Missouri gubernatorial candidate Eric Greitens remains a mystery in both Jefferson City and Washington, thanks to some creative use of the rules. In essence, the super PAC has avoided Missouri campaign disclosure requirements by filing with the federal system instead and has effectively circumvented federal disclosure requirements by running all its money through a nonprofit corporation listed at the same address as the founder of the super PAC. Its unclear whether the super PAC has broken any law. But it has definitely highlighted gaping loopholes in both the state and federal campaign finance systems. Theyre gaming the disclosure laws to hide the sources of their money, said Brendan Fischer, association counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington-based nonpartisan reform group. Missouri regulators have left the issue in the hands of the Federal Election Commission, which in turn has been asleep at the switch, said Fischer. They have consistently declined to enforce the law. The super PAC, a Virginia-based entity with the ubervague name Patriots for America, has been at the heart of a longstanding grudge match between Greitens and businessman John Brunner. Both are seeking Missouris Republican nomination for governor this year, along with former Missouri House Speaker Catherine Hanaway and Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder. Patriots for America was set up in November by Adam McLain, a former Brunner campaign staffer. The super PAC also has apparent connections to Brunners former campaign chief of staff, Paul Holzer, a Post-Dispatch inquiry found this week. Still, McLain has insisted the super PAC is his own venture, with no ties to the Brunner campaign. As such, its allowed to raise unlimited money, as long as theres no coordination with any candidate. The super PAC has been aggressive in attacking Greitens, to the point that Greitens complained bitterly to Brunner in a telephone confrontation last year that Brunner secretly recorded, and which was later publicized. Yet there is no record of Patriots for America in Missouris campaign disclosure system, where political campaigns operating in the state are supposed to divulge the sources of their funding and how their money is being spent. One potential defense for that lapse is the fact that the super PAC has filed disclosure forms with the FEC. Its possible that could legally relieve the PAC of the responsibility of filing in Missouri, said Liz Ziegler, general counsel for the Missouri Ethics Commission. So those federal filings would answer the funding questions that arent getting answered in Missouri, right? Not exactly. According to Patriots for Americas federal filing, its sole monetary donor is a recently formed nonprofit corporation called Franklin & Lee, which contributed more than $84,000 in January and February. And where did Franklin & Lee get that money? No one knows. As a nonprofit, it isnt required to divulge its donors in the way that a super PAC is. Little information is available about Franklin & Lee. But its mailing address in the tiny town of Paquoson, Va., is the same as one of the listed addresses for McLain, the former Brunner staffer who set up the Patriots for America super PAC, according to campaign records. McLain also shares an address with the super PAC itself in the same town as the nonprofit, about four blocks away, according to a Paquoson map. McLain didnt return emails seeking comment this week. When a reporter called the Boston attorney listed on Patriots for Americas documentation to ask if anyone else could speak for the super PAC, the attorneys office referred questions to Holzer, Brunners former campaign chief of staff. Someone answering Holzers phone Friday said he was unavailable, and hung up. Despite the involvement of its two former staffers, Brunners campaign has repeatedly denied it has any connection with the super PAC. A Brunner spokesman didnt respond to multiple messages seeking comment for this article last week. Since the U.S. Supreme Courts 2010 Citizens United ruling that unleashed corporate political spending, reformers say its become common for super PACs to game the rules in various ways to make the money harder to follow. Fischer, of the Campaign Legal Center, said one unusual aspect of the Missouri situation is that the super PAC in question chose to file as a federal committee, even though its operational focus is on a state gubernatorial candidate. He suggested that is a testament to the FECs reputation for lax enforcement that the super PACs organizers may have felt that even Missouri, known nationally for its refusal to impose ethics standards on campaigns, would subject them to more scrutiny than the FEC would. The Missouri Ethics Commission has deferred their responsibility to the FEC, said Fischer, ... and the FEC is not going to enforce the law. An FEC spokesperson said in a written statement that the agency doesnt comment on specific campaign committees. Chuck Raasch Chuck Raasch is a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Follow Chuck Raasch Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today WASHINGTON Lame ducks have proliferated here as much as the Aflac duck on TV. Not just for President Barack Obama, who is taking the traditional second seat to those campaigning to replace him. The Republican-controlled Congress has decided to leave big questions, including the next Supreme Court justice, for the next Congress and the next president. In D.C., 2016 has become the year of living laggardly. Wait till next year the eternal motto of Chicago Cubs fans also applies to your capital city. While the presidential primaries wind down to frantic finishes, the District of Columbia has settled in to settling for the modestly achievable in a highly partisan environment. Obama is legacy-building, currently on a trip to the Middle East and Europe mocked by Republicans as an apology tour. The president also is unleashing a burst of executive actions on issues such as requiring financial advisers to put the interest of clients over fees that he knows the Republicans dont have the votes to stop. Republicans, who have spent most of Obamas 87 months in office trying to delegitimize his presidency, seem content with passing appropriations bills and slow-walking even some pressing issues, like the administrations request for more money to fight the dangerous, mosquito-borne and sex-transmitted Zika virus. The House and Senate have a busy feel, passing minor, less controversial bills, like those that direct the government to come up with better definitions of farms as small businesses, sponsored by Rep. Mike Bost, R-Murphysboro, Ill. Or a reauthorization of the Federal Agency Administration, which passed the Senate 95-3 this week. But for the most part, the Big Questions immigration and entitlement reform among them will almost certainly be left on the table for the 2017 cast of political characters. The lame duck is an American tradition, the natural offspring of a representative democracy that, unlike many, is constitutionally subject to congressional elections every other year, and presidential elections every four years. But lame-duckism has gotten more pronounced in the era of the permanent campaign, when people sometimes run for an office about as long as the time they spend in it. Actual governing that is undisturbed by super PACs or the ambitions of those next in line has had an increasingly narrow window in which to operate. When Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky pronounced early in Obamas first term that Republicans considered Obamas ideas so detrimental to the country that they would do all they could to stop him, Obamas 2008 campaign promises of hope, change and grand bargains were out the window. That was seven years ago. The illegal immigration problems that have fueled Donald Trumps front-running Republican campaign have festered throughout. Fundamentally, Trump is a creation of the inability of Obama and the Republicans opposing him to get together to solve a problem the millions of people here illegally but aspiring for the American dream for the good of the country. Now, in the final nine months of Obamas presidency, Republicans and Democrats are consigned frequently to gestures, such as Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., joining a press conference to push for a higher minimum wage that simply cant make it through this Congress. Lame-duckism got so pronounced in Congress this week that Democrats in the House of Representatives, who have no role in naming the next Supreme Court justice, held a soliloquy on the House floor to denounce Senate Republicans for refusing to schedule a hearing or vote on Obamas Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland. C-SPAN audiences everywhere caught a glimpse of the frustrations of political irrelevancy. As a result, a Supreme Court that is ideologically divided, 4-4, could persist for a year, in effect leaving in place a spate of lower-court rulings on many important questions before it, including the administrations attempts to ease deportation of millions of people in the country illegally. In that way, the Supreme Court has become a lame duck, too. These important constitutional questions, many of them, could be left in limbo because the Senate Republicans refuse to even do their job, said Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas. Ironically, he could be a congressional lame duck himself in a matter of months, or he could be campaigning for a lame-duck twin. Castro, and his twin brother, Julian, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, are potential Democratic vice presidential choices. JEFFERSON CITY Working against a self-imposed deadline, Missouri lawmakers approved a $27 billion spending plan Thursday that restores many threatened cuts to higher education, includes a modest bump for public schools and forgoes any tax increases. With the clock ticking, the Republican-led Legislature worked to get the budget blueprint to Democratic Gov. Jay Nixons desk in order to give themselves time to override any possible vetoes before their scheduled May 13 adjournment date. Winners include state employees, who will see raises of 2 percent in the fiscal year beginning July 1. Losers include Planned Parenthood, which will see its state funding cut by an estimated $380,000 as part of an ongoing election-year move by Republicans to defund the agency. In order to slight the organization, perceived as an abortion provider, the state is leaving $8 million in federal funding on the cutting room floor. The final plan came together after negotiators from the House and Senate reviewed more than a dozen bills that constitute state funding for the coming fiscal year. In a statement, Nixon said he would review the budget with an eye on keeping the states AAA credit rating intact. Here in Missouri fiscal discipline is a value, so I thank members of the General Assembly for passing the budget on time and answering my call to make smart, fiscally responsible investments in mental health services and college affordability, Nixon said. In the coming days, we will review the budget line by line to ensure we keep the budget in balance, our AAA rating intact and our economy moving forward. No longer included in the document is $50,000 that would have gone toward the hiring of a valet to help park lawmakers cars and trucks in the Capitol basement. Legislators did insert language that would prohibit state money from being spent on renovations to the Scottrade Center in St. Louis. They also earmarked $500,000 for Harris-Stowe State University to launch a postgraduate program. That was down from a proposed $1 million allocation, which triggered outcry from Sen. Jamilah Nasheed, D-St. Louis, who said the cut was racially motivated because the school is a historically black institution. Much of the focus of budget talks this year centered on the University of Missouri, where protests last fall led to threats of budget cuts from GOP lawmakers who were unhappy with the response to the turmoil from administrators. But, rather than go along with plans in the House to cut funding to the university system by $7.6 million, the final version reflects a $3.8 million reduction. A separate $1 million cut to the Columbia campus also was eliminated. Rep. Stephen Webber, D-Columbia, called the $3.8 million reduction retaliatory and voted no on the higher education portion of the budget because the cuts wont hurt administrators. Rather, the university has already announced plans to lay off 50 maintenance workers. Budget-writers were able to secure guarantees from the states universities to freeze tuition for the coming year in exchange for a 4 percent funding increase equaling about $37 million. Earlier versions had limited the increase to 2 percent. Public schools wont see as much money as Nixon had sought in his budget outline. The Legislature agreed to pump an additional $71 million toward K-12 education, down from the $85 million increase in the foundation formula Nixon had proposed. I am disappointed that legislators provided less funding for our K-12 classrooms than I recommended, Nixon said. Rep. Margo McNeil, R-Florissant, said the education funding increase was based on a shaky premise because $5 million of the money is based on revenue from the state lottery. It may come in or it may not come in. Kinda chancy, McNeil said. She said the state could look for other sources of revenue to boost spending for schools. Were not making (education funding) a high priority, McNeil said. The cuts to Planned Parenthood drew fire from Democratic lawmakers. In essence, the attempt is to shut down Planned Parenthood but the effect is denying low-income women their access to health care through the provider of choice, said Sen. Jill Schupp, D-Creve Coeur. Youre actually punishing women by this political agenda, said Rep. Stacey Newman, D-St. Louis. Others had concerns about using $4.3 million to fund programs advocating alternatives to abortion. The money is available because of an estimated $20 million in savings resulting from the state scaling back the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Im not opposed to the alternatives to abortion, I just dont think that it should be coming out of TANF, said state Sen. Jason Holsman, D-Kansas City. Much of the growth in government spending is targeted at rising health care costs for the states poorest residents. Medicaid costs are expected to jump 34 percent, with prescription drug costs rising above $1.8 billion. Senators want the administration to cut prescription drug costs by at least $22 million by negotiating better prices with drug companies and potentially limiting the amount of different drugs prescribed to recipients. In all, total state Medicaid spending is set at $10.2 billion, down from Nixons proposal of $10.3 billion. Current year spending on Medicaid is about $9.3 billion. There are a lot of things in this budget that we dont have to do, but that we want to do, said Rep. Marsha Haefner, R-south St. Louis County. The legislation is House Bills 2002-2012. John Ashcroft, whose gospel music talents helped his decades-long political career in Missouri and Washington, will soon sing a tune for his son Jay - who's running this year for the Republican nomination for Missouri secretary of state. He'll be joined at a Jay Ashcroft fundraiser by another famous musical Republican - former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, known for his bass guitar playing. The elder Ashcroft and Huckabee both will perform at the event June 9 at the Ashcroft family farm near Springfield. It's billed as the "first annual Ashcroft Faith 'N Freedom Festival." Jay Ashcroft, a St. Louis County attorney, said Wednesday that he loves to sing at family gatherings but typically doesn't get up on stage at bigger events like his dad. While his father was Missouri attorney general and governor in the 1970s and 1980s, he toured inside and outside the state in a singing duo with Max Bacon, a Democratic circuit judge also from Springfield. The two also cut albums. Later, as a U.S. senator, the elder Ashcroft teamed with three GOP colleagues in the Singing Senators group. He went on, of course, to become U.S. attorney general under then-President George W. Bush. Huckabee, who ran unsuccessfully this year for the GOP presidential nomination, is the second nationally-known Republican pol not named Ashcroft to campaign for Jay Ashcroft. In February, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appeared at a fundraiser in Clayton. Jay Ashcroft, an unsuccessful state Senate candidate in 2014, is running against state Sen. Will Kraus of the Kansas City area for the GOP secretary of state nomination. JEFFERSON CITY Lawmakers will have to wait at least six months to become lobbyists under a measure heading to Gov. Jay Nixons desk. Despite facing criticism from senators who questioned whether the change would help clean up the capital city, the Senate endorsed the states first-ever cooling-off period on a vote of 31-1. Passage of the revolving door ban is the latest in a handful of good-government measures moving through the Legislature in response to the resignations last year of two lawmakers accused of having inappropriate relations with interns. Republicans launched the 2016 legislative session saying that improving ethics laws was their No. 1 priority. Other proposals include limiting lobbyist gifts to elected officials. Missouri lawmakers can now become lobbyists immediately upon leaving office, cashing in their experience under the dome with companies and organizations looking for an inside track for favorable treatment. In all, at least 33 states impose waiting periods for lawmakers looking to move into lobbying. Among surrounding states, there are no restrictions in Illinois, Kansas or Nebraska. Lawmakers in Oklahoma, Iowa and Kentucky must wait for two years to lobby. In Arkansas and Tennessee, there is a one-year wait. Sen. Jason Holsman, D-Kansas City, said the Legislature needed to address campaign contribution limits. This cooling-off period is not going to change how Jefferson City operates, Holsman said. This is window dressing. Sen. Scott Sifton, D-Affton, said the waiting period should have been longer. It doesnt go as far as I would like it to go, but it is progress, Sifton said. Sen. Dave Schatz, R-Sullivan, said the cooling-down period was not an issue with voters. He said lawmakers should be able to pursue better jobs without interference. Nonetheless, he voted yes. I hope this thing gets challenged, Schatz said. I do not believe that this is good policy at all. Sen. Ed Emory, R-Lamar, cast the lone no vote. Nixon has signaled he supports the change. If approved, those who violate the ban could face up to six months in jail. The legislation is House Bill 1979. JEFFERSON CITY The Missouri House has snuffed out a plan that would have allowed terminal cancer patients to legally use marijuana for pain relief. Two days after giving preliminary approval to the plan, the House reversed course and voted 66-87 against the measure, which would have called for voters to decide this fall whether they favor legalizing medical pot only for people who are in hospices. It comes as a supporters of legalizing marijuana are seeking to put a question on the November ballot asking for a much broader legalization of the drug. The group, New Approach Missouri, is collecting signatures for a plan that would apply to a wider population of people suffering from painful diseases. Among those voting no on the limited proposal Thursday was Rep. Karla May, D-St. Louis. She and others said the state shouldnt be placing such tight restrictions on who gets to use marijuana. I think its not broad enough, May said. In addition, May said the rules governing who can grow and sell the pot are too limited because they bar felons from being involved in the business. The plan called for the Missouri Division of Alcohol and Tobacco Control to regulate the growing, distribution and sale of the drug. The agency would be able to issue up to 30 licenses for medical marijuana dispensaries and 30 licenses for cultivation centers, subject to strict regulation. The proposed law would not allow citizens to grow marijuana at home. It is locking others out of the economic impact of what were creating, May said. Rep. Keith Frederick, R-Rolla, said he sought the more limited measure because he believes marijuana use is damaging to teenage brains. The legislation is House Bill 2213. Updated at 9:15 p.m. with details from the Wednesday night hearing. JEFFERSON CITY The chairman of the state House Emerging Issues Committee said Wednesday night that the panel was delaying a vote on a measure that would grant greater protections to some people and entities opposed to same-sex marriage. A few of them (committee members) have asked for more time, because theyve gotten legal memos just today and theyve asked for more time to consider them, state Rep. Elijah Haahr, R-Springfield, said Wednesday night. Haahr said the legal memos members had received included arguments about whether the measure was constitutional. But besides the memos, advocates on both sides of the issue have not let up pressure on the committee since a hearing last week. I think the members are doing their best to try to make a determination about whether to move the bill forward, Haahr said. Senate Joint Resolution 39 would ask voters whether clergy and their churches should be shielded from government penalties and legal liability if they decline to participate in a same-sex wedding ceremony. Opponents argue that such protections already exist under the U.S. and state constitutions. Wedding vendors such as florists, bakers and photographers would also be granted greater legal protections if they decline to participate in a same-sex wedding. Certain religious organizations including hospitals, colleges and nursing homes with religious ties could not be penalized for opposing same-sex marriage, which opponents say would allow for widespread denial of services. State Rep. Mike Colona, D-St. Louis and the Legislatures only openly gay member, said Wednesday night that there had been talk in the House about amending the bill since the Senate approved it. Depending on the day, depending on the hour, we either have just enough votes or just not enough votes, Colona said of proposed amendments. Its been very fluid. He said that there were a couple of amendments floating around out there. One would have the bill apply only to clergy; another would weave in a protection for businesses so employees couldnt sue their employer when disciplined for declining service to gay people. Those issues and the underlying constitutional amendment itself are being lobbied so heavily by both sides that its hard for the members to commit one way or another, Colona said. Haahr said Wednesday night that he preferred that the bill move forward as it was. But he said he didnt speak for the entire committee. Im leaning toward supporting the bill in its current form, but Ive said from the beginning, I have a membership of 12 committee members, and its a majority vote, he said. Im not going to force them to go one way or the other. They get to vet the bill and they get to decide whether or not they think it should be amended, passed or voted down. If the proposal passes the Emerging Issues Committee, it still has to go through at least one more committee before heading to the House floor. If an amended version passes the House, there would have to be a House-Senate conference committee to reconcile differences. That would burn time when there are less than four weeks remaining in the legislative session. They (senators) have made their preference clear, theyd like to keep it in its current form, Haahr said. But, you know, were the House and we will hear it and we will make our determination as a committee and as a House body on whether or not we agree with that position. On Wednesday, PROMO, a gay rights advocacy group, and the ACLU of Missouri held a rally under the Capitol dome to urge opposition to the measure. Former Rams and Mizzou defensive end Michael Sam, who is openly gay, spoke out. This so-called religious liberty bill is just another way to undermine the dignity of LGBT people and their families, Sam said. As an athlete who grew up in a Christian home, two things were always made clear to me. First: Treat every person, every team, competitor with respect. Second: Everyone should have an equal shot and start on an equal playing field. On Tuesday, proponents also held a rally at the Capitol, with Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder, state Sen. Bob Onder of Lake Saint Louis and state Rep. Paul Curtman of Union all main backers of the legislation and all Republicans in attendance. The resolution has faced headwinds since a 37-hour filibuster in the Senate by Democrats in March, with growing national interest and a backlash from some of the states most well-known businesses. Proponents say that no one should be commandeered into servicing a same-sex wedding if it violates their religious views. Onder, the sponsor, also has disputed claims that the amendment would encourage widespread denial of services and harm business in Missouri. On Tuesday, Eric Greitens, a Republican candidate for governor, broke with the three other GOP candidates seeking the partys nomination to oppose the measure. St. Charles County supporters of Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump have filed challenges of the results of the countywide Republican caucus won April 9 by backers of Ted Cruz and their allies. Trump supporters also are appealing the outcomes of two smaller caucuses they lost the same day in Missouri River and Maryland Heights townships in west St. Louis County. The state GOP's credentials committee will hold hearings Saturday in Jefferson City to consider the complaints, which allege violations of party rules by caucus organizers. "Consider what the party is doing on all levels to attack and undermine the clear front-runner, even in jurisdictions like St. Charles County where Trump won the primary election by a clear majority vote," said one of three challenges filed by Trump supporters in the county. But caucus chairman David Zucker, who also is mayor of Dardenne Prairie, said the accusations of rules violations "have no merit." Leaders of the disputed St. Louis County caucuses said the same thing. The state GOP panel also will consider a Cruz supporter's challenge of the way a St. Louis city GOP caucus narrowly picked a pro-Trump slate over a so-called "unity slate" made up of supporters of various candidates. The challenges are another reflection of the closeness and bitterness of the Trump-Cruz battle for delegates nationally, which could end up in an unusual GOP national convention in Cleveland in which the outcome isn't known in advance. On the first ballot in Cleveland, the Missouri delegates must vote for the candidate based on results of the state's March 15 presidential primary - 37 for Trump and 15 for Cruz. But if no one gets a first-ballot victory, delegates can vote for anyone they wish. In St. Charles County, Trump supporters want the state GOP to order a new caucus. Among their allegations: caucus officials unfairly disqualified the pro-Trump slate of people nominated to attend upcoming Congressional district conventions April 30 and the GOP state convention next month. Those meetings will select the national delegates. Officials said some of the Trump group's paperwork turned in for their slate wasn't filled out correctly, while Trump advocates say they had all the required information available in a different form. The disqualification, which wasn't announced to the caucus, meant that participants only could vote yes or no on the non-Trump slate, called "the courageous conservatives," and couldn't choose between the two alternatives. The vote was 160-138 for the non-Trump slate for the state convention. Similar Cruz-flavored delegations from St. Charles County to two district conventions also were chosen. Had both slates been qualified, Trump activist Brenda Webb argued in another challenge, caucus-goers "may have well been swayed to vote for Donald Trump and support his team." Trump, the New York billionaire businessman, had carried the county in the primary. Cruz, the Texas senator, finished second, as he did statewide. Trump activists also complained that the names on the winning slate weren't disclosed to the caucus and that various procedural motions made by Trump supporters were rejected. Zucker said he followed party rules and Robert's Rules of Order. He added that he was neutral on which slate should be picked and had voted himself for Trump in the primary. "My job...was to call the balls and strikes regardless of who is pitching," he said. Meanwhile, County Republican Chairman Joe Brazil complained that a caucus official later refused his request to release the Trump slate paperwork to show in detail why it was disqualified. Brazil said his request and the refusal occurred at a county GOP committee meeting last week. He said he hasn't taken a position on the caucus challenges, however. In St. Louis County, Trump narrowly won countywide in the March primary but Cruz carried the two townships where the caucus results ended up being challenged by Trump supporters. In the challenge filed in Missouri River Township, Trump backers said an initial show of hands vote resulted in a 27-27 split between backers of Cruz and Trump delegate slates, then Trump won 28-27 in a second such vote. The Trump challenge complained that caucus chairman Mark Dunn then called for a paper-ballot vote which was won by the Cruz slate, 29-27. The Trump challenge said the rules didn't allow a paper vote but Dunn on Tuesday insisted that it was proper. Moreover, he said before the paper vote there had been only one show-of-hands vote which ended in a tie. Dunn said he was neutral and didn't vote in the caucus. In Maryland Heights Township, the Trump side complained that some of their supporters left the caucus after a caucus official announced that the Trump slate paperwork wasn't completely filled out and was in violation of rules. That was disputed by Annette Read, a Trump organizer for St. Louis County. Caucus chairman Jim Cain said despite the rules issue, he said he allowed participants to vote between the pro-Trump slate and one made up of township party officials like himself that aren't tied to a particular candidate. The non-Trump slate won, he said. Had the Trump side won, his group would have filed a challenge. Cain said he had been a supporter of former presidential candidate Carly Fiorina and has yet to decide who to back further in the process. In St. Louis, Cruz supporter Connie Eller complained that after a Trump slate and a rival "unity slate" were nominated, caucus chairman Michael Chance erred by allowing a few on the unity slate to remove their names and by calling recesses to allow the slates to be changed if needed. Chance said most of the people in question were Trump backers who had been included on both slates. Eller said had those who asked to be removed stayed on the unity slate and voted for it as they had earlier promised, the unity group would have won. Chance said he acted according to the rules. Trump carried the city in the primary. Overall, Missouri Republican Party spokesman Jonathon Prouty said, the number of caucus challenges - 10 dealing with four caucus locations - this year was lower than in 2012 when there were 38. FRONTENAC The former Ladue Early Childhood Center site on Clayton and Spoede roads in Frontenac now has "villa" zoning, but no redevelopment proposal is before the city, and various groups remain at odds over potential uses for the site. The rezoning measure was adopted Tuesday night by the Board Aldermen after another a long discussion and applause from groups present. Up to 3.5 units per acre are now allowable on the 9-acre site, rather than the long time one-acre zoning there. Many neighbors want to keep that due to traffic considerations. But other residents say the more dense plan is acceptable, or else the site may never attract redevelopment due to low prospects of profitability. The Pulte Group, whose plan for villas as well as assisted living on the site was turned down last May after almost a year of consideration, has insisted that its plans were not given due consideration. Pulte sued the city after the May vote, but recently dropped the lawsuit without explanation. In the interim, Pulte offered a reduced plan, but consideration was thwarted because the city had just imposed a moratorium on redevelopment there during a study period. Among other things, the study served to convince aldermen that the villa zoning was allowable and even preferred by residents and the planning and zoning commission in the past, and incorporated into permanent city records. Mayor Keith Krieg eventually said at a board meeting that the single-acre requirement was indefensible. On Tuesday night the Ladue School District, which still owns the site but hasn't used it since 2011, cautioned through a representative that villa zoning would drive down the price of what could be realized from a sale, which would ill-serve district residents. But others noted that the district got voter support for more than $80 million in capital improvement projects in the April 5 election, and therefore ought be satisfied for the time being. Vietnam's phones and accessories exports witnessed a sharp year-on-year increase of 24.2 percent in the first quarter of the year, cementing mobile phone products among the country's most important export items. Occupying over 30 percent of total export value, mobile phones and accessories topped the list of processed industrial products. The runner-ups were textiles and electronics, computers and components. The export value of telephones, mobiles and parts has increased gradually from 2012, and hit $8.27 bln in the first quarter of this year. According to data from Vietnam Customs, $8.255 bln (accounting for 99.8 percent) of the total export value comes from FDI companies. The United Arab Emirates is the biggest export market for Vietnam's phone products, followed by the U.S., South Korea and Germany. This quarter witnessed over a 300 percent increase in export value to South Korea and Cambodia. However, there was over a 50 percent decrease in export value to India and Indonesia. Source: Vietnam Customs Visiting justices from Canadas high court sat in on Mondays immigration arguments before the Supreme Court and after their 90-minute education in the current state of American jurisprudence, our neighbors to the north would be forgiven if they had fantasies of building a border wall of their own. The Senates refusal to confirm a replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia has left the U.S. high court evenly split and increasingly paralyzed. As the justices heard arguments about President Obamas executive actions on illegal immigration, there were really only two possible results: chaos or more chaos. A divided Congress couldnt agree on legislation to deal with the 11 million immigrants here illegally. Obama tried to do something on his own use his executive authority to defer deportation of parents of children who are American citizens and the rift grew deeper. Texas, supported by 25 other states, most led by Republican governors, sued. Sixteen other states and the District of Columbia filed briefs on the other side. The GOP-led U.S. House sued as well, but 186 members of the House and 39 senators (virtually the entire Democratic caucus) filed opposing briefs. Now the Supreme Court has to rule on Obamas DAPA policy (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans). But with no expectation that the justices can reach agreement on the merits of the case, that leaves two options: Chief Justice John Roberts joins the liberals in dismissing the case on a technicality that Texas doesnt have standing in court. This would leave it unclear whether DAPA is legal and set off confusion in the country as other entities try to file suit and the administration tries to enforce its legally ambiguous policy. Or, the justices come to a 4-to-4 tie on the merits of the case, and even greater chaos ensues. An appellate ruling invalidating the law stands, at least in part of the country. Cases will be brought in other circuits, probably causing different views of the law to arise in different parts of the country. With either of these two possibilities you have chaos about whether DAPA is legal or not, says Neal Katyal, the Supreme Court litigator with Hogan Lovells who filed a brief in the case from former immigration officials supporting the administration. The current confusion, following the 4-to-4 split in an important labor case, is another indication that the Supreme Court is struggling to function. The justices have granted only three cases since Scalia died, according to a list kept by the court, a figure Supreme Court watchers say is extraordinarily low. Theyre tending away from deciding much, and when they do reach decision, it is often a very narrow ruling, Katyal tells me. On Monday, the justices seemed split down the middle, both on the merits of the case and the question of standing. Roberts said Texas position, that it would lose money because it would have to issue drivers licenses to those aided by Obamas order, was the classic case for standing, and he accused the administration of putting Texas in a Catch-22. Justice Anthony Kennedy, too, said that the policy was being done backwards and upside down and that the decision should be a legislative, not an executive, act. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor ridiculed the claim that the executive orders would have a negative economic impact on Texas. Those nearly 11 million unauthorized aliens are here in the shadows they are affecting the economy whether we want to or not, she said. If Congress really wanted not to have an economic impact, it would allot the amount of money necessary to deport them, but it hasnt. Nobody disputed that the administration has the discretion to defer action on certain illegal immigrants. What disturbed lawyers for the House and for Texas was that those who receive such deferred action are, under long-standing federal law, eligible to apply for authorization to work based on economic need, even though they dont have legal status. Erin Murphy, representing the House, said flatly that Congress has passed a statute that says if you are living in this country without legal authority, you cannot work. But Donald Verrilli, the administrations solicitor general, pointed out that, even without DAPA, there are millions of people who dont have legal status but legally work in the United States. They would be out of luck and out of work under the law as the House Republican majority would like it to be interpreted. Tossing millions from their jobs would cause chaos. But chaos is what you get when you sideline the Supreme Court. Dana Milbank Copyright The Washington Post Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has asked the Peoples Committee of Ho Chi Minh City to review criminal proceedings against a Pho restaurant owner for being five days late obtaining a business registration certificate. Nguyen Van Tan, the owner of a restaurant on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, was prosecuted last month for breaking a regulation under Article 159 of the Criminal Code, which punishes individuals who conduct business without a licence. Nguyen Van Tan opened his restaurant in August last year in the suburban district of Binh Chanh and named it Xin Chao (literally translated as Hello). The restaurant became a regular eating place offering the main dish pho and drinks during breakfast and lunch. Five days after opening, two local policemen came to check on his business registration. Tan was given an administrative warning for doing business without a business registration certificate. Despite the fact that Tan took immediate action to redeem the violation and managed to obtain the certificate just five days later, but he still faced a heavy fine of up to VND17 million ($800). The business law makes it an offence to run a business without a registration certificate, but the maximum fine for such an infraction should only be VND7.5 million. Police in Binh Chanh district have elaborated on the reasons for the heavy fine, saying that the restaurant owner also had to pay a penalty of nearly $800 for breaking other regulations on food safety standards; health and hygiene responsibilities of food handlers; and the origins of food additives and ingredients. Tan was unable to pay the fine after investing all his money in the restaurant, including a huge upfront five-year lease payment. He was forced to temporarily shut the restaurant while waiting for food safety and hygiene certificates. But the local policemen kept coming to inspect the restaurant, and issued two more for having toxic insects in the kitchen and using below-standard water. Murphys Law, which states things tend to go from bad to worse, seems to be at play in this situation as local police authorities in late September decided to probe the case and bring criminal charges against the restaurant owner. On March 11, the district prosecutor issued an indictment against Tan for illegally doing business. Nguyen Van Tan faced criminal charges for "doing business without a business registration certificate". Photo by Hai Duyen. Tan said he had no idea why he was faced with criminal charges when all he wanted to do was earn a living. Is it because my business is opposite the police station? Does it compete with their canteen? Saigon Giai Phong newspaper quoted Tan as saying. Under Vietnamese criminal law, convictions for charges of doing business without a registration certificate can carry a maximum two years probation. The incident has evoked public concern and criticism of the administration of justice. The district Peoples Committee, which issued the business registration certificate, has rejected a request by local police authorities to ban Tan from running his restaurant by revoking his certificate. Many lawyers have expressed their opinions about the case in favor of the restaurant owner. They have all cited the revised 2013 Constitution which clearly states that the State allows people to do business in areas that are not prohibited, saying that they didnt think the case warranted criminal charges. Top government officials have had to jump in to prevent a possible public outcry about an unfair business environment in the country. In the latest development, the Prime Minister, in a meeting this morning, requested Ho Chi Minh Citys government to intervene and identify the individuals responsible for bringing criminal charges against the noodle restaurant owner. Secretary of the city's Party Committee Dinh La Thang yesterday asked the chief prosecutor of the municipal procuracy to thoroughly review the case and instructed Binh Chanh police to submit a detailed report. He stressed that if the local authorities had been wrong to bring a criminal charge against the restaurant owner, they would face severe punishment. "It is what we need to do to regain public trust and ensure that the business environment in Ho Chi Minh City is fair for everyone and every business," the city leader was quoted by the governments online news portal as saying. LONDON MARKET CLOSE: FTSE 100 ends higher; Mordaunt makes UK PM tilt Friday, October 21, 2022 - 17:22 The pound regained some poise on Friday afternoon but remained in precarious territory, after falling below the $1.11 mark in afternoon trade. The pound was quoted at $1.1203 at the close on Friday, down versus $1.1294 at the London equities close on Thursday. It hit an intraday low of $1.1063 not long after midday. Sterling was hurt by continued political uncertainty. Speculation about who will join Penny Mordaunt in throwing their hats in the ring in the race for Number 10 continues. Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, one-time neighbours at Number 10 and 11 Downing Street - but now bitter rivals - have pockets of support from Tory MPs. Adding to the pressure on sterling, disappointing UK retail sales data showed a bigger-than-expected decline in September, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. Retail sales fell 6.9% annually in September, with the decline accelerating from a 5.6% fall in August. It also was worse than FXStreet-cited market consensus, which had expected a fall of just 5%. The pound had initially found some support on Thursday after Liz Truss called an end to her disastrous tenure as prime minister - poking above $1.13 - but has since been dragged lower. The FTSE 100 index closed up 25.82 points, or 0.4%, at 6,969.73 - closing out the week up 1.6%. The FTSE 250 lost 182.38 points, or 1.1%, at 17,206.55, but still managed to gain 1.0% this week, and the AIM All-Share ended down 1.04 points, or 0.1% at 785.40 - but advanced 0.8% over the past five days. The Cboe UK 100 closed up 0.4% at 696.31, the Cboe UK 250 ended down 1.0% at 14,694.15, and the Cboe Small Companies lost 0.3% at 12,240.46. In European equities on Friday, the CAC 40 in Paris lost 0.9%, while the DAX 40 in Frankfurt gave back 0.3%. The Tories have begun to declare their allegiances in the party's second leadership contest of the year as speculation mounts over who will seek to replace Truss at the helm of the party. Supporters of Johnson are backing the former prime minister to make an extraordinary political comeback, while ex-chancellor Sunak and Commons Leader Mordaunt also have the public support of several MPs. Mordaunt become the first to declare her candidacy, with a pledge to re-unite the bitterly divided party. The leader of the House who finished third in the last leadership election said she had been encouraged by the support she had received from fellow Conservative MPs. There has also been no declaration yet from Sunak, who did not answer questions from reporters as he left his home on Friday morning. Whoever does win will face an immediate test, choosing whether to go ahead with the planned Halloween statement setting out how the government intends to get the public finances back on track, Downing Street has said. Work is continuing in Whitehall, led by Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, in preparation for the medium-term fiscal plan to be announced on October 31 along with an updated set of economic forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility. However, a Number 10 spokeswoman said it would be up to Liz Truss's successor to decide whether to proceed with that approach and with the same timetable. In London, blue chip miners helped push FTSE 100 higher. Glencore gained 3.6%, Anglo American 3.1%, Antofagasta 2.7%, and Rio Tinto added 1.6%. Retailers, however, were showing weakness after the disappointing UK retail sales data. A profit warning from Adidas did nothing to help the mood either. JD Sports closed down 6.1%, Frasers 4.0%, Burberry 2.2%, and Next shed 2.9%. On Thursday, Adidas lowered annual guidance as it struggles with "deteriorating traffic" in China and high inventory levels. The sports apparel maker said it has needed to turn to "higher clearance activity" to try and shift stock. It lost 9.0% in Frankfurt. Deliveroo gained 3.6%. The London-based online food delivery service said gross transaction values rose 8.3% annually in the third quarter to 1.70 billion from 1.57 billion, though orders fell by 1.1% to 72.8 million from 73.6 million. Deliveroo said the decline in orders was due to a difficult consumer environment. With economic data on Friday showing that UK consumer confidence remains near record lows, this seems unlikely to change anytime soon. InterContinental Hotels gave back 2.2% but reported strong revenue growth in the third quarter to September 30, saying that high global employment levels are boosting occupancy levels. Revenue per available room, or RevPAR, rose 28% year-on-year and now exceeds its pre-pandemic level, being up 2.7% on the third quarter of 2019. In the third quarter of 2022, the average daily rate increased by 13% compared to a year ago and was up 11% on 2019. Chief Financial Officer & Head of Strategy Paul Edgecliffe-Johnson will leave the company in six months time to become CFO of Flutter Entertainment in the first half of 2023. IHG has started the process of finding a new CFO. The euro stood at $0.9802 Friday evening, down against $0.9822 at the close on Thursday. Against the yen, the dollar was trading at JP148.03, compared to JP149.77 late Thursday. The yen was staging a fightback after the open on Wall Street, after nearly hitting JP152 during the Asia session. Stocks in New York opened higher on Friday, with the DJIA up 1.1%, the S&P 500 index up 0.9%, and the Nasdaq Composite was 0.6% higher. Brent oil was quoted at $92.84 a barrel late Friday, down from $93.29 late Thursday. Gold was quoted at $1,643.70 an ounce Friday, up against $1,641.90 from Thursday. In the international economics events calendar next week, Monday will be dominated by a slew of composite PMIs, with Japan overnight followed by Germany, eurozone and the UK in the morning then the US in the afternoon. A quiet Tuesday will be headlined by a US house price index. On Wednesday, there is Chinese GDP, retail sales and industrial production overnight, then on Thursday attention will be on the European Central Bank interest rate decision at 1315 BST. Friday will be headlined by a Bank of Japan rate decision. In the local corporate calendar on Monday, there are half-year results from Dr Martens, while education publishing firm Pearson will issue a third quarter update. Copyright 2022 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved. Vietnams new government has promised to step up the fight against corruption, eliminate cumbersome bureaucracy, and continue public administration reform, said newly-appointed Minister of Home Affairs Le Vinh Tan in an interview with Vietnam News Agency. Vietnam has completed the government reshuffle with the appointment of all ministerial heads in place. The new administration has so far shown determination to push for socio-economic reforms. And the Home Affairs Minister is the latest leader joining in the effort. The Ministry of Home Affairs will focus on fighting against corruption, bureaucracy and abuse of power by state administrators to harrass citizens, said Tan. He also vowed to improve the way the government authorizes, operates and delivers services to citizens through a comprehensive public administration reform. Under the reform, staff and officers in ministries, localities and government agencies will be held more accountable for their jobs. In an attempt to increase efficiency of public administration, the Home Affairs Ministry suggested to reduce the number of those on the state payroll in various sectors by at least 10 percent in the next five years. The government estimated that more than 200,000 people are on state payroll. The Home Affairs Ministry, in addition, said more power will be delegated to local government authorities who can take advantage of close proximity to quickly respond to local issues. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc on Thursday said the government will not allow the countrys economic growth to decline this year. We will not accept lower economic growth, Phuc said at a meeting with the Ministry of Planning and Investment on Thursday. The ministry, in charge of advising the party and central government on policies for the countrys social economic development, is one of the first ministries the new prime minister has met with. His comments were made after Vietnams GDP growth in the first quarter registered 5.46 percent, lower than the 6.12 percent recorded in Q1 last year. He asked government officials to formulate policies to ensure economic growth and use management tools promptly and effectively. The country has encountered several challenges since the beginning of this year, including severe drought and saline intrusion, which, according to some international organizations, may cause GDP growth to fall. Other difficulties included low oil prices, budget collection, business development and the complex situation in the East Sea, according to Phuc. Chairing his first meeting with the new cabinet earlier this month, Phuc said the government would focus on dealing with drought and saline intrusion, the business environment, budget collection, stimulating economic growth in the context of natural disasters and falling oil prices, strengthening administrative reform and addressing issues of critical public concern such as food safety and hygiene. The prime minister will meet with the private sector on April 29 as part of his agenda to clear barriers facing enterprises and improving the business environment. Seven officers suspended after escape of over 400 patients from rehab A week after 447 patients escaped, seven top officials and officers of the drug rehabilitation center in Vung Tau province, southern Vietnam, have been suspended. On April 20, Ba Ria Vung Tau Department of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs (DOLISA) suspended Director Tran Thien Chi and Deputy Director Nguyen Van Chau of Labor Education and Vocational Training Center. DOLISA appointed Pham Minh An, director of a nursing home, as new deputy director of the rehab center. Following the appointment, An suspended five officers of the center. The patients that stayed behind repairing the damage. Photo by Phuoc Tuan The mass suspension of the rehabs staff by DOLISA is part of the process to hold those responsible for the escape of 447 patients accountable. The incident took place in the evening of April 13, when patients destroyed doors and walls to escape. Nearly 20 security guards used pepper spray to control the situation but it wasnt enough. Many patients entered local houses to steal clothes; some stole a motorbike. To date, the authorities have only managed to bring 250 patients back to the center. Stifel analyst, Mark Swartzberg, thinks that Wednesdays's underperformance of Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO) (down 4.8%, XLP down 1.1%) reflects skepticism Coke will hit its 4%-5% organic revenue target for 2016 and he reduced his organic revenue estimate to +4.0% from +4.9%. However, he maintained his Buy rating and $54 PT. However, he also thinks Wednesdays weakness creates a buying opportunity for the following reasons: 1) North America continues growing and at a faster rate than it did before refranchising began (trend in body of note). 2) Europe is next up for accelerated refranchising. Coca-Cola European Partners is on track for creation by the end of 2Q and likely to realize at least $900 mil in revenue synergies, or approximately 7% of 2015 pro forma revenue, over the next three to five years. 3) Africa is also next up for accelerated refranchising. We expect Coke to close on the creation of Coca-Cola Beverages Africa by the end of 2Q. In Wednesday's earnings related call, management said the South Africa Competition Commission has recommended that the Competition Tribunal approve the Coca-Cola Beverages Africa merger with certain conditions. The Tribunal is set to meet in May to review the pending transaction. 4) Plans for China refranchising are more ambiguous, though the company continues expecting completion by the end of next year. We believe disappointing region performance creates added incentive to complete refranchising on time. For an analyst ratings summary and ratings history on Coca-Cola click here. For more ratings news on Coca-Cola click here. Shares of Coca-Cola closed at $44.37 yesterday. An oil pump jack can be seen in Cisco, Texas, August 23, 2015. REUTERS/Mike Stone By Caroline Valetkevitch NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil prices slipped on Thursday as producers hinted at more output, while U.S. stocks had their first loss in four sessions after a mixed bag of earnings reports. The euro eased against the dollar after traders saw potential for the European Central Bank to eventually increase its stimulus measures if necessary. In his comments Thursday, ECB President Mario Draghi brushed off German criticism of his ultra-loose monetary policy and vowed to use all the tools at his disposal for "as long as needed." "Markets are convinced that the ECB will do more if it becomes necessary," said Sireen Harajli, currency strategist at Mizuho Corporate Bank in New York. The euro was last down 0.04 percent against the dollar at $1.1290, after hitting a nine-day high of $1.1394 on the back of comments from Draghi. Crude oil prices fell as Russia and major producers in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries indicated they will raise output. U.S. crude oil prices slid 2.3 percent to settle at 43.18 a barrel. In London, Brent crude was down 2.8 percent to settle at $44.53 a barrel. Despite Thursday's slide, crude oil prices are up about 40 percent from multi-year lows hit seen in January. U.S. stocks ended lower, snapping a three-day winning streak on mixed earnings. Verizon fell 3.3 percent after warning that a strike by workers would likely impact its bottom line. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 113.75 points, or 0.63 percent, to 17,982.52, the S&P 500 lost 10.92 points, or 0.52 percent, to 2,091.48 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 2.24 points, or 0.05 percent, to 4,945.89. ROBOT Expectations for first-quarter U.S. earnings were low, with S&P 500 index companies expected to post a 7.2 percent fall in profit on average, and a 1.4 percent decline in revenue, according to Thomson Reuters. "These are greatly reduced expectations, so I hope they do beat these expectations, because otherwise we'd really be in dire straits," said Michael Mullaney, chief investment officer at Fiduciary Trust Co in Boston. The MSCI world stock index hit its highest level in almost five months early Thursday before trading down 0.2 percent, while European shares closed down 0.3 percent. BOND YIELDS RISE TO 3-WEEK HIGHS U.S. Treasury yields rose to more than three-week highs as recent gains in oil reduced demand for safe-haven U.S. bonds, and as high quality European government bond yields spiked. U.S. benchmark 10-year Treasury notes fell 5/32 in price to yield 1.87 percent, up from 1.85 percent on Wednesday and 1.78 percent on Tuesday. Weakness in high-grade European government bonds, which had supported U.S. debt, added to pressure after it was reported that Greece had a primary surplus last year. "The optics of higher oil led to some small lot selling yesterday that then got compounded," said Jim Vogel, an interest rate strategist at FTN Financial in Memphis, Tennessee. (Additional reporting by Noel Randewich in San Francisco; SAm Forgione and Karen Brettell in New York; Editing by Clive McKeef, Bernadette Baum and Nick Zieminski) Two decisions today from the Ohio Supreme Court upheld capacity cost charges for American Electric Power's (NYSE: AEP) AEP Ohio utility unit, but rejected a part of AEP Ohio's retail stability rider (RSR) competitive transition charge. The full impact of today's decisions will be determined after remand to the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO), but the company expects the net financial result will be minimal. The Supreme Court decision rejecting a portion of AEP Ohio's RSR requires the PUCO to decrease AEP Ohio's capacity deferral balance. However, a separate decision also requires that the PUCO reconsider the energy credit used to reduce AEP Ohio's capacity charges for that period. The company believes that recalculation of the energy credit in the remand proceeding will increase AEP Ohio's capacity prices for that period and will be approximately equal to the reduction in the deferral balance, so that customers are not likely to see a significant net impact. "We're pleased that the Ohio Supreme Court agreed with us and the PUCO that a cost-based price was appropriate to recover the value of our Ohio generation capacity. Although the Supreme Court's decision rejected one part of the retail stability rider, the Court found that the amount of the energy credit used to reduce our capacity costs was not appropriately determined," said Nicholas K. Akins, AEP chairman, president and chief executive officer. "We believe that when we present information about our actual capacity costs in the remand proceedings, our cost-based price will increase and yield a small net impact when combined with the deferral reduction from the RSR decision." AEP Ohio expects the remand process to begin soon and a decision on the remand to be issued in the next several months. AEP Ohio delivers electricity to nearly 1.5 million customers of AEP's subsidiary Ohio Power Co. in Ohio. AEP Ohio is based in Gahanna, Ohio, and is a unit of American Electric Power. Allergan plc (NYSE: AGN) announced that it has acquired Topokine Therapeutics, a privately held, clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on developing topical medicines for fat reduction. Under the terms of the agreement, Allergan acquired Topokine Therapeutics for an upfront payment of $85 million and success-based development and sales milestones for XAF5, a first-in-class topical agent in late-stage development for the treatment of steatoblepharon, also known as undereye bags. Applied to the lower eyelids once nightly, XAF5 penetrates the skin and acts pharmacologically on fat cells to shrink undereye bags. An estimated 40 million Americans have steatoblepharon,i which can make the face look older, tired, stressed or sad. In XOPH5-OINT-2, a Phase 2 randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial, XAF5 met the primary endpoint achieving statistically significant and clinically meaningful reductions in undereye bags. In January 2016 Topokine initiated XOPH5-OINT-3, a pivotal Phase 2b/3 study of XAF5. "The acquisition of Topokine and its XAF5 technology adds an innovative technology to Allergan's industry leading mid-to-late stage pipeline of more than 70 programs and bolsters our leadership in medical aesthetics," said David Nicholson, Executive Vice President and President, Global Brands Research & Development at Allergan. "XAF5 has the potential to be the first topical fat reduction product for the treatment of steatoblepharon, a condition with no current therapeutic options available for patients. We look forward to continuing the outstanding development work conducted by the Topokine team to bring this innovative medical aesthetic treatment to market." "Allergan is a leader in medical and facial aesthetics, with unparalleled commercial and development expertise in the medical aesthetics community and a laser-focus on innovation. These characteristics make Allergan ideally suited to continue the successful development and maximize the potential commercialization of XAF5," said Murat Kalayoglu, MD, PhD, Topokine's Chief Executive Officer and a board-certified ophthalmologist. "I am deeply appreciative of the commitment and dedication of our Topokine team that has championed the discovery and development of XAF5. We look forward to working with Allergan to ensure continued development success for XAF5 and realize a successful launch of the product." "Physicians and their patients have been seeking an FDA-approved, non-invasive treatment option to address undereye bags where current treatment options are limited," said Jeffrey Dover, MD, FRCPC, a board-certified dermatologist and director of SkinCare Physicians in Chestnut Hill, MA. "Adding a topical treatment that physicians could offer to their patients would be an important step forward in the treatment of steatoblepharon." Topokine's investors include Schooner Capital, a Boston-based private investment firm engaged in venture capital, growth equity and alternate asset investments. Leerink Partners LLC acted as financial advisor to Topokine. Covington & Burling LLP acted as legal advisor to Allergan and Foley Hoag LLP acted as legal counsel to Topokine. In the wake of severe hailstorms in the southern United States, The Allstate Corporation (NYSE: ALL) announced estimated catastrophe losses for the month of March 2016 of $638 million, pre-tax ($415 million after-tax), and an estimated $827 million, pre-tax ($538 million after-tax), for first quarter 2016. Catastrophe losses occurring in the first quarter comprised 17 events at an estimated cost of $830 million, pre-tax, partially offset by a minor reserve reestimate of prior reported catastrophe losses. "Our purpose is to protect our customers from life's uncertainties and severe hailstorms like this are why Allstate exists," said Thomas J. Wilson, Allstate chairman and chief executive officer. "These storms, one of which ranks as the largest hailstorm to ever impact Allstate, produced unusually heavy damage to both homes and cars given the size of hail and wind speeds. We have deployed over 1,200 claim professionals to assist local Allstate agencies in handling the more than 39,000 claims reported to date to ensure our policyholders can start the recovery and rebuilding process as quickly as possible." Two severe hail events, primarily impacting the state of Texas in March, accounted for two-thirds of the catastrophe losses for the quarter. The larger of the two storms occurred on March 23, 2016, extended from Texas to Florida and produced violent thunderstorms with 2.5" hail and 65 mph winds in Texas, and 1" hail and similar winds in Florida. The smaller of the two events occurred during morning rush hour on March 17, 2016 and produced hail as large as 2.75" in Texas and 1.75" as it moved east into Louisiana. The cities of Fort Worth and Arlington, Texas, saw the greatest amount of damage from the storm. Allstate's claim volume has been heaviest in Collin, Dallas and Tarrant counties where the Allstate brand has estimated market share greater than its statewide average. Allstate expects to file a current report on Form 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission announcing first quarter 2016 results at or after 4:15 p.m. ET on Wednesday, May 4. By Kshitiz Goliya (Reuters) - Advanced Micro Devices Inc's forecast implied that the struggling chipmaker could post a surprise rise in current quarter revenue, ending a run of six quarters of declines, helped by strong demand for its chips and a new licensing deal. AMD also reported a lower-than-expected drop in revenue for the third quarter in a row due, in part, to the licensing deal, helping send the company's shares surging 21 percent in trading after the bell on Thursday. The company forecast second-quarter revenue would grow 15 percent, plus or minus 3 percent, sequentially, which translates to $928.1 million to $985.5 million. That implies revenue could be higher than the $942 million from a year earlier. Analysts on average were expecting revenue to fall to $887.8 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. AMD said on Thursday it signed a $293 million agreement to license its processor technology to a joint venture it formed with Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment Co Ltd, an investment unit of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The technology will help China produce its own server chips for datacenters, a market dominated by Intel Corp, one of AMD's biggest rivals along with Nvidia Corp. "This deal is at least one victory lap on monetizing its IP. I expect more to come in the future, especially with GPUs (graphic processing units)," Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Patrick Moorhead said. AMD said it expects the licensing deal to add about $52 million to 2016 revenue, with $7 million already recognized in latest first quarter. Chief Executive Lisa Su said AMD's revenue would increase more than usual on a sequential basis this quarter due to strong demand for its graphics chips and semi-custom chips, designed to suit customers' specific needs. AMD is slated to ship its Polaris GPUs in the middle of the year, which it hopes will lead to revenue growth in 2016 after 2015 revenue declined 27.5 percent. The company's first-quarter revenue fell 19.2 percent year-over-year, to $832 million, but beat analysts estimates of $818.2 million. Net loss narrowed to $109 million, or 14 cents per share, from $180 million, or 23 cents per share. Excluding items, AMD lost 12 cents per share. Analysts were expecting a loss of 13 cents. AMD's shares were up 21 percent at $3.17 in extended trading. They had fallen 8.7 this year through Thursday's close, while the broader semiconductor index had gained 0.6 percent. (Reporting by Kshitiz Goliya and Rishika Sadam in Bengaluru; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh and Savio D'Souza) Vietnam's Ministry of Foreign Affairs handed a diplomatic note to the Chinese Embassy in Hanoi on April 20 protesting Chinas illegal landing of a military aircraft on Vietnam's Fiery Cross Reef in the East Sea. A Y-8 military aircraft landed illegally on Fiery Cross Reef to pick up three sick workers. Photo by ChinaNews. Vietnam strongly opposes and demands China to immediately cease and not repeat all the acts of infringement on the sovereignty of Vietnam, ministry spokesperson Le Hai Binh said during a regular press conference this afternoon. Binh said the act of sending a military aircraft to the island has complicated the situation in the East Sea. Vietnam has reaffirmed its sovereignty over the Paracel and Spratly Islands multiple times. Activities that are conducted by foreign countries in the area without Vietnams approval are all considered illegal, he said. Chinese media on April 17 said that a Y-8 military aircraft landed on Fiery Cross Reef to rescue three sick workers and fly them to Hainan Island for treatment. According to a Chinese military website, the Y-8 number 9271 is one of four aircrafts of this type that are used for scouting, sea patrols and reconnaissance by the Chinese military. The act of sending this type of aircraft is considered a militarization move by China can use a civilian aircraft could have been used to transfer the patients. This is the first time China has publicly landed a military aircraft on Fiery Cross Reef, which belongs to Vietnams Spratly Islands. The 3,000 meter long runway on the island is one of three runways that Beijing has illegally built on artificial islands in the Spratly archipelago. In January, China sent civilian aircrafts to do test landings on the runway. Vietnam's Minister of Foreign Affairs responded by sending a diplomatic note protesting the illegal deployments. Binh said Beijing's went against the spirit of the Joint Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the East Sea (DOC), the common understanding of the two countries leaders as well as the agreement on the guiding principles on the settlement of issues at sea between Vietnam and China. Novartis (NYSE: NVS) reported Q1 EPS of $1.17, $0.02 worse than the analyst estimate of $1.19. Revenue for the quarter came in at $11.6 billion versus the consensus estimate of $11.9 billion. Growth Products[2] grew 24% (USD) to $3.9 billion, or 34% of Group net sales Cosentyx ($176 million) continues to grow strongly, benefitting from long-term efficacy data for psoriasis and new launches in AS and PsA[3] Entresto ($17 million) launch continues to accelerate in EU, field force ramping up in US Commenting on the results, Joseph Jimenez, CEO of Novartis, said: "I am pleased we were able to show sales growth in constant currencies despite the entry of a generic version of Gleevec in the US. As expected, our results reflect additional investments behind our new launches and Alcon. We are on track with the plan we outlined in January to further focus our divisions, drive greater innovation and significant synergies and productivity. I remain confident in our long-term growth prospects, underpinned by our strong pipeline and the talent leading our Research and Development functions." Key growth drivers Underpinning our financial results in the first quarter is a continued focus on key growth drivers, including Gilenya, Tasigna, Cosentyx, Tafinlar + Mekinist, Jakavi, Promacta/Revolade and Entresto, as well as Biopharmaceuticals and Emerging Growth Markets. Growth Products Growth Products, an indicator of the ongoing rejuvenation of our portfolio, contributed 34% of Group net sales in the first quarter, and were up 24% (USD). In Pharmaceuticals, Growth Products contributed 42% of division net sales in the quarter, and sales for these products were up 31% (cc). Gilenya (USD 698 million, +12% cc), our oral MS therapy, grew double-digit in the quarter behind strong volume growth. Tasigna (USD 382 million, +6% cc) continued to grow globally and in the US, despite the entry of a generic version of Gleevec in the US market on February 1, 2016. Cosentyx(USD 176 million), which was launched in the first quarter of 2015 as the first fully human IL-17A inhibitor for the treatment of psoriasis, continued to show strong growth and accelerated uptake in the first quarter of 2016, benefitting from its three approved indications (psoriasis, ankylosing spondylitis and psoriatic arthritis). Tafinlar + Mekinist (USD 150 million) grew as the first approved combination therapy for the treatment of patients with BRAF V600 mutation-positive unresectable or metastatic melanoma. Promacta/Revolade (USD 131 million) performance was driven by continued growth in the chronic immune (idiopathic) thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) indication worldwide. Jakavi (USD 124 million, +44% cc), an oral JAK inhibitor approved for myelofibrosis and polycythemia vera, continued to grow strongly over the previous-year quarter. Entresto (USD 17 million), our breakthrough treatment for chronic heart failure with reduced ejection fraction, saw formulary access improve in the US. 91% of Medicare patients now have access, with 65% at the lowest branded co-pay by plan. Starting in April, the US field force is being expanded and a direct-to-consumer campaign is being launched. Early experience in Europe has also been encouraging, with better early access and a more rapid uptake. Entresto sales are expected to be approximately USD 200 million for full year 2016. Biopharmaceuticals (which include biosimilars, biopharmaceutical contract manufacturing and Glatopa) grew 50% (cc) to USD 214 million, benefitting from the launches of Glatopa in June 2015 and Zarxio in September 2015. Emerging Growth Markets Net sales in Emerging Growth Markets - which comprise all markets except the US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand - grew 5% (cc) in the first quarter, led by Brazil (+17% cc) and Turkey (+19% cc). For earnings history and earnings-related data on Novartis (NVS) click here. TORONTO (Reuters) - Plaintiffs leading a lawsuit against online dating website Ashley Madison over a security breach that exposed the personal data of customers must publicly identify themselves to proceed with the case, a U.S. judge has ruled. Forty-two plaintiffs, seeking to represent users of the website who had their information compromised, had proceeded anonymously against Ashley Madison's Toronto-based parent company Avid Life Media, the ruling released on April 6 showed. The plaintiffs are suing Ashley Madison, a website that facilitates extramarital affairs, for failing to adequately secure their information, marketing a Full Delete Removal service that did not work, and using fake female accounts to lure male customers, according to the ruling. Their action comes after hackers who claimed to be unhappy with Avid Life's business practices publicly released Ashley Madison customer data last August. Reuters has not independently verified the authenticity of the data, emails or documents. Judge John A. Ross, of a district court in Missouri, wrote in his ruling that being publicly named as an Ashley Madison user amounts to more than common embarrassment, but noted the 42 plaintiffs have special roles in the case that require identification. The plaintiffs are "class representatives" and may need to testify or offer evidence, unlike "class members," those in the lawsuit who do not need participate as actively, Ross wrote. He ruled that the plaintiffs must either identify themselves or proceed as class members, who can remain anonymous. The "class" for the collective lawsuit has not yet been certified, the ruling noted. There are at least 10 plaintiffs who are publicly named. Avid Media did not immediately respond to a request for comment. (Reporting by Ethan Lou in Toronto; Editing by Bernadette Baum) TULSA, Okla., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- For the second time, the Oil & Gas Journal and POWER-GEN are pleased to announce that American Electric Power (AEP) will serve as Host Utility for POWER-GEN Natural Gas Conference and Exhibition. The 2016 event will take place August 23-25 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, the electric utility is one of the largest in the United States, delivering electricity to more than 5 million customers in 11 states. With the support of AEP, the Oil & Gas Journal and POWER-GEN in 2015, the inaugural 2015 event attracted more than 1,500 attendees and 100 exhibitors in a strong demonstration of interest in the shift to gas-fueled power generation in the Appalachian basin. Interest this year promises to be even higher as questions have grown about generation technology and operations, health of gas producers and processors, environmental issues, and logistical challenges affecting development of the world-class potential of the Marcellus and Utica shales. "Since the inaugural POWER-GEN Natural Gas conference, economic and regulatory problems of the oil and gas industry have intensified," said Bob Tippee, Editor of Oil & Gas Journal. "Speakers at the 2016 event will help power-industry professionals understand how the turbulence affects development of Appalachian basin gas supply." In addition to providing content that is regionally focused, the event covers overarching trends in power generation, such as the transition to cleaner-burning natural gas. POWER Engineering's Managing Editor, Russell Ray, stated, "POWER-GEN Natural Gas 2016 features the latest advancements in gas turbine technologies, siting and construction, and operations & maintenance." Nowhere else can gas-fired generation and production professionals get content so regionally focused and strategize with leading experts about the future of North American energy independence while more than 100 companies launch and demonstrate the high-tech products to make it happen. In combination with the comprehensive technical conference and exhibit hall, POWER-GEN Natural Gas offers technical tours, pre-conference workshops, and networking events for industry leaders to freely discuss challenges and opportunities. Alongside the event, co-located GenForum will provide a platform for gas-powered generation executives to immerse themselves in critical issues facing the energy industry, and gather intelligence about ongoing generation trends and projects in North America. For more information and to register for POWER-GEN Natural Gas Conference & Exhibition, visit www.power-gennaturalgas.com. About PennWell CorporationPennWell Corp. is a diversified business-to-business media and information company that provides quality content and integrated marketing solutions for the following industries: electric power, water and wastewater, oil and gas, renewable, electronics, semiconductor, contamination control, optoelectronics, fiberoptics, enterprise storage, converting, nanotechnology, fire, emergency services and dental. Founded in 1910, PennWell publishes over 100 print and online magazines and newsletters, conducts 60 conferences and exhibitions on six continents, and has an extensive offering of books, maps, web sites, research and database services. In addition to PennWell's headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma the Company has major offices in Nashua, New Hampshire; Houston, Texas; London, England; Mountain View, California; Fairlawn, New Jersey, Moscow, Russia, and Hong Kong, China. In 2010, PennWell celebrated 100 years in business. Contact: Tim ChambersE: [email protected] P: 918-831-9704 Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160420/357951LOGO Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110627/DA26630LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/american-electric-power-and-power-gen-natural-gas-do-it-again-300255125.html SOURCE PennWell Corporation HOUSTON, April 20, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Rowan Companies plc ("Rowan" or the "Company") (NYSE: RDC) announced today that its report of drilling rig status and contract information has been updated as of April 20, 2016. The report titled "Fleet Status Report" can be found on the Company's website at www.rowan.com. Rowan intends to provide quarterly updates to this report in 2016. Notable events in the current report include: Rowan Viking: A reduced rate of $282k is retroactive to January 1, 2016 pending Lundin's exercise of an option to extend the contract by 270 days for $275K per day following the firm term. The strike date of the option is June 1, 2016 and the financial impact will be recognized in the period the customer exercises the option. Should the option not be exercised, the day rates under the original contract will remain effective. A reduced rate of $282k is retroactive to January 1, 2016 pending Lundin's exercise of an option to extend the contract by 270 days for $275K per day following the firm term. The strike date of the option is June 1, 2016 and the financial impact will be recognized in the period the customer exercises the option. Should the option not be exercised, the day rates under the original contract will remain effective. Ralph Coffman : Awarded an estimated three month contract in Suriname with Petronas at a day rate of $161K that commenced in mid-April. Awarded an estimated three month contract in Suriname with Petronas at a day rate of $161K that commenced in mid-April. Ralph Coffman: Awarded a multiple well contract estimated for 10 months in Trinidad with EOG at a day rate of $135k commencing in October 2016. Awarded a multiple well contract estimated for 10 months in Trinidad with EOG at a day rate of $135k commencing in October 2016. Rowan Renaissance: Rig went on Standby Rate in mid-March (98% of Operating Rate.) No operational downtime is included in projected out-of-service days, but the Company estimates jack-up operational downtime to account for approximately 2.5% of in-service days in current and future quarters. Rowan continues to expect drillship operational downtime to be approximately 5% after a break-in period of approximately six months up to one year (during which drillship operational downtime will likely be higher). Out-of-service days are days where a rig is (or is planned to be) out-of-service and is not able to earn revenue. The Company may be compensated for certain out-of-service days such as shipyard stays or transit periods preceding a contract. However, any such compensation is deferred and recognized over the period of drilling operations. Operational downtime is when a rig is under contract and unable to conduct planned operations due to equipment breakdowns or procedural failures. Unless otherwise indicated, all day rates on the fleet status include estimated amortization of contract mobilization/modification revenues. However, day rates exclude approximately $20 to $30 million of other miscellaneous aggregate annual revenue the Company receives during rig operations (or approximately $5 to $8 million per quarter). Day rates also exclude rebillable revenues which are equally offset by drilling expenses. This summary is provided as a courtesy and is not intended to replace a detailed review of the Fleet Status Report. While the Company has attempted to include items it believes are significant, we encourage you to review the Fleet Status Report in detail. Rowan is a global provider of contract drilling services with a fleet of 31 mobile offshore drilling units, composed of 27 self-elevating jack-up rigs and four ultra-deepwater drillships. The Company's fleet operates worldwide, including the United States Gulf of Mexico, the United Kingdom and Norwegian sectors of the North Sea, the Middle East, and Trinidad. The Company's Class A Ordinary Shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "RDC." For more information on the Company, please visit www.rowan.com. Forward Looking Statements Statements herein that are not historical facts are forward looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including, without limitation, statements as to the expectations, beliefs and future expected business, financial performance and prospects of the Company. These forward-looking statements are based on our current expectations and are subject to certain risks, assumptions, trends and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by the forward-looking statements. Among the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include oil and natural gas prices, the level of offshore expenditures by energy companies, variations in energy demand, changes in day rates, cancellation or renegotiation by our customers of drilling contracts, letter agreements or letters of intent or the exercise of early termination provisions, risks associated with fixed cost drilling operations, cost overruns or delays on shipyard repair, construction or transportation of drilling units, maintenance and repair costs, costs or delays for conversion or upgrade projects, operating hazards and equipment failure, risks of collision and damage, casualty losses and limitations on insurance coverage, customer credit and risk of customer bankruptcy, conditions in the general economy and energy industry, weather conditions and severe weather in the Company's operating areas, increasing complexity and costs of compliance with environmental and other laws and regulations, changes in tax laws and interpretations by taxing authorities, civil unrest and instability, terrorism and hostilities in our areas of operations that may result in loss or seizure of assets, the outcome of disputes and legal proceedings, effects of the change in our corporate structure, and other risks disclosed in the Company's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Each forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date hereof, and the Company expressly disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, except as required by law. To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rowan-provides-fleet-contract-status-update-300255064.html SOURCE Rowan Companies plc DENVER, April 20, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Triangle Petroleum Corporation ("Triangle" or the "Company") (NYSE MKT: TPLM) -- The NYSE MKT Company Guide Section 610(b) requires public announcement through the news media disclosing the receipt of an audit opinion containing a going concern explanation. As previously disclosed in its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2016, which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 14, 2016, the Company's audited financial statements contained a going concern explanatory paragraph in the audit opinion from its independent registered public accounting firm. This announcement does not represent any change or amendment to the Company's consolidated financial statements or to its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2016. About Triangle Triangle (NYSE MKT: TPLM) is an independent energy company with a strategic focus on developing the Bakken Shale and Three Forks formations in the Williston Basin of North Dakota and Montana. For more information, visit Triangle's website at www.trianglepetroleum.com. Forward-Looking Statements Disclosure The information presented in this press release may contain "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements, other than statements of historical facts, included in this press release that address activities, events or developments that the Company expects, believes or anticipates will or may occur in the future are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results contemplated by the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results contemplated by the forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, the risks discussed in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K and its other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements in this press release are made as of the date of this press release, and the Company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement as a result of new information, future developments, or otherwise. Contact Triangle Petroleum CorporationJoe Magner, Vice President, Capital Markets303-260-7125[email protected] To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/triangle-petroleum-receives-audit-opinion-with-going-concern-explanation-300254984.html SOURCE Triangle Petroleum Corporation Rescue team members and policemen search for victims at a collapsed hotel (L) after an earthquake struck off the Pacific coast in Pedernales, Ecuador, April 19, 2016. REUTERS/Henry Romero By Ana Isabel Martinez and Diego Ore PEDERNALES/QUITO, Ecuador (Reuters) - Ecuador will temporarily increase some taxes, sell assets, and may issue new bonds on the international market to fund a multi-billion dollar reconstruction after a devastating 7.8 magnitude quake, a somber President Rafael Correa said on Wednesday. The death toll from Ecuador's weekend earthquake neared 600 and rescue missions ebbed as the traumatized Andean nation braced itself for long and costly rebuilding. "It's hard to imagine the magnitude of the tragedy. Every time we visit a place, there are more problems," Correa said, fresh from touring the disaster zone. The leftist leader estimated the disaster had inflicted $2 billion to $3 billion of damage and could knock 2 to 3 percentage points off growth, meaning the economy will almost certainly shrink this year. Lower oil revenue had already left the poor nation of 16 million people facing near-zero growth and lower investment. In addition to $600 million in credit from multilateral lenders, Correa, an economist, announced a raft of measures to help repair homes, roads, and bridges along the devastated Pacific Coast. "We're looking at the possibility of issuing bonds on the international market," he said on Wednesday afternoon, without providing details. Ecuador had been saying before the quake that current high yields would make it too expensive to issue debt. Yields on its bonds are close to 11 percentage points higher than comparable U.S. Treasury debt, according to JPMorgan data, and creditors are likely to be wary after the quake. Correa's government in 2008 defaulted on debt with a similar yield, calling the value unfair. His government has since returned to Wall Street and Ecuador currently has some $3.5 billion worth of bonds in circulation. In a nationally televised address later on Wednesday, Correa also announced the OPEC nation was poised to shed assets. "The country has many assets thanks to investment over all these years and we will seek to sell some of them to overcome these difficult moments," he said. He also unveiled several short-term tax changes, including a 2-point increase in the Valued Added Tax for a year, as well as a "one-off 3 percent additional contribution on profits," although the fine print was not immediately clear. The VAT tax is currently 12 percent. Additionally, a one-off tax of 0.9 percent will be imposed on people with wealth of over $1 million. Ecuadoreans will also be asked to contribute one day of salary, calculated on a sliding scale based on income. 'FOOD, PLEASE' Briefly pausing talk of reconstruction and hindering rescuers, another quake, of 6.2 magnitude, shook the coast before dawn on Wednesday, terrifying survivors. "You can't imagine what a fright it was. 'Not again!' I thought," said Maria Quinones in Pedernales town, which bore the brunt of Saturday's disaster. That quake, the worst in decades, killed 570 people, injured 7,000 others, damaged close to 2,000 buildings, and forced over 24,000 survivors to seek refuge in shelters, according to government tallies. Four days on, some isolated communities struggled without water, power or transport, as torn-up roads stymied deliveries. Along the coast, stadiums served as morgues and aid distribution centers. "I'm waiting for medicines, diapers for my grandson, we're lacking everything," said Ruth Quiroz, 49, as she waited in an hour-long line in front of a makeshift pharmacy set up at the Pedernales stadium. On a highway outside the town, some children sat holding placards saying: "Food, please." When a truck arrived to deliver water to the small town of San Jacinto, hungry residents surrounded the vehicle and hit it as they yelled: "We want food!" Scores of foreign aid workers and experts have arrived in the aftermath of Saturday's disaster and about 14,000 security personnel have kept order, with only sporadic looting reported. But rescuers were losing hope of finding anyone alive even as relatives of the missing begged them to keep looking. Speaking from the highland capital, Quito, Correa said the death toll would likely rise further, although at a slower rate than in previous days. "May these tears fertilize the soil of the future," he said. (Additional reporting by Alexandra Valencia and Diego Ore in Quito, Brian Ellsworth in Caracas; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne and Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Tom Brown, Peter Cooney and Michael Perry) A demonstrator draws a heart shape on a police shield during a protest against the government, in front of the EU office in Skopje, Macedonia April 21, 2016. REUTERS/Ognen Teofilovski By Robin Emmott BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union threatened sanctions on Thursday against Macedonian politicians who it says have obstructed efforts to end a long-running crisis after a push for EU-mediated talks failed. Macedonia, a poor Balkan country on the frontline of the migrant crisis, has been in turmoil since the opposition accused then Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and his counter-intelligence chief in February 2015 of wiretapping more than 20,000 people. Under an EU-brokered agreement, Macedonian politicians agreed last year to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the scandal and to hold early elections, but the process is on the brink of collapse. The EU is willing to consider travel bans and asset freezes against politicians judged to be blocking progress, said an EU official involved in the mediation, speaking on condition of anonymity. The official said that Macedonia faced being shunned on the world stage unless its political leaders made a concerted effort to end the 14-month-old crisis, which deepened last week when President Gjorge Ivanov drew protests by pardoning 56 officials over the wire-tapping scandal. "We are extremely concerned by the short-sightedness of the current government. The EU is willing to consider sanctions on politicians blocking a resolution of the crisis. Macedonia is heading toward international isolation," the official said. EU Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn and three members of the European Parliament, who have acted as mediators, earlier admitted the failure of their efforts to bring Macedonian political leaders together for talks in Vienna on Friday. Macedonia's opposition Social Democrats said they would only take part in the Vienna talks if Ivanov annulled the pardons. They also want June 5 elections postponed until a free and fair vote can be held. They have pledged to boycott the election if it goes ahead. The EU official said Ivanov must now annul the pardons as a pre-requisite for more EU-brokered talks. "That is the number one priority. Only then can we go back and talk," he said. In a statement, Hahn and the other EU mediators said Macedonia must take urgent steps to ensure the elections were credible and could be recognized by the international community. The crisis could hinder Macedonia's attempts to join the EU and NATO, they said. "We deeply regret retrograde steps that move the country further away from its aspirations toward European Union accession. In the absence of any further progress, we are now forced to consider further actions," they said. Steps Macedonia must take to prepare credible elections include updating its voter list, the EU official said. The United States and other countries have called on Ivanov to reconsider the pardons. Ivanov has stood firm, although he has said that any politician who had received a pardon could ask for it to be overturned in his or her individual case. (Additional reporting by Shadia Nasralla in Vienna and Ivana Sekularac in Belgrade; Writing by Adrian Croft, Editing by Angus MacSwan) Indonesia's chief security affairs minister Luhut Pandjaitan speaks to of local government and security officials in Serang, Banten province west of Jakarta February 29, 2016 in this photo taken by Antara Foto. REUTERS/Asep Fathulrahman/Antara Foto By Fergus Jensen and Kanupriya Kapoor JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesia fears piracy on a shipping route along its sea border with the Philippines could reach Somalian levels and has told vessels to avoid danger areas, officials said on Thursday, after a spate of kidnappings. Analysts say the route carries $40 billion worth of cargo each year. It is taken by fully laden supertankers from the Indian Ocean that cannot use the crowded Malacca Strait. Concerns over maritime attacks by suspected Islamist militants are disrupting the coal trade, with at least two Indonesian coal ports suspending shipments to the Philippines. Up to 18 Indonesians and Malaysians have been kidnapped in three attacks on tugboats in Philippine waters by groups suspected of ties to the Abu Sayyaf militant network. Abu Sayyaf, which has posted videos on social media pledging allegiance to Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, has demanded 50 million pesos ($1.1 million) to free the Indonesian crew. "We don't want to see this become a new Somalia," Indonesian chief security minister Luhut Pandjaitan told reporters, referring to the southern Philippine waters of the Sulu Sea, where the abductions took place. Piracy near Somalia's coast has subsided in the last few years, mainly due to shipping firms hiring private security details and the presence of international warships. The foreign ministers of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines will meet in Jakarta to discuss the possibility of joint patrols, Pandjaitan said. He said the armed forces chiefs of the three countries would hold talks in Jakarta on May 3. The Indonesian Navy has instructed all commercial vessels "to avoid piracy-prone waters around the southern Philippines", a spokesman for the Indonesian military said. The navy is increasing patrols around Indonesia's borders with Malaysia and the Philippines "to prevent acts of piracy and hijacking", Tatang Sulaiman told Reuters. The Kuala Lumpur-based Piracy Reporting Centre has also warned ships sailing in the Celebes Sea and northeast of the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo to stay clear of suspicious small vessels. COAL TRADE HIT Two Indonesian coal ports have blocked departures of ships for the Philippines and more suspensions are expected, said Pandu Sjahrir, chairman of the Indonesian Coal Mining Association, and a director of Jakarta-listed coal producer Toba Bara Sejahtera. Toba had suspended all shipments to the Philippines, Sjahrir said. Other companies had canceled shipments "from both sides", he added. Indonesian state-owned coal miner Bukit Asam said it was diverting Philippine coal shipments to Hong Kong for the next three months. The company ships less than a million tonnes to the Philippines per year, Bukit Asam corporate secretary Joko Pramono told Reuters. One company with a fleet of 40 dry cargo ships saw a silver lining, however. "If Indonesia bans tugs and barges from exporting coal then it will have to travel in larger cargo ships, of 32,000 to 64,000 tonnes," said Khalid Hashim, managing director of Bangkok-listed Precious Shipping. "All this would of course be beneficial for shippers like us." Indonesia, the world's largest thermal coal exporter, supplies 70 percent of the Philippines' coal import needs, which Indonesian data shows stood at about 15 million tonnes, worth around $800 million, last year. Philippine coal importers, however, said they could import coal from other countries including Australia, South Africa and Russia and source more locally if Indonesian shipments dried up. (Additional reporting by Keith Wallis in SINGAPORE and Wilda Asmarini in JAKARTA; Editing by Andrew Roche) A member of forces loyal to Libya's eastern government carries his weapon during clashes with the Shura Council of Libyan Revolutionaries in Benghazi, Libya April 19, 2016. REUTERS/Stringer By By Ayman al-Warfalli BENGHAZI, Libya (Reuters) - Islamic State fighters retreated from long-held positions around the port city of Derna on Wednesday, military forces in eastern Libya said, as troops loyal to the government in the region pressed on with an offensive in Benghazi. If the retreat around Derna is confirmed, it could mark a significant shift in the alignment of forces in the area. Islamic State gained territory in Libya as two rival governments and a range of armed factions battled to control the country in the past two years. But it has also faced resistance from other local armed groups on the ground. Derna has a history of Islamism and was an early bastion for Islamic State. The militant group lost control of the city last June to rival armed Islamists grouped under the Derna Mujahideen Shura Council, but retained positions around the outskirts. Derna and its suburbs had been "completely liberated from the apostates", the council said in a statement. Eastern security forces, which are allied to a government based in the east, have carried out occasional strikes against Islamist rivals around Derna in recent months. Military spokesman Abdulkarim Sabra said Islamic State had retreated from Derna's 400 neighborhood and al-Fatayeh, 20 km (12 miles) south of the city, and its forces were trying to head towards the militant group's Libyan stronghold of Sirte when they were intercepted. The military was providing air support for troops, he said. There were no immediate reports of casualties. Pictures circulating on social media showed some Derna residents celebrating and waving Libyan flags on the streets. Eastern military forces have also been involved in heavy fighting around 250 km (155 miles) to the west in Benghazi, where they have taken several neighborhoods from fighters loyal to Islamic State and other groups. Clashes continued there on Wednesday, and the military said it had nearly full control of the southern district of Guwarsha. It said one commander had been killed in the fighting and four soldiers were wounded. The eastern government was set up after armed opponents took control of the capital, Tripoli, in 2014, and installed a rival administration. Both are backed by alliances of former rebels who once fought together to oust Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 but have slowly turned against each other. Last month, a U.N.-backed unity government arrived in Tripoli, where it has been trying to establish its authority. The West sees the new government as the best chance of ending Libya's political divisions and uniting its armed factions to take on Islamic State. But the government has yet to win approval from Libya's eastern parliament, which received international recognition and has repeatedly failed to hold a vote on the issue. Lawmakers in the east who support the new government say they have been threatened and physically impeded from holding a vote, including when they tried to convene on Monday. They have been opposed by allies of eastern military commander Khalifa Haftar, who are concerned about losing control of military appointments if the unity government takes full power. In an apparent attempt to break the ice with the eastern military, the unity government's leadership released a statement on Wednesday congratulating it on its advances in Benghazi. The Presidential Council said it would "provide all necessary support to Benghazi and other affected cities for reconstruction," and that it was committed to "supporting the institution of the army". It also congratulated the "people of Derna and all Libyans" on the "liberation" of the areas around where Islamic State retreated. (Additional reporting by Ahmed Elumami in Tripoli; Writing by Aidan Lewis; Editing by John Stonestreet and Peter Cooney) By Yara Bayoumy WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. citizen who had been sentenced in Bahrain to 10 years in jail in 2013 has been granted a royal pardon and was freed on Thursday after paying a fine, he and his lawyer said. Tagi al-Maidan was born in the United States to a Bahraini mother and Saudi father and his status as a U.S. national had thrown a spotlight on the complex relationship between Washington and Bahrain, a U.S. ally in the volatile Gulf region that has long provided a base for the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet. Maidan was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in jail in 2013 on charges of attempted murder during a disturbance related to Shi'ite Muslim demands for greater rights. He had told Reuters that the charges against him were false, but that he had made a false confession under torture after his detention in October 2012. (http://reut.rs/23LY29H) The government has denied any abuse in the incident, saying it has a "zero-tolerance policy" towards torture. Mohammed al-Jishi, Maidan's lawyer, said he had received an official document that referred to the royal pardon in Maidan's case. A copy of a document issued by Bahrain's Public Prosecution office dated April 21 showed the details of the case. "The accused carried out the sentence in the Reform and Rehabilitation Administration from Sept. 24, 2013 until April 20, 2016, as there was a special royal pardon and the required monetary amount was paid on April 21," the document said. Maidan was freed as President Barack Obama visited Saudi Arabia for talks with leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council, a Gulf Arab grouping that includes Bahrain. Maidan, reached by phone on Thursday, said he was on his way to Dubai. "I was released a few hours ago. They told me a royal pardon was issued and that if I paid a fine, I would be released. I told my mother and she paid it," said Maidan, who sounded composed. Bahrain, which faces criticism over human rights, has seen frequent protests by members of the Shi'ite majority since February 2011, when it quelled a Shi'ite-led uprising demanding that the Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty give up power. The persistent unrest has placed Bahrain on the front line of a struggle for regional influence between Sunni Saudi Arabia, Bahrain's close ally, and Shi'ite Iran, which denies Bahraini accusations of fomenting Shi'ite protests. Bahrain's Shi'ites have long complained of entrenched discrimination in areas such as employment and public services, allegations the Sunni-led government denies. Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry gently pressed Bahrain on human rights as he praised security cooperation with the Gulf monarchy. (Editing by Don Durfee and Frances Kerry) China has deployed a large fishing fleet in the mouth of the Gulf of Tonkin near Vietnamese waters, according to a report announced by the Vietnam Fisheries Resources Surveillance Force on April 20. A Vietnamese surveillance ship on duty. Photo: Nguyen Dong The Vietnam Fisheries Resources Surveillance Force has dispatched two ships to patrol and drive away any Chinese fishing boats that try to enter Vietnamese territory. The force said it will resolutely deal with any fishing boats trespassing in the countrys waters. Director of the force Luu Van Huy told VnExpress that the waters from the mouth of the Gulf of Tonkin inwards have been delimited and are under the sovereignty of Vietnam. The area outside is still under negotiations with China, and foreign fishing vessels are allowed to operate there according to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea from 1982. If we catch any Chinese fishing vessels entering the delimited waters and violating Vietnams sovereignty, Vietnam's marine law enforcement will drive them away and make a record immediately, Huy said. Besides the two ships that have been sent to deal with the situation, many other Vietnamese surveillance ships are enforcing the law in the Gulf of Tonkin as part of a planned annual patrol, he added. In addition to the surveillance force, border and coast guards are on patrol to support fishermen. Since the beginning of the year, and especially in the first half of April, these forces have caught a number of Chinese fishing boats violating Vietnam's sovereignty. We will calculate how many vessels have been recorded or driven away for violating our waters or attacking fishermen," Huy said, adding that the fisheries inspection force has a constant presence at sea to support Vietnamese fishermen. Fishermen in Thua Thien - Hue Province previously reported that Chinese vessels had damaged their boats while they were out at sea. Colonel Le Van Phuong, deputy commander of the Border Guard of Thua Thien - Hue province, said he had received information about Chinese vessels destroying local fishermen's equipment while they were fishing in Vietnam's sovereign waters. By Astrid Wendlandt and Joyce Lee SEOUL (Reuters) - Italian fashion house Versace sees 2016 as a tough year with slower sales growth as tourist traffic in European cities such as London, Paris and Brussels has been hit by security concerns and demand remains unstable, its chief executive said. Versace, known for its glittering evening gowns and medusa logo, has been going from strength to strength since flirting with bankruptcy in 2004 and could be headed for a stock market listing when market conditions improve. "I expect growth this year to be slightly below that of 2015," Versace Chief Executive Gian Giacomo Ferraris told Reuters in an interview on the fringes of the Conde Nast luxury conference. "It will be a tough year." Versace, still family-controlled with Donatella at the creative helm, saw revenue rise 8.6 percent in 2015 at constant exchange rates in the year to Dec. 31 to 645 million euros ($729 million). Its cautious outlook comes after several luxury groups including LVMH , Richemont (NYSE: CFR) and Burberry posted weak first-quarter sales, hit by lower tourist spending and depressed demand in key cities such as Hong Kong. Ferraris said business in Europe was growing mainly thanks to local consumers as there had been a drop in buyers from regions such as Russia and the Middle East. The chief executive credited with turning the company around and steering a course through family feuds, said next year was the earliest Versace could float as it had not started choosing advisers and not decided on where the shares would be listed. Rival Italian luxury brand Valentino has also said it was planning to float in 2017. U.S. private equity firm Blackstone (NYSE: BX) bought a 20-percent stake in Versace in 2014. Ferraris said Versace was actively investing in social media and e-commerce, both in-house and with multibrand online retailers such as Yoox Net-a-porter. He said he was in Seoul to develop the brand's business in Korea, the world's biggest duty-free market and No.8 luxury goods market. On Thursday, he was on his way to Japan, where he also saw solid growth prospects. "I am quite optimistic about our growth in Asia," he said. (Reporting by Astrid Wendlandt; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle) Record net migration gains mean New Zealand's population is growing at the fastest pace in 40 years, Net migration hit a record level for the 20th month in a row, but there are signs the trend may finally be peaking. Figures from Statistics New Zealand showed New Zealand saw a net gain of 67,619 permanent and long term arrivals in the 12 months to March 31, driven by strong gains from Australia, China and the Philippines. But the March gain of 5330 was down significantly on the 6070 increase in February, the clearest sign yet that the gains may be flattening off. While the number of New Zealanders heading overseas has been below average, principally because fewer Kiwis are moving to Australia, another key driver of record net gains has been a surge in the number of international students coming to study here. READ MORE: Record migration boosts growth short term, but will it make NZ richer? Economists have said the growth in international students - which followed changes allowing them to work part time while studying - was likely to flatten off eventually. JOHN ANTHONY/FAIRFAX NZ Fewer New Zealanders are moving overseas than in recent years, with net migration from Australia positive for the first time since 1991. Westpac said on Thursday that the trend appeared to have turned. "There's has been a sharp decline in arrivals of international students in recent months, and this looks to have continued this month," Westpac senior economist Satish Ranchhod said. "Migration can be volatile on a month-to month basis, so we're careful not to place too much weight on one month's data. However, we will still be keeping a close eye on next month's figures to see if this is more than just normal monthly volatility." ASB economist Kim Mundy said the net gains in March were the lowest since May 2015, suggesting that migration gains may be peaking, however the impact of Easter falling in March may mean the drop off may be exaggerated. *Comments have now closed on this story* New Zealand's use of 'dodgy' carbon credits killed off new plantation forestry for carbon sinks. OPINION: Don't get me wrong. New Zealand did not cover itself in glory by using a swag of virtually worthless, 'dodgy' international carbon credits to meet its climate change commitments under the Kyoto Protocol. A responsible government would cancel at least some of the remaining credits stored up to meet future obligations. But the 'shock horror' reaction to the Morgan Foundation's report dubbing New Zealand a 'carbon cheat' this week is hardly news. READ MORE: Government allowed 'climate fraud' to reach emission reduction targets - report The fact is that the none of the few countries with emissions trading schemes already in place have clean hands when it comes to the early global efforts to reduce carbon emissions. Smoke and mirrors abound not just here, but everywhere. That doesn't excuse us, but we might ease up on the self-flagellation all the same. The good news is a bit like the good news on global tax evasion: global consensus is firming on widely shared action and enough big players are in the tent after last December's climate change summit in Paris to justify hope for the future. Shared commitment was missing in the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol. Not only were the mechanisms for reducing carbon emissions rudimentary works-in-progress, they also didn't apply to enough countries. With neither China nor the United States on board, every Kyoto signatory country was trying to look busy on climate change while doing no economic or political damage by getting ahead of the pack. In New Zealand, we did that by chowing down on vast swathes of emissions reductions units available mainly from Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet states, while letting emitters off the hook for half their emissions. For European Kyoto signatories, the global financial crisis was a great help. Economic distress and plummeting carbon emissions went hand in hand. Britain, for example, was hailed for achieving its carbon reduction targets when much of the improvement was a direct result of recession. Many others made strides by replacing one fossil fuel coal with another - natural gas for electricity generation. As a result, for many European countries, it was easy to say no to dodgy post-Soviet economies' carbon credits. They simply didn't need them to meet their carbon targets. In New Zealand, there was an outcry about them and their purchase has been banned. However, the issue was complex and barely covered in mainstream media. Hence the belated outrage today, thanks to racy packaging by the Morgan Foundation. Meanwhile, with renewable electricity generation close to 80 per cent of total production and with an economy not so badly hit by the global financial crisis, New Zealand had no such easy wins. As one of the few countries outside Europe even to have an ETS, the 'dodgy' credits became our sullied ticket to looking busy while doing nothing. As a result, by 2012, the New Zealand ETS had become a pointless joke, with the local carbon price as low as 10 cents a tonne and the one sector that New Zealand policymakers had fought hard in Kyoto negotiations to favour forestry out in the cold. The dodgy credits killed off new plantation forestry for carbon sinks. Now, with the carbon price above $13 per tonne and closing on the $15 seen as a minimum for carbon farmers, the biggest threat to new plantings is distrust that any new policy settings will survive for any length of time in an industry that relies on 25 year growing cycles. That's the real tragedy of the New Zealand ETS so far: short term politics has trumped long term aims so often that it will take years for anyone to believe in it. (BusinessDesk) Sign up to receive our new evening newsletter Two Minutes of Stuff - the news, but different. Shavaughn Ruakere signed her sisters and her cousin up for TV3's gameshow, Family Feud. Television actress Shavaughn Ruakere is about to share the spotlight with her two older sisters. The former Shortland Street actress is no stranger to being broadcast into living rooms across New Zealand, but this time she's taking some family members with her. Watching her older sisters Bianca and Alana Ruakere getting ready to star on TV3's Celebrity Family Feud special was an awesome moment, Shavaughn says. "I'm really used to being on a set, but for them it was a totally new experience. READ MORE: * Shortland Street's most memorable deaths * Dai Henwood takes break from stand-up to focus on gameshow Family Feud * Tangi honours a man born to lead "Seeing my sisters stress about what they were going to wear, it was cool." Joining the three girls for the pre-shoot hair and make-up was their cousin Karlos Drinkwater, also of Shortland Street fame. The foursome competed in the gameshow against Silver Fern Catherine Tuivaiti and her family in a quest to win $5000 for a charity of their choice. While the public will have to wait until Monday night to see who won the cash, Shavaughn said her team did a spectacular job. "But I can't say on what end of the scale," she laughed. The Hawera born actress, who started her career on What Now in 1997, said the charity the Ruakere family picked was Te Rangimarie Hospice in Taranaki. The suggestion was Drinkwater's and as soon as he made it the family knew it was the right choice. Shavaughn said their uncle, the late Taranaki Maori leader Lindsay MacLeod of Parihaka, had been cared for by the wonderful staff at Te Rangimarie Hospice. "What they do is just so incredible. It was an easy decision, to try and win some money for these guys, and also to acknowledge the great work they do." Shavaughn, who has recently volunteered at a hospice in Auckland, said filming their episode of Family Feud, hosted by comedian Dai Henwood, was incredibly fun. "We all got to meet up for a few days, have fun and act like goofs," she said. * The Celebrity Family Feud special airs on TV3 at 7pm on Monday April 25. Vietnam welcomes efforts by any party that help maintain peace and security in the East Sea, foreign ministry spokesman Le Hai Binh said on Thursday while responding to a question regarding U.S.-Philippines joint patrols in the region. Maintaining peace, stability, maritime and air security and safety in the East Sea is the common interest and responsibility of all countries in the region and the world. Therefore, efforts by any party that contribute to this common goal deserve to be welcomed, Binh said. The United States said on April 14 it would ramp up its military presence in the Philippines and announced that the two countries had started joint patrols in disputed waters. Plans to deepen U.S.-Philippine military ties, including joint patrols in the South China Sea, known as the East Sea to Vietnam, reflect a "Cold War mentality", China's defense ministry said the same day, adding that the patrols "promote the militarization of the region". China claims most of the energy-rich waters of the East Sea, through which about $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year, but the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam also have claims. Countries across the region have expressed concern over China's growing assertiveness in the region, which has intensified with a rapid buildup of man-made islands in the Spratly Archipelago, to which the Philippines and Vietnam lay claim. The Vietnamese foreign ministry spokesman also said a representative from the ministry had handed over a diplomatic note to the Chinese embassy in Hanoi to protest China's illegal landing of a military aircraft for the first time on April 17 at an airport on a newly-built island in the Spratly Islands. (UN New York)Photo: UN Photo / Manuel Elias Terrorists must never be allowed to destroy centuries of peaceful co-existence of Muslims and Christians in the Middle East region, the Vatican envoy has told a special session of the UN Security Council. "Too many individual citizens and groups have suffered and continue to suffer death and all forms of violence and discrimination because of their religion, ethnicity or political beliefs," said Archbishop Bernardito Auza. The Holy See's U.N. representative said April 14, "In the Middle East, in particular, terrorists must never be allowed to destroy centuries of peaceful co-existence of Muslims and Christians in the region." The archbishop is the apostolic nuncio leading the Holy See's Permanent Observer Mission to the United Nations, and spoke in the Security Council's open debate on threats to international peace and security. Any long-term solution to foil violent extremism and terror must consider the importance of sacrosanct human dignity and rights, irrespective of race, religion, political belief and difference. Archbishop Auza said violent extremism does not know any border. "Recent terror activities in Lahore, Beirut, Paris, Brussels, Aden, and before that Moscow, Barcelona, London, New York and whole regions in Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Kenya and Somalia illustrate that fundamentalist terror is a transnational phenomenon," he said. The archbishop explained the terrorists show a total disregard for civilian immunity, killing and maiming women, children, the elderly and the handicapped, and "commit unspeakable crimes against women and girls." Bearing the brunt of their brutality are religious and ethnic minority groups. "The utter barbarity of their behaviour and crimes leaves us dismayed and asking how the human heart can plan and carry out such horrible acts," said Auza. 30,000 FOREIGN FIGHTERS He noted the 30,000 foreign fighters from 100 U.N. member states who have entered Islamic State-controlled territory. "Once trained and completely indoctrinated in the most warped and violent ideologies, they travel to sow terror in other countries," he said. "No one of whatever religion or culture must ever be allowed to carry out acts of violence and oppression in the name of that religion or culture or under whatever pretext," said the papal envoy. Terrorism is "a fundamental threat to our common humanity," said the archbishop noting that the fight against it needs "a shared commitment from all nations and people of good will." He said that using the legal tools and resources together to stop citizens becoming foreign terrorist fighters, governments should engage with civil society to tackle at risk communities from radicalization and recruitment and to attain their social integration. The papal representative urged engagement to end the internet recruiting new supporters to terrorist groups and an end to internet funding for these groups. The Security Council needs to have harsh penalties against arms suppliers. "Collaboration with terror groups, whether for profit or for ideological complicity, must be outlawed. Member states that abet violent extremism or shelter terror groups must be rigorously challenged by this Council," said Auza. Economic Development Minister Steven Joyce today opened the NZ Exporters CEO Summit in Washington DC, with 11 New Zealand hi-tech exporters in attendance. The Summit is being held to discuss new opportunities for NZ companies to participate in the worlds largest and most sophisticated government procurement market. The US Federal Government alone purchases $500 billion worth of goods and services every year, Mr Joyce says. Now by joining the WTO Government Procurement Agreement, New Zealand companies can compete on a level playing field for those contracts, from their New Zealand base. Mr Joyce is currently leading a delegation of New Zealand exporters targeting government procurement in Washington DC, organised by New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE). The purpose of the two-day CEO summit is to highlight and leverage New Zealands 2015 accession to the GPA and to bring together companies seeking to expand opportunities in the US public sector. With more than 4.1 million employees almost the population of New Zealand the United States Government is a mega employer and has contracts with about 200,000 suppliers. Through the US GPA agreement New Zealand companies can now more easily and readily join this list of suppliers and the purpose of the Summit is to identify tangible ways that New Zealand industries and sectors can benefit. US procurement is committed to transparent and competitive government procurement that delivers the best value for money, Mr Joyce says. It is a very lucrative, open, complex market, which does not discriminate against foreign bidders. There are opportunities for New Zealand businesses in almost every sector in the US. Source: Office of Steven Joyce. Radius Althorp manager Melissa Harris says the company itself decided to provide flagpoles for each of the facilities in order to honour their heritage and history. Today is about actually leading into Anzac celebrations its a great way to kick off that weekend. The new flagpole sits just outside the main building, and Melissa says this placement was intentional. Its important to our residents to have access, which is why its put in such a central place. Every morning we can see the flag and remember at this time our ancestors and part of our history. Melissa says Radius Althorp has not had a flagpole acknowledgement of their history and culture for their residents. Its about acknowledging peoples past acknowledging the present and celebrating that. Ninety-years-old and still ruling with grace, Queen Elizabeth II is celebrating her birthday with a new set of commemorative postage stamps. The stamps feature Prince Charles, Queen Elizabeth II and Price William sitting in chairs, but little Prince George had to be hoisted up in order to help him read head height with the other royals. The rescue of boaties stranded on the Tairua-Pauanui bar has earned the Trust Waikato Pauanui Surf Life Saving Club two surf lifesaving awards. The rescue saw the Pauanui club win Surf Life Saving New Zealands rescue of the month for the Eastern Region along with the national BP Rescue of the Month for March. The fall resulted in a serious back injury and even though he managed to get back to the house nearby, his condition deteriorated, says a rescue helicopter spokesperson. He was stabilised by a St John paramedic before being flown to Rotorua Hospital for further treatment. The helicopter was called due to the injury and distance to the required hospital. Meanwhile, the Trustpower TECT Rescue Helicopter was dispatched Rangiwaea Island, which lies in the Tauranga Harbour, near Matakana Island this morning. A 59-year-old local had become very unwell due to a medical condition. She was flown to Tauranga Hospital for treatment. The helicopter was used because of access difficulties to and from the island. The call from opposition parties for a moratorium or a new tax on consents for bottled water plants is typically uninformed and scientifically unsound in respect of dealing with the challenges New Zealand has in freshwater management, says Environment Minister Dr Nick Smith. New Zealand has five-hundred trillion litres of fresh water each year flowing through our lakes, rivers, and aquifers, and we extract only two percent of that for human purposes. Ten trillion litres are extracted, made up of six trillion for irrigation, two trillion for town water supplies, and two trillion for industries. The total water extracted for bottled water is only 0.004 per cent of the resource. The suggestion by the Greens of a moratorium on bottled drinking water takes is about as sensible as pretending you could solve Aucklands traffic congestion by banning bikes. The New Zealand First proposal for a special tax would be like putting a charge on bikes but ignoring trucks, cars and buses and pretending that it would help traffic management, Dr Smith says. It is wrong to target the bottled water industry in the broader debate about improving the system by which water is allocated and reducing the pollution of our rivers, lakes and aquifers. New Zealands water shortages are in quite distinct areas and at particular times of the year. The Governments latest proposals for improving freshwater management contained in the Next Steps for Freshwater discussion document represent a far more rational response. The introduction of Technical Efficiency Standards for all water users will have far greater benefits for the sustainability of water use than banning bottled water. There is also a contradiction by opposition parties calling for a more diverse range of export industries than dairying but then wanting to prohibit the export of bottled water. Each litre of milk takes about 400 litres of freshwater to produce and if the export market is prepared to pay a good price for bottled water, it may be a more efficient and productive use of the resource. It would also be difficult to justify a charge on bottled water but not on a bottled product made with minimal additives of juice concentrate or other similar bottled drinking products. There is no case for the bottled water industry to be treated any differently from the thousands of other water users. The Government is tightening the regulation of freshwater but in a consistent approach that does not target one industry on the basis of misinformation and politics. SOURCE: Office of Dr Nick Smith Police have named the 22-year-old woman who was killed in a fatal crash on State Highway 29, near Matamata, on Monday. Waikato Road Policing Manager Inspector Freda Grace says officers are continuing their investigation into crash which killed Donna Gou, who was visiting New Zealand from America. Prime Minister John Key officially launched the 2016 kiwifruit season for Zespri in China at an event last night, marking a new phase for Zespris China Strategy. Chief Executive Lain Jager says having the Prime Minister launch Zespris season in Shanghai is a great start to what is set to be a record-breaking season. Prime Minister John Key has today announced French Prime Minister Manuel Valls will visit New Zealand in the first week of May. Prime Minister Valls and his delegation arrive on Sunday 1 May for a series of events in Auckland, including an official welcome at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, followed by a wreath laying and bilateral talks. This is the first time in 25 years that a French Prime Minister has visited New Zealand, Mr Key says. We have a close and long-standing relationship with France and I am looking forward to discussing a number of issues with Prime Minister Valls, including trade, our mutual interest in the Pacific and the international response to terrorism. I am pleased that New Zealand is able to host Prime Minister Valls for this short but very important visit. Prime Minister Valls will depart New Zealand on May 2. SOURCE: Office of John Key Fred Pinny thought he would be a war hero when he returned from the war, but what he had been promised and what he returned to were two different things. Tauranga man Brian Pinny has made a movie about his fathers time during World War II from 1942 until his return to New Zealand three years and 306 days later. Brian Pinny wants to share his fathers, Fred Pinny (pictured here), memories of the war so they arent lost forever. Watch Brians movie below or on YouTube. Brian wants to share the movie, so the memories of WWII are not lost forever. Its too important not to do. Time goes by, and these memories get lost forever. Brian spent many hours compiling the video. Some of the images used in the movie are of Brians father Fred during his time in the war. A lot of the anecdotes that I have talked about in the movie were from memories that he told me, says Brian. He didnt talk much about it, but when he did I remembered the anecdotes he did talk about, like the part where they gave up chasing flies away and ate them too. Brian says there is a part in the movie where he recalls Fred telling him about the particular sound a bomb makes when theyre falling from the sky. He and his mate ran toward a house, and they went either side of a chimney. The bomb went off on his mates side and his mate was killed. He had to deal with all of that. He drove a truck because he thought it would be the safest thing to do, says Brian. Fred thought he wouldnt have to shoot anyone, but in the end it was either shoot or be shot. One thing Brian recalls is the disappointment his father had when he returned from the war. While they were over there, they thought they were war heroes. That is what they were told. Its only now, we know what a hero they were. The movie goes on to share more of Freds memories, including his time at Trentham Camp where he lost all of his teeth, and the boring boat ride. Brian ends the movie with a quote from H.G Wells: If we dont end war, war will end us. That is very poignant, and its a good one for Anzac Day. The historic docks, located by Tower Bridge and the Tower of London, are due to undergo a careful refurbishment and restoration programme which will see the marina re-launched later this year under the Camper & Nicholsons brand, with 170 new berths with a max. LOA of 40+ metres. Since acquiring the site in late 2014, Blackstone has ensured the continued evolution of St Katharine Docks as one of the capitals most vibrant business, retail and leisure destinations. A key part of the ongoing works programme is the restoration of the marina, and C&N Marinas were commissioned to conduct a detailed audit and put together a proposal for its refurbishment, leading to its full management and operation. Dan Hughes, Business Development Director at Camper & Nicholsons Marinas commented: We have worked closely with Blackstone on a new vision for the Docks, to develop a genuinely international marina as part of a thriving waterside community in the centre of one of the worlds greatest cities. The plans include an improved marina layout and berth plan, better facilities both ashore and afloat, and an overall improvement to the marina experience. Sean Purdy, Marketing Director at C&N Marinas commented: The vision for the marina is for it to become a thriving hub of yachting and social activity for London - the capital of the world. As this 24-hour city adapts to the needs and demands of its ever-growing international business population, we see St Katharine Docks being at the heart of that. Guy Rudd, Managing Director of Blackstone Property Management added: We are delighted to be working with Camper & Nicholsons on the rejuvenation of St Katharine Docks. As well as being an important cultural destination and Central Londons only marina, the docks is a prominent mixed-use community featuring modern and unique office space, luxury homes and quayside dining and shopping. This partnership will further enhance the business and lifestyle offer at the Docks, so that we can continue to attract leading occupiers. He went on to say: As a key London landmark, St Katharine Docks holds appeal to yacht owners, affluent travelers, discerning Londoners and visitors, and progressive companies alike. The quality of the marina is integral to the appeal of the Docks, and the waterfront is being enhanced with an increasingly diverse range of quality restaurants and retailers, while still retaining its historic charm. In addition to starting operation in the city of London, Camper & Nicholsons are also creating an entirely new marina in Cowes on the Isle of Wight. Located on the eastern side of this most iconic of yachting harbours, the marina at Victoria Quay is scheduled to open in the summer of 2017 and will be a key contributor to the regeneration of East Cowes. An expert opinion is a highly sought after asset when diving, but first-hand knowledge of adventurous locations, rare experiences and exciting new diving styles from William Trubridge is another matter entirely. Cave Diving Theres cave systems in the Bahamas like nowhere else in the world. In some cases they extend for miles underneath the limestone rock. Youll go through chambers and passageways with the most incredible stalagmite and stalactites, and then youll pop up somewhere else in another tiny blue hole. For someone with a lot of experience it would be one of the most incredible things you can do on the planet. Free Diving Deans Blue Hole off of Long Island is widely considered the best destination for freediving in the world. The water is so deep yet you dont have to deal with swell, waves, currents, boats and jelly fish the things that are typical in the open ocean. Its also a spectacular place to dive because it almost feels like you are in an underwater cathedral. Shark Diving This is an experience that everyone should get first hand. To actually be amongst these creatures when theyre feeding makes you a lot more confident about being in the water because you see how non-threatening and uninterested they are in humans, and it can dispel some of the fear created by films like Jaws. Almost every island has a shark dive where you go out in a boat sit on the sand at the bottom and the sharks come around and swim as they feed on the fish that the dive master brings. Swimming with Wild Dolphins Atlantic Spotted Dolphins, which come through Bahamian waters, are the most social species of dolphin in the world. They will spend hours swimming around and interacting with people. And if you dive down about 30-40 feet and then come up very slowly with your hands by your sides, a group of them will often cluster around you, and as you float to the surface they will spin around and break away, kind of like a flower erupting from the water. Its the most incredible thing to be so close to these mammals and look them in the eye and see the intelligence so vividly displayed in their gaze. Wall Diving Almost every island in the Bahamas has a wall close by where the shelf or the flat sandy banks will drop off from 30-40 feet to thousands of feet very, very quickly, and along that edge theres a lot of activity, a lot of reef and groupers and sharks and all sorts. So its a great place to dive and go slightly deeper than you can in most other places in the Bahamas and to experience that vastness of the open ocean whilst still having the reef close by. While these activities may seem daunting, there is a word of encouragement from the globally revered sportsman for those looking to embrace the adventure of life underwater. What would you say to people looking to try freediving? "If youre on a yacht, free diving is something you can do anywhere. Its not something that requires super deep water you can free dive just on a shallow reef. So by learning the skills of free diving it would enrich your experience of cruising around the islands. One of the most amazing things is just to stop the boat, jump in and swim down into this ever-lasting expanse of blue. If you can acquire the confidence to hold your breath and the ability to swim efficiently, you can enjoy the water so much more and essentially become a sea creature yourself." You also run a freediving centre in the Bahamas what can you tell us about that? "When I first came to Deans Blue Hole to see if it would be suitable for setting up camp, I fell in love not just with the Blue Hole but the island itself. Its the perfect combination of a tropical island but with not too much tourism. It still retains its own individuality and hasnt become another destination on package tours. And it offers a lot of things for me to do outside free diving time, most of them relating to the water, but it still gives me that diversity." ELKO Drama classes from Elko and Spring Creek high schools are joining this week to bring Annie Get Your Gun to the Lorena Moren Theatre at the Elko Convention Center. This collaboration brings kids together to help put something on for the public and they become friends, said drama instructor Marie Binger. The play is based on famed gunslinger Annie Oakley. In the plot she falls in love but still becomes the best sharpshooter in the West. The group has been doing dress rehearsals for the past few days in preparation for performances that run tonight through Saturday. The show starts nightly at 7 p.m. and at 2 p.m. for the Saturday matinee. Mackenzie Gowans plays Annie Oakley, or, Little Miss Sure Shot as she was commonly known. Spencer Debenham portrays the leading male role, Frank Butler. In real life, 15-year-old Annie Oakley won a shooting match with Butler, the traveling marksman, whom she later married. The two would go on to perform in Buffalo Bills Wild West show a few years later. Oakleys career launched her into international stardom. She performed for royalty and many other heads of state. Oakleys aim was highly respected, and German Kaiser Wilhelm II asked her to shoot the ash from his cigarette. When World War I broke out Oakley wrote to the Kaiser and asked him if she could have a second shot. He did not reply. Drama teacher Kelly Moon is co-director for the performance. Kaiti Gentry is the orchestra director, and longtime volunteer Ann Louise Alger plays the piano, a task she has carried on for the combined school performances for 20 years. I think this is about bringing people together, said Binger. Its so awesome to have the kids from both schools working on this. Over the years we have had three marriages come out of the combined drama production. Despite their rivalry, Elko and Spring Creek High Schools show that teaming up is sometimes the best way to go. This Page Is Under Construction - Coming Soon! Why am I seeing this 'Under Construction' page? ELKO On a day known for celebrating cannabis culture, a small group outside City Hall was joined by Councilman John Patrick Rice to protest the Citys medical marijuana moratorium. The demonstrators, peacefully walking around the dais in front of City Hall on College Avenue, were led by the founder and president of the Elko County Medical Marijuana Patients Association, Ron Abbott, asking for the moratorium on medical marijuana facilities to be rescinded. Who are we? he would ask to a unified chorus responding Elko County Medical Marijuana Patients Association. What do we want? Our dispensary When do we want it? Now, they would chant. Were trying to refresh the city councils memory about the need for a dispensary here in the community, said Abbott. Were trying to ease some of the hardships for the medical marijuana patients in the community, he said, discussing how some of them have to travel to Reno or Las Vegas to get their medication. In March, the council voted 4-1 in favor of extending a two-year moratorium within the City on those business licenses until March 2018. Unity with patients Were trying to relieve some of the pain, suffering, were trying to show unity within a community of the patients, said Abbott. Not all of the supporters are patients. Some have familial ties, while others said they support the benefits and want to ease the infringement upon liberties this moratorium has caused. I have been an advocate for the establishment of a medical marijuana dispensary in Elko for some time, said Rice. He feels the councils continuation of a moratorium allows for a great opportunity for both the council and community to become educated on the topic. Not only are there health benefits, Rice told the Free Press, but also its economic benefit cannot be ignored. Supporter Jackie Melton said she thinks the county could use the revenue. Meltons daughter, Ashley, needs the cannabis to aid with her autism behaviors, she said. She received the news that BrightPath Adult Day Services could potentially close its doors, because of a lack of funding. The facility has an on-site nurse and helps foster quality of life for those who have mental, physical or medical handicaps, said Melton. It is very important because families also use it as care, while they are at work my daughter attends there. She uses it for quality of life, said Melton, who feels if there was a dispensary this much-needed facility would not be closing. She said her daughter is not getting medical marijuana due to the expense. Melton, who has to go to Reno for it, estimated the cost for the product, gas, food and lodging to be $500. Voters support it I think its important for the community to understand, this was passed by a referendum and passed the Legislature a couple of years ago, and the people of Elko County voted 60 percent in favor of the establishment of medical marijuana in the State of Nevada, said Rice. Liberty is also called into question, he said, discussing that the State created a law giving people the right to use medical marijuana. That liberty is something that is being enjoyed everywhere in the State except for rural Nevada, he said. The market partly factors into the decision for a local dispensary to open. Rice said the regulations in establishing these facilities can be stringent and costly it is not simply based on a solid business plan as there are fees and multiple steps preceding such services. Right now, weve shut the door on anyone even exploring it in the City of Elko with the moratorium and the county, as well. The county has banned it outright, he said. Rice said he thinks the Elko County Commission should continue to look at this issue. The citizens of Elko County have already spoken on this matter, and the citizens of Elko County have told us, in two referendums, they want medical marijuana in Elko County, he concluded. Tiffanie Huffman, executive assistant of the patients association, said they would like to reapproach the council to lift the moratorium, and are looking to one day get the county ban lifted. As it stands right now, there are approximately 2,000 medical marijuana patients in the rural areas of Nevada. That is more than enough to support a dispensary, she said. How dispensaries work Huffman compared a dispensary to a pharmacy with a little more security. Doctors recommendations for medical marijuana are sent to the State and a card is issued with a persons name and information. Prescriptions must be written by a Nevada licensed physician, who is in good standing with the State. Upon entrance into a dispensary, patient registration is required. Additionally, there are limits on the amount of cannabis allowed. The State sets the legal limit of 2.5 ounces of dry herb within a two-week period. As it stands right now, Nevada only recognizes medical marijuana, said Huffman, drawing it away from the common misconception of recreational use. There are six legitimate conditions Huffman is aware of that warrant a recommendation, including cancer, severe pain and post-traumatic stress disorder. Even children who suffer from seizures where conventional medicine is not helping them can benefit from cannabis, she said. Medical marijuana can also reduce pain and nausea, and increase appetite. Huffman is an Elko County native who began her research on cannabis after the CNN reports Weed 1 and Weed 2. She focused on the benefits regarding children. A few years ago, my husbands grandma was dying of cancer. She was on the morphine patches, she was on everything, and it wasnt helping. She couldnt sleep, she couldnt eat, she said. We used a cannabis salve on her, we got her some oils, and she actually ate, she took a long nap. ... She got to see her great-grandchildren. Those are moments that Ill never get back, but at least I got them and it was amazing, concluded Huffman. Carol Martin-Thurman is a medical marijuana card holder, who also goes to Reno for a dispensary. I have had two back surgeries. Im getting neck surgery next Monday, I have MS (multiple sclerosis), and Im in and out of a wheelchair. Pot helps with the pain, she said, explaining pain pills and patches are not enough. I cannot sleep because of the pain, said Martin-Thurman, explaining why she has to smoke cannabis at night. I dont want to buy it on the street. Im not the kind of person that does things illegally at all, she said. Martin-Thurman wants a dispensary in Elko for those like her and others who really need it. Getting medical marijuana can be especially costly, and she is on disability. Because of the pain, Martin-Thurman cannot make the round trip to Reno. Why is the county not putting one in? Look at the money theyre throwing away on taxes alone. It could support BrightPath or any other organization that really needs it. Im crippled with MS, four herniated disks, and Im going blind from the MS. I need help, concluded Martin-Thurman. SHARE By Laurie K. Blandford of TCPalm MARTIN COUNTY A woman was injured in a house fire in Jensen Beach on Thursday afternoon, officials said. The woman was pulled from a home in the 3200 block of Northeast Skyline Drive about 3:30 p.m. and sustained traumatic injuries, said Martin County Fire Rescue spokesmen Bill Schobel and Doug Killane and sheriff's spokeswoman Laurie Weber. She was flown to Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. Firefighters arrived at the house, saw heavy smoke coming out the windows and put out the fire within five minutes, officials said. Northeast Skyline Drive was closed in the area of the house fire until 6 p.m., Weber said. No further information was available late Thursday. Martin County Fire Rescue firetruck SHARE By Lidia Dinkova of TCPalm An independent fire district consolidating fire rescue services would work in Martin County and could even offer financial savings, according to a private consultant. Martin County and Stuart solicited a study on fire rescue consolidation to get more information on the issue. Consultant Fitch & Associates LLC was hired April 2015. Fitch and commissioners from all five local governments Martin County, Stuart, Jupiter Island, Ocean Breeze and Sewall's Point will meet 1-4 p.m. Thursday at the Children's Services Council, 101 S.E. Central Parkway in Stuart, to discuss the study. The meeting is open to the public. Independent fire districts are common in Florida, according to Fitch's report, released in March. St. Lucie County is the nearest example. There, the Fire District operates as its own government entity, separate from the authority of any commission or council. The St. Lucie County Fire District seven-member board is comprised of local elected officials and a governor's appointee. But fire districts could have different structures. If one is created in Martin County, officials would have to determine how it would be structured whether it would include just Martin County and Stuart or the other municipalities in the county and how it is governed. Fitch, in its report, offers two possibilities: Martin County and Stuart fire rescues would consolidate into an independent district, with Jupiter Island, Ocean Breeze and Sewall's Point contracting with the district for services. All local governments except for Jupiter Island would consolidate into an independent fire district. Jupiter Island would contract with the district for services. Currently, Martin County fire rescue services unincorporated areas and Stuart fire rescue services the city areas. Jupiter Island and Ocean Breeze contract with the county to receive fire rescue services. Jupiter Island has a public-safety department, supplemented by the county. Sewall's Point contracts fire rescue services from Stuart. Tweets by @TCPalmLidia Helen Hill, left, of Port St. Lucie, and her daughter, Jill Cutshaw, of Michigan, walk Hill's dog, Petunia, past one of Lily Zhong's parcels at City Center on Wednesday in Port St. Lucie. "I hope somebody buys it, because they really use this place ... it's a beautiful place," Hill said. "I feel lucky to have this right now." (XAVIER MASCARENAS/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS) SHARE Lily Zhong owns 22 parcels of land surrounding City Center, seen Wednesday in Port St. Lucie. (XAVIER MASCARENAS/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS) By Nicole Rodriguez of TCPalm PORT ST. LUCIE The public soon will learn the fate of Lily Zhong's controversial City Center property. Interim City Attorney John Fumero is expected to brief City Council members May 9 on discussions he's had with federal officials over the imminent sale, by a court-appointed receiver, of Zhong's 22 pieces of land that encompass City Center. The City Council in March authorized Fumero to engage in extensive talks with the Securities and Exchange Commission about the property, which was frozen by the federal government as part of its investment-fraud case against the elusive developer. Fumero was to explore options for the property, which could include a purchase by the city. Should the city decide not to buy, the council directed Fumero to attempt to partner with the SEC to protect its interest if the land goes to another party. Mayor Greg Oravec had asked for an update for the council by Monday. However, there was no public briefing at Monday's City Council workshop and no private briefings to council members. The delay was to be expected, Oravec said Wednesday, given the recent firing of City Attorney Pam Booker in February. "The city attorney's office is in transition and I think they have more challenges than they have time," Oravec said. Council members will be briefed individually before the May 9 meeting, Oravec said. The talks authorized by the City Council are an extension of conversations the city has been having since November with the receiver over Zhong's frozen assets, according to a February federal court filing. "The receiver and Port St. Lucie are currently exploring the potential sale of the City Center parcels to the city," receiver Michael Goldberg wrote in a report filed earlier this year. Goldberg could not be reached for comment Wednesday. The SEC and Zhong in March reached an agreement that bars her from violating the federal laws she was accused of breaking; waives her right to appeal the judgment and its enforcement; and requires her to pay an unspecified amount of fines. It could, however, take at least 60 days to hash out how much Zhong must pay, both in fines and to her alleged victims, SEC officials have said. Zhong faced six counts of violating the Securities Act and Exchange Act. The SEC in November alleged she used money from Chinese investors, intended for Port St. Lucie's City Center and residential projects in Palm Bay, to purchase luxury cars and a boat. The SEC claimed Zhong, a citizen of New Zealand, fraudulently raised at least $8.5 million from at least 17 investors between March 2011 and August 2014 through the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program, and diverted nearly $1 million to buy the expensive items. Zhong purchased the 22 parcels that encompass City Center at Walton Road and U.S. 1 nearly three years ago for $500,000 through her company US Investment LLC with the intention of building a $380 million downtown. She set up a regional EB-5 center, a federal program that requires foreign investors to put down at least $500,000 each and create 10 American jobs per investor in exchange for green cards. Zhong has had virtually no communication with city officials since then and owes approximately $18 million in outstanding taxes on the land. It's unclear what will become of the back taxes in the event of a sale to the city or other entities. St. Lucie County had planned to auction 16 of Zhong's 22 parcels to collect back taxes, but the federal intervention curtailed the auction. THE FEDERAL CASE AGAINST LILY ZHONG November 2015: The Securities and Exchange Commission charges developer Lily Zhong with six counts of violating the Securities Act and Exchange Act for using money from foreign investors, intended for Port St. Lucies City Center and residential projects in Palm Bay, to purchase luxury cars and a boat. The SEC freezes Zhongs assets. December 2015: Asset freeze against Zhong is extended until the case is resolved. February 2016: Court filing reveals city and receiver over Zhongs assets have been in talks to potentially sell City Center land to Port St. Lucie. March 2016: SEC settles case with Zhong. Settlement bars her from violating the federal laws she was accused of breaking; waives her right to appeal the judgment and its enforcement; and requires her to pay an unspecified amount of fines. It could take up to 90 days to hash out how much Zhong must pay. Source: U.S. District Court documents Janet Pineda of Okeechobee and Lucero Carrillo-Moctezuma of Fort Pierce spent too many school days working in the fields rather than sitting behind a school desk. Both women come from families who for decades have picked citrus in Florida and then traveled in late summer and early fall to harvest fruit in New Jersey and Michigan. As a result, they both missed a lot of school every fall. Pineda and Carrillo-Moctezuma decided early on they wanted a lot more out of life. In grade school they were introduced to the Take Stock in Children program, which provides an educational pathway for deserving, low-income students. Over 20 years the program has helped more than 26,000 at-risk children in Florida graduate from high school, complete college and become productive members of society. Today, Pineda is an accountant in Okeechobee studying for her Certified Public Accountant exams. Carrillo-Moctezuma handles tax-deed sales for the St. Lucie County Clerk of Court. Both women are the first in their families to graduate from college. Take Stock in Children has been administered locally by Indian River State College since 1996. The college offers four-year scholarships to students who sign a contract in middle or early high school promising to achieve both academic and personal goals, then ultimately graduate high school. Those goals include meeting weekly with a mentor, maintaining good grades, staying crime- and drug-free, demonstrating good behavior and attendance. On May 9, a group of 44 students from Martin, St. Lucie, Indian River and Okeechobee counties will participate in the program's 20th graduation ceremony at IRSC. The college has awarded nearly 1,000 scholarships since 1996. Each scholarship is valued at about $20,000. Local sponsors kick in $9,000, which is matched by the Florida Prepaid College Foundation. Betty Saffioti is program director for the Take Stock in Children program at IRSC. The program has been so successful, Saffioti said, because of the commitment students make when they sign the contract. In other words, they are invested in their success from an early age. Having adult mentors take personal interest in each student is another plus, Saffioti said. The mentors who come from private sector program sponsors, the school system or college staff monitor students' grade performance at least quarterly. If there are problems, Saffioti said, they can act quickly to overcome them. Pineda comes from a single-parent family. Take Stock in Children removed the financial burden from her mother, she said. "There are seven in my family," Pineda noted. "It was good to be able to talk with (a mentor) about dual-enrollment classes at the college. My mom was clueless about that; she only speaks Spanish." Carrillo-Moctezuma is a first-generation immigrant who came from Mexico at age 9. "I doubt if I'd be here (at the clerk's office) without the scholarship," she said. She encouraged one younger sister to become a registered nurse through the Take Stock program and she's also working to get her youngest sister and brother to apply for the program. "It's changed my life tremendously, " she said. "The program gives students the opportunity to reach their hopes, dreams and goals," program director Saffioti said. Disadvantaged children often find it hard to even dream of a better future, let alone achieve one. Take Stock in Children proves that those dreams can and do come true. Take Stock In Children awards ceremony When: 7 p.m. May 9 Where: McAlpin Fine Arts Center, IRSC main campus, 3209 Virginia Ave., Fort Pierce Call: 772-462-4786 for information, to donate scholarship funds or volunteer as a mentor Fadel Kasbar, of Stuart, owns a gasoline station at U.S. 1 and County Road 512 eastbound in Sebastian. Earlier this month, Sebastian code enforcement officials asked him to remove this sign from the corner. (LAURENCE REISMAN/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS) Laurence Reisman Columnist SHARE Fadel Kasbar Poll Should merchants be allowed to keep signs up like the one posted by the Sebastian gas station operator for more than 21 days a year? Yes No Undecided vote View Results Yes: 79% No: 18% Undecided: 3% Total Responses: 33 Last summer I was heading south on U.S. 1 near County Road 512 eastbound in Sebastian. I saw what looked like a sparkling, new Mobil station on the southwest corner, with a clean, white, ground-level banner touting, "Veteran Operator." I didn't have to get gas, but the price was right. When I pulled up, the store operator welcomed me which I thought was nice, but unusual. Until Wednesday. That's when I introduced myself to operator Fadel Kasbar, who did two tours in Iraq during a five-year Army hitch. I was in Sebastian trying to learn why the city told Kasbar to remove his "Veteran Operator" signs. The removal has sparked some passionate conversation about citizen rights and veteran support in Sebastian and on Facebook. "As soon as the sign went down (earlier this month), the veterans got on it," said Kasbar, an outgoing, friendly fellow. "I think some of them got more mad than I got." Some veterans wondered, Kasbar said, why the city would make him take out his clean, attractive signs, while allowing sandwich boards, A-frames and yard signs along U.S. 1 and in city rights of way. Turns out the answer is simple: city code. "It doesn't matter if someone has 'veteran' up there (on his sign), we still have to apply the code," said City Manager Joe Griffin, a retired Marine pilot. Griffin defended the city's efforts to help veterans, including a donation of $50,000 to the Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion posts to convert septic systems to sewer, the Fourth of July celebration and veterans memorial. On Saturday, Griffin is headed to the American Legion to judge its chili cook-off. "We're damned if we do, damned if we don't," Griffin said of enforcing city sign ordinances. In the case of Kasbar, who flies U.S. and prisoner of war flags at his Chevron station on East Ocean Drive in Stuart, he had to remove the signs because they were up too long. Dorri Bosworth, a city planner, said Kasbar received a free permit last fall for 60-day temporary signs, which businesses use for grand openings. He also received permission to keep the signs up 21 more days in 2015 and 2016. Every year, businesses may get permits to add temporary signs for up to seven days in three weeks. Eventually, Bosworth said, someone realized the permit expired and Kasbar was asked to take down the signs. He's storing his $500 investment, hoping to use them again during a three-week window in 2017. The signs have been incredibly effective, Kasbar said. Edgar Britt, a 32-year veteran of the Army and special forces representative on the Veterans Council of Indian River County, agreed. "That's one of the reasons I go to the Mobil station because it's veteran operated," he said, noting he was sad to see the sign taken down. Britt plans to ask the veterans council to see if there's something it can do for Kasbar. Sign ordinances, which have evolved over the years, and enforcement, often become issues, particularly in election years. That's when free speech rights collide with regulations over what's allowed on private property and in rights of way. Sebastian City Council currently is reviewing its sign ordinance, Bosworth said. City Council and the Planning and Zoning Commission are where citizens can discuss the ordinance. "This whole sign issue is just a wake-up call to all of us," Dale Doelling, a City Council candidate said on the Sebastian FL. Facebook page. "The city code regarding signs is about control, plain and simple. Does it make sense for our city? I don't believe so. The fix is very simple: Change the code." If you don't like what happened at the Mobil station; if you think there are too many ugly signs no matter what your views are folks like Kasbar and Britt served and fought to defend your rights. Those include one of five contained in the First Amendment: to petition your government. The council will meet again April 27. Check the city's website (cityofsebastian.org) and learn how you can speak that night. Express your opinion in the most passionate, yet civil, way possible. Confederate and American flags are displayed on a truck as seen on April 6 in the Vero Beach High School student parking lot. (ERIC HASERT/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS) By Editorial Board The chief responsibility of any school board is to create an environment conducive to student learning. This includes providing quality teachers and curricula, safe classrooms and access to technological resources. It also includes limiting distractions that are detrimental to education. In recent weeks, the Confederate flag has become a distraction in the Indian River County School District. It started in March, when some students at the Freshman Learning Center in Vero Beach created and distributed a racist flier containing the emblem of the Confederate flag. The students were suspended. The incident struck a nerve, in part, because it occurred against the backdrop of perceived educational inequities for some students. The district remains under a federal desegregation order calling for a more equitable school system for minority students. The racist flier prompted the county's chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to urge the school board to ban the Confederate flag from school campuses. Tony Brown, local leader of the NAACP, articulated the philosophical basis for banning the flag at an Indian River County School Board meeting. "I'm not talking about anybody's right to freedom of expression," Brown said. "I'm talking about an environment that's not conducive to our children getting a proper and fair education." No school district in Florida has outlawed the flag, which is a symbol of history for some and racism for others. After weighing all sides of the argument, the Indian River County School Board chose to stay the course and not impose a ban. However, the incident at the Freshman Learning Center should not be minimized. In light of the desegregation order and ongoing concerns about equity in the schools, it's important for school officials to closely monitor the issue. If other incidents arise involving the Confederate flag, the board should reconsider its decision not to impose a ban. The Confederate flag is at best a distraction in classrooms at worst an invitation for conflict. If this symbol proves to be an ongoing distraction and not an isolated incident the educational environment likely will suffer. MORE | Indian River School District discusses Confederate flag ban on campuses Confederate flag debate: Should Indian River County schools ban it? Laurence Reisman: Ban Confederate flags in school? Maybe theres a better solution Indian River County School Board wont pursue Confederate flag ban SHARE By Editorial Board DOUBLE STANDARD?: Those who criticize Gov. Rick Scott for being callous to the poor have new ammunition at their disposal. Scott, who styles himself the "Jobs Governor," recently vetoed legislation that would have improved dental care for poor Floridians in medically underserved areas. House Bill 139, sponsored by Rep. Travis Cummings, R-Orange Park, and Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Niceville, would have provided grants to dentists from $10,000 to $100,000 to open private practices in rural or low-income communities. Both chambers of the Florida Legislature had approved HB 139. Unanimously. However, our governor said he "could not support a program that does not place appropriate safeguards on taxpayer investments." Ironically, that's the same criticism lawmakers lodged against Scott with respect to the latter's proposed spending on economic development programs and projects. Apparently, safeguards are less important when it comes to private businesses and more important when it comes to helping the poor. SHARE By Editorial Board RIDING THE WAVE: State Sen. Maria Sachs is the latest Florida politician who's been moved to offer a solution to a rash of boating tragedies. The Delray Beach Democrat is calling for Florida students to be offered boating safety classes in school. For several years, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has offered online boating safety courses for high-schoolers through the Florida Virtual School. FWC officials say the program is unique because it's the only course in the nation that combines hunting and boat safety instruction. The problem is few people know about the classes. Sachs says she wants to go further. At a recent FWC meeting, she suggested having FWC-trained volunteers go into elementary, middle and high schools to teach basic boating safety skills to students. If the idea saves even one life on the water, it would be worthwhile. Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, right, and Hillary Clinton react as they speak during the CNN Democratic Presidential Primary Debate at the Brooklyn Navy Yard on April 14 in New York. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig) SHARE By Paula Dockery The Republican presidential primary has been the circus everyone expected, with front-runner Donald Trump as the ringleader. But it was supposed to be different more civil on the Democratic side. Hillary Clinton was the presumptive nominee riding high with solid poll numbers. She withstood a barrage of attacks and investigations by Republicans painting her as untrustworthy. Any primary opponent other than Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren was considered a minor inconvenience. Two candidates surfaced. Martin O'Malley, the former governor of Maryland and mayor of Baltimore, failed to gain traction and left the race. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, elected as an Independent in Vermont, decided to run as a Democrat. No one seemed to take his candidacy seriously. To his credit, Sanders warned that he shouldn't be underestimated. The Democratic presidential primary started off civil in stark contrast with the tone of the GOP primary. Even the Democratic debates were respectful with candidates disagreeing on issues while avoiding personal attacks. Clinton is running on her record, her experience and a promise to continue progress on health care, immigration, equal pay, equal rights, voter rights, increasing minimum wage and gun control, including background checks. While her issues resonate with Democratic voters, her message lacks the passion of Sanders. Pundits believed Clinton would benefit from a primary challenge to keep her in the public eye and sharpen her campaign skills. It was never anticipated that Bernie could pose a real threat. Sanders, a self-described socialist, had been in the U.S. Senate for many years with little fanfare, national name recognition or accomplishments. Sanders had a consistent message that was consistently ignored. But the mood of the country was changing and Sanders' message of income inequality gained traction. He attracts huge crowds to his rallies and continues to outraise all candidates through millions of individual contributions on the internet. He's energized college students, millennials and independent voters. His proposal offering free college tuition is effectively winning him college students. He's unapologetic about his socialist beliefs. Voters see him as honest, genuine and authentic. Sanders won caucuses and primaries in states with predominantly white voters and open primaries. As he gained momentum, his tone changed. He became more combative, more divisive and less civil, morphing from a lovable grandfather to a grumpy old neighbor yelling, "Get off my lawn." He criticized Democratic Party leaders over debates and super delegates, and accused them of stacking the deck for Clinton. Sanders knew the rules when he chose to run as a Democrat. He could have run as an independent but wanted the advantages of running in a party structure. Both candidates got testy in the last debate and talked over each other. Sanders openly questioned Clinton's character and judgment while constantly wagging his finger. He attacked her on giving paid speeches and questioned her excessive speaker fees. He also demanded that she release the transcripts of her private speeches, handing Republicans an effective line of attack in the general election. Clinton carefully avoided calling Sanders "unqualified," despite Morning Joe's repeated efforts. Sanders falsely accused her of doing so and launched an attack on her qualifications. Despite winning eight of the last 10 contests, Sanders is still losing. He blames it on a "rigged system," which fits his message of the powerful against the powerless, but it doesn't match reality. Clinton has 2.6 million more votes and a large lead in pledged delegates before the super delegates are even considered. Clinton is expected to do well in the next five or six states that have closed primaries and high minority populations. It's not impossible for Sanders to win the nomination, but it's highly unlikely especially after Clinton's decisive win in New York. The Sanders camp is complaining that independent voters were unable to vote in New York, even though they know it is a closed primary state. But his supporters point to it as another vote-rigging conspiracy. His supporters are growing increasingly hostile on Twitter, using obscenities, calling for prison for Clinton and vowing to never give up the revolution. Sanders plans to take it all the way to the convention, even though he trails in the popular vote, pledged delegates and super delegates. With an unlimited flow of campaign funds, he can afford to stay in. In 2016, the Democratic Party expected to prosper from a divided GOP. Instead, it now has to worry about drama at its own convention and figure out how to unite voters that are becoming increasingly adversarial. Paula Dockery is a syndicated columnist who served in the Florida Legislature for 16 years as a Republican from Lakeland. She can be reached at PBDockery@gmail.com. Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. Later this year, Comcast Xfinity subscribers will no longer need an expensive cable box to watch video on their televisions. The cable giant will instead let subscribers stream video to connected TV devices, starting with Roku boxes, Roku-powered TVs, and Samsung Smart TVs. An Xfinity TV Partner Program will bring Comcasts app to other devices that meet certain technical requirements. This will allow customers to pay one time for the hardwaresuch as the $50 Roku Streaming Stickinstead of tacking on recurring equipment rental fees to their bills. Although Comcast already supports streaming video on phones, tablets, and computers, TV devices have been an afterthought. Comcast did offer a streaming app for the Xbox 360, but discontinued it last year. The story behind the story: The timing of this news may not be a coincidence. In February, the FCC announced a proposal to open up the cable box market, theoretically allowing any device maker to integrate pay TV programming into their set-top boxes. Cable companies like Comcast have opposed the plan, as they dont want to lose control over how their customers access TV services. Their own streaming video apps, they argue, are good enough. Look ma, no regulation! Comcast is already pointing to its new apps and partner program as evidence that the FCCs plan isnt necessary. The FCCs proposed set-top box mandate threatens to undermine this highly-dynamic marketplace, create substantial costs and consumer harms, and will take years to developonly to be likely outdated by the time it reaches the marketplaceall in an effort to achieve what apps are already delivering for consumers, Comcast senior vice president Mark Hess wrote on the companys website. The FCC, however, issued its own statement suggesting that Comcast hasnt gone far enough: While we do not know all of the details of this announcement, it appears to offer only a proprietary, Comcast-controlled user interface and seems to allow only Comcast content on different devices, rather than allowing those devices to integrate or search across Comcast content as well as other content consumers subscribe to. The key point of contention here is how customers will actually get to Comcast content. Under the FCCs proposal, device makers can integrate TV channels and shows in any way they please. You might, for instance, be able to access your favorite shows directly from the home screen on an Android TV box, or rearrange the order of the channel guide. By comparison, cable companies want to offer self-contained apps where they are in complete control of the experience. In essence, they dont want Apple or Google messing with their interface. That said, Comcast is promising search integration as part of its partner program, so a Roku users might be able to see Xfinity shows right alongside listings from Netflix and Hulu. The other issue is about who shoulders the burden of developing these TV apps. Under the FCCs proposal, all TV services would submit to one standard, so that device makers could integrate pay TV programming no matter whos providing it. With Comcasts plan, device makers would have to build a specific app for Xfinity programming, and theyd have to do the same for Time Warner Cable, Charter, Dish Network, and DirecTV if those providers followed suit. Comcast says development should be simple thanks to open web standards, but its still not the same as creating one system that works with everything. In other words, the issue of delivering cable TV without excessive rental fees is far from resolved. But whether the FCC intervenes or not, at least things are moving in the right direction. Thats not the way democracy is supposed to work, Donald Trump thundered on Fox News. The system is rigged. I see it now, 100 percent. Trump was complaining about a series of states Colorado, Louisiana, South Carolina where Ted Cruzs well-organized campaign elected delegates at state conventions and sliced into Trumps national lead. Supporters of Bernie Sanders are making similar protests about a rigged system on the Democratic side, where hundreds of superdelegates mainly party officials and office holders get seats at the convention and can support anybody, no matter how the folks back home voted. Hillary Clinton holds a large lead among these party regulars, and Sanders supporters are aggressively lobbying even harassing them to change sides in states that Bernie won. Its time we take our democracy back, proclaims one website devoted to pressuring Clinton backers. The Trump and Sanders people are both wrong. The contests are not rigged or unfair. These whiners misunderstand the basic nature of American democracy. Our system was never supposed to subject every question to a plebiscite, a direct vote of the people. The Founders built in a series of checks and balances specifically designed to contain and counteract the gusts of emotions that can blow forcefully through the electorate and cause long-term damage to the national interest. In his famous Federalist 10 essay, aimed at explaining and defending the Constitution, James Madison presciently warned against the threat of factions, which he defined as a number of citizens ... who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. Thats why the founders created rules and institutions that would dilute pure democracy and defend the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. One example: the ability of the president to veto bills passed by a majority and to sustain his action with the support of only one-third of the legislature. Or a nine-member court with lifetime tenure that can declare laws unconstitutional. The threat of factions is directly relevant to the current debate in both parties about convention rules. Trump and his followers are a classic example of a movement actuated by some common impulse of passion that feeds on fears and phobias and threatens to damage precious traditions and values. The anti-Trump forces are probably fighting a losing battle, especially if he wins big in New York next week. But they are using the rules in a very American way to impede a faction, to force a rethinking, to make sure that the power of passion is balanced out by other interests, especially those of the Republican Party. Exit polls make it clear that many voters who are backing Trump are not even Republicans, and care very little about his electability. But electability is the first priority of any political party, and Republicans have every right to use every rule in the book to find a candidate with a better chance of winning in November. The Democrats are in a different situation, since their insurgent, Sanders, is not the frontrunner. Nor does he mirror Trumps cynical appeals to racist and nativist prejudices. But his supporters are echoing Trumps complaints about a rigged system, and they are wrong for the same reasons. The superdelegates to the Democratic convention were created after 1972, when a passionate faction of antiwar activists nominated George McGovern, an honorable man but a terrible candidate who led the party to a disastrous defeat. A commission chaired by James Hunt, then the governor of North Carolina, recommended the innovation as a way of returning a measure of decision-making power and discretion to the organized party. Democrats, like Republicans, have legitimate party interests that dont necessarily coincide with primary results. Sanders, like Trump, is backed more by independents than party regulars, and Democrats have voted 2 to 1 in favor of Clinton. In fact, Sanders has proudly called himself an independent through most of his career, and did not officially join the Democratic party until he announced his candidacy less than a year ago. Hes never raised money for Democrats or campaigned for them or cared about the party. Why should the superdelegates feel any loyalty to him now? The truth is, many Republicans sure wish their party had superdelegates, too. It would make stopping Trump a lot easier. As Lee Kinch, the Democratic state chairman in Kansas, told the Kansas City Star: The argument for superdelegates is Donald Trump. Visa, the world's largest payments processor, has confirmed that chip-enabled cards flooding the US market are indeed effective at curbing fraud. Stephanie Ericksen, vice president of risk products at Visa, recently told USA Today that five of the 25 merchants that suffered the most instances of counterfeit fraud at the end of 2014 realized an 18.3 percent drop in fraudulent transactions just one year after adding the ability to process chip-enabled credit and debit cards. Visa said it has issued roughly 265 million chip-enabled cards to date that can be used at over a million merchants across the country. That's only about 20 percent of merchant locations, however, highlighting the fact that the overwhelming majority of merchants don't yet support cards with EMV technology. Rival MasterCard told the publication that 70 percent of its consumer credit cards are now chipped. Adoption aside, another hurdle that Visa is tackling is the amount of time it takes to process a transaction. With its new software update, the payments processor says cardholders can insert and remove a chip card within two seconds or less rather than having to leave the card in the terminal until the transaction is authorized. Ericksen said that the overall transaction may only be a few seconds faster but being able to remove a card from a terminal quickly gives shoppers the impression that the transaction is much faster. Florida zoo lead keeper died in a tiger-attack, immediate family members and coworkers mourn. Stacey Konwiser, Palm Beach Zoo lead keeper was fatally injured by a 13-year-old endangered male Malayan tiger on April 15. Zoo staff and immediate family of the victim gathered to mourn on April 16. "Konwiser was preparing the night house for the evening routine, which includes cleaning and feeding," said General Curator Jan Steele. Konwiser was airlifted by the West Palm Beach Police helicopter from the zoo to St. Mary's Medical Center. The authorities tranquilized the tiger to be able to get the victim out of the tiger's den. The zoo management is cooperating with the Konwiser family to establish a memorial fund in honor of the 38-year-old late lead keeper. Funeral service was also planned and a note of support was read by Jeremy Konwiser, victim's husband and a fellow zoo staff. "Please thank everyone for their support and kind words. This is a tragic and traumatic event for the zoo family, but together we can help each other heal. Human beings and animals lost a wonderful friend yesterday," said Jeremy Konwiser. Colleagues and workmates described Konwiser as a wife, a sister, a daughter and a dedicated protector of endangered subspecies. "Our condolences go out to the Konwiser family in the midst of this tragic loss," said Naki Carter, spokeswoman of Palm Beach Zoo. "Stacey came here as a lead keeper, she is proficient and efficient in working with these animals," Carter added. She added that Konwiser was up-to-date when it comes to protocols and was excellent in executing them daily. The staff were puzzled whether Konwiser did something out of the norm when she's inside the enclosure. From her previous stint at the Living Desert Museum and Zoo, Stacey Konwiser transferred and started working at the Palm Beach Zoo three years ago. She is a well-oiled machine when it comes to managing large cats. "She loved tigers. You don't get into this business without the love for the animals while understanding the danger that's involved even more," Carter said. Konwiser earned her bachelor's degree in Biology at Mount Holyoke College and master's degree in Conservation Biology at University of Queensland, Australia. After three days that the zoo was closed to public, it reopened Monday April 18, 9 a.m. Unfortunately, Keeper Talks, Experiences and shows are temporarily suspended but they have provided a 'Tiger FAQ' page. Palm Beach Zoo and Conservation Society is cooperating in the on-going investigation of the incident, while West Palm Beach Police and Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission are currently working on the case. 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Many travelers experience losing their luggage while on a trip, and in worse cases fail to recover it anymore. Fortunately, Samsonite has introduced a tracking beacon to help travelers find their luggage using a smartphone app, the Track&Go. Samsonite's Track&Go device allows owners to privately and securely track their Samsonite suitcases with a Bluetooth beacon that uses Google's Eddystone Ephemeral Identifiers (EID), a privacy or security protocol. "We're excited to work with Google on this project to make sure that our beacons support Eddystone EIDs. Missing or permanently lost luggage is the nightmare of every traveller. As the world's largest luggage manufacturer, we wanted to find a way to make this issue a thing of the past," said Samsonite CEO Ramesh Tainwala. The Bluetooth beacon, designed and assembled by Accent Systems, is attached to the Samsonite Track&Go bag. Owners of the bag must register the beacon to Samsonite's app Travlr, developed by mobile agency In The Pocket. Travlr is a free-of-charge Samsonite app that was launched in September of 2015 giving travelers tips and reminders about their flight. The new Track&Go solution can locate luggage at a distance of 70 meters. The app can also notify the owner whenever the luggage is either moving closer or farther. If the luggage does not reach its owner, the app will flag the luggage as "lost". Then the app will search users' information within its database. Anyone using Travlr within the 70-meter range can pick up the luggage's EID. The information picked up by other Travlr users, including location and time stamp, will be sent to the luggage owner. The company plans to launch the first Track&Go suitcase in the European market by the end of 2016. It also aims to reach a wider market by 2017. Samsonite plans to collaborate with airports and companies specializing in baggage handling to extend their network of Bluetooth beacons within the most visited travel hubs. In addition, the company expects that all smartphone users would be able to retrieve their lost suitcases. 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Utah officially became the first state to deem pornography as a "public health crisis" as Gov. Gary Herbert signed the resolution on April 19. The resolution, which was passed last month, calls for improved prevention, education and changes in policies to fight pornography. "We realize this is a bold assertion and there are some out there who will disagree with us," said Herbert. "We're here to say it is, in fact, the full-fledged truth," he added. Todd Weiler, a Republican state Senator introduced the resolution in January 2015, to address the effects of explicit material to public health and society as a whole. Weiler said that the resolution is not intended to ban explicit material but it could lead to ways to protect children and families from it. "This concurrent resolution of the Legislature and the Governor recognizes that pornography is a public health hazard leading to a broad spectrum of individual and public health impacts and societal harms," the resolution said. Lawmakers identify pornography as a harmful epidemic that particularly affects young individuals and perpetuates a sexually toxic environment. Pornography could lead to various public health issues and harm the society in various ways. The resolution states that education is essential to let the public know more about the harms of pornography. Experts hope that this move in Utah could pave the way for other states to follow its footsteps to address the growing problem on pornography, especially since younger populations are more vulnerable to its effects. Technological advancement has created ways for children and teens to have access to restricted sites. The universal availability of the internet has allowed young children to be exposed to pornography that was once dubbed taboo. The average age of kids being exposed to porn sites is now between 11 and 12 years. Being exposed to explicit material increases the risk of low self-esteem, body image disorders and problematic sexual activity in young children. It could also drive teens to be involved in risky sexual behavior and activities that could lead to a broad spectrum of public health issues. Photo: Robby Van Arsdale | Flickr 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Have you ever wondered which public high schools in the United States are the best? The top public schools across all 50 states and the District of Columbia are in Arizona and Texas, according to the U.S. News Best High School rankings. U.S. News and RTI International, a North Carolina-based nonprofit social science research firm, evaluated more than 28,000 schools across the United States to determine the schools that are considered the best of the best, producing top-notch students equipped to pursue college education and providing quality education to all their students. For the fifth year in a row, the Dallas-based School for the Talented and Gifted grabbed the top spot, while Arizona-based schools BASIS Scottsdale and BASIS Tucson North placed second and third, respectively. The nation's top 6,000 high schools have graduation rates at least 15 percent higher than other schools. Gold, silver and bronze medals are awarded to schools that show exceptional performance in four key aspects, namely the performance of students on required math and reading tests imposed by states, the performance of disadvantaged subgroups on these tests, the rate of students who graduated and the rates of participation in and performance on the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate tests. Being awarded gold medals means that a school has students who show the highest level of readiness to pursue college education. This year, 500 schools or 3 percent of the total number of schools assessed received gold medal awards. Out of this number, 17 schools received the highest possible score of 100 for college readiness. "A high school education is imperative for success in both college and a career, and a school's graduation rate is a key indicator of whether students are being effectively prepared for both paths," said the Managing Editor of Education at U.S. News, Anita Narayan. The ranking gives both parents and students information on the performance of public schools. This will help them decide about which school they want to enroll in. The 10 Best Public High Schools In The United States 1. School for the Talented and Gifted - Dallas, Texas 2. BASIS Scottsdale - Scottsdale, Arizona 3. BASIS Tucson North - Tucson, Arizona 4. School of Science and Engineering - Dallas, Texas 5. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology - Alexandria, Virginia 6. BASIS Oro Valley - Oro Valley, Arizona 7. Pine View School - Osprey, Florida 8. Academic Magnet High School - North Charleston, South Carolina 9. International Academy - Bloomfield Hills, Michigan 10. Carnegie Vanguard High School - Houston, Texas Photo: U.S. Department of Education | Flickr 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The country's largest health insurer, UnitedHealth, has announced its plan to exit most ObamaCare state exchanges where it currently operates by 2017. The company expects losses from its exchange business to reach a total of $1 billion for 2015 and 2016 and has decided to pull back from the Affordable Care Act (ACA), simply known as ObamaCare. UnitedHealth has previously announced that it will withdraw from Arkansas, Michigan and Georgia. It said it will pull out of ObamaCare exchanges in most of the states. Since the Affordable Care Act has expanded, the health insurer can't continue to serve the increased demands of the market. Higher risks coming from customers and large financial losses in the future have prompted United Health to act immediately. A recent study by the Blue Cross Shield Association (BCSA) has revelead that new enrollees of the ACA are sicker, more expensive and are higher-risk. They had higher rates of chronic diseases such as depression, hypertension, diabetes, coronary heart disease, hepatitis C and Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) infection. By 2016, the UnitedHealth Group expects about $650 million losses, up from its previous projection of $525 million. Last year, the company lost a total of $475 million. David Wichmann, UnitedHealth's president and chief financial officer said that the firm has served about 795,000 people on public exchanges at the end of the first quarter. By December, the company expects about 650,000 enrolled customers. The company's CEO, Stephen Hemsley, said that even if the company expanded to about three dozen state exchanges in 2016, it can't cope with the larger demand in the market. "We continue to remain an advocate for more stable and sustainable approaches to serving this market," Hemsley said. The Kraiser Family Foundation has provided estimates on recent trends in health insurance in the United States. This move by the UnitedHealth could mean higher insurance premiums in many states including Arizona, Iowa, Alabama, Nebraska and North Carolina. Rivals of the company are merging with Aetna partnering with Humana, while Cigna joins forces with Anthem. This could mean that the industry will have only three big players in health insurance, down from five in the past. Photo: Blake Patterson | Flickr 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Has the time passed to save endangered wolves in Michigan? Unfortunately yes, as the worlds longest-running predator-prey study, an attempt to save the nearly wiped-out wolves on Isle Royale through the process of genetic rescue, revealed on April 19. In March, the National Park Service proclaimed that the natural recovery of the wolves population is already unlikely. The disappearance of wolves could hold great ecological consequences, as they prey on moose and thus keep the latter from damaging forest vegetation, which is their natural food. Only two wolves remain on the Lake Superior island while the moose herd of 1,300 is still likely increasing, according to the 58-year report of Michigan Technological University researchers Rolf Peterson and John Vucetich. The two warned that throwing new breeding wolves into the bunch could be a misunderstanding of the genetic processes at play. "The surviving wolves may or may not have any more deleterious genes than you or I, but when combined with a family member's genes, recessive genes can be expressed," says Peterson, reporting that the two remaining wolves are half-siblings and also a father-daughter pair. The drop in wolf population on Isle Royale results from inbreeding, with the two remaining wolves definitely family. They will be ages 6 and 8 this spring, while the island wolves life expectancy has been around 4 years of age. Genetic rescue may not be the best idea in this case, as wolves are believed to possess too many deleterious genes. In 2009, for instance, authorities discovered that the local wolf population suffered high rates of malformed backbone, which specifically afflicted one-third of studied specimens. Only one out of 100 wolves suffers the specific condition lumbosacral transitional vertebrae (LSTV) in healthy populations, but on Isle Royale it has steadily increased as inbreeding became more prevalent. The two scientists, previously staunch supporters of genetic rescue, counted three wolves in the study a year earlier. Now, they did not observe anything to convince them that the wolves could escape extinction and that the moose would not damage the forest due to rapid growth, adds Vucetich. Geneticist Phil Hendrick from Arizona State University explains that mating between close relatives accelerates inbreeding rates. Offspring produced by the last two wolves in the area, for instance, have an inbreeding coefficient or measure of severity of their incestuous links between 0.311 and 0.565. While inbreeding is also measured in species like Mexican wolves and cheetahs, it is rare for a given population to achieve such high inbreeding coefficients, says Hendrick. The moose population, on the other hand, is up 4 percent from 2015 also likely underestimated since administrative limits enabled the scientists to count moose only on three-quarters of the usually covered plots. Some argue that reintroducing wolves could still limit the ecological damage, while others believe it is best to not intervene anymore. A public survey by the National Park Service analyzed by Michael Nelson from Oregon State University, however, revealed that 86 percent thought wolves should stay present on Isle Royale even if it means intervening for them. Of the remaining respondents, many opposed intervention out of the belief that healthy ecosystems should be free of human meddling. 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The Duke of Cambridge, Prince William, and his younger brother, Prince Harry, had a day of brotherly bonding on April 19 by channeling The Force within them and traveling to a galaxy far, far away. The two members of England's Royal Family visited Pinewood Studios for a guided tour around the set of Star Wars: Episode VIII and met some of the more popular characters in The Rebellion, as well as practiced their sword fighting skills with a little lightsaber battle. The princes were toured around the set and the places where the magic happens - that is, the costume and props department - where they were happily welcomed by Chewbacca, the new popular droid BB-8, the Force-sensitive duo of Finn and Rey and the Jedi knight everyone was looking for: Luke Skywalker. The Kensington Palace's official Twitter account documented the visit and tweeted some choice photos while the duke and the prince were touring the set. In one photo, Prince William is seen holding a head cast of actress Daisy Ridley and looking very amused while Prince Harry seems to be regarding it as a little creepy and, no, he won't be holding that dismembered head - just look at that smile masking his inner thoughts. The Duke and Prince Harry come face to face with Daisy Ridley's @starwars head cast @PinewoodStudios pic.twitter.com/vrXHdQR2AO Kensington Palace (@KensingtonRoyal) April 19, 2016 After that, they tried to channel the Force in the props department and we suppose we have to keep an eye on Prince Harry because of his choice in lightsabers. A tour in the costume department had them looking at Rey's scavenger outfit in the beginning of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, as well as a figure of Maz Kanata, and it is a good thing they were on set and not in a museum because Prince Harry seems to be touching the display. Chewie probably sees a little bit of his old buddy, Han Solo, in Prince Harry because just look at the tight hug he gave the royal. Prince Harry has made a new friend... pic.twitter.com/mTra1UoSMx Kensington Palace (@KensingtonRoyal) April 19, 2016 It is also no secret that Prince William is a pilot so maybe that is why BB-8 has taken a liking to him. ...and so has The Duke! pic.twitter.com/c9gOh4ACyA Kensington Palace (@KensingtonRoyal) April 19, 2016 The duke is most likely asking Luke how he got to the island when there does not seem to be any other aircraft around. Both Princes William and Harry got to say hello to the cast of Star Wars: Episode VIII. Don't forget BB-8 - The Duke and Prince Harry say hi to the @starwars cast!https://t.co/9ibP96L2vS Kensington Palace (@KensingtonRoyal) April 19, 2016 They obviously had lot of fun. Star Wars: Episode VIII heads back to cinemas on Dec. 17, 2017. 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Editor: Mission statement: The Elko Area Chamber of Commerce promotes economic growth and stability through advocacy and communication in service of business members. Opposition to the Commerce Tax referendum is in direct opposition to this statement by virtue of the fact that it is a gross proceeds tax rather than a net proceeds tax. It could be the mortal blow to startup or struggling businesses as well as an additional burden on all affected businesses. Because the commerce tax has 26 business categories, each with its own tax rate, it is a bookkeepers nightmare. Even the most diligent and honest businessman could not prepare a return that couldnt be challenged. In addition, many businesses evolve during the course of a taxable year to meet the challenges of a changing business environment. The failure to cap the $4 million excluded from the gross revenues provides a built-in green light to lower the exclusion. Lowering the exclusion, for even the most frivolous of perceived needs, becomes a slam-dunk. Most concerning is the quote from the chamber meeting: "It is much easier for us to explain our position and get buy-in from 63 legislators than it is from 2.8 million Nevadans. A blatant admission that the will of the people is to be bypassed. What happened to Government of the People, by the People and for the People? Jim Polkinghorne Former Elko mayor Chinese brand Xiaomi sold around 14.8 million smartphones in the first quarter of 2016, including overseas sales, says Kevin Wang of IHS Technology. The company's sales number so far this year almost matches last year's sales of 14.98 million handsets around the same time. However, Xiaomi has not officially announced the first-quarter sales figures yet. The company is now the biggest brand in China, next to Huawei, and sold 70 million handsets in 2015. But the company was not very happy with this number as it had upped its sales target to 80 million that year. Despite the miss, Xiaomi did very well and even topped Huawei in the Chinese-market sales. However, Huawei still has an edge over its competitor as their devices are sold all over the world, whereas Xiaomi has stuck to selling its products at specific markets only. One reason for the company missing its target can be failure to launch a flagship device for quite some time. The Mi 5 is finally here after taking almost two years in the making, but the device was released by way of flash sales and is yet to impact the sales figures on a larger scale. The Redmi 3 smartphone has also been introduced to the Chinese market, which was followed by the Redmi Note 3. India is Xiaomi's biggest market, after its home ground, with the company successfully catering to the needs of the huge consumer base that is always looking for smartphones with high-end specs at a budget-friendly price. The 2016 Xiaomi models have also crept into the country, and the company's ambitions now include setting up single-brand retail stores to sell the Mi products in India. Xiaomi apparently also has another device up its sleeve, called Xiaomi Max. With a rumored 6.4-inch display, this phablet may just be Xiaomi's biggest smartphone yet although an official announcement has yet to settle all speculations. Photo: Vernon Chan | Flickr 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Palliative care has serious branding issues that prevent many patients and caregivers from seeking it, says a new Canadian study. Palliative care is a specialized type of medical care provided mostly to patients who are already in the advanced stages of disease like cancer. Its goal is to improve the patient's quality of life by managing both the stress and the symptoms related to the illness. However, the study now published in Canadian Medical Association Journal shows that these benefits are overshadowed by the constrained idea about palliative care. "Patients with advanced cancer and their caregivers described palliative care as carrying a negative stigma associated with death and with care at the very end of life," said the study. It Means No Hope For the research, the team chose 48 advanced cancer patients with a prognosis of half a year to two years, as well as 23 caregivers. They were all part of a randomized clinical trial that compared standard and palliative oncologic care. Twenty-six of the 48 patients served as the intervention group and received early palliative care in an outpatient setting while the rest were the control group and only had standard care. Caregivers of the intervention group, meanwhile, had the option to join clinic visits. The participants were then interviewed about their perception about palliative care. The results reveal that, initially, palliative care for patients and caregivers equated to death, state of hopelessness, a life of no meaning and end of life. Both patient groups also felt fear and shock when they were introduced to palliative care, particularly if they had already encountered health care teams who might have presented it as a last resort. Those who received only standard care chose to avoid it because they wanted to remain optimistic or they thought such care is irrelevant at that point in their lives. Change Of Heart While there's no change in the negative perception about palliative care before and after the trial among those who received only standard care, intervention groups developed a "more comfortable" attitude and broader understanding, and were able to experience an improved quality of life. However, this happened only after the health care team, which included the oncologists and the researchers, explained the process properly to them. "Patients told us if palliative care were called something else, they wouldn't feel so stigmatized," said Dr. Camilla Zimmermann, the University Health Network's Palliative Care head and lead author. The research highly suggests "rebranding" palliative care so that it includes other types of services that can be taken advantage of at any time during the illness. The definition of the term may also have to be adjusted so it is less confusing and more consistent while participants recommend including palliative care during discussions about diagnosis or launching public education. 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The Great Barrier Reef is in danger as 93 percent of it suffers from coral bleaching, a comprehensive reef survey has shown. A few weeks ago, an aerial survey conducted by Professor Terry Hughes of the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce in Australia showed that the northern part of the reef has high levels of bleaching. It is the most untouched area yet the most affected, with 81 percent of its 522 reefs fried. Professor Andrew Baird of the Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies reported that the latest underwater and aerial survey already showed the northern portion of the reef has 50 percent coral mortality. Worsening climate change, particularly El Nino, has been causing the bleaching of the reefs. Hughes further explained that if temperatures continue to drop in the coming months, 90 percent of the corals in the north can die. However, he also expressed hope that the corals can recover. Hughes pointed out that in two mass coral bleaching incidents that occurred in 1998 and 2002, 40 percent of the reefs survived bleaching, with only 18 percent severely fried. But this time is much worse - it is as if 10 cyclones hit simultaneously. "By that metric, this event is five times stronger," Hughes said. "This time it's 55 percent." Continued study of the southern portion and underwater areas showed that only 7 percent or 68 reefs of the entire Great Barrier Reef remain unaffected by coral bleaching. Federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt has acknowledged that the extent of the coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef is the worst bleaching ever recorded. The surveyed area, encompassing 2,300 kilometers (1,429 miles) including 911 reefs, was varied and patchy but still very significant. The extent of coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef has threatened its world heritage status. Last year, the World Heritage Committee excluded the reef on its "in danger" list, basing its decision on a federal report that said the northern area is unaffected. Hunt shared that his office is updating the committee on the status of the coral bleaching event, including their comprehensive monitoring response. Hunt also cited the government's long-term Reef 2050 plan to address environmental issues. 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. With the 1,000 card issuer mark passed more than a month ago, Apple Pay's expansion is still in high gear. On Tuesday, Apple counted over 50 more banks that support its virtual wallet platform. The addition of the latest batch of banks comes just a day after Apple announced that Apple Pay had expanded into a sixth country, Singapore. The island nation joined the US, China, Canada, the UK and Australia in supporting Apple Pay. A few weeks before bringing Singapore aboard, Apple Pay finally gained the support of all of the UK's major banks when Barclays got on board. While Apple Pay has been expanding, it has been having trouble converting consumers into regular users of the platform. Though an increasing number of iOS users have been using Apple Pay about 23 percent of them, PYMNTS found that repeat use has been declining. About 21 percent of the users PYMNTS surveyed indicated that they forgot to use Apple Pay, about a third of eligible consumers indicated that they either like something else better or weren't impressed enough to use it again. Consumer loyalty may be an issue for Apple Pay, but recruiting more banking partners doesn't appear to be a problem. Here's the list of banks that just started supporting Apple Pay (thanks 9to5Mac): Access Federal Credit Union Alcoa Tenn Federal Credit Union Audubon Savings Bank Bank of Stockton Barrington Bank & Trust Company N.A. Beverly Bank & Trust Company N.A. Champlain National Bank Community Trust Bank Connected Credit Union Country Club Bank Crystal Lake Bank & Trust Company N.A. Englewood Bank & Trust Financial Horizons Credit Union Financial Plus Credit Union First & Farmers National Bank First Enterprise Bank First Metro Bank First National Bank of Chadron First State Bank First State Bank of Porter FirstCapital Bank of Texas N.A. Frontier Community Credit Union General Electric Credit Union Georgia's Own Credit Union Greenville Federal Credit Union Hinsdale Bank & Trust Company Jefferson Bank of Florida Journey Federal Credit Union Kentucky Employees Credit Union Lake Forest Bank & Trust Company Libertyville Bank & Trust Company Metropolitan Bank Midwest Bank Mutual Security Credit Union National JACL Credit Union North Iowa Community Credit Union Ohio HealthCare Federal Credit Union Old Plank Trail Community Bank N.A. Orange County's Credit Union Otis Federal Credit Union Pacific Postal Credit Union Picatinny Federal Credit Union PNC/BNY Mellon-Fidelity PrimeTrust Financial Federal Credit Union Queensborough National Bank & Trust Company Robins Financial Credit Union Schaumburg Bank & Trust Company N.A. SouthWest Bank St. Charles Bank & Trust Company State Bank of Cross Plains State Bank of the Lakes Stock Yards Bank & Trust Town Bank Union Savings Bank Union State Bank of Fargo United Bank of Michigan University Credit Union University of Wisconsin Village Bank & Trust Wheaton Bank & Trust Company Wintrust Bank 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Samsung has just taken another shot at Apple's iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. The company has announced a new Pink Gold color option for the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge. When Apple launched the iPhone 3G in 2008, the smartphone featured a new design when compared with that of the first-generation iPhone, which had an aluminum shell, while the iPhone 3G was mostly constructed of plastic. The handset started a new trend in the smartphone world. Apple launched an 8 GB and 16 GB iPhone 3G and offered what turned out to be an extremely popular white color option in the larger storage configuration. At the time, most smartphones were only offered in muted dark colors, but the white iPhone 3G not only stood out against rivals BlackBerry and Palm, but also signified it was the top-tier iPhone. Soon, its rivals jumped on the white smartphone bandwagon, and the color is now an almost standard option offered by all smartphone makers. Apple repeated this step when it introduced the gold iPhone 5s in 2013, and the color proved to be a hit with consumers, especially because it stood out against the sea of black and white smartphones. It also sent the message that it was the latest and greatest iPhone. In September 2015, Apple once again added a new color option to its iPhone lineup, this time introducing a new golden hue with its rose gold iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus. Smartphone makers are now joining Apple by offering their take on rose gold. Samsung is introducing a new Pink Gold Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, and the company wants to make it clear that it's not copying Apple. Here's Samsung's official statement: "Pink Gold was chosen as it, like the other colors available for the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge, is a natural color that provides a sense of comfort. These hues glitter and shimmer as if illuminated from inside their glass surfaces. "In particular, the refined Pink Gold color scheme is intended to soothe and incorporate a touch of gentleness, radiance and sophistication to the smartphones' design." The Pink Gold Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge are now available in Korea, and the company says the new color option will be coming to customers in select markets. We'll keep you posted on when we can expect to see the new color make its way to the U.S. 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. In what may sound like a Nicholas Sparks novel, a German couple has found a message bottle - a no-ordinary one since it's been at sea for at least 108 years. None other than the Guinness Book of World Records has confirmed that the bottle found near the German North Sea coast by Mrs. Marianne Winkler and husband Horst is 108 years, 4 months, and 18 days old. It has therefore beaten the oldest existing record of 99 years and 43 days, which was discovered almost three years ago. What Does It Say? Hundreds of bottles containing messages are picked up every year, but while many of the letters enclosed may be more personal - romantic, even - some like the one discovered in Amrum in North Frisian Islands can be scientific related. During the early years of the twentieth century, a prominent UK marine researcher named George Parker Bidder III, conducted a "citizen science" project. He wanted to know the flow of the ocean currents and the behavior of the fish, but to achieve that, he sent out more than a thousand of bottle-trailer bottles containing postcards out into the sea from 1904 to 1906. The postcards contained a very simple message. Whoever gets to have it should fill out information such as the date it's picked up and from which location, and if it was trawled, the finder could send it back to Plymouth Laboratory, where the Marine Biological Association (MBA), which started in 1884, can also be found. In return, the "discoverer" gets a prize of a shilling. The Bottle That Traveled Far The now-famous bottle may have traveled for around 500 kilometers from the UK to the German North Sea in Amrum where the Winklers were spending their holidays almost a year ago. When they stumbled upon the bottle, they knew it was old. What they weren't aware of was where it came from and, more interestingly, why it had such a unique message. Nevertheless, they decided to follow the instructions and sent the postcard in an envelope back to Plymouth. The Confusion - and Exhilaration The incredible story was surprising for the people of MBA. Bidder, who was the association's president from 1939 to 1945, has been dead for more than 50 years. Further, while they know about the experiment and at least 55 percent of the bottles had been returned by fishermen, "some bottles were never returned, assumed to be lost in the open ocean forever," said MBA Communications Officer Guy Baker, who also filled out the application form for Guinness. MBA has already kept the end of the bargain by giving a shilling it found online to Marianne. Interestingly, the discovery of the bottle proves that not only does the deep sea current of the North Sea move from east to west, but "the percentage of bottles recovered by the trawls did not differ from the percentage of plaice in the same area caught by the trawl at the same time. This meant that Bidder could use the bottles as an instrument for assessing the intensity of trawling because they cannot migrate," MBA wrote. 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. This one's for the books: a 38-year-old man defied science by coming back to life after his heart stopped beating for 45 minutes. Cardiac arrest is a serious matter - so serious that everyone is encouraged to learn how to do cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). In cardiac arrest, once the blood supply is cut off, different parts of the body especially the brain begin to starve from oxygen, and their tissues die. CPR should also be done very quickly since it takes only five minutes before the brain damage sets in and only 10 minutes before the patient is more likely going to die. Jaysukhbhai Thaker, stationery shop owner in Probandar in India, is something else. All thanks to a daring but truly life-saving procedure, his cardiac arrest that lasted for almost an hour was reverted. Not only that, he got a new heart. It Was End Stage When the medic arrived to pick up Thaker and airlift him from Probandar to Fortis Malar Hospital in Chennai, he wasn't only weak - he was also jaundiced, an obvious sign that his liver was already failing. However, it was expected as what he had was an end-stage dilated cardiomyopathy, a heart disease wherein the ventricles begin to thin out, preventing the blood to flow properly in the heart. When he arrived in the hospital, a health care team immediately stabilized him with medications before he was moved to a ward, waiting for a possible heart transplant. But before his new heart came, he suffered a major cardiac arrest. With crash carts in tow, nurses tried to revive him to no avail. That's when the team thought of doing something more aggressive: extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation (ECPR). The Procedure ECPR is a known support procedure in emergency care and is usually considered if standard CPR tends to have failed. Nevertheless, it is not easy. It is invasive and risky, and it can introduce serious complications to the patient. Of course, there's the likelihood that it wouldn't work. Thaker's situation, though, required the procedure, especially since the medical team wanted to protect the patient's brain from completely dying. Thus, the doctors connected Thaker to a portable bypass machine called extracorporeal membrane oxygenator (ECMO) through a catheter inserted through his femoral vein. While a nurse continued with the CPR, his blood moved through the machine where it was oxygenated before it went back into his body. The team stopped only when they heard his heartbeat again - after 45 minutes. Since the machine cannot be connected to him indefinitely, the doctors inserted a left-ventricle assist device (LVAD), which works like an artificial pump, until the new heart comes along. Renewed Life Thaker's cardiac scare wasn't smooth sailing as he was in coma for 10 days, scaring his wife, Manisha. "They told me that people who go into coma never wake up. We had spent several lakhs by then. I thought I had lost my husband. But in just a few minutes I heard from the staff nurse that he had woken up," she said. The team also faced the challenge of transporting the new heart, which would come from a brain-dead man in Hyderabad. Pressed for time, the donor heart had to be delivered courier style: via air ambulance. Today, Thaker is alive and well, definitely appreciating his renewed life. As for the hospital team, it's giving huge thanks to the machine, "which routinely brings people back to life," commented hospital cardiac sciences director Dr. K. R. Balakrishnan. For a complete discussion of the procedure, check out the video below: 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. McDonald's customers in the United Kingdom will soon be able to enjoy their favorite burger meal while catching up with social media or playing online games using a tablet. The company is installing Samsung Galaxy tablets in key restaurant locations in the United Kingdom in a move to fulfill its ambition of providing customers with the "Experience of the Future." "The tablets form an important part of our new customer experience initiative, which is part of our overall 'Experience of the Future' programme," said Doug Baker, Head of IT Restaurant Solutions and Service at McDonald's UK, in a press release statement at PR Newswire. "We pride ourselves on listening to our customers and trying to provide new and innovative experiences." The Galaxy tablets will come equipped with a customized software by SOTI, a leading Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) expert. While the devices will not be used for the purpose of ordering a meal, they will come pre-installed with social media, games and other popular applications for web-based browsing. In 2015, McDonald's conducted a trial launch of the Galaxy tablets initiative at some of its restaurants and franchise locations. The resulting success of the trial period prompted the company to formally launch the project after partnering with Samsung and SOTI. "This initiative highlights the increasing trend toward retailers like McDonald's utilizing modern technologies to provide differentiated, personalized customer experiences," said Nassar Hussain, Managing Director Europe and South Africa at SOTI, in a statement at PR Newswire. This is not the first time that McDonald's has embraced and experimented with technology. Earlier this year, customers in Sweden who purchased the company's Happy Meal boxes also had a hands-on experience with virtual reality by converting the boxes into cardboard VR headsets that are inspired by Google's DIY design. Meanwhile, it also introduced the wireless charging pads of Samsung to customers who visited its restaurants across Europe. Lastly, McDonald's is one of the supporters of Apple's mobile payment system since the technology was launched in October 2014. There's no information yet on the exact Galaxy tablet models that McDonald's is installing in its restaurants. Since the devices will be in a location where food, drinks and technology will hopefully mix, it may be safe to assume that the tablets could be designed with some anti-spill mechanism or a grease and ketchup-friendly display. 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Mitsubishi Motors has confessed falsifying fuel economy test data for more than 600,000 vehicles sold in Japan, putting its shares down to more than 15 percent and cutting down $1.2 billion from its market value, the stocks biggest day drop in nearly 12 years, reports Reuters. At a media briefing in Tokyo on April 20, Mitsubishi Motors president Tetsuro Aikawa, together with company bosses, appeared dismayed over the issue. "The wrongdoing was intentional. It is clear the falsification was done to make the mileage look better, said Aikawa. But why they would resort to fraud to do this is still unclear. While he said he is unaware of the irregularities, he said he feels responsible for the issue. He added that the issue was already reported to Japans transportation ministry. The problem was discovered after Nissan suspected inconsistencies. The inaccurate tests involved 625,000 cars built since 2013. The impacted vehicles included 157,000 light passenger vehicles and 468,000 cars manufactured for Nissan Motor. Nissan has already ordered its dealers to discontinue selling the affected cars and is already looking for ways on how to extend its help to owners of the affected vehicles. Last year, Volkswagen was uncovered to have manipulated diesel emissions test results. This may be different from Volkswagens issue, but the market has become very sensitive to such kind of news, said Tokai Tokyo Research Center Seiji Sugiura. It may have a similar impact in terms of sales and the companys reputation. Before this fuel emission tests scandal, Mitsubishi has been hoping to bring back the confidence in its cars after facing a series of issues more than a decade ago. These include the alleged flawed axles that, according to Bloomberg, led the carmaker to seek multiple bailouts from Mitsubishi group of companies. Sugiura said the new issue is again bad for the automakers image, adding that this scandal will certainly not help in rebuilding its reputation. In 2014, South Korean car makers Hyundai Motor Co and Kia Motors Corp paid penalties amounting to $350 million to the United States government for overstating the fuel economy ratings of their vehicles. The automakers have also arrived at a resolution regarding the claims from the owners of the affected vehicles. 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Ever wondered what would happen if you left your precious smartphone out in the wild, unattended and at the mercy of the elements for several months? Probably never see it survive the ordeal right? A South Korean however, has a different story to tell. Bae Gyu-ryong from Chungiu - a 70-year-old man who works at a medical center - misplaced his Samsung Galaxy S5 while in a persimmon orchard near his farmhouse in September 2015. Since the smartphone was in the silent mode, Bae was unable to locate the missing handset even after several days of futile search. Bae then finally gave up and purchased a new handset. Flash-forward to April 2016 and Bae was plowing the soil in his orchard when he stumbles upon his lost Galaxy S5! Surprisingly, even after seven months of being in extreme conditions, the smartphone is completely functional. The handset was wet when Bae discovered it, because it was exposed to snow and rain. However, the Galaxy S5 works properly, once Bae dried the unit and charged its battery. Happily enough for Bae, since the smartphone is still operating well, he was able to recover his saved photos and contacts as well. How did the Galaxy S5, which was released in 2014 survive the harsh conditions, you wonder? Because the handset is the first flagship from Samsung to support water and dust resistance. It is IP67 certified (unlike successor Galaxy S6) and as a result, is protected against dust and up to 1 meter of water for half an hour. However, as Bae's story reveals, the smartphone seems to be more robust than what the certification estimates because it survived harsh outdoor conditions for seven months! On April 18, Samsung Electronics came forward to acknowledge the Galaxy S5's feat, which proves that the smartphone is durable and lives up to its promise of being dust and water resistant. As for Bae, he was pleased as punch and shared that he was "was surprised to see the smartphone, which went through rain and snow, being fully functional." "The Galaxy S5 boasts excellent waterproof features," said Bae. Photo: Karlis Dambrans | Flickr 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Researchers have come up with a paper-based biosensor as an inexpensive but innovative tool in detecting water toxicity. Detecting contaminants is crucial in analyzing and controlling water quality, which has become necessary in the urban setting. A number of chemical analysis techniques are in place for evaluating samples but most of them are geared toward those with multiple contaminants. The new biosensor then is ideal because it can check for contaminants singularly depending on the biological element to be used. "The innovation provided by our sensor is based on the use of absorbent paper matrices with entrapped bacteria with the aim of conducting colorimetric measures of toxicity," said Ferran Pujol, one of the authors of the study published in the journal Analytica Chimica Acta. For the study, the researchers used E. coli cells as model bacteria. Following mechanisms similar to litmus paper tests for pH, the detection technique they developed uses samples added to matrices combined with ferrocyanide, a coloring agent. When breathed in by microorganisms, ferrocynanide changes from yellow to transparent. Depending on how intense bacterial cell metabolism is, the paper sensor will change color inversely proportional to how toxic a sample is. This means that the brighter the color change, the less contaminated a water sample is. As this change is readily observable with the naked eye, there will be no need for complicated equipment. This not only simplifies the process but also makes it highly affordable as well, making it ideal for use in developing countries or other areas with economic restrictions. Called a bioassay, the paper sensor detects all contaminants, like hydrocarbons or heavy metals, toxic to the sample bacteria after 15 to 30 minutes of exposure. Depending on whatever water source needs to be tested, the bioassay can be used on both urban wastewater and natural water. Researchers from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the National Centre for Microelectronics and the UPC Centre for Research and Innovation in Toxicology collaborated on developing the bioassay, which they have applied a patent for. Problems With Contaminated Water In 2014, complaints about contaminated water began in Flint, Michigan. Turns out, when the city switched to Flint River as a water source, corrosive river water scraped lead off the city's old pipes, which found its way into homes. It was only in March 2016 that Flint enacted a program to eliminate all its lead water lines, taking the first step toward bringing fresh water again into the city. Photo: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers | Flickr 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Monkeys first arrived in North America roughly 21 million years ago, according to examination of teeth discovered in the Panama Canal. These primates arrived on the continent following a major ocean voyage, researchers determined. Roughly 21 million years ago, the continents of North and South America were separate bodies. At that time, a cadre of monkeys appears to have journeyed at least 100 miles across open ocean to reach their destination. If confirmed by further investigation, this discovery will push back the date when monkeys were known to walk the northern American continent. Seven teeth belonging to members of the Panamacebus transitus species were found during excavations for an ongoing expansion of the Panama Canal. This variety of medium-sized primate was previously unknown to biologists. As workers used explosives to blast away at rocks in the Las Cascadas Formation, paleontologists and other researchers quickly came in to collect fossils unearthed by the excavation. "We suggest that Panamacebus was related to the capuchin (also known as 'organ-grinder' monkeys) and squirrel monkeys that are found in Central and South America today. Prior to this discovery, New World monkeys were thought to have evolved in isolation on South America, cut-off from North America by a wide seaway," said Jonathan Bloch of the Florida Museum of Natural History. Until South America joined to its northern cousin 3.5 million years ago, animals on that continent evolved in extreme isolation from species on other lands. Before this recent find, the oldest known mammal migration from South to North America was a population shift of sloths between 8.5 and 9 million years before the modern day. The newly-discovered species was named in honor of the location they were found, Panama, as well as their willingness to journey great distances. Although the continents were separated at the time the monkeys made their journey, water levels were fairly shallow between the pair of bodies. This may have aided the primates in carrying out the journey to their new home. However, even given this fact, swimming 100 miles to North America would have been arduous task. One of the few methods by which this migration may have occurred would be if the monkeys built rafts out of vegetation, and floated north. Roughly 37 million years ago, monkeys undertook a similar journey from Africa to South America, biologists believe. Discovery of the ancient monkey migration was profiled in the journal Nature. 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Global warming is bringing moderate temperatures to most of North America, but this may not be a good thing, according to a new study. The northeastern United States, for instance, experienced an extremely mild winter during 2015 and 2016. However, some environmentalists are concerned that mild weather, an enjoyment to most people, could reduce public concern about the environmental effects of global climate change. Over the last four decades, winter weather has become more mild in 80 percent of the counties around the U.S., researchers report. Meanwhile summers have not grown significantly hotter than they were in the 1940s. This combination has resulted in a more moderate, temperate climate year-round across much of the U.S. These conditions are preferred by a majority of Americans, investigators found, which could reduce concern over climate change around the world. "Rising temperatures are ominous symptoms of global climate change, but Americans are experiencing them at times of the year when warmer days are welcomed," said Patrick Egan of New York University. Although conditions today are more pleasurable, on the whole, than climate in the 1970s, investigators warn pleasant times will soon be drawing to an end. Computer climate models show conditions could be significantly less comfortable by the end of the century than they are today. If Americans grow passe about the rise in global temperatures until conditions become uncomfortable, it may be too late to stop the environmental degradation, researchers fear. New York and Duke University researchers examined data showing temperatures from 1974 to 2013, recorded in counties around the nation. Investigators showed January temperatures around the U.S. increased by an average of 1.04 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. July temperatures rose much more slowly than that during the same time period just 0.13 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. This data was then compared to records of human migrations from the northeastern states and midwest to the sun belt region. Data was analyzed and used to create a weather preference index to gauge public attitudes toward climate. The same team of researchers who carried out this study found, as part of a 2012 investigation, that locale affects attitudes toward global warming. People living in areas experiencing warmer-than-normal conditions were more likely than others to support the idea that average temperatures are rising around the globe. Analysis of the public attitude of Americans toward global warming in light of moderate temperatures was published in the journal Nature. 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Polar bears in the Arctic Basin are now forced to swim longer distances as sea ice in the region continues to retreat faster, marking an evidence of climate change's "fingerprint," a new study in Canada revealed. Past research has shown that swimming is a costly activity for polar bears in terms of their body's energy expenditure. With that, a team of scientists led by Nicholas Pilfold sought out to understand polar bears' swimming behavior. The researchers found that polar bears are swimming more frequently and in longer distances as a result of the changes in the location and quantity of summer sea ice. This, in turn, is caused by climate change. Pilfold and his colleagues tracked populations of polar bears in Hudson Bay and the Beaufort Sea through satellite-linked telemetry. Factors such as swimming frequency were different between individual polar bears, depending on body size, sex, age, and the region's geographic features. How Swimming Longer Negatively Impacts Polar Bears In 2012, the same year in which the quantity of Arctic sea ice dropped to a record-low, about 69 percent of the telemetry-tracked female polar bears in the Beaufort Sea had swam more than 50 kilometers or 31 miles at least once, the team found. Female polar bears with young cubs often swam less to prevent submersion of their youngsters in frigid waters, while single subadults swam as often as lone adults, researchers said. The longest recorded swim ever in the research was done by a subadult female polar bear, travelling for more than 687 kilometers or 427 miles over the course of nine days in 2011. The female polar bear lost 22 percent of her body weight. Her cub died along the way. "These bears are going for days without stopping," said Pilford. Pilfold, a postdoc fellow at San Diego Zoo Global, also found that swimming occurred more frequently in the Beaufort Sea than in Hudson Bay. Biologist Andrew Derocher, a co-author of the study, said more and more polar bears are caught in places that they just can't stay. The ice they are on keeps breaking up, the floes are too small, and the animals have to swim longer distances to find better habitat. What's more, the polar bear population in the Beaufort Sea has dropped to more than 50 percent in the past decade, Derocher said. Although the study did not find any direct link to the population decline, Derocher and the team were unable to track survival of any cubs who may have been with female polar bears. The study, which is a collaboration that involved experts from Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) and the University of Alberta, is published in the journal Ecography. Photo: Anita Ritenour | Flickr 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Anti-slavery crusader Harriet Tubman will replace the portrait of the United States' 7th president Andrew Jackson on the new $20 bill. A slave owner, Jackson's portrait will be pushed to the back of the bill, along with an image of The White House. On April 20, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew announced that the switching of portraits on the new $20 bill will represent two historic milestones in the nation's history. Apart from being the first African-American on a U.S. paper currency, Tubman will also be the first woman whose portrait will be included in the national currency in more than a century. "The front of the new $20 will feature the portrait of Harriet Tubman, whose life was dedicated to fighting for liberty," said the U.S. Department of the Treasury in an announcement. The New $20 Tubman was born a slave in 1820 in Maryland. Following her 1849 escape from the South, she moved on to become a famous "conductor" on the Underground Railway and helped many slaves escape through a secret safe house network. She helped hundreds of slaves from the South escape to the North. Tubman also served as a nurse, a scout and a cook during the American Civil War. Tubman has become one of the famous anti-slavery crusaders in the United States' history. She was a celebrated humanitarian, abolitionist and Union spy in the history of the Civil War. In 1913, Tubman died of pneumonia. She was buried with military honors. "Not only is this going to be the first African-American historical figure on U.S. currency, but it's a woman specifically from the era of slavery," commented historian Amrita Myers from Indiana University. The last time a woman's portrait was depicted on a U.S. paper money was between 1891 and 1896 when the nation's first lady Martha Washington was featured on a $1 silver certificate. In 1865 to 1869, Native American Pocahontas also made a brief appearance on a U.S. paper money. Sacagawea and Susan B. Anthony appear on dollar coins. Sacagawea was a Shoshone Indian guide while Anthony was an advocate for the woman suffrage movement. 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. A YouTube science experiment went horribly wrong as a 15-year-old Ohio teen was electrocuted inside his family's garage while conducting the experiment he found on the video-sharing site. When Erie County deputies arrived on the scene, Morgan R. Wojciechowski was found on the garage floor, not breathing. The first response team performed a CPR to no avail. The teenager was pronounced dead at the Mercy Regional Medical Center. The investigators found a metal box and an extension cord near the spot where Morgan lay. The team secured several items from the family's garage, including a microwave generator, jumper cables, sandals, work gloves, a pocketknife and a clothing hanger made of wire. Morgan was trying to replicate the Jacob's Ladder experiment, wherein a 12,000-volt power source is attached to two copper wires in order to produce an "electrical arc." In the course of his experiment, Morgan was electrocuted. The teen was a freshman at Vermilion High School. Philip M. Pempin, the Vermilion Schools superintendent, released a statement published on Facebook by the Vermilion Local Schools. "On behalf of Vermilion Schools, we would like the greater community to know that we are brokenhearted to learn about the tragic loss to our school community ... Our thoughts and prayers are with Morgan's family, and we continue to be available for anything they need," said Pempin. In related news, the growing popularity of social media has been linked to increased injuries and deaths. For instance, in 2015, a 17-year-old Russian teenager plunged to his death in an attempt to do a signature Instagram shot. Andrey Retrovsky was hanging onto a rope from a building when the rope snapped. Retrovsky fell from a height of nine stories and died at the hospital two hours later from extensive injuries. In September 2015, a 66-year-old Japanese tourist fell down the Royal Gate of Taj Mahal staircase while taking a selfie. However, the doctors who attended the victims said the tourist had a heart attack. In some cases, the mere act of taking "selfies" proved fatal to some people. Also in September, a 19-year-old man from Texas was taking a selfie while holding a gun to his head when the firearm went off. Photo: Tony Webster | Flickr 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. In an effort to curb smoking, Health Canada is looking at potentially forcing tobacco companies to make cigarettes less addictive. This possible anti-smoking initiative has not been implemented in any other country. Making cigarettes less addictive means cutting down its nicotine level. While it makes sense to reduce nicotine levels in cigarettes, experts have opposing opinions on this possible solution. Some health experts say lowering nicotine levels in cigarettes can help discourage smokers and help them kick the habit. Critics said creating a mandated nicotine limit would result in smokers consuming more cigarettes to reach their desired nicotine hit. In this scenario, smokers would only take in more of the carcinogens present in the tobacco product. "It's so wrong-headed. The unintended consequences are screaming out on this. People adjust the way they smoke to get the nicotine they need or want," commented anti-smoking supporter and Ottawa lawyer David Sweanor. In a 2015 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers found that the participants given cigarettes with lowered nicotine levels smoked 25 percent less daily during the six-week experiment. The promising results were achieved without smoking more cigarettes just to get the desired nicotine limit they were accustomed to. Early this year, critics said the results were misleading and the participants who were assigned to the reduced nicotine sticks "supplemented" the low nicotine levels with normal cigarettes smoked outside of the study. Other countries also adopt means to curb smoking rates. By May 2016, all cigarette products in the United Kingdom will be marketed in standardized, plain packaging. This initiative was rolled out in Australia in December 2012. The anti-smoking project optimized on the evidence that found plain cigarette packaging lowered the number of young smokers. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has required the placement of bigger and more prominent health warnings on all cigarette packaging. The same inclusions are required in all tobacco advertisements across the country. Manufacturers who do not include the health warnings will no longer be allowed to distribute their products in the country. The FDA requirement aims to communicate the real dangers of smoking to consumers. 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. As she celebrates her 90th birthday, Britain's Queen Elizabeth took some time off from her busy schedule to pose for the camera together with her great-grandchildren. Taken by famed American photographer Annie Leibovitz, the portrait shows the Queen with 11-month-old Princess Charlotte sitting on her lap and 2-year-old Prince George standing beside them. Her Royal Highness is also surrounded by her three other great-grandchildren 5-year-old Savannah and 3-year-old Isla Phillips and 2-year-old Mia Tindall, as well as her youngest grandchildren 12-year-old Lady Louise Windsor and her brother, 8-year-old James, Viscount Severn. The photoshoot took inspiration from portraits of Queen Elizabeth's great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, who often had her pictures taken while she was surrounded by the youngest members of the royal family. Queen Elizabeth's portrait was shot at Windsor Castle's Green Drawing Room sometime after Easter, and it is just one of three photographs taken by Leibovitz that Buckingham Palace released. This is the first time Leibovitz was asked to take pictures of the British monarch following the controversial "Queengate" incident in 2007. At that time, BBC hired Leibovitz to photograph Queen Elizabeth to mark her state visit to the United States. The shoot was filmed as part of a documentary. A trailer for the documentary, however, was met with controversy after it showed a scene where the Queen seemingly stormed out angrily during the shoot, when in fact she was simply making her way into the room. In the scene, Leibovitz can be seen telling Queen Elizabeth that the photograph would look better and less dressy if they left out her crown. The Queen responds by pointing to her ceremonial robe and asking the photographer about what she thought the monarch was wearing. She also gives Leibovitz an icy stare. BBC issued an apology to Queen Elizabeth and admitted that the scene in the trailer had been "misrepresented" and that Her Highness had not stormed out during the shoot. The media storm that followed the showing of the trailer also led to the resignation of BBC1's controller Peter Fincham. Aside from her recent photoshoot with Leibovitz, Queen Elizabeth also had her pictures taken together with her son, Prince Charles, her grandson, Prince William, and her great-grandson, Prince George. These were for a commemorative stamp series to celebrate her 90th birthday. 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The bigger the company, the bigger the target it becomes, and Google knows this all too well. In the past, the search giant has been brought to court against regulators over its taxes, our privacy, and its competition. Outside of the United States, Europe is the place where the company is finding its most vocal detractors, and now Android has become the next target. The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, is slapping Google with new anti-competition charges related to its mobile operating system that powers billions of handsets around the world. Just last year, the same body filed a complaint against Google for being way too good at what it does: search. The EU had said that its search dominance over the Internet led to Google favoring its own services over those of others. This time, however, the commission is attacking Google's practices of requiring smartphone manufacturers and wireless telecommunications companies to preinstall Google's services such as Search and Chrome Browser on Android-based phones to access Google's Play app store. At the same time, the commission is also questioning Google's financial incentives to its Android partners for not installing competitor's software on their devices. Unlike the search and advertising business that makes up a large piece of Google's profit pie today, Android's revenue pull pales in comparison. However, Android does play a vital role in the company's future, and should the EU succeed at its current efforts, Google's bottom line will take a hit. If, for example, Google was forced to unbundle its Chrome Browser from Android while manufacturers like Samsung preload Microsoft's Bing instead, Google would see a drastic cut in mobile searches on its platform. Fewer searches going through Google also means fewer advertisements being served, and ultimately, a declining source of revenue for the search company. Similarly, Google would then have to pay out even more to manufacturers like Samsung to keep Google's Search as the default app embedded in Samsung's TouchWiz version of Android. Even if it would take years for any fines, charges, and mandates to be imposed by the EU, in the long term, Google's business will nonetheless be affected at least within the European Union. Photo: Mac Morrison | Flickr 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. China is planning to encourage ships donning its flag to take the arctic route to decrease travel time from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. The Asian country is specifically looking at the possibility of its ships taking the Northwest Passage through the Arctic Ocean. The decision comes as trade tactic and as a way to maximize the melting ice in the area due to global warming. China's Trade Booming In The Polar Areas Chinese business in the field of mining has been booming in the polar regions, with the country turning into one of Greenland's biggest investors and coming to a free trade agreement with Iceland. With this, the country has started looking for ways so they could have more convenient and faster travel routes to do business. This will not only save them time, it would also spare them of extra costs entailed in long and complex trips to and from the ocean. An example of how using the Arctic Ocean route could benefit China is the travel distance from Shanghai to Hamburg in Germany. If ships would take the Arctic Ocean route, they would only need to travel 2,800 nautical miles shorter than if they will take the Suez Canal route. Specific Route Being Planned This month, the Marine Safety Administration of China issued a guide that includes a precise route guidance starting from North America's northern coast to the northern Pacific. Administration spokesperson Liu Pengfei says once the route becomes a common guide, it will explicitly alter the maritime transport in the world and bring a thorough impact on international trade, global economy, capital stream and resource usage. In the end, he says that ships from China will sail across the Northern Passage soon, without disclosing an exact time range. Global Warming Global warming may have been attributed to numerous negative things, but for the maritime industry, it is not all bad. Sea ice melt has paved the way for passage of commercial ships in once-frozen areas. China is determined to be active in the region. Although the area is still covered in ice, global warming and subsequent loss of Arctic ice are making China's hopes come alive. Beijing, in particular, is looking at taking advantage and maximizing the opportunity to transform global trade processes. What Canada Has To Say Majority of the areas in the Northwest Passage is within the territory of Canada, at least that is what the country claims. When asked about Chinese ships passing by Canadian waters, an Ottawa spokesperson named Joseph Pickerill says there is no instant right of transit passage in waters of Northern Passage. "We welcome navigation that complies with our rules and regulations. Canada has an unfettered right to regulate internal waters," says Pickerill, who works for Foreign Minister Stephane Dion. 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Ausbanc chief Luis Pineda during the search of association premises on Friday. Samuel Sanchez Judges from all levels of the Spanish court system accepted pay from Ausbanc, a consumer rights group whose leader has been arrested on extortion charges, for delivering lectures at various public events. Magistrates from the High Court, the Supreme Court, provincial and regional courts received between 800 and 1,500 depending on the type of seminar and the venue, several judges have admitted. Some of the events ended with a meal or a wine tasting. In recent years, Pinedas association has filed numerous lawsuits in dozens of courts on behalf of its members. Some of the judges overseeing these cases have participated in Ausbanc events. I conveyed to them that I didnt want to get paid, but they really insisted, saying they had a budget allocation for it High Court judge Some speakers refused the money, and instead instructed Ausbanc to transfer the amount to a charity. All the biggest events were personally presided by Ausbanc president Luis Pineda, who was arrested on Friday on suspicion that he was threatening banks and individuals with negative media coverage unless they took out expensive advertising in his specialized magazines. A spokesman for the financial consumer association said no judge was ever paid to participate in an Ausbanc symposium. Sign up for our newsletter EL PAIS English Edition is launching a weekly newsletter. Sign up today to receive a selection of our best stories in your inbox every Saturday morning. For full details about how to subscribe, click here. But investigators suspect that by hiring judges to act as guest speakers at his events, Pineda was trying to create a bond with individuals who might later preside over the lawsuits that he pressed in the name of his association members. Several members of the judiciary were also contributors to Ausbancs publications. In some of his threatening letters to lenders, Pineda noted that judges of the kind that slap people with fines were writing for him. Carlos Lesmes, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and chairman of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), the legal professions watchdog, has declined to comment on the numerous payments made by Ausbanc to Spanish judges. But legal sources have said that, privately, Lesmes has occasionally expressed concern over this paid work at events that are often organized by big law firms. The CGPJ has sometimes denied permission to attend these kinds of seminars. Travel expenses included In 2013, Ausbanc organized an event at a Madrid hotel called Retos de la Audiencia Nacional del siglo XXI (Challenges facing the High Court in the 21st century). Several judges from Spains central criminal court attended the seminar. One of them has told EL PAIS that he refused to accept payment. They were paying us between 800 and 1,000, says this judge, who spoke on condition of anonymity. They called me the next day to know how they should send me the money, and I told them I didnt feel I should charge anything. I conveyed to them that I didnt want to get paid, but they really insisted, saying they had a budget allocation for it, so I finally gave them the account number for Doctors Without Borders in Mali. A few days later they sent me an email certifying that the payment had been made. Carlos Lesmes, head of the CGPJ, has privately expressed concern over these paid events. Javier Lizon (EFE) Another judge who sits on the High Court got a call from Ausbanc a year ago to be a guest speaker at a panel discussion in the Canary Islands. My intuition told me I shouldnt participate, and I turned down the invitation, he says. I got mad at them because they put my name on the program without permission. They told me that they would pay for the speech and the travel expenses. I cant remember the amount. Javier Lopez, president of a debt consolidation firm called CreditServices who was a victim of Ausbancs alleged extortion, says that one of the Supreme Court justices who oversaw his suit against Pineda participated in legal seminars organized by the consumer association. English version by Susana Urra. Harriet Tubman, one of the most influential people behind the anti-slavery movement during the 1850s, is set to be honored by the U.S. Department of Treasury by placing her image on the new look $20 bill. According to the agency, Tubman's likeness will replace that of former president Andrew Jackson, which will be incorporated in the depiction of the White House at the back of the bill. Aside from featuring Tubman, the Treasury Department said the redesigned bills will also include other important scenes from American history, such as depictions of leaders from the civil rights and women's suffrage movements on the $5 and $10 bills. Ellen Feingold, a curator at the National Museum of American History (NMAH), pointed out that the last woman to have her image depicted on a major American banknote was Martha Washington, the wife of former president George Washington. Her likeness was featured on the old $1 silver certificate during the late 1800s. In 2015, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew revealed that the department was planning on replacing Alexander Hamilton's image on the $10 bill with that of a woman and asked the public to send in their suggestions. Some of the names submitted to the agency included Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of former president Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Rosa Parks, who is hailed as "the first lady of civil rights." Following the Treasury Department's announcement, a movement known as "Women on 20s" petitioned the government to have Andrew Jackson's image removed from the $20 bill. A prominent slave-holder during his time, Jackson is believed to be the one who ordered the forced removal and subsequent genocide of Native Americans. In the end, the Treasury Department agreed to retain Hamilton's depiction on the $10 bill and replace Jackson's with that of Tubman's. Underground Railroad Conductor Tubman achieved prominence in American history for her efforts in helping black slaves escape the South and reach the safety of slavery-free Northern states. Having been born a slave herself, Tubman spent the first few years of her life working as a house servant and field hand during the early 1800s. Even back then, she was already well-known among her peers as someone who would always stand up for others. When one of her fellow field hands got into trouble with their overseer, Tubman tried to step in between them. While she was able to protect her peer, she was hit on the head with a 2-pound weight that the overseer threw at her. She later met a former slaved named John Tubman and the two of them were married in 1844. However, five years later, Tubman was forced to flee for her life after she, her family and the rest of the slaves in the plantation were threatened to be sold off to another master. Despite not knowing where to go, Tubman kept on running until she met a white woman who helped her. She used the North Star as a guide at night in order to find her way until she was finally able to reach Pennsylvania. She soon found work in Philadelphia and was able to save up some money. Tubman was determined to go back to Maryland and help her family achieve freedom themselves. One by one, she was able to save her siblings and even escorted a few other slaves as well. She tried to reunite with her husband, but she found out that he had already taken a new wife. Seeing a way how she could help other slaves, Tubman kept going back to the South to escort those who wanted to be free of their masters. She was able to developed clever techniques that allowed her to ensure the safety of the fugitives, including the use of a network of safe houses known as the Underground Railroad, which were managed by fellow antislavery activists. When the U.S. Civil War erupted, Tubman helped out in the Union Army in different capacities such as a cook, nurse, scout and even as a spy. She was also a prominent member of the women's suffrage movement, but her failing health forced her to retire to a home for elderly African-Americans, which she had helped establish. She died in 1913. 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. When the next season of Doctor Who starts, someone new will eventually step into the Tardis as the Doctor's new companion. The BBC plans on announcing who the actor behind that someone is on Saturday, April 23. The network has the announcement timed to begin during half-time of its Match of the Day Live event. For Doctor Who fans in the rest of the world, the BBC will also make the announcement through its various social media outlets, including the official Doctor Who Facebook page. This announcement comes after the departure of Jenna-Louise Coleman, who portrayed companion Clara Osgood, who confirmed that she had plans to leave the series last year (although rumors of her departure began two years ago). Coleman was the longest-running companion since the reboot of the series in 2005 and was also the second companion of the new series to ever work with two Doctors, 11 and 12. Although the reveal of the new companion comes in 2016, fans still have to wait until 2017 for a full season of the series, although a Christmas special will air this year. To make things even harder on viewers, the 2017 season will also serve as the last for showrunner Steven Moffat, who plans on handing over the reins to Chris Chibnall. This means that the Doctor has already had an eventful year, even without new episodes to look forward to: the loss of a companion, the gaining of a new companion and the loss of one showrunner for a new one. American Doctor Who fans also had a rough start to the year, when both Netflix and Hulu pulled the series from their sites. Fortunately, Amazon Prime picked up the new series, although the classic series is currently unavailable on any streaming site. Fans also found themselves relieved when Peter Capaldi confirmed that the BBC asked him to stay on as the Doctor after Moffat's departure. Capaldi has not confirmed that he has plans to do so, but his statements placated rumors that the BBC wanted to oust him. Doctor Who returns to televisions this Christmas, with a new season airing sometime in 2017. 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Instagram And Snapchat Help Boost Brand Awareness: L2 Intelligence Report | TechTree.com Instagram and Snapchat has gained immense popularity ever since its launch, but the debate continues, is Instagram better or Snapchat? A report published by L2 Intelligence titled Instagram vs Snapchat analyses the impact of the photo-sharing apps for brand marketing. The L2 Intelligence report "Instagram vs. Snapchat," demonstrates that, while the number of posts on Snapchat outpace those of Instagram, the former is still a point of differentiation for brands across a number of categories. The report - which evaluates the performance of 280 brands across nine categories on Instagram and Snapchat - provides insights relating to the comparative impact of the platforms. "As two of the most engaging platforms that are still experiencing incredibly high growth rates, Instagram and Snapchat have emerged as the darlings of the social media world, particularly among millennials," said Claude de Jocas, Director of L2's Intelligence Group. "It behooves brands across a number of sectors to build a unique brand presence on both, taking into account nuances in terms of publishing cadence, content quality, and media mix on each." Key findings from L2's report include: - Instagram continues to be the destination for editorialized, curated content, while Snapchat is best leveraged for casual, creative interaction with consumers. - Brands posting video on Snapchat account for over 50 per cent of content in all industry sectors (excluding Watches and Jewelry and Retail), while Instagram brands hover just above 10 per cent in the highest growing sectors. - On Instagram, traditional photo advertisements are brands' preference: 59 per cent of advertisements observed were single-image sponsored posts, vs. carousel ads (22 per cent) and video ads (19 per cent). - While both platforms offer e-commerce capabilities, their capacities are nascent. Until Instagram is able to provide more sophisticated advertising models, and Snapchat releases updates that allow for more engagement within a snap, brands should utilize the platforms to build traditional brand equity and awareness. - Looking forward: Snapchat's "Chat 2.0" advanced messaging features (including voice and video conference) will allow the app to compete against larger messaging services; Instagram's roadmap seems to be impacted by the core Facebook platform, most notably a transition to an algorithm-based personalized user feed. TAGS: Instagram, Snapchat, Photo Sharing Apps Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak likens cyber crime to the atom bomb threat In an interview on Australian TV news show, Lateline, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said that cybersecurity is the greatest threat known to man since the atom bomb, one which is getting worse and worse year by year. The Woz, told Lateline that cybercrime was the greatest threat the world faced and he likened it to the cold war nuclear hysteria of his childhood. We used to fear the atomic bomb when I was young, and you used to come home from school and sirens would go off for a test on every corner, he said. Saying that the cyber threat seems to unstoppable, Wozniak added: Now we fear all the cyber attacks and hacking. Whats the next one were going to hear about? Is one going to come close to me? Is it going to hit me? Could they really take out our electrical system, take out our internet, how far can it go? And its getting worse and worse year by year, not better and better. Woz hits out at FBI Woz also hit out at the FBIs attempts to force the tech giant to unlock an iPhone that belonged to a terrorist. . Woz sid it was wrong for the US government to try to order Apple to unlock the phone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters What if the FBI was able to go to any company, any time they felt like it and said you have to build a product our way? I dont think thats right, he said. What if the FBI cant get into a phone? Theyve still got all the records in this recent case, theyve still got all the records from the phone company of every communication that was made, of every SMS message that was sent. Woz left his role as vice-president of research and development at Apple in the 1980s and sold most of his shares, but he is still an employee of the company and receives an annual salary. At present, he is the Adjunct Professor at the University of Technology, Sydneys Engineering and IT faculty. Wozniak had said that he would love to retire in Australia, where his son and his family live. European Union competition commission likely to charge Google with antitrust charges over Android The European Commission (EC) is getting ready to hit Google with anti-competitive charges for allegedly offering unfair deals to Android phone makers in order to keep its own services on top, according to two people briefed on the investigation. The Financial Times reports that tight deadlines given to four lawyers suggest that the EC, the blocs antitrust watchdog, will issue the statement of objections against Google around noon on Wednesday, the two people said, although the process could still take slightly longer. EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager said on Tuesday that the commission was concentrating on Googles demand that smartphone makers and mobile carriers using Android load Google apps on their devices if they offer any of the companys servicesincluding searchon their phones. In its contracts, Google requires phone makers to pre-install a folder of 11 apps within one flick of the home screen. This will be the ECs second antitrust case against Google assuming charges are filed. The Commission began a second investigation after previously finding Google guilty of abusing its dominance in search to promote its own services over those of competitors. This one is focused on whether Google uses its control of Android to force smartphone manufacturers to favour its own apps over rival ones. In its statement last year, the commission said: The majority of smartphone and tablet manufacturers?.?.?.?use the Android operating system in combination with a range of Googles proprietary applications and services. In order to obtain the right to install these applications and services on their Android devices, manufacturers need to enter into certain agreements with Google. If Google was charged and the eventual ruling goes against the company, the potential penalty could be severe: the EU could impose fines as high as 10% of the companys annual global revenue, which would amount to more than $7billion. Speaking on Tuesday, Vestager said that she was worried Google was shutting out rival app developers with the contracts because it prohibited consumers from allowing them to decide for themselves which apps to download. However, Google had hit back, saying that consumers have the last word about which apps they want to use on their devices. The antitrust case targeted at Android represents one of the most serious tests Google has yet faced from regulators, threatening an online-advertising machine that generated more than $67 billion in revenue last year. This hacker made Amazons Alexa talk to Googles Now and make it activate Apples Siri What could be better than asking just one voice assistant to call upon the others? In other words, what if we could make them all talk to one another? An enterprising developer by the name of Leon Nicholls recently activated Siri on an iPhone by going through three different voice-enabled assistants first. Using Amazons recently released Alexa voice-command system, a naughty chain of command was created between Amazons Alexa, Google Now, and Apples Siri. First, Nicholls used a Raspberry Pi loaded with Amazons Alexa Skills Kit, a collection of tools that allows users program new features into the voice service. Then, he starts off by activating voice commands on his Raspberry Pi and he asks it to Ask Alexa how to use Siri. Alexa, ask Google how to enable Hey Siri, says the Raspberry Pi. Okay Google, Amazons black cylinder replies, using keywords that activate a Google Nexus 6P phone at its base. How do I enable Hey Siri? asks the Amazon Echo. The phone pauses to search for an answer on Google. According to MacWorld, the next time you summon Siri with a command by either holding down on the home button or by calling out Hey Siri! when your iOS device is plugged in, youll be prompted with a setup screen, replies Google Now. An iPhone 6S takes a moment to recognize the call. It wakes up, asking no person or device in particular, Yes? As the Siri is left hanging, the conversation reaches a dead end. While it is amusing to see companies who are vying for a share of the nascent market for its virtual assistants, it will equally interesting to see what other tricks people can come up with when using all these different services together. A 40 anos de Malvinas "Revisar el pasado es pensar el futuro". La frase de la presidenta de Telam, Bernarda Llorente, resume el espiritu del documental coproducido entre la agencia de noticias y el canal publico de TV sobre la cobertura que los medios de comunicacion hicieron del conflicto, plagada de censura y mentiras. Una autocritica necesaria para mirar hacia adelante en un (ya viejo) contexto de fake news y negocio informativo. The central and Catalan governments picked up relations again on Wednesday after nearly a two-year hiatus. Spanish acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and Catalan premier Carles Puigdemont met in Madrid on friendly terms, but came away without having found much common ground. Both men are fundamentally opposed over the Catalan nationalists desire to hold a referendum on self-rule, which Madrid considers illegal. Without law, there is no democracy, said Rajoy of the Popular Party (PP), echoing a position he has long held. No surprise Puigdemont did not seem shocked at the outcome. It is no surprise to say that there was no agreement. I didnt expect any other kind of reaction, because we are separated by an abyss, said Puigdemont, who rose to the premiership in an eleventh-hour assembly vote in January of this year, three months after Catalans had gone to the polls. Court confrontation P.R./J.C. The degree to which both goverments are at odds with each other is reflected in the fact that the Catalan executive has filed 49 appeals before the Constitutional Court, while the central government has filed 29. Rajoy said on Wednesday that this type of confrontation should be reduced in future. His predecessor, Artur Mas, had maintained a similar verbal confrontation with Rajoy during his own term in office, which was marked by an informal independence referendum held on November 9, 2014. Rajoy held his last meeting with Mas in late July 2014. All contact was severed after that, and the Catalan premier, who had held moderately nationalist views, fully embraced the independence movement from that point onward. By the time Mas was replaced at the helm of the Catalan government by Puigdemont (after failing to secure enough parliamentary support to get himself reinstated, a position that Rajoy now finds himself in at the national level) relations were so strained that even a telephone conversation was out of the question. On Wednesday, Rajoy and Puigdmont chatted for more than two hours inside La Moncloa palaces Tapies room, a space usually reserved for top authorities. Rajoy also gave a press conference afterwards, something he had not done for over a month. His speech was dotted with expressions such as dialogue, working together and together, we are all winners. Enduring differences But the public overtures of friendship could not disguise the enduring differences between both men. Sign up for our newsletter EL PAIS English Edition is launching a weekly newsletter. Sign up today to receive a selection of our best stories in your inbox every Saturday morning. For full details about how to subscribe, click here. We support the idea that Catalonia is part of Spain and, like the vast majority of Spaniards, we feel this way and wish for us to stay together, said Rajoy. We are going to defend this political and personal position. Puigdemont, for his part, handed Rajoy a document with 46 demands, twice as many as Mas had brought to Madrid in July 2014. He insisted that he plans to take Catalonia to the doors of independence, but left room for dialogue. We will never walk away from the table, and if during this journey toward independence the government feels that it has an offer to negotiate the referendum, we will listen; we are ready to talk. The Catalan premier admitted that Rajoy had listened to all his proposals, but added that he sees no possibility of an agreement we stand at opposite extremes, and I expected no other reaction. Despite the lack of agreement, both leaders suggested a meeting of their deputies to analyze other issues, including how to deal with the refugee crisis, new regional financing rules, and investment in infrastructure. English version by Susana Urra. It was day three of my safari at South Africas Sabi Sabi Game Reserve when the elephants came. There by the waterhole, two opposing herds of perhaps 20 elephants apiece emerged from the thickets and unexpectedly came head to head. A sudden standoff: ears flapped, feet stomped, calves trumpeted urgently for their mothers, until one group suddenly seceded and scarpered. The victors made their way to drink and play, spraying jets of water from their trunks as though they were fire hoses; it was happy hour in the bushveld. Wallowing in the pool all that time, a lone hippo responded to the spectacle with characteristic indifference; those of us watching from the open-top truck were rendered mute by awe and appreciation. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recorded an unprecedented number of apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border in a fiscal year. | Read More The Spanish Navys training ship Juan Sebastian Elcano in Havana in 2012. EFE Spain wants to make up for lost time in Cuba. To that effect, it is preparing a packed agenda in May that will include a stopover by the Navys training ship, the Juan Sebastian Elcano; a trip by acting foreign minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo, and a visit by a business delegation under the auspices of the Spanish Chamber of Commerce. Hotel chains, the beermaker Damm and the sanitary ware firm Roca are interested in doing business in Cuba And as a finishing touch, Madrid and Havana are about to sign a deal turning the islands 375 million debt with Spain into investment. Although political gridlock in Spain is preventing a visit by acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy or by King Felipe VI, Spain will nevertheless be notably present in Cuba this coming month. The Spanish return to the Caribbean island will be most graphically illustrated by the presence of the four-masted Juan Sebastian Elcano, the third-largest tall ship in the world. The Spanish Armys famous training ship will stop in Havana on May 11 after visiting Puerto Rico. Acting foreign minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo wants to visit Cuba next month. John Thys (AFP) It will be the 10thvisit to Cuba by the schooner barque since 1929, and the first in four years. But this particular stop will stand out above the others because of Cubas domestic situation and because the Elcano will sail straight from Havana to Miami on the 16th. Not even the most veteran observers could recollect the last time a warship even if it is a sailboat covered the 200 miles separating the Cuban capital from the capital of the Cuban exile in the United States. Meanwhile, the Spanish foreign minister told the radio station Onda Cero that he is looking for the right date to travel to Cuba immediately. Garcia-Margallo would like his own trip to coincide with the Elcanos, said sources familiar with the situation. This will be the acting ministers second trip to Cuba after his November 2014 visit, when he delivered a speech in favor of a democratic transition a speech that cost him a meeting with President Raul Castro. Sign up for our newsletter EL PAIS English Edition is launching a weekly newsletter. Sign up today to receive a selection of our best stories in your inbox every Saturday morning. For full details about how to subscribe, click here. And on May 19 and 20, delegates from the chambers of commerce of both countries will meet to discuss business opportunities opening up on the island following the thaw with the US. All the major Spanish hotel chains, which already run over 40% of hotel accommodation on the island, are interested in building new hotels and restoring old ones before their US competitors show up. Other companies that have expressed an interest in Cuba include the beermaker Damm and the sanitary-ware firm Roca. The decisive push for bilateral economic relations will be the deal to convert a remaining debt of 375 million into an investment fund to finance common projects on the island. The agreement was sealed last week and must be signed in the coming weeks. English version by Susana Urra. President Correa announces tax hikes at a press conference. FREDY CONSTANTE (EFE) More information Ecuador sube los impuestos para reconstruir el pais tras el terremoto The Ecuadorian government has adopted exceptional measures to raise funds to meet the urgent needs of those affected by the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that killed 570 people and left more than 5,000 injured in the north of the country on Saturday. Ecuadors president, Rafael Correa, said the state would raise taxes to finance reconstruction efforts in the affected areas. Several towns have seen up to 85 percent of their infrastructure destroyed, while some areas need to be completely rebuilt, the president explained. Buildings will have be to be torn down while some towns need to be completely redesigned. Ecuador will hike its sales tax or value-added tax (VAT) by two percentage points for a year, withhold 3% on profits, and also impose a 0.9% tax on individuals whose assets are greater than $1 million [878,000]. Meanwhile, those who earn more than $1,000 a month will contribute one days pay to rebuilding efforts. If you earn $1,000, you will contribute one day of just one month; if you earn $2000 [1,757], one day for two months; and those who earn more than $5,000 [4,400] will contribute one day during five months, the president explained. Correa said the government will know the exact cost of reconstruction in two weeks but he expects it to be roughly $3 billion (2.6 billion). If I am correct, this means nearly three percentage points of our GDP, he told reporters in Quito. He underscored that Ecuador has to take temporary measures in light of the magnitude and unexpected nature of the cost, because such a catastrophe would affect even the richest country in the world. Correa also told the press that his administration was studying the possibility of selling bonds on the international market, among other initiatives, which include a tax-reform bill he sent to parliament a few days ago. We will have to take exceptional measures to generate funds and face this emergency, he added. The Ecuadorian president said he has established contingency plans with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), World Bank, and Development Bank of Latin America. These institutions could make $600 million (527 million) available in the short term, which they could increase in the long term. We have mourned our victims and we must keep mourning, but, I insist, let those tears fertilize the soil of tomorrow, Correa added. The best act of international solidarity is to visit Ecuador, he added now more than ever. He thanked the international community for sending help in the form of food aid and specialists, including 1,073 rescue experts from Colombia, Cuba, Spain and Mexico who worked with Ecuadors team of 600. One group from Mexico helped rescue six people who were trapped under the rubble. Correa promised that the state would provide medical attention to those in the affected areas, even though three hospitals in Manta, Chone and Bahia de Caraquez collapsed due to the earthquake. He insisted on the need for medical clinics at the camps built for the displaced as rebuilding efforts go forward, a process that will take several years. This is not a three-day, three-week, or three-month problem, Correa warned. This will be a problem for years, he explained, as Ecuador faces what he described as its worst emergency crisis in the last 70 years. English version by Dyane Jean Francois. Mariano Rajoy with PP politician Maria Dolores de Cospedal on Thursday. Bernardo Perez While there may technically be some time for Spains political parties to reach a deal to form a government, acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy appears to have ruled out any chance of that happening at least between his Popular Party (PP) and the Socialists (PSOE). While traveling from Madrid to El Toboso, in nearby Toledo, the politician published a tweet about the current political stalemate, in which Spain has found itself since inconclusive elections on December 20. Pedro Sanchez can avoid the elections, wrote Rajoy, in reference to the leader of the PSOE. I invite him once more to work toward a great coalition government that will bring stability to Spain. M.R. Later, in an informal chat with journalists, the acting prime minister went further, explaining what he will say to the king when he meets with him on Tuesday, in the last round of meetings with the monarch aimed at finding a prime ministerial candidate. I will tell him the same as always that I dont have the votes for the investiture. Rajoy has already twice turned down King Felipe VIs invitation to try to form a government, on the basis that, although the PP got won the most seats at the elections, the party lacks the majority needed to win the first round at the investiture vote, and the simple majority needed for the second. The closest any parties came to a deal was an agreement between the PSOE and emerging center-right party Ciudadanos, which would have seen Pedro Sanchez become prime minister. But even between them they lacked the votes they needed, and Sanchezs bid for power failed due to a lack of support or abstentions from other parties. The clock is now running down before new elections have to be called, most likely for June 26. But for Rajoy, the time for potential deal-making is already over. Talking to reporters on Thursday, he said it was absurd to insist on the idea that he could send one last letter to Sanchez in order to repeat the offer that had been continually rejected by the PSOE since December 20. He is not interested, Rajoy said in reference to the Socialist chief. Ive been trying since December 21, but he doesnt want to. The acting prime minister went on to say that an alliance between the PP and the PSOE traditional opponents since the return of democracy to Spain in the late 1970s would have been the best option for Spain. Rajoy also criticized the PSOEs attempt to reach a deal with Ciudadanos and left-wing anti-austerity group Podemos, which he labeled as a coalition between radicals and extremists. English version by Simon Hunter. An undated photo shows passengers boarding Jetstar Pacific aircraft. Photo: Mai Vong Low-cost carrier Jetstar Pacific, a joint venture between national carrier Vietnam Airlines and Australia's Qantas, ended last year with profits of VND267 million (US$11,800), the first ever since 2008, the airline reported on Wednesday. Speaking to the press, CEO Le Hong Ha attributed the positive results to overhaul attempts over the years, such as reducing costs and cooperation with Vietnam Airlines. In light of the profits, the shareholders have agreed to earmark $139 million for Jetstar Pacific to double its fleet from 15 aircraft at the moment in the next five years, he said. Official figures showed Jetstar Pacific, which currently operates 31 international and domestic routes, controlled 14.9 percent of the domestic air passenger market last year. Vietnam Airlines has 40.8 percent of the market and VietJet, a budget carrier, 36.3 percent. Jetstar Pacific was formed from the restructuring of state-controlled charter cargo carrier Pacific Airlines in 2008, when the Australian carrier acquired a stake of 30 percent. Four years later, sovereign fund State Capital Investment Corporation transferred its stake of 70 percent to Vietnam Airlines. Vietnamese dairy firm TH has recently announced US$2.7 billion of investment into cow farms, a milk plant and distribution channels in Russia. Chairwoman Thai Huong said the market has great potential because Russia is facing a dairy shortage due to sanctions imposed by the EU for its military intervention in Ukraine. The company is expected to have a herd of 350,000 cows and build a plant with an annual capacity of 1.8 million tons of milk. Its made-in-Russia products are set to hit the market from the middle of 2017. TH is one of many fast growing Vietnamese firms that have sought new opportunities abroad after the local market becomes increasingly crowded. Military-run Viettel said it will launch mobile services in Myanmar after winning the fourth telecom license from the government. The Hanoi-based company will own a 49 percent stake in the venture, with the rest going to 11 local firms and a company owned by the defense ministry, Myanmar media reported, citing a government statement. Viettel has been eyeing Myanmars underdeveloped mobile market for years. It will be the third foreign player after Norways Telenor and Qatars Ooredoo were granted licenses and began operating there in 2014. Late last year, the Vietnamese operator launched mobile and Internet services in Tanzania after investing $736 million in East Africa's second-biggest economy, following expansion efforts in Mozambique, Burundi and Cameroon. Expanding overseas is necessary to ensure stable growth," a representative of Viettel said. "The local market is like a tight shirt and, even with a population of more than 93 million, it will stop getting bigger at some point, he said. The firm is seeking to enter Congo and Colombia soon. Since its first overseas venture in 2006, Viettel has opened its operations in 10 countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa, serving 265 million customers. Its revenue in 2015 was VND222.7 trillion ($9.93 billion), up 13 percent from 2014. Of the number, over VND30 trillion came from overseas markets. Since the first overseas operation was reported in 1989, Vietnamese firms have invested $20.4 billion abroad, according to the Foreign Investment Agency under the Ministry of Planning and Investment. Mining tops the list of industries they have invested in, accounting for 34 percent, followed by agricultural processing. Laos has attracted the largest investment of more than $4.2 billion. Do Nhat Hoang, head of the Foreign Investment Agency, said this trend of overseas expansion is contributing to Vietnam's integration into the global economy. He said several firms have been successful with their ventures abroad . In addition to traditional, neighboring markets, including Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, local enterprises have expanded their reach to Europe, Africa, the US, and New Zealand. Vietnamese top IT company FPT has identified the US as an important market, according to a Nikkei Asian Review report. FPT hopes to have some mergers and acquisitions worth $50-100 million in the US, where its revenue growth was estimated at about 45 percent in 2015, said chairman Truong Gia Binh. The projected growth rate is higher than that of Japan, currently FPT's biggest overseas market, above Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar. M&As will be the key strategy for FPT to accelerate growth, he said, adding that it plans to invest about $50 million in one or two M&As to capture new markets and build up expertise every year. Dairy giant Vinamilk is also looking abroad, pouring $30 million into three plants the US, New Zealand and Cambodia and $3 million in a subsidiary in Poland, aiming to eventually use it as a gateway to the EU and benefit from a new free trade agreement between the bloc and Vietnam. The trend of expanding overseas will continue in the coming time, especially in the context of stiffer competition at home, said economist Nguyen Mai. Early this month, Vietnamese real estate conglomerate Hoang Anh Gia Lai Group started work on the second stage of a major project in Myanmar estimated to cost US$230 million. The group announced at a groundbreaking ceremony that it would build five 28-story towers with more than 1,134 apartments and offices in the second stage. Mobile World Investment Corporation, Vietnams biggest mobile-phone retailer, is eying Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar for the next three years. The firm has planned to spend tens of millions of US dollars in Myanmar alone next year. But experts say it is not always easy for firms to operate abroad because of legal, cultural and political differences. An undated file photo shows Vietnam tech giant FPT's office in Myanmar. Some projects have been delayed due to changes in the business environment or difficulties in capital and human resources, according to the Foreign Investment Agency. Some sectors like telecommunications require large outlays, while it takes a long time to earn profits. Viettel could only reap profits from Cambodia after five years, and from Laos and Haiti after three ears. The shortage of skilled and experienced employees is also an issue that Vietnamese enterprises face in new markets, said a representative from the FPT. The company, in 2014, had to spend $47 billion on training. To have enough IT engineers with strong language skills to work in Japan, FPT sent 5,000 employees to the country for training. Mai said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs should update information about foreign markets and legal regulations, helping enterprises operate more effectively abroad. (L-R) Tran Van Hieu, Mai Van Vien and Nguyen Trung Tien at a trial in Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province July 24, 2014, as they were sentenced for smuggling people to Australia. Photo: Nguyen Long A court in the southern province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau have sent three locals to prison for organizing illegal migrations to Australia. Nguyen Trung Tien, 31, got five years while Mai Van Vien, 36, and Tran Van Hieu, 28, three and a half years. Nguyen Huy Thiep remains at large. The court found Tien guilty of starting an illegal immigration service in early 2013 with information provided by his relatives then working in Australia. He approached relatives, friends and recruited Hiep to advertise the service to strangers for VND100-150 million each. Vien (Tiens neighbor) was assigned to buy a boat with which to smuggle the migrants into Australia. Vien later hired Hieu to assist him in the task. A total of 84 customers were loaded onto a boat on the night of June 28 of last year only to be caught two weeks later while approaching the Australian coast. According to the Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship, in April 1976, the first boat carrying Vietnamese asylum seekers arrived on Australias northern shores and in the following five years, over 50 additional boats carrying more than 2,000 Vietnamese followed. Illegal migration to Australia has continued for nearly forty years after the Vietnam War ended in 1975. Hundreds of Vietnamese people have been smuggled to Australia since 2009, many of them from Vung Tau and the north-central Nghe An Province. In recent years, Vietnam has become more aggressive about sentencing smugglers to jail in Vung Tau. The migrants themselves were forced to return home in most of the cases, after they had spent a great deal on the trip. Australia also maintains detention camps in Papua New Guinea and other outlying islands to house people who arrive illegally by boat. Some men are caught after running away from a rehab center in Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province on Wednesday night. Photo: Nguyen Long Police in the southern province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau on Thursday morning brought 150 people back to a drug rehab center after a large group of 447 staged a chaotic scene and escaped last night. Hundreds of police officers were mobilized to search for the runaways at around 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday. The group, who entered the center in compulsory programs, reportedly assaulted several officers of the center, knocked down walls and gates and fled. Earlier they staged a fight. W hen a group of officers reached the scene to end the violence, they were assaulted by dozens of inmates. After getting out of the center, several reportedly threw stones into the center, robbed some motorbikes and broke into a local company. Authorities said they are calling upon families of the other drug users to help bring them back to the center. Doctors in southern Vietnam on Tuesday said a four-year-old boy attacked by a crocodile in the weekend is stable after two days of treatment. The boy, Tran Khanh Tai, was admitted to a children's hospital in Ca Mau Province on Sunday afternoon with severe bite wounds on his right arm. The boy reportedly played near a crocodile cage in his family-run farm while his uncle was cleaning the cage. He tried to pick up a water hose and got attacked by one of the crocodiles. His uncle managed to pull him out and the family rushed him to hospital. Tran Khanh Tai, 4, after a surgical procedure at a hospital in Ca Mau Province. Photo provided by the hospital. Earlier in January, another four-year-old boy in the same province was mauled by a dog and was rushed into the hospital with severe injuries on his face. The dog reportedly attacked the boy after he tried to play with her newborn. Children are very active, so parents should keep an eye on them to prevent such accidents, said doctor Le Van Khen of the Ca Mau hospital. The crocodile as seen in the Soai Rap River, which runs between Long An Province and Ho Chi Minh City. Photo credit: Can Giuoc Police Agency Long An Province has issued an alert warning the public about a crocodile on the loose in the Soai Rap River, which runs between the province and Ho Chi Minh City. Relevant forces are still hunting for the crocodile with nets and electrocution guns, said Nguyen Anh Dung, chairman of Can Giuoc District Peoples Committee. According to witnesses, the crocodile weighs around 40-50 kg. It has probably escaped from a farm in other places because there is no crocodile farm in Can Giuoc. The district police are coordinating with park rangers and fisheries agency to hunt for it, he said. Local authorities have warned people not to swim or wash clothes in the river to avoid being attacked, Dung said. Earlier on April 18, local residents found the reptile swimming in the river near Tan Tap Port. Local authorities have proposed shooting it after police and fishermen failed to catch it with nets. However, the provincial authorities rejected the proposal, saying that it is unnecessary, and ordered relevant agencies to catch it alive. Police in the southern coastal province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau have proposed that four people be charged with organizing illegal emigration services to Vietnamese nationals seeking to go to Australia. The police on Friday said Pham Van Tuong, 59, began smuggling people out of Vietnam in April of last year, sending six to Australia by boat before his service was busted by local coast guards on June 21. Tuong's syndicate also included Nguyen Dinh Kinh, 47, and Nguyen Ngoc Loi, 43. Tran Van Gioi, 47, was paid VND500 million (US$24,000) to captain the ship for each trip. All were arrested at the time, while their 25 clients were each fined VND3.5 million ($168). Investigations found that the group's initial clients were charged $6,000, but that the fee was later raised to between $8,000 and $13,000. Many of the emigrants came from Tuong's hometown in the central province of Nghe An and neighboring Ha Tinh Province. It found that the group had organized another voyage in early May last year to send around 50 people to Australia, but the trip failed due to rough seas. RELATED CONTENT Police arrest 17 for trafficking women from Vietnam to China Human trafficking on the rise in Vietnam: report A court in Ba Ria-Vung Tau in June last year sentenced six other people to up to 77 months in jail each for smuggling people into Australia in 2010 and 2011. Vietnam's Penal Code states that organizing illegal emigration is punishable by between two and seven years in jail, but the penalty can be raised to 12 years for repeat offenders. Like us on Facebook and scroll down to share your comment An attack on a three-year-old boy by a captive bear at his home outside Ho Chi Minh City has focused attention on the dangerous but common practice of keeping wild beasts as pets and as farm animals. The incident happened on January 11 when the boy, identified only as D, put his arm into the bears cage through a hole caused by its feeder becoming rusty. The childs family, living in Hoc Mon District, managed to rescue him but doctors were unable to reattach his right arm that was severely damaged by the 100-kg bear before it was killed by electric shock by an unidentified person. Several neighbors said it was scary to realize that they had been living near a dangerous wild animal for three years without being aware of it. But in many cases, people who are aware of living near dangerous captive animals suffer permanently from anxiety. According to Do Quang Tung, director of the CITES (Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species) office in Vietnam, more than 1,800 bears, 120 tigers, 100 elephants, and 500,000 snakes are being kept besides 1,000 crocodile farms. These are dangerous wild animals but many facilities have not followed relevant safety and registration regulations, threatening the safety and life of local residents. Roaring tigers In Xuan Tin Commune in the northern province of Thanh Hoa, residents complain they are frightened by the roars of 11 tigers kept at a local farm. The tigers often roar at night and scare people. We also suffered from pollution from the farm, a local farmer said. The tigers are possessed illegally by Nguyen Mau Chien, who bought them from an unidentified person in Laos. It was unclear how he managed to obtain a license in 2012. The animals are kept on a farm separated from the surroundings by walls about 2.5 meters high. Many residents said the walls could collapse due to flooding since the farm is only around 300 meters from the Cau Chay dike which broke once in 2012. Dozens of tigers are also being kept at the Pacific Beer Company in Binh Duong Province. After a tiger killed an employee at the nearby Dai Nam Tourism Complex, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development considered seizing captive tigers in the province. However, it later decided against it. Crocodiles, snakes Meanwhile, crocodile farming has become popular in Dong Nais Vinh Cuu and Dinh Quan districts bordering the La Nga River and Tri An Reservoir in the past few years despite experts warnings that the farms lack safety. Crocodiles at a farm in Dong Nai Province. Photo: Le Lam According to Dinh Quan park rangers, more than 150 families in the district are raising around 94,000 crocodiles. Another 34,000 of the reptiles are bred elsewhere in Dong Nai. At least two crocodiles have escaped from these farms since last November, with one being shot down and the other caught by local residents. Nguyen Van Hoang, a crocodile farmer in Dong Nai, said he often buys escaped crocodiles that local resident captured. According to Ton Ha Quoc Dung of the Dong Nai Forest Protection Department, crocodiles are listed as endangered by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which bans the transnational trade of the animals. But it is legal to farm the reptile and park rangers can only monitor the activity, he said. In Vinh Phuc Provinces Vinh Son Commune, another smaller reptile species has become a nightmare for many locals. Many families in the commune raise poisonous snakes, including cobras, and it is common for people catch them around their house. Recently, I heard strange sounds and turned on the flashlight to see a large cobra outside the mosquito net in my bed, Ha Van Hoa, a local man,said. In another incident, I heard some neighboring children cry after a cobra entered their house while their parents were away. Some of men are escorted to a drug rehab center in Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province a day after they escaped from the center on April 13, 2016. Photo: Nguyen Long Authorities in the southern province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau on Wednesday suspended seven officials of a drug rehab center after a large group of 447 people with addiction staged a chaotic scene and escaped last week. Director Tran Thien Chi, his deputy Nguyen Van Chau and five others were temporarily removed from their posts at the center in Tan Thanh District for 15 days. Authorities will review their violations and announce strict punitive measures. Police have managed to bring back 250 runaways after the mass breakout at around 8:30 p.m. on April 13. The group of 447 , who entered the center in compulsory programs, reportedly assaulted several officers of the center, knocked down walls and gates and fled. A wall at the rehab center is fixed after the mass breakout last Wednesday. Photo credit: VnExpress. Earlier they staged a fight. When a group of officers reached the scene to end the violence, they were assaulted by dozens of inmates. After getting out of the center, several reportedly threw stones into the center, robbed some motorbikes and broke into a local company. Authorities said they are calling upon families of the other drug users to help bring them back to the center. Residents walk along Lang Co Beach in Thua Thien-Hue Province to hunt for dead fish. Photo: Dinh Toan/Thanh Nien Residents in coastal areas in the central provinces of Thua Thien-Hue and Quang Binh have recently reported an unusual number of fish that were found dying or already dead and drifted ashore. The residents living near Lang Co Beach in Thua Thien-Hue flocked to the beach to catch batoids, which were almost dead when they were drifted ashore, over the past week. Each of them caught around 10 kilograms of batoids each day. Nguyen Van Chien, a resident, said that batoids drifting ashore was an extremely rare event because they lived deep under the sea. Seaside hotels have warned swimmers against batoids as they may be hurt by the fish. Other kinds of fish were also found dead and washed into spots between rocks near the shore. Local authorities invited the agency in charge of aquatic resources to investigate the phenomenon. Experts from the agency took samples of water for testing. They said the results will be announced soon. The same thing occurred in some beaches in Quang Binh Province. SUBSCRIBERS OF UCOMS ALL TIME BEST OFFER TO ENJOY ADDITIONAL BENEFITS Armenia-Azerbaijan: EU sets up monitoring capacity along the international borders PACE co-rapporteurs on Armenia concerned by reports of alleged war crimes or inhuman treatment perpetrated by Azerbaijans armed forces There is still 35% gender pay gap: Sona Ghazaryan Google Ad Global Finance Names Ameriabank the Safest Bank in Armenia Mikayel and Karen Vardanyans provided 136 million AMD support for the overhaul of the Myasnikyan statue, which was in unsafe state of disrepair Believe me, as a representative of a country which uses the Schengen system very often, it is quite important. Vardanyan I really look forward to having answers from the Azerbaijani side for these alleged gross human rights violations: Secretary General I call on Armenian and Azerbaijani parliamentarians to use this Assembly as an agora of opportunities President Tiny Kox UCOMS SPECIAL OFFER OF THE UNLIMITED INTERNET IS NOW TERMLESS There is no place for the death penalty in a State that respects human rights: PACE General Rapporteur EU and CoE call on two Member States that have not yet acceded to this Protocol Armenia and Azerbaijan to do so without delay An urgent debate requested on "The military hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan". UCOM AND PES-PES CONTINUE COOPERATION WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF EDUCATIONAL PROJECT The statement of the meeting between Prime Minister Pashinyan, President Aliyev, President Macron and President Michel of October 6, 2022 Largest Corporate Bond Program at the Securities Market of Armenia Completed Successfully Google Ad The statement of the Defender on the video of the execution of Armenian PoWs by the Azerbaijani armed forces LEVEL UP ONLY FOR STUDENTS: UCOM OFFERS X2 AND X3 MORE INTERNET STATEMENT BY SECRETARY ANTONY J. BLINKEN This criminal act is another proof that the Armenophobia policy. Tatoyan Nikol Pashinyan, Nancy Pelosi discuss a number of issues related to the Armenian-American agenda and regional developments Delegation by Nancy Pelosi Accompanied by Alen Simonyan Visits Tsitsernakaberd Memorial Complex Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi Arrives in Yerevan Armenian Revytech, global technology leader SAP and financial services software specialist SAP Fioneer sign a cooperation agreement With 120 million drams donated by Mikael Vardanyan, the defenders of the homeland will be treated in a new building OSCE Chairman-in-Office and OSCE Secretary General call for immediate cessation of hostilities along Armenia-Azerbaijan border Statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Artsakh USA Embassy Message for U.S. Citizens ANCA Issues National Call to Action to Stop Taxpayer Funding of Aliyevs Aggression North Korean leader Kim Jong Un looks through a pair of binoculars during an inspection of the Hwa Islet Defence Detachment standing guard over a forward post off the east coast of the Korean peninsula North Korea fired at least one ballistic missile on Friday, which flew about 800 km (500 miles) before hitting the sea off its east coast, South Korea's military said, as the isolated state stepped up its defiance of tough new U.N. and U.S. sanctions. South Korea's Yonhap news agency said the missile was likely a medium-range Rodong-missile. If confirmed, it would mark North Korea's first test of a medium range missile, capable of reaching Japan, since 2014. The launch comes amid heightened tension on the Korean peninsula after the North rejected U.N. Security Council sanctions imposed earlier in the month in response to a nuclear test conducted in January and the United States issued fresh sanctions this week. The missile was launched from north of the capital, Pyongyang, flying across the peninsula and into the sea off the east coast early Friday morning, the South's Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement. It appeared the North may have fired a second missile soon after from the same region, with a projectile disappearing from radar at an altitude of about 17 km, it added. South Korea did not confirm the type of the missiles. But 800 km was likely beyond the range of most short-range missiles in the North's arsenal. The North's Rodong missile has an estimated maximum range of 1,300 km, according to the South's defense ministry. A U.S. official told Reuters in Washington that it appeared to be a medium-range missile fired from a road-mobile launcher. The U.S. State Department said in a statement it was closely monitoring the situation and urged North Korea to focus on taking concrete steps toward fulfilling its international commitments and obligations. Japan concerned Japan quickly condemned the launch, lodging a protest with North Korea through its embassy in Beijing, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told parliament. "Japan strongly demands North Korea to exercise self-restraint and will take all necessary measures, such as warning and surveillance activity, to be able to respond to any situations," Abe said. Last week, the North fired two short-range missiles into the sea off its east coast and its leader Kim Jong Un ordered more nuclear weapons tests and missile tests to improve attack capability. North Korea often fires missiles at periods of tension on the Korean peninsula or when it comes under pressure to curb its defiance and abandon its weapons programs. New U.S. sanctions on Pyongyang were issued on Wednesday aiming to expand its blockade by blacklisting individuals and entities that deal with the North's economy. The North has also reacted angrily to annual joint military drills by U.S. and South Korean troops that began on March 7, calling the exercises "nuclear war moves" and threatening to wipe out its enemies. South Korea and U.S. officials began discussions this month on deploying the advanced anti-missile Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) system to the U.S. military in the South, despite Chinese and Russian objection. Japan has previously said it was considering THAAD to beef up its defenses. North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test in Jan. 6 and launched a long-range rocket on Feb. 7 in defiance of existing U.N. Security Council resolutions. On Wednesday, North Korea's supreme court sentenced a visiting American student to 15 years of hard labor for crimes against the state, a punishment Washington condemned as politically motivated. An Egyptian activist holds a poster calling for justice to be done in the case of the recently murdered Italian student Giulio Regeni during a demonstration protesting the government's decision to transfer two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia. Photo: REUTERS/MOHAMED ABD EL GHANY An Italian student who was tortured and murdered in Egypt had been detained by police and then transferred to a compound run by Homeland Security the day he vanished, intelligence and police sources say. The claims contradict the official Egyptian account that security services had not arrested him. Giulio Regeni, a 28-year-old postgraduate student, disappeared on Jan. 25, friends say. His body was found on Feb. 3, dumped on the side of a road outside Cairo. It showed signs of torture, according to forensic and prosecution officials in Egypt. Egyptian officials have strongly denied any involvement in Regeni's death. Soon after his body was found, police suggested he was the victim of a car accident. Weeks later they said he might have been killed by a criminal gang impersonating policemen. But three Egyptian intelligence officials and three police sources independently told Reuters the police had custody of Regeni at some point before he died. Asked if Regeni had been taken to the Izbakiya police station in Cairo, as some of the sources asserted, an official in the Interior Ministry said: "We did not issue a statement on this matter." Mohamed Ibrahim, an official in the media department of Homeland Security, said: "There is no connection whatsoever between Regeni and the police or Interior Ministry or Homeland Security. He has never been held in any police station or here. The only time he came into contact with police was when the police officials stamped his passport when he landed in Egypt. "If we had any suspicions concerning his activities the solution would have been simple: Expel him." Regeni's fate has re-focused attention on broader allegations of police brutality in Egypt and created tensions between Cairo and Italy, one of Egypt's most important trading partners. A senior forensic official told Reuters that Regeni had seven broken ribs, signs of electrocution on his penis, traumatic injuries all over his body, and a brain haemorrhage. He had been killed by a sharp blow to the head. Pointing to the signs of torture, human rights groups such as the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms and Amnesty International have suggested Regeni may have been killed by Egyptian security services. Rome is demanding Egypt find Regeni's murderers. All six intelligence and police sources told Reuters that Regeni was picked up by plainclothes police near the Gamal Abdel Nasser metro station in Cairo on the evening of Jan. 25. Security had been heightened that day because it was the anniversary of the beginning of the 2011 Arab Spring uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak. An Egyptian man was picked up at the same time. Three sources gave his name but Reuters was unable to verify the man's identity. His connection to Regeni, if any, is unclear. It is also unclear why the men were picked up, though all the sources said the two had not been specifically targeted but were detained as part of a general security sweep. One of the intelligence officials said the two men were taken to the Izbakiya police station, a fortress-like compound located beneath a flyover near downtown Cairo. "They were transported in a white minibus with police licence plates," he said. The three police sources said officers on patrol in the area that night confirmed to them that Regeni had been taken to Izbakiya. "We were told that an Italian was arrested and he was taken to Izbakiya police station," said one of the police officers, who confirmed the detainee was Regeni. A senior police official in the Izbakiya station told Reuters that he recalled an Italian being brought in and said he would check the records to confirm the name. He subsequently declined to comment. "I don't know anything about it," he said. "I checked the books. Regeni's name was not there." One of the intelligence sources said that Regeni was held at Izbakiya for 30 minutes before he was transferred to Lazoughli, a state security compound run by Egyptian Homeland Security. The sources did not say what happened to the Italian after that. Reuters was unable to obtain information on the whereabouts of the Egyptian. "This is our work" On March 24, Egyptian police said they had discovered Regeni's bag and passport following a shootout with a criminal gang whose members had in the past posed as policemen. Police suggested he might have been a victim of this gang. Italian officials have dismissed the story. Regeni's family have said they believe the student was not killed for criminal gain. The family declined to comment. Regeni's parents have said that if Egypt fails to uncover the truth behind their son's murder they want Rome to respond strongly. Paola Regeni, his mother, said she might release a photograph held by the family's lawyer to show the world what had happened to him. Italy has significant economic interests in Egypt, including the giant offshore Zohr gas field, which is being developed by Italy's state energy producer Eni. A delegation of Italian businessmen led by then-Industry Minister Federica Guidi cut short a visit to Cairo and returned home when Regeni's body was recovered in February. On April 8, Italy recalled its ambassador to Egypt for consultations because, the Italian foreign ministry said, Egyptian investigators in Rome had failed to hand over all their evidence to the Italians. Italian prosecutors said they still wanted details from Cairo mobile phone towers that had connected to Regeni's mobile phone. Egypt said this would violate Egyptian laws and the constitution. Ahmed Essam, a Vodafone official in Egypt, told Reuters that security officials had asked him about "a technical issue related to an investigation that is still ongoing about something secretive." He would not elaborate. Police sources said security officials had asked Essam for telephone recordings but added they could not elaborate. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has said Egypt deeply regretted Regeni's death and intended to continue its "full cooperation" with Italy to resolve the case and bring the culprits to justice. Regeni, who studied at Cambridge University, was researching trade unions in Egypt, focusing on street vendors. In the aftermath of the 2011 uprising, vendors were often used by police to attack protesters or acted as informers. Some vendors were also targeted by the police for blocking roads. His obituary on the Cambridge University website said Regeni "sought to understand how the labor sector was changing in the country, in the context of economic globalization and greater international institutional linkages." A colleague at Cambridge said Regeni had not flagged any concerns about his safety. But Regeni's research had raised the suspicions of police, a security source told Reuters. The trade union movement is seen as the origin of the 2011 uprising and the last bastion of dissent under Sisi's crackdown. Egypt's interior and foreign ministers both dismissed the allegation that security forces were behind Regeni's murder. "Any foreigner who does this kind of research is followed by the security services," a mid-ranking Homeland Security official told Reuters. "This does not mean that we suspect him. This is our work." An U.S. Navy picture shows what appears to be a Russian Sukhoi SU-24 attack aircraft making a very low pass close to the U.S. guided missile destroyer USS Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea in this picture taken April 12, 2016 and released April 13, 2016. Photo: Reuters/US Navy/Handout via Reuters Two Russian warplanes flew simulated attack passes near a U.S. guided missile destroyer in the Baltic Sea on Tuesday, the U.S. military said, with one official describing them as one of the most aggressive interactions in recent memory. The repeated flights by the Sukhoi SU-24 warplanes, which also flew near the ship a day earlier, were so close they created wake in the water, with 11 passes, the official said on Wednesday. The planes carried no visible weaponry, the official said. A Russian KA-27 Helix helicopter also made seven passes around the USS Donald Cook, taking pictures. The nearest Russian territory was about 70 nautical miles away in its enclave of Kaliningrad, which sits between Lithuania and Poland. "They tried to raise them (the Russian aircraft) on the radio but they did not answer," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity, adding the U.S. ship was in international waters. The U.S. military on Wednesday released photos and videos of the incidents. In one photograph, an SU-24 appears to pass at extremely low altitude over the Donald Cook's bow. The events were reminiscent of the Cold War, when a series of close calls led to a bilateral agreement aimed at avoiding dangerous interactions at sea that was signed in 1972 by then-Secretary of the Navy John Warner and Soviet Admiral Sergei Gorshkov. The agreement prohibited "simulated attacks against aircraft or ships, performing aerobatics over ships, or dropping hazardous objects near them." The accord can be seen here: www.state.gov/t/isn/4791.htm White House spokesman Josh Earnest said, "This incident ... is entirely inconsistent with the professional norms of militaries operating in proximity to each other in international water and international airspace." The incident came as NATO plans its biggest build-up in eastern Europe since the Cold War to counter what the alliance, and in particular the three Baltic states and Poland, consider to be a more aggressive Russia. The Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which joined both NATO and the European Union in 2004, have asked NATO for a permanent presence of battalion-sized deployments of allied troops in each of their territories. A NATO battalion typically consists of 300 to 800 troops. Moscow denies any intention to attack the Baltic states. "We cannot treat this as anything else than provocation, yet another example of aggressive intentions towards NATO, towards the United States, towards Poland," Poland's Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz told private radio RMF. The USS Donald Cook had just wrapped up a port visit in the Polish city of Gdynia on April 11 and proceeded out to sea with a Polish helicopter on board. The first incident took place on April 11, when two SU-24 jets flew about 20 passes near the Donald Cook, coming within 1,000 yards (meters) of the ship, at about 100 feet (30 meters) in altitude. That was followed by even closer passes by the SU-24s the following day and the passes by the Russian helicopter. The U.S. defense official said the commanding officer of the Donald Cook believed that Tuesday's incident was "unsafe and unprofessional." The U.S. military's European Command said in a statement that "U.S. officials are using existing diplomatic channels to address the interactions, while the incidents are also being reviewed through U.S. Navy channels." "These actions have the potential to unnecessarily escalate tensions between countries, and could result in a miscalculation or accident that could cause serious injury or death," it said. U.S. Representative J. Randy Forbes, who chairs the House Armed Services subcommittee on seapower, said in a statement that "U.S. naval activity in Europe must be expanded accordingly to address the threat posed by Russia's international behavior." The U.S. Navy's video of the incidents can be seen here: youtu.be/e-pLgvJULOM youtu.be/5deRj1umjM0 youtu.be/y8D48itR2cg youtu.be/vkkCZwiENh8 Souvenir mugs featuring Syria's President Bashar al-Assad, Russia's President Vladimir Putin and Lebanon's Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah are seen among other items for sale in old Damascus, Syria, February 8, 2016. Last July, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad seemed to be losing his battle against rebel forces. Speaking to supporters in Damascus, he acknowledged his army's heavy losses. Western officials said the Syrian leaders days were numbered and predicted he would soon be forced to the negotiating table. It did not turn out that way. Secret preparations were already underway for a major deployment of Russian and Iranian forces in support of Assad. The military intervention, taking many in the West by surprise, would roll back rebel gains. It would also accelerate two shifts in U.S. diplomacy: Washington would welcome Iran to the negotiating table over Syria, and it would no longer insist that Assad step down immediately. "That involved swallowing some pride, to be honest, in acknowledging that this process would go nowhere unless you got Russia and Iran at the table," a U.S. official said. At the heart of the diplomacy shift which essentially brought Washington closer to Moscow's position was a slow-footed realization of the Russian military build-up in Syria and, ultimately, a refusal to intervene militarily. Russia, Iran and Syria struck their agreement to deploy military forces in June, several weeks before Assad's July 26 speech, according to a senior official in the Middle East who was familiar with the details. And Russian sources say large amounts of equipment, and hundreds of troops, were being dispatched over a series of weeks, making it hard to hide the pending operation. Yet a senior U.S. administration official said it took until mid-September for Western powers to fully recognize Russia's intentions. One of the final pieces of the puzzle was when Moscow deployed aircraft flown only by the Russian military, eliminating the possibility they were intended for Assad, the official said. An earlier understanding of Russias military plans is unlikely to have changed U.S. military policy. President Barack Obama had made clear early on that he did not want Washington embroiled in a proxy war with Russia. And when the West did wake up to Russian President Vladimir Putin's intentions, it was short of ideas about how to respond. As in Ukraine in 2014, the West seemed helpless. French President Francois Hollande summed up the mood among America's European allies: "I would prefer the United States to be more active. But since the United States has stepped back, who should take over, who should act?" Signposts In July last year, one of Iran's top generals, Qassem Soleimani, went to Moscow on a visit that was widely reported. The senior Middle Eastern official told Reuters that Soleimani had also met Putin twice several weeks before that. "They defined zero hour for the Russian planes and equipment, and the Russian and Iranian crews," he said. Souvenir plates depicting Syria's President Bashar al-Assad and Russia's President Vladimir Putin are seen among other items for sale in old Damascus, Syria, February 8, 2016. Russia began sending supply ships through the Bosphorus in August, Reuters reported at the time. There was no attempt to hide the voyages and on Sept. 9 Reuters reported that Moscow had begun participating in military operations in Syria. A Russian Air Force colonel, who took part in preparations and provided fresh details of the build-up, said hundreds of Russian pilots and ground staff were selected for the Syria mission in mid-August. Warplanes sent to Syria included the Sukhoi-25 and Sukhoi-24 offensive aircraft, U.S. officials said. In all, according to U.S. officials, Russia by Sept. 21 had 28 fixed-wing aircraft, 16 helicopters, advanced T-90 tanks and other armored vehicles, artillery, anti-aircraft batteries and hundreds of marines at its base near Latakia. Despite this public build-up, the West either played down the risks or failed to recognize them. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sept. 22 that Russian aircraft were in Syria to defend the Russians' base - "force protection" in the view of U.S. military experts. At the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 28, the French announced their own first air strikes in Syria. "The international community is hitting Daesh (Islamic State). France is hitting Daesh. The Russians, for now, are not doing anything," Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius Fabius said at the time. The next day Russia announced its strikes in Syria. Warnings One former U.S. official, who was in government at the time, told Reuters that some U.S. officials had begun voicing concern that Russia would intervene militarily in Syria two weeks before the bombing began. Their concerns, however, were disregarded by officials in the White House and those dealing with the Middle East because of a lack of hard intelligence, the former U.S. official said. "There was this tendency to say, 'We don't know. Let's see,'" recounted the former U.S. official. Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) shakes hands with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during a meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, in this October 20, 2015 file photo. Yet between October and December, American perceptions shifted, as reported by Reuters at the time. By December, U.S. officials had concluded that Russia had achieved its main goal of stabilizing Assads government and could maintain its operations in Syria for years. "I think its indisputable that the Assad regime, with Russian military support, is probably in a safer position than it was," a senior administration official said. Diplomatic u-turn At that point, the U.S. pivoted to the negotiating table with Russia and Iran. Officials say they had few other options with Obama unwilling to commit American ground troops to Syria, aside from small deployments of Special Operations forces, or provide U.S.-backed opposition fighters with anti-aircraft missiles. In Munich on Feb 12, Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced an agreement for humanitarian access and a "cessation of hostilities" in Syria, far short of a ceasefire. "Putin has taken the measure of the West... He has basically concluded, I can push and push and push and push and I am never going to hit steel anywhere," said Fred Hof, a former State Department and Pentagon Syria expert now at the Atlantic Council think tank. Today, U.S. officials sound a far different note than in the early days of the uprising against Assad when they said his exit must be immediate. Now, with the war entering its sixth year, they say they must push the diplomatic possibilities as far as possible and insist Kerry is fully aware of what Russia is doing to change facts on the ground. Russian warplanes fly in the sky over the Mediterranean coastal city of Latakia, Syria, in this January 28, 2016 file photo. In congressional testimony on Wednesday, Kerry acknowledged there was no guarantee the "cessation of hostilities" would work, adding: "But I know this: If it doesnt work, the potential is there that Syria will be utterly destroyed. The fact is that we need to make certain that we are exploring and exhausting every option of diplomatic resolution." For the rebels, the reality is bleak. Government forces have closed in on the city of Aleppo, a major symbol of the uprising. Their supply routes from Turkey cut, rebels in the Aleppo area now say it may only be a matter of time before they are crushed altogether. "We are heading toward being liquidated I think," said a former official in a rebel group from the city. Other fighters remain determinedly upbeat, saying Assad is only gaining ground because of Russian air power and he will not be able to sustain the advances. For Syrians living under government rule in Damascus, Moscow's intervention has inspired a degree of confidence. They credit one of the calmest periods since the start of the war to the death of rebel leader Zahran Alloush, killed in a Russian air strike on Christmas Day. There are few foreign visitors these days. Bashar al-Seyala, who owns a souvenir shop in the Old City, said most of his foreign customers are Russians. His shop had just sold out of mugs printed with Putin's face. South Korean defense ministry's Director General Major General Jang Kyung-soo shakes hands with U.S. Forces Korea's Major General Robert Hedelund (L) during their working-level talk to discuss the potential deployment of a THAAD missile defense system at the Defense Ministry in Seoul, South Korea, March 4, 2016. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji The United States hopes to talk with China and address its concerns about the possible deployment of the THAAD missile defense system that Washington is discussing with Seoul, a senior State Department official said Tuesday. Rose Gottemoeller, undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, stressed that the United States and South Korea had just begun discussions, and no decision had been made to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system. Gottemoeller also emphasized that the system was defensive in nature and aimed at North Korea, not China. "THAAD is truly only capable of defending the territory on which it's deployed. It is not capable of the kind of reach that the Chinese seem to be afraid that it has," she told reporters at a breakfast meeting. "We will be very glad and hope we'll have the opportunity to sit down and talk with China about those very technical limitations and facts about the system," she said. Gottemoeller gave no timetable for a possible meeting. The United States and South Korea agreed to begin the talks last month after North Korea launched a long-range rocket on Feb. 7 carrying what it called a satellite. Defense Secretary Ash Carter on Tuesday told a congressional hearing that Seoul and Washington had an "agreement in principle" to discuss deploying a THAAD system to South Korea. Doing so, he said, would protect "the entirety of the peninsula against North Korean missiles of greater range." Wang Yi, the foreign minister of China, North Korea's neighbor and main ally, last month underscored China's concerns about a possible THAAD deployment but seemed to open the door to a diplomatic solution. Wang said China understood the desire of the United States and South Korea to ensure the defense of their own countries, but Beijing had legitimate concerns that should be addressed. U.S. military officials have long said the THAAD system is needed in South Korea, but until North Korea's recent satellite launch, Seoul had been reluctant to openly discuss its deployment given the risk of damaging ties with China. Army Lieutenant General David Mann, commander, U.S. Army Space & Missile Command, told reporters that the THAAD system would result in a "huge increase" in missile defense capabilities on the Korean peninsula. But he said Washington understood the sensitivity of the discussions given the concerns raised by China, one of South Korea's key trading partners. "It's very, very important that we clarify that that radar, that system is not looking at China," he said. "If the decision is made to deploy it, that system would be oriented on North Korea and threats posed by the North Korean military." The system was designed to intercept and destroy ballistic missiles inside or just outside the atmosphere during their final phase of flight. Mann said the Army would complete training for its fifth THAAD system by the end of the year. He said Japan was also interested in the system, as were U.S. military commanders in Europe and the Middle East. Once a site was approved and prepared, the mobile THAAD system could be deployed "in a matter of weeks," Mann said. U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policy Sung Kim speaks to the media at a news conference in Beijing, China April 21, 2016. Photo: Reuters/Jason Lee China has no need to be worried about U.S. plans to deploy a new anti-missile system in South Korea to protect it from North Korea, a senior U.S. diplomat said on a visit to Beijing, adding North Korea had shown no interest in diplomacy. The United States and South Korea have begun talks on possible deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system after North Korea tested its fourth nuclear bomb on Jan. 6 and launched a long-range rocket on Feb. 7, both in defiance of U.N. resolutions, but China firmly opposes the move. "The fact is that North Korea presents a very serious missile threat to the Korean peninsula," Sung Kim, the U.S. special envoy for North Korea, told reporters. "And we, together with South Korea, have decided that we should take appropriate defensive measures to protect ourselves against this missile threat from North Korea." Kim said the United States remained open to credible and meaningful diplomacy with North Korea, but the country had shown no interest. North and South Korea remain technically at war after their 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce, rather than a treaty. The North, whose lone major ally is neighbor China, routinely threatens to destroy South Korea and its major ally, the United States. The North Korean threat was why "we have started formal consultations about the possibility of deploying the THAAD system on the peninsula", Kim said. "It's a completely defensive system. There is no need for China or Russia to be concerned about this system." North Korea has vowed to conduct further nuclear tests, despite stepped up international sanctions. Satellite images show that North Korea may have resumed tunnel excavation at its main nuclear test site, similar to activity seen before the January test, a U.S. North Korea monitoring website reported on Wednesday. Kim said he had no definitive information a fifth test was coming, and that he was not sure China knew either. China is North Korea's most important economic and diplomatic backer, but has been infuriated by North Korea's nuclear and missile tests and has signed on for tough U.N. sanctions. The effectiveness of current or any new sanctions depends heavily on them being fully implemented by China, U.S. officials and analysts say. Kim said China had taken "a number of steps toward implementation" of the latest sanctions resolution. "I hope and I expect that China would take its responsibility very seriously and actually implement all provisions of this unprecedented resolution," he added. China says it has a right to develop what it calls "normal relations" with North Korea. North Korea became China's second-biggest coal supplier in March, with deliveries up 80.6 percent from a year ago to 2.35 million tons, data from China's customs authority showed on Thursday. China's Ministry of Commerce announced at the beginning of April that it would ban North Korean coal imports to comply with new U.N. sanctions. But it would make exceptions for coal delivered via North Korea's Rason port from third countries, and for exports intended for "the people's well-being" and not connected to nuclear or missile programs. A Russian Sukhoi Su-24 front-line bomber is seen on a runway shortly before taking off, part of the withdrawal of Russian troops from Syria, at Hmeymim airbase, Syria, March 16, 2016. REUTERS/Russian Ministry of Defence/Vadim Grishankin/Handout via Reuters The United States said on Thursday it was concerned about reports that Russia is moving more military equipment into Syria to bolster President Bashar al-Assad, with a truce in tatters and peace talks in meltdown. A U.S. official separately said Russia has been repositioning artillery to northern Syria - a move that may suggest the Syrian government and its allies are preparing another assault on the divided city of Aleppo. The arrival of Russian reinforcements would risk driving the war into an even higher gear after the effective collapse of the truce and U.N.-led peace talks in Geneva aimed at ending a five-year war that has killed at least 250,000 people. Russias defense ministry did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. U.N. special envoy Staffan de Mistura will on Friday assess whether Geneva talks can go on with the main opposition negotiators refusing to participate and combatants accusing each other of breaking the six-week-old ceasefire. The opposition this week urged more military support for rebels after declaring a truce was over and that talks would not re-start until the government stopped committing "massacres". The talks aim to halt a conflict that has allowed for the rise of the Islamic State group, sucked in regional and major powers and created the world's worst refugee crisis. With talks on life support, all members of the main Syrian opposition will leave Geneva by Friday, a source close to the High Negotiations Committee and a Western diplomat said. "I'm saddened and believe it's a mistake," the diplomat said. "It will be very difficult to find a pretext for them to return given the situation on the ground and now the regime knows that a bombing will ensure they stay away," he said, referring to an air strike this week that killed dozens. Both sides are far apart and Syrian government forces have been boosted on the battlefield by Russia's firepower. Rebels vow to fight on France, which accused the government of rushing "headlong" into violence and showing its refusal to negotiate a political solution, said it would consider with other European powers and the United States the idea of convening a ministerial meeting of major powers in the next two weeks to work out what to do. "If the regime insists on stubbornness, obstruction and rejection of international resolutions, we will continue our revolution," Abdullah Othman, head of the politburo of the Levant Front rebel fighting group, told Reuters. "Our only option is to realize the revolution's goals." In March 2011, pro-democracy protests in the southern Syrian city of Deraa were crushed. This triggered nationwide demonstrations that ignited into widespread unrest and civil war. The multi-sided conflict splintered Syria into a patchwork of areas controlled by the government, an array of rebel groups, Islamic State, and the well-organized Kurdish YPG militia. Far from the main frontlines between government forces and rebels in western Syria, Kurdish groups, meanwhile, fought one of their most serious battles yet with government forces in the northeast, routing pro-Damascus militiamen in Qamishli. It was a rare example of confrontation between sides that have mostly left each other to their own devices since the start of the conflict in 2011, and underlined growing Kurdish power that has alarmed neighbouring Turkey. Syrian government officials could not be reached for comment. With violence escalating, Syria's fragile peace talks might not resume for at least a year if they are abandoned, one senior Western diplomat warned. De Mistura, who has come closer than any mediator so far in bringing the warring sides to peace talks, would not be drawn on what to expect on Friday. "Destroying terrorism" Government negotiators say Assad's presidency is non-negotiable. Underlining confidence in Damascus, a top Assad aide reiterated its view that local truce agreements and "destroying terrorism" were the way towards a political solution. The opposition wants a political transition without Assad, and says the government has failed to take goodwill measures by releasing detainees and allowing enough aid into opposition-held areas besieged by the military. Endorsed by the U.N. Security Council, the Geneva peace talks marked the most serious effort yet to resolve the war but failed to make any progress with no sign of compromise over the main issue dividing the sides: Assad's future. The war was tilted in Assad's favor last year by Russia's intervention, supported on the ground by members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps who have been bolstered recently by the arrival of members of Iran's regular army. "We've been concerned about reports of Russia moving materiel into Syria," Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama, said at a news briefing in Riyadh where Obama was at a summit with Gulf Arab leaders. "We think it would be negative for Russia to move additional military equipment or personnel into Syria. We believe that our efforts are best focused on supporting the diplomatic process," Rhodes added. States opposed to Assad have been channeling military support to vetted rebel groups via both Turkey and Jordan, in a program that has included military training overseen by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Battle for Aleppo The U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the repositioning of Russian artillery and some forces near Aleppo followed the Syrian government's recapture of the city of Palmyra from Islamic State. The widely violated truce began fraying some two weeks ago near Aleppo, where the Syrian army accused rebel groups of taking part in assaults by Islamists who are not covered by the ceasefire. Rebels say they were defending themselves from attacks by the army and its Shi'ite militia allies. Aleppo is divided into areas controlled separately by the Syrian government and opposition. To the north of the city meanwhile rebels have been battling the Islamic State group, forcing more people to flee. Heavy air strikes have also resumed in opposition-held areas of Homs, with new battles also erupting in Latakia province. The Qamishli fighting erupted on Wednesday. The city near the border with Turkey is mostly controlled by the Kurdish YPG militia, with the government still controlling the airport and a small area in the city. A Reuters witness said a gun battle at a prison in the city ended with the surrender of at least 40 pro-government militiamen who had been holed up inside. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based group that tracks the war, said the fighting began on Wednesday when the Kurdish internal security forces, called the Asayish, stopped a car carrying an officer of a militia that operates under the control of the Syrian army. Heads up to prevent injury from falls Morning walks in my neighborhood are one of the most enjoyable parts of my day. I love the coolness of daybreak and the special sightings of the stag and two does that frequent our open space. I also enjoy my walk because each day at... Signs that point to the best time for retirement Ive been thinking a lot about retirement lately. One of our amazing staff members, who has been with Senior Concerns for the last 13 years, retired last month. It just doesnt seem real. I always thought of Dana as young. Certainly not the person to... Rethinking the mandatory retirement age How old is too old for working at a job? Last week a news story hit my inbox and it really got me to thinking about age and retirement. The article noted that Target Corp. abandoned its mandatory retirement age of 65 for its CEO,... Tips to promoting a healthy nights sleep for children Question: Help, please. My daughter is almost 2 years old and has been an easy child to put into her own bed. Yet in the past few weeks she is purposefully stretching out the bedtime routine longer and longer. She wants more: more stories, more... Charles McCulloch's family were expecting a celebration on the 94-year-old's second day at a nursing home in Canberra. It was his granddaughter's birthday, and there were to be a string of visitors to help welcome him to life at Jindalee Aged Care Residence in Narrabundah. The inquest into the bashing death of an aged care resident has raised issues of staffing, training, regulations, funding and inadequate preparations for suspicious deaths. Credit:Rohan Thomson Instead, they were left identifying his body, and imagining the final moments before he was beaten to death by a fellow resident in Jindalee's secure dementia ward. An inquest has spent weeks poring over the circumstances of Mr McCulloch's death. The average price of domestic airfares fell by 5.77 per cent in the first quarter of the calendar year, after having risen by 8 to 9 per cent last year when demand was stronger. "We are now seeing cheap fares available right up to five and three days prior to departure," said Virginia Fitzpatrick, the general manager of Flight Centre Travel Group's consulting arm, 4th Dimension. Her comments came as 4th Dimension and CAPA released their latest Australian aviation and airfare analysis report. It found that the decision by Qantas and Virgin Australia to limit capacity additions last year had paid off in the form of higher airfares. The cost of the average one-way fare rose by 9.4 per cent to $147.10 for leisure travellers, while fares for corporate travellers rose by 8.1 per cent to $176.20, in part because they tended to book closer to the travel date. After kicking off a probe into life insurance claims' practices the corporate regulator's next project will be demanding information about life products from industry executives. As first revealed by Street Talk, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission wrote to all bank-owned and independent Australian insurers last week, ordering them to take a look at their claims management records over the past five years. ASIC will send letters to Australia's biggest banks and life insurers demanding information about their products. It is understood ASIC will soon also write to insurers requesting key details about the terms and conditions of their life insurance products, which include total and permanent disability cover and income protection. A spokesman for the corporate regulator declined to comment. Barely three years have passed since Doug Pertz signed up at Brambles to lead the document storage group it was about to spin-off Recall. The company has now officially shuffled off into the arms of US rival Iron Mountain, part of a $2.5 billion takeover. It's been the cherry on the cake for Recall investors, who have had a pretty amazing run on the ASX. And, come to that, what a bountiful three years it has been for the Altanta, Georgia-based Doug. Australia's corporate watchdog has seized files belonging to the corrupt Monaco-based oil industry firm Unaoil as part of its criminal investigation into leading Australian executives including Peter Gregg. The Australian Securities Investment Commission served Fairfax Media with a compulsory order to hand over the Unaoil files, which detail millions of dollars of offshore payments by Australian companies, including Leighton Holdings. The ASIC order reveals the watchdog is investigating former Leighton executive Mr Gregg, who is now the chief executive of a $2 billion Australian listed health firm, over alleged false accounting offences linked to a $15 million payment to a Dubai consultant in 2011. The Unaoil files, which were leaked to Fairfax Media last year, reveal the Dubai consultant is corrupt. They also separately implicate former Leighton senior executives David Savage, Russell Waugh and Peter Cox in major bribery and money laundering in the UAE and Iraq, including the corrupting of two Iraqi oil ministers. NK issue transferred from assembly hall to the PACE backstage (video) There has been no lack of clashes of opinions on the Karabakh conflict and four-day April war at the spring session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). The Azerbaijani delegation recalled that until April 1 nobody and nothing hindered Azerbaijan to be a democratic country; Azerbaijans delegate Ganira Pashayeva said that for already more than 20 years Armenia has occupied the territories of Azerbaijan and it is dangerous not only for the South Caucasus, but also for Europe; Europe must do something. The President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker didnt intend to speak long and only answered, Stop firing! The French, in general, have much to say to Azerbaijanis. French MP Francois Rochebloine notes that the soldiers of Aliyev acted like beasts towards the population of the Nagorno-Karabakh. The topic of the Karabakh issue was transferred from the assembly hall to the PACE backstage. President Pedro Agramunt wrote on his Twitter page that he had met with the heads of Armenian and Azerbaijani delegations and told them that without the dialogue between the sides there will be no peace. Hermine Naghdalyan hasnt forgotten who is speaking about dialogue; a person, who spoke in support of Azerbaijani during the days of war. By the way, Mrs Naghdalyan told A1+ that the stance of the PACE somehow tired even the members of that organization, as according to the Head of the Armenian delegation, the Assembly has diverted from its mandate. Most of the members of the Parliamentary Assembly, says Mrs Naghdalyan, understand that they have no tools to influence the conflict. April 2011 was crunch time for Australian corporate high-flyer Peter Gregg. "This is diabolical," the Leighton Holdings chief financial officer wrote to the company's boss in India, Russell Waugh, on 16 April 2011. "As a matter of urgency ... settle this issue immediately." Mr Gregg was desperate to close a deal between Leighton's Indian business and Welspun, a company part owned by Mumbai billionaire BK Goenka. Welspun was stalling, delaying and doing everything possible to advantage its interests in a deal in which it was supposed to pay Leighton $100 million for a large chunk of the Australian company's Indian business. Mr Gregg wanted to finalise the deal so Leighton could tell the market. Wesfarmers has flagged major markdowns and store closures at Target, as new department stores chief Guy Russo kicks off a strategic review, clears slow-moving winter stock and exits product lines that overlap with Kmart. Wesfarmers managing director Richard Goyder said the conglomerate had no plans to get rid of the Target brand as some analysts have suggested after merging the two fiercely competitive chains into a single operating division run by the former Kmart boss. However, Mr Goyder said more loss-making or underperforming Target stores would be converted to Kmart stores and he flagged more "co-ordination" between the chains in areas such as property and procurement to boost returns after a 75 per cent slump in profits at Target over the past five years. "People are underestimating the opportunities and over-estimating the extent of the (merger)," Mr Goyder told analysts and media on Thursday after announcing record sales growth at Kmart in the March quarter and another lacklustre period for Target. Anzac Day is an appropriate time to reflect on why our more recent veterans are being left behind in the day's social and nationalist resurgence. As the number of Australians wanting to become involved increases, unforeseeable changes in the fabric of the day and its meaning are occurring. That's only natural: Anzac Day means many things to different people, and culturally constructed movements are seldom stable. There have been well-meaning but disrespectful changes. In many cases, Anzac Day has gone from being a solemn event to one with a carnival atmosphere. Images of casually dressed young men with Australian flags tied around their necks are hard to look at when I'm reflecting on a friend who recently tried to commit suicide because of the burden of his military service. Rather than being a time for us to reflect on sacrifice and service, it's increasingly become a celebration of nationalistic spirit and identity. This isn't a criticism, but the focus on our national Anzac identity has left behind those who have served. One day we set off from Curtin to visit Parliament House and finished up at the Red Hill lookout. At this point, while looking over the suburbs and surrounding countryside, it became abundantly clear what was missing. A light rail service! One day our hosts took us for adrive to Gungahlin, and once again it became apparent that a tram ride would have been much easier, straight through town and out to Gungahlin. I think the benefits of a light rail service far outweigh any of the disadvantages being bandied about by some groups. David Apps, Perth, WA A move too far It was with amazement that Ilearnt of the imminent transfer of the Canberra and Region Visitors Centre from its current Northbourne Avenue location toRegatta Point. It will be interesting to learn how many caravan-towing tourists happen across the information centre in its new location. Perhaps they might catch a tram from the current location to Regatta Point? Last year in Stockholm, after searching for some time, I found the tourist information centre on the second floor of a department store. There was not one caravan, and few tourists, to be seen. If our local government plans to close the information office because of lack of patronage, it could do worse thanadopt the Swedish model. Stuart Yorston, Macgregor Insults no help I am flabbergasted that of all your correspondents, H. Ronald (Letters, April 20) should charge others with "intolerance and bigotry towards anyone who does not share their view". Is this a masterpiece of irony or a tragic lack of self-awareness? I disagree with almost everything H. Ronald has written, but no matter how repugnant I find his/her views, Ido not deny his/her right to express them. Could I suggest to H. Ronald that describing people with insulting terms such as "intellectually fragile feminists" and their views as "infantile nonsense" does nothing topromote the "robust exchange ofideas" he/she claimsto desire. D.J. Taylor, Kambah Disturbing perspective Amin Saikal ("Bernie Sanders dares to challenge Israel", Times2, April 20, p5) exposes his true perspective on Israel, and it's not pretty. He claims that Benjamin Netanyahu's tactics toprevent peace include "continuously treating Hamas asa 'terrorist organisation'." Hamas is a terrorist organisation, and is recognised as such by the US, Europe, our government and even various Arab countries. It is committed to violently destroying Israel and killing or driving out the Jewish people, and continually conducts and encourages murderous attacks on civilians. Apparently that's not enough for Saikal to consider it a terrorist group, hopefully not because of who its targets are. He also talks about Palestinians resorting to "individual acts of resistance". These acts are actually attacks on random Israelis, often civilians, using knives, guns and cars, and have killed more than 30 people and injured hundreds more. But according to Saikal, when Israeli forces stop the attacks by killing the perpetrators, that's the"atrocity". While Sanders is critical of aspects of Israeli policy, I doubt he would share Saikal's disturbing perspective. Alan Shroot, Forrest Balance needed Professor Amin Saikal has highlighted Australia's growing isolation as an uncritical supporter of all manner of Israeli policies and actions that have both entrenched Palestinian plight and desperation, and simultaneously benefited the Jewish state in terms of illegal settlement expansions. Indeed, as Saikal notes, there are but a mere few countries in the world that are as blithely one-eyed as Australia has been towards such a grave and persistent two-sided issue. We can expect a sharp response from the pro-Israel lobby, of course, despite the fact that Australian Jews hold a range of ideological positions onhow the pro-Israel position should be operationalised within the Australian context. There needs to be balance andfreedom in the press, and Professor Saikal bravely plays his part, as always. He is to be thanked. Ross Kelly, Monash What about Hunter? Your editorial, "Rattenbury does Greens proud?" (Times2, April 19, p2) mentions three ACT Greens who served in the Legislative Assembly from 2008 to 2012, but omits to mention the Greens' leader, Meredith Hunter. Leon Arundell, Downer A life of nothing but suffering has no meaning or sacredness Further to Peter Comensoli's comments about euthanasia ("Growing euthanasia statistics should be a warning", Times2, April 20, p5), the Catholic Church has always been happy to keep people poor and suffering, so the downtrodden run to it for comfort. To watch loved one after loved one waste away from a genetic disease at close quarters or die slowly from the treatment for cancer is a real world you don't occupy. We are sensible enough to be able to study existing systems and to be aware of the pitfalls. Many have the motive and means to die with dignity now, and they do, but at great stress to their families because of the illegality. When life is just suffering, it has no meaning and no sacredness. Jesus was not a big fan of suffering, for himself or others. Your church taught me that. Medicine keeps many alive beyond what is reasonable. Have pity, priest. Please. Roseanne Byrne, St Georges Basin, NSW Professor Fitzgerald ("Minority rules on euthanasia", Times2, April 18, p4) is right in his robust criticism of our secular and clerical leaders, for being so out of touch with modern thought when it comes to thisvery important issue. Like so many of us who have had to see the suffering that our loved ones have had to bear at the end, I say the time has come to demand that our leaders get on board and enact laws to decriminalise euthanasia. Like capital punishment and suicide, it takes a groundswell of public opinion to move the legislature to pass laws that are existentially, humanistically and inherently right. This is especially so when the clergy demand preservation of the status quo. It is time to make erstwhile the horror shows we all witness. Go ahead, leaders, lead. Michael O'Brien, Newtown, NSW Fine figure incorrect "Diplomats' unpaid fines: $5000,000" (April 19, p1) incorrectly stated that Indonesian diplomats owed $90,801 of outstanding fines. On cross-checking with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the ACT government, we found that the outstanding fines total $1731 and that $236 of it has been paid by a staff member. It is long-standing policy at the Indonesian embassy to require staff to obey Australian laws, including traffic regulation, and to pay fines forany traffic infringements committed by staff members. Your failure to cross-check data has damaged the reputation of Indonesian diplomats in Australia and that of the embassy in general. Ernawati, Consular section co-ordinator, Indonesian embassy, Yarralumla "Diplomat's unpaid fines: $500,000" (April 19, p1) stated the Saudi Arabian embassy has $140,000 in unpaid parking fines. A study of UN diplomats and parking fines in 2007 showed that Saudi Arabian diplomats were racking up 34.2parking violations per diplomat in New York City. To combat this failure to pay traffic violations, the US Department of State gave New York City the power to remove the official diplomatic plates of vehicles with three or more outstanding unpaid violations. The effect of the threat of removal of the diplomatic plates was that the Saudi Arabian violations went from 34.2 to 0.52 violations per diplomat in the next three years. The result for other diplomatic missions in New York was the same. I think that if we have countries flouting our laws under the guise of diplomatic immunity, we have the right to remove their diplomatic plates until the fines are paid and the behaviour changes. There is proof that this is an effective deterrent to poor behaviour. Michael Callan, Lyons Mistreatment ignored Trevor Willis' solution (Letters, April 19) to the high rates of Aboriginal incarceration is simplistic. Considering the history of dispossession, marginalisation, blatant discrimination and attempted extermination of the Aboriginal population, it would not be surprising if Aboriginal people did not feel part of mainstream Australian society or beholden to our legal system which, for most of the last 200 years, controlled their most minute actions on missions and reserves, removed their children without parental consent, sent them to work as domestics and labourers, and withheld their wages. Addressing alienation, poverty and disadvantage through carefully targeted justice reinvestment programs would be a far more productive approach than that advocated by Trevor Willis. Patricia Saunders, Chapman C.L. Johnston (Letters, April 19) remarks that "much is being made about the number of Aboriginals being incarcerated for criminal offences". I disagree. Last week marked the 25thanniversary of the groundbreaking report into Aboriginal deaths in custody. Despite the promise of this report, a majority of the royal commission's recommendations have never been implemented, and research indicates that Indigenous incarceration and police custody rates have increased, from 14 per cent of the prison population in 1991 to 27 per cent today. This is 14.8 times higher than the rate for non-Indigenous people. On Monday, Parliament reconvened. On Tuesday, the House of Representatives notice paper indicated no government business to be debated. I wonder if this would have been the case if the non-Indigenous prison population was 2.5 times the rate in the United States? Perhaps, as Trevor Willis (Letters, April 19) notes, this is nothing to do with non-Indigenous Australians. Afterall, "the law does not discriminate on colour". This is thanks to the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, which makes it illegal to be treated unfairly because of your race. Unfortunately, the Racial Discrimination Act can be overridden, as it was by John Howard's amendments to the Native Title Act, and in the Northern Territory intervention. Additionally, the implementation of laws that appear to be neutral, such as statutes making offensive conduct a criminal offence, is notoriously discriminatory. Willis may be "sick and tired" of hearing from "the do-gooders". I am sick and tired of attitudes like those of Willis and Johnston. Harry Hobbs, Zetland, NSW Father broke Aust law by taking kids away The two Australian children in Lebanon whom their mother attempted to abduct were in fact abducted by their father from Australia. Their father has consequently committed a crime under Australian law. According to the Wikipedia article Abduction Law in Australia, Australia has an extradition law with Lebanon (though no citation is actually given). Australia should commence extradition proceedings with Lebanon to get the children and their father back to Australia. Custody was awarded by an Australian court which presumably made a fair decision: that custody with the father was not good for the children. Hopefully their mother will not take the law into her own hands in the future. The children must be returned to Australia. Lebanon is a violent country racked by civil war where the children are hardly safe. Australia has taken many refugees from Lebanon and they owe us a favour (such as the release of the mother). Lebanon must also observe the rule of law. Paul Knobel, Lyneham Glyphosate in the ACT Six days ago, the EU Parliament called on the European Commission to restrict the use of the toxic herbicide glyphosate, best known in Monsanto's Roundup formulation. Glyphosate was last year determined to be "probably carcinogenic" by the World Health Organisation, and the resolution calls for no approval in or close to schools, public parks and playgrounds. As it was being sprayed yesterday in Canberra's suburbs, one is tempted to ask what actions, if any, the ACT management have in place for removing this dangerous product. A public statement made by someone with some real responsibility and knowledge on the subject is required, now! Rex Williams, Ainslie TO THE POINT LEAVE EASTMAN ALONE Two of the murderers of refugee Reza Barati will serve only five years in jail in Papua New Guinea. But, in Canberra, David Eastman, who has served 19 years after his conviction in the dodgy 1995 trial, faces another legal assault by the same set of AFP and DPP adversaries all this at ACT taxpayers' expense. Chris Smith, Kingston THE DOYEN KNOWS Jon Stanhope's views on AMC visiting hours (Letters, April 16) must be wrong. Why? The doyen of custodial services Ray Hadley on Radio 1206 says he is. Peter Conway, Braddon HYPHENS ON LOOSE What version of the English language was Michael Gordon ("Turnbull heads northside and loses his bearings", April 20, p1) using with such utterances as "10-minute, 74-day, and Governor-General"? Have we entered the era of the hyphen? Mr Gordon needs to remember the adage, "if you can't speak proper you can't speak clear". Jim Coats, Fadden CUSTOMERS WILL BE HIT As the ASIC money will be raised from a levy on banks ("ASIC to get back its lost $120m", April 20, p4) , you don't suppose there's any likelihood the big banks will pass it on to customers? Thos Puckett, Ashgrove, Qld SEXUAL GRATIFICATION So H. Ronald (Letters, April 20), what you are saying is that you encourage and support the singing of songs that promote the subjugation of females for the sexual gratification of males? David Grant, Murrumbateman, NSW LONG LIVE THE QUEEN Happy birthday, Elizabeth II, Queen of Australia. When we look around the world and see the dysfunction in so many republics we are so lucky to be a stable constitutional monarchy. Long live the Queen. Adrian Jackson, Middle Park, Vic NOT GULLIBLE ENOUGH Did Peter Comensoli ("Growing euthanasia statistics should be a warning", Times2, April 20, p5) honestly think that anyone would be gullible enough to swallow his brainwashed opinion when his article blatantly uses his own previous work as supposedly unbiased references? Jason Craig, Fadden THIEVEABLE PROPOSALS When are we going to be informed of the Coalition's Plan B if the Labor Party should run out of thieveable policy proposals before July 2? Les Brennan, Sunshine Bay, NSW Email: letters.editor@canberratimes.com.au. Send from the message eld, not as an attached le. Fax: 6280 2282. Mail: Letters to the Editor, The Canberra Times, PO Box 7155, Canberra Mail Centre, ACT 2610. "Surely the men and women who endured such sacrifice merit more." Anzac Day. And the nation is summoned to remembrance. This year the focus will shift. Away from a bungled landing on the beaches of Gallipoli, to the killing fields of the Western Front. Already the government has invested millions in developing a "Remembrance Trail" across France and Belgium. Now it will turn to the completion of Australia's showpiece for the centenary, the $100 million redevelopment of the Australian War Memorial in Villers-Bretonneux. Illustration: Andrew Dyson The exhibitions planned for Villers-Bretonneux will be centred on a series of biographies. John Monash will be there and presented as the architect of victory in 1918. So too will a number of VC winners, men whose heroism singles them out in the mass mechanised murder of industrialised war. If the government listens to an expert panel of historians it has appointed, some stories will grapple with quite confronting questions. The first Australian Imperial Force may have been a formidable fighting machine, but Australians also had a reputation for not taking prisoners. In killing the enemy, something of their humanity died as well. Windfall may not add up The government's super proposal is a reform deserving widespread support ("PM's super crackdown" 20/4). Whether this measure will yield the $2 billion in extra tax is another matter. Extra tax of this order would require deductible contributions for this group of taxpayers of $13.33 billion. With a maximum deductible amount of $30,000, this implies that there are at least 440,000 taxpayers with taxable incomes between $180,000 and $300,000, all of whom will make the maximum deductible contribution. In the 2013/14 year, there were less than 390,000 taxable incomes above $180,000 of which less than 300,000 fell into the range $180,000 to $300,000. Given the relatively subdued wage conditions of the intervening period, it is surely improbable that the numbers in this income bracket would have increased by about 50 per cent. While this measure would make a worthwhile contribution to budget repair, it is unlikely to contribute anything like half the foreshadowed $16billion savings. Alan Noble, Brighton The tabloid take Those who think that the resolution of the Lebanese custody dispute represents an unmitigated disaster for Channel Nine have obviously never watched the Australian TV news satire Frontline. Right now, I can picture a Channel Nine producer headlining a spreadsheet: "The Homecoming". Following a "dignified" month or so of emotional recovery, prepare for a ratings bonanza of fraught, but inspiring, interviews with the TV crew, their families and the mother at the centre of the egregious kidnapping episode. Tabloid media is a chameleon-like beast. Setbacks become victories. Ethics are dispensable. Unethical behaviour can be transmuted into "heroism". Enlightenment comes last. And, in the real world, Sally Faulkner still hasn't got her children. Jon McMillan, Mount Eliza Children pay the price The worst aspect of parental child abduction is, as Julie Szego rightly points out ("Parents not the real victims in child abduction story", Comment, 21/4), the detrimental and long-term effects on the children including emotional, psychological, social, cultural and legal dimensions. The best aspect, if there is such a thing, of the Faulkner-Elamine case is that the consequences of the direct involvement of a well-known Australian media team has drawn attention to the plight of children in such cases. Hopefully, this will provide the catalyst for Australian media to take a more considered, less emotive and less sensational approach to reporting on parental child kidnapping, with a view to facilitating a better community understanding of the complexity of rights and issues involved including parallels with other situations involving children, family formation, family breakdown and parent-child separation across borders. Penny Mackieson, Richmond Show some remorse Nine's management should be deeply embarrassed and apologise for the whole saga that has tarnished the reputation of not only the Australia's broadcast industry, but our country. The federal government needs to ensure that no individual or company profits from the attempted kidnapping in Lebanon. The community will not tolerate blatant profiteering from this possibly criminal behaviour. Justin Robertson, Carnegie Self-protection mode An early lesson from the Royal Commission into Institutional Response to Sexual Abuse is that the first duty of authorities must be to those in their care, not to the institution. The response of Melbourne Girls Grammar in expelling one student and suspending two students found with illicit substances smacks of self-protection ("Second school hit by drug scandal", 21/4). What the students need is the care and protection of the school and its "very strong wellbeing program to support our students, specifically concerning illicit substances, alcohol and anything else that is potentially dangerous and damaging". The school has acted to protect itself, not the girls to whom they have a duty of care. Some are slow on the uptake. Rob Lake, Rye Performance problem The Australian Bankers Association assures us that banks will continue to treat their customers fairly. This assurance despite the fact that fairness has not been a key objective over the past decade. If the Treasurer believes ASIC has been doing a good job, why has it taken whistleblower Jeff Morris, and reporters such as Adele Ferguson, to expose the recent scandals? The Treasurer does not seem to realise that it is the systemic culture of the banks that needs fixing, and one cannot be sure that ASIC, on past performance, even with more resources, is capable of being the fixer. Bruce MacKenzie, South Kingsville Getting away with it Let's get this straight. Because of the deplorable behaviour and corporate culture of the big banks, providing shonky financial planning advice, not paying valid insurance claims, and basically giving the public a one-finger salute, ASIC has been given an extra $137 million to bring the banks to task. Instead of taking it on the chin and paying the costs through their multibillion-dollar profits, the banks will probably pass these costs on to their customers, again giving the public a one-finger salute. Why? Because they can. Barry Lizmore, Ocean Grove Full exposure Inappropriate conduct by the finance sector was happening long before the government slashed ASIC's funding. Making the banks pay to restore this lost funding may be a neat trick, but will it actually make any difference to the conduct issue? Public transparency is the best and probably the cheapest disinfectant. Linda Brownstein, Swan Hill Insult to upper house I always thought the Senate was meant to be a house of review, not a rubber stamp. So how dare Malcolm Turnbull and his government call a double dissolution, only a few months before a scheduled general election, on an issue that is neither urgent nor a matter of national security? And how dare Mr Turnbull and his government take such cavalier risks with the political future and livelihoods of genuine, hard-working senators who are conscientiously just doing their job? If this is what is meant by nimbleness, innovation and creating opportunity and jobs for all, then god help Australia. Sandra Peeters, Ventnor Timing must be right Dean Wotherspoon (Letters, 20/4), with a double dissolution, both houses of parliament are elected for a new term of office, with the House of Representatives elected for three years and the Senate for six. The next lower house election for the House of Representatives will therefore be in 2019. The half Senate election will be conducted with this election as well with the two territorial senators from each of the ACT and NT also standing for election because unlike state-elected senators, they stand for election every three years. Rod Smyrk, Sunbury You're fired I have been a supporter of Ricky Muir and was going to put him number one on my Senate paper. However, having seen the photo of him holding what is virtually a pump-action shotgun and supporting its legalisation, he will be down the bottom of my voting paper ("Senator snipes in election video", 21/4). Colin McLean, Montrose A spoilt bunch Malcolm Fraser's suggestion (Letters, 20/4) regarding accommodation for our politicians in Canberra is common sense, practical, economical and fair to all. So is the Washington DC method of using a shuttle bus to and from the airport for US politicians, instead of a fleet of chauffeur-driven cars for individual Australian politicians so precious in Canberra. Ray Brown, Seymour At the tipping point? The huge swathes of pink and red (unusually hot) on the map showing land and water temperatures in March are deeply worrying, but it is the blue area south of Greenland which is most scary ("Record global heat, worst storm, reef dire", 21/4). While almost all the world's land and ocean regions had temperatures way above average in March, this patch of ocean in the North Atlantic had temperatures much cooler than average. This blue, cold area surrounded by hot pink has been around for some years. It appears to indicate a weakening in the North Atlantic Drift current and may be related to increased freshwater run-off from the Greenland Icecap. The importance of this current in maintaining the mild climate in Western Europe cannot be over-estimated. As a potential tipping point, this is as worrying as they come. Peter Lynch, Kew Sweet thoughts Do insects think ("The research is in: yes, insects think", 21/4)? A book More than Honey the Survival of Bees provides a fascinating example. Bees returning to the hive with news of a new source of nectar do a "dance" indicating its direction and distance. Other bees observing the dance, but exploiting another nectar source, return to the old source. However if, when they return, the old source has become depleted of nectar, they fly directly to the new source without having to return to the hive to follow the other bees' directions (a feat many humans are incapable of performing). It appears bees are capable of producing a mental map and plan with just 1 million neurons in their brain. Wayne Robinson, Kingsley, WA Dump the lingo Interesting the way the dunny/toilet block becomes a bathroom ("Ringwood Lake dunny tops toilet roll of honour", 19/4). It seems unlikely that anyone will be having a bath in this facility. Let's not adopt this American term for this convenience. Bill Pimm, Mentone AND ANOTHER THING ... Banks Scott Morrison will be "furious" ("Banks may pass on costs of watchdog", 21/4)? I'm sure the banks are "petrified". Ian Millar, Mordialloc It seems the Treasurer doesn't trust the banks to act ethically, which is why we need a royal commission. Rob Rogers, Warrandyte The big four may or may not directly offload the ASIC costs on to customers, but they will claim the costs against their tax liabilities. And the taxpayer will not be paying? Dawn Richards, Huntingdale Asking the banks to pay for ASIC to regulate them is a bit like asking robbers to pay the police to catch them. Paul Reid, Kyneton Society Good that the 60 minutes team will be home with their loved ones. Jails should be reserved for bad people. Not so much for the misguided. John Rawson, South Morang A hotly promoted 60 Minutes program about how their crew spent two weeks in a Lebanese jail will attract better ratings than a story about a mere custody kidnapping. Monty Arnhold, Port Melbourne Thank you, Aisha Novakovich, Medina Idriess, Ali Kadri and Muhammed Edwars ("What it means to be Muslim in Australia", 21/4) for your honesty. Yours are the stories that need to be told. Elizabeth Morris, Kennington The good news, Muslims, is that in Australia you don't have to be Muslim. Or Catholic, Hindu or Presbyterian. God doesn't mind. Francis Smith, Caulfield North Sport Sally Pearson is defending her 100m hurdles crown, not 400m ("Doubt Pearson at your peril", 21/4). Kuno Mikkor, Melbourne The AFL should scrap the "golden point" and in case of a draw at the end of extra time, award the premiership to the team with the higher percentage. Three of Sydney's major arts institutions will host a series of exhibitions of Australian art to be held every two years from 2017. But Carriageworks director Lisa Havilah said the creation of a new art biennial, called The National: New Australian Art, should not be seen as a vote of no confidence in the Biennale of Sydney. Carriageworks director Lisa Havilah, MCA director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor and AGNSW director Michael Brand say their new Australian art biennial will not compete with the Biennale of Sydney. Credit:Louise Kennerley "It's a biennial survey of international art including Australian art," said Carriageworks director Lisa Havilah. "This just has a sole focus on Australian art so not putting it in an international context." CRAFT FRESH! Craft, city, until May 14 The line-up of Craft's annual graduate show is devised with the help of craft and design professionals who view college end-of-year exhibitions. Of course, much student work apes the look of precursors studied as part of the educational process, but graduation can certainly herald a fresh start. Niamh Minogue's work on display at Fresh! for Craft. In this show of last year's cohort, 10 candidates from four institutions were in the running for three prizes. As in the past, RMIT dominated the field, with four graduates given the nod, among them Future Leaders prize-winner Alexsandra Pontonio, a committed furniture-maker, whose set of cold-pressed laminated plywood shelves with joinery of dovetailed Tasmanian blackwood and European ash will also be shown at the Milan Furniture Fair, in April, through the advocacy of design group Melbourne Movement. Overall 3,317 ,677,639 AMD transferred to the special account number opened by Artsakh Government Since April 4 up to April 20 overall 3,317 ,677,639 AMD was transferred by 4,350 legal and natural persons including transfers with dollars, euros and rubles to the special account number opened by the AR Government. 45,894,276 million AMD was transferred on April 20 by 155 persons. We would like to remind that the whole sum will be directed to further strengthening of combat readiness of the defense army. On behalf of the Artsakhi people, the Government expresses its gratitude to every contributor ensuring that each penny will have a noticeable value in the process of Artsakh security provision. Let us inform that there is a virtual POS-terminal in the website of the Ministry of Finance, where you can make your online transfers with VISA, Master and ArCa cards. The link of the page is below. http://minfin-nkr.am/?section=payameria/index And for the transfers to bank accounts see the following data: The acquiring bank-Artsakhbank CJSC Address- Kievyan St., 3, Yerevan, Armenia SWIFT` ARTSAM22 Receiver- The Ministry of Finance of Nagorno Karabakh Republic Account number` 22300612211100 (AMD). Account number ` 22300110153200 (USD). Account number ` 22300200153300 (Euro). Account number ` 22300400153100 (Ruble): The report of transfers is periodically updated in the website of the Ministry of Finance as well. Sam Rockwell, often smarmily sarcastic, was impressive in Moon. Let the record reflect that I don't happen to be part of that "we": I've witnessed each of those actors deliver at least one or two honest, accomplished performances in the course of his career. But, if I'm honest, there are stars I tend to approach with my arms crossed: I never found Kevin Costner to be a particularly interesting screen presence; he was often called the Gary Cooper of his generation, but by my lights that's because they were equally monotonous and inert. Sam Rockwell always exuded a smarmy sarcasm that left me utterly cold. I've never understood the appeal of Martin Lawrence, whom I find strident and one-note. For reasons far beyond my powers of explanation, whether it was The 40-Year-Old Virgin or Pitch Perfect, Elizabeth Banks never once made me laugh; to me, she was cut from the same kind of blandly generic cloth as Kate Bosworth and January Jones the female versions of such interchangeably attractive and preternaturally dull actors as Ryan Phillippe, Hayden Christensen and Sam Worthington. At this juncture, it's important to note that none of this is personal. I bear no hard-working creative artists ill will. When the lights go down, only the most uncharitable churl would be rooting for them to fail. I appreciate the sheer courage it takes to put oneself out there in any form actors who dare to put their entire inner and outer lives on display for our derision or delectation can only be admired. And yet, evaluating actors and their performances is deeply personal, because that's the only thing they bring to their work: their selves. Understanding what we irrationally like and dislike about certain actors helps get to the essence of what they do, which is to be an interpretive instrument through which the audience can understand a story's meaning and emotion. The only tools actors have for this job are their physical beings their faces, bodies and voices and their psychic beings, in the form of marshalling research, analysis and imagination to bring their characters to credible, emotionally-affecting life. Tickets to Splendour in the Grass have sold out. It took just over an hour for three day passes, single day and camping tickets for the music festival to sell out after they went on sale on Thursday at 9am. Considering the line-up of major acts such as The Cure, The Strokes, Sigur Ros and the return of Australian band The Avalanches, it's no surprise the event has proved so popular. Tickets to the 2015 festival sold out in under an hour. It's the Go Waaay Back Where You Came From of reality television, the ancestry.com of ancient origins, and it takes SBS's obsession with ethnic and cultural identities to new heights. It is DNA Nation, a new three-part series from Blackfella Films, the creators of Redfern Now and First Contact, and it promises to send three Australians "on an epic journey of genetic time travel to find out where they and the rest of us come from". And it will force Ian Thorpe, Julia Zemiro and Ernie Dingo to think again on the matter of the place they call home. "You are the very first Australians to use DNA to trace your ancient ancestry over 200,000 years of history," the obligatory Man in White Coat tells them in a trailer for the show released on Thursday. "You're going to be experiencing the life of your mother's mother up to 8000 generations ago." Zaha Hadid's work to live on in wake of her death Following leading architect Zaha Hadid's shock death from a heart attack last month, her London-based firm Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) has announced it will continue on without its founder and namesake. The late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. Credit:Kevork Djansezian The office will continue work on the 36 projects (in 21 different countries) that were in development at the time of the much-admired and often controversial Iraqi-born architect's passing. In a statement released by ZHA, the firm described Hadid as "in the DNA" of their operations and attitude. Knowing that the Turnbull government had the opportunity to make the super contribution permanent but chose not to while allowing the deficit levy to lapse, the Labor leader will be able to say the Coalition is keen to help high earners but indifferent to the circumstances of low ones. Shorten knows a bit about the low-income super contribution. He introduced it as assistant treasurer in 2012. It ought not to be contentious. It gives back to low earners the 15 per cent tax they've paid on superannuation contributions, up to a maximum of $500. As they are below the tax-free threshold, they shouldn't be paying it in the first place. The Turnbull government will acknowledge the problems inherent in taxing all super contributions at 15 per cent on budget night when it imposes a higher tax on more high-income Australians. If through inaction it allows low earners to revert to 15 per cent, it will show it isn't serious. It's a time bomb that can still be defused. Peter Martin is economics editor of The Age. Follow us on Twitter Labor's vote is 20 points down from its peak of 53 per cent in mid-2015, the height of the Abbott government's political woes. At 32 per cent, the Greens' primary vote among 18 to 24-year-olds is seven points ahead of the Coalition and just one point behind Labor's 33, highlighting the century-old social democratic party's problem with losing voters from the left. Buried in the rich data of recent opinion polling lurked a disturbing number for Labor Party apparatchiks: the Greens have amassed record support from Australia's youngest voters. While Ipsos public affairs director Jess Elgood noted an 8.3 per cent margin for error given the relatively small number of young voters surveyed, she said the April Fairfax-Ipsos poll result demonstrated the competition Labor would face from its left flank at the July 2 election. The figure also raises questions about the political wisdom of Labor's proposal to reduce the voting age to 16. The younger people are, the more partial they are to the Greens. Bringing in roughly 500,000 16 and 17-year-olds could be a major boost for their left-wing rivals. Labor senator Sam Dastyari, the party's 32-year-old shadow parliamentary secretary for youth, said the strength of the progressive vote deserved attention from his party. "This all presents a challenge and an opportunity for the Labor Party. It's a challenge because it demonstrates that there is a youth vote that requires a certain focus but it's an opportunity because when we actually present our case and talk about the issues, we can win their votes," Senator Dastyari said. It has been an eventful and perhaps ominous start to the unofficial election campaign in the knife-edge Victorian seat of Indi, where former Liberal MP Sophie Mirabella is trying to snatch back her old electorate from independent Cathy McGowan. What started with reports of shoving at the opening of a nursing home has turned into a showdown on national television, replete with accusations of reverse pork-barrelling and voter blackmail. Ms Mirabella has emphatically denied reports in a local newspaper, the Benalla Ensign, that she "very publicly pushed Ms McGowan out of the way" of a photo with federal Liberal MP Ken Wyatt at the opening of a new nursing home wing last week. Exclusive A regional Victorian man has pleaded guilty to sexually abusing his infant surrogate twin daughters and two young nieces from NSW - in a case certain to fuel debate about international surrogacy laws. The man was already abusing his nieces when he spent $44,000 to have the twins conceived overseas using a donor egg with the clear intention of sexually exploiting the children. He began abusing them when they were 27 days old and continued for seven months. The man also produced some of the most depraved exploitation material ever seen, according to the Australian Federal Police. The man was found to have been accessing child pornography for decades. Surrogacy laws including the legal aspects of international surrogacy are already being examined by a federal parliamentary committee. Two days after his alleged role in killing university student Jamie Gao, former policeman Glen McNamara made a discovery that worried him so much he decided he needed to go to Kmart. What he had found was a green backpack under the seat of a white Ford Falcon station wagon that had been used to dispose of Mr Gao's body. Mr McNamara told the NSW Supreme Court that, inside this backpack, he found two plastic parcels containing white crystals, some of which had spilled into the bag. A drug-addicted Sydney man has been jailed for at least 14 years for a string of armed robberies that culminated in the murder of a south-west Sydney fruit shop worker. Jame Phan, also known as Van Linh Dang, was found guilty of the murder of Kamran Yousaf, a worker at the Villawood Value Fruit Market, who died after being shot in the stomach and back on October 12, 2013. Victim: Villawood Value Fruit Market worker Kamran Yousaf. In the NSW Supreme Court on Thursday, Acting Justice Jane Mathews said Phan, 30, had battled addiction to heroin and methamphetamine for years and had a "low level of culpability" for the murder. "In my long experience overseeing murder trials, his is the lowest level of culpability I have ever encountered," she said. Action against import of products from Turkey and Azerbaijan (video) Members of Protest action against Turkish products today have gathered outside the Government building. They handed over a letter-petition to Department for Reception of Citizens and Discussion of Petitions of the Government. Member of the initiative Arman Ghukasyan told A1+, They said that they would answer the letter maximum in a month. In reply to the question which the initiatives alternative is in this issue, Arman answered, There are precise economics calculations that it is possible to get rid of the Turkish products in 2 years. There is an alternative to the Turkish production; it may be Iranian, Chinese and other markets. We also offer to free the micro-business of taxes for two years. In addition to these offers, there is also another offer, We offer to develop a draft, as there is no law in Armenia which bans the import of products from Turkey and Azerbaijan. It is known that two years ago Azerbaijani garlic was found in one of the stores. There must be also the societys will; since 1991 we have got used to importing Turkish products. Today we offer alternative ways. Taking into account national dignity and security reasons, we should understand that Turkey is the backer of terrorism, noted member of the initiative. Police have charged 11 people with drug offences after a major bust on the Gold Coast overnight. Detectives from the Gold Coast Major and Organised Crime Squad found more than 300 kilograms of marijuana at a number of locations and it all began after they intercepted a car in Parkwood. 300 kilograms' worth of marijuana has been seized in raids across south-east Queensland. Credit:Rohan Thomson Police allege the car contained about 90 kilograms which triggered a number of other search warrants to be executed at properties in Southport, Caboolture and Redcliffe. There they found the rest of the stash, weighing about 210 kilograms. The total haul has an estimated street value of more than $3.5 million. She came to Australia to start a new life. Instead, Maricar Virata says, she soon found herself working up to 18 hours a day, was on call 24 hours a day, and was paid as little as $3 an hour for her troubles. Then she was sacked by email when she went home to the Philippines on holiday. The Fair Work Ombudsman has launched court action to prosecute an employer it says underpaid four Filipino workers on 457 visas, including Ms Virata, by more than $260,000 between 2012 and 2015. Maricar Virata, at home in Darwin, found herself working up to 18 hours a day and getting paid as little as $3 an hour. Credit:Glenn Campbell Their employer, Michael Parkes who co-owns the Comfort Inn in Halls Gap, and the Quality Inn Country Plaza in Queanbeyan, with his wife Rowena told Fairfax he would fight the case in the Federal Circuit Court next month. He said "a lot of lies" had been told but he would not elaborate. A man who jumped onto train tracks at Flinders Street station caused major delays across the rail network for more than an hour on Thursday night. A police spokeswoman said police had been called shortly before 9.30pm and were still talking to the man nearly an hour later. He was subsequently arrested and taken to hospital for an assessment. Man on the tracks at Flinders Street. The incident caused major delays for nearly all metropolitan train lines while the city train station was shut down on police request. Affected lines initially included Craigieburn, Cranbourne, Frankston, Hurstbridge, Pakenham, Sandringham, South Morang, Sunbury, Upfield, Werribee and Williamstown. Three teenagers have been charged over the Moomba Festival riots, which saw violence spread across the Melbourne CBD. Three young men, a 14-year-old, a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old all presented at police stations on Friday following a police appeal. Youths took to the streets of the Melbourne CBD to create havoc during Moomba. Credit:twitter.com/@russmulry The arrests come as investigations continue into the violence that broke out in Federation Square and nearby streets on Saturday, March 12, forcing revellers to flee in terror. Police used capsicum spray to subdue groups of youths who were fighting and throwing chairs in City Square on Swanston Street. Two men who manage a Melbourne pub have appeared in court and been remanded in custody on drug trafficking charges after a large quantity of drugs were allegedly seized during recent police raids. Fairfax Media revealed on Thursday that drug taskforce detectives allegedly found thousands of ecstasy pills, methamphetamine and cash during separate raids at Brunswick's Railway Hotel and Melbourne nightclub Two Floors Up. The Railway Hotel in Brunswick. Credit:Jason South Paul Polito, 37, the manager of the Railway Hotel, appeared via video link before Melbourne Magistrates Court on Thursday, on charges of trafficking ecstasy, amphetamines and cocaine. Chris Lytras, 47, believed to own the hotel, separately appeared before a magistrate on similar charges. It also found that the hospital ignored police suspicions the man may have attacked a "high" number of children at the hospital over many years. The volunteer, Harry Otto Pueschel, has since died. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse said former CEO of the Royal Children's Hospital, Dr John de Campo, mismanaged a 1997 complaint from a woman that she had been molested at the hospital during the early 1980s by a long-serving volunteer. A suspected sexual predator volunteered at Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital for 17 years, and when the allegations against him surfaced, the hospital's CEO discouraged the victim from pursuing police action. The Royal Commission heard the woman, known as "AWI", had been a patient in the hospital's respiratory unit in 1981 when she was 12 years old. During her stay, she said two volunteers, including Mr Pueschel, repeatedly molested her. AWI told the commission Mr Pueschel stroked her breasts in the hospital's playroom, while his penis was erect. This occurred a few times a week during her stay. Another male volunteer also touched her genitals during a game called "sardines". When she was 16, the teen said she attempted to contact the hospital to report the abuse but was kept on hold for too long, so lost confidence and hung up. In December 1997, she reported the abuse to the then CEO, Dr de Campo, in a two-page email. She said she suspected at least one other girl had been abused by a man named "Harry" who frequented her ward with another male volunteer, and asked the hospital to investigate whether he was still working with children and whether other complaints had been made about him. Medical files belonging to at least a dozen patients have allegedly been stolen from a Melbourne GP clinic and dumped in a park, exposing people's most intimate personal history. The privacy breach also puts the patients at risk of identity theft because the files included their full name, address, date of birth, medicare number, and medical history. The documents were so comprehensive they included details about who the people lived with and what medications they were on. Medical records found in Isabella Williams Memorial Reserve in Sunshine. Dr Peter Andrianakis from Prime Medical clinic in Sunshine West said while staff were moving from an office in Fitzgerald Rd to Glengala Rd over the Easter break, somebody illegally entered the old clinic and "forced open a locked disposal unit containing copies of old patient care-plans". He said these documents were meant to be destroyed by an approved contractor and were awaiting collection. Instead, they appear to have been dumped in a local park. A woman who was walking her dog in Isabella Williams Memorial Reserve in Deer Park on Sunday found a burning pile of rubbish that included the medical records, old magazines and pamphlets for an old locum doctor service. A 52-year-old North Perth man has been charged in relation to the abduction and sexual assault of two young children. Police will allege the man enticed a 4-year-old girl and 5-year-old boy from a holiday school care program in North Perth - sparking a manhunt on Tuesday. CCTV footage was released as part of the manhunt. Credit:WA Police He has been charged with three counts of sexual penetration of a child under 13 years of age and two counts of deprivation of liberty. He was arrested late on Wednesday afternoon in relation to another matter, but was later questioned over the alleged attack in North Perth. A Maddington man who wound back car odometers by some 400,000 kilometres was fined $13,000 and ordered to pay costs of more than $9000 in the Perth Magistrates Court on Wednesday. He was found to have bought and sold vehicles without a dealer's licence and for having sold four vehicles with their odometers wound-back. The odometers were wound back a collective 400,000 kilometres. Credit:Getty Mohammad Farhad Momand was fined $5000 for unlicensed dealing between April 2013 and August 2014 and $2000 for each of four vehicles sold with altered odometers. He was also ordered to pay costs of $9187. Police searching a home in North Perth over a child sex attack may have been acting on a tip-off given directly to the Police Commissioner himself during a radio interview on Thursday morning. Detectives and forensic officers cordoned off a house three streets away from Hyde Park on Thursday afternoon and reportedly took a man in for questioning. Chilling vision of the man accused of the crime in North Perth. Earlier in the day, a caller to Radio 6PR, Peter*, said he had seen CCTV footage of the wanted man leading his two victims, aged 4 and 5, down a street and recognised him straight away. "I know who it is, I rang up Crime Stoppers, I was on the line for 20 minutes waiting, it just kept waiting and waiting so I rang up the police and spoke to somebody there," he said. NK issue discussed at PACE ad hoc sub-committee sitting (video) Today before the PACE plenary sitting, the sitting of the ad hoc Sub-Committee on Conflicts between Member States of the Council of Europe was held. This ad hoc sub-committee has operated for already one year. The sitting was closed. From the Armenian delegation Hermine Naghdalyan and Naira Zohrabyan, as representatives of the authorities and opposition, took part in the sitting. As the CoE doesnt have a mandate for conflicts resolution, this sub-committee is trying to find a line, which will be able to use its potential in order to support the ongoing processes, said Hermine Naghdalyan. She says that this sum-committee tries to exchange information. The Armenian side used this platform to present the events on the Karabakh-Azerbaijani Line of Contact to the delegates. It again angered Azerbaijanis. Hermine Naghdalyan noted that the Armenian side presents the facts confirmed by the International Committee of the Red Cross. By the way, when the journalist of A1+ requested those materials from the Head of the Azerbaijani delegation, the latter suggested applying to the Red Cross. He refuted the fact of mutilating the bodies of Armenian servicemen, though, those photos were published on the website of Baku University. Police have charged 140 people and seized large amounts of drugs, weapons, cash and stolen items valued at $2 million in raids targeting Perth's suburban dealers. The items included $1.25 million worth of ice, more than $250,000 in cash and sizeable amounts of cocaine, ecstasy and weapons including homemade sub-machine guns. Police also managed to recover stolen property worth more than $300,000. "The occupants of these properties are causing significant harm in our community, and in many cases are also bringing misery to their law abiding neighbours," police commander Pryce Scanlan said. A 35-year-old man from Perth's southern suburbs has died after his car was involved in a head-on collision with another on Wednesday afternoon. The crash, which brings WA's 2016 road toll to 60, occurred near Boddington around 5pm at a bend on Pinjarra-Williams Road. A WA Police spokeswoman said the Piara Waters man, travelling in a Honda Civic, died at the scene. The occupants of the Toyota Hilux, a 43-year-old man and three young children under ten years old, escaped with only minor injuries. "Investigators would like to speak to anyone who may have seen the crash, or saw either vehicle prior to the crash," the spokeswoman said. But employees reacted angrily, and many in Hong Kong joined them in drawing a link between the publication of the Panama Papers story and the dismissal of Keung Kwok-yuen, the No. 2 editor in the newsroom. The Chinese-language paper, Ming Pao, said in a statement with no mention of the editor by name that it was cutting staff because of a "difficult business environment". Hong Kong: A senior editor at one of Hong Kong's most prestigious newspapers was fired after the publication of a front page devoted to a single story: the offshore holdings uncovered by the Panama Papers of some of the city's tycoons, celebrities and politicians. Ming Pao is one of a number of newspapers around the world that have worked with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which this month began releasing a trove of millions of documents linking some of the world's wealthiest and most powerful people to secretive offshore companies. A Ming Pao staff member puts a sign up on a wall outside of Ming Pao headquarters in Hong Kong. Credit:Anthony Kwan The paper's employees, represented by the Ming Pao Staff Association, confronted the chief editor, Chong Tien Siong, in a tense meeting on Wednesday afternoon, asking for a more thorough explanation of why Keung lost his job, said Phyllis Tsang, the chairwoman of the association and a participant in the meeting. Keung's firing also set off a round of condemnations from political leaders in Hong Kong. Many say the city's press freedoms are being steadily eroded by what they see as the growing influence of mainland China. Hong Kong was promised a high degree of autonomy over its affairs as part of an agreement that led to its return to Chinese control in 1997 after more than a century and a half under British rule. "Cost-cutting is unacceptable as a reason for dismissing Mr Keung," Alan Leong, the leader of the pro-democracy Civic Party, told reporters. "It shows how media owners and editors do not even bother to come up with better excuses anymore - no one would believe such an excuse." Review - 2016 Dodge Durango -This Dodge Does What? By Larry Nutson 2016 Dodge Durango This Dodge Does What? SEE ALSO: Totally Dodge By Larry Nutson Senior Editor and Bureau Chief Chicago Bureau The Auto Channel Recently I was walking through the residential garage where I park and took the chance to ask a fellow parker how she liked her new three-row SUV. Her response was positive, adding the comment that they bought their new vehicle because they have three children and needed the room inside. Thats exactly where the 2016 Dodge Durango fills the bill in the very popular SUV-buying trend we find ourselves in these days. Its cabin is spacious and roomy providing more than many other competitors SUVs. The Durango is all about capacity. Once we thought only the minivan filled that bill. Well, SUVs have taken over that role and then some. The Durango can carry up to seven people. Behind the third row seat youll find 17.2cuft of space. Fold the 50/50 split third row and that space grows to 47.3 cuft. Now fold the 60/40 split second row and you have 85.1cuft. To add to that, the Durango can tow a trailer weighing up to 6,200lbs with the V6 and 7,200lbs with a V8 model. I recently spent a week driving a 2016 Durango Citadel AWD model. The base price on this Citadel is $43,895. The 2016 Durango pricing starts at $30,495 for the SXT rear-wheel drive version and goes up to $44,490 for the new Citadel Anodized Platinum AWD model. Dodge also offers an SXT Plus, Limited and an R/T model, each in either RWD or AWD. The price step for AWD is $2600 and I would opt for this if I lived in a northerly clime that gets lots of winter rain or snow. Or, of course, if you occasionally like to venture on unpaved roads no matter where. The standard engine is a 295HP 3.6-L V6. The sporty R/T comes with a 360HP 5.7-L V8, and this engine can also be optionally had on the Citadel with AWD. An 8-speed automatic transmission makes the connection to the drive wheels. New this spring on the Citadel model is the optional Anodized Platinum appearance package, which adds new 20-inch Satin Carbon aluminum wheels and Platinum grille, exterior mirror caps, fog lamp bezels, exterior badge, door handles and lower sills. The Citadels Anodized Platinum appearance package has a U.S. MSRP of $1,095. Theres also a new Brass Monkey appearance package available on the Durango Limited model. It features 20-inch Burnished Bronze aluminum wheels, a Gloss Black grille and exterior badge, and a monochromatic exterior. The Durango Limiteds Brass Monkey appearance package can be had for $995. My Durango drive experience included a highway road trip. Weve all been hearing a lot about autonomous or self-driving cars as of late. Well, it will be awhile for them to show up. But we do have today many semi-autonomous, or better said, driver assistance features that really help quite a bit to make for safer driving. My Durango tester was equipped with a rear back up camera and Park Sense rear park assist with Stop as standard equipment. In an optional $1,995 Technology Group this Durango also was equipped with Full Speed Forward Collision Warning Plus, Adaptive Cruise Control with Stop, Advanced Brake Assist and Blind Spot and Cross Path Detection. At a recent presentation to the Midwest Automotive Media Association (MAMA), representatives from the National Safety Council and the University of Iowa said that 95 percent of car crashes are due to driver error. However, new vehicle technology can help prevent or greatly reduce the severity of the crash. The rear view camera and parking sensors have been around for a few years and are big help especially when backing a large SUV like the Durango in tight spaces in a crowded city. Blind spot monitor is on many vehicles and that helps quite a bit especially on crowded roads. The newer technology like adaptive cruise control that will maintain a pre-selected distance to a vehicle in front on the highway and automatic emergency braking are two technologies worthy of your consideration when buying a new vehicle. The National Safety Council and the University of Iowa have teamed up to provide an online, mobile- and tablet-friendly resource My Car Does What.Org to help educate consumers. The websites homepage lists the 28 technology and safety features present on vehicles today. This webpage is a great resource to consult when you are car shopping. You might say to yourself I dont need that or be unwilling to spend the extra money. Consider that one collision will probably cost you inconvenience, car repair bills, paying your insurance deductible, and maybe an increase in insurance rates. Oh did I mention injury. Its all about reducing accidents to prevent injury or even death. On my Durango road trip I explained the Adaptive Cruise Control with Stop to my wife . She remarked lets not test that. Well I did. The Durango nicely and smoothly kept the pre-selected distance as I approached a slower vehicle in my highway lane. The slowing rate was gradual and not jerky or disturbing and the re-acceleration rate the same. I used the stop function too. I just steered, with both my feet on the floor, and the Durango did the rest bringing us to a smooth stop behind a vehicle in front. Twenty vehicle makers have pledged to make automatic emergency braking a standard feature by 2020. IIHS estimates that as many as 20 percent of the 5 million vehicle crashes that occur annually in the U.S. could be prevented by this technology. Road trips are also good for making fuel consumption measurements. We got 23 mpg on a 250 mile highway run. Not bad considering my spirited driving style. EPA test-cycle ratings for the Durango V6 AWD are 21 combined mpg, with 18 city mpg and 25 highway mpg. On my return highway leg I didnt do as well, getting about 22 mpg. We did have a headwind on this segment and perhaps I was bit more spirited or off and on the throttle more due to traffic. Auto stop-start technology is now standard for the V-6 engine and that helps a bit to reduce fuel consumption in city traffic. Ive had various past experiences owning SUVs to provide the transportation needs for my family. Although my wife and I are now back in the sedan-mode we found the Durango quite comfortable with a very nice luxury feel to the interior. Being the first to complain about bad seats, my wife exited out road trip with no aches to share. The Durango is fairly big but not so big that its unwieldy to handle. You can learn more about the 2016 Dodge Durango at www.dodge.com. Comparisons to other large SUVs can be made right here on Totally Dodge Coming back to driver-assistance technology, please do give it fair consideration. It may save the life of a loved one. 2016 Larry Nutson, the Chicago Car Guy (c) 2016 The Auto Page Syndicate Find More Independent Dodge Content Than Anywhere Else On The Web GAC Motor Releases Their New Luxury Sedan, The GA8, To The Market GUANGZHOU, China - April 21, 2016: China's best automaker, GAC Motor, released its highly-anticipated next-generation luxury sedan, the GA8, at an unveiling ceremony and press conference at Guangzhou Stadium on April 16. GAC Motor invested over RMB1 billion (USD$154 million) over the course of five years to research and develop the GA8, the all-new sedan targeting the high-end market. The company has also revealed the details of the GA8's design and configuration. The model comes with cutting-edge power and electronic systems, matching technology and world-class materials for interior decoration to provide the most convenient driving and riding experience. The sedan features an all-around intelligent driving assistance system that can navigate, raise collision alerts and actively assist in braking. A 360-degree panorama visual imaging system makes driving and riding the GA8 much safer and easier. The second generation smart guide on board the vehicle also allows drivers to connect to service specialists for technical support with the touch of a button, offering 24-hour free roadside service and a four-year warranty covering 100,000 kilometers. "The GA8 is a strategic model that GAC Motor spent five years developing. It has withstood the challenges from previous appearances as service cars for both the NPC and CPPCC meetings in Beijing last month, as well as the Second G20 Sherpa Meeting in Guangzhou last week, where it was praised for its overall performance and high level of comfort. We are confident that our self-developed GA8 will open a new era for luxury sedans in the Chinese and international market," said Wu Song, General Manager of GAC Motor. At the conference, Chairman of the Board of GAC Group, Zhang Fangyou, delivered the key to the first owner. The first global GA8 sedan owner is a French national, Gilbert Ranoux. He not only has a deep affection for China, but also particular feelings for GAC Motor. He said, "The products of GAC Motor have seen great improvement, including a nicer design and more advanced technology. I believe that the GA8 will become a very popular model, and that China will soon have its own globally famous auto brand, and the brand should be GAC Motor." The GA8 is powered by GAC Motor's second generation 320T engine. The 320T is supported by technologies such as a low-inertia E-Turbo turbocharger that can bring down 35 percent of inertia, GCCS combustion control that improves the combustion rate by 22 percent while lowering the gas consumption by 15 percent, as well as DCV VT double-span variable valve timing. The streamlined vehicle has a 2907mm wheelbase, peak torque at wide range from 1600-4500 RPM and gas consumption as low as 35 MPG. "The GA8 was developed following the strictest international standards. GAC Motor's research and development bases across China are working together to bring technical innovation and the next generation of vehicles to the fore, while our worldwide support system is dedicated to providing the best VIP service to all customers," Wu Song said. The GA8 sedan has officially released in Chinese market in Guangzhou at a price starting from RMB169,800 (USD$26,217). About GAC Motor About GAC Motor GAC Motor is a subsidiary company of GAC Group which ranks 362nd on the Fortune 500 list of enterprises. The company is committed to developing and manufacturing world-class quality vehicles, engines, components and auto accessories. GAC Motor ranked in the top eight among all brands in the 2015 China Initial Quality Study from J.D. Power Asia Pacific, the highest of all Chinese brands for the third consecutive year. Auto Lab Live April 23, 2016: Car Question or Concern? Call Toll Free 888-692-7234 April 23, 2016 Car Question or Concern? Call Toll Free 888-692-7234 Auto Lab is a 27 year old interactive automotive-focused New York area radio call-in show hosted by Professor Harold Wolchok. Each week a cadre of experienced hands-on automotive experts are in-studio with advice for the New York area's 12 million people, providing listeners with honest, practical and street-smart car repair and buying advice. Auto Lab is also about the automotive industry, its history, and its culture, presenting the ideas and advice of leading college faculty, authors, and automotive practitioners in a relaxed, conversational interactive format. http://www.theautochannel.com/cybercast/theautolab/autolab_live.asx 8 to 9 am on WMCA Radio Listen Live on WMCA Radio 9 to 10 am on WNYM Radio Listen Live on WNYM Radio New programs air Saturday mornings. After listening to the first hour on WMCA, you will need to close that window and click the link to listen to the second hour on WNYM. After listening to the first hour on WMCA, you will need to close that window and click the link to listen to the second hour on WNYM. Listeners can hear the past 18 years of archived Auto Lab shows as simulcast on www.theautochannel.com. Listen - Auto Lab Page (Includes Audio-on-Demand Archives, Auto Programs at Community College Database, Guests Pictures April 23, 2016 - Car Question? Straight Answers From These In-Studio Auto Lab Experts Harold Bendell- Major Auto Fred Bordoff-Bronx Community College, CUNY Tim Cacace-Master Mechanix David Goldsmith - Urban Classics Auto Repairs Joseph Guarino-Joe Guarino's Auto Repairs Peyton Knight-Knight's Automotive Repairs Joanne Porcelli, Esq Michael Porcelli - Central Avenue Auto Repairs & I-CAR Nicholas Prague- MTA and Rockland Community College, SUNY April 23, 2016 - Correspondent Reports - Car Reviews, Opinion and Other Automotive News and Information Robert Erskine, Senior European Correspondent, Suffolk England TAKE OUT THE LIGHTS! Robert Sinclair-AAA Northeast DOHA AND DIESEL IN THE NEWS, GAS PRICES CONTINUE TO CLIMB Sharon Sudol & John Russell Senior Correspondents 2016 KIA SEDONA SX Russ Rader, Vice President Insurance Institute for Highway Safety SPEED LIMIT INCREASES CAUSE 33,000 DEATHIS IN 20 YEARS Steven Tyler, Ford Police Marketing Manager FORD F-150 SPECIAL SERVICE VEHICLE REPORTING FOR DUTY SUBSCRIBERS OF UCOMS ALL TIME BEST OFFER TO ENJOY ADDITIONAL BENEFITS Armenia-Azerbaijan: EU sets up monitoring capacity along the international borders PACE co-rapporteurs on Armenia concerned by reports of alleged war crimes or inhuman treatment perpetrated by Azerbaijans armed forces There is still 35% gender pay gap: Sona Ghazaryan Global Finance Names Ameriabank the Safest Bank in Armenia Mikayel and Karen Vardanyans provided 136 million AMD support for the overhaul of the Myasnikyan statue, which was in unsafe state of disrepair Believe me, as a representative of a country which uses the Schengen system very often, it is quite important. Vardanyan I really look forward to having answers from the Azerbaijani side for these alleged gross human rights violations: Secretary General I call on Armenian and Azerbaijani parliamentarians to use this Assembly as an agora of opportunities President Tiny Kox UCOMS SPECIAL OFFER OF THE UNLIMITED INTERNET IS NOW TERMLESS There is no place for the death penalty in a State that respects human rights: PACE General Rapporteur EU and CoE call on two Member States that have not yet acceded to this Protocol Armenia and Azerbaijan to do so without delay An urgent debate requested on "The military hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan". UCOM AND PES-PES CONTINUE COOPERATION WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF EDUCATIONAL PROJECT The statement of the meeting between Prime Minister Pashinyan, President Aliyev, President Macron and President Michel of October 6, 2022 Largest Corporate Bond Program at the Securities Market of Armenia Completed Successfully Google Ad The statement of the Defender on the video of the execution of Armenian PoWs by the Azerbaijani armed forces LEVEL UP ONLY FOR STUDENTS: UCOM OFFERS X2 AND X3 MORE INTERNET STATEMENT BY SECRETARY ANTONY J. BLINKEN This criminal act is another proof that the Armenophobia policy. Tatoyan Nikol Pashinyan, Nancy Pelosi discuss a number of issues related to the Armenian-American agenda and regional developments Delegation by Nancy Pelosi Accompanied by Alen Simonyan Visits Tsitsernakaberd Memorial Complex Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi Arrives in Yerevan Armenian Revytech, global technology leader SAP and financial services software specialist SAP Fioneer sign a cooperation agreement With 120 million drams donated by Mikael Vardanyan, the defenders of the homeland will be treated in a new building OSCE Chairman-in-Office and OSCE Secretary General call for immediate cessation of hostilities along Armenia-Azerbaijan border Statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Artsakh USA Embassy Message for U.S. Citizens ANCA Issues National Call to Action to Stop Taxpayer Funding of Aliyevs Aggression Volkswagen and US Justice Reach Agreement On Consequences Of VW Diesel Lies Washington DC April 21, 2016; David Shepardson writing for Reuters reported that Volkswagen AG and the Justice Department reached a deal in principle to address excess diesel emissions in nearly 600,000 polluting vehicles that will include buyback offers and a possible fix, a federal judge said Thursday. U.S. Judge Charles Breyer said the settlement is expected to include a buyback offer for nearly 500,000 2.0-liter vehicles and a possible fix if regulators agree on it. The settlement will include an environmental remediation fund and additional compensation to owners to sell back or have vehicles fixed. The government and Volkswagen have until late June to complete a final "consent decree" that will face public comment before taking effect. Editing for Reuters by Chizu Nomiyama EXPERT COMMENTS From Rebecca Lindland, senior analyst, Kelley Blue Book: The plan for Volkswagen going forward involves buy backs, modifications and for lessees, returning vehicles. But this matter is by no means resolved, since penalties and fines still loom. Additionally, Volkswagen has to establish a fund for appropriate remediation efforts and commit other funds to promote green automotive entities. We dont know yet the full financial impact on Volkswagen. While this has provided SOME guidance for owners and lessees, it is clear this matter is a long way from being settled. I believe this is the first time in the history of defeat device cases that the consumer will be compensated. Prior violations all were resolved through fines and penalties to the manufacturers. This could set a new precedent for these kinds of violations. From Karl Brauer, senior analyst, Kelley Blue Book: The nature of Volkswagens diesel issue is reflected in this initial, complex ruling by the U.S. legal system. There will be no simple fix because the vehicles involved cover a broad spectrum of models and production years. This is only the first step in a long road to final resolution. Volkswagens diesel customers now have a sense of what their options will be, but numerous details need to be finalized. Volkswagens total costs remain clouded, but beyond customer restitutions we know the company will have to fund various environmental efforts to offset emissions violations. From Michelle Krebs, senior analyst, Autotrader: A federal judges blessing of Volkswagens framework of a plan to take care of its customers is a long-awaited first step, but much more work needs to be done to flesh out the details in the coming months. Indeed, it is a fairly sketchy framework at this point. Meantime, Volkswagen customers will have to stay patient a bit longer until all of the details of the compensation deal are hammered out. Then they will have to carefully weigh all of their options, which include having Volkswagen buy back their cars, have them repaired if that is possible, or return their lease cars. From Detroit News:Volkswagen plans to pay $1 billion to owners of its diesel cars that were rigged to cheat federal emission standards as the automaker tries to move past a scandal that has badly damaged its image in the United States. , Complete Detroit News Report Birmingham architects acquired by ambitious national practice A BIRMINGHAM architects has been acquired to support the ongoing growth of a national design practice. Stride Treglown has added the architects division of the Bournville Village Trust to capitalise on opportunities both in the second city and beyond. The terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed. Now one of the largest practices in the UK, Stride Treglown has grown through a combination of acquisition and opening new offices; Birmingham will be its tenth location. The practice has previously worked on a number of projects in the Midlands, including a 1,116-bed student housing scheme in Coventry which was recently granted planning consent. Founded in 1900, BVT is one of the oldest housing associations in the country. It provides housing and estate management services to 8,000 homes of mixed tenure and 25,000 people in Birmingham and Telford. Bournville Architects has designed and delivered sustainable communities in the Midlands for BVT and built a portfolio of housing, education and care projects for clients throughout the UK. Following the acquisition, Bournville Architects will be renamed Stride Treglown but will continue to operate from its current offices in Bournville and provide a range of services to BVT, as well as building its local client base further. The combined team has already collaborated on a bid for the design of a historic village trust in the south of England. Stride Treglown chairman David Hunter said with an increasing number of enquiries and focus on the Midlands as an area of growth, the practice leadership felt the time was right to open an office in the region. We are delighted to be opening our new Birmingham office with the acquisition of Bournville Architects. When we began the process, we took soundings from clients, consultants and colleagues in Birmingham and the Midlands region and Bournville Architects very quickly emerged as the ideal organisation. With a growing workload in the area we are excited about the opportunities that the new office will open up for Stride Treglown. This acquisition absolutely follows our ethos of providing a service locally whilst being able to draw on a huge bank of expertise from throughout the UK. Ian Tipton, formerly director of Bournville Architects, who will lead the new office added: The team here is excited to be joining Stride Treglown, its an extremely good fit both in terms of culture and workload. We have a proud and significant track-record working within Bournville Village Trust and are looking forward to being able to share our experience even more widely. Peter Roach, chief executive of Bournville Village Trust, said: Stride Treglown is an experienced and respected architects practice and by joining with the organisation, Bournville Architects will be able to share its expertise nationally as part of one of the largest practices in the UK. We are proud of the work that Bournville Architects has delivered for the Trust, including the regeneration of the Shenley estate and our flagship care village in Birmingham, and we look forward to continuing to work with them under their new ownership. Speaker of Parliament of the Republic of Korea interested in Karabakh issue On April 20, the RA NA Deputy Speaker Eduard Sharmazanov met with the Speaker of the Parliament of the Republic of Korea Chung Ui-hwa during his working visit to Moscow. The sides discussed the bilateral programmes aimed at the development of parliamentary cooperation and a concrete agreement was reached for the support being expected by the Parliament of Korea to the NA and cooperation programme. Mr Chung Ui-hwa was interested from Eduard Sharmazanov in the Armenian-Azerbaijani problems, the progress of education and economy in Armenia: the RA NA Deputy Speaker presented comprehensive information regarding the issues. During the conversation Eduard Sharmazanov talked about the Nagorno Karabakh problem, the large scale aggression unleashed at the beginning of April by the Azerbaijani armed forces, the handwriting of ISIS terrorist organization noticed in Azerbaijans actions, as well as the organisation of education in the RA and the current situation of economy. The RA NA Deputy Speaker has documented that one of the main obstacles of the quick development of the RA economy is keeping Armenia factually under blockade by the Turkish authorities. The Speaker of the Korean Parliament thanked the RA NA Deputy Speaker for presenting detailed information and assured that the Korean Parliament will continue the close cooperation with the Parliament of the Republic of Armenia. Rachel Eade appointed to key advisory banking role ONE of the most-respected experts in the West Midlands manufacturing industry has joined Clydesdale and Yorkshire Banks to advise on their support to the UK automotive sector. Until the end of March, Rachel Eade was national automotive lead for the Manufacturing Advisory Service. She was forced to leave her post when the Government unexpectedly pulled the plug on the support service at the end of last year. Ms Eade, who received an MBE for services to the UKs car manufacturing sector in 2014, will be based in Birmingham, and will have a UK-wide role as part of Clydesdale and Yorkshire Banks specialist automotive team, which was established in 2015. In her 20 years in the industry, Ms Eade has developed an unparalleled knowledge of the automotive supply chain. In her roles as operations manager of supply chain initiative Accelerate and then with MAS, she has worked with more than 5,000 companies. Her role at Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank, working alongside head of manufacturing Kevin Rimmer and automotive directors Heather Griffin and Meg Salt, will be to support the banks new and existing customers in the supply chain. She will work closely with an automotive team set up to specifically support businesses in the sector, with a particular focus on those which require tooling finance. Manufacturers in the supply chain typically invest between 30,000 to 1m for each new piece of tooling, but tend not to see a return on that investment for around 18 months. The banks financial support includes a rolling tooling finance facility which allows automotive manufacturers access to funding as and when they require new tools, rather than having to apply for funding every time a new tool is required. Kevin Rimmer, Clydesdale and Yorkshire Banks head of manufacturing, said: Rachels experience working with UK manufacturers and supply chain partners is unrivalled. She is regularly called upon to work with industry bodies and support programmes, to drive innovation in the sector and to develop the next generation of industry leaders. She will work closely with our customers to unlock opportunities and improve supply chain efficiencies. Ms Eade said: Clydesdale and Yorkshire Banks are committed to the growth of the UKs automotive sector, and I am looking forward to supporting new and existing customers, and the banks own industry experts. The outlook for UK manufacturers and those in the supply chain, while buoyant, is not without its challenges. Skills shortages remain a constant issue, which presents future recruitment hurdles to overcome. Monarch consults on job losses after hitting turbulence JOB cuts by Monarch will affect its Birmingham operations, although it is the proposed closure of the airlines maintenance hangar at Manchester Airport that will bear the brunt of the job losses. Around 140 jobs are at risk after Monarch launched a consultation with its staff. Several roles at Birmingham are under threat plus 13 at Luton, with more than 120 engineering jobs dependent on the Manchester site. Andy Mackay, Monarchs interim managing director, said: We are fully committed to retaining talent, skills and expertise within our business. In the event that redundancies become necessary, we will offer alternative roles to all those affected, with relocation to our other facilities. The news was branded a severe blow by union Unite, which has more than 1,000 members working for Monarch in engineering and cabin crew roles. Unite regional officer, Paul Bouch said: The company blames a lack of work for these job losses and not the level of summer bookings. Unite will be giving maximum support to our engineering members affected at Monarch in the days and weeks to come. We have our first meeting with management tomorrow (Thursday 21 April) where we will be pressing very hard to avoid compulsory redundancies and also for redeployment, wherever possible. In October 2014 Greybull Capital took control of Monarch from the Mantegazza family. Major success as employment and housing schemes to move forward For Dogs, its Trick and Treat Its almost Halloween, a great time to teach your dog a trick and give him a treat. Most trainers are fans of trick training. Its not as silly as it... Muzzle is not a bad word If you see a dog in a muzzle, you immediately think the dog is aggressive. Right? Well, this is not always true. Unfortunately, seeing a dog in a muzzle carries... Oprah Winfrey, the TV star, is living her best life. At least it certainly seemed that way Wednesday evening at the Tribeca Film Festival. Our lord and savior was in New York to talk, in some respects, about her lord and savior. She premiered the first episode of her upcoming OWN drama series Greenleaf, about a pastors family at a Tennessee megachurch, and how a tragedy forces them all to reckon with their faith and sins. Its Winfreys first recurring role on a scripted series in two decades, and, whoo-ee, its a doozy. The first episode of Greenleaf alone lobs hints of storylines that deal with religious corruption, crises of faith, familial warring, infidelity, incest, suicide, homosexuality, and all the cover-ups and secrets required to keep all those things under wraps when they involve the pastors family at a megachurch with over 4,000 members at worship. Winfreys plays Aunt Mavis, the keeper of those secrets and family outsider, who enlists the help of the shows faith-questioning heroine, Gina (a stunning Merle Dandridge), to help her bring it all to light. Being able to do this show is a dream come true for me, Winfrey told a riotous crowd at the Tribeca Tune-In screening. Its not just that Winfrey is clearly having a ball playing the shows magnetic rabble-rouser. (In the opening credits for the first episode, Winfrey is listed as special guest star.) Its that shes tangibly joyous about what she thinks the show will be able to do for her OWN network. Original content brings it onto a whole new playing field, and judging by the audiences hoot-and-holler reactionall culminating in a fit of tears at the emotional last sceneit should be a home run. When I started this network five years ago every word that was written, the narrative for OWN was struggling, struggling, struggling network, she said. Our team got together and had the dream of being able to do this kind of scripted television. She credited Tyler Perry, who created, writes, directs, and produces the hit OWN soap opera The Haves and the Have Nots, with laying the foundation for the network in the scripted space. I can do it and I can do it cheaper than anyone, is what Winfrey said Perry told her. And from that foundation the network is now able to move onto Greenleaf and, later this year, Queen Sugar, which was created by Selma director Ava DuVernay. What this taught me is that dreams, as big as I can dream and as big the dream that God has held for me, things get even bigger and better, Winfrey said, preaching to an audience soaking up her sermon. And it wasnt the first time the post-screening Q&A became a bit of a religious experience. Winfrey appeared alongside Greenleafs creator Craig Wright, director Clement Virgo, and stars Merle Dandridge, Lynn Whitfield, and Keith David. They kicked off the event with the story of Winfreys first meeting with Wrightan alum of Six Feet Under and Dirty Sexy Money, two shows Greenleaf is a clear descendant of. Wright explained to Winfrey that before he made it in Hollywood, he was a preacher himself. As a joke I said, Was it a black church? Winfrey laughed. And we had this conversation about church and what the black church in particular means in our community. We started going back and forth about it and he said, That sounds like a series. I said, I think it is. The narrative would revolve around the return of this familys prodigal daughter, a woman who didnt just leave her family behind when she left them but also her faith. To call the homecoming dramatic would be the understatement of the century. Midway through the premiere theres a dinner scene that was 13 pages long and featured a dozen characterseach alternately crying, yelling, chastising, pleading, deceiving, and believing over the course of it, and all of it centered around questions about the daughters commitment to Christianity. Virgo compared the script to a Tennessee Williams play, telling Wright, Youve created Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with these characters. What I keep telling people about this show is its not a soap, its not a sermon, Wright said. Its a story about a woman who returns home because she misses the family and the faith that she left behind. The shows MVP, at least in the premiere episode, is Lynn Whitfield, who plays the megachurchs regal, calculating first lady Mae Greenleaf. For her part, Whitfield was the MVP of the panel, tooand a panel with Oprah Winfrey on it, to boot. When Winfrey told her, Youre the only person I wanted to do it, Whitfield replied shocked. Is that true? she said, pausing to laugh. Say it again. She also hit on what makes the show, which tonally calls on elements of Dynasty, Melrose Place, Empire, and Tyler Perrys most serious dramas, seem powerful. And she elucidated why, for all of its lofty discussion of religion, it never seems too broad or convoluted. What I loved is that this is a story weve not seen on television, she said. Then, to escalating applause and with perfect poise: What we get to say in this piece is its not the messenger that you must follow. You have to continue to follow the message, and build your personal relationship. Because we dont know who were following. And we need to question who we are following and what we really believe. So for me to be a part of a show that says you better keep your personal relationship with God together, its such an honor for me to be a part of that. Sure, theres a heavy-handedness to the show at times. There is with any soap opera (which, despite Wrights claims, this very much is), so you can imagine the level a show in that genre reaches when God becomes a character. But for the explosive emotions and tornado of issues the characters face, the show escapes any bait to cross into camp. I think a problem when we try to connect to religion in the white church, inevitably it degenerates either into satire or sanctimony, Wright said. Even though youre criticizing and questioning the faith, this show takes the faith really seriously and respects it. It doesnt seem silly. It doesnt seem laughable or foolish. It actually seems deeply grounded and important to the lives of the characters, so you take their struggles seriously. Perhaps we should expect such nuance. This is Oprah Winfrey, after all. Trading in high emotions and channeling all of our spirituality isat least Ive hearda bit of her specialty. All my work is all about the same thing, she said. Its about showing people new ways of seeing themselves and seeing the problems and flaws and dysfunctions that we all have, and shining a little light on that, being able to lift that just enough that you can see yourself in that. Pausing to punctuate, she concludes: This is what Im always striving for no matter what Im doing. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump have found plenty to disagree about recently, and now they are taking their fight to the bathroom. The issue at stake is the highly controversial HB2 bill in North Carolina which restricts bathroom use for trans people by only allowing individuals to use restrooms that correspond to the gender of their birth. The issue has been largely ignored on the Republican side of the presidential race, aside from words of support from Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich questioning whether is was necessary. Until today. Cruz, a staunch conservative, has said that the country collectively has gone off the deep end, in the backlash to this bill. Thats not a reasonable position, it is simply crazy and the idea that grown men would be allowed alone in a bathroom with little girlsyou dont need to be a behavioral psychologist to realize bad things can happen, and any prudent person wouldnt allow that, Cruz told Glenn Beck Thursday morning. And Trump, well, he took a much different tack on The Today Show. Asked about the HB2 bill Thursday morning, he co-opted a liberal stance on the issue: Let it be. Look, North Carolina did something that was very strong, and theyre paying a big price. And theres a lot of problems, Trump said, tiptoeing around the rim of the issue. I heard one of the best answers I heard was from a commentator yesterday saying leave it the way it is right now. There have been very few problems. He went on to say that Caitlyn Jenner, a trans woman, would be allowed to use whichever bathroom she would like in Trump Tower. How noble. This of course incensed the Cruz campaign, who has taken Trump to task in the past for his lack of true conservative values. So Trump says we should give him the nomination AND let dudes who want to be girls use the bathroom with my daughter. #NeverTrump, Cruzs top strategist Jason Johnson fired off in a tweet. He has not responded to a request for comment from The Daily Beast. Cruz himself seized on Trumps remarks at a Maryland rally Thursday afternoon. Donald agreed with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in attacking the state of North Carolina for passing their bathroom ordinance, Cruz said. And Donald on television this morning said gosh he thought men should be able to go into the girls bathroom if they want to. Now let me ask you: Have we gone stark raving nuts? However this line of attackCruz, the stalwart of conservatism, vs. Trump, the anything-goes secret liberalis nothing new for the Cruz campaign. In February, shortly after the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Cruzs campaign released an attack ad featuring Trumps remarks during an appearance on Meet the Press in 1999. Im very pro-choice, Trump said over 15 years before his presidential campaign began. The ad suggests that a Trump administration would bring about a liberal Supreme Court justice, upending the legacy of Scalias pro-life stance. Life, marriage, religious liberty, the Second Amendment. Were just one Supreme Court justice away from losing them it all, the narrator dramatically says. We cannot trust Donald Trump with these serious decisions. The irony though is that Cruz is standing alone on this issue among the Republican candidates. And hes not going after the guy who first took up the mantle against the bill. Kasich previously expressed a similar position to Trump, suggesting that the law was polarizing during an appearance on Face the Nation last month. In our state, were not facing this, so everybody needs to take a deep breath, respect one another, and the minute we start trying to write laws, things become more polarized, thingsthey become more complicated, Kasich said. Why do we have to write a law every time we turn around in this country? Cant we figure out just how to get along a little bit better and respect one another? I mean thats where I think we ought to be. Everybody chill out. Get over it if you have a disagreement with somebody. So thats where I am right nowand unless something pops up, Im not inclined to sign anything. Kasichs campaign has not responded to a request for comment about him agreeing with the real estate mogul on a major issue. But maybe all the fracas is for nought. Trump did change his position on abortion half a dozen times in about three days. Trumps campaign has yet to release a statement refuting what the candidate said. Theres still a lot time left in the day. To no one's surprise, Trump altered his stance less than 24 hours later in an interview with Sean Hannity. "I think that local communities and states should make the decision," he told his Fox pal. "And I feel very strongly about that. The federal government should not be involved." Update 4/22/16, 9:48 am: The story was updated to reflect Trump changing his mind on his own position. The Ninja Burglar got his moniker from the all-black outfitcomplete with mask and hoodhe wore while committing more than 160 burglaries over a 10-year period, mostly in Staten Island, but also in upstate New York and Connecticut. He would drive through a well-to-do neighborhood until he saw his next target and enter in darkest night via the second- or third-floor window, often using a ladder he took from a nearby residence. He would usually slip into the master bedroom, because that is where people tend to keep their valuables. Roughly half the time, the house was occupied. He would often search the room and take what he wanted while the owners slept in that very room. He sometimes would spy unseen on people in their most intimate moments. He would other times be standing hidden in the shadows, invisible in his all-black outfit as a person walked right past him. If he came upon a safe, he would return another night with tools to open it. His total score in all the burglaries is believed to total at least $4 million in cash, jewelry, and other valuables. Once he was nearly caught, and he fled into a grassy area beside a school. He covered himself with leaves and remained undiscovered while the police searched for him. He was so prolific and brazen and elusive that the Staten Island Advance called the Ninja Burglar the boroughs top news story of 2007. He continued on for year after year, committing one perfect crime after another, meticulous even in his departure. When he left he would return the ladder from where he got it and thus there was not the suspicion that he was using those ladders, Staten Island District Attorney Michael McMahon said. And, until a slipup up in Connecticut that was his undoing, the burglar never left forensic evidence. Not a single fingerprint. Not so much as a fragment of DNA. Theres no question that when he applied his craft, if you will, he was very good at it and left not a trace behind, McMahon said on Wednesday when announcing that the Ninja Burglar had finally been brought to justice. But before movie and TV producers start scrambling for the Ninja Burglars life rights, they should know that he is no gentleman thief. McMahon passed along an observation that another Staten Island official had made regarding the notorious burglar they now knew to be 47-year-old Robert Costanzo. This is not the case case of Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, McMahon said. McMahon reported that Costanzo is a registered sex offender, having committed at least five rapes, the first in 1989. He was 19 when he broke into a Staten Island apartment where an elderly grandmother was sleeping. He raped her at knifepoint before tying her up and fleeing with whatever valuables he could find. After that, Costanzo fled to Kissimmee, Florida, and got a job at a Toyota dealership. He also raped four women at knifepoint during burglaries, two within an eight-day period, leaving a considerable amount of DNA on the bathrobe of the fourth victim, a Walt Disney World worker. He fled again after he answered the phone at the dealership and a detective began asking about an employee named Robert Costanzo without realizing who was on the line. In December 1991, Costanzo was back in New York and got into a shootout with the police during a drug deal in Harlem. He was convicted on rape, weapons, and drug charges in 1992 and sentenced to a maximum term of 19 years. He was paroled after 12 years. He worked as a welder until his employer learned that he was a sex offender and fired him. He might very well have resumed breaking into houses anyway. In his next round of burglaries, Costanzo took far greater care not to get caught. He dressed in black and kept this face covered and wore gloves. He managed to abstain from further rapes for fear of leaving DNA. But he was not so cautious that he refrained from burglarizing occupied houses. He must have liked padding around people as they lay unsuspecting in their beds. He may have gotten a rush of power such as every rapist seeks. He also may have reasoned that when folks are home, so are whatever valuables they might have gone out with. He would take valuables, cash, watches, occasionally designer handbags, McMahon said. He said he liked to give [the handbags] to his friends, if you will, as gifts. He lived on a middle-class street in Staten Island with a woman and a child. He went about his life as if he were just another guy who worked nights and maybe gambled a bit. Pretty much leading a normal life, McMahon said. Costanzo sought to keep the police from discerning a pattern by choosing no particular night of the week to hit a house. Detectives nonetheless became sure that a large number of burglaries were being committed by a single black-clad individual. They came to call it Pattern 16. The public called the perpetrator the Ninja Burglar. And Costanzo would later indicate to detectives that he was not entirely displeased when his crimes became the talk of Staten Island. McMahon noted, I think that there was certainlysadlysome pride in that. In October 2014, NYPD detectives assigned to the Staten Island District Attorneys office met with investigators from New Jersey and upstate New York. By happenstance, they spoke to a detective from Saratoga Springs, New York, who advised them that her department was investigating a similar residential burglary pattern and that the main suspect was a Staten Island residentCostanzo, McMahons office would later report. The Staten Island investigators compared their cases with the one in Saratoga Springs and later with ones elsewhere in New York and in New Jersey. They placed Costanzo under physical and electronic surveillance. Costanzo slipped away to Connecticut, and maybe the pressure made him get sloppy. He broke into a house in Farmington that had a floor safe in a closet, but rather than come back another night with tools, he ordered an elderly woman to open it while pressing a knife against her neck. As she was still kneeling by the now-empty safe, Costanzo stepped away. She heard him make a cellphone call and was even able to hear a voice message come on. After Costanzo fled, she called the police, and she did not forget to tell them about the cellphone call. Detectives checked the surrounding cell towers and determined that a cellphone with a New York City area code347had been used to call a man in New Britain at the time of the burglary. The man initially played dumb, but then he confessed to driving a man named Robert Costanzo to the vicinity of the house in question, picking him up after the burglary. When the Farmington detectives sought to track down Costanzo, they discovered that he was a sex offender and that he had failed to verify his address every 90 days, as required by law. That gave the U.S. Marshals a reason to join the hunt. In November 2014, Costanzo was arrested. He had doubly slipped up during the Farmington burglary by leaving behind some DNA. The detectives took a sample from him, and it matched. Back when he was charged with the Florida rapes, Costanzo had agreed to plead guilty if he was allowed to do his time in New York and be near his family. The detectives and McMahons office now offered Costanzo a similar deal in this case. Costanzo agreed and made a detailed confession on videotape over the course of two days. Many of the burglaries had occurred more than five years before, the statute of limitations on such crimes in New York state. On Wednesday, Costanzo appeared for arraignment in Staten Island criminal court. The man who had crept into more than 160 homes in all black now stood before a judge in a light tan sweatshirt and matching sweatpants. The woman and girl with whom he had so often been seen while living an apparently normal life now sat at the back of the courtroom. He waived his right to have the case heard by a grand jury. Afterward, McMahon held a press conference and announced that Costanzo had agreed to plead guilty to three burglaries. The deal would involve a considerable number of yearssaid to be in the double digitsto be served in New York state. McMahon said the exact term would not be made public until Thursday, when Costanzo is expected to enter his plea and be sentenced. What McMahon was able to say on Wednesday with some rightful pride was this: The Ninja Burglar case has finally been solved. GUSH ETZION, West Bank On a recent cold foggy day at the entrance to Bethlehem, Israel Defense Forces Lt. Col. Yair Pinto pulled his military jeep to the side of the road to point out an overpass where, on occasion, young Palestinians rain down rocks on Israeli cars below. Pinto, a battalion commander whose infantry unit was responsible for this north-west sector of Gush Etzion, a restive part of the southern West Bank, seemed preternaturally calm despite being at the doorstep of a major Palestinian citywhich was likely the point. Despite the six months of unrest wracking the West Bank, and despite being in a solitary jeep, he seemed to be intimating that there was little to worry about. And what of those youths, or anyone more serious, who might materialize above on the overpass? The expectation is that the Palestinian Authoritys security forces will take care of it, he said. I dont feel there isnt someone to trust on the other side. Mondays bus bombing in Jerusalem that injured over a dozen people might make that argument seem implausible. Hamas reportedly claimed responsibility for the attack, which despite the relatively small size of the explosive device does suggest a reasonably sophisticated terrorist infrastructure. But, in fact, unrest on the West Bank has declined significantly since December, with the numbers of Palestinian terror attacks and demonstrations dropping steadily month on month. For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been quick to take credit for the overall drop in violence, attributing it to the governments strong, responsible, and methodical policy implemented by the various security services. It was left to the official Shin Bet assessment to highlight the overlooked fact that has also helped in containing, however tenuously, this latest round of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the work of the Palestinian Authority Security Forces themselves. Cooperation between the IDF and PASF has held firm, a point every Israeli security official, like Pinto from the battalion level and on up to the chief of staff, emphasizes repeatedly, despite nearly 30 Israeli and 200 Palestinian deaths in the last half-year. As Palestinian General Intelligence chief Majid Faraj told Defense News in January, the PASF had thwarted 200 attacks against Israelis since last October alone, arresting terror operatives and Islamist activists and confiscating weapons. Indeed, this month PA General Intelligence tracked down three Palestinian youths who had been missing for days. According to Israeli press reports, the youths were found in the hills outside Ramallah, armed with guns and hand grenades ahead of a planned terror attack. This was just the latest sign of what Faraj, in the interview, called a deliberate Palestinian policy on the path to statehood. We fought for many decades in a different way, and now we are fighting for peace, he said. So I will continue fighting to keep this bridge against radicalization and violence that should lead us to our independence. Faraj paid dearly for these public statements, drawing condemnations from many quarters of Palestinian society, not least the militant Hamas, for what is popularly viewed as collaboration with the enemy. Its not uncommon for Palestinians to call the PASF sub-contractors of the occupation, a phrase heard repeatedly in the West Bank. For this reason Palestinian security officials rarely speak openly on the matterin particular since Farajs interview. But if we go back to 2014, to a heavily fortified compound incongruously perched next to an amusement park on a hill high above Ramallah, we can find a senior official from the PAs Preventive Security agency holding forth on the topic of security coordination with the Israelis. As its name suggests, Preventive Security is the intelligence arm tasked with internal stabilitythe Palestinian FBI, or as its otherwise known, the Hamas hunters. The senior official explained to me then that security cooperation between Israel and the PA hinges on daily and weekly contacts, and meetings on all levels, from brigade commanders in the field to security chiefs like him. From a security perspective there is not much difference of opinion with the Israelis we share the same interests, he said. In most cases, he added, the focus was on security hazards and changes which threaten the stable security situation on both sideslike Hamas, and increasingly over the course of the recent unrest, ordinary Palestinians, overwhelmingly young, who pick up a knife and decide to head out to inflict harm. According to Israeli military officials and press reports, Palestinian intelligence has taken to monitoring social media, looking for telltale signs of incipient violence and interdicting the potential attacker ahead of time. In the school system, educators issue alerts for any truant students, soliciting assistance from parents in tracking down the individual and ensuring that he or she isnt on the way to commit an attack. As Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told Israels Channel Two this month, Our security services go into the schools to search in the students bags, to check if they have knives In one of the schools we found 70 boys and girls with knives. We took the knives from them, we spoke to them and we told them that this is a mistake: We dont want you to kill and to die. We want you to live and for the other to also live. Seventy knife-wielding kids in one school might seem an odd admission to make, providing succor to those intent on blaming the wave of violence on official and deliberate Palestinian incitement starting from the top. Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett has called Abbas a terrorist, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month charged Abbas with helping to inculcate a new generation of young Palestinians with murderous hatred for Israel. Even cursory reviews of Palestinian media uncover untold paeans to violence; Abbass Fatah party, including at times the president, publicly extols the virtues of the young shahids shot dead while targeting Israelis. So there is indeed truth to the incitement charge and genuine cause for concern. Abbas in the Channel Two interview readily admitted that incitement exists, although hedging the charge by calling attention to incitement on the Israeli side too. Even more telling, though, is the fact that the PA in recent months has taken major steps to curb official incitement, a positive shift confirmed to The Daily Beast by a senior IDF officer responsible for the West Bank. Abbas ultimately feels the need to walk this tightrope between the passions of his disillusioned and despairing people and the interest in maintaining stability on the West Bank. Its a question of legitimacy and confidence on the part of the PA as it struggles to return law and order to Palestinian society. The early stages of the unrest last fall were the PAs nadir, according to the senior IDF officer. Back then, the PASF initially disappeared from the streets, he said, taking a softer stance against demonstrators marching on Israeli checkpoints (plainclothes security agents simply made sure that protestors were not armed). Now, however, uniformed PASF are back in plain sight, actively suppressing demonstrations before they reach friction points with the Israeli military and settlers (like at the entrance to Bethlehem). As several IDF officers and international diplomats in Jerusalem told The Daily Beast, the PASF has navigated the tumult better than many expected, managing to maintain its cohesion, professionalism, and discipline. The PASF, numbering nearly 30,000 armed men, has only seen three isolated instances of its officers taking part in the current violence. This is in sharp contrast to the days of the Second Intifada (2000-2005), when PA security officers stripped off their uniforms and turned their guns on Israeli soldiers and civilians. The renewed decade-long effort by the U.S. to train and equip the PASF, to the tune of approximately $100 million per year, has clearly borne fruit. In some ways its the most successful part of the entire Peace Process effort, said a veteran former diplomat with knowledge of the training mission. The IDF, to be sure, still conducts almost nightly arrest operations in Palestinian citieswhat the Shin Bet assessment termed ramified counter-terrorist operations primarily aimed at Hamas operatives and inciters on social media. Israel is still the ultimate guarantor of security in the West Bank. Yet such raids require a high level of coordination with the PASF, who stand down as Israeli units pass by, despite such raids badly undermining the legitimacy of the PA in the eyes of its own people. Once we needed a division to enter [the Palestinian city of] Jenin, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon said last October. Two days ago we did it with a small force. The PASF, though, arent the only armed group to have stood down thus far. Almost as important, the grassroots militia of the ruling Fatah party, the Tanzim, has not gotten involved in the unrest either. The Tanzim, along with its terrorist arm the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, are believed to have at least a few thousand armed men in the West Banks various refugee camps. Abbas and other Fatah officials are known to have met with Tanzim leaders, and whether by persuasion or coercion the Tanzim have not, to date, followed through on their many public threats of violence. If they do, Israeli security officials would view that as a game-changer. I dont see the Palestinian street coming out [to support the unrest], Lt. Col. Pinto observed as he navigated the fog-shrouded roads of Gush Etzion. People dont want to see an escalation. Pinto, a veteran of the Second Intifada, recalls the days when each individual demonstration would see several thousand Palestinians squaring off against Israeli security forces. In contrast, on the worst day of the unrest last fall, the IDF estimates 5,000 demonstratorstotalin nearly a dozen locales took to the streets of the West Bank. It is telling that the largest West Bank demonstration in a decade took place not in the last several months, but rather in the summer of 2014, at the height of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. On one night, an estimated 20,000 Palestinians marched on the Qalandiya checkpoint connecting Ramallah with Jerusalem. In interviews afterward, several PA officials explained that the demonstration, rather than being a spontaneous outpouring of emotion, was actually organized and led by Fatah. It was a means for the Palestinian leadership to let the people vent out, the Preventive Security chief told me then, and to direct peoples anger against Israel and not the PA. Despite over six months of unrest and a litany of internal political problems, the Palestinian leadership has not felt the need to repeat this move. On the contrary, it has been working with Israel to de-escalate. While the declining levels of attacks are a positive indication, the coming weeks will prove crucial, especially in the wake of the Jerusalem bus bombing, the first such attack on public transport in three years. The impending Passover holiday period, and Ramadan in early June, will test the security relationship between the PA and Israel even more. The bigger question, though, is whether such a policy is sustainable given populist pressures on both sides and, perhaps more importantly, whether the policy can outlive its biggest advocate, the 81-year-old Abbas. I hold on to security cooperation, Abbas explained in the Channel Two interview, because if we give up on it, there will be chaos here. There will be rifles, there will be explosives, there will be gunmen, who will pop up everywhere and want to enter Israel. I put my hands on them and deny them. Without security cooperation, he added, a blood-drenched Intifada would break out. Last month, in the small city of Beni-Mellal in central Morocco, two men were dragged from a private home, beaten by a mob (on camera), and then arrested by the authorities for homosexual acts. It's a case of punishing the victims, said Graeme Reid, the director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Program at Human Rights Watch. And indeed, one of the men was convicted almost immediately for sexual deviancy and public drunkenness and sentenced to four months in prison and a fine of 500 dirham (US $52). Two of their attackers were convicted of assault, but received only two-month suspended sentences, according to a press release issues by HRW. But then came the outcry. The video of the attack, showing the men bloody, naked, and crying, was shared widely on social media, both in Morocco and internationally. And in a surprise move last week, April 12, a Moroccan judge released the two men who had been attacked, while jailing four of the men involved in the assault. The case shows the power of social media to expose what had previously been kept secret. A co-founder of Aswat Collective Against Discrimination Based on Gender & Sexuality, an LGBT rights group in Morocco, who requested anonymity for security reasons, told The Daily Beast that while the overall situation in regards to LGBT rights is getting worse, it has started getting national and international attention, which is a good thing. Yet the attack and the arrest also illustrate the wider impact of anti-gay laws such as Moroccos Article 489, which outlaws lewd or unnatural acts with an individual of the same sex. Far greater than the laws actual reach, in terms of people arrested, is its role in inciting violence against LGBT people. The Moroccan government incites violence by maintaining Article 489, which does not allow gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, transgender persons and queers to access justice, said the Aswat spokesperson. Hence the impunity of the aggressors, For example, in discussing a similar anti-gay attack in the Moroccan city of Fez last year, Justice Minister Mustafa Ramid said that we should not let people enforce the law themselves ... but the persons involved should not provoke society, because society is like this. This kind of victim-blaming is common in these cases, but Aswat firmly rejected Ramids characterization of Moroccan society. There is no one standard LGBTIQ life for the whole community, the spokesperson said, and the degree to which someone experiences discrimination depends heavily on social class and geographical location. Not all the international attention to the Beni-Mellal attacks has been helpful. On April 11, as the second of the two men attacked in Beni-Mellal went on trial, approximately 100 people showed up to demonstrate in support of the attackers, according to Morocco World News. Two activists from France, part of the European feminist activist collective FEMEN, were arrested for attempting to stage a topless counter protest. They were subsequently deported from the country for trying to damage public morals. Last year, when two other FEMEN activists initiated a similar protest in Rabat, Aswat issued a statement sayingAswat Collective would never participate in activities such as that of FEMENs in Morocco simply because such actions are a contradiction to our vision and approach. We believe in different, more peaceful and productive forms of activism, which do not depend on gaining attention through provocation and shock. In Morocco, 99 percent of the people identify ethnically as Arabic or Berber, and 99.9 percent are Muslim. It remains to be seen whether the reversal of fortune in the Beni-Mellal case represents a one-off incident, or a potential turning point. Aswats first priority is to document and follow the cases of arrests and violations resulting from Article 489 in hopes of getting it overturned. Hard data about any kind of homophobic incidents, whether or not they are reported to the police, is almost impossible to come by. I've seen [official] numbers, said Eric Goldstein, the deputy director of Human Rights Watchs Middle East and North Africa Division. I think theyre garbage. As a result, its impossible to know the extent of the laws effects. Its also impossible to know how many other Beni-Mellal-style attacks are taking place away from the glare of social media. Were it not for that video, its quite possible that the victims would still be in jail, and the perpetrators of the attack would still be free. But abolishing Article 489 is only the first step. Eventually, Aswat told The Daily Beast, it hopes to pursue non-discrimination laws that would protect LGBT people and other marginalized populations from this kind of government-sanctioned abuse. In the meantime, at least two victims of that abuse appear to have been rescued by the power of the camera. Ombudsmans report on atrocities committed by Azerbaijani military forces Nagorno Karabakh Republic (Artsakh Republic) Human Rights Defender (Ombudsman) Interim Public Report On Atrocities Committed by Azerbaijani Military Forces Against the Civilian Population of the NKR and the Servicemen of the NKR Defence Army on 2-5April 2016 Dear Colleagues, On April 02, 2016 Azerbaijani military forces breached the Ceasefire Agreement of 1994 by a well-planned large-scale massive attack. The most serious and bloody military operation along the entire NKR-Azerbaijani line of contact for the last 20 years was initiated, that resulted in gross mass violations of human rights. Today, the Interim Public Report of the NKR Ombudsman on Atrocities Committed by Azerbaijani Military Forces against the Civilian Population of the NKR and the Servicemen of the NKR Defence Army on April 2-5, 2016 has been published. The Report is in English and it analyses the Azerbaijani hatred policy towards people of Armenian origin and its horrific consequences that violate all international human rights standards with certain examples of torture and humiliation. The Report provides international human rights organizations objective assessments of Azerbaijans policy of inciting hatred and violence towards people of Armenian ethnicity. It also presents hate speech in the Azerbaijani mass media and social networks. The Report also reveals Azerbaijani high officials and other public persons activities aimed at spreading hate speech and incitement to violence. The Report presents the violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law; cases of attacks on civilian population of NKR, cases of inhuman treatment, as well as cases of torture and mutilation of the NKR Defence Army Servicemen. The Report will be sent to international human rights organizations, ombudsmens international institutions and to respective foreign institutions. I would like to thank the human rights NGOs of the Republic of Nagorno Karabakh for their assistance in drafting the Report, as well as all mass media representatives that have revealed in their publications the brutal cases of gross human rights violations. 18+ Warning: The Report contains pictures and descriptions of brutality and mutilation committed by Azerbaijani military forces. The report reflects pictures largely disseminated in the media. Sincerely, NKR Human Rights Defender Shushi, 21.04.2016 Shahen Harutyunyan to fight with another group: action ended (video) 21:00 A jostle broke out outside the RF Embassy, which quickly ended. Then the action participant Davit Sanasaryan was allowed to approach the Embassy building and hand over the box. After the end of the action Shahen Harutyunyan said that next time he would come to fight with another group, I dont want to come and not to be allowed to fight. Other organizers of the action urged to end the action. 20:28 The police officers made a wall on the sidewalk opposite to the RA Embassy and dont let the protesters approach the gates. The action participants prepared presents for the RF Embassy. They brought a box with a dirty shoe in it, This is the shoe of that Russian, let them take it, announced the action participants. They also showed a bottle and said that there may be diesel fuel in it, We will give it not only to this building, but also Baghramyan 26. The action participants tried to put the box beside the RF Embassy, but the police officers didnt let them cross the police cordon. 20:00 The action participants outside the MFA building once again reminded that they are not going to yield even an inch. They are against deploying peacekeeping troops in the NKR, The only peacekeeper of our country is our soldier, they were chanting. At the moment the action participants are heading to the RF Embassy. 19:50 The participants of the action vociferating We are to decide, We are Karabakh, No inch to enemy reached the MFA building, where scores of police officers have already made a wall. A man in civilian clothing started shouting outside the MFA building addressing the action participants, Shame on you! What are you doing? What will you achieve by shouting? We have 3 million Armenians in Russia, do you want to make them an enemy? What are you doing? This speech angered the action participants, Hey guy, you are not to decide! The police officers quickly removed the man in civilian clothing. 18:30 Short time ago a protest march has kicked off from the Liberty Square against Sergey Lavrovs visit to Armenia. Before the start of the march, participant of the action, member of City Council of Yerevan at Barev Yerevan fraction Davit Sanasaryan announced, We know what will be discussed here, thats why we say that we will not yield an inch, it is not a populist statement, it is respect towards our comrades. No one can trade at the expense of our soldiers blood. Heritage lawmaker Zaruhi Postanjyan distributed the photos of deceased soldiers to the participants of the action. The participants of the action also demanded freedom for Levon Hayrapetyan. Dozens of police officers follow the action participants. McLennan County will move a few offices out of the courthouse in order to keep its no weapons signs up at the building under a new agreement with the Texas Attorney Generals Office. The district attorneys office pretrial services and hot check department will move to the administrative area of the old sheriffs office on Columbus Avenue and out of the courthouse annex. Those with a concealed carry license will be able to carry in the old sheriffs office building but not in the courthouse or annex. County Judge Scott Felton said representatives from the AGs office visited the McLennan County Courthouse on April 13 to tour the building and the annex. The visit came after the AGs office notified the county it needed to remove signs at the entrances of the courthouse and the annex or face penalties for prohibiting licensed handgun holders from entering an entire building simply because the courts or the offices of the courts are located in a portion of a multipurpose building. County leaders have stood against allowing licensed handgun holders to enter the historic building with their weapons, citing security issues. We knew it was important to us. Were glad it was important for them to come here and actually walk the facility, Felton said about the representatives. Well save a lot of money on extra security we would have put into place if people were allowed to carry weapons within the common areas of the courthouse. Felton said county staff informed the AGs office representatives during the visit to Waco that there is now a preliminary plan to relocate the district attorneys pre- trial services and hot check department out of the annex. The new offices will have a more accessible public entrance at Columbus Avenue. The AGs office reported that those plans will allow the courthouse to retain its ban on weapons and that the office will not file suit or seek the collection of civil penalties. Commissioner Ben Perry said after the AGs office originally told the county to remove its signs, county leaders chose to communicate first rather than jumping straight into litigation. Perry said the AGs office was very receptive to hearing from the county and recommended the modifications. Will (moving the offices) cost us money? Yes. There will be an expense to build out some office space, but it will be a minimal expense compared to litigation or compared to additional security at the courthouse, Perry said. Perry said this is an example of good government at work. The county received a violation letter March 30, alleging the courthouse and annex which is accessed through the courthouse were in violation for prohibiting licensed handgun holders from entering into an entire building with their weapons. The violation letter was prompted by complaints from Open Carry Texas. CJ Grisham, Open Carry Texas president and CEO, said the group is looking into civil disobedience to force the issue into a court case. What the AG and the county is saying is that in order to exercise my First Amendment right, I have to surrender my Second Amendment right, Grisham said, noting the commissioners courtroom is still in the courthouse. If they want to play this game where theyre going to suppress the rights of the citizenry, then were going to stand up and were going to challenge them. Felton said there is plenty of room in the new space for the offices, and the building is already compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act. We came out with a real amiable solution, he said. While a College Station couple was doing long-term missionary work in Nairobi, Kenya, in September 2013, they made a trip to a high-end shopping mall to find a new suit for their son, who had just been accepted into a model United Nations program at school. Chris Suel was in a store with the oldest of his five children when they heard explosions and then machine gun fire coming from where he thought his wife, Jamie, and four other children were shopping. The family remained separated for the next five hours, while four terrorists from an al-Qaida affiliated group killed 63 people and injured 175 throughout the mall. Chris and Jamie Suel shared their story of the Westgate shopping mall terrorist attack to a crowded auditorium of crime victim professionals Wednesday on the second and final day of the Every Victim Every Time conference in Bryan. "It was like one of those nightmare dreams where you're trying to run but not moving," Chris Suel said, saying he and his son tried different ways to get back to the rest of their family, but were turned away by the sight of tracer rounds coming through the hallways. Jamie Suel said the scene turned into mass chaos when the terrorists started firing. She began to run with her four children, looking for a place to hide. She took in two other children while they ran, who hid with her family behind sacks of flour while they resisted tricks from the terrorists to get them out of hiding. The seven stayed hidden in the small space for three and a half hours until the situation settled down enough for Jamie to lead the children, moving from cover to cover, to safety. Chris Suel and their oldest child stayed hidden for another two hours until security forces escorted them out. "There was such a euphoria knowing we had gotten out and survived," Chris said. They all slept with a buddy that night, and for a long time had trouble leaving their neighborhood compound, which was surrounded by 12-foot walls and barbed wire. When they did, any loud noise brought flashbacks of that Saturday in the shopping mall. Jamie Suel said she felt like she could be shot in the back at any moment. The family eventually left Kenya for a few months to have time to cope. "For a while, Westgate defined us," Jamie Suel said. "What we've learned is that it doesn't have to." The Suels' presentation came after three high school students were awarded scholarships named in honor of Constable Brian Bachmann, who was shot and killed while serving an eviction notice in College Station in 2012. Precinct 1 Constable Jeff Reeves presented the scholarships, saying each of the recipients exemplify Bachmann's drive for excellence and dedication to helping others. Recipients of the scholarship had to be high school seniors in the Brazos Valley and also be accepted to a college or university for the fall. Cody Murph of Bryan High School, Mikayla Norsworthy of Caldwell High School and Ray Smith of Anderson-Shiro High School, each received a $1,000 scholarship. The workshops Another 24 workshops and seminars were made available to the more than 700 professionals in attendance Wednesday on topics including dating violence, the difficulties associated with prosecuting charming and good-looking men and more ways of working with victims of crime. One workshop led by Assistant Brazos County District Attorney Kara Comte and her mother, Debra Hamilton, focused on the best ways to communicate with people from different generations. Their two-hour seminar broke down the characteristics of the silent generation, baby boomers, Generation X and millennials and explained why people from those generations might act the way they do. Comte also shared examples of how people from each generation might act in the courtroom and on the stand, giving information that could help an attorney get the most from their witness. Hamilton said it is important to keep these differences in mind when working with people across generations, and to understand that neither is usually right or wrong, they just have different ways of thinking. Comte led another talk with Assistant Brazos County District Attorney Jessica Escue about the challenges when prosecuting charming, attractive men in family violence and sexual assault cases. Every seat in the room was full, and those who couldn't find seats were sitting on the floor. Comte and Escue each shared examples of different cases from the Brazos County in which a defendant either had lots of friends that testified to his high-quality character, or was a seemingly first-time offender who just made a mistake. They talked about how defendants' appearances change from the booking photo to the trial date. She said defense attorneys will dress them in nice clothes and they'll be clean shaven with a new haircut. Escue said studies show that people automatically assign favorable traits to good-looking people, and that defendants who are more attractive typically get far lighter punishments than others -- a process known as the halo effect. "This is what our abusers look like, they're good looking, they come from good families," Comte said. "This is how they are able to target their victims." Grimes County is one of nine Texas counties part of a state of emergency declared by Gov. Greg Abbott, and College Station-based Texas Task Force 1 and 2 have been working to rescue people from flooding in both Grimes County and the Houston area. On Friday, Abbott added seven counties to the state of emergency list, including Milam County. Officials say 55 homes in the county have been affected by severe flooding and county officials are working to assist locals who have been displaced. Since Sunday, College Station-based Texas Task Force 1 rescuers have assisted the Navasota Fire Department and local game wardens in rescues of Grimes County residents trapped in their homes, officials said. "We were lucky, though. Nobody died and nobody got hurt," said Grimes County Sheriff Don Sowell. Texas Task Force 1 and 2 also worked to rescue 36 people from the deadly flooding Monday and Tuesday in Houston. The urban search and rescue teams evacuated 119 people by late Wednesday afternoon and assisted with another agency's rescue, according to Brian Blake, communications director for the Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service. Eleven water teams, along with nine swimmers who are helicopter search and rescue technicians, were deployed to the region that was hit with at least 16 inches of rain in less than 24 hours. At least eight people have died in the flooding in the Houston area. Eight counties remain under a flood warning until midnight tonight, including southeastern Washington County and southeastern Grimes County. More rain is expected in the Brazos Valley and the Houston area this morning. In Grimes County, there has been some damage to bridges, roadways and railroads because of rising waters, though as of Wednesday night, the only road still closed was F.M. 3090, according to county emergency management coordinator David Lilly. Gibbons Creek Reservoir remains at reasonable levels, Lilly said, with no reports of flooding or water released into the neighboring creek. Lilly said he anticipates displaced Grimes County residents will receive federal assistance, though an emergency on a national level has not yet been declared. A certain number of affected people must be reached before President Barack Obama may declare Texas in a national state of emergency. Lilly said he feels Texas is soon to reach that number, after which resources from organizations such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency can be received. The American Red Cross is assisting any Grimes County residents in need of help because of flood damage. Lilly urged any Grimes County residents looking for help report to Todd Mission Town Hall for assistance. He also said any residents with flooding questions or concerns call 979-204-4592. CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (AP) Missiles whizzing overhead, the ever-present danger of explosions on the trek to school and constant checkpoints are realities the Ghraowi family faced the last few years in Damascus, the capitol city of Syria. For the family of longtime chocolatiers, financial constraints eventually helped them make the decision to leave their beloved home. "During war, no one is buying chocolate," said Yazan Ghraowi, the 19-year-old son of Syrian chocolatier Bashar Ghraowi and an immigrant to the United States. Bashar, his wife Mais Kayal and Yazan Ghraowi were granted a specific type of work visa to build a chocolate business in America while continuing to operate a candy factory in Damascus. The family's business venture, Ghraowi Chocolate Co., has opened its new shop on Agnes Street in Corpus Christi. In the Middle East, especially Syria and Lebanon, the Ghraowi name is synonymous with chocolate. "I remember growing up and every time I went to a new class in high school or middle school, they would read my last name and say 'You're the chocolate people,'" said Nour Ghraowi, the 23-year-old daughter who attends the University of Texas at Austin. After two years at Austin Community College, she was accepted to UT and is majoring in English Literature and minoring in creative writing. She also writes for the Daily Texan, the university newspaper. More than two years ago, Nour Ghraowi was accepted to the community college in Texas, but she was denied a visa three times before she was granted permission to come to the states. Her persistence was derived from a need for education, she said. "It wasn't an easy journey coming here," Nour Ghraowi said. "It was hard leaving (my family) behind. I left my brother and sister in Egypt and didn't know if I would be seeing them any time soon. And then here, I had never lived by myself before. "I would just call them, text them every day just to know if they were alive," she said. It would be several months before Bashar Ghraowi, his wife and Yazan received the work visas necessary to come to America. Once they got them, they made the three-day road trip from Damascus to Beirut, Lebanon, before boarding a 16-hour flight to Houston. "The business was not what it used to be. We left Syria in 2012 and went to Egypt for two years and then returned to Syria for a year," said Yazan Ghraowi. "Because of the war, 80 percent of my friends left Syria and now live all over the world." Many of Yazan's friends, and friends of his family, are Syrian refugees living in Turkey, parts of Greece and Germany. "I used to go to college under missiles and bombs, but you get used to it," he said. "(Damascus) is better than other places, because the capitol is where the president is. For more, it was not safe with checkpoints for the army." The family chose Corpus Christi at the behest of Bashar's brother, Dr. Ayman Ghraowi, and his family, who have been in the city for more than 20 years. Ayman Ghraowi's wife, Sohair Sabawi, has helped the family rent the factory space in 1 Agnes Plaza, order essential chocolate-making equipment and start the next phase of their visa process to remain in the U.S. Their current visas are valid for another month if they are not extended. "We started the process in April to submit their papers, but getting the documents from Damascus can take three times as long," Sabawi said. "We'll hear from them in two weeks (on the visa extension). But in two months, we have bought equipment, oversaw the vendors it has been hectic." For the near future, the business will be mostly through online sales via GhraowiChocolateCompany.com. But there could be a local counter selling the cocoa delicacies. Claudia Hurt, baking and pastry instructor at Del Mar College and owner of FillinGood Bakery, and her husband, Darryl Hurt, want to sell them alongside their cakes and baked goods soon. "We've sampled his stuff and it's phenomenal," Darryl Hurt said. "(Before we bought the shop), it was a gourmet chocolatier and people were very fond of it. It was a community staple for the area, so we knew we had to have some chocolate items." Not every Ghraowi was reunited in Texas. The oldest daughter, Aala Ghraowi, was denied a visa and runs the chocolate factory and storefront in Damascus in her father's stead. Bashar Ghraowi's 94-year-old mother was also forced to stay in the country, but receives calls daily from her sons and grandchildren. A contingency of Bashar's visa is that he will go back to Syria to run his business there and later return to Corpus Christi. His son, Yazan, was attending a university before the family left Syria and plans to obtain a degree in graphic design in America. "We have to make sure the business takes off here and also continue the business back home," Sabawi said. "We have found a lot of really good helpful people who didn't feel competitive against us. Here, people help each other and have good ideas for us. "It has been lovely." On this day, 180 years ago, Gen. Sidney Sherman's men led the left wing of Sam Houston's Army into battle against Mexican Dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna's troops at San Jacinto. These men carried the only banner the Texans had that day as they rushed to meet their fate in a life-or-death struggle for liberty. The bedraggled volunteers had been outnumbered and on the run from Santa Anna's army of trained soldiers for weeks after the massacres at Goliad and the Alamo. Their surprise attack on the Mexican Army shortly after 3:30 p.m. -- during siesta -- lasted just 18 minutes, but gave birth to the Republic of Texas. The banner they carried into battle now hangs behind the speaker's platform in the Texas House of Representatives. It was a gift from the Galveston Chapter of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. Preserving the history of the men who fought to create Texas that day, and honoring their heroic struggles, has been the core mission of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas from the very start. Texas won its independence that day, and set into motion events that led to the United States acquisition of New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Utah, parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas and Oklahoma. The Battle of San Jacinto changed world history. But it would be 37 years until the men who fought for their freedom that day would meet in Houston and form the Texas Veterans Association to pass their story along. The Daughters of the Republic of Texas didn't exist yet, but the 300 aging soldiers there took special effort to thank the women who forged Texas in the form of a resolution: Resolved -- that the surviving pioneer women of the period we commemorate who were joint sharers in the trials and privations of that period, and whose patriotism was equal to the occasion, we tender our kindest regards and remembrances. The Daughters of the Republic of Texas was not organized until 56 years after the battle, when those pioneer women began to meet jointly with the few remaining members of the Texas Veterans Association. The legacy of the old soldiers had been passed along, and was in good hands. The story of Texas and the story of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, have been intertwined from the beginning. We didn't just save the Alamo. Texas acquired and preserved the San Jacinto Battlefield at the Daughters insistence. In 1902, the Daughters toured the battleground with a group of legislators and a San Jacinto battle survivor. They placed temporary, improvised monuments in a dozen locations, including the camp where Gen. Houston lay wounded under a tree on the bayou, the same spot where Santa Anna was delivered to him as a captive. The San Jacinto Monument was raised with the help of the Daughters in 1939. At 567 feet, the monument remains the tallest masonry column in the world, 12 feet taller than the Washington Monument. The story of Texas independence is a story known around the world. It is the story of the men who fought for liberty 180 years ago today at San Jacinto. The Daughters of the Republic of Texas exist still today to tell their story. "The hours, days and years of unfolding time shall never dim the spirit of liberty kindled on this field of battle," reads the inscription of a sundial placed at the battlefield by the San Jacinto Chapter. Keep that spirit of liberty kindled today, and fly your Texas flag proudly every April 21 in remembrance. Betty J. Edwards is president general of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. About Sonny's Barber Shop Sonny's Barber Shop is one of the oldest barbershops in Bryan, Texas. We are locally owned and operated. We originally opened our doors in August of 1968 as Darby Meyer served as owner until 2006 when he retired and sold the barbershop to an existing barber, Sonny Brown. Sonny has occupied the shop for many, many years and now serves as the existing owner. Sonny's has continued to serve the barber needs of many men and women in the Bryan/College Station area just as they did many years before. The three barbers that occupy the chairs have over 75 years of combined experience and pride themselves on the comfortable and relaxing setting that they provide for their long time clients. Sonny's Barbershop offers Haircuts, Razorcuts, Layers, Shampoos, and Shaves. If you don't already know these barbers please stop by today for that comfortable and relaxing cut that you deserve. Visit Our Facebook Page! Accepts: American Express Check Discover MasterCard Paypal Visa As with any sweeping conclusion in human sciences, there are numerous known unknowns. For example, did Yanomami raiding in the 1960s increase through growing pressure from settler or missionary incursions? (After all, Chagnon used the extremist New Tribes Mission to get into the Yanomami.) Did the influx of outside trade goods, including guns, play a role? Such impacts are difficult to analyze, though some believe they were clearly significant. But the most significant fact, the extraordinary single error that, in this case, does destroy Chagnon's thesis in one swoop, is something Chagnon doesn't tell us - unokai does not just mean 'killer'. It's also the status claimed by everyone who's ever shot an arrow into a dead body during an inter-village raid (most raids stop after one killing). It describes many other individuals as well, including men who've killed an animal thought to be a kind of shamanic embodiment of a human, as well as stay-at-homes who try and cast lethal spells. It even includes those who've participated in a ritual during their future wife's puberty (she also becomes unokai). In other words, many unokai haven't killed anyone. With this simple fact, every one of Chagnon's conclusions about 'killers' falls apart. But supposing he was right after all, what would his figures show? What percentage of the population are we talking about? Here the brew gets fishier: Chagnon plays fast and loose with his own data. His autobiography, Noble Savages, says that "killers" number "approximately 45 percent of all the living adult males." Yet even according to his own (shaky) data, that is simply not true: Chagnon's own figures do not show that 45% of men are unokai. He has grossly inflated his percentage by ignoring everyone younger than 25, an age group with far fewer claiming unokai status. Were they included, his percentage would plummet. Chagnon has been asked about this manipulation for years. When he bothers to reply, he claims he'll publish new supporting data. We're still waiting. Don't let the awkward facts get in the way of a great story! So there you have it: That's the poster boy of the 'scientific proof' behind the myth of the brutal savage. The fact that Chagnon's thesis has been repeatedly demolished in scholarly publications for decades is simply ignored by those who want him to be right. For them to dismiss the many Chagnon critics, to pretend that science is on their side, and to chorus sneeringly 'noble savages' whenever Chagnon is criticized, is just facile propaganda. By the way, if you want to know how many unokai (supposed 'killers') Chagnon managed to winkle out during a quarter century of fieldwork with one of Amazonia's largest tribes - numbering several thousand - the answer is just 137 men. They could all comfortably fit into a single car on the New York subway. How many of those were actually killers? We'll never know. That's the size of the sample group supposedly proving that tribal peoples live in a state of chronic warfare and, by throwing in more red herrings, that our ancestors did so too. The latter assertion is widely promulgated. It goes like this: The Yanomami are a small-scale tribal (non-state) hunting society, our ancestors were the same, so the Yanomami can teach us about our ancestors because they live in a similar way. And yet the theory fails on several points: For example, no one knows the degree to which our distant ancestors scavenged for meat, rather than actively hunted it. That's quite a different approach to life, and the Yanomami wouldn't dream of doing it. In any case, a moment's informed reflection tells you that no one who inhabited the ice age plains of Eurasia, for example, lived remotely like the tropical rainforest Yanomami of Chagnon's 1960s. The prosaic truth: different peoples are different The real story is more obvious, prosaic and simpler than the Chagnon-created 'fierce people' and their supposed 'chronic' warfare. The truth is that there are some tribal peoples who have a belligerent reputation, others known for avoiding violence as much as possible, and lots in between. That's nothing to do with any grasping at mythic noble savages, it's what anthropologists have actually found. Despite the growing mythology, the archeological record reveals very little evidence of past violence either (until the growth of big settlements, starting around 10,000 years ago). Researchers Jonathan Haas and Matthew Piscitelli studied descriptions of 2,930 earlier skeletons from 900 different sites worldwide. Apart from a single massacre site of two dozen people in the Sudan, they found "but a tiny number of cases of violence in skeletal remains", and noted how just four sites in Europe "are mentioned over and over by multiple authors" striving to demonstrate the opposite of what the evidence actually reveals. The archeological record before 10,000 years ago, they conclude, in fact "shows that warfare was the rare exception." Much of the other 'proof' for the brutal savage advanced by Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, and other champions of Chagnon, is rife with the selection and manipulation of facts to fit a desired conclusion. To call this 'science' is both laughable and dangerous. These men are desperate to persuade us that they've got 'proof' for their opinions, which isn't surprising as they're nothing more - opinions based on a narrow and essentially self-serving political point of view. They have proved nothing, except to those who want to believe them. The real danger is the 'brutal savage' myth itself Does it matter? Yes, very much. How we think of tribal peoples dictates how we treat them. Proponents of Chagnon seek to reestablish the myth of the brutal savage which once underpinned colonialism and its land theft. It's an essentially racist fiction which belongs in the 19th century and, like a flat Earth, should have been discarded generations ago. It's the myth at the heart of the destruction of tribal peoples and it must be challenged. And it's not just deadly for tribal peoples: it's dangerous for all of us. False claims that killing is a proven key factor in our evolution are used to justify, even ennoble, the savagery inherent in today's world. The brutal savage may be a largely invented creature among tribal peoples, but he is certainly dangerously and visibly real much closer to home. Stephen Corry has worked with Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples' rights, since 1972. Visit Survival International's campaign here. Join Survival's public campaign to change conservation. This article was originally published on CounterPunch. The asbestos apologist The other critic of the IARC quoted in Kelland's article is Paolo Bofetta, who is identified as having worked for 18 years at the IARC but as now being at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in the US. There is no mention of the fact that Bofetta left the IARC in 2009 to set up a consulting company, the International Prevention Research Institute, that quickly took money to do work for industry. Also omitted from Kelland's article is the scandal that erupted after Bofetta co-authored an IARC paper on asbestos, published in the British Journal of Cancer in 2012. Bofetta had stated on the paper that he had no conflict of interest. Yet according to Kathleen Ruff of the human rights advocacy group RightOnCanada, in 2011, at the same time that Bofetta was co-writing IARC's paper on asbestos, he was being paid by an Italian company to help it defeat charges of criminal negligence after the deaths of 12 workers who had been exposed to asbestos at the company's Montefibre factory. The workers had died of mesothelioma, a type of cancer associated with asbestos exposure. A watered-down admission of Bofetta's conflict of interest was later published in the journal as a 'corrigendum'. According to Ruff, Bofetta testified in court that repeated exposure to asbestos doesn't increase the risk of harm, so only managers that worked at the plant in 1950s and 1960s should be held responsible. In other words, Bofetta argued that once you're exposed to asbestos, you might as well continue to be exposed for the rest of your life without the company being held liable. Ruff also accused Bofetta and his co-author of carefully omitting crucial data in a scientific review that they published. These data show that continued, increased exposure to asbestos does, in fact, cause additional harm to workers. Ruff concluded that the review is marked by "serious scientific and ethical flaws ... The article is biased and the bias served the interests of the company that had paid them." Bofetta has also produced scientific articles in support of other toxic industries. These include articles questioning the carcinogenicity of dioxin and of diesel fumes, and the link between leukemia and formaldehyde, as documented by the journalist Stephane Foucart in Le Monde. In 2013 Bofetta was nominated to become director of France's top epidemiology centre, the Center for Research in Epidemiology and Public Health (CESP). A number of scientists, as well as the National Association of Asbestos victims (ANDEVA), complained on the grounds of his close relationship with polluting industries, as well as improper scientific and ethical conduct. Bofetta withdrew his nomination in early 2014. Is anonymous 'observer' an industry representative? Kelland's article also mentions "One observer, a specialist in food and animal science who attended the [IARC] working group on red and processed meats in 2015", and who "spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity". This person alleged that "the expert panel reviewing the scientific evidence appeared to aim for a specific result". The same observer is quoted as saying, "I expected that the science would be reviewed with a high level of rigour. But quite frankly, at the end of the 10 days, from a scientific standpoint I was really quite shocked." There is no mention of whether the observer was a representative of the meat industry. Glyphosate the real target A second article by Kelland, positioned immediately under the main hit piece, makes clear what this attack on the IARC is really about. It's not processed meat or hairdressing, but the weedkiller glyphosate. The article is titled, 'Is your weedkiller carcinogenic?' and it paints the row about glyphosate's cancer causing potential as just "the latest dispute to blow up around IARC". The article focuses on the disagreement between the IARC, which has named glyphosate herbicide as a probable human carcinogen, and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which says glyphosate is unlikely to pose a cancer risk. The implicit message of this pair of articles is: only people who are mad enough to think hairdressing gives you cancer would believe the IARC on glyphosate. Kelland's article criticizes the involvement of Dr Chris Portier in the IARC's glyphosate decision. He is introduced into the article namelessly as "an adviser" to the IARC who is "closely linked to the Environmental Defense Fund", which she characterises as "a US campaign group opposed to pesticides". Yet the article quotes a spokeswoman for the EDF as saying it neither supports or opposes pesticides, but is "strongly in favour of scientific research to assess how chemicals impact human and environmental health". Despite this, Kelland's misleading framing of the organisation as "opposed to pesticides" is allowed to stand. While focusing on Dr Portier's part-time work with the EDF since 2013, Kelland fails to mention his long and successful career in prestigious mainstream organisations. In 2010 he joined the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as director of the National Center for Environmental Health and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. Before that, he was with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) for 32 years, where he served as the NIEHS associate director, director of the Environmental Toxicology Program, and associate director of the National Toxicology Program. But rather than engage with Dr Portier's distinguished record, Kelland prefers simply to have nameless "critics" say that he is biased due to his association with the EDF. The Mysterious Three Kelland mentions a letter signed by 94 scientists, led by Dr Portier, that was sent to EFSA criticizing the agency's assessment of glyphosate. Yet she fails to address any of the substantive points raised by the scientists in their detailed and heavily referenced letter. Instead she quotes the executive director of EFSA, who dismissed the letter as "Facebook science ... you have a scientific assessment, you put it on Facebook and you count how many people like it." Kelland also fails to mention that EFSA was heavily relying for its reassuring assessment of glyphosate on three industry studies that are considered 'confidential business information'. EFSA refused to make them public and also did not share them with IARC, leading the scientific reviews specialist Paul Whaley to dub them "the Mysterious Three". Whaley argued that if the evidence for the non-carcinogenicity of glyphosate "is as strong as EFSA claims, then there is no reason for keeping the data secret. If it is not, then glyphosate may be a chemical which needs to be removed from the market because it poses a cancer hazard. Either way, we need to find out." Orchestrated smear campaign? In what looks very much like an orchestrated campaign, within hours of its publication, the Reuters attack on IARC and Portier was joined by two other pro-industry sources. One was an article for The Times by Matt Ridley, in which he called upon IARC to "Stop misusing science to scare the world". Ridley is an anti-environmentalist commentator who loses no opportunity to hype industrialized agriculture and attack organics, or, as a key member of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, to argue against action on climate change. A keen proponent of deregulation, Ridley's major claim to fame is having presided over the collapse of the Northern Rock bank in his role as chairman. The second IARC attack came in the form of an article by Andrew Porterfield, which claimed IARC had been "infiltrated" by NGO interests. Porterfield describes himself on LinkedIn as a "communications consultant for the biotechnology industry". His article was published on the website of the Genetic Literacy Project, which is run by Jon Entine, a long-time public relations operative with deep ties to the chemical industry. Reuters pieces don't even try for objectivity The Reuters articles are crude hit pieces that make no pretence of objectivity. It's particularly unfortunate that Reuters published these articles in the guise of investigative journalism under its 'Reuters Investigates' tag. Reuters previously had the courage to acknowledge that its coverage had not been sufficiently open about the industry affiliations of GMO lobbyists and to amend its copy accordingly. Let's hope it has sufficient editorial integrity on this occasion to similarly amend Kelland's articles in order to make clear their use of pro-industry sources with massive conflicts of interest. Claire Robinson is managing editor at GMWatch, a public news and information service on issues surrounding GM crops and foods. This article was originally published by GMWatch. The Cambodian Government has banned the premiere screening of the documentary 'I am Chut Wutty', released this week, which recounts the life and death of the Cambodian forest activist. Government forces are widely believed to have been behind the activist's murder in 2012 and the killing has never been properly investigated. Two days before the screening was due, director and producer Fran Lambrick announced the news on social media: "Our screening this week at Meta House has been cancelled by order of Mr. Sin Chan Saya, Department of Cinema and Cultural Diffusion - why is that Mr. Sin Chan Saya? Are you not proud to share this story of Cambodia's forest defenders?" Lambrick makes her film debut with the 54 minute documentary which she directed while researching her doctorate in Cambodia's Prey Lang forest. The film is set amid a crisis in Cambodia which has in recent years seen the once extensive tropical forests ravaged by some of the highest deforestation rates in the world. Wutty had joined forces with the communities of the Prey Lang forest - the last lowland forest in the country and dwindling fast. Cinematographer and co-director Vanessa de Smet uses narrow depth of camera focus to conjure up the mystical atmosphere of Prey Lang. The rich cinematography of the film artfully juxtaposes the livelihood activities of the people in the forest, with corrupt commercial logging pressures. Much revered by the local people for spiritual reasons and as a rich source of livelihood, the film follows a woman resin collector who remains anonymous: "When I was very young my grandparents told me stories about Prey Lang. I was 10-12 years old. They said that years ago Prey Lang was so full of animals. But over the years the animals left because the forest is disappearing." Passionate about the forest and her role in the community forest protection movement 'The Prey Lang Network', she explained: "We go to patrol twice a month. But if we don't patrol it [the forest] will get destroyed." Since 2001 hundreds of Economic Land Concessions (ELC) have been handed out by the government and are widely blamed for driving the country's deforestation. Prey Lang is surrounded by ELCs which are encroaching on the forest. For example Sokphaknica Investment Co Ltd is a rubber plantation company with an ELC in nearby Tumring. The film shows an interviews the Chief Executive Officer who says he would like to expand his business in the area. He says of the local farmers: "It's a shame, I don't want them to have those fields." Chut Wutty - a local hero The film portrays Wutty as a modest, unassuming, but nevertheless, fearless, persistent and effective campaigner, who galvanised community dismay and turned it into an effective forest monitoring network. "The people decided to burn the timber once and for all to stop the company profiting from it", said Wutty, as the film shows piles of tropical timber set alight by members of the community. SHARE Frank O'Nan, Henderson Libertarianism akin to being a Nazi Well, they ganged up and buddied up against Donald Trump in Wisconsin. They have little to crow about. The "Destroy all Unions" governor, Scott Walker, radio hosts, PACs, and the Boy Scouts of Scott Walker persuasion worked to rally women and everyone against Trump. John Kasich was submerged. The powers in the GOP don't intend for Donald Trump to be their nominee. Doesn't it seem that there might be a third party this presidential election? Paul "The Procrastinator" Ryan may emerge, to the joy of the wealthy, as the GOP candidate. Party bosses for both political camps write their own rules. Now I'm not a Donald Trump fan, but certainly "Lying Ted Cruz" could be worse. Particularly for the poor, elderly, children and women. The Koch brothers, Charles and David, and other wealthy big shots of libertarian kind own Congress. Do a little research on what the libertarian philosophy is and you might realize it is somewhat akin to Nazism. Ted Cruz at a Koch brothers meeting declared "Victory or death!" He once tried to promote Texas leaving the Union and helped shut down the federal government. A short sketch of libertarian philosophy: government would be reduced to a skeletal function, just protect property rights, period and the abolition of all other government functions. No Federal Election Commission, abolition of all health care, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. No FBI, CIA, Environmental Protection Agency, no laws concerning employment, no child labor laws or minimum wage laws. No income tax, corporate tax, or capital gains tax and no prosecution of violators. Get rid of the Food and Drug Administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Republicans already want to destroy the Department of Education. I guess the PTA would be next. Isn't it frightening when local politicians talk about growing more Republicans? The leading libertarian in Kentucky is Rand Paul. It's time to send him back to his medical practice in Bowling Green or home to Texas to commiserate with Rick Perry and maybe Ted Cruz. Trick-or-treat, walk Ed Stone's Haunted Halls and more this week in SE Iowa Your guide to getting off the couch and out the door this week in Southeast Iowa. We have another update on the passing of Prince. Nearly two years to the day on which Prince died from This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate A surge of voters registering online for Connecticuts presidential primaries is further straining the states much-maligned Department of Motor Vehicles, which reported intermittent computer outages at its branches Wednesday. State and local election officials reported delays in the residency verification process on the states self-service website that some attributed to the DMV. Touted as a convenient alternative to having to register in person for Tuesdays primaries, the automated system relies on the DMV to authenticate the signatures on new voters drivers licenses. But glitches are forcing some users to print out their voter cards and submit them by mail or by hand to their municipal registrar of voters, election officials say. Thursday is the last day to use the online system, otherwise new voters have until noon Monday to register for the primary in-person. A spokesman for Secretary of the State Denise Merrill, a Democrat, stopped short Wednesday of pointing a finger at the DMV for the delays. But an internal email from the office of Connecticuts top election official to municipal registrars Friday, and obtained by Hearst Connecticut Media, said there was a connectivity problem. The DMV connection to the on-line voter registration system is not working properly, wrote Taffy Womack, an administrative assistant in Merrills office. We are attempting to get the problem resolved and will notify you when it is back up and running. Despite warning customers Wednesday to avoid its branches and renew their licenses at AAA locations, DMV officials characterized the latest computer outages and voter registration issues as unrelated. There is no evidence of any malfunction, Bill Seymour, the agencys chief of staff, said of license verifications. A troubled recent history The agency has been plagued by a spate of software glitches related to a computer system upgrade and customer service complaints, culminating with the January resignation of its commissioner, former Bridgeport state Sen. Andres Ayala. The scope of the problem, DMV officials said, has been limited to motor vehicle registrations, not drivers license information. None of our branches have reported any issues with retrieving the (drivers license) signatures, Seymour said. Merrill spokesman Patrick Gallahue said that state election officials are troubleshooting the problem, but that the law does not allow for Thursdays online registration deadline to be extended. It has come to the agencys attention that there were intermittent slowdowns and disruptions to the online voter registration system, Gallahue said. It is now back up and running and we encourage people to use the system. We are working with our (information technology) specialists to identify the issue. At this point, there is no evidence that any agency is to blame. On Monday, 1,421 new voter registrations were processed by the states online system, followed by 2,586 on Tuesday, according to Gallahue. When an online registration form is submitted, that voters name is added to a list maintained by state and local election officials. We have a had a couple of instances where the DMV system appears to be down, said Fred DeCaro III, Greenwich's Republican registrar and Fairfield County chairman of the Registrars of Voters Association of Connecticut. A matter of verification Speaking an individual and not for the group, DeCaro called for improved guidance from state election officials on what to do when theres a breakdown in the verification process. I think that the process is so opaque for your average registrar that we have no idea where the fault lies, but we certainly have ideas of how it can be improved, DeCaro said. One troubling shortcoming of the online system, DeCaro said, is that a person can put down a different voting address in a different town than the one that appears on his or her drivers license. We would never figure it out until after the election, if at all, DeCaro said. In Bridgeport, the citys GOP registrar, Linda Grace, said she resorted to stuffing envelopes and filling out paperwork in between running down the list of new voters because of a computer system lag. (Tuesday) was pretty frustrating, Grace said. I dont know if it had anything to do with the hookup to the DMV or not. I know theyve certainly had their issues over there. Grace said the delays, which subsided Wednesday, could be due to the volume of new voter registrations. The last week, its been pretty heavy, she said. neil.vigdor@scni.com; 203-625-4436; http://twitter.com/gettinviggy This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate NORWALK From now on, an elected group of 15 to 17 people within each Norwalk public school will allocate the schools money as it sees fit. With six votes in favor and one abstention by local Board of Education members, the policy to implement school governance councils in all Norwalk public schools passed Tuesday night. Each School Governance Council, or SGC, would be the primary body for allocating its own schools funds. The council would consist of seven parents, five certified staff, two community members and the school principal. The high schools would also include two students in their councils. The policy was passed after a slight modification was made to clarify the superintendents ability to intervene, should a councils election process prove problematic. Shirley Mosby abstained from the vote because, though the SGCs could empower parents and provide opportunity for students, she said, there are still concerns that the policy needs to ensure more diversity on the council. Lynne Moore, vice-president of the Norwalk Association of School Administrators, echoed Mosbys concerns earlier in the day. The major concern we have as NASA is the fact that principals dont have a vote (and) there is no process for ensuring a diversity of parents on SGC via the election, Moore said. Moore, who is also the West Rocks Middle School principal, said another concern of NASA was that parents and school staff arent necessarily qualified to make the financial decisions that the councils will have to make. But Board of Education Chairman Michael Lyons said the proposed SGC policy doesnt totally hand over the reins. Now, they cant take the, say, $4 million and spend it all on a trip to Cancun, he said. Under the new policy, schools that demonstrate lower performances in their annual reports would be subject to intervention by the superintendent and board. The policy is based on the School Governance Council model proposed by the state in 2010. In the state model, the council serves in an advisory, nonvoting capacity and is required only for low-performing schools. Lyons said SGC members would be elected in May, in the hope that the councils would be up and running by October. Council members are to have two-year terms, with no member allowed to run for more than two terms. What we dont want to do is allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good, Lyons said. Right now, we dont have anything like this to allow parents and teachers to actively participate, he said. This will create the opportunity for them to do that Even if it is imperfect at first, giving them a good opportunity is better than no opportunity. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Hendri Yulius (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Thu, April 21, 2016 Although she is hailed as the symbol of Indonesian womens empowerment, Raden Ajeng Kartini remains open to various interpretations and imagery. The New Order regime twisted and reduced the significance of Kartini Day, commemorated annually on her birthday of April 21, into a kebaya fashion show to emphasize womens femininity and domestication. Meanwhile, modern feminist groups reclaim her as the representation of the early Indonesian feminist, who was not only concerned about womens issues, but also about the struggle for the independence from Dutch colonialism. However, Indonesias early feminist consciousness was essentially different from the modern one. Only since the mid-1990s have the terms feminism and gender been widely used. Therefore, Kartini might illustrate the historical development of Indonesian feminist consciousness, which emerged at the intersection of nationalism, Islam and Western values. Before colonialization, women appeared to have access to high status. The historian Cora Vreede-De Stuers shows that Acehnese women participated in local forces to combat Dutch rule, while many Javanese women became leaders. The modern economy, alongside Western education, significantly transformed society. The historian Denys Lombard asserts that the emergence of ports, urban society and Islam further limited womens roles. Some local traditions also restricted women from enjoying equal opportunities with men. Born in 1879 to a feudal family, Kartini, at a young age, wanted to be a teacher to improve the education of young women. She dreamed of studying in the Netherlands to obtain a teachers certification and establish a boarding school for women. But Javanese traditions made Kartini leave school at 12 and enter the confinement of her own home. She started to read voraciously and write letters to her Dutch friends -- letters clearly imbued with her anxieties, hopes and dreams for women and independence. Motherhood, being child bearers and child educators gave women a reason to be involved in public life, increasing their importance in preparing the next generation for the nations progress. Hence, motherhood became a vehicle of empowerment. In one of her letters, Kartini wrote that Europe was the center of civilization and advancement. However, as a female native living under colonial oppression, Kartini witnessed injustice and exploitation, as noted by literary scholar Katrin Bandel. Furthermore, her interest in Western knowledge coincided with her love and respect for her family and nation. Consequently, although she was fascinated with the advancement of womens rights in the West, she could not entirely detach herself from either Javanese culture or Islamic values. Some resources even indicated that she was a disciple of famous Islamic scholar K. Saleh Darat as-Samarani (1820-1903). Unlike the modern feminist notion, Kartini instead emphasized that the empowerment of Indonesian women could not simply be separated from their roles of mother and husband. In a letter she highlighted the importance of women and motherhood. It is from women that humans receive their first education on a womans lap, a child gradually learns to feel, think and speak; I came to realize more and more that the effect of the first education is not insignificant to human life ... Moreover, she apparently saw womens education and advancement as a crucial aspect of nation-building through the development of morality. She wrote that women are the pillars of civilization. Not because women are considered capable of the task, but because I myself strongly believe that women make the biggest contribution to advancement of human morality. In line with the concept of maternal feminism cited by the scholar Elisabeth Locher-Scholten, Kartini thus followed the Javanese gender ideal of being a wife a mother working together with her husband to educate her children, to prepare the next generation. In this context, womens empowerment also should not conflict with a harmonious marriage. Kartini thus believed that, God created women to be mens partners, and their ultimate purpose in life is to have a husband I gladly declare that womens ultimate happiness for now and the next centuries will be to live harmoniously with men! Kartini clearly reappropriated womens empowerment discourse to fit the dominant ideologies, such as Islam, nationalism and the Javanese ideal of being a woman. To understand Kartinis thoughts means to examine the complexity of the interactions between Islam, nation-building and Western values. Although inspired by Western progress, Kartini developed her concept of womens empowerment between the boundaries of Islam, Javanese ideals and traditional gender norms. Sadly, in 1903, Kartini was forced to marry the regent of Rembang and became his fourth wife. She passed away after giving birth to her first child. Yet her figure remains an example of the fluidity of cultural discourses and how feminist discourse in Indonesia cannot be separated from its interactions with local aspects. It is no exaggeration to say that Kartini is a national figure with a transnational mind. *** The writer, who obtained his Masters in public policy from the National University of Singapore, is the writer of Coming Out and a lecturer of gender and sexuality studies. --------------- We are looking for information, opinions, and in-depth analysis from experts or scholars in a variety of fields. We choose articles based on facts or opinions about general news, as well as quality analysis and commentary about Indonesia or international events. Send your piece to community@jakpost.com. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Haeril Halim (The Jakarta Post) London Wed, April 20 2016 President Joko Jokowi Widodo met with senior executives of UK financial institutions on Tuesday during his six-day European trip to tell the financiers that Indonesia is reforming its economy to attract investment into the country. Jokowi told the UK finance bosses that Indonesia was not immune to the global economic slowdown, but it is reforming the economy to boost competitiveness and openness, in an effort to lure more money into Southeast Asias largest economy. The lengthy list of the meetings participants included holders of Indonesian financial assets from government bonds to domestic stocks, such as Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Assets Management, Ashmore Investment Management, Deutsche Asset Management Group and Aberdeen Asset Management, among many others. to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,500/month Unlimited access to our web and app content e-Post daily digital newspaper No advertisements, no interruptions Privileged access to our events and programs Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Zacky Khairul Umam (The Jakarta Post) Berlin Wed, April 20 2016 Historic figures and events often lead to a nation reflecting upon itself. On Sept. 27, 2005, South Africa posthumously conferred the dissenting figure Sheikh Yusuf al-Makassari (Yusuf of Makassar, his original hometown in South Sulawesi) the highest Order of the Companions of OR Tambo for his staunch resistance against colonialism. Sheikh Yusuf died in Cape Town in May 23, 1699, and became a source of inspiration for Nelson Mandela who denoted the former as one of the best sons of Africa. People of South Africa referred to Sheikh Yusuf in their struggle against apartheid, as seen in historical narratives. to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,500/month Unlimited access to our web and app content e-Post daily digital newspaper No advertisements, no interruptions Privileged access to our events and programs Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Callistasia Anggun Wijaya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Thu, April 21, 2016 Heavy rains that hit Jakarta and its upper areas, like Depok, Bogor and Tangerang, have caused flooding in many places across the capital city on Thursday, expelling hundreds of people from their houses and cutting road access in a number of places. According to the Jakarta city Disaster Management Agencys monitoring center, residents in 13 districts, 20 subdistricts, 48 community units and 90 neighborhood units were affected by flooding. As an example, flooding had woken up residents of Gedong subdistrict, Pasar Rebo, East Jakarta as rainwater entered their houses early Thursday. Febian, one of the residents, said it was the worst flooding he'd seen for five years. The heavy rain hit the area at about 4 a.m. The water entered my house a half hour after. All my furniture was inundated. It was the worst in the last five years, said Febian as reported by tribunnews.com on Thursday. The flooding also inundated junior high school SMP 257 on Jl. Kelurhan Rambutan Ciracas and Jl. Raya Centex Ciracas with water levels of between 20 and 40 centimeters. Other places in East Jakarta affected by the flooding were Makasar, Kramajati and Jatinegara districts. The worst area was Cipinang Melayu in Makasar district where water levels reached 180 centimeters high. Meanwhile, in South Jakarta, floods with water levels of between 30 and 100 centimeters hit Jagakarsa, Pasar Minggu, Pancoran and Tebet districts. A resident reported to @TMCPoldaMetro, a Jakarta Police Twitter account, that Jl. Kemang Utara IX was inundated and the vehicles had to find alternate roads. The flooding in Kemang Timur had also inundated elementary school SDN Bangka 03 and the Pondok Karya Tendean housing complex. In West Jakarta, the floods affected the Rawa Buaya subdistrict in the Cengkareng district. In Central Jakarta, Jl. Gunung Sahari and Jl. Bungur Raya were also inundated. Floods also hit the Gambir subdistrict. In response to the Thursdays flooding, Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama said he would continue to evict some illegal residents to allow his administration to continue its flood mitigation projects. He said the flooding was caused by some buildings around the Krukut and Pessanggrahan rivers in South Jakarta that have blocked the waterways. Originally, the Pesanggrahan Rivers width was about 60 meters, but now it is only between 5 and 15 meters. I should widen the river and move people who live around the river, Ahok said at City Hall on Thursday. But the evictions will be conducted after the number of low-cost apartment towers are finished being built, said Ahok, adding that in May hundreds of apartments would be ready to be occupied. (bbn) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (Associated Press) Jakarta Thu, April 21, 2016 Indonesia's security minister says China has asked the government to extradite four Uighur men in exchange for returning an Indonesian graft fugitive recently arrested in Shanghai. Coordinating Minister for Politics, Legal and Security Affairs Luhut Pandjaitan said Thursday that Indonesia will allow China to question the men, who are serving prison sentences for collaborating with Indonesia's most wanted militant, Santoso. He said China's request was made during negotiations for the deportation from China of corruption fugitive Samadikun Hartono. Pandjaitan said Indonesia would talk with China separately about the four members of China's Muslim Uighur minority "because it is a different case." Hartono fled from Indonesia in 2003 after the Supreme Court sentenced him to four years in prison for misappropriating government bailout funds during the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (Associated Press) Kapolei, Hawaii, US Thu, April 21, 2016 A pilot is preparing to take off for a flight from Hawaii to California with no jet fuel aboard his plane. The Swiss-made Solar Impulse 2 is scheduled to leave Hawaii on Thursday to continue its circumnavigation of the globe using only energy from the sun. The crew landed in Hawaii last July but was forced to stay in the islands after the plane's battery system sustained heat damage on its trip from Japan. The plane, now preparing for the ninth leg of its journey, plans to finish its trip across the Pacific and land in Mountain View, California, in about three days. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin thejakartapost.com (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Thu, April 21, 2016 Lawmakers have been warned not to drag the military nor the police into politics by allowing their respective personnel to take part in the upcoming regional elections. "This idea would open the door for the military and police to engage in politics once again, like during the New Order [1966-1998]," Al Araf, the executive director of human rights watchdog Imparsial, said in Jakarta on Thursday. Al Araf referred to current deliberations of an amendment to the Regional Election Law by the House of Representatives, of which some factions have proposed to allow soldiers and police officers to seek candidacy in the regional elections without resigning from their military or police posts. The amendment is being discussed by House Commission II overseeing home affairs. Prevailing law requires soldiers, police officers and civil servants to submit resignation letters if they want to contest an election. However, several fractions, including the Golkar Party and Gerindra Party have expressed their objections to the requirement. "Soldiers, police officers and civil servants are public posts, while a lawmaker or regional head is a political post. Hence those posts cant be treated the same, Al Araf stressed. The Indonesian Military (TNI) was known for its dual role concept during the New Order, with members actively involved in politics and business. The military ran newspapers and radio stations and issued recommendation letters for job applications, arrested criminals and settled both large-scale conflicts in Jakarta and disputes in villages. An amendment to the Constitution during the Reform Era removed the militarys dual role. Bahrain, the advocacy director of the Foundation of the Indonesian Legal Aid Institute (YLBHI) said that the participation of military and police officers in the regional elections would contravene the 2004 TNI Law and the 2002 National Police Law, both of which prohibit them from being involved in politics. "The elimination of the resignation requirement will harm the mandate of our democracy," he said. (vps/bbn) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Sam Magdy (Associated Press) Cairo Thu, April 21, 2016 An Egyptian opposition figure who ran in the presidential elections against Abdel-Fatah el-Sissi is suing the president over his decision to hand over two strategic Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia, according to a copy of a document obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday. The announcement on the handover of the islands, which have been under Egypt's protectorate, sparked demonstrations last week. Hamdeen Sabahi, the leader of the Egyptian Popular Current, submitted a 10-page complaint to an administrative court in Cairo over the case, calling for the deal to be suspended immediately. The document claims the Tiran and Sanafir islands are "part of Egypt's sovereign control" and cannot be relinquished without a referendum. It also says the surrender of the two islands threatens Arab and Egyptian national security and also endangers Egypt's relations with Saudi Arabia. Egypt's government says the islands at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba belong to Saudi Arabia, which asked Cairo in 1950 to protect them from Israel. Tiran, the larger of the two islands and closer to Egypt's southern Sinai coast, is in the minds of many older Egyptians associated with their country's four wars against Israel, between 1948 and 1973, a time of nationalistic fervor and patriotism. More recently, Tiran has become a popular destination for tourists. Sabahi was a member of parliament during ousted autocrat Hosni Mubarak's years in office. He ran against el-Sissi in 2014 as the sole alternate candidate but was crushed in a landslide victory for the former military chief. Separately, Khaled Ali, a prominent rights lawyer and a former presidential candidate in the 2012 vote that elected Islamist Mohammed Morsi, has filed a court case to demand that the Egyptian-Saudi agreement on the islands be annulled, allegedly because it violates Egypt's constitution. (ags) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Erika Anindita Dewi (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Thu, April 21, 2016 The steering committee of the Golkar Partys extraordinary national congress (Munaslub) has decided to collect contributions of Rp 5 billion (US$379,000) to Rp 10 billion from each member running for the partys chairmanship. Steering committee chairman Nurdin Halid said the contributions were part of the requirements each applicant had to meet, and this requirement would be applied strictly to all would-be chairman candidates once they passed the verification process. The decision was based on our calculations on the amount of money needed to cover activities directly related to their nomination, such as the organizing of candidate debates, campaign activities and transportation costs, Nurdin told journalists on the sidelines of a committee meeting at the partys headquarters in Slipi, West Jakarta, on Wednesday. Nurdin added that the donation served as a fence to prevent chairman candidates from money politics, such as giving money for transportation, accommodation and pocket money to participants of the Munaslub. He further said that the committee had initially prepared five models of contribution. The donation of Rp 5-10 billion chosen at the plenary meeting was the fifth option. The high of the donation was based on the estimation that there would be six to nine prospective candidates. Aside from the collection of candidate contributions, spending on the Munaslub would be shouldered by the partys central executive board, so that the congress could run smoothly and clean. In return for the paid contributions, Golkar plans to set up stages for the chairman candidates to campaign at events to be attended by their supporters. Nurdin said Golkar would need approximately Rp 85 billion to hold the national congress that had been postponed to May 27 in Bali. The senior Golkar politician explained that money politics had always been related closely to pocket money payments for congress participants. The pocket money always accounted for the largest portion of overall conference costs. Nurdin said the steering committees decision on the contribution fund was only a recommendation so far. He added that the party's central executive board had the final say on whether or not to apply the recommendation. Azis Syamsuddin, one of the party's chairman candidates, refused to comment on the candidate contribution requirement and said he would wait for the results of the party's central board plenary meeting on the recommendation. "I haven't seen the recommendation. This is the result of the steering committee's meeting. There will be a central board plenary meeting. We'll wait for that," Azis told thejakartapost.com on Wednesday evening. Another chairman candidate, Idrus Marham, called on all parties to respect the steering committees recommendation, which he called a political creation. Idrus noted hat the committees decision would still be discussed at Golkars central executive board's plenary meeting, the highest-level decision-making forum in the party. "As to whether there are acceptable arguments for this political creation, we will wait for the explanation at the plenary meeting," Idrus said on Wednesday evening. Great support Golkar has so far gathered donations of Rp 126.15 million and S$3,000 in the week from April 13 to April 20 for the Bali congress. Steering committee member Andi Sinulingga said on Wednesday the donation idea had been initiated by the party's younger generation, who aimed to ensure that the upcoming Munaslub could be an independent event free from business interests. Andi said the donation fund would not be used for candidate campaigns, as those would be covered by different donations. (ebf) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Farid Khan (Associated Press) Karachi Thu, April 21, 2016 Gunmen on motorcycles shot and killed seven Pakistani police officers involved in a polio vaccination campaign in two separate attacks Wednesday in the port city of Karachi, police said. A breakaway faction of the Pakistani Taliban that calls itself Jamat-ul-Ahrar claimed responsibility for the attack later Wednesday. The slain officers had been deployed to protect health workers administering polio vaccinations. No health workers were harmed in the attacks in Karachi, the capital of southern Sindh province, local police official Mohammad Ijaz said. Another senior police officer, Feroze Shah, said authorities had no plans to suspend the polio campaign despite the attacks. Earlier, provincial Home Minister Suhail Anwar told the Pakistani Geo news network that the attacks that killed the seven officers were minutes apart. He said the attackers targeted police deployed in the city for the campaign to vaccinate children. Hours later, Ahsanullah Ahsan, a spokesman for the Jamat-ul-Ahrar militant group, claimed responsibility for the attack. In an email to reporters, he said Wednesday's attack in Karachi was part of the group's campaign against security forces. However, Islamic militants have in the past targeted vaccination efforts both in Pakistan and in neighboring Afghanistan, based on conspiracy theories that they are a cover for a Western-led sterilization campaign. The Pakistani military has launched multiple offensives against militant hideouts in the tribal regions and elsewhere, but the insurgents have proven resilient. Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif strongly condemned Wednesday's "terrorist attack" Karachi. In a statement, he said police officers sacrificed their lives to secure the future of our coming generation. Polio, which can cause paralysis and death, remains endemic in Pakistan. Also Wednesday, the Pakistani army said troops had freed 24 police officers captured by a criminal gang earlier this month in the eastern Punjab province. Army spokesman Lt. Gen. Asim Saleem Bajwa said the gang leader and his men surrendered during the police operation in Rajanpur district. The development came days after a notorious criminal gang, the Chutto, killed six policemen when police raided its hideout. (ags) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Callistasia Anggun Wijaya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Thu, April 21, 2016 On a cloudy morning on Wednesday, a wooden boat was approaching the dock made of bamboo in Kali Adem port in Muara Angke of North Jakarta. Local fishermen gradually got off of the boat after sailing through the night to go fishing. A middle-aged man named Catim stepped out the vessel and slowly tied a rope to the dock. His sunburnt face expressed nothing but disappointment as he moved the fish from a styrofoam container inside the boat to a blue plastic bucket. For more than 10 hours, he has fought the wind and raging waves in the Jakarta Bay to catch fish with conventional means. However, he only brought home a small amount of fish as his fishing hook caught more trash than fish. Catim is a prominent fisherman in Muara Angke. Among residents of the fishermen's village, Catim is mostly known for his skills after catching 100 kilograms of fish by himself two years ago. Those were his glorious days. On that gloomy Wednesday morning, meanwhile, Catim looked at his meagre catch with resentment. "This is not even valuable. That is all I managed to catch all night long," Catim said, pointing to some small fish in the blue bucket. Saudi, another fisherman, was out of luck, too, with only four fish caught throughout the night, including a snapper and a catfish. The two of them walked reluctantly to a gazebo used by vendors to weigh the fish. The scales pointed to numbers below 30 kilograms. Fishing conditions in the waters off Jakartas coast had drastically changed over the past five years, said Yopi, who buys the fish from the fishermen before selling it on to vendors at the fish market. "Several years ago, we wouldn't have had time to talk to journalists like you in the morning. We would be busy weighing the fish, which would fill this whole gazebo. Now look at us," Yopie said, pointing to some men playing chess. He recalled that in 2011 traditional fishermen could collectively catch 80 to 100 tons of fish per day. Now, the fishermen would be grateful if they got 50 kilograms a day. Such amount has decreased compared to two or three years ago. Galur said that he could get Rp 1 million to Rp 2 million for a day of sailing. The fishermen faced many difficulties in doing their job today, from trash in the ocean to the construction of islets blocking their sailing area. Another fisherman, Galur, 33, who has been in the business since the age of nine, admitted that lately his daily income had decreased rapidly, which he blamed on the land reclamation project. There was one particularly bad day when Galur only brought home Rp 15,000 (US$1.14). If he was lucky, he could make Rp 250,000 to Rp 500,000 a day, a stark contrast to the income he regularly got two or three years ago, which would be up to Rp 2 million from a night of sailing. Saudi, who also started fishing at a young age, agreed that lately the occupation had become less profitable. "As fishermen, we dont aspire to be rich. As long as we can eat and our children are not hungry, we are already grateful, Saudi said. Environmentalists have slammed land reclamation work in the Jakarta Bay for environmental degradation and a decrease in the fish population. The Jakarta Bay contains a lot of toxic substances from all the waste from the capital that finds its way into the bay through 13 rivers. The reclamation project has worsened the pollution. The fishermen said they felt the impact from the reclamation project around six months ago as they noticed the water becoming dirtier. The stack of sand building up the reclaimed islets had also caused a reduction in fish in what used to be their fishing areas. Some of the fishermen now have to sail further to Muara Gembong, Karawang and Bekasi in West Java to catch more fish. This, of course, means digging deeper into their pockets for fuel. Before the construction of Islet G, Saudi said he needed 15 liters of diesel for sailing. Now, he needed at least 35 liters, costing him Rp 280,000 per day. Yopi questioned the leadership style of Basuki "Ahok" Tjahaja Purnama, slamming Jakartas Governor for not involving fishermen in decision-making on policies for North Jakarta and the Jakarta Bay. Some fishermen from Muara Angke and Kali Adem came to the City Council on Tuesday to push councilors to urge the city administration to revoke all permits related to reclamation work that had harmed their livelihood. Ahok claimed the fishermen's protest was politically motivated. "I really want to spread the net in front of Ahok's face while he's here, so he knows that we can still find fish here," Saudi said. A local fisherman caught a white snapper using fishing string and hook in Muara Angke of North Jakarta on Tuesday.(thejakartapost.com/Callistasia Anggun Wijaya) Islet security Most of the fishermen said they had not heard of the reclamation project until they saw the construction of Islets C, D and G. Yopie said he saw people creating piles in the sea last year, without knowing that it was part of a land reclamation project. Meanwhile, the construction of Islet G, conducted by Agung Podomoro Land (APL) subsidiary PT Muara Wisesa Samudra, has separated the fishermen from their previous catchment area. Speedboat security patrols by the giant developer often expelled the fishermen when they got within 200 to 300 meters of the islet. My boat was hit by their boat until it was almost broken, fisherman Galur said. Currently, although the central government has ordered a moratorium on the controversial project for 17 man-made islets in Jakarta Bay, sand-dredging equipment for Islet G is still in operation. Security patrol speedboats were also seen to guard the islet by going around it continuously. The government has said the reclamation should be stopped. Then, why are these people still working? a fisherman named Hasim asked angrily. (rin) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Ayomi Amindoni (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Thu, April 21, 2016 Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi has said that during President Joko Jokowi Widodos working visit to Germany and the UK, Europe expressed its hope that Indonesia would expand its role and contribution in the global fight against extremism, radicalism and terrorism. "Indonesia is considered by others a success for having maintained democracy, tolerance and pluralism in a predominantly Muslim society, Retno said in London on Wednesday morning, local time. The minister further said that despite its diversity, political stability could emerge in Indonesia and the countrys economy even grow above the world average. It is a living laboratory seen by other countries. They consider this diversity an invaluable asset for Indonesia, she said. Retno said Jokowi had reiterated his countrys commitment to counterterrorism and counterextremism. Indonesia is always ready to contribute to global peace and stability. We want to strengthen our role in the eradication of extremism, radicalism and terrorism, Retno said. Earlier, Jokowi said Indonesia was committed to upholding the universal values of humanity, pluralism and tolerance and to promoting democracy and human rights. Jokowi said that by population, Indonesia was the most populous Muslim nation in the world, with more than 200 million Muslims living in the country. It is a country where Islam and democracy can go hand in hand, Jokowi said during his speech at the UK parliament on Tuesday, local time. "We are proud that Islam in Indonesia has an important role in consolidating democracy, and acting as a guardian of pluralism and tolerance. It also calls for moderation in society and is against radicalism, all forms of terrorism, extremism and violence. It can be an inspiration to the world, the President said. Jokowi further said since the reforms of 1998, Indonesia had become the third largest democracy in the world. All citizens, regardless of their racial background, gender and religion, were equal before the law and had equal rights and obligations, he went on to say. The President also explained that Indonesia's military was no longer involved in politics. "Freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion are all guaranteed by the Constitution. Every citizen has the right to be President," he added. Just as in other countries, Jokowi said Islam in Indonesia and democracy still faced various challenges, such as intolerance, radicalism and violent extremism, as well as acts of terrorism, perpetrated in the name of religion. Some of our citizens have joined with terror movements abroad, even though the number is very small compared to 252 million people living in Indonesia, Jokowi said. To face these challenges, he said, Indonesia was in the process of revising its anti-terror laws and improving the capability of its intelligence authorities. At the same time, Indonesia also promoted the use of soft power, including religious and cultural approaches, to countering terrorism and extremism. (ebf) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Ayomi Amindoni (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Thu, April 21, 2016 During his working visit to the United Kingdom, President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo visited an exhibition hosting five Indonesian designers, showing his support for the creative industry. Jokowi hoped the exhibition held in the Fenwick Department Store in New Bond Street, Mayfair, London, would inspire more Indonesian designers to export their products to Britain. "It is the beginning of a cooperative era that will provide opportunities for Indonesian designers to penetrate the British market," he said in a press statement on Wednesday, in local time. The five Indonesian designers are holding the exhibition to promote young Indonesian designers and their work to international fashion week shows. The exhibition will last for one month until May 17. The young Indonesian designers featured in the "Indonesia Fashion Forward" exhibition are Toton Januar, Sheila, Peggy Hartono, Ari Seputra and Yessy Randy W. Kusumo. The exhibition, Jokowi said, was an example of Indonesian and UK cooperation. Earlier, during a meeting with Prime Minister David Cameron, he asked the two countries to tighten cooperation in the creative industry, including in fields such as handicrafts, performing arts, dance and design. The government, through the Creative Economy Board, will provide budgetary support for the creative industry, Jokowi said. "But the most important thing is that there is cooperation in training and in bringing the products to the market in accordance with trends," he said. (ags) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Haeril Halim, Ina Parlina and Stefani Ribka (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Thu, April 21 2016 With the dust over a maritime skirmish involving Chinese coast guard vessels and Indonesian patrol boats last month yet to settle, relations between Indonesia and China are once again being put to the test. On this occasion China has refused to extradite a fugitive Indonesian tycoon recently caught in Shanghai, unless Indonesia returns four Chinese citizens, of Uighur ethnicity, currently detained in prison for terrorism. Indonesian authorities joy at the arrest of Samadikun Hartono in Shanghai 13 years after he fled the country was short-lived after officials confirmed the extradition process was likely to be complicated. Indonesia and China already have an extradition treaty and State Intelligence Agency (BIN) chairman Sutiyoso confirmed the swap proposal to The Jakarta Post on Wednesday. Just wait. I will immediately resolve the problem, he said, without elaborating. Law and Human Rights Minister Yasonna Laoly, who oversees immigration affairs, said on Tuesday that the extradition could not proceed smoothly as China had demanded something in return. Meanwhile, the Chinese Embassy in Jakarta has declined to comment. Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Luhut Pandjaitan is due to discuss the issue with his counterpart in China during his visit to Beijing next week, although Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi, who is accompanying President Joko Jokowi Widodo on his European trip, said she had no knowledge of such a demand. The Chinese authorities detained Samadikun last week on suspicion of passport falsification. Before his arrest, Samadikun had reportedly traveled into and out of China frequently by means of changing his identity. He was arrested just prior to the start of the Formula One race in Shanghai on April 14. Samadikun was sentenced to four years in prison in 2003 for embezzling funds from the Bank Indonesia liquidity support (BLBI), which caused state losses amounting to Rp 169 billion (US$12.84 million). The funds were to be used to bail out his Modern Bank during the monetary crisis of 1998. Chinas demand for the return of the Uighur prisoners hinges on its campaign against terrorism and on a row with Turkey over the cultural identity of the Uighur people, who are mostly Muslim and whose language is related to Turkish. The restive Xinjiang province, home to the Uighurs, has long been a hotbed of terrorism. A Cabinet member, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Indonesia was unlikely to return the Uighurs because of concerns about mistreatment once they were handed over to the Chinese. Indonesia would be condemned by the international community if something awful happened to the returned Uighurs, he said. The North Jakarta District Court sentenced the four Uighurs to six years in prison last year after finding them guilty of conspiring with the East Indonesia Mujahidin terrorist group, led by fugitive Santoso. The court ruled that Ahmet Mahmut, Tuzer Abdul Basit, Altinci Bayram and Ahmed Bozoglan were guilty of violating the antiterrorism and immigration laws. The men were arrested in September 2014, as they attempted to link up with Santoso in Central Sulawesi. The Turkish authorities have lobbied Indonesia to have the prisoners extradited to Turkey rather than sending them back to China. Turkey insists that the Uighurs are their citizens, a claim strongly denied by the Chinese. International law expert Hikmahanto Juwana said the existing extradition deal between the two countries, signed in 2009, permitted extradition without swaps. There should be no requirements by China, he said. The prisoner-swap issue comes on the heels of Indonesias accusation that China obstructed law enforcement when two Chinese coast guard vessels intercepted Indonesian patrol boats towing a Chinese fishing boat caught operating illegally near the Natuna Islands. The Chinese coast guard vessels took the fishing boat from the much smaller Indonesian patrol boat, which had to settle for detaining the fishing boats eight-man crew. The crew are still being detained at the immigration detention center in Riau Islands. Beijing has called on Jakarta to release the eight, arguing they were operating in traditional Chinese fishing grounds. _________________________________________ To receive comprehensive and earlier access to The Jakarta Post print edition, please subscribe to our epaper through iOS' iTunes, Android's Google Play, Blackberry World or Microsoft's Windows Store. Subscription includes free daily editions of The Nation, The Star Malaysia, the Philippine Daily Inquirer and Asia News. to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,500/month Unlimited access to our web and app content e-Post daily digital newspaper No advertisements, no interruptions Privileged access to our events and programs Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin thejakartapost.com (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Thu, April 21, 2016 The government is working on its latest economic policy package. The package will focus on improving the ease of doing business as part of efforts to deregulate Indonesias economy, an official at the Office of the Coordinating Economic Minister has said. Edy Putra Irawady, deputy coordinating economic minister for trade and industry, said the forthcoming package was aimed at raising peoples purchasing power, increasing industrial competitiveness and strengthening export commodities. "We will focus on one point: how to improve the ease of doing business," he said after a seminar on economic policy packages in Balikpapan, East Kalimantan, on Wednesday. As previously reported by kompas.com, Coordinating Economic Minister Darmin Nasution promised to release the twelfth economic policy package after President Joko Widodo visited Europe. Edy argued that red-tape problems as well as certification and other bureaucratic issues continued to hinder small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from doing business. The coming package is expected to solve these issues. He further said the upcoming package would build upon previous ones on SMEs and export-oriented business loans. However, Edy acknowledged that the packages issued over the last 10 months were often constrained by details and there were often problems in implementing them in the field, especially among regional governments. (ags) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin thejakartapost.com (The Jakarta Post) Siak Thu, April 21, 2016 The Indonesian Oil Palm Estate Fund (BPDP) has invested Rp 6.75 billion (US$512,530) with 155 farmers to help them replant their plantations in Siak, Riau. The farmers are partners of palm oil producer Asian Agri. BPDP president director Bayu Krisnamurti said that was the initial portion of funds to be disbursed by the institution as part of government efforts to support the sustainable palm oil industry. In the first phase of a multi-year program, the BPDP plans to spend Rp 52 billion to replant 2,100 hectares of palm plantations. "Each farmer receives Rp 25 million per hectare. The money has been transferred to the receivers bank accounts," he said in remarks on Wednesday during the fund disbursement ceremony at the Mulus Jaya village unit cooperative (KUD). The fund disbursement, he continued, had been quite easy and took only three months to process. He warned the farmers not to misuse the cash for other purposes and asked the KUD and banks to supervise the utilization of the funds. In its program, the BPDP aims to help farmers replant a total of 100,000 hectares of oil palm plantations per year. The program is reserved for smallholder farmers with plantations of less than 4 hectares. Those participating must join the KUD for replanting. Mulus Rahayu KUD chair Pawito Saring said the grant was allocated to help replant 310 hectares of smallholder farmers plantations. "Each farmer has previously taken out a 13-year loan from Bank Syariah Mandiri worth Rp 51 million to replant a hectare of plantation. With the [BPDP] fund disbursement, the farmers only need to repay Rp 26 million to the bank," he said. During the ceremony, Krisna also signed a memorandum of understanding with three other cooperatives that are also partnering with Asian Agri. Asian Agri managing director Kelvin Tio said the replanting was the corporations strategic program to maintain productivity in the long run. "We will keep supporting small farmers. Since 1987, the 29,000 farmers with a total plantation area of 60,000 hectares are significant partners for Asian Agri," he said. This year, Asian Agri targets to replant 2,402 hectares of small farmers plantations in Riau. Next year, it eyes another 4,000 hectares. Asian Agri, owned by Indonesian tycoon Sukanto Tanoto, has been in the spotlight recently following tax evasion amounting to Rp4 trillion in 2012. (ags) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin thejakartapost.com (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Thu, April 21, 2016 After a over a week of searching, police finally arrested on Wednesday a man accused of murdering and mutilating his pregnant partner. He is being intensively interrogated, said head of Jakarta Police general crimes division Sr. Comr. Krishna Murti in Jakarta on Thursday. The man, Kusmayadi, aka Agus, was arrested at a restaurant on Jl. Masrip in the East Java capital of Surabaya by Tangerang Police officers. Before the arrest, the police had been hunting for Agus in Lampung in South Sumatra, and in Bogor, West Java, at the house of his wife. Before the arrest, Police spread photographs of Kusmayadi using social media. He has been at large since NA, his victim, was killed on April 10. Agus is accused of killing NA and mutilating her body. Parts of the victim's body were found at a rented house in Cikupa in Tangerang regency, Banten. Before her body was found, neighbors had heard quarrels between Agus and NA. (bbn) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Marguerite Afra Sapiie (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Thu, April 21, 2016 Joint police personnel have been readied in Nunukan regency, North Kalimantan, to assist in an operation to rescue 10 Indonesian sailors held hostage by Abu Sayyaf militants in the Philippines. National Police chief Gen. Badrodin Haiti said the special troops, comprising personnel from the detective unit, intelligence unit, Brigade Mobile (Brimob) and Densus 88 antiterror squad, were now on standby to be deployed at any time. "We are ready to join the Indonesian Military [TNI], which has also prepared troops in North Kalimantan," Badrodin said during a hearing with House of Representatives Commission III overseeing legal affairs on Wednesday. Army Strategic Reserve commander (Pangkostrad) Let. Gen Edy Rahmayadi said that the TNI was on standby in the waters bordering the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, principally in Tarakan, North Kalimantan, kompas.com has reported. The police have also coordinated with the owner of the kidnapped vessel, PT United Tractors, to establish a crisis center in North Jakarta, where the police's cyber crime unit is on standby, Badrodin said. Meanwhile in external measures, Badrodin said, the National Police is intensively cooperating with the Philippine police to track the movement of Abu Sayyaf, a southern Philippines-based militant group who have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (IS). On March 29, two Indonesian-flagged vessels, the Brahma 12 tugboat and Anand 12 barge, were hijacked in Philippine waters near Borneo by Abu Sayyaf, and the two crews, numbering 10 men in total, taken hostage. While the two vessels have been rescued by the Philippine and Malaysian authorities, Abu Sayyaf is demanding a ransom of US$ 1.14 million in return for the release of the hostages. Ahead of attempts to rescue the 10, the police are coordinating with the Foreign Ministry, Badrodin added. Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi has previously said that the Philippine and Indonesia governments are continuing communication and coordination, adding that the safety of 10 Indonesian sailors was the priority. However, Badrodin noted that the Philippine constitution did not permit the operation of foreign troops in the country's territory. "There needs to be the approval of the Philippine parliament before we, as a foreign authority, can take action." (dan) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Marguerite Afra Sapiie (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Thu, April 21, 2016 The joint police and military Operation Tinombala will continue, regardless of time and expense, until it succeeds in capturing wanted terrorist Santoso and his followers. National Police chief Gen. Badrodin Haiti said on Wednesday that joint forces grouped in the operation would step up offensive measures to track down the East Indonesia Mujahidin (MIT) movement in the jungles of Poso, Central Sulawesi. Following a recent visit to Poso to evaluate the operation, Badrodin called for innovations in tactics, such as moving at night with night goggles to monitor any movement. "We will improve all monitoring and communication equipment [...] and intelligence equipment to assist the operation," Badrodin said. If Santoso and his men are not immediately cornered, Badrodin said, they will keep recruiting members to their group, making it all the harder to eradicate them. National Counterterrorism Agency (BNPT) chief Comr. Gen. Tito Karnavian has previously called Santoso a symbol of rebellion who attracts extremists and the disaffected from across the archipelago. Recently, the joint troops succeeded in arresting two young members of the MIT, namely Sulaeman from Madura, East Java, and Ibadurrohman from Bima, West Nusa Tenggara, as the two were searching for food in Padalembara village, Poso Pesisir Selatan. According to Badrodin, the police will continue to interrogate the detained men regarding the whereabouts of Santoso and the MIT. Since January this year, the police and Indonesian Military (TNI) have deployed more than 2,500 personnel to hunt the terror group, which publicly pledged allegiance to the global terrorist Islamic State (IS) group in 2014. (dan) TheJakartaPost Please Update your browser Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below. Just click on the icons to get to the download page. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (Associated Press) Beijing Thu, April 21, 2016 The Taiwanese wire fraud suspects who were deported from Kenya to China are adjusting to conditions in a Beijing detention center, said an official from the island who visited the facility Thursday. Chen Wen-chi, who leads the Justice Ministry's department of international and cross-strait legal affairs, was given a tour of medical facilities and interview rooms in the Haidian district detention center, but she was only able to observe the suspects on security cameras. "I saw those Taiwanese detainees today. They are in good physical condition. Please rest assured that they are all adjusting well at the detention center," Chen told a small group of reporters accompanying the delegation. Chinese police are investigating the 45 Taiwanese over their suspected involvement in telephone scams that cheated Chinese victims out of large sums. Several have been shown on Chinese state television describing how the scammers pretended to be government officials and other authority figures to convince victims to transfer funds to them or provide personal financial details that could be used to steal money. Taiwan's government protested the deportations out of concern that China was using the case to assert its claim to Taiwan. China said it had jurisdiction because its citizens were victimized and argued that Taiwan had not sufficiently punished past perpetrators. Along with looking into the condition of the detainees, Chen's delegation is discussing with Chinese officials how they might cooperate in future cases. While some on Taiwan hope the 45 can return home to stand trial or serve their sentences, China appears to be determined to deal with them on its own. Taiwan managed to convince Malaysia to send another group of suspected scammers to Taiwan rather than the mainland, but then released them on arrival for lack of evidence sparking anger from China. On Thursday, 18 of the 20 were taken into custody after prosecutors reviewed evidence dockets forwarded by Chinese investigators. They argued there was strong evidence of their culpability and concerns they would collude on their stories and pervert the course of justice. The two not taken into custody were ordered to stay in Taiwan. ___ AP journalist Johnson Lai contributed to this report from Taipei, Taiwan. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Audrey Mcavoy and Caleb Jones (Associated Press) Kapolei, Hawaii Fri, April 22, 2016 Two pilots are slowly carving their way into a new future of solar-powered flight as one of them embarks on the latest leg of their around-the-world journey in a plane powered only by the sun. After some uncertainty about the winds, the Solar Impulse team took off from Hawaii early Thursday. The aircraft landed in Hawaii last July but was forced to stay in the islands after the plane's battery system sustained heat damage on its trip from Japan. The Swiss-made Solar Impulse 2 is now on course to land in Mountain View, California, in about three days. The aircraft started its journey in March 2015 from Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, then made stops in Oman, Myanmar, China and Japan. It's on the ninth leg of its circumnavigation. Pilot Bertrand Piccard, who is flying this leg of the trip, said the idea of crossing the ocean in a solar-powered plane a few years ago stressed him out, but Thursday morning he was confident things would go according to plan. Piccard also said the flight's destination, in the heart of Silicon Valley, is fitting. He said on his way to the airfield that when the plane lands there, it will land "in the middle of the pioneering spirit." Piccard's co-pilot Andre Borschberg, who flew the leg from Japan to Hawaii, told Piccard he greatly admires his dedication and strength. He said the plane "represents what we could do on the ground in our communities, in our cities." The team was delayed in Asia, as well. When first attempting to fly from Nanjing, China, to Hawaii, the crew had to end their trip early and divert to Japan because of unfavorable weather and a damaged wing. A month later, when the weather conditions were right, the plane departed from an airport in Nagoya in central Japan for Hawaii. That trans-Pacific leg was the riskiest part of the plane's global travels, as there was nowhere for it to land in an emergency. The same is true for the trip from Hawaii to the U.S. mainland. The plane's ideal flight speed is about 28 mph, though that can double during the day when the sun's rays are strongest. The carbon-fiber aircraft weighs more than 5,000 pounds, or about as much as a minivan or midsize truck. The wings of Solar Impulse 2, which stretch wider than those of a Boeing 747, are equipped with 17,000 solar cells that power propellers and charge batteries. The plane runs on stored energy at night. The crew successfully arrived in Hawaii after completing their longest trip to date, but the plane's batteries became too hot on the first day of its trip from Japan to Hawaii. There was no way to cool them down, the team said, and the system required extensive repairs. The company said there was no weakness in the technology, but they didn't anticipate similar temperature fluctuations in a tropical climate. (bbn) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Norbaiti Phaharoradzi (Associated Press) Kota Tinggi, Malaysia Thu, April 21, 2016 A tugboat and a barge and their crew of eight Indonesians have been detained by the maritime authorities for smuggling sand in Pengerang waters, here. The Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) said the vessels were spotted during a routine patrol 3.4 nautical miles south of Teluk Ramunia at 10.15am on Wednesday. The agency's Tanjung Sedili enforcement chief Maritime Capt Amran Daud said the foreign-registered tugboat and barge were carrying about 145 tons of sand from Kuantan to Singapore. Checks on the Batam-registered tugboat TB Buana Superior and barge Buana Ocean 05 also found eight Indonesian crewmen including the captain aged between 21 and 38. The crewmen have been brought to the MMEA's Tanjung Sedili base for further investigations, he said in a statement here on Thursday. Capt Amran added that the case would be investigated under the Customs Act 1967 for smuggling taxable goods, which carries a fine of up to 10 times the value of the goods, upon conviction. As we reported yesterday, prosecutors are asking a federal judge to slap former Assemblyman Sheldon Silver with a stiff sentence. After his late-November conviction on corruption charges, theyre calling for a prison term of greater than 14 years. This morning, were publishing the full memorandum from the defense, which includes many letters of support from Mr. Silvers Lower East Side neighbors. The document, filed in court yesterday, reveals that Silver, 72, has prostate cancer. He was diagnosed a year ago and has undergone radiation treatments. The cancer is currently in remission. Defense attorneys are asking Judge Valerie Caproni to take Silvers medical condition into account when hes sentenced next month. The filing also includes a letter of apology from Silver. It reads, in part: There are letters from the former speakers children, as well as from Rosa Silver, his wife of 49 years. Writing this letter is the most difficult thing I have ever done, she told the judge. I am not sure what I can say to Your Honor except that my husband is a good man. He has done so much good for his family, which always came first, and also for the people of the State of New York Please give him as lenient a sentence as possible. There are too many letters of support to mention all of them here. They include a wide cross-section of the 65th Assembly District, which Silver represented for almost 40 years. There are neighbors in the Hillman Co-op, where Silver has lived since the 1970s; local rabbis; community leaders, seniors and small business owners. Mendel Hagler, former executive director of Gouverneur Health, Michael Zisser of University Settlement, Pastor Marc Rivera of Primitive Christian Church and Seward Park Co-op General Manager Frank Durant are just some of those who testify to Silvers good works on the Lower East Side. Tenant leaders such as Aixa Torres of the Smith Houses and Grisel Cintron of the Vladeck Houses submitted pleas to the judge. Torres acknowledged Silvers conviction, but said that through 9/11, two hurricanes and other crises, Mr. Silver has been present to help our community, and in doing so gave us hope to continue. In Chinatown, people such as Justin Yu, head of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce; pharmacist Peter Lau; and Virginia Kee, co-founder of the Chinese American Planning Council, all wrote letters. Kee, explained, I was truly touched that Assemblyman Sheldon Silver endorsed my candidacy (for district leader in 1985) At that time very few elected officials paid any attention to Chinatown It is part of Sheldon Silvers legacy that our Asian community has been empowered and seeks representation. While Mr. Silvers many public and private good works do not excuse the conduct on which his conviction rests, argued defense lawyers, they along with his personal circumstances deserve thoughtful consideration in reaching a result that is truly fair. The attorneys also tried to minimize the damage from last weeks revelations regarding Silvers alleged extra-marital affairs. Make no mistake, they wrote, the Government has not proven them and certainly has not proven that there was any quid pro quo regarding them despite its extraordinary investigation of every aspect of Mr. Silvers life. Silvers legal team is proposing that he be allowed to serve a portion of his term by performing community service at The Fortune Society, a non-profit group that advocates on behalf of criminal justice issues. U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara is urging a federal judge to crack down hard on Sheldon Silver when the former Lower East Side assemblyman is sentenced next month. In documents filed today, prosecutors argue that Silver should be sentenced to more than 14 years in prison. The longtime New York state power broker was convicted on corruption charges this past November. While guidelines suggest a sentence of up to 27 years, the courts probation department has recommended a 10-year prison term. Prosecutors have not made a specific proposal, but argue that the sentence should be substantially in excess of whats been recommended. In a memo to Judge Valerie Caproni, they called for a penalty greater than any sentence imposed on other New York State legislators convicted of public corruption offenses. The longest sentence for a similar crime was handed to former Assemblyman William Boyland, who was convicted on corruption charges last year. Hes serving a 14-year term. Prosecutors also want Silver to relinquish more than $5 million profits from his bribery schemes and pay at least $1 million in fines. They argued: The sentence imposed on Silver should reflect the unprecedented magnitude, duration, and scope of his abuse of power It should reflect the immeasurable damage Silver caused to the democratic process and to the public trust. It should punish Silver for the vast harm he has caused and the position of trust that he exploited, deter other elected officials from the temptation towards corruption, and communicate to the public that the rule of law applies even to the most prominent of public officials. Silvers lawyers also weighed in on the subject today. They called for a lighter sentence that would permit the former lawmaker to, continue to employ his unique talents to benefit others. They suggested that, a sentence that incorporates extensive community service and little if any incarceration could do that. Silver was convicted last year of seven counts, including honest services fraud, extortion and money laundering. Prosecutors said he illegally collected about $4 million in legal fees after using his position, that of assembly speaker, to aid a cancer researcher and two real estate firms. Silver will be sentenced May 3. The lifelong Lower East Side resident is 72 years old. Here are the dueling memos from the prosecution and defense, courtesy of Politico New York. Danny Boyle's cult classic 28 Days Later was surely ripe for a Secret Cinema immersive cinema make-over I mean who doesnt want to enter a post-apocalyptic world where a virus is turning humanity into blood-thirsty zombies. I decided to brave the horror for a four-hour experience that would thrust me directly into the films world, and around the population's infection with the deadly rage virus. As with all their efforts the experience starts well before the actual night, with emails from the 'NSH' and junior doctor Louise Chambers, urging me and other patients to register for vaccination. As well as this BBCC news reports on the patient website and social media created a sense of realism and panic at the spreading virus. This was a really clever touch as it created social media hype around the event. At the secret London location itself, as patients, you are thrust directly into the action starting with your vaccination. It felt as though we had genuinely been dropped into the middle of an apocalyptic world, and, I for one, really felt the fear of the unknown. You dont just watch a film, you feel the world around it and it feels real. Having already seen 28 Days Later before attending Secret Cinema, the whole experience felt truly authentic and the quarantine process was scarily realistic. Being shut out from the outside world for four hours and confined within a huge warehouse is probably the closest we can come to experiencing an apocalyptic crisis. The experience was extremely jumpy and forced us to run as fast as we would in the real situation. The warehouse itself was also incredibly well suited to the daunting yet thrilling journey, with corridors spanning a huge distance, leaving me genuinely worn out when I reached the end. The fear of being infected is at times overwhelming even though you are aware it is all an act. The design and set up of the warehouse was almost identical to some scenes in the film, however unfortunately too much time was spent running to stop and admire these aspects. Like 28 Days Later, the experience had a great soundtrack of techno music remixed to fit the convulsions of rage infected 'zombies'. Details such as this made it feel as if we were really living the movie. Even during the screening the experience didn't end as it continued to be interactive. For 28 Days Later fans like myself, there is no better way to experience this film. It is the closest we can come to living the thrilling nightmare, and the whole experience was a really amazing tribute to a great film. 2 Turks put on security watch list after Singapore alert NATIONWIDE: Two Turkish nationals have been placed on a Thai security watch list following a security alert from Singapore, the Immigration Bureau says. immigrationpolice By Bangkok Post Thursday 21 April 2016, 09:25AM Shackled and handcuffed, the two Chinese Uighurs accused of last years Erawan shrine terrorist bombing went to military court to begin a marathon trial. Photo: AFP Singapore warned Thailand to watch out for three Turkish nationals suspected of plotting an attack against Chinese interests on Thai soil. Of the three names handed over by Singapore, only one, identified as Ali Yalcin, 36, was found to have entered and left the kingdom in March. Further checks have found he had travelled with another Turkish national, Arif Yilmaz, 35, who was not on Singapores watch list. Both Mr Yalcin and Mr Yilmaz hold Turkish passports. Lt Gen Nathathorn Prousoontorn, chief of the bureau, said immigration authorities have placed both men on their watch list and are awaiting more details from Singapore. The pair have no criminal record in the country and no warrants for their arrest have been issued by Interpol, he said. According to the immigration database, Mr Yalcin arrived at Don Mueang airport on March 18 from Singapore on an AirAsia flight and left for Cambodia on March 22. He re-entered the country on March 24 and left for Malaysia via Phuket International Airport on March 28. There was no record of a third entry. Lt Gen Nathathorn said immigration authorities have run checks and found that Mr Yalcin was travelling with Mr Yilmaz as their seats were next to each other. The commissioner said security authorities have been keeping a close watch on Turkish nationals and Mr Yalcin was picked out at random for questioning when he arrived on March 18. At that time immigration had no information about him. He said police have been sent to gather more information in the Sukhumvit 16 area and Phuket where the two men were seen during their stay in the country. He also rejected any links between the three Turkish nationals and an earlier report about two Uighurs entering the country to commit terrorist attacks here. Based on a media report earlier this month which was denied by police, two Uighur individuals were said to have arrived in Phuket and authorities were told to be cautious as the individuals could be targeting Chinese tourists or Chinese interests in Thailand. National police chief Chakthip Chaijinda said the police force has been keeping a close watch on foreign nationals and following up on every security warning. Sometimes the warnings came after they had left, so its hard to trace them. I am confident everyone is being careful about attacks, he said. Gen Thawip Netniyom, secretary-general of the National Security Council, said the Singapore warning asked Thailand to be cautious about three Turkish nationals without discussing any details of possible attacks. He said he was informed of the security warning from Singapore on Tuesday (Apr 19) and discussed it with immigration authorities who insisted none of the men are currently in the country. Col Pirawat Saengthong, spokesman of the Internal Security Operations Command (Isoc), said yesterday intelligence authorities have assessed the situation and concluded the security risk is low. He said army commander Teerachai Nakwanich, who serves as Isoc deputy chief, has told intelligence officials to keep working diligently and called on the public to keep an eye out on behalf of the authorities. Read original story here. Man dies installing extractor fan in Phuket property, electrocution possible cause PHUKET: Police have yet to confirm the cause of death of a man who died when installing a extractor fan at a property in Kathu earlier today (Apr 21). They suspect the man could have received an electric shock during the installation. accidentsdeathpolice By Eakkapop Thongtub Thursday 21 April 2016, 05:14PM Police inspect the scene of the incident. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub Capt Suwanya Eidtrong from Thung Thong Police received a call at around noon today from a resident of Moo Baan Sinthongtani in Soi Singtaotani 6, Kathu stating that a man had died whilst installing an extractor fan in his kitchen. Police arrived at the scene with Kusoldharm rescue workers and were led to the body of 59-year-old Montri Jaiboon who was lying lifeless on the kitchen floor. Capt Suwanya said, The home owner, Mr Prapas Chewphirom, said that he had hired Mr Montri to install an extractor fan above his cooker. Whilst fixing wires to the extractor fan Mr Montri fell from his ladder and crashed into the cooker before falling on the floor. He believes he may have received an electric shock. Mr Montris body was taken to Vachira Hospital and police are waiting for doctors to confirm the exact cause of death. PM casts fisheries chief adrift BANGKOK: The regime has decided to remove Fisheries Department chief Wimol Jantrarotai for making slow progress in addressing illegal fishing amid concerns Thailand is still at risk of being slapped with a red card by the European Union (EU). marinepolitics By Bangkok Post Thursday 21 April 2016, 08:59AM Trawlers head out to sea amidst continuing charges of illegal fishing, human trafficking and inhuman treatment of fishermen, all of which add up to a real threat of an EU red card. Photo: Bangkok Post file photo The EU issued a second yellow card warning to Bangkok in April last year for not doing enough to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing activities, which could lead to an EU ban on Thai seafood products. The EU has yet to set a deadline for reviewing the countrys yellow card status after reviewing the countrys progress in cleaning up the fishing industry in January. Agriculture and Cooperatives Minister Chatchai Sarikulya said yesterday (Apr 20) Mr Wimol tended to take an academic approach and his achievements were below par. He has made slow progress and several targets have not been reached, Gen Chatchai said. Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha yesterday invoked Section 44 of the interim charter to transfer Mr Wimol to become a special inspector-general attached to the Prime Minister's Office. Deputy director-general Adisorn Promthep assumes the fisheries chief role. The transfers were aimed at improving administration efficiency in the Agriculture and Cooperatives Ministry, which oversees the Fisheries Department, according to his order. Gen Chatchai said he believed the new director-general would be able to expedite the campaign to stamp out IUU practices. During this period of time, it is urgent we eradicate IUU practices since it has been almost one year since the EU issued the yellow card, Gen Chatchai said. I want to see the Fisheries Department adjust its work to be more fluid and effective and this is the reason the department director-general had to be changed. He also said if the new director-generals work is unsatisfactory, a change will be made immediately. I have tried to find a capable person who has confidence in his work, Gen Chatchai said. As the department has been restructured, it should be able to speed up efforts to deal with several issues, the minister said. A government source said yesterday that a Thai negotiating team on IUU issues, led by the Thai ambassador to the United Nations, Virachai Plasai, warned the government that there are still several obstacles to addressing the problem, which could lead to a red card being issued. The source declined to disclose many details about the warning but said one of the problems was a lack of cooperation between the navy and the Fisheries Department. The navy, which is playing a key role in stopping illegal fishing practices, is stringent and decisive in its work, while the department adopts academic principles. Another key concern is about political motivation. As long as Thailand is under military rule, the country faces the risk of a negative outcome from the EU, he said. A navy source said it was unlikely a rift between the navy and the department was the cause of Mr Wimols removal. It more likely stemmed from problems between Mr Wimol and his deputy, Mr Adisorn. The source said they did not appear to get along well. Command Centre to Combat Illegal Fishing spokesman Vice-Admiral Chumpol Lumpikanon said he did not know why Mr Wimol was removed and it was a matter for senior figures to consider. We are following all the EU recommendations. I dont know if there will be political motivation involved but EU will need to clearly justify its decision, he said. Col Sirichan Ngathong, deputy spokeswoman of the National Council for Peace and Order, said 85 per cent progress had been made in eradicating IUU practices. Read original story here. Sale of Phukets West Sands Resort attracts Hong Kong, Singapore interests PHUKET: The West Sands Resort and Villas in Mai Khao, on Phukets northwest coast, has attracted strong investment interest from Singapore, Hong Kong and Mainland China since it was put up for sale earlier this month, according to JLL Hotels and Hospitality, who is leading the sale. tourismeconomicslandproperty By The Phuket News Thursday 21 April 2016, 12:30PM The beachfront swimming pool at the West Sands Resort and Villas in Mai Khao, on Phukets northwest coast. The West Sands Resort and Villas, with its own integrated water park, occupies a prime freehold 113 rai beachfront site at Mai Khao Beach near the newly expanded Phuket International airport. The strongest interest to date has been from Singapore, Hong Kong and Mainland China as well as domestic Thai groups who know better than anyone the scarcity of West Coast beach front real estate in Phuket, said Mike Batchelor, Managing Director of JLL Hotels and Hospitality Group. The potential to secure a Thailand Board of Investment (BOI) privilege, which would allow 100-per-cent foreign ownership of the hotel and the land, was also of great appeal to the foreign investors reviewing the opportunity. The enquiries signalled the healthy investment appetite for hotel assets in Asia Pacific, he added. The master-planned resort, with its large land holdings, provides expansion opportunities for both the existing hotel and water park with the original plans for a development of up to 1,000 keys. The hotel asset currently has 575 keys. The site could be further developed to include condominiums and villas, fractional or vacation ownership or a senior living component, noted JLL in its release issued on Tuesday (Apr 19). According to Mr Batchelor, the completion of the new airport terminal in June will be a game changer for Phuket, which currently has direct flights to 14 countries and 43 cities around the world, including 19 cities in China. Phuket and its tourism industry has benefited from increased international arrivals, in particular those from Mainland China, noted JLL, adding that Chinese inbound arrivals into Thailand have grown at a rate of 47.7% annually over the past five years. The Tourism Authority of Thailand aims to further grow arrivals to Phuket by targeting first-time visitors from established European markets as well as emerging Eastern European countries. We expect visitor arrivals to increase, facilitated by the expansion of the airport, said Mr Batchelor. JLLs Hotels & Hospitality Group has completed more transactions than any other hotels and hospitality real estate advisor over the past five years, totalling more than US$68 billion (B2.28 trillion) worldwide. Between negotiating the worlds most extraordinary, enticing, and profitable property deals, the groups 350-strong global team also closed more than 4,400 advisory, valuation and asset management assignments, said the release. How to watch and what to know about South Dakota State at North Dakota As Queen Elizabeth turns 90 on April 21, we pay tribute to some of the vehicles in the royal fleet. Bentleys, Rolls-Royces, Land Rovers and Daimlers have been the brands of choice used by the Queen, members of the royal family and visiting dignitaries, all part of the fleet of vehicles housed in the Royal Mews garage at Buckingham Palace. Chauffeurs drive the state vehicles, but having served as both a mechanic and ambulance driver during World War II, the Queen has logged a lot of her own drive time. Starting with the new Bentley SUV that Queen Elizabeth is the first in line to own, having driven a prototype at her Balmoral estate in Scotland last fall, the following are six key cars Her Majesty is famously associated with. 2016 Bentley Bentayga Unveiled at the 2015 Frankfurt Motor Show in September, this ultra-luxury SUV is a descendant of the British carmakers first SUV concept, the 2012 EXP 9. Its twin-turbo, 600 hp W12 (12 cylinders configured in a W shape) engine propels the Bentayga from 0 to 100 km/h in 4.0 seconds to a top speed of 300 km/h. Starting at $290,381 , the Queens is #1 of 608 First Edition models marked with Union Jack badges, unique 22-inch alloy wheels, illuminated door sill entry plates, and a gravitationally self-winding Breitling dash clock. All the first editions were sold in advance and Bentley expects to assemble 3,000 to 4,500 Bentaygas per year to meet the demand for the worlds first uber-luxury SUV. Bentley hails its first ever 4X4 as the most powerful, luxurious, and exclusive sport utility vehicle in the world. 2015 Range Rover State Review Its been said that Queen Elizabeth has owned as many Land Rovers as Corgis since her accession in 1952, and when it came time to update her 2002 Range Rover roadster, HRH went with a longer wheel base Range Rover Hybrid LWB landaulet. Powered by an SDV6 3.0-litre 340 hp turbo diesel engine mated to an electric motor and an eight-speed automatic transmission, its capable of launching from 0 to 100km/h in 6.9 seconds and reaching 217 km/h. As a state vehicle, specially customized by Jaguar Land Rover, this SUV is for public functions and not country cruises. Its the fourth time the carmaker has built an open-roof landaulet model for the Queen to use as a parade vehicle, from which she can be seen as she waves to crowds. While private-use regal Land Rovers have traditionally been painted British racing green, state vehicles, from SUVs to limos, are typically a maroon colour, called Royal Claret Livery. 2002 Bentley Arnage Golden Jubilee Edition Custom-built for Queen Elizabeth IIs 2002 Golden Jubilee, this lavish limo cost almost three times more than the base models list price. Weighing about 4,000 kilos, its 400 hp 6.75-litre V8 runs on propane to reduce emissions. Designed with security in mind, this state vehicle was expanded in length, width and height to contain all the necessary safety elements making it bulletproof and blast resistant. The tires are made with Kevlar and the sunroof is impervious. The bulked up exterior and cavernous insides makes occupants seem tiny. The glass panoramic roof and windows have a reflective coating sandwiched between two glass panels to keep it cool inside. Its one of the Queens two Bentley state vehicles. 2000 Land Rover Defender 110 HRH has driven many Defenders since Land Rover began supplying 4X4s to the royal family when her father King George VI reigned in 1948. The Queen rarely drives in public, but shes been often seen casually attired behind the wheel of these iconic British vehicles on royal properties. At Balmoral in 1998 she took the visiting prince of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, for a spin around the grounds. Hanging onto his seat, the future king of the Arab nation that forbids women to drive asked his regal chauffeur, through his interpreter in the back seat, to slow down. Its 122 hp 2.5-litre, five-cylinder diesel engine tops out at 130 km/h, more than anyone, including royalty, would care to go in a rough riding box built more for off-road conditions than long motorway hauls. The last Defender rolled off the line Jan. 29 this year. 1977 Rolls-Royce Phantom VI Silver Jubilee Edition The official state vehicle until 2002 when Bentley became the Queens favoured armoured transporter, the Phantom VI was a gift from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders in honour of her 25th anniversary as monarch. This was the royal Rolls that delivered Prince Williams fiancee, the soon-to-be Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton and her father, to the 2011 wedding at Westminster Abbey. It was repaired and restored after protesting students pelted it with paint bombs, rocks and sticks five months earlier. The first Phantom VI ranked as the worlds most expensive car when it debuted in 1968. Packed with security features, the Queens Phantom is a custom-made, raised roof limo powered by a 535 hp 6.75-litre V8. The Queens Phantom VI has a silver hood ornament depicting St. George slaying a dragon, instead of the traditional Spirit of Ecstasy emblem. 2001 Jaguar Daimler Super V8 LWB The Queen has had three Daimlers for her personal use and for family members to travel between Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and in the London area. Shes even driven one. Built at Jaguars Coventry factory, Daimlers have been a part of the royal fleet since they were first built in 1896. The Queen Mother owned four and monarchs from Edward VII to Elizabeth II have been chauffeured in Daimlers. The Queens favourite Daimler limo had custom security and communications features as well as various personal touches, like a rear sliding console panel for her handbag, specially designed window switches, custom leather seats and lambskin carpeting. Its supercharged 358 hp 4.0-litre V8 could reach a top speed of 250 km/h. That British racing green-coloured Daimler sold at auction in 2013 for 40,500 ($75,440 Cnd.) complete with a few Corgi hairs visible in the carpeting. SHARE: Netflix has followed through on its plan to crack down on Canadian viewers who use virtual private networks to watch unlicensed content such as Degrassi: Next Class programming which is availableon the American version of the streaming service, but not its Canadian counterpart. While few details are available on how many Canadian users are affected, error messages have been appearing on fee-based VPNs when Netflix customers attempt to establish a virtual address in the U.K. or the U.S., countries where the streaming service company offers abundant programming. PayPal has reportedly begun denying payment services to VPNs that it believes violate copyright law and Canadian customers of Unblock-Us say the provider is the latest casualty of the aggressive Netflix action. The homegrown teen drama Degrassi, along with such popular movies as Inglorious Basterds and Blue Velvet, are so far excluded from Netflix Canada, which offers some 4,209 movies and shows versus the 6,870 that are available on Netflix USA. Netflix in the U.S. offers more content and more up-to-date programming than its service in Canada. Canada is an important Netflix market with an estimated four million users and as many as one third of a million having used a VPN to access content outside of the country. Franchise creator and executive producer Linda Schuyler told the Hollywood Reporter that the Degrassi reboot debuted worldwide last January on the U.S. version of Netflix, as well as on Family Channel in Canada, because thats where the kids are. Observers say Netflixs blocking methods are not entirely clear, but the company appears to cross-reference a customers IP address from subscription agreements against a blacklisted proxy IP list to deny access or only stream content available in the country of residence. Along with user complaints, the Netflix move has prompted charges that the U.S.-based streaming service has caved to legacy content providers and rights-holders while walling off its own expanding catalogue of original Netflix productions. Leading global provider NordVPN said Netflixs action has the potential to undermine peoples effective and legitimate use of pro-privacy technology. One has to wonder why Netflix went through all the trouble (of) blocking a small number of users, and the likely answer to that is that the company has been pressured by rights-holders to do so, NordVPN said in a blog post. Many Internet users feel their choices had been significantly limited. It is also unfortunate that they are discouraged from using VPN and proxy services, which indirectly discourages the use of security software that makes their Internet browsing secure and private. Following an expansion that saw its content become available to most nations, albeit with varied quality and quantity, Netflix on Jan. 14 announced a VPN and proxy service crackdown. While the company had previously turned a blind eye, its obligation to rights holders and a need to protect its own content led to takedown requests to a number of sites hosting pirated versions of its shows, TorrentFreak reports. Netflix has also begun to disclose links to Google search that it suspects are related to pirated material. Read more about: SHARE: The dream of a new detached house with a yard just passed the million-dollar mark in the Toronto area widening the gap between a starter condo and a place with a little more space. As of March 31, the average price for a new detached home in the GTA was $1.05 million - more than double what it cost a decade ago and 21 per cent higher than the end of last March, according to a report by Altus Group for the Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD) released Thursday. The Toronto region has crossed a key psychological threshold, said BILD CEO Bryan Tuckey "It's really, really important because in people's minds $1 million is a lot of money for a home," he said. Tuckey puts the existing price situation down to simple supply and demand. "If we continue with this supply not keeping up with demand prices will increase. It's that simple," he said. There is an influx of 36,000 new households into the GTA annually while the supply of new ground-level homes, including detached houses, town homes and semis, is at a record low, 3,036 - down from nearly 15,000 10 years ago. "Thirty-six thousand homes is a lot of homes. It's a big challenge," said Tuckey. As the supply of detached homes, towns and semis declines, high rise supply has remained fairly steady with 18,280 condos available, including pre-construction projects, those under construction and 1,736 built units. Around 2008, the difference in price between the average high rise condo and the detached or attached ground level home was less than $100,000. Today it is close to $400,000. "The challenge becomes quite extreme for new home purchasers. Even if they are able to sell a condo if they have one for $400,000, they still have to come up with a mortgage of $400,000-plus just to bridge that gap," said Tuckey. Part of the high price phenomenon is a result of taxes. An earlier Altus study found 20 per cent of the price of new homes is attributable to government fees such as development charges and land transfer. "Development charges in the GTA since 2004 have increased between 143- and 257 per cent and that is generally passed on to the consumer," said Tuckey. "When you have taxes in the 20- to 23-per cent range, municipalities have to begin to make different choices," he said. Tuckey said the building industry has transitioned its business to respond to the province's densification plan, Places to Grow. But the government needs to do a better job of explaining what that means to residents. "It's not a boom. It's an incredible shift from low-rise homes to high-rise homes," he said. But Tim Gray of Environmental Defence said builders and developers have traditionally resisted those sprawl-prohibiting policies. There's more than enough land to build sub-divisions until at least 2031, he said. "If you look at places like Vaughan or suburb cities north of the city, they have a large amount of land within their urban boundaries approved for low-density development," he said. Prices are climbing in urban areas because people want to live there, said Gray. "They don't want to drive because it's hellish. That is what's driving high home prices in downtown Toronto," he said, adding there's mounting evidence that Ontario needs more policies like the development-protected Green Belt around Toronto. New home numbers $861,848 Average price of a new detached house in the GTA in March 2015 $439,294 Average price of a new detached house in the GTA in March 2006 $849,312 Average price of townhouse, semi- and detached home in the GTA in March $459,231 Average price of a new GTA condo in march $300,000 Average price of a new condo in 2006 3,592 GTA new home sales in March 3,757 GTA new home sales in March last year 3,382 10-year average of GTA new home sales in March Altus Group for BILD SHARE: Canadian auto parts giant Magna International Inc. has emerged the frontrunner to build the rumoured Apple iCar, according to a German newspaper. Magna spokesperson Tracy Fuerst said the company does not comment on speculation. The idea gained traction after a German newspaper, Handelsblatt, said luxury car makers Daimler AG and BMW AG have both ended talks with Apple. The report quoted unnamed sources close to both companies. At thestar.com: Driverless cars: Who will own the market? Magna is now considered to be the frontrunner in Apples search for an automaker that could build its vision of an electric, possibly self-driving car, the German paper said. The Aurora-based auto parts maker has experience assembling vehicles at its Magna-Steyr facility in Austria for both Daimler and BMW. Apple executives reportedly toured that plant in September, 2015. I have no insight into whether or not Magna is the front runner to build vehicles for Apple or not but Magna is certainly capable, said Tony Faria, co-director of the University of Windsors Office of Automotive and Vehicle Research. Magna has assembled vehicles for many of the worlds leading auto companies, including Chrysler, BMW and Mercedes and has built a full vehicle of its own in the past, Faria noted. Magna has also expressed interest in working with Apple, Google and other tech companies that want to get into the auto industry, Faria added. Apple has declined to acknowledge what Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said is an open secret that its building an electric, possible self-driving car. Earlier this week, Apple reportedly added former Tesla vice-president of vehicle engineering Chris Porritt to its growing roster of automotive experts. Talks between Apple and the German automakers Daimler and BMW reportedly broke down over who would control the project, the German newspaper said. Correction - May 25, 2016: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said Magna International Inc. has assembled vehicles for Ford, Toyota and Volvo. In fact, the auto parts giant has supplied components and systems to these automakers but has not assembled complete vehicles. Read more about: SHARE: If Prince and the city of Toronto had a mutual love affair, his surprise March visit was a fitting final dalliance. The shows developed with the late Purple Ones typical secrecy and spontaneity. Mark Hammond, CEO of the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts, says the venue learned Tuesday, March 22 that Prince might be interested in dropping by that Friday for a pair of shows. It was out of the blue, but not out of character; the pop mastermind had set up surreptitious shows at the Sony Centre just 10 months earlier. So, Hammond and his senior staff began planning for the shows, as quietly as possible. You just hope to hell (staff) keep it quiet because if the word had got out, we knew he wouldnt have come, Hammond said. He was quite a secretive person that way. Related: Vote Prince was a mad musical genius of incomparable confidence PHOTOS: Music legend Prince and his 40-year career Social media erupts with tributes to Prince Indeed, one of the most famous people to ever live in Toronto was also famously reclusive. And yet, he seemed to open up ever-so-slightly here. In October 2001, Prince and his then wife, Toronto-born Manuela Testolini, bought a sprawling $5.5 million estate at 61 The Bridle Path. They divorced in 2006, though Testolini posted Thursday that she had told Prince this week she was building a school in his name. Im beyond heartbroken that he wont be there to see that come to fruition. (The house was sold in 2011 and recently listed again for $12.788 million.) Prince was a common sight at Raptors games and DJing at clubs, where hed sip coffee, Amaretto on ice or Merlot through a straw. He recorded his 2004 album Musicology here, flaunting the citys skyline in his liner notes. He used to shop at the Chapters bookstore in Bayview Village, tweeted local Peter Jakes. He was a tiny perfect person. In a 2004 interview with The Canadian Press, Prince declared his appreciation for our cold winters (its worse in Minneapolis, where he was born) and, best of all, Speakers Corner, where he noted he was always so tempted to stop his car and say what I have to say. Its cosmopolitan, he said. Theres all sorts of different kinds of people everywhere you go in Toronto, theres all sorts of great music, great restaurants, great night spots that dont respond to a lot of American playlists. Still, Prince could disappear when he wanted. He was immensely private, said ET Canada host Cheryl Hickey, who saw Prince perform at a private Emmys after-party in 2006. You never heard of him being at the local Sobeys. He really just blended into everyday life in Toronto. Well, he couldnt just blend in during his last visit here. After his Sony Centre shows which fan Jason Allen called transcendent Prince was scheduled to appear at club called the Everleigh on King St. W. He showed up around 12:30 a.m. and hung out with his band behind a curtain eating a vegetarian meal, recalled Zark Fatah, a partner at Capture Group, which owns the club. At one point, Prince poked his head out and said that if the crowd stuck around, hed come out and dance with them. That was around 1:30 a.m., and when he didnt emerge by 3 a.m., the club started to close and guests left. Prince left too, around 3:30, and Fatah figured that was it. Then, 15 minutes later, the club got a call: Prince wanted to play. At this point, 90 per cent of the crowd was gone and maybe 30 staff and friends remained. Prince performed for 45 minutes a magical unplugged jam session, Fatah recalls then packed up and drove directly to the airport. He didnt bother with a hotel. Some elements of the evening are a blur to Fatah, but he recalls one quote vividly. One thing he said was funny: Now that everybodys gone, lets have some fun. SHARE: Viet Cong the band is no more. The Calgary group, which announced it would change its name last September after criticism over the old ones association with Vietnam War atrocities, has finally revealed the new handle: Preoccupations. We apologize to those who were adversely affected by our former band name, the members wrote in a statement. This was never anticipated nor our intent. We are artists and not politicians, we understand that the name reflected pain to some individuals and we are happy to change it and move on and focus on our music. Thanks to all our friends and fans. See you all soon. Band members had admitted being ignorant about the historical and political context of the name when they first chose it the Viet Cong was the name of the National Liberation Front army that battled American and South Vietnamese forces while inflicting atrocities upon civilians during the Vietnam War - but the issue threatened to overtake their Polaris Prize nomination last year. Oberlin College in Ohio cancelled a show over the controversy. Preoccupations will now get on with touring, including an Oct. 8 show at Torontos Danforth Music Hall. Read more about: SHARE: I recently lost my virginity to a guy who lives nearby. A week later, my so-called friend slept with him. Ive forgiven them both, but kept them at arms-length since. Ive finally given a close friend a chance (after two of three years), and although were not together, I care for him. I also care for the other guy, my first. Im happy and comfortable with this close friend, but my first is acting funny, maybe jealous. Hes been doing little slick things and been really petty about the situation. He thinks Im mad at him, but I dont know what to say to him anymore. Now that Im happy, he comes rushing back, suddenly misses me, and says, We need to talk about what we are. I dont know what to do and I dont want anyones feelings getting hurt. Between A Rock and Hard Place Look in the mirror. This is about you and how you want to live, not about keeping every guy you know happy. Your first immediately moved on to your friend. He didnt care about your feelings, just about getting more sex. Why care about him? Why get caught up in whatever his little slick things are? He just wants to break up your current closeness with this friend. Keep looking in the mirror and telling yourself that youre in charge of your body and your choices. Then tell your first sex partner that he threw away having any further chance with you. And mean it. I was born in Europe, but have lived in Canada my entire life. I go to school and have lots of great friends. I do really well in my studies, especially English. But for four years my mom keeps demanding that we move to Europe. And my dad has given in. Going to school will be a disaster! Without knowing the native language, my grades will drop. Also, I dont have the good looks that can steal a crowd. Its just the group of people I hang out with that keep me from being lonely. If I move, Ill be a loner. Plus, my parents are overprotective and I still dont have a phone. My grandparents try to convince me to move, but I love my house and my school and friends. And with all the terrorist news from Europe, I dont know why my parents want to take me out of safety. My parents are almost always talking about the move and selling our house next year. This summer Im heading to Europe for my aunts wedding and Im scared about having to stay there forever. What should I do? Im not a crazy teen. I just CANT MOVE. Terrible Drama Take a deep breath and ask your parents to help you. Say (without yelling) that you WONT or CANT move, that youre extremely anxious at even the thought of moving. Say that its interfering with everything at school, and at home. Suggest that you all go to a family counsellor and hear each other out. Say that youll be willing to try and understand why they want this move if they can be willing to hear how it affects you. If they refuse this idea, ask at school to see a counsellor, or talk to a trusted teacher. You need to air out your fears with a neutral professional, perhaps even your family doctor to help deal with increasing anxiety. Tip of the day Someone who plays fast and loose with your feelings doesnt deserve your loyalty, even if he/she is your first. Email ellie@thestar.ca . Follow @ellieadvice SHARE: WINTER HAVEN, FLA.Weve all played with and created amazing things with Lego, and Legoland in Florida lets both kids and adults enjoy the experience on a larger scale. I convinced my nieces, ages 9 and 13, along with their parents, to join me on a Florida gulf coast holiday, with a two-day side trip to Legoland Florida Resort in Winter Haven. A great destination for families, this park and hotel is about a 90-minute drive from the coast along the Gulf of Mexico and our holiday home base at Anna Maria Island. The Legoland Hotels model citizens (employees) let you store your luggage if needed so you can head directly to the park while waiting for a call that tells you your room is ready. Travelling with a 9-year-old fan of the Lego Friends, we went straight to the newest section of the park, Heartlake City, for Mias Riding Adventure. This became a fast favourite for the kids and the biggest kid of the bunch me on a day of roller-coasters, more rides and interactive fun. We explored the theme areas Star Wars, Miniland USA (scenes from across the U.S. built with Legos), Kingdoms (takes kids back to medieval times), Chima (a water park), Technic (the most extreme zone with games and rides), and Duplo (for the youngest guests), and tested all the great rides. A must-do for all kids is to become a fully licensed driver (by Legoland standards) at the Ford Driving School. For competitive types, theres interactive fun on the Lost Kingdom Adventure ride. Here we fired laser blasters at targets to gain points as we rode through an ancient ruined temple in all-terrain roadsters. This ride kept us coming back to better our scores and one up each other. Thank goodness the park is just steps away from the hotel, so we could quickly switch from park fun to hotel relaxation. Disco elevators, pits filled with Lego bricks to play with, and a pool with foam Lego bricks comprise this hotel designed with kids in mind. Our Kingdom-themed room featured lower door peepholes, a separate childrens sleeping area, a king-size bed for the adults, plus a treasure hunt to unlock the chest. But, before that sleep, an evening of more kid fun must happen, so be prepared to play in the pool or enjoy a character show. We fuelled up at the Skyline Lounge, which has a fun Lego skyline to check out. The Bricks Family Restaurant is also a dining option, but we saved that for the breakfast buffet included in our stay. Anne-Marie Marais was hosted by Bradenton Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, which didnt review or approve this story. When You Go Get there: WestJet and Air Canada offer direct flights to Sarasota, which is a short drive from Anna Maria Island. Tampa airport is another option. Get around: Youll need to rent a car. The drive from Legoland to Anna Maria Island is about 90 minutes. The island is walkable and has bike rentals and a trolley. Legoland: Legoland Florida Resort: Legoland.com At the Legoland Hotel, sign your children up for the daily Lego Master Model Builder Sessions as soon as you arrive as the spots fill up fast. Bring Lego Minifigures to trade with model citizens (employees). You get access to the park 30 minutes before it opens. Anna Maria Island: Find out more: visitannamaria.com Rent a guest house on Pine Avenue from Anna Maria Island Accommodations for a family-sized space. Tortuga Inn Beach Resort is steps from the beach and has three heated pools. The Mainsail Beach Inn offers luxurious condo-like accommodations with beachfront access, a heated pool, hot tub, poolside grill, and beach lounge chairs and umbrellas. Tradewinds Beach Resort has pastel cottages, a heated pool, and a fishing pier. Read more about: SHARE: OTTAWAThe day former senator Raymond Lavigne was sentenced for filing $10,000 worth of fraudulent expense claims Sen. Mike Duffy noted the disgraced Liberals fate in his diary: 6 months in jail; 6 months house arrest. It was June 2011. Now, nearly five years later, Duffy is about to learn his fate Thursday when Judge Charles Vaillancourt delivers verdicts on 31 charges of fraud, breach of trust and bribery that RCMP laid against the former broadcaster-turned-senator. Live updates, click here. Yet it isnt just Duffys professional and personal futures that hang in the balance. Whatever the judge rules, legal experts say the Duffy case never mind the intense coverage of the case and its role in shaping a federal electoral result has already influenced public expectations of the Senate and will soon shape legal understanding of what exactly the public trust means for public officials claiming to respect it. I think it has precedential value for sure, said former House of Commons law clerk Rob Walsh. Parliament doesnt get caught up in the courts that often, so where it happens it has an impact. Retired judge James Fontana, who until recently was Vaillancourts judicial colleague, said no matter which way it goes, the decision will carry weight and influence. It may get the powers-that-be, and I think they already have, to clarify and clean up the rules governing Senate expenses, and maybe have the controllers of the purse keeping a bit better eye on things, Fontana said in an interview. Fontana said arguments that rules are unclear, or other senators equally mismanaged expense claims as revealed by last years auditor general report into the Senate may have little or no influence on the outcome: Its like the fellow travelling down the (Hwy.) 417 and theyre all speeding and hes number three and they nab him. Either way, Fontana and Walsh said the decision will guide our view of the standard of behaviour expected of public officials. That decision in itself will stand as a clarification, a confirmation and a guideline of what the situation is going to be in the future, Fontana said. It can get vague as to what constitutes a breach of the public trust, says Walsh. What does it mean for, in this case, a senator? Did he use his office in some way that is contrary to the public interest? Well, spending money in ways for which it was not given to him may not . . . include a fraudulent action on his part but may in the judges mind constitute an abuse of his position and in that sense be a breach of trust. Duffys lawyer, Donald Bayne, has said his client is innocent of criminal charges. Walsh said conviction on any of the fraud charges facing Duffy will send a clear message to parliamentarians that youre not beyond the law when it comes to using public funds and you have to be careful. An acquittal on all charges could have the opposite impact, says Walsh. It might be there would be a sense of immunity from successive prosecutions. Walsh said the judge will have to separate and resolve the legal issues that may be clouded by the larger political context. They are not always easily separated. The politics is there. The judge can hopefully more in a more disciplined manner more easily discern where the politics leaves off and the law takes over. The decision may also have implications for other cases, including former Conservative Sen. Patrick Brazeau and retired Liberal senator Mac Harb, and any others still under RCMP scrutiny. It does have broad implications one way or other, but I dont think anyone is sure which way it will have implications and to what extent, said Fontana. For Duffy the stakes are more obvious and immediate. Only acquittal on all counts would allow Duffy to take up his Senate seat again right away. Conviction on any charges would mean Duffy would remain suspended with pay until a sentence hearing. At that point any sentence other than a discharge would see him immediately suspended without pay until all appeals are resolved. Duffy, who joined the Senate in January 2009 but was suspended during the last session of Parliament after the Mounties charged him, hasnt yet fully qualified for a Senate pension. Conviction on the more serious fraud counts carries a heavy maximum jail penalty, up to 14 years. The Crown says Duffy fraudulently claimed more than $90,000 in living expenses, paid by the Senate, in designating a P.E.I. cottage as his primary residence and his longtime Ottawa home as a secondary residence. Other charges state Duffy fraudulently spent $65,000 in Senate funds for consulting contracts routed through a friends company for services explicitly barred by Senate rules, or which were for his own benefit, not Senate business. Duffy is separately alleged to have billed thousands of dollars in travel for personal or partisan political benefit, such as funerals or fundraisers, contrary to Senate rules. Finally, Duffy is charged with bribery, breach of trust and fraud on the government in connection to what the Crown says was his deliberate attempt to solicit and accept a benefit or bribe $90,172 from the former chief of staff to Stephen Harper, Nigel Wright to repay the Senate for what were deemed inappropriately claimed housing expenses. The sensational case was heard in whats generally called a lower provincial trial court the Ontario Court of Justice, which hears about 95 per cent of criminal cases in Ontario. But the experts say the rarity of such a case and the deep dive into the evidence, the Senate rules and the law means this decision will make history. Read more about: SHARE: An Ontario judge has found that the provincial government substantially interfered with teachers right to collective bargaining. The governing Liberals imposed contracts on teachers in 2012 that froze some of their wages and limited their ability to strike. Several unions took the government to court, arguing that Bill 115 violated their constitutional rights. Ontario Superior Court Judge Thomas Lederer issued his decision today, ruling in favour of the unions. Sam Hammond, the president of the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario, says the decision is a total vindication of the unions pursuit of democratic rights. Paul Elliott, president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation, says he is pleased the court reconfirmed the importance of free, fair and meaningful collective bargaining. The judge has left it up to the unions and the government to discuss what the remedy should be. I find that considering the overall process undertaken, the actions of Ontario substantially interfered with meaningful collective bargaining, he wrote. It is telling that although all sectors were experiencing the same fiscal concerns, Ontario allowed for free negotiations and did not interfere with collective bargaining in any other sector. SHARE: Health minister Eric Hoskins drew heat from fellow doctors and political peers on Wednesday over Ontarios stem cell transplant crisis, which has seen under-funded hospital programs rationing life-saving treatment as patients are dying on unacceptably long wait lists. A Toronto Star investigation this week revealed more than 200 of Ontarios sickest patients, who are ready for a transplant and have been matched with a donor, cannot be helped at home. Instead, the ministry has decided to outsource this critical care to hospitals in Buffalo, Cleveland and Detroit at a cost that could exceed $100 million. Cancer Care Ontario told the Star the ministry expects to pay $400,000 to $600,000 (US) per patient more than double the rate in Ontario. The money is ready to go but the patients are not. Only 19 have agreed to go south so far. The treatment requires patients to travel with a caregiver and live in the U.S. near the hospital for three to four months. These personal costs are not covered by the government program. The situation highlights the continued mismanagement of health care by this government, Conservative health critic Jeff Yurek said during Question Period. The situation did not come about without warning. In 2008, Cancer Care Ontario released a report to this government. It stated: Access to transplant services in Ontario is at imminent risk . . . Services in the Greater Toronto Area need to be augmented as there is only one program to serve the entire region. The government ignored that warning. Now the system is broken and Ontarians are suffering. Princess Margaret, the countrys leading cancer centre, closed its doors to new stem cell transplant patients at the end of March. The centres waiting list for treatment is six to eight months; international standards dictate that transplantation occur within three months of diagnosis. Princess Margarets medical director is calling for a second transplant centre to open in the GTA. We definitely need another centre in Greater Toronto Area. Thats where the pressure is, Dr. Mary Gospodarowicz told the Star. Ive never heard of a city in North America the size of Toronto that doesnt have at least two transplant centres, Dr. Irwin Walker, medical director of the bone marrow transplant program in Hamilton, said in an interview. Hoskins said in Question Period that Cancer Care Ontario is working with Juravinski Hospital in Hamilton, The Ottawa Hospital and Princess Margaret Cancer Centre to rebuild their programs. The process is expected to take two to three years. Patients now have two choices: die, or travel out of country for their treatments, Yurek said. Will the minister stop the political rhetoric and give an honest answer to Ontarians on how the government will help those seeking stem cell transplants in Ontario today, instead of two years from now? Hoskins noted the three Ontario programs responsible for stem cell transplants using unrelated donors the most complicated and expensive kind of transplant, which is growing in popularity as people have fewer siblings to rely on will receive a collective $30 million. Were working with them on the capital, were working with them on the operational (pressures), but were also providing that option for individuals for out-of-country treatments, should they so choose it, Hoskins said. Yurek tried again. Will the minister admit that they failed Ontarians, ignored the warnings of imminent collapse of the system, and offer immediate relief to patients needing life-saving stem cell transplants? Hoskins said his government has increased funding for stem cell transplants in the past four years by 600 per cent. I know Opposition doesnt want to hear the truth, but Im telling them that theyve increased the number of transplants taking place at Princess Margaret hospital by 25 per cent, Hoskins said. 600 per cent.......!!!! I cant take that seriously, Walker, Juravinskis stem cell transplant director, told the Star in an email. Weve grown 25 per cent without really getting any new capacity, Princess Margarets Gospodarowicz explained. We need to have more doctors, more nurses. We have challenges with our laboratories, pharmacy, pathology. Theres a lot of infrastructure. At Roswell Park Cancer Centre in Buffalo, where Ontarians are being treated, a team of 60 health-care workers including doctors, nurses, laboratory and pharmacy staff interact directly with stem cell patients. The scope of the treatment demands a large, cooperative team. Directors province-wide agree that staff are working harder than ever and are on the edge of burnout. But its not because a geyser of money is rushing into their programs. The Ottawa Hospital is doing 50 per cent more transplants than 18 months ago and all resources are lagging, said Dr. Chris Bredeson, the hospitals head of malignant hematology. There are not 50 per cent more people doing 50 per cent more transplants, Bredeson said. Every day is a juggling match. How are we going to get 22 patients in the same number of beds that we used to put 12? And how do you do that without making a mistake? We feel sick. It keeps me, it keeps all of us, awake. No solution will be fast enough. More on thestar.com: Ontario to spend $100M outsourcing life-saving transplants to U.S. Ontario cancer patient cant say enough about Buffalo stem cell transplant SHARE: More than 16 months after a parliamentary committee enacted a new sexual harassment policy for MPs and their staff, information about how its being used has yet to be made public. The much-discussedguidelines were adopted on Dec. 9, 2014 by the multi-party Board of Internal Economy following disturbing allegations about sexual misconduct by elected officials. It set out formal and informal procedures for dealing with complaints between MPs and political staffers. Written into the House of Commons Policy on Preventing and Addressing Harassment was a provision stating the chief human resources officer would monitor its implementation, and provide the board with an annual statistical report on the number, nature, and outcome of harassment complaints, as well as the number of people who attended training sessions on the policy. A spokeswoman for the office of the Speaker of the House of Commons confirmed to the Star on Wednesday that the yearly report has not yet been published. It will be reported on the first full cycle (2015-16) to the Board of Internal Economy in the coming months, Heather Bradley wrote in an email. She did not directly answer a follow-up question about whether reporting in the coming months would conform to the timeframe of annual reports outlined by the policy. Concerns about gender bias were the talk of Parliament Hill again this week, when Conservative MP Michelle Rempel (Calgary Nose Hill) wrote an op-ed cataloguing the everyday sexism she has experienced as a female politician. In the column published by the National Post on Monday, Rempel said sexist behaviour that male MPs have subjected her to included telling her not to discuss issues until she was less emotional, and advising her to be more cheerful. She wrote that one MP told her It turns me on when youre direct. Julie Lalonde, program manger of the Draw-the-Line Campaign, said its vital to track the number and nature of sexual harassment complaints in order to determine whether the new policy is working. Its great that theyre enacting a policy, but Im not willing to celebrate if its not actually being enacted, and if its not actually doing something other than sitting on a piece of paper, she said. Publishing numbers about sexual harassment complaints would show you whether or not people felt comfortable using the (complaint) mechanism, she said. Lalonde added that it is important that the tracking figures are made available to the Canadian public. The policy states that the statistical report should go to the Board of Internal Economy, a secretive body that publishes only vague minutes of its meetings, sometimes months after they take place. I would support the Canadian public knowing those numbers, absolutely. Because those are our elected officials, we pay those peoples salaries, she said. In response to questions about Rempels column Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said sexism is a problem in workplaces across the country. Weve improved here but theres still an enormous amount of work to do and were part of the solution, he said in French. Trudeau has made combating gender bias in government a priority, and won widespread praise for appointing Canadas first gender-balanced cabinet upon his election last October. On Wednesday, the Prime Ministers Office declined to answer questions about the lack of a report on the new sexual harassment policy, and referred the Star to government House leader Dominic Leblanc. Attempts to reach Leblanc on Wednesday were unsuccessful. Legislators in Ottawa agreed it was necessary to create policies to address sexual harassment complaints in 2014, after two female NDP MPs came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against Liberal MPs Scott Andrews and Massimo Pacetti. Both men denied any wrongdoing. Justin Trudeau removed them from the Liberal caucus in November 2014. Two separate but similar policies were drafted; one governs allegations of harassment between MPs; the other, which mandated annual reporting, covers the conduct of members of parliament, including house officers, in their role as employers, and also applies to their staff. The former was adopted by the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs in June 2015, and came into effect at the start of the current session of Parliament. Larry Bagnell, Liberal representative for the riding of Yukon and chair of the standing committee, told the Star Wednesday that the complaint process between MPs as far as I know had no activity at all yet. With files from Joanna Smith SHARE: NEW WESTMINSTER, B.C.A prosecutor has asked for a five-year prison sentence for a British Columbia man notorious for images of himself abusing young boys in Southeast Asia. But even if a B.C. Supreme Court judge agrees with the Crowns request, Christopher Neil would serve about 10 months after time he has already served awaiting trial. Neil pleaded guilty in December to five charges including counts under Canadas rarely used child-sex tourism laws. Neil was dubbed Swirl Face by international media after authorities unscrambled online child-sex abuse photos leading to the B.C. mans arrest in Thailand, where he was imprisoned for four years on separate charges. He was freed under strict conditions when he returned to Vancouver in October 2012, but was arrested on 10 new charges in March 2014 and has been in custody ever since. The charges include two counts of sexual interference in Cambodia in 2003, one charge of possessing child pornography in Maple Ridge, B.C., in 2007 and two charges of accessing child pornography in Vancouver in 2013. Read more about: SHARE: Danger came with Paul Mannings job. One time, as an undercover Hamilton police officer, he was lured into a dark basement, certain that he was about to get a bullet in the back of the head. Other times, the danger came from within. Feeling sold out and alone, Manning says he placed his service handgun in his mouth and thought of pulling the trigger. In an extraordinary lawsuit, Manning and his wife, Sabina, are seeking $6.75 million in damages, including $4.5 million from Hamilton police, alleging the service failed to protect him and his family, effectively ending his career. Sabina Manning claims the police had a duty of care to her husband that should have been extended to her. The couple is also seeking $2.25 million from the OPP. Manning, an experienced undercover officer trained in England, alleges his cover team during an infiltration of illegal gambling lacked proper training and there was no structured exit strategy for him and his wife. Those failures, he alleges, led to mental health issues and suicidal thoughts he shared with peers and superiors yet no one asked him to turn in his gun. Manning is unable to work due to chronic post-traumatic stress and is unlikely to return to police work. He is also suspended due to pending police act charges stemming from a threat he allegedly made to a lawyer for the Hamilton Police Association, the police union. Manning also alleges his identity was revealed by a high-ranking police colleague to a Hamilton crime family because Mannings undercover work was close to exposing the officers criminal activity. The officer, Manning alleges, asked the crime family to scare off Manning. Mannings lawsuit includes a long list of explosive allegations of police corruption in Hamilton, which Manning claims to have learned about from his police duties and undercover work, including his network of informants, two of whom have since died violently. It is highly unusual for police officers in Ontario to sue their own service and just as unusual for officers to make public allegations about the misbehaviour of colleagues. This is a way of punishing them, Manning said in an interview, because there is no other way I can punish them. His wife, Sabina, supports the allegations. He was born to be a cop, he was born to help people, she added. And they destroyed it. None of Mannings allegations have been proven in court and many of his claims cannot be independently verified. He and his wife are representing themselves without a lawyer. The Star and the Spectator have elected to remove many of the names in the suit, because of the serious and personal nature of the unproven allegations. Lloyd Ferguson, chair of the Hamilton Police Services Board, said he could not comment on Mannings statement of claim because the matter is before the court. The board has given legal counsel direction to vigorously defend it, said Ferguson, councillor for Ancaster. Neither Hamilton police nor the OPP have yet filed statements of defence. Reporters sought comment from the Ministry of the Attorney General in regards to the OPP allegations but did not receive an immediate reply. Hamiltons police services board is attempting to have the suit tossed out, arguing his claims should be dealt with as union grievances. In its motion, Hamilton police call Mannings allegations scandalous, frivolous or vexatious or are otherwise an abuse of the process of the court. The board also alleges Mannings claims of injury to reputation are an attempt to dress up a defamation claim. Among Mannings claims in his lawsuit: Hamilton police officers fraudulently claimed reward money from Crime Stoppers, and others were involved in ripping off drug dealers and marijuana grow operations. Two officers have been on the take since the 80s. They would pay reward money to a relative and then split the proceeds. A senior Hamilton officer sold information about the investigation into the unsolved 1998 murders of criminal lawyer Lynn Gilbank and her husband, Fred. Its believed Gilbank may have been the subject of a gangland hit at her Ancaster home. Several Hamilton police officers have ties to organized crime and the Hells Angels. Manning also names a Toronto officer he alleges was selling guns to Toronto gang members. He and his wife were falsely detained and their rural home subject to an improper search by Hamilton police, who told him they had received a tip and came looking for a marijuana grow op. More than 20 officers showed up but no grow op was found. What police did find and took from his safe without issuing a receipt, Manning alleges, were personal notebooks detailing his undercover activities. Manning has applied to have the search warrant unsealed and his notebooks released. An off-duty Hamilton police officer frequented an illegal booze can operated by a member of the Hells Angels, where cocaine was openly snorted off the bar. Manning says his mental health has suffered and that he has engaged in some reckless and self-destructive acts since 2006, when his cover was compromised. Once, during a routine traffic stop, Manning admits pointing his handgun at the driver as he experienced a flashback and thought the driver was one of the men who had tried to kill him. On another occasion, he pointed a gun at the head of an officer from behind a partially closed front door. While Mannings allegations are unproven, he has clearly been damaged by his police work, according to psychologists reports. And what is also true is that, in filing such a lawsuit, Manning has broken a police code of not speaking out. What follows is based on medical letters, documents, interviews, news reports and Mannings unproven allegations in his lawsuit. Paul Manning, 42, grew up in Accrington, a suburb of Blackburn, in northwest England. He began his policing career in the U.K. in 1993 and, according to his lawsuit, he worked for numerous law enforcement agencies, including the Metropolitan Police Service in London. He says he worked in special squads, including a stint in Belfast combating IRA terrorism. In 2004, Manning interviewed for jobs in Hamilton and Toronto, and accepted an offer from Hamilton police. The couple moved to Canada in early April 2005. Manning went to Ontario Police College, where he won an award for highest grades, and then, after a half-day use-of-force training, stepped right into the role of undercover officer. Almost immediately, according to his lawsuit, he was buying drugs from the likes of brothers Thomas and Shane Riordan, who in 2006 would kill a man over a drug deal. Manning was quickly assigned to infiltrate the Hamilton Mob and investigate illegal gambling. Using the alias Paul Wright, Manning says he gained the trust of crime family members as well as members of the Hamilton Hells Angels chapter. In a November 2005 memo to Hamilton police human resources, the suit states, a supervisor called Manning one of the best undercover officers. In one incident, he was put to the test. In an interview, Manning said one of his targets made it known he had a job for him and asked him to come to a house. Manning feared that might mean the Mob was preparing to kill him, and warned his police team. When Manning entered, the door was bolted behind him. Two large men he had never seen before were there. He was told to head to the darkened basement, followed by three men, and that hed find a light switch. My knees are going, legs are going, Manning said. I think Im going to get done in the back of the head. He switched on the light to reveal a freshly renovated basement apartment. We want you to live here. Come and live with us, he recalls being told. When he left, he spotted his cover team in a nearby parking lot, ready to storm the house, fearing he was going to be killed. Instead, Manning told his police handler: Were in. While Manning, for safety reasons, never did move in, he had passed the Mobs test with flying colours. According to the suit, on March 24, 2006, while undercover, Manning was standing outside a bar on James St. N. when he was approached by four men, including the Riordan brothers, Thomas and Shane. Hey cop, Thomas said to Manning, the suit states, and then without warning the four men started hitting Manning. Manning, according to the suit, ran to his undercover apartment, called his police handler and was told to wait there for extraction. The handler called back to say the men were gone and that a marked cruiser was on scene. When Manning emerged, there was no police car, the suit states. The four men were there, armed with knives, one of them purporting to have a gun in his pocket. The suit states he fought them for about 10 minutes before getting back inside. One attempt to stab him cut through his T-shirt. Manning alleges a member of his cover team drove by during the second attack and did not stop to help. The suit alleges an OPP officer kept the ripped T-shirt as evidence of an attempted murder, but no charges were ever laid. Manning remained undercover. I stayed because I wanted to. I knew the risks, he said in an email. He said he was very cautious, but I also know this was the undercover job of the decade. According to the suit, he immediately began to have night terrors. Manning, in an email, said he felt hed been sold out but was told I was being a little paranoid. He told no one of the night terrors, he said. At one point, he claims his cover team lost him and phoned his wife to see if he had returned home. In fall 2006, Manning, according to his claim, learned an OPP officer had lost a laptop and notebook containing details of the police operation looking into illegal gambling, including Mannings involvement and his personal details. With that, the operation was over. Manning and his wife fled their home and received spotty armed protection from police. For his own protection, police provided Manning with his service pistol to carry at all times, his lawsuit states. It was also around this time that Manning, on at least three separate occasions put his service firearm in his mouth with intent to kill himself, the suit states. Manning, the suit states, shared his thoughts of self-harm with both the service and the Hamilton Police Association. The service, according to the suit, ordered Manning to see a Toronto psychologist, but Manning alleges the sessions made his condition worse because it appeared the service had been briefing the psychologist. No one, the suit claims, relieved him of his firearm. Manning took to sleeping at the front door, with his service pistol in his hand and his feet planted against the bottom of the door, his suit claims. At the end of October 2006, Manning says in his suit, he learned the Riordan brothers were suspected of killing Michael Walsh. Walsh, 22, had been clubbed with a candlestick, stabbed and shot on Oct. 11, 2006. In 2009, the Riordan brothers admitted their involvement in what the judge called the assassination of a helpless man. Thomas Riordan received a life sentence for second-degree murder, while Shane received seven years for manslaughter. Manning alleges Hamilton police are indirectly responsible for Walshs death, since they never charged the Riordans with attempted murder in the attack on him six months earlier. In April 2007, Manning started as a uniformed patrol officer in Stoney Creek. His depression and nightmares worsened and twice he placed his gun in his mouth, he says in his suit. Not long after, Manning claims he met a high-ranking police officer and a police association representative. Near the end of the meeting, Manning says in his suit, he raised Walshs murder because he felt guilt over it and how he wanted to tell the Walsh family the same. The suit claims the senior officer told him to be careful what you say, because one day you might call 10-78 and nobody comes a reference to the radio code for an officer in need of assistance. Manning wanted to find out how the Riordans knew he was a cop. He alleges he met one of his informants, Lou Malone, a former Hells Angels enforcer who would be gunned down on a Hamilton street in 2013. In his lawsuit, Manning alleges Malone told him that Insp. Rick Wills, the disgraced former head of Hamiltons vice and drugs unit, had sold him out to a Hamilton crime family, which led to the attack by the Riordans. Wills was worried about Mr. Mannings infiltration turning up aspects of his years of criminal wrongdoing, Manning alleges in his suit. Wills pleaded guilty in 2010 to fraud for stealing $60,000 of drug-bust money and ultimately served time in jail. Wills, the suit alleges, wanted the crime family to scare off Manning so he wouldnt delve into Willss activities. Wills declined to comment about Mannings allegations. By 2010, Mannings mental health continued to deteriorate. On Aug. 9, 2010, Manning was alone on patrol in a marked cruiser, at a time, according to his suit, when he was constantly thinking of killing himself, and of harming others. I turned left on to King St., I took my seatbelt off and I just accelerated, he said. The speedometer rose past 70 km/h when the cruiser mounted a curb and, according to the suit, drove directly into a large hydro pole, shearing it in two. His head struck the windshield. Manning was charged with careless driving and remained on the job. In October 2013, Manning was diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder directly linked to the 2006 attempt on his life. On March 2, 2014, Manning alleges he had a lawyer serve a notice of intent to sue on then-chief Glenn De Caire. About three weeks later, Manning claims, 21 uniformed officers came to his house with a warrant for a grow op. Police searched the house but left without searching outbuildings and much of his large property, the suit states. No grow op was found. In May 2014, the suit states, the police association asked for any paperwork relating to his workplace woes to ensure the union had done its due diligence. He later received a letter from an association lawyer full of intentional factual errors. In February 2015, Manning sent an email demanding an apology. The email said if no retraction was received, I will attend the lawyers Toronto home and obtain one under duress. Manning was arrested and charged with threatening bodily harm to the lawyer and unsafe storage of a firearm. In June 2015, the criminal charges against him were withdrawn. In exchange, Manning signed a peace bond and was banned from owning a firearm for five years. On Sept. 30, 2015, Mannings suit says he was officially informed by WSIB that he would never be returning to policing. He is well, he was a good cop, said Sabina. He knew his job, he knew exactly what he was doing, he was confident. She has a name for the part of him that feels compelled to speak up: Stupid Paul. With that, Paul Manning shares a regret. In speaking up to superiors, he broke the police code. All of these years, he says, I should have kept my mouth shut. SHARE: OTTAWASilent but smiling, Sen. Mike Duffy pushed past a throng of people as he left the Ottawa courthouse a free man after a judge swept aside 31 criminal charges and declared him not guilty on all counts. However, the final act of the long-running political and legal drama had a hell of a plot twist. Judge Charles Vaillancourt delivered what Duffys defence lawyer Don Bayne called a resounding acquittal and condemned instead the ruthless actions of Stephen Harpers PMO aimed at ending a political storm over Duffys so-called inappropriate expenses. The 308-page ruling, summarized by the judge over nearly four hours, was a ringing endorsement of Duffys credibility, and a scathing critique of Harper, his former chief of staff Nigel Wright, and other political aides who pressured and cajoled Duffy to help make the scandal go away. The political, covert, relentless, unfolding of events is mindboggling and shocking, he wrote. The precision and planning of the exercise would make any military commander proud. However, in the context of a democratic society, the plotting as revealed in the emails can only be described as unacceptable. It could breathe new life into ethics investigations by the independent Senate and Commons conflict of interest and ethics offices, suspended while the criminal trial unfolded. The judge said Harper himself advised Duffy his primary residence would be P.E.I. upon appointment to the Senate. Duffy, he ruled, was a credible witness while the Crown failed utterly to challenge or disprove his evidence when it had the chance. It failed to call key witnesses to rebut Duffy, or to cross-examine him in detail. He said Duffy was innocent of criminal charges that he defrauded the Senate, breached the public trust in relation to living, travel and contracting expenses, or solicited and accepted a $90,000 bribe from Wright, Harpers top aide, in exchange for silence. The RCMP and prosecutors singled out the wrong person for criticism, the judge suggested. The Crown claimed Duffys actions were driven by deceit, manipulations and carried out in a clandestine manner representing a serious and marked standard expected of a person in Senator Duffys position of trust. I find that if one were to substitute the PMO, Nigel Wright and others for Senator Duffy . . . you would have a more accurate statement, said Vaillancourt. It was an astonishingly thorough trashing of the PMO, and Duffys lawyer said in 44 years hed never seen the likes of it. It brought to an end a saga that began in late 2012 as news stories about Duffys and other senators expenses cast a harsh spotlight on the senate. When Wrights payment to Duffy was exposed, he resigned, and Duffy was tossed from the Conservative caucus. The RCMP investigation, which cost about $1 million according to the force, laid bare the inner workings of the Harper PMO and Senate, and the ensuing trial tainted the former governments bid for re-election. But the judge said none of it ever rose to the level of criminal conduct on Duffys part. He may have made administrative errors, or found unorthodox ways to pay for a fitness consultant to advise him on seniors health, for makeup services, or services like speechwriting or photo framing, but overall, Vaillancourt concluded Senate rules allowed payment for most of his activities. That included Duffys travel to partisan events, or trips where Duffy combined Senate business with personal, family visits. The former broadcaster, seated next to his wife Heather, at first appeared stunned by the sweeping acquittal after the judge adjourned. He finally embraced his lawyer, family and friends. This is overwhelmingly rewarding for Duffy and his legal team, said Jim Warren, a friend since 1971 who accompanied Duffy to court through the 62-day trial. Duffy was immediately reinstated with full Senate privileges, but Warren said itll be interesting to see what kind of reception he gets when he returns. A lot of those people were pretty tough on him and thought he was tainting the organization. It turns out he may well have been responsible for cleaning up the organization and a lot of improvements that have to take place. Bayne told reporters the ruling sent a message the Senate has to create clear rules, educate senators on what they can and cant do in the public interest. Im sure all of you, like me, could make a good argument that some of the things that senators are allowed to travel across the country for at business-class expense may or may not pass a value-for-money test, he told reporters outside court. There has to be that kind of assessment on Parliament Hill of expenditure of public money. Those kind of rules did not exist in Mike Duffys day. The judge said reading the PMO email traffic about the Duffy affair and the damage control strategy was like peering through the looking glass. Was Nigel Wright actually ordering senior members of the Senate around as if they were mere pawns on a chessboard? Were those same senior members of the Senate meekly acquiescing to Mr. Wrights orders? Were those same senior members of the Senate robotically marching forth to recite their provided scripted lines? Did Nigel Wright really direct a senator to approach a senior member of an accounting firm that was conducting an independent audit of the Senate with the intention to either get a peek at the report or part of the report prior to its release to the appropriate Senate authorities or to influence that report in anyway? Does the reading of these emails give the impression that Senator Duffy was going to do as he was told or face the consequences? The answers . . . are YES; YES; YES; YES; YES; and YES!!!!! Senate Expenses Timeline Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch, an ethics watchdog group trying to mount a private prosecution of Wright, called on the Crown to charge Wright because essentially the judge said that they prosecuted the wrong person for the $90,000 . . . the corruption and the deceit for the payment was on the PMO side. Harper still sits as an MP for Calgary Heritage. A request for comment to his spokesman went unanswered. Harpers former attorney general and justice minister, Rob Nicholson, was surprised by the ruling and didnt accept the judges criticism of the former governments role or the suggestion that politics drove it all. I dont buy that. I mean this is something that was investigated, the Crown laid the charges here, it wasnt the government (that) lays the charges, its the Crown and so it was up to the Crown to prove it. Clearly they didnt. Marjory LeBreton, former government leader in the Senate, claimed she was in the dark about the tactics employed by the Prime Ministers Office condemned by Vaillancourt in his judgment. She told CBCs Power and Politics the actions of a few individuals in the PMO were to blame, adding it would be unfair to assume the whole office was consumed with the issue. The judge said Duffy followed advice not just of Harper but of senior Senate officials when he signed forms saying his primary residence was P.E.I., not Ottawa, a declaration that entitled him to travel expenses and per diems that the court ruled were in order. Duffy never padded his pockets, or inflated the expense claims. He said Duffy did incur travel costs and reasonably believed he was within the rules. There was no badge of fraud, said Vaillancourt. The judge said Duffy may have made administrative errors in finding unorthodox ways to pay for makeup services, extra cellphones, or fitness training that Duffy claimed as consulting on seniors health issues. He observed the Senates procurement policy has changed for the better, but he added it wasnt the courts role to oversee Senate spending or get involved in the political debate over Senate reform. Recap More on thestar.com: Mike Duffy cleared, but Harper PMO feels judges lash: Editorial Duffy is clear, but condemnation of Harper PMO is there for posterity: Tim Harper Read more about: SHARE: MONTREALCanada needs to enhance its reputation as a defender of human rights and do more to free Raif Badawi, a spokeswoman for Amnesty International Canada said Thursday at a rally in support of the jailed Saudi blogger. Badawis wife, Ensaf Haidar, was among several dozen people who waved bright yellow signs bearing pictures of him and other prisoners of conscience as they chanted slogans calling for their release. Badawi, who is not Canadian, was arrested in 2012 and convicted in 2014 for his criticism of Saudi clerics. He was sentenced to 10 years in jail as well as 1,000 lashes. He received the first 50 in January 2015 but is not believed to have had any since. Haidar, who lives in Sherbrooke, Que., with the couples three children, said the family has already been waiting four years for him to come home. Its a lot for me, its a lot for my children, she told the rally. Amnesty spokeswoman Beatrice Vaugrante criticized the federal government for moving forward with a contract to sell light-armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia while human rights abuses in the country worsen and Badawi remains in jail. Its really time that Canada gets in line with its reputation as a defender of human rights and not its reputation for honouring commercial contracts, she told the rally. Clearly were not against commercial contracts, but were above all in favour of human rights. In an interview, she said the event had been organized because nothing seems to be happening with Badawis case. We dont have any recent positive or even negative developments, she said. It seems nothing moves. While Vaugrante acknowledged Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dions efforts to raise Badawis case with Saudi authorities, she said Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus most recent comments on the case are worrisome. Trudeau said two weeks ago his government wants to help free Badawi but must tread warily. We are a bit worried when Mr. Trudeau himself says we have to do it slowly, Vaugrante said. How slow (can it be)? Because its going to be the fourth year Raif Badawi will be in jail and its a long, long time. Haidar and Amnesty International are asking Trudeau to personally intervene to ask for Badawis release. SHARE: Toronto is looking for provincial help in building a new or improved convention centre to attract major gatherings that now go to other cities. Mayor John Tory broached the subject with Premier Kathleen Wynne at a meeting Thursday, saying such a project is fundamental to jobs and investment in Toronto. We have a convention centre that, I guess, looks good if you walk around in it, but actually when you rank it, and its subjective rankings that are done, it ranks somewhere in the thirties, Tory said at a news conference with Wynne. (Tory did not specify what rankings he was citing but a 2013 city report stated that the Metro Toronto Convention Centre ranked 33rd in North America in terms of available space.) There was no mention of cost or other details with the idea previously raised during discussions about a possible downtown casino three years ago still in its early stages. We dont have the blueprints, Wynne quipped in her only comment on the subject. Tory said the existing Metro Toronto centre on Front St. W., which has rooms on many levels in its north and south sections, does not have enough contiguous space cavernous enough to accommodate major conventions. We know for a fact that weve lost some very important conventions and shows that just wont come here, the mayor told reporters. We have to fix that because thats going to be fundamental to getting all the best and the brightest from around the world, from important industries and important scientific organizations and so on, to come to the city. A large part of people deciding to invest here and even to live here is that they get exposed to the city and see how we live and see the quality of life. Tory said he wants to have a serious discussion with the provincial government about getting the project rolling. He wouldnt discuss possible sites for a new convention centre Were a long way from locations and blueprints. During the downtown casino debate in 2012 and 2013, proponents said Toronto should not ignore the convention, trade show and tourist benefits that a downtown gambling resort could bring. One proposal at the time, by Oxford Properties, was for a $3-billion expansion of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to act as a casino anchor. The convention centre currently hosts about 175,000 delegates per year who spend $300 million. Some estimates suggested that spending could be more than doubled with a bigger convention centre. Read more about: SHARE: One of the black community leaders meeting with Mayor John Tory on Saturday says the attendees support Black Lives Matter and that group must be part of future meetings. We will arrive in full support of Black Lives Matter and to facilitate a public meeting and get them a seat at the table, and ensure issues theyre raising are addressed at the policy level, said Andray Domise, a Rexdale activist among about 15 invited to meet privately for two hours with Tory and Police Chief Mark Saunders. We need to get some detente and agreements and some commitments to work together. If we stay on the current trajectory the (black) communities will have no trust in the mayor or the police chief. Torys office said Wednesday that Toronto is a proudly diverse city that struggles with racial equality, discrimination and trust, and singled out Black Lives Matter as one voice calling out the problems. But Tory did not invite its members to the Saturday meeting and has spurned invitations for a public meeting with the group, which camped out in front of Toronto police headquarters calling successfully for an inquest into the police shooting death of Andrew Loku. Black Lives Matters has spurned Torys offers of a private meeting in the past. But on Wednesday night, leaders of the group released a statement saying they would tentatively agree to attend the meeting, pending more information on its format and focus. Tory said Saturdays gathering will set the agenda for future public meetings, which can include Black Lives Matters participation. But he warned: I dont think it will accomplish very much to have something that degenerates into a circus. This is not going to advance the interests of eradicating discrimination ... Domise, who helped Torys office organize the meeting, said the mayor has mishandled issues including the police carding of young black men. We need to find a way forward to get good things accomplished on issues like income equality and institutional racism instead of fighting for the next two-and-a-half years of Torys term, he added. Sandy Hudson, a Black Lives Matters Toronto co-founder, said of Torys comments: We are optimistic but confused. She welcomes the invitation but said there should be meetings specifically on anti-black racism in policing. Its great to have public meetings, but it seems unfocused to have one forum addressing how race interacts with a whole host of social issues. Read more about: SHARE: Despite calls for change, the Toronto Police Service is the only force in the GTA that allows its officers to prepare their own misconduct reports without any oversight before testifying in criminal court cases. Torontos current system is in contrast to Peel, York, Halton and Durham region forces and the Ontario Provincial Police, which use independent third parties to fill out the disciplinary summaries, called McNeil reports. These reports are a critical part of the criminal justice system, which has the power to take away an accused persons liberty. But to do so, a judge or jury must assess the evidence and credibility of witnesses, including police officers called to testify. A McNeil report is a one-page document thats supposed to provide a summary of any officer misconduct, so the Crown can decide what might reasonably impact a case and share that information with the defence. The Toronto Police Accountability Coalition, a police watchdog group, asked the board to consider introducing a process that is at least as good as other forces in the GTA. The request was rejected at Wednesdays monthly Toronto Police Services Board meeting at police headquarters, where chair Andy Pringle, Mayor John Tory and other board members voted to receive a status quo report prepared by Chief Mark Saunders. The report concluded the current system is effective, efficient, economical, in compliance with the Supreme Court of Canadas direction, and low-risk to the Service. Councillor Shelley Carroll was the only board member to vote against receiving the report, after grilling acting deputy chief Rick Stubbings on how officers fill out their own reports without any check and balance. The information that they have submitted to the Crown is factual, its based on evidence and hearing decisions, and thats what gets to the Crown attorney, and that is legal, Stubbings replied. How do we know its factual? Who looks at it to make sure its factual? Carroll asked. Stubbings said officers rely on information provided to them by the TPSs professional standards, or internal affairs, unit. They give the officer the information that they put on the form, they verify that that information is accurate. The senior officer also discounted a drug case cited by TPAC in a letter to the board as a red herring, since there was no finding of any misconduct. Last year, a judge tossed drug charges after finding a Toronto constable had withheld information on his McNeil report. Stubbings said TPS representatives meet regularly with prosecutors from the Ministry of the Attorney General, and weve had no complaints whatsoever from our Crown attorneys that we work with each and every day. Carroll wondered: How would they know what to complain about? But Pringle and Tory said they were satisfied that Torontos self-reporting system is fine, because no one has complained about the reports being inaccurate or incomplete. Tory said the issue looks like a solution in search of a problem. Pringle agreed that without formal complaints, theres no evidence that weve got an issue here. There appears to be the proper compliance. I kind of take comfort in that until I hear differently. After the meeting, Carroll responded to the Stars request for comment on Twitter. The board seems more focused on the savings part of reform than the culture change part, she wrote. The board has created a task force, purportedly to bring transformational change to the $1 billion-plus organization, but critics see Pringle and Tory as obstacles to any meaningful police reform. During the discussion, Saunders told the board that officers would not jeopardize an investigation or their careers by willfully misleading an administrative process, even if its not perfect. David Bayliss, the defence lawyer who represented the accused in last years case cited by TPAC, said the McNeil system falls short because defence lawyers receive only a summary of an officers discipline history, not source material. When the defence receives disclosure of cellphone records, he said by way of contrast, You dont get a report about the cellphone records, you get the cellphone records. - ABOUT THE MCNEIL REPORT The McNeil report was created after a 2009 Supreme Court of Canada ruling that said police investigating a case must tell prosecutors about findings of serious misconduct against them that could reasonably impact the case against an accused person. The ruling followed the case of an accused drug trafficker, Lawrence McNeil, who didnt learn until after he was found guilty that the officer who arrested him had his own history of drug-related offences. McNeil appealed and his conviction was set aside, based on new evidence of the officers drug-related misconduct. As a result, police now submit to prosecutors, in a sealed envelope, a one-page document called a McNeil report. It is supposed to provide a summary for each incident of misconduct. In Toronto, the officer in charge of a case completes a McNeil checklist listing all officers involved. If an officer is required to complete a McNeil report, he or she does so and seals it in an envelope addressed to the Crown. The envelope is sealed to ensure the officers privacy. Should the Crowns office have concerns about the nature or content of the McNeil report, it is supposed to contact the officer in charge, or legal services. On Wednesday, acting deputy chief Rick Stubbings said there have been no complaints since the system was created. HOW OTHER FORCES HANDLE MCNEIL REPORTS Toronto Police Service Officers prepare their own McNeil misconduct reports. According to Deputy Chief Rick Stubbings, information for the forms is provided to the officers by the TPS professional standards unit. Peel Regional Police A McNeil disclosure officer who is a ranking detective maintains the Peel forces McNeil database and prepares the reports for the Crown. York Regional Police The professional standards bureau prepares officers McNeil disclosure reports. Durham Regional Police A professional standards member prepares the reports. The list is not very large, so one sergeant is assigned to manage the Durham forces McNeil files. Halton Regional Police Officers self-report their McNeil disclosure form, but the reports are reviewed by the Halton forces professional standards bureau for accuracy and timeliness. The bureau updates the forms if necessary and sends them to be signed off by the officer. Ontario Provincial Police Officers do not prepare descriptions of misconduct; this job is done by the OPP professional standards bureau and filed in an automated system. The prepared documents are printed, signed and dated by the officers for each court case. All responses as of mid-2015. SHARE: The RCMP is seeking to restrict the movements of two GTA men they fear will commit acts of terrorism. Samuel Augustin Aviles of Whitby, and Kadir Abdul of Toronto appeared in a Brampton court Thursday morning after being arrested on peace bonds. According to court documents, the RCMP fears Abdul may participate in an activity of a terrorist group, travel to participate in an activity of a terrorist group, or facilitate terrorist activity. They fear Aviles may travel to participate in an activity of a terrorist group. The RCMP is seeking to restrict their movements for one year because of these fears. A RCMP spokesperson said it is alleged the pair attempted to travel to international conflict zones for the purposes of participating in a terrorist group. The national police force may pursue a peace bond if they have reasonable grounds to believe a person may commit a terrorism offence explained media relations officer Cst. Annie Delisle. She encouraged the public to remain vigilant and report any suspected terror activities to the National Security Information Network. At an east-end Toronto apartment listed in court papers as Abduls address, the man who answered the door said he was Abduls father but declined to speak with the Star. We cant (say) anything, please talk to my lawyer, he said. Aviles and Abdul are not facing criminal charges. The two men will next appear in court on May 20. Read more about: SHARE: The reek assaulted the nostrils from a block away. Deep inside the Weed Wednesday formally 420 Toronto demonstration at Yonge-Dundas Square, averting a contact high was challenging. Not so bad as that time the Star sent me to Amsterdam, on the papers expense account, to investigate legal pot use and it took two days to recover from my research before I was fit to file. Wednesday I eased the queasiness by sticking my head inside a chip wagon and inhaling deeply. Rather the smell of oil and grease than grass fumes. Many people like the sickly sweet scent of cannabis. I do not. It makes me gag a built-in say-no sniff aversion to marijuana and hashish. But in this friendly gathering, that rendered me an alien creature among the smokers and tokers, the bongs and pipes, the bubblers and grinders. On the stage, lined with lush marijuana plants, someone is hustling cannabis coloring books. Kiosks do a lively business peddling dope paraphernalia. Information booths offer advice on the law. Merchandisers boast a vast array of seed kits. Bands, comedians and a sea of blissful faces, all those consumers sitting cross-legged on the pavement; students from nearby Ryerson University, homeless youth with their stud-collared dogs, yet also plenty of folks well beyond middle-aged. This is what I think about pot: It may be a mildly mind-expanding drug but its definitely not brain-enhancing. Ive never met a single chronic user who is anything other than dim-witted and dull. It is the perfect un-stimulant for slackers. If you want to indulge, however, be my guest just not when youre a guest at my tobacco-friendly house. It all felt time-warpy, this passive assembly of marijuana devotees participating in an event that traces its hazy roots to a bunch of California stoners and Grateful Dead truckers in the 70s. Someone at the microphone is now patting himself on the back as a dope pioneer, recalling the days of The Riverboat, with Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee performing. This makes me feel awfully old, because I was a great fan of the folks-blues duo and saw them many times at that long-gone Yorkville establishment. Weed Day is annually celebrated on April 20, which was also the date many advocates had circled on their calendar 2016 when Canada would be pronounced a legal marijuana utopia coast to coast. That day has not arrived yet, despite the faith dopers had put in Justin Trudeaus campaign promise. But yesterday did coincide with a declaration by our appropriately named federal health minister, Jane Philpott, at a special session of the UN General Assembly in New York: Canadian laws to legalize marijuana will be ready to roll within a year. We will introduce legislation in spring 2017 that ensures we keep marijuana out of the hands of children and profits out of the hands of criminals. Yay, went the crowd here. A low-buzz yay. What Philpott really meant, I suspect, is we, the government, will snort the profits of cannabis-retailing instead an estimated windfall of $5 billion annually from tax revenue on legal sales of the drug. Thats extrapolating from the 11 per cent of the population age 15 and older that had used marijuana in the previous year, according to a 2013 survey contained in a November ministerial briefing. The money wont come out of my pocket, but then Ive already given the government a small fortune from four decades of cigarette purchases. Seems a bit counter-intuitive, promoting widespread use of cannabis while smokers have been hounded into leper status, the province reverses itself to restrict vaping and Toronto bans shisha lounges. More sensible would be to decriminalize drugs in their varieties so that addiction can be handled strictly as a health issue. Except I know that cities with extremely lax drug policies, places such as Amsterdam and Oslo, have been transformed into wastelands of the wasted. As a doctor who has worked in both Canada and sub-Saharan Africa, Ive seen too many people suffer the devastating consequences of drugs, drug-related crime and ill-conceived drug policy, Philpott told the UN. Doubtless thats true. Nobody has got it right. Maybe theres no such thing, and the best we can aspire to is reducing harm. But neither Philpott nor Trudeau has been specific about whether Canadas legislation will be aimed at decriminalization or legalization. Either way, after extricating Canada from international narcotics conventions to which this country is now a signatory, wed be looking at an infernal regulatory bureaucracy. Would the state have a monopoly on sales? Could provinces enact more stringent rules on retail, legal age for consumption and where pot could be used? If legalized, what would happen to the thousands of individuals now serving jail time for trafficking when the state becomes a trafficker? How would drug impairment be measured under highway and traffic laws? It hurts my brain just thinking about all the complexities and permutations. And I hate the thought of what a mess government pinheads will make of it. So stressful. But hey, fire up a spliff and pass the munchies. Ill just have a shot, beer back, thanks. More on thestar.com: Blunt talk about why today is 4/20, the stoners holiday VIDEO: 4/20 celebrations at Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. SHARE: When Black Lives Matter Toronto ended its tent city occupation at police headquarters, the group left behind a sign: You are on notice. Your anti blackness has been exposed. We are not finished. They werent finished, and they werent starting, either. The group has been putting police on notice, using the exact same language, since organizing under the banner for the first time in November 2014. Recent victories, such as the fulfillment of its demand for a coroners inquest into the police shooting death of Andrew Loku, have come after prolonged efforts going back far beyond the encampment. Weve been trying to get attention on this for almost a year. Some of these demands extend longer than a year, Sandy Hudson, one of the groups co-founders, told the Star recently. Though the recent protests were sparked in part by a Special Investigations Unit decision not to lay charges in Lokus death, the group and its overarching demands overhaul the SIU, end carding, address anti-black racism are nothing new. Torontos Black Lives Matter chapter has taken up the fight for police accountability, a movement that stretches back decades in this city, with the support of an international network that began forming in 2012. And its starting to stand out. Im really proud of (them), Patrisse Cullors, one of the networks founders, told the Star. I think theyre doing some of the most cutting-edge work in our network. Its a network with distinct goals and guiding principles, including privileging women and queer and trans people, and an infrastructure to support local action. Cullors who is based in Los Angeles and married to Toronto organizer Janaya Khan officially launched the project, along with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, in 2014 with 18 chapters. It has since expanded to include more than 30 in the U.S., Toronto and Ghana. Though iterations have cropped up in other Canadian cities, including Montreal, Halifax and Vancouver, none has officially signed on yet. The network provides support, from fundraising help to dispatching people to join actions in other cities (L.A. members attended Torontos tent city), to hosting strategy retreats for leaders. The guiding principles include a commitment to diversity, tackling misogyny and heteronormativity, dismantling patriarchy, and unapologetically privileging black voices. We are working to (re)build the Black liberation movement, reads the groups website. For Cullors, an out queer woman, bringing marginalized voices to the forefront and championing diversity in all its forms wasnt a calculated decision. We werent sitting around the table saying, These are the people we need to add, Cullors said. It was like: These are the people who have been left out. Toronto joined the network in 2014, following a vigil that Hudson, Khan and others held to remember black people killed by police in the GTA and the U.S., including Jermaine Carby in Brampton in 2014 and Michael Brown in Missouri in 2014. In the time since, the group has held press conferences, panel discussions and marches. But it was the Allen Rd. shut-down last July, soon after Lokus death, that changed its course. People really seemed to be paying attention to what was happening, Hudson said. We thought, OK, thats it then. They committed to becoming, as she puts it, impossible to ignore. Most recently, that action came in the form of a 15-day occupation outside police headquarters. Though sparked by the SIU decision, the tactic took its lead from Los Angeles and Minneapolis, where chapters have camped at police precincts and politicians houses in the past. (It) wasnt this brilliant action in a vacuum, Cullors said. Its the continuation of a legacy of creative black activism, she added. As human beings we are creative, and as black folks we come with a creative pulse to whatever we do, she said. Protests from the U.S. civil rights movement to marches in Soweto, South Africa, have employed non-violent civil disobedience to get across their points, she says. Its a naive and destructive assumption that the first place black people go is violence, she said. In Toronto, Kingsley Gilliam has been marching, meeting and pushing for police accountability since the 1970s, through work with the Black Action Defence Committee. Among its tactics, that group has launched lawsuits against three GTA police forces, alleging racial profiling. Gilliam credits Black Lives Matter for their energy and urgency. What they have done is pick up on an area that needs sustained effort, because racists have never taken a holiday since they went to Africa and captured my ancestors, he said. The work of Gilliam and others led to the creation of the SIU in the 1990s, but hes not satisfied with the state of affairs today. As long as police can kill people with impunity, society will always be faced with these kinds of protests, he said. Gilliam supports renewed calls for a more transparent SIU, which he calls a toothless tiger, echoing the language of a 2008 report by Ontarios ombudsman. And he calls the recent backlash against Premier Kathleen Wynne for acknowledging systemic racism another example of its pervasiveness. Is there any dummy around that dont know that racism exists in Canada? he said. When Black Lives Matter packed up its tent city and issued a 300-hour deadline for the demands to be met, the timeline may have sounded unreasonable. But months had passed since some of the demands were first issued, organizers say. Along with other civil rights groups, BLM members have been calling for a meeting with Mark Saunders since he became Torontos police chief a year ago. Calls for meetings with Mayor John Tory and the premier go back that far, too. Along with other civil rights groups, BLM members have been calling for a meeting with Mark Saunders since he became Torontos police chief a year ago. Calls for public meetings with Mayor John Tory and the premier go back that far, too, but Tory insisted on a private meeting. Tory instead convened a meeting for Saturday with black community leaders and Chief Saunders, not including Black Lives Matter. Andray Domise, a Rexdale activist among those invited, insists the group be included in future discussions and that their requests for public meetings be fulfilled. If we stay on the current trajectory, the (black) communities will have no trust in the mayor or the police chief, Domise said. Wednesday night, both sides seemed to be softening their stance, with BLM saying it would consider attending the meeting, depending on its format and focus. The main difference after the tent city isnt the groups goals or progress, Hudson says. It is BLMs visibility and strength in numbers. (A recent Forum poll, released after Hudson spoke with the Star, speaks to her point. It suggested a majority of Torontonians support the movement and agree there is systemic racism in Toronto.) Politicians are aware that they need to make it look as though theyre doing something about it. Now we need to get that to translate into actually doing something about it, Hudson said. The inquest is a start, but the group has bigger plans. The next steps are where the new movement departs from traditional tactics. Hudson and her counterparts remain steadfast in their requests for public meetings, one of their more unorthodox tactics, and demands for sweeping changes, despite backlash from critics. Where people are denying that something needs to be done or trying to blame the organization for not being set up exactly the way they want us to be set up you dont control us, she said. I know that may suck for politicians, because were making certain people look bad. Portrayals of the movement as an Occupy-style group with no central leadership, no readily available contact information and no focused demands fail to recognize the elaborate mechanics operating behind the banner. The project to overhaul the SIU and policing is going to be major, huge, Hudson says, requiring vast resources and political will. (Politicians) know that its going to be difficult for them to undertake this and its going to be a long-term, difficult project that may not result in their typical voter base being particularly excited about it, she said. She says she suspects that those who portray the group as unreasonable or undeserving of a meeting do so as a deflection. I truly believe that they know what its going to take, and they want to turn their attention to the group to make it easier to talk about why theyre not doing anything about it. Theyre placing the blame on us. Ultimately, though, its policy-makers, not Black Lives Matters actions, that Hudson wants at the centre of attention. We are not accountable to anybody but ourselves. But these folks are accountable to entire populations that they are not serving. - A BLACK LIVES MATTER TIMELINE Sept. 24, 2014 Jermaine Carby, 33, is shot and killed by a Peel police officer in Brampton. Nov. 25, 2014 Thousands protest against police brutality under the banner black lives matter in the wake of Carbys death and a decision not to lay charges in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by police. Soon after, Toronto becomes an official chapter in the Black Lives Matter network. Dec. 13, 2014 Black Lives Matter Toronto leads hundreds in a die-in at Yonge-Dundas Square, coinciding with the protests across North America calling for action after a recent decision clearing an NYPD officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner. Feb. 5, 2015 BLMTO co-presents a panel at the AGO titled It Could Have Been Me: Perspectives on the Fight for Racial Justice and the Legacy of Jean-Michel Basquiat. May 13, 2015 BLM co-founder Pascale Diverlus joins the Anti-Black Racism Network and others in a press conference calling for an end to carding. They ask for meetings with newly appointed Police Chief Mark Saunders, Mayor John Tory and Premier Kathleen Wynne. June 17, 2015 BLMTO joins other civil rights groups in a press conference calling on the Toronto police board to end carding, rather than wait for province to act. July 5, 2015 Andrew Loku, a 45-year-old father of five and former child soldier in his native South Sudan, is shot and killed in his apartment building by a Toronto police officer. July 9, 2015 Lokus friends are joined by BLMTO, the African Canadian Legal Clinic and the Canadian Mental Health Association in calling for an action plan for eliminating fatal encounters between police and black residents with mental health challenges. July 16, 2015 A dozen BLMTO protestors crash a police board meeting, reading aloud demands including an update on recommendations made for police dealing with emotionally disturbed people. July 21, 2015 The SIU announces no charges will be laid in Carbys death. July 27, 2015 BLMTO organizes a rally in which hundreds of protesters shut down a portion of Allen Rd. to call for justice in police shooting deaths of Loku and Carby and draw attention to police brutality against the black population. Sept. 1, 2015 Hours before the provinces final public consultation on street checks, BLMTO joins the African Canadian Legal Clinic, the Anti-Black Racism Network and more in a press conference criticizing Wynnes government for altering, rather than ending, carding. Nov. 10, 2015 The Star runs an op-ed by BLMTO co-founder Sandy Hudson, How Ontario can really end carding. Nov. 25, 2015 A coroners inquest into the police shooting death of Jermaine Carby is announced. Dec. 5, 2015 About 100 BLMTO demonstrators gather on the steps of the TDSB to declare Black hair is beautiful after a Grade 8 student was allegedly sent home for having too poofy and unprofessional hair. Jan. 6, 2016 In an op-ed, BLMTO co-founder Rodney Diverlus calls for an end to carding, an overhaul of the SIU and full implementation of the Iacobucci report. In it he calls on black communities to march, occupy, disrupt, and mobilize for justice and an end to anti-black racism in the year to come. Feb. 23, 2016 Demonstrators confront Mayor Tory at city hall over the continuation of carding and a proposed budget increase for the police service. March 13, 2016 21-year-old Alex Wettlaufer is shot dead by Toronto police near his North York apartment building. March 20, 2016 #BLMTOtentcity sets up camp outside police headquarters. The next day, police and fire crews move in to remove tents and fire, pushing and shoving many protesters in the process and dumping what a police spokesperson later identifies as a biodegradable flame retardant on their firewood. March 24, 2016 The group helps serve a lawsuit to police from Jean Montaque, a black mother who alleges her home was illegally raided and searched by three Toronto officers. March 26, 2016 A rally at the encampment draws hundreds with music and speeches. March 31, 2016 A group of demonstrators visit Premier Kathleen Wynnes home, setting up a vigil for Loku and delivering an invitation to their encampment, using a tent, cheese and crackers. April 4, 2016 BLMTO leads a funeral march from the encampment site to Queens Park, scattering rose petals along the way. Premier Wynne holds a brief impromptu meeting with organizers, vowing to hold more meetings. The tent city ends that day with a promise from organizers of more action in 300 hours if demands are not met. April 13, 2016 Coroner Dr. Jim Edwards announces an inquest into the police shooting death of Andrew Loku. April 14, 2016 A Forum Research poll reveals a majority of Torontonians support the BLMTO movement. April 17, 2016 The group declares a partial victory after the inquest announcement; a meeting with Michael Coteau, Ontarios minister responsible for anti-racism, days before; and in light of the provinces commitment to host four public consultations across the city on the state of policing. With files from Star staff SHARE: A Hamilton-area physician suing the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board and her former employer for $3.2 million claiming she was fired when she wouldnt deliver a medical opinion that suited the WSIB can proceed with the lawsuit, a Toronto judge ruled last week. Superior Court Justice Elizabeth Stewart threw out the WSIBs request to dismiss the lawsuit or to at least strike portions of Dr. Brenda Steinnagels statement of claim. Steinnagels former employer, Workplace Health & Cost Solutions, also lost its bid to strike portions of the statement. Dr. Steinnagel is pleased with the decision and that her claim can proceed as filed, and we will continue to vigorously pursue compensation for her, said her lawyer, Mark Polley. None of the allegations in the statement of claim has been proven in court. Obviously, WHCS is disappointed with the ruling and continues to regard Dr. Steinnagels case as having no merit, WHCS lawyer Greg McGinnis told the Star. A WSIB spokeswoman said: We maintain that there is no truth to Dr. Steinnagels allegations, we deny acting wrongfully in any way and we will continue to defend the lawsuit. Steinnagel is alleging that she was terminated last year after the WSIB repeatedly demanded that her employer, Vaughan-based WHCS, change the medical opinion she wrote on hospital security guard Shawn McCabe, who was claiming benefits after suffering head injuries while trying to restrain a patient at Rouge Valley Centenary in Scarborough. McCabe told the Star last year he didnt recognize himself after he was injured. He would cry for no reason and became increasingly irritable, while still trying to do his job on a modified work plan. I was suffering from this profound sense of sadness, he said. Steinnagel had concluded in late 2014 that McCabes emotional issues could be related to his workplace accident, according to the statement of claim. Within two weeks of delivering her opinion, she alleges the WSIB requested clarification. After further review, which included speaking with McCabes family doctor, Steinnagel says she reached the same result in her medical opinion, but the WSIB continued to resist her conclusion, according to the statement, filed in Toronto Superior Court in July. The defendants WSIB and WHCS tried to force Dr. Steinnagel to participate in a fraud upon the public, the statement alleges. She alleged she was fired after her employer provided a different opinion to the WSIB, thereby providing WSIB with the false and fraudulent opinion it needed to deny the hospital worker his benefits, according to her statement of claim. The defendants argued in court that the allegations of fraud upon the public are incapable of being proven, are scandalous and ought to be struck, and further argued that Steinnagels statement lacks the necessary elements to prove fraud and conspiracy. The judge disagreed. It is not plain and obvious that the causes of action pleaded have no chance of success such that they should be struck, Stewart wrote. SHARE: MTA Hanoi 2016 will attract the participation of 4,500 visitors with 50 delegations from major markets. The press conference for the event Ryu Hang Ha, Chairman of the Korean Chamber of Business in Vietnam (KORCHAM) said that the event has drawn strong participation from technology companies of the Republic of Korea. This comes in the wake of the huge investment flows from Korea to Vietnam in recent years, especially after the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) have been signed. As many as 16 Korean companies confirmed their attendance at the event, a four-fold increase from the previous exhibition. The event will showcase the latest home-grown cutting edge technologies and solutions specially developed for the Northern Vietnam market. Mr. Ryu Hang Ha judged that Vietnam is becoming an attractive destination for foreign investors and major corporations. The RoK is taking advantage of Vietnams investment potential, pouring billions of US dollars into many projects in Vietnam, especially in the manufacturing and processing sectors, which are the two main focus industries. On the sidelines, the organizers will host three seminars on increasing value for the manufacturing industry in Vietnam, Vietnamese mechanical businesses with baggage on the threshold of TPP, and managing and developing new products./. Premier Kathleen Wynne says it is a matter of when not if the secret Special Investigations Unit report into the police shooting death of Andrew Loku is made public. What we need to do is sort out how to make the information in the SIU report public. All I mean by that is that where there are privacy considerations, where there are issues that need to be considered, I need to know what those are, Wynne told reporters Thursday, as the opposition again demanded in the legislature for the document to be released. But I want the information that is in the SIU report to be in the public realm. Its not a matter of whether, its a matter of how we do that and thats the work that were doing now. Asked if that means releasing the report with the unnamed officers identity censored, Wynne nodded. It may mean that. Again, I cant pre-empt that discussion. But I do make a commitment to work to find a way for the information thats in the SIU report to be made public. Sandy Hudson, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto, said its encouraging that the government is now committing to making some form of the report public, but said the group will keep pushing for all reports and all the details contained within, including the names of police officers, to be released. What is there to hide? For all of us, this is information that is going to be useful in holding the powers accountable, she said, adding that its urgent the report come out now. Under current legislation, the director of the SIU, which investigates death, serious injury and allegations of sexual assault involving police, is only required to submit his report to the Attorney General. The government has always kept these reports secret, saying they contain personal information. But both the current and former Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario back the release of the reports. Current commissioner Brian Beamish told the Star last week that the names of police officers involved in an SIU investigation and other information associated with a probe could be made public in circumstances of significant public interest . . . for the purposes of fostering accountability and public confidence in police services, and ensuring transparency in its operations. His immediate predecessor, Ann Cavoukian, told the Star Thursday that a trust me model simply wont work, and that the reports must be seen by the public. People have a right to know what has transpired and the facts that have been documented in the report produced on this controversy, she said. The public deserves to know more, as they are allowed to do in other provinces such as British Columbia. Release the report, or face the consequences of the appearance a coverup. Three other police watchdogs in Canada in British Columbia, Manitoba and Nova Scotia always make their director's reports public. In B.C., the document is often extensive, but does not include the names of officers or witnesses. It does include detailed information about witness statements and the analysis that led to the directors conclusions. If the privacy commissioners, the people responsible for making the decisions over what should be private and not be private, are saying Look, this OK, then why is it that our politicians are saying no? That doesn't make sense to us, said Hudson. Loku, a 45-year-old father of five from South Sudan, was shot dead by a Toronto police officer last year in the hallway of his apartment building. The SIU cleared the officer of any criminal wrongdoing. A coroners inquest, which has yet to be scheduled, will probe the circumstances of his death and some of the information contained in the SIU directors report could come out at that time. As of now, there is no timetable for the government to make the Loku report public. I know that theres some urgency around this, said Wynne, noting a review of police oversight bodies, including the SIU, will soon begin. We are in the process of working on appointing someone to conduct the review, but that review is broader. The review is about a number of oversight bodies, she said. So I think that this piece of how do we make this information public will move as expeditiously as possible in the context of these other things but I dont think it has to be sequential in every case. Progressive Conservative MPP Randy Hillier (Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington) said it was outrageous that the report was being kept under lock and key. This is not just another government report full of numbers and figures. Its an investigation into why someone died a father, a husband, a son, a person was killed. It is deserving of immediacy, said Hillier, who blasted Attorney General Madeleine Meilleur for not keeping her eye on the ball. Can the attorney general explain to this house what was so important that it took priority over this investigation and justified her turning her back, not just on the family of Mr. Loku but on all of Ontario? he thundered in the legislature. But Meilleur emphasized that it is a priority. I want to assure the house that I was very well briefed twice on this report and that Ive read the report, the provinces top lawyer said. Public confidence in the transparency of police oversight is a priority for our government. We recognize that there are concerns about the current process. We have a responsibility to ensure that the public is being serve. She later added to reporters: I support working with the director of the SIU to find a way to make the information in the Andrew Loku report public. Meilleur faced criticism on Monday for not reading the report, even though it had been submitted to her office a month earlier. That prompted calls from activists to fire her. Hillier also sent a two-page letter to Meilleur Thursday, asking for a statutory framework for openness regarding the SIU directors reports. While I understand that these reports may contain information sensitive to ongoing investigations or perhaps contain delicate personal information of individuals who are subject to the reports, there are numerous avenues that can be taken to ensure sensitive information is protected while still providing openness and transparency of the report for public examination, he wrote in the letter, obtained by the Star. Clarification - April 26, 2016: This article was edited from a previous version to make clear that the reports that are made public by police watchdogs in British Columbia, Manitoba and Nova Scotia are called director's reports and are a summary of the investigation reports. SHARE: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2016. The annual list of leaders, artists, titans, pioneers and so-called icons includes such notable names as Pope Francis, Nicki Minaj and Caitlyn Jenner. Trudeau is among the 32 people featured in the leader category and is named alongside U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump, Christine Lagarde of the International Monetary Fund, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and even North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. In a write-up for Time by Saturday Night Live executive producer Lorne Michaels himself a Canadian Trudeau is described as talented and disciplined. In many ways Canada is no longer the country I grew up in, but when I hear Justin Trudeau talk, it sounds like my Canada again. Bold, clear as a bell and progressive, writes Michaels, adding that he believes Trudeau will be a force for good. Explaining how Time picks its influencers, managing editor Nancy Gibbs writes that each embodies a breakthrough: they broke the rules, broke the record, broke the silence, broke the boundaries to reveal what were capable of. They are seekers, with a fearless willingness to be surprised by what they find. The issue is being released with six different covers featuring Minaj, Lagarde, actor Leonardo DiCaprio, actress Priyanka Chopra, philanthropists Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the Broadway hit Alexander Hamilton. It hits newsstands Friday. SHARE: Headlines: A former undercover officer is suing the Hamilton Police Services Board for allegedly failing to protect him and making explosive allegations of police corruption. A Toronto judge ruled that a Hamilton-area physician suing the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board and her former employer for $3.2 million can proceed. The physician says she was fired after refusing to change a medical opinion on an injury. Sen. Mike Duffys professional and personal future hangs in the balance. He will learn his fate Thursday when Judge Charles Vaillancourt delivers verdicts on 31 charges of fraud, breach of trust and bribery. Weather and traffic: Our sunny streak is coming to an end. Clouds are going to start rolling in this morning and theres a 30 per cent chance of showers in the afternoon. The daytime high is expected to be 17 C in the city (10 C if youre right by the lake). The TTC and GO Transit arent reporting any major delays. Operations with Billy Bishop and Pearson International Airports are running normally. Always be sure to check the status of your flight before leaving for the airport. Hows that local sports team? Kyle Dubas, the 29-year-old assistant general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs isnt leaving his position despite rumours to the contrary. Whats going on in the entertainment world? Actress Jennifer Aniston is at the top of People magazines list of the worlds most beautiful celebritiesbut plenty arent happy with the choice. On this day: The ancient city of Rome is founded, according to legend, by twin brothers Romulus and Remuson this day in 753 B.C.E. Baron Manfred von Richthofen (aka the Red Baron fighter ace of WWI) is shot down by Allied forceson this day in 1918. Whats coming up? Theres just one week left until Torontos Hot Docs festival! Over 150 films from Canada and around the world are being showcasedpick up your tickets here. Read more about: SHARE: Revelations about Ontarios political fundraising blight have finally forced our politicians to call for sweeping reforms. But the quick remedies promised by Premier Kathleen Wynne may already be bogged down by political bickering. Oddly, its the opposition parties whose grandstanding may be standing in the way of a rapid clean-up of the provinces outdated campaign finance laws. For people who believe our fundraising free-for-all has festered long enough, and that the time for excuses is past, the sudden impasse in the legislature is bizarre. Shamelessly enriched by corporate and union donations, the major parties are getting so down in the weeds that they cant seem to see the (reform) forest for the trees. If that happens which is to say, if nothing happens we will all be the poorer for it. One might expect the politicians to be collectively hanging their heads in shame and rolling up their sleeves to work together on reforms. Instead, the three major parties have descended into public heckling, private hectoring and tiresome sulking. While the opposition demands outside investigations and extra-parliamentary consultations ostensibly to remove partisanship from the equation they have politicized the reform process in the most picayune way. Never mind the routine insults hurled in the legislature, name-calling also erupted when the two opposition leaders were invited to meet Wynne in the premiers office earlier this month. For the record, no party with the possible exception of the Greens, who never manage to raise much money has a monopoly on virtue here. Whence the vitriol? Wynne has been lambasted in recent columns, and deservedly so, for dragging her heels on campaign finance reforms since taking power three years ago. Her Liberals greedily exploited election loopholes and limitless limits inherited, it must be pointed out, from the previous Progressive Conservative government. But Wynne also deserves credit for finally pledging action eating her own words and swallowing her pride by belatedly promising sweeping reforms. Wynne could have gone further by proposing a special select committee, with more equal representation among the parties, to conduct public hearings for any reform legislation. With well-chosen MPPs, such a committee could work miracles. Early reaction from PC leader Patrick Brown seemed promising. He expressed support, in an interview, for transitional public funding. And made the eminently sensible proposal for a select committee of MPPs. But the NDPs Andrea Horwath has remained stonily silent on any substantive suggestions for reform. At her meeting with Wynne, she refused to even look at the premiers proposals, leaving the proffered document behind on the table. Instead, the NDP is focusing obsessively on process and an extra-parliamentary one at that. Horwath is demanding a specially constituted panel that brings in outside experts including wait for it representatives of big business. While the rest of us are trying to end disproportionate corporate influence, the NDP wants to save a seat at the table for big business? Corporations cant vote, so why should special interests have a special say? What happened to that quaint Queens Park where legislators used to debate, hold public hearings, compare notes, and get the job done? Thats how Albertas New Democrats banned corporate and union donations last year using the normal legislative process but Ontarios NDP has its own view. Now, Brown has signed on to that NDP extra-parliamentary crusade, suddenly jettisoning his own proposal for a select committee. The PCs also want a public inquiry to search for criminal activity, on the grounds that fishing expeditions sometimes catch fish but at what cost in time, money and baiting? The opposition clings to a 1970s-era example of an outside panel that once proposed reforms to our campaign finance laws albeit leaving enough holes to drive a Big Blue Machine through. Today Ontario is too far behind the times to start from scratch. A better starting point is the path laid out by the federal Parliament a full decade ago when it banned corporate money, dramatically lowered spending limits, and regulated third-party advertising. Its not as if campaign finance reform is a matter of life and death. Speaking of which, the assisted suicide bill now being debated in Ottawa emanated from the regular parliamentary committee process, so why is it so hard to fix fundraising? Recent coverage has revealed the pervasive rot in the fundraising system, and the urgent need for change. That has generated an undeniable public consensus and momentum to move forward on the substance of reform. Inventing a new extra-parliamentary process and poisoning the existing democratic one risks blocking progress. Unless the point of the protests is merely to score political points. Martin Regg Cohns Ontario politics column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. mcohn@thestar.ca , Twitter: @reggcohn Read more about: SHARE: LONDONIt did not take long. Almost as soon as the bombs went off in Brussels Tuesday morning, the new act of terrorism in the heart of Europe was employed in the bitter debate about the influx of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa. Even before the identities and nationalities of the attackers were known, there was an immediate association in popular discourse between the attacks on the airport and subway station in Brussels and the migrant crisis. Right-wing politicians and average citizens alike raised concerns that groups like Daesh, which claimed responsibility for the attacks, are slipping radicalized recruits, including European jihadis, through the vast migrant stream and into an unprepared Europe. The murderous attacks in another European capital, just days after the Belgians finally tracked down the sole surviving suspect in a series of similarly co-ordinated attacks that killed 130 people in and around Paris in November, prompted new questions about European solidarity and security. And they came during a period of severe self-doubt about the European Union, with low growth, high unemployment, and the threat of a British exit from the bloc, to be decided in a June referendum. There is a growing perception among European public opinion that EU leaders are not in control of the Continents terrorist threat, said Mujtaba Rahman of the Eurasia Group, a political risk and consulting company. Combined, these attacks will increase xenophobic and anti-immigration sentiment across the EU, which has already been rising in light of the EUs ongoing refugee crisis. Right-wing parties all over Europe, and especially the Alternative for Germany party, have and will continue to conflate refugees with terrorism, Rahman said. This will in turn put more pressure on incumbent governments and limit their space for policy action to address Europes multiple crises. Nigel Farage, a leader of the populist, conservative U.K. Independence Party, said: I think weve reached a point where we have to admit to ourselves, in Britain and France and much of the rest of Europe, that mass immigration and multicultural division has for now been a failure. The attacks will also put more strain on the deal brokered last week by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany with the Turkish government to restrict the migrant flow into Europe, in return for more liberal visa arrangements for travel into Europe by Turkish nationals. That deal was already being criticized as a security threat to Europe and had been questioned on humanitarian and legal grounds. In the public eye, everything gets connected: the mass abuse in Cologne on New Years Eve and the attacks today, said Rem Korteweg, a security analyst at the Center for European Reform in London, referring to the sexual abuse and robberies in Cologne on New Years Eve that were linked to migrants. However different, in the public mind and for the euroskeptic populace, theyre all the same thing. The fierce reaction was evident on Tuesday in Germany, where Merkels popularity has been dented by her decision to open the countrys borders to more than one million migrants last year, aiding the Alternative for Germany party in recent state elections. Officials in Merkels government who made the usual statements of support for victims were mocked and criticized on social media. Read more about: SHARE: NAYPYITAW, BURMAHtin Kyaw, a trusted friend of Nobel laureate Aung San Kyi, took over as Burmas president Wednesday, taking a momentous step in the countrys long-drawn transition toward democracy after more than a half-century of direct and indirect military rule. But democracy in this impoverished Southeast Asian nation still feels incomplete. The military retains considerable power in the government and parliament, and the president himself will play second fiddle to Suu Kyi, who has repeatedly said that she will run the country from behind the scenes because the military has ensured through a constitutional manipulation that she cant be the president. For now, the country was celebrating the installation of the 70-year-old Htin Kyaw, as he took the oath of office in a joint session of Burmas newly elected parliament, as Suu Kyi sat watching in the front row. I, Htin Kyaw, do solemnly and sincerely promise and declare that I will be loyal to the Republic of the Union of Burma and its citizens, he said, reading from a written pledge, while repeating after the house speaker Mann Win Khaing Than. I will uphold and abide by the constitution and its laws . . . I will dedicate myself to the service of the Republic of the Union of Burma. The same pledge was simultaneously read by First Vice-President Myint Swe and Second Vice-President Henry Van Tio. After a 20-minute tea break, all 18 members of Htin Kyaws Cabinet, including Suu Kyi took a joint oath of office read out by the speaker. Rightfully, the job belonged to Suu Kyi, who has been the face of the pro-democracy movement and who endured decades of house arrest and harassment by military rulers without ever giving up on her non-violent campaign to unseat them. But a constitutional provision barred Suu Kyi from becoming president, and she made it clear that whoever sits in that chair will be her proxy. She has said repeatedly she will run the government from behind the scenes. Still, Htin Kyaw will be remembered by history as the first civilian president for Burma and the head of its first government to be elected in free and fair polls. Suu Kyis party, the National League for Democracy, won a landslide victory in elections last November, in a reflection of Suu Kyis widespread public support. The constitutional clause that denied her the presidency excludes anyone from the position who has a foreign spouse or children. Suu Kyis two sons are British, as was her late husband. The clause is widely seen as having been written by the military with Suu Kyi in mind. The military has reserved 25 per cent of the seats in parliament for itself, guaranteeing that no government can amend the constitution without its approval. The military also heads the Home Ministry and the Defence Ministry, which gives it control over the corrections department, ensuring that the release of political prisoners is its decision to make. Also, it ensured that one of Htin Kyaws two vice-presidents is a former general, Myint Swe, a close ally of former junta leader Than Shwe. Myint Swe remains on a U.S. Treasury Department blacklist that bars American companies from doing business with several tycoons and senior military figures connected with the former junta. SHARE: A fourth-grade teacher in the U.S. says her students many of Hispanic descent often talk in fear about the policies of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. He hates Mexicans and wants to send my family back to Mexico, one nine-year-old reportedly said. Thats one of nearly 4,800 alarming responses to a Southern Poverty Law Center survey of U.S. teachers. They show that in the age of Trump classrooms have become a microcosm of an inflamed presidential race. Were deeply concerned about the level of fear among minority children who feel threatened by both the incendiary campaign rhetoric and the bullying theyre encountering in school, law centre president Richard Cohen said in a statement. Weve seen Donald Trump behave like a 12-year-old, and now were seeing 12-year-olds behave like Donald Trump. The civil rights groups online survey asked teachers how the campaign is affecting schoolchildren. The answers reveal an increase in the bullying, harassment and intimidation of students whose races, religions or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates, according to the report. One child declared in his middle school homeroom that he stood with Trump and was ready to get em all out of here, his teacher reported. Two of my Latina students are in that class. They were visibly shaken. If girls wear shorts and halters they are going to get raped by those Mexican criminals that keep coming in, an 18-year-old student said, according to another teacher. More than two-thirds of the teachers reported that students mainly immigrants, children of immigrants and Muslims have expressed concerns or fears about what might happen to them or their families after the election. Heightened tension in the classroom means teachers have been reluctant to discuss those issues at a time when mutual understanding seems especially critical, noted Maureen Costello, who authored the report. Schools are finding that their anti-bullying work is being tested and, in many places, falling apart, she said. Since June, Trump has called for a massive wall across the southern U.S. border to be paid for by Mexico as well as a ban on Muslims entering the country. The billionaire real estate mogul has also dubbed Mexican immigrants rapists, appeared to mock a disabled newspaper reporter and stated that abortions should carry some form of punishment if outlawed. The long-term impact of the campaign on childrens attitudes and civic education is tough to gauge. Some teachers reported that their students are more engaged in the political process this year. Others worry the election is making them less trusting of government or hostile to opposing points of view, or that children are losing respect for the political process. Here are the surveys recurring themes: Xenophobia At the all-white school where I teach, dirty Mexican has become a common insult. Before election season it was never heard. Anti-Muslim vitriol Just today, at the high school, I heard students in the hallway going to lunch. One student yelled out, I hate Muslims! Kids havent turned on each other yet, but it has made it OK to say hateful things about Muslims and immigrants The adults in my town are even worse. People are showing their true colors. Racism My students are terrified of Donald Trump They think that if hes elected, all black people will get sent back to Africa. I have another student at my school who is Indian that has been targeted because the other students perceive him to be a Muslim. He has been harassed by being called Isis and with students saying, Allah Akbar to him, among other things. His mother confessed to me that they had considered moving because of it. Fear for the future 95 per cent of the 117 students I teach are actually from Mexico Teenagers are crying in class, students are writing heartbreaking journal entries, and some students have already gone back to Mexico out of pure fear. One of my students from Iraq used to wear a hijab. A few days after the Paris attacks, she stopped wearing it and she told me her mother made her take it off because she was afraid she would get killed. Anger at Trump Some of my male students have even gone so far as to say that if they had a chance they would like to assassinate Trump It scares me that Trumps campaign seems to encourage violence in both Trumps supporters and detractors. There has been an increase in bullying by way of accusing each other that they are Trump supporters to isolate them from the social groups. Encouraging signs My students have maintained an openness toward immigrants There may be some who are increasingly anti-immigrant, but they are less vocal than those who want to support refugees. If anything, my students quite openly make fun of him. My Muslim and Mexican students have used some gallows humor about enjoying their last days in the U.S. before President Trump ends up in the White House and they get deported. These quotes are drawn from 4,796 comments made in response to a Southern Poverty Law Center survey of 2,000 K-12 teachers from across the U.S. between March 23 and April 2. The survey does not claim to be representative of the nation, as respondents were a non-random sample of website visitors and email subscribers. With files from PRIs The World Read more about: SHARE: LONDONIts springtime in London, but President Barack Obama might sense a chill in the air. The U.S. leader will be welcomed by British Prime Minister David Cameron and wined and dined by the royal family on a three-day visit to the U.K. that starts late Thursday. But Britains looming June 23 referendum about whether to stay in the 28-nation European Union has strained the special relationship, with several senior U.K. politicians bluntly telling the president to butt out of Britains debate. They have branded Obama anti-British and unsuccessful and accused him of meddling for suggesting that the U.S. would be happier if Britain stayed in the bloc. The White House says Obama is willing to speak out on the subject. If hes asked his view as a friend, he will offer it, U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said, adding that the American stance was clear. As the president has said, we support a strong United Kingdom in the European Union. Obamas agenda before he leaves for Germany on Sunday includes talks with Cameron on the global economy, on countering an increasingly assertive Russia and on the fight against Daesh, also known as ISIS or ISIL. The presidents British stopover one of a series of international visits during his last year in office will also include a lunch with Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle on Friday a day after her 90th birthday and a dinner hosted by Prince William, his wife Kate and Prince Harry at the younger royals Kensington Palace home. But for the British media, the visit will be dominated by the debate over a possible EU exit, dubbed Brexit. Cameron, who is meeting Obama for talks Friday at 10 Downing St., is eager for the presidents intervention. Cameron is leading the campaign to stay in the EU, but faces opposition from within his own Conservative government and widespread skepticism among voters about the benefits of membership in the bureaucratic Brussels-based behemoth that is the EU. Backers of the Leave side have lined up to accuse Obama of interfering. Nigel Farage, leader of the anti-immigrant U.K. Independence Party, called Obama the most anti-British American president there has ever been. Conservative lawmaker Jacob Rees-Mogg said Britons would not want to be told what to do by a rather unsuccessful American president who has had one of the least successful foreign policies in modern history. Even Londons Conservative mayor, Boris Johnson born in New York and resolutely pro-American has accused Obama of hypocrisy for urging Britain to give up some of its sovereignty to a powerful multinational body. I just think its paradoxical that the United States, which wouldnt dream of allowing the slightest infringement of its own sovereignty, should be lecturing other countries about the need to enmesh themselves ever deeper in a federal superstate, Johnson said Tuesday. Cameron said Wednesday that British voters will make the final decision about the countrys future but listening to what our friends say in the world is not a bad idea. I struggle to find the leader of any friendly country that thinks we should leave, he said. Tim Oliver, an expert in trans-Atlantic relations at the London School of Economics, says Obama is in a no-win situation. He would be criticized if he didnt say something, and he is criticized for saying something, Oliver said. Obama is not the only American offering his opinion. Eight former U.S. Treasury chiefs said Wednesday in a letter to the Times of London that Brexit could diminish Britains influence and threaten Londons global primacy as a financial centre. Oliver said many American politicians, policy-makers and diplomats regarded the EU referendum as a bit of an unwanted headache and believed a Brexit would weaken Britain on the world stage. From the U.S. perspective, this doesnt serve anyones interest, he said. It doesnt make sense for the U.S. It doesnt make sense for NATO. It doesnt make sense for the European Union. It doesnt even make sense for the U.K. So who does this benefit? Read more about: SHARE: France got 99 problems But hijab aint one, one poster held aloft by French student activists read Wednesday. The activists were taking part in a so-called Hijab Day, whose intention was to help non-Muslims understand the stigmatization Muslim women face, according to organizers. The initiative started at French university Sciences Po Paris, but has sparked a wider, national debate about the conservative head coverings. France has taken controversial measures prohibiting face coverings primarily full veils standing out among its European neighbours. In a tense political climate, Muslim associations repeatedly point out that Muslim women only wearing hijabs which only cover parts of the face are also now facing frequently discrimination and verbal insults. If you believe that all women should have the right to decide what to wear and to expect that their decision is respected join us, the student organizers wrote on Facebook, in a post shared ahead of Hijab Day. Reactions to the idea were mixed. Thousands of commentators on social media asked whether encouraging women to wear hijabs was sending the right signal to women. One tweeted, How about a bikini day in Saudi Arabia as a #HijabDay version in Paris? Yeah, didnt think so. Some individuals at Sciences Po are opportunistic and are seizing this as their chance to get exposure and to stir debates, one graduate student enrolled at the university said. French philosopher and writer Bernard-Henri Levy voiced a similar opinion in a tweet: Hijab Day at Sc Po [Sciences Po]. So when is there going to be a sharia day? Or a stoning day? Or a slavery day? The increasing number of head scarves worn by young women attending French universities, as in many European universities, have caused tensions in France. Last week, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls sparked controversy when he suggested a ban on head scarves in institutions of higher education. Laurence Rossignol, French minister for womens rights, recently compared women who voluntarily choose to wear head scarves with Negroes who supported slavery. Such controversial remarks led Sciences Po students to create Hijab Day in an effort to promote understanding, organizers said. The initiative has not only provoked a public fallout, it has also sparked a fiery debate among students. Frances Le Monde newspaper quoted one student called Gaelle who participated in the Hijab Day as saying: I do not know if this event is the best way to mobilize, but I support those women who wear the veil and want to talk about it. We do not give them the floor enough. Read more about: SHARE: SYRACUSE, N.Y.A New York doctor is accused of hiding two surveillance cameras in a bathroom of a hospitals intensive care unit. Thirty-two-year-old Jeffrey Gould has been charged with unlawful surveillance stemming from the March 1 discovery of two spy pens in a bathroom at Crouse Hospital in Syracuse. Police say one camera was taped to the side of a trash can and the other was on a toilet paper dispenser. Defence attorney Edward Menkin tells The Post-Standard of Syracuse that Gould hid the cameras to try to catch the person who he says stole his prescription medication and a camera. Menkin says his client used terrible judgment, but didnt intend to invade anyones privacy. He says Gould has since been fired. SHARE: First Secretary of the CPCs Central Committee Raul Castro In his message, Mr Nguyen Phu Trong congratulated the CPC on the success of the seventh Party Congress and said he firmly believes that in the light of the Party Congress Resolution and under the sound leadership of the CPC led by Raul Castro, the fraternal Cuban people will overcome difficulties and challenges and reap greater victories in the national construction and defence, toward the goal of building a prosperous and sustainable socialism. On the occasion, he once again reaffirmed the Vietnamese Party, State and peoples wish and determination to further strengthen and deepen the model fraternal ties, traditional friendship, comprehensive cooperation and loyal solidarity between the two Parties, States and peoples./. RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIAPresident Barack Obama on Thursday pledged to remain vigilant against Irans destabilizing activities in the Middle East as he tried to allay concerns of Persian Gulf allies wary of his nuclear deal with their regional rival. None of our nations have an interest in conflict with Iran, Obama said as he met with top officials from six Arab nations at a Gulf summit in Saudi Arabia. Obama, finishing his brief trip to the kingdom, said he and the Gulf leaders had agreed about ways to move forward in their campaign against Daesh, also known as ISIS or ISIL, with members of the Gulf Cooperation Council agreeing to increase their contributions to the fight. He said the nations had also agreed to help Iraq. That was a nod to Obamas request to Gulf countries to step up their financial and political support for rebuilding Iraq after years of war. Obamas comments in the Saudi capital came after talks aimed at reassuring and co-ordinating with Mideast allies that harbour serious doubts about Obamas outreach to Iran and about U.S. policy toward Syria, where a civil war rages on. Obama said the fragile cessation of hostilities there was under tremendous strain and he decried continued violations, but made the case for sticking to the U.S. strategy of using diplomatic talks to pursuing a political transition for Syria. This violence is yet another reminder that theres just one way to end this civil war, Obama said, adding that the Gulf leaders had agreed. The summit followed bilateral talks that Obama held with Saudi King Salman on Wednesday shortly after arriving in the kingdom. Besides Saudi Arabia, the GCC includes the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain. Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and other Gulf countries share the U.S. view that Daesh militants pose a threat, and have joined the U.S.-led bombing campaign against the group. But they want the U.S. to do more to attempt to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad from power. The Gulf states are also skeptical of Obamas willingness to negotiate with Shiite Iran, and fear that last years nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic will lead to a rebalancing of regional stances at their expense. Obama said even with the deal, the U.S. and its Gulf partners had serious concerns about ongoing Iranian behaviour, including arms shipments that have been interdicted. We will remain vigilant to make sure Iran fulfils its commitments, just as we fulfil ours, Obama said. The U.S. has said Iran is meeting its commitments under the nuclear deal while continuing to violate other international obligations. Yet Obama has also faced intense criticism from many Republicans in the U.S. as well as Sunni-led countries for sanctions relief the U.S. is granting Iran under the deal. Read more about: SHARE: Ive never visited Attawapiskat to cover its crises, past or present, as many journalists have. Despite that, I want to say something about it. The late Edward Said encouraged non-Muslims to deploy their common humanity to try to understand events in the Muslim world. You dont always need expertise or direct experience, you can go some distance without them. Former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, a sympathetic observer, says people in Attawapiskat will have to move; theres not enough economic support. Jonathan Kay in the National Post who has visited Attawapiskat is astute and compassionate on ways that the former hunter-gatherer community has been shattered. But he, too, thinks they must leave. What I dont get is why people who are reeling from the near obliteration of their community would be better off going somewhere that lacks even the shards of community left them. Why does community matter? Because its about culture, the relationship is intimate. A community has a physical location, but its riddled with emotional and historical, i.e., cultural, associations. You cant easily relocate think of the failed attempts by early Zionists to place a Jewish homeland in Uganda or Argentina. They never resonated. For a while politicians here tried to move the Toronto island community elsewhere. Theyd say, Community? Weve got lots of housing for them in North York. I used to think they were just dolts but really, those politicians felt at home in North York because it was their community: they were comfortable with the people, the lingo, the culture! They didnt even realize they had their own culture there. Mel Lastman would have been as disoriented on Toronto island as islanders in North York. But whats crucial in this case is that culture isnt only about space, its also about time not just some glorious past but the future. If things are going smoothly in life, you can focus on the past, like the guy who went on Ancestry.com and, based on his findings, traded in his lederhosen for kilts. Good for him. However if life is harsh and your prospects unsettled, what you want from your culture isnt just assurance about where you came from; its that you have a future. Elders and leaders can play a crucial part or not. A culture includes this sense that the world you inhabit has a place for you in its schema as you grow up. Even a rickety community can make you feel that you have a useful role in fixing it, if youre strong enough and survive. Anger, too, can offer a sense of purpose, as in Black Lives Matter. But the young are susceptible to despair if theres no sense of a future, even a rotten one. If emptiness feels like its all that binds people into a community, they might bet everything on that, as some perhaps did in Attawapiskat. When a kid at a Toronto high school committed suicide this year, all the students at that vast institution grieved him, even those who didnt know him. They shared a sense of being on the cusp of an uncertain, not particularly reassuring future. The head of an aboriginal youth legal service said, We find we get most bang for our buck by reconnecting youth with their culture. I dont find that crass. Your culture should be what helps you cope with brutal realities while staying anchored, so you dont fall apart. In this sense, culture matters to everyone. If its effective, you might take it for granted. If its been smashed, you may panic. Another expert said youth in Attawapiskat have almost no hope of getting a job and earning a livelihood and having a meaningful life. The part about meaningful isnt just tagged on; the more desperate your life is, the more you need the meaning; itll keep you going and maybe get you through. As for Saids notion of what can bridge differences: everyone has noticed Bernie Sanders appeal to the young. Whats with that? Hes like an elder, offering a sense of a past that links to their future. Feeling the Bern is as much cultural as political. He retains past ideals and together we can make them the future. Hillary always says I, theres no community or culture in her diction. Shell do it for you, at best. As for Trump and youth: are you kiddin me? Rick Salutin appears every Friday. Read more about: SHARE: Canadians need to think about energy differently. Like former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, they conflate energy with oil. He was fond of saying the country is an emerging energy superpower but in making that claim he forgot that it will become one because of its clean energy assets and potential to develop them, not oil. This is a mistake also seen on the other side of the political spectrum, where oil is often placed at the centre of discussions about Canadas energy system, missing opportunities to talk about other energy sources. Doing so ignores the fact that Canada is uniquely endowed with a wide range of clean energy assets. There is massive potential for innovation and expansion in the renewable energy sector, which is the countrys real future as an energy superpower. The Sustainable Canada Dialogues proposed evidence-based climate solutions from more than 60 scholars from across the country. It found that Canada already produces more than 70 per cent of its electricity from low-carbon emissions sources and it is well within reach to have 100 per cent low carbon electricity by 2035. This is due to existing hydro assets and abundant potential to expand wind and solar energy subject to assessment of social and environmental impacts. Canada already exports electricity to the United States and can continue to do so through renewable sources. Provinces such as Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, and Newfoundland and Labrador already have major hydroelectricity resources. The Southern Prairies, areas near the Great Lakes, the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, and much of northern British Columbia, Yukon, Nunavut, Quebec and Newfoundland are all areas with great potential for wind farming. Solar energy resources are viable across much of southern Canada, especially in the Prairie Provinces. At least one town in the Northwest Territories, Colville Lake, aims to run entirely on the suns energy, replacing expensive and aging diesel generators. The most innovative companies in the business sector have already recognized the economic potential of renewable energy. According to Clean Energy Canada, a record $367 billion (U.S.) was invested last year in renewable power, which is almost double the amount invested in fossil fuels. Environmental sustainability is not counter to economic growth in fact, it is essential to growth over the long term. Already more people in Canada are employed by clean-energy sector jobs, almost 24,000, than the oil sands, about 22,000 at its peak. Some traditional oil and gas companies are also recognizing the potential for innovation and have become among the biggest investors in renewable energy. Many companies are increasingly proactive in shifting their business from only oil and gas to expanding to renewable and other energy sources as part of a broader approach to our energy system. For instance Suncor, which issues annual sustainability reports and has a climate action plan, has already begun investing and has committed to investing almost $1 billion in renewable energy. Despite such initiatives and Canadas vast renewable energy potential, governments across the country appear reluctant to adopt explicit plans for a transition to renewable energy. This is something that foresighted and innovative oil producing countries, such as the United Kingdom and Norway, are already doing. Their national climate action plans, among the best in the world, explicitly include the oil and gas sector as key parts of the discussion in responding to climate change. In effect, to avoid global warming of more than 2 degrees C, renewable energy must be fully embraced in the next decades. In order to truly fulfill the promise of Canada as an energy superpower for the 21st century we need to stop thinking that energy only equals oil. Only by thinking more broadly about our energy system will Canada realize its future as an innovative energy producer. Only then will space be opened for governments, businesses and communities to work together to transition to a truly sustainable economy. Howard Ramos is Professor of Sociology at Dalhousie University. Mark Stoddart is Associate Professor of Sociology at Memorial University. Catherine Potvin is Professor of Biology at McGill University. She is the Canada Research Chair in Climate Change Mitigation and Tropical Forests. SHARE: In 2002, Mark Henick, a teenager in Nova Scotia at the time, was at the edge of an overpass contemplating ending his life when he was met by a stranger, Mike Richey. Richey approached him, made small talk, and when Henick attempted to jump, Richey grabbed him by the shirt and saved his life. There are two heroes here: One was present and one emerged. Richey saved a man from killing himself. Henick went on to be a mental health advocate. I fear now, with Canadas physician-assisted suicide Bill C-14, that weve effectively minimized the horror of suicide and the benefit of perseverance. Im certain that its only a matter of time before we allow people with treatable mental illnesses to cut their lives short. In fact, the parliamentary committee recommended that the mentally ill should have the right to die. When it wasnt granted, the media erupted with people with depression demanding it be amended. However, with open-ended phrases like intolerable suffering, assisted suicide will surely be given to virtually anyone, but especially to the mentally ill who have a seamless case for intolerable suffering. I know it firsthand. My depression began at 14 and went on for about ten years. I was able to function well at times, but it was always there, and sometimes I needed hospitalization. I was constantly in therapy and tried dozens of drugs. The suffering was mysterious in that Id think I couldnt tolerate the mental anguish a second longer, only to tolerate more pain, much longer. I know we have trouble thinking of things being infinite, but I swear depression feels timeless and bottomless, as if theres no end to the rope. I was eventually given the antidepressant Zoloft and after a few weeks I realized my depression had ended. I innately knew I was feeling was what normal people feel like and what I had felt like before high school. My hope was restored, bubbling up during adversity, as it does with healthy people. The experience of pain is self-centred, and I dont mean this in an accusatory way, but this is why we need people around us, distracting us from ourselves. So to summarize, I had a bad depressiona terrible illnessand I recovered and went on to live a (sometimes messy) but beautiful life. Depression has been the great contrast to all the good. More importantly, I witnessed true compassion and mercy from people when I was at my lowest, something healthy and happy people simply cant know. I had no dramatic moments but I had many great heroes around memy family, medical professionals, even strangers---but also my peers who were suffering from depression. We lifted each other up, even though we couldnt do it for ourselves. We supported and encouraged each other to carry on and keep fighting. So when I hear people with depression suggesting assisted suicide, honestly, it makes me angry and brings out a mother-bear protectiveness in me. The mentally ill can be easily persuaded into doctor-assisted suicide. Theres another element to the news story I told at the beginning, a villain. When Mark Henick was teetering on the brink of suicide, a man below called him a coward and told him to jump. Anyone advocating for assisted suicide for the mentally ill, dont kid yourself. Youre not the hero in the story; youre suffering from misplaced mercy. No matter what happens to Bill C-14, the heroes are there beside you, making small talk, telling you to hang on, and yanking you back by your shirt when you need it the most. Elizabeth King is a freelance writer in Hamilton. SHARE: Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh and US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken. (Source: vov.vn) The two sides also discussed coordination between the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the US Department of State in organising the upcoming visit to Vietnam by President Barack Obama in May. They reminisced about developments in the bilateral relations since the two countries issued a Joint Vision Statement during the official visit to the US by Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong in July 2015. Deputy PM and FM Minh called on the US to continue its close coordination with Vietnam to deepen the two countries comprehensive partnership in a more pragmatic and effective fashion in order to serve their peoples interests and contribute to peace, stability, cooperation and development in the region. The host reiterated Vietnams resolve to approve and effectuate the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, expressing his hope that the US Congress will soon ratify the pact so that it can be put in place, thus helping enhance economic and trade ties between its member countries and promote regional development cooperation. He also called on the two countries to deepen their bilateral collaboration in nine areas named in the Vietnam-US Joint Statement issued in 2013, which takes development cooperation as central to the relationship. Antony Blinken, in reply, affirmed that US leaders regard the upcoming Vietnam visit by President Barack Obama as one of the countrys most important diplomatic events in 2016. Through the visit, President Obama wishes to beef up the comprehensive cooperation between the US and Vietnam, and learn more about the culture, history and people of the Southeast Asian nation, he said. The US will continue to join hands with Vietnam to foster their affiliation in trade, investment, climate change response, education-training, maritime security and post-war consequence settlement, the guest stated. He hailed Vietnams determination to negotiate and accelerate the approval of the TPP agreement, saying the move has motivated the US side to swiftly adopt the deal. Mentioning the East Sea issue, Antony Blinken affirmed the USs backing for the peaceful settlement of disputes in the sea through diplomatic channels and on the basis of international law as well as common standards, including the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the East Sea and the joint statement made by US and ASEAN leaders in Sunnylands last February./. Log In Receive full access to our market insights, commentary, newsletters, breaking news alerts, and more. Log In This photo provided by St. Johns County Sheriffs Office shows Father Rene Wayne Robert, a Roman Catholic priest in Florida whose body was found in rural east Georgia, who dedicated his life to working with prisoners and society's downtrodden. He was reported missing April 12 after church officials became concerned when he missed an appointment. (FHSMV/St. Johns County Sheriffs Office via AP) From left, Oman's Deputy Prime Minister Fahd bin Mahmoud al-Said, President Barack Obama, and Saudi Arabia's King Salman, participate in the Leaders Photo at the Diriyah Palace during the Gulf Cooperation Council Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Thursday, April 21, 2016. The president is on a six day trip to strategize with his counterparts in Saudi Arabia, England and Germany on a broad range of issues with efforts to rein in the Islamic State group being the common denominator in all three stops. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) This April 17, 2015, file photo provided by the U.S. Treasury shows the front of the U.S. $20 bill, featuring a likeness of Andrew Jackson, seventh president of the United States. A Treasury official said Wednesday, April 20, 2016, that Secretary Jacob Lew has decided to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, making her the first woman on U.S. paper currency in 100 years. (U.S. Treasury via AP, File) remaining of Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. Recover your password. A password will be e-mailed to you. Hospital acquires new surgical robotics technology Burke Health announced the purchase of new robotics technology for use during spine surgical procedures last week. The Globus ExcelsiusGPS is a revolutionary robotic navigation platform system designed to be intuitive and streamline the surgical workflow. Real-time tracking of instruments and implants, along with audible, visual and tactile feedback, enables... County center wins senior trike Local seniors now have access to an adult tricycle. Director Kimberly Mathis attended the Move Augusta Senior Expo and Bike Rodeo sponsored by Augusta Urban Ministries October 8. The event, held at The Salvation Army Kroc Center, was aimed at people over 50 years old, and included resources and health... 4-H Food Challenge Team takes State For the first time, Burke County 4-H decided to put together a junior food challenge team this summer. Teams are compromised of 2-4 students in the 6th-8th grades. This competition is very competitive and teams must advance to state after the district competition. Our team started practicing weekly in July... County rehashes trash problem I am bringing up the trash again, Commissioner Evans Martin said during the October 11 meeting. We have to do something about the trash. Martin asked that the record show that he wants to do something about the countys dumpster sites. He made a suggestion that eliminating 10 sites would... [COMMUNICATED CONTENT] Take an ecxlusive tour of the worlds most famous hat brand which uses techniques invented by Mr. Giuseppe Borsalino 160 years ago. By Micah Soffer The array of customers visiting the new Borsalino Brand Store on Avenue J in Brooklyn, NY, fit in perfectly with the eclectic selection of fedoras the famous hat company has been meticulously manufacturing in Italy since 1857. On any given day in the store, you might find an exuberant 13-year-old ready to practice maturity, a father sent to purchase new attire for his daughters wedding, or a stylish fellow seeking an updated look for his next visit to Shul. The name Borsalino, the most recognized hat brand in the world, has always conjured images of the classy, dignified man in the most elegant attire. Whether an elderly rabbi or a world statesman, the felt head covering has completed if not created a mans honorable look. As the holiday of Pesach nears, customers frequent the Flatbush-based upscale boutique. They try on a few options, rush to the mirror, and then painstakingly choose one from the finalists. Most are unaware that as hard as their decision-making might be, the creation of the hat is tenfold more complex. Lets take an exclusive tour into the renowned hat-making process, most of which remains discreet and hidden from the public eye in the small Italian town of Alessandria, on a plain between the Tanaro and Bormida rivers. VIDEO: Inside Borsalino Filmed by Gianluca Miotto, Edited by Daniel Finkelman The Orthodox Jewish community is important for us, the youthful Edouard Burrus, Borsalinos recently appointed Vice Chairman, told us. He is part of the Geneva-based Quest Partners led by Italian financier Philippe Camperio that bought the company after it faced financial troubles. Burrus and his partners have taken the reins of the iconic hat company which have become renowned as the makers of coveted accessories for fashionable men and women, sold in elegant boutiques and prestigious department stores across the world, as well as Borsalinos single-brand sales points in Italy, Paris and Tokyo. To better understand the hat industry join us on our virtual visit with the manufacturers of Borsalino. The Jewish market represents approximately 10% of their turnover per year, and we plan on expanding it, Burrus tells us. For the Orthodox Jewish community, which dons fedoras on a daily basis, the Borsalino brand has attained even higher status, having established itself as the preferred choice for consumers. More than simply a fashion statement, head coverings in the Jewish world proclaim an identity and a sense of belonging, often revealing the origin and connection to a movement or stream founded in Russia, Poland or Lithuania. Today, frum Sephardic Jews wear hats as well. Located an hour from Milan, workers in the factory deal with the provinces humid subtropical climate which can get hot and wet during the summer and very cold in the winter. Touring the large and busy plant, most notable is the amount of employees working with the materials, shaping the felt and doing many quality checks. In a way, not much has changed in the production process that began 160 years ago. Credited with inventing its creation is Giuseppe Borsalino. He was an errand boy and an apprentice before earning his nickname u siur Pipen (Master Joe) and becoming the namesake of the most famous hat brand today. He developed his love and knowledge of hats at the Berteil hat factory in Rue du Temple, Paris, where he worked for 7 years before becoming a qualified Master Hatter. Upon returning to his hometown of Alessandria, Mr. Borsalino opened a workshop together with his brother, Lazzaro. With demand growing and the work depending on their physical labor, Mr. Borsalino decided to join the Industrial Revolution and imported machines from Denton, Stockport, in the suburbs of Manchester, which had revolutionized the hat-making industry. According to legend, Mr. Borsalino paid a visit in 1897 to Battersby hat-making factory in London. Without being seen, he dipped his handkerchief in a vat of tar, and took back to Italy the English secret for making perfect bowler hats. Mr. Borsalinos drive for quality and detailed craftsmanship remains alive in the factory which still operates some of the machines that he invented or perfected. These machines are part of our companys secret formula, and are what makes the hats so special and unique, one employee explained. The machines were all custom designed and built by Mr. Borsalino and his factory staff to solve different problems, our guide explains. Thats how Mr. Borsalino worked, if there was something he needed, he would invent a solution and then they would build it, she explains. Borsalino hats are made from the softest and highest quality rabbit fur, which is then heated, molded and shaped into the classic fedoras in many different colors and styles. They are shuttled around the factory on specially designed wooden carts, which they explain is to protect the hat from damage while they are being fashioned, from being shaped, to having ribbons carefully cut and sewn on, to the genuine 18K gold Borsalino stamp which is embellished by hand on every single hat. The time needed to produce a hat from the day we receive the raw rabbit hair until it is ready to leave the factory takes 7 weeks and goes through 52 steps of production, Burrus explains. By the time the customer receives the hat, it has been worked on by 65 different people. Burrus says with the new leadership, the company is looking towards future expansion and growth. As of today our main focus is to consolidate and to capitalize on the brand and build brand awareness, he says. Our team puts a lot of effort into producing the best quality hats which we are very proud to sell throughout the world. One market in which the brand enjoys consistently solid sales is the Orthodox Jewish community. Borsalino spends the first 2 months of every year, January and February, producing the specialized hats made for the Jewish consumers in Israel, North America and Europe. Burrus says the Borsalino company is proud of their popularity among Orthodox Jewish consumers. The loyalty of the community is incredible, he says, noting the new specialized brand stores they opened in Jerusalem, Bnei Brak and Brooklyn, NY. We have plans to open several more, including in Lakewood, NJ by this summer, and other locations in the next few years, he says. The benefits of the brand stores are threefold, explains Borsalino sales manager Claudio Mennuni. We can offer a large variety of Borsalino products in the same store, giving the customers the experience of choosing from a variety of qualities, price points, and different details that make Borsalino the best hat in the world. [PHOTOS IN EXTENDED ARTICLE] While visiting her son in Lakewood Frumi Z. felt a sharp pain on her side. When the pain did not subside after taking a deep breath, sitting down and taking a drink, her son Yossi knew that something was wrong. Fast forward nine hours and Mrs. Z is now recovering in the post-op room at Robert Wood Johnson hospital in New Jersey. Her emergency appendectomy completed by the top Chief Surgeon was a success, her familys needs met, and someone at their side throughout this ordeal. All because of the collaborative work of one small, yet powerful group of individuals better known as the Jewish Medical Liaison Group (JMLG) What is a hospital liaison? We all hear about them and we all know someone who works as one. A liaison works for a particular hospital to represent patients in different religious or cultural demographics to streamline any issues that may arise because of their designation. They coordinate with different medical professionals related to their patient. They advocate for their patients. They deliver calm to chaotic situations. They quite literally are the go to people with all things medical throughout the frum community. These 43 liaisons for the frum community hailing from places like New York, Lakewood, Montreal, Chicago and beyond joined together to form the JMLG several years ago for the singular purpose of connecting with each other, collaborating with one another and to multiply their resources for the good of our communities. Many of the group members have never met in person. Phone calls, emails and texts are exchanged when one liaison needs information to help a client that may be more readily available to a fellow liaison. Various annual gatherings, email and other text forums keeps everyone updated and available for each other as needed. While working as a liaison is a hired job, joining the JMLG has taken their dedication to a whole new level. This tireless and thankless job can sometimes is rigorous, never ending and truly a 24/7 commitment. Chizuk and inspiration was needed and through the brainchild of its executive board, a weekend convention was prepared to gather all liaisons and their spouses for the first time. To rejuvenate them, acquaint themselves with each other and prepare themselves for all that will face them ahead. After months of preparation, 45 couples enjoyed a weekend in the Somerset Doubletree in New Jersey. It was a Shabbos that most will never forget. In fact, for many of them it was the first time they ever met face to face. This event would not have been possible without the innovation and sheer generosity of Mr. Kenny Rosenberg and Daryl Hagler founders of the Centers for Care Company, at the forefront of the Medical almost every facet of health care. Through their nursing homes, rehab programs, Senior Care Ambulance, Home health aids and variety of health care initiatives, they have worked with many liaisons throughout the year and this convention was a natural fit. They have shown real sensitivity and compassion to the particular needs of the frum patient. The convention program began with a key-note given by Rabbi Boruch Ber Bender of Achiezer, on behalf of the JMLG. The theme of this event is Gratitude, he said, specifically to the spouses and families of those present. Rabbi Bender pointed out the dedication of those present and pointed out how each and every one of the convention attendees had likely never experienced a quiet and peaceful Shabbos without the interruption of a particular emergency. Rabbi Yechiel Spero, prolific author and speaker and the resident Rabbi of the Shabbos, delivered many stirring drashos throughout the weekend underscoring the importance of the achdus of the group, while highlighting the selfless acts that happen every day due to the work of the JMLG members. The Shabbos morning drasha was given by Rabbi Benzion Lesser, a Chaplain at Maimonidies Hospital and his warn divrei chizuk were well received by all. The delicious meals over Shabbos were punctuated by a riveting round table discussion clarifying different questions that come up on a day to day basis. Led by Rabbi Yehuda Kasirer, of Lakewood Bikur Cholim, the issues were diverse. One question addressed how to navigate family members torn on whether to transfer a patient. So many facets need addressing. Will it be harder to visit that patient in the new hospital, stalling recovery due to his emotional turmoil? Will that move cause the family financial hardship due to insurance concerns? Is the best doctor necessarily somewhere else? The weighing of options is crucial for all decisions. And the challenge of making those decisions with the speed necessary should be noted. During the Shabbos meal, Heshy Neuman of the Centers group delivered beautiful words reflecting on this unique weekend. The culmination of the event was on Motzei Shabbos when 100 more participants joined the convention. Representatives of area Bikur Cholim organizations, medical referral groups and Hatzolah coordinators from across the tri state area arrived to join this special weekend. Rabbi Boruch Ber Bender began the program and once again marveled at the diverse crowd that had gathered from every stripe and background all with the same common denominator. Each of these groups is directly involved in medical care in the Jewish community and bringing them all together can and will benefit so many families and individuals in the future. He introduced Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zweibel, a close friend to JMLG and Executive Vice President of the Agudas Yisroel of America. He gave stirring divrei bracha and reminded and highlighted the impact that the group had on our society at large. Rabbi Bender then introduced Mr. Sruly Rosman, a liaison for NYU Medical center. Mr. Rosman went on to enumerate the amazing details that led up to the creation of the convention and then introduced Kenny Rosenberg, one of the event sponsors. Mr. Rosenberg spoke about the work that his Centers for Health Care does for so many throughout the Jewish community. The next speaker was Mr. Solomon Rosenberg, a liaison at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. Mr. Rosenberg gave gripping detail of the JMLG from its early days of creation and how it has now flourished into an active and robust group that works together on a daily basis. Mr. Rosenberg gave a rallying call to all, to continue to work together to make sure that no Jewish patient ever find himself alone. He announced plans that will be rolled out in the near future to further integrate these liaisons, Hatzolah members, organizations, and other askanim so that patients in our communities will be better served. He went on to explain that when all of these individuals work hand in hand, great things can be accomplished. The evening was closed with the moving final words of divrei Torah shared by Rabbi Spero. He poignantly integrated the weekends message. Many people lingered after the speeches to network to get to know each other and exchange contact info, all with the same goal: to help Klal Yisroel in any way possible. Indeed it was a weekend not to be forgotten and one that all of the participants look forward to in the coming years. (By Chaia Frishman / YWN World Headquarters NYC) Hillary Clinton got what she needed in New York, a solid victory that stopped Bernie Sanderss weeks-long winning streak. But any cause for celebration among her supporters probably will be tempered by the reality that her unexpectedly difficult nomination battle has taken a significant toll on her candidacy. By the end of next weeks contests in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware, her lead in pledged delegates in all likelihood will be insurmountable. For Sanders, there seemingly will be no path to the nomination other than the unlikely strategy of trying to persuade superdelegates to go against the will of Democratic voters. By the beginning of May, Clinton will be at liberty to turn her attention to the general election. At that point, turning around public perceptions will be crucial if she hopes not just to win the presidency but to be able to rally the country behind her agenda. The good news for Clinton and Democrats will seize on this is that, against either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz in a possible general election matchup, she looks strong. Thats especially the case against Trump, who continues to run up negative numbers unheard of for a potential major-party nominee. But Trumps problems do not diminish the fact that, standing alone, Clinton looks much weaker than recent nominees. Republicans must be gnashing their teeth over the fact that their two leading candidates are unpopular while the candidates with the third- and fourth-most delegates Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who suspended his campaign in March, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who hopes for a miracle at the GOP convention would be far stronger against Clinton. The damage to Clinton from her battle with Sanders is borne out in the latest NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll. The longer this race has gone on, the more she has shown vulnerabilities. The top-line number that caught the eyes of so many analysts shows her now in a dead heat with Sanders nationally ahead of him by just two percentage points, 50 to 48 percent. Those numbers have no influence on the state-by-state results but offer a window into both the success of Sanders in generating enthusiasm and Clintons inability to capitalize on all her political advantages. Since October, when her candidacy began rising again after several months of controversy about her use of a private email server, she has been on a downward slide. Her lead over the senator from Vermont has dropped from what was then a 31-point advantage to the current two points. Meanwhile, her negative ratings have been rising and now outweigh her positives by 24 points, according to the NBC-Wall Street Journal poll. That makes her seen no more favorably than Cruz is. Her only salvation is that Trumps net negative is minus 41. Sanders, meanwhile, has a net positive of nine points although its fair to say that one reason for that is that he has received far less in the way of attacks from Republicans or scrutiny from the media than Clinton has. Clintons image is at or near record lows among major demographic groups. Among men, she is at minus 40. Among women, she is at minus nine. Among whites, she is at minus 39. Among white women, she is at minus 25. Among white men, she is at minus 72. Her favorability among whites at this point in the election cycle is worse than President Obamas ever has been, according to Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducted the NBC-Wall Street Journal poll with Democratic pollster Peter Hart. Minority voters have been the linchpin of Clintons nomination strategy and were a key to her success in New York. Among African Americans nationally, the NBC-Wall Street Journal poll shows her with a net positive of 51 points. But thats down 13 points from her first-quarter average and is about at her lowest ever. Among Latinos, her net positive is just two points, down from plus 21 points during the first quarter. Voters perceptions of her having the knowledge and experience to be president remain strongly positive and unchanged since last fall. On other measures, such as whether she is easygoing and likable, or shares your position on issues, or is able to bring real change to the country, or is honest and straightforward, she has seen her standing erode since last fall and even more when compared with her first presidential campaign, in 2008. By any conventional standard, this is a candidate whos been disqualified to be president [by the voters], McInturff said. Her terrible numbers for months have been masked because we have the one candidate in modern history who has worse numbers. The spectacle of Donald Trump has gotten so much attention that shes slipped under the radar for what ought to be a real story. . . . Her numbers have gone from terrible to historic and disqualifying. Democrats see Sanders as an agent in Clintons decline, arguing that in recent weeks his attacks have been aimed less at policy differences and more at questions about her character. Sanders has attacked Clinton as being too cozy with Wall Street, too dependent on big money and for not releasing transcripts of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs. Its hard to dispute the rising negatives, said Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. I was actually surprised when Sanders began not just to make that personal but appeared to be producing enduring damage. Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster who is working with Priorities USA, a pro-Clinton super PAC, said the primaries have reinforced perceptions of the former secretary of state as strong, smart and resilient and as a candidate with a policy agenda far more in tune with the electorate than what Republicans are offering. But he also said that Sanderss attacks have reinforced stereotypes that are untrue but challenging nonetheless for Clinton. Other candidates have come out of tough nominating contests badly bruised, including Clintons husband, former president Bill Clinton, in 1992. He was successful, through a major effort by his campaign, in turning around his image in the time between the end of the primaries in early June of that year and the end of his convention later in the summer. Republicans believe that Clinton is so well known that she will have difficulty changing minds. She is substantially weaker as a candidate than I expected and substantially less able to create a compelling persona on the stump, said Whit Ayres, who was Rubios campaign pollster. Greenberg said there certainly was more room for Bill Clinton to get a second look from voters because he was newer to the national stage. But Greenberg noted that Hillary Clinton has been able to rebound in the past and said she can do so again. I dont think theres the same degree of freedom [as her husband had], but theres room to improve, he said. And I wouldnt overlook this broad base [of voters] that wants to vote for a Democrat and doesnt want to vote for a Trump or Cruz. Garin added, I think people are making a mistake if they believe that the numbers you see today inevitably are going to define her standing two or three months from now. Things are not nearly as etched in stone as one would think. It is doubtful Clinton imagined a year ago, as she was making early trips to Iowa and New Hampshire, that the nominating contest would be as competitive and bruising as it has turned out to be. She may be lucky in her potential general election opponent, but she has work to do to get ready for what lies ahead. (c) 2016, The Washington Post Dan Balz [PHOTOS IN EXTENDED ARTICLE] Magen David Adoms youth division volunteers are working hard ahead of Pesach collecting food for the needy around Israel. Anyone who has been to a shuk or supermarket in any major city has likely seen the volunteers in uniform, asking customers to please buy an extra item or more to donate to the needy. These items are placed in cartons at the cashiers and then brought to central collection sites, packaged and distributed for Pesach. MDA reports volunteers in Ramat Gan alone have collected over 500 cartons of food in the past two weeks. Mayor Yisrael Zinger met with MDA officials, praising the operation which is yet another life-saving aspect of the organization which operates largely on a volunteer basis. (YWN Israel Desk, Jerusalem) On the afternoon of Monday 10 Nissan, Petah Tikva Magistrate Court Judge Eliana Danieli excoriated the ISA and the Central Unit of the Yehuda and Shomron Police in light of their conduct on Friday, 7 Nissan when a Jewish minor held by the ISA (Israel Security Agency Shin Bet) felt unwell and was rushed to hospital for medical treatment. The minor has been detained for over a week and is prohibited from speaking to an attorney. On Friday, police representatives telephoned parents of the minor and requested their authorization to give their son medical treatment after he felt unwell. The policemen did not specify what had happened to their son and refused to inform the parents of either their sons medical status or of the medical treatment he received. Throughout Shabbos and Sunday the parents were left worrying, without being able to know what their sons status was. Only on Monday morning during a deliberation were they told in court that he had been treated by a doctor and apparently felt better. However neither his parents nor the Honenu Attorney, Aharon Roza, representing him have been allowed to meet with him. Roza raised the issue during a deliberation on the morning of Monday, 10 Nissan and criticized the conduct of the police and the ISA. The parents have not seen their son for a long time and neither has an attorney been able to see him because of an order prohibiting a meeting. What sort of conduct is this when a family is not informed of the status of their minor sons health after he was evacuated for medical tests and they were not allowed to accompany him to those tests? Under what kind of a regime are we living? asked Roza. Petah Tikva Magistrate Court Judge Eliana Danieli wrote in her decision that its content is permitted for publication: On Friday the minor felt unwell and the interrogating unit requested permission from his parents allowing him to receive medical treatment. The parents gave their consent. However afterwards they were not informed of his medical condition. There is no need to point out the worry which grips parents when they do know what the medical condition of their son is after they have been informed that he has suffered from medical distress, wrote Judge Danieli and expressed hope that if there are such instances in the future, the investigating units will conduct themselves in an appropriate manner. The remand of two of the minors brought on Monday 10 Nissan to a deliberation has been extended by four days. The remand of an adult has been extended by three days. (YWN Israel Desk, Jerusalem) The Main Hall of the Presidents Residence is used to regularly host official events but on Tuesday, 11 Nissan, it was packed with hundreds of busy hands wrapping Pesach meal packages for needy families. President Reuven Rivlin joined employees of the Presidents Office as well as volunteers from the Leket Israel organization in putting together the food packages. The President said, This is the house of the Israeli people, of all of us together, and it is so meaningful for me that at this time, the holiday period, a time when we need to take care of all our people for Pesach, we are gathered here in the nations house in order to observe the mitzvah of mutual responsibility. This is not charity, it is our duty as a nation and this is our way of maintaining it. The President then turned to Leket Chairman Joseph Gitler and said, You have promoted this social obligation in an incomparable manner, and all the people of Israel should thank you for the initiative that started in a small car. It is a situation whereby we all take care of each other together, of any who needs some kind of assistance, and today my grandson and I, as well as the Presidents Office employees, have all came here to help. Director General of the Presidents Residence, Harel Tubi added, The Presidents Residence, and its employees led by the President, has opened its doors to the important and blessed work that Leket Israel does all year round and especially before the holidays, before Pesach. The importance of this activity, is the social safety net that organizations like Leket Israel and others provide, doing amazing charitable work throughout the year. There is full cooperation of the Presidents Residence as an official state body with civil society organizations, which work hard on a daily even hourly basis to create a safety net for all those in need and all those who cannot afford to buy food for the holiday, and I congratulate all our partners in that effort. Leket Israel is a food bank organization which was established to salvage left-over food and distribute it to those in need. The 500 food boxes which were packed today, will be distributed to 250 families in the Jerusalem area, and contained vegetables and fruits collected from farmers fields including cabbage, peppers and potatoes, as well as dry products which were selected on the recommendation of the organizations nutritionist. (YWN Israel Desk, Jerusalem/Photos: Kobi Gideon, GPO) [PHOTOS IN EXTENDED ARTICLE] Health Minister Yaakov Litzman on Wednesday 12 Nissan visited victims of the Egged number 12 bus terror attack who are recuperating in Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital. Four victims of the attack remain in the hospital. The minister also visited with victims of the Brussels Airport terror attack who remains hospitalized. The minister was briefed on the treatment of each victim of the bus attack recuperating in an ICU. Their wounds are primarily burns over areas of their bodies. He then went to an orthopedic unit to meet with victims of the Brussels attack, speaking with Chaim Winternitz and Mendel Farkash, who were told by doctors they will be permitted to enjoy seder at home with their families. Litzman was accompanied by the Hospital Director Professor Zeev Rothstein, Chief of Orthopedics Professor Meir Liebergall, Chief of Orthopedic Trauma and Orthopedic Surgery Prof. Ram Mosheiff, MK Yisrael Eichler and other personnel. Photo: (left to right) Prof. Liebergall, Minister Litzman, Prof. Rothstein, MK Eichler and the victims of the Brussels attack. (YWN Israel Desk, Jerusalem/Photos: Hadassah Spokesman) Two New York Police Department detectives are charged with assaulting a uniformed postal worker. Detectives Angelo J. Pampena and Robert A. Carbone were arraigned Wednesday in Queens. Their attorneys did not immediately respond to messages requesting comment. According to an indictment, Karim Baker had just gotten into his car on the evening of Oct. 21, 2015 when the detectives punched and kicked him, then dragged him onto the sidewalk. Pampena filed a sworn criminal court complaint alleging that Baker was parked directly in front of a fire hydrant. However, the prosecutor said video evidence showed that the vehicle was parked more than 15 feet from the hydrant. (AP) Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker says he would back Donald Trump as the Republican presidential nominee, even though he endorsed Ted Cruz. Walker told reporters Wednesday that he will support whoever is the nominee, even if its Trump. Trump criticized Walker and his record as governor while campaigning in Wisconsin, a state that Cruz won by 13 points. Walker endorsed Cruz the week before Wisconsins April 5 election, cut a television ad and campaigned alongside him. Walker had repeatedly said before he endorsed Cruz that he would support whoever gets the GOP nomination. His spokesman Joe Fadness said Tuesday that nothing had changed. On Wednesday Walker stressed that he remains a big backer of Cruz, but that any Republican would be preferable to Democrat Hillary Clinton as president. (AP) First Hillary Clinton, and now Harriet Tubman. This week the Treasury Department announced that they will be replacing the image of Andrew Jackson on the twenty dollar bill with that of Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist freedom fighter, presenting a challenge to those newspapers and publications that avoid pictures of women. The issue first came up last year when the plan was to scrap the picture of Alexander Hamilton on the ten dollar bill and replace it with a woman. There was a he backlash of Hamilton supporters who managed to get those plans scrapped. The challenge now is much greater because the twenty dollar bill is a much more popular denomination than the ten dollar bill. According to the Federal Reserve there are only 1.9 billion ten dollar bills in circulation, while there are a whopping 8.6 billion twenty dollar bills in circulation. In regard to the earlier challenge of reporting about a female running for president, HaModia and other newspapers have cleverly met with the issue by publishing photos of Bill Clinton instead of Hillary. This cannot be done in the case of Harriet Tubman, because there are no known extant pictures of her first husband, John Tubman, nor her second husband, Nelson Davis. Inside media sources say that this idea would not work anyhow, because here the challenge is in the monetary denominations that the newspaper publishers use, and not the photos that they print. There are two alternatives left, if they continue to hold to this controversial halachic position of no photos of women. They can begin using more ten and fifty dollar bills, or begin using credit and debits cards more. Of course, the third alternative is that Harriet Tubmans appearance on the twenty dollar bill could be embraced. She believed in G-d, helped 71 people go free, and dressed modestly. By the way.so does Hillary Clinton. Check the photos. Its sad to say, but Hillary Clinton is dressed more Tzniyus then most Frum women walking our streets. He neck is covered, wears long skirts and has her sleeves covered with chumros! And besides..didnt the Skverer Rebbe pay her a visit at the Whitehouse to secure the pardon of one of his Chassidim? What will they do if she becomes president? They might just photoshop her out of the photos like the Satmar newspapers did..and then endorsed her for president.. Pesach Benzmanim Brooklyn NOTE: The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of YWN. DO YOU HAVE AN OPINION YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE POSTED ON YWN? SEND IT TO US FOR REVIEW. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu headed to Russia on Thursday morning 13 Nissan for a one-day visit to meet with President Vladimir Putin. Mr. Netanyahu returns to Israel on Thursday night. According to official reports to the media, the Prime Minister will be discussing Syrias involvement in Syria as Israel will stress it has no objections to a peace agreement in that country for as long as Israels border with Syria remains quiet. The Prime Minister will also address Russias decision to move ahead with the sale of the advanced S-300 anti-aircraft system to Iran despite Jerusalems objections. (YWN Israel Desk, Jerusalem) A former ambassador and congressman who sat on the 9/11 Commission is urging the release of 28 pages that have been kept secret. Tim Roehmer says the public should be allowed access to the material, which reportedly focuses on Saudi Arabias possible role in the Sept. 11 attacks that killed thousands. Appearing on MSNBCs Morning Joe show Thursday, Roehmer says panel investigation did not discover any role by senior, high-level Saudi government officials. But he also says its possible that financing in support of the al-Qaida inspired attack came from Saudi sources. Four airplanes were hijacked and used in the attack on U.S. soil. Two flew into the World Trade Center in New York, another struck the Pentagon in suburban Arlington, Virginia, and a fourth crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. (AP) A number of youths in Betar Illit set up a carwash in a parking lot in Betar Illit ahead of Pesach to earn some extra money. A car owner who wished to use their service gave one of the youths his car keys on Wednesday night the eve of 13 Nissan. The youth, 16, who does not have a drivers license, got into the vehicle to move it. He traveled a short distance in reverse, pinning 4-year-old Moll Bernstein oh between the vehicle and a wall. Her injuries were grave. The panicked youth fled but a short time later turned himself over to police. Resuscitation efforts began on the girl, who was pronounced dead in a Jerusalem hospital. (YWN Israel Desk, Jerusalem) The following was on an email group for the Waterbury Jewish Community. The names in the story have been changed. Good morning, As you know, I posted an email yesterday that an envelope of money and personal checks was found on my lawn. What I, and the person to whom the envelope belongs, didnt realize at the time, was that there is a really cool back story here that is hashgacha pratis. I called up Sara Kibber this morning in response to her email that one of her sons is the rightful owner of the envelope. I called her because I wanted to explain to her that I really didnt do much in this story besides keep the envelope in my house. The person who really found the money was the shoprite delivery guy who worked the 5-7 shift. The delivery man (I cant remember his name because I was so flustered at the time, but maybe Wally?) called me to tell me he was at my door, and to inform me that there were personal checks and cash all over my lawn. I was in the YK parking lot at the time picking something up and rushed home. The man had picked up everything he could find when I arrived. When I finished telling this to Sara, she told me that it must be HaShems way of paying her back. A week or so ago, she was bringing her daughter to babysitting before work, realized she forgot something at home, and went back to get it. She saw the shoprite delivery truck drop their credit card reader and An envelope of money! Sara called up shoprite to return the money to the delivery man, who picked it up later that day. Its always amazing when you can see HaShems hand in your life. We know He is always there orchestrating everything, but we dont have kriyas yam suf every day. Its moments like these, no matter how little, that remind us that He is always looking out for us. In the merit of our shmiras hamitzvos, may klal yisroel be zochim to all be returned to Eretz Yisroel, and may our words at the conclusion of the Seder, lshana habaah byerushalayim come into fruition with the coming of moshiach. Pesach kasher vsameach! (YWN World Headquarters NYC) Life between Education Minister Naftali Bennett and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is strained on the best of days, including ups and downs that may have reached an unprecedented level at a recent cabinet meeting on Wednesday, 12 Nissan. According to reports, the situation between the two deteriorated at the meeting to the point Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu threatened to oust Bennett from the cabinet. It appears this latest round surrounded the possibility of reducing or removing IDF troops operating in PA areas (Areas A) and the Prime Ministers decision not to bring the matter to a cabinet vote. PM Netanyahu reportedly promised to bring the matter to discussion during the meeting amid reports Israel is now committed to removing IDF forces from PA (Palestinian Authority) areas. At some point Mr. Netanyahu shouted at Bennett You dont run the show here, going so far as to threaten ousting Bennett from the cabinet. Calm yourself or I will fire you! Mr. Netanyahu reportedly shouted back at Bennett. Those present who were willing to speak to the media explained that while tings between Bennett and Netanyahu have not been great, this latest round was unprecedented. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister later in the meeting explained he did not like the way Bennett spoke or his tone, but he did agree to discuss the matter as requested by Bennett before the feud. (YWN Israel Desk, Jerusalem) [By Aryeh Gelfand] The BDS movements connection to terrorist organizations has been revealed and reaffirmed by the testimony of Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, in the House of Representatives Tuesday.. According to testimony Schanzer provided to a House Foreign Affairs Committees Subcommittee, three leaders of organizations that were designated as supporters of terrorism, or shut down, or held civilly liable for providing material support for the terrorist organization Hamas, have gravitated toward the movement to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel. The name of the subcommittee of which he testified at is Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade in the Middle East and North Africa. The effort to delegitimize the state of Israel in the eyes of the international community has taken a new, less overtly violent front in recent years. The BDS movement began in July of 2005 with the decision of 170 Palestinian Non-governmental organizations (NGO) to promote international sanctions against Israel in an attempt to coerce Israel to comply with their demands. The goals of the movement are: the end of Israels occupation and colonization of Palestinian land and the Golan Heights, full equality for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, and respect for the right of return of Palestinian refugees. The pressure the BDS movement has placed upon Israel has been felt in real terms in recent years. SodaStream, an Israeli company was forced to close its Maale Adumim plant after a boycott slowed sales and made downsizing the only option. The movement has faced criticism from many in the international community. Critics cite instances of anti-Semitic rhetoric in use by the movement and efforts to delegitimize Israel as a country. In western circles, the movement is seen as a nonviolent grassroots campaign similar to the movement against South Africas apartheid regime, but a closer look reveals a darker side. The movement is actually funded by the Palestinian Authority leadership and in some cases Hamas itself. After two failed guerilla wars against Israel; Hamas has taken a different approach this time. It seeks to mobilize the international community in an economic, academic, and, cultural boycott of Israel. This new form of warfare is a dangerous example of the asymmetric tactics non-state actors are now utilizing against forces technologically and financially superior. Schanzer named the American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) as a leading driver of the BDS campaign. It is pretty damning that at least seven individuals who work for or on behalf of AMP have worked for or on behalf of organizations previously shut down or held civilly liable in the United States for providing financial support to Hamas: the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), and KindHearts. In fact, according to the Treasury Department, Khaled Meshal, a top Hamas official, identified one of HLFs officers, Mohammed El-Mezain, as the Hamas leader for the U.S. The AMP is up front about its aims in this bitter fight. In its headquarters there is a poster that reads in Arabic no Jew will live among them in Jerusalem. (Aryeh Gelfand YWN) You do not have to be a Corbynista to cheer loudly when investors deliver a bloody nose to overpaid chief executives. If anything, the 41 per cent vote against Mark Cutifanis 3.4million pay packet at De Beers owner Anglo American was timid. This, after all, is a company in acute distress which is cutting 85,000 jobs and closing down or selling two-thirds of its operations, imposing a terrible burden on communities in some of the poorest parts of the world including its southern Africa homeland. In the days when the Oppenheimer family were still in control, Anglo American earned a reputation for being a cut above the rest of the natural resource companies and played an important role in exposing and defeating apartheid. Unrest: Anglo American Platinum miners strike in Rustenburg, northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa in 2013. The mining giant is cutting 83,000 jobs in some of the poorest parts of the world Now Anglos reputation lies in ruins. Just how out of touch the panjandrums at the top have become was exposed at the companys annual general meeting. It was left to a veteran private shareholder, Phil Clarke, to challenge chairman Sir John Parker as he raced through the resolutions. Clarke forced the top table to retrace its steps to show the vote against pay. No doubt Cutifani has a horrible job and is partly having to clear up the mess left by his predecessor, Cynthia Carroll. It is the task of his board, and the chairman of the remuneration committee in particular, to protect him from his own greed. But you dont get too much help from Sir Philip Hampton, chairman of Anglos pay committee, who has a habit of letting chief executives swing in the wind. As post-crisis chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland he did the Government an enormous favour by taking on a role no one wanted. When it came, however, to the pay of the admittedly rather precious chief executive Stephen Hester, he did little to shield him from opprobrium. Hester took all the criticism to the point he was driven from office by George Osborne. Needless to say, Hampton is now in the safer harbour of GlaxoSmithKline where he already has helped to wield the axe against chief executive Sir Andrew Witty. The reality is that, of all the governance reforms, pay committees have been the most catastrophic. At Reckitt Benckiser, where chief executive Rakesh Kapoor earned 23million last year, the chairman of the pay committee Judy Sprieser has been in the job too long and lacks genuine British experience. Pay committees are littered with feeble directors who too easily slough off responsibility to fee-hungry consultants who see their primary role as bidding up pay to skyrocketing American levels. The system is broken and the layering of long-term bonuses, on top of shorter-term incentives, makes tracking of the eventual payouts all but impossible. The rarefied world of the boardroom makes most non-executives totally unsuited to setting pay. If Parker, Hampton et al had spent a little more time at the pit head, working in atrocious conditions, they might better understand the unfairness of it all. Forecast errors In a week when the Treasurys forecasting skills have been put to the test by its Brexit calculations, it is possible to see what a difference a few weeks can make, let alone projections looking towards 2030. Just over a month ago the Office for Budget Responsibility forecast a 2015-16 budget deficit of 72.4billion and the actual number came in at 74billion. Project and compound the error forward and you would get a very big, meaningless number. That is why the very precise figure that if the nation voted to leave the EU, families would be worse off by 4,300 is so much claptrap. As it happens, a budget deficit of 74billion, given the market turbulence in the early weeks of the year and the slowdown in the first quarter, is not a bad outcome. The trend is still in the right direction and a borrowing requirement of 3.9 per cent of national output should not be a cause for jitters. What may give more pause is the way that total debt is still rising at 1594billion or 83.5 per cent of total output, against 83.3 per cent in 2014-15. However, the IMFs Fiscal Monitor, released last week, shows the last UK tax year as the peak before debt as a percentage of GDP starts to fall. The City had expected a much larger deficit for the final month of the last tax year. The 4.8billion shortfall is less than the 6billion forecast and 7.4billion a year earlier due partly to a surge in stamp duty before it went up on April 5. The public thirsts for reliable data on the Brexit referendum. But the truth is that even the most authoritative projections cannot be relied upon. Shock treatment There can be no better advert for Anglo-Saxon capitalism and the ways of the London Stock Exchange than the bidding war for French electrical group Darty. In a few short hours the company received no less than three separate offers, lifting the companys shares by an amazing 17.5 per cent. Quite a coup for the companys biggest investor Schroders with 14.7 per cent of the stock. The new boss of Marks & Spencer has reshuffled its key womenswear team to match how women actually shop. Steve Rowe, 48, who started his career as a Saturday boy at M&Ss Croydon store, became chief executive earlier this month and unveils his new strategy in May. However he has already started to put his mark on the retailer by retaining direct control of the clothing division the section he had run for the past year. His new structure will focus its 200-strong team of buying, merchandising and design experts on products rather than brands and collections. Reshuffle: New M7S boss Steve Rowe wants his womenswear team to match how women actually shop This means rather than teams being responsible for collections such as Per Una or Autograph, staff will focus on individual products like trousers and dresses. The changes will prevent duplication of similar products under different brands. M&S has been criticised for having too many brands and too many product ranges. It currently has six: M&S Collection, Classic, Autograph, Per Una, Limited Edition and Indigo. Plans: New M&S boss Steve Rowe, 48, started his career as a Saturday boy at M&Ss Croydon store The new structure is part of Rowes plan to simplify the business, which has been accused of being too bureaucratic. A spokesman said: In simple terms, it means that there will be one team responsible for designing and buying all of one type of product for our customers. All of our trousers, whether they are M&S Collection, Autograph or Per Una, will be bought by the same team. It will now have ten product categories that its teams will focus on, such as dresses, footwear and knitwear. The womenswear team is being led by Jo Jenkins. M&Ss weak spot has been its clothing business, in contrast to the success of its food. Last month, it revealed at its fourth-quarter trading update that sales in its clothing and home division fell 2.7 per cent in the first three months of this year. The division, which contributes around 60 per cent of profit, has only increased clothing sales in one quarter in nearly five years. Rowe, who took over from Dutchman Marc Bolland, said: We are not leaving a stone unturned. Record numbers of spectators visited Britains most popular racecourses last year but bookmakers are nursing heavy losses after a successful Cheltenham Festival for punters. The Jockey Club, which owns 15 racecourses including Cheltenham, Aintree, Epsom and Newmarket, said attendances rose 8 per cent to nearly 2million in 2015. Turnover was up 7.1 per cent to a record 183.3million and profits nudged higher from 21.7million in 2014 to 21.9million last year. Attendances were lifted by music nights where the racing was followed by gigs by artists such as Kylie Minogue. The Jockey Club is looking forward to the Derby meeting where the Queens horse, Daphne, will run in the Oaks. To see the Queen win one of the big races would be absolutely fantastic, said club chief executive Simon Bazalgette. The Jockey Clubs update came as Ladbrokes revealed it suffered a terrible Cheltenham Festival. But the company said the 33-1 Grand National winner Rule The World delivered a welcome contrast. It would take a 3million hit if Leicester City win the Premier League but it said revenues rose 10.6 per cent in the first quarter of the year. Pensions Minister Baroness Altmann said 'turning pensions into Isas would be a disaster' at a meeting of industry insiders this week - potentially setting her at loggerheads with the Treasury should it revive the radical idea in future. Altmann's comments at an Association of British Insurers conference this week put her on 'a collision course' with Chancellor George Osborne over the future direction of pensions taxation, and could reduce the likelihood he will forge ahead with a Pension Isa, according to one top industry player. Osborne is believed to have held off on a plan to axe pension tax relief and introduce a Pension Isa for everyone in his March Budget, for fear of a backlash from voters ahead of the Brexit referendum. Pension tax: Baroness Altmann said 'turning pensions into Isas would be a disaster', something which is believed to be a pet plan of the Chancellor Instead he launched the Lifetime Isa, which allows people aged 18-40 to save for a home and retirement at once. This was widely seen in the finance industry as a prototype or 'Trojan horse' for a full-blown Pension Isa, which could be dusted off if the Government wins the EU vote. Introducing a Pension Isa would mean savers no longer receive tax relief on contributions to a pension, at a cost of 34billion-plus a year to the Treasury. Instead it would pay out tax free in retirement, providing a future Government didn't slap penalties back on later. The other option understood to be on the table before the Budget was a new flat rate of tax relief on contributions of between 25 per cent and 33 per cent. This would mean all taxpayers received the same level of tax relief regardless of how much they earned. Either plan would abolish for good the historical principle that the money people put towards old age saving is not taxed no matter how much they earn - an idea that originated in the Finance Act of 1921. Industry critics say switching to a pension regime where people's money gets taxed before it goes in, not when taken out during retirement as now, would cause a raft of problems and involve trusting future politicians not to slap extra taxes back on later. Other objections to ending upfront tax relief on pension contributions include that it would remove incentives to save, reduce the size of retirement pots, and create an admin nightmare during the lengthy transition period. Those who talk up the advantages say pensions that become more like 'Workplace ISAs' would be simpler and easier to understand, and create a stronger savings culture. 'The Lifetime Isa, recently announced by the Chancellor in his Budget, has been seen by many as the prototype for to a full-blown Pension Isa,' said Adrian Walker, retirement planning manager at Old Mutual Wealth. HOW DOES PENSION TAX RELIEF WORK AT PRESENT? The Government currently pays out well over 34billion a year in tax relief - including rebates to employers as well as workers - on contributions to pension pots. The tax perk is aimed at encouraging us all to save more for retirement, but at present you get a bigger sweetener the more you earn. The rebate we get is based on our income tax rates of 20 per cent, 40 per cent or 45 per cent, which tilts the system in favour of the better-off. But it's supposed to ensure you aren't penalised by tax on your pension contributions, so if you earn enough to put more in your pot you get more back in tax relief. 'But the fact that we appear to have two members of the same party of Government on a collision course over the future direction of pensions taxation states to me that it is now increasingly less likely the prototype will become the final product. 'Making contributions to a Pension Isa, after income tax and National Insurance is taken, would bring forward billions of pounds in tax revenue for the Government but it would also threaten to undermine years of work to improve the image of long term saving through pension schemes via initiatives such as auto-enrolment.' He went on: 'Savers and the pensions industry want to see government make a cross-party commitment to a long-term, sustainable pension saving system. There has been widespread political support for pension freedom reforms that change the way people take pension income, now we need the same certainty in the way we save into those pensions. 'The Chancellor is believed to be in favour of major reform and that presents something of a sword of Damocles for the industry and for pension savers. While the Pensions Minister has expressed her concern about a pension Isa, we really need the same guidance from the Chancellor to end the current uncertainty.' Tom McPhail, head of retirement policy at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: 'This is about consumers. Our key concern is that the decision-making process is simply for investors so they can make a straightforward, intuitive decision about how and where to invest their money. 'There needs to be clarity for the investor at the point of decision over whether their interests are best served by investing in a pension, a Lifetime Isa or an Isa. 'I think from a political point of view, the Chancellor has been happy to plant this seed and let it grow. From a pension point of view, the Lifetime Isa is here and will take 20 years to come to fruition. 'That gives the Chancellor the luxury of revisiting this at his leisure and deciding whether to advance the Lifetime Isa and perhaps to further undermine the pension pension system, or simply to let them run as they are.' A Department for Work and Pensions spokeswoman confirmed that Baroness Altmann did say something along the lines reported above at this week's ABI, but added that the minister went on to say a pension is the best way to save for retirement and that's supported by the Lifetime Isa. It also issued the following statement from Baroness Altmann: 'We are committed to creating a nation of savers and have been clear that the new Lifetime ISA is designed to complement, not replace pensions. It will give people greater freedom and choice to save flexibly for the long term in a way that works for them.' The number of Britons switching current account hit its highest monthly level last month, according to new data from Bacs. A total of 124,615 ditched their bank for pastures new in March, up 10 per cent compared to this time last year, the payments body says. Santander, Nationwide Building Society and Halifax were the biggest winners in terms of those switching in. Surge: Santander has seen the number of switchers surge in recent years - but the data lags six months behind, and since that time, it has hiked the 123 Current Account price to 5 per month Santander made a net gain of around 51,000 customers using the seven day switching service between July and September - far higher than any other provider. However, these specific bank figures are six months in arrears and Santander could have taken a hit after changing the monthly price of its 123 current account from 2 to 5 earlier in the year. Nationwide made a net gain of more than 15,000 customers in the same period while Halifax made a net gain of 11,000. At the other end of the spectrum, NatWest/RBS lost a net 26,000 customers, Barclays 25,000, Lloyds Bank 10,000 and HSBC 8,000. Winners and losers: According to the bank data - which lags six months behind - Santander was one more the big winner in the switching battle The current account switching service launched in 2013 and has seen a relatively slow start to the numbers embracing it. The figures relate to individual banks and building societies only cover people switching their account using the service - and not those who switch outside the service. Overall, there have been more than 2.8million switches under the scheme. Bacs said 309,678 switches took place during the three months from January to March 2016, 20 per cent higher than the last three months of 2015. The switching guarantees that people can complete their switch in seven working days - compared with up to 30 working days before the service was introduced. It means all outgoing and incoming payments are automatically swapped over to the new account for those using the switching service and a guarantee means that people will not be left out of pocket if something goes wrong with the switch. Better signs? According to data, March was the best month for switching current account Kevin Mountford, head of banking at comparison website MoneySuperMarket, said the latest current account switching figures were very encouraging. He said: While the increase in figures is positive news, the number of switches is still comparatively small, given there are 65million active current account holders in the UK. Banks and building societies therefore have a good opportunity to capitalise on these people and should continue to create innovative products that create consumer excitement and encourage switching, especially as it's only a handful of providers that are making net gains from switching activity at the moment. Data shows that the number of current account products now offered has grown, standing at 143 in 2016 at the last count, in 2011, there were 120. At the same time, numbers of banking providers offering current accounts has risen from 30 to 45, and since 2012, the Bank of England has granted licences to 21 providers. Large retailers have entered the market, too, including Tesco Bank and M&S. Harriett Baldwin, the Economic Secretary, said: Increasing competition in banking is part of the Governments plan to ensure customers get a better deal. So I am delighted that the latest figures from the switching service show record levels of customers taking advantage of the service over the past three months. It is a service that truly works for customers, allowing them to vote with their feet and switch where they see a better deal simply, reliably and quickly. It might have looked like unfortunate timing when Aruna Seth took the step of launching a business selling 500 shoes at the onset of the credit crunch. But nine years on, she's selling them in Harrods for 650 - and exporting them around the world. A former pupil of Croydon High, and Young Enterprise competitor, her footwear has graced the pedicured feet of celebrities from Pippa Middleton (who wore a pair to her sister Kate's wedding reception back in 2011) and Britain's Got Talent judge Amanda Holden to Countdown numbers guru and Strictly Come Dancing competitor Rachel Riley. Aruna, now in her early thirties, launched her first collection of luxury womens shoes in 2007. Each pair is made by the 'best of the best', she says, just outside Venice. Signature style: Aruna Seth's butterfly brooch motif has won her legions of celebrity fans By 2009 her shoes were selling in boutiques from Russia to Italy and the US. Today she has 25 employees and the shoes are stocked in the world's biggest and best department stores, as well direct from her website - and she's planning to open a standalone store in London later this year. 'I love Aruna Seth shoes, they are comfortable and a timeless quality piece to add to my wardrobe,' Amanda Holden has said of the brand. Selling luxury items - her business has expanded to include accessories such as handbags and leather iPad cases - Aruna is well aware that it helps if her shoes are practical too. She understands that if her shoes are comfortable, versatile and that her designs are elegant, they will be far more appealing to those customers carefully considering their purchases - such as brides splashing out on their big day as well as her more famous clientele. Pippa Middleton wore a pair of Lynn stilettos by Aruna Seth for the reception of the Royal Wedding Establishing a high-end shoe brand during the credit crunch was no easy feat and she admits those challenging times made her rethink her initial strategy. Before the credit crunch I used to deal mainly with boutiques. But I had to change my business around at the time to do more private selling. In some ways it was a blessing. 'It allowed me to travel less as before I was travelling every ten days to deal with boutique owners in Russia and Italy'. This level of personalised service, she says, proved fruitful and the benefits of working so closely with her customers has played a huge part in securing sales ever since. To sell at such high prices I have to offer my clients a bit more, she says. To personalise shoes we can add extra padding, stretch the shoes or add more durable rubber soles. I can even add more Swarovski crystals. A credit crunch might not seem like the best time to start a luxury business but she's proved opportunities can be found in the most trying of circumstances for those out there willing to grasp them firmly with both hands - though perhaps it also helped that her clients have very deep pockets. Here she explains more about how she built her business. Countdown's queen of numbers Rachel Riley is a big fan of Aruna Seth - especially this pink Farfalla style How did you fund your venture? I had investment from my father of 100,0000 in the first year to create my product in Italy with the best factories, pay for trade shows and develop the branding. What relevant skills did you already have in place and what has been the important thing you've learnt on the job? I grew up around shoes so I have had years of experience in the shoe industry. I used to work at my fathers shoe company every summer when I was young. I love every aspect of running a company, especially seeing the finished sample from the original design. I have learnt many things from my own business and the most important is to know who your client is and give them the best possible service, then they will be loyal regardless of how much the retail industry fluctuates. Aruna has built a successful luxury business on the back of a combination of high quality and stylish design What do you want your business to achieve over the next three years? This year we have just opened our first store in Beijing and then plan to open our first standalone stores in London and Dubai. Over the next three years, Aruna Seth stores will be in five different countries and her shoes will be in all the best department stores, including Harrods - which we are launching a special pop up store with us this June. We are also rolling out our accessory and resort line to compliment the Aruna Seth luxury Italian main line, which I am very excited about. What do you see as your biggest challenge and how will you try to overcome it? Controlling our rollout of stores will be a challenge but it is about getting the right partners and support staff in those countries to make sure everything is running smoothly. What do you think of the government/business support that has been made available to you since you started up? We have used UK Trade & Investment [the government's initiative to to help UK exporters] with New York trade shows, as well as in Milan in the early stages. But within the UK we have had little help. I think the support for small businesses and fashion start-ups from government help needs to be improved. Now is the time to be a British designer in the world as everyone looks to London for fashion inspiration. Did you receive any help or enterprise/financial education in school? Yes we did some great courses at my all girls school, Croydon High, including the Young Enterprise scheme. This certainly aided my development of my entrepreneurial skills and helped focus me on the path to having a successful company - especially as a woman with her own business. What advice would you give to others? I would advise you to know your product well and make sure you have a strong customer base. If your clients can feel your passion for your company then the product will sell anywhere. Sign up for our amNY Sports email newsletter to get insights and game coverage for your favorite teams By Bill Parry The boroughs Ecuadorean community, still reeling from Saturdays 7.8-magnitude earthquake that claimed at least 400 people and injured more than 2,500 in their home country, gathered for a candlelight vigil at St. Leos Church in Corona Wednesday as plans to aid relief efforts gained strength. State Sen, Jose Peralta (D-East Elmhurst), U.S. Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-Jackson Heights) and state Assemblyman Francisco Moya (D-Jackson Heights) are hosting the Queens for Ecuador benefit concert to raise funds to provide aid to the victims and their families. Musicians from Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and the Dominican Republic were scheduled to perform at La Boom at 56-15 Northern Blvd. in Woodside Sunday from 1 to 7 p.m. All proceeds of the event will go to UNICEF, which is the international organization working with the Consulate General of Ecuador in New York. Meanwhile, Moya has turned his office into a command center this week, where he has coordinated with civic organizations and the Ecuadorean consulate in Manhattan. On Saturday when I heard of the devastating earthquake that stuck Ecuador, my heart sank, he said. Like many Ecuadoreans living in New York my first thought was to reach my family and friends still living in Ecuador to know they were safe. Since then I have been working closely with members of the community and representatives from the government of Ecuador to connect families and organize relief efforts. Moya, the first Ecuadorean American lawmaker in the United States, said his office would remain available to help those affected connect with resources. The phone number is 718-458-5367. Peralta, whose district has a population of 46,000 Ecuadoreans, vowed to do everything possible to help. Words cannot express how devastated I was when I heard the news about the disaster, he said. Ecuadoreans here in New York are also feeling the aftershocks, especially the ones trying to get in touch with their family members and havent been successful. As Ecuador recovers, we will cooperate in any way we can to assist them in relief efforts. Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said billions of dollars will be needed to help his country rebuild. In Washington, Crowley introduced a resolution in support of the people of Ecuador Tuesday after the nation requested assistance. The road to recovery will be long and difficult for the people of Ecuador, and Im pleased that the U.S. government has pledged assistance, Crowley said. Our resolution is a signal to the people of Ecuador that the U.S. Congress also stands with them in the wake of this tragedy. Mayor Bill de Blasio assured the citys 140,000 Ecuadorians that his administration is prepared to help. Our Community Affairs Unit is already on the ground working with the community organizations and leaders to best channel any support we can offer as Ecuadoreans prioritize rescue efforts and begin to rebuild their cities, he said. Sign up for our amNY Sports email newsletter to get insights and game coverage for your favorite teams By Madina Toure CORONA A 29-year-old police officer was arrested and charged with criminal mischief after he allegedly knocked down mannequins at a clothing shop last weekend, the NYPD said. At about 12:10 a.m. Sunday, the officer, identified by police as Joshua Castro, went into the Medellin Colombia Fashion shop in Corona, knocked down some mannequins and ended up breaking one of them, according to a police spokesman. Castro was issued a desk appearance ticket by the NYPD and was expected in court on June 17, according to a spokeswoman for Queens District Attorney Richard Brown. Sign up for our amNY Sports email newsletter to get insights and game coverage for your favorite teams By Bill Parry U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara told a roomful of Queens civic leaders that public corruption affects every single person in New York whether you vote or not just days after he vowed to root out corruption at all levels of government, including the mayors and governors offices. In a speech to the Queens Civic Congress, Bharara said his office is the best corruption fighting team in the business after successfully prosecuting former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Dean Skelos on corruption charges last year. Bharara said the two former leaders would be sentenced in the next couple of weeks. There are so many good people in government and elected office who do great things and are honorable and have integrity and loyalty to the law and want to do good things the right way, Bharara said. What ruins it for them is the bad ones that my office has sent to jail in the last few years. He did not mention Gov. Andrew Cuomo or Mayor Bill de Blasio during his speech Sunday at Antuns in Queens Village nor did he speak of any current investigations. Last week during his keynote speech at Common Cause New Yorks annual gala, he said the executive branches of the state and city government are far from immune from the creeping show-me-the-money culture that pervades New York politics. The problem is theres too much corruption going on and Queens is not immune, Bharara told the Queens Civic Congress, an organization formed in 1997 to represent more than 100 civic and community groups. He was warmly received and interrupted often by applause, and even laughter after mentioning disgraced former City Councilman Dan Halloran, who is currently serving a ten-year prison term for his role in a bribery scheme. He said in his own words money is what greases the wheels, good, bad or indifferent, Bharara said. The prosecutor started off his speech on a light note. I left all of my subpoenas in Manhattan today so everyone can relax and enjoy their lunch, he said. Born in Punjab, India in 1968, Bharara and his family came through JFK Airport when he emigrated to the United States as a young man. I am foreign-born like so many of the people in this borough, he said, pointing out 48 percent of people living in Queens are foreign born. Its great to be in what we celebrate in America as the most diverse county in the country, the most diverse county in the world. Bharara spoke of the rights of the disabled and those living in public housing who deserve a clean and safe environment. He warned of the dangers of painkiller abuse saying, these pills are getting so expensive people are turning to heroin (and) prescription painkillers are now a gateway drug to heroin. He said the rule of law is a cornerstone of democracy and members of the Queens Civic Congress play an important role. We will pursue every corrupt official we can, but you cant prosecute your way out, Bharara said. It will take the press, the politicians themselves, and it will take the public through organizations like this one that hold the politicians feet to the fire. Sign up for our amNY Sports email newsletter to get insights and game coverage for your favorite teams TimesLedger Staff Queens voters, enthusiastic about being relevant at the polls once again, cast their votes in large numbers for Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump in the most contested presidential primary in decades. Based on a spot check of polling sites across the borough by TimesLedger Newspapers, voting was heavy in Sunnyside, Hollis and Astoria Tuesday as a steady stream of voters circled their ballots in Bayside and Jamaica. At the polling site at Hillcrest Jewish Center in Fresh Meadows, Annam Malik said it had been busier than in other primaries. The youth voteI heard about it on the news, she said. But now Im actually seeing it. When final numbers on turnout are calculated, Clinton was expected to have drawn about 61 percent of the Democratic vote in Queens vs. nearly 40 percent for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, with support topping 75 percent for the former New York senator in southeast Queens. Sanders scored in the Rockaways, Astoria and Ridgewood. On the GOP side, Queens native Trump swept an estimated 68 percent of the boroughs vote, raising questions about the political futures of both Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (18 percent) and Ohio Gov. John Kasich (14 percent) as the primary battle wears on. Up for grabs in New York state were 247 Democratic delegates and 95 Republican delegates. There were some glitches at the Queens polls, but major irregularities in the other boroughs prompted Comptroller Scott Stringer to announce he would audit the city Board of Elections. Some 125,000 registered Democratic were inexplicably dropped from the rolls in Brooklyn between November and Primary Day. The people of New York City have lost confidence that the Board of Elections can effectively administer elections and we intend to find out why the Board of Elections is so consistently disorganized, chaotic and inefficient, Stringer said in a statement. In Astoria at PS 85, veteran precinct coordinator Loretta Csikortos found herself swamped when more than 1,100 voters showed up before 11 a.m. She was shorthanded because 14 poll workers had failed to report for duty. If its like this on Election Day, they just better shut this one down, she said. Were really juggling here. Astoria voter Chris Escandon, 24, works around the corner from PS 85 and was hoping he could vote by affidavit. But he was told his vote might not be counted. Id rather vote at home and make sure it counts because this is such a pivotal moment for the country, he said. We have no idea where we are headed. A Flushing woman could not find her name in the book at one polling site even though her family had not moved. She was directed to fill out an affidavit, which allowed her to vote. Many voters in Queens were looking for change as they marked their ballots for Trump or Sanders, while others said they voted for Hillary and sometimes Kasich because of their proven track records. Wall Street, money, the economy, middle class struggles and illegal immigration were recurring themes. Confusion reigned at some polling spots in Queens when independent voters tried to cast their ballots and others wanted to switch their party affiliations just to vote in Tuesdays primary. Under New York election law, only people registered with a party can vote in that partys primary, which leaves independents without a vote. To change parties a voter had to have registered by Oct. 9, 2015. The Board of Elections did not mail out the standard voter cards about polling sites and voting hours for the primary, annoying some voters. But after filling out their ballots, voters were issued little stickies to indicate they had done their civic duty and a flurry of paper circles began appearing on Facebook pages. Patrick Donachie, Mark Hallum, Bill Parry and Madina Toure contributed to this report Sign up for our amNY Sports email newsletter to get insights and game coverage for your favorite teams By Patrick Donachie A Queens lawmaker has asked Gov. Andrew Cuomo to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the death of a man who was shot by NYPD officers last weekend, saying that an external investigation could help ensure objectivity. State Sen. James Sanders Jr. (D-Rochdale Village) asked the governors office to appoint the prosecutor to probe the death of George Tillman, 32, who was shot by police at the intersection of 135th Street and 116th Avenue in South Ozone Park at about 1:30 a.m. Sunday. They have a wealth of experience and resources to bring to bear, Sanders said in a phone interview, referring to state Attorney General Eric Scheidermans office. And by being impartial, they have the ability to be far more objective. Police said that on the evening of the shooting, two plainclothes officers from the 106th Precincts Special Conditions Unit approached Tillman in an unmarked car after they saw him leaning against the outside of a double-parked SUV holding an open container of alcohol. The police said the officers were able to make out the butt of a .40-caliber Hi-Point pistol in his waistband. Two officers approached Tillman, according to police, who then fled the scene on foot with the officers in pursuit. Three additional police officers joined the chase. Police said Tillman reached for his weapon when he was confronted by the officers, Four of the officers fired, hitting Tillman several times, and he was later pronounced dead at Jamaica Hospital. According to police, the weapon Tillman had was found at the scene. Sanders said he decided to make the request after being shown videos from two different sources that captured the moments leading up to Tillmans death. The lawmaker did not disclose the contents of the videos, but said they were from surveillance cameras, not cell phone videos. He also said neighbors were worried about police intimidation after police officers allegedly entered the homes of residents near the scene of the shooting on the night it happened. In addition to Sanders request for an inquiry, Leroy Gadsden, the president of the Jamaica branch of the NAACP, also called on Scheiderman to appoint a prosecutor to investigate the shooting. Our investigation reveals that at the time of the initial encounter with the police, Mr. Tillman was not in the process of committing any crime nor was the community in any stage of aggression, hostility, or criminal or unusual behavior, Gadsden wrote in a letter to Scheiderman. Therefore, we are concerned as to how what appeared to be a possible open container violation charge escalated into a police killing. Sanders said he expected a positive outcome from the governors office to his request for a special prosecutor. Calls for comment from the NYPD, the governors office and the office of the attorney general were unanswered as of presstime. Sign up for our amNY Sports email newsletter to get insights and game coverage for your favorite teams By Madina Toure A Whitestone man who stabbed his estranged girlfriend to death and then hid her body in the trunk of her car in September 2015 has been sentenced to up to 28 years in prison, according to the Queens district attorney. Luis Zambrano, 31, pleaded guilty to manslaughter on March 31 as well as attempted burglary on an unrelated matter before Queens Supreme Court Judge Kenneth Holder, District Attorney Richard Brown announced Tuesday. A young womanthe mother of two small childrenhad her life senselessly and violently cut short, Brown said. The defendant, who professed to love her, repeatedly plunged a knife into her body and to hide his cowardly actions stuffed her bloody remains in the trunk of her own car. And then this killer fled the state hoping to escape justice. Holder sentenced Zambrano to 25 years in prison on the manslaughter charge and 1 to three years in prison on the attempted burglary charge and the sentences are to run consecutively, Brown said. Zambrano admitted to murdering the victim, Angie Escobar, 28, of Queens Village, whom he repeatedly stabbed on or about Sept. 6, 2015, Brown continued. Escobars family last spoke to her on Sept. 5, 2015 and reported her missing four days later as she had missed her sons first day of school, the DA said. Her decomposing body was found late on Sept. 10, 2015 in the trunk of her 2004 Nissan Maxima, which had been abandoned near 22nd Avenue and Murray Street in Whitestone, Brown said. Zambrano was arrested in Daleville, Va. on Sept. 18, 2015 and waived extradition to New York, Brown added. His attempted burglary charge stems from an incident on Oct. 2, 2013 at about 11:15 a.m. when he broke into the Paradise Alley Bar at 41-09 150th St. and stole about $100 in cash and three bottles of alcohol, the DA said. 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. WELCOME DAK: Cowboys get back to winning formula in second half in Prescott's return The Dallas Cowboys went back to its winning formula of elite defense and a strong ground attack in the second half in a 24-6 win over Detroit. CHRISTOPHER WALKER/TIMES RECORD NEWS Necessary repairs at the existing Wichita County Jail have county leaders considering building a new jail. Plans have been discussed for years, but no action has ever been taken. SHARE By Claire Kowalick of the Times Record News Wichita County is considering calling in the professionals to assist in smoothing out issues with its two jail facilities. Three commissioners, county judge Woody Gossom, and a handful of other county staff met with representatives of Griffith Mosley Johnson and Associates (GMJ) at a work session Wednesday morning. The group, based in Port Arthur, has more than two dozen associates who have worked with counties across Texas to resolve problems related to criminal justice, government affairs, environmental and regulatory affairs, economic development and grant administration. All GMJ consultants come from careers in the justice system, including retired judges, lawyers, sheriffs, and chiefs of police. GMJ Division Director and Project Manager Natacha Pelaez-Wagner, criminal justice consultants Donna Klaeger and Suzanne Bradford were at the meeting and GMJ Presidents and CEO Carl R. Griffith joined the conversation by phone from Port Arthur. Griffith said the most important component for a successful criminal justice system is the cooperation of departments with each other. "It's a continuous process from the time of arrest through legislation. You need to work together. When you don't, it's the taxpayers who pay, Griffith said. The GMJ group recounted success stories from Midland, Dallas, Harris, Victoria, Denton, Bell, and Hays counties. Bradford presented an overview of statistics they found for Wichita County, mainly sourced from the Department of Labor. She said the county has an above average high school graduation rate (85.6 percent), but a rather high poverty rate at 19.3 percent. There is a decline of job growth, but job growth in the next 10 years is expected to be 34.3 percent (below Texas level which is expected to see 40.5 percent growth.) One statistic that stood out was the incarceration rate in the county compared to the state. The incarceration rate is the percentage of the population that is arrested in a given time frame. Wichita was at 3.76 and the state average was 2.15. The GMJ group said there were a number of positive steps the county is already taking to improve the system. Since the Wichita County jail facilities were found to be out of compliance in a number of areas on a TCJS May 2015, the county has spent more than $300,000 addressing issues. GMJ grouped the county's infractions on the failed report and said most of the problems are in either procedural issues or facility issues related to deferred maintenance. The report did not find any faults relating to inmate population management. Based on their discussion at the three-hour meeting, Pelaez-Wagner said the group can submit a proposal to include scope of services and fees for an operations assessment, jail population projection and a high-level overview of the facilities. TORIN HALSEY/TIMES RECORD NEWS Texas Alliance of Energy Producers Chairman George Rogers, right, introduces District 30 Sen. Craig Estes, R-Wichita Falls, left, and District 61 Rep. Phil King, R-Weatherford at the annual meeting Wednesday at the Ray Clymer Exhibit Hall. Estes and King each received the Tom Haywood Lifetime Achievement Award. SHARE By John Ingle of the Times Record News Two state legislators were recognized by the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers for their work to strengthen the oil and gas industry in Texas. District 30 Sen. Craig Estes, R-Wichita Falls, and District 61 Rep. Phil King, R-Weatherford, were presented with the Sen. Tom Haywood Lifetime Achievement Award during a luncheon Wednesday at the Ray Clymer Exhibit Hall. "Both of these guys have really fought for a strong oil and gas industry in Texas," said Alliance Chairman George Rogers. Estes, who succeeded Haywood as the district's senator, said he was honored to be selected to receive the award named after his predecessor. He recalled visiting with Haywood a couple days before the senator succumbed to Parkinson's disease in 2001. "I've thought a lot about him over the years and would (think), 'What would Tom do?'" Estes said. "To have an award given to me that's named after him, it means a lot." The senator said he is looking forward to getting to work on oil and gas issues as the new chairman of the Natural Resources Committee. He said he is assembling a staff to work on any industry issues legislatively. King said he entered the Texas Legislature when Haywood was an incumbent senator. He said the senior senator was important to him learning the ways of the Legislature and getting settled. He, too, was honored to receive the award. The representative, who was elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1998, serves as chairman of the State and Federal Power and Responsibility Committee and is also a member of the House Energy Resources, Environmental Regulation and Federal Environmental Regulation committees. His 61st district, Wise and Parker counties, is where production of the Barnett Shale began, he said. "Texas is changing the world," he said, citing comments made by Railroad Commissioner Christi Craddick made during the luncheon. "The amount of production we have but the scientific innovation in production and drilling coming out of Texas is literally changing the way the world is today." He said the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Counties is not longer setting the price per barrel of oil mostly because of the explosion in production in Texas. SHARE The battle for the Iraqi city of Mosul pits Iraq's disparate and often divided collection of combat forces (backed by a U.S.-led coalition) against the genocidal fanatics of ISIS. Mosul matters. For Iraqis, Mosul is their second most-populous city or was prior to June 2014, when ISIS seized it. The fanatics claim Mosul as the capital of their global caliphate at least for the moment. Iraq's offensive to recover Mosul began in 2015, with operations to secure Tikrit and Ramadi. ISIS terrorists still plague both towns, but "the Caliphate" no longer controls them. Tikrit and Ramadi were bloody and exhausting struggles. The specific combat operation to approach and then liberate Mosul officially began March 24. To say the Mosul offensive has moved at a snail's pace insults snails. In an interview this week with CBS News, President Barack Obama said; "My expectation is that by the end of the year, we will have created the conditions whereby Mosul will eventually fall." That isn't a tight timetable, but Obama isn't Iraq's commander in chief. The bloody struggle for Mosul has also become a clash of two great battle narratives, both that have the power to shape current politics and affect future history: the apocalyptic "final battle" and the "battle forging nationhood." ISIS leaders depict every fight in apocalyptic terms, but the defense of Mosul is a priority apocalypse. A senior Kurdish security officer told Voice of America that Mosul "will be a bloodbath ... for two years they (ISIS militants) have been digging tunnels ... planting IEDs, booby-traps, everything." He also said ISIS intends to use Mosul's population as "human shields." This means ISIS wants to kill en masse inflict apocalyptic casualties. Throughout history, fanatical commanders have used the apocalyptic combat narratives as dramatic political and psychological tools. The looming battle is a fight over stakes so categorically precious and fundamental that negotiation, retreat or surrender are not options, militarily or morally. Their fighters must secure victory or die seeking it. Even if their deaths mean complete (apocalyptic) destruction of their forces, their display of ferocious willpower serves as an example to other fighters and recruits. The story helps steel subordinate commitment to the cause and stiffen discipline. It may even harden souls. Proclaiming the victory-or-death commitment even if it is a hollow tout may double as psychological warfare if it deters any enemy forces reluctant to risk high casualties in close-quarter combat with zealots. Iraqi fighting forces are reluctant forces, afflicted with low morale. However, Iraqi political leaders see the collective opportunity Mosul offers. In June 2014, Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani said Iraq must unite to defeat ISIS invaders. Liberating Mosul from ISIS genocidaires gives Iraqi Kurds, Shia and Sunni Arabs and other ethnic and religious minorities a common objective. A single "battle forging nationhood" is a romantic notion, but creating a cooperative process to solve a shared problem isn't. The complex political and logistical process of creating, training, deploying and then employing Iraq's diverse forces to drive ISIS from Mosul is a constructive process. In fact, it is a national effort. Iraqi officials indicate everyone will have a chance to join this national effort to liberate Mosul. Popular Mobilization Units will supplement the Iraqi Army and Kurdish peshmerga main force units. There are around 40 PMU militias, most of them Shiite, but there are also Sunni Arab, Yazidi and Arab Christian militias. Iraqi officials hope the people of Mosul will tacitly support the national effort. ISIS seems to fear civilian cooperation. In 2015, ISIS conducted at least two mass executions of suspected "spies" in the Mosul area. Will Iraqi national unity emerge from this national effort? It could be a significant step to bridging divisions and building trust. The national effort, however, must first deal the apocalyptic fanatics a thorough and uncompromising defeat. Austin Bay is a commentator on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition," covering foreign affairs but often addressing issues in Texas that have a national interest. Sand Lake A Rensselaer County group opposed to the Northeast Energy Direct natural gas pipeline is asking the state to consider the project's potential impact on hundreds of acres of state-protected farmlands. Save Burden Lake, a grassroots group focused around the popular residential lake in the town of Sand Lake, wrote March 28 to the state Department of Agriculture and Markets with concerns about how the massive pipeline would pass through or near numerous farms that are part of state-sanctioned agricultural protection districts. Such districts, created under a 1971 state law, are meant to promote and protect farming. Preventing nearby uses that could damage or inhibit farms, the law also places limits on the use of eminent domain to obtain private property from owners unwilling to sell. Eminent domain is routinely used by pipeline companies, which get that authority from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission once the commission approves a project. So far, the NED project is seeking FERC approval, but does not have it. On Wednesday, Russell Bennett, a member of Save Burden Lake, said the group wants state officials to review potential application of agricultural district protections to the NED pipeline project, which would cut through East Greenbush, Schodack, Nassau and Stephentown. The route passes through two agricultural districts. "There are some very old family farms that would be hurt by this," said Bennett. "In some cases, the pipeline cuts right through the middle of a district." A spokeswoman for the state Department of Agriculture and Markets said it was cooperating with FERC, but that it had no permitting jurisdiction over federal gas pipeline projects. "We do routinely provide FERC with recommendations for construction and restoration mitigation in an attempt to minimize impacts to agricultural resources to the greatest extent practicable," the spokeswoman said, adding that it could also recommend alternative routing for the pipeline and locations for the compressor stations to reduce impacts on agriculture. A planned 41,000-horsepower natural gas compressor station for the pipeline is proposed for Clark's Chapel Road in Nassau. As of January 2014, there were more than 220 such districts statewide, encompassing more than 24,000 farms on 6.1 million acres, accoriding to the department's web site. Houston-based energy company Kinder Morgan is seeking permission from FERC to build the 400-mile NED pipeline to connect the hydrofracking fields of Pennsylvania to Boston. It would follow the Interstate 88 corridor and continue through Schoharie, southern Albany and Rensselaer counties. The issue of state land protection rules along another proposed pipeline route in Massachusetts prompted a lawsuit by Kinder Morgan. There, the company wants to route its line through about two miles of the Otis State Forest in Berkshire County. The state's conservation department, which holds the land, won't give the company an easement through the state forest without approval of the Massachusetts legislature. The Bay State constitution requires a two-thirds vote for such a conveyance of conservation land. The developer claims federal law on natural gas pipeline overrides state and local laws. bnearing@timesunion.com 518-454-5094 @Bnearing10 Saint Rose graduate art show opens The College of Saint Rose will present the 2016 Graduate Show, an annual exhibition of thesis works by students in its graduate art education program. The exhibit will feature artwork by two candidates Gabrielle Gapczynski and Lauren Hogan for the degree of master of arts and is the final requirement for graduation. The show opens with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday, at the Esther Massry Gallery, Massry Center for the Arts, 1002 Madison Ave., Albany. Works presented include prints, works on paper, video and sculpture, which will be on view through May 6. For information, contact gallery director Jeanne Flanagan at 485-3902 or flanagaj@strose.edu, or go to https://www.strose.edu Jennifer Patterson Skidmore teacher's film at Tribeca "Memories of a Penitent Heart," a documentary by filmmaker and Skidmore College English professor Cecilia Aldarondo, has been screening at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. The film follows Aldarondo on her quest to understand the death of her uncle from AIDS and the family dynamics that resulted. One screening remains: at 5 p.m. Saturday, at the Regal Cinemas in Battery Park, 102 North End Ave., Manhattan. The line for rush tickets, if available, starts 45 minutes before. For more information, see tribecafilm.com. Also at Tribeca, the student film "Make It Float" a collaboration between Youth FX filmmaker Aden Suchak and Albany High student and fashion designer Taofeek Abijako is screening today as a finalist in the "America I Am" competition. Amy Biancolli This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate In a decision cheered by local opponents, Kinder Morgan suspended plans for a 419-mile natural gas pipeline connecting Pennsylvania's fracking fields to Boston by winding through local counties. Kinder Morgan's Northeast Energy Direct Pipeline had planned to traverse Schoharie County and Albany County before passing through southern Rensselaer County en route to Massachusetts. The Texas-based firm using the word "suspended" to define its move said New England customers couldn't commit to buying the gas. A news release said innovations in production resulted in a low-price environment that, "while good for consumers, has made it difficult for producers to make new long-term commitments." The $3.3 billion pipeline was meant to ease New England's high natural gas and electricity costs, said the company, which had also touted job-creation potential. The decision follows months of public hearings and group meetings where environmental activists and area residents expressed deep anxieties about the project. "The apparent demise of the unneeded and unsafe NED project is another nail in the coffin for fossil fuel usage in the USA and beyond," said a statement from Robert Connors and Becky Meier of Stop NY Fracked Gas Pipeline. The anti-pipeline activists said the suspension confirms their belief that current market forces made gas prices and the company's stock price plummet, but they also credit their "fierce, cumulative and cohesive public efforts." During the course of the fight, concerns were raised about water quality and air and water pollution risks. Capital Region residents and local governments discussed the potential impact of the pipeline in town meetings and open forums over the last year. In late March, an estimated 400 people attended a forum at Maple Hill High School in Castleton-on-Hudson. Speakers led the crowd in a mass yell "no new permits for fracking infrastructure." Albany County passed legislation in September saying anyone who wanted to blast would have to research and clean ground contamination within two miles of the blast area. Two months later, Rensselaer County legislators voted 17-1 to approve a law under which anyone blasting would have to sample well water quality and the recharge rate before and after blasting of all wells in a mile of the blasting site. Construction for the 30-inch pipeline would have started next January, with a proposed in-service date in November 2018. Compressor stations, increasing the pressure of the gas to move it through the pipeline, were planned in Delaware, Schoharie and Rensselaer counties. State and local lawmakers also welcomed the news. The pipeline was planned to end in Dracut, Mass., north of Boston. State Sen. Kathy Marchione, whose district includes parts of Rensselaer County, called the decision "a huge win" for residents, particularly those in the town of Nassau, where a 41,000-horsepower compressor station would have been built. "I'm pleased that common sense finally prevailed and local families won't have to worry about the pipeline or gas compressor station threatening their safety, negatively impacting their quality of life, reducing their property values or jeopardizing a precious local natural resource like Burden Lake," she said in a statement. "This is a project that no one wanted, and this is a fitting end to the story," Rensselaer County Legislator Judith Breselor, whose district encompasses Sand Lake, Schodack and Nassau, said in a statement. Bethlehem Town Supervisor John Clarkson noted how the Town Board passed a resolution opposing the pipeline unanimously on Feb. 10. "Virtually everyone was against it in our town," he said. Tennessee Gas Pipeline Company, a Kinder Morgan subsidiary, "will continue to work with customers to explore alternative solutions to address their needs, particularly local distribution companies that are unable to fully serve consumers and businesses in their areas because of the lack of access to abundant, low-cost domestic natural gas," Kinder Morgan said in a statement. But Connors and Meier of the Canaan-based anti-fracking group, said there are still many other pipeline projects continuing in New York state and beyond and foes "must bring the forces we brought to defeat the NED to many of these other projects." Ken Crowe contributed. lellis@timesunion.com 518-454-5018 @lindsayaellis This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate The suspect in the death of a Catholic priest with ties to the Capital Region was charged with malice murder, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation confirmed Wednesday to the St. Augustine, Fla., Record. The Rev. Rene Robert, who graduated from St. Mary's School in Waterford and Catholic High in Troy, worked in the Diocese of St. Augustine. On Wednesday, the suspect in Robert's death, Steven James Murray, 28, if Jacksonville, Fla., made his first appearance in a Burke County, Georgia, courthouse and was denied bond, according to GBI spokesman Agent Scott Dutton. READ THE ST. AUGUSTINE RECORD STORY HERE Murray led investigators on Monday to a rural area of Georgia, just south of Augusta, where a body believed to be Robert's was discovered. Dutton said an autopsy Wednesday determined that the cause of death was multiple gunshot wounds, but "based on the condition of the body" investigators have not been able to confirm the identity. "They are working on getting dental records from Florida to do a positive ID," Dutton said. Robert was never assigned to the Albany Roman Catholic Diocese, but came back to visit from Florida and occasionally stayed at St. Mary's Church in Waterford and St. Augustine in Troy. Authorities believe Murray kidnapped the priest, took him to Georgia in Robert's car and killed him there, but the motive for the slaying remains unclear. "He did prison ministry, and unfortunately in this case it seems to have come back against him," said the Rev. John Gillespie, a fellow priest in the Diocese of St. Augustine where Robert was a senior priest. Gillespie said Robert's work sometimes took him to places and people most would consider dangerous. Material from the Associated Press contributed to this story. ALBANY A 36-year-old man was sent to the hospital following a third-floor fire at a five-unit home on 5 S. Pine Ave., Deputy Fire Chief Joseph Toomey said at the scene Wednesday. Albany firefighters arrived on the scene at 8:07 p.m., and the fire was under control at around 8:50 p.m., he said. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Reassuring an anxious ally, President Barack Obama sat down Wednesday for a meeting with King Salman as he opened a trip to Saudi Arabia shadowed by the kingdom's deep opposition to his Iran nuclear deal and skepticism about his approach to Syria. Obama, during a roughly 24-hour stay in the Saudi capital, planned to attend a Persian Gulf summit focused on regional stability, Iran and counterterrorism including the fight against the Islamic State group and al-Qaida. Under crystal chandeliers, King Salman greeted Obama in a grand foyer at Erga Palace, where the two walked slowly to a reception room as the smell of incense wafted. The two offered polite smiles as they sat down side by side for pictures at the start of their two-hour private meeting. "The American people send their greetings and we are very grateful for your hospitality, not just for this meeting but for hosting the GCC-U.S. summit that's taking place tomorrow," Obama said, referring to the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council summit. King Salman offered similarly gracious words for the president, who is paying his fourth trip here for face-to-face meetings and photos with royal rulers since becoming president. "The feeling is mutual between us and the American people," the king said through a translator. In addition to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain are participating in the regional summit. In addition to the Islamic State, the talks are also expected to address the Saudi-led military campaign against Shiite rebels and their allies in neighboring Yemen. Concerns about IS extremists were also on the agenda for Obama's meeting late Wednesday in Riyadh with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and a key Emirati leader, the White House said. U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter and CIA Director John Brennan were among the officials accompanying Obama. Carter, meeting with defense ministers from the Gulf nations Wednesday, pressed them to provide more economic and political support to Iraq in a preview of themes Obama was expected to emphasize. Stepping off of Air Force One earlier at King Khalid International Airport, Obama was greeted not by King Salman but by a lower-ranking royal, Prince Faisal bin Bandar Al Saud, the governor of Riyadh. Ahead of Obama's arrival, Saudi state television showed the king personally greeting senior officials from other Gulf nations arriving at the King Salman Air Base. Mustafa Alani, a security analyst at the Gulf Research Center, said the Saudi decision not to dispatch a high-level delegation to greet the president was unusual and intended to send a clear message that they have little faith in him. "He will find a leadership that's not ready to believe him," Alani said. "The Saudis had disagreements with previous presidents. Here you have deep distrust that the president won't deliver anything." U.S. officials have expressed hope the latest meeting will build on last year's Camp David summit, though they acknowledge differences between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Obama's recent comment that the Saudis and Iranians should "share the neighborhood" roiled officials in Riyadh. The Sunni Muslim-ruled kingdom the world's biggest oil exporter and the largest buyer of American-made weapons sees Shiite-led Iran as its main rival. Saudi leaders are concerned that concessions granted to Iran in last year's nuclear deal will embolden it to pursue what Saudis view as meddling. Salman's reign has overseen a more assertive foreign policy, with Saudis venturing into Yemen and pushing the U.S. to take more aggressive moves to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad. Saudi Arabia and Iran back opposing sides in Syria's civil war and in the Yemen conflict, where the U.S. military is providing refueling and other logistical help to the Saudi-led war effort. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Flint, Mich. The Flint water crisis became a criminal case Wednesday when two state regulators and a city employee were charged with official misconduct, evidence-tampering and other offenses over the lead contamination that alarmed the country and brought cries of racism. "This is a road back to restoring faith and confidence in all Michigan families in their government," state Attorney General Bill Schuette said in announcing the first charges to come out of the disaster, blamed on a series of bad decisions by bureaucrats and political leaders. He warned there will be more charges "That I can guarantee" and added: "No one is off the table." For nearly 18 months, the poor, majority-black city of 100,000 used the Flint River for tap water as a way to save money a decision made by a state-appointed emergency manager while a new pipeline was under construction. But the water wasn't treated to control corrosion. The result: Lead was released from aging pipes and fixtures as water flowed into homes and businesses. Gov. Rick Snyder didn't acknowledge the problem until last fall, when tests revealed high levels of lead in children, in whom the heavy metal can cause low IQs and behavioral problems. Michael Prysby, a former district engineer with the state Department of Environmental Quality, and Stephen Busch, a supervisor in the department's drinking water office, were charged with misconduct, conspiracy, tampering with test results and misdemeanor violations of clean-water law. The felonies carry maximum penalties of four to five years in prison. Among other things, they were accused of failing to order anticorrosion chemicals added to water to coat pipes and prevent them from releasing lead. Flint utilities administrator Michael Glasgow, who oversaw day-to-day operations at the city's water plant at the time, also was charged Wednesday with tampering with evidence for allegedly falsifying test results and with willful neglect of duty. Busch and Prysby pleaded not guilty and were released on bail. Both were suspended without pay. Their attorneys did not immediately return calls seeking comment. Glasgow was also placed on leave and awaited a court appearance. A telephone number for him could not be found, and it wasn't known whether he had a lawyer. The crisis and the state's slow and dismissive response to complaints about the water from experts and residents led to allegations of environmental racism, became an issue in the presidential race during Michigan's Democratic primary in March, and sent other cities rushing to test water, particularly in neighborhoods with lead pipes. Essentially, all three were accused of failing to do their duty to provide safe drinking water. "This is rare," said Neil Rockind, a Detroit-area defense attorney and former prosecutor. "It's very hard to find a similar case where people are charged for just being personally bad or neglectful at their job. Usually there's some personal corrupt intent involved." This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Albany The husband of a French citizen who died after Albany County jail medical staff denied her proper doses of medications to treat her chronic heart failure has settled a wrongful death lawsuit against the county and the private firm that ran the jail medical unit. A settlement notice filed in federal court does not reveal the amount of the settlement with the estate of Irene Bamenga or otherwise detail the terms. But a person familiar with the agreement told the Times Union that the portion associated with Albany County's role in the case is about $1.1 million. Danielle Garten, a New York City attorney who represented the county, declined to comment. Mary Rozak, a spokeswoman for the county, said no taxpayer money would be used to pay the settlement. Michael Lurie, the Boston attorney who represented Bamenga's husband, Yodi Zikianda, also declined to comment citing confidentiality agreements. Bamenga, 29, died in the Colonie jail July 27, 2011, after having been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to await deportation for an expired visa. Bamenga, who had been living outside Boston with her husband on an expired visa, was taken into custody July 15 while trying to cross into Canada on the Peace Bridge in Buffalo so she could fly home to Paris from Toronto that evening, the lawsuit alleged. Bamenga was refused entry to Canada because she lacked a current visa stamp and then detained while trying to re-enter the U.S. side of the bridge, Lurie said. Eventually, she was transferred to the Albany County jail on July 21. Court filings in the case revealed she never saw a doctor between then and when she was found unconscious in her dormitory area just after midnight on July 27. Court filings also revealed Bamenga had pleaded with medical staff in writing less than 48 hours before her death because she was missing doses of the six medicines that she took to treat her cardiomyopathy and chronic congestive heart failure, and was experiencing dizziness, shortness of breath and heart palpitations. At the time, the jail's medical unit was run by the private company Correctional Medical Services, now known as Corizon Inc. The firm's lone doctor at the jail, who was on vacation for much of Bamenga's incarceration, testified in a deposition that the staff was "overwhelmed." Corizon was also a named defendant in the suit; its attorney could not be reached for comment Wednesday. A separate settlement was struck last month with Allegany County, where Bamenga was held between July 15 and July 21 and where she was also allegedly denied medication. The terms of that settlement also have not been disclosed. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and features with our afternoon newsletter. "It was an absolutely avoidable outcome," Lurie said. If the case had gone to trial in May, he said, several experts were "prepared to testify that if she had received the care that she was seeking and that she knew she needed, she would not have died." Bamenga's death, Lurie said, should prompt municipal officials to question the wisdom of hiring for-profit companies that receive fixed rates to provide medical care to people like jail inmates who have no other choice "because the incentives are to withhold care." The State Commission of Correction ruled that Bamenga died of natural causes, but an investigation commissioned by ICE identified the missed medications and incorrect doses as "significant factors that contributed to the decompensation of her congestive heart failure" and her death was preventable. ICE was not named in the lawsuit, but Lurie said the case also documented that the agency's leadership had urged field staff to use discretion about detaining people before deportation especially those, like Bamenga, with serious medical conditions and without criminal records. "They didn't have to take her into custody," Lurie said. "At least on two scores, they had a reason to just let her go." jcarleo-evangelist@timesunion.com 518-454-5445 @JCEvangelist_TU Albany There are two ways to look at the 2.65 million-voter turnout for Tuesday's presidential primaries in New York. An optimist might see one-third of enrolled voters from each party showed up at the polls roughly the same as 2008 level as a solid showing in a state with poor turnout in some years. A pessimist might see that two-third of enrolled Republicans and Democrats stayed home. But while inferences are easier to make based on actual data, what's more difficult to discern is what happened for numerous voters who were turned away or forced to file affidavit ballots because they weren't enrolled in a party or at least weren't enrolled in time for the primary they wanted to vote in. The state attorney general announced late Wednesday afternoon that his office had received more than 1,000 primary-related complaints from voters, far and away more than what it received in years past. As New York surveyed the damage on Wednesday, there came calls for state lawmakers to change the state's "archaic voter registration system" to address potential further disenfranchisement in the democratic process for some citizens. "Once again, New York's archaic voter registration system has highlighted dramatic shortcomings in the administration of elections across the state," the New York Public Interest Research Group said in a statement, calling for automatic voter registration and same-day voter registration. Such pleas aren't new, but they have been slow to be addressed or are the source of partisan bickering at the state Capitol, where of 84 pieces of legislation (some of them duplicates in the Assembly and state Senate) currently before state lawmakers include the word "voting" (333, again with some duplicates, include the word "election"). Of those numerous bills, a select few are targeted at the type of issues voters faced Tuesday. Among the same-day registration proposals is a provision sponsored by Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh, D-Manhattan, that would allow potential voters to register not only on the day of a general election but also on the day of a primary. In New York's closed primary system, only those affiliated with a party (think of it like an exclusive club with many members) can vote in that party's primary. "Prior registration is an unnecessary obstacle that should be removed," Kavanagh said. Kavanagh also has proposals to address the long lead time required for voters who are enrolled as a member of one party but want to change their party affiliation to vote in a different primary. The deadline to switch was in October of last year, long before the primary season began and serious voter interest in this state was sparked. In legal terms, that deadline was 25 days before the general election prior to the next primary a voter wishes to vote in. One bill would move that date up to 25 days before an election. Another would move the date up to 90 days before a primary. Gov. Andrew Cuomo in his State of the State address proposed automatic voter registration. Under Cuomo's plan, unless a person explicitly opted out, information used on any state Department of Motor Vehicles application would automatically be sent to the county board of elections to register an applicant or update their registration. Addressing the Brooklyn situation seems to be a different bear. About 125,000 Democratic voters were taken off the rolls there, creating headaches when some showed up. That prompted New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer to pledge to perform an audit of the city Board of Elections to determine what went wrong. State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman later said his office has opened an investigation into "allege improprieties" in Tuesday voting by the city Board of Elections. In a call with The New York Times that was livestreamed online Tuesday night, Stringer said it was likely thousands of voters were disenfranchised by the purge-related problems, and he laid some blame for electoral issues at the feet of state lawmakers. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and features with our afternoon newsletter. "This is a sense of disorganization during these primaries (in) which conceivably maybe the next president of the United States was picked," Stringer said in an interview with WCNY's "The Capitol Pressroom" on Wednesday. "I think we want to give people every belief that these elections are fair and transparent and that everybody has an opportunity to vote and participate." Often in Albany, a debacle leads to new legislation. Whether there will be an appetite for election-related legislation in the seven weeks of session that remain when lawmakers return May 3 is another thing entirely. The Assembly and Senate have taken up separate pieces of legislation that would consolidate the federal and state primaries. The Assembly also passed legislation allowing 17-year-olds to vote in the presidential primary if they will turn 18 by the general election. But consider that a version of Kavanagh's same-day registration legislation has been introduced each session since 2006, when current state Sen. Michael Gianaris, D-Queens, was carrying the flag. Chairmen of the Assembly Election Law and Senate Election committees could not be reached for interviews by late Wednesday afternoon, though Kavanagh remained optimistic about what can be accomplished in seven weeks. "That's plenty of time," he said. mhamilton@timesunion.com 518-454-5449 @matt_hamilton10 This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Albany Kevin Bailey has Tanzania on his mind. The 34-year-old owner of High Peaks Solar joined Jean Dobbs of African Reflections Foundation on Wednesday at Pine Hills Elementary School to receive a check for $15,000. The donation was three years in the making for students, teachers and staff who held bake sales, redeemed bottles and flipped pancakes to support a solar-powered well at an elementary school in the East African country. Third-grade teacher Deann Lynch spearheaded the project in memory of her late aunt, Mary Stella Greco, a missionary who died in 2013, and worked closely with fellow teacher Michelle Chiappone. More Information Clean water changes lives For information about making a donation to help provide safe drinking water in Tanzania, go to http://www.theskyisnotlimited.org. See More Collapse "People collect murky, stagnant rainwater to drink from holes in the ground and there's a lot of health implications, especially for children," said Bailey, who started the nonprofit The Sky is Not Limited in 2006 and serves on the board of African Reflections Foundation. "Providing reliable, clean drinking water is life-changing." Bailey and his team have been designing and installing solar power systems throughout the state since 2008. The growing business has allowed Bailey and his wife, Tiffany, to pursue their true passion humanitarianism. The couple welcomed their first child, son Alexander, in December. Putting his knowledge about all things solar to good use, Bailey has traveled to Tanzania a handful of times to help install water wells, most recently in 2014. He teamed up with African Reflections Foundation founder Maria Pool, who has been working to raise the standard of living in Africa for more than a decade, and Dobbs, who runs the charity stateside. (More information is available at http://africanreflectionsfoundation.net.) The foundation credits its kiosk space at Empire State Plaza, provided by the Office of General Services, for helping to spread its message. Dobbs has been collaborating with Pine Hills Elementary for several years. In addition to providing funding for a well, the school hopes to keep in contact with the African elementary school through a pen pal program. Students sang songs during the check presentation Wednesday, where school officials said they hope to continue supporting the school in Tanzania by donating books and supplies. "The school through its own initiative raised this money to solely sponsor a well," Bailey said. "It's just tremendous." Over the past two years, Bailey's nonprofit has funded the installation of three wells and he hopes to go back to Tanzania next month to check on them and install the one funded by Pine Hills Elementary. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and features with our afternoon newsletter. The wells are powered by the sun and provide a clean water source for entire communities. Instead of villagers walking great distances to find a water source which are often contaminated and unsafe the wells Bailey installs offer safety as well as access to fresh water. Bailey recently teamed up with Wells Fargo Bank and its Community & Urban Stabilization Program, which provides foreclosure properties that didn't sell at auction to nonprofits across the country. The Sky is Not Limited was selected to receive a local property in Wynantskill in need of some TLC at no charge. Wells Fargo provided some funding to make repairs. Bailey said all money raised from the sale of the property will go toward providing solar-powered wells to communities in need. "We're keeping busy for sure, and that means our work of providing access to clean, safe drinking water continues as well." jpatterson@timesunion.com @JenSPatterson 518-454-5340 This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Rensselaer SUNY Polytechnic Institute is asking for new proposals to develop its high-tech project on the city's Hudson River waterfront. The request for proposals seeks a developer or construction contractor to build a complex that offers space for research, technology, business development, education and housing. Rensselaer officials, who have spent six months waiting for the project to move forward after an earlier SUNY Poly plan for the land was rebid, were glad to see movement again on a multimillion-dollar construction program that was first discussed nearly a year ago. "We're committed to working with them," Mayor Dan Dwyer said. "It's a wonderful waterfront site. It will bring jobs to the city of Rensselaer." SUNY Poly President Alain Kaloyeros toured the 24-acre De Laet's Landing site with Dwyer last May. The initial proposal called for converting the location into the Rensselaer Clean Energy Deployment Center, a $12.5 million project. The SUNY Poly project is considered to be a consolation prize for the financially distressed city after it lost out to Schenectady in the competition for the Capital Region's commercial casino license. Rivers Casino & Resort is being built on land along the Mohawk River in Schenectady. The land SUNY Poly considered building on is on waterfront land known as De Laet's Landing. The high-tech nanotechnology college wants to build a satellite operation on the site. The new proposals are due June 10 to SUNY Polytechnic and its real estate arm, Fuller Road Management Corp., according to the documents. Dwyer and other city officials did not know the new request had been sent out until SUNY Poly informed them Thursday morning. The last time they had heard about any developments was when SUNY Poly received a $1.6 million grant to help fund the development at the site. The site's owner, U.W. Marx, received city Planning Commission approval in January to construct a 96-unit apartment building with 96 garages, a swimming pool and other amenities. The project is expected to take 16 to 18 months to build and another 10 to 12 months to fully lease, company officials said at the time. There is enough space at De Laet's Landing for both the apartment project, SUNY Poly and possibly other construction. SUNY Poly officials told the city they wanted residential development on the site, city officials said. The company selected to work at the Rensselaer site is required to participate in local economic development efforts for five years with an extension of up to five more years, according to the proposal documents. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and features with our afternoon newsletter. SUNY Poly's plans for projects around the state were halted last year after the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York City began investigating the Buffalo Billion revitalization project, which includes projects for several high-profile, high-tech companies, including IBM, SolarCity and Albany Molecular Research Corp. SUNY Poly officials said the college is not a target of the investigation and has cooperated with investigators. It is the second local SUNY Poly project to be rebid. Last month, SUNY Poly announced plans to build a 170-apartment complex next to the main campus on Washington Avenue. Previously, SUNY Poly's Fuller Road Management Corp. drafted plans for new student housing and a 650-space expansion of parking capacity in a neighborhood near the main campus on Washington Avenue in Albany. Columbia Development was the lone bidder for that work. But the college decided to rebid the student housing project in November, citing a "change in program requirements." U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan has subpoenaed records from SUNY Polytechnic Institute as part of an investigation into the Buffalo Billion program championed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. kcrowe@timesunion.com 518-454-5084 @KennethCrowe Troy City Council President Carmella Mantello wants the federal government to investigate "significant asbestos issues" at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall building. Mantello wrote the Environmental Protection Agency's New York City office Wednesday after reviewing documents requesting a tax assessment cut for the music hall building and other properties by about 80 percent. "I would submit that the amount of asbestos labeled as 'significant' in the basement of these buildings should be investigated," Mantello wrote Judith Enck, EPA regional administrator. Mantello said correspondence states that a past offer to buy the buildings was withdrawn over concerns about remediation costs in the buildings. "I believe to ensure that the significant asbestos in these buildings does not cause harm to the environment or individuals that this should and must be investigated," Mantello wrote. The City Council voted 7-2 to table the measure that called for reducing the combined tax assessment from $1.795 million to $340,000. The First Niagara Bank-owned properties involved are the buildings at 32 Second St. and 14 First St. and parking and building at 44-48 Second St. Corporation Counsel Kevin Glasheen said the asbestos posed no threat to the music hall and bank buildings. The asbestos is in the basement and would have to be remediated if the space was developed, he said. Glasheen said the assessment reduction request was due to the expense of maintaining the building in which the music hall is located, the difficulty in finding a buyer and the potential asbestos-related costs. Since First Niagara Bank closed its offices in the building, there has been no rental income and only one purchase offer, which was withdrawn, according to documentation supporting the assessment reduction provided by Glasheen's office. "Although the property was subsequently marketed and listed, it sparked little market interest due to significant asbestos issues in the basement, limited parking and the associated financial burden of paying for upkeep of the Troy Music Hall," the memo said. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and features with our afternoon newsletter. Councilman Robert Doherty, whose district includes the music hall, said the asbestos is not a current public health threat. "When we're talking about the value of the music hall, asbestos is a minor issue," Doherty said. If the city does not approve the proposed property tax settlement, the case challenging the tax assessment would go to trial in July. Mantello, citing the environmental contamination and public health problems in Hoosick Falls and Flint, Mich., said she felt it was her duty to approach the EPA. kcrowe@timesunion.com 518-454-5084 @KennethCrowe THE ISSUE: The case of a man shot to death by police after he fled a traffic stop calls for an outside probe. THE STAKES: It is exactly the kind of case for which Gov. Cuomo's executive order was intended. More Information To comment: tuletters@timesunion.com or at http://blog.timesunion.com/opinion See More Collapse - We may never know the reason Edson Thevenin fled a police stop early Sunday morning in Troy. The unarmed Watervliet man was shot and killed by police minutes later in a confrontation that leaves too many unanswered questions. Yet, just one day after the tragedy, before autopsy results were in and before police had been able to formally question Troy Police Sgt. Randy French, the officer who fired eight bullets into Mr. Thevenin's windshield, Police Chief John Tedesco seemed to have all the answers he needed conclude the patrol sergeant acted "in line with the law" when he killed Mr. Thevenin. Police say that Sgt. French, who suffered minor leg injuries, fired after being pinned by Mr. Thevenin's car and after repeated warnings to stop his vehicle. At the chief's side was Rensselaer County District Attorney Joel Abelove, who said he would determine later whether a county grand jury needed to review the case. Then came the confusion. Mr. Abelove said he was advised the case would not fall under an executive order last year by Gov. Andrew Cuomo giving state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman jurisdiction in cases of police killings of unarmed civilians. Chief Tedesco argues the suspect's vehicle was used as a weapon. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and features with our afternoon newsletter. Mr. Abelove declared as "categorically not true" a Times Union report that Troy Police initially did not cooperate with the state investigators at the scene Sunday. Chief Tedesco then stepped in to say he did indeed issue such a directive that his department not discuss the case with Mr. Schneiderman's investigation unit, at least until the jurisdiction issue was settled. Mr. Schneiderman's office says it is still determining whether or not it would assume jurisdiction in the case. This case begs for an investigation by Mr. Schneiderman. The governor's order last year was intended to make probes of the deaths of unarmed civilians by police as transparent as possible to restore public confidence that they are handled in a fair and just manner. Questions have been consistently raised about whether a local DA's close relationship with police interferes with an investigation or worse, influences the outcome. It followed several incidents nationwide, including the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, which was captured on a cellphone video. He suffocated when New York City police used a banned choke-hold while arresting him for a minor crime of selling cigarettes on the street. Unfortunately, whoever investigates the Troy case will be limited because police have no video. A plan to use a federal grant for police vehicle dashboard cameras was scrapped last year after the cash-strapped city determined replacing six police patrol cars was a higher priority. Sunday's incident has prompted renewed calls for such equipment to promote police accountability. In its absence, an outside look by Mr. Schneiderman's office is all the more essential to insure justice. Hippocrates once said Walking is man's best medicine. We often see people walking through Roscrea for pleasure and of course hundreds of people walk through everyday to get their shopping, go to the post office, the playground or to see the GP. What might a mobility challenged person encounter if they walked from the post office to St Cronan's RC church via Rosemary Street and on to Abbey Street or if they took the route down Castle Street and across Ballyhall toward the rear entrance of the church? When a person is older, using a wheelchair or pushing a buggy, or has a visual impairment, it is important that the town is user friendly so that everyone can access the town. Age Friendly Roscrea has started a walkability study of Roscrea, to see how it measures up against a national audit tool and other towns in the country. Last Tuesday, Shane Winters from the national Age Friendly office visited Roscrea to brief team leaders on the audit tool. The next day, 20 enthusiastic participants divided into five teams covering five routes around the town. Participants included TY students & people with wheelchairs and visual impairment. The process was a real eye opener for the people involved. The town looked really well and was very clean with very little litter on the streets, due in no small way to the recent clean up by Roscrea Mens Shed. The Moneen River and historical buildings, like the Castle always look their best basking in the spring sunshine. Roscrea is a town with a past, a town with real character. These same historic features that contribute to the town's personality are also a major physical constraint when it comes to development and upgrading but with creativity and imagination it is possible to develop solutions to maximize accessibility. It was noted that work on footpaths had recently been completed on both the Dublin & Limerick Roads and are just about to start in Assumption Park. The findings of the first audit were similar to those found in other historic towns such as Kinsale. A second walk around will take place this week and then a report will be compiled. Three key areas emerging from the audit include: 1). Driver Behaviour The teams noticed that many drivers were driving too fast around the town of Roscrea, often parking on paths or in front of pavement dishes, designed so that people with wheelchairs or pushing buggies can dismount easily from the pavements. Some cars were found parked in disabled spaces but no badges were displayed. 2). Condition of pavements Some pavements were very narrow and un-level. Moss was growing on some paving slabs, which is unsightly and can become slippery if wet. The teams noted dog fouling, broken kerbs, damaged cobbles, broken paths and street furniture and obstacles on pavements. 3). Crossings On many roads there are no designated crossings for pedestrians and where they exist the position of some of them is questionable.Ramps in the town, where they are present appear to be placed inappropriately in some locations, are damaged or lipped. Other interim findings include difficulty accessing some public and commercial buildings, inadequate signage, challenging roads for cyclists and poorly designed areas for bus stops with no seating or protection from the elements. Age Friendly Roscrea would like to thank everyone who participated: to give additional feedback, contact 0831133987). The dates have now been confirmed for a series of 'Atlantic' screenings in the Tipperary area. Cahir filmmaker Risteard O Domhnaill's powerful new documentary film 'Atlantic' will go on general release from April 29th while screenings will also feature in the Cahir House Hotel on May 5th at 7.30pm (followed by a post screening discussion with the director), the Nenagh Arts Centre on May 11th (8.30pm), The Source Arts Centre on May 18th (8pm) and on May 28th as part of the Cloughjordan National Biodiversity Week in the Heritage Centre, Cloughjordan. Emmy Award-winning actor Brendan Gleeson narrates the feature-length film which was shot in Ireland, Norway and Newfoundland (Canada) by Scannain Inbhear (Inver Films). 'Atlantic' was awarded best Irish documentary at the recent Dublin International Film Festival. Indeed, Brendan Gleeson described 'Atlantic' as an engrossing piece of truth-seeking, visually stunning and crafted with clarity and insight. It was an honour to be involved. After previously taking a behind-the-scenes look at Irelands Corrib Gas controversy O Domhnaill realised that a wider story of resource mismanagement was emerging - one that needed to be told for the sake of coastal communities everywhere. For more details on this fascinating project please visit theatlanticstream.com. [April 21, 2016] 31st Class of Flinn Scholars to Attend Arizona Public Universities The 2016 Flinn Scholarship has been awarded to 20 of Arizona's highest-achieving high-school seniors, who will receive an unparalleled package for undergraduate study at an Arizona public university. The highly competitive merit-based scholarship includes the cost of tuition at one of the three state universities, funding for room and board, support for at least two study-abroad experiences and an off-campus internship, university faculty mentorship, and other benefits. The scholarship, supported by the Phoenix-based Flinn Foundation and the universities, is valued at more than $115,000. Members of this 31st class of Flinn Scholars will begin their undergraduate studies in August at Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, and University of Arizona. "These newest Flinn Scholars once again have impressed the Foundation with their intellect, talent, and dedication to their schools and communities," said Jack B. Jewett, Flinn Foundation President and CEO. "We proudly welcome this diverse group of student leaders from throughout the state, who will receive exceptional educations and college experiences at Arizona's three universities." The 20 Scholars represent 18 high schools throughout the state. Westwood High School in Mesa, with three Scholars, is the only school with more than one. Last year, Westwood was one of two schools to produce two Scholars. Seven of the 20 Scholars attend charter schools. Three represent BASIS high schools-Chandler, Scottsdale, and Tucson North-and two attend Great Hearts Academies-Anthem Preparatory Academy and Chandler Preparatory Academy. In addition, there was one Scholar each from Horizon Honors High School in Ahwatukee and Tempe Preparatory Academy. Another Scholar attends Phoenix Union Bioscience High School, which emphasizes science, technology, enginering, and mathematics. Four high schools are celebrating their first Flinn Scholar: Anthem Preparatory Academy, BASIS Scottsdale, Glendale High School, and Horizon Honors High School. There are two Scholars from northern Arizona-attending Blue Ridge High School in Pinetop-Lakeside and Flagstaff High School-and three are from Tucson-attending BASIS Tucson North, Sabino High School, and University High School. The other 15 Scholars represent the full scope of metro Phoenix. The Scholars have a wide range of planned fields of study, including biomedical engineering, accounting, philosophy, Chinese, astrophysics, theatre arts, biological anthropology, and neuroscience. Many declined offers from the nation's most selective universities to accept the Flinn Scholarship. The 20 Scholars were chosen from 761 applications submitted by Arizona high-school seniors-translating to an award rate of 2.6 percent. "The academic and extracurricular achievements of these young adults and their focus on service to make the world a better place are extraordinary. It's no wonder that the most prestigious universities in the country recruited them intensely," said Anne Lassen, Flinn Scholars Program director. "They clearly benefited from dedicated teachers and from seeking engaging programs and rigorous curriculums." The scholarship benefits, beyond covering eight semesters of tuition and providing funding for room and board, include: A three-week summer seminar in China following the freshman year, and at least one additional study-abroad experience; Funded participation in the Professional-Leadership Internship Program, exclusively for Flinn Scholars, at an Arizona company or organization; Mentorship from top faculty and exposure to local and world leaders, including Arizona's leading business, civic and academic minds; Fellowship in a community of about 80 current and nearly 500 alumni Scholars; Membership in a university honors college or program, with small classes, guest lectures, and research experiences; Intellectual, cultural and social activities developed for Scholars by both the Flinn Foundation and the universities. The typical Flinn Scholar achieves at least a 3.5 grade-point average, a top-5 percent class rank, a score of 1300 on the SAT or 29 on the ACT, and participation and demonstrated leadership in extracurricular activities. The Flinn Scholars Program is operated by the Flinn Foundation Scholarship Program LLC and supported by the Flinn Foundation, a Phoenix-based private, nonprofit, grantmaking organization. The Foundation, founded in 1965, also supports the advancement of Arizona's bioscience sector, arts and culture, and the Arizona Center for Civic Leadership. 2016 Flinn Scholars: http://www.flinn.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/2016-Flinn-Scholars.pdf View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160421006534/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 21, 2016] ChildServe and UnitedHealthcare Establish Relationship to Serve Medicaid Members in Iowa ChildServe and UnitedHealthcare have established a new relationship, giving children enrolled in UnitedHealthcare Medicaid plans access to all ChildServe facilities and care providers. ChildServe provides a variety of residential and community services for children with varying health care conditions and needs, and operates locations in Ames, Des Moines and Johnston. UnitedHealthcare is administering the IA Health Link program, working to meet Iowans' health care needs by providing health plans that deliver quality, cost-effective care. "Our mission is to partner with families to help children with special health care needs live a great life," said Lloyd VanderKwaak, ChildServe president and CEO. "More children with developmental delays, disabilities and acquired injuries will be able to access our pediatric specialty health care services through our new relationship with UnitedHealthcare." "ChildServe is an important provider of health care services, and this new relationship gives children enrolled in UnitedHealthcare's Medicaid plans access to critical health services in their communities," said Kim Foltz, CEO for UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of Iowa. People enrolled in UnitedHealthcare Medicaid plans who need more information about their coverage may call 1-800-464-9484 or visit www.UHCCommunityPlan.com/ia. UnitedHealthcare serves more than 700,000 people enrolled in Medicaid, Medicare, TRICARE, and employer-based and individual health plans with a network of more than 120 hospitals and other care facilities and more than 15,000 physicians and other care providers statewide. About UnitedHealthcare UnitedHealthcare is dedicated to helping people nationwide live healthier lives by simplifying the health care experience, meeting consumer health and wellness needs, and sustaining trusted relationships with care providers. The company offers the full spectrum of health benefit programs for individuals, employers, military service members, retirees and their families, and Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries, and contracts directly with 1 million physicians and care professionals, and 6,000 hospitals and other care facilities nationwide. UnitedHealthcare is one of the businesses of UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH), a diversified Fortune 50 health and well-being company. For more information, visit UnitedHealthcare at www.uhc.com or follow @myUHC on Twitter (News - Alert). About ChildServe ChildServe improves the health and well-being of over 3,500 children each year through specialized clinical, home, and community-based programs and services. We serve children with developmental delays, disabilities, acquired injuries, and other special healthcare needs. For more information, visit www.childserve.org. Click here to subscribe to Mobile Alerts for UnitedHealth Group. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160421006243/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Coupa Announces Executive Advisory Board Coupa Software (News - Alert), a leader in cloud-based spend management solutions, announced today that it has formed a new Executive Advisory Board (EAB) comprised of top business leaders from various industries that will rethink how companies can raise profits and reduce costs with cloud-based spend management. The EAB's goal is to transform how enterprises manage their spending while achieving improved employee productivity and contract compliance in the new digital economy. EAB member and The Global Fund's Chief Information Officer Paul Tuxford said the Board will help with his efforts to transform the information technology function of his organization by incorporating additional aspects of technology service delivery, including Coupa, for its office in Geneva, Switzerland and partners worldwide. "I am joining this team of leaders so The Global Fund can actively contribute to the rapid growth of Coupa to innovate around our dynamic needs and to support our vital mission of fighting AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria," Tuxford said. The EAB is led by Coupa's Executive Strategic Advisor Kendra Von Esh and includes current and former business executives. The group will convene for the first time on May 10, 2016 in San Francisco at Coupa Inspire, the company's annual user conference. "This is a unique opportunity to think about how we better develop a culture around corporate policies require people to follow," said Todd Dooley, a member of the EAB and vice president of finance at H&R Block. "It allows us to share our experiences across procurement, finance, IT and to learn from others and collaborate on interesting paths forward." There are 16 inaugural members of the Coupa EAB including 14 external members and two corporate members. External members of the Coupa EAB, listed below, include recognized leaders across finance, procurement and information technology and cover financial services, healthcare, energy, banking, technology, food and beverage, and retail industries. Kendra Von Esh, Executive Strategic Advisor, Coupa Software Donna Wilczek, Vice President Strategy and Product Marketing, Coupa Software "In spend management, it's critical to have CPOs, CFOs and CIOs working together for maximum business value," said Von Esh, who implemented Coupa while she was CIO at Veolia North America. "We're bringing top executives together to strategize about working more effectively, the relationship of technology and the economy, and to develop best practices and create the future of spend management." The initial goals of the EAB will be to: 1. increase knowledge on how strategic spend management can fund growth initiatives and deliver bottom-line results; thus making it the new business financial imperative, 2. define productivity-enhancing business processes and hybrid cloud IT management best practices to maximize technology investments, 3. expand open network models to maximize collaboration and reduce supply chain costs, 4. influence cloud spend management technology in the digital age via collaborative innovation. "Ensuring customer success is the most important thing we do at Coupa. Our technology innovations are disrupting this market because we collaborate with and can rapidly deliver measurable business value for our customers, their employees and their suppliers," said Donna Wilczek, vice president strategy and product marketing at Coupa. "This board will fuel us to innovate even faster than ever before as the collective thought leadership and passion of this team is, put simply, a rocket booster." About Coupa Software Coupa Software, a leader in cloud-based spend management, enables businesses everywhere to recognize bottom-line financial success via Savings-as-a-Service. Customers - small, medium and large - representing the Americas, EMEA, and APAC rely on Coupa to support business agility and reduce costs. Only Coupa provides an organic suite of true cloud spend management applications, including invoicing, procurement, expense management, sourcing and inventory, allowing customers to realize a return on investment that can start within a few months and grow continually. Learn more at www.coupa.com. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160421005357/en/ [April 21, 2016] Everbridge Selected by Florida Division of Emergency Management to Develop New Statewide Emergency Notification System, ALERTFLORIDA Everbridge, a global enterprise software company that provides applications which automate the delivery of critical information to help keep people safe and businesses running, today announced that the Florida Division of Emergency Management (FDEM) has selected Everbridge as the service provider for the development and implementation of AlertFlorida, a landmark initiative which will provide statewide emergency alert and notification services to Florida residents, businesses and visitors. "Ensuring the safety of all Floridians is the Division's top priority," said FDEM Director Bryan W. Koon. "The selection of Everbridge as the AlertFlorida vendor marks a milestone toward providing the State's Emergency Managers with a standardized system to communicate critical emergency information to every resident, business and visitor in Florida." AlertFlorida services are currently being implemented in several counties during an initial phase, with additional deployment phases continuing throughout 2016. Each participating jurisdiction will be able to customize the categories of alerts available in their community through a local opt-in portal. The system also will provide automated notifications of flash floods, tornados and other watches and warnings issued by the National Weather Service. AlertFlorida is expected to be the most comprehensive and coordinated statewide emergency notification program in the country. Once fully deployed, users will be able to select their preferred language and methods for receiving alerts, including SMS text messaging, e-mail, voice calls, TDD/TTY messaging and mobile device apps for Android (News - Alert)TM, Apple and Windows mobile devices. The system will also allow users to post alerts to social media channels and will interface directly with existing broadcast-based alerting systems. "The stat of Florida continues to demonstrate strong leadership in emergency management, and this statewide critical communications program will improve Florida's overall preparedness and resiliency during severe weather disasters and manmade emergencies," said Jaime Ellertson, CEO of Everbridge. "We applaud the state of Florida for this initiative and we are delighted to partner with FDEM to help ensure that all individuals and organizations in the state are safe and informed." Everbridge provides critical communication services to over 2,700 global customers. Everbridge's large public sector clients include eight of the ten largest U.S. cities and all but one of the top 25 busiest airports in North America. Everbridge's communications platform can deliver billions of messages each year across multiple languages and device types. For additional information about the Florida Division of Emergency Management, visit Floridadisaster.org. FDEM also features an extensive social media presence. Follow FDEM on Twitter (News - Alert) at @FLGetAPlan, Instagram at @FLGetAPlan and Facebook (News - Alert) at Facebook.com/FloridaDivisionofEmergencyManagement and Facebook.com/KidsGetAPlan. About Everbridge: Everbridge is a global enterprise software company that provides applications which automate the delivery of critical information to help keep people safe and businesses running. During mission-critical business events or man-made or natural disasters, over 2,700 global customers rely on the Everbridge platform to quickly and reliably construct and deliver contextual notifications to millions of people at one time. The company's platform sent over 1 billion messages in 2015, and offers the ability to reach more than 200 countries and territories with secure delivery to over 100 different communication devices. A broad set of applications enable companies, hospitals, agencies, states, cities and towns to address issues related to severe weather and man-made incidents, IT outages and cyberattacks, safety of traveling staff, and facilitate regulation-compliant messaging. Everbridge serves 8 of the 10 largest U.S. cities, 7 of the 10 largest U.S.-based investment banks, 24 of the 25 busiest North American airports, and 6 of the 10 largest global automakers. Everbridge is based in Boston with additional offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Beijing and London. For more information, visit www.everbridge.com, read the company blog, http://www.everbridge.com/blog, and follow on Twitter and Facebook. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160421005951/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 21, 2016] PSEG Chooses GE's High-Efficiency HA and Complementary Alstom Technology; Connects Fleet Virtually PSEG Power, a subsidiary of PSEG, has ordered a 7HA.02 gas turbine engineered equipment package from GE (NYSE:GE) for the Bridgeport Harbor Generating Station in Bridgeport, Connecticut. This marks the second order in recent weeks for GE's high-efficiency technology in the New England region. The 7HA.02 package includes a gas turbine, a steam turbine, associated generators and a former Alstom-engineered heat recovery steam generator (HRSG) that is now part of the GE portfolio. The high-efficiency package will be used in an expansion of the existing Bridgeport Harbor facility and will clear the way to retire an existing coal-fired unit in operation for nearly 50 years. The unit is the last coal-fired plant in Connecticut; its retirement will help the state meet requirements expected under the federal government's proposed Clean Power Plan. PSEG also marked a major milestone in its efforts to digitize its fleet recently, connecting five plants with plans to connect others (both GE and other original equipment manufacturers) to its state-of-the-art Monitoring & Diagnostic (M&D) Center. PSEG partnered with GE to deploy asset-performance management tools to improve predictive analytics and its ability to manage its fleet across generating capabilities. PSEG's plants account for more than 6 gigawatts (GW) of electricity and are an example of the growing trend of energy companies like PSEG leveraging the power of the Industrial Internet to increase efficiency. "With these advanced technologies from GE, PSEG can provide cleaner, more reliable energy to Connecticut and the region for many years to come," said Rich Lopriore, president of PSEG Fossil. "The environmental benefits of this project are essential, and we're pleased to have received strong community support." At the Bridgeport Harbor facility, the existing coal-fired steam turbine has only run about 800 hours per year due to lower efficiency and higher emissions output. The new 485-megawatt (MW) 7HA.02-based combined-cycle power plant is expected to be one of the most efficient facilities in Connecticut, capable of running nearly 8,000 hours per year with lower emissions while providing the equivalent power needed to supply nearly 500,000 U.S. households. The new plant is scheduled to begin commercial operation in 2019. "These projects demonstrate the value of combining GE's HA gas turbine with our complementary steam tail technologies and the power of software," said Joe Mastrangelo, president and CEO of gas power systems, GE Power. "In Connecticut, GE's high-efficiency technologies will provide cleaner, more efficient power and help give PSEG a real adantage to getting power on the grid." The new 7HA.02 unit at the Bridgeport facility will run primarily on natural gas, but also will be able to operate on ultra-low-sulfur distillate as a backup fuel, an important option in the ISO-NE region where-despite an increasing supply of natural gas-long, cold winters require units that can operate on backup fuel. Benefits of the 7HA.02 include: Plant flexibility: The ability of the 7HA.02 to ramp up or down at 50-MW per minute is viewed as a tremendous benefit to PSEG and ISO-NE, especially as intermittent renewable resources are added to the grid. Rapid response: The 7HA.02 engineered equipment package is a full rapid-response plant, able to start up and achieve emissions compliance in as little as 30 minutes while providing over 200 MW of power to the grid within 10 minutes. Largest, most-efficient 60 Hz gas turbine: The 7HA.02 gas turbine is the world's largest 60 Hz gas turbine and provides high power density and lower total installed costs. It also creates lower amounts of greenhouse gas emissions per megawatt hour. GE's H-class technology has been embraced by customers in Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, Brazil, the United States, France, Russia, Germany, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan and Argentina. About GE GE (NYSE:GE) is the world's Digital Industrial Company, transforming industry with software-defined machines and solutions that are connected, responsive and predictive. GE is organized around a global exchange of knowledge, the "GE Store," through which each business shares and accesses the same technology, markets, structure and intellect. Each invention further fuels innovation and application across our industrial sectors. With people, services, technology and scale, GE delivers better outcomes for customers by speaking the language of industry. www.ge.com About GE Power GE Power is a world leader in power generation with deep domain expertise to help customers deliver electricity from a wide spectrum of fuel sources. We are transforming the electricity industry with the digital power plant, the world's largest and most efficient gas turbine, full balance of plant, upgrade and service solutions as well as our data-leveraging software. Our innovative technologies and digital offerings help make power more affordable, reliable, accessible and sustainable. For more information, visit the company's website at www.gepower.com and http://powergen.gepower.com. Follow GE Power and GE Gas Power Systems on Twitter (News - Alert) @GE_Power and @GE_GasPower. About PSEG PSEG Power Connecticut's Bridgeport Harbor and New Haven Harbor stations are part of PSEG Power LLC's generating fleet. PSEG Power LLC is an independent power producer that generates and sells electricity in the wholesale market, with a fleet totaling 11,782 MWs of electric generating capacity. It is a nationally recognized industry leader on environmental issues. PSEG Fossil LLC is one of four main subsidiaries of PSEG Power, and operates the company's portfolio of natural gas, coal and oil-fired electric generating units. PSEG Power is a subsidiary of Public Service Enterprise Group Incorporated (PSEG) (NYSE:PEG), a diversified energy company (www.pseg.com). View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160421005387/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 20, 2016] Global Online Retailer, SoftwareProjects.com Partners with The Net Momentum to Connect Advertisers with Marketing Pros BEAVERTON, Ore., April 20, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Global online retailer, SoftwareProjects, today announced a partnership with The Net Momentum.com, the leading provider of affiliate management and recruiting services. The Net Momentum was founded by Dush Ramachandran formerly VP Sales & Business Development at Clickbank and Terra Goeres formerly head of Client Account Management at Clickbank. Today, The Net Momentum connects a growing portfolio of more than 10,000 marketing professionals directly with top brands and advertisers around the world. Advertisers turn to The Net Momentum to outsource day-to-day management of affiliates, creatives, leaderboards and newsletters. The Net Momentum maintains close relationships with the top marketing professionals in every niche, ensuring affiliates are empowered with all the tools and resources they need, to deliver qualified highly-engaged visitors to advertiser's websites. "Affiliates are extremely important to us. We are always looking for new ways to empower affiliates with tools, resources and hand-holding that can help them deliver quantifiable results for our vendors," said Norman Buhagiar, CEO of SoftwareProjects. "With The Net Momentum, we know that affiliates are in good hands, with every need addressed immediately." As a rapidly growing Inc 5000 company, SoftwareProjects provides a safe and reliable way to shop online, selling thousands of software products, ebooks and online services to consumers and businesses around the world. The Net Momentum was selected to augment a comprehensive suite of tools and resources the company already makes available to its growing network of affiliates. "We are extremely pleased SoftwareProjects chose The Net Momentum to handle their affiliate management and recruiting," said Dush Ramachandran, CEO of The Net Momentum. "Our focus has always been to connect the highest quality marketing professionals, with world class brands and advertisers." About The Net Momentum Founded in 2010, The Net Momentum has quickly become the preeminent provider of revenue enhancement services (such as affiliate program growth and management, affiliate recruitment, list monetization, and many others) to ethical, successful, and collaborative direct response marketers. With their team's combined 30+ years in the IM business, The Net Momentum delivers extraordinary client and affiliate experiences by providing unparalleled high value services that leverage their unique, collective expertise and ingenuity, making them the industry leader that people rave about. For more information, visit: www.thenetmomentum.com. About SoftwareProjects SoftwareProjects is a global online retailer, selling thousands of software products, ebooks and online services to consumers and business around the world. Established in 2003, SoftwareProjects evolved from a full service Internet Marketing consulting agency, to a SaaS provider of CRM, ESP, shopping carts and analytics solutions, all the way to a global online retailer. Throughout its evolution, SoftwareProjects remained true to its vision helping consumers and businesses realize their full potential, by providing access to the right technology and information. Learn more at www.softwareprojects.com. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160420/358029LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/global-online-retailer-softwareprojectscom-partners-with-the-net-momentum-to-connect-advertisers-with-marketing-pros-300255051.html SOURCE SoftwareProjects [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 20, 2016] frog Unveils Yibu: A Learning Platform for Children that Transforms Screen Time into a Meaningful and Physically Active Experience SHANGHAI, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The global design and strategy firm, frog, has developed Yibu to enable children to learn about the world around them and feel empowered to positively influence it. The platform includes five crafted wooden toys embedded with sensing technology, connected to a character experiencing environmental challenges on-screen. Yibu is designed as a modular system that could support a variety of different games that connect to the sensing toys. The sensing toys gather real-time environmental data and, together with location-based data, influence the digital game. By moving around and placing the toys in different situations, the child discovers how temperature, sound, light, direction and wind influence the digital character. Simone Rebaudengo, Senior Interaction Designer, frog Shanghai said: "There are many solutions in the market today that use sensing technology to help us measure, and control our lives. As designers, we have an opportunity to transform the use of sensing technology and empower kids to safely explore the world using a new set of tools." Yibu solves an increasinglycommon challenge for parents and children around the world: keeping kids active and healthy. In the United States, according to a nationwide survey conducted by Common Sense Media, 72 percent of children 8 or younger used a mobile device in 2013, for example, compared with 38 percent in 2011. Kids are spending more time indoors and alone with their digital screens than ever before, often at the expense of physical activity. Yibu was created in the frog Shanghai studio as part of frogLabs a platform dedicated to encourage frog employees to experiment, research and prototype with emerging technologies, guided by user-centered design principles as well as market realities. Independent from client engagement, a multi-disciplinary team of Design Technologists, Interaction, Visual, and Industrial designers, experimented with multiple sensor interactions, character development, and generative storytelling to bring Yibu to life. frog seeks to inspire organizations and investors in the toy retailing, smart toy, gaming and education markets to make kids' screen time a more meaningful and physically active experience. ABOUT FROG frog is a global design and strategy firm. We transform businesses at scale by creating systems of brand, product and service that deliver a distinctly better experience. We strive to touch hearts and move markets. Our passion is to transform ideas into realities. We partner with clients to anticipate the future, evolve organizations and advance the human experience. San Francisco . Seattle . Austin . New York . Boston . London . Amsterdam . Milan . Munich . Singapore . Shanghai www.frogdesign.com To keep up to date with all things frog, please follow us on social media: Twitter Facebook LinkedIn For further information, please contact: Sherry Shi Allison + Partners +86 159 0047 7699 [email protected] Photo - http://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20160420/0861603593-a [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 21, 2016] Welding Wire Industry 2021 Global Market Research Reports PUNE, India, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Market-Research-Reports.com adds "Global and Chinese Welding Wire Industry, 2016 Market Research Report" latest study of 150 pages, published in Apr 2016, to the Chemicals Metallic intelligence collection of its store. The Global Welding Wire Industry 2016 Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Welding Wire industry. Complete report on Welding Wire market divided into 11 major chapters that offer an overview of current market scenario as well as 2021 forecasts is now available at http://www.market-research-reports.com/453168-welding-wire-industry . The Global Welding Wire Industry 2015 Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Welding Wire industry. Firstly, the report provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The Welding Wire market analysis is provided for the international market including development history, competitive landscape analysis, and major regions' development status. Secondly, this report states import/export, supply and consumption figures as well as cost, price, revenue and gross margin by regions (United States, EU, China and Japan), and other regions can be added. Then, the report focuses on global major leading industry players with information such as company profiles, product picture and specification, capacity, production, price, cost, revenue and contact information. Upstream raw materials, equipment and downstream consumers analysis is also carried out. What's more, the Welding Wire industry development trends and marketing channels are analyzed. Finally, the feasibility of new investment projects is assessed, and overall research conclusions are offered. In a word, the report provides major statistics on the state of the industry and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the market. p>Order a copy of this report at http://www.market-research-reports.com/contacts/purchase.php?name=453168 . The first chapter introduces the Welding Wire Industry by Brief Introduction, Development & Status of Welding Wire Industry. The second chapter focuses on Manufacturing Technology of Welding Wire, the third one gives Analysis of Global Key Manufacturers (Including Company Profile, Product Specification, 2011-2016 Production Information etc.) The forth chapter deals with 2011-2016 Global and China Market of Welding Wire. The chapter 5 summarizes Market Status of Welding Wire Industry. List of Tables and Figures for Global & China Welding Wire Industry: Table Welding Wire Classification Table Welding Wire Applications Figure 2016 Global Welding Wire Market Share By Country Figure 2016 Global Welding Wire Major Manufacturers Market Share Figure 2016 Global Welding Wire Market Share By Application Table 2011-2016 Global Major Manufacturers Welding Wire Capacity List Table 2011-2016 Global Major Manufacturers Welding Wire Capacity Market Share List Table 2011-2016 Global Major Manufacturers Welding Wire Production List Table 2011-2016 Global Major Manufacturers Welding Wire Production Market Share List Figure 2011-2016 Global Welding Wire Capacity Production and Growth Rate Table 2011-2016 Global Welding Wire Demand and Growth Rate Table 2011-2016 Global Welding Wire Supply Demand and Consumption List Table 2011-2016 China Welding Wire Production Import Export List Another research titled Global and Chinese Submerged-Arc Welding Wire Industry, 2011-2021 Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the global Submerged-Arc Welding Wire industry with a focus on the Chinese market. It explores international and Chinese major industry players in detail. In this part, the report presents the company profile, product specifications, capacity, production value, and 2011-2016 market shares for each company. Through the statistical analysis, the report depicts the global and Chinese total market of Submerged-Arc Welding Wire industry including capacity, production, production value, cost/profit, supply/demand and Chinese import/export. The total market is further divided by company, by country, and by application/type for the competitive landscape analysis. The report then estimates 2016-2021 market development trends of Submerged-Arc Welding Wire industry. Comprehensive Table of Contents and more for the report is available at http://www.market-research-reports.com/toc-453169-submerged-arc-welding-wire-industry . Explore more report on Chemicals Metallic Industry at http://www.market-research-reports.com/cat/chemicals/Metallic-market-research . About Us: Market Research Reports is an aggregator of syndicated market research studies that offer current and future market intelligence across multiple industrial verticals through is high quality database. Market Research Reports aims to help you take business decisions accurately and on time, every time. Understanding your time constraints, we can help you find the most relevant research based on the requirements you share with us. Our customers get 24 X 7 email and phone support. Feel free to reach us at +1 888 391 5441 with your business intelligence needs. Contact: Ritesh Tiwari UNIT no 802, Tower no. 7, SEZ Magarpatta city, Hadapsar Pune - 411013 Maharashtra, India. Tel: +1-888-391-5441 [email protected] SOURCE Market-Research-Reports [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 21, 2016] Fexy Media Acquires Leading Food Blog Simply Recipes To Solidify #1 Ranking In Millennial Audience Composition SEATTLE, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Fexy Media today announced its acquisition of Simply Recipes, the popular, award-winning cooking and recipe blog founded by Elise Bauer. Currently the highest indexing cooking site for women, aged 21-49 (comScore, November 20151), Simply Recipes joins Fexy Media's expanding food-focused brand portfolio, propelling it to become one of the top 10 food and lifestyle-based digital media companies. Fexy's portfolio also includes: Serious Eats, Roadfood, The Food Lab, and Relish. This is the sixth acquisition for Fexy since its formation in late 2014. Simply Recipes was established in 2003 and quickly grew into one of the most highly trafficked online resources for home cooks interested in quality scratch cooking. The site reached 6.5 million unique monthly visitors in November 2015 (comScore). In response to a growing trend among millennials to search for the "best recipes" in their favorite food categories (Google Trends, 2014 and 2015), Simply Recipes focuses on inspired, well-tested recipes that help home cooks be successful in the kitchen. The blog effectively uses social media to reach audiences looking to find consistently great recipes and learn new cooking skills. "Simply Recipes started as a way to document and share our family's favorite recipes and has become a trusted resource for millions of people around the world who love to cok," stated Elise Bauer, Simply Recipes Founder. "Being part of Fexy Media will help us reach even more people who share our passion for home cooking." Fexy Media, formed by co-CEOs Cliff and Lisa Sharples, and CFO Ben Sternberg, continues to expand its portfolio with brands that address the specific needs of the millennial foodie generation: Simply Recipes inspires home cooks with well-crafted recipes using in-season whole food ingredients and scratch-cooking methods. inspires home cooks with well-crafted recipes using in-season whole food ingredients and scratch-cooking methods. Serious Eats is the source for discerning eaters featuring inspirational content about dining out, food experiences, the science behind food and cooking. is the source for discerning eaters featuring inspirational content about dining out, food experiences, the science behind food and cooking. Roadfood is a mobile resource for food lovers to explore regional culture through local dishes they eat along highways, in cities, and tucked away in small towns. is a mobile resource for food lovers to explore regional culture through local dishes they eat along highways, in cities, and tucked away in small towns. Relish allows readers to discover the recipes America loves and is cooking right now. "We are very deliberate about our acquisition strategy as we build a complementary portfolio of food-focused brands," said Cliff Sharples, co-CEO Fexy Media. "Simply Recipes is the cornerstone site from which we are going to expand the Fexy network's recipe content strategy. We are thrilled to have Elise join the Fexy family, partnering with our growing talent across the portfolio and utilizing resources at Fexy Studios and Labs to help realize the brand's full potential." About Fexy Media Fexy Media was founded in Mercer Island, Washington in 2014 by digital media veterans Cliff and Lisa Sharples and investment professional, Ben Sternberg with private equity backing by Tritium Partners. Fexy Media includes a brand portfolio focused on digital experiences for millennials spanning today's food culture, including recipes, cooking how-to resources, travel experiences and restaurant discoveries, with over 13 million monthly unique visitors. Fexy Media includes Fexy BrandsSimply Recipes, Serious Eats, The Food Lab, Roadfood, and Relish; Fexy Studiosa digital video production studio focused on creating and distributing expert-driven content; and Fexy Labsoffering proprietary technology, marketing analytics, industry-leading insights and measurement solutions for Fexy's brands and advertising partners. For additional information on Fexy Media, visit: http://www.fexy.com/ About Simply Recipes Elise Bauer started Simply Recipes in 2003 after having spent over 15 years in Silicon Valley as a strategy and marketing consultant and Internet startup executive. Under her guidance, Simply Recipes grew to become one of the most respected food blogs in the country and is now the #1 cooking blog for women 25-49. The site began in her parent's kitchen in Carmichael, California as a family recipe blog focused on sharing well-crafted scratch cooking recipes for the home cook. Simply Recipes now has over five million unique visitors per month. Bauer is a founding officer of the Sacramento California chapter of Les Dames d' Escoffier International, a philanthropic society of women culinary professionals, and a founding board member of the Food Literacy Center, a non-profit delivering after school food education programs to elementary school children. Bauer has a B.S., M.B.A, and Masters in Food Research from Stanford University. *Indexes higher for W21-49 than the top 10 Food-Lifestyles domains per comScore Multi-Platform November 2015 1 Indexes higher for W21-49 than the top 10 Food-Lifestyles domains per comScore Multi-Platform November 2015 Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160421/358287LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/fexy-media-acquires-leading-food-blog-simply-recipes-to-solidify-1-ranking-in-millennial-audience-composition-300255396.html SOURCE Fexy Media [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 21, 2016] Lockton Benefit Group Invests in Data Intelligence to Improve Employer Response to Health Plan Challenges KANSAS CITY, Mo., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Lockton Benefit Group today announced a material investment in its InfoLock data intelligence platform. The enhancements to the platform improve Lockton's ability to partner with their clients to identify health trends and respond to areas driving the cost of health. Lockton uses InfoLock to advise employers on developing comprehensive health management programs to address the continuum of health risks across their working population. By providing frequent in-depth analyses of medical and pharmacy claims, biometric screenings and health risk assessment information, Lockton helps employers optimize employee benefit plan design, implement targeted disease management initiatives and develop highly-focused employee wellness programs. Lockton's team of clinicians works in concert with its client service teams to help employers make strategic, data-driven decisions about their health plans. The enhancements to the current InfoLock data intelligence platform offer improved accessibility, access to additional data sources and agile customization of reports to help identify trends in chronic disease, high-cost claims and utilization patterns. Key to the success of this investment is the incorporation of SCIO Health Analytics, predictive analytics solution. The analytics enable Lockton's client service teams to gain timely insights into trends and make evidence-based recommendations that have a high probability of improving employee behavior to drive better health outcomes. The combination of Lockton's strategic, unbiased consulting and SCIO's deep expertise in analytics provides greater transparency into the data, enabling employer-clients to translate insights into acion quickly and precisely, resulting in lower healthcare costs and higher workforce productivity. "Quick access to relevant information combined with the experience and expertise of our consultants gives our clients an unprecedented advantage in the efforts to control health plan costs," said Bob Reiff, president of Lockton Benefit Group. "Our investment in this new data analytics technology provides our service teams and clients with the ability to tap into their own reports and get the answers they need to help save money and increase productivity. We've always offered unbiased consulting to our employer-clients and this major investment will give us more data on which to base recommendations. The bottom line is this: we help make our clients' businesses better and InfoLock is a real driver of those improvements." "Lockton understands not only the power of advanced data analytics, but also how to interpret that data in a way that makes it actionable for their clients," said Rose Higgins, president of North America for SCIO Health Analytics. "We are excited to put our upgraded resources and experience to work for Lockton clients, to help them drive care transformation, improve productivity and cut healthcare costs." About Lockton More than 6,000 professionals at Lockton provide 48,000 clients around the world with risk management, insurance, employee benefits consulting, and retirement services that improve their businesses. From its founding in 1966 in Kansas City, Missouri, Lockton has attracted entrepreneurial professionals who have driven its growth to become the largest privately held independent insurance broker in the world and 10th largest overall. For seven consecutive years, Business Insurance magazine has recognized Lockton as a "Best Place to Work in Insurance." To see the latest insights from Lockton's experts, check the Lockton Health Risk Solutions Blog. About SCIO Health Analytics Based in West Hartford, Connecticut, SCIO Health Analytics is a leading health analytics solution and services company. It serves more than 80 healthcare organizations across the continuum including over 20 provider groups and 30 health plans representing more than 90 million members, four of the top six PBMs, and clients in 30 countries for 8 of the top 15 global pharmaceutical companies. SCIO provides predictive analytic solutions and services that transform data into actionable insights, helping healthcare organizations create the understanding that drives change through care, network and reimbursement optimization as well as commercial effectiveness. www.sciohealthanalytics.com Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20090415/CG99351LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lockton-benefit-group-invests-in-data-intelligence-to-improve-employer-response-to-health-plan-challenges-300255444.html SOURCE Lockton Benefit Group [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 21, 2016] NYU Langone's Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology Launch Global Research Initiative NEW YORK and HAIFA, Israel, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Drug-carrying "nanoghosts" that battle melanoma and new treatments for malignant mesothelioma will be the focus of the first joint research projects led by NYU Langone Medical Center and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology under a groundbreaking research initiative supported by noted philanthropists and NYU Langone Trustees Laura and Isaac Perlmutter. NYU Langone and its Perlmutter Cancer Center - which the Perlmutters named in 2014 with a separate gift of more than $50 million - and the Technion established the new partnership last year to advance global collaboration in cancer research and therapeutics. The joint program is positioned to attract additional, world-class support from institutions and individuals dedicated to eradicating cancer through focused and efficient research. The first $3 million of the Perlmutters' $9 million donation to the two institutions is earmarked to finance six joint research projects. Co-investigators on each project will receive a two-year, $500,000 grant--$250,000 for each site. The remaining $6 million is designated to establish a state-of-the-art research facility on the Technion campus in Israel to support these and other research projects, primarily in the emerging field of cancer metabolomics, the systematic study of the unique chemical fingerprints that cellular processes leave behind. These processes are both affected by, and can influence, a variety of human diseases, including cancer. Examining a Novel Approach to Treat Metastatic Melanoma In the first joint collaboration, NYU Langone and Technion researchers will test the ability of a nanotechnology based on stem cell "nanoghosts" to deliver to the brain a promising treatment for metastatic melanoma, skin cancer that has spread or metastasized, and is often incurable. In earlier studies, researchers at the Technion took a stem cell, removed its contents, and then shaped a piece of the cell's outer membrane into a vehicle to deliver treatments into the brain. The idea was to borrow the stem cell's outer membrane ability to home in on cancer cells. As a fragment of the former stem cell's membrane, the nanoghost encompasses particular mechanisms that slow it enough to traverse the barrier that filters blood flowing into the brain, and which keeps most drugs from entering. The nanoghost's cargo is a microRNA (miR), a stretch of genetic material that fine-tunes genetic messages by blocking the conversion of genes into proteins. First applied by NYU researchers to metastatic melanoma, miR-124a, in particular, blocks the expression of cancer-promoting genes. The joint team's experiments will seek to determine the feasibility of encapsulating miR-124a in the nanoghost, and study how the vehicle reaches its target in mouse models of the disease. "Our studies should provide important information on nanoghosts' general value as drug and gene carriers to the brain, and create potential for new treatment approaches against brain tumors and metastases," said Professor Marcelle Machluf, PhD, head of the Laboratory for Cancer Drug Delivery & Cell Based Technologies at the Technion, and inventor of the nanoghost with her colleagues there. "The difficulty of delivering agents to the brain represents a major impediment to improving outcomes in patients suffering from brain tumors. Our state-of-the-art nanovehicle promises safer, simpler and more clinically relevant treatments than existing vehicles, which are comprised of polymers or synthetic vesicles which largely lack the ability to enter the brain and to target evoving and changing pathologies." "It is much harder to secure funding for this type of high risk, high reward research," said Eva Hernando-Monge, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Pathology at NYU Langone, a member of the Perlmutter Cancer Center, and leader of the NYU team that first identified miR-124 as a suppressor of the growth of brain metastases. "The Perlmutters' generous gift gives us the ability to be bold." Like the stem cells they are based on, nanoghosts are invisible to the immune system, which means they could potentially be made from donated stem cells, expanded to large numbers in the lab, and not just from the patient's own supply. In the future, this could enable the stockpiling of nanoghost treatments used off the shelf without fear of immune reactions to treatments based on "foreign" cells. New Approach to Mesothelioma The second joint project will investigate whether an enzyme called heparanase can be used to diagnose and treat mesothelioma, a rare cancer that develops in the mesothelium, the protective lining of the lungs and other internal organs of the body. Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM), the most common form of the disease, often occurs after exposure to asbestos and is resistant to most therapies. Heparanase was first identified as a treatment target in 2004 by a team led by Israel Vlodavsky, PhD, one of the project's co-investigators and professor at the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine. Past studies found that patients with high levels of this enzyme in their tumors have lower survival rates after surgery, and that related tumors in mice respond to treatment with heparanase-inhibiting compounds. The enzyme breaks up molecular chains of heparan sulfate, a building block of the scaffolds that give organs shape and support. Cancer cells use the enzyme to break down tissue barriers around a growing tumor, providing new pathways for the cancer to spread and for the building of blood vessels that supply tumors. In addition, breaking up extracellular matrices releases pro-growth proteins stored there to further drive disease. Furthermore, the joint team has developed the novel theory that heparanase secreted by tumor cells primes local microenvironments in a "vicious" cycle where inflammation and tumor growth drive each other. The co-investigators at NYU Langone -- led by Harvey I. Pass, MD, the Stephen E. Banner Professor of Thoracic Surgery and vice chair for research, Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, at NYU Langone, also a member of its Perlmutter Cancer Center -- will use tissue samples from its Thoracic Oncology Archives to validate Dr. Vlodavsky's findings in hopes of eventually evaluating the treatment potential of heparanase-inhibiting compounds in mesothelioma clinical trials. Dr. Pass has been collecting tissue samples from his surgical patients since 1989, when he was head of thoracic oncology at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The collection now houses frozen specimens from more than 350 mesothelioma patients. "This project, supported through the generosity of the Perlmutters, enables us to collaborate with one of the world's leading experts on the role of heparanase in cancer, and is crucial in developing new strategies," Dr. Pass says. "We hope that these experiments can be translated into applications for ongoing funding from the NCI, and enable Phase I trials with new therapeutics that influence heparanase pathways." "Our collaboration represents the first attempt to focus on heparanase as a major risk factor in mesothelioma and a valid target for the development of heparanase-inhibiting drugs," Dr. Vlodavsky says. "In fact, applying a potent inhibitor of the heparanase enzyme we have already demonstrated a most prominent inhibition of tumor progression in mouse models of human mesothelioma, resulting in a pronounced extension of mouse survival. This joint effort provides an opportunity to make important strides in both our fundamental understanding of mesothelioma and in translating this knowledge into therapeutics." About The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is a major source of the innovation and brainpower that drives the Israeli economy, and a key to Israel's renowned as the world's "Start-Up Nation." Its three Nobel Prize winners exemplify academic excellence. Technion people, ideas and inventions make immeasurable contributions to the world including life-saving medicine, sustainable energy, computer science, water conservation and nanotechnology. The Joan and Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute is a vital component of Cornell Tech, and a model for graduate applied science education that is expected to transform New York City's economy. American Technion Society (ATS) donors provide critical support for the Technion--more than $2 billion since its inception in 1940. Based in New York City, the ATS and its network of chapters across the U.S. provide funds for scholarships, fellowships, faculty recruitment and chairs, research, buildings, laboratories, classrooms and dormitories, and more. About NYU Langone Medical Center NYU Langone Medical Center, a world-class, patient-centered, integrated academic medical center, is one of the nation's premier centers for excellence in clinical care, biomedical research, and medical education. Located in the heart of Manhattan, NYU Langone is composed of five hospitals--Tisch Hospital, its flagship acute care facility; Rusk Rehabilitation; the Hospital for Joint Diseases, the Medical Center's dedicated inpatient orthopaedic hospital; NYU Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn; and Hassenfeld Children's Hospital, a comprehensive pediatric hospital supporting a full array of children's health services across the Medical Center--plus the NYU School of Medicine, which since 1841 has trained thousands of physicians and scientists who have helped to shape the course of medical history. The Medical Center's tri-fold mission to serve, teach, and discover is achieved 365 days a year through the seamless integration of a culture devoted to excellence in patient care, education, and research. For more information, go to www.NYULMC.org, and interact with us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Media Inquiries: Jim Mandler (212) 404-3525 [email protected] This news release was issued on behalf of Newswise(TM). For more information, visit http://www.newswise.com. To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nyu-langones-laura-and-isaac-perlmutter-cancer-center-and-technion-israel-institute-of-technology-launch-global-research-initiative-300255447.html SOURCE NYU Langone Medical Center [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 21, 2016] Touch Based Human Machine Interface (HMI) Market by Touch Screen Type (Resistive, Capacitive) by Components (MCU, PMIC, Sensors) by Product Type (PLC, Controllers) by Applications (Industrial Automation, Others) by Geography: (2015 - 2020) LONDON, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Automation is rapidly perforating all sorts of industrial applications and the past few years have witnessed considerable rate of adaptation of automation devices and its accessories. Touch Based Human Machine Interface (HMI) are among the major automation oriented devices deployed across major applications in industrial automation, automotive, oil & gas sectors. These devices enable higher reliability and quality outputs and are gradually replacing the manual relay of the industrial equipment. Touch based HMIs are being acknowledged by all the major industries as these devices are capable of offering a real time update of the processes via Ethernet or wireless connectivity. Touchscreen HMIs are gratifying the organization's productivity, safety, humanization and environmental compatibility goals. The rate of deployment of these touch screen HMIs in all the major industries have increased in the past two years attributing to introduction of new markets in the automobile, home automation and building automation. The manufacturers are constantly investing substantial amount in developing automation solutions to ease out the complexity of the processes. The technical compatibility of the HMI devices is being synchronised with advanced software in order to makethem ready for real time updates and predominantly to enable precised supervision of the processes. These devices are used as different functional modules such as display monitors, industrial PCs, graphical panels and many more based on the type of application.The report incorporates the discrete analysis of the touch based HMI market on the type of the touch screen technologies, type of components such as microprocessors, microcontrollers, PLCs and many more. The market has also been segmented on the basis of function modules and also by the type of end user industry such as automotive, factory automation and so on. The market has also been studied on the basis of geography that includes a detailed study of the key economies across each region like Asia-Pacific, Europe and others. The report also contains a detailed analysis of financials, strategy, products, recent developments of the leading companies in the touch based HMI market. Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/3759007/ About Reportbuyer Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers http://www.reportbuyer.com For more information: Sarah Smith Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com Email: [email protected] Tel: +44 208 816 85 48 Website: www.reportbuyer.com To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/touch-based-human-machine-interface-hmi-market-by-touch-screen-type-resistive-capacitive-by-components-mcu-pmic-sensors-by-product-type-plc-controllers-by-applications-industrial-automation-others-by-geography-201-300255730.html SOURCE ReportBuyer [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Why IU lost to Rutgers: Hoosiers blow early lead, drop 5th straight Indiana scored two touchdowns on its first two possessions but didn't score another in a 24-17 loss to Rutgers on Saturday Volunteer walks in honor of her husband Thousand Oaks resident Joan Hull will be among those participating in this years Conejo Valley Walk to End Alzheimers at 9 a.m. Sat., Oct. 22 at the Westlake Promenade. Hull... Overpass could get protective fencing A substantial safety upgrade for the areas most notorious overpass is finally getting some Caltrans considerationbut dont expect changes any time soon. At the Sept. 21 Moorpark City Council meeting,... Early detection is the best way to survive breast cancer Every October, we celebrate those men and women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer. But what is breast cancer and how can it be diagnosed and managed? There are... Despite a useful second E Ink screen, the Siam 7X's finicky cameras and odd software prevent it from being a viable option. A few years ago, the YotaPhone turned heads with a unique second E Ink screen, though the phone (and its successor) never took off stateside. Enter the Siam 7X, a $450 dual-screen phone created by entrepreneur Darius Allen that's available in the U.S. Sporting a 16-megapixel camera, SMS Audio speakers and a quad-core processor, the Siam 7X seems like a solid phone on paper, but a bunch of unfortunate quirks prevent it from being a real contender right now. Design: Heavy Duty The first thing I noticed about the Siam 7x, other than its second screen, was how heavy and chunky it felt. At 5.99 ounces and 0.35 inches thick, the Siam 7x is heavier and thicker than the iPhone 6s, the Galaxy S7 Edge and the LG G5. (Image credit: Jeremy Lips / Tom's Guide) But there's a reason for the Siam 7x's heft: the cool second screen on its back. It's like getting a smartphone and an e-reader in one device, so the added bulk seems understandable. And the Siam 7X is definitely better-looking than the YotaPhone 2, which is made of plastic and has a chunkier appearance. Image 1 of 12 Our black review unit looks like your run-of-the-mill Android phone, with its rounded rectangle silhouette and flat surfaces. There's also a white-and-gold version, which looks quite appealing. MORE: Best Smartphones on the Market Specs Carrier: Unlocked Display Resolution: 1280x720 Form Factor: Dual Screen Operating System: Android 5.1 RAM: 2GB Memory Expansion Type: microSD Card Display (main): 5-inch 1280 x 720 IPS Display (secondary): 4.7-inch 960 x 540 Front Camera Resolution: 5 MP Camera Resolution: 16MP Size: 5.59 x 2.77 x 0.35 inches Weight: 5.99 ounces Second Screen: Very Useful, But Sometimes Burns The 4.7-inch E Ink screen on the Siam 7x's back is somewhat useful. In addition to offering e-reader functionality and simply displaying photos, the Siam 7x's rear display can show your upcoming appointments, an automatically generated business card (complete with QR code) and a music player that you can control. Since this is a touch screen, you can interact with your monochrome content as well. I loved showing off my selfies and reading books on the Siam's second display. There are other ways to get an E Ink screen added to your phone. Popslate makes a battery case for the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s and 6s Plus that adds a second monochrome screen to the device's rear. The Popslate 2 ($89 for pre-orders that ship in August; $150 retail after that) can run up to five apps at a time, including an e-reader, to-do lists, news feeds and dashboards that serve up customized info. Android lovers in the U.S. who want a second screen are out of luck. (Image credit: Jeremy Lips / Tom's Guide) I loved showing off my selfies and reading books on the Siam's second display. The phone only supports TXT, DOC, HTML and CHM formats for now. Sending something to the E Ink screen is simple enough. Just launch one of the E-Ink Apps (E-Manager, E-Reading, E-Photos, E-Music, E-Card and E-Notes) in the folder on the home page, select what you want to display, and hit the send to screen button. Siam says its creating new apps for E Ink to improve the user experience. I wish there was a single app from which to control the E Ink display instead of an app for each function. (Image credit: Jeremy Lips / Tom's Guide) Unfortunately, the E-Ink's spiral screensaver, which appears whenever you lock the phone, burns into the panel, leaving a mark that showed up on my pictures and books. Changing stuff on the page helps clear this up, and it sometimes takes more than one refresh to clean up the screen completely. Main Display and Audio The Siam 7X's 5-inch, 720p display provided a surprisingly enjoyable viewing experience. A 1080p trailer for Marvel's Doctor Strange showed off beautifully clear drops of rain and vibrant blue-and-yellow neon signs. Registering 417 nits on our light meter, the Siam 7X's display is slightly dimmer than the average smartphone (437 nits), but brighter than the YotaPhone 2 (329 nits) and the Nexus 6P (337 nits). The screen reproduced 119 percent of the sRGB color gamut, which is less colorful than the average smartphone (138 percent) and the Nexus 6P (187 percent). (Image credit: Jeremy Lips / Tom's Guide) With a Delta-E error rating of 1.97, the Siam 7X's screen is more accurate than the average smartphone (2.8) and the Nexus 6P. (A score of 0 is perfect.) The Siam 7X's 720p display is the least sharp of the lot, with the YotaPhone 2 (1080p) and the Nexus 6P (2560 x 1440) boasting higher-res displays. The Siam 7X's bottom-mounted SMS Audio speakers blasted me with booming music, but Iggy Azalea's Team sounded hollow and canned. My iPhone 6s, while not as loud, provided rounder, more distinct sound. Software: Split Personalities You might not even recognize the Siam 7X's interface as Android 5.1 Lollipop. Icons that replace standard apps look foreign: the browser looks just like an Internet Explorer symbol; Google's Play store looks like a tote bag with an Android logo on it; and the calculator has an icon that looks just like the one on iOS. The phone sometimes stuttered when switching apps, and the E Ink screen was slow to switch pages and launch different apps. A bunch of unknown apps are preloaded on the Siam 7X, such as secure messaging service Confide, Blue Magic Warranty and BestMe Selfie Camera, adding to the unfamiliar look and feel. You'll also get extraneous apps such as RunKeeper (useful only to runners) and BuzzFeed News. MORE: Best Cheap Unlocked Smartphones Oddly, our review units came with the data service disabled by default, but the company told us this will not be the case for units that ship to consumers. Cameras The 7X's 16-megapixel rear camera took bright, colorful pictures but sometimes struggled with focus. I pointed the phone at a taco truck on Fifth Avenue, saw the focus box latch on to a customer's face, then pressed the shutter button. (Image credit: Cherlynn Low / Tom's Guide) I took a bunch of photos in this scenario, and all of the pictures were blurry. I took some closer shots of the truck, and the camera seemed to focus on graffiti on a rail on the left that was slightly nearer to me than the truck was. (Image credit: Cherlynn Low / Tom's Guide) The focus issue is unfortunate, since the Siam 7X did deliver vibrant colors, such as the pink truck and a passing yellow cab. (Image credit: Cherlynn Low / Tom's Guide) When it did focus, the Siam 7X took a mouthwatering picture of some yummy fries, clearly depicting individual strands of hair on my furry jacket sleeve as well as the orange and yellow creams on the fries. (Image credit: Cherlynn Low / Tom's Guide) At night, the Siam 7X also had trouble focusing, with details such as buildings in my New York City nightscape looking blurry. The picture was also dark, with most of the foreground barely visible and buildings indistinguishable from one another. The 7X's 16-megapixel rear camera took bright, colorful pictures but struggled with focus. I wish the front camera took brighter, more vibrant selfies. My portraits looked blue and dull, even when I shot them at my favorite selfie spot that offers the best lighting in my apartment. (Image credit: Cherlynn Low / Tom's Guide) Although colors were dull, the image was sharp enough to make out the scars on my chest (for better or for worse). The camera app has a Live Photo mode that mimics Apple's identically named feature, taking a second of video before and after your shot, but saves as a video file. The Siam was slower to record Live Photos than the iPhones, though. I also liked the Multi-Angle view mode. It records like you're taking a panorama, but stores a standard-size image that can actually be dragged to see different parts of your pic. Performance: Meh With a 1GHz quad-core MediaTek processor, which is the kind of processor you'd expect to see in a sub-$300 phone, the Siam 7X delivered lackluster performance. While I didn't notice significant lag in just swiping between pages and going from an app to the home screen, the phone sometimes stuttered when switching apps. The E Ink screen was also slow to switch pages and launch apps. Notching 1,788 on the general performance test Geekbench 3, the Siam 7X is slower than the average smartphone (3,177), the YotaPhone 2 and the Nexus 6P. The Siam 7X took 9 minutes to convert a 240MB video from 1080p to 480p, slower than the average smartphone. On graphics test 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited, the Siam 7X's score of 4,907 is poorer than the average smartphone (14,838), the YotaPhone 2 and the Nexus 6P. Battery Life Having a second screen has one big drawback: battery drain. Lasting just 4 hours and 58 minutes on Tom's Guide battery test (Web surfing over AT&T's 4G LTE network at 150 nits of brightness), the Siam 7X has much less endurance than the average smartphone (8:26), the YotaPhone 2 (5:52) and the Nexus 6P (12:25). Bottom Line: Hold Off (at Least for Now) I applaud Darius Allen for his entrepreneurial spirit in creating the Siam 7X. It takes determination, perseverance and guts to produce a smartphone from scratch on your own. Allen's efforts show, as the phone offers a decent display and thoughtful E Ink apps for the second screen. MORE: How to Buy the Right Smartphone for Your Needs However, the phone just doesn't feel finished, and it lacks the polish that bigger brands have. From the misspelling of the phone's name in its own "About Phone" section to the glitchy second screen to the finicky camera focus, the Siam 7X has a homemade feel. In its current form, the Siam 7X is not good enough for you to consider as your everyday phone. The history books are filled with colossal blunders and embarrassing missteps that couldve been avoided if someone had simply said, Hey guys, maybe we, like, shouldnt? The offices of popular photo app Snapchat could have used one of those recently. As Consequence of Sound reports, the company apparently decided it would be good fun to celebrate 420 the national holiday of the worlds pothead community. That on its own is not necessarily a bad idea. After all, 420 was trending all over the web. They decided to celebrate the special occasion with one of their famous filters, which again, is not necessarily a bad idea. But its when we tell you that they also decided to pay homage to reggae legend and marijuana advocate Bob Marley with their filter that things take a turn. Instead of, say, adding a cartoon joint to users Snapchat photos or surrounding their in thick plumes of weed smoke, Snapchat issued a filter that adorned the user with a Jamaican-style beanie, dreadlocks, and changed their skin tone to match Marleys. Yeah, they created a blackface filter. Naturally, people arent happy about it, but Snapchat are insisting the Marley filter was simply a way of showing their appreciation for Bob Marley and his music and was created in partnership with the Bob Marley Estate. The lesson you should take away from this is pretty clear: if you feel like honouring a late Jamaican music legend and think the best way to do this would be to create a photo filter that basically lets you don blackface, like, maybe you shouldnt. Welp! Snapchats 420 filter celebrates Bob Marley with blackface https://t.co/R5eA0gFK9c pic.twitter.com/zHrTuJr1ht WIRED (@WIRED) April 20, 2016 Oh my god oh my god oh my god snapchat put a "Bob Marley" filter and it's bad and in poor taste, to say the least pic.twitter.com/syAHGXp3f6 Alp Ozcelik (@alplicable) April 20, 2016 Snapchat's Bob Marley 4/20 filter criticized for adding blackface: https://t.co/d7r23xIiOA pic.twitter.com/kCX77SHjMP ABC News (@ABC) April 20, 2016 Melbournes loveable psych punks Horace Bones are today unveiling their brand new single Outside a very suitable follow on from their manic single Tarantula. Like Tarantula, Outside was recorded and produced by Daniel Caswell (The Living End, Dune Rats) at the newly established Alamo Studios. Together theyre crafted the disorientated, love crossed lament that is Outside. To celebrate the release of this bristling new track, the guys will be hitting the road once again, get out and welcome another bunch of new Boners to the cause. Check out the dates dates below and the bands Facebook page for more info. Upcoming Tour Dates Friday 27th May | Vic On The Park | Sydney Saturday 4th June | The Grace Darling | Melbourne Friday 10th June | CATS @ Rocket Bar | Adelaide Earlier this week we reported on a burgeoning class action suit that disgruntled music fan Justin Baker-Rhett is looking to pursue against Kanye West. Baker-Rhett has accused West of fraudulently boosting the value of controversial streaming service Tidal. Back in February, West claimed on Twitter that the infamous streaming platform owned by Jay-Z and a cabal of other superstars (including West) would be the only place where fans would be able to hear his latest album, The Life of Pablo. Fans immediately flocked to the service, agreeing to pay the US$9.99 (AUD$13) per month fee for the otherwise maligned streaming platform. The Life of Pablo subsequently appeared on Apple Music and Spotify a couple of months later. Now, Baker-Rhett and Jay Edelson, the lawyer leading the class action suit against West, are accusing the rapper and Tidal of tricking consumers into signing up for the service, adding millions of customers to the struggling platform. According to the suit, the apparent conspiracy tripled Tidals subscriber base to three million, increased its value from US$24 million to US$84 million, and violated the privacy of fans by forcing them to give Tidal their credit card data. Speaking to triple js Hack, the US-based Edelson called Wests claims about The Life of Pablos exclusivity straight fraud which actually boosted the valuation of his company to the tune of over $60 million. Meanwhile, Australian lawyer Michael Bradley says Australians who signed up for Tidal after reading Wests tweet can join the suit, as they are as entitled as anybody to get their money back from this basic case of deception. Bradley said the most likely scenario is for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) to get involved. Theyd be looking to get everyone out of their Tidal contracts and get their money back, he told Hack. [include_post id=477207] The ACCC would say these guys [Tidal] have breached Australian Consumer law in a number of ways, including misrepresentation [Kanye fibbing about where he was releasing his album] and unfair contracts. Furthermore, Bradley said Tidals own T&Cs, such as a stipulation which claims you are not entitled to a refund if youre outside of the EU or that any dispute with the company must be settled in New York, would constitute an unfair contract under Australian law. According to Bradley, the ACCC could prosecute for these breaches of law and pursue financial penalties which could be in the millions. However, Aussies will not be able to claim any of th potential damages awarded in the US class action. We listen to a lot of music here at Tone Deaf HQ, and were the first to admit were perhaps a little biased towards sounds of the Australian variety. We do make the best music in the world, after all. In honouring our favourite Aussies, weve once again compiled a list of the most outstanding local releases you should be listening to right now whether theyre smaller indies acts or big-name essentials, these are the newest Australian records you should be adding to your must-listen list. Lets get started. Milwaukee Banks Deep Into The Night (Dot Dash / Remote Control Record) Its no secret that were long time fans of woozy-avant hip hop duo Milwaukee Banks. From their string of attention commanding singles and stunning music videos to their Rose Water EP in 2014, each release sees these guys nudge the bar a little higher when it comes to producing quality local hip hop, and their anticipated release of the debut LP Deep Into The Night is no exception. Building upon the foundations of their acclaimed 2014 Rose Water, Deep Into The Night sees producer Edo craft a sound that encapsulates whats so exciting about Australias rising underground of new electronica, while MC Dyl Thomas continues his reign as one of the countrys most enthralling lyricists. If you havent heard this LP yet youre really missing out. Habits Ugly Cry (Independent) If you can find a more fascinating Aussie act than Melbourne duo HABITS wed like to hear em. Producing self- described sad goth party jams, the local duo have released a five track EP filled to the brim with thoughtfully crafted electronic gems. Garnering hype for their live shows and the release of their singles Ether and Reverend Mother in 2015, the release of Ugly Cry sees the two piece blow all those expectations out of the water with this, one of 2016s most defining Aussie EP releases. Lower Spectrum New Haze (Pilerats) Perth based (via Melbourne) producer Lower Spectrum is one of this countrys best kept music secrets. After releasing a string of impressive EPs, singles and remixes Ned Beckley is back at it with a brand new collection of minimal electronic gems on his EP New Haze. Heady and sprawling, one incredibly fascinating element of Beckleys output is the sheer consistency of his work. Following the release of his stunning 2014 EP Traces, this new collection of tracks picks up where Traces finished ebbing and flowing into new and unexpected terrains. Nearly Oratorio Tin (Solitaire Recordings) Having garnered fans locally and internationally with his production work both in the studio and on stage with local acts Ills and Kllo, Nearly Oratorio (aka Simon Lam) is now releasing his second solo EP. Its been about five years since Lam uploaded his first ever release as Nearly Oratorio: the stripped back, yet supremely sophisticated EP Showers. Like Showers this new effort Tin is incredibly striking in Lams trademark unassuming way. The five track effort encapsulates Lams indisputable talent as a song writer, performer, producer, mixer and everything in-between. Summer Flake Hello Friends (Rice Is Nice) As weve reported, old mate Henry Rollins cannot get enough of Summer Flake, and if you spend just even the teeniest bit of time with the Adelaide projects latest release Hello Friends its pretty clear why. Following on from the release of the buoyant but melancholy single Wine Wont Wash Away Hello Friends is the perfect balance of delicately crafted yet not overthought guitar pop gems. Having performed in a swag of iconic local bands in the past, the woman behind Summer Flake, Stephanie Crease is undoubtedly one of this countrys most important songwriters of recent years, spend some time with Hello Friends and see what we (and uncle Hank) are on about. Ribongia Escapisms (Independent) Recently Italian born/Sydney based producer Ribongia was hand picked by Hermitude to join them on their massive EU tour and listening to his EP Escapisms its pretty clear why youd want this guy kicking off your parties. Featuring chilled out tropical dance numbers with more world-music infused bangers, Escapisms is a proper escape into the psyche of the well-travelled producer. Escapisms is Ribongias celebration of native African cultures such as Azonto, Gqom and Shaangan electro, both mind-opening and addictively danceable it has something for every keen electronic music lover. Man Made Mountain Congo Square (House Of Beige) Local genre-pushing hip hop duo Man Made Mountain are releasing their brand new EP Congo Square via Remi and Sensible Js burgeoning label House of Beige. This EP is made up of hip hop, jazz, soul, spoken word, and instrumental tracks spanning a whopping 14 tracks. Comprised of ARIA Award winning producer Billy Hoyle and vocalist Cazeaux O.S.L.O. Man Made Mountain draw upon their spiritual connection with the sounds of Brazil which they combine with their undeniable knack for crafting soulful, laid back hip hop journeys that both uplift and challenge the boundaries of hip hop. Beni Bjah SURViVOR (Independent) What a couple of months is has been for Aussie hip hop releases! Another title to add to your already stacked new local hip hop playlist is the latest LP from Perth lyricist and rap talent Beni Bjah. Having won WAMs acclaimed song of the year award for the LP title track Survivor, Bjah has dropped a collection of socially conscious, politically charged gut punching Australian hip hop. Telling his life story from struggle and pain, to strength and glory, from a nothing with no one, to that someone with everything, SURViVOR is an incredibly powerful effort from this West Australian talent. One of the most successful bands ever to come out of New Zealand, Shihad are set to return to Australian shores this June and July for the first time since they brought roofs down on their 2014 FVEY tour. This month sees the legendary Kiwi rockers re-releasing their 1996 self-titled breakthrough album (affectionately known as The Fish Album amongst fans), re-mastered for both a digital release and vinyl. Joining the band for this run of WA-only shows will be West Coast legends Storytime, whove forged an untouchable reputation with their singular instrumental compositions that have captivated and astounded fans for years. Shihads West Coast tour kicks off this June, but keep an eye out just in case the boys decide to drop dates for the rest of the country. Check below for all dates and ticketing details. Tickets go on sale 9am WA local time Thursday, 21st April. Shihad Australian Tour Dates Thursday, 23rd June 2016 Settlers Tavern, Margaret River Tickets: Oztix Friday, 24th June 2016 Rosemount Hotel, Perth Tickets: Oztix Saturday, 25th June 2016 Rosemount Hotel, Perth Tickets: Oztix Sunday, 26th June 2016 Newport Hotel, Fremantle Tickets: Oztix Tickets for Splendour In The Grass 2016 went on sale this morning and sold out within a matter of hours. For those lucky enough to score passes, now begins the long, laborious process of Splendour prep. In addition to making sure you have all the necessary camping equipment, for some this will involve organising transportation to the festivals Byron Bay site. However, Splendour organisers want you to be conscientious with your choices. Specifically, organisers would prefer you steer clear of campervans emblazoned with sexist slogans. As FasterLouder reports, Splendour officials have issued a specific warning to punters via their official website. If youre booking a campervan, please steer clear of sexist slogans! You know who you are. Its 2016. Get with the program. Whilst it hasnt been confirmed, many speculate the warning is aimed at patrons of Wicked Campers. The company offer super-cheap campervans, often decorated with gaudy street art, usually bearing references to drugs or sexual innuendo, which many consider to go well beyond the realms of just plain bad taste. Image via Questions For Us As the blog Questions For Us details, the slogans on Wicked Campers vehicles range from crass to downright rapey. In fact, in 2014 company chief John Webb removed an offensive slogan from his vans in the wake of a petition that garnered 110,000 signatures. According to FasterLouder, at least two acts booked for recent Splendour iterations have worked with the company. Dune Rats, who performed at Splendour 2015, have promoted the company and 2016 act Kim Churchill was featured in a promo for the company early last year. Gone Is Gone is another hard rock supergroup whose lineup reads like any metalheads wet dream. The band is comprised of Mastodons Troy Sanders, At The Drive-Ins Tony Hajjar, Queens of the Stone Ages Troy Van Leeuwen, and keyboard maestro Mike Zarin. As Rolling Stone reports, the four-piece are set to unveil their self-titled debut EP this July and theyve already premiered the EPs lead single. A sludgy stomper titled Violescent was premiered via Zane Lowes Beats 1 radio show earlier this week. According to RS, Gone Is Gone came out of Hajjar and Zarins joint sessions for various movie trailer and film scores. They eventually decided to flesh out one of their songs with a full band lineup, tapping Van Leeuwen and Sanders to join. But in addition to producing one of the most eagerly anticipated heavy releases of the year, Gone Is Gone cements a newly created music industry rule: every new heavy supergroup that forms must have at least one member of Mastodon involved. Were not sure when this was decided or just what the punishment is for not including one of the members of the mighty Atlanta outfit in your new supergroup project, but weve been keeping an eye on this trend for a while. It can be traced back to 2014, when Sanders joined members of Soulfly, The Mars Volta, and The Dillinger Escape Plan to form Killer Be Killed. The Max Cavalera-fronted outfit released an acclaimed debut LP and played last years Soundwave festival. Then, early last year, Mastodon axeman Brent Hinds formed Legend of the Seagullmen with members of Tool and Off!. The band, which featured Tool drummer Danny Carey and Off! and Burning Brides guitarist Dimitri Coats, recorded a batch of sea shanties with director Jimmy Hayward as producer. Then Hinds joined Alice in Chains frontman William DuVall, Dillinger Escape Plan guitarist Ben Weinman, Dethklok bassist Pete Griffin, and former Mars Volta drummer Thomas Pridgen to form Giraffe Tongue Orchestra, whose earlier sessions featured vocals from Juliette Lewis. Well continue to speculate over what the next project to involve a member of Mastodon will be, whilst praying all the extra-curricular activities dont mean we have to wait a few more years for a new Mastodon record. "Jackson County Exec Mike Sanders has informed JaxCo personnel officers that the next chief operating officer will be Gary Panethiere. . . "Gary gets along with everybody but now he's going to be in the direct line of fire. Make no mistake, this is a political job . . ." There has been a bit of house cleaning underway at the Courthouse . . . Here's the big deal . . .Actually, we hear the contract was signed yesterday . . .We didn't know quite what to make of this move until we talked to Jackson County Insiders who only lamented that Mr. Panethiere will be moving from a relatively safe job into a much more contentious gig.And so, the County Exec moves his chess pieces once again as just about everybody knows he's only good for another 18 months until his next step up.Developing . . . The sordid subject of college campus sexual assault has been dominating the news as of late. For those who haven't read it already . . .while everyone basically acknowledges that divisive gender politics coupled with binge drinking, casual drug use and so much experimentation of every kind make university sex life almost impossible to police And while there isan excuse for rape . . . The reality is that college campuses are becoming an increasingly dangerous and pointless part of life for a great many people. Check this report and you decide: Raped at Off-Campus Frat Houses, Students Say, and Ignored by College CHECK THIS NOTICE OF MARIJUANA LAW REFORMERS ROLLING UP AN ALL-STAR CAST OF SPEAKERS FOR A KANSAS CITY CHALLENGE AGAINST THE DRUG WAR COMING SOON!!! The Missouri Cannabis Restoration and Protection Act and Leigh Liles Bookings will be hosting the 2016 Global Marijuana March, with key speakers Shona Banda, Charlo Greene and Jeff Mizanskey, SATURDAY, MAY 7TH, 12 pm TO 8pm. Tonight our blog community smokes the Kansas City local media with this late night preview of an EPIC marijuana reform movement march on this cowtown in just a few days.To wit . . .Here's the word and something to consider on this 4/20 evening. Checkit:The march will start at the J.C. Nichols fountain at 1 west 47th ST KCMO at NOONParticipants will march through the plaza and up to South Moreland Park for a rally, press interviews and after party.We will be bringing awareness to the true cost of prohibition and calling for an end to such restrictions and harsh penalties. We will have multiple organizations there providing education including Missouri Marijuana Legalization Movement, Show Me Cannabis and Kansas City Norml. We will also have speakers of those affected by the drug war including but not limited to: Mother and Crohns patient facing 30yr prison sentence for medical cannabis; Ms. Banda has filed a federal law suit against the state of Kansas Sentenced to life in prison for cannabis only, recently released. Nationally acclaimed journalist, and winner of the 2014 Courage in Media Award. Vice President of MCRPA and mother of Autumn Gordon epilepsy patient Mother of Gavin battling Doose Syndrome epilepsyAlong with many more.This will be a moment in history as Shona Banda, Jeff Mizanskey, and these other patients and mothers come side by side with citizens to speak up against one of the biggest forms of preventable biocide this world has ever seen. Come meet them, shake hands, and ask questions to the victims of cannabis prohibition.######You decide . . . Craig Glazer: Trump Wins! Acts Presidential! Hillary Clinton all but clinched her nomination for the Democratic parties choice for President of The United States. Bernie has no path to victory anymore. Donald Trump is now the only Republican who can secure the needed plus 1200 delegates to clinch his parties nomination.We saw a new 'Donald Trump' last night. He was calm, he had no nasty words for Ted Cruz and he acted presidential. In fact he referred to Cruz as 'senator Ted Cruz' not the usual attack names. His advisors are 'winning' with him now. His victory speech was short and to the point. Trump explained that Cruz was now eliminated from the public's voting him into the nomination. He has to win over 100% of remaining delegates. Trump needs 52% now. All this over both candidates huge wins in New York.The only way Trump loses now is of course a contested convention where the 'old guard' will have to steal it from him. Trump has a couple million votes over Cruz, will nearly double Cruz with delegates earned by voters and has clearly become 'the' choice of his parties public to be the one who runs against Hillary Clinton in November. The public has spoken. They want the DONALD.Maybe most shocking Trump won 60% of female votes in New York. This belies the chant of women will not vote for Donald. They did. Only 14% voted for Cruz. Trump won in every other category and by a large amount. Donald had 61% of the vote gaining 89 delegates to Cruz's 0. John Kasich came in second. Kasich remains in the race only as a long shot in a contested race but more likely hoping Trump or Cruz picks him as V.P. This is a move Trump might make if he falls short in delegate count by convention time.Lets face it only Trump can defeat Hillary Clinton. To be honest that will be uphill. She has Barack Obama's minority voters wrapped up and that's huge. However will they turn out for her as they did Obama in general election?The G.O.P. old guard hates Trump cause they can't control him, not because he is evil. Lets face it either Hillary or Trump will do just fine as President. Trump will be better for the economy and Clinton is a seasoned political leader who knows the job. Trump will make more changes or try too and Hillary will be Obama part Two.I am now of the belief that Trump will win the nomination, even in a contested convention. He will be very close to the magic number and Cruz will be even further behind than he is today. We know the old guard wants Trump out, but it will cause a huge uproar from voters to cheat Trump from what he has earned. The American people should pick a candidate not the powers to be and that candidate like it or not is Donald Trump.########### Greece is and remains a safe destination and this must be Parliament's message to those choosing to spend their holidays in the country, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said on Wednesday Greece is and remains a safe destination and this must be Parliament's message to those choosing to spend their holidays in the country, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said on Wednesday. Addressing MPs during a debate on security requested by main opposition New Democracy, Tsipras praised ND leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis for ending his own address in Parliament on this note but criticised the decision to call for a debate on security in the first place, accusing the main opposition leader of "fishing in the murky waters of the far right." "This is the first debate that [Mitsotakis] has asked to be held in Parliament. ND did not ask for a debate on the economy, the refugee problem, unemployment, pensions or the country's growth prospects. I do not underestimate the issue [of security] but I wonder...What does this initiative seek to achieve; my question is rhetorical because the motives are clear," Tsipras noted. A linking of citizens' security with the refugee crisis "was the argument of the most reactionary forces in Europe. The position of those raising walls in Europe," Tsipras added, noting that ND was a adopting a xenophobic line. Replying to Mitsotakis, he said the ND leader's address was a "monument to danger and doom-mongering" and rejected all suggestion of a relationship between the Left and terrorism, stressing that leftists do not have and have never had relations with anti-establishment and other groups "that do not respect the value of human life." Ongoing negotiations The prime minister also replied to criticism regarding the ongoing negotiations to conclude the first review of the Greek programme, saying "ND should not bet all its money on the government's failure." Replying to other centre-left opposition leaders, namely PASOK's Fofi Gennimata and Potami's Stavros Theodorakis, he urged them to take stock of what was happening in Europe and support the government "because there can't be a centre-left without a left." The review will be completed and the figures due to be released by Eurostat on Thursday will show that there is no basis for ND's claim that the SYRIZA-ANEL government's negotiation "destroyed" the economy, Tsipras said. He pointed to Wednesday's interview given by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who said that there was no need for emergency measures for Greece and challenged ND to state its own position at the "difficult turning point." Tsipras attributed the better-than-expected results to an increase in tourism and the government's decision to vote the 100-installment settlement schemes for debts to the state, as well as the 98 pct absorption of EU funds that injected five billion euros in the Greek market. "The Cassandras will be proved wrong. The review will be concluded. We will overcome this obstacle and the very crucial discussion on reducing the debt will begin," he said, urging the political forces to enter into a discussion on how the country can return to growth. Wrapping up the debate, he said the message emerging from the discussion in Parliament was that Greece remains a safe country, with a culture of deeply held universal human values that the Greek people had demonstrated during the unprecedented refugee crisis, opening up their arms to welcome what was different and allowing solidarity and humanity to prevail. Surplus of values "Having this surplus of values as a compass, I believe that we will succeed. This year Greece will break all records for foreign visitors and after six years, Greece will begin the great effort for an exit from the crisis," he emphasised. In his own address in Parliament, Mitsotakis said that the state was "absent" on issues of security and public order and referred to the recent events with refugees on the country's border with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), which had prompted FYROM authorities to carry out acts of policing on Greek territory. "At the most sensitive point of the borders there was an absence of the forces of law," he said. He criticised the government's handling of the refugee crisis, saying it had allowed "favelas" to spring up in Piraeus and elsewhere, with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) stepping in to do the work of the Greek state. "The story about so-called humanitarianism must stop; take a walk around Idomeni and Piraeus to see where the humanitarianism is," he added, particularly criticising the "indefinite" closure of the railway line at Idomeni by protesting refugees and migrants. Mitsotakis also criticised the situation in the Athens district of Exarchia and suggested there was an "open line of communication between some of your echelons and the anti-establishment scene." PASOK party leader Fofi Gennimata, in her address, accused the prime minister of "leaving the country on automatic pilot, heading straight off a cliff" and urged him to wrap up the negotiations. Communist Party of Greece (KKE) General Secretary Dimitris Koutsoumbas blamed a "skein" of mistaken political choices and decisions by present and previous governments for the "security or the insecurity felt by citizens." Potami's Theodorakis said that SYRIZA, after feeding the voters' fear and insecurity from the opposition, was trying and failing to present everything as ideal. "Your policy is a mixture of leftist populism with a little bit of battle fatigues and power-mania. Your leftist populism, in spite of the battle fatigues, gives birth to new insecurities," he said. Source: ANA-MPA 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 Print media in Greece will strike on Thursday and Friday in a protest against pension reforms Print media in Greece will strike on Thursday and Friday in a protest against pension reforms. The 48-hour strike was decided by the Panhellenic Federation of Journalists Unions (POESY). The strike will affect electronic media and the semi-state ANA-MPA news agency as well. The strike will finish at 6 a.m. on Saturday, when broadcast media will begin their 48-hour strike. POESYs board is scheduled to meet again on Friday to decide whether to take further action against the changes to the pension system detailed in a bill the government put to public consultation this week. 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 The following four Greek beaches are included in the list of the 12 most beautiful beaches in Europe in 2016, according to the Best European Destinations tourism platform. Kavalikefta beach, Lefkada The wonderful landscapes give way to equally wonderful seascapes, with azure waters bathing white sands in coves adorned with picturesque fishing villages. Sail around the island to explore all those unspoiled spots. As a matter of fact, sailing has developped in a rather impressive way here. The modern marina in the town of Lefkada can host up to 620 vessels, attracting Robinsons in quest of fun and adventure on the island of Lefkada and on the smaller ones opposite Nydri: Prigkiponissia, Meganissi with the countless coves, Kalamos and Kastos with the secluded beaches and sea caves. If diving is your cup of tea, the lefkadian sea bed will fascinate you with the unforgettable images youll see unfold before your eyes. (Visitgreece). Apela Beach, Karpathos Island Karpathos is situated in the most south part of Dodecanese complex, between Crete and Rhodes, and is the second largest island of the complex. Basically, it is considered a mountainous island (Kali Limni is the highest peak-altitude 1.214m) full of water springs, pine-trees forests, vineyards, olives and fruit-bearing trees. The rock-caves of the island are the home of the Mediterranean seal called onachus monachus, while, along with Kastelorizo, this is the only place where we can meet the amphibian species Mertensiella luscani. According to mythology, Iapetos, the son of Uranus and Gaea [Sky and Earth] was the first inhabitant of the island. The conquerors who defined the islands character were Francs, Turks and Italians. The island extends over a surface of 301 km2, its coastline is 106 km long and it has 6,500 inhabitants. (CC). Kokkari Beach, Samos Island Kokkari is a fishing harbour of Samos Island, which has now developed into a tourist center. Still, it preserves its old traditional face, with small houses and lanes full of flowers. Kokkari is on a small peninsula full of houses which climbs up to the top of the hill with a small harbour on one side and a superb pebble beach on the other. Surrounded by green mountains and the view out to the sea, it's worth a journey. Near Kokkari are several villages like Platanakia, Valeodates, Staurinides as well as many others, which are all connected with streets or small paths. Hiking paths lead all around the island. Find many hidden pebble beaches, like Tsamadou, Tsambou, Lemonakia close to Kokkari. Zakynthos Island Zakynthos is a verdant island endowed with fertile valleys and a temperate climate (area: 406 sq. km; coastline: 123 km). Its landscape diversity has resulted in different types of beaches: there are sandy beaches in secluded coves where the tranquil waters are deep blue on the islands southeastern part; yet, if rugged cliffs and an interesting underwater world are to your liking, try the western part of the island. The full list of the 12 best beaches in Europe include: 1. Stiniva Beach | Vis Island - Croatia 2. Tossa de mar | Costa Brava - Spain 3. The Concha | San Sebastian - Spain 4. Berlanga Island | Portugal 5. Cala Acciarino | Lavezzi Island - Corsica 6. Kavalikefta | Lefkada 7. Armacao de Pera Beach | Algarve - Portugal 8. Apela Beach, Karpathos Island - Greece 9. Santa Maria Dell' Isola | Calabria - Italy 10. Ksamil beach | Ksamil Islands - Albania 11. Kokkari Beach, Samos Island 12. Zakynthos Island - Greece 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 The 2016 Euromoney Jordan Conference next week will aim to chart developments in Jordans economy, as well as explore the role the kingdoms SME and start-up sectors can play in its economic development. The Euromoney Conference will be held under the patronage of HM King Abdullah II in Amman on April 25. The highly-interactive conference entitled Finance for an Invigorated Economy will be co-hosted by the Ministry of Finance. Newly confirmed panellists from Jordans start-up and SME community include Nasser Saleh, founder and chief executive officer of e-payments provider MadfooatCom; Hussam Hammo, CEO of mobile game publisher Tamatem; and Ahmed Moor, co-founder and CEO of peer-to-peer lending platform liwwa. Meanwhile, investors confirmed to speak at the event include Rasha Manna, managing director of entrepreneur network Endeavor Jordan; and Fawaz Zubi, founder and CEO of early-stage venture capital firm Accelerator Technology Holdings. Prioritising audience participation and engagement, Euromoney Jordan Conference will feature a series of keynote interviews, debates and panel discussions incorporating questions from the audience. In an effort to encourage audience engagement, attendees, as well as those who are unable to attend on the day, have been invited to tweet their questions on the conferences themes in advance, offering them the chance to shape the direction of its discussions. Questions tweeted at @EuromoneyConf using the hashtag #emJordan will be put directly to the speakers during on-stage discussions and broadcast on a live Twitter wall, allowing interested participants to join the debate. The conference will also include an interactive Digital Debate featuring an audience poll, enabling attendees and speakers to voice their thoughts on how entrepreneurship and innovation can best be promoted in Jordan. In the run-up to the conference, delegates, as well as members of the public with an interest in the development of Jordans digital ecosystem, have been requested to vote in an online pre-conference poll found on the event webpage, the responses to which will be gathered and used to guide the debate on the day of the event. Bringing together 300 financiers, investors, business leaders, entrepreneurs and government officials, the one-day conference will feature a number of prominent keynote speakers, including Dr. Ziad Fariz, governor of the Central Bank of Jordan; Omar Malhas, Jordans Minister of Finance; Eng. Imad Fakhoury, Minister of Planning and International Cooperation; and Nemeh Sabbagh, CEO of Arab Bank. TradeArabia News Service Qatar Navigation (Milaha), a leader in marine transportation and offshore support services, has taken delivery of a new lift boat which will be deployed offshore, particularly in support of its field maintenance efforts. Abdulrahman Essa Al Mannai, president and CEO of Milaha, and Vivek Seth, CEO of Halul Offshore Services recently attended the launch and naming ceremony of the vessel at the Bohai Shipyard in China, said a statement from the company. The new build, named the Milaha Explorer, will be the biggest lift boat to be owned by a Qatari company, with a large deck area and variable load capacity, as well as the ability to accommodate 300 persons on board, it added. The lift boats capabilities will help enhance the companys diverse portfolio of offerings to the offshore oil and gas sector, particularly in support of its clients brown field operations, it said. Milaha Explorer was built by Bohai Shipbuilding Heavy Industries Co at its yard in Liaoning Province in China, and was designed by the China-based Tianjin De-Sail Machinery Equipment Co, said the statement. Al Mannai said: We are delighted to add the Milaha Explorer to our fleet, which allows us to partner ever more closely with leading global energy companies to meet their diverse needs, now and in the future. We are optimistic about continued growth opportunities despite the current challenges in the oil and gas sector, and this new build lift boat will enable us to further strengthen our position in the region and beyond, he said. Seth said: We have ordered a particularly large lift boat to address the growing demand for these types of assets, both in the region and the world. We believe that this strategic asset will help augment our status as a partner in the life extension of mature fields and enhanced field maintenance services, he added. TradeArabia News Service Omantel, a top telecom provider in Oman, has announced the landing of the Asia Africa Europe-1 (AAE-1) cable system in the French city of Marseille. Spanning approximately 25,000 km, the AAE-1 submarine cable is one of the first unique cable systems to connect Hong Kong to Singapore, Africa and Europe, all via Oman. The cable will provide an alternative and low latency short route between Hong Kong, Singapore and Europe while covering close to 50 per cent of the worlds population. Talal Said Al Mamari Omantel CEO said: The decision to join hands with Marseille to become the landing site for AAE-1 was an easy one as the city is a critical telecommunications connectivity hub, a key trade port and an entry way into Europe. This achievement would not have been possible without the support of the city of Marseille. To land a cable of this magnitude requires permits and regulatory approvals from many areas within the government. Our experience of Marseille is a city that is professional, business oriented and one that welcomes foreign investment, he added. The AAE-1 landing was made possible through the creation of Omantel France, an Omantel subsidiary company tasked with ensuring that the AAE-1 cable system is able to deliver seamless connectivity between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia while offering operators an alternative access point in Europe. Omantels carrier neutral landing facilities and new data centers in Marseille gives carriers competitive access to and from Europe via the AAE-1 cable system. Network operators arriving in Europe or seeking to access undersea cable infrastructure are often faced with expensive backhaul and interconnect costs due to monopolistic pricing. Operators in Europe that need to connect their networks to a landing station usually have no alternative but to pay. The Omantel facility will have an open and neutral model in the Interxion data centers in Marseille which will give operators new and affordable access to undersea cable infrastructure. Omantels extensive international network will provide additional protection and diversity to the AAE-1 cable system through other systems like EPEG, which is a major high-capacity system consisting of redundant undersea cables to Iran and onwards terrestrial cable all the way via Azerbaijan and Russia to Frankfurt avoiding existing heavily congested cable systems and crowded bottlenecks on the route between Asia and Europe. Sohail Qadir, VP Whole Sale Unit at Omantel said: As the first GCC operator to land a submarine cable in Europe, we are thrilled with the successful execution of this project, especially given the landing of the AAE-1 cable was concluded ahead of schedule. The AAE-1 cable represents a further step in our vision to become a truly global telecommunications player. In the coming years, further extending our reach internationally is a key focus for Omantel, and a central goal of our 3.0 transformation strategy, he added. TradeArabia News Service Cyberhawk Innovations, a world leader in aerial inspection and survey using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), has completed the first commercial oil and gas inspection in Qatar. The inspection now allows the significant cost benefits of Cyberhawks industry leading drone inspection service to be provided throughout the Qatari market, said a statement. The project, which saw the inspection of 136-m high flares, while still operational, was completed at an onshore oil and gas refinery in March 2016. An experienced team of two from Cyberhawk, including an industry qualified inspection engineer and oil and gas qualified inspection pilot, undertook the work using Cyberhawks state-of-the- art inspection UAVs. This inspection marks a major step forward in the commercial use of drones in the region, which to date have been heavily regulated by the Qatari government due to concerns over security of airspace and privacy of citizens. Cyberhawk undertook an intensive campaign, lobbying the government to explain the vast benefits on offer through UAVs, including significant cost and time savings, and how safely these unmanned aircraft can be operated by experienced operators. After a thorough assessment of Cyberhawks track record and extensive, proven case study history in the Middle East, a panel of authorities granted an exclusive permit for Cyberhawk to conduct the work in Qatar, it said. This project also builds Cyberhawks growing client base in the Middle East, where it has been commercially operating since 2012. The company has already inspected more than 75 live flares and other oil and gas structures in Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Oman. Cyberhawk CEO Craig Roberts said: Historically, the use of UAVs in Qatar for industrial purposes has been prohibited. Our teams unrivalled experience in the safe use of drones, with more than 13,000 commercial flights successfully completed in more than 20 countries worldwide, meant we had the credibility and competency to successfully gain the necessary permission to operate legally in Qatar." Business development manager Ajay Sethi, who is based in Cyberhawks Abu Dhabi office, said: These maiden flights mark a significant leap forward in the industrial inspection market in Qatar, and in particular, the support we have received from our client has been crucial in making this happen. Following the successful completion of this project, we anticipate further opportunities will be created in the region, and will continue to support and advise authorities to help extend the boundaries of commercial drone usage. Headquartered in Livingston, Scotland, and with bases in the Middle East and SE Asia, Cyberhawk carried out the very first remotely operated aerial vehicle (RoAV) industrial inspection in 2009 and since then, has completed more than 25 world firsts to date, with blue-chip customers including all oil and gas supermajors and the majority national oil companies in more than 20 countries on four continents. In the Middle East, Cyberhawk works with clients including Gasco, Dubai Petroleum, Sabic, PDO, Occidental, Daleel and Oman LNG. - TradeArabia News Service Gourmet pizza chain ZPizza has opened its first restaurant in Bahrain. The opening was hailed by the American Chamber of Commerce in Bahrain (AmCham Bahrain) as another success story of the Bahrain-US Free Trade Agreement. Located in Al Sultan Mall, Zayed Town, the artisan-inspired pizza chain appeals to traditional pizza lovers, health-conscious consumers and gourmet palates in Bahrain, said a press release. Speaking before the ribbon cutting, Qays H. Zubi, president of AmCham Bahrain, stated ZPizza is an FTA success story. In addition to being a California-based franchise, any ingredients, restaurant appliances and other required items sourced from the U.S. enter Bahrain duty free. This contributes to the companys bottom line and good value of ZPizzas unique and delicious product. ZPizza brings new jobs and opportunities to the Kingdom. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have become a vital part of Bahrains private sector and contribute substantially to the Government of Bahrain goal of greater economic diversification, he added. The Bahrain-US Free Trade Agreement is marking its 10th anniversary this year. Bilateral trade reached more than 2 billion dollars in 2015, according to the press statement. Companies and consumers in Bahrain and the U.S. benefit from the FTA in many ways, including through duty free trade in consumer, industrial and agricultural products; substantial market access across the entire services sector; strong protection and enforcement for copyright, patent, and trademark owners and intellectual property protection in the digital environment, supporting electronic media and Internet service providers, increased transparency and efficiency in customs administration, including publication of laws and regulations on the Internet and procedural certainty and fairness. All of these benefits create a ripe environment for promoting bilateral trade and investment, the statement added. TradeArabia News Service Turkish Airlines and Air Algerie have signed a codeshare agreement on routes between Algeria and Turkey, which is set to further expand travel opportunities for the customers of the two airlines. The agreement was signed in Algiers by Air Algeries CEO Mohamed Abdou Bourderbala and Turkish Airlines deputy chairman and CEO Temel Kotil, PhD. in the presence of officials from both sides. The agreement will be effective as of May 15. This new codeshare agreement is bound to broaden the commercial partnership between the two companies. At the same time, passengers of both airlines will be given more travel options between Algeria and Turkey. Under the terms of the agreement, Air Algerie and Turkish Airlines will place their carrier codes on each others flights reciprocally between Istanbul Algiers and Istanbul - Constantine. In this respect, Air Algerie will place its carrier code on Turkish Airlines flights on IstanbulOran, IstanbulTlemcen and Istanbul-Batna. In addition to this, Turkish Airlines will place its carrier code on Air Algeries flights on the routes of Alger-Sabiha Gokcen, OranSabiha Gokcen and AnnabaIstanbul. The agreement might also enable the two carriers to put their codes on the flights to other destinations operated beyond the two capitals in the future. Kotil said: We are extremely pleased to sign this codeshare agreement with Air Algerie and aim to improve our partnership to maximise the travel opportunities offered to our passengers through the networks of both airlines. As Turkish Airlines, we are operating scheduled flights to five different cities in Algeria from Istanbul and we do all our best to establish vital bridges between the two countries on these services by mutual cooperation. We are very proud of being the first codeshare partner of Air Algerie and believe that this partnership will bring enormous benefit to both airlines from a commercial perspective in rapidly growing relations between our countries. - TradeArabia News Service Qatar Executive, the private jet division of award-winning Qatar Airways, is preparing for the holy month of Ramadan and the busy summer season by adding a second all-Premium Class Airbus A319 aircraft to its luxurious charter fleet. As Ramadan is a very popular time to perform Umrah in Saudi Arabia, the two 40-seat all-Premium Class Airbus A319 aircraft are expected to be well-received by large families, as well as travel agents looking to charter aircraft for group bookings. Umrah travel by charter aircraft is made more comfortable and convenient with direct-aircraft access via the Executive terminal and customised immigration and customs processing. The Airbus A319 aircraft is perfectly suited for travel to Taif, Jeddah or Madinah from where passengers can continue the holy pilgrimage to Makkah. In addition, the Airbus A319 aircraft can serve destinations around the globe with completely customised schedules, allowing for more flexibility and the option to reach remote or multiple locations in the shortest amount of time in ultimate comfort. Passengers are offered an exclusive private jet experience, award-winning service, spacious cabins, and world-class cuisine. Qatar Airways group chief executive Akbar Al Baker said: We are delighted to offer our distinguished clientele these bespoke charter travel solutions, and to provide them with a singular, luxurious experience at the time and location of their choosing. The 40-seat aircraft with a single aisle, 2-2 seating configuration, and range of up to 3,700 nm/6,850 km, can easily connect destinations throughout the Middle East with major cities in Europe, Africa and South Asia. The seats recline and convert into 79-inch long fully-flat beds, which come with elegant Italian Frette linen and duvets. Each seat further provides generous space for work or rest, and comes equipped with power outlets, wi-fi, GSM services, USB port, audio sockets and LED lighting. The two all-Premium Class Airbus A319 aircraft complement Qatar Executives existing long-range fleet of two brand new Gulfstream G650ER and eight modern Bombardier aircraft, including three Challenger 605s, four Global 5000s and a Global XRS, all available for worldwide charter. - TradeArabia News Service You can opt out of certain types of cookies (e.g. those used in social media sharing) by choosing "I do not accept". The website will still largely function well, but with slightly less functionality in places. To manage your cookie preferences in future, visit the "Cookie Statement" link at the bottom of any page. Search News Archive : Fast Travel News Promotion Via Search, Social Media + Email Follow Us On : MUSTAFA SULTAN ENTERPRISES & HMH ANNOUNCE OPENING OF CORAL MUSCAT HOTEL & APARTMENTS Industry: Hotels Coral Muscat Hotel & Apartments was officially inaugurated last evening under the Kind Patronage of (TRAVPR.COM) UAE - April 21st, 2016 - Coral Muscat Hotel & Apartments was officially inaugurated last evening under the Kind Patronage of His Highness Sayyid Tarik Bin Shabib Bin Taimur Al Said. The opening ceremony was attended by top VIPs and dignitaries from Oman along with prominent businessmen. Owned by Mustafa Sultan Enterprises, Coral Muscat Hotel & Apartments is a deluxe 4-star property conveniently located in Qurum merely 20 minutes-drive from Muscat International Airport in Oman and enjoys close proximity to diplomatic and commercial city centre. Addressing the exclusive gathering, Mr Abdulredha Mustafa Sultan, Managing Director of Mustafa Sultan Enterprises, said, We are truly proud to announce the opening of Coral Muscat Hotel & Apartments. In every respect, this new hotel symbolizes the spirit and substance of our rich culture and hospitality and is an excellent addition to the diverse range of accommodation options available in the city. Laurent A. Voivenel, CEO of HMH, said, In keeping with the brand promise, our aim with Coral Muscat Hotel & Apartments is to offer guests a distinctive experience combining authentic Arabian hospitality with international standards. The goal is to appeal to both leisure and business travellers with an intimate, more personalized service and greater attention to detail in a comfortable environment that doesnt feel over bearing. Coral Muscat Hotel & Apartments is part of a shopping arcade and multiplex and features 88 beautifully furnished apartments including 23 one-bedroom apartments, 20 one-bedroom deluxe apartments and 45 two-bedroom apartments. Warm and welcoming, all spaces are elegantly furnished and well-equipped with modern comforts for both long and short-stay guests including families. On site are an international all-day-dining restaurant Sapphire, a chill-out pool deck and shisha outlet, terrace lounge, superb meeting venues for small to medium sized conferences as well as excellent leisure and fitness facilities such as a fully-equipped gymnasium, aerobics room and swimming pool. Laurent stressed, Oman is a key development market for HMH in keeping with the groups strategy to prioritize expansion in GCC and we are proud to debut our brands in the country. The hospitality industry in Oman is witnessing remarkable growth at the moment and we are eager to capitalize on the favourable market conditions. HMH is well-positioned in the region and equipped with the most advanced technology and we are confident Coral Muscat Hotel & Apartments will add tremendous value to our growing presence in Oman while strengthening our international portfolio. Oman saw inbound tourism numbers rise by an average of 7.4% per annum in the last decade and is targeting 12 million visitors annually by 2020 which is fueling the demand for quality mid-market hotels. Oman Ministry of Tourism has forecast hotel room capacity to expand at an annual growth rate of 5.3% over the next four years while tourism is expected to contribute 5% to the countrys GDP by 2020. About HMH Founded in 2003 in Dubai, HMH Hospitality Management Holdings is a fully-integrated hotel management company that prides itself on being one of the pioneers among local groups from the region. It provides hotel owners and developers a broad spectrum of comprehensive management solutions with five distinct, yet complementary, hotel brands catering to varied market segments from budget to luxury. These include The Ajman Palace Hotel, Coral Hotels & Resorts, Corp Hotels, EWA Hotel Apartments and ECOS Hotels. Through its dynamic operation and strategic expansion in the Middle East and North Africa, HMH has been successful in unlocking a world of opportunities while creating value for its stakeholders, associates, staff members and customers. Its existing portfolio features superb properties located in some of the most desirable destinations across the MENA region, as well as a healthy pipeline of hotels under development. For more information about HMH please visit http://www.hmhhotelgroup.com or https://www.hmhhotelgroup.com/subscribenow For media contact: Hina Bakht Vice President MPJ (Marketing Pro-Junction) Mob: +971 50 697 5146 Email: h.bakht@mpj-pr.com http://www.mpj-pr.com ### Please contact the person or company listed above for information regarding the content of this press release. TravPR.com are not the issuers of this press release and are not responsible for the accuracy of the content. Share Release : CONTACT INFORMATION Name: Hina Bakht Company: Marketing Pro Junction Phone: +971 50 6975146 Email: pressrelease@mpj-pr.com Web: PRESS RELEASE TAGS Discovering a city through the eyes of a local is priceless. Be able to live the authentic Prague life with its people. (TRAVPR.COM) CZECH REPUBLIC - April 21st, 2016 - When it comes to absorbing the full effect of a foreign citys culture, history, and excitement, many travelers turn to local guides and tour companies to help maximize the enjoyment of the journey. This sentiment is shared by travelers around the globe, and in Prague, the only company worth using is Guidilo. Born from the combination of the words guide and local, Guidilo is staffed with local natives whose excitement and energy for the breathtaking city knows no bounds. The company specializes in unique, personal tours that shy away from the touristic, crowded attractions, and instead focus on all the hidden details that make the city so wonderful to experience. There are similar companies operating worldwide but Guidilo is the first of this kind in the Czech Republic. The experience is designed to feel as if youre experiencing the city alongside a new friend, instead of a stiff tour guide, Tereza Vitkova says, co-founder at Guidilo. Hanging out with locals is always the best way to explore any destination. No guidebook can give you all the insider tips and hidden gems that the people living there ever day can offer. From our years of travelling, weve learned that a good guide can make the difference between an unpleasant walk and a wonderful lifelong memory. Globalism has opened up the world and made travel accessible and affordable. Tourism has seen a boom and many businesses have gotten their foot in the door and shaped our expectations for what traveling looks like. However Guidilo has proven that its still possible to improve and change the way we travel. Tourists traveling to the Czech Republic now have a wider spectrum of experiences to choose from to make their trip more special and authentic. Those interested in booking a visit to Prague with Guidilo should visit their website. Every tour guide passes a thorough background check, has a serious passion for the city they call home, and loves meeting the individual needs of every traveler they encounter. ### When you visit the site, Dotdash Meredith and its partners may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. Cookies collect information about your preferences and your devices and are used to make the site work as you expect it to, to understand how you interact with the site, and to show advertisements that are targeted to your interests. You can find out more about our use, change your default settings, and withdraw your consent at any time with effect for the future by visiting Cookies Settings, which can also be found in the footer of the site. Lt Gen Bhopinder Singh (retd) China has been a cradle of religio-cultural diversities that were historically tolerated by the various ruling dynasties who claimed the mandate of heavens to shape the overarching traditions, philosophies and cultures as opposed to the rigidity of a formal and definitive religion. However, since the Communist Party of Chinas reign in 1949, Mao Zedong initially suppressed all expressions of societal religiosity, only to see a certain liberal acceptance of religious autonomy in recent times, as long as it didnt conflict with regime survival. Amidst a total population base of 1.4 billion, an estimated 1.7 to 2 per cent are of the Islamic faith (approximately 25 million). In addition to the majority Han population (91.6%), the Chinese government officially recognises 55 ethnic minorities (8.4% of population), of whom 10 are predominantly Sunni Muslims. Old manuscripts claim the advent of Islam to the 620s when Sad ibn Abi Waqqas, uncle of the Islamic Prophet, supposedly came to China on a mission and established the Huaisheng Mosque, over 1,300 year ago. Broadly speaking, there are two distinct groups of Islamic adherents in China the majority Hui people (who are similar to the majority Han Chinese in terms of ethnic-lingual profiles, spread across China) and the more restive Turkic ethnicity based Uyghurs, who are concentrated around the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. Interestingly, official Chinese cartography encompasses the Indian territory of Aksai Chin, within the Xinjiang Autonomous region affording it borders with India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Mongolia and Russia. Within the cauldron of Xinjiang, the majority Uyghurs (46.4% of population) aggressively jostle with Han (39% of population) to practise, preserve and perpetuate the Uyghur identity and relevance. It is the forbidden lands of Xinjiang that test the Chinese regimes stranglehold over the global Pan-Islamic wave of puritanical militancy and secessionist tendencies often, resulting in violence, popular unrests and hidden fissures that are kept away from the glares of the world. Chinese absolutism is practised to ensure the lid is kept on the regions simmering dissent by the Uyghurs. However, the Chinese governments Uyghur-specific discrimination has resulted in further alienation and hardening of the Uyghur Muslims and their causes of separatism. The famed Chinese strike hard approach against the three evils of separatism, extremism and terrorism has clearly divided the Islamic adherents into two groups one of the patriotic Chinese Muslims, i.e., Hui people (they have no secessionist group or tendencies), who are allowed to practise their faith and beliefs, and the other of the discriminated Uyghur, who pray in different mosques from the Hui, and who have East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) as the main secessionist group to form an independent East Turkestan. The divide-and-rule of the Chinese government is clinically effective with the Hui Muslims seamlessly integrated into the Chinese mainstream. The taint of Islamic terror and fundamentalism is restricted to the Uyghurs. Usual tactics of repressive security cover to blank out news, demographic resettlements of Hans and the economic discriminations have increasingly marginalised the Uyghurs and therefore turned Xinjiang into a veritable tinderbox. The footprint of the ETIM is visible from the cadres operating in Afghanistan (where they were trained by Al Qaida and 22 of them were arrested and detained in Guantanamo Bay), Pakistan (where they attacked Chinese engineers in the port city of Gwadar) and even in the ongoing conflict in Syria-Iraq, where the Uyghur cadres are seen fighting along the Al-Qaida affiliate, Nusra Front. However, the ETIM (or Turkistan Islamic Party, as they call themselves) have been designated as a terrorist group by the US under Executive Order 13224 (blocking financial transactions) and the US Terrorist Exclusion List (which debars members from entering US). This terror designation is further confirmed by the UN, UAE, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and obviously China, thereby squeezing and limiting international support and funding. But, they have competing baiters amongst the ISIS, Al-Qaida and even the Taliban who empathise with the Uyghur cause and recruit their foot soldiers, arming and training the frustrated Uyghurs to the ultimate consternation of the Chinese. Strategically for China, the import of Xinjiang unrest goes beyond the fears of Uyghur Islamic fundamentalism and militancy it also tests the Chinese ability to cover its intrinsic fault lines in Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Taiwan, each of which has its own secessionist rationales against the mainland-Han Chinese rule. It forces doubts in the minds of the Chinese strategists and policy planners to invest in a restive area that is the principal highway of the strategic China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), as indeed the gateway to the energy-flush Central Asian Republics that are key to keep the Chinese engines of economic growth running. So far, heavy boots on ground and providential international environment of most countries clamping down on terror groups has spared Xinjiang from going completely out of control, though over 200 acts of terrorist strikes have been attributed to the ETIM. There is no visible or credible Chinese governmental effort to economically or socially try and integrate the restive Uyghurs. On the contrary, it is the sole strike hard approach, bereft of any inclusive imperatives, that is getting deployed and the same has diminishing returns in the modern era, especially for a religious movement and insurrection that knows no official border or emotional appeal amongst the adherents across the globe. Its appeal is theoretically more readily available than say for a Tibet or Taiwan that is restricted to its constituents, beyond a point. Xinjiang is the underbelly of a glaring Chinese reality that potentially posits the duplicitous Chinese stand of vetoing against India in the UN forum towards Indian efforts to designate Maulana Masood Azhar as a terrorist, as the Chinese still feel comfortable to egg on the Indo-Pak game of cloak and dagger as a willing accomplice of Pakistan. Though like Pakistan, which self-admittedly is atoning the sins of supporting fundamentalism, this is Chinese augury for chickens to come home to roost in Xinjiang. The dynamics and intrigues of international diplomacy may force the wary Western powers and the other stakeholders to recognise the tactical utility of the Xinjiang unrest as a counter-check to Sino aggression, duplicity and hegemony in the region. The writer is former Lt-Governor of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and Puducherry. G Parthasarathy PAKISTAN is one of the few countries today, which puts its defence minister in a virtual purdah. All those who deal with Pakistan, have heard of, or seen the ubiquitous Gen Raheel Sharif. Does anybody, however, know the name of the person who holds the high office of the defence minister in Pakistan? The peripatetic General Sharif is in Washington on one day, in Kabul on the next. He is also frequently travelling with Nawaz Sharif to countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran. When VIPS, including Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, or US Vice- President Joe Biden visit Pakistan, they visit the GHQ, to pay respects to the army chief. But defence minister Khwaja Asif, a Muslim League stalwart, is rarely seen or heard. Pakistans defence ministry hardly has the gumption or authority to turn down anything that the army chief based in the GHQ in Rawalpindi says or does. General Sharif has never been seen accompanying, meeting or talking to the hapless Khwaja Asif. He is only seen sitting opposite, or besides the Prime Minister, behaving like a co-equal of the Prime Minister. Even federal ministers and the Prime Ministers brother and Chief Minister of Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif, have to seek permission to meet the regal General Sharif in his hallowed GHQ. The army regards itself as being above the law, disregarding notices from the Supreme Court on its operations in Baluchistan and undermining the courts efforts to bring Musharraf to book for violating Pakistans constitution. Given this exalted role of the GHQ, one was surprised to recently read a widely publicised statement made to a parliamentary committee by Pakistans defence secretary. Incidentally, given their contempt for bloody civilians, the Pakistan army routinely insists that the defence secretary should be a retired army officer. Defence secretary Lt Gen Alam Khattak told the parliamentary committee on April 6 that Indias infamous R&AW had set up a special cell to sabotage the much-hyped China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which the Pakistan army believes is the magic wand to solve all the countrys economic ills. General Khattaks statement came the day after General Sharif said the same thing while blaming India for destabilising Pakistan. General Khattak added the usual masala to his statement by alleging that Indian consulates in Jalalabad, Kandahar and Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan were working with that countrys National Directorate of Security (NDS), the Afghan counterpart of the ISI, by carrying out subversive activities in Baluchistan and the Pashtun tribal areas of Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan. Such allegations against India are not new. The recent addition has been the references to that notorious Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav, who was first said to have been arrested along the border with Afghanistan and was later claimed to have been arrested in Baluchistan. But here again, Pakistan finds itself in a bind. By denying India customary consular access to an arrested Indian national, statements made by Jadhav while under Pakistani custody will be seen to have been made under coercion. If Pakistan releases him, which seems unlikely for the present, Jadhav will sing a different tune and severely embarrass his captors with the many truths he will reveal. The Jadhav episode has also cast a shadow on Pakistans efforts to mend its strained relations with Iran. The bumptious General Sharif chose not to be present when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif met visiting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. With his customary swagger stick in his hand, he separately met President Rouhani the next day. The obedient army spokesman dutifully tweeted that his exalted boss had given evidence to the Iranian President about the evil Indians using Iranian soil to destabilise the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. An obviously irritated President Rouhani bristled with anger, when he was asked about this, noting that India, like Pakistan, was a friendly country. The Iranian embassy reiterated this a few days later. All this is occurring at a time when Pakistans relations with Afghanistan are going through a critical phase. With great difficulty and with significant help of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the head of the infamous Taliban linked Haqqani Network, the ISI has united a number of top Taliban leaders, including members of Mullah Omars family, with its handpicked protege, Mullah Akhtar Mansour. The ISI calculation had been that with the Obama Administration beating a hasty retreat from Afghanistan, its Taliban proteges would take over, with China facilitating this process of transition. China obviously expects that a Pakistan-sponsored regime in Kabul would help it in eliminating the insurgency by its Muslim population in its neighbouring Xinjiang province. With the Taliban determined to seize control of more and more territory, one can expect heavy casualties in the ensuing months in Afghanistan. More so, as the China-US-Pakistan brokered peace talks, which are said to be Afghan led and Afghan owned, are going to be headed nowhere. Pakistan cannot remain unaffected by the conflict across the Durand Line. General Sharifs operation Zarb-e-Azb in Pashtun tribal areas has resulted in nearly one million Pashtun tribesmen being uprooted from their homes, with bleak prospects of early return and rehabilitation. The Tehriq-e-Taliban, now operating from Afghan soil, has hit back, with attacks on institutions in Pakistan, linked to the Pakistani military. For the first time, the army is fighting its citizens in all four provinces of Pakistan. With Pashtuns comprising around one-fourth of the army, its generals will have to start looking at the reliability of its Pashtun soldiers. General Sharif has obviously learnt nothing from history. The only time Punjabi soldiers have prevailed over Pashtuns was under the command of a Sikh General, Hari Singh Nalwa, during the reign of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Sadly for Pakistan, General Sharif does not have the attributes of military leadership of Hari Singh Nalwa. It is clear that the present dispensation in Pakistan has neither the imagination, nor foresight, to escape the inevitable consequences of its blunders in Afghanistan. Moreover, after the revelations of Nawaz Sharifs familys offshore accounts in Panama, Pakistans Prime Minister himself faces an uncertain future and tempestuous times ahead. While continuing a process of engagement with Pakistan, we should not have exaggerated expectations of any significant breakthrough. General Sharif should be left to stew in his own juice, along Pakistans western frontiers. In setting aside the Modi governments March 27 decision to bring Uttarakhand under President's rule, the Uttarakhand High Court has rolled back a blatant misuse of Article 356. In restoring the Harish Rawat government and directing a floor test on April 29 in the Uttarakhand Assembly, the High Court has, in effect, enunciated a sound jurisprudential principle: the courts cannot become legal enforcer of political illegalities. The imposition of President's rule just a day before the Assembly was set to have a floor test was a brazen misapplication of Article 356. No one need be surprised if the Modi government chooses to challenge the High Court judgment in the apex court. The Modi government is too enamoured of its political calculations to take a well-deserved rebuff lying down. Besides quashing the presidential proclamation, Chief Justice KM Joseph has done the polity another good turn. He insisted on reiterating a fundamentally sound principle: the President has no absolute power. Chief Justice Joseph made it abundantly clear that any exercise of presidential authority under Article 356 is subject to judicial review. This was a principle well-settled in the Bommai case and it is inexplicable that the NDA government should have invented the argument of political wisdom of the President to circumvent the Bommai case judgment. The High Court should be complimented for seeing through the inherent jurisprudential mischief in the Centres argument. The President, in the constitutional scheme of things, has no wisdom in such matters. All his wisdom is circumscribed by the aid and advice he receives from the Council of Ministers, headed by the Prime Minister. The decision to use or, rather misuse Article 356 in Uttarakhand was a political decision of the Modi government. The Thursday afternoon judgment also pre-empted the possibility of the Modi government revoking Presidents rule before the High Court could rule on the constitutionality of the March 27 proclamation. Only a few months ago the BJP had first abused Article 356 to dismiss a Congress government in Arunachal Pradesh, impose Presidents rule, and, then used the interregnum to manoeuvre to install a new government before Parliament would get a chance to vote it down. This was nothing but constitutional chicanery. The Thursday verdict needs to be applauded as politically fair and constitutionally sound. Suhail A Shah Anantnag, April 21 Former Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah on Thursday said Pakistan is in the hearts of Kashmiri people and money would not change that. Kashmiris love Pakistan and economic packages are not going to change that. India has spent a lot of money in Kashmir but they have not been able to take out Pakistan from the hearts of Kashmiri people, said Farooq. He was addressing a gathering in the Khannabal area of Anantnag on the death anniversary of senior National Conference leader Abdul Gani Shah. The former Union Minister was talking about the recent controversy at Srinagars National Institute of Technology. People in Delhi complain that Kashmiri people, despite so many economic packages, keep loving Pakistan. I tell them Kashmiris will take the money and still keep following their heart, he said. He said India and Pakistan should sort out their issues while emphasising that the status quo on Kashmir issue would remain intact. Talking to the media later in the day, Farooq called the removal of an Army bunker from Handwara town in north Kashmir a welcome step. Most of the bunkers should go, he said. The NC president said the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) should also be reviewed and removed from areas wherever it was not needed. He raised the question that why wasnt AFSPA implemented in Chhattisgarh, All the time CRPF jawans are being killed there. Why dont they have AFSPA there? Samaan Lateef Tribune News Service Srinagar, April 21 Hospitals in Kashmir are facing an acute shortage of medical supplies after the PDP-BJP governments much-hyped J&K Medical Supplies Corporation Limited (JKMSCL) failed to procure medicines and equipment even after nine months of its establishment. Officials said the JKMSCL had not invited tenders for the past nine months to purchase life-saving drugs and equipment for the government hospitals, leading to a crisis. The situation is alarming in the primary, secondary and tertiary care hospitals, where doctors prescribe medicine for the patients from private shops. Hospitals are short of life-saving drugs, suture material and essential disposables such as tubes for ventilators, said a senior doctor at Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital in Srinagar. He said the shortage of supplies had adversely affected the functioning of the hospital. At the Valleys lone children hospital, GB Pant, the critical care units have almost become defunct. We witness a huge rush of patients, but the supplies of antibiotics have exhausted long ago, putting the lives of children at risk here, said a doctor at GB Pant Hospital. The situation is no good in the peripheries, where the hospitals are facing an acute shortage of drugs. We do not have even bandage here, said a doctor at a Public Health Centre in north Kashmirs Baramulla district. In several hospitals, CT scan and MRIs machines are defunct as the hospitals are not authorised to repair the equipment. After the PDP-BJP government dissolved the procurement committees of the tertiary care and peripheral hospitals, former Health and Medical Education Minister Lal Singh had inaugurated the JKMSCL on June 1, 2015. He had promised that medicines would be supplied through the corporation from August 2015. However, the JKMSCL failed to function, causing shortage of supplies in the government hospitals across the state. Managing Director, JKMSCL, Dr Yashpal Sharma had set March 1, 2016, as the deadline for supplying drugs and equipment to hospitals, but the hospitals received no supplies. Minister of State for Health Asiea Naqash said the hospital authorities had been authorised to procure 25 per cent of the supplies. We have informed them (hospital authorities) verbally to procure 25 per cent of the supplies. A written order will reach them from the secretariat within three days, said the minister. Tribune News Service Ludhiana, April 20 The BML Munjal University (BMU) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Singapore Management University (SMU). In keeping with its core philosophy of creating a world-class, research-oriented university focusing on the advancement and dissemination of practically oriented knowledge, benchmarked with the best global standards, the university will work with SMU towards establishing joint academic and research programmes. Established in 2000, SMU is already a well-known Asian city university, and is internationally recognised for its world-class research and distinguished teaching. Modelled after the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, SMU has quickly established itself as a premier university capable of generating high-impact and rigorous research that addresses Asian issues of global relevance. SMU education is reputed for its highly interactive pedagogy, with seminar-style teaching in small-sized classes. Since its inception in 2014, BMU is committed to creating an industry-immersive learning environment through innovative teaching, learning, and research techniques. BMU fosters the spirit of entrepreneurship to inspire students and faculty to push the boundaries in terms of research and innovation. Through its partnerships with leading corporates and universities such as KPMG, IBM, Siemens, and Imperial College London, BMU has created a platform for its students to gain global exposure and skills and opportunities for its faculty to collaborate with the industry to conduct cutting-edge research. Talking about the collaboration, Akshay Munjal, President, BML Munjal University, said: We are delighted to partner with SMU. It is a significant step in our endeavour to create a world-class teaching and learning environment. Both universities are aligned in their vision of providing research-based, hands-on practical learning to their students and we see significant synergies and gains for both parties. This collaboration will provide our students and faculty with a great opportunity to gain relevant global insights and exposure. Tribune News Service New Delhi, April 21 President Pranab Mukherjee will be on a major diplomatic foray this coming month as he heads out to Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and China. The President was earlier scheduled to visit Singapore along with his China trip, but sources privy to the planning said the Singapore visit had been cancelled due to technical reasons. Mukherjee is headed to a two-nation tour of Papua New Guinea and New Zealand from April 28 while the China trip will take place end of May. The Singapore visit is likely to take place in the second half of the year now. From a strategic view point, the China visit of the President will be very important. The President will travel to Beijing and the Chinese industrial city of Guangzhou which has strong trade links with India. Mukherjees visit was formally announced today in Beijing by the National Security Adviser Ajit Doval while the exact dates are expected to be announced later. India-China relations have never been easy and Chinas recent bid at the UN to prevent JeM chief Masood Azhar from getting designated as an international terrorist has caused much heartburn in India. The Presidents visit will be followed by PM Narendra Modis visit to Chinese city Hangzhou to attend the G20 Summit in September. Dehradun, April 21 Uttarakhand Assembly Speaker Govind Singh Kunjwal today said the "effective strength" of the House has now come down to 62 as the state High Court has upheld the disqualification of the nine rebel Congress MLAs. "The effective strength of the Uttarakhand Assembly is now 62 with the disqualification of the nine rebel Congress MLAs," Kunjwal said. Out of the 62 MLAs, 27 belong to Congress, PDF has six and BJP 28. It also includes a nominated Anglo-Indian member. The nominated member is also eligible to vote in the vote of confidence in the Assembly on April 29, he said. Asked about rebel BJP MLA Bhim Lal Arya, against whom his party had submitted a petition to the Speaker seeking his disqualification, Kunjwal said the petition has not been disposed of yet and Arya can take part in the trust vote. The imposition of President's rule in the state was today quashed by a High Court division bench, which restored the dismissed Congress government. Directing revival of the Harish Rawat government, which was dismissed by the Centre on March 27, the court ordered that he should seek a vote of confidence in the Assembly on April 29. PTI Tribune News Service Chandigarh, April 21 On the request of Canada's Foreign Ministry, Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee (PPCC) president Capt Amarinder Singh has cancelled his plans to hold political rallies in Toronto and Vancouver. However, he will interact with the Punjabi diaspora during his six-day visit to Canada that begins on April 23. Amarinder was informed by India's Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar on the phone that Canadian rules, under the Global Affairs Policy, prevented foreign governments and individuals from conducting election campaigns in Canada. "Since the host country does not allow such events, I thought it was better to cancel them," he said, adding that "I look forward to meeting my fellow Punjabis in their homes and in small groups in compliance with Canada's laws," Captain said. Sources said the Canadian Government had taken up the matter after human rights group Sikhs For Justice objected to Amarinder's initial plan to hold rallies. Tribune News Service Dehradun, April 21 Doctors of the Provincial Medical Health Services (PMHS) today boycotted work across the state to protest the murder of Dr Sunil Kumar Singh, child specialist, posted at the additional primary health centre (PHC) at Jaspur in Udham Singh Nagar district on Wednesday. The PMHS doctors at a meeting today demanded immediate arrest of the culprits who shot Dr Sunil while he was discharging his duties at the PHC. There is a sense of fear and insecurity among the doctors. The administration and the police need to take adequate steps to ensure such incidents do not take place, said Dr SK Goswami, president of the PMHS. The doctors also demanded compensation for the victims family and security for themselves. It is quite painful for us to know that our colleague was murdered while he was working. Doctors are not safe here, he said. Meanwhile, there were skeletal emergency services in the hospitals. Health services in other parts of the state remained paralysed. The doctors are boycotting OPD and emergency duties but not the postmortem duties, said Dr Naresh Napalchayal, general secretary of the PMHS. The staff of the Doon Medical College also supported the boycott call. The emergency services at the hospital are being run by pharmacists and nurses. However, I have asked the junior residents to take on the emergency duties so that the work is not affected, said Dr Napalchayal. Though the doctors have given a boycott call for three days, they are likely to review their decision tomorrow due to the fluid political situation in the state. Beijing, April 21 China wants to have deeper military ties with Afghanistan, including counter-terrorism intelligence cooperation and joint drills, a senior Chinese officer told a visiting Afghan envoy. China is working with Pakistan and the US to broker peace talks to end a Taliban insurgency that has raged for 15 years in Afghanistan, but last month the militants refused to take part. The US-led NATO mission ceased combat operations at the end of 2014, and has withdrawn most of its forces. China says it does not seek to fill a void left by their withdrawal. But, it has promised to play a huge commercial role in helping rebuild the country, where the Taliban seek to re-establish their Islamist regime. China is very nervous at the prospect Islamist militants from its restive far western region of Xinjiang getting support from the Taliban and other groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan and central Asia. Fang Fenghui, a member of the powerful Central Military Commission which controls Chinas armed forces, told Mohammad Hanif Atmar, the Afghan presidents national security adviser that their two armed forces had always had good relations, Chinas Defence Ministry said late on Wednesday. China is willing to deepen counter-terrorism intelligence, joint drills, personnel training and other areas of practical cooperation, the ministry cited Fang as saying. China wants to promote a regional counter-terrorism mechanism to jointly protect regional peace, stability and development, he added. Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which prizes its long-time alliance with China, have been fraught with mistrust in the past. For year, Afghan leaders repeatedly accused Pakistan of harbouring Taliban militants and covertly supporting their cohorts. But, the Talibans recent refusal to join a peace process and ongoing offensive has raised doubts over how much influence Islamabad still exerts over the militants. Atmar told Fang Afghanistan was willing to work with China to fight terrorism, and explained the Afghan role in combatting the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which Beijing blames for much of the violence in Xinjiang, the ministry said. Chinas official Xinhua news agency said Atmar also met Chinas domestic security chief Meng Jianzhu, where they discussed counter-terrorism too. Chinas vice president last year pledged infrastructure and security support for Afghanistan, signing several deals during a rare high-level Chinese visit to Kabul. China has become increasingly concerned about what it calls extremists and separatists Xinjiang, where violence has killed hundreds in recent years, and sees security in Afghanistan as key to stability at home. Rights groups, however, blame unrest in Xinjiang on the frustration of the largely Muslim Uighur people from the region over Chinas controls on their culture and religion, charges Beijing denies. Reuters Kuala Lumpur, April 21 Malaysia, Australia and China will hold a ministerial meeting on missing Malaysia Airlines plane MH370 in June end to discuss the next steps to be taken regarding the tracking of the jet that mysteriously disappeared over two years ago. The meeting would, among others, discuss whether to proceed with phase 4 of wreckage recovery process or continue with current search efforts led by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), Malaysia's Deputy Transport Minister Ab Aziz Kaprawi said on Thursday. "A total of 103,000 sq km out of the 120,000 sq km of the designated search area at the Southern Indian Ocean have been covered so far. It will take about two more months to complete the whole area," he said. He said Malaysia would also seek assistance from Mozambique, where the debris said to belong to MH370 was found. Malaysia would request for Mozambique authorities advice if there was any further discovery of debris there and to decide on whether it would send its team there, he said. "Other than the flaperon and other debris found so far, there is no new discovery (apart from those mentioned in the report) including the stenciled key words and numbers on the horizontal stabiliser and the wing, which fully matches the font used by Malaysia Airlines," he said. The Joint Agency Coordination Centre MH370 Operational Search in its latest update yesterday stated that the governments have agreed that there will be no further expansion of the search area in the absence of credible new information that leads to the identification of a specific location of the aircraft. The Boeing 777 jetliner vanished from radar screens en route to Beijing after taking off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8 2014 with 239 people, including five Indians, aboard. Australia is leading the underwater search effort to find the plane in the southern Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, Malaysia said the Australian Transport Safety Board's (ATSB) report that two pieces of debris found in Mozambique were "almost certainly" from MH370, is in line with the government's announcement that the flight ended in the southern Indian Ocean. Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said the drift pattern prepared by experts had shown that debris from the aircraft could have reached Mozambique and South Africa. "This is one of the analysis that can show that MH370 had indeed ended in the southern Indian Ocean. Secondly, the debris will also be carefully analysed to determine how the flight ended. If more debris is found, it can also help to determine how. "Whether it crashed suddenly, slowly or whether it exploded, much can be found out through the debris," he said. He added that both Mozambique and South Africa had agreed cooperate in the search for more debris. "We will send our team there if more debris is found. Right now we will not be sending our team there yet as both countries had agreed to help us in the search. PTI Riyadh, April 21 US President Barack Obama met Gulf leaders in Saudi Arabia on Thursday to push for an intensified campaign against the Islamic State group, despite strains in ties with Washington. Making what is likely his final presidential visit to Americas historic allies, Obama posed for a summit photo with the six regional leaders, including Saudi King Salman, before beginning about four hours of talks at a royal palace. With nine months left of his term, the President is also again seeking to reassure his Sunni allies upset over American overtures to their regional rival, Shiite Iran. The summit comes after Washington reported progress in recent months against the Sunni extremists of IS, who seized large parts of Iraq and Syria. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states are part of the US-led coalition which has been carrying out air strikes against IS. In a bid to keep up the momentum against the jihadists, Defence Secretary Ashton Carter in Riyadh with Obama announced on Monday that the US will send more troops and Apache attack helicopters to Iraq. Washington also wants to emphasise the reconstruction of cities taken back from IS. Yesterday, Carter pleaded for greater Gulf financial and political involvement in Iraq, which is battling an economic crisis as well as the extremists. Carter made the comments after meeting his Gulf Cooperation Council counterparts. I encourage our GCC partners to do more, not only militarily as the Saudis, as the UAE have been doing... but also politically and economically, Carter said. Sunni support for multisectarian governance and reconstruction in Shiite-majority Iraq will be critical to ensuring the defeat of IS, the Pentagon chief said. On the eve of the summit, US Secretary of State John Kerry was also in Riyadh, where he held talks with Deputy Crown Prince and Defence Minister Mohammed bin Salman. Bahrains King Hamad said in a statement that the summit clearly reflects outstanding relations between the GCC countries and US. He hoped the talks would come up with results that would help handle the grave regional and international challenges, (and) boost regional peace and security. AFP Riyadh, April 21 The United States will deter and confront aggression against Gulf Arab monarchies, who continue to have concerns about threats from Iran, President Barack Obama said after meeting their leaders to iron out strains in their alliance. Obama came to Saudi Arabia hoping to allay Gulf states' fears over Iranian influence and encourage them to douse sectarian tensions in an effort to confront the threat posed by jihadist militants like Islamic State. "I reaffirm the policy of the United States to use all elements of our power to secure our core interests in the Gulf region and to deter and confront external aggression against our allies and our partners," he said in Riyadh on Thursday after the summit with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The president added in his statement that all the leaders were committed both to the fight against Islamic State and to de-escalating regional conflicts, and addressed the Gulf countries' concerns on Iran. "Even with the nuclear deal we recognise collectively that we continue to have serious concerns about Iranian behaviour," he said. There was no denying the strains that have afflicted ties between Washington and its Gulf partners, though, even as they have worked together on shared concerns such as the wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, however. "What is true between the United States and the GCC, as is true with all of our allies and friends is that at any point of time there are going to be differences," Obama said. Footage and photographs aired on state media showed the leaders at a large circular table under a chandelier, with Obama sitting with King Salman on his left and the Abu Dhabi crown prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahayan on his right. Years of frustration among Gulf countries, aggravated by more recent stumbles, may have made Saudi Arabia and its regional allies less receptive to Obama on his fourth and most probably final trip to the kingdom. The Middle East is mired in a contest for influence between a bloc of mostly Sunni countries, including the conservative, pro-Western Gulf monarchies, and Shi'ite Iran and its allies. Most GCC states have been disappointed in Obama's presidency, during which they believe the US has pulled back from the region, giving more space to Iran. Reuters Islamabad, April 21 Pakistans two senior Generals were among 11 top officers dismissed by Army Chief General Raheel Sharif on charges of corruption, a rare move in the country where the military wields enormous power. A Lieutenant General, one Major General, five Brigadiers, three Colonels and one Major were dismissed by the Army Chief on corruption charges, security officials said. Two soldiers were also dismissed on similar charges. Gen Raheels move came days after he demanded across the board accountability, saying the ongoing war against terrorism and extremism cannot bring enduring peace and stability unless the menace of corruption is not uprooted. Therefore, across the board accountability is necessary for the solidarity, integrity and prosperity of Pakistan, he had said. No official announcement was made but all local TV channels reported the sacking of the officers. Gen Raheels move to dismissed the top officers assume significance in the wake of raging scandal in Pakistan over embattled Prime Minister Nawaz Sharifs family offshore wealth after the Panama Papers leak mentioned his childrens name for having shell companies. PTI Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman and Chairman of Odesa Regional Administration Mikheil Saakashvili have discussed the creation and functioning of the new customs office in Odesa region. "We've discussed the possibility of completing construction and the launch of a new customs office in Odesa region where the process would quicken and it would be impossible to take bribes thanks to technologies and new employees with large salaries selected at tenders," Saakashvili wrote on his Facebook page on Wednesday. He said that he also discussed with the president and prime minister the issue of accelerating road construction, Prosecutor General's Office, Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and State Fiscal Service staff reshuffling. He said that the prime minister asked several days to submit his proposals. "On Saturday I will get the final answers and I inform residents of Odesa region and society about them," he wrote. Rolf Lockwood Innovation and trucking go hand in hand. Always have, always will. Its one of the things I love most about this game. These days most of the innovations we see have to do with saving a buck, and we dont often see one aimed at making drivers more comfortable. The steering-wheel job is one of the toughest out there, so I was especially intrigued when I ran across a pair of entrepreneurs in eastern Canada with what seems like a fine idea. How about a custom-fitted truck seat that can be adjusted remotely by a medical professional? Like from miles and miles away. No matter where the driver is, in fact. Its an interesting tale. Two enterprising guys in Moncton, New Brunswick, have been busy over the last three years developing an altogether new kind of truck seat. With a background in custom wheelchair design and physical rehabilitation, Shawn Leger took an idea to his inventor friend Darrell Mullen. The goal was to develop a very capable, medically proven seat, and together they formed Force 3 Innovations. Their initial research involved buying a few seats, which they tore apart to see what was good and what was bad about the designs. Their conclusion? They liked the suspensions but thought they could improve on the average main cushion and backrest for drivers with chronic back issues. So they designed what they call a seat topper that can be fitted to existing suspensions. They took prototypes to three universities for testing and validation. Finished late last year, the testing showed that the Force 3 seat improved comfort markedly. But there were also cognitive benefits. As Leger explains it, by focusing on the pelvis in their design, theyre able to adjust the seat to optimize a drivers posture, remove any slumping, and thus open up the chest so that the lungs take in more oxygen. The result is demonstrably improved alertness and less fatigue. When its ready for market (in the next 7-12 months) the idea is that the seat will be customized for each individual driver, with medical consultation in the process as required. Adjustability is near infinite in order to accommodate all the weird and wonderful human body shapes out there. And thats where remote adjustment will enter the picture. If a driver finds his seat uncomfortable three or four hours or three or four days down the road, he could call Force 3, describe whats going on, and from home base theyd make adjustments through the ether. Thats phase two, says Leger. First they have to seal investor deals and find the right manufacturer. In the meantime, theyll help make your present seat do a better job, if you happen to find yourself in Moncton. For example, they just put a driver with a broken tailbone back to work. Hed been unable to sit for more than half an hour, so Leger and Mullen devised an air bladder and installed it in the fellows seat cushion. Hes back driving again. One aspect of this fledgling companys progress will be especially interesting: Leger says that remote connectivity will allow them to collect data on how people sit. Nobody has done that before, at least not this way, and Id guess that will prove to be useful science. Prime Minister of Ukraine Volodymyr Groysman has said that the government of Ukraine will be forced to raise tariffs. "I have no choice," Groysman said on "Left Bank with Sonia Koshkina" TV program aired on Channel 24. According to him, low and "economically ungrounded tariffs spawn rampant corruption. People who now claim they don't have a kopek actually earned tens and hundreds of billions (of hryvnia) on this. Actually, they do have money." Groysman said. On the subject of land plot sales, the PM confirmed he is in favor of extending the moratorium on land sales. "I don't want the land market to become another episode of deception for the people. That's why it's important not to rush with this," he said. Groysman said each local community should decide what to do with land plots at their disposal. Tulsas planning commission approved a revamped site plan for a CVS pharmacy in midtown on Wednesday despite opposition, saying the latest proposal is close enough to meeting guidelines in the relevant small-area plan. The Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission denied an earlier site plan in December in a split decision, saying the planned project on the northeast corner of 15th Street and Utica Avenue fell short on several issues. The commissions recommendation for denial went to city councilors, who last week sent the recently changed site plan back to the commission for consideration. Terry Meier, president of the Terrace Drive Neighborhood Association, said the planning commissions decision disappointed residents of large midtown area not just nearby neighbors. I do agree that CVS has done a wonderful job of putting lipstick on a pig, Meier said. The very first plan CVS proposed was obviously, completely disregarding the small-area plan. Meier said even the revamped site plan falls short of the small-area plan recommendations on several fronts, including preferences for mixed-use developments, increased density and a functioning second story. The CVS planned development has been the first test of the Utica Midtown Corridor Small Area Plan, and residents, including Meier, have said that allowing CVS to deviate from the plan sets a bad precedent. For the first shot out of the gate here, this is a huge belly flop in urban design, Meier said. Since first appearing before the planning commission, the site plan has gone through major changes both to accommodate small-area plan guidelines and opposition complaints. Attorney Lou Reynolds, who represents the developers, presented major changes to the site plan that have been made since December. We moved the store to the property line like we were asked to do, Reynolds said. We moved the door to Utica like we were asked to. And we moved the drive-through to the rear. Reynolds even made three more amendments during the meeting Wednesday in response to concerns from residents. The planning commissions recommendation for approval now goes back to the City Council for its consideration. OKLAHOMA CITY A mental health bill named for slain Labor Commissioner Mark Costello is on its way to the governors office after final passage in the Oklahoma House of Representatives on Wednesday. House Bill 1697, by Rep. Lee Denney, R-Cushing, allows for court-ordered out-patient treatment of certain adults with severe mental health conditions. Originally requested by the Mental Health Association and passed by the House last year, the bill was reworked and renamed after Costello was stabbed to death last August in an Oklahoma City restaurant, allegedly by his mentally ill son. Costellos widow, Cathy Costello, supported the bill and was introduced along with other members of her family during Wednesdays session. HB 1697 passed 79-0 with 22 members absent or not voting. The House met for only about three hours Wednesday morning despite the approach of Thursdays deadline to act on Senate Bills. More than three dozen bills and resolutions remained on the floor calendar the list of measures for possible consideration by the full House but most of those could not be heard until Thursday because of House rules. Among the legislation that must pass the House on Thursday to remain active this legislative session is Senate Joint Resolution 68, the proposed constitutional amendment that proponents say would allow the state to modernize its alcohol laws. Four floor amendments have been filed for SJR 68, but two appear identical. They would require those selling so-called strong beer to be at least 21 years old. Also yet to be heard is Senate Bill 683, which is intended to allow the Department of Public Safety to issue licenses and identification cards compliant with the federal Real ID Act. A summary attached to the bill says the DPS estimates that a substitute measure passed by a House committee earlier this month would cost the department an additional $1 million and move our drivers license program backward. Also still to be considered are several measures dealing with school standards and testing, and several dealing with collection of sales and use taxes from Internet transactions. The House did pass eight bills Wednesday and voted down two. One of those defeated would have raised a $9 court fee to $10, with most of the proceeds going to law enforcement training. The other involved regulation of food grown or made at home for sale. A Tulsa man has been arrested for allegedly punching a woman multiple times and grabbing her 6-year-old daughter's neck after she tried to intervene Wednesday night. Jeremy Avery Iglehart, 29, was booked into the Tulsa Jail on complaints of domestic assault and battery in the presence of a minor and child abuse after a felony conviction. Bail was set at $125,000. Officers responded to a reported domestic disturbance at a house in the 700 block of North Louisville Avenue about 11:30 p.m. A woman at the scene told police that Iglehart became physically combative with her after she said he couldn't drive her vehicle, according to an arrest report. He then allegedly punched her in the face and in the back of the head. The victim's daughter told officers that Iglehart grabbed her by the neck and began cursing at her when she tried to intervene, the report states. The suspect arrived at the house while police were present and was apprehended. The report does not establish the relationship between the alleged victims and Iglehart. Court records show Iglehart pleaded guilty to possession of a controlled drug with intent to distribute in 2009 and was given a deferred sentence. Efforts to increase the number of Oklahoma students who get a college degree are succeeding, but the state funding shortfall is threatening some programs. Presidents from five institutions reported on their schools' degree-completion programs Wednesday during a meeting of the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education. Tulsa Community College has exceeded its goal to confer an additional 71 degrees each year since Oklahoma launched its Complete College America initiative in 2011. Keeping that pace will be harder going forward, President Leigh Goodson told the regents. CCA is a 12-year program with a goal of increasing the number of degrees and career credentials awarded statewide by 67 percent. Goodson said Tulsa Community College is one of 30 colleges nationwide selected from 200 applicants to take part in the American Association of Community College's Pathways Project. OKLAHOMA CITY His voice cracking with emotion Thursday morning, University of Oklahoma President David Boren accused lawmakers of sabotaging the states future by slashing higher education budgets. Its morally wrong what we are doing to the next generation here in Oklahoma, he told the State Regents for Higher Education. State colleges and universities have faced a series of budget cuts since last July adding up to more than $112 million, or 11 percent of state funding, the regents reported. In fact, revenue has been dwindling since the recession of 2008, with higher education spending down more than $175 million even as total enrollment in state colleges has grown by more than 17,000. Those students are going to rely on their degrees to make themselves attractive in the national job market and to lure more jobs to Oklahoma, Boren said. But the funding shortage could put them at a disadvantage to students in other states, he said. The future of Oklahoma really hangs in the balance, Boren said, before sarcastically offering to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to any legislator who believes higher education can absorb the cuts without affecting the quality of education that students are receiving. The regents spent more than 90 minutes listening to Boren and several other college and university presidents describe the cuts they have been forced to make in recent months ranging from faculty furloughs and staff layoffs to closing degree programs and suspending athletic programs. Factoring in budget cuts and rising fixed costs, OU effectively operates on $150 million a year less now than it did in 2008, even with more than 1,000 additional students on campus, Boren said. We simply cant pretend that were going to get through this with better efficiency and not affect the quality of education, he said. Smaller colleges have been hit even harder, with campuses reducing faculty, closing degree programs and reducing student services, officials told the regents. Were past the point of making tough decisions, said East Central University President John Hargrave. Were making gut-wrenching decisions. Regents blamed higher educations dependence on oil revenues for the disproportionate budget cuts, and they called on the Legislature to do more to shield state colleges and universities. We know cuts are necessary given the states budget crisis, said state higher education Chancellor Glen Johnson. But drastic cuts are coming very close to jeopardizing the quality of higher education, he said. Tuition would have to increase more than 20 percent to offset the latest reductions in state funding, which isnt practical and would drive students out of the state, said Oklahoma State University President Burns Hargis. But strained university budgets are already driving students and faculty out of Oklahoma, many never to return, he said. Youre cutting into the very thing that youre looking for more of, which is economic development in Oklahoma, Hargis said. Youre cutting the very thing thats going to make Oklahoma stronger. WASHINGTON The Obama administration has a new economic worry: competition or, allegedly, the lack of it. Americas businesses, the indictment goes, merge too often, innovate too little and bilk consumers too much. The open question is whether this argument is shrewd politics, shrewd economics or both. No doubt, the politics are enticing. In this election season, criticizing big, impersonal firms has a strong populist appeal. And Americans venerate competition, at least in the abstract, as a check on companies market power. So the White Houses pitch is familiar. The President is launching a new initiative to stoke competition, the White House announced. No corporation [will] unfairly squeeze their [sic] competitors, their workers, or their customers. Strong stuff. Backing the words with deeds, the president supported a proposal from the Federal Communications Commission to open up set-top cable boxes to competition. Renting the set-top boxes (at a reported average annual cost of $231) is a rip-off, the White House suggested. If cable companies faced competition, consumers could buy boxes with more digital features at less cost. The president also asked departments and agencies to report back in two months on pro-competitive executive actions they could take to empower consumers, workers and entrepreneurs. As the administration sees it, many U.S. firms are engaging in an orgy of anti-competitive behavior. Testifying recently before a congressional committee, Bill Baer, the assistant attorney general of the Antitrust Division, reported that in fiscal 2015, there were 67 proposed mergers valued at more than $10 billion more than twice the number in fiscal 2014. To the administration, many mega-mergers are motivated by the quest for greater market power: the ability to raise prices. Not surprisingly, the administration has rejected many of these deals: the merger between cellphone firms AT&T and T-Mobile; Comcasts proposed merger with Time Warner Cable; appliance-maker Electroluxs acquisition of General Electrics appliance division; the proposed merger of two large makers of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron. More pending major mergers may face administration opposition. The Justice Department has already announced it would fight the proposed merger of two large oil service firms, Halliburton and Baker Hughes. Also, there are two mergers of big health insurers that require government approval: Aetna and Humana, and Anthem and Cigna. The White Houses Council of Economic Advisers finds other evidence of diminishing competition. In an array of industries from retail stores to hospitals, total revenues became increasingly concentrated among the top 50 firms from 1997 to 2012. Likewise, the rate of new start-up businesses has declined, perhaps indicating more barriers to entry. The administrations case is strong but not airtight. Generally, there are two types of competition: one named after Adam Smith (1723-1790), involving price and quality competition among firms producing similar products (think steel, groceries or clothes); and the other named after Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), emphasizing the clash between new products and production techniques and the old (think jet travel vs. railroads, big box stores vs. local merchants or the internet vs. newspapers). Do we have a competition deficit? It depends on the form of competition. If its Schumpeters competition, the answer is almost certainly no and this is the most disruptive type of competition and the hardest to defend against. Dozens of industries are making fundamental adjustments to the internet and its side effects. Companies that built their business models based on one set of products and strategies have difficulty coping with circumstances largely outside their experience or competence. Unfortunately, one response to this intensifying competition is to try to limit Adam Smiths traditional competition by merging with major competitors. Thats what seems to be happening now. Facing slow growth, increasing IT costs and greater uncertainty, companies are trying to create growth, cut costs and reduce uncertainty by getting bigger. Its a baffling mixture that does not sit well with traditional antitrust thinking. The jury is still out on whos right. The opposition is calling for public disclosure of the legal advice given to former Attorney General Faris Al Rawi relating to the indemnity agreement with Vincent Nelson. Speaking at the UNCs weekly Sunday media conference this morning, MP Saddam Hosein also criticized what he sees as the law associations delayed and weak response to the entire matter. 'Let's wait and see' Groysman about need to replace Fiscal Service chief Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman has not yet decided on the possible replacement of the head of the State Fiscal Service. "'Let's wait and see," he told reporters at a briefing after the government meeting. The prime minister said that the plan to normalize the operation of the State Fiscal Service will be drawn up in the near term. He said customs offices are faced with problems, which must be removed. Groysman also promised to hold meetings with businessmen to learn firsthand about deficiencies in the work of customs and tax agencies. Nine CEO Hugh Marks has announced an internal review of its 60 Minutes saga will be conducted by founding 60 Minutes Executive Producer Gerald Stone, former A Current Affair Executive Producer David Hurley and General Counsel Rachel Launders. In an email to staff, Marks thanked DFAT staff and its news team in helping to secure the release of the four crew members. The 60 Minutes crew are expected back in Australia later today while Sally Faulkner is due to have access to her children in Lebanon, with estranged husband Ali Elamine. Charges for remaining detainees, including Australian Adam Whittington, are still pending. Dear All As you would all by now be aware our 60 Minutes team, together with Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner, are out of detention and on their way home. It is an enormous relief for all involved but particularly the families and loved ones of our 60 Minutes team who have suffered a great deal over these last two weeks. I would like to personally thank the Australian Government, the Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, the Australian Ambassador to Lebanon, Glenn Miles, and his consular staff in Beirut and staff at the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra for their advice and assistance. I also pass on my thanks to our local team in Lebanon, and those who supported them from Australia (particularly Kirsty Thomson and the 60 Minutes team) who have worked around the clock in securing our teams release. You should know that the crew has asked me to thank the officials in Lebanon who were involved in their detention for their professionalism and for treating them with dignity and respect. It is important to reiterate that at no stage did anyone from Nine or 60 Minutes intend to act in any way that made them susceptible to charges that they breached the law or to become part of the story that is Sallys story. But we did become part of the story and we shouldnt have. Nine will conduct a full review that will be headed by Gerald Stone, with David Hurley and General Counsel Rachel Launders, to ascertain what went wrong and why our systems, designed to protect staff, failed to do so in this case. We will task the review with recommending the necessary actions to ensure that none of our colleagues are put in a similar position in the future. This has been an extraordinarily stressful time for the crew and for their families and I want to very publicly acknowledge how much they have been through and thank them for their courage, their perseverance and for the trust they placed in us to resolve events. What has happened to Sally happens all too often and affects thousands of Australian families. It is a story that not only is profoundly in the public interest but also one the public is interested in. Its an issue that we will continue to highlight. Finally, I would like to acknowledge and thank our head of news and current affairs Darren Wick who has been in Lebanon since early last week. We should all drop in to Wickies office when he is back and say thanks. Hugh Students who participated in HenMUN IV worked together to craft solutions to real-world challenges. Daniel Green addresses an audience of nearly 500 high school students as the keynote speaker of this year's HenMUN opening ceremony. 3:16 p.m., April 21, 2016--As Daniel Green, associate professor of political science and international relations at the University of Delaware, addressed this years nearly 500 HenMUN participants at an opening ceremony, he looked to each of them as members of the next generation of leaders in global affairs. In its fourth year, HenMUN, the University of Delawares Model United Nations Conference, has prepared high school students in the region to do just that. According to Kevin Konzelman, the secretary general of HenMUN IV, the annual conference prompts students to dissect todays top issues, addressing topics including refugees, land and resource rights in various parts of the world, and nuclear security, among others. We need to know...how this world works, in 2016 and the future -- more than ever before because I think that we are still the best choice to lead that world of equals. You need to be ready to do that, said Green. In this world of which he spoke, with persistent multipolarity, technology, wealth and the flow of information will create the opportunity for equal strength and importance on the part of several great powers. The worlds family of human beings is going to have to live with each other on a global scale as equals. That couldnt have happened before in history, he said. Julio Carrion, associate chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations, added that HenMUN participants, who hailed from 30 high schools across the East Coast, gained the ability to reach across borders, developing solutions to shared challenges. Many of our so-called national problems -- energy, climate change, financial and economic crises, travel, and immigration, just to name a few -- are global in nature, said Carrion. That means they cannot be properly addressed if we act in isolation from other nations. The weekend-long event offered more than a dozen committees and specialized agencies, where students adopted and advocated for the viewpoints of a particular country. They know the issues their committee is going to take up ahead of time, said George C. Marshall High School adviser Tom Brannan, adding, They have to do some kind of research on a countrys position on those issues. They have to be faithful to the position their country has taken. The conference, which prides itself on a realistic approach, also includes several midnight crisis situations, in which the students are awakened to find that they must work together to solve a recently-erupted problem. Outside of their official duties, participants took tours of the Universitys campus upon arrival, attended a HenMUN tradition -- the delegate dance -- and sampled UDairy Creamery ice cream during an ice cream social. The delegation also raised $1,676 for Operation Smile, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the health and lives of children in more than 60 countries born with cleft lip, cleft palate, and other facial deformities. In addition to the eight members of the secretariat -- Kevin Konzelman, Micah Petersen, Alessandra Chapman, Gerard Weir, Chris Merken, Rachel Travis, Laura Holt and Alyssa Dugan -- more than 80 UD students volunteered to make the conference a success. Konzelman, Petersen, Chapman, Travis and Holt are students in the Honors Program. HenMUN IV has been sponsored by the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Office of the Provost, Institute for Global Studies, Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, School of Public Policy and Administration, Office of Admissions, UD Honors Program, and the Office for International Students and Scholars. For more information on HenMUN, visit the programs website, email sec-gen@henmun.org, or follow along on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Article by Nikki Laws Photos by McKenzie Tsaousis 4:27 p.m., April 21, 2016--University of Delaware alumnus Jonathan R. Pennock has been named director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations (NOAA) National Sea Grant College Program. Pennock, who grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, earned two degrees at UD: a masters degree in marine studies in 1981 and a doctoral degree in oceanography in 1983. For the past decade, the longtime coastal scientist has served as director of New Hampshire Sea Grant. He previously served as deputy director of University of New Hampshires School of Marine Science and Ocean Engineering. He is a past president of the National Sea Grant Association and served as a Sea Grant representative for NOAA Researchs Senior Research Council. The announcement comes as Sea Grant is celebrating 50 years of serving Americas coastal and Great Lakes communities by providing innovative science to address a range of environmental and economic issues. Jonathan will bring to NOAA Sea Grant a strong scientific background and significant experience creating vibrant research programs and forging partnerships that are making a difference for coastal communities, Craig McLean, NOAA assistant administrator for NOAA Research, said in a press release. While at UD, Pennock received support from Delaware Sea Grant (DESG) for his doctoral research on the effect of nutrient runoff from land use on estuaries, developing his passion for both the ocean and the Sea Grant program. Named the nations ninth Sea Grant College in 1976, Delaware Sea Grant is currently celebrating 40 years of putting science to work for Delawares coastal communities and other important stakeholders. We are proud of the accomplishments of alumni like Jonathan, who recognize the connection between science and policy, research and extension. As one of the nations Sea Grant programs we look forward to having someone at the helm who has a deep understanding of the role academia can play in addressing coastal issues, said Mohsen Badiey, acting dean of the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment, which administers the Delaware Sea Grant program at UD. About the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment UDs College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment (CEOE) strives to reach a deeper understanding of the planet and improve stewardship of environmental resources. CEOE faculty and students examine complex information from multiple disciplines with the knowledge that science and society are firmly linked and solutions to environmental challenges can be synonymous with positive economic impact. The college comprises the School of Marine Science and Policy, Department of Geography and Department of Geological Sciences. CEOE brings the latest advances in technology to bear on both teaching and conducting ocean, earth and atmospheric research. Current focus areas are ecosystem health and society, environmental observing and forecasting, and renewable energy and sustainability. Article by Laura Bilash Photo by Jim Murray 2:51 p.m., April 21, 2016--Three University of Delaware undergraduates who are developing a graphic novel to explore the culture of an indigenous group in Peru were selected to present their work to members of Congress and their staffs in Washington, D.C. English majors Aubrey Arnold and Cori Burcham and biological sciences major Alex Stubbolo worked with Siobhan Carroll, associate professor of English, to develop the EseEja Graphic Novel Project. Both Arnold and Burcham are in the Honors Program at UD. The students presented a poster describing their work at the April 20 Posters on the Hill event on Capitol Hill, organized each spring by the Council on Undergraduate Research. The UD project was one of 60 only four of them from the humanities invited to participate from among hundreds of applicants around the country. Posters on the Hill aims to raise awareness of the high-quality research undergraduates perform, the impact of this research on students professional preparation and the importance of continued investment in undergraduate research support. The event also is designed to help members of Congress understand the importance of undergraduate research by talking directly with student researchers. The graphic novel originated with an earlier cultural mapping project in which an interdisciplinary team of UD students and faculty members conducted research in the Amazonian region of Peru with the EseEja, an indigenous hunting, gathering and fishing people. Jon Cox, assistant professor of art and design, helped lead that project. He and Rosalie Rolon-Dow, associate professor of education and the Cultural Mapping Project's education director, later approached Carroll with the idea for a book exploring the culture of the EseEja. We decided on an anthology, with each of us writing separate but related narratives, said Arnold, who is writing two stories and contributing her own artwork to the book. Each story tackles a different issue thats important to the EseEja. The three students, who were not part of the original expedition to Peru, conducted extensive research on the EseEja and on the process of developing visual narratives. We wanted to tell an adventure story in an accessible way, Stubbolo said. Graphic novels are a really good medium for this project, because we want to communicate with different age groups and with people who have a strong oral tradition. Plans call for selling the novel in the United States and, later, to have it translated into Spanish for distribution in Peru. For all audiences from EseEja children to American adults the students goal is to tell the story of the group accurately and authentically, to promote respect for the EseEjas culture and way of life, and to raise awareness about the environmental and other challenges they are facing today. Storylines in the book include a variety of EseEja traditional beliefs and oral legends and history, as well as ways in which the people are seeking to find a balance between their traditions and the modern world. For Burcham, it was the idea of helping to preserve oral legends that first made the project attractive. This reminded me of previous documentations of mythology in literature such as Virgils Aeneid or Homers Iliad, she said. A lot of what we know today about Greek and Roman mythology was preserved in these two works. For Stubbolo, combining folklore with serious issues in the novel was a way to reach both the EseEja and those outside their community with important messages. Burcham agreed: I hope EseEja children will be able to read these comics and be proud of their cultural identity, and maybe be inspired to create art of their own [with] their own unique worldview, she said. Article by Ann Manser Photo by Iain Crawford 10:27 a.m., April 21, 2016--Twenty-one scholars in material culture from the University of Delaware and Winterthur Museum have been invited to present their research at an international symposium in Germany focused on refugees, UDs Center for Material Culture Studies (CMCS) announced. The symposium, The Refuge of Objects/Objects of Refuge, will be hosted by the Johannes Gutenberg Universitat in Mainz, Germany, from Dec. 14-18. Over the past year, the CMCS directors have worked closely with colleagues in Mainz to develop the symposium program and helped to secure funding from German federal and state institutions to support travel for the Delaware delegates. The newly founded Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at the Universitat Mainz has sought to develop a lasting partnership with the Center for Material Culture Studies. The institute identified UD as a leader in material culture studies and invited faculty and graduate students to share their perspectives on the materiality of refuge across the disciplines, periods and geographies in all the diversity of material objects involved. The selected participants will present on topics that include Materiality and Religion, Migratory Letters and Prints, Things of Refuge and Keepsakes, Lost and Found Print Culture, The Role of Actor Network Theory and Early Modern Studies, Survivor Objects and Photographs. The UD delegates, and their affiliations, are: History Alex Ames, Michelle Everidge Anderson, Laura Helton (also English) and Jesse Kraft. English Martin Bruckner (Center for Material Culture Studies co-director), Siobhan Carroll, Jessica Conrad, Laura Helton (also History), Kyle Vitale, Sarah Wasserman and Julian Yates. Art History Sandy Isenstadt (Center for Material Culture Studies co-director), Kiersten Mounce and Kaila Schedeen. Winterthur Program in American Material Culture Rosalie Hooper, Catharine Dann Roeber and Alexandra Ward. Preservation Studies Michael Emmons. Art Conservation Studies Debra Hess Norris. Center for Historic Architecture and Design Rebecca Sheppard and Cate Morrissey. CMCS Natalie Wright (Center for Material Culture Studies). More about the symposium In view of recent political events and natural catastrophes that have displaced millions and created international humanitarian crises, the theme of Refuge has acquired a new sense of urgency for students and teachers working in the fields related to material culture studies. Definitions dating back to the great trans-Atlantic migrations of the 17th and 18th centuries have characterized refuge in mostly spatio-political terms as insular settings of escape or privilege, as colonial enclaves or post-national territories or as secular or sacred retreats. Rather than rehearse the spatial premise of these terms, this collaborative symposium reflects historically, methodologically and theoretically on the material dimensions of refuge, that is, on of the ways in which objects generate or confound refuge, accompany or encumber refugees and, in short, express the condition of the refuge and the refugee through objects and/or as material experience. 9:27 a.m., April 21, 2016--University of Delaware junior Sarah Hartman, an environmental engineering major with minors in French and political science, has been named a 2016 Truman Scholar. A native of Wilmington, Delaware, Hartman is one of 54 new scholars selected from a pool of almost 800 applicants attending 305 colleges and universities. The federal scholarship provides $30,000 for graduate study and is awarded to juniors based on their records of leadership, public service, and academic achievement. The 20th Truman Scholar in the Universitys history, Hartman intends to pursue a masters degree in water and environmental policy, with a focus on drinking water and sanitation in developing countries. She plans to use the technical knowledge gained from her engineering education to effect policy change that will bring clean water for agriculture, industry, and residential use to people across the world. I lived in developing parts of China for six weeks and spent a summer in Senegal, where even in the capital, people struggled to have access to water, Hartman says. At a muddy school surrounded by dirt playing fields, I saw the joy a borehole well could bring children. Water enabled them to go to the bathroom. It let their vegetable plants grow. Water was their source of not just joy, but life. Hartman joined UDs chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) as a freshman and was quickly selected to lead the organizations next project designing a sustainable solution to the water needs of the small village of Ubujan in the Philippines. Since then, she has planned and led two successful assessment trips to test the water, built formal relationships with local leaders, and started a water and sanitation education program. She was inspired by the late Prof. Steve Dentel, who founded and advised EWB at UD. In addition to working with Dentel through EWB, Hartman did research with him on the Eco-Vapor toilet, which uses a semipermeable membrane to manage fecal sludge. Hartmans resume is packed with awards and accomplishments: UD Woman of Promise, Girl Scout Gold Award, VanDemark and Lynch Sophomore Award, peer mentor for the English Language Institute, and an almost-perfect grade-point average. But this Honors Program students attention is always turned away from herself and toward others whether its in the local community through a weekend service program she founded called Reach Out or across the globe through EWB. She knows that she will never see the Philippines project to completion, but shes satisfied knowing that she has laid the foundation for a lasting change in Ubujan and that she has inspired countless people along the way. Winning the Truman award has given Hartman much to think about as she nears the end of her junior year. In the fall, she will assume the presidency of UDs EWB chapter for the 2016-17 academic year. During the summer of 2017, she will join other Truman Scholars in completing an internship in Washington, D.C. She is looking for an opportunity with an agency focused on international water policy. After graduate school, Hartman hopes to begin her career working for an international organization such as Water Aid, the United Nations Environmental Program, or United Nations Water, where she can gain exposure to the complexity of water issues, such as the application of solutions in a social and cultural context and how to optimize results. Applications to problems are effective only when they are correctly fitted to the needs of the community theyre meant for, she says. To be effective, you need to understand a society and how it functions as you plan and implement a program. About the Truman Scholarship The Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation was created by Congress in 1975 to be the nations living memorial to President Harry S. Truman. The foundation has a mission to select and support the next generation of public service leaders. The Truman award has become one of the most prestigious national scholarships in the United States. Annually, candidates for the Truman Scholarship go through a rigorous, multi-stage selection process. In 2016, there were 775 candidates for the award nominated by 305 colleges and universities, a record number of applications and institutions. The 200 finalists for the award were interviewed in March and early April at one of sixteen regional selection panels. The 54 new Truman Scholars selected in 2016 will receive their awards in a ceremony at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum on Sunday, May 29. Recipients of the Truman Scholarship receive a $30,000 scholarship toward graduate school and the opportunity to participate in professional development programming to help prepare them for careers in public service leadership. Article by Diane Kukich Photos by Kathy F. Atkinson and Stacy Rubin Weile Manchester City's draw at Newcastle on Tuesday brought moderate celebrations for the relegation-threatened home club but nothing compared to the reaction in Leicester. The Premier League leaders, in their 133rd year, are now assured of a top-three finish in England and, with it, a place in next season's UEFA Champions League group stage. The Foxes became the sixth team to secure their place in Europe's premier club competition, and a glance at the previous five gives a good snap shot of the company they now keep: Atletico Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munchen, Borussia Dortmund and Paris Saint-Germain. Yet this could be just the start, with Claudio Ranieri's side on the verge of a first English title. It is a story which has captivated the world. Many predicted the Midlands club would be embroiled in a relegation fight at the outset of the campaign. Bookmakers were offering odds of 5,000-1 for them to win the league. Instead, with just four matches remaining Leicester are top, five points clear of Tottenham. Another eight points and a trophy cabinet that currently contains three League Cups, seven second division titles and the third division trophy won in 2008/09 (a mere seven years ago) will be opened again for a totally unexpected prize. The title would also mean a place in Pot 1 for the UEFA Champions League group stage draw in Monaco on 25 August. Ranieri, for one, is already looking forward to it. "There is the Champions League music," the Italian said last week. "I love the music. It would be a fantastic achievement; from the dream arrives the reality." Leicester's European experience 2000/01 UEFA Cup first round: L 4-2 on agg v Crvena zvezda Despite Muzzy Izzet's away goal at the neutral Gerhard-Hanappi-Stadion in Vienna, Leicester succumbed to a 4-2 aggregate defeat after drawing 1-1 at their old Filbert Street ground courtesy of Gerry Taggart's header. Getty Images 1997/98 UEFA Cup first round: L 4-1 on agg v Atletico Madrid The reward for lifting the English League Cup in 1997 was a tie with Atletico. Ian Marshall's 11th-minute strike gave the visitors a shock lead in the Spanish capital, but Juninho's equaliser and a Christian Vieri penalty handed the hosts a 2-1 advantage. Managed by Martin O'Neill, now Republic of Ireland boss, Garry Parker's red card at home ended Leicester hopes as the visitors scored twice in the closing stages. 1961/62 European Cup Winners' Cup first round: L 3-1 on agg v Atletico Madrid Eventual winners Atletico ended Leicester's journey in the first round. Jorge Alberto Mendonca's last-minute equaliser in England earned the Madrid outfit a draw, and just over a fortnight later they completed the job with two goals in the last half-hour, the first a penalty. 1961/62 European Cup Winners' Cup preliminary round: W 7-2 on agg v Glenavon Under the club's longest serving manager, Matt Gillies, Leicester made light work of Northern Irish side Glenavon on their European debut. James Jones gave the hosts a surprise lead in Lurgan but three goals in seven minutes before half-time swung the tie Leicester's way. They added another after half-time, and wrapped things up back in England. Delaying the decision to reorganize public joint-stock company Ukrnafta depends on the position of the Finance Ministry and the State Fiscal Service, Naftogaz Ukrainy Head Andriy Kobolev told reporters in Kyiv on Wednesday. "We are engaged in difficult talks with the Finance Ministry and the Fiscal Service. The date of the meeting [of the supervisory board] and potential decisions that could be made depend on the position of these agencies," he said. A meeting of the supervisory board of Ukrnafta, scheduled for March 28, has been postponed. The date of the rescheduled meeting has not been determined. There had been plans to discuss the company's financial position and the possibility of reorganization. Ukrnafta's debt to the national budget in taxes and fees exceeds UAH 10.2 billion. Hi, my name is Scott C. Waring and I wrote a few books and am currently a ESL School Owner in Taiwan. I have had my own UFO sighting up close and personal, but that's how it works right? A non believer becomes a believer when they experience their first sighting. You witnessed it, your perceptual field changes, so now you need to share it. I created this site to help the UFO community get a little bit organized. I noticed that there was a lot of chaos when searching for UFO sighting reports, so I hope this site helps. I wanted to support those eyewitnesses who have tried to tell others about what they have seen, yet were laughed at by even closest of friends. More and more each day the governments of the world leak bits and pieces of UFO information to the public. They have a trickle down theory in hopes of slowly getting citizens use to the idea that we are not alone in universe and never have been. The truth is being leaked drop by drop until one day we look around and find ourselves neck high in it. The discovery of alien species in existence is the most monumental scientific event in human history, suppression of that information is a crime against humanity. About me: I live in Taiwan. I OWN MY OWN ENGLISH SCHOOL, AND ONCE HAD 5 SCHOOLS. Am Former USAF at SAC base (flight line). Age: 42 Educ: BA in Elem ed. Masters in Counseling ed. I had two UFO sightings, (30+bus size orbs) in military and in 2012 personally saw the UFO over Taipei 101 building on New Years Day (and recored it). Settlement of the conflict in eastern Ukraine may take years. Ukrainian Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak has said this in an interview with foreign journalists on Wednesday, DW reports. "In my opinion, this [conflict settlement] will take years," he noted. According to Poltorak, Russia is still deploying its servicemen in Donbas with a well-functioning mechanism of rotation. "Just over 7,000 Russian soldiers are there now. They are being rotated constantly," he said. Poltorak predicted that pro-Russian separatists in Donbas would attack Ukrainian positions, provoking a return fire in order to present Kyiv as a violator of the Minsk Agreements. At the same time, according to his evaluation, the ability of pro-Russian militants to launch a major offensive at the current stage is "restricted." ol Romania can become another country that will export gas to Ukraine. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said this at a joint press conference with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, an Ukrinform correspondent reports. I suggest that we should speed up the work on the completion of agreements on the interconnectors between the gas transport systems of our countries, due to which Romania will become another state, where Ukraine will be able to import gas from, President Poroshenko said. At the same time, the president noted that he offered Romania to use the potential of Ukrainian gas storages. And by joint efforts we are raising the energy security not only of Ukraine, not only of Romania, but of the whole region, Poroshenko added. iy The government of Romania has decided to provide Ukraine with technical and military assistance worth 250,000 euros. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said this following the talks with Romanian Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos in the scope of his official visit to this country, the presidential press service reports. The head of the Ukrainian state thanked the Romanian government for granting the military and technical assistance worth 250,000 euros to Ukraine, and for providing the 500,000 euros contribution by Romania to the functioning of the Ukraine-NATO Trust Fund on Cybersecurity, reads the statement. President Poroshenko also noted that these decisions show the principle position of Romania regarding the support of Ukraine in its fight against the Russian aggression. iy Ukraine views the European Commissions decision on a visa-free regime with Ukraine as powerful impetus for further reforms. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said this at the meeting with the EU delegation and EU Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations, Johannes Hahn, in Kyiv, the press service of the Head of State reports. "It is an important step towards the European aspirations of the Ukrainian people after the Euromaidan and the Revolution of Dignity. The decision adopted by the European Commission today is recognition by European partners of reforms carried out in Ukraine," Poroshenko said. The Head of State noted that "Ukraine views the decision as powerful impetus for continuation of reforms and relies on the support of EU countries and European institutions in establishing the visa-free regime and further integration of Ukraine into the EU. In his turn, Johannes Hahn called the achievements of Ukraine in legislative amendments for introducing the visa-free regime with the EU a perfect example of great cooperation between the President, Government and Parliament. ol Even if security issues are solved, the financing of elections in the occupied territories is still impossible. Ukraines representative in the political sub-group of the Trilateral Contact Group Roman Bezsmertny told this to the Ukrayinska Pravda news site. "The Ukrainian side raised the issue that financing of elections in the occupied territories is impossible under the current circumstances even if the security issues are solved," he said. Bezsmertny recalled that the Ukrainian banking system did not operate in the occupied part of Donbas. "It is necessary to restore the system of real Ukrainian authorities. Under the current circumstances, any financing will mean financing the illegal authorities in the occupied territories," he noted. ol Ukraine and Romania have signed the agreement on joint patrolling of the state border and on military traffic cooperation. President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko said this during a joint press conference with President of Romania Klaus Iohannis, an Ukrinform correspondent reports. "Ukraine and Romania have signed the agreement on joint patrolling of the state border, which will allow both parties to combat corruption, smuggling and illegal migration more effectively," Poroshenko said. Ukrainian President also informed that the agreement on military traffic cooperation was signed, which was of great importance for the development of cooperation between the defense ministries of both states. ol Romanian Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos says the formation of the new government in Ukraine will step up the process of reforms and stabilization in the state. The Romanian prime minister said this during a business lunch with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Bucharest, an Ukrinform correspondent reports. The Romanian prime minister assured President Poroshenko of unconditional support of Ukraines European integration aspirations, as well as in the implementation of reforms and the realization of the Association Agreement with the European Union. President Poroshenko, in turn, told Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos about the situation in Ukraine, stressing that the new government of Ukraine is taking all the needed measures to stabilize the situation and continue reforms. iy 04/20/2016 By David Perry eNABLE Lowell, a team of students dedicated to supplying low-cost, 3D-printed prosthetic hands for children, landed the campuswide DifferenceMaker award and a cool $6,000 purse at the fourth annual DifferenceMaker Idea Challenge. In all, 10 teams split $35,000 in prize money, and one other fan favorite took home $1,000. The event, hosted by the universitys Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship at University Crossing, featured teams of finalists, narrowed down from more than two dozen entrants. A panel of eight judges seven alumni joined by Lowell City Manager Kevin Murphy heard from teams making five-minute presentations. The pitches ranged from an emergency alert technology, to a top that slides onto standard empty beverage cans converting them to an ashtray and repository for cigarette butts, to a web-based platform to help military veterans negotiate the morass of paperwork when applying for disability benefits. Photo by Tory Germann Photo by Tory Germann DifferenceMaker judge Mark Saab examines eNABLE Lowell's 3D-printed prosthetic hand. This is so rewarding, said Peter Larsen, senior biology major and main speaker for eNABLE. Larsen is a DifferenceMaker veteran. As a freshman, he helped develop a proposal for a video education channel on YouTube, reaching the semifinals. The eNABLE team is ready to keep pushing development of their product. We dont plan to stop. There are a lot more families out there who need help, said Larsen, who was joined on the eNABLE team by senior exercise physiology major Katherine Bilodeau, senior biology major Kreg Kaminski, senior mechanical engineering major Alexander Peters, junior exercise physiology major Allison Dunbar and sophomore business administration major Shannon Maguire. During its pitch, the eNABLE team showed pictures of Ethan, an 8-year-old Florida boy born with a right hand with a thumb and no fingers, who is using the first of the teams prosthetic hands. Photo by Tory Germann Photo by Tory Germann The Security Top team makes its pitch to judges during the fourth annual DifferenceMaker Idea Challenge. We can help 2,000 children just like Ethan, Larsen said. Hes an amazing kid. The DifferenceMaker program really symbolizes everything great about this university, Chancellor Jacquie Moloney told the students. She said the challenge allows students to take an idea and do something wonderful, go out and change peoples lives. You are taking UMass Lowell to the next level, she said. During deliberations, judges commented how much teams had improved since the challenge was launched four years ago. For Mark Saab 81, 13, chief technical officer at Vention Medical, the competition has grown tougher to judge. Ive seen them all but have judged just one other time, said Saab. Id almost really rather sit in the audience. What I like about judging is that you get a lot of information ahead of time about these teams and projects. But whats hard is how good theyve become. At first, it was easier. Now, everybody knows what to do and how to do it. That makes our job as judges more difficult. Photo by Tory Germann Photo by Tory Germann Judges deliberate in private after hearing the pitches at the DifferenceMaker Idea Challenge. The panel also included Rich Miner 86, 89, 97, co-founder of Android and general partner at Google Ventures, a first-time judge who lauded a lot of well thought-out ideas. More than 100 people filled Moloney Hall during the presentations. Lowell City Manager Kevin Murphy spoke of the magnetism that surrounds the university and the city. In the two years since he was named city manager, three corporations have settled in Lowell, drawing nearly 2,000 workers. And the No. 1 one reason they all gave was the proximity to UMass Lowell and the talented workforce it introduces each year, he said. The winners: Campuswide DifferenceMaker: eNABLE Lowell, $6,000. Significant Social Impact: Veterans QFR, a web platform that simplifies applying for service-connected disability benefits, $4,500. Innovative Technology Solution: Flair, a wearable device connecting to smartphone via Bluetooth that sends information to emergency contacts with the push of a button, $4,500. National joint-stock company Naftogaz Ukrainy has sued Russia in an international court over refunding of damage due to the loss of its assets located on the occupied territory of Crimea, Naftogaz chief Andriy Kobolev has said. "We've filed a claim against the Russian Federation over compensation of not only the cost of rigs, but also all assets Naftogaz had lost on the territory of Crimea due to Russian occupation, or those assets we temporarily do not have access to. For example, in oil and gas production in Crimea and the sea shelf," he said on Channel 5 TV on Wednesday. He said litigation will take longer and will be more complicated than the Stockholm arbitration with Gazprom. "Here we have the element of hostilities, and the defender is not a commercial organization, as Gazprom in our first case, but Russia as a state," Kobolev said. Tehran, 20 April 2016 -Visiting the Islamic Republic of Iran as part of his tour to the region to review the situation of Afghan refugees, UNHCR Assistant High Commissioner for Operations, Mr George Okoth-Obbo commended Iran for its generosity and exemplarily role in relation to refugees. He noted UNHCR's commitment to continue and further enhance its support towards Iran. Citing numerous examples of the generosity of the Iranian government, Mr. Okoth-Obbo said: "For over 30 years, Iran has demonstrated a humanitarian commitment to protect millions of refugees. This is heart-warming, particularly at a time when 60 million people are forcibly displaced worldwide." During his mission to Iran, Mr. Okoth-Obbo met with senior officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Interior and the Ministries of Education, Health and Labor. He also had the opportunity to interact with Afghan communities, key partners and the diplomatic community and visit refugee centres, schools, health centres and other facilities that provide services to refugees. He commended the high quality of health care offered to refugees on par with Iranian nationals. He noted that the inclusion of refugees in Iran's Universal Public Health Insurance scheme is exemplarily. He called for efforts to stabilize this initiative in the coming year and committed UNHCR's support to the government towards this scheme. In relation to education of refugees, he commended the government and for providing refugee children access to Iranian schools. In particular, he recognized the critical importance of the Supreme Leader's decree that allowed for children of undocumented families to attend schools in the country. Mr. Okoth-Obbo pledged UNHCR's support in easing the pressure that the educational system will face as they enroll even more children. He noted that refugees can be an asset to their host country, while recognizing that the government and UNHCR have provided vocational training and created jobs to ensure that refugees, especially vulnerable women, become self-reliant. He noted that these skills would help them throughout their lives, in Iran and also when they return back to their country. He noted the initiatives that the Government of Iran has taken and will continue to take to address the situation of the undocumented Afghans in the country. This population is residing in Iran in addition to the nearly one million Afghans currently registered as refugees. In this context, he reaffirmed UNHCR's commitment to Iran and the Afghan refugees, and noted that the Solutions Strategy for Afghan Refugees (SSAR) - the quadripartite regional framework between the governments of the Islamic Republics of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran together with UNHCR - continues to be the main framework for joint interventions aimed at facilitating voluntary return and sustainable reintegration of Afghan refugees in Afghanistan while simultaneously providing assistance to refugee hosting communities. Mr. Okoth-Obbo also thanked the government and People of Iran for the support provided to some 30,000 Iraqi refugees who have been residing here for decades, and for ensuring they have access to services in the country. Expressing his appreciation for his visit to Iran, Mr. Okoth-Obbo noted: "I remain confident that the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran will continue providing asylum space to the refugees and with the existing good relationship between the Government and UNHCR, they will do the necessary to best overcome the existing challenges and address the protection issues related to the refugees." The Assistant High Commissioner is appealing to the donor countries to enhance their financial support to UNHCR and enable it to carry out its programmes in support of the Afghan refugees in Iran as well as other countries hosting Afghans. During Mr. Okoth-Obbo's first mission to the Islamic Republic of Iran in his capacity as Assistant High Commissioner for Operations from 18-21 April, he was accompanied by Ms. Daisy Dell, Director of the Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific. On 18 April, he arrived in Dogharoun, Iran's border station with Afghanistan and then proceeded to Torbat-e-Jam refugee settlement. He also visited refugee projects in Mashhad. In Tehran, he visited Solymankhani Administrative Centre for refugees. For more information please contact Samar Maleki, External Relations, [email protected] President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko has proposed that Romania use Ukraine's underground gas storage facilities in order to improve energy stability in the region. "I proposed to the Romanian side to use a potential of the Ukrainian underground gas storage facilities to reserve gas. In so doing, we can jointly improve security of not just Ukraine, not just Romania, but the whole region," the president said during a joint press conference with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in Bucharest on Thursday. Poroshenko said it was necessary by the joint efforts to strive for strengthening of the energy security in the region and thanked his Romanian counterpart for understanding in the existing situation. Former Energy and Coal Industry Minister of Ukraine Volodymyr Demchyshyn has joined the supervisory board of national joint-stock company Naftogaz Ukrainy as a representative of the presidential administration. The press service of the Economic Development and Trade Ministry reported that candidate Demchyshyn was agreed by a panel that appoints heads of especially important enterprises for the Ukrainian economy. The ministry said that an independent supervisory board at Naftogaz Ukrainy is being created first in the history of the company. It is part of the corporate management reform. The reform meets the recommendations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) regarding management of state-run companies. It aims at curbing risks of political interference into the operation of the holding and creating modern tools for professional management in the interests of Ukrainian citizens. The first meeting of the board could be held on May 10 or May 11. The board chairman will be elected at the meeting. Naftogaz Ukrainy unites oil and gas production assets in Ukraine, and is the country's gas transit, underground gas storage, and oil pipeline transportation monopoly. Ukraine seeks to return to the public foreign loan markets in 2018, thanks to cooperation with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and conducting reforms, Ukrainian Finance Minister Oleksandr Danyliuk said in Kyiv on Thursday. He made the remarks at the conference "Week of Structural Reforms." The event was held in honor of (deceased Georgian businessman and reformer) Kakha Bendukidze. "Ukraine must pay $18 billion in 208-2020," he said, explaining the necessity of the decision. He said that investors should see prospects for the country's development. Ukraine needs to convince them that the country is trustworthy. "We can stay without the IMF for a month or two, maybe even a year. However, we need a prospect We would face crisis in several months without reforms," he said. Considering the low standard in African's higher education, Ibrahim Oanda Ogachi from the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa is optimist that the continent can embrace the economy globalization. Ogachi said that the dynamic of higher education has forced African universities to adapt with the changes. They have to be accommodative as well as being able to take outside influences to renew their intellectual - which could match the global education. Speaking to University World News, the officer admitted that universities in Africa will experience an under-pressure state as they take learning to international level. However, he hoped to increase the students capabilities in researching and innovating on various sectors that would benefit Africa in return. Raising the bar, the African diaspora is fully supported by The Council for the Development of Social Science research in Africa (CODESRIA). The council launches initiative that will improve African academics. It involves nurturing potential students with scholarships and PhD programs. It also supplies reliable teachers and mentors in many African institutions. Conducting a research on Kenyan universities, Ogachi stresses the importance in incorporating African born academic diaspora in America and Canada especially in research and analysis activities. Alongside Olayiwola Erinosho's research on Nigeria, both experts conducted interviews in Canada and the U.S. - calling African born students by phone and Skype. The report submitted to Carnegie Corporation of New York summarized the effectiveness of African diaspora in improving African higher education. Student exchange and scholarship are among sustainable elements that could possibly contribute to the improvements. However, the diaspora still faces a stereotype as many of the African governments view their citizens working abroad as unpatriotic. With the global change, Ogachi argues that politicians have to think twice about their opinion and find ways to make academic diaspora to return. Furthermore, Ogachi suggests evaluating the current engagements to unlock full benefits of the diaspora intellectual resources. Ukraine has proposed to Romania the construction of an interconnector between the gas transport systems of two states, President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko has said. "I propose to speed up work over signing an agreement on interconnectors between gas transport systems of our states, thanks to which Romania will be the next state from which Ukraine will be able to import gas. I'm grateful to the head of the Romanian state for backing such an initiative," Poroshenko said at a joint press conference with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in Bucharest on Thursday. Party on the Paseo will be Thursday, April 21 on the UTSA Main Campus Share this Story (April 21, 2016) -- UTSA's Party on the Paseo will begin at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 21 at the H-E-B University Center Paseo on the UTSA Main Campus, rain or shine. The party, an unofficial Fiesta event, is geared toward raising awareness of the dangers of alcohol abuse. There will be free food, games and activities including live music. Mothers Against Drunk Driving will be on hand to share the message of the importance of responsible alcohol use and the dangers of drunk driving. This year, a livestream of the event will take place on the official UTSA Facebook page as part of a contest to give away five 2016 UTSA Fiesta medals. If UTSA students can find the source of the livestream and complete a challenge, they will win one of the few remaining medals. The livestream will begin at 6 p.m. Party on the Paseo is sponsored and coordinated by several UTSA student organizations and supported by the UTSA Office of Student Activities. Now in its eighth year, Party on the Paseo is a BACCHUS Network General Assembly Outstanding Creative Alcohol Abuse Prevention Program award-winning event, and is funded in part by a supporting grant from the U.S. Department of Education. By Joanna Carver Public Affairs Specialist ---------------------------- Connect with UTSA online at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and UTSA Today. All the latest Uttoxeter news Story Saved You can find this story in My Bookmarks. Or by navigating to the user icon in the top right. Head of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) Valeriya Gontareva has confirmed the government is ready in the coming days to invite the mission of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to the country. "I can tell you that the mission is set to arrive as soon as possible. It now depends on the Ministry of Finance, which will confirm their readiness. I spoke to First Vice Premier Stepan Kubiv, Finance Minister Oleksandr Danyliuk. They hope this will happen in the coming days, they will invite the IMF mission. The mission is ready to come," she said at a press conference. As reported, with reference to IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde at a meeting with the Ukrainian delegation at the spring meetings of the IMF and the World Bank in Washington, the IMF mission intends to visit Ukraine in the near future. The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has sent a letter to law enforcement agencies containing information that could be indicative of organized criminal activities at insolvent Bank Khreschatyk (Kyiv), the NBU reported on its website. According to the report, in particular, the NBU noted that problems in the bank intensified after in late March-early April legal entities had carried out operations on current activities, including the transfer of funds to their accounts in other banks for a total of UAH 840 million. In addition, on April 4 it was established that the bank over the weekend "divvied up" funds of legal entities for a total of UAH 23 million, with a further transfer to the current accounts of individuals. Individual customers of the bank on April 4 repaid the credit debts of private enterprises associated with the shareholders of Bank Khreschatyk worth over UAH 600 million. The sources of loan debt repayment were transfers from the accounts of legal entities and individuals, including the provision of returnable financial assistance. As a result of such transactions, the bank freed liquid assets from the pledge - securities, mortgages, integrated property complexes and land plots. As reported, the NBU in the evening on April 5 declared Bank Khreschatyk insolvent and transferred it to the Individuals' Deposit Guarantee Fund for introducing temporary administration. MMA superstar Conor McGregor shocked the world this week with the announcement that he was retiring from UFC. The news came out of nowhere with no speculation or rumors leading up to the decision which he announced via Twitter. It only took a matter of hours for the rumors to begin about whether it was true or not and then speculation started about a potential WWE career for McGregor, due to him following the likes of Triple H on Twitter. Not only that, but the WWE themselves jumped on the rumors and began posting videos and mentioning McGregor's name, adding fuel to the fire. However after releasing a statement it has been made clear that the UFC star is not yet retired and hopes to compete at UFC 200, but that doesn't rule out a move in the future. Entering the squared circle Swapping the octagon for a wrestling ring would certainly be an interesting career choice, and one that the WWE Universe would happily welcome, but would it work? Well McGregor is certainly not shy of an opinion and has been known for his trash talking abilities at press conferences, an ability which lends itself kindly to the WWE. With wrestlers constantly having to work on the microphone to build their personal feuds, the way the Irishmen has built his matches shows he would be more than comfortable doing so in the WWE. McGregor has been arguing with Sheamus recently. Photo-whoatv.com The real question would be whether he could work safely in the ring. Whilst there is no doubt he is one of the best fighters on the planet, wrestling is a different situation and even though the company wants the moves to look as real as possible the crucial element is protecting your opponent at the same time. That is something that McGregor would need to train on should he ever be interested in appearing in WWE. For the company itself the possibility of signing one of the biggest sporting stars in the world is a simple decision. With Brock Lesnar already on the roster and Ronda Rousey having appeared on WWE television several times, the company has shown they have no issue's in bringing in UFC's stars. Even though the deal currently isn't possible, it could only be a matter of time before McGregor makes an appearance for professional wrestling's biggest company. LISA MCKINNON/THE STAR The first floor of The Big Yellow House in Summerland is once again available for lease, after plans to turn it into an Italian restaurant fell through. Lisa McKinnon Columnist SHARE LISA MCKINNON/THE STAR The first floor of The Big Yellow House in Summerland is seen in mid-renovation. It was last occupied by a restaurant about a decade ago. LISA MCKINNON/THE STAR The first floor of The Big Yellow House in Summerland is once again available for lease, after recent plans to turn it into an Italian restaurant fell through. LISA MCKINNON/THE STAR The basement space at The Big Yellow House in Summerland was once the site of the Wine Cellar Gift Shop. In "The Spirit of The Big Yellow House," former employee Rod Lathim writes that the space was inhabited by a presence he named Hector. LISA MCKINNON/THE STAR The Big Yellow House in Summerland was built in the 1880s as the home of the community's founder, H.L. Williams. Psst! Want to open a business at a freeway adjacent landmark address that people still think of as a restaurant even though it's been empty for a decade? You can, now that the first floor of The Big Yellow House in Summerland is available for lease again. The space is back on the rental market more than a year after the owner of Pace (PA-chey), an Italian restaurant in Los Angeles County, told the Montecito Journal he planned to open a second location there. His efforts appear to have stalled at putting up some new drywall and applying for an alcohol license. That application is still listed as "pending" on the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control website. Pace's owner has not returned calls seeking comment. But a "for lease" sign bearing the name and phone number of Teles Properties in Montecito is displayed in one of the three picture windows that once afforded dining-room views of the ocean just beyond the traffic on Highway 101. "It could be the perfect place for a store or offices, or to build on the location's history a restaurant or a wine bar," said Andria Kahmann of Montecito Real Estate Group. At nearly 3,370 square feet, the first-floor space retains some of the woodwork and fireplace surround that diners may remember from their back-in-the-day visits. The basement, with its river-rock exterior and a door that opens onto the parking lot, is about 980 square feet. Built in the 1880s as the private home of Summerland founder H.L. Williams, the mansion was turned into a restaurant in the 1970s by June Young. She is credited with changing the exterior paint job from boring beige to the titular yellow. Known for the practice of weighing children to determine the price of their meals, the Summerland spot became the flagship for a small chain of family-style restaurants, none of which appear to still be in operation. Young's death in 2003 lead to a revolving door of restaurant operators that at one point included Bernard Rosenson, now the owner of Mirabelle Inn and Cocquelicot Estate Vineyards in the Santa Ynez Valley. After buying the property in 2011, Carpinteria-based contractor Paul Franz updated the parking lot, made structural repairs and added an exterior elevator tower on the south side of the building. The elevator takes clients directly to Evolation Yoga, which opened on the top floor of the house in February 2015. Last summer, Franz submitted plans to the Santa Barbara County zoning department for approval to change the building's instantly recognizable pole-sign displays with new inserts. The rectangular "Family Dining Cocktails" panels would be replaced by new ones advertising the yoga studio. Larger panels for "The Big Yellow House" would be swapped out for a new design touting Pace Restaurant. (Back to the drawing board, on that score.) For more information about The Big Yellow House, including floor plans and interior and exterior photos, click on Kahmann's website devoted to the property: http://bit.ly/1WeicDv. Lisa McKinnon is a staff writer for The Star. Her Cafe Society column appears in the Sunday Life section and Fridays in the Time Out section. For between-column updates, follow 805foodie on Twitter and Instagram and "like" the Facebook page VCS Eats. Please send email to lisa.mckinnon@vcstar.com. STAR FILE PHOTO Smoke billows above the scene of an explosion at the Santa Clara Waste Water plant near Santa Paula in November 2014. SHARE By Marjorie Hernandez of the Ventura County Star Attorneys for defendants facing criminal charges related to the 2014 Santa Clara Waste Water explosion near Santa Paula argued Wednesday whether a former district attorney obtained statements that violate attorney-client privileges of those charged in the case. Prosecutors said former Ventura County District Attorney Michael Bradbury conducted interviews with defendants and witnesses of the Nov. 18, 2014 explosion at the wastewater facility on Mission Rock Road. The explosion caused injuries, led to evacuations and required dozens of people to be treated for potential exposure. On Wednesday, Senior Deputy District Attorney Karen Wold said Bradbury was retained by Musick, Peeler & Garrett LLP to conduct an internal investigation. Bradbury conducted interviews of victims and people who are now defendants in the case. In a motion filed in January, Wold said Musick, Peeler & Garrett LLP, and Burke, Williams & Sorensen LLP represent multiple defendants, as well as witnesses and victims in the case. Some defendants now fear their initial statements could be used against them in the criminal case. "Now we are in a situation where people are being prosecuted who previously provided statements that they believed were confidential to Mr. Bradbury and thinking it would not be used against them," Wold said. Some defense attorneys said Wednesday their clients initially thought Bradbury was acting as their attorney. Barry Groveman, of Musick, Peeler and Garrett, disputed that when the declarations were presented in court. He said the defendants knew Bradbury wasn't their attorney when they were interviewed. A Ventura County grand jury in August issued a 71-count indictment against Santa Clara, Green Compass, and nine company officials and employees, including CEO William Mitzel and Assistant General Manager Marlene Faltemier. Others who were indicted include board Chairman Douglas Edwards, Vice President Charles Mundy, Vice President Dean Poe, and managers Kenneth Griffin and David Wirsing. They are accused of conspiracy to commit a crime, handling hazardous waste with a reckless disregard for human life, disposal of hazardous waste, committing violations causing injuries and other charges. Groveman characterized the explosion as an industrial accident. Andrew Krause, who represents Griffin, said he did not want to view the declarations and did not consent to the release of any statement made by his client. Martin Zaehringer, who represents Faltemier, said he read the declaration but needs to speak to his client. Prosecutors also said they did not want to see the declaration because it is not public record and could contain attorney-client information they are not supposed to view. Ventura County Superior Court Judge Kent Kellegrew asked all parties to return May 2 to discuss the declarations and the prosecution's motion regarding defense conflict of interest. Kellegrew also ordered the defendants to appear June 9 to discuss defense objections to the indictment. Nine of the defendants charged in August have yet to enter their pleas. 3-term incumbent, heart surgeon vie in race for Congress A three-term incumbent with ties to Oxnard faces a heart surgeon with a celebrity wife in the 24th Congressional District. The Ukrainian side views the attacks on the checkpoints on the dividing line between the parties to the conflict in Donbas inadmissible, Ukrainian representative in the Trilateral Contact Group's humanitarian subgroup, Verkhovna Rada Deputy Speaker, Iryna Gerashchenko, said. "Ukraine's position is that ahead of the major holidays, the number of people who want to visit relatives or the native towns, is on the rise these days. The attacks on the checkpoints are inadmissible, which resulted in the damage to the checkpoints in Stanytsia Luhanska and now the facilities need a repair there," Gerashchenko wrote on her Facebook page on Wednesday. Gerashchenko recalled that, as of now, the checkpoints do not operate in the Luhansk region due to security issues. "And, therefore, one needs to urgently stop the violation of ceasefire on the contact line, specifically at the places of checkpoints and negotiated transport corridors. We call for the checkpoints to work quicker, and people to be able to visit their relatives on holidays," she said. The sides focused on the operation of the checkpoints at a meeting of the humanitarian subgroup in Minsk, Gerashchenko said. The access of international humanitarian organizations to the occupied territories has also been discussed at the meeting, she said. Additionally, the Ukrainian side suggested the issues concerning the observance of the rights of children in the conflict area be discussed at one of the next meetings of the group. The participants in the negotiating process on Ukraine call on the warring parties in Donbas to resume the operation of the checkpoints on the contact line shortly, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Special Envoy Martin Sajdik said, previously on Wednesday. ANTHONY PLASCENCIA/THE STAR Stephanie Chang, an 11th-grader at Oak Park High School, explains her project on ocean acidification to judge Linda Chilton, of the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, during the 62nd Ventura County Science Fair at the Ventura County Fairgrounds on Wednesday. SHARE ANTHONY PLASCENCIA/THE STAR Ryan Damerell (right), a 10th-grader at Ventura High School, explains his project on photovoltaic generation to a group of judges from the Ventura County Amateur Radio Club during the Ventura County Science Fair at the Ventura County Fairgrounds on Wednesday. Radio club members included Steve Noll, Rob Byl and Robert Brodie. ANTHONY PLASCENCIA/THE STAR An experiment by Santa Clara Elementary's Alysa Alavarez tested the teeth-staining abilities of various everyday drinks. ANTHONY PLASCENCIA/THE STAR Veronica Zepf (right) and partner Asha Slyker, of St. Bonaventure High School in Ventura, explain their project to Navy engineer David Medeiros during the Ventura County Science Fair at the Ventura County Fairgrounds on Wednesday. By Anne Kallas, Special to The Star More than 900 Ventura County students gathered Wednesday to show off their science acumen, from manipulating the taste of chocolate to studying the effects of Omega-3 oils on cancer patients. The 62nd Ventura County Science Fair featured 796 projects from students in grades 6-12, which were displayed at the Ventura County Fairgrounds. In addition, CSU Channel Islands hosted a STEM expo, which featured presentations by area businesses and organizations touting futures in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. "We want to take their excitement in science and transfer it into a career in science," said CSUCI Chemistry Professor Phil Hampton, who was demonstrating the super-cooling powers of liquid nitrogen. "Studies show that by fifth grade, most students are either turned on or off to science." More than 100 professionals judged the students' science projects. Among them was CSUCI Education Professor James Martinez, a physics projects judge. "We make sure they have a project that creatively addresses all required aspects that need to be presented," Martinez said, noting that the presentation portion of the project makes up 15 percent of a student's total score. "The presentation can make or break a student in terms of bringing a project to life." Emma Medina, a junior at St. Bonaventure High School in Ventura, explained her project to Maura Raffensperger and Kristine Durand, special awards judges for the Society of Women Engineers. Medina's project involved cooling chocolate chips using water (H2O) or dry ice (CO2) to see how it affected taste. She said she became interested in studying the effects of different gases on flavor after reading that NASA astronauts have trouble eating in space because the flavor of food is affected. Lauren Hinkley, a junior at Thousand Oaks High School, titled her project, "Effects of Platinum-induced Fatty Acids on Intracellular Glutathione in Saccharomyces cerevisiae." As she explained to the judges, studies have shown that chemotherapy patients become resistant to one of the drugs commonly used to treat their disease cisplatin if they take fish oil supplements. Using yeast cells because she was unable to test human subjects, Hinkley, who wants to become a surgeon, was able to determine that the resistance is lower when flax oil is used in small doses by people who need to take Omega-3 oil supplements. She said she was nervous when she returned from the STEM Expo to find a group of judges standing by her project. "I wasn't expecting them to be right there when I came back," Hinkley said. Dylan Wilde, a 10th grader at Ventura High School, looked at whether the carbon fibers used to make paddleboard paddles create an electrical current that attracts sharks. Wilde, a casual surfer, said that since the advent of standing paddleboards, shark attacks have increased. "Sharks have a sixth sense, which comes from near their nose, and they can sense electrical impulses and heartbeats," Wilde said. And while saltwater conducts electricity, his experiment, titled "Shark Attracting Paddleboarder," showed that the impulses generated by the carbon fiber paddle were too scattered and insignificant to be registered by sharks. John Tarkany, Ventura County Office of Education competitions coordinator, said the science fair is the last big competition for the 2015-16 school year. He explained that the science fair was held later this year because organizers had to work around the Ventura Fairgrounds schedule. "I think the science fair gives kids a chance to explore something they question," Tarkany said. "Science and technology go from being abstract concepts when they are able to study them." Science fair winners will be announced at an awards ceremony at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at the Ventura County Office of Education, 5100 Adolfo Road, Camarillo. About 40 participants will advance to the California State Science Fair on May 23-24 at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. SHARE Thank you for a warm welcome. The March 12 editorial in the Ventura County Star left me even more enthusiastic about joining California State University Channel Islands and the Ventura County community. The editorial clearly illustrated how much this university means to the residents of Ventura County. Before penning my response to the editorial, I wanted to have the opportunity to visit the campus as the "official" president-designate and learn more about the enduring partnership between the community and the faculty, staff and students at Channel Islands firsthand. My visit was phenomenal, and I thank the campus for hosting me. Aside from the glorious landscape and beautiful campus architecture, what struck me most was the profound commitment to the students and surrounding community that was exuded by every member of the campus. I left inspired to lead the next era of advancement at Channel Islands. Promises are not something I take lightly, but I assure you that I will work diligently to build upon the extraordinary foundation that President Richard Rush and the Ventura County community have established. As a university that has grown hand-in-hand with the community, Channel Islands has attracted a student body that reflects the richness of the region. As we usher in the next phase of development, we will continue to serve a highly diverse, first-generation student population, and celebrate our success in creating a truly multicultural campus. Committed to our role in economic development and civic engagement, more than 80 percent of our graduates choose to stay in Ventura County. They are thriving in their chosen professions and becoming the future leaders of our region. This is success at its finest. Providing an exceptional learning experience is our highest priority. We will continue to re-imagine higher education for the 21st century and empower students with the belief that Channel Islands is the ideal place for them to achieve their highest aspirations. Its world-class faculty and staff will continue to provide hands-on, interdisciplinary learning experiences to meet the needs of Ventura County's rapidly evolving economy and society. But above all, we will continue President Rush's legacy of placing students at the center of every decision we make. You will hear these words from many universities, but here at Channel Islands, this is a commitment reflected in every corner of the campus. Community support will absolutely be essential to our continued success, and I will seek out your input, support and engagement at every turn. We will continue to build partnerships through volunteer, internship and service-learning programs that provide students with the opportunity to meet a public need while simultaneously strengthening their leadership and civic engagement skills. We will continue to work diligently with our K-12 and higher education partners to further educational opportunities in the region, and we will seek to develop new public-private partnerships to enable our continued growth. I'm looking forward to working with Channel Islands students, faculty and staff and getting to know our local communities and leaders. Together, we will continue to develop new ideas and soar to even greater levels of success. Erika D. Beck will officially assume her duties as president of CSU Channel Islands on Aug. 8. Southern Nevada community members who have experienced the loss of loved ones can celebrate and honor their memory during the 13th Annual John Anderson Celebration of Life Live Butterfly Release. Nathan Adelson Hospice Foundation will host the event at 2 p.m. Sunday, May 1, at the UNLV Alumni Park Amphitheater, 4505 S. Maryland Parkway in Las Vegas, behind the Flora Dungan Humanities Building and the Student Union. Free parking is available outside the Student Union on Maryland Parkway and Harmon. The butterfly release will commence at approximately 2:30 p.m. The event, named after a beloved 23-year Nathan Adelson Hospice employee who passed away in April 2007, is open to the public. Butterflies can be reserved in advance for $25 by contacting Stephanie Forbes at 702.938.3910 or via email at sforbes@nah.org. Sponsorship opportunities are available. Our Celebration of Life event is a wonderful opportunity to honor and pay tribute to those who have completed their lifes journey, said Carole Fisher, president and chief executive officer of Nathan Adelson Hospice. Butterflies are a beautiful symbol of transition and can provide comfort and hope to those that have experienced the loss of a spouse, parent, child, or any loved one. An important part of the Nathan Adelson Hospice philosophy is providing emotional and spiritual care to patients and families. The premise of the butterfly release is based on an American Indian legend for carrying wishes to the heavens. The legend said that if anyone desired a wish to come true, they had to capture a butterfly and whisper that wish to it. The butterfly, which makes no sound, could not reveal the wish to anyone but the Great Spirit, who hears and sees all. The butterfly carried the wish to the heavens to be granted. The annual event has brought together hundreds of friends and families to release more than 500 butterflies in the memory of loved ones who have died. By: Dezan Shira & Associates Editor: George Llewellyn-Jones In 2016, prevailing societal values and strong economic tailwinds combine to create promising opportunities in Vietnams education sector. For those capable of navigating the bureaucratic hurdles of the Vietnamese Market, timing has never been better to establish operations. Historically, education has been championed as part of Vietnams Confucian value system. Not only has this created a strong demand for education related services, it has also propelled the sector to the top of the governments agenda, with education development listed among the top seven foreign investment promotion categories within the country. In addition to historical reverence, the skilling of workers is also seen by officials as the ticket to increasing national competitiveness and bolstering investment. As increased trade, steady government policies, and strong economic growth continue, increasing disposable incomes are now enabling families to afford private tutoring outside of the unsatisfactory teaching quality in schools. As 42.1 percent of the population are aged between 0-24 years, the window of opportunity for foreign investors cannot be overstated. Demographic Opportunities On an individual level, economic modernization has resulted in significant changes in the demand for labor within the Vietnamese economy. A job market that once focused on agriculture has subsequently migrated to manufacturing and will likely see pulls towards services in the near to medium term. Many parents are therefore seeking to enhance their childrens education so they may obtain skills which meet the ever increasing demands of the labor market. Following in the footsteps of countries such as China and South Korea, parents in Vietnam increasingly see foreign universities as the most effective means of obtaining a leg up for their children. In 2015 alone nearly 110,000 Vietnamese students studied abroad at a cost US $3 billion. With income levels rising at record levels, this trend is set to continue and will likely fuel demand for services intended to prepare students for relevant entrance requirements. In this regard, data from the World Bank shows that around 27 percent of households in Vietnam send their children to private lessons and the majority of them (90 percent) spend between one percent and five percent of household expenditures on supplementary lessons. Wealthier families in major cities such as Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are where the biggest demand is found, although a number of private tutoring centers have cropped up and sustained profitability in smaller cities including Hai Phong, Bien Hoa, and Da Nang. The State of Foreign Direct Investment in Education Out of all the skills required for university entrance exams, the most pertinent and requested are for languages. The main languages sought after are English, Chinese, Japanese, and French, with English in particular being highly regarded. Not only does English make up more than half of the US $198.7 billion global private language education market, the vietnamese government has set an ambitious target for all graduates to have a good grasp of English by 2020. Unfortunately, poor teaching quality remains rife in public schools and is resulting in growing dissatisfaction with conventional education institutions As the demand continues to grow and remains unserviced by the public sector, opportunities for foreign investment abound. As of May 2015, there have been 213 FDI projects in the field of education, with total registered capital of US $822 million according to the Foreign Investment Agency (FIA). The majority of these investment have been in private english language centers that aim to prepare students for rigorous language exams such as the TOFEL. Current competitors in the language prep market include Apollo, ILA, and VUS (Vietnam USA Society). VUS has 15 centers in Ho Chi Minh City, and Apollo and ILA operate across Vietnam with 18 and 31 centers, respectively. As one of the first foreign entrants to the Vietnamese education market, Apollo was the first company to take advantage of becoming a 100 percent foreign-invested education entity. Apollo and ILA have both employed long term investment strategies which emphasise the importance of giving students a sense of achievement from each lesson. Apollo ensures this by focusing on having strong teacher training systems. Learning environments are of high quality too with all classrooms having air-conditioning and good lighting. Apollo initially established a small centre to better understand the market and then used their experience to set up eight centres in larger cities. Alongside these nationwide brands, there are many independent language schools operating throughout the country. Common Investment Vehicles As stated above, language tuition centers remain the primary means investment within Vietnamese language education. This is in large due to investment restrictions that have been placed the education sector. Currently, foreign capital is limited to a 20 percent share in all projects relating to the provision of a fully private education experience. Although offering a replacement for public education institutions remains limited, supplemental education, foreign language centers and pre-univeristy prep program included, remains open to 100 percent foreign ownership and is thus primed for investment. For those considering investment, pre-university language schools and education providers are able to operate under the following structures: A 100 Percent Foreign Owned Investment Since 2009, 100 percent foreign ownership of language centers has been permitted, allowing investors to act under the same conditions as domestic enterprises. Since 2009, 100 percent foreign ownership of language centers has been permitted, allowing investors to act under the same conditions as domestic enterprises. Joint Ventures (JV) These will have at least one foreign and one Vietnamese investor and can operate with a majority foreign share. These will have at least one foreign and one Vietnamese investor and can operate with a majority foreign share. Business Cooperation Contracts (BCC) The most common form of foreign investment in education in Vietnam. Foreign firms will partner with a Vietnamese investor without the creation of a new entity such as a JV or 100 percent FOI. Under this model, foreign and local education institutions will usually conduct twinning programs, offer training courses, and/or exchange programs. The most common form of foreign investment in education in Vietnam. Foreign firms will partner with a Vietnamese investor without the creation of a new entity such as a JV or 100 percent FOI. Under this model, foreign and local education institutions will usually conduct twinning programs, offer training courses, and/or exchange programs. Representative Office These are usually set up to investigate the market in-depth. Their activities are restricted and establishment can be difficult but it allows for local relationships to be built. Tax Incentives Socialized sectors in Vietnam, including education, will enjoy a preferential Corporate Income Tax rate of 10 percent. This allows for a substantial discount over the already competitive CIT rate of 20 percent that is normally levied. Understanding the Challenges Ahead Set up Setting up as an education service provider can be a tedious process with a number of preconditions. The initial step is to obtain an Investment Certificate before any investments can begin. The government requires a minimum investment of VND 20 million per student (not including the land tenancy). Once a location is chosen, facilities need to be set up before an application for an Educational Institution License can be submitted. Following the business registration, a corporate bank account should be opened to register for the tax code. Employees can then be hired and registered. Human Resources Compliance From an HR perspective, teachers must also meet certain requirements. They must have college degrees along with a TEFL certificate. Health and police checks are also required. Naturally, parents are particular about teachers and native speakers are usually preferred. Fortunately, there is an abundance of foreign teachers in Vietnam looking for work. The quantity of potential applicants enables schools to conduct face-to-face interviews with potential teachers. All teachers may be employed on a probationary period, after which a work permit and a residence card should be applied for. The school must then collect Personal Income Tax (PIT) from the employee. Optimizing Investments While the bureaucracy may seem daunting, many foreign-owned schools have been successful due to their emphasis on facilities, pricing, and targeted markets. Confidence should therefore be instilled by promoting a strong and responsible brand that meets the expectations of parents. In addition to this, investors should strive to maintain a firm understanding of the latest setup and compliance procedures in order to ensure that operations can be established and run smoothly. About Us Asia Briefing Ltd. is a subsidiary of Dezan Shira & Associates. Dezan Shira is a specialist foreign direct investment practice, providing corporate establishment, business advisory, tax advisory and compliance, accounting, payroll, due diligence and financial review services to multinationals investing in China, Hong Kong, India, Vietnam, Singapore and the rest of ASEAN. For further information, please email vietnam@dezshira.com or visit www.dezshira.com. Stay up to date with the latest business and investment trends in Asia by subscribing to our complimentary update service featuring news, commentary and regulatory insight. Annual Audit and Compliance in Vietnam 2016 In this issue of Vietnam Briefing, we address pressing changes to audit procedures in 2016, and provide guidance on how to ensure that compliance tasks are completed in an efficient and effective manner. We highlight the continued convergence of VAS with IFRS, discuss the emergence of e-filing, and provide step-by-step instructions on audit and compliance procedures for Foreign Owned Enterprises (FOEs) as well as Representative Offices (ROs). Navigating the Vietnam Supply Chain In this edition of Vietnam Briefing, we discuss the advantages of the Vietnamese market over its regional competition and highlight where and how to implement successful investment projects. We examine tariff reduction schedules within the ACFTA and TPP, highlight considerations with regard to rules of origin, and outline the benefits of investing in Vietnams growing economic zones. Finally, we provide expert insight into the issues surrounding the creation of 100 percent Foreign Owned Enterprise in Vietnam. Tax, Accounting and Audit in Vietnam 2016 (2nd Edition) This edition of Tax, Accounting, and Audit in Vietnam, updated for 2016, offers a comprehensive overview of the major taxes foreign investors are likely to encounter when establishing or operating a business in Vietnam, as well as other tax-relevant obligations. This concise, detailed, yet pragmatic guide is ideal for CFOs, compliance officers and heads of accounting who must navigate Vietnams complex tax and accounting landscape in order to effectively manage and strategically plan their Vietnam operations. The Ministry of Planning and Investment is going to work with the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) to prepare the list of at least 50 representative of foreign invested enterprises (FIEs) to take part in the meeting. This is PMs first official meeting with the business community since the start of his term. Besides, the meeting will see the participation of 20 representatives from associations and 300 representatives from Vietnamese companies. The meeting aims to convey the PMs message that the government is going to create the most conducive conditions to facilitate starting up a business and to enable companies to grow not only in terms of number but also of quality. At the conference the PM will discuss ways to build an institutional setting that facilitates the operation of companies and answer questions and proposals posed by participants. Phuc has request the ministries and the peoples committees of cities and provinces to report on their progress in resolving the issues that companies meet and suggest ways to improve the business environment. Furthermore, the VCCI is also going to work with the peoples committees of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to draft a guarantee to create the best business environment for companies in the two cities. The two committees are going to sign the guarantee in front of the prime minister. Le Phuoc Vu Vietnamese companies urgently need government support: Le Phuoc Vu - chairman of Hoa Sen Group Foreign invested enterprises are growing strongly, contributing 70 per cent of the countrys export turnover while domestic companies are only contributing about 30 per cent, and mostly in the agriculture sector. In some cases Vietnamese companies are losing in the domestic market. For example, Thai companies have acquired many Vietnamese retailers and some production companies have reported being unable to get their products to be distributed in this channel. Vietnamese companies need the government to make policies that enable them to compete fairly. The Vietnamese economy is like a body, with the left leg being foreign invested companies and the right leg being domestic companies. Only when the right leg is strong and can walk with the left leg can the body be strong. It seems that now the right leg is atrophied. If macroeconomic policies are not conscious of this, its going to be more and more difficult for Vietnamese companies to catch up with foreign invested companies. All countries need foreign direct investment for economic growth and Vietnam is not an exception. Never have Vietnamese companies needed the government as now. We want to have freedom and not be chained by the current administrative institution. Binh Ba Island is also known as Tom Hum (Lobster) Island. This is the most-famous island in the cluster of Tu Binh islands. Binh Ba Island is not big and does have tourism services but its beaches are exceptionally beautiful. Binh Hung Island possesses wild beauty, with white sand, turquoise water and fresh seafood. Binh Lap is praised as "Vietnams miniature Maldives". Diep Son Island is still wild. Its most special things are a road under seawater that links the three islands. At 6pm daily, when the tide is low, the sand path appears. When the tide is high, the road is submerged. Robinson Island is a private island located in Cam Ranh Bay. There is only one house on the island and no services. Thanks to that, the island has unspoiled beauty, with white sand and turquoise sea. Hon Mun is an ideal place for bathing and diving. Hon Tam is about 110 hectares. Tri Nguyen Aquarium, located on the island of Hon Mieu is designed in the shape of a ship full of moss. Inside the ship is a miniature ocean with a lot of rare species of fish and live coral. President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko has said that the visit of the EU delegation and European Commissioner Johannes Hahn coincides with the resolution of political crisis, as well as the formation of a new, pro-European government, which now includes Deputy Minister for European Integration Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze. "We have all prerequisites to demonstrate our determination to implement the whole package of reforms," Poroshenko said adding that the reform strategy for the first 100 days of the new government's work had been approved at a meeting of the National Council of Reforms. According to the president, the program of actions of the new government includes fulfillment of obligations to the IMF and implementation of the Association Agreement. Ukraine strictly follows items of Minsk Agreements, he said. "For the reforms in Ukraine to be successful, we need internal stability, unity, foreign support and solidarity with the EU," Poroshenko noted. According to him, Ukraine is very interested in accelerating the receipt of the IMF tranche, EU macro-financial aid and U.S. credit guarantees. "After the referendum in the Netherlands, we must unite our efforts to accelerate and complete the ratification of the Association Agreement," the president said. European Commissioner Johannes Hahn emphasized that the decision to establish visa-free travel to the EU demonstrated the EU's support for Ukraine, even in the context of the Dutch referendum. "Of course, this issue depends on this country, but we should take into account that the Association The Association Agreement has already been ratified by 27 EU member states," he stressed, adding that the outcome of the Dutch plebiscite shouldn't affect relations between Ukraine and the EU. In the course of the meeting, the parties discussed the allocation of the second EU tranche in the framework of the third program of macro-financial aid in the amount of EUR 600 million. It will follow the fulfillment of criteria by Ukraine and the restoration of cooperation with the IMF. The leaders also discussed assistance under the Contract on State Development and Program of Support for the Public Administration Reform. The parties praised the results of the first quarter of implementation of DCFTA between Ukraine and the EU and noted the importance of the speedy entry into force of the Association Agreement. The president informed the Commissioner on the developments in Donbas, prospects for repatriating (jailed Ukrainian pilot and MP) Nadia Savchenko and other Ukrainian political prisoners in Russia. The parties confirmed that the sanctions against Russia will stay in place until full implementation of the Minsk Agreements and the restoration of Ukraine's territorial integrity. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton widened her already substantial delegate lead by securing 57.9 per cent of the vote in New York. (AFP/Timothy A. Clary) NEW YORK: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump hit the campaign trail on Wednesday (Apr 20) after their big primary wins in New York, with the Democratic frontrunner locking up the nomination, while the Republican billionaire's path to victory remains unclear. The routs on their home turf reset the races in their favour, with Clinton putting an end to rival Bernie Sanders' multi-state winning streak and Trump righting his ship after a series of losses to Ted Cruz that have raised the specter of a brutal battle at a contested convention in July. Leading contenders for the US presidency. (AFP/John Saeki, Adrian Leung) "The race for the Democratic nomination is in the home stretch and victory is in sight," Clinton told jubilant supporters late Tuesday in Manhattan. Clinton - the former secretary of state, first lady and senator from New York - widened her already substantial delegate lead by securing 57.9 per cent of the vote. Sanders, who was born and raised in Brooklyn but represents Vermont in the US Senate, received 42.1 per cent - clearly a letdown for a campaign which had predicted a strong showing. In her victory speech, the 68-year-old Clinton shifted her focus to the general election match-up with Republicans, extending an olive branch to Sanders supporters after a particularly tense New York primary battle. "It's humbling that you trust me with the awesome responsibility that awaits our next president," she said. "And to all the people that supported Senator Sanders, I believe there's much more that unites us than divides us." But the self-declared democratic socialist Sanders, who was recharging his batteries in Vermont, expressed determination to remain competitive. "There are five primaries next week and we think we are going to do well and we think we have a path to victory," he insisted to reporters. Sanders, 74, returns to the campaign trail on Thursday in Pennsylvania, which holds its primary on April 26, as do Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland and Rhode Island. TRUMP CONFIDENT Trump wasted little campaign time, scheduling campaign stops in a trio of states on Wednesday including Pennsylvania and Maryland. Clinton holds two events later on Wednesday in Philadelphia. Trump scored a blowout victory on Tuesday with 60.5 per cent of the vote, against 25.1 per cent for Ohio Governor John Kasich, and 14.5 per cent for Trump's main rival Cruz, an arch-conservative Texas senator who was thumped after daring to criticise "New York values." "We don't have much of a race anymore," a confident Trump said after his victory secured him at least 89 of the 95 New York delegates at stake. "Senator Cruz is just about mathematically eliminated," he said, noting how Trump's campaign is nearly 300 delegates ahead. Trump's provocative candidacy has appalled establishment Republicans, many of whom have joined an effort to block him from winning the nomination. But Trump, 69, toned down his divisive rhetoric on Tuesday, declining to use his epithet "Lyin' Ted" to belittle his rival, although he continued to take subdued digs at the "rigged" primary delegate system. Even with his New York victory, Trump is far from guaranteed the 1,237 delegates necessary to win the Republican nomination outright before the July convention in Cleveland. He has now won 847 delegates, according to a CNN tally, with some 670 delegates at stake in the remaining 15 Republican primaries. Cruz added zero New York delegates to his total of 553, while Kasich has 148. HUMBLED In many other states, though, Cruz's campaign has shown more savvy than Trump's in working the complex delegate system. If Trump does not reach the 1,237 threshold, he fears Republican grandees will conspire to deny him the nomination in Cleveland, even if he is well ahead in delegates. For the past two weeks, the real estate mogul has expanded and reshuffled his campaign inner circle, notably adding expert Paul Manafort to oversee his delegate-getting and convention operations. Cruz, angling for a contested convention, downplayed Trump's New York command performance as nothing more than "a politician tonight winning his home state." In a recent Philadelphia speech where he invoked former presidents Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, Cruz called on Republicans to coalesce behind him. "We must unite the Republican Party because doing so is the first step toward uniting all Americans," he said. Trump and Clinton are well ahead in polls in Pennsylvania and Maryland, the two big primary prizes on Apr 26. The Italian Navy has already rescued thousands of migrants whose vessels sank while they attempted to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Libya. (AFP/Handout) ROME: The UN refugee agency said on Wednesday (Apr 20) it feared around 500 migrants from Africa had drowned in the Mediterranean, in what could be one of the worst tragedies since the start of the migrant crisis in Europe. Survivors who were spotted drifting at sea before being picked up by a passing merchant ship on Apr 16 told the UNHCR many migrants drowned when human traffickers tried to transfer people to an already overcrowded vessel somewhere between Libya and Italy. The latest reported deaths come as Europe struggles to find a way of stemming the flow of people fleeing war, poverty and persecution in what has become Europe's worst migrant crisis since World War II. "The survivors told us that they had been part of a group of between 100 and 200 people who departed last week from a locality near Tobruk in Libya on a 30-metre (100-foot) boat," the UNHCR said in a statement. "After sailing for several hours, the smugglers in charge of the boat attempted to transfer the passengers to a larger ship carrying hundreds of people in terribly overcrowded conditions," it said, adding that the larger boat then capsized and sank. MIGRANTS ARRIVALS SHARPLY DOWN The 41 survivors - 37 men, three women and a three-year-old child - included migrants who were still on the smaller ship when the one they were being transferred to capsized as well as others who had already boarded the larger ship and managed to swim back when it sank. They are believed to have drifted at sea for up to three days before being rescued by the Philippine-flagged cargo vessel and taken to Kalamata on the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece. Of those rescued, 23 were Somali, 11 Ethiopian, six Egyptian and one from Sudan, the statement said, adding that they were being temporarily housed in a stadium in Kalamata. In what is believed to be the deadliest incident involving migrants and refugees trying to reach Europe, at least 740 people were feared to have perished in April 2015 after a crammed fishing boat capsized in Libyan waters. In another incident in September 2014, up to 500 migrants drowned off Malta after people smugglers rammed their boat in an attempt to force them onto a smaller vessel. The huge refugee influx arriving on European Union shores has sparked fierce disagreements among the bloc's 28 members and brought its system of open borders to the brink of collapse. Under a deal with Ankara to try to ease the burden, migrants who travel to the Greek islands are being returned to Turkey in return for billions in EU cash. The EU also promised to resettle one Syrian refugee for every Syrian taken back by Turkey, to grant visa-free travel to Turks within the border-free Schengen Zone and to reassess Turkey's stalled EU membership bid. Migrant arrivals in Greece have fallen sharply since the agreement took effect on Mar 20. The number landing on the Greek islands has now stabilised at around 100 people a day - around a tenth of the arrivals last summer. PERILOUS JOURNEY But about 50,000 people remain stranded in Greece since the closure of the migrant route through the Balkans in February. More than 10,000 of them are stuck in a slum-like camp at Idomeni on the border with Macedonia, which has seen a growing number of violent incidents sparked by desperate attempts to break through the frontier. More than one million people crossed clandestinely to Europe in 2015 while some 179,000 have made the trip since the start of this year, according to UNHCR figures. More than 3,700 people died in 2015 trying the make the perilous crossing over the Mediterranean, with 761 recorded as dead or missing in 2016. Authorities fear that calmer seas at the onset of spring will encourage greater numbers of migrants to attempt the perilous crossing to Italy after a winter lull. On Saturday, Pope Francis again highlighted the humanitarian crisis by visiting the Greek island of Lesbos and returning to Rome with three refugee families who fled the conflict in Syria. The pope told reporters that his gesture was "a drop in the ocean" but hoped that afterwards, "the ocean will never be the same again". The house of disgraced Ukrainian businessman Dmytro Firtash in Vienna (Austria) has been raided by police, Ukrainian Ambassador to Austria Oleksandr Scherba has said. "Firtash's house in Vienna was raided by the police. The raid lasted for three hours. It is likely that there are new charges. This time from Germany, not from the U.S.," he wrote on his Twitter page on Wednesday. Austria's APA news agency reported that the raid was conducted as part of the provision of legal assistance under a request of Germany. To go or not to go: Republicans face Trump convention dilemma When a boat stacked with gravel moors at a jetty in Yangon, 14-year-old Aung Htet Myat fills a basket he then carries on his back to trucks that whisk the load to construction sites springing up across Myanmar's booming biggest city. For each basket a labor broker rewards the boy with a stick he puts in a plastic bottle tied to his belt. At the end of the shift, which at the busiest times can last up to 24 hours, he exchanges the sticks for cash - 100 baskets earns him about $2.50. "I carry baskets with stones the whole day," said Aung Htet Myat, who has worked at the jetty for the last two years. "If there is no gravel boat to unload, I help bus drivers as an assistant." One in five children in Myanmar aged 10-17 go to work instead of school, according to figures from a census report on employment published last month, and the opening up of the economy since 2011 has triggered a spike on demand for labor. As the former Burma emerges from nearly 50 years of neglect under military rule, Yangon has been transformed into a vast construction site. Than Than Win and her two teenage sons began working at the same jetty as Aung Htet Myat after her husband died. The family now rely on a labor broker who lends her money in return for on-demand, non-stop work when a boat arrives. "He gives us a place to stay and we can also take money from him when we have no job," said Than Than Win, as nearby her sons carried another load of gravel on their backs. "We have no way to pay it back, so whenever he asks us to work we can't refuse." Her story is common in Yangon's slums, filled with people who have flocked from the countryside as the economy has boomed, says Michael Slingsby, an urban poverty expert based in the city. "People borrow money from lenders and in order to repay their debts children are being sent out to work," he said. Watch related video report from VOA's Zlatica Hoke: Laws Rarely Enforced May Win Myint, a senior member of Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) which took power this month, said tackling child labor was one of the party's goals. "If we cannot solve this problem, there will not be any development in our country because they will be the people serving the country in the future," she said. "They need to be educated to do that." To do that the first freely elected government since the early 1960s will need to address labor laws that experts say are fragmented and rarely enforced. Myanmar law bars children under 13 from working in shops or factories, and says teenagers aged 13-15 should not work more than four hours a day, or at night. "Nobody under 18 should be carrying heavy cargoes," said Vicky Bowman, a former British ambassador who now runs the Yangon-based Myanmar Center for Responsible Business. Outside of construction, child labor is most visible in hospitality, with even small children serving food in Myanmar's ubiquitous tea shops. Many children also work in fish farming and processing. At Yangon's San Pya fish market, the country's largest, over two days in February Reuters found girls and boys as young as nine cleaning and processing fish and unloading boats and trucks during 12-hour overnight shifts. "I don't want my son to do this kind of hard labor," said Hla Myint, 56, whose 15-year-old son works in San Pya. Speaking from their home in a dilapidated bamboo hut close to the river bank, Hla Myint did not share many of his fellow citizens' high hopes for Suu Kyi's government. "Whatever they say they would do, or give us, it will never reach here," he said. "I don't believe in any change." Like many teenagers, 19-year-old Negin Khpalwak from Kunar in eastern Afghanistan loves music, but few people of her age have battled as fiercely to pursue their passion in the face of family hostility and threats. Playing instruments was banned outright during the period of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, and even today, many conservative Muslims frown on most forms of music. Negin took her first steps learning music in secret, before eventually revealing her activity to her father. He encouraged her, but the reaction from the rest of her conservative Pashtun family was hostile. "Apart from my father, everybody in the family is against it," she said. "They say, 'How can a Pashtun girl play music?' Especially in our tribe, where even a man doesn't have the right to do it." Now living in an orphanage in the Afghan capital of Kabul, Negin leads the Zohra orchestra, an ensemble of 35 women at the Afghanistan National Institute for Music that plays both Western and Afghan musical instruments. When she went home on a recent visit, her uncles and brothers threatened to beat her for a performing appearance on television, and she had to return to Kabul the next day. "Compared to women outside Afghanistan, we feel we are in a cage," she said. In a country notorious internationally for harsh restrictions on women in most areas of life, Negin's story highlights a double challenge. "The formation of the orchestra is an achievement in itself," said Ahmad Naser Sarmast, a musicologist who returned home from Australia after the fall of the Taliban to help found the National Institute for Music in 2010. "I Will Never Accept Defeat" While children at the school have the support of their parents, they often face pressure from their wider family as well as from religious authorities, he said. "The bravery of the girls sitting in the orchestra and the leadership of a young female conductor is an achievement for Afghanistan," he said. Some of the women say their relatives are proud of their achievements, but they face suspicion from others, as well as intimidation. "When I have my musical instruments with me, people talk a lot behind my back," said Mina, a trumpeter in the orchestra, whose mother is a policewoman in the eastern city of Jalalabad. "There are a lot of security problems, and if we go from one place to another with our instruments, then we have to go by car," she added. The dangers awaiting performers in Afghanistan were brutally highlighted in 2014, when Sarmast was nearly killed by a suicide bomber who blew himself up during a show at a French-run school in Kabul. He has not been discouraged, however. The formation of the girls' orchestra was the best response to extremists, he said, adding that the school was trying to help Negin continue her education, despite the family problems. Negin remains fiercely determined to continue on a path that has given her a new sense of identity. "I am not that Negin anymore," she said. "I have been leading this orchestra for six months now, and leadership takes a lot of effort." She is ready to leave her family behind for the sake of her music, she said, although, in Afghanistan, family is crucial to most people's sense of their position in the world. "I will never accept defeat," she said. "I will continue to play music. I do not feel safe, but when people see me and say, 'That is Negin Khpalwak', that gives me energy." Australia says it is building up its capability to thwart cyber crime. Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull recently unveiled his $220 million Cyber Security Strategy, aimed at boosting the nation's defenses against online assaults by hackers on individuals, businesses and governments. Turnbull said defenses need to be boosted against foreign hackers because of what he called the unprecedented scale and reach of malicious cyber activity. To help in this effort, the prime minister is seeking closer collaboration between the government and businesses, and appointing a special ambassador to coordinate efforts with foreign governments. Australia has also admitted that it has the capacity to respond to threats by launching cyber attacks of its own. Although Turnbull did not elaborate on what techniques or technology could be used if the government launched such cyber attacks, he said the use of offensive cyber capability was subject to stringent legal oversight. Dr. Tobias Feakin, a government adviser and head of the International Cyber Policy Center at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, says online threats are becoming more serious. If you're a big business, you're probably having to deal with thousands of instances each week. Prime Minister Turnbull is clearly focused on this issue. It's an issue that, you know, he's incredibly interested in. He's one of the most technically astute leaders that this country's ever had, if not, to be honest, globally. So he's engaged on this topic, said Feakin. Last year China was suspected of infiltrating Australias Bureau of Meteorology. The bureau has a direct link to the Defense Department and it is thought the intrusion was an attempt to steal information. Beijing denied any involvement. Now for the first time, the government in Canberra has confirmed that the security breach did take place, although there has been no official declaration of who was responsible. An Australian television crew and mother accused of abducting her two children were released from jail in Lebanon Thursday after the childrens father agreed to drop charges against the group. Sally Faulkner, an Australian national, and the four-person television crew were arrested and charged with abduction earlier this month after Faulkner allegedly hired a team of retrieval agents to kidnap her two children from their father, with whom they had been staying. A Lebanese court charged nine people with kidnapping the children. Faulkner and the news team were among those arrested, along with two employees of the U.K.-based organization Child Abduction Recovery International (CARI) and two Lebanese men. Faulkner claims the children's father took them to Lebanon last year without permission and never returned them to Australia. The television crew was identified as members of a news team from Australia's Nine Network who accompanied Faulkner to highlight the issue of cross-border custody disputes. Ali al-Amin, the childrens father, said he dropped the charges because he didnt want the kids to think I was keeping their mother in jail. As part of the deal, Faulkner agreed to surrender any claims of custody over the children, who will live with their father in Lebanon. The Sydney Daily Telegraph reported that a multi-million dollar deal was struck between the Nine network and al-Amin, but lawyers and the judge involved in the case did not comment about any compensation. Faulkner was released into the custody of the Australian Embassy and is expected to leave the country Thursday. The television crew has already returned to Australia. Ukraine's Cabinet of Ministers is ready for the new law on civil service to take effect on May 1, 2016, Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman has said. "I want to emphasize my position and I think it coincides with the position of the government there can be no delay. The bill has been passed. It must come into force," he said at a government meeting on Wednesday. Groysman said technical amendments could be made to the document. Changes to the law would be approved during the course of its implementation, he said. "I'd like to convey this message to Ukrainian lawmakers it is impossible to delay (implementation of the measure). This would not solve the problem, but make it worse," he said. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko at a meeting of the National Reforms Council said that the law on civil service should be revised, noting that amendments to the bill would soon be floored in parliament. Special celebrations are taking place in Britain and the Commonwealth to mark the 90th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II. Royal gun salutes were fired in London, while the Westminster Abbey bells tolled in the queens honor. British Prime Minister David Cameron and opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn led tributes in the House of Commons to countrys longest-serving monarch. Her Majesty has been steadfast, a rock of strength for our nation, for our Commonwealth and on many occasions for the whole world, Cameron said, adding that with her unshakable sense of duty the queen had provided counsel to 12 British prime ministers and met a quarter of all the U.S. presidents in history. "Her Majesty has lived through some extraordinary times in our world, the prime minister said " ...As her grandson Prince William has said, time and again, quietly and modestly the queen has shown us all that we can confidently embrace the future without compromising the things that are important." Labor Party leader Corbyn said Queen Elizabeth had served her country "with a clear sense of public service and public duty". Today we are talking about a highly respected individual who is 90. And Mr. Speaker whatever different views people across this country have about the institution, " Corbyn said, adding " the vast majority share an opinion that Her Majesty has served this country and has overwhelming support with a clear sense of public service and public duty, which the prime minister has just indicated." Outside Windsor Castle, a royal family residence near London, people lined the streets as the monarch walked out accompanied by her husband, Prince Philip, to greet the crowd. Queen Elizabeth cut a cake that won a British television contest, while the well-wishers were singing "Happy Birthday" and applauding. The queen and Prince Philip then traveled the streets of Windsor in an open top Range Rover. The monarch unveiled a plaque marking The Queen's Walkway, a 6.3 kilometer trail that links 63 significant points in Windsor. The British postal service has issued a series of 10 stamps to mark the milestone birthday. Buckingham Palace released three photographs of the royal family taken for the occasion by renowned American portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz. Chinese President Xi Jinping has been adorned with the new title of commander in chief of the countrys Joint Operations Command Center, and with it has assumed a more prominent role in directing the Chinese military, state-run media reported Thursday. Xi was seen in news reports Wednesday and Thursday wearing camouflage battle dress bearing the centers insignia for the first time publicly. As well as being president, Xi is already the Central Military Commission chairman, which gives him authority over the 2.3-million-member Peoples Liberation Army, the largest standing army in the world. He is also general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and chair of the recently created National Security Council. Xi has already created a more assertive Chinese foreign policy since he took office in 2012. He has overseen the rapid building of artificial islands in the South China Sea and dispatched ships into Japanese-controlled waters, which many have seen as signs of aggression. The state-run Xinhua news service reported Xi visited the command center Wednesday, where he called on the staff to closely follow the trends of global military revolution and strive to build a joint battle command system that meets the need of fighting and winning an informationized war. Xi was accompanied by the commissions two vice chairmen, Gen. Fan Changlong and Gen. Xu Qiliang. The center is reportedly located underground in the western outskirts of Beijing. More than a week after the presidential runoff election on the Comoros Islands, the outcome remains in doubt. Comorian Vice President Mohamed Ali Soilihi has challenged the vote results that gave victory to former coup leader Azali Assoumani. Third-placed presidential candidate and Grande Comore Governor Mouigni Baraka has also rejected the results. Vice President Soilihi has called for fresh elections on Anjouan, one of the three Comoro Islands, because he said results from 23 of the 400 polling stations there were likely to favor him. Mohamed Mchangama, president of the consumer society of Comoros, said the situation remains tense in Comoros as Vice President Soilihi has asked the constitutional court to rule on the legality of the results from the island of Anjouan. We have provisional results from the electoral commission saying that Colonel Azali, but of course the challenger, Dr. Mohamed Ali Soilihi, the vice president is going to the constitutional court saying that there was fraud, and many electors could not vote. So they are asking for a new vote in some parts of the island of Anjouan." Mchangama said although there has been no fighting, the situation remains quite tense as everyone is claiming victory. The followers of Mohamed Ali Soilihi were having a meeting, which is supposed to be forbidden, claiming that the constitutional court will recognize them as the winner, he said. He said he understands the constitutional court began work Wednesday, and everyone is waiting for what the constitutional court will do. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon commended the Comorian people for peacefully fulfilling their civic duty by participating in the second round election on April 10, 2016. The elections are an important step in the consolidation of democracy in Comoros, a spokesman said in a statement. The first-round election took place only on Grand Comore Island, in line with electoral rules to choose the president on a rotating basis from the three main islands. Mchangama said the political infighting has further hurt the already poor economy of the Comoros Island. Meanwhile, current President Ikililou Dhoinines term expires May 28 this year after serving one five-year term. El Salvador has deployed a heavily armed special police force to hunt down gang leaders who have made the Central American nation one of the world's most violent and deadly places to live, the government said Wednesday. The force includes 600 army commandos and 400 specially trained elite police officers using assault rifles, helicopters and armored trucks. Vice President Oscar Ortiz said no effort will be spared to capture gang leaders who have caused so much bloodshed and grief. "We are going to go after them in the countryside and in the city. We are going to hit those who try to create disorder," Ortiz said. He calls the force a new hope for El Salvador. The president's office says the mission has three major objectives: neutralize organized crime gangs, arrest the top 100 leaders, and stop those members responsible for murder. "Our success is not based on how many bullets are fired," force commander Howard Cotto said Wednesday. "Our success will be based on the trust our citizens feel when you see [police] in the territories at night, in the rain, in the worst conditions [so] our people can say, 'Here's our police and our armed forces to defend [us]. " The new force is part of a general crackdown in El Salvador against gangs. Experts who study gangs say the reason young men hook up with such violent groups may be less about drugs and weapons trafficking, and more about poverty and a lack of education and job opportunities. El Salvador is said to be the world's most dangerous country that is not at war. The murder rate is 104 for every 100,000 people 22 murders a day, in a population of 6.3 million. Ethiopia's military says it has entered South Sudan and surrounded villages where more than 100 children abducted from Ethiopia are being held. The children were taken when suspected ethnic Murle fighters attacked villages in Ethiopia's southwestern Gambella region on Friday. More than 200 people were killed in those attacks. South Sudan's government says it is cooperating with Ethiopia's military. Acting Foreign Minister Peter Bashir Gbandi said South Sudan's army was not involved in Friday's attacks. Baba Medan, governor of Boma state where the Murle live, blamed fighters of the Cobra faction, a former militia in the area, for the attack. The Cobra rebelled against South Sudan's government from 2011 to 2013. David Yau Yau, who led the Cobra rebellion, denied they were responsible. He told VOA the suspects were militia armed by Medan himself. The European Union threatened sanctions on Thursday against Macedonian politicians who it says have obstructed efforts to end a long-running crisis after a push for EU-mediated talks failed. Macedonia, a poor Balkan country on the frontline of the migrant crisis, has been in turmoil since the opposition accused then Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and his counter-intelligence chief in February 2015 of wiretapping more than 20,000 people. Under an EU-brokered agreement, Macedonian politicians agreed last year to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the scandal and to hold early elections, but the process is on the brink of collapse. The EU is willing to consider travel bans and asset freezes against politicians judged to be blocking progress, said an EU official involved in the mediation, speaking on condition of anonymity. The official said that Macedonia faced being shunned on the world stage unless its political leaders made a concerted effort to end the 14-month-old crisis, which deepened last week when President Gjorge Ivanov drew protests by pardoning 56 officials over the wire-tapping scandal. "We are extremely concerned by the short-sightedness of the current government. The EU is willing to consider sanctions on politicians blocking a resolution of the crisis. Macedonia is heading towards international isolation," the official said. EU Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn and three members of the European Parliament, who have acted as mediators, earlier admitted the failure of their efforts to bring Macedonian political leaders together for talks in Vienna on Friday. Macedonia's opposition Social Democrats said they would only take part in the Vienna talks if Ivanov annulled the pardons. They also want June 5 elections postponed until a free and fair vote can be held. They have pledged to boycott the election if it goes ahead. The EU official said Ivanov must now annul the pardons as a pre-requisite for more EU-brokered talks. "That is the number one priority. Only then can we go back and talk," he said. In a statement, Hahn and the other EU mediators said Macedonia must take urgent steps to ensure the elections were credible and could be recognized by the international community. The crisis could hinder Macedonia's attempts to join the EU and NATO, they said. "We deeply regret retrograde steps that move the country further away from its aspirations towards European Union accession. In the absence of any further progress, we are now forced to consider further actions," they said. Steps Macedonia must take to prepare credible elections include updating its voter list, the EU official said. The United States and other countries have called on Ivanov to reconsider the pardons. Ivanov has stood firm, although he has said that any politician who had received a pardon could ask for it to be overturned in his or her individual case. A Florida woman is facing charges of conspiring to illegally export technology used in underwater drones to state-owned entities in China, according to an indictment unsealed Thursday. The U.S. Department of Justice indicted Amin Yu with 18 counts of conspiring to obtain systems and parts used in "marine submersible vehicles" from companies and deliver them to co-conspirators at Harbin Engineering University in China and other "state-controlled entities." The indictment says Yu, a resident of Orlando, Florida, worked to export the technology from 2002 until February 2014. As a citizen of China and a legal permanent resident of the U.S., she allegedly obtained parts from companies in the U.S., Canada and Europe. The case could further strain relations between the U.S. and China, which have repeatedly engaged in protracted spats over intellectual property and other matters. The case was investigated by several U.S. government agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI says economic espionage cases jumped 53 percent in 2015 and a majority of the cases involved Chinese nationals. The 53-year-old Yu could spend many years in federal prison if convicted. She faces maximum sentences of 20 years for each count of money laundering, 10 years for acting as an illegal agent for a foreign government, and five years on all other counts. The case will be tried in a U.S. District Court in Florida. The massive anti-terror demonstrations at the Place de la Republique are history. Make way instead for a pair scantily clad women, mock fencing on a recent sunny evening. Nearby a group of Algerian Berbers wave flags and listen to songs from their native Kabylia. The more serious-minded head to a corner of the iconic Paris square now devoted to political gatherings. Its here where a group is carving out a new constitution. And where a woman speaks tearfully about the lack of democracy in the Republic of Congo, as people seated cross-legged on the concrete waggle hands in agreement. Grassroots movement Heading into its fourth week, Frances Nuit Debout or Up all Night defies easy stereotypes. Born last month from a youthful protest against proposed labor reforms, it has morphed into a leaderless and hodgepodge citizens movement aimed to occupy, to recreate and to offer a grassroots voice of at least one slice of the French population. Its totally anarchic in the good sense of the term, said theater student Jean Briault, 25, a regular Nuit Debout goer. I personally want to finish with capitalism. Some observers compare it to the "Occupy" movement in the United States or the "Indignados" uprising in Spain. Others draw reference to the May 1968 uprisings that left an indelible mark on France. Still others poke fun at it. Le Monde newspaper cartoonist Xavier Gore depicts a bunch of penguins gathered with the tagline, Lets meet nightly until we can figure out why were here. Nuit Debout is a bit complex to define, said political scientist Bruno Cautres, of the Centre for Political Research at Sciences Po in Paris, of the largely leftist movement. Its trying to invest new forms of democracy and reinvent what it means to be a leftist in France, he added. Police stand guard on the edge of the square, some holding riot shields. Sporadic clashes between police and hard-core protesters have given it an ugly edge. Youth discontent Still the movement that has attracted thousands in towns across France and even spilled across French borders remains a largely peaceful expression of youth discontent. We dont trust the people leading us any more, said university student Joy Gromil. What we are trying to find is not a new leader, but a new way of running the country. There are plenty of reasons feeding the restlessness, starting with the countrys unpopular president, Francois Hollande. Thousands of students have taken to the streets to protest proposed labor reforms floated in a wider bid to turn around the countrys struggling economy. Hollande has called Nuit Debut legitimate, yet his remarks last week suggested it was merely a youthful phase. I was once 20 years old, and I was also involved in a movement because there were injustices and inequalities and the world was not going the way it should, he said on TV. Many center-right politicians are less generous, criticizing the government for letting daily sit-ins continue, despite Frances ongoing state of emergency. Still other prominent figures are making their pilgrimage to Republique square, including far-left French firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. We need to go to the Place de la Republique, conservative politician Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet told the weekly Journal de Dimanche, in a rebuttal to fellow center-right lawmakers. A generation is asking questions. Not everyone stays. Conservative philosopher Alain Finkielkraut beat a hasty retreat last Saturday under a hail of boos and insults, sparking questions about Nuit Debouts tolerance of diversity. Still a 'bourgeois' movement Others are embraced. A woman from the Republic of Congo carried a banner against prisoner abuses in her country, while an unwashed 44-year-old man sporting earrings and a ponytail said he was fighting for poverty. The youth make sense to me, its important to defend their cause, said the man, who gave only his street name, Drake. Still, the movements reach remains limited. Nuit Debout has yet to galvanize youngsters from Frances gritty suburbs that exploded into violence a decade ago. The movement that occupies the Place de la Republique is much more a movement of educated, bourgeois, urban people which is not at all the sociology of the banlieues, analyst Cautres said. And while a recent OpinionWay poll found that 70 percent of French youth support the movement, only one-quarter are willing to stay up all night. For many Parisians, Nuit Debout nonetheless offers a quixotic splash of color after a grim 2015, bookended by terrorist attacks. It makes me really happy to see all these young, and not so young people, all together trying to change something, said Marion Chataing, 60, who wandered through the crowd at Republique. How it will end is anybodys guess. It might peter out, it might be violently repressed or it might produce something that is completely new, said biology teacher Guillaume Thomsen, 38, another Nuit Debout goer. But I think it could be really important and I want to be part of it. French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said Thursday "conditions are coming together" to eradicate the Islamic State group. He noted caution in his message on France Info radio, but said that for the first time he is optimistic. France is part of the U.S.-led coalition carrying out airstrikes against Islamic State targets in both Iraq and Syria, while local forces and allied groups fight the militants on the ground. Le Drian said Islamic State has lost 30 to 40 percent of its territory since June 2014. He also highlighted the coalition's goal of pushing the militants out of Iraq's northern city of Mosul and the group's de facto capital in Raqqa, Syria by the end of the year. U.S. President Barack Obama said in a CBS News interview aired Monday that his expectation for the end of 2016 is that conditions will be in place for the eventual recapture of Mosul. If you are a small-business owner in New York City, you are on the horns of a dilemma: You want to take care of valued employees. You need to make a profit. But you may be facing an 80 percent increase in the cost of labor. Fifty-two percent of the 70,000 small businesses in New York City are owned by immigrants. Under a new law in New York state, all New York City businesses will have to pay a minimum wage of $15 an hour within three years. One of these business owners is Steve Hung, who was born in China and raised in Vietnam before coming to the United States with his family. Hung owns VCD Trading, which specializes in high-end fashion manufacturing, including items for The Row, a critically acclaimed brand of fashions and accessories designed by TV celebrity twins Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen. Most of my workers [he has 15 employees] average between $11 and $13 per hour, and thats probably, in this industry, one of the higher ones, said Hung, but now ... youre actually raising the minimum wage from $8.75 to $15 in three years, which is 80 percent. I dont know how to sustain that. Other businesses in the city face the same dilemma, and most of them are also owned by immigrants. Slightly more than half of New York's businesses are immigrant-owned. Hung believes the average salary at VCD is going to be between $16 and $18 and, he added, I dont think this industry made in the U.S.A. can support that. A study by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California at Berkeley concluded that the $15 minimum wage would be very positive with employer payroll costs across the entire for-profit sector rising by only 3.2 percent on average. The study said many businesses already pay more than $15 an hour, and many low-wage workers are paid more than $9 an hour. Also, in a recent Quinnipiac poll, 75 percent of New York City residents said they favored the new $15 minimum wage. Starting a business in N.Y. The garment industry, once thriving in New York City, has faced stiff competition from China and other Asian countries that pay workers very little, resulting in lower manufacturing costs. Hung said he thought about starting a factory in China, but there was too much competition, and the transfer of goods was too costly, especially if a client did not pay on time, or at all. Hung decided to manufacture in New York and built a reputation. Everybody saw that I was giving a quality product," he said. "Word of mouth started, people introduced me to other people that needed my quality of work. And, a lot of new customers are looking for garments made in the U.S.A. and a good, quality, reliable factory. Susie Liebowitz, director of production for Ten By womens sportswear, is one of Hungs customers. Liebowitz said the Chinese want large orders, not boutique-type orders. It just ends up being cheaper, faster, easier in New York, because you can communicate directly with the factory, even just walk over if theres an issue and solve it, she said. Liebowitz said she saw a glimmer of hope around manufacturing in New York. Made in the U.S.A. is a big selling point, and its a really big selling point to international customers, oddly enough," she said. "If you are selling to a Chinese vendor, made in the U.S.A. means something because the Chinese can get stuff made in China anywhere. Made in the U.S.A. increases the value of the product. Maintaining a business The New York-based Fiscal Policy Institute (FPI) says most of New York's immigrant-owned businesses, unlike Hung's, are likely to be Main Street businesses, such as grocery stores, restaurants and barbershops. David Dyssegaard Kallick, director of FPIs Immigration Research Initiative, told VOA, So what were talking about are the hair salons, the dry cleaners, the stuff that makes up the kind of character of a neighborhood." In New York, FPI figures show that almost 50 percent of all Main Street businesses are owned by immigrants. Those are not necessarily the biggest employers or the big drivers of the overall economy," he added. "Youre talking about the small neighborhood places; they are what makes an area attractive." And something else: Immigrant businesses often bring new energy to the urban, suburban and rural landscape of America. The odds against small businesses lasting more than five years are high. Kallick praised the immigrants' drive and determination. People come here clearly to some extent, its an act of entrepreneurship," he said. "Just to pick up and move from your country, go to a different place, youre a risk-taker. That person is someone who has ambition to make a different life for oneself. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about half of all new establishments survive five years or more, and about one-third survive 10 years or more." The bureau says survival rates have changed little over time. That might bode well for small, immigrant-owned businesses that have stood the test of time, like Hung's, an indication they will find a way to solve the new minimum wage dilemma. The EU-Ukraine Association Agreement has preliminarily taken effect despite the Dutch referendum, European Neighborhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations Commissioner Johannes Hahn said. Twenty-seven EU member countries have ratified the association agreement with Ukraine. The Netherlands has preliminarily ratified that agreement, so it could be said that the agreement has preliminarily taken effect, Hahn said at a press conference in Kyiv on Thursday. Now the European Council should decide what to do next. Hahn said that Ukraine and the EU could cooperate even under the current circumstances. A rights group says Egyptian security forces tortured a group of 20 people, eight of them children. Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Wednesday that the torture happed in February after the subjects were arrested in the city of Alexandria. According to the information gathered by HRW from relatives and lawyers, authorities used torture to force people to confess to crimes or give the names of other suspects. The rights organization said Egyptian authorities also refused to acknowledge holding them or disclose their whereabouts for more than a week. Three boys, 16 and 17-years-old, and three men, 18 to 21 years old, were detained during the raid for allegedly demonstrating without permission, committing vandalism and arson, and joining a banned organization, HRW said. Some Egyptian officials have disappeared children and apparently tortured them, then faked arrest records to cover it up, said Zama Coursen-Neff, childrens rights director at Human Rights Watch, adding that the authorities have turned a blind eye to the reports of abuse and refused to investigate. Rights groups have repeatedly accused Egypt's security services of carrying out illegal detentions, forced disappearances of people, including children, and torture of detainees and called on the country to stop such practices. America's high-tech center of Silicon Valley is growing, and much of its energy comes from immigrant entrepreneurs like Punsri Abeywickrema from Sri Lanka and Taiwan-born Gee Chuang. Both are founders of California startups, each at a different stage of development. Abeywickrema is beginning to build a user base for his website, Cloud of Goods, and Chuang is expanding the user group of millions for the site Listia. Both companies are part of the the peer-to-peer sharing economy made famous by the ride-share giant Uber and lodging site Airbnb. Cloud of Goods and Listia, like the larger companies, operate in the expanding tech region around San Francisco. A champagne celebration marked the first $500 in revenue at Cloud of Goods, which links local residents to tourists who need to rent household items that were too bulky to bring on their journey. Developers in Sri Lanka program the website, but it's run from Abeywickrema's San Francisco apartment. The 10 unpaid employees discuss business at a weekly meeting and shared dinner, where the talk quickly turns from Japanese fried dumplings to website marketing. Reallocating resources The team, which includes technical consultants and a real estate agent, plans to build a multimillion-dollar internet company. The idea was that there are a lot of resources that we all have accumulated in our homes, in our garages, in our closets, that are sitting idle, and how can we use this to make it better for everyone, said co-founder Abeywickrema. Between 2010 and 2012, he ran a similar site called Rentalic, a neighbor-to-neighbor rental. It didn't work out, he said, but five years fast forward, I think there is a real opportunity to build that Airbnb-for-everything-else company. Co-founder Stacy Tran said the company is starting small, focusing in the baby space first and expanding slowly, similar to how Amazon did it with books, and now to everything. The company now brokers the rental of baby strollers and car seats in San Francisco. Tran, an inveterate traveler, said the offerings later would grow to include kayaks, canoes and other adventure equipment as Cloud of Goods spreads its reach across the United States. A key: Hiring good people Listia is a web-based marketplace for used goods, including collectible vintage toys and rare coins, which are traded for Listia credits that can later be used to buy other things. The company was founded in 2009 by two Chinese Americans, Gee Chuang and James Fong, who met while they were students at Cornell University in New York state. Their operation is housed in a modern office in suburban Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Listia has 9 million registered members, according to Chuang, and more than 100 million items have been traded on the site. Eighteen people work in the company's headquarters, and a smaller staff in Taiwan explores opportunities in Asia. Chuang said getting good people is important for a startup, people that know more than you, are better than you and can help what it is that you want to build. He and Fong just love building things, Chuang said, so at the start, it doesn't feel intimidating. We just want to build it and see what happens. He said challenges include mediating disputes among the site's users, detecting fraud and overcoming the hurdles of running a business. Among Listia's challenges was a 2014 investigation by the U.S. Labor Department following complaints by online moderators who were paid with Listia credits. The founders said they didn't realize that moderators, who commonly are found on websites, could be considered employees, but after we got much larger, Chuang said in a statement, we found out that these activities should be classified as paid work. He said the company paid back wages and hired the moderators as part-time workers. Starting is tough Starting an online business can be difficult. It's pretty hard to get them off the ground, said analyst Neal Gorenflo of the news and advocacy site Shareable, noting it is especially hard for companies that require a change of behavior, as do many in the sharing economy. While some of these companies have grown quickly, Gorenflo said, it often took them a few years to find how to make it happen. Abeywickrema of Cloud of Goods acknowledged that starting a business takes time, but the tech economy is booming and from the industrial parks along the California freeways to downtown San Francisco, startups are attracting energetic people from around the world. All that different expertise, different skill sets, different talents mix here together, and that is the right recipe for a successful company, he said. Orient Craft, an Indian company exporting to retailers such as Marks and Spencer in Britain, says it is deeply worried about the upcoming June 23 referendum that will decide whether Britain exits the European Union. Nearly one-third of its total apparel exports are destined for Britain and Europe. And many other Indian companies are expressing similar concerns over the upcoming vote. However company Chairman Sudhir Dhingra points out the United Kingdom (UK) by itself is a very small market compared to the rest of Europe. I feel very certain that our businesses in [the] UK will definitely decline and our customers who enjoy good market share will also suffer, and if they suffer, we will also suffer. So I am very anxious, he said. Due to the deep historical links between the two countries, Britain has served for decades as the gateway to Europe for Indian businessmen. Calling London the number one place for those wanting to establish offices and businesses in Europe, Dhingra points out that, it clearly has lot of pluses in terms of the law, the judicial system, taxation, the language above all. Deep pockets In recent years, a fast-growing domestic economy has put more money in the pockets of Indian business magnates as their investments in Britain have grown in scale and size, making India the third largest foreign direct investor behind the United States and France. In 2014, Indian investment in Britain increased by as much as 64 percent. But the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry warns the flow of these investments will suffer if Britain chooses to leave the European Union as this will create uncertainty for Indian businesses. Gurcharan Das, an author and former corporate leader, is categorical that the loss of Europe would outweigh any possible benefits in the minds of Indian investors. One of the attractions of investing in Britain, is that you get the whole European Union market along with Britain. If Britain exits from EU, the path to the rest of Europe becomes less clear, he said. There are about 800 Indian-owned businesses in Britain. The biggest presence is that of the Indian conglomerate Tatas, which owns the huge car manufacturing company Jaguar Land Rover, Tetley Tea and a troubled steel business, which it is selling. According to estimates, Indian businesses in Britain have helped create 110,000 jobs in the country. On a visit to London last November, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the British parliament that India invests more in Britain than in the rest of the European Union. Arpita Mukherjee at the Indian Council for Research in International Economic Relations said one of the major advantages enjoyed by Indian businesses with UK subsidiaries is the free trade agreements that the European Union has signed with a host of countries. If [the] UK moves out of the European Union, then [the] UK will also not have access to all these benefits that these trade agreements offer with other countries. Therefore these companies need to really rethink their strategies, she said. Closed door strategy However while big Indian companies who use Britain as a bridge to Europe worry about its exit from EU, many small Indian businesses based in Britain and selling mainly to the domestic market feel they will benefit if the focus turns to the British economy. They prefer closed door, low competition, that kind of a strategy, said Mukherjee. It is still two months before the fate of Brexit, as it is being called, is decided. But businessmen like Dhingra are preparing to switch gears in the event that Britain leaves the European Union. We will have to certainly grow our penetration into Europe and other markets as well, because we have a capacity that we want to sell. So our energies will have to be focused somewhere else, which is again an uphill task, but we will do it. It is not just the Indian business community that is echoing concerns about Brexit. In the tourist haven of Goa, in western India, thousands of people who acquired Portuguese nationality in recent years are wondering how they will be impacted. They could do so because Goa was ruled by the Portuguese until 1961. Most of those who have taken Portuguese citizenship have gone on to settle in Britain using EU provisions that allow them to live and work in any of the European Unions member countries. But the Goans who have emigrated now worry that their days in Britain could be numbered if it exits the European Union. An International Energy Agency (IEA) official predicted the worldwide glut in oil supplies would drop in the next year or two and result in a rebound of oil prices. Global oil supplies will be rebalanced by the largest cut in oil production by non-OPEC countries in a generation, IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol told reporters in Tokyo. "This year, we are expecting the biggest decline of non-OPEC oil supply in the last 25 years. "At the end of this year or the latest 2017, we expect oil markets to rebalance and prices to rebound," Birol added. A reduction in about 700,000 barrels of oil a day, coupled with growing demand from emerging economies, will lead to increases in the price of oil, he said. "Global oil demand grows [at] a healthy pace, led by India, China and other emerging countries," Birol said. But the drop in oil supplies could be offset by increased output from countries such as Iran, Libya and Russia. So any rebalancing of global oil supplies will hinge largely on cuts by U.S. oil producers, he added. "Any hope of market rebalancing from the current surplus in supply [lies] on the predicted decline in U.S. oil production," said analysts at the French bank BNP Paribas. "If the decline in the U.S. oil supply proves insufficient to tighten balances, then ... the oil price will remain low." The predictions came as Birol and other top government officials met in Tokyo to prepare for a Group of Seven (G-7) summit next month in Japan. After the meeting, Paul Stevens, a distinguished fellow at Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, called for G-7 leaders to encourage oil companies to boost investment in oil production as part of a broader effort to ensure stable oil supplies. Israeli police announced Wednesday the arrests of six members of what they called a "Jewish terror cell" allegedly responsible for attacking Palestinians. The suspects are settlers from the West Bank. Shin Bet security agents said they included two minors and an Israeli soldier. Their alleged crimes included throwing firebombs and tear gas canisters into Palestinian homes and attacking Palestinian drivers and a farmer. No serious injuries were reported from these crimes. Shin Bet said the cell was inspired by last year's firebombing of a Palestinian home by Israeli settlers, burning three people to death, including a baby. Also Wednesday, a passenger injured in this week's bus bombing in Jerusalem died. The Gaza-based terrorist group Hamas claimed the passenger was a member of the group, and it called him a martyr. But Israeli officials have not yet identified the passenger. The blast wounded 20 others. The death toll from an explosion at a chemical plant in southeastern Mexico stood at 13 Thursday, with 18 others still missing. Another 136 people were hurt in the blast Wednesday at the plant in Coatzacoalcos, in Veracruz state. The cause of the explosion is not immediately known, but Mexican President Enriqie Pena Nieto called it a "tragic accident." Mexico's state-run oil giant, Pemex, jointly runs the plant with a company called Mexichem. It produces chemicals used to make plastic pipes. This is the latest in a series of disasters that has plagued Pemex. A fire at the same plant killed one worker in February, followed by a fire at a Pemex offshore oil platform weeks later, killing two. A gas explosion and fire at its Mexico City headquarters killed 37 people in 2013. After three government officials in the U.S. state of Michigan were charged with criminal offenses in the city of Flint's toxic water crisis, the question is how far up the ranks of government will anyone be held accountable for the lead poisoning in the city's corrosive water pipes. Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette says there will be more people charged, saying, "No one is off the table." Some Flint residents, have called for charges against Governor Rick Snyder and his resignation. Snyder has repeatedly rejected calls to quit and has apologized for the crisis, saying "bureaucrats making bad decisions failed the people of Flint." Asked whether he did anything criminal in his handling of the crisis, Snyder, chief executive of the Gateway computer company and a venture capitalist before winning the governorship, said, "I don't really want to get into that kind of speculation. I don't believe so." High-level state involvement extends to April 2014, when a Snyder-appointed executive who was overseeing the management of the financially troubled city approved switching the city's water supply from the large-scale Detroit water system that draws its water from Lake Huron to the Flint River that courses through the city. The switch, which lasted until last October, was aimed at saving the city several million dollars. But during that nearly 18-month period, officials failed to use a $100-a-day chemical to prevent corrosion of the city's water pipes, and lead leached into the drinking water. Medical tests have shown numerous Flint residents with elevated lead levels in their blood stream, including at least 200 children. Lead poisoning diminished the learning ability of young people and leaves them prone to anti-social behavior. Flint residents complained about the color, taste and odor of the water after switching supply to the Flint River, but government officials largely discounted their initial protests. After tests showed that the water was contaminated, officials switched the water supply back to the Detroit system. Watch: How Flint's Water Became Toxic Meanwhile, government agencies and charitable groups trucked thousands of bottles of water into the city to hand out to residents, along with protective filters to add to water taps in homes. Snyder did not acknowledge the problem until late 2015 when the medical tests showed high lead levels in children. City officials, with only modest success, have been demanding the state and national government pay millions of dollars to remove and replace Flint's aging lead water pipes. Snyder has called for state aid for Flint, although Congress has yet to agree on assistance for the city. Officials now claim the water is safe to drink, with use of filters as a precaution. Many residents still refuse to drink or bathe in it. Snyder visited one Flint home earlier this week and filled jugs with tap water, saying he would drink the city's water for the next month to show how safe it is. As thousands of people in flooded areas around Houston, Texas, struggle to deal with flood damage from Mondays record rainfall, new storms are coming in off the Gulf of Mexico, swelling streams, rivers and bayous and adding to their misery. At least eight people have died as a result of the flooding that followed heavy rains beginning late Sunday. Governor Greg Abbott declared a state of disaster for nine water-soaked Houston-area counties. The nation's fourth-largest city remains mostly closed for business. Rescue crews have saved more than 1,200 people who were left stranded by floodwaters, and their work continues as the latest rainfall, combined with runoff from areas farther north, causes some rivers to overflow their banks and flood low-lying areas. Massive damage More than 1,000 homes have been damaged by the floods, and many areas have no electrical power or access to other services. The problem is even worse for people living on the first floors of large apartment buildings, where many of Houstons poorest people live. When the rains stopped for several hours Tuesday, residents pulled out water-damaged carpets, furniture and other belongings, leaving piles of debris outside their doors. In some places, there were piles of broken drywall outside apartment doors, as well as carpets and warped wood from floors and doorways. Landlords are faced with costly repairs, which they cannot even begin until the flooding stops. Many tenants are frustrated. WATCH: Houston Struggles to Recover From Flooding Joshua Lewis rents a water-damaged first-floor apartment in the Greenspoint area of north Houston. He told VOA his landlord had not spoken to tenants about what repairs would be done but still expected tenants to pay their monthly rent by May 1. Lewis said, I am not paying my rent until I can walk into my apartment and smell brand-new drywall, brand-new tile, carpet, whatever. Health threat Omar Delfin, who lives in another apartment complex nearby, is in a similar fix, but his landlord has committed to replacing soaked carpets. But we are going to have to pay for our furniture and everything like that, he said. As is the case with many people in this area, Delfin does not have insurance. He and his wife and small child plan to stay with nearby family members who live outside the flood zone to avoid exposure to health-threatening mildew and mold, which has already started growing in carpet and on walls in flooded apartments. Another big problem for people in the flood zone is transportation. Although there is some bus service in the area, most people in this sprawling city rely on automobiles to get to and from work, and hundreds of flooded cars are sitting in parking lots here, useless. Tow trucks move in and out of apartment complex parking lots, removing cars that will not start. A mechanic named Jerry has been helping his neighbors clean out their flooded vehicles in hopes that he can get them to start, but he said many of them will be a total loss if the water damage is extensive. The newer-model cars are more electronic-type cars, he said, and when that water gets up there to a certain level, it messes up the electrical system. So it is pretty much totaled. Lending a hand In some cases, people have used battery cables to jump-start neighbors' cars. If a car will start, there is a good chance it was not damaged too badly, but such vehicles can have problems later if there is damage that is not detected. This is a big challenge for the mostly low-wage workers who live in Greenspoint, especially for those who are temporarily out of work as they wait for their employers to reopen. Another person left stranded by a flooded vehicle was Lyriic, 23, who moved to Houston from Michigan and has no family members nearby. Right now I have friends helping me, she said, but I am just going to have to work very hard for the next couple of weeks and try to get another car. I am just going to have to do my best. She works at a local bar and also does tattoo art, but the bar remains closed and she cannot get around with her equipment to serve potential clients without a car. Many businesses, schools and government offices remain closed in the Houston area as the rain and flooding continue. Forecasters expect the rain to taper off by the weekend, when sunshine could return to help dry out the region. The United States said it is concerned about reports that Russia is moving more military equipment and personnel back into Syria, while the top NATO official said the cease-fire still remains the best chance for a peaceful solution to the crisis. "It would be negative for Russia to move additional military equipment or personnel into Syria," said Ben Rhodes, the U.S. deputy national security advisor to President Barack Obama. "We believe that our efforts are best focused on supporting the diplomatic process." U.S. defense and intelligence officials said Russia has been steadily increasing its presence around the key northern Syrian city of Aleppo, ahead of a renewed push by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Putin, Obama call Earlier this week, in a telephone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Obama stressed the importance of all of the parties living up to commitments made when the cessation of hostilities was agreed to. Russia announced in March that it was partially withdrawing its military forces from Syria, however NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said it "maintains a considerable military presence" in support of Assad's government. Stoltenberg, who spoke Thursday in Ankara, said that although the nearly two-month-old cease-fire is "under strain," it still represents Syria's best chance at a peace. Cease-fire violations The cessation of hostilities between pro-government forces and opposition fighters went into effect at the end of February, and has been widely credited with sharply reducing fighting in Syria. But both sides have reported numerous violations, including a rise in fighting the past few weeks. Stoltenberg, who met with Turkish Foreign Affairs Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, welcomed Turkey's participation in international efforts to defeat the Islamic State militant group, including allowing its Incirlik Airbase to be used by the U.S.-led coalition conducting airstrikes against the militants. Turkey's warplanes have been taking part in the airstrikes in Turkey, but not Iraq. North Korea is demanding that a meeting be set up between a dozen recent defectors it claims were abducted by South Korea and their parents, or the south will face strong retaliatory action. The twelve women worked in a North Korean restaurant in China before they arrived in the South earlier this month. South Korean leaders say the women came of their own free will, while the North claims the women were essentially kidnapped by spies who tricked them into defecting. The recent case is a premeditated and organized group abduction which [the South] committed by mobilizing gangsters of the puppet Intelligence Service, North Korea's Red Cross said in a statement issued through the state-run Korean Central News Agency. The families who have their beloved daughters abducted in broad daylight are earnestly asking for direct contact with them as early as possible. The spokesman said North Korea will send the parents to Panmunjom or even Seoul if necessary to secure the meeting. Panmunjom is a truce village along the Korean border where the two countries engage in diplomatic talks. Should the South decline the meeting, it only serves as self-admitting the group abduction, the statement said. North Korea is notoriously harsh against would-be defectors, often subjecting those who are unsuccessful in escaping to severe punishment. The militants conducted 33 attacks on Ukrainian army positions over the past day, including nine attacks by use of large-caliber weapons, the army operation press center has said. "In disregard of the Minsk agreements, the militants fired 120mm mortars on Popasna and 82mm mortars on Ukrainian strongholds near Zaitseve and Maryinka," the press center wrote on Facebook on Thursday. The gunfire was most intense in the Avdiyivka defense area, where the militants used mortars of both calibers in addition to various types of grenade launchers, machineguns and small arms against Ukrainian troops. "Despite the serious impact on Maryinka, where the militants used their entire arsenal of weapons, including 82mm mortars, 14 times, the Ukrainian Armed Forces remained in control," the staff said. The hostiles were also active in Shyrokyne, Vodyane, Berezove, Krasnohorivka, the Butivka mine, Schastia and Novozvanivka, the report said. "In the reporting period, the Ukrainian Armed Forces opened fire 14 times when the threat of the enemy's advancement was the biggest," the press center said. President Barack Obama was in London on Thursday for talks with British Prime Minister David Cameron on terrorism, the refugee crisis in Europe and the global economy. Obama arrived in the British capital after attending the one-day Gulf Cooperation Council summit in Saudi Arabia, where he said the U.S. and Gulf state leaders remained united in efforts to destroy Islamic State and stabilize the conflict-ridden Middle East. "We remain united in our fight to destroy ISIL ... which is a threat to all of us," Obama said in Riyadh, using an acronym for the Islamic State group. He said members of the GCC would also "continue to increase their contributions to the fight against ISIL and the coalition we formed." "Overall, there is a broad consensus in assisting each other in our collective security," the president said. "Our intelligence sharing is vital in fighting against terrorism." Obama spoke broadly of areas of agreement between the U.S. and GCC leaders, such as the Gulf leaders agreeing to increase humanitarian efforts in Iraq and Syria, as well as continuing to support Iraq as it "liberates and stabilizes towns and cities from ISIL control." The U.S. and the GCC also agreed that a political solution is needed in Syria. Obama said they agreed that the only way to end Syria's civil war is through a transitional government and a move away from President Bashar al-Assad. Iran tensions However, one area of tension between the U.S. and GCC leaders is Iran. "Probably the biggest area where there has been tactical differences has been with respect to Iran," Obama said. "The issue is not the need for shared cooperation to deter against Iranian provocations. On that, we all agree." The nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers "cut off every single one of Iran's pathways to a nuclear weapon, (but) we recognize, collectively, that we continue to have concerns about Iran." However, Obama stressed diplomacy in the region and entering into dialogue "to reduce tensions." "None of our nations have an interest in conflict with Iran," he added. Besides Saudi Arabia, the GCC alliance includes Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman. Iran reaction In an op-ed Thursday in The Washington Post, Iran Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif accused Tehran's "Western-allied neighbors" of the same tactics of destabilization through a "rapid build-up of their already excessive military hardware." "They have repeatedly resorted publicly to raising the specter of military even nuclear attack on my country, in blatant disregard for international law," Zarif wrote. "I urge my counterparts around the world to reflect on what has been achieved through diplomacy rather than threats, sanctions and demonization. ... My government remains committed to constructive engagement and my initiative for a regional dialogue forum," he wrote. Tensions between Washington and its Arab allies have been apparent over differing approaches in the region. While both seek a cessation to sectarian violence, the U.S. is pressing for a greater focus on political solutions and democratic reforms, especially in states such as Yemen and Syria where cease-fires have been put in place, though they remain very fragile. However, some Gulf states, such as Saudi Arabia, have expressed doubts about the administrations vision for security in the region, especially with regard to what they perceive as growing threats from Iran. Administration officials in Riyadh downplayed disagreements. Deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said all sides want to see Islamic State and al-Qaida defeated, stability in Yemen restored, a political transition in Syria, and unity and stability in Iraq. On the core issues, there's agreement about where we want to go. There have been occasional tactical differences about what we are emphasizing," Rhodes said. But I think what this summit allows us to do is make sure that we are working to align our approaches and strategies." Obama told reporters at the close of the summit, "A lot of the strain was always overblown. ... The fact of the matter is that friendship and cooperation between the U.S. and the Gulf countries has been consistent for decades." Following a two-hour closed meeting Wednesday, Obama and Saudi Arabias King Salman agreed on the importance of "an inclusive approach to de-escalating regional conflicts. Pakistans powerful military chief, General Raheel Sharif, has dismissed a group of top officers from service over corruption charges. A lieutenant-general, one major-general, and three brigadiers and a colonel were among those fired after a year-long internal army probe found them guilty of corruption, military sources confirmed to VOA. All the officers [have been] sent home on corruption, the sources said. The ousted officers were all serving in the paramilitary Frontier Corps based in southwestern Baluchistan province. Army spokespeople were not immediately available to comment on the development that dominated headlines Thursday on Pakistani television stations. The local media put the number of fired army officers at 11, describing the move as unprecedented in the history of the Pakistani army. General Sharif has been widely praised at home and outside Pakistan for undertaking significant military actions against terrorist and extremist groups operating in the country. But in recent days, he has called for uprooting the menace of corruption in Pakistan to sustain gains the army-led counterterrorism operations have made in recent years. Therefore, across the board accountability is necessary for the solidarity, integrity and prosperity of Pakistan, said General Sharif, who is not related to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. PM Sharif under pressure The reported dismissals come as the prime minister is under growing pressure, including demands for him to resign, after documents leaked from a Panama-based law firm revealed his children own several offshore companies. The documents showed three of his children owned offshore companies that hold luxury residential property in London. But Prime Minister Sharif has ignored calls for establishing an inquiry commission under Pakistans chief justice, and assisted by international auditors, to determine the legality of the Sharif family's foreign assets. Responding to questions about whether firing the army officers could increase pressure on Prime Minister Sharif, defense and security analyst Maria Sultan said, I think any decision, which comes against corruption, definitely leads to pressure for people who would think otherwise." Prime Minister Sharifs two previous elected governments in the 1990s were dismissed for widespread corruption and misrule, though he rejected the allegations as politically-motivated. Corruption allegations are also engulfing his current government. The army has staged repeated coups in Pakistan, prompting some critics to suggest it is again creating grounds for another interference in the democratic process. A Peruvian potato farmer who was beaten and jailed after protesting against the loss of her land and home to a mining firm is among six winners of the Goldman Prize, one of the world's richest awards for environmental activists. The winners, including a Tanzanian land rights campaigner, a Slovakian public interest lawyer and a Puerto Rican nature reserve developer, will be honored at a ceremony Wednesday in Washington D.C. An initial ceremony was held April 18 in San Francisco, California. Each winner will receive $175,000 to support their environmental activism and continuing local campaigns. "People all over the world are fighting to protect their land and water," said Maxima Acuna, a Peruvian farmer, mother of four and grandmother, who won the prize for Latin America. Her campaigning over more than five years eventually led to the suspension of the $4.8 billion Conga gold and copper mine project in the Peruvian highlands. Environmentalists feared the mine would have poisoned local water sources and displaced communities and individuals living and farming there. Acuna's home in a remote area a four-hour drive from Cajarmarca, the capital of the mountainous region was destroyed as part of the mine project and the family's attempts to rebuild have been blocked several times since 2011. Security forces backing the mining company's claim to the family's land have been accused of beating Acuna's elder daughter because of her activism, the 47-year-old farmer said. "I stayed on my land and wouldn't leave," Acuna told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a conference call. "Harassment from the mine and security guards is still heavy." Mining companies at the center of the dispute have criticized the decision to award the prize to Acuna, saying the committee did not have "balanced or complete information about the land dispute or the events surrounding it." Slovakian waste dump Other winners included Slovakian lawyer Zuzana Caputova, who led successful efforts to prevent a waste dump from being built in her hometown of Pesinok. Protests against the proposed dump were the largest mobilization of citizens in the region since the 1989 Velvet Revolution which helped end communism in Eastern Europe, the Goldman Prize committee said. Edward Loure, a leader of Tanzania's indigenous Masaai, won the Africa prize for protecting more than 200,000 acres of communal land from investors. Baltimore student Destiny Watford won the North American prize for launching protests which stopped an incinerator from being built less than a mile from her high school. Luis Herrera won the prize for Island Nations after successfully establishing a nature reserve in Puerto Rico, protecting an important nesting ground for endangered sea turtles. Cambodian forestry campaigner Leng Ouch won the Asian prize for exposing corruption in land deals, causing the government to cancel some large concessions. Last year's winner of the Goldman Prize for Latin America, Honduran land rights campaigner Berta Caceres, was murdered in March, a crime condemned by environmentalists worldwide. Swazilands pro-democracy and civil society organizations have asked the government to scrap plans to buy a new presidential jet for King Mswati III, estimated to cost $13.2 million. The banned opposition and pro-democracy group, the People's United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO), described the move to buy the new jet as insensitive and corrupt, adding that the amount could be better spent to alleviate the economic challenges Swazis face. The group says this comes at a period when about one in four of the countrys 1.3 million population is in danger of hunger because of prolonged drought in the southern African region. Vincent Ncongwane, general secretary of the newly re-registered Trade Union Congress of Swaziland (TUCOSWA), says Swazis are unhappy with the governments plans to purchase the new jet. He expressed concern that the government will go ahead with those plans when local media reports show the Labor Ministry does not have transportation to ensure that its inspectors carry out their duties. We do not see what good use the purchase of the jet is going to do for the workers of Swaziland, said Ncongwane. Supporters of the administration in Mbabane say there is a need for King Mswati to have safe transport. They add that the kings security and safety are paramount. They also say he is the best person to travel abroad to attract foreign investors who would create jobs for Swazis. The issue of the king not having a safe transport is not the point of debate here. The point of debate here is can the country afford to buy this jet? It is sad that we have a parliament here that there is no opposition, therefore there has not been much opposition [there] against the purchase of the jet, said Ncongwane Critics of the trade union say the group has yet to forcefully demand the government reconsider its decision to buy the plane; but, Ncongwane said the criticism is unjustified. He says current rules make it difficult for the group to participate in street protests if they are not labor related. He is one of the worlds leading experts on ancient Mesopotamia who has traveled to Syria often. But all University of Chicago professor McGuire Gibson could do during Islamic States rampage of destruction in the historic city of Palmyra and other sites was watch helplessly from afar. This is the worst its ever been. This is totally out of control, Gibson mourns. Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage site, was retaken from Islamic State last month. The city dates from the 1st century A.D. when it was situated along a major trade route of the Roman empire. The expulsion of IS forces from Palmyra brought some relief to Gibson, who believes that with a return to government control, whats left of the ancient citys past might be back in safe hands. I hope the government gets more and more control. And actually, thank God for the Russians, said Gibson. Gibson believes Russias military intervention and cooperation with the Syrian government was the best hope to stop further destruction of Syrias irreplaceable cultural heritage. Much still at risk Gibsons view is not universal. Other preservationists, like Shawnee State University professor Amr Al Azm, warn that much remains at risk. This sense of euphoria, of anything to get ISIS out is, in my opinion, shortsighted and naive. Al Azm is a member of the Syrian opposition who once worked at Syrias Department of Antiquities. He has been studying the destruction of Palmyra from the air and says it is every bit as bad as was feared. But he said indiscriminate airstrikes by the Russians, as well as the Syrian government, were just as dangerous as deliberate acts of destruction by IS militants. The Russians and the regime have no consideration. Theyll bomb anything thats in their way, said Al Azm. Al Azm receives reports and images of the destruction in Syria daily from a network on the ground. While critical of the role of Russian and Syrian forces, he does agree with Gibson on the larger threat to Syrias heritage. But the looting, which is far more destructive in my opinion, it has done far more damage to Syrias cultural heritage, that goes shall we say unmentioned, he said. Much of the trade in historic artifacts from Syria is illegal. But the chaos of war and international demand have created a black market for Syrian artifacts. This is organized gangsterism, said Gibson. But theres a market for it. Al Azm said theres only one solution that will stop the widespread looting and destruction: What really needs to happen is for the war to stop. That is what is going to save Syrias cultural heritage. Widespread and systematic human rights abuses in North Korea continue despite two years of intense efforts by the United Nations to pressure the Kim Jong Un government to change, a new report by a Korean human rights organization found. The report released this week by the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB) was based on interviews with thousands of North Korean defectors who now live in South Korea. The finding of over 50,000 cases of human rights violations in North Korea is not verifiable and could be overstated, as it includes not only what witnesses have directly experienced and observed, but also what they have heard from others. Still it provides rare insight and documents extensive testimony to support its conclusion that conditions in the secretive and repressive North Korean state have not improved since 2014, when the United Nations released an investigative report documenting a network of political prisons camps in the country and widespread atrocities comparable to what the Nazis did before and during World War II The [U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea] report actually had a very restricted influence overall and we do not see any significant improvement, said Yoon Yeo-sang, the Chief Director of NKDBs North Korean Human Rights Archives. The international community has tried to pressure the Kim leadership to make reforms and hold perpetrators of atrocities accountable, or face escalating penalties and eventual prosecution. Based on the Commission of Inquiry report, the U.N. General Assembly voted to refer North Korea to the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity. However, the measure has still not been brought to a vote in the Security Council, given the near certainty that North Korea allies Russia and China would veto it. Arrests and executions The NKDB report said arbitrary arrests and imprisonments accounted for almost half of the 53,000 human rights violation cases they documented. Witnesses said violations that led to detentions by the state security officers included attempting to escape from the North and trying to communicate with relatives in the South. And, families of offenders would often also be arrested. Since North Korean leader Kim Jong Un took office in late 2011, the NKDB reports, nearly 100 government and military officials have been killed in either public or secret executions. The NKDB says it is unclear if the recent purges among the Pyongyang leadership indicate the young North Korean leader is a brutal despot, or that an internal power struggle has forced him to take harsh measures. We can see after Kim Jong Uns assent to power there have been a number of internal political problems within the country, that actually prevented any policies that might have been aimed at improving the human rights situation, Yoon said. Worse a decade ago While there are still a significant number of reported violations, in some human rights categories, the number of cases has dropped in the last decade. Torture and inhumane treatment peaked in the 2000s but still occur at a consistent rate, said Yoon. And even though poverty is widespread, Yoon said, no North Korean has died from starvation in recent years, due in part to agricultural reforms that give farmers more incentives and increase private market trade with China. Severe famines in the 1990s that killed more than three million North Koreans were made worse by the communist governments restrictive agricultural system and a sudden halt in economic aid after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The new U.N. sanctions imposed on North Korea in March for conducting its fourth nuclear test and another long-range rocket launch this year, did not mention the countrys human rights violations. Chinas support for sanctions is considered crucial because of its close economic ties with North Korea, and Beijing most likely would have opposed any focus on human rights abuse given its own record of, according to critics, unlawful harassment, imprisonment and torture. However new U.S. unilateral sanctions imposed on North Korea did cite human rights violations, as well as nuclear proliferation, as justifications for the punitive measures. In March, South Korea also passed legislation that will make improving human rights conditions across the border part of any humanitarian aid program, and will document rights abuses by the North Korean government and its leaders. Scientists in Australia say the country's iconic Great Barrier Reef is experiencing its worst coral bleaching on record thanks to a rise in water temperatures. Surveys of the reef that stretches for 2,300 kilometers off Australia's east coast showed 93 percent of the coral had some bleaching. The problem is worst in the northern part of the reef, where 81 percent is severely bleached. The problem happens when warm temperatures cause the coral to expel algae, which turns it white and robs it of an important food source. If temperatures drop, the coral has a chance to recover. Scientists said in some areas half of the corals in the reef are already dying. The Great Barrier Reef is a World Heritage site that brings Australia $5 billion per year in tourism. A Norwegian law firm says it has filed a lawsuit with an Oslo court so American whistleblower Edward Snowden - the leaker of U.S. government documents - can safely travel to Norway for a prestigious award ceremony without fear of extradition to the United States. Lawyers at the Schjodt law firm in the Norwegian capital said they filed the petition on behalf of the former U.S. intelligence contractor and the Norwegian PEN, which has invited him to receive its Ossietzky Prize for 2016 on November 18. The lawsuit asserts that the extradition of Snowden would be contrary to Norwegian and international laws, and for that Schjodt is seeking a declaratory judgment from the court. The U.S. Espionage Act prohibits Snowden or any whistleblower in his position from raising any defense that he acted in the public interest, that the disclosures benefited society, or that the disclosed information had been improperly withheld by the government, Schjodt said. Norwegian PEN has awarded Snowden the Ossietzky Prize for 2016 for his contribution to defend freedom of expression, the group said in a statement, and will do its utmost to ensure that Snowden may receive the prize in person. In 2013, the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor leaked to the press details of a secret government eavesdropping program and left the country. Under the U.S. Espionage Act, Snowden faces charges in the U.S. that could land him in prison for up to 30 years. PEN is the original acronym for "Poets, Essayists, Novelists" and now it stands for "Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, Novelists." It includes writers of any form of literature, such as journalists and historians. Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud said lack of opportunity is to blame for the number of young Somalis boarding rickety boats in hopes of reaching Europe. The United Nations refugee agency said Wednesday that up to 500 migrants may have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea when their overcrowded boat capsized and sank earlier this month. Survivors told VOA's Somali service that more than 200 Somalis were among those killed. In an exclusive interview with VOA Somali in Washington, Mohamud said, We bear some of the responsibility for the influx of refugees [to Europe], as we are the leaders of Somalia. These youths dont hate their country; the parents are not [selling] their assets to send their kids to die in the sea, but the economic hardship is driving them to take the risky journey, Mohamud said. Asked why his government is not able to create jobs for the youth to stay home, Mohamud said, Over 70 percent of Somalias population are youth under the age of 30, so the government cant employ all of them, but we are busy to restore peace that will enable the youth to work in [the country]. Regarding al-Shabab, Mohamud said the war against the militants is a "succeeding model" and pro-government African Union forces are winning. The Somali government and the AU force known as AMISOM have been fighting al-Shabab for nearly a decade, and the group continues to launch deadly attacks in the capital and on AU bases in the countryside. Mohamud, 60, also said he will run for a second term when Somalia holds new elections later this year. He was first elected in 2012. The United States, China and other world powers are demanding an end to disputes that have held up the peace process between South Sudan's government and rebel forces. Ten countries, the European Union and the African Union released an ultimatum Thursday, saying they expect rebel leader Riek Machar to return to the capital, Juba, no later than April 23. If he does not, they said, they will refer the matter to the United Nations and African Union security councils and request that action be taken. Machar was due to return to Juba this week to be sworn in as vice president and form a transitional government with his rival, President Salva Kiir; but, expected arrivals on Monday and Tuesday fell through because of last-minute disagreements over the number of troops accompanying Machar and the weapons they would carry. Machar's return is seen as key to advancing a peace deal the sides signed in August to end South Sudan's two-and-a-half-year civil war, which has displaced more than 2.3 million people. The countries behind Thursday's statement are partners to JMEC, a body set up to monitor implementation of the peace deal the government and rebels signed in August. They expressed "disappointment" with the government for imposing restrictions on Machar's delegation and "profound disappointment" with Machar for imposing new conditions for his return. The countries said security conditions in Juba are sufficient for Machar to return, and proposed a final compromise that would allow him to arrive with 195 troops, armed with individuals weapons, 20 machine guns and 20 rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Rebel negotiator Taban Deng Gai said the rebels, known as the Sudan People's Liberation Movement in Opposition ((SPLM-IO)) approved the compromise. "If tonight the government brings its approval to allow the bringing in of 20 PKM and 20 RPG, then we can talk about the arrival of the first vice president to Juba at any time," said Gai. Government spokesman Michael Makuei said he doubted officials would agree. "We are not expected to accept. This is a mere proposal, and a proposal does not necessarily mean that it must be accepted. The government has not accepted the proposal," said Makuei. US urges sides to be 'more flexible' On Wednesday, U.S. Ambassador to South Sudan Cartherine Molly Phee said Washington is disappointed with the leaders of the warring parties in South Sudan. In an interview with VOA's South Sudan in Focus, she urged both sides to honor their pledges and make decisions that advance the peace deal they signed last August. Ambassador Phee said both parties are to blame for the slow implementation of the peace agreement. "Both sides need to be more flexible and Dr. Riek needs to recall that the international community met the conditions that he asked for in the JMEC group," she said. She said the rebels' troops and weapons had been transported to Juba and that Machar has no excuse for not coming to the capital. The U.S. envoy said Washington will not work with South Sudan's government if the two parties are not implementing the peace agreement. She said institutional reforms will remain a prerequisite for assisting the Kiir administration. "We do not believe it is appropriate to engage in a government that is not inclusive, that fails to make sure that every community in South Sudan, every ethnic community, every political point of view has a seat in the house. Everybody should have a seat and voice in the house and should be able to address differences through a political process rather than at the point of a gun," Phee said. The U.S. diplomat said South Sudanese leaders should work hard to meet the conditions set by the international community in order to enjoy donor support. She said both President Kiir and Machar need to speed up the formation of the Transitional Government of National Unity and kickstart critical institutional reforms in security sector, governance, economy and reconciliation. "Those steps are needed for South Sudan to stop this death spiral and to move forward in a positive direction. That is what we all want and that is what we are pushing for," Phee said. The Ukrainian and Romanian foreign ministers have signed an agreement on the joint patrolling of the common border during Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's ongoing visit to Romania. "Ukraine and Romania have signed an agreement on jointly patrolling the border, which should enable both parties to oppose corruption, smuggling, and illegal migration more efficiently," Poroshenko said at a joint press conference with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in Bucharest on Thursday. Starbucks, the coffee chain ubiquitous in U.S. cities, has spread to sub-Saharan Africa with the opening Thursday of a new location in Johannesburg. The company announced in July it would be partnering with Taste Holdings to bring a number of stores to South Africa. A group of people lined up outside the Johannesburg store before it opened, including some who waited there for seven hours. Starbucks has more than 23,000 locations around the world. Before Thursday, the only African locations were in Egypt and Morocco. The company says it gets a "considerable amount" of its coffee from farms in sub-Saharan Africa working with its centers supporting farmers in Ethiopia, Rwanda and Tanzania. Those centers opened not long after Ethiopia accused the company of trying to block it from obtaining trademarks for the country's best-known coffee beans. They later agreed to work together to promote three of Ethiopia's coffee brands. Russia and Iran are gearing up around the key northern Syrian city of Aleppo in what appears to be the beginning of a renewed push to shore up the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. We have seen regime forces, with some Russian support as well, begin to mass and concentrate combat power around Aleppo, Operation Inherent Resolve spokesman Colonel Steve Warren told Pentagon reporters during a telephone briefing Wednesday. This is something were concerned about, he added. U.S. defense and intelligence officials say Russia has been steadily bolstering its presence around Aleppo, shifting much of the artillery used in the offensive to retake Palmyra from Islamic State militants up north. Russian aircraft, helicopters and troops have also been moving toward Aleppo over the past several weeks, they say. At the same time, hundreds of Iranian-backed Shia militia fighters are converging on the area to bolster existing regime forces. Endgame The Syrian regime seems to be driving towards the eventual isolation of opposition forces in and around Aleppo, a U.S. intelligence official said on condition of anonymity. The official said at least in the area north of Aleppo, Russian actions appeared to be in support of the Syrian regime, aimed at cutting off the supply lines for moderate opposition forces. We also see indications of fighting southwest of Aleppo between Syrian forces with Russian backing and opposition elements, the official added. Russian officials have long said their actions in Syria have been aimed at terror groups such as Islamic State and al-Qaida-linked Jabhat al-Nusra, and U.S. officials admit Russia has picked up the pace of airstrikes on terror targets. But analysts caution the type of Russian equipment being sent to Aleppo suggests not just a different enemy in the short term but also a broader strategic endgame. Russia has begun to alter the shape of its own deployment, Institute for the Study of War analyst Genevieve Casagrande said during a panel discussion Wednesday. These types of military assets arent necessarily used, you dont actually need them to fight ISIS, she said, using an acronym for Islamic State. Iranian role While Russian forces seem to be the primary driver behind the looming offensive in Aleppo, providing critical air support and heavy weapons, Iranian-backed Shia militias have also been playing a critical role. Many of the Shia militia forces continued to fight even during the cease-fire, said Phillip Smyth, a University of Maryland researcher who specializes in Shia militia activity. They've seen a greater and more open deployment around the country, particularly in the areas around Aleppo. Despite seeing heavier casualties across Syria earlier in the year, Iran has continued to recruit Shias from Iraq and elsewhere to join the fight, again increasing its online efforts, Smyth said. He estimates there could be 14,000 or more Iranian-backed Shia fighters in Syria as well as another 3,500 Iranian troops. For now, U.S. defense officials say developments around Aleppo are unlikely to affect the U.S.-led coalition effort to destroy the Islamic State terror group, though one official said it could influence operations peripherally. Turkeys top appeals court has overturned the convictions of senior military officers who had been charged with planning to overthrow the government. The convictions two years ago were hailed as an example of civilian rulers ending the militarys influence in Turkish politics. Turkeys top appeals court, the Yargitay, ruled that convictions in a conspiracy to overthrow the government were unfounded. The ruling ended nine years of investigations and court cases that led to the imprisonment of 274 senior military officers, politicians, journalists and writers. The Ergenekon conspiracy, as prosecutors dubbed it, was an attempt to overthrow the Islamist-rooted AK Party government. But critics claimed the investigation was a witch hunt involving fabricated evidence against the pro-secular military and its supporters. The decision by the appeals court to overturn the convictions was welcomed by the leader of the main opposition Republican People's Party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Kilicdaroglu said "the decision revealed how right in our criticisms we were in the past. There are still judges in this country." But the convictions of senior military officers, including former military chief General Ilker Basbug, was widely seen nationally and internationally as a seminal moment for the country, ending the political meddling of the army in politics. History of coups Since 1960, the military seized power on three occasions, and in 1997 an Islamist-led government was forced from office. The army traditionally saw itself as a guardian of the secular state. But last year Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was believed to be the target of the alleged conspiracy, apologized to senior military officers for the investigation, blaming followers of an Islamist cleric, Fethullah Gulen. Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile, was once a close ally to Erdogan, but they have become bitter rivals. Turkish law professor Istar Gozaydin says while she understands why the court of appeals made its decision, she still thinks the decision is flawed. "Procedurally there have been problems in the legal sense. However, substantially I don't agree. I am surprised. I do think there have been structures like Ergenekon. So [in terms of] substance, I do not agree at all." Observers claim the collapse will likely only add to concerns over the politicization of the legal system. Earlier this month, the U.S. State Department and European Parliament warned that the independence of Turkey's courts was increasingly being eroded. Two members of the U.S. House of Representatives are calling for an investigation into the 2015 assassination of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa, and Representative Eliot Engel, Ranking Member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, have introduced a resolution urging the U.S. government to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin to bring Nemtsov's murderers to justice. "The circumstances surrounding Boris' murder are highly questionable but have yet to receive a proper investigation," said Ros-Lehtinen. "Boris' murder deserves a full and transparent investigation and I urge the administration to do everything it can to press the Putin regime." The February 2015 killing of such a high-profile government critic in an area near the Kremlin continues to reverberate throughout Russia. Members of the opposition have pointed blame at the government, with suspicions high that Nemtsov's murder was ordered as retaliation for his fierce criticism of Putin. In addition to the plea to find Nemtsov's killers, Engel said the resolution calls for "an increase in American support for democratic and civil-society groups inside Russia - groups that have been under increasingly vicious attack by authorities." Russia has detained five suspects in the murder of Nemtsov. Allies of Nemtsov expressed skepticism after the arrests, believing it is difficult to determine whether suspects are the real perpetrators. Allies believe it is equally important to find and detain those who ordered the killing. The Kremlin has denied involvement in Nemtsov's murder. President Putin labeled the killing "a provocation" and vowed the government would do everything to ensure those responsible are "properly punished." The British Foreign office released a travel advisory Tuesday to LGBT tourists looking to visit North Carolina or Mississippi. The U.S. is an extremely diverse society and attitudes towards LGBT people differ hugely across the country, reads the advisory, posted on the Foreign Offices website. "LGBT travelers may be affected by legislation passed recently in the states of North Carolina and Mississippi. Before traveling please read our general travel advice for the LGBT community. The travel advice includes warnings to avoid excessive public displays of affection, to exercise caution particularly in rural areas, and to be mindful that some hotels may reserve the right to turn away a gay couple. Jonathan Lovitz, vice president of external affairs of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC) said it is interesting that this is receiving attention internationally. Its clear that governments around the world have an eye on whats happening, he told VOA. Were facing a patchwork of laws here in the United States you can drive 20 minutes across state lines and your protections are radically different. Thats dangerouson an economic level. Tourist-unfriendly bills North Carolinas bathroom bill," as its called, signed into law on March 23, mandates that individuals use the public bathroom corresponding to their gender at birth. Private schools and businesses are allowed to determine their own policies for bathrooms and locker rooms, but all public schools, agencies, and universities must follow the new law. The North Carolina board of tourism released a statement making clear that as an organization operating under contract with the state government, it does not usually comment on public policy. However, we acknowledge that a number of companies have expressed reservations about doing business in North Carolina because of concerns regarding House Bill 2, Director of Communications Scott Peacock said in the statement. We are confident our states lawmakers and governor will work together to consider ways to best address the concerns of all parties affected by this legislation, and we encourage timely resolution of this matter. North Carolina has already been subjected to many high-profile boycotts, including rocker Bruce Springsteens cancelled tour dates in the southern state and financial business PayPal ended plans to open a facility in the central city of Charlotte. Mississippi has been subject to similar boycotts after passing a controversial state law allowing businesses to deny service to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender customers based on religious beliefs. Economic fears While Lovitz is confident that the economic pressure put on these states will force them to repeal the recent legislature, small businesses worry about attracting visitors with peak tourist season rapidly approaching. North Carolina's city of Asheville is one of its most popular tourist destinations. The mountainous city attracts 9.8 million visitors and $1.7 billion annually, and 1 in 7 of its 85,000 residents work in the tourism industry. Buncombe County voted no to the bill, said Stephanie Pace Brown, Executive Director of the Asheville Visitors Bureau. What we say is a reiteration of our communitys core values our community is built on acceptance. Brown said small businesses and hourly wage earners who depend on tips from tourists and conferences would be most affected by a drop in tourism. The future of these state laws is being contested. A recent case in Virginia that ruled in favor of a transgender teen is expected to impact a lawsuit against the new law in North Carolina. The United States welcomed the start of the Yemen peace talks that began Thursday in Kuwait, after being delayed when opposition delegations stayed home complaining of cease-fire violations by pro-government forces. "We understand that all parties now have arrived in Kuwait and are set to begin the talks," said State Department spokesman John Kirby, adding that the U.S. believes the recent cessation of hostilities in Yemen has "largely held." Kirby said the U.S. "continues to believe these talks are vitally important for Yemen right now. We urge the parties to fully engage in good faith in order to end the military conflict immediately and to return to a peaceful political process." The negotiations are being held in Kuwait and were due to start Monday. Members of the Houthi rebels and the party of former Yemeni leader Ali Abdullah Saleh, which backs the rebels, left Yemen on Wednesday after getting assurances the cease-fire would be respected. Focus of talks The U.N. envoy for Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, has said the process will focus on the withdrawal of militias and armed groups, the handover of heavy weapons to the government, interim security arrangements, the restoration of state institutions, and the creation of a special committee on prisoners and detainees. The Houthis have controlled Yemen's capital, Sana'a, since seizing it in September 2014. Six months later, they marched south in an offensive that led to their capture of the port city of Aden, and sent President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi fleeing to Saudi Arabia. Hadi and his government have since returned to Aden, aided by a yearlong bombing campaign by a Saudi-led coalition that helped push back the Houthis. The conflict has left more than 6,400 people dead and millions of people in need of humanitarian aid. The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, is on a three-nation visit to east Africa to highlight U.S. support for the fight against the militant group, which is active in the Lake Chad Basin area where Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon all share borders. Power said Wednesday in Chad's capital, N'Djamena, that the United States continues to support the fight against Boko Haram by providing advisors, information, training, logistics support, and equipment to the regional military force set up to counteract the group's attacks and attempts to gain control of more territory. She said, repeating a point she made a day earlier in Cameroon, that the fight against Boko Haram will take more than military effort. She said the effort must also include political accountability, respect for human rights, and strengthening of the rule of law. When questioned about Boko Haram's most famous kidnap victims, the so-called "Chibok girls" abducted from a Nigerian school two years ago, Power noted that the more than 200 girls are among thousands of Boko Haram kidnap victims. She said the passage of time has not blunted the resolve to reunite those victims with their families. Washington's first envoy for gay rights says there is an "emerging consensus worldwide that LGBT persons should enjoy the same rights as everyone else." Randy Berry said Wednesday that his first year on the job was "extraordinary," with countries around the world taking positive steps to ensure the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people. He notably welcomed advances in Vietnam, Nepal, Mozambique and Botswana. "Nepal made history for its new constitution, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity the first country in Asia to take that step," he said. Vietnam revised its civil code to make it easier for transgender persons to alter their legal identity. Mozambique decriminalized consensual adult same-sex relations, and courts in Botswana affirmed the right of an LGBT association to register as a formal organization. But, despite the positive notes, Berry warned "we live in a world where nearly 80 countries still criminalize LGBT conduct or relations." He singled out Russia and Nigeria as examples where "governments use LGBTI issues as a political wedge to bolster their own positions." And "in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, lesbians and transgender persons face incredibly high rates of violence and rape." Given this ongoing violence and discrimination, he said, "its no surprise that LGBTI individuals are fleeing their homes and their countries to avoid imprisonment, harassment, persecution, and at times, an almost certain death," as is the case in places under Islamic State control. Berry is tasked with helping countries coordinate U.S. strategy on rights for the LGBT community, as well as to highlight such issues around the world. The three U.S. Republican presidential candidates are wooing party officials at an oceanside resort in Florida to try to shape rules that could govern a contested nomination fight at the party's national convention in July. The campaign front-runner, billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump, says he expects to have a majority of convention delegates necessary to claim the nomination by the time state-by-state nominating contests end in early June. Nonetheless, Trump, who has often attacked party officials and claimed that election rules that vary from state to state have "rigged" the outcome against him, sent his top aides to meet Thursday with the 168 local and state officials who constitute the Republican National Committee. A Trump campaign memo this week vowed that he would have 1,400 delegates pledged to vote for him at the convention. If so, that number outweighs the 1,237 simple majority needed to be the party's standard bearer in the November national election to pick the successor to President Barack Obama, who leaves office in January. But numerous U.S. political analysts say a contested convention fight over the nomination is a distinct possibility. It would be the first contested convention for Republicans since 1976. With 15 states yet to hold nominating contests, Trump has a narrow path to claim the nomination ahead of the convention. Cruz, Kasich and numbers Trump's chief rival for the nomination, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, showed up at the party conclave and scoffed at Trump's claim that he will have the nomination sewed up by the time the quadrennial convention convenes. "What is clear today," Cruz said Wednesday, "is that we are headed toward a contested convention. Nobody is able to reach 1,237. I am not going to reach 1,237, and Donald Trump is not going to reach 1,237." A third presidential contender, Ohio Governor John Kasich, told the partys gathering that surveys of U.S. voters show that he is the only Republican who can defeat the likely Democratic presidential nominee, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in the November election. "My message to the delegates is that I can win," Kasich told reporters. "It's reflected in every poll." Cruz complained about Kasich staying in the presidential contest, claiming that it undercuts his chances of overtaking Trump for the nomination. Kasich has won only one nominating contest in Ohio, the state he governs. Kasich rebuffed Cruz, saying, "He's saying if I can't mathematically win the nomination, I should get out. He can't mathematically win. What's good for the goose is good for the gander." Further complicating the numbers game: Once the convention is underway, some delegate votes can change. Hundreds of the national convention delegates that Trump is accumulating, for example, are obligated to vote for him only on the first ballot. If Trump does not win a first-ballot victory and claim the nomination, those delegates can switch their allegiance on subsequent ballots. Clinton, the country's top diplomat from 2009 to 2013, has yet to wrap up the Democratic nomination, but has a commanding lead over her sole challenger, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. There are five more state nominating contests for both parties Tuesday, in the five northeastern states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware. U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter has welcomed Denmark's decision to expand its military campaign against Islamic State militants to include airstrikes in Syria. Denmark has been a part of the U.S.-led coalition bombing Islamic State targets, but had done so only in Iraq. The country's parliament voted Tuesday to approve operations in Syria. The total Danish contribution to the coalition will include seven F-16 warplanes and 400 military personnel, some 60 of them special forces. Carter said the move shows "growing momentum" in the fight to defeat Islamic State and will increase military pressure on the group. The U.S. launched the first airstrikes against the militants in Iraq in August 2014, shortly after they had seized control in large portions of the northern and western part of the country. The coalition effort expanded to Syria a month later. Denmark joins Australia, Canada, France, Jordan, the Netherlands and Britain among countries conducting airstrikes in both Iraq and Syria. To date, the coalition has carried out more than 11,500 strikes. A subgroup for economic issues as a part of the Contact Group which mediates the conflict in Donbas has discussed problems with water supplies and railway carriages in certain districts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Special Envoy Martin Sajdik said. "The parties covered water supply issues, restructuring of a system of railway shipping and issue of payments. A work of the international expert for organization of restoration of destroyed infrastructure in Donetsk region was positively estimated," the envoy said. According to him, difficulties with restoration of the destroyed infrastructure in Donbas appear because of the security problems. Venezuela will begin cutting electricity supplies amid a prolonged drought that has limited power generation, the electricity minister said Thursday, an unpopular measure for a population already struggling to obtain food and medicine. The rationing effort adds to the woes of President Nicolas Maduro, whose socialist administration is facing chronic problems in supplies of staple goods as low oil prices have stretched the OPEC nation's state-led economic model. Most of the country's electricity comes from the massive Guri hydroelectric dam, whose reservoir has reached historic lows as the El Nino weather phenomenon delays the rainy season. "There will be restrictions," Electricity Minister Luis Motta said in a televised address, avoiding the use of the politically charged term "rationing." "It's necessary, it's a sacrifice." Power cuts will rotate among different hours during different four-hour periods for 40 days starting Monday, Motta said, adding that additional details would be published Friday. The crucial oil sector is expected to be exempt from the cuts. Motta said the measure would help raise the level of the reservoir and promised a "careful administration" of the dam. Opposition critics say the situation is also the result of the government's failure to boost thermoelectric generation as an alternative source of power, which would reduce the usage of the water in the reservoir. Late socialist leader Hugo Chavez was forced to ration power during a drought in 2010, which proved to be one of his most difficult years in terms of his public approval rating. The collapse of oil markets nearly two years ago has left Venezuela struggling to maintain its system of currency and price controls, leaving Venezuelans stuck in lines for hours to seek everything from corn flour to basic medicine. Maduro says his government is the victim of an "economic war" led by political adversaries with the support of Washington. German automaker Volkswagen is expected to tell a U.S. federal court Thursday how it will compensate the owners of cars it sold with software to illegally get past emissions tests. The company is facing a civil lawsuit after admitting in September that it included the cheating software in its diesel cars and sport utility vehicles sold since the 2009 model year. Tests showed those cars emitted up to 40 times the permissible pollutants when driven. The details of Volkswagen's plans have not been completely worked out, including how much each car owner would get. But those briefed on the agreement between the company and U.S. officials say Volkswagen will buy back a certain number of the nearly 600,000 cars involved, and on top of that will make payments to owners totaling more than $1 billion. A judge had told Volkswagen to present a plan by Thursday, and he could still send the case to trial. The deal does not include plans to repair the cars. That and the cost of the fixes are still being worked out. More than 170 countries signed an agreement Friday aimed at limiting the rise of global temperatures and slowing the effects of climate change on the planet. The deal was agreed to in Paris at the end of last year, but opened for signatures on Friday Earth Day. We are in a race against time, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned. The window for keeping global temperature rise well below two degrees Celsius, let alone 1.5 degrees, is rapidly closing. The era of consumption without consequences is over. He said nations must intensify efforts to de-carbonize their economies and urged support for developing countries in making this transition. Biggest Emitters The countries signing the deal represent more than 93 percent of the planets greenhouse gas emissions. They are also the largest number of first-day signatories to any international agreement. The worlds biggest emitters China and the United States which together account for about 40 percent of emissions both urged early enforcement of the deal. That would require 55 countries representing 55 percent of global emissions to sign and then ratify the agreement. On Friday, 15 countries, mainly small island nations, submitted their ratifications to the U.N. chief. Chinas Vice-Premier, Zhang Gaoli, said his country plans to sign the accord before the G20 summit, which is to take place in September in Hangzhou, China. WATCH: Leaders sign climate change agreement Secretary of State John Kerry, who signed for the Obama administration, also said the United States plans to formally join the Paris agreement this year. The power of this agreement is the opportunity that it creates, Kerry said. He noted that investment in renewable energies are at an all-time high and that for the first time ever, more of the worlds money was spent on renewable energy technologies instead of new fossil fuel plants. Today we know: The new energy future, the efficencies, the alternative resources, the clean options none of what we have to achieve is beyond our capacity technologically. The only question is whether it is beyond our collective resolve, Kerry added. Kerry signed the agreement with his toddler granddaughter on his lap reinforcing the idea that this climate agreement will impact future generations. Brazils President Dilma Rousseff who is facing impeachment at home participated in Fridays signing ceremony. All renewable sources of energy will have an increased share in our energy mix, accounting for up to 45 percent by 2030, she said. She said the government is also working to restore 12 million hectares of forests and 15 million hectares of pastoral lands. Supporters We can congratulate each other today but it will mean absolutely nothing if you return to your countries and fail to push beyond the promises of this historic agreement, Hollywood actor and climate activist Leonardo DiCaprio told leaders. Now is the time for bold unprecedented action. Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, a civil society representative from Chad, urged developed countries to expand financing for adaptation measures, saying without it, soon there will be no one to adapt. She warned that people are going to become climate refugees as their crops and livestock are disappearing. Climate change is adding poverty to poverty every day. While leaders congratulated themselves for signing up to the Paris Agreement, they seemed to fail to notice the irony of the emissions they created traveling from all corners of the planet to attend Fridays ceremony. Key points of deal Goal: The long-term objective is to make sure global warming stays "well below" 2 degrees Celsius and pursue efforts to limit the rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Targets: Countries agreed to national targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions every five years. Developed countries are expected to cut their emissions; developing nations are "encouraged" to do so. Transparency: There is no penalty for countries that miss their emissions targets. But the agreement has transparency rules to encourage countries to follow through. Money: The deal calls for wealthy countries to continue to offer financial support to help poor countries reduce their emissions. Small Islands: The agreement includes a section recognizing "loss and damage" associated with climate-related disasters that is seen as a victory for small nations threatened by rising seas. A Tunisian woman who pushed past a culture of low expectations in her hometown and a Gaza man who uses social media to help Palestinians tell their stories to the world are among this year's recipients of the Emerging Young Leaders Awards. The awards, presented April 20 by the U.S. State Department, recognize young people from around the globe for their initiatives to improve conditions in their communities. Among the 10 recipients is Ahlem Nasraoui, a Tunisian woman who has started a program to confront terrorism and extremism, and who has launched several initiatives designed to train women. She made these strides against great odds. "In my hometown, where I come from, nobody is expecting that you are a leader or that you can be one," said Nasraoui, who grew up in the country's Kasserine region. Nasraoui remains a hopeful and steadfast advocate for cultural transformation. "As a young person, nothing can define you the place, or birth or race," she said. "Stand up to be a change-maker." Gaza native Basel Almadhoun is being recognized for organizing TEDx social media talks in Gaza that have helped Palestinians in isolated regions share their stories with the world. The TEDx Program "is designed to help communities, organizations and individuals to spark conversation and connection through local TED-like experiences." Almadhoun says his passion for the spoken word grew out of his experience as a high school exchange student in the U.S. state of Oregon, where he developed a love for debate. He started a small debate club when he returned to the Gaza Strip, and eventually turned to social media as an effective platform. "In Gaza, we have so many people with great stories that want to be heard outside, but [because of] the border closure, the conflict that is happening, and the many things that are affecting all of these people, they cannot come out of the Gaza Strip and meet people outside," he said. The other recipients are from Afghanistan, France, Georgia, Honduras, Indonesia, Kenya, Malta and Myanmar. "They represent the power of young people to launch grass-roots initiatives to improve their communities," said Evan Ryan, the assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs. "Whether they are working to promote interfaith dialogue, entrepreneurship, social justice, civic engagement these young leaders are jump-starting the change the world needs now," she said in a ceremony honoring the recipients. In addition to visiting Washington, the honorees will travel to cities across the U.S. where they will participate in professional meetings and meet their American counterparts. Later, they will reconvene in Washington, D.C., to share experiences and explore ways they can collaborate on future projects. Asha Hassan, from Kenya Hassan, an ethnic Somali, has developed youth-led groups spearheading dialogue and reconciliation among ethnic clans in her home region of Kenya. "We have to love each other and we have to be together to share the ideas," she said. "We have to respect each other's religion." Hassan teaches children the value of life and warns them of the dangers of joining extremist groups and being used to cause conflict in a community. Ahmad Shakib Mohsanyar, from Afghanistan Mohsanyar founded the social media campaign "Afghanistan Needs You" in an effort to counter the idea that youth need to leave Afghanistan for a better life. "Afghanistan has changed a lot since 2001, and the youth should stay in the country and help their future or to make their future," he said. His social media campaign received 26,500 "likes" in its first seven months. He works as a job placement specialist and serves as president of a professional network that promotes universal education, entrepreneurship and civil society engagement. Hillary Briffa, from Malta, currently pursuing a Ph.D. in London Briffa is Malta's youth ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), where she helped lead a campaign against violent extremism at an OSCE human rights conference last year. She has focused on youth issues ranging from gaining access to health care and education to countering online hate speech, and she led after-school courses on conflict resolution. Jessel Recinos Fernandez, from Honduras Fernandez was raised in Cofradia, a suburb of San Pedro Sula, a Honduran city that has been called "the murder capital of the world." Soon after joining a gang, he was shot. Calling that a turning point, he founded Skate Brothers, a club that offers various activities for at-risk youth to help them avoid gangs. Samuel Grzybowski, from France, founded Coexister youth interfaith organization Grzybowski founded Coexister, France's leading youth interfaith organization, while he was still in high school. The group has 19 chapters in France, Belgium and Switzerland, and its members' use of the hashtag #NousSommesUnis (We are united) was the most retweeted French hashtag after the terror attacks on Paris last November. Nino Nanitashvili, 23, from Georgia, head of communications at the International School of Economics at Tbilisi State University Nanitashvili uses evolving technologies to promote peace-building and development. She founded the Google Developer Group, Georgia's first technology-oriented professional community, and leads the Women Techmakers Community in Tbilisi, an initiative supported by Google. "Confidence-building is all about people and it takes every young person, it takes every individual to get involved in this process," she said. She is a mentor for tech startups and social entrepreneurs in Georgia, and has spoken about technology-driven civic initiatives at Google headquarters, the parliament of Georgia, and TEDxYouth Tbilisi. Thinzar Shunlei Yi, from Myanmar, coordinator of Burma's National Youth Congress and the National Youth Network Thinzar Shunlei Yi focuses on youth development and dialogue and helped organize the ASEAN Youth Forum. She held a highly successful U.N. International Youth Day event that reached thousands of young people and raised awareness on mental health issues. She is an active member of the Ambassador's Youth Council at U.S. Embassy Rangoon, which advises the ambassador on youth perspectives and needs in Burma. Zulfirman Rahyantel, from Indonesia, currently a student at Patimmura University in Ambon Rahyantel has organized discussions on the issues of grief, resentment and hatred in Ambon, a city that has experienced 10 years of inter-religious violence. "We have to love each other and we have to be together and we have to share ideas," he said. "We have to respect each other's religion." He was a facilitator for the Indonesia Interfaith Youth Pilgrimage project, in which youth from across the country gathered at a camp to learn about each other's religion and to visit each other's places of worship. Zambias President Edgar Lungu has issued a special operational order to the security services to restore law and order in some parts of the capital, Lusaka. This, the government says, is to stop the recent spate of ritual murders, which resulted in riots in some townships. The administration also says the riots led to rumors that were responsible for xenophobic attacks on foreigners, their businesses and property. Some Zambian youth attacked foreigners and their shops following rumors that the shop owners had been engaging in ritual murders, which enabled their businesses to flourish. Information Minister Chishimba Kambwili says the special presidential order to the security agencies could be reversed after review on Thursday. It would be reviewed tomorrow around 9 oclock [local time]. But I can confirm to you that all the towns are now calm and business has gone back to usual, and I am convinced beyond reasonable doubt the president will certainly reverse this order that he has given because the situation has calmed down, said Kambwili. He says Lungu has the constitutional mandate as the commander in chief of the countrys armed forces to protect Zambian citizens as well as foreign nationals. What transpired in the last four days in Zambia was unprecedented where there was this rumor that foreign shop owners were perpetuating ritual killing and some criminals took advantage of that to start looting their shops and threatening their lives. We tried to use the police, but the situation was not getting under control, said Kambwili. The problem that we are faced with is a problem that needs quick action. If we do not control this situation where Zambians are beating up or looting shops belonging to investors, we may end up going back to a situation where the kwacha [local currency] loses its strength and then the economy would be on its knees," he said. "So the president took this decision to try and protect the integrity of the country and of course protect the life and property of the so-called foreign nationals that were being targeted by unruly and unscrupulous Zambians. So far the Zambian police have been able to arrest some of the alleged perpetrators behind the attacks and looting of foreign shops in parts of Lusaka. Some Zambians say it appears political party supporters are using the riots to score cheap political points. Kambwili says there is a possibility of political parties using the riots to attack each other, but added there hasnt been any evidence to back the assertion. So far there have been two types of arrests. Police have arrested 249 people in connection with the rioting and looting, and they have also apprehended 11 suspects who are helping police with investigations leading to the ritual killings that have rocked Lusaka, said Kambwili. We do not have tangible evidence to back up that allegation. But we have received this information that some opposition political parties have taken advantage to sponsor some youths to try and cause chaos so that the gains that the kwacha has recorded against the major international currencies can be eroded. "But, I think by and large you only issue certain statements to certain things when you have got empirical evidence to back up your claims. But I can say that it is a possibility and there is information to that effect.," he said. President Robert Mugabe has arrived in New York for a climate change event set for Friday convened by the United Nations. The Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights has challenged the suspension of Harare mayor Bernard Manyenyeni by Local Government Minister Ignatius Chombo. Women vendors cry foul over constant harassment by the Harare municipal police. A United States Congressional staff member has attributed Britains decision to renege on its Lancaster House commitment to compensate for land, on what he calls Zimbabwes corrupt and lop-sided land redistribution exercise. And in our youth slot, Let Us Engage, this evening we are featuring Donald Chakututa, chief executive of Eden Energy Technology. Stay tuned for these stories and more coming up on Studio 7 at 7:30 pm on 9-0-9 Medium Wave and on the 4-9-3-0, 5-9-4-0 and 1-5-4-6-0 shortwave frequencies. We also broadcast on www.channelzim.net. Please check us out on Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter. This evening on Livetalk our hosts of the Womens Round Table will be talking with listeners and experts about women vendors in Zimbabwe. Participate by sending your messages on our WhatsApp number 001 202 465 0318. The number again 001 202 465 0318. Stay tuned!!!!!! A United States Congressional staff member has attributed Britains decision to renege on its Lancaster House commitment to compensate for land, on what he calls Zimbabwes corrupt and lop-sided land redistribution exercise. Almost three decades after Zimbabwe undertook a controversial land reform exercise that saw many white farmers forcibly removed from the farms they occupied, debate has been ranging over why President Robert Mugabes government embarked on what has been described as a haphazard and chaotic exercise. The debate was reignited at a recent town hall hosted by Voice of Americas Zimbabwe Service, titled Zimbabwe @ 36: The way Forward. Staff director Gregory B. Simpkins, of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health and Human Rights, clashed with his Zimbabwean co-panelists Baptist minister and educator Rev. Isaac Mwase and businesswoman Sibongile Sidile Sibanda on the genesis of the reform and beneficiaries. Simpkins declared Zimbabwes land reform exercise as mired in controversy since the countrys independence from British rule, and beneficial to mostly loyalists of President Mugabe's ruling Zanu PF party. He further claimed that white commercial farmers were forced over the years to pay for the land by some suspected Zanu PF supporters as they knew that they got it through unconstitutional ways. Britain provided millions of dollars under the so-called willing buyer willing seller land ownership scheme for the resettlement of thousands of people soon after independence, but reportedly ended the payments with the incoming administration of Tony Blair, who demanded accountability for the money disbursed. Simpkins backed the claims that the British stopped funding the program following allegations that some state officials were allegedly pocketing the money. The United States allegedly pledged to pay $75 million every year in the first 10 years of Zimbabwes independence but that was not done. President Mugabe defied Britains call for accountability saying Zimbabwe was not obligated to do so. It was soon after that the ruling Zanu PF party decided to forcibly take over white-owned commercial farms in 2000 claiming that Britain had reneged on paying for Zimbabwe's land reform program. But Simpkins said this land reform program did not benefit millions of Zimbabweans, including farm workers. However, Reverend Isaac Mwase disputed this fact, stating that some families have benefited immensely from the land reform program. He noted that the agrarian reforms were designed to address the lopsided land distribution pattern in Zimbabwe. His views were echoed by Sibongile Sidile Sibanda, also a panelist. But she noted that the land is not being fully utilized by some new black farmers. Obi Egbuna, a correspondent for the state-controlled Herald newspaper, argued that the land reform program was being impeded by sanctions. He asked Simpkins why the U.S recently imposed restrictive sanctions on some agrochemical industries. In his response, Simpkins noted that the sanctions at times have an unintended negative impact. America and its allies imposed targeted sanctions on President Mugabe over alleged human rights violations and election rigging. But Mr. Mugabe says the sanctions were imposed after Harare embarked on the land reform exercise. The president has blamed the sanctions for the countrys current poor state of the economy. An environmentalist says the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change signing ceremony scheduled for Friday in New York is a milestone, especially for developing countries like Zimbabwe. Barnabas Mawire, who is Environment Africa country director, says the Paris Agreement is very important as it fills in the vacuum that was left by the expiry of the Kyoto Protocol. We really look forward to this but we are not saying signing is an end in itself. We would actually call for action to implement some of the clauses of the agreement, said Mawire. He said there was also need for those that are not yet on board to join in because they are dealing with a common cause. Zimbabwe is among the 196 United Nations member countries who signed the Paris Agreement in France in December of 2015. President Robert Mugabe is already in New York for the ceremony. Mawire said Zimbabwe will have to sacrifice and make sure that the treaty is followed because it is among nations hard-hit by climate change. I think borrowing a leaf from other international treaties, I think our performance has been good especially on the wildlife side. The Paris Agreement will see all member-countries working together to limit global temperature rise to below two degrees Celsius. Mawire said developed countries were the main culprits in polluting the common Universe. Flights between Kyiv and Bucharest to be resumed soon Poroshenko Direct flights between Kyiv and Bucharest will be resumed soon, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said. "We hope that airlines would use their permits and resume direct flights between Bucharest and Kyiv soon," he said at a joint press conference with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in Bucharest on Thursday. Poroshenko said that this would be especially interesting after the introduction of visa free regime between Ukraine and the EU. Lawyer: Savchenko not to serve time if she returns to Ukraine Nadia Savchenko's lawyer Mark Feygin believes that the Ukrainian pilot and parliament deputy will not serve time in case of her return to Ukraine under the Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced Persons. "Being in Brussels, I once again clarified the immunity of PACE delegate Savchenko. Just to make sure. She will not be imprisoned after her transfer to Ukraine under the convention," the lawyer wrote on Facebook on Thursday. The Donetsk City Court in the Rostov region sentenced Savchenko to 22 years in a penitentiary on March 22. The Russian justice minister said on Wednesday that the Ukrainian Justice Ministry had requested him for documents to support the transfer of convicted Savchenko to Kyiv for serving time. In his novel Journey to the end of the night Louis-Ferdinand Celine provocatively described the soldiers who had died in the First World War as idiots. The French writer was referring to the fact the soldiers had given their lives for a cause that was not their own- a futile slaughter of the poor for the benefit of the rich. In the books many pertinent reflections on the human condition, the Celine notes how, in modernity, the street has come to constitute the place of dreams. Que fait-on dans la rue, le plus souvent ? On reve. Cest un des lieux les plus meditatifs de notre epoque, cest notre sanctuaire moderne, la Rue - what do we most often do in the street, we dream. It is the most meditative place of our time, it is our modern sanctuary." Since the French government recently introduced legislation reforming labour laws, a new spontaneous and acephalous, social movement has taken root throughout French cities- the Nuit Debout- Up All night movement. As the title suggests, the social movement is taking place at night time and one of its slogans is reve general ! - general dream, which is a pun on greve generale-general strike. So, instead of calling for a general strike in order to bring the government to its knees, the activists are calling for dreaming in the streets! The movement took off after the release on February 23 of journalist Francois Ruffins film Merci Patron- Thank you boss, a firm critical of French plutocracy. Although the film criticizes the avarice of contemporary capitalism, it does not treat the relationship between monopoly capitalism, foreign wars of conquest in the service of capital accumulation, class warfare and mass media disinformation. Nor does Ruffins film expose and denounce the complicity of all corporate French media outlets in war crimes and genocide in the Middle East and throughout Africa, through the dissemination of lies and disinformation about the role of Western imperialism in these wars. There is no mention of the fact that the reason President Laurent Gbagbo of the Ivory Coast was kidnapped in 2010 by French commandos- his country bombed and his character assassinated- was due to the fact that he defied the powerful Club de Paris, the circle of French bankers who control the African neo-colonys money; Gbagbo had proposed that the Ivory Coast print its own currency- a bold move which would have enabled the resource-rich country to build up its own industrial base independent of colonial interests. Although there is a stand at the place de la Republique claiming to expose the detrimental role of French policy in Africa, there is no real information of what that role is, nor have any of the pan-Africanist intellectuals who have written on the topic been invited to speak and sell their books. The Nuit Debout movement is predominantly white and middle class. Ruffins film also fails to point out how French bosses in the cereal industry colluded with terrorism against the people of Libya when they secretly met in with Libyan traitors in Paris in November 2010 to organise the bombing and destruction of Africaa richest and most democratic country. The French ruling class are not just guilty of destroying centuries of social gains by French workers, they are complicit in genocide and crimes against humanity. So why is Ruffin silent about that fact? Ruffin writes for leftist publications which supported the NATO-backed rebels in Libya- rebels who were in fact Al-Qaeda terrorists in the service of NATO. In 2011 the left-wing Monde Diplomatique published an article on Libya declaring that there was no doubt about the brutality of the regime, in spite of the fact all of the crime imputed to Colonel Gaddafi were carried out by the Takfiri rebels. Ruffin and the dishonest publications he writes for are all complicit in the genocide waged by NATO against the people of the Southern Hemisphere states, from the Middle East and Africa to Latin America. No, none of these uncomfortable realities are depicted in Ruffins anti-capitalism. Instead, we have ultra-leftist slogans, petty-bourgeois irony and the mindless occupation of a public square by youths, who have neither the education nor the experience necessary to understand the structural reasons and deeper implications of the labour reform they claim to oppose. The Nuit Debout movement is certainly not spontaneous, nor is it grass-roots and acephalous as so many pundits claim. On the contrary, it is the result of decades of careful policy analysis by US imperial ideologues. Since the undemocratic dissolution of the USSR in, 1991, the United States has perfected a regime change technique commonly referred to as colour revolutions. The strategy involves co-opting leftist slogans and symbols to serve a right-wing agenda. Lenin and the Bolshevik party had repeatedly denounced Leon Trotsky for utilizing this counter-revolutionary technique both before and after the October Revolution. It has now become a standard tool of US foreign policy. The manipulation of youthful naivety and rebellion for the purposes of either overthrowing a foreign government hostile to US interests or creating a left-wing opposition movement in imperial countries designed to kill all real opposition- this is a strategy which every would be activist needs to study if he wishes to engage in movements capable of real, social, political and economic change. The Nuit Debout movement is being led by petty-bourgeois, bohemians with little or no understanding of contemporary capitalism. The movement is organized on the same principals as the US backed colour revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Arab Spring- empty slogans, idiotic puns and political infantilism. Although we cannot yet prove it, the use of the clenched fist as the movements logo coupled with cretinous slogans, are strongly reminiscent of strategies and tactics of CANVAS, the Centre for Applied Non-Violent Actions and Strategies, a regime change youth training organization close to the CIA. The ruling class in France have evidently spent more time reading Marx than their would-be opponents. For the objective allies of monopoly capitalism in Europe today are the likes of Francois Ruffin and the other leading bourgeois leftist ideologue of this movement Frederic Lordon- both of whom mask the reactionary nature of their pseudo anti-capitalism or, to be more precise, their anti-neoliberalism, with a mixture of convoluted semantics, pseudo-intellectualism and ultra-leftist sloganeering. There are thousands of real, grass-roots organizations in France, and they get much of their information from independent media such as Meta TV, Cercle Des Voluntaires, Reseau Voltaire and many more. Real proletarian analysis of capitalism is provided by communist organizations such as OCF , andURCF. Coherent bourgeois critique of French and EU imperialism is provided by the political party UPR. The Nuit debout activists talk about a convergence of struggle yet journalists and activists from these genuinely popular organisations have been forcibly escorted from the Place de la Republique and denounced as fascists. Antifa is an organisation which purports to fight fascism but spends most of its time attacking all genuine anti-imperialist activists by blackening their name with the label fascist. Antifa have been active again in the Nuit Deboutmovement where genuine French anti-imperialists such as Sylvain Baron have been forcibly evicted from the square. This writer repeatedly pointed out in 2011 that the failure of the left to understand the reactionary ideology of the Arab Spring and the role of US agencies in its planning and execution, would have dire consequences for progressive politics. Now, similar techniques are being used throughout the world in order to criminalize real anti-capitalist agitation and create the conditions of military dictatorship. The objective allies of that strategy are petty bourgeois anti-capitalists such as Francois Ruffin and Frederic Lordon; these are the phastamagorical, would-be intellectuals who shine in the streets of the nocturnal, metropolitan dream world so eloquently depicted by Celine. The representation of imperialisms foreign wars of aggression as revolutions and humanitarian interventions, coupled with an infantile advocacy of vacuous concepts such as social Europe- this is the nefarious role played by these post-modern revolutionaries, who are the very avant-garde of reactionary imperialism. A malady when this writer denounced it in 2011, pseudo-leftism has now morphed into a serious planetary pandemic. If this form of leftism did not exist, imperialism would have had to invent it. The Nuit Debout movement is now spreading throughout the world.Pseudo-leftist media will zealously present this movement as a global painting of Delacroixs Liberty Leading the People when sadly, it is rather more of a sinister version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The soi-disant anti-fascists in this movement denounce as fascists those who expose corporate media lies used to justify the crimes of NATOs foreign wars-the foreign wars of capital accumulation waged by the same corporations imposing austerity and class war at home; but it is they who are the fascists, it is they who are the enemies of the working class! Ideological confusion is the great political illness of our time. Celine describes war and illness as the two infinities of nightmare. The French author could have included fascism in among the nightmares cited- the pernicious ideology his cynicism eventually led him to embrace. One could describe the two contemporary infinities of nightmare as the proliferation of wars of aggression and the triumph of capitalist repression due to the political illness of ultra-leftist cretinism, which has taken over the labour movement in the last 30 years. Until our youth emancipate themselves from the pernicious influence of controlled opposition and pseudo-leftist ideology- which turns them into useful idiots of the monopoly capitalism rather than revolutionaries- their good natured activism is tragically destined to precipitate civilizations journey to the end of the night. Editors note: This piece originally ran in March 2013. Questlove is in a large dressing room backstage at Carnegie Hall, getting his Afro picked out before going onstage to lead a concert honoring the music of his all-time favorite recording artist, Prince. His mother is sitting beside him, beaming at her boy. Back when Quest, now the Roots drummer and Jimmy Fallon bandleader, was a teenager, she and his father only listened to Christian radio and behaved like the black Ned and Maude Flanders, he writes in his upcoming memoir, Mo Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove. When she found Prince records in his room, she would throw them out. When Princes 1999 came out, he writes, it touched off a saga that lasted half a decade. I would say, conservatively, that I purchased that record eight times between 1982, when it first came out, and 1987, when I stopped getting on punishment for having it. The Carnegie Hall concert falls in the middle of a sort of ad hoc Prince festival in Questloves life. He hosted Prince March 1 on Fallon for a performance of Screwdriver, one of several great new songs (Prince may be preparing the release of a new album, and has also sent a new theme to his friend Tamron Halls MSNBC NewsNation). Then, the following Wednesday, came a dress rehearsal for the Carnegie show at City Winery, which felt like a full-on concert in an unlikely space, with almost everybody scheduled for the Carnegie show hanging backstage, swapping Prince stories as Quest sat behind the drum kit as bandleader. The day after Carnegie Hall, in Quests Friday NYU class Topics in Recorded Music: Classic Albums, he would deconstruct Dirty Mind with his studentstalking through the three-hour seminar about how the album challenged the nature of funk while borrowing from porn. Then, Saturday, the professor would fly to Minneapolis to play with members of the Revolution in an annual benefit concert. If Prince is a musical god, then Questlove has made himself into the Pope of Princeland. And tonight he has assembled an august conclave to sing his praises in a building hallowed as a church. Only Pope Questo could summon cardinals like DAngelo, Elvis Costello, Chris Rock, Wendy Melvoin, Susannah Melvoin, Sandra Bernhard, Fred Armisen, and Maya Rudolph. I wanted to make sure it was balanced among people I knew could stretch the bounds of the artistic envelope, he says. People I knew would be open to interpreting the songs. People with what he called a high Purple IQ. Prince is probably the only artist who got to live the dream of constant innovation, Quest told me in an interview for my new book about Prince, I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon. He knew the balance between innovation and Americas digestive system. Hes the only artist who was able to, basically, feed babies the most elaborate of foods that you would never give a child and know exactly how to break down the portions so they could digest it. I mean, When Doves Cry is probably the most radical song of the first five years of the eighties, because theres no bass. I heard the version of Doves Cry with a bass lineit wouldnt have grabbed me. Without bass it had a desperate, cold feeling to it. It made you concentrate on his voice. With the bass line, the song was cool. Without it, it was astounding. But Sister may be the Prince song Questlove has thought about the most. Its like the creation story for a superhero: My hypersexual older sister turned me out and made me into the hypersexual creature I am today. This is so whether or not you believe its a true story. The man who may or may not have been seduced by his loose older sister went on to become the King of Eighties Porn Chic, a cultural climate in which Prince and his quasi-biographical film Purple Rain fit perfectlyits like a soft-core porno set in the world of nightclubs. Pauline Kael wrote of the performance, He knows how he wants to appearlike Dionysus crossed with a convent girl on her first bender. That gender bending wasnt just for the stage. Those who know about Prince in bed know he was not afraid of a gender twoness. He loved women so much he sometimes mirrored femininity. A woman who had sex with Prince said, He was the most patient man Ive ever been with. And the most complicated in terms of being in bed with. The most sensitive, the most androgynous, the most balance of male-female energy. He was the closest thing that Id had to having a woman. That particular sort of carnality was always in full view onstage. Rarely had black sexuality been presented in such a raw, rough, wild, bi-gendered form as it was in the body and persona of Prince. In a hypersexual era, Prince made Hugh Hefner look like a slowpoke and Dr. Ruth Westheimer like a freshman. White America has long viewed black sexuality with fear and fascination, certain that blacks are better endowed, more sexual, having more sex and having it with more abandonas James Baldwin famously wrote, To be an American Negro male is also to be a kind of walking phallic symbol. Prince takes that to the nth degree, but he worships women so much that in his sex-story songs hes less a devastating Casanova than a man being picked up by female aggressors whose sexuality he fights to keep up with. Black male sexuality is always going to be a threat in America, Quest says. And Prince came along at the right time. America still had post-Mandingo dreams, no matter how it looked, which really werent getting met by Michael Jackson. I remember a lot of interviews when Prince started catching on where they asked people, Why do you like Prince?, and they said, Well, Michael Jacksons cool, but Prince gives us more sex. He chose that role consciously. Dez Dickerson, who played guitar in the earliest iterations of the Revolution, recalls an early sit-down. Everybody in this band is going to have a distinct personality and identity, Prince said. Im going to portray pure sex. Cats had to fit with the look he wanted, not the sound, Questlove says. He didnt pick the best players; he picked people who fit with his multicultural vision. He wanted an updated Sly and the Family Stone thing. He remembers advice an older musician gave him when Quest was a kid. You have to make [your band] look like America to make it in America. Then you wont have to do this Chitlin Circuit bullshit. Maybe youll get farther than we did. The big-tent concert Quest built in tribute wasnt just about Prince lovers regurgitating the familiar. I didnt want them to climb mountains they couldnt climb, because his fan base is very guarded, he said. I felt it was wise to approach his songbook from an obscure level, so its artists interpreting songs so theyll have a fair chance with the audience. The show featured some hits, like the Waterboys doing Purple Rain and Sandra Bernhard doing Little Red Corvette, but also great songs that werent hits, like Elvis Costello doing the unreleased track Moonbeam Levels, the Blind Boys of Alabama doing The Cross, and Bilal doing Sister as a punk-inflected, raw, nasty thing filtered through his devastating falsettoaccording to many, including this writer, the high point of the night. At the end of the show, after a stunning, high-energy finaleDAngelo leading everyone else on the bill through 1999Quest is back in his dressing room, again with his mother at his side, this time getting his hair cornrowed. He should be celebrating, but he cannot help but nitpick. I hope one day to be good enough to play Princes music and not be constantly like, Oh damn, I screwed that up. *This article originally appeared in the March 25, 2013 issue of New York Magazine. Click through the slideshow to see eight previously unpublished images of a 19-year-old Prince. TFW they ask if youve gotten taller since you last saw them. Photo: HBO No show on TV this year will have you feeling more like an aunt than Game of Thrones, which is bringing back Isaac Hempstead-Wrights Bran Stark and oh my God, hes gotten so big! Since the last time we saw him, the 16-year-old Hempstead-Wright has transformed from mop-topped tween to serious young man, which, while we certainly wouldnt begrudge him for it, certainly raises the question of how old Bran is supposed to be now. In our world, five years have passed since Thrones premiered; how long has it been in Westeros? Unfortunately, its hard to say for sure. We could track the passage of time on Rome or Downton Abbey quite easily, since their timelines often synced up with real-world historical events, but thats not the way things work on the show, or in George R.R. Martins books which most of the scholarship on the timing issue is concerned with. Martin is often fairly vague about things like time, in part because it gives him more storytelling leeway its hard enough to get all those characters lined up correctly as it is and also because, with seasons in Westeros lasting for years, his narrators dont have the same psychological relationship with time that we do. (This same thing happens to people who move to Los Angeles.) Some chapters in the series cover a few weeks, some cover a few minutes, and in five published books, theres only been one day whose date were entirely sure of: Joffreys wedding in A Storm of Swords, which took place on the first day of the year 300 A.C. (A.C. refers to After Aegons Conquest, the year the first Targaryen king took over the continent with his dragons. The calendar actually measures from the date of his coronation, not the start of his invasion, but were only mentioning that here so no pedants pop up to correct us in the comments.) But fantasy fans are nothing if not extremely detail-oriented, and many of them have attempted to work out a universal timeline of the saga, regardless. Their work has rested on two main assumptions: 1. Days, weeks, months, and years are as long in Westeros as they are for us, which is handy for keeping this discussion from going completely off the rails. 2. A human gestation period still takes around nine months. From there, we know that Daenerys got pregnant near the start of the book A Game of Thrones and was nearing the end of her term at its climax, so that novel must take place over the course of a little less than a year. And since Roslin Frey was impregnated at the Red Wedding in A Storm of Swords and had not yet given birth by Jaime Lannisters chapter in A Dance With Dragons, the last three books proceed at a slightly faster pace, even considering the timeline overlap of Dance and A Feast for Crows. Because hes not a total sadist, Martin is also kind enough to include characters ages from time to time. Sansa starts the series at 11 years old, is almost 13 when she marries Tyrion in Storm, and ages herself up to 14 while posing as Littlefingers daughter in Feast. Joffreys 12th nameday takes place shortly before the beginning of Thrones, his 13th is at the beginning of Clash, and hes still 13 when he dies in Storm. Arya is 9 at the beginning of Thrones, 10 at Harrenhall in Clash, and is almost eleven when she arrives in Braavos in Feast. Add that all together, and you get various guesses at the total time elapsed since the saga began, with many of the discrepancies coming from everyones best guesses of how long sieges, marches, and ship journeys take. (Theres a lot of timeline fuzziness around travel in particular, so Martin can have coincidences like Tyrion and Catelyn running into each other at the inn in the first book.) For years, this massive forum post, published in 2008 before the publication of Dance, was the timeline to beat; it figures three-and-a-half years from Daenerys meeting Drogo in Game (season one) to Arya going blind at the end of Feast (season five), an event which seems to happen way later in the timeline than everything else. Its successor is this gigantic crowdsourced Google spreadsheet, with hundreds of citations, that comes up with a three-year span, with Thrones starting in mid-297 A.C. and Jons assassination in Dance coming eight months into 300 A.C. But again, there isnt one definitive answer; this Quora user estimates a little more than two years for the whole thing. Generally, two or three years seems to be a good ballpark estimate. Of course, as both George. R.R. Martin and the shows producers will tell you, at this point the book is the book and the show is the show. Though theyve diverged most sharply in recent years, the two versions have had different timelines since day one; the show increased the number of years since Roberts Rebellion from 14 to 17, aging up many of its characters in the process. For what I assume is the sake of simplicity as much as anything else, the shows Wiki assumes that each season takes place in a different year; since season one was 298 A.C., the upcoming season will take place in 303 A.C. Storywise, that might not make a ton of sense Jons story line in seasons two through four really didnt seem like it was taking place over the course of three whole years but it solves the aging problem for the child actors at least. Anything else would be a wild guess. Hopefully, when winter finally comes, it will arrive with a very detailed calendar. In the second episode of The Last Panthers, our three central characters are pulled deeper into their own grim histories. The past is past, but it still plays a role in the present. In one arc, a French cop becomes an enforcer in a tenement where he once lived. In another, a diamond thief is pulled back into the life of crime he had left behind to save his brother. Finally, an investigator is given a way out of a case that has resurrected ghosts for her, but she heads right back into the heart of darkness. Each character is trying to burn bridges or rebuild ones they previously torched. We open in Les Agnettes, a notoriously dangerous housing estate in Marseilles. (For more on the regions violence, read this fascinating article.) Kahlil (Tahar Rahim) is leading a raid on a place he once called home. Theyre tracing the guns from the diamond heist. As tense music plays, we see shots of men in SWAT gear filing up to the raid. Elsewhere, Naomi (Samantha Morton) washes the blood out of her hair after last episodes ambush, and the team searches apartment by apartment for evidence of the gun trade. At the same time, Milan (Goran Bogdan) is in the hospital at his brother Adnans bedside. Director Johan Renck deftly brings us back into all three plotlines in these tense opening moments. Naomi comes downstairs with a bruise on her face, and we learn that shes in her own place, airlifted out of Belgrade after the attack. Tom (John Hurt) is in her kitchen, making breakfast, and singing Major General from The Mikado. Naomis kitchen reveals a lot about her character cold lines, blank walls, neon lights. Shes off the case, and someone else is now running point. Theyve identified the men behind the raid, including Milan, the one who survived and let her live. Shes on trauma leave until she feels de-traumatized, I guess. Yeah, thats how it works. They know that the notorious Dragan Tosic (Boris Isakovic) is the mastermind behind the raid, even though hes behind bars. Theyre determined to find Milan, figure out what happened to Naomi, and recover the stolen diamonds. The Last Panthers is full of interesting cuts, and in the one that follows, we jump from a man who broke into Naomis house, to another kitchen thats being raided by Kahlils team. Theyre looking everywhere, but finding no guns. A dryer gets thrown out a window onto a cop car. Its basically turning into The Raid. Kahlil and his team hear suspicious activity in a nearby apartment. Could someone be moving the guns in there? Although they dont have a warrant, they decide to break in anyway and find an old couple lying in bed. She seems scared. Are they prisoners? Collaborators? Kahlil finds guns under the bed and a guy jumps out of the closet. Shots are fired. Kahlil takes one in his bulletproof vest. We see Milan spending time with his brother, a reminder that hes the diamond thief with a heart of gold. To drive that characterization home, we flashback to when they were kids, so poor that Adnan would joke about flipping a coin to see which brother would eat the other. Milan has always protected Adnan; he does what needs to be done. After another flashback in which a young Zlatko brings Milan into the Panthers, we see them in the present day in an all-white room. Zlatko is a bit dramatic. Hes done with high-risk, low-reward crimes that involve guns and drugs. He wants to bring the Panthers into the modern age. Hell give Milan the money to help his brother, but itll come with conditions. This is not the kind of guy you want to owe a favor. Naomi trades some of her information for Interpols case file on Dragan, but only gives them two of the three names. She clearly knows Milan from her past, and holds back the file on him. Information is a commodity in this world. So why is Naomi protecting Milan? Meanwhile, Kahlil is interrogating the couple from the shooting at Les Agnettes. They claim the guy with the guns entered two minutes before the cops, stashed the bag under the bed, and hid in the closet. Theres no sign of a struggle or break-in, so Kahlil is suspicious. He thinks theyre in on it. Some scenes in The Last Panthers feel a bit dragged-out, and this is definitely one of them. They clearly helped the guy. We soon learn that Kahlil even knew this couple when he lived there. In many ways, Kahlils arc is that of a man whose past is invading his present. To the people who grew up with him, hes a rat the man who left them in poverty, then returned to take them down. Naomi meets with Dragan in prison. When she asks if he recognizes the photos of the diamond thieves, he doesnt even look before saying no. We learn that Dragan was jailed with Milan, but it doesnt look like Naomi is going to get much out of him: Panthers dont talk. Panthers have never talked. Why would you ask me some stupid questions? Shell need a new tactic. In an unexpected twist, we learn that Zlatko (Igor Bencina) is taking a leaf out of Tony Sopranos book, getting contracts and business related to new construction. Guillaume (David Dencik, a great actor who can be seen in Men & Chicken with Mads Mikkelsen) is building an airport in Belgrade. The Panthers will run security and get a piece of the action. When they meet with Guillaume, though, it goes poorly. Guns are drawn. Zlatko offers 2 million euros, but he cant just wander across the border with cash. Thinking quickly, Milan suggests diamonds. Theyre much easier to transport. The Marseilles police find blood stains from the apartment shootout. They now know that the couple werent victims; they were collaborators. Its too late for them. As Dragans room is raided and they find his phone, beating him up in the process, the arms-dealing couple is brutally murdered. Theyre left on the side of the road for Kahlil to find. Its a message: Get close to us and well kill people. Dragan gets the message sent by Naomi, too. She has his phone. He called three numbers on the day of the raid, one in Marseilles and then two in Serbia. He makes an offer: For the names of the men who just beat him up, hell give up where the diamonds are likely to go next. Turns out theyre being transported in the body of a dog, given to Guillaume at the airport. Finally, Khalil gets a note that includes the gym card of the dead man from the side of the road and a reference to his role as The White Knight of Les Agnettes. Will he get the message? Other Notes: Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin has said that the foreign minister of "Normandy Format" countries (Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia) are discussing the possibility of holding a meeting in May. "We are discussing the possibility of a meeting in May to address principal security issues," Klimkin told Interfax-Ukraine on Thursday. According to the minister, the possibility of the meeting is still under discussion. Therefore, it is too early to speak about a specific date. Klimkin has noted that one of the main issues at the meeting will be Kyiv's initiative to deploy the OSCE (police) mission in Donbas. In addition, the general security situation in the region, as well as the concept of the electoral process should be discussed at this meeting, the minister said. Robert Drowning-in-cash Jr. Photo: Theo Wargo/NBC Tony Stark has an advanced degree in electrical engineering from MIT, billions to his name, and a side career as a crime fighter you may have heard of, but did he ever get that GED? Robert Downey Jr. is heading back to high school in Spider-Man: Homecoming, starring Tom Holland in his solo Marvel film debut. Holland and Downey Jr. team up in Captain America: Civil War, which introduces the new Spidey, and it seems their bond will extend further than the time spent beating Chris Evans to a pulp. Downey Jr. joins a cast that includes Marisa Tomei as Aunt May, with Zendaya, Tony Revolori (The Grand Budapest Hotel), and Laura Harrier all in unspecified roles. Downey Jr., of course, will be Iron Man, the one in the metal suit. This week, Underground is all about the kids. Cradle turns the focus to James, Boo, Ben, Henry, and T.R., as they all face major crossroads. We get our first hint that theyll be taking center stage during the cold open, which features a pair of hands rolling, cutting, and wrapping Necco wafers as a childrens chorus plays as the score. The candy is a recurring visual motif throughout the episode each time we see it, its accompanied by a bittersweet development. James in the Field Despite Ernestines best efforts to keep James away from hard labor and a promise elicited from Tom Macon hes reassigned to work in the cotton fields. Ernestine and Sam try to give him a crash course in cotton-picking, but his day is predictably disastrous: His little hands are bloodied, he refuses to drink the filthy water from the communal bucket, and hes threatened with punishment if he doesnt make weight of 300 pounds of cotton by days end. As the pickers wait for their bags to be weighed, Sam switches with James so he wont have to face the lash. Sam takes his lashes instead, but Ernestine warns against any further protection, so as not to keep James soft. James overhears this and works hard the next day, taking frequent water breaks and making weight. Sam is impressed, and so am I especially when James later empties the false bottom hes sewn into his bag. He padded his numbers by adding dirt to the bottom. Ernestines entire family is clearly brilliant, thanks to her careful tutelage. But as the weeks wear on with Rosalee and the others still at large, Ernestines power, as it were, seems to be diminishing. She has less and less control over what happens to her children, so theyll need to rely on the survival skills shes given them. With James now working in the field, all three of Ernestines children have been forced to adapt to enslavement in distinct ways. Its a marvel that theyve mostly succeeded. Boo on the Run When Boo first appears in Cradle, shes hiding inside a bunch of bushes. What happened? Wheres Moses? Elizabeth spots her while walking by, then tries to coax her out, until the patrollers call out asking if she has seen a black child. After she steers them away from Boos hiding place, she takes her inside. Tom is out of town, so it looks like Elizabeth is flying solo on this abolition mission. We learn through flashbacks that Moses was killed in some sort of ambush; he took a few flaming arrows in the back, then fell mere feet from Boo while she was hiding. Shes been fending for herself ever since. Elizabeth draws a bath for her, but shes too traumatized to get in. After a long days silence, she begins answering some of Elizabeths questions, revealing that she fled from the Macon plantation. Elizabeth looks ill at that news. The sheriff who is also Elizabeths ex-fiance, as you may remember pays a visit to look for Boo. He quickly finds her hiding under the floorboards, then subtly propositions Elizabeth. Seeing no other way to keep their secret, she tells Boo to wait for her in the parlor. Day passes into night as Boo sits there, eating the occasional Necco wafer. Like James, shes learned to be silent and unsmiling. But in this moment, her face also looks far more at peace than weve seen before. Eating that candy is the first age-appropriate thing shes done in weeks. Eventually, she wanders from the parlor toward the bathroom, where she finds Elizabeth soaking in misery. Boo kneels and washes her, with what seems to be empathy and tenderness. Ben and His Mother When Ben and August arrive at the mental hospital, they learn Charlotte has gone missing. Ben overhears the doctor say that shes been lobotomized, and decides to track her down by using the skills August has taught him. After a quick look at the song lyrics shes scrawled onto the walls of her room, he finds his mother in the woods, singing a single bar of a hymn. August joins in, extending the song, and Charlotte is briefly coherent. She remembers her husband, but not her son. She and Ben have a sweet, sad conversation in which he asks if she recalls Jay and his story about the good and bad wolves. When she says she does, he asks which one August is. Charlotte looks worried. Its worth noting that Bens voice has deepened. Hes not quite as doe-eyed as he was when he left home. Nevertheless, hes still so innocent and impressionable; its heartbreaking to watch August strip him of that. Henrys Tragic Sacrifice We catch up with the Macon escapees while theyre still hiding in Indian territory. Henrys feeling left out because Noah is spending so much time with Rosalee, and befriends an abolitionist who shows him four crosses deep in the woods. The crosses signal how many caskets will be built to transport the Macon crew to the next safe station. He also shows him a hut filled with gunpowder. Cato taunts Henry for not having Noahs full attention anymore, but Noah redeems himself by tattooing Henry and telling him theyll take on the same last name when theyre free: Hampton. This means the world to Henry who, we learn, has never known any of his family. Tragically, the newly minted Hamptons will never to get to live out their brotherhood together. Their camp is ambushed, and while Henry is sitting with Rosalee, bonding over what could be their shared future as in-laws, he gets shot in the shoulder. The crew is surrounded. Henry tells Noah about the gunpowder hut, but when Noah charges toward it and gets shot, Henry takes the torch from him, running toward open fire to ignite the gunpowder hut. He succeeds, giving the others a chance to escape, and presumably dies in the explosion. Its a heroic end to a sweet character. Henry never had Catos ruthless sense of self-preservation, and he wasnt as full of rage and flint as Noah, so its not entirely surprising that he didnt make it. T.R. Macons Future Inside the Macon household, T.R faces a much lighter coming-of-age story. He skips around with a toy, pestering the kitchen staff until Ernestine bribes him away with Necco wafers. Weve seen this work for her in the past; candy is an easy currency for controlling T.R.s behavior. But then, the boy bumps into the reverend, who says hes too old for toys. After teaching him how to mount a horse and break wild steer, Tom decides its time for T.R. to learn the ways of plantation ownership. He tells him one day hell own everything, including the slaves. He gets his first lesson in handling slaves when Sam comes into the study to talk to Tom. As T.R. looks on, Sam petitions to buy Jamess freedom. Hes saved every penny hes ever made on carpentry nearly $100 and presents it Tom. Tom says no, and T.R. looks uncomfortable. Later that night, as he goes to Jamess new home in the field quarters, he spots Sam running. T.R. tells James that he plans to make things better when hes in charge, but it may take a while. James asks how long and T.R. says, Ten years, maybe longer. In that moment, James makes a crucial decision: He cant trust that T.R. will grow up to be kinder than the overseers and their own father. Hell inherit their cruelty. When T.R. then offers James half of the Necco wafers that Ernestine gave him, he rejects the candy outright. T.R. is so insulted that he marches right back to his dads office to snitch on Sam. That change-of-tune didnt take long. Other Notes: When Baylor University associate professor of percussion Todd Meehan says he and his percussionist colleagues are playing timber in a Saturday public concert, hes being literal. Twice. Meehan, guest performers Doug Perkins and Ivan Trevino, and Baylor percussion students will play Michael Gordons Timber in an open-air concert Saturday evening on the front lawn of the Cooper Foundation House, 1801 Austin Ave. Theyre also playing timber, in the form of wooden two-by-fours, amplified by contact mikes, that Gordons hourlong piece calls for as instrument. What does a concert of six mallet-wielding percussionists sound like? Come and hear, Meehan said, always eager to introduce new listeners to the aural dynamics of percussion music. The Saturday night concert comes as part of the Baylor School of Musics annual Percussion Symposium, which has brought nationally known performers and composers to the Baylor campus for several years. This years concert offerings, free and open to the public, span two days and offer something different from past performances: longer pieces. This (symposium) is much more focused on the magnitude of the pieces were playing, said the percussionist and professor, who also performs as the Waco Symphony Orchestras tympanist. Gordons Timber, for instance, runs nearly an hour while Sundays concert, held in Baylors Jones Concert Hall, features Steve Reichs pioneering Drumming in its 70-minute entirety and his Music For Pieces Of Wood. Meehan, the Baylor Percussion Group and other ensembles have played full programs of smaller works to Waco audiences over the years and he felt the time was right to expand into longer pieces. These pieces are performed fairly frequently in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. I thought itd be good to give Waco audiences a chance to hear, he said. Guest artists for this years symposium are Doug Perkins, founder of the group So Percussion and partner with Meehan in their Meehan/Perkins Duo; Austin percussionist Ivan Trevino, who taught at Baylor last fall as visiting professor of percussion; and the Baylor Percussion Group. Saturdays 7 p.m. outdoor concert continues Meehans ongoing interest in performing music in public spaces in downtown Waco. Baylor Percussion Group members have played in such places as the Stratton Building and a vacant lot off Fifth Street, the latter for a concert that drew more than 100 listeners. The Cooper House grounds wont have chairs set up those attending should bring blankets or lawn chairs but Meehan said listeners can take advantage of the open-air nature of the performance by moving to different vantage points in the course of the hour-long work. What does one listen for in a long percussion piece? Flowing patterns of rhythm and timbre (pronounced TAM-ber), said Meehan, the latter being the quality of tone produced by an instrument. Such as a piece of timber. The Jubilee Theatres latest childrens play, The (ALMOST) Totally True Story of Hansel & Gretel, puts a different spin on a familiar fairy tale, painting the title characters in a less than flattering light. Maybe its best to let the actors playing those roles to explain. Hansel? He eats a lot, just like me, and hes kinda bad, said 12-year-old Francisco Lara, an Indian Spring Middle School student who plays Hansel. Hes a jokester and kinda dumb, too. And Gretel? Talia Davis, 13, who plays her in the production, sums her up: Shes kind of sassy and can be sweet sometimes. Shes got attitude. Davis also played Alice in the companys last production, Alice in Wonderland, a character she described as sweet girl but confused. Attitude is the word for the Evil Stepmother, played by Keanna Ware, 13, of Carver Middle School. The stepmother, the one who sends Hansel and Gretel into the forest, can be sweet at times. Or not. We call her the bipolar stepmother, said Ware, adding another comment by way of Alice in Wonderland: I think the stepmother would be like the Mad Hatter. The three actors, part of a youth theater company that is part of Mission Wacos after-school program, are already stage veterans at the Jubilee, with several productions under their belt. The show that they and about two dozen fellow cast members will put on this weekend represents a step up, Jubilee Theatre director Afton Foreman said. While Foremans young actors have a knack for improvisation, this Samuel French play is more scripted and longer than past productions. That was part of Foremans selection. It was written in such clean, plain language, she said. Her actors had to adapt to the extra, scripted lines. Its easy to be sassy, but I have to say my lines over and over to learn them, said Davis, a Tennyson Middle School student. She also has to deal with a sister and brother in the same play, Tiara Hill and TyRick Thompson. Ware shared her technique as learn, learn, learn a bunch of lines, then return and learn some more. The plays plot features a somewhat frazzled fairy godmother named Streptococcus (Baylor University freshman Anne-Marie Berg), whose bent wand causes problems. She aims to tell the story of Snow White, but conjures up an ogre instead and another fairy tale with a markedly different twist: Its the story of Hansel and Gretel, but in this account, police investigators are tracking them down because the siblings have left mischief in their wake. Left out of the Hansel and Gretel story that most people know are a host of other fairy-tale characters Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack the Giant Killer, etc. that the brother and sister have messed with in some way or another. Proceeds from The (ALMOST) Totally True Story of Hansel & Gretel will go toward an August trip to Washington, D.C., for some 20 kids in the afterschool and summer programs plus five adults to accompany them, Foreman said. Outside of having to remind her youth theater to leave your attitude at the door and bring your acting the three young actors recite the sentence in unison Foreman finds her young cast open to directing, even if she has to rely on celebrities for analogies. Theyre very vocal, open and honest. That helps them onstage, she said. The Jubilee director plans on adding a childrens production to the theaters regular season next year. If she does, her male lead already has a suggestion. If this goes very well, can we do Game of Tiaras? Lara said. Four servicemen of the Ukrainian Armed Forces have suffered injuries in the army operation zone in eastern Ukraine over the past day, but there have been no fatalities, Ukrainian Presidential Administration spokesman Oleksandr Motuzianyk said. "We did not lose a single soldier in the hostilities over the past day but four suffered injuries. That happened near Avdiyivka," he said at a press briefing in Kyiv on Thursday. The truce was breached in Schastia and in the Popasna district in the Luhansk sector, Motuzianyk said. In all, four shelling incidents, including one by use of mortars, were observed in that area. Hostile gunfire was intense near Avdiyivka, and shelling incidents occurred near Zaitseve and the Putylivska mine in the Donetsk sector. In all, seven shelling incidents, including four by use of mortars, were observed in the Donetsk sector over the past day. Maryinka was the epicenter of the hostilities in the Mariupol sector, where the hostiles conducted a series of mortar attacks. A former U.S. Army Sergeant stationed at Fort Hood was sentenced Wednesday to 16 months in prison after a conviction for stealing more than $120,000 in five months through fraudulent travel vouchers. Justin Neal Watson was sentenced in federal court in Waco after he admitted to stealing the money by processing fraudulent travel vouchers from November 2011 to April 2012. In addition to the 16-month prison sentence, United States District Judge Walter Smith Jr. ordered Watson to pay $121,797.96 in restitution. He also must be placed on supervised release for three years at the end of his prison term. In December 2015, Watson pleaded guilty to one count of theft of government property while he was assigned as the authorizing official for the Defense Travel System. In court, he admitted that he defrauded the U.S. Army by creating and approving fake vouchers and directing payments into his bank account for his own use. The case was investigated by agents with the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command Southwestern Fraud Field Office, and Assistant United States Attorney Greg Gloff prosecuted the case. A construction worker, who killed his family 31 years ago and who was arrested this month on charges of electronic harassment of three Waco women, says he just wants to put his experiences in McLennan County behind him and move on. Jovan Collier bonded out of the McLennan County Jail on July 18 and told the Tribune-Herald this week that he is staying in Escondido, Calif., just to get away from it all for awhile. But Collier isnt in California. His electronic ankle monitor shows hes in Houston; hes been there since he bonded out. And McLennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara says Collier is a danger to any woman he meets. He butchered his family when he was 14, and everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie, McNamara said. After getting what his attorney described as ridiculously high bail for misdemeanor charges reduced and bonding out, Collier, 46, contacted the Tribune-Herald, saying he wanted to set the record straight about a few things, including a denial that he killed his family. At the advice of his attorney, Susan Kelly, he declined to discuss the pending harassment charges against him, other than to say he had already moved to another city and had another girlfriend when he was arrested July 5 on the Class B misdemeanors. He is not violating the conditions of his bond by being in Houston, McNamara said. Collier was instructed not to contact the women in any way. At various times, Collier told the Tribune-Herald he was in Fort Worth, that he was moving to Houston and then that he was in Escondido, Calif. He emailed from two different accounts and used two different phone numbers. He texted a picture of himself, supposedly in California, to confirm his identity. With all Ive been through, no one is going to pretend to be me, these days, Collier offered. But according to McNamara, who checked Friday with the company that monitors the GPS ankle bracelet Collier was ordered to wear as a condition of his bond, Collier went from Waco to Houston and hasnt left the Houston area since. He lies even when the truth serves him better, the sheriff said. If I say the wrong thing, people always interpret it incorrectly, said Collier, who changed his name from Peter Zimmer after serving almost four years in a juvenile facility for murdering his parents and younger brother in Wisconsin in 1983. Once this is all over, I will sit down and talk and talk and talk. I havent said anything in 30 years and it is kind of eating at me. But every time someone retells my story, it becomes more and more sensational. Grabbing attention Colliers story, sensationalized or not, immediately grabbed McNamaras attention. McNamara began researching Collier after learning the man was in McLennan County through complaints that Collier was forcing unwanted advances on two women, including one who previously was engaged to him. He is a very dangerous individual, McNamara said. Any woman who comes into contact with him is in danger as far as I am concerned. His past record speaks for itself. Two of the women who filed harassment complaints against Collier recognized him after he was featured on the television show, I Dated A Psycho, and contacted the sheriffs office about their chance discovery. Collier said his breakup with the woman to whom he was engaged was emotionally and physically devastating. No two people I have known have ever been so obviously in love. Our days always started on a happy note, and I always looked forward to the next day because I know I would love her more and more every day. A friend of that woman told the Tribune-Herald that Collier incessantly tried to get her to intervene on his behalf once his past was uncovered. She said she took an immediate dislike to Collier but was hesitant to say too much because her friend seemed to really like him at first. The Tribune-Herald has agreed not to identify the women involved in Colliers case because one said his harassing behavior escalated and they are afraid of him. The woman who was engaged to Collier declined an interview. Collier pleaded guilty to aggravated stalking in Pinnellas County, Florida, in May 2010 and was sentenced to 3 years in prison for sending an ex-girlfriend a dead pig, stalking her and putting personal information and photographs of her on an adult solicitation website, according to McNamara and published reports about Collier. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, and he has done nothing to show that his patterns are any different than when he harassed and stalked that poor woman in Florida, the 42-year-old friend said. 2,000 second chances He stalked that woman in Florida and he was doing the exact same thing here. He kept saying he wanted a second chance. He has had about 2,000 second chances. A man who cannot take no for an answer is someone to be feared, and he cannot take no for an answer. Collier denies he sent a dead pig to the woman in Florida as an intimidation measure. He said she was a teacher and her second-grade students were preparing projects for a science fair. He said he ordered a fetal pig on a school supply website and it came complete with dissecting tools for students. It came after he and the woman broke up, but he said he sent it to her so her kids could use it for a science fair project. I sent that on to her out of the kindness of my heart for the benefit of her kids, Collier said. Everything I do with good intentions gets turned into an evil thing. But the friend of Colliers ex-fiance in Waco, said, Everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie or a perversion of the truth. That woman was a second-grade teacher. There are no second-grade children in this country who do dissections of animals. He sent that to her as a threat. Collier said he came to Waco in February after landing a job with a company building a local hotel. He said if the women actually were traumatized by his behavior, they could have blocked him from their phones, emails, text messages and Facebook accounts. The friend said the three of them did all that, but he contacted them on their work phones or work email accounts, which they could not readily change because of their professions. Why should we have to do all of that? she asked. He is a narcissist who cant stand to be rejected. Messages to women McNamara said a third woman, who Collier pursued while he was supposedly engaged, lent Collier her iPad. When she got it back, she discovered Collier had used it to set up dates with five other women on Match.com. Collier also sent nearly identical text messages moments apart to two separate women telling them how much he loved them both and how he wanted them back, McNamara said. You cant protect everybody from everything, but we have really made a concerted effort to stand between this guy and these women because they were really scared to death after they found out he was a triple-murderer and had just been in prison for stalking a woman in Florida, McNamara said. Kelly, Colliers attorney, noted Colliers original $150,000 bond in Waco, set by Justice of the Peace Pat Richardson, was very excessive. Normal bonds for Class B misdemeanors range from $500 to $1,500, court officials said. I would hate to think that the reason he is being treated so harshly is because of something that happened when he was a kid, Kelly said. Kelly also said the electronic harassment section of the Penal Code is very problematic, adding it is so vague that she is considering challenging its constitutionality. The statute says it is a crime to send electronic messages with intent to harass, alarm, torment or embarrass someone. In our electronic age, we all send text messages. Who knows? Someone could be annoyed with just a few text messages. We are all going to be in trouble if that is liberally enforced. Colliers 1983 case in Wisconsin so shocked the region that two state laws were changed as a result. At the time, Collier, known then as Peter Zimmer, could not be tried as an adult and there was no provision allowing juveniles to be transferred to adult prison after they turned 18 to serve longer sentences. That was changed because Collier was freed when he turned 18, serving less than four years in a juvenile facility. Also, when he was released, he was able to collect the proceeds from his parents estate, despite the fact that he was found guilty in their deaths. That prompted new legislation blocking criminals from profiting from their crimes. Gave me nightmares Bob Hille, then a young sheriffs deputy in southern Wisconsin, who retired two years ago after 38 years in law enforcement, said, That was the only crime scene I worked that gave me nightmares, Hille said. I was young then and maybe that had something to do with it, but it was especially troubling to me because it was such a brutal crime and because of the child, the younger brother. That really bothered me because it looked like he put up so much of a fight for his life. Besides claiming he was in California, Collier claimed in a phone interview this week that his father, Hans Zimmer, was a Nazi and a German native who made frequent trips to Germany. He said his home was filled with Nazi weapons, swastikas and uniforms and that his father mentally, physically and sexually abused him for many years. He also claimed his parents let their friends sexually abuse him and claimed he was abused by two clergymen in Illinois while he served as an altar boy. Hille, the primary crime scene investigator, said he found no evidence in the Mineral Point, Wis., home associated with Nazism or anything that connected Hans Zimmer to it, as Collier claims. Hille said he found evidence that Collier went into the attic and rifled through his fathers military trunk, taking weapons and ammunition. But he said his father was in the U.S. Army and the gear was American, not German. Collier left his bloody clothes in the bathroom and it appeared he tried to wash the blood off in the shower, Hille said. He stole his fathers car and was caught in Kansas City, Mo., while using one of his fathers credit cards. Hille said Collier stabbed his mother 25 times, including violent thrusts that pierced her skull, and stabbed his brother 14 times, also splitting his skull with a knife. Collier shot his father five times with a .22-caliber rifle. It was just a brutal, brutal crime, Hille said. It sticks out after a 38-year career. Collier, on the phone in Houston but claiming to be in California, said he did not kill his parents and his younger brother. He says he knows who did, but he doesnt know if the person is still alive or where the alleged real killer might be. He says hes saving that information for a book he wants to write. Parents were still divided about a proposed Rapoport Academy elementary school realignment during the first open forum on the subject Wednesday at East Campus Elementary School. At the come-and-go event, attendees were invited to ask questions of staff members and board members and write their questions or concerns down to be submitted to the board. During a board meeting earlier this month, Rapoport Superintendent Alexis Neumann presented a proposal that would reshuffle students in the two elementary schools so all students in a grade would be at the same building. The suggestion is to move all pre-kindergarten, kindergarten and first-grade students to the East Campus and all second-, third- and fourth-graders to North Campus. Families spoke at length of their concerns at a special board meeting in April, with the majority expressing concern about a perceived rush to implement the transition by August. In an effort to provide the community with more information on the proposal, Rapoports administration sent multiple emails and posted information online in the past two weeks. District reports state that administrators hope to fix some perception problems between the two elementary campuses that are causing difficulties when students combine in fifth grade. East Campus failed state academic standards for the first time this year, and North Campus passed. As the competitive mentality takes over and we begin to identify with our specific campus rather than the overall vision, we also have a tendency to devalue those we see ourselves in competition with. . . . This kind of mentality is not healthy for our Rapoport community, the report states. But the emails and handouts didnt seem to sway the parents at Wednesdays forum. Sunny Edwards, who teaches at North Campus and has a child about to go into pre-kindergarten, said she is nervous about the suggested changes because she doesnt feel she has enough information. Edwards said she doesnt want to put her young child on a bus but also doesnt know if she will have enough time to drop off her son at school and get back in time for work. Not enough time Edwards also said she doesnt think there is enough time to plan the changes so the transition would run smoothly by August. This would create chaotic classrooms that could disrupt learning, she said. Its pretty nerve-wracking, she said. It scares me because its a big change. Corina Caliman also is nervous about the suggested changes because her child has attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and changing schools could reintroduce poor behavior, she said. Caliman said her son began attending East Campus in the 2014-15 school year, but it took him almost an entire year to adjust. Caliman said he couldnt concentrate or control himself, so the school continually asked her to pick him up early. But this year, Caliman said, her son has done well and hasnt been sent home for bad behavior once. Introducing him to another environment could cause him to fall back into old habits, she said. Antranette Tatum said she has a son in North Campus, but if Rapoport realigns the campuses she will enroll him in Connally Independent School District because she doesnt want him to attend the East Campus. Its not the school. I dont like the area, she said. Not all parents disagreed with the idea. Jenna Swanson, who has two sons at the North Campus, said she is not opposed to the idea but isnt satisfied with the reasons the district has given for the change. It could be the best thing for our kids . . . but we havent been given the data, Swanson said. John Lugo, who has two students at North Campus, said he is open to the realignment. Dividing his children before middle school doesnt really concern him, but they wouldnt use the shuttle. I dont want to take too much advantage of the situation, Lugo said. Baylor Universitys search for a new provost ended Wednesday with an announcement that L. Gregory Jones is filling the position, effective May 16. Jones was senior strategist for leadership education at Duke Divinity School and is no stranger to Baylor. He has been a senior adviser in Baylors Institute for Faith and Learning since October. At Duke, he was also the Ruth W. and A. Morris Williams Jr. Professor of Theology and Christian Ministry. Ive really come to have a deep affection and admiration for Baylor up close, Jones said. Ive known the school for many years, friends who have taught here, and taught students who graduated from here in my roles at Duke, and Ive always admired the people who comprise the Baylor community. Jones replaces Edwin Trevathan, who resigned in January after less than eight months at the post. Trevathan remains at Baylor as a neuroscience professor. Todd Still, dean of Truett Seminary, served in the interim role. Jones has a bachelors degree and a masters in public policy and administration from the University of Denver. He also has a masters of divinity and a doctorate from Duke University. Dr. Greg Jones is a prolific and distinguished scholar much admired in American higher education for his visionary leadership, creativity and wisdom, President Ken Starr said in a statement. His diverse experiences at a leadership level at Duke University provide him with exceptional insight into the challenges facing higher education, and we are delighted he will bring his extraordinary gifts of strategic and collaborative leadership and clear commitment to Pro Futuris to Baylor University and its academic enterprise. Pro Futuris is a five-point vision university officials adopted in 2014 focused on transformational education, compelling scholarship, informed engagement, committed constituents and judicious stewardship. Jones also will be Baylors executive vice president, and his wife, the Rev. Susan Pendleton Jones, will join the university as senior fellow in the Institute for Faith and Learning. Listen and learn The first task I think is to listen and learn, Jones said. I want to listen to people and learn about the history, the stories, the hopes, the dreams and really get a sense of what is the heartbeat, or heartbeats, given the universitys size and scale. One of the most important things for me is to learn whats already been accomplished, what still needs to be worked on and how can I work collaboratively with people across the university to help further that really laudable vision, which is part of what attracted me to Baylor in the first place, Jones said. He also wants to continue Baylors recent goal of increased diversity, which Trevathan spearheaded as provost. The Presidents Advisory Council has set a timeline for the task until February 2017, and Starr last week appointed Elizabeth Palacios, dean for student development in the Division of Student Life, as special assistant to the president on diversity. Diversity is a very important issue, Jones said. Its important for a Christian university to articulate the framing of the question in ways that should make a university like Baylor frame it in a really important way rooted in the Gospel. Jones has written or edited 16 books and published more than 200 articles and essays. The provost leads all schools of the university, and he hopes his theological background can help animate all aspects of Baylor, Jones said. My background as a theologian is important in terms of Baylors identity as a Christian research university, and the way I understand the task of theology is to bring a theological perspective to all that I am and all that I do, Jones said. South Carolina became a pioneer in providing sanctuary to refugees fleeing religious persecution with the March 1, 1669, Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina protecting the rights of Jews, heathens and other dissenters from the purity of Christian religion. This included a Charleston community of Sephardic Jews, who finally found sanctuary after generations of roaming the globe following their expulsion from Spain. The document, co-written by John Locke, was revolutionary. It helped to form the philosophical bedrock that laid the foundation for the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the American tradition of serving as a refuge for the persecuted. In the coming days, however, South Carolina could go in a different direction, this time pioneering dangerous and misguided legislation that would create a hostile environment for refugees, pressuring them and faith-based groups that help them to self-deport from the state. This legislation, which recently passed the state Senate and will soon be considered by the House, would force social service agencies and houses of worship to register any refugees they help resettle and hold them liable in civil court for any crimes those refugees might commit. As the shocking rise in anti-Muslim bigotry collides with increasing concern about terrorism at home and abroad, legislation attacking refugees has spread rapidly across the country. But South Carolinas bill could set a unique and dangerous precedent. If South Carolina passes this disastrous legislation, it risks not only endangering those seeking refuge on our shores and tarnishing our countrys proud tradition of assisting those forced to flee their homes but also jeopardizing the promise of religious freedom that is the core of American civic life. This proposal rests on a fundamental misconception about refugees and immigrants, one too often promoted by those who peddle in bigotry and fear. From our experiences, from the stories of our families and communities and from countless people weve worked with over the years, we know the significant contributions that refugees make to our country. Refugees have become our religious leaders and successful entrepreneurs. They are artists, scientists, scholars, police officers, doctors and soldiers; they are our neighbors. But most important, they are children of God, entitled to equal opportunity, dignity and respect. This bill is a failure of both our religious ideals and our promise of religious freedom. Houses of worship and religious communities have always held a privileged place in American life, groundwork that was also laid in the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. That privilege has allowed religious communities to be at the forefront of movements for social justice throughout our history, and it enables us to step up and serve refugees today. Conservatives have used this religious-freedom claim to carve out exemptions for religious organizations to nondiscrimination laws, health care mandates and much more. That so many of them seem ready to abandon religious-freedom concerns when it comes to refugees, subjecting religious organizations to undue scrutiny and impeding their ability to serve, suggests that these politicians value religious freedom only when it serves their political agenda. Our nation is struggling to address the deteriorating situation in the Middle East and the largest global refugee crisis since World War II. We cannot allow South Carolinas dangerous proposal to become an example for states across the country and our international neighbors. We hope that the people of South Carolina will help defeat this legislation and continue the hard work of finding real solutions. The ultimate irony is that faith organizations have played such a vital role in responding to the refugee crisis precisely because of the failure of our federal, state and local governments to act. If South Carolinas disastrous, discriminatory idea becomes the norm, who will be left to reach those people in need? All of us who cherish religious freedom should be deeply concerned by this proposal that is so obviously aimed at discouraging religious organizations from fulfilling our sacred duty to serve. Mark Hetfield is the president and chief executive of HIAS, a Jewish nonprofit group dedicated to refugee resettlement. Jack Moline is a rabbi and the president of Interfaith Alliance, an organization committed to protecting faith and freedom. Taxpayers were given a few extra days to do their income tax returns this year, with the deadline extended to April 18. The extra time may have resulted in less hair pulling and gnashing of teeth this year, because our readers werent too taxed by their returns. Still, there are some frustrations, as evidence by our responses below to the question, What is the most aggravating part about doing your federal or state income taxes? Paying taxes when soooo many people dont pay or contribute to society what so ever! - Shorty Christiansen I dont really find taxes that aggravating. It takes some effort, but we plan ahead to account for the self-employment tax we are responsible for. The best part is we get to go see my dad. - Megan Patent-Nygren Math. Gross. - Chantelle Jackson Having to round up all of my car regsitrations! - Suzi Nelson NEXT WEEK'S QUESTION: WHAT ONE TOY WOULD YOU LIKE TO THROW REPEATEDLY AT A BRICK WALL? Russia has taken the decision to ban the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatars because the world community let them to, Leader of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis Refat Chubarov has said. "We have no more questions for Putin. He is as bold in occupied Crimea as the world community lets him be. Another matter is whether leaders of the western countries understand the consequences of the policy of hiding their heads in the sand towards Russia, which is clearly trying to take on the role of a master of the world's fate," he said from the rostrum of the Verkhovna Rada during a parliamentary sitting on Tuesday. He recalled that the decision of the Russian Justice Ministry on April 18 the Mejlis was included in the list of forbidden extremist organizations. "By taking this step, Putin's regime has becoming increasingly like Hitler's regime," the MP said. The very best in the global legal market came together on 11 April 2016 at the University Club in New York to celebrate each others triumphs at the third annual Whos Who Legal awards ceremony. For the third time, Sayenko Kharenko has won the Ukraine Law Firm of the Year award. Over a number of successive years Sayenko Kharenko has consistently performed strongly in the National categories at the most prestigious global awards, reflecting the firms strong performance in the Ukrainian legal market. Sayenko Kharenko became the first Ukrainian law firm to ever receive the country award for Ukraine at Whos Who Legal Awards in 2013. The repeated presence of the firm on Whos Who Legal Awards list confirms clients recognition of Sayenko Kharenkos legal services. Since 1996 Who's Who Legal has identified the foremost legal practitioners in business law based upon comprehensive, independent research. This year the Who's Who Legal country awards were issued to the outstanding law firms in 60 jurisdictions, including Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton (Belgium), Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer (England) and Debevoise & Plimpton (USA, New York). The awards are given based on nominations by clients and peers. Sayenko Kharenko enjoys global reputation as a leading Ukrainian full service law firm. The firms leading market position builds on continuous excellence of its highly specialized practice teams. In 2015 Sayenko Kharenko collected three most prestigious professional excellence awards, including Law Firm of the Year by IFLR European Awards 2015, Chambers Europe Awards for Excellence 2015, Whos Who Legal European Awards 2015.Oleksandra Ananyeva PR Manager T: +380 44 499 60 00 E: OAnanyeva@sk.ua China plans to launch core module of space station around 2018 BEIJING, April 21 -- China will launch a core module belonging to its first space station around 2018, according to a senior engineer with China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. on Thursday. Two space labs will be launched later and dock with the core module, "Tianhe-1," said Wang Zhongyang, spokesperson with a key research institute attached to the corporation. The construction of space station is expected to finish in 2022, Wang said. by Capt. Lauren Ott USAFE-AFAFRICA Public Affairs >U.S. and French military and civic leaders attended the Lafayette Escadrille Memorial event in Marnes-la-Couquette, France, yesterday, to commemorate the centennial of the flying squadrons formation. The Lafayette Escadrille was formed on April 20, 1916 by 38 U.S. volunteer pilots who flew under French command a year before the U.S. entered into WWI. The memorial celebrates not only the 38 original pilots of the Lafayette Escadrille, but all 269 American pilots who flew with the French Air Force as part of the larger Lafayette Flying Corps, 68 of whom were killed during the war and are interred at the memorial crypt. Secretary of the Air Force, Deborah Lee James, remarked that, We also honor all French and American citizens who have devoted their life to protecting our shared ideals. These valiant Airmen laid the foundation for an American Air Force that will forever stand with France. During the ceremony, U.S. Ambassador to France, Jane Hartley, along with French Minister of State for Veterans and Remembrance, Mr. Jean-Marc Todeschini, addressed those gathered for the memorial event.Both Hartley and Todeschini emphasized the sacrifice that the men of the Lafayette Escadrille made 100 years ago to fight for their countrys shared values and to defend their freedoms just as the men and women of the U.S. and French militaries continue to do today.The ambassador acknowledged two individuals in particular that were in attendance at the event. We salute the courage and sacrifice of all the Tuskegee Airmen, and especially the two here with us today, Mr. Eugene Richardson and Mr. Theodore Lumpkin, said Hartley. The Tuskegee Airmen were in attendance in honor of the worlds first black aviator, Eugen Bullard, or as he was better known, the Black Swallow of Death, who flew with the Lafayette Escadrille and ultimately earned Frances highest military decoration, the Legion of Honor. In speaking of the significance of the Lafayette Escadrilles formation, Lt. Gen. Timothy Ray, 3rd Air Force Commander, commented, Im reminded, of course, of the great relationship between the French and the American people. We had a tremendous alliance. They were a huge part of our nation and its birth, and we were a huge contribution to helping them in the First World War. The relationship that Ray refers to is the 238-year alliance that exists between the U.S. and France with a long history of shared values and sacrifice. The centennial of the Lafayette Escadrille exemplifies this relationship. Throughout the ceremony there were a total of three flyovers in honor of the men of the Lafayette Escadrille. In addition to paying respects to the fallen pilots, these flyovers served as a demonstration of the evolution of airpower from WWI to modern day. Participating in the flyovers were four USAF F-22 Raptors, a B-52 Stratofortress, three FAF Mirage 2000Ns, a FAF Rafale and a World War I-era Stearman PT-17 biplane. The F-22 can trace its lineage back to the Lafayette Escadrille through the 94th Fighter Squadron, Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Va., to the 103rd Aero Squadron, which was the successor to the Lafayette Escadrille when the Air Service, American Expeditionary Force, arrived in France in 1917. The four F-22s that participated in the flyover were from the 325th Fighter Wing, Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida, while two of the participating pilots were from the 94th legacy squadron.Several bomb squadrons can also trace their legacy back to WWI, including the 93rd Bomb Squadron whose lineage goes back to the 93rd Aero Squadron and the distinction of having taken part in 157 combat missions during WWI between the Lorraine, St. Mihiel, and Argonne-Meuse.The B-52 that flew in representation of the 93rd Bomb Squadron during the memorial event was from the 5th Bomb Wing, Minot Air Force Base, North Dakoka. Also in attendance at the event were descendants of the Lafayette Escadrille pilots who came to pay their respects to their relatives and the legacy that they created 100 years ago. Lt. Col. Nick Rutgers is the great-grandson of one of the original Lafayette Escadrille pilots, Capt. James Norman Hall. Rutgers carries on the fighter pilot legacy of his great-grandfather as an F-15C pilot with the Oregon Air National Guard and was in attendance at the centennial. I really look at [the pilots] as the founding fathers of the Air Force, said Rutgers. They were jumping into a completely new realm of combat just a little more than 10 years since the inception of aviation. What they did, who they were, and what they represent is pretty incredible and the monument is a testament to that. Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday inspected the Central Military Commission (CMC) joint battle command center, calling for building a joint battle command system with Chinese characteristics. Xi on Wednesday morning visited the center, where he serves as the Commander in Chief, calling for implementing the military strategies under the new situations and focusing on the key functions of studying on fighting wars and commanding battles. Xi, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and CMC chairman, also asked officers to change their ideas, innovate and tackle difficulties, in a bid to build a joint battle command system that was "absolutely loyal, resourceful in fighting, efficient in commanding and courageous and capable of winning wars." The strategic and operational command system should be efficient and active in both peace and war, Xi added. Your Ultimate Investing Toolkit Sign up for MarketBeat All Access to gain access to MarketBeat's full suite of research tools: Portfolio Monitoring Top Stock Lists Premium Reports Stock Screeners Live News Feed Premium Support Free for your first month. Chinese President Xi Jinping, also chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects the commission's Joint Command Headquarter in Beijing, on April 20, 2016.[Photo/Xinhua] Officers told to study art of command and operation, build an efficient system President Xi Jinping urged the Chinese military on Wednesday to continue to improve its joint command capability. Xi, also chairman of the Central Military Commission, gave the instruction on an early-morning visit to the commission's Joint Command Headquarters in Beijing. During the visit, it was announced that the president had become commander-in-chief of the CMC Joint Command Headquarters. Xi told officers at the headquarters to concentrate on studying the art of command and operation and to build a professional and efficient joint command system. He told them to regard their positions at the headquarters as their combat positions on the battlefield, ordering them to effectively handle any kind of contingencies and to resolutely safeguard the country's sovereignty, security and development interests. Xi said one of the major goals of the ongoing military reform is to strengthen the capabilities of the CMC Joint Command Headquarters. He stressed that headquarters officers must have a clear sense of crisis and hone their ability for "informationized warfare". "We will take special measures to train professionals for joint operations ... and speed up the development and deployment of advanced military technologies," he told senior commanders and officers. Xi also told the headquarters to improve personnel grouping, streamline operational procedures and share its experience with regional joint commands. The president wore a camouflage uniform during his visit, which was the first time a Chinese president had inspected a top military body in a combat uniform and the second time Xi had appeared in public in such a uniform. Xi wore a camouflage uniform for the first time in January 2014 when he inspected a border defense regiment in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region. Xu Liangcai, a senior officer at the Joint Staff Department under the People's Liberation Army Southern Theater Command, said modern warfare features a high level of joint operation and sophisticated command, requiring a joint command system with good control of information and excellent precision in maneuvers. The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation provides a range of financial products and services in the United States and internationally. The company operates through Securities Services, Market and Wealth Services, Investment and Wealth Management, and Other segments. The Securities Services segment offers custody, trust and depositary, accounting, exchange-traded funds, middle-office solutions, transfer agency, services for private equity and real estate funds, foreign exchange, securities lending, liquidity/lending services, prime brokerage, and data analytics. This segment also provides trustee, paying agency, fiduciary, escrow and other financial, issuer, and support services for brokers and investors. The Market and Wealth Services segment offers clearing and custody, investment, wealth and retirement solutions, technology and enterprise data management, trading, and prime brokerage services; and clearance and collateral management services. This segment also provides integrated cash management solutions, including payments, foreign exchange, liquidity management, receivables processing and payables management, and trade finance and processing services. The Investment and Wealth Management segment offers investment management strategies and distribution of investment products, investment management, custody, wealth and estate planning, private banking, investment, and information management services. The Other segment engages in the provision of leasing, corporate treasury, derivative and other trading, corporate and bank-owned life insurance, renewable energy investment, and business exit services. It serves central banks and sovereigns, financial institutions, asset managers, insurance companies, corporations, local authorities and high net-worth individuals, and family offices. The company was founded in 1784 and is headquartered in New York, New York. Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Limited, a pharmaceutical company, develops, manufactures, markets, and distributes generic medicines, specialty medicines, and biopharmaceutical products in North America, Europe, and internationally. The company offers sterile products, hormones, high-potency drugs, and cytotoxic substances in various dosage forms, including tablets, capsules, injectables, inhalants, liquids, transdermal patches, ointments, and creams. It also develops, manufactures, and sells active pharmaceutical ingredients. In addition, it focuses on the central nervous system, pain, respiratory, and oncology areas. Its products in the central nervous system include Copaxone for the treatment of relapsing forms of multiple sclerosis; AJOVY for the preventive treatment of migraine; and AUSTEDO for the treatment of tardive dyskinesia and chorea associated with Huntington disease. The company's products in the respiratory market comprise ProAir, QVAR, ProAir Digihaler, AirDuo Digihaler, and ArmonAir Digihaler, BRALTUS, CINQAIR/CINQAERO, DuoResp Spiromax, and AirDuo RespiClick/ArmonAir RespiClick for the treatment of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Its products in the oncology market include Bendeka, Treanda, Granix, Trisenox, Lonquex, and Tevagrastim/Ratiograstim. Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Limited has a collaboration MedinCell for the development and commercialization of multiple long-acting injectable products, a risperidone suspension for the treatment of patients with schizophrenia. The company was founded in 1901 and is headquartered in Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel. CHANGES to the junction between New Street and Barrack Street have backfired, becoming yet another source of traffic chaos in the heart of the... Cut-price cooked chook, Colgate and Kleenex tissues were Coles' weapons of choice in the third quarter, propelling the supermarket chain's same-store food and liquor sales 4.9 per cent higher and upping the pressure on embattled rival Woolworths. The Wesfarmers-owned supermarket chain beat analyst expectations and defied soft consumer sentiment to post $7.5 billion in grocery and liquor sales for the third quarter. In the financial year to date, Coles' food and liquor sales are up 5.6 per cent to $24.2 billion, boosted by record trade over Easter. The result will underscore the need for Woolworths to super-charge its turnaround and convince shoppers it can match Coles on price, range and customer service. Woolworths in February reported comparable food and liquor sales fell 0.8 per cent in the six months to January 3. It is due to release its third-quarter sales on May 3. Wesfarmers' combined Kmart-Target or "Karget" sales were 11.4 per cent higher, powered by a 15.2 per cent jump in same-store sales at Kmart while Target grew like-for-like sales by just 1.4 per cent. Wesfarmers' newly appointed chief of department stores, Guy Russo, said softer sales in womenswear and underwear, and the warm autumn weather were to blame for a weakening in trade through the quarter. Never before has a budget advertisement been prepared ahead of the budget itself. In fact, rarely before has a budget needed an advertisement. The leaked script read on Sky News is a bit like something for Seinfeld in that it is a script about nothing. All previous budget advertising campaigns have been about something specific, such as small-business tax breaks. The government has worked up the ads early because it will have only days to air them before the election is called. After that date, they would be, arguably, illegal. They will help the government get its lines straight, however. The government minister who said the Coalition had cut Labor's debt probably needs to know that by doing little to cut the deficit, it has allowed debt to balloon. The minister who said Labor's negative gearing policy would push up house prices probably needs to know that the official line is it would push them down. How can we judge Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner, a case study in desperation? At the time of writing, she finds herself imprisoned in a Beirut jail, with 60 Minutes journalist Tara Brown her cellmate, after a botched attempt to snatch her two children from her estranged husband. Trying to scrutinise maternal love is like trying to gaze into the sun: unbearable, blinding. So the public conversation understandably swerves away from weighing Faulkner's actions, settling on phrases such as "any mother in her position would do the same". Father Ali Elamine leaves court on April 18. Credit:Getty Images It is much easier, more comfortable and more conspicuously in the public interest to dwell instead on 60 Minutes and the ethics, or lack of, displayed by the program in allegedly paying $115,000 for a "child recovery agent" to demonstrate expertise with the cameras rolling. But judgment underpins this dreadful saga, specifically 60 Minutes' impeccable news judgment in knowing its viewers would side with a mother succumbing to extreme measures to recover her abducted children. Picture of Guo Gang at training. Guo Gang's release certificate. Guo Gang is a 17-year-old student who saved a woman from harassment on the bus. However, his righteous behavior not only went unrewarded, he was actually punished for it. Recently his story was posted on Weibo, and many netizens are forwarding and reposting it, hoping to locate the female victim to testify for him. On March 23, 2015, Guo and his friends took a bus from Dujiangyan to Luzhou in Sichuan province. On the bus they saw a man around 30 years old pawing at a girl who was clearly uncomfortable with his advances. When they arrived at Luzhou, the man even held the girl to stop her from leaving. After they confirmed with the girl that she did not know the man, Guo and his friends tried to stop him. They got into a fight, during which the girl ran away. Guo called an ambulance for the man after he fainted. At the hospital, the man was declared to have several significant injuries and level VII disability as a result of the fight. On August 4, 2015, Guo was accused of intentionally injuring the man. Guo has always been a top student at school. However, because of the incident, he did not even get to take the national college entrance exam. And because of the charges against him, no company wants to hire him. On April 18, Guo was sentenced to two years and six months in prison with three years probation. He was fined 157,173.76 yuan. Now Guos former classmates and teachers are trying to help him to find the victim so she can testify on Guos behalf. It's on again. The tin is being rattled and the begging letters are going out to all and sundry. Ah, what bliss it is to be alive in the days of the group email and the megaphone of Facebook. But like much else in Australia today, election campaign financing is a hierarchical business decided by the few on behalf of the many. For the wannabes, that sturdy band of underdogs now running campaigns in dozens of electorates across the country, it's a case of how many coins can be raised through backyard barbecues and deck parties. Only the favourites, or the "targeted", will benefit from the munificence of party coffers. Illustration: John Spooner Sophie Ismail, Labor's candidate in Melbourne, is a case in point. Gutsy enough to put her hand up to take on Greens MP Adam Bandt in an inner-city seat once held by Arthur Calwell and later by Lindsay Tanner, the young employment lawyer can expect to receive the bare minimum in resourcing from the ALP head office. Even more galling for Ismail is facing up to the flush-with-cash Bandt, whose fortunes have been further boosted by a reported $300,000 donation from the Electrical Trades Union. Ali Elamine, the father at the centre of a bungled child abduction in Beirut that involved the 60 Minutes television crew, is now planning to go "out for lunch" with Sally Faulkner, his ex-partner who organised the incident before she flies home to Brisbane. "I don't want the kids to see her in handcuffs. So we'll go grab lunch and pretend it's a normal day," Elamine, a Beirut surf school instructor, said on the Kyle and Jackie O show on Kiis 106.5 on Thursday. "They don't know their mum was in a jail cell and I hope no one tells them that." A Liberal councillor and nominee for the key federal seat of Parramatta who registered at the wrong address on the electoral roll, a move critics say was part of a political power play, says he is just a victim of the city's rental market. Fairfax Media discovered that Parramatta councillor Jean Pierre Abood had changed his address on the electoral roll from his Carlingford home in the federal seat of Bennelong to a Parramatta house in which he did not live. The incorrect change could have serious implications. Electoral roll applications are statutory declarations. Making false or misleading statements in enrolment papers carries a maximum penalty of 12 months' jail. The vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney, Michael Spence, has told a scientific forum there is "a lot of stupid talk about innovation" and declared that universities will be at the centre of a global revolution for innovation in science. Speaking at the launch of the Australian Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology and its Sydney Nanoscience Hub, Dr Spence said "universities are critical to revolutions . . . That's why governments are suspicious of us". The university has invested $110 million in its centre for nanoscience research, alongside $40 million from the federal government. "Not the kids yet. I can't wait to speak to them obviously, but they have no idea about any of this. It's great to talk to home. It's great to be going home." The 60 Minutes crew, Stephen Rice, Ben Williamson and David Ballment, following their release from a Lebanon jail. Credit:Nine Network It is understood McAvoy had not told the couple's two young children, aged seven and five, about their mother's predicament in Lebanon. Ms Faulkner said she was "just so glad to be out of there". Nine's review will "ascertain what went wrong and why our systems, designed to protect staff, failed to do so in this case". Credit:AP "I mean, they treated us well. We can't complain about that. But it's just the uncertainty that sort of kept me awake at night, not knowing if it was going to be a life-long sentence or what. Yeah, it was no joke," she said. Ballment said "we were all hoping for the best, but prepared for the worst", while Rice appeared emotional as he reflected on his release. Ali Elamine outside court. Credit:Nine Network "Half an hour ago we were sitting in a very, very small cell. This has just come completely out of the blue," he said. It was the personal anguish of Ballment and Williamson at not being able to see their children that, in part, led to Mr Elamine dropping the personal charges over the botched child-recovery operation two weeks ago. Williamson's first thoughts after his release were about his family in Australia. "I'll hug my wife and my kids and tell them I love them," he said, as the van travelled to the airport. The 60 Minutes crew's flight is believed to have landed in Dubai early on Thursday AEDT, and they are expected back in Sydney late on Thursday night. Steinfort said it was "quite amazing" to be there when the crew was released from custody. "We were in the van with them as they headed out to the airport, and just the smiles on their faces, particularly the cameraman, Ben Williamson," Steinfort said. "He was talking to me about the phone conversation he had just had with his wife for the first time. He hadn't spoken to her for two weeks, they've had no contact back home. He said he didn't know whether to laugh or cry. There were tears, there was joy, and for all of them, there was that gamut of emotions, the fact that after this ordeal, they were finally free. "I spoke to some of their family members overnight who were in tears with this news that their loved ones were coming home, and they said they would be delivering hugs so strong they may well break their ribs when they get back there." He also said the crew had been relieved to see sunshine again. "They had not seen the sun for two weeks," he said. Steinfort said a deal had been struck between all parties in the case, and a compensation payment had been made to Mr Elamine. He did not reveal how much Mr Elamine had been paid. While the personal charges had been dropped, Steinfort said a criminal case against the crew would potentially still go to trial in Lebanon. How expensive can a bowl of beef noodles be? The 688 Beef Bowl restaurant in Taiwan currently has the most expensive beef noodles on the market. Customers who want to taste their noodles must pay up to 2,000 yuan and even make an appointment beforehand. The 688 Beef Bowl restaurant is not particularly big. It offers seven different flavors of beef noodles, priced from 100 yuan to 2,000 yuan. Wang Congyuan founded the beef noodle restaurant in 1990. About five years after opening, the restaurant started to become very popular. Wang began to do research about how to make beef noodles even more delicious and delicate. From the beef itself to the china in which he serves it, Wang has devoted himself to making the very best beef noodles. Now, all the beef Wang uses is imported from Japan, Australia, the U.S., Brazil etc. Each cut of beef gets trimmed in a certain way, and the soup Wang uses has six different flavors, all prepared from different body parts of the cattle. Wangs beef noodles are now regarded as legend in the food industry. Many customers come to Taiwan for the express purpose of trying the beef noodles from 688 Beef Bowl. Wang is thinking about retiring soon and having his son, Wang Yinqi, take over the business. From the age of 40, all Ive thought about is how to make the most delicious beef noodles. My dream now is to make the best beef noodles in the world. Patrick Norman Pat Chapman is a 34-year-old, Caucasian male who was last known to be in Piedmont which is near the area of Greenville, Missouri on May 10, 2020. Pat had stayed the night with a friend and his wife at their home. In the early morning when the friend woke to go to work. Pat was gone in his own Burgundy color 1995 Ford Escort. That is the last anyone was known to have seen him. The vehicle was later recovered on May 29, 2020 in Mill Spring, Missouri. TAIPEI, April 21 -- Taiwan's judicial authorities have detained 18 telecom fraud suspects and slapped a travel ban on two more. Taichung District Court issued the ruling early Thursday after Taichung District Prosecutors Office on Wednesday summoned the 20 suspects, who were released on April 16 by Taiwan Police due to an alleged lack of evidence. Prosecutors have obtained evidence from Malaysia, which is sufficient to impose compulsory measures on the suspects, said the office. The decision to release the suspects last Saturday was met with criticism from media outlets and the public. From 15 to 17 February 2016, a COPES workshop was held in Dakar, Senegal, on the premises of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Regional Office for West and Central Africa. The event was organized in partnership with the UNODC-WCO-INTERPOL Project AIRCOP and Senegals Directorate General of Customs. To fight effectively against trafficking in cocaine, this Project aims to set up a real-time exchange of information between Africa, Central America, South America and the Caribbean. In addition, regular "COCAIR" operations facilitate seizures and enable the collection of information on new fraud trends and the launch of investigations into major cases. The aim of this workshop was to create synergies between the COPES Programme and Project AIRCOP, while testing the inter-agency nature of the new training. The training was given to the Joint Airport Interdiction Task Force (JAITF) in Dakar, a unit set up within the framework of Project AIRCOP and dedicated to combating illicit trafficking in drugs. The JAITF is made up of Customs officers, gendarmes and police officers. Officials from the Central Office for the Repression of the Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs (OCRTIS) and the Directorate of Customs Investigations also benefited from the training. The new training on the importance of collecting evidence for investigation and prosecution purposes, delivered in French, was very well received by participants, regardless of their home administration. It also became clear that the new COPES training was a valuable complement to the training already received by the staff of this specialized unit. For further information please contact Mr. Gilles Thomas, WCO COPES Programme Coordinator, at the following e-mail address: Gilles.Thomas@wcoomd.org. At the invitation of the Director General of Mexican Customs, Mr. Ricardo Trevino, in his capacity as Vice-Chair of the Americas and Caribbean region, WCO Secretary General Kunio Mikuriya attended the regional meeting of Heads of Customs, held in Santa Cruz (Bolivia) on 18 and 19 April 2016. The meeting, chaired by Ms. Isabel Clavijo of Mexican Customs, debated a wide range of issues, including the outcomes of the Policy Commission and their follow-up actions such as Digital Customs. The participants discussed the challenges their Administrations faced and shared experience in respect of collaboration with the private sector, cooperation with police, passenger control, and the illicit trade in cultural goods. They also explored how best to enhance their cooperation in risk management, AEO, capacity building and the fight against illicit trade. The meeting adopted the first regional strategic plan, which provides a comprehensive view of joint actions in the region. Secretary General Mikuriya expressed his appreciation to the region for sharing regional priorities, including the adoption of the regional strategic plan and new ideas and best practices on how best to tackle the common challenges. The region nominated Chile to be its next Vice-Chair. All the participants thanked the Director General of Bolivian Customs, Ms. Marlene Ardaya, and her team for the warm hospitality and excellent organization of the meeting. SYDNEY, April 21 -- Chinese internet company Alibaba has announced it would expand its operations to Australia. New South Wales (NSW) state chief executive of the Australia-China Business Council James Hudson confirmed to Xinhua he would begin at Alibaba's Australian headquarters next month. "We see a lot of potential in the Australian market as Alibaba continues its globalization efforts," an Alibaba spokesperson said in a statement on Thursday. "We aim to have dedicated country operations to work closely with Australian merchants and partners and it is our plan to establish an office in Australia in late 2016 to better help local brands and merchants to access to the Chinese consumer market." Australia ranked as the fifth top-selling country into China during its Global Shopping Festival last year, the company said. "Australian brands and retailers like Woolworths, Chemist Warehouse, Bellamy's Organic, Jessica's Suitcase, Blackmores, Swisse and many others have opened a flagship online store on Tmall Global (owned by Alibaba) to sell to Chinese consumers,"they added. Alibaba surpassed 476 billion U.S. dollars in gross merchandise volume in March 2016. Donating sperm is one of the most generous things a man can do, as it gives others the chance to have a baby. The number of sperm donors has seen a sudden rise after a local newspaper reported that Chongqing sperm bank has been put into operation. After three years of preparation and construction and one year of trial operation, the sperm bank finally got approval from Chongqing Municipal Health and Family Planning Commission. Potential candidates need to make an appointment for health examination before donation, said a doctor at the sperm bank. Every day, the sperm bank arranges 15 people to donate their sperm. According to the introduction of the bank, only married or single men who meet requirements such as being 22 to 45 years of age, a height of at least 1.65 meters, being in good health, with well-formed features and having education at junior college level or above can donate sperm. They must also be confirmed as not having hereditary or sexually-transmitted diseases through laboratory examination. Six months after the sperm donation, a volunteer will be required to have a blood test again. Only after one is confirmed that he hasnt been infected with HIV can his sperm be qualified for supply to the outside. Usually, only 24 percent of male applicants who meet the initial criteria qualify and not all qualified applicants become donors at last, said the doctor. A sperm donor can earn as much as 5,000 yuan (US$ 771.9) once. Every walk-in applicant will have 50 yuan of transportation allowance. BEIJING, April 21 -- China and the Republic of Korea (ROK) will hold talks on maritime demarcation in Beijing on Friday. The talks, the first round between working groups of the two countries, is the first to be held following delegations from the two countries reaching a consensus in Seoul in December, according to Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying. Hua told a regular press briefing that a reasonable and fair solution between China and the ROK through negotiation and consultation is of great importance to the peace and stability of the waters between them, as well as their friendly cooperative relations. "This also embodies China's consistent stance to solve disputes through negotiation with directly related countries, on the basis of historical facts and in accordance with international laws," Hua added. She noted that China hoped to have a reasonable and fair settlement of the overlap of maritime rights and interests with the ROK through friendly negotiations, and hoped such practice would set a good example for regional countries to handle similar issues. Bridge deck work at two different locations in Graves County start this week Advertisement By West Kentucky Star Staff Apr. 21, 2016 | PADUCAH, KY By West Kentucky Star Staff Apr. 21, 2016 | 11:21 AM | PADUCAH, KY A Paducah man was arrested Tuesday on burglary and drug charges. On Tuesday McCracken County Sheriffs Deputies responded to a burglary at a home in the 7100 block of Old Calvert City Drive in the Reidland area. Several items were reported as missing including old stereo equipment, tools, shop equipment and an antique sewing machine. Neighbors reported seeing 31-year-old John Myrick at the home a few days prior. Deputies located Myrick at 3404 Cook Street and arrested him on several unrelated bench warrants. While arresting Myrick, deputies reportedly saw several old pieces of stereo equipment inside the home. During an interview, deputies said Myrick admitted to having additional stolen items inside his home, including the sewing machine. During a search deputies found the sewing machine, along with the stereo equipment. They also found a syringe loaded with methamphetamine. Deputies said they later discovered that Myrick had recently pawned a rifle that had been reported stolen in a burglary earlier this year. Myrick is charged with receiving stolen property, burglary, possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia. Deputies said additional charges or arrests are possible. By West Kentucky Star Staff Apr. 20, 2016 | 05:53 PM | PADUCAH, KY At a debate among candidates for Paducah mayor Monday night, one person was missing - Louis "Elliot" Polach. The 24-year-old went to the County Clerk's office Wednesday to officially drop out of the race, but told local media Monday that he would not continue his campaign. Polach spoke to West Kentucky Star and clarified his decision, saying a family member recently moved back to the area on very short notice, and needs his help to get settled. Polach said he felt he would be unable to devote time to the campaign through the May primary election. Four candidates remain in the race - incumbent Gayle Kaler, Arthur Baskin, Brandi Harless, and Buzz Vontezmar. Listen to the Greg Dunker Show on NewsTalk 94.3 for interviews with all candidates for mayor and city commissioner over the next week to ten days. The interviews will also be posted to the podcast page at this website. By West Kentucky Star Staff Apr. 20, 2016 | 08:14 PM | GRAVES COUNTY, KY A man faces wanton endangerment charges after a two-car crash Tuesday in Graves County. According to the Graves County Sheriff's Office, the crash happened around 8:05 am, at the intersection of State Route 1241 and East Hunt Road. Deputies said a car driven by Hassan Farah was traveling south on State Route 1241 when he began to pass another vehicle driven by 36-year-old Abdisamad Mohamed Jama, in a no-passing zone. Farah's rear passenger side fender struck the front driver side fender of Jama's car, causing Farah's car to spin and then flip, landing upside down. Farah's front seat passenger, 20-year-old Austin Runyon was ejected from the vehicle. Farah and his other passenger, Liiban Ibraham Aden, were removed from the car by good Samaritans. Runyon was air-lifted to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for treatment of his injuries. Farah and Aden were taken by ambulance to Jackson Purchase Medical Center. Aden was later transferred to Vanderbilt. Jama and his passenger, 26-year-old Mohamed Abdi, were not injured in the crash. A warrant was obtained Farah, and on Wednesday he was arrested and lodged in the Graves County Jail. Farah was charged with three counts of wanton endangerment, improper passing, reckless driving, failure of owner to maintain required insurance and failure to wear a seat belt. China eyes more say in global gold pricing with new benchmark BEIJING, April 21 -- With the launch of its own gold price benchmark, China, the world's biggest producer and consumer of gold, has more influence in the pricing of the precious metal. It will be some time, however, before "Shanghai Gold," launched by the Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE) on Tuesday, can truly challenge the dominance of its international counterparts. The fix, the Shanghai Gold Benchmark Price (code: SHAU), was set at 260.39 yuan (about 40.2 U.S. dollars) per gram on Thursday morning, by the afternoon the fix was 261.82 yuan. As the first gold price benchmark denominated in the Chinese currency, the SHAU is the quote for trading of 1 kg of 99.99-percent purity bullion, derived from multiple rounds of trading. Eighteen institutions, including the Bank of China and China Construction Bank, are listed by SGE as market makers for the fix. The trading margin is set at 6 percent and transaction fees are exempted until June 30 this year. A LANDMARK MOVE The launch of the new benchmark is of great significance to China and marks the start of a new global gold market, business insiders said. Aram Shishmanian, CEO of the World Gold Council, lauded the move as a landmark for the exchange and the internationalization of China's gold market. China is one of the world's biggest buyers of the gold, and the SGE has been the world's largest physical gold exchange for nine years. However, the gold price is generally set in New York and London. In addition, as the gold price is denominated in U.S. Dollar, market insiders have long held the view that the old pricing system cannot reflect the real market demand for gold in different regions. The Shanghai fix could lay the foundations for a new global gold market jointly built by London, New York and Shanghai, and the trend of the gold going from the West to the East would continue, Shishimanian added. The introduction of the benchmark is a major effort of China to further open up and integrate its financial market into the global system, said Pan Gongsheng, vice governor of the People's Bank of China (PBOC) Tuesday. The establishment of the new pricing mechanism for the gold is also in line with the latest trend of the gold market shifting from the West to East, Pan added. SGE chairman Jiao Jinpu said the launch of the benchmark offers the opportunity to develop bullion trading in China's financial markets and encourage more participation by global investors. The Chinese currency would also be a winner, as the fix denominated in yuan would naturally help reduce gold's price dependency on the U.S. dollar and boost international use of the yuan, analysts said. THE ROAD IS LONG The new benchmark would help China break away from the "shackles" of the "London Gold," but there is a long way to go before "Shanghai Gold" can have a serious impact on global gold pricing, experts said. Adrian Ash, head of research at BullionVault, told media that the Shanghai fix, for now, "will remain just another measure of localized demand and supply, rather than a tool for global traders," citing the country's ban on exports of gold bullion. Only when "Shanghai Gold" attracts leading global market makers can it influence the global gold sector value chains, a gold trader who asked to be kept anonymous told Xinhua. "London Gold" has been long blamed for its lack of transparency in pricing, but it will remain the most influential benchmark in the global market, as its five market makers, including HSBC, enjoy a powerful status that no other can match, the trader said. It would be extremely hard for SGE to enlist them as market makers, and this is why it is still too early to discuss whether "Shanghai Gold" can catch up with its New York and London counterparts, he added. "Shanghai Gold" and "London Gold" are more complementary than competitive, Li Guohong, general manager of China's Shandong Gold Group, told Xinhua in an interview. The two benchmarks reflect the supply and demand of different regions and markets, and are targeting different investors, Li added. By West Kentucky Star Staff Apr. 20, 2016 | 07:32 PM | MAYFIELD, KY The case against a Mayfield chiropractor accused of sexually abusing 13 women is headed to a grand jury. A preliminary hearing for Dr. Stephen Douglas McAdoo was held Wednesday in Graves County. McAdoo had four of his first-degree sexual abuse charges amended down to third-degree sexual abuse charges, making them misdemeanors instead of felonies. Three of those misdemeanors were dropped because they happened more than a year ago. The other misdemeanor charge is still pending Two misdemeanor indecent exposure charges were also dropped because of a statute of limitations. The other nine felony first-degree sex abuse charges were bound over to a grand jury. The grand jury meets on June 9. McAdoo's attorney, Bryan Wilson, said he was pleased with Wednesday's hearing. Any time you can get charges reduced or dropped, it's a positive thing, Wilson said. But we're not celebrating. These are strong allegations that have been made against my client and he's not able to defend himselft right now. I hope everyone will reserve judgment on this case until the whole story has been told. McAdoo has continued practicing since his arrest in February. Email To : Multiple e-mail addresses must be separated with a comma character(maximum 200 characters) Email To is required. Your Full Name: (optional) Your Email Address: Your Email Address is required. Advertisement By The Associated Press Apr. 20, 2016 | FRANKFORT, KY By The Associated Press Apr. 20, 2016 | 06:14 PM | FRANKFORT, KY Republican Gov. Matt Bevin has issued an executive order removing the chairman of the Kentucky Retirement Systems board of trustees. Thomas K. Elliott was reappointed to the board by former Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear last year. His term does not expire until 2019. Bevin said the Kentucky Retirement Systems needs ``a fresh start'' and said the board was opposed to transparency under Elliott's leadership. The board of trustees has a meeting scheduled for 8 a.m. Thursday, where Elliot was expected to be re-elected as the chairman. Kentucky Retirement Systems Executive Director William Thielen said Bevin does not have the authority to remove Elliott. The Kentucky Retirement Systems is among the worst funded systems in the country. It has an unfunded liability of more than $19 billion. YONGIN, April 21, 2016 -- Chinese giant panda "Le Bao" eats bamboo at the Panda World of Everland Resort in the city of Yongin, South Korea, on April 21, 2016. The Panda World of Everland Resort opened to the public on Thursday with giant panda "Ai Bao" and "Le Bao" from China. (Xinhua/Yao Qilin) SEOUL, April 21 -- A pair of Chinese giant pandas, which arrived in South Korea in early March, were unveiled on Thursday to the South Korean public after about 50 days of adjustment period. The three-year-old male Le Bao and the two-year-old female Ai Bao, whose names mean pleasant and lovely treasures, began to be made public at the 3,300-square-meter Panda World in Everland, South Korea's largest theme park located around 40 km from capital Seoul. Attending the opening ceremony were about 400 journalists and officials from both countries, including Chinese Ambassador to South Korea Qiu Guohong, South Korean culture and tour minister Kim Jong-Deok and Gyeonggi province governor Nam Kyung-pil. Minister Kim appreciated to the Chinese government for sending the valuable panda pair, which is expected to serve as goodwill ambassador for improved relations between the two countries. The Everland expected the lovely pandas to help increase visitors to the theme park, appointing them as honorary employees. The panda pair arrived in South Korea on March 3 on a 15-year lease. Joint research will be conducted by Everland and China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda (CCRCGP). Everland installed thermostatic and humidity equipment and planted familiar trees in Panda World to simulate the environment in Sichuan. CCRCGP, which heads China's international panda research and cooperation program, has sent 32 pandas to 12 zoos and parks in 10 countries and regions since the 1990s. BEIJING, April 21 -- China criticized Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's offering to the notorious war-linked Yasukuni Shrine during the shrine's spring festival on Thursday. Abe, along with other notable senior politicians, made ritual offerings to the shrine that honors Class-A convicted war criminals of World War II, who were directly responsible for the war of aggression. "The Japanese side should face up to and deeply reflect on the history of the invasion, make a clean break from militarism, and regain trust from its Asian neighbors and the international community with concrete action," said Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying. She told a regular press briefing that China holds a clear and consistent position with regard to the Yasukuni Shrine issue. Abe has offered the "masakaki" trees during the shrine's spring and autumn festivals since he returned to power late 2012 and paid an unpopular visit in December 2013, prompting strong protests from China and the Republic of Korea. BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, April 21 -- Top diplomatic officials from China and Brunei on Thursday pledged to further boost strategic cooperation between the two nations and push forward ties between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations(ASEAN). The remarks were made at a meeting between Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Brunei's Second Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade YB Phein Dato Lim Jock Seng. At the meeting, Wang said Brunei is a reliable and sincere friend and partner of China, and China highly values the strategic cooperative relationship between the two countries. The mutual respect and support between China and Brunei, which are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the establishment of their diplomatic relations this year, has set a great example of equal treatment and mutually beneficial cooperation between big powers and smaller nations, he said. Wang pointed out that the two countries are especially complementary in cooperation as both are facing the task of economic restructuring and upgrading, as well as accelerating sustainable development. Therefore, at this point, the two sides should work to inject fresh momentum into their pragmatic bilateral cooperation to open up new prospect for the China-Brunei strategic cooperative relationship, he said. Wang proposed that the two sides should maintain high-level exchanges to constantly push forward bilateral ties and show support on major issues concerning each other's core interests. Wang called for further pragmatic cooperation between the two countries, noting that China is willing to promote the synergy between the China-proposed 21st Century Maritime Silk Road and Brunei's "Vision 2035" to help Brunei with economic diversification. Wang said China will encourage its enterprises to invest in Brunei, expand cooperation in infrastructure construction and financial sectors, and boost the construction of the Brunei-Guangxi Economic Corridor. China supports enterprises from both countries to cooperate in the integration of the petrochemical industry and is also willing to back Brunei to play a central role in the East ASEAN Growth Area, he said. China and Brunei should promote cultural exchanges to deepen the friendship between the two peoples, said Wang, adding that the two sides should also enhance dialogue and cooperation in global affairs like combating climate change and ensuring sustainable development. China supports and advocates the "dual-track" approach on dealing with the South China Sea issue which was first put forward by Brunei, said the Chinese foreign minister. As an important ASEAN member, Brunei has long been pushing forward the development of China-ASEAN ties and made positive and significant contribution in this regard, Wang said. "China is willing to work with ASEAN for the summit to mark the 25th anniversary of the establishment of China-ASEAN dialogue relations this year and maintain the good momentum of the development of China-ASEAN ties." Among ASEAN's ties with major countries around the world, the China-ASEAN ties are of the earliest, the deepest, most potential and most promising, the Chinse foreign minister said. For his part, Lim Jock Seng said Brunei and China have a long history of exchanges and have enjoyed close relations. Brunei is willing to join hands with China to further deepen strategic cooperation and maintain high-level exchanges between the two sides, boost pragmatic cooperation in the fields of infrastructure construction, finance and petrochemical industry and expand exchanges in tourism, Chinese medicine and youth, he said. Brunei will always uphold the one-China policy, Lim Jock Seng noted. Brunei appreciates the important leadership role China has played in meeting the challenges posed by climate change and sustainable development, and is willing to strengthen coordination with China in international affairs, said the minister. "The ASEAN-China ties are vital to ASEAN, and Brunei is willing to work hard to push forward the development of ASEAN-China ties." Brunei has always maintained that related disputes should be resolved through dialogues and consultations by the parties directly involved and the countries outside the region should support their efforts, he added. The Chinese foreign minister is on a five-day trip to visit Brunei, Cambodia and Laos from April 20 to 24. TOKYO, April 21 -- Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made an offering on Thursday to a symbol of past Japanese military expansionism, Yasukuni Shrine, despite neighbors China and South Korea's call to stop such provocative move. Abe has offered the "masakaki" trees during the shrine's spring and autumn festivals since he returned to power late 2012 and paid an unpopular visit in December 2013, prompting strong protests from China and South Korea. The United States also expressed its disappointment to the prime minister's Yasukuni worship. The controversial war-linked shrine honors 14 convicted Japanese war criminals during World War II and the Yushukan, a propaganda museum inside the shrine, spares no efforts to whitewash Japan's wartime wrongdoings. Abe never restricts his Cabinet ministers and lawmakers from his Liberal Democratic Party to pay homage to the notorious shrine. China has urged Japan to do more to improve bilateral ties that are scratched due to Japan's unilateral move over their territorial disputes and Abe's historical revisionism. The Yasukuni offering is apparently a move went opposite to enhance relations between China and Japan and will continue damage mutual trust. (Global Times) 08:52, April 21, 2016 Illustration: Liu Rui/GT I started working in Brazil in the summer of 2013, when the country's economy was still booming. But soon I began to feel something wrong with the country. I found that iPhones were sold at a surprisingly high price in Brazil. An iPhone 4 cost over $1,000, which was almost twice the price in the US and could be the most expensive worldwide. And in monthly rent there was a cleaning charge of about $70 to pay the elderly black women - Brazil's most disadvantaged group - who did the cleaning every week. The cleaning fee was still charged even if you didn't use the service, and the clean ladies must stay in your home for three hours. The iPhones are expensive because of Brazil's stringent protectionism. Heavy taxes are levied on products that are not manufactured in Brazil. The cleaning charge was to ensure jobs for the underprivileged. The two charges indicate that Brazil's manufacturing is frail and inadequately open with little competitiveness, and the poor in Brazil depend on relief measures. This puts developing countries like Brazil in a quandary as wilting manufacturing and inflated low-level services combined have eroded economic competitiveness. Now the previous star of the BRICS is plagued by economic collapse. But analysts mostly focus on political and economic factors, and ignore the unsustainable impetus for development caused by dwindling manufacturing. Compared to Latin American countries, the Asian economy can drive global development and keep doing fine despite the global slowdown because Asia has a strong manufacturing sector. Economic history shows that industrialization may be the only path that countries, save for very small nations, can take to turn from a low-income nation to a high-income one. Only by manufacturing can the large numbers of the rural poor be offered a way into the middle class. Robust manufacturing can enable these people to become disciplined and well-organized, and strive for their rights through trade unions so that society will develop in a fair manner. But manufacturing does not depend only on government policies, but also culture. Some countries fail to advance manufacturing because, for cultural reasons, the poor lack the skills or inclination for the grind of manufacturing work. It's hard to imagine that Brazilians will stay at assembly lines for hours every day without a break as Chinese rural young people do. In the case of Brazil, the government used the profits from raw material exports to subsidize the poor when the economy was dynamic, and even requires the middle-class to do their part, as the cleaning charge shows. But this doesn't fundamentally prompt these people to seek a job and gain skills. Offering relief funds to the poor can secure ballots, but can't raise their status. When the budget gets tight, people will vote with their feet. Asian countries that haven't been completely industrialized face a similar problem of how to provide a pathway to the middle class for the poor through manufacturing rather than low-level services. As production drops, China needs to figure out ways to enable part of the reduced labor force to re-enter manufacturing via training and micro credit support instead of looking to shift them into the low-level service industry. Asian people have a tradition of diligence, which is a basic condition for industrialization. We now need to channel capital into manufacturing by policy, promote industrial openness and circulation, and restructure the industrial chain. This should be a major target of China's "Belt and Road" initiative. The author is a senior editor with People's Daily, and currently a senior fellow with the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China. [email protected] Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 21/04/2016 (2376 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Manitoba farmers are expected to plant more soybeans, corn for grain and dry peas this year, and less wheat, oats and sunflowers, Statistics Canada said today. The agency said its 2016 spring survey of farmers crop-planting intentions found Manitoba farmers also expect to plant less flaxseed and dry beans, and about the same amount of canola (3.1 million acres) and barley (400,000 acres) as last year. Although the canola acreage is expected to be unchanged, it will still be the most popular crop among Manitoba farmers. TREVOR HAGAN/WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES A canola crop near Grunthal in 2015. Because of an anticipated 3.4 per cent decline in spring wheat acreage and an expected 11.4-per-cent decrease in winter wheat acreage, the total number of acres of wheat this year is expected to dip to about three million. But that would still make it the second most popular type of crop after canola. Flaxseed is expected to see the biggest decline this year, falling by 44 per cent to 360,000 acres. Sunflowers will likely see the second biggest drop, with acreage falling by 20 per cent to about 80,000 acres. The number of acres of dry beans is expected to decline by 11.1 per cent to 80,000 acres, while oats acreage is expected to drop by 10.4 per cent to 430,000 acres. On the flip side, dry field peas are expected to see the biggest rise in popularity this year. Statistics Canada said farmers are expected to seed about 155,000 acres, which would be a 121 per cent increase from last year. Corn for grain is expected to see the second biggest gain, with the number of seeded acres jumping by 44 per cent to 360,000. And soybean acreage is expected to rise by 7.1 per cent to a record 1.5 million acres. Statistics Canada noted this will be the ninth consecutive year that Manitoba farmers expect to plant more soybeans than in the previous year. murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 20/04/2016 (2377 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. OTTAWA A Canadian human rights delegation urged Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dions office Wednesday to come to the aid of Honduran villagers they say are being exploited by a Canadian mining company. The group including First Nations women leaders, the organization MiningWatch Canada, lawyers and activists visited Honduras this past week and want to draw attention to the plight of villagers in Azacualpa. The group says in a brief presented to Dions office that the operations of Toronto-based Aura Minerals are affecting the health of villagers by exposing them to cyanide leaching and from its open pit gold mine. They also say the company wants to move both the villagers and their community graveyard. Theyre also calling on the Canadian embassy to stop supporting the companys activities in Honduras. A request to the company for comment went unanswered Wednesday. The rights group says it is troubling that the Canadian government has deepened economic relations with Honduras, including signing a free trade agreement, following the countrys 2009 military coup. We would like Canada to make a little bit more noise, said Catherine Morris, the research director for Lawyers Rights Watch Canada, a delegation member. Dions spokesman Joe Pickerill said in an emailed statement that the government is committed to demonstrating leadership on corporate social responsibility. Canadians expect our businesses operating abroad to respect human rights, labour rights, all applicable laws, and to conduct their activities in a socially and environmentally responsible manner, he said. In 2014, the previous Conservative government announced the creation of a revamped, corporate social responsibility counsellor that would screen foreign community complaints about mining operations and companies. Companies that refused to co-operate with the counsellor would lose government support. The new counsellor does not have the power to compel mining companies to co-operate, but some non-governmental organizations saw it as a positive step after more than a decade of advocating for tougher scrutiny of Canadian overseas mining operations. Liberal MP John McKay recently called for stricter oversight of Canadian mining companies because they periodically face accusations that they are violating local laws and human rights, despite overall improvements in the industry. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 20/04/2016 (2377 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. ST. JOHNS, N.L. The man in charge of the $9.2 billion Muskrat Falls hydro project in Labrador is stepping down amid increasingly intense scrutiny of cost and schedule overruns but says he wasnt pushed to go. Its my decision, Ed Martin said as he announced his resignation Wednesday as president and CEO of Crown corporation Nalcor Energy, effective immediately. Fallout was swift as, late Wednesday, a source who wasnt authorized to speak publicly confirmed that the entire Nalcor board is also resigning as of Friday in apparent solidarity. The five-member board included Martin and oversees governance, approves audited financial statements and guides corporate strategy. The construction site of the hydroelectric facility at Muskrat Falls, Newfoundland and Labrador is seen on Tuesday, July 14, 2015. The man in charge of the $9.2-billion Muskrat Falls hydro project in Labrador is stepping down.Premier Dwight Ball says Nalcor CEO Ed Martin has resigned, effective immediately.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan Board chairman Ken Marshall could not be reached late Wednesday for official comment. Earlier in the day, Martins voice at times wavered as he spoke during a news conference of how his wife Mary Lou my high school sweetheart his four sons, and his father have supported him throughout his 10 years at Nalcor. Many times this job has come with significant public scrutiny. I recognize that that comes with the territory; however, I have to say, its quite difficult on my family. And I find that troubling. Martin, a veteran of the oil and gas sectors in Nova Scotia and Calgary, said hes looking forward to the birth of his second grandchild and has decided to move on. Im comfortable that this is the time, he said. Im extremely proud of the accomplishments we have all achieved as a company. Nalcor is our provinces heritage fund and we should be proud of it. The Liberals, who won power last fall after 12 years of Progressive Conservative rule, have pledged to tighten oversight of Muskrat Falls, Nalcors major venture. First power, to be generated by 2017, is now delayed until sometime in 2018, although Martin declined to discuss such details Wednesday. Absolutely not, he said when asked if he had any regrets about the projects management. Martin said he constantly worked to improve oversight and has every belief it will succeed long term. The joint venture between Nalcor and Nova Scotia utility company Emera (TSX:EMA) will bring power to the island of Newfoundland and on to Nova Scotia using subsea cables and overland transmission lines. Nalcor has most recently estimated its costs at just over $7.6 billion while Emeras are almost $1.6 billion. A recent interim report by EY formerly Ernst and Young found problems with oversight. It also said Nalcors cost and timeline forecasts last September were not reasonable. The full report, with new price tags and schedules, is expected in May. Martin said there has been much public debate about Muskrat Falls, but used his parting news conference to defend it. We need the power, he said. We will pay back our investment, and dividends will be paid back to the people of the province. Those earnings will help offset increased power bills for ratepayers, he said. The key is, in just a few short years, the investment in Muskrat Falls combined with oil and gas and other lines of business (are) projected to return $400 million to $500 million in dividends each year for decades to come. His words seemed a thinly veiled rebuke of comments by Finance Minister Cathy Bennett as she delivered a budget Thursday that hiked taxes and fees while still projecting a $1.8 billion deficit. Since its creation in 2007, taxpayers have invested over $2.25 billion yet have received no dividends, she said of Nalcor. For all corporations and their shareholders, this would be unacceptable. Nalcor Energy reported that its CEO and president received $681,429 in salary, performance benefits and other pay such as vehicle allowance in 2015. Premier Dwight Ball praised Martins work and said it was his choice alone to leave. We had a good working relationship, he told reporters. Ball said he already has a short list of potential candidates, and a new president will be chosen as early as Thursday. Any severance pay for Martin will be up to the Nalcor board, he added. Not everyone was buying the storyline. Former Tory premier Danny Williams called it a huge loss fraught with politics. In the face of relentless and often recklessly partisan criticism, Eds commitment to this province has remained his sole focus. Christopher Dunn, who teaches political science at Memorial University of Newfoundland, said a big question is how many other senior Nalcor executives will follow. Its plain as day that the government has driven Mr. Martin away. Follow @suebailey on Twitter. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 21/04/2016 (2376 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. OTTAWA Mike Duffy walked out of an Ottawa court a free man Thursday after a judge cleared him of all charges while at the same time delivering a scathing indictment of the Prince Edward Island senators former political masters. Duffy sat almost totally still throughout the four hours Justice Charles Vaillancourt spent dismantling the Crowns argument that the senator had deliberately defrauded the public purse by claiming invalid living and office expenses and had engaged in corrupt behaviour when it came to paying that money back. Vaillancourt all but wagged his finger in admonishment at the Crown as he repeatedly questioned their decision not to extensively cross-examine Duffy or try to challenge his testimony with witnesses of their own during the 62-day trial. Sen. Mike Duffy leaves the courthouse after being acquitted on all charges Thursday, April 21, 2016 in Ottawa. Duffy has been cleared of all 31 fraud, breach of trust and bribery charges he had been facing in relation to the long-running Senate expense scandal. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld But the justices harshest words were aimed at the Prime Ministers Office under Stephen Harper and its conduct regarding a decision by Harpers former chief of staff, Nigel Wright, to give Duffy $90,000 to repay his living expenses. Vaillancourt said he did not see it the same way as the Crown, which had argued Duffys actions were driven by deceit, manipulations and carried out in a clandestine manner when he took the cheque. I find that if one were to substitute the PMO, Nigel Wright and others for Senator Duffy in the aforementioned sentence that you would have a more accurate statement, Vaillancourt said. Vaillancourt said he found Duffy a credible witness and that he was subject to intense pressure from the PMO and its staff, who only had one goal: make the political storm created by Duffys expense issues go away. He said the email traffic between Wright, Duffy and other PMO officials exposed a chief of staff ordering senators around like pawns on a chess board, and saw senators meekly acquiesce and then robotically march out to repeat their scripted lines. The political, covert, relentless, unfolding of events is mind boggling and shocking, Vaillancourt said. Duffys face showed no emotion as he rose from his courtroom seat following the verdict, but he was greeted with hugs from his friends, family and even his lawyer before he left court and faced a throng of reporters. But like he did at the end of every day of his trial on 31 counts of fraud, breach of trust and bribery, he climbed into his car without saying a word. His lawyer Donald Bayne called the verdict a resounding acquittal. I would say that Sen. Duffy has been subjected for the last two and half, three years, to more public humiliation than probably any Canadian in history, said Bayne. Duffy can now resume sitting in the Senate if he chooses as his acquittal requires the upper chamber to immediately reinstate him. In addition to the three bribery and breach of trust charges connected to the cheque from Wright, Duffy was charged with 29 other counts related to his residency, office and travel expenses. Duffy had filed expense claims for his long-time Ottawa home, maintaining he was entitled to the money because a P.E.I. cottage was his primary residence. The Crown argued he barely ever set foot in the province and was seeking to make a buck. But Vaillancourt ruled the senator had sought repeated advice on the subject of his residency and entitlements from as high an official as Harper himself and honestly and reasonably believed that advice and acted on it. The largest chunk of charges dealt with Duffys travel and expense claims, including $65,000 in Senate money that was funnelled through companies run by Duffys friend Gerald Donohue for expenses like make-up costs, photos, paying a volunteer and hiring his personal trainer as a consultant. The Crown referred to the money as a slush fund designed to get around Senate expense rules and Vaillancourt agreed that the way it was set up had a number of shortcomings, but it wasnt a crime. The circumstances of this case are a far cry from the usual fraud/breach of trust playbook, Vaillancourt said of the Donohue arrangements. I was not presented with evidence suggesting expensive wining and dining, lavish living or pricey gambling junkets, or secret financial hideaways. Now, fraud and breach of trust can occur outside the aforementioned examples; however, the thrust of all of Sen. Duffys perceived misadventures was focused on Senate business. Each of the trips Duffy took had legitimate reasons, even if they also included personal business such as the impending birth of a grandchild or an impromptu visit to a dog show to acquire a puppy, Vaillancourt ruled. He acknowledged not everyone may be comfortable with Duffys approach. But you know certain uncomfortableness does not even begin to approach proof of criminal conduct beyond a reasonable doubt. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 21/04/2016 (2376 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. wfpvideo:114798972:wfpvideo All six babies found decaying in a storage locker rented by Andrea Giesbrecht could have been alive when born, a Winnipeg court heard today. Dr. Michael Narvey, a neonatologist at the Childrens Hospital and the University of Manitoba, testified that he came to this conclusion after examining autopsy reports and photos of the bodies. I believe that at least some, if not all, of these children could have been alive (when born), Narvey told provincial court Judge Murray Thompson on Thursday. MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Andrea Giesbrecht keeps her face covered as she leaves court Monday. She is on trial on six charges of concealing a childs body. But Narvey said the bodies were so decayed he could not determine the cause of death. Narvey testified that from what he could see the babies were structurally normal and they were all born between 34 to 42 weeks into pregnancy. He did not find any genetic abnormalities. He said the likelihood of a mother bearing six stillborn children was extremely improbable. An obstetrician who has delivered thousands of babies says the odds would be astronomically small for a mother to have six stillborn babies. Dr. Sharon Naugler, the head of obstetrics at the Health Sciences Centre, testified on Thursday that the odds of Andrea Giesbrecht having six stillborn babies was 1.5 in 100 trillion. But Naugler added that because all six babies five boys and one girl were almost full term babies, the actual chance is one in 500 trillion. Any way you look at it, it is astronomically small. I would say medically impossible. Just impossible. Naugler also said laboratory records of Giesbrecht from a 2002 pregnancy showed no signs that she would have any problems with a future pregnancy. Naugler also said it is impossible for anyone to kill an unborn, full term fetus without doing major harm to the mother. SUBMITTED PHOTO Surveillance footage of Andrea Giesbrecht from the McPhillips Street U-Haul in Winnipeg on October 3, 2014. The footage was supplied as evidence in the trial. Giesbrecht, 42, is charged with six counts of concealing a childs body. The remains of the infants were found inside a U-Haul facility on McPhillips Street in Oct. 2014. Court heard Wednesday that the official causes of death have been listed as undetermined. DNA profiling matched the human remains of all six bodies to a sample taken from a used sanitary napkin seized from Giesbrechts home and a voluntary blood sample provided by Giesbrechts husband, suggesting they are the parents of the babies. Defence lawyer Greg Brodsky has previously said he believes the remains are likely more than a decade old. He is challenging whether the state of the infants meets the legal requirement to prove the charges against his client. Police did originally caution Giesbrecht that they may charge her with murder or some related offence, but that never came to fruition. Brodsky revealed in court Wednesday that his clients medical records show she had 10 legal abortions between 1994 and 2011. She gave birth to her two sons in 1997 and 2002. The relevance of mentioning those abortions isnt clear at this time, but may emerge later once lawyers get into final arguments. There is no suggestion the remains in the storage locker are connected to those procedures. kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 21/04/2016 (2376 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Longtime NDP MLA Steve Ashton received a jolt on election night when he lost what was considered a safe seat in Thompson constituency. But according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, he will be able to take some solace in his $86,000-a-year pension. Ashton was the dean of the Manitoba legislature, having served since 1981. Other long-serving MLAs will also have comfortable work pensions to fall back on: outgoing Kildonan MLA Dave Chomiak will pocket $64,000 a year, while finance minister and outgoing Selkirk MLA Greg Dewar will bring in $54,000, according to the CTF. Both Chomiak and Dewar were elected in 1990, with the former spending more time in cabinet than the latter. MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Outgoing Thompson MLA Steve Ashton Progressive Conservative MLA Stuart Briese, first elected in 2007, did not seek re-election. The CTF estimates hes eligible for $15,000 in pension per year for a total of $299,000 to age 90. Ashton could earn $2.5 million in pension benefits to age 90, while Chomiak could pocket $1.7 million and Dewar $1.6 million. In a statement, the CTF called on newly elected Manitoba MLAs to reform their pension plan. Currently, MLAs have a defined benefit plan that pays out specific amounts regardless of the amount of money they contribute to it. MLA compensation is currently established through an independent process. MLAs dont set their own pensions. As of April 1, the annual salary of a Manitoba MLA will be $93,000. Manitobans who diligently contribute to their own RRSPs deserve to have MLAs that do the same, said Todd MacKay, the CTFs Prairie director. MLAs should receive what they put in, rather than leaving taxpayers on the hook if their pension fund comes up short. MLAs contribute seven per cent of their salary to their pension plan and are then eligible to receive set payments depending on their income and years of service. MLAs pensions should be like the plans the overwhelming majority of the rest of us have and depend on the amount they actually contribute, said MacKay. Defined contribution RRSP-style plans are a much more reasonable system. MLAs also qualify for generous severance payouts whether they retire or fail to get re-elected with departing MLAs getting a minimum of $23,256 and a maximum of $93,025 depending on the number of years served, the CTF said. The federation said it is hopeful the next speaker of the legislature will release the MLA pension plan financial reports to the public so that taxpayers will know whether they are on the hook for unfunded pension liabilities. larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 20/04/2016 (2377 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Peguis First Nation is calling a series of meetings to discuss details on a new funding deal with Enbridge and its $7.5-billion pipeline project. The Interlake Ojibway community is believed to be the first of a handful of Manitoba First Nations the pipeline company is negotiating with as it moves ahead with construction. Any First Nation with territory along the pipeline route can sit down with the pipeline company and work out a similar deal. A spokesperson for Peguis couldnt be reached for comment Wednesday. A notice on the Peguis First Nation website late last week announced the band is holding meetings with band members on and off reserve every day next week. The meetings start in Brandon April 25 and move on to Portage la Prairie, Winnipeg, Selkirk and Peguis each day until Friday. The Line 3 pipeline is Enbridges biggest project and it calls for replacing an existing pipe that runs 1,073 kilometres across western Canada. The line runs from the existing Hardisty terminal in Alberta to Gretna, Man., and crosses the territory of 49 prairie First Nations, including about a dozen in Manitoba. Peguis is expected to issue a public statement but no one could be reached for comment Wednesday. No dollar figure attached to the deal has been made public. One former southern Manitoba chief said such deals are worth several hundred thousand dollars and are intended to cover the costs of compiling data for the company on sensitive cultural sites or hunting areas along the route. The deals are separate from royalty payments that First Nations also want once the pipeline is replaced and its capacity is doubled to 760,000 barrels a day. A map posted with the Peguis announcement shows the Manitoba segment crosses Treaty 1 and Treaty 1 territories in southern Manitoba, from Cromer near the Saskatchewan border to Gretna near the North Dakota border. Peguis First Nation wishes to gather community member knowledge and feedback to inform Enbridge Pipeline Inc. of issues and concerns, the Peguis post read. Peguis is conducting various activities including workshops, surveys and interviews The project may potentially affect: wildlife, wetlands, harvesting, hunting, trapping, gathering, habitat, cultural practices and Peguis First Nation interests, it said. Enbridge, meanwhile, said it is pleased with the level of interest at Peguis. Enbridges Aboriginal Engagement Program is focused on building relationships with the identified indigenous groups to fully understand their interests and concerns and to have those groups meaningfully participate in the project, company spokesman Graham White said in an email Wednesday. Engagement activities include community investment, environmental initiatives, economic participation, training and employment, community open houses, community technical sessions and traditional land use studies, White said. Construction plans call for the pipeline to start operating by October 2017 but until now, talk of the pipeline has served as a flashpoint for environmentalists and indigenous-rights advocates who oppose extracting Albertas bitumen, let alone sending it through a pipe across half a continent. In December, officials from Enbridge and the National Energy Board took part in a day-long ceremony at Sagkeeng First Nation to hear elders opinions. alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca BEIJING, April 20 -- China is strongly dissatisfied with senior British official Hugo Swire's comment on the South China Sea, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said on Wednesday. Hugo Swire, British minister of state for the foreign office, said on Monday that growing tensions in the South China Sea are driven by China's assertive actions. He said Britain will stand alongside the U.S. in supporting an upcoming ruling by an international tribunal on a complaint lodged by the Philippines and that any ruling "should be binding on both parties." "Mr. Swire's comment neglects facts and is full of bias. It breaks Britain's commitment that it does not take sides on issues involving territorial disputes. China is strongly dissatisfied with this," Hua said at a regular news briefing. Hua said the United States and the Philippines colluded to create an illusion of tension on the sea, while what people see is "more than 100,000 vessels passing safely through the region every year as usual." The only difference is the more frequent and high-profile appearance of U.S. military ships and planes in the region. The U.S. ambassador to the Philippines said recently the U.S. will give Manila an observation blimp and military equipment worth 42 million U.S. dollars, Hua said. "Facts show that the U.S. is the biggest driver behind tension on the South China Sea. The U.S. is calling white black by blaming China," Hua said. Manila unilaterally initiated an arbitration case against China over the maritime disputes at an international tribunal in The Hague in early 2013 under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). "The Philippines' attempt to deny China's sovereignty over the Nansha Islands is obviously a result of instigation behind the scene and political manipulation," Hua said, calling the Philippine move "an abuse of international law". China has repeatedly said it will not accept nor participate in the process. The South China Sea disputes between China and the Philippines lies in territorial and maritime demarcation. China declared in 2006 that arbitration and other compulsory dispute settlement procedures do not apply to issues like maritime delimitation, which was outlined in Article 298 of the UNCLOS. Opinion Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 21/04/2016 (2376 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. While Canada pulled the plug on the Afghanistan mission two years ago, the U.S. and a handful of other NATO countries have continued to provide a drip feed of life-support to prop up the western-installed regime in Kabul. No one even pretends the current Afghan government has a democratic foundation. When the election process in 2014 failed to produce a verifiable result, the U.S. brokered a power-sharing arrangement wherein Ashraf Ghani would rule as president, and his rival, Abdullah Abdullah, would assume the newly fabricated post of national chief executive officer. Given this not-so-dynamic duo is in cahoots with the same motley collection of warlords in top ministerial posts, they are as widely despised as the countrys former president, Hamid Karzai. To prop up this Kabul cabal against the steadily increasing threat from the Taliban, al-Qaida and now the Islamic State, the U.S.-led international coalition continues to pour in weapons and trainers with the objective of making the Afghan security forces self-sufficient. This was, of course, the initial goal of the NATO international security assistance force when it first deployed to Afghanistan in 2002. Back in those heady days, it was believed within just three short years, the international community could create a democracy, stage an election, build an Afghan army and withdraw all foreign troops by 2005. The present announced timeline would see the U.S. training mission cease at the end of 2016 just eight short months from now. However, given the recent track record of the Afghan security forces in waging a counterinsurgency on their own, it would appear the U.S. will need to extend its military commitment well into the foreseeable future. Throughout 2015, the Afghan military suffered horrific casualties and lost vast tracts of land to Taliban control. Contributing to the ineffectiveness of these Afghan units is the widespread, unreported desertions, which results in the phenomenon known as ghost soldiers. The corrupt commanders continue to collect rations and pay for these non-existent troops. This proves ultimately problematic when those under-strength battalions are called upon to actually fight the insurgents. One of the excuses offered by NATO trainers for their lack of success with the Afghans and Canadian trainers used these same lines is they had to virtually build an Afghan military from scratch following the ouster of the Taliban in 2001. While that excuse might have been applicable in 2002, the fact is the U.S.-led coalition has been arming, training and equipping Afghans arguably the fiercest warriors on the planet for 15 years without achieving a successful result. In 1914, when Canada heeded Britains call to arms for the First World War, the number of regular soldiers in uniform was a mere 3,000. Just over four years later, at the signing of the armistice Nov. 11, 1918, we had trained and equipped 620,000 citizen soldiers into what was considered to be the best shock army in the world. In 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, Canadas military consisted of 4,500 members in the Permanent Force and a tiny, underfunded militia. Less than six years later, at wars end, Canada had over one million men and women in uniform, the fourth-largest navy in the world and arguably one of the most effective air forces on the planet. That is what you call building a military from scratch. Of course, the failure to create an effective security force in Afghanistan, and thereby the failure to create a secure environment, means any of the so-called reconstruction successes that were achieved are being reversed. In late March, the Afghan Ministry of Education admitted because of the escalating insurgency 714 schools have had to close, leaving 2.5 million Afghan children without education. In 2014, when Canada staged a day of honour on Parliament Hill to commemorate the 158 soldiers killed and 2,000 wounded during the 12-year commitment to Afghanistan, many pundits used that milestone to ask if it was worth it. This prompted the warmongering apologists to argue it was too soon to tell. Well, 24 months later, the Afghan army is in complete disarray, the Taliban are resurgent, the Islamic State has a foothold in the country and the schools we built are being closed. So no, our failure in Afghanistan was not worth the sacrifice in blood and gold. We failed. Scott Taylor, a former soldier, is editor of Esprit de Corps magazine. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 20/04/2016 (2377 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Rana Bokharis fate as Liberal leader could be known by late Thursday evening. Thats when the partys executive meets to conduct a postmortem on the election campaign in which the Liberals won three seats and almost doubled their popular vote. But Bokhari finished a distant third in the Fort Rouge riding she chose to contest, and there are serious questions about the partys finances and its ability to continue to pay a leader without a seat in the legislature especially with premier-designate Brian Pallisters vowing to rescind retroactively the so-called vote tax that would reward the Liberals for every vote it won Tuesday. BORIS MINKEVICH / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Liberal Leader Rana Bokhari Tuesdays outcome was still far below what the partys heady standing in the polls promised when the election was called. Bokhari and party president Paul Hesse did not make themselves available to the media Wednesday. However, the three elected Liberals said they will be in Winnipeg Thursday to hold their first caucus meeting with Bokhari. While careful not to offer any predictions, they praised the rookie leader. The Liberals elected Cindy Lamoureux in Burrows and Judy Klassen in Kewatinook, and re-elected former Liberal leader Jon Gerrard in River Heights. Veteran political observer Kelly Saunders, a political scientist at Brandon University, urged Bokhari to resign before the party makes the decision for her. I expected her to step down (Tuesday) night, Saunders said Wednesday. Its clear she should step down, and its clear she should step down of her own volition. Saunders said she has never seen a party leader not make a concession speech on election night, not congratulate the winner, and not thank her supporters and volunteers. Bokhari held a very brief media scrum, hugged a few candidates and supporters gathered at a downtown hotel, and left. A podium backed by party signs was never used. Progressive Conservative Leader Brian Pallister and NDP Leader Greg Selinger delayed their own formal speeches while waiting for Bokhari the last-place finisher traditionally speaks first. I was very surprised that she not only did not give a speech, but didnt hang around, Saunders said. Its something we saw constantly through the campaiign, how green a leader she is. Its a very traumatic, emotional experience, said Saunders, but, There is a tradition, a protocol, you take the high road and congratulate the winner and thank your supporters. The buck stops with the leader she managed this campaign, and let the party down. Gerrard urged the party Wednesday not to rush into any decisions. Rana should get significant credit. This is a significant accomplishment going from one to three seats and doubling the vote. Rana has been the moving force behind that. Lamoureux said she did not know what Bokhari or the party would do, and said she wouldnt be commenting further for a few days. SUPPLIED Cindy Lamoureux and her dad MP Kevin Lamoureux came to the legislature around midnight Tuesday and took this photo. She wanted her dad with her the first time she walked in as an MLA-elect. Her father Liberal MP and former MLA Kevin Lamoureux went to the legislature around midnight on Tuesday so the two could walk around inside the grand building. Kevin needed to be back in Ottawa early Wednesday, she said. I wanted my first time in the legislature (after winning a seat) to be with my dad. Klassen, a member of St. Theresa Point First Nation, praised Bokhari for having recruited so many indigenous candidates. I am so proud of Rana she is a very honoured person in my area. St. Pauls College political scientist Chris Adams said its understahdable that Bokhari may have been so exhausted and emotionally drained that she did not follow tradition Tuesday night. I suspect she will be starting to move to withdraw as leader, Adams said in an interview. He speculated the Liberals will be hoping Selinger quits as an MLA so they can run in a St. Boniface byelection and win the fourth seat that would make them an official party and receive far more funded support in the legislature. Longtime Liberal Dougald Lamont, who finished second to Bokhari in the 2013 leadership race, said winning three seats was significant, but, They probably could have won more. Lamont said the real power now rests with the three MLAs. They have a real say, theyve been elected by people. Its up to the three MLAs. Echoing another longtime Liberal Tuesday night, who asked not to be named, Lamont said, I have no idea what the partys internal finances are, or what the party is paying her. nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 20/04/2016 (2377 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. NDP Leader Greg Selinger said he is staying on as MLA, but has left the door open for an early exit before the next provincial election. Selinger announced his resignation as party leader following Tuesday nights crushing defeat, which saw his party reduced to 14 seats in the legislature. Speaking to reporters in the aftermath of Tuesdays election, Selinger said he intends to keep his seat in St. Boniface, but wouldnt confirm whether hed stick it out for the next four years. People made a decision last night about who they wanted as a government and I fully support that, he said. The people of St. Boniface asked me to serve as MLA my intention is to do that, how long I will do that, it is a four-year mandate, if changes occur before that date, you folks will be the first to know. Selinger told media he is hoping to have an interim leader in place in two to four weeks. Selinger won in St. Boniface with about 42 per cent of the votes on Tuesday night. When asked what kind of role he hopes to play in his partys opposition government, Selinger said thats up to the interim leader. We are going to have a caucus of about 14 people, so everybody is going to have to contribute to do a good job and I will certainly do that in a support role in any way people wish, he said. The NDP could have an interim leader in place as early as May. Thats when the party executive is expected to head to the provincial council with a recommendation for who should be interim leader and when a leadership convention will take place. Keith Bellamy, the partys provincial secretary, said the executive will consult with caucus as they delve into possible leaders to pick from within the party. Speculation points to veteran MLAs such as James Allum or Andrew Swan as popular contenders. What the executive committee is looking for is somebody with experience, that will effectively and ably represent the party as the leader of the party, Bellamy said. Typically speaking the interim leader is not somebody who is seeking the leadership. Bellamy expects the provincial council meeting to take place in May, when the partys 140 council members will make a decision on who the interim leader will be based on the executives recommendation. However, the partys constitution does not dictate when a leadership convention has to take place. Meanwhile, some hard post-election feelings were evident Wednesday, as a defeated Manitoba NDP MLA Dave Gaudreau said the party fell victim to Selingers desire to hang on to his job. Gaudreau, who lost his St. Norbert legislature seat Tuesday, said Selinger should not have fought to keep his job when a caucus coup erupted in 2014. If we would have swapped leaders, or had a different leader, I think we would have pulled it out. I think it would have been different, Gaudreau said as he packed up his constituency office. Its just too bad that good MLAs fell because of one guys drive to prove that he was right. The New Democrats were swept from power Tuesday night after 16 years and reduced to 14 seats. The party lost constituencies that had been NDP for decades, including Thompson, Brandon East and Kildonan. With 40 seats, the Progressive Conservatives won the biggest majority government in a century. The NDPs popularity dropped when Selinger raised the provincial sales tax in 2013. Five of his most senior cabinet ministers went public a year later with a call for his resignation, but he stayed on and survived a leadership contest. BORIS MINKEVICH / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Brian Pallister and Greg Selinger met in the Premier's office. Gaudreau did not support the revolt, but later backed one of Selingers leadership opponents, Steve Ashton. Selingers decision to stay on was a mistake, said Gaudreau. Opinion polls suggested Selingers personal popularity was lower than the partys. Yet during the election campaign, NDP ads continued to focus largely on Selinger. This campaign focused on the guy that everybody was focused on getting rid of, Gaudreau said. Other defeated New Democrats did not feel the same way. Healthy Living Minister Deanne Crothers, Children and Youth Opportunities Minister Melanie Wight and others said Tuesday night the main factor in the campaign was a desire for change among voters after four terms under the NDP. Wab Kinew, an author and indigenous activist who was brought in as a star candidate and won a seat for the NDP, said he remains loyal to Selinger. He has dedicated decades of his life to serving our city and our province and he has done a lot of good for our community. with files from The Canadian Press kristin.annable@freepress.mb.ca The Winona Sons of Norway will be having its April meeting from 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesday, April 26, at Central Lutheran Church's Grace Hall. Carrie Heckman, a Minnesota native, will present her familys experience living in Bergen, Norway, with their young children and husband, Davin, a Fulbright Scholar teaching at the University of Bergen. Davin is now a professor of Mass Communications at Winona State University. Through stories and photos, she will share her familys adventures and misadventures, discussing some of the benefits and challenges of living abroad with small children. Shell describe her impressions of Norwegian culture, including its food, clothing, schools, and holiday traditions. The whole family will be available to answer questions about their experience. The Nor-Win lodge will serve light refreshments following the presentation. The public is invited to attend. Nordic heritage is not required. The number of seniors in the United States is on the rise and services in Winona and across the country have to keep up. Thats what representatives from Minnesota U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchars office told a group of about 30 people at the Winona Friendship Center Thursday morning. The stop was part of their statewide Serving Our Seniors staff tour, intended to highlight the resources and services that exist across Minnesota, and what the senators policy priorities are for seniors and caregivers. Klobuchar said in a video played at the center that seniors are a growing percentage of the population, which she jokingly referred to as the silver surge, and said shes aware of their concerns. Issues Klobuchar is working on include access to affordable medication, including proposed changes to regulation that would allow more generics, and trying to legalize importing cheaper prescription medication from Canada. Ive heard from many of you that youre struggling with the high price of prescription drugs, Klobuchar said. We can almost see Canada from our porches, right? So lets take advantage of that. Other efforts focus on reducing financial strain on seniors and their families through tax credits, and trying to pass laws to empower Medicare to negotiate for the lowest price of medication for seniors. Currently only pharmaceutical companies can do so. Klobuchars staff were joined by representatives of the Friendship Center, Winona County and AARP, all of which currently offer local programs and assistance for seniors. Winonas Friendship Center, through its senior advocacy program, provides assistance ranging from health to financial. Malia Fox, the centers director, said that out of the 11,000 senior centers in the US, Winonas is one of just a handful accredited by the National Council on Aging. It was accredited earlier this year, and is the only center in Minnesota that is. We have a fine program, Fox said. Were here for you. Fox said center staff and members are hoping for funding to build a new facility, particularly as they watch both need and membership grow. Currently roughly 25 percent of Winonans are eligible for membership at the Friendship Center, with the requirement being 55 years of age or older. Beyond the city level, Winona County also steps into several roles with health and general welfare in distributing state-mandated services. Stephanie Ayoub, a public health nurse, said one of the countys main roles is helping people navigate the system of programs to get what they need. Ayoub said a concentration now is keeping people independent. What the state of Minnesota really wants for seniors is that you stay in your home, Ayoub said. Thats the goal. They work with the Senior LinkAge Line the Minnesota Board on Agings free statewide information and assistance service and the Senior Advocacy program at the Friendship Center to spread resources and referrals as well. During the question-and-answer session, concerns stuck to the three issues that dominated the forum: housing, finding and paying for adequate care, and affordable medication. Several people complained about Social Security payments that wont see increases, and of general use of Medicare dollars by doctors and assisted-living centers or nursing homes. Anne Yakle, a social worker with Winona County, said that even if they want to stay in a home of their own, finding adequate and affordable housing is difficult in the Winona area. Yakle said that most places have wait lists, even if theyre specific to seniors. Its a real problem for seniors, Yakle said, finding safe housing. School districts these days more or less live and die by these referendums in terms of their ability to sustain programs and staff, Dan Rossmiller of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards recently said, as reported by The Isthmus. So far in 2016, voters approved more than three-quarters of the 85 ballot referendums to raise property taxes to send more local dollars to schools. The nearly 77 percent pass rate is much higher than a few years ago. People are voting to raise property taxes to keep their schools alive. Recently I met with officials from the Department of Public Instruction to understand school funding trends. I learned there was a big shift in the success of referendums. Prior to 2011 (and the deep school cuts that year) about half of school referendums passed. In the past five years about two-thirds passed. Historically, communities voted to raise school property taxes to build buildings. Prior to 2011, nearly two-thirds of referendum votes were for the purpose of raising debt for building projects. After 2011, over half of the votes to raise school property taxes are to fund current educational costs. But there is a limit to how much people can raise their property taxes to pay for current operations. Back in 2012, the community of Gilmanton raised the school portion of their property taxes by over 40 percent to keep their beloved school alive. After the vote, many constituents told me voters will never again be able to afford such an increase in property taxes. At a recent legislative breakfast, local school officials pleaded with lawmakers to increase state aid. School officials spoke of local referendum fatigue, meaning people just cant afford to raise their property taxes, even though they want to keep the school district afloat. Prescott is a community that recently voted down a referendum for existing educational programs and staff. The February loss means the district is facing cuts of nearly 10 percent of its budget. Just over river from Prescott, in Minnesota, voters do not face the same harsh realities of raising property taxes or facing deep cuts to schools. Minnesota funds about two-thirds of school budgets with state aid. Only 30 percent comes from local sources like property taxes. Todd Langenfeld, a Prescott resident active in the referendum discussion, told me, Wisconsin made a commitment to fund schools with two-thirds state funding. But we are well below that. The state of Wisconsin contributes about 45 percent (compared to Minnesotas 64 percent) of the cost of schools, while locals contribute almost half. When the state pays less, people face awful choices; raise property taxes just to stay even with the cost of educating children or keep property taxes the same and cut childrens educational opportunities. For Prescott, state funding this year covers about 53 percent of students costs. But two years ago, the state aid covered about 55 percent of the school district budget. Given rising costs and the expiration of a non-recurring referendum (renewed since 1999), it is not surprising voters faced a hard choice. Prescott voters will get another opportunity to support their schools on May 25, when a special election will be held on another referendum. This time voters will be asked to make permanent (or recurring) the expiring referendum. The immediate lay-off of teachers, cuts in student activities, canceling bus routes, and closing buildings may be averted with the passage of the May referendum. However, voters all around the state must solve long-term problems by electing a Wisconsin Legislature willing to tackle the tough questions of how to increase permanently the state share of money for our childrens education. British Tourist Authority VisitBritain wins gold award for its work in getting businesses in the North of England China-ready London, Apr. 20 (People's Daily Online) VisitBritains work to increase the welcome and services that Chinese visitors to England experience has been recognised with a gold award in the service quality category of the Chinese Tourist Welcome Awards 2016 held in Beijing. Chinese visitors are already some of the UKs highest spenders, spending on average 2,688 a head, and VisitBritain has ambitions to double spend from Chinese visitors to 1 billion by 2020. The award is in recognition of the more than 260 tourism industry professionals from 70 organisations ranging from castles and stately homes, destination management organisations and tour operators, to retailers and attraction providers from across the North of England, who took part in VisitBritains China Welcome Training programme held between October 2015 and March 2016. The training considered Chinese tourists motivations and expectations when they travel, how businesses can adapt their products and marketing to meet these needs, and the importance of providing services in Chinese, amongst other topics. Ninety per cent of those who took part in the course said they were planning to make changes to their business within six months as a result of the training. VisitBritain Director Patricia Yates said: China is the worlds largest outbound market and a huge tourism opportunity for Britain. We want to deliver a world-class experience for Chinese visitors, maximizing their spend and stay, to support our ambition of making Britain the most welcoming destination in Europe, so we are honoured to receive this endorsement of our work. Other developments to promote the UKs competitive tourism offer in China include a new direct airline route from Beijing to Manchester. The new route, operated by Hainan Airlines, becomes operational from June 2016 and will offer up to four direct flights per week from Beijing to Manchester, making it easier for Chinese visitors to explore the UKs northern regions. Latest figures from VisitBritain show that visits from China were up 37% in the first nine months of 2015, smashing previous records. There were 214,000 visits from China from January to September, beating the number of visits for all of 2014, with figures for the last quarter of 2015 still to come. (Bai Tianxing) Thanks to Winona County commissioners Greg Olson and Jim Pomeroy for starting the discussion of a frac-sand ban. I know over the last several months, commissioners have been alerted to environmental and health concerns of frac-sand mining. Many hundreds of calls, cards, and emails have been sent. I ask: Has any thought been given to the economic impact large scale frac-sand mining would have on agriculture, tourism, hunting and fishing? These are proven economic sources for our county. As a farmer, I am aware of the burden that transportation costs place on my livelihood, products I sell and inputs I buy. When oil and sand production is in the boom cycle, the availability of barges, rail and trucks is a major concern. History shows that oil will pay whatever is needed to secure barge and rail sources. A few years ago we saw North Dakota farmers receiving half-price for their corn and beans as the oil and sand industry monopolized rail, their main source of harvest transportation. In our area, any talk of barge shortages raises fertilizer prices. Commissioners, have you considered the impact to agriculture in the spring and fall if those shortages are a reality? How about tourism? Show me numbers from Wisconsin that tourism has improved and not declined in the heavily mined areas of that state. We know tourism is an established economic source for Winona County. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources can provide numbers confirming revenue amounts generated by hunters and fishermen in Winona County. The DNR spends a great deal of time and money protecting trout streams, forest and grassland to maintain this industry in our state. Will frac-sand mining be a benefit to preserving these resources for our deer, turkey, pheasant and songbird populations? Commissioners, it is time to talk and come to a decision on banning frac mining. Unwarranted fears of legal opposition would be made less likely by a unanimous vote. Let it be known you stand together against the negative impacts this industry would have on established economic resources. You have legitimate economic concerns. Use your legal authority and move forward with a ban. Wesley United Methodist Church would like to thank all who attended the musical Charlottes Web on April 7-9. It was our second effort, and we were very pleased with the support of our members and the community. We added two pre-play events for our members and the community, the Read before you See with selected parts of the story book read by Barb Rahn and Al Thurley, and the Wesley County Fair with an art show lead by Stephanie Schoh. The production is grateful to the Winona Community Foundation for the grant they gave us in support of community events. With this grant we were able to offer reduced family rates on Thursday preview night and complementary tickets to residents of local assisted living facilities, Winona Senior Friendship Center, clients of Home and Community Options and families of the Food for Thought backpack program at Jefferson school. We also would like to thank the Wesley Agape Fund and our members who became sponsors of the play along with community sponsors: Dahl Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, Fawcett-Junker Funeral Home, Floor Coverings of Winona, Hoff Celebration of Life Center, and Mark Swenson of Sweeney Inc. We thank all of those who gave of their time and talents, including the cast, musicians, set building crew, the local media, those who sold tickets, supplied refreshments and served as ushers. We also include thanks to St. Ambrose University, Davenport, Iowa for their use of the production costumes. A special thank you to Valerie Williams, Director, Becky Wisted, Musical Director, Tim Wangen and John Doffing, technical support, Mark Hecht, set production, Sim Sound Systems, A Js Sound & Light Show, Hardts Music and Audio, Midtown Foods, Hy-Vee, Winona, The Book Shelf, and Dominos Pizza. Give them a vote. Congress owes that much to the 400,000 retirees set to have their Central States Pension Fund benefits slashed next month. Thousands of Central States pensioners rallied Thursday at the Capitol in Washington. The private pension fund, like hundreds of others, was mismanaged for decades by trustees. Union bosses were AWOL throughout, turning their heads as the risky investments piled up. With a value of just $1.8 billion, Central States has more than $42 billion in liabilities. Then, in 2014, Congress got involved. Lawmakers hoped to shield the federal insurance agency that backs private pensions from the coming wave of failing private funds. Inserting a tiny clause, empowering Treasury officials to reduce pension payments in the event of a funds pending collapse, did just that. The massive change, potentially altering the lives of 25,000 Central States pensioners in Wisconsin breezed through Congress with little to no discussion. Thats the beauty and the farce of jamming voluminous budget bills with tangential policy. Central States admits the proposed bailout is unlikely. The Houses continued slide to the right precludes the bailout from conservatives purity test, Central States argues on its website. Even further, the increasing rarity of private pensions, in a 401(k)-invested economy, feeds anger among non-union taxpayers who snarl at the word bailout. Add to that, the inherent politicization of the Senate draft sponsored by insurgent Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and Sanders bailout is probably doomed to inaction. Treasury officials have set a May 7 deadline for a decision. Congress is in session through April 29 before a planned week off. A congressional side-step would be nothing short of shameful cowardice. The clock is ticking. The GOP-run Congress, after all, inserted itself into this issue with its 2014 federal funding bill. Yet, lawmakers appear to lack the spine to openly debate the political principles that probably doom the bailout to the dust-collecting pile. A floor debate followed by a vote is the least Congress can do for the 400,000 Americans facing financial upheaval. Theres a compelling conservative argument against bailing out Central States. The bank bailout in 2010 still enrages the masses, who arent likely to much care about the distinction between hedge fund managers and retired truck drivers. The bill could set a precedent that would cost taxpayers for decades. Up to 200 private pensions could go bust over the next two decades, says the Pension Rights Center. The U.S. government could find itself on the hook for billions, year after year. But the 400,000 people reliant on the sinking Central States pension were made a promise. Pay in for so long and enjoy a secure retirement. Theyre victims of poor management and union indifference. And they face personal catastrophe. Congress pulled a fast one on more 40,000 Iowans and Illinoisans. True to form, the ruse was well hidden, only rearing its ugly head when Central States pensioners started receiving notices in the mail. Theres merit to both sides of the Central Fund bailout debate. And congressional Republicans are always willing to make some statement about government spending. If Republican lawmakers truly believe their mantra, theyll have the courage to apply it to real people facing real personal disaster. JUNEAU | Allen Behl, chairman of the Dodge County UW-Extension Education Committee, was part of a Wisconsin delegation attending the 2016 Public Issues Leadership Development Conference in Washington, D.C. On this visit I was able to network, advocate for extension and learn more about the similar challenges we face nationwide with lack of time and declining funding, Behl said. The conference was held April 10 through 13 at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City Hotel in Arlington, Va. More than 200 representatives from across the nation attended the conference, which featured presentations on extension programs in Wisconsin and from around the country addressing issues important to agriculture, businesses, communities, families and youths. Wisconsin delegates met with their congressperson and senators. Behl met with Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner and Sen. Tammy Baldwin. We told our elected officials how important federal, state and local partnerships are when resources are so tight at all levels of government, Behl said. We need funding from all three partners to continue offering important local programs through cooperative extension. Cooperative extension dean and director Rick Klemme also attended the conference. I always am impressed with the commitment our colleagues, county partners, 4-H youth representatives and our Resource Advocacy Network members appreciate their informing our congressional delegation about the value of their local extension program, Klemme said. I find that members of congress and their staff are very attentive to their constituents as they talk about their experiences with cooperative extension. On June 3, community members of all ages are invited to join in the fight against cancer by attending the Relay For Life of Columbus and Fall River at Firemans Park in Columbus. In its 19th year, the Relay For Life of Columbus and Fall River is a family-friendly event designed for the whole community. Lynnette Scharf, committee member, has been participating in the Columbus and Fall River Relay for the past 10 years. I became involved after I heard the statistic that one in seven women would develop breast cancer, said Scharf. I have three sisters and a mom. That is five women in my immediate family that are at risk. I want to change that statistic. This year, the Columbus and Fall River Relay For Life will begin at 5 p.m., with a survivor ceremony at 6 p.m., a community walk at 8 p.m. and a luminaria ceremony at 9:30 p.m. Food, bingo, pony rides, a bouncy house and more are planned for the evening. I chose to be a part of the Relay For Life because of the sense of community, said Scharf. When you are a part of the Relay you are not fighting against one type of cancer, you are fighting against all types of cancer. The event provides hope to those in our community who are facing a great struggle. Anyone may participate in the event on June 3. For those who would like to donate to the event or join in the fight online, visit www.relay forlife.org/columbuswi. Follow local teams on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/columbusrfl. The American Cancer Society estimates there will be 1,685,210 new cancer cases and 595,690 cancer deaths in the United States in 2016. For more cancer statistics, visit the American Cancer Society online at cancer.org/statistics. Members of Columbia Countys Home and Community Education clubs gathered at Savanna Oaks Community Center in Fall River on Tuesday for their annual Rendezvous and Cultural Arts Program. This year, the theme was Manners, Mending, and Morals, with the keynote speaker, Dale-Harriet Rogovich of the Wisconsin Historical Museum, dressed in vintage attire to speak on A Ladys Lot in Life, from 1850 into the 20th Century. Attendees were also asked to dress in period costumes or vintage hats, to go along with the theme for the day. After the program and dinner, HCE members had a chance to look over the cultural arts that were exhibited, and awards were handed out. Cultural arts that were selected to go on to the State HCE Convention were made by: Gert Stilson, Anna Vedder, Betty Heller Hobbs, Kay MacLeish, Dorothy Meitzel, Nonalee Savoy, Phyllis Peterson, Beth Hahn, Kris Young, Judy Cuff and Jennifer Blan. Professors and other academics are sometimes derided as living in an ivory tower, but Ive always found the vast majority of them to be smart, helpful and grounded. The response to the arrest last week of a 21-year-old UW-Madison student, however, suggests the ground some of them are standing on is located on a different planet. On the same day Denzel McDonald was arrested for allegedly tagging campus buildings with Racizm in the air. Dont breathe, The devil is a white man and similar sentiments causing an estimated $4,000 in damage faculty and staff members started signing a statement that rationalizes the graffiti, and criticizes the deplorable actions by campus police while suggesting they acted with bias. The way UWPD officers entered my class was very aggressive with bulletproof vests and guns visible, McDonalds professor, Johanna Almiron, is quoted as saying. I cannot believe they humiliated and terrified my students. If the mere presence of an officer wearing a (holstered) gun and a bulletproof vest is aggressive, then the single officer who entered the classroom was an aggressor. But I sure didnt see much sign of humiliation or terror during the 30 seconds the officer was in the classroom, based on the police body-mounted camera recording of the incident. The vast majority of the 14-minute interaction between student and cop, ending in the students handcuffing and arrest, takes place outside the classroom or outside the classrooms building. About the worst thing you can say about the officers decidedly deferential behavior is that he continually refers to McDonald as man like they were old buddies or something. Statement signer and Afro-American Studies department chairman Craig Werner said the media have framed McDonalds arrest in a way that ignores the fundamental question of whether its legitimate to go to a classroom to arrest a student. The officer should never have entered, he said. True enough, that decision violated department practice, UW Police Chief Sue Riseling has said. But other attempts to contact McDonald in person or by phone were not successful, and the officer went in thinking the class had not yet started. Speaking of fundamentals, Werner also said that the fundamental issue here is not graffiti, but the much larger and deeper patterns contributing to racial tension on campus. The statement he and some 800 other faculty and staff signed says the graffiti in question directly confronts the racism faced by students like (McDonald) on campus. It seems reasonable enough for police to wait until class is over to arrest a suspect who isnt otherwise causing a problem. But if youre going to suggest the hearing of constitutionally protected political speech is more important than the cops interest in enforcing well-established and legal limits on how that speech can be expressed like in spray paint, on state property then you cant really discriminate based on the content of the speech. Maybe the next cop attempting to ambush a classroom will be there to arrest someone for spray-painting the devil is a black man on Bascom Hall. OP-ED: US fanning the flames of potential World War III will only hurt itself Recently, an article titled If World War III Erupted in Asia was published on the U.S. foreign policy website National Interest. The premise of the article was speculation about what would happen if a naval battle occurred between China and the U.S. A month ago, the same website published another story titled Saving the South China Sea without Starting World War III. That article went on at length about the role the U.S. should play in the South China Sea. But what those U.S. media sources are really doing is distorting information and fear-mongering. By repeatedly citing terms like "transportation routes," "maritime security," "navy" and "submarine," those articles seem to claim that the regions security is hanging by a thread. They also aim to put the blame on China. By blaming Chinas development for the instability in the South China Sea and misrepresenting China's activities in the region, Western media is attempting to find new selling points for the China Threat Theory. There is no doubt that the U.S. is the major force behind this operation. And U.S. media has several important things to gain by publicly speculating on a possible World War III. Firstly, the U.S. military could strengthen its presence in the Asia-Pacific region if other countries become nervous about a potential large-scale conflict. Increasing military presence is an important part of the U.S. "Asia-Pacific Rebalance" strategy. In recent years, the U.S. has already carried out multiple military operations in the Asia-Pacific region under the guise of "responding to China." Secondly, the U.S. is assisting in the one-sided international arbitration proposed by the Philippines. By painting China as a bully, the U.S. tries to label the Philippines as the meek, blameless victim, deserving of international sympathy. This way, the U.S. can not only cover up the Philippines' provocation against China's sovereignty, but can also attack China's ability to safeguard its own territory. Thirdly, the U.S. wants to consolidate its power. By bringing attention to a so-called security problem in the South China Sea, the U.S. can further solidify its ties with allies and reinforce its position at the head of an allied network. The U.S. has already claimed that it will carry out "joint patrols" with the Philippines, even calling on Japan and Australia to join them. If this happens, the cooperation framework of U.S.-Japan-Australia and U.S.-Japan-Australia-India will be cemented. It is also likely that the U.S. will continue trying to win support on the South China Sea issue during the G7 Summit to be held next month. The U.S. should be aware that peace and development are the only constructive path forward for a community with a shared destiny. Speculation about a possible World War III is in no way useful and actually quite harmful. In todays world, the containment strategy adopted during the Cold War has no place in global politics. China is confident in its ability to overcome obstacles and peacefully realize the "Chinese Dream." The U.S. must see China's development as an opportunity rather than an antagonistic challenge; an attempt to hinder Chinas rise will only end badly. The U.S. has agreed to build a new type of major-country relationship with China. Both countries should uphold the principles of non-conflict, non-confrontation, mutual respect and mutually beneficial cooperation. Inciting disputes and speculating about war will not lead to strong China-U.S. ties. (The author is an expert on international affairs.) The arrest became a flashpoint for students and professors near the end of a semester in which the university was rocked by several high-profile, racially charged incidents. You cant convince Jackie McGowan not to pursue an opportunity. Everybody told me I was crazy, that nothing else had worked here, she said over the many voices of a tavern, busy for an early-afternoon weekday. People who know me understand that kind of thinking makes me crazy: I wanted to buy it. Buy it, she did. McGowan and her niece, Tara Glendenning, in late January opened Jacks Tap at 1207 Dunn St. a location, they noted, thats seen its share of tavern identities: The Caboose, J.T.s, the Firehouse, Kruegers Trackside, and in the mid-1990s McGowans aunt and uncle owned it, when it was The Party House. Oh, my Gosh; its been numerous places, McGowan said. After selling a hospice care business McGowan owned and operated for 26 years in the Twin Cities area, she returned to the place she was born and raised. And despite the warnings, Jacks Tap is coming into its own, the business partners said. They started serving food in March, featuring a menu thats already a hit for an old pizza recipe unique to Portage and Friday night fish fries. Jacks Tap serves burgers, Philly cheesesteaks and Ruebens, among other sandwich selections, and a variety of appetizers. The homemade pizzas are flying out the door, said Glendenning, who for five years prior was bar manager at Corner Pocket. McGowan and Glendenning will look to further establish their business in the Portage community with an all-day, grand-opening celebration set for June 11. The event will feature three local bands, grilled food, contests and prizes. I always wanted to do this. I have great memories (of this area), McGowan said, citing her time at The Party House, as well as her grandfathers tavern on Oneida Street: Johnnys Tap. Johnny Wielgus opened Johnnys Tap in the 1950s, running it until 1973. Her father, Jack Wielgus, is where they got the name Jacks Tap a tip of the hat to a very family-oriented individual. Everything was about family with my dad, McGowan said of Jack Wielgus, who died in 1998. A photo of him rests above the bar a reminder, she said, of what he meant to them. We didnt just open this place up. We put our heart and soul into it. More than drinks Early success became apparent to McGowan and Glendenning as they struggled to keep up with the demand. Talking to the vendors, we were running out of beers, booze and food, McGowan said of the first months. They told us to be happy about that. Its a great problem to have. McGowan and Glendenning gutted the building, undertaking various upgrades, and soon they hope to offer outdoor dining options with music. On a beautiful day in Wisconsin, we should be outside, McGowan said. Upgrades include removing pool tables to make room for people, and improvements to the flooring, walls, ceiling, bar equipment and kitchen area. Its awesome to watch peoples reaction to how much weve changed it, Glendenning said. Some of them, she added, grew up in the tavern. What Jacks Tap has to offer goes beyond drinks and food, they said. The tavern is about creating the atmosphere they learned from their family. That makes charity important, McGowan added, noting Jacks Tap holds meat raffles twice a month, so far raising money for Wounded Warriors and for multiple sclerosis research and awareness. On April 9 they raised $2,000 in two hours for the Portage Caring Tree. Some of the proceeds from the Jacks Tap Grand Opening will go to Portage American Legion. And well continue to do that, McGowan said of charity events. Business has been beyond our expectations, McGowan said. Theres something for everybody. We ended up with a mixed clientele. Everybody knows everybody. Young and old get in here, and they get along. The Columbia County Board began its new two-year session Tuesday with a frank discussion of how the board might make itself more accessible to the public, and to potential new county supervisors. County Board members offered mixed perspectives, and divided votes, when Supervisor Nancy Long of Lodi offered a pair of proposed amendments to the County Boards standing rules, calling for mostly evening meetings for the County Board and for its committees. Both proposals were voted down 15-11 in the case of evening County Board meetings, and 19-7 in the case of evening committee meetings. The County Boards current monthly meeting schedule calls for 9:45 a.m. sessions from November through April and 7 p.m. sessions from May through October usually with no meeting scheduled in February and August. And, all of the County Boards standing committees meet during the day, year-round. For people who work during the day, Long said, evening County Board sessions are more convenient to attend which is why her proposed amendment would have set all County Board meetings at 7 p.m., except in December and January, when the meetings would be held at 9:45 a.m. Long said this many daytime meetings means only people who are retired, or who have very flexible schedules, can serve on County Board. We also run (for county supervisor) because we have time, she said. And time is a precious commodity to a lot of folks. Long received support from a supervisor who hadnt expected to be back Robert McClyman of Wisconsin Dells, who did not seek re-election, but got it, via nine write-in votes. Evening meetings would better fit the schedules of younger working people, McClyman said. Youll see a change in the board, and you wont see so much gray hair like mine, he quipped. Not necessarily, said the County Boards youngest member, Matthew Rohrbeck of Portage, whos 25. My generation, if thats the group youre trying engage we work at all hours, he said. Rohrbeck noted that he was on the recently-disbanded ad hoc committee to examine the County Boards standing rules, and meeting times were a hotly-debated topic. Anyone who would be elected as a county supervisor, Rohrbeck said, needs a flexible schedule. Supervisor John Tramburg of Fall River who has been on the County Board since September 1982, making him the longest-serving member expressed two concerns with evening meetings. First, he said, county employees typically take the official minutes of County Board meetings and committee meetings and if they should be required to do so outside of typical daytime office hours, that would mean costs to the county for overtime and compensatory time. Second, Tramburg said, older County Board members that have to travel a long way to get to and from Portage are likely to be nervous about driving at night in the winter. Wisconsin winters tend to endure well beyond December and January, noted Supervisor Bruce Rashke of the town of Wyocena. Two of the 28 supervisors were absent from Tuesdays meeting: Mark Sleger of the town of Lowville, and a newly-elected supervisor, James Brooks of the town of Lodi. Supervisor Adam Field of Portage, who works in the Capitol in Madison (as does Rohrbeck), said he knows Brooks, who is a Capitol Police officer, and who could not get away from an in-service session for the County Board meeting at which he was to be inaugurated. Field said Brooks had told him that one of his biggest concerns about being on the County Board was getting away from work during the day to attend meetings. Another new supervisor, Steve Attoe of the town of Lodi, expressed similar concerns. I will say this is the No. 1 reason why I had a hard time deciding to run, said Attoe, who is a utility lineman and a real estate agent. I will have to take vacation to make it to these meetings. Long said she thinks meetings in the evenings, for the full County Board and its committees, would also improve the publics engagement in the countys business. Tramburg said that hasnt been his experience. In 2011, 2012 and 2013, Columbia Countys budget process included a public hearing, in a late October evening, on the budget in addition to the public hearing that is held at the November (morning) County Board meeting when the budget is presented fo adoption. The 2013 session attracted no one. The 2012 session had only a few members of the public, and was over in less than 30 minutes. The 2011 session brought mostly county employees concerned about the effects of the newly-enacted Act 10. The lack of public participation prompted county officials to stop offering the October public budget sessions, Tramburg said. We do not get an individual from the public to come to this meeting, to ask questions about whats going on, he said. Portage Kiwanis seeks to get its vision out there, in the public, the clubs president said, a vision of promoting literacy for children. Winning the Distinguished Club Award from Kiwanis International can only help those efforts. The local organization took home the high honor for hitting all seven of the criteria and it only needed six. Its an award that was given to just six of 158 Kiwanis clubs within the Wisconsin-Upper Michigan district. For Margaret Rudolph, the award is about working hard for local youth. When I ask someone on the street, What is Kiwanis? they might say, Oh, thats the group who gives books to children in our area, Rudolph said. And its a different focus from many clubs out there. In the past year, Portage Kiwanis members gave out 2,500 books at multiple events, including in a parade in Pardeeville and Culvers Kids Day in Portage. Later, they provided two books for every kindergarten student in public and parochial schools. Our biggest fundraiser is the Ride To Read bike ride, and we will always take any donation from anybody whos interested in providing books for kids, Rudolph said. Within the Distinguished Club criteria, Portage Kiwanis was recognized for increased membership, reporting 37 members up a half-dozen in the past two years. Members from throughout the region sign up, covering areas like Pardeeville and Rio. My daughter, who lives in Wautoma, participates in Portage Kiwanis, Rudolph said. You go wherever you want to go, in Kiwanis. Our book program appeals to many because we all know children need to read. Recognized Portage Kiwanis efforts also include starting a Builders Club at Pardeeville Middle School, for which students regularly participate in service projects like planting trees or cleaning parks. Portage Kiwanis officers organize meetings with guest speakers, letting people know whats going on in the area. Club members attend conferences both near and far, Rudolph said, last year participating at the International Conference in Indianapolis. Next year its in Canada. In the following year or year after, it will be in Paris, Rudolph said. Even from our little club, people are going. Portage Kiwanis chipped in for global community service, a part of Kiwanis International efforts that raised more than $100 million to help eliminate maternal and neonatal tetanus a disease the organization reports takes the lives of 49,000 babies and a significant number of women every year. Its now been eradicated in some countries, Rudolph said of those efforts, details for which are available at kiwanis.org. Portage Kiwanis also sponsors Key Club in the high school, raising money for students to attend leadership programs. They can continue service not only at Portage High School, but in their lifetime, that they understand the importance that we all give back to the community, Rudolph said. Portage Kiwanis is always looking for help or new members, and if you want to hear Rudolphs one-minute elevator speech about joining the program, itd go something like this: Do you have a heart for children? Do you have a passion for helping children in your community by volunteering your efforts? Then were the club for you. To learn more about Portage Kiwanis, visit portagekiwanis.org or email Rudolph at kiwanisportage@gmail.com. You can also attend Portage Kiwanis meetings at Pizza Ranch, held on Wednesdays at noon. Disaster. Incredible economic burden. The biggest job-killer in this country. Central to the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz has been the claim that the Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare, has been a complete failure, and that the only way to save the country from this scourge is to replace it with something they design. Its worth examining the big myths they are peddling about the Affordable Care Act and also their ill-conceived plans of what might replace it. Millions of people have lost their insurance: In January, Mr. Cruz claimed that millions of Americans had lost their health insurance because of the health reform law. He even claimed to be one of them, saying our health care got canceled because Blue Cross Blue Shield left the individual market in Texas. Insurers did stop offering some plans after the law took effect, including those that didnt provide required benefits like maternity care or that charged higher premiums to older or sicker people. But people with those plans had the opportunity to sign up for others. And over all, the law has drastically reduced the number of Americans who lack health insurance. According to the Census Bureau, the number of uninsured Americans dropped by 10 million between 2010, when the law passed, and 2014. While critics said employers might stop offering health insurance because of the law, 3 million people actually gained coverage through their employers between 2010 and 2014. Incidentally, Mr. Cruz never lost his health insurance. Blue Cross Blue Shield did cancel his particular plan, but it automatically moved him and his family to a new one. A Cruz spokeswoman said the senator had been misinformed by his insurance broker. Millions of people have lost their jobs: Mr. Cruz has called the Affordable Care Act the biggest job-killer in this country and said millions of Americans have lost their jobs, have been forced into part-time work because of it. This is false. The unemployment rate has fallen since the law took effect, PolitiFact notes, as has the number of people working part time when they would rather work full time. A 2015 study using data from the Current Population Survey found that the law had virtually no adverse effect on labor force participation, employment or usual hours worked per week through 2014. Reduce costs by weakening state regulations: Mr. Trump frequently talks about his plan to get rid of the lines around the states to foster competition among insurance companies. Customers in states where insurance is heavily regulated, the thinking goes, would be able to save money if they could purchase coverage from insurers based in states with fewer rules. Mr. Cruz, too, supports allowing people to buy insurance across state borders its one of the few proposals hes offered for replacing the health law if it is repealed. But the biggest obstacle stopping insurers from setting up in more states is not regulation; its the difficulty of establishing a network of providers in a new market. And such a structure would destroy the longstanding ability of states to regulate health insurance for their populations. Some states, for instance, require coverage for infertility treatment and others have chosen not to. Allowing cross-border plans would encourage insurers to base themselves in low-regulation states, and the result might be a proliferation of poor-quality plans. The Affordable Care Act is not perfect. Premiums for plans on the exchanges rose between 2015 and 2016 and are likely to rise again next year. A few insurers have left the exchange market, raising concerns in some quarters that more companies might follow. But the law has helped millions of Americans, especially low-wage workers like cashiers, cooks and waiters who previously struggled to pay for coverage. In inventing problems that dont exist and proposing solutions that wont help, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz show that they dont care about helping Americans get health care, which has never been their interest. They want to trash the Affordable Care Act, and theyre willing to mislead the public any way they can. A popular Wisconsin author will make her first visit to Reedsburg on April 24. Victoria Houston, writer of the Loon Lake series, will be at the Reedsburg Public Library at 1 p.m. to meet fans and sign books. Her most recent novel, Dead Rapunzel, will be discussed during the librarys Titles & Tea program at 10 a.m. April 26. Houston, who has a background in publishing, credits her home state for inspiring her books. The Rhinelander native grew up around lakes, fishing and boating, and nothing pleases her like a good dose of the north woods. She said she stopped fishing for awhile but took it up again as an adult. She also never planned on returning to Wisconsin after getting a publishing job in New York City but destiny brought her home. Its the lakes and streams and rivers. It just feels right, she said. Houston said she has traveled across Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan to promote her books and looks forward to seeing Reedsburg for the first time. She noted that her books are sold worldwide but the bulk of her fans are from the Midwest. Some of her most dedicated readers live in metro areas like Detroit and Milwaukee. This area has always drawn people from the cities, she said. Research Houston proves that writing is both perspiration and inspiration. Since her books are murder mysteries she spends several hours a day researching criminal forensics and monitoring current events. She said she is an avid newspaper reader and follows the news both in print and online. None of her books are based on real cases but watching people and listening to conversations gives her ideas for stories. Advancements in DNA and detective work also fascinate Houston. She said she tries to incorporate what she learns into her stories. She added that her father, grandfather and uncle were dentists and she used what she learned from them to show how dental records and teeth molds play a part in criminal forensics. She said she usually sets her stories about two years in the past so she can take advantage of modern knowledge and techniques. The characters, however, never age. Stories arent always easy to put down on paper but Houston said rewriting helps rekindle her creative energy. Rewriting is a major part of her process. For now, she said shes busy working on her next book and planning for book signings. Its going to be a nice summer, she said. The new protective suit for firefighters. (Photo/Beijing Daily) China will soon equip firefighters with a new type of protective suit, which will be multifunctional, safe and comfortable. A reporter from Beijing Daily saw the newly developed suit in the Haidian firefighting division of Beijing on April 20. According to an official with Beijing's fire department, advanced technologies from Chinese space suits are being applied to the design of the new firefighting suit. No wonder the new suit is so impressive! The helmet, which resembles Iron Man's helmet, boasts various functions including a built-in phone, information collection and temperature monitoring. Under the face shield is a respirator, and the red triangle on top of the helmet functions as both a headlamp and camera. When the firefighter enters the scene of a fire, the helmet's information collection system transfers what the firefighter is seeing to the remote control station. The helmet is also equipped with an alarm. If the firefighter is still for 20 seconds, the helmet begins to flash red and blue lights and buzz loudly. Because the suit has a location function, backup firefighters are then able to find and rescue their endangered comrade. The new suit also has an automatic cooling system. A tester wore the suit in a high-temperature cabin for 30 minutes and still felt comfortable. In addition, the new suit can monitor the wearer's motion, pulse and other vital signs. As soon as it enters an extreme environment , the suit goes into action to protect and assist its wearer. In anticipation of the 12th China International Cartoon & Animation festival to be held from April 27 to May 2, 2016, a subway train decorated with animated characters has been put into operation in Hangzhou, east China's Zhejiang province in recent days. It is said that this train will run for about one month. Zhang Yuanyuan (first from the left) with the South Sudanese children. (Photo/PLA Daily) Zhang Yuanyuan, a female soldier with the Chinese peacekeeping force stationed in South Sudan, saved four local boys in an armed conflict last October. On October 2, 2015, a large-scale conflict broke out near the temporary operational base where Zhang was stationed. Zhang, along with her fellow soldiers, immediately went to the nearby village to assist civilians. She quickly noticed that a teenage boy, dragging three younger boys with him, was running about in fear of the gunshots. Zhang took all four boys to the military protection zone of the Chinese peacekeeping force. The oldest boy told Zhang that his name was James. His mother had been killed in another conflict and his father had been forced to join the fighting. He was alone with his three brothers. The youngest brother suffered from malaria and a dangerously high fever. Zhang brought him to the army doctor and the boys life was saved. In the following days, Zhang came often to the boys' home, giving the brothers food and telling them stories. The night before Zhang's detachment left, James came specially to the operations base in order to say goodbye to her. The next morning, he and his brothers went to the gate of the base to see Zhang off. After Zhang returned to China, she sent T-shirts and stationary back to James through the new detachment of soldiers going to South Sudan. James asked the soldiers to take a photo of him and his brothers and send it to Zhang. Undergraduate business program at W&M among nations best William & Mary included on multiple rankings this spring The Raymond A. Mason School of Business at William & Mary offers one of the top undergraduate business programs in the country, according to a ranking released by Bloomberg Businessweek April 19. The business school is ranked 12th in the nation, up from 22nd in Bloombergs last review of undergraduate business programs. The report was based on an employer survey, a student survey, starting salary for students who had already secured jobs and the percentage of graduates who had internships during college. The Bloomberg list comes in the midst of the spring rankings season, and William & Mary has appeared on a number of national lists for everything from graduate programs to campus beauty. Just last week, Money, in collaboration with Essence magazine, included W&M on its list of the 50 Best Colleges for African Americans. The university was ranked 31st in that report, which was based on graduation rates, affordability, earnings potential and representation. In the latest U.S. News & World Report graduate school and program ranking, released in March, the W&M School of Education came in at 55th, and the Flex MBA program was 66th among the nations part-time MBA programs. The William & Mary Law School ranked 33rd in the nation and second in Virginia. Earlier this spring, the National Jurist listed W&M Law School at 19th on its Honor Roll of best schools for practical training. Additionally, the National Law Journal included the school on its list of 2016 Go-To Law Schools, which features U.S. schools that supply the highest percentage of associates to the nations 100 largest law firms. Using data from the Class of 2015, the journal ranked W&M Law School 24th on that list. William & Mary has also been included in several rankings posted by websites, including College Choice, which recently listed W&Ms undergraduate business school at 33rd in the nation. Another website, Online Accounting Degrees, ranked William & Mary 32nd on its 2016 list of the 50 Best Accounting Schools in the USA, and Buffalo Business First ranked W&M as sixth among the nations top public colleges. The universitys dining program received attention this spring when the website College Rank included it at number 19 on its list of The 50 Best College Dining Experiences. W&M was also hailed for its beauty by Great Value Colleges, which listed the university as the 16th most beautiful college in the nation. In addition, W&Ms work with veterans was recognized by Military Advanced Education & Transition. The university was named a top school in the magazines 2016 Guide to Colleges & Universities , which rated institutions based on military culture, financial aid, flexibility, general support, on-campus support and online support services. China News on Women Sorry, the page you requested was not found. If you're having trouble locating a destination on Womenofchina.cn, try visiting the Womenofchina Home page File photo of Liao Xinggen. Liao Xinggen, the last surviving Achang veteran of the Chinese Expeditionary Force, died at the age of 92 in his home in Yunlong county, Yunnan province on April 18. In 1942, more than 3,000 soldiers with the Chinese Expeditionary Force came to the mountain fortresses of the Achang people, an ethnic minority in Chinas Yunnan province. Passions kindled by demonstrations against Japanese aggression, many Achang people volunteered to join the army. Liao, one such volunteer, served as a machine gun operator in Myanmar and in western Yunnan. After the victory in the Chinese Peoples War against Japanese Aggression, Liao became a soldier in the People's Liberation Army. In 1951, Liao retired from the army. In January 2013, Cao Xianxiang, a scholar of the Achang ethnic group, went to Liao's hometown and discovered that Liao's family was poverty-stricken. Soon, local authorities and kindhearted people from many different walks of life came to help Liao and his family. With a subsidy of 13,000 yuan from the Yunlong county government and individual donations amounting to 43,494 yuan, Liao was finally able to purchase a new house in October 2013. In September 2015, Liao received a commemorative medal on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of victory in the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. EnergySolutions and JAPC team up on decommissioning 21 April 2016 Share A cooperation agreement has been signed between EnergySolutions and Japan Atomic Power Company (JAPC) through which the US nuclear commercial services company will share its know-how in decommissioning light water nuclear power plants with JAPC. As part of the agreement signed yesterday, EnergySolutions will share its decommissioning and decontamination experience and capabilities with JAPC for use in the decommissioning of unit 1 of its Tsuruga nuclear power plant. JAPC announced in March 2015 that Tsuruga 1 - a 341 MWe boiling water reactor that started up in 1970 and is one of Japan's oldest nuclear reactors - would be decommissioned. It noted that while it would have been technically feasible to bring Tsuruga 1 up to the standards required, the size of the project and the degree of capital investment required underpinned the decommissioning decision. EnergySolutions began the ten-year process of dismantling the Zion plant in Illinois in September 2010. EnergySolutions will eventually move away parts of the plant to its property in Utah. The two pressurized water reactors at Zion were shut down in January 1998 after Commonwealth Edison, owner of the plant at the time, concluded that the continued operation of Zion Station was not financially feasible and the plant was removed from service. EnergySolutions said to ensure the successful implementation of its new agreement with JAPC, staff from the Japanese company will participate in the decommissioning work being carried out at Zion. Subsequently, employees of EnergySolutions will join JAPC's project team in Japan for the decommissioning of Tsuruga 1 "to support effective knowledge transfer and implementation of the EnergySolutions decommissioning and decontamination experience". Ken Robuck, president of EnergySolutions' disposal and decommissioning business, said: "This is a tremendous opportunity for our company to provide our decommissioning and decontamination experience and capabilities in Japan. Our primary goal is to support the Japanese nuclear industry in achieving safe and efficient decommissioning projects." JAPC submitted its decommissioning plan for Tsuruga 1 to the country's nuclear regulator for approval in February this year. The company said it expects to take 24 years to decommission the unit. The decommissioning is to be carried out in three stages: the first stage, lasting about nine years, will involve preparing the reactor for dismantling (including the removal of all fuel), while the second, also lasting nine years will be to actually dismantle the reactor and other major equipment. The third stage, taking about six years, will involve the demolition of the reactor building. JAPC said it anticipates a total of some 20,600 tonnes of solid waste to be generated during the decommissioning of Tsuruga 1. This will include about 40 tonnes of high-level waste, 1990 tonnes of intermediate-level waste and 10,760 tonnes of low-level waste. The remaining waste will not need to be treated as radioactive waste. JAPC has been decommissioning Tokai unit 1 since December 2001. The 166 MWe gas-cooled reactor - which operated between 1966 and 1998 - was Japan's first commercial power reactor. Researched and written by World Nuclear News Related topics A video showing a fight between a group of students and an English teacher in classroom has gone viral on Chinese social media recently, shocking web users who condemned the incident. The fight happened when the teacher was collecting test scripts from the students while one of them refused to submit his paper in Fanji High School, Mengcheng county in Anhui. The two argued, before the teacher reached out his hand to push the student away and then grabbed his neck to force him lose hold of the papers. The student, however, beat the teacher back and was quickly joined by a group of other students. They cornered the teacher and threw kicks and blows violently at the teacher. One of them smashed the teacher with a wooden bench. The teacher fought back several times, and each time slapped one student in the face. The headmaster of the school has been suspended. Local police and Mengchang education officials have launched an investigation into the incident, while no public announcement has been made for the time being. The death toll from the powerful earthquakes that struck Ecuadors Pacific shore on April 16 rose to 553 Wednesday, with far many more still counted among the missing. The quake, which measured 7.8 on the Richter scale, shook Ecuadors northern coast near the Colombian border. It was felt along the coast and inland, as far south as Peru, and caused a blackout in Ecuadors capital, Quito. The quake, the most intense since 1979, lasted for a long time and was followed by hundreds of aftershocks. These are difficult moments for our nation, declared President Rafael Correa, who declared this quake was the greatest tragedy in 67 years, (since the Ambato Earthquake of August 5, 1949). Hundreds of homes have been destroyed and residents have been left without shelter, and with inadequate food and water. The earthquakes epicenter was between the cities of Pedernales and Cojimies in Manabi province, 310 kilometers northwest of Quito. Also severely impacted were the coastal provinces of Esmeralda, on the Colombian border, and Guayas. Further west, the provinces of Santa Elena, and Santo Domingo de Tsachilas also shook. On Wednesday April 20, a second earthquake, measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale, hit the already devastated region. The coastal region is a center of tourism, and also includes some of the poorest inhabitants of that Andean nation. Ecuador as a whole is one of the most impoverished and socially polarized nations in Latin America. With poverty rates of over 50 percent (and more than 60 percent on the north coast), Ecuador is the fourth poorest country in South America. Young people in the region are often forced to migrate, and their families depend on the funds that they send back. In addition to the dead, as of Wednesday there were more than 4,500 reported injured, while estimates of the number missing varied widely. The attorney general put the figure at 1,700, while the Defense Ministry estimated 231. Many remain trapped in the rubble of homes, hotels and bridges. Teams from Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador and other Latin American nations are helping with the rescue effort, which is made more difficult by the flooding of coastal highways. The death toll is expected to continue rising. Four days after the quake, there were signs of growing anger among the residents of Esmeralda and Manabi. According to the Madrid daily El Pais, in addition to the residents worries over the destruction of roads, homes and telephone links, there are shortages of water and food. The Bogota daily El Tiempo interviewed Pedernales residents: We sleep in cars, in the street. While my family and I have managed to find food, we are in bad shape, very bad shape, declared Steve Castro. In Pedernales, a city of 56,000 inhabitants, both the extent of the damage and the absence of basic resources, belie a serious lack of foresight--indifference really--to the effects of a major earthquake in the region. There were no body bags in the towns of the region, no portable bathrooms, no emergency lights, no mosquito netting and no stored food, not even disposable gloves. Outside of downtown, corpses are seen on sidewalks, covered with blankets and waiting to be picked up. Many of the survivors had no protection against the rain that followed the earthquake; others, fearing a Tsunami wave, moved into the hills above Pedernales. Further south, in Puertoviejo, survivors are living in makeshift tents in the Cayanbe public park, where entire families congregate with whatever belongings they have managed to salvage. Doctors at a nearby mobile clinic report that the dust stirred up by the collapsing structures caused allergic reactions in many; this problem is compounded by weakness and dehydration due to the scarcity of food. Pedernales Mayor Gabriel Alcivar has called for voluntary rationing, such as people sharing water bottles. Alcivar has appealed for more rescue workers in his city, while at the same time pointing out that all those volunteers also need to be fed and sheltered. Many mobile hospital units, promised by President Correa, have yet to arrive. The Colombian government has announced plans to deliver humanitarian assistance, such as emergency rations, portable sanitary facilities and blankets. The only element in abundance, is human resources, writes El Pais, the last group of corpses found on Sunday were found at midnight by a group of fire fighters from Machachi and Tabacundo [towns near Quito] that had labored for more than 10 hours and only stopped when they found five people that were patrons of the Chimborazo hotel, whose three stories collapsed. Captain Jose Velazquez, who led this indefatigable team declared: this is very traumatic. We found a child and father, hugging each other, who had been imprisoned by a collapsed metal gate. To see that was very hard on us. The firefighters are being aided by hundreds of volunteers who mostly arrived on their own from across Ecuador and Colombia. Late on Tuesday, six people were found alive in the city of Manta. Many of the volunteers and much of the material aid has arrived through spontaneous drives on social media. Given the high temperatures in the region (well over 30 degrees Celsius--86 degrees Fahrenheit), the stench of death has invaded the towns in the region, and is expected to get worse. Mosquito swarms have become a problem. The World Health Organization and the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) issued a warning Tuesday about the danger of eruptions of the Zika virus, dengue and other diseases carried by mosquitoes. The warning indicated that stagnant waters and the lack of working sewers, even in government-provided shelters, all contributed to outbreaks of diseases. UNICEF also worries about the lack of sanitation and poor-quality water, particularly in the coastal communities, which are among the most impoverished in Ecuador. Marcela, an elderly Manabi resident, originally from Colombia, declared, Everything that we are living through reminds us of other tragedies in Colombia, such as the Armero landslide and the Armenia earthquake. All the elements are in place for a public health emergency: high heat, coupled with lack of water and sanitation, food shortages and mosquitoes. Though people have been pulled alive from the rubble, clearly time is running out for those that may still be alive among the ruins. Further south the most affected area was the port city of Guayaquil, though not directly on the coast. It was there that an important bridge in the center of town collapsed, as well as homes and downtown shopping centers. A young woman was reported dead from collapsing debris at a shopping center. A motorist was killed when a pedestrian pathway collapsed on his automobile at the Guayaquil airport. President Correa estimates that the reconstruction of the destroyed infrastructure will cost Ecuador some US$3 billion, 3 percent of the countrys gross domestic product. The disaster comes on top of the countrys slide into deep recession driven primarily by the fall in the price of oil. The International Monetary Fund has forecast a 4.5 percent contraction of Ecuadors economy this year. Facing demonstrations and mass strikes by Ecuadorean workers and the indigenous population, Correa has been forced to renounce a bid for another presidential term. The State of Michigan has indicted three low-level state and local officials on charges stemming from the lead poisoning crisis in the city of Flint. Michigan Attorney General William Schuette announced the charges Wednesday afternoon at a downtown Flint press conference. The announcement reeks of damage control in the face of national and international outrage over the lead poisoning of residents in this city of 100,000, 70 miles north of Detroit. In 2014 the State of Michigan authorized Flint, then under a state-appointed emergency manager, to switch its water supply from the Detroit water system to the polluted Flint River. The city sent the corrosive Flint River water through the system without proper corrosion control, leaching lead and copper from the citys antiquated piping into homes, schools and workplaces. The indictments received prominent treatment in both the regional and national press. Republican Governor Rick Snyder continues to face pressure from some Democrats to resign over the crisis in an attempt to defuse public anger and deflect attention from their own complicity in the poisoning of Flint. Local residents, who were barred from the press conference, held a picket outside the venue. Several held signs calling for the prosecution of Snyder. For his part the governor, in response to the indictments, blamed bureaucrats, continuing to deny any direct responsibility. Two officials with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) are named in the indictment. Stephen Busch, who was a district supervisor in the MDEQ Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance, and Michael Prysby, a former MDEQ district engineer. Also named is Michael Glasgow, laboratory and water quality supervisor for the City of Flint. On April 17, 2014, just eight days before the switch to Flint River water, Glasgow sent an email to MDEQ official Adam Rosenthal warning that the citys water plant was not ready to begin treatment of Flint River water. In his email Glasgow wrote, I was reluctant before, but after looking at the monitoring schedule and our current staffing, I do not anticipate giving the OK to begin sending out water anytime soon. He continued, If water is distributed from this plant in the next couple of weeks, it will be against my direction. Glasgow said he never got a response, and his warning was apparently ignored by state officials. In a CNN interview in March Glasgow said that Busch and Prysby told him to alter reports on lead in Flint water in 2015, removing the highest lead results. He said he did not have the power to overrule their decision. Busch and Prysby are charged with misleading federal regulatory officials in the US Environmental Protection Agency, in particular EPA Region 5 official Miguel Del Toral, about the safety of Flint water. In addition they are charged with authorizing a permit to the Flint Water Treatment Plant knowing the facility was deficient in its ability to provide clean and safe drinking water. Further, the men are charged with tampering with evidence and manipulating monitoring reports in relation to the testing of lead levels in Flint water and failing to utilize corrosion control treatment at the Flint Water Treatment plant after the switch to Flint River Water. Four of the charges are felonies carrying maximum prison sentences of four to five years. They have both pled not guilty. Glasgow faces a four-year felony charge of tampering with evidence related to the filing of altered reports on lead levels in the Flint Water System. He is also charged with a misdemeanor count of failing to perform the duties of an F-1 Certified Operator employed by the Flint Water Treatment Plant, presumably related to the lack of corrosion control additives. In his remarks to the press Attorney General Schuette emphasized that his goal in filing charges was to restore public trust in government officials. He indicated that those charged will be removed from their current posts and that further indictments were likely to follow. Schuette suggested that his office would be open to plea deals with those indicted in exchange for cooperation in the investigation. Responding to a question in relation to the charges against Glasgow a state official said that following instructions was not a defense for his actions, citing the Nuremburg war crimes trials of Nazi war criminals as precedent. The most obvious question raised by the indictments is, what forces were behind the instructions to Busch and Prysby to falsify test results? The idea that the men indicted were alone responsible for the Flint tragedy is absurd. Evidence points to the involvement of officials at the highest levels of the state government and federal Environmental Protection Agency, who clearly knew of the dangers facing Flint residents, but covered them up. The decimation of the US infrastructure has been presided over by Democratic and Republican administrations for decades, leaving former industrial centers like Flint in shambles and exposing residents to a wide range of environmental dangers. To this day serious reconstruction work on Flints piping system has not begun. The anger of Flint residents was evident just outside the press conference. Gladyes Williamson, one of those picketing, spoke with the WSWS. Im disappointed. Schuette shook my hand and looked me in the eye and said this is just a start. I told him these are crumbs! They are going after the people who covered it up, but what about the people who carried it out? They work harder to cover up the water crisis than what it took to create it! All the politicians are grandstanding. When three buses of Flint residents arrived in Washington, DC for the hearings in February, [Congressman Dale] Kildee was in the room with us just long enough to get his photo op. What about Snyder, [Emergency Manager] Darnell Earley, [former Flint Mayor] Dayne Walling? Another Flint resident, Nakiya Wakes, said, Im really angry. I feel it was just the smaller people that got charged and took the rap. What about Snyder? He should be charged along with all the other elected officials. On February 11, 2016 I would have had two babies if I hadnt miscarried drinking the contaminated water. I recently had my water tested by Water Defense. The water in my home showed 1,100/ppb. The MDEQ has been coming every two weeks to test my water and their tests showed 3/ppb. And what is even worse, the Water Defense testing shows a number of other contaminants in my water including elevated levels of copper, iron, manganese, nickel, phosphorus, thallium and zinc. Auston Healy, a 26-year-old worker from Flint told the WSWS, Its a bum deal. What happened to Snyder? Im also concerned about this--what if someone wants to sue and the State of Michigan says that person no longer works for us? Whether the charges stick or not, Ill believe it when I see it. I would like to see no let up in this, but who knows. The main thing is they are trying to keep this quiet, especially on the federal level because the lead problem is everywhere. It came out in Flint, it was a very deliberate process because there is so much poverty here. In my opinion you have an impressive president, said the German economics minister, vice chancellor and Social Democratic Party (SPD) chairman, Sigmar Gabriel, in reference to the Egyptian despot Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Gabriel made the remark during a press conference last Sunday in the Egyptian capital of Cairo. This single sentence says a great deal about the character of the SPD. With this quote, Gabriel places himself directly in the tradition of Gustav Noske, who, as the first social democratic defence minister, declared during the 1918 November Revolution in Germany, As far as Im concerned, someone has to be the bloodhound! I will not shirk the responsibility! Noske drowned the workers uprising at the end of the First World War in blood, in the process overseeing the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. As the World Socialist Web Site has written, al-Sisi is on an equal footing with General Augusto Pinochet, the leader of the Chilean military junta, under whose rule between 1973 and 1990 tens of thousands were imprisoned, tortured and murdered. The former head of military intelligence under Mubarak, trained in the United States, al-Sisi is the absolute ruler of one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world and the gravedigger of the Egyptian revolution. Since July 3, 2013, when al-Sisi seized power following mass protests against the Islamist President Mohamed Mursi, all opponents of the regime have faced the possibility of being murdered at the hands of al-Sisis security forces or being arrested and tortured. According to Amnesty International, just in the first two years under al-Sisi, 41,000 people have disappeared into the countrys torture chambers. Thousands were shot during the suppression of protests and strikes or sentenced to death. Freedom of the press doesnt exist even on paper in al-Sisis Egypt. Parties and organizations that merely criticize the regime are proscribed by the dozens. In June 2015, when the German government rolled out the red carpet for the hangman of Cairo in Berlin, the World Socialist Web Site put together a partial timeline of the bloodiest crimes of al-Sisis military junta: * July 8, 2013: Egyptian security forces shoot 53 Mursi supporters in front of the building of the Republican Guard in Cairo. * August 14, 2013: The army and police storm two camps of anti-putsch protestors and kill more than 1,000 people, among them many women and children. Humans Rights Watch identifies the massacre as the worst incident of illegal mass killing in the modern history of Egypt. * January 25, 2014: On the third anniversary of the Egyptian Revolution, military and security forces kill more than 100 opponents of the regime during demonstrations. * March 24, 2014: On a single day of hearings in the largest mass trial in Egyptian history, 529 people are sentenced to death. * April 28, 2014: In another mass trial, 683 more people are sentenced to death in less than 15 minutes. * May 15, 2015: Mursi himself and more than 100 other co-defendants are sentenced to death. * May 16, 2015: Six of those convicted are hanged. Amnesty International strongly condemns the trial and points out that the confessions of the accused were extracted under torture. Since then, the state terror has only increased. Just weeks before Gabriels visit, the terrible news of the brutal torture and murder of Italian student Gulio Regeni on the fifth anniversary of the Egyptian revolution provoked outraged protests worldwide. There are strong indications that al-Sisi himself was involved in the murder. Relying on an anonymous source in the Egyptian security apparatus, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported that Regenis transfer to military intelligence was decided by Interior Minister Gen. Abdel Ghaffar together with al-Sisis adviser general, Ahmad Jamal ad-Din. In a subsequent conversation, which concerned Regenis corpse, al-Sisi was revealed to have been present. On the weekend of Gabriels visit, Egyptian security forces put down protests against al-Sisis reign of terror in Cairo, Gizeh and Ismailia, among other locations. According to media reports, large quantities of tear gas were used against demonstrators and at least 119 were arrested. The protests were ignited by the handing over of two strategically important islands in the Red Sea, Tiran and Sanafir, to Saudi Arabia. Tens of thousands took to the streets throughout the country and chanted the slogan used during mass protests in 2011 against al-Sisis predecessor, the long-standing dictator and vice-regent of the West, Hosni Mubarak: The people want the downfall of the regime. Gabriels embrace of the counterrevolutionary al-Sisi regime was so blatant and obvious that even some German politicians chose to criticize it. Green Party Chairman Cem Ozdemir asked on broadcaster ARDs morning news program, I dont know what it is about President Sisi that impressed Mr. Gabrielis it the torture, is it the oppression, is it the censorship, is it the dealings with German foundations? Bernd Riexinger, chairman of the Left Party, reproached the German government, saying it should not be a fan club for despots. The criticism by these opposition parties is transparent and phony. When the despot al-Sisi was a guest in Berlin last year, Katrin Goring-Eckardt, leader of the Green Partys parliamentary fraction, explained: Certainly, one must, when necessary, also speak with a military dictator when it comes to the extremely difficult situation in the Middle East. The then-chairman of the Left Party, Gregor Gysi, wrote at the time: Because dialogue is the only possibility for influencing the solution to the conflict, it would be wrong not to speak with Sisi. Why do leading German politicians from all parties, who otherwise regularly spout phrases about human rights, feel so attracted to the Egyptian dictator? The answer is obvious. German imperialism, hungry for exports and raw materials (the finance minister was accompanied by some 120 business representatives) has enormous interests in the Middle East and North Africa and fears nothing more than renewed mass uprisings in the most politically and culturally influential country in the region. Gabriel explained, We have a real interest in maintaining the countrys stability. Should Egypt, with its 90 million people, be destabilized, it would have immediate consequences for Europe. Gabriel left no doubt that the German government intends to support al-Sisi with more than just words. Among other things, he promised German aid in the anti-terror fighta code word for the suppression of all oppositionand the building-up of the Egyptian regime. Cairo has already received four German U-boats and expressed interest in border protection assets. That Gabriel regards a man like al-Sisi to be impressive is a warning to workers and youth in Germany and throughout Europe. The same ruling class that brought Hitler to power in 1933 is once more prepared to adopt the methods of a brutal military dictatorship to defend its geostrategic and economic interests worldwide and suppress any opposition from the population. Vote Leave, the official campaign in favour of Britain leaving the European Union (EU) in the upcoming referendum, has unveiled its first billboard poster. Lets give our NHS the 350 million the EU takes every week, it declared. Labour Party MP Graham Stringer, a Vote Leave board member, said, If we take back control of our borders, democracy and economy on 23 June we can ensure that the UK and our health service prospers for this and future generations. The anti-EU sections of the Conservative Party have suddenly discovered their opposition to the underfunding of the National Health Service (NHS), and even to the attack by the government on junior doctors, in order to disguise their right-wing programme of economic nationalism and more anti-immigrant measures. As for the Remain camp, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt had the effrontery to warn that a British withdrawal from the EU would create a staffing crisis in the NHS by jeopardising the status of 100,000 EU workers who help to sustain the UKs health and social care system. This is from a government that is imposing a contract on 55,000 junior doctors in England that slashes pay and removes existing safeguards against excessive hours, risking driving many from the public sector or abroad, and which has just removed bursaries for trainee nurses. The Vote Leave campaign is using the most inflammatory language in seeking to deflect opposition to the destruction of the NHS in an anti-immigrant direction. Boris Johnson, Conservative London mayor, declared, We get uncontrolled immigration, which puts unsustainable pressure on our vital public services. Professor Angus Dagleish, a principal of the Vaccine Institute and UK Independence Party candidate in last years general election, was quoted in the right-wing Daily Express and Daily Mail claiming that the NHS is being bled dry by European migrants. Dagleish has criticised the government for not including restrictions on access to the NHS within its measures denying welfare benefits to EU migrants. Matthew Elliott, chief executive of Vote Leave, is co-founder of the lobby group, the Tax Payers Alliance, which advocates the replacement of the NHS with a contributions-based insurance system. The fear whipped up over health tourism, which is a centrepiece of the Vote Leave campaign, in fact formed the basis for measures introduced by the government in April 2015 imposing a health surcharge. Applied to all non-European Economic Area (EEA) temporary migrants remaining more than six months, the surcharge came to 200 and 150 for students. It has created a precedent that attacks a cornerstone of the NHShealth care that is free at the point of use. Non-EEA temporary migrants who are working end up paying twice, through taxation on their wages and the upfront charge. The measure has far greater political significance than the negligible amount it stands to generateless than 1 percent of the annual NHS budget. It is a policy of divide and rule in the face of the biggest spending squeeze in the history of the NHS. The toxic atmosphere it creates provides the pretext for extending charges more widely against those branded undeserving or a drain on limited resources. The limited disclosures contained within the Panama Papers have revealed the real source of the crisis facing the NHS by exposing how the financial elite stash their wealth in offshore tax havens. Based on the figures from the government in 2011-2012, it is estimated that the unpaid tax bill by corporations and businesses in the UK amounted to 35 billion. This equates to the lions share of the cuts to the NHS budget made from 2010 to 2020. Research demonstrates that EU migrants are in fact net contributors to the NHS. They consist of a younger demographic with less need to access health care. Moreover, the fifth largest employer in the world, the NHS is dependent on health professionals drawn from around the world. Of those who provide the public with treatment on a daily basis, 30 percent of doctors and 40 percent of nurses were born abroad. Vote Leaves claim that withdrawal from the EU will provide 350 million by redirecting the present UK contribution sent to Brussels is a lie. Even the figure is false, as it does not include the rebate the UK receives, which brings it nearer to 276 million. But more importantly, the idea that this would be used to shower the NHS with an additional 18 billion annually is nonsense. In addition to never-ending budget cuts, the NHS has been used as a milch cow by private corporations through policies such as the Private Finance Initiative. Under these conditions, Lord David Owen, a leading Liberal Democrat in the Vote Leave campaign, has linked the call to quit the EU with opposition to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)the US-EU trade deal currently under negotiation that will accelerate the process of privatisation already taking place. But even as he did so, he felt obliged to make clear that he was not in fact opposed to privatisation! We agreed in Vote Leave that, whatever our political views on the present marketisation of the NHS, decisions on the NHS should for the future be for the UK parliament and devolved administrations to take, he said. It should not be for the European commission nor the European parliament. The invocation of national sovereignty as representing the will of the people is belied by the fact that the British parliament is no less an instrument of the financial elite than the EU apparatus in Brussels. The Health and Social Care Act 2012, the largest single piece of legislation aimed at privatising the NHS, did not appear in the manifesto of either the Liberal Democrats or Conservative Party in the 2010 general election. Owen now cynically poses as a defender of the NHS by calling for the repeal of sections of this legislation, such as restoring the responsibility of the secretary of health to provide rather than arrange health provision. The greatest danger is posed by the fact that it is those advocating xenophobia and anti-immigrant hysteria who now talk about a crisis in the NHS. With the Tory government wracked by internal divisions over Europe and confronting mounting social anger against cuts and attacks on junior doctors, it is left to the Labour Party and trade unions to make the case for the Remain campaign. Their support for the EU paints a picture of economic prosperity and investment, which is totally at odds with social reality in Britain and throughout Europe. Four of the former health secretaries in the Labour government of 1997 to 2010 wrote a letter to the Guardian to declare, Brexit would mean less money for the NHS. It warned that continued investment in the NHS (!) is now under threat. The economic implications of Britain leaving Europe would be felt at the heart of our cherished national institution. With regard to the Leave campaign, it states, These are the same people who have campaigned for increased NHS charging; increased privatisation; and cuts to spending. People should not trust their motives or their maths. However, this is an equally apt description not just of the Cameron government and its health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, but of the letters signatoriesAlan Milburn, Patricia Hewitt, Andy Burnham and Alan Johnson. It was under Labour that entry points were first opened up for private companies to provide NHS-funded clinical treatment and the first round of 20 billion worth of cuts implemented by the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition were initiated. Hundreds of people have been displaced and at least seven have been confirmed dead in Houston as a result of historic floods that submerged entire neighborhoods. The city received 17.6 inches of rain in less than 24 hours on Monday, a level of rainfall Houston has not seen since tropical storm Allison inundated the city in 2001, costing 23 people their lives. Water levels of forty feet above average were reported in some parts of the city. Twelve hundred people were forced to evacuate. Over 140,000 residents lost power on Monday; 7,500 remained without power on Tuesday. Texas Governor Greg Abbott declared a state of emergency on Monday evening, and Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner advised residents to await evacuation and remain in place. Residents of North Houstons Greenspoint neighborhood, however, found it necessary to evacuate themselves as the water rose above the tops of cars. Families fearfully loaded their children onto inflatable beds and wading pools, and, in one case, a refrigerator, attempting to make it through the flooded streets to a community shopping center that residents had set up to host evacuees. Many people from Greenspoint expressed indignation and frustration over the evacuation efforts. Using Twitter and Facebook, residents praised the cooperation of their neighbors while denouncing the citys response. Rescue teams arent available for the Greenspoint residents? one resident posted on Facebook. Houston response teams must do better. THIS is unacceptable! Responses to her post echoed her dismay. Some questioned whether the city would have responded as lackadaisically had Greenspoint been a wealthier neighborhood. For many, the situation in Greenspoint harked back to the anemic rescue efforts after Hurricane Katrina, when entire families in New Orleans sat stranded on bridges with no assistance. The comparisons to Katrina could be found throughout social media. Cruel irony is that many people living in #greenspoint are Katrina survivors, a Twitter user noted. Another Twitter user lamented, I'm seeing a flashback of Hurricane Katrina in the Greenspoint area. Mayor Turner disputed the criticisms at a press conference Monday evening, stating, No one has been ignored. This has been a dynamic situation across the city No area has been ignored. No area has been treated unduly, unfairlyFor anyone to suggest that a community isnt being attended to or we are not placing the proper resources there, that would be a serious misstatement. He dismissed contentions that predominantly Hispanic, working class Greenspoint was given less consideration than wealthier areas of the city, saying, Its a situation where all throughout the city, and quite frankly all throughout our region, were dealing with high water. The debate about the citys response to the crisis in Greenspoint highlights significant wealth disparities in Houston. While the Houston metropolitan area boasts the sixth-highest personal income rate among US cities, its median income is only $40,000. In 2015, a report by Torontos Martin Prosperity Institute revealed that Houston ranked number four in a survey of Americas most economically segregated cities (Texas cities Austin and San Antonio made the top ten as well). The average household income in Houstons wealthiest neighborhood is over $300,000. It is just at $30,000 in its poorest neighborhood. Greenspoints residents are primarily working class. Most of them are employed in the service industry. The neighborhood lies within a 100-year floodplain that has been incompletely delineated by the city. Researchers at Houstons Rice University have been urging the city to address the floodplain for years. In 2013, Lester King, sustainability fellow at Rices Shell Center for Sustainability, reported that the city needed to map the floodplain completely and use the information to fund flood mitigation, drainage and home buyouts in the areas most likely to be affected by flooding. King reported that per-capita capital improvement spending ranged from $602 per person in Houstons poorest district in the floodplain to $1,359 per person in its wealthiest. This discrepancy has not gone unnoticed by Greenspoints residents. There is no relief in sight for Houstons flood-weary population. Several more inches of rain are predicted in the upcoming days. Furthermore, rain-swollen Cypress Creek, which flows through northwest Houston, has not yet crested. While some Houstonians wait out the flood, others are leaving their homes for higher ground, or await evacuation. These residents nervously eye Cypress Creeks swelling while watching the weather forecasts. The worst is yet to come is a common refrain on social media, as people watch the waters rise in their neighborhoods ahead of more rain. Since last fall, without any public acknowledgment by the US government and military, US warplanes have been bombing civilian areas in Iraq and Syria under loosened rules of engagement, the US Defense Department announced Wednesday. Under the new rules, US forces may attack any area considered to have a non-combatant value of 10, that is, a likely fallout of fewer than 10 civilian deaths. Given the current volume of airstrikes, the expanded rules of engagement imply that the Pentagon may murder thousands of civilians every month. This March alone, US warplanes dropped nearly 2,000 bombs on Iraq and Syria, an increase over the 1,700 bombs dropped by US forces during the previous March. Last November, the US-led coalition set a new record for a single month, dropping nearly 3,300 bombs. Since the beginning of Operation Inherent Resolve in August 2014, Iraq and Syria have been pummeled by a combined total of more than 40,000 bombs, the vast majority of them made by American companies and delivered by American planes. The gradualistic, painfully slow, incremental efforts of the current administration undercut the principals of modern warfare, and harken back to the approach followed by the Johnson administration, retired US Air Force general David Deptula, now with the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, said Tuesday, defending the expanded air strikes in comments to USA Today . The revelation comes amid numerous signs that Washington is preparing even greater military violence against the Middle Eastern working class and oppressed masses, as part of a general expansion of military operations throughout the region, coordinated with the Saudi monarchy and Gulf sheikdoms. During a visit to Abu Dhabi Wednesday, US defense secretary Ashton Carter demanded increased involvement by the Gulf Cooperation Council governments of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and UAE in the US war against Iraq and Syria. The US defense chief called for the Arab monarchies to adopt new measures to counter Iranian power, including joint US-GCC patrols along Yemens coastlines in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, and adoption of US-sponsored plans to develop the cyberwarfare, special operations, naval and missile defense capabilities of the Arab states. The U.S. military remains committed and capable of responding to Iranian malign and destabilizing activities and deterring aggression against our regional friends and allies, Carter said. In the coming months, the American military will continuously accelerate its Iraq-Syria war, Carter said Monday. In remarks from Baghdad, Carter unveiled plans to deploy more than 200 additional US troops to Iraq, along with Apache helicopter gunships and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS). The reinforcements will be deployed in support of large-scale assaults aimed at recapturing Mosul and other Iraqi cities currently held by Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Carter said. The flurry of announcements of new US military projects has underscored the fact that, notwithstanding the Obama administrations diplomatic overtures to Tehran, Washington remains committed to armed aggression throughout the region and to countering Iranian influence by military means. Despite all the differences, Saudi Arabia and America are not getting divorced. We need each other, former Central Intelligence Agency official and Brookings Institution intelligence analyst Bruce Riedel told CNN. Despite the emergence of real divisions within the US-Saudi camp, the Kingdom remains the central pillar of US domination over the region. In a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report Wednesday, titled The Saudi and Gulf Perspective on President Obamas Visit, leading US ruling class strategist Anthony Cordesman explains the indispensable role of the US-Saudi alliance within the US-dominated world order established at the end of the Second World War. Americas strategic ties to Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf stateswhich in practice include Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the UAEhave been critical to U.S. strategic interests ever since Britain withdrew from the Gulf, Cordesman notes. The strategic partnership between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia has been progressively more important ever since President Roosevelt met with King Ibn Saud on the deck of the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal on February 14, 1945. US political and military domination over the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf remains necessary to what Cordesman identifies as the central priority of American policy in the region, namely: Ensuring the stable flow of some 17 to 18 million barrels of petroleum exports per day out of the Gulf, and steadily increasing the flow of oil, gas and product exports to meet the demands of the global economy. US control over these resources requires continued funding to the Gulf States in support of weapons systems tailored to supporting joint action against Iran. The US must work closely with its regional partners to deal with the full range of complex threats posed by Iran and counter the steady expansion of Iranian influence and arming of non-state actors and proxy forces in areas ranging from Lebanon and Gaza, to Syria and Iraq, which threatens states like Kuwait, Bahrain, and Yemen, Cordesman warns. Waged under the banner of the war against ISIS, the US wars in Iraq and Syria, are driven in large measure by Washingtons determination to thwart the emergence of Iran as a regional hegemon, the threat of which has become more acute as Iranian influence in both Iraq and Syria has grown amid the wreckage produced by US-led wars against both countries. US imperialism is desperately seeking to defend its position through further support for and massive arms sales to the Saudi and Gulf militaries, which are stoking sectarian conflicts throughout the region, moving toward ever greater confrontation with Iran and pushing the entire region toward an all-out conflagration. Peter Liang, the former New York City police office convicted in the November 2014 shooting death of Akai Gurley, will serve no prison time. On Tuesday, the judge, state Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun, reduced the original manslaughter conviction to criminally negligent homicide. He sentenced Liang to five years of probation and 800 hours of community service. Gurley, a 28-year-old black man, was struck by a bullet fired accidentally by Liang in the darkened stairwell of a New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) building in Brooklyn, as Liang and his partner were conducting what the New York Police Department (NYPD) calls a vertical patrol. Liang, a rookie cop, with gun drawn for no apparent reason, reportedly fired his weapon when he was startled by a noise. The bullet ricocheted off of the stairwell wall and hit Gurley in the chest. Gurley and his girlfriend had decided to take the stairs because the buildings elevator was broken, a not infrequent occurrence in poorly maintained NYCHA housing. After the shooting, instead of immediately calling for medical assistance, the two officers debated what to do, finally deciding to call their union representative, while Gurley lay bleeding to death. All parties agree that Gurley was not engaged in any unlawful activity. Despite having his gun drawn without any imminent danger and failing to provide assistance after the shooting, the judge ruled that the prosecutors failed to prove that Liang consciously disregarded the risk of causing another persons death. Akai Gurleys family bitterly denounced the extremely lenient sentence. Liang could have received a prison term of up to 15 years under the original manslaughter conviction. Instead, the prosecutor, Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson, the boroughs first African-American prosecutor, had recommended no prison time. The judge not only agreed, but reduced the nature of the conviction as well. Both sides have announced the intention to appeal, but it is unlikely that there will be any significant changes to the outcome. The shooting of Akai Gurley and the extremely light sentence imposed on Liang reveal much about the role of the police in capitalist society, especially as the economic crisis drives inequality and the resulting class conflict to ever higher levels. Liangs defense has called Gurleys death an unfortunate accident. It may well be asked, however, How many working class defendants are given long prison sentences for accidents of a much less serious nature, or even for nothing at all? Liangs light sentence is a glaring example of unequal class justice. While the officer did not intend to shoot Akai, the entire context of his killing is the product of the role of the police as part of the body of armed men created and deployed by the ruling class to impose control, by violence and brutality if necessary, on the working class. The virtual military-style occupation of New Yorks public housing complexes by the police, including the vertical patrols within the buildings, is one especially clear example of this policy. Police in New York City and around the country view the working class neighborhoods they patrol as enemy territory, as was expressed overtly in Ferguson, Missouri, during the military-style actions against protests following the killing of Michael Brown, and numerous other such incidents. In New York, the NYPDs longstanding policies of stop and frisk and broken windows, originally instituted by the current police commissioner, William Bratton, are consciously designed to intimidate the working class population and instill a climate of fear. The choking death of Eric Garner and the totally unjustifiable shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice are indicative of the mentality that is endemic in police departments throughout the US. This is not a question of bad apples or a lack of proper training, but rather an expression of class antagonism that is instilled in an occupying force. Peter Liang was a rookie, a new and inexperienced cop. While the shooting itself was not intentional, the fact that he was patrolling with gun drawn when there was no immediate threat, compounded by Liangs subsequent failure to act on Gurleys condition, the consequence of Liangs actions, illustrate dramatically that the us against them mentality was already well established in his mind. The arrogance of police toward the working class population is promoted and encouraged by the virtual impunity with which they operate. A Washington Post report indicates that nearly a thousand people were fatally shot by police last year. Yet, the indictment of a police officer for killing a civilian is extremely rare, and conviction is nearly unheard of. The last conviction in New York City was in 2005. Another study revealed that New York police routinely violate the Fourth Amendments prohibition against warrantless searches. As an officer told the victim of one such search, I can do anything I want. The choice to indict and ultimately convict Liang stands in stark contrast to the treatment of the vast majority of other police killings of civilians, such as Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who choked Eric Garner to death. Pantaleo was not indicted despite clear video evidence of his actions and the fact that he had a previous history of complaints lodged against him for various instances of improper conduct. Much has been made about the difficulty of this case, given that Liang, an Asian-American, shot Gurley, who was African-American. The fact that Liang is not white has been used to argue that this incident should not be grouped with the mass of police shootings in which white officers disproportionately target blacks. The injection of identity politics seeks to obscure the fundamental class nature of police violence. Working class whites, as the majority in the US population, also comprise the majority of victims of police violence. And black officers brutalize and kill black victims, as, for example in a recent case in Texas. Democrat Bill de Blasio, New Yorks progressive mayor, was elected three years ago pledging to fight inequality. However, while the condition of the working class continues to deteriorate (e.g., critical lack of affordable housing and record high homelessness), the mayor and his police commissioner, William Bratton, have continued to implement and expand aggressive police policies designed to defend the wealth and privileges of the citys ruling elite. De Blasio has supported police actions against anti-police-violence protesters. The Liang case is but one more confirmation that there are two sets of lawsone for the working class and another for the ruling class and the police that protect it. Several thousand people demonstrated Saturday in Leeds on the Yorkshire March for the NHS, including a contingent of junior doctors currently in dispute with the government over the imposition of an inferior contract. The protest was called by Keep Our NHS Public (KONP) and there were banners from Unison, the British Medical Association (the junior doctors organisation) and the GMB unions, as well as the Labour Party and Green Party. West Yorkshire is a county with a population of 2.2 million and the NHS in the region is being devastated due to huge cuts. In the towns of Huddersfield and Dewsbury, accident and emergency units are being shut and maternity units are closing. In York, the citys only public adult mental health hospital was closed last October, with just five days notice. A number of those attending the march brought homemade banners with slogans including, Protect our DoctorsProtect the NHS and Public Health NOT Private Wealth. The Leeds event was prominently advertised on the Trades Union Congress web site. However, the trade unions have not lifted a finger to prevent a single attack on the NHS from going through. Hundreds of protests against closures and cuts since 2010 have been localised, isolated and defeated. The Conservative governments Health and Social Care Act, laying the basis the privatisation of the NHS, was passed with barely a whimper from the unions, including Unison, which has nearly half a million members employed in the NHS. The role of Keep Our NHS Public is to ensure that any fight back remains within the stranglehold of the Labour Party and the trade unions. It is pledged to work towards the election of a Labour government. It was Labour that began the process of opening up the NHS for privatisation under the Blair/Brown governments from 1997 to 2010. The election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader has not resulted in any change in its treacherous record. Labour refuses to officially support the junior doctors strike, which has widespread public support, and has confined itself to criticising the government for provoking a protracted industrial dispute. Last week, 40 representatives from Keep Our NHS Public and a wide range of campaigning groups met with Corbyns closest ally, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, along with Labour Shadow Health Secretary, Heidi Alexander, in Parliament. A summary of the meeting noted that Alexander refused to back an NHS Bill, restoring the NHS as a publicly owned body. According to the summary, Alexander saw the Bill as possibly creating turmoil. Asked if Labour would table an NHS Bill in the next session of parliament, the summary notes that Alexander said that Labour could not change legislation at this point because Labour did not have a majority in the House of Commons. In the meeting Keep Our NHS Public said Labour MPs should visit and support the picket lines of striking junior doctors. In response, the summary notes, HA [Alexander] said she had not been on a picket line and did not plan to be. She thought that a large number of people would not expect to see the Shadow Secretary of Health on a picket line. The summary notes that the KONP told the Labourites, We have hundreds of years of experience, in this room alone. We can advise you on policy far better than you are currently being advised. KONP representative Joe Ryle said that John McDonnell was committed to an ongoing relationship and A think tank should be established to advise John. Members of the Socialist Equality Party campaigned at the Leeds protest with the NHS FightBack statement, Junior doctors face political fight to save National Health Service, which was well received. Ryan said, It is pretty disgusting the whole idea of privatising the NHS. They are squeezing the staff, by reducing their wages in real terms, in favour of cutting taxes for big corporations, in favour of private enterprises taking over. Its a very sad situation that weve got to argue between paying nurses their wages or allowing companies to pay less tax, so they can create these so-called jobs. Weve already got people that have jobsthey need paying equitably for it. We are being treated like idiots. We are told that everything is getting better, we are told that the country is improving. But when you can see junior doctors and nursesand NHS staff in generalrevolting, going against the word of the government saying, No, this is not OK, you can see what is really going on, and it is appalling. On the revelations of tax avoidance contained in the Panama Papers, Ryan said, That is a disgrace. Money is getting diverted from British tax funds to benefit rich individuals, just a few people. We are being told we are all in this together, but when the political leaders of the country are involved and complicit in tax avoidance, it shows the complete hypocrisy of it all. We are not all in it together. They in their group are all together, but we are very much left aside. It is getting clearer and clearer that the world is not run for the benefit of ordinary people, it is run for the benefit of the monied class, the people who stand to benefit substantially from these decisions. All we want to be able to do is live a normal lifelive in a house, pay rent and buy foodbut for the rich that is a stretch too far. Daniel said, I wanted to come down here and express my support for the NHS. As a country that is one of the richest in the world, it is fair that people who are vulnerable should have access to affordable health care. There is more than enough capital to cover that. It has been proven to be the case, if it wasnt being undermined as it is. Privatisation of health care would be a huge step backwards, he said. People come from all over the world to study the NHS and learn from it. The way that it is going is a massive shame. Who is going to benefit from this? It is providing health care for the most vulnerable in our society, who would otherwise be unable to afford it. I think that is the measure of a society, how it treats people who would otherwise be left for dead. A return to an insurance-style system would be a tragedy. Rose said, I have been working in operating theatres in the NHS for around eight years. I do the scrubbing up and related preparation. I have seen a lot of things change during that time. People are more tired and stressed than they used to be. I am here to oppose the running down of the health service and to voice my opposition to the lowering of standards. For further information visit: nhsfightback.org The European powers are exploiting the mass drownings in the Mediterranean Sea to expand their military engagement in the region and prepare a new intervention in Libya. Concretely, the EU intends to expand its military mission in the Mediterranean and take action against refugees on the Libyan coast. This was agreed at a meeting of EU foreign and defence ministers on Monday in Luxembourg. Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz declared it was important that we are already active on the Libyan coast. His German counterpart, Frank-Walter Steinmeier (Social Democrats), declared, We currently have a mandate allowing us to combat the operations of smugglers and taking refugees from the Mediterranean, meaning emergency rescue at sea. That more in addition will be necessary, and even possible, goes without saying. By expanding the EUNAVOR Med Sophia mission, which was officially agreed upon exactly a year ago, warships in the Mediterranean would be permitted to take action against smugglers in foreign territorial waters. To date, the operation was in its second phase merely in seas outside of Libyan sovereign waters and was aimed at stopping refugee boats and arresting alleged smugglers. According to EU diplomats, the expansion and extension of the naval operation will be agreed at the end of May or in early June. In fact, under the guise of a struggle against criminal smugglers, much more comprehensive plans for a new military intervention in Libya are being discussed. The French delegation presented a strategy paper in Luxembourg according to which EU ships would be tasked with policing the weapons embargo imposed on Libya to prevent the supply of weapons to Islamist militias aligned with Islamic State in Libya, media reports said. Steinmeier proposed that the subject should be dealt with and reviewed in a further UN Security Council resolution. The German foreign minister and his French counterpart Jean-Marc Ayrault also reported in Luxembourg on their brief meeting on Saturday in Tripoli with Fayez al-Sarraj, the prime minister of the imperialist-backed Libyan unity government. Ayrault described the visit as an extremely important stage and opined that the unity government now required the support of Libyans, the parliament and the international community. Steinmeier declared, We have to proceed with caution and attempt step-by-step to empower this government in Tripoli. The EUs goal is to install the puppet Sarraj, who thus far only rules over a militarily secured green zone in Tripoli, and receive his agreement for a direct military intervention. The Suddeutsche Zeitung wrote on the EU and Steinmeiers goals: Along with economic assistancethe EU has already offered a small package of 100 millionthe issue above all is how the unity government can be put in a position where it can extend its control beyond the capital city throughout the country, where militias rule and the terrorist organisation Islamic State (IS) is active. To strengthen the security forces, a civilian mission within the framework of the joint security and defence policy is being considered. In truth, the plans go well beyond a civilian mission. In Luxembourg, the foreign and defence ministers decided to support the new unity government to rebuild security forces. Although Berlin proposed training these troops in Tunisia out of security considerations, the British government stated it would consider conducting training in Libya. In addition, British Defence Minister Michael Fallon called for the collaboration of NATO to train the coast guard. Based on a military source, British media reported that Britain already has special forces present in Libya and was preparing for the arrival of regular army units in a matter of weeks. According to the Daily Star, the plans are robust and comprise Apache helicopters, warships, Tornados and Eurofighter jets based in Cyprus. British Prime Minister David Cameron had declared his support in principle for British units together with French, Italian and American troops marching into Tripoli to stabilise and secure the city. Such a mission has long been secretly prepared. In mid-March, the Italian government, which has been pressing for a war in Libya for some time, confirmed similar plans. Italy was to lead a UN mission with up to 6,000 soldiers, which would be supported by air strikes from the Sicilian air bases of Trapani and Sigonella. Western agents and special forces have been in Libya for some time to train and arm militias, and armed drones have already been flying out of Sigonella. The German government, which withheld its support in 2011 for the NATO bombardment of Libya, is also preparing a military intervention. Defence Minister Ursula Von der Leyen (Christian Democrats) made clear in January in reference to the installation of the unity government in Libya and the struggle against IS in Libya, Germany will not be able to evade its responsibility to make a contribution there. After the Luxembourg meeting, she stated that it was now decisive that Libya itself formulates the type of assistance it requires. What the German government understands by assistance was made clear in an interview with Wolfgang Ischinger, the head of the Munich Security Conference (MSC), in Mondays edition of Die Welt. According to Ischinger, who for the first time last week held a core group meeting of the MSC in Africas capital Addis Ababa, Germany ought to have joined the Libya mission five years ago. The bombardment that destroyed the society, killed tens of thousands and turned millions into refugees, was not wrong, but necessary. However, they had forgotten to think about the day after and to use just as much energy to stabilise the country. Ischinger gave free rein to his dream of a new and comprehensive German policy of colonial occupation. Africa was not a troop training ground and the military intervention could only be the first step. Steps two and three are much more important and difficult, because we have to use more resources for them. It requires people to take care of justice and the police, to maintain the administration and order, promote rebuilding and growth. He added: The crises in Africa are the places where we can show that we have learnt from our mistakes. In particular that one requires comprehensive concepts for the overcoming of crises. And for that, one cannot take half measures. Ischinger left no doubt about what he meant by this. Responding to a question from Die Welt on whether Europe would have to fight, he said: Who else? We can no longer rely on the US Sixth Fleet to regulate the problems for us. Obama has repeated that America is no longer running around with a fire extinguisher and providing security around the world. An emancipation of European security policy in the sense of a forward-looking and independent policy of crisis prevention and fighting to realise its own interests is therefore unavoidable. A glance at the numerous foreign policy strategy papers prepared in Berlin in recent years reveals what these own interests are and on what traditions the German elite, which already fantasised about a hegemonic position in Africa under the Kaiser, is drawing. Germanys entry into the new scramble for Africa has been planned for some time and is part of Germanys return to an aggressive imperialist foreign policy. The Guidelines for an Africa policy adopted by the German government early in 2014, refer to the Growing relevance of Africa for Germany and Europe, which, among other things, arises out of the increasingly dynamic economy and the rich natural resources of the continent. Therefore, the German government intended to target the strengthening of Germanys engagement in Africa politically, in security policy and economic policy, act early, quickly, decisively and substantially, and deploy the entire range of available resources across government departments. The ambassadors of NATO countries and Russia assembled yesterday in Brussels for a meeting of the NATO-Russian Council, which was suspended in February 2014 after the NATO-backed putsch in Kiev and the ensuing conflict in Ukraine. The main concern prompting the resumption of the council meetings was fear that NATO military deployments to eastern Europe and the resulting close proximity between NATO and Russian forces could lead to a military clash and escalate to all-out war. The meeting came after a series of incidents in which Russian fighters flew very close to NATO warships or surveillance aircraft operating near Russia in the Baltic Sea area. After the meeting, NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg announced, I have just chaired a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council. And we all agree that it is in all our interest to keep political channels for political dialogue open. According to Stoltenberg, issues discussed included the crisis in and around Ukraine, the security situation in Afghanistan, including regional terrorist threats, and transparency and risk reduction related to military activities. He explained, NATO allies expressed concern about last weeks incidents in the Baltic region involving Russian military aircraft. It is important to consider what steps we can all take to increase transparency and predictability. He added, Especially when tensions are high, political dialogue is necessary to discuss our differences and to reduce the risk of military incidents. Stoltenbergs remarks are a barely veiled admission that the reckless policies pursued by NATO in Europe since the Kiev putsch have heightened international tensions to the point that a border clash could easily erupt, leading to a military escalation with horrific consequences. The immediacy of the danger was made clear last year, when Turkish fighters shot down a Russian bomber flying a mission over Syriathe first time a NATO member state had destroyed a Russian warplane since the Korean War, over 60 years ago. Nonetheless, despite the immense dangers facing Europe and the entire world, the NATO-Russian council meeting took no concrete action to calm the tensions between the major powers. Stoltenberg confirmed that there would be no return to practical cooperation with Russia, stating, NATO and Russia have profound and persistent disagreements. Todays meeting did not change that. The meeting came two days after a phone call between US president Barack Obama and Russian president Vladimir Putin, described as intense by US officials, over reports that Russian artillery was being positioned in northern Syria for a possible renewed offensive there. This danger of military escalation in this situation was stressed also by German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger, the head of the Munich Security Conference, in an interview with Deutsche Welle. Asked whether it was a mistake for NATO to break off the NATO-Russia Council meetings, Ischinger replied that the decision to suspend the meetings was not a great moment for diplomacy. He added that the current situation is the most dangerous there has been since the end of the Cold War. He explained, Over the past few days, there have been two so-called close encounters in the Baltic Sea between Russian military aircraft and a US warship as well as a US reconnaissance plane. In such situations, one false move can quickly lead to an incalculable escalation. Ischinger stressed that the NATO-Russia Council should reconvene, adding, I would say that the first order of business must be the establishment of a much-needed, 24/7 military crisis prevention arrangement. Western and Russian officers have to make sure that such near misses, and the possible misunderstandings that they give rise to, be avoided. Such remarks highlight that the provocative policy pursued over the last several years by the NATO powers of aggressively stoking tensions with Russia and China has placed the world on the verge of a world war between nuclear-armed powers. Ischingers remarks also undermine the official account of the Kiev putsch and the resulting NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine, which falsely blamed the entire conflict on Russian aggressiveness. They make clear that it was NATO, and not the Kremlin, that broke off lines of communication after the Kiev putsch. Nonetheless, the NATO powers have all fallen behind a policy of confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, led by Washington and Berlin. NATO is itself deeply and publicly divided over NATOs limited attempts to de-escalate the conflict, with prominent governments particularly in eastern Europe pressing for a hard, anti-Russian line. Polish defense minister Antoni Macierewicz, whose government has announced that it will seek continued NATO military escalation in eastern Europe aimed at Russia at a NATO summit in Warsaw in July, called for further increases of NATO troops strength near Russian borders. So far, all Russian behavior attests to systematic preparation for aggressive action, he told the Rzeczpospolita daily in an interview. And its time to talk about it openly. Le Monde reported that Germany and France had pressed for the NATO-Russia Council meeting in the face of opposition from the Baltic republics, Poland and Canada. It added, It was in reality the more conciliatory attitude of US Secretary of State John Kerry that finally made possible an event that would have been unimaginable only a few weeks ago. Russian officials indicated that they were open to more talks to calm tensions, but that these tensions would not subside as long as NATO was escalating its military presence in eastern Europe threatening Russia. A further dialog on new confidence-building measures is impossible without real moves from NATO to cut military activity at the Russian borders, said Russian ambassador to NATO Alexander Grushko as he left the council meeting. Policy and military planning of NATO that base on deterrence of Russia are incompatible with any plans to create confidence-building measures. The Kremlin nonetheless indicated that it was open to cooperation on selected measures, such as on a reactionary plan to extend NATOs Resolute Support operation in Afghanistan, keeping thousands of troops in the country ostensibly to train its security forces. Keiko Fujimori, daughter of jailed former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), won the largest vote in the April 10 first round of Perus presidential elections with 39.81 percent of the ballots cast. Her party, Fuerza Popular (FP), also won slightly more than half of the seats in Congress. Second place went to Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (PPK) of Peruanos por el Kambio. Kuczynski, a right-wing millionaire who holds dual Peruvian-US citizenship, won 20.99 percent of the vote. Coming in third was Veronika Mendoza of the pseudo-left Frente Amplio with 18.84 percent. Null and blank votes totaled 20.25 percent. The election has been marked by the demise of the old dominant parties of the Peruvian bourgeoisie. The candidate of an alliance between APRA and Partido Popular Cristiano (PPC), Alan Garcia (twice president in 1985-1990 and 2006-2011), was reduced to 5.85 percent of the vote; Alfredo Barnechea of Accion Popular (with its founding leader Fernando Belaunde holding office twice, in the 1960s and the 1980s) got 6.97 percent. The worst performing party though was Peru Posible of former president Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006), reduced to a mere 1.31 percent of the ballots cast. The emerging markets boomtouted by the IMF and World Bank as a bright spot for world capitalism in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdownhas come to an end, throwing Peru and much of Latin America into a period of recession. This has resulted in plummeting approval ratings and, in several cases, charges of corruption and bids to oust presidents in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile. This phenomenon has also had its effect upon Peruvian politicians. President Ollanta Humalas wife, Nadine Heredia, is under investigation for money laundering and corruption and is suspected of having links to the massive Petrobras scandal in Brazil. Humalas Peruvian Nationalist Party was forced to withdraw its candidate for fear that overwhelming disapproval ratings for the president would result in a vote of less than 5 percent, causing it to forfeit its status as a registered political party. Alejandro Toledo of Peru Posible and APRAs Alan Garcia are both under scrutiny over corruption charges. The father of the front-runner, former president Alberto Fujimori, is serving a 25-year sentence for his role in the massacres of Barrios Altos and La Cantuta in the early 1990s. Hostility to Fujimoris candidacy and her fathers record of bloody repression found expression on the eve of the elections in a protest by tens of thousands in the capital of Lima. For its part, the Peruvian business class celebrated the first round election results by bidding up shares on the Lima Stock Exchange (BVL). Reuters Christian Laub, president of the BVL, declared: No doubt the news of the election and that the two options are pro-market have driven the stock market. The economic daily Gestion reported that businessmen breathed a sigh of relief that two pro-free-market candidates were slated for the second round. The BVL General Index rebounded 8.61 percent, its biggest daily percentage gain since November 4, 2008. Most notable, the large mining company Volcan recorded a 46.21 percent rise in its share value the Monday after the elections. The vote for Keiko Fujimori, a thoroughly right-wing figure, stemmed in some measure from the populist and minimal social programs for the poor established by her father during the 1990s, even as he dutifully imposed neoliberal reforms dictated by the IMF and waged a bloody counterinsurgency war against Sendero Luminoso, the Maoist guerrilla group. The failure of APRA and what passed for the Peruvian left in the 1980s, dominated by the Stalinist Peruvian Communist Party, allowed Fujimori to engage in populist gestures that won him a degree of support among the most impoverished layers of Peruvian society, which Keiko Fujimori has been able to continue exploiting in the absence of a political party that truly represents the working class and fights for its interests. Veronika Mendoza and her Frente Amplio (Broad Front) represent no such party. Mendoza, who has dual Peruvian-French citizenship and was educated at the Sorbonne, began working on support committees for Humalas Peruvian Nationalist Party in the mid-2000s. In 2009, she was the party youth groups press secretary and became spokesperson for its womens commission the following year. Mendoza was elected to Congress in 2011 as part of the Gana Peru alliance that placed Humala in the presidency. Fears within Peruvian ruling circles and in Washington that Humalas campaign rhetoric about social inclusion would translate into an incursion on the profit interests of Peruvian and transnational capital were quickly relieved by the newly elected president himself, who subordinated his policies to the banks and the big mining corporations. After Humala was elected in 2011, Mendoza played a prominent role representing the Gana Peru alliance in Congress. She broke with Gana Peru following the governments 2012 crackdown against anti-mining protests directed at the expansion of a copper mine in Espinar province by the Swiss corporation Xstrata, in which Humala declared a state of emergency, suspending constitutional rights and sending police shock troops who shot to death two protesters. Shortly thereafter, she joined a parliamentary faction dominated by the right-wing Accion Popular party. While in 2011, Ollanta Humala, a former military officer, won the entire south of Peru, with margins of 80 percent in some departments, as well as the working class and poor districts of the capital Lima, Mendoza won just 45 to 53 percent of the vote in the southern region but lost Arequipa, the second largest city in the country, to PPK. In Lima, which accounts for one third of the votes, Keiko Fujimori got 40.59 percent and PPK 29.76 percent, with Mendoza left with just 12.04 percent. Frente Amplio won in districts with mining projects involving substantial foreign investments. Among these are the Tia Maria and Las Bambas projects (Apurimac and Arequipa) worth billions of dollars. It also won in Moquegua and Tacna, where the Southern Corporation of Grupo Mexicano operates. Mendoza, whose Frente Amplio won 20 of the 130 parliamentary seats, told El Comercio that the Peruvian people have given us the mandate to establish ourselves in opposition in Parliament. While no doubt the partys vote reflected anger at economic conditions among layers of the working class and poor, Frente Amplio is a political party that reflects the interests of privileged layers of the middle class and, in the end, will follow the same path of betrayal as Mendozas former political mentor, Humala. Underscoring Mendoza and Frente Amplios submission to the status quo was a visit by US Ambassador Brian A. Nichols to the FAs headquarters. The daily Diario Uno, a newspaper of the Peruvian pseudo-left, reported that Mendoza explained her major proposals to Nichols during his visit and expressed her concern for the effects of the US-led Trans Pacific Partnership, arguing that its ratification should be postponed for the next Congress and be matter of a national debate. Australias media establishment welcomed Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbulls announcement on Tuesday that he will call a double dissolution election on July 2, while insisting that Turnbull must use the election to clear the way for unprecedented attacks on social services and working class conditions. Editorials and commentaries described Turnbulls decision as a bold bid to assert his governments authority and secure a mandate for economic reform. But they also warned that, for a start, his Liberal-National Coalition government must hand down a tough and difficult budget on May 3, even though sweeping social spending cuts will fuel popular discontent. Turnbull has moved for a rare election of all members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the upper housethe first such double dissolution election for nearly 30 years. His government is trying to break through a protracted political impasse, with opposition and so-called independent senators, themselves fearing seething public hostility, blocking a range of budget cuts, especially to health, education and welfare. The prime minister told parliament on Tuesday he would ask the governor-general, the Queens representative, to dissolve both houses for an election once the government had secured the passage of the supply bills in the federal budget, which Turnbull has brought forward to May 3. Fears were voiced throughout the media commentary that Turnbull would fail to deliver the so-called economic leadership that he vowed to provide when he ousted his predecessor Tony Abbott last September. These concerns reflect the conundrum that has wracked governments, Coalition and Labor, over the past decade: how to retain voter support while imposing pro-market measures that are antithetical to the interests of the majority of the electorate. Concerns are also being expressed that Turnbulls July 2 poll could backfire, resulting in the election of more independent or minor party senators, or a government unable to command a majority in the House of Representatives. Even if the government survives, it could fail to win enough seats in both houses to push through the bill that it used as a double dissolution triggera draconian bill directed against construction workers. That would be an abject and unprecedented humiliation for a prime minister, the Australians editor-at-large Paul Kelly warned on April 20. Kelly described the July 2 election as a significant test of the political and constitutional system. In the same vein, the Melbourne Age declared in its April 20 editorial: Australia is at a crossroads. How this nation will develop beyond the mining boom, what standard of living Australians can and should expect in the next few decades, and whether the electorate has the stomach for the tough calls are some of the critical questions our political leaders must confront ahead of the July 2 election. High levels of government debt and unsustainable fiscal deficits must be reined in. An editorial in Murdochs Australian declared that Turnbull had been too wishy-washy since he deposed Abbott. He had to show more certainty as he campaigns for a Coalition victory under his leadership in just 73 days. The editorial insisted: We cant afford a do-nothing budget. Turnbull and Treasurer Scott Morrison must accept fiscal rectitude as their strength and demonstrate that they are capable of reducing expenditure, even in the shadows of an election. These demands are intensifying because of a rapidly deteriorating economic situation. The implosion of Australian capitalisms two-decade mining boom is being compounded by slowing growth in China, a worsening global slump and signs that the domestic real estate bubble is starting to unravel. Writing in the Business Spectator, columnist Alan Kohler warned that cracks are starting to appear in the economy. He cited a jump in the National Credit Insurance trade credit risk index to its highest level everabove the worst of the 200809 global financial crisis. The index measures the risk of creditors being hit by business insolvencies, such as the recent liquidations of Arrium steel, Queensland Nickel and the Dick Smith retail chain. Overall insolvency insurance claims in the first quarter of 2016 were 80 percent above the same quarter last year. When Turnbull ousted Abbott last year he initially sought to boost the economy by repeatedly proclaiming that it was never a more exciting time to be an Australian, spruiking the opportunities supposedly offered by Chinas growth. That claim, always contemptuous of the reality of massive job losses, falling real wages and declining social conditions confronting millions of working people, can no longer be sustained. Last month, Turnbull unveiled a new theme: that Australians had to learn to live within our means, that is, accept even greater cuts to living standards and essential programs such as health and education. Now, however, the government is desperately casting around, seeking to match populist electoral pitches by the Labor Party opposition. In an attempt to capitalise on the widespread hostility generated by deepening social inequality, Labor has promised to reduce superannuation tax concessions for those earning above $250,000 a year, curtail corporate tax evasion and conduct a royal commission inquiry into the banks, whose predatory practices have ruined thousands of their customers, including retirees, farmers and small business people. In a revealing indication of the governments fears of losing the July 2 election, there are reports that it will outdo Labor by pledging to lower the superannuation tax concession cut-off point to incomes of $180,000 per year. Only last year, Treasurer Morrison declared: The government has made it crystal clear that we have no interest in increasing taxes on superannuation either now or in the future ... unlike Labor, we are not coming after peoples superannuation. Labors populist posturing and claims it will put people first is designed to contain the widespread discontent within the parliamentary framework and divert attention from its own long record of imposing the dictates of big business on the working class. Addressing investors at a Credit Suisse conference in New York this week, Reserve Bank of Australia governor Glenn Stevens urged a return to the politics of the 1980s and 1990s. That was when the Hawke and Keating Labor governments, backed by the trade unions, deregulated the financial system, slashed corporate and high incomes taxes, privatised public services, including the Commonwealth Bank, and drove down wages and working conditions. During the 1980s and 1990s, Stevens stated, Australia had a strong leadership, who had an idea what to do and who seized the moment and got the community, albeit in some cases a bit grudgingly, to come along. In reality, the Hawke and Keating governments, together with the unions, ruthlessly suppressed opposition among workers as they carried through the greatest transfer of wealth from the working class to the wealthiest layers of society in Australias history. Stevens invocation of that record is a warning of an even deeper offensive that will be launched after the July 2 election, regardless of whether Turnbull survives or Labor returns to office. In the aftermath of the November 2011 pepper spraying of University of California (UC), Davis, students and alumni participating in Occupy Wall Street protests, campus administration paid consultants upwards of $175,000 to remove references to the incident from the Internet. The vicious use of military-grade pepper spray came to epitomize the states willingness to ruthlessly suppress any opposition to social inequality. Eleven protesters received medical treatment and two were hospitalized, one of whom coughed up blood for hours. Police had already violently suppressed the Occupy UC Berkeley and Occupy Oakland encampments, while the FBI was preparing a nationwide crackdown on all Occupy encampments. Videos of the brutal pepper spraying were viewed millions of times, with the incident making headlines and generating outrage worldwide. The image of campus police Lt. John Pike methodically spraying the seated students in their faces became the basis for dozens of memes parodying police brutality. Administration officials led by Chancellor Linda Katehi ordered police to remove tents set up by protesters, making her fully responsibility for the subsequent crackdown. Katehi, already hated by students for her role in the police suppression of 2009 protests against tuition hikes, came under intense scrutiny and was subjected to a silent walk of shame by hundreds of students the following night. An online petition calling for her resignation garnered more than 100,000 signatures. Fallout from the incident continued throughout 2012, culminating in a September 2012 settlement of a federal class-action lawsuit against the UC Regents on behalf of 21 students who were pepper sprayed. The students each received roughly $35,000 from the university. Prior to the UC Regents settlement with the students, Lt. John Pike was fired in July 2012 after being on paid administrative leave for eight months. In 2013, he received $38,055 in workers compensation, a clear message of approval of Pikes brutal actions. Documents released by the Sacramento Bee last week indicate that the UC Davis administration moved to hire consultants from Nevins & Associates shortly after the legal settlement with the students, signing a six-month, $15,000 a month contract in January 2013. The overarching goal of this contract was to improve the results obtained by those searching on Google or other search engines for information about the university or Katehi. One of the objectives listed in a six-page proposal from Nevins included the eradication of references to the pepper spray incident in search results on Google for the university and the Chancellor. As part of the agreement, Nevins & Associates pledged to counteract the venomous rhetoric about UC Davis and the chancellor through strategic placement of online content, including modifications to existing and future content and the creation of original content as needed. In June 2014, UC Davis contracted with the PR firm IDMLOCO for $82,500 to design a comprehensive search engine results management strategy. IDMLOCO promised to create a reasonable balance of positive natural search results. Apparently after achieving some success, the company was awarded two more contracts last yearone in February 2015 for up to $96,000 and another in September for up to $67,500. As part of these deals, the company agreed to create an integrated social media program for executive communications. The firm also stated that its primary goal was to achieve a reasonable balance of positive natural search results on common terms concerning UC Davis and Chancellor Katehi. Financing for these lucrative contracts came from UC Davis strategic communications department, whose budget increased under Katehi from $2.93 million in 2009 to $5.47 million in 2015. These damning revelations underscore the reactionary character of the UC Davis administration under the widely hated Katehi. In recent weeks, Katehi herself has come under intense scrutiny following separate revelations that she accepted a board seat on DeVry Education Group, a for-profit higher education company currently under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, and that she has already earned $420,000 serving on the board of John Wiley & Sons, a leading publisher of science and math textbooks for universities. Regarding the Wiley & Sons revelation, Ed Howard, senior counsel for the Center for Public Interest Law, told the Sacramento Bee that Katehi was being paid a huge sum of money by a private, for-profit corporation that has business with the University of California. ... Its pretty much the dictionary definition of a conflict of interest. In response to these initial revelations, students began a five-week occupation of the 5th floor of the administrative building Mrak Hall, directly outside Katehis office. On April 1, hundreds of students and faculty marched through campus, calling for the resignation of Katehi. The roughly two dozen students occupying Mrak Hall left the building last Friday, feeling that their protest was isolated. In a statement issued upon the ending of their occupation, the students wrote, The problem is not only with Linda Katehi and does not only reside at UC Davis. We are calling on students, workers, and faculty across the UC campuses and across the broader United States to speak out against their administrators and institutions that are placing pride and profit over students and workers. Among the various corrupt chancellors and heads of American universities facing student demands for their resignation, Katehi is arguably the most deserving. In her ruthless careerism and pro-business policies, she personifies the transformation of public higher education in the US along corporate lines. Katehi and UC President Janet Napolitano, among others, also represent the merging of the military-intelligence apparatus with higher education. Katehi serves on a special FBI task force called the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board, whose purpose is to monitor radical students on many of Americas leading universities and promote discussion and outreach between research universities and the FBI. After overseeing the deportation of hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers and the deaths of thousands of others who have perished struggling to enter the US, Napolitano brought her spying skills acquired as chief of Homeland Security to the UC system when she was hired as president in 2013. She was recently exposed for implementing a secret spyware system designed to monitor and collect data from all individuals within the networks affiliated with the UC. She has come to Katehis defense during the recent protests. In her native Greece, Katehi played a major role in 2011 in bringing police back onto Greek university campuses after a nearly 30-year ban on such activity. She co-signed an influential report that led to the overturning of the Academic Asylum Law, initially passed in 1982 following the 1973 police massacre of 24 student protesters at Athens Polytechnic. The law required police to request permission from a prosecutor before entering a campus. Katehis personal corruption is by no means exceptional. Her $424,360 annual salary is the standard fare for chancellors at the UCs most competitive campuses and at many universities nationwide. Napolitano has a base salary of $570,000. UC San Francisco Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann received $220,000 in cash and additional stock options for 180 hours of work on the board of Procter & Gamble in 2012 and 2013, while many other chancellors moonlight on corporate boards nationwide. The UC Davis International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) unequivocally condemns the corrupt actions of the UC Davis administration and in particular Chancellor Katehi, and supports the calls for her resignation. To fundamentally address the crisis of public education, however, requires a complete break with the Democratic Party and a struggle to unite students and workers against all forms of austerity. Only through such a broader struggle can the basic social right to free, high-quality public education be secured. Hundreds of Verizon workers picketed a Verizon facility in Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC, which is being used to coordinate the companys strikebreaking operations. Strikers from several states converged on the massive facility, crossing a major highway while shouting, Scabs go home! The giant telecom company has spent months preparing for the strike and has trained 20,000 managers and contractors. Call center, engineering and sales managers have been brought into the Maryland facility from as far away as Texas to counter the impact of the eight-day strike by 39,000 Verizon workers along the US East Coast. Verizon is refusing to back away from its demands for deep health and pension concessions, the continued outsourcing of jobs and the power to transfer workers long distances for weeks or months at a time. The highly profitable company, which last year spent billions buying AOL, wants to slash more jobs and transform its wireline workforce, which services the companys landline phone business and FiOS broadband system, into low-paid, on-call workers. While workers expressed their determination to fight, the Communications Workers of America sought to turn the event into a rally for the Democratic Party. At a rally before the picket, CWA officials paraded Maryland Congresswoman Donna Edwards before strikers. Far from defending workers, the Democrats have long backed the telecommunication monopolies, and Verizon is now using Obamas Cadillac Tax on supposedly overgenerous health benefits to force strikers to accept substandard care and far greater out-of-pocket costs. Citing supposed national security concerns during the 2011 strike, the FBI, under the direction of Obamas Justice Department, launched an investigation into Verizons bogus claims that strikers were sabotaging critical infrastructure. One FBI special agent issued a provocative email connecting the alleged incidents to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Striking workers at the Maryland picket spoke with the WSWS Verizon Strike Newsletter about their struggle. Troy, a Verizon worker with 27 years of experience, said, I was in the 2011 strike and the four-month-long strike in 1989. Im ready to be out here for four months or longer if that is what it takes. In the 2011 strike we were out here for two weeks, and then we got sold out by the union. The upper echelons of the union are always willing to make deals with the company. So, now you dont know what you are going to get. Im planning on retiring in a few years, and I dont know what the company is going to do. I already have a plan B and C, if they change things. Everything has already gotten worse since I started working here. Before, this was a more worker friendly environment. I used to recommend this to my friends and family. Now I wouldnt recommend this job to a dog. Every few years now we go out on strike, and the company is trying to outsource everything. The Newsletter also spoke with a striking worker from Northern Virginia who wanted to remain anonymous out of concern that he would face retribution from the company and the union. Referring to the WSWS he said, I read your leaflet, and I thought it was interesting. I do think the workers [on strike] are being controlled by both the company and the union. Speaking on the clause the CWA sanctioned as part of its back-to-work agreement from the last strike, which allows the company to fire workers for alleged strike misconduct, including calling strikebreakers names, the worker said, The union signed an agreement with the company that allows the company to define what is and what isnt hate speech. Its essentially handcuffing its members. Speaking more broadly, the worker noted, Everything the union seems to do is reactionary, if it reacts at all. We always hear the same old cry about what the company is doing, this and that, and how terrible it is. We know how bad the company is. What I want to know is what youre [the union] doing about it. Its the same tactic all the time. We are forced to go to the labor courts, or vote for someone in an election. Theres never any real action. The worker added, My belief is that a wildcat is the best way forward, because then youre actually stopping the company completely, but theyve illegalized it everywhere. There was a situation where we organized a sickout [at a garage], and we were warned by our union that, technically, it constituted a wildcat, and if we did it again the union wouldnt help us. The WSWS also spoke to strikers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Terry, who has eight years at Verizon, said jobs and health care are the main issues. Verizon wants to move our jobs. They want to be able to transfer us 100 miles without any notice. We are trying to keep our jobs here in Pittsburgh. I would have to uproot my family and my whole life. As far as health care, they want us to pay more for it, and they are not giving us a raise to compensate. Our health care used to be completely paid for. In the last contract we had to start paying I think 12 percent, and now they want to take that up more. Three years ago we werent even paying for health care, now we are. But when you profit $1.8 billion a month and you are trying to take away from the little guy, it hurts. We are the ones who keep this company together, we are the ones who deal with the customers, who do all the hard work, yet our CEO makes $22, $25 million a year. People need to stick together. I think it is a good thing to have rights. I think everyone should have a good paying job. Charles, with seven years, said, Definitely job security is the major issue. No one wants to move from where they are living now. It would be devastating for me and my family if I had to move anywhere. I have one child. Ive worked five years here and two in New Jersey. They can make you move for two months to anywhere or transfer you up to 100 miles. Both of those things are on the table. Jackson, Jennifer and Deana work in one of Verizons massive customer call centers. Jennifer said, It is all about corporate greed. We are not asking for anything, we would just like to keep what we have. Verizon makes $1.5 billion a month, and they refuse to let us keep what we have. Jackson said, I just want to maintain. I want to keep my household together. Verizon is taking away everything. They dont care about anything. They dont care about the working class people. This is happening to workers all over. They are trying to stomp and destroy. Jennifer added, They are trying to squash the middle class, you are either very, very poor or you are uber rich. There is no middle class. We are just trying to make an honest living to raise our families. Deana said, Maybe six or eight months ago, they moved the Verizon Wireless call center to another state, and if the workers wanted to keep their job, they also had to move. The call center was in Cranberry Township. Responding to the need to unite the working class throughout the world so everyone can have a decent living, Jennifer said, Absolutely, they [workers outside the US] will do anything they are so poverty stricken, they are just trying to maintain their families as well. That is why companies send work to poverty stricken areas. The Newsletter also spoke with strikers at a rally in Bronx, New York Wednesday. "Its day eight already, said Fitz. This is a defining strike. Most members have devoted a minimum of 15 to 20 years to this company so it could make huge profits. We maintain the infrastructure, and now were just being pushed to the side. Everything we are fighting for was fought for in the past, nothings ever been given to us. We fought for health benefits, pension benefits, now the company just wants to kill them. Were fighting to simply keep the things we have. The struggle for fair wages and labor is a worldwide struggle. And the sooner people realize that the better. Another striker, Joe, added, We work so hard and the company wants to take so much away. I cant get my head around why someone would want to take so much money from the people who create all the money. It seems the higher up you are the more disconnected you are from the worker. I mean being out of contract since August its reached a point where we had to stand up to them. And we are. TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - Elder Care Services, Inc. (ECS) brought together local celebrities from the community Tuesday to deliver hot meals to seniors in the area. The "Big Wheels Deliver Meals" program included special deliveries from Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, FAMU President Dr. Elmira Mangum, the Tallahassee Police Chief, city and county commissioners and many more. It was all to show the importance of the Meals on Wheels program and the impact it has on those who receive the meals. "We have lots of food insecurity issues and lots of seniors that are on very limited incomes, so this is just another way to highlight how important the program is," explains ECS CEO Mark Baldino. WTXL ABC 27's Abbey Maurer and Casanova Nurse also participated in the event. Each year, over 5,000 seniors and their families receive help from Elder Care Services. For more information on Elder Care Services or the Meals on Wheels program, visit www.ECSBigBend.org or call (850) 921-5554. BRADENTON -- Police are looking for a 31-year-old man wanted on felony warrants for animal cruelty regarding 9 dogs locked in his backyard. The Manatee County Animal Services and Bradenton Police seized nine dogs from the backyard of 1106 3rd Street West, Bradenton. One of the smaller dogs had injuries to his head, ear and tail and was tethered to a tree by a heavy chain. None of the dogs had food. Neither electricity nor running water is connected to the house where these dogs were caged. There were several violations cited by the Animal Control officers. All of the dogs were taken to a secure facility for medical examinations performed by a certified veterinarian. Two of the nine dogs were suffering from injuries and neglect from not receiving care for these injuries and are now considered evidence. Derris Sturdivant claims ownership of all of the dogs and has not cooperated with police. Mr. Sturdivant has not cooperated with our investigation. All nine dogs are now in the custody of Manatee County Animal Services and will be examined and treated for any and all injuries. Once the dogs are free of any injuries they will be put up for adoption. Anyone with knowledge of the location of Sturdivant, is asked to call the Bradenton Police Department at 941-932-9300. Sarasota County sheriff's deputies released a GoPro helmet cam video of a motorcyclist fleeing from police in excess of 110 mph. The video shows Sergey Baygulov, 20, weaving in and out of traffic and coming within a few inches of other vehicles including a school bus. He also sped past a marked law enforcement car A helicopter was called in and followed Byguloy as he continued his morning commute to work along River Road and I-75. Video also was released from the helicopter cam and patrol cars. See police chase video here. Baygulov exited onto Fruitville Road and drove to his place of work on Tower Lane. Deputies were waiting in the area and arrested Baygulov when he stopped at the air conditioning business where he works as a laborer. Deputies said at the speed Byguloy was going he is lucky to be alive. "The impact of a bike traveling at these speeds is deadly for the motorist and anyone or anything they come into contact with," says Sheriff Tom Knight. This is a frightening trend." Sarasota County has had 84 traffic crashes involving motorcycles since Jan 1. Here are the numbers reported: Sarasota County Sheriffs Office 14 Sarasota Police Department 21 Florida Highway Patrol 37 North Port Police Department 6 Venice Police Department 6 Byguloy was charged with a felony count of aggravated fleeing to elude JACKSON COUNTY, FL (WTXL) - A registered sex offender was arrested in Jackson County Tuesday for failing to tell authorities he just moved to the area from Arkansas. Daniel Hayes was taken into custody after deputies got a tip the 28-year-old did not register his new address, when he moved to Jackson County two years ago. He's charged with failing to register as a sex offender and is being held for Arkansas authorities. You are the owner of this article. If you are sending a Letter To the Editor, please be sure to follow these rules: Letters have a firm 200-word limit and will be edited for grammar, clarity and accuracy. The person who signs the letter must be the author. Anonymous letters will not be considered. Letters must address the editor, not a third party. We will not print form letters, libelous letters, business promotions or personal disputes, poetry, open letters, letters espousing religious views without reference to a current issue, or letters considered in poor taste. Letters reflect the opinion of the writer. The Yakima Herald-Republic cannot verify the accuracy of all statements made in letters. Writers are limited to one published letter per calendar month. The IDF completed a large-scale military exercise in the Golan Heights on Wednesday that simulated a conflict with armed groups in Syria. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter The unannounced exercise began four days ago at the behest of IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot. It included drills against terror attacks on Golan Heights communities such as rocket and missile barrages, and ground infiltration of terrorist cells armed with machine and hand guns, anti-tank missiles, and other explosive devices. During the exercise, trainees in the Nahal Infantry Brigade and the 401st Armored Brigade carried out emergency war protocols and joined the battle. The two brigades were joined by air force combat squadrons, CH-53 helicopters, UAVs, special intelligence forces, and other elite IDF units. Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, Photo: IDF spokesperson The exercise is a continuation of a series of exercises that the new Regional Division has carried out in the Golan Heights in the past year. The Golan Regional Division also performed an emergency response drill, a multilateral exercise which included reservists, and a divisional exercise. These exercises are similar to other exercises that were carried out to simulate a surprise attack emanating from the southern or central Golan Heights. Tank in Golan Heights, Photo: IDF spokesperson This year, the Golan Regional Division finished building a new barrier along the Syrian border with advanced observation posts overlooking Syrian territory, most of which the Syrian regime no longer controls. Rebel groups including the Free Syrian Army, Jabhat al-Nusra (which identifies with al-Qaeda) and the Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade (which pledged allegiance to ISIS) now control these territories and are fighting amongst each other, with loyalties changing almost weekly. The IDF has maintained a policy of non-intervention on the Syrian side of the border, but has provided humanitarian aid and medical treatment to wounded Syrians. Israel also has foiled terror attacks aimed at hitting Israeli targets in the Golan Heights. The IDF said the exercise was planned and not connected to ongoing events, but it did take place after recent IDF operations on the Syrian side of the border. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed a week ago that the IDF has undertaken tens of preemptive strikes against weapons shipments to Hezbollah. The Iron Dome anti-missile defense system successfully shot down an American drone in a first test of its kind conducted by the US Army last week. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Special adjustments were made to the Iron Dome interceptor missile Tamir prior to the test so that it would be compatible with the US launcher. This was the first time that a test of the Iron Dome interceptor against a drone target was held on US soil. Iron Dome's Tamir interceptor being fired (Photo: Rafael spokesperson) In Rafael's announcement, Lt. Col. Michael Fitzgerald, head of the project in the US Army, was quoted as saying that the launch and interception from a multi-purpose launcher were highly successful, and that this was part of an examination of a number of air defense alternatives being conducted by the US Army. The US Army is considering buying the Israeli system from Rafael, which has so far not been acquired by foreign armies, and the test was part of this review. In recent years, Iron Dome has been upgraded to intercept not only rockets, missiles and UAVs, but also manned aircraft, artillery, helicopters and glide bombs, although it was first designed to intercept short-distance Qassam rockets. Earlier this month, the Air Force celebrated the fifth anniversary of Iron Dome's first interception. Pini Jungman , head of missile defense systems at Rafael, pointed out that the next step will consist of performing a full match of the US missile program's requirements and a series of additional tests. The Iron Dome system has shot down more than 1,500 rockets since 2011, at a success rate of around 90 percent. The test was carried out in cooperation with the American defense contractor Raytheon, which specializes in the development of military defense systems and civilian solutions in the field of cyber warfare. Raytheon and Rafael have collaborated on several occasions, most notably on the David's Sling air defense system, as well as joint manufacturing of the Iron Dome system's components in the United States. An extreme political activist who refused to condemn ISIS and has advocated armed resistance against Israel was elected on Wednesday to become the new president of the British National Union of Students (NUS). Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Malia Bouattia, the first black Muslim to occupy the position, has previously expressed her support for armed Palestinian resistance against Israel and claimed that non-violent protests are not enough. Malia Bouattia calls for armed Palestinian resistance X In a video filmed a year-and-a-half ago, which was publicized this week, Bouattia can be seen delivering a speech in which she refers to a vocal an uncompromising anti-colonialist approach to the occupation of Palestine and calls upon Palestinians to partake in an armed uprising against Israel. With mainstream Zionist-led media outlets...resistance is presented as an act of terrorism...This has become an accepted discourse among too many, Bouattia said. She further stated that the the alternative to resistance has led to what she dismissively describes as peace talks that, she says, have resulted in the expansion of settlements and violations of human rights. Moreover, after endorsing the Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions Movement (BDS) and boasting of her involvement in it, Bouattia declares that To consider that Palestine will be free only by means of fundraising, non-violent protest and the BDS movement is problematic. The Algerian-born Bouattia, 28, first made headlines when she refused to condemn ISIS, reasoning that to do so would abett Islamophobic sentiment. As a result of her stance, the association was forced to clarify that it does not support the Jihadist group. Shortly before the elections, many NUS officials refused to endorse Bouattia as a result of her contention that "the University of Birmingham is something of a Zionist outpost in British Higher Education". Last week, she denied that she was anti-Semitic in response to a letter authored by 57 Jewish leaders expressing that they were extremely concerned by her remarks. I am extremely uncomfortable with insinuations of anti-Semitism. I want to be clear that for me to take issue with Zionist politics is not me taking issue with being Jewish," Bouattia retorted. Prior to the NUS elections, a conference was held in Brighton in which the union discussed whether it was necessary to observe Holocaust Memorial Day. Some of the speakers at the event rejected the need on the basis that the union ignores and forgets other cases of genocide. Indeed, the remarks triggered a response from Labor MP John Mann, who said the union is not doing enough to combat anti-Jewish hatred, and as such is failing in its responsibilities to its members. Despite the controversy surrounding Bouattia, she managed to beat the incumbent NUS president, Megan Dunn by a vote of 372 to 328. IDF and Judea and Samaria Police forces uncovered two lathes used for the production of weapons and pipe bombs in the village of Abu Dis in East Jerusalem overnight Wednesday. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter In one of the shops, Israeli forces found and seized raw material for the production of explosive devices, ammunition, two old handguns and several grenades. One suspect was arrested. One of the lathes found in Abu Dis (Photo: Police) Among these makeshift weapons is the Carl Gustav recoilless rifle, over 20 of which have been seized so far. In addition, Israeli forces seized 18 hunting rifles and a similar number of makeshift handguns. Seized pipe bomb (Photo: Police) The hunt for the illegal arms stockpiles in the territories has increased in the wake of the past six months of attacks, including the combined vehicular and shooting attack in Kiryat Arba in March, and the shooting attack in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramot that same month. "In addition to the arms stockpiles we're aware of in the West Bank, the amount of lathe-shops has grown. Inside a storage unit you could make a handgun or even a rifle using a hidden machine," an official in the Judea and Samaria Police explained. "We're working based on intelligence, and over the last few months we've arrived almost every day at houses in which weapons were being manufactured. There are big arms stockpiles and we will continue operating against them." It's hard not to see a connection between two events taking place this week, in both of which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plays a central role. The first is the exhibitionist government meeting in the Golan Heights, and the other is Netanyahu's scheduled meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Netanyahu's declaration that the Golan Heights must remain part of the State of Israel and must not be returned to Assad under any agreement about Syria - is the right one. Israel cannot concede the Golan, primarily because it would be impossible for it to defend itself without it. That point is easy to prove in professional dialogue, and I haven't encountered anyone who could prove otherwise. There were quite a few Israeli officials in the past, including prime ministers, who thought Israel should promote a peace agreement with Syria, and give up the Golan as part of this agreement, especially when negotiations with the Palestinians were stuck. Netanyahu and Putin in their last meeting in Paris (Photo: Amos Ben Gershom, GPO) This attitude represents a complete lack of understanding regarding the difference between the Palestinian issue and the Syrian one. The world demands that we reach an agreement with the Palestinians not because of a territory dispute, but because we're living in a reality in which one people occupies another. This is an unacceptable phenomenon in the 21st century. In the Golan Heights, however, there is a territorial dispute between two states, the likes of which exist in dozens of other places in the world, and most of these disputes are unsolvable. The problem, therefore, is not in Israel's position on the future of the Golan, but in the tactic that was chosen: To put the issue on the agenda in a public and provocative manner. Who needs that? If there is good reason to believe that Israel might pay a price as part of an agreement between world powers about Syria, then we should definitely discuss this in Washington and Moscow. About two years ago, we saw that when these two nations reach an agreement, like in the case of destroying Syrian's chemical arsenal, there is nothing that could stop it. Meetings in Moscow and Washington are vital, but why make declarations in advance? In 2004, after Israel and the US agreed on the Gaza disengagement plan and it became public, I was sent as the head of the National Security Council by then-prime minister Ariel Sharon to present the plan to the Russians. I met, among others, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who admonished me: "Why are you coming to tell me about something that has already been declared and made public? I can read about it in the paper. Why didn't you think to consult with us before making the decision?" Lavrov remains the same, as does Putin. If there is one thing they hate is not having a say in the matter. In Israel, many confuse diplomatic relations with diplomatic moves. In reality, these are two opposite things. Diplomatic relations are about loudly telling the world how good we are and how evil our enemies are. Good diplomatic relations carry some weight, but it's negligible. A diplomatic move, however, is done behind the scenes and its purpose is to convince international players that they should, for the sake of their own interests, to choose a position that would also serve our interests. The more this move is kept under wraps, the easier it is for the other side to make the desirable move (and easier to us as well), while presenting it as their decision and not the result of pressure or influence. If such a covert move had already been made with the Russian, then why anger them with a public declaration made from the Golan Heights? And if such a move is still in the works, there's nothing worse than not letting them have their say. A comment made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas earlier this week about the PA's security cooperation with Israel has caused outrage in the various Palestinian factions. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Abbas made the statement in an interview with Der Spiegel during his visit to Germany, saying "Our security forces are working very efficiently to prevent terror. Just a couple of days ago, three young men were tracked down and arrested. They were planning an attack." He went on to say that, "Our security cooperation with Israel is functioning well. Hamas is trying to sabotage things, but we have the situation under control." Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Photo: Reuters Hamas was quick to condemn Abbas's statement. Sami Abu Zuhri, the Islamist movement's spokesperson, said that "Abbas is denying the intifada and the resistance's operations." He called on Abbas "to stop making statements that are foreign to our people's culture and national positions." Other Palestinian factions have also taken shots at Abbas. The Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) called on the PLO Executive Committee, the highest decision-making body in the Palestine Liberation Organization, "to hold the President of the PA accountable and question him (in light) of his political attitudes that cross the line in terms of the customs and tradition of our people and its modern revolution." The PFLP was angered by the fact that Abbas's statements describe the resistance as terrorism. The Palestinian Mujahideen Movement joined the chorus of condemnations as well. An official press release of the movement stated that the statements made by the PA president "are erroneous and a national disaster." Despite popular Palestinian support for knife attacks, Abbas and the Palestinian security forces have continued security cooperation with Israel. PA General Intelligence Chief Majid Faraj even revealed to Defense News in November that the PA had foiled more than 200 attacks against Israelis from October-January. The PA security forces have also carried out numerous arrests of Hamas militants in the West Bank. However, PA officials continue to threaten to end security cooperation. Just this week, PA Spokesperson Nabil Abu Rudeinah told Al-Quds Al-Arabi, "The coming days will see clear political positions and decisions taken that are not typical," seemingly referring to the possibility of partially ending security cooperation. Two days after Yosef Ben-David, 30, was found guilty of the murder of 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir, Channel 10 broadcast a chilling reconstruction of the murder in which the killer details exactly how it transpired. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Ben-David described how he and his two accomplices selected their victim and recounted the smallest details of how Abu Khdeir was murdered. We didnt see a minor, we saw a man. He was tall and he was wearing a hood, Ben-David said before elaborating on how the convicted trio kidnapped him. Ben-David said that when Abu Khdeir was asked how to get to Tel Aviv or the Damascus Gate, he responded: "I am an Arab. I dont understand." Mohammed Abu Khdeir (Photo: Reutrs) "We covered his mouth so he couldnt talk and put him in the car. The door didnt close because his leg was blocking it. So we uncovered his mouth, and as a result he screamed, Ben-David recounted. In a state of panic, one of Ben-David's co-conspirators told him, "I am choking him (Abu Khdeir)." "I said that maybe we should leave (Abu Khdeir), put him on the side (of the road) and forget it. All the while Abu Khdeir couldn't breathe, he said. Asked to re-enact how this was done, Ben-David replied: I dont want to demonstrate on a Jew. As the reconstruction proceeded, Ben-David took the investigators to the exact place where he took his victim and struck him with a crow-bar while exclaiming: This is for the Fogel family, this is for Shalhevet Pass (a Jewish baby shot in 2001 by a Palestinian sniper - ed.). Convicted killer Yosef Ben-David (Photo: Gil Yohanan) Ben-David then demanded that he be brought the the bottle of gasoline: I poured it all over him. One bottle, one liter. I lit a lighter and didnt think about anything. In one second he was aflame. Before the three kidnapped Abu Khdeir, they also attacked an Arab family. We decided that we will go for a woman, attack her and go. She wont bring any more terrorists into the world, Ben-David continued. She was walking with a stroller with two children. One on her right was wearing a white t-shirt and the second on the left was wearing a yellow shirt. We grabbed the boy in white by his throat and the second boy tried to kick us. After the woman began screaming and resisting, one of the gang punched her in the face which sent her about three meters and she screamed and screamed. He then got back into the car and we drove off, he recalled. The three then contemplated their next victim and resolved to simply take someone. We turned on the radio in Arabic, so that they wouldnt recognize us. We were always taught to bless Gods name and not shame it. This is something which I always keep in mind. So we took off our kippah (yarmulke) for the first time in our lives so that we didnt shame Gods name, said Ben-David. Shortly after this they spotted Abu Khdeir. I said to them: yes, yes, yes him. Excellent. Excellent. After they set Abu Khdeir on fire, he explained I took off the Arabs sandals. I put them one on top of the other. We each washed our hands in the sprinklers and freshened up." The Jerusalem District Court convicted Ben-David of murder on Tuesday after the protracted legal proceedings were delayed for months by psychiatric evaluations purporting that the defendant was clinically insane and that he was not responsible for his actions. However, the plea was disregarded after a court-appointed psychiatric evaluation rejected the assertion. Abu Khdeir was murdered in July 2014 in revenge for the kidnapping and murder of the three teenagers, Gil-Ad Shaer, Naftali Frenkel and Eyal Yifrach. Indeed, a day before Abu Khdeirs murder, Ben-David and his accomplices attempted to kidnap seven-year-old Mussa Zalum as he walked with his mother and two brothers in Beit Hanina. The three scouted the area until they arrived at the Shuafat neighborhood in East Jerusalem, where they argued for twenty minutes about who to kidnap. Lets kidnap a minor. A woman screams more than a man, one of them suggested. Close to 3:45pm, they spotted Aby Khdeir. Two of them exited the vehicle and glanced at him to confirm that he was an Arab. Suspicious of the three, Abu Khdeir called his uncle and attempted to distance himself before they hit him and forced him into the car. During the struggle which ensued, Khdeir kicked one of his attackers in the head who shouted finish him! The Arab League met for an emergency session on Thursday to discuss the Prime Minister Netanyahu's declarations regarding the Golan Heights. During the meeting high-ranking representatives stated their opposition to Israel and the meeting which it convened on the Golan this week. The Arab League already addressed the issue at the beginning of the week. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Russian President Vladimir Putin at the beginning of their meeting on Thursday that the Golan Heights is a "red line" for Israel and it must remain a part of it. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter "We are doing everything to prevent the emergence of an additional front of terror against us at the Golan Heights," he added. Netanyahu arrived to Moscow to discuss closer military coordination to avoid incidents between Israel and Russia, which launched a military operation in support of Syrian President Bashar Assad last year. Netanyahu and Putin meet in Moscow (Photo: AFP) The issue of the Golan Heights has become a contentious issue over the past week after Netanyahu declared at a special government meeting held in the Golan that the area will forever remain part of Israel and urged the international community "to recognize finally that the Golan will remain permanently under Israeli sovereignty." Israel captured the Golan Heights in the 1967 Six-Day War and officially annexed it in 1981, in a move that has not won international recognition. Now, Israel is worried that it will be asked to return the Golan to Syria as part of an effort led by world powers to bring the civil war in the country to an end. "In the 19 years the Golan was under Syrian occupation, it was used for bunkers, barbed wire fences, landmines, and aggression. It was used for war. In the 49 years it has been under Israeli rule, it has been used for agriculture, tourism, economic initiatives, construction. It is being used for peace," Netanyahu said. The prime minister's declaration received condemnation from the Arab League and from Syria, as well as from the United States and European Union. "Every administration on both sides of the aisle since 1967 has maintained that those territories are not part of Israel," US State Department Spokesman John Kirby told reporters this week. Kirby went on to say that the conditions under which the Golan Heights should be returned must be decided through negotiations between the respective parties. "And obviously, the current situation in Syria makes it difficult to continue those efforts at this time," Kirby said. A day later, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini reiterated that "The EU recognizes Israel within its pre-1967 boundaries, regardless of the (Israeli) government's claims on other areas, until a final settlement is reached." US President Barack Obama is making what appears to be his final in-office visit to Saudi Arabia to meet with Gulf leaders. Unfortunately for Obama, the most memorable part of his visit will not be the results of Thursday's meetings, but rather the humiliating reception he was given on Wednesday at the Riyadh airport. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter While the elderly Saudi King Salman Bin Abd al-Aziz attended an official airport reception of Gulf leaders, he did not bother to greet Obama at the airport upon his arrival. Instead, Riyadh Governor Prince Faisal Bin Bandar Bin Abd al-Aziz, a relatively low-level official, welcomed the US president upon his arrival. Obama arrives in Riyadh. (Photo: Reuters) Moreover, Saudi state television did not broadcast Obama's arrival at the airport, but it did so live for the Gulf state leaders' arrival. In their meeting, King Salman and President Obama appeared to be smiling, but their smiles cannot hide the major crisis in relations between Washington and Riyadh. The most recent chapter of this crisis is the US Congress's attempt to allow 9/11 victims to prosecute Saudi Arabia for its alleged direct involvement in the terror attacks on US soil. Following 9/11 victims' and US legislators' calls to release censored documents that could implicate Saudi Arabia in the deadliest terror attack in US history, Obama confirmed this week that the highest-ranking US intelligence authority will review the censored documents. US President Obama visits Riyadh. (Photo: AP) Saudi-US relations have also suffered from the Iran nuclear deal's consequences and the corresponding thaw in relations between the US and Iran, which Saudi Arabia considers its greatest enemy. Riyadh is unsatisfied with US policy in the Middle East, especially concerning Syria, where Obama backtracked on his red line to strike the Assad regime after the latter carried out a chemical weapons attack on a Damascus suburb in the summer of 2013. Obama harshly criticized Saudi Arabia in an interview with the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg last month, accussing Saudi Arabia of being a "free rider." In response, former Saudi Intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal wrote that Obama has forgotten who his friends are. Al-Faisal, who also previously served as Saudi ambassador to Washington, told CNN that Saudi Arabia needs to reassess how much it can rely on the US in light of the changes that have surfaced under Obama. Al-Faisal is also not optimistic about the next US president: "I do not think that we can expect from any new US president to return to what we had before." The Jerusalem Police released a statement Thursday, saying, Through intensive intelligence and field activity, the Shin Bet, the Israel Police, and the IDF arrested a number of suspects about a day after the attack on the Jerusalem bus Hamas suspects from the Bethlehem area who are suspected of being involved in planning the attack and executing it. Their questioning is in progress, and their identities are classified. It was also officially confirmed that the person who was killed in the attack, which also wounded 20, is the terrorist who committed it. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter The official statement also said that it has been cleared for publication that the critically wounded man from the attack, who died at the Shaare Zedek hospital, is the terrorist who perpetrated the attack on the Egged line 12 bus. The bus on Monday, shortly after the attack. (Photo: Yarden Leitner) The terrorist, Abd al-Hamid Abu Srur, (who was) about 19 years old, (was a) resident of Beit Jala and affiliated with the Hamas movement, was, as stated, critically wounded during the perpetration of the attack and died of his wounds (on Wednesday) at the hospital. The attack wounded 20 civilians, one of them severely, seven moderately, and the others lightly. The Jerusalem Magistrate Court approved a request by investigators and lifted the gag order on the case, allowing details that could aid in identifying the suspects to be published. A Jewish lawyer, one of the most prominent in Washington, approached me a few days ago, after a lecture. He loves Israel, defends it in all sorts of circles, donates money to anti-boycott initiatives on college campuses. Hes also frustrated. Why, he asked, does Israel never initiate? Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter He knows this material. Hes aware of the fact that the halted negotiations arent Israels fault. Hes well aware of the fact that Hamas wants to wipe Israel off the map. He knows about Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authoritys deceptive behavior, but he has a hard time speaking to Jewish youth. Some of them go to J Street. Some go in much worse directions. Continud construction in the settlements confounds even many of Israel's suppoters abroad. (Photo: AFP) If Netanyahu were to initiate a move regarding Gaza, or a settlement construction freeze - even if only in settlements outside the large and well-established clusters it would give the pro-Israel side a lot of points in the argument, he said. It would prove that Israel, as far as its concerned, is trying to go in a positive direction. But Israel, he complained, isnt taking even the most simple and requisite action to counteract the BDS movement. A week after the lecture he sent me an email with a link to a news story about the latest decision regarding additional construction in the settlements. He asked me if the Israeli government had lost its mind. The same exact day, by happenstance, I receives an email from a retired senior IDF officer, with a paper he wrote in the course of his academic studies in strategy. The paper dealt with Gaza alone. It analyzed the options Israel was facing. The eruption will come, after all. Its just a matter of time. And its clear that the cannons of propaganda will be well-fed by the armories of anti-Israel claims: Its the blockade, the despair, the isolation, the fact that the Gaza Strip is the worlds largest prison, and more. So why, the officer asks, shouldnt we swallow some preventative medicine? Why not initiate a plan to save the Strip? Something big and dramatic, which includes removing the blockade, opening a new seaport, investing in the Gazan economy, etc. All with one condition: he Strips disarmament, as the European Union has suggested in the past, while accepting the Quartets conditions (acknowledging Israel, the secession of violence, and accepting the validity of previous agreements). These are the international communitys conditions the UN, the EU, the US, and Russia. We shouldnt wait for an international initiative, or pressure, or international campaigns: We need to initiate. After all, the officer writes, this could be a win-win situation. If the Palestinian response is positive Israel gains a lot. If its negative the Palestinians take the blame. Israels usual haters will go on as usual, repeating the mantra that says Israel is to blame. But there are many others. This initiative is a pressing need. Its the humane thing to do, and its in line with the national interest. Gaza should get a new seaport, in return for its disarmament. (Photo: AFP) The Washington lawyer and the IDF officer are both correct. The struggle against the anti-Israeli campaign on US campuses isnt simple. The claims against Israel sound reasonable because theres a perception that Israel isnt doing anything. Ive spoken in campuses in recent weeks, as well as in synagogues and community centers. Ive listened to the various voices, including the worried ones. Its not enough to say that the Palestinians have rejected every peace proposal so far and that and Israeli withdrawal could make things worse. Thats all true, but it doesnt counteract the tough queries. It wouldnt be a mistake to say that 90 percent of US Jews have a hard time understanding the logic in the continued settlement project. And Im talking about pro-Israel activists here. The governments determination in dealing with the anti-Israel campaign is a step in the right direction but PR alone, with all due respect, has a limited scope of influence. We need policy too. We need a show of good will. The government has allocated NIS 100 million to combating the anti-Israel campaign, but thats not very much at all. An Israeli initiative would cost $10 billion at least. Why the heck does the Prime Minister of Israel not understand what Israels supporters around the world understand very well? Why does he insist one doing nothing? Why does he insist on helping the BDS movement? (Editors note: As the Air Force Reserve celebrates its 68th birthday this month, the service is also celebrating more than 50 years of being a good neighbor in communities throughout the United States and the world. For years, Air Force Reservists have been helping people in need in underserved areas across the United States through the Innovative Readiness Training program. This story highlights the most recent IRT project.) About 130 total force service members, including 35 Air Force Reservists, spent two weeks in April on Kodiak Island in Alaska providing free medical and veterinary care to people and pets with limited access to these services as part of Arctic Care 2016. As a Department of Defense Innovative Readiness Training project, Arctic Care is designed to provide valuable real-world training to military members while addressing public and civil-society needs. IRT is the ultimate win-win, said Maj. Anna Hill, Air Force Reserve Commands IRT program manager. The military members involved receive tremendous real-world training working with people from their sister services, and the communities involved receive medical or civil engineering services they desperately need. Arctic Care 2016 was a medical IRT project that provided dental, medical, optometry and veterinary services in the city of Kodiak and the smaller villages of Ouzinkie, Port Lions, Larsen Bay, Old Harbor, Akniok and Karluk. In downtown Kodiak, a city of about 6,000 people, hundreds of locals showed up every day at a converted grocery store to receive basic medical care, have their eyes and teeth examined or to seek care for their pets. We are seeing about 60 patients a day in the optometry clinic alone, said Lt. Col. (Dr.) Joni Scott-Weideman, an optometrist assigned to the Air Force Reserves 413th Aeromedical Staging Squadron at Robins Air Force Base, Georgia. Scott-Weideman and fellow optometrist, Capt. (Dr.) Roxanne Buffano, a Reservist assigned to the 927th Aerospace Medicine Squadron at MacDill AFB, Florida, examined patients and wrote prescriptions for eyeglasses on the spot. From there, patients could pick from among six different frame options, and their glasses were crafted by specialists from the Naval Ophthalmic Support and Training Activity. They could then pick up their new glasses the next day. We get to treat patients who have never had an eye exam before, and its amazing to see the look on their faces when they are finally seeing like they should be, Scott-Weideman said, adding that the optometrists worked with officials from the Kodiak Area Native Association to try and arrange follow-on care for people who needed more than a pair of glasses. Kodiak is by far the biggest city on Kodiak Island, which is dotted with a host of smaller remote villages that are only accessible by plane or boat. You cant drive to these smaller villages, but we know there are people there who still need our help, Hill said. So we would send a full team, including a doctor, dentist, optometrist and veterinarian, to these locations for a few days to make sure they were taken care of. Port Lions is one of these smaller villages and is home to about 150 full-time residents. The village has a small clinic but no full-time health care providers. We are so grateful for Arctic Care and the military doctors who have spent the past few days here, Port Lions Mayor Melvin Squartsoff said. Were pretty isolated, and it means the world for our people and their pets to have doctors come here and take care of them. On one of the last days of Arctic Care in Port Lions, the community put on a luncheon feast for the health-care providers and a host of Defense Department distinguished visitors who had come to witness Arctic Care firsthand. Capt. Lisa Alimenti, a health-care administrator assigned to the 940th AMS at Beale AFB, California, said she really enjoyed helping out her fellow Americans during Arctic Care. To me thats the best thing about IRT projects helping out people who really need it, she said. But its also great to see all of the services coming together to work as one team. IRT is all about total force, Hill said. We work hand in hand with active, Guard and Reserve service members from the Army and Navy on these IRT projects, and this year with Arctic Care we had the opportunity to work closely with the Coast Guard and Canadian service members as well. The Arctic Care team members who worked out of the transformed grocery store in the city of Kodiak stayed in tents on the Coast Guard base there. They ate breakfast and dinner prepared in a field kitchen and had meals-ready to eat for lunch each day. Our medical crews get most of the attention, and they certainly do a great job, but we have a lot of people working behind the scenes to make these IRT projects work, Hill said. We have food services team preparing meals, comm folks making sure we can all communicate and logistics people ensuring our teams have all of the equipment they need. These behind-the-scenes folks are getting excellent training as well. In addition to Arctic Care, Air Force Reservists will be taking part in a host of other IRT projects this year, both medical and civil engineering. Other medical IRTs include the South Mississippi medical IRT in the Natchez community and Tropic Care medical IRTs in Hawaii. Reserve civil engineers will be taking part in IRTs in support of the YMCA of the Rockies, the Chenango community in New York, the Southwest Indian Foundation in New Mexico and Arizona, and the Boy Scouts of America in Camp Hinds, Maine. Although her plate is full of IRT projects for 2016, Hill said she is already looking forward to Arctic Care 2017. The Navy was the lead service for Arctic Care 2016, and they did a tremendous job, she said. We (the Air Force Reserve) will be the lead service in 2017, and we are already making plans for next years project. But in spite of those issues, one pro-development lobby group has called for work to start on more apartments in the city, claiming they are needed to address an undersupply of new homes. While new home commencements in Australia reached a record mark in 2015, with work starting on more than 220,000 dwellings, lobby group Urban Taskforce claims Sydney has missed out on thousands of new homes the city needs and believes the apartment sector still has a role to play in fulfilling that demand. The NSW Department of Planning says that 33,200 new homes are needed each year for 20 years in Sydney but last financial year only 27,348 new homes were completed. With a shortfall of nearly 6,000 new homes during the boom times it is essential that more homes are built across Sydney, Urban Taskforce chief executive officer Chris Johnson said. Our members believe the market is still strong for new apartments in key parts of Sydney where cosmopolitan living is becoming the norm. They are concerned however that the market could be destabilised by a series of negative actions that combine to lower confidence in the industry, Johnson said. Rich Harvey, chief executive officer of Propertybuyer.com.au, agreed with Johnson that Sydney likely has an undersupply of new homes and also said some concerns about the city and its apartment market may be somewhat overstated. Traditionally Sydney has been quite undersupplied and the most undersupplied of all the capital cities around Australia and it looks like there will continue to be pressure on the supply side, Harvey said. What were seeing is that theres a very strong pipeline of supply coming and I dont think were going to have any major problems with supply in Sydney. I definitely think theres a bit of fear mongering going on and thats around the APRA and RBA discussion about the potential for oversupply, he said. Harvey doesnt completely discount the issue of apartment oversupply, but he believes concerns that apply to certain suburbs have been extrapolated to cover the entire Sydney market. I do believe there will be pockets of oversupply and thats where the investors need to be careful and do a lot of research to identify the areas where there is the potential for a lot of supply, he said. [People] paint Sydney with the same brush. They think oh gosh, there are so many cranes in the air. For the average property observer out there, youve got to drill down and look at the numbers at a suburb by suburb level. Harvey said suburbs such as Green Square and Parramatta are examples of where oversupply might be an issue, but Todd Hunter, founder of wHeregroup, believes the issue may be spreading and that demand for apartments is falling. A lot of the concerns have been centred in that Zetland and Green Square area, but areas like Hurstville are starting to see number of new apartment projects pop up, Hunter said. I dont agree that theres a need for more apartments in Sydney. Were already seeing prices drop and demand drop. Banks are stopping lending for them, either by suburb or by dwelling type and theyre doing that for a reason, he said. Hunter also said any issue of an undersupply of available homes is likely made worse by apartments being left vacant by foreign owners. I think weve got a glut of supply at the moment, but a lot of it is being left unoccupied. Its stuff thats been bought by foreign buyers and they might visit and use it once a year or its used for part of the year by their children who are at university. Our directory features more than 18 million business listings from across the entire US. However, if we're missing your business, add your business by clicking on Add Your Business. Dispur: A tribal woman chopped off of man's genitals, killed him and later buried his body for allegedly attempting to rape her daughter in the north-eastern state of Assam. According to a report in the Hindustan Times, the matter came to fore after the local police arrested Rita Orang and her husband late on Tuesday for killing a youth identified as Krishna Bhumij in Bharajuli village in Biswanath Chariali district of Assam. During interrogation, the tribal woman narrated the whole incident to police which was probing a 'missing person complaint' filed by Krishnas family regarding his sudden disappearance a fortnight ago. While probing the case, the police came to know that Krishna was killed. His body was exhumed on Tuesday night and sent for autopsy, Biswanath Charialis Superintendent of Police Anjur Jain was quoted as saying. Krishna, a criminal and wanted in two cases, was hacked to death with an axe by the woman after he tried to rape her and her daughter in their house on April 4. Hit hard by the axe, Krishna fell unconsciousness on the ground. It was then the woman chopped off his private parts and later killed him in a fit of rage. Rita then called seven other women from her village, narrated the whole incident and later buried his body in the crematorium. Raipur: The Chhattisgarh Board of Secondary Education (CGBSE) will declare the Class 12 results (CGBSE Result 2016) on Thursday (April 21) at 11 am. Students can visit the official websites of the Chhattisgarh Board to access results: cgbse.nic.in, cgbse.net The Chhattisgarh Higher Secondary exams for all streams - Science, Commerce, Arts - were held in the months of February and March. Around three lakhs students had appeared for the exams. Earlier, it was reported that CGBSE 12th Results 2016 will be announced in May. CGBSE was established in September 20, 2001 after formation of the state of Chhattisgarh. The main aim of this board is to promote and develop of secondary education in the complete state. All facility provided by CG Board can be checked online at official website of board. Zeenews.com wishes best of luck to all students. New Delhi: The ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Thursday accused the BJP of setting Delhi`s dump yards on fire to sabotage the city government`s flagship odd-even restrictions on plying four-wheelers for reducing pollution in the national capital. The AAP said the fires at various dump yards in Delhi may cause health hazards and alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was "playing with the lives" of people in Delhi. "The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is stooping to the lowest in Delhi to fail odd-even. MCD burning dump yards, creating health hazard. BJP pollutes Delhi," senior Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Dilip Pandey tweeted. "Such a hatred against Delhiites is not good, Modi ji. You got the dump yards set on fire just to fail the odd-even scheme in Delhi. Don`t kill Delhi like this," he added. "You (Prime Minister Narendra Modi) are playing with the lives of Delhiites through MCD. It`s not only wrong, but also inhuman. Please stop this." Raipur: The Chhattisgarh Board of Secondary Education (CGBSE) will declare the Class 12 results (CGBSE Result 2016) on Thursday (April 21) at 11 am. Students can visit the official websites of the Chhattisgarh Board to access results: cgbse.nic.in, cgbse.net The Chhattisgarh Higher Secondary exams for all streams - Science, Commerce, Arts - were held in the months of February and March. Around three lakhs students had appeared for the exams. CGBSE was established in September 20, 2001 after formation of the state of Chhattisgarh. The main aim of this board is to promote and develop of secondary education in the complete state. All facility provided by CG Board can be checked online at official website of board. Raipur: Chhattisgarh Board of Secondary Education will announce the Class 12 results (CGBSE Result 2016) on Thursday (April 21) at 11 AM. Students can visit the official site of Chhattisgarh Board to access their results - cgbse.nic.in, www.cgbse.net The Chhattisgarh Higher Secondary exams for all streams, Science, Commerce, Arts were held in the months of February and March. Around three lakhs students had appeared for the exams. Earlier it was reported that CGBSE 12th Results 2016 will be announced in May. CGBSE was established in September 20, 2001 after formation of Chhattisgarh. The main aim of this board is to promote and develop of secondary education in the complete state. All facility provided by CG Board can be checked online at official website of board. Best of luck to all students. Rohtak: It seems the government officials refuse to learn from past mistakes. Even after huge uproar over wastage of water for Akhilesh Yadav, S Siddaramaiah's visits in their respective states, 1,000 litres of water was used for preparing helipad for Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar's chopper in Yamunanagar. Last week, the Haryana government faced Supreme Court ire over drought. BJP activist Dayanand Nene had claimed that 10,000 litres of water was used for helipad for Union Minister Radha Mohan Singh in Bhiwandi. News agency ANI had reported that thousands of litres of water was wasted in the preparation of the helipad which Maharashtra Minister Eknath Khadse's helicopter needed to land on. Several litres of water was wasted in drought-hit Lalitpur district of Uttar Pradesh to ensure smooth landing of Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav's chopper on Tuesday. The local administration had sprinkled two tankers of water on a particular stretch through which Karnataka Chief Minister S Siddaramaiah and his convoy were supposed to pass. The SC had last week slammed the Centre over the state of acute drought in parts of the country asking the latter as to why they were not taking a call and waiting for the states to declare drought themselves. Washington DC: If this turns into a reality, it will be a major shot in the arm for PM Narendra Modi. Four US lawmakers have written to House Speaker Paul Ryan asking him to invite PM Modi to address a joint meeting of the US Congress, according to a report in TOI. The PM's address may take place during his visit to US on June 7-8. Reportedly, the US lawmakers in their letter to the speaker has said, "We believe this (PM Modi's US visit) is an ideal opportunity for the Congress to hear directly from the PM." "Inviting Prime Minister Modi to address a Joint Meeting will allow Congress to express support for this special global partnership," the letter by the US lawmakers mentioned. Signatories to the letter include Ed Royce, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, ranking member Eliot Engel, and Congresmen George Holding and Ami Bera. Noteworthy, Ami Bera is the only Indian-American lawmaker in Congress. New Delhi: Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju on Wednesday criticised the Congress for coining the word "saffron terror" and said this terminology was given by that party as it was "working with an agenda". He was talking to reporters in New Delhi a day after NIA chief Sharad Kumar said there is no evidence linking arrested Army officer, Lt Col Prasad Purohit, who was chargesheeted in the 2008 Malegaon terror attack case, with the Samjhauta blast case. On Thursday, Congress faced criticism on Twitter for allegedly favouring the minority community. Here's what Twitteartis said: #CongressVsHinduism Hindus and Hinduism have suffered immensely under Congress raj cause of their anti Hindu policies Gaurav Mohnot (@mohnotgaurav18) April 21, 2016 If Kasab was not caught alive, whose innocent Hindu Life would have been blamed like Col Purohit #CongressVsHinduism pic.twitter.com/oO6BdfZEpn C@PTAIN ABSOLUT (@MrWanderfoool) April 21, 2016 Samjhauta Expose tells us Congress is the ISI of India in the name of Hindu Terrorism #CongressVsHinduism C@PTAIN ABSOLUT (@MrWanderfoool) April 21, 2016 Kissing the minority & Kicking the majority Has always been the policy of cong #CongressVsHinduism Madhav (@mahesh10816) April 21, 2016 Feel shameful. Congress party ruled this country not for the people, but just 4 their political career & own benefits.#CongressVsHinduism Tina Basetia (@tinabasetia) April 21, 2016 Kamlesh Tiwari rots in jail for inflammatory statements but the Ulema who offered 51 lakhs for his head is roaming free #CongressVsHinduism Archie (@Archu243) April 21, 2016 @INCIndia is a anti Hindu party! So they got only minority vote & reduced to a minority party 44 in LS #CongressVsHinduism Truth Hurts (@shall_isaytruth) April 21, 2016 New Delhi: The members of the Defence Acquisition Council are expected to meet on Thursday to decide on matters related to to Defence Procurement Procedure. According to reports, the DAC is also likely to decide on the purchase of 36 Rafale fighter jet deal from France. New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday asked civil servants not to work in silos but as a team and act as an agent of change for welfare of the people and development of the country. Addressing bureaucrats on Civil Services Day here, he asked them to experiment to bring in change besides increasing engagement with the people for greater results. "Some people work in silos. We get more results working in team than in isolation. We need to come out of silos and work together as a team for nation building," Modi said. He said the role of civil services was earlier of a regulator. Then after some time, the role changed to that of an administrator and then controller. "When time further changed, you (civil servants) must have thought of acquiring managerial skills. Time is changing. Only being an administrator and controller is not enough. It is the need of the hour that everybody, at every level, has to be an agent of change," the Prime Minister said. He said, "we need to bring in changes. When we sit at one place we forget to experiment. If we do not experiment then how do we bring changes. There is no experiment without risk. And if we don't experiment, then it becomes merely a job". "I always reward experiments. People who do work differently and experiment, they get a different satisfaction," the Prime Minister said. In his about 45-minute long pep talk to a large gathering of bureaucrats from the Centre and states, Modi asked senior officials to benefit from the knowledge of their juniors, who are of a different generation and probably know better ways to do a task. He said that his mantra of "reform to transform", should be interpreted by civil servants as "reform to perform to transform". Modi said if civil servants were able to perform, the transformation on the ground would be evident. Modi asked seniors to combine their experience with knowledge and skill sets of juniors and asserted there would be nothing which cannot be done. The Prime Minister said there should not be any "tiredness" while they are working as it will create obstacles. "Rukavat samasya paida nahin karti hai, thakavat karti hai (Obstacles do not create problems but tiredness do)", he said asking the civil servants to be energetic and to keep away weariness from their attitude. The Prime Minister said that 'jan bhagidari' or public participation is the key to success. "Initiatives have succeeded when 'jan bhagidari' is embraced. Engaging with civil society is very important," he said. Modi asked bureaucrats to engage with the people, so that the government's schemes and initiatives can be better implemented on the ground. Referring to the Committees of Secretaries which had been formed at his initiative to look into key areas of governance, he said that officials worked on these tasks voluntarily after office hours and on holidays. Modi said these teams had "successfully broken silos", and presented fresh ideas and suggestions. They had devoted 10,000 man-hours to this work. "Let us create an atmosphere where everyone can contribute. The energy of 125 crore Indians will take the nation ahead," the Prime Minister said. Chandigarh: Haryana Finance Minister Abhimanyu on Thursday questioned the "silence" of Congress president Sonia Gandhi and vice president Rahul Gandhi on the violence during the Jat agitation in the state in February. "I want to ask why Rahul Gandhi, who has a habit of spot visits after any small happening, remained mum when Haryana was burning," Abhimanyu told the media here. He also questioned Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Haryana Congress president Ashok Tanwar and former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda as to "why they remained silent on the Congress role" during the agitation by Jats who were demanding quota in government jobs and educational institutions. He said that arson at his house, and other places in Rohtak were a "political conspiracy", adding that evidence emerging from investigation clearly indicated to a political link behind the violence. "Those who have come under the scanner have direct relation with a group within that political party (Congress)," Abhimanyu said. Asked about his (minister's) photographs with Sandeep Kalkal who is accused of violence, Abhimanyu said Kalkal was closely linked to Congress politicians and his family members benefitted during Bhupinder Singh Hooda's government. The minister indicated that more violence took place in areas where Congress leaders had good influence. Bhopal: Ujjain is geared up to host Kumbh Mela, the biggest religious congregation of Hindus, from Friday during which over five crore people including seers are expected to visit the holy city, with Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan saying it will be a "Green Simhastha". Apart from a string of conventions that are typically attached with the Kumbh, this time eunuchs have set up their 'akhara' in the fair area and took out a procession today. "We have made all arrangements for holding the grand religious Simhastha mela in Ujjain from tomorrow. During the month-long fair, a three-day international philosophic convention will be held which will be inaugurated by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat on May 12 and Prime Minister Narendra Modi will chair the concluding function on May 14," Chouhan told reporters here. He said on the basis of deliberations of the convention, a declaration would be released on issues confronting the world like global warming, environment and pollution, value-based life, science and spiritualism, welfare of human being through religion, organic farming, cleanliness and women empowerment. "In other words, it will be a Green Simhastha," the CM said. Replying to a query, he said during the 'Shahi Snan' (royal bath) in Kshipra river, no VVIP or VIP would visit Ujjain so that the event could be held without any disturbance. While the first 'Shahi Snan' is slated for tomorrow, another is scheduled on May 21. Over five crore pilgrims are expected to visit Ujjain and other holy places during the fair, for which huge security and logistical arrangements have been made, including shifting of police forces from various districts to Ujjain, one of the 12 'jyotirlingas' and the abode of Lord Mahakaleshwar. "This time eunuchs have also set up their 'akhara' in the mela area and today they have successfully taken out their procession in the city which was accorded grand welcome," Chouhan said. As per the convention, all 13 'akharas' of seers took out a procession called 'Peshwai' in Ujjain on the eve of the main fair, he said. Heads of state including that of Sri Lanka and Nepal, besides a large number of prominent dignitaries from various countries would take part in the mela. "Around five crore devotees are expected to take part in the Kumbh mela on the banks of pious Shipra river for which security has been ramped up in every nook and cranny of the district," said Inspector General of Police (IGP), Ujjain Range, Madhu Kumar. At present, 22,000 security personnel, including the state policemen, personnel from central forces and other departments have been deployed, he said. "At the time of Shahi Snan (royal dip) in Shipra river, 25,000 security personnel will keep a watch at the Mela venue," Kumar added. New Delhi: In what has turned the tables on India, Pakistan foreign office has claimed that the National Investigation Agency has not made any request to visit the country to conduct Pathankot terror attack probe, News18 report stated on Thursday. Meanwhile, a couple of days ago reports had claimed that NIA has readied fresh Letters Rogatory (LRs) to be sent to Pakistan containing the addresses of four Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists who attacked the strategic Pathankot IAF base in January. The LRs are being despatched notwithstanding indications from the Pakistani side that it was not yet ready to receive Indian investigators to carry forward the probe in the January two attack that left seven security personnel dead. Four terrorists were also killed in the 80-hour gunbattle. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) had put the pictures of the four dead terrorists on its official website and asked general public for help in identifying them. According to official sources, the central probe agency, set up in the aftermath of 26/11 Mumbai attacks, was flooded with many emails, some of which originated from Pakistan also, giving information about the terrorists. NIA, during its interaction with the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) of Pakistan, had sought details about the place of residence of the terrorists whose names had been shared with the visiting probe team. However, there was no response from Pakistan on the Indias request. The five-member JIT also comprising an ISI officer had visited India from March 27 to April one during which they visited the air base and recorded statements of 16 witnesses. During the exercise of verification of the information gathered through emails, the NIA showed the pictures and addresses to some of the jailed terrorists of Jaish-e-Mohammed terror group lodged in jails here and got important inputs from them. (With PTI inputs) Delhi: In a tragic news, a pregnant Indian woman working as a nurse in Oman was found dead in her apartment, according to a media report. Hindustan Times quoted Times of Oman as saying that Chikku Robert, who hailed from Kerala, was found with at least a dozen stab wounds on her body. Robert and her husband were working at Badr Al Samaa hospital in Salalah city, the capital of Dhofar province. They had married four months ago. She was found dead in her apartment yesterday. She was supposed to be on duty by 10 pm. As she didnt turn up to duty, her husband went to the apartment only to find her lying dead, Manpreet Singh, the honorary Indian consular agent in Salalah, was quoted as saying. Investigation is on, police have sealed the area and the body is kept in Sultan Qaboos Hospital, he added. KO Devassy, the group marketing manager of Badr Al Samaa hospital, was also quoted as saying, "Its sad news. We are waiting for updates." Lucknow: A day after newly appointed UP BJP chief Keshav Prasad Maurya said that Ram Janmabhoomi issue was never a key poll plank of BJP, Union Minister Kalraj Mishra on Thursday said the construction of Ram temple in Ayodhya has always been a top priority for the party. The BJP is making desperate attempts to establish its presence in Uttar Pradesh. Law and order should be sound in the state. Before it, we cannot talk about other issues. Our agenda in the polls would be development, good law and order, communal peace and harmony. Without resolving these issues, nothing can be done, Union Minister for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Kalraj Mishra said. While asserting that 'Ram Mandir' has never been a poll issue for the BJP, Maurya had said that the party will contest the 2017 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections on the development issue. Maurya had said Ram temple is an issue of faith and not a poll plank for the Uttar Pradesh polls which will be fought on development agenda. The BJP won 71 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats from Uttar Pradesh in 2014, with two other seats going to an ally. The Samajwadi Party won five seats while the Congress got just two. The BSP drew a blank. In subsequent bye-elections, however, the BJP has suffered ups and downs in the state. New Delhi: The Supreme Court has hit out at the rich and powerful for trying to abuse the judicial process using money power. The court rued that such elements use money power to waste the time of courts. The court made the remarks while imposing Rs 25 lakh penalty each on three firms Griesham GmbH (MGG), Goyal Gases Ltd (GGL) and the Ruias - for the loss of judicial time. As per a report in the Deccan Chronicle, a bench of Justices J Chelameswar and AM Sapre said the money would be paid to the National Legal Services Authority and utilised for funding poor litigants in deserving cases. Justice Chelameswar said: This case should also serve as proof of the abuse of the discretionary jurisdiction of this court under Article 136 of the Constitution by the rich and powerful in the name of fight for justice at each and every interlocutory step of a suit. Enormous amount of judicial time of this court and two High Courts was spent on this litigation. Most of it is avoidable and could have been well spent on more deserving cases. According to the report, the companies had filed suits on allotment of shares and trade agreements. They had filed appeals in the Supreme Court against each interim order passed by the Bombay High Court, which had led to a prolonged litigation. The bench said, The examination of various questions raised by the petitioners in these special leave petitions, in our opinion, is wholly uncalled for. The net effect of all the litigation is that for the last 18 years, the litigation is going on. The bench added, ...We believe that it is only the parties who are to be blamed for the state of affairs. This case, in our view, is a classic example of the abuse of the judicial process by unscrupulous litigants with money power, all in the name of legal rights by resorting to half-truths, misleading representations and suppression of facts. Each and every party is guilty of one or the other of the above-mentioned misconducts. New Delhi: The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) has cut ties with Rajendra K. Pachauri, accused of sexually harassing a female colleague in 2015. According to The Hindu, Pachauri was sacked by the governing council of the research institute in a meeting earlier this week. As per the report, the governing council cut its ties with Pachauri despite the fact that his employment contract expires in July 2017. It was also decided that the 75-year-old's membership for the council will not be renewed, which ended on March 31 this year. It was decided to "pay all the dues for the remainder of the tenure and bring an immediate end to it (contract)". The decision means Pachauri will no longer be the executive vice-chairman. Speaking to The Hindu, TERI's spokesperson said, ...Dr. Pachauris term as a Member of the Governing Council of Teri ended on March 31, 2016. As the post of executive vice-chairman is co-terminus with this membership, his role as executive vice-chairman also ended along with his membership of the Council. TERI's decision comes as, earlier this month, a third woman alleged she was sexually harassed by Pachauri. Pachauri was accused of sexually harassing a female colleague in 2015. He stepped down as chairperson of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in February last year. In November, the woman researcher who accused him of sexual harassment quit her job at TERI, alleging that she was treated badly. Patna: Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Thursday criticised the Modi government after Uttarakhand High Court quashed the order of that had put the state under President's Rule. "This is a very important verdict, what was done in Uttarakhand was against the constitution. The BJP can't tolerate other party's rule, they will do anything to dismantle those governments," Nitish told the media here. In a setback to the Bharatiya Janata Party-led NDA government at the Centre, the Uttarakhand High Court on Thursday set aside President's rule proclamation in the state. Allowing ousted chief minister Harish Rawat's petition challenging the imposition of President's Rule, the court fixed April 29 for a floor test for him. Meanwhile, Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi has said the Centre would challenge the court's verdict in the Supreme Court on Friday morning. Kolkata: Dissatisfied by his reply to the show-cause notice, the Election Commission on Thursday ordered a police case against Trinamool Congress candidate Abdur Rezzak Mollah over his "objectionable" remarks about BJP's actress-turned-poll nominee Roopa Ganguly. "Mollah replied to the show-cause notice but it was not satisfactory. The returning officer did not find his reply to be satisfactory. So a first information report has been lodged against him under section 509 of the Indian Penal Code," said state chief electoral officer Sunil Kumar Gupta said. The section deals with outraging the "modesty of woman" and carries a maximum punishment of one year simple imprisonment. The EC on Wednesday had issued a show-cause notice to Mollah, contesting the West Bengal assembly polls from Bhangar in South 24 Parganas, after the Bharatiya Janata Party moved it, seeking action against Mollah for his remarks which had cast aspersions on the character of Ganguly, famous for portraying Draupadi in the TV series Mahabharata. Known for making controversial remarks, Mollah, a former state minister, was expelled from the Communist Party of India-Marxist in 2014 for "anti-party activities". Mollah had been censured and show-caused earlier by the poll panel for some of his utterances. Srinagar: Two unidentified militants were killed on Thursday in an encounter with security forces in north Kashmir's Kupwara district, the Army said. Acting on specific information about the presence of militants in Putshai area of Lolab in the district, security forces cordoned off the area and began a search operation today, an army official said. He said as the search operation was going on, militants who were hiding there fired upon the forces resulting in a gun battle. Two militants have been killed in the operation so far, the official said. He said the identity of the slain militants could not be immediately ascertained. The operation was still ongoing. Srinagar: Even though scores of students on Wednesday staged a demonstration here demanding the release of a 16-year-old school girl who is at the centre of Handwara molestation row, her classmates are not too keen on welcoming her back. Schools reopened in Handwara on Thursday. Trouble had erupted in the town in north Kashmir, 70 km north of Srinagar, after rumours last Tuesday that a school girl had been molested by a soldier while she was using a public lavatory, near a security picket in a town square of Handwara. Five people were killed in firing by security forces in the widespread violence that engulfed Handwara and adjacent areas in Kupwara district after the alleged molestation incident. The girl later deposed before the chief judicial magistrate (CJM) of Handwara that she had not been molested by anybody and that some local youth were responsible for accusing her and spreading the molestation rumour in the town. Talking to news channel NDTV, classmates said that the school girl "suppressed reality, she should have spoken the truth". Most told the channel that they would not mingle with her if she returns. The principal of the teen's school, however, said: "We will support her fully we would like her to continue her studies in this institution despite all the odds. The girl is in preventive custody with her father and aunt. Srinagar: Three guerrillas belonging to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) outfit were arrested here on Thursday. The arrests took place in Lal Mandi area, a police officer said. One of the three was identified as Ubaid. The officer said the development was a major success as their questioning could lead to arrests of more militants. Srinagar: In a major success, security forces today killed three militants in an encounter in Lolab, about 99 kms from here, in Kupwara district and recovered a large quantity of arms and ammunition from them. The encounter in Putshai area erupted when militants fired at security forces who went there on receiving specific information about the presence of the ultras, an army official said. Three militants were killed in the encounter, he said. A Defence spokesman said the killing of the three militants is a "major blow" to militant outfits operating in Kashmir Valley. "It is a major blow to the terrorist outfits that security forces today eliminated three-heavily armed terrorists without causing any collateral damage," Defence spokesman Lt Col N N Joshi said. He said a large quantity of arms and ammunition has been recovered from the militants which includes three AK 47 Rifles, three UBGL, 387 AK 47 rounds, 10 AK 47 magazines and three pouches. The identity and group affiliation of the slain militants was yet to be ascertained, a police spokesman said. Their bodies were handed over to local Auqaf of the village for burial after completion of legal formalities. In another operation launched in Zudur area of south Kashmir's Pulwama district, security forces recovered a cache of war like stores including ammunition and grenades, the spokesman said. Srinagar: Security forces on Thursday killed three militants in a gun battle in Jammu and Kashmir`s Kupwara district which officials said was still raging. The killings were reported in Patushai village, a senior police official told IANS here. One militant may still be hiding in the area, the official added. The Rashtriya Rifles and the Special Operations Group of the Jammu and Kashmir Police began the operation after getting a tip about the presence of militants in the area. Three AK-47 rifles were recovered from the dead men. Kochi: Two persons were detained by the Election Commission who were travelling to Kerala in a bus with carrying Rs 1 crore 34 lakhs. The two hail from Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. Both have been handed over to the Tax Department, which is now interrogating them. It is to be noted the a Model Code of Conduct is in force in Kerala in view of the ongoing assembly elections here. Thiruvananthapuram: Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy on Thursday asked the health authorities to take steps to ban the use and sale of e-cigarettes in the state. A statement issued from Chandy's office said that after reports about the dangers associated with e-cigarettes and the increase in its sale in the state, the chief minister wanted necessary steps to be taken to see that the item is banned. E-cigarette is a hand-held, electronic cigarette-shaped device that vaporises a flavoured liquid and is believed to affect the general health of its user. Nashik: In yet another step towards ending gender disparity, the Trimbakeshwar temple trust on Thursday allowed women to enter and pray inside inner sanctum of the famous Lord Shiva temple here. ''Trimbakeshwar temple will now allow both men and women to enter and pray inside inner sanctum, '' DS Kushwah, Nasik Collector, told reporters. Dedicated to Lord Shiva, the Trimbakeshwar temple is one of the 12 Jyotirlingas situated in the country. As per reports, a group of three women activists of the 'Swarajya Sanghatan' led by Vanita Gutte, was allowed to enter the temple amidst tight security. 'Bhumata Brigade' president Trupti Desai, who started the campaign for womens entry to all places of worship in January, welcomed the development and announced she will visit the temple on Friday. The development is significant as it comes 13 days after women were permitted entry to the Shani Shingnapur temple in Ahmednagar district on April 8. Refusing to bend before the religious bigotry, Bhumata Brigade activists had warned that they will attempt to enter the inner sanctum of Trimbakeshwar Temple in Nashik today. Triputi, who had earlier tried to enter the sanctum, was detained at a place called Nandur Shingote near Pune-Nashik border in Maharashtra. The Trimbakeshwar Devasthan Trust in Maharashtra had maintained that the women devotees can be allowed into the famous Lord Shiva temple's sanctum sanctorum for an hour everyday, but with a rider that they must wear wet cotton or silk clothes while offering prayers in the core area. There is no discrimination between men and women, we allow entry inside inner sanctum for 1 hour, from 6 am to 7 am. We allow entry of women only if they wear wet cotton or silk clothes, Temple trustee Lalita Shinde had said earlier. Members of Bhumata Brigade and women devotees, who had refused to follow the temple trust' dictates, were stopped from entering the temple, which led to a scuffle. An FIR was also lodged in this regard later by the Bhumata Brigade activists. (With ANI inputs) Mumbai: Two convicts of 2002-03 Mumbai blast case - Atif Mulla and Hasib Mulla - filed appeals on Thursday against their conviction in the Bombay High Court. They also filed bail applications. The Bombay High Court admitted the pleas for hearing and issued notices to the Government of Maharashtra and others on bail pleas of the two blasts case convicts. The notices are returnable in two weeks. Both Atif Mulla and Hasib Mulla are sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment in the case.\ A Special Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) court on April 6 awarded life imprisonment to three of the 10 convicts in the 2002-2003 Mumbai blasts that killed 12 people and injured 27 others between December 2002 and March 2003. Four convicts, including key accused Saquib Nachan, were sentenced to 10 years of rigorous imprisonment. Three other convicts, who have already served around eight years in jail, got two years of simple imprisonment. There were three explosions in Mumbai in four months starting with the first blast on December 6, 2002 at the McDonald`s at Mumbai Central Railway Station. The second blast occurred on January 27, 2003 at Vile Parle East market and the third blast took place in a local train at the Mulund Railway Station on March 13, 2003. Mumbai: Seeking bail for former media baron Peter Mukerjea, his lawyer on Thursday claimed in a court here that his client had nothing to do with the murder of Sheena Bora. Peter's wife and Sheena's mother Indrani is the prime accused in the case. Peter's lawyer, advocate Aabad Ponda, today argued in the court of special CBI judge H S Mahajan that CBI picked up sentences from the statements of witnesses shorn of context to claim that Peter wanted to kill Sheena. Peter was not against the relationship between Sheena and Rahul (his son from earlier marriage) and in fact he blessed them when they got engaged, Ponda said, adding that Indrani, on the other hand, was against this relationship. "It is because of (Peter's) `karma' and fate that he got Indrani as his wife,' the lawyer said. About the allegation that Peter and Indrani were in constant touch during the period when crime took place (April 2012), Ponda said these were normal calls between husband and wife. "Strangers including police officers are called by (Indrani), CBI did not find it suspicious, but calling her husband is suspicious," Ponda said. Peter was in Rome during this period with Vidhie (Indrani's daughter from her relationship with former husband and co-accused Sanjeev Khanna) and many calls were just casual `good morning/good evening' conversations, he said. Indrani spoke to both Vidhie and Peter, he added. "If talking on phone is an offence, then many witnesses in the case such as police officers, psychiatrists and Indrani's personal assistant should have been named as accused," Ponda said. The arguments will continue tomorrow. Peter's bail application has been rejected once earlier. He was arrested on November 19. Other arrested accused are Indrani, Sanjeev Khanna and her driver Shyamvar Rai. Indrani, Rai and Khanna allegedly strangled Sheena (24), Indrani's daughter from earlier relationship, inside a car in April 2012. The crime came to light last August. According to CBI, the crime was linked to financial transactions. Nashik: Refusing to bend before the religious bigotry, Bhumata Brigade activists led by its president Trupti Desai will attempt to enter the inner sanctum of Trimbakeshwar Temple in Nashik on Thursday. Triputi, who had earlier tried to enter the sanctum, was detained at a place called Nandur Shingote near Pune-Nashik border in Maharashtra. The Trimbakeshwar Devasthan Trust in Maharashtra has maintained that the women devotees can be allowed into the famous Lord Shiva temple's sanctum sanctorum for an hour everyday, but with a rider that they must wear wet cotton or silk clothes while offering prayers in the core area. There is no discrimination between men and women, we allow entry inside inner sanctum for 1 hour, from 6 am to 7 am. We allow entry of women only if they wear wet cotton or silk clothes, Temple trustee Lalita Shinde had said earlier. Members of Bhumata Brigade and women devotees, who had refused to follow the temple trust' dictates, were stopped from enterning the temple, which led to a scuffle. An FIR was also lodged in this regard later by the Bhumata Brigade activists. (With ANI inputs) New Delhi: The popular search engine giant Google celebrated Earth Day with a range of colourful animated doodles. The visitors on the homepage are greeted with series of doodles where five animals, polar bear, fox, elephant, tortoise and octopus are profiled in it. Users can see the other illustrations by refreshing the homepage. The doodles are designed by Sophie Diao. Every year Earth Day is celebrated on April 22 all over the world and encourages people to look after the Earth by being environmentally friendly. The concept of celebrating Earth Day started in 1970. Check out the doodles: Chandigarh: Launching a scathing attack on AAP and Congress, Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal on Thursday alleged that both the parties are indulging into ugly politics for their narrow motives The SAD supremo accused both the parties of doing politics on farmers' deaths. Badal asked Congress and AAP to put a brake on their "vulture mentality against Punjab farmers and stop praying for death and destruction so that they could get an opportunity to exploit it". "Please stop playing politics of death in Punjab," the SAD leader was quoted as saying by a party release here. He claimed the issuance of Cash Credit Limit (CCL) by RBI to facilitate payment to farmers for the procurement of wheat was "a strong vindication" of the stand of the government that not a single grain of wheat was missing from stocks. SAD had yesterday slammed Congress leader Sunil Jakhar for claiming that wheat has "disappeared" from godowns in the state. The ruling party said if the charges were true, the Reserve Bank of India would not have issued authorisation of CCL of Rs 17,523 crore towards first instalment for the procurement of 90 lakh tonnes of wheat. Lashing out at Congress and AAP, Badal alleged, "These parties are so desperate for power in Punjab that just in order to show the government in poor light, they went to the extent of organising 'havans' to pray for non-clearance of money to farmers." "As a rural Punjabi and farmer, I know with what eagerness every member of a farmer's family, from children to elderly parents, waits for the harvest season and how everything in the family depends on a good crop and timely payment. I could hardly sleep all these days, till CCL was cleared. It was such a huge relief for every farmer and for me personally when it was finally done," the five-time Chief Minister said. He claimed that "every farmer in the state was upset and angry with Congress and AAP for playing politics even on an issue of life and death for the peasantry." Reacting to Jakhar's comment, Badal said, "I expected at least you, being a farmer, to distance yourself from this vulture-mentality." Punjab goes to Assembly polls in 2017. (With PTI inputs) Jodhpur: A group of dalit residents who have been protesting against the opening of a liquor shop in their locality have claimed that they have converted to Buddhism as the state administration has ignored their demand. The residents of Sant Ravidas Colony in Bhadasia suburb of Jodhpur have been protesting for three weeks now against the liquor shop. Some of the protesting residents have also got themselves tonsured. Ashok Balotia, one of the protesters who shaved his head, said that they would continue their movement against the liquor shop "come what may". "We had warned of conversion from Hinduism and since we are followers of B R Ambedkar, we have adopted Buddhism like him," he said. Bhagwanti from the same locality said that they were ready to go to any extent to stop the opening of the liquor shop and would not settle for anything less than the cancellation of the shop licence. District collector Vishnu Charan Mallik said that they are looking into the issue and would soon come out with a solution. "We are up to it in order to come out with a mutually acceptable solution and hope that in a day or two, the issue would be resolved," said Mallik. Islamabad: Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has vowed to have the name of his three children cleared in the 'Panama Papers' issue and is weighing all options to deal with the accusations of money laundering and tax evasion, according to a media report. Dawn News reported that Sharif wants to complete the probe into the issue as soon as possible whether it is through the judicial commission he announced earlier or through some other forum. Sharif returned from London on Tuesday after a week-long stay for medical treatment and was reportedly under immense pressure to come clear after the 'Panama papers' reported that his sons Hassan and Hussian and daughter Maryam were owners of offshore companies, the daily said. The Prime Minister had promised setting up of a special commission headed by a retired judge of the Supreme Court to lead the probe into the issue before going to London but this was rejected by the opposition. If an agreement cannot be reached with opposition parties over the formation of a judicial commission, the option of a joint parliamentary committee as suggested by Pakistan People's Party (PPP) leadership could also be utilised, the Prime Minister's aides were quoted as saying. One of the federal government's legal advisers told the daily that, "We have done our homework and the next move will be made after the PM is briefed -- in a day or two -- about talks with leaders of parliamentary parties that Senator Ishaq Dar has held over the past few days." A PML-N lawmaker, involved in the discussions over the government's possible response to the opposition parties' demands, was quoted as saying that "the government is also brainstorming the option of formally asking for the CJP's input if the commission can be formed under his aegis or a serving judge of the Supreme Court." The lawmaker said that in case of a continued disagreement with the opposition, there was every likelihood that the government would go ahead with the commission. Whatever level and forum is employed, the lawmaker said one thing was certain that the matter of the Panama Papers will be addressed legally so that it cannot create future problems for the Premier's three children. According to the documents, three of Sharif's four children -- Maryam, Hasan and Hussain -- "were owners or had the right to authorise transactions for several companies". The Prime Minister and his family have dismissed allegations of money laundering and denied any wrongdoing but the opposition is demanding an independent probe. Washington: Amid the US' push to expand cooperation with India in the space sector, the country's nascent private space industry has expressed its opposition to the large scale use of low cost ISRO launch vehicles for putting American satellites into orbits. Such a move, corporate leaders and officials of the fast- emerging American private space industry told lawmakers this week would be detrimental to the future health of the private sector US space companies as it would be tough for them to compete against low-cost Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launch vehicles, which they alleged are subsidised by the Indian government. "I think the concern about using Indian boosters is not so much the transfer of sensitive technology to a nation that is a fellow democracy, but rather whether the Indian launches are subsidised by the government to a degree that other market actors would be priced out of the market," Elliot Holokauahi Pulham, CEO of Space Foundation, said. Testifying before a Congressional committee, Pulham said there has been some discussion about allowing US built satellites to fly on boosters such as the Indian PSLV. Eric Stallmer, president Commercial Spaceflight Federation, opposed efforts to facilitate a government- subsidised foreign launch company. "In this case, India, to compete with US companies. Such policy runs counter to many national priorities and undermines the work and investment that has been made by the government and industry to ensure the health of the US commercial space launch industrial base," Stallmer said. He said the challenge right now is that the satellite manufacturers are making satellites at a quicker rate right now than the US has the launch capability. So a satellite is not making money while it's sitting on the ground, he said. "Currently, the Indian launch vehicle PSLV has a sweet spot and has the capability of launching some of these satellites right now in a timely manner. We don't want to see US launches going overseas by any means, whether it's to India, Russia or whomever else. But right now, from the satellite, you know, producers and manufacturers, they need to get their assets up in the sky as quick as possible," Stallmer said. Noting that the current policy with the waivers and the review is a sound policy, he said the US should stringently look at every launch that is taking place in every vehicle or every payload that the US are putting up on an Indian vehicle. "I think it really needs to be evaluated. We hope to phase this out as a new generation of launched vehicles come online," Stallmer said. "I've heard from a number of companies that build and operate small satellites that there isn't enough capacity in the (US) market at a price they can afford to meet their needs," said Congressman Brian Babin, Chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Space. "India has stepped in and offered to fill, in part, this demand and is launching smaller satellites on their PSLV vehicle. The administration has provided a number of export waivers on a case-by-case basis for these launches, in part, because India is becoming a strategic ally in South Asia," Babin said. "Unfortunately, the administration seems to lack a clear long-term policy to guide access to PSLV launches. What should US policy be with regard to Indian and other foreign launch vehicles?" the Republican Congressman from Texas said. He asserted that if it can be shown that there is no viable US launch opportunities in the given time-frame to a required orbit, launches on Indian vehicles should continue to be considered on a case-by-case waiver review for US payloads, as been the practice for the last several years. "This practice should continue while still relevant, but with the knowledge that this is definitely a temporary solution," Stallmer said. Dadri: Authorities in Uttar Pradesh have allegedly refused to make official marriage of a Hindu man and a Muslim woman in Dadri town, as per a media report. The couple are said to have failed to get their marriage registered even after six months. As per Mail Today, the reason given by officials was fear of a resurgence of last year's communal tensions which was sparked by lynching of 52-year-old Mohammad Ikhlaq by a mob over rumours that he slaughtered a calf. The couple reportedly hail from Chitehra village. Manjeet Bhati (24) and Salma (20) fled from Dadri in Gautam Budh Nagar district to Allahabad city on October 19 last year. The woman later changed her name to Sapna Arya. She adopted Hinduism and the couple got married at an Arya Samaj temple. "We went to the marriage registrar in January but he said that he will not register our marriage as I was a Hindu and my wife a Muslim and this could ignite violence in the area. I assured him that no local has a problem with our marriage and our village is quite peaceful, but still he refused and also demanded Rs 20,000," Manjeet was quoted as saying. On the other hand, Sapna says, "My parents died while I was quite young. I was living with some relatives who wanted me to marry an elderly man. But Manjeet and I were friends for long and we decided to get married." "As my relatives have threatened to kill us, we sought protection from police for a month and then we appeared before the magistrate in Meerut in December 2015. I produced my certificate and my medical test was done, which established I was an adult. The magistrate ordered that I was free to live with anyone and I chose my husband," she adds, as per the website. Meanwhile, as per the report, the district magistrate of Gautam Budh Nagar, NP Singh, promised that the marriage will be registered. He also asked a senior officer to look into the matter. "If both of them are adults then there should not be any problem in registering their marriage. I cannot deny that they were told by a government officer that registering their marriage can ignite communal violence. A similar case happened in Meerut Singh," Singh was quoted as saying. Meerut: In yet another case of religious conversion, a Muslim youth from Baghpat converted to Hinduism in protest against denial of arms license to him by the authorities. According to a report in Times of India, Furqan Ahmad had been wearing a 'choti' after shaving off his hair, pasting tilak on his forehead and calls himself 'Phool Singh', causing heartburn to fellow Muslim brethren. Ahmad, who drives an e-rickshaw during the day to support his family of six members, needs a gun license to be a security guard which will also supplement his meagre income. He had applied for a gun license in 2010. However, despite all efforts, his application for a gun license has not been approved yet by the district administration. ''For almost three years, I ran from one department to another to get all the clearances and certificates required for it. Much to my disappointment, even after repeated requests to the then DMs, the babus misplaced my file in 2014. I had to restart the entire process again. Even now, it has been months that my file got completed and yet I am not being granted an arms licence," Ahmad was quoted as saying. Ahmad even filed an RTI query to discover that a total of 378 arms licences were issued in the district during this period, but his file kept gathering dust. In utter frustration, Ahmad decided to change his religion as a mark of protest against the authorities. When contacted, Baghpat District Magistrate Hardev Shankar Tiwari reportedly said, ''An arms licence is given only after thorough investigation and ascertaining level of security threat to an aspirant. Everyone cannot claim such a sensitive thing as arms licence by resorting to such measures as Ahmed has taken." Ahmad, who is now planning to approach High Court in the matter, says he is not worried about pressure from the religious leaders of his community and maintains that it is his life and no one can dissuade him from converting. Amethi: Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi on Thursday held a 'Janata Durbar' for people of his constituency and heard their grievances on the second day of his visit here during which he also had one-on-one with party workers. Gandhi patiently heard the complaints regarding power, road, water and unemployment and assured the people that he will see to it that those were resolved, party sources here said. His one-on-one meeting with the workers at the party office in Ghorha village lasted for more than an hour. There was a minor mishap during the 'Janata Durbar' when a tent got uprooted due to gusty winds and poles supporting it fell on some people. They received minor injuries, party sources said, adding Gandhi was present in another tent when the incident occurred. Later, the Congress MP reached Bhadar area and met the family members of three party leaders, who were killed in a road mishap here on February 27. Offering condolences, he said the deaths of former block president Om Prakash Singh, Gir Prakash Singh and Hari Shankar Singh was a huge loss for the Congress family. He also met party leader Ashok Singh 'Hitler' who was injured in the accident. According to party sources, Gandhi will be visiting his parliamentary constituency regularly from May. Union Minister Smriti Irani is also scheduled to visit Amethi on April 24 and distribute radio sets among farmers to enable them to listen to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'Mann ki Baat' programme, BJP leaders said. She will also honour progressive farmers of the area and address a function for women during her day-long stay. Irani, who had unsuccessfully contested the last Lok Sabha elections against Gandhi, has been regularly visiting the constituency ever since. Dehradun: The Uttarakhand High Court on Thursday sought assurance from the Centre that the President's Rule will not be revoked in the state for at least a week. Coming down heavily on the Centre, the two-judge bench of the high court said, ''Tomorrow if you revoke President's Rule and invite somebody it will be travesty of justice.'' Is government a private party, it asked. Rapping the Centre for the haste shown in imposing the President's Rule here, the high court said, ''More than anger we are pained that you can behave like this, how can you be playing with court?.'' ''Why don't you give a definite instruction that you won't revoke President's Rule for a week,'' it maintained. The two-judge bench of the High Court made these observations while hearing former chief minister Harish Rawat's plea challenging Centre's decision to impose President's Rule in the state. While hearing the matter on Wednesday, the bench had said, ''President of India is not a king who is infallible but can go wrong and that his decision is open to judicial scrutiny.'' "Absolute power can spoil anybody's mind. Even the President can go wrong and in such case his decisions can be subjected to scrutiny. Indian courts have the power to scrutinise all orders," the court said. The strong observations from the high court came as a bench of Chief Justice KM Joseph and BN Bisht was hearing outgoing Uttarakhand chief minister Harish Rawat's plea challenging the imposition of President's Rule in Uttarakhand. Rawat's counsel and Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi contended that the Centre's action to impose President's Rule was not permissible on the pretext that the Governor had termed 'controversial' the assembly speaker Govind Singh Kunjwal's approval to a legislation. He said that the President, Governor or the Centre could not decide if the demand for a division of votes (in the assembly) should be accepted or not. This power rested with the assembly speaker, Singhvi said and added that the Governor's report sent to the Centre did not mention any constitutional crisis in the state. The counsel stressed that the majority or otherwise of the government is decided only on the assembly floor. The high court had earlier criticised the Centre during a previous hearing over the imposition of the Presidents Rule in Uttarakhand on March 27, a day before a floor test was due to be carried out in the assembly. Uttarakhand was plunged into a political crisis when nine Congress legislators, including former chief minister Vijay Bahuguna, whom Rawat replaced, revolted against the chief minister and turned to the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for support. In the 70-member assembly, the Congress has 36 legislators, including the nine rebels. The BJP has 28. The other six members, from smaller parties, are said to support the Congress. Dehradun: Shaktiman the Uttarakhand Police horse who succumbed to its injuries yesterday had not given up even after its hind leg was amputated and struggled till the end to survive, according to the grieving caretaker. Shyam Singh Chauhan, the man who took care of the animal, said, "Shaktiman did not give up eating, he showed his will to fight back and survive till the end.'' Recalling the memories of the brave horse, a teary-eyed Chauhan said, ''We have lost a colleague, a member of our team." "Even senior officers were visiting him to check on his recovery," he added. Shaktiman, a majestic white horse, who joined the Uttarakhand Police nearly 10 years ago, suffered multiple fractures on its hind leg during a Bharatiya Janata Party and died yesterday. BJP MLA Ganesh Joshi, who is accused of hitting the horse during the protest, has expressed his condolences, stating that he feels sad about it. He, however, said the videos showing him hitting the horse are doctored. Reacting to Shaktiman's death, Union Minister Maneka Gandhi, a prominent national activist, said that the person responsible for his death must be arrested. The pictures of Shaktiman being assaulted with a baton turned him into a national concern, with thousands of people discussing his condition and chances of recovery on social media. A prosthetic leg was imported, but Shaktiman struggled with physiotherapy to get used to it. Shaktiman was buried last evening. Dehradun: Affirming that truth triumphs in the end, former chief minister Harish Rawat on Thursday lauded the judiciary after Uttarakhand High Court quashed the President's Rule in the state. "In the end, truth wins, we respect the verdict of the High Court," said Rawat. I am thankful to the judiciary which vindicated the Congress party's stand on the BJP-sponsored constitution crisis in the state. The former chief minister also thanked the people of his state, saying it is there victory. Rawat also thanked his party colleagues for their unflinching support to him. The Uttarakhand High Court earlier today quashed the President's Rule in the state and ordered floor test in the assembly on April 29. Rawat's lawyer K.C Kaushik said the High Court has restored the former chief minister's position as on March 27 when the President's Rule was imposed. The High Court earlier said that it was "pained" by the Centre's actions in the case on imposition of President's Rule in Uttarakhand where the Centre was acting like a "private party". In a major blow to the central government, the Uttarakhand High Court on Thursday set aside President's Rule imposed in the hill state last month. After two consecutive days of hearing on a matter filed by ousted Congress chief minister Harish Rawat, the court said the proclamation of central rule in the state stood null and void. The court said central rule should be clamped in a state as a last resort, suggesting this did not happen in Uttarakhand. It fixed April 29 for a floor test in the state assembly. The ruling triggered noisy celebrations outside Rawat's residence by Congress leaders and activists who shouted slogans against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Congress leader and former Uttarakhand finance minister Indira Hridayesh said her party "saluted the judiciary for upholding truth and law". "It is a victory for democracy," the Congress said. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal also hailed the court decision. "This is a huge embarrassment to the (Narendra) Modi government. He should stop interfering with elected governments and respect democracy," the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader tweeted. President's Rule was imposed in Uttarakhand on March 27 after nine Congress legislators defected, depriving majority support in the assembly to the Rawat government. Kolkata: Amid incidents of violence that left one person dead and several others injured, West Bengal saw over 79 percent votes cast in 62 constituencies on Thursday in phase three of the Assembly elections. The Election Commission said that 79.22 per cent voter turnout was recorded in today's polls. However, the EC added that the turnout could be more as the figures were based on text messages sent by polling officials from the field till 5 pm. Deputy Election Commission in charge of West Bengal Sandeep Saxena said while one person was found murdered near a polling station, nine others were injured in clashes between political rivals during which crude bombs were used. When asked whether the incidents of violence were the highest in this phase, he said the Commission "cannot compare" the number of incidents in each phase, as per PTI. The body of a 35-year-old CPI(M) supporter, identified as Tahidur Islam, was found about 500 metres away from the polling booth at Shibapara area of Domkal assembly seat in Murshidabad district. In Kolkata, Trinamool leader Anwar Khan was arrested following instructions from Chief Electoral Officer Sunil Gupta after he was shown on TV channels abusing the poll panel while talking to a party worker over phone. In Burdwan's Ketugram constituency, four persons were injured in separate incidents. A CPI(M) worker's ear was slashed and the leg of another party supporter fractured in a scuffle in front of a booth number 78. Two other CPI(M) workers were injured at booth number 48 when bombs were reportedly hurled at them. District Election Officer Soumitra Mohan said four persons have been arrested in this connection. Complaints of voter intimidation and scuffles between rival political activists were also received from several booths in Kolkata, including Beliaghta and Entally. Union Minister Babul Supriyo was seen chasing a "drunkard" in a lane of north Kolkata's Jorasanko constituency and handing him over to the police. Supriyo is a voter of the constituency. Accusing the ruling Trinamool of indulging in "massive rigging" and booth capturing in Domkal, the alliance partners demanded repoll in 15 polling booths. Left Front spearhead CPI-M state secretary Surjya Kanta Mishra said there were disturbances in six-seven constituencies. "We think there should be repoll in 15 polling booths of Domkal constituency," said Mishra, whose demand was seconded by state Congress chief Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, as per IANS. However, Mishra expressed overall satisfaction over the role of the Election Commission. Over 1.37 crore (1,37,42,000) voters were eligible to elect their legislators across 16,461 polling stations, including 10 auxiliary booths, from among 418 candidates, including 34 women. The ruling Trinamool and the Bharatiya Janata Party are contesting all 62 constituencies in the third phase. The Left Front-Congress alliance is in fray for all the 62 constituencies. But the Congress nominees are also clashing with those from the Left Front in 11 seats -- 10 in Murshidabad and one in Nadia. Earlier voters in 105 of the state's total 294 assembly constituencies exercised their right to franchise on April 4, 11 and 17 in the first two phases. Polling in the fourth, fifth and sixth phases will be held on April 25, 30 and May 5 for 49, 53 and 25 constituencies respectively. (With Agency inputs) Kolkata: Photographs of candidates are displayed in polling booths for the first time in the ongoing West Bengal Assembly polls for voters who get confused if namesake candidates are contesting from the same seat. "In form 7-A which shows the list of candidates we are also putting their colour photos along with their names and party symbols. This is for additional identification of candidates by voters," Amitjyoti Bhattacharya, Deputy Chief Electoral officer, told PTI. This list of candidates with photographs is displayed prominently across all polling booths, he said. He said the measure was taken in the state for the first time as also being done on postal ballot papers. Officials said this would take care of likely confusion when candidates with same or similar names contest from the same constituency. "For this purpose, all candidates were asked to submit to the returning officer their recent stamp size photographs as per the specifications laid down by the Commission," he said. However, it was not mandatory for candidates to submit photos. "It was optional, but used widely by all candidates," officials said. The last date of the six-phase polling is May 5, while results will be out on May 19. Mogadishu: At least 25 Al-Shabaab militants were killed in heavy fighting between the militant group and Somalia National Army (SNA), an official said on Thursday. District Commissioner of Elbur, Abdi Hassan, told journalists that the joint forces gained military victory over the battle which took place in the military bases in Budbud and Ulajarad regions, Xinhua news agency reported. "The joint forces killed 25 members of the militant group during the battle. We also fully control the areas where the fighting occurred and the troops are advancing to new locations in the region in order to liberate more areas from remnants in the region," Hassan said. Al-Shabaab militants are yet to make any comment. Kaduna: Suspected Boko Haram gunmen on horseback killed at least 11 people in northeast Nigeria this week, two civilian vigilantes assisting the military said on Thursday. The attack on Zango village, in the Gulani district some 150 kilometres (94 miles) south of the Yobo state capital, Damaturu, happened overnight on Tuesday to yesterday, said Aisami Mamman. It came two weeks after a similar attack on two nearby villages left at least 20 dead, he added. "They (Boko Haram) came around midnight (Tuesday) and started firing gunshots in the village. This prompted residents to flee into the bush," Mamman told AFP. "They pursued them, shooting at them while others set fire to the whole village. The whole village was burnt. Eleven people were killed and several others were injured, six of them critically. "They were brought here to Damaturu where they are receiving treatment for gunshot wounds." The motive for the attack was not immediately clear but previous strikes have seen Boko Haram steal cattle or foodstuffs. The hit-and-run attack has been a trademark of the Islamic State group affiliate but such incidents have become rarer because of a concerted military counter-offensive in the northeast. Troops have over the last year wrested back territory lost to the militants in 2014, scattering fighters and cutting off their supply lines. Boko Haram fighters have conducted a number of attacks on remote villages after arriving on horseback and even bicycles because of a shortage of fuel for vehicles or motorbikes. Mamman suggested the attackers in Zango came from the Sambisa Forest area of neighbouring Borno, where Boko Haram has long had camps. "Exactly two weeks ago there was a similar attack on two villages nearby. They attacked Gurum and Dokshi villages," he said in an account of both incidents supported by another militia member. "They burnt them completely and killed more than 20 residents." Boko Haram has killed nearly 1,900 people since President Muhammadu Buhari took office in May last year, according to AFP reporting. Overall, an estimated 20,000 people have been killed since the start of the insurgency in 2009. Washington: Denmark is a steadfast partner in global coalition efforts against ISIS and its contributions have been significant, the US has said, a day after Danish parliament approved the country's expanded role in the fight against the dreaded terror group. "This week's decision by the Danish Parliament to approve an expanded role in the fight against ISIL is a welcome contribution from a valued partner in the counter-ISIL coalition and another sign of the growing momentum for the campaign to defeat ISIL," US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter said yesterday. "Denmark is a steadfast partner in global coalition efforts. Its contributions, including strike aircraft, air defence radar and training and assistance to Iraqi forces, have already been significant. "This renewed and expanded role in the military campaign, including the authority to participate in the full spectrum of combat operations in Iraq and Syria, will further increase the military pressure on ISIL," Carter said. In addition, Denmark will provide important resources to help ensure security and stability in areas freed from ISIL control, an essential element in dealing ISIL a lasting defeat, he said. The State Department joined Carter in welcoming the Danish decision. "The US welcomes the vote yesterday by the Danish parliament and the announcement by the UAE to expand their contributions to the coalition to counter ISIL," State Department Spokesman John Kirby said. "Denmark's vote to increase authorised personnel on the ground and the redeployment of F-16 fighter aircraft for operations in both Iraq and Syria will complement their existing contributions to the coalition and will certainly complement the broader coalition kinetic efforts as well," Kirby added. Denmark's Parliament voted on Tuesday to expand its role in the 66-member global coalition combating the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to include a presence in Syria. Paris: French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian is voicing cautious optimism about the defeat of the Islamic State group, suggesting the possibility that it can be eradicated. Le Drian said on Thursday on France-Info radio that the extremist organization has lost 30-40 percent of its territory in Syria and Iraq and "conditions are coming together to eradicate Daesh," referring to the group by its Arabic acronym. Le Drian says the goals of the U.S.-led coalition are that Mosul, in Iraq, and the northern Syrian town of Raqqa, which serves as the IS capital, "fall before the end of the year." He adds: "I say this with lots of caution, but for the first time, I have this rather optimistic message." London: It has emerged that the Islamic State terror group has executed 250 girls in northern Iraq. The reason: the girls had refused to become sex slaves in Iraq's second largest city of Mosul. London-based Kurdish news agency 'AhlulBayt' reported that the girls were forcefully married to ISIS terrorists and murdered. Some of the girls were murdered alongside their families, the report said. Kurdish Democratic Party spokesman Said Mamuzini said the women hailed from Mosul. "At least 250 girls have so far been executed by IS for refusing to accept the practice of sexual jihad, and sometimes the families of the girls were also executed for rejecting to submit to ISIS' request," Mamuzini told 'AhlulBayt'. An official of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), Ghayas Surchi said women in Mosul were not allowed to go out alone and did not have the right to choose their spouses. Benghazi: Islamic State fighters retreated from long-held positions around the port city of Derna on Wednesday, military forces in eastern Libya said, as troops loyal to the government in the region pressed on with an offensive in Benghazi. If the retreat around Derna is confirmed, it could mark a significant shift in the alignment of forces in the area. Islamic State gained territory in Libya as two rival governments and a range of armed factions battled to control the country in the past two years. But it has also faced resistance from other local armed groups on the ground. Derna has a history of Islamism and was an early bastion for Islamic State. The militant group lost control of the city last June to rival armed Islamists grouped under the Derna Mujahideen Shura Council, but retained positions around the outskirts. Derna and its suburbs had been "completely liberated from the apostates", the council said in a statement. Eastern security forces, which are allied to a government based in the east, have carried out occasional strikes against Islamist rivals around Derna in recent months. Military spokesman Abdulkarim Sabra said Islamic State had retreated from Derna`s 400 neighbourhood and al-Fatayeh, 20 km (12 miles) south of the city, and its forces were trying to head towards the militant group`s Libyan stronghold of Sirte when they were intercepted. The military was providing air support for troops, he said. There were no immediate reports of casualties. Pictures circulating on social media showed some Derna residents celebrating and waving Libyan flags on the streets. Eastern military forces have also been involved in heavy fighting around 250 km (155 miles) to the west in Benghazi, where they have taken several neighbourhoods from fighters loyal to Islamic State and other groups. Clashes continued there on Wednesday, and the military said it had nearly full control of the southern district of Guwarsha. It said one commander had been killed in the fighting and four soldiers were wounded. The eastern government was set up after armed opponents took control of the capital, Tripoli, in 2014, and installed a rival administration. Both are backed by alliances of former rebels who once fought together to oust Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 but have slowly turned against each other. Last month, a U.N.-backed unity government arrived in Tripoli, where it has been trying to establish its authority. The West sees the new government as the best chance of ending Libya`s political divisions and uniting its armed factions to take on Islamic State. But the government has yet to win approval from Libya`s eastern parliament, which received international recognition and has repeatedly failed to hold a vote on the issue. Lawmakers in the east who support the new government say they have been threatened and physically impeded from holding a vote, including when they tried to convene on Monday. They have been opposed by allies of eastern military commander Khalifa Haftar, who are concerned about losing control of military appointments if the unity government takes full power. In an apparent attempt to break the ice with the eastern military, the unity government`s leadership released a statement on Wednesday congratulating it on its advances in Benghazi. The Presidential Council said it would "provide all necessary support to Benghazi and other affected cities for reconstruction," and that it was committed to "supporting the institution of the army". It also congratulated the "people of Derna and all Libyans" on the "liberation" of the areas around where Islamic State retreated. Washington: US Secretary of State John Kerry will meet in New York today with Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, as Tehran complains that Washington has not lived up to its nuclear deal obligations. Kerry's spokesman told reporters in Washington that the two top diplomatic chiefs will hold another day of talks following a meeting at the UN on Tuesday. Tehran has said it is not receiving enough sanctions relief. "In these discussions with Foreign Minister Zarif tomorrow , I fully expect that they will continue to talk about the sanctions relief process, and the degree to which banks, foreign and domestic, as well as institutions foreign and domestic are evaluating their options under the JCPOA," State Department John Kirby said yesterday, referring to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action as the international nuclear deal is also known. The two men will address "the degree to which they have before them a sufficient level of understanding to make decisions with respect to sanctions relief," Kirby said at the State Department's daily briefing. This week's meetings mark the first face-to-face encounters between Kerry and Zarif since January, when they met in Vienna to formally implement the nuclear deal. Iranian officials have complained that the United States has not lived up to its side of the nuclear agreement because Western banks and corporations have been reluctant to renew business ties. Kirby said nothing could be further from the truth. "We certainly are not trying to become an obstacle in any way of foreign banks and institutions working with Iran through the sanctions relief process and doing legitimate business with Iran," he said. He added: "We believe we are working hard to try to explain what the obligations are, what the responsibilities are and what the opportunities are for foreign institutions and banks under the JCPOA." Washington, for its part, has also pointed the finger at Tehran, warning that it retains the right to impose new sanctions over Iran's ballistic missile tests. London: US President Barack Obama flies to London on Thursday with a mission: to persuade wavering British voters not to ditch membership of the European Union in a June 23 referendum that Washington fears could weaken the West. His visit is a welcome one for Prime Minister David Cameron, leading the "In" campaign, but has drawn scorn from those arguing Britain should leave the EU. Obama is likely to suggest Britons should vote to stay in the bloc to preserve Britain`s wealth, its "special relationship" with the United States and the cohesion of the West. "As the president has said, we support a strong United Kingdom in the European Union," Ben Rhodes, Obama`s deputy national security adviser, told reporters in Washington ahead of the trip. After a visit to Saudi Arabia, including talks with King Salman, Obama flies to London on Thursday evening. The U.S. government - and many U.S. banks and companies - fear a "Brexit" would unleash market turmoil, torpedo British clout, undermine London`s status as a global financial capital, cripple the EU and undermine Western security. Polls on Wednesday showed British voters leaning towards the "In" camp, but many remain undecided. Asked about Obama`s views, Cameron told the British parliament: "Personally I believe we should listen to advice from friends and other countries and I struggle to find the leader of any friendly country who thinks we should leave." Cameron has said that in the face of what he terms Russian President Vladimir Putin`s aggression, this is no time to drop out of the club Britain joined in 1973. "BUTT OUT" "The UK economy will be better off within the Union than if it leaves," Charles Kupchan, the senior White House director for European affairs, said ahead of the trip. "And as a key economic partner, thats an issue of interest to the United States." Opponents of the EU - many of whom laud the U.S. alliance - say that membership has shackled Britain to the corpse of a failed German-dominated experiment in European integration and that Britain, if freed, could prosper as a sole trader. New York-born Boris Johnson, the London mayor who heads the "Out" campaign, said he did not want to be lectured by Americans about EU membership. "President Obama should butt out," Nigel Farage, another prominent opponent of EU membership, told Reuters in an emailed statement. "This is an unwelcome interference from the most anti-British American president there has ever been. Mercifully, he won`t be in office for much longer." "Out" campaigners have said the United States would never agree to dilute its own national sovereignty in the way the EU requires of its member states. Obama`s term in office ends next Jan. 20. On Friday he will have lunch at Windsor Castle with Queen Elizabeth, who celebrates her 90th birthday on Thursday, and her husband Prince Philip. After lunch, Obama will hold talks with Cameron followed by a briefing with reporters and dinner with Prince William, his wife Kate and Prince Harry at Kensington Palace. Obama, who will be joined by his wife Michelle in London, will hold a discussion meeting with young people on Saturday before departing for Germany. Kabul: At least seven people were killed and 327 others wounded in an ongoing Taliban attack in central Kabul Tuesday, the Afghan health ministry said. "Many of those wounded are in serious condition," ministry spokesman Mohammad Ismail Kawoosi told AFP. Beirut: Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said on Thursday that states including Turkey continued to supply terrorists in Syria with advanced weapons, state media reported, as fighting raged across the country after peace talks halted. Moualem said the Syrian government would press on with its fight against terrorists, at a meeting with China`s special envoy to Syria, the state news agency SANA reported. Kuwait: Talks aimed at ending Yemen`s war opened in Kuwait on Thursday, with Kuwait`s top diplomat appealing to both sides to "turn war into peace" after more than a year of conflict which has killed more than 6,200 people and caused a humanitarian crisis. Yemen`s foreign minister warned against high expectations from the U.N.-sponsored talks, which brought together the Houthi group and its General People`s Congress party allies with the Saudi-backed government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. The talks, originally scheduled to start on Monday, were delayed over accusations by the Houthi group of truce violations and disagreements over the agenda for the negotiations. Kuwait`s foreign minister Sheikh Sabah al-Khalid al-Sabah, in an opening speech at Bayan Palace, urged Yemenis to "turn war into peace and backwardness into development". The talks are based on U.N. Security Council resolution 2216 which calls for the Houthis to withdraw from areas they seized since 2014 and hand heavy weapons back to the government, U.N. special envoy to Yemen Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed said. "The choice today is one of two options: a safe homeland that ensures security for all of its citizens... or remnants of a land whose sons die everyday," Ould Cheikh Ahmed said in an opening speech. The talks are expected to focus on creating a more inclusive government and restoring state authority over the country, which is now divided between the Houthis and Hadi`s administration. The war has caused a major humanitarian crisis in Yemen, the poorest country in the Arabian Peninsula. Apart from the more than 6,200 killed, the United Nations says some 35,000 people have been wounded and more than 2.5 million people displaced. The fighting has also allowed the militant Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Isalmic State to consolidate their presence in the country next door to the world`s top oil exporter. The United States and the Saudi-led coalition welcomed the start of the talks. "We urge the parties to fully engage in good faith in order to end the military conflict immediately and to return to a peaceful political process," State Department spokesman John Kirby said in Washington. The Saudi-led coalition spokesman, Brigadier-General Ahmed Asseri, speaking to Dubai-based al-Arabia Television, said: "Everybody knows that the way out in the end is political, and the issue will not end through military means, and the coalition has no desire to ... prolong the situation." FIVE POINTS Ould Cheikh Ahmed outlined five points which he said were derived from U.N. Security Council resolution 2216 as the basis for the talks, officially dubbed as "consultations". These included withdrawal from cities seized by the Houthis since the crisis began in 2014, forming a more inclusive government and handing over heavy weapons to the new government. The chief Houthi negotiator, Mohammed Abdul-Salam, registered his delegation`s objections to what he said were continuing air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition and to the five-point agenda outlined by Ould Cheikh Ahmed, saying they were not clear enough. The crisis began in September 2014 when the Iran-allied Houthis seized the capital Sanaa. A Saudi-led Arab alliance intervened last year, launching a campaign of mostly air strikes against the Houthis in support of Hadi`s forces. The Houthi group and the GPC had accused the Saudi-led coalition and Hadi supporters of failing to honour a truce that began on April 10, and refused to send their negotiators to Kuwait until the truce was consolidated. They agreed to join the talks following intervention by the U.N. Security Council permanent members and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Yemeni Foreign Minister Abdel-Malek al-Mekhlafi, speaking before the talks, said the government delegation would do all it could to make the talks a success. "The Houthis and Saleh`s party, by refusing to arrive on the agreed time, and by putting a series of conditions and by saying they reserve the right to boycott sessions if their conditions are met -- all of these have lowered the ceiling of expectations," Mekhlafi told Reuters. The meeting adjourned until Friday afternoon. Caracas: Recession-wracked Venezuela is to ration electricity in 10 of its most populous and industrialized states, including metropolitan Caracas, the socialist government said Wednesday. Luis Motta Dominguez, minister for electric power, made the announcement during a televised broadcast and said further details would be released in the coming days. Huge plumes of toxic smoke billow from the plant known as Pajaritos in the city of Coatzacoalcos, southern Mexico on April 20, 2016 The death toll from a thunderous blast at a petrochemical plant in Mexico has risen to at least 13, officials said Thursday, in the latest accident plaguing state-run oil giant Pemex. A cloud of toxic chemicals spewed from the plant after Wednesday's explosion, which sent huge plumes of thick, black smoke billowing into the sky. Pemex insisted the toxic cloud posed no threat to the population, but the explosion triggered panic among locals still traumatized by a 1991 blast at the same plant that caused a deadly gas leak. The death toll could rise further as 136 people were injured, 13 of them critically. Another 18 people are missing, officials said. The blast in the city of Coatzacoalcos in eastern Veracruz state was so powerful it was felt 10 kilometers (six miles) away. It shattered windows and forced the evacuation of schools and businesses. Crews kept working Thursday to cool off one particularly hard-hit area of the plant, hosing it down with water. Investigators have yet to enter this area because of fears that structures might collapse, Luis Felipe Puente, a senior civil protection official with the state interior ministry, told Milenio television. "We have searched the affected area within the complex, and sadly so far located 13 victims," Puente wrote earlier on Twitter. The blast at the Petroquimica Mexicana de Vinilo (PMV) plant was caused by some kind of leak, said Jose Antonio Gonzalez, chief executive of Pemex. The plant "uses flammable materials like chlorine and ethanol but we do not know the cause of the leak," he told Televisa television. He assured locals that the toxic cloud caused by the blast had been "dissipated by the wind" and posed no risk. Pemex co-owns the plant with a private company, Mexichem, which operates the facility. Some 100 plant workers and about 2,000 residents had to be evacuated, according to Veracruz governor Javier Duarte. Duarte rushed to the scene of what he said was "a very strong explosion," where fire crews had the blaze under control. Story continues As the situation unfolded, he urged people living in the vicinity to remain indoors as the "cloud of chemicals" dissipated. School classes in Coatzacoalcos, a port city, and nearby communities were suspended. Pemex said Wednesday afternoon the situation was "completely under control." - Agonizing wait - Soldiers set up a security cordon several kilometers from the plant, where workers' families flocked at dawn, anxiously awaiting news of their loved ones. "We don't know what happened to Miguel Angel. He was working for a company inside the area affected by the explosion," a relative told AFP. Many outside the plant said they feared the number of missing was far higher than the 18 people announced by officials. Residents were still struggling to get over the shock caused by the blast, which blew out the windows of stores and homes. "I left my house running. I thought the whole city was going to catch fire," said Marcela Andrade Moreno. Other terrified residents feared a repeat of the 1991 explosion at the same facility. The death toll from that incident officially stands at six, although local media insist the number is much higher. "We live in a time bomb," said Abelardo Garduza, a merchant from the village of Allende located a few kilometers from the plant. Pemex has had to deal with several deadly accidents at its land-based and offshore facilities in recent years. Even its headquarters ?- a skyscraper in the heart of Mexico City ?- was hit in January 2013 by a blast caused by a gas buildup that killed 37 people. Accidents have hit several oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, while fires have erupted in pipelines after fuel thieves punctured them. In February, two people were killed and at least seven injured in a blaze at a Pemex oil platform off the coast of Campeche, also in the southeast. Pemex provides one-fifth of the Mexican government's revenue but has posted huge losses amid crumbling production and oil prices. The government has implemented a sweeping reform of the energy sector, which opens it to foreign investors for the first time in decades and partly aims to help modernize aging infrastructure. European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi pressed the case for Britain to stay in the EU on Thursday, warning that doubts over its membership are already buffeting the markets. Draghi vowed to keep touting the benefits of Britain's EU membership ahead of a knife-edge June 23 vote that could lead to the country's exit, or Brexit, with far-reaching economic consequences. "Let me say unequivocally that we view the participation of the UK to the European Union as mutually beneficial and we will continue to say so in the coming weeks," Draghi told a news conference after an ECB policymakers' meeting. Talk about a possible Brexit "has already produced some significant consequences on the markets", in particularly hurting the value of sterling, Draghi said. "We do expect continuation of market volatility certainly until the referendum ... probably even after the referendum," he said, while stressing that he did not want to speculate about the result of the vote. As Prime Minister David Cameron tries to turn the tide in favour of staying in the EU, Britain's Treasury this week warned that Brexit could leave an average household 4,300 pounds (5,400 euros) worse off. US President Barack Obama is expected to lend his weight to the pro-EU campaign after he touches down Thursday on a visit to Britain, possibly at a joint press conference with Cameron on Friday or at a town hall-style meeting with British youngsters on Saturday. Obama has consistently said he favours a strong Britain in a strong EU and aides say he is likely to reinforce that message. - Evenly split - With opinion polls showing the "Leave" and "Remain" camps evenly split at around 50 percent each, the Group of 20 top world economies last week warned that one of the risks to the global economy was "the shock of a potential UK exit from the European Union". In Frankfurt, Draghi said a recovery in the eurozone economy was probably safe, however. "Is it enough to endanger the economic recovery in euro area? The assessment of our staff is that the risk of this happening is limited," Draghi said. Story continues That assessment contrasts with the Treasury's report on the economic cost to Britain. Brexit could shave six percentage points off Britain's growth by 2030 and the annual loss of gross domestic product to each household could be as high as 4,300 pounds (5,400 euros), it said. Finance Minister George Osborne warned that the country would be "permanently poorer if we leave the European Union" and it was "complete fantasy" to expect that Britain could then negotiate an advantageous trade deal with the EU. Around a fifth of voters remain undecided after the campaign officially got started last week. Panama's President Juan Carlos Varela (L) shakes hands with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe prior to their meeting in Tokyo on April 20, 2016 Japan on Wednesday agreed to finance a $2.6 billion monorail Panama intends to have built by 2022 as an extension of its young metro system, the Panamanian government said. "This financing Japan is giving us today is recognition of the solidity and credibility of Panama," a statement quoted President Juan Carlos Varela saying during a visit to Tokyo. Varela's government is fighting to save Panama's image as a budding global business hub after the so-called Panama Papers revelations that exposed how politicians, the wealthy and some criminals used its offshore expertise. The Japanese credit for the monorail is a 20-year deal extended through the government-backed Japan Bank for International Cooperation. A memorandum of understanding was signed in January and Varela's trip to Tokyo sealed the agreement with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The cost of the monorail project makes it the biggest in Panama after a massive expansion of its century-old canal, which is to be inaugurated in June after an investment of over $5 billion. The monorail will constitute a line three to Panama's new metro network, opening up a 26-kilometer (16-mile) run between the capital and Arraijan, a town in the west. While Japan will stump up for the project, a public tender will go out to select the company or consortium to build the line. "Our economy is based on solid fundamentals and we are showing that today," Varela was quoted as saying. What is the Brexit and what does it mean for Canada? The Brexit. Its one of those terms youve probably noticed a few times in the financial pages, maybe in that European wire story you glanced at but couldnt be bothered to read. It might be stuck in the back of your head, sounding a bit like a new breakfast sandwich at the local fast-food joint. An abbreviation on British exit, the Brexit refers to the possibility that the United Kingdom will leave the 28-member European Union following a referendum in June. Britain has long had an uneasy relationship with the European Union and its precursor, and British Prime Minister David Cameron had promised to hold the referendum if he won the 2015 general election, though he supports staying within the union. For Brits, its a very big deal. A British departure from the worlds largest trade bloc would mean renegotiated trade deals, economic uncertainty, and very possibly the end of the road for PM Cameron. For Canada, which still shares a head of state with the Britain, its natural to wonder whether the shockwaves will reach across the pond if Britain pulls the trigger. While the event obviously wouldnt be as seismic here as in Europe, there will be noticeable effects leading up to the vote, says BMO Senior Economist Benjamin Reitzes. Financial markets dont like uncertainty, and the question of a G8 nation pulling out of a major trade bloc creates more than a little of it. You could have stock markets weakening, and just general risk aversion in bond yields, weighing on the Canadian dollar, weighing on the oil prices, he says. How long this lasts would depend obviously on the outcome of the vote, with a leave vote leading to continued uncertainty. However, markets would likely calm down somewhat after the vote no matter the outcome, says Reitzes. Afterwards I think there will be more of a tempered reaction, kind of a sell the rumor, buy the fact, he says. Of course, market disruption wont be a Canada-specific phenomenon, although Canadian companies that do business in the U.K., particularly with the European mainland, could see disruption to their business. Story continues What is Canada-specific is how a Brexit would impact the Canada-EU trade deal (CETA), which is currently winding its way towards ratification, with Great Britain currently part of it. A Brexit could mean changes to the deal and then the possibility of a separate trade with a non-EU Britain. Ultimately, Canada and Britain should continue to trade, but it could take a while to sort out new deals, and Canada probably wont be at the top of Britains list of priorities, leading to uncertainty in the interim. However, while Canadas historical ties to Britain are strong, the trade between the countries has become less significant over the years, notes Carleton business professor Ian Lee. The reality is that we have not really for 100 years been deeply integrated or dependent on the UK, he says. According to Statistics Canada, Canadian exports to the UK totaled just over $16 billion last year, which makes it easily Canadas best European customer. But that total is dwarfed by the $396 billion Canada exported to the United States, and comes in shy of the $21 billion in exports to China. There will be an adjustment like any shock to the system whether its a commodity shock or a trade shock or a currency shock. There will be short term shock, he says. Contracts will be re-priced, trade agreements will be renegotiated and life will go on. A possible bright spot for Canadians could be the prospect of increased labour mobility within the Commonwealth in the event of a Brexit. London mayor Boris Johnson, one of the strongest voices in favour of leaving the union, has mused about a free labour mobility zone involving certain Commonwealth countries, most likely Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Recent opinion polls show the two sides of the Brexit argument running neck-and-neck, but betting odds have shifted in favor of Britain remaining with the EU, meaning this could all go down as another referendum that just got everyone excited for a while. By Olivia Oran (Reuters) - Wall Street banks are piling into equities trading and doing increasingly creative things to win over clients. But as competition heats up, the low-margin business may come under further pressure. The list of banks focused on growing equities spans both sides of the Atlantic, including Citigroup Inc, UBS Group AG and Deutsche Bank AG. They are taking different tacks, with some focused purely on old-fashioned buying and selling of stocks, others on derivatives or exchange-traded funds, and others on prime brokerage or electronic trading. Some aim to do all things for all clients. As newcomers try to gain ground, leading firms like Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Morgan Stanley are fighting to maintain market share. The business already has razor-thin margins, and rivals are trying to nab clients with aggressive prices or new products, traders and analysts said. "If everyone tries to grow equities, the economics aren't going to be that great," said Guy Moszkowski, a bank analyst with Autonomous Research. "It's also not going to be easy." The industry has set its sights on the business because it is a safe harbor under new capital rules and because client demand is fairly strong. However, launching and growing this kind of business requires big up-front investments that can take years to recoup. It is impossible to tell whether banks are building equities trading profitably because they only report revenue from the business, not earnings. A veteran Wall Street executive said it would take a small player at least five years to reach No. 5 or 6 in market share. The person, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said it takes that long to recruit talent, build trading technology and attract investors with smart research and useful products. Banks are trying to do just that. Goldman, Morgan Stanley and UBS have created non-traditional research teams that use tools like web-scraping technology, consumer surveys, social media, climate data, droids and satellite imagery to provide unique analysis. Such analysts might, for example, try to extract inventory data from online retailers to gauge demand for Apple Inc's latest product. Banks hope such research will convince clients to route more trading through them. HUNT FOR GROWTH The equities focus is part of a desperate hunt for growth across Wall Street. After five-plus years of weak results, banks are lifting every rock to find revenue underneath. First-quarter results underscored that trend. Data from research firm Coalition shows why equities may seem attractive: as industry-wide bond trading revenue shrank 36 percent from 2010 to 2015, stock-trading revenue rose 23 percent. During the first quarter, equities trading revenue fell at big banks but fared much better than bond trading. "It's still tough out there," said Richard Johnson, an analyst with research firm Greenwich Associates. "Fixed-income has been one of those areas that hasn't been doing well, so compared to that, other areas look better." During last decade's bond-trading boom, some banks all but abandoned stock trading because margins were so thin. These have only shrunk since then. The average commission in U.S. markets is now 2.64 cents per share, down from 3.2 cents in 2007, according to consulting firm Accenture. Bank executives say the only way to make the business work is to trade very large volumes, focus on high-margin products, or do all of the above. High-margin businesses like derivatives and prime brokerage tend to be riskier and require more capital but are among the few places on Wall Street where profits are rising. Banks are also keen on structuring liquid alternative funds, which hold various securities but trade like stocks, as well as smart beta products, which allow investors to create custom indexes. "Banks are looking at ways they can provide creative, differentiated products" that require as little capital as possible, said Greg Berman, a managing director at broker dealer Norfolk Markets who previously led institutional equity structuring at Deutsche Bank AG. NO QUICK FIX Although Wall Street has high hopes for equities trading, it won't be a quick fix for profit problems. Citigroup, for instance, has been investing heavily in equities trading. After reporting a 19-percent revenue decline there in the first quarter, the bank's finance chief John Gerspach, said he won't be able to judge success until early next year. Goldman and Morgan Stanley, which compete for the No. 1 spot in equities, were not immune from ups-and-downs of the business, either. They reported equities trading revenue declines of 23 percent and 9 percent, respectively. European rivals may have to wait even longer to see investments bear fruit. UBS Group AG has focused on equities trading since 2012, when it said it would largely pull out of bond trading. Despite leading in Asia and Europe, it has not yet caught up in the United States, according to Coalition. Deutsche Bank is only beginning to dive more aggressively into stocks. It plans to hire around 100 people to boost the equities trading business, with an emphasis on electronic trading. Meanwhile, Barclays is exiting much of its cash equities business in Asia. Japanese bank Nomura Co Ltd is shutting down European equity operations. (Reporting by Olivia Oran in New York; additional reporting by David Henry; Editing by Lauren Tara LaCapra and Nick Zieminski) TORONTO, ON--(Marketwired - April 21, 2016) - Excellence Canada and PwC Canada are pleased to announce that applications are now being accepted for the 2017 Canadian Business Excellence Awards for Private Businesses. This national award recognizes Private Businesses from all industries for their ability to earn the loyalty and satisfaction of their stakeholders which include customers, employees, suppliers, investors and the communities in which they do business. Organizational excellence drives results and differentiation among private businesses. Recipients of this award have demonstrated a strategic approach to improving their business performance and achieving their goals. Businesses will be evaluated for excellence based on the following key performance indicators: Delighted Customers Engaged Employees Innovation Businesses submitting applications must meet the following criteria: Privately held company operating in Canada In business for at least three years Over $1 million in revenue There is no charge to apply for or to receive recognition under this award program. Applications can be submitted directly from Canadian-owned private businesses or nominations can be submitted on their behalf from customers, employees and other stakeholders that believe a business is deserving of recognition. Applications are made online and the deadline for submissions is August 1, 2016. The award presentation ceremonies will take place on November 1st, 2016 at The Carlu in Toronto. Award submissions are evaluated and benchmarked on their own merit against criteria reflecting industry best-practices as determined by Excellence Canada. The award adjudication committee is comprised of business experts from prestigious organizations that include BC Business Magazine, Canadian Federation of Independent Business, Carleton University, CBC, CEO Global Network, MaRS, PwC Canada, and Excellence Canada. Why Should Businesses Apply for the Award? "Private businesses are the backbone of the economy. They benefit many important stakeholders including their customers, employees, investors and the community at large," said Allan Ebedes, President and CEO of Excellence Canada. "However, seldom do businesses, whether small, medium or large, get the recognition that they rightly deserve for having exemplary business practices. This award will give them that recognition and validation of stakeholder loyalty." Story continues Tangible benefits for Award Recipients include: brand profiling on the national stage as an excellent organization with which to do business third-party validation of excellence by Excellence Canada, PwC Canada and a panel of experts an attractive award certificate for display listing on the Excellence Canada website name and logo celebrated in a feature article in Excellence.ca magazine the right to display the Awards logo on recipient's marketing materials and websites the opportunity to receive a complimentary strategic working session from Excellence Canada or PwC Canada All applicants will receive feedback from Excellence Canada on the merits of their submission, regardless of whether or not they qualify for an award. For complete details regarding submitting applications for the Canadian Business Excellence Awards for Private Businesses please visit https://www.excellence.ca/en/awards/ or call Excellence Canada at 416.251.7600 Ext 233. About Excellence Canada Excellence Canada is an independent, not-for-profit corporation that is committed to advancing organizational excellence across Canada. Since 1992, Excellence Canada has helped thousands of organizations become cultures of continuous quality improvement and world-class role-models, through its Excellence, Innovation and Wellness Standard and its four-level progressive methodology. As a national authority on Excellence, Healthy Workplace, and Mental Health at Work, Excellence Canada provides frameworks, standards, and independent verification and certification to organizations of all sizes and in all sectors. It is also the custodian and adjudicator of the Canada Awards for Excellence program, now in its 32nd year, of which the Patron is His Excellency, the Right Honourable David Johnston, C.C., C.M.M., C.O.M., C.D., Governor General of Canada. Image Available: http://www.marketwire.com/library/MwGo/2016/4/20/11G094357/Images/CBEA_Logo_EN2017-111428fd3d168090a8a379b83354fee4.jpg By Lisa Richwine LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A California judge on Wednesday rejected a bid by Sumner Redstone's granddaughter to join the media mogul's former girlfriend in a lawsuit that challenges the 92-year-old billionaire's mental competency. The granddaughter, Keryn Redstone, argued in court papers that Sumner Redstone had become a "prisoner in his own home" after the former girlfriend, Manuela Herzer, was ejected from his mansion in October. Herzer, 51, had sued to be reinstated as his designated healthcare agent. Keryn Redstone had asked to be added to the case as a co-petitioner. In ruling on the 34-year-old granddaughter's request, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge David Cowan said, The court doesnt believe ... her being a party truly adds anything to this case." Cowan said that Keryn Redstone can testify as a witness in the trial if Herzer calls her. Redstone controls a majority of the voting stock at Viacom Inc and CBS Corp. Shareholders have closely followed the case for what it could reveal about his mental condition. Also on Wednesday, Herzer withdrew a request for a neurologist she had hired to examine Sumner Redstone. The move came after the mogul's lawyers said they would not call their own neurological expert as a witness. Redstone's attorneys say he was fully aware of his actions when he removed Herzer as his designated healthcare agent last October. Herzer argues that he lacked the mental capacity to make that decision. Both sides have discussed a possible settlement but have so far failed to reach an agreement. The case is scheduled to go to trial on May 6. (Reporting by Lisa Richwine; Editing by Jonathan Oatis) By Olesya Astakhova, Denis Pinchuk and Dmitry Zhdannikov MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia said on Wednesday it was prepared to push oil production to historic highs, just days after a global deal to freeze output levels collapsed and Saudi Arabia threatened to flood markets with more crude. Venezuela predicted prices could crash in the next few weeks if producers failed to resume dialogue and urged that non-OPEC participants be observers at a June OPEC meeting, as the specter of oversupply loomed once more. OPEC member Venezuela and top non-OPEC producer Russia had been the main proponents of the output freeze deal, in the making since February, until it collapsed on Sunday in Doha after Riyadh said it would not sign unless Iran took part. The deal had been meant to help the market rebalance by removing a large chunk of oversupply and a stockpile glut. But Saudi Arabia said it could jack up output instead - by as much as 2 million barrels a day to over 12 million, which would allow it to overtake Russia as the world's largest producer. "They (Saudis) have the ability to raise output significantly. But so do we," Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak told journalists on the sidelines of an international energy conference in Moscow. He said Russia was "in theory" able to raise production to 12 million or even 13 million bpd from current record levels of close to 11 million bpd. Russian oil output has repeatedly surprised on the upside over the past decade, rising from as low as 6 million bpd at the turn of the millennium. Oil experts have repeatedly predicted an unavoidable decline but it has yet to happen. Oil prices crashed to below $30 per barrel in January from as high as $115 in mid-2014 after Saudi Arabia decided to raise output to drive higher-cost producers such as the United States out of the market. The kingdom, OPEC's de facto leader and the world's top exporter, has been pumping unprecedented volumes above 10 million bpd for a year. Saudi Arabia says it has enough spare capacity to push output to more than 12 million bpd. It has never tested such levels, however, hence the market has little insight about its ability to do so. "Of course they (Saudis) can increase output. They have been steeply raising drilling volumes recently," said Lukoil Chief Executive Vagit Alekperov, whose firm has been drilling for gas in Saudi Arabia. Adding to the glut, Iran said it was determined to raise output to regain market share after the lifting of Western sanctions on the Islamic Republic in January. NEW PRICE CRASH Alekperov said Russia's government needed to approve new legislation to ease the tax burden on mature fields in Western Siberia and encourage exploration of other regions, otherwise raising production would be impossible. "Our industry is at a very mature stage of development. We haven't launched a single new oil province since the end of the Soviet Union except for Northern Caspian," Alekperov told a panel with Novak. Saudi Arabia has one of the lowest costs of oil extraction and its oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, has long argued that Russian output would soon fall because of ageing fields. Alekperov said he believed oil prices had bottomed and should hover at around $50 a barrel this year, rising from 2017, because of a looming deficit as investment in crude production had fallen too steeply and too fast. But Venezuelan Oil Minister Eulogio Del Pino said prices could crash and that discussions needed to restart. The country's proposal "for now" is that non-OPEC producers who participated in the Doha meeting attend a June OPEC meeting as observers. "And we can renew discussions," Del Pino told Reuters. "I anticipate that, without a deal, prices from now to OPEC will drop and it's not the same to sit down at the table with Brent at $43 per barrel as it is when it's below $30. "We are close to 90 percent of inventory levels already. ... We could see a steep fall in oil prices in the next few weeks," Del Pino told the same panel with Novak. With global supply still exceeding demand by 1.5 million to 2 million bpd, producers in and outside the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries have no other option but to resume dialogue, Del Pino said. Novak said he was unsure whether OPEC could reach a consensus before its next meeting in about six weeks' time. "This is a hard task which the countries undertook - to agree by June". (Additional reporting by Alexandra Ulmer in Caracas; Writing by Dmitry Zhdannikov; Editing by Dale Hudson and Peter Cooney) [Komagata Maru ship/The Indian Times] By Nicole Riva Canadas Sikh community will be the next group to receive a formal apology from the federal government when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologizes for the treatment of those aboard the Komagata Maru who sought refuge in Canada in 1914. The ship carrying 376 passengers from India, mostly of Sikh heritage, was turned away in Vancouvers Burrard Inlet because of security concerns, which were later determined to be erroneous. Previous governments have apologized for the wrongdoings of the past. In 1988, an apology was given to the Japanese for their internment during the Second World War. In 2014, the government apologized for a long-running head tax on Chinese immigrants. The 2008 apology for residential schools offered compensation for survivors and resulted in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. An apology for the Komagata Maru is long overdue, immigration expert and Queens University law professor Sharry Aiken says. This has been one very significant wrong that has not been appropriately acknowledged or redressed and its about time, Aiken told Yahoo Canada News. Although the Komagata Maru itself affected a relatively small number of people, its impact is still being felt by the descendants and community members, Aiken says. We have communities today who have some link to the actual personal experience of being on that boat and being turned away, she says. Nelson Wiseman, a political science professor and director of the Canadian studies program at the University of Toronto, isnt so sure the apology will have a wide-ranging impact. It will be significant to some people in those communities and not to others, Wiseman says. The Komagata Maru isnt a well-known incident, he says, adding that he only learned about it through a documentary 15 years ago. If you ask people in the Sikh community, a lot of them dont know anything about this affair, but this will raise their consciousness of it. Story continues The list of historic wrongs that could warrant an apology is a lengthy one, Wiseman says. Apologies could be issued to the Jewish people who werent allowed in Canada during the Second World War and likely ended up being killed, Wiseman says, or the Italian, Ukrainian and German communities who were interned at various points in history, or for Canadas participation in slavery. In 1939, a ship carrying 907 Jewish refugees was denied entry to Canada. The passengers were returned to Belgium. Approximately 31,000 Italian-Canadians were questioned as fascist supporters or spies during the Second World War and 600 were taken to internment camps. Between 1914 and 1920, Ukrainian-Canadians were the majority of 3,138 people taken to internment camps because the country was deemed an enemy of the British Empire. Thousands of Germans were also interned at the same time. At one level, these things are good because they raise our historical consciousness about the Canadian experience. A lot of my students have a rosy view, I think, that the way things are now, is how they were and Canada was always a tolerant, accepting open society and thats BS, he says. On the other hand, do we sit and tear our hair out because of the sins of the elders? Trudeau has signalled he will also apologize for discrimination against gay people working for the government. Aiken, though not a political expert, says such apologies are important. We cant ever turn back the hands of time and undue what happened, but acknowledgment, apology and redress are important components of what government should do today to signal its intention to be fully equality promoting in all respects, Aiken says. Its not enough to do the right thing going forward; its important to look backwards. Norway violated laws banning inhuman and degrading treatment in its imprisonment of mass killer Anders Behring Breivik, a court has ruled. The decision gave the right-wing extremist a partial victory after he sued the state over his prison conditions since he was jailed for killing 77 people in a 2011 massacre. The ruling also said Norway had not violated Breivik's right to a private and family life - but ordered the state to pay his 28,000 (331,000NOK) legal bill. Breivik, 37, had claimed that being kept in isolation throughout his imprisonment amounted to a breach of the article in the European Convention on Human Rights prohibiting inhuman and degrading treatment. He also complained about prison food, excessive use of handcuffs, repeated strip searches and being woken up during the night. Although he has the run of three cells and access to a television and games console, Breivik claimed the state had been "trying to kill me for five years" with his solitary confinement. The regime in Breivik's Skien prison also allows him access to a computer (without an internet connection), contact with prison staff, lawyers, a priest and health professionals and the opportunity to play chess with volunteers. He can also prepare his own food and do his own washing, have conversations with a "female friend" - and was allowed to take part in a prison "bake-off" competition, making a gingerbread house. The government had rejected his claims and said the conditions were appropriate for a dangerous fanatic. Breivik exploited the hearings to promote his extremist views - making a Nazi salute on the opening day and later vowing to fight "to the death" for Nazism. The case was broadcast on Norwegian television, but his testimony was not aired out of respect to the families of the victims and the survivors, and to prevent him from sending any coded messages to his supporters. Breivik's lawyer, Oystein Storrvik, told Norwegian news agency NTB he would not appeal the ruling. He said prison authorities must now lift Breivik's isolation. Story continues It was not immediately clear whether the government would appeal. Breivik's attacks on 22 July, 2011, shocked Norway and the world. After months of meticulous preparations, he set off a car bomb outside the government headquarters in Oslo, killing eight people and wounding dozens. He then drove to Utoya island, where he opened fire on the annual summer camp of the left-wing Labor Party's youth wing. Sixty-nine people were killed, most of them teenagers, before Breivik surrendered to police. One of the main suspects in the investigation into the suicide bombings in Belgium has also been charged over the Paris terror attacks. Prosecutors have said Osama Krayem could have been present at several of the hideouts used by the militants before the terror spree in the French capital. The Swedish national was arrested earlier this month and was among four people charged with "terrorist murders" and "the activities of a terrorist group" over last month's suicide bombings in the Belgian capital. The blasts at Zaventem Airport and Maalbeek metro station left 32 people dead, four months after the carnage in Paris which killed 130 people. The authorities suspect Krayem of buying the suitcases used in the Brussels bombings after he was caught on CCTV at the shopping centre where they were purchased. He's also accused of being the man seen with suicide bomber Khalid El Bakraoui minutes before he blew himself up on a metro train. Kraiem, who is thought to have joined Islamic State in 2014, was among six people arrested in Belgium on 8 April. Among them was Mohammed Abrini , the so-called "man in the hat" who was with the airport bombers before he fled the scene. He's also been charged over the Paris attacks. The devastation from Saturday's earthquake in Ecuador, with a death toll of 587 so far, is so great that some communities will likely need to "start from new," the UNICEF representative in that country says. "There are one or two locations where the government's contemplating relocating towns ... because of the level of destruction," Grant Leaity told CBC News on Wednesday evening. Several days after the disaster, people desperately continue to dig through rubble in the hopes of finding survivors, as aid workers try to assess the enormous humanitarian consequences of the largest quake Ecuador had seen in decades. "We're still going strong, and everybody is, in terms of search and rescue," Nicolas Verdy of the Canadian Red Cross told CBC News on Wednesday. "We have full teams going through the rubble, being helped by the military, by the government." "Obviously time is running out so they're moving as quick as they can," he said. Verdy, who lives in Ottawa, manages international emergency operations for the Canadian Red Cross and has been travelling to hard-hit areas on Ecuador's Pacific coast since he arrived on Monday. But it's hard to get "a full picture or a clear picture of the needs," he said, as blocked roads are impeding access to some communities. UN appeal expected Even a partially-completed picture, however, shows that the humanitarian response required is enormous. In addition to homes, critical infrastructure like hospitals and schools were damaged, or in some cases, completely destroyed. The United Nations is expected soon to announce a global appeal for around $70 million US ($88 million Cdn) to fund relief efforts in Ecuador over the next three months, Leaity told CBC News. Hundreds of Ecuadorian Red Cross volunteers mobilized in the first 24 hours following the earthquake, Verdy said. In addition to search and rescue efforts, the agency is focused on providing first aid and medical treatment to the thousands of people injured, he said, as well as "psychosocial support." Story continues "There's a lot of people that are traumatized," Verdy said. "People are sleeping outside. People are scared. There's a lot of aftershocks." Both the Red Cross and UNICEF are also providing shelter and clean water, deploying supplies that were already pre-positioned in the region, with more coming from international warehouses. Zika, dengue among illness concerns Other critical items, they say, are mosquito nets to protect people while they're sleeping outside or in shelters particularly as Ecuador battles Zika virus. It's "a major concern," Leaity said, noting that the same mosquito that carries Zika virus also causes dengue fever. After the initial life-saving needs are met, UNICEF and other agencies will try to restore as much normalcy as possible for children, partly by working with the Ecuadorian government to get them back to school within weeks or months, Leaity said. But rebuilding in Ecuador will be a long process, both aid agencies say. "We're going to see people in need not just for the next coming weeks but the next coming months," Verdy said. "For some people, it's going to be for the next coming years." 'Wake-up call' for construction standards The earthquake's epicentre "was very close to the poorer parts of the coast," Leaity said. That contributed to the severity of the destruction in some areas, aid agencies say. "The poorer people have less solid houses so their houses tend to get destroyed first," Verdy said. A lot of the houses were "built on very poor ground soil quality," Leaity said, adding that "this earthquake is a wake-up call" for construction standards. Both agencies say it's essential to adopt the principle of "build back better" in helping Ecuador rebuild. If people's homes are built to appropriate standards, "the next time there's an earthquake they might not lose everything," Verdy said. "It might save their lives." Around eight tons of illegal drugs have been seized in a newly-discovered tunnel running between the US and Mexico. Federal officials in San Diego say the half-mile-long tunnel connects a Tijuana house with an industrial lot advertised as a wooden pallet business in the Californian city. The tunnel, which has a railway track, lighting and ventilation, was entered using an elevator large enough for up to 10 people which was hidden in the closet of the Tijuana house. For 874 yards, the 3ft-wide tunnel then zig-zagged until it reached San Diego, where the exit was covered by a large rubbish bin. Laura Duffy, US attorney for the Southern District of California, described it as "a rabbit hole". She added: "Just the whole way that it comes up and that it comes up out right into the open, it is a bit ingenious, I think, and it's something completely different than what we've seen." Authorities seized more than a ton of cocaine and seven tons of marijuana in the tunnel on Wednesday, revealing that it was the 13th sophisticated secret passage found along the California border with Mexico since 2006. The region is popular for such tunnels because its soil is quite easy to dig with shovels and pneumatic tools. Both sides of the border also have warehouses that can provide cover for trucks and digging equipment. Ms Duffy said this tunnel was unusual because it was not just built for marijuana - which is often transported this way because its bulk and smell make evading border inspectors' scrutiny more difficult - but cocaine as well. Investigators had started monitoring the industrial lot in San Diego last autumn after Border Patrol agents noticed the heavy traffic and become suspicious. Ms Duffy said she was "fairly confident" that the first drug load was sent earlier this month. Six people have been arrested in connection with the tunnel, including one US citizen, two Cubans who were granted asylum and three Mexicans who were legally entitled to be in the country, Ms Duffy said. Wildrose Leader Brian Jean and MLA Scott Cyr have written a letter to the federal Liberals urging them to keep the Office of Religious Freedom open. The controversial office was established by the previous Conservative government. The federal Liberals decided not to renew its mandate, so the office closed at the end of March. In their letter, Jean and Cyr urged Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion to reverse that decision, which they called a "glaring blow to our multiculturalism." "The office has annual funding of $5 million, a smart and strategic investment in protecting and defending this most fundamental of rights and freedoms," the letter states. "It is the position of our party that it is important to renew the value we have put in this office. "The mandate of the Office of Religious Freedom is admirable and, in our view, a key component in protecting every Canadian's right to religious freedom. When you look at what the office is working to achieve you can see its value." The letter cites the persecution of the Yazidi Christians by ISIS in Iraq as an example of what faith communities are facing. Garnett Genuis, the Conservative MP for Sherwood Park-Fort Saskatchewan, posted a tweet thanking Jean and Cyr for writing the letter. Genuis brought forward a failed motion to save the office. The Wildrose leader was reluctant to discuss the letter when asked about it by reporters but promised to release it. His staff sent a copy to the media moments later. Jean was a Conservative MP for 10 years before stepping down in January 2014. The office was criticized for mixing religion and politics. Some believed that former Prime Minister Stephen Harper created the office to appeal to faith groups. India says it is still determined to get back the Koh-i-Noor diamond even though it is presently on display as part of the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London. The country's chief legal adviser claimed on Monday that the priceless jewel had in fact been given to Queen Victoria by an Indian king, and not stolen as many Indian citizens believe. Solicitor general Ranjit Kumar surprised many when he told the Supreme Court that his country should therefore give up its claim to the awesome gem. However, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government said its adviser's view was not representative of the government and it was pressing on with its claim. "The Government of India further reiterates its resolve to make all possible efforts to bring back the Koh-i-noor Diamond in an amicable manner," the ministry of culture said in a statement. The stone was a "valued piece of art with strong roots in our nation's history", it added. The Indian government has yet to give its opinion to the Supreme Court which is hearing the case. A lawyer in India's neighbour Pakistan last year filed a court petition calling for the stone's return. India and Pakistan became two different countries with partition in 1947, when they became independent from Britain. India has repeatedly called for the return of the 105-carat diamond that was given to the then-queen around 1850. It originally weighed 793 carats but by the time it reached Queen Victoria it had been cut down to 186 carats. Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, unimpressed with the stone's dull appearance ordered the change and refashioning, making it the size it is now. It is set in the crown worn by Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, at the coronation of George VI, the Queen's father in 1937. The crown was placed on the Queen Mother's coffin at her funeral in 2002. The Duchess of Cambridge is likely to wear the crown when William - who is second in line to the throne - eventually becomes king. BRUSSELS (Reuters) - NATO's first formal meeting with Russia's envoy to the alliance in almost two years underscored the deep East-West divide over the Ukraine crisis and the future of Europe's security, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said. "In the meeting, it was reconfirmed that we disagree on the facts, on the narrative and the responsibilities in and around Ukraine," Stoltenberg said after the meeting. "Many allies disagree when Russia tries to portray this as a civil war. This is Russia destabilizing eastern Ukraine, providing support for the separatists, munitions, funding, equipment and also command and control," he said. "So there were profound disagreements," he said. (Reporting by Robin Emmott; editing by Philip Blenkinsop) Premier Wade MacLauchlan has announced his Liberal Party will introduce a bill looking at political party financing and hints he may want to follow the federal rules that ban corporate or union donations to political parties. In the legislature on Wednesday, Green Party leader Peter Bevan-Baker tried to push for details while revealing some of his own. Bevan-Baker said in 2014, a non-election year, the Liberal Party of Prince Edward Island received 54 per cent of its $522,000 in donations from businesses. He also said the Progressive Conservative party received 58 per cent of their $286,000 in donations from businesses. "These are very often the companies that receive government contracts," Bevan-Baker said. MacLauchlan said the bill would be introduced during this current session of the legislature and expected it would be discussed into the fall session. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggested earlier this month that provinces should stop allowing corporations and unions to donate to political parties. Federal parties have operated under those rules since 2006. Trudeau told reporters it was time for provinces to "shift their behaviour in a positive way" and allow only individuals to donate to political parties. MacLauchlan said that was one of the questions that the bill will consider. When Bevan-Baker asked directly if he would be ending corporate or union donations to political parties, MacLauchlan repeated the bill would be tabled soon, but didn't say no. "The federal regime is one that we should be giving close consideration to," he said. "One of the questions that will be considered, in fact it's one that comes to the fore when considering legislation of this type is who should be eligible to make political contributions." BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syria's prime minister and foreign minister on Thursday accused European and regional powers of supporting terrorists and fuelling fighting in the country, in a defiant tone from Damascus after a halt to peace talks this week. Prime Minister Wael al-Halaki said Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Britain and France did not want a political solution to the conflict. "These regimes are working to escalate terrorist actions, support terrorists and destroy the cessation of hostilities agreement agreed by Russia and the United States," state news agency SANA quoted him as saying. Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said earlier that states including Turkey continued to supply rebels in Syria with advanced weapons, and that the Syrian government would press on with its fight against terrorists. The partial truce, brokered by Washington and Moscow in February, initially reduced violence in the west, but fighting has picked up again in recent weeks, leaving the ceasefire in tatters. The statements from Damascus suggested it still felt it was in a position of strength, bolstered by a six-month-old Russian military intervention on President Bashar al-Assad's side. A top adviser to Assad said that "dialogue, local agreements and destroying terrorism" were the way to ensure a political solution to the conflict. "We are trying to exploit every possible opportunity for the success of the political solution to the Syrian crisis," Bouthaina Shaaban said. (Reporting by John Davison and Omar Fahmy in Cairo; Editing by Dominic Evans) By Louis Charbonneau UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has recommended extending the mandate of a peacekeeping mission in the disputed territory of Western Sahara for a year, warning that the conflict there was in danger of reigniting, according to a new report. "The risk of a rupture of the ceasefire and a resumption of hostilities, with its attendant danger of escalation into full-scale war, will grow significantly in the event that MINURSO is forced to depart or finds itself unable to execute the mandate that the Security Council has set," Ban said in the report, which was seen by Reuters on Tuesday. Morocco expelled dozens of U.N. staff from the mission in Western Sahara, known as MINURSO, after Ban last month referred to the North African nation's 1975 annexation of the region from Spain as an "occupation." Morocco has said its decisions were irreversible but that it was still committed to peace. In his annual report to the U.N. Security Council, Ban urged the 15-nation body to ensure the resumption of full operations of MINURSO, which has been crippled by the staff reduction and closure of a military liaison office. He said the resulting vacuum "can be expected to be exploited by terrorist and radical elements." "I call on the Security Council to restore and support the mandated role of MINURSO, uphold peacekeeping standards and the impartiality of the United Nations, and, most importantly, avoid setting a precedent for United Nations peacekeeping operations around the world," he said. The Security Council is scheduled to vote next week on whether to renew MINURSO's mandate. The controversy over Ban's "occupation" comment, made during a visit to refugee camps for Sahrawi people, is the worst dispute between the U.N. and Morocco since 1991, when the international body brokered a ceasefire to end a war between Rabat and rebels fighting for independence in Western Sahara. MINURSO was established at that time. The Sahrawis' Polisario Front separatist movement wants a referendum on independence, but Morocco says it will only grant autonomy. The U.N. mission had nearly 500 military and civilian personnel before the recent staff reduction. Morocco also has canceled some $3 million in support for the mission. "The military component will struggle to maintain its monitoring of the ceasefire given its reliance on civilian capabilities and technical functions for sustainability," Ban said. "Other key tasks and standard peacekeeping functions, such as assessments of and reporting on local conditions that may affect the mission's operations and the political process, have been discontinued," he added. (Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Paul Simao) YAOUNDE (Reuters) - The United States will give $40 million in humanitarian assistance to countries bordering Lake Chad fighting Islamist militant group Boko Haram, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said on Tuesday. The money was to help about seven million people affected by the insurgent group that has killed around 15,000 people. It takes total U.S. aid to the sub-region since 2014 to $237 million, she said. Power was in the capital of Cameroon and met President Paul Biya and attended a ceremony to burn 2,000 tusks in a bid to end elephant poaching. The trip includes visits to Chad and Nigeria. "We discussed the monstrous threat posed by Boko Haram and we agreed, and he was very forceful on this point, that the military response alone could not succeed in defeating Boko Haram in the long-term," she said of her meeting with Biya. Respect for human rights, good governance, economic and forest development and a focus on civil society were essential components of the campaign, she said. Cameroon, Nigeria and Chad are contributing forces to fight the group. Power has been scheduled to visit the region's Multinational Joint Task Force, which is staffed with troops from the three nations as well as Niger and Benin. The United States has sent troops and drones and offered to send a special operations mission to the fight against Boko Haram, which has pledged allegiance to Islamic State. On Monday, a vehicle in her motorcade that was carrying United Nations and Cameroonian officials struck a young boy. Medics in the convoy treated him but he died of his injuries. "I joined the (Cameroonian) governor of the area ... the leading U.N. official who manages the humanitarian and development response and Ambassador Hoza, and we visited with the boy's family to offer our profound condolences," Power said in a speech. Power also described meeting refugees and called for financial support from the international community to aid the development of areas battered by Boko Haram. (Reporting by Sylvain Andzongo in Yaounde and Makini Brice in Dakar; Writing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg; Editing by Grant McCool) By John Irish and Rodi Said GENEVA/QAMISHLI, Syria (Reuters) - The United States said on Thursday it was concerned about reports that Russia is moving more military equipment into Syria to bolster President Bashar al-Assad, with a truce in tatters and peace talks in meltdown. Asaad Zoubi, chief negotiator for the main Syrian opposition, the High Negotiations Committee (HNC), said all its members will leave the peace talks in Geneva by Friday, with little prospect of a resumption unless the situation on the ground changes radically. U.N. special envoy Staffan de Mistura will decide on Friday whether talks to end the five-year war that has killed at least 250,000 people can go on without the HNC, and with combatants accusing each other of breaking a February ceasefire deal. Two Western diplomats said it looked like de Mistura would continue the talks until next Wednesday given the late arrival of the Syrian government delegation. "The HNC stayed the course, including through extended technical discussions on real substance," one said. "It's natural that the special envoy may continue discussion with those still in town who have yet to offer any real ideas, to press them to do so." A second diplomat said some experts from the HNC would remain for technical consultations. HNC spokesman Salem al-Meslet suggested de Mistura might be better off preparing for the next round of talks and ensuring the government was serious. A U.S. official told Reuters on Thursday that Russia has been repositioning artillery to northern Syria -- a move that may suggest the Syrian government and its allies are preparing another assault on the divided city of Aleppo. "It's understandable that the opposition felt unable to stay further given sustained regime attacks on Syrian civilians and continuation of siege and starvation tactics," said one senior Western diplomat. "Those who back the regime need to get a leash on them." The arrival of Russian reinforcements would risk driving the war into an even higher gear. Russia's defense ministry did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed concern over a "serious degrading of the situation" at the peace talks, a Kremlin spokesman was reported as saying. The HNC, which is backed by Western nations and key Arab states, had this week urged more military support for rebels after declaring the truce was over and said talks would not re-start until the government stopped committing "massacres". The talks aim to halt a conflict that has allowed for the rise of the Islamic State group, sucked in regional and major powers and created the world's worst refugee crisis. "I'm saddened and believe it's a mistake," said a Western diplomat of the opposition's decision. "It will be very difficult to find a pretext for them to return given the situation on the ground and now the regime knows that a bombing will ensure they stay away," he said, referring to an air strike this week that killed dozens. REBELS VOW TO FIGHT ON France, which accused the government of rushing "headlong" into violence and showing its refusal to negotiate a political solution, said it would consider with other European powers and the United States the idea of convening a ministerial meeting of major powers in the next two weeks to work out what to do. "If the regime insists on stubbornness, obstruction and rejection of international resolutions, we will continue our revolution," Abdullah Othman, head of the politburo of the Levant Front rebel fighting group, told Reuters. "Our only option is to realize the revolution's goals." The crushing in March 2011 of pro-democracy protests in the southern city of Deraa triggered demonstrations across Syria that ignited into widespread unrest and a multi-sided civil war. Syria is now a patchwork of areas controlled by the government, an array of rebel groups, Islamic State, and the well-organized Kurdish YPG militia. Far from the main frontlines between government forces and rebels in western Syria, Kurdish groups were fighting one of their most serious battles yet with government forces in the northeast. A Syrian Kurdish official said more than 21 pro-Damascus militiamen had been killed in two days of battles in Qamishli, near the Turkish border. It was a rare confrontation between sides that have mostly left each other alone since the start of the conflict in 2011, and underlined growing Kurdish power that has alarmed neighboring Turkey. Syrian government officials could not be reached for comment. With violence escalating, Syria's fragile peace talks might not resume for at least a year if they are abandoned, one senior Western diplomat warned. "DESTROYING TERRORISM" Endorsed by the U.N. Security Council, the Geneva peace talks marked the most serious effort yet to resolve the war but failed to make any progress with no sign of compromise over the main issue dividing the sides: Assad's future. Government negotiators say Assad's presidency is non-negotiable. Underlining confidence in Damascus, a top Assad aide reiterated its view that local truce agreements and "destroying terrorism" were the way towards a political solution. The opposition wants a political transition without Assad, and says the government has failed to make goodwill measures by releasing detainees and allowing enough aid into opposition-held areas besieged by the military. The war was tilted in Assad's favor last year by Russia's intervention, supported on the ground by members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps who have been bolstered recently by the arrival of members of Iran's regular army. "We've been concerned about reports of Russia moving materiel into Syria," Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama, said at a news briefing in Riyadh where Obama was at a summit with Gulf Arab leaders. "We think it would be negative for Russia to move additional military equipment or personnel into Syria. We believe that our efforts are best focused on supporting the diplomatic process." Press reports in the United States indicated that Russia has moved more artillery into Syria, weeks after declaring a partial withdrawal of its military presence there. Analysts said the Kremlin had changed rather than diluted its military power by increasingly relying on helicopters to support the Syrian army. States opposed to Assad have been channeling military support to vetted rebel groups via both Turkey and Jordan, in a program that has included military training overseen by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. BATTLE FOR ALEPPO The U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the repositioning of Russian artillery and some forces near Aleppo followed the Syrian government's recapture of the city of Palmyra from Islamic State. The Russian military said on Thursday it had completed the demining of the ancient part of Palmyra. The widely violated truce began fraying some two weeks ago near Aleppo, where the Syrian army accused rebel groups of taking part in assaults by Islamists who are not covered by the ceasefire. Rebels say they were defending themselves from attacks by the army and its Shi'ite militia allies. Aleppo is divided into areas controlled separately by the Syrian government and opposition. To the north of the city, meanwhile rebels have been battling the Islamic State group, forcing more people to flee. Heavy air strikes have also resumed in opposition-held areas of Homs, with new battles also erupting in Latakia province. (Writing by Peter Millership, reporting by Stephanie Nebehay, Bushra Shakshir, Tom Perry, John Davison, John Irish, Phil Stewart, Roberta Rampton and Angus McDowall; Editing by Catherine Evans) By Fergus Jensen and Kanupriya Kapoor JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesia fears piracy on a shipping route along its sea border with the Philippines could reach Somalian levels and has told vessels to avoid danger areas, officials said on Thursday, after a spate of kidnappings. Analysts say the route carries $40 billion worth of cargo each year. It is taken by fully laden supertankers from the Indian Ocean that cannot use the crowded Malacca Strait. Concerns over maritime attacks by suspected Islamist militants are disrupting the coal trade, with at least two Indonesian coal ports suspending shipments to the Philippines. Up to 18 Indonesians and Malaysians have been kidnapped in three attacks on tugboats in Philippine waters by groups suspected of ties to the Abu Sayyaf militant network. Abu Sayyaf, which has posted videos on social media pledging allegiance to Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, has demanded 50 million pesos ($1.1 million) to free the Indonesian crew. "We don't want to see this become a new Somalia," Indonesian chief security minister Luhut Pandjaitan told reporters, referring to the southern Philippine waters of the Sulu Sea, where the abductions took place. Piracy near Somalia's coast has subsided in the last few years, mainly due to shipping firms hiring private security details and the presence of international warships. The foreign ministers of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines will meet in Jakarta to discuss the possibility of joint patrols, Pandjaitan said. He said the armed forces chiefs of the three countries would hold talks in Jakarta on May 3. The Indonesian Navy has instructed all commercial vessels "to avoid piracy-prone waters around the southern Philippines", a spokesman for the Indonesian military said. The navy is increasing patrols around Indonesia's borders with Malaysia and the Philippines "to prevent acts of piracy and hijacking", Tatang Sulaiman told Reuters. The Kuala Lumpur-based Piracy Reporting Centre has also warned ships sailing in the Celebes Sea and northeast of the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo to stay clear of suspicious small vessels. COAL TRADE HIT Two Indonesian coal ports have blocked departures of ships for the Philippines and more suspensions are expected, said Pandu Sjahrir, chairman of the Indonesian Coal Mining Association, and a director of Jakarta-listed coal producer Toba Bara Sejahtera. Toba had suspended all shipments to the Philippines, Sjahrir said. Other companies had canceled shipments "from both sides", he added. Indonesian state-owned coal miner Bukit Asam said it was diverting Philippine coal shipments to Hong Kong for the next three months. The company ships less than a million tonnes to the Philippines per year, Bukit Asam corporate secretary Joko Pramono told Reuters. One company with a fleet of 40 dry cargo ships saw a silver lining, however. "If Indonesia bans tugs and barges from exporting coal then it will have to travel in larger cargo ships, of 32,000 to 64,000 tonnes," said Khalid Hashim, managing director of Bangkok-listed Precious Shipping. "All this would of course be beneficial for shippers like us." Indonesia, the world's largest thermal coal exporter, supplies 70 percent of the Philippines' coal import needs, which Indonesian data shows stood at about 15 million tonnes, worth around $800 million, last year. Philippine coal importers, however, said they could import coal from other countries including Australia, South Africa and Russia and source more locally if Indonesian shipments dried up. (Additional reporting by Keith Wallis in SINGAPORE and Wilda Asmarini in JAKARTA; Editing by Andrew Roche) Manila (AFP) - Trash-talking Philippine presidential favourite Rodrigo Duterte has warned he is prepared to cut diplomatic ties with the United States and Australia after their envoys criticised his comments about the jailhouse rape of a missionary. Duterte also told the ambassadors to "shut their mouths", as controversy raged over his comments last week in which he said he wanted to have been the first to rape the Australian woman who was brutalised and murdered in a 1989 prison riot. "If I become president, go ahead and sever (diplomatic ties)," Duterte, 71, said on the campaign trail on Wednesday night, referring to the relationships with the United States and Australia, two of the Philippines' closest allies. Duterte, who while campaigning has called the pope a "son of a bitch" and promised to kill tens of thousands of criminals, recounted at a recent rally the attack on the Christian missionary as part of his tough-on-crime pitch to voters. "I was mad she (the missionary) was raped but she was so beautiful. I thought, the mayor should have been first," she told the crowd. Duterte was at the time mayor of Davao, a major city in the southern Philippines where he is accused of running vigilante death squads that have allegedly killed more than 1,000 people. The front runner has at times on the campaign boasted about running the death squads, claiming they killed 1,700 people, but also denied any links to them. Duterte has similarly offered varying responses to the rape comments, with his media team releasing a statement in which he apologised. But on the campaign trail, he has repeatedly told reporters he would not say sorry. Australian ambassador Amanda Gorely criticised his remarks this week, saying on Twitter: "Rape and murder should never be joked about or trivialised. Violence against women and girls is unacceptable anytime, anywhere". US ambassador Philip Goldberg later agreed with her. Story continues "Statements by anyone, anywhere that either degrade women or trivialise issues so serious as rape or murder are not ones that we condone," Goldberg said in an interview with CNN Philippines television. - 'Shut your mouths' - Duterte has repeatedly expressed anger at what he regards as their intervention in domestic politics. "It would do well with the American ambassador and the Australian ambassador to shut their mouths," Duterte told reporters on Wednesday. A US embassy spokesman told AFP Thursday there was no immediate response to Duterte's remarks about the ambassadors. An Australian embassy spokeswoman said there would be no comment. Incumbent President Benigno Aquino on Thursday also criticised Duterte's remarks, while warning the policies of certain candidates could reverse the high rates of economic growth the country had seen during his six-year rule. "What do we gain by this? America is a very big trading partner, Australia has been helping us... so what is the value (of such actions?) If there is no value, why will you do it?" he told reporters. "I do have to thank them (certain candidates) for showing how different their styles are from ours," Aquino said. "These (economic growth) results were a direct outcome of our governance. If governance (were reversed) surely it is not reasonable to expect that progress would continue," Aquino added. Meanwhile in another warning to the country's traditional allies, Duterte's camp signalled it was prepared to start direct talks with China over a long-running territorial dispute. Aquino has been improving defence ties with the United States and Australia to bolster the Philippines in its dispute with China over the South China Sea. China claims most of the sea, even up to the coasts of its neighbours like the Philippines which has accused China of "bullying" other claimants. However Duterte spokesman Peter Lavina told ABS-CBN television on Thursday that the presidential hopeful would be prepared to talk directly with China if elected. Aquino has refused to hold direct talks with China over the dispute, preferring multilateral discussions and filing a legal challenge with a United Nations-backed tribunal. By Stella Mapenzauswa and James Macharia JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South African President Jacob Zuma said on Thursday that an investigation into a major government arms deal arranged in the late 1990s had found no evidence of corruption or fraud. Critics denounced the findings as a coverup and said they would continue to campaign for justice, including a possible legal challenge in the United States under U.S. anti-graft laws. The 30 billion rand (1.4 billion) deal to buy European military equipment has cast a shadow over politics in Africa's most industrialised economy for years. Zuma - then deputy president - was linked to the deal through his former financial adviser, who was jailed for corruption. This almost torpedoed Zuma's bid for president but all charges against him were dropped in 2009. "No evidence was found as well through the Commissions own independent inquiries," Zuma said in a televised address on Thursday. Zuma said the three-volume report on the investigation, which heard evidence from senior politicians including Thabo Mbeki, the former president, and ex-cabinet ministers, would be made public. Former banker and anti-arms campaigner Terry Crawford-Browne, who sued the government, leading to the establishment of the commission of inquiry into the arms deal, said he would challenge the investigation's findings. "The report is a whitewash, the whole thing is a farce," Crawford-Browne said. The probe had ignored documentary evidence gathered in a separate investigation by the state, he said. Crawford-Browne said he would ask his lawyers to consider taking the case to the Constitutional Court, South Africa's top court, or to the United States to be tried under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Andrew Feinstein, a former ANC member of parliament who has long called for more investigations into the deal, said in a statement that "this was not the end of the road in the struggle for accountability of corruption in the arms deal." Zuma's former financial adviser, Schabir Shaik, was found guilty and jailed in 2005 of trying to solicit bribes worth 500,000 rand a year for Zuma from a French arms company. Then-president Mbeki sacked Zuma after his deputy was also implicated in the deal. It was alleged that Zuma had offered to protect the French firm from an investigation into the deal. Zuma later ousted Mbeki to win leadership of the ANC. In 2009, a month after prosecutors dropped an investigation into more than 700 charges of fraud, corruption and racketeering relating to the same arms deal, Zuma was elected president. Zuma said the four-year investigation he set up in 2011 had found no evidence of widespread bribery, corruption or fraud in the selection of the preferred bidder to supply the arms. Nor had it found evidence that officials were bribed in an attempt to influence the deal. The South African leader has been beset by scandal during his tenure. Earlier this month, he survived an impeachment vote after the Constitutional Court said he breached the law by ignoring an order to repay some of the $16 million in state funds spent on renovating his home. In December he was widely criticised for changing his finance minister twice in a week, sending the rand plummeting and alarming investors. (Writing by James Macharia; Editing by Jon Boyle) MEMPHIS, Tenn., April 21, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As increasing numbers of workers explore job opportunities with multiple employers over the course of their careers, fewer professionals mark decades of service with one company. In fact, the median tenure for an American worker is less than 5 years at any one company. A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/e82f4271-febc-4169-8e69-b3fb984ad176 But thats not the case for Betty Bradbury, who is celebrating her golden anniversary with First Tennessee. Bradbury, the longest tenured employee at First Tennessee, joined the bank in 1966 as a teller in Chattanooga before moving to Middle Tennessee. A succession of promotions led to roles as financial center manager, sales manager and later retail banking manager of Rutherford County. Today Bradbury is relationship manager for Employees First in Middle Tennessee. When Bradbury joined First Tennessee in 1966, Time Magazine named Baby Boomers its Man of the Year, and 8-track tape players were popular options in Fords. The ATM wouldnt even be invented until three years into Bradburys career at First Tennessee. First Tennessee Bank is the greatest place in the world to work, Bradbury said. First Tennessee values its employees because it sees them as its most valuable resource. Ive had the opportunity to advance as far as I wanted to go and have always been very happy with my career here. While Bradburys career is singular in scope, hundreds of her peers have also called First Tennessee home for decades. In fact, almost 300 First Tennessee workers have been with the company for 30 years. Average tenure of the nearly 4,300 First Tennessee employees is 11.1 years, average service for commercial banking managers is 12 years and average tenure for private banking managers is 26.4 years. That level of job stability is rare in todays professional environment and even more so in an industry that experiences frequent turnover. Research from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals that in 2014, median tenure for finance sector employees was 5 years. Betty Bradbury is just the type of dedicated professional who has made First Tennessee what it is over the past 152 years, said Bryan Jordan, chairman and CEO of First Tennessees parent company, First Horizon National Corp. Her professionalism and energy have set high standards for everyone who has the chance to work with her. Jordan invited Bradbury to host the employee video news program that marked the companys 150th anniversary in 2014. First Tennessee, which has been named one of the top companies in the country to work for by American Banker, Forbes and Working Mother magazines, has a proud history of employee retention and satisfaction. And Bradbury is honored to be part of that tradition. I will always consider First Tennessee to be such an important part of my life, said Bradbury, who plans to retire in June. Ill always be a part of the First Tennessee family. About First Tennessee First Tennessee Bank is the largest bank headquartered in Tennessee, with the number one deposit market share in Chattanooga, Knoxville, Memphis and the Tri-Cities and a top-five deposit market share in Nashville. The FTB Advisors wealth management group has 313 financial advisors and $25 billion in assets under administration. First Tennessee was founded during the Civil War in 1864 and has the 14th oldest national bank charter in the country and one of the highest customer retention rates of any bank in the country. First Tennessee, FTN Financial and FTB Advisors are part of First Horizon National Corp. (NYSE:FHN), which has 4,300 employees. First Horizon has been recognized as one of the nation's best employers by Working Mother and American Banker magazines. More information is available at www.FirstTennessee.com. FHN-G FALLS CHURCH, Va., April 21, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) will highlight a full range of solutions aimed at providing best-value enhancements and game-changing capabilities during the Army Aviation Association of America (AAAA) Mission Solutions Summit. The event will be held April 28-30 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. Northrop Grumman's booth 938 will spotlight tailored enhancements that help preserve command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) dominance, expand mission capabilities and create tomorrow's solutions for today's Army aviation force. Featured in the booth will be the company's digital helicopter cockpit and integrated avionics solutions. Derived from the U.S. Army's UH-60V Black Hawk program, the system offers an affordable, integrated suite of avionics equipment. The system's integrated architecture can be applied to many platforms and sustained through a single software package. Among the multifunction/multiplatform solutions on display will be the Common Infrared Countermeasures (CIRCM) system, which is a lightweight and highly reliable laser-based countermeasure system that is designed to integrate and operate with legacy and emerging missile warning systems for rotary wing, tilt-rotor and small fixed-wing aircraft across the military services. The company will also showcase the AN/APR-39D(V)2, a radar warning receiver and electronic warfare management system designed to maximize survivability by improving aircrew situational awareness via interactive management of all onboard sensors and countermeasures. Additionally, Northrop Grumman will highlight its Advanced Threat Warner (ATW), Light Weight Countermeasures Device (LWCMD) and family of tactical radars including STARLite, VADER and Longbow. A number of Navigation Systems (including LN-200, LN-200A, LN-251, LISA 200, LN-100, LN-260 and LN-270) will also be on display. Information on the Global Combat Support System for the Army (GCSS-Army), Guardrail RC-12X airborne signals intelligence system, Army Aviation Full Life-Cycle Support, and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) Integration and Global Sustainment will also be available in the Northrop Grumman booth. Information on the solutions showcased at the show is available online at www.northropgrumman.com/MediaResources/MediaKits/AAAA/. Northrop Grumman is a leading global security company providing innovative systems, products and solutions in autonomous systems, cyber, C4ISR, strike, and logistics and modernization to government and commercial customers worldwide. Please visit www.northropgrumman.com for more information. As of August 26th, 2021 Yahoo India will no longer be publishing content. Your Yahoo Account Mail and Search experiences will not be affected in any way and will operate as usual. We thank you for your support and readership. For more information on Yahoo India, please visit the FAQ Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21 By Anvar Mammadov - Trend: Some 71.47 percent of the investment portfolio of the State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ) was invested in financial tools for up to five years in Jan.-March 2016, SOFAZ's report on the results of the first quarter of 2016 said. As of April 1, 2016, the total volume of SOFAZ investment portfolio is $33.94 billion or 99.1 percent of the total volume of assets, the report said. Around 35.64 percent of SOFAZ investment portfolio is placed in securities for a one-year period, 21.56 percent for one to three years, 14.27 percent for three to five years and 9.13 percent for more than five years. Some 19.4 percent is kept in real estate, assets and gold, the report said. SOFAZ assets are partially placed in securities, tools of the monetary market such as deposits and bank accounts. Some 80.6 percent of the investment portfolio is placed in bonds. Around 14.04 percent accounted for the securities with 'AAA' ratings, 26.76 percent in 'AA', 36.76 percent in 'A', and 22.36 percent in 'BBB', 0.08 percent in 'BB'. SOFAZ assets cannot be placed in securities with a lesser investment rating. Around 3.1 percent of the investment portfolio is placed in gold, real estate- 4.6 percent, assets - 7.7 percent, investments in the projects - 2.5 percent. The assets of the investment fund were placed as follows: 60.46 percent in European countries, 20 percent in North America, 3.62 percent in Australia, 11.80 percent in the Asia-Pacific Ocean region, 0.63 percent in the Middle East, 0.27 percent in South America, 3.21 percent in international financial organizations, Africa - 0.01 percent. As of April 1, 2016, SOFAZ assets increased by 2 percent compared to early 2016 ($33.57 billion) and were estimated at $34.25 billion. SOFAZ was established in 1999 with assets of $271 million. Based on SOFAZ's regulations, its funds may be used for the construction and reconstruction of strategically important infrastructure facilities, as well as solving important national problems. The main goals of the State Oil Fund include: accumulation of resources and the placement of the fund's assets abroad in order to minimize the negative affect on the economy, the prevention of "Dutch disease" to some extent, promotion of resource accumulation for future generations and support of current social and economic processes in Azerbaijan. Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21 By Anvar Mammadov - Trend: Relations between Azerbaijan and Iran have never been on such a high level, Iranian Minister of Communications and Information Technology Mahmoud Vaezi told reporters in Baku Apr. 21. He made the remarks at the meeting of Azerbaijani and Iranian delegations. Vaezi said that the two countries currently established friendly and fraternal relations. "There is a big role of the heads of our states in the fact that we have currently reached such a level of bilateral relations," Vaezi said. He added that cooperation within the framework of the North-South transport corridor and laying a railway bridge over the Astarachay river are very important factors in the development of economic cooperation, in particular freight transportation, tourism and trade. Vaezi said that Iran and the Azerbaijani government should continue to provide state support to the private sector and remove all existing barriers for entrepreneurs. "We must prove to the world that, despite a sharp drop in oil prices, we can ensure the development of economic relations at the expense of private entrepreneurs and non-oil sector," said Vaezi. Azerbaijani Economy Minister Shahin Mustafayev, in turn, said that the relations between the two countries developed rapidly over the last two years and have already reached the level of strategic partnership. "About 60 meetings were held and more than 30 documents were signed between our countries over the last two years," said Mustafayev. Over this period, the presidents of the two countries held six meetings, two of which were held in the last two months, he added. Mustafayev also noted that currently, 439 companies with the Iranian capital operate in Azerbaijan. He added that Iran is one of Azerbaijan's main trade partners. "The trade turnover between the two countries increased by 53 percent (compared to the January-March 2015) and totaled $41.4 million in the first quarter of 2016," said Mustafayev. He added that Azerbaijan and Iran are currently working on expansion the cooperation in the spheres of agriculture, tourism, pharmaceutics, transport, banking sector and others. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 21 By Elmira Tariverdiyeva - Trend: The U.S. administration should defy the Armenian lobby and support justice for Azerbaijan -- a true ally of America in the region, American Thinker, daily internet publication, wrote. While speaking about an Armenian occupation of Azerbaijan's territory, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region, Raoul Lowery Contreras, author of the article, said that the territory has been and is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan. "Nagorno-Karabakh has never been independent or part of Armenia," the article said. "In the middle of the cease-fire was Russia, not the United States," the author wrote. "The lack of the US meaningful diplomacy in this instance is shocking." "Why didn't the president of the United States intercede in this larger-than-a-firefight episode where it is said hundreds of soldiers and civilians died?" the author wrote. The author wrote that while this may be news to the president, Azerbaijan has been a partner of the United States in fighting terrorism since 2002. "On top of that, Azerbaijani soldiers have served in Afghanistan as allies and are there today, in April 2016," the article said. "Azerbaijan has also been crucial in providing energy security to the U.S. as well as its allies in Europe and Israel." "It is one of Washington's absurdities that the U.S. Congress passed a law (Section 907 to the Freedom Support Act) in 1992, rewarding Armenia for an illegal invasion and punishing Azerbaijan for defending itself," the author wrote. "The law was adopted at the behest of the well-financed Armenian lobby," the article said. "This ludicrous American law was never overridden despite United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding Armenian forces withdraw from Azerbaijani territory." The author wrote that Armenia was found guilty of an illegal invasion and illegal occupation of Azerbaijani territory by the European Court of Human Rights in June, 2015. "The fighting over the first April weekend would never have happened if Armenia had followed multiple United Nations resolutions to leave the territory of Azerbaijan it has illegally occupied for 22 years," the article said. On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers. The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements. Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on Apr. 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire. 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 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. Moscow, Russia, Apr.21 By Orkhan Yolchuyev - Trend: As the international mediator, Russia is ready to render all possible assistance to the parties of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Mariya Zakharova, spokeswoman for Russia's Foreign Ministry, said during the briefing Apr.21. She noted that the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict will also be discussed during the visit of Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to Yerevan. Currently, it is necessary to exercise restraint and return to stability, according to Zakharova. "We are firmly convinced that the parties [of the conflict] should resume the negotiation process aimed at achieving a lasting settlement," she said. "It is essential to intensify the work on reducing the war risk on the basis of the existing agreements." On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements. Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on Apr. 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides. 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 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. Edited by SI Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21 By Elmira Tariverdiyeva - Trend: Iran is urging Azerbaijan and Armenia, the sides of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, to prevent a war in the region, said Ali Larijani, speaker of the Iranian parliament. "We always recommend our partners in Azerbaijan and Armenia to use such solutions that will not lead to a war," Larijani said Apr. 21 in an interview with Mikhail Gusman, first deputy director general of the Russian TASS news agency. Larijani said that one of the existing mechanisms is the OSCE Minsk Group. "The OSCE Minsk Group was established at the initiative of Russia in 1992," he said. "It consists of 12 countries. The co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group are Russia, the US, and France." "We recommend our Armenian and Azerbaijani friends to prevent a new war in the region, as the consequences will be very painful," he added. "The Iranian Defense Ministry has already contacted the colleagues in Baku and Yerevan, as well as in Moscow." "Moreover, Azerbaijan and Armenia are neighbors," he said. "Another numerous human loss will cause hatred. It will be very difficult to get rid of hatred in the future." Larijani also said that everyone needs to put efforts to resolve the issue through politics. On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers. The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements. Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on Apr. 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire. 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 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21 By Anakhanum Hidayatova - Trend: There can be no military solution to the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Alexander Vershbow, NATO's deputy secretary general, tweeted Apr. 21. "Nagorno-Karabakh conflict urgently requires de-escalation and diplomatic progress under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs," he said in another tweet. On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers. The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements. Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on Apr. 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire. 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 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. Edited by EA --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Anahanum Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21 Trend: Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry has dismissed the Armenian media reports which suggest that allegedly the Azerbaijani side violated the ceasefire in the direction of Talish village and that Armenian serviceman Marat Danielyan was killed as a result of the shootout. "An Armenian Zil-131 truck was blown up on Apr. 21 morning on an Armenian mine in the northern part of the line of contact. The explosion left one dead and several injured," the ministry told Trend Apr. 21. "By spreading such false information, Armenians try to conceal from the public the number of the dead and injured, as well as their failures on the frontline," added the Defense Ministry. Details added (first version posted on 17:24) Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21 Trend: Azerbaijan is urging the international community to condemn Armenia for the gross violation of international law, Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry said in a statement issued Apr. 21. "The ongoing armed conflict in and around the Nagorno-Karabakh region of the Republic of Azerbaijan has resulted in the occupation of almost one fifth of the territory of Azerbaijan and has made approximately one out of every nine people in the country an internally displaced person or a refugee," said the statement. The Republic of Armenia bears the responsibility for unleashing the war and using force against Azerbaijan, occupying its territories, carrying out ethnic cleansing on a massive scale and committing other serious crimes during the conflict, said the ministry. "The international community has consistently deplored, in the strongest terms, the use of military force against Azerbaijan and the resulting occupation of its territories," reads the statement. "In 1993, the United Nations Security Council adopted resolutions 822 (1993), 853 (1993), 874 (1993) and 884 (1993), condemning the use of force against Azerbaijan and occupation of its territories and reaffirming the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Azerbaijan and the inviolability of its internationally recognized borders." "In those resolutions, the Security Council reaffirmed that the Nagorno-Karabakh region is a part of Azerbaijan, and called for immediate, complete and unconditional withdrawal of the occupying forces from all occupied territories of Azerbaijan," added the ministry. "Other international organizations have adopted a similar position." The statement said that Armenia, in total disregard of the position of international community and in flagrant violation of international law, continues to undertake efforts aimed at further consolidating the current status quo of the occupation, strengthening its military build-up in the seized territories, changing their demographic, cultural and physical character and preventing the hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijani forcibly displaced persons from returning to their homes and properties in those areas. Moreover, regular ceasefire violations, attacks on the towns and villages in Azerbaijan, situated along the line of contact of the armed forces of Armenia and Azerbaijan and the border between the two states, have become more frequent and violent recently, resulting in the killing and injuring of Azerbaijani civilians, said the Foreign Ministry. "The Republic of Azerbaijan has repeatedly brought its strong protests and serious concerns in that regard to the attention of the international community and has made it clear on numerous occasions that the unlawful presence of the armed forces of Armenia in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan is the main cause of tensions and incidents in the conflict zone and the major impediment to the political settlement of the conflict," the statement said. The Republic of Azerbaijan has also repeatedly stated that the military occupation of its territories does not represent a solution and will never produce a political outcome desired by Armenia, according to the ministry. "Starting from the early morning of April 2, 2016, the armed forces of Armenia increased fighting from their positions in the occupied territories, subjecting the armed forces of Azerbaijan along the line of contact and the adjacent densely populated areas under control of Azerbaijan to intensive fire with heavy artillery and large-caliber weapons," said the statement. The ministry noted in its statement that as a result of Armenia's attacks and subsequent hostilities, 34 towns and villages along the line of contact were shelled, a number of Azerbaijani civilians, including children, were killed and wounded. "Substantial damages were inflicted upon the private and public property. Thus, 353 civilian buildings, among them 314 residential houses, 3 schools, 3 kindergartens, 1 cultural center, and other civilian objects were either destroyed or damaged," said the statement. "Furthermore, 357 electricity poles, 3 power substations, 30 transformers, as well as water reservoirs, gas pipelines, roads and other property were damaged." Armenia's offensive actions also caused casualties and injuries among the servicemen of the armed forces of Azerbaijan, said the Foreign Ministry. "On April 10, 2016, the International Committee of the Red Cross facilitated the handover, between the sides, of the bodies of those killed in action following the recent escalation," said the statement. "The subsequently performed forensic medical examination registered numerous signs of post-mortem mutilation of the bodies of Azerbaijani servicemen." By its deliberate offensive actions, Armenia undermined the ceasefire regime established in 1994 and endangered the prospects of the political settlement of the conflict, added Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry. "On April 5, 2016 in Moscow, under the mediation efforts of the Russian Federation, a ceasefire was agreed between Armenia and Azerbaijan," said the statement. "Despite that, Armenia continues to violate that agreement by firing at the positions of the armed forces of Azerbaijan and the towns and villages situated along the line of contact with the use of large-caliber machine guns, mortars, grenade launchers and artillery systems." "Armenia's direct and deliberate attacks against the Azerbaijani civilian population and civilian objects, as well as inhuman acts against Azerbaijani military, constitute a serious violation of international humanitarian and human rights law, in particular the 1949 Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol I thereto, the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and its protocols, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms," said the ministry. Alongside with the Republic of Armenia's responsibility as a state for internationally wrongful acts, violations by Armenia of international humanitarian and human rights law during the conflict amount to crimes under international criminal law, said the statement. "The overall assessment of the causes and consequences of the war unleashed by Armenia against Azerbaijan make it absolutely clear that the crimes committed by Armenia during the conflict were not isolated or sporadic acts, but were part of Armenia's widespread and systematic policy and practice of atrocities," Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry said. The Republic of Azerbaijan is confident that the consistent measures being taken at the national level, as well as the existing international legal framework, will serve to bring to justice those responsible for the grave offences committed in the course of Armenia's aggression against Azerbaijan, according to the statement. The Republic of Azerbaijan urges the international community to condemn Armenia for blatant violation of international law and insist on the implementation of the aforementioned UN Security Council resolutions, the ministry said. "The conflict can only be resolved on the basis of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Azerbaijan within its internationally recognized borders," said the statement. "The Republic of Azerbaijan will spare no efforts towards achieving the political settlement of the conflict and ensuring peace and justice in the region." Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 22 Trend: Russia considers two ceasefire agreements signed between Azerbaijan and Armenia in 1995 and 1996 as the foundation of cessation of hostilities in Nagorno-Karabakh region, the Russian Foreign Ministry said. "In the context of the situation around Nagorno-Karabakh, the Russian side insists that the 1994 agreement on the ceasefire and the agreement on the strengthening of the ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh conflict reached in 1995 has no time limitations and continue to form the foundation of the cessation of hostilities in the conflict zone," the ministry said in a Thursday statement. On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers. The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements. 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 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21 By Elmira Tariverdiyeva - Trend: The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, while not taking place in Israel's immediate neighborhood, has potential "ripple effects" on the Middle East, the US-based news agency 'Jewish News Service' 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 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. "Azerbaijan is the side that lost its territory and it wants to win it back," said Amberin Zaman, a Turkish-born US public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Azerbaijani Ambassador to the US Elin Suleymanov said Azerbaijan is looking for international support towards attaining a peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict considering the four UN Security Council Resolutions. "Armenia has continued to ignore the resolutions...and the world has been comfortable with the status quo," Suleymanov said. "As long as our conflict did not move to active warfare, it was easier just to ignore it or to refrain from putting pressure on Armenia to move toward demobilization," he said. In fact, the first large-scale Armenian attack took place while Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev was in the US to attend the fourth Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, DC, according to Suleymanov. On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers. The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements. Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on Apr. 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire. Russia has a proactive diplomatic power in the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Suleymanov said. The ambassador noted that while US-Russia relations remain strained, he believes that regional powers could see the benefit of Azerbaijan's strategic ties with the US and Israel. Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21 By Anakhanum Hidayatova - Trend: Indonesia's vice foreign minister Abdurrahman Mohammad Fachir will visit Azerbaijan, the Indonesian Embassy in Baku told Trend Apr. 21. Fachir, who will lead a delegation of more than 20 people, will take part in the 7th Global Forum of the UN Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC), to be held Apr. 25-27 in Baku. It is planned to hold a meeting with participation of high-ranking officials and about 30 sessions during the Forum. The Baku Declaration is expected to be adopted during the high-level meeting of the UNAOC Global Forum. Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev signed a decree on July 24, 2015 to create an organizing committee for holding the 7th UNAOC Global Forum in Baku. Edited by EA --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Anahanum Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr.21 Trend: President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has received a delegation led by Minister of Information and Communications Technology of the Islamic Republic of Iran, co-chairman of Azerbaijan-Iran State Commission on economic, trade and humanitarian spheres Mahmoud Vaezi. The president hailed Mahmoud Vaezi`s contributions to the development of friendly relations between the two countries, adding the Azerbaijani government and people appreciated it. President Aliyev then awarded Vaezi with the "Dostluq" (Friendship) Order, saying it was for Vaezi's contributions to the development of friendly and cooperative ties between the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Mahmoud Vaezi thanked the president for the award, and said he is proud to be serving their own people and the people of neighbouring Azerbaijan, which has the same religion. The president touched upon the groundbreaking ceremony of a railway bridge over Astara River on Azerbaijan-Iran border. He expressed satisfaction with the implementation of all agreements reached between the two countries. The president said he met with President of the Islamic Republic of Iran Hassan Rouhani in Istanbul, and discussed how to develop the bilateral ties. President Aliyev also recalled with pleasure his visit to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Mahmoud Vaezi conveyed sincere greetings of President of the Islamic Republic of Iran Hassan Rouhani to President Ilham Aliyev. The minister said President Hassan Rouhani hailed his meeting with President Ilham Aliyev in Istanbul. He said bilateral and international cooperation between the two countries are developing successfully under the leadership of the two presidents. The president thanked for the greetings of President Hassan Rouhani, and asked the minister to communicate his greetings to the Iranian president. Adnkronos (Adnkronos) - Il Segretario generale della Nato Jens Stoltenberg ha espresso le sue ''congratulazioni a Giorgia Meloni per la nomina a primo ministro''. Su Twitter Stoltenberg ha scritto che ''l'Italia e un membro fondatore della Nato, impegnata nel legame transatlantico e sta dando un forte contributo alla nostra sicurezza in un mondo piu pericoloso. Non vedo l'ora di lavorare con lei''. "Grazie @jensstoltenberg. Pronti a collaborare con la NATO, che e piu di un'alleanza militare: un baluardo d Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 22 Trend: The US continues to support the OSCE process and still believe that that's the best way forward, US State Department spokesperson John Kirby said on April 21. "Our Minsk group co-chair, Ambassador Warlick, visited the region with his Russian and French counterparts, making it clear that we want to see a return to negotiations and settlement immediately. And we remain firmly committed, again, through the OSCE, to working with the sides to reach a lasting peace", Kirby said. On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers. The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements. Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on Apr. 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire. 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 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. The 2nd European Union - Azerbaijani Business Summit will be held at the ADA University in Baku on 18 May 2016. The European and Azerbaijan businesses will meet to investigate the business opportunities in Azerbaijan and to establish business partnerships. Following the official opening ceremony, four panels addressing promising sectors of the Azerbaijani economy, will be organized: 1) Opportunities in the agriculture and agro-food sector 2) Opportunities in transport and logistics 3) Opportunities in the tourism sector 4) How to do business in Azerbaijan Relevant public organizations, national and international institutions and experts, government and company representatives will be invited to attend the Business Summit to engage in debate and to offer relevant information to participants. This event is providing you with an excellent opportunity to showcase your company and promote your business. After the panels, B2B meetings will be held between EU and Azerbaijani companies. Do not miss the chance of taking the advantage of B2B discussions to develop business opportunities, to find out new projects and to expand your network of business contacts and competent partners! The participation in Business Summit is now open for registration. Please contact Julia Egel ([email protected]) for more information and registration for the event. OSHA Cites Four Companies After Worker Suffers Fatal Injuries The agency says the companies violated confined space safety regulations while working on a renovation of the Springfield Metro Sanitary District's Sugar Creek Plant. OSHA announced an enforcement case against four companies after a 42-year-old worker suffered fatal blunt force injuries when an inflatable bladder ruptured at a Springfield, Ill., wastewater treatment plant last October. OSHA said its inspectors found the employer, Henderson Construction of Central Illinois Inc., failed to train the employee properly. The company was also cited for failing to manage how and when workers entered the large round pipe as well as confined space-related violations. These are some of the first citations given under the new construction confined space standard, which took effect Aug. 15, 2015. "Workers can be killed when employers fail to protect construction workers from the many dangers in confined spaces," said Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health Dr. David Michaels. "These are among the first citations under OSHA's new confined space standard. Employers can prevent more tragedies like this one if they ensure proper training of workers and communication among multiple employers whose workers are on the same site." The companies were contractors working on a $54.4 million renovation of the Springfield Metro Sanitary District's Sugar Creek Plant. OSHA on April11 issued citations to Henderson, Williams Brothers Inc. (the controlling contractor on the site), and subcontractors Tobin Bros. and Crawford, Murphy & Tilly Inc. for multiple safety violations: NFPA Alerts Responders to Be Ready for Toyota's Mirai The new hydrogen fuel car is now available for use on California roads. It and other alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs) are challenging for the fire service and emergency responders. Toyota has introduced the Mirai, a hydrogen fuel car, for use on California roads, and NFPA is urging emergency responders to be sure they're prepared to respond to accident scenes involving it and other alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs). They can be challenging for the fire service and emergency responders, a post on the association's blog pointed out. According to Toyota's online product sheet for the Mirai, it bears an MSRP of $57,500 with a $5,000 California rebate and an $8,000 federal tax credit available for qualified buyers. It is a zero emissions vehicle equipped with a nickel metal hydride battery and two carbon fiber-reinforced hydrogen tanks. The sheet says Mirai's safety features include a hydrogen monitoring system with leak detection sensors and hydrogen tanks with safety shut-off valves. NFPA offers training programs on AFVs, including a free online training program that examines every type of AFV and an AFV emergency field guide. "In general, AFVs are different for first responders because they're used to responding to vehicles that have internal combustion engines. They have decades of experience addressing vehicle fires that have that sort of technology, so AFVs present new challenges for emergency response crews," Michael Gorin, a project manager at NFPA, said in the blog post. "The general sense in the industry is that the popularity of AFVS will continue to expand as the vehicles become more affordable for the public." He also says responders should use thermal imagers when dealing with any hydrogen emergency in order to determine the presence of fire, and that any hydrogen fire that does occur should not be extinguished unless the flow of gas can be stopped. Two North Dakota Companies Cited After Serious Fall Injury OSHA has asked all employers to commit to fall safety in its annual May campaign. Two Bismarck, N.D., companies have been cited by federal safety inspectors for failing to protect workers from fall hazards of up to 18 feet at a construction site. After reports that a worker suffered serious injuries when he fell about 20 feet while using a blowtorch to thaw roofing materials, inspectors observed four employees working without fall protection systems in place the following day. "It is disappointing that the day following a serious fall injury, that L & L Brendel would fail to ensure its workers were using adequate fall protection to prevent further injuries at this site," said Eric Brooks, OSHA's area director in Bismarck. "Falls remain the leading cause of preventable death in the construction industry, accounting for 40 percent of construction fatalities last year. All employees working at a height greater than 6 feet must use lifesaving fall protection equipment." As a result, OSHA issued L & L Brendel Construction LLC two willful safety violations for exposing workers to falls of 11-18 feet and failing to train employees on fall hazards, and Front Street Millwork & Lumber was issued one serious violation. OSHA's annual National Safety Stand-Down is taking place May 2-6 and is intended to help employers, unions, and workers nationwide re-commit to understanding and using fall safety protection to avoid serious injuries and fatalities. Amnesty International on Thursday condemned Russia for sending migrants and asylum seekers back to its highly repressive ex-Soviet ally Uzbekistan where they face "pervasive" use of torture. The rights group accused Russia in a new report of being "partners in crime" with Uzbekistan, a Central Asian country ruled by dour former Communist strongman Islam Karimov since 1991. Amnesty urged Moscow to stop extraditing or facilitating the forcible removal of Uzbeks who face the "real risk of torture" and "manifestly unfair trials." "The Russian authorities are not simply turning a blind eye to torture and injustice in Uzbekistan, they are lending a helping hand," said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International's director for Europe and Central Asia. Hundreds of asylum seekers, refugees and labour migrants have been abducted or forcibly returned from Russia to Uzbekistan since 2014, said the report, based on interviews with lawyers, activists and survivors of torture. Despite "overwhelming evidence that torture continues unabated in Uzbekistan," Russia continues to return alleged opponents of Karimov's regime, it said. Those sent back undergo "incommunicado detention, torture and other ill treatment to force them to confess," Amnesty said. "They face unfair trials that result in long prison sentences served in cruel, inhuman and degrading conditions." Uzbekistan, which hosted United States Secretary of State John Kerry last year, denies the use of torture. A relative of an asylum seeker forcibly returned to Uzbekistan in 2014 told Amnesty that his torturers "kicked in almost all of his teeth... He has only tiny splinters sticking out from his gums." "They are killing him slowly," the unnamed relative said. Amnesty accused Russia of prioritising "good relations and mutual interests" over international human rights obligations. It claimed Russia has colluded in "abductions and forced returns" and circumvented emergency orders by the European Court of Human Rights to halt extradition. Uzbek security forces have resorted to abductions in the "rare instances" when Russia refused extraditions, the report said. "Police and officers from the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) have often been complicit in such abductions." It described how Russia's FSB security service in central Moscow seized an Uzbek businessman accused of organising an Islamist terrorist group and handed him to Uzbek guards at an airport despite a European Court ban on his extradition. Uzbekistan, a country of some 30 million people, was last year listed among the "Worst of the Worst" countries in terms of political rights and civil liberties by US think tank Freedom House. The US State Department's 2015 human rights report highlighted Uzbekistan's "torture and abuse of detainees by security forces" and "denial of due process and fair trial." AFP News Ukraine on Sunday denounced as dangerous lies suggestions from Russia that it was preparing to use a "dirty bomb". Its western allies also dismissed the allegations from Moscow, just hours after Russia went public with the claims. In conversations with his British, French and Turkish counterparts, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu conveyed "concerns about possible provocations by Ukraine with the use of a 'dirty bomb'", Moscow said. Russia did not mention the alleged "dirty bomb" allegation in its statement following Shoigu's call with Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin. "If Russia calls and says that Ukraine is allegedly preparing something, it means one thing: Russia has already prepared all this," President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address on social media. "I believe that now the world should react as harshly as possible." Earlier Sunday, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba denounced Moscow's claims as "absurd" and "dangerous". "Russians often accuse others of what they plan themselves," he added. A British defence ministry statement said Defence Secretary Ben Wallace had "refuted these claims and cautioned that such allegations should not be used as a pretext for greater escalation". And in Washington, National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson dismissed Moscow's "transparently false" claim. "The world would see through any attempt to use this allegation as a pretext for escalation," she added. - 'Vile strikes' - Russia also announced Sunday that it had destroyed a depot in central Ukraine storing over 100,000 tonnes of aviation fuel. Kyiv's energy operator meanwhile said scheduled power cuts had been introduced in the Ukrainian capital due to Russia's repeated strikes on the nation's power network. The blackouts started from 11:13 am (0813 GMT) with consumers in Kyiv divided into three groups "disconnected for a certain period of time", energy company DTEK said. DTEK reiterated calls for residents to use electricity "sparingly" and for businesses to limit their use of external lighting. More than one million Ukrainian households have lost electricity following recent Russian strikes, according to the Ukrainian presidency, at least a third of the country's power stations having been destroyed ahead of winter. Zelensky condemned the "vile strikes" in comments late Saturday, after Russian attacks caused power cuts across the country. - 'Save your strength' - In the southern Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rig, deputy mayor Sergiy Miliutin was dealing with emergencies and power outages from his underground bunker, used as a venue for a children's martial arts competition. "I've reached a point where I just survive on my drive. You have to stay level-headed and save your strength. No one knows how long this will all last," he told AFP. The intensification of Russian strikes on Ukraine, particularly energy facilities, came after the bridge linking the annexed Crimea peninsula to mainland Russia was partially destroyed by an explosion earlier this month. It was another major setback for Moscow's forces, battling to contain a Ukrainian counter-offensive in the south and east of the country. French President Emmanuel Macron said Sunday that it was for Ukrainians to decide when "peace is possible", in comments made in Rome at the start of a peace summit. Ukraine reported three deaths in an overnight Russian artillery strike in the Toretsk area, a governor of the eastern Donetsk region said. Inside Russia, two lines of defence have been built in the border region of Kursk to deal with any possible attack, a local governor said on Sunday. On Saturday Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor in the neighbouring Russian border region of Belgorod, said the construction of defence structures had begun. Gladkov said two civilians had been killed in strikes there Saturday, and that 15,000 people had been left without electricity. - Kherson evacuations - Meanwhile Ukraine's SBU intelligence service said it had detained two officials of Ukrainian aircraft engine maker Motor Sich on suspicion of working with Russia. The SBU said management at the company's plant in Ukraine's southern Zaporizhzhia region -- partly controlled by Russian forces -- had colluded with Russian state-owned defence conglomerate Rostec. The suspects had supplied Russia with Ukrainian aircraft engines that were used to make and repair attack helicopters, the SBU said. In the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson, which Russia claims to have annexed, pro-Moscow officials on Saturday urged residents to leave "immediately" amid a "tense situation" at the front. Kherson, the region's main city, was the first to fall to Moscow's troops and retaking it would be a major prize in Ukraine's counter-offensive. A Moscow-installed official in Kherson, Kirill Stremousov, told Russian news agency Interfax on Saturday that around 25,000 people had left Kherson city to the left bank of the Dnipro River. Ukraine has denounced the removal of residents from Kherson, describing them as "deportations". bur-imm/raz/jj/lcm Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr.21 Trend: On 25-28 April, 2016, BHOS and UK-based Confidence Capital company with the support of SOCAR will jointly organize international practical conference on 'Caspian Basin and Central Asia: Trade, Logistics, Oil Processing and Oil and Chemistry' dedicated to the 93rd anniversary of National Leader of Azerbaijan Heydar Aliyev in Baku. Dedication of the mentioned conference to 93rd Anniversary of National Leader of Azerbaijan Heydar Aliyev firstly means demonstration of profound reverence to the National Leader, the founder of the independent Azerbaijan Heydar Aliyev, who initiated oil strategy of our country successfully continued by the President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev. The conference aims at popularization of achievements connected with oil strategy, drawing attention of specialists to Azerbaijan's development via topics highlighted during conference, establishing collaboration relations with the representatives of diverse countries, providing mutual information exchange between SOCAR and international partners. It is expected that 59 specialists and experts from 19 countries will visit Baku to join the conference. Azerbaijan will be represented with more than 150 participants at the conference including 23 specialists and experts. Representatives of the government and SOCAR, heads of SOCAR various structures, members of the National Parliament, representatives of companies functioning in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Turkey, Georgia will join the plenary meeting on 25 April. Conference will last three days encompassing 9 sessions dedicated to various topics. Following topics will be highlighted and discussed during the conference: Current development trends related to oil and chemistry industry of Azerbaijan, review of petroleum and macroeconomics market of the Caspian basin and Central Asia, assessment of the state and development of logistics related to energy supply, gas market of the region, review of petroleum fields of the Caspian Basin countries: production, processing, consumption, import, export, practical aspects of oil and oil products trade of the region, development of oil processing and oil and chemistry industry of the Caspian Basin and Central Asian countries, increase of production profits and the latest technologies. The sessions of the said Conference will also include the role of the market on petroleum and oil and chemistry related products of the Caspian Basin and Central Asia, the analysis of specific development spheres concerning oil processing and production in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan etc. In the frames of the conference, foreign specialists will visit SOCAR production sites. BAGUIO City Liberal Party standard bearer Manuel Roxas II has lost his election protest against Vice President Jejomar Binay in their 2010 vice presidential contest. An insider said the Supreme Court (SC), which sits as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET) in resolving election cases involving presidential and vice presidential candidates, is expected to dismiss Roxas petition. The SC failed to resolve the case in its session last Tuesday, or less than a month before the May 9 elections where Roxas and Binay will once again face off this time for the presidency. Thats moot already, the insider explained, referring to the status of the case. The source, however, would not reveal when the PET would convene to formally dismiss the petition. The insider, a member of the tribunal who requested anonymity for lack of authority to speak for the high court, only confirmed the ruling would effectively uphold the election of Binay as vice president. The source further told The STAR the dismissal of Roxas protest would be inevitable since the tribunal has failed to resolve it based on merits. The insider cited previous cases of protests dismissed by the PET after filers of the cases ran for elective posts in succeeding polls. Another insider confirmed that the protest is most likely to be junked based on technicality, citing PET rules. Theoretically, it (protest) can be considered moot upon filing of COC (certificate of candidacy) by the protestant (Roxas), the source explained. The PET will not be able to resolve the case based on merits until after the upcoming elections since the high tribunal will start its recess next week and resume session after the May polls, according to the source. The PET last acted on the case in October last year when it took note of Binays motion to dismiss the protest due to abandonment by Roxas of the case. Binay argued that Roxas appeared to be no longer interested in pursuing the case after he failed to pay the required filing fee of P166,635,000. Story continues The tribunal also cited Roxas inaction on his earlier plea for forensic examination and random manual audit of the ballots an undertaking the Binay camp branded as a self-serving fishing expedition not provided under PET rules. Binays lawyers pointed out that it has been five years since Roxas sought the conduct of forensic examination during preliminary conference on the case. Roxas, now the Liberal Party standard bearer, has not even filed a motion for resolution of his plea. To bolster their position, Binays lawyers cited relevant rulings SCs Ortega vs De Guzman, Senate Electoral Tribunal in Firdausi Abbas vs Heherson Alvarez et al, and House of Representatives Electoral Tribunal in Guades v. Uy where all poll protests were dismissed on the ground of inaction or failure of the filers to pursue the cases. The last time PET acted on the case was in December 2012 when it granted a request of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to use 75 percent of the ballot boxes containing votes under protest by Roxas for this years elections to save the government more than P160 million. Binays camp had asked the PET to junk the protest for lack of merit and for being invalid. But the tribunal has not acted on the Binay camps plea. In his protest filed in July 2010, Roxas alleged that election results used for Binays proclamation did not reflect actual votes due to what he described as anomalously high incidence of null and misread votes in the certificates of canvass in all precincts nationwide especially in his bailiwicks, Regions 6, 7 and Caraga. Roxas claimed he should have won the election if only the Comelec had counted the null votes, which supposedly largely belonged to him and would have made him overtake the final 727,084-vote advantage of Binay. But Binay, in his answer, said his camp has documented null votes in the automated polls and found that they were the lowest compared to the 2004 and 2007 polls. The Vice President also argued the results of the Comelec canvass were consistent with survey results. Results of random manual audit conducted by election watchdogs have shown 99.6 percent accuracy rate of the poll results in 2010. The Binay camp also dismissed as baseless allegations of Roxas that fraud and irregularities, including statistical improbabilities in certain clustered precincts in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, had characterized the conduct of the polls. In a counter-protest against Roxas, Binay contested results in over 40,000 precincts in Regions 6, 7 and Caraga due to irregularities, including alleged use of illegal ballots and failure to use Comelec stamps. The PET started hearing the protest and counter-protest in September 2010 with retired SC justice Bernardo Pardo designated as hearing commissioner. Introducing a bill of rights guaranteeing personal freedoms in our Constitution would only create more issues and weaken democracy. It is important that the debate on the morality of our laws remains on a societal and political level, rather than being decided by unelected judges in the courts. I refer to the article Resolving Democracys Irrationalities, published on 5th April 2016. I disagree with the authors proposal to enshrine an inviolable bill of rights in our Constitution that cannot be touched or altered by any democratic majority. There are some basic points of agreement between us. For one, it is true that the democratic system should form the basis of our political system, as it enjoys an almost unsurpassable legitimacy. Further, I agree that democracy is a means to an end and not an end itself. That the Philippines and Taiwan have faced economic setbacks due to endless partisan gridlock in their legislatures is surely indicative that the fleeting passions of individuals can be detrimental to national interests. A democratic republic is only as good as the people who constitute it. However, beyond these two points, I beg to differ from his line of reasoning. The authors proposal is unfeasible, unnecessary, and will surely lead to a less stable constitutional order if it were to somehow be implemented. Firstly, the entrenchment of a bill of rights is not feasible since it will require the support of a majority in Parliament; and it is unlikely that our Parliament, dominated as it is by a party that is accommodating of our societys largely conservative morality, would adopt such a libertarian proposal it would not risk offending the moral majority. Readers may recall that the ruling party has not only retained illiberal legislation such as Section 377A of the Penal Code, the Newspaper and Printing Presses Act and the Internal Security Act, but has also vocalised reasons for their refusal to repeal these laws. Story continues An alternative would be to put the proposed entrenchment to a vote in a referendum. However unlikely this alternative might seem (given that we have not had one since 1962), let us suppose for a moment that the referendum is conducted. Would the ruling party not exhort the people to reject this proposal, since it has always been aware that its broad law-making powers could be restrained by liberty-protecting language in the Constitution? For example, that we neither have a right to property clause nor a freedom from cruel and unusual punishment clause in our Constitution is due to their potential incompatibility with the Land Acquisition Act and the death penalty respectively. Moreover, the ruling party is unlikely to introduce such a sweeping change as it believes that gradual amendments are more suitable for constitutional reform, as evident from Mr Lee Kuan Yews colourful shoe analogy: Stretch them, soften them, resole them, repair them. They are always better than a brand new pair of shoes. Lee Kuan Yew and new shoes Sometimes, however, Lee Kuan Yew did wear new shoes. (Photo: Twitter) Secondly, if the proposal is implemented, we would end up with intractable political problems that have already been seen in the United States. As a late Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States observed, the tendency of unelected judges to read their own economic philosophies into the Constitution is one of the great dangers of the American plan of giving the judges the last word. Today, some Americans are battling against the odds to overturn the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, in a desperate attempt to stem the corrupting influence of money on Congress. If we do adopt an unmodifiable, entrenched bill of rights, the legislature might face a situation in which its enactments of social insurance, work safety, environmental and electoral laws (amongst others) are struck down by a judiciary that chooses to take license with the words of the Constitution in order to engage in policy-making. Judges are entirely unsuited to policy-making, since most of them do not have the requisite technical expertise; they are also not accountable to the electorate. Yet they engage in such activity blatantly in the United States. Do we really want such a system? Moreover, nobody can proclaim a monopoly over what is moral and what is not not even judges. Since we do not want conflict over how we are each to live and yet must decide on general laws that apply to all, democratic deliberation and law-making is the ideal way to resolve moral conflicts due to their acceptance by almost everyone. Removing societal debate on morality by placing the power to legislate these matters in the hands of the judiciary would lead to an even more divided and partisan society. Circumventing democratic decision-making would offend the peoples deepest sensibilities and create the perception that the judiciary is taking sides. The us-versus-them mentality that we are supposed to avoid would therefore be exacerbated. Finally, the proposal is unnecessary because our system of actually-existing democracy already has an in-built check against voter irrationality. We do not have pure democracy in Singapore; rather, we have representative democracy. Citizens do not decide on every single piece of legislation. In fact, we the people trust that there are individuals who are better suited to the task of writing the laws and governing the country on a day-to-day basis. And, fortunately, decision-making based on technical details, best derived from factual analysis and not political idealism, is somewhat shielded from popular pressure during the term of government in between election periods. We should not give up on democracy and we should not endorse the rule of philosopher kings. Better that we continue our tentative search in the dark for the public good together through collective deliberation, than have an unelected body or framework impose certain ideas on the rest of society. Top photo: The Singapore Parliament, against the backdrop of the old Supreme Court, Razorback88 Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or views of Inconvenient Questions or its editorial team. About the author: Darren Teoh is a full-time national serviceman who has a keen interest in the intersections between constitutional law and political theory. He describes himself as a cautious proponent of deliberative democracy. Aid groups launched their largest humanitarian delivery yet in war-torn Syria on Thursday after the UN evacuated hundreds of besieged residents, intensifying relief efforts even as peace talks falter. The two operations were a rare sign of humanitarian progress in Syria, where the brutal five-year war has left 270,000 dead as a partial ceasefire hangs by a thread. The dire humanitarian situation had even stalled UN-backed peace talks in Geneva, with the opposition walking away in frustration at sieges and attacks on civilians. UN envoy Staffan de Mistura told reporters in Geneva that Thursday's developments showed "modest but real progress". "If humanitarian aid increases, as there should be, and the cessation of hostilities goes back into what we consider a hopeful mood, that would certainly help the political discussions," he said. Aid groups began delivering medical and food aid to 120,000 people in and near the besieged rebel-held town of Rastan. "The people have suffered terribly," said Majda Flihi, who led a team from the International Committee of the Red Cross into the area. "Peoples' livelihoods, especially farming and raising livestock, have been severely affected. Damage to the town's irrigation infrastructure has made the situation even worse," she said. The ICRC said items for the provision of clean water were also part of the aid delivered in coordination with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and the United Nations. "More aid should be delivered in the coming days," it said. ICRC spokesman Pawel Krzysiek said it was "the largest joint humanitarian convoy we have done in Syria so far". The last ICRC delivery was in 2012, the same year rebels seized the town in central Homs province. - Major medical evacuation - Both the rebels and regime have used besiegement as a weapon of war in Syria, and more than four million people live under siege or in hard-to-reach areas. On Thursday, the UN completed a major evacuation of hundreds "in urgent need of life-saving medical attention" and their families, from four other besieged towns. The carefully synchronised operation began late Wednesday and lasted throughout the night. It saw 250 evacuees brought out of the rebel-held towns of Madaya and Zabadani near Damascus and then transported to Idlib city. The same number left Fuaa and Kafraya, pro-government towns under siege by Islamists, and travelled to the regime's coastal bastion in Latakia. Jihadist factions like the Islamic State group and Al-Qaeda are not party to an increasingly strained truce between the government and non-jihadists rebels. The "cessation of hostilities" came into force on February 27 and initially saw a significant reduction in bloodshed. Although none of its signatories have officially declared the truce dead, violence has surged in recent weeks, particularly in Idlib province and the battleground northern city of Aleppo. On Tuesday, suspected government strikes on the Idlib province towns of Maaret al-Numan and Kafranbel hit two markets, killing at least 44 civilians, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The strikes drew a furious reaction from the opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) which said they vindicated its decision to suspend its participation in the Geneva talks. - 'Shred of humanity' - The Britain-based Observatory reported new air strikes on Thursday -- some involving barrel bombs infamous for their indiscriminate nature -- against rebel-held towns in Homs province that are covered by the truce. The UN as well as Russia and the United States -- which brokered the truce -- are desperate to see it hold long enough to secure a negotiated settlement of the five-year conflict. But the HNC walkout has left a political solution increasingly distant, and has emboldened the government delegation to take a tougher line. The HNC's members were set to all leave Geneva by Friday, an opposition official told AFP. HNC chief negotiator Mohammed Alloush said the regime would have to "stop its massacres and release thousands of detainees so that it could have a shred of nationalism and humanity." "Then, the talks can start again," he told journalists as he left his hotel in Switzerland. The government's chief representative in Geneva, Bashar al-Jaafari, said his delegation would stay the course but that only opposition members "who reject terrorism (and) who do not work for the sake of a foreign agenda" would be permitted to join a "broad-based unity government". That would appear to rule out the HNC, which he described as a group of "extremists, terrorists and mercenaries" working for Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the opposition's main backers. Decades ago, the sight of seagrass swaying beneath the waters off south Florida conjured romance for those who dangled their fishing lines in hopes of catching redfish, snook or mangrove snapper. But now, seagrass is dying at a rate unseen since the late 1980s in the Florida Bay, off the southern tip of Florida between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. "It is like a desert," said fishing guide Xavier Figueredo, peering into the water, where only an occasional needle fish or ray could be seen scooting along a bottom clustered with matted, dead underwater grasses. Seagrass provides shelter for small fish, which are eaten by bigger fish, and serves as the foundation for the marine food chain. In Florida, where recreational saltwater fishing is a $7.6 billion industry, experts consider seagrass a key indicator of the ecosystem's health. "This has historically been a wonderful spotted seatrout fishery. This year it was non-existent, literally," said Figueredo, one of a group of fishing guides who cater to tourists visiting the string of islands known as the Florida Keys. - A man-made problem - Ecologists say the problem is mainly due to the way humans have for decades diverted the natural flow of fresh water from central Florida southward to the Everglades wetlands, protecting sugar cane farms and other property. A massive die-off that began in 1987 and lasted for years helped spark ambitious plans to protect the area, but fishermen say progress has been too slow. Now, they see the death cycle happening again, as increasingly warm and salty water smothers the underwater grass. First the grass detaches from the bottom. It floats to the surface during the day and sinks again at night, earning it the nickname "zombie grass," said Steve Davis, a wetland ecologist with the Everglades Foundation, as he inspected a once-popular fishing area called Whipray Basin. "It's dead, it just doesn't know it yet," he explained. Eventually, the grass bleaches, and the blades amass into smelly islands. The die-off makes an algae bloom quite likely, sucking oxygen out of the water and making it a hostile environment for marine life. "It is dramatic. It looks like a disaster area," said Davis. Heavy rain led to record freshwater inflows coming into the bay in January and February, Davis said, but it is not enough. The die-off is gathering steam. "We just have to now ride it out, and we know it is going to take years to recover," he said. State wildlife officials say the affected area covers about 25,000 acres (110,000 hectares) of dead sea grass -- about the size of Paris. But Davis said fishermen who have seen it firsthand say it's twice that big -- on the order of 50,000 acres. "It is a massive area in Florida Bay where the entire habitat has been decimated," said Davis. - 'Big Sugar' and the salty water - The crisis has prompted some fishing guides to press for government action. Some have formed advocacy groups like Captains for Clean Water, which has more than 9,000 followers on Facebook. The solution, they say, is to acquire a patch of land south of the state's largest freshwater lake, Lake Okeechobee, to act as a reservoir for fresh water that can flow south to the Everglades and the Florida Bay. But the land in that area belongs to sugar cane farms, a powerful industry known as "Big Sugar" that has resisted giving up any territory. "When times were tough, the industry was anxious to sell, and then times got better and the economics changed," Congressman Carlos Curbelo told a gathering of fishermen and concerned citizens in Islamorada this month. "We need to find a partner that is willing to engage." The lead government agencies involved -- the US Department of the Interior and the South Florida Water Management District -- did not respond to AFP requests for comment. The Everglades Foundation said money is not an issue, with some $200 million a year for the next 20 years earmarked to pay for the state's share of restoration, and federal funds to match. "The only other thing that is lacking is the political will to get the land that we need," said Davis. "Without that land, without that reservoir, we can't solve the problem in the Florida Bay." - Changing way of life - The Florida Bay did bounce back on its own after the 1987 die-off, but the rejuvenation process took nearly a decade. John Guastavino, who has been taking tourists out to fish from the Florida Keys for 26 years, remembers a time, not so long ago, when the catch was bountiful. "I've had days when I could go catch 65 redfish in a day, and days when I've caught 30 or 40 snook," he said. Now, "if you are having a good day, you might catch five or six snook," he added. "I can't remember the last time I had someone catch more than one or two redfish." He also has to travel farther than ever to find a good fishing spot. "It is probably one of the most frequently asked questions that I get," said Guastavino. "'Aren't there any fish back there, the 30 miles we just traveled?' It is sad to tell them, 'No, not really.'" US to China: No plans for military planes in Spratlys? BEIJING The Pentagon on Tuesday called on China to reaffirm it has no plans to deploy military aircraft in the Spratly Islands after Beijing used a military plane to evacuate sick workers from a new airstrip on an island it has created in the disputed South China Sea. Chinas Defense Ministry earlier dismissed US queries as to why China had used a military aircraft rather than a civilian one in Sundays evacuation from Fiery Cross (Kagitingan) Reef. US State Department spokesman John Kirby told a regular news briefing it was difficult to understand why China would have had to use a military aircraft for the evacuation. He also said it was a problem that the workers had apparently been working on infrastructure improvements of a military nature. A Pentagon spokesman, Commander Gary Ross, called on China to clarify its intentions. We urge China to reaffirm that it has no plans to deploy or rotate military aircraft at its outposts in the Spratlys, in keeping with Chinas prior assurances, he said. Ross also called on all rivals in the South China Sea to clarify their claims in accordance with international law and to avoid unilateral actions that change the status quo. Chinas Defense Ministry said Beijing had indisputable sovereignty over the Spratly Islands and the United States had no right to comment on Chinese building works and defensive facilities there. It said it was Chinese military tradition to wholeheartedly serve the people and help those in need. In sharp contrast, the US side is expressing doubts about whether its a military or civilian aircraft at a time when somebodys life is in danger, it said. We cannot but ask: if a US citizen suddenly took ill on US soil, would the US military look on with folded arms? Chinese activity in disputed waters of the South China Sea, including the construction of islands by dredging sand onto reefs and shoals in the Spratly archipelago, has alarmed rival claimants, particularly the Philippines and Vietnam. Story continues The United States has repeatedly criticized the construction of the islands and worries that China plans to use them for military purposes. It worries that trade in what is one of the worlds busiest waterways could be threatened, but China says it has no hostile intent. The runway on Fiery Cross Reef is 3,000 meters long and is one of three China has been building in the archipelago. Civilian flights began test runs there in January but Sundays landing was the first China has publicly reported by a military plane at Fiery Cross Reef. In a related development, China expressed anger yesterday after a senior British official said a ruling expected within a few months in an international arbitration case the Philippines has brought against Chinas South China Sea claims must be binding. Hugo Swire, British minister of state responsible for East Asia, also said Britain saw the ruling, by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, as an opportunity for China and the Philippines to renew dialogue over their territorial disputes. The comments by Mr. Swire neglect the facts and are very discriminatory and one-sided and seriously go against Britains promise not to take sides, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a daily news briefing. We are extremely dissatisfied. Tension in the South China Sea is the fault of the United States and the Philippines, not China, with US ships and aircraft increasingly appearing in the region, she added. The facts prove that if the South China Sea is tense then its the US which is the biggest pusher of this, Hua said. She repeated that China would neither accept nor participate in the arbitration case and it was an abuse of international law. The court is expected to rule in late May or early June. In February, the United States and the European Union, of which Britain is a part, warned China it should respect the ruling from The Hague. The court has no powers of enforcement and its rulings have been ignored before. Britain has prioritized developing economic ties with China and welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping on a state visit in October, leading critics to accuse it of placing short-term financial gain above human rights and security interests. It also upset the US administration when it became the first non-Asian country and the first member of the Group of Seven advanced economies to join a China-backed development bank for Asia seen by Washington as an unwelcome rival to Western-led institutions such as the World Bank. Reuters, AP By John Irish and Rodi Said GENEVA/QAMISHLI, Syria (Reuters) - The United States said on Thursday it was concerned about reports that Russia is moving more military equipment into Syria to bolster President Bashar al-Assad, with a truce in tatters and peace talks in meltdown. Asaad Zoubi, chief negotiator for the main Syrian opposition, the High Negotiations Committee (HNC), said all its members will leave the peace talks in Geneva by Friday, with little prospect of a resumption unless the situation on the ground changes radically. U.N. special envoy Staffan de Mistura will decide on Friday whether talks to end the five-year war that has killed at least 250,000 people can go on without the HNC, and with combatants accusing each other of breaking a February ceasefire deal. Two Western diplomats said it looked like de Mistura would continue the talks until next Wednesday given the late arrival of the Syrian government delegation. "The HNC stayed the course, including through extended technical discussions on real substance," one said. "It's natural that the special envoy may continue discussion with those still in town who have yet to offer any real ideas, to press them to do so." A second diplomat said some experts from the HNC would remain for technical consultations. HNC spokesman Salem al-Meslet suggested de Mistura might be better off preparing for the next round of talks and ensuring the government was serious. A U.S. official told Reuters on Thursday that Russia has been repositioning artillery to northern Syria -- a move that may suggest the Syrian government and its allies are preparing another assault on the divided city of Aleppo. "It's understandable that the opposition felt unable to stay further given sustained regime attacks on Syrian civilians and continuation of siege and starvation tactics," said one senior Western diplomat. "Those who back the regime need to get a leash on them." The arrival of Russian reinforcements would risk driving the war into an even higher gear. Russia's defence ministry did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed concern over a "serious degrading of the situation" at the peace talks, a Kremlin spokesman was reported as saying. The HNC, which is backed by Western nations and key Arab states, had this week urged more military support for rebels after declaring the truce was over and said talks would not re-start until the government stopped committing "massacres". The talks aim to halt a conflict that has allowed for the rise of the Islamic State group, sucked in regional and major powers and created the world's worst refugee crisis. "I'm saddened and believe it's a mistake," said a Western diplomat of the opposition's decision. "It will be very difficult to find a pretext for them to return given the situation on the ground and now the regime knows that a bombing will ensure they stay away," he said, referring to an air strike this week that killed dozens. REBELS VOW TO FIGHT ON France, which accused the government of rushing "headlong" into violence and showing its refusal to negotiate a political solution, said it would consider with other European powers and the United States the idea of convening a ministerial meeting of major powers in the next two weeks to work out what to do. "If the regime insists on stubbornness, obstruction and rejection of international resolutions, we will continue our revolution," Abdullah Othman, head of the politburo of the Levant Front rebel fighting group, told Reuters. "Our only option is to realise the revolution's goals." The crushing in March 2011 of pro-democracy protests in the southern city of Deraa triggered demonstrations across Syria that ignited into widespread unrest and a multi-sided civil war. Syria is now a patchwork of areas controlled by the government, an array of rebel groups, Islamic State, and the well-organised Kurdish YPG militia. Far from the main frontlines between government forces and rebels in western Syria, Kurdish groups were fighting one of their most serious battles yet with government forces in the northeast. A Syrian Kurdish official said more than 21 pro-Damascus militiamen had been killed in two days of battles in Qamishli, near the Turkish border. It was a rare confrontation between sides that have mostly left each other alone since the start of the conflict in 2011, and underlined growing Kurdish power that has alarmed neighbouring Turkey. Syrian government officials could not be reached for comment. With violence escalating, Syria's fragile peace talks might not resume for at least a year if they are abandoned, one senior Western diplomat warned. "DESTROYING TERRORISM" Endorsed by the U.N. Security Council, the Geneva peace talks marked the most serious effort yet to resolve the war but failed to make any progress with no sign of compromise over the main issue dividing the sides: Assad's future. Government negotiators say Assad's presidency is non-negotiable. Underlining confidence in Damascus, a top Assad aide reiterated its view that local truce agreements and "destroying terrorism" were the way towards a political solution. The opposition wants a political transition without Assad, and says the government has failed to make goodwill measures by releasing detainees and allowing enough aid into opposition-held areas besieged by the military. The war was tilted in Assad's favour last year by Russia's intervention, supported on the ground by members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps who have been bolstered recently by the arrival of members of Iran's regular army. "We've been concerned about reports of Russia moving materiel into Syria," Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama, said at a news briefing in Riyadh where Obama was at a summit with Gulf Arab leaders. "We think it would be negative for Russia to move additional military equipment or personnel into Syria. We believe that our efforts are best focussed on supporting the diplomatic process." Press reports in the United States indicated that Russia has moved more artillery into Syria, weeks after declaring a partial withdrawal of its military presence there. Analysts said the Kremlin had changed rather than diluted its military power by increasingly relying on helicopters to support the Syrian army. States opposed to Assad have been channelling military support to vetted rebel groups via both Turkey and Jordan, in a programme that has included military training overseen by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. BATTLE FOR ALEPPO The U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the repositioning of Russian artillery and some forces near Aleppo followed the Syrian government's recapture of the city of Palmyra from Islamic State. The Russian military said on Thursday it had completed the demining of the ancient part of Palmyra. The widely violated truce began fraying some two weeks ago near Aleppo, where the Syrian army accused rebel groups of taking part in assaults by Islamists who are not covered by the ceasefire. Rebels say they were defending themselves from attacks by the army and its Shi'ite militia allies. Aleppo is divided into areas controlled separately by the Syrian government and opposition. To the north of the city, meanwhile rebels have been battling the Islamic State group, forcing more people to flee. Heavy air strikes have also resumed in opposition-held areas of Homs, with new battles also erupting in Latakia province. (Writing by Peter Millership, reporting by Stephanie Nebehay, Bushra Shakshir, Tom Perry, John Davison, John Irish, Phil Stewart, Roberta Rampton and Angus McDowall; Editing by Catherine Evans) The human gut is a complex and amazing system, and the more we learn about it, the more amazed we are. It turns out Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21 Trend: Arrest term for the former head of the Antiterrorist Center of Azerbaijan's abolished National Security Ministry, Major-General Elchin Guliyev, was extended for four months on Apr. 21. This decision was made by the Baku City Sabail District Court. Elchin Guliyev was detained Dec. 25, 2015, and was sentenced to four months in prison. He is charged under several articles of the Criminal Code within the criminal case initiated by the Grave Crimes Investigation Department at the Prosecutor General's Office. STEM Bedtime Math To Expand to 6 Cities Bedtime Math, a nonprofit organization billing itself as a "math ambassador," will expand to a half dozen new cities following a pilot project at Newark Public Schools (NPS). Announcement of the expansion came today as part of the White House Early STEM Symposium. Designed to help reduce math anxiety among both students and parents, Bedtime Math offers quick, engaging story problems for parents and students to solve together daily. "In a given year, kids spend three to four times as many hours outside school as in it, so their parents have a huge effect on their learning," said Laura Overdeck, founder of Bedtime Math, in a news release. "Parents are a child's most important educators, and by using Bedtime Math, even the most math-anxious parents can add a little 'math talk' to their daily routine. With the support of school districts across the country, we're hoping to help even more kids learn to love and embrace math." In the Newark pilot, a parent-teacher conference model was used. Six elementary schools in the district were chosen to participate. Teachers at those schools were taught about the app, and then shared information about it with parents during conferences. "Initial results found 10-20 percent of parents at each school were using the app with their kids, with the strongest results among prekindergarten through second grade," according to a news release. As a result of the success of the pilot, Newark Public Schools has decided to roll the program out to all 54 of its elementary schools. The program will also be rolled out to at least five more districts. "I love Bedtime Math," said Christopher D. Cerf, superintendent of NPS, in a prepared statement. "Bedtime Math has made math accessible to students and parents across the city. I especially appreciate the way it encourages shared time for parents to participate directly in their children's learning. It is exciting to see students learn to love and embrace math, which is a critical tool for long-term academic success. We are proud of our partnership with Bedtime Math and are thrilled that NPS can serve as a model for other school districts across the country." Project-Based Learning Hands On with STEM Just because you're using a computing device to do something doesn't make it STEM-friendly. Here's how to know if your classroom technology is speaking the right language. Robertsville Middle School students work with Arduinos for a cubesat project. Students: It's About the Doing Ask Livesay's middle schoolers about STEM, and they don't talk about technology; they talk about what they're doing and how they best learn. Veda, an eighth grader who had just finished painting her CO2 dragster, explained that in a "normal" science or math class, "you just write the facts down." In a STEM class, "instead of just writing them down, you apply them to a project to show what you know." And that approach suits her learning style, she added. "People are either audio learners, visual learners or physical learners. And I'm definitely a physical learner. I learn by applying myself and actually doing." Seventh grader Jackson insisted that the engineering processes he has been a part of are helping him in his other classes too. "We don't just build things. We also give presentations and speak to people. We had visitors from South Carolina today, and I was presenting to them." The process gets you more comfortable about being able to say what you feel and do what you think." Sam, a sixth grader, has found that how he's learning in the STEM course has made it easier for him to understand "how you'd apply that in real life." His strength, he has discovered, is "the problem-solving part." "I'm a very hands-on learner," he said. "It helps me that this class is just that. I'm getting a lot out of it." Todd Livesay was amped. An eighth grader in fifth period had just broken the Robertsville Middle School record for building the sturdiest bridge he has ever tested. It was eight inches long, three inches by three inches square and made of one-eighth-inch balsa wood. The structure took her 23 days of classes to design and build using Autodesk Inventor. Up until this moment the record stood at 400 pounds, held by another girl who's now a senior at Oak Ridge High School. But this student's assembly remained intact on the Pitsco hydraulic tower tester for a solid 412 pounds. "When that thing went," said Livesay, "it just exploded all over the room." So transpired another school day in one of Livesay's STEM classes. His district, Oak Ridge Schools, is set in a small town in Tennessee where science, technology, education and math are a way of life. This is the same Oak Ridge that hosts the national laboratory for the United States Department of Energy that same one in charge of extracting plutonium from uranium used in atomic weaponry during WWII. At one time, claimed Livesay, the town had more Ph.D.s than any other spot on the globe. Now it has Project Lead the Way, a fee-based bundle of professional development, curriculum and assessments for delivering STEM education in the form of activities, projects and problems, sorted out by bands of grades: K-5, middle school and high school. When the students walk into one of the seven courses that Livesay oversees as a STEM teacher, they quickly learn one thing: What they do will be hands-on. And that makes the difference between a STEM lesson plan and a traditional lesson plan: the real-life component. As an example, he said, "If you were teaching a lesson on how to figure square footage of a room, it's just length times width. To make that a STEM lesson, you could have tape measures in the room and after doing stuff on paper, the kids would pick up a tape measure and measure the room and do the calculations. It's student-centered learning instead of teacher-centered." 7 STEM Titles to Get You Started Danny Wagner, the manager for STEM education content at Common Sense Education, suggested these seven apps and online programs to help your students follow scientific and engineering practices straight from the Next-Generation Science Standards. Mosa Mack Science (grades 4-8). "Part of the NGSS is integrating engineering into teaching, which can be scary to some teachers," Wagner noted. This program asks students to solve questions. Through solving those, they do inquiry and carry out investigations. From there, they're given design constraints and a problem to engineer solutions for based on the science they're doing in class. "That's really important, that teachers aren't just tacking on engineering activities randomly in their lessons, that the engineering activities are related to the science that's going on." ExploreLearning Gizmos (grades 3-12). This program, said Wagner, "has simulations where students manipulate variables and analyze and interpret data they see as they're changing those variables." DesignSquadNation (grades 3-8) and Monster Physics (grades 6-8) both "really get the kids to define their problems and then iterate on those solutions, which is another part of the engineering process," Wagner said. NOVA Labs (grades 6-12) and Tuva Labs (grades 9-12). Wagner said that teachers need to use "as much real data as possible." These two programs allow students to do just that, "which makes it more interesting [and] more engaging." Curiosity Machine (grades 2-12). As students are trying to design solutions, they have the ability to talk with an expert in the field. "We want them to be acting like mathematicians and scientists and engineers," he pointed out. That doing may be researching and building working models of maglev trains or designing and prototyping CubeSats for a project underway with a NASA contact. While technology is definitely a component of STEM in the classroom, that isn't defined solely by the use of computers, Livesay noted. It could consist of that tape measure; it could be a tower tester; it could be a dial caliper. "Technology has been around since the wheel. There's a lot of old technology that's still very useful." Networking & Wireless Ramsey School District Upgrades to Private Fiber Network Ramsey School District in New Jersey has upgraded to a 100 percent fiber network to support several bandwidth-intensive education initiatives. The district has standardized on Google Apps for Education, which requires a reliable Internet connection for students and teachers to access online resources. Ramsey SD also deployed more than 2,000 iPads recently and offers a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) program, two initiatives that require robust Wi-Fi access. And the Online PARCC assessments require a strong, reliable Internet connection. Ramsey School District has been a customer of Lightpath Ethernet-based communication services for 15 years, and decided to stick with the same service provider for this upgrade. The district implemented Lightpath's managed Private Fiber Service, with 10 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) connections between several key locations, including the middle and high school, and 1 Gbps connections to each of the district's three elementary schools. The network upgrade doubles the district's Internet bandwidth and increases connection speeds between key locations by 10 times, according to a news release. Lightpath is part of the New Jersey Middlesex Regional Education Services Commission (MRESC) purchasing cooperative, which aims to coordinate cost-efficient purchasing opportunities for educational institutions. Ramsey School District took advantage of this opportunity to save money on the network upgrade. Ryan Kenny, director of Ramsey School District's technology department, said he anticipates that the private fiber network will serve the district's increasing bandwidth needs in the years to come. "While a 1G Internet connection serves our needs today, we'll likely have to double or triple that in just the next couple of years," he said in a prepared statement. (Repeats April 20 item. The opinions expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters.) By Andy Home LONDON, April 20 (Reuters) - "Unless China starts to take timely and concrete actions to reduce its excess production and capacity in industries including steel (...) affected governments - including the United States - will have no alternatives other than trade action to avoid harm to their domestic industries and workers." Political language doesn't get any blunter than that. The stark warning came in a joint statement issued by the U.S (Other OTC: UBGXF - news) . Department of Commerce and the U.S. Trade Representative after what appears to have been a non-meeting of minds at multilateral talks in Brussels to address what is rapidly becoming a global steel crisis. And Beijing responded in undiplomatic kind. "Blaming other countries is always an easy, sure-fire way for politicians to whip up a storm over domestic economic woes, but finger-pointing and protectionism are counterproductive," thundered an editorial from China's official Xinhua news agency on the same day as the Brussels meeting. Adding apparent insult to perceived injury, Chinese steel mills lifted headline run-rates to record levels in March and exports accelerated again to an annualised 120 million tonnes. The reasons behind this resurgent production give cause for doubting that China is going to heed calls to discourage what the United States terms "market-distorting policies". Because this is not just about Beijing's steel policy, it's about a clash of economic ideology. FEELING THE PAIN Everyone is feeling the steel pain. Britain is in a collective hand-wringing mood over the potential disappearance of its once mighty steel production sector. In Germany, more than 40,000 steel workers took to the streets last week to protest over the impact of Chinese exports. And, make no mistake, China itself is feeling the same pain. The country's major steel mills made combined losses of 11.4 billion yuan ($1.8 billion) in the first two months of this year, hot on the heels of record financial losses in 2015. Story continues The China Iron & Steel Association (CISA), which issued these figures, is clear about what needs to be done - namely the elimination of more excess capacity. Beijing agrees. It (Other OTC: ITGL - news) is targeting the closure of 100-150 million tonnes of capacity at a cost of an estimated 400,000 jobs, a figure that dwarfs the social impact of potential steel closures in Britain, not least because China has no equivalent social security net to mitigate the blow. The problem, though, is two-fold. Firstly, that capacity closure figure is only around half CISA's estimate of excess capacity in China's steel sector, which produces as much as the rest of the world combined. Secondly, the entire Chinese sector has just been thrown a lifeline in the form of rising domestic prices, improved margins and, for the most financially beleaguered producers, a stay of execution. The collective willingness to grasp that lifeline explains why the country's steel output surged last month. MORE STIMULUS PLEASE Resurgent steel prices in China are down to resurgent domestic demand and the filling of a de-stocked supply chain in the country. Mills, in other words, are restarting capacity only because they are being incentivised by "market forces" to do so. But those "market forces" are directly down to government intervention. It is now clear that China has unleashed a renewed stimulus package to prop up its slowing economy. And this stimulus is the same as the last, bigger one used to stave off the impact of the global financial crisis in 2009-2010. State banks and local governments are once again pumping money into fixed asset investment (FAI). FAI growth accelerated to 10.7 percent in the first three months of this year. Crucially, growth in FAI derived from state entities rocketed to 23.3 percent from 10.9 percent last year. Combined with micro-stimulus in parts of the property market, this translates into demand for more steel, cement and other building materials. It's ironic that all of this runs counter to China's official mantra about steering the economy away from FAI towards a more consumer-oriented model. But in terms of the bigger stakes of economic growth and social stability, FAI remains Beijing's most powerful medicine for economic slowdown. If that means prolonging the problems of overcapacity in sectors such as steel, so be it. This is how a centrally planned economy works. Although Beijing superficially embraces free-market concepts, when the going gets tough, the government steps in to shield its population from the potential chaos of unfettered markets. So when the U.S. Commerce Department calls for a "market-driven" restructuring of the global steel sector "absent the effects of government measures that distort markets", it's missing the point as to how China really works. TRADE WAR? The other countries taking part in that failed Brussels meeting have offered China a way back into the talks in the form of cooperation on information-sharing and policies to mitigate the social impact of restructuring the global steel industry. Whether China picks up that olive branch remains to be seen. The acrimonious language used by both sides doesn't bode well. The alternative is more trade sanctions. The U.S. statement pointedly added as a footnote that the administration last year started "an historic number of trade remedy proceedings", including $45.5 million of penalties on steel importers. Further "robust enforcement measures" will proceed in parallel with continued talks. The problem is that bilateral sanctions don't work in a commodity supply chain such as steel. Chinese exports hit not just the United States but other big Asian steel producers such as South Korea and Japan, which respond by stepping up exports. India and Japan have already clashed in the World Trade Organization over the former's move in February to set a floor price for steel imports. In Australia, where local steel maker Arrium (Dusseldorf: ONL.DU - news) has just gone into administration, the government has already applied 41 anti-dumping measures to imported steel products, including 13 for China and eight for South Korea. In the steel industry such a proliferation of trade sanctions is commonly known as "whack-a-mole", a reference to the popular game in which the player has to hit a mole that appears randomly from a series of holes. What it means is that one set of bilateral sanctions immediately causes a change in steel flows to affect another country, which in turn initiates its own penalties on cheap imports. This process has not only started but is gathering global momentum as every country seeks to protect its own steel sector. A global dialogue on steel restructuring is surely the right way to prevent a full-scale global trade war. But with China unwilling and unable to sacrifice its broader goals of economic growth and stability to steel policy, the danger is that it will be a dialogue of the mutually deaf. (Editing by Dale Hudson) ABIDJAN (Reuters) - Ivory Coast will seek to raise 4.425 trillion CFA francs ($7.65 billion) during a meeting with donor partners next month to help fund an ambitious 5-year development programme, the government's spokesman said on Wednesday. The West African nation is aiming to invest a total of around 30 trillion CFA francs from 2016 to 2020 as part of efforts to foster economic development and reduce poverty. Around 18 trillion CFA francs is expected to come from private sector investment with the government's contribution making up the remaining 11 trillion CFA francs. Bruno Kone said that an advisory group headed by President Alassane Ouattara will meet in Paris on May 17 and 18. "It will aim to mobilise the sum of 4,425 billion francs for public investments planned for the period of 2016-2020," he said. "This is part expected from external partners." Having emerged from a decade of political turmoil following the civil war in 2011, Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa grower and French-speaking West Africa's largest economy, is increasingly turning the heads of foreign investors. Under the stewardship of Ouattara, who won re-election in a landslide victory in October, its economy has expanded by an average of around 9 percent in each of the past three years. But the former senior International Monetary Fund official is under pressure to make that growth more inclusive in his second, and final, five-year term. ($1 = 578.6000 CFA francs) (Reporting by Loucoumane Coulibaly; Writing by Joe Bavier; Editing by Toby Chopra) * Crude prices spring from smaller-than-thought U.S (Other OTC: UBGXF - news) . stockpiles * Moscow denies reports OPEC, other producers meeting in Russia * End of Kuwait strike initially stirred fresh glut worries * Distillates the star in EIA report; gasoline the weakest link (New (KOSDAQ: 160550.KQ - news) throughout, updates prices and market activity to settlement) By Barani Krishnan NEW YORK, April 20 (Reuters) - Oil prices rose 4 percent on Wednesday after a smaller-than-expected build in U.S. crude inventories offset glut worries stirred by the end of a Kuwaiti strike, and as oil bulls bet that major crude producers would meet again to try to curtail output. Moscow, however, denied media reports that Russia planned to host such a meeting. Just on Sunday, Russia and OPEC nations failed to reach an agreement on freezing production at a meeting in Doha, Qatar. "There is no such agreement" for producing nations to meet in Russia, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak was quoted as saying by RIA news agency. Earlier, Russia said it was ready to ramp up its oil output in a further fallout after producers failed to reach a deal for a freeze. Brent's front-month contract settled up $1.77, or 4 percent, at $45.80 a barrel. It (Other OTC: ITGL - news) had fallen to a session low of $42.81. U.S. crude's front-month contract, May, which expired at Wednesday's settlement, finished up $1.55, or 3.8 percent, at $42.63 a barrel. The session low was $39.85. Oil prices rebounded after the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said crude stocks rose 2.1 million barrels last week, compared with forecasts for a 2.4 million-barrel build and industry group American Petroleum Institute's data showing a 3.1 million-barrel rise. "It's overall mixed and slightly supportive, with total stocks of refined products and crude oil combined declining slightly," said Dominick Chirichella, senior partner at the Energy Management Institute in New York. Story continues Prices of ultra-low sulfur diesel, also known as heating oil , rose 5 percent and hit 4-1/2-month highs after the EIA report showed an unexpected drop in stockpiles of distillates, which include diesel. Gasoline rose more modestly, about 1 percent, after inventories for the motor fuel fell just about a tenth of expected levels. "Distillates are the standout bullish element of the report and gasoline is the disappointment," said Matt Smith, director of commodity research at New York-headquartered energy data provider ClipperData. Crude prices had initially tumbled as the Kuwaiti oil and gas industry called off a three-day strike and reports later said six supertankers had lined up at Kuwait's crude export terminal to load oil. Kuwait has also raised its oil output to 1.6 million barrels per day (bpd) from 1.1 million on Sunday. (Additional reporting by Simon Falush in LONDON; Editing by David Gregorio; Editing by Marguerita Choy) FRANKFURT (Reuters) - European Central Bank President Mario Draghi on Thursday dismissed German criticisms of his and the bank's policy actions, saying the ECB was independent and obeyed the law, not politicians. "We have a mandate to preserve price stability for the whole of the euro zone, not just Germany," he told a news conference. Draghi was responding to a storm of German criticism, sparked by his recent comments that the idea of 'helicopter money' - sending money directly to citizens - was a very interesting concept. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble was even reported as blaming the ECB's cheap-money policy in part for the rise of the right-wing anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD). Later, conservative German politicians said that the next ECB president should be a German. Draghi said 'helicopter money' had not been discussed at the ECB's Thursday meeting, but added that its ultra-loose policy was not unusual in the current global economic climate. "Our policies are not very different from policies being implemented in all major jurisdictions," he said. "And our policies are working," he added. (Reporting By John O'Donnell Editing by Jeremy Gaunt) Astara, Azerbaijan, April 21 By Maksim Tsurkov - Trend: Iran will draw a loan to finance its part of the construction of a railroad bridge over the Astara River on the Azerbaijani-Iranian border, Javid Gurbanov, head of Azerbaijan Railways JSC, told Trend April 21. Gurbanov has not specified the amount, source and timing of Iran's drawing the funds. He said that Azerbaijan will finance the construction of its part itself. A groundbreaking ceremony was held in the Azerbaijani city of Astara Apr. 20 for construction of a railroad bridge over the Astara River. At present, the sections of the Qazvin-Rasht and Astara (Iran) - Astara (Azerbaijan) railway are being constructed as part of the project. The Astara (Iran) - Astara (Azerbaijan) section is planned to be constructed in 2016, while the Qazvin-Rasht section in 2017. The Rasht-Astara railway will be under construction simultaneously. The Qazvin-Rasht-Astara railway is a part of the North-South transport corridor. Construction investments are estimated at $400 million. Initial plans call for transporting six million tons of cargo through the corridor a year, which is expected to reach 15-20 million tons per year in the future. JOHANNESBURG, April 21 (Reuters) - South Africa's Anglo American Platinum said on Thursday refined production for its first quarter halved compared with the same period a year ago mainly due to safety stoppages, and warned the slump would impact first-half profits. Production was stopped for 12 days and this in turn affected output for 37 days at the company's refinery, the unit of global miner Anglo American (LSE: AAL.L - news) said in a statement. Combined with a planned stock take, the stoppages led to a 52 percent slump in refined platinum production to 261,000 ounces for the three months to end-March, Amplats said. Shares (Berlin: DI6.BE - news) were trading 1.78 percent lower at 409.62 rand by 1035 GMT. Mines are mandated by the government to stop production after a death or an injury to allow time for safety investigations and inspections. The industry has at times complained that the drive to a goal of "zero harm," was overzealous, with frequent safety stoppages resulting in output and revenue losses. Amplats, the world's largest platinum miner, said production lost will be made up in the next two quarters and cautioned that this would have a short term impact on the company's financial position in the first half of 2016. Despite this, Amplats kept its full-year guidance unchanged at between 2.3 to 2.4 million tonnes. (Reporting by Zandi Shabalala; Editing by James Macharia) MS 13 member tattoo One of Latin America's largest and most powerful street gangs has come to be known by a simple moniker: Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. And the garish tattoos that adorn the faces and torsos of its members often do more to announce the gang's presence than the formal name. But the somewhat sinister name and the gang's extensive operations are a far cry from its humble origins. Migrants from Central America, El Salvador in particular, fled civil wars in the region in the 1970s and '80s, with a large number of them ending up in LA and Southern California. Many of those young men, who arrived in the US without family networks or any other connections, gravitated toward gangs. MS 13 gang member signs Some of them, according to Ioan Grillo's "Gangster Warlords," joined up with Barrio 18, an established gang that was started by Mexican immigrants but had begun letting in members of other nationalities. Other migrants, at the time just teenagers on the streets of LA, started a new gang. Grillo, citing the work of anthropologist Juan Martinez and the dogged reporting of Spanish-language news site El Faro, described how they arrived at their new organization's name: Bizarrely it comes from a Charlton Heston movie. Back in the 1950s, the film The Naked Jungle was a hit in El Salvador with the weird translation of "Cuando Ruge la Marabunta" or "When the Ants Roar." Following this, Salvadorans took the name Mara to mean group of friends, who like ants protect each other. As Grillo describes, the first wave of Maras in LA saw themselves as rockers, dressing the part, listening to heavy metal, and calling themselves the "Mara Stoners." Their newness and odd attire marked them as targets for other LA gangs, who attacked them throughout the early 1980s. But by 1984, according to Grillo, the Maras had changed. Story continues "To sound tougher and reinforce their Salvadoran identity, the Stoners re-baptized themselves as the Mara Salvatrucha," Grillo writes. "People have speculated that Salvatrucha might be a play on words of Salvadoran and trucha, meaning 'street smart.' Others say it just sounded good." As the civil war in El Salvador deepened in the 1980s, more Salvadorans arrived in LA and found their way to Mara Salvatrucha. This influx of new recruits, ones hardened by the horrors of the civil war back home, helped make the Maras better able to strike back at their rivals. ms13 As time went on, the violence MS-13 members instigated and participated in got them thrown in jail, where, according to Grillo, the dynamics of gang life were different. Rather than acting as upstarts carving out their own territory, Maras had to look for a bigger organization for protection: Mara inmates realized they had to join La Eme [The Mexican Mafia] to survive, and the mob was happy to add war-hardened machete wielders to its cell-block armies. The Mexican Mafia uses the number thirteen (M as the thirteenth letter of the alphabet), so as Maras joined up, they became the Mara Salvatrucha 13. MS-13 has only grown in the years since. As of 2012, the UN estimated that it had 19,000 members in Honduras and El Salvador, and members have been arrested as far away as Washington, DC, where the surrounding counties are believed to be home to as many as 3,000 members. While the gang mainly focuses on local-level crime extortion, drug dealing, and theft it also has links to Mexican transnational drug cartels. It reportedly does street-level drug distribution for the Sinaloa cartel, helping that Mexican organization secure the vast majority of the US drug market. NOW WATCH: EX-DEA AGENT: What I did when a drug dealer tried to bribe me with $3 million More From Business Insider MONTREAL, QUEBEC--(Marketwired - Apr 20, 2016) - Revenue before fuel surcharge from continuing operations up 1% to $866.7 million Adjusted net income from continuing operations* of $31.5 million, or $0.32 per diluted share*, versus $27.5 million last year, or $0.26 per diluted share 32 % increase in free cash flow from continuing operations* to $24.7 million, or $0.25 per share* Sale of Waste Management business for $800 million generating a pre-tax gain of $559.2 million Proceeds from the sale of Waste Management used to reimburse $705.4 million in debt and repurchase $63.6 million in common shares * This is a non-IFRS measure. For a reconciliation, please refer to the "Non-IFRS Measures" section below. TransForce Inc. (TFI.TO)(TFIFF), a North American leader in the transportation and logistics industry, today announced its results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2016. In 2015, TransForce ceased its U.S. rig moving operations and completed the sale of its Waste Management segment on February 1, 2016. Results for these activities are accordingly presented as discontinued operations in the Company's financial statements. Data for corresponding periods of the previous year have been restated. "The first quarter of 2016 produced mixed results for TransForce. We recorded higher volume in the Package and Courier (P&C) segment driven by increased e-commerce activity in the United States, but a weak Canadian economy continues to restrain organic growth in other business segments. While lower volume negatively affected operating income, optimization initiatives to adapt supply to demand resulted in higher profitability in the P&C and Less-than-Truckload (LTL) segments. We sold our Waste Management operations for $800 million generating a pre-tax gain of $559.2 million. The proceeds were used to reimburse a significant amount of debt and to repurchase 2.9 million common shares during the quarter. TransForce now has greater financial flexibility and will use free cash flow to further reimburse debt, repurchase shares or proceed with selective acquisitions," said Alain Bedard, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of TransForce. Story continues Financial highlights Quarters ended March 31 (in millions of dollars, except per share data) 2016 2015 Total revenue from continuing operations 934.2 963.6 Revenue before fuel surcharge from continuing operations 866.7 858.0 Operating income from continuing operations1 40.3 44.0 Net cash from continuing operations 40.2 47.4 Free cash flow from continuing operations2,3 24.7 18.7 Adjusted net income from continuing operations2,4 31.5 27.5 Per share - diluted5 ($) 0.32 0.26 Net income from continuing operations 15.3 13.0 Per share - diluted ($) 0.15 0.12 Net income6 503.6 14.0 Per share - diluted ($) 5.09 0.13 Weighted average number of shares outstanding ('000s) 97,619 102,376 1 Net income from continuing operations before finance income and costs, and income tax expense. 2 This is a non-IFRS measure. For a reconciliation, please refer to the "Non-IFRS Measures" section below. 3 Net cash from continuing operations, less additions to property and equipment, plus proceeds from sale of property and equipment. 4 Net income from continuing operations excluding amortization of intangible assets related to business acquisitions, net changes in the fair value of derivatives, net foreign exchange gain or loss and items not in the Company's normal business, net of tax. 5 Adjusted net income from continuing operations divided by the weighted average number of diluted common shares outstanding. 6 Includes net income from discontinued operations of $488.3 million, mainly attributable to a $490.8 million after-tax gain on the sale of the Waste Management segment. FIRST-QUARTER RESULTS Total revenue from continuing operations reached $934.2 million, down 3% over last year. Net of fuel surcharge, revenue from continuing operations rose 1% to $866.7 million. This increase reflects acquisitions completed in the previous twelve months and the effect of local currency appreciation on U.S.-dollar denominated revenue. Before fuel surcharge and acquisitions, revenue decreased due to lower LTL volume and reduced activity in specialized Truckload (TL) divisions servicing the oil and gas industry. Operating income from continuing operations totalled $40.3 million, compared with $44.0 million last year. As a percentage of revenue before fuel surcharge, operating income stood at 4.6% of revenue in the first quarter of 2016, versus 5.1% a year ago. The reduction in operating income reflects lower revenue and margins in the TL and Logistics segments, partially offset by improvement in the P&C and LTL segments resulting from optimization measures. Net income from continuing operations reached $15.3 million, or $0.15 per diluted share, up from $13.0 million, or $0.12 per diluted share, a year ago. Adjusted net income from continuing operations, which excludes amortization of intangible assets related to business acquisitions, net changes in the fair value of derivatives, net foreign exchange gain or loss, and items not in the Company's normal business, net of tax, was $31.5 million, or $0.32 per diluted share, up from $27.5 million last year, or $0.26 per diluted share. Considering the gain, net of taxes, on the sale of Waste Management operations, net income amounted to $503.6 million, or $5.09 per diluted share, versus $14.0 million last year, or $0.13 per diluted share. Reflecting disciplined capital investment, free cash flow from continuing operations amounted to $24.7 million, or $0.25 per share, in the first quarter of 2016, up from $18.7 million, or $0.18 per share, a year earlier. SEGMENTED RESULTS FROM CONTINUING OPERATIONS (in millions of dollars) Quarters ended March 31 2016 2015 $ $ Revenue* Package and Courier 319.5 286.6 Less-Than-Truckload 172.7 183.3 Truckload 334.7 342.5 Logistics 54.4 62.4 Eliminations (14.6 ) (16.7 ) Total 866.7 858.0 $ % of Rev.* $ % of Rev.* Operating Income (Loss) Package and Courier 17.9 5.6 14.7 5.1 Less-Than-Truckload 4.2 2.4 3.0 1.7 Truckload 20.6 6.1 25.6 7.5 Logistics 4.2 7.7 5.6 8.9 Corporate (6.5 ) (5.0 ) Total 40.3 4.6 44.0 5.1 Note: due to rounding, totals may differ slightly from the sum. * Revenue before fuel surcharge FINANCIAL POSITION During the quarter, TransForce completed the sale of the Waste Management segment for $800 million. The Company used proceeds from this transaction to reimburse $705.4 million in long-term debt and to repurchase up to 2.9 million common shares for a consideration of $63.6 million, mostly as part of a substantial issuer bid program completed on March 28, 2016. As a result, TransForce's long-term debt to equity ratio as at March 31, 2016 stood at 0.61, compared with 1.57 as at December 31, 2015. OUTLOOK "Looking ahead, the U.S. economy remains healthy driven by resilient consumer spending, which bodes well for the P&C and TL segments. In Canada, the economy remains depressed by low oil prices, while the effects of a weak currency have yet to provide a significant boost to the manufacturing sector. In this context, TransForce's decentralized and diversified business model will allow the Company to rapidly benefit from market opportunities as they arise. In addition, our disciplined capital management ensures that we invest in initiatives that generate superior returns, meet our main objective of generating cash flow and create lasting value for shareholders," concluded Mr. Bedard. CONFERENCE CALL TransForce will hold a conference call for analysts and portfolio managers on Wednesday, April 20, 2016 at 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time, to discuss these results. Business media are also invited to listen to the call. Interested parties can join the call by dialling 1-877-223-4471. A recording of the call will be available until midnight, May 4, 2016, by dialling 1-800-585-8367 or 416-621-4642 and entering passcode 78110912. ABOUT TRANSFORCE TransForce Inc. is a North American leader in the transportation and logistics industry operating across Canada and the United States through its subsidiaries. TransForce creates value for shareholders by identifying strategic acquisitions and managing a growing network of wholly-owned operating subsidiaries. Under the TransForce umbrella, companies benefit from financial and operational resources to build their businesses and increase their efficiency. TransForce companies service the following segments: Package and Courier; Less-Than-Truckload; Truckload; Logistics. TransForce Inc. is publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TFI.TO) and the OTCQX marketplace in the U.S. (TFIFF). For more information, visit http://www.transforcecompany.com. FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS Except for historical information provided herein, this press release may contain information and statements of a forward-looking nature concerning the future performance of TransForce. These statements are based on suppositions and uncertainties as well as on management's best possible evaluation of future events. Such factors may include, without excluding other considerations, fluctuations in quarterly results, evolution in customer demand for TransForce's products and services, the impact of price pressures exerted by competitors, and general market trends or economic changes. As a result, readers are advised that actual results may differ from expected results. NON-IFRS MEASURES Adjusted net income from continuing operations, adjusted earnings from continuing operations per share, free cash flow from continuing operations and free cash flow from continuing operations per share are financial measures not prescribed by IFRS and are not likely to be comparable to similar measures presented by other issuers. Management considers these to be useful information to assist investors in evaluating the Company's profitability, liquidity and ability to generate funds to finance its operations. These measures do not have any standardize meaning under IFRS and could be calculated differently by other companies. These measures should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for or superior to, measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with IFRS. Adjusted net income from continuing operations Quarters ended March 31 (unaudited, in thousands of dollars, except per share data) 2016 2015 Net income 503,631 14,045 Amortization of intangible assets related to business acquisitions, net of tax 8,093 6,996 Net change in fair value of derivatives, net of tax 6,226 6,935 Net foreign exchange loss, net of tax 1,616 447 Tax on multi-jurisdiction distributions 195 127 Net income from discontinued operations (488,309 ) (1,055 ) Adjusted net income from continuing operations 31,452 27,495 Adjusted EPS from continuing operations - basic 0.32 0.27 Adjusted EPS from continuing operations - diluted 0.32 0.26 Free cash flow from continuing operations Quarters ended March 31 (unaudited, in thousands of dollars, except per share data) 2016 2015 Net cash from continuing operations 40,244 47,426 Additions to property and equipment (29,122 ) (37,032 ) Proceeds from sale of property and equipment 13,544 8,316 Free cash flow from continuing operations 24,666 18,710 Free cash flow from continuing operations per share1 0.25 0.18 1 Free cash flow from continuing operations divided by the weighted average number of common shares outstanding. Note to readers: Consolidated financial statements and Management's Discussion & Analysis are available on TransForce's website at www.transforcecompany.com. Among the ruins of ancient treasured buildings, the twisted remains of the victims of air strikes and the soiled reputation of international relations, it's often hard to find a winner in any civil war. But as the dust begins to settle on Yemen's year-long conflict, the glint of white can be discerned through the fog of bloodshed the white teeth of al Qaeda fighters. A Saudi-led coalition of fellow Sunni Arab states launched air strikes and later a land campaign against Shia Houthi rebels in March last year. They were officially coming to the aid of the internationally-recognised president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. The Houthis sided with his (Sunni) predecessor, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and were seen as having the backing of Iran, the Shia theocracy and arch rival of the Sunni Arab dynasties. The coalition saw the fight against the Houthis as essential. Making up 35% of Yemen's population, the Houthis were seen as a potential threat along Saudi Arabia's southern border - much like the Hezbollah along Israel's northern frontier. A new confidence among younger members of the Gulf Co-operation Council fed a belligerent mood and pride that (at last) Arab nations were taking control of their own destinies and not asking Americans to do their fighting for them. But a year in, things have not gone so well. :: Concerns Raised About UK's Role In Yemen War The coalition has been blooded. The military performance of some units, led occasionally by Gulf royals, have gone some way to shaking off the caricature of the overweight and idle "Gulfie". But human rights groups have been outraged by that they say has been the profligate disregard for civilian life shown by coalition war planes. On top of that, Gulf allies, notable the UK and the US, have come in for bitter criticism for supplying bombs to the coalition. British officials have been squirming about trying to come up with a credible moral explanation for the "six to ten" personnel the military have working in the Saudi targeting cell. Story continues The Whitehall line is that they're there to train Saudi targeteers but have no access to battle damage assessments - without which no training would be possible. This has all been awkward for governments keen to flog munitions to the Saudis. Britain sold 1.75bn-worth in the first six months of last year. Western governments continue to stick to the notion (publicly anyway) that human rights matter. More problematic, though, is that the war in Yemen has created more space for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to operate. This, remember, is the group behind the Charlie Hebdo massacres and numerous bomb plots. Al Qaeda now has a significant presence across at least a quarter of central Yemen, and control of Makallah Port which generates $2m a day in revenues. It controls about 370 miles of Yemen's coastline and has begun raising taxes to fill coffers already gorged with $100m in looted bank cash. This is the first time al Qaeda has controlled and administered territory on this scale a victory delivered thanks to a war against someone else. NAIROBI (Reuters) - A senior army officer and a motorcyclist and two members of an armed group have been killed in separate incidents in Burundi, officials said on Thursday, a day after the latest flareup of violence in the country's year-long crisis. Tit-for-tat killings by supporters of President Pierre Nkurunziza and his political opponents have raised concerns that Burundi could slide back into conflict, after the country emerged from an ethnically fuelled civil war in 2005. More than 400 people have been killed since Nkurunziza said he would run for a third term last year. Opponents said he was violating the constitution and a peace deal that ended the civil war. A court ruled he could run, and he won re-election in July. In one incident on Wednesday, gunmen ambushed Colonel Emmanuel Buzubona as he travelled on the back of a motorbike to his home in Bujumbura, the capital, according to Moise Nkurunziza, deputy police spokesman. "The senior officer tried to flee but he didnt make it because the attackers finished him off by throwing a grenade," Nkurunziza told Reutershe said. The motorcyclist also died. The motive was not immediately clear. Buzubona's neighbours said he had returned in September from Tanzania, where he had been an instructor at a military college for officers from the East African Community bloc. He was awaiting a new assignment, army spokesman Gaspard Baratuza said. An ethnic Hutu, Buzubona had been a member of CNDD-FDD rebel force, which became the ruling party of the president. In the civil war, Hutu rebel groups such as CNDD-FDD fought the then-Tutsi-led army. The army has since been reformed to include both Hutus and Tutsis in all ranks. Leaders of a failed coup in May included both Hutus and Tutsis. In a separate incident on Wednesday, soldiers on patrol killed two people in a clash with an armed group in Kivumu village in Mugamba southern district, 60 km southeast of Bujumbura, said Christian Nkurunziza, regional governor of the district where Mugamba is located. "As they were patrolling, soldiers exchanged fire with an armed group of eight men, killing two people," he said. Four members of the CNDD-FDD party were killed in the same village last week. About 250,000 people have fled since violence erupted, most to border camps in neighbouring Tanzania. (Additional reporting by Patrick Nduwimana in Kigali; Writing by George Obulutsa; Editing by Edmund Blair, Larry King) BEIJING (Reuters) - China expressed anger on Wednesday after a senior British official said a ruling expected within a few months in an international arbitration case the Philippines has brought against China's South China Sea claims must be binding. Hugo Swire, British minister of state responsible for East Asia, also said Britain saw the ruling, by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague, as an opportunity for China and the Philippines to renew dialogue over their territorial disputes. China claims virtually all of the South China Sea and rejects the court's authority in the case, which is widely expected to go in favour of the Philippines, significantly raising tension in the strategic waterway. "The comments by Mr Swire neglect the facts and are very discriminatory and one-sided and seriously go against Britain's promise not to take sides," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a daily news briefing. "We are extremely dissatisfied." Tension in the South China Sea is the fault of the United States and the Philippines, not China, with U.S. ships and aircraft increasingly appearing in the region, she added. "The facts prove that if the South China Sea is tense then it's the US which is the biggest pusher of this," Hua said. She repeated that China would neither accept nor participate in the arbitration case and it was an abuse of international law. The court is expected to rule in late May or early June. In February, the United States and the European Union, of which Britain is a part, warned China it should respect the ruling from the Hague. The court has no powers of enforcement and its rulings have been ignored before. Britain has prioritised developing economic ties with China and welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping on a state visit in October, leading critics to accuse it of placing short-term financial gain above human rights and security interests. It also upset the U.S. administration when it became the first non-Asian country and the first member of the Group of Seven advanced economies to join a China-backed development bank for Asia seen by Washington as an unwelcome rival to Western-led institutions such as the World Bank. More than $5 trillion of world trade is shipped through the South China Sea every year. Apart from China's territorial claims there, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam have rival claims. (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Clarence Fernandez) By Ben Blanchard BEIJING (Reuters) - China wants to have deeper military ties with Afghanistan, including counter-terrorism intelligence cooperation and joint drills, a senior Chinese officer told a visiting Afghan envoy. China is working with Pakistan and the United States to broker peace talks to end a Taliban insurgency that has raged for 15 years in Afghanistan, but last month the militants refused to take part. The U.S.-led NATO mission ceased combat operations at the end of 2014, and has withdrawn most of its forces. China says it does not seek to fill a void left by their withdrawal. But, it has promised to play a "huge" commercial role in helping rebuild the country, where the Taliban seek to re-establish their Islamist regime. China is very nervous at the prospect Islamist militants from its restive far western region of Xinjiang getting support from the Taliban and other groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan and central Asia. Fang Fenghui, a member of the powerful Central Military Commission which controls China's armed forces, told Mohammad Hanif Atmar, the Afghan president's national security advisor that their two armed forces had always had good relations, China's Defence Ministry said late on Wednesday. China is willing to "deepen counter-terrorism intelligence, joint drills, personnel training and other areas of practical cooperation", the ministry cited Fang as saying. China wants to promote a regional counter-terrorism mechanism to "jointly protect regional peace, stability and development", he added. Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which prizes its long-time alliance with China, have been fraught with mistrust in the past. For year, Afghan leaders repeatedly accused Pakistan of harbouring Taliban militants and covertly supporting their cohorts. But, the Taliban's recent refusal to join a peace process and ongoing offensive has raised doubts over how much influence Islamabad still exerts over the militants. Atmar told Fang Afghanistan was willing to work with China to fight terrorism, and explained the Afghan role in combating the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which Beijing blames for much of the violence in Xinjiang, the ministry said. China's official Xinhua news agency said Atmar also met China's domestic security chief Meng Jianzhu, where they discussed counter-terrorism too. China's vice president last year pledged infrastructure and security support for Afghanistan, signing several deals during a rare high-level Chinese visit to Kabul. China has become increasingly concerned about what it calls extremists and separatists Xinjiang, where violence has killed hundreds in recent years, and sees security in Afghanistan as key to stability at home. Rights groups, however, blame unrest in Xinjiang on the frustration of the largely Muslim Uighur people from the region over China's controls on their culture and religion, charges Beijing denies. (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore) By Hamid Shalizi and Jibran Ahmad KABUL/PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) - Afghan President Ashraf Ghani vowed on Wednesday to avenge "every drop of blood" from this week's suicide attack in Kabul, as officials more than doubled the death toll to 64. The attack hit an office of the national security services, in an area close to the heart of the government and diplomatic area. Most of the casualties, including 347 wounded, were civilians, Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said. But around 30 members of the National Directorate of Security (NDS) died in the attack, most shot by gunmen who rushed into the complex after a vehicle packed with explosives blew up at the entrance to the compound, according to lawmakers. The Taliban quickly claimed the attack, the deadliest single incident of its kind in Kabul since 2011 which came only days after the Islamist insurgent movement announced the start of its annual spring offensive. But it rejected the statement about civilian casualties, accusing the government of "malicious propaganda". The Taliban said 92 security service personnel had been killed in the attack, although they often exaggerate casualty figures. Smashed windows and damaged shop fronts hundreds of metres away attested to the strength of the blast, which tore through the area. "My cousins were trapped under the dust and wreckage for almost three hours and there was no one to help them," said 28-year-old Javid Sabiri, as he worked on clearing up the debris from his family's house. Concerns about civilian casualties had already been raised in a recent United Nations report, which said an increase in urban warfare had caused a spike during the first three months of the year. The attack, which Ghani called "unjust, un-Islamic and inhumane", appeared to destroy any hopes of reviving the stalled peace process, which the Taliban had already rejected. However despite their denials, insurgent leaders acknowledged the issue of civilian casualties as a problem. "Though civilian losses aren't as high as declared by the Afghan government and media, it saddened us," one senior commander said. "We do take extra care and sometimes we even postpone our attacks in highly important areas because we don't want common people to suffer," he said. The comments underline the sensitivity of the Taliban to accusations that it has no regard for ordinary citizens, a charge frequently levelled by both the Kabul government and Afghanistan's international partners. According to an adviser to one member of the Taliban's powerful Rahbari Shura, or leadership council, an investigation has been ordered into the casualty reports with a view to limiting them in future. But the attack during the middle of the morning rush hour took place at a time when hundreds of civilians were on the streets near the offices of a department in the NDS, just across the river from the presidential palace. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the bombers had approached the building from the side least likely to cause casualties among passers-by. "However, the blasts were so powerful that they caused some damage to nearby buildings and injuries to civilians which we regret," he said in a statement. The NDS has not given any figures for casualties among its personnel, but Zahir Sadat, a lawmaker from Panjshir, and Abdul Rahoof Enhami from Badakhshan, said that around 30 NDS men from their districts had been buried. (Additional reporting by Mirwais Harooni and Mohammad Aziz; Writing by James Mackenzie; Editing by Paul Tait and Mike Collett-White) Baku, Azerbaijan, April 21 By Azad Hasanli - Trend: The second EU-Azerbaijan Business Summit will start in the Azerbaijani capital Baku May 18, EU Neighbourhood Info Center said. According to the center, agriculture and food, transport and logistics, as well as tourism development - are the three main topics on the event agenda. "The summit offers a platform for European and Azerbaijani companies to investigate business opportunities and establish business partnerships in Azerbaijan," the center said. According to the center, EU companies interested in doing business in Azerbaijan are invited to participate in the event. A business meeting will be held on the eve of the summit May 17 with the participation of representatives of Germany-Azerbaijan, France-Azerbaijan, Italy-Azerbaijan Chambers of Commerce, British Business Group, the European Investment Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. According to the center, the event is supported by the EU-funded regional trade facilitation project East-Invest. It supports economic development of the Eastern Partnership region and the improvement of its business environment. By Alastair Macdonald LUXEMBOURG (Reuters) - EU governments agreed on Thursday to speed the formation of a common European border and coastguard that could be in service by this summer to control migrants arriving from the Middle East and Africa. Interior ministers from the 28 member states gave a mandate to their Dutch chairman at a meeting in Luxembourg to open talks with the European Parliament as soon as possible. The Dutch minister, Klaas Dijkhoff, said the force, based on the EU's Frontex agency with more powers and more resources, should be operational this summer. European Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos said he hoped the European Border and Coast Guard would be working by mid-June. EU officials said full establishment would take longer but that elements of the plan could go into effect in a couple of months. The rush to set up a force, to be drawn mostly from seconded national personnel and designed to intervene rapidly where the EU's external border may be overwhelmed, comes after nearly 1.3 million people sought asylum in the EU last year, with almost 1 million coming to Greece and most of the rest to Italy. Ministers noted a sharp drop in those reaching Greek islands since a deal last month under which Turkey will take back anyone makes the crossing. But a day after a report of up to 500 people drowned on one vessel, they warned of a possible renewed surge on the longer and more dangerous route from Africa to Italy. "If we sit back, the situation will occur like we have seen in Greece," Dijkhoff told reporters, adding his voice to calls on Rome to ensure it is ready to handle those arriving. He also called on governments to make good on pledges to take in more Syrian refugees from Turkey as they agreed: "If we don't deliver ... the migration flows will increase again," he said. Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said a Turkey-style deal with a new government the EU hopes can stabilise Libya could help. Officials said a discussion on long-term reform of the asylum system to spread responsibility for arrivals beyond the Mediterranean frontline revealed continued deep divisions. Some countries, especially in the ex-communist east, have ruled out taking in significant numbers of refugees, angering notably Germany which took in 1 million people last year. Addressing concerns about security following the Islamic State attacks on Paris and Brussels, ministers agreed to push on with plans to link a confusing array of national and EU databases on travellers and suspects with a view to having all such data available to authorities and easily searchable. Highlighting the gaps in existing intelligence, the EU's counterterrorism coordinator gave ministers figures indicating that more than 2,000 of some 5,300 European Islamists logged by various intelligence services as fighting in Syria or Iraq had had their details entered by EU states into a shared EU system. A month after suicide bombers killed 32 people in Brussels, Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon said Islamic State could be sending more European fighters to attack their home countries. (editing by John Stonestreet) By Josh Smith and Hamid Shalizi KABUL (Reuters) - A Taliban suicide bomb and gun assault on a government security building during Tuesday morning rush hour in central Kabul killed at least 28 people and wounded more than 320, in the deadliest single attack in the Afghan capital since 2011. President Ashraf Ghani condemned the assault "in the strongest possible terms" in a statement from the presidential palace, located only a few hundred meters away from the scene of the blast. The insurgency led by the Afghan Taliban has gained strength since the withdrawal of most international combat troops at the end of 2014, and the Islamist group is believed to be stronger than at any point since it was driven from power by U.S.-backed forces in 2001. With nerves on edge in Kabul, a second explosion hit the city in the evening but no serious casualties were reported from the blast, which was caused by an improvised device, according to Interior Minister spokesman Sediq Sediqqi. Police chief Abdul Rahman Rahimi said civilians and members of the Afghan security forces were among those killed and wounded in the morning blast, when a suicide car-bomber blew himself up outside the wall of a National Directorate of Security (NDS) office. Witnesses described chaotic scenes after the blast. "I was here when a huge explosion happened," said Amir, who works in a nearby restaurant. "I saw three boys with severe head injuries. My uncle was injured and my brother is missing, I don't know what happened to him." It was the worst single militant strike in Kabul since 2011, when about 60 people died in a suicide blast outside a mosque, and will reinforce concerns in Afghanistan and the West that the country is being dragged into a worsening spiral of violence. Rahimi said one attacker had tried to slip into the NDS building through a destroyed wall after the blast, but he was discovered and killed. SMOKE, SIRENS The Taliban said on their Pashto-language website that they had carried out the suicide bombing on "Department 10", an NDS unit responsible for protecting government ministers and VIPs. They said a suicide car bomber blew up the main gate at the front of the office, allowing other fighters, including more suicide bombers, to enter the heavily guarded compound. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a separate statement that the attackers engaged in a gunbattle with Afghan security forces inside the building. He said as many as 92 security staff and soldiers were killed. The Islamist group often exaggerates details of attacks against government and military targets. A thick plume of black smoke was seen rising from the area near the sprawling U.S. embassy complex nearby immediately after the blast. Warning sirens blared out for some minutes from the embassy compound, which is also close to the headquarters of the NATO-led Resolute Support mission. The U.S. embassy and the NATO mission both said they were not affected by the blast. The Taliban announced the beginning of their spring offensive on April 12, and fighting has raged around the symbolically important northern city of Kunduz since then, although the capital had been relatively quiet. Kunduz, Afghanistan's fifth-largest city, fell briefly to the Taliban last September in the biggest blow to Ghani's Western-backed government since NATO-led forces ended their combat operations at the end of 2014. Taliban fighters have also been making territorial gains in the southern province of Helmand, further stretching Afghan forces who have struggled to contain the insurgency. Tuesday's blast came days after a United Nations report said urban warfare had caused a spike in the number of deaths and injuries among women and children in Afghanistan this year. The U.S. embassy said the attack underscored the harm the Taliban continued to inflict on the Afghan people. "Afghanistan deserves peace and security, not attacks that victimize parents taking their children to school, workers on their morning commute, and people who have stepped forward to help defend their fellow citizens," it said in a statement. (Additional reporting by Jibran Ahmed in PESHAWAR; Writing by Robert Birsel; Editing by Mike Collett-White and Paul Tait) By Swati Pandey SYDNEY (Reuters) - When U.S.-based financial technology company Acorns launched in Australia in February, its mobile app that helps people invest loose pennies in stock markets received nearly 70,000 downloads in just over two months, beating its own expectations. The 'virtual piggy bank' chose Australia as its first foreign market thanks to the country's deep Internet and mobile penetration and tech-savvy population, Managing Director George Lucas told Reuters. Acorns' entry is a reflection of rising interest in Australia from overseas financial technology - or FinTech - companies, drawn by its heavy banking concentration and limited competition, consultants and financial advisors said. The country's $348 million alternate finance lending market, which includes peer-to-peer lending and online lending, is the third-largest in Asia-Pacific, trailing China and Japan, after growing at 320 percent in 2015, according to research by accounting firm KPMG. "The market potential is very, very significant in Australia," said Cath Rogers, investment director at Sydney-based AirTree Ventures, which invests in Fintech companies. Rogers' firm is backing a Sydney-based online lending company called Prospa which has a referral tie-up with Australia's No.3 lender Westpac Banking Corp. Earlier this year U.S.-based online lending firm OnDeck entered into an exclusive banking referral partnership with No.2 lender Commonwealth Bank of Australia. The government is supportive: it wants to develop Sydney as a FinTech hub similar to the Silicon Valley and has announced tax breaks for early-stage investments as well as a visa scheme for entrepreneurs to attract talent. Homegrown FinTech companies say the government's backing has helped them hit the ground running. "If we'd thought of doing this at home, on our own, we'd not have reached where we are today," said Ranin Mendis, co-founder of LoanDolphin, Australian auction platform where brokers and banks bid for consumers' home loans. LoanDolphin, which is disrupting the mortgage broking industry, auctioned close to A$17 million ($13.11 million) worth of home loans in the two months to end-March. By comparison, most brokers or lenders, on average, write about A$4 million a month. BATTLING THE BIG FOUR Australian banks are beefing up their own FinTech operations in response to growing competition from digital rivals. Over a quarter of current banking industry revenue, or about A$27 billion ($20.82 billion), is at risk from "digital disruptors", KPMG estimates. However, the dominance of the four biggest Australian banks - National Australia Bank, Commonwealth Bank, Westpac Banking Corp and ANZ Banking Group, which together control 80 percent of lending, means FinTech start-ups face a tougher environment than elsewhere. "A lot of the FinTech discussion in Australia is about how these companies partner with the Big Four banks," Acorns' Lucas said. "In the UK, they've taken a different approach where it's about innovation and disrupting the industry. A lot of FinTechs and even us are finding it difficult because of this government mentality to protect the four large banks." On the plus side, Australia punches well above its weight in the financial services sector with its funds management industry among the largest in the world, led by its $1.5 trillion pension funds which are actively seeking FinTech partnerships to cut costs, industry players say. In addition, the major banks have been mired in controversy around misconduct in their wealth management units, prompting players that offer digital or robo advice to slowly make inroads into the market. "Two years ago when we spoke about FinTech, Australians thought we were talking about some technology for surf boards," said Sid Sahgal, CEO of a global share investment platform Macrovue in which Australia's No.1 wealth manager, AMP Capital, recently invested A$1 million ($761,500.00). "But now there is a huge amount of hype about FinTech and people know what it really is." ($1 = 1.2970 Australian dollars) (Reporting by Swati Pandey; Editing by Stephen Coates) ATHENS (Reuters) - Migrant flows to Greece have decreased markedly in recent months, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said on Wednesday, defending his government's support of a deal between the European Union and Turkey to tackle the migrant crisis. Turkey and the EU last month sealed an accord which aims to end the chaotic arrival of migrants and refugees, most fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, after more than a million reached Europe last year. Hundreds have died making the short but precarious crossing from Turkey to the shores of Greek islands in inflatable dinghies. The island of Lesbos is full of unmarked graves. "A few months ago we had flows of 3,000 to 4,000 daily to our islands ... Today, the flows are about 50 to 60 (migrants and refugees) daily," Tsipras told parliament during a debate on security. Greece's Defence Minister Panos Kammenos met his German counterpart Ursula von der Leyen in Athens a day earlier and said that NATO's naval back-up in the Aegean Sea to help stop people smugglers had also contributed to the reduced flows. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is expected to visit Athens later this week, according to government officials. Von Der Leyen urged migrants stranded at a makeshift camp on Greece's northern border with Macedonia to move to official shelters. Athens has set up accommodation for more than 50,000 people, she said, calling the move "a clear message for refugees that there are now well-equipped camps in which the reception is possible according to all standards." Human rights groups have accused Greece of bad conditions in reception centres. They say the EU-Turkey deal, aimed at halting migration to Europe in return for financial and political rewards for Ankara, violates international conventions. Last week Pope Francis visited a camp at the island of Lesbos where migrants wept at his feet, kissed his hand and begged for help. He took three families of Syrian refugees back home. (Reporting by George Georgiopoulos, Angeliki Koutantou and Sabine Siebold; Writing by Renee Maltezou; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky) By Fergus Jensen and Kanupriya Kapoor JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesia fears piracy on a shipping route along its sea border with the Philippines could reach Somalian levels and has told vessels to avoid danger areas, officials said on Thursday, after a spate of kidnappings. Analysts say the route carries $40 billion worth of cargo each year. It is taken by fully laden supertankers from the Indian Ocean that cannot use the crowded Malacca Strait. Concerns over maritime attacks by suspected Islamist militants are disrupting the coal trade, with at least two Indonesian coal ports suspending shipments to the Philippines. Up to 18 Indonesians and Malaysians have been kidnapped in three attacks on tugboats in Philippine waters by groups suspected of ties to the Abu Sayyaf militant network. Abu Sayyaf, which has posted videos on social media pledging allegiance to Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, has demanded 50 million pesos (750,000) to free the Indonesian crew. "We don't want to see this become a new Somalia," Indonesian chief security minister Luhut Pandjaitan told reporters, referring to the southern Philippine waters of the Sulu Sea, where the abductions took place. Piracy near Somalia's coast has subsided in the last few years, mainly due to shipping firms hiring private security details and the presence of international warships. The foreign ministers of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines will meet in Jakarta to discuss the possibility of joint patrols, Pandjaitan said. He said the armed forces chiefs of the three countries would hold talks in Jakarta on May 3. The Indonesian Navy has instructed all commercial vessels "to avoid piracy-prone waters around the southern Philippines", a spokesman for the Indonesian military said. The navy is increasing patrols around Indonesia's borders with Malaysia and the Philippines "to prevent acts of piracy and hijacking", Tatang Sulaiman told Reuters. The Kuala Lumpur-based Piracy Reporting Centre has also warned ships sailing in the Celebes Sea and northeast of the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo to stay clear of suspicious small vessels. COAL TRADE HIT Two Indonesian coal ports have blocked departures of ships for the Philippines and more suspensions are expected, said Pandu Sjahrir, chairman of the Indonesian Coal Mining Association, and a director of Jakarta-listed coal producer Toba Bara Sejahtera. Toba had suspended all shipments to the Philippines, Sjahrir said. Other companies had cancelled shipments "from both sides", he added. Indonesian state-owned coal miner Bukit Asam said it was diverting Philippine coal shipments to Hong Kong for the next three months. The company ships less than a million tonnes to the Philippines per year, Bukit Asam corporate secretary Joko Pramono told Reuters. One company with a fleet of 40 dry cargo ships saw a silver lining, however. "If Indonesia bans tugs and barges from exporting coal then it will have to travel in larger cargo ships, of 32,000 to 64,000 tonnes," said Khalid Hashim, managing director of Bangkok-listed Precious Shipping. "All this would of course be beneficial for shippers like us." Indonesia, the world's largest thermal coal exporter, supplies 70 percent of the Philippines' coal import needs, which Indonesian data shows stood at about 15 million tonnes, worth around $800 million (558 million), last year. Philippine coal importers, however, said they could import coal from other countries including Australia, South Africa and Russia and source more locally if Indonesian shipments dried up. (Additional reporting by Keith Wallis in SINGAPORE and Wilda Asmarini in JAKARTA; Editing by Andrew Roche) Details added (first version posted on 12:44) Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 1 By Azad Hasanli - Trend: Bank Standard and the International Bank of Azerbaijan are negotiating to merge their assets, a source on the country's banking sector told Trend Apr. 21. No agreements have been reached at this stage yet, according to the source, however the source said that the issue of consolidation of these banks will be solved before late April. At the same time, Bank Standard appealed to Azerbaijan's Financial Market Supervisory Body for financial support, and the supervisory body is currently examining the situation in the bank. Bank Standard was established in 1995. At present, the Bank is one of the largest private commercial banks in Azerbaijan, which is among the leaders in terms of deposits. The International Bank of Azerbaijan was founded in January 1992. The main shareholder is the ministry of finance on behalf of the Azerbaijani government, which owns 54.96 percent of shares, while the remaining shares are owned by private physical and legal entities. By Meredith McGrath BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union has agreed to start free trade talks with Indonesia, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Thursday, as the growth-hungry bloc presses for improved economic ties with Asian countries. Juncker said he and EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom made progress on Wednesday in discussions with Indonesian President Joko Widodo. "We have concluded yesterday... preparatory discussions for a comprehensive economic partnership agreement and that's good news both for Indonesia and the European Union," Juncker told a joint news conference on Thursday. The comprehensive economic partnership (CEPA), envisaged since 2011, would liberalise trade in goods and services and open up investment and procurement markets with the largest economy in the Association of South East Asia Nations (ASEAN). The EU has reached free trade deals with Singapore, Vietnam and South Korea as it seeks to sign deals with the 10-member ASEAN on a country-by-country basis, a strategy that is strongly supported by Britain. Widodo said he hoped Britain, which holds a referendum on EU membership on June 23, would remain part of the bloc. He also met British premier David Cameron this week. Just as the United States has sought to shift its focus to Asia, the EU is also trying for a trade deal with Japan and is in talks to deepen investment ties with China, potentially a precursor to a free-trade accord. Widido said a free trade deal would be in line with Indonesia's policy to make its economy more open and competitive. Indonesia mainly exports agricultural products, fuel, minerals, textiles and semi-manufactured goods to the 28-member bloc. The EU's main exports to Indonesia are high-tech machinery, transport equipment, manufacturing goods, chemicals and processed foods. Trade in goods between the parties was some 24 billion euros (19 billion) in 2014, compared with some 180 billion between the European Union and ASEAN as a whole. The European Union had initially sought to negotiate a free trade deal with the entire ASEAN bloc, but broke off talks in 2009, launching separate negotiations instead. It is set to hold a first round of talks with the Philippines in the first half of this year. (Additional reporting by Julia Fioretti, Robin Emmott, Robert-Jan Bartunek, Philip Blenkinsop; editing by John Stonestreet) By Terrence Edwards ULAANBAATAR (Reuters) - An electoral pact between the two main opposition parties in Mongolia collapsed this week, weakening the odds of victory for the Mongolian People's Party (MPP), which oversaw the world's highest economic growth five years ago, in crucial polls set to take place in June. The ruling Mongolian Democratic Party was expected to come under intense pressure at this year's elections, scheduled for June 29, after four straight years of slowing growth and declining foreign investment, but it remains unclear if the MPP now can take advantage. The MPP oversaw the country's highest-ever growth in 2011 and the strongest in the world that year at 17.5 percent. It was also in power for the signing of the investment agreement for the giant Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold mine in 2009, which spearheaded a three-year mining boom as world coal prices rallied. Since then, the country's mining sector has taken a hit as a result of a dispute with Anglo-Australian miner Rio Tinto over Oyu Tolgoi, which has recently been resolved. Mineral-dependent Mongolia is also one of the countries worst affected by slowing growth in China, which buys up nearly all of its northern neighbour's copper, gold and coal. Negotiations fell through on Wednesday between the MPP, which ruled when Mongolia was a one-party state under Soviet hegemony before 1990, and the breakaway Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP). The two sides disagreed over how seats would be divided in an electoral pact, according to a statement from the MPP. "It would have been a hit with the electorate because they're splitting each other's votes," said Dale Choi, analyst and head of the Mongolian Metals & Mining research group, about the proposed campaign pact. "It absolutely would have given the MPP the upper hand." The MPRP first ran for elections in 2012 under the leadership of former president Nambaryn Enkhbayar, who was convicted on corruption charges in 2012 and pardoned the following year. The MPP currently has a small lead over the Democrats, according to poll published this month from the Sant Maral Foundation. The poll gives the MPP a 14.6 percent approval rating from voters, higher than the 11.1 percent scored by the incumbent Democratic Party. The MPRP was the third most popular party, with a 6.8 percent approval rate. Government under the Democrats has been dogged by party infighting, with one dispute derailing a deal that would have brought $4 billion (2.7 billion) of investment into the country's enormous Tavan Tolgoi coal mine. The government of the current prime minister, Chimed Saikhanbileg, negotiated the deal in 2015 but it was blocked by Zandaakhuu Enkhbold, the parliamentary speaker, on the day when investors were due to sign the final agreement in Ulaanbaatar. (Reporting by Terrence Edwards; Editing by David Stanway and Nick Macfie) Barack Obama has met Saudi Arabia's King Salman in Riyadh in a low-key visit that analysts say hinted at Gulf Arab frustration with the US President's policy in the region. Stepping off Air Force One, Mr Obama was not met by the Saudi monarch, who was shown on state television greeting senior officials from Gulf nations who have flown in for the same summit. Saudi television did not broadcast live - as it has previously done - the arrival of Mr Obama, who was on his fourth and probably final trip as US President. The Saudi monarch was instead waiting for Mr Obama at the Erga Palace, where they met for two hours. The US President pressed Saudi Arabia and Gulf nations to step up efforts to defeat the Islamic State group and help rebuild Iraq, said the White House. The Sunni Muslim-ruled kingdom is staunchly opposed to Mr Obama's outreach to their arch-enemy, Iran, and sceptical of his approach to Syria. There were polite smiles as the two sat down for a photocall. "The American people send their greetings and we are very grateful for your hospitality," Mr Obama said, referring to the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council summit. "The feeling is mutual between us and the American people," the king said through a translator. The president was to spend little more than 24 hours in the Saudi capital before heading to London and Hanover, Germany. Thursday's Gulf Cooperation Council summit will focus on the fight against Islamic State and al Qaeda as well as the issue of Iran. The talks were also expected to address the Saudi-led military campaign against Shia rebels and their allies in neighbouring Yemen . US Defence Secretary Ash Carter and CIA Director John Brennan accompanied Mr Obama. Saudi Arabia - the world's top oil exporter and the biggest customer for US weapons manufacturers - was outraged over concessions granted to Iran in last year's nuclear deal . There was no immediate word on whether Mr Obama or Salman had addressed a bill which would expose Saudi Arabia to legal action over any links to the 11 September attacks. The New York Times is reporting that Saudi Arabia has threatened to sell its multibillion-dollar US assets if Congress passed the measure. Mr Obama said he opposes the bill because it could expose the US to lawsuits from citizens of other countries. Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr.21 By Aygun Badalova - Trend: The rebalancing process on the oil market is well under way, especially in North America where US and Canadian high cost producers are forced to cut production, Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank, told Trend Apr.20. "The continuous rise in global demand and the slowdown in non-OPEC production will help support the price over the coming months," he said. Following the capital expenditure cuts worth billions of dollars, the market focus will eventually shift from oversupply to lack of supply, said Hansen. The oil worker strike in Kuwait had a major supporting impact up until Wednesday when it was called off, he added. The Saxo Bank representative said that the increase in production from Iran, and a stabilizing Libya raises the prospects of barrels returning from Libya which used to produce 1.6 million barrels per day and now only around 300,000. "The failed Doha meeting of oil producers indicates that the risk of political impact on oil prices has increased," he said. The oil producers' meeting held Apr.17 in Doha on oil output freeze ended without an agreement. The event was attended by representatives of 17 countries. The meeting kicked off about 6.5 hours later than the fixed time. Reportedly, the meeting was delayed as Saudi Arabia unexpectedly said it wants all OPEC countries, including Iran to participate in the output freeze. Iran wasn't represented at the meeting. If Saudi Arabia begins increasing production, a revisit to the low $30s cannot be ruled out, according to Hansen. He noted that in the very short term, a record long speculative position in Brent crude could have a significant negative impact on the price if events trigger a need to reduce exposure. "We expect crude oil to be range bound between $35 and $45 this quarter, before moving higher in the second half of the year, towards $50 by the end 2016," said Hansen. "Even if the market starts to rebalance there is still an oversupply of 100s of millions of barrels of oil in storage, which needs to be reduced," he said. "This will add to supply over the coming months, especially as the contango begins to contract." --- Follow the author on Twitter: @AygunBadalova Paris terror attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam has been charged over a deadly shootout with police days before the Brussels bombings. One Islamist suspect was killed and four police were wounded in a gun battle at an apartment in the Forest district of Brussels on 15 March. The raid came three days before Abdeslam was arrested and a week before the Brussels attacks on 22 March. Abdeslam's lawyer Sven Mary told AFP: "He has been charged with attempted murder either alone or jointly." Abdeslam is due to be extradited to France in the coming days to face charges over last November's attacks in Paris. He is suspected of being a key member of the terror squad that killed 130 people across the French capital. Investigators believe he was supposed to blow himself up after driving suicide bombers to the Stade de France. Belgian police have also tried to question him over his links to the three suicide bombers who struck Brussels airport and metro, killing 32 people and injuring hundreds. The Islamic State group has claimed both attacks. Asked if Abdeslam admitted being present at the Forest shootout, Mr Mary said: "We won't discuss that, I won't comment." Abdeslam will appear before a Belgian court again on 28 April and his extradition to France will come "perhaps two days after his court appearance," Mr Mary added. Abdeslam and alleged Paris accomplice Mohamed Abrini, who has also been charged over the Brussels attacks, were moved to different jails in Belgium last week. Abrini, 31, has confessed to being "the man in the hat" caught on video with suicide bombers at Brussels airport. He was also linked to the Paris attacks after being caught on video at a motorway service station with Abdeslam. BELGRADE (Reuters) - Serbia lodged a diplomatic protest on Thursday after Croatia's foreign minister was quoted as saying it was "an historical perversion" for Belgrade to claim the right to judge war crimes committed anywhere in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The protest marked an escalation of a row between the neighbours over Croatia's attempt to set conditions for Serbia to make progress in its talks on joining the European Union. Croatia, which fought a 1991-95 war against Belgrade-backed Serb rebels to forge its independence from Yugoslavia, wants Serbia to drop its claim - enshrined in a 2003 law - to jurisdiction over war crimes committed on the entire territory of the former Yugoslavia. The opening of a new policy area or chapter of Serbia's EU entry talks has been held up while Croatia, which joined the bloc in 2013, lobbies its EU partners to support its position. "The country in which plans for the 1990s wars were made cannot be the judge or the policeman for war crimes in all countries in former Yugoslavia, including Croatia," Croatian Foreign Minister Miro Kovac said in an interview last weekend with the country's "Jutarnji list" newspaper. "That is absurd, an historical perversion in a way, and prevents good neighbourly cooperation," Kovac said. Serbia's Foreign Ministry called in Croatia's ambassador on Thursday to deliver a protest note over Kovac's comments "in which he insults and undervalues Serbia", the ministry said. "The ministry thinks that refraining from such statements in the future would contribute to better bilateral and neighbourly relations," it said in a statement. The Croatian Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the protest, delivered a few days before Serbia's general election. Serbia approved the law claiming jurisdiction to prosecute war crimes over the whole territory of former Yugoslavia in 2003 saying it would improve cooperation with the U.N. tribunal in The Hague. Croatia reacted angrily last month when the U.N. tribunal acquitted Serbian nationalist Vojislav Seselj of war crimes. Croatia banned Seselj from entering the country and Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic called the verdict "shameful". Serbia and Croatia have sought reconciliation over the last 15 years but bad feeling flares up from time to time. (Reporting by Ivana Sekularac in Belgrade and Igor Ilic in Zagreb; Editing by Adrian Croft and Gareth Jones) ZURICH (Reuters) - The Swiss government blocked on Wednesday exports to the Middle East of war materiel worth some 19 million Swiss francs (13.7 million) that it suspected could wind up fuelling the year-long war in Yemen. The government approved around 185 million francs worth of military exports to the region, mostly parts and components for air defence systems in Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE that it said were unlikely to be deployed in Yemen. But it rejected unidentified Swiss companies' requests to send small arms, ammunition, spare parts, 25,000 hand grenades and more than 8,000 shells to the region, the neutral country's cabinet said in a statement. It also blocked sending an armoured personnel carrier to Qatar for testing and exports of large amounts of small-caliber ammunition and propellant to the United Arab Emirates. The Yemen conflict has killed at least 6,200 people and caused a humanitarian crisis, prompting the Swiss to keep a close eye on arms exports to countries involved in the fighting. (Reporting by Michael Shields; Editing by Tom Heneghan) By John Irish, Stephanie Nebehay and Tom Perry GENEVA/BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syria's fragile peace talks might not resume for at least a year if they are abandoned now, a senior Western diplomat warned on Wednesday, as the opposition urged more military support for rebels after declaring a truce was over. Intense fighting has left Syria's partial ceasefire in tatters. The truce was brokered by the United States and Russia to pave the way for the first peace talks attended by rebel factions since the crisis began five years ago. Those talks, taking place under U.N. auspices in Geneva, also appear to have collapsed this week. The opposition says it has called a "pause" to negotiations, although it is reluctant to accept blame for the collapse by walking out altogether. "If this ends now, it will be over for at least a year ... The Russians will steamroll -- taking advantage of a U.S. vacuum," the Western diplomat said, referring to fears Washington will be preoccupied by November's U.S. presidential election. "There will be three million more refugees and thousands more dead," said the diplomat, who declined to be identified while describing a scenario world powers still hope to avoid. "If we all leave Geneva, I dont see the process continuing. Damascus negotiators say the presidency of Bashar al-Assad is non-negotiable while the opposition sees removal of the president as a prerequisite and complains of no progress on an end to violence, humanitarian access and political detainees. The Geneva talks aim to end a war that has killed more than 250,000 people, created the world's worst refugee crisis, allowed for the rise of the Islamic State group and drawn in regional and major powers. Russia's intervention in the conflict beginning late last year has swayed the war in Assad's favour. The already widely violated truce began fraying more quickly some two weeks ago near Aleppo, where the Syrian army accused rebel groups of taking part in assaults by Islamists who are not covered by the ceasefire. Rebels say they were defending themselves from attacks by the army and its Shi'ite militia allies. A total collapse of the Geneva talks would leave a diplomatic vacuum that could allow a further escalation of the war that is being fuelled by rivalries between foreign powers including oil producers Iran and Saudi Arabia. Seeking to ease that rivalry, U.S. President Barack Obama met Saudi Arabia's King Salman on a visit to Riyadh on Wednesday and discussed the need to reinforce the partial truce in Syria and support a transition from Assad's rule. France said it would consider with other European powers and the United States on Monday the idea of convening a ministerial meeting of major powers in the next two weeks to work out the next steps for Syria. GIRDING FOR MORE BATTLE As fighting raged and air strikes on rebel-held areas intensified, the opposition urged foreign states to supply them with the means to defend themselves, a thinly veiled reference to the anti-aircraft weapons long sought by insurgents. Air strikes killed around 40 people in a crowded market on Tuesday in what may have been the worst incident of its kind since the cessation of hostilities took effect in February. France said the government was rushing "headlong" into violence and showing its refusal to negotiate a political solution. Syrian state TV cited a military source denying any air force raids on residential areas. Anas Al Abde, president of the Turkey-based opposition Syrian National Coalition, said the Geneva talks were "futile" and there was no hope in discussing political transition. Speaking in Istanbul, he urged "qualitative support" for rebel groups, and said the solution must be a "political-military" one. U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura has come closer than any mediator so far in bringing the warring sides to peace talks which began last month, after the implementation of the partial truce brokered by the Washington and Moscow. But the sides have yet to narrow their differences on issues like the fate of Assad, and it will be difficult to lure the opposition back to the table if fighting resumes unchecked, with the government taking advantage of Russia's firepower. On Wednesday experts were meeting in Geneva but the opposition's Riad Hijab, chief coordinator of the Saudi-backed High Negotiations Committee (HNC), had quit the talks with senior delegates while de Mistura had left for personal reasons. About half of the HNC delegation remained. The Syrian government negotiator Bashar Ja'afari poured contempt on the opposition for its partial walkout, accusing it of sulking and political immaturity. "By leaving they may be taking away a major obstacle that will allow us to reach a solution," he told reporters. The U.S. State department rejected that view. "We do not believe that the way forward is any removal by the opposition from these talks. In fact, quite the opposite," spokesman John Kirby said in Washington. Russia said the opposition was incapable of reaching a deal. "By issuing ultimatums, the Riyadh group, it seems, is trying to mask the fact it has no concrete and realistic proposals," the foreign ministry said. Kirby called on the government delegation to explain what it meant by its proposed broad-based government of national unity. Randa Kassis, who heads up a Moscow-backed opposition group, said both sides wanted to impose their view. "The solution will have to come from outside: Russia, the U.S. and the Security Council," she said. "It will take a lot more time." Western-backed rebel armed groups appear to be girding for more war. Fares al-Bayoush, a colonel who heads the Northern Division told Reuters: "Our situation on the frontlines is acceptable, but we await the increase of the support, or as the states promised ... so we can force it (the regime) to resort to the political solution." He said there would be no return to negotiations "soon". States opposed to Assad have been channelling military support to vetted rebel groups via both Turkey and Jordan, in a programme that has included military training overseen by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. GRAVE CONCERNS AT NEW REFUGEE EXODUS The United Nations expressed deep concern on Wednesday over the fate of Syrians who have fled fighting near the northern city of Aleppo. More than 40,000 people in camps, residential areas and settlements have been displaced due to fighting in recent days, mostly pushed eastwards towards the strategically vital border town of Azaz, as well as the Bab al-Salam and Sijjou camps for internally-displaced, the United Nations said. "Taking into account the previous influx of over 75,000 internally displaced people into the Azaz sub-district in January and February, humanitarian needs are expected to rise exponentially," the U.N. Office for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in an overnight update. Previous rebel losses in the area near the Turkish border have made it difficult for international aid agencies to reach civilians, making it one of the areas of greatest concern for those trying to protect Syria's civilians from harm. The opposition accuses the government of violating the cessation of hostilities to capture Aleppo, Syria's most populous city before the war, which has been divided between government-controlled and rebel-held zones for years. The medical charity Medecins Sans Frontiers said there were now more than 100,000 people trapped on the Syrian side of the Turkish border, with 35,000 having fled in the past week from camps that had been taken over by Islamic State fighters or had become too close to the front line. (Additional reporting by Lisa Barrington; writing by Peter Millership; editing by Peter Graff and Philippa Fletcher) Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21 By Anvar Mammadov - Trend: Iran is ready to cooperate with Azerbaijan to develop fields in the Caspian Sea, said Iran's Minister of Communications and Information Technology Mahmoud Vaezi. He made the remarks during the meeting of the Azerbaijani and Iranian delegations in Baku. The minister called on to expand cooperation between the two countries in this sphere, regardless of low oil prices. He also recalled the agreement on continuation of the construction and operation of hydroelectric power plants and hydroelectric complexes "Khudaferin" and "Giz Galasi" on the Araz River. "I think that we should take a similar step in relation to the development of fields in the Caspian Sea," said Vaezi. Earlier, in his interview with Trend Vaezi said that the sides are already conducting negotiations in this sphere. The two countries have great potential for cooperation in the oil and gas sphere, according to him. The agreement on cooperation in the field of energy and water resources use, continuation of the construction and operation of hydroelectric power plants and hydroelectric complexes "Khudaferin" and "Giz Galasi" on the Araz River was signed within the visit of Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev to Iran in February 2016. The agreement includes principles of respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity of Azerbaijan and Iran, highlights the need to restore the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan in accordance with the UN resolutions, proclaims equal rights for water and energy resources along hydroelectric complexes "Khudaferin" and "Giz Galasi". The document states that Iran will ensure completion of construction of hydroelectric complexes and hydroelectric power plants, preservation and operation of water and energy resources at hydroelectric complexes and hydroelectric power plants until the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan is restored. The agreement says that the sides will use these facilities on equal terms. Azerbaijani specialists will be involved in construction and operation of the facilities in accordance with the agreement. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Anvar_Mammadov BEIRUT (Reuters) - Rare violence erupted on Wednesday between Kurdish groups and Syrian government forces in northeast Syria in which several people were killed, a monitoring group said. Kurdish groups control most of Qamishli city, near the Turkish border, but government forces still hold the airport and a few areas of the centre. The fighting, one of the most serious flare-ups yet between the two sides in the city, began after the Kurdish internal security forces, called the Asayish, stopped a car carrying an officer of the Syrian national defence forces, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. Two Asayish members were later killed, a Kurdish YPG official told Reuters. "Syrian regime forces targeted a patrol of the Kurdish Asayish forces in Qamishli and two Asayish members died," the official told Reuters. The Observatory said three members of the Asayish forces and four Syrian national defence members died as the fighting escalated. Violence was continuing late on Wednesday and more than 20 members of the Syrian national defence forces had been taken prisoner by the Asayish, said the Observatory, which monitors the five-year-old conflict through a network of sources inside Syria. Kurdish forces encroached into territory previously held by Syrian government forces in the city, the Observatory said. The fighting kept shops closed all day. The Asayish is an internal security force set up by the autonomous Kurdish administration that runs large areas of northern Syria. The Syrian army could not be reached for comment. (Reporting by Tom Perry and Lisa Barrington; Editing by Andrew Roche) WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. first lady Michelle Obama will join her husband, President Barack Obama, for his trip to Britain later this week, the White House said on Monday. The Obamas will attend a private lunch with Queen Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip at Windsor Castle on Friday. That evening they will have diner with Prince William, his wife Kate, and Prince Harry at Kensington Palace, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. The president's trip comes as the British weigh whether or not to remain in the European Union in an upcoming referendum and as Obama completes his final year in office as president. (Reporting by Timothy Gardner and Jeff Mason; Editing by Marguerita Choy) We can help you make sense of the agribusiness industry, extending from chemicals and fertilizers used as inputs into agriculture, to the commodities, food and by-products that are an output to farming, with policy and regulation applied at every step of the value chain. Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21 By Elena Kosolapova - Trend: A deal on the oil production freeze even if it was reached at the meeting of oil producing countries in Doha, would not have worked, professor of economics in the US National Defense University, Adjunct Professor in Georgetown University and energy analyst Paul J. Sullivan believes. "If those oil producers who were there, froze their production the price of oil would have gone up. This would have prompted those oil producers who were not there to produce more at the higher price," Sullivan told Trend in an email. The expert noted that the countries producing a majority of the oil in the world were not at the table in Doha even if most of the real large producers were. For example, the US which is the largest oil producer, according to BP data, and Iran which is planning to pump up oil production, did not take part in the meeting. Moreover, Sullivan noted that Iraq and others may have said they were going to freeze oil production, but as soon as they saw the prices going up (if they would have), they and others would have jumped into the market and immediately cut into whatever deal there may have been on oil production. The analyst does not expect OPEC to agree to freeze oil production at the next meetings in 2016. "Freezing oil production is likely impossible in this political and economic environment. Many of the OPEC countries are facing severe budget stress - and even economic distress for some," Sullivan said. Sullivan noted that without nearly pure monopoly power and an ability to keep the other players in the near monopoly in line no freeze agreement could work. OPEC is a lot weaker than it was decades ago and the more oil producers there are the weaker OPEC gets, according to expert. The meeting of oil producing countries in Doha on the oil production freeze on Apr. 17 ended without reaching an agreement. In total, representatives of 17 countries took part in the meeting. Edited by SI Follow the author on Twitter: @E_Kosolapova KKR has agreed to buy into seeds provider Advanta Enterprises in a deal which values the business at about $2.25bn. Jim joined Greenspring Associates in 2004. Previously, he was a Director at Commonfund Capital, a fund-of-funds firm that, as of the time of his... Calgary, AB: Bayer Inc, is facing a Bayer Inc, is facing a Xarelto class-action lawsuit filed in Calgary alleging its blood thinner is linked to dozens of deaths. The lead plaintiff in this class action alleges that the anticoagulant drug caused her to suffer from an uncontrollable bleeding event which nearly led her to cardiac arrest. Canadian Xarelto Class Action Lawsuit Legal Help According to reports published in the Calgary Sun, as of March 2015, Health Canada had received an estimated 1,100 adverse event reports from patients taking Xarelto. The article indicates that, according to a lawyer from Toronto, if the class action is successful, "...it would be in the millions of dollars."The Calgary Sun report also discussed the likely formation of another class action suit in Ontario at this time.Xarelto (known generically as Rivaroxaban) is a new-generation anticoagulant, in a class of drugs known as direct thrombin inhibitors. It is a blood thinner used to reduce the risk of blood clots and strokes. Xarelto has also been marketed as being easier to use than warfarin (known by the brand name Coumadin), an older anticoagulant, because it does not require medical monitoring.Xarelto has reportedly been linked to an increased risk of uncontrollable bleeding (hemorrhaging). A risk of hemorrhaging exists in many blood thinners; however, warfarin has an antidote in that can reduce the risk of uncontrollable hemorrhaging. Some newer blood thinners do not have an antidote. This means that injuries, including minor cuts or internal bleeding, can result in uncontrolled bleeding, which can be fatal.This Canadian class action lawsuit closely follows the formation of Multidistrict Litigation number 2592 in the United States by the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation. This MDL consolidated and transferred over 2,800 lawsuits filed in reference to Xarelto by plaintiffs who allege much the same. These lawsuits are additionally joined by another group of 620 Xarelto lawsuits which have been formed into a mass tort program by the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Lawsuits in these groupings have been filed against defendant Bayer AG as well as Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a subdivision of Johnson & Johnson corporation.In the US, the FDA has given the blood thinner two "black box"warnings, which are the severest warnings a product can receive before it is removed from the market for public sale.The plaintiff in the Canadian Xarelto class action is represented by Toronto lawyer Bryan McPhadden.If you or a loved one has suffered similar damages or injuries, please fill in our form on the right and your complaint will be sent to a defective products lawyer who may evaluate your claim at no cost or obligation. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 21 By Khalid Kazimov - Trend: Iran and Kazakhstan have decided to increase their volume of trade turnover to $1 billion per year, a senior Iranian official said. Iranian Deputy Industry, Mine and Trade Minister Valiollah Afkhami Rad has said that the decision was made at a meeting between Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev and Iranian economic officials in Tehran, ILNA news agency reported. Valiollah Afkhami Rad further added that during the meeting a number of Iranian businessmen discussed the issue of expansion of trade ties with President Nazarbayev. According to the official, President Nazarbayev called on Iranian companies to cooperate in agricultural and mining sectors in his country. Nazarbayev also pledged to take measures aimed at easing visa requirements for Iranian traders, Valiollah Afkhami Rad added. According to Iranian Customs Administration, over the last fiscal year (ended March 20) the Islamic Republic imported goods worth at $87 million from Kazakhstan. Meanwhile Iran exported goods worth at $137 million to Kazakhstan. During Kazakh president's visit to Iran, Tehran and Astana agreed on a total of 66 documents on cooperation between the two countries. Addressing a joint press conference with Nazarbayev in Tehran April 11, President Hassan Rouhani described the documents signed during his Kazakh counterpart's visit as a turning point in ties between the two countries. Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21 By Elena Kosolapova - Trend: Standard & Poor's Ratings (S&P) Services placed Apr. 21 its 'BB' long-term corporate credit rating on Kazakhstan's national railroad company Kazakhstan Temir Zholy (KTZ) and its core subsidiary - freight-wagon owner JSC Kaztemirtrans (KTT) on CreditWatch with negative implications, the agency reported. The agency also placed 'kzA' Kazakhstan national scale rating on KTZ on CreditWatch negative. "The CreditWatch placement primarily reflects that KTZ has not yet secured refinancing for its $350 million notes that mature on May 11, 2016," said the agency. The S&P may lower the ratings on KTZ by more than one notch if the company fails to seal the refinancing deal over the coming weeks. The agency also said that with less than one month remaining before the maturity date, KTZ's ability to finalize the transaction is vulnerable to any further delays in its negotiations with creditors or delays for any other reason. Meanwhile, the S&P estimates that KTZ had about $320 million (109 billion Kazakh tenges) of cash and cash equivalents as of Jan. 1, 2016, which continue to be available to the company and could be used for refinancing purposes if part of external financing is delayed for any reason. The agency's rating on KTZ also incorporates its assumption that there is a very high likelihood that KTZ's owner - the Kazakh government - would be able to provide extraordinary support to the company should it be needed to meet the maturing obligations. "The CreditWatch negative placement reflects the possibility that we could lower the rating by more than one notch if the company does not finalize the refinancing deal over the next few weeks or is unable to accumulate the full amount to repay the notes falling due in May," said S&P. The S&P plans to resolve the CreditWatch over the coming weeks, once the agency have a clear view whether the company will be able to repay maturing notes on time or not. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @E_Kosolapova Published On Apr 21, 2016 01:00 PM By Arun Japanese auto giant Mitsubishi has admitted to rigging the fuel economy results of its passenger vehicles sold in Japan. Mitsubishi Motors confirmed that tests were conducted improperly to obtain fuel consumption figures better than the actuals. The company also admitted that the testing method was also different from the one required by Japanese law. Mileage figures of 625,000 cars have been manipulated, including those manufactured by Mitsubishi for Nissan. Four models have been affected by the fudging, which include the Mitsubishi eK Wagon, eK Space, and the Nissan Dayz and Dayz Roox. All cars affected are mini cars, or 'kei cars', as Japan calls them. 157,000 units of the eK models and 468,000 units of the Dayz models had been sold with the rigged fuel efficiency numbers. Interestingly, it is Nissan that discovered the malpractice and reported the same. In effect, both Mitsubishi and Nissan have suspended sales of the affected models. Mitsubishi has also set up a panel to investigate the issue. Notably, in 2014, Korean manufacturers Hyundai and Kia had agreed to pay $350m in penalties for overstating their vehicles' fuel economy ratings. It remains to be seen if Mitsubishi is fined or penalized for this misconduct. However, soon after Mitsubishi admitted to falsifying test results, shares of the auto giant plunged a whopping 15%, which wiped off $1.2 billion of its market value. This is the companys biggest one-day fall in almost 12 years. With norms getting stricter by the day, it is only reasonable to expect well-known and well-respected auto manufacturers such as Mitsubishi to lead by example. With the emission scandal looming over Volkswagen's head, another instance of a reputed manufacturer resorting to malpractice doesn't spell good news for the auto industry in general. Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Apr. 21 By Huseyn Hasanov - Trend: The seventh International Gas Congress of Turkmenistan is planned to be held May 19-20, 2016 at 'Avaza' national tourist zone, the event organizer Turkmengaz state concern announced. The forum will bring together around 400 delegates from over 30 countries. The following topics will be discussed during the event: Turkmenistan's role in the world gas industry, effective development of the country's gas resources, investment opportunities and innovative methods of exploration and development of fields, the next stage of Galkynysh field's development, investment opportunities and international cooperation in developing Turkmenistan's gas transportation infrastructure and other issues. During the forum, it is planned to hold business meetings between foreign businessmen and representatives of Turkmenistan's oil and gas institutions. Turkmenistan is one of the key players on the energy market of the Caspian Sea region. The country produces around 70-80 billion cubic meters of gas which is exported to China and Iran. Turkmenistan ranks fourth in the world in terms of the gas reserve volume. Edited by SI National Credit Union Administration Chair Debbie Matz will conduct the last board meeting of her tenure today and will leave the agency April 30. News Now had an opportunity to sit down with Matz and discuss her time with the NCUA, as well as her thoughts on the credit union system going forward. Q: What memories from your time at NCUA stick out the most? A: After laboring over how to deal with legacy assets and coming up with innovative plans to sell NCUA guaranteed notes, I have to confess at this time that we had no Plan B. We were incredibly nervous about whether or not the securities would be sold; whether theyd be sold in the U.S. or wed have to go overseas; and whether or not anyone would be interested in them. So when the first round of notes was offered, and we raised more than $1 billion in just one hour, and the offering was oversubscribed, that definitely is a very good memory. When we became the first federal depository institution regulator to earn recoveries from Wall Street firms that contributed to the crisis, and our billion-dollar recovery from JPMorgan stands out. Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Apr. 12 By Demir Azizov - Trend: President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev will pay a visit to Uzbekistan on Apr. 14-15, the Uzbek foreign ministry said in a message Apr. 12. Nazarbayev will visit Uzbekistan at an invitation of his Uzbek counterpart Islam Karimov. The presidents will discuss current state and perspectives of development of the Uzbek-Kazakh relations in various areas, as well as the pressing regional and international problems. (The rural ag scene is made up of many people who often go unrecognized. In 2016, our Rural Roles series will feature some of those personalities, and why their voices are so important to agriculture.) HANOVERTON, Ohio Some could say conservation is a family thing for the Conkle family. However, Pete Conkle never considered a future in it it was just something his family did. In 1999, Conkle had a different plan. He had returned home after graduating from the Ohio State University with a degree in wildlife biology management. He started applying for graduate school, planning to leave the farm and Ohio. That plan got derailed by some cows he purchased. Even his dad, Larry, thought he was crazy. Instead of grad school, Conkle went to work for Gary Irwin, owner of K&S Millwrights at the time, and learned welding skills and how to deal with the public while he worked there for a couple of years. Then, in 2002, a phone call changed his plans again. It was Kevin Swope, who was leaving the Columbiana Soil and Water Conservation District and thought Conkle would be a good successor because of the conservation work on the Conkle farm. I thought he would be a good fit to fill in after I left, said Swope. Fast forward to 2016. Pete works as a technician at the Columbiana Soil and Water Conservation District and was recognized earlier this year by the Ohio Cattlemens Association for his own farms environmental stewardship efforts. His cattle operation has grown from those few cows he purchased in the late 1990s to a herd of 50 today. He now operates a commercial, grass-fed Red Angus operation near Hanoverton, in southern Columbiana County. He starts calving in the middle of April and finishes up around the first of June. Color does matter Conkle said he always heard Black Angus was the only way to go, and for some, it is still the only way to go. Everyone said we needed cows with a black hide, said Conkle. He got started with his registered Red Angus herd when he went to a sale in Old Washington, Ohio, and bought his first open heifer. He immediately saw the benefits the Red Angus brought to his operation. Conkle said his cattle herd is fenced out of the woods, which doesnt create much shade for the animals. He said he always found the black cattle panting in the middle of the summer, which hampered weight gain. They just struggle with the heat and no shade, said Conkle. So now, while his herd isnt only Red Angus, he is working to make it entirely Red Angus. I like them because they are quiet and handle well. Conkle said they just continually eat, and the heat doesnt impede them. He also finds them to be more docile and better mothers. Conkle serves on the Ohio Cattlemens Association board of directors and is also a board member of the Columbiana-Mahoning-Trumbull Cattlemens Association. Conservation and cattle Cattle isnt the only thing on Conkles mind. What Conkle loves to do is to combine what he has learned from working at the SWCD with his cattle herd and on the farm. He was able to do that by helping to establish the Eastern Ohio Grazing Council through the Columbiana SWCD. He said he likes the combination of the SWCD and cattle because no two days are alike. Cattle rotation Conkle said it was clear the farm was not going to support the number of cattle that he was producing in his herd. The acreage was hilly and growing crops was just not his favorite thing. However, the farm could grow grass. Conkle said he and his dad transitioned the farm from row crops to grass over years. The cattle herd kept growing and we needed more feed, so we kept transitioning acres, said Conkle. He said he rotates the 50 pairs every 24 hours during the grazing season. They are provided an acre and a quarter for grazing. Low inputs Conkle said intensive grazing management works for his operation because it means low inputs. The cow herd is fed solely grass the majority of the year, but they do get additional hay in the winter. Conkle admits the tractor seat is not his favorite place to be, so by not having to grow crops for the cattle herd, he can spend less time in the seat. He loves the grazing end of cattle production and teaching others about the benefits. We all have a responsibility to give back. Whether its the SWCD or a seat on the board at the Ohio Cattlemens Association to represent northeast Ohio, he said. Stream protection Conkles stewardship efforts began by fencing the stream on the farm in order to protect it from cattle. I dont just worry about cattle. I worry about the water quality, said Conkle. But his first involvement with the Columbiana SWCD began in 1998. He said there was an emergency conservation program and his parents were interested in it. They were interested in developing the springs on the property and the funding helped to purchase one of the first concrete water tanks on the property. That was the start. Now, the farm features 7,000 feet of 1-inch pressured water line. By having the pressurized waterline, Conkle is able to divide the pastures so that the cattle can be moved from paddock to paddock to get the biggest benefits out of intensive grazing. It (the waterline) is good for the cattle. They dont have to travel a lot to get their water, which means they can concentrate on grazing which means a greater gain, said Conkle. There are now four concrete stock tanks on the farm that dont freeze. The waterline is drained at the end of November because it can freeze since it is on top of the ground. And the streams Conkle started out fencing, now include 3,600 feet of stream exclusion fence, which is designed to keep cattle out of the streams on the property. My granddad and his great-granddad would be happy to see what he has done, said Larry Conkle, Petes dad. Conservation history Conkle said the home farm where his parents live was his grandparents farm, and they were the first to build conservation projects. His dad adopted tillage strips and his grandparents built ponds on the farm dating back to 1952. Community The last 14 years have flown by. I couldnt ask for a better job, said Conkle. Conkle is very humbled to be in the position he is at the SWCD. He said he appreciates being able to work in the community in which he grew up in. He purchased a farm not far from his parents farm in 2010 and it has allowed both properties to be used for grazing. He said by living close to his parents and his sister and brother-in-law, it makes life easier for everyone. Some days can be a headache; I couldnt do it without them, said Conkle. Five Minutes With Pete Conkle Hometown: Hanoverton, Ohio YOUR FIRST JOB OR CHORE? Feeding hogs and delivering baby pigs. YOUR BEST FAMILY MEMORY? Conkle said his best memory was when he received his award from the Ohio Cattlemens Association in January. He said it meant a lot to him to have his entire family, including his mom and dad, Alice and Larry Conkle, along with his sister and brother-in-law, Mary Alice and Josh Sigler, his niece, Tatym Sigler, and his significant other, Tammie Ambrose, there to help him accept the honor. To be recognized by cattlemen from across the state was an honor all of its own. But the award wouldnt have been possible without what my family has done to help me as well. We have worked together to get it all done, said Conkle. PEOPLE WOULD BE SURPRISED TO KNOW: That I raise chickens. I raise several batches of broilers out on pasture just like the cattle. YOUR FAVORITE VACATION DESTINATION? Conkle likes to travel out of state for bull sales and beef production sales. He said the trips give him a chance to see other farms and how they operate. TELL US ONE THING ON YOUR BUCKET LIST? To travel to Africa someday and work with farmers there on grazing management. BURGER OR STEAK? Steak DO YOU HAVE A NICKNAME? Disco. No comment on what it means except that he got it in college. THE BEST PIECE OF ADVICE EVER RECEIVED? Money isnt everything. He said that people often assume since he has a government job that money isnt an issue. But what he says people forget is that he works for the county government and money can be a problem. However, he has learned to live within his means. In a late night conference call on Wednesday night 20 April 2016 between Australian Federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt, Queensland State Environment minister Steven Miles and Environment ministers from other Australian states it was agreed that what is currently happening on the Great Barrier Reef with extensive and severe coral bleaching is alarming and is an issue of concern not just to Queenslanders but to all Australians. Ministers all agreed that strong and urgent action was needed on climate change. The call included Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority chairman Russell Reichelt and Queensland Universitys Global Change Institute director Ove Hoegh-Guldberg. Greg Hunt participated in the call from Melbourne Airport shortly before boarding a plane to New York to participate in a signing ceremony of the Paris Agreement that was negotiated at the UN climate talks in December 2015. Over 160 nations are likely to be represented in New York, representing a record for countries eager to sign an international accord or treaty. In a media statement Steven Miles said "Ministers described their concern that the Great Barrier Reef is bleaching before our eyes, that Victoria is facing the extraordinary occurrence of bushfires in April, and in this summer in Tasmania, fires tore through tens of thousands of hectares of ancient world heritage-listed forests," Coral bleaching is caused by climate change. That's what all the scientists tell us including the Great Barrier Reef independent expert panel which provided this advice to me and Minister Hunt in writing only two weeks ago." Dr Miles said. I wrote to Mr Hunt urging him to hold a meeting in Cairns so Ministers and officials could witness first-hand the devastating effects of warmer ocean temperatures. I want to see national action on climate change and this is a priority for the Palaszczuk Government. Fighting global warming is a crucial step in helping safeguard the Great Barrier Reef, the thousands of jobs it supports, and the billions of dollars it continues to generate," Dr Miles said. Environment Minister Greg Hunt agreed to conduct weekly talks, before going into caretaker mode for the Federal election, likely to be on July 2. Queensland Deputy Premier Jackie Trad said the fact that Hunt agreed to this schedule was an acknowledgement of the pressure on the Federal Government to deliver a more coherent and effective national climate change policy. Last night was an extremely valuable opportunity for us all to come together to talk, but the time for debate is now well and truly over, Ms Trad said. The reef needs Malcolm Turnbull and the Federal Government to step in and bring Australias climate change policy in line with what Mr Turnbull has advocated in the past. Australia needs to adopt emissions reductions targets in line with the expert advice from the Climate Change Authority. In addition we need to adopt a mechanism that helps achieves this abatement, Queensland Deputy Premier Jackie Trad said. Both the Federal Liberal National Party Government and Queensland State Labor Government have approved the Adani Carmichael coal mine in the Galilee basin which has been identified as a carbon bomb for the emissions it would cause if the project ever goes ahead. Neither government has reversed it's approval for the mine, a huge threat to climate change and the future health of the Great Barrier Reef. Conservative politicians like Townsville based Liberal Party MP Ewen Jones think that the mine and a 1.2GW coal power station would be great to develop and argue that governments should massively subsidise the project. They seem to delight in ignoring the current crisis of coral bleaching the Great Barrier Reef and it's bleak future in a world of greater coal consumption and climate change. In other developments, scientists published a full page ad in the Brisbane Courier Mail with an open letter arguing strongly for the phase-out of coal to save the Great Barrier Reef. Scientists: Great Barrier Reef needs #coal phase-out to protect from Climate Change In a full page advertisement in the Brisbane Courier Mail newspaper, 56 climate change and marine science experts articulated that phasing out coal should be a top priority for Australia to protect the Great Barrier Reef. The scientists called for "the end of the fossil fuel era" because the Great Barrier Reefs future depends on how much and how quickly the world, including Australia, can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit ocean warming. The full open letter is below and was published by the Climate Council, with money for the ad raised from many Australians concerned about climate change and the damage to the reef. Climate Councillor Professor Lesley Hughes said in a Climate Council media release that the science was clear: the mass bleaching event would not be occurring without the influence of climate change. This is not a surprise because we have known for decades that the burning of fossil fuels is driving climate change, and that delicate ecosystems like the reef will be destroyed as a result, she said. We are now seeing first hand the damage that climate change causes, and we have a duty of care to speak out. Latest reports from aerial and marine surveys show that 93 per cent of the reef has suffered coral bleaching, and much of the damage is severe. Just 7 per cent of reefs were not affected in this global coral bleaching event. (SMH report) Weve never seen anything like this scale of bleaching before. In the northern Great Barrier Reef, its like 10 cyclones have come ashore all at once, says Professor Terry Hughes, convenor of the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce that is documenting and studying the event. "Towards the southern end, most of the reefs have minor to moderate bleaching and should soon recover." "We have now flown over 911 individual reefs in a helicopter and light plane, to map out the extent and severity of bleaching along the full 2300km length of the Great Barrier Reef. Of all the reefs we surveyed, only 7% (68 reefs) have escaped bleaching entirely. At the other end of the spectrum, between 60 and 100% of corals are severely bleached on 316 reefs, nearly all in the northern half of the Reef." concluded Hughes in an ARC centre of Excellence Coral Reef Studies media release. World-renowned reef scientist Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg said that if the reef was in hospital, itd be in ICU. For scientists like me, who have devoted their lives to improving our collective understanding of the Great Barrier Reef, its been distressing to see first-hand the severity and extent of damage from the bleaching event underway. This is one of the most visible icons of Australia one of the worlds seven natural wonders and a multi-billion dollar economic asset. It is under threat and we must act now to save it. If we dont, we will be explaining to our children and grandchildren that we had the chance to save this precious reef and we failed to take it. said Hoegh-Guldberg. The open letter by scientists follows: Climate Change is Destroying our reefs. We must phase out coal We, the undersigned, have collectively devoted over 1200 years studying climate change, marine ecosystems and the reef. We know that the burning of fossil fuels is severely damaging our Great Barrier Reef. This is directly threatening a major economic resource. The World Heritage listed Great Barrier Reef earns multiple billions for the economy and provides jobs to tens of thousands of Australians. As you read this, the Great Barrier Reef is currently experiencing the worst mass coral bleaching event in its history. Whilst the full extent of the damage is still unfolding, the current bleaching is far worse than previously expected, with large portions of the reef severely bleached and likely to die. Warmer ocean temperatures, driven by the burning of coal, oil and gas, are increasing the occurrence of severe coral bleaching events like the one were witnessing now. Over the past 30 years the Great Barrier Reef has lost 30-50% of its coral cover from bleaching and other stressors, and at this moment even more of the Reefs coral is being destroyed. One of the most visible Australian icons is under threat and we must act now to save it. Record breaking ocean heat has triggered a global coral bleaching event that is devastating the Great Barrier Reef. Since March 2016, the weekly average sea surface temperature over the northern Great Barrier Reef has been around 1-1.5C above the recent decadal average (2002-2011) for this time of year, with higher anomalies in some localised waters. This has resulted in coral bleaching across the Great Barrier Reef, particularly the most pristine and isolated reefs in the far north. Aerial surveys of more than 500 coral reefs from Cairns to Papua New Guinea reveal that the overwhelming majority of reefs in this section are ranked in the most severe bleaching category. The science is clear. The current bleaching would not be occurring without the influence of climate change. The increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the burning of coal, oil and gas is warming the oceans, causing these devastating bleaching events that are threatening the survival of coral reefs worldwide. Australia has weathered El Nino events for centuries but it was only from the early 1980s that the Great Barrier Reef began to experience repeated coral bleaching events, after global warming began in earnest. The burning of fossil fuels is also increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the oceans, increasing ocean acidity and slowing the ability of reefs to recover from impacts such as bleaching, cyclones and predatory starfish. Australia is the custodian of one of the seven wonders of the natural world. Not only is the reef incredibly beautiful, its also a billion dollar economic asset. The value-added economic contribution of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area to the Australian economy in 2011-12 was $5.7 billion and it supported 69,000 jobs. The future of the Great Barrier Reef, and reefs around the world, depends on how much and how quickly we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit ocean warming. Small-scale actions such as culling predatory Crown-of-Thorns starfish on a handful of reefs and improving water quality in the southern reef will not prevent ongoing damage from climate change. If the world, including Australia, continues to burn coal, oil and gas and warm the climate at current rates, corals worldwide will be subject to increasingly frequent and severe bleaching events. This will overwhelm the ability of corals to recover and reefs like the Great Barrier Reef will disappear by mid-century if not sooner. This will directly threaten the livelihoods of over 500 million people worldwide. As scientists we have a duty of care. We understand that one of the most biologically diverse and economically valuable ecosystems on Earth is being destroyed, and we know the steps we have to take to prevent even more damage. We have a responsibility to speak out about the facts, especially when the stakes are so high. At the Paris conference on climate change in December 2015 the world came together to agree that strong eorts must be made towards limiting global warming to well below 2C with a target of 1.5C in the long-term. Now is the critical time to make this pledge a reality. Australia has a critical role to play in the global effort to reduce fossil fuel emissions. We are the largest emitter per capita of the developed countries and the 13th largest worldwide in absolute terms. Our fossil fuel emissions continue to increase. We, the undersigned, are calling for the end of the fossil fuel era. Australia must rapidly phase-out existing ageing and inefficient coal-fired power stations. In addition, there can be no new coal mines. No new coal-fired power stations. The transition to a renewables-led energy system, already underway, must be greatly accelerated. This must be the number one priority if we are to protect what remains of the Great Barrier Reef and other reefs around the world. Sources: Boston, MA Plaintiffs involved in Plaintiffs involved in Zofran lawsuits, including multidistrict litigation (MDL 2657), have discovered that Zofran labeling in Canada warns against the use of the anti-nausea drug during pregnancy because of possible birth defects. The US label has no such warning. According to plaintiffs, this means that Canadian mothers were warned that Zofran may harm their babies when taken during pregnancy, but mothers in the United States were not. This discrepancy in labeling begs the question: why is the birth defects warning in Canada and not in the United States? Currently, more than 220 plaintiffs are demanding answers.In April 2015, Canada acknowledged the risks associated with using Zofran during pregnancy to treat morning sickness. The Canadian label reads: the safety of ondansetron for use in human pregnancy has not been established, and use in pregnancy is not recommended.The Zofran label in the United States reads: Pregnancy Category B. Reproduction studies have been performed in pregnant rats and rabbits at I.V. doses up to 4 mg/kg per day and have revealed no evidence of impaired fertility or harm to the fetus due to ondansetron. There are, however, no adequate and well-controlled studies in pregnant women. Because animal reproduction studies are not always predictive of human response, this drug should be used during pregnancy only if clearly needed.GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in 2012 was accused of illegally promoting and marketing Zofran as safe, and the pharmaceutical giant settled its accusation of criminal behavior by paying the US Department of Justice $3 billion. But approximately 1 million pregnant women per year still use the anti-nausea drug off label to treat morning sickness.Almost a year before the Canadian warning came into effect, the(June 2014) reported that at least 20 Canadian women who used ondansetron to treat morning sickness experienced serious suspected side effects, including two infant deaths and multiple cases of newborns with heart defects and kidney malformations. The newspaper analyzed publicly available records in the FDAs adverse events reporting system, or FAERS No wonder GSK made Number One on Public Citizens list of Worst Offenders, both in number of settlements and size of criminal and civil penalties. The non-profit consumer rights group and think tank in 2012 found that big pharma companies, including GSK, had paid governments more than $30 billion, much of which stemmed from allegations of unlawful off-label marketing, such as the marketing and promotion of Zofran. In 2012, GSK paid its $3 billion fine. To this day, the drug giant still denies allegations that Zofran causes birth defects. Further, the company has not offered to change its labeling. Baku, Azerbaijan, April 21 By Khalid Kazimov - Trend: Iran eyes projects to construct 5,000 km-long gas-pipelines across the country over the next five years, an Iranian gas official said. Hassan Montazer Torbati, the planning director of the National Iranian Gas Company, has said the company for fulfilling the plans needs $15 billion, SHANA news agency reported. Hassan Montazer Torbati added that his company on average needs to attract $3.3 billion worth of investment per year. For materializing the projects, he further called for luring foreign and domestic investment. According to an Iranian oil Ministry's document obtained by Trend, the ministry needs to spend $55.8 billion on gas transit projects until 2025. The document also suggests that Iran will need to invest about $27 billion on gas distribution projects. Earlier Iran's Oil Ministry and Saipem SpA, an Italian oil and gas industry contractor, held talks for the construction of the Islamic Republic's ninth cross-country gas pipeline. The 1,900 km long pipeline is expected to deliver 110 million cubic meters of natural gas per day from Asalouyeh gas field to north western regions of Iran. Tehran, Iran, April 19 By Mehdi Sepahvand - Trend: On April 17 Iran wrapped up its 10th international plastics & rubber industry exhibition Iran Plast 2016, with many Iranian and foreign companies seeking business opportunities in the Islamic Republic. It was the first time the foreign companies outnumbered locals at such event, Ahmad Ali Saatnia, expert and adviser at The Italian association of Plastics, Rubber and Moulds Manufacturing Association (ASSOCOMAPLAST), told Trend April 19. ASSOCOMAPLAST was heading about 20 companies to the exhibition that was staged April 13-17. However, the historically exceptional outnumbering was not all originated from positive factors as it was largely due to a ban on the event by members of the Iranian Processing & Moulds Association (PMMA), Saatnia pointed out. Processing machine manufacturing companies of Iran under the umbrella of their PMMA Association unanimously avoided the exhibition due to various factors, which is something odd since most of such exhibitions around the world allocate their largest section to molds and processing machine manufacturers, he noted. Most of these companies cited bad timing, transportation problems, lack of time for disassembling, dispatching and assembling of their machinery to expose at the exhibition and also the event's close date to the next Chinaplas exhibition in Shanghai, China as reasons for not attending, Saatnia said. Saatnia, who himself had abstained from setting up a booth in the fairground as a show of respect for the PMMA of which he has been a co-founder, however, implied without further details that there has been more to their reasons for not attending. Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21 By Farhad Daneshvar, Fatih Karimov - Trend: Trade turnover between Iran and Azerbaijan has increased by 53 percent in the first three months of the current year, said Iran's ICT Minister Mahmoud Vaezi speaking to reporters in Baku April 21. Vaezi, who is the Iranian co-chair of the Azerbaijan-Iran joint economic commission, expressed hope for reaching new agreements between Tehran and Baku before the Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's upcoming visit to Baku. He further called for developing the economic ties between Iran and Azerbaijan, adding that the sides have decided to expand the banking ties. Vaezi also called for removing obstacles to the cooperation of the private sectors, inviting both countries' private sectors to cooperate in Iran's projects. He said the Iranian government will back the private sectors in this regard. "The private sectors should be confident that I and Azerbaijan's Economy Minister Shahin Mustafayev will support them," he stressed. Vaezi further called for launching joint ventures between Iran and Azerbaijan in order to export products to other countries, saying the Iranian and Azerbaijani markets should not be the only destinations for the goods produced jointly by the two countries. He said the trade ties between Iran and Azerbaijan should be independent of oil prices. The minister also called for mutual cooperation on the Caspian energy resources. Elsewhere in his remarks, Vaezi thanked Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev for honoring him with a medal, saying the medal will encourage him in carrying out his tasks. Vaezi, together with some members of the Iran-Azerbaijan Joint Economic Cooperation Commission, headed to Baku to hold a meeting there Apr. 21. The two countries today signed four memorandums of understanding as part of joint projects in the medicine and vehicle production. Azerbaijan's exports to Iran almost doubled to $14.4 million in Q1 2016 year-to-year, while imports increased from $19.4 million in Q1 2015 to $27 million in Q1 2016, according to the Azerbaijani State Customs Committee. President Muhammadu Buharis government would soon be one year old. Since its inauguration on May 29, 2015, the administration has witnessed different political scheming that may limit the chances of the ruling party, All Progressive Congress (APC), come 2019 when the administration is expected to seek re-election. Although often downplayed as party or family affairs, APC has gone through different trials from within and outside the party in the short period of ascending from an opposition party to the ruling party. What will the partys fate be in 2019? Who are the politicians within the APC that might scuttle the partys chances of retaining power come 2019? Legit.ng lists Top 5 APC politicians that may make or mar the partys chances in 2019. Sen. Bola Ahmed Tinubu President Buhari has spoken highly in favour of Tinubu recently Bola Ahmed Tinubu needs no introduction when it comes to politics in Nigeria. The former governor of Lagos state and national leader of the APC is often applauded for his role in piloting the affairs of the first Nigerian opposition party to win a ruling party PDP during the last presidential election. Being a highly respected political figure, Tinubu and other party leaders felt slighted when Bukola Saraki played his cards well aligning with PDP senators to become the Senate president against the partys wish. Since then there has been a sudden crave for political positions by members of the ruling class which according to reports often clash with Bola Ahmed Tinubus choice. Unconfirmed reports suggest that there is an unconscious or not so evident battle going on within the party and Tinubu is in the middle of it all. Will this turn out in Tinubus favour? What will happen if the partys structure is hijacked from him? The coming months will determine if APC is counting down to extinction come 2019. Atiku Abubakar The former vice-president, Atiku Abubakar is not new to fighting political battles. He is notable for scuttling the third term agenda of his superior, former president Olusegun Obasanjo when they were in power. At the end, President Obasanjo anointed another candidate to run for the presidency. Atiku was later barred from contesting the presidential election after he was indicted by the Ignatius Ayya administration panel of inquiry. He then defected, won the presidential ticket and contested on the platform of the Action Congress. He however lost the election to former president Umar Musa Yaradua. Atiku, together with other prominent members of a faction of the PDP called new PDP merged with the Action Congress of Nigeria and other political parties to form the present APC. It is the merger that has polarised the party along the merging entities especially when it comes to sharing the loot of political power. Although, the former vice-president has not been politically active like before, he is still considered as an important political figure with ample political capital at his disposal. There are reports that Atiku is eyeing the chairmanship of the ruling partys Board of Trustees (BOT), the same post said to be coveted by Tinubu. Although, the party chairman, Mr Oyegun recently dismissed insinuations that the delay in the constitution of the BOT is tied down to who will be the chairman, Nigerians and indeed party adherents are waiting to see what will become of what can be termed as the fight between two elephants. Expectedly, the grass that will suffer in this case is the party. Bukola Saraki Bukola Saraki The Senate president, Bukola Saraki became the president of the red chamber in controversial circumstances. He is perceived to be the major black sheep in the national assembly. Saraki is currently facing a trial at the Code of Conduct Tribunal over asset falsification. The trial is believed in some quarters to be orchestrated by some powers that be in the party because of his disobedience to partys directives. He has also affirmed that he is currently being politically persecuted and not prosecuted. He is currently struggling for survival and has so far remained rigid despite calls for his resignation due to corruption trial. One thing that cant be taken away from Saraki is his ability to play his cards well. It would not take many people by surprise if the senate president cross-carpets to the PDP when pushed to the wall. If that eventually happens, what then will be the fate of APC in the senate with the likelihood of Senator Ike Ekweremadu emerging as his replacement? Rabiu Musa Kwakwansho Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso is also a force to reckon with in the APC. He was the governor of Kano state from 1999 to 2003 and then from 2011 to 2015. After jetting out of the PDP, Kwankwaso joined and contested the APC presidential election but lost in the primary election to Muhammad Buhari. Counting on his popularity in Kano state he contested and won the senatorial election to represent Kano state central senatorial district in the 8th Assembly. At the moment there are reasons to suggest that all is not well with APC in Kano state. Less than a year after Kwankwaso handed over power to the current governor, Mr Ganduje, the struggle for the control of the partys structure, cabinet appointments amongst other things broke out with the camp of the former governor turned senator, Rabiu Kwankwaso accusing Ganduje of shutting out his men. Putting the voting strength of Kano state into consideration, the face-off between the two political bigwigs in the state if not quickly resolved could affect the votes garnered by APC in 2019. Aisha Buhari Yes, Aisha Buhari. You may wonder how the wife of the president, Aisha Buhari might scuttle her husbands (or party) chances of retaining power in 2019 but then as with previous administrations the office of the wife of the president of the federation is an important one. It is that important that it can also determine the fate and political fortunes of any party in power. Many believe that one of the contributory factors that led to the defeat of the PDP and President Jonathan at the polls can be traced to the utterances made by his wife, Mrs Patience before and during the campaigns. In the build-up to the elections, Patience Jonathan was accused of making divisive statements. Aisha Buhari has shown that glimpse of character said to be unsympathetic to the plights of the masses. Many have criticized her for launching her book on beauty and therapy a day after the commemoration of the 2 year abduction of Chibok girls. The book launch, people say has shown that the first family in Nigeria are far away from the people. Although, Mrs Buhari on Monday, April 18, launched her pet project in Cross River state, it is expected that more eyes would be on her as she goes about her activities. Source: Legit.ng Details added (first version posted on 13:06) Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21 By Anvar Mammadov - Trend: A signing ceremony of four memoranda between the Azerbaijani and Iranian companies within the framework of joint projects' implementation in the sphere of medicine and vehicles manufacturing took place in Baku Apr. 21. The documents were signed during the Iranian delegation's visit to Baku headed by Minister of Communications and Information Technology Mahmoud Vaezi. The memoranda were signed between the Sumgait Chemical Industrial Park, Azerbaijan Investment Company OJSC, Azersun Holding, as well as Iranian major pharmaceutical company Darou Pakhsh and leading vehicle manufacturer Iran Khodro. The documents were signed by Director of Sumgait Chemical Industrial Park Nazim Talibov, Executive Director of Azerbaijan Investment Company OJSC Rovshan Najaf, Director General of Azersun Holding Savas Uzan, Director of Azeurocar LLC Alakbar Farajev, Executive Director of Darou Pakhsh company Kambiz Amjadi and Deputy Director for Export of Iran Khodro company Saeed Tafazoli. Azerbaijan Investment Company OJSC, Azersun Holding and Iranian Darou Pakhsh signed a memorandum of understanding on the organization of pharmaceutical production in accordance with international standards. The established joint venture will be financed by these companies. The plant is planned to produce 52 kinds of medicines, including painkillers, antibiotics and vitamins, which will primarily be intended for the domestic market. The enterprise will become a resident of Sumgait Chemical Industrial Park, and the park has also signed a memorandum with Darou Pakhsh. In addition, Azeurocar LLC and the Iranian company Iran Khodro signed a memorandum on the joint production of passenger cars and spare parts to them. In accordance with the memorandum, models of cars will be determined at the first stage of the project, and then a business plan prepared. The project will be implemented in Azerbaijan's Neftchala Industrial Quarter, and a memorandum was signed between the Azerbaijan Investment Company OJSC and Azeurocar LLC in connection with this fact. Credit: Ira ChernovaCage the Elephant has released the video for their single, "Trouble." The clip, which premiered on Pitchfork.com, begins with what looks like a classic Old West showdown, but then things start to get weird. "I really wanted to make a video that was like John Wayne or a young Clint Eastwood acting in a [Jean] Cocteau play or Ingmar Bergman's [1957 film] Wild Strawberries," says frontman Matt Shultz, who also directed the "Trouble" video. "A metaphorical journey that hopefully people could read between the lines." "Trouble" is a single from Cage the Elephant's latest album, Tell Me I'm Pretty. The band will hit the road next month in support of Tell Me I'm Pretty on a North American arena tour, which kicks off May 1 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Copyright 2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21 By Fatih Karimov - Trend: Iranian Army's causalities in Syrian clashes have increased to seven since its first presence in the crisis-hit country early this month. Sadegh Sheibak and Hossein Hemmati, members of the army's elite forces namely the 65 Nohed Airborne Brigade have been reportedly killed in armed clashes with Syrian opposition groups, Fars news agency reported. Meanwhile, the Army Commander Major General Ataollah Salehi has rejects Army's organized military presence in Syria. Salehi said April 20 that army has no responsibility in providing advisory supports to Syria, however he confirmed that some "volunteers" from army have been dispatched to Syria under the responsibility of a certain organization which dispatches Iranian military advisors to Syria. Earlier in April, Iranian media outlets quoted Brigadier-General Ali Arasteh, an Iranian Army commander, as saying that army has deployed a group of its commandos from the 65 Nohed Airborne Brigade in Syria to provide advisory support for President Bashar al-Assad's army in fight against terrorist groups. Iranian media outlets reported Apr. 11 that Iran's Army for the first time lost its members in clashes in Syria. A day later the Commander of the Iranian Army's Ground Forces Ahmad Reza Pourdastan confirmed the causalities, saying a number of Iranian army ground force members from various units, including the Special Forces of the 65th birgade, are in Syria for advisory mission. Iranian officials have constantly confirmed that the IRGC provides the Syrian army with advisory support in fight against the terrorist groups. The Islamic Republic views the Syrian regime as its main strategic ally in the region, as well as a part of the "axis of resistance" against Israel. Tehran has always expressed support for the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21 By Farhad Daneshvar, Anvar Mammadov - Trend: Azerbaijan's integral sovereignty is of high importance for Iran, the country's Minister of Communications and Information Technology Mahmoud Vaezi told reporters in Baku Apr. 21. Vaezi expressed sympathy for the death of civil and military personnel of Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone and condemned the occupation of the country's lands. On the night of April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire from the Armenian side, which used large-caliber weapons, mortars and grenade launchers. The armed clashes resulted in deaths and injuries among the Azerbaijani population. Azerbaijan responded with a counter-attack, which led to liberation of several strategic heights and settlements. Military operations were stopped on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian armies on Apr. 5 at 12:00 (UTC/GMT + 4 hours) with the consent of the sides, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry earlier said. Ignoring the agreement, the Armenian side again started violating the ceasefire. 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 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. Vaezi said the relations between Iran and Azerbaijan have never been at such a high level as they are today. He said the two countries have established the relations of friendship and brotherhood. "There is a great merit of the heads of our countries in the fact that we have currently reached such a level," added Vaezi. Heres one for ya. Anders Breivik, who committed the horrifying white nationalist attacks in Oslo which killed 77 people, has won a case against the Norwegian government claiming that his rights were violated during his incarceration by keeping him isolated from other inmates and outsiders. The judge, Helen Andenaes Sekulic, agreed with him. The prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment represents a fundamental value in a democratic society. This applies no matter what also in the treatment of terrorists and killers, she said. The state has to pay Breivik 331,000 Norwegian crowns (about $52,090). Its not an argument she pulled out of thin air it comes from the countrys participation in the European Convention on Human Rights. However, she did not rule in favour of Breiviks claim that his right to private and family life was restricted. The state had argued that restricting his mail is completely normal and necessary procedure especially seeing as he wanted to send mail to far-right extremists. This comes after a number of reports of Breiviks interesting prison demands over the past few years, such as his allegation that being denied a PlayStation 3 to replace his ageing PlayStation 2 constituted torture. Scandinavian prisons are known for being much more accomodating than, say, Australian prisons, but they werent buying that argument. Lawyers for the state are considering whether to appeal, and havent made a decision. Source: News.com.au. Photo: AFP. The Supervisory Board of Aareal Bank AG has resolved upon two changes to the Management Board. Christof Winkelmann, who has headed Aareal Bank's Special Property Finance division, will be appointed to the Bank's Management Board, with effect from 1 July 2016. The appointment is subject to approval by the European [] Neil Harris, Senior Vice President at GIC Real Estate International, has been announced as INREVs new Chairman at the associations Annual Conference currently taking place in Vienna. New members of the Management Board have also been appointed. At the same time INREV has unveiled its Global Investor Real Estate Performance [] The JLL Irish Property Index continued to perform strongly, with Overall Returns of +4.0% in the quarter and +25.5% in the last 12 months. Capital Values increased by +2.6% in the quarter and +18.5% in the year. This was driven by growth across all three sectors, with Industrial (+9.8%) recording [] Javascript Error Javascript is deactivated in your browser. To use all functions on this portal, for example the login, Javascript must be activated. Please activate Javascript in your browser settings. The Royal Enfield Bullet 350 is set to receive BS6 update alongside its Classic sibling. The new version is an interim measure until the all-new model based on the next generation modular J platform gets ready towards the end of this year or early next year. Unofficial bookings for the 2020 Royal Enfield Bullet 350 BS6 have commenced at dealerships across the country with a deposit of INR 10,000 (may vary according to the outlet). Save for the powertrain update, we dont expect to see any other changes to the good old Bullet 350. The 346 cc single-cylinder air-cooled engine will receive electronic fuel injection system just like the recently launched Classic 350 BS6. In its latest avatar, the motor produces 0.71 hp less at 19.3 hp while maintaining the same torque output of 28 Nm. Transmission will continue to be the 5-speed unit. Royal Enfield is most likely to introduce new colour options for the Bullet 350 BS6. Both electric and kick start variants are expected to be on offer. The addition of EFI is estimated to inflate the price by around INR 10,000 to 12,000. For reference, the base kick start variant currently retails for INR 1.21 lakh (ex-showroom, Delhi). The frame, suspension, brake and other components will stay unchanged for now. The retro-classic motorcycle is equipped with traditional telescopic front fork and twin rear shock absorbers. Braking is courtesy of a 280 mm front disc and a 153 mm rear drum. Single-channel ABS is a standard fitment. The motorcycle sits on spoked wheels which are wrapped with 3.75 x 19 tyres. The 2020 Royal Enfield Bullet 350 BS6 is set to be launched in the coming days. The motorcycle is a more accessible alternative to the popular Classic 350. The Bullet 350 is the most affordable motorcycle in REs currently portfolio but once the product onslaught begins at the end of Q1 2020, there would be a lighter and more affordable offering which will target younger and women audience. Likely to be christened as the Explorer, the new product will adopt retro classic design but is likely to have a more youthful appeal. Like most other two wheeler OEMs, Royal Enfield has been struggling with sluggish sales for the past several months. Regular inflow of products from rivals in the price range adds to the pressure. The new products are expected to give the brand some relief. Erosion after severe wildfires can be the dominant force shaping forested mountainous landscapes of the U.S. Intermountain West, suggests a new research paper by two University of Arizona geoscientists. The study is the first to assess the impact of wildfires on such landscapes by combining several different ways to measure short-term and long-term erosion rates, said study co-author Jon Pelletier, a UA professor of geosciences. After the 2011 Las Conchas fire in New Mexico, soil and rock eroded from burned watersheds more than 1,000 times faster than from unburned watersheds nearby, the team found. Most of the erosion happened in the first year after the fire. Caitlin Orem had been studying erosion in seven mountain watersheds near New Mexico's Valles Grande but wasn't focused on wildfire. When the Las Conchas fire burned two of her study areas, she seized the opportunity to compare the rates that watersheds were denuded of soil and rocks before and after a severe wildfire. "We knew that wildfire increased the rate of erosion, but we didn't know how important it was over long time scales," said first author Orem. The research was part of her doctoral studies in the UA Department of Geosciences. "It was a really huge opportunity to learn a lot about wildfires. There are very few times you can see that big of a change and can actually document it." Orem and Pelletier calculated total erosion rates for their study area for time scales up to 1 million years ago. The scientists found more than 90 percent of the erosion happened in the geologically brief time intervals right after forest fires. Those post-fire intervals constituted just 3 percent of the total time. advertisement The research is part of the UA Santa Catalina Mountains & Jemez River Basin Critical Zone Observatory, a project funded by the National Science Foundation. Pelletier, co-director of the CZO, said, "I think we can generalize this to similar landscapes in the Intermountain West -- landscapes that are forested, have very little bare ground, and have few areas with slopes steeper than about 25 degrees." The paper, "The predominance of post-wildfire erosion in the long-term denudation of the Valles Caldera, New Mexico," by Orem, now a geologist for BP in Anchorage, Alaska, and Pelletier, has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. In 2010, Orem and Pelletier began studying the role of erosion in sculpting the mountain watersheds that drain into the Valles Grande, including those on Redondo Peak and on Cerro del Medio. Pelletier said, "The goal is to determine topographic change--the volume that has been removed or deposited." Working with the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, the UA geoscientists used a technology called LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) to create a digital map, or digital elevation model, showing the area's surface relief at that time. advertisement Although Redondo Peak, one of the team's study areas, now has steep-sided ridges and deep valleys, previous investigators showed that Redondo Peak formed 1.24 million years ago as a rounded volcanic dome. To calculate long-term erosion rates for Redondo Peak, the team needed to figure out how much rock and soil had been stripped off the mountain and how long it took for that material to be removed. Using the digital elevation model, known as a DEM, Orem calculated the volume of material that eroded from the original dome over time. Dividing that volume by the mountain's age gives the average long-term erosion rate. Such a long-term rate incorporates many different events in the mountain's history. The researchers already knew events such as flood or wildfire could increase erosion rates. The team corroborated their DEM-based calculation by measuring how much beryllium-10 had accumulated in the soil. Pelletier said beryllium-10 analyses provide an "erosion clock" over time scales of thousands of years. To calculate the day-in, day-out background rate of erosion in the absence of disturbance, Orem, Pelletier and colleagues took regular samples of stream water from the Redondo Peak watersheds from 2008 to 2012. By measuring the amount of sediment suspended in the water, Orem calculated the background rate of erosion. The researchers found the long-term erosion rate for Redondo Peak was 100 times greater than the background rate, indicating erosion rates on the mountain had been greater in the past. Redondo Peak had no wildfires during the time the team took stream samples. A nearby mountain with similar terrain, Cerro del Medio, had a severe forest fire in 2011, giving the team the opportunity to measure post-wildfire erosion directly. Post-fire, the increase in erosion was obvious--boulders the size of office desks had rolled down the slopes and into the meadow below. The team had already made a pre-fire digital elevation model, or DEM, of two Cerro del Medio watersheds. The team made new DEMs of the changing landscape right after the fire and again 10, 13 and 22 months later. By comparing the pre-fire DEM to the series of post-fire DEMs, the scientists found the burned watershed lost 1,000 to 10,000 times more rocks and soil in the first year after the fire than did a similar but unburned watershed on Redondo Peak. The researchers calculated that over a million years, if such post-wildfire erosion occurred for a year just once every 30 to 300 years, enough material would be removed to sculpt Redondo Peak's original dome into the steeply incised mountain it is today. "Over millennia there's a gradual transfer of soil from high spots to low spots," Pelletier said. "Most of the post-fire erosion is in the streambed. In the time period between fires, soil is still moving, but it's moving to fill in the hole created by the flooding just after the fire." The team's estimate of past wildfire frequency matches what other researchers found by studying the natural records of wildfires contained in the region's tree rings and lake sediments. Orem said, "Other researchers have found that in the Western U.S., the area being burned and the severity of the burns are increasing. With that increase, we expect to see more wildfire-caused erosion." The Geological Society of America also funded part of the research. Researchers have discovered a link between the BRCA1 gene mutation and lower levels of a hormone that is an indicator of the number of eggs left in a woman's ovaries, according to research published in Human Reproduction, one of the world's leading reproductive medicine journals. In the first large study looking at BRCA1 and BRCA2 genetic mutations and levels of anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH) in women who carry the mutated genes, the group of international researchers found that carrying the BRCA1 mutation was associated with AMH concentrations that were, on average, 25% lower than those in non-carriers. The effect was not seen in women with the BRCA2 mutation. Professor Kelly-Anne Phillips, a consultant medical oncologist at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in East Melbourne (Victoria, Australia) and the first author of the study, said: "This means that women in their mid-30s, who carry the BRCA1 mutation, have, on average, ovarian reserves similar to those of non-carriers who are two years older." Although AMH is a reliable marker of ovarian reserve, Prof Phillips said: "It's important to remember that AMH is only one indicator of a woman's potential fertility, the ability to conceive and carry a baby to full term is affected by many other factors as well, including egg quality and whether the fallopian tubes are unobstructed, neither of which are measured by AMH. Women with low AMH levels can sometimes still have a baby and, conversely, women with high AMH levels are sometimes unable to do so. "However, our findings suggest that women carrying the BRCA1 mutation should try to avoid delaying pregnancy until their late 30s or 40s when fertility is reduced anyway because of their age. For women trying to conceive in their 20s, any difference in ovarian reserve between BRCA1 mutation carriers and non-carriers is unlikely to be of clinical significance." Women who carry the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations have a higher risk of cancers in the breast, ovaries, fallopian tubes and peritoneum. The risk increases with age and is generally higher for those with the BRCA1 mutation than with the BRCA2 mutation. The mutations are rare in the general population -- about 0.1% for BRCA1 and 0.2% for BRCA2 -- although they can be more prevalent in certain groups, such as Ashkenazi Jews. As mutation carriers enter their early 40s they are usually advised to have their ovaries and fallopian tubes removed in order to minimise their cancer risk (as these cancers are hard to detect in their early stages when they are easier to treat). For this reason, many women who know they are carriers try to have their children when they are younger. However, until now, there has been little good-quality evidence about the effects of these genetic mutations on non-cancer-related conditions such as fertility. Prof Phillips and colleagues from research centres in Australia and Scotland (UK), analysed AMH levels from 693 women, aged between 25-45 years (average age was 35), who had no personal history of cancer but who had enrolled into the Australian and New Zealand Kathleen Cuningham Foundation Consortium for research into Familial Breast Cancer (kConFab) study between 1997 and 2012. A total of 172 women were carriers and 216 women non-carriers from families carrying the BRCA1 mutations, and 147 carriers and 158 non-carriers were from families with the BRCA2 mutations. The women retained both ovaries and were not pregnant or breast-feeding at the time that blood was taken from them. The researchers adjusted their results to take account of age, oral contraceptive use, body mass index and smoking. In addition to BRCA1 mutations carriers having 25% lower AMH concentrations, on average, than non-carriers, they were also more likely to have AMH concentrations that placed them in the lowest quarter when the women were divided into four groups according to the AMH levels. This was not seen in BRCA2 mutation carriers. In their Human Reproduction paper, the authors say that a possible mechanism for the link between the BRCA1 mutation and ovarian reserve may be the role played by both the mutations in DNA repair -- inefficient DNA repair has been shown to contribute to the aging of a woman's eggs. BRCA1 and BRCA2 are both integral to mending breaks that occur in both strands of the DNA helix. "BRCA2 has a more limited role in double-strand DNA break repair compared with BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation carriers tend to develop fewer cancers and at a later age, compared with BRCA1 mutation carriers," explained Prof Phillips. "So it is credible that any effect of mutation status on ovarian reserve would be more pronounced in BRCA1 mutation carriers. There may be a lesser effect in BRCA2 mutation carriers as well, but our study did not have adequate power to detect it." The researchers say that their findings also raise the hypothesis that BRCA1 mutations carriers may have a higher than average risk of chemotherapy-induced menopause. "The hypothesis is that if BRCA1 mutation carriers have lower ovarian reserve than their non-carrier counterparts when they start chemotherapy for cancer treatment, the carriers may be more likely to develop menopause associated with the chemotherapy. However, this is just a hypothesis at this stage and requires further research," she concluded. Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21 By Farhad Daneshvar - Trend: Iran and Azerbaijan are considering to involve private sectors from both countries to contribute to the expansion of trade ties between the two neighbors, an Iranian minister told Trend. Minister of Communications and Information Technology of Iran Mahmoud Vaezi, who is on an official visit to Baku, said that industry and engineering services from both countries are among the sectors that are of priority for cooperation. Agricultural and commerce as well as health sectors are also proper fields for cooperation between the two friendly countries, Vaezi told Trend on the sidelines of a ceremony for inking a number of deals between companies from Iran and Azerbaijan. Predicting that the ties between the two brotherly countries will be closer in the near future, he vowed support for private sector. Vaezi previously said that the trade turnover between Iran and Azerbaijan has increased by 53 percent in the first three months of the current year. Meanwhile, the State Customs Committee of the Republic of Azerbaijan reported that the country's export to Iran almost doubled to $14.4 million in 1Q16 year-to-year, while imports increased from $19.4 million in 1Q15 to $27 million in 1Q16. Vaezi further said that a major part of issues agreed between Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev, have been materialized over the past two months. Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev concluded his visit to Iran in late February, which took place on the invitation of Hassan Rouhani. The high-level official visit resulted in conclusion of documents covering various areas of cooperation between Tehran and Baku. Vaezi heading the Iran-Azerbaijan Joint Economic Cooperation Commission arrived in Baku Apr. 21 to discuss expansion of bilateral ties. During the visit, President Aliyev presented Vaezi state award, the Order of Azerbaijan "Dostlug" (friendship). On March 28, the U.S. Geological Survey issued a one-year seismic forecast for the United States that for the first time includes ground-shaking hazards from both natural and human-induced earthquakes. In the wake of the forecast's release, researchers are gathering at the Seismological Society of America's (SSA) 2016 Annual Meeting April 20-22 in Reno, Nevada, to discuss some of the science behind the report. Presenters at the meeting will speak about factors that may influence the location and strength of induced earthquakes in the central United States and western Canada and what can be done to minimize the occurrence and impacts of this seismic activity. The USGS report estimates that about 7 million people in the central and eastern United States now live in areas affected by induced earthquakes. In central Oklahoma and southern Kansas, there is a 5 to 12% chance of a damaging (magnitude 4.5 or larger) earthquake occurring within the next year. Other areas at risk for induced earthquake hazards include parts of Texas, Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Ohio and Alabama. At the SSA meeting, Mark Petersen, chief of the USGS National Seismic Hazard Mapping Project, will discuss the data that were used to build the new seismic forecast. The vast majority of induced seismicity in the United States is related to wastewater from enhanced oil recovery operations being injected back into the ground, says research geophysicist and deputy chief of the USGS Induced Seismicity Project Justin Rubinstein. At the SSA meeting, Rubinstein will discuss how places such as Harper and Sumner counties in southern Kansas have seen a surge in seismic activity since a 2012 increase in oil and gas operations in the area, including a magnitude 4.8 earthquake in 2014. When the Kansas Corporation Commission placed limits on the industry's wastewater disposal, Rubinstein reports, earthquake activity in the area under the limits decreased by 40 to 50% in the six months following the commission's order. A presentation by AECOM seismologist Ivan Wong will address one of the questions on the minds of infrastructure engineers and public policy planners after learning about the new USGS report: what is the potential for damage from these types of earthquakes? There is some disagreement among researchers, Wong notes, about whether the expected ground shaking in induced seismicity might be stronger or weaker in natural earthquakes. It may also be possible that even earthquakes of magnitude 5 or smaller could damage infrastructure in the central U.S. because buildings and roads in those regions have rarely been built with seismic hazards in mind. Several presentations in the induced seismicity session will examine whether there is a set of seismic features that can be used to distinguish natural from induced earthquakes. This remains a challenging problem, Rubinstein says, "since induced earthquakes involve the same sorts of slip processes as natural earthquakes." For the moment, induced earthquakes are identified by researchers looking at the full catalog of seismicity for a region, "and determining whether changes to industrial operations have coincided with changes in earthquake rates," he says. While the USGS report has raised new interest and concern about induced earthquakes in the central U.S., induced seismicity may have a relatively long history in the region, according to USGS seismologist Susan Hough, who will discuss 20thcentury oil and gas practices in Oklahoma in her SSA talk. She and her colleagues have turned up some interesting documents in the course of tracking down the roots of induced seismicity in the state, including a rare earthquake insurance policy taken out by an prominent Oklahoma City petroleum geologist in 1952, just a couple months before the magnitude 5.7 El Reno earthquake toppled buildings and chimneys and cracked the state capitol building in Oklahoma City. A new "virtual gas field simulator" developed by Stanford scientists aims to help companies and government agencies weigh the economic costs and benefits of different methane leak detection technologies and pick the best one for a given situation. The tool, detailed online in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, examines the cost associated with implementing four different detection technologies and calculates the economic benefit from the sale of additional gas saved. "This tool will help both businesses and government to compare various technologies for mitigating leakage and detecting leaks from a very common standpoint," said study coauthor Arvind Ravikumar, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in monitoring and stopping leaks at natural gas wells because of methane's potential for accelerating climate change. The primary component of natural gas, methane is a potent greenhouse gas that is up to 80 times more effective at absorbing heat than carbon dioxide. The massive natural gas leak near Los Angeles earlier this year--which released more than 97,000 tons of methane into the air--drew national attention and prompted California Governor Jerry Brown to issue a state of emergency. Methane leaks can also pose a hazard to human safety, as demonstrated by multiple recent explosions in New York City resulting from natural gas leaks in aging pipes. At present, companies are not required to find and repair leaky gas wells, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is developing federal guidelines to address the nation's emissions. advertisement Ravikumar and his colleagues hope that their tool will help energy companies determine on a case-by-case basis whether or not a leak detection and repair program make economic sense. For instance, a company that has a very large facility might opt for a technique that is fast but less sensitive. "Right now, the only way that a company can figure out if something works is to try it at their facilities, and this problem is compounded by the fact that companies don't often share their test results," Ravikumar said. "Our tool aims to both streamline and standardize the technology selection process." FEAST Dubbed the Fugitive Emissions Abatement Simulation Toolkit, or FEAST, the tool looks at four detection technologies that vary widely in their costs of equipment and labor: distributed detectors (DD), manual infrared (MIR) detection, and flame-ionization detection (FID), and automated infrared (AIR) detection, which is essentially a drone-mounted infrared camera. "We are taking these four technologies and simulating how much they will cost to operate and how much gas they will save over the course of 10 years," said study coauthor Adam Brandt, an assistant professor of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford. Using the tool, the team showed that three of the technologies (AIR, MIR, and DD) save enough gas that a company could still turn a profit of up to $12,000 per well on average. However, FID, the most traditional method of detection and very time intensive, resulted in a net cost to a company, even though it has the potential to save the most gas. advertisement The study also found that selectively targeting the small fraction of so-called "super-emitters" could help mitigate methane leakage at much lower costs than repairing every leak. Super-emitters, which typically spew 10 to 100 times more methane than average, only make up less than 1 percent of the total number of leaks in a field. "We found that by tuning your methods to detect only the largest leaks, you can eliminate over 80 percent of methane being emitted irrespective of the technology that you're using," Ravikumar said. Costly, But Effective Another important finding from the study is that there's a distinction between low-cost technology and low-cost detection. For example, a drone-mounted infrared camera can cost as much as $200,000 to get up and running, but FEAST shows that it is the single-most cost-effective way to detect leaks. "A single drone-mounted camera can cover large areas of gas fields very efficiently in a short time," said Brandt, who is also a Center Fellow at Stanford's Precourt Institute for Energy and an affiliate at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. In contrast, the equipment cost for FID is only about $35,000, but employing the technology is an extremely slow process that requires hundreds of man-hours for every gas field. "Our study shows that it is okay to use expensive instruments as long as leak detection can be performed rapidly," Ravikumar said. At the UN this week, envoys from more than 130 nations, including 60 world leaders, will convene to sign the Paris Climate Change Agreement. This historic deal, achieved during global climate talks last December, was bolstered by contributions from hundreds of city mayors and corporate CEOs who made their own climate pledges during the negotiations. Now robust implementation of these pledges from cities, states, companies, and investors worldwide will be crucial to delivering on the agreement's promise. But what do these commitments add to national plans? And how do they factor into the global climate agenda? According to new Yale research, the potential impact of these commitments is crucial. In a new analysis published in Nature, a research team highlights the need to move from a discordant system of climate commitments to a more transparent, coordinated, and comprehensive framework. Using data from a UN registry known as NAZCA (Non-State Actor Zone for Climate Action), the Yale team analyzed more than 11,300 climate commitments from cities, regions, private companies, and financial institutions throughout the world. Launched in 2014 by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, NAZCA is the world's most comprehensive climate action registry. The new analysis, led by Angel Hsu, an Assistant Professor at Yale-NUS College and the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES), provides a detailed picture of this sub-national and non-state climate action landscape. "Climate actions pledged by city mayors and corporate CEOs played a crucial role in building momentum for national government leaders to deliver the Paris Agreement," said Hsu, who is also director of the Yale Data-Driven Environmental Solutions Group. "Now it is critical to track these commitments to ensure they are implemented and to understand how they add to the goals countries pledged in Paris." In their analysis, the Yale team synthesizes central themes reflected in NAZCA's data, describes the platform's main challenges, and offers critical feedback for improvement. Though larger than any other reporting site, NAZCA still has sizable data gaps, especially in the developing world. Many major historical polluters and financial institutions are missing from its rolls. Engaging with companies, banks, and sub-national governments in the Global South is a needed next step for NAZCA, and for the data providers in its network, to fill these gaps, according to the analysis. Hsu and her fellow researchers make the case that a reporting hub like NAZCA could play a central role in promoting climate action within and amongst nations. Offering a principal, publicly available registry -- one that governments and individuals look to for details and data on climate initiatives -- could act as a "climate club," they say. Such a resource, they suggest, could help coordinate standards and benchmarks for climate actions, build a framework for implementation tracking, foster ambition and collaboration among actors across sectors, and promote vertical alignment throughout all levels of governance. The Yale team makes several core recommendations for NAZCA to grow itself into this sort of next-generation platform, laying out actionable measures for the registry to undertake, such as strengthening reporting criteria and tracking its members' follow-through on their commitments. It's exciting to see that climate actions recorded on NAZCA grew almost three-fold, from 3,000 to 11,300, in less than 12 months," said Yaping Cheng, a researcher on the Data-Driven Yale team. "NAZCA has the potential to develop into the go-to place for gauging the momentum of global climate actions." Created in 2015, Data-Driven Yale is an interdisciplinary research group that uses data analytics to create solutions to the world's environmental challenges. The group includes policy experts, data scientists, visual designers, and interactive programmers from F&ES and Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Machine learning has come of age in public health reporting according to researchers from the Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. They have found that existing algorithms and open source machine learning tools were as good as, or better than, human reviewers in detecting cancer cases using data from free-text pathology reports. The computerized approach was also faster and less resource intensive in comparison to human counterparts. Every state in the United States requires cancer cases to be reported to statewide cancer registries for disease tracking, identification of at-risk populations, and recognition of unusual trends or clusters. Typically, however, busy health care providers submit cancer reports to equally busy public health departments months into the course of a patient's treatment rather than at the time of initial diagnosis. This information can be difficult for health officials to interpret, which can further delay health department action, when action is needed. The Regenstrief Institute and IU researchers have demonstrated that machine learning can greatly facilitate the process, by automatically and quickly extracting crucial meaning from plaintext, also known as free-text, pathology reports, and using them for decision-making. "Towards Better Public Health Reporting Using Existing Off the Shelf Approaches: A Comparison of Alternative Cancer Detection Approaches Using Plaintext Medical Data and Non-dictionary Based Feature Selection" is published in the April 2016 issue of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics. "We think that its no longer necessary for humans to spend time reviewing text reports to determine if cancer is present or not," said study senior author Shaun Grannis, M.D., M.S., interim director of the Regenstrief Center of Biomedical Informatics. "We have come to the point in time that technology can handle this. A human's time is better spent helping other humans by providing them with better clinical care." "A lot of the work that we will be doing in informatics in the next few years will be focused on how we can benefit from machine learning and artificial intelligence. Everything -- physician practices, health care systems, health information exchanges, insurers, as well as public health departments -- are awash in oceans of data. How can we hope to make sense of this deluge of data? Humans can't do it -- but computers can." Dr. Grannis, a Regenstrief Institute investigator and an associate professor of family medicine at the IU School of Medicine, is the architect of the Regenstrief syndromic surveillance detector for communicable diseases and led the technical implementation of Indiana's Public Health Emergency Surveillance System -- one of the nation's largest. Studies over the past decade have shown that this system detects outbreaks of communicable diseases seven to nine days earlier and finds four times as many cases as human reporting while providing more complete data. "What's also interesting is that our efforts show significant potential for use in underserved nations, where a majority of clinical data is collected in the form of unstructured free text," said study first author Suranga N. Kasthurirathne, a doctoral student at School of Informatics and Computing at IUPUI. "Also, in addition to cancer detection, our approach can be adopted for a wide range of other conditions as well." The researchers sampled 7,000 free-text pathology reports from over 30 hospitals that participate in the Indiana Health Information Exchange and used open source tools, classification algorithms, and varying feature selection approaches to predict if a report was positive or negative for cancer. The results indicated that a fully automated review yielded results similar or better than those of trained human reviewers, saving both time and money. "Machine learning can now support ideas and concepts that we have been aware of for decades, such as a basic understanding of medical terms," said Dr. Grannis. "We found that artificial intelligence was as least as accurate as humans in identifying cancer cases from free-text clinical data. For example the computer 'learned' that the word 'sheet' or 'sheets' signified cancer as 'sheet' or 'sheets of cells' are used in pathology reports to indicate malignancy. "This is not an advance in ideas, it's a major infrastructure advance -- we have the technology, we have the data, we have the software from which we saw accurate, rapid review of vast amounts of data without human oversight or supervision." A new study in the April 22 edition of Science reveals that volcanic activity associated with the plate-tectonic movement of continents may be responsible for climatic shifts from hot to cold over tens and hundreds of millions of years throughout much of Earth's history. The study, led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences, addresses why the Earth has fluctuated from periods when the planet was covered in ice to times when even the polar regions were ice-free. The study explores very long-term shifts in Earth's baseline climate, not short-term or human-induced climate change. Lead researcher Ryan McKenzie said the team found that periods when volcanoes along continental arcs were more active coincided with warmer, or greenhouse, conditions over the past 720 million years. Conversely, periods when continental arc volcanos were less active coincided with colder, or icehouse, conditions. Continental volcanic arc systems such as the Andes Mountains are created at active continental margins where two tectonic plates meet and the oceanic plate descends under the continental plate, forming a subduction zone. When this happens, magma mixes with carbon trapped in the Earth's crust and releases carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) gas into the atmosphere when volcanoes in the system erupt. "Continental arc systems are plumbed through the Earth's crust and they tend to interact with carbon reservoir rock preserved beneath the surface," said McKenzie, who began the work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Jackson School and finished the study at Yale University. advertisement Scientist have long known that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere influences the Earth's climate, McKenzie said. The unanswered question is what caused the fluctuations in CO 2 observed in the geologic record. Other theories have suggested that geological forces such as mountain building have, at different times in the planet's history, introduced large amounts of new material to the Earth's surface, and weathering of that material has drawn CO 2 out of the atmosphere. The new study points to the amount of CO 2 being released into the atmosphere, rather than the amount removed from it, as the primary driver of Earth's climate. Using nearly 200 published studies and their own fieldwork and data, researchers created a global database to reconstruct the volcanic history of continental margins over the past 720 million years. "We studied sedimentary basins next to former volcanic arcs, which were eroded away over hundreds of millions of years," said co-author Brian Horton, a professor in the Jackson School's Department of Geological Sciences. "The distinguishing part of our study is that we looked at a very long geologic record -- 720 million years -- through multiple greenhouse-icehouse events." Specifically, researchers looked at the uranium-lead crystallization ages of the mineral zircon, which is largely created during continental volcanic arc activity. Zircon is less common in other types of volcanic settings, such as hot spots like Hawaii or island arc volcanoes such as the Marianas, so the mineral can be used to track continental arc volcanism. For the study, they looked at data for roughly 120,000 zircon grains from thousands of samples across the globe. "We're looking at changes in zircon production on various continents throughout Earth's history and seeing how the changes correspond with the various icehouse and greenhouse transitions," McKenzie said. "Ultimately, we find that during intervals of high zircon production we have greenhouse conditions, and as zircon production diminishes, we see a shift into our icehouse conditions." The cooler icehouse periods tended to correlate with the assembly of the Earth's supercontinents, which was a time of diminished continental volcanism, Horton said. The warmer greenhouse periods correlated with continental breakup, a time of enhanced continental volcanism. Jackson School researchers Shannon Loomis and Daniel Stockli, Yale University's Noah Planavsky, and Rice University's Cin-Ty Lee also worked on the study. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation. When a baby bunny - so young her eyes weren't even open - was found all alone, she was brought to Wildlife Haven Waterloo (WHW) in Ontario, Canada. Wildlife Haven Waterloo Even though baby bunnies have a hard time surviving without their moms, wildlife rescuers at WHW are trying to keep her strong - with the help of a tiny, hand-knitted nest. These little nests are provided by Wildlife Rescue Nets, a group that organizes crafty volunteers to knit and crochet all sorts of nests for wildlife rescue centers around the world, according to WHW. Baby bunny hides out in her Wildlife Rescue Nest, which helps her feel safe. | Wildlife Haven Waterloo "Bunnies stress out a lot, so it is very important that they can feel safe and protected," Joy Huggins, of WHW, told The Dodo. But it's also important to build their strength and independence. The baby bunnies at WHW get bottle-fed by caring rescuers when they're very tiny, like this one. Dodo Shows Soulmates Growling Little Kitten Becomes Her Mom's Best Friend Baby bunny getting bottle-fed by a wildlife rescuer at WHW. | Wildlife Haven Waterloo Then, the babies get some time outside, so they can get used to the sights, smells and sounds of life in the wild. In the afternoons, Huggins takes this little baby - along with two others being rehabilitated at the rescue center - to an outdoor enclosure. Baby bunnies at WHW in their outdoor enclosure. | Wildlife Haven Waterloo In case they get scared, there's a cardboard box - with a cozy blanket inside it - where they can hide. Their little hiding spot in their outdoor enclosure. | Wildlife Haven Waterloo "The older the baby the better chance of survival," Huggins said. That this one is so tiny was a bit concerning at first. But things are already looking up for her. Wildlife Haven Waterloo "She is starting to eat on her own which is very encouraging," Huggins said. When orphaned bunnies start to eat on their own, it's a good sign. | Wildlife Haven Waterloo Wildlife Haven Waterloo "I am not giving up on her," Higgins said. Never has a dog been more ready to become a big brother to a cat. Meet Bubba. He's one handsome pit bull ... ... and he knows it. Dodo Shows Wild Hearts Guy And Wild Shark Have Been Best Friends For Decades Rebecca Pizzello rescued Bubba from a shelter in Phoenix, Arizona, six years ago, when he was just 3 months old. At the same time, Pizzello's roommate had rescued a litter of kittens and was caring for them until they were old enough to be adopted. "Since then, Bubba has had an endless affection for cats," Pizzello told The Dodo. "Like, literally obsessed. I always knew he'd love having one of his own, but I wanted to wait until we moved to New York City [from Los Angeles] this year." After weeks of applying for a rescue cat, Pizzello finally received a call from Brooklyn Animal Action and learned that a baby kitten in need would be ready in a week for a forever home. The rest was history. "Rue stood out like no other and I took her home as fast as I could," Pizzello said. "The fact that Bubba and Rue have identical coloring still blows my mind ... I knew Bubba would be filled with joy the second we walked in the door and boy was I right." Bubba immediately knew he would need to be gentle with his new little sister, and just after just a few hours of settling in to her new surroundings, Rue fell asleep right on top of her big brother. Rebecca Pizzello Pizzello said their connection was instant and now the two of them are inseparable. "Rue thinks Bubba is her mom and Bubba loves it," she said. "He bathes her like a baby and snuggles close to her to make her comfortable." Pizzello also described Bubba as a pretty mellow dog who's grown up with not only kittens, but puppies, and small and larger dogs over the years. On the other hand, Rue, who is only 2 months old, loves to cuddle nonstop. "She's so tiny still so it's like having a baby right now," Pizzello said. "If I walk away somewhere, [Bubba] always follows me. Now I will say, 'Go watch your sister,' and he turns around and goes and watches where she is," she said. When Rue isn't resting on Pizzello's chest (listening to her mom's heartbeat comforts her), she can be found right by Bubba's side. "They will definitely be a fun duo to watch grow up together," Pizzello said. The United States International Trade Commission (USITC) today determined that there is a reasonable indication that a U.S. industry is materially injured by reason of imports of phosphor copper from Korea that are allegedly sold in the United States at less than fair value. All six Commissioners voted in the affirmative. As a result of the Commissions affirmative determination, the U.S. Department of Commerce will continue to conduct its investigation on imports of this product from Korea, with its preliminary antidumping duty determination due on or about August 16, 2016. The Commissions public report Phosphor Copper from Korea (Investigation No. 731-TA-1314 (Preliminary), USITC Publication 4608, May 2016) will contain the views of the Commission and information developed during the investigation. The report will be available after May 23, 2016. After that date, it may be accessed on the USITC website at: http://pubapps.usitc.gov/applications/publogs/qry_publication_loglist.asp. UNITED STATES INTERNATIONAL TRADE COMMISSION Washington, DC 20436 FACTUAL HIGHLIGHTS Phosphor Copper from Korea Investigation No. 731-TA-1314 (Preliminary) Product Description: Phosphor copper is a master alloy of copper containing between 5 and 17 percent phosphorus by weight. Phosphor copper is frequently produced to JIS H2501 and ASTM B-644, Alloy A3 standards or higher. The subject product has three primary uses: (1) a deoxidizing agent, (2) an alloying additive, and (3) a component of brazing alloys. Status of Proceedings: 1. Type of investigation: Preliminary antidumping. 2. Petitioner: Metallurgical Products Company, West Chester, PA. 3. Preliminary investigation instituted by the USITC: March 9, 2016. 4. Commissions conference: March 30, 2016. 5. USITC vote: April 21, 2016. 6. USITC determination to the U.S. Department of Commerce: April 25, 2016. 7. USITC views to the U.S. Department of Commerce: May 2, 2016. U.S. Industry: 1. Number of producers in 2015: Three. 2. Location of producers plants: Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania. 3. Employment of production and related workers in 2015: [1] 4. Apparent U.S. consumption in 2015: 1 5. Ratio of the value of total U.S. imports to total U.S. consumption in 2015: 1 U.S. Imports: 1. From the subject countries during 2015: 1 2. From other countries during 2015: 1 3. Leading source during 2015: Korea (in terms of total value). Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21 By Fatih Karimov - Trend: Iran's deputy foreign minister Abbas Araqchi arrived in Vienna, Austria on April 21 to attend the third session of the Joint Commission established under the July 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and the six world powers. Representatives from Iran and the P5+1(US, UK, Germany, France, China, Russia) will attend the session which is scheduled for April 22, IRNA news agency reported. The issues related to the implementation of the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action aka nuclear deal) will be discussed during the meeting. The Iranian delegation will also hold mutual meetings with some members of the P5+1 on the sidelines of the session. The second session of the JCPOA Commission was held last December in Vienna. Any problem arising from the implementation of the JCPOA, are addressed by the commission. Iran and the P5+1 group of countries agreed in July 2015 on a landmark nuclear deal to curb Tehran's sensitive nuclear activities in return for lifting of the sanctions on the Islamic Republic. The international sanctions on Iran were removed as the JCPOA entered the implementation phase on Jan. 16. HOUSING Home sales show rebound in March The National Association of Realtors said Wednesday that U.S. sales of existing homes rose 5.1 percent in March to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.33 million. The increase follows a steep 7.3 percent decline in February sales to 5.07 million. Gains were concentrated last month in the Northeast and Midwest. The housing market has been volatile in the first three months of the year. Builders pulled back on permitting last month, while stock market swings and relatively meager listings left some would-be buyers cautious in February after robust January sales. Marchs sales growth is a sign that demand remains ripe this spring, even though fewer properties are coming onto the market. The number of listings has fallen 1.5 percent during the past 12 months. Supplies have remained tight over the past three years, escalating prices for buyers at a pace more than double wage growth. The median home sales price was $222,700 in March, a 5.7 percent annual increase from a year ago. Associated Press CABLE Comcast to offer app to stream via Roku Comcast says later this year you wont need a cable box to watch cable as the company follows its rivals in offering TV-watching apps. The announcement Wednesday comes as the federal government works on new rules that would force the TV industry to let tech companies say, TiVo or Google sell cable boxes, too. Consumers typically pay cable companies extra fees for these boxes, and the cable industry is opposed to the effort. Like Time Warner Cable and Charter, which is buying Time Warner Cable, Comcast is going to launch an app on the streaming-TV gadget Roku that takes the place of a box. Its also coming up with an app for Samsung smart TVs. Roku is one of the largest providers of streaming TV devices . . . and we are thrilled to provide Xfinity TV customers with access to their subscription across Roku devices, Mark Hess, a Comcast senior vice president, said in a statement. We want to give our customers the ability to watch what they want, when and where they want. The company did not say when the apps will be available. Associated Press Also in Business Yum Brands on Wednesday reported first-quarter profit of $391 million. The Louisville, Ky.-based company said it had profit of 93 cents per share. Adjusted earnings came to 95 cents per share. The parent company of KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut posted revenue of $2.62 billion in the period. United Continental Holdings named former Air Canada chief executive Robert Milton as chairman. He will replace Henry Meyer III, who took office in September after the ouster of Jeff Smisek, United said Wednesday. From news services Coming Today Guy Hamilton with Honor Blackman (front right) and Sean Connery while filming Goldfinger in 1964. (TERRY O'NEILL/REX/Shutterstock/Rex via AP) Guy Hamilton, a film director who excelled in the cinematic realm of masculine excess and bravado stories of adventure and espionage that included Goldfinger and three other entries in the James Bond franchise died April 20 in a hospital on the Spanish island of Majorca. He was 93. A hospital spokesperson confirmed the death to the Associated Press but did not provide the cause. Mr. Hamilton, who had no interest in following his father into the British diplomatic service, entered films at 17 as a studio office boy. After wartime exploits in behind-the-lines reconnaissance, he apprenticed in the late 1940s under British director Carol Reed on masterpieces such as The Fallen Idol and The Third Man. The second, set in postwar Vienna, featured Orson Welles in a pivotal role as a black-market profiteer named Harry Lime. Mr. Hamilton, who held Reed in great esteem, was furious that Welles, the celebrated director of Citizen Kane, later tried to take credit for many of the best-remembered sequences in The Third Man. In fact, Mr. Hamilton said, Welles was a troublesome collaborator, and the ample use of shadow and tricky editing techniques in The Third Man served dual purposes: not only underscoring the theme of corruption but also masking Welless frequent absences from the set. Guy Hamilton in 2005 at the Cannes International Film Festival. (Jean-Francois Guyot/AFP/Getty Images) One day Orson was supposed to be there, and we discovered he was in Rome, Mr. Hamilton told the Guardian of London. So someone was sent to fetch him and meanwhile, a Benzedrine-fuelled Carol said we had to shoot something. So he made me dress up in a big silly hat, and a big black coat with padded shoulders because I was rather skinny. And I found I was rather good at running in front of an arc of light and making the shadow of Harry Lime. Mr. Hamiltons reputation for ingenuity among budget-conscious directors furthered his career, and he worked alongside director John Huston on The African Queen (1951). The next year, Mr. Hamilton graduated to directing modestly budgeted thrillers. His breakthrough was The Colditz Story (1955), a POW drama leavened with dry humor that proved a hit with British audiences. In 1964, Mr. Hamilton was recruited to Goldfinger, the third outing in the wildly popular series about a sybaritic British secret agent. To the director, the central problem was keeping audiences mesmerized by an impossibly handsome hero who was a wizard with women and who always seemed destined to defeat the villains. The secret, he said, was to entertain with ever-more-outrageous stunts and expensive gadgetry such as tricked-out Aston Martins. He also played up the intellectual charge between Bond and sadistic criminal masterminds such as the title villain in Goldfinger, played by German actor Gert Frobe. Do you expect me to talk? Bond, portrayed by Sean Connery, asks as he is held spread-eagle on a table as a laser beam inches toward his crotch. No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die! Goldfinger sneers. The three other Bond films directed by Mr. Hamilton Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Live and Let Die (1973) and The Man With the Golden Gun (1974) began to steer the series in the direction of the outlandish, even cartoonish, as when Roger Moores Bond jumps across the backs of snapping alligators in Live and Let Die. Mr. Hamiltons other directing credits included Funeral in Berlin (1966), based on the Len Deighton novels about a low-key, working-class spy, Harry Palmer. Michael Caine starred in that picture, as well as in Mr. Hamiltons Battle of Britain (1969), which was crowded with aerial dogfights and other technically dazzling effects. On the ground, critics said, the film worked far less compellingly. Mr. Hamilton also made Force 10 From Navarone (1978), a World War II drama with Harrison Ford, and two Agatha Christie adaptations, The Mirror Crackd (1980) starring Angela Lansbury as Miss Marple and Evil Under the Sun (1982) featuring Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot. Guy Hamilton was born on Sept. 16, 1922, in Paris, where his father was a press attache in the British Embassy. Drawn to show business in his teens, he began a promising film career at a studio in Nice, but the German invasion of France in 1940 curtailed his future. He fled on a cargo ship bound for North Africa. Once back in England, he joined a navy unit that helped rescue British airmen downed in enemy-held France. His group was once left stranded in Brittany for weeks as they tried to circumvent German patrols. He told the London Independent that the navy men were once taken to a local pub by members of the Resistance to celebrate their good fortune in avoiding capture. As they wandered in, they saw the cafe filled with Germans, so they pretended to be Frenchmen out for a drink and a game of skittles. On the way out, the lady of the estaminet said to the Resistance boys, Your friend isnt from round here, is he? They said I was from Brest. Oh, that explains it, she said, because hes got a slight accent, I couldnt place it. He was almost trembling at the time, he recalled, but the three Resistance guys thought it was hilariously funny. My amusement was fairly limited. His marriage to actress Naomi Chance ended in divorce. He later wed Kerima, a French actress whom he met on the set of Reeds Outcast of the Islands (1951), on which Mr. Hamilton was an assistant director. With Kerima, he settled on Majorca from earnings he made when hired to direct Superman (1978), the first entry in the series starring Christopher Reeve. He left the project before it commenced because the producers decided on shooting in England instead of Rome, and Mr. Hamilton had disputes with British tax authorities. 1 of 20 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad Catch these colorful homes in the D.C. area View Photos Not all exteriors in the region are brick or beige or gray Caption Not all exteriors in the region are brick or beige or gray Alan Kanners home in Takoma Park, Md., was designed by architect Mark McInturff as a magic box. Mongling Lee/For The Washington Post Wait 1 second to continue. Five years ago, home builder Alan Kanner bought a nondescript, one-story house in Takoma Park, Md., for its choice wooded lot. He hired architect Mark McInturff, with whom hed previously worked, to open up the main level and add a second floor. What McInturff designed was a magic box resembling an outrageously wrapped gift rising amid the trees. Corrugated aluminum siding pre-coated with black enamel provided an inky backdrop for a 10-by-14-foot abstract design made up of rectangular windows and cement fiber panels. Those six panels are painted aqua, yellow, pale gray and three shades of blue, and the whole artwork is framed in bright orange. McInturff, who was inspired by Richard Diebenkorns Ocean Park series, also put a 6-by-12-foot variation on one side of the house. I drove by the first time after it was finished and said, Oh my God, its terrible, Kanner recalls with a laugh. And that was after he made McInturff lose three of the original nine street-facing panels, which he deemed over-the-top. Some of my immediate neighbors are not fans, so I got a little blowback from them. But now I like it. I think its very cool. He sold his excess land to a couple who commissioned their own custom place, a four-level Victorian-meets-Arts-and-Crafts with a postmodern twist, clad in fancy millwork that was crying out for color. I used a warm and happy yellow, two shades of green, beige and a pop of red on the porch railings, says owner Dan Trachtman, creative director at the National League for Nursing. My home pays homage to the architectural history of Takoma Park, known for its mix of residential confections dating from the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as its longtime nuke-free/lefty/artsy/enviro vibe. Alans home pays homage to the eclecticism of Takoma Park. I used a warm and happy yellow, two shades of green, beige and a pop of red on the porch railings, says owner Dan Trachtman of this house in Takoma Park. (Mongling Lee/For The Washington Post) The two dwellings among the most vibrantly incongruous adjacent abodes in the Washington area also pay homage to the decorating axiom that exterior color is one of the quickest ways you can express yourself and differentiate yourself from your neighbors. So says Chrysanthe B. Broikos, a National Building Museum curator whose exhibitions include Do-It-Yourself: Home Improvement in 20th-Century America. On new construction and old, vivid facades are increasingly popular. People are getting more comfortable with earth gray, rich taupe, dark greens with an olive cast, even dark blues, says Mark Woodman, a past president of the Color Marketing Group, which tracks color trends for industries as diverse as luggage, appliances, automobiles and fashion. The cool thing with these deeper, muted shades is that they allow sassier colors for the front door, like an olive house with ocher, or deep gray with raspberry, adds the founder of Mark Woodman Design & Color in Laurel, Md. Adventurous paint jobs seem to be more popular in Marylands freewheeling Takoma Park and such D.C. pockets as Cleveland Park, lower Foxhall Road and Capitol Hill than in more traditional Virginia, where a few vivid townhomes and rowhouses dot Old Town Alexandria. (Obviously, we couldnt find or include every great exterior in the region.) Share your favorite vividly painted homes with the Post on Instragram by tagging @washingtonpost in your photo. Wherever one lives, however, making the leap isnt always easy. Real estate agent Will Prendergast agonized for weeks before painting his 116-year-old home, 20 blocks north of the U.S. Capitol, an assertive slate blue. Originally red brick, the building that once housed a corner store was covered in gross yellow when Prendergast bought it last year, well after its blondness became part of the opening credits of House of Cards. Painting it blue was a huge, huge gamble because all you really know in advance is how the color looks in a can, says Prendergast. He swallowed hard, paid the contractors $15,000 and told them to cover the house in dark blue, the corner turret in light blue and the trim in black. Today, that home owns its intersection. Painting it blue was a huge, huge gamble, says real estate agent Will Prendergast. (Mongling Lee/For The Washington Post) The flip side of painting as aesthetic expression is painting to signal discretion and compliance, particularly in communities with rigid historic preservation or homeowners association rules. I would suspect that in areas where the value of the home is higher, you will be seeing a little less creativity since the look of a house is very tied to its value, says curator Broikos. At the higher end, you wont have many purple and yellow and green homes. What you will have, at every price point in this region, is endless red brick, largely untouched by brush, roller or sprayer. Brick that is painted tilts heavily toward white, yellow and gray, lots of gray. Long before Fifty Shades dominated bondage lit, colors with names like fog, ash, pewter, pearl, armor, dove and smoke were en route to becoming embedded in the beautification and gentrification fan deck. Other peoples paint jobs barely register for most of us, but if we pay attention, well notice a residence here or a cluster of homes there. I have come to cherish the sightings of such distinctive houses and occasional apartment buildings as welcome eye candy. (Warning: Ogling real estate while driving can be as dangerous as texting. A better idea would be to ride shotgun, preferably in a top-down convertible.) Nearly all the rowhouses on the south side of block-long Parker Street NE near Union Station present a distinctive face: bright blue, medium olive, light sage, ocher, mocha and red. So do a few homes across the sunny street. It happened organically. I dont think anybody consulted with anybody, says Colm Jones, an IT manager who bought his place at the eastern end in 2000 and was one of the first to go vivid, with what he hoped would be a rich, dark blue. Its a bit brighter than what I wanted, but I like it. A bigger worry is the large apartment building going up at the western end of the street, which neighbors fear will block the light, perhaps making their colorful facades all the more important. It happened organically, one resident said of the houses on Parker Street in Northeast Washington. (Mongling Lee/For The Washington Post) Which brings us to the emotional value of color on the places we call home. It makes people happy, like listening to music. It makes them feel good, says architect Suzane Reatig, who designed 625 Rhode Island Ave. NW. The long, low apartment building is clad in deep gray siding accented with orange, red and magenta panels. None of it is painted, Reatig explains, but is a colorfast, weather-resistant, durable (and pricey) Dutch construction material called Trespa. We like our buildings to last a long time, she says. For organic-restaurant pioneer Nora Pouillon, the medium pink of her curved-front art deco home simultaneously salutes deco-heavy Miami and her native Austria, where there were a lot of brownish-pink houses. She went with a mauve-ier tone and dark gray trim, a classic pairing for the sleek, chic architecture of the 1920s and 1930s. Despite Georgetowns stringent preservation regulations, no one challenged Pouillons pink. Perhaps they found it a vast improvement over the previous yellow. Sometimes, a bit of color is all it takes. When landscape designer Nicolien Van Schouwen and her family moved to their Takoma Park cottage, they had the red brick painted white. Homeowner Nicolien Van Schouwen is honoring her Dutch roots with orange accents on her house. (Mongling Lee/For The Washington Post) For contrast, the shutters got dramatic red harlequin diamonds, while the porch pillars and front door became solid scarlet. But during a trip to her native Netherlands, founded by William of Orange in the 16th century, she decided to celebrate her roots by changing the reds to orange, trimmed in deep teal. Kids would stop and say, I love the colors. The adults would say, very interesting, which is polite American for I would never do that. Architect Bill Hutchins jokes that he learned a valuable life lesson from his father, a Marine Corps fighter pilot: If you cant be good, be colorful. Striving to be both, Hutchins built an eco-friendly home a decade ago using straw bales for insulation and a long list of recycled materials inside and out. Although passersby occasionally ask if he bought his exterior paint at an odd-lot fire sale, he says he carefully chose the four pastels mint green, soft orange, periwinkle and yellow in the seemingly random arrangement of large squares in, yes, again, Takoma Park. I just like the vitality and life force of color, he says. Im a Californian, and D.C. is so boring, so to find any color is a miracle. Its so sweet. People walk up and stare. They smile. Cars slow down so they can get a better look. But he couldnt please everyone. A woman walked by one day and asked, Why isnt this house brown or gray like everyone elses? he recalls. And I said, You just answered your own question. Washington journalist Annie Groer writes widely about design, culture and politics. Her last story for the magazine was about the home of filmmaker Aviva Kempner . E-mail us at wpmagazine@washpost.com. For more articles, as well as features such as Date Lab, Gene Weingarten and more, visit The Washington Post Magazine. Follow the Magazine on Twitter. Like us on Facebook. On April 28 , 1865, two weeks after Abraham Lincolns assassination at Fords Theatre, Mary Surratt was questioned under oath about her familys interactions with the presidents killer, John Wilkes Booth, at the boarding house she ran at 541 H St. NW. Booth was a handsome man and gentlemanly, she told the colonel questioning her. I did not suppose he had the devil he certainly possessed in his heart. Historians will ever debate whether Surratt, the first woman executed by the U.S. government, was aware that Booths far-fetched idea to kidnap Lincoln to force the release of Confederate prisoners of war had morphed into a plot to kill him. She was a devout Catholic who had converted to that faith in girlhood, says Laurie Verge, director of Surratt House Museum in Clinton, Md. (then known as Surrattsville), about eight miles from the District in Prince Georges County. Surratt avowed her innocence to Father Jacob Walter hours before she mounted the gallows, even as Lincolns successor, Andrew Johnson, refused to hear her daughter Annas tearful last-minute plea for her mothers life. The museum once the Surratt family tavern and hotel, owned by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission does not take an official stand on the matter, preferring to let visitors sift through myriad anecdotes and theories that argue for or against Surratts innocence. Some say she was pure as the driven snow, others that she was the devil incarnate, says collections manager Lindsey Horn. Most say she was somewhere in the middle. For her Confederate sympathies and her role as host to a number of Booths conspirators, both at the tavern and the boarding house, Surratt is guilty in my mind even if she was only plotting to kidnap the president, contends Harold Holzer, who has written numerous books on Lincoln, including The President Is Shot! (2004, Calkins Creek Books). Vicarious liability laws stipulated that her and other conspirators involvement in the kidnapping plot including her son John, a Confederate courier ultimately made them culpable in Lincolns death. (John was tried in 1867 but escaped conviction.) President Johnson is said to have described Surratt as having kept the nest that hatched the rotten egg, referring to the boarding house, now numbered 604 H St. NW. (It houses the Wok and Roll Chinese restaurant, filled each day at noon with tourists and feds alike in search of a cheap and tasty lunch special. Theres a plaque about the buildings history near the front door.) Mary Surratt along with Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt and David Herold was executed July 7, 1865, on a brutally hot day at what is now Fort McNair, then buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Northeast Washington. Anna and other relatives later were buried in adjacent unmarked graves. The headstone there today replaced the original, smashed by vandals decades ago. Engraved with a broken-stemmed rose, pieces of that first tombstone lie in the attic of Surratt House. The museum, at 9118 Brandywine Rd., is open Wednesday through Friday 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday noon to 4 p.m. Admission is $5, $4 for seniors, $2 for ages 5 through 18 and free for those younger than 5. The 40th anniversary of the opening of Surratt House as a historic house museum is slated for May 1 . For more information, see pgparks.com. Dear Heloise: I came across a can of vegetable soup in my pantry, and the date on the bottom read March 25, 2015. I called the company using the free customer-service number on the can. The agent told me I had nothing to worry about. The soup is perfectly safe to eat. She said the date is to ensure the highest quality of product in terms of flavor, texture and appearance. The vegetables can break down over time, but they are still okay. The company recommends eating the product before the Better If Used By date, but the product is safe after the date. If the date is five years ago, throw it out. Mark J., Fairfax, Va. Mark J.: Good for you, checking the date. Thanks for the reminder that on most canned goods, the expiration or best by date is a guideline. However, if the contents smell off, look off or taste off, toss it immediately! No food poisoning allowed! Oh, and take advantage of those toll-free numbers they are for you to use. When in doubt, call! Dear Heloise: I took an old ceramic teapot that had lost its lid, strung a thin wire through the handle and hung it off a branch in a tree in my front yard. Its now the cutest birdhouse! Itll be fun to watch a bird family each morning. Mom giving flying lessons is the best! Heidi in Texas Dear Heloise: Ive been reading your column for years, and I dont think Ive seen this hint. When I go into a department store, on my way out, I find a perfume that I like, and I douse one of the little papers that are supplied alongside the sample bottle. Then I leave it in my car as an air freshener. The scent will last for several days. Pam F., via email Dear Heloise: I hope you can help me! Recently, I decided to bake some bread from scratch, and I used the dining-room table to cool the bread. I used a cooling rack on top of a bath towel. After removing the loaves from the metal pans, I found white areas on the dark-stained table where the two loaves had been. The white areas really stand out! Is there anything I can do to restore the dark finish to my table? L.L., Branson, Mo. L.L.: Help is here! Mix a small amount of white toothpaste (not gel) and baking soda, and rub into the white areas in the direction of the grain. Rub until warm. This can take a while, so be patient, and dont give up. Once the white marks are gone, wipe with a damp cloth and polish the areas, then the table. Dear Heloise: I always wear a wide headband under my shower cap. It keeps the hair around my face dry. Paula A., via email Heloises column appears six days a week at washingtonpost.com/advice. Send a hint to Heloise , P.O. Box 795000, San Antonio, Tex. 78279-5000, or email it to Heloise@Heloise.com. Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21 By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend: Turkish armed forces are shelling the positions of the "Islamic State" (IS, aka ISIS, ISIL or Daesh) terrorist group in Syria, Turkey's newspaper Hurriyet said Apr. 21. The shelling of the IS positions in Syria began at 10:00 (GMT+3 hours) on Apr. 21. The shelling will continue until the complete destruction of the IS supporting points in areas in the north of Syria, bordering the Turkish provinces of Kilis and Hatay. Turkey's south-eastern province of Kilis came under fire last week from Syrian territory, which is controlled by the IS. Five people died as a result of the shelling. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu MARYLAND 2 people who died in plane crash identified Authorities have identified two people who were killed Tuesday after the single-engine plane they were riding in crashed near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Richard Hess, 63, and his friend Janet Metz, 56, died at the scene. They were both from Ellicott City, Md. Hess was the pilot, police said. The plane, a Vans RV-12, crashed just before 1 p.m. in a field near Route 8 and eastbound Route 50 in Stevensville, in Queen Annes County. Dana Hedgpeth Officer must testify in Freddie Gray case A Baltimore judge on Wednesday granted a motion by prosecutors to force Officer Garrett E. Miller to testify at the trials of two fellow police officers charged in the arrest of Freddie Gray, who died a year ago of injuries he suffered in a police van. In a brief hearing, Circuit Court Judge Barry G. Williams granted the motion to compel Miller to testify at the trials of Officer Edward M. Nero, which is scheduled to begin May 10, and Lt. Brian W. Rice, set for July 5. Both Miller and Nero were involved in Grays arrest and have pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree assault, reckless endangerment and two counts of misconduct. Baltimore Sun VIRGINIA Search for missing firefighter continues Law enforcement officials will review cellphone files downloaded by a missing Fairfax County firefighter shortly before she disappeared, according to a Facebook page set up by friends and family. Her family believes the files could provide crucial tips in locating Nicole K. Mittendorff. Mittendorffs family had put out a call for urgent help from a lawyer Tuesday night, saying that the wireless carrier was refusing to release the files for legal reasons, according to the Facebook page. But in a Wednesday update, the family said the files would be transferred to law enforcement. It was unclear exactly what was in the files. Mittendorff, 31, a resident of Woodbridge, last had contact with her family April 13, and her car was found in Shenandoah National Park, state police said. Police said they did not have any evidence of foul play. Justin Jouvenal Supporters of D.C. statehood call for an end to taxation without representation as they protest outside the U.S. Capitol on April 15. (Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA) D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser won an early endorsement Thursday of her ambitious plan to petition Congress and the next president for full statehood for the nations capital. A commission that includes D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson unanimously backed her proposal, including calling a constitutional convention to ready a statehood ballot initiative to put before voters in November. Doing so could require the D.C. Council to convene in summer session and possibly delay action on other priorities. But Mendelson said Bowser had made a convincing case that the District cannot repeat the mistake of being flat-footed when the next president and Congress is elected especially if Democrats who empathize with the Districts lack of voting rights win control of the White House, Congress or both. D.C. now has more residents than either Vermont or Wyoming, and its residents pay the highest federal taxes per capita, but the District has no voting representation in Congress and federal lawmakers can dictate how the city spends its own local tax money. We could take more time, and taking more time would mean we miss what I think is going to turn out to be a historic election in November, said Bowser (D). We miss the opportunity for a new president to have a complete package from the voters of the District of Columbia. Mendelson added: Given how Congress has viewed our effort, I dont know that we can ask too often ... or demand too often that residents of the District be fully franchised. However, the council chairman would not commit to finishing a constitution before November. Lets see if we can do it, he said, and if not, he added, voters could pass an advisory measure and the city could continue working toward a vote on a constitution next year. The main thing here is we want to present a fresh request [for statehood] and we will. [D.C. is about to declare its independence from Congress] The comments of both Bowser and Mendelson reflected the fact that crafting a new constitution could become a messy process, and completing the document on the mayors proposed timeline will be no easy task. The last time the District drafted a constitution for statehood, the exercise in the early 1980s took more than two years and left District leaders bitterly divided over the end product. At Bowsers request, the New Columbia Statehood Commission also approved setting up a series of working groups and committees, including one launching a 50-state outreach program, another to finalize new boundaries for the would-be state and others to lobby businesses as well as politicians at the presidential conventions over the summer. The Districts shadow senator, Paul Strauss, said he was already working on a plan for the conventions, including the Republican convention. We know that when we talk to Republicans there are themes that resonate, Strauss said. One is, nobody wants to be the subject of a dysfunctional Congress. The commissions vote came as The Washington Post released the transcript of an interview with Republican presidential hopeful John Kasich in which he largely dismissed the need for D.C. statehood. Thats just more votes in the Democratic Party, said the Ohio governor. Strauss said he thanked the governor for his honesty. It helps us make our case, he said. Adam Eidinger, right, and other advocates for legalizing marijuana light up in front of the White House on April 2. After the smoke-in, Eidinger was invited to meet with White House officials. (Mike Theiler/AFP/Getty Images) Adam Eidinger had been sending letters to the White House asking for a meeting since he led a successful ballot measure fight to legalize pot in the nations capital. The letters asked for a Bud Summit with President Obamas drug policy advisers to talk about removing pot from the nations list of most dangerous drugs. Eidinger, however, never received a reply until he tried something more aggressive. He organized an illegal smoke-in outside the White House, complete with a 51-foot replica of a marijuana joint painted with the phrase Obama, Deschedule Cannabis Now! The protest ended with several dozen activists simultaneously lighting up and not getting arrested sending a cloud of marijuana smoke wafting over the north lawn of the White House. And unlike letters, that, apparently, got the attention of officials inside. A White House spokesman on Wednesday confirmed that Eidinger and a small group of advocates behind marijuana legalization in the District would meet with White House officials on Monday. The White House confirmed the meeting after Eidingers group issued a press release announcing the meeting. It was not immediately clear if the meeting would be with Obamas Office of National Drug Control Policy, which has done similar outreach with national groups lobbying for less stringent marijuana laws, or if it would be with higher level White House officials. Eidinger declined to name the official he was invited to meet with, but he cast the meeting as historic, and a hopeful sign that the Obama administration may advocate for changing marijuanas official federal designation as a Schedule 1 substance by the Drug Enforcement Agency. Even though marijuana has been legalized for recreational use in Colorado, Washington state, the District and Alaska, it remains classified under federal law as on par with heroin and ecstasy. That makes possession a felony in the eyes of the federal government and makes it difficult to do clinical research. Eidinger, a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) in the Democratic presidential contest, used national exposure from the White House smoke-in this month to urge Obama to take a more active role in marijuana reform to help unite the Democratic Party behind likely nominee Hillary Clinton. [Marijuana advocates vow to get arrested smoking pot outside White House ] Sanders wants recreational use of marijuana legalized. But Eidinger wants Obama to begin the process of reclassifying marijuana before he leaves office, because he thinks it would provide political cover for Clinton to finish the job should she win the presidency in November. Eidinger also tried to guilt and embarrass Obama into action. Fliers announcing this months event at the White House said the event was being held not on the typical national day of action over marijuana policy, April 20, but earlier, because of the president. Due to popular demand, were rescheduling 4/20 this year to 4/2 because Obamas been a BIG ZERO on cannabis reform, said the fliers printed by Eidingers group, DCMJ. In Eidingers last letter to Obama officials before the smoke-in, however, he offered to call off the spectacle if the president agreed to sit down with marijuana advocates. As a former cannabis (and current?) user, you know firsthand that cannabis does not belong in the Controlled Substances Act, Eidinger wrote. [The Choom Gang: President Obamas pot-smoking high school days detailed in Maraniss book] He called for Obama to agree to a Bud Summit, where leaders of the cannabis reform movement are invited to the White House to discuss steps you can take to end the failed War on Drugs you inherited as president. The White House press office did not respond to inquiries about Eidingers letter then. But on Wednesday, spokesman Frank Benenati confirmed a meeting was scheduled for Monday. Eidinger credited the smoke-in and its global attention for pushing the White House to meet on Monday. [Marijuana advocates take their protest over pot laws to the White House] Sabrina De Sousa at her former home in Washington in 2012. She faces extradition from Portugal to Italy for her alleged role in the CIA abduction of Abu Omar in 2003 in Milan. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post) More than 13 years after an Egyptian cleric was kidnapped off the streets of Milan by CIA operatives, one former agency officer now living in Portugal faces extradition to Italy, where she was sentenced to four years in prison for the abduction. Sabrina De Sousa, 60, was one of 26 Americans convicted in absentia by Italian courts for her alleged role in the February 2003 rendition of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. Like the other convicted Americans, De Sousa never really faced the threat of Italian imprisonment, because she had moved back to the United States long before the Italian trials began. But last spring, De Sousa moved to Portugal to be near relatives. In the fall, she was detained by local authorities at the Lisbon airport on a European arrest warrant. This week, Portugals highest court upheld the countrys lower courts rulings, declared that they did not violate the constitution, and said De Sousa should be sent to Italy as soon as May 4. Portugals Constitutional Court also reiterated a condition set by the lower courts and guaranteed by Italy in De Sousas European arrest warrant that once she arrives in Italy, she must be given another trial or a chance to appeal with new evidence, and the ability to call Italian and U.S. witnesses, because she had been tried in absentia. [A kidnapping unravels a spys career] But De Sousa, who has adamantly asserted that she played no role in Abu Omars kidnapping, said she is not sure that Italy wont simply throw her in prison once she lands there. Her Portuguese attorney, Manuel Magalhaes e Silva, said he has gotten word that Italian authorities view this condition in the abstract and might wind up forcing De Sousa to complete her four-year prison term. Its kind of a surreal situation, De Sousa said in an interview with The Washington Post. Ive spent years wanting to counter the charges against me. Right now, I want to know what happens, step by step, in Italy. Benjamin Fischer, a former CIA chief historian, said he couldnt think of another case like De Sousas in agency history. Its unprecedented, he said. An Italian Embassy press officer referred The Post to Giovanni Melillo, chief of cabinet of the Italian Ministry of Justice. Phone calls left with the ministry were not returned. The CIA declined to comment. The State Department released a brief statement late Thursday afternoon acknowledging that officials there had seen reports of the Portuguese courts decision and referring The Post to the Italian and Portuguese governments for further comment. De Sousa, a dual Portuguese and American citizen, always knew that flying to Europe made her vulnerable to arrest, but she has numerous close relatives in Portugal (a street in Lisbon is named after her uncle) and a sister in Germany, and her 90-year-old mother lives in India. She figured if she were detained or sent to Italy, her cases urgency would force the U.S. and Italian governments to reinvestigate. If I was a natural-born U.S. citizen and my entire family lived in Kansas, for example, then maybe I wouldnt need to worry about going to Europe again, De Sousa said. De Sousas extradition and potential imprisonment would be an astonishing turn of events for a case that raises major questions about how much diplomatic protection CIA case officers abroad possess when carrying out operations sanctioned by their superiors. During her CIA tenure, De Sousa was registered in Italy as a State Department officer at the U.S. Consulate in Milan. She did not work as a NOC, a covert operative with non-official cover status who lacks diplomatic protection. Those of us who were convicted were accredited diplomats and declared to the Italian government, De Sousa said. We instead find ourselves treated like NOCs with our U.S. government affiliation disavowed. I would have never joined the CIA if I was told there was a remote possibility that I would never see my mother in Goa again and not travel abroad. This has set a terrible precedent. This rendition was funded by Congress with approval of senior government officials in the U.S., Italy and Egypt. [From the archives: Europeans investigate CIA role in abductions] It all began on Feb. 17, 2003, when two men snatched Abu Omar while he was walking to a mosque in Milan and stuffed him into a van. The cleric was flown to Egypt, where he was beaten and subjected to electric shock but eventually released. It was not until early 2005 when reports surfaced that Italian authorities were investigating the CIA officers for allegedly breaking local laws against detaining terrorist suspects in Europe. The Italians prosecution, built largely off the CIA officers phone records, embarrassed the agency putting a spotlight on what was seen as poor tradecraft and aggravated relations between the United States and a European ally over one of the agencys most controversial practices after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In early 2009, De Sousa resigned from the CIA after failed bids to persuade the State Department to grant her immunity. Later that year, De Sousa sued her former employer, the Justice Department and the State Department to force the government to confer diplomatic protection. But it was too late. By November 2009, De Sousa and multiple other CIA officers were convicted in absentia in Italy on aggravated kidnapping charges. The Italians never produced hard evidence proving De Sousa was involved, other than showing calls made from her phone to one of the kidnappers several months before and around the time of the rendition. Armando Spataro, the Italian prosecutor who handled the case, told The Post in 2012, To pass a sentence, the court doesnt need the smoking gun! [From the archives: Italians detail lavish CIA operation] On the day of the kidnapping, De Sousa was chaperoning her sons high school ski trip in northern Italy. De Sousa, who speaks Italian, said her only involvement with renditions came in early 2002, about a year before Abu Omars kidnapping. That is when CIA officers flew to Italy to meet with their intelligence counterparts to discuss the logistics of renditions. De Sousa said she served as an interpreter between the services. But at that point, rendition was just a concept, she said. Abu Omar, she stressed, was not even discussed. Since De Sousas conviction, she has hired a series of attorneys to clear her name. In late 2012, after Italys highest criminal court upheld her conviction, De Sousas attorney at the time wrote a letter to Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of state, asking her to authorize an inquiry into the case. De Sousa said she never heard back. [Read De Sousas attorneys letter to Hillary Clinton] Though she lost her lawsuit against the government for not granting her immunity, she sued the CIA and the Defense and State departments in November 2014. In the suit, she argues that the agencies violated the Freedom of Information Act after they refused to confirm or deny the existence of documents she had requested showing that the rendition was approved by the CIA and senior government officials. As part of her FOIA request, De Sousa has sought documents showing why her name was not on a U.S. government list put forward in 2014 to the Italians asking for a pardon. (Some of the Americans convicted by the Italians did receive full pardons.) Also, she is seeking a National Clandestine Service investigation into the rendition. When I asked for the CIA review, I was told I couldnt see it because I wasnt involved in the rendition, and therefore I was not investigated, she said. Laura Pitter, a senior national security counsel at Human Rights Watch, did not want to comment on the merits of De Sousas case but said she does not think she should be the first and so far only person held accountable for the CIAs rendition program, given her allegedly minor role. It should be the senior officials and contractors involved in authorizing and implementing the program and those who actually inflicted the torture on individuals in U.S. custody, she said. In recent weeks, De Sousas attorney in Washington, Abbe Lowell, said he has spoken with government officials about her case. He declined to elaborate on his conversations but said the government appreciates the unusual situation that Sabrina finds herself in. As she waits to be sent to Italy, De Sousa and her husband are living in a rented condominium in Lisbon. She keeps herself busy working on her case and a memoir. Gordon Livingston, a psychiatrist and best-selling author who wrote about self-induced unhappiness and some possible cures, as well as about his own grief and anger over the deaths of two sons, died March 16 at a hospital in Columbia, Md. He was 77. The cause was heart ailments, said a daughter, Emily Livingston. Dr. Livingston was a West Point graduate and onetime Army physician who at the height of the Vietnam War was sent home as an embarrassment to the command. His offense: composing and distributing a satirical prayer at an Army ceremony on Easter Sunday 1969, in which he asked God to help us to bring death and destruction wherever we go. As an author, he was best known for the 2004 bestseller Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart, a variation on a Dutch proverb. The book has been translated into 22 languages. It contains a foreword by the late Elizabeth Edwards, the lawyer and wife of former vice presidential candidate and senator John Edwards (D-N.C.). She also had grieved the loss of a child. The book includes essays on what Dr. Livingston called 30 bedrock truths. Among them: Any relationship is under the control of the person who cares the least. Only bad things happen quickly. Forgiveness is a form of letting go, but they are not the same thing. The statute of limitations has expired on most of our childhood traumas. Dr. Livingston found in one military experience an apt metaphor for decisions in life amid circumstances that cannot be controlled. He was a young officer on a training exercise, and his map showed a hill that he could not see anywhere around him. Flummoxed, he asked a more-experienced sergeant for advice. Sir, the sergeant said, if the map dont agree with the ground, then the map is wrong. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly wrote that Livingstons words feel true, and his wisdom hard-earned. Among the many blithe and hollow self-help books available everywhere, this book stands out as a jewel. Gordon Stuart Livingston was born in Memphis on June 30, 1938, and he grew up in Albany, N.Y., where his father was a Veterans Administration physician. He graduated in 1960 from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. For two years, he was an infantry officer, serving as a parachutist and an Army Ranger in the 82nd Airborne Division. While still in the Army, he attended Johns Hopkins Universitys medical school, graduating in 1967. He volunteered for service in Vietnam, arriving in November 1968 as a surgeon assigned to the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. In a letter published by the Saturday Review in 1969, he described how he quickly grew disillusioned about American involvement in the war, namely the indiscriminate destruction of lives and property, and at what he called the overwhelming criterion by which a commanders performance is judged: the body count. His outrage mounted. At the change-of-command ceremony involving then-Col. George S. Patton, the son and namesake of the World War II general, Dr. Livingston passed among the guests copies of his satirical prayer. It said, in part: Grant us, O Lord, those things we need to do thy work more effectively. Give us this day a gun that will fire 10,000 rounds a second, a napalm which will burn for a week. . . . We thank thee for this war fully mindful that while it is not the best of all wars, it is better than no war at all. Attending the ceremony were Gen. Creighton W. Abrams Jr., the U.S. military commander in Vietnam, and 19 other generals. Relieved of his duties, Dr. Livingston was sent back to the United States as an embarrassment, but he was allowed to resign his commission and received a general discharge. Just before leaving Vietnam, he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for an action several months earlier. He had persuaded a U.S. helicopter to land behind enemy lines to assist a wounded enemy soldier, whom he took into custody. The Army credited this as a capture. After Army service, he trained in adult and child psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, then began practicing in Howard County, Md. For 34 years, he was chief of psychiatry for the Columbia Medical Plan, an HMO, and he practiced psychiatry with Crossroads Psychological Associates until shortly before his death. His marriage to the former Katherine Lowry ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of 38 years, Clare V. King of Columbia; three children from his first marriage, Kirsten Livingston of Guilford, Conn., Nina Livingston of Durham, Conn., and Michael Livingston of Madison, Conn.; a daughter from his second marriage, Emily Livingston of Washington; and four grandchildren. In Only Spring: On Mourning the Death of My Son, written after the 1992 death of his 6-year-old son, Lucas, from leukemia, Dr. Livingston described his anguish, compounded by the suicide, by hanging, a year earlier of his 22-year-old son, Andrew, who struggled with bipolar disorder. Reflecting on the loss of children, Dr. Livingston once told The Washington Post:The lesson, if there is a lesson to be learned from something like that, is that we endure what we must. I dont find anything more profound than that. Most of the lessons that people imagine bereaved parents learn are really lost on most bereaved parents: This idea that somehow you achieve some sort of closure, which is a word that is just hated by parents who have lost children, because there really is none to lifes really profound losses. And then people say, Youre so strong. You got through this. And the answer to that is, What choice do you have? Harriet Tubman will officially be the face of a $20 bill. And, sure, its great news that the defiant, brave and inspiring abolitionist will replace slaveholder Andrew Jackson on the currency of Americas ATMs. But hold the confetti, because the fight to get a proper honor for Tubman or just about any American woman is far from over. You wont find Tubmans likeness on the Mall. And you wont find the African American, Maryland-born heroine among the giants honored in the U.S. Capitol, despite a long fight to have Maryland replace its statue of John Hanson (I know, who?) with one honoring Tubman. [Harriet Tubman vs. John Hanson: Statuary Hall smackdown] A proposal to replace a statue of Marylands John Hanson with one of abolitionist Harriet Tubman in the U.S. Capitol's Statuary Hall went nowhere. (Sarah L. Voisin/THE WASHINGTON POST) Nope. Didnt happen. But thats the case with our continued mansplaining of U.S. history. If our civilization came to an end and sometime in the future, explorers hacked through the kudzu and plastic grocery bags to discover our rubble and figure out who we were, they would have to assume that women were a novelty in this society. Because as far as memorial Washington and monumental America are concerned, were one big nation of men mostly white men. Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. providing the only bit of diversity. (Eleanor Roosevelt does get a statue within the FDR Memorial, though its the presidents dog, Fala, that rates a more prominent spot in the depiction of Roosevelts career.) Even the abstract Washington Monument has, um, zero feminine qualities. Aside from Eleanor, only the statue of three Vietnam nurses on the Mall suggests that women had anything to do with the founding and building of our country. Sure, theres Mary McLeod Bethune in Lincoln Park. But thats 12 blocks behind the Capitol. Its not the nations front yard, where we honor our men. And thats the case all over the nation. Of more than 5,000 public outdoor sculptures of noteworthy Americans, just under 400 honor women, according to the Smithsonian American Art Museums Art Inventories Catalog. Thats 8 percent. But women are 51 percent of our population, remember? And much the same principle is in effect when it comes to the countrys streets, plazas, buildings, schools and libraries. How many are named to commemorate women? Lets go back to Statuary Hall in the Capitol, where each state gets to place two statues of their heroes. White dude, white dude. Old white dude, young white dude. Theres one Latino guy, a Hawaiian man, some Native Americans. Oh, and a bunch of white supremacists. Of the 100 statues on display, 91 are men. It wouldnt be acceptable if the roles were reversed, said Lynette Long, a Chevy Chase psychologist who is also the founder of Equal Visibility Everywhere, an advocacy group for women being equally represented in our nations imagery and one of the leaders in getting Tubman on the $20 bill. [Does putting Harriet Tubman on the $20 matter in the gender equality fight? Yes. ] The lack of female representation on currency, memorials and other important symbols sends a message, she said, that men are important, men are leaders, men are presidents. While Long hailed the Treasury Department decision to honor Tubman on the $20 bill, she vowed not to be satisfied until we are equally represented in our nations symbols and icons. Our states seem to think that only nine women deserve any acknowledgment in Statuary Hall. No Prudence Wright, Revolutionary War militia commander and mother of 11; no aviator Amelia Earhart; no Stephanie Kwolek, inventor of Kevlar; no Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross. Five years ago, Maryland considered legislation backed by then-Gov. Martin OMalley (D) to commission a statue of Tubman to replace John Hanson, a patriot and member of the original Continental Congress. (Hansons got a highway. We hear his name on the radio traffic report every 10 minutes isnt that enough?) That bill died after a bruising fight between the Tubman supporters and traditionalists exercised about scrapping one of the (yawn) dozens of statues of white men already in the hall. [A black woman in the Senate: When she sits there, we all sit there.] The Tubman statue was revisited last month, when Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) who is running for the Senate against a black woman, Rep. Donna F. Edwards (D-Md.) proposed donating a statue of Tubman to the Capitols collection. That would be part of a wider exhibit, which includes foreign leaders such as Vaclav Havel and Winston Churchill, as well as civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks. But it wouldnt replace the two white men representing Maryland in the hall of 100. So why has it been easier to get Harriet Tubman on a $20 bill the ubiquitous currency of every cash machine, pocket and black market across the globe than to get her into a hallowed hall that is curated by the countrys power brokers? Statuary Hall is like an exclusive club. And the folks who decide which two statues represent each state are mostly male lawmakers who also get to decide how they want their own reality represented. Know any other elite groups of 100 who allegedly represent the nation but look very little like it? Hmm, let me think. THE DISTRICT Man fatally shot in Southeast A man was shot and killed early Thursday in Southeast Washington. Police were alerted to the incident by a ShotSpotter, a device that detects gunfire. When officers arrived in the 1600 block of 16th Street SE, they found a man with gunshot wounds. The shooting occurred about 1:20 a.m. The man was identified as Matthew E. Smith, 34, of Southeast. Dana Hedgpeth Motorcyclist killed in crash with bus A motorcyclist who struck a Metrobus in Southeast Washington on Wednesday night has died, D.C. police said. The victim was identified as Demetrus Keys, 31, of Southeast. D.C. police said the crash occurred about 8 p.m. in the 1300 block of Southern Ave. SE, along the Maryland border. The bus driver was turning left when the motorcyclist struck the bus head-on. Keys died at a hospital, authorities said. The bus was on the A2 route. Peter Hermann FBI details robbers bank visits in NE A man who robbed a bank Wednesday in the NoMa neighborhood in Northeast Washington apparently returned Thursday to rob the same bank, and then tried to rob another bank in the next block, the FBI said. Authorities said that police officers and FBI agents who were investigating Thursdays first robbery arrested a man during the attempted holdup of the second bank. A description was put out in the first incident, and then he hit the second one, and moments later he got picked up, said Andrew Ames, a spokesman for the FBIs Washington field office. Police arrested Tyrone Edward Wright, 45, of no fixed address, and charged him Thursday with three counts of bank robbery. The first robbery was at a TD Bank branch Wednesday in the 1200 block of First Street NE. The second incident apparently was an attempted robbery at a Premier Bank branch in the 1100 block of First Street NE. Ames said investigators think the man arrested Thursday also targeted the Premier Bank on Wednesday. Also Thursday, Roger Jerome Fisher, 32, of no fixed address, was arrested and charged with bank robbery in the Oct. 5, 2015, robbery of the PNC Bank branch in the 4100 block of South Capitol Street in Southeast Washington. Peter Hermann VIRGINIA Fairfax student found in bathroom dies A 16-year-old girl died after she was found unresponsive in the bathroom of a Fairfax County high school, police said Thursday. Fairfax County police officers and rescuers went to Lake Braddock Secondary School in West Springfield shortly before 6 p.m. Wednesday for a report of an unresponsive female in a bathroom in the school, police said. Rescuers performed CPR on the girl before she was taken to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead. Police identified the girl as Brenda Carina Soto of Heritage Square Drive in Burke. Justin Jouvenal THE REGION Suspicious box halts Wilson Bridge traffic Authorities shut down the Woodrow Wilson Bridge for about three hours Thursday night as Maryland State Police investigated a suspicious box found in the roadway, producing miles-long backups on the Capital Beltway. Police found a box with duct tape and wires in the southbound local lanes of the bridge about 6:45 p.m. Two Prince Georges County fire department bomb technicians were on the scene, said Mark Brady, a fire department spokesman. Beltway traffic was backed up about eight miles in Virginia to the Van Dorn Street area, and about seven miles in Maryland to the St. Barnabas Road exit. Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21 By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend: Turkey plays a key role in the fight against terrorism in the region, said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. He made the remarks at a joint press conference with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu held during his visit to Ankara, TRT Haber news channel reported Apr. 21. Stoltenberg also pointed to Turkey's active role in peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan. He said Ankara also plays an important role in the settlement of the Syrian refugee crisis. Stoltenberg is scheduled to meet with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Apr. 21 in Ankara. Edited by EA --- Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) is running for the Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski. (Amanda Voisard for The Washington Post) Chris Van Hollens resume reads like a carefully crafted road map to the U.S. Senate. Twelve years in the state legislature, 13 in Congress. Special assistant to the speaker of the House. Ranking Democrat on the Budget Committee. Yet the arsenal of credentials he has built to justify that promotion is now being used against him. He faces a tough primary opponent in Rep. Donna F. Edwards, who in an election year that favors outsiders has dismissed his vast record as at best irrelevant and at worst a reflection of the clubby power structure she wants to change by becoming Marylands first African American senator. Her attacks have deeply frustrated Van Hollen. The congressman has spent the past year telling Democratic primary voters about bills he shepherded and negotiations he led in the State House in Annapolis and in a Republican-dominated Congress battles, he says, that prove his qualifications for the Senate. For decades, he reminds them, he has worked with both black and white elected officials to defend liberal policies, driven by a belief in the importance of using politics to achieve progressive goals. Rep. Chris Van Hollen gives a thumbs up to a honking supporter after holding a press conference at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore on April 13. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post) I see public service as a way to fight for justice and equal rights, he said. Anybody who knows me, knows me as someone who has been working in the trenches for a very long time. The equanimity that makes Van Hollen a good negotiator has left him open to his rivals criticism. While he never endorsed cuts to Medicare or Social Security in the debt talks, such changes were discussed during debt negotiations and Van Hollen said he was open to talking about them. Edwards has used that position to try to impugn Van Hollens progressive credentials. The congressmans irritation at those jabs is palpable. In forums and debates, he sometimes shakes his head incredulously or mouths not true as Edwards speaks. He was particularly bothered by her claim that he is a Wall Street Democrat, those who know him say, given his commitment to closing tax loopholes for the financial industry. Do I enjoy it when somebody distorts my record for political purposes? Obviously not, Van Hollen said. But I enjoy being able to set the record straight. If Edwardss attacks get under Van Hollens skin, it is her biography that has proved most challenging. Edwards would be the first black senator from Maryland and the second-ever black woman in the U.S. Senate, a chance at history she has trumpeted throughout her campaign. Van Hollen, in contrast, would merely be another of the white men who dominate the Senate. His voice has a tendency toward squeakiness, and he is drawn to details rather than dramatic declarations. Hes not a bumper-sticker guy, said Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.). Politician with ambition Although Maryland Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert) recently described him as born to the U.S. Senate, Van Hollen insists he has not always wanted to be in the upper chamber or even in elected politics. Old friends disagree. Chris was . . . aware of cultivating and managing his public persona, said Peter Siegenthaler, a college classmate. I think we all certainly I saw him headed toward the public side of public service. The son of a diplomat and an intelligence analyst whose childhood was spent all over South Asia, Van Hollen began his public-service career as a congressional aide, an expert in foreign affairs. We grew up in a family that thought deeply about the role of politics and the importance of committing your life to public service, said Cecilia Van Hollen, the congressmans younger sister. Chris Van Hollen was active in the anti-apartheid movement as a student at Swarthmore College. As a Hill staffer, he says, watching Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) organize votes to override President Ronald Reagans veto of sanctions on South Africa helped him see elected politics as a vehicle for change. He ran for state legislature in 1990, driven by concern about overcrowded classrooms and underfunded schools in his home base, Montgomery County. We were both congressional staffers first who decided to run for office because we thought we could get something done, said Heather Mizeur, who served with Van Hollen in the House of Delegates and is backing him in the Senate race. Former colleagues describe him as eager to climb the ladder. He made it to the state Senate in 1995 by taking on incumbent Patricia Sher, the mentor who had brought him to Annapolis. Van Hollen says Sher was out of step politically with her liberal district. Sher never forgave him for usurping her, saying that the challenge felt like one of my sons has kicked me in the mouth with a boot. In 2002, he made the jump to Congress, beating favored Kennedy family member Mark Shriver in the Democratic primary and then defeating a well-liked Republican incumbent, Rep. Constance A. Morella, who had become vulnerable in a redrawn district. It was never a secret that he wanted to be in the U.S. Senate, said Barbara Hoffman, a Van Hollen supporter who served with him in the state Senate. He always was looking for what was going to be next. But Van Hollen did not jump at the first opportunity. In 2005, then-Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes announced his retirement after 30 years, creating a rare open seat. Van Hollen, on his second House term, was intrigued. But he bowed to then-Rep. Benjamin L. Cardins seniority and the strong support Cardin had already amassed among state leaders and donors. A decade later, when longtime Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski said in March 2015 that she would not seek another term, Van Hollen thought his time had come. He announced his candidacy two days later, immediately winning the endorsement of Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). But Edwards, from a neighboring district and with five fewer years in Congress, did not recognize rank. She launched her own campaign, winning support from Emilys List and other national progressive groups. The poker of politics Those who have worked with Van Hollen say he is a master at pushing past obstacles, linking common interests and finding compromise when needed to get a law passed or an agreement approved. Though colleagues in Annapolis sometimes grumbled that Van Hollen was too invested in his own image, he proved adept from early in his career at marshaling the press to advance a liberal agenda. In the state Senate, he secured money he was seeking for Montgomery County schools by teaming up with Hoffman, who represented Baltimore and was focused on allocating more funding to the poorest school districts. He was the most effective advocate for his constituency that I ever had to deal with, Hoffman said. Including more expensive school districts in the legislation, Van Hollen said, brought enough senators from those wealthier counties on board for the bill to pass. If youre going to get stuff done, youve got to be willing to take a strong stand, and then youve got to know when to translate your leverage into results, Van Hollen said. Its like how you play a poker hand. His preferred poker variation is guts a deceptively simple game that offers high rewards for high risks. Van Hollens combination of aggressiveness and obsessiveness impressed Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who tapped Van Hollen to recruit Democratic candidates in 2006 and lead House campaign efforts for the next two elections. To her, he combined three key attributes: policy acumen, political smarts and people skills. He knows how to win elections, she said. Van Hollen helped Democrats take back the House in 2006 and expand their majority in 2008. Under President Obama, he helped write the Affordable Care Act and the economic stimulus package, which steered the country out of the 2008 recession. The 2010 elections were disastrous for Democrats, but Van Hollen distinguished himself within the party by raising enough money for candidates to compete. Pelosi rewarded him with the Budget Committee post, which Van Hollen wanted because he said that in a Republican-controlled House, the action would be in blocking conservative economic plans and voicing alternatives. Its a place where I think you really can at least set the framework for: What do we stand for? What are our priorities as a country? he said. Colleagues saw him as the perfect foil to Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), the Budget Committee chairman at the time. Van Hollen became a regular presence on cable news and the conduit between House Democrats and the White House. Pelosi said he was a natural choice to take part in bipartisan debt negotiations. He was one of us that was trying to get a solution, said Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), who served with Van Hollen on the debt-reduction supercommittee in 2011. Hes well-respected on both sides and doesnt take any cheap shots, and he works in earnest. Van Hollen also toiled on behalf of his constituents. Unlike most members of Congress, he insists that a senior staff person run his district office. He looks over nearly every piece of mail his staff sends out; if he recognizes a name, he adds a personal note. Im not going to have anyone tell me Im anything but better than Connie Morella was his mantra early on, according to former chief of staff C.R. Wooters. Bethesda resident Pat Talbert Smith says Van Hollens office spent more than a year making sure her father, a Tuskegee airman, was honored with a Congressional Gold Medal after he mistakenly was disqualified. When her dad accidentally left an old photo of himself behind after the ceremony, Van Hollen mailed it to him, along with a note. The attention means an awful lot, Talbert Smith said. Especially because her father does not even live in Van Hollens district. Those are the kinds of things that Chris does all the time, said Craig Rice, a Montgomery County councilman and longtime Van Hollen backer. Hes coined a name for them: Chris-isms. Getting personal In recent debates, the congressman struck a rare personal note, talking about the sex discrimination his mother faced while trying to get a job in the Foreign Service decades ago. But in general, he is more likely to pepper people with policy questions than share a family story or an emotional response. On a trip to an innovative high school in South Baltimore, Van Hollen listened to three 11th-graders describe their love for the school. Then he pressed them to detail the policies that inspired that devotion. How do you account for that better experience? he asked. The teenagers thought for a moment. The lack of bullies, they said. He tried again. Is there anything the school itself is doing? he asked. After Van Hollen failed several times to squeeze educational reform strategy out of the teenagers, an administrator stepped in. On a walking tour through Baltimores troubled Park Heights neighborhood, Van Hollen only briefly mentioned his roots in the city. (His father and his paternal grandmother were active in local politics; Hollen Road, in the Cedarcroft neighborhood, is named for the family.) What I talk about is my efforts to listen to other peoples stories and translate those stories into action, Van Hollen said. What really matters at the end of the day are the stories of millions of Marylanders and how we can make a difference for them. Only if asked will Van Hollen discuss his love of fishing and biking, and his penchant for spontaneous travel. During college, he and a friend hitchhiked across Alaska, earning money along the way at seafood-processing plants. Pressed to talk about the experience, he recalled that he started as a fish cleaner, before graduating to salmon grader and finally forklift driver. In true Van Hollen fashion, he worked his way up. Kelsey Snell contributed to this report. Rep. Donna Edwards is getting some last-minute, much-needed help in her Democratic Senate primary campaign in Maryland against Rep. Chris Van Hollen. Women Vote, a super PAC run by the Democratic womens group Emilys List, is putting $500,000 behind new ads for Edwards in the final days before Tuesdays primary. The ads will run in the Baltimore, Salisbury and Washington media markets. The ad Strength is one the group used successfully last fall, focusing on Edwardss history as a single mother and activist. Democrat Donna Edwards knows what its like to struggle, the narrator says. Divorced and without a place to live. Raising her son alone. Going without health insurance to put food on the table. But Donna persevered. Then she put that strength to work for us. Protecting women from domestic violence. Taking on the NRA. Rejecting Wall Streets cash. Powerful interests dont want Democrat Donna Edwards. Thats a powerful reason why we do. [I wasnt part of the club: Edwards emphasizing her unique perspective] The group has spent $2.4 million on the race, helping Edwards to tie Van Hollen in polls when she was airing no ads of her own. It has also put $500,000 toward get-out-the-vote efforts supporting Edwards. But it has not bought airtime in the race since March, and this month Van Hollen and super PACs supporting his bid have dominated the airwaves. A Monmouth University poll released Thursday suggests his message is breaking through, showing him leading Edwards by 16 points. While Edwards raised over $1 million in the first three months of this year, the first time she has reached that milestone, she still lags far behind her opponent in both collecting and spending campaign cash. She started April with $668,000 in the bank, compared with Van Hollens $1.7 million. He spent $3.7 million by April; she spent only $843,000. Edwards has had other super-PAC support, from a group called Working For Us that has aired a controversial spot targeting a compromise Van Hollen made with the National Rifle Association in hopes of passing campaign donor disclosure legislation. However, the group may have done her more harm than good by angering the White House with its campaign, which drew fire for invoking President Obama. Van Hollens advertising has tied Edwards to the super PAC. [In a year of outsiders, Chris Van Hollen bets on his long resume] Van Hollen, meanwhile, has benefited from ads run by the National Realtors Association and a super PAC backed by a Baltimore affiliate of the Service Employees International Union. The two groups have together reported spending $1.5 million supporting Van Hollen. This latest ad buy gives Edwards and her allies parity on television with Van Hollen and his supporters in the Baltimore and Salisbury media markets but not in more expensive Washington. A rendering of the originial plans for a life-science village in eastern Montgomery County. It would be a sprawling biological sciences campus in an area not known for this type of massive development. (Percontee) Montgomery Countys joint venture with a private developer to create a life sciences town center in its economically stagnant eastern sector may be close to collapse because of clashes over environmental cleanup and legal questions surrounding the developer-owned land. County officials and developer Percontee have spent more than a year attempting to negotiate an agreement to build Viva White Oak, a 300-acre hub for medical and life-science companies adjacent to the Food and Drug Administration campus near Route 29 and New Hampshire Avenue. A top Percontee executive said this week that the company has set a deadline of April 28 to resolve all outstanding issues. If we cant get to a mutually acceptable agreement by that date, theres probably a reason why well never get to one, said Percontee executive vice president Jonathan Genn. Percontee is owned by the Gudelsky family, which has a long history in Washington area real estate. Each side blames the other for the inability to reach a deal. Genn said the legal document, known as a general development agreement, has been through nearly 20 drafts, scrutinized by a revolving group of county officials. The county asserts that Genn wants an accord that does not hold the company to specific dates or time frames. [Montgomery planning board approves White Oak Science Gateway] Government officials and community leaders envisioned the project, known as LifeSci Village before its rebranding as Viva White Oak last year, as an economic catalyst for a region of the county with few jobs and significant pockets of poverty. Supporters estimate that the medical science town center, combined with the new Washington Adventist Hospital that recently broke ground nearby, could generate as many as 10,000 jobs over the next quarter century. Montgomery officials declined to speak publicly about the particulars of the dispute, citing ongoing discussions. They did note, however, that the negotiations have extended past multiple deadlines set by Genn. County Executive Isiah Leggett said Wednesday that he remained optimistic about prospects for an agreement. All parties have an intention of getting this resolved, said Leggett, who met last month with Percontee president and chief executive John Gudelsky. But its not a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all kind of negotiation. I just want to make sure that whatever the county does that the public interest is protected. [Affluent Montgomery and its poverty in the east] The plan calls for the county to commit $40 million in capital funds for construction of roads and other infrastructure. Negotiations have unraveled over the terms of a complex land deal in which the county and Percontee owners of adjacent property at the site would be partners in development of the life-science center. The 115-acre Montgomery property is a former Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission sewage-composting facility. The 180 acres owned by Percontee is a sand and gravel quarry. Montgomery has removed industrial contaminants from its land, under requirements set by the Maryland Department of the Environment. Officials said they want a date by which Percontee will complete a similar cleanup. Genn said the company will clean the site when the deal is consummated and construction is ready to begin. We had a very clear understanding that its not an issue for the purposes of the GDA [general development agreement], Genn said. The larger issue involves half-century-old covenants on the Percontee property. Under the 1956 and 1965 agreements, Contee Sand & Gravel (Percontees former name) promised surrounding property owners it would limit industrial uses of the land. They included a commitment that the square footage of any construction would take up no more than 40 percent of the site. The covenants on the Percontee land are significant, officials said, because the county is allowed to build on about 75 percent of its site. The county said the imbalance raises questions about the actual value of Percontees land. It also complicates a key element of the plan, which calls for making a piece of the Percontee property available for expansion of the FDA campus. [Leggett, Council clash over details of White Oak plan] Officials said county attorneys discovered details of the covenants last year through their own due diligence. Genn said there was no intent to conceal them, but that they are no longer a factor because the land has been rezoned. Montgomery attorneys disagree, warning that the covenants could leave the county vulnerable to lawsuits from adjacent property owners and residents in surrounding neighborhoods who might want the covenants enforced to limit the size of the project. The county wants the development agreement to stipulate that the company will resolve the issue by the end of the year. White Oak community leaders, who spent years organizing and lobbying to bring the FDA to the east county, and who view the life-science development as the crucial next step, expressed alarm. Betsy Bretz, head of LabQuest, the umbrella community group, said she holds the county responsible for not acting with sufficient urgency or interest. The county wants to blame everyone but themselves, she said. County Council member Tom Hucker (D-Eastern County), who represents the White Oak area, also expressed dismay, but he added that if the venture with Percontee falls through, the county-owned land is still a viable site for redevelopment on its own. If this falls apart, its not the end of the world, Hucker said. I dont think we should take on a bad deal that puts taxpayers at risk. Obituaries of residents from the District, Maryland and Northern Virginia. Mortimer A. Dittenhoffer, financial management officer Mortimer A. Dittenhoffer, 102, a financial management officer at federal agencies including NASA, the old Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and what is now the Government Accountability Office, died March 4 at a hospital in Silver Spring, Md. The causes were congestive heart failure and pneumonia, said a daughter, Jane Grant. Dr. Dittenhoffer was born in St. Paul, Minn., and had lived in the Washington area since 1963. From 1980 to 1985, he was an associate professor at Georgetown Universitys business school. He then spent 16 years as a professor of finance at Florida International University, living in Silver Spring in summers and when school was not in session. He wrote a book on auditing standards and was a former chief executive of the Association of Government Accountants. Donald R. Klenk, NLRB lawyer Donald R. Klenk, 86, a lawyer for the National Labor Relations Board from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s, died March 9 at his home in Potomac, Md. The cause was chronic liver disease, said his wife, Yvonne Klenk. He had undergone a kidney transplant several years ago. Mr. Klenk was born in Philadelphia and grew up Phoenixville, Pa. He was an Army veteran. He settled permanently in the Washington area in 1972 and rose to the position of deputy chief counsel to board members at the NLRB. His memberships included the Sigma Phi Epsilon and Phi Delta Phi fraternities, the Phi Alpha Theta history honor society and the Montgomery Square Copenhaver Swim Club in Potomac. Annie Lou Berman, Smithsonian staffer, writer, volunteer Annie Lou Berman, 40, who conducted oral history interviews for the Smithsonian Institutions Archives of American Art before becoming a freelance writer, online entrepreneur and volunteer, died March 27 at her home in Washington. The cause was breast cancer, said a brother-in-law, Greg Berman. Mrs. Berman was born Anne Louise Bayly in the District and worked at the Archives of American Art from 1998 to 2005, when she became the founding editor of DailyCandy, an online source of recommendations about shopping, food and cultural events. As a mother of four, she was a founding member of BabyLove DC, a nonprofit organization providing infant clothing and supplies for people in need, and a teacher in the Roots of Empathy program, which seeks to build understanding and reduce violence. She was on the boards of the D.C. Public Library Foundation and the Blue Igloo Playgroup and was active in the PTA at Horace Mann Elementary School in the District. George E. Jarboe, NIH official George E. Jarboe, 85, a retired executive officer of the National Institutes of Healths Division of Research Grants, died March 18 at a hospital in Olney, Md. The cause was complications from dementia, said a daughter, Kathleen Jarboe Marsden. Mr. Jarboe, a resident of Silver Spring, Md., was born in Washington and served in the Air Force in the early 1950s. He joined the NIH in 1959, beginning his career in the personnel management branch. He moved to the Division of Research Grants in 1962 and retired in 1985. Peggy Barnett, federal employee Peggy Barnett, 78, a federal employee for more than two decades who retired in the early 2000s as a financial analyst with the Environmental Protection Agency, died March 12 at a care center in Aldie, Va. The cause was cancer, said a daughter, Lisa DeLauder. Mrs. Barnett was born Peggy Wade in Rockfish, Va., and grew up in Alexandria, Va. She began her career in the 1960s as a secretary with the American Red Cross and later did administrative work at the U.S. attorneys office in Alexandria and the Army Materiel Command. She was a financial analyst for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives before joining the EPA. Mrs. Barnett was a Gainesville, Va., resident and belonged to the alumni association of George Washington High School in Alexandria. William Buchanan, USPS management analyst William Buchanan, 79, a management analyst with the U.S. Postal Service from 1962 until his retirement in 1992, died Feb. 27 at a hospital in Washington. The cause was a pulmonary embolism, said his companion, Leslie Wilder. Mr. Buchanan was born in Philadelphia and served in the Air Force before settling in Washington in 1962 to begin his full-time career with USPS, where he specialized in international mail. He sang with the Choral Arts Society and the Cathedral Choral Society in Washington and did advocacy work with the American Council for Immigration Reform. Brian Danis, Special Forces soldier Brian Danis, 52, a former member of the Army Special Forces and National Guard who served in combat units overseas, died Feb. 26 at George West, Tex. The cause was a self-inflicted gunshot wound, said his brother, Mike Danis. Mr. Danis was born at Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Oscoda, Mich., where his father, an Air Force officer, was based. He enlisted in the Army in 1981, earning Airborne, Ranger and Special Forces designations. He served as a medic and special warfare combat dive instructor. He saw action in Grenada, Panama and Iraq and took part in anti-drug operations in Colombia. After leaving the Army as a sergeant first class in 1997, Mr. Danis joined a National Guard unit based in New York and served in Iraq in 2005. He also worked under contract as a civilian medic in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Danis, a longtime Fairfax County resident, also did historical research in the 1990s on the maritime unit of the Office of Strategic Services, a World War II forerunner of the CIA, helping veterans of the unit earn Green Berets and combat swimmer recognition. Rodion Cantacuzene, Navy officer Rodion Cantacuzene, 87, a retired Navy captain who later helped organize Washingtons Hillwood museum and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, died March 16 at his home, Landfall Farm, in Aldie, Va. The cause was pulmonary failure, said a son, Michael Cantacuzene. Capt. Cantacuzene, who was born in Chicago, was a great-great-grandson of President Ulysses S. Grant, his family said. He was a 1952 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and served as the captain of three Navy ships, the USS Meadowlark, USS Swerve and USS Robert L. Wilson. After retiring from the Navy in 1975, he worked for the Atlantic Council, an organization that promotes global understanding, and helped manage the conversion of heiress Marjorie Merriweather Posts Hillwood estate into a museum in the 1970s. He was a past secretary of the museums board. He assisted in the launch of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in the 1980s and served on the museums board. Capt. Cantacuzene raised steeplechase racehorses and was a trustee and secretary of the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame. He also served on the boards of other racing, educational and historical organizations. Nancy Wiederhorn, psychiatric nursing professor Nancy Wiederhorn, 78, who taught psychiatric nursing at George Mason University in the early 1980s and helped advise then-Gov. Harry Hughes (D) on nursing practices in Maryland, died March 19 at her home in Washington. The cause was breast cancer, said her son, Jon Wiederhorn. Dr. Wiederhorn was born Nancy Wanderman in New York City. She was a public-health nurse in New York and Delaware before settling in the early 1960s in Washington, where she taught at Suburban Hospital and what is now Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, both in Bethesda, Md., in the late 1980s. She was a consultant to Maryland Del. Marilyn R. Goldwater (D), who in 1985 chaired a state task force under Hughes on licensed practical nursing. From staff reports Leaders in Anne Arundel County are calling on Sheriff Ronald Bateman to resign after police released a 911 recording and other documents related to his arrest last week on charges he assaulted his wife. Bateman, 54, is charged with second-degree assault in the alleged attack. He has maintained his innocence but has placed himself in an administrative role until the charge is resolved. Bateman said Wednesday he would not resign and that he would seek re-election when his term is up in two years. During the 911 call released Wednesday, Batemans wife tells a dispatcher, The sheriff is drunk and he just punched me in the eye. That contradicts statements made by Bateman and his wife following his arrest. Ronald Bateman, sheriff in Anne Arundel County, arrested and charged in domestic violence incident. (Courtesy of Anne Arundel County Police) Bateman said last week that he did not strike his wife. His wife, Elsie, released a statement last week saying that at no point did Ron punch or hit or kick me. [Sheriff in Anne Arundel County arrested and charged in domestic violence case] Anne Arundel County Executive Steve Schuh, state Sen. Ed Reilly and Republican County Chairman Nathan Volke issued a statement calling the documents released Wednesday troubling and unsettling. The three officials, all Republicans like Bateman, said the case threatens the public trust in the Office of Anne Arundel County Sheriff, and compromises Mr. Batemans ability to administer the Sheriffs Office. We believe it is in the best interests of our citizens that Sheriff Bateman resign his office, they said. Bateman was first elected sheriff in 2006. He is now serving his third term. Reached by telephone Wednesday, he rejected the call to resign. Actually, Im running for re-election in 2018, he said. Elsie Batemans attorney, Thomas Fleckenstein, declined to comment Wednesday. He said Elsie Bateman would make no further statements and was now handling the matter privately. It is unclear whether there is a mechanism to remove the sheriff from office, even if he were to be convicted. Under the Maryland Constitution, an elected official can be removed from office if convicted of a felony, or of a misdemeanor related to his or her official duties. Neither applies to Batemans situation. County police officers were called to Batemans home in the Riviera Beach neighborhood of Pasadena on the evening of April 10. When they arrived, police said in a statement of charges, Elsie Bateman told them her husband had assaulted her. Elsie Bateman told the officers the couple had argued, police said. Ronald Bateman told her to leave the house, police said. She didnt have any money, she said, and tried to grab his money clip, police said. She said that angered her husband, according to police. Ronald Bateman pushed her onto a bed, she told officers, threw her into a wall in the craft room and she hit the back of her head, and hit her in the left side of her face and mouth, police said. Her son, who police said witnessed part of the incident, told them his mother slapped Ronald Bateman, police said. Officers observed slight redness along Elsie Batemans left cheek near her left eye and a small swollen spot on the left side of her lower lip, police said, and blood vessels in her left eye appeared to be busted. Ronald Bateman had been drinking and acknowledged arguing with his wife, police said. He told police he never struck his wife but held her down on the bed to try to retrieve his money clip. During the 911 call released Wednesday, the dispatcher asks Elsie Bateman if she wants him to remain on the line until officers arrive or if she feels safe enough to end the call. She tells the dispatcher she will hang up and wait outside her home for officers. Police also released screen shots of what they said was a text message exchange between Elsie Bateman and county police Detective Tim Utzig, who works with domestic violence victims, the day after the incident. Utzig seems to be instructing Elsie Bateman how to file a protective order at the Glen Burnie courthouse. The exchange ends when Bateman tells Utzig she does not want to pursue charges. He never struck me or hit me and I am truly not sure how I was injured because it all happened so fast, the last text message reads. She then asks the detective not to contact her further. Anne Arundel County States Attorney Wes Adams has referred the case to outside prosecutor Steve Kroll, executive director of the Maryland States Attorneys Association. The investigation is being conducted by Anne Arundel County police a separate agency from the sheriffs office. Bateman took a day of paid leave following his arrest and then placed himself on administrative duty. His second-in-command, Col. Rick Tabor, is overseeing daily operations. Officers removed guns from the Bateman home. Police say they will be retained until the charge has been resolved. The Anne Arundel County sheriffs office is responsible for serving warrants and other court papers, including protective orders for victims of domestic violence, and overseeing courthouse security. Bateman was elected as a Democrat in 2006, 2010 and 2014 before registering with the Republican Party last fall. Others say the sheriff deserves the benefit of the doubt while the case is investigated and pursued legally. Bateman is a good guy, said County Councilman John Grasso, a Glen Burnie Republican. Folks need to stay out of his business and refrain from judgment until a court decision is made. Fellow Councilman Chris Trumbauer, an Annapolis Democrat, said he was uncomfortable commenting on Batemans situation. But if the sheriff is convicted, Trumbauer said, he should step down. Authorities in Arlington County are on the lookout for a man who tried to lure three children into a blue pickup truck on Tuesday. Police said the man was driving in the 5200 block of North 30th Street around 7 p.m. The children who are between the ages of 8 to 11 were outside playing hide-and-seek, when he approached them in a navy, older-model pickup, according to a department press release. Authorities said the children were all able to run away. Investigators said the man was about 40 to 50 years old and was wearing a tattered blue tank top. Police say that anyone who has information on the identity of the suspect should contact the Arlington County Police Department at (703) 558-2222 or Detective Saundra Lafley at (703) 228-4052 or slafley@arlingtonva.us. To report information anonymously, contact the Arlington County Crime Solvers at 866.411.TIPS (8477). D.C. police made three of its stations available Thursday for people who need to meet to complete transactions involving goods bought and sold over the Internet. The idea is to provide a safe place for strangers to conduct business that most often involves cash and which led to buyers or sellers being unwittingly lured into a robbery more than 50 times in the past year. Several involved guns, police said, and in one, a persons vehicle was stolen in a carjacking. A lot of people are showing up in dark areas of the city and at night, D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said in announcing the safe havens Thursday. The purported exchanges sometimes are turning into robberies, she said. Lanier said that detectives have made arrests in 28 of the robberies linked to transactions negotiated on Internet sites such as Craigslist and several others. She noted that such cases tend to close quickly because the assailant has left some sort of a digital trail. People think they are anonymous when theyre doing these transactions and theyre really not, Lanier said. Police selected the following three locations to accommodate transactions: Third District station at 1620 V St. NW; Sixth District station at 5002 Hayes St. NE; and the Harbor Unit at 550 Water St. SW. Business can be done between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Lanier said they chose stations that are typically quieter than other spots and are strategically placed to be near most areas of the District. Police noted that these are but one option for people wary about meeting strangers from the Internet. They typically recommend public spots during daylight hours. The police chief did caution that officers in the stations will not mediate between sellers and buyers, and will not stand guard during a transaction. But there tends to be a steady flow of armed officers in and out of the stations, and the front desks are staffed at all times. Police are not getting involved in disputes or complaints about what you bought, Lanier said. A rancher drives across his land in Boulder, Mont. The ruling in the Keepseagle case allows the formation of a trust that will help promote Native American farmers and ranchers in agriculture. (Thom Bridge/Independent Record via AP) A federal judge on Wednesday approved the creation of what is expected to become the largest U.S. philanthropy serving Native American farmers and ranchers, redistributing $380 million left unclaimed in a landmark 2010 civil rights settlement in which the U.S. government agreed to pay for years of official discrimination. Most of the $680 million in the 2010 settlement went unspent after far fewer people than expected brought successful claims. Instead of the 10,000 anticipated, only about 3,600 applicants were paid. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the District approved an agreement reached in December over how to handle the remaining funds. Under the new deal, those Native American farmers and ranchers will receive $21,275 in cash and tax payments on their behalf about $77 million in all atop the $50,000 apiece most received initially. An additional $38 million will go to nonprofit groups chosen by lawyers who represented those in the class action, and the remaining $265 million will endow a Native American-led trust that will distribute money at its discretion to nonprofit groups over 20 years. The Court finds that with the creation of this Trust, governed by community leaders with relevant expertise, the process for distributing those funds will be fair, reasonable, and adequate, Sullivan wrote. If the judge had not approved the new plan, all of the leftover money would have been distributed in equal shares to nonprofit groups chosen by class attorneys, an outcome all sides opposed once it became clear that the sum would be vast. Under the new terms, funds can be spent by the trust for business assistance, education and technical support to promote Native American farmers and ranchers in agriculture. Court documents also show that recipients can include new nonprofit groups as well as certain agencies of tribal governments. In a statement, lawyers for lead plaintiff Marilyn Keepseagle, a North Dakota Sioux rancher, said they were pleased with the decision. Faced with limited realistic choices, we believe it was the best option available to favorably resolve this suit and provide additional direct relief to the class members, while allowing the distribution of trust funds by Native American leaders who understand the unique challenges of Indian agriculture, said Marshall L. Matz and John G. Dillard of the Olsson Frank Weeda Terman Matz law firm. [Native American farmers reach historic settlement with USDA ] Lead class attorney Joseph Sellers of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll had argued for the change, saying it would serve the interests of an estimated class of 30,000 members, not only successful claimants. Experts blamed the inability to distribute money under the initial agreement in part on the Agriculture Departments failure to keep records of applicants who previously were denied loans and were eligible for a settlement, a history of skepticism in Indian country about federal promises, and the difficulty in reaching poor and isolated Native Americans in remote areas to identify wronged parties and make them aware of the settlement. Those objecting to the new agreement included individuals who had tried to collect through the initial settlement but were denied and those who had never filed and were left out altogether. Class representative Keith Mandan, a North Dakota rancher with the Hidatsa tribe, also opposed awards to what he called undeserving third parties instead of splitting the remaining money among successful claimants who proved they were victims of discrimination. [Native American farmers and ranchers press USDA on bias complaints] The suit filed in 1999 alleged that the Agriculture Department discriminated against Native Americans in loan programs from 1981 to 1999. In a statement, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said, We have worked hard to build a new era for civil rights at USDA, where all people are treated with dignity and respect. This decision is another positive step forward. Sheriff officials in Yorktown, Va., are looking for this man who allegedly stole a donation jar from a convenience store. The money was meant for the family of a slain Virginia State trooper. (Courtesy of York-Poquoson Sheriff's Office) The jar of mostly small bills, about $50 in all, was intended for the widow and two children of a Virginia State Police trooper who was fatally shot last month as he responded to a call at a bus station. But a thief, whom police said was a man, took it off the counter of a convenience store in Yorktown, Va., officials said. Now theyre trying to find him. The York-Poquoson Sheriffs Office in Yorktown released photos this week from a video surveillance system that shows a man they are looking for in connection with the incident. In the photos, the man is wearing a black shirt and green pants. The incident happened Tuesday about 1 p.m. at a 7-11 store in the Edgehill area, authorities said, when the man allegedly stole the jar of cash. Authorities werent sure exactly how much money was in the jar but estimated it was at least $50. Sheriff officials in Yorktown, Va., are looking for this man who allegedly stole a donation jar with at least $50 in cash from a convenience store's counter. (Courtesy of York-Poquoson Sheriff's Office) The money was intended to go to the family of Virginia State Trooper Chad P. Dermyer, 37, who was killed in the line of duty at a Greyhound bus station March 31 in Richmond. James Brown III, 34, attacked Dermyer from inches away with a .40-caliber semiautomatic handgun. Brown was fatally shot by two troopers after he shot Dermyer. [Gunman who shot Virginia state trooper had 143 rounds of ammo in his luggage] On Thursday, Lt. Dennis Ivey, a spokesman for the York-Poquoson Sheriffs Office, said that authorities have tentatively identified the man shown in the photos but have not arrested him. On social media, the sheriffs office and commenters shared their thoughts about the alleged jar thief. The sheriffs department wrote, Criminals steal, they lie and they steal some more, but there is even a low some criminals wont stoop to and that is stealing from charity. The post went on, This person pictured did not feel that way and he is accused of stealing the DONATION JAR for Dermyers wife and two children. Somehow he felt he needed it more than them! The family of Virginia State Trooper Chad P. Dermyer watch as his casket is taken out of a church. Dermyer was killed at a bus station in March. (Steve Helber/AP) The Facebook posting of the surveillance photos generated plenty of online comments. Sallie Ann Haynes wrote, Nasty. Lisa Scott said, Shame . . . shame on him that is just awful. Another commenter on Facebook, Brian White, wrote, Take him behind the wood pile! And Karen Gayle said, I hope you catch him. Stealing is bad enough, but stealing from a fund for a widow and children is REALLY BAD!!! The sheriffs office asked on its Facebook page, If you know who this person is, or if this person sees this and decides to grow a conscience (even for a second), please call. The tip line is 757-890-4999. Newly released video shows Donald Bricker telling detectives how he fatally shot his ex-girlfriend in a Target parking lot last year in Germantown, Md. Bricker was hospitalized at the time, having crashed his truck fleeing from the crime scene. (Montgomery County Circuit Court Records) Newly released video shows Donald Bricker telling detectives how he fatally shot his ex-girlfriend in a Target parking lot last year in Germantown, Md. Bricker was hospitalized at the time, having crashed his truck fleeing from the crime scene. (Montgomery County Circuit Court Records) Unable to accept a breakup, Donald Bricker sent a barrage of more than 2,000 text messages to his beautiful, accomplished girlfriend as she tried to pull away. When that failed, he persuaded her to meet one last time, he said, so hed know it really was over. She agreed to a public place, and it was in a Target parking lot in Germantown, Md., last summer, that Bricker, 27, pulled out a replica of an antique black-powder revolver and shot Mariam Shade Adebayo twice, the second time in her face after she had fallen to the pavement. Now, Bricker again says he cannot accept an outcome the one from December, when he stood in a courtroom to admit to the shooting and plead guilty to first-degree murder. In an unusual, lengthy request written from the Montgomery County jail, Bricker said he wants to withdraw that plea. He argued that he was high on prescription drugs when he made the plea, his attorney hadnt fully explained the consequences, and that over the past 10 months, since being jailed, he has had trouble thinking clearly. I have been in a state of duress the entire time of my incarceration, he wrote. Donald Bricker and Mariam "Shade" Adebayo. (Picasa/Montgomery County Police/Courtesy of Stephanie Evans) In court Thursday, Montgomery Circuit Judge Joseph Dugan briefly addressed the request, telling Bricker hed get to make his case at a longer hearing in the future. Dugan also allowed Bricker to part ways with his private attorney. The judge told Bricker that, temporarily at least, hed be represented by a public defender, and that he and his family need to move quickly if he wanted another private lawyer. You need to get your folks cracking if theyre going to find somebody else, Dugan said, adding, You understand that, Mr. Bricker? Yes, sir, Bricker said. Bricker faces a steep challenge in trying to erase his earlier plea. During plea hearings, judges ask defendants a series of questions as Dugan did for about 25 minutes on Dec. 2 designed to make sure defendants understand what they are doing. At least twice, Dugan asked Bricker if he was freely and voluntarily pleading guilty, to which Bricker replied yes. After chilling confession, gunman pleads guilty to slaying in Target parking lot Brickers request to vacate the plea is one of a series of recent court filings that expand the portrait of him. The documents also underscore the opportunity he dashed after meeting Adebayo. He was ecstatic. Things were finally looking up for him, his mother wrote in a letter to Dugan. He told me of his plans to save money and eventually go back to college. Adebayo believed in him, got him interested in holding a steady job and took him shopping for professional clothes, accounts in court documents show. Adebayos numerous friends some who came to court Thursday have recalled her as an ambitious, cheerful 24-year-old with a degree in public health. Court files show that Bricker had bad breaks growing up. But the filings also display a theme: When events have not gone Brickers way, he has been quick to blame others. Bricker grew up near Hagerstown, Md., 70 miles northwest of Washington. By age 6, he had been given a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and was prescribed Ritalin, which he had to stop taking six years later after developing a tic disorder. In middle school, he reported being bullied by other children and continued having difficulty paying attention, wrote Neil Blumberg, a private forensic psychiatrist retained by Brickers attorney to assess Brickers mental state at the time of the crime and to give an opinion on how amenable he may be to rehabilitation. He noted that he never applied himself, had an attitude, but still was able to get Bs and Cs. By his 21st birthday, court records state, Bricker had been charged with assault, trespassing and failing to obey a restraining order, cases that were dropped. But one accusation stuck a statutory-rape case from May 17, 2008, when Bricker was 20. Hed had sex with an underage girl, denied it when confronted by detectives, then admitted to it and said he thought she was like 14, according to a Maryland State Police affidavit filed in the case in Washington County District Court. The affidavit also stated that a friend of the girls had told Bricker, eight months before the sexual encounter, that the girl was 13. Bricker pleaded guilty to third-degree sex offense, was sentenced to two months in jail and was ordered to register as a sex offender in a public database. As years passed, Bricker grew bitter about being in the database thinking it kept him from getting jobs. At the same time, according to court records and interviews, he told others that he had thought the girl was older either 16 or in high school. With the girls age slightly elevated and with Brickers being in the database the story he was relaying carried the element of his being a victim. Adebayo grew up in Germantown, earned a degree from the University of Maryland, entered the health-care industry and was exploring graduate programs in occupational therapy. In September 2014, she met Bricker online through a dating app called Plenty of Fish, according to court records. They communicated online for a month, met in person and Adebayo soon was regularly spending weekends in Hagerstown. The new court records shed light on what Adebayo found appealing: Bricker is well-read and is consistently described as smart and funny. Initially, at least, Adebayo found him to be a good listener. But that began to change last year. He became increasingly controlling, wanting her to call him at the end of every evening, especially if she was out with friends, wrote Blumberg, the psychiatrist. Although Mr. Bricker stated he was totally in love with her, they began arguing more, apparently as a result of his smothering behavior. In March last year, Bricker texted Adebayo while she was planning a beach trip with friends. I would be extremely uncomfortable if you guys even decided to invite random people over, he wrote. Really Donnie? Adebayo wrote back. Why are you going to start this up again? Everybody loved her: Womans life ends with shots in Target parking lot Over four days during the beach trip, Bricker harangued Adebayo through 1,526 text messages, asking questions, lobbing subtle accusations and pestering her for not responding, according to court papers filed by Montgomery Assistant States Attorneys Cynthia Bridgford and Debbie Feinstein. The relationship was a strain on Adebayo. On May 1, she asked Bricker to give her space, court files show. His response: More texts, more calls, and uninvited stops at her home and workplace. On May 8, she told him it was over. He hounded her, persuading her to meet him. She relented, agreeing to see him in a public place not out of fear he would hurt her, but because she thought that would constrain his outbursts. Bricker had other plans. Court files show that a week earlier, he had ordered a replica of an 1851 pistol online. It arrived the day of his meeting with Adebayo. He practiced firing it in the woods, loaded three more bullets, drove to Germantown, entered the Target parking lot and then got into Adebayos car. His intention, he would later say, was to kill himself in front of her to let her know how much she hurt me. In the car, he tried to talk about rekindling their relationship. She interrupted, saying he had only 10 more minutes to talk. He pulled out the gun and put an arm around her and could see that she was frightened. He asked to look at her phone to see who had called her. Adebayo made a quick move for the gun. They struggled. Adebayo managed to break free, get out of the car and run. He acknowledged leaning over and firing at her one time, the psychiatrist, Blumberg, wrote later in court documents. He noted that he got out of the car, saw that she had been shot in the chest and that she had fallen on her left side. He stated, I didnt want her to feel pain, so I turned the barrel to the next bullet and shot her in the face. Talking to the doctor, Bricker demonstrated considerable remorse for his actions, Blumberg wrote, although he had little, if any, insight into his inability to accept the end of his relationship with Shade. Blumberg concluded that although Bricker was not criminally insane at the time he shot Adebayo, he was severely impaired as a result of his severe depression and underlying extremely unstable character structure. If Bricker were to be incarcerated for Adebayos death, Blumberg added, mental-health treatment would reduce his risk of re-offending. The evidence against Bricker, according to court files, includes two confessions he made to detectives, and surveillance video from the Target parking lot showing the crime. At Brickers Dec. 2 plea hearing, the judge, Dugan, explained what rights Bricker would be giving up by not going to trial. Among Dugans queries: Was he at that moment under the influence of any illegal drugs, prescription drugs or alcohol? No, Bricker said. He asked Bricker whether he was satisfied with the services of his defense attorney, Gary Gerstenfield. Yes, Bricker said. In now asking to withdraw his guilty plea, Bricker is critical of Gerstenfield, alleging that the lawyer did not show him enough documents and case evidence to help him make a good decision. In court Thursday, Gerstenfield explained to Bricker that if Bricker let him go as his attorney, Gerstenfield might be called as a witness by prosecutors at a future hearing. Bricker said he understood the risk. In an interview before the hearing, Gerstenfield said attorney-client confidentiality prevented him from commenting on specifics of the case. This has been a very difficult time for Donald, and hes grappling with a number of issues, Gerstenfield said. Donald is having trouble reconciling the events and the person he knows himself to be. Earlier, to the court, Bricker wrote: My attorney has done nothing but criticize me instead of attempting to help me. Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 21 By Ilhama Isabalayeva - Trend: Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will arrive in Azerbaijan Apr. 25, the Turkish Ambassador to Azerbaijan Ismayil Alper Coskun told Trend Apr. 21. Turkish president will take part in the 7th Global Forum of the UN Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC), to be held Apr. 25-27 in Baku, he said. President Erdogan will be accompanied by a large delegation consisting of deputy prime minister, ministers of foreign affairs, energy, economy and culture, according to Coskun. He added that usually at such multilateral forums presidents discuss the agenda, therefore, a top level meeting will be held. Coskun said it will be the third meeting of the Azerbaijani and Turkish presidents in 2016. The diplomat noted that the Turkish ministers will also meet with their Azerbaijani counterparts during their visit. A 16-year-old girl has died after she was found unresponsive in the bathroom of a Fairfax County high school, police said Thursday. Fairfax County police officers and a rescue team responded to Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke shortly before 6 p.m. Wednesday for a report of an unresponsive female in a bathroom inside the school, police said. Rescue crews performed CPR on the girl before she was transported to Inova Fairfax Hospital, where she was pronounced dead a short time later. Police identified the girl as Brenda Carina Soto of Heritage Square Drive in Burke. Police said there are no overtly suspicious circumstances associated with Sotos death and no threat to the general public. They did not disclose what caused Sotos death. Fairfax County schools officials have made counselors available to students and staff members at the school. A man who robbed a bank Wednesday afternoon in the upscale NoMa neighborhood in Northeast Washington apparently returned Thursday to rob the same bank, and then tried to rob another bank in the next block, according to the FBI. Authorities said police officers and FBI agents who were investigating Thursdays first robbery arrested a man during the attempted hold-up of the second bank. A description was put out in the first incident, and then he hit the second one, and moments later he got picked up, said Andrew Ames, a spokesman for the FBIs Washington field office. Ames said investigators believe the man is the same person in all three robberies or attempted robberies. Police said he was being questioned Thursday afternoon, and charges were pending. Police said the first robbery occurred at 12:32 p.m. Thursday at a TD Bank branch in the 1200 block of First Street NE. Ames said a man passed a note to a teller demanding money, and obtained an undisclosed amount. That block includes a hotel, a Wells Fargo bank branch, a CVS drug store and a Harris Teeter grocery store. The second robbery occurred at 12:58 p.m. at a Premier Bank branch in the 1100 block of First Street NE. Ames said it appears it was an attempted robbery, also using a note. Ames said investigators believe the man arrested Thursday also robbed the Premier Bank about 3:20 p.m. on Wednesday. Fairfax County, Va., firefighter Nicole Mittendorff vanished on April 15, and a major search effort has turned up nothing. Here is what is known about her disappearance. (Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post) Fairfax County, Va., firefighter Nicole Mittendorff vanished on April 15, and a major search effort has turned up nothing. Here is what is known about her disappearance. (Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post) Search teams working in Shenandoah National Park on Thursday discovered a body believed to be that of a Fairfax County firefighter whose car was found in the park on Saturday. Virginia State Police preliminarily identified the body as that of Nicole K. Mittendorff, 31, of Woodbridge. Officials also said the search for her had been suspended. The discovery followed six days of intensive searching for Mittendorff in a heavily forested area. Officials said a note found in Mittendorffs car and other evidence leads them to believe Mittendorff did not die as a result of foul play. Virginia State Police said in a news release that the remains were discovered in a remote location a little more than a mile from the Whiteoak Canyon Trail parking area where Mittendorffs Mini Cooper was parked. Virginia State Police and National Park Service personnel discovered the body about 2 p.m., about 330 yards from the trail in treacherous rocky terrain, officials said. Investigators were still processing the scene on Thursday evening. Mittendorffs family wrote in a statement that they were devastated. Nicole Mittendorff (Family photo) Our hearts are broken, the statement read. We believe that Nicole has been found and is finally coming home, however not in the way we anticipated. This is not the positive outcome that we continued to hope and pray for over the past week. Mittendorff was last in touch with her family a little over a week ago. Virginia State Police said Wednesday that physical and digital evidence they have collected has been critical in focusing the search operations in recent days. Mittendorffs family had previously said files on her cellphone that were given to law enforcement officials Wednesday might provide key evidence. State police have declined to comment on what that evidence is, and the family would not discuss it. The body was being transported to the Office of the Medical Examiner in Manassas for autopsy and positive ID, Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said in an e-mail Thursday night. The physical and digital evidence collected during the course of this investigation to include a note recovered from her car leads us to believe there was no foul play involved in her death, Geller said. The discovery of the body came a day after family members and colleagues held a vigil in Burke at Fire Station 32, where Mittendorff worked as a firefighter and paramedic. I, along with the men and women of the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department, are profoundly saddened to learn that the body found earlier today . . . is thought to be that of Mittendorff, said Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department chief Richard Bowers. We continue to extend our thoughts and prayers to Nicoles friends and family. Relatives said they last had contact with her via a text message shortly before 11 a.m. on April 13. Fairfax County fire department officials said she called in sick that day. Mittendorff was officially reported missing when she failed to show up for work last Friday. A park ranger found her car on Saturday night, and the searches for her began in the park. They involved aircraft, dogs and trained search teams. Mittendorffs family surmised that she may have traveled to the Shenandoah to train because she is an avid runner and triathlete. Mittendorffs disappearance drew an outpouring of support from her colleagues. Mittendorffs husband is a Virginia State Police trooper, and her brother-in-law is a firefighter in Fairfax County. A 45-year-old man who died following an encounter with Fairfax County police after wandering away from his caretakers Wednesday was severely autistic and could not speak, his brother said Thursday. Paul Gianelos, of Annandale, Va., had no history of violence, his brother Jim Gianelos said. About six months ago, Paul Gianelos wandered away from his caretakers but was returned by police without incident, his brother said. Jim Gianelos said he was waiting for autopsy results before commenting on whether he thought officers handled the situation properly. He said the autopsy could be finished as soon as Thursday. Its too hard to speculate on what happened at this point, Gianelos said. We are waiting for all the facts to come out. The incident began shortly before 1 p.m. Wednesday, when police were called to Roundtree Park in Falls Church for a report of a critical missing man, police said. Paul Gianelos had walked away from a lunch at the park organized by a group that helps people with disabilities. Police said an officer found Gianelos about a mile away on a commercial strip on Annandale Road shortly after 1 p.m. The longtime officer, who is trained in dealing with people with cognitive disabilities and has been on the force for more than two decades, attempted to engage Gianelos in conversation, police said. Gianelos could understand speech. The officer also called Gianeloss caregiver and asked that the caregiver reunite with him, police said. For unknown reasons, police said, Gianelos became combative with the officer and a struggle ensued. The officer requested assistance, and three additional officers came to the scene. Police said Gianelos remained combative and was taken to the ground and handcuffed. He had a minor scrape on his forehead and an ambulance was called at 1:06 p.m., police said. Fairfax County Police Chief Edwin C. Roessler Jr. described Gianelos as 5-foot-9 and 280 pounds, and he said he did not think officers used weapons while taking Gianelos into custody. He said he thought Gianelos was unarmed. Police said Gianelos was alert and breathing when an ambulance was called; Roessler said Gianelos collapsed when medics arrived and that he went into cardiac arrest. Medics began performing CPR at 1:17 p.m., and Gianelos was taken to Inova Fairfax Hospital, where he died shortly after arriving. The death is being investigated by the police departments major crimes division and internal affairs. Roessler said he planned to release the names of the officers involved and additional details about the circumstances of Gianelos's death as they become available. "From all indications, the goal was to stop aggressive action and get help," Roessler said. "I truly believe the compassion was there, but it's a horrible tragedy." Roger Deshaies, president of St. Johns Community Services, said Gianelos was in the care of the group when he wandered off. For more than 20 years, Gianelos had been part of a program that helps people with disabilities become more independent by orienting them to services in the community and giving them social experiences, Deshaies said. He confirmed Gianelos left while members of the program were eating lunch at Roundtree Park. St. Johns is launching an internal investigation into how Gianelos walked off and is hiring an independent investigator, Deshaies said. He said the probe was just getting started, so he didnt yet know how Gianelos left the group, how long before he was reported missing or whether he had wandered off before. This has been a truly devastating event, not only for his family but for our staff, Deshaies said. Were all struggling to understand what happened. He said it was too soon to comment on how the police handled Gianelos, but he said that, historically, his clients had positive interactions with authorities. Ari Neeman, president of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, said his group has had continuing concerns about interactions between the police and those with disabilities, after a number of high-profile incidents in recent years. In 2015, an autistic sixth-grader in Virginia was charged with a felony after attempting to get away from a school resource officer. The charges were later dismissed. In 2013, a man with Down syndrome died in Frederick County, Md., after off-duty sheriffs deputies forcibly removed him from a movie theater. Neeman said he wanted a thorough investigation of Gianeloss case. Its clear something went very wrong here, Neeman said. We want a full and comprehensive investigation of the police conduct and why Mr. Gianelos wandered. Arthur Baldwin Jr., an officer with the U.S. Secret Service, parked his silver Nissan Altima on a road in Southwest Washington. He was not at work that December afternoon. He was waiting for a friend. D.C. police said two people one of them a teenager spotted Baldwin sitting in his car in the 4700 block of First Street SW, on the edge of the Bellevue neighborhood. In an affidavit filed in court in a co-defendants case, police said the men mistakenly thought Baldwin was there to buy a large amount of drugs. The teenager, Maurice Bellamy, announced that he wanted to pull a move a street term for a robbery, witnesses recounted for police, according to the court document. It was just before 3 p.m. on Dec. 15. Police said Bellamy, 17, and Charles Sims, 29, robbed and then fatally shot Baldwin. Afterward, they buried .22- and .38-caliber pistols in woods and near a creek off First Street, marking the spot with a blue ribbon tied around a tree, the court paper states. They made off with an iPad, but no cash, according to the document. [Teen accused in Metro killing linked to second fatal shooting] At a Wednesday news conference, D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier announced that Bellamy has been charged with first-degree murder in Baldwins death. The teen now faces charges in two unrelated slayings. Bellamy was in jail awaiting trial on charges that he fatally shot 15-year-old Davonte Washington on the platform of the Deanwood Metro station March 26 over what police said was a glance perceived as disrespectful. Washington was on his way to get an Easter haircut with his mother and two younger sisters. Lanier said the charges in Baldwins slaying were the result of months of work by detectives. These types of investigations take a lot of time, she said. There has been an awful lot of investigative work that has been done on this case in the past couple of months. Ming Cardwell, one of Baldwins three sisters, said it was difficult to discover that the alleged shooters may have mistaken her brother for a drug dealer and that the shooting was a case of mistaken identity, that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That just makes it worse. Cardwell, who lives in suburban Cincinnati and mentors troubled youths, said her brother had started a construction company after he was suspended from the Secret Service pending an investigation over a domestic incident with an ex-girlfriend. She said she doesnt think he knew how dangerous the area was that he was in on the day he was shot. Bellamy, Sims and another man walked up to Baldwins car, according to the police affidavit. Bellamy was the first to approach, knocking on the window and asking Baldwin the time, according to one witnesss account included in the records. Bellamy then pointed a pistol at Baldwin. One member of the trio opened the passenger door, the other the drivers door, the third the trunk. A witness told police that the men rummaged through the car for about three minutes when Baldwin suddenly got out. Bellamy shot twice, the police affidavit says. [U.S. Secret Service officer killed during robbery in Southwest]Police said Sims then fired. Baldwin, struck in the torso by five bullets, ran across the street to a grassy area near the woods and collapsed. The gunmen ran. [] One witness told police, according to the affidavit, that he later heard Bellamy tell Sims that he shot the decedent because he tried to buck on him and take his pistol. The same witness said Sims told him he fired because Bellamy was struggling with the decedent and once Bellamy shot [Baldwin], Sims couldnt leave him there alive. Sims, of Southeast Washington, was charged Tuesday with first-degree murder. Baldwins slaying left his family angry and in mourning. Because her brother had been suspended from his job with the Secret Services Foreign Mission Branch, Cardwell said his funeral lacked the pageantry befitting the killing of a law enforcement officer. There was no 21-gun salute, no American flag draped across the coffin. Although Cardwell said the Secret Service privately offered the family support, the agency kept its public comments to a two-sentence statement: We are aware he was killed. We express our condolences to his family. Because he was suspended, they were hesitant to acknowledge him, Cardwell said. This was an officer who was committed to his work. He worked in the White House and took an oath to protect the president, only to be gunned down in the middle of the street. He never got the attention that was warranted. The police affidavit makes clear that Baldwin, 30, of Upper Marlboro, did not have drugs and was not in the area buying drugs. Authorities confirm that he was simply waiting to meet a friend when he was ambushed. Officers found him at 2:51 p.m., lying in the grass, struggling to breathe. He died at a hospital at 3:23 p.m. His vehicle was found with the front door and trunk open. A silver watch was found near where Baldwin fell. His iPad and wallet had been taken. Court papers say a witness told police that Bellamy found no cash in the billfold, so he tossed it down a storm drain. Correction: An earlier version of this story provided the wrong numbers for the candidates campaign contributions. The story has been corrected. Arlington County Board Chair Libby Garvey, who so angered local Democrats two years ago that she was forced to step down from the partys leadership committee after she refused to support a fellow Democrat in two heated elections, may do it again, she told fellow party members Wednesday night. At the first forum of the primary election season, she told about 100 of the party faithful that rather than promising to support the Democratic nominee in any race, she would gather facts and make her own judgment. Her challenger, Erik Gutshall, immediately answered the same question with Absolutely, 100 percent unequivocally, I will support the Democrat, period. The race has the potential to be heated because Garvey, a first-term County Board member who previously served 15 years on the School Board, has positioned herself as a fiscal conservative while Gutshall, running for office for the first time, declared himself a progressive in the tradition of the deep-blue county. [Garvey trounced by challenger in straw poll] Erik Gutshall, who is running in the June Democratic primary for Arlington County Board. (Alex Orosco/Gutshall campaign) Arlingtonians, who are some of the most loyal Democratic voters in the nation, veered away from that loyalty two years ago when they elected Republican-turned-independent John Vihstadt to the County Board. But last year, they returned to form by voting in two liberal Democrats. The reelection, or not, of Garvey could indicate whether the strongly Democratic county has become less liberal. Garvey, by virtue of her tenure, is serving as the County Boards chair this year, and Wednesday she declared her first four months in that post a success. We are clicking as a team, she said, and despite disagreements, we vote and move on. Gutshall, however, saw problems with Garveys record and leadership, attacking her failure to support full funding of the countys affordable housing loan program last fall, her opposition to a proposal to delay the widening of Interstate 66 until mass transit options were in place, and her failure to come up with a plan to improve the Columbia Pike neighborhoods after the cancellation of the streetcar project 17 months ago. [A year later, plan to improve Columbia Pike transit still unclear] Shes been there a while, Gutshall said. She says she didnt have the votes [to make changes]. Both Arlington and leadership is about getting the votes. I dont understand why shes willing to work with Republicans but cant forge deals with other Democrats, he said. He called on her to reject campaign contributions from current and former Republican elected officials, a clear swipe at two $500 donations she received from former congressman Tom Davis (R) in the past year. She did not respond to his challenge. Gutshall has outraised Garvey by about $17,000 so far this year, but she started with a $27,566 balance in her campaign fund from her previous campaigns. Gutshall raised almost $52,000 while Garvey raised $34,600 this year, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. Garvey had a campaign fund balance of about $41,999 while Gutshall had $33,655 still in his coffers as of March 31. Garvey, who leaned heavily on her record as a School Board member during the debate, told those who attended the Arlington Young Democrats forum Wednesday that no one is a stronger supporter of schools, calling them Arlingtons most important economic asset. Your schools are great in a large part because of what Ive done over the years, she said. She said she supports the trimmed-down plan to build an aquatics and recreation center at Long Bridge Park so far and warned that the county may need to delay some of its projects in the years ahead in order to build schools, which have experienced serious overcrowding for several years. We cant build our way out of [the] affordable housing problem, Garvey said, promoting the preservation of existing market-rate housing that low- and medium-income families can afford. Gutshall, the vice chairman of the local planning board, said the county has missed several opportunities, including encouraging medium-density housing in places that are neither high-rise districts nor single-family home enclaves. Gutshall said that the county needs the kind of bold, long-term vision that past leaders demonstrated when they put the Metrorail underground and protected single-family-home neighborhoods from encroaching development while clustering high-rises around the Metro corridors. We need a plan for the future and we need to make long-term, strategic investments in Arlington, he said. The primary is June 14. An archaeological dig at the Boston house where civil rights leader Malcolm X spent part of his childhood has found unexpected evidence of an older settlement at the site dating to the 1700s. (Bill Sikes/AP) An archaeological dig at the boyhood home of Malcolm X in Boston has turned up some surprising findings, but theyre unrelated to the early life of the civil rights activist, who was assassinated in 1965 at age 39. City archaeologist Joseph Bagley said last week that researchers digging outside the 2 1/ 2 -story home have uncovered kitchenware, ceramics and other evidence of a settlement dating to the 1700s that they hadnt expected to find. Weve come onto a whole layer, roughly two feet down and across the whole site, thats absolutely filled with stuff from the period, he said. So we have this whole new research question, which is: What the heck was going on here in the 18th century? Rodnell Collins, a nephew of Malcolm Xs who grew up in the house with him, says the findings reveal a richer story than he ever knew. Its fantastic and enlightening. This is the history of Boston, he said. Its a terrific educational opportunity, and thats what this family is all about. Thats what Uncle Malcolm was about. The two-week dig, which began March 29, was meant to shine a light on Malcolm Xs formative years in Boston as well as the homes previous owners, an Irish immigrant family who lived there through the Great Depression. But it was halted because of bad weather and will resume May 16. City records show that the house was built in 1874 on what Bagley and his team had assumed was farmland. But their early findings suggest there probably was another house on or near the site, dating to Colonial times. Researchers also have found a small stone piece that may date to Native American tribes that once inhabited the area. But its too early to tell how old the fragment is and whether it is Native American in origin. A closer examination will be undertaken later. What has been found so far from Malcolm Xs time in Boston broken dishes, bits of jewelry, toys and a record probably come from when the home was vandalized in the 1970s and items were tossed haphazardly into the yard, Bagley says. Collins is eager to see what the next phase of the dig turns up. His mother, Ella Little-Collins, became the legal guardian of Malcolm X then known as Malcolm Little after his father died and his mother was committed to a mental institution. The family still owns the vacant and badly deteriorated house and hopes to renovate it for public tours and other uses. Its the last surviving residence from Malcolm Xs time as a teenager and young adult living in Bostons historically black Roxbury neighborhood during the 1940s. This takes me back to my childhood, Collins said. So many memories. They should be shared. The suspect of last October's bomb attack in Ankara that killed 103 people has been remanded in custody, Anadolu Agency reported. The suspect Nihat Urkmez who had been detained in Turkey's eastern Elazig province, was remanded after appearing in an Ankara court on Thursday, said security sources who spoke on condition of anonymity due to safety reasons. The security sources added that more detentions could occur as the investigation progresses. In October 2015, 103 people were killed by twin bomb attacks at a peace rally in the Turkish capital Ankara. The attack was blamed on the terrorist group Daesh. Confused about how low your blood pressure should be? Thats understandable, considering the headlines that a major study generated recently. The study, dubbed the Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial, or SPRINT, suggests that a blood pressure level that is much lower than what is currently recommended for some people can significantly cut the risk of heart failure and death from heart problems. But many experts, including those at Consumer Reports Best Buy Drugs, say its unknown whether the SPRINT findings are relevant for most people with high blood pressure. Thats because the study looked only at a small, high-risk subset of people with hypertension. Old questions, new answers If youve received a hypertension diagnosis, its important to keep your blood pressure at a healthy level. In the United States, uncontrolled high blood pressure leads to more heart attacks and strokes than any other cause. But how low is low enough? Under current guidelines, the ideal is a systolic pressure (top number) of 120 millimeters of mercury or less, and a diastolic pressure (bottom number) of 80 or less. Youre considered to have high blood pressure if the systolic hits 140 or the diastolic goes to 90 or above. But experts have long debated whether those with high blood pressure need to get their levels all the way down to the ideal. The SPRINT study sought to end this debate, and at first glance the results suggest that lower is healthier. Heres why: The trial involved more than 9,300 people with elevated blood pressure and a high risk of heart attack. They were given medication to reduce their blood pressure. About half aimed to lower their systolic pressure to 120; the other half had a goal of 140. The study had been slated to run for five years, but it was stopped after slightly more than three years because results were so dramatic. During that time, 65 people in the group aiming for a systolic pressure of 140 died and 100 developed heart failure. Of those trying to get down to a systolic of 120, only 37 died and 62 developed heart failure, researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. Gary Gibbons, director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), SPRINTs primary sponsor, says the findings will change high blood pressure treatment and save lives. But the benefits came with significant downsides. To get down to 120, people in the study had to take three blood pressure medications, on average. That led to almost double the instances of serious side effects, including some that required emergency care at a hospital, such as kidney failure, dangerously low blood pressure and imbalances in potassium or sodium blood levels. Also, many people find it difficult to take their blood pressure medication consistently, and an additional pill may increase that challenge, notes Michael Pignone, chief of internal medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill. In fact, because of side effects, the need to cut costs and/or other factors, up to half of people stop taking their hypertension medication within a year of starting on it. Putting somebody on more medications if theyre not consistently taking their current regimen is not a helpful strategy, Pignone says. Whom does this study affect? SPRINT focused on a specific group of people with hypertension: those 50 and older with at least one other chronic condition, such as heart disease or kidney disease (both of which raise heart attack and stroke risks), and those 75 and older. Of every six people with high blood pressure, only about one of them is in such a high-risk group. If you are in that group, talk with your doctor about whether lowering your systolic blood pressure to 120 is worth the risk, says Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at Yale University. If youre not in that group, based on these new findings, you may not need to aim for such a low number. Also talk with your doctor about making lifestyle changes that can help reduce blood pressure. Those are especially important for people like those in the group studied in SPRINT. For the rest of us . . . If youre not in one of the previously mentioned high-risk categories, what should your blood pressure be? Consumer Reports medical experts consider 150/90 a reasonable goal for most people age 60 to 75 who dont have other risk factors. They suggest a goal of 140/90 for people younger than 60, those with diabetes and those younger than 50 with chronic kidney disease. Those numbers are based on recommendations from an independent expert panel convened by the NHLBI. The panel noted that achieving levels below 140/90 can require additional blood pressure drugs or high doses. That increases the risk of the previously mentioned side effects and depending on the drugs problems such as persistent coughing, erectile dysfunction and frequent urination. But be sure of your numbers Uncertain about your blood pressure? Get it measured, even if you think its fine. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends that everyone 18 and older be screened for hypertension. Having high blood pressure generally causes no obvious symptoms, so an estimated one-fifth of American adults with the problem dont know they have it. Surprisingly, the most accurate way to measure your blood pressure is not at your doctors office. Up to 30 percent of people receive an incorrect diagnosis of high blood pressure, often because their blood pressure is normal at home but spikes in a doctors office, perhaps because of anxiety. Blood pressure can also fluctuate depending on such factors as sitting position, bladder fullness and placement of the monitors cuff. The gold standard for measuring blood pressure a method known as ambulatory monitoring involves wearing a small, doctor-prescribed device that records your blood pressure at frequent intervals over 24 hours. But that monitoring isnt widely available, and insurance might not cover the cost. A good alternative, the task force says, is a home blood pressure monitor. Record levels once in the morning and once in the evening for a week. Copyright 2016. Consumers Union of United States Inc. MAINE Multiple marijuana operators sentenced Three men involved in an operation that produced one of the biggest marijuana seizures in Maine history were sentenced Thursday in U.S. District Court in Bangor. A judge imposed sentences of more than 14 years for Malcolm French, 54, of Enfield, and more than 12 years for Rodney Russell, 52, of South Thomaston, for charges including manufacturing drugs and harboring workers who were in the country illegally. A third man, Kendall Chase, 59, of Bradford, was sentenced to five years in prison for conspiracy. The men were convicted by a federal jury in January 2014. The marijuana operation was concealed in the woods and bogs of rural Washington County at the nations eastern tip. Drug agents found nearly 3,000 plants, some as tall as eight feet, along with 40 pounds of processed marijuana, all valued at $9 million. It was camouflaged so well that a game warden rode past it the day before law enforcement officials spotted it using aircraft in 2009. Associated Press TEXAS Evacuations follow heavy storm Thunderstorms raced through the Houston area Thursday, aggravating flooding in drenched parts of the city as mandatory evacuations were ordered for low-lying neighborhoods in a community about 50 miles away. Houston and surrounding counties have received more than a foot of rain since Sunday night, and the flooding has forced thousands of people from their homes as creeks and bayous became overwhelmed. At least eight deaths have been blamed on the weather. A heavy rainstorm Thursday morning dumped more than an inch of rain in less than an hour in some areas of Harris County, which includes most of Houston. Meanwhile, officials in Wharton, a community of about 8,700 residents about 50 miles southwest of Houston, ordered residents to leave their homes in some low-lying neighborhoods along the rain-swollen Colorado River. The rivers flood stage is 39 feet but the river level exceeded 47 feet Thursday. Associated Press FLORIDA Police shoot man who choked ex-wife A Florida police officer fatally shot a shotgun-wielding man who had abducted his ex-wife at a grocery store and choked her in a stolen vehicle he drove from Louisiana, police said Thursday. The man pointed the gun at a K-9 officer who confronted him while searching a wooded area where the vehicle was found Wednesday evening, according to a statement from Miami-Dade Police. The officer shot the man, who was pronounced dead at the scene. Police did not release the identities of either the man or the officer, but the statement described the male officer as a 23-year veteran and the suspect as a white man in his 40s. The 38-year-old woman, whose name was not released, was found safe. The suspect reached her Wednesday at a grocery store in the Miami suburb of Homestead and forced her into the vehicle at gunpoint before driving away, according to a statement from Detective Alvaro Zabaleta. Associated Press Tons of garbage left after 4/20 smokeout: Thousands of marijuana enthusiasts who joined a massive smokeout on Hippie Hill in San Franciscos Golden Gate Park to celebrate the informal pot holiday named 4/20 left behind 11 tons of trash, officials said Thursday. About three dozen people worked into Wednesday night after the event and were back out at the park cleaning up on Thursday morning after the event, said a San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department spokesman. Associated Press BELGIUM Abdeslam faces count of attempted murder Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam has been charged with attempted murder in a shootout with police that took place last month in Brussels. The charge was announced in a statement Thursday by Belgian federal prosecutors. Four police officers were fired on and slightly injured when they arrived March 15 to search what they thought was a vacant apartment in the citys Forest district. Police fatally shot an Algerian suspect, and Abdeslams fingerprints were found. Three days later, Abdeslam was arrested in Brussels. Abdeslam is a key suspect in the Nov. 13 attacks that killed 130 people in Paris. Belgian police have also been questioning him about potential links to the three suicide bombers who attacked the Brussels airport and subway on March 22, killing 32 people. Associated Press MEXICO Blast kills at least 13 at chemical plant An explosion killed at least 13 people and injured dozens at a petrochemical plant on Mexicos southern gulf coast, forcing evacuations as a fire emitted a toxin-filled cloud, officials said Thursday. Eighteen workers were reported missing. The head of Mexicos civil defense agency, Luis Felipe Puente, wrote on Twitter that emergency personnel had been able to enter the burned-out plant and found 10 bodies. Three other workers had been reported dead immediately after the blast Wednesday afternoon. The director of the state oil company Pemex, Jose Antonio Gonzalez Anaya, said family members reported that 18 workers at the plant remained missing. Pemex said 136 workers were injured in the blast in the city of Coatzacoalcos. Gonzalez Anaya said the explosion was caused by a leak. . . . We dont know how that leak occurred. Pemex said the blast hit the Clorados 3 plant of Petroquimica Mexicana de Vinilo, which produces vinyl chloride, a hazardous chemical used in PVC pipes and for other purposes. Associated Press BAHRAIN U.S. citizen says he has received a pardon A U.S. citizen who had been sentenced in Bahrain to 10 years in jail in 2013 has been granted a royal pardon and was freed on Thursday after paying a fine, he and his lawyer said. Tagi al-Maidan was born in the United States to a Bahraini mother and Saudi father, and his status as a U.S. national had highlighted the complex relations between Washington and Bahrain, an ally in the volatile Persian Gulf region. Maidan was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in jail in 2013 on charges of attempted murder during a disturbance related to Shiite Muslim demands for greater rights. He had told Reuters that the charges against him were false but that he had made a false confession under torture after his detention in October 2012. The government denied any abuse in the incident. Reuters 3 Red Cross staffers reportedly abducted in Mali: A Tuareg separatist says an Islamist extremist group has asserted responsibility for kidnapping three International Committee of the Red Cross staffers in northern Mali. Before the kidnapping, the separatist said, French soldiers stopped the ICRC team near Abeibara, detaining its guide and the guides apprentice, both of them Tuareg. The three staffers were then kidnapped by the Ansar Dine group near Kidal, he said. The group says it will free them if French forces free the guide and apprentice, said the separatist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not permitted to speak to the press. ICRC spokesman Valery Mbaoh Nana said that the staffers disappeared Saturday but that the ICRC has not received such a claim or any demands. 2 dead in bike-lane fall in Rio: An oceanfront stretch of an elevated bike lane in Rio de Janeiro collapsed when it was hit by a strong wave, killing at least two people, authorities said. Rio Municipal Secretary Pedro Paulo Carvalho said a third person was thought to be missing. He said an investigation was underway to determine what caused the accident on the Tim Maia Bike Path, which was inaugurated in mid-January and connects the beachfront Leblon and Sao Conrado neighborhoods. U.S. denies entry to Syrian honoree: A Syrian opposition activist said he was turned back and denied entry into the United States a day before he was to receive one of the most prestigious prizes from peers for his volunteer work saving lives in his war-torn homeland. Raed Saleh, 32, said he doesnt know why he was turned back upon landing in Washington on Monday. After two hours of waiting, Saleh said, officials at the airport told him that his visa was not valid. He returned the same day to Turkey. Saleh leads a team of nearly 3,000 search-and-rescue volunteers known as the Syrian Civil Defense Team, or the White Helmets. He was traveling to receive an award from InterAction, the largest U.S. alliance of nongovernmental organizations. A lucky duck in Ecuador: Rescuers searching through quake-collapsed buildings in Ecuador found an unusual survivor: a duck that had been buried under a pile of rubble. The white-and-brown duck has become an instant social-media celebrity in a country eager for good news five days after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake killed more than 500 people. A crew was searching for survivors in the city of Pedernales when they pulled the bird free Wednesday. From news services Susan Okie is an assistant clinical professor of family medicine at Georgetown University School of Medicine, a poet, and a former medical reporter and science editor at The Washington Post. In the first six years of his life, Nic Volker, a Wisconsin boy born in 2004, beat the odds twice, in radically different ways. At age 2, he developed symptoms of a horrific illness that inflamed his intestines whenever he ate. Theyd spring tiny holes that led to leakage, infections, malnutrition and wounds that refused to heal. Undersized and emaciated, nourished by tube and intravenous feeding, he pleaded for the food he couldnt have. So confounding was his case that pediatricians considered him the sickest child at Childrens Hospital of Wisconsin, located in Milwaukee. Some gave up searching for a diagnosis, convinced he was going to die. Nics physicians, grappling with a brand-new disease, suspected that hed had the dreadful luck to be born with a single, previously unknown genetic mutation that had derailed his immune system, making it attack his digestive tract while hampering his ability to fight infections. The human genome had recently been sequenced using DNA samples from 28 people, a 10-year project costing $600 million. In 2009, a team of doctors and researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin took an enormous gamble: They used costly, cutting-edge technology to read key portions of Nics genome, then devised a computer program to analyze the places where his DNA differed from the sequence of the reference version produced by the international project, hoping to discover the biological coding mistake causing his illness. Miraculously, they found it. The boy whod lost the genetic lottery won a medical one and received a bone marrow transplant that cured him. Widely reported in the media, the achievement proved that it was possible to use a persons genes to diagnose and treat a previously unknown disease, and it helped usher in the use of genome sequencing to aid people with unusual disorders. Mark Johnson and Kathleen Gallagher were the two reporters on a five-person team that covered the Volker story for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, winning the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism in 2011. One in a Billion, their account of the medical teams frantic search for the genetic error threatening Nic Volkers life, is a riveting scientific detective story, enriched by thorough research and the kind of intimate access to key players that good journalists develop during years of dogged beat reporting. In alternating sections of the book, Johnson and Gallagher interweave the tale of Nic and his familys ordeal with accounts of the career paths of geneticist Howard Jacob and the other scientists and doctors who collaborated to try to solve the puzzle of his illness. The books greatest strength is its portrayal of the boldness of the teams decision to sequence and analyze Nics genes, a foray into uncharted medical and ethical territory. In 2009, when they undertook the effort, there was no published record of any doctors sequencing someones genes and using the information to pinpoint the cause of a disease. Team members disagreed over whether to proceed. Alan Mayer, Nics gastroenterologist, had failed to persuade specialists at the hospital to perform a bone marrow transplant, a risky procedure that he thought offered the only chance of curing the boy. Nics doctors had found abnormalities in some of the white blood cells responsible for fighting infection, and they reasoned that a genetic defect in his immune system led his intestines to become inflamed when exposed to gut bacteria that would be harmless to a normal person. During the transplant, doctors would use chemotherapy to wipe out the boys bone marrow cells including the infection-fighting white blood cells and replace them with new bone marrow cells from a healthy donor. But such a transplant is dangerous: During the period before the new cells start to function, the recipient has no defense against infection. Theres also a risk that the transplanted cells may attack the recipients organs, a condition called graft-vs.-host disease. In a patient like Nic, who lacked a diagnosis, the chance that the treatment itself would be fatal was about 50 percent. So the transplant team had refused, arguing that it would be unethical. When Mayer approached Jacob, the geneticist saw a chance to use his scientific expertise, based on years of research in rats, to help a real, suffering patient. Everything weve done, for me has been about understanding human disease, he said. But James Verbsky, another specialist treating Nics immune system, feared that the team would be unable to pick out the disease-causing mutation from the haystack of sequencing data they would obtain or worse, that they might choose the wrong genetic finding, leading to treatment decisions that would be useless or dangerous. Mayers response: If the researchers didnt try to find a genetic explanation, Nic would die. Without overwhelming the reader, Johnson and Gallagher provide clear, understandable explanations of the science involved how DNA is removed from blood cells, how a sequencing machine works, how scientists used a recently designed probe to isolate and capture only the exons, those portions of Nics DNA that contained the codes for his bodys proteins. (Limiting the sequencing operation to exons was an educated guess that greatly simplified the search and reduced its cost.) Most thrilling is the authors account of data expert Elizabeth Wortheys ingenious invention of a computer program, dubbed Carpe Novo (Seize the new), that used existing knowledge about disease-related genes to zero in on likely candidates for Nics mutation. Worthey winnowed the suspects from more than 16,000 possible mutations to 32, then to a hot list of eight apparent errors in his genetic code, one of which was likely to be the culprit. Unfortunately, the books other major characters the Volker family arent captured as vividly as the doctors and researchers treating Nic. This is particularly frustrating in the case of Amylynne Volker, Nics indomitable mother, whose assertiveness and single-minded focus on her son often led to conflict with his health-care providers, although those qualities also helped get him the care he needed. Amylynne is an intriguing personality, a woman who would sleep in her sons hospital bed at night, then don a fresh business suit and makeup for her day beside him on the ward. Yet the reader rarely hears her voice unfiltered. Instead of quoting her directly, Johnson and Gallagher rely most on her written comments in an online journal of Nics illness that she posted on CaringBridge, an organization that hosts websites where family members and friends of a sick or injured person can communicate and receive emotional support. The journal was an invaluable day-by-day record of Nics surgeries and complications, but the excerpts in the book dont fully reveal the emotions that led this mother to antagonize Nics caregivers, sometimes firing a doctor or throwing a nurse out of the room. A doctors daughter and a born-again Christian, she relied on faith as a bulwark against her fear of losing her son, and desperately wanted the medical team to treat her as an equal and share their thinking. At one point, the authors recount, a nurse pulls Amylynne aside and hands her a piece of paper. Written on it is the name of a breast reduction surgeon. Amylynne might want to pay him a visit, the nurse suggests. Rather than reacting with outrage, the mother, who has been teased about her large breasts since high school, concludes that her appearance is preventing the hospital staff from taking her seriously. She undergoes surgery to reduce the size of her breasts and afterward is convinced that it accomplished her objective: Everybody treated me differently, she tells the authors. Nics father, Sean, is portrayed as a quiet man who struggled to support the family and care for three daughters in suburban Madison during the months when his wife stayed at the hospital with Nic. The book scarcely mentions the girls until the penultimate chapter, in which the authors, to their credit, detail the devastating emotional and financial burdens placed on the family by Nics years of illness and by the discovery of his inherited mutation, which led to the genome sequencing of both parents. Nic is growing up with the consequences of his treatment epilepsy, post-traumatic stress disorder, the surgical removal of his large intestine. Sean and Amylynnes marriage nearly ended. Nics sisters were mostly kept away from the hospital and were not told the details of his condition. Missing their mother and feeling ignored, all three suffered from academic and social problems in the years after Nics bone marrow transplant. The Volkers were guinea pigs, confronted with all the information stored in their own genomes at a time when guidelines for counseling potential recipients of such secrets didnt exist. Sean Volker chose not to be told the results of his sequencing. Amylynne learned the findings about herself and her husband. She told the authors that it led her to conclude that the couple were never meant to have children. If I were to do it all over again, she said, I wouldnt get my own information. Its disturbing. IN 1838, Georgetown University sold 272 slaves to plantations in the Deep South. Families and communities were shattered as men, women and children as young as 2 months old were sent on ships to be sold on the docks in New Orleans. The Jesuits who arranged the sale to get money to keep the university alive knew the evil of what they were doing. It would be better to suffer financial disaster than suffer the loss of our souls with the sale of the slaves, wrote one Jesuit official who balked before being talked into the sale. Now, more than 170 years later, Georgetown is in the midst of an extraordinary effort to come to a reckoning with those events. The intent is not only to bear witness and make amends, but also to address the racism that still infects American life and institutions. The work of a number of Georgetown professors, students, alumni and genealogists to find out what happened to these 272 slaves and to trace their descendants was detailed in a powerful article by the New York Timess Rachel L. Swarns. The university established a working group in August; in the fall, its work acquired greater urgency in the wake of student protests across the country about racial injustice. The names of two college officials involved in the sale were removed from buildings being renovated, which were renamed Remembrance Hall and Freedom Hall. Separately, alumnus Richard J. Cellini set up a nonprofit, hired genealogists and raised money to assist in the research. The work of the Georgetown Memory Project is guided, says its website, by the Jesuit philosophy of magis (doing more). This is not a disembodied group of people, who are nameless and faceless. These are real people with real names and real descendants, Mr. Cellini told the Times. Poignant proof of his words came in the story pieced together by the researchers of Cornelius Hawkins, about 13 years old when he was sold in 1838. He became a father, a husband, a farm laborer and finally a free man. The coda was the location of one of his descendants. Oh my God. Oh my God, said Maxine Crump, 69, of Louisiana when she was told of her ancestor. The hardest task for the university lies in deciding what to do about its past sins. Does it issue an apology, create a memorial to those enslaved, provide scholarships for the descendants of the slaves? The working group is preparing recommendations, so it is premature for the school to embrace a specific course of action. No amends can ever be adequate, but Georgetown has already done something valuable by illuminating a dark part of its history as well as the lives of those 272 human beings. China, the world's second largest economy, has the power to influence the prices of raw materials such as copper and iron ore, as well as commodities and futures contracts. (Photo : Reuters) China, one of the largest import and export economies in the world, is exerting a strong influence over the price of raw materials such as iron ore and copper, despite the slowing down of demand in China that resulted in marked impact on markets last year. An article published by businessinsider.com cited a note written on Monday, April 18, by Ed Morse, which said that commodities and future contracts are increasingly being dominated by China in another way. Advertisement Morse said that Beijing is set to play a larger role in global price discovery as he urged futures markets in China to keep their expansion over the next few years. This includes the launch of China's first crude futures contract which is highly anticipated in late 2016. To give Chinese investors ways to track a number of commodities in both onshore and offshore market, ETFs and long-only funds (LOFs) should also start trading, he added. Last year, trading volumes in Chinese futures contracts increased, Morse noted. Morse, who is the global head of commodities at Citi, gave three reasons for the increase in trading volumes in Chinese future contracts. First was the volatile currency, and second was the growing demand to hedge onshore despite falling commodity prices. He said that since it became harder to short-sell in the stock market, betting against commodities became a way to bet against China in general, in addition to the easing of domestic liquidity conditions, which was the third reason he cited. "Chinese commodity futures markets have exploded in the past two years," Morse wrote. "Key contracts in industrial metals, gold and agricultural products have become some of the most widely traded commodity futures contracts in the world." The expert also predicted that the popularity of futures contracts, which give traders the obligation to buy or sell commodities in the future at an agreed price, would continue to grow. According to the World Federation of Exchanges report released on Monday, trading in commodities on the Dalian Commodity Exchange and the Shanghai Futures Exchange surged to more than 1 billion contracts last year. Bloomberg reported that trading in Dalian rose 45 percent last year, while Shanghai transactions climbed 25 percent in 2015. As volume on the commodity bourses in China grew, the center of the commodities world has now shifted to the East. Conservatives should be delighted that Harriet Tubmans likeness will grace the $20 bill. She was a Republican, after all, and a pious Christian. And she routinely exercised her Second Amendment right to carry a gun, which she was ready to use against anyone who stood in her way or any fugitive slave having second thoughts. On her long road to freedom, there was no turning back. Instead, weve had mostly silence from the right. Donald Trump did mouth off, of course, opining that slated-to-be-displaced Andrew Jackson had a great history and that substituting Tubman who, he allowed, was fantastic amounts to pure political correctness. Ben Carson defended Jackson as a tremendous president who balanced the federal budget. Both men suggested that Tubman instead be put on the $2 bill, which nobody uses. That would be a great recipe for tokenism. Im glad that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew made a bolder and more meaningful choice. It matters whos on the money. Since the ancient Greeks began stamping coins with images of their gods, nations have used currency to define a pantheon of heroes. Tubman was a great hero not because of who she was but what she did: bravely fight to expand the Constitutions promise of freedom and justice to all Americans. Critics who polluted social media with invective after Lews announcement seemed to look past Tubmans deeds and focus on her identity. Yes, she was a black woman. If anyone cant deal with that fact, and doesnt want to use the new bills when they finally come out, feel free to send them to me. Tubman was born into slavery on Marylands Eastern Shore around 1822. She escaped to Philadelphia in 1849 but returned to the South more than a dozen times, risking life and liberty, to lead runaway slaves to freedom. Slave owners reportedly offered bounties of thousands of dollars for capturing the diminutive woman known on the grapevine as Moses. I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, she said later in life, and I can say what most conductors cant say I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger. But that was just the beginning of Tubmans heroic service. During the Civil War, she guided a team of Union scouts operating in the marshlands near present-day Beaufort, S.C. In 1863, she led a raid on plantations along the Combahee River that freed more than 750 slaves becoming, apparently, the first woman to lead U.S. troops in an armed assault. Later in life, she worked alongside Susan B. Anthony and others in the crusade for womens suffrage. She died in 1913, frail yet still unbowed, having lived one of the greatest of American lives. Is it political correctness and historical revisionism to put her defiant likeness in our pockets? Of course and high time, too. Unceasing struggle has expanded the meaning of we the people, once reserved for white men only. As our understanding of freedom and equality has changed, so has our reading of the nations history. In fighting for the rights of African Americans and women, Tubman risked her life for the highest of American ideals. Her example ennobles us all. By definition, the study of history requires interpretation and assessment. The many vital contributions made by black people, women and other outsiders were long overlooked or undervalued. We are now able to see Tubman through a sharper lens, and she was magnificent. As for Jackson, history has been less kind. He was a major slave owner, of course, like so many of our early presidents. If that alone were enough to get a president booted from our money, wed have no dollar bills, no nickels and no quarters. Of course we should keep George Washington and Thomas Jefferson around, understanding their flaws while celebrating their greatness. But Jackson also initiated the forced migration of thousands of Native Americans from the Southeast to the West, an exodus called the Trail of Tears that can be described only as genocidal. He knew that many Indians would die along the way just as Southern plantation owners, New York financiers and other supporters of slavery knew that keeping human beings in bondage was wrong. Still, Jackson did win the Battle of New Orleans; if he hadnt, the young nation might not have survived the War of 1812. I say lets put him on the $2 bill, if anybody can find one. Read more from Eugene Robinsons archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. You can also join him Tuesdays at 1 p.m. for a live Q&A. Flames light up the landscape at a fracking operation near Tilden, Tex., in February. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post) If fracked natural gas is clean, as the April 19 editorial Mr. Sanderss war on clean energy asserted, then why are many scientists worried about it? Natural gas is primarily methane, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded three years ago that methane is 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat over 100 years. Last month, the American Geophysical Union disclosed that U.S. methane emissions increased by almost one-third between 2002 and 2014. Apparently Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has gone beyond the adage that the good is the enemy of the best and concluded from scientists concerns that fracked natural gas is not even good. I agree with him. Caroline Emmet Heald, Rixeyville, Va. The editorial board came to a logical conclusion, but when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a Democratic candidate for president, opposes methane-based natural gas, he is not opposing clean energy. In the short term, methane causes more warming than carbon dioxide. Were racing to curb warming before tipping points are reached, so front-loading warming is wrong. Research by a University of California scientist has found that if coal can be replaced by renewables within 12 years, then its preferable to use coal in the short term and avoid methane gas for electricity production. Mr. Sanderss carbon emissions fee would level the playing field and allow cleaner energies to replace coal. Judy Weiss, Brookline, Mass. The writer is co-leader of the Boston chapter of Citizens Climate Lobby. Should the United States cut its ties to Saudi Arabia? The question emerges amid fresh controversies and President Obamas recent visit to the kingdom. Ive been a critic of Saudi Arabia for decades, but despite all the problems, I think the United States is better off with the alliance than without. Congress might soon pass a bill that would allow individual Americans relatives of those who died on 9/11 to sue the Saudi government. Some of these relatives have also demanded that the Obama administration release 28 pages redacted from a congressional report that examined Saudi involvement in the attacks. But were the United States to strip the Saudis of the immunity that foreign governments traditionally have, it would make Washington vulnerable to reciprocal actions around the globe. Imagine if the U.S. government faced lawsuits for every one of its drone strikes, bombing raids, special operations not to mention wars. As for the report, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow, argues that the 28 pages contain unvetted, raw material from FBI files that appears to implicate people in serious crimes without the benefit of follow-up investigation to determine if such charges are valid. I believe that Saudi Arabia bears significant responsibility for the spread of a cruel, intolerant and extremist interpretation of Islam one that can feed directly into jihadi thinking. But as Gregory Gause points out in a forthcoming essay in Foreign Affairs, the story is more complicated. Saudi Arabia lost control over the global [extremist] movement in the 1980s, and . . . the Saudi regime itself has been targeted by that movement since the 1990s. After all, if the United States was target No. 1 for al-Qaeda, Saudi Arabia was target No. 2. In the 1950s, Saudi Arabias Wahhabi version of Islam, a product of nomadic desert culture, was practiced by a tiny minority of Muslims perhaps 1 to 2 percent. Then came the oil boom, and Saudi Arabia flush with cash spread these ideas throughout the Muslim world. The president will travel to Saudi Arabia this week, but renewed scrutiny in allegations that Saudi officials in some way supported the 9/11 terrorist attacks fifteen years ago could make for a complicated trip. (Adam Taylor,Jason Aldag/The Washington Post) This globalized Wahhabism has destroyed much of the diversity within Islam, snuffing out liberal and pluralistic interpretations of the religion in favor of an arid, intolerant one. In the 1980s, as the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union was infused with religious fervor, doctrines of jihad flourished. In many cases, Islamic fundamentalism turned into Islamic terrorism. In the years after 9/11, after much defensiveness and many denials, the Saudis began to reverse course, shutting down government funding for Islamic extremist movements. David Petraeus once told me that the most significant strategic shift during his time in uniform was that Saudi Arabia went from being a tacit supporter to an aggressive foe of jihadi groups. Today Saudi intelligence is a major ally in fighting al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and other groups. Yet Saudi funding of Islamic extremism has not ended, and its pernicious effects can be seen from Pakistan to Indonesia. These funds come from individuals, not the government. Still, it is hard to imagine that the Saudi monarchy cannot turn off the pipeline of money to extremists abroad and at home. Saudi Arabia remains reluctant to take on its religious extremists for fear of backlash. Hard-line religious leaders and ideologues have significant sway in Saudi society. The kingdom is known for its vast and growing social media. Less known is that its biggest stars are Wahhabi preachers and extremist ideologues who are now spreading anti-Shiite doctrines as part of the struggle against Iran. The central dilemma remains: Were the Saudi monarchy to fall, it might be replaced not by a group of liberals and democrats but rather by Islamists and reactionaries. Having watched this movie in Iraq, Egypt, Libya and Syria, I am cautious about destabilizing a regime that is in many areas defense, oil, finance a stable ally. Saudi Arabia has created a monster in the world of Islam, a Frankenstein monster that threatens Saudi Arabia as much as the West. The Saudi monarchy must reform itself and its export of ideology. But the reality is, this is far more likely if Washington engages with Riyadh rather than distancing itself, leaving the kingdom to fester in isolation. Foreign policy means dealing with the world as it is, not as you wish it to be. It requires forgoing the satisfaction of a grand moral victory and accepting instead possibly frustrating quarter-measures. In few cases is this more true than in the United States relations with this strange desert kingdom. Read more from Fareed Zakarias archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. Of all the mysteries of this very mystifying political season, none is more baffling than the Republican Partys determined refusal to nominate Ohio Gov. John Kasich for president. On paper, he makes sense. Hes a tax-cutting, budget-balancing conservative with 18 years in Congress under his belt, plus a term-and-a-half leading the nations seventh-largest state. Kasichs state has 18 electoral votes, which Republicans need in November; he is popular there, with a 62 percent approval rating. Whats more, in 15 head-to-head polls during 2016, he beat Hillary Clinton every time, by the margin of error or greater, according to RealClearPolitics. Both Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) consistently trail the Democrat. Familiar, conservative, electable: Whats not to like? Yes, yes hes a rambling orator, at best, and notoriously peevish. But having met Kasich and listened to him talk about the issues with The Posts editorial board for more than an hour Wednesday, Ive got a hypothesis about why hes failed and it has nothing to do with his quirks, which were mostly under control during our session. Kasichs problem is that hes not apocalyptic. Republican presidential candidate John Kasich talks to The Washington Post about the race to win delegates, Donald Trump and race relations in the U.S. (The Washington Post) U.S. unemployment and economic growth are better than in most industrial countries; international security is dicey but contained. For GOP primary voters, though, its axiomatic that President Obamas America is going to hell in a handcart. More than 80 percent of them told a Rand Corp. survey in December that the country is off on the wrong track. That number barely scratches the surface of GOP discontent. In March, the Pew Research Center found that 66 percent of the party rank-and-file believe life is worse for people like them than it was a half-century ago. Some 64 percent feel it will be even worse for the next generation. In both respects, GOP negativity was greater by double-digit margins than that of the general public. To this epic angst, Kasich responds with a message thats not so much sunny as it is conventional: I get that. But my idea is we can fix it these things can be fixed. And I think weve overdramatized our situation. Im not being coldhearted here, but weve had worse times in this country far worse times in this country. Well be fine. He touted his record in Ohio, his policy proposals, the spirit of ordinary folks. He forgot to hate the mainstream media, praising the responsible role of The Post and other major dailies even lauding the New Yorker, whose subscriber list is not in high demand with GOP fundraisers. These are the sorts of things you say when you think its still important to curry favor with editorial boards, and that voting is still an instrumental exercise a choice about the best person to entrust with the Oval Office for four years. Alas for Kasich, Republicans this year seem to be voting as a form of expressive conduct a statement about who they are, how they feel and, above all, whos to blame for their grievances. What arouses people what makes them feel validated are Trumps complaints that we dont win anymore, and, to a lesser degree, Cruzs promises to pull us back from the abyss, as he put it in January. Something similar is happening with Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side but in his case the scapegoat is Wall Street rather than the Muslims or undocumented immigrants who populate the demonologies of Trump and Cruz. Kasich, to his credit, has refused to match their ugliest rhetoric one reason, possibly, that he polls well with the more moderate November electorate. Yet this has not helped him with overwhelmingly white doom-and-gloom GOP voters 56 percent of whom told Pew that immigrants burden the country, and only 46 percent of whom said increasing racial and ethnic diversity makes America a better place, in contrast with 71 percent of Democrats. In March, Rand re-surveyed the same people it polled in December; those GOP voters who thought the country was on the wrong track in the first poll were 40 percent less likely to support Kasich than Trump or Cruz, according to researcher Michael Pollard. Republican voters who thought the economy was getting worse were 45 percent less likely to support Kasich. This, even though GOP voters identified Kasich as the candidate closest to them on the ideological spectrum: The Ohio governor scored right at the partys midpoint, Trump well to the left of it and Cruz to the right. At various times in our interview, Kasich faulted his opponents negativity, accusing them, a bit inelegantly, of driving the people into the ditch. He flatters the voters. Into the ditch is the course they have chosen, and if an electoral apocalypse awaits Republicans in November, it will be of their own making. Read more from Charles Lanes archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. THE USUAL concern of an editorial page is government ineptitude or corruption, but it is also our occasional pleasant duty to call attention to cases of government competence the most recent of which is Treasury Secretary Jack Lews proposed redesign of U.S. currency. In fact, competent is too weak an encomium for Mr. Lews elegant handling of a sensitive task to include images of women and minorities on heretofore white-male-dominated paper money. In responding to a groundswell that began with Internet-based petition drives to replace Andrew Jacksons image on the $20 bill with that of a woman, Mr. Lew had to navigate all the treacherous crosscurrents that characterize identity politics in 21st-century America. He initially planned to meet the demand for a woman by replacing Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill, which was due for a redesign anyway. When that met with resistance from Hamiltons admirers ranging from former Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke to fans of the eponymous Broadway musical Mr. Lew took their good arguments into account and pivoted to a wider, and even more inclusive, plan to modernize several bills, not just the $10 or the $20. The hallmark of Mr. Lews plan is addition, not subtraction; to embroider ever more of the countrys complex history, and the characters who made it, into these most widely used of government documents as opposed to purging them or dumbing them down. Harriet Tubman, the great leader of the Underground Railroad and hero of the Union intelligence effort during the Civil War, will take Andrew Jacksons place on the front of the $20; she becomes the first woman so honored on paper currency in more than a century, and the first African American. However, Jacksons image will be retained in a redesigned reverse side of the bill due recognition of his pivotal presidency and military leadership and, perhaps, a conversation-starter about his darker side as a slaveholder and oppressor of Native Americans. Meanwhile, Abraham Lincoln and Alexander Hamilton will remain on the front of the $5 and $10 bills, whose reverse sides will feature new engravings of historic democracy-expanding events at the Lincoln Memorial and Treasury building, including specific images of their protagonists: Martin Luther King Jr.; Marian Anderson; Eleanor Roosevelt; womens suffrage leaders. Executed appropriately, these more artistically intricate bills promise to be not only more reflective of Americas diversity, but also beautiful. To be sure, it will be a long time before this good plan takes effect. Not until 2020 will the final designs be ready, and it may be a couple more years after that before bills featuring Tubman and the others go into circulation. Mr. Lew argues, credibly, that this is unavoidable, given the technical challenges involved in making the new designs secure against digital-age counterfeiters. No doubt the delay leaves his plan vulnerable to shifting political winds; and, of course, no plan is perfect, or immune to criticism. This one, though, is pretty close. CONGRESS AND President Obama are engaged in a needless spat over the presidents Feb. 8 request for about $1.9 billion to fight the growing danger of the Zika virus. For two months, the Republican-controlled House and Senate have not acted. Further delay will degrade preparedness for a virus that carries a greater punch than was first believed . The dispute is one that White House and legislative staff could easily resolve in an hour and ought to get done tomorrow. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced April 13 that a careful study showed Zika is a cause of microcephaly and other severe fetal brain defects. Tom Frieden, the CDC director, said the study was a turning point. This means that women who are pregnant and get infected by the mosquito-borne virus are at risk of giving birth to children with the brain disorder, although not every pregnant woman infected will do so. The virus, carried by Aedes mosquitoes, has been steadily expanding throughout the Americas in recent months. So far, the 358 cases in the United States have been among travelers, but local outbreaks could reach the shores of the southern United States this summer. In many cases, the virus causes mild symptoms, but the link with brain damage is now of genuine concern, especially in poor, urban areas. When infectious disease strikes, it often races ahead of the response by people. It has been an unfulfilled dream of biomedical researchers to find a rapid response mechanism, but vaccines and therapeutics take time to discover and manufacture. The scientific and medical hurdles aside, another reason for delay is that governments wait too long. This was a central lesson of the Ebola disaster in West Africa. It is not known how serious of a Zika crisis could erupt in the United States, but the time to prepare is now. A multipronged effort is urgent: research on vaccines and rapid diagnostics; bolstering the nations fragmented mosquito control programs; and public education, among other things. Presented with White House requests for the open-ended emergency supplemental, Republicans balked, suggesting that Mr. Obama could use unspent Ebola funds instead. Mr. Obama agreed April 6 to redirect $589 million in Ebola money for Zika response, but he insists his original request is still valid. House Republicans are saying that the White House hasnt provided enough detail. We applaud the congressional urge to apply oversight, but not the delay. Congress and the president have no shortage of staff to investigate, hammer out legislation, create programs and build an effective response. They must get to work immediately. Zika doesnt know a Democrat from a Republican. What will members of Congress tell those mothers and children in the United States who become victims of Zika this year and next year because resources were not committed to preparing for the virus? That there were unanswered questions in the paperwork? How lame, and irresponsible. Republican presidential candidate John Kasich talks to The Washington Post about the race to win delegates, Donald Trump and race relations in the U.S. (The Washington Post) Republican presidential candidate John Kasich talks to The Washington Post about the race to win delegates, Donald Trump and race relations in the U.S. (The Washington Post) Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) criticized his party for a lack of ideas Wednesday in a wide-ranging and occasionally combative interview with The Washington Posts editorial board. Kasich, who sees the April 26 primary in Maryland as a way to increase his delegate total, argued that neither of his rivals could win the presidency, because of their negativity. If you dont have ideas, you got nothing, and frankly my Republican Party doesnt like ideas, Kasich said. They want to be negative against things. We had Reagan, okay? Saint Ron. We had Kemp, he was an idea guy. Id say Paul Ryan is driven mostly by ideas. He likes ideas. But you talk about most of em, the party is knee-jerk against. Maybe thats how they were created. [Read the transcript of John Kasichs interview with the Washington Post edtiorial board] After Tuesdays New York primary, where weeks of campaigning landed Kasich half a dozen delegates, the governor repeatedly emphasized his conservative credentials while taking care to define what conservative was. Republican presidential candidate John Kasich met with The Washington Post editorial board on April 20. This is a full audio recording of that conversation. (Adriana Usero) Im gonna kill the Commerce Department, Kasich said. I dont know why you dont have an Education Department tied to the Labor Department. Kasich derided the idea of a carbon tax Im not big on tax increases and when challenged on the math behind his tax-cut plan, which many analysts say would increase deficits, he mocked the pretenses of experts. The Center for a Responsible Budget what have they ever balanced? he asked. When there is certainty, both on the regulatory side, on the tax side, and on the spending side, you basically get economic growth. And look, if we find out that were getting off the path, then well have to adjust. For more than a month, Kasich has been mathematically eliminated from winning the Republican nomination with the pledged delegates awarded in primaries. Tuesdays result in New York came close to slamming the same door on Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), something the senator addressed in an impromptu news conference Wednesday. While Cruz went on to call Kasich a spoiler, the Ohio governor agreed with him on one point: Front-runner Donald Trump was not entitled to the nomination if he failed to reach a simple majority of 1,237 delegates. One time I made an 83 on my math test, and I did better than everybody else, and I asked the teacher: How come I dont have an A? Kasich said. The teacher said, An A is 90. I said, Oh, I get it. Say he gets in there with 1,100 go get the rest of em. Kasich went on to imagine a convention where he could appeal to Trump voters by respecting them. Citing his work in Ohio to calm tensions after a police shooting in Cleveland, Kasich said hed advanced past his bombast years, where I was pounding on everybody. He boasted of Ohios fracking boom but emphasized that the state had probably the most regulation of the natural gas industry in the country. He also rejected the idea that he had moderated by opposing birthright citizenship when he was a congressman and endorsing it as a governor. Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) speaks with the editorial board at The Washington Post on Wednesday. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post) I probably signed onto some bill, shrugged Kasich. Somebody probably walked up to me on the floor and said, how bout putting your name on this? At other points, Kasich vigorously defended his record. He said that changes to Ohios early voting law, opposed by Democrats, were simply fair and had been requested by local officials. Do you think 28 days of voting is restrictive? Kasich asked. How many other states have 28 days of early voting? Kasich made a few stabs at populism, criticizing the President Obama-era Federal Reserve for its multiple rounds of quantitative easing. To Kasich, that only resulted in companies buying up more of their stock and making the rich richer. He was otherwise light on criticism of the Obama administration. On the District, Kasich dismissed the idea of statehood or a vote in Congress. I just dont see that we really need that, okay? Kasich said. Referring to the Republicans who have stopped such proposals, Kasich said that they know thats just more votes in the Democratic Party. But as he pondered the question some more, Kasich softened. They send me a bill, and Im president of the United States? he said. Ill read your editorials. President Obama said Thursday that he is concerned about whether Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi can hold onto power, and he urged Americas Arab allies in the Persian Gulf to bolster Sunni support for the beleaguered Iraqi leader. Obamas comments came as he promised gulf leaders weapons and support to counter Iranian influence in the region, while simultaneously pushing them to be open to dialogue and diplomacy with their longtime rival. Obama met with envoys from the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council a bloc led by Sunni Muslim rulers stretching from Kuwait to Oman in an effort to combat perceptions that the United States is pulling back from the region at a time of crisis. Speaking to reporters about the predicament that Abadi, a Shiite, now faces, Obama said: Im concerned. I think Prime Minister Abadi has been a good partner for us. But he added that the current political divisions in Iraq are not strictly sectarian. Theres actually significant dissension and disputes, even among the Shia power blocks, Obama said. The Iraqis have got a lot on their plate, he said. Now is not the time for government gridlock or bickering. [Inside the Saudi PR machine in Washington] Facing an economic crisis stemming from corruption, a collapse in oil prices and war against the Islamic State, Abadi has struggled for the past two months to install a new cabinet. His initial proposal of nonpartisan technocrats was rejected by powerful political blocs, including his own. Since then, as salaries have gone unpaid and key jobs unfilled, power struggles have riven the parliament, dividing sectarian and political groups vying for supremacy and fracturing them from within. While Iraqis need to make decisions about the direction of their government for themselves, the president said, we do think, however that it is vital for the health and stability of Iraq that the cabinet and the makeup of the government is finalized and stabilized. Both Obama and Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter, who met with his Arab counterparts here Wednesday, pressed the gulf countries to support Abadi. But in an apparent attempt to maintain some leverage over the Iraqi situation, Obama said he had recommended that the Arab partners wait to assess how the current government turmoil plays itself out over the next couple of weeks before we make final decisions about how useful particular offers of assistance will be. Asked about tensions in the relationship, and his description of the Arab allies as free riders in a recent interview with the Atlantic magazine, Obama said he thought that a lot of the strain was always overblown. At any point in time there are going to be differences in tactics, the president said, adding the United States and its Arab partners are working to have more consistent institutionalized communication at every level of government to ease unintended friction in a region that remains fraught with political strife. Obama sought to address concerns among gulf leaders over Irans resurgence as an oil exporter and its rapprochement with Western nations. At the core of his strategy is a two-part bet: that helping shore up the Arab allies defenses also will raise prospects for their diplomatic overtures with Tehran. He said he wanted to de-escalate and resolve regional conflicts even as the allies continued to have serious concerns about Iranian behavior in the Middle East. Last spring, Obama promised Saudi Arabia and the smaller Arab states new weapons to help defend against Iranian missiles, maritime attacks and cyberattacks. More recently, the United States has stepped up the interdiction of illicit Iranian arms shipments believed to be headed for Houthi rebels in Yemen. But what Ive said to them is that we have to have a dual track, he said of the gulf Arabs in response to reporters questions at the end of his visit. We have to be effective in our defenses and hold Iran to account where it is acting in ways that are contrary to international rules and norms. But we also have to have the capacity to enter into a dialogue to reduce tensions and to identify ways in which the more reasonable forces inside of Iran can negotiate with the countries in the region, with its neighbors, so that we dont see an escalation of proxy fights across the region. The meetings in Riyadh followed a similar gathering in May at Camp David in which the strains between the president and the Arab allies were obvious. King Salman of Saudi Arabia and several other gulf leaders skipped those talks. In a formal statement with Salman at the conclusion of the latest summit, Obama emphasized that the two sides have much in common, especially when it comes to countering the rise of militants such as the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh. We remain united in our fight to destroy ISIL, or Daesh, which is a threat to all of us, Obama said. [How 9/11 still shadows Saudi-U.S. ties] Salman called the summit constructive and fruitful. But in addition to disagreements over Iran, serious fissures remain between the administration and gulf governments on how to pursue shared objectives. Saudi Arabia and other Western allies in the region back rebel factions opposing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but they have differed on the nature and recipients of their assistance and on the urgency of removing Assad from power. In Yemen, where a Saudi-led force has conducted airstrikes against rebel groups which the Saudis say are backed by Iran the administration has provided some assistance but has urged the Saudis to find a way to end the conflict. The Gulf Cooperation Council includes Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates nations that have some key U.S. military sites such as the 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain. Thats a very important reason why we believe that these regional conflicts that often have a sectarian tinge need to be de-escalated, Rob Malley, a senior adviser to the president on the Middle East, told reporters last week. [Obamas realism with allies also carries some sting] Obama said talks on Syria included discussions about what options are available to us should the current cessation of hostilities break down. None of the options are good, he said. Earlier, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters that the United States is concerned about reports about Russia moving materiel into Syria and has seen a persistent uptick in violations of the partial cease-fire there by both the Syrian regime and Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria. It has been my view consistently that we have to get a political solution inside of Syria and that all the external actors involved have to be committed to that as well as the actors inside of Syria, Rhodes said. And the problem with any plan B that does not involve a political settlement is that it means more fighting, potentially for years. And whoever comes out on top will be standing on top of a country thats been devastated and that will then take years to rebuild. Eilperin reported from Washington. Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report. A Chinese researcher was given the death sentence for selling state secrets. (Photo : Getty Images) China sentenced a home-grown science researcher with the death penalty after he was found guilty of selling state secrets to foreign agencies. According to the South China Morning Post, 41-year-old Huang Yu was given the life sentence after authorities found out that he sold over 150,000 confidential documents to foreign spy agencies that have not been identified. Advertisement Citing the China Central Television, the SCMP revealed that the documents Huang leaked included 292 "confidential," 90 "top confidential," and 1,674 "secret" files, some of which are cipher codes for government, Communist Party, military, and financial communications. Huang Yu and China's State Secrets According to China.org, Huang Yu is a researcher who worked for a Chengdu-based encryption research institute between 1997 and 2004 but was dismissed for poor work performance in 2002. At the time, Huang allegedly contacted a spy agency overseas to sell confidential information to them, most of which he was able to acquire from his work. In June, he met with a representative of that foreign agency in a hotel located in an unidentified Southeast Asian country. According to the outlet, he was paid $10,000 for three electronic documents that contained state military secrets and was promised a monthly payment of $50,000 by the foreign spy if he delivered more documents to them. Prior to his arrest in 2011, Huang earned a total of $700,000 for leaking over 150,000 classified materials. Aside from Huang, a Chinese court also sentenced his wife, Tang, to spend five years in prison, while her brother, identified only as Tan, was given three years imprisonment for "negligent disclosure of state secrets." China's Efforts Against Espionage Deemed as one of the most powerful nations in the East, China is a country that does not tolerate espionage when it's on the receiving end of the crime and Huang's death sentence is the latest proof of this fact. In 2012, Chinese authorities sentenced a man identified as Tang with 15 years behind bars after he was found guilty of earning over 200,000 yuan ($30,880) for leaking military secrets to foreign organizations. Three years after, four employees of one of Sichuan Province's top defense industry companies were sentenced for allegedly selling classified information about China's state-of-art weapons to foreign intelligence agencies, China Daily reported. According to the outlet, one of the suspects known as Wen was approached online by an alias "H" and was offered a part-time job. At the time, "H" told Wen that he was a journalist from a foreign media outlet and proposed to pay him a salary of 3,200 yuan ($534) per month if Wen allowed him access to restricted data. Britain's Queen Elizabeth II greets well-wishers during a walkabout on her 90th birthday in Windsor, west of London. April 21, 2016 Britain's Queen Elizabeth II greets well-wishers during a walkabout on her 90th birthday in Windsor, west of London. John Stillwell/AFP/Getty Images Its not a problem one faces every day: What kind of present do you give a nonagenarian who lives in castles and is arguably the worlds most famous royal? The thick crowds that lined the streets in Windsor on Thursday, where Queen Elizabeth II was celebrating her 90th birthday, opted for flowers (lots of carnations, said to be the monarchs favorite), cakes (one shaped like a corgi), cards (many homemade) and a giant stuffed bulldog. Windsor, a city about 20 miles west of London, was the focal point for the queens many birthday celebrations taking place across the country. Wearing a bright, lime-green coat dress and hat she likes to be spotted in a crowd the queen mingled with thousands of well-wishers during a 30-minute walkabout. She cheerfully accepted dozens of cards and flowers which were passed to her lady-in-waiting and unveiled a plaque marking The Queens Walkway, a 6.3-kilometer walking trail. [The queens 90th: Lunch with Obama and 1,000 bonfires] At 90, she is still doing this. I think shes just wonderful, said Jeanette Standee, 64, a self-described royalist who made the queen a birthday card and wears a watch whose face sports a picture of the monarch. There is a much more festive mood in the air than there was in September, when Elizabeth II became Britains longest-reigning monarch, surpassing her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria. At the time, royal-watchers said she was reluctant to mark that milestone, in part because her reign began with the death of her beloved father. But there was an undeniable lightness on this sunny spring day while throngs sang Happy Birthday and snapped pictures on their smartphones as the queen walked by. At one point, she stopped to talk to The Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain, who showed her the orange drizzle cake she whipped up for the occasion. Elizabeth II has spent nearly two-thirds of her life as head of state, and shes still carrying out royal duties. This week, she marked the 500th anniversary of the postal service and opened a bandstand. On Friday, the queen and her husband, Prince Philip, will host a lunch for President and Michelle Obama. [Prince George steals the royal spotlight in his postage-stamp debut] Most people at 90 would want to kick back, I think, said Mary Laturner, 32, an Australian living in London who was sharing a royal-themed birthday cake retailers are keen to cash in on the occasion with others in a dense crowd outside Windsor Castle. Shes an ambassador for what it means to work hard regardless of your age. The queen is turning 90, and throngs of people line the streets outside Windsor Castle in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the monarch on her walkabout. (Karla Adam/The Washington Post) Back in London, British Prime Minister David Cameron led tributes in the House of Commons, praising the monarch as a symbol of continuity. More tributes rolled in. Actor Roger Moore, best known as one of the James Bonds, told the BBC that the queen was calm and beautiful. He admitted he was a tad jealous when it was Daniel Craig, another James Bond, who got to make an Olympics skit with her. The award for tiniest tribute went to scientists at the University of Nottingham who used a focused ion beam to etch the message Happy 90th Birthday Your Majesty onto a strand of corgi hair. Prince Charles, the queens eldest son and heir, recorded a special radio broadcast of an edited passage from William Shakespeares Henry VIII. In the evening, he hosted a private family dinner. At a second public appearance, the queen lit the first of over 1,000 torches or bonfires set ablaze across the U.K. and beyond. Gun salutes thundered out across Stirling, Edinburgh and London. Her birthday was also marked with the release of photographs taken by photographer Annie Leibovitz. In one picture -- splashed on the cover of the Daily Telegraph newspaper -- the queen is photographed with her two youngest grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, including Prince George, who calls the head of state Gan Gan. But for some, it was important to be here in Windsor, a city dominated by the massive Windsor Castle, a royal residence and the queens weekend home. Judy Daley, 50, left her home town of Cardiff at 3 a.m. so she could plant herself in the front row, where she hoped the queen would take notice of her giant pink balloons. Every day she is out performing royal duties. At the age of 90. Shes a formidable lady, she said. Locals turned out, too. My queen, that is, said 80-year-old Windsor resident Anne Pamment as she pointed at the queen and Prince Philip as they drove by in an open-topped Range Rover, dubbed the Queenmobile in the British press. At that moment, the queen turned in her direction and gave a tiny, white-gloved wave. Read more: Britain hails Queen Elizabeth IIs longevity on the throne The evolution of Queen Elizabeth II, as shown by banknotes Map: The rise and fall of the British Empire Palestinian youth put up a poster depicting alleged bomber Abdel Hamid Abu Srour, 19, at Aida refugee camp in the town of Bethlehem on April 21. (Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images) The young man accused of being the first suicide bomber in Jerusalem in a decade doesnt fit the profile of a desperate Hamas operative and that worries the Israelis. His uncles are prosperous merchants. He did not grow up in a refugee camp. He went on shopping trips to Jordan. But the cover photo on his Facebook page includes the image of Yahya Ayyash, a.k.a. The Engineer, the chief bombmaker for Hamas, who likely was killed by an exploding mobile phone planted by Israeli agents in 1996. On Monday afternoon, 19-year-old Abdel Hamid Abu Srour boarded the Egged No. 12 bus and placed a package between his legs. His uncles think that it might have been his first visit to Jerusalem. His seat was above the vehicles gas tanks, according to Israeli news media. His relatives scoffed at the idea that Abu Srour would know how to make a bomb himself. The bus explosion in the heart of Jerusalem on Monday wounded at least 20 people and raised fears of a return to the Palestinian suicide attacks that ravaged Israeli cities a decade ago. (Oded Balilty/AP) His high school grades were poor enough that he wanted to retake subjects and redo his exams. Who gave him the bomb and how it was detonated is the object of a fast-moving investigation. Hamas claimed that Abu Srour was a member of the Islamist militant movement, although the Gaza-based terrorist group did not assert direct responsibility for the bombing. Israeli police announced Thursday that they had arrested several members of a Hamas cell in Bethlehem tied to the case. Mondays explosion shattered hopes on both sides that six months of violence was subsiding. The bomb created a fireball that consumed the bus, injuring 20 Israelis, one seriously. Abu Srour was mortally wounded in the blast. He lost both his legs and died Wednesday after a series of surgeries at an Israeli hospital. The Palestinian Ministry of Health described Abu Srour as a resident of the Aida refugee camp, a tough, politicized neighborhood of tight, twisting alleys where the walls are painted with murals of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and covered with the faded posters of dead teenagers hailed as martyrs, killed either attacking Israelis or in clashes with Israeli troops. But his relatives said Abu Srour was more of a Palestinian preppy, the scion of a well-to-do and well-known clan of eight prosperous brothers, who own and operate a string of furniture outlets and are rich enough to take their young sons for holidays in Jordan and to set them up with their own shops selling clothes. We are financially comfortable, you could say very comfortable, said his uncle Mahmoud Abu Srour, who was gathered with relatives in a courtyard at a family house in Bethlehem awaiting the return of his nephews body so they could bury him. Abu Scours teenage cousins listened to their uncles speak but kept silent. They wore pricey watches, skinny jeans and fancy sneakers. Abu Srours father declined to speak on the record. He was exhausted, he said. His family said his DNA was used to identify his son. He said the body was unrecognizable to him. Earlier in the day, the father denied in an interview with Reuters that his son had any connection to Hamas, which had announced Wednesday that Abu Srour was the bomber and that he was an affiliate of the group. I never thought my son would do such an act, the father said. My son did not make me feel, even for 1 percent, that he has feelings or thoughts like that. Never. An uncle said that Abu Srour didnt know chemistry, had never done construction or worked in mining suggesting that he could not have built a bomb and that someone gave him the explosive device. He had some chickens and goats in the back yard, his uncle said. He told us he wanted to be a veterinarian. His connection to Hamas is mystery, the uncle said. After the explosion, all the political factions claimed him as their own. But on his Facebook page, there is a photo Abu Srour with a Hamas flag. Israeli news media also reported that before he died, Abu Srour had given his mother a photograph of himself wearing a Hamas scarf. The Jerusalem Post reported that Abu Srours relatives gave out sweets on the street to celebrate his martyrdom in the bomb blast. Relatives suggested a possible motive for the suicide attack. Abu Srours cousin was killed by Israeli soldiers during a clash in January when troops raided a neighborhood in Beit Jala, a town that abuts Bethlehem. According to Palestinian news media, Ahmad Abu Srour, 21, was shot in the chest while confronting Israeli soldiers. As Palestinians say, funerals beget funerals. His uncle tried to explain that the families are worried what their sons will do. They tell them not to confront Israelis and take away their IDs to keep them at home. Was it possible that Abu Srour was upset by the death of his cousin and wanted revenge and so he could have been recruited and groomed by Hamas to be a suicide bomber? Everything is possible under these circumstances, he said. He blamed Israels 49-year military occupation, but he also said he only wanted to live in real peace. They are making a big mistake provoking these children, he warned. Kids today are uncontrollable. Sufian Taha contributed to this report. Read more: After six months of violence, Palestinians wonder: What was gained? Palestinians struggle to define Palestinians who attack Israelis Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world In this 2010 photo, an unmanned U.S. Predator drone flies over Kandahar Air Field, southern Afghanistan on a moonlit night. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP) A federal appeals court on Thursday dismissed a long-running lawsuit seeking access to more details about the U.S. governments lethal-drone operations. In a brief order, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the government can continue to withhold certain information about the strikes because such details could reasonably be expected to damage national security. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has pressed the CIA for specific statistics about the strikes, including the dates, locations and numbers of people killed, in addition to a dozen legal memos outlining the governments authority to carry out the operations. The three-judge panel made up of Thomas B. Griffith, David B. Sentelle and David S. Tatel upheld a lower court ruling after reviewing a classified affidavit from a CIA official. The agencys explanations as to why the records are classified are both logical and plausible and uncontroverted by evidence in the record, according to the five-page order. The unsigned order does not carry the precedent-setting weight of a formal, signed court opinion. [Read the courts order dismissing the public records lawsuit] Jameel Jaffer, the ACLUs deputy legal director who argued the case, called the decision a disappointment. The Obama administration, he said, should independently release redacted versions of the memos the ACLU requested in its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed in 2010. Secret law is always invidious, but its particularly so here because of the subject matter, he said. These legal memos describe the circumstances in which the CIA believes it has authority to carry out extra-judicial killings. After oral arguments in February, the ACLU asked the D.C. Circuit to remand the case to a lower court for further review because the administration has announced plans to disclose the number of casualties from U.S. drone strikes and other targeted killings since the president took office in 2009. The original ACLU lawsuit requested information on all CIA drone strikes outside the active wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The administration has long promised to release figures on civilian deaths from strikes outside areas of active hostilities, and Lisa Monaco, President Obamas chief counterterrorism adviser, said in a speech last month that the information would be published in the coming weeks. While the administration is likely to release information about strikes in Yemen, Somalia and perhaps Libya, its figures may not include Pakistanwhere the vast majority of CIA strikes have occurred. The administration, but not the ACLU, has generally described Pakistan as part of the active war in Afghanistan. The court essentially told the civil liberties group to wait and see what information is released by the administration and suggested that it could always file another lawsuit. It is not yet possible to determine whether the information the government plans to release will duplicate that being withheld or undermine the governments assertion that disclosing summary strike data could reasonably be expected to harm national security, the court said. Karen DeYoung contributed to this report. Read more: U.S. airstrikes kills more than 150 at Somalia terrorist camp, military says U.S. appeals court considers access to records on lethal-drone operations China celebrates the first-ever National Security Education Day. (Photo : Getty Images) Beijing is warning female government employees against trusting good-looking foreigners who might turn out to be a spy in the countrys latest campaign on state security to raise public awareness. According to the Xinhua News Agency, China celebrated its first-ever National Security Education Day on Friday to mark the passing of the National Security Law in July 2015. Advertisement During the celebration, the central government released a "plethora of promotional material" that summarized what would happen if public servants become too trusting of foreign visitors in the country. One particular poster that caught the world's attention was a 16-panel comic strip titled "Dangerous Love," which talks about Xiao Li, or "Little Li," a woman working in the government who trusts a handsome foreigner with state secrets. "Dangerous Love" According to the Associated Press, Little Li's tale begins when she meets a red-haired young man named David who pretended to be a scholar visiting the country. In reality, he is actually a spy who used sweet words, and even sweeter gifts to extract confidential information from the oblivious government employee. The poster went on to narrate how Little Li provided David with confidential documents from the government propaganda office she was working at, which later led to their arrest. The last panel showed Little Li handcuffed while being scolded by two police officers telling her how she had a "shallow understanding of secrecy for a state employee." According to AP, the material was focused on preventing rank-and-file government employees as well as female citizens from being misguided by mere physical appearances of the people they meet. The National Security Law China takes its security very seriously and does not treat those who try to demolish it with much kindness. In fact, an encryption research institute technician was made an example of how the country treats traitors and spies after he was given the death penalty for leaking thousands of confidential information to foreign intelligence agencies. In July 2015, China's State Council passed the National Security Law that is expected to "safeguard stability and development in the country and region as a whole," according to an editorial from Xinhua. "In contrast to some Western nations' notion that the definition was 'too broad,' the law is based on China's national conditions, follows the basic principles of international law, and draws from good experience and common practice of other countries," the article read, referring to a BBC News report when the law was passed. According to the U.K.-based media, China's National Security Law is more of "an ideological declaration," citing East China University of Political Science and Law ex-professor Zhang Xuezhong. "A good security law should state who on what conditions gets what punishment, but this law doesn't. Technically speaking, the law is awful, as it is difficult to enforce it on individuals and companies," Zhang was quoted saying. Before their families drowned, before the smugglers abandoned them in the choppy waters of the Mediterranean, before they drifted for three days with meager supplies of food and water, the migrants had gathered last week in the Libyan port city of Tobruk. All had fled repressive regimes or war-scarred nations in Africa. All had paid $1,800 for a chance at a new life in Europe via a perilous journey on rickety boats that would end in what could be one of the deadliest maritime disasters of the past year. Only 41 would survive. But missing from the scores of passengers as many as 200 by some estimates were Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans, the most prominent faces of the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. There were Somalis, Eritreans, Egyptians and Sudanese, Mowlid Isman, a 28-year-old survivor who fled Yemen, told reporters in the Greek capital on Thursday. There were no Syrians, no Iraqis. Five days after the survivors were rescued at sea, authorities in several countries flanking the Mediterranean are seeking answers. The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other agencies say that as many as 500 people may have drowned when a large smugglers boat sank somewhere between Libya and Italy. The boat by then included the passengers from Tobruk, who had been transferred from their smaller vessels. On Thursday, national coast guards remained on the lookout for bodies washed ashore and pieces of the capsized ship. [Despite outcry, migrants sent back over same waters they crossed] A deal struck last month between the European Union and Turkey effectively closed down what had been the primary gateway into Europe for asylum seekers from the Middle East: the short voyage across the Aegean Sea to Greece. Since then, fears have risen that the pact would push those migrants aiming for Greece to take the far riskier route to Europe via Italy, which often involves a dangerous trek first into lawless Libya and a crossing over a wider stretch of sea known for having a higher death rate. But thus far, aid groups and officials say, those fears have not become reality. Although some Italian officials have portrayed it as such, last weeks horrific shipwreck does not yet appear to signal a new and sudden surge of migrant traffic into Italy. And as of now, there is no indication that more Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans are suddenly voyaging to Italy although that, U.N. officials say, may change. The question is whether there has been a switch in routes because of the Turkey-E.U. deal, and so far the answer is no, said Barbara Molinario, a UNHCR spokeswoman in Italy. There was a big spike in arrivals in Italy in March before the E.U.-Turkey deal was implemented. But officials cited better weather and other factors unrelated to the agreement. And in April, after the E.U.-Turkey agreement took effect, migrant traffic into Italy actually decreased. Overall, migrant arrivals to Italy from Jan. 1 to April 20 were marginally lower than in the same period in 2015 roughly 25,000 now compared with about 26,000 then, according to the UNHCR. We think that weather probably has the main impact on the numbers arriving to Italy via Libya, said Joel Millman, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration. At this point, its not fair to say its a substitute [route], but it could be in the future. Compared with the months before the E.U.-Turkey deal, there has been no significant change in the mix of migrants mostly from Africa entering Italy. Nevertheless, the country has been a key destination in the past for asylum seekers from the Middle East. In 2014, tens of thousands of Syrians arrived on Italian shores from Libya, their numbers significantly dwindling last year as many crossed from Turkey to Greece. In fact, about 90 percent of those who entered Europe through Greece were asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. [Pope Francis tours front lines of migrant crisis] On Thursday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters in Turkey that the numbers of migrants crossing the Aegean Sea to Europe are significantly down and that international coordination helped bring those figures down. But he urged authorities not to abandon efforts prematurely as human smugglers can easily change routes and tactics, including trying to bypass NATO patrols and other measures on the routes between Turkey and Greece. There are some signs of a possible shift in migration routes in the coming months. Last month, Egyptian authorities detained 85 Syrians including 31 children and 24 women who crossed illegally from Sudan to join relatives already in Egypt, according to UNHCR officials, Egyptian police sources and Syrian activists. The Syrian refugees were recently released from detention centers along the border, said Yehia Khelidy, a UNHCR spokesman in Egypt. Other officials working with migrants and refugees in North Africa said they were preparing for more Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans to pass through Sudan and travel to ports in Egypt and Libya to connect with smugglers. In the Tunisian town of Zarzis, several bodies of people attempting to cross to Italy from Libya washed ashore earlier this month, said Mongi Slim, the head of the Tunisian Red Crescent in southern Tunisia. The dead were all from sub-Saharan Africa, but also included a white person, who he said may have been from the Arab world. We are expecting more people to come from Syria, Iraq, even Afghanistan, Slim said. Sudan could become the new gateway to Libya, and then Europe. For now, however, the boats to Italy are carrying Africas impoverished and oppressed. People like Muaz Mahmud, 25, who fled Ethiopia with his wife and 2-month-old baby and boarded one of several small boats in Tobruk last week crammed with other families like them. After a few hours at sea, during the early morning, the boats approached a ship, already overcrowded with several hundred passengers, Mahmud said. The smugglers ordered him and his family to transfer to the ship, along with the rest of the migrants. But the ship soon began taking on water, presumably from the extra weight of scores of new people. Panicked passengers jumped into the water to swim back to the smaller boats. But most couldnt swim. The boat was going down, down in the water, Mahmud said. The people died in minutes. We swam to save our lives. In the chaos, Mahmud lost sight of his wife and baby. When he reached one of the smaller boats, it was clear he would never see them again. My wife and child died, he said. Those onboard threw him a rope and saved him and around 10 others. But when the survivors begged the smuggler driving the boat to rescue more people struggling in the sea, he refused. We have to save these people, Mahmud recalled pleading with the smuggler. He take knife and said I will kill you. We cant stand here. The survivors included 37 men, three women and a 3-year-old child. They were all now in one boat. But an hour later the smuggler stopped the boat, saying the motor didnt work. They were drifting. At some point, another smugglers boat arrived, but it was there to pick up the driver of Mahmuds vessel. The driver assured the survivors that he would go for help and headed back to Libya, Mahmud said. Before he left, he tossed them a satellite phone which they later used to call the Italian coast guard, Mahmud added. They never saw the smuggler again. We were all crying, Mahmud said. For three days they drifted on the sea, sustaining themselves on junk food and a small amount of water, Mahmud said. They were finally spotted and rescued by a Filipino merchant ship and taken to the port city of Kalamata in Greece. Today, their futures remain uncertain. The Greek authorities have given them one-month residence permits, but it is unclear whether they will receive asylum. We told them, Please help us, Mahmud said. We dont know where we will go. Raghavan reported from Athens and Tunisia, Faiola from Berlin. Heba Habib in Cairo contributed to this report. Read more How Europes migrant policy is tearing families apart As the route to Europe closes, migrants journey through grief Europes harsh new message for migrants: Do not come Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world U.S. musician Smokey Robinson talks April 21 at the end of a visit by a U.S. presidential committee on the arts to Havana. (Alejandro Ernesto/European Pressphoto Agency) I hope this is the beginning of an entire love relationship, Smokey Robinson said in a dreamy voice that made you think he was working on a song. Guitarist Dave Matthews said he felt so safe in this proud yet fraying city that he let his children, 8 and 14, walk alone on the street, because the responsibility people have to each other here is very rare, and I love it. Joshua Bell got out his Stradivarius violin and jammed comfortably with Cuban pianists and drummers, but the biggest surprise for him, he said, was the skill of the young violinists in an all-female orchestra he also worked with: They played with extreme polish and enthusiasm that I think some of our American artists could actually benefit from. The three artists were among a dozen who joined a presidential delegation led by the directors of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Smithsonian Institution that wrapped up a three day-mission to Cuba on Thursday morning. The purpose was to expand cultural exchanges with Cuba the latest sign of warming relations in the wake of the countries decision to restore full diplomatic ties last year. The U.S. and Cuban cultural leaders announced the delegations achievements at a closing forum in the beautifully restored Grand Theater. The officials delicately worded, and bilaterally edited, bureaucratese did not quite match the giddy passion of the artists, but it seemed that some progress had been made, even as the Cubans ire at the U.S. trade embargo hovered over the proceedings. William Adams, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, said the trip had proved to him that we have much to learn from the ways in which [Cuban] museum professionals approach the important work of collecting and preserving Cuban culture and history. He said the NEH will fund a program to send conservators and students to visit Cuba to enhance and broaden American conservation practices. Jane Chu, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, announced that for the first time, the U.S. government will fund visits of American artists to Cuba through the U.S. Artists International program. A separate program will welcome Cuban artists to the United States. Their belief that the arts belong to every single person, from children to seniors, is so fundamental here, Chu said in an interview. We appreciate that . . . because we want to dispel any thought that the arts only belong to some people. Smithsonian Secretary David Skorton had hoped to announce an agreement to make Cuba a centerpiece of the Folklife Festival on the Mall in 2017. A delay in ironing out contract language which Smithsonian officials said is routine in festival planning meant that he and Gladys Collazo, president of the Cuban National Council of Cultural Heritage, could only announce both sides resolve to keep working toward the goal of a festival in 2017. Im optimistic that we will have a formal agreement fairly soon, said Michael Atwood Mason, director of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Read more Obamas visit comes as American businesses are rushing back to Cuba A socialist vision fades in Cubas biggest housing project Facing new test, Cubas revolution circles back Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world Amid speculation that a fifth North Korean nuclear test is imminent, the US has warned that the punitive sanctions currently in place would be made even tougher if Pyongyang proceeds in detonating another test device. The American threat heightens tensions on the Korean Peninsula as the US and South Korea conduct their largest-ever annual joint military exercises, designed to rehearse a war against North Korea. South Korean President Park Geun-hye declared on Monday that signs of increased activity near North Koreas nuclear test site indicated that another test was being prepared. We are in a situation in which we cannot predict what provocations North Korea might conduct to break away from isolation and to consolidate the regime, she said. Park ordered the South Korean military to stay on high alert. The North Korean official media reported last month that the countrys leader, Kim Jong Un, had ordered a nuclear warhead explosion test and a test fire of several kinds of ballistic rockets able to carry nuclear warheads within a short time. A nuclear test might be timed to coincide with a congress of the ruling Workers Party, the first since 1980, due to be held in early May. The US already pushed harsh sanctions through the UN Security Council during March in response to a fourth North Korean nuclear test in January, followed by the launching of a long-range rocket in February. The UN measures were designed to cripple the North Korean economy, including a total ban on exports of gold, titanium ore, vanadium ore and rare earth minerals and a ban, unless for livelihood purposes, on exports of coal, iron ore and iron, and oil sales to North Korea. US Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Russel told Reuters on Tuesday that any new nuclear test by North Korea would trigger new sanctions. Like a regime of medicine, the dosage can be upped when the effects fall short of whats required, he said. Russel suggested the US could target remittances sent by North Koreans working abroad. A South Korean study put the number of such workers, mainly employed in China and Russia, as high as 150,000 and their remittances to North Korea at $900 million annually. On Monday, the UN Security Council released a list of additional items related to North Koreas nuclear and missile programs banned under existing sanctions, including certain aluminium, nickel and cobalt magnets, large steel bars and tubes, frequency converters and some chemicals. US Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, after meeting with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts in Seoul on Tuesday, told the media: If North Korea undertakes additional provocations, the existing Security Council resolution calls for additional significant measures so we would anticipate that in that event that is exactly what the international community would do. Pointing to the US-led nuclear deal struck with Iran, Blinken indicated that the door was open to talks with North Korea, but insisted that Pyongyang had to make a fundamental choice to freeze and roll back its nuclear program and allow inspectors to come in and create time and space to see if we could agree on a comprehensive agreement. The intensifying US pressure is not primarily directed at Pyongyang, but against Beijing, as part of the Obama administrations pivot to Asia. North Koreas nuclear tests provide Washington with a convenient pretext for its military build-up in North East Asia, including the stationing of anti-ballistic missile systems in South Korea and Japan that are integral to the Pentagons preparations for war with China. With its bellicose but empty threats, the North Korean regime plays directly into the hands of US imperialism. Its nuclear and missile tests have nothing to do with defending North Korea from attack, but rather are a desperate and futile attempt to pressure Washington to reach an accommodation. Pyongyang has been pressing for decades for a peace treaty with the US to formally conclude the 1950-53 Korean War as a means of achieving diplomatic recognition and opening up the country to foreign investment. In testimony to the US Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, General Vincent Brooks, who has been nominated to lead US forces in South Korea, played up the threat posed by North Koreas limited nuclear and missile capacity. Theyre struggling with getting the program up and running, he said. Over time, I believe were going to see them acquire these capabilities if theyre not stopped. Brooks accused China of not doing enough to rein in its North Korean ally. The Chinese are the one country that still has economic leverage but they are reluctant to put it to full use because they dont think itll work and they are worried about the costs. The Chinese regime is caught in a bind, which the US is exploiting. Beijing is deeply concerned that North Koreas nuclear tests will provide a pretext to Japan and South Korea to develop their own nuclear weapons. At the same time, it is worried that the unstable regime in Pyongyang could collapse under the pressure of harsh economic sanctions, opening the door for an intervention by the US and its allies. In a sign of Beijings nervousness, the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy reported that the Chinese military has sent 2,000 troops to the border with North Korea. Some of the troops are trained to measure radioactivity in the event that North Korea carries out a nuclear test. The current joint US-South Korean war gamesFoal Eagle and Key Resolvewill only heighten fears in Pyongyang and Beijing. The drills underway are the largest ever, involving 300,000 South Korean troops and 17,000 US personnel, backed by hi-tech armoured vehicles and artillery, as well as air and sea power. This years exercises are based on a new joint operational plan known as OPLAN 5015, which shifts the strategy for war against North Korea from a nominally defensive stance to an offensive one. Details leaked to the media envisage pre-emptive attacks on North Koreas nuclear and missile sites, as well as decapitation raids by special forces units to kill top North Korean leaders, as a prelude to the seizure of the entire Korean Peninsula. US military firepower was on display again this week. Thousands of US and South Korean personnel, supported by helicopters, surveillance aircraft and a warship, conducted the largest ever drill to counter any North Korean military infiltration. Last Friday, the South Korean and US air forces launched their two-week Max Thunder exercise, involving more than 100 aircraft and nearly 2,000 military personnel, designed to deter and respond to North Korea. Michelle Bridges claims to have never met someone who is obese and happy. (Photo: Network Ten) In a TV interview on Monday night, personal trainer Michelle Bridges who works with contestants on the Australian version of The Biggest Loser was asked if she had an agenda when it comes to overweight men and women. What she said is causing a firestorm of negative feedback. If you are happy where you are, more power to you, she told Australian Story. But I can tell you, Im yet to meet someone who is morbidly obese and happy. Related: Why Thin-Shaming Is Not OK Either Very few are taking Bridgess fat-shaming comments kindly. Specifically, Twitter couldnt wait to tell the professional trainer just how wrong she was. https://twitter.com/AnnaMarisaKant/status/722305822626189312 https://twitter.com/jocelynseip/status/721912132288163840 https://twitter.com/thatsironical/status/721912254371770369 Former co-worker and Biggest Loser host Ajay Rochester also had some thoughts for the TV physical trainer. She Instagrammed a shot of her bare behind with the caption, Michelle Bridges can kiss my fat happy ass. Related: Parents Go to Battle With Blue Shield Over Daughters Anorexia Treatment Australian radio personality Chrissie Swan also weighed in. In fact, she said she has known the trainer a long time, and she should eat her words. Hi, Michelle, if you are listening, remember me? Ive known you for years, Swan said on her show. We have met many, many times. You can take it back now. Im happy. Ultimately, we all have good days and bad days, happy days and sad days but the fact that popular culture perpetuates the idea that overweight should mean unhappy is extremely detrimental, psychologically. All we are saying is you should not judge someones entire character by what they look like, Swan said on Nova 101. According to counselor and psychologist Karla Ivanovich, PhD an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, Springfield and an expert on obesity stigmatization Bridges is perpetuating a weight stereotype that is unfair and untrue. Story continues To arbitrarily assign qualities based on someones weight is unhealthy for all involved, speaks to societys views about thinness as a measure of beauty and perfection, and casts a lot of shame on a profession [trainers] that desires to help people too, Ivankovich tells Yahoo Beauty. She should not be perpetuating the cycle of abuse so pervasive in our society. There are a lot of unhappy thin people, yet we dont assign their unhappiness to the fact that they dont eat more. So, why are fat people always taking the brunt of negativity? Proponents of fat-shaming propose that obese individuals would be best served if they could be given a dose of shame, Ivankovich says. In doing so, they believe the person would be more likely to drop unhealthy weight as a means of gaining societal acceptance. In reality, Ivankovich says, shaming isnt effective or welcome. Australian DJ and KIIS 101.1 radio host Meshel Laurie agreed with Swan, Ivankovich, and the Twitterverse. During her Tuesday show, she said that Bridges was forming her views from a difficult perspective because she is in the business of meeting people who have come to her because they are unhappy. Although Laurie knows she carries a few extra pounds by societal standards, she insisted that she is content with herself and said she was preaching body acceptance to her son. He said to me, Mummy, youre fat, she told listeners. I said, Yeah and thats OK. Im really happy. Im a really happy person. I meant it from the absolute pit of my soul. Ivankovich says fat-shaming comments have no purpose or place. She generalized and stigmatized a group that is already marginalized, she explains. Had she made a statement like this about a race or people with disabilities, it would have been automatically unacceptable. Thankfully, Laurie (and many others) know what real happiness looks likes. Im such a lucky person, she explained to her KIIS 101.1 listeners. Ive got two arms that work, two legs that work. A brain thats sharp. It is actually possible to be fat and happy, I promise you. Lets keep in touch! Follow Yahoo Beauty on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Illustrations by Norah Stone. Dope, weed, reefer, ganja judging by monikers alone, one could easily declare that marijuana has about as much sex appeal as a stoner in a classic comedy. (Apologies if Cheech really does it for you.) And yet, as we write this, cannabis-infused soaps, lotions, shampoos, perfumes, and other assorted beautifying potions are piled high all around us. Related: Why Blake Livelys Hair Always Looks So Damn Good Some of their packaging proudly flaunts the familiar leaves. Others discreetly display the magic ingredient on the back of the bottle. But these arent all obscure, made-in-my-kitchen companies were talking major beauty brands here. Related: The Craziest Beauty Routines of the Rich & Famous Pro-pot day spas are also helping to advance marijuanas makeover. The LoDo Massage Studio in Denver and Renu Day Spa in Deerfield, IL, both incorporate cannabis-spiked creams into their most popular body treatments. LoDos Mile High Massage elevates a basic Swedish rubdown with a hit of pain-relieving lotion laced with tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD) two of the most potent active chemicals made by the Cannabis sativa plant. Both are known for their analgesic and anti-inflammatory powers THC, of course, is responsible for weeds inebriating effects. When combined with massage, they can ease muscle soreness, increase mobility, even lessen the achiness that develops after deep-tissue work, says Alexi Atkins, a massage therapist at LoDo. But to answer everyones burning question: No, cannabis creams cannot get you high. They arent designed to penetrate the skin or enter the bloodstream, says James Kennedy, founder of Apothecanna. Related: Everything Youve Ever Wanted to Know About Lip Injections Spafinder Wellness 365 reports that many marijuana dispensaries have been aligning themselves with the spa school of thought, adopting similar, blissed-out offerings, like massage, acupuncture, medicinal smoothies, and consults with naturopaths. Editor-in-chief Elaine DFarley says the growing support for marijuana legalization and an increased awareness of the potential benefits of cannabis are the driving forces behind this movement. As it stands, Colorado, Alaska, Oregon, Washington state, and Washington, D.C., have green-lit recreational use of pot; 23 states allow some form of medicinal use. And with more legalization initiatives on the 2016 ballot, many more states could follow suit later this year. Clinical studies have found THC to be a pain reliever, antioxidant, and suppressor of seizures. CBD has anxiety-quelling, antibacterial, even cancer-killing properties. In the derm realm, these same molecules are proving to be useful remedies for treating skin woes, like acne, psoriasis, and eczema (more on that ahead). Yet, despite all the buzz, our understanding of cannabis and the ways it can benefit our skin, hair, and senses has been hazy at bestuntil now. Ahead, we call on dermatologists, cosmetic chemists, perfumers, botanists, even a couple of neuroscientists and psychopharmacology researchers (the guys who investigate myriad uses for medical marijuana) to enlighten us on the age-old ingredient when it comes to makeup, fragrance, skin, and hair care. Its high time, wouldnt you say? Refinery29 in no way encourages illegal activity and would like to remind its readers that marijuana usage continues to be an offense under Federal Law, regardless of state marijuana laws. To learn more, click here. Story continues Why does our body lotion tout hemp, but our perfume says cannabis? Botanists have been debating pot taxonomy for centuries, but heres the bottom line: All of the weed extracts used in cosmetics come from the one-and-onlyCannabis sativa plant. But there are two main varieties of this plant, typically referred to as the drug type and the fiber type. (Still with us?) The joint-bound kind is called marijuana or cannabis, and is specifically bred to contain loads of high-inducing THC. Type two is industrial hemp. Its defining characteristic is its low level of THC (less than .3%), which makes it legal to sell in the US. Related: What to Do If You Cant Get Kylies Lip Kits You can smoke an entire field of this crop and never get high, says Jennifer Hirsch, a botanist for The Body Shop, which sources its hemp seeds from small family farms in France. The seeds we press dont contain detectable levels of THC our oil is tested to confirm this, she adds. Related: Fake a Facelift With These Haircuts Hemp seed oil is the key ingredient in most pot-inspired shampoos, washes, lotions, lip balms, and the like. From hemp, you can also extract CBD, and while its illegal to use anything but the seeds and stems of the plant when making products that cross state lines, in places where there are hemp bills on the books, we can tap into the [more cannabinoid-rich] flowers and leaves as long as the resulting product doesnt leave the state, explains Kennedy of Apothecanna, which has THC products that are sold only in licensed marijuana dispensaries. (You can buy the companys CBD-only lotions online and across the country.) Different parts of the plant yield distinct beauty benefits, which well dive into next. Hemp seed oil is a supercharged moisturizer and healer. Not only is it brimming with vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, it provides the perfect balance of inflammation-taming essential fatty acids, says cosmetic chemist NiKita Wilson. Related: Glow International With These Asian Beauty Products Its a rare source of gamma-linolenic acid, a sort of unicorn among omegas, necessary for healthy skin cell growth, notes Katarina Maloney, cofounder of Hemp Health, Inc. Its unique constitution makes hemp seed oil a smart remedy for eczema, psoriasis, and run-of-the-mill dryness, as it helps repair the skins moisture barrier by filling in cracks between cells to reduce water loss and shut out irritants, says Joshua Zeichner, MD, director of cosmetic and clinical research in dermatology at Mount Sinai Hospital. Its also one of the driest of all natural oils, says Wilson, absorbing fast without greasiness. Even better, the oil packs a ton of protein to help strengthen skin, hair, and nails, adds Whitney Bowe, MD, a dermatologist in New York City. Our current hemp obsessions: The Body Shop Hemp Hand Protector, Marley Natural Hemp Seed Soap, Natures Gate Hemp + Argan Oil Nourishing Shampoo, Oyin Handmade Honey Hemp Conditioner, Nubian Heritage Indian Hemp & Haitian Vetiver Body Lotion,Cibaderm Body Wash, Mad Hippie Antioxidant Facial Oil, and Butter Elixir Lip. There are countless body lotions, salves, and sprays promising to leave us comfortably numb or at least mellow out tense muscles. They rely on blends of potent extracts pulled from the flowers, leaves, and stalk of the cannabis plant. They work by interacting with our bodys endocannabinoid systemseriously, thats the actual name of this intricate network that regulates pain, appetite, immune function, mood, and more. Throughout the brain and body, there are receptors that click on in the presence of cannabis-based chemicals. (As in, this is your brain on drugs.) We even make our own innate versions, which have a calming effect on the body. Cannabinoid receptors have been detected in skin cells, hair follicles, and in the cells lining oil and sweat glands, says Dr. Bowe. So, when applied to the skin, CBD and THC bind to those receptors to reduce irritation. Thats the theory, anyway. Do they work? If the source of the pain is very localized in the skin, rubbing on a concentrated solution of cannabis might help reduce the pain, says a slightly skeptical Gary Wenk, PhD, professor of psychology, neuroscience, and medical genetics. Though bear in mind that theres a tremendous placebo effect with cannabis-based medicines, especially anything pertaining to topicals and massage, adds Ethan Russo, MD, a board-certified neurologist, psychopharmacology researcher, and past president of the International Cannabinoid Research Society. Bottom line: More randomized clinical trials are needed. Move over, benzoyl peroxide: Cannabis topicals can work quite well for acne, especially those containing cannabidiol [or CBD, the non-psychoactive part of the plant], which is anti-inflammatory, reduces sebum production, and even acts as an antibiotic, says Dr. Russo. A 2014 study in The Journal of Clinical Investigation looked at the effects of CBD on oil glands and found it actually stopped their cells from growing. While the study has limitations, because it was done in a lab setting [think: skin cells in petri dishes], the cannabis extract definitely shows promise as a possible acne therapy, says Dr. Bowe. CBD isnt the only pimple-fighter in the plant, however. One study found THC to have 20 times the anti-inflammatory power of aspirin (derivative of salicylic acid) and twice that of blemish-shrinking hydrocortisone. Limonene, a fragrant oil abundant in most cannabis strains, has been shown to knock out P. acnes the bacteria behind breakouts better than germ-killing triclosan. While face-focused cannabis products are surprisingly scarce, we did discover a CBD lotion on Etsy by the Colorado company Urban Chaos, which has racked up hundreds of positive reviews, many from acne sufferers. You might also try using a gentle antibacterial wash with hemp oil, like Dr. Bronners Tea Tree Pure Castille Soap, to soothe and clarify stressed-out skin. For the rest of our insights, visit Refinery29. By: Jolene Edgar From Esquire The cancer on American justice that is the civil forfeiture system is finally moving states to realize that turning their citizens into ATMs for the benefit of corrupt local cops and sheriffs is no way to run a Constitution. It was a foul-but integral-element of the stupid "war" on drugs. People have been raising hell about it for a while now. (To be entirely fair, the libertarian right and the civil-liberties left have both been pushing in the same direction, which gives me some hope for the thus-far-chimerical bipartisan effort for criminal justice reform.) In Nebraska, it seems, the members of the state legislature have decided they don't give much of a damn who thinks they're soft on crime. Civil forfeiture has ensnared a wide swath of victims in Nebraska. A Peruvian pastor once had $14,000 seized during a traffic stop. Only after the local chapter of the ACLU intervened was he able to recover his cash. Last year, a federal appellate court upheld forfeiting more than $63,000 in savings from a decorated Air Force veteran, even though he was never charged with a crime. In addition to this practice being an offense against the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments, it obviously was a marvelous environment for official corruption. The Air Force veteran's story is a nightmare that would have driven Kafka to writing Harlequin romances. After gaining Brewer's consent, Wintle walked around the car with a canine unit; the dog alerted to the trunk. When he searched the trunk, Wintle found two backpacks that had a "strong odor of raw marijuana" and $63,530 in cash. Brewer said he was travelling to Los Angles to visit his uncle and planned to use the money as a down payment for a house. According to Brewer, he had been saving that cash during his military service and from disability payments. Wintle did not believe his story, so Brewer's cash was seized and his car was towed. At the Douglas County Sheriff's Office, a later search "located disability documents, old paystubs and tax returns in the vehicle, along with two articles entitled 'How to Make Wicked Hash' and 'How to Make Weed Oil Without Blowing Yourself Up.'" But deputies never found any drugs in the car. Nor did the government ever charge Brewer with a crime. Deputy Wintle didn't even issue Brewer a traffic citation-the basis for the stop. So, all hail the mighty Unicameral! This is a good day for the Constitution. From Cosmopolitan Debris found on the coast of Mozambique is "almost certainly" from missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said Tuesday. "Part No. 1 was a flap track fairing segment, almost certainly from the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft, registered 9M-MRO," the report said of a piece found on a beach in December. "Part No. 2 was a horizontal stabiliser panel segment, almost certainly from the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft," ATSB said of a second piece found about 135 miles away from the first on February 27. MH370 went missing March 8, 2014 - the Boeing 777 disappeared from radars while traveling from Malaysia to Beijing. It was announced that all 239 passengers and crew were presumed dead last January but the exact fate of the plane has remained a mystery. Follow Kate on Twitter. Just in time for Earth Day 2016, Disneynature has unveiled the first look at its newest entry, Born in China (watch exclusively above), which will hit theaters on Earth Day 2017. And be warned if susceptible to bouts of adorability overload: Its got a baby panda. The studio behind Earth, Oceans, Bears, and Chimpanzee is calling Born in China its most ambitious film yet for the lengths the filmmakers went to capture footage in the Asian wild or the heights, as it were. The production crew ascended the 16,000-foot-high Qinghai-Tibet Plateau to film the real-life adventures of three different families in the animal kingdom: monkeys, snow leopards, and pandas. Disneynature is partnering with World Wildlife Fund and donating a percentage of opening week ticket sales to help protect pandas and establish new programs to protect snow leopards in China. And if that isnt reason enough to go did we mention the baby panda? BUYERS: Fredrik Eklund and Derek Kaplan LOCATION: Roxbury, CT PRICE: $3,500,000 (last asking) SIZE: 5,144 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Top Manhattan real estate broker and Million Dollar Listing New York star Fredrik Eklund sells so much high-end real estate in the Big Apple and in his native Stockholm hes able to maintain a property portfolio that likely rivals many of his multi-millionaire clients. Last summer the high-strung high-kicker and his handsome husband, Zimbabwe born and South Africa reared abstract painter Derek Kaplan, agreed to pay an unknown but no doubt considerable amount of dough for an investment/vacation condo at the not-yet-completed Renzo Piano-designed Eighty Seven Park complex in Miami Beach. Now comes word via Mister Eklunds own Instagram account the comely couple have not-so-quietly snatched up a scenically sited spread in Connecticuts historic and picturesquely pastoral Litchfield County that was last listed on the open market at $3.5 million. Listing details, property records, and other online resources we turned up show the stately, classic Georgian residence was reimagined by a top NY designer that would be John Michael Murphy who acquired the property in August 2014 for $1.325 million and, as designers tend to do, refurbished the place to his own quite traditional specifications and tastes. The country estate, about 90 miles outside of but worlds away from Manhattan, spans 8.26 partly wooded acres on a quiet country lane just outside the itty-bitty community of Roxbury where a few other high-profile homeowners include Dustin Hoffman, Daniel Day-Lewis, Denis Leary, Stephen Sondheim, and Vanity Fair publisher Graydon Carter. The 5,144-square-foot residences center hall entry leads to ample but still comfortably cozy living and dining rooms plus a den, all with hardwood floorboards and fireplaces. The freshly renovated kitchen is outfitted with stone counter tops and white subway tile back splashes that extend all the way to the ceiling and somewhat curiously appear to wrap around the walls of the adjoining breakfast area. A screening room, which may or may not be in the basement, offers built-in media equipment and a wet bar. There are four bedrooms and four bathrooms including an upper floor master suite that Mister Eklund wrote on his Instagram announcement made him misty-eyed the first time he entered it and comprises, per listing details, a large bedroom with fireplace plus a luxury bath and step down dressing area with two huge walk in closets perfect for all of Mister Eklunds designer suits and Mister Kaplans painting smocks. Set nobly high on the property to take advantage of panoramic vistas that sweep over the tree tops of thickly forested hills, the house opens to a sizable and partly covered and boxwood ringed stone terrace and overlooks rolling lawns, ancient stone walls, an infinity edge swimming pool, a postcard-ready pond stocked with fish. Story continues Given Mister Eklunds screaming professional success and resulting pecuniary firepower, its not too much of a surprise that in addition to buying a couple of multi-million dollar weekend places the Eklund-Kaplans have also recently upgraded their Manhattan living situation. In late 2012, the year before they were married, Mister Eklund paid $1.65 million for a loft-style condo in the Flatiron District that was sold in May 2015 for $3.125 million, a fair amount above its final asking price of $2.995 million. Around the time of that sale we heard through the real estate gossip grapevine and circumstantial digital evidence we turned up certainly suggests the couple moved to a high-floor rental at the supermodel skinny One Madison tower, the same swank complex where Rupert Murdoch owns a triplex penthouse he has on the market at a mind-freezing $72 million. Whether they did or did not pay through the nose to lease a luxury spread at One Madison, property records are quite clear that in February of this year (2016) the couple shelled out $5,426,000 for a Hudson River-facing three-bedroom and 3.5 bathroom condo in a newly built boutique building tucked into the coveted northern tip of the terrifically trendy and tremendously expensive Tribeca neighborhood. Presumably theyll set up camp there until such time theyre ready for another upgrade. Listing photos: Klemm Real Estate (via Zillow) Taiwanese Diplomats Fly to China to Negotiate Their Involvement in the Probe of 45 Taiwanese Telecoms Scam Suspects Deported from Kenya Taiwan's deportation of the telecom fraud suspects was seen by mainland China as tolerance to crime. (Photo : Getty Images) Diplomats from Taipei headed to Beijing for talks regarding two separate telecom scams, one of which led to the deportation of more than 40 Taiwanese nationals from Kenya. On Wednesday, a delegation from the island traveled to the mainland to convince China to "collaborate" with them in solving the telecom scam case that involved 45 Taiwanese citizens, Focus Taiwan reported. Advertisement Last week, Taiwan was enraged when Kenya "forcibly" deported 45 Taiwanese nationals who were caught and linked to a telecom scam in the country. Why Kenya Deported the Suspects to China Kenya discovered a group of fraudsters operating outside the capital city of Nairobi. Since they were Taiwanese nationals, they should have been deported to their home island, according to Taiwan's reasoning. However, Kenya does not have official ties with Taiwan and does not see the island as a separate nation from China, according to Reuters. As a matter of fact, Kenya considers the island a part of the so-called "one China," which is why the country chose to deport all of the people suspected of fraud including 32 Chinese and 45 Taiwanese on Wednesday last week. Citing China's security ministry, Reuters said that the Taiwanese suspects were "falsely presenting themselves as law enforcement officers to extort money from people on the Chinese mainland through telephone calls." Because their victims were mostly Chinese, they should be prosecuted in the mainland, per the Ministry of Public Security. The Taiwanese Delegates' Goal According to Reuters, Taiwan hopes to get involved in the trial of the telecom scam suspects because China's judicial system has been widely criticized in the island. "The Chinese judicial system is in question for many people in Taiwan. They are wondering if those people can get a fair trial in China," Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party legislator Lo Chih-cheng told the outlet. Because of this, Taiwan sent a group of 10 diplomats headed by the director of the Department of International and Cross-Strait Legal Affairs of Taiwan's Ministry of Justice, Chen Wen-chi. According to Chen, Taiwan hopes to convince China to cooperate with their proposed joint investigation of the criminal activities that involved their citizens without sacrificing their human rights. "We also hope to help set a precedent for the two sides to deal with similar cases in the future," she added during an interview with the press prior to their departure from the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport. Last week, the Taiwanese government gained support from the United States who had been following the case because one of the suspected fraudsters sent to China was also a U.S. citizen. "We encourage Beijing to engage with Taipei to resolve this issue on the basis of dignity and respect," urged Anna Richey-Allen, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department. Johannesburg (AFP) - South Africa will not push to lift the global ban on rhino horn trading, the government said Thursday, despite pressure from some campaigners who say the ban fuels poaching. Rhino breeders want the Asian demand for rhino horn to be met by horns sawn off anaesthetised live animals, arguing that a legal source of horn could end poaching deaths. The government's decision came ahead of a meeting in Johannesburg in September of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), where the global ban could be reviewed. "Cabinet approved the recommendations made by the Committee of Inquiry on the feasibility of trading in rhino horns," said a government statement. "The committee recommends that the current mode of keeping the country's stock levels be kept as opposed to the trading in rhino horns." South Africa is home to around 20,000 rhinos, some 80 percent of the worldwide population. Rhino horn is composed mainly of keratin, the same component as in human nails, but it is sold in powdered form as a supposed cure for cancer and other diseases in Vietnam and China. Rhino horn can fetch as much as $60,000 (55,000 euros) per kilogramme, more than gold or cocaine. The World Wildlife Fund welcomes the government announcement, saying "we do not believe that a well-managed legal trade is feasible without negative impacts for wild rhinos". But Pelham Jones, chairman of the Private Rhino Owners Association, said it was a "severe setback" for the long-term survival of the animal. "The poachers will certainly be celebrating this decision because it ensures only illegal trade will continue and all benefits going to the criminals," he said. Further legal battles are expected. In a case bought by two game breeders, a South African judge in November lifted a domestic ban on trade in rhino horn, alarming conservationists. The government lost an appeal against the decision, but has said it will take the case to the Supreme Court of Appeal. Story continues Nearly 1,200 rhinos were killed by poachers in South Africa in 2015 in another year of carnage by poachers driven by the soaring price for rhino horn. Fewer than 100 rhinos were poached in 2008, since when numbers have rocketed. A record 1,215 were killed in 2014. Many of the armed gangs are based in Mozambique, across the border from South Africa's Kruger National Park. BEIRUT (Reuters) - Dozens of trucks carrying humanitarian aid set off on Thursday for the town of Rastan in Syria's Homs province for a delivery to a besieged area where supplies have not been able to enter for months, the Red Crescent said. Rastan was one of the first areas to be bombed by Russian warplanes when Moscow intervened in the five-year Syrian war in September. New government air strikes have targeted the area in recent days as a partial truce in western Syria has unraveled. A spokesman for the Red Cross, which was to deliver the aid alongside the Red Crescent, said Thursday's convoy included 65 trucks carrying food and medical aid. He said it was one of the largest joint humanitarian aid deliveries in Syria. United Nations and Red Cross aid deliveries have reached a number of besieged areas in Syria this year, including during a U.S.-Russian-brokered cessation of hostilities agreement that took effect in February. The truce is now in tatters after fighting intensified, and peace talks in Geneva appeared to collapse this week. Fresh fighting has displaced tens of thousands more people in recent days near the northern city of Aleppo, the United Nations says. Many locations besieged by government forces and their allies, Islamic State fighters and other insurgents remain hard to reach, aid agencies say. (Reporting by John Davison, editing by Larry King) TORONTO (Reuters) - A small Air Canada passenger plane was damaged while landing late on Wednesday in the eastern province of Newfoundland and Labrador, and three passengers were taken to hospital, the airline said on Thursday. Two of the passengers were released from hospital Wednesday, the airline said in a statement, and one is expected to be released on Thursday. The flight, carrying 14 passengers and two crew, sustained damage to its landing gear as it set down at Gander International Airport, Air Canada said. The flight came from Goose Bay, another community in the province, and was part of Air Canada Express, operated on behalf of the airline by the local firm Exploits Valley Air Services. One passenger said the weather was snowy and windy during the landing, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. The broadcaster posted a picture showing the plane resting on its front with a broken nose cone. An Air Canada spokesman declined further comment. The airline's statement said the passengers walked off the aircraft and those not taken to hospital were provided hotel accommodation for the night. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada is investigating the incident, Air Canada said. (Reporting by Ethan Lou in Toronto; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Bill Trott) American Express Company AXP just released its first quarter fiscal 2016 earnings results, posting earnings of $1.45 per share and revenue of $8.1 billion. Currently, AXP has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold), but it is subject to change following the release of the companys latest earnings report. Here are 5 key statistics from this just announced report below. American Express: 1. Beat earnings estimates. The company posted earnings of $1.45, topping our Zacks Consensus Estimate of $1.36. 2. Beat revenue estimates. The company saw revenue figures of $8.1 billion, surpassing our consensus estimate of $8.004 billion and reflecting a 1.9% increase on a year-over-year basis. 3. Reported net income of $1.4 billion, down 6% from the year-ago period. 4. Posted consolidated provisions for losses of $434 million, up 3% from $420 million a year ago. 5. AXP was up $2.48, or 3.81%, to $67.50 as of 4:38 PM ET in after-hours trading shortly after its earnings report was released. Heres a graph that looks at American Express Street Actual and Estimate EPS: American Express Company is primarily engaged in the business of providing travel related services, financial advisory services and international banking services throughout the world. American Express Travel Related Services Company, Inc. provides a variety of products and services, including, global network services, the American Express Card, the Optima Card and other consumer and corporate lending products, stored value products, and several others. Check back later for our full analysis onAmerican Express first quarter earnings report! Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report AMER EXPRESS CO (AXP): Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research London (AFP) - A plaque was unveiled in central London on Thursday marking the place where William Shakespeare lodged in the city, in time for the 400th anniversary of the playwright's death. Actress Fiona Shaw read out Shakespeare's "Sonnet 55", while hand bell ringers and a children's choir gave performances. "William Shakespeare had lodgings near here in 1604, at the house of Christopher and Mary Mountjoy", the blue plaque reads. The plaque has been installed on a low brick wall in Noble Street, by remains of the Roman wall surrounding the City of London, and among its modern concrete and glass towers. It was unveiled by David Wootton, a former lord mayor of the city. Nicholas Kenyon, managing director of the nearby Barbican Centre performing arts venue, told AFP: "We wanted to install a blue plaque here because this is very near the place where Shakespeare lodged in the city. "It was always known that he had been here but it was only recently that it was established where it was." The 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death on Saturday will be marked in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon, central England, with a day of theatre, dancing, music and parades. Some of Britain's finest actors are returning to the town's Royal Shakespeare Theatre to perform his most celebrated scenes, in a special show being broadcast live on British television and to cinemas around Europe. Irish actress Shaw, who has worked extensively with the Royal Shakespeare Company, which is based at the Stratford theatre, said the anniversary had triggered a reawakening of awareness about the Bard. "In this 400-year celebration of his death, we are noticing absolutely everything about Shakespeare: where he was, maybe to the point you can't believe the person existed. So we are reminding ourselves of him and his greatness," she told AFP. Less than a week before the penultimate Super Tuesday of the 2016 presidential primary season, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are comfortably seated in the drivers seat. With landslide victories in New Yorks presidential primary on Tuesday, the pair solidified their frontrunner positions and left their respective rivals gasping for breath as the contest pivots to next week when five eastern states will hold their primaries. Related: Trump and Clinton Sweep New York and Score Big Delegates Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island will vote next week and polls show Trump and Clinton with healthy leads that could grow after their resounding wins in New York. The two now have the chance to break away from their rivals for good and begin focusing their attention on what is sure to be a bruising general election. On the GOP side, Sen. Ted Cruz (TX) is perilously close to being mathematically eliminated, while Ohio Governor John Kasich has thus far only managed to win his home state neither seems ready to change the dynamics of the race enough to prevent Trump from collecting the 1,237 delegates he needs to become the Republican standard-bearer. Related: Hey, GOP: Maybe Its Time to Really Rig This Election Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders (VT), coming off a stinging, double-digit loss in New York, will have to make some serious moves if hes going to add any more states to his win column any time soon. Below is a snapshot of the polls ahead of next weeks contests: Pennsylvania 210 Dem delegates, 71 GOP delegates Democrats: Clinton: 51.3 percent Sanders: 38.3 percent GOP: Trump: 44.8 percent Cruz: 24.3 percent Kasich: 23.5 percent Maryland 118 Dem delegates, 38 GOP delegates Democrats: Clinton: 57 percent Sanders: 36.3 percent GOP: Trump: 41 percent Kasich 26.3 percent Cruz: 24. 5 percent Connecticut -- 70 Dem delegates, 28 GOP delegates Democrats: Clinton: 50 percent Sanders: 42.5 percent GOP: Trump: 49 percent Kasich: 27 percent Cruz: 18 percent Story continues Delaware 31 Dem delegates, 16 GOP delegates Polling not available Rhode Island 33 Dem delegates, 19, GOP delegates Democrats: Clinton: 49 percent Sanders 40 percent GOP: Trump: 43 percent Kasich: 14 percent Cruz: 10 percent Considering that almost all of the remaining White House hopefuls announced their bids over a year ago, it would be nice to think that next Tuesday will be the last Super Tuesday of the 2016 campaign. But with Sanders promising to stay in the race until the Democratic National Convention this summer and Cruz and Kasich hoping for a contested Republican convention there will be at least one more when voters in California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and North and South Dakota go to the polls on June 7. How much drama lies in store for that date very much depends on how much campaigning Cruz, Kasich and Sanders do in the next week and if theyre able to close the sizeable polling gaps facing them. Top Reads from The Fiscal Times: Coatzacoalcos (Mexico) (AFP) - Anguished relatives nervously awaited news of their loved ones Thursday outside a Mexican petrochemical plant where an explosion killed at least 13 people and sent toxic smoke billowing into the air. Starting at dawn, family members flocked to a military cordon set up around the plant after Wednesday's explosion, which blew out the windows of nearby stores and homes and triggered panic among locals still traumatized by a deadly blast at the same facility 25 years ago. About 300 people had gathered by midday outside the plant in Coatzacoalcos, in the eastern state of Veracruz, some weeping loudly, some scuffling with soldiers. "We want them to cut to the chase and give us (our relatives). If they don't let us through, we'll force our way in," said Guadalupe Torres, whose 21-year-old brother Fernando was working a temporary job at the plant and was among the 18 officially missing. Many outside the plant said they feared the real missing number was far higher. A worker who survived the explosion told journalists some 300 employees were on site when the blast occurred. "I was out back when the first explosion came. We saw the windows collapse, the iron bars crumple, because (the facilities) are extremely old," he said. "When the second explosion happened, I saw bodies fly off the scaffolding." Pemex chief executive Jose Antonio Gonzalez Anaya said the explosion was caused by a gas leak. The plant, known as Petroquimica Mexicana de Vinilo (PMV), "uses flammable materials like chlorine and ethanol but we do not know the cause of the leak," he told Televisa television. Pemex co-owns the plant with a private company, Mexichem, which operates the facility. An employee of a contractor at the site, Jose Antonio Galicia, said the plant had been registering leaks for weeks. - Schools closed - The release of toxic columns of black smoke sowed panic in the area as officials initially warned residents to stay indoors. Story continues But Mexican authorities and Pemex officials later said the cloud posed no threat to the population. Around 2,000 evacuated residents returned home Thursday, and life in the town was returning to normal as the dissipating cloud drifted into the distance -- though schools remained closed. President Enrique Pena Nieto sent his condolences to victims' families and announced he would visit the site. The death toll could rise further as 136 people were injured, 13 of them critically. Soldiers eventually began allowing small groups of family members through the security cordon to ask about their relatives' fate. - 'Time bomb' - Some residents were still in shock. "I left my house running. I thought the whole city was going to catch fire," said Marcela Andrade Moreno, whose windows were blown out. Other terrified locals feared a repeat of the 1991 explosion at the same facility. The death toll from that incident officially stands at six, although local media insist the number is much higher. "We live in a time bomb," said Abelardo Garduza, a merchant from the village of Allende, located a few kilometers from the plant. Pemex has had to deal with several deadly accidents at its land-based and offshore facilities in recent years. Even its headquarters - a skyscraper in the heart of Mexico City - was hit in January 2013 by a blast caused by a gas buildup, killing 37 people. Accidents have hit several oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, while fires have erupted in pipelines after fuel thieves punctured them. In February, two people were killed and at least seven injured in a blaze at a Pemex oil platform off the coast of Campeche, also in the southeast. Pemex provides one-fifth of the Mexican government's revenue but has posted huge losses amid crumbling production and oil prices. The government has implemented a sweeping reform of the energy sector which opens it to foreign investors for the first time in decades and partly aims to help modernize aging infrastructure. Parents call for laws to prevent the vaccine scandal from ever happening again. (Photo : Getty Images) Chinese parents call for more action from the government to deliver justice for their children who they claim had experienced negative effects of the improperly stored and expired vaccines distributed illegally in the country. According to the South China Morning Post, almost 70 protesters which included both parents and children marched in front of the National Health and Family Planning Commission in Beijing while carrying slogans that call for "justice and awareness for their children's plight." Advertisement Amid the rally, some parents have also filed lawsuits supporting their cause, Liu Lixin, one of the parent activists, told Radio Free Asia. "Everybody gathered outside the National Health and Family Planning Commission today, and then we all marched to their complaints department in the Xizhimen District," he told the outlet The indictments filed by the parents stated that the illegal vaccine scam resulted in "varying degrees of harm and disability" for their children, citing some cases where some of the immunized kids had "lost the ability to live independently." Liu also declared that their group is taking steps for legislators to pass a law that would govern the purchase, handling and distribution of vaccines all over China. "We are calling for a vaccines law, because there is no legislation covering vaccinations right now, and families who have been victims of this disaster have no judicial redress," Liu said. According to the lawsuit, the parents had called on several government officials and offices to address the issue but only got sympathy and no action. Lack of judiciary action on the vaccine scam aside, Liu said that they were happy about how the court handled their lawsuits. "It went extremely smoothly, and everyone was very sympathetic and cooperative, and all of the lawsuits were filed. The judge also gave us a further 15 days to pull together all of the evidence against the National Health and Family Planning Commission," Liu said. At the high end of the smartphone market, Apple and Samsung continue to dominate as other global brands fight for scraps. This has been the case in the industry for quite some time now, and at this rate it's not likely to change anytime soon. At the low end of the market though, something curious has happened over the past few years. A wave of China-based companies has stormed the market with surprisingly capable smartphones being sold at incredibly low prices, and they have stolen a massive chunk of business from established players like Samsung, LG and HTC. Of all the companies analysts thought might be able to fight back against these budget brands, Apple certainly wasn't at the top of any lists but it looks like that's exactly what's happening. MUST SEE: 5 hidden Galaxy S7 features I wish my iPhone had In the grand scheme of things, Apple's new iPhone SE isn't terribly affordable. The $399 to $499 price range is a bargain compared to other iPhones, but perfectly capable handsets can be purchased from Chinese Android phone vendors for half the price. One such company called Xiaomi has built a massive business worth billions by copying Apple's playbook but selling low-cost smartphones instead of high-end handsets. Samsung in particular has had a great deal of trouble with these budget brands in recent years. The company's profits slid for seven consecutive quarters at one point thanks largely to pressure from these Chinese companies. Apple, on the other hand, has never fought at the low end of the market, so the impact felt from these brands hasn't been anywhere near as powerful. Interestingly, a new report claims it's now Apple that is stealing market share away from more aggressive Chinese brands thanks to the lower-cost iPhone SE. "The launch of relatively low-priced iPhone SE in China has squeezed market share from local brands, including Huawei, Xiaomi Technology, Vivo and Oppo, affecting the earning performance of these brands," Digitimes said in a new report. Story continues Of note, the site's supply chain sources have been hit or miss in the past. But other reports have also suggested the iPhone SE has been a strong performer in the region, with preorders at third-party retailers alone said to have reached 3.4 million units ahead of launch. Related stories 11 paid iPhone apps on sale for free today A brief look at what Apple may announce at WWDC this year iOS 10 concept video shows off fantastic new features we hope Apple adds More from BGR: Huge sale drops price of Google Nexus 6P to under $400 This article was originally published on BGR.com NAIROBI (Reuters) - A senior army officer and a motorcyclist and two members of an armed group have been killed in separate incidents in Burundi, officials said on Thursday, a day after the latest flareup of violence in the country's year-long crisis. Tit-for-tat killings by supporters of President Pierre Nkurunziza and his political opponents have raised concerns that Burundi could slide back into conflict, after the country emerged from an ethnically fuelled civil war in 2005. More than 400 people have been killed since Nkurunziza said he would run for a third term last year. Opponents said he was violating the constitution and a peace deal that ended the civil war. A court ruled he could run, and he won re-election in July. In one incident on Wednesday, gunmen ambushed Colonel Emmanuel Buzubona as he travelled on the back of a motorbike to his home in Bujumbura, the capital, according to Moise Nkurunziza, deputy police spokesman. "The senior officer tried to flee but he didnt make it because the attackers finished him off by throwing a grenade," Nkurunziza told Reutershe said. The motorcyclist also died. The motive was not immediately clear. Buzubona's neighbours said he had returned in September from Tanzania, where he had been an instructor at a military college for officers from the East African Community bloc. He was awaiting a new assignment, army spokesman Gaspard Baratuza said. An ethnic Hutu, Buzubona had been a member of CNDD-FDD rebel force, which became the ruling party of the president. In the civil war, Hutu rebel groups such as CNDD-FDD fought the then-Tutsi-led army. The army has since been reformed to include both Hutus and Tutsis in all ranks. Leaders of a failed coup in May included both Hutus and Tutsis. In a separate incident on Wednesday, soldiers on patrol killed two people in a clash with an armed group in Kivumu village in Mugamba southern district, 60 km southeast of Bujumbura, said Christian Nkurunziza, regional governor of the districk where Mugamba is located. "As they were patrolling, soldiers exchanged fire with an armed group of eight men, killing two people," he said. Four members of the CNDD-FDD party were killed in the same village last week. About 250,000 people have fled since violence erupted, most to border camps in neighbouring Tanzania. (Additional reporting by Patrick Nduwimana in Kigali; Writing by George Obulutsa; Editing by Edmund Blair, Larry King) TORONTO (Reuters) - Plaintiffs leading a lawsuit against online dating website Ashley Madison over a security breach that exposed the personal data of customers must publicly identify themselves to proceed with the case, a U.S. judge has ruled. Forty-two plaintiffs, seeking to represent users of the website who had their information compromised, had proceeded anonymously against Ashley Madison's Toronto-based parent company Avid Life Media, the ruling released on April 6 showed. The plaintiffs are suing Ashley Madison, a website that facilitates extramarital affairs, for failing to adequately secure their information, marketing a Full Delete Removal service that did not work, and using fake female accounts to lure male customers, according to the ruling. Their action comes after hackers who claimed to be unhappy with Avid Life's business practices publicly released Ashley Madison customer data last August. Reuters has not independently verified the authenticity of the data, emails or documents. Judge John A. Ross, of a district court in Missouri, wrote in his ruling that being publicly named as an Ashley Madison user amounts to more than common embarrassment, but noted the 42 plaintiffs have special roles in the case that require identification. The plaintiffs are "class representatives" and may need to testify or offer evidence, unlike "class members," those in the lawsuit who do not need participate as actively, Ross wrote. He ruled that the plaintiffs must either identify themselves or proceed as class members, who can remain anonymous. The "class" for the collective lawsuit has not yet been certified, the ruling noted. There are at least 10 plaintiffs who are publicly named. Avid Media did not immediately respond to a request for comment. (Reporting by Ethan Lou in Toronto; Editing by Bernadette Baum) Sydney (AFP) - Scientists are training an endangered furry marsupial -- Australia's beloved quoll -- to avoid eating toxic toads that have devastated predator populations in a novel attempt to save native fauna. Carnivorous quolls, commonly known as the native cat, are under attack from the poisonous cane toad, an invasive species from Central and South America. The toads were introduced to Australia in 1935 but are so poisonous they can kill predators that try to eat them. Numbering more than 200 million, the invasive species continue to spread across northern Australia at an estimated 40-60 kilometres (25-37 miles) a year, leaving a trail of catastrophic population declines in native predators. Now a government-funded project has been set up to train "toad-smart" northern quolls to avoid eating the poisonous toads and help re-establish a population of the marsupials in Kakadu. Quolls are also under threat from feral cats. Up to 30 trained quolls will be released in the wilds of southern Kakadu's Mary River district this year as part of a three-year plan. Quolls are exposed to food containing toad skins and nauseous chemicals which they gradually learn to avoid. A successful experimental programme from 2010 showed that the toad-smart females not only survived and reproduced but that new generations learnt to avoid eating the toads from them, resulting in a five-fold increase in local quoll numbers. "It is fantastic to see the success of this innovative programme to protect Australia's small mammals," said Environment Minister Greg Hunt on Thursday. "This is extremely important work. Without focused conservation initiatives such as this it would be unlikely the species would recover for the foreseeable future." Threatened Species Commissioner Gregory Andrews said the project was part of a Aus$750,000 (US$585,000) investment strategy to make Kakadu safe again for native animals and plants. Story continues "Quolls are an iconic carnivorous Australian marsupial and an incredibly important part of our ecosystem," he said. "By teaching the quolls not to eat cane toads and making Kakadu safe for them from feral cats, we can ensure their survival in this important world heritage-listed area." National Parks director Sally Barnes said the research had shown that each generation of quolls would learn to avoid cane toads. "We are thinking this will only need to be done once to protect quoll populations from cane toads as each generation learns to avoid them," she said. "The Kakadu research shows us that 'toad-smart' quolls can be reintroduced after a cane toad invasion." Sydney (AFP) - An Australian television crew accused of aiding a mother in the botched kidnapping of her two children in Lebanon arrived home Thursday, amid reports of a multi-million dollar deal struck with the father to drop abduction charges. Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner and the Channel Nine team were arrested and charged last week after Faulkner's son and daughter were snatched in broad daylight on a Beirut street. But they were released on bail Wednesday after the father, Ali al-Amin, decided not to pursue the charges in court. Bailed star reporter Tara Brown led her producer Stephen Rice, cameraman Ben Williamson and sound recordist David Ballment on to the earliest flight out of Beirut after their release from custody. The Nine team arrived in Sydney Thursday, touching down about 10 pm (1200 GMT) on an Emirates flight from Dubai. They were mobbed by a large media scrum as they left the airport via a private exit, and were whisked off in waiting black vans. "I'm just so glad to be home," Brown said as she was escorted by Rice to a van. Ballment added that he was looking forward to "a shower and seeing my wife". Faulkner, however, remains in Beirut for a custody hearing with her estranged husband. It was a disastrous end to the news story the crew had planned. - Deal struck - Faulkner's lawyer Ghassan Mughabghab earlier said a deal had been struck granting Amin full custody of the children in line with Lebanese law. The commercial Nine network did not mention any deal they were reportedly behind, but announced a full inquiry into the bizarre episode. The Australian newspaper said "a multi-million dollar deal was struck to drop abduction charges". "Nine pays dad to win freedom for crew and mum," Sydney's Daily Telegraph headlined, adding that "a massive sum of cash" had been paid in compensation. The Sydney Morning Herald said it had cost several hundred thousand dollars, but that an exact figure could not be confirmed. Story continues The crew and Faulkner still face potential charges by Lebanon's public prosecutor, but they can be sentenced in absentia. Amin's lawyer Hussein Berjawi told AFP he had not dropped charges against two Britons and two Lebanese allegedly involved in the abduction through a child recovery agency. "They intended to get away in a boat captained by a member of a private child recovery agency," a Lebanese security source said. - 'Public interest' - The crew were arrested April 7, a day after the two children were grabbed. Video footage shows them walking with an elderly person said to be their grandmother before several figures jump out of a car, shove the adult aside and carry the children off in the vehicle. Police later found Faulkner with the children, reportedly a six-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy, at a home in Beirut. They were handed back to their father through the courts. Faulkner accused him of taking them for a holiday to Beirut and then refusing to return them to Australia. The channel's handling of the coverage has proved controversial in Australia and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull issued a warning. "We are very pleased they (the television crew) are on their way home," he said, "and we want to thank the Lebanese authorities for their cooperation". But he added: "All Australians, regardless of what they do or who they work for, should recognise that when they are outside of Australia, they must obey the laws of the country in which they are visiting." Nine Network chief executive Hugh Marks pledged to "ascertain what went wrong and why our systems, designed to protect staff, failed to do so in this case". "What has happened to Sally happens all too often and affects thousands of Australian families," he said. "It is a story that not only is profoundly in the public interest but also one the public is interested in." Netflix's landmark docuseries Making a Murderer will be feted at the Banff World Media Festival as the 2016 Program of the Year. Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, the creators of the popular series about Steven Avery, who had a rape conviction overturned before being convicted of murder, will be on hand to receive the award at the Banff Rockie Awards. Ricciardi and Demos will also give a master class in Banff on their 10-part series that has the factual TV world looking for their next true crime series. The creative duo may have news on a possible second season pickup by Netflix for the docuseries. The water-cooler effect of Making a Murderer resulted in tens of thousands of people calling for the reopening of the Teresa Halbach murder investigation that led to Avery's conviction, and even resulted in a petition to the White House for President Obama to pardon him. "Making A Murderer is one of those riveting programs that come around once in a lifetime," Ferne Cohen, the Banff festival executive director, said in a statement. Avery served 18 years in prison for sexual assault out of Manitowoc County, Wis., for which he was exonerated by DNA evidence in 2003. In 2005, Avery was convicted of the murder of 25-year-old Halbach. Avery's nephew, Brendan Dassey, was also convicted for the same murder. Dassey's lawyers argued his confession to authorities was coerced. The Netflix series, which premiered in December 2015, raises numerous questions on whether Avery committed the murder or was framed. The Banff World Media Festival is set to run from June 12-15 in the Canadian Rockies. Read More: 'Making a Murderer': Steven Avery Files Appeal, Requests Murder Conviction Be Thrown out More than a dozen banks will have to turn over details of their dealings with Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca to New York's banking regulator, as authorities continue to respond to revelations from the Panama Papers investigation. The order came from the New York Department of Financial Services and was sent to 13 foreign banks identified in articles published by ICIJ and its media partners. Among the banks are Deutsche Bank AG, Credit Suisse Group AG, Commerzbank AG and ABN Amro Group NV, Bloomberg reported. The banks have been given 10 days to respond, and were asked to provide communications, phone logs and records of transactions between their New York branches and employees or agents of Mossack Fonseca, as well as any subsequent communication with shell companies formed as part of these transactions. According to Bloomberg, the regulator has also asked banks to identify any New York-based personnel who may have held positions at the shell companies. The regulator is reportedly searching for potential violations of rules or regulations related to the law firm. The banks have not been accused of wrongdoing. The second ranking Democrat on the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services committee also used the Panama Papers investigation on Wednesday to request hearings on a bill introduced earlier this year aimed at stopping anonymous company ownership. Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, D-N.Y., cited the Panama Papers investigation in asking for the hearings, and said its findings highlighted "the ease with which criminals and corrupt officials can use anonymous shell companies to hide assets from law enforcement." Maloneys bill, The Incorporation Transparency and Law Enforcement Assistance Act, would require corporations and limited liability companies to disclose who their true owners, to the states in which they are incorporated, if the states have such a requirement, or to the Treasury department. Offshore entities often take advantage of multiple ways in which to make it harder to identify their ownership, including corporate records that make it appear as if stand-ins are actually running the business, or being owned by foundations in jurisdictions such as Panama where the law requires that those involved in setting up the foundation or any person that obtains information relating to the activities, transactions or operations of the foundation maintain strict confidentiality even following its termination. Breaches of the law are punished with up to six months imprisonment and penalties up to $50,000. Story continues This story is part of The Panama Papers. Click here to read more stories in this series. Don't miss another Accountability investigation: Sign up for the Center for Public Integrity's Watchdog email. Earlier in April, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., asked the U.S. Treasury to investigate any U.S. companies or U.S.-linked companies that appeared in the Panama Papers. Wyoming, where Mossack Fonseca maintains an office, conducted an audit of firms registered there by the company right after the investigation was published. Secretary of State Ed Murray said that the audit determined that M.F. Corporate Services Wyoming LLC failed to maintain the required statutory information for performing the duties of a registered agent under Wyoming law. The information was subsequently provided, he said. Last week, the IRS participated in a special meeting of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Developments Joint International Tax Shelter Information & Collaboration Network that was called in the wake of the Panama Papers. People hiding assets offshore should recognize the continued changes and progress in the international tax arena and come forward voluntarily, the IRS said in a statement. The IRS welcomes the OECDs support of the JITSICs work to coordinate the effort by tax authorities across the world to respond to the released information. We will be closely monitoring the situation along with our international tax administration partners as we determine what steps to take to ensure compliance with U.S. tax laws and meet our shared global interests. This story is part of The Panama Papers. Click here to read more stories in this series. Related stories Copyright 2016 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C. Kaduna (Nigeria) (AFP) - Suspected Boko Haram gunmen on horseback killed at least 11 people in northeast Nigeria this week, two civilian vigilantes assisting the military told AFP on Thursday. The attack on Zango village, in the Gulani district some 150 kilometres (94 miles) south of the Yobo state capital, Damaturu, happened overnight on Tuesday to Wednesday, said Aisami Mamman. It came two weeks after a similar attack on two nearby villages left at least 20 dead, he added. "They (Boko Haram) came around midnight (2300 GMT Tuesday) and started firing gunshots in the village. This prompted residents to flee into the bush," said Mamman. "They pursued them, shooting at them while others set fire to the whole village. The whole village was burnt. Eleven people were killed and several others were injured, six of them critically. "They were brought here to Damaturu where they are receiving treatment for gunshot wounds." The motive for the attack was not immediately clear but previous strikes have seen Boko Haram steal cattle or foodstuffs. The hit-and-run attack has been a trademark of the Islamic State group affiliate but such incidents have become rarer because of a concerted military counter-offensive in the northeast. Troops have over the last year wrested back territory lost to the militants in 2014, scattering fighters and cutting off their supply lines. Boko Haram fighters have conducted a number of attacks on remote villages after arriving on horseback and even bicycles because of a shortage of fuel for vehicles or motorbikes. Mamman suggested the attackers in Zango came from the Sambisa Forest area of neighbouring Borno, where Boko Haram has long had camps. "Exactly two weeks ago there was a similar attack on two villages nearby. They attacked Gurum and Dokshi villages," he said in an account of both incidents supported by another militia member. "They burnt them completely and killed more than 20 residents." Boko Haram has killed nearly 1,900 people since President Muhammadu Buhari took office in May last year, according to AFP reporting. Overall, an estimated 20,000 people have been killed since the start of the insurgency in 2009. Samsung Galaxy S5 LTE-A was released in 2014 with Android 4.4.2 KitKat and now it is getting Android Marshmallow. (Photo : YouTube/ Marques Brownlee) T-Mobile is rolling out the Android Marshmallow 6.0.1 update for Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+ and Galaxy Note 5. According to T-Mobile's support page, the rollout has started and it will commence in a phased manner for both devices. The model number of Samsung Galaxy Note 5, which is getting the update is N920TUVV2DPD1. Advertisement Network carrier T-Mobile was a little late to release the update for Samsung Galaxy Note 5, as Verizon and AT&T have already released it in March. Even Sprint had rolled out the Android Marshmallow update in March-end for the same device. According to CNET, T-Mobile will roll out the Android Marshmallow 6.0.1 update to all the users of Samsung Galaxy Note 5 and Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+ by mid-May. Users can check whether the update is available to them or not, by a manual check. They can go to Settings> System> About Device> Software Update and see if the device prompts for a download. The Android Marshmallow 6.0.1 update is more than 1 GB in size, so it is recommended that the device has more than 50 percent battery before starting the download. Users are also recommended to attempt the download, when their device is hooked on to a stable Wi-Fi connection, in order to avoid any interruptions. Alternatively, it can also connected to a charger, in case the battery levels are low. Meanwhile, Google had released Android Marshmallow in Nov. 2015, but it has not yet reached most of the devices. The reason behind the delay is that the network carriers need to test it for each and every device, before they can release the update. Numerous Samsung devices have been slow on the uptake and some of them may directly get the upcoming operating system - Android N. On the other hand, Android Marshmallow has also been released for numerous other devices, such as Sony Xperia Z series. Sony had to quickly release a patch, when users began to complain about numerous bugs, after the Android Marshmallow update. The patch fixed the issues and now the devices are running fine. Watch this video to learn about the top-rated and unique features of Android Marshmallow here: By Christian Plumb UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Bolivian President Evo Morales said on Thursday that an unexpected meeting at the Vatican with U.S. presidential contender Bernie Sanders had demonstrated a "thirst for a different kind of democracy" in the United States. While Sanders' meeting with Pope Francis was his highest profile encounter with a foreign leader during his Vatican visit last week, the self-described Democratic socialist candidate also crossed paths with Morales at a conference there on social justice. "I don't want to meddle in the domestic affairs of the United States, but what a strange coincidence that on certain important issues such as democracy, for example, there should be such overlap between us and some pre-candidates in the U.S.," Morales said during a press briefing at the United Nations in New York. The firebrand leftist, known as an outspoken critic of U.S. influence of Latin America, added that Sanders' critique of wealthy donors' outsized influence in the U.S. squared with his own skeptical view of its democracy. "It seems interesting that if we have a candidate who is saying publically that here in the United States the millionaires are the ones who buy the elections, that that is a truth, then that makes it abundantly clear that free market policies affect politics negatively," he said. Morales, a one-time coca grower, was recently rebuffed by Bolivian voters when they defeated a referendum that would have changed the country's constitution to allow him to run for a fourth term. Sanders, a Democratic senator from Vermont, has campaigned on a promise to rein in corporate power and level the economic playing field for working and lower-income Americans who he says have been left behind. (Reporting By Christian Plumb; Editing by Andrew Hay) Brasilia (AFP) - Brazil's Supreme Court dealt a new blow to embattled President Dilma Rousseff, postponing a decision on whether to let her influential predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, join her government. The latest delay on Wednesday leaves Lula, who was named chief of staff last month, in limbo while Rousseff's own job hangs by a thread, amid an impeachment fight that could force her to step aside within weeks. After this new setback, the 68-year-old leftist president will travel to New York Thursday to sign a global climate pact at the United Nations, giving her an international stage to press her argument that she is the victim of a coup bid. The lower house of Congress voted last Sunday to send impeachment proceedings to the Senate, which is expected to decide to put her on trial and suspend her by mid-May. Rousseff had given Lula, her political mentor, the ministerial job on March 16, betting on his political prowess to save her job. But a Supreme Court judge temporarily blocked the appointment, citing suspicions that it was a bid to shield Lula from prosecution in lower level courts, in connection with a massive corruption case at state oil giant Petrobras. In Brazil, lawmakers and ministers can only be tried by the Supreme Court. The full court, however, postponed its ruling after one of the justices requested the delay to add new files to the case and discuss all of them in a single hearing. No date was set for a new session. Lula, a left-wing icon and founder of the ruling Workers' Party, is accused of accepting a seaside apartment and a country home as bribes from construction companies caught up in the multibillion-dollar graft scandal that has upended Brazilian politics. Although Lula was blocked from taking the cabinet job, he led an intense lobbying campaign for votes in the lower house, which ultimately failed. Rousseff says charges that she used illegal accounting tricks to mask budget deficits have no legal basis. Story continues Supreme Court justice Celso de Mello rejected Rousseff's claims of a parliamentary coup, saying that it was "a constitutional procedure that took place until now in a climate of total legal normalcy." - Power duo in trouble - Lula's potential return to the government could come too late, as local media surveys show that a majority of senators favor Rousseff's impeachment. "I think that at this stage, whether or not Lula enters the government won't make a big difference," said political analyst Sergio Praca. "A lot of things have happened these past few weeks and the fact that he was not authorized to take up his post caused a shock, a surprise, that had giant consequences" for Rousseff's government, he added. Now for Lula, the bigger issue will be whether his political career can survive to elections in 2018, when he hopes to return to the presidency. The former shoeshine boy and union leader took office in 2003, won a second term, and handed over to Rousseff, his handpicked successor, on January 1, 2011. Lula's popularity and the success of the economy during a period of high commodity prices helped him ride out numerous corruption scandals plaguing the Workers' Party. He left office with 80 percent popularity ratings. Now, even if the court does allow him to enter government, his stint may be over almost as soon as it starts. If the Senate opens a trial, Rousseff would have to step aside for 180 days, replaced by her vice president Michel Temer. After that, a two-thirds majority vote would be enough to oust her permanently. Temer, who turned on Rousseff to support impeachment, is already assembling a future cabinet of his own -- and Lula would clearly not be welcome. Temer will get a taste of the job this week as he will be in charge of the country while Rousseff is in New York until late Friday or early Saturday. Meanwhile, three more of Rousseff's ministers belonging to Temer's centrist PMDB party resigned their posts Wednesday, the president's office announced, leaving just two of seven PMDB members that had initially been a part of her cabinet. - 'The snake is alive' - But Temer is not popular either, with an April 10 survey by polling firm Datafolha giving him no more than two percent of votes in the 2018 election. For his part, Lula remains a formidable political force. "The snake is still alive," the former president said recently. Despite his legal troubles, a survey by polling firm Datafolha on April 10 found that 21 percent of Brazilians would vote for him in the first round of the 2018 presidential election, making him the frontrunner. SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Brazilian Mines and Energy Minister Eduardo Braga said on Wednesday he is leaving the post to retake his seat in the Senate as the upper chamber of Congress prepares to vote on the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff next month. Braga, who is from the PMDB major opposition party, said however that he will take a break for medical tests and might not be present when the vote takes place. He declined to say if he is in favor or against the removal of Rousseff on charges of breaking budget laws. (Reporting by Leonardo Goy; Writing by Marcelo Teixeira; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe) Oslo (AFP) - Prison conditions for Anders Behring Breivik will remain unchanged for now, the prison warden said Thursday, one day after a court ruled that Norway violated the mass murderer's human rights. The Oslo district court ruled Wednesday that Breivik, who has been held apart from other inmates for almost five years, has been subjected to "inhuman" and "degrading" treatment in contravention of the European Convention for Human Rights. Asked by AFP if Breivik's conditions would be eased after the ruling, the warden of Skien prison Ole Kristoffer Borhaug said there would be no immediate changes as "the judgment is not yet enforceable". The state has not yet said whether it would appeal against the court's decision, which shocked many. Norway's most notorious inmate has been detained in high-security prison units since his bomb and gun rampage in 2011 that killed 77 people. The court said that Breivik's "relative" isolation violated Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. After the ruling, Breivik's lawyer, Oystein Storrvik immediately requested that his client's isolation be ended. Breivik is serving a maximum 21-year sentence -- which can be extended if he is still considered dangerous -- for killing eight people in a bombing outside a government building in Oslo and then gunning down another 69, most of them teenagers, at a Labour Youth camp on the island of Utoya on July 22, 2011. In prison, Breivik has three cells at his disposal, which are equipped with two showers, two televisions, an Xbox, a Playstation, a typewriter, books and newspapers. Breivik also challenged restrictions on his mail and prison visits but both points were rejected by the court. London (AFP) - Britain on Thursday marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of novelist Charlotte Bronte, whose intense and passionate vision of rural life in "Jane Eyre" has haunted generations of readers. Fans are hosting a birthday party in the house in northern England where Charlotte and her sisters Emily and Anne grew up and wrote their books. The anniversary highlights the enduring global popularity of the Brontes, whose works are seen as among the most important ever written by female authors. A wreath will be laid for Bronte in Westminster Abbey on Friday and a ballet version of "Jane Eyre" is opening next month, while the National Portrait Gallery is hosting an exhibition in her honour. The Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth, a remote village on the edge of moors in Yorkshire, draws tens of thousands of visitors from around the world each year, while the sisters' books are staples of British bookshops and school curriculums. Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte were a clergyman's daughters who wrote for pleasure and dreamt of becoming published authors but feared they would not be taken seriously because they were women. They therefore adopted the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell when they sent "Jane Eyre", "Wuthering Heights", "Agnes Grey" and "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" to publishers in the 1840s. Emily Bronte fell ill with consumption and died in 1848, followed by Anne the following year. Charlotte lived for a further six years before dying in Haworth in 1855 aged 38. "Jane Eyre", which has never been out of print in Britain, tells the story of the heroine's youth as an orphan and how she falls in love with her employer, Mr Rochester, while working as a governess. Charlotte Bronte's other works include "Shirley" and "Villette". Her biographer Claire Harman told the BBC this month that she was someone "who both longed to be 'forever known', but clung to anonymity in order to achieve it, a woman much more concerned about truthfulness than personal fame and someone who felt compelled to put into words her own terrible sufferings... as being the only way to deal with them." LONDON (Reuters) - Britain could force those with unexplained wealth to declare the source of their funds under new plans to crack down on money-laundering announced by the government on Thursday. Under the proposals for "Unexplained Wealth Orders", those who are not able to say where their wealth has come from or who fail to cooperate with the authorities will have their assets seized. "Britain's world-leading financial system is at risk of being undermined by money-laundering, illicit finance and the funding of terrorism," Home Secretary Theresa May said in a statement. "We will not tolerate this type of activity in our financial institutions ... we will act vigorously against the criminals and terrorists responsible, to protect the security and prosperity of our citizens, and safeguard the integrity of Britain's financial economy." Extra measures will be taken to improve reporting of suspicious activity, the government said, while a new offence of illicit enrichment could also be brought in for public officials who have had a significant and unexplained increase in wealth. The proposed changes, subject to a six-week consultation, also include new powers to be able to designate a company as of money-laundering concern, requiring banks, lawyers and accountants to take special measures when dealing with them. The Times reported that Prime Minister David Cameron, who is due to host an anti-corruption summit next month, will also announce plans for the details of owners of offshore companies who buy property in Britain to placed on a public register. Last year, Cameron said the government would look at what it could do to make property ownership by foreign companies more transparent. A government consultation on what steps could be taken was carried out earlier this year. "We are now in the process of considering responses and then we will set out next steps," Cameron's spokeswoman said. (Reporting by Kylie MacLellan; editing by Stephen Addison) United Nations (United States) (AFP) - Bulgaria's Irina Bokova on Thursday hits back at reports of corruption in the UN agency she has been running for seven years, branding them an attack aimed at undermining her bid to become the next UN chief. The director of the UN cultural agency UNESCO is considered a strong contender to become the first woman at the helm of the United Nations when Ban Ki-moon steps down on January 1 next year. The 63-year-old former acting foreign minister is touting her experience as the head of UNESCO in her campaign, but the allegations of mismanagement are casting a pall. Reports have recently surfaced that Bokova appointed an under-qualified Brazilian national to a senior UNESCO position, in an apparent bid to win over Brazil's support for her UN bid. "I deplore these types of reports which I wouldn't say are impartial and are manipulative and untrue -- I'm not afraid to say -- totally false," Bokova told AFP in an interview. During her tenure at UNESCO, there have been 42 investigations of possible conflict of interest, she said, adding that these had resulted in the dismissal of 17 people. Asked whether she thought the reports were linked to her campaign for the top UN job, Bokova said, "I think so." "I guess there is a big interest in me and other candidates. Maybe somebody is not happy. I cannot please everybody and it's normal in a democratic world." "But what I don't like is these types of attacks which are false," she said. "I just don't think this is dignified." Bokova has came under fire before over her handling of the Palestinian membership in UNESCO, which led to a cutoff of US funding in 2011. - Moscow's candidate? - A fluent Russian speaker, Bokova rejected suggestion that she was Moscow's candidate in the race. "I wouldn't say that I am closer to Russia than I am closer to other countries," she said at UN headquarters. Story continues "Of course I studied in Moscow. I think a lot of Eastern Europeans at that time studied in the Soviet Union. This was the way, this was the life," she said. A graduate of the prestigious Moscow Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), Bokova said her time in Moscow allowed her to meet progressive thinkers during the US-Soviet detente of the early 1970s and to learn foreign languages. Aside from English, she speaks fluent French and Spanish. Bokova drew a comparison with Angela Merkel, noting that the German chancellor had also came under scrutiny over her communist past in East Germany. "It doesn't prevent her from being a great leader," she said. In all, there are nine declared candidates to lead the United Nations including seven from eastern Europe, the only region that has yet to be represented in the top job. Four of the candidates are women. Bokova defended the unwritten rule of regional rotation to fill the secretary-general's post and said choosing a woman to run the United Nations would send an "important message" to countries worldwide. "The message is that women take political positions seriously, that women can do hard jobs and it will be a message to their national and political environments," she said. In July, the UN Security Council is expected to begin a round of straw polls to nominate a candidate for secretary-general. The General Assembly is expected to endorse the choice in October. Nairobi (AFP) - Gunmen in Burundi shot dead a high-ranking military officer seen as a critic of the regime, a witness and an army spokesman told AFP on Thursday. Lieutenant-Colonel Emmanuel Buzubona died on his way home on Wednesday along with his driver when he was attacked by three men armed with rifles and grenades, the witness told AFP on condition of anonymity. The killing comes amid turmoil in the country since President Pierre Nkurunziza decided to run for a third term, which he went on to win in July 2015, with violence leaving hundreds dead. Suspected of forging an alliance with insurgents opposed to Nkurunziza's bid for a third term, Buzubona was arrested in December 2015 by the national intelligence service, which operates on the direct orders of the president. He was released six days later, a security source told AFP. Army spokesman Colonel Gaspard Baratuza confirmed what the witness saw, adding that the attackers first shot Buzubona and then hurled a grenade at him. "A police inquiry is under way to try to find the assassins," he said. Buzubona, Burundi's former deputy military intelligence chief, had been on leave since his return from a mission in Tanzania six months ago, another high-ranking military officer told AFP on condition of anonymity. There has been no claim of responsibility for the latest killing, but supporters and opponents of Nkurunziza traded accusations on social media networks. Supporters of the regime accuse soldiers of the former Tutsi army of shooting dead the Hutu officer. Opponents however say the officer was killed because he was hostile to the government. - Deadly shootout - In a separate incident in southern Burundi, two civilians were killed and two others wounded in the crossfire during a shootout on Wednesday between troops and "armed criminals", a police spokesman said Thursday, using a term often used by the government to refer to rebels. "A military patrol was sent to Kivumu hill where people had reported the presence of armed criminals in a bar. There was an exchange of fire and four residents present at the scene were injured, two of who died from their wounds," deputy police spokesman Moise Nkurunziza said. Story continues Witnesses say police had initially arrested all the men at the bar. "They let us go, warning us against helping the rebels who had been reported to be in the area, but they took with them eight young men," a resident of Mugumba told AFP on condition of anonymity. Located some 90 kilometres (60 miles) south of the capital Bujumbura, Mugumba has seen some of Burundi's most frequent clashes between government forces and armed rebels. Four ruling party militants were killed in two incidents on Saturday, police says. Violence over the past year has left more than 400 people dead and forced more than 250,000 people to flee Burundi, and watchdogs have repeatedly sounded the alarm. The Jeep Renegade, a sub-compact SUV, is displayed in a showroom in Geneva in March 2015. (Photo : Reuters) A new plant of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles located in Guangzhou, China, has started producing the Jeep Renegade, the second vehicle sold by the company in China without import duties, according to an article published in www. freep.com. Advertisement In a joint venture with Guangzhou Automotive Group (GAC), the FCA is making the Jeep Renegade, a subcompact SUV. Arriving later in China than most automakers, FCA made a joint venture with GAC as part of efforts to gain foothold in the world's largest automotive market. "Today is an important step in our strategy to expand the Jeep brand's global presence and, equally important, it represents a further strengthening of the joint enterprise with our respected and valuable partner here in China, the GAC Group," FCA CEO Sergio Marchionne said in a statement. FCA's global expansion is reflected in the Jeep Renegade's production where it's now currently produced in three factories in three countries, namely, China, Brazil and Italy. In 2015, more than 1.2 million Jeep SUVs were sold by Jeep around the world, a 22-percent increase compared with 2014 and the brand's fourth consecutive record year. According to the report, FCA will sell the Jeeps it builds in Guangzhou to Chinese consumers. Last year, FCA began building the Renegade at its plant in Melfi, Italy, as well as in its new plant in Brazil. FCA began building the Jeep Cherokee in Changsha last fall, while GAC Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is producing the Renegade at a new plant in Guangzhou, which has the capacity to build 160,000 vehicles a year. "GAC FCA stands for an excellent joint effort among China, the U.S. and Italy," Zhang Fangyou, chairman of Guangzhou Automobile Industry Group, said in a statement. "Without a doubt it will further accelerate the development of not only GAC Group, but also the whole automotive industry here in Guangdong Province, China." By Alex Dobuzinskis LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Subway etiquette in California is on the move. In the car-choked cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco, public transit commuters fed up with "seat hogs" and "manspreaders" will soon find relief as transit agencies crack down on passengers occupying more than their share of space as others are left standing. "This is directed at that knucklehead who, when asked by a courteous person to vacate a seat, refuses to do so," said Joel Keller, a member of the Bay Area Rapid Transit Agency in San Francisco. Last week, the agency's board voted 5-4 to adopt a new "one ticket, one seat" rule imposing a $100 fine on commuter train riders who, after a warning continue to use a seat for something other than sitting. Subway riders who park a backpack on a seat or spread out in wide-legged oblivion have long been the bane of the rush-hour crowd in major commuter cities across the United States. The effort to prevent these faux pas in California follows similar campaigns launched by transit agencies in New York, Philadelphia and Seattle with slogans such as "Two seats? Really?" and "Dude ... Stop The Spread. Please." At SeatHogs.com, commuters are shown splaying their sleeping bodies over a row of seats, putting their feet up or placing anything from a stack of newspapers to a handbag on the nearest seat. Keller said there is no space to spare with ridership at an all-time high on the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) network, which carries passengers between San Francisco and distant suburbs. A similar proposal in Los Angeles will be considered by the regional Metropolitan Transportation Authority in the coming months, said Alex Wiggins, executive officer for security for the agency. The Los Angeles region, which according to tracking firm INRIX ranks worst in the nation for traffic, is opening two commuter rail extensions that, at a cost $2.5 billion, are expected to attract tens of thousands of new riders. Story continues Officials with the agency, which already has a $75 fine for seat blocking, said many new riders will need an education on commuting "dos and don'ts." Marta Correas, who commutes by train to jobs cleaning houses in Los Angeles, said she often sees people taking two seats, but stays quiet to avoid a tongue lashing. "Sometimes you want to sit down like they do, but you can't," said Correas, 50, in Spanish. "I pay my fare, the same as them. I don't get mad, but it's not right." (Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Sara Catania and Andrew Hay) Ottawa (AFP) - A Canadian senator at the center of an expenses scandal that sullied the former Tory administration and contributed to its electoral loss last year was cleared Thursday of criminal wrongdoing. An Ontario court declared Senator Mike Duffy not guilty of 31 charges including breach of trust, bribery and fraud related to his government expenses claims. Duffy, a former broadcast journalist, had pleaded not guilty. Outside the courthouse, defense lawyer Donald Bain called the decision "a resounding not guilty." In delivering his verdict, Judge Charles Vaillancourt deemed Duffy to have been "an overall credible witness" who had shown no "sinister" intent in his actions, save perhaps opportunism. Prosecutors accused the senator of disbursing taxpayer funds to friends and family for personal expenses including for hair and makeup, and for a fitness trainer. He was also accused of filing travel expenses for "partisan political activities" such as giving speeches at party fundraisers, and for personal trips including to buy a puppy, and attend his daughter's play and several funerals. The defense acknowledged administrative mistakes but said Duffy never intended to defraud the public purse. The most serious bribery charge stemmed from a Can$90,000 ($70,000) check Duffy received from then-prime minister Stephen Harper's chief of staff, Nigel Wright, to help the lawmaker repay his expenses. Political heat ensued after it was revealed the government of the day tried to cover it up. Duffy has said it was all an attempt to quell a public uproar over Senate spending and make a political situation embarrassing to Harper's base go away. Duffy is now expected to return to work. His acquittal also casts doubt on the likelihood of successful prosecutions of two other senators facing similar charges, and on other cases under internal investigation by the Senate. By Allison Lampert MONTREAL (Reuters) - A $1 billion Canadian government aid package for Bombardier Inc should not be delayed over fears that the plane-and-train maker could outsource jobs to Mexico or China, the head of Canada's largest private sector union said on Thursday. Unifor President Jerry Dias said in a telephone interview that he opposes any outsourcing of aerospace jobs, but that Canada's Liberal government should nevertheless "plow ahead" with aid for the company's CSeries jet even without guarantees that Bombardier will keep producing Q400 turboprop cockpit and wings in Toronto. Executives with Montreal-based Bombardier have talked about their desire to outsource production of parts of the turboprop in an effort to lower costs and better compete with rivals ATR, co-owned by Airbus Group and Italy's Finmeccanica. On Wednesday, Canada's Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains, who is in control of the negotiations, told reporters the government has linked any aid for Bombardier with research and development investment in Canada, the location of the company's Montreal head office and "good-quality jobs." "I understand the government's sensitivity. And I understand clearly that the optics for our government look terrible," said Dias. "But I also understand also that this is a company that needs help ... I have to look at the bigger picture." Dias said the union would lead a separate battle to keep the 200 Q400 jobs in Toronto and had language in its contract that would help protect them. "I believe there is a made-in-Canada solution," he said. Bombardier's 18,000-strong workforce in the province of Quebec is largely aerospace-focused and its presence helps support many smaller part vendors and suppliers in the region. Bombardier wants Ottawa to match the province of Quebec's $1 billion investment in the CSeries, which is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. (Reporting by Allison Lampert; Editing by Sandra Maler) By David Ljunggren OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadian Senator Mike Duffy was acquitted of fraud and bribery charges on Thursday, marking the end of a high-profile trial that contributed to the defeat of the ruling Conservative government last year. Duffy had faced 31 criminal charges related to roughly C$90,000 ($71,000) in expenses he charged after former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper appointed him to the Senate - the upper chamber of Parliament - in late 2008. The trial started amid enormous media coverage last August, shortly after Harper, who took power in 2006, had launched an election campaign. As the case progressed, polls showed the Conservatives starting to lose support. The Liberals of Justin Trudeau, who said the affair showed Harper could not be trusted, won a majority in the federal election on Oct. 19. Harper's chief of staff, Nigel Wright, told the court he had pressed Duffy to repay the expenses, even though he felt they were most likely legal. Evidence showed that Harper's aides effectively took control of the leadership of the Senate, which is supposed to be independent, and provided Conservative senators with scripted lines. Emails indicated Wright had told one senator to approach an accounting firm that was carrying out an independent audit of the Senate, to try to influence its report. In a 308-page ruling, Judge Charles Vaillancourt said he found Duffy to be a credible witness but blasted Harper's aides for their "mind boggling and shocking" conduct. "In the context of a democratic society, the plotting ... can only be described as unacceptable," he told the court. Duffy, a former television journalist, had been a popular fund-raiser for the Conservative Party before the scandal broke. He insisted all along he was innocent, saying the Senate's expense rules were so vague he had done nothing wrong. "I don't think I've ever been witness to such a resounding acquittal," Duffy's chief lawyer Donald Bayne told reporters. Duffy, who did not comment, was not the only senator to run into expenses problems. In June 2015, an official report found that 30 current and former senators had improperly spent almost C$1 million ($810,000) in just two years. Trudeau is promising major reforms to the 105-member Senate, which is officially charged with reviewing legislation passed by the lower house. Senators are named by the prime minister of the day and the institution has historically been criticized as a dumping ground for political operators. ($1=$1.27 Canadian) (Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Paul Simao and Tom Brown) Abe Lincoln Jr.s first performance piece, if you had been lucky enough to be stage side at Palo Altos now-defunct New Varsity theater back in the 1980s, was as unexpected as it was welcome in the midst of a super-serious hardcore show. Entering from the wings across from his partner in crime and meeting in the middle, they proceeded to greet each other and shake hands. Twenty minutes later they were still shaking hands, each iteration of the handshake behind the back, in the air like Indonesian shadow puppets, under their legs was accompanied by a running commentary that was equal parts doggerel, street slang and inside jokes. And it was funny as shit and not even what Lincoln did really well, which was make art. But the 80s ended and Lincoln, bored with California and chasing a girlfriend, headed to New York, dug in good and tight to a Times Square apartment back when Times Square apartments were nothing youd tell your parents about. West CoastEast Coast constants? Street art, graffiti, skateboards, bikes and music both playing it and listening to it that pissed people off. 196615852 8f995725a5 z Source: Courtesy of Abe Lincoln Jr. I grew up going to hardcore shows in the Black Flag days, says Lincoln, now a father of two. But as I got older, all my musician friends traded in their thrash for acoustic guitars and feelings. Not my cup of tea. So he started a good old-fashioned 80s hardcore band called Gettysburg Express, to reawaken the troops, and dubbed himself Abe Lincoln Jr., complete with an orange convict suit with a gun on the back, a fake beard and a top hat. The plan was to sing songs about the Civil War from Honest Abes perspective. Details magazine got wind of it, and before Lincoln had written even one song, he was doing interviews in which he mangled U.S. history by having Abe cutting down cherry trees and eventually a showstopper: a 15-minute show, the end of which John Wilkes Booth shoots him. Cut, print and step dead center back into his first love: art vandalism, as well as graffiti, comics, T-shirts and toys. Most significant of all is the Sticker Social Club, where, as a result of open sticker drawing parties that gather a bleary bevy of street artists and fellow collectivists such as Cosbe1, Fling_1 and Mister_guh, the byproducts are stickers you can buy. They are irreverent and sometimes amusing, and, like some of our favorite art, infused with a multicolored spirit of idiosyncrasy. It seems what a gallery would want, so why not go the gallery route? Story continues Ive been challenging myself to not bow to pressure, internal or external, says Lincoln, to do anything specific with this art career-wise. So he just does what he wants, up to and including gallery shows when he wants to, exhibitions and, always, the streets. The latest and greatest? A sticker and T-shirt line just in time for any holiday that involves Jesus (it features a Kawaii Jesus and the words Jesus Loved These Hoes). And by way of tentpoles? Girlsbike.com for his handprinted works of art and Fugue State Records, a fictitious and nonfunctioning heavy metal record label that has Lincoln creating merch for bands that dont exist merch and demo tapes made out of blocks of wood and shoestrings. After a certain point, were just coming for the joy of seeing someone relentlessly pursuing any muse, but most importantly their specific muse, says animator and art teacher Pilar Newton-Katz. Which Mr. Lincoln most assuredly does. Related Articles N'DJAMENA (Reuters) - Chad's incumbent President Idriss Deby, an important ally of the West in the fight against Islamist militants, won a fifth term in office in a lopsided first-round victory, the Central African country's elections commission announced on Thursday. Deby, who argued during the campaign that only his government was capable of ensuring security amid a rising wave of extremist violence, took 61.56 percent of the vote in the April 10 poll, easily avoiding a second-round runoff. Saleh Kebzabo finished a distant second with 12.80 percent of the vote followed by Laokein Kourayo Mbaiherem with 10.60 percent, according to the commission, which put turnout at 76.11 percent. Chad has one of the most capable armies in the region and Deby has played a key role in efforts backed by the West to combat neighboring Nigeria's Islamic State-affiliated Boko Haram fighters as well as al Qaeda militants. A former French colony, Chad also hosts the headquarters of Paris' 3,000-troop strong regional anti-militant operation, known as Barkhane. (Reporting by Madjiasra Nako, writing by Joe Bavier, editing by G Crosse) By Julia Harte WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two New England men accused of plotting to behead Massachusetts police officers in support of the militant group Islamic State were receiving instructions from one of the group's cyber experts, according to a new indictment released on Thursday. A grand jury in federal court in Massachusetts added conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries to the charges against David Wright, 26, of Massachusetts, and Nicholas Rovinski, 25, of Rhode Island. According to the new indictment, Rovinski has continued to support Islamic State while in jail by trying to recruit others to "decapitate non-believers" and take down the U.S. government and by writing a new pledge of support to the group's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, on the back of his own criminal complaint. Rovinski and Wright pleaded not guilty to the original charge of conspiring to provide material support to a designated terrorist organization after they were arrested in June, and they were due to face trial in February 2017. According to the new indictment, Rovinski and Wright plotted their attacks with Wright's uncle, Usaamah Abdullah Rahim, who was shot dead by law enforcement officers last June when Boston police and agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation approached him and he threatened them with a knife. The indictment accused Rahim of beginning communication one month before he was shot with a British member of Islamic State, Junaid Hussain. Hussain was believed by government sources to be the leader of CyberCaliphate, a hacking group that last year attacked a Twitter account belonging to the Pentagon. The indictment said Hussain gave Rahim instructions that Rahim passed on to Wright about targeting individuals such as Pamela Geller, organizer of a "Draw Mohammad" cartoon competition in Garland, Texas, that was attacked by two gunmen last May. Hussain was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Syria last August. Story continues Wright has pleaded not guilty to charges he alone faced of obstructing justice and conspiring to obstruct justice after he was accused of instructing Rahim to delete his phone and laptop data. Wright and Rovinski now face maximum sentences of life in prison as a result of the new charges announced on Thursday. They are scheduled to be arraigned on April 28, according to the docket report in their case. (Reporting by Julia Harte) The wheels of justice are finally beginning to turn in Flint, Michigan, following last years startling revelation that the citys drinking water had been poisoned with lead for over a year before residents learned of the crisis. Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette announced that criminal and misdemeanor charges had been brought against two former state environmental health officials and the man who ran the city water treatment plant for neglect of duty and intentionally covering up details of the disaster while more than 8,000 children were exposed to dangerously high levels of lead. Related: Outraged Americans Want Immediate Action on Flint Water Crisis Mike Glasgow, the former city official, was charged with tampering with evidence and willful neglect of duty for allegedly filing false reports to the state about water quality, according to the Detroit Free Press. State environmental health officials Stephen Busch and Michael Prysby were charged with misconduct, evidence tampering, conspiracy and violations of the Safe Water Drinking Act for allegedly changing water test results. If convicted, the three could face up to five years in prison, the attorney general said at a news conference. And Schuette promised there would be more prosecutions in the case that has enraged many Americans and severely tarnished the reputation of Republican Gov. Rick Snyder Flint residents and city officials, no doubt, were pleased with what appears to be the first serious step towards determining accountability for a beleaguered city that has gone without potable drinking water for over a year. The predominantly black and impoverished factory town has been beset with a host of public health problems, including an uptick in Legionnaires Disease and the horrifying threat of developmental problems for infants and toddlers who were exposed to the lead-laden drinking water. Related: How the Flint Drinking Water Crisis Became a Political Punching Bag Story continues Flint became a cause celebre for the two Democratic presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who staged a presidential debate there in early March. The governor and federal Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy were recently hauled before a House investigative committee and pummeled by Republicans and Democrats alike for botching the crisis. Making matters worse, a national study by a public interest group found that Flint residents paid the highest water rates in America at the same time the water was being poisoned with lead from leaching pipes. While he has rejected repeated calls for his resignation, Snyder, a once promising Republican chief executive, has launched a flurry of legislative and funding initiatives to finance a complete overhaul of Flints aging water system. And just this week, he dramatized the fact that the water quality has improved by announcing that he would be drinking filtered Flint tap water at his home and office for the next month. Related: Flints Drinking Water Crisis Just Got More Toxic with Legionnaires Disease But grandstanding aside, Flint Mayor Karen Weaver and city residents would be far happier if state and federal officials made good on their promises to help fund a replacement of the citys water treatment facility and the network of pipes that have leached lead into the water system. Asked yesterday for her reaction to the charges brought against the three former city and state officials, Weaver said that while establishing accountability was important, What we really need is financial assistance. Weaver is championing the citys Fast Start program with a commitment of funding from the state to replace lead service lines suspected of having poisoned the citys water supply, but its off to a slow start. The original plan was to complete new connections to 30 homes by the end of last month, but the city missed the deadline. Weaver has told reporters that the total cost of replacing the system is roughly $55 million. So far, the Michigan state legislature has moved at a glacial pace to act on the majority of Snyders $195-million budget package to revitalize Flint, including new funding for water line replacement, according to the Detroit Free Press. The funding problem only gets worse higher up the food chain. Related: Congress Fumbles Again on Funding for the Flint Water Crisis In Washington, a single Republican senator Mike Lee of Utah managed to hold up a major federal funding package worth more than $100 million which could have been used in part to help Flint address its water crisis. Sens. Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters, both Michigan Democrats, fought hard to keep the Flint funding included in a much larger energy projects package. However, they recently gave up and allowed the Flint funding to be dropped by the legislation when Lee refused to budge. Michigan has an enormous budget surplus this year and a large rainy-day fund, Lee said in a statement. Relief and repair efforts are already in the works. The people and policymakers of Michigan right now have all the government resources they need to fix the problem The only thing Congress is contributing to the Flint recovery is political grandstanding. Stabenow did not agree. "It's totally unacceptable that Sen. Lee continues to block a vote on our fully paid for, bipartisan agreement to help Flint and other communities across the nation who have serious lead and water problems," she said. "This is about something as basic as making sure families have clean water to drink and children with lead poisoning get the help they need." Top Reads from The Fiscal Times: By Alister Doyle OSLO (Reuters) - Some child brides are living with older husbands in asylum centers in Scandinavia, triggering a furor about lapses in protection for girls in nations that ban child marriage. Authorities have in some cases let girls stay with their partners, believing it is less traumatic for them than forced separation after fleeing wars in nations such as Afghanistan or Syria. Some girls have also passed themselves off as adults. Both these issues have caused unease in Scandinavia, where critics say that the authorities risk complicity in child abuse. Of 31,000 asylum seekers who arrived in Norway in the past year or so, 10 of those aged under 16 -- the minimum local age for sex or marriage -- were married and four had children, the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI) said. Of the 10 "some live in adult asylum centers, some in their own rooms and some with their partners," it said in emailed replies to Reuters questions. "Minors seeking asylum are in a difficult situation where they have left their homeland, family and friends, and the partner they have traveled with can be the only person they know and trust in Norway," said Heidi Vibeke Pedersen, a senior UDI official. A subsequent tightening of rules means such couples arriving now are separated, she said, and child protection authorities were reviewing all cases from 2015. Some child protection agencies say any bride aged under 18 should be placed in a special center for children. "To place them with their partner in facilities rigged for adults is not acceptable," said Camilla Kayed, of the Ombudsman for Children Norway, an official watchdog for children's rights. COUNCIL OF EUROPE She said there were no clear European rules for separating child brides and that Oslo had "unfortunately not ratified" conventions by the Council of Europe mapping out ways to prevent sexual exploitation and abuse. And similar problems have occurred elsewhere. In February, Danish Integration Minister Inger Stojberg said that she would "stop housing child brides in asylum centers" after a review found dozens of cases of girls living with older men. Couples younger than 18 would not be allowed to live together without "exceptional reasons", said Sarah Andersen, spokeswoman for the Integration Ministry. "There will never be exceptions in cases where one side is below the age of 15," she said. In Denmark, 15 is the minimum age for sex and for marrying with a special permit. Denmark took in 20,000 asylum seekers last year. In January, after reports by Swedish Radio, authorities said that at least 70 girls under 18 were married in asylum centers run by municipalities including Stockholm and Malmo. "This is worrying," Sweden's Ombudsman for Children Fredrik Malmberg wrote in a blog, urging better child protection. "We know that children fleeing are very vulnerable both for human trafficking and to become targets of forced marriage." In Sweden, the lowest age for sex is 15 and marriage 18. PLAN, a non-governmental organization which helps children in developing nations, believes there are 15 million child marriages every year and says developed nations should never approve. "If the girl is aged under 16, the minimum age for sexual intercourse in Norway, the child bride refugee should be separated from her husband even if they have children together and even if they say they want to stay together," said Kjell Erik Oie, head of PLAN Norway. Poor parents in developing nations sometimes marry off their daughters when times get hard to reduce food and other bills. In the north Norwegian county of Finnmark, authorities are investigating circumstances surrounding a Syrian girl, now aged 16 who already has one child and is pregnant again, police lawyer Jens Herstad said. "We still have to hear the husband's account," he said. (Editing by Alistair Scrutton and Tony Jimenez) BEIJING (Reuters) - China has given the go-ahead for 10 commercial banks, including Bank of China <601988.SS>, the Bank of Beijing <601169.SS> and the Bank of Shanghai to begin a pilot program to directly invest in technology companies. The pilot program, aimed at supporting high-tech innovation, will be limited to five "demonstration zones' in the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Wuhan and Xian, according to a document published by China's banking regulator on Thursday. The purpose of the scheme is to provide financial support for the seeding, start-up and growth of scientific ventures, and to effectively increase the funds available for high-tech enterprises, said the document, drawn up by the China Banking Regulatory Commission, the Ministry of Technology and the central bank. The banks are required to set up subsidiaries to carry out the investments, which can consist of equity or loan-linked investments, it said. Reuters reported in February that China was planning a pilot program to allow selected commercial banks to set up equity investment arms that would take direct stakes in technology firms, stoking competition with private equity players. (Reporting by Matthew Miller and David Stanway; editing by Jason Neely) Peter Liang Won't Go to Jail, to Serve Five-year Probation Instead Ex New York City police officer Peter Liang during the reading of his sentence on Tuesday. (Photo : Twitter) Ex New York City police officer Peter Liang isn't going to jail, contrary to expectations, as he was sentenced to a five-year probation on Tuesday. Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun handed the sentence to Liang for the death of Akai Gurley in 2014. Chun also ordered the convicted officer to render at least 800 hours of community service. Advertisement In coming up with his decision, the judge lowered Liang's case from manslaughter to criminally negligent homicide, allowing for a lower sentence. Chun declared that "there is no evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, that the defendant is aware of Akai Gurley's presence," CRI reported. Liang was expected to receive a 15-year jail term after he was convicted of manslaughter in February. Chun's decision is nearly identical to the recommendation made by Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson in March. In his recommendation, Thompson noted that Liang never intended to harm Gurley. He added that, due to the circumstances of the case, a prison term should not be warranted. Upon hearing the decision, Gurley's family expressed their dismay over the lowered sentence. In a statement released right after the hearing, they argued that the sentence might send a wrong message that officers who kill people are free from any serious consequences. Gurley's mother Sylvia Palmer called Chun's decision an "insult" not only to the memory of her son but also to the families of those who have been killed. During the trial, Liang again expressed his regret for what happened and apologized to Gurley's family and said that he wished that he could undo the event. Earlier, the court denied Liang's request for a retrial, The Guardian reported. His defense lawyers argued that one of the jurors, Michael Vargas, made public remarks that have cast doubt on the February conviction. However, Chun turned down the request, saying that Vargas's statements outside of the court do not affect his decision. By Ben Blanchard BEIJING (Reuters) - China will launch a "core module" for its first space station some time around 2018, a senior official told the state-run Xinhua news agency on Thursday, part of a plan to have a permanent manned space station in service around 2022. Advancing China's space program is a priority for Beijing, with President Xi Jinping calling for the country to establish itself as a space power, and apart from its civilian ambitions Beijing has tested anti-satellite missiles. China insists its space program is for peaceful purposes, but the U.S. Defense Department has highlighted its increasing space capabilities, saying it was pursuing activities aimed to prevent adversaries from using space-based assets in a crisis. The "core module" for the space station would be called the "Tianhe-1", the Chinese word for galaxy or Milky Way, Wang Zhongyang, spokesman for the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp, told Xinhua. "Two space labs will be launched later and dock with the core module, Tianhe-1," he said. "The construction of the space station is expected to finish in 2022." It gave no details of what the "core module" would consist. "If the International Space Station, which has extended its service, is retired by 2024, China's new space station will be the only operational one in outer space," Wang added. In a manned space mission in 2013, three Chinese astronauts spent 15 days in orbit and docked with an experimental space laboratory, the Tiangong (Heavenly Palace) 1. This year, China will launch the Tiangong 2 and Shenzhou 11 spacecraft, which will carry two astronauts and dock with Tiangong 2, Xinhua added. Next year, China's first cargo ship, Tianzhou 1, will attempt to dock with Tiangong 2, it said. China also plans a space telescope similar to the Hubble Space Telescope, which will "be on a separate space unit and share orbit alongside the space station", Wang added. Xinhua, in a separate report, said China was also working on its own reusable rocket technologies and has already built a prototype model. "The experiment has laid solid foundation for the realization of reusable rockets in the country," an unnamed source told Xinhua. China has been moving to develop its space program for military, commercial and scientific purposes, but is still playing catch-up to established space powers the United States and Russia. China's Jade Rabbit moon rover landed on the moon in late 2013 to great national fanfare, but soon began experiencing severe technical difficulties. The Jade Rabbit and the Chang'e 3 probe that carried it there marked the first "soft landing" on the moon since 1976. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had accomplished the feat earlier. (Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Nick Macfie) By Siva Govindasamy and Joseph Sipalan SINGAPORE/KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - With an eye on China's more muscular stance in the South China Sea, Southeast Asian governments are stepping up efforts to replace aging fighter aircraft fleets, paving the way for multi-billion dollar deals in a boon for warplane makers. Despite tight budgets across the region, sales executives say they are busier than ever after a five-year lull - and both industry and government sources say the next months could see several multi-billion dollar deals from Malaysia to Vietnam. A trade conference held in Kuala Lumpur this week thronged with would-be buyers and salesmen from Russian, French, British, Chinese, Pakistani and American firms. Held every other year, attendees reported it was busier than ever. A prime drawcard was one of the region's biggest prizes: Malaysia, which is set to finally replace its Russian 1990s-era MiG-29 fighters after several years of delays. Industry sources say Kuala Lumpur could buy up to 18 jets, a deal potentially worth more than $2.5 billion. Options include the Saab Gripen, the Eurofighter Typhoon, Russian Sukhoi Su-30, and the Sino-Pakistani JF-17. France is optimistic about winning an order for Dassault-built Rafales but other bidders are also hopeful. "We are hoping to make Malaysia the ninth country to buy the Typhoon," said John Brosnan, who heads the Asian business for BAE Systems, one of the partners in the Eurofighter consortium. Malaysia's defense ministry did not respond to requests for comment on the talks. Vietnam, eyeing options beyond traditional supplier Russia, is among those next on the buyers list. It has had preliminary talks with Saab and France's Dassault to purchase at least 12 fighter jets, industry sources and a separate source familiar with the government talks said. "They seem to be keen on moving away from Russia, but it has been dormant so far," said Kaj Rosender, regional director for Gripen exports at Saab. "It looks like the next call will be on Vietnam." Industry sources say Vietnam is also in talks with Moscow over several Su-35s. Officials at Rosoboronexport, Russia's arms export agency, declined to comment on any negotiations. Vietnamese officials rarely comment on procurement matters, and did not respond to Reuters' requests for comment. FOCUSING MINDS While reluctant to comment publicly, officials in countries including Indonesia and Vietnam privately say their renewed interest in new fighter jets is driven in large part by China's growing presence in the disputed South China Sea. Chinese state media reported this week that a military plane had landed on Fiery Cross Reef, one of a number of new runways on reclaimed artificial islands, fuelling expectations that China will soon deploy fighter jets at the doorstep of many of the Southeast Asian claimants. "Rising tensions in (the Asia Pacific region) have seen a long overdue process of military modernization move up the political agenda in a number of countries," Craig Caffrey, principal analyst at IHS Jane's said in a report. "The Philippines, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam are all following Chinas lead and we see no sign of this trend coming to an end." Beijing for its part says it needs the facilities for self-defense and says the United States and others are militarizing the region, not China. By rights, U.S. defense firms should be benefiting as the region renews and revamps - they were a heavy presence in Southeast Asian sales 1980s and 1990s. But they now they face tough competition, as well as tighter purse strings. Thailand, which has Northrop F-5s and Lockheed Martin F-16s, has bought the Saab Gripen and could order more from the Swedes, say industry sources familiar with the negotiations. "We do want new jets, we have long-term plans, but we don't have the money for it," Major General Kongcheep Tantrawanit, Thai defense ministry spokesman, said. "There are no deals in the making right now." Boeing executives had been plugging their F/A-18E/F Super Hornets to Malaysia, which operates the older Boeing F-18 Hornet variants. But Kuala Lumpur appears to be leaning towards the Europeans, say industry sources. Boeing's only presence at this week's show was to promote its unmanned systems. Boeing officials did not respond to requests for comment. Meanwhile, Indonesia, which operates older Lockheed Martin F-16s, is close to an order for Russian Su-35s to supplement its Su-30s, industry and government sources said. It is also a partner in the Korean Aerospace Industry KF-X fighter jet program, which Lockheed is helping to develop. Lockheed did not respond to requests for comment. For U.S. players, that leaves the list of likely partners at Singapore, which operates only U.S. fighters jets and is a partner in the Lockheed F-35 program. The region's other supplier, of course, is China itself. Its JF-17, which it developed with Pakistan is a being marketed as a viable low-cost option for air forces, including Malaysia and Myanmar. (Additional reporting by Patpicha Tanakasempipat in BANGKOK, Manuel Mogato in MANILA, Aradhana Aravindan in SINGAPORE; Editing by Clara Ferreira Marques and Lincoln Feast) Five former New Orleans police officers accused of killing unarmed civilians and covering it up pleaded guilty on Wednesday, more than a decade after the incident on Danziger Bridge. Under the plea deals, the four former officers involved in the shooting agreed to prison terms ranging from 7 to 12 years. Another officer accused of the cover-up agreed to a three-year sentence. Those sentences are significantly less than the 38 to 65 years in prison the four former officers previously faced. A judge found that there was prosecutorial misconduct, and lessened the terms. By pleading guilty, the officers avoided a retrial. They were originally found guilty in 2011, and have remained in jail without bond since. The Times-Picayune accounts for what happened that day: The shooting occurred on Sept. 4, 2005, six days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, as the police riding inside a rental truck said they were responding to a report of an officer on the nearby I-10 high rise taking fire from the direction of the Danziger Bridge's intersection with Downman Road. The report wasn't verified, but the resulting police action would claim the lives of mentally disabled Ronald Madison, 40, and James Brissette, 17. Brissette was attempting to cross the eastern side of the bridge with members of his uncle's family, who were pushing a grocery cart away from the flooded city center in search of supplies. Leonard Bartholomew III, his wife Susan, daughter Lesha and Brissette's friend Jose Holmes all sustained serious injuries when the police drove up and opened fire. Only 14-year-old son Leonard Bartholomew IV, who managed to escape under the bridge, got away unharmed. The incident added on to the already 700 dead from the hurricane. In the years that followed, the citys police have been under heavy scrutiny, including a federal investigation, requested by Mayor Mitch Landrieu, into the New Orleans Police Department. Story continues Read more from The Atlantic: This article was originally published on The Atlantic. By Christian Plumb UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said on Thursday that successful peace deals with the country's two largest guerrilla groups would make a big dent in the drug trade, boosting the country's effort to replace illicit crops with legal ones. Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly, Santos also slammed policies purely focused on "repression" which he said had often targeted poor, small farmers in Colombia - one of the world's top cocaine producers - instead of deep-pocketed drug traffickers. "After so many lives that have been destroyed, after so much corruption and so much violence, after so many young people being marched off to jail, can we say that we have won the war (on drugs) or at least that we are winning it?" Santos asked. "Unfortunately the answer is 'no.'" Santos is the latest Latin American leader to question the aggressive war on drugs during a special U.N. session called to rethink global strategy in the war on narcotics for the first time in two decades amid an international trend toward more liberal drug laws. "How do you explain to a humble Colombian farmer that he's going to jail because he's growing marijuana when anybody in Colorado or Washington in the U.S., anybody at all, can grow marijuana, sell it and consume it freely?" Santos asked. "It simply doesn't make sense." Instead, Colombia has been going after major drug traffickers while also focusing on getting farmers to switch to legal crops, an effort Santos said would be helped greatly by a successful conclusion to continuing peace talks with the country's largest rebel group, the Marxist FARC, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Negotiations are also slated with the second-largest guerrilla group, the leftist National Liberation Army. "If we are able to do this, this will be a historical turnaround not only for Colombia but the entire world and a step in the right direction," he said. Colombia, long a hub for narcotics production and trafficking, was once home to large marijuana cultivations. Much of the crop was smuggled to the United States before drug cartels began producing more profitable cocaine. The push toward more liberal drug policies accelerated this week as Canada's government said it would seek to legalize recreational pot and Mexico's president said he was open to legalizing medical marijuana. The latter move follows a decision by Santos in December to allow the therapeutic use of pot. (Reporting by Christian Plumb; Editing by Tom Brown and Sandra Maler) Comcast a company that doesnt exactly have the best reputation in customers eyes looks ready to give subscribers something to smile about, by eliminating the cable box. The company today announced that it's working on a new program that will let customers watch TV via a Roku streaming device or a Samsung smart TV, without needing to also have a cable box in their homes. The announcement follows FCC Chairman Tom Wheelers recommendation that third-party hardware and software developers should give customers an alternative way to access content beyond traditional cable and satellite boxes (which typically carry monthly fees that can total more than $80 per year). Wheeler wasnt the only government official recently calling for a more competitive cable landscape. President Barak Obama sat down with Yahoo Finance last week to discuss an executive order he signed to increase competitiveness across the economic spectrum. As part of that order, the Commerce Department sent a letter to the FCC essentially backing up Wheelers recommendation. The timing of Comcasts announcement isnt a coincidence though, as the company specifically mentions that the program will let customers watch TV without needing to pay cable box rental fees, and calls the FCCs proposal unnecessary. Of course, this is likely nothing more than Comcast trying to show the FCC that it has things under control and doesnt need the government to step in. Importantly, this marks the first time Comcast customers will be able to watch cable on their actual TVs via an app. The companys previous Xfinity TV app lets you watch shows and movies on your favorite channels but its only available for Android and iOS. And Comcast isnt the only cable company experimenting with delivering cable programming to its customers without the box. Time Warner Cable already had a pilot program that allows customers in the New York City area to access their cable through their Roku streaming devices. Comcast says its app will be available for Roku later this fall, while the smart TV version will hit sometime later this year. Email Daniel at dhowley@yahoo-inc.com; follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley. By Peter Apps In the movie Top Gun, there is a running gag in which hotshot fighter pilot "Maverick" - played by Tom Cruise - insists on repeatedly "buzzing" U.S. Navy control towers in his F-14 Tomcat. Every time he achieves something in the air, he requests permission for a high-speed, low-level flyby. It is always denied - but that maverick Maverick does it anyway. In reality, though, flying fast-moving aircraft is one of the worlds riskiest occupations. And while sparring in the skies - even the bloodless posturing common between nations in time of tension -- is what some aviators live for, there is little tolerance for truly unnecessary risks. When two Russian Su-24 jets made what U.S. officials described as several simulated attack runs on the destroyer Donald Cook in the Baltic last week, the United States military appears to have suffered a comprehensive but understandable sense-of-humor failure. In a press release, the United States European Command described the actions of the Russian aircraft as unsafe and unprofessional, warning that they brought with them a significant risk of sparking unintended conflict. There is unquestionably a degree of theater in the current U.S. outrage and public complaints. Whatever Secretary of State John Kerry might say, the U.S. Navy is unlikely to blast unarmed Russian military aircraft from the sky, even if they come uncomfortably close at least not without a shooting war already underway. Like the Russians, U.S. military aircraft and warships have a tradition of making their presence felt in places they are not always wanted albeit in international waters and airspace where they have every legal right to be. In the South China Sea, for example, U.S. and allied freedom of navigation operations deliberately send ships and aircraft through areas Beijing claims it has exclusive economic and other rights to claims which are largely disputed by just about everybody else. In January, the Chinese government made a very similar complaint over what it described as an unprofessional and irresponsible passage by the destroyer Curtis Wilbur that came within 12 miles of a Chinese-controlled island. U.S., Australian, Filipino, Indonesian and other aircraft regularly challenge what that governments say are illegally declared Chinese air-defense zones around disputed islands. Beijing, too, frequently sends warships and aircraft to inspect U.S. and other foreign forces operating in international waters near its territory. These operations, some experts worry, bring with them the same risk of accidental confrontation and escalation. In general, however, U.S. officials say Chinese forces have become increasingly professional in their interaction with U.S. and other counterparts. Military units keep a respectful distance from each other, they say, tend to communicate clearly and effectively in English and avoid operating aircraft or vessels so close together that things might become unintentionally dangerous. That is a serious relief for U.S. commanders, who have been trying to build relationships and a basic understanding of rules of the road for several years. Speaking at a conference in Washington, in March, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson said very real progress had been made on making sure U.S. and Chinese warships could establish direct bridge-to-bridge communications in an emergency. "By and large, there is more and more abiding by that rule set as we go forward," he said, according to an official transcript. "I've got good communication with my counterpart [in China]. In the event that something happens that raises questions, we can get in touch with one another." In the Persian Gulf, U.S. naval officers also admit a grudging respect or at least appreciation for the way in which Irans armed forces also tend to operate clearly and effectively. Any U.S. forces approaching Iranian territory are swiftly warned away in English. Irans more politicized Revolutionary Guard units, however, are seen as much less predictable and prone to pushing the envelope as they did earlier this year when they detained two U.S. Navy patrol boats they accused of briefly entering Tehrans territorial waters. When it comes to aerial and maritime confrontations with Russia, there does seem to be a clear feeling in U.S. and NATO circles that Moscow or at the very least, some of its personnel are simply taking too many risks. Many U.S. officials believe they would not do so without encouragement from the very top. In the case of the mock attacks on the Cook, the key complaint appears to be the sheer speed and proximity with which the Russian jets approached. The U.S. vessel was carrying out flight operations with its own helicopter at the time, something its commander felt compelled to suspend. A Russian military helicopter circled the U.S. warships shortly afterward in a move that appeared much less dangerous, but was still clearly an attempt at intimidation. U.S. officials say the incident fits with a much wider pattern of behavior that has repeatedly seen Russian aircraft probe the airspace of the Baltic states in particular. In some cases, aircraft have been accused of actually crossing the boundary. Some of these incidents have resulted in near misses, Western officials say. Last year, Sweden protested after it said a Russian surveillance aircraft operating without an identifying transponder came dangerously close to a civilian airliner. In December, NATO described recent Russian actions as a threat to regional civil aviation. At the end of last week, shortly after the incident with the Cook, Washington said another Russian jet performed a potentially dangerous barrel roll around a U.S. surveillance aircraft also operating in the region. With Russias military reach and clout now grown to a scale not seen since the Cold War, such incidents may not be limited to its immediate neighborhood. Russian complaints that it is unfairly scapegoated, however, may occasionally be justified. Last year, a Northern Irish fishing boat was nearly capsized after snagging what its crew believed was an unidentified submarine in its nets. With no British submarines said to be involved, some experts suggested a Russian vessel might have been responsible. In September, however, British officials revealed it had been a Royal Navy submarine after all. Part of the problem may be that current Russian military doctrine appears to heavily prioritize keeping the details of Moscows military activities as opaque as possible. Its annexation of Crimea in 2014 showed some of the advantages of this Russian irregular forces or at least, forces without clear military insignia were able to secure much of the peninsula before Western governments really knew what was happening. On land, the United States and NATO are now prioritizing coming up with doctrines and strategies to manage something similar, particularly should confrontations happen in the formerly Soviet states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. They are all now members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the founding charter of which states that an attack on any member is an attack on all. Offshore and in the air, matters should be more clear-cut not least because of a 1972 U.S.-Soviet agreement on managing incidents at sea, a treaty the United States says last weeks flyby in the Baltic breached. No one expects Russian posturing to cease indeed, many U.S. and Western officials concede it often makes sense from Moscows perspective. The shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, however, starkly underlines the risks of blurring lines of military responsibility too much. Russian President Vladimir Putin might wish to rein in his fighter jocks in. At least a touch. (Peter Apps is Reuters global affairs columnist, writing on international affairs, globalization, conflict and other issues. He is also founder and executive director of the Project for Study of the 21st Century; PS21; , a non-national, non-partisan, non-ideological think tank operating in London, New York and Washington DC. Prior to that, he spent 12 years as a reporter for Reuters covering defense, political risk and emerging markets. Since 2016, he also has been an officer in the British Army Reserve.) By Sebastien Malo NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Nations on the verge of eliminating malaria risk falling short of their goal, just as it lies within reach, due to funding being shifted elsewhere, researchers said on Thursday. Global aid has moved to areas where malaria remains widespread, while internal domestic funding gets diverted to fighting other diseases perceived as more urgent, said researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, in a study published in The Lancet medical journal. Once a leading cause of death and illness, malaria has been wiped out in half the world's countries, experts say. Nations on the verge of eliminating the disease include China, Mexico, Turkey and South Africa, the study said. Overall, such countries where eliminating malaria is within reach are expected to face a one-third drop in international funding, the research said. The biggest financier in the fight is the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which receives funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates organization also provided grant money for the University of California study. Nations that recently eliminated the mosquito-borne illness include Armenia, Morocco, Turkmenistan and the United Arab Emirates. Malaria can prove troublesome because quasi-eradication can be followed by resurgence, Richard Feachem, the paper's senior author, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview. More than 60 resurgences of malaria have occurred since about 1930, failures he attributed to emboldened politicians and governments willing to cut budgets for fighting the disease. "It becomes out of sight, out of mind," he said. Looking at 35 countries with current low malaria transmission, the study found signs of diminishing political and financial commitment. That amounts to "the greatest threat to malaria elimination," the paper said. Europe on Wednesday became the world's first region to wipe out malaria entirely, a milestone announced by the World Health Organization. Last year, there were 214 million cases of the disease, and it killed 438,000 people, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. World leaders committed to ending the disease by 2030 when they adopted the Sustainable Development Goals last year at the United Nations. (Reporting by Sebastien Malo, Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org) Lyle Denniston, the National Constitution Centers constitutional literacy adviser, looks at how the Courts Bank Markazi ruling may redefine how Congress can influence a court case. The wheels of justice sometimes turn slowly in the nations courts, but much of the time, the two sides must simply wait for the process to run its course toward a decision. In the federal courts, though, it may now be possible for a frustrated individual or organization with a lawsuit to turn to Congress with a plea for it to take sides in that specific case and decide or at least strongly influence how it should come out. That is one of the potential results of a major Supreme Court decision on Wednesday, testing the constitutional doctrine of the separation of powers among the branches of the national government. The decision came in a case involving the congressionally imposed duty for the government of Iran to pay off hundreds of victims of Mideast terrorist acts that the Iranian regime has been found to have sponsored. Just how far that decision, in the case of Bank Markazi v. Peterson, goes beyond this particular controversy will depend upon how expansively courts interpret that ruling in future cases. Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., in a history-laden dissent, seemed to be cautioning lower courts to apply narrowly the principles of the ruling if anyone else succeeds in getting Congress to make a similar foray into shaping a pending court case. Roberts warned that, as the majority had decided the case, it amounted to a significant shift of judicial power away from the courts and to Congress. The ruling, he said, could become a blueprint for extensive expansion of the legislative power at the judiciarys expense. The Chief Justice recalled that the Founder, James Madison, had warned against Congresss tendency to extend the sphere of its activity and draw all power into its impetuous vortex. Whatever the future prospect is, that case could have produced a historical constitutional debate between Supreme Court Justices over how the Constitution does or does not insulate the federal courts created by Article III from efforts by Congress to shape how they decide specific pending cases. As the case turned out, however, only the dissenting Justices felt obliged to dig deeply into constitutional history to guide their analysis. The majority hardly answered that recitation of history as it upheld the federal law at issue, finding it to be a valid exercise of legislative authority hardly different in kind from other statutes that change existing law with the change then affecting ongoing court cases. Story continues The Bank Markazi case was begun in a variety of lawsuits by some 1,300 individuals, victims (or their families) of terrorist bombings in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. They had won billions of dollars worth of court rulings against the Iranian government, and had turned to the federal courts to try to collect. They discovered that the central bank of Iran, named Bank Markazi, had about $1.75 billion in assets in a New York City bank, so they went after that to satisfy at least part of what they were owed under the court judgments. When that bogged down in the refusal of the Iranian government to recognize an obligation to pay, the lawyers for the victims turned to Congress in 2012. What emerged from their lobbying efforts was a law tailored very specifically to their case. Not only did it identify that case by specific citation of its court docket number; the 2012 law also specified that it was declaring the law only for that case, and could not be applied to any other case. The law told the federal courts that, if they found that the assets in the New York bank did belong to Bank Markazi, and that no one else owned them, it would be obliged to award those assets to the victims and their survivors and families. Was that a legislative takeover of the court case, or was it merely a change within Congress power to alter existing law? That was the issue before the Supreme Court. The decision emerged Wednesday, and the victims won, by a 6-to-2 vote. From the perspective of the majority, speaking through an opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the law was not, in fact, a law to govern just a single case but a stack of consolidated lawsuits filed by various combinations of the victims, and the law was little different from many laws that Congress passes that are narrow in scope and, sometimes, benefit only a single individual or organization and have an impact on existing court cases. The Chief Justice, in a dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, viewed the congressional initiative as an unprecedented intrusion into the business of the courts, targeting a specific case and leaving so little for the courts to decide to complete it that the law could only be understood as a mandated victory for the victims. The very idea of an independent judiciary, created by the Constitutions Article III, Roberts wrote, was to change away from a practice in the colonial governments of letting legislatures act like courts, with legal outcomes depending upon shifting political sentiments. Roberts also relied heavily upon a Civil War-era precedent, the courts 1872 ruling in United States v. Klein, which he said was the first ruling by the court to enforce the judicial independence that has been assured by Article III. That ruling, he said, affirmed the bedrock rule of Article III that the judicial power is vested in the Judicial Branch alone. By contrast, the Ginsburg opinion for the majority suggested that the 1872 precedent was only a puzzling ruling, that actually did not stand as a sturdy guarantor of judicial independence, but was little more than an attempt to advise Congress not to require courts to take steps that would violate the Constitution. Whether it was the majoritys intent to belittle that often-cited precedent, the apparent effect was to do just that. It also is not clear why the majority opinion did as little as it did to counter the historical arguments mounted by the dissent. But by keeping the focus only on its interpretation of the specific law that Congress had passed in 2012 on access to the Iranian government assets for the terrorism victims, Justice Ginsburg and her supporting colleagues may simply have been implying that this case did not provide the occasion for a broad inquiry into constitutional history. Even so, it would have been fascinating and useful to have had a rebuttal to the Chief Justices recitation. Recent Stories on Constitution Daily Supreme Court tackles standing, executive powers in immigration arguments Previewing todays immigration arguments at the Supreme Court Is Hamilton in, and Jackson out, on U.S. currency? By Georgina Cooper WINDSOR, England (Reuters) - Queen Elizabeth greeted thousands of well-wishers from across Britain and beyond as she celebrated her 90th birthday on Thursday, demonstrating the world's oldest monarch's intent to keep doing the job she has performed for more than six decades. Usually the queen's birthday passes with little ceremony but to mark Thursday's milestone a beaming Elizabeth, attired in a light green outfit, mingled with crowds during a lengthy walkabout near her Windsor Castle home, west of London. In a rare move in recent years, she then drove through Windsor in an open-topped car with Prince Philip, her husband of 68-years by her side. "All of us are here to respect the queen and to show her our affection and how much we appreciate all her years of service and to wish her a happy birthday," said Donna Werner who had travelled to Windsor from Connecticut in the United States. Werner, like many others in the crowd festooned with red, white and blue, had been camped out since before dawn along with three English friends she met during the 2011 wedding of Elizabeth's grandson William and his wife Kate. Later the queen will light a beacon, the first of about 1,000 across Britain and worldwide to mark the occasion. There were also artillery gun salutes in London and other British cities, while the Houses of Parliament were to be illuminated later in red, white and blue. "I send my best wishes to those who are celebrating their 90th birthday ... on this shared occasion, I send my warm congratulations to you," said a post on the queen's Twitter site. Close aides say Elizabeth, who has been on the throne for 64 years and is by far the oldest monarch in British history, was far more interested in events to mark her 90th birthday than she had been about overtaking her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria last September as Britain's longest-reigning sovereign. Born on April 21, 1926, Elizabeth shows no signs of retiring let alone abdicating. An Ipsos MORI poll last week found 70 percent wanted her to stay queen compared to 21 percent who thought she should abdicate or retire. "HUMBLE ADDRESS" "As the sands of culture shift and the tides of politics ebb and flow, Her Majesty has been steadfast, a rock of strength for our nation, for our Commonwealth, and on so many occasions, for the whole world," Prime Minister David Cameron said in a "humble address" in parliament. Jeremy Corbyn, the ardent republican leader of the opposition Labour Party, paid tribute to her "outstanding commitment to public life". "Whatever differing views people across this country have about the institution, the vast majority share an opinion that Her Majesty has served this country ... with a clear sense of public service and public duty," he said. Some, though, were less overawed by the occasion. "Headline polling figures mask what's really happening," said Graham Smith, chief executive of campaign group Republic. "With the republican movement stronger than ever - and growing - and with the succession looming on the horizon, the monarchy is in a more perilous position than pundits will tell you this week." (Reporting and writing by Michael Holden; Editing by Stephen Addison) China, along with neighboring nations such as Taiwan and Malaysia, claims territorial ownership over the South China Sea. (Photo : Getty Images) China has landed a military plane on one of the islands in the disputed South China Sea to evacuate three injured workers, the BBC reported. Thought to be a first, the Chinese military has admitted in public that it indeed sent a plane on the man-made island known as the Fiery Cross Reef. Advertisement Landing on a Sunday morning, the military aircraft picked up three construction workers who were reportedly hurt. According to China's state media, the workers were then flown to Hainan Island to receive treatment. China and several of its neighboring countries have long been engaged in a territorial dispute over the South China Sea. Beijing claims that it owns the area almost entirely. The BBC also said that previously, China has landed civilian planes on the Fiery Cross Reef. This move has earned ire from the United States and Vietnam, one of the countries who claims the said territory. Other countries who claim areas within the South China Sea include Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines. Coming to defense, Beijing clarified that it has been building artificial islands and other structures only for civilian purposes. Nonetheless, other countries claim that there is a possibility that the facilities are directed for military purposes. The U.S. has previously stressed that China's move to build islands all the more aggravates the tension among the involved countries. It has also been preventing vessels to freely navigate in the disputed area. The Fiery Cross Reef has become an artificial island after China began a dredging operation and kicked off the construction of buildings and an air strip, the BBC said. Back in February this year, the U.S. and Taiwan claim that China has deployed missiles on another disputed island named Woody or Yongxing Island. In response, China expressed concerns that the U.S. is the one militarizing the area, citing its air and naval patrols. The U.S. then emphasized that the patrols are part of the country's freedom of navigation. The Western giant also stressed that it takes no position on the heated territorial disputes. On April 21, 1898, Spain broke off diplomatic relations with the United States in a long-simmering dispute over Cuba. The brief war that followed would have permanent implications for American foreign policy, and push the formerly isolationist power on to the global stage. USS Maine towed from Havana Harbor The Spanish-American War is just one of five conflicts where Congress approved an official declaration of war using its constitutional powers. In total, war declarations have been declared by Congress in the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, World War I and World War II. In the Constitution, Article I, Section 8, gives Congress the power to declare war and raise and fund the Armed Forces, and Article II, Section 2, names the President as the Commander in Chief in such conflicts. Since 1942, the President and Congress have used other means to take military action. In the case of the conflict between Spain and the United States, it was clear that the declared war was just that, but the United States government would wind up with a global presence after eight months of conflict. Prior to the war declaration by Congress on April 25, 1898, tensions were high as United States business interests eyed the sugar-producing industry in Cuba. There was already an uprising in Cuba by its colonial inhabitants against Spain. And after the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havanas harbor on February 15, war seemed inevitable. On April 11, 1898, President William McKinley asked Congress for authorization to end the fighting in Cuba between the Cuban rebels and Spanish forces, and on April 20, Congress passed a joint resolution that acknowledged Cuban independence, and authorized President McKinley to use whatever military measures needed to guarantee Cubas independence. On April 21, Spain informed the United States that it broken off all diplomatic ties with the Americans. On the next day, President McKinley ordered a blockade of Cuba. Spain declared war on April 23, and then Congress approved its own war declaration on April 25, making it retroactive to April 21. Story continues The actual fighting in the declared war lasted for a 10-week period. On May 1, in Manila Bay, Commodore George Deweys Asiatic Squadron defeated the Spanish naval force located in the Philippines, another Spanish possession. In June, American troops captured Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and attacked the harbor city of Santiago. After defeating the Spanish army on the ground in Cuba, the U.S. used its Navy to destroy the Spanish Caribbean squadron in July. In late July 26, the French intervened for Spain to start peace negotiations, and a cease-fire was signed on August 12. The final peace between U.S. and Spanish governments came with the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898. The costs to Spain were heavy. It had to guarantee the independence of Cuba, give Guam and Puerto Rico to the United States, and agree to sell the Philippines to the United States for the sum of $20 million. But there was one final constitutional step in the process: the U.S. Senate had to ratify the treaty in February 1899, and that was far from guaranteed. A two-thirds majority of the Senate is needed to approve a treaty, and a powerful anti-Imperialist group opposed expanding the United States into a global power. The lobby included former Presidents Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland, and the industrialist Andrew Carnegie. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty on February 6, 1899, by a margin of just one vote, after William Jennings Bryan decided to support a treaty backed by his arch rival, President McKinley. Also, during the conflict, the United States annexed Hawaii. A joint resolution of Congress made Hawaii a U.S. territory on August 12, 1898, as concerns grew about its strategic importance in protecting the prospective new American interests in the Pacific. Related Constitution Daily Historical Stories Five myths about the start of the Revolutionary War Official: Tubman replaces Jackson, Hamilton remains on currency 50 interesting facts about Abraham Lincolns life Benjamin Franklins place among the most influential Americans ever PARIS (Reuters) - The oil market will begin rebalancing by the third quarter of this year and will turn positive by 2017 despite world's top producers failing to reach an agreement to freeze production during a weekend meeting in Doha, OPEC's secretary general said in Paris on Thursday. "Doha or no Doha, we see that the market is turning," Abdullah El-Badri told an oil summit in the French capital. "Maybe demand will be more than supply, and we see that the market by 2017 will turn around and it will be positive. I don't know how much the price will be, I cannot really tell you. But at least it will be better than what we are seeing right now," Badri said. He added that he saw the market turning around by the third quarter of this year. "The only problem we are having is this overhang, if we can solve this overhang then the market will stabilize," he said. (Reporting by Michel Rose and Bate Felix; Editing by James Regan) Eindhoven (Netherlands) (AFP) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday fewer migrants were now reaching European shores, giving EU nations a chance to shore up plans to protect the continent's outer borders. "Now that the number of refugees coming to Europe has lessened, we have an opportunity to find together a European solution," Merkel said after talks with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. Merkel and top EU officials will visit an area near the Turkish-Syrian border at the weekend to follow up on a deal aiming to stem the migrant crisis. Europe is struggling to deal with its worst refugee crisis since World War II, with a million migrants having arrived on its shores last year. Many of them are fleeing conflicts in the Middle East, but many are also economic migrants seeking a better life. The European Union sealed a deal with Ankara last month under which Turkey takes back all "irregular migrants" who arrive in the Greek islands in exchange for billions of euros in aid for refugees and political concessions. Merkel warned it was of utmost importance to ensure there was a European effort to reach "a controlled, legal migration with our neighbours." "Either Europe protects its outer borders, or we will be taking a bitter step backwards," Merkel said, after spending the day in the Dutch town of Eindhoven. Germany's liberal refugee policy last year ushered in 1.1 million asylum-seekers from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. "We are seeing influx numbers going down. It's too early to draw conclusions, but the first signals are positive," Rutte told reporters at their joint press conference. Merkel will also hold talks in Hanover on Monday with US President Barack Obama and French President Francois Hollande, as well as the British and Italian prime ministers, David Cameron and Matteo Renzi. Migration will be among the topics discussed at the talks to be hosted Merkel. In a bid to deter the people smugglers ferrying people across the seas on perilous journeys to Europe, NATO deployed ships and helicopters in Turkish and Greek territorial waters in early March. NATO said Thursday it had no plans to wind up the mission to stop migrant traffickers in the Aegean Sea, even though there had been a reduction in the numbers of migrants, and warned smugglers were changing routes very quickly. By Ana Isabel Martinez and Diego Ore PEDERNALES/QUITO, Ecuador (Reuters) - Ecuador will temporarily increase some taxes, sell assets, and may issue new bonds on the international market to fund a multi-billion dollar reconstruction after a devastating 7.8 magnitude quake, a somber President Rafael Correa said on Wednesday. The death toll from Ecuador's weekend earthquake neared 600 and rescue missions ebbed as the traumatized Andean nation braced itself for long and costly rebuilding. "It's hard to imagine the magnitude of the tragedy. Every time we visit a place, there are more problems," Correa said, fresh from touring the disaster zone. The leftist leader estimated the disaster had inflicted $2 billion to $3 billion of damage and could knock 2 to 3 percentage points off growth, meaning the economy will almost certainly shrink this year. Lower oil revenue had already left the poor nation of 16 million people facing near-zero growth and lower investment. In addition to $600 million in credit from multilateral lenders, Correa, an economist, announced a raft of measures to help repair homes, roads, and bridges along the devastated Pacific Coast. "We're looking at the possibility of issuing bonds on the international market," he said on Wednesday afternoon, without providing details. Ecuador had been saying before the quake that current high yields would make it too expensive to issue debt. Yields on its bonds are close to 11 percentage points higher than comparable U.S. Treasury debt, according to JPMorgan data, and creditors are likely to be wary after the quake. Correa's government in 2008 defaulted on debt with a similar yield, calling the value unfair. His government has since returned to Wall Street and Ecuador currently has some $3.5 billion worth of bonds in circulation. In a nationally televised address later on Wednesday, Correa also announced the OPEC nation was poised to shed assets. "The country has many assets thanks to investment over all these years and we will seek to sell some of them to overcome these difficult moments," he said. He also unveiled several short-term tax changes, including a 2-point increase in the Valued Added Tax for a year, as well as a "one-off 3 percent additional contribution on profits," although the fine print was not immediately clear. The VAT tax is currently 12 percent. Additionally, a one-off tax of 0.9 percent will be imposed on people with wealth of over $1 million. Ecuadoreans will also be asked to contribute one day of salary, calculated on a sliding scale based on income. 'FOOD, PLEASE' Briefly pausing talk of reconstruction and hindering rescuers, another quake, of 6.2 magnitude, shook the coast before dawn on Wednesday, terrifying survivors. "You can't imagine what a fright it was. 'Not again!' I thought," said Maria Quinones in Pedernales town, which bore the brunt of Saturday's disaster. That quake, the worst in decades, killed 570 people, injured 7,000 others, damaged close to 2,000 buildings, and forced over 24,000 survivors to seek refuge in shelters, according to government tallies. Four days on, some isolated communities struggled without water, power or transport, as torn-up roads stymied deliveries. Along the coast, stadiums served as morgues and aid distribution centers. "I'm waiting for medicines, diapers for my grandson, we're lacking everything," said Ruth Quiroz, 49, as she waited in an hour-long line in front of a makeshift pharmacy set up at the Pedernales stadium. On a highway outside the town, some children sat holding placards saying: "Food, please." When a truck arrived to deliver water to the small town of San Jacinto, hungry residents surrounded the vehicle and hit it as they yelled: "We want food!" Scores of foreign aid workers and experts have arrived in the aftermath of Saturday's disaster and about 14,000 security personnel have kept order, with only sporadic looting reported. But rescuers were losing hope of finding anyone alive even as relatives of the missing begged them to keep looking. Speaking from the highland capital, Quito, Correa said the death toll would likely rise further, although at a slower rate than in previous days. "May these tears fertilize the soil of the future," he said. (Additional reporting by Alexandra Valencia and Diego Ore in Quito, Brian Ellsworth in Caracas; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne and Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Tom Brown, Peter Cooney and Michael Perry) People look at a Tesla Motors vehicle on the showroom floor at the Dadeland Mall on February 19, 2014 in Miami, Florida. (Photo : Getty Images/Joe Raedle) Apple Inc. has reportedly hired Chris Porritt, who previously worked for Aston Martin as chief engineer and Tesla as vice president of vehicle engineering. Porritt has said to have worked on Tesla's Model S, X and 3 and on One-77 supercar, the iconic DB9 and V12 Zagato at Aston Martin. In Apple, he will work with "special projects," in lieu of Steve Zadesky who previously spearheaded the company's Titan, the codename of its electric car project. Advertisement There have been some job poaching issues between Apple Inc. and Tesla Motors. Prior to Porritt, Apple had hired engineers from the automotive company, not top executives - until now. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla jokingly called Apple "The Tesla Graveyard," for hiring the people they have fired when the smartphone maker's electric car program "Project Titan" commenced. Apple will reportedly release the first electric car in 2019 or 2020. The vehicle may not be self-driving, though many believe that the iPhone maker is developing that technology. Porritt was a key engineer in the UK automotive industry prior to his transfer to Silicon Valley. He started at Land Rover in 1987 as an intern and was promoted in 1997 to Principal Engineer in Vehicle Dynamics. He then went on to work for Aston Martin as Chief Engineer, then joined Tesla in 2013. Porrit's title is "Special Projects Group PD Administrator," a deliberately vague title, according to AppleInsider. He would be among the most senior car experts at the Cupertino tech firm with Zadesky out of the picture as he reportedly left the company earlier this year. Hence, the most qualified candidate to take over Project Titan, which falls under "special projects." The leap Tesla to Apple by Porritt was not direct but with a few months in between. Some high-level engineers will be reporting to him, one of whom is Emery Sanford, who is said to have worked directly with Zadesky and has several patents to his credit. Apple's Chief Designer Jony Ive is known to own a few Ashton Martin cars as he is said to have a weak spot for the UK car maker. Steve MacManus, also a former Aston Martin chief engineer joined Tesla as Vice President of Engineering when Porritt left, Electrek reported. Tesla CEO Musk is fine with Apple making electric cars, as the following video features. (Reuters) - An Italian student who was tortured and murdered in Egypt had been detained by police and then transferred to a compound run by Homeland Security the day he vanished, intelligence and police sources say. The claims contradict the official Egyptian account that security services had not arrested him. Giulio Regeni, a 28-year-old postgraduate student, disappeared on Jan. 25, friends say. His body was found on Feb. 3, dumped on the side of a road outside Cairo. It showed signs of torture, according to forensic and prosecution officials in Egypt. Egyptian officials have strongly denied any involvement in Regeni's death. Soon after his body was found, police suggested he was the victim of a car accident. Weeks later they said he might have been killed by a criminal gang impersonating policemen. But three Egyptian intelligence officials and three police sources independently told Reuters the police had custody of Regeni at some point before he died. Asked if Regeni had been taken to the Izbakiya police station in Cairo, as some of the sources asserted, an official in the Interior Ministry said: "We did not issue a statement on this matter." Mohamed Ibrahim, an official in the media department of Homeland Security, said: "There is no connection whatsoever between Regeni and the police or Interior Ministry or Homeland Security. He has never been held in any police station or here. The only time he came into contact with police was when the police officials stamped his passport when he landed in Egypt. "If we had any suspicions concerning his activities the solution would have been simple: Expel him." Regeni's fate has re-focused attention on broader allegations of police brutality in Egypt and created tensions between Cairo and Italy, one of Egypt's most important trading partners. A senior forensic official told Reuters that Regeni had seven broken ribs, signs of electrocution on his penis, traumatic injuries all over his body, and a brain haemorrhage. He had been killed by a sharp blow to the head. Pointing to the signs of torture, human rights groups such as the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms and Amnesty International have suggested Regeni may have been killed by Egyptian security services. Rome is demanding Egypt find Regeni's murderers. All six intelligence and police sources told Reuters that Regeni was picked up by plainclothes police near the Gamal Abdel Nasser metro station in Cairo on the evening of Jan. 25. Security had been heightened that day because it was the anniversary of the beginning of the 2011 Arab Spring uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak. An Egyptian man was picked up at the same time. Three sources gave his name but Reuters was unable to verify the man's identity. His connection to Regeni, if any, is unclear. It is also unclear why the men were picked up, though all the sources said the two had not been specifically targeted but were detained as part of a general security sweep. One of the intelligence officials said the two men were taken to the Izbakiya police station, a fortress-like compound located beneath a flyover near downtown Cairo. "They were transported in a white minibus with police licence plates," he said. The three police sources said officers on patrol in the area that night confirmed to them that Regeni had been taken to Izbakiya. "We were told that an Italian was arrested and he was taken to Izbakiya police station," said one of the police officers, who confirmed the detainee was Regeni. A senior police official in the Izbakiya station told Reuters that he recalled an Italian being brought in and said he would check the records to confirm the name. He subsequently declined to comment. "I don't know anything about it," he said. "I checked the books. Regeni's name was not there." One of the intelligence sources said that Regeni was held at Izbakiya for 30 minutes before he was transferred to Lazoughli, a state security compound run by Egyptian Homeland Security. The sources did not say what happened to the Italian after that. Reuters was unable to obtain information on the whereabouts of the Egyptian. "THIS IS OUR WORK" On March 24, Egyptian police said they had discovered Regeni's bag and passport following a shootout with a criminal gang whose members had in the past posed as policemen. Police suggested he might have been a victim of this gang. Italian officials have dismissed the story. Regeni's family have said they believe the student was not killed for criminal gain. The family declined to comment. Regeni's parents have said that if Egypt fails to uncover the truth behind their son's murder they want Rome to respond strongly. Paola Regeni, his mother, said she might release a photograph held by the family's lawyer to show the world what had happened to him. Italy has significant economic interests in Egypt, including the giant offshore Zohr gas field, which is being developed by Italy's state energy producer Eni. A delegation of Italian businessmen led by then-Industry Minister Federica Guidi cut short a visit to Cairo and returned home when Regeni's body was recovered in February. On April 8, Italy recalled its ambassador to Egypt for consultations because, the Italian foreign ministry said, Egyptian investigators in Rome had failed to hand over all their evidence to the Italians. Italian prosecutors said they still wanted details from Cairo mobile phone towers that had connected to Regeni's mobile phone. Egypt said this would violate Egyptian laws and the constitution. Ahmed Essam, a Vodafone official in Egypt, told Reuters that security officials had asked him about "a technical issue related to an investigation that is still ongoing about something secretive." He would not elaborate. Police sources said security officials had asked Essam for telephone recordings but added they could not elaborate. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has said Egypt deeply regretted Regeni's death and intended to continue its "full cooperation" with Italy to resolve the case and bring the culprits to justice. Regeni, who studied at Cambridge University, was researching trade unions in Egypt, focusing on street vendors. In the aftermath of the 2011 uprising, vendors were often used by police to attack protesters or acted as informers. Some vendors were also targeted by the police for blocking roads. His obituary on the Cambridge University website said Regeni "sought to understand how the labour sector was changing in the country, in the context of economic globalisation and greater international institutional linkages." A colleague at Cambridge said Regeni had not flagged any concerns about his safety. But Regeni's research had raised the suspicions of police, a security source told Reuters. The trade union movement is seen as the origin of the 2011 uprising and the last bastion of dissent under Sisi's crackdown. Egypt's interior and foreign ministers both dismissed the allegation that security forces were behind Regeni's murder. "Any foreigner who does this kind of research is followed by the security services," a mid-ranking Homeland Security official told Reuters. "This does not mean that we suspect him. This is our work." (Edited by Simon Robinson, Sara Ledwith) NIAMEY (Reuters) - Authorities in Niger have jailed eight senior civil servants for corruption and fraud after over 1,800 workers in the health sector were hired without proper qualifications, a state prosecutor has said. The arrests appear to signal a heightened campaign by the government of President Mahamadou Issoufou, who said at his inauguration to a second term on April 2 that his main priority was to step the fight against corruption. "Eight officers in the public service and health ministries were charged and jailed for acts of corruption, examination fraud and criminal association," said prosecutor Samna Chaibou, adding that the results of the exams had been annulled. "The facts are extremely serious especially because they concern the health sector. Imagine 1,831 people entering the sector who have zero qualifications," Chaibou said on Tuesday, adding that 14,000 people had applied for the jobs. Civil service jobs are seen as relatively lucrative and stable in Africa, where many people lack formal employment. As a result, competition for entry into government bureaucracy can be intense, which can lead to corruption. Transparency International ranked Niger in 99th place in 2015 in its annual listing of countries according to perceptions of corruption, up from 134th place in 2010. (Reporting by Abdoulaye Massalaki; Writing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg; Editing by Tom Heneghan) Two-time Palme d'Or winner Emir Kusturica has denied, himself, via a producer and via a promoter for his band, telling a Russian news agency that his new film, On the Milky Road, was rejected by the Cannes Film Festival because of his support for president Vladimir Putin. The comments came amid confusion following a story earlier this week by Russia's NSN National News Service that quoted the director saying, "Politics has more and more often interfered with the way the Cannes Film Festival works. I have suspicions that someone gave an order that my film shouldn't be accepted." The story also said the director had submitted his film a day after a deadline set by Cannes. The report was based on an interview with Mirko Radenovic, the Moscow-based promoter of Kusturica's band for Russia, the Baltic and former Soviet countries: The No Smoking Orchestra. NSN said Thursday Radenovic had spoken on behalf of Kusturica. The Yugoslavia-born director insisted Thursday that comments attributed to him, including claims that the Cannes festival had not even bothered to watch his new film, were nonsense. Kusturica said Cannes festival director Thierry Fremaux had watched On the Milky Road as a work-in-progress and had closely followed the project throughout its three-year production period, something the film's producer, Paula Vaccaro, confirmed to THR. Vaccaro told THR that Kusturica never spoke to Russian media about the Cannes festival and that the story by NSN, which was later picked up by many other Russian news outlets, was "completely fabricated." She added: "The Cannes film festival doesn't have a deadline for filmmakers like Emir Kusturica." The Serbian director has twice won Cannes' top prize, the Palme d'Or, for When Father Was Away on Business in 1985 and Underground in 1995. According to Vaccaro, On the Milky Road is not finished and was not submitted to Cannes for consideration. She noted that the festival and the director were both interested in having the film premiere at Cannes this year, but it was physically impossible, as the movie only completed shooting in early March and is still in postproduction. Story continues Read More: Emir Kusturica Says Cannes Festival Rejected New Film due to His Support for Vladimir Putin Radenovic spoke to the news service on Kusturica's behalf, according to NSN. But the promoter tells The Hollywood Reporter the news agency has got its facts wrong. "The story is not true," he said. "It's the journalists who are not correct." He talked to THR by phone from Moscow. "It's not clear [about Cannes], and Kusturica did not say anything about that," he explained. "For that reason, I do not wish go make [any] further comment." Radenovic's comments give credence to a denial issued Thursday by Kusturica, who told a British film-trade magazine that he was "really confused" about the Russian reports, claiming he had "absolutely not spoken to anybody." NSN, however, was standing by its story on Thursday. Rustam Yulbarisov, deputy editor in chief at the news agency, told THR that Radenovic had repeatedly told them he was authorized to comment on behalf of Kusturica. Kusturica has been public in the past about his admiration for Russian president Putin and is close friends with Oscar-winning Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov, another Putin fan. Last week, Kusturica and his band played in Paris, where they opened the show with Russia's national anthem. Last year, he was banned from visiting Ukraine, where he was scheduled to play with the band, because of his pro-Putin statements. Read More: Ukraine Crisis: Palme d'Or-Winning Director Emir Kusturica Voices Support for Russia Skopje (AFP) - The European Union on Thursday cancelled mediation talks on resolving the political crisis in Macedonia, as tens of thousands of pro- and anti-government demonstrators again took to the streets of Skopje. The EU had invited Macedonian political leaders to talks Friday on ending the crisis that has gripped the small Balkan country for the last two years. "We regret that the leaders' meeting planned in Vienna on April 22 could not take place," Commission spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic told AFP. "We have consistently said that the breakdown of the Przino Agreement would have serious consequences for the country," she added, referring to an accord among political leaders reached under EU auspices last year. The country's crisis ratcheted up a notch on April 12 when President Gjorge Ivanov unexpectedly halted a probe into more than 50 public figures suspected of involvement in a wire-tapping scandal, granting a mass pardon to those implicated. Macedonia's opposition said Wednesday it would only join the EU talks if the government revoked the amnesty and postponed snap elections called by Ivanov for June 5. The dropped probe has triggered nightly street protests against Ivanov, while his supporters have held counter-demonstrations. Tens of thousands in the rival camps again massed in the Macedonian capital on Thursday, kept apart by riot police backed by water cannons, an AFP reporter saw. There were no immediate reports of any clashes however. The opposition has said it will boycott the June ballot on grounds that conditions for free and fair polls have not been met -- a contention shared by the EU. Macedonia is a candidate for EU membership since 2005, but is yet to open accession talks. It has had close dealings with Brussels over the migration crisis, as it closed its borders to thousands of people trying to come via Greece. "We would deeply regret any retrograde steps in Skopje that would move the country further away from its aspirations towards European Union accession," Kocijancic said. By Foo Yun Chee BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union charged Google on Wednesday with using its dominant Android mobile operating system to squeeze out rivals, opening a second front against the U.S. technology giant that could result in large fines. EU antitrust regulators said that by requiring mobile phone manufacturers to pre-install Google Search and the Google Chrome browser to get access to other Google apps, the U.S. company was harming consumers by stifling competition. The EU's move is the latest in a series of anti-trust challenges Google has faced in both the EU and countries including India, Brazil and Russia. U.S. regulators closed their most recent investigation of the company in 2013 without taking action. The European Commission said Google's Android licensing practices, which started in 2011 when the company became dominant in mobile operating systems and app stores, showed Google was seeking to shield its search engine, the world's most popular, from competition. Google is already facing EU charges over the promotion of its shopping service in Internet searches at the expense of rival services in a case that has dragged on since late 2010 despite three attempts to resolve the issues. The stakes are higher for Google in the Android case as it made about $11 billion last year from advertising sales on Android phones through its apps such as Maps, Search and Gmail, according to estimates by financial analyst Richard Windsor. "A competitive mobile Internet sector is increasingly important for consumers and businesses in Europe," European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in a statement. "We believe that Google's behavior denies consumers a wider choice of mobile apps and services and stands in the way of innovation by other players," she said. The European Commission said about 80 percent of smart mobile devices in Europe and the world run on Android and that Google holds more than 90 percent of the market for general Internet searches on Android in the European Economic Area. Wall Street analysts were sanguine about the financial consequences of the EU's action. "In the near-term, we do not believe there will be any material financial impact," Mark Mahaney, a prominent Internet analyst with RBC Capital Markets, said in a research note. He added that there could be a material impact down the line as the case moved forward, but that it was "almost impossible" to gauge the likelihood of the company being forced to change its business practices. Still, Mahaney noted that regulatory risk was "something of a 'permanent' investment risk" for Google. And there were some signs Tuesday that the EU's action could help rekindle antitrust investigations in the United Sates -- potentially an even bigger threat. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said he hoped the action by European regulators prompts the Federal Trade Commission to take a close second look at whether Google is deserving of antitrust scrutiny in the United States. FINANCIAL INCENTIVES Google, which has 12 weeks to respond to the EU charges, said Android was a remarkable system based on open-source software and open innovation. "We look forward to working with the European Commission to demonstrate that Android is good for competition and good for consumers," Google's general counsel, Kent Walker, said in a blog. He said any phone maker could load Google apps and rival products and that users had freedom of choice as well. Complainant FairSearch said Google was hindering the development of versions that might lead to new operating systems able to compete with Android, despite launching it as an open source project. The Commission said while Android was an open source system that could be used to develop new mobile operating systems - known as Android forks - Google required phone manufacturers to sign an agreement not to sell devices running on such forks if they wanted to pre-install Google apps. The EU also charged Google with giving "significant financial incentives" to some of the world's largest smartphone makers to pre-install Google Search exclusively on devices. Mozilla, which develops the Firefox browser, said in a statement: "This behavior ... is one of the reasons why launching competitive products like Firefox for mobile and Firefox OS is challenging. We see substantial value in removing barriers to entry so competition and innovation can flourish." Internet Explorer-browser maker Microsoft Corp declined to comment. Norway's Opera Software could not immediately be reached for comment. Vodafone, BT Group's EE, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, KPN, Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics were not immediately available to comment. Huawei [HWT.UL] declined to comment. (Additional reporting by Eric Auchard and Harro ten Wolde in Frankfurt, Se Young Lee in Seoul, and Jonathan Weber in San Francisco; Rriting by Philip Blenkinsop; Editing by David Clarke and Sandra Maler) Brussels (AFP) - The economy in Greece has performed "substantially better" than forecast in its massive bailout deal, the EU said on Thursday, a day ahead of a key meeting of eurozone finance ministers to discuss the rescue. Greece and officials from the EU, ECB and IMF are locked in crunch talks in Athens to close a review of the 86-billion-euro bailout, in time for talks by the eurozone's 19 finance ministers in Amsterdam on Friday. Ahead of the meeting, fresh data released by the EU's Eurostat statistics agency showed that Greece's public spending last year, not counting the heavy cost of borrowing, delivered a surplus of 0.7 percent of GDP. This was "indeed substantively better than the (bailout) programmes fiscal target of a primary deficit of 0.25 percent of GDP for 2015," European Commission spokeswoman Annika Breidthardt said at a briefing in Brussels. Breidthardt added that "talks are continuing in Athens with a view of concluding the review as soon as possible". Any further payout of Greece's third bailout in five years depends on the conclusion of the review, which has been delayed since last autumn by disagreements over pension cuts and bad loans. A row between the IMF and the European institutions in charge of the bailout has also slowed progress. The two sides differ over debt relief and present conflicting data on the state of the Greek economy. Debt relief is a key condition by the International Monetary Fund to remain in the rescue of Greece. The IMF is also requiring much deeper cuts to Greek pensions than what is so far on the table. As a compromise, the IMF and EU are drawing up contingency reforms to impose on Athens in the case of missed targets. "We have a deal on about everything except on the pension reform front," said Greek Employment Minister Georges Katrougalos, after a meeting with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in Athens. A pension reform law would be introduced to Greek parliament on Thursday or Friday, Katrougalos said. A eurozone official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said eurozone ministers in Amsterdam would give important signals on how things will move forward for Athens. "We will have to see if the signal from the ministers in the Eurogroup (of eurozone finance ministers) is a positive one," the official said. By Julia Fioretti BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union's executive warned Sierra Leone, Trinidad & Tobago and Kiribati on Thursday for failing to tackle illegal fishing adequately, exposing the countries to possible trade bans. However, the European Commission lifted its warning against Sri Lanka after it strengthened sanctions against illegal fishing, improved control of its fleets and changed its legal framework. "Sri Lanka has now a robust legal and policy framework to fight illegal fishing activities," said Karmenu Vella, EU Fisheries Commissioner. Since 2010, the EU - the world's biggest fish importer - has acted against countries that do not follow international standards to prevent over-fishing, such as policing their waters for unlicensed fishing vessels and imposing penalties. The EU also said it still had serious concerns about Thailand's efforts to address illegal fishing. "This means that further action by the Commission cannot be ruled out. A meeting with the Thai authorities in May will be a new opportunity for them to show their good will and commitment," the Commission said in a statement. Thailand, the world's third-largest seafood exporter, was given a "yellow card" a year ago for failing to certify the origin and legality of its fish exports to the EU. [nL5N0XI1ZM] Sierra Leone, Kiribati and Trinidad and Tobago have six months to implement measures suggested by the Commission. Failing that, the 28-member bloc could impose an embargo on fish imports. Sierra Leone's sanctions system fails to deter illegal operators fishing internationally under its flag. Trinidad and Tobago also has a large fleet operating internationally where authorities do not control or inspect foreign vessels, the Commission said. Kiribati does not control fishing activities by foreign fleets, raising the risk that illegally caught fish could be laundered through its ports. (Reporting by Julia Fioretti; Editing by Ruth Pitchford) Luxembourg (AFP) - There are still major gaps in intelligence sharing on Islamic State fighters returning to Europe in the wake of the Brussels and Paris attacks, the EU's anti-terrorism coordinator warned Thursday. The report by Gilles de Kerchove to interior ministers meeting in Luxembourg comes after repeated calls by European Union leaders for greater cooperation in dealing with jihadists returning from Syria and Iraq. "There are still significant gaps with regard to feeding Europol" with data on so-called foreign terrorist fighters who travel abroad and are then at risk of returning to carry out attacks, said the report, a copy of which was obtained by AFP. The European police organisation's database contained only 2,956 foreign fighters despite official estimates saying that around 5,000 EU citizens had travelled to fight with the IS group. More than 90 percent of the names on the database were entered in 2015 by just five out of the 28 EU member states, he added. Another database, the European Information System, contained only 1,615 names, he said. "The Paris and Brussels attacks seem to indicate that some if not most of the attackers were known to the police... there also seem to be links to several other member states," de Kerchove's report added. This shows the "importance... of feeding the data" it said. A European source told AFP that "certain countries were not feeding all the databases", adding that "dangerous individuals can therefore return and not be detected." The EU ministers meeting in Luxembourg called for a "change in mentality" to improve counter-terrorism following the November Paris attacks in which 130 people were killed and the March 22 Brussels airport and metro suicide bombings which killed 32 people. Both attacks appear to be the work of a single IS cell straddling France and Belgium. EU migration and anti-terrorism commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos said member states' databases should be "interconnected with a single click." Paris (AFP) - Europe is set to launch two satellites on Friday with very important missions: one will track environmental damage to Earth, while the other will test a mainstay of physics theory. Setting off on a Russian Soyuz rocket will be Sentinel-1B with its Earth surveillance radar, and Microscope, a French-built orbiter seeking to poke a hole in Einstein's theory of general relativity. They will be hoisted from Europe's launch pad in Kourou, French Guiana, at 2102 GMT Friday. Sentinel-1B is the twin of Sentinel-1A, launched two years ago. The pair are equipped with sophisticated, cloud-penetrating radar with which to monitor Earth's surface by day and night, regardless of the weather conditions. Their mission is to track climate and environmental change and assist in disaster relief operations. Sentinel-1A and 1B are part of the 3.8-billion-euro ($4.3-billion) Copernicus project, which will ultimately sport six orbiters in all. It is a joint undertaking of the European Space Agency and the European Commission. Between them, the twin satellites will be able to take a picture of anywhere on Earth every six days from an altitude of nearly 700 kilometres (435 miles). The images can be used to spot icebergs and oil spills, illegal logging or landslides. They will help scientists monitor changes in forest cover, water and crop health. And their mapping of areas stricken by flood or earthquake will help emergency teams target the worst-hit areas and locate passable roads, railway lines and bridges. - Free fall - Also on board the Soyuz will be Microscope, designed to test a key component in the theory of general relativity published by Albert Einstein 100 years ago. The 130-million-euro satellite will probe -- with 100 times more accuracy than has been possible on Earth -- the so-called "equivalence principle," which says that a feather in a vacuum should fall at the same speed as a lead ball. The experiment will compare the motion of two different objects "in almost perfect and permanent free fall" aboard the orbiting satellite, according to France's CNES space agency, which financed 90 percent of the project. Story continues If any difference in motion is observed, the equivalence principle would collapse -- "an event that would shake the foundations of physics," it states on its website. Such a result would suggest that Einstein's relativity theory may be flawed. This would be a great relief to physicists who have long struggled to explain why the theory cannot be reconciled with quantum physics, the other pillar of modern physics. "We shall then know that Einstein's theory of general relativity is not the whole story of gravity -- that there are other forces contributing to it," French physicist Thibault Damour told reporters in Paris last week. "It will not mean that Einstein's theory is completely wrong -- just incomplete," he added. The Soyuz will also boost into orbit three so-called "CubeSats", tiny orbiters built by European science students. The quest to develop Ao Yun started in 2009, when Moet Hennessy CEO Christophe Navarre nursed a dream to establish a spot in China for wine-making. (Photo : Moet Hennessy USA) Although China still has a long way to go to join the ranks of established wine-making regions like Bordeaux and Napa, LVMH's new red blend from the Middle Kingdom will definitely put China on the luxury wine map, according to an article by Bloomberg. Advertisement A bottle of the luxury wine backed by LVMH costs $250--and there are only 24,000 bottles in existence. Labeled "Ao Yun," which means "roaming above the clouds," the red blend was described by Bloomberg's Elin McCoy as "the best China I've yet sampled." "The blend of 90 percent cabernet sauvignon and 10 percent cabernet franc is ripely fruity, dark, and powerful, with a spicy tang, a hint of licorice, and a silky smooth texture," McCoy wrote in the article. "It's nearly 15 percent alcohol and tastes unique, something like a combo of a Spanish Ribera del Duero and a Napa cult cab. There's tons of tannin, so it should age for a long, long time. It was a pretty good accompaniment to braised short ribs, too." The quest to develop Ao Yun started in 2009, when Moet Hennessy CEO Christophe Navarre nursed a dream to establish a spot in China for wine-making. He turned to Australian enologist Tony Jordan to embark on a several-year journey throughout China in search of the "best terroir." Jordan automatically eliminated provinces where other producers are already deep in creating a Chinese red. Shandong Province was too wet, while Ningxia was too cold. Northwestern Yunnan Province, however, was perfect. Cabernet vines have already been planted in the region by Tibetan villages back in 2002 in an effort to introduce new crops to the area. Moet Hennessy selected four of these villages, two each situated on both banks of the Mekong River. Due to the altitude, the climate was perfect for growing and making wine. Sunlight was short, however, as it's only available from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. "Think of it like slow cooking," said Jean-Guillaume Prats, president of Moet Hennessy's Estates and Wines division, in an interview with Bloomberg. "Sunlight over a longer period of time creates intensity and tannins that are very, very silky." Despite the limited sunlight and the logistical nightmare encountered, Moet Hennesy was successful in creating Ao Yun. Although the quality of the flavor is not commensurate with its price point, wrote McCoy, it certainly puts China on the map as a producer of seriously good wine. By now, even casual consumers of the financial media have likely read several articles on the new fiduciary standards being mandated for advisors that work with client retirement accounts. But the new rules leave open many questions as to what investors should actually expect in terms of account changes due to the new rules. First, a warning: just because your advisor must now act as a fiduciary, meaning in your best interest and not his or his employer's, that does not necessarily mean that short-term account performance will dramatically improve. The fee-based registered investment advisor business model really took off in the early 1990s. RIAs and their investment advisors' representative are required to always act in their clients' best interest for all accounts, not just for retirement accounts. While a fiduciary standard is a good reason to choose an RIA to work with, that doesn't mean that RIAs have a significantly better investment track record. [Read: How Inflation Affects Your Investments.] There is not a very short list of investments that are "good" and everything else is high-fee garbage that will simply go away. There are more than 10,000 listed stocks, 30,000 mutual funds and who knows how many UITs, index-linked CDs, private placements and others. Not all of these exist just because of good marketing -- many offer valid investment opportunities. And despite claims to the contrary, timing does matter. Individual investment accounts are just as likely to underperform as to overperform expectations. Being a fiduciary does not grant a license to operate your own crystal ball. The investor still needs to be aware and perform some basic due diligence before choosing an advisor when investing their hard-earned funds. A good advisor or broker will remain a good advisor or broker. And hopefully the minority of bad brokers and the bad products they sell will leave the industry. What is likely to happen to investors' benefit is a consolidation of mutual funds around a consistent fee structure. Steele Systems, using data provided by Morningstar, has 30,243 mutual fund records in its database. That does not mean there are that many different mutual funds. For example, the American Funds Group, a popular choice among brokers, lists 18 pricing structures for the same fund! Story continues If you are investing in American Investors Fundamental Investors (ticker: ANCFX) via a 529 plan, you could be paying a front-end load of 5.75 percent, annual expenses of 0.7 percent and a 12b-1 load of 0.22 percent. Or you could just be paying annual expenses of 0.48 percent with no loads or back-end surrender fees. That is a big difference. Retirement plan investors could be paying as much as 2.4 percent annually or as little as 0.31 percent, with six additional choices in between. [Read: Start Now to Prepare for Tax Day in 2017.] While American Funds will say that the reason for the difference is that the higher fees are necessary to recoup costs for smaller plans, there is nothing in their application that requires brokers to offer low-cost versions for larger plan balances. Lest we paint the load or broker-sold funds alone into the bad-guy corner, consumer favorite Vanguard also offers multiple fee structures. The Vanguard Developed Markets index fund (VTMGX) is offered in four payment plans. Vanguard is more consistent in that their lower-expense funds become available to larger accounts and their overall cost structure is very low. Over the long run, these fee differences make a significant difference. And this is what the new rules focus on, along with adequate disclosure. For example, the Wells Fargo Index A Fund (WFILX) is the same fund as the Vanguard S&P 500 index fund (VFINX) as they both replicate the Standard & Poor's 500 index. The Wells Fargo offering has a 0.56 percent annual expense and can cost up to a 5.75 percent upfront load, while the Vanguard retail offering has an expense of just 0.17 percent with no additional load. And its exchange-traded fund (VOO) is cheaper yet, with just a 0.05 percent expense ratio. The new rule doesn't necessarily mean that American Funds will consolidate from 18 to a single cost offering, or that Wells Fargo will necessarily stop offering an index fund. What it means is that if you are invested in a higher-expense share class or company with higher expenses, there needs to be a reason why. [Read: How Inflation Affects Your Investments.] For index funds, it is hard (even impossible) to rationalize a higher expense ratio from one fund to the next. Actively managed funds are a little trickier. You do need to look at risk, strategy and multiple returns over time. But the point is that fees and conflicts of interest must now be openly disclosed, and justified based on the merits to the investor. That's something RIAs have been doing all along. Now there is just a level disclosure playing field. William DeShurko started in the financial services industry in 1987 and formed his own practice in 1994. He is a portfolio manager for Covestor, the online investing marketplace, and owner of 401 Advisor, LLC a registered investment advisor in Centerville, Ohio. After following fads, phases, and products of the day for nearly 30 years, he hopes that his insights and experience can help today's investors navigate the financial markets. You can read more of his insights at www.deshurkoblog.com or contact him directly at bill@401advisor.com. , (Reuters) - The European Union charged Google on Wednesday with abusing its position as the dominant supplier of Android software for phones, opening a second front against the U.S. technology giant that could lead to large fines. The following is a summary of the new charges: LICENSING GOOGLE APPS The Commission alleges that Google imposes unfair licensing conditions on device makers wanting to pre-install the Google Play Store, its app store for Android, which include making Google Search the default search engine. It also alleged that Google required pre-installing its Chrome mobile browser in return for licensing Play Store or Google Search. The Commission said it aims to ensure Android phone and tablet makers are free to choose which apps they include. "The Commission has evidence that smartphone manufacturers would wish to source at least some of the apps that they pre-install from other parties than Google," its statement read. ANTI-FRAGMENTATION Google created Android as open-source, meaning the software can be freely modified to create alternative operating systems. This is what many big Chinese smartphone makers do, as well as the smaller Silicon Valley Android developer Cyanogen. However, any Android device maker wishing to pre-install the Google Play store or Google Search is required to agree to an "anti-fragmentation agreement" with Google which commits the vendor not to sell devices running on alternative versions of Android software, the Commission alleged. Industry experts said this argument was confusing because, while all the world's top makers of Android-powered smartphones choose to take advantage of pre-installing Google apps, several of them also now market phones based on alternatives including Cyanogen. That is, unless the EU has turned up evidence showing otherwise, they said. EXCLUSIVITY The Commission also said Google had given unspecified financial incentives to manufacturers and mobile network operators on condition that they exclusively pre-install Google Search on their devices. Story continues It said it took issue not with financial incentives in general but with how Google ruled out payments if other search services were pre-installed on phones. MARKET DOMINANCE One necessary step in proving violations of EU antitrust rules is for the Commission to show that a company is not merely big in terms of market share but actually exerts "market dominance". The charge sheet alleges Google dominates in: 1. General Internet search services - Asserts Google's market share is 90 percent or above in most EU member states. 2. Licensable operating systems for smartphones, tablets and other devices - Google share with Android exceeds 90 percent. Apple's iOS operating system is proprietary to the device maker and thus does not fall within the definition chosen by the Commission. Two thirds of all mobile phones used in Europe this month were running on Android, according to StatCounter data. Devices running on Apple's iOS software account for another 27 percent, leaving other systems such as Microsoft and Blackberry barely registering in the rankings. 3. App stores for Android-based mobile phones which enable users to choose and download from a vast selection of apps - Google Play Store accounts for more than 90 percent of Android app downloads in the roughly 30-country European Economic Area, according to Commission estimates. (Reporting by Foo Yun Chee in Brussels and Eric Auchard in Frankfurt; Editing by Greg Mahlich) Worries about being associated with Donald Trump have prompted a growing chorus of Republicans to say theyll skip their partys national convention this summer. Several senators in tough reelection fights -- including Mark Kirk (IL), Kelly Ayotte (NH) and Richard Burr (NC) -- have recently said they may not be Cleveland for the Republican National Convention in mid-July. Related: Let the Games Begin: Republicans Begin Fight Over Convention Rules Earlier this week Sen. John McCain (AZ), the GOPs 2008 presidential nominee who is facing a primary challenge from the right, told reporters he would be too busy campaigning to attend. Meanwhile, Senate Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley (IA), who has been the point-man of the Republican blockade of President Obamas Supreme Court Justice pick, told the Associated Press he hasnt decided if hell go the convention or not. He cited the cost of a hotel room as a potential stumbling block. "I will do something different and maybe stay in hotels or motels I can buy a night at a time," he said. And its not just lawmakers who could sit out what is supposed to a political partys version of the prom. The New York Times reported that some major companies such as Walmart and Google are reconsidering their sponsorship plans for the gathering and could roll back their involvement, possibly to the tune of millions of dollars. Related: Hey, GOP: Maybe Its Time to Really Rig This Election Much like some Capitol Hill lawmakers, corporations are worried about being associated with Trumps divisive views on women and minorities, fearing they could hurt them in the future. Already a steady trickle, the pace of desertions could turn into a flood in the final weeks of the primary season if the possibility of an ugly brawl over delegates between Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz (TX), Ohio Governor John Kasich moves closer to becoming a reality. The desertions could also pick up if Trump continues to suggest there could be violence in the convention hall and rioting in the streets if he is denied the nomination for failing to reach the 1,237 delegate threshold. Story continues Last week Trump warned of a "rough July" if the GOP national committee doesn't change how it chooses its nominee ahead of the meeting. "They better get going," he urged at a campaign rally. "Because I'll tell you what, you're gonna have a rough July at that convention. Related: Romney: 'With Three Candidates I Think Trump Gets It on the First Ballot' Of course, a problem with skipping your own convention is that you are basically ceding the field to those who do show up, namely Trumps and Cruzs far-right supporters, something House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) seems aware of. "If you were planning on going to the convention, you should go," Ryan told CNN. "It could be a great historical exercise. I mean, it could be something you'll remember the rest of your life, so I would go if I were, if I had a chance to go." For now the only ones who seem ready to get going these days are Trumps fellow Republicans, but in the opposite direction. Top Reads from The Fiscal Times: Jerusalem (AFP) - Tourists and worshippers streaming toward the ancient Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City encounter a rigid directive: men to the left, women to the right and no mixing allowed. There has long been a push to change it, and the rule rooted in a strict interpretation of Jewish law is now at the heart of a political battle testing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government. "For Israelis, this is like the tip of the trunk of the elephant," said Batya Kallus, a 59-year-old activist with the Women of the Wall group, which has long fought for equal prayer rights at the historic site. "It's symbolic. It speaks about exclusion in some ways where other forms of exclusion are less visible and obvious," she said on a recent day at the plaza leading to the wall, where rabbis bow in reverence and visitors stuff bits of paper with prayers on them between its stone blocks. The controversy has highlighted a sensitive debate among Israelis over the often blurry line between state and religion in a country founded as the nation of the Jewish people. The Western Wall, in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, is the holiest site in which Jews are currently permitted to pray, giving the rules surrounding it heavy symbolic importance. On the surface, the issue is simple -- and it had seemingly been resolved in January. Activists and reformers want to create a space where women and men are allowed to pray together at the wall, considered among the last remnants of the second Jewish temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. It is contentious because the ultra-Orthodox Jewish establishment, which wields legal power over a range of issues in Israel and has often played a kingmaker role in its politics, views such change as sacrilegious. Under its reading of Jewish law, mixed prayer is not allowed. Women are also not permitted to lead prayers, though Kallus's group regularly does so at the women's section of the wall to the anger of ultra-Orthodox rabbis. Story continues - 'Will not compromise' - After years of political and legal disputes, not to mention harassment of women seen as breaking tradition at the wall, a compromise was at last reached in January. The agreement, approved by Israel's cabinet and labelled historic, laid out a plan to create an egalitarian prayer space away from the men's and women's sections controlled by the ultra-Orthodox. It was said to have been the result of careful negotiations begun in 2013 involving the government, Women of the Wall and the Western Wall rabbi, among others. But as word spread that the ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties that form part of Netanyahu's coalition had not prevented the deal, pressure built. Members of the ultra-Orthodox community, which amounts to between seven and 10 percent of Israel's population, expressed outrage. Demanding the deal and other related issues be scrapped, ultra-Orthodox politicians have signalled they could pull out of Netanyahu's coalition, which holds only a one-seat majority in parliament. "There is a status quo that remained over the years and we wish to preserve it," Health Minister Yaakov Litzman, of the United Torah Judaism alliance of ultra-Orthodox parties, said by email. "We will not compromise." That is partly because the issue encompasses much more than prayer at the site. The ultra-Orthodox are opposed to granting religious authority to Reform and Conservative Jews, whose numbers are limited in Israel but who are numerous in the United States. Those more liberal streams of Judaism have pushed for an easing of restrictions on matters including conversions, marriage and divorce, which are under ultra-Orthodox control in Israel. The Conservative and Reform movements joined Women of the Wall in its campaign to create the egalitarian prayer space. "It gives them a formal position in the most holy place for the Jewish people, and that makes many (ultra-Orthodox) leaders outside politics, those that were not involved in striking the compromise, object to it," said Shuki Friedman, head of the Centre for Religion, Nation and State at the Israel Democracy Institute. - Back to the negotiating table? - Efforts are now underway to reach yet another compromise. Netanyahu in late March gave the head of his office, David Sharan, 60 days to come up with possible solutions. Friedman said that, despite their firmness in public, the ultra-Orthodox parties have an interest in finding an agreement to avoid another court battle, with previous decisions having gone against them. They would also not likely relinquish the power they wield and the benefits they receive under one of the most right-wing governments in Israel's history by causing it to collapse, he said. As for Women of the Wall, they say they are not willing to renegotiate an agreement reached in good faith. They are planning another challenge to ultra-Orthodox control on April 24 with a first-ever "women's priestly blessing" at the wall -- a tradition always overseen by men. "The Western Wall is a deeply symbolic place for Israelis and for Jews," Kallus said. "And it's a place which has utterly excluded women from any kind of active engagement with Judaism." The Michigan attorney general filed criminal charges against three government officials in connection with the contamination of the Flint water supply Wednesday almost two years after Flint and state officials raised their glasses to celebrate the inauguration of the Flint River as the citys new water source. Ive stated this was the beginning of the road back the road back to building and restoring trust and confidence of Flint families in their government, Attorney General Bill Schuette said at a press conference Wednesday afternoon. Ive made it abundantly clear that our system of justice applies to everybody. Its not rigged. No one is above the law. SLIDESHOW Water crisis in Flint, Michigan >>> The accused one an administrator at the Flint Water Treatment Plant, the other two officials with Michigan's Department of Environmental Quality were the first to face charges stemming from the series of disastrous decisions that culminated in the contamination of Flints water supply with lead, poisoning many residents, especially children. But, Schuette insisted, they wouldnt be the last. Nurse Brian Jones draws a blood sample from Grayling Stefek, 5, at the Eisenhower Elementary School in Flint, Mich., Jan. 26, 2016. Students were being tested after high levels of lead were found in the city's drinking water. (Carlos Osorio/AP Photo) The three named Wednesday are: Michael Glasgow, Flint water treatment plant operator When Flints water treatment plant resumed operations for the first time in 50 years in April 2014, Michael Glasgow was the only certified plant operator in the building. In an email sent to Michigan DEQ officials shortly before the switch in April 2014, Glasgow warned against moving Flints water supply from the Detroit system to the Flint River, arguing that the citys long-unused water plant and its staff were not prepared for such an undertaking. "I was reluctant before, but after looking at the monitoring schedule and our current staffing, I do not anticipate giving the OK to begin sending water out anytime soon, Glasgow wrote at the time. If water is distributed from this plant in the next couple weeks, it will be against my direction. Story continues "I need time to adequately train additional staff and to update our monitoring plans before I will feel we are ready. I will reiterate this to management above me, but they seem to have their own agenda." Despite Glasgows warnings, the change took place as scheduled on April 25, 2014. While testifying about the water crisis before a state joint legislative committee this March, Glasgow claimed that he had initially intended to use corrosion-control chemicals such as phosphates to treat Flint's water but he was instructed by the DEQs Michael Prysby to hold off. "I did have some concerns and misgivings at first," Glasgow said before the committee. "But unfortunately, now that I look back, I relied on engineers and the state regulators to kind of direct the decision. I looked at them as having more knowledge than myself." Glasgow now faces up to four years in prison on a felony charge of tampering with evidence. According to the complaint submitted Wednesday, Glasgow allegedly manipulated the results of lead-in-water tests to downplay the lead levels in Flints drinking water. His other charge, willful neglect of duty, is a misdemeanor. In this July 22, 2013 file photo, Michael Glasgow tests water for bacteria and pH levels, among other tests, at the Flint, Mich., water plant. (Photo: Jake May/The Flint Journal/AP) Stephen Busch, district supervisor, Michigan Department of Environmental Quality A former district supervisor for the Michigan Department of Environmental Qualitys drinking water division, Busch was suspended earlier this year amid an investigation of his role in the Flint water crisis. In an email sent to fellow DEQ officials on March 26, 2013, Busch cautioned that the river water presented a risk for increased levels of microbials and cancer-causing byproducts of disinfectants both of which were discovered in Flint's drinking water within months of switching to the river the following year. The felony charges against Busch include misconduct in office, for allegedly misleading EPA officials about the citys failure to treat Flint River water with proper corrosion controls and willfully interfering with the Genesee County Health Departments ability to investigate an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease that left 12 dead. He also faces charges of conspiracy and tampering with evidence, for allegedly manipulating the results of three water test reports. Busch was also hit with two misdemeanor charges. The first, a treatment violation under the Michigan Safe Drinking Water Act, relates to the alleged failure to require that Flint River water be treated with corrosion-control chemicals. The other misdemeanor charge, a monitoring violation under the same Safe Drinking Water Act, involves allegedly distorting lead-in-water test results by instructing Flint residents to pre-flush the taps before collecting water samples from their homes. Busch faces up to five years in prison for the felony misconduct charge and up to four for tampering with evidence. Michigan National Guard Specialist Lonnie Walker unloads bottled water and filters to distribute to residents, Thursday, Jan. 21, 2016 in Flint, Mich. (Paul Sancya/AP Photo) Michael Prysby, district engineer, Michigan Department of Environmental Quality Until this week, Michael Prysby has remained in his role as a district engineer with the MDEQs Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance. And though he faces all the same charges as Busch, the Detroit Free Press confirmed on Monday that Prysby had voluntarily left his post to work in a different division of the DEQ that deals with transportation and flood hazards. Prysbys name had appeared numerous times in the troves of internal emails released by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyders office regarding the water situation in Flint. Prysby received Glasgows April 2014 email warning of the Flint water plants inability to safely treat the river water for public consumption. Emails sent after the switch document Prysbys effort to reassure the public of the Flint waters safety as well as his somewhat callous exasperation with their complaints. On Sept. 18, 2014, Prysby joked about the flood of calls from Flint residents concerned about the color, taste and smell of their tap water in an email to DEQ colleague Richard Benzie, writing, "Thanks Richard ... Now off to physical therapy ... perhaps mental therapy with all of these Flint calls ... lol" In another email from Oct. 13, 2014, Prysby appears to boast about his response to a reporters question regarding General Motors decision to stop using Flint water because it was causing engine parts to rust. I stressed the importance of not branding Flints water as corrosive from a public health standpoint simply because it does not meet a manufacturing facilitys limit for production, Prysby wrote. An email thread from April 3, 2015 shows Prysbys exchange with a Flint resident concerned about how the citys water might be affected by a sewage spill into the Flint River one day earlier. I will need to know the location of the spill and when it occurred, Prysby wrote in response to the womans question. I refuse to believe you are unaware of this incident, she wrote back, along with a link to a news article about the spill from the daily before. Prysby was hit with the same five charges as Busch, as well as an additional count of misconduct in office for allegedly authorizing the Flint Water Treatment Plant to resume operations despite knowing that the facility was not equipped to properly treat water from the river. The maximum penalty for conspiracy to tamper with evidence is up to four years in prison. For the felony misconduct charges the maximum sentence is five years. China's State Councilor Guo Shengkun (Photo : Getty Images) China opposes any moves to legalize the use and sale of narcotics, Chinese state councilor Guo Shengkun said at the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Tuesday. Guo made his remarks during a special three-day session to review the progress and challenges facing the current global war against illegal drugs. Advertisement The councilor, who heads the Chinese delegation to the U.N., is also the head of China's national anti-drug commission and public security ministry. "We should firmly oppose any efforts to legalize narcotics and also respect and support the differentiated policies and strategies each country adopts," he said. "There should always be a comprehensive, balanced, scientific evidence-based anti-narcotic strategy in place to uphold the authority, stability and inclusiveness of anti-narcotic policies." Guo laid out a five-point proposal, including the formation of equal partnerships, the mobilization of NGOs and civil society, the adoption of differentiated strategies, and the creation of more efficient mechanisms as well as enhancing international cooperation. According to the latest figures from the U.N., around 250 million people--one in every 20 aged between 15 and 64--used illegal drugs in 2013. Of these, 27 million are suffering from disorders caused by drug use. Despite a broad agreement, deep divisions persist among the U.N. members, with some nations in favor of decriminalizing drugs. Several Latin American leaders say the war on drugs has failed and legalizing so-called "soft" drugs such as marijuana is an inevitable trend, while a number of others openly expressed their disagreement. Guo has called on developed nations to do more in helping these countries and the wider world in general. "Developed countries should provide funding and technological support to developing countries, and pursue the strategy of alternative development to improve the livelihoods of people living in traditional drug plant cultivation regions," he said. Guo noted China's investment of 1.6 billion yuan in Myanmar and northern Laos to help residents there to find other trades to replace their work at drug plantations. The high-level session on the global drug problem, which will conclude on Thursday, is the fourth one in U.N. history. A draft outcome document, which was adopted at the meeting, suggests that the drug problem should be dealt with an "integrated, multidisciplinary, mutually reinforcing, balanced, scientific evidence-based and comprehensive approach." London (AFP) - Former British prime minister Gordon Brown said Thursday he was setting out a "patriotic" case for Britain to remain in the EU, in his first intervention on the looming referendum. Brown said it would be a "tragedy" if the campaign to leave the European Union was seen as the patriotic side in the June 23 vote. The Scot said there were two competing visions of Britain: one that "stands aloof", and an "outward-looking" and "internationalist" approach he is promoting. Brown's impassioned late intervention for the "No" campaign in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum is credited with being one of the factors behind a majority of Scots voting to stay in the United Kingdom. "It would be a tragedy if those people who say that Britain should leave the European Union were identified as the patriotic group and those who wanted to stay in were seen in some way as standing up for Europe against Britain," Brown told an audience in London. "So my message is: be positive, be principled and be patriotic and put the case with passion." Brown, who was prime minister from 2007 to 2010, outlined two different visions of Britain: "The Britain that stands alone, that stands aloof, the Britain of the Dunkirk Spirit, the Britain that is fiercely independent." On the other side was a Britain "that has always been best when it is outward-looking, when it is engaged and when it is internationalist". He added: "As the world becomes more interdependent... the Britain that is outward-looking, the Britain that is engaged, the Britain that is internationalist will be the Britain that young people identify with." The former Labour leader also urged supporters of the centre-left party to get out and vote. Brown, who was prime minister Tony Blair's finance minister from 1997 to 2007, said many of them did not feel the status quo was working for them and did not feel financially secure. Story continues He said the way to convince them was with a positive pro-EU message about jobs, security and the environment. Brown said communities hit by high levels of EU immigration should be given more help from the government and Brussels. The 65-year-old also said crises in the Middle East and Africa required an EU-wide approach. He said looking at the right balance between "the autonomy we desire and the co-operation we need, if the EU was not in existence it would have to be invented to deal with these problems on our doorstep," he said. Opinion polls put the Leave and Remain camps neck-and-neck, though bookmakers put a vote to stay as their odds-on favourite. QAMISHLI, Syria (Reuters) - More than 21 pro-government militiamen have been killed in two days of battles with Syrian Kurdish forces in northeast Syria that has widened the Kurds' control over a city at the border with Turkey, a Syrian Kurdish official said. Five members of the Kurdish internal security force, the Asayish, were also killed in the fighting in Qamishli which the official said was the second most violent between the government and Kurdish forces since the Syria conflict began in 2011. A Reuters witness saw at least 40 members of the pro-government militia surrendering to the Kurdish forces in the city after a battle for a prison where they were holed up on Thursday. Heavy gunfire could be heard in the city. "More than 21 dead from regime forces of Qamishli as a result of clashes and regime attacks, with five Asayish fighters martyrs," the official wrote in a message to Reuters. Syrian army officials could not be reached for comment. Qamishli is mostly controlled by Kurdish security forces that took control as the crisis spiraled in 2011. Syrian Kurdish groups now control wide areas of northern Syria where they have set up their own government. The main Kurdish groups and their allies aim to finalize plans within six months for an autonomous political federation in northern Syria, pressing ahead despite the objections of foreign governments which fear Syria's disintegration. Kurdish and government forces have mostly avoided confrontation since the start of the Syrian uprising in 2011. Syria's opposition accuses Kurdish groups that control the northeast of cooperating with President Bashar al-Assad. They deny this. The Kurdish official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not an official Asayish spokesman, said Kurdish forces had seized three positions from government forces in the course of the fighting, including the prison. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based group tracking the war, said the fighting began after the Asayish stopped a car carrying an officer of a militia that operates under the control of the Syrian army. It also reported an explosion that was likely to have been from a car bomb. The Kurdish official said the violence was triggered by Syrian government arrests and attacks on civilians. The Syrian government still controls a few areas in the city center, and its airport. (Reporting by Rodi Said in Qamishli and Tom Perry in Beirut; writing by Tom Perry and John Davison; Editing by Dominic Evans and Angus MacSwan) Paris (AFP) - French auto giant PSA Group, the maker of Peugeot and Citroen cars, said Thursday its premises had been raided by France's anti-fraud squad as part of a probe into emissions. "As part of ongoing investigations on pollutants in the automobile sector, today PSA Group has been the subject of a visit and a seizure by France's General Directorate for Competition Policy, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF)," PSA, France's biggest carmaker, said in a statement. The fraud squad said separately that the raid was prompted by harmful emission "anomalies" found in three PSA car models during pollution tests triggered by a Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal. Five PSA sites were raided, four in the Paris suburbs and one in Montbeliard, eastern France. PSA said it was cooperating fully with the directorate, which comes under France's economy ministry, and confirmed the "compliance of its vehicles in pollutant emissions in all countries where it operates". Gilles Le Borgne, head of research and development at Peugeot Citroen, told AFP by phone that the investigators took away computers, which he expected would be returned on Friday. "We are being completely transparent... we are clearly going to provide maximum collaboration," he added. Thursday's raid comes three months after a surprise probe at Renault, France's second-biggest automaker, as part of the government's drive to shed light on emissions practices by car manufacturers in the wake of the global emissions scandal at Germany's Volkswagen. The German company has admitted it installed illegal software into 11 million 2.0 litre and 3.0 litre diesel engines worldwide, including VW, Porsche and Audi models, that intentionally masked the vehicle's real emissions levels during testing. Volkswagen reached an agreement Thursday with US regulators to offer US owners of some 480,000 illegally polluting diesel cars options of "substantial compensation" and to fix the cars, or to buy them back. Story continues In the latest scandal to rock the sector, Japan's Mitsubishi Motors admitted that it had also cheated, on fuel-efficiency tests. The shock statement sent stock market investors fleeing, wiping $2.5 billion (2.2 billion euros) off Mitsubishi's market value in just two days. Trade unions at PSA on Thursday showed their support for the company. "We are very confident, this doesn't seem to be worrying the management," said FO union representative Christian Lafaye. PARIS (Reuters) - The conditions necessary to eradicate Islamic State in Syria and Iraq are "in the process of coming together", French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told France Info radio on Thursday. "I note that Daesh (Islamic State) is retreating and that Daesh is retreating significantly," Le Drian said. "Since Daesh's occupation of Syria and Iraq, since the attempt to attack Baghdad in June 2014, I think Daesh has lost between 30 and 40 percent of its territory." An international coalition is providing air support to Kurdish and Iraqi forces, which intend to liberate Mosul, in Iraq, and Raqqa, in Syria, by the end of the year, the minister added. "We will need ... a lot of determination, but I think the conditions are in the process of coming together for eradicating Daesh," he said. "For the first time, I have this slightly optimistic message." (Reporting by Emmanuel Jarry and James Regan, edting by Larry King) New York (AFP) - General Motors reported soaring first-quarter earnings Thursday, easily topping expectations as it broke even in Europe and scored more banner results in North America. Earnings came in at $2.0 billion, compared with $0.9 billion in the year-ago period. Revenues were up 4.5 percent to $37.3 billion. GM boasted record pre-tax profits in North America of $2.3 billion. Auto deliveries were up slightly in the region, where sales of sport utility vehicles and other large cars have boosted GM's profits. GM's improved performance in Europe reflects the benefits of cost-cutting in the region and successful launches, said chief financial officer Chuck Stevens. GM last reported an annual profit in Europe in 1999. The automaker is monitoring the British debate on whether to exit the European Union in light of its assets held in British pounds and manufacturing and logistics operations throughout the region. "Our biggest concern longterm is what that does to the commercial flows," Stevens said. Pre-tax earnings in GM's International Operations division, which includes China, were essentially flat at $400 million. However, GM's continued to struggle in South America, where the pre-tax loss was $100 million, half the amount in the year-ago period. Auto deliveries slumped 26.1 percent to 133,000 in the quarter, with Brazil sales falling by 36,000. The automaker reduced headcount in the region by more than 20 percent in the last year, Stevens said. GM confirmed its projection of 2016 earnings per share of $5.25 to $5.75, well above the 2015 figure of $5.02. "We're growing where it counts, gaining retail share in the US, outpacing the industry in Europe and capitalizing on robust growth in SUV and luxury segments in China," said chief executive Mary Barra. Quarterly earnings translated into $1.26 per share, 25 cents better than analyst expectations. GM shares shot up 3.3 percent in pre-market trade to $33.26. Moscow (AFP) - The last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on Thursday urged the West to stop isolating Russia and take a more "constructive" approach in response to President Vladimir Putin's moves towards normalising relations. The 85-year-old who presided over the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War argued that Moscow has an "important and positive" role to play on the world stage, writing in Rossiiskaya Gazeta government daily. "It's time for the West to stop attempting to isolate it," he wrote. Russia and the West have seen ties slump to their worst level since the Cold War over Moscow's 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and its alleged responsibility for a bloody insurgency in the east of the country. Gorbachev, however, argued that Putin in his set-piece annual phone-in session last week had "shown a striving towards normalising relations with the West." Putin softened his rhetoric during his annual phone-in on April 14 by pointing to examples of positive cooperation with the West and evaded some cues for populist America-bashing, even describing President Barack Obama as a "decent person." "Can our partners reset themselves to a more constructive wavelength? That's unclear so far but I urge them to do so," Gorbachev wrote. No one should assume that Russia will accept a "second tier role in the world," he said, adding that "everyone would only lose from a new Cold War." Formerly a harsh critic of Putin for his perceived rolling back of democratic freedoms, Gorbachev has in recent years taken a more conciliatory stance towards the Kremlin strongman and supported his takeover of Crimea. Gorbachev said that Russia and US cooperation on finding a resolution to the conflict in Syria has "already led to some relaxing of tensions in relations betweeen Russia and the West. "If this trend continues, we need to broaden it into other spheres of relations," Gorbachev said, while warning this would be a "lengthy and difficult process." He gave the example of the ongoing fighting in eastern Ukraine between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian forces, saying that the crisis cannot be left as "an abscess spreading fever in Europe and the world." "Europe might not be able to stand another frozen conflict," he argued, saying he was repeating a 2014 call to Obama and Putin to "meet and discuss this ongoing crisis." By Matt Spetalnick GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) - Observed from behind a one-way mirror and heavy chain-link fence, a handful of bearded detainees in baggy t-shirts mill around inside a communal cellblock at the Guantanamo Bay military prison, vastly outnumbered by U.S. troops guarding them. This is the shrinking world of Americas notorious offshore prison, a scene that underscores how U.S. President Barack Obama is running out of time and options to meet his pledge to close the compound before he leaves office in January. Obama has whittled down the number of prisoners to 80, the lowest since shortly after his predecessor George W. Bush opened the facility to hold terrorism suspects rounded up overseas following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But the president faces political and legal obstacles that may prove insurmountable in his final push to empty the detention center at the U.S. naval station in Cuba, according to some U.S. officials in Washington. (Graphic: http://tmsnrt.rs/1NmI52e) Still, there were growing signs during a carefully scripted media tour this week that operations are beginning to wind down at the prison, where many cells now stand empty. As inmate numbers dwindle - the latest departures being nine Yemenis sent to Saudi Arabia last weekend - participation also has ebbed in what was once a widespread hunger strike. Fewer than five inmates are being force-fed, the chief medical officer told reporters as he displayed a restraint chair of the type where prisoners are strapped down and nasal tubes inserted twice daily. But the 1,100-strong force of military personnel assigned to secure Guantanamo's far-flung lockups, ranging from communal compounds for well-behaved prisoners to solitary confinement for those considered most dangerous, has remained largely unchanged. That works out to about 14 guards for each current inmate. Work inside the razor wire is labor-intensive. Squads of guards in protective visors swarmed through an eerily darkened corridor one lunch time, preparing to deliver meals in Camp Six, home to the most cooperative prisoners. Unaware of being watched and recorded through the sound-proof glass, detainees went about their routines. One waved over a guard and complained about not having enough pens for his artwork, while another sat at a steel table doing paperwork. In Washington, Republican lawmakers are readying for a legal battle if Obama tries to move prisoners to U.S. soil. Obama's plan to close Guantanamo, announced two months ago, hinges on bringing possibly dozens of remaining prisoners deemed too dangerous to release to maximum-security prisons in the United States. But that would defy a congressional ban on such transfers. FEWER DETAINEE DISCIPLINE PROBLEMS Administration officials have not ruled out that Obama might seek to bypass Congress and resort to executive action to close the prison but say privately he probably won't make a decision until after the November presidential election. Republican frontrunner Donald Trump and his party rivals vow to keep the jail open if they win the White House. At its peak, Guantanamo housed nearly 800 prisoners, becoming a symbol of the excesses of the "war on terror and synonymous with accusations of torture. Obama, whose promise to shutter the prison dates back to the 2008 campaign, has called it a recruitment tool for terrorists. Nowadays, camp officials credit improved compliance by prisoners to a sense that release is getting closer. Most have been held for more than a decade without charge or trial. Only two detainees are listed for misconduct, which can entail anything from physically assaulting guards to splashing them with bodily fluids, said Army Colonel David Heath, commander of the Guantanamo guard force. Hunger strikers, who numbered more than a hundred at the peak of their protest in 2013, are now just a handful and there is no longer any need for extraction teams to pull them from their cells for enteral feeding sessions, according to Navy Captain Rich Quattrone, head of the camps medical facilities. He insisted the process is safe and humane. But Omar Farah, attorney for Tariq Ba Odah, a Yemeni hunger striker who lost half his body weight and was among the group sent to Saudi Arabia, said force-feeding was utterly humiliating. Guantanamo officials remain mindful of other potential sources of trouble, especially given Islamic religious sensitivities. For instance, when a reporter entered a model cell meant to display living conditions and began inspecting a bookshelf, camp officials rushed over and told her not to touch a copy of the Koran. Her cameraman was ordered to delete the scene. At the detainee library, where Harry Potter books are the most popular items, officials screen out anything deemed to promote jihadist themes or containing graphic violence or nudity. Inmates sometimes go a step further. A woman's photo on the cover of an Arabic-language National Geographic was scribbled over by a detainee apparently offended by her uncovered face. (Reporting by Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Don Durfee and James Dalgleish) Albino Luciani, a humble priest, made his way through the throngs gathered in Rome to pay tribute to the recently deceased Pope Paul VI. It wasnt until Luciani was recognized as the cardinal of San Marco that he was ushered to kneel beside the dead pontiff. Little did the 65-year-old know that he would soon be recognized the world over. The 15-year papacy of Paul VI had ended when the 80-year-old succumbed to a heart attack on Aug. 6, 1978, and the pastoral priest praying beside his body would soon become the most powerful man in the Catholic Church. His reign as Pope John Paul I would begin on Aug. 26, but it would be cut far shorter than anyone could have imagined, paving the way for a leader who would exert a far-reaching influence not only in the religious realm but in the political arena as well. [John Paul II] really had an agenda of putting on the brakes in terms of church changes. Dennis Doyle, University of Dayton Paul VIs papacy was spent trying to hold things together in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, which had caused rifts and confusion in the church, according to Dennis Doyle, a professor of religion at the University of Dayton. On one side were those who wanted priests to be able to marry, women to be ordained and artificial birth control to be an accepted method for family planning. More conservative forces, meanwhile, felt the church shouldnt change at all, and Paul VI was the glue trying to keep the faithful from splintering during this divisive period. Adding to the friction was Paul VIs Humanae Vitae (1968), which offered what Doyle calls an extremely contentious teaching by forbidding the use of artificial means of contraception an issue Vatican II had chosen not to rule upon. Gettyimages 508726374 Pope John Paul I following his appointment, Sept. 1978. Source: Getty Weeks after Paul VIs death, 111 cardinals convened to choose his successor. Few would have guessed that Luciani would make the short list, but it quickly became clear, owing to the warring factions within the church, that a Vatican insider could not be elected, says Doyle. And so, on Aug. 26, the first day of the conclave, the cardinal was heard murmuring, No, please no, as the counting of ballots came within seven votes of his papacy, according to John Julius Norwich in Absolute Monarchs. The ever-modest Luciani reluctantly became Pope John Paul I and immediately brought a change in tone and atmosphere by being the first to refuse the tiara, Doyle says. Unlike others before him and impacting every pontiff since John Paul I was inaugurated, not coronated, forgoing the crown and the royal we, for I. This, says Cambridge University history professor John Pollard, was crucial because he was the first person to seriously dismantle the monarchical trappings of the church with a more direct, accessible papacy a precursor to Pope Francis. And then, 33 days into his reign, John Paul I was found dead in bed also the victim of a heart attack (conspiracy theories abound, and have been debunked). Story continues Charged with naming a successor, the cardinals assembled for the second conclave in as many months. They still wanted an outsider and chose to cast their net even further, electing Karol Jozef Wojtya, the archbishop of Krakow, on the third day. The first non-Italian pope since 1522, he assumed the name of his predecessor to become Pope John Paul II. While John Paul I would likely have followed the same path as Paul VI, Doyle says, John Paul II really had an agenda of putting on the brakes in terms of church changes. The new pope felt the essence of Vatican II was restoring the idea that the church is the mystical body of Christ. This pontiff wasnt about to make changes inside the Catholic Church, but he was willing to take an ecumenical approach and extol social justice outside of it. So while he held firm on no female priests, for example, he was careful to promote women in the world. Pope John Paul II also took bold strides into the political sphere, aligning with Ronald Reagan and pushing communist countries to re-evaluate their effectiveness in establishing social order to such an extent that he is often credited with helping bring the Cold War to a close. The fact that you had a Polish pope had some bearing on the way in which the Cold War came to an end, says Pollard. In just over two months in 1978, two huge disruptions rocked the worlds 700 million Catholics, who grieved and cheered as they watched the papacy lay down its crown, drape itself in a conservative mantle and step onto the world stage. Related Articles Mitsubishi Motors President Tetsuro Aikawa bows during a press conference on April 20, 2016 in Tokyo, Japan. (Photo : Getty Images/Tomohiro Ohsumi) Japanese automaker Mitsubishi Motors Corporation admitted recently that their staff had intentionally cheated on fuel consumption tests for different vehicle models. Minicars with tiny engines were the vehicles that had falsified fuel consumption data. According to the statement from the corporation's official website, their staff had conducted testing in an improper way, to let the public see that the vehicles had better fuel consumption rates, compared to the actual ones. They added that Japanese law required a specific testing method, but their staff did a different version. Advertisement The tests with inaccurate data done by the automaker involved its own 157,000 eK wagon and eK Space light passenger cars, and 468,000 Dayz and Dayz Roox vehicles, which were produced for the Nissan Motor Company. All of these models are minicars, which had great mileage as its main feature. Company president Tetsuro Aikawa told the reporters in a press conference that what the staff had done was intentional, and the act of falsification of data was true. He could not explain why their staff could resort to doing this fraud. As an apology, Aikawa and the other company executives bowed down before the media. The car company said that they would investigate the matter, and find out if the data for vehicles that were sold overseas were also falsified. According to News 3 Las Vegas, a spokeswoman for the United States Environmental Protection Agency checked to see if they were investigating the car models that were sold in the US. The 2017 Mitsubishi Mirage subcompact was listed by the EPA as getting up to 43 miles per gallon. Detroit consultant Alan Baum told the publication that it is likely that the US agency will investigate the Mitsubishi vehicles being sold in the country. The car company sold a small amount of their vehicles in the US, so they will not get a high priority as a result, he added. The car company is now planning to set up a panel of outsiders to make an investigation of the latest scandal. All affected models' production and sales have been halted to give way to the investigation. Check out the 2016 Outlander commercial video below: By Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) - New heart drugs hailed as breakthrough treatments by researchers are struggling to gain traction among prescribing doctors, posing a headache for makers such as Novartis, which reported more weak sales for its Entresto medicine on Thursday. Novartis has touted the novel heart failure drug as a $5 billion-a-year seller and is banking on the product to help offset loss of patent protection on its blockbuster cancer medicine Glivec. Yet first-quarter sales of $17 million were well below analyst expectations of $25-30 million and the company now predicts 2016 sales of just $200 million, or less than half of consensus forecasts compiled by Thomson Reuters Cortellis. Novartis' problems are not unique. Sanofi and Amgen are also battling to win prescriptions for their new so-called PCSK9 cholesterol-fighting injections Praluent and Repatha. Such difficulties are in marked contrast to other disease areas such as cancer, where Bristol-Myers Squibb's new treatment Opdivo is an outstanding commercial hit. Novartis' own psoriasis drug Cosentyx is also beating expectations. U.S. heart specialist Richard Chazal, president of the American College of Cardiology (ACC), believes slow uptake of pricey new heart drugs highlights the peculiar difficulties surrounding such medicines, which are typically given for life. "Cost is a problem," he said in an interview. "There is concern on the part of many clinicians that if patients are reasonably stable and one starts a new medicine then they may become discouraged by the cost and actually stop taking medication." The U.S. list price for Entresto is around $4,500 a year, while the PCSK9 drugs cost about $14,000. Adding to doctors' reticence is the lack of specific guidelines from professional bodies such as the ACC, American Heart Association and European Society of Cardiology. While updated guidelines covering the potential use of Entresto are in the works, the delay has frustrated some experts such as Milton Packer, one of the cardiologists who led trial research into Entresto that found it cut the risk of both cardiovascular death and admissions to hospital by a fifth. Packer complained in a journal article last month about the fact that the guideline process had so far been "silent". For Praluent and Repatha there is the added complication that while both drugs have been shown to reduce cholesterol dramatically, clinical trials are still ongoing to prove this will actually cut heart attacks as expected. In the long term, most experts still predict the new clutch of heart drugs will become multibillion-dollar-a-year sellers, but it is going to be a longer haul than initially anticipated. "We're extraordinarily fortunate to have these wonderful new tools that science shows us can potentially improve outcomes," said Chazal. "How to use them is something we are still working through but I think we will see increased uptake in the next 12 months." In a bid to invigorate Entresto sales, Novartis said it was expanding its U.S. field force of sales representatives, starting this month, and also launching a direct-to-consumer advertising campaign. However, the combination of lower sales and increased marketing spend suggests that Entresto - arguably the Swiss company's single biggest new drug hope - will take time to contribute significantly to the bottom line. (Editing by Mark Potter) By Lefteris Karagiannopoulos and Abdi Sheikh ATHENS (Reuters) - A knife-wielding human trafficker prevented survivors of a shipwreck from pulling others to safety, leaving them to drown in the dark, one of the surviving migrants said on Thursday. Up to 500 people are believed to have died in last week's disaster, when an overcrowded boat sank in the southern Mediterranean. Just 41 people were eventually saved by a passing merchant ship and brought to Greece on April 16. Muaz Mahmud, 25, from Oromia in Ethiopia, managed to escape the packed vessel as it was sinking and clambered onto a nearby boat. However, a people smuggler prevented them from helping others still in the sea, saying they had to leave immediately. "I told him 'don't start motor please we have to save these people'. He took a knife. "I am going to kill you, we don't stand here," and then I just cried," Mahmud told reporters, speaking in broken English. He had been with his wife and 2-month-old baby, having paid $1,800 each for the passage. They are feared drowned. While the handful of survivors recounted their tales of horror, families of those still missing, many of whom were believed to be from Somalia, described how their relatives had hoped to reach Europe and escape poverty. In Somalia's bombed-out capital, the parents of Mohamed Farah, 25, are still awaiting word of his fate. His family and friends had scraped together thousands of dollars to help him to make the perilous trip over land and sea to Europe. They have been told his picture was not among those of the survivors. "Is he alive or dead? His mother has not eaten food for days," said Ali Nur, his 23-year-old cousin and friend. "The agent (trafficker) is the criminal behind the disaster. He got rich from the Somalis drowning in the sea." The stories from the survivors and grieving relatives give a clear timeframe for one of the worst such tragedies in recent years, showing not just the dangers of the journey but also the relative sophistication of the human trafficking ring. More than 150,000 migrants reached Italy by boat last year, with some 25,000 arriving so far this year. About 800 are believed to have died trying to make the crossing since January. NIGHTTIME RENDEZ-VOUS Mohamed Farah left Mogadishu in early February, traveling through Somaliland, Ethiopia and Sudan before reaching Egypt. On April 8 he called home to say he was set to leave, having paid about $3,000 for his place on the boat. "'We are going to sail, please pray for me, parents,'" Nur quoted him as saying in that final call. It is not clear when precisely he put to sea, but survivors have said one boat with up to 300 people aboard departed somewhere from Egypt, while a second, smaller boat, carrying up to 200, left from near Tobruk in eastern Libya. Many hours after putting to sea, these two vessels met up in the dead of night, probably on April 13. The smugglers transferred almost everyone onto the bigger boat, at which point it started taking in water. Survivors and officials say that between 400-500 were probably on board when it sank. "When this boat was falling, we started swimming to save our life to the other boat. Some survivors on the other boat threw something to us (to help us). We were 10 people," said Mahmud. With others still swimming towards them, the smuggler started the engine and abandoned them. "We saw the dead guys with our eyes," said Mowlid Isman, 28, from Mogadishu in Somalia. Like Mahmud, he had managed to reach the smaller boat before it left. His sister and her baby did not and are feared drowned. "Other peoples' families died too. There wasn't anything we could do because they were in the water (and) we moved away," he said, speaking through an interpreter. Survivors said the smuggler headed towards Italy but at a certain point he boarded a third boat to return to Libya. He promised to return with water and food, but never reappeared. He also left a satellite phone, with an Italian number for them to call. "I called. It was the police, I called them to help us," Mahmud said. One ship passed nearby but did not pick them up, he said. A second boat finally found them and took them to Greece. The survivors -- 37 men, three women and a three-year-old child from Somalia, Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan -- said they had drifted at sea for three days. They are now in Athens and Greek non-governmental organization Praksis said they had all been given a one-month permit to stay in the country. In Somalia, news of the disaster started to filter through on April 17. Farah's cousin said they got confirmation from a man nicknamed Magafe, which means 'he who never misses', who was the agent who had organized the doomed crossing. "Before (Farah) sailed away we spoke to him and his friends whom he made on the way and with whom he stayed in Egypt. Now all of them are gone in the sea." (Writing by Crispian Balmer; Abdi Sheikh reported from Mogadishu, Additional reporting by Edmund Blair in Nairobi and Angeliki Koutantou in Athens; Editing by Angus MacSwan) By Mark Weinraub CHICAGO (Reuters) - The Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board (IELRB) on Thursday voted to ask the state attorney general to go to court to prevent what it called illegal strikes by the Chicago Teachers Union in the future. The move follows a one-day walkout earlier this month by the union, which represents 27,000 educators and support personnel in the third-largest U.S. public school system that is saddled with a $1.1 billion budget deficit. "The Labor Board's important ruling gives Chicago families more certainty that the CTU leadership cannot strike illegally whenever they want," Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Forrest Claypool said in a statement. The board voted 4 to 1 in favor of moving forward to seek injunctive relief. "The governor's labor board is prosecuting its war on workers," the union said in a statement following the Board's decision. "The IELRB was ignoring decades of its own legal precedents." Chicago Public Schools administrators called for binding arbitration on Wednesday to reach a contract and avoid a threatened teacher strike, which could happen as early as next month, but the union immediately shut the door on the proposal. Republican Governor Bruce Rauner is pushing for a state takeover of the Chicago public school system. (Reporting by Mark Weinraub; Editing by Tom Brown) ANKARA (Reuters) - Iran has denounced as "theft" a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that almost $2 billion in frozen Iranian assets must be paid to American families of those killed in attacks blamed on the Islamic Republic, state television reported. The ruling was handed down on Wednesday as U.S. President Barack Obama visited Iran's regional rival Saudi Arabia, hoping to reduce Gulf states' fears over Iranian influence in the region. "This is totally rejected. It is theft ... it is like stealing Iran's money and we condemn it," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossein Jaber Ansari was quoted as saying. "The decision is incompatible with international laws." The court found that the U.S. Congress had not usurped the authority of the courts by passing a law in 2012 stating that the frozen funds should go toward satisfying a $2.65 billion judgment against Iran won by the families in a U.S. federal court in 2007. The ruling would affect, among others, the families of 241 U.S. soldiers killed in truck bomb attacks on a U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut in October 1983. A conservative Sunni Muslim monarchy, Saudi Arabia sees revolutionary Iran as the paramount threat to the Middle East's stability, because of its support for Shi'ite militias that Riyadh says have inflamed sectarian violence. Riyadh fears a nuclear deal reached with the United States and five other major powers in 2015 might embolden Tehran to tighten its grip in the Middle East and step up its efforts to dominate Arab countries such as Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. However, Iran's top authority Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has repeatedly ruled out any detente with the United States even after the lifting of economic sanctions in January under the nuclear deal in exchange for curbing Iran's nuclear work. Relations with Washington were severed after Irans 1979 Islamic revolution and enmity to the United States has always been a rallying point for hardliners in Iran. "The (U.S. court) ruling again displayed America's hostility towards Iran ... and proved that America cannot be trusted," Jaber Ansari said. (Writing by Parisa Hafezi; Editing by Richard Balmforth) By Conor Humphries DUBLIN (Reuters) - Irish citizens should use their influence with friends and family in Britain to help make the case for continued membership of the European Union, Prime Minister Enda Kenny said on Thursday. Brexit would damage Ireland's exporters, undermine the European Union and deal a blow to Northern Ireland, Kenny told parliament ahead of Britain's June 23 referendum on whether to remain in the bloc or leave. Kenny stopped short of calling on British voters to vote to stay, saying the referendum is "entirely a matter for the UK electorate." But he called on the Irish people to use their influence. "I urge all other members of the House to use their connections and influence to reinforce the case," Kenny said. "This is a matter on which we should be united. "I also hope that people in Ireland will also reach out to family, friends and business colleagues in Britain." In addition to the 1.2 million eligible voters in Northern Ireland, there were 120,000 UK voters living in Ireland, Kenny said. Irish "In" campaigners in Britain are also targeting over 600,000 Irish-born voters who live there. Kenny dismissed suggestions that Ireland might be forced to follow the UK out of the European Union, saying the country would remain a committed EU member whatever the result. But he said the beneficial economic relationship between the UK and Ireland, which trade 1.2 billion euros (945.4 million) of goods and services each week, would be at risk ,with trade in food and energy particular areas for concern. The common travel area between the United Kingdom and Ireland which has existed for almost a century "cannot be guaranteed" either if the UK leaves, Kenny also said. That warning contradicted recent comments by Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Theresa Villiers, who is campaigning for the United Kingdom to leave. Deutsche Bank this week described Brexit as "the single biggest source of uncertainty facing the Irish economy in the near-term" beyond the formation of a new government. The parliamentary debate on Brexit was one of the first since an inconclusive Feb. 26 election left the country without a government. Finance Minister Michael Noonan on Thursday said parties were edging towards agreement on forming one. (editing by John Stonestreet) United Nations (United States) (AFP) - With their very existence under threat from climate change, the world's island states come to the United Nations on Friday not only to sign the Paris climate deal but to be first in line to make sure it goes into force. Led by Fiji, at least nine islands will formally present their ratification of the agreement to the United Nations, moving quickly to the next stage in a bid to bind countries to their commitments to tackle global warming. The Paris agreement will come into force as soon as 55 countries responsible for 55 percent of the world's greenhouse gases have ratified the accord. "We wanted to be the first to ratify it," said Fiji's Prime Minister Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama, whose cabinet quickly endorsed the deal, followed by the parliament in February. That same month, the Pacific paradise island was hit by Tropical Cyclone Winston that killed 44 people, destroyed 40,000 homes and caused more than $1 billion in damage. "A single climatic event can wipe out all the gains we have made and set back our development," the prime minister told a news conference. Other early ratifiers of the deal will be Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Maldives - low-lying islands that face oblivion from rising sea levels -- as well as Belize, Barbados, Nauru, Saint Lucia and Samoa. - Paris not enough - China and the United States, the world's top two greenhouse gas emitters, are pushing for quick ratification so that the Paris deal can come into force, possibly as early as 2016 or 2017. More than 160 governments, including some 50 heads of state and government, are to sign the historic accord during the ceremony on Earth Day. It will be the largest signing of an international agreement since the Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982. French President Francois Hollande will be the first to sign the accord, but the ceremony will also see island leaders take the podium to appeal for urgent action to ratify the Paris accord. Story continues "What was achieved in Paris was a positive first step, but it is not nearly enough to avert catastrophe," the Fijian prime minister said. Fiji and other island states want to keep global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, instead of 2 degrees as outlined in the Paris accord. Island governments want to unlock international financing so that they can better prepare their economies and infrastructure to withstand the impact of climate change. Tropical Cyclone Winston, the strongest ever to hit the south Pacific, affected some 250,000 people, or 40 percent of the regional population. "After Winston, we've had three tropical depressions that have brought continued flooding," said Bainimarama. "We've received some 1,000 earthquake tremors, so we are fairly worried about earthquakes and tsunamis," he said. London (AFP) - Guy Hamilton, director of four James Bond films including classics "Goldfinger" and "Diamonds Are Forever", has died at the age of 93, former Bond actor Roger Moore said Thursday. Writing on Twitter, Moore -- who was directed by Hamilton in "Live and Let Die" and "The Man with the Golden Gun" -- said he was "incredibly, incredibly saddened to hear the wonderful director Guy Hamilton has gone to the great cutting room in the sky. 2016 is horrid." Ken Adam, the designer of many of the Bondfilms' elaborate villainous lairs as well as 007's Aston Martin ejector seat, also died last month, aged 95. Hamilton died on Tuesday at his home on the Spanish island of Majorca, according to British press reports. His other credits include "The Battle of Britain", "Evil Under the Sun" and "The Mirror Crack'd". He was born in Paris in 1922, where his father was the press attache to the British Embassy, but he attended school in England. Hamilton launched his career in the French cinema industry in the 1930s, starting out as a tea boy before the looming outbreak of World War II forced him to escape to North Africa. He served in the Royal Navy during the conflict as part of a unit that attempted to rescue British servicemen caught in France, once enlisting the help of the Resistance after becoming stranded on a Breton beach in 1944. "Quite simply, if was not for the Resistance I would not be alive," he once said. After the war, he become a director and took over Bond duties in 1964 with "Goldfinger" starring Sean Connery. Hamilton is credited with accentuating many of the elements associated with Bond, including the films' dramatic theme tunes, 007's luxury toys and his coterie of female admirers. "Don't take a train when you can take a plane, and if you're going to take a plane, take the newest one around," Hamilton said of the Bond image. He is survived by his second wife, French actress Kerima. TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Thursday sent a ritual offering to a controversial Tokyo shrine for war dead, prompting China to urge it to "deeply reflect on its invasion history", as the Asian neighbors prepare for a meeting to help smooth ties. Chinese ties with Japan have long been strained by what Beijing see as Japanese leaders' reluctance to atone for the country's wartime past. China and South Korea suffered under Japan's sometimes brutal occupation and colonial rule before Tokyo's defeat in 1945. Abe's spring festival offering of a "masakaki" ceremonial tree at the Yasukuni shrine, which some see as a symbol of Japanese militarism in World War Two as it honors convicted war criminals among other war dead, comes as Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida prepares to visit Beijing. Kishida is likely to meet Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on April 30 in a bid to ease friction over issues such as sovereignty disputes over the South China Sea, Japanese media have said. "I am aware that the prime minister sent a 'masakaki' offering," chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga told a news conference. "He did it as a private person and did not use public funds." Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said the shrine consecrates war criminals. "We urge Japan to honestly and deeply reflect on its invasion history, demarcate a complete boundary on militarism, and take practical actions to win back the trust of its Asian neighbors and the international community," she told a daily news briefing. Seiichi Eto, a special advisor to Abe, visited the shrine on Thursday, Japanese media said. Other lawmakers are expected to pay their respects there on Friday. Abe's offering at Yasukuni, where 14 leaders convicted as war criminals by an Allied tribunal are honored with war dead, treads a fine line between the demands of conservative allies that he visit the shrine in person and a desire to avoid the diplomatic furor that would result if he attended the festival. Japan hosts the Group of Seven (G7) leaders summit next month, and Abe is eager to put his best foot forward, particularly ahead of an election in July. His last visit to Yasukuni, in December 2013, angered China and South Korea and provoked rare criticism from key ally the United States. Since becoming premier in late 2012, Abe has sent ritual offerings to the annual spring and autumn festivals. He sent a cash offering last August, at the time of the 70th anniversary of Japan's World War Two defeat, but did not visit. (Reporting by Kaori Kaneko; Additional reporting by Jessica Macy Yu in Beijing; Editing by Elaine Lies, Michael Perry and Nick Macfie) Milan (AFP) - Tanel Kangert made it two wins in three days for his Astana team on the Tour of Trentino, the Estonian ending his three-year wait for victory on the race's third and penultimate stage Thursday. Kangert, who last won in the professional ranks in 2013, triumphed after soloing away from a select group of frontrunners on the final climb of the 204.6km race from Sillian, Austria to Mezzolombardo, Italy. Austrian Patrick Konrad finished second for the Bora-Argon team at 10secs behind, at the front of a chasing group that contained Kangert's Astana team leader Jakob Fuglsang and overnight leader Mikel Landa. Landa, who rides for Team Sky, won the second stage of the race on Wednesday, a day after Italian Valerio Agnoli crossed the line first for Astana on their opening-stage team time-trial victory. Landa retained the race lead ahead of Friday's final stage, a 160.9 km race from Male to Cles, but has only an eight-second lead on Kangert. Dane Fuglsang, however, could be poised to strike for overall victory. He sits in third place overall at 10secs off the lead. The deal, aimed at empowering women in the job market, was signed with the support of UN Women and the Sawiris Foundation for Social Development Egypt and France signed on Tuesday an agreement aimed at empowering women in the job market on the sidelines of the French President Francois Holland's visit to Egypt. The agreement brings together the largest French companies and banks in Egypt and the Middle East to collaborate side-by-side with the Egyptian government and civil society to build job skills for women to be employed by these companies. The agreement was signed with the support of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment (UN Women) and the Sawiris Foundation for Social Development, which is to launch the "The Egyptian Woman: the Pioneer of the Future" programme. The signing was attended by the French ambassador to Egypt Andre Parant, UN Women Regional Director for Arab States Mohammad Naciri, and Egyptian business tycoon Naguib Sawiris. "The agreement signed today combines the efforts of the government, civil society, and the private sector, which is the most effective collaboration that guarantees the sustainable economic empowerment of women on the ground," Naciri said. This is the first agreement of several planned for launch with the support of UN Women in a number of Arab states, including Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria in efforts to strengthen economic support for women in the Middle East. Search Keywords: Short link: PARIS (Reuters) - French luxury group Kering's flagship Gucci brand posted a lower-than-expected rise in first-quarter sales on Thursday amid a difficult environment for the luxury sector. Gucci posted 3.1 percent growth in comparable sales, below analysts' expectations of 5 to 6 percent and slowing from 4.8 percent growth in the last quarter of 2015. The luxury goods industry has had a difficult start to the year, partly due to the Chinese economic slowdown and a sharp drop in tourist traffic in shopping hotspots such as Paris, Milan, Hong Kong and Macau. The Gucci first-quarter results are "confirming it is starting to get traction - but pointing to the fact that this will progress over time and that Rome wasn't built in a day," Exane BNP Paribas analyst Luca Solca said in a note. Kering's second luxury brand, Bottega Veneta, posted an 8.3 percent drop in comparable sales, suffering from its strong exposure to Asian clients. Yves Saint Laurent carried on a strong track with 26.5 percent growth in comparable sales, but Balenciaga and Boucheron suffered from their exposure to the French market's woes following the November attacks in Paris. Sales at sportswear brand Puma grew by 8.1 percent on a comparable sales basis. The Kering group overall posted 2.724 billion euros in first-quarter sales, below expectations in a Reuters poll that predicted 2.767 billion euros. "Kering's solid first-quarter 2016 performance in a challenging market environment is testimony to our focus on driving organic growth," Francois-Henri Pinault, Kering's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer said in a statement. "We are confident that we can extend our growth trajectory over the full year thanks to our multi-brand model, our continued strict operating and financial discipline, and the top-quality work of all our teams." Kering is among the last of luxury groups to report first-quarter sales. Rivals Prada <1913.HK>, LVMH , Richemont and Burberry have all said they were suffering from weaker demand since the start of the year. Analysts say that adding to their woes, their troubles also stem from consumers, particularly in the United States and Asia, increasingly suffering from mega-brand fatigue, preferring instead smaller, more up-and-coming and innovative brands. (Reporting by Ingrid Melander and Pascale Denis; Editing by Michel Rose and David Evans) Washington (AFP) - US Secretary of State John Kerry will meet in New York on Friday with Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, as Tehran complains that Washington has not lived up to its nuclear deal obligations. Kerry's spokesman told reporters in Washington that the two top diplomatic chiefs will hold another day of talks following a meeting at the UN on Tuesday. Tehran has said it is not receiving enough sanctions relief. "In these discussions with Foreign Minister Zarif tomorrow, I fully expect that they will continue to talk about the sanctions relief process, and the degree to which banks, foreign and domestic, as well as institutions foreign and domestic are evaluating their options under the JCPOA," State Department John Kirby said Thursday, referring to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action as the international nuclear deal is also known. The two men will address "the degree to which they have before them a sufficient level of understanding to make decisions with respect to sanctions relief," Kirby said at the State Department's daily briefing. This week's meetings mark the first face-to-face encounters between Kerry and Zarif since January, when they met in Vienna to formally implement the nuclear deal. Iranian officials have complained that the United States has not lived up to its side of the nuclear agreement because Western banks and corporations have been reluctant to renew business ties. Kirby said nothing could be further from the truth. "We certainly are not trying to become an obstacle in any way of foreign banks and institutions working with Iran through the sanctions relief process and doing legitimate business with Iran," he said. He added: "We believe we are working hard to try to explain what the obligations are, what the responsibilities are and what the opportunities are for foreign institutions and banks under the JCPOA." Washington, for its part, has also pointed the finger at Tehran, warning that it retains the right to impose new sanctions over Iran's ballistic missile tests. (Reuters) - Manager Juergen Klopp's preferred style of play has become second nature to Liverpool's players who took time to get used to the German's tactics, midfielder James Milner has said. After initially struggling under Klopp, who replaced Brendan Rodgers in October, Liverpool have now lost only once in their last 15 games following Wednesday's 4-0 Premier League win over Merseyside rivals Everton. "The manager's style is a bit more second nature than it was a few months ago, we know how he wants to play and everyone is on the same page. I think you can see that in the performances," Milner told the club website (www.liverpoolfc.com). Liverpool are seventh in the league, six points behind fourth-placed Arsenal, who hold the final Champions League qualifying spot with five games left. Klopp also led his side into the Europa League semi-finals against Spanish side Villarreal after overcoming his former club Borussia Dortmund in dramatic fashion. "We seem to be in the rhythm at the moment. You need a full squad and we have got a quality squad of players, a young squad as well but when the younger guys have come in they have done brilliantly as well," Milner said. "There's a lot of competition for places and that's what you need." Liverpool host former boss Rafael Benitez's Newcastle United, who are second bottom of the table, on Saturday. (Reporting by Shravanth Vijayakumar in Bengaluru, editing by Ed Osmond) QAMISHLI, Syria (Reuters) - At least 40 pro-Syrian government fighters surrendered to Kurdish forces in the city of Qamishli in mostly Kurdish-controlled Hasaka province on Thursday, a Reuters witness said. The pro-government forces had been holed up in a prison which is now under the control of the Kurdish security forces. Gunfire could still be heard in the city after rare violence erupted between the two sides late the day before. (Reporting by Rodi Said; writing by Tom Perry and John Davison; Editing by Toby Chopra) Prince, a dizzylingly prolific multi-instrumentalist and virtuosic performer, was found dead at his recording studio in Minnesota early on Thursday, according to a TMZ report. He was 57. Deputies are on scene at Paisley Park in Chanhassen, authorities told The Hollywood Reporter. The sheriffs office says they are conducting a death investigation currently and are notifying next of kin before releasing the name of the individual who died. The artists rep has not yet responded to a request for comment. No further information was immediately available. The performer was born Prince Rogers Nelson June 7, 1958, in Minneapolis, Minn. He released his debut album, For You, in 1978, followed by Prince (1979), Dirty Mind (1980) and Controversy (1981). All of them traded in his trademark sound - deep synth funk grooves with provocatively sexual lyrics and heart-piercing ballads sung in pure tto. His mainstream breakthrough came with back-to-back albums with his backing band the Recultion: In 1982, 1999 launched several pop and dance floor hits onto the charts, including Little Red Corvette and the title song, a post-apocalyptic party anthem. Two years later he released the album - a soundtrack, actually, to his movie-starring debut - that would launch him into the same superstar stratosphere of other 80s pop titans like Michael Jackson and Madonna. The soundtrack was 1984s Purple Rain, a searing musical backdrop to a semi-autobiographical tale of The Kid, a Minneapolis rocker from an abusive family. The album launched five singles, two of which - When Doves Cry and Lets Go Crazy" - went to Number 1 on the Billboard chart. The title ballad reached No. 2 and has gone on to become one of the most recognizable rock anthems in history. The soundtrack itself is frequently cited on music critics polls as being one of the best of all time. Subsequent releases grew more experimental in nature, including the pyschedelic Around the World in a Day (1985) and Sign O the Times (1987), a double album recorded partly before a live audience in Paris that dispensed with the Revolution and which is widely to considered to have been produced at Princes creative peak. (Among the compositions on it are The Ballad of Dorothy Parker, If I was Your Girlfriend, and I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man. Story continues Read More: Prince Discovery Vanity Dies at 57 In between he starred in one more film, 1986s Under the Cherry Moon, in which he stars as a gigolo wooing Kristin Scott Thomas in the south of France. The movie bombed, but produced a successful soundtrack album: Parade, which featured the hits Kiss and Mountains. Throughout the 1990s, Prince was later backed by a large band known as The New Power Generation, and his sound moved away from synth and heavy rock guitars and into one of brassier R&B. In 1993, he famously changed his name to that of an unpronounceable glyph that melded the symbols for male and female. The move was one of protest against his label. Warner Bros., leading him to shave the word Slave into his face at one. Between 1994 and 1996 he churned out the five remaining records due on his contract and signed with Arista Records in 1998. By the 2000s, the glyph was retired and he was once again referring to himself as Prince. In the 15 years since, hes released an astonishing 15 records and toured tirelessly. His latest tour, dubbed Piano & a Microphone, saw him criss-crossing the globe from Melbourne, Aus., to Oakland, Calif., performing an intimate, improvised evening of hits performed solo at a grand piano. On the night he learned of his collaborator Vanitys recent death, Prince told the crowd, I just found out a little while ago that someone dear to us has passed away. So Im going to dedicate this song to her." The song was: Little Red Corvette. See More: Hollywoods Notable Deaths of 2016 More to come. The two parliamentarians accused a splinter organisation of committing the murder with the aim of disrupting trade relations between Egypt and Italy Two Italian members of parliament ruled out this week the possibility of the Egyptian government's involvement in Italian student Giulio Regeni's murder earlier this year, describing it as a "plot" to spoil the relationship between Egypt and Italy. Italian Senator Lucio Barani of the Liberal Popular Alliance Bloc and Senator Francesco Amoroso, the former president of the Euro-Mediterranean parliament, stated that Regeni's killers were both Egypt and Italy's enemies. Regeni vanished from the streets of Cairo on 25 January and his body was discovered in a ditch on the outskirts of the city nine days later, showing signs of extensive torture. Some have speculated that Egyptian authorities were behind the killing of the student, who was conducting research on trade unions in the country. The Italian MPs made the comments in an interview earlier this week on Sada El-Balad TV with renowned Egyptian businessman and current honorary president of the Euro-Mediterranean Parliament Mohamed Abul-Enein. They stressed during the interview, which was translated into Arabic for Egyptian viewers, that the Egyptian government was not involved in the murder. The Italian lawmakers accused what they referred to as a "splinter organisation" funded by international economic powers of being behind the murder of the 28-years-old political researcher, saying that it aimed to replace Italy and its economic relations with Egypt. Barani and Amoroso also stressed that the Italian ambassador should return to Cairo soon. In early April, the Italian government recalled its ambassador for consultation following a series of meetings in Rome between a high-level Egyptian security and legal delegation and Italian officials to discuss Cairo's investigation into the murder. We understand Egypts refusal to deliver phone records to the Italian side, they said, referring to Egypts rejection of a request by Italian investigators to release the call logs of thousands of Egyptian phone numbers because it would be "unconstitutional and illegal." Egypt has vigorously denied claims that security forces were involved in Regeni's murder. Search Keywords: Short link: By Ana Isabel Martinez and Julia Symmes Cobb PEDERNALES, Ecuador (Reuters) - The death toll from Ecuador's weekend earthquake surpassed 500 and rescue efforts ebbed on Wednesday as the traumatized Andean nation braced itself for long and costly rebuilding ahead. To help fund the multibillion-dollar reconstruction of homes, roads and buildings in the devastated Pacific coast region, Ecuador may issue new bonds on the international market, a sombre President Rafael Correa said. "It's hard to imagine the magnitude of the tragedy. Every time we visit a place, there are more problems," he said, fresh from touring the disaster zone. Another quake, of 6.2 magnitude, shook the coast before dawn on Wednesday. It terrified inhabitants and briefly hindered rescuers searching for the dwindling number of survivors from Saturday's bigger 7.8 quake, which killed 525 people, according to a central government tally. "You can't imagine what a fright it was. 'Not again!,' I thought," said Maria Quinones in Pedernales town, which bore the brunt of Saturday's disaster. "FOOD PLEASE" Correa said the weekend disaster had inflicted $2 billion to $3 billion of damage and could knock 2 to 3 percentage points off growth, meaning the economy will almost certainly shrink this year. Lower oil revenue had already left the poor nation of 16 million people facing near-zero growth and lower investment. "We're looking at the possibility of issuing bonds on the international market, but other measures have been planned, a tax reform is being discussed," Correa said, without giving more details. Ecuador had been saying before the quake that current high yields would make it too expensive to issue debt. Yields on its bonds are close to 11 percentage points higher than comparable U.S. Treasury debt, according to JPMorgan data. Leftist Correa's government in 2008 defaulted on debt with a similar yield, calling bondholders "monsters" and the value unfair. His government has since returned to Wall Street, however, and Ecuador currently has some $3.5 billion worth of bonds in circulation. Still, creditors are likely to be wary following the quake. Four days after the quake, some isolated communities struggled without water, power or transport, although aid was trickling in. Along the coast, stadiums served as morgues and aid distribution centres, though torn up roads were slowing the delivery of some supplies. "I'm waiting for medicines, diapers for my grandson, we're lacking everything," said Ruth Quiroz, 49, as she waited in an hour-long line in front of a makeshift pharmacy set up at the Pedernales stadium. On a highway outside the town, some children sat holding placards saying "food, please". Scores of foreign aid workers and experts have arrived in the aftermath of Saturday's disaster and about 14,000 security personnel have kept order, with only sporadic looting reported. But rescuers were losing hope of finding anyone alive even as relatives of the missing begged them to keep looking. Speaking from the highland capital Quito, Correa said the death toll would likely rise further, though at a slower rate than in previous days. "May these tears fertilise the soil of the future," the deeply-moved president said. (Additional reporting by Alexandra Valencia and Diego Ore in Quito, Brian Ellsworth in Caracas; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne and Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by James Dalgleish and Tom Brown) Manchester (United Kingdom) (AFP) - Manchester United manager Louis van Gaal reacted angrily to suggestions that his club's supporters had voted with their feet by missing a 2-0 victory over Crystal Palace at Old Trafford. The Premier League side announced a near-capacity crowd of 75,277 for the win which maintained their bid to finish in the top four and claim a place in next season's Champions League. But it is understood that figure includes season ticket holders, regardless of whether or not they attend, and there were uncharacteristic empty seats at Old Trafford as full-back Matteo Darmian scored his first goal for the club and forced Damien Delaney into an own goal for the opener. "I didn't see a lot of empty seats," snapped the Dutchman. "But you saw that because you wanted to see it." However, Van Gaal did see England centre-forward Wayne Rooney continue his comeback from two months out with a knee injury in a deeper midfield role -- a solid 75-minute performance that may have put him in contention for a start in the weekend FA Cup semi-final against Everton. "Now he has played 75 minutes so I build up his capacity in the matches, which I have done also with the other players, like Marcos Rojo," said Van Gaal. "He was the player who switched the play and I liked that very much. "No player has a fixed position. I use a player where I think they can give a contribution in that game. It was more of a midfield role today also because of the way Crystal Palace was playing. "I don't want to change (Marcus) Rashford so I have to look for another position for Wayne. He played there also last year. I am very happy with the way he performed." Rashford, the exciting teenage striker, suffered a slight contact injury against Palace, as did defender Chris Smalling, although Van Gaal is hopeful both will recover in time to play Everton at Wembley. The comfortable victory, coupled with Everton's 4-0 defeat in the Merseyside derby at Liverpool on the same evening, suggests United will be strong favourites for the semi-final, although Van Gaal insisted that all he cared about was collecting the victory against Palace. Story continues "I want three points," said Van Gaal. "That is the most important thing. We needed three points and that is what I said to my players. "We have to win and we must win and now is another game. First you can enjoy but you must recover also because within two days you have to play again." - 'Unbelievable' - For all their disappointments, Van Gaal and United could now end the campaign by winning the FA Cup and a place in Europe's top club competition, and their manager believes his players have shown great resilience. "We have to work very hard to reach this level because we have a very full season," said Van Gaal. "We have played in three competitions. "It is unbelievable, many more matches than last year and also a new selection with a lot of youngsters so we have to work very hard to reach this level and also we have to recover a lot. So I think we have to play Everton, when we survive Everton I shall give the players a lot of days off." Palace, of course, are another of the four remaining clubs in the FA Cup, with their semi-final with Watford taking place at Wembley on Sunday. Manager Alan Pardew conceded that many of his players had their attention turned towards the cup this weekend. "The FA Cup for Man United is going to be a big, big event,a he said. "But for us it's going to be a huge event. "I could see a little bit of blurred focus in my players and that's understandable. A lot of those guys might never get the chance to play in an FA Cup Final again and you could see that a little bit in our play." By Marcus E. Howard NEW YORK (Reuters) - Massachusetts on Thursday unveiled what state officials called the first initiative in the country to offer tuition rebates to full-time students who begin their studies at a community college and complete a bachelor's degree at a state university. The program, called the Commonwealth Commitment, provides a 10 percent rebate on tuition and fees at the end of each completed semester, as long as students maintain a cumulative grade point average of 3.0 or higher. It is open only to state residents and is estimated to provide an average savings of $5,090 on the cost of a four-year degree. Tuition and mandatory fees will be frozen at the rate at which participants enter the program, which will be phased in over a period of two academic years, beginning in September. As part of the agreement, participants must complete a two-year, associate's degree at one of the state's 15 community colleges in 2-1/2 years or less and transfer to a state university to complete a bachelor's degree in no more than two years. Additionally, participants must choose to study at least one of 24 majors offered, not including engineering and nursing due to their higher costs. "This program was designed to decrease the cost of a college degree and accelerate on-time completion for students across the Commonwealth, creating more opportunities and helping more people get into the workforce with the skills they need," Governor Charlie Baker said in a statement. Increased attention has been given to community colleges as more employers look to hire employees with a college education. President Barack Obama has pushed to make tuition free at community colleges across the country. The high cost of college tuition has also emerged as an issue in the 2016 presidential race. In his bid for the Democratic nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders of neighboring Vermont has proposed making tuition free at public colleges and universities. Story continues The colleges will pay for cost of the initiative, said Katy Abel, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Higher Education. However, the exact price is unknown because there is no estimate for how many students will participate, she said. About 260,000 students, including non-state residents, attend the state's 15 community colleges, nine state universities and five campuses of the University of Massachusetts, according to the state. (Reporting by Marcus E. Howard; Editing by David Gregorio) Mexico City (AFP) - Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto proposed Thursday legalizing medical marijuana and easing restrictions on recreational use, a major policy shift for a government embroiled in an ultra-violent drug war. Pena Nieto's decision to send landmark legislation to Congress was the result of a national debate on cannabis laws and comes amid a growing debate about drug policy across the Americas. "Society and the scientific community have spoken. There was a clear consensus that there are limits to the current focus in which Mexico has dealt with the marijuana issue," Pena Nieto said. The bill sent to Congress would allow the use of medications made with marijuana or its active ingredients, and it would also increase the amount of the drug that can legally be possessed for personal consumption from five to 28 grams (one ounce). But his proposal falls short of a full legalization of marijuana as demanded by activists who won a landmark case last year at the Supreme Court, which authorized four individuals to grow and smoke pot. Pena Nieto said his legislation aims to fix "two types of injustices": The inability of patients to access marijuana-based medicine and the "disproportional" prison sentences against people arrested on pot-related charges. "Mexicans know very well the scope and limits of the prohibitionist and punitive scheme, and of the so-called war on drugs, which has prevailed for over 40 years at the international level," he said in a speech. Mexico, a major supplier and transport hub for drug trafficking to the United States, has endured a horrific explosion in cartel violence over the past decade. More than 100,000 people have been killed or disappeared since Mexican authorities deployed troops to combat drug trafficking in 2006. "Fortunately, a new global consensus is gradually emerging in favor of a reform of the international drug regime," he said Story continues "With this reform proposal, we take firm steps toward a new paradigm that looks at drugs from the perspective of prevention, health and human rights." The medical marijuana initiative would allow imports of medicine containing marijuana and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the plant's main psychoactive ingredient. Such medicine would be subject to strict health controls by the authorities, just as any other legal drug. The increase in the amount of pot that a person can possess for personal use would be "in line with international standards," Pena Nieto said. - 'It changed our lives' - Mexicos move follows policy shifts across the region. Canadas health minister said Thursday that his government would introduce legislation next year to legalize marijuana, while Uruguay in 2013 became the first country in the world to fully legalize marijuana. In December, the president of Colombia, another country beset by drug violence, signed a decree legalizing medical marijuana. In the United States -- the biggest consumer of drugs from Mexico -- 23 states have legalized medical marijuana use while four states plus the US capital city have legalized its recreational use. Pena Nieto decided to hold a series of five public forums on the country's tough marijuana laws after last year's Supreme Court decision. The ruling was limited in scope, giving permission to just four individuals, but activists hopes that either the government would loosen its laws or that the court would issue other similar rulings to set a legal precedent. Juan Francisco Torres, an attorney who was of the foursome that took its case to the top court, said the president's proposal "falls short." "They increase the number of grams but there's still a problem in the background, there's nothing that says that supply is legal," he told Milenio television. But Pena Nieto's initiative was welcomed by another pioneer in Mexico's marijuana debate, Raul Elizalde, who won a lower court battle to get authorization to give his young epileptic daughter medical cannabis last year. Elizalde, who spoke at Pena Nieto's event, said the quality of life of his daughter, Grace, had improved since she began taking cannabidiol (CBD), a therapeutic oil. "My daughter is a different person. She has improved with the treatment. It has changed our lives," he said. A Michigan radio personality and prominent breast cancer research advocate was allegedly killed by her husband in an apparent murder-suicide Tuesday morning, police say. Eric Stewart, 51, allegedly murdered his wife, Denise Bohn-Stewart, 45, in their Royalton Township home, Lt. Charles Christensen tells PEOPLE. Christensen says the couple's three young children ages 10, 9 and 8 were home and that one of them called 911 after hearing gunshots. "They heard something; they didn't see anything," Christensen says. The children were unharmed and were taken to a safe location. Christensen says Denise had multiple gunshot wounds, and that when police arrived, Denise and Eric were in two separate rooms. He says investigators had learned "they were having some marital issues. They had been for some time." Gayle Olson, Board Chairman and President of 98.3 The Coast, the radio station in St. Joseph, Michigan, for which Denise co-hosted the morning show, tells PEOPLE, "She recently made it clear that she was moving on and that a divorce was likely, although nothing had been formally filed." He says that Eric worked as a maintenance supervisor at the Cook Nuclear Plant, one of the largest employers in the region. Beloved Personality and Fierce Advocate for Breast Cancer Research: 'A Force of Nature' Denise was the co-host of Denise and Johnny in the Morning, the morning show on 98.3 FM, and also did news reporting for the station. On air, says Olson, "She was very outgoing, very friendly, and very much about the audience and listeners and not about her. So many morning shows are star-centric. But she was about the community and the causes." Olson says Denise began her career at the station about 25 years ago and returned a little over a year ago so she could have greater schedule flexibility to spend time with her children and devote herself to her work fighting breast cancer. In addition to her work on the radio, she was the development director of the Susan G. Komen Foundation's Michigan affiliate. She had survived breast cancer herself after being stricken when her youngest child was just two months old. She had also survived a serious car accident in the 1990s that disabled her for months and required her to get metal rods inserted into her neck. "This is someone who fought back from two life-threatening situations and was absolutely at the top of her game," Olson says, adding that she became "kind of a role model for the young, active, mom demographic. Everyone looked up to her." Jennifer Jurgens, Executive Director of the Susan G. Komen Foundation's Michigan affiliate, tells PEOPLE that Denise was "a tireless advocate for breast cancer research and for helping people locally find it early and pay for [treatment]. Being a survivor herself, she could have empathy, she could relate." As development director, Jurgens says, Denise was "a force of nature. Driven, passionate, energetic, funny, with a super sharp wit. She was able to tell her story over and over again and not have it lose an ounce of impact, because it came from the heart every time." Jurgens says 10 women in Denise's family have been diagnosed with breast cancer and that four have died of the disease. Denise was dedicated to doing everything in her power to prevent her daughter from battling the disease. It is for this reason, she says, that the organization has decided to proceed with its upcoming Race For the Cure run this Sunday despite the tragedy. "I asked the entire team if we needed to cancel, and they all said Denise would be so mad if we did. We're going to try to honor her by being as tough as she was." Jurgens pointed to a testimonial Denise wrote on the organization's website about why she fights for a cure: "Why I fight? I fight for the little girl who wakes up every morning with a smile on her face. I fight for the little girl who gives me tight hugs and calls me mommy. I fight for the little girl who loves to draw butterflies, swim like a fish and play softball. I fight for Regan, my daughter." By Sarah McBride SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp and Intel Corp's financial results this week brought into sharp relief the onetime PC partners' attempts to gear up for cloud computing, where Microsoft is soaring and Intel has not quite taken off. Chipmaker Intel has seen its share price drop 2 percent over the last year, as software maker Microsofts stock has risen 30 percent. Microsoft's market capitalization of around $439.68 billion is almost three times Intel's at $150.96 billion, compared to about double five years ago. "Wintel" computers running Windows on Intel chips dominated the personal-computing era, which is slowly ending as more people turn to mobile phones for computing needs and corporations deemphasize desktops. Both Intel and Microsoft, run by relatively new CEOs Brian Krzanich and Satya Nadella, are betting their businesses on the cloud. Microsoft's cloud business, a combination of services and software catering to corporations moving computing functions to remote data centers run by outside providers, is growing strongly, although analysts want more clarity. A category it calls "intelligent cloud," which includes traditional server software, grew 3 percent over the last year to $9.46 billion. At Intel, in a quarter where the company announced plans to cut 12,000 jobs as it shifts away from the PC, data-center business revenue rose 9 percent to $4 billion. That segment includes the chips powering cloud data centers, where the company says it is doing well. Theres this perception that Microsoft is more on the cusp and benefiting from this (cloud) trend, said Dan Morgan, a fund manager at Synovus Trust Co who holds both companies in his portfolio. Intel is still more drowned out, meaning not as high-profile. Microsofts best-known play in the cloud is Azure, a set of services for computing and storage as well as tools for software developers. Azure is gaining ground on Amazon's AWS unit, the industry heavyweight in cloud computing services. Azure commands about 10 percent of the $23 billion market, estimates Synergy Research, compared with AWSs 31 percent. Intel has done well in its category, dominating the market for processor chips that are the brains of data center computers, but the business faces major pressures. Much of the difference in the companies' fortunes boils down to Microsofts fundamental business as a software company versus Intels as a hardware company, argues Nick Sturiale, a venture capitalist at Ignition Partners. Clients are spending an ever-larger part of their technology budget on software, according to research firm Gartner. And Intel's customer base for data-center chips is consolidating into a few big companies, including Facebook, Google, Amazon and Microsoft itself, from a much wider group. The cloud vendors are brutal price negotiators and have more power over Intel, said Sturiale. Average prices of data center chips fell 3 percent in the last quarter, although Intel said that reflected the fact that cheaper chips were gaining ground the fastest. Intel could suffer as big data-center builders like Facebook increasingly design their own data-center hardware. So far, Intel has held its own, but one day its customers could extend their cost-cutting to chips. In a call this week with analysts, Krzanich said Intels top to bottom understanding of the cloud-based data center and keen eye on competitors would help it stay ahead. Always paranoid about the competition, always driving, he said. And you know that we live or die by the performance of our product. Intel makes other promising products, including chips for Internet-connected devices known as the Internet of Things. If a blockbuster consumer or business product in that market comes along, those chips could take off. And Microsoft may be overemphasizing how far it has come. Much of its intelligent cloud business comprises software for traditional on-premises servers and other businesses with little to do with the cloud. A spokeswoman said the segments name is to align to the ambition of building the cloud. Microsoft also is good at playing up its cloud business. In its January earnings call with investors, the term cloud came up 59 times. In Intels call this week, it came up 11 times. (Reporting by Sarah McBride,; additional reporting by Noel Randewich; editing by Andrew Hay) The Shorouk newspaper cited anonymous sources saying that Sisi instructed police to prevent protests planned for 25 April over the recent island deal with Saudi Arabia Egypts presidency slammed a story published in the daily Shorouk newspaper on Wednesday evening stating that President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi gave instructions to police to stop any protests on 25 April, an official statement released on Thursday read. The story, according to the presidency, included misleading information attributed to anonymous sources about a series of meetings conducted by El-Sisi and his aides with security officials. However, the statement did not specify what parts of the article included misleading information, which it described as completely untrue in substance while criticising the paper for not confirming the story before publishing. The article stated that El-Sisi met with police officials "to express his anger" over the protests that took place in Cairo on Friday against the governments recent agreement to give two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia. The piece stated that "the president told his aides that he will not allow this scene to be repeated on 25 April," which has been set by dissenters as a date for further protests against the deal. The presidency called on all media outlets to ensure accuracy, rely on official sources and verify news related to the presidency before publication. Thousands of Egyptians protested on Friday against the recent cabinet decision to acknowledge Saudi Arabia's sovereignty over the Red Sea islands of Tiran and Sanafir, which caused widespread controversy in Egypt. Search Keywords: Short link: By Terrence Edwards ULAANBAATAR (Reuters) - An electoral pact between the two main opposition parties in Mongolia collapsed this week, weakening the odds of victory for the Mongolian People's Party (MPP), which oversaw the world's highest economic growth five years ago, in crucial polls set to take place in June. The ruling Mongolian Democratic Party was expected to come under intense pressure at this year's elections, scheduled for June 29, after four straight years of slowing growth and declining foreign investment, but it remains unclear if the MPP now can take advantage. The MPP oversaw the country's highest-ever growth in 2011 and the strongest in the world that year at 17.5 percent. It was also in power for the signing of the investment agreement for the giant Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold mine in 2009, which spearheaded a three-year mining boom as world coal prices rallied. Since then, the country's mining sector has taken a hit as a result of a dispute with Anglo-Australian miner Rio Tinto over Oyu Tolgoi, which has recently been resolved. Mineral-dependent Mongolia is also one of the countries worst affected by slowing growth in China, which buys up nearly all of its northern neighbor's copper, gold and coal. Negotiations fell through on Wednesday between the MPP, which ruled when Mongolia was a one-party state under Soviet hegemony before 1990, and the breakaway Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP). The two sides disagreed over how seats would be divided in an electoral pact, according to a statement from the MPP. "It would have been a hit with the electorate because they're splitting each other's votes," said Dale Choi, analyst and head of the Mongolian Metals & Mining research group, about the proposed campaign pact. "It absolutely would have given the MPP the upper hand." The MPRP first ran for elections in 2012 under the leadership of former president Nambaryn Enkhbayar, who was convicted on corruption charges in 2012 and pardoned the following year. The MPP currently has a small lead over the Democrats, according to poll published this month from the Sant Maral Foundation. The poll gives the MPP a 14.6 percent approval rating from voters, higher than the 11.1 percent scored by the incumbent Democratic Party. The MPRP was the third most popular party, with a 6.8 percent approval rate. Government under the Democrats has been dogged by party infighting, with one dispute derailing a deal that would have brought $4 billion of investment into the country's enormous Tavan Tolgoi coal mine. The government of the current prime minister, Chimed Saikhanbileg, negotiated the deal in 2015 but it was blocked by Zandaakhuu Enkhbold, the parliamentary speaker, on the day when investors were due to sign the final agreement in Ulaanbaatar. (Reporting by Terrence Edwards; Editing by David Stanway and Nick Macfie) Moscow (AFP) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow Thursday over fears the Kremlin's involvement in Syria and weapons deliveries to Iran could bolster the Jewish state's fiercest opponents. "Israel has obvious and evident red lines connected to our security," Netanyahu told Putin at the start of the meeting. "Firstly, we are doing everything that depends on us to stop the most hi-tech weaponry from Syria and Iran from falling into the hands of Hezbollah," he said, referring to Lebanon's powerful Shiite militia. "Secondly, we are doing everything in order to prevent an additional terrorist front opening up against us in the Golan Heights." Russia is currently flying a bombing campaign in support of forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Iran and allied Shiite militia Hezbollah are also battling on the side of the regime in Damascus -- making the trio de facto allies on the ground. Israel fears that the chaos in Syria could help strengthen its arch-enemy Hezbollah and Netanyahu admitted for the first time this month that Israel had attacked dozens of convoys there which were transporting weapons to the group. It was the first clear public acknowledgement that Israel had carried out attacks in neighbouring Syria with which it is still officially at war. Russia has also stirred Israeli ire by pushing ahead with the long-awaited delivery of the S-300 air defence system to Tehran. Iran used its annual Army Day parade last week to showcase parts of the systems -- ordered from Moscow in 2007 but not delivered until now due to UN Security Council resolutions relating to Tehran's nuclear programme. Netanyahu last visited Moscow in September when he and Putin agreed to set up a "hotline" between the two sides to avoid accidental clashes between Russian and Israeli forces in Syria. North Korea said Thursday it wanted to set up a meeting -- in Seoul if necessary -- between a dozen recent defectors and their parents to prove Pyongyang's claim that the former were abducted by South Korea. Twelve women working as staff in a North Korean restaurant in China arrived in the South, along with their manager, earlier this month. Seoul said they came voluntarily, while the North insists they were tricked into defecting by South Korean spies who effectively "kidnapped" them with the connivance of the manager. A spokesman for the North Korean Red Cross said the parents of the 12 staff were demanding "direct contact" with them as early as possible. "We will send the parents to Panmunjom or to Seoul, if necessary, so that they could meet face to face with their daughters," the spokesman said in a statement carried by the North's official KCNA news agency. Panmunjom is the UN truce village situated on the inter-Korean border. "What we want is to let the daughters meet their parents and directly clarify their stand," the statement said. A refusal by Seoul would be tantamount to "self-admitting the group abduction," it added. A brief statement from Seoul's Unification Ministry, which handles cross-border affairs, flatly rejected the suggested meeting, citing consideration for the defectors and international norms related to humanitarian affairs. Nearly 30,000 North Koreans have fled poverty and repression at home to settle in the capitalist South. But group defections are rare, especially by staff who work in the North Korea-themed restaurants overseas that are a key source of hard currency for the regime in Pyongyang. They are generally handpicked from families that are "loyal" to the regime and go through extensive ideological training before being sent abroad. Anyone caught fleeing the country can be subject to harsh punishment, as can the families of those who successfully defect. Story continues Relatives are often featured in state propaganda, either making tearful pleas for defectors to return home or berating them for betraying the motherland. The latest defections came at a time of elevated military tensions on the divided Korean peninsula following Pyongyang's nuclear test in January. North Korea is scheduled to hold a rare party congress in May -- aimed at showcasing the country's achievements and fostering a sense of national loyalty and pride. Ankara (AFP) - Russia has kept a considerable military presence in conflict-torn Syria to bolster the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday. "Despite the announced partial withdrawal we see that Russia maintains a considerable military presence in support of the Assad regime in Syria," he said at a press conference in Turkey. A month ago Russian President Vladimir Putin surprised the West by ordering the "main part" of his forces to pull out. Despite Moscow having signed on to efforts to promote a political settlement in Syria, US officials have complained that Russian warplanes appear to be flying in support of Syrian forces attacking rebel positions in Aleppo. Since the Kremlin said it was scaling down its air presence in the country, regime forces -- backed up crucially by Russian firepower -- have scored some of their most dramatic successes in areas not covered by a February ceasefire. The landmark partial ceasefire, which was negotiated by the US and Russia, had dramatically curtailed violence across much of Syria and raised hopes that a lasting deal could be struck to end the bloodshed. But a new round of fierce fighting last week around Aleppo overshadowed peace talks in Geneva aimed at ending the country's five-year civil war. Stoltenberg said the Syrian ceasefire "is under strain" but "remains the best basis for a negotiated peaceful solution to the crisis". By Byron Kaye SYDNEY (Reuters) - Nearly half Australian adults would support their country distancing itself from the United States if Donald Trump became U.S. president, a poll suggests, as the New York billionaire tightens his grip on the Republican nomination race. The telephone poll of 1,202 Australian adults found that 45 percent believed the country should distance itself from the U.S. "if it elects a president like Donald Trump", said researcher the Lowy Institute, which commissioned the research. Just 51 percent of Australians believed the country should remain close to the United States regardless of who became president in the Nov. 8 election, the lowest level of support in a generation. "By allying ourselves with the United States ... we contribute to global security as well as our own," said Lowy Institute executive director Michael Fullilove. "That nearly half of Australians would seek to move away from America in the event of a Trump victory says something quite disturbing about the GOP front runner." Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. have been formal allies since signing the ANZUS treaty to protect the Pacific in 1951, and have been allies in most conflicts of the past century. Australia currently has troops in the Middle East to fight Islamic State alongside the United States. The poll by the Lowy Institute, an independent policy think tank based in Sydney, was conducted between Feb. 26 and March 15. It did not offer any insight into how Australians would want to distance themselves from the United States, nor did it specify a Donald Trump presidency - merely "a person like Donald Trump" becoming president. But Australia's sentiment towards the United States under Trump is weaker than it was under President George W. Bush in 2007, several years into the unpopular Iraq war. In what was considered a dip, 63 percent of Australians regarded the country's alliance with the United States then as important to Australia's security, Lowy said. Just a year ago, 80 percent of Australians said the alliance with the United States was either "very" or "fairly" important, Lowy said. (Editing by Nick Macfie) Riyadh (AFP) - US President Barack Obama said Thursday that neither the United States nor Arab Gulf nations had an interest in conflict with Iran. "Even with the nuclear deal we recognise collectively that we continue to have serious concerns about Iranian behaviour", Obama said at the close of a summit in the Saudi capital with the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council. He referred to Iran's "destabilising activities" in the region but said: "None of our nations have an interest in conflict with Iran." Differences over relations with Iran are at the heart of tensions between Sunni Gulf nations and Washington. Gulf states are concerned about what they see as Obama's moves towards closer ties with their Shiite arch-rival, fearing that Tehran will be emboldened to seek a bigger regional role after the lifting of sanctions under its landmark nuclear deal with major powers led by the United States. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbours accuse Iran of widespread interference throughout the region, where they support opposite sides in conflicts in Yemen and Syria. At an event celebrating the 34th anniversary of Sinai Liberation Day, Egypt's defence minister Sedki Sobhi said that security forces have eradicated numerous terrorist hideouts in North Sinai, Al-Ahram Arabic newspaper reported. Sinai Liberation Day, which falls on Monday 25 April, commemorates the completion of the withdrawal of the Israeli army from the Sinai Peninsula in 1982 after 25 years of occupation. The withdrawal was in accordance with the peace treaty signed between Egypt and Israel in 1979. Sobhi saluted members of the Armed Forces at the event, which took place at the Galaa Army Theatre in Cairo, and extended his condolences to the families of those who lost their lives in the countrys fight against Islamist militants. "We are full of determination to eradicate the roots of this abhorrent terrorism, it is our sacred duty," says Sobhi. The event was attended by Egypt's parliament speaker Ali Abdel-Al, Prime Minister Sherif Ismail and a number of ministers and MPs. Egyptian security forces have been battling an Islamist insurgency in North Sinai, which spiked after the ouster of Islamist Mohamed Morsi in July 2013. Search Keywords: Short link: By Dasha Afanasieva and Tulay Karadeniz ANKARA (Reuters) - The number of migrants and refugees crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey into Europe is falling significantly but people smugglers can rapidly change routes and authorities must not reduce their security efforts prematurely, the head of NATO said on Thursday. Speaking in the Turkish capital, Ankara, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the migrant crisis showed the urgent need for a peaceful solution in Syria and said a fragile ceasefire there remained the best way forward. Turkey and the EU last month sealed an accord which aims to end the chaotic arrival of migrants and refugees, most fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, after more than a million reached Europe last year. NATO's naval back-up in the Aegean Sea, a major route for migrants crossing from Turkey to the Greek islands, has helped to stop people smugglers and reduced the flows. "Based on information NATO has provided, Turkey is taking action to break the business model of human traffickers. And figures from different international organizations confirm that numbers of migrants and refugees crossing the Aegean Sea is now going significantly down," Stoltenberg said. "It confirms that our collective efforts are making a difference. We need to remain flexible because the people smugglers can shift their routes very rapidly," he told a joint news conference with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu. New arrivals on the Greek islands from Turkey have dropped since the EU-Turkey deal came into effect in early April. Under the accord, migrants and refugees who cross the Aegean illegally are sent back to Turkey. But Stoltenberg warned migrants were still trying to cross and that the numbers could surge again if NATO and its partners were to wind down their efforts too early. He also said that a ceasefire in Syria, which is in danger of collapse, was the best option and criticized Russia's continued military support for President Bashar al-Assad. Intense fighting has left the partial truce in tatters and has brought peace talks, taking place under U.N. auspices in Geneva, to virtual collapse. "Despite the announced partial withdrawal, we see that Russia maintains a considerable military presence in support of the Assad regime in Syria," Stoltenberg said. "The Syrian ceasefire is under strain. But it remains the best basis for a negotiated peaceful solution to the crisis." (Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by David Dolan) London (AFP) - US President Barack Obama was set to wade into the poisonous Brexit debate on Friday and become Queen Elizabeth II's first lunch guest after turning 90. Obama flew into Britain late Thursday to begin what is his fifth and likely final presidential visit to the kingdom. The president, along with First Lady Michelle Obama, will pay tribute to the queen, who celebrated her 90th birthday on Thursday, when they meet at Windsor Castle, west of London. "The president has very much enjoyed his engagements with the queen over the years," said top Obama foreign policy aide Ben Rhodes. The queen has reigned since 1952, during which time she has met with a string of US presidents from Harry Truman to Obama, who leaves office in January. After lunch at Windsor Castle, Obama will travel to Prime Minister David Cameron's Downing Street office for talks that come ahead of a crunch British referendum on its European Union membership on June 23. Obama is sure to be asked to weigh in on the controversial issue during a joint press conference afterwards, or at a town hall-style meeting with youngsters on Saturday. Britain's departure from the EU -- a so-called Brexit -- could have deep ramifications for Washington's "special relationship" with London, and on the stability of the 28-country bloc itself. Obama has consistently said he favours a strong Britain in a strong EU. - Cameron stresses shared values - Seen from Washington, Cameron's decision to call a referendum was a bold -- if not downright risky -- gamble that could leave Britain and the EU badly weakened. "Obama is not an instinctive pro-European," said Ian Bond of the London-based Centre for European Reform think-tank. "He opposes Brexit because it risks creating more problems for America in Europe." Polls put the pro-EU and Brexit camps neck-and-neck among those who express a preference to vote. Obama's "focus is on how Brexit would affect Europe's ability to help America tackle international problems," said Bond. Story continues Britain has long been a key conduit for US influence in Europe. Downing Street insisted that close ties would endure and sought to underscore areas of continued cooperation by saying the talks would focus heavily on the fight against the Islamic State jihadist group. "Britain's relationship with the United States is special and enduring. Based on shared values and convictions it has stood the test of time," Cameron said. "I am deeply proud of what it has allowed us to achieve, in dealing with the global challenges we both face and ensuring the security and prosperity of our people." "I am confident that Britain and the US can continue to build on a solid basis of friendship and a shared commitment to freedom, democracy and enterprise to shape a better world for future generations." - Brexit intervention risk - Obama's seven years in office have seen the United States try to disentangle itself from wars in the Muslim world and pivot toward the growing economies of Asia. But sovereign debt crises, jihadist terror attacks and now Britain's potential exit from the EU have thrust Europe back onto Obama's agenda. However, for the US president, wading in is not without risk. Pro-Brexit supporters have issued calls for the US president to stay out of the European Union referendum debate and cast him as a meddling outsider. Nigel Farage, leader of the anti-EU UK Independence Party, said Obama should "butt out" while former cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith said he failed to see how an intervention by the US leader could be "appropriate". More than 100 members of Britain's parliament have reportedly written to the US ambassador in London to make their displeasure known. It could be a potent argument in a country that shares cultural affinities with the United States, but which is deeply wary of being treated as Washington's lapdog. During Obama's visit he and the first lady will also have dinner on Friday with Queen Elizabeth's grandson Prince William, his wife Kate and his brother Prince Harry. From Britain he will travel to Germany for a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other EU leaders. Riyadh (AFP) - President Barack Obama said Thursday the United States is united with Gulf Arab nations in fighting the Islamic State group and sought to reassure them about US overtures to regional rival Iran. In Riyadh for talks hosted by Iran's arch-foe Saudi Arabia, Obama said Washington still had "serious concerns" about Tehran, but insisted no country had an interest in conflict with the Shiite power. Obama, on likely his final presidential visit to America's historic Gulf allies, was in Riyadh seeking to reduce tensions with the Sunni Arab states. With the IS jihadists suffering a series of recent setbacks in Syria and Iraq, Washington is seeking more help from the oil-rich Gulf monarchies to keep up the pressure. Speaking at the close of the summit of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, Obama played down any divisions and vowed continued cooperation in the battle against the extremists. "We remain united in our fight to destroy (IS)," he said, adding the US "will continue to increase our security cooperation with our GCC partners". Saudi King Salman also spoke positively, stressing the GCC's commitment to developing ties with the US "in order to serve common interests and security and peace". - 'Destabilising activities' - Seated beside Salman inside a Riyadh royal palace, Obama said concerns remained about Iran's "destabilising activities" despite its landmark nuclear agreement with world powers and the lifting of sanctions. "Even with the nuclear deal we recognise collectively that we continue to have serious concerns about Iranian behaviour," Obama said. He warned, however, of the risk of confrontation with Tehran. "None of our nations have an interest in conflict with Iran," Obama said. Iran's emergence from international isolation following the nuclear deal has worried the Gulf monarchies, which fear Tehran will be emboldened to seek a still bigger regional role. Story continues Gulf Arab states and Iran back opposing sides in a range of Middle East conflicts, including in Syria and Yemen. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states belong to the US-led coalition that has been carrying out air strikes against IS in Syria and Iraq since mid-2014. But US officials have urged them do to more, especially to support Baghdad, which is battling political chaos and an economic crisis as well as the extremists. Ben Rhodes, a close adviser to Obama, said there were "political steps that can be taken," as Iraq would need assistance to hold on to and rebuild areas reclaimed from IS. Obama said a cessation of hostilities in Syria is "obviously under tremendous strain" as fighting has intensified in some areas despite efforts to hold peace talks in Geneva. Washington hopes that in both Syria and Yemen -- where a Saudi-led coalition launched air strikes against Iran-backed rebels in March last year -- an end to broader fighting can lead to a greater focus on the battle against IS and other jihadists. UN-backed peace negotiations between Yemen's warring sides started in Kuwait on Thursday, and Obama "urged all parties" to abide by a ceasefire that began on April 11. Jihadists -- including the powerful local branch of Al-Qaeda -- have exploited the Yemen conflict to strengthen their presence in the country's south. Both Defence Secretary Ashton Carter and US Secretary of State John Kerry joined Obama in Riyadh, holding meetings with top officials. - Strains 'overblown' - The diplomatic offensive followed months of rising tensions between the United States and the Gulf monarchies, which have for decades enjoyed strong security ties. Prince Turki al-Faisal, the kingdom's former intelligence chief, told CNN that Obama's conduct and declarations has made Saudi Arabia realise the relationship has changed. "My personal view is that America has changed," he said. The senior royal said the kingdom would have to "recalibrate" things such as "How far we can go with our dependence on America? How much can we rely on steadfastness from American leadership?" In highly unusual moves, Saudi state news channel Al-Ekhbaria did not broadcast either the start or the summit meeting or Obama's airport arrival on Wednesday. At a news conference after the summit, Obama said talk of strains "was always overblown", saying there were "tactical" differences on how to deal with Iran. Obama also told the summit that Washington and Gulf states would work together to lessen the impact of the dramatic fall in oil prices since early 2014. The United States and GCC "will launch a new high-level economic dialogue with a focus on adjusting to lower oil prices, increasing our economic ties and supporting GCC reforms", Obama said. Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, and its petroleum-rich neighbours have been forced to cut subsidies and adopt other measures to deal with deficits caused by plunging oil prices, which make up the bulk of their revenues. Washington (AFP) - US President Barack Obama mourned Prince as one of the most gifted artists of his time after the pop legend's sudden death Thursday. "Today the world lost a creative icon," Obama said in a statement, adding: "Few artists have influenced the sound and trajectory of popular music more distinctly, or touched quite so many people with their talent." "As one of the most gifted and prolific musicians of our time, Prince did it all. Funk. R&B. Rock and roll. He was a virtuoso instrumentalist, a brilliant bandleader, and an electrifying performer," he said. Obama last year invited Prince, along with Stevie Wonder, to perform a concert for friends at the White House, which generated a level of controversy as the event was listed as private. Prince was famously reclusive but has occasionally taken up politics, last year writing the song "Baltimore" in support of African-American victims of perceived police brutality. US President Barack Obama has said the Gulf Arab monarchies have agreed to "increase their contributions to the fight" against the Islamic State group. As he finished a summit in the Saudi capital with the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Mr Obama also said: "We remain united in our fight to destroy ISIL." Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and other Gulf countries joined the US-led bombing campaign against the jihadist militants, though American officials say their allies' involvement has tapered off. But many of the GCC members want more done to try to remove Syrian President Bashar al Assad from power. The Gulf Arab states were upset by Mr Obama's remarks in a recent magazine article that appeared to cast them as "free-riders" in US security efforts. In the same interview, he urged them to "share the neighbourhood" with their arch-enemy Tehran. "None of our nations have an interest in conflict with Iran," Mr Obama said on Thursday. But he also said the US would stay vigilant to Tehran's activities. He said Washington had "serious concerns" about Iran's "destabilising acts". The Gulf states, including Bahrain and Oman, have been sorely disappointed with Mr Obama's presidency, believing the US has drawn back from the region. They are also deeply sceptical of his willingness to negotiate with Iran, especially last year's nuclear deal with the Islamic republic. The US would ideally like the Gulf states to provide ground troops for the fight against IS. But Saudi Arabia has recently had its hands full attempting to drive out Shia rebels from Yemen to prop up its government. The GCC summit follows talks that Mr Obama held with Saudi King Salman on Wednesday shortly after arriving in the kingdom. Besides Saudi Arabia, the GCC includes the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain. It is likely to have been Mr Obama's final visit to Saudi Arabia as president. He is now heading on to Britain and Germany . Breaking a campaign promise, President Obama wont use the term genocide on Armenian Remembrance Day. (Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP) For the eighth and final time, President Obama this year will break his unambiguous 2008 campaign promise to declare that the mass killings of Armenians at the hands of Ottoman Turks in 1915 and 1916 amounted to genocide, a leading Armenian-American activist told Yahoo News on Thursday. According to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, at least 664,000 and perhaps as many as 1.2 million Armenians died in massacres, in individual killings, or as a consequence of systematic ill-treatment, exposure, starvation and disease. But officially designating the Ottoman Turks actions as genocide would have deeply angered Turkey, a NATO ally and a pivotal player in the coalition Obama has assembled to wage war on the Islamic State in neighboring Syria. Turkish governments have sharply disputed the figures of Armenian dead and categorically rejected the genocide label. Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America, told Yahoo News shortly after a briefing from Obama aides at the White House that the president would once again stop short of using the term genocide in his annual statement about the tragedy. We took from todays meeting at the White House that the president will end his tenure in office as he began it, caving in to Turkish pressure and betraying his own promise to properly recognize the Armenian genocide, Hamparian said by telephone. Hamparian told Yahoo that Obamas annual statement, usually issued on April 24, was not finished yet but that the officials were very clear that it would not deviate from past years in which he has shunned the term genocide. White House officials declined to comment. Hamparian said this years decision carried a special sting because the Obama administration recently applied the genocide label to atrocities carried out by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. Story continues Theres absolutely no excuse to withhold the same designation in the Armenian case, he said. As a senator, Obama supported but did not co-sponsor a 2007 resolution calling for the use of the term genocide when discussing the Armenian tragedy. (Hillary Clinton, then a senator, co-sponsored the measure. As secretary of state, however, she did not use the term. Aides to her presidential campaign did not return emails seeking her current position.) And when he was running for the presidency in 2008, Obama could hardly have been clearer. My firmly held conviction [is] that the Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence, he said in a statement. As president I will recognize the Armenian genocide. Once in office, however, Obamas grip on that conviction apparently loosened, and he joined other presidents like George W. Bush in saying one thing during the campaign and another from the Oval Office. In 2015, the 100th anniversary of the tragic events, Obamas statement referred to Meds Yeghern, Armenian for the great calamity. He also included a reference to Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term genocide during World War II. Pope Francis referred to the same events as the first genocide of the 20th century. In 1981, then president Ronald Reagan referred to the genocide of the Armenians. Forty-three U.S. states have recognized the Armenian genocide. Twenty-four countries and the European Parliament have done so as well. By David Ingram and David Bailey (Reuters) - The lead criminal charge brought on Wednesday against two Michigan state officials in connection with the tainted water supply in Flint, Michigan, could be difficult to prove, lawyers familiar with the state's criminal law said. The charge against state Department of Environmental Quality water supervisor Stephen Busch and water engineer Michael Prysby alleging "misconduct in office" might also be difficult to deploy against higher-level officials without day-to-day responsibilities relating to the city's water, the lawyers said. The lawyers interviewed said that to prove official misconduct, the prosecutor would have to show that someone acted with intent either by failing to perform a duty or acting in a way that violated a duty to get a conviction. "It has to be more than really screwing up your job or making a negligent mistake in your job," James Brady, a former federal prosecutor now at the law firm Dykema Gossett in Grand Rapids told Reuters. Official misconduct is a felony carrying a penalty of up to five years in prison. It has been used before in Michigan against police officers accused of excessive force as well as legislators and public officials including former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice. Other charges also were lodged against Busch and Prysby, who have pleaded not guilty. A third official, Flint water quality supervisor Michael Glasgow, was charged with tampering with evidence and willful neglect of duty. It was not immediately clear when he would enter a plea. In announcing the criminal charges, state Attorney General Bill Schuette, a Republican, vowed that no one was above the law and said more charges were to come. Embattled Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, a Republican, has been the focus of public outcry over the Flint water crisis. Though he has apologized publicly for the contamination, which resulted from a decision to switch the source of the city's water, Snyder told a news conference on Wednesday he did not believe he was himself criminally liable. "A handful of bureaucrats created a terrible situation in Flint," he said. But the governor also highlighted the challenge at the heart of the official misconduct charges. "Was it actually criminal, or was it just poor decision-making?" Snyder asked at the news conference. Busch and Prysby violated the anti-misconduct law when they willfully and knowingly misled other regulators in violation of their "duty to provide clean and safe drinking water" and to protect public health, the state attorney general's office said. Prysby further violated the same law when he authorized a permit to the Flint water treatment plant despite knowing the plant was deficient, the office said. Demonstrating intent is not often clear-cut, the lawyers said. "This is an amorphous offense, which makes it a challenge for both sides, both for prosecutors and the defense," said Peter Henning, a law professor at Wayne State University in Michigan and a former federal prosecutor. Theoretically, the lawyers said Schuette or the special prosecutor could go after higher-level officials including Snyder for "misconduct in office" during Flint's lead crisis but they said it would be a challenge for prosecutors the more removed the official was from day-to-day decisions. The charges against Busch and Prysby are closely related to their duties with the DEQ. "Where it becomes difficult is if it is not clear what that person's obligations were," Henning said. Kilpatrick, who resigned as Detroit mayor in 2008, was one senior official in Michigan who faced a misconduct charge. He subsequently pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, admitting to lying under oath, in a deal with county prosecutors. He was later convicted on separate federal charges and is currently serving a 28-year sentence. Some other U.S. states have similar laws barring official misconduct. Last year, a same-sex couple in Kentucky accused Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis of official misconduct after Davis refused to issue marriage licenses despite a court order; Kentucky's attorney general opted not to prosecute. (Reporting by David Bailey in Minneapolis; Additional reporting by Ben Klayman in Detroit; Writing by David Ingram in New York; Editing by Anthony Lin, Noeleen Walder and Diane Craft) The visit is expected to include talks on strengthening bilateral relations and international issues of mutual interest Abu Dhabi's Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan arrived in Cairo on Thursday for a short visit to meet Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, state owned MENA agency reported. The prince, who arrived from the Saudi capital Riyadh following his participation in the US-Gulf Summit, was received by the president at Cairo International Airport. The visit is expected to include talks on strengthening bilateral relations and international issues of mutual interest. Egypt and the UAE have been conducting a joint military drill in the Gulf country's waters aimed at boosting military cooperation between the two Arab states, with the latest exercise starting last week. The UAE has emerged as one of Egypt's main backers following the 2013 ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, providing Cairo with billions of dollars in aid. Search Keywords: Short link: * Torch lit in ancient Olympia * Rio to receive flame in April 27 handover (Adds IOC President Bach quotes) By Karolos Grohmann and Karolina Tagaris ANCIENT OLYMPIA, Greece, April 21 (Reuters) - The official countdown to this year's Rio de Janeiro Olympics began with the lighting of the torch at the site of the ancient Games on Thursday and organisers hoping to shift attention away from Brazil's political and financial turmoil. On a glorious spring day with the sun burning hot above the ancient stadium in Olympia, an actress playing a high priestess lit the torch from the rays of the sun at the temple of Hera, using a parabolic mirror. Greek gymnastics world champion Lefteris Petrounias started the domestic relay after receiving the flame, handing the torch over to Brazilian double Olympic volleyball champion Giovane Gavio. A refugee will also carry the torch during the Greek leg of the relay in a symbolic move to highlight the plight of refugees before Brazilian organisers receive it in a handover at the Panathenian stadium on April 27 in Athens, site of the first modern Olympics in 1896. Brazil will start its relay on May 3 in the capital Brasilia with the first of 12,000 runners, carrying it through 300 cities and towns in the 26 Brazilian states and ending in Rio on the day of the opening ceremony on Aug. 5. Preparations, however, for the first Games in South America, have been plagued by problems and a shortage of cash for organisers as the country is experiencing its worst recession in decades. "(The torch lighting) brings a message that can and will unite our dear Brazil," Rio Games chief Carlos Nuzman said in his speech. Brazil President Dilma Rousseff, who cancelled her trip to ancient Olympia, is facing impeachment and federal prosecutors are investigating Olympic projects for corruption. Asked if organisers were concerned about a possible change of government, Nuzman told Reuters: I'm not a politician and I don't know. We know what we need to do, and we'll do (it)." CORRUPTION SCANDAL The crisis has paralysed the country's ability to revive its economy from recession in the midst of a huge corruption scandal involving state-run oil firm Petrobras. "Despite the difficulties that Brazil is facing today, the flame is a timeless reminder that we are all part of the same humanity," International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach said in his speech. "We are now in the operation phase and we see the great progress the organising committee has made in the last year. 98 percent of all infrastructure is ready," Bach told reporters later. "You see us very confident in general and on a day like this you see us more confident and more emotional about these Games for Brazil." Brazil's interim sports minister, Ricardo Goncalves, echoed Bach's confidence, telling Reuters authorities were very happy because Brazil is ready. "The Olympic Park, the venues are ready. Everything was done, so no impact," he said. Thursday's ceremony marked the 80-year anniversary since the relay, which did not exist in the ancient Greek Olympics, was introduced by the Nazi organisers of the 1936 Berlin Games. "Brazil will start telling the world a different story from the one we usually see in the news lately," 2016 Olympics Ceremonies producer Marco Balich told Reuters. "The story about the celebration of humanity and the joy of life." (Editing by Ed Osmond) United Nations (United States) (AFP) - The Palestinian foreign minister said Thursday that a push for a UN resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlement expansion will be put on hold to focus instead on a French proposal for a peace conference. The draft resolution was circulated to Arab countries and to some members of the Security Council earlier this month as part of a drive for UN action in support of the two-state solution. Palestinian foreign minister Riyad al-Maliki said the draft would be shelved to focus instead on the French initiative, which provides for a first ministerial meeting in Paris on May 30. "We have agreed that our move at the Security Council should not jeopardize in any way the French initiative," Maliki told reporters in New York following talks between president Mahmud Abbas and Chinese Ambassador Liu Jieyi, who chairs the council this month. "We should really sail smoothly in a way that the French initiative will continue," he said, adding that the Palestinians would decide on formally presenting the draft text at a later time. Diplomats said that France, Egypt and Saudi Arabia had discouraged the Palestinians from moving ahead with the proposed measure that would have put pressure on the United States to resort to a veto. The Security Council failed in 2011 to adopt a draft resolution condemning Israeli settlements after the United States vetoed it. Earlier this month, Abbas said there was an "urgent" need for a UN resolution on Israeli settlements to salvage the two-state solution in which Israel and Palestine would be both recognized. French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said in Paris that the May meeting will prepare an international summit to be held in the second half of 2016, which would include the Israeli and Palestinian leaders. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process has been frozen since a US-led initiative collapsed in April 2014. Brussels (AFP) - Key Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam was charged Thursday with attempted murder over a deadly shootout with police in Brussels a week before the suicide bombings in the Belgian capital, his lawyer and prosecutors said. An Algerian Islamist suspect was killed and four police officers were wounded in the March 15 shooutout, which led to Abdeslam's arrest three days later after a massive European manhunt. "He has been charged with attempted murder either alone or jointly" over the gunbattle at an apartment in the southern Forest district of Brussels, lawyer Sven Mary told AFP. Belgian prosecutors later confirmed the charges against Abdeslam, 26, who is currently awaiting extradition to France. "Salah Abdeslam has been charged today with attempted murder in the case opened after the gunbattle in Forest during which several police officers were injured," the federal prosecutor's office said in a statement. "The judge did not make an order for his arrest given that he is already in detention over the attacks in Paris." Abdeslam, a French national of Moroccan origin who grew up in Belgium, is due to be transferred to France in coming days over the November 13 Paris attacks, in which he is believed to be the last surviving member of the terror squad that killed 130 people. But Belgian police have also tried to question him over his links to the three suicide bombers who struck Brussels airport and metro on March 22, killing 32 people and injuring hundreds. The Islamic State group has claimed both attacks. - Extradition next week? - The Forest shootout began after a joint raid by Belgian and French police on an apartment that had been rented under a false name by Khalid El Bakraoui, who one week later would carry out the suicide attack at Maalbeek metro station. Mohamed Belkaid, an Algerian terror suspect who had been pictured in a car with Abdeslam on the Hungarian border in mid-2015, was shot dead by a police sniper after apparently opening fire on police. Story continues Four police officers -- three Belgian and a Frenchwoman -- were wounded. Based on evidence from the Forest raid including Abdeslam's fingerprints found at the scene, Belgian authorities were able to track down Abdeslam to a property about a block away from his family home in Molenbeek. Asked if Abdeslam admitted being present at the Forest shootout, Mary said: "We won't discuss that, I won't comment." Abdeslam will appear before a Belgian court again on April 28 and his extradition to France will come "perhaps two days after his court appearance," Mary added. Separately a judge remanded in custody for one month Abid Aberkan, who was arrested on March 18 for sheltering Salah Abdeslam in Molenbeek and charged with "participating in a terrorist group" and hiding a fugitive. Abdeslam and alleged Paris accomplice Mohamed Abrini, who has also charged over the Brussels attacks, were moved to different jails in Belgium last week. Abrini, 31, has confessed to being "the man in the hat" caught on video with suicide bombers Ibrahim El Bakraoui -- Khalid's brother -- and Najim Laachraoui -- the alleged bombmaker for the Paris attacks -- at Brussels airport. IS said last week that the Bakraoui brothers, formerly known as small-time local criminals, obtained the weapons and explosives for both the Paris and Brussels attacks. Abrini was meanwhile also linked to the November Paris massacre after being caught on video at a motorway gas station with Abdeslam en route to the French capital. Paris (AFP) - France will host a meeting of ministers from 20 countries on May 30 to try and relaunch the Israel-Palestinian peace process, Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault announced on Thursday. But in an interview with four newspapers, including Israel's Haaretz and pan-Arab daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi, the minister said Israel and the Palestinians would not be invited to the Paris meeting. Ayrault said the aim was to prepare an international summit in the second half of 2016, which would include the Israeli and Palestinian leaders. "The two sides are further apart than ever," he admitted. But he said: "There is no other solution to the conflict than establishing two states, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, living side by side in peace and safety with Jerusalem as a shared capital. "We cannot do nothing," Ayrault told the newspapers, which also included France's Liberation and the Wall Street Journal. "We have to act before it's too late." He said the discussions would be based on the 2002 Saudi peace initiative, which was largely ignored by Israel. Drawn by oil kingpin Saudi Arabia, the Arab Peace Initiative called on Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territory occupied in 1967, including east Jerusalem, in exchange for a normalisation of ties with Arab countries. It also outlined the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and envisaged a "just solution" of the refugee issue. "In Israel, the government is more and more ambiguous on the issue of a two-state solution and the Palestinians are more and more divided," he said. "We have to explain to the Israelis that settlement activity is a dangerous process and that it puts their own security in danger." The initiative was announced in February by Ayrault's predecessor Laurent Fabius. "I am not naive, I am perfectly sincere," he said. "There is no alternative -- the other option is fatalism and I reject that." Story continues A former French ambassador to Washington, Pierre Vimont, has been given the job of preparing the meetings. US Secretary of State John Kerry gave the French proposal a guarded welcome when he visited Paris in March. Kerry brokered a previous round of Israel-Palestinian peace talks that collapsed in April 2014. "Not any one country or one person can resolve this. This is going to require the global community, it will require international support," Kerry said. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An armored U.S. military brigade permanently stationed in Europe would be more effective at deterring Russian aggression in the region than the current rotational presence, the Army general nominated to lead U.S. forces in Europe said on Thursday. General Curtis Scaparrotti, President Barack Obama's choice to lead U.S. European Command and become the next NATO supreme allied commander, said he agreed with other military leaders that Russia posed the greatest threat to the United States and Washington should be firm in asserting its rights. "From a military perspective, we should sail and fly wherever we are allowed to by international law, and we should be strong, clear and consistent in our message in that regard," Scaparrotti told his nomination hearing when asked about a recent incident in which Russian jets buzzed a U.S. warship. Scaparrotti told the Senate Armed Services Committee he thought Washington should supply Ukraine with the arms it needs to defend itself against Russian-backed forces, including an anti-tank missile like the Javelin. He also said he was "concerned" about the threat Russian submarines pose to U.S. shipping routes. Scaparrotti and Air Force General Lori Robinson, Obama's nominee to become the next leader of U.S. Northern Command, both identified Russia as the top U.S. military threat. Scaparrotti told lawmakers a resurgent Russia was displaying "increasingly aggressive behavior that challenges the international norms, often in violation of international law." Asked about U.S. forces in Europe, he said a permanent U.S. armored brigade would be better at deterring Russia than the current rotational presence. The United States began reducing its presence in the region several years ago due to big cuts in defense spending, replacing permanent units with rotations of troops that traveled to Europe for training. But Russia's seizure of Ukraine's Crimean peninsula led the U.S. military to increase its presence again. In March, it said it would deploy rotations of U.S.-based armored brigade combat teams to Europe. A typical U.S. Army armored brigade has about 4,500 soldiers. The teams would be on nine-month rotations starting in February 2017, and would conduct military exercises across Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Scaparrotti told lawmakers a permanent presence would be better. "A permanent brigade ... establishes relationships with the supporting elements of all forces from the United States as well as a more permanent relationship ... with all of our allies," he said. It "gives you a little more substance, a little more strength in relationship building." (Reporting by Idrees Ali and David Alexander; Editing by James Dalgleish) PARIS (Reuters) - PSA Peugeot Citroen was raided by anti-fraud investigators on Thursday as part of ongoing investigations on pollutants in the automobile sector, the French carmaker said in a statement. "PSA Group confirms compliance of its vehicles in pollutant emissions in all countries where it operates. Confident in its technologies, PSA Group is fully cooperating with the authorities," the statement said. The raid was undertaken by France's General Directorate for Competition Policy, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF), the statement said. A company official later said the raid was continuing at four research and development centers, with offices sealed off and disc drives and computers seized. In January this year, shares in rival French carmaker Renault fell sharply on news that it had been raided by the same regulator in an echo of the emissions test cheating scandal that has engulfed German rival Volkswagen. Volkswagen last year admitted to using software to conceal the level of toxic emissions from some of its diesel vehicles in the United States. The German carmaker and the U.S. Justice Department have reached a deal in principle to address excess diesel emissions in nearly 600,000 polluting vehicles that will include buyback offers and a possible fix. The case has prompted investigations across several countries into Volkswagen, as well as checks on other car manufacturers and a tightening of emissions regulations which some industry analysts think could hit the entire diesel vehicle industry - a key market for Peugeot and Renault. (Reporting by Ingrid Melander and Gilles Guillaume; Editing by Andrew Callus) The ministry warns it could take legal action against those who spread 'false rumors' after a news agency publishes report based on testimony of anonymous police officials Egypt's ministry of interior slammed a report by a news agency which claimed that anonymous sources told the agency slain Italian student Guilio Regeni was seen in the custody of authorities on the night he disappeared. In an official statement released on Thursday evening, an interior ministry media spokesperson said that reports published by one news agency that police or any other sovereign authorities stopped the Italian student and transferred him to a police facility were unfounded. Earlier on Thursday, Reuters reported that several police and intelligence sources, who spoke to the agency on condition of anonymity, said that 28 PhD student Regeni had been detained by police on the 25 January in a police station near Ramsis Square in Cairo and held for thirty minutes before authorities transferred him to the headquarters of the Ministry of Interior in Downtown Cairo. The ministry said it reserves its right to take all legal measures against those who "promote such rumors and false news". Regeni vanished from the streets of Cairo in the evening hours of 25 January, and his dead body was discovered in a ditch on the outskirts of the city nine days later, showing signs of extensive torture. Egypt has repeatedly denied accusations by some critics locally and internationally that its authorities were involved in the killing of Regeni. The Egyptian authorities have been conducting an investigation into the murder of the Italian student, but have been unable so far to identify the perpetrators. Earlier this month, an Egyptian security delegation visited Rome to share its up-to-date findings in the case with their Italian counterparts. The inability of the Egyptian authorities to apprehend those who killed Regeni has strained relations between Cairo and Rome, who enjoy strong political and economic ties. Italian police and government officials have urged Cairo to do more to make available to Rome information they believe would help in resolving the case. Search Keywords: Short link: On April 18, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in one of the most important cases of the current Supreme Court term: United States v. Texas, in which Texas and 25 other states are challenging the legality of President Obamas deferred deportation programs for some U.S. residents living in the country illegally. Joining We the People to discuss the statutory and constitutional issues in the case, and to review oral arguments, are two experts in the field. Josh Blackman is an Associate Professor of Law at the South Texas College of Law. Cristina Rodriguez is the Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law at Yale Law School. In February, Blackman and Rodriguez were joined by Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz of Georgetown University and Adam Cox of New York University for a program at the Center on this important case. Watch on constitutioncenter.org, or listen on Live at Americas Town Hall. Download this episode (right click and save) This show was engineered by Kevin Kilbourne and produced by Nicandro Iannacci. Research was provided by Josh Waimberg, Lana Ulrich and Danieli Evans. The host of We the People is Jeffrey Rosen. Get the latest constitutional news, and continue the conversation, on our Facebook page and Twitter feed. We want to know what you think of the podcast! Email us at editor@constitutioncenter.org. Please subscribe to We the People on iTunes. While youre in the iTunes Store, leave us a rating and reviewit helps other people discover what we do. Please also subscribe to Live at Americas Town Hall, featuring conversations and debates presented at the Center, across from Independence Hall in beautiful Philadelphia. We the People is a member of Slates Panoply network. Check out all of our sibling podcasts at iTunes.com/Panoply. Despite our congressional charter, the National Constitution Center is a private nonprofitwe receive little government support, and we rely on the generosity of people around the country who are inspired by our nonpartisan mission of constitutional debate and education. Please consider becoming a member to support our work, including this podcast. Visit constitutioncenter.org to learn more. Story continues Recent Stories on Constitution Daily Have some of the courts power been shifted to Congress? Official: Tubman replaces Jackson, Hamilton remains on currency Podcast: The future of free speech at the Supreme Court Los Angeles (AFP) - Emergency personnel tried and failed to revive music legend Prince, who died Thursday at age 57, after finding him slumped unresponsive in an elevator at his Paisley Park studios in Minnesota, the local sheriff said. "First responders attempted to provide lifesaving CPR, but were unable to revive the victim. He was pronounced deceased at 10:07 am," the Carver County Sheriff's Office said in a statement, saying it was investigating. Editors note: We published this tribute to Prince a couple of years ago. Today, we cant believe hes gone. Good night sweet Prince, and thank you. Well be dancing tonight. Early on, around the time Prince released Dirty Mind and Controversy in 1980 and 1981, I swore allegiance to his Purple Majesty. So did all my friends. He was crazy-talented, a modern Mozart, a one-man band serving up the funk. And, lets just say it: He was cute. Want proof? Check out a touring photo exhibit of a very young Prince. With these early albums, Prince established his freaky bona fides: He permed his fro and sported eyeliner, thongs and garter belts while singing enthusiastically about all kinds of kinky sex. Somehow, he made it all look masculine; soon, straight boys around the country were ringing their eyes in kohl, too. (Most skipped the garter belts.) Further adding to his allure, Prince shrouded himself in mystery, rarely doing interviews and making cryptic references to his background: Am I black or white? / Am I straight or gay? Way ahead of the curve, he created a multiculti, gender-bending world where black girls sounded like white girls and white girls sounded like black girls, and when it came to partying, everybody was invited: White, black, Puerto Rican / Everybody just a freakin. Prince tapped into the angst of a subgeneration, those of us sandwiched between the real boomers and Gen Xers. So by 1982, when Prince released 1999, his fifth studio album, we were primed for what would become the definitive rock/R&B/funk/New Wave/erotic album of the decade. 1999 catapulted Prince into the mainstream, reaching multiplatinum status in record sales, and establishing him as a pop icon, becoming one of the first black artists to get regular airplay on MTV. Theres a reason for this: With 1999, Prince tapped into the angst of a subgeneration, those of us sandwiched between the real boomers and Gen Xers. We were integration babies coming of age with Ronald Reagan as president; the early 80s were a time of disaffection. By the time we hit college, the economy was in the toilet, disco was dead and Gordon Gekko-esque yuppies ruled. As kids, we watched the real boomers protest, tune in and drop out, but by the time we hit our teens, we werent sure what we were supposed to be protesting. We were left with the drugs and not much else, truly rebels without a cause. Story continues With 1999, his first double album, Prince became the voice for all that defiance looking for a target and he set it to a booty-shaking beat. Back then, the year 2000 sounded like another world or rather, the end of it. We grew up with the specter of nuclear war hanging over our heads, when it really felt like it could all end at any minute with the push of a button. Album cover in purple with words PRINCE 1999 in illustrative form Prince hit puberty after the sexual revolution and like the rest of us, he was still trying to figure out what it all meant. Prince got that. Our worries were his worries. The title song, brooding and fretful, explored fears about an impending apocalypse. It opened with a robotic voice intoning, Dont worry; I wont hurt you / I only want you to have some fun, before bursting into a pounding, New Wave-y dance anthem. His solution to the bad news on the telly? D.M.S.R., or Dance, Music, Sex, Romance, a full on embrace of nihilism. Prince, born in the late 50s, hit puberty after the sexual revolution and the advent of the pill and like the rest of us, he was still trying to figure out what it all meant. You hear that confusion in the lyrics to the rollicking Lets Pretend Were Married, where the protagonist cant decide if he wants matrimony or a really raunchy one-night stand. 1999 was on constant rotation in many a Walkman. We didnt just dance to it, though dance we did. We parsed his clever lyrics for hidden meanings. Was Little Red Corvette about a car or some wayward woman? Whats up with the screams at the end of Lady Cab Driver? For all the f*** it, lets f*** philosophizing, when listening to 1999, you never got the feeling all that sex helped Prince resolve his fears of an impending 21st-century Armageddon. His God, the creator of man, is an ever-present force, watching and taking notes. Woman on left, Prince in center and male actor on far right sitting on a bench Guest appearance of Prince in an episode of New Girl Today, Prince is a lot less mysterious, seemingly a lot more comfortable playing front and center. Hes still cranking out albums at a prodigious clip. But now hes ditched the perm for another fro and appeared in the post-Super Bowl episode of New Girl alongside Zooey Deschanel (what was that about?). In Sochi, U.S. Olympic skater Jason Brown, 19, skated to The Purple Ones The Question of U while sporting a blinged-out Prince symbol on his back. Thirty-two years later, Prince is still inspiring generations of rebels with/without a cause. Related Articles TAIPEI (Reuters) - A Taiwan artist has refused to see the big picture and instead captured the likeness of president-elect Tsai Ing-wen, to celebrate her inauguration next month, on a single grain of rice. Chen Forng-Shean, who has also sculpted the face of China's late Chairman Mao Zedong on rice, said the staple was a fitting medium for his work because it met the basic needs of ethnic Chinese. "Rice gives nourishment to the proverbial belly of the ethnic Chinese people. I used rice (as a medium) to encourage Taiwan's leader, Tsai Ing-wen, hoping that she can take care of the common people, so they don't need to endure hunger, and improve their financial situation," he said. He outlined the facial features and accompanying Chinese characters with a needle-point pen on to the surface before carving and then dabbing black paint into the grooves. It took three months and more than 10 tries to get the sculpture to Chen's satisfaction. Visitors to his cluttered workshop near the capital Taipei can view more than 150 of his works using a magnifying glass. Chen reminded Tsai, who takes office on May 20, that she pledged in her acceptance speech in January to work for the people of Taiwan. "'(Be) modest, modest and even more modest.' I wrote this sentence of hers on to this grain of rice." (Reporting by Fabian Hamacher; Editing by J.R. Wu and Nick Macfie) (Reuters) - A civil rights group said on Thursday it has launched an investigation into the arrests of several Tennessee school children aged six to 11 in connection with an off-campus fight. The non-profit Southern Poverty Law Center said on Twitter it was investigating the arrest and handcuffing of the children at Hobgood Elementary School in Murfreesboro, Tennessee on Friday, for failing to stop the fight involving other children. Murfreesboro is about 35 miles southeast of Nashville. The Tennesseean newspaper said the arrests happened after police saw a video of the incident, in which students are accused of standing by and watching the fight instead of breaking it up. The Murfreesboro Police Department on Thursday confirmed the arrests, but declined to provide details, citing state law that prohibits revealing the specifics of juvenile arrests. The Tennesseean reported that 10 students from the elementary school were arrested and charged with criminal responsibility for the conduct of another. The newspaper said at least 5 of the 10 students involved were black. It was not possible to contact the families of the children involved as they have not been identified. The arrests gained national attention and sparked criticism of the police, who met with community residents on Sunday. The police in a Tuesday statement acknowledged the concern of residents and promised to conduct an internal review of the incident. "The department is committed to assuring that its officers consistently use good judgment and act in accordance with policy. If we need to make changes or address issues internally we will identify any issue and act accordingly," Police Chief Karl Durr said in the statement. Durr also said he would meet with a coalition of Murfreesboro pastors to review recommendations after that internal review. The Southern Poverty Law Center's legal director, Rhonda Brownstein, in a Wednesday statement called the arrests "appalling." Story continues "This appears to be yet another example of the over-policing of school children," she said. "It is simply not OK to arrest and handcuff such young children." Tennessee lawmakers this week called for an investigation of the arrests. A spokesman for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said they have not received a request to investigate from the local district attorney general, which would lead the bureau to look into the matter. (Reporting by Suzannah Gonzales, Editing by Ben Klayman and Andrew Hay) Related Australia trying to find TV crew detained in Lebanon An Australian television crew accused of aiding a mother in the botched kidnapping of her two children in Lebanon flew home Thursday amid reports of a multi-million dollar deal struck with the father to drop abduction charges. Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner and the Channel Nine team were arrested and charged last week after Faulkner's son and daughter were snatched in broad daylight on a Beirut street. But they were released on bail Wednesday after the father, Ali al-Amin, decided not to pursue the charges in court. Faulkner's lawyer Ghassan Mughabghab said a deal had been struck granting Amin full custody of the children in line with Lebanese law. The commercial Nine network did not mention any deal they were reportedly behind, but announced a full inquiry into the bizarre episode. The Australian newspaper said "a multi-million dollar deal was struck to drop abduction charges". "Nine pays dad to win freedom for crew and mum," Sydney's Daily Telegraph headlined, adding that "a massive sum of cash" had been paid in compensation. The Sydney Morning Herald said it had cost several hundred thousand dollars, but that an exact figure could not be confirmed. The crew and Faulkner still face potential charges by Lebanon's public prosecutor, but they can be sentenced in absentia. Amin's lawyer Hussein Berjawi told AFP he has not dropped charges against two Britons and two Lebanese allegedly involved in the abduction through a child recovery agency. Faulkner however remains in Beirut for a custody hearing with her estranged husband. Bailed star reporter Tara Brown led her producer, cameramen and sound recordist on to the earliest flight out of Beirut after their release from custody. The Nine team were due to arrive in Sydney Thursday night. It was a disastrous end to the news story they had planned. "They intended to get away in a boat captained by a member of a private child recovery agency," a Lebanese security source said. The crew were arrested April 7, a day after her children were grabbed. Video shows them walking with an elderly person said to be their grandmother before several figures jump out of a car, shove the adult aside and carry the children off in the vehicle. Police later found Faulkner with the children, reportedly a six-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy, at a home in Beirut. They were handed back to their father through the courts. Faulkner accused him of taking them for a holiday to Beirut and then refusing to return them to Australia. The channel's handling of the coverage has proved controversial in Australia and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull issued a warning. "We are very pleased they (the television crew) are on their way home," he said, "and we want to thank the Lebanese authorities for their cooperation". But he added: "All Australians, regardless of what they do or who they work for, should recognise that when they are outside of Australia, they must obey the laws of the country in which they are visiting." Nine Network chief executive Hugh Marks pledged to "ascertain what went wrong and why our systems, designed to protect staff, failed to do so in this case". "What has happened to Sally happens all too often and affects thousands of Australian families," he said. "It is a story that not only is profoundly in the public interest but also one the public is interested in." Search Keywords: Short link: ANCIENT OLYMPIA (Greece) (AFP) - The Olympic flame was lit Thursday in an ancient temple in one country in crisis and solemnly sent off carrying international hopes that Brazil's political paralysis will not taint the Rio Games that start in barely 100 days. As the flame was kindled in the 2,600-year-old Temple of Hera at Ancient Olympia, International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach and Rio organisers sought to rally support. Bach said the Rio Games will be held "in a world shaken by crises" but hailed preparations for the first Olympics in South America. "Brazilian people will enthusiastically welcome the world and amaze us with their joy of life and their passion for sport," he predicted. "Despite the difficulties that Brazil is facing today, the flame is a timeless reminder that we are all part of the same humanity," Bach said. Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff cancelled her attendance as she battles threatened impeachment proceedings. In her place, Rio 2016 organising committee chairman, Carlos Nuzman, said the flame "brings a message that can and will unite, our dear Brazil." "Brazil is ready," Brazil's acting sports minister Ricardo Leyser told reporters after the ceremony. Setting off from a country at the forefront of Europe's migrant crisis, the flame will tour Greece and then go to scores of Brazilian cities arriving at Rio's Maracana Stadium for the August 5 opening ceremony. After giving thanks to the ancient Greek sun god Apollo, high priestess Katerina Lechou, a prominent Greek actress, handed the flame to the first relay runner, Greece's gymnastics world champion Lefteris Petrounias. - Refugee torch-bearer - Petrounias passed it to Brazilian volleyball legend Giovane Gavio, an Olympic champion at the 1992 Barcelona and 2004 Athens Games. Overall, some 12,000 torchbearers will carry the flame through Brazil. In a gesture to the migration crisis, a Syrian man who lost a leg in his country's civil war will carry the torch through the Eleonas refugee camp in Athens next Tuesday. Story continues The man, whose is to be named Friday, has been living and working in Athens since being granted asylum in Greece. The Olympic torch will be handed over to Brazilian officials on Wednesday in a ceremony at the historic all-marble Olympic stadium in Athens, site of the first modern Games in 1896. The torch harks back to the ancient Olympics, when a sacred flame burned throughout the Games. The tradition was revived in 1936 for the Berlin Games. Brazil's preparations have been overshadowed by the government crisis caused by accusations that Rousseff juggled government accounts to disguise budget shortfalls during her 2014 reelection. The beleaguered president insisted this week that Rio's preparations are ahead of schedule. "The Games are in a totally adequate situation, we're even a little ahead of schedule and more so than we had planned for," Rousseff said Tuesday. - 'Big party' will banish problems - "(In terms) of the organisation of the Games everything was done...I don't think it's really a problem for the Games," said Leyser. He said that in true Brazilian tradition, there will be a "big party" and "people (will) forget the other problems." Bach on Wednesday said he was confident that Rio would lay on an "excellent Games". "Ninety-eight percent of all infrastructure is ready, the test events are going successfully...we are just full of anticipation to come to Brazil," he told reporters on Thursday. The IOC and Rio organisers have played down crime concerns and fears over the quality of water in Rio bay to be used for yachting and some swimming. "We are very confident that the competition area will offer safe and fair conditions," Bach said this week. There have also been travel warnings and athlete cancellations over the Zika virus that is believed to potentially cause serious birth defects if contracted by pregnant women. Greek Olympic Committee chairman Spyros Kapralos said Brazil would pull through, much like Athens overcame chronic delays before it hosted the 2004 Games. "I think like we had in Athens, the same will happen in Rio, everything will come together and we will experience a fantastic Games," he said. Moscow (AFP) - Amnesty International on Thursday condemned Russia for sending migrants and asylum seekers back to its highly repressive ex-Soviet ally Uzbekistan where they face "pervasive" use of torture. The rights group accused Russia in a new report of being "partners in crime" with Uzbekistan, a Central Asian country ruled by dour former Communist strongman Islam Karimov since 1991. Amnesty urged Moscow to stop extraditing or facilitating the forcible removal of Uzbeks who face the "real risk of torture" and "manifestly unfair trials." "The Russian authorities are not simply turning a blind eye to torture and injustice in Uzbekistan, they are lending a helping hand," said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International's director for Europe and Central Asia. Hundreds of asylum seekers, refugees and labour migrants have been abducted or forcibly returned from Russia to Uzbekistan since 2014, said the report, based on interviews with lawyers, activists and survivors of torture. Despite "overwhelming evidence that torture continues unabated in Uzbekistan," Russia continues to return alleged opponents of Karimov's regime, it said. Those sent back undergo "incommunicado detention, torture and other ill treatment to force them to confess," Amnesty said. "They face unfair trials that result in long prison sentences served in cruel, inhuman and degrading conditions." Uzbekistan, which hosted United States Secretary of State John Kerry last year, denies the use of torture. A relative of an asylum seeker forcibly returned to Uzbekistan in 2014 told Amnesty that his torturers "kicked in almost all of his teeth... He has only tiny splinters sticking out from his gums." "They are killing him slowly," the unnamed relative said. Amnesty accused Russia of prioritising "good relations and mutual interests" over international human rights obligations. Story continues It claimed Russia has colluded in "abductions and forced returns" and circumvented emergency orders by the European Court of Human Rights to halt extradition. Uzbek security forces have resorted to abductions in the "rare instances" when Russia refused extraditions, the report said. "Police and officers from the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) have often been complicit in such abductions." It described how Russia's FSB security service in central Moscow seized an Uzbek businessman accused of organising an Islamist terrorist group and handed him to Uzbek guards at an airport despite a European Court ban on his extradition. Uzbekistan, a country of some 30 million people, was last year listed among the "Worst of the Worst" countries in terms of political rights and civil liberties by US think tank Freedom House. The US State Department's 2015 human rights report highlighted Uzbekistan's "torture and abuse of detainees by security forces" and "denial of due process and fair trial." WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Russia has been repositioning artillery to northern Syria, including near the city of Aleppo, a U.S. official said on Thursday, in a move that is stoking U.S. concern about what Russian-backed Syrian forces intend to do next. Although Russia pulled out about half of its fixed-wing aircraft in mid-March, it broadly preserved its capabilities within Syria and remains a potent military force in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, U.S. officials say. Analysts said the Kremlin had changed rather than diluted its military power by increasingly relying on helicopters to support the Syrian army. The U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the repositioning of artillery and some forces near Aleppo followed the Syrian government's recapture of the city of Palmyra from Islamic State. The opposition accuses the government of violating the cessation of hostilities to capture Aleppo, Syria's most populous city before the war, which has been divided between government-controlled and rebel-held zones for years. U.S. officials have noted a significant presence of the al Qaeda-linked al Nusra Front around Aleppo. Al Nusra is not included in the cease-fire agreement. (Reporting by Phil Stewart) BUCHAREST (Reuters) - No talks on lifting Western sanctions against Russia should take place until Moscow completely withdraws its military presence from Ukraine, President Petro Poroshenko said on Thursday. Any sanctions relief in return for a partial fulfillment by Russia of the conditions of the Minsk peace deal "will be a direct threat to solving the situation in Donbass," the region of eastern Ukraine where pro-Russian separatists are battling Ukrainian government forces. Kiev says Russia has sent troops and heavy weapons to the region, but Moscow has repeatedly denied this. Extended at the end of last year, the Minsk deal signed by Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany aims to give Ukraine back control of its border with Russia, see all heavy weapons withdrawn, return hostages and allow an internationally monitored local election in the east. Speaking after talks with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in Bucharest, Poroshenko said he was convinced that early sanctions relief "can prompt Russia to continue its aggressive actions .... The Minsk agreements must be implemented in their entirety." NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Wednesday that the first formal meeting with Russia's envoy to the alliance in almost two years underscored the deep East-West divide over Ukraine. "It was reconfirmed that we disagree on the facts, on the narrative and the responsibilities in and around Ukraine," he said. (Reporting by Radu Marinas; editing by John Stonestreet) Moscow (AFP) - Russia's military on Thursday said it had completely demined the UNESCO world heritage site of Palmyra in Syria after it was recaptured by government forces from Islamic State group fighters last month. "As of today the tasks to demine the ancient architectural part of Palmyra have been completed in their entirety," Yury Stavitsky, the commander of Russia's military engineers, told President Vladimir Putin in a televised video link-up from Syria. Stavitsky said that Russian sappers had discovered and defused 2,991 explosive devices at the 234-hectare (580 acre) site and along 23 kilometres of road leading to it. "Now the units of engineers have moved on to demining the residential area of the town of Palmyra and the airport," Stavitsky reported. "367 buildings have been checked, 40 hectares of territory and 9.5 kilometres of roads. 1,432 explosive devices have been destroyed." Some 560 hectares in the modern town remain to be demined, he added. "Pass on my gratitude to all the personnel: officers, rank-and-file, those providing security. Thank you very much. I wish you success," Putin said in the broadcast. Palmyra was retaken from IS by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad -- backed up by Russian firepower -- on March 27. The jihadists had blown up UNESCO-listed temples and looted ancient relics at the site -- known as the "Pearl of the Desert" -- after overrunning it in May 2015. The recapture of Palmyra and its world famous antiquities has been one of the biggest propaganda coups for Moscow since it launched a bombing campaign to support long-time ally Assad in September, a move that sparked condemnation in the West. The demining mission was personally ordered by Putin and the Kremlin has been keen to publicise it. The Daily Beast Emily Elconin/GettyThe far-right ReAwaken America gathering in Manheim, Pennsylvania, this weekend wasnt your typical pro-Trump rally.It was a whole different level of crazy.The QAnon-peppered programming frequently flew off the rails Saturday, as speakers took severe issue with everything from McDonalds being part of the deep state to demonic satellites controlling the voting system in the United States.The days activities kicked off with a prayer asking for Trumps eyes to be opened s By Natalie Grover (Reuters) - U.S. Food and Drug Administration staff reviewers stuck by their negative assessment of Sarepta Therapeutics Inc's rare muscle disorder drug, further diminishing its chances of approval and wiping out nearly half of the company's value. The reviewers highlighted similar concerns on Jan. 15 ahead of a scheduled meeting of an independent panel of experts advising the FDA on the drug. However, the meeting was postponed due to a snow storm. FDA reviewers reiterated on Thursday their discomfort with trial design, statistical analysis and overall effectiveness of the drug, eteplirsen. (http://1.usa.gov/1Wfkrqd) Sarepta is seeking accelerated approval for eteplirsen, which is designed to treat a subset of patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). There are no FDA-approved drugs for the disease and most patients die by the age of 30. After publication of the original review, Sarepta submitted additional information and claimed "key inaccuracies" in the FDA staff analysis. On Thursday, the reviewers not only disagreed with Sarepta's rebuttal but said fresh information had cast further doubt on the reliability of trial data. Sarepta is conducting a "confirmatory" late-stage study, but it is designed in a way that patients will either get eteplirsen or go untreated. The reviewers said any potential beneficial effects of the drug are unlikely to be large enough to detect unless the drug is tested against a placebo in a large trial. The reviewers didn't formulate a voting question for panelists to ascertain whether they think Sarepta has provided enough evidence of the drug's effectiveness to warrant approval. "If there's no clear cut voting question then this is just a farce," said Janney Montgomery Scott analyst Debjit Chattopadhyay, who sees a less-than 5 percent chance of approval. Sarepta's shares fell as much as 47 percent to $10.50, wiping out about $420 million of market value. UNUSUAL APPEARANCE Pressure has been mounting on the FDA to approve treatments for the progressive, muscle wasting disease. The independent panel will discuss the drug on Monday. The FDA is not obliged to follow its advice but usually does. The head of the FDA's pharmaceuticals division, Dr. Janet Woodcock, is expected to attend the meeting, indicating an unusually high degree of scrutiny. The agency has also set aside an exceptionally long period for public commentary in the meeting, which will include testimony from patients, family members and advocates. "The panel will be tough ... although, no doubt parent/patient testimony for 2.5 hours will pull on heartstrings," Wedbush Securities analyst Heather Behanna said in an email. Although most analysts see the staff assessment as the end of the road for eteplirsen, the FDA has in the past brushed aside a negative staff review in the face of strong advocacy. Last year, the agency approved Addyi, the first drug to treat low sexual desire in women, despite a scathing review from its staff. Patient advocacy and clinician support could be an interesting counterbalance at the eteplirsen meeting, as well as the expected FDA decision date of May 26, William Blair's Tim Lugo said in a note. The FDA staff's stern review of Sarepta's drug in January came a day after the regulator rejected a rival drug developed by BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc. "BioMarin's drug is dead. Eteplirsen is now dead. There is nothing in DMD for the foreseeable future," Chattopadhyay said. (Reporting by Natalie Grover in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel and Ted Kerr) SALT LAKE CITY Japan's troubled Hitomi satellite managed to collect some science data before going silent last month, scientists said. Officials haven't heard from the Hitomi X-ray astronomy satellite since late March, about six weeks after the satellite's launch, and the craft appears to have broken into several pieces. But Hitomi did manage to complete two scientific measurements before the trouble hit, said Ann Hornschemeier, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "I am aware of the situation right now with Hitomi," Hornschemeier said here Sunday (April 17), during a session at the American Physical Society's April Meeting. "However, it did gather science data. There are science-data activities going on right now. At NASA, we're still carrying it as an operating mission." Ralph Kraft, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, also spoke briefly about the Hitomi results during his presentation in the same session, which focused on NASA's Physics of the Cosmos program. "Hitomi actually made two observations, science-calibration observations," Kraft said. "One was of the Crab Nebula; one was of the Perseus cluster." Kraft clarified that Hitomi managed to take spectroscopic data of these two objects. Spectroscopy allows scientists to study the chemical and atomic properties of a source, based on the light that the source emits. Kraft is not working on the Hitomi science analysis himself. However, he said he has seen preliminary results from that analysis, which he said are not yet public. Kraft indicated that the results had been submitted for publication. Hitomi, also known as ASTRO-H, launched to Earth orbit on Feb. 17. The satellite is equipped with instruments to observe the sky in both X-ray and gamma-ray wavelengths; its planned observations were intended to help scientists study dark matter distribution in the universe, the evolution and large-scale structure of the universe, black holes and other extreme states of matter, and many other phenomena. Story continues It's unclear what exactly happened to Hitomi. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said it hasn't given up hope on saving the satellite, but the long silence and the apparent breakup of the probe are obviously not good news. "This is a real tragedy for our community that Hitomi is having problems," Kraft said. Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield.Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com. Editor's Recommendations Copyright 2016 SPACE.com, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Turkey has frozen the assets of former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and his son, in line with UN Security Council sanctions against the ousted strongman, the government said Thursday. All assets belonging to Saleh and his son Ahmed Ali Abdullah Saleh in Turkish banks and other financial institutions "are frozen until February 26, 2017," read an announcement in the government's Official Gazette. Saleh amassed between $32 billion and $60 billion (28 billion euros and 53 billion euros) through corruption and stashed assets in at least 20 countries during his 33 years in power, a UN report released last year found. The Council imposed sanctions in 2014 on Saleh, who was forced out in 2012 under a Gulf-sponsored deal and blacklisted for obstructing peace in Yemen, notably for backing the Shiite Huthi militia that seized power in Sanaa. Peace talks aimed at ending the conflict in Yemen had been due to begin in Kuwait on Thursday, but were delayed pending the arrival of rebel representatives to the UN-backed talks. The talks are the most important attempt yet to resolve the country's devastating conflict, which the UN says has killed more than 6,400 people and forced almost 2.8 million people from their homes. Search Keywords: Short link: Los Angeles (AFP) - A school district in the US state of Colorado will arm its security staff with semiautomatic rifles to protect teachers and students, an education official said. Douglas County, on the outskirts of Denver, is spending more than $12,000 to buy 10 semiautomatics as a preventive measure. "From the lessons learned from other school shootings, including several in Colorado, we feel it is our priority and our focus to ensure that any student, staff, parent or community member who is in our property is safe at all times," Paula Hans, a school district spokeswoman, told AFP. "This is a completely proactive step and just another step in keeping our students and staff safe." The district covers 86 schools and about 67,000 students, but is projected to nearly double that by 2040. The semiautomatic rifles will be in the hands of the eight members of the school district security team. They are already armed with handguns but will need training for the heavier weapons. The first few rifles should be ready for use within a month's time, The Denver Post reported. There have been several mass shootings at US schools in recent years, most notably in December 2012 at Sandy Hook school that killed 26, including 20 children. While there have been no mass shootings in Douglas County schools, Colorado has witnessed two of the worst shooting incidents of recent times. In 1999, two students killed 13 people and wounded 24 in Columbine before killing themselves, in the deadliest high school shooting in US history. And in 2012, a mass shooting at a cinema in the town of Aurora during a late screening of a Batman film left 12 dead. Kano (Nigeria) (AFP) - At least seven people were killed in a suicide bomb attack near a camp for those displaced by the Boko Haram conflict in northeast Nigeria, the army said on Thursday. The attack happened early Wednesday in Banki, a town on the border with Cameroon some 130 kilometres (80 miles) southeast of the Borno state capital, Maiduguri. "Seven people lost their lives. There were two suicide bombers," both women, army spokesman Colonel Sani Usman told AFP. News of the attack was slow to emerge because of the poor to non-existent telecommunications in the remote area. Usman said one of the women failed to detonate her explosives and was arrested, despite being injured but a civilian vigilante said the second bomber died of her wounds on her way to hospital. "Two female suicide bombers came by a checkpoint manned by CJTF (civilian joint task force) and the military at about 6:30 am (0530 GMT) yesterday (Wednesday)," the vigilante said. "They successively detonated their explosives. One of them died instantly while the second one was badly injured. "She died on the way to Maiduguri because she was evacuated along with the wounded. Seven people were killed including two women and their infants. "A vigilante and two residents were also killed. Nine people were injured and we brought them to Maiduguri for medical attention." Boko Haram has carried out suicide bombings often using women and girls as part of its armed campaign to establish an Islamic state in northern Nigeria. Mosques, crowded markets, bus stations and military checkpoints have been frequent targets. But in February, two female suicide bombers killed at least 58 at camp for those made homeless by the insurgency in Dikwa, some 90 kilometres from Maiduguri. That attack raised security fears about the safety of internally displaced people (IDPs), whom the government is encouraging to return home. Suicide bombers also tried to get inside one of the biggest IDP camps near Maiduguri in January after a Boko Haram attack on a nearby village that killed at least 85. Dublin-born John Carney has worn many hats. He was the bassist for the Irish band The Frames in the early 90s. He subsequently worked in indie film and television. (His show Bachelors Walk has been described as the most successful in Irish history.) But it wasnt until 2007 that he truly pushed the Hibernian envelopeindeed, split it to shredswith the tiny, scintillating gem Once. A musical romance made for less than $200,000, the film astonished critics (me, perhaps even more than most), won an Oscar for Best Song, and ultimately spawned a hit Broadway musical. And so, in 2013, Carney attempted to replicate the formula with Begin Again, another film about a talented musical ingenue and an older male mentor who together attempt, quasi-romantically, to put together an album. (The movie might just as well have been titled Twice.) This time, though, Carney opted for a bigger budget and bigger stars (Keira Knightley, Mark Ruffalo), and forsook his native town for the glamour of New Yorkperhaps the city on Earth least in need of a musical encomium. Begin Again wasnt a bad movie, but the subtle magic of Once was lost in trans-Atlantic translation. I could scarcely be more delighted to report that Carney has rediscovered that magic with Sing Street, another tiny, winsome charmer set in Dublin. The year is 1985, with all that entails musically, good and (often) bad. When we first meet the protagonist, 15-year-old Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), hes experimenting with song lyrics in his bedroom: Ill be the mechanic of your heart, and with a wrench Ill take you apart. Hearing his parents (the sorely underutilized Aidan Gillen and Maria Doyle Kennedy) fight downstairs, he instead endeavors to put their violent hollering to music: If we didnt share a mortgage, Id leave you. Recommended: Prince the Immortal The family is in dire financial straits, so his parents pull Conor from the school he was attending to send him to one run by the Christian Brothers: essentially a teen penitentiary overseen by strict, possibly predatory, priests and sadistic bullies. But one day Conor meets Raphina (Lucy Boynton), a 16-year-old truant who lives across the street from the school. When she world-wearily informs him that she is a model with plans to move to Londonthe one-year difference in their ages might as well be a decadehe impulsively asks her if shed like to star in a music video for his band. Story continues The problem, of course, is that there is no band, and Conor himself can scarcely hold a tune or strum a guitar. But these details are overcome with enchanted efficiency. Conors sole friend, Darren (Ben Carolan, resembling a pint-sized Danny Partridge), imagines himself a manager and introduces Conor to quiet, sensitive Eamon (Mark McKenna), who keeps rabbits and happens to play every instrument known to humankind. The band quickly fills out like a pubescent version of The Commitments, takes the name Sing Street as an ironic reference to their school, Synge Street CBSthe very school Carney himself attendedand in no time they have produced their first song and amateur video, the shamelessly Duran Duranian Riddle of the Model. Conor, for his part, takes little time to find his voice: in the band, at school, and, most importantly, with Raphina. Recommended: How Animals Think And so the story unfolds, as the band cycles through its The Cure phase and its Spandau Ballet phase, hair gel waxing or waning as appropriate. The soundtrack also includes entrants from The Jam, Joe Jackson, and, if you listen closely, a gentle, piano-only version of A-Has Take On Me. But its the original songs, written by Carney himself, that are the true draw here: the teen anthem Drive It Like You Stole It, the plaintive To Find You, and the intolerably infectious Upwhich might have served as an apt title for the movie had it not already been well spoken for. There is nothing particularly novel about the tale Carney tells, but he tells it with an uncanny combination of tenderness and joy. Throughout it all, Conor receives advice and encouragement, both romantic and musical, from his college-dropout older brother, Brendan (a fantastic Jack Reynor, channeling Seth Rogen). Whenever Conor is down, Brendan bucks him up with the ineffable wisdom of the stoner-sage: Did the Sex Pistols know how to play? You dont need to know how to play! You need to know how not to play! There is nothing particularly novel about the tale Carney tells, but he tells it with an uncanny combination of tenderness and joy. Endearing moments abound: three siblings dancing together to Hall & Oatess Maneater; a magnificently awkward kiss over half-chewed biscuits; the magical realism of a dream prom performance; a redemption that is no less satisfying for being utterly predictable; the bygone intimacy of the cassette tape. Tucked in among these are even a few discreet references to Once: a cameo by a Hoover, another girl listening to a sad song on headphones at night. Recommended: Remembering Prince Befitting its young subjects, Sing Street is more lightweight than Once. Pools of melancholy lurkfamily breakdown, poverty, alcoholism, abusebut the film never wades too deeply into them. The result is a giddy pop fantasy that nonetheless carries beguiling undertones of wistfulness and regret. As Raphina explains to Conor, Your problem is youre not happy being sad. But thats what love is: happy-sad. It may not be true of all love, but its an apt description of the particular form of love that John Carney has once again brought to life onscreen, in all its rapturous, lightheaded splendor. Read more from The Atlantic: This article was originally published on The Atlantic. Pan-European pay TV giant Sky on Thursday reported its fiscal third-quarter subscriber and nine-month financial results. The company, in which Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox owns a 39 percent stake, posted nine-month operating earnings of $1.64 billion (1.14 billion), up 12 percent. Revenue rose 5 percent. The company, led by CEO Jeremy Darroch, signed up 177,000 new customers in the latest quarter, its fiscal third quarter, ending it with 21.7 million, up from nearly 21.5 million at the end of 2015. In the U.K. and Ireland, it added 70,000 customers and passed the milestone of 40 million products in U.K. and Irish households. In Germany and Austria, Sky added 73,000 customers, while in Italy, it added 34,000. Sky ended its fiscal third quarter, which ran through March, with 12.35 million customers in U.K. and Ireland, 8.63 million in Italy and 7.91 million in Germany and Austria. UBS analyst Polo Tang had said in a preview report that the fiscal third quarter is "a seasonally quieter quarter versus the second quarter." For the U.K., he had forecast 65,000 customer net adds, including 40,000 TV net adds. For Germany and Austria, he had predicted 75,000 customer net adds, while for Italy, he had estimated a 15,000 drop. One negative analysts highlighted was increased subscriber churn, especially in the U.K., where the firm cited less discounting, and Italy. "Interestingly, churn has seen a significant pickup in the quarter," said Liberum Capital analyst Ian Whittaker, adding that Sky in Italy felt "the impact of the loss of Champions League [soccer] rights." He predicted that a recent Vivendi deal that gives the company a foothold in southern Europe could lead this trend to continue: "Following the Vivendi/Mediaset deal, we believe Vivendi are going to become a more significant competitor in Europe and we could see these higher churn rates persist as competition intensifies," Whittaker said. Story continues Read More: Idris Elba, John Ridley Team for 1970s Civil Rights Drama at Showtime "It's been another strong quarter for Sky," said Darroch. "Our strategy to broaden our business, expanding into new markets and customer segments, has delivered further excellent financial results." He added: "We want to offer customers the very best TV experience, whenever and however they want to watch. With the launch of Sky Q in February, we now have three outstanding products to meet all our customers' needs. We are pleased with the early response to Sky Q, as we focus on establishing this premium product in its first market. Our approach to the connected home continues to engage customers; almost 11 million Sky households have now connected to enjoy our on-demand services including Sky Box Sets, which recently launched in both Germany and Italy." Darroch also discussed the importance of content. "Our content offering is getting bigger and better," he said. "With Sky originals, we are creating unique and high-quality shows such as Stan Lee's Lucky Man, which drew record audiences. We have many more exciting original productions to look forward to with our first production in Germany, Babylon Berlin, shortly to begin filming, and we have just announced our most ambitious production slate in the U.K., featuring world-class talent such as Idris Elba, Tim Roth and Christina Hendricks in six major new shows." And the CEO touted a recently struck new deal with one of the Hollywood majors. "Strengthening our movies offer, we secured our first group-wide movie deal with Sony this quarter, and for families we launched our new Sky Kids App, which will be rolled out in all territories." Read More: James Murdoch to Become Sky Chairman; European Pay TV Giant Reports Subscriber Gains Oslo (AFP) - Fugitive US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden has filed a lawsuit against the Norwegian government seeking a guarantee he will not be extradited if he visits to accept an award, a literary rights group said Thursday. The Norwegian branch of the PEN Club has invited Snowden, who has been living in exile in Russia since 2013 after revealing widespread US foreign surveillance, to collect the Ossietzky prize for freedom of expression in November. PEN said a law firm had filed a petition with Oslo City Court "in order to allow Snowden to travel to Norway without fear of extradition to the US, where he faces decades of imprisonment under the Espionage Act". "We will do our utmost to ensure that Snowden may receive the prize in person," it said in a statement. The 32-year-old American was charged by US authorities with espionage and the theft of state secrets after revealing the extent of surveillance programmes run by the National Security Agency. Norway's justice ministry said it had not yet received the lawsuit. "We never comment on individual extradition cases, let alone when they have not been examined in court," said ministry spokesman Gunnar Johansen. Considered a whistleblower by some and a traitor by others, Snowden won a similar Norwegian award last year. He was unable to collect it in person after he failed to receive assurances that he would not be arrested and extradited to the United States. Snowden has also been nominated again for this year's Nobel Peace Prize, which will be announced in October. Cape Town (AFP) - A South African judicial inquiry has cleared all government officials of long-standing charges of corruption in a multi-billion dollar arms deal, President Jacob Zuma said Thursday. The four-year inquiry into one of the biggest political scandals since the end of apartheid, in which Zuma was a central suspect, found that there was no evidence to support widespread allegations of bribery, fraud and corruption, the president said. Zuma summarised the findings of the commission in a statement in which he said he had received the three-volume report at the end of last year and would now release it to the public. Critics have long charged that the government-appointed inquiry was toothless and was being used in an attempt to put the issue to rest. Paul Hoffman, a lawyer representing anti-arms deal activists, likened the inquiry to "a farce". The commission suffered a series of controversial resignations of officials involved, including the departure of one of the three original judges. "The Commission states that the widespread allegations of bribery, corruption and fraud in the arms procurement process, especially in relation to the selection of the preferred bidders and costs, have found no support or corroboration in the evidence," Zuma's statement said. "Government had been of the view that any findings pointing to wrongdoing should be given to law enforcement agencies for further action. There are no such findings and the Commission does not make any recommendations." The $4.8 billion arms deal saw the government acquire a vast range of military equipment, including Gripen fighter aircraft for the air force and submarines for the navy. The commission's report comes as a High Court challenge is underway to reinstate more than 700 charges of corruption against Zuma which were dropped in 2009, shortly before he became president. The charges, which relate to the arms deal signed in 1999 when Zuma was deputy president, were dropped allegedly because of interference in the prosecution case by his political opponents. Story continues Zuma was accused of having accepted bribes from international arms manufacturers to influence the choice of weaponry. Zuma's advisor, Schabir Shaik, was jailed for 15 years on related charges in 2005, with the judge saying there was "overwhelming" evidence of a corrupt relationship between Shaik and Zuma. Shaik was released on medical parole in 2009, the year Zuma was elected president. The opposition Democratic Alliance party called the commission's report "a massive disappointment because those who were implicated in arms deal corruption have effectively been let off the hook". CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - South Africa will not bid to have the global ban on trade in rhino horn lifted but will maintain its existing policy of stockpiling the commodity, a cabinet minister said on Thursday. South Africa, where thousands of rhinos have been killed by poachers for their valuable horns prized in Asia, had considered global trading in rhino horns as a possible way of stemming the poaching activities. "The recommendations endorse South Africa's integrated strategic management approach to resolving the poaching of rhino and illegal trade in rhino," Jeff Radebe, minister in the presidency, told a media briefing. "The committee recommends that the current mode of keeping the country's stock levels be kept as opposed to the trading in rhino horns," Radebe said, citing an advisory committee's findings on the feasibility of trading in rhino horns. The WWF conservation group welcomed the decision. "Reopening the legal trade in rhino horn under current conditions would have been counterproductive and increased the risk of even more rhinos being poached," Colman O'Criodain, WWF Wildlife Trade Analyst said in a statement. Rhino horn is prized in Asia for use in traditional remedies and surging demand has meant more poaching, with a record 1,305 of the animals illegally killed in Africa last year. Buying and selling rhino horn internationally was banned in 1977, and if it had changed to allow the global trading of horns, South Africa would have to take that decision to Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) for endorsement at its September meeting in Johannesburg. (Reporting by Wendell Roelf; Editing by James Macharia and Richard Balmforth) JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa's Anglo American Platinum said on Thursday refined production for its first quarter halved compared with the same period a year ago mainly due to safety stoppages, and warned the slump would impact first-half profits. Production was stopped for 12 days and this in turn affected output for 37 days at the company's refinery, the unit of global miner Anglo American said in a statement. Combined with a planned stock take, the stoppages led to a 52 percent slump in refined platinum production to 261,000 ounces for the three months to end-March, Amplats said. Shares were trading 1.78 percent lower at 409.62 rand by 1035 GMT. Mines are mandated by the government to stop production after a death or an injury to allow time for safety investigations and inspections. The industry has at times complained that the drive to a goal of "zero harm," was overzealous, with frequent safety stoppages resulting in output and revenue losses. Amplats, the world's largest platinum miner, said production lost will be made up in the next two quarters and cautioned that this would have a short term impact on the company's financial position in the first half of 2016. Despite this, Amplats kept its full-year guidance unchanged at between 2.3 to 2.4 million tonnes. (Reporting by Zandi Shabalala; Editing by James Macharia) JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa's Oakbay Resources appointed a local firm as its new auditors on Thursday after the local unit of KPMG ditched the company over allegations that its owners, the Gupta family, are wielding undue political influence. Oakbay Resources said SizweNtsalubaGobodo Inc, South Africa's biggest black-owned accounting firm, had been appointed with immediate effect. Officials at SizweNtsalubaGobodo, which traces its roots to 1985, did not immediately respond to request for comment. Oakbay Resources, the Gupta family holding company, is scrambling to restore relations with banks after all four of South Africa's major lenders cut ties amid concerns about the family's relationship with President Jacob Zuma. Zuma has acknowledged the Guptas are his friends but denies anything improper. The Guptas, whose wide range of business interests include media and mining, have denied the allegations and say they are pawns in a plot to oust Zuma. (Reporting by Tiisetso Motsoeneng; Editing by Joe Brock and Susan Thomas) Peace talks between Yemen's warring factions are on hold pending the arrival of rebel representatives to the UN-backed negotiations, diplomats told AFP on Thursday. The talks were initially scheduled to start on Monday, and any further delay could dash hopes of ending Yemen's war after the government delegation threatened to pull out if meetings did not begin immediately. "According to the latest information, the rebel delegation should arrive in Kuwait by the end of the day," said one diplomat close to the talks. "As a result, the talks could be delayed further until Friday," another diplomat said. On Wednesday, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said negotiations would begin in Kuwait on Thursday. The rebels only agreed to join the talks after they said they received assurances from the United Nations that pro-government forces would respect a ceasefire which has been violated by warring parties since it came into effect on April 11. There was still no word Thursday from the rebels on their expected time of arrival. Representatives of the Iran-backed Huthi insurgents and their allies left Sanaa on Wednesday for Oman and they are expected to continue on to Kuwait. But they were still in Oman on Thursday morning, according to diplomats. In Yemen itself, fighting wore on on several fronts, military sources said, as each side blamed the other for truce breaches. The rebels late on Wednesday fired a Katyusha rocket on the loyalist-held city of Marib, east of the capital, according to an AFP journalist there. Pro-government military sources reported heavy fighting in Nahm, northeast of Sanaa, as well as sporadic clashes in the northern Jawf province, Taez in the southwest, and central Baida province. The rebels meanwhile claimed on their sababnews.net website that a Saudi-led coalition fighting them in support of the Yemeni government carried out two air strikes on Nahm and flew sorties over Sanaa, Marib, and Jawf. The talks are the most important attempt yet to resolve Yemen's devastating conflict, which the UN says has killed more than 6,400 people and forced almost 2.8 million forced from their homes. Search Keywords: Short link: Juba (AFP) - International powers gave South Sudan's rival leaders a Saturday deadline to strike a deal and ensure rebel chief Riek Machar returns to the capital, peace monitors said. If they fail to agree, the peace deal to end over two years of intense civil war would collapse, warned Festus Mogae, head of the internationally-backed Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission (JMEC). In a country awash with weapons, the deal now stands or falls on how many machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades the rebel troops protecting Machar should be allowed to bring with them. "If we are not able to reach an agreement, then it is a total breakdown," Mogae told reporters Thursday, after no breakthrough was made in an all-day JMEC meeting in the capital Juba. Tens of thousands have been killed and more than two million have been driven from their homes since war broke out in December 2013, a conflict characterised by extreme brutality and human rights violations. The April 23 deadline was proposed by the non-South Sudanese members of JMEC, which include the African Union and European Union, as well as China, Britain, Norway and the United States, diplomats said. Rebel officials said Machar would return on a one-hour flight from neighbouring Ethiopia as soon possible after a deal was agreed, and then take up the post of vice-president. If they fail, the rivals will be reported to the UN Security Council. His return to forge a unity government with arch-rival President Salva Kiir is seen as fundamental to ensure the repeatedly delayed and broken peace deal sticks. But his arrival on Monday was delayed by wrangling over how many soldiers and weapons he could bring with him, with the government saying his large armed entourage would contravene the peace deal. The international proposal -- accepted by rebels -- is that Machar's guards can bring 20 machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, while the government says the limit should be just seven. Story continues "If there is no agreement until that day, then I am required to report to the IGAD heads of state, to the Security Council of the African Union and to the Security Council of the United Nations," Mogae said, when asked what will happen if the April 23 deadline is missed. Minister of Information Michael Makuei told reporters that both sides were "advised to go and sleep on this and think how best we can come out with an amicable solution." Rebel negotiator Taban Deng Gai said they accepted the international proposal. "Once we have this approval by the government... we shall have the first vice-president to Juba as early as possible," Gai said. The peace deal is already months behind schedule, with multiple militia forces paying little heed to paper agreements. A 1,370-strong armed rebel force has finished arriving in the city as part of the peace deal, while government forces say they have pulled out all but 3,420 of their troops, according to the agreement. All other soldiers have to remain at least 25 kilometres (15 miles) outside the capital. Earlier on Thursday, more than 100 hundred rebel supporters arrived in Juba from Ethiopia, boosting hopes for Machar's return. By Denis Dumo JUBA (Reuters) - South Sudan's government and rebels said on Wednesday a deal had been reached to let rebel leader Riek Machar return to the capital to form a unity government, resolving differences that led to a delay this week that had worried peace monitors. Rebel spokesman James Gatdet Dak told Reuters by telephone from Nairobi that Machar, who had been due to return early this week before the latest in a series of delays since last year's peace deal, was now expected to fly into Juba on Thursday. Machar and his rival, President Salva Kiir, signed an agreement in August to end a two-year conflict in which thousands of people have been killed and more than two million forced to flee their homes. But clashes have flared since then. The United States and the U.N. Security Council have both voiced concern over the latest delay to the return of Machar, who is due to take up the post of First Vice President next to Kiir as part of a power sharing deal. The body monitoring the peace deal, the Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission (JMEC), which includes Western powers, African representatives and others, also said it was worried. "I'm happy to announce to you that we as a government have accepted that Riek should come with 195 (members of his) forces accompanying him and his chief of staff," Peter Bashir Gbandi, acting foreign minister, told a news conference in Juba. A government official earlier said Machar was held up because he had wanted to bring equipment and troops into Juba in excess of what was agreed with Kiir's camp. Machar told Al Jazeera television the government was creating "obstacles". "We have given him clearance also for all the three planes that are coming with him," Gbandi said, without giving a timing. Kiir's sacking of Machar as his deputy in 2013 precipitated the crisis that led to a conflict in December 2013. Fighting has often run along ethnic lines, pitting Kiir's dominant Dinka ethnic group against Machar's Nuer. The conflict, which erupted barely two years after South Sudan's independence in 2011, has hammered the economy and left swathes of the 11 million population without enough food. Oil production, South Sudan's main source of revenue, has tumbled as oil fields have been cut off and global prices have dropped. (Writing by George Obulutsa and Edmund Blair; Editing by Richard Balmforth) Khartoum (AFP) - Stepping onto a Khartoum stage and launching into their first song, The Nightingales -- Sudan's best-loved girl band -- still raise whoops and cheers from adoring fans, 45 years after their debut. Sisters Amal, Hadia and Hayat Talsam were known in their 1970s heyday as the "Sudanese Supremes" for their stylish bobs, matching dresses and their soulful ballads, changing the image of female artists in Sudan forever. Their outfits may have changed a little -- at the January concert in Khartoum, the sisters appeared in long robes and loose headscarves -- but the audience's adoration has only increased, with fans dancing and singing in front of the stage. Their vintage brand of Sudanese pop, songs of longing and youth blending elements of folk music with their driving vocals aim to show the world another side to Sudan. "We want to travel the globe and offer our art to all the peoples of the world," Amal said after the concert at the family home, sitting beside her sisters. "We could show a beautiful side of Sudan to the outside world" said Hadia, the oldest of the sisters, grinning. Although they haven't got round to planning their tour, they do have some prior experience. - 'Vibrant period' - The Nightingales were formed in 1971, when a family friend came to their home in Omdurman, Khartoum's twin city, to ask their father if he could pick three of his seven daughters to perform a song he wrote. The trio performed so well that they made the arrangement permanent and they were picked to tour Sudan with president Jafer al-Nimeiri, a socialist-leaning army officer who seized power in 1969. "It was a very, very vibrant period for culture and art," said Hayat, the quietest of the sisters. Amal said she was 15, Hadia 17 and Hayat just 13 years old when they started touring, building a region-wide fan base. But in socially conservative 1970s Sudan, not everyone was pleased at the three young women travelling unaccompanied and singing and dancing in front of crowds. Story continues But the sisters won acceptance by force of character and with support from their family. "The Nightingales changed the way people looked at female artists in Sudan," said Hadia. The group did nothing to change their looks and even appeared on the state broadcaster performing their songs. Other female artists had preceded them but their music had been more traditional. Neighbours, friends and even some relatives criticised their father for their on-stage and television appearances as their fame grew. "Our father wasn't interested in any of that and he used to encourage us a lot," Hadia said proudly. "We were able to stand firm and fight back against people who were against us and our progress and our presence on stage proved that there was nothing wrong with it," Amal added. By the 1980s, the group had cemented their reputation as one of the country's best loved groups ... but Sudan itself was changing. Nimeiri grew increasingly paranoid and repressive toward the end of his 16-year reign, declaring sharia Islamic law in 1983 and igniting another civil war with southern rebels. - 'Better than the Supremes' - The Nightingales kept playing but in 1988, with all three married and other commitments, they played their final concert in Khartoum. Amal and Hadia left for the Gulf with their families, before moving to the US, while Hayat stayed in Khartoum. The next year, now-president Omar al-Bashir seized power in an Islamist-backed coup and his military authorities imposed a curfew that lasted for years, putting limits on musical performances. But in 2007, Hadia and Amal performed in New York's Central Park at a festival of Sudanese music and people urged them to return to Sudan for a full reunion. Apprehensively, Hadia and Amal returned the next year and organised a concert with Hayat at the officers' club in central Khartoum, unsure whether their fans would remember them after 20 years. When they arrived, the streets were jammed with expectant fans. "The only thing that changed was they liked it much more and it was a huge success," Amal said. Now, the Nightingales tour Sudan when they are all in the country together, drawing hundreds of spectators of all ages to their shows across Khartoum. They have lost none of their glamour, singing in matching outfits, with performances punctuated by mid-set costume changes -- and a quick cigarette break. Amal, Hadia and Hayat are confident they can win more fans abroad and are keen to arrange their tour. And would the comparison with the Supremes help draw foreign crowds in? "Honey, we're better than the Supremes," Amal shot back in American-accented English. "We came to their country, but they never came here". (Reuters) - SunEdison Inc asked a U.S. bankruptcy judge on Thursday to appoint an independent examiner to review recent transactions, although the company said it is not aware of any particular wrongdoing. The company cited in the request a subpoena it received from the U.S. Department of Justice related to financing activity, an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and a lawsuit filed against it by TerraForm Global Inc, one of its affiliates. SunEdison, once the fastest-growing U.S. renewable energy company, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Thursday after a short-lived but aggressive binge of debt-fueled acquisitions proved unsustainable. (Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; Editing by Nick Zieminski) TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan prosecutors angered China over the weekend by freeing 20 Taiwanese suspected of defrauding Chinese nationals in a telecoms scam but on Thursday changed their minds, taking most of them into custody on suspicion of committing "serious crime". The move came as island officials are in Beijing this week to negotiate the return of 45 of its citizens who were forcibly sent to China from Kenya and linked to a similar telephone fraud case abroad against Chinese nationals. Taiwan at the time accused China of kidnapping the suspects. China has since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949 regarded self-ruled Taiwan as a breakaway province, to be taken back by force if necessary should it make moves towards independence. Since Tsai Ing-wen and her independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party won Taiwan's presidential and parliamentary elections by a landslide in January, Beijing has been stepping up pressure on the self-ruled island. Taiwan authorities had said they had requested evidence from China ahead of the arrival of the 20 Taiwanese deported on Friday from Malaysia, but no information was provided. Hong Chia-juan, a chief prosecutor in the Taichung District Prosecutors Office, said Thursday's move came after visual evidence gathered from Malaysian authorities gave his team the evidence they needed to detain most of the individuals for at least two months for investigation. Two of the suspects were under effective house arrest with their movements limited, Hong said. Led by the island's justice ministry, Taiwan officials left for China on Wednesday in the hope of establishing a way to jointly investigate the two cases. (Reporting by J.R. Wu; Editing by Nick Macfie) President Barack Obama says the United States and Arab allies remain united in their efforts to destroy the Islamic State group and will continue to increase their contributions to the fight. Obama's comments come after meetings in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, with leaders from the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council. The president says the leaders have agreed to enhance humanitarian efforts in Iraq and Syria. He says they also continue to see violations of a fragile cease-fire agreement in Syria and that they agree the road ahead there must have a transitional government, a new constitution with free elections and a move away from President Bashar Assad. Obama says that the leaders also continue to have serious concerns about the behavior of the Iranian government. The US President also says there's a need for better communication with America's Gulf Arab allies, and that summits like Thursday's in Saudi Arabia are a step in that direction. The president says the formation of a new government in Libya and peace talks to end fighting in Yemen along with last year's nuclear deal with Iran wouldn't have been possible without support from the Gulf states. Obama say there's a need for "consistent, institutionalized communication" with countries in the region because "the possibilities of misunderstanding increase when there's so much activity taking place." Search Keywords: Short link: What poses a greater risk to French school children: a potential terror attack, or smoking cigarettes? This is the unusual question gripping France as a result of the jihadist attacks on Paris last November -- and a court ruling later this week may point to the answer. Many high schools began letting pupils smoke on school premises as part of security measures introduced after the gun-and-bomb assaults which killed 130 people and left 350 injured. To education officials, having dozens of teenagers crowd the pavement outside their schools to grab a quick smoke during breaks was simply too much of a risk. "But this doesn't mean you have to let them smoke inside," complains Corinne Depagne, the mother of a 16-year-old boy, who has filed a criminal complaint against his school in the southeastern city of Lyon. An administrative court outside Paris is set to rule by the end of this week in a separate complaint against a school in Courbevoie, a northwestern suburb of the capital. Depagne, a pneumologist, told AFP she was "stupefied" that teens at her son's school were being allowed to smoke in the courtyard between classes. The official rules are clouded by confusion, and parents, activists and teachers are split between those who think tobacco is the lesser evil, and those who wonder why pupils are allowed to smoke during school hours at all. Shortly after the November 13 attacks on Paris nightspots and the national stadium, the Islamic State group issued threats against French schools. Under the state of emergency imposed after the attacks, a circular signed by both the education ministry and interior ministry was sent to schools urging them to avoid having pupils gather outside their premises. Some schools then sent out letters to parents about new dedicated smoking areas, even specifying that ashtrays would be provided. - Smoking 'normal' again - The move outraged anti-tobacco activists such as the group Non-Smokers' Rights (DNF) which argues it is a massive step backwards a decade after smoking was banned in public spaces under the "Evin law," a hard-won piece of legislation named after a former minister of health. Story continues "It is disastrous for public health because we are exposing very young people to tobacco. Many of these establishments are both high schools and secondary schools, with children as young as 11," said Stephen Lequet of the DNF. "Above all we are making the act of smoking seem normal again." A study in June 2015 showed that one in three 17-year-olds smoke daily in France. Lequet said the argument put forward by those in favour of the move -- that it keeps children safe and out of harm's way -- was "false". "The virtual terrorist risk exists, but luckily it will never leave as many people dead as tobacco," he said. He pointed out that in other parts of the world, smoking during school hours is completely forbidden, and that as it is even illegal in France to buy cigarettes if you are under 18, the entire situation was "completely absurd". Lequet said the DNF and other anti-tobacco groups decided to file administrative complaints against three schools in and around Paris, to force them to stop pupils smoking on their premises. - 'We must remain pragmatic' - Five months after the circular was issued, the education ministry appears to be struggling to formulate a coherent response to the debate. Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem sowed further confusion last week when she said that "during this period of heightened security, high school students must simply be asked not to smoke". Asked to elaborate on the minister's words, her ministry veered between insisting the measure was "exceptional" but at the same time saying "the ban on smoking must remain the rule." "According to the minister it is a difficult balance and we must remain pragmatic," a spokeswoman at the education ministry told AFP. Vallaud-Belkacem's comments outraged the main school principals' union SNPDEN, which said it felt "abandoned" by the education ministry. "In any case, it is unrealistic," said SNPDEN national secretary Joel Lamois. "The terrorist risk is much greater right now than the health risk. Between two diseases we are trying to deal with the worst." - 'Kill themselves smoking' - But for Depagne that is an outrageous view in a country where 200 people die a day from smoking-related disorders. "Other parents tell me: 'Why are you pursuing this, Corinne? I don't want them to get killed in front of the school.' I say, 'How can you let them smoke and kill themselves that way?'" Depagne said the fact that no-one blinks an eye at high school students puffing away outside schools in normal times was a sign of "laxism". "I think in France addiction is really under-estimated, whether to tobacco or alcohol. It is so normal to smoke that even when children smoke, it doesn't bother anyone." By Curtis Skinner SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Thousands of marijuana enthusiasts gathered on "Hippie Hill" in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park on Wednesday to light up joints, pipes and bongs in celebration of the annual but informal cannabis holiday, named 4/20. The long-running Bay Area tradition, which authorities closely monitor but allow, could mark the last such observance while recreational marijuana remains illegal under state law in California. Voters will decide in November whether to approve a ballot measure that would legalize adult possession and use of the drug for the purpose of just getting high. The distinct odor of marijuana smoke mixed with the smell of barbecue in a gentle breeze wafting over an estimated 15,000 attendees enjoying the sunny day. "It's pretty chill," said Erik Elder, 19, a college student who traveled from Sacramento with friends. "It's all lit. It's all just good vibes." As the clock struck 4:20 p.m., cheers and clouds of smoke rose into the air. "It's an appreciation of weed, and everyone coming together and enjoying the same thing," said 19-year-old barista Heidi Rice. Marijuana, once widely demonized in the United States, has seen growing acceptance in recent years, especially among younger, more liberal Americans. Although cannabis remains classified as an illegal narcotic under federal law, two dozen U.S. states have approved marijuana for medical purposes since California became the first to do so in 1996. Since 2012 recreational use of the drug has been legalized in Colorado, Washington state, Oregon, Alaska and the District of Columbia. California is one of several states where advocates are pushing to follow suit. The date of April 20, or 4/20, corresponds with the numerical figure widely recognized within the cannabis subculture as a symbol for all things marijuana. Marijuana magazine High Times has written that the concept of 4/20 originated in the early 1970s, as a group of teenagers in the Bay Area city of San Rafael used it as code to gather after school and smoke the drug. Story continues San Francisco Supervisor London Breed coordinated with municipal agencies to handle traffic, litter and public safety issues surrounding the city's 4/20 event. Several streets around the area were closed off, public buses were rerouted, and police increased their presence at the park with both uniformed and plain-clothes officers. The event will cost the city between $80,000 to $100,000, according to Breed's aide, Samantha Roxas. Most of the money goes to cleanup afterward. Last year, some 5 tons of litter were left behind, she said. (Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Editing by Sara Catania and Andrew Hay) By Lizbeth Diaz COATZACOALCOS, Mexico (Reuters) - At least 13 people died after a leak caused a deadly petrochemical plant blast, and the death toll could still rise, Mexican oil giant Pemex said on Thursday, the latest in a series of fatal accidents to batter the company. Pemex CEO Jose Antonio Gonzalez Anaya, who traveled to the site of Wednesday's blast near the port of Coatzacoalcos, one of Pemex's top oil export hubs, told local television it was unclear what caused the accident. The massive explosion at the facility's chlorinate 3 plant in the Gulf state of Veracruz also injured 136 people, 13 of them seriously. Another 18 people were unaccounted for, and one badly damaged part of the plant had yet to be scoured. "We know there was a leak, what we don't know is why, but everything points to an accident," Gonzalez Anaya said. The odor of ammonia filled the air and the plants' turbines still streamed gray smoke on Thursday afternoon, where local and municipal police, as well as marines, blocked the entrance to the facility. Most officials wore blue face masks to protect against the fumes, while family members crowded around, their faces uncovered, demanding more information on missing relatives and at times throwing objects at the officials or pushing them. "We are desperate because no-one is coming out to show their face," said Ancelma Cordero, 49, whose 21-year-old brother is one of the missing and has not responded to his cellphone. She said she had been waiting since the prior night and her head was starting to hurt. "They told us we were breathing toxins and we should leave," she said of authorities. "But ... if we leave, they could make the bodies disappear." Calling it a "tragic accident," President Enrique Pena Nieto said he would head to the region to attend to victims. The blast occurred at a vinyl petrochemical plant that is a joint venture between Pemex's petrochemical unit and majority owner Mexican plastic pipe maker Mexichem . Pemex operates the larger petrochemical complex where the plant was located, known as Pajaritos. Shares in Mexichem closed 5.2 percent lower on Thursday. "This is neither the time for excuses nor finding those to blame," Juan Pablo del Valle, Mexichem's chairman, said on Twitter. "It is the time to tend to the injured, be accountable and support all those affected." In February, a fire killed a worker at the same plant, which makes vinyl chloride monomer, also known as chloroethene, an industrial chemical used to produce plastic piping. The explosion was the latest in a litany of safety disasters that have plagued the state oil giant, which is trying to stem the bleed of sliding output and slash costs as it creaks under the pressure of low crude prices. In 2013, at least 37 people were killed by a blast at its Mexico City headquarters, and 26 people died in a fire at a Pemex natural gas facility in northern Mexico in September 2012. A 2015 fire at its Abkatun Permanente platform in the oil-rich Bay of Campeche affected oil output and cost the company up to $780 million. Pemex said last year it had reduced its annual accident rate in 2014 by more than 33 percent. But a Reuters investigation found that Pemex was reducing its accident rate by including hours worked by office staff in its calculations. (Reporting by Tomas Bravo, Anahi Rama, Veronica Gomez, Gabriel Stargardter and Joanna Zuckerman Bernstein, writing by Alexandra Alper; Editing by Simon Gardner and Alan Crosby) Donald Trump at Trump Tower in Manhattan after he won the New York state primary. (Photo: John Moore/Getty Images) Any reporter who has ever spent time on a presidential campaign has heard the perennial rant about process stories. Thats when the candidate tells you that really he is desperate to illuminate in numbing and nuanced detail his plan to reverse the decline of American manufacturing (which consists of about 500 words of boilerplate blather on his website), but all we in the media ever ask about is how he intends to win, so he cant. (Of course, if you ask him to sit down and talk about the manufacturing plan, his aides will say no, because how can they trust that youre really going to ask him about the manufacturing plan and not about, you know, the process? Alas, this is their predicament.) At this late stage in the 2016 races, however, process seems to be the only thing some candidates actually do want to talk about. The system itself has now become the burning issue of the campaign. Bernie Sanders rails against a rigged system supported by superdelegates and closed primaries. And of course Donald Trump has now launched a full-on assault against the rules of the Republican nominating process, which he seems determined not to grasp. Trumps son Donald Jr. weighed in earlier this week, when he told Sean Hannity, I feel like were living in communist China. This would be a cogent observation, except that, A, in communist China you go to prison for publicly excoriating the integrity of party leaders, and B, Juniors dad once praised the strong Chinese response to the riot in Tiananmen Square, so I guess brutal repression is fine so long as its being used only to shut down and punish people who dont agree with you. All that aside, these indictments of the process are bound to reverberate well beyond the conventions, and Id bet you a lot of money that we are, in fact, going to see some big changes in the way we choose our presidents. Story continues Just dont be surprised if its not the parties who actually change it. Theres a strange Matrix-type thing happening in Republican politics right now (and, to a lesser extent, among Democrats), where voters are suddenly waking up in their little gooey cocoons and realizing that they dont actually nominate their candidates as theyve always been led to believe they do. As I wrote a few weeks ago, and as the Democratic expert Elaine Kamarck explained to my colleague Jon Ward here, the nominees in both parties have always been chosen by a select group of delegates. For most of our history, those delegates were responsive to voters only to the extent that they cared about fielding a candidate with some demonstrated appeal. In other words, the parties held a few primaries so they could better judge their nominees not so they could empower voters to choose them. By the time the tumultuous, violent cycle of 1968 had ended, though, it was clear that a system entirely dominated by local party bosses couldnt hold without some major retooling. Thats because the traditional nominating process particularly in the Democratic Party was colliding head on with the momentum of powerful social movements. A new generation of activists demanded a system that included more women and minorities and gave more power to the voters themselves. After much reflection and argument, the modern primary system was born, and Republicans quickly emulated it. What this has meant, in practical terms, is that nominees of both parties are chosen, almost without exception, by a majority of primary voters. In truth, though, the same generation of party activists who reformed the system in the late 1960s have spent most of the past four decades trying quietly and bureaucratically to consolidate their own power against popular uprisings. Thus did Democratic leaders invent the all-powerful superdelegates after the 1980 election, to keep another insurgent like Ted Kennedy at bay. (Among those who enacted that plan, by the way, was a guy named Tad Devine, whos now the chief strategist for Sanders. Ruminate on that.) Just four years ago, Republican leaders came up with an arbitrary eight-state rule, which said no one who hadnt won eight primaries could be nominated. The rule was intended to thwart Ron Paul; now, of course, party elders are talking about rescinding it so they can nominate someone who isnt Trump or Ted Cruz. The 2016 campaign seems now to have become something very close to 1968 a moment when the nominating process suddenly feels absurdly out of step with larger shifts in the society. In this case, the irreconcilable conflict isnt about social justice, as it was then, but about the rise of transparency and the toppling of big institutions. Voters in the age of eBay and WebMD, who increasingly decline to affiliate with either party and who tend to believe they could do heart surgery themselves if directed to the right webpage, arent inclined to tolerate an arcane process that gives them only a limited say in the outcome. The illusion of democratization, perpetuated by both parties for 40 years, has been exposed. Writing in The Hill newspaper this week, Mark Penn, the onetime grand strategist of the Clinton world, offered some suggestions for party reform. Penn urged the parties to adopt open primaries, e-voting and a rotating sequence of primaries to reflect different parts of the country all solid ideas, if you ask me. Except for one small problem: A party apparatus exists for a reason, and that reason is to consolidate power, not give it away. You might as well ask the oil industry to build an electric car, or tell movie theaters they should be handing out iPads. Opening up the process in such radical ways might be great for the democracy, but it would be significantly less great for the state chairmen or committeemen who would have to enact those reforms at the expense of their own control. No, reform is more likely to come not from within, but from without. If Trump loses the Republican nomination despite piling up a plurality of votes (or even if he wins only to find that the party establishment undercuts his campaign at every turn), the next generation of Trumps and theyre coming, believe me will be tempted to bypass the nominating process altogether. Heres what I think it will look like: Aspiring, novice candidates who are rich or famous or both will do it the way Ross Perot did it in 1992, or the way Michael Bloomberg threatened to do it this year. They will take on the arcane, state-by-state ballot system and run as independents. And sooner than later, one of them will win. Like Trump, most of these outsider candidates will be populist reflections of their moment, channelers and manipulators of emotion, exploiters of a vacuum in the market. They will deploy in passion and fury what they could never have amassed in organizational muscle. Will our politics get more democratic after 2016? Yes. Nobody said it would get better. Istanbul (AFP) - Turkey's highest appeals court on Thursday overturned scores of convictions over an alleged coup plot against the government of then prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The court threw out an earlier verdict by an Istanbul court which saw many top military officers convicted, saying the original trial had failed to uncover proof of the alleged plot in 2003, media reports said. There was no evidence the "terror organisation", dubbed Ergenekon, was real, the Anatolia news agency said. The appeals court also found that the lower court had relied on illegal wiretappings, statements from witnesses whose identities were not revealed, the illegal wiretapping of members of the National Intelligence Organisation (MIT) and unlawful searches for its 2013 verdict. The ruling is the latest twist in a drama which saw 275 people officers, journalists, lawyers and academics indicted for allegedly conspiring to oust Erdogan, who is now the country's president. - 'Poisoned judicial process' - In one of the biggest cases in the country's recent history, prosecutors claimed they had uncovered a shadowy "deep state" which hoped to foment social unrest and a military coup. In 2014, a Turkish court went so far as to describe the alleged Ergenekon network as an "armed terrorist organization". Scores of defendants were released in the months following their convictions after successful claims that their rights had been violated, but many were ordered not to travel and clamoured for their reputations to be restored. Erdogan's supporters have accused US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen, his one-time ally and now arch enemy, of trying to weaken the country's powerful secularist army by fabricating evidence against officers for the trial. Turkey's deputy prime minister Yalcin Akdogan took to Twitter after Thursday's ruling to accuse Gulen's network of followers of having "poisoned the judicial process" in the original trial. Story continues But Erdogan had originally been seen as a driving force behind the criminal investigation, in his battle against a military establishment which has for decades held it has a duty to protect Turkey's secular democracy against creeping Islam. - 'Could go to retrial' - The investigation into a possible coup was sparked after the discovery in 2007 of a cache of explosives at the house of a former army officer, which prosecutors said led them to uncover a criminally-minded network. The armed forces have long wielded power in Turkey, bringing down four governments between 1960 and 1997. But after falling out in 2014 with Gulen, a self-exiled Muslim cleric who wields tremendous influence across all levels of power, Erdogan said he would favour retrials for those caught-up in the alleged coup plot case. The about-turn followed a huge corruption scandal at the end of 2013 which implicated Erdogan's entourage and which Gulen was accused of masterminding. The government has since then purged the police and justice system of those suspected of being in cahoots with Gulen. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the head of Turkey's main CHP opposition party, welcomed the appeal court's decision Thursday, saying it "revealed how right in our criticisms we were in the past. There are still (independent) judges in this country". Ilkay Sezer, lawyer for the highest-ranking defendant, former military chief Ilker Basbug -- who was originally given a life sentence -- told AFP the case could still go to a retrial. "Any such decision would rest with the prime minister under the constitution," he said. By Gulsen Solaker ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey's appeals court has overturned coup plot convictions imposed in 2013 on a retired military chief and scores of senior figures in a case then regarded as clipping the wings of the secularist and military establishment, state media said on Thursday. The ruling closes the final chapter in a nine-year legal drama whose twists and turns have tracked the shifting balance of power at the heart of the Turkish establishment. In August 2013, ex-military chief General Ilker Basbug was sentenced to life in jail for his role in the "Ergenekon" plot to overthrow then-Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's Islamist-rooted government. Politicians, lawyers and journalists were also among 275 defendants in the case, which emerged in 2007 when an arms cache was discovered in a house in an Istanbul suburb. It was at the time championed by Erdogan and his supporters as a battle against anti-democratic forces and to tame a military that had seen itself as the guardian of secularism, carrying out three coups and forcing a fourth, Islamist-led government from power in the second half of the 20th century. In Thursday's ruling, the appeals court said there had been no "Ergenekon terror group", and that evidence had been collected illegally, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported. SLEDGEHAMMER After the 2013 convictions, the case became entwined in a power struggle between Erdogan and U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whose influential followers in the judiciary had been seen as key to the Ergenekon convictions. Erdogan accused Gulen of using his influence within state institutions to try to unseat him in a coup plot. As their feud deepened, the Ergenekon defendants were released in March 2014, with the government suggesting they too may have been unfairly treated and the victims of a Gulenist plot. Another trial over an alleged 2003 plot against Erdogan, the "Sledgehammer" case, ended with acquittal for more than 200 military officers in March last year. The prosecutor who led the Ergenekon investigation, viewed as close to Gulen, fled to Armenia in August as an arrest warrant was issued for him over his role in a separate investigation of alleged corruption in Erdogan's inner circle. That corruption inquiry was thrown out by the courts and the judiciary and police subjected to a systematic purge of suspected Gulen supporters. Police operations have subsequently targeted thousands of supporters of Gulen, accused of leading what prosecutors described as a "Gulenist Terror Group" trying to overthrow Erdogan. Gulen denies the accusations. (Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by Nick Tattersall and Ralph Boulton) An award-winning Syrian opposition activist says he's been denied entry and turned back from the United States for unspecified reasons. Raed Saleh, a 32-year old from northern Syrian, said Thursday he doesn't know why he was turned back upon landing in Washington. Saleh leads a team of nearly 3,000 search-and-rescue volunteers who have saved thousands of lives in Syria's five-year-old war. He had traveled to the US before where he met with officials and presented evidence of the Syrian government's use of chlorine in bombs. Damascus denies it uses barrel bombs and has said it destroyed its chemical arsenal. Saleh was traveling Monday to receive a humanitarian award by InterAction the largest US alliance of non-governmental organizations. State Department spokesman John Kirby had no specifics on Saleh's case. Search Keywords: Short link: Rio de Janeiro (AFP) - A seaside section of an elevated bicycle path built as part of improvements for the Rio Olympics collapsed, killing two people, after a powerful wave crashed into it Thursday. The tragedy on the $12.6 million path, which was only inaugurated in January, is just the latest setback for Rio de Janeiro as it prepares to host the Olympics in August, the first in South America. Scuba divers searched for a possible third victim in the ocean after the structure fell along its seaside path over a sheer cliff, said Pedro Paulo, a senior official in the mayor's office. Rescuers brought the bodies of two men onto a crowded beach and covered them with a sheet. A woman wept over one of the bodies. Three other people were found alive. One of the victims was a 54-year-old man who was jogging when the path crashed, relatives said. "He always ran there," Joao Ricardo, his brother-in-law, told the G1 news website. Paulo said authorities were investigating the cause of the accident but that a "strong" wave had struck the path, which is held up by pillars, beforehand. "The first possibility is that the force of the wave coming from below up lifted the (bike lane) and then the path fell," he told reporters. "What happened is unforgivable," Mayor Eduardo Paes, who was in Greece to attend the lighting of the Olympic torch, said in a statement. "I ordered an immediate investigation and I am returning to Brazil to follow this closely." The mayor's office said it would check other projects linked to the Games. A witness told Globo television that he had just biked across the path when a big wave appeared. "It hit the (sea) wall and it went up four to five meters. We saw five people who were also biking fall. The sea was very strong today," Damian Pinheiro de Araujo, a 60-year-old retiree, told the network. Waves were still crashing on the cliff where the 50-meter-long (160-foot) section of the bicycle path fell. Story continues The lane runs along Niemeyer Avenue, a road that leads to the Olympic village in Rio's Barra da Tijuca neighborhood. The four-kilometer path links the ritzy beach neighborhood of Leblon with Sao Conrado. The path was built as a city upgrade and tourist attraction ahead of the Olympics. The company that built the path, Contemat-Concrejato, sent technicians to the site to investigate. "We will demand an explanation, whether it comes from the engineers who made the calculations or the company that build the structure," Paulo said. A group of cyclists called for a protest to demand better road safety in the city. Forget what you thought you knew about evolution because researchers have determined that a particle responsible for the way DNA information is decrypted comes from space. Added to this, in an unrelated study, some biologists make the case that human hands actually derive from shark-like gills. So did we all descend from a race of space sharks? DONT MISS: 5 hidden Galaxy S7 features I wish my iPhone had Researchers discovered that the R in RNA known as ribose can form naturally in space. As Science Alert explains, life on Earth requires three macromolecules including RNA, DNA, and proteins. Ribose, a sugar needed to form RNA, may have formed in space on comets and then it may have fallen onto Earth where it combined with other components to create life. Researchers from the University Nice Sophia Antipolis in France were able to simulate a comet landing in a lab, where they then observed the formation of ribose. However, researchers are yet to find ribose in space on a real comet, though that may change in the future. A different study published in the journal Development reveals that researchers believe it may be possible that human limbs evolved from shark gills, a theory that was discarded more than a century ago. Scientists from the University of Cambridge studied skates, or cartilaginous fish just like sharks and rays, that have gills protected by skin flaps. The skin flaps are held up by arches made of cartilage, and components of those arches called branchial rays fan out like just like our fingers. The extent of the similarities here is compelling, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin told Gizmodo. Those rays are really behaving like digits developmentally. Essentially what [study lead author Andrew Gillis] is seeing is that some of the genetic processes that build and pattern gill rays are fundamental to the formation of limbs with fingers and toes. That is a very interesting insight. So there you have it, folks. We all may be related to sharks, and we all may have evolved on this planet thanks to a tiny particle formed somewhere in space if the conclusions in these studies are accurate check both of them in full at the source links below. Story continues Related stories Airbnb wants you to sleep with the fishes - well, sharks, to be precise Is this a UFO? Someone thinks he found an alien ship near Area 51 using Google Maps SharkCam helps researchers understand the predatory behavior of sharks More from BGR: Huge sale drops price of Google Nexus 6P to under $400 This article was originally published on BGR.com By Julia Edwards WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Florida woman was charged with conspiring to illegally export U.S. technology used in underwater drones to a Chinese state-owned entity, according to an indictment unsealed on Thursday. Amin Yu, 53, of Orlando, Florida worked from 2002 until February 2014 to obtain systems and components used in marine submersible vehicles at the direction of her co-conspirators at Harbin Engineering University in China, according to the charges. Yu was charged with 18 counts, including acting as an illegal agent for a foreign government, unlawful export and money laundering. Yu fraudulently and knowingly exported materials in violation of U.S. law, the indictment said. Harbin Engineering University conducts research and development for the Chinese government and military, according to the charging document. Yu was a citizen of China and a lawful permanent resident of the United States while obtaining parts from companies in the United States, Canada and Europe. In an email entered as evidence, Yu said at least one of the devices she had obtained, an underwater acoustic locator, would be used on an underwater drone. The case underlines tensions between the United States and China over intellectual property rights. The FBI has said cases of economic espionage rose 53 percent in 2015, the majority of which involved Chinese nationals. If convicted, Yu faces a maximum of 20 years in federal prison for each count of money laundering and a maximum of 10 years for acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government. By Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (Reuters) - The U.N. Special Envoy for Syria said on Thursday peace talks will continue next week despite the main opposition's decision to leave early, a move he dismissed as "diplomatic posturing". Staffan de Mistura, in an interview with French-language Radio Television Suisse (RTS), said 400,000 people had been killed in the five-year-old war, far higher than the previous U.N. toll which has varied from 250,000 to 300,000. All members of the main Syrian opposition will leave peace talks in Geneva by Friday, their chief negotiator Asaad Zoubi said on Thursday, with little prospect of talks resuming unless the situation radically changes on the ground. "There is also lots of diplomatic posturing and it's normal. That is to say, propose things that are more difficult to accept leave and come back, leave again and come back," de Mistura said. "It's also fairly justified, because there are moments when one asks whether the ceasefire is holding." Asked whether the talks would continue, he said: "We cannot let this drop. We have to renew the ceasefire, we have to accelerate humanitarian aid and we are going to ask the countries which are the co-sponsors to meet." World and regional powers sponsor the fragile cessation of hostilities that went into effect on Feb 27 but has been left in tatters by increased fighting in the past week in Aleppo, Latakia and other hotspots. The latest round of talks, which began on April 13, was meant to focus on the thorny issue of political transition. But the Damascus delegation has called for a national unity government, and shows no signs of accepting opposition demands for President Bashar al-Assad to go. "His interest is to try to stay in power, in my opinion. In the current conditions, the solution is political transition," de Mistura said. "Despite the negotiating tension, they all agree - all of them - that there must be a transition, that means a radical change," he said. De Mistura, asked to confirm whether "the partisans and enemies" of Assad have met in Geneva hotels and spoken directly, replied: "You know in all negotiations, there are formal discussions. And that's exactly the reason you have to extend them by several days, it allows for what is called informal diplomacy." Pressed to say whether the two sides had met, he said: "They all know each other, and they are all Syrians. And I would like to believe in the end they believe in Syria too." (Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay, Editing by Andrew Roche and Angus MacSwan) By Yara Bayoumy WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. citizen who had been sentenced in Bahrain to 10 years in jail in 2013 has been granted a royal pardon and was freed on Thursday after paying a fine, he and his lawyer said. Tagi al-Maidan was born in the United States to a Bahraini mother and Saudi father and his status as a U.S. national had thrown a spotlight on the complex relationship between Washington and Bahrain, a U.S. ally in the volatile Gulf region that has long provided a base for the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet. Maidan was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in jail in 2013 on charges of attempted murder during a disturbance related to Shi'ite Muslim demands for greater rights. He had told Reuters that the charges against him were false, but that he had made a false confession under torture after his detention in October 2012. (http://reut.rs/23LY29H) The government has denied any abuse in the incident, saying it has a "zero-tolerance policy" towards torture. Mohammed al-Jishi, Maidan's lawyer, said he had received an official document that referred to the royal pardon in Maidan's case. A copy of a document issued by Bahrain's Public Prosecution office dated April 21 showed the details of the case. "The accused carried out the sentence in the Reform and Rehabilitation Administration from Sept. 24, 2013 until April 20, 2016, as there was a special royal pardon and the required monetary amount was paid on April 21," the document said. Maidan was freed as President Barack Obama visited Saudi Arabia for talks with leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council, a Gulf Arab grouping that includes Bahrain. Maidan, reached by phone on Thursday, said he was on his way to Dubai. "I was released a few hours ago. They told me a royal pardon was issued and that if I paid a fine, I would be released. I told my mother and she paid it," said Maidan, who sounded composed. Bahrain, which faces criticism over human rights, has seen frequent protests by members of the Shi'ite majority since February 2011, when it quelled a Shi'ite-led uprising demanding that the Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty give up power. The persistent unrest has placed Bahrain on the front line of a struggle for regional influence between Sunni Saudi Arabia, Bahrain's close ally, and Shi'ite Iran, which denies Bahraini accusations of fomenting Shi'ite protests. Bahrain's Shi'ites have long complained of entrenched discrimination in areas such as employment and public services, allegations the Sunni-led government denies. Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry gently pressed Bahrain on human rights as he praised security cooperation with the Gulf monarchy. (Editing by Don Durfee and Frances Kerry) In a statement on Thursday, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists made it clear that while it welcomed interest from the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office in its Panama Papers project, it would not be taking part in any official investigation. Preet Bharara, who heads the U.S. Attorneys office for the Southern District of New York, wrote to ICIJ that his office had opened a criminal investigation regarding matters to which the Panama Papers are relevant. On Thursday, in a brief phone conversation, ICIJ's counsel told prosecutors in Bharara's office that the organization would not turn over unpublished data. "We certainly welcome the U.S. Attorney's Office reviewing all of the information from the Panama Papers series that we have made available to our readers and conducting its own investigation, said ICIJ Director Gerard Ryle, in a statement. However, ICIJ does not intend to play a role in that investigation. Our focus is journalism. ICIJ, and its parent organization the Center for Public Integrity, are media organizations shielded by the First Amendment and other legal protections from becoming an arm of law enforcement," he said. The U.S. investigation is just one of multiple investigations around the world that have been touched off by the Panama Papers revelations published by ICIJ, German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and more than 100 other news organizations. Earlier this month, what had been expected to be a meeting of tax officials from 28 countries drew officials from 35 nations including the United States, who have agreed to work jointly to develop a plan to tackle any tax crimes revealed by Panama Papers data. All 35 jurisdictions represented at the meeting signed up to take joint compliance actins where appropriate, said Australian commissioner of taxation Chris Jordan who called the meeting and who heads the Organization on Economic Cooperation and Developments Joint International Tax Shelter Information and Collaboration network. The network is also exploring the use of taskforces and smaller working groups to make faster inroads, he said, according to the Australian Financial Review. Story continues This story is part of The Panama Papers. Click here to read more stories in this series. Don't miss another Accountability investigation: Sign up for the Center for Public Integrity's Watchdog email. Meanwhile, though, a Hong Kong journalist has been fired following the publication of his newspapers front page devoted to the Panama Papers, which included information about some of Hong Kongs prominent citizens. The influential newspaper Ming Pao didnt mention fired second-in-command editor Keung Kwok-yuen by name when it issued a statement blaming a reduction in staff on a difficult business environment. But it was the second time that a top editor at the paper lost his job shortly after publishing a collaboration with the ICIJ. Former chief editor Kevin Lau Chun-to, was removed from that job in January 2014, leading to fears that the Chinese Communist Party was asserting control over the newspaper. Lau was removed after Ming Pao cooperated with ICIJ on an earlier leak of offshore documents. Keungs coworkers protested over his dismissal as did Hong Kong politicians and others who viewed it as further erosion of the former British colonys independence from mainland China. This story is part of The Panama Papers. Click here to read more stories in this series. Related stories Copyright 2016 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C. HANOI (Reuters) - A top U.S. official on Thursday said China's land reclamation and militarization in the disputed South China Sea was raising tensions and serious questions about its intention. On a visit to Vietnam, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Washington would continue to play a constructive role in supporting its regional allies but was not looking to set up bases for its troops. "United States and Vietnam are sharing interest in maintaining peace and stability in the region, so is China," Blinken said in a speech at a Hanoi university. "But its massive land reclamation projects in the South China Sea and the increasing militarization of these outposts fuels regional tension and raises serious questions about China's intention," Blinken said. Blinken also called on China, and all nations, to respect an upcoming decision by an international arbitration court in a case brought by the Philippines that could dent China's claim to nine-tenths of the South China Sea. Similar comments by Hugo Swire, British minister of state responsible for East Asia, angered China earlier this week. Beijing claims virtually all of the South China Sea and rejects the court's authority in the case, which numerous experts believe will go in favor of the Philippines, potentially raising tensions in the strategic waterway. "The United States will defend our national interests and support our allies and partners in the region," said Blinken. "We are not looking for bases but we will continue to sail, to fly, to operate anywhere that international law allows." More than $5 trillion of world trade is shipped through the South China Sea every year. Apart from China's territorial claims there, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam have rival claims. (Reporting by Mai Nguyen; Editing by Martin Petty) By Michael Martina BEIJING (Reuters) - China has no need to be worried about U.S. plans to deploy a new anti-missile system in South Korea to protect it from North Korea, a senior U.S. diplomat said on a visit to Beijing, adding North Korea had shown no interest in diplomacy. The United States and South Korea have begun talks on possible deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system after North Korea tested its fourth nuclear bomb on Jan. 6 and launched a long-range rocket on Feb. 7, both in defiance of U.N. resolutions, but China firmly opposes the move. "The fact is that North Korea presents a very serious missile threat to the Korean peninsula," Sung Kim, the U.S. special envoy for North Korea, told reporters. "And we, together with South Korea, have decided that we should take appropriate defensive measures to protect ourselves against this missile threat from North Korea." Kim said the United States remained open to credible and meaningful diplomacy with North Korea, but the country had shown no interest. North and South Korea remain technically at war after their 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce, rather than a treaty. The North, whose lone major ally is neighbour China, routinely threatens to destroy South Korea and its major ally, the United States. The North Korean threat was why "we have started formal consultations about the possibility of deploying the THAAD system on the peninsula", Kim said. "It's a completely defensive system. There is no need for China or Russia to be concerned about this system." North Korea has vowed to conduct further nuclear tests, despite stepped up international sanctions. Satellite images show that North Korea may have resumed tunnel excavation at its main nuclear test site, similar to activity seen before the January test, a U.S. North Korea monitoring website reported on Wednesday. Kim said he had no definitive information a fifth test was coming, and that he was not sure China knew either. China is North Korea's most important economic and diplomatic backer, but has been infuriated by North Korea's nuclear and missile tests and has signed on for tough U.N. sanctions. The effectiveness of current or any new sanctions depends heavily on them being fully implemented by China, U.S. officials and analysts say. Kim said China had taken "a number of steps toward implementation" of the latest sanctions resolution. "I hope and I expect that China would take its responsibility very seriously and actually implement all provisions of this unprecedented resolution," he added. China says it has a right to develop what it calls "normal relations" with North Korea. North Korea became China's second-biggest coal supplier in March, with deliveries up 80.6 percent from a year ago to 2.35 million tonnes, data from China's customs authority showed on Thursday. China's Ministry of Commerce announced at the beginning of April that it would ban North Korean coal imports to comply with new U.N. sanctions. But it would make exceptions for coal delivered via North Korea's Rason port from third countries, and for exports intended for "the people's well-being" and not connected to nuclear or missile programmes. (Writing by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Nick Macfie) London (AFP) - Britain announced plans Thursday to take in up to 3,000 of the most vulnerable children and their families from conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa by 2020. The scheme, drawn up in coordination with the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), is aimed at children deemed at risk of child labour, forced marriage and other forms of abuse or exploitation. It will affect children on their own and those accompanied by relatives or carers, and will see several hundred people resettled in the coming year, the Home Office interior ministry announced. The commitment is in addition to Britain's pledge to resettle 20,000 of the most vulnerable refugees from camps on Syria's borders by 2020. So far, more than a thousand -- half of them children -- have arrived. Britain has committed A2.3 billion (2.9 billion euros/$3.3 billion) to helping refugees in Syria and the region, but has opted out of European Union quotas for taking migrants and dispersing them around the 28-nation bloc. "We have always been clear that the vast majority of vulnerable children are better off remaining in host countries in the region so they can be reunited with surviving family members," said Home Office minister James Brokenshire. "However, there are exceptional circumstances in which it is in a child's best interests to be resettled in the UK." The UNHCR's representative to Britain, Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, said the new scheme was an "important contribution" to the agency's efforts to address the needs of refugee children. "We welcome the scheme's focus on children at risk, including unaccompanied and separated children, and the UK's commitment to upholding the principles of child protection and the child's best interest, in implementing the programme," he said. The British government also announced it would be offering 75 expert personnel to help with the processing and administration of migrants in reception areas in Greece, as part of an EU deal with Turkey. KIEV (Reuters) - Ukraine's Finance Minister Oleksandr Danyliuk, who has come under fire over alleged offshore assets, apologized on Thursday for failing to declare that he was director of two firms in Cyprus and one in the Cayman Islands while in public office. In Ukraine, there is growing public interest in overseas assets, after the 'Panama Papers' revealed that President Petro Poroshenko placed his business assets in an offshore account, forcing him to deny accusations of tax evasion. Danyliuk is a figure of especial interest due to his leading role in managing Ukraine's war-torn finances in a new government which critics say lacks the will to root out widespread corruption. Officials are not meant to conduct business while in office and Danyliuk said he did not realize he was still, in name, the director of the three offshore companies after he returned to live in Ukraine in 2010. "I will make the changes in my declarations and want to apologize to the public - all these facts should have been correctly declared by me the first time around," he said in a post on Facebook. He said the mistake had not led to a conflict of interest as it had arisen from a failure by his former business partners and lawyers to formalize his decision to quit as director before he assumed public duties in Ukraine. He said it was important he publicly confessed to the errors in the documents to avoid giving opponents "a means to put pressure on me or let them put spokes in the wheels of important reforms", and to serve as "an example of openness to others". Some Ukrainian lawmakers such as Radical party leader Oleh Lyashko have said Danyliuk's connection to offshore companies disqualifies him from his job. In 2015 Danyliuk declared annual income of 177,985 hryvnia ($7,021), most of which he said came from his salary as deputy head of Poroshenko's administration. ($1 = 25.3500 hryvnias) (Reporting by Natalia Zinets; Writing by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Dominic Evans) Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki said Thursday that they strongly support a French initiative to hold a ministerial meeting, probably on May 30, as a first step to an international conference aimed at reviving the long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process. France will host a meeting of ministers from 20 countries on May 30 to try and relaunch the Israel-Palestinian peace process, Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault announced on Thursday. But in an interview with four newspapers, including Israel's Haaretz and pan-Arab daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi, the minister said Israel and the Palestinians would not be invited to the Paris meeting. Ayrault said the aim was to prepare an international summit in the second half of 2016, which would include the Israeli and Palestinian leaders. "The two sides are further apart than ever," he admitted. But he said: "There is no other solution to the conflict than establishing two states, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, living side by side in peace and safety with Jerusalem as a shared capital. "We cannot do nothing," Ayrault told the newspapers, which also included France's Liberation and the Wall Street Journal. "We have to act before it's too late." He said the discussions would be based on the 2002 Saudi peace initiative, which was largely ignored by Israel. Drawn by oil kingpin Saudi Arabia, the Arab Peace Initiative called on Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territory occupied in 1967, including east Jerusalem, in exchange for a normalisation of ties with Arab countries. It also outlined the creation of a Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank and Gaza and envisaged a "just solution" of the refugee issue. "In Israel, the government is more and more ambiguous on the issue of a two-state solution and the Palestinians are more and more divided," he said. "We have to explain to the Israelis that settlement activity is a dangerous process and that it puts their own security in danger." The initiative was announced in February by Ayrault's predecessor Laurent Fabius. "I am not naive, I am perfectly sincere," he said. "There is no alternative -- the other option is fatalism and I reject that." A former French ambassador to Washington, Pierre Vimont, has been given the job of preparing the meetings. France's former foreign minister Fabius said in January that the government was planning to host an international conference to bring Israel and the Palestinians together along with their American, European and Arab partners in order "to make happen a two-state solution." If the attempt faces a deadlock, Fabius said, France will recognize a Palestinian state. US Secretary of State John Kerry gave the French proposal a guarded welcome when he visited Paris in March. Kerry brokered a previous round of Israel-Palestinian peace talks that collapsed in April 2014. "Not any one country or one person can resolve this. This is going to require the global community, it will require international support," Kerry said. *The story was edited by Ahram Online. Search Keywords: Short link: Washington (AFP) - America stands alone among Western nations for its use of the death penalty, but the number of prisoners it executes has slowed to a trickle in recent years -- partly due to a lack of drugs. Death sentences carried out by lethal injection have fallen dramatically since a European export ban stopped pharmaceutical companies that produce the drugs from sending them to US prisons. Now some states facing shortages of such substances believe they have found a solution: guaranteeing anonymity to pharmaceutical companies that manufacture them. But experts say that strategy comes with risks. Already slowing for several years, the number of US executions dropped to 28 in 2015, the lowest since 1991. The drug shortage is one reason for that -- alongside falling crime rates, flagging public support for capital punishment, and its high cost. Last week, Virginia became the latest state to look to secrecy as a way of reviving the pace of executions after Governor Terry McAuliffe suggested amending legislation currently under debate. He recommended officials be allowed to obtain lethal drugs for executions on an emergency basis, keeping the identities of companies providing the drugs secret. Arkansas, Missouri and Ohio have already adopted similar measures with mixed initial results. McAuliffe, a Democrat, presented his idea as a "reasonable compromise" that would help kill a measure to make the electric chair mandatory when drugs for lethal injections are unavailable -- a proposal backed by the Republicans who control the state legislature. But anti-death penalty activists criticized the debate for offering a flawed choice between two means of meting out death. "The governor's proposal would replace a barbaric practice (the electric chair) with a constitutionally suspect one (a veil of secrecy over executions)," a Washington Post editorial said. - Secret sources - A number of Republican politicians have welcomed McAuliffe's amendment, however, seeing it as an acceptable way out of the current impasse. Story continues It has essentially fallen to the states -- which can choose whether or not to institute the death penalty -- to run the obstacle courses now necessary for obtaining the three drugs. The shortages have prompted some of them to quietly turn to companies not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, or to violate US federal law by finding secret sources abroad. Just this week the state of Texas -- which carries out a majority of all US executions -- was blocked by the agency for the second time in a year from importing the unapproved drug sodium thiopental. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice said it was "reviewing the tentative decision by the Food and Drug Administration and exploring its options moving forward regarding the lawful importation of drugs used in the lethal injection process." Prisons generally use a cocktail of three drugs to execute the condemned, including one that knocks them unconscious, another that paralyzes muscles and a third that stops the heart. Some of the lethal-injection executions carried out since 2014 have been widely criticized after they made prisoners die slowly in agony, gasping, groaning and wracked by convulsions. The Constitution's Eighth Amendment bans "cruel and unusual punishment" and defense lawyers have not hesitated to launch last-minute appeals questioning the effectiveness of various drugs, often successfully. Experts say the moves toward secrecy will provide more grounds for challenging scheduled executions, while news media will probably demand to know drug manufacturers' identities, relying on the First Amendment right to freedom of the press. "State execution secrecy laws also raise questions about obstructing enforcement of federal drug laws against illegal compounding activities," says Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Information Center. - Multiplying appeals - Legal action against the murkiness surrounding pharmaceutical companies providing drugs for lethal injections has been quick to start. In Arkansas, where the authorities want to resume putting prisoners to death after a decade's hiatus, a judge in October halted the executions of eight death-row inmates who demanded to know what products would be injected into them. Last week, the state's Supreme Court said it would take up the case. In Ohio and Missouri, death row also appears to lead to courtrooms more frequently than execution chambers. The future for secrecy laws is far from clear. "It is hard to predict how the different state courts will rule," says Dale Baich, a lawyer who specializes in the death penalty. "Some have ordered the information to be released and others have upheld secrecy." Since secrecy statutes are state laws, the Supreme Court is unlikely to weigh in, he adds, meaning each state will continue grappling with a punishment that's increasingly coming under fire. CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela will begin cutting electricity supplies amid a prolonged drought that has limited power generation, the electricity minister said on Thursday, an unpopular measure for a population already struggling to obtain food and medicine. The rationing effort adds to the woes of President Nicolas Maduro, whose socialist administration is facing chronic problems in supplies of staple goods as low oil prices have stretched the OPEC nation's state-led economic model. Most of the country's electricity comes from the massive Guri hydroelectric dam, whose reservoir has reached historic lows as the El Nino weather phenomenon delays the rainy season. "There will be restrictions," Electricity Minister Luis Motta said in a televised address, avoiding the use of the politically charged term "rationing." "It's necessary, it's a sacrifice." Power cuts will rotate among different hours during different four-hour periods for 40 days starting on Monday, Motta said, adding that additional details would be published on Friday. The crucial oil sector is expected to be exempt from the cuts. Motta said the measure would help raise the level of the reservoir and promised a "careful administration" of the dam. Opposition critics say the situation is also the result of the government's failure to boost thermoelectric generation as an alternative source of power, which would reduce the usage of the water in the reservoir. Late socialist leader Hugo Chavez was forced to ration power during a drought in 2010, which proved to be one of his most difficult years in terms of his public approval rating. The collapse of oil markets nearly two years ago has left Venezuela struggling to maintain its system of currency and price controls, leaving Venezuelans stuck in lines for hours to seek everything from corn flour to basic medicine. Maduro says his government is the victim of an "economic war" led by political adversaries with the support of Washington. (Reporting by Brian Ellsworth; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama) CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan prosecutors have indicted local businessman Josmel Velasquez on charges of money laundering and criminal association as part of an investigation that followed local media reports on the leaked Panama Papers. Local website Armando.info reported this month that Velasquez's brother Adrian, a former aide to late President Hugo Chavez, had opened a shell company in the Republic of the Seychelles with $50,000. The report was based on the documents leaked from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. Prosecutors detained Josmel Velasquez and his mother Amelis Figueroa on Friday at an airport outside Caracas as they were attempting to leave the country, the chief prosecutor's office said in a statement. Raids on family properties had turned up luxury cars, motorcycles and diamond certificates, the statement said. Reuters was unable to immediately obtain comment from the Velasquez family. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists obtained 11.5 million confidential documents with information on 214,000 offshore companies created by Mossack Fonseca that illustrate how individuals and corporations hide assets from public scrutiny and avoid taxes. (Reporting by Corina Rodriguez, writing by Brian Ellsworth; editing by Andrew Hay) Caracas (AFP) - Recession-wracked Venezuela is to ration electricity in 10 of its most populous and industrialized states, including metropolitan Caracas, the socialist government said. It is the latest drastic measure to alleviate a severe electricity crisis which President Nicolas Maduro and his government blame on the El Nino weather phenomenon that causes drought. Critics say it's the result of years of economic mismanagement. Luis Motta Dominguez, minister for electric power, made the announcement during a televised broadcast and said further details would be released in the coming days. Maduro is under growing pressure from the center-right opposition, which vowed to oust him when it took control of the legislature in January after winning elections, blaming him for the crippling economic crisis. Venezuela's economy has plunged along with the price of the oil on which it relies for foreign revenues. Shortages of medicines and goods such as toilet paper and cooking oil are widespread. Maduro blames the collapse on an "economic war" by capitalists. Last week, his government said it was shifting its time zone forward by 30 minutes to save power. Other measures include giving government workers an extra day off each week for the next two months, and Maduro has urged Venezuelan women to stop using their hairdryers. "The greatest power consumption is residential," Motta said, speaking at the Guri hydroelectric plant. The water level in the dam feeding the facility in Venezuela's southeast, which supplies 70 percent of the country's grid, "continues to decline steadily and is approaching the minimum operating height," he added, saying it left authorities no option but to ration. Maduro said Wednesday that residential energy-saving targets had not been met, necessitating the rationing that "will save the Guri" from collapse. Water levels in the country's 18 hydroelectric dams have dropped to dangerously low levels, and citizens regularly suffer blackouts and water rationing. Story continues Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil reserves, but the government has resisted using crude to generate electricity, calling it inefficient. - Other measures - Maduro's other measures to cut electricity use include reducing the workday to six hours for ministries and state companies and ordering them to lower their electricity consumption by 20 percent. He has also ordered shops and hotels to ration electricity, obliging them to generate their own power for several hours a day. Shopping centers have cut back their hours since that plan was introduced. Analysts, however, warn that the measures being introduced will further damage the productivity of the country, which is in serious economic straits. Its inflation rate of 180 percent for 2015 is the highest in the world, and basic goods are scarce. Some workers complain that although they might be getting more time off, they don't have any money to enjoy it. So they end up doing more household chores or lining up at the supermarket for rare subsidized food items. Maduro reached the halfway point of his mandate this week, leaving him prey to legal measures to drive him from office. He has vowed to hold on to power and press on with the socialist "revolution" launched by his late predecessor Hugo Chavez. Caracas (AFP) - Recession-hit Venezuela will turn off the electricity supply in its 10 most populous states for four hours a day for 40 days to deal with a severe power shortage, the government said Thursday. It is the latest drastic measure to alleviate a severe electricity crisis which President Nicolas Maduro and his government blame on a drought caused by the El Nino weather phenomenon. Critics say it is the result of years of economic mismanagement. "Each user will have a temporary suspension of four hours a day. The plan will last approximately 40 days" to ease pressure on the country's largest hydroelectric dam, said Electricity Minister Luis Motta. Maduro is under growing pressure from the center-right opposition, which vowed to oust him when it took control of the legislature in January after winning a landslide election victory, blaming him for the crippling economic crisis. Venezuela's economy has plunged along with the price of the oil which it relies on for foreign revenues. Shortages of medicines and goods such as toilet paper and cooking oil are widespread. Maduro blames the collapse on an "economic war" by capitalists. Last week, his government said it was shifting its time zone forward by 30 minutes to save power. Other measures include giving government workers an extra day off each week for the next two months, and Maduro has urged Venezuelan women to stop using their hairdryers. Motta had warned Wednesday that mandatory power cuts were imminent as he toured the Guri hydroelectric plant, where officials say the water level is approaching the critical limit. The dam supplies 70 percent of the country's electricity. Seventeen other hydroelectric dams are also near critical levels, and citizens regularly suffer blackouts and water rationing. Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil reserves, but the government has resisted using crude to generate electricity, calling it inefficient. Story continues - Beer cuts, too - Maduro's other measures to cut electricity use include reducing the workday to six hours for ministries and state companies and ordering them to lower their electricity consumption by 20 percent. He has also ordered shops and hotels to ration electricity, obliging them to generate their own power for several hours a day. Shopping centers have cut back their hours since that plan was introduced. Analysts, however, warn the measures will further damage productivity. Maduro reached the halfway point of his six-year term this week. Under Venezuela's constitution he can now be removed from office in a recall referendum -- one of the options the opposition has vowed to pursue to oust him. He has vowed to hold on to power and press on with the socialist "revolution" launched by his late predecessor Hugo Chavez. In another bit of bad economic news, the country's largest brewery said it will stop producing beer because of a barley shortage. Cerveceria Polar, maker of the country's best-known brands of beer, said it will run out of the key ingredient on April 29 and is unable to get more because it can not access dollars to pay importers under Maduro's tight currency controls. The brewery is part of Venezuela's largest corporation, Empresas Polar, whose chief executive, Lorenzo Mendoza, has repeatedly clashed with Maduro as the economy has veered into a deep recession. Maduro accuses the billionaire businessman of sabotaging the economy by slowing production, which the leftist leader blames for crippling shortages of food and basic goods. But Polar said Thursday the government's policies left it no choice but to stop making beer. "We have warned the country about the grave situation we are facing and we have exhausted all options to run debts with our international suppliers, all the while waiting for the government to address the debt problem." Venezuela's cash-strapped government is unable to meet business demand for the dollars they need to buy goods and materials abroad. The import-dependent economy contracted 5.7 percent last year, its second year of recession, and inflation came in at more than 180 percent. San Francisco (AFP) - Volkswagen reached an agreement Thursday with US regulators to offer US owners of some 480,000 illegally polluting diesel cars options of "substantial compensation" and to fix the cars, or to buy them back. With the German automaker facing a court deadline for solutions to the emissions scandal, San Francisco district court judge Charles Breyer said the agreement in principle would give owners of its 2.0 liter diesel cars choices for compensation which also included cancelling the contracts for those under lease. The offer, which will likely cost Volkswagen billions of dollars, also included creation of a fund for environmental protection, the company said at a court hearing. Details of the proposal between Volkswagen USA, the Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency were not immediately released. But it appeared to be enough to allow Volkswagen to avert a huge trial over how it would deal with the scandal that has already deeply damaged the company. Volkswagen has admitted it installed illegal software into 11 million 2.0 liter and 3.0 liter diesel engines worldwide, including VW, Porsche and Audi models, that intentionally masked the vehicle's real emissions levels during testing. The San Francisco lawsuit had accused Volkswagen of major damages to the environment and to the owners of the tainted diesel cars. But both the company and the US agencies had sought a deal to avoid trial that included a credible fix to the vehicles, or for VW to go as far as to take all of them off the road and compensate owners. In February Breyer offered the company a March deadline to reach a deal, and then later extended it to Thursday. In a statement, Volkswagen said it "is committed to earning back the trust of its customers, dealers, regulators and the American public." "These agreements in principle are an important step on the road to making things right. As noted today in court, customers in the United States do not need to take any action at this time." Story continues - VW still faces criminal probe - Even if the agreement announced Thursday is fully approved -- further hearings in the coming months will review the details and plaintiff's views -- the company still faces fines potentially running to the tens of billions of dollars from US regulators. And it remains under criminal investigation over the scandal in the United States, as well as investigations in a number of other countries where emissions rules were violated. The Department of Justice said in a statement that the criminal probe continues. "This agreement in principle addresses one important aspect of the departments pending case against VW, namely what to do about the 2 liter diesel cars on the road and the environmental consequences resulting from their excess emissions,"spokesman Wyn Hornbuckle said. "The department's other investigations into VW's conduct remain active and ongoing." Volkswagen will also have to address the claims of some 80,000 owners of 3.0 liter cars that were also equipped with the emissions-cheating software. The cheat software limits the output of toxic nitrogen oxides to US legal limits during emissions tests by regulators. When the vehicles are in actual use, the software helps them to achieve high levels of fuel efficiency but at the same time allows the cars to spew poisonous gases at up to 40 times the permitted levels. Volkswagen shares surged Thursday on news of the deal, adding 4.0 percent in Frankfurt to 124.48 euros ($140.58). UN-brokered peace talks to end 13 months of armed conflict in Yemen opened Thursday in Kuwait with a call for compromise between the rebel and government delegations from the impoverished state. The talks were originally slated to start on Monday but rebels stayed away in protest at alleged Saudi violations of a ceasefire, in effect since April 11. The rebel delegation from the Shia Houthi militia and allied representatives of ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh arrived just hours before the talks finally started. Foreign Minister Sheikh Sabah al-Khaled Al-Sabah of host country Kuwait opened the meeting by hailing the talks as "a historic opportunity" to end the bloodshed. "War will only lead to more devastation, losses and displacement of people," he said. UN special envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed appealed to the warring parties to work to reach a comprehensive and durable accord. "Today, you have one of two options; a secure nation that guarantees an honourable life or the ruins of a nation," he said. Ould Cheikh Ahmed called for "compromise" solutions and stressed Yemen was "closer to peace than any time before". The first session ended after less than two hours of talks and the next round would be held on Friday afternoon, a delegate told AFP. More than 6,400 people have been killed and almost 2.8 million displaced since a Saudi-led Arab coalition began operations in March 2015 against the Iran-backed rebels who have seized swathes of territory, including the capital Sanaa. The UN has been pushing the talks that it hopes will end a conflict that has been exploited by jihadists and sent tensions between Shia Iran and its Gulf Arab neighbours soaring. President Abd-rabbo Mansour Hadi had sent a message to Ould Cheikh Ahmed rejecting "rebel conditions to modify the agreed agenda", according to a member of the government delegation. Hadi's representatives arrived in Kuwait City at the weekend and threatened to pull out if meetings did not begin on Thursday. Mahdi al-Mashat, a representative of rebel leader Abdulmalik al-Houthi, said Wednesday the rebels had been assured the agenda for the talks would be "clear and tackle issues that could help achieve peaceful solutions". Writing on Facebook, Mashat warned however that "we will have the right to suspend our participation" if the assurances are not met. Diplomats say rebels are demanding an end of the Arab coalition operations and a naval blockade on Yemen. They also want UN sanctions against some of their leaders, including Saleh, to be lifted. Saudi Arabia's ally Turkey said on Thursday that it has frozen assets belonging to Saleh and his son, in line with the sanctions. Saleh amassed billions of dollars and stashed assets in at least 20 countries during his 33 years in power, according to a UN report released last year. US President Barack Obama was Thursday in Saudi Arabia, where he was expected to discuss the wars in Yemen and Syria with Gulf leaders. Ben Rhodes, one of Obama's closest foreign policy advisers, urged all Yemeni warring sides to participate "constructively" in the Kuwait talks. A political solution would "allow for a focus on (Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) AQAP in Yemen," he said. Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS) group have gained ground in the government-held south, carrying out attacks against officials. Yemen's rebels seized control of Sanaa in 2014 before expanding, forcing Hadi's government to declare main southern city Aden as the temporary capital. And while the loyalists managed since July to reclaim large areas, they have been unable to dislodge the rebels from Sanaa and other key areas. Fighting has continued on several fronts, military sources said, as each side blamed the other for truce breaches. The rebels fired a Katyusha rocket late Wednesday on the loyalist-held city of Marib, east of the capital, according to an AFP journalist there. Pro-government military sources reported heavy fighting in Nahm, northeast of Sanaa, and sporadic clashes elsewhere. The rebels said on their sabanews.net website that coalition warplanes carried out two strikes on Nahm and flew sorties over other areas, including Sanaa. Search Keywords: Short link: Kuwait City (AFP) - Delayed peace talks aimed at ending 13 months of conflict in Yemen resumed on Friday, a day after UN mediators finally managed to get warring sides to the table. The United Nations hopes negotiations -- which were originally due to begin on Monday -- will put a stop to fighting across Yemen that has killed more than 6,800 people and driven 2.8 million from their homes since March last year. The talks resumed on Friday afternoon, Charbel Raji, spokesman for UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed told AFP. Two delegations, each of seven members, representing the government, and the rebels and their allies, joined Ould Cheikh Ahmed at the meeting, a delegate said. The envoy appealed to both government and rebel delegations to seize the opportunity of the talks in Kuwait, saying Yemen was "closer to peace than any time before". The rebel delegation -- consisting of representatives of the Shiite Huthi militia and allied forces loyal to ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh -- arrived in Kuwait late on Thursday after receiving assurances from the UN that a ceasefire -- in place since April 11 -- would be respected. Delegates representing the government of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi had threatened to pull out of talks altogether if the rebels were not around the table by Thursday evening. A first session was eventually held and lasted less than two hours, a delegate told AFP. Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheikh Sabah al-Khaled Al-Sabah hailed the talks as "a historic opportunity" to end the bloodshed. "War will only lead to more devastation, losses and displacement of people," he said. Yemen has been riven by fighting since a Saudi-led coalition launched a military intervention last year against Iran-backed Huthi rebels, who had seized the capital and much of the rest of the country. The violence has allowed Al-Qaeda and its jihadist rival the Islamic State group to make headway, overrunning swathes of southern Yemen and establishing a toehold around second city Aden -- where the Saudi-backed government is based. Story continues The conflict has stoked tensions between Sunni heavyweight Saudi Arabia and its Shiite rival Iran, which has been accused of smuggling weapons to the rebels. Previous UN-sponsored peace efforts failed to make any headway, and the last ceasefire in December was repeatedly violated and eventually abandoned by the Arab coalition on January 2. - Honourable life or ruin - But the UN envoy said the latest truce and negotiations offered a unique chance to end the violence. "Today, you have one of two options -- a secure nation that guarantees an honourable life or the ruins of a nation," he told delegates. The rebel delegation met Ould Cheikh Ahmed after the opening session, their news agency reported late Thursday, and stressed the "need to secure the ceasefire." The delegation said the "key to reaching a solution is agreeing on a transitional authority," Sabanews.net reported. Diplomats say the rebels are demanding an end to the coalition's air campaign and naval blockade, as well as its ground operations. They also want UN sanctions against some of their leaders, including Saleh, to be lifted. UN Security Council Resolution 2216, which is seen as a basis for any peace plan, states that the rebels must withdraw from seized territories and disarm before talks can progress. But diplomatic sources have said the rebels are demanding a change to the UN initiative, preferring to first agree on a political leadership for Yemen before making military concessions on the ground. At the opening session Thursday, Ould Cheikh Ahmed said the UN process "will not necessarily follow a particular sequence." "Instead, discussions will happen in parallel through working committees that will look into implementation mechanisms of each element, for the sake of reaching one comprehensive agreement that paves the way for a peaceful and orderly transition." The Huthis, who had waged an on-off rebellion for a decade, swept from their stronghold in the northern mountains to take Sanaa unopposed in September 2014, before storming south and forcing Hadi into exile in March last year. With the support of coalition troops and air power, Hadi's loyalists have managed to oust the rebels from Aden and neighbouring southern provinces as well as some districts on the Saudi border. But the rebels and their allies remain in control of the capital and much of the northern and central highlands, as well as the Red Sea coast. Despite the nominal ceasefire, fighting has continued, particularly around the battleground third city of Taez, where loyalist forces have been under rebel siege for months, and in Jawf province on the Saudi border, military sources said. LUSAKA (Reuters) - The measured response by Zambia's central bank to the turbulence in the kwacha exchange rate has helped towards its recovery, President Edgar Lungu said on Thursday. The Bank of Zambia raised interest rates by 300 basis points in November in a bid to curb inflationary pressures stemming from the sharply weaker kwacha, but left them on hold in February, citing concerns about slowing growth. "My administration has the full confidence in the leadership of the central bank which is why we allow them the necessary autonomy to execute monetary policy professionally as they can," Lungu said in a statement. "The synergy between officials handling fiscal and monetary policy gives me even greater confidence that we are on a recovery path." The kwacha has recouped some of last year's heavy losses which were mainly triggered by a sharp slide in the price of copper, although it has come under renewed pressure this week after a credit rating downgrade from Moody's. Lungu criticised politicians and analysts who have dismissed the kwacha's recovery as a political gimmick ahead of general elections in August. He said Africa's second-biggest copper producer was experiencing increased investor interest in government securities and renewed confidence in the mining industry. Glencore will invest over $1.1 billion in Zambia to sink three copper mine shafts with new technology that will extend mine life by over 25 years. "I am focused on consolidating these gains to ensure that stability and growth increases," Lungu said. (Reporting by Chris Mfula; Editing by Stella Mapenzauswa) By Chris Mfula LUSAKA (Reuters) - A ratings downgrade by Moody's would have little impact on Zambia as it was already negotiating a programme with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), officials and analysts said. Moody's downgraded the southern African nation's long-term issuer rating to B3 from B2 late on Tuesday and changed the outlook to negative from stable, due to anticipated fiscal slippages in 2016 and prospects of further debt deterioration. Presidential spokesman Amos Chanda said Zambias budget deficit would not worsen because of austerity measures. "There will be progressive removal of subsidies and the government is drawing up plans to significantly reduce subsidies on electricity, fuel and fertiliser," Chanda told Reuters. The kwacha weakened 1.5 percent to 9.3900 per dollar, as sentiment for commodity-linked currencies waned with copper prices backtracking after a 3-week rally as well as a dent to broader investor confidence after Moody's downgrade. "In essence, it means that there are few alternatives open to the sovereign other than to adopt the policy prescriptions of the Fund," Standard Chartered Bank Africa chief economist Razia Khan said in response to an email from Reuters. "The downgrade nonetheless serves as a reminder of the many challenges that Zambia faces." Zambia and the IMF began talks in March on an aid programme after agreeing that the country's budget deficit was not sustainable. Moody's said Zambia was likely to face liquidity pressures and find it difficult to finance the budget deficit. In February, Finance Minister Alexander Chikwanda had told parliament the 2016 budget deficit would be contained at around 3.9 percent of GDP. Zambia's economy is expected to grow at 3.7 percent in 2016, up from 3.6 percent last year, due to shrinking demand of its main export copper, the central bank said in February. [J8N14Z02J] Moody's said Zambia's debt could exceed 60 percent of GDP by 2018. University of Zambia analyst Chrispin Mphuka said the debt issue would be addressed by the IMF programme which is expected to kick in after general elections in August. "Once the IMF programme is in place, there will be measures to control the debt and it is unlikely to get to the levels that Moody's is projecting now," Mphuka told Reuters. (Editing by James Macharia; Editing by Jon Boyle) From LennyLetter When I moved to New York by myself a decade ago, I developed this thing where I believed that seeing certain people, "celebrities" to me, was a sign of luck, and a sign that my life was on the right path. These were not the kinds of people who would be in the pages of Us Weekly but creatives whose work I admired, like the photographer Ellen von Unwerth or the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister. Many years ago, while waiting to cross the street at Bleecker and Lafayette, I noticed the designer Maria Cornejo standing in front of me. I was a big fan of her minimal-but-not-boring aesthetic. I broke into a huge smile, and as we walked our separate ways, I thought: OK, everything is where it's supposed to be. Cornejo's clothes exude an undeniable power, a sense of cool. Fashion loves to describe things as "effortless," but that is what her clothes are. Her dresses are architectural but not conceptual. They're made for a woman's body. A body with curves and bulges and muscles and life. It's no surprise then, the kind of women her clothes attract - women confident in their own skin, like artist Cindy Sherman and First Lady Michelle Obama. A few years after I saw Maria on the street, I ended up working at her store in NoHo for about three years. That only made things a little weird when I sat with her a few weeks ago in the backyard of a restaurant not too far from her studio. I'd been a fan of her designs, but I also loved that she was Chilean. I felt like she was "my people." While I knew that she had left Chile for England after the civil unrest that developed in her home country in 1973, I did not realize what this actually meant for the luminous, peaceful woman that I got so used to seeing on my day-to-day. It was difficult to hear her hardships, but I came away from our conversation feeling like Maria was almost superhuman, not so much because of the success she's had but because she is a person so filled with love that she immediately changes the energy of any room she walks into. I understood why her clothes are imbued with such a sense of power, and why when you put them on you feel like you can take on anything, because she already has. Story continues Laia Garcia: I wanted to start with your childhood in Chile. How old were you when you left? Maria Cornejo: I was 12. LG: How much did you know about what was going on at the time politically? MC: I remember that September the 11th [the day of the coup d'etat in Chile], it was teacher's day. I had prepared all these things for my teacher because we were supposed to do a little presentation. I remember going to school, and we could hear the American bomber jets bombing La Moneda [Chile's house of government] and the tanks rolling down. It was really scary. Then my parents lost their jobs. They both worked for the National Publishing Company, my dad in sales, my mom in the art department. They both got fired, so my dad went from being the head of sales to selling eggs at the market out of the back of a truck to put food on our table. It was really bad. Even before the extreme right [took power] in Chile, there was no food. They were holding blockades. We had coupons to come buy food: to buy sugar, oil, anything. You could only get like four eggs a week or something. The right really wanted [President Salvador] Allende out, because he was the first-ever elected Socialist president anywhere in the world, and he was a good man. They were basically starving people to make them revolt and making them feel that it was the government's fault. It was really scary. My parents, they were both Socialists, they were young - 30, 31. They were both successful career people. They had been teachers, and my dad spoke English. My parents came from very humble families. My grandfather had a construction business coming from farmland, and my grandmother could never read or write. We were very spoiled. We had a nice house, and then all of a sudden we had nothing. My grandfather had a little plot of land like three blocks from where he lived with a tiny, little house, basically like a hut. We went to live there right after the coup. My mother got charged with treason. At the time I didn't know what was going on; she told us afterward. She was being judged, and the only reason she got away is because my godfather had been in the air force, and he was quite high up. He was dead, but the guy who used to clean his shoes was one of the judges at her court case, and he recognized her. They tortured people in front of her, but they let her go because he recognized her. He said, "I give you 24 hours to leave. You have to get out, 24 hours. I can't help you." We got taken out by the United Nations. We literally left with the clothes on our back and nothing else. Everything was gone. We ended up in Peru for a year. We were sleeping on the floor of a church for half of it. Every Sunday when they had to do Mass, we had to clear the mattresses. Then we ended up in this house with all these refugees. Our parents seemed OK, so we felt like it was OK. Even though it was a crazy time, we felt that we were safe, so that fear of getting out was already done. LG: How long was it before your family left for England? MC: It was a year. Basically my dad had to apply [for a country to take us in]. His first choice was Cuba, and then it was England and Canada because he spoke English. You had to wait, and every day they would come and get people. Like, the Cuban embassy would say, "OK, we have five seats on the plane," you never knew what was going to happen. I remember that day we'd gone to the beach, and the Cuban embassy came, so we missed the boat, and so we go back to the bottom of the list. The next one that came out was England. So we ended up in England, in a house in Shepherd's Bush. I remember arriving. It was the middle of winter. All I knew about England was Sherlock Holmes films. I imagined that it was just going to be dark and foggy. I didn't speak a word of English. We ended up in this big house full of refugees. You had to share rooms with everybody. They had this damp room full of clothes, like bedding and clothes, and you just had to pick through. It's one of the reasons why I'm not so keen on vintage, just having somebody else's clothes ... I have a hard time, just the smell of it. It's funny, I had the same conversation with Hussein Chalayan (who had to flee his native Cyprus for England after civil unrest), and he feels the same way. LG: How long did it take for you to feel normal in this new life? MC: It's hard to say. We stayed in London for about six months, and then we got sent to Manchester, because they had a certain amount of refugees locked into the city. So we ended up in Manchester, which was ... I don't know if I felt normal? I mean, when did I feel normal? I think I'm just beginning to feel normal, you know. I'm an American now. It took like a year before I could really understand English, to feel like I wasn't a fish out of water. I remember having this great feeling of frustration because I couldn't say the word crisp because it's such not a Latin sound. Crisp. I remember I had such a thing when I actually could say it. My mom died soon after that, so it was sad. She died in '77, two years after we got to England. LG: Were you always a creative person, or was there something specific in England that led you into more creative pursuits? MC: I was into clothes. I made clothes with my grandmother, hand-knitted. I made clothes because she made clothes. My aunt made stuff, my mom was creative, so I was surrounded by that. When I moved to England, it was '75, and everything was happening. My whole teenage life is England, glam rock, and David Bowie, and Sex Pistols, and Iggy Pop, all that stuff. LG: What started your interest in fashion as a career? MC: I remember doing my A-levels, at the time I was doing pretty well in chemistry and science, but I was always doubting myself, because I kept going to the teacher like, I think this is wrong. It's too easy for me to figure this out. My art teacher was really encouraging me, because he really liked that I could draw. I felt very torn. At that time I had to pick one, and I felt much more confident in the arts than I did in chemistry. My big thing was that I actually wanted to be like Jacques Cousteau. LG: Really? MC: That was my aspiration in life! Except I couldn't swim. Then when I could swim, I was a shit swimmer, and I realized I hated being underwater anyway, so I changed the plans. When I went to art school, I just really enjoyed being creative. I realized that there was something really special about it. It was a special time in England as well. It was never about money, it was just more about being creative. When I went to college it was right after punk, and there was this feeling of possibility. After being quite shy, for me it was a real awakening. Clothes became a form of self-expression, a way of dealing with being an alien. I mean, I was an alien. Especially being Chilean - when I moved to Manchester, the kids were evil. They literally used to scream at me down the street, "You fucking Paki!," because it was a really rough area; they thought I was Pakistani or Indian. So for me, it was almost like trying to camouflage. I would say clothes are like camouflage. They give you confidence, they give you that sense of power. LG: So how did your first line, Richmond-Cornejo, come about? MC: I met John [Richmond, her partner on the label] in a gay club on New Year in the early '80s. Then I decided I was going to go to London for college. At the time, my father didn't want me to leave Manchester. I was helping him with my two brothers, and I was 18 or 19. After doing it for four years, I was going to have a nervous breakdown. I had to leave. I said to him, "I'm not their mother, I'm not your wife." It was a really hard separation. I did graphics for a year at Stockport College, then I decided to do fashion in London, so I moved there. I grew up in the public eye, from the minute that John and I did that first collection, my college collection I sold to Joseph [an important designer store]. I sold my menswear to Jim Kerr from the Simple Minds, Chrissy Hynde had my stuff, Iggy Pop - it was very full-on. It was all too much, too, and I was bulimic. I was 21, and everyone was saying how well we were doing, and I was bulimic. I was so miserable, and we were going to Japan every four weeks, and Italy. I was never really in London that much; I was traveling all the time. John and I just ended up from being like a love story to it just not working out. I did all my growing up, all my mistakes, with my own money, with my own time. It was very public, my and John's split was very public. It just felt toxic. After being in the spotlight, you can understand why people sort of go a little loopy. It's almost too much and too young. We had like 20-odd stores in Japan; people had me signing the back of their jackets. We had a scarf with my face and John's on it. It was the best-selling thing out of the collection. It was weird. LG: Incredible. So when you started your current line, Zero+Maria Cornejo, you knew everything that you didn't want to do, because you already had lived through it. MC: Yeah, and so that probably has been the conflict, especially in the last ten years. I think you have to do things that sit well with you, because life's too short. It's hard to live with yourself if you're not happy with what you're doing, or the way you're doing things. I think that's one of the things for me, is losing everything so young, and then losing my mother so young, and then losing my dad. People are important: the way you treat people, the way you behave with people. That's one of the lessons I learned. I don't want to work with people I don't like. I don't want to be in situations that I don't feel comfortable in. Life's too short. So you try and find like-minded people, and you surround yourself with them. That's how our company is built. I'm 53 now; my dad died when he was 55. I'm thinking, God, I've got two years, what am I going to do with the next two years? What is going to happen? Got to make a difference, got to do something. All of a sudden you face it, and you think: Well, actually this is why I'm doing it. This interview has been condensed and edited. Laia Garcia is Lenny's deputy editor. Bernie Sanders might be the only viable Jewish candidate in American presidential history, but Hollywoods Jewish community seems to think theres something not quite kosher about him. As Sanders sets his sights on California, which has emerged as a must-win state in the Democratic race for the White House, he may have to brace for a wave of resistance from Jewish leaders in Hollywood who view him as anti-Israel. He doesnt understand the complexities of the Middle East, Clinton supporter and one of Hollywoods biggest Democratic donors Haim Saban told TheWrap. Its been proven over and over again. Saban, an Israeli-American media mogul, is just one on a long list of Jewish Hollywood power players increasingly underwhelmed with the senator from Vermont, particularly when it comes to his views on Israel. In fact, Hollywoods biggest Jewish heavy hitters, including Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, Jeffery Katzenberg, Barbara Streisand, Amy Schumer, Dustin Hoffman, Abbi Jacobson and Lena Dunham, are all on Team Hillary. Also Read: Hollywood Stars for Bernie Sanders (List) While Sanders does have a few recognizable Jewish celebrity backers of his own including Sarah Silverman, Jeremy Piven, Zoe Kravitz, Art Garfunkel and Vampire Weekends Ezra Koenig its nowhere near as impressive as Clintons. From the beginning, Sanders has been slow to attract Hollywoods Jewish movers and shakers, many of whom believe the Vermont senator has been deliberately downplaying his religious ancestry for political reasons. When Sanders thanked supporters following his landslide victory in New Hampshire earlier this year, he spoke about being the son of a Polish immigrant who came to this country speaking no English and having no money. The crowd cheered. But his words were like nails on a chalkboard for many Jews watching in disbelief. Rabbi Michael Paley of New York told the New York Times he was surprised that the Vermont senator failed to mention his father was a Polish Jewish immigrant, an important distinction. Story continues Also Read: Bernie Sanders Slams 'Bad' Israel After Skipping AIPAC Convention Last month, Sanders was the only presidential candidate Democratic or Republican to skip the annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most influential pro-Israel lobby in the country. While Sanders cited a prior commitment, he did manage to find time to slam Israel just hours later during a CNN town hall, telling Wolf Blitzer that, Overwhelmingly the United States time and time again has looked aside when Israel has done some bad things. Sanders also criticized Israel for its response to Gazas rocket attacks in 2014, which led to Operation Protective Edge, a two-month long bloody conflict. The kind of destruction that was wreaked on Gaza during that war was way above what needed to be done for military purposes, Sanders said. To be fair, there are plenty of Jews and even Israelis who agree with Sanders assessment. But many in Hollywood believe Sanders condemnation lacked context. Israel did level swaths of Palestinian territory near the border with Gaza essentially creating a buffer zone between it and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip but only after Hamas fired thousands of rockets on Israeli cities from those very same areas. A lot of people were surprised and disappointed he didnt speak at AIPAC, Los Angeles-based lawyer and Clinton fundraiser, Dana Perlman whose mother is a Holocaust survivor told TheWrap. There was so much energy and excitement about a Jewish-American vice president when Joe Lieberman joined Al Gores ticket in 2000. Im not seeing that energy when it comes to Sanders. Also Read: Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders Clash Over Israel in Brooklyn's Democratic Debate During an interview with The New York Daily News earlier this month, Sanders continued his criticism of Israel, saying that over 10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza. Does that sound right? It actually doesnt. In fact, its almost seven times the United Nations estimates. He then added that, Hospitals, I think, were bombed. Sanders did not mention that those hospitals also served as Hamas private launching pads for rockets aimed at Southern Israel and Tel Aviv. The Anti-Defamation League quickly urged Sanders to correct his misstatements. He is critical of Israels behavior based on misinformation, Saban said. If rockets are shot out of hospitals targeting women, men, children not soldiers do you take out that rocket launcher or not? And earlier this month, Sanders was forced to fire his national Jewish outreach coordinator Simone Zimmerman just two days into her new gig, after a particularly vulgar Facebook post she wrote about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was revealed. All that has taken a hit on Sanders polling numbers among Jewish voters, a problem that extends well beyond the Thirty-Mile Zone. While a recent Siena Research survey showed Clinton leading Sanders by a mere 4 percent (52-48), when it came to Jewish Democratic voters, Sanders trailed Clinton by a whopping 22 points (60-38). Also Read: Bernie Sanders Meets Pope Francis, Calls Pontiff a 'Beautiful Man' He doesnt have a long-standing involvement with the Jewish community as Hillary does, L.A.-based Democratic strategist and Clinton supporter Donna Bojarsky told TheWrap. She obviously loves Israel. The Clintons have had a warm relationship with Israel for decades. Unlike President Barack Obama, whos had a contentious, sometimes dismissive, relationship with Netanyahu, Hillary Clinton was able to find common ground with Israels hawkish leader. For me, it was very telling that during the Democratic debate in New York, she offered what I think was a very sympathetic portrait of probably one of the most controversial Israeli prime ministers in history, Danielle Berrin, writer of the Jewish Journals weekly blog Hollywood Jew told TheWrap. Her defense of Bibi came from a deep internalization of the challenges he faces. Also Read: Mazel Tov! Bernie Sanders Becomes First Jewish Primary Winner But Berrin does not believe Sanders hates Israel. She sees him as representing the views of an emerging generation of Jewish Hollywood power players who dont necessarily have Israel at the top of their concerns when choosing a presidential candidate, and believe change in the Middle East will only come with intense international pressure. Even so, Berrin says Sanders may never enjoy the kind of support and admiration from the Jewish community in Hollywood or elsewhere as the Clintons. To ask the Jewish community to get excited about Bernie Sanders when hes not excited about the Jewish community is a tall order, she said. Sharon Waxman contributed to this report. Related stories from TheWrap: NY Daily News Endorses 'Warrior Realist' Hillary Clinton Over 'Fantasist' Bernie Sanders Hollywood Democrats 'Disappointed' as Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders Get Nasty Bernie Sanders Gets Slammed for 'Disaster' Interview With NY Daily News Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff flew to New York on Thursday to sign a global climate change pact, giving her an international stage to address efforts to oust her. Rousseff's trip comes just four days after the lower house of Congress sent impeachment proceedings to the Senate, which is expected to vote on opening a trial by mid-May. Rousseff is going to the United Nations to sign the climate deal on Friday, but a government official told AFP that her speech would include "one sentence" about the political crisis back home. The opposition has already warned the leftist leader against criticizing the impeachment process, which she has described as a "coup," while she is abroad. Senator Cassio Cunha Lima said it would amount to a "crime against the nation." Rousseff decided to go to New York even though she had cancelled her attendance at the ceremony to light the Olympic flame in Greece on Thursday ahead of the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro in August. Her trip means that Vice President Michel Temer, whom she accuses of conspiring to oust her, will be in charge of the country until her return, due late Friday or early Saturday. Rousseff says charges that she used illegal accounting tricks to mask budget deficits have no legal basis. If the Senate opens a trial next month, Rousseff would have to step aside for 180 days and Temer would take over in the meantime. After that, a two-thirds majority vote would be enough to oust her permanently, leaving Temer to serve out her term, which ends in late 2018. Search Keywords: Short link: EU interior ministers formally agreed Thursday on a proposal for a new border and coastguard force that could intervene in under-pressure countries like Greece to slow the influx of migrants. The proposal must now go to the European Parliament for approval which officials said could come by June to allow the new force to be operational by the end of the summer. Brussels also played down concerns that the new force would impact national sovereignty, saying individual countries would have to give their consent before it intervened. "Today the council has reached an agreement on the European border and coast guard," EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos told a news conference after the ministers met in Luxembourg. "If we keep up this pace I have confidence we will be able to finalise the legislative process by June". In December, EU leaders set a June 30 deadline for agreement on the new force, a key part of the bloc's strategy for tackling the flow of the migrants along with a deal with Turkey sealed last month. Brussels aims to have the force start operations in September and be fully operational by November, under a roadmap unveiled last month to restore the passport-free Schengen Zone after the travails of the migration crisis. Several countries have reintroduced border controls that were eliminated years ago as part of Schengen as the EU deals with a record flow of more than one million migrants and refugees since the start of 2015. Avramopoulos said it was "impossible" that the force would erode national sovereignty, a growing concern in a bloc increasingly beset by criticism of meddling by Brussels in countries' affairs. "National sovereignty is not threatened by this initiative -- on the contrary I would say," he said. "It will intervene always with the approval of the member state." A European source said the ministers had agreed that the European Council grouping member states would have to agree on any intervention -- effectively giving the concerned country a veto if it did not consent. Search Keywords: Short link: There are still major gaps in intelligence sharing on Islamic State fighters returning to Europe in the wake of the Brussels and Paris attacks, the EU's anti-terrorism coordinator warned Thursday. The report by Gilles de Kerchove to interior ministers meeting in Luxembourg comes after repeated calls by European Union leaders for greater cooperation in dealing with jihadists returning from Syria and Iraq. "There are still significant gaps with regard to feeding Europol" with data on so-called foreign terrorist fighters who travel abroad and are then at risk of returning to carry out attacks, said the report, a copy of which was obtained by AFP. The European police organisation's database contained only 2,956 foreign fighters despite official estimates saying that around 5,000 EU citizens had travelled to fight with the IS group. More than 90 percent of the names on the database were entered in 2015 by just five out of the 28 EU member states, he added. Another database, the European Information System, contained only 1,615 names, he said. "The Paris and Brussels attacks seem to indicate that some if not most of the attackers were known to the police... there also seem to be links to several other member states," de Kerchove's report added. This shows the "importance... of feeding the data" it said. A European source told AFP that "certain countries were not feeding all the databases", adding that "dangerous individuals can therefore return and not be detected." The EU ministers meeting in Luxembourg called for a "change in mentality" to improve counter-terrorism following the November Paris attacks in which 130 people were killed and the March 22 Brussels airport and metro suicide bombings which killed 32 people. Both attacks appear to be the work of a single IS cell straddling France and Belgium. EU migration and anti-terrorism commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos said member states' databases should be "interconnected with a single click." Search Keywords: Short link: Egypt has been facing a historic shortage in foreign currency since the end of last year, a major obstacle to attracting foreign investments, Minister of Finance Amr El-Garhy told Ahram Online Tuesday on the sidelines of the AmCham Door Knock meetings in Washington DC. El-Garhys statements coincide with a leap in the rate of the US dollar against the local currency on the black market, reaching around EGP 11, while the official rate has been stable at 8.78, according to Al-Ahram news website citing traders. A delegation from US companies and members of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt is currently visiting Washington DC to meet officials and policy makers from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the US State Department, as well as investors and executives of large US companies. Egypt's foreign currency reserves stood at $16.5 billion in March, less than half of the $36 billion it registered before the 2011 uprising, which was followed by political and security unrest that spooked investors and tourists, the main sources of foreign currency. However, El-Garhy stressed that we have faith that investors will come to our country because reforms are ongoing. Egypt embarked on a fiscal reform programme in the fiscal year 2014/15, raising new taxes including the property tax and cutting energy subsidies to clench on a growing budget deficit. The government aims to revive the economy and improve the state budget deficit through implementing the value added tax and continuing with the subsidy cut plans, El-Garhy said. But carrying on with liberalising energy prices is not on the agenda now, he added. Last week, El-Garhy said that due mainly to lower global energy costs, Egypt will reduce spending on fuel subsidies by nearly 43 percent in the 2016/17 budget to reach EGP 35 billion ($3.94 billion) in an attempt to cut the budget deficit down to 9.8 percent of the GDP, compared to 11.5 percent projected by the end of current fiscal year. Also, to trim this deficit, Egypt will consider all options for long term debt, including international bonds and global financial institutions, El-Garhy said. Egypt does not have any sensitivity towards dealing with any international financial institution, El-Garhy said. On 15 April, an International Monetary Fund official said at a press conference in Washington that Egyptian authorities have not formally requested a financial programme of assistance from the IMF. Search Keywords: Short link: In the first of our Egypt's photographic memory series, we celebrate Salah Jaheen, as today marks 30 years since Egypt bid farewell to one of her dearest and most talented sons. A pillar of vernacular poetry, a talented cartoonist and a great screenwriter, Jaheen's talent flourished in all these realms with equal excellence, grace and great inspiration. In all his works, he sided with freedom and the marginalised, and expressed his love of this country. His philosophy of life reflected that of most Egyptians; a melange of satire and a sense of humor, while always believing that the best is yet to come. This was a crosscutting theme in all his artworks, which in itself is a form of resistance. Below is a link to a recitation of Jaheen's poetry by his son and grandson, poets Bahaa Jaheen and Ahmed Haddad, in Berlin 2011 while celebrating Jaheen's 80th birthday by the Al-Dar non-profit organisation in collaboration with the Egyptian embassy in Berlin. http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContentMulti/1386/Multimedia.aspx Former president Roh Moo-hyun's hometown of Bongha and Jeongtowon, a small temple nearby where Roh's ashes have been temporarily placed, continued to draw crowds of visitors after his funeral Friday. A queue stretching 200-300 m was formed by visitors who came to pay tribute to the altars set up in front of the Bongha village center, and 50 to 60 people paid tribute at a time. Police estimate that around 50,000-60,000 people visited Bongha on Sunday. About 3,000 people on Thursday attended the fourth memorial service for former president Roh Moo-hyun in his hometown of Bongha Village in Gimhae, South Gyeongsang Province. Some 40 lawmakers from the main opposition Democratic Party attended the service. Among them were DP leader Kim Han-gil and former presidential candidate Moon Jae-in, one of the former leader's closest aide. The DP changed its name back this month from Democratic United Party. Roh committed suicide by jumping from a cliff near his home four years ago amid a corruption investigation. The UN refugee agency is confirming reports up to 500 people may have lost their lives when an overcrowded boat capsized and sank earlier this month in the Mediterranean Sea between Libya and Italy. The incident reportedly happened April 8. Monday, witnesses and survivors told VOA Somali a smuggler's vessel overturned while carrying as many as 500 people. They said an unknown number swam to boats nearby and were taken to Greece. Citing survivor accounts, the UNHCR said Wednesday a boat attempting to transfer passengers to a larger ship capsized and sank. The UNHCR said that a merchant ship eventually rescued 41 survivors and dropped them off near the Cretan port of Kalamata on April 16. UNHCR spokeswoman Ariadni Spanaki on Crete told journalists that many of the survivors "were in shock," and that "some were crying." If the death toll is confirmed, this could be one of the worst tragedies since the start of the migrant crisis in Europe. Indian government officials said Tuesday they will seek to retrieve a 105-carat diamond that was given as a gift to Queen Victoria in 1850, when India was a British colony. The priceless Koh-i-Noor Diamond now sits on display as part of the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London. Ownership of the diamond is much disputed, and at least four countries, including India, have claimed the jewel in the past. During a hearing in the Supreme Court Monday, India's solicitor general surprised and outraged many Indians when he said the diamond belonged to Britain and should not be returned to India. He said the diamond was a gift, and not stolen like many Indians believe to be the case. "It was given voluntarily by Ranjit Singh to the British as compensation for help in the Sikh Wars. The Koh-i-Noor is not a stolen object," Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar said. Japanese automaker Mitsubishi Motors admitted that it falsified fuel-efficiency data on 625,000 vehicles. Mitsubishi president Tetsuro Aikawa bowed in apology during a news conference Wednesday in Tokyo admitting to the irregularities. The company said the false data dates back to 2013, involving its eK mini-wagon and eK Space light passenger cars, as well as it Dayz Roox vehicles it produces for rival carmaker Nissan Motors. The problem was uncovered after Nissan noticed the inconsistencies in the data, prompting Mitsubishi to conduct an internal probe. Aikawa said the tire pressure tests on the vehicles were rigged to make the fuel mileage better than it actually was. "The wrongdoing was intentional. It is clear the falsification was done to make the mileage look better. But why they would resort to fraud to do this is still unclear," he said. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was given the Order of the Netherlands Lion and became a, the highest Dutch civilian award, on Tuesday. The Dutch order of chivalry, founded in 1815, is awarded to people who have contributed to the world peace and humanity. In 2006, then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan also received the award. In a ceremony at The Hague, Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders said, "You worked tirelessly for peace, safety, justice and development in the world. You are the voice of people affected by natural disasters, discrimination, conflict and inequality." Aerospace giant Boeing wants to buy more aircraft parts from Korean companies. Boeing has imported US$2.9 billion worth of Korean parts over the past 10 years but last year alone bought $500 million worth. Several key Boeing executives met representatives from 20 Korean aviation parts makers like Samsung SDI, LG Electronics and Kolon in Seoul on Wednesday to discuss possible deals. Boeing has so far relied chiefly on Toray and other Japanese companies for parts. But Boeing VP John Byrne said the company is ready to form new partnerships if there are innovative products available. One example is Hyosung's carbon fiber, which Boeing wants to use instead of aluminum for the next-generation B787 passenger aircraft. Carbon fiber can increase fuel efficiency because it is lighter. Currently some 35 Korean companies including Hyundai Glovis supply parts to Boeing. Gen. Vincent Brooks, nominated to succeed Curtis Scaparrotti as U.S. Forces Korea chief, told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday that if Washington removes its nuclear umbrella, South Korea "would have to contemplate [nuclear armament] to maintain their own security. That question would likely come up." Brooks' comments were apparently a response to blather by Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump, who has claimed the U.S.' allies overseas are paying practically nothing for their defense and should be getting their own nuclear arms. But unless Trump is elected, the U.S. government is steadfast in its readiness to protect South Korea from a North Korean nuclear attack. The U.S. made the pledge to provide a nuclear umbrella in a treaty in 1978, and President Barack Obama countered Trump's nonsense by saying Washington's nuclear umbrella for South Korea and Japan forms the "cornerstone" of America's role in the Asia Pacific region. But the fact that the subject of South Korea's possible nuclear armament was discussed in the U.S. Congress is not to be taken lightly. It could suggest that skepticism is spreading in the U.S. over its nuclear umbrella policy rather than that Washington wants Seoul to strengthen its defenses. And if such skepticism prevails and the U.S. decides to remove the nuclear umbrella out of the blue, that would lay South Korea wide open to North Korean threats. Indeed some skepticism has already arisen within the U.S. whether Washington would really be willing to use nuclear weapons to protect its allies and thus expose itself to a nuclear attack. In these circumstances it is foolish and irresponsible for a man who hopes to be president of the U.S. to utter nonsense that could embolden North Korea to launch further provocations. North Korea is gearing up for another nuclear test, desperate to be recognized as a nuclear power with leverage in negotiations with the U.S., and Seoul and Washington have their hands full trying to discourage this strategy. They need no further input from the likes of Trump that could destabilize the situation. Read this article in Korean Kenyan bank acquires collapsed Chase Bank 2016-04-21 15:28 NAIROBI, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Kenya's top regional financialinstitution, the Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB) Group, has taken overthe operations of Chase Bank, which collapsed three weeks agosending ripples in the East African nation's banking sector. The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) Governor Dr. Patrick Njorogetold a news conference in Nairobi that that the takeover will seeall the branches of the troubled lender open next week. "All the Chase Bank branches will open by April 27. The onlineand mobile banking services will also become available. However,branches may initially offer limited services," Njoroge said. Depositors who had their savings frozen in the bank after it wasput under receivership will now be able to access their funds. The move comes after KCB Managing Director Joshua Oigaraconfirmed last week that his bank was willing to play a role in therevival of Chase Bank without providing details. The bank currently operates in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda,Burundi and South Sudan. Oigara said that bank also plans to set upa subsidiary in the Democratic Republic of Congo by the end of2016. Chase Bank's closure caused panic in the local financial marketswhen the Central Bank sent executives from the Kenya DepositInsurance Corporation accompanied by the Police to take over theBank. A mid-tier lender with 62 branches across Kenya, mostly servingcorporate, retail and small and medium enterprises, Chase Banksuddenly failed to meet its depositors' demands for cash, leadingto its closure. Njoroge said even though the Central Bank was being blamed forthe sudden collapse of the Chase Bank, it was not theresponsibility of the apex bank to run the commercial banks. "Chase Bank customers will have immediate access to theirdeposits of up to a maximum of 10,000 U.S. dollars. On this basis,167,270 account (equivalent to 97 percent of accounts or 6 percentof total deposits) will have their funds available in full," saidthe apex bank. The other deposits, said CBK, will be available in a structuredmanner with details to be announced later. Njoroge said the moratorium on payments to creditors and lendersremains in place. However, he said the Manager will correspond withthem in the near future with details of how these would be dealtwith. The regulator noted that KCB and Kenya Deposit InsuranceCorporation, the receiver manager, will institute efforts torecover loans. "Ongoing efforts to collateralise existing loan and recoverfunds obtained irregularly or are non-performing will be steppedup. Existing borrowers are required to continue servicing theirloans," added CBK as it assured depositors that the banking sectoris sound and firm action will be taken against rogue lenders. Among those who had been hit hard by the closure of Chase Bankwere farmers, students and small businesses. The Central Bank placed Chase Bank under receivership followingliquidity problems after its top executives were forced to resignafter giving conflicts accounts of the financial state of the bankwithin a week. The first statement had understated insider loans to staff anddirectors by about 80 million dollars, necessitating the second setof statements. Imperial Bank and Dubai Bank are other lenders that havecollapsed in the last nine months in what was described as "toxiclending practices." Enditem The minister said the order was an attempt to create stagnation in the higher education sector and that it was definitely a setback for the sector's progress. Vietnamese students not interested in reading VietNamNet Bridge - University students are required to spend appropriate time on self-study, but few students have the habit of going to the library. University students are required to spend appropriate time on self-study, but few students have the habit of going to the library. The libraries of the HCMC University of Social Sciences & Humanities, HCMC University of Natural Sciences and Agriculture & Forestry University are believed to be the most modern school libraries in Vietnam. However, they are usually deserted because students dont have the habit of going to the library.Ngo Thi Yen, a student of the HCMC University of Natural Sciences, said she rarely goes because she can find documents she needs on internet.Why do you still have to go to library if you can stay at home and look for information with your laptop? she said.The knowledge we have to prepare for the exams can be found in textbooks and documents provided by lecturers, she explained.Meanwhile, a student from the HCMC University of Social Sciences & Humanity said she would go to library to borrow books when she has to prepare for exams.In fact, libraries, to some extent, are useful for many students. They go there to access internet for free, play games or watch films. Some of them go to library just to enjoy the fresh air in hot days as there is no air-conditioner in their dormitory rooms. Others go there to sleep, or gossip, because libraries large space can be a wonderful place for meetings.The cool air in library and free internet attract students who come to entertain themselves and surf on the internet, said Do Thi Loi, deputy director of the HCMC Agriculture and Forestry.A librarian in HCMC noted that students do not read books for knowledge. They only rush to go to library if they have exams tomorrow.The students borrow books so that they can crib documents at the exams, she said. And they would disappear after the exams finish."According to Hoang Thi Thuc, director of the HCMC National Universitys Library, the number of students coming to read books has decreased sharply in the last three years, from 400,000 in 2013 to 300,000 in 2015. The number of documents lent has also decreased by 50 percent, from 500,000 in 2012 to 250,000 in 2015.Meanwhile, she can see the considerable increase in the number of document downloads, from 100,000 in 2009 to 185,000 in 2014. The figure was four times higher in 2015 with 420,000 downloads.At the HCMC University of Natural Sciences, 120 people registered to use internet documents in the 2011-2012 academic year, while the figure rose to 79, mostly lecturers, in 2012-2013. Later, as students also can register to use online documents, the figure increased to 2,300 in 2014-2015.NLD KARIM SAHIB/AFP/Getty ImagesJanet Jackson will executive produce a TV movie for Lifetime telling the story of 1920s New York City mobster, Stephanie "Queenie" St. Clair, the network announced. Queenie was the first and only women gangster during prohibition, and was known as a notorious mob boss who ran multiple criminal enterprises in Harlem, New York. Her crime syndicate was said to have clashed with those of the Italian mafia, but she managed to stay entirely independent. St. Clair was said to have lived a lavish lifestyle, making over $20,000 a year in the 1920s. She died in Harlem in 1969 at the age of 82 and spent her latter years as an activist for the black community. Cicely Tyson played Queenie in Bill Duke's 1997 gangland crime drama "Hoodlum". Director Kenny Leon is scheduled to direct the film. Copyright 2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. #HD Hyundai shipyards Unionists at HD Hyundai's shipyards begin strike vote Unionized workers at HD Hyundai's three shipyard units kicked off a joint strike vote Monday amid little progress in their collective negotiations. Unionists at the three shipbu... #Korean Air-Cebu incident Korean Air flight overruns Cebu runway, no injuries reported Korean Air Lines Co. said Monday its flight KE631 with 173 people on board overran the runway while landing at Cebu International Airport in the Philippines a day earlier but no in... Following up his blistering attack on Shell and the governments attitude to the Shell-To-Sea campaign in 2010's The Pipe, Atlantic shows Risteard O'Domhnaill hasn't softened in any way. The oil companies are still in his sights but the director casts the net wider, this time exploring the struggles of Irish fisherman under the cosh of EU quotas. Narrated by Brendan Gleeson, Atlantic takes on the plight of fishing communities of Dingle, Aranmore, Ros a Mhill and more, charting their current malaise back to Irelands entry to the then EEC; Jack Lynch's Fianna Fail government's opening up of Irish seas to Europe and giving oil companies carte blanche in 1973 was followed by Labour's Justin Keating's attempt to correct this by demanding a hefty/fair return for the use of sovereign waters. This was then in turn reversed by Ray Burke in an act described here as 'economic treason'. Local fisherman like Jerry Early now watch on as a "city of boats" from Spain and the Netherlands light up the night sea while he is hampered by quotas that make it difficult to make a living out of. If that wasn't bad enough, 2006 brought a ban on salmon fishing due to a fall in salmon numbers, which is hotly disputed by those interviewed here; Early is brought to court for his nets which have the potential to catch salmon. But O'Domhnaill goes further afield, exploring the devastation the village of Renews, Newfoundland suffered when quotas were introduced in the late eighties/early nineties (the director unearths some wonderfully taut archive footage of protests as the announcement is made). He finds Charlie Kane who explains that a quota of two tonnes "is not even worth catching." Atlantic also makes it to Norway and charismatic Bjornar Nicoailsen and his countrys state-owned oil policy. Theres also an investigation into the effect the oil companies underwater explosions have on marine life. Whenever in danger of getting lost in facts and figures, O'Domhnaill always brings it home, illustrating what all this means for the man in the boat. Despite the heart-tugging stories, Atlantic finds beauty in the sadness with the director breaking up the talking heads with majestic swoops of coastlines. Geriatric-action has become a genre in and of itself, all precipitated by Liam Neeson and Taken. Since then, we've had 3 Days To Kill, From Paris With Love and a few others have cropped up in its wake. The formula is simple - somewhat well-known action star from the '80s, foreign city, shaky cameras, impossibly beautiful women are somewhat attracted to said action star, probably a few other semi well-known actors thrown into the mix. Gratuitous violence. Shake well and serve. That's what's going on with Criminal. Kevin Costner is a career criminal who has a brain defect that renders him incapable of knowing right from wrong or the consequences of his actions. When Ryan Reynolds is brutally murdered by a Spanish anarchist (Jordi Molla) for possession of a flash-drive that will give him access to the US military's strike capabilities - because that's just left on a flash-drive, of course - CIA director Gary Oldman activates a long-dormant medical experiment that's fronted by Tommy Lee Jones that will transplant the memories of Ryan Reynolds into Kevin Costner. Yes, Ryan Reynolds is going to enter Kevin Costner. It all sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? You'd think a film like this would commit to that craziness and just go all out. Turn it into a zany action film with a frantic pace, lots of humour and more than a few catchy one-liners? Nope. Instead, director Ariel Vromen opts to take a film that's a terrible idea to begin with and actually give it consideration and commit to it seriously. We see Kevin Costner - doing his best, mind - growling with the best of them and trying to show himself as a cold-blooded, remorseless killer. It's effective, to be sure, but it's the fact that he stops every ten minutes and clutches his head that takes any wind out of the sails. As well as this, you've got Gary Oldman shouting at computer screens in every other scene and Michael Pitt in there as an Edward Snowden-esque hacker who created the flash drive they're all after. The performances right around the table are all pretty in-depth, with Gal Gadot giving good innings as the widow of Ryan Reynolds whilst Tommy Lee Jones does what he can with a truly mediocre script. Kevin Costner, as mentioned, is pretty good as a straightforward villain, but it's when he starts becoming more and more human and emotional that it all begins to run out of steam. Had this film been given to someone like Luc Besson or one of his acolytes, there might be something interesting here. Instead, it's a dull, boring thriller with no thrills and no action. The idea of a Bruno Mars and Missy Elliott collaboration is mouthwatering to many, but it looks like it may be really happening. The Hawaiian 'Uptown Funk' star has spent time in the studio with the hip-hop legend, and there are photos to prove it. She captioned the below photo: "Big up to @brunomars I had a blast with him in the studio vibing!#magic He such a rare gem & such a humble spirit! I am so humbled & grateful Bruno.Y? We laughed & laughed the whole night then he played me some (hot) ass songs 4 his album Whewwww #INCREDIBLE! It's so inspiring to vibe with ppl who can create real music & have a creative mind! Big up to lisenny from Brooklyn ayyyye. see y'all soon!" Alright, so it doesn't strictly say that they were working on material together, but it could be the start of something beautiful. Missy Elliott has already collaborated with Pharrell Williams on comeback track 'WTF (Where They From)', released last year, as well as releasing 'Pep Rally' in February - and now it looks like it may be full steam ahead for her long-awaited album, which she hinted may be released this year. Her last album was 2005's 'The Cookbook', so this one is long overdue. The European Commission on Tuesday (19 April) revealed plans to create a Digital Single Market to help European business, industry, small and medium-sized enterprises, researchers and public authorities to go digital. The Commission is planning to support a number of national initiatives for the digitization of industry and related services across all sectors. The EU executive would like to boost investment via strategic partnerships and networks to speed up the development and launch of 5G communications networks and cyber security. As the first step, Brussels is going to give Europes 1.7 million researchers and 70 million science and technology professionals a virtual environment to store, manage, analyze and re-use a big amount of research data. The Commission says that many sectors have been quick to take up digital technologies and processes but companies of all sizes must fully utilize the digital potential and opportunities to keep Europes competitiveness on a global scale. Traditional industries, such as construction or textiles, have been particularly slow to catch up with the digital revolution. According to some latest studies, the digitization of products and services in Europe will add more than 110 billion of the revenue for the industry per year by 2021. As part of the EUs efforts to boost the digital economy, the Commission will help coordinate national and regional digital initiatives, focus on EUs public-private partnerships by encouraging to use the opportunities offered by the EU Investment Plan and the European Structural and Investment Funds as well as invest 500 million in a pan-EU network of digital innovation hubs. The EU also seeks to support projects strengthening the Internet of things, advanced manufacturing and technologies and adopt future legislation that will support the free flow of data. Andrus Ansip, the Commissions Vice-President for the Digital Single Market, commented that The industrial revolution of our time is digital. We need the right scale for technologies such as cloud computing, data-driven science and the Internet of things to reach their full potential. As companies aim to scale up across the Single Market, public e-services should also meet todays needs: be digital, open and cross-border by design. The EU is the right scale for the digital times. The European Commission announced yesterday (20 April) that there had been good progress regarding the operationalization of the EU-Turkey Agreement. The EU Executive, however, said that more effort is needed to consolidate the position and continue the return and resettlement operations. In mid-March, EU Heads of State or Government and Turkey agreed to put an end to the irregular migration from Turkey to the EU and instead replace it with legal channels of resettlement of refugees to the European Union. Thanks to the new measures, there has been a sharp decrease in a number of people irregularly crossing the Aegean Sean from Turkey to Greece. Moreover, the Commission says that the EU-Turkey Joint Action Plan of November 2015 has helped to communicate that turning to smugglers is a wrong choice to make. The resettlement of migrants from the EU to Turkey started on 4 April and so far 325 irregular migrants that had arrived to Greece via Turkey were returned. Both Greece and Turkey have made a number of legal changes to make sure that the deal fully respects EU and international law. Moreover, Greece has introduced an accelerated procedure for the processing of all stages of asylum applications on the islands from the initial interviews to the appeals. The EU has also released additional 1 billion to help cover programming and project implementation costs under the Facility of Refugees. This comes on top of the contributions made by 16 EU Member States, covering 1.61 billion out of the 2 billion pledged for 2016-2017. The first contracts under the Facility, worth 77million, were signed on 4 March and the first payments were made on 18 March. Financial and technology companies ranked most authentic brands in China Updated: 2016-04-21 17:02 By Li Xiang(chinadaily.com.cn) A visitor takes a close look at the smartwatch unveiled by Lenovo Group Ltd in Beijing, May 28, 2015. [Photo/China Daily] Chinese consumers ranked the companies in the financial and technology industries as the most authentic brands while those in the education and real estate sectors the least authentic, a survey by global communications agency Cohn & Wolfe showed on Thursday. The survey, which revealed the 100 most authentic brands in China and globally, was part of the firm's global study on the authenticity of the brands in the eyes of consumers. Financial brands including Bank of China and China Merchants Bank as well as technology brands including Huawei, Alibaba and Baidu made the China Top 100 list. Traditional Chinese medicine brands Tong Ren Tang and Yunnan Baiyao were also ranked high on the list. On the global basis, Disney, Amazon, Apple, Samsung and Lego broke into the top 10 on the Global Authentic 100 brands while no Chinese brand made in the list, the survey showed. Nearly 12,000 consumers in 14 markets in the United States, Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East were surveyed in the 2016 authenticity study. The study defined authenticity based on three major attributes: reliable (delivers on promises, high quality), respectful (treats customers well, protects privacy and data) and real (genuine, communicates honestly, acts with integrity). The survey showed that Chinese consumers are the least cynical toward brands as 36 percent of them believe that brands and companies are "open and honest" while the number is 23 percent in the US, 13 percent in Singapore, 7 percent in Germany and 5 percent in Sweden. The attribute of "being real" ranked more important in China than elsewhere, indicating that Chinese consumers put more value on being genuine and acting with integrity, the survey showed. Chiaki Nozu/Getty ImagesThanks to an internet hoax, rumors were flying this week that Limp Bizkit would play a secret show at a Sunoco gas station in Dayton, Ohio on Wednesday in celebration of 4/20, also known as the marijuana smoker's holiday. The band didn't show up, of course, but groups of Limp Bizkit fans stormed the gas station in the hopes that Fred Durst and company would play, according to ABC affiliate WKEF-TV. The rumors of the show started when a Facebook event page popped up advertising a secret Limp Bizkit concert at the Sunoco on 2017's 4/20. When the page went viral, people thought that the concert would be held this week. The Dayton Police Department was quick to dispel any notions that Limp Bizkit would actually be playing a show at the gas station, and Durst himself also denied the rumors, tweeting, "NOT TRUE - don't let them pull one on you." Even though the concert was definitely proven to be a hoax, fans showed up anyway. So many did show up, in fact, that the Sunoco management decided to actually shut the station down for the night. Perhaps next 4/20 Limp Bizki will make their gas station debut. Copyright 2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Brad Tilden, Chairman, President and CEO of Alaska Airlines speaks during a panel discussion at the 2015 International Air Transport Association (IATA) Annual General Meeting (AGM) and World Air Transport Summit in Miami Beach, Florida, June 8, 2015. REUTERS/Joe Skipper (Reuters) - Alaska Air Group Inc expects it will be challenging to keep customers who are loyal to Virgin America Inc after the two companies merge, Alaska Air's chief executive said on an analyst call on Thursday. Alaska Air said earlier this month that it would buy Virgin America, a carrier with cult status among leisure and business travelers on the U.S. West Coast, for $2.6 billion. Chief Executive Brad Tilden said "the biggest challenge" ahead will be appealing to its own customers as well as Virgin America's passengers, after that airline is merged into the Alaska brand. Virgin America has a distinctive style, with in-flight mood-lighting and media-rich entertainment. Shares of Alaska Air were down about 3 percent in afternoon trade. JPMorgan analyst Jamie Baker said on the same call that he had underestimated Virgin America's following, and asked if Alaska Air expected a spillover from the deal. "We are aware of the value that that company has brought to its customers. Our goal isn't to lose that," Tilden said. "Our goal is to gain that as a foothold in the state of California as something that we grow in the decade or two ahead." Alaska Air has said it might keep using the Virgin America brand in some form. Executives said they still expect regulatory approval of the deal this year, and that they are answering the U.S. Justice Department's questions about the merger. The company also said it grew adjusted profit 23 percent to $183 million in the first quarter, or $1.45 per share, not including Virgin America's results. Analysts on average had expected $1.42, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. (Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin in New York, Editing by Franklin Paul and David Gregorio) Definitive Agreement to Develop Delaware Medical Cannabis Center 200,000 Square Foot Greenhouse Facility in Dover DENVER, CO / ACCESSWIRE / April 21, 2016 / AmeriCann, Inc. (ACAN), a company that designs, develops and owns advanced medical cannabis facilities, announced that it has signed a definitive agreement with AQUSCAN Delaware, Corp. (AQUSCAN) to expand AmeriCann's Preferred Partner Program into Delaware. The partnership will, upon award of a license to AQUSCAN, develop the Delaware Medical Cannabis Center (DMCC), which has the potential for over 200,000 square feet of sustainable, greenhouse cultivation infrastructure. The project would have a positive economic and employment impact on Kent County and the City of Dover. The DMCC project will be developed on 10 acres of land in the newly finished Garrison Oak Technology Park in Dover, DE. The City of Dover, which owns the Technology Park, has executed a Purchase and Sale Agreement for the 10-acre property that is contingent upon an awarding of a license from the State. City officials have been extremely supportive of the project and provided letters of support for the AQUSCAN application submitted on April 13, 2016. AQUSCAN is one of eleven new applicants that submitted applications to the Delaware Department Division of Public Health. The State has already approved one organization in 2014 to operate a Registered Compassion Center and will award up to two additional vertically-integrated licenses in this latest round of applications. The State is scheduled to award the new licenses in August of 2016. "We look forward to developing a strong partnership with the City of Dover and to providing Delaware patients with safe, affordable access to medical cannabis. Our partnership with AmeriCann allows us to operate a sustainable, scalable infrastructure to better serve patients," said Chapman Dickerson, CEO of AQUSCAN. In addition to building the DMCC, AmeriCann will purchase and renovate an existing 3,200 square foot building located in Dover as a secure, medical cannabis dispensary. Story continues The state-of-the-art sustainable greenhouse will be designed utilizing AmeriCann's proprietary cultivation system known as Cannopy. The project will consist of multiple planned phases to allow AQUSCAN to support the Delaware medical marijuana market as it grows. The first phase of the planned project consists of 27,000 sq. ft. of cultivation and processing infrastructure. AmeriCann can expand the first phase to approximately 204,000 sq. ft. for AQUSCAN, based on patient demand. In addition to producing dry cannabis flower, AQUSCAN will produce lotions and creams, tinctures, capsules, and other products for the medical cannabis patients of Delaware. AmeriCann has designed the "Preferred Partner Program" whereby it partners with entrepreneurs in newly regulated states to provide expertise and infrastructure to help build long-term sustainable businesses that meet the needs of medical cannabis patients throughout the country. "We are very impressed with AQUSCAN and the team's commitment to serving patients and hiring veterans. The management team is very dedicated to the cannabis industry and we look forward to fulfilling our objectives together in Delaware which represents an exciting new market," said Tim Keogh, CEO of AmeriCann. AmeriCann's sustainable greenhouse designs are more energy efficient than traditional indoor warehouse facilities that rely exclusively on artificial lighting. This can lower utility bills by up to 75% and dramatically decrease the cost of production. Also, harnessing natural sunlight is the best energy source for plants. About AmeriCann AmeriCann designs, develops and owns advanced medical cannabis facilities to produce the best possible medical cannabis in the most efficient manner utilizing advanced, sustainable practices. The Company has over 1,000,000 square feet of facilities in various stages of development in Colorado, Massachusetts, Delaware, and Illinois. AmeriCann does not cultivate, process or distribute cannabis, but partners with local business to serve marijuana patients in their communities. More information about the Company is available at: www.americann.co. About AQUSCAN Delaware, Corp. AQUSCAN is a not-for-profit Delaware Corporation formed to applying for and receive authorization to open and operate a Compassion Center in Delaware. AQUSCAN will be a vertically integrated medical marijuana business that cultivates, processes, and dispenses medical marijuana for patients who are residents of Delaware. AQUSCAN has assembled a diverse team of successful professionals from the medical marijuana and other industries and is committed to serving the patients of Delaware by providing them with access to safe, effective medical marijuana and medical marijuana products. Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the "Exchange Act") (which Sections were adopted as part of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995). Statements preceded by, followed by or that otherwise include the words "believe," "anticipate," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "plan," "project," "prospects," "outlook," and similar words or expressions, or future or conditional verbs such as "will," "should," "would," "may," and "could" are generally forward-looking in nature and not historical facts. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the Company's actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any anticipated results, performance or achievements. The Company disclaims any intention to, and undertakes no obligation to, revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, a future event, or otherwise. For additional risks and uncertainties that could impact the Company's forward-looking statements, please see the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended September 30, 2015, which the Company has filed with the SEC and which may be viewed at: http://www.sec.gov Contact Information: Corporate: AmeriCann, Inc. 3200 Brighton Blvd. Unit 114 Denver, CO 80216 (303) 862-9000 info@americann.co www.americann.co Investors: Hayden IR hart@haydenir.com (917) 658-7878 SOURCE: AmeriCann, Inc. Pau Barrena | Bloomberg | Getty Images. Singapore will be the first country in Southeast Asia to receive Samsung's mobile payment system, Samsung Pay, the smartphone maker said Wednesday. The world's two largest smartphone makers muscled into Singapore's already-crowded mobile payment space this week, but experts say it may take a while for them to see much enthusiasm from locals. Apple (AAPL) launched Apple Pay in the city-state on April 19 for American Express card holders, who can use it at selected outlets and through various apps on most Apple smartphones and some iPads. Jennifer Bailey, the vice president of Apple Pay, said credit and debit cards from Singapore banks including DBS, UOB and Standard Chartered would work with Apple Play in the coming months. The service had previously been launched in the U.S., China, UK, Canada and Australia. A day after Apple's announcement, South Korean electronics giant Samsung (Korea Stock Exchange: 593-KR) said Singapore would be the first country in Southeast Asia to receive its mobile payment system, Samsung Pay. The company said the service would launch this quarter, without giving a specific date. Once available, the city-state will join the likes of South Korea, the U.S. and China, where the service is already up and running. In February, Samsung said its mobile payment service had about 5 million registered users, prior to its launch in China in March. Samsung said that a February survey had showed that interest in the service in Singapore was strong. Of the 400 responses the company received, it said 71 percent were positive. Consumers can use Samsung Pay in most retail outlets that accept credit card payment, using the Galaxy Note 5, Galaxy S6 edge+, Galaxy S7 and S7 edge smartphones, said Samsung. To prepare for the roll out, Samsung said it was providing training for cashiers at partnering retailers and merchants. The company will also allow users to beta-test the service prior to the launch. Samsung has already confirmed its partnership with MasterCard and Visa, with American Express expected to join up later. Samsung will also partner major banks in Singapore, including DBS/POSB, OCBC Bank and Standard Chartered. Story continues But even with Singapore's phenomenal mobile penetration rate, analysts believe the uptake of both Apple and Samsung's mobile payment services may be disappointing. Data from the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore showed the city-state had a mobile phone penetration rate of 148.4 percent in 2015. "I think that consumer adoption of both Apple Pay and Samsung Pay will be slower than expected in Singapore," a researcher at Forrester, Zhi Ying Ng, told CNBC. Ng said while the use of contactless card payments was increasing in Singapore, and consumers were becoming more comfortable with the technology, it would take time for them to realize the additional value that digital wallets brought in terms of simplicity, security and experience. International Data Corporation's (IDC) senior market analyst Michael Yeo told CNBC that while mobile payments were "absolutely huge in Asia" with the success of Alipay and WeChat wallet offerings in China, in Singapore, the technology had yet to take off. "There are quite a few systems out there...but there isn't one which has quite yet made big inroads into the payments scene," said Yeo. This was largely "due to the siloed nature and incompatibilities between the various payment methods" in Singapore, he added. Many banks and payment networks already have mobile payment apps, including MasterCard's MasterPass, Standard Chartered Bank and SingTel's Dash, DBS's PayLah! and OCBC's Pay Anyone. Kiranjeet Kaur, a research manager at IDC, added that Apple had a slight advantage over Samsung because, of the Samsung phones shipped in 2015, only half supported Samsung Pay, while Apple shipped most iPhone 6 models that are Apple Pay-enabled. Both Yeo and Kaur said the limitation Apple Pay faced in Singapore was that it is currently limited to American Express cardholders, but once the service was extended to other banks, Yeo said he expected to see Apple Pay take "close to 20 percent of payments that are made through NFC terminals in Singapore by the end of the year." NFC refers to near field communication, the technology that allows two devices, such as a smartphone and a payment terminal, to communicate by putting them near each other. Follow CNBC International on Twitter and Facebook. More From CNBC (Adds details) By Serajul Quadir DHAKA, April 21 (Reuters) - Bangladesh's central bank was vulnerable to hackers because it did not have a firewall and used second-hand, $10 switches to network computers connected to the SWIFT global payment network, an investigator into one of the world's biggest cyber heists said. The shortcomings made it easier for hackers to break into the Bangladesh Bank system earlier this year and attempt to siphon off nearly $1 billion using the bank's SWIFT credentials, said Mohammad Shah Alam, head of the Forensic Training Institute of the Bangladesh police's criminal investigation department. "It could be difficult to hack if there was a firewall," Alam said in an interview. The lack of sophisticated switches, which can cost several hundred dollars or more, also means it is difficult for investigators to figure out what the hackers did and where they might have been based, he added. Experts in bank security said that the findings described by Alam were disturbing. "You are talking about an organization that has access to billions of dollars and they are not taking even the most basic security precautions," said Jeff Wichman, a consultant with cyber firm Optiv. Tom Kellermann, a former member of the World Bank security team, said that the security shortcomings described by Alam were "egregious," and that he believed there were "a handful" of central banks in developing countries that were equally insecure. Kellermann, now chief executive of investment firm Strategic Cyber Ventures LLC, said that some banks fail to adequately protect their networks because they focus security budgets on physically defending their facilities. POLICE BLAME BANK, SWIFT Cyber criminals broke into Bangladesh Bank's system and in early February tried to make fraudulent transfers totalling $951 million from its account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Most of the payments were blocked, but $81 million was routed to accounts in the Philippines and diverted to casinos there. Most of those funds remain missing. Story continues The police believe that both the bank and SWIFT should take the blame for the oversight, Alam said in an interview. "It was their responsibility to point it out but we haven't found any evidence that they advised before the heist," he said, referring to SWIFT. A spokeswoman for Brussels-based SWIFT declined comment. SWIFT has previously said the attack was related to an internal operational issue at Bangladesh Bank and that SWIFT's core messaging services were not compromised. A spokesman for Bangladesh Bank said SWIFT officials advised the bank to upgrade the switches only when their system engineers from Malaysia visited after the heist. "There might have been a deficiency in the system in the SWIFT room," said the spokesman, Subhankar Saha, confirming that the switch was old and needed to be upgraded. "Two (SWIFT) engineers came and visited the bank after the heist and suggested to upgrade the system," Saha said. GLOBAL WHODUNIT The heist's masterminds have yet to be identified. Bangladesh police said earlier this week they had identified 20 foreigners involved in the heist but they appear to be people who received some of the payments, rather than those who initially stole the money. Bangladesh Bank has about 5,000 computers used by officials in different departments, Alam said. The SWIFT room is roughly 12 feet by 8 feet, a window-less office located on the eight floor of the bank's annex building in Dhaka. There are four servers and four monitors in the room. All transactions from the previous day are automatically printed on a printer in the room. The SWIFT facility should have been walled off from the rest of the network. That could have been done if the bank had used the more expensive, "managed" switches, which allow engineers to create separate networks, said Alam, whose institute includes a cyber-crime division. Moreover, considering the importance of the room, the bank should have deployed staff to monitor activity round the clock, including weekends and holidays, he said. (Additional reporting by Jim Finkle in BOSTON; Editing by Paritosh Bansal, Raju Gopalakrishnan and Alan Crosby) By Anthony Boadle and Alonso Soto BRASILIA, April 19 (Reuters) - Brazil's ruling Workers Party, reeling from a humiliating defeat in an impeachment vote in Congress, is threatening to bring the country to a standstill with mass protests against what it calls a 'coup' to topple President Dilma Rousseff. Party leaders' pledges to take their fight to the streets, after the lower house on Sunday backed a motion to impeach Rousseff, have raised fears they will attempt to destabilize a transitional government in Latin America's largest economy. But the party's popularity has been shattered by a deep recession and a succession of graft scandals during its 13-year rule. It is a shadow of the organization that once commanded near fanatical support among Brazil's poor, and will struggle to sustain its fight against impeachment, analysts say. Protests are part of the Workers Party (PT) DNA. Born in the grim industrial belt that rings Sao Paulo, it emerged from a union-led pro-democracy movement in the twilight of Brazil's military dictatorship in the 1980s. It slowly developed into a formidable political machine. Brazil's first working class national party has won four straight presidential elections since Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's breakthrough in 2002. Yet formerly-loyal labor unions and leftist social movements have distanced themselves from the unpopular Rousseff because of belt-tightening moves adopted last year in a failed bid to curb Brazil's runaway budget deficit. Abandoned by many of its allies within Congress as the political crisis has deepened, the party's national decline could accelerate once it loses its grasp on power and control over government resources and jobs, analysts say. It would automatically relinquish the presidency if, as expected, Rousseff is put on trial in the Senate next month for breaking budget rules. The reins of power would pass to Vice President Michel Temer, denounced as a 'traitor' by Workers Party leaders, who would see out her term until 2018 if Rousseff is found guilty. Story continues Party insiders and other political sources in Brasilia say the PT would not be able to keep up protests for long. "Support for the PT has deteriorated, the party is weak," said Marco Antonio Baratto, the bearded leader of the Landless Workers' Movement (MST), a long-time ally of the PT frustrated by its lack of leftist reforms while in government. "If you go to the slums today to defend the government or Dilma, they chase you away." Speaking at a rally in Brasilia on Saturday against impeachment, he made plain the PT could not rely on automatic support from his movement: "If the government does not represent the interests of the workers, it will have a problem with us." RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY Workers Party leader Rui Falcao on Tuesday repeated calls for members to take to the streets to oppose what he called a right-wing conspiracy to roll back social benefits won by Brazil's poor since Lula took office in 2003. "The PT will not give a possible Temer government any peace," he said at a news conference in Sao Paulo, with party founder Lula at his side. "Our opposition will go far beyond Congress. We are telling society that an illegitimate government will have no peace, there will be a fight." The rhetoric of class-struggle has resonated with some grass-roots supporters. "We'll go to the streets, we'll fight, because it's the only weapon we've got," said Jose Lacerda, 50, holding a red cap in his hands, standing outside Brazil's Congress building after Sunday's vote. But many Brazilians blame the Workers Party's economic stewardship for worsening the deepest recession since the 1930s, which has thrown millions out of work and pushed unemployment to more than 10 percent of the workforce. That in turn has reduced the clout of the unions and the PT's sway among organized labor. When Lula swept to power as Brazil's first working class president, voters celebrated his pledges to clean up Brazil's corrupt and fragmented political system. But PT involvement at the heart of a massive graft scheme designed to systematically milk political kickbacks from suppliers to state controlled Petroleo Brasileiro has shocked Brazilians used to decades of corruption scandals. Leading figures from the PT have been jailed, including former party Treasurer Joao Vaccari Neto, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison in September. Lula himself is being investigated for allegedly receiving a luxury seaside penthouse and a country estate from companies implicated in the graft investigation. While he remains Brazil's most influential politician, Lula's prestige and influence has been badly dented by the scandal. Weariness with the PT has grown even among working class Brazilians, who have little appetite for a fight amid the dire economic situation. "Lula will not be able to maintain pressure from the streets for very long because he is losing face with Brazilians, and the protests would further damage his credibility," said Thiago de Aragao at Brasilia-based consultancy Arko Advice. As Sunday's impeachment vote ended in Rousseff's defeat, hundreds of PT supporters sat downcast on red flags and banners. "The party won't recover from this loss," said Renato Bonetti, a social activist who traveled for 30 hours from the state of Parana in Brazil's south to march against impeachment. "I'm not even sure I'll vote for them next election." (Reporting by Alonso Soto and Stephen Eisenhammer; Writing by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Daniel Flynn and Andrew Hay) eyes A politician delivers his message as he scans the faces in an eager crowd. A college student gives a presentation and reinforces her points with nods to her classmates and professor. A businessman strides down the sidewalk and offers a smile to colleagues heading home. What do these people all have in common? They're skilled at making eye contact and, as a result, they exude confidence. According to Lillian Glass, a body-language expert and author of "The Body Language Advantage," strong eye contact is the single greatest indicator of confidence. "Confident people are always looking up, never down at the table, the ground, or their feet," Glass says. "Whether in conversation or just walking in the office hallway, they're looking at other people. They're engaging them through their eye contact." Eye contact establishes a connection, shows sincerity, and helps to create a sense of trust between people. A study conducted at the University of Leuven in Belgium concluded that individuals with higher self-esteem are more likely to hold eye contact than their less-confident peers, whose low self-esteem was associated with darting gazes. Researchers at King's College London also found that we associate higher levels of eye contact with stronger leadership abilities, greater aggression and strength, and higher intelligence. For many people, though, looking others in the eye and holding that gaze can be difficult. If this is something you struggle with, then try looking at the other person's eyes for two seconds, looking at their nose for two seconds, looking at their mouth for two seconds, and then looking at their face as a whole for two seconds. Continue this rotation throughout your conversation. If you use this trick, Glass says, then the other person won't be able to tell that you're not looking directly at their eyes the entire time. Make a habit of practicing eye contact in your day-to-day life on the subway in the morning, strolling outside on your lunch break, and in conversations at the office and with friends. You'll be surprised by how much more confidence you project as you get better at locking eyes. Story continues NOW WATCH: A Harvard psychologist reveals the best way to fake it till you make it More From Business Insider PASADENA, CA / ACCESSWIRE / April 21, 2016 / Brazil Minerals, Inc. (BMIX) (the "Company" or "BMIX") announced that one of its remaining convertible noteholders has now fully converted its debt into equity. BMIX received notice that LG Capital Funding, LLC has fully converted its remaining variable-rate convertible note. Therefore, as of now, there are only three short-term oriented institutional holders of outstanding convertible notes. The Company considers a lesser number of such holders an important step in the right direction. The current size of the convertible debt left to convert by these holders is as follows: $126,215 in principal and interest from St. George Investments, LLC; $90,785 in principal from GW Holdings Group, LLC; and $25,000 in principal from JSJ Investments Inc. Any other convertible debt left on the Company's books belongs to individuals who have substantial equity in BMIX and that the Company believes are likely to convert such debt into common stock for long-term capital appreciation. BMIX's press release from Tuesday of this week was not distributed to certain important financial sites. The Company is reissuing it immediately below for broader distribution at this time. The April 19, 2016 edition of the Brazilian government gazette features the publication of its long-awaited permit to begin mining a promising new diamond and gold area. BMIX has now begun the process of excavation and removal of diamondiferous and auriferous gravel from this new area. All operations are open-sky. It may take approximately ten days to safely reach the level of between 12 to 15 meters below ground where such gravel is found. Thereafter, it should take approximately five days for removal and transport of enough material to our large processing plant to begin the recovery of diamonds and gold. Therefore, the Company expects to have its first production from this new area by early May, and generate cash from sales shortly thereafter. Story continues Last week, BMIX filed its 2015 Annual Report on Form 10-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company believes that it has made substantial progress in decreasing both costs and debt. It is a goal of BMIX to eliminate all convertible debt as soon as possible and thereafter to remain as close to debt free as possible. About Brazil Minerals, Inc. Brazil Minerals, Inc. (BMIX) is a U.S. holding company with Brazilian mining properties that produce diamonds, gold, and high quality sand, and a business unit that manufactures and sells mortar. More information on BMIX can be found at www.brazil-minerals.com. Safe Harbor Statement This press release contains forward-looking statements made under the "safe harbor" provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward looking statements are based upon the current plans, estimates and projections of Brazil Minerals, Inc.'s management and are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ from the forward looking statements. Such statements include, among others, those concerning market and industry segment growth and demand and acceptance of new and existing products; any projections of production, reserves, sales, earnings, revenue, margins or other financial items; any statements of the plans, strategies and objectives of management for future operations; any statements regarding future economic conditions or performance; uncertainties related to conducting business in Brazil, as well as all assumptions, expectations, predictions, intentions or beliefs about future events. Therefore, you should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. The following factors, among others, could cause actual results to differ from those set forth in the forward-looking statements: business conditions in Brazil, general economic conditions, geopolitical events and regulatory changes, availability of capital, BMIX's ability to maintain its competitive position and dependence on key management. This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any security and shall not constitute an offer, solicitation or sale of any securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of such jurisdiction. Cautionary note regarding estimates of Indicated and Inferred Mineral Resources of Diamonds and Gold as found in MDB's NI 43-101 Technical Reports. We advise U.S. investors that while these terms and amounts are recognized by Canadian regulations, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) does not recognize them. U.S. investors are cautioned not to assume that any part or all of the mineral deposits in these categories will ever be converted into mineral reserves as defined by the U.S.s Industry Guide 7. Cautionary note regarding estimates of Mineral Reserves of Diamonds and Gold as found in MDB's Bankable Feasibility Study. We advise U.S. investors that while these terms and amounts are recognized by Brazilian regulations, the SEC does not recognize them. U.S. investors are cautioned not to assume that any part or all of the mineral deposits in this category will ever be converted into mineral reserves as defined by the U.S.s Industry Guide 7. Cautionary note regarding estimates of Volume and Weight of Sand as found in MDB's studies filed with the local Brazilian regulatory agencies. We advise U.S. investors that while sand volume and weight terms and amounts as filed in Brazil are recognized by Brazilian regulations, the SEC does not recognize them. U.S. investors are cautioned not to assume that any part of such are not considered mineral reserves as defined by the U.S.s Industry Guide 7. Contact: Marc Fogassa (213) 590-2500 info@brazil-minerals.com www.brazil-minerals.com SOURCE: Brazil Minerals, Inc. One of the blast furnaces of the Tata Steel plant is seen at sunset in Port Talbot, South Wales, in this May 31, 2013 file photo. REUTERS/Rebecca Naden By Kylie MacLellan LONDON (Reuters) - Britain could part-nationalise Tata's (TISC.NS) UK steel plants by taking a 25 percent equity stake, as part of a support package worth hundreds of millions of pounds designed to attract a buyer and save at least 10,000 jobs. The Conservative government, which privatised the steel and other industries under former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, is seen as being anxious to avoid an imminent closure of Britain's biggest steel works just before a referendum on European Union membership in case of a protest vote. India's Tata group announced plans to quit its entire British steel operation last month, leaving the government battling to save a once mighty industry that has been hammered by cheap Chinese imports, soaring costs and weak demand. The government said exactly what support it provided would depend on the purchaser, but that it would be on commercial terms and was most likely to be debt financing. Taking an equity stake was also an option, it said. "If we were to take an equity stake it would be a minority one with the aim of supporting the purchaser in delivering long term future for the business. We are certainly not seeking to be controlling the company," Prime Minister David Cameron's spokeswoman said. The Business Ministry said in a statement the government could take a stake of up to 25 percent in the assets. HEIRS TO THATCHER Both Cameron and Business Secretary Sajid Javid have pitched themselves as heirs to Thatcher, who during her time in office in 1979-1990 privatised British Steel, acquired in 2007 by Tata, and sold off government stakes in other national champions. But Cameron, under pressure from trade unions and the opposition Labour Party, fears the prospect of more than 10,000 jobs being lost in the run-up to a June 23 EU referendum. Eurosceptics have seized on the crisis, saying the EU has not done enough to stop Chinese imports and blaming the bloc's rules on state aid for preventing government intervention. Story continues Labour welcomed the government's announcement as "a step forward" but said more needed to be done. "This alone will not be enough to save the steel industry. The government must ensure Tata allow enough time for a suitable buyer to be found and they must reassure the customer base and supply chain," said Labour's business spokeswoman Angela Eagle. "Crucially, they need to address the underlying challenges facing the industry; energy costs, business rates, procurement, and most of all, the illegal dumping of Chinese steel." The government also said it was working with the pension scheme trustees of Tata Steel and British Steel to reduce the impact on any purchaser, including whether it could separate the scheme from the business. Greybull Capital, which earlier this month bought Tata's Long Products Europe division in Scunthorpe, northern England, has been reported to be considering making a bid for Tata's speciality steels arm. Sanjeev Gupta, the boss of metals trader Liberty House Group, has also expressed an interest in Tata's UK assets, while senior staff at Tata's loss-making Port Talbot site in Wales, Britain's biggest steel works, are seeking to launch a management buyout plan. (Additional reporting by Costas Pitas and William Schomberg, editing by Stephen Addison and Elaine Hardcastle) By Ben Blanchard BEIJING (Reuters) - China will launch a "core module" for its first space station some time around 2018, a senior official told the state-run Xinhua news agency on Thursday, part of a plan to have a permanent manned space station in service around 2022. Advancing China's space programme is a priority for Beijing, with President Xi Jinping calling for the country to establish itself as a space power, and apart from its civilian ambitions Beijing has tested anti-satellite missiles. China insists its space programme is for peaceful purposes, but the U.S. Defense Department has highlighted its increasing space capabilities, saying it was pursuing activities aimed to prevent adversaries from using space-based assets in a crisis. The "core module" for the space station would be called the "Tianhe-1", the Chinese word for galaxy or Milky Way, Wang Zhongyang, spokesman for the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp, told Xinhua. "Two space labs will be launched later and dock with the core module, Tianhe-1," he said. "The construction of the space station is expected to finish in 2022." It gave no details of what the "core module" would consist. "If the International Space Station, which has extended its service, is retired by 2024, China's new space station will be the only operational one in outer space," Wang added. In a manned space mission in 2013, three Chinese astronauts spent 15 days in orbit and docked with an experimental space laboratory, the Tiangong (Heavenly Palace) 1. This year, China will launch the Tiangong 2 and Shenzhou 11 spacecraft, which will carry two astronauts and dock with Tiangong 2, Xinhua added. Next year, China's first cargo ship, Tianzhou 1, will attempt to dock with Tiangong 2, it said. China also plans a space telescope similar to the Hubble Space Telescope, which will "be on a separate space unit and share orbit alongside the space station", Wang added. Xinhua, in a separate report, said China was also working on its own reusable rocket technologies and has already built a prototype model. Story continues "The experiment has laid solid foundation for the realisation of reusable rockets in the country," an unnamed source told Xinhua. China has been moving to develop its space programme for military, commercial and scientific purposes, but is still playing catch-up to established space powers the United States and Russia. China's Jade Rabbit moon rover landed on the moon in late 2013 to great national fanfare, but soon began experiencing severe technical difficulties. The Jade Rabbit and the Chang'e 3 probe that carried it there marked the first "soft landing" on the moon since 1976. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had accomplished the feat earlier. (Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Nick Macfie) By David Stanway and Ruby Lian BEIJING (Reuters) - China will strictly control credit available for new capacity additions in the steel and coal sectors, both of which are suffering from price sapping supply gluts, the government said on Thursday. Beijing will also boost state support for the export of steel and coal by encouraging firms to shift capacity abroad as part of its efforts to ease domestic overcapacity, according to a joint statement issued by the central bank and several other government bodies. It was unclear whether the government planned to encourage greater exports of the two commodities directly from China. The statement said China would "strengthen financing support for enterprises 'going out'", and use loans, export credits and project financing to encourage coal and steel enterprises to build capacity abroad. "The details are in line with the government's overall guidelines," said Jiang Feitao, a steel researcher with the China Academy of Social Sciences. "China's measures to boost the economy will definitely lift demand and this will be unfavourable for the overcapacity cut." "I am also cautious about China's move to shift overcapacity overseas as this doesn't help, and just replaces exports," he added. China has been blamed for flooding world markets with cheap steel, putting overseas producers at risk of closure, though analysts say cost disadvantages make a large surge in coal exports highly unlikely this year. China is planning to shed 100-150 million tonnes of crude steel capacity in the next five years, and a further 500 million tonnes of surplus coal production, in a bid to tackle huge capacity overhangs that have saddled domestic firms with persistent losses. Local governments have been reluctant to force through bankruptcies at so-called zombie coal and steel enterprises amid fears of rising unemployment and a surge in non-performing loans. The government has earmarked 100 billion yuan (10.7 billion pounds) to handle layoffs, and it is also promising to establish mechanisms to deal with mounting debt. Story continues The government said in Thursday's statement that it would speed up the handling of non-performing loans in the debt-ridden sectors, and extend direct financing to support their restructuring. It would also would work to deal with possible default risks in the two sectors as soon as possible. It said banks would use a wide range of methods, including debt restructuring and bankruptcy settlements, to handle the problem, and it would also develop pilot projects aimed at securitising non-performing loans. (Reporting by Beijing Monitoring Desk; Editing by Richard Pullin and Joseph Radford) WEST KELOWNA, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - Apr 21, 2016) - COLORADO RESOURCES LTD. (TSX VENTURE:CXO) ("Colorado" or the "Company") announces it has acquired a 100% interest in 32,825 ha in the Golden Triangle area in northwestern British Columbia through combination of staking (29,425 ha) and purchase of the Max claims (3,400 ha) from a third party (collectively referred to as the "KingPin Property"). The KingPin Property covers thirty-five BC Government Minfile (mineral) occurrences and favorable geology on strike between the past producing Granduc Mine* and Colorado's KSP Property under option from SnipGold. With the addition of the KingPin Property Colorado now joins the ranks as one of the largest landholders in the region with claims covering approximately 65 km's of prospective geology. (See Figure 1). Adam Travis, President and CEO of Colorado states, "Colorado's management and technical team's experience in the region spans over 50 years combined and resulted in the strategic decision in 2013 to pursue the option to acquire an 80% interest in the KSP Property. Since 2013 Colorado has worked alongside BC government geologists to bring further attention to this prominent belt that shares many geological similarities to the KSM/Pretium* camp located 30 km to the southeast. We look forward to the upcoming drill program focusing on the high grade gold targets at Inel (see news release of February 29, 2016) and advancing the KingPin Property in a similar manner to achieve what we have accomplished to date at KSP." Mineral occurrences on the KingPin Property include copper skarns, copper porphyries, copper gold porphyries, polymetallic veins and gold veins. Previous explorers in the 1970's, focused on the copper potential and may have not properly recognized or evaluated the gold potential. Colorado intends to advance exploration on the KingPin Property following further review and compilation of the historical data by its technical team. Story continues Pursuant to an arm's length purchase agreement dated April 20, 2016 (the "Agreement") between the Company and a third party (the "Vendor"), the Vendor has agreed to sell its 100% interest in the Max Property to Colorado subject to a retained 2% net smelter returns royalty (the "NSR") for the following consideration: On signing a $20,000 cash payment to the Vendor; and 200,000 common shares of Colorado to be issued to the Vendor within 10 days of TSX Venture Exchange ("Exchange") approval. The Company has the option to purchase from the Vendor 1% of the NSR for $1,000,000 within 240 day of commercial production and thereafter at any time the remaining 1% for $5,000,000. The Max Property will form part of the KingPin Property and the Agreement is subject to Exchange approval. Qualified Person Greg Dawson P.Geo, is the Qualified Person ("QP") as defined by National Instrument 43-101 that has reviewed and approved the technical content of this news release. Cautionary Notes *This news release may contain information about adjacent properties on which Colorado has no right to explore or mine. Readers are cautioned that mineral deposits on adjacent properties are not indicative of mineral deposits on the Company's properties. About Colorado Colorado Resources Ltd. is currently engaged in the business of mineral exploration for the purpose of acquiring and advancing mineral properties located in British Columbia and is also seeking opportunities in Southwest USA and Latin America. Colorado's current exploration focus is to continue to advance: the KSP property optioned from SnipGold, located 15 km's along strike to the southeast of the past producing Snip Mine; its 100% owned North ROK property, located 15 km's northwest of the Red Chris mine development, both located in northern central British Columbia. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF COLORADO RESOURCES LTD. Adam Travis, President and Chief Executive Officer Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements contained in this news release, constitute "forward-looking information" as such term is used in applicable Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking information is based on plans, expectations and estimates of management at the date the information is provided and is subject to certain factors and assumptions, including: that the Company's financial condition and development plans do not change as a result of unforeseen events, that the Company obtains required regulatory approvals, that the Company continues to maintain a good relationship with the local project communities. Forward-looking information is subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause plans, estimates and actual results to vary materially from those projected in such forward-looking information. Factors that could cause the forward-looking information in this news release to change or to be inaccurate include, but are not limited to, the risk that any of the assumptions referred to prove not to be valid or reliable, which could result in delays, or cessation in planned work, that the Company's financial condition and development plans change, delays in regulatory approval, risks associated with the interpretation of data, the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits, the possibility that results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations, as well as the other risks and uncertainties applicable to mineral exploration and development activities and to the Company as set forth in the Company's Management's Discussion and Analysis reports filed under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com. There can be no assurance that any forward-looking information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, the reader should not place any undue reliance on forward-looking information or statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking information or statements, other than as required by applicable law. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. WASHINGTON, DC--(Marketwired - April 21, 2016) - In a hearing on US-Morocco relations held Wednesday in Rayburn House Office Building, members of Congress from both sides of the aisle praised Morocco as a "stable and stalwart US ally in a complicated part of the world," and called for a negotiated solution to the forty-year-old Western Sahara conflict based on a formula of autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty. "The US and Morocco have had a long and strategic relationships for so very long," said Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Middle East and North Africa Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) in opening statements at the event, which was co-sponsored by Subcommittee Ranking Member Ted Deutch (R-FL). "Morocco has been one of the few bright spots of stability, of reform, of progress in North Africa, and we want to see that continue." Referring to the imminent renewal of the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping mission in the Sahara known as MINURSO, the Chairman noted, "That's why it is so vital that the United States reaffirm our position in support of Morocco and work with our ally to draft a clean resolution that will bring this crisis to a close." The crisis she was referring to dates back to last month when, as she explained at the hearing, "[United Nations] Secretary General Ban Ki-moon made some outrageous comments misrepresenting Morocco's administration of the Western Sahara. The Secretary General's indiscrete comments called into question the neutrality of the United Nations and its ability to facilitate what we want -- a negotiated solution." Other members of Congress in attendance included Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL), Congressman Gregory Meeks (D-NY), Congressman Carlos Curbelo (R-FL), and Congressman Albio Sires (D-NJ). A panel of experts provided testimony in support of Moroccan sovereignty over the region. "Polisario intransigence, coupled with historical North African rivalry embedded in Algeria's view of the Western Sahara, represent the two defining impediments to a solution," said former US Ambassador to Morocco Marc Ginsberg, reflecting on his experience in Rabat under the first Clinton Administration. Remarking on the UN Secretary General's recent comments on the issue, Ambassador Ginsberg expressed his "deep disappointment with the unwarranted and unhelpful interference by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon," adding that Ban "has singularly undermined the critical role which the United Nations has heretofore played to preserve the peace." Story continues "[Autonomy] under Moroccan sovereignty constitutes a just and viable solution, particularly at a time where the expansion of ISIS and Al Qaeda in North Africa should render independence the least justifiable option for American security," he went on. Echoing the sentiment, former US Ambassador to Morocco Michael Ussery said, "For the US, the clear option going forward is one of common sense, supporting Morocco, our long-standing friend and an ally in the war on terror, and a nation of religious tolerance." He warned that an independent Western Sahara "is a path that can lead to more regional instability and terrorism and possibly the next Libya." "I think it is important that we speak plainly and with common sense about the best outcome for the people and territory of Western Sahara and, frankly, what is in the national security interest of the United States," said former Senate Foreign Relations Committee Staff Director Lester Munson. "This outcome -- genuine local autonomy [under Moroccan sovereignty] for the people of Western Sahara -- is a reasonable compromise that accounts for most of the interests of all parties." Speaking to the welfare of the people of the region, Nizar Baraka, President of Morocco's Economic, Social, and Environmental Council, explained how Morocco is doing everything it can to improve life for those living in the Western Sahara, namely through the country's regionalization plan, which "consists of a large transfer of authority to directly elected regional councils," as well as a number of infrastructure and economic development initiatives. "Through their elected representatives, the populations of the Moroccan Sahara choose to take full and entire responsibility in building a better future for their children without being hostage of the long-lasting UN process." US policy on the Western Sahara dates back to 1999 and has continued under the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Administrations. In a Joint Statement issued on November 22, 2013 following a meeting between President Obama and King Mohammed VI, the US reiterated that Morocco's autonomy plan is "serious, realistic, and credible." The two leaders also affirmed "their shared commitment to the improvement of the lives of the people of the Western Sahara." The policy -- and support for Morocco's autonomy plan -- has also been reiterated by bipartisan majorities of both the US House and Senate. In April 2009, 233 members of the United States House of Representatives sent a letter to President Obama reaffirming their support for Morocco's autonomy proposal. The letter built on another letter from 2007 signed by 173 Members of the House reiterating Congressional support for the Moroccan plan, and a letter from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and other former policy makers. In March 2010, 54 members of the United States Senate affirmed their support for Morocco's autonomy plan in a letter addressed to thenSecretary of State Hillary Clinton, urging her to "make the resolution of the Western Sahara stalemate a U.S. foreign policy priority for North Africa." In its legislative report for the 2016 Appropriations Bill passed in December 2015, Congress re-affirmed its strong bipartisan support for a negotiated solution to the dispute over the region based on autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty, and encouraged American private sector investment in Western Sahara. The Moroccan American Center for Policy (MACP) is a non-profit organization whose principal mission is to inform opinion makers, government officials, and interested publics in the United States about political and social developments in Morocco and the role being played by the Kingdom of Morocco in broader strategic developments in North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. This material is distributed by the Moroccan American Center for Policy on behalf of the Government of Morocco. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC. donald trump On Thursday's "Today" show, Donald Trump surprised people by expressing opposition to North Carolina's "bathroom law." That's the new law restricting use of bathrooms in government facilities to people of the same biological sex, meaning that many transgender people will have to use bathrooms that conflict with their expressed gender. Trump's stance shouldn't have been a surprise. If you were expecting Trump to just take whatever was the most hateful position available, you've misunderstood him. First, you need to remember that Trump has almost no core ideological views. The only deeply held opinion he has about bathrooms is that they should be coated in marble and brass. What Trump does care about is winning. He likes winners, he hates losers. And it's abundantly clear by now, with companies announcing cancellation of their expansion plans in the state, that the North Carolina law is a loser. "They're paying a big price," Trump said of North Carolina. "There's a lot of problems." Indeed. Republican Gov. Pat McCrory did not deal from strength, and he got crushed. Trump doesn't like losers, but he does like deals. And I'm sure he's convinced that, if he were governor of North Carolina, then he would have made a great bathroom deal that made everyone happy. In Trump's North Carolina, there would be so much peeing, people of all genders would be bored of peeing. The most interesting lesson from Trump's statement today is this: Maybe trans panic doesn't have the currency with Republican voters that social conservatives hoped and LGBT advocates feared. From the president's birth certificate to the Mexican government sending us its "rapists" to Muslim 9/11 "celebrations" in Jersey City, Trump is happy to play to people's unfounded fears. Yet he doesn't think appealing to bathroom panic is a good play. "There have been very few complaints the way it is," he said, basically arguing that North Carolinians should chill if they're afraid that creepy men are going to use transgenderism as a cover to sneak around to watch women and girls pee. Story continues That's a sentiment shared by South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard, a Republican who vetoed a similar bill on the grounds that there was not "any pressing issue" of bathroom conflicts. But it's not shared by Ted Cruz, who says that it's "stark-raving nuts" to let people who were born male "be alone in bathrooms with little girls." Trump must have known that Cruz would hit him on this. We'll see if he's right in his apparent judgment that his voter base is motivated by fear of Muslims and resentment of Mexicans, but view transgender people as a non-threat, and wouldn't want to risk the economy by picking a needless fight with them. So far, he's been a pretty accurate reader of the average Republican voter's id. NOW WATCH: 'It's pure political correctness: Trump on Tubman on the $20 bill More From Business Insider * Ecuador president says int'l bond issue eyed * Leftist Correa announces temporary tax hikes * Death toll from Saturday quake hits 570 * Fresh tremor rattles weary survivors (Recasts with announcements, adds new death toll) By Ana Isabel Martinez and Diego Ore PEDERNALES/QUITO, Ecuador, April 20 (Reuters) - Ecuador will temporarily increase some taxes, sell assets, and may issue new bonds on the international market to fund a multi-billion dollar reconstruction after a devastating 7.8 magnitude quake, a somber President Rafael Correa said on Wednesday. The death toll from Ecuador's weekend earthquake neared 600 and rescue missions ebbed as the traumatized Andean nation braced itself for long and costly rebuilding. "It's hard to imagine the magnitude of the tragedy. Every time we visit a place, there are more problems," Correa said, fresh from touring the disaster zone. The leftist leader estimated the disaster had inflicted $2 billion to $3 billion of damage and could knock 2 to 3 percentage points off growth, meaning the economy will almost certainly shrink this year. Lower oil revenue had already left the poor nation of 16 million people facing near-zero growth and lower investment. In addition to $600 million in credit from multilateral lenders, Correa, an economist, announced a raft of measures to help repair homes, roads, and bridges along the devastated Pacific Coast. "We're looking at the possibility of issuing bonds on the international market," he said on Wednesday afternoon, without providing details. Ecuador had been saying before the quake that current high yields would make it too expensive to issue debt. Yields on its bonds are close to 11 percentage points higher than comparable U.S. Treasury debt, according to JPMorgan data, and creditors are likely to be wary after the quake. Correa's government in 2008 defaulted on debt with a similar yield, calling the value unfair. His government has since returned to Wall Street and Ecuador currently has some $3.5 billion worth of bonds in circulation. Story continues In a nationally televised address later on Wednesday, Correa also announced the OPEC nation was poised to shed assets. "The country has many assets thanks to investment over all these years and we will seek to sell some of them to overcome these difficult moments," he said. He also unveiled several short-term tax changes, including a 2-point increase in the Valued Added Tax for a year, as well as a "one-off 3 percent additional contribution on profits," although the fine print was not immediately clear. The VAT tax is currently 12 percent. Additionally, a one-off tax of 0.9 percent will be imposed on people with wealth of over $1 million. Ecuadoreans will also be asked to contribute one day of salary, calculated on a sliding scale based on income. 'FOOD, PLEASE' Briefly pausing talk of reconstruction and hindering rescuers, another quake, of 6.2 magnitude, shook the coast before dawn on Wednesday, terrifying survivors. "You can't imagine what a fright it was. 'Not again!' I thought," said Maria Quinones in Pedernales town, which bore the brunt of Saturday's disaster. That quake, the worst in decades, killed 570 people, injured 7,000 others, damaged close to 2,000 buildings, and forced over 24,000 survivors to seek refuge in shelters, according to government tallies. Four days on, some isolated communities struggled without water, power or transport, as torn-up roads stymied deliveries. Along the coast, stadiums served as morgues and aid distribution centers. "I'm waiting for medicines, diapers for my grandson, we're lacking everything," said Ruth Quiroz, 49, as she waited in an hour-long line in front of a makeshift pharmacy set up at the Pedernales stadium. On a highway outside the town, some children sat holding placards saying: "Food, please." When a truck arrived to deliver water to the small town of San Jacinto, hungry residents surrounded the vehicle and hit it as they yelled: "We want food!" Scores of foreign aid workers and experts have arrived in the aftermath of Saturday's disaster and about 14,000 security personnel have kept order, with only sporadic looting reported. But rescuers were losing hope of finding anyone alive even as relatives of the missing begged them to keep looking. Speaking from the highland capital, Quito, Correa said the death toll would likely rise further, although at a slower rate than in previous days. "May these tears fertilize the soil of the future," he said. (Additional reporting by Alexandra Valencia and Diego Ore in Quito, Brian Ellsworth in Caracas; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne and Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Tom Brown, Peter Cooney and Michael Perry) (Adds defense lawyer comment) By Nate Raymond NEW YORK, April 21 (Reuters) - A Florida man was arrested on Thursday for participating in a bribery scheme aimed at supporting an illegal bitcoin exchange operated by his son and owned by an Israeli behind a series of hacking attacks on organizations such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. Michael Murgio, who serves on a school board in Palm Beach County, was charged in an indictment filed in federal court in Manhattan for participating in a scheme to pay bribes to let the bitcoin exchange's operators gain control of a credit union. Murgio, 65, was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Thursday. He was later released on a $250,000 bond following a hearing in federal court in West Palm Beach. Stuart Kaplan, Murgio's lawyer, said he was "confident that he will be fully exonerated from the allegations." The indictment added Murgio as a defendant in a case against three other individuals including his son Anthony Murgio, who prosecutors say operated the unlicensed bitcoin exchange, Coin.mx, and was involved in the bribe scheme. Prosecutors have said that Coin.mx was owned by Gery Shalon, an Israeli accused of orchestrating a massive hacking scheme with another Israeli, Ziv Orenstein, and an American, Joshua Samuel Aaron. Prosecutors contend Shalon, Orenstein and Aaron ran a criminal enterprise that hacked into a dozen companies' networks, stealing the personal information of more than 100 million people. In the case of JPMorgan, prosecutors said records belonging to more than 83 million customers were stolen. While the Murgios are not accused of engaging in the hacking offenses, prosecutors said they committed crimes with their co-defendants, Florida resident Yuri Lebedev and New Jersey pastor Trevon Gross, related to the unlicensed operation of Coin.mx. Prosecutors said beginning in 2013, Anthony Murgio operated Coin.mx, which exchanged millions of dollars of the virtual currency bitcoin for customers, while Lebedev supervised computer programming functions for the exchange. Story continues To evade scrutiny of Coin.mx, the Murgios and Lebedev in 2014 acquired control of Helping Other People Excel Federal Credit Union of Jackson, New Jersey, by paying $150,000 in bribes to Gross, its chairman, the indictment said. Anthony Murgio, Lebedev and Gross have previously pled not guilty to the charges against them. They are scheduled to face trial on Oct. 31. Extradition proceedings in Israel against Shalon and Orenstein remain pending. Aaron remains at large and was believed by the FBI as of November to be in Eastern Europe. The case is U.S. v. Murgio, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 15-cr-00769. (Editing by Bernadette Baum) Several thousand people took the streets to demand resignation of President Gjorge Ivanov over his decision to block judicial proceedings against top politicians embroiled in wire tapping scandal on April 13, 2016, (AFP Photo/Robert Atanasovski) (AFP/File) Skopje (AFP) - Several thousand people marched through the Macedonian capital on Tuesday for the eighth day running, protesting at President Gjorge Ivanov's decision to halt a probe into top politicians embroiled in a wire-tapping scandal. The protesters marched throughout central Skopje carrying placards reading "No justice, no peace" and "Ivanov resign." Smaller protests were also held in other towns. The two-year-long political crisis in the landlocked Balkan country ratcheted up a gear a week earlier, when Ivanov announced a decision that would protect more than 50 public figures from possible prosecution. Those amnestied include the president's ally, former prime minister Nikola Gruevski, and the head of the main opposition, Zoran Zaev. The move was also condemned by the European Union and United States. Observers saw it as damaging to Macedonia's ambitions to draw closer to the EU and Washington. The ambassadors of EU countries met Ivanov on Tuesday, the EU's representative in Skopje, Aivo Orav, said in a tweet. "Pardons undermine accountability and rule of law. What future for the country and its Euro-Atlantic integration?", the tweet said, without giving details of the talks. The EU has invited Macedonian leaders to talks in Vienna Friday on ending the drawn-out crisis. Gruevski's ruling VMRO-DPMNE conservative party has accepted the invitation. The opposition Social Democrats (SDSM) have yet to announce if their leader Zaev will join the talks. LAS VEGAS, NV / ACCESSWIRE / April 21, 2016 / Gold and Silver Mining of Nevada, Inc. ("CJTF") ("the Company"), (PINK SHEETS: CJTF) a junior mining company in Nevada, announces the plans for shareholders from positive cash flow from mining operations that have recently commenced and which were announced in recent press releases. The company projects that the current production operations will move into positive cash flow to the company. Because our contract operator will reimburse themselves for their costs there will be a distribution after costs to the shareholders. The company's portion of this money will be mostly (Up to 90%) distributed to shareholders either by dividend or by royalty income sharing. As the company moves forward and continues to expand this operation the revenues will continue to grow until the mill is at full capacity and the company portion of revenues should grow to $10 to $12 million per year. Basically the company is projected to morph into a Royalty company and the company does not intend to plow profits back into further exploration and asset development. Therefore once the company moves into positive cash flow it estimates that it will continue to stay in positive cash flow as long as the mining operations continue at this site which based on what is known at this time are estimated to be for another 50 years. About Gold & Silver Mining of Nevada, Inc.: The company is in the business of precious metals mining and processing of massive gold and silver ore bodies in Nevada. The gold and silver located in the company owned mining claims in these districts are located adjacent to other known and established mining operators. The company is not looking for ore, but is in the process of developing previously identified ore bodies. Safe Harbor Statement This release includes "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E and/or 27E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 that are based upon assumptions that in the future may prove not to have been accurate and are subject to significant risks and uncertainties, including statements as to the future performance of the company and the risks and uncertainties detailed from time to time in reports filed by the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Statements contained in this release that are not historical facts may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that forward-looking statements are inherently uncertain. Although the company believes that the expectations reflected in its forward-looking statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations or any of its forward-looking statements will prove to be correct. Factors that could cause results to differ include, but are not limited to, the company's ability to raise necessary financing, retention of key personnel, timely delivery of inventory from the company's suppliers, timely product development, product acceptance, and the impact of competitive services and products, in addition to general economic risks and uncertainties. Story continues For more information please contact: N. Fred Anderson, President of CJTF fred@goldandsilvermining.com 801-679-3945 Investor Relations at 801-679-3945 Visit the company web site at www.GoldandSilverMining.com SOURCE: Gold and Silver Mining of Nevada, Inc. dead whale shark giant fish The sharks are going after bigger prey. Hedge funds big and small are taking on larger targets in their activist campaigns, according to data from FactSet. The number of campaigns to shake up organizational structures of large- or mega-cap companies has taken off in recent years wrote Andrew Birstingl. "Macys, Qualcomm, and AIG. What do these companies have in common? Each of them is a large and well-established firm that has been the target of an activist campaign in the past year," he said in a note to clients. "These three examples of activist investors targeting larger and well-known companies are not anomalies. This is a growing trend within the shareholder activism space." According to Birstingl's data, there were 30 activist campaigns launched against companies with a market cap larger than $10 billion in 2015, 8% of all activist moves. This is a serious jump from just a few years ago, in 2009 there were only 6 such campaigns which was 2.6% of the total. Screen Shot 2016 04 21 at 9.57.40 AM Additionally, as measured by average market cap, the jump in activists targeting massive firms is even more apparent. "The average market value of companies targeted by activist investors is significantly higher than it was several years ago," said Birstingl. "The average market value of the firms involved in the 262 activist campaigns in 2012 was $2.7 billion. In 2015, the average market cap of targeted companies was $4.7 billion, 73% higher than the 2012 value." Birstingl did note that activist campaigns were launched against Apple in 2013 and 2014, skewing their data, but stripping out those moves shows the data has been steadily increasing since 2013. Screen Shot 2016 04 21 at 10.04.59 AM Birstingl noted that even small hedge funds are getting in on the act such as SpringOwl Asset Management going after Viacom and Altimeter Capital Management going after United Continental airlines. Story continues With all the activism, Birstingl said, even companies that would seem safe have become targets. "Even if a companys stock is performing well, the firm is still susceptible to an activist investor knocking on the door," said the note. "Of the activist campaigns since 2008, 38% of the target companies stocks were up in the last year leading up to the campaign announcement date, and 29% of the target companies stocks were up more than 10%. These numbers are even higher for mega- and large-cap firms." So to recap: hedge fund activists of all sizes are unceasingly going after gigantic firms whether or not the company's stock is doing well. Activism, everybody's doing it. NOW WATCH: The science behind why you shouldn't pop your pimples More From Business Insider By Sinead Cruise LONDON (Reuters) - Pay is not the only thing HSBC investors will challenge executives over at Friday's annual meeting in London, calls for reassurance on dividends, Chinese expansion and succession planning are all set to feature. Concerns about moving to Asia, which dominated last year's event, have been replaced by a litany of fresh worries, topped by fears about whether an 8 percent dividend yield can be sustained as the global economy stalls. "Owners of the stock need to be aware that there is a very high probability that HSBC is going to have to cut its dividend in the next 12 to 18 months," said Ian Tabberer, a fund manager at Henderson Global Investors, which holds HSBC shares. "They (HSBC) appear to jump head first into markets where supply of capital is increasing, the price they can fetch comes down and they end up hurting themselves," he said, referring to a push into mainland China, under HSBC's "Asia Pivot" strategy. Chief Executive Stuart Gulliver and Chairman Douglas Flint are both big believers in the potential of China's Pearl River Delta - home to 11 industrial cities set to fuse into one megopolis - but the big pay-off may not come until long after they have left the bank, analysts warn. Other investors question whether this capital-intensive expansion should be halted until HSBC completes its exit from Brazil, quells worries about its main capital ratio and cuts its compliance bill, which is set to peak in 2016. Such concerns mean shareholders, reeling from a 25 percent fall in HSBC's share price over the last year, have given a proposal to buy back shares a lukewarm reception, citing a weak revenue outlook and fears that HSBC's management has run out of ideas to support short-term growth. "I don't think HSBC have a lot of capital to play with," said one of the bank's 40 largest investors, who declined to be named in line with his company's policy. "The market is implying that HSBC's dividend is gone or halved. A buyback perversely does help to sustain the dividend as it reduces the share count...The earnings per share trajectory is much more important," the investor said. At Monday's Hong Kong shareholder meeting, Gulliver said the management team shared investor frustrations about the share price and said HSBC remains "committed to a progressive dividend", subject to its long-term profitability. PAY ATTENTION Investor advisory firm Pensions & Investment Research Consultants (PIRC) has urged shareholders to reject HSBC's pay plans and oppose Flint's re-election, days after it was named in a data leak from a Panamanian law firm which set up thousands of offshore structures to help rich clients hide their wealth. HSBC said the documents pre-dated a reform of its business model, but the saga is a set-back to attempts to overhaul the bank's image, after a series of scandals and a year after revelations its Swiss business helped clients dodge tax. Investors are also keen for an update on HSBC's search for a chairman, following speculation that ex-AXA boss Henri de Castries was being readied for the position. The search for a new CEO is expected to follow shortly after. HSBC has already said it was looking for a replacement for Flint, 60, and aims to nominate his successor in 2017. Last year, 96 percent of investors backed his re-election. And dissent on pay continues. PIRC has also criticised Gulliver's bonus, which exceeded 200 percent of his salary and benefits package, which is worth 50 percent of his base pay. Some of HSBC's future benefit plans for its executives have been reined in, but PIRC said the maximum potential awards are still "highly excessive", and should be opposed. Last year, there was a significant backlash, with almost 1 in 4 investors who voted opposing HSBC's remuneration report for 2014. "We have had an active and constructive dialogue with all our major shareholders with respect to our remuneration policy," a spokeswoman for HSBC said in a statement. "We haven't voted in support of any banks on pay since 2012, and we have taken that decision because of performance, conduct issues, fines and returns all of those things put together mean it is difficult to see how boards have been able to justify the amounts paid to executives," Shade Duffy, Head of Corporate Governance at AXA Investment Managers, one of HSBC's 15 largest shareholders, told Reuters. HSBC agreed in 2012 to pay $1.92 billion in U.S. fines, mainly for allowing itself to be used to launder drug money flowing out of Mexico. (Additional reporting by Lisa Jucca and Sumeet Chatterjee in Hong Kong and Simon Jessop in London; Editing by Alexander Smith) SOFIA, April 21 (Reuters) - Malaysia-based IHH Healthcare Berhad is to buy Bulgaria's Tokuda Hospital in a deal that will help to make it the biggest private healthcare provider in the Balkan country, the company said on Thursday. The enlarged group plans to develop the medical tourism business by attracting patients from the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. IHH's Turkish subsidiary Acibadem has agreed to acquire Tokuda from Japan's Tokushukai Medical Corporation for 65 million euros ($73.6 million). It is also paying around 11 million euros to its existing operating partners to raise its stake in Bulgaria's City Clinic to 76.5 percent. "The total amount of the deal is about 250 million levs ($144.5 million), as it also includes some debt," Angel Angelov, one of Citi Clinic's shareholders, told Reuters. After the acquisition, Acibadem will become the leading private healthcare operator in Bulgaria with four hospitals, totalling 750 beds and four medical centres. "We will focus on the development of medical tourism as this business is still underdeveloped in Bulgaria. We will aim to attract customers from the former Soviet Union countries as well as the Middle East," he added. The newly created holding company will have 2,300 employees. The two transactions boost Acibadem's beds globally to more than 3,500 across 22 hospitals in three countries. ($1 = 1.7303 leva) ($1 = 0.8849 euros) (Reporting by Angel Krasimirov; Editing by Keith Weir) A gas flare on an oil production platform in the Soroush oil fields is seen alongside an Iranian flag in the Gulf July 25, 2005. REUTERS/Raheb Homavandi/File Photo LONDON (Reuters) - Iran is determined to recover its share of the world oil market following the lifting of sanctions, and can withstand low prices since it has sold oil for as little as $6 a barrel in the past, a source close to Iranian oil policy said. The source was speaking after Russia, one of the participants at last weekend's meeting of oil producing nations which failed to deliver an agreement to freeze output, indicated it could raise supply. "We paid for our barrels with our centrifuges," the source said, referring to Iran's acceptance of curbs on its nuclear program in order for Western sanctions on Tehran to be lifted. "We are going to get our share back. For us, oil is only 12 percent of our GDP. We used to sell oil in the war (between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s) at $6 a barrel." He added any agreement to restrain supply at the next OPEC meeting in June depended on Saudi Arabia and non-member Russia. "If June is going to produce an agreement, you have to ask Saudi Arabia and Russia. They are the problem." (Reporting by Alex Lawler; Editing by Dmitry Zhdannikov and Mark Potter) By Francesca Landini and Stephen Jewkes MILAN (Reuters) - Banca Popolare di Vicenza faces legal claims of up to 1.65 billion euros (1.32 billion pound) from clients who allege they were mislead into buying its shares, potentially undermining a state-backed rescue of the loss-making bank. Italy's eighth-largest bank revealed the legal risks on Thursday in a 950-page prospectus for its initial public offering, aimed at raising money to shore up its balance sheet. The share sale has become a test of confidence in Italy's banking sector, the fourth largest in the euro zone. Italy is saddled with 360 billion euros in bad debts, a third of the euro zone's total, and there had been fears that a failure of the Vicenza IPO would trigger a sector-wide crisis. Vicenza's share sale is underwritten by Italy's new bank bailout fund, Atlante, created this month to boost confidence in the country's banks. European Central Bank President Mario Draghi said on Thursday the fund was a "small step" in the right direction. But the legal claims facing Vicenza, based in the picturesque northern Italian city of the same name, threaten to eat into the 1.76 billion euros it plans to raise in its IPO. The bank also said in the prospectus it had suffered deposit outflows in March and was heavily dependent on funding from other banks to keep its liquidity above regulatory requirements. Many of Vicenza's 119,000 shareholders are its depositors and borrowers who also bought its shares. Some allege in civil lawsuits the bank compelled them to buy shares as a condition for securing loans. Vicenza (IPO-BPVS.MI) has said it is fully cooperating with authorities investigating the complaints. A bank spokeswoman said on Thursday it had already made an offer to discuss the claims with aggrieved clients. Fabrizio Bernardi, an analyst at broker Fidentiis, said the Atlante bailout fund may end up with nearly 100 percent of the bank if, as expected, the issue fails to attract investors. Story continues "We see little or no chances that this capital increase may be successful," he said. "We see large room for risks: key problems may arise from lawsuits ... We also believe Vicenza will need time to bring back its own credibility in order to regain the trust of its client base. The pain may not be over." The IPO, expected to be priced at around 10 euro cents per share, will effectively wipe out the savings of thousands of Italians, mostly from Vicenza's home region where the 150-year-old co-operative bank was a byword for tradition and security. Some of the bank's clients bought its unlisted shares for as much as 62.5 euros each two years ago. Only a year ago, the bank sold shares at 48 euros apiece. In its prospectus, Vicenza said it faced 647 million euros in claims for damages under law suits already with the courts, with another 1 billion euros in potential claims. It said it had secured around 860 million euros in financing from JP Morgan (JPM.N) and Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE) earlier this year to help restore its liquidity coverage ratio - a measure of a bank's ability to ride out short-term cash outflows. After a 23 percent drop in deposits last year, Vicenza said direct funding had stabilised in the first two months of the year, but fell by an unspecified amount in March. UniCredit, Italy's biggest bank by assets, had agreed to underwrite the Vicenza issue, but that role has passed to the Atlante fund, set up as a safety net for Vicenza and other banks struggling to raise the capital they need. The fund, which has so far had pledges for 4 billion euros, is financed mainly by banks and insurers, but is also backed by state lender Cassa Depositi e Prestiti. Popolare di Vicenza's IPO will run from April 21-28. Twenty-five percent of the offer will be for retail investors, with the rest for institutional investors in Italy and abroad. The bank said earlier this week the pre-marketing phase was weak. (Additional reporting by Silvia Aloisi; Writing by Mark Bendeich; Editing by Alexander Smith and Jane Merriman) By Tetsushi Kajimoto TOKYO (Reuters) - Most Japanese firms think a Donald Trump presidency would harm the Japan-U.S. security alliance and make the United States a less attractive place to invest, a Reuters poll showed, in a further sign of international angst about his candidacy. The Republican frontrunner, known for his unpredictable style and fiery rhetoric, would also cause bilateral trade to shrink if he became president, a majority of respondents said. Portraying Japan as a free-rider on security, Trump has suggested that the U.S. ally might need nuclear weapons to ease U.S. financial commitment to its defence - anathema to the only country ever attacked by atomic bombs. Trump has also said he might withdraw U.S. troops from Japan unless it pays more to feed and house the 50,000 it hosts, and he has accused Japan of stealing U.S. jobs. His comments have only fuelled simmering worries amongst some Japanese in recent years about whether Washington would defend Tokyo in a crisis under their alliance - the lynchpin of Japan's security policy for decades. The Reuters Corporate Survey, conducted April 1-15, found 78 percent of firms thought Japan's security environment would deteriorate under Trump. The remainder said it would not change much. Not one firm thought it would improve. The monthly poll surveyed 510 big and mid-size firms. Around 230 answered questions on the U.S. presidential race. In written comments, companies voiced concerns that uncertainty would grow over U.S. diplomacy and that protectionism would rise, with some saying a President Trump would embolden China as it struggles to exert its influence in the South China Sea and other parts of Asia. "It is very easy to imagine China taking advantage of the power vacuum to step up military operations in the region," wrote a manager at an electronics maker. In particular, Tokyo and Beijing have long been at odds over tiny islands claimed by both in the East China Sea. Story continues "We worry that geopolitical risk would heighten a lot and Sino-Japanese relations would be extremely strained, which could result in a very negative impact on the Japanese economy," the manager added. Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks did not respond to requests for comment. BAD FOR BUSINESS While the possibility of a President Trump has triggered alarm among some foreign diplomats, economists and business executives, he has moved closer to the Republican nomination after winning a commanding victory in New York state's presidential nominating contests on Tuesday. Some respondents to the survey said, however, that they see Trump's comments as mere posturing and did not expect any real change in policy even if he won the Nov. 8 election. Managers answered on condition of anonymity in the survey which was conducted for Reuters by Nikkei Research. Around 55 percent of firms said that Trump would be bad for business in the United States, that Japanese corporate appetite for investing in the U.S. would wane, and that trade between the two countries would decline. The amount of Japan-U.S. trade has grown by about a quarter in the past two decades to be worth around $215 billion, accounting for 15 percent of Japan's overall trade. The United States is Japan's No. 2 trading partner after China, while Japan is the United States' fourth-largest trading partner. In contrast to Trump, more than 80 percent of Japanese firms believe Democratic Party frontrunner Hillary Clinton would keep a steady hand on economic relations and maintain the status quo on security. The White House has described Trump's suggestions on Japan adopting nuclear arms as destabilising. Representatives for Clinton did not respond to requests for comment. "She would adopt realistic policies. It would lack freshness and stage no surprise, which would be a relief to us," wrote a manager at a construction firm. (Reporting by Tetsushi Kajimoto; Additional reporting by Izumi Nakagawa in Tokyo, Emily Stephenson and Amanda Becker in Washington; Editing by William Mallard and Edwina Gibbs) (Recasts with reported deaths, updates injury toll, adds details on Mexichem plant, Pemex accident rate) MEXICO CITY, April 20 (Reuters) - An explosion rocked a major petrochemical facility of Mexican national oil company Pemex in the Gulf state of Veracruz on Wednesday, and the state governor said he was told that three people had been killed. The blast injured as many as 40 people, although oil exports were not affected, officials said. The governor of Veracruz state, Javier Duarte, told local television he was informed that three workers had died in the explosion. Pemex said the explosion, which sent a huge, dark plume of smoke billowing into the sky, occurred at the facility's chlorinate 3 plant near the port of Coatzacoalcos, one of the company's top oil export hubs. The cause was unclear. Arturo Bermudez, head of public security in Veracruz, told local television that at least 40 people were injured in the explosion. Pemex put the current toll of injured at 30. Local emergency officials said hundreds of people had been evacuated from the site. Television footage showed an initial burst of flames followed by a tower of thick smoke. A Pemex official said local oil exports were not affected by the blast. The incident took place at Petroquimica Mexicana de Vinilo, or PMV, a vinyl petrochemical plant that is a joint venture between Pemex's petrochemical unit and Mexican plastic pipe maker Mexichem. The plant, operated by Mexichem, is located within Pemex's larger Pajaritos petrochemical complex. Mexichem said in a brief statement that the explosion occurred in an ethylene unit at the plant. The company could not be immediately reached for further comment. In February, a worker was killed in a fire at the PMV plant, which produces vinyl chloride monomer, also known as chloroethene, an industrial chemical used to produce plastic piping. The incident occurred just weeks after three workers were killed and at least seven injured when a fire broke out on a Pemex oil-processing platform in the Gulf of Mexico. Story continues It also came as Pemex fights to stem a slide in output that has hammered the company, and to implement deep cost cuts to cope with a sharp drop in oil prices. Mexico is trying to lure private investors to revive its oil industry. Pemex, which enjoyed a decades-long monopoly over Mexico's oil and gas sector until an energy reform opened up the sector in 2014, has experienced a series of high-profile accidents. In 2013, at least 37 people were killed by a blast at Pemex's Mexico City headquarters, and 26 people died in a fire at a Pemex natural gas facility in northern Mexico in September 2012. A 2015 fire at its Abkatun Permanente platform in the oil-rich Bay of Campeche affected oil output and cost the company up to $780 million. Pemex said last year it had reduced its annual accident rate in 2014 by more than 33 percent. But a Reuters investigation found that Pemex was reducing its accident rate by including hours worked by office staff in its calculations. (Reporting by David Alire Garcia, Gabriel Stargardter, Liz Diaz, Dave Graham and Anna Yukhananov; Editing by Simon Gardner and Peter Cooney) MEXICO CITY, April 20 (Reuters) - At least 40 people were injured on Wednesday in an explosion that rocked a major petrochemical facility of Mexican national oil company Pemex, according to state emergency services. Arturo Bermudez, head of emergency services in eastern Veracruz state, reported the tally on local television. Pemex put the current number of injured at 30. (Reporting by David Alire Garcia) CYPRESS, TX / ACCESSWIRE / April 21, 2016 / Lode-Star Mining Inc. (LSMG) is pleased to announce completion of the two water monitoring holes required by the Nevada Department of Environmental Protection (NDEP). The two wells have been sampled with another set of samples due to be completed in mid-July of this year. Once these samples are analyzed the Company can submit its production permit request. During the week of water well drilling, the Company had the Nevada Department of Minerals evaluate a number of the property's abandoned mine shafts it wishes to utilize as future waste storage. As anticipated, none of the shafts reviewed had any presence of water or wildlife that could hinder plans to execute surface storage. Company President Mark Walmesley says, "It's good to have this milestone now completed. Having the water monitoring wells in place provides a good benchmark with NDEP as we prepare our long-term working relationship. It also puts the most logistically challenging and costly part of the permitting process behind us. It is my belief the Company is well on track to meet its goal of being production-able by Q4-2016." About Lode-Star Mining Inc. Lode-Star Mining Inc. (LSM), is a U.S. based junior-tier mining company focused on the exploration, development, and production of North American mineral assets. LSM is the operator of the Goldfield Bonanza property, acquired under an option for development on December 11, 2014 from Lode-Star Gold, Inc., a private Nevada corporation. The property is located in the historic gold producing district of Goldfield, NV, which at one time was Nevada's largest gold producing district. Historic production totaled better than 4 million ounces of gold. Contacts for Lode-Star Mining Inc. Pam Walters Lode-Star Mining Inc. investor relations phone : (281) 256-7101 e-mail : info@lode-starmining.com website: www.lode-starmining.com Forward Looking Statements This news release may contain forward-looking statements that involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause LSMG's actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward looking statements. Forward-looking statements reflect LSMG's current views with respect to future events and are based on assumptions and subject to risks and uncertainties. Given these uncertainties, investors should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Except as required by law, LSMG assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in any forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future. SOURCE: Lode-Star Mining Inc. LAS VEGAS, NV--(Marketwired - Apr 21, 2016) - Hemp, Inc. (OTC PINK: HEMP) executives are pleased to announce that Louisiana's House Agriculture Committee has recently approved two bills to the House floor, HB1085 and HB1099. House bill 1085, sponsored by Representative Jack Montoucet, authorizes institutions of higher education to develop a pilot program to study the growth, cultivation or marketing of industrial hemp for agricultural or academic research. If passed, the bills would allow universities in the state to research the use of the fiber from the hemp plant for use in textiles and other industries and growing marijuana for medicinal use. Craig Perlowin, Secretary of Hemp, Inc. commented, "This is a big step for Louisiana. With each favorable industrial hemp legislation passed, it is evident to me, that the United States federal government can no longer bridle the demand for this economical and sustainable crop which was once key to our nation's development, wealth and defense. Hemp, Inc. is in an ideal position. We are close to finishing America's largest (and only) commercial-sized, hemp processing facility which will have the capability and capacity to process hemp in very large quantities. We just installed our massive 60-ft tall steel silo at our facility after being delayed weeks due to excessive rain. However, the 60-foot silo and concrete foundation are now completed, as nothing can stop the industrial hemp revolution." To see the video of America's largest hemp processing facility (70,000 square feet under roof, on 9 acres) and 60-foot silo installation, click here. Louisiana's second bill, HB1099 sponsored by Major Thibaut, would "legalize and set up a system for the production and distribution of medical marijuana," allowing Louisiana State University Agricultural Center and Southern University Agriculture Center first rights to grow marijuana. According to reports, "production would be under the watchful eye of the Department of Agriculture and Forestry," and, "the bill would ideally offer a solution for patients legally prescribed marijuana in Louisiana but unable to obtain the drug." To see the video of America's largest hemp processing facility (70,000 square feet under roof, on 9 acres) and 60-foot silo installation, click here. Bruce Perlowin, CEO of Hemp, Inc. (OTC PINK: HEMP) continued, "Let's face it. The benefits of industrial hemp are undeniable which is why we are seeing more and more states pass industrial hemp bills. We're seeing opportunities abound in the hemp industry. With each industrial hemp bill passed, we are keeping our shareholders informed. Hemp, Inc. will remain at the forefront of the industrial hemp industry with the largest commercial decorticating plant in the United States." "Every advancement in the industrial hemp industry reinforces Hemp, Inc.'s advantage in the marketplace because we are years ahead of the curve. For example, our portable decorticators can be purchased or leased in states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, or any other state in America, to process hemp on site, thus creating revenue for the local farmers and raw materials for Hemp, Inc's marketing arm to sell to manufacturers for hemp products. Our subsidiary, Industrial Hemp Manufacturing, LLC (IHM), is also becoming known throughout the industry as a leader in this sector. Any hemp farmer, anywhere in America interested in purchasing or leasing our portable hemp decorticator, please contact us at info@ihempman.com." To see the video of America's largest hemp processing facility (70,000 square feet under roof, on 9 acres) and 60-foot silo installation, click here. ABOUT INDUSTRIAL HEMP AND MEDICAL MARIJUANA CONSULTING COMPANY (IHMMCC) This lucrative division of Hemp, Inc. is once again picking up momentum. The Industrial Hemp and Medical Marijuana Consulting Company (IHMMCC) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hemp, Inc. that pulls industry information from a vast network of specialists. IHMMCC is entrenched primarily in all the multi-faceted opportunities of the Industrial Hemp industry while also maintaining professional contacts in the medical marijuana sector. As the country transitions to embrace more sustainable agricultural practices, public and private companies want to expand into the industrial hemp industry and consulting services from IHMMCC are helping them in leading the way. IHMMCC's most recent agreement, before entering into an agreement with Green Cures and Botanical Distribution, Inc.. is with FutureLand Corp, a leading provider of strategic real estate investment, grow facilities and material solutions to the global cannabis industry. Per the Consultant Agreement, IHMMCC will provide consulting services specific to the Industrial Hemp/Medical Marijuana Industry in the area of sales and marketing strategy, public company venues, and general industry specific business guidance to FutureLand Corp. For more information on FutureLand Corp, visit their website here. SUBSCRIBE TO HEMP, INC.'S VIDEO UPDATES "Hemp, Inc. Presents" is capturing the historic, monumental re-creation of the hemp decorticator today as America begins to evolve into a cleaner, green, eco-friendly sustainable environment. What many see as the next American Industrial Revolution is actually the Industrial Hemp Revolution. Join "Hemp, Inc. Presents" and join the hemp revolution. Watch as Hemp, Inc., the #1 leader in the industrial hemp industry, engages its shareholders and the public through each step in bringing back the hemp decorticator as described in the "Freedom Leaf Magazine" article "The Return of the Hemp Decorticator" by Steve Bloom. Freedom Leaf Magazine, a leading cannabis industry magazine is published by the public company, Freedom Leaf Magazine, Inc. "Hemp, Inc. Presents" is accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, by visiting www.hempinc.com. To subscribe to the "Hemp, Inc. Presents" YouTube channel, be sure to click the subscribe button. Subscribers will automatically get an email from YouTube every time a new Hemp, Inc. video update is posted along with suggestions of other similar videos. Stay up-to-date with industrial hemp news and the progress of Hemp, Inc.'s multipurpose industrial hemp processing plant while being educated on the industrial hemp industry. Our video update views are collectively reaching over a thousand views per week. Stay informed by subscribing to Hemp, Inc.'s video updates. Hemp, Inc. is positioned to be the avant-garde of the industrial hemp industry and leader of processing industrial hemp in America. HEMP NATION MAGAZINE HempNationMagazine.com (HNM) is published by Hemp, Inc. and focuses on informing, educating, raising awareness and connecting the public to the powerful world of HEMP. HNM reports on Politics, Industrial Growth, Banking, Distribution, Medical, Lifestyles and Legalization. HNM is your source for all things HEMP and news about this emerging multi-billion dollar industry. For more information on HNM, visit www.HempNationMagazine.com. ABOUT INDUSTRIAL HEMP When it comes to environmental impact, industrial hemp is a crop that can actually give back to the earth. It takes less water to grow and process, is less polluting from pesticides and can actually help rebuild depleted soil. A hemp crop requires half the water alfalfa uses and can be grown without the heavy use of pesticides. According to a USDA report in 2000, industrial hemp is not very susceptible to widespread disease. Most contagion can be controlled through seed treatment before planting. Additional research has shown that industrial hemp can be used for phytoremediation of polluted environments and significantly detox toxic soil. Hemp is a durable natural fiber that is grown as a renewable source for raw materials that can be incorporated into thousands of products. It's one of the oldest domesticated crops known to man. Hemp is used as a nutritional food product for humans and pets, building materials, paper, textiles, cordage, organic body care and other nutraceuticals, just to name a few. It has thousands of other known uses. HEMP, INC.'S TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE Hemp, Inc. (OTC PINK: HEMP) seeks to benefit many constituencies from a "Cultural Creative" perspective, thereby not exploiting or endangering any group. CEO of Hemp, Inc., Bruce Perlowin, is positioning the company as a leader in the industrial hemp industry, with a social and environmental mission at its core. Thus, the publicly traded company believes in "up streaming" a portion of its profits back to its originator, in which some cases will one day be the American small farmer -- cultivating natural, sustainable products as an interwoven piece of nature. By Hemp, Inc. focusing on comprehensive investment results -- that is, with respect to performance along the interrelated dimensions of people, planet, and profits -- the triple bottom line approach can be an important tool to support its sustainability goal. http://www.twitter.com/hempinc (Twitter) http://www.facebook.com/hempinc (Facebook) http://www.instagram.com/hempinc (Instagram) SAFE HARBOR ACT Forward-Looking Statements are included within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. All statements regarding our expected future financial position, results of operations, cash flows, financing plans, business strategy, products and services, competitive positions, growth opportunities, plans and objectives of management for future operations, including words such as "anticipate," "if," "believe," "plan," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "could," "should," "will," and other similar expressions are forward-looking statements and involve risks, uncertainties and contingencies, many of which are beyond our control, which may cause actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from anticipated results, performance, or achievements. We are under no obligation to (and expressly disclaim any such obligation to) update or alter our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. * Irishman Bellew, Malaysian Shazalli Ramly front-runners to be CEO-sources * Successor will have to complete revamp started by Mueller By Praveen Menon and Siva Govindasamy KUALA LUMPUR/SINGAPORE, April 21 (Reuters) - The abrupt exit of Malaysia Airlines' German boss has revived debate in Malaysia over the wisdom of picking a foreigner to run its ailing carrier, potentially limiting the group's options as it seeks a new leader midway through a radical revamp. Christoph Mueller, a German national credited with turning around Aer Lingus, took the helm at state-owned Malaysia Airlines in May last year on a three-year contract, as it attempted to pull itself back after the loss of two Boeing 777s in less than a year. Among the front-runners to replace him as CEO is chief operating officer and Irishman Peter Bellew, formerly with Ryanair, who sits on the group's board, industry sources and sources familiar with the matter said. Another is Malaysian executive Mohammed Shazalli Ramly, head of unlisted telecommunications firm Celcom Axiata Bhd, who has no experience in airlines but joined the board last year. "It is a strategic national company with lots of national pride involved. When they hired (Mueller), the cannot just say they did not anticipate this from the beginning," said Tian Chua, national vice president of opposition party PKR. He said his party had advised the government in 2014 that it was "unfair" to bring in a foreigner for the job. "The point is that the government did not properly consider all the possible factors that affect this decision." Surprising even those close to him in the company, Mueller announced his departure for unspecified family reasons late on Tuesday, giving no further detail. He will leave the top job in September, though he remains a non-executive director. With little detail to go on, politicians, newspapers and social media have blamed the exit on everything from internal disagreements to political rows and friction with Khazanah , the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund which bankrolled the bail-out. Story continues Mueller dismissed rumours in a town hall with employees, according to newspaper reports. Neither the company nor Mueller have commented further. The government has not commented, while Khazanah has said it would have wanted Mueller to continue, but respected his decision. It has not commented further. Malaysia Airlines did not respond to Reuters' request for comment on Thursday. INDUSTRY NEWCOMER But whatever the real reason, analysts say, fresh debate over the choice of a foreigner for the top job will prove a headache for the government and the airline, which had anticipated Mueller would give way to a local successor in time. "For stability, an internal (candidate) sounds better, but who knows," said Mohsin Aziz, analyst at Maybank Investment Bank in Kuala Lumpur. Shazalli Ramly, if appointed, would not be the first executive without an industry background to successfully run an airline: Kazuo Inamori successfully turned around Japan Airlines (JAL) with no previous experience at all in aviation management. But such appointments and successes are rare. Any successor will also be expected to complete the course chartered by Mueller - and it is all even tougher, analysts predict, in a country where running the flag carrier involves unions who have close ties to the ruling party. "(Mueller) made the airline more professional and I don't know if that will continue with his departure," one company executive said. (Reporting by Praveen Menon in KUALA LUMPUR and Siva Govindasamy in SINGAPORE; Editing by Clara Ferreira-Marques and Muralikumar Anantharaman) Will they listen? Mexico City just launched a massive experiment in digital democracy. It is asking its nearly 9 million residents to help draft a new constitution through social media. The crowdsourcing exercise is unprecedented in Mexicoand pretty much everywhere else. Chilangos, as locals are known, can petition for issues to be included in the constitution through Change.org (link in Spanish), and make their case in person if they gather more than 10,000 signatures. They can also annotate proposals by the constitutions drafters via PubPub, an editing platform (Spanish) similar to Google Docs. The idea, in the words of the mayor, Miguel Angel Mancera, is to bestow the constitution project (Spanish) with a democratic, progressive, inclusive, civic and plural character. Theres a big catch, however. The constitutional assemblythe body that has the final word on the new citys basic lawis under no obligation to consider any of the citizen input. And then there are the practical difficulties of collecting and summarizing the myriad of views dispersed throughout one of the worlds largest cities. That makes Mexico Citys public-consultation experiment a big test for the peoples digital power, one being watched around the world. A city is born Fittingly, the idea of crowdsourcing a constitution came about in response to an attempt to limit people power. For decades, city officials had fought to get out from under the thumb of the federal government, which had the final word on decisions such as who should be the citys chief of police. This year, finally, they won a legal change that turns the Distrito Federal (federal district), similar to the USs District of Columbia, into Ciudad de Mexico (Mexico City), a more autonomous entity, more akin to a state. (Confusingly, its just part of the larger urban area also colloquially known as Mexico City, which spills into neighboring states.) Story continues However, trying to retain some control, the Mexican congress decided that only 60% of the delegates to the citys constitutional assembly would be elected by popular vote. The rest will be assigned by the president, congress, and Mancera, the mayor. Mancera is also the only one who can submit a draft constitution to the assembly. Manceras response was to create a committee of some 30 citizens (Spanish), including politicians, human-rights advocates, journalists, and even a Paralympic gold medalist, to write his draft. He also called for the development of mechanisms to gather citizens aspirations, values, and longing for freedom and justice so they can be incorporated into the final document. The mechanisms, embedded in an online platform (Spanish) that offers various ways to weigh in, were launched at the end of March and will collect inputs until September 1. The drafting group has until the middle of that month to file its text with the assembly, which has to approve the new constitution by the end of January. An experiment with few precedents Mexico City didnt have a lot of examples to draw on, since not a lot of places have experience with crowdsourcing laws. In the US, a few local lawmakers have used Wiki pages and GitHub to draft bills, says Marilyn Bautista, a lecturer at Stanford Law School who has researched the practice. Icelandwith a population some 27 times smaller than Mexico Citysfamously had its citizens contribute to its constitution with input from social media. The effort failed after the new constitution got stuck in parliament. In Mexico City, where many citizens already feel left out, the first big hurdle is to convince them its worth participating. According to a 2013 survey (Spanish, pdf) by Mexicos national electoral authority: Most Mexicans, 66%, consider there is little or no respect for the law. Half of them see democracy as a system in which everyone participates but few benefit. Nearly a third have no trust in the federal government at all, and more than 40% distrust political parties and lawmakers. More than 70% dont trust their fellow Mexicans. To engage with its jaded residents, the city built the site with eye-catching drone video of the city. And its been posting videos on YouTube of members of the drafting committee, encouraging citizens to participate. One of the drafters, Carlos Cruza former gang member who has created several programs to keep youth from getting involved in organized crimetalks about raising the minimum wage and reducing inequality (Spanish). Kiosks where citizens can participate. (Mexico City) There are various levels of participation on offer, from ranking the citys biggest problems in an online survey to making detailed comments on draft proposals. For people without internet access, 300 computer kiosks have been set up throughout the city with staff to guide them through the process. For this to be awesome, there have to be hundreds of thousands of answers, said Diego Cuesy, a city policy analyst who helped build the platform. Making sense of it all Convincing chilangos to share their views is just the first step, though. Then comes the task of making sense of the cacophony that will likely emerge. Some of the input can be very easily organizedthe results of the survey, for example, are being graphed in real time. But there could be thousands of documents and comments on the Change.org petitions and the editing platform. Ideas are grouped into 18 topics, such as direct democracy, transparency and economic rights. They are prioritized based on the amount of support theyve garnered and how relevant they are, said Bernardo Rivera, an adviser for the city. Drafters get a weekly delivery of summarized citizen petitions. Audience by signature The drafting group has pledged to respond to petitions on Change.org with more than 5,000 signatures, and to have a few of its members meet with petitioners who gather more than 10,000. More than 50,000 signatures earns an audience with the full committee. An essay about human rights on the PubPub platform. (PubPub) The most elaborate part of the system is PubPub, an open publishing platform similar to Google Docs, which is based on a project originally developed by MITs Media Lab. The drafters are supposed to post essays on how to address constitutional issues, and potentially, the constitution draft itself, once there is one. Only theyor whoever they authorizewill be able to reword the original document. User comments and edits are recorded on a side panel, with links to the portion of text they refer to. Another screen records every change, so everyone can track which suggestions have made it into the text. Members of the public can also vote comments up or down, or post their own essays. But will it work? In nearly three weeks, Change.org has collected more than 200 petitions, which have been signed by more than 10,000 people. So far the most popular, with some 3,500 supporters, calls for politicians to be considered service providers, not staffers, and to be paid only for the time they work and not for weeks when all they are seen doing is sleeping or playing with their iPads. The next most popular is about animal rights. Meanwhile, on PubPub, only one member of the drafting group has published a documenta dense academic essay on the legal framework the city should use to protect human rightswhich has picked up two annotations. A group of university students has added around 20 texts, though most of them remain unedited. To be fair, its early days yet. Things may pick up as more events are held to get citizens engaged. But even if many of them participate, says Antonio Martinez, a digital rights lawyer, theres nothing spelling out how the inflow of ideas will influence the drafting groups decisions. Its a bit of a show, he says. Others argue that theres still value in the platform even if all the citizen comments end up in some lawmakers drawer. Luis Fernandez, president of Participating for Mexico, an NGO, says it will help generate discussion. The more information there is about the topics that have to be incorporated, the more information sources constitutional delegates will have to better do their job, he said. Cuesy, from the city, admits that its hard to track whether and how citizens digital input can modify officials views and behavior. Its a question that the city is trying to answer through the experiment. Were going through a learning curve, he said. Still, the platform represents, at the very least, a commitment by the government to listen, Cuesy added. There will also be an electronic record for everyone to see, and potentially to hold the constitutional assembly accountable if, for example, it skips a topic that hundreds of thousands of citizens said was key. (The top challenges for the nearly 15,000 people who have answered the survey so far are corruption and jobs.) Thats an improvement over the demonstrations that frequently bring the city to a halt, Cuesy argued. I love protests, he said. But if I go out to the street, there is no legal mechanism that requires the drafting group to consider what I have to say. Sign up for the Quartz Daily Brief, our free daily newsletter with the worlds most important and interesting news. More stories from Quartz: (Adds stock's jump to eight-month high, 4th paragraph) By Gabriela Lopez MONTERREY, Mexico, April 21 (Reuters) - Mexico's Cemex reported an unexpected $35 million profit in the first quarter of 2016, following a loss of $149 million in the same period a year earlier, helped by increased sales in the United States. Analysts surveyed by Reuters had expected Cemex, one of the world's largest cement producers, to report a net loss of $30 million in the quarter. In the United States, its leading market, Cemex said net sales rose 6 percent to $920 million, aided by a pickup in residential and infrastructure construction as well as better weather than a year earlier. The better-than-expected results helped send Cemex shares to an eight-month intraday high of 13.540 pesos on the Mexican stock exchange. The stock was last trading up 2.4 percent on the day at 13.380 pesos. The Monterrey-based company, which has been selling assets to cut debt, reported a 3 percent fall in consolidated net sales to $3.2 billion. Cemex reiterated its guidance in February that it was targeting a total debt reduction of up to $2 billion by 2017. In a presentation, Cemex said it saw asset divestments worth $1 billion to $1.5 billion by 2017. The company lowered its 2016 total capital expenditure to $650 million from the $700 million seen in February. Cemex added it expected to raise its free cash flow for the year by $400 million to $450 million, up from a previous estimate of a $350 million increase. Cemex's earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization were $583 million, its best such quarterly result since 2009. It added that on a like-for-like basis, taking into account ongoing operations and foreign exchange fluctuations, its global sales rose 3 percent. ($1 = 17.3947 pesos) (Additional reporting by Parikshit Mishra in Bengaluru and Gabriel Stargardter in Mexico City; Editing by Bernadette Baum and W Simon) Larry Page and Satya Nadella Here's an interesting upside for Microsoft thanks to its aggressive push of free Windows 10 for consumers: People seem to be using Bing more. When Microsoft reported its fiscal year 2016 third-quarter earnings on Thursday, the company said (emphasis added): Search advertising revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs grew 18% in constant currency with continued benefit from Windows 10 usage. The company also said that 35% of the revenue from search in March came from Windows 10 devices. Microsoft didn't disclose what those traffic-acquisition costs were, which are the costs paid to third parties to drive traffic to Bing, so we don't know exactly how much revenue Windows 10 is generating for Microsoft in this way. Beating Google at the search game is part of the master plan of giving Windows 10 away for free. Many of Bing's services are baked into Windows 10, including search when you ask Cortana a question as well as Maps and other online services. Microsoft hopes that with Windows 10, Bing will scoop up some serious internet search-advertising market share. But Google is hardly shaking in its boots. It also reported earnings today, and it reported a sizeable increase in its advertising revenue: up 16% to $18 billion. The fact is, it's not a zero-sum game between Bing and Google. As more people in the world come online, and more of us use multiple devices, we're simply using the internet more, including Google and Bing. NOW WATCH: Microsoft is in hot water for throwing a party with scantily-clad dancers More From Business Insider LONDON (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama flies to London on Thursday with a mission: to persuade wavering British voters not to ditch membership of the European Union in a June 23 referendum that Washington fears could weaken the West. His visit is a welcome one for Prime Minister David Cameron, leading the "In" campaign, but has drawn scorn from those arguing Britain should leave the EU. Obama is likely to suggest Britons should vote to stay in the bloc to preserve Britain's wealth, its "special relationship" with the United States and the cohesion of the West. "As the president has said, we support a strong United Kingdom in the European Union," Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser, told reporters in Washington ahead of the trip. After a visit to Saudi Arabia, including talks with King Salman, Obama flies to London on Thursday evening. The U.S. government - and many U.S. banks and companies - fear a "Brexit" would unleash market turmoil, torpedo British clout, undermine London's status as a global financial capital, cripple the EU and undermine Western security. Polls on Wednesday showed British voters leaning towards the "In" camp, but many remain undecided. Asked about Obama's views, Cameron told the British parliament: "Personally I believe we should listen to advice from friends and other countries and I struggle to find the leader of any friendly country who thinks we should leave." Cameron has said that in the face of what he terms Russian President Vladimir Putin's aggression, this is no time to drop out of the club Britain joined in 1973. "BUTT OUT" "The UK economy will be better off within the Union than if it leaves," Charles Kupchan, the senior White House director for European affairs, said ahead of the trip. "And as a key economic partner, thats an issue of interest to the United States." Opponents of the EU - many of whom laud the U.S. alliance - say that membership has shackled Britain to the corpse of a failed German-dominated experiment in European integration and that Britain, if freed, could prosper as a sole trader. New York-born Boris Johnson, the London mayor who heads the "Out" campaign, said he did not want to be lectured by Americans about EU membership. "President Obama should butt out," Nigel Farage, another prominent opponent of EU membership, told Reuters in an emailed statement. "This is an unwelcome interference from the most anti-British American president there has ever been. Mercifully, he won't be in office for much longer." "Out" campaigners have said the United States would never agree to dilute its own national sovereignty in the way the EU requires of its member states. Obama's term in office ends next Jan. 20. On Friday he will have lunch at Windsor Castle with Queen Elizabeth, who celebrates her 90th birthday on Thursday, and her husband Prince Philip. After lunch, Obama will hold talks with Cameron followed by a briefing with reporters and dinner with Prince William, his wife Kate and Prince Harry at Kensington Palace. Obama, who will be joined by his wife Michelle in London, will hold a discussion meeting with young people on Saturday before departing for Germany. (Reporting by Roberta Rampton and Kylie MacLellan; Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Andrew Roche) Critics of the Affordable Care Act are still salivating for bad news about the controversial health lawand sometimes getting it. UnitedHealth (UNH), the nations biggest insurer, just announced it will pull out of most Obamacare markets it operates in, because its losing money. Investors applauded, sending the companys shares up on the news. And that comes shortly after the Congressional Budget Office sharply lowered its estimate of the number of Americans likely to be covered under the ACA this year. Opponents of the ACA warned that more insurers could follow UnitedHealth out the door, possibly imperiling the whole program. Americans are realizing that government-run health care is leaving them with fewer choices and higher costs, the conservative nonprofit group Freedom Partners declared. Its time to reverse course on this reckless experiment before more people are harmed. But the ACA has survived many challenges so far, and it will certainly survive the departure of one carrier. By some measures, in fact, Obamacare is becoming more popular and more efficient, even as Americans everywhere continue to struggle with rising healthcare costs and access to doctors. Even though its the nations biggest health insurer, UnitedHealth was a latecomer to the ACA and never committed to many of the markets it served the way other insurers did. The company, for instance, covered fewer than 1,000 patients in Massachusetts, one of the markets its leaving. To get less than 1,000 members in a state like Massachusetts is pretty ridiculous, says Jeffrey Loo, a healthcare analyst at S&P Capital IQ. Leaving the ACA will benefit UnitedHealths bottom line, but for the ACA its relatively immaterial. The Kaiser Family Foundation analyzed the impact of UnitedHealths departure, and found that there would be less competition in perhaps one-third of the markets covered by an ACA healthcare exchange. Thats bad for consumers, because its easier to raise premiums when there are fewer companies offering insurance. But Kaiser also found that UnitedHealth didnt push down premiums by much when it entered those markets, partly because of the types of policies it chose to offer and also because of fairly low market share. Overall, UnitedHealth covers only about 6% of people who have insurance under the ACA. Story continues Its also likely other insurers will step into some of the markets UnitedHealth is leaving, especially those that are more heavily populated and therefore more profitable. Cigna (CI) says it plans to expand its ACA offerings. Aetna (AET), Anthem (ANTM), Humana (HUM) and Blue Cross/Blue Shield have no plans to leave. The end result may be fewer carriers and higher premiums in some less populous rural areas, which is often the case in the private market for insurance as well. Meanwhile, beneath the turbulence, the ACA has been slowly gaining more acceptance. One new study published in Health Affairs found notable changes in the way Americans view the law since it was first passed in 2010. While still unpopular overall, fewer people worry about it disrupting their own healthcare and more feel the law has actually done some good. And the portion of Americans favoring repeal is declining. The ACA has delivered discernible benefits, the study concludes, and some Americans are increasingly recognizing that it is improving access to health insurance and medical care. Here's a snapshot of the findings: Source: Health Affairs Roughly 20 million Americans have gained healthcare coverage through Obamacare about 13 million through an exchange and the rest through expanded Medicaid coverage. And the portion of Americans lacking insurance has declined by about 9 percentage points under the law. Problems obviously remain. Insurers say theyve got too many people signing up for coverage only because theyre sick or they anticipate needing expensive care in the near future; some of those patients then cancel coverage once theyve received the care they need. Such selective enrollment makes the pool of people covered under the ACA more expensive to cover, one factor UnitedHealth cited in its decision to pull out of the program. The Obama administration may consider rule changes meant to cut down on such churn and force people to enroll for longer periods of time. High deductibles, co-pays and other out-of-pocket costs also put care out of reach for too many peopleincluding some with insurance. But thats also true for people with insurance provided by an employer. And the rising cost of prescription drugs is a challenge across the healthcare marketplace. That suggests Obamacare is far from finished, with more reforms needed. But like it or not, its here to stay. Rick Newmans latest book is Liberty for All: A Manifesto for Reclaiming Financial and Political Freedom. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman. WARSAW, April 21 (Reuters) - Poland was the only European country not to suffer recession during the financial crisis, the Polish statistics office said on Thursday, after it revised data that had shown in March the economy contracted in late 2012 and early 2013. Last month, the statistics office said Poland's seasonally adjusted gross domestic product declined 0.1 percent in the first quarter of 2013 and 0.3 percent in the last quarter of 2012. Two consecutive quarters of decline are technically a recession. This week the statistics office revised data for the first quarter of 2013 to zero, allowing politicians to call Poland a "green island" again. "The difference is minimal, so the significance of this data is rather symbolic, but indeed, Poland was a green island," Jakub Rybacki, an ING Bank Slaski economist, said on Thursday. "But what is more important, despite temporary slowdown, Poland is now doing well, with economic growth rising, and receiving even more fuel from the 500 plus program that will effectively influence the economy in May," Rybacki also said. Poland's eurosceptic Law and Justice (PiS) party which won October election after eight years of pro-business Civic Platform (PO) rule, introduced a broad social spending agenda, including 500 zlotys ($131.86) monthly child benefit, financed from new taxes. ($1 = 3.7918 zlotys) (Reporting by Marcin Goclowski, editing by Larry King) BRUSSELS, April 21 (Reuters) - Portugal had a budget deficit, excluding one-off government support for the Banif bank, of 2.8 percent of gross domestic product last year, the European Union's statistics office Eurostat said on Thursday. EU finance ministers have asked Portugal to cut the deficit to 2.5 percent under a disciplinary budget procedure. (Reporting By Jan Strupczewski) Surveillance monitoring expert watches a bank of screens showing images from Edinburgh City Council's network of CCTV cameras in Edinburgh If you want a job in Europe, brush up on data privacy. New EU laws on data protection will force companies across the continent to hire more privacy experts during the next two years as they work to comply with law. As many as 28,000 new jobs will be created, according to new research by the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP), a trade organization. Tech, healthcare, drug and financial services companies that process large amounts of data will become particular hotbeds for hiring. Every organization trying to use data will need to hire privacy professionals, says J. Trevor Hughes, chief executive of the IAPP. The trade group now has only 3,000 members in the EU. Companies have two years to comply with the EUs new General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). The IAPP study arrived at a conservative estimate, Hughes says, and the actual number of new data-protection officers required could be far higher, he said. The GDPR replace local data protection laws. The rules are stricter and apply to all companies, regardless of size, who process data at a large scale. What constitutes large scale is open to interpretation, Hughes says. The law firm Olswang has noted that life for international companies will not get easier with the GDPRs passage. Handling data pays. (International Association of Privacy Professionals. 2015 Privacy Professionals Salary Survey) Companies will be allowed to outsource data-protection work, so many consultancies and law firms have been building their privacy and data protection practices. Theyve seen this coming for a year, Hughes says. The role of data protection officer has become increasingly lucrative. The median salary for a data protection officer has grown by about 50% between 2003 to 2015 to $152,000 a year, an IAAP survey shows. Tech companies have hired most of the data protection officers and many wont have to hire more, Hughes said. Story continues Privacy and data protection are at the heart of tensions between global tech companies and European law. Companies shipping data between the EU and the United States are currently in a legal limbo, after the longstanding Safe Harbor data-protection framework was stuck down last year by Europes highest court. It ruled that the US didnt provide EU citizens personal data with sufficient protection from government surveillance. A replacement, called the EU-US Privacy Shield, is being rushed through legislation, but theres no guarantee itll be approved by member states, or that it wont be challenged in court by privacy advocates on the continent. Sign up for the Quartz Daily Brief, our free daily newsletter with the worlds most important and interesting news. More stories from Quartz: David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images. Jim Cramer spoke with Bill Pulte, as the public battle for PulteGroup leadership took aim at another member of the board. The highly public leadership dispute for PulteGroup (NYSE: PHM) just took another contentious turn. The company's founder, William Pulte, has called for James Postl to immediately resign from the board of directors. This comes just weeks after his request for current CEO Richard Dugas to resign. In a letter released by William Pulte on Wednesday, he wrote "It is my conviction that Richard Dugas and James Postl must resign immediately from all their positions with the company." Additionally, Pulte stated that in the event that Dugas and Postl refuse to resign immediately and be replaced by direct shareholder representatives, he will vote against the entire board in this year's shareholder meeting. In an interview with CNBC's Jim Cramer on Wednesday, Pulte's grandson and Pulte Capital Partners CEO Bill Pulte said "We believe that Jim and Richard are still really running the company, remember they hold chairman, CEO and lead director." The request for Postl's resignation stemmed from what Pulte considered a "massively failed deal" with Centex, where William Pulte's letter stated that shareholders lost more than $1.46 billion. "We need someone on the board to work with them constructively. We will meet with them any time, unfortunately our calls haven't been answered," Pulte said. Read more from Mad Money with Jim Cramer Cramer Remix: Tina Turner's money making lesson Cramer: Hot money is flooding into...a trough Cramer: Damage to IBM, Netflix hard to reverse When Cramer asked Pulte if he would like to become CEO of PulteGroup, he responded "Absolutely not, no. Frankly, I'm not qualified to be the CEO of the company, but at the same time I can say that Mr. Dugas with all due respect, losing $500 million doesn't qualify you to run this company." PulteGroup is the nation's third-largest homebuilder and was founded by William Pulte in 1950. He and five friends built a house near Detroit and sold it for $10,000. Six decades later, Richard Dugas now stands as the CEO and chairman of the board of directors. Story continues Initial stock performance under Dugas was impressive, with PulteGroup shares more than tripling in just over two years. However, shares collapsed in 2007 going into the financial crisis and have not bounced back nearly as well as other major homebuilders, such as Lennar (NYSE: LEN) or D.R. Horton (NYSE: DHI). The conflict of leadership was ignited by the company's founder and his family against Dugas. The spat was thrust into the public eye in April when the company announced that Dugas planned to step down in May 2017, partially due to pressure from Bill Pulte and his ally on the board of directors, Jim Grosfeld. Additionally, the company also announced it was trying to boot Grosfeld off the board at the annual shareholder meeting. In response, Bill and William Pulte published a scathing letter to the board reiterating disappointment in Dugas. Since then, Grosfeld has resigned from the board of directors. "I recently recommended that Pulte should buy KB Home (NYSE: KBH) but while I think that would make a lot of sense, I doubt an issue this contentious will be resolved that easily," the "Mad Money" host said. In a statement released on April 11, a PulteGroup rep said, "We are disappointed that the Pultes continue to attempt to destabilize the company's leadership and derail our successful value creation strategy through their public statements. Their attacks bear little resemblance of the facts." PulteGroup did not immediately return calls for comment from CNBC. Questions for Cramer? Call Cramer: 1-800-743-CNBC Want to take a deep dive into Cramer's world? Hit him up! Mad Money Twitter - Jim Cramer Twitter - Facebook - Instagram - Vine Questions, comments, suggestions for the "Mad Money" website? madcap@cnbc.com More From CNBC B 52 ISIS qatar Since summer 2014, the US and a coalition of 65 partner nations have waged war on ISIS from the air and the ground, but only recently did the legendary B-52 bomber join the fight. The first video released from the Combined Joint Task Force's Operation Inherent Resolve shows a departure from the B-52's carpet-bombing strategy of old. Instead, this video shows precision munitions hammering individual targets. The footage below shows a B-52 hammering a ISIS weapons-storage facility near Qayyarah, Iraq: Here's a closer shot: More From Business Insider By Lisa Lambert (Reuters) - U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a firebrand for strong financial regulation, asked on Thursday why securities regulators approved Steve Cohen's new firm as an investment adviser after barring the billionaire from managing other people's money until 2018. In a letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Massachusetts Democrat said the regulator's decision to approve the firm, Stamford Harbor Capital L.P., makes "a mockery of the SEC's core mission to 'protect investors.'" "The Commission has permitted a recidivist hedge fund manager, well-known for his former company's willingness to evade and ignore federal law, to once again profit from - and potentially exploit - investors," she wrote, calling it "the latest example of an SEC action that fails to appropriately punish guilty parties, deter future wrongdoing, and protect investors." In 2012 Cohen was implicated in an insider trading scandal at a unit of SAC Capital Advisors, a hedge fund he founded. The SEC in January reached a settlement with Cohen prohibiting him from serving in a supervisory role at any broker, dealer, or investment adviser until 2018, addressing charges related to the subsidiary. "As the only law enforcement agency to charge Steven Cohen, the SEC imposed important restrictions, including a supervisory bar plus the additional oversight requirements in the settlement that are even stronger than typical remedies," said Andrew Ceresney, director of the SEC's enforcement division. Mark Herr, a spokesman for Point 72 Asset Management, Cohen's family office that manages his assets, said the conditions in the settlement were clear. "We are not going to manage one dollar of outside money prior to Jan. 1, 2018," he said. Earlier this month the SEC granted registration to the new Stamford Harbor entity, which Cohen owns. At the time, a Stamford Harbor spokesman said Cohen will "not supervise the activities of anyone acting on its behalf," thus allowing him to abide by the agreement. Story continues The firm will initially focus on investments in private companies that are illiquid, according to filings. But it could also seek or accept outside capital in the future. Warren said the firm had a "shell management structure" and the SEC should ensure "that future settlement agreements cannot be so easily undermined." She asked for a complete list of "other individuals or firms who, like Mr. Cohen, were barred from managing funds (or barred from other activities by SEC) yet are presently indirectly involved in those activities with SEC-registered entities." * South Africa govt says banks move might deter investors * Oakbay said needs banks to be able to pay staff salaries * Oakbay Resources gets new auditors after KPMG exit (Releads with task team, adds SizweNtsalubaGobodo comment) By Wendell Roelf and Tiisetso Motsoeneng CAPE TOWN/JOHANNESBURG April 21 (Reuters) - South Africa stepped in on Thursday to try to contain the damage from a stand-off between the country's banks and Oakbay, a company owned by the Gupta family who are alleged to wield undue political influence. The government had appointed a ministerial team to find a solution after the banks ditched Oakbay, a move which could deter future investment in South Africa, Minister in the Presidency Jeff Radebe said. Earlier this month, several South African companies, including all four major banks, cut links with companies associated with the Guptas, a family of Indian-born businessmen who are also friends with President Jacob Zuma. "Whilst cabinet appreciates the terms and conditions of the banks, the acts may deter future potential investors who may want to do business in South Africa," Radebe told a news conference in Cape Town. Although the Gupta's relationship with Zuma has been a source of controversy for years, it burst into the open last month when senior figures went public to say the family had exerted undue sway, including offering cabinet positions Zuma has acknowledged the Guptas are his friends, but denies anything improper. The Guptas, whose wide range of business interests include media and mining, have denied the allegations and say they are pawns in a plot to oust Zuma. Oakbay Investments, a holding company for the family businesses, says it employs 7,500 people and it will not be able to pay their salaries if it is unable to restore the bank ties. The company and government's taskforce have until at least the end of May, which is when the banks' notice periods expire, to restore relations between the parties. Story continues At least one of the four banks - Barclays Africa's Absa, First National Bank, part of FirstRand, Standard Bank and Nedbank - that have ostracised Oakbay Investments has so far rejected attempts to patch up relations. Oakbay Resources, a unit of Oakbay Investments, appointed SizweNtsalubaGobodo Inc, South Africa's biggest black-owned accounting firm, as it new auditors after the local unit of KPMG ditched it earlier this month. In a memo to staff, KPMG cited association risk as the reason for parting ways with the company. SizweNtsalubaGobodo, which dates back to 1985, said it followed a stringent on-boarding process in accepting Oakbay Resources as a client. "We are aware of our ethical responsibilities and reporting responsibilities to all stakeholders and are confident that we are in a position to fulfill these responsibilities," it said in statement on Thursday. (Editing by Alexander Smith) JOHANNESBURG, April 21 (Reuters) - Scores of Johannesburg's caffeine crowd lined up in the shopping hub of Rosebank on Thursday to buy a first cup of Starbucks coffee in sub-Saharan Africa. Not to worry, though, rooibos, the local bush tea favourite, also features on the menu. Starbucks, brought in under licence by South Africa's Taste Holdings, is the latest U.S. chain to court brand-conscious consumers in South Africa, which has Africa's most advanced economy. The same queues snaked out from Krispy Kreme when the doughnutmaker opened its first store 50 metres up the road last year. And more on-the-go snacks are coming. Grand Parade Investments, the Cape Town-based group which also runs Burger King in South Africa, said it will open the first Dunkin' Donuts by the end of June, despite economic growth forecast to be below 2 percent this year. Taste Holdings Chief Executive Carlo Gonzaga told Reuters last month that he plans to open up to 15 Starbucks outlets over the next two years. While Johannesburg has coffee shops in virtually all shopping malls and a wide choice in most well-to-do suburbs, Starbucks brings a range of syrupy lattes that are less common in South Africa. "The flavours are something we're not that used to here, and could be their selling point," said Katy Meurs, a twenty-something queueing for her latte. Taste, which is also the master franchisee of Dominos Pizza in South Africa, holds the local licence for Starbucks and has the right of first refusal in several other African markets. "People will only queue on day one, after that Starbucks needs to be good enough to compete with the coffee shops that are already around here," said Prince Ndlovu while waiting for his coffee. (Reporting by TJ Strydom Editing by Jeremy Gaunt) * Spain's deficit at 5.1 pct/GDP, well above 4.2 pct target * Portugal's deficit at 4.4 pct instead of required 2.5 pct * Without Banif recap, Lisbon deficit at 2.8 pct/GDP (adds data on Portugal deficit with Banif recap) By Francesco Guarascio BRUSSELS, April 21 (Reuters) - Spain and Portugal had bigger than expected budget deficits last year, badly missing targets set by European Union finance ministers, European Union statistics office data showed on Thursday. The data is likely to add to pressure on the two countries from the European Commission and EU finance ministers to step up deficit-reduction efforts this year. Spain had a deficit of 5.1 percent of gross domestic product in 2015, Eurostat said. Although the gap decreased from 5.9 percent in 2014, it was still above forecasts and well above the 4.2 percent target set by EU ministers. In February, the European Commission forecast Spain would cut the deficit to 4.8 percent in 2015. Spain's caretaker government said on Tuesday that, in light of the wide miss on 2015 targets, it aimed to cut the deficit this year and next at a slower pace than originally agreed with Brussels. Portugal's deficit was 4.4 percent in 2015, Eurostat said, a significant drop from the 7.2 shortfall in 2014. But Lisbon was supposed to have cut the gap to 2.5 percent last year and exit the EU disciplinary procedure for countries running deficits above 3 percent. The outcome is also worse than the Commission's prediction from February when the EU executive arm forecast a 4.2 percent gap for Portugal in 2015. Excluding one-off government support for Banif bank, Portugal's deficit in 2015 would have been 2.8 percent of GDP, Eurostat said. The Commission, which monitors EU countries' budgets, will issue its assessment of budgetary plans for the next three years of all EU members in May and decide whether to step up the disciplinary procedure against those who miss targets. (Editing By Jan Strupczewski and John Stonestreet) Supporters of the southern separatist movement rally in Yemen's second city of Aden on April 18, 2016 (AFP Photo/Saleh Al-Obeidi) Kuwait City (AFP) - UN-brokered peace talks on Yemen's war were set to finally set to kick off Thursday as a rebel delegation arrived at the crucial negotiations in Kuwait after three days of delay. The United Nations has been pushing the talks that it hopes will end a conflict that has been exploited by jihadists and sent tensions between Iran and its Gulf rivals soaring. More than 6,400 people have been killed and almost 2.8 million displaced since a Saudi-led coalition began operations in March 2015 against Iran-backed rebels who have seized swathes of territory, including the capital Sanaa. The talks were originally supposed to start on Monday but were delayed after the rebels failed to show up in protest against what they described as Saudi violations of a ceasefire, in effect since April 11. "They (the rebel delegation) have arrived in Kuwait just a few minutes ago," Charbel Raji, spokesman for UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, told AFP. Insurgents have sent representatives from the Shiite Huthi group and members of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh's General People's Congress party. A member of the Yemeni government delegation confirmed that the talks were to open at 1600 GMT. President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi had sent a message to UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed demanding the "negotiations open on Thursday evening" and rejecting "rebel conditions to modify the agenda agreed on," according to a member of the government delegation. Hadi's people arrived in Kuwait at the weekend and threatened to pull out if meetings did not begin on Thursday. Mahdi al-Mashat, a representative of rebel leader Abdulmalik al-Huthi, said Wednesday that the rebels had been assured that the agenda for the talks would be "clear and tackle issues that could help achieve peaceful solutions". Writing on Facebook, Mashat warned however that "we will have the right to suspend our participation" if the assurances are not met. Story continues Diplomats say that rebels are demanding an end of the Arab coalition operations and a naval blockade on Yemen that began more than 13 months ago. They also want UN sanctions against some of their leaders, including Saleh, to be lifted. Saudi ally Turkey said on Thursday that it has frozen assets belonging to Saleh and his son, in line with the sanctions. Saleh amassed billions of dollars through corruption and stashed assets in at least 20 countries during his 33 years in power, according to a UN report released last year. - Talks 'allow Qaeda focus' - US President Barack Obama is visiting Saudi Arabia, where he is expected to discuss the wars in Yemen and Syria with Gulf leaders. Ben Rhodes, one of Obama's closest foreign policy advisers, urged all Yemeni counterparts on Thursday to participate "constructively" in the Kuwait talks. A political resolution to the country's conflict would "allow for a focus on (Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) AQAP in Yemen," he said. Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group have gained ground in the government-held south, carrying out attacks against officials. Yemen's rebels seized control of Sanaa in 2014 before expanding, forcing Hadi's government to declare main southern city Aden as the temporary capital. And while the loyalists managed since July to reclaim large areas, they have been unable to dislodge the rebels from Sanaa and other key areas. Fighting has continued on several fronts, military sources said, as each side blamed the other for truce breaches. The rebels fired a Katyusha rocket late Wednesday on the loyalist-held city of Marib, east of the capital, according to an AFP journalist there. Pro-government military sources reported heavy fighting in Nahm, northeast of Sanaa, and sporadic clashes elsewhere. The rebels claimed on their sabanews.net website that coalition warplanes carried out two air strikes on Nahm and flew sorties over other areas, including Sanaa. Taiwan Earthquake and Slow Apple Sales Shake TSMCs Fiscal 1Q16 (Continued from Prior Part) TSMCs technology roadmap In the previous part of the series, we saw that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (or TSMC) (TSM) has been ramping up its 16/20nm (nanometer) technology in order to secure more orders. The company has been shifting its production according to the market trend. Lets look now at the companys technology roadmap and investments in plants and machinery. Investing in 16nm and beyond TSMC is currently ramping up production of its 16nm technology. It expects to complete it by the end of fiscal 2Q16. It plans to start ramping up its 10nm technology at two of its 12-inch giga-fabs (fabrication facilities) with an aim to have a capacity of 200,000 wafers per quarter by the second half of 2016. Intel (INTC) is also working on 10nm technology but has delayed it to 2017. The 10nm would attract mobile customers. TSMC also plans to develop 7nm technology by 1Q17, with production ramp-up planned in the first half of 2018. The 7nm is just an advancement of the 10nm with more than 95% common tools. The 7nm would be more than 60% denser and 30%40% more power efficient than 10nm. It would attract manufacturers of GPUs (graphic processing units), FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays), and other consumer product applications. Investing in plant and machinery To support the aggressive technology ramp-up, TSMC has placed orders for machinery equipment at various SME (semiconductor manufacturing equipment) suppliers. This includes a $16.7 million order from Applied Materials (AMAT) and a $37 million order from KLA-Tencor (KLAC). TSMC and the city government of Nanjing, China, have signed an agreement to spend $3 billion on a 12-inch wafer fabrication facility in China. Given the tension between China and Taiwan over protection of intellectual property, the facility would be wholly owned by TSMC. It would have a capacity to manufacture 20,000 12-inch wafers a month. TSMC is expected to begin production in the second half of 2018. The company also plans to build a design service center inside the facility. Story continues Acquiring third-party patents TSMC has also signed a patent licensing and sales agreement with Canadas (EWC) NPE WiLAN. As part of the deal, TSMC can use NPE WiLANs semiconductor process technology patents. It can also use Polaris, a portfolio of more than 7,000 former Qimonda patents that NPE acquired from Infineon in June 2015. TSMC also acquires third-party patents by investing in start-ups through its venture capital arm TSMC Partners. In the next part of the series, well look at the companys cash position to fund these developments. Continue to Next Part Browse this series on Market Realist: A worker walks past a pile of steel pipe products at the yard of Youfa steel pipe plant in Tangshan, in China's Hebei Province, November 3, 2015. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon/File Photo WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and seven other countries called on Tuesday for urgent action to address global steel overcapacity, a day after China and other major steel producing countries failed to agree on measures to tackle an industry crisis. Representatives of the United States, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Switzerland and Turkey agreed that urgent steel industry restructuring was imperative, and must be market driven, according to a joint statement released by the U.S. Department of Commerce. They also agreed that their governments should not provide subsidies or other support that sustain loss-making steel plants or encourage additional capacity. In a separate statement, U.S. officials said they would continue to lobby for action on steel with trade partners. "It is our shared goal that other economies, including China, will come to recognize the value of these actions and will join our collective effort to address the causes of the current excess capacity problem," Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker and U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman said in a separate statement. "The United States will continue to engage bilaterally and multilaterally with trading partners, including China, to take meaningful action to meet that goal." A meeting of ministers and trade officials from over 30 countries, hosted by Belgium and the OECD on Monday, concluded only that overcapacity had to be dealt with in a swift and structural way. Washington pointed the finger at China for the talks failure, saying Beijing needed to cut overcapacity or face possible trade action from other countries. But Chinese officials said it was already taking sufficient steps to curb capacity, while state news said blaming China for the global steel industry crisis was a lazy excuse for protectionism that would be counter-productive. "It is the slow recovery of the world economy that causes sluggish demand for steel products, which further leads to the overcapacity issue in the steel sector," Zhang Ji, assistant minister at China's Ministry of Commerce, told state-run Xinhua News Agency on Tuesday. Story continues The Chinese government has taken the most concrete measures and is paying enormous price to cut overcapacity, said Zhang. Beijing is also aiming to boost domestic steel demand from major consumers including the automobile and machinery sectors and drive the use of high-value added steel structures in infrastructure, Zhang said. China, the world's top steel producer and exporter, is also the fifth-largest importer of steel, buying an equivalent of 13.57 million tonnes of crude steel last year. China's steel production hit a record high last month as rising prices, and profits, encouraged mills that had been shut or suspended to resume production. The OECD says global steelmaking capacity was 2.37 billion tonnes in 2015, but declining production meant only 67.5 percent of that was being used, down from 70.9 percent in 2014. Britain in particular has felt the squeeze as its largest producer Tata Steel has announced plans to pull out of the country, threatening 15,000 jobs. Last week, more than 40,000 German steel workers took to the streets to protest against dumping from China. (Reporting by Eric Beech; Additional reporting Melanie Burton in MELBOURNE and Ruby Lian in SHANGHAI; Editing by Eric Walsh and Lincoln Feast) 2000 - 2022 24 .- . focus-news.net, () . 24 . 24 . . 24 . China's domestic capital plays an increasingly important role in the country's real estate investment market, with SOEs poised to become significant sellers, a report from international real estate consultancy firm JLL showed on Wednesday. The report highlights the record-breaking year for commercial real estate investment in China in 2015, with a total value of transacted assets reaching about 150 billion yuan ($23.8 billion), three-quarters of which were driven by domestic investment. Supported by a range of savvy investors including private equity funds, corporate, State-owned enterprises (SOEs) and insurance firms, China's domestic investment has expanded strongly, with a compound annual growth rate of 15.4 percent over the past eight years, according to the report. "China's real estate investment universe will continue to grow in line with its economy to accommodate changing investment appetites," said Anthony Couse, Head of Capital Markets for JLL China. "China's domestic investors are becoming increasingly sophisticated and competitive in capturing investment opportunities both domestically and globally. Foreign investors will no doubt continue to increase their footprints across China, but it will be domestic players that still provide the greatest contribution." China's real estate market has expanded rapidly over the past several years the total size of its institutionally invested real estate universe in 2015 was estimated to be second only to that of the US, at $806 billion and JLL predicts that it is likely to maintain a swift pace going forward. "At the same time," Anthony said, "we are seeing a greater diversity of domestic investors accumulating both the size and experience to build, purchase and sell real estate assets on an unprecedented scale. We expect to see 2015's record broke several times in the years ahead, with domestic capital still providing most of the momentum." The report identifies five trends as the major forces paving the way for China's domestic investors to carry on driving investment volumes to structurally higher levels: 1. SOEs are poised to become significant sellers in the market: With future SOE reform expected to break up real estate holdings of inefficient State-owned firms, further opportunities will emerge for acquisitions and the repositioning of assets. 2. Chinese insurers are likely to emerge as some of the largest buyers domestically and globally: China's deregulation has allowed domestic insurers to become one of the most active groups of institutional players. As insurance companies grow more experienced with real estate investment, JLL anticipates their investments will expand and even accelerate in the years ahead. 3. Chinese private equity funds will expand their footprints: China's real estate private equity has the potential to develop significantly, and could even receive a boost from the activity of its domestic insurers. 4. Securitization is set to catalyze the next wave of investment activities: The Chinese government has been testing the concept of securitization through numerous pilot programs across the country for years, and the role of securitization will grow as the government improves tax and regulatory clarity. 5. Innovative methods will supplement mainstream investment channels: Applications like crowd-funding and peer-to-peer lending are just two examples of technology-enabled innovations in the real estate investment sphere. JLL expects certain technologies to be embraced even faster in China than they have been in the West. We value your privacy. Focus Taiwan (CNA) uses tracking technologies to provide better reading experiences, but it also respects readers' privacy. Click here to find out more about Focus Taiwan's privacy policy. When you close this window, it means you agree with this policy. To activate the text-to-speech service, please first agree to the privacy policy below. Taipei, 21 (CNA) Eighteen out of 20 fraud suspects who were deported back to Taiwan from Malaysia last Friday were placed in detention Thursday after their release last week sparked controversy in Taiwan as well as in China, where many of their alleged victims reside. Comforter I will send him unto you will convict the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment he shall guide you into all the truth what things soever he shall hear, these shall he speak things that are to come None can object to justice; justice is demanded by all people, except of course the transgressors and the guilty.Yet none may achieve justice. That is because most people in fact are prone to non-justice: because of their wrong-doing.In other words: they know justice is good and should be done, but their souls - darkened with their wrong-doing - are reluctant to justice.Anyhow, the Mahdi is specified with establishing the justice among people: so that as a parable: it is said:if one steals something from somebody and hides it under his tooth, the Mahdi will pluck his tooth and take out the stolen thing and return it to its owner!And(which is a prophetic tradition.)In the Gospel, he condemns the world for sin and for righteousness and for judgment (In Arabic the words mean something that I may later explain)Gospel of John 16:7-137 Nevertheless I tell you the truth: It is expedient for you that I go away; for if I go not away, thewill not come unto you; but if I go,8 And he, when he is come,12 I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.13 Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come,: for; but: and he shall declare unto you theSo what do you think: has the earth been filled with injustice and iniquity? or not yet?I wonder will his justice be restricted to individuals or to states? Because we now see the powerful states transgress on the weak states!?So he will take the rights from the transgressing states and return it to the states on which they transgressed! I don't know.But for certain, he will restore Palestine to its owners: the Palestinian people. About this I am sure and certain.==============================================================================================No no: droppings of eagle on your baldness.That is if you were a bald eagleBut if not a bald eagle: then droppings of eagle in your ugly beak. This is not about race, this is not about religion, its not about illegal immigration. This is about supporting a neighborhood, supporting a way of life and supporting jobs that are good jobs. Jobs that can bring a person into this community so they can have the same benefits that we do. With those words of passion and disagreement with prior statements reported in various media sources over the last few weeks, Randy Ruppert of Nebraska Communities United opened a meeting in the small and humble town of Nickerson. In recent weeks, the village of about 450 people served as the focal point over a dispute involving the possible setting of a large-scale poultry operation proposed for construction by Costco Wholesale. However, late Tuesday, a decision by Costco Wholesale and Lincoln Premium Poultry officials eliminated the Nickerson site from the potential list of locations. A decision largely influenced by the Nickerson Village Board vote to deny a change to the towns future land use map for the specified location. That change would have eventually facilitated Costcos ability to construct the poultry facility. The Greater Fremont Development Council however, continues to reaffirm Costcos favorable outlook on the Fremont Area for the construction of the facility. But Communities United also restated their continued opposition to any large corporation that seeks to establish, in Nebraska, an operation governed by vertical integration. We do not want vertical integration in our community, county or in our state, Ruppert clearly stated. Opponents of vertical integration cite among many disparities how vertical integration can amass control over every aspect of product creation, from the genetics of the seeds used to grow a crop to the eventual packaging of the product in the grocery store. Opponents also argue that it results in unfair contracts that put suppliers (e.g. local farmers) in servile positions with unfair contracts. Ruppert stressed that Communities United holds the education of the issues as one of its highest priorities. Working in conjunction with consultants from organizations like Nebraska Bold, Food and Water Watch, and the Social Responsible Agricultural Project, Ruppert stated that Communities United remains focused on keeping local communities together, providing jobs to the people who want them and protecting the farm life. What we are really going to focus on is getting the information to the growers and to the rest of the community about the pitfalls of signing these contracts with vertical integration programs, Ruppert said. A conversation with Ron Tillery, executive director of the Fremont Area Chamber of Commerce represented another point of view that also exists in the community. Tillery stressed that our community, our county and the regional area can all benefit from the opportunities Costcos operation would bring. Some of those opportunities Tillery said include direct jobs at the facility that consist of entry level positions with a wage that reaches above the Dodge County average; and also jobs at management levels and higher. He also pointed out that Costco has indicated that all employees will qualify for a very generous benefits package. These are going to be good quality jobs that are going to be attractive to people, Tillery underscored. Additionally such an operation can lead to various positive ripple effects that radiate out to the community, Tillery explained. He said it could bring new types of businesses like housing developments, restaurants and other attractions that would all come with employment opportunities. Tillery further clarified that businesses already in operation in Fremont could feel a fiscal boost with arrival of the Costco facility, and they will continue to grow alongside the company; businesses that include transportation, packaging, and technical expertise for servicing the sophisticated electronics and air conditioning systems in the barns of farmers in the growers network. You can just keep going on down the line and see how this project is going to help lift the economy and opportunities for dozens and dozens of other businesses, Tillery added. It would be a tremendous loss for Fremont, Dodge and Nebraska if we cant take this project across the finish line. In the end, Ruppert sees Costcos decision to remove Nickerson as a potential operational site only a minor victory but he expressed gratitude for the village residents. We want to let everyone from Nickerson know that we love them. That we appreciate what they did, Ruppert said. Hydrangeas, once most common in the East and South, have become increasingly popular in North Iowa as more cold-hardy varieties have been developed. Theres been a lot of breeding done in the last 15 to 20 years, said Mary Hardin, horticulturalist and co-owner of Blackmore Nursery in Mason City. More (hydrangeas) are coming to the market here. The good news for those living in established neighborhoods or those with plenty of trees is that hydrangeas tend to do well in the shade, Hardin said. No hydrangea likes too much sun. Known for their large, often colorful pom-pom like flowers, hydrangeas today come in many varieties, said Aaron Koppes, nursery operator at Country Landscapes in Clear Lake. Three species of hydrangea are especially popular in North Iowa. Soil determines color The bigleaf, or bush hydrangea, blooms with large pink or blue flowers. The color of the flower will depend upon the pH of the soil, Koppes said. Acidic soil produces blue flowers. Alkaline soil, which is predominate in North Iowa, produces pink flowers. Blue hydrangea planted in alkaline soil will tend to turn pink unless you work with the plant. If you want blue, you amend the soil with peat moss or you can buy products such as aluminum sulfate to achieve the blue color, Koppes said. You will need to keep applying the mixture to maintain the blue color. Bigleaf hydrangeas do best with morning sun and afternoon shade, Koppes said. They love water and will wilt when theyre getting dry. The best time to prune the bigleaf hydrangea is when the plant starts to leaf out, Koppes said. Trim out the dead wood above the last bud. Tough grower The smooth hydrangea, also known as Annabelle hydrangea or snowballs, has a white to lime green flower. Smooth hydrangea, including Annabelles, can grow on the north side of the house, often the most difficult area to grow a flowering plant. They are water loving and do not do well in sunny or drought conditions. Once theyre rooted in, theyre pretty stable and pretty showy, Koppes said. They bloom in early summer. Jeff Otto, owner of Ottos Oasis in Charles City and Mason City, recommends cutting back the Annabelle hydrangea in the spring to promote flowering in the summer. Only the dead branches should be taken out. Pruning selectively will result in bigger heads next year, said Koppes. Alternatively, Annabelles can also be pruned back to about six inches every fall, said Hardin. The flowers will be larger, she said. The plants will stand up better. Tough to contain The panicle hydrangea, a treelike plant, features a conical head and is gaining in popularity, Koppes said. Some varieties include peegee, quickfire and limelight. These shrubs can get huge, said Hardin. You dont want to plant them in areas where you want them contained. Panicle hydrangeas can take more sun than other species and are more tolerant of drought conditions. They change in color and may start out limey then change to pink, Hardin said. Otto noted that most hydrangeas arent bothered by the Japanese beetle, which can be a problem for some plants. Theyre good for North Iowa, he said. The flowers persist through the fall and can be left during the winter for interest in your winter landscape. Bigleaf hydrangeas are also popular for making dried flower bouquets, Otto said. A roundup of legislative and Capitol news items of interest for Wednesday, April 20, 2016: MARCHING TO ADJOURNMENT (MAYBE): Top leaders in the Iowa House and Iowa Senate were still operating under the expectation that the 2016 legislative session could adjourn this week, but they also were hedging their bets a bit Wednesday. Were going to pursue that, were going to push hard to get there and, if theres something that happens -- which can, obviously -- then well review it, said House Speaker Linda Upmeyer, R-Clear Lake. But right now I think were on a path and everything is moving forward. Well see. Both the House and Senate passed fiscal 2017 budget bills between chambers with the expectation that a few would end up in conference committees to resolve, which could slow the process. Upmeyer and Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, D-Council Bluffs, said they expected that legislators would work Friday and possibly Saturday if they were near the finish line. Some time Friday well make a judgment as to whether enough pieces are in play to finish, said Gronstal, or come back for a 16th week of session. CAPITOL EARTH DAY: Iowa lawmakers plan to observe Earth Day at the state Capitol Building on Thursday. The midday event will highlight current environmental challenges, solutions, and upcoming Earth Day activities across the state. Organizers say they hope to unite and move Iowans from awareness to action to promote a healthy, prosperous, and sustainable future. After comments from legislative and environmental speakers, Sen. Rob Hogg, D-Cedar Rapids, will moderate a soap box program for Iowans to share their concerns and solutions for our environment and our future. Also Thursday, Iowa Interfaith Power & Light will be releasing its 2016 Religious Leaders Statement on Climate Change. RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: Roughly 50 people gathered in the Capitol Rotunda for a ceremony for religious freedom. Among the third annual events speakers were legislators and the Bishop of Des Moines. The previous week, Gov. Branstad signed a proclamation declaring April 13, 2016, Religious Freedom Day. The proclamation says strong religious liberties work to secure other civil liberties through vigorous public debate where all participants may exercise such influence as their ideas engender, and individuals have a duty to respect the rights of others in a pluralistic society. Some of the events speakers touched on those notes. Dr. Rizwan Shah, a Des Moines pediatric doctor and Muslim, praised Iowa for its welcoming atmosphere and said, In every religion we address the creator in a way we feel comfortable. FUEL PRICES RISE: The price of unleaded retail gasoline in Iowa rose seven cents this week to $2.10 per gallon, according to AAA. That price was seven cents higher than one week ago and 33 cents a gallon lower than one year ago. The national average on Tuesday was $2.11 per gallon, up three cents from last week. Retail diesel fuel prices in Iowa were two cents a gallon higher with a statewide average of $2.09 compared to $2.62 in Iowa one year ago. On the heating fuels said, a weekly report from the state Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship reported that propane prices were a penny lower than last months prices for a statewide average of $1.00 per gallon. Home heating oil remained steady at last months figures, ending with a statewide average of $1.65 per gallon while natural gas prices were four cents lower at $1.90/MMbtu. OBAMA AMENDS DECLARATION: President Obama has made additional disaster assistance available by authorizing an increase in the level of federal funding for public assistance projects undertaken by the Omaha Tribe of Nebraska and Iowa as a result of flooding during the period of May 25 to August 1, 2011. Under the presidents major disaster declaration issued for the state of Iowa on June 27, 2011, federal funding was made available for public assistance and hazard mitigation at 75 percent federal funding of total eligible costs. Under the president's order this week, the federal share for public assistance has been increased to 90 percent of the total eligible costs for the Omaha Tribe of Nebraska and Iowa. QUOTE OF THE DAY: I think were well positioned. I havent seen any bad news the last two days. Everything has gone well. Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, D-Council Bluffs, in sizing up progress toward adjourning the 2016 session. -- compiled by the Globe Gazette Des Moines Bureau. DES MOINES Lawmakers continued their slow trek toward adjournment Wednesday with action on pieces of a $7.35 billion state budget that could usher in cutbacks for county clerks of court facing a status-quo funding level beginning July 1. The Iowa Senate voted 26-24 to finalize a nearly $181.8 million spending level for Iowas Judicial Branch which would be unchanged from current funding for a budget area that requested a $5.6 million increase to support current court operations and the 1,903 employees spread among courthouses in Iowas 99 counties. I dont have any answers yet, said State Court Administrator David Boyd after senators approved House File 2457 but did not send it to Gov. Terry Branstad yet pending action on the remaining fiscal 2017 budget bills. He previously had warned that clerks of court offices could face a return to employee layoffs, furloughs, reduced hours or other belt-tightening measures given that personnel costs make up 95 percent of judicial costs. Sen. Tom Courtney, D-Burlington, co-chair of the Legislatures justice-systems budget subcommittee, called this years appropriations process extremely difficult and painful in lamenting that the House-Senate joint budget targets did not provide enough money to run the states court system. We are short-changing our courts, said Courtney, floor manager of H.F. 2457 during Wednesdays Senate debate. This is a status-quo budget. As we all know, the status quo budget means potential cutbacks. The Judicial Branch deserves to be able to function at a level where it can adequately serve all Iowans. Sen. Julian Garrett, R-Indianola, tried unsuccessfully to include language requiring county clerk offices to be open during normal business hours like elected county officials to close a loophole in the bill that addressed conducting normal hours such as is reasonably possible given the budget constraints. This is a very reasonable proposal, Garrett told his Senate colleagues, but Courtney dismissed it as an unfunded mandate that would take away court administrators flexibility for making the best use of limited dollars. MASON CITY As part of an agreement to allow Prestage Farms to build its $240 million meatpacking plant, it must donate $1.4 million over a decade to Mason City schools. Under the terms of the agreement, yet to be approved by the City Council, the company would be obligated to pay the district $140,000 each year between January 2018 and January 2027 to bolster its general fund. MASON CITY Colorful T-shirts of all sizes with empowering messages for victims of violence were hung on a clothesline in The Music Man Square Wednesday afternoon. Crisis Intervention Service hosted the Clothesline Project in conjunction with the Take Back the Night walk. Community members could view the display and decorate a shirt to support victims of violence, CIS Sexual Assault Program Supervisor Theresa Price said. Shirts, paints and other craft supplies were provided to decorate the shirts. Part of the goal is to help with the healing process for people who have lost a loved one or are survivors of sexual abuse, Price said. The Crisis Intervention Service hopes to put an end to victim blaming and rape culture through events like these. Shannon Roberts, CIS sexual assault advocate for Cerro Gordo County, organized the events. We really want to educate and raise awareness about sexual assault to help society come to know that sexual assault is not OK and its not the victims fault, Price said. Take Back the Night walk began at The Music Man Square with glow sticks and glow necklaces in the place of candles for the weather. Escorted by the Cerro Gordo County Sheriffs Department, the participants carried signs to help raise awareness as they walked around Southbridge Mall and back. We want the public to know that were here and that victims know that theyre not alone, Price said. A big part of it is to break the silence so everybody knows that theyre not alone. A lot of people go though this and were here to help. MASON CITY Dale Alan Berneman, 56, of Mason City, died Monday April 18, 2016, at his residence. Visitation will be held from 3 until 5 p.m. Sunday at Major Erickson Funeral Home, 111 N. Pennsylvania Ave. Private family funeral services will be held with interment to follow in Elmwood-St. Joseph Cemetery. Memorials may be directed to the Dale A. Berneman Memorial Fund in care of the family. Online condolences may be left for the family at www.majorericksonfuneralhome.com ROCKWELL A Mason City woman was reported in fair condition Wednesday afternoon at Mercy Medical Center-North Iowa following a morning crash near Rockwell. Samantha Allen, 20, was transported to the hospital by Mason City Fire Department ambulance following the two-vehicle crash at 9 a.m. on Highway 65 south of Rockwell. Allen was driving north on Highway 65 when her car crossed the center line and collided with a southbound car driven by Tami Balhagen, 51, Sheffield, according to a report from the Iowa State Patrol. Both vehicles came to rest in the west ditch. One of the cars was on its side in a field near the road. The other vehicle was about 200 feet away next to the intersection. In between the two vehicles, the side of the road was littered with glass and tire rubber and parts. Balhagen was not injured. Charges are pending, according to the state patrol. News Story not available This story has been published on: 2022-10-24. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. This story is no longer available on our site. The parent company of China Eastern Airlines Corp Ltd on Thursday announced a non-public issuance of shares, in which 3 billion yuan worth of the shares will be subscribed by Chinese online travel agency Ctrip.com International Ltd. Next, the travel agency will boost its shareholding in China Eastern. China Eastern Air Holding Company, the parent company, inked an all-around strategic cooperation agreement with the nations largest online travel agency on Thursday, and on the same date, trading of the carrier on the Shanghai Stock Exchange was suspended in accordance with the bourse's rules. The two parties vowed to explore cooperation in the fields including tourism productslow-cost aviation, IT, e-commerce, equity and capital markets. "This cooperation will greatly enhance our competitiveness within the tourism industry chain," said Liu Shaoyong, chairman of China Eastern. China Eastern reportedly was to get approval from the China Securities Regulatory Commission in January for issuing non-public A-shares with a maximum value of 15 billion yuan to up to 10 unrelated investors at a price of 6.44 yuan per share. The 2016 presidential elections are proving historic, and not just because of the surprising success of self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders, the lively debate among feminists over whether to support Hillary Clinton or Donald Trumps unorthodox candidacy. The elections are also groundbreaking because theyre revealing more dramatically than ever the corrosive effect of big money on our decaying democracy. Following the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision and related rulings, corporations and the wealthiest Americans gained the legal right to raise and spend as much money as they want on political candidates. The 2012 elections were consequently the most expensive in U.S. history. And this years races are predicted to cost even more. With the general election still six months away, donors have already sunk $1 billion into the presidential race with $619 million raised by candidates and another $412 million by super PACs. Big money in politics drives grave inequality in our country. It also drives war. After all, war is a profitable industry. While millions of people all over the world are being killed and traumatized by violence, a small few make a killing from the never-ending war machine. During the Iraq War, for example, weapons manufacturers and a cadre of other corporations made billions on federal contracts. Most notoriously this included Halliburton, a military contractor previously led by Dick Cheney. The company made huge profits from George W. Bushs decision to wage a costly, unjustified and illegal war while Cheney served as his vice president. Military-industrial corporations spend heavily on political campaigns. Theyve given over $1 million to this years presidential candidates so far over $200,000 of which went to Hillary Clinton, who leads the pack in industry backing. These corporations target House and Senate members who sit on the Armed Forces and Appropriations Committees, who control the purse strings for key defense line items. And cleverly, theyve planted factories in most congressional districts. Even if they provide just a few dozen constituent jobs per district, that helps curry favor with each member of Congress. Thanks to aggressive lobbying efforts, weapons manufacturers have secured the five largest contracts made by the federal government over the last seven years. In 2014, the U.S. government awarded over $90 billion worth of contracts to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. Military spending has been one of the top three biggest federal programs every year since 2000, and its far and away the largest discretionary portion. Year after year, elected officials spend several times more on the military than on education, energy and the environment combined. Lockheed Martins problematic F-35 jet illustrates this disturbingly disproportionate use of funds. The same $1.5 trillion Washington will spend on the jet, journalist Tom Cahill calculates, could have provided tuition-free public higher education for every student in the U.S. for the next 23 years. Instead, the Pentagon ordered a fighter plane that cant even fire its own gun yet. Given all of this, how can anyone justify war spending? Some folks will say its to make us safer. Yet the aggressive U.S. military response following the 9/11 attacks the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the NATO bombing of Libya and drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen has only destabilized the region. Regime change foreign policies have collapsed governments and opened the doors to Islamist terrorist groups like ISIS. Others may say they support a robust Pentagon budget because of the jobs the military creates. But dollar for dollar, education spending creates nearly three times more jobs than military spending. We need to stop letting politicians and corporations treat violence and death as business opportunities. Until politics become about people instead of profits, well remain crushed in the death grip of the war machine. And that is the real national security threat facing the United States today. Between the loose cannon Donald Trump and the ultraconservative Ted Cruz, Republicans have been doing their best to give the presidential election away. But it's worse than that: They are doing their best to drive voters into the Democratic fold for years to come. With their targeting of Muslims, hostility to immigration reform, rejection of climate-change science and opposition to same-sex marriage, the two threaten to sharply narrow the party's slice of the electorate. The question is: Will the Democrats accept the favor? It's easy to overlook how they are putting their own political future in peril. Bernie Sanders is not likely to win the nomination, but his robust challenge to Hillary Clinton makes it plain that the Democratic Party has shifted leftward just as Republicans marched the opposite way. Sanders, remember, is a self-styled democratic socialist who always ran as an independent because he considered the Democrats insufficiently progressive. At the outset, he was considered this year's Dennis Kucinich -- a preachy gadfly with no chance of winning. Yet he has come out ahead in 17 state contests. In the process, he has exposed major weaknesses in Hillary Clinton's appeal. Though he is the older candidate, his support skews young. Sanders leads among men and whites, but his most notable feat is beating Clinton among Democratic voters younger than 50 by a 2-to-1 ratio. This is the party base of the future. He also rouses more fervent ardor than she does. Even if Clinton wins this time, there is a leftward riptide that she will have trouble resisting, on the campaign trail or in office. Not that she's trying very hard. Her husband recaptured the White House for the Democrats after three consecutive losses by candidates perceived as too liberal on big issues such as taxes, crime and Communism. Bill Clinton was a master of playing to the center, providing an attractive option to independents and "Reagan Democrats." Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 with a similar approach. Barack Obama followed suit in 2008, stressing his support for more troops in Afghanistan, the conservative pedigree of his health care reform and the sanctity of the Second Amendment. But Hillary Clinton is doing something very different in an obvious effort to appease the Occupy Wall Street faction. Eight years ago, she strongly identified with her husband's record. This year, she has said the 1994 crime bill he signed was too harsh, rejected a Pacific trade agreement she had previously lauded and endorsed a $15 minimum wage enacted in New York. She has also tried to sound like populist firebrand Elizabeth Warren on banking issues. Maybe she can veer back toward the middle if and when she gets the nomination. But motivating Sanders' supporters to get to the polls will be crucial, and that need will put strong pressure on Clinton to stay in the left lane. So it looks as though there will be a gaping hole in the middle of the political spectrum, with centrist voters forced to choose between an increasingly liberal Democratic Party on the one hand and, on the other, Trump or Cruz -- who are anathema even to relatively moderate Republicans, much less independents. The last Republican to win, George W. Bush, called himself a "compassionate conservative." George H.W. Bush emphasized his own "kinder and gentler" approach. Adjectives such as that have gone out of style in the GOP. But the Democrats also have contributed to the polarization. Sanders has nothing good to say about capitalism. And it's hard to imagine Clinton echoing what President Clinton said in 1996: "The era of big government is over." Looking at the two likely Republican nominees, centrist Americans ask: "What about us?" So far, the Democratic response is: "What about you?" -- By the Chicago Tribune Espoo, Finland, 2016-04-21 09:25 CEST (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SRV YHTIOT OYJ PRESS RELEASE 21.4.2016, AT 10:25 New Vantaankoski Idea Competitions winning entry proposes free city for experiments in working life A multidisciplinary team, led by L Arkkitehdit Oy, has been selected as the winner of the New Vantaankoski Idea Competition, jointly organised by SRV, Sanoma, the City of Vantaa and VTT. The goal of the New Vantaankoski Idea Competition was to find a concept for an innovative business campus. The winning proposal, Futurama, openmindedly breaks down the boundaries of work, leisure, home and workplace. We decided to enter because we were attracted by the new type of competition format. From the very start, we challenged the prevailing area and office construction practices, and we visualised on a concept level what working and living in the urban environment of the future will be like. We put together a team that included not only architects, but also, among others, a futurist and a working life expert. They helped to broaden our horizon and see a future full of opportunities, says Katia Salo, Development Manager at L Arkkitehdit Oy, and leader of the winning team. The winning entry is based on the premise that the sharp opposition between work, home, work and leisure will end. The working premises concept has run its course and it will be flexibly replaced according to need by an operating environment that also offers people more options in the deciding the rhythm of their daily lives. The present way of developing urban environments is inflexible and does not allow room for spontaneous innovations and rapid modification of the urban space. In the spirit of cutting red tape, we propose for the New Vantaankoski a form of free city in which the customary, restrictive rules do not apply. In a delineated area, light-touch, fast experiments on working and urban living would be permitted, explains Salo. According to the winning entry, in the future, space will be a service that is modified according to need. The urban space, including transport, for example, will also be a service, as well as a platform for events and in activity. The winning entry proposes that the campus area be allowed to develop in a business-driven way, and that fast infill and conversion construction be permitted through flexible land-use planning. The goal would be that companies, as their situation changed, would not have to leave the area, rather the premises would flexibly accommodate change. We wanted to shake up urban planning and business premises projects, and we succeeded. Next, we will launch negotiations with the winners and others who submitted interesting concepts. We will select elements from different works and develop them further. We would like to see applications of the ideas within a year or two, says Jouko Poyhonen, SRVs Director, Project Development, and chairman of the competition jury. The competition received a total of 17 entries. The competitions EUR 20,000 main prize was won by the entry Futurama. The entry Symbioosi was awarded EUR 10,000 for a concept whose strengths lay particularly in social interaction services and the reconfigurable use of space. R2D2K and The Mesh Studio shared a EUR 10,000 prize for digital services ideas. The entry Hyonteiselamaa (Insect Life) was awarded EUR 5,000 for a mobility solution in the aerial dimension. The entry Kiertotaloustulostin (Circular Economy Printer) was awarded EUR 5,000 for implementation of the circular economy in the area. Further information on the competition and its entries: The winning entries teams and contact persons as well as comments of the jury will be published on 21 April at 10.00 a.m. on the www.uusivantaankoski.fi website. Contacts for the media: Jouko Poyhonen, Director, Project Development, SRV Group Plc, tel. +358 201 455247, jouko.poyhonen@srv.fi Hanna Johde, Communications Director, Sanoma Plc, tel. +358 40 673 8977, hanna.johde@sanoma.com Jose Valanta, Director, Economic Development, City of Vantaa, tel. +358 9 8392 1108, +358 50 523 1116, jose.valanta@vantaa.fi We will provide representatives of the media, on request, extracts from the winning teams competition entries. If you wish to order an information pack, please contact Aino Laakso of our partner Mailand Communications Oy. Contact information: aino.laakso@mailand.fi, tel. +358 50 553 8831. Ownership rights to the competition proposals are held by the competition organisers and publishing the entries in their entirety is not permitted. The media may, however, publish elements of the visualisations and quote the proposals. HOWDIEEEE.. to anyone who reads this...!!Now I have a very specific situation (thats what i think ) so i am submitting my info to which i would love to hear from anyone who has the adequate knowledge to address my concernsHeres my BACKGROUND10th grade=> 73%12th grade => 74% (a science student)Then i took an year off as i did not get into the a decent engineering college..Trust me here- i got into many colleges but all of them were Pretty much CRAP (sorry for the curse but i am being bluntly honest here)In the mean time I assisted my father during the day and studied during night..I am not sure that experience will count for business schools nevertheless i am very proud that i did that as at an early age i got to understand as to how someone who runs an industry actually functions..The Gap year proved fruitful as i got into GGSIPU Delhi plus i got a pretty good and a decorated college in the Capital city..Engineering was Good in fact great ..Aggregate=> 71%(B.Tech In Information tech)Now to be honest with you guys i was working with my father during my engineering years as well ..I would literally pick up documents and do other chores for him (Yes He Paid Me too)Here is the real problem why i wrote this piece =>My age is 23 years and 330 daysI will be 24 next month..!!I graduated in June 2015..And from DAY 1 i have been working with my father in our Family business..Initially i was hesitant to join him as i was an IT engineer and my family is into Footwear business. Then I started to love my job [Common we make shoes and other footwear's for a living. Who would not love that rightNow almost an year later i feel like i need to grow my business outreach..Trust me when i say this - Work is Fine..But the glitch is => "i want to take my family Business to places" Actually i want that to be Awesome instead of just Fine (sorry for the choice of words )Hence i need an MBA..And to much of my surprise my father stands right by me in this decision..! In fact He told me that its a very mature move..!!I know most of you might think its too early for an MBABut honestly guys Waiting for another 2 or 3 years will not take my business anywhere .It will be in a stand still.Plus i think i have the added advantage of working with my father in my initial GAP year where i assisted him if it counts.So it goes without saying => I DON'T ONLY WANT AN MBA ; I NEED AN MBA..!!secondly i am a bit confused about this work experience thing ..!!Most of the business schools require 2 years of work experience in there applicants ..What does 2 years mean?till the program actually starts or till the time you fill out your applicationIf i apply in 2016 for fall 2017 admissions then by the time i actually start my school in September i will be having 2 years and 2 months of experience.. I guess that would do..???WHAT ARE THE SCHOOLS I CAN TARGET ???Top 20 can i get in ?Okay Top30?Top40?i am flexible as long as it in the Top 40-45Common Guys Help me get into top 40 at-least..!!!! I don't want to wait ..!!I am into manufacturing shoes and other footwear so anything related to marketing and advertising would be Fabulous ..Plus i like Advertising.Now if (only if) i wait another year( which probably would not do any good to my industry ) then will it increase my chances of getting admitted..GMAT => Appearing this October..I think i can get a good score..i will try for 700 maybe ..I will Dig that (i have started preparing)now to the most important part=>Community services => I am an active part of an Organisation which rescues street dogs and treats them until they are healthy..I have been a part of this organisation from my engineering days ..the reason i do it it i honestly believe in the work we do..We organise dog shows too..Positions held => "I am not given any designations actually .. I am responsible for marketing and supply ..Plus sometimes manufacturing too. Family business comes with several added responsibilities tooThe Post MBA goals => " I WOULD LIKE TO RETURN TO MY HOME COUNTRY THE DAY AFTER I GET AN MBA . Off course i would like to do an internship however..But apart from that i have one any only one vision that is to Do Justice to my family business and take it to a level it deserves"ANYONE WHO READS THIS Please Feel free TO POST any suggestions You guys Have for me... It will be really helpful..Love and respect to everyoneStone Cold_________________ Late Night with Seth Meyers writer/performer Conner O'Malley has yelled at rich people in cars, attended the Exxxotica Expo in NJ, marched in the 69th annual P.C. Richard and Son Alternative Thanksgiving Day Parade, and come up with an interpretive dance to the Charlie Rose musicbut now he's (literally) emerged from the depths of the Hudson River to spread awareness of Donald Trump to the ignorant, garbage New Yorkers who besmirch his name. Watch below as #1 Trump fan Mark Seevers defends "the white God Donald Trump" to people in Times Square, goes undercover at a Trump protest, and refuses to be pushed around by "the enemy," at a Bernie Sanders rally. "Here is a man who will not, refuse to, I refuse, I will get my hands dirty," he says very eloquently. "I will clean up this countrylook at my sick Deadpool mask!" This isn't the first time O'Malley has gone all-in for Trumphe also attended a Trump rally in Florida where he shouted a lot. Watch below as he goes on a long dark night of the soul in Orlando. We rely on your support to make local news available to all Make your contribution now and help Gothamist thrive in 2022. Donate today The Borough Park, Brooklyn power broker at the center of a federal investigation into NYPD corruption may have had police helicopters do a flyover his Hudson River cruise party. The Daily News reports, citing unnamed sources, that Jeremy Reichberg arranged the buzz-by to impress the dozens of guests at his floating shindig. As the News writes, this should have been against protocol, given that the NYPD's aviation unit "has strict rules regarding where it can fly and is largely used to handle emergencies or special events." Reichberg and Upper West Side developer and investor Jona Rechnitz supported Mayor Bill de Blasio's 2013 election, fundraising for which is also under federal scrutiny. The most publicized piece of the probe so far, though, has been the businessmen's close relationships with high-ranking law enforcement officials, including former Chief of Department Philip Banks, jailer union head Norman Seabrook, and several commanding and executive officers. Reportedly at issue are trips the men took with police brass, and possible favors done in return, such as providing police security details for social functions, and possibly, in Seabrook's case, investing $10 million in union money with a pension fund Rechnitz had ties to. Nine NYPD officers have been at least temporarily demoted in connection with publicity around the investigation. Most recently three officers in the License Division were reassigned for allegedly working with a member of the Boro Park Shomrim, a Hasidic Jewish volunteer police force, to grant gun licenses to otherwise ineligible people, in exchange for bribes. The Shomrim member, Shaya Lichtenstein, was charged with bribery in federal court on Monday. Some of the figures questioned in connection with the probe have ties to Borough Park's 66th Precinct, including Banks, who was once its second-in-command, and a community affairs detective who was stripped of his gun and badge after pleading the Fifth before a grand jury. The News' anonymous sources echoed a claim made recently in the New York Post, implicating Rechnitz in another bit of alleged high-flying graft, saying that he took cops on trips using his private jet, and that at least one flight featured a sex worker dressed as a flight attendant. On Monday, de Blasio declined to say whether his campaign staff had been contacted by the FBI. He'd previously said they hadn't. "I am not going to get into the details day by day," he told the News. "The bottom line here is we hold ourselves to very high ethical standards. Were going to cooperate." Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that the massive investigation is also looking into de Blasio's fundraising for Democrats running for state Senate seats in 2014. The paper wrote that subpoenas went out earlier this week seeking records related to the mayor's support of the campaigns. Good government advocates previously criticized de Blasio for evading campaign contribution limits through his nonprofit Campaign for One New York, saying it constituted a "shadow government." Rechnitz gave $50,000 to the group, and Reichberg hosted a dinner for it. The mayor is now disbanding the organization. A lawyer for de Blasio's campaign called off an April 26th fundraiser for the mayor's upcoming reelection bid because of the federal scrutiny, the Wall Street Journal reported. For those hoping that this investigation might cut down on the level of corruption pervading New York politics, don't hold your breath. The recent convictions of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate majority leader Dean Skelos for selling their officesprosecutors are seeking more than 14 and 12 to 15 years in prison for them, respectivelyhave not yet motivated legislators in Albany to pass any ethics reforms. In Silver's Lower East Side district of nearly 40 years, meanwhile, his anointed successor Alice Cancel won the special election for his Assembly seat by 1,000 votes last night. At a debate earlier this month, Cancel called Silver "a hero in this community," and in February she told the Times of his crimes, "Whatever he did in his private life has nothing to do with our district. To me, it doesn't matter." In the final weeks of her campaign she did, when pressed, agree that Silver should serve time in prison. New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has announced that he will investigate the city Board of Elections in the wake of yesterday's messy primary. He joins Comptroller Scott Stringer and Mayor de Blasio in demanding answers and reforms from the NYC BOE. "I am deeply troubled by the volume and consistency of voting irregularities, both in public reports and direct complaints to my office's voter hotline, which received more than 1,000 complaints in the course of the day yesterday," Schneiderman said in a statement. "That's why today, we have opened an investigation into alleged improprieties in yesterday's voting by the New York City Board of Elections." Those alleged improprieties are numerous, from tens of thousands of Brooklyn residents finding they'd been purged from voter rolls, to missing voter registration books and malfunctioning ballot scanners. You can read our roundup of the worst problems voters encountered here. Schneiderman's investigation will focus specifically on the NYC BOE, but he said that he will open it up to other areas of the state if it appears that there were high instances of irregularities elsewhere. "Voting is the cornerstone of our democracy, and if any New Yorker was illegally prevented from voting, I will do everything in my power to make their vote count and ensure that it never happens again," he said. Meanwhile, Stringer will audit the board, and has demanded to know how it plans to avoid such problems in the futureand why they occurred in the first place. In a statement yesterday, de Blasio spoke specifically about the Brooklyn branch of the BOE, and said that errors made by that office "indicate that additional major reforms will be needed to the Board of Election and in the state law governing it." At the Brooklyn office yesterday, a "nonstop" stream of frustrated voters begged judges to give them a court order allowing them to vote. The board has yet to provide a full explanation as to why over 120,000 Brooklyn Democrats were removed from voter rolls ahead of yesterday's primary, and yesterday, executive director Michael Ryan characterized the day's issues as "what we typically see during elections." The BOE did not respond to our request for comment. Southside Williamsburg bar Crown Vic, which draws huge crowds to its enormous backyard, taco truck, and bocce, is closing. A bartender at the bar tells us, "It's 100% [closing], it's just a question of when." The bartender, who did not want to be named because employees have been told to keep quiet about the closure, said there's hope the bar can hang on for one more summer, but that is uncertain. The reason for the closure, according to the bartender, is that the property owner has sold the sizable lot, which was formerly used as parking for taxis. According to DOB records, the owner of the property is JBJ LLC, which is registered under Long Island-based landlord Bruce Terzano. Terzano did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A rumor is circulating that the neighboring bar and cafe Freehold intends to expand into the Crown Vic space, but when asked about this, Freehold's Eric Eim declined to comment. In October of 2015, The Real Deal reported that Terzano owns the Freehold property, and was being sued for backing out of a deal to sell the Crown Vic lot, and others on the block, to investor Shulem Herman. One Williamsburg business owner tells us today that the Crown Vic lot "was bought by a large NYC-based developer and they want to start immediate construction on a major project on the site." The source says Crown Vic will close by the end of May. Asked about all of this, Crown Vic's owners issued a statement saying, "Williamsburg's 'Appetite for Construction' meant that a sprawling backyard like Crown Vic's couldn't last. Our endless summer days are numbered. Come join us for a farewell drink." Crown Vic received considerable negative attention in November, when a woman accused bar employees of refusing to help her after she was assaulted outside the establishment. The owners issued an apology and fired the employees involved. As part of its ongoing effort to persuade the City Council that it's here to help the middle class, Airbnb has launched a public relations push highlighting its positive economic impact on the city's predominantly-black neighborhoods, from Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn, to West Harlem and the Rockaways. According to the startup's latest internal analysis, Airbnb is growing faster in black neighborhoods than elsewhere in the city, and in Bed-Stuy/Bushwick most of all. The number of Airbnb guests in 30 NYC zip codes with the most black residents jumped 78% between 2014 and 2015, compared to 51% city-wide. Per-zip code data shared with Gothamist shows that the number of guests in the 11221, which covers sections of Bed-Stuy and Bushwick, jumped 86% last year, to 39,494. The 10030, in West Harlem, saw a 65% increase in guests, to 10,557. Other neighborhoods with a recent influx of Airbnb users include Wakefield and Edenwald in the Bronx, Averne in the Rockaways, and Southeast Queens near JFK Airport. Airbnb hosts across these neighborhoods pocketed more than $43 million combined last year, according to the startup. The average per-host annual take-home was $6,100. "This impacts everyone: from the coffee shop in Harlem to the food stand in Flushing to the thousands of Airbnb hosts," said the company in its analysis. "That is money theyre using to pay the rent or mortgage, start small businesses, and save for retirement." But local politicians and advocates, as well as independent data analysts, challenge that Airbnb has played a role in furthering gentrification in the neighborhoods it purports to boost. These groups have long argued that the startup isn't doing enough to discourage illegal hotel operatorsbad actors who flip entire apartments into year-round Airbnb listings, jeopardizing the safety of longterm tenants and snatching up a significant portion of the city's already-dwindling affordable housing stock. "Airbnb is a gentrifying tool that is being used by people moving into these neighborhoods, who are displacing long-term residents and turning around and renting [on the platform]," said Bed-Stuy based data analyst Murray Cox. Airbnb's report does not include the racial demographics within each focus zip code, so there's no indication of how many of the hosts are black. Cox has developed a beta map showing Airbnb data from the fall of 2014, which includes host photos for each pinpointed listing on the NYC map. You can peruse it here. Data analyst and 1 Quant NY blogger Ben Wellington says that any data analysis released by Airbnb should be assessed with asterisks, since the app keeps much of its data secret. "When you withhold data on a mass scale, it's very easy to pick and choose and tell a positive story," he said. "Their last data dump forced you to go down to their office [to look at it]. Any time someone does science, but doesn't release the data behind the science, there's suspicion." A sliver of Bed-Stuy (via). Cox's own analysis, Inside Airbnb, maps the public information associated with every single Airbnb listing in New York City. The map can be filtered to show how many nights a particular listing is rented per year, whether the listing is for an entire home or a private room, and whether the host is associated with multiple listings. In Crown Heights, one of the neighborhoods targeted in Airbnb's report, Cox's crunching shows that out of 1,148 listings, 44.6% are for entire apartments (which is against the law for most people), and a quarter of them are managed by hosts who are juggling multiple listings. For Cox, these signs point to fishy behavior; these hosts are "more likely to be running a business," he says. In Bed-Stuy, which includes the NYC zip code with the most black residents documented in Airbnb's report, Inside Airbnb shows 2,013 listings, 45.7% of which are for entire apartments, and 28.6% of which have multiple listings. Airbnb's new report emphasizes that hosts in predominantly black neighborhoods are more likely to rent out a single room than the city as a whole58%, compared to 44% city-wide"creating a great opportunity for retirees, empty nesters and anyone with a little extra space to make a bit of extra money." "They put the spin on it, emphasizing that it's less than 50% [full apartment listings]," said Cox. "The company is highlighting that 58 percent of hosts are offering private rooms as opposed to whole apartments, however that still leaves nearly 50 percent of their hosts contributing to the lack of housing options in the city," echoed council members Jumaane Williams and Helen Rosenthal, longtime critics of the platform, in a statement to DNAInfo. Williams and Rosenthal also challenged that the report doesn't indicate whether the hosts are renters, or owners. In Bed Stuy, 78.1% of residents rent. In Crown Heights, renters make up 82.9% of the population. If these hosts are renters, the council members stated, "more likely than not, the apartment owners do not live in the same communities they are profiting from." Addressing widespread complaints about irregularities (i.e. missing names) on voter lists at poll sites on Primary Day, city Board of Elections director Michael Ryan gave no quarter. "No one was disenfranchised," he told Fox5, facing unfriendly questioning from Greg Kelly. "What we did see was a concerted effort by some folks to apparently, to protest New Yorks closed primary process by showing up to vote when they werent registered to vote. We tracked down dozens who say they were disenfranchised and as it turns out, they werent registered in the parties that they were trying to vote for." There's a bit to unpack here, so let's do that. The many complaints about registration problems came largely from Bernie Sanders supporters, and mainly came in two forms: people who tried to change parties or register as new voters ahead of the deadlines for doing those things, them found themselves un-registered or not in their chosen party; and longtime Democratic voters who found themselves listed as unaffiliated, registered Republican, or with no registration at all. We have looked into the details of approximately two dozen reported irregularities (there are many, many more online). In most of these, voters provided some amount of documentation from the Board of Elections. Some cases were explainable by stray marks on a DMV formit turns out if you check "I do not wish to enroll in a party" when renewing your driver's license, you un-enroll from your current partyor ignorance of New York's closed primary system and restrictive October party-change deadline. The majority of cases, however, offered no easy explanation, and certainly could not be settled by pulling up their names and checking whether they were "registered in the parties they were trying to vote for." Quite the opposite: not being registered in a chosen party was the very problem people were complaining about. At least some situations were clearly the result of errors on the BOE's end. For instance, my wife could not find her active registration because, it turned out after some investigation, her name was listed with a letter missing, and a digit had been entered wrong in her birth year, so the board thought she was 90 (her poll workers were able to find her in the book under the misspelling). At least two other people I know personally found their names not listed at their poll sites, though they have lived in the same place and have consistently voted in Democratic primaries for years. A clerk for a judge handling cases of potentially disenfranchised voters on the morning shift at the Brooklyn BOE office on Primary Day said that at least "one or two" cases heard stemmed from problems on the BOE side, though he said the majority were the result of voter confusion. Similar problems were reported statewide, and the Attorney General's Office said its hotline received more than 1,000 complaints, six times the number in the 2012 general presidential election. Brooklyn seemed to be a hub of confusion though, in part because as WNYC first reported, the Brooklyn BOE office took 126,000 people off the active rolls between November of last year and this April. Mayor Bill de Blasio said that in the process, whole buildings and even blocks were stricken from voter lists. Ryan insists that this reduction, the largest of any county in the state, was due to backed-up, routine data maintenance, and no, no one was disenfranchised. On the activist Sanders supporters' end, a group of dozens of voters did sue the state on Monday in a last-ditch effort to open the primary, or at least preserve all affidavit ballotswhich voters not found in the voter lists could castthe merits of which they wanted debated in future hearings. That lawsuit failed, but what Ryan says about protesters is true, to a degree. Starting around 12 hours before the polls opened, some activists did begin directing those who felt they were disenfranchised and independents to vote using affidavit ballots in hopes that a federal judge would order this primary open to unaffiliated voters. Anecdotal reports indicate that workers at certain polling sites processed many more affidavit ballots than usualone woman we spoke to said that a poll worker for a single Assembly district in Bedford-Stuyvesant told her that he had processed 10 by 11 a.m., and another voter, in Prospect Heights, said a worker showed her "hundreds and hundreds" of the ballotswhich could be from a combination of faulty voter lists and independents hopeful about the Hail Mary lawsuit. Pressed on Fox5 by Kelly, Ryan refused to acknowledge that even the slightest thing was out of the ordinary on Primary Day, dismissing complaints as internet hype. "I dont believe there were disenfranchised voters in Brooklyn," he said, explaining he had visited polling sites. "What happened on the ground just doesnt bear out that there was mass disenfranchisement of voters in Brooklyn." As Kelly noted when closing out the interview, the city BOE is now being investigated by Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, as well as audited by Comptroller Scott Stringer. Mayor de Blasio yesterday also called for "major reforms" to the agency, though a spokeswoman did not respond to a request for elaboration on that point. We have submitted the details of 15 cases of registration irregularities to a BOE spokeswoman for her to review and will update if we learn more about the circumstances of those. An adventurous cat who climbed seven stories up a tree and couldn't (or wouldn't?) come down was rescued in dramatic fashion in the Bronx on Tuesday. Locals say good feline Samaritan Pedro Rosario, who started New Beginnings Animal Rescue, made his way high up the tree after other city agencies declined to help. NBAR volunteer Roxanne Delgado tells us, "Residents including the cat owner called NYPD, FDNY, and 311 for days to no avail. Yesterday the ESU arrived and assessed the situation. They stated cat was on top of the tree which was about 7 stories high. They left after stating the top branches were too thin and they wouldn't risk their safety for a cat. Pedro... arrived immediately afterwards with just a ladder and climbed up to top of tree and rescued cat." This video shows the cat falling to the safety of a blanket! The cat, named Missy, wandered onto the tree after climbing onto the scaffolding (Missy usually goes in and out of her second-flood apartment). Originally Missy was about half way up the tree, but the night before the rescue, some people were throwing some pebbles at her, in hopes she's come down. Instead, Missy climbed higher. Missy (New Beginnings Animal Rescue) Rosario took Missy to a veterinarian for a checkup. She received fluids and is back at home with some antibiotics. Owner Rosie Ortiz said her windows are definitely not going to be opened wide anymore. New Beginnings Animal Rescue is holding a fundraiser on June 4, with 100% of proceeds going to the no-kill shelter. (It's actually the only no-killer shelter in the Bronx.) Rosario used his 401K money to start and keep the shelter going. "I don't think you're supposed to be here," a teenage boy in a yarmulke tells me, staring me down through a car window in disbelief. "It's not right." I'm sitting in the passenger side of an RV on Eastern Parkway, about to take part in the biannual "Mitzvah Tank Parade," courtesy of Crown Heights's Chabad-Lubavitch community. Twenty-eight RVsall bedecked with pictures of the Lubavitcher Rebbe and heralding the imminent arrival of the Messiahare set to parade through Brooklyn into Manhattan, blasting music and reminding Jews and gentiles alike that Passover is on its way. I am going to ride with them, and it's clear I am an outsider. I am Jewish, but I am obviously not observant. I'm wearing jeans, for one thing, which is verboten for women in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. I'm also, in that vein, a woman, and all 28 RVs appear to be filled exclusively with boys and men. The gawking teen is not wrongI am not supposed to be there, and I am a little uneasy. "Chabad wants to spread the 'good word' about Judaism," my chaperone, Yossi Vorovitch, tells me. "The Rebbe says it's a mitzvah, a good deed, to spread the light of Judaism out to the whole world." Hence the mitzvah "tanks." For some, the ultra-Orthodox community is startling and alien, but it's not the unfamiliarity that makes me uneasy. I went to a Jewish day school from nursery through eighth grade, and though my family wasn't religiousand the school welcoming of all denominationsas a kid I felt pressured to feign observance to fit in. I pretended to be kosher. I feared other children would spot me getting out of my parents' car on a Saturday. I hid the Halloween candy my mother would put in my lunchbox, since the other kids scoffed at that pagan holiday. By middle school, things were worse. I joined my class's more religious prayer group because it seemed elite and exclusive, even if girls had to sit on a different side of the room from the boys. I worried about my friends showing up to my parents' hippie Reconstructionist synagogue on my bat mitzvah and judging it for not being modern Orthodox. When I visited a family friend my age in Borough Park, I wore a long skirt and followed her lead when it came to ritual hand-washing and praying after the meal. Not being an outsider was important, and the only way to do that was to follow the rules. (Rebecca Fishbein/Gothamist) The Chabad-Lubavitch are much more welcoming of outsiders than the Satmar Hasidim in Williamsburg. They are disciples of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, a wildly influential Orthodox Jewish rabbi who moved to New York from Eastern Europe in 1941 and helped unify Jews who were displaced and suffering in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Schneerson preached outreach to Jews living in isolated communities, urging his followers to teach non-practicing members of the tribe about holidays, rituals, history, and customs. Schneerson died in 1994 (though the devoted say that's up for debate), but his message resonated with the rest of the sect, which is why so many Chabad houses freely dispense alcohol on college campuses. Vorovitch tells me that the Chabad community's been sending the so-called "tanks"dubbed as such because they're combating an "army of evil"out into secular communities twice a year since 1974, later setting up camp on street corners to offer unsuspecting laypeople candles and matzah for Passover. Near holidays like Sukkot, Hanukkah, and Passover, it's a rite of passage for non-Orthodox New Yorkers to get approached by Chabad activists asking, "Are you Jewish?" before thrusting a pair of Shabbos candles on them. Vorovitch, who grew up in Toronto but now lives in Crown Heights with his new wife, was born to two former secular Jews from the USSR who later became involved with the Chabad movement. They were once outsiders too, which is perhaps why Vorovitch is so kind to me, even though I am clearly a fallen angel. He asks me if I'm Jewish (I am), if I've been to Israel (I have) and if I speak Hebrew (I do), and when the aforementioned teenager tries to eject me from the mitzvah tank, Vorovitch tells him he's being disrespectful and asks him to apologize. He does. It's nice. And so, I'm good to go, with Vorovitch in the driver's seat and about a half-dozen boys ranging from age from roughly six to eighteen, in the back of the RV. The tanks are all blaring the same song"Moshiach! Moshiach! Moshiach!"but the synchronization is off, and the children are all yelling and fighting. "It's a balagan," Vorovitch says apologetically, using the Hebrew word for "mess." The tanks begin to move, directed by police escorts, and we slowly turn up Kingston Avenue. "This is the main street in Crown Heights," Vorovitch tells me, and though the Crown Heights I know is dominated by Franklin and Nostrand Avenues, this is the main drag in this world. Much like Lee Avenue in South Williamsburg, there are clothing stores and grocery shops and delicatessens catering specifically to ultra-Orthodox Jews. A huge crowd of women and children cheer and wave as we pass by. Even though the Chabad-Lubavitchers aren't as resistant to the outside world as the Satmars, the community is still isolated. (Rebecca Fishbein/Gothamist) Vorovitch explains that the 28 mitzvah tanks make their rounds once around Hanukkah, and again on Rebbe Schneerson's birthday, which this year, according to the Jewish calendar, is April 19. School-aged children (male, of course) can sign up to ride in the tank, and the older teenagers serve as staff and counselors. The group will preach 10 mitzvotJewish education, purity of family, tefillin, having a mezuzah on your doorpost, having a home full of Jewish books, lighting Shabbos candles, loving a fellow Jew, tzedakah (charity), and keeping kosher. The last mitzvah is that of the "moshiach campaign," which is what we're striving for today. (Mosiach means Messiah.) The Chabad-Lubavitch believe that we are very close to the coming of the Messiah, and we have to carry out these mitzvot for it to come. "The Moshiach coming means the end of the world, and the beginning of a new one," Vorovitch tells me. "It means the end of suffering and beginning of peace, when all people live in peace together." The mitzvah tank uneasily careens down Eastern ParkwayVorovitch has trouble driving the RV, which he complains is a "hunk of metal"to little fanfare, and even when we head up Flatbush, few passersby even take notice, though one old man shakes two fists at the car. Vorovitch, who occasionally yells, "Happy Passover!" out the window, assures me the real action is in Manhattan. "There are a lot of personalities. Sometimes people smile and wave, sometimes they get mad," he tells me. Inside the RV, the children chatter in a mixture of Hebrew and English. One child complains that his bike can move faster. When we pass by the Barclays Center, another child yells, "Hey look! The Islanders!" On the bridge, Vorovitch keeps hopping out to take photos of the parade for me. "The driver is crazy," one kid admonishes. I see a Victoria's Secret along the route and am tempted to point it out, but I refrain. Vorovitch is right about Manhattan. We run red lights in Chinatown and come dangerously close to pedestrians, none of whom seem particularly pleased about the train of orange RVs blocking traffic and blasting music (it's still the "Moshiach! Moshiach! Moshiach! song, and by this point I am ready for Moshiach to come and end it). "Ach, Manhattan!" Vorovitch keeps saying, as taxi drivers try to cut him off. "Happy Passover!" he yells at them cheerfully, and the screaming children behind me follow suit. This scene continues as we drive down Houston and head up 6th Avenue. We're solidly in the middle of the train now, and pedestrians are gathering at streetcorners to point at the trucks and snap photos. Vorovitch seems to think the spectators' laughter is a sign they're getting into the holiday spirit (maybe it is?) and he keeps shouting, "Happy Passover!" at them, punctuated with the occasional quip about how busy Manhattan is. Staffers in yamalkes, tallises and peyes run around in traffic, handing people boxes of round matzah and pamphlets urging them to "Vote for the Moshiach." I ask Vorovich if anyone's ever shouted anything rude at the mitzvah tanks, or tried to attack any of them. "Of course. This is Manhattan!" he says. Right. Inside the mitzvah tank, I am revisited by that old need to blend in. I showed up in Crown Heights in pants on purpose so I could distance myself from the clan, but inside the tank I'm starting to feel like I belong, and I wish I were dressed for the part. Vorovich and I swap stories about Israel and chat about the ritual cleaning of one's home for Passover, even though I do not intend to eschew bread products during the holiday. When a man crossing 23rd Street yells at our car, I feel indignant, as if I too am part of the cause. I hop out of my mitzvah tank at Bryant Park, after nearly two hours inside of it. Vorovitch and the rest of the crew are headed elsewhere in Manhattan, where they'll post up on the sidewalk and hand out more Jewish goodies to passersby. Vorovitch asks if I want a box of round matzah and I decline, sprinting off to the F train as the tank drives away. It was nice of him to offer, but I have a lobster roll waiting for me in the office fridge. On Tuesday, in a sunny courtroom overlooking the Manhattan skyline, a federal judge considered how much NYPD spying is too much. Judge Charles Haight of the Southern District of New York is deciding whether to approve an agreement reached between civil rights groups and the NYPD in Handschu v. Special Services Division and Raza v. City of New York. At a time when anti-Muslim sentiment has never been higher, and when the threat of foreign and domestic terrorism continues to be used as justification for increasing levels of surveillance, do the settlement terms represent substantive progress or an empty compromise? Tuesdays fairness hearing allowed members of the public to weigh in on the terms of the agreement. Many spoke in favor of the settlement moving forward as quickly as possible, and noted that it would provide tangible, if limited relief to the citys half-a- million-plus Muslim residents, Black Lives Matter demonstrators, and all activists, protesters, and politically-minded New Yorkers who have found themselves under the NYPDs gaze. The Handschu case has been ongoing for over forty years, and began when civil rights attorneys sued the NYPD to stop its red squads from spying on groups like the Black Panthers. Raza, which focused on the NYPDs discriminatory and unjustified surveillance of New York Muslims, was filed in June 2013. The two lawsuits were eventually combined, and a settlement was announced in January. Under the settlement, the NYPD will be barred from engaging in investigations in which race, religion or ethnicity play a substantial or motivating factor. Investigations will have presumptive time limits and be subject to six-month reviews. Perhaps most significantly, the settlement will also formalize the creation of a Handschu Committee, whose members may attend the monthly meetings in which investigations are presented for opening, extension or closure, although the final decision will be left to the Deputy Commission for Intelligence. In addition to eleven high-level NYPD officials, the Committee will include a civilian representative, who will be empowered to contact the Police Commissioneror in certain cases, the Handschu judgeif she or he believes that investigations are violating the guidelines. Muslim women participate in the 2nd annual New Horizons gathering on June 5, 2011 in Brooklyn (Getty Images) Jethro Eisenstein, one of the original attorneys on the Handschu case, urged the judge to approve the settlement quickly, and invoked Senator Ted Cruzs calls for police to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized. We can have effective law enforcement while providing New Yorkers with protection against unwarranted investigation based on race, faith or ethnicity, said Eisenstein. Hina Shamsi, an ACLU lawyer on the Raza suit, echoed Eisensteins sentiments, stressing that the settlement achieved immediate, concrete and beneficial changes for city residents, and also offered a platform for more necessary reforms. Peter Ferrell, an attorney for the City, offered a few remarks in support of the settlement. Mohammad Elshinawy, one of the plaintiffs in Raza, told the court that he had long suspected the NYPD was spying on him. In 2013, the Associated Press revealed that police had watched Elshinawy for years, even sending an informant to infiltrate his wedding and videotape his guests. I felt like I was living in a house without walls, said Elshinawy. Many community members concurred that the settlement should move forward as quickly as possible. I am overwhelmed by their courage, said Arab American Association Executive Director Linda Sarsour, of the Raza plaintiffs. She said that NYPD spying had not only chilled religious practice in Muslim communities but also but free speech and political organizing. We dont have the luxury to wait anymore, she said. As the day wore on, though, many other speakers expressed concerns about the terms of the settlement and asked Judge Haight extend the comment period. Afaf Nasher, the Board President of New Yorks Council on Islamic Relations, said the settlement could be binding upon future litigation and explained to the judge that an overwhelming fear of the police had hampered efforts to educate Muslim communities about the settlement. People think attendance [at workshops] will make them susceptible to surveillance, Nasher said. Several people raised questions about the limited role of the civilian representative on the Handschu Committee, including Ravi Raghbir of the New Sanctuary Coalition of NYC, who said that that the proposed position had no teeth. Others worried the new guidelines did little to prevent the entrapment of vulnerable Muslims by undercover cops or informants, and pointed to what they said was subjective language that would do little to hamper police misconduct. Cheikh Ahmed Mbareck, the executive director of the Islamic Leadership Council of New York, told Judge Haight that he needed more time to ensure that the diverse and multilingual Muslim communities of the city understood the proposed settlement and its implications, and had the opportunity to share their views. At Tuesdays hearing Judge Haight appeared open to extending the comment period until August, after Ramadan. The Raza lawyers now defend their plaintiffs and their own interests, Ahmed said, turning to Judge Haight. The only one who can defend us now, is you. Aviva Stahl is a Brooklyn-based journalis. Follow her @stahlidarity. The city is stopping $35,000 in taxpayer funding to the Boro Park Shomrim, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish volunteer neighborhood patrol group, after federal agents arrested one of its leaders for allegedly bribing police to issue gun licenses to people who would otherwise have been ineligible. (Handout) The money was set aside for the group last summer by Brooklyn councilmen David Greenfield and Chaim Deutsch, and the mayor's office is holding off on signing for the payments until, a spokeswoman said, City Hall assesses that the Shomrim group is "a responsible vendor." Politico New York reported that the city gave the organization $425,708 from 2010 to 2015, including two $10,000 grants from Mayor Bill de Blasio when he was the neighborhood's councilman. The arrest of Shaya Lichtenstein, listed as the patrol group's treasurer on city forms, came out of an ongoing, wide-ranging FBI investigation into corruption possibly involving NYPD brass, fundraising by de Blasio, and two prominent businessmen, one, Jeremy Reichberg, from Borough Park. The NYPD has a long history of working closely with, and granting favors to, prominent people in the Borough Park Orthodox community, and the Shomrim, founded in the 1990s, works in coordination with the neighborhood's 66th Precinct. In some cases, the group has been reported to take action to avoid police involvement in altercations involving Jews. The Forward reports: Joe Levin, a private security consultant who works within the Orthodox community, told the Forward that the Shomrim have full control of the 66th Precinct. Levin said that when Shomrim respond to an incident in which they have a personal interest, they control the situation. Shomrim leadership has advocated for police to [be] kept in the dark when Orthodox Jews commit domestic violence. In 2012, amid a public debate over police access to new publicly-funded security cameras being posted throughout Boro Park, Shomrim president Jacob Daskal told the Forward that giving police direct access to the cameras could lead to unwanted police interference in domestic violence cases. The camera is very good for the community, but if its a private thing, Daskal told the Forward at the time. If its a public thing it might hurt a person who doesnt want to arrest her husband for domestic violence. In 2010, Shomrim members accosted and beat a man named David Flores, who they accused of public masturbation, and he shot four of them in the ensuing struggle, none fatally. At trial, he was cleared of 15 charges in connection with the shooting, and convicted only of weapon possession, after jurors found that the volunteer patrolmen may not have had cause to stop Flores, and may have been the aggressors. Shomrim officials told reporters that Lichtenstein had dropped out of the group and moved to Rockland County, where he was arrested Monday, but the Forward notes that he was photographed playing with the Shomrim softball team against the 66th Precinct team last August, and seems to have been present at a meeting just last week with the current commanding officer, Captain Kenneth Quick, about Passover. A man who answered the Boro Park Shomrim's hotline number hung up when I identified myself as a reporter. Details are surfacing about the "Live" debacle involving beloved TV personality Kelly Ripa and the surprising news that her Live co-host Michael Strahan is jumping ship to Good Morning America. Ripa called in sick yesterday, and one source explained, "Kelly didnt want to show up to work and mouth off and say something she would have regretted. She is upset and didnt want to take it out on her own staff." Another source told CNN, "She is beyond angry. Beyond." On Tuesday morning, ABC announced that Super Bowl champion Strahan would be moving to GMA full-time, four years after joining Live in a highly-publicized co-host search (which included Pat Kiernan), and two years after joining GMA as a twice-a-week contributor. ABC News president James Goldston praised Strahan for being a "tireless and versatile broadcaster with an incredible ability to connect with people," adding that "he will help us drive forward into a very exciting future." TMZ reports that apparently Disney (which owns ABC) CEO Bob Iger told Strahan not to tell Ripa about the plans. The entire transition has been terribly executed on Disney's behalf. Ripa apparently only found out about Strahan's decision moments before the public announcement, after Live aired on Tuesday, and had previous concerns about this happening. From the NY Times: He began as an on-air correspondent for Good Morning America two years ago, a decision that Ms. Ripa expressed concerns about at the time, according to the person. Ms. Ripa was worried it would distract him from Live but was reassured it would only be a temporary position. Mr. Strahan continued to appear on the morning show, and ABC executives recently decided that bringing him into the Good Morning America lineup could help stem the ratings drop. After Live ended on Tuesday morning, Ms. Ripa was called to a meeting along with the shows longtime producer, Michael Gelman, and the WABC general manager, Dave Davis (the show is produced by WABC, and it is distributed by ABC and Disneys syndication group). She did not know the purpose of the meeting. After a 20-minute wait, Mr. Strahan entered the room and broke the news that he was leaving. It wasnt long before tensions flared. Didnt I tell you this was going to happen? Ms. Ripa said to Mr. Davis at the meeting, according to the person. I told you two years ago this was going to happen. ABC said that Ripa would be out through Tuesday; Friday and Monday were pre-scheduled absences to celebrate her 20th wedding anniversary. A source told the Post, "She didnt show up for work and isnt taking anyones calls." TMZ claims, "We're told Kelly and Michael don't get along. Our sources say she feels he's disrespectful to her and is full of himself. Apparently Michael often rolls with an entourage and it doesn't sit well with her." At the end of yesterday's Ripa-less show, Strahan talked about the switch (which will happen in September) and added, "Kelly, I thank you, I love you." There's also reportedly tension with the GMA team: The Daily Beast reports, "While Strahan is said to be very well liked by the GMA staff and talentand co-hosts Robin Roberts and George Stephanopoulos, and news reader Amy Robach posted tweets warmly welcoming him as a fulltime colleague after Tuesdays announcementthey are reportedly chafing at the notion that Strahan is being publicly positioned as GMAs savior." There's speculation that by adding Strahan, ABC News wants to create a third hour of GMA to go head to head with the Today show; currently Live airs from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. Ripawho appeared with Malcolm Gladwell's "David And Goliath"is reportedly vacationing with family in Turks and Caicos, where hopefully she's channeling her Broad City alter-ego: Culture Salman Rushdie loses eye, use of hand in attack: Agent The British writer Salman Rushdie, who was attacked in the United States in August, lost sight in one of his eyes and paralyzed his hand, as well as other injuries, according to what his agent indicated in a statement released to the media. Scary fox encounter in Canso By Lois Ann Dort GUYSBOROUGH This fox put its front legs down, head down, eyes looking at me and tail up. As soon as I started screaming, it started scurrying and chasing itself, staggering and making weird noises. Thats why I thought it was rabid, Nicole Munroe told The Journal last week, describing the close encounter she had with the animal in Canso on the night of Oct. 8. READ MORE A former Lewis and Clark County sheriff's deputy arrested for pulling a gun on a man he called "an ISIS" while drunk at a party received a deferred sentence Thursday. Phillip Jay Clark was initially charged with two felony counts of assault with a weapon and criminal endangerment on accusations he pointed a gun at a man's chest three times with his finger on the trigger at a bonfire in December. Clark pleaded guilty to two lesser charges of negligent endangerment as part of an agreement. Clark, 49, received an 18-month deferred imposition of sentence for the two charges. Clark, who has since resigned from the sheriff's office, admitted to causing substantial danger by pointing and waiving a loaded firearm at various people while intoxicated during a bonfire outside his home on Dec. 4. "Mixed with the alcohol, the handgun probably wasn't a good idea," Clark told District Judge Kathy Seeley. Seeley went with a compromise between the sentence recommendations of both sides. Ole Olson, assistant state attorney general, asked for a two-year suspended jail sentence with special conditions. "Several innocent lives were put at risk," Olson said. Clark's private attorney, Matt Johnson, recommended a one-year deferred imposition of sentence. Under both sentences, he would be under supervision. With a deferred sentence, the conviction can be removed from his record upon completion. Clark, who has been on house arrest when not in treatment, opted to have his initial appearance, arraignment and sentencing in one hearing. As conditions of his sentence, Clark must relinquish his Public Safety Officer Standards and Training certificate, not possess any firearms, follow treatment recommendations, including six weeks of in-patient treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, and not consume alcohol for the duration of the sentence. Clark, who has been in law enforcement for 24 years, was arrested in January. At the time, he had already started treatment for PTSD partly stemming from military deployment oversees, according to testimony. Clark's rock bottom was being put in an orange jail jumpsuit in front of coworkers and inmates he had arrested, Johnson said. "That was significant punishment for him," Johnson said. "He's here a broken man. He knows he's messed up." At the time of Clark's arrest, Johnson said his client was acting in self defense. The topic was not brought up during Thursday's hearing. The main victim, identified as C.F., is a friend of Clark's neighbor, court documents note. C.F. told the investigator Clark was "super intoxicated" and "excited" when he arrived at the gathering. The documents say C.F. told the investigator Clark hit him in the ribs, then asked the victim to name the capital of Thailand, responded "Bangkok" and hit him in the groin before the man could respond. "C.F. had long hair on his head, facial hair and he is half-Asian," court documents note. Later during the bonfire, Clark reportedly became aggressive toward the man again and called him "an ISIS" while brandishing his gun. C.F. reported a friend telling him to flee. "He said as he ran away he was '100% positive he was gonna start shooting,'" the documents say. During Thursday's hearing, Johnson called Clark's wife, Michelle, to the stand. She spoke of the hardships the arrest and subsequent media coverage has caused her family. Clark was placed on leave when the accusations surfaced and he was later forced to resign from his job as sheriff's deputy, she said. "The impact is that he's lost everything," Michelle Clark said. "It's been a nightmare for my family and myself." Several public events will be held in the Helena area Thursday (today), Friday and Saturday, commemorating the 46th Earth Day and offering celebrators the chance to do everything from cleaning up a local park to learning about renewable energy. EARTH Action EARTH Action will be held at Montana Wild, 2668 Broadwater Avenue, at 11 a.m. This Earth Day event is designed by students to help create community awareness about the environment. Keynote speaker Gov. Steve Bullock will kick off the event. There will be government, community and student designed booths, a trashion fashion show, and food vendors, including Copperline Pastys, Lifehouse Coffee and more. It's a great opportunity to celebrate Earth Day and to make an impact. Moonlight hike Join the Montana Discovery Foundation for a moonlight hike at the Helena Regulating Reservoir Thursday evening at 6 p.m. to look at scenery and migratory birds. Organizers have extra binoculars for participants, and there is no age restriction. Call 495-3718 or find the foundation on Facebook for more information. Spring Meadow Lake beach sweep In the spirit of Earth Day, on Friday from 9:30-11:30 a.m., children are invited to team up to get Spring Meadow Lake a little greener. This event is organized by sixth-grader Jasmine Hinshaw, with the help of her friends and Adventures Unlimited. The event's mission is to help instill community environmental stewardship in local area youth. Aluminum cans, food wrappers, and other litter will be sorted into recyclables and trash. For more information, or to find out how to become involved in the Spring Meadow Lake Beach Sweep, call Jasmine at 465-4562. Family wildflower hunt Join the Montana Discovery Foundation and the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest on Friday for a Family Wildflower Hunt on Mount Helena from 10 a.m. to noon. Organizers will have some activities and crafts and plenty of opportunity to practice wildflower spotting. Come to the main parking area above Reeder's Village with extra points awarded for walking or biking. Call 495-3718 for more information. Montana Wild Earth Day Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks is celebrating springtime and Earth Day by showing two films about young wild animals at Montana Wild on Friday. Catch Me If You Can features Montana young grazers and predators in their natural habitats. Produced by Trailway Films and filmed by Bob Landis and Helenas own Mike Gurnett, these fun, fast-paced movies are perfect for young children. The 30-minute show grazers begins at 1 p.m. and the 30-minute show predators begins at 1:30 p.m. at the Montana Wild Education Center, located at 2668 Broadwater Ave., next to Spring Meadow Lake State Park off Highway 12 West. For more information call 444-9944. Earth Day Expo at Carroll College The Alternative Energy Resources Organization, Montana Department of Environmental Quality, Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation and the Carroll College Environmental Program will host an Earth Day Expo on the Carroll College campus, 1601 N. Benton Ave., Saturday, April 23, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The event will feature a series of community-led workshops indoor and out, along with an expo of organizations and businesses, local food vendors and live music throughout the day, according to Corrie Williamson, outreach director for AERO. This years event will foster community engagement with energy, agriculture, and environment, he said. From state agency programs to entrepreneurs and nonprofits, we see good things happening in Montana for biomass, solar, farming, conservation and other sustainable efforts. The expo will offer valuable resources and information. On May 14, the Montana Republican Party has scheduled a delegate selection convention. With the Montana primary being held on June 7, scheduling the delegate convention before the primary is a mistake. The results of the primary should determine the selection of the delegates. If Donald Trump or Ted Cruz win the most votes in the Montana primary, then the delegate selected should be individuals who support them. If there is a brokered convention, as expected, the second ballot and maybe even the third ballot could determine the winner. By hosting the delegate convention before June 7, no one knows the outcome of the primary. That means that all of the delegates selected early might even be supporters for Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan or Mitt Romney. They could easily vote for one of these three on the second and following ballots and maybe, just maybe, that could be the reason why delegates will be selected on May 14 and ahead of the primary. BILLINGS -- A 13-month-old girl who was abducted from her home in Poplar on Tuesday morning has been found dead. Lee Allmer, Roosevelt County public information officer, said authorities found Kenzley Olson dead in Poplar on Wednesday. One person is in custody in connection with the death and officials from the Roosevelt County Sheriff's Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is in charge of the investigation, are on scene and investigating the girl's death. No further details were available as of 2:30 p.m. The Montana Department of Justice canceled an Amber Alert issued early Wednesday for the girl and referred further questions to the Roosevelt County Sheriff's Office. Authorities ruled out two persons of interest earlier named in the Amber Alert issued for Olson. The Amber Alert issued Wednesday morning said that Kenzley Ava-Leann Olson was taken at about 9 a.m. on Tuesday. The initial alert named a man and woman as persons of interest and said they may be headed to Minot in a silver 2006 Chrysler 300C. The woman and the Chrylser were located in Minot on Wednesday morning before the people were ruled out as suspects. According to the Roosevelt County Sheriff's Office, the Fort Peck Tribal Police and the FBI assisted in the search for Olson. An Amber Alert was issued in Roosevelt County on Feb. 26 when a 4-year-old girl was abducted in Wolf Point. The girl was found alive on Feb. 28. John William Lieba, 20, pleaded not guilty on March 1 to charges of kidnapping, attempted murder and aggravated sexual assault of a minor, during an initial appearance in Fort Peck Tribal Court. Judge Marvin Youpee ordered him held without bail. Federal charges also are anticipated in that case, FBI Special Agent Todd Palmer said. DECATUR The last passenger pigeon is enshrined in the museum at the Leighty-Tabor Science Center. Dennis School students visited Millikin University on Tuesday as part of their study of plants and their life cycles, and part of the tour was a visit to the museum, which houses the final passenger pigeon as well as other taxidermied birds, fish and other creatures. Passenger pigeons became extinct in 1914 when the last one, Martha, died in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo. The third-graders came armed with checklists of things to look for and visited four stations in their tour: the museum, two classrooms where they studied stomata and flowers and beans, and the greenhouse atop the building. We have a variety of different things that they're doing, said Judy Parrish, a professor of botany at Millikin. They'll be dissecting flowers and bean seeds to really look closely at flowers and see the little baby plant within the seed. Many people, not just little children, have no idea how seeds grow or what a seed is. They look closely at the seed and then at the flower. "Next door, they'll be looking at the leaves and the little pores, the stomata, on the leaves and looking at the bottom surface and the top surface and see there are a whole lot more stomata on the bottom surface, because that's shaded and they won't lose as much moisture that way. In the greenhouse, they were introduced to plants' adaptations to different weather conditions, and each child received a tiny cactus and a miniature terrarium. We're going to take these home and take care of them, said Alex Richard, carefully holding his terrarium. You don't have to water them or anything, said Alaina Aufrecht. The miniature terrariums will give the kids a chance to watch something grow from a tiny seedling to a full-size plant, Parrish said. And the cactus, said Brielle Jackson, takes its moisture out of the air. Dennis students, as part of the school's project-based learning focus and the partnership with Millikin for the lab school concept, visit the campus regularly, and Millikin students visit Dennis. The 16 Millikin students who helped out on Tuesday aren't even, for the most part, future teachers, Parrish said. Burcham is majoring in psychology and human services, and Tharp in biology. They just like working with kids. Tuesday may have been a game changer for the Decatur community. The community celebrated the grand opening of National Foodworks Services in the former Brush College School building. The possibilities of the new business were emphasized by the attendance of several local and state officials, Archer Daniels Midland Chairman, President and CEO Juan Luciano and Gov. Bruce Rauner. ADM has been supportive of the start-up from the beginning, investing $2 million for the business to get started. The interest of a corporate giant in a company just getting off the ground is unique. "This is what we believe is one of the large facilities of its kind in the country," Tony Caccomo, managing partner along with Jim Milano, said. "The relationship is unlike any between a Fortune 500 company and a small startup. They had a vision and believe in us." The goal of National Foodworks is to provide space, equipment and expertise to help food-based businesses get started and to expand production to reach larger markets. The opening of the center comes at a time when food production is moving toward smaller, more localized manufacturers. To spur new entrepreneurs, ADM and National Foodworks have launched the Food Innovation Challenge. The challenge welcomes entrepreneurs from Illinois and six surrounding states to build and sell their business idea in the baked good, snack-type bar or condiment category. The winners will receive a total of $100,000 in seed funding and will have access to business and production mentors to help make their company successful. National Foodwoks blends in well with another area initiative, the Midwest Inland Port. Food manufacturers tend to be established in areas where they can easily transport raw materials and finished products. The Inland Port would give Decatur-based companies access to a highway and rail transportation system that cant be replicated, said Ryan McCrady, Economic Development Corporation of Decatur and Macon County president. In addition, companies tend to locate near areas where assistance is readily available and where similar companies are located. National Foodworks could be the impetus for the Decatur area to be one of the worlds leaders in food innovation. The hope for the Decatur area is that companies that receive assistance from National Foodworks and ADM will locate in the immediate area, leading to more jobs in the food industry. That process may take a while, but entrepreneurship and growing new businesses is the key to growing the area economy. The easy access to raw materials, the assistance being offered by National Foodworks and ADM and the transportation system are solid reasons that the strategy should work. Of course, a ribbon cutting is largely symbolic and the real work is ongoing. Success wont happen immediately. But it may well be that a few years from now the community will look back on Tuesday as the beginning of significant change. Armenian Prime Minister Hovik Abrahamyan today hosted Ambassador Argo Avakov, newly appointed to the post of the Head of the OSCE Office in Yerevan. Abrahamyan stressed the positive role that the Office has played in facilitating various reforms in Armenia, singling out the legislative sector, improvement of the business arena, and the defense of human rights. Before joining the OSCE, Ambassador Avakov served as Chief Adviser at the Foreign Policy Directorate of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation since 2008. Between 1998 and 2008 he held several posts within the United Nations Development Programme. His previous diplomatic postings include several senior positions at the Foreign Ministry in the Russian Federation; earlier he served at the embassies in Nepal and Sri Lanka. Ambassador Avakov holds an M.A. in oriental studies from Moscow State University. He speaks Russian, English, Nepali, Hindi and Armenian. Photo (from left): Ambassador Argov, PM Abrahamyan Statement of the NKR State Commission on Prisoners of War, Hostages and Missing Persons On April 20, at 16.00, in accordance with the arrangement reached between the Nagorno Karabakh Republic and Azerbaijan through the mediation of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the office of the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office, the Azerbaijani side handed over the body of a deceased serviceman near Bash-Karvend settlement. It was three days ago that the village of Akori, in Armenias Lori Province, received news that native son Gevorg Gevorgyan had been killed in the recent round of fighting in Artsakh. Gevorg fell to an Azerbaijani sniper round on April 19. The young man started his military service on January 20, 2015. The dead soldiers body was handed over to his family yesterday afternoon. Gevorg is the eighth Akori resident to die over the years in the Artsakh liberation struggle. Akori residents say that Gevorg, one of six children, came from a poor family and that the parents could barely make ends meet. Lieutenant Colonel Sevak Hayrapetyan, Deputy Commander of Gevorgs unit in Artsakh, says that Gevorg was a machine gunner on the frontline. I visited their position four days before Gevorg was killed. He died instantly from a snipers bullet. He was a very fine soldier who received extra vacation time for outstanding service, said Hayrapetyan. The last time Gevorg was home on leave was March 20. They had a young calf and wanted to raise it. They couldnt and were forced to slaughter it. At least, they could pay for Gevorgs return from the base and to feed him for the five days he stayed, said a neighbor. I have six children. Gevorg was the middle one. We live on a stipend of 36,000 AMD (US$75). I turned the TV on in the morning and heard the news by chance, that Gevorg Gevorgyan had been mortally wounded. He liked army life. My Gevorg was an industrious boy and a learner. He really wanted to go and serve. We talked to him by phone on Monday evening. He told me he was alright, said Gevorgs mother Irina Gevorgyan. Garegin, Gevorgs father, had trouble expressing his emotions. As a father, theres much that I wasnt able to do. My mind is tangled now. I cant say. My conscience is killing me because I wasnt able to keep my Gevorg safe and well, said Garegin. Gevorgs younger brother Zhora Gevorgs death has really upset his 15 year-old brothers Zhora. I will definitely do my military service at the very same position where my brother died. I will continue his work, said a tearful Zhora. Gevorg spoke to his younger brother just two days before he was shot and killed. He said that when he got discharged wed go up to our mountains. He dreamt of Mt. Bgavor where we spent our childhood, Zhora said. It was a hard childhood. Gevorg would do odd jobs for others, cutting wood, piling hay, and the like. Hed go to the forest and haul back wood to heat the house. He was a well behaved and respectful boy, said neighbor Radik Tatoyan. Gevorg was attending classes at the Alaverdi vocational school. He loved to sculpt. His father took him out of the school in order to help him out. I told him to keep the boy in the school. He has talent I said. He took him out anyway, said Varouzhan Simonyan, a Akori native who serves as director of the Alaverdi Vocational School. Gevorgs parents He was small in stature with bright eyes. His soul was deep and was always ready to help others. I amazed that the boy was able to fight like he did. We never took any notice of him in class. We should have. His friends always did, said Silva Simonyan, Gevorgs teacher from grades 5-10. The teacher said that there are currently 33 soldiers from Akori in Artsakh. Three of them were in Jabrayil with Gevorg. We have soldiers in Talish and Mataghis as well. What I want to say is that the village has been in spiritual turmoil ever since April 1. Today, in Akori, Gevorg Gevorgyan will be laid to rest. The young soldier will take with him the childhood he never had and his yearning for his native Mt. Bgavor. By Katherine Berjikian While I was growing up in the United States, I rarely heard about Nagorno-Karabakh. I knew that there was land near Armenia that was called Nagorno-Karabakh, and that there was an ongoing conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, but this conflict did not play a central role in my life or how I saw the world. While both of my parents are Armenian, neither of them spent much time in Armenia. They were born in Syria and Lebanon, and their war was the Lebanese Civil War not Nagorno-Karabakh. I mention this not because I see Nagorno-Karabakh as an irrelevant issue for Armenians in the diaspora, but to point out that as a diasporic Armenian my relationship with Nagorno-Karabakh and what it means to be Armenian is going to be different from Armenians that have grown up in the Armenian state. And while Ive lived and worked in Armenia, I noticed that this is true for many diasporic Armenians from all around the world. I am currently part of a program called Tebi Hayk, or Birthright Armenia. This is a program that houses diasporic Armenians in Armenia for a period of time from fourteen weeks to one year, and in return the participants agree to volunteer and work in Armenia. For this article I asked three of my fellow volunteers how they felt about Nagorno-Karabakh. And I found their opinions vary dramatically, regardless of the fact that they are all ethnically Armenian. The following are summaries of the conversations I had with them about Nagorno-Karabakh. Mher Apo Boghigian Mher is twenty-two years old, and had been in the Birthright program for a couple months when I recently interviewed him. Mher is one of the rare volunteers who has been exposed to the Armenian community for the majority of his life, and has spent part of his childhood in Armenia. Mher was also raised in the Los Angeles, which has the largest Armenian community in the United States. And while the statistics vary, the numbers range from two hundred fifty thousand Armenians to half a million. Because of the large number of Armenians in Los Angeles, there is an already established infrastructure for the Armenians currently living there. This includes many community centers and schools readably accessible to the Armenian youth. Unlike myself, Mher knew about Nagorno-Karabakh from his early childhood. When I asked to describe how the conflict is discussed in the United States he stated: The general understanding is thatwe know that we have border conflicts, we know that there is technically a ceasefire. And Im talking on behalf of other Armenians there. At least some informed ones. We know that it is technically not a war, but we are killing each other...I dont know what the mentality is. Its not a full on war mentality, obviously, its not an official war, its like an unofficial war. Like many other Armenians his age, Mher went to Armenian school for most of his life, and was an active participant of the Armenian Youth Federation. The AYF is the youth faction of the ARF - the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. It is a large part of Armenian youth life in the United States. They regularly host after school activities, events, and protests about issues effecting the Armenian community and the larger Middle Eastern community. In AYF, there is a focus on Armenian nationalism, and political education. During AYF meetings members sing the Armenian national anthem and have educational talks. Many of these events, both educational and social, are meant to bring the Armenian community together and educate them. In his late teens, Mher was corresponding sectary for the AYF Burbank chapter. And when he went to UC Berkeley, an area with a far smaller Armenian community, he joined his schools Armenian Student Association. Because of the large number of Armenian in LA, the Armenians have also historically been a very active political presence. For example, every year on April 24th there is a protest in front of the Turkish consulate, and recently, AYF has to work with Palestinian soldiery groups in the United States. Therefore, it is not shocking that the Armenian community in the United States rallied around Nagorno-Karabakh in the hopes of spreading awareness in the US. During the four day war, there were protest in front of the Azerbaijani consultant, a flash mob protest at the Americana in Glendale, a large open air mall, and far more on college campuses throughout California. When we talked about this, Mher stated the following, In my opinion, the only thing a diasporic can do who is living here is to keep contact with others in the United States and just try to battle the misinformation. Becausethis isnt just a war on the ground, this is a war in the media. In UC Berkley, the college that Mher attended, the Armenian Student Association made a GOFUNDME page that raised seven thousand dollars for the troops in Nagorno-Karabakh. When asked about how he felt as a diasporan in Armenia during the escalation of violence, he stated the following: I cant help and feel like Im close to a tourist here. I cant help and feel that way. Im part of Birthright Armenia, Im part of a group that is paying for my trip to come here. Allowing me to work wherever I want based on my interestsAnd ultimately Im just living here without the fear that if a war happens Im going to get drafted. There is a huge divide there and there is nothing I can do about that. Im just not a citizen. Of course I can voluntarily go and fight, but thats not something that Im going to do personally. Izabel Sarkissian Izabel is a Kuwaiti Armenian with both Syrian and Armenian citizenship. She, like the other two people I interviewed, went to Armenian school growing up. While I did not know much about the Armenian community in Kuwait before interviewing her, she informed me of the large number of Armenians currently living there; around 3,000 Armenian families. Most of them are originally from Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, and are new arrivals to the country. Growing up, Izabel and the Armenian community in Kuwait felt a great connection to the Armenian state. And like other diasporic communities around the world, they donated money and goods throughout the years to Armenia. While in school, Izabel also took both Armenian history and language classes. While we talked, she stated that in her Armenian history classes she learned the names of the Armenian political parties, about Nagorno-Karabakh, and the names of the soldiers who died during the war in the 90s. While she cannot remember the first time she heard about Nagorno-Karabakh, she figured that is probably from watching the Armenian TV channel in Kuwait or Armenian news, which her family regularly watched. Izabel is currently a student at the National University of Architecture and Construction in Armenia . In the American University, many of Izabellas classmates are currently serving in the Armenian military or have just finished their service. In Armenia, boys go to the Armenia military for a period of two years from the age of 18 to twenty. While I spoke with her, she stated that one of her worries is that if there is a war they are going to call everyone to go and fight. And in fact, this has already happened. While we spoke, she talked about the tragic loss of two of her classmates. And now we heard one of my classmates, who is in military service, was attacked by Azerbaijani troops. I dont know how many Armenian soldiers died, but twenty five of them were kidnapped. And he was one of themWe still dont know what happened to them. But today they said that they beheaded the kidnapped soldiers. But we are not sure if the guy that I know is one of them or not. And just today, we heard that one of the university students had just died, and we went to university and we saw his picture at the entrance, with the flowers and the candles on the table. And the girls who were his classmates, they were crying in the library. They were just sitting there, talking and crying. While we spoke, she stated that everyone was worried about the possibility of war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. And she spends a lot of her time with her classmates discussing this possibility. Another worry she has discussed with her classmates is the possibility of this being a yearly thing. If this stops now, they think, and me too, that this is going to happen every year. That they are going to shot, soldiers are going to die, and then they are going to talk, and everything is going to be fine after that. Like, if this stops now, and nothing happens, this will happen every year. And now they took some land from Karabakh which they didnt return. So we think that if we didnt command them to return it, and we leave that land to them, they are going to attack us every year. And meter by meter they are going to take all of Karabakh. Like the other people I interviewed, I asked Izabel what she thought the diasporic Armenians role is when it comes to the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. She responded: I can only say about Syrian and Kuwaiti Armenians. I cant talk about Armenians in other countries like America. But we are close to our Armenian community, and our country, and we are not going to allow Azerbaijan to attack it and take our lands. So they will come and fight. Im sure about that. Kyle Khandikian Kyle is 23 years old, and American. Like Mher, Kyle grew up in the Armenian community in Los Angeles. He also went to private Armenian school from kindergarten to his senior year in high school. When I was speaking to him, he made a point to acknowledge that growing up he felt very close to the Armenian community in Los Angeles. He stated That was my educational environment, that was my social environment that was my entire life before college, was that communityI always felt very Armenian. I put it in quotes, because being Armenian is lots of different things for lots of different people. But for me personally, my Armenian identity has always been a very important part of identity, as a human being. While we spoke, Kyle stated that this was in large part to the education that he received in his Armenian school. In Los Angles, many of the private Armenian schools are connected to the ARF, the Armenian Revolution Federation. And because of this, the schools are very nationalistic. Even his family, before immigrating to the United States, was part of the ARF in Lebanon. Growing up in the Armenian community in the United States, images of the genocide are everywhere. And activism that attempts to recognize the genocide is a central part of many young Armenians lives. For example, many University of California campuses have recently divested from Turkey. This was a campaign that was in large part pushed and fought for by the UCs Armenian Students Associations. There are no similar mass movements in regard to Nagorno-Karabakh. Kyle elaborated on this when I talked to him. He stated, I dont remember the first time I heard it, but it was always sort of framed as being a part of this bigger conflict, this bigger clash between nations. And those nations being the Armenian nation and the Turkish nation. I feel that growing up in the Armenian diaspora the Armenian genocide and denial of the genocide, and justice for the genocide, as an issue, as a political issue, and also as an issue in terms of identity for people who are descendants of survivors of the Genocide, that issue overshadowed the Karabakh issue for sure...At least in my experience, and what I have seen as a diasporic Armenian, Karabakh is kind of an afterthought. Like Mher, Kyle also saw a divide between himself and the Armenians with Armenian citizenship. He stated, I certainly stand in solidarity with the people of Karabakh and the people of Hayastan who I do feel like really are my compatriots. But there certainly is a power imbalance of privilege when it comes to this issue. And being conscious of my privilege as an American citizen in this country has been very important. In the way that I express myself. Because the last thing that I want to do is contribute to this cycle of hatred and nationalism and othering of people. While I spoke to Kyle, nationalism and the role it played in the current conflict was a major theme we discussed. He stated that he thought this was one of the most important things a diasporic person could change in the way that they talk about the conflict that might positively change things. He stated, We are teaching them that the Turks killed a million and a half of us a hundred years ago, they did the same thing in BakuAnd so, its nationalism. Its othering. Thats not a solution to this problem. In fact, it only contributes more to this problem and makes it worse. Because you are just fanning the flames of nationalistic hatred. And so, what I would like to see, and I would like too hopefully one day do, is really change that. And really empower students to begin to think outside of the limits of nationalism. Outside of the limits of what it means to be an Armenian and how to express solidarity. Not just with Armenia, but with people in Azerbaijan who want peace. The people who dont like this ultra-nationalistic rhetoric and this constant hatred and othering of these people. Because thats ultimately how this conflict is going to end. (Katherine Berjikian is a Birthright Armenia volunteer from the U.S. now working at Hetq) Share your opinion on this topic by sending a letter to the editor to tctvoice@madison.com. Include your full name, hometown and phone number. Your name and town will be published. The phone number is for verification purposes only. Please keep your letter to 250 words or less. Chris Rickert | Wisconsin State Journal Urban affairs, investigations, consumer help ("SOS") Follow Chris Rickert | Wisconsin State Journal Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today Professors and other academics are sometimes derided as living in an ivory tower, but Ive always found the vast majority of them to be smart, helpful and grounded. The response to the arrest last week of a 21-year-old UW-Madison student, however, suggests the ground some of them are standing on is located on a different planet. On the same day Denzel McDonald was arrested for allegedly tagging campus buildings with Racizm in the air. Dont breathe, The devil is a white man and similar sentiments causing an estimated $4,000 in damage faculty and staff members started signing a statement that rationalizes the graffiti, and criticizes the deplorable actions by campus police while suggesting they acted with bias. The way UWPD officers entered my class was very aggressive with bulletproof vests and guns visible, McDonalds professor, Johanna Almiron, is quoted as saying. I cannot believe they humiliated and terrified my students. If the mere presence of an officer wearing a (holstered) gun and a bulletproof vest is aggressive, then the single officer who entered the classroom was an aggressor. But I sure didnt see much sign of humiliation or terror during the 30 seconds the officer was in the classroom, based on the police body-mounted camera recording of the incident. The vast majority of the 14-minute interaction between student and cop, ending in the students handcuffing and arrest, takes place outside the classroom or outside the classrooms building. About the worst thing you can say about the officers decidedly deferential behavior is that he continually refers to McDonald as man like they were old buddies or something. Statement signer and Afro-American Studies department chairman Craig Werner said the media have framed McDonalds arrest in a way that ignores the fundamental question of whether its legitimate to go to a classroom to arrest a student. The officer should never have entered, he said. True enough, that decision violated department practice, UW Police Chief Sue Riseling has said. But other attempts to contact McDonald in person or by phone were not successful, and the officer went in thinking the class had not yet started. Speaking of fundamentals, Werner also said that the fundamental issue here is not graffiti, but the much larger and deeper patterns contributing to racial tension on campus. The statement he and some 800 other faculty and staff signed says the graffiti in question directly confronts the racism faced by students like (McDonald) on campus. It seems reasonable enough for police to wait until class is over to arrest a suspect who isnt otherwise causing a problem. But if youre going to suggest the hearing of constitutionally protected political speech is more important than the cops interest in enforcing well-established and legal limits on how that speech can be expressed like in spray paint, on state property then you cant really discriminate based on the content of the speech. Maybe the next cop attempting to ambush a classroom will be there to arrest someone for spray-painting the devil is a black man on Bascom Hall. Madison police were looking for a gunman who fired from his vehicle Thursday and hit a man in another vehicle on the citys South Side. Police spokesman Joel DeSpain said the victim a Madison man in his 20s was hit in the leg by one round just after 1 p.m. in the 1000 block of Ann Street. He was taken to a hospital for treatment. Officers recovered several shell casings at the scene, DeSpain said, and the vehicle that was hit also was found with several bullet holes in it. Police believe the victim was specifically targeted by the shooter. There was no evidence to connect Thursdays shooting with a fatal shooting Tuesday in front of OGradys Irish Pub on Mineral Point Road, police said. Martez Moore, 30, of Madison was killed in that shooting on the citys Far West Side. Police described the gunman in Thursdays non-fatal shooting as a black man with dreadlocks who at the time of the incident was wearing a white T-shirt and driving a newer, maroon Chevrolet with a gold emblem on the back. The gunfire Thursday occurred in front of an apartment building next door to United Rentals at 1018 Ann St. Coming from Marshfield, a small town in the middle of Wisconsin, Forrest Woolworth intended to move to the East Coast for college. But after considering his intended major, computer engineering, he opted for UW-Madison. As graduation approached, Woolworth felt a pull from the burgeoning tech centers on the West Coast. But again, he chose Madison. In 2008, Woolworth and a handful of college friends established their own mobile gaming company, PerBlue, anchoring him in Madisons growing entrepreneurial community. I thought, when in our lives were we going to have a team of people like that together again and an opportunity to do something like this, said Woolworth, 30. PerBlue has gone from a startup run out of a college apartment to a business with more than 30 full-time employees that has produced mobile games played by millions of people worldwide. Woolworth, PerBlues chief operating officer, is also co-founder of Capital Entrepreneurs, which he describes as the social fabric that ties the Madison entrepreneurial community together. Why have you personally stuck with this idea (PerBlue) that started in college? Its been a crazy adventure throughout the whole time, from the early bootstrapping days of PerBlue to where we are now. Were a very different company. Weve grown a ton as individuals, as a company and as a team. Its been awesome to stick with it, especially with our industry. Mobile gaming is a rapidly growing industry. We started PerBlue in 2008 and mobile gaming pretty much didnt exist and now its about a $30 billion global industry. So its a constantly growing, constantly changing space to be in and its made sticking with PerBlue very exciting and always giving us new challenges and new things to figure out. Does PerBlue still feel like a startup then? Yes, were definitely in this weird position where were a real company but were also a startup ... we definitely try to act like a startup in how were very nimble, always adapting, always changing. We cant get set in our ways. At the same time, we have a team of 30 full-time people here thats growing. You know we have to support them so the real business challenge is we have to make revenue. Whats a Madison thing that you do? I like craft beer. I also home brew a little bit, and I enjoy drinking beer at any one of the breweries in town. I also like cheese. I guess in that sense Im very textbook Wisconsin. What else do you do for fun? I have a 5-month-old baby boy named Leo, so hes been the new adventure. Its been awesome to have him join us and then kind of learning the whole new world of fatherhood. ... I have this little human being that Im responsible for. Its a lot of work, but its super gratifying and its the best thing in the world. Was there a shift in your perspective on Madison from college to young professional? Its just a shift of borders. When youre a college student, the borders of the university are the borders of your world. A perfect analogy is State Street. How you treat State Street changes from when youre a student to a non-student. Most people gradually move up State Street to the Capitol Square. You go from Churchkeys and rail drinks to bacon night at Wandos, to craft cocktails and beers to small plate tapas at some place on the Square. What does serving as the co-founder of Capital Entrepreneurs entail? It ultimately comes down to facilitating social connections, whether thats at our monthly meetings or at bigger events. (On the campus level) were trying to get students to look beyond the borders of the campus, literally and figuratively. Especially when it comes to the entrepreneurial community, resources like Capital Entrepreneurs, Gener8tor and 100State want to be involved and support the entrepreneurship on campus to help bridge those ties and leverage resources back and forth. We want students to know that if they want to start their own company, they can do that in Madison. They dont have to go to the Bay area. Isnt helping other companies hurting your own? Technically, thats true. But I like to use the pie analogy. The more established we make the tech ecosystem in Madison and the bigger we make the pie, the better for everyone. Interview by Cadence Bambenek The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has many functions, but one of the more dangerous is fighting wildfires. The public will now be able to keep track in real time where the DNR and local fire departments are fighting wildfires, thanks to the new web page Live Status Wildfire Occurrence. The site tracks every fire that occurs on DNR land, and shows location of the fire, a preliminary cause, how many acres burned and any structures threatened or lost. The site will be constantly updated as resources are dispatched to the fire, with updates continuing until the fire is out. This week is Wildfire Prevention Week in Wisconsin, a way for the DNR to remind the state how fast outdoor conditions can change and with change, how fast the danger of wildfires can increase. "The focus is on fire weather awareness," said Catherine Koele, DNR wildfire prevention specialist. "Weather has a direct correlation to fire occurrence." Wisconsin gets about 4,000 wildfires a year, mostly from March through May. Wisconsin wildfires are much different than the huge fires we see on TV out West. Most of the fires here are small, maybe one or two acres, and a big reason for that is the rapid response of local agencies and the DNR. Koele said the average response time to a wildfire is less than 15 minutes when the DNR and local departments are both involved. The DNR's goal is to get to a fire in less than 30 minutes from when it's first reported. So far in the spring of 2016, 231 fires were reported in the state, burning 240 acres. The top cause of wildfires in Wisconsin is burning debris, which is why counties require burn permits that include rules on what to do and not do if burning outdoors. A wildfire caused by burning debris can be costly to the debris burner, because the person found responsible for starting a wildfire is liable for all firefighting costs and potentially any damages. With the recent legalization of same-sex marriage, we might be inclined to think the fight for equal rights for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community is over. But we are far from having equal rights for everyone in Wisconsin. One group in particular is often left out of these basic human rights. While Wisconsin bans discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment, housing, education and all public accommodations, there are currently no state laws against discrimination based on gender identity. While certain counties and cities in Wisconsin ban this type of discrimination, residents of Wisconsin not living in these areas have no protection. These people can legally be turned down for a job or a home based solely on their gender identity. They may be discriminated against doing something as simple as using a public bathroom. Why in 2016 are we not protecting the basic human rights of all of our citizens and not just those who fit comfortably into our gender stereotypes? We must all fight so everyone in Wisconsin has equal rights. -- Emma Phillips, Edgerton America's Future Foundation held an intimate briefing with a leading Supreme Court expert, Ilya Shapiro , Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies, Cato Institute and Editor, Cato Supreme Court Review, on Monday, April 18, 2016, at the University Club of Chicago. The AFF chapter in Chicago, and those in more than 20 cities around the country, are a safe haven for free-market young professionals to network, discuss ideas, and learn the skills they need to become effective lifelong advocated for free markets, limited government, and personal responsibility. Roger Custer, executive director of America's Future Foundation, spoke of the common purpose AFF has with the Illinois Policy Institute in its defense of those who made our nation great. An on-going effort is being made to establish 50 chapters in cities across the nation by 2018 to promote personal responsibility, free market, and limited government, with a goal is to bring down to a personal level those principles embraced by AFT as a way to inspire millenniums. Mr. Ilya Shapiro, upon being introduced by Roger Custer, discussed the future of the court after the passing of Justice Scalia, in remarks based upon his topic of the night: A New Direction for the Supreme Court? Shapiro's thoughts about Antonin Scalia Scalia joined the Supreme Court in 1986 and proceeded to revolutionize what it meant to be a legal theorist, thus changing the way the justices approached their craft. As an originalist, Scalia based his decisions on what the words meant in the Constitution when ratified. Before Scalia Constitutional texts were often used when the history wasn't clear. District of Columbia v. Heller was cited by Shapiro as an example of Scalia's interpretation of the law according to the dictates of the Constitution. Judge Scalia delivered the opinion of the Court in considering whether a District of Columbia prohibition on the possession of usable handguns in the home violates the Second Amendment to the Constitution. What does the passing of Scalia portend for the Supreme Court? Now that the Court is split ideologically, so many important issues will be decided by the judge who replaces Scalia. Mr. Shapiro is of the opinion that it wouldn't matter if a so-called moderate like Garfield were confirmed, or a more liberal judge candidate. Shapiro applauds the Republican decision of "NO HEARING; NO VOTE", and for keeping a stiff spine so far, not only because the seat to be filled is a pivotal one and the replacement would not be sitting to hear arguments until fall, but also because it is only fair for the public to have one more cycle to figure out the direction of this country in light of the partisan political atmosphere that prevails in the Supreme Court. Regarding the recently argued immigration bill (4/18/2016), a 4 - 4 split decision would be seen as a victory for the challenger. Stressed was that most law happens in the lower courts. Only a fraction of cases advance to the Supreme Court. Shapiro reflected that if Hillary wins in November she'll probably stick with Merritt Garland and that he will be confirmed in early January. A word of caution: These three judges are up in years and the next president might have the opportunity to appoint three new judges: Ruth Bader Ginsburg (83); Stephen G. Breyer (78); and Anthony M. Kennedy (78). Mr Shapiro described Judicial Activism as used on both the right and the left, as an "empty term." It is used today, because so often in he 60's and 70's Constitutional restraint was practiced and thought acceptable. Instead of striking down a law it was deemed preferable "to sit on ones hands." Thoughts about Chief Justice John Roberts Ilya Shapiro denied that Justice Roberts was confused when voicing his opinions. Other than the two Obamacre cases, Shapiro stated that "Republicans don't have much beef against him." Shaprio was then asked why he though Roberts ruled as he did? In the Obamacare ruling of 2012, Obamacare was upheld when Justice Roberts was able to label the individual Obamacare mandate as a tax, even though it wasn't called a tax by President Obama. The laws challengers had rejected the characterization of the law as a tax, noting the mandate as a penalty. Scalia lashed out at Chief Justice John Roberts for his key vote to save a provision of the Affordable Care Act that allowed the federal government to provide healthcare subsidies to Americans in 34 states that did not set up their own healthcare exchanges. The law should have been considered unconstitutional since tax bills must originate in the House. The House did file a brief, but nothing came of it, and the decision was left standing. This article suggests it was Robert's concern over his legacy as Chief Justice as reason why he literally created the tax issue out of thin air so he could side with the Obama administration. Closing thought: Those present agreed that the system of checks and balances has been shattered by the regulatory state; however, progressives aren't concerned about government control; they relish it. Some in the room did take exception to a few derogatory comments Ilya Shapiro made about Republican candidate Donald Trump. Before Shapiro's comments, John Tillman, one of sponsors of the event and CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute, spoke positively about Illinois' future. The Illinois Policy Institute, which he heads, is striving to turn a blue state into red; it is now purple. Two reasons why optimism should prevail: 1) Speaker Mike Madigan doesn't run the show, there is competition at the state level reflected by a .2 difference in the number of Democrats casting ballots as compared to Republican voters. 2) The Democrat agenda reflects a dangerous game with their group identity pitch to black, single women, and millenniums. In order to attract all groups catered to by Democrats, most importantly millenniums, the pro-freedom argument must be made. Also present as a member of the Host Committee was Robert E. Russell, Jr, who was a member of the Senior Management of The Heritage Foundation, serving as Counselor when Edwin Feulner, Ph.D served as President of The Heritage Foundation. A post-reception followed Shapiro's presentation, as a continuation of the reception that preceded the event. SPRINGFIELD - After a lengthy debate over an array of issues concerning the beginning of life, contraception, abortifacients and whether employers should be required to provide insurance coverage for all forms of prescription contraceptives, the Illinois House voted to pass HB 5576 with a 61 to 52 Thursday morning. The sponsor and supporters pointed to the insensitivity of "white men" who opposed the legislation in House committee testimony because of the costs HB 5576 would add to employers' health care requirements. Both the state's Chamber of Commerce and several insurance companies opposed the legislation. "Insult to injury came along when a panel of white men came along, saying how important it is to manage the costs of being inside my uterus," said openly-gay State Rep. Kelly Cassidy (D-Chicago.) "It was jarring, quite frankly, that we are here in 2016, and I am still being told by a panel of white men what belongs in my body." For too long our politicians have ignored the people and simply done whatever benefited them and the special interests who support them. This has to come to an end, McConchie said. BARRINGTON - With the unanimous support of GOP county and township chairman in the 26th District, attorney Dan McConchie was sworn in Wednesday night to succeed state Senator Dan Duffy. He will begin serving his district Thursday. We arent lacking good ideas to solve what ails us. What we are lacking is the political will to do what is right. Its time to stop the cronyism and self-dealing that has characterized our state for decades. I will work every day to do that. I am excited to drive down to Springfield first thing tomorrow morning to join those other reform-minded legislators who are actively working to return power back to the people and get our state on the right track again. McConchie won a heavily-contested three-way primary last month. As of now, he has no opponent in the general election. Illinois 26th Senate District is in the northwest Chicago suburbs and includes all or part of Algonquin, Barrington, Carpentersville, Cary, Crystal Lake, Deer Park, Fox River Grove, Green Oaks, Hawthorn Woods, Hoffman Estates, Island Lake, Kildeer, Lake in the Hills, Lake Zurich, Libertyville, Long Grove, Mundelein, Oakwood Hills and Vernon Hills. That's the theme of a piece written by Steven Woodworth, a history professor at Texas Christian Univeristy that has drawn a lot of attention. While Woodruff is not a fan of Donald Trump and voices frustration with the populist demands Trump's supporters are attempting to thrust upon the system, he makes points that are being overlooked by many: Whats the difference between a republic and a democracy? Lets look at what the Founders had to say about that. Madison, again in Federalist 10, described democracies as governments in which the people rule directly. By contrast, as John Adams wrote in 1775 in Novanglus Essay Number 7, a republic is a government of laws and not of men. So the Founders established a system of government in which the people would rule indirectly through representatives, and the whole government would be hemmed in by a fundamental lawthe Constitutionthat would protect individuals and minorities from infringement of their rights, and would also protect the majority itself from the consequences of passing fits of public foolishness. Thus bills were to be passed by a House of Representatives, elected by the people, and by a Senate, elected by the state legislatures, which were in turn were elected by the people, and before those bills could become law, they were to be signed by a president, elected by electors, who were elected by whatever system each individual state set up. The Founders were skeptical, to say the least, that the common people would know what was best to be done, but they believed the people would know how to choose wise men from among their numbers who would know what to do at the next level. It was to be government of, by, and for the peoplethrough representativeswithin the limits of the Constitution. Why does it matter what these men thought in the 1770s and 1780s? There are many good reasons why it matters, but Ill just mention here that their system has worked better than any other frame of government devised by man before or since. How many countries now enjoying freedom and self-government have done so with a constitution older than that of the United States? Depending on how you define some of those terms, the answer would be very few or none, and none of them have enjoyed as much freedom as the United States. And what has this got to do with the way Colorado or any other state chooses delegates to the Republican convention? Political parties did not exist at the time of the founding, but the systems for choosing delegates and nominating candidates are very much patterned after the thought of the Founders. Each state chooses its own system. In some, delegates are awarded proportionally on the basis of the voters candidate preferences in a primary election. In others, the majority winner in such an election gets all the states delegates. In other still, such as Pennsylvania, voters cast their ballots for individual delegates, who may or may not vote for a given candidate. In states like Colorado, citizens meet in caucuses and elect delegates to district conventions. The district conventions choose some of the states delegates to the national convention and also choose delegates to a state convention, which in turn chooses the rest of the states delegates to the national convention. Yojiro Takita. [Photo/Mtime] Oscar-winning Japanese director Yojiro Takita is working on his first Chinese-language film with China's Magilm Pictures, the company announced on Wednesday. Wen Yan, which literally means "smell vapor," is scheduled to start shooting this year. It revolves around the relationship between a son and his father in their family bakery, according to Takita, whose 2008 drama Departures won Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. Magilm Pictures made the announcement with the director in town for the Beijing International Film Festival. Related: Ladies and gents, and those who have yet to make up their minds... By Mary Young Oct 20, 2022 However, in tests with safety pack the global model of the Japanese firm received a four-star rating. As per Euro NCAP, which has created the five-star safety rating system to help consumers, three star rating means "average to good occupant protection but lacking crash avoidance technology". By India Today Web Desk: Japanese auto major Suzuki's premium hatchback Baleno , which is manufactured only in India by Maruti Suzuki , has received a three-star rating in crash tests with standard equipment by automobile safety agency Euro NCAP. However, in tests with safety pack the global model of the Japanese firm received a four-star rating. ALSO READ: Maruti Suzuki Baleno crosses one lakh bookings since launch advertisement As per Euro NCAP, which has created the five-star safety rating system to help consumers, three star rating means "average to good occupant protection but lacking crash avoidance technology". As per the report compiled by the Euro NCAP, the passenger compartment of Baleno remained stable in the frontal offset test. Dummy readings indicated good protection of the knees and femurs of both the driver and passenger, it noted. ALSO READ: Spec Comparison: Maruti Suzuki Vitara Brezza vs Maruti Suzuki Baleno "In the full-width rigid barrier impact, protection of the driver was rated as good except for the chest, protection of which was adequate," it added. Dummy readings of chest compression indicated marginal protection for this part of the body but good or adequate protection elsewhere, it said. In the side barrier test, dummy numbers showed good protection but the score for the head was penalised as the side curtain airbag was deemed not to have deployed in the correct manner in the side pole test, Euro NCAP said. ALSO READ: Vitara Brezza vs NuvoSport vs Baleno vs Creta "In the more severe side pole impact, dummy readings of lateral rib compression indicated weak chest protection and the head protection was downgraded to adequate as a result of the incorrect airbag deployment," it noted. The front seats and head restraints demonstrated good protection against whiplash in the event of a rear-end collision. A geometric assessment of the rear seats also indicated good protection. However, the optional 'Radar Brake Support' was not included in this assessment, Euro NCAP said. ALSO READ: Maruti Suzuki Baleno continues to impress The agency gave a four-star rating to the Baleno fitted with safety pack of radar brake support. As per Euro NCAP, a vehicle with four star rating offers overall good performance in crash protection and additional crash avoidance technology may be present. While refusing to comment on NCAP findings, a company spokesperson said: "In recent months Maruti Suzuki has systematically introduced enhanced safety equipment comprising dual airbags and ABS with EBD as standard in certain models, and as option across all variants of most models. Alto comes with a driver airbag option in all variants". advertisement Last month, Suzuki Motor Corporation (SMC) had launched the Baleno in the Japanese market. It is for the first time that Maruti Suzuki India-made model is being exported to Japan where SMC is based. ALSO READ: Maruti Suzuki Baleno vs Honda Jazz vs Hyundai i20 vs Volkswagen PoloGT Diesel Maruti had launched Baleno in domestic market last year. The premium hatch is being manufactured at the company's Manesar plant. --- ENDS --- The new Koleos is designed and engineered with global appeal to play a part in boosting Renault's international growth. The new Koleos also delivers all-terrain ability while ensuring excellent ride and handling and stability. By India Today Web Desk: Renault rounds off its high-end range with a brand new D-segment SUV, the new Koleos. The new model will play a key role in Renault's product offensive that has seen a record-breaking year with the introduction of 10 new vehicles across the world. ALSO READ: 2014 Renault Duster vs 2016 Renault Duster The new Koleos is designed and engineered with global appeal to play a part in boosting Renault's international growth, including China where Renault opened a plant in Wuhan earlier this year. advertisement Renault Chairman and CEO Carlos Ghosn will reveal the new Koleos at the Beijing International Automotive Exhibition on April 25, 2016. ALSO READ: India-bound Renault Kaptur unveiled, launch in 2017 The new Renault Koleos: SUV capability and comfort combined with dynamic French style The new Koleos delivers a blend of robust SUV design cues together with the refinement and features associated with large saloon cars. ALSO READ: Renault considering Kwid based mini SUV to rival Maruti Suzuki Alto K10 The new Koleos boasts a powerful stance that sets it apart from its D-segment SUV rivals and provides a refined, comfortable interior that boasts record room for passengers. The new Koleos also delivers all-terrain ability while ensuring excellent ride and handling and stability. --- ENDS --- The Gothenburg-based company said it would reach the goal by making at least two hybrid versions of each model, while releasing its first all-electric car in 2019. China's Geely bought Volvo Cars from Ford Motor Co. in 2010. By Reuters: Chinese-owned car maker Volvo Car Group has set a target to sell a total of one million electrified cars by the year 2025, it said on Thursday. ALSO READ: Volvo boss says hybrid cars will compete on cost with diesel The Gothenburg-based company said it would reach the goal by making at least two hybrid versions of each model, while releasing its first all-electric car in 2019. advertisement "It is a deliberately ambitious target," Chief Executive Hakan Samuelsson said in a statement. ALSO READ: Netherlands looking to shift to electric cars by 2025 China, which became Volvo's biggest market last year, expects electric cars sales to more than double this year, the country's industry minister said last month. China's Geely bought Volvo Cars from Ford Motor Co. in 2010. ALSO READ: Volkswagen asked to make electric cars by US authorities --- ENDS --- On the occasion of the 10th Civil Services Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed various bureaucrats from Centre and State at an event organised in New Delhi. By India Today Web Desk, Press Trust of India: On the occasion of the 10th Civil Services Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed various bureaucrats from the Centre and State at an event organised in New Delhi. What did Modi say at the event? The PM praised the civil servants for successfully implementing all the key projects proposed by the government in recent times Also, the PM gave directions to civil servants to work together in a team and not individually in order to work for the welfare of the people Apart from honoring the works of civil servants of the country, Modi said that they should start focusing on experimenting on new changes besides recruiting more people for greater results Modi also released two books, 'Transforming India' and ' Change Makers' during the event. advertisement 'Experiment to bring in change' Modi said, "When time further changed, you (civil servants) must have thought of acquiring managerial skills. Time is changing." Further, he said, "We need to bring in changes. When we sit at one place we forget to experiment. If we do not experiment then how do we bring changes. There is no experiment without risk." And if we don't experiment, then it becomes merely a job". Moreover, he said, "The mantra of "reform to transform", should be interpreted by civil servants as "reform to perform to transform". Lastly, he concluded that it was high time that seniors took advanced knowledge from juniors of the current generation as they have better know-how of completing work. Read: Degrees without studying will lead to nation of block heads: J&K High Court Read: Indian Navy women officers to get permanent commission! Defence ministry's motivation For information on more latest news and updates, click here. --- ENDS --- The department of Atomic Energy, Government of India, Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) has released the official notification inviting all the interested, eligible candidates to apply for Executive Trainee vacancies in various departments. All the eligible candidates are requested to apply latest by May 15, 2016. Join Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited :Apply before May 15 By India Today Web Desk: The department of Atomic Energy, Government of India, Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) has released an official notification inviting all the interested, eligible candidates to apply for Executive Trainee vacancies in various departments. All the eligible candidates are requested to apply latest by May 15, 2016. Vacancy details: Number of posts: 183 advertisement Name of the post: Electrical: 32 Mechanical: 75 Electronics: 26 Chemical: 28 Instrumentation: 12 Industrial and Fire Safety: 10 Eligibility criteria: Educational qualification: All the candidates who are interested in applying must possess a full time Bachelor of Engineering (BE)/ Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech)/ Bachelor of Science (B.Sc) Engineering of 4 year duration. For more details on eligibility criteria, candidates are requested to visit the official website. Age limit: All the candidates should not exceed the maximum age limit of 26 years as on May 15, 2016. Selection procedure: The selection of the applicant will be done on the basis of written test conducted by the organisation. How to apply: All the candidates are requested to apply online on the website, www.npcilonline.co.in All the details should be filled in the prescribed format only. Important dates: The online registration process will start from April 25, 2016. The last date to apply is May 15. Click here to get latest updates on government jobs in India. --- ENDS --- DMK's MK Stalin left no chance to target the chief minister and said that she held rallies in the afternoon because her chopper cannot fly after sunset. By India Today Web Desk: Two AIADMK workers collapsed and later died due to heatstroke at AIADMK chief Jayalalithaa's election rally in Salem on Wednesday. Pachiannan (55) and Periyasamy (62), AIADMK party workers from Salem district, were rushed to the hospital where they were declared dead on their arrival. The bodies have now been sent for a postmortem. The incident triggered a spark among the Opposition, who immediately raised their ante against the chief minister. DMK's MK Stalin left no chance to target the leader and said that she held rallies in the afternoon because her chopper cannot fly after sunset. 2 ppl died at CM's afternoon rally in Salem due to heat & exhaustion. ADMK sacrificing lives of TN ppl for comfort of its leader M.K.Stalin (@mkstalin) April 20, 2016 advertisement Following criticisms, the chief minister expressed regret over the deaths and promised compensation to the victims' family. Jayalalithaa has always received flak for holding rallies in the afternoon in the 40-plus heat. Last week, two people were killed in a stampede at a party rally in Virrudachalam, 250 km from Chennai. --- ENDS --- By PTI: New Delhi, Apr 21 (PTI) Three drug peddlers including a Nigerian national have been arrested in separate raids leading to recovery of fine-quality heroin and cocaine estimated to be worth Rs 1.70 crore in the international market, police said today. A Crime Branch team caught Nigerian Omokhogie Sunny, 49, on specific inputs from Janakpuri district centre, with 55 gram cocaine worth Rs 35 lakh. He was also carrying Rs 1.14 lakh in cash at the time of his arrest, Joint Commissioner (Crime) Ravindra Yadav said. advertisement Sunny who had come to India for doing business, in December 2015 took to drug peddling after suffering heavy losses. He lived at Mahavir Enclave in Palam and his daughter is studying in Hyderabad, the officer said. The Crime Branch sleuths arrested one Nawab, a resident of Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh, near Kashmere Gate ISBT and found 200 gram of fine-quality heroin on him. The contraband carried by him was worth Rs 60 lakh in the international market, he said. Another drug peddler Om Prakash was arrested by the Crime Branch from Nangloi in west Delhi. He was found to be carrying 260 gram of fine-quality heroin worth Rs 75 lakh, Yadav said. Nawab and Om Prakash received drug from Bareilly based suppliers for delivery in Delhi. Sunny had received 100 gm cocaine from a fellow Nigerian in Mumbai and had already sold 45 gram of it. Further investigation is on to unearth linkages of the arrested drug peddlers, the officer said. PTI VIT KND RG KND --- ENDS --- Three passengers on board a Kolkata-Mumbai IndiGo flight were today detained by Mumbai airport police for misbehaving with air hostesses of the flight. By India Today Web Desk: Three passengers on board a Kolkata-Mumbai IndiGo flight were today detained by Mumbai airport police for misbehaving with air hostesses of the flight. Complainant Amir Gupta said that the passengers were making video of the air hostesses. "I felt very aggressive and slapped the man after which I complained. Police is very proactive about the matter and everyone is being very supportive," Gupta said. advertisement One of the accused passenger is on run. More details are awaited. In January, at least 70 passengers were offloaded from a Raipur-bound IndiGo flight at Rajiv Gandhi International Airport on the grounds of "unruly behaviour", following which the fliers lodged a complaint with airport police alleging they were harassed by the airline staff. --- ENDS --- By Simar Singh: Backwaters of Kerala Picture courtesy: Flickr/Hari Prasad Nadig/Creative Commons Calm and relaxing, a trip to the backwaters is bound to be rejuvenating for everyone. A one- or two-day stay in a gorgeous and cosy houseboat would be nice. The most ideal way of exploring the place with them would be to sail on the intricate network of tranquil coconut tree-fringed lagoons, lakes, canals and estuaries, in order to soak in the beauty of the place . The great thing about the houseboats is that they have all the basic facilities that re required for a relaxing stay. The areas are well-connected to the main urban centres, which means that the journey there is quite comfortable and hassle-free. advertisement Ranthambore National Park, Rajasthan Picture courtesy: Flickr/Pete Favelle/Creative Commons Located at the confluence of the Vindhya Plateau and the Aravalli Hills, Ranthambore offers a fantastic blend of nature and history. Visitors can take a safari through the park on one of the open-roofed gypsies or canters and visit the 10th-century fort. The journey there is quite simple. The closest airport is Jaipur, which is a four-hour drive away and the closest railway station is just 11 km away. There are plenty of good accommodation options around the park. Coorg, Karnataka Picture courtesy: Flickr/SandeepAchetan.com Travel/Creative Commons Unlike most popular hill stations, the road to Coorg is quite gentle and free of hairpin bends, which makes it a great hill destination for the elderly. There is a lot to do here -- right from just soaking in the green that envelops the area, to visiting coffee, tea and spice plantations, and visiting picture-perfect waterfalls. Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu Picture courtesy: Flickr/Luca Penati/creative Commons For those looking for a spiritual rejuvenation, Kanchipuram is the perfect destination. The city is home to many historical and vibrant temples, dating back to the Pallava, Chola or Vijayanagar dynasties. The architecture of each of these temples is itself is something to marvel at. The city can be easily covered in a day trip from Mahabalipuram or Chennai. Udaipur, Rajasthan Picture courtesy: Flickr/Cedric S/Creative Commons With the sparkling water of the lake and gorgeous buildings all around, this laid-back city is the perfect place to relax. Stay options are plenty, and visitors can spend time here by taking boat rides on Lake Pichola, watching Rajasthani cultural shows or simply taking a tour of the vibrant city. Despite being a tourist hotspot, Udaipur has somehow managed to retain its old-world charm. --- ENDS --- By Samonway Duttagupta: Not everything is bad about the summers. It opens up a lot of opportunities for travellers, including the adventure activities that are offered in several destinations across the country. River rafting is one adventure activity that has gained popularity among Indians in the last couple of years. Let's take a look at the places that offer the best rafting experience in India. advertisement Rishikesh, Uttarakhand Picture courtesy: Facebook/Delhi Help Rishikesh has become almost synonymous with rafting. The moment somebody mentions about a rafting trip, the first place that comes to the mind is Rishikesh. With up to three grades of rapids and numerous rafting camps on the white sand beaches of River Ganga, this holy town in Uttarakhand has become a hot favourite among those who love rafting. Besides, the place provides ample opportunities for other adventure activities, including trekking and cliff jumping. Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir Picture courtesy: Facebook/I AM AN Indian Yes, you read that right. In case you didn't know, Ladakh is not just about bikers, trekkers and mountain lovers. The place has a lot more to it. You must have heard of the Zanskar river -- the one on which the popular Chadar Trek is done during the winters. It's the same river on which rafting is offered in the months of July and August. At an altitude of 12,000 feet, rafting is a completely different experience -- the river flows between high mountain walls, each of a few hundred feet. The views one gets are stunning to say the least -- while on one side you come across remote and unseen areas of Ladakh, it's a treat to see the river merging into River Indus at the end of the rafting route. Orchha, Madhya Pradesh Picture courtesy: Facebook/Pradeep Singh Picture courtesy: Facebook/Pradeep Singh Orchha offers a unique melange of adventure and heritage. As you go rafting on the rapids of the turbulent River Betwa, you will be charmed at the views of various cenotaphs lined up across the banks of the river. To add to your experience are the lush green environs, making for a soothing locale to enjoy a high adrenaline adventure activity like rafting. The rafting tours are organised by MP Tourism, and starts from the scenic Kanchana Ghat. Kullu, Himachal Pradesh Picture courtesy: Facebook/The Best of Manali River Beas offers some of the best rapids for white water rafting in India. The rafting tour in this region starts from Pirdi, at a distance of four kilometres from the town of Kullu, and covers 14 km, before ending at a place called Jhiri. Rafting here enables travellers to enjoy views of the Pir Panjal Range, that covers the entire region of Kullu-Manali. The rapids here range from beginner's level to Grade 1 and Grade 3. Kolad, Maharashtra Picture courtesy: Flickr/Himanshu Sarpotdar A popular destination among adventure seekers, especially during the monsoons, Kolad is also a hotspot for rafting in Maharashtra. Located within the depths of the Sahyadri mountain range, in Raigad district, Kolad is home to scenic surroundings, thanks to the lush vegetation of the place. Rafting here is done on River Kundalika, which has several rapids in its 14 km stretch. advertisement Coorg, Karnataka Picture courtesy: Facebook/Mesmerize Coorg Another unlikely place for rafting, the coffee district of Coorg also offers amazing opportunities for rafting enthusiasts. Carried out on River Barapole, the grades vary from one section of the river to the other, thanks to the presence of the beautiful Western Ghats. There are approximately four to five rapids in the upper section of the river, and about six to seven in the lower section, with grade level ranging from 1 to 4. The rafting season in Coorg is from June to September. Also read: 6 places in India every coffee lover must visit --- ENDS --- The simulation came as about 30,000 soldiers took part in a major exercise 'Shatrujeet', led by the elite Mathura-based Strike Corp, in desert area of Mahajan firing range where it is honing its skills to counter Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) warfare among others. Indian Army tanks light up the night sky with shells and tracers during Exercise Shatrujeet in Rajasthan. By Press Trust of India: A strike formation of the Army today undertook drills to counter any tactical nuclear attack on its mechanised unit, as part of the war games being conducted in deserts of Rajasthan. IN PICS The simulation came as about 30,000 soldiers took part in a major exercise 'Shatrujeet', led by the elite Mathura-based Strike Corp, in desert area of Mahajan firing range where it is honing its skills to counter Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) warfare among others. advertisement The aim of CBRN simulation was to validate the army's response in case its faces a tactical nuclear attack. "Our policy has been always that we will never use nuclear weapons first. But if we are attacked, we need to gather ourselves and fight through it. The simulation is about doing exactly that," an Army source said. The aim is to practise the capability to strike deep into the enemy territory in an integrated air-land battle environment. The exercise is in the last phase and next week on April 22, Army Chief Dalbir Singh Suhag is likely to visit to review the exercise. As part of its training and operational preparedness, various drills involved in CBRN warfare were practiced by the troops including use of Individual Protective Equipment (IPE) and fighting in a CBRN contaminated area. Troops underwent simulations of chemical and nuclear attacks and practiced measures to mitigate effect on persons and operations. A tactical nuclear attack was also simulated on one oF its mechanised formations spearheading the attack, the sources said. --- ENDS --- The Uttarakhand High Court's reprimand to the Centre continued today with the court asking for a definite assurance it will not revoke the President's Rule in the state for a week during which it is likely to deliver its verdict. By India Today Web Desk: The Uttarakhand High Court's reprimand to the Centre continued today with the court asking for a definite assurance it will not revoke the President's Rule in the state for a week during which it is likely to deliver its verdict. "Why don't you give a definite instruction that you won't revoke the President's Rule for a week? Tomorrow, if you revoke President's Rule and invite somebody, it will be a travesty of justice," the court said. advertisement The Congress, which has challenged the Centre's rule in the state, has expressed its apprehension to the court that the President's Rule might be revoked and the Governor might invite the BJP to form government before a verdict is pronounced or even reserved. "Is the government a private party? More than anger, we are pained that you can behave like this. How can you be playing with the court?" the court said in remarks that echo its sentiment on Wednesday when it ruled that even the President of India can "go wrong" in such matters. On Wednesday, the Uttarakhand High Court had hoped the Centre will not "provoke" them by revoking the central rule and made it clear that the decision is open to judicial review as even the President can go wrong. "Absolute power can spoil anybody's mind and even the President can be wrong and in that case his decisions can be subjected to evaluation," it said. "There is no king or absolutism. Howsoever high you are, the law is above you. Legitimacy of relevant inference drawn from the material that is placed before the President is open to judicial review," a bench of Chief Justice KM Joseph and Justice VK Bist said. "We hope they will not provoke us" till a verdict is delivered on the petition challenging its imposition, the bench said. The court criticised the central government over the imposition of President's Rule in Uttarakhand on March 27, a day before the floor test was due to be carried out in the state Assembly. The Centre's representative, Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Tushar Mehta, did not confirm whether any decision with regard to the revocation of the President's Rule has been taken by the Centre. Meanwhile, the Union government is likely to move the Supreme Court to expunge the comments made by the High Court on President Pranab Mukherjee while hearing the case over the imposition of central rule in the state. "The government does not approve such harsh comments against the president. We will definitely move the Supreme Court, requesting it to expunge the comments," a Union minister told IANS on condition of anonymity. "Such comments against the president will put a wrong precedent, if not objected to," the minister added. advertisement The Uttarakhand political crisis began when nine Congress legislators, including former Chief Minister Vijay Bahuguna revolted against incumbent Harish Rawat. The rebels then turned to the BJP for support. In the 70-member Assembly, the Congress had 36 legislators, including the nine rebels. The BJP had 28. The other six members, from smaller parties, are believed to have supported the Congress. ALSO READ | Even President can go wrong: Uttarakhand High Court to Centre --- ENDS --- There will be artillery gun salutes in the British capital at Hyde Park and the Tower of London, while parliament will be illuminated red, white and blue. By Reuters: Britain's Queen Elizabeth turned 90 today with beacons and gun salutes heralding the birthday of the world's oldest monarch, who still performs hundreds of engagements a year and shows no signs of losing her appetite for the job. Usually her birthday passes with little ceremony but to mark today's landmark Elizabeth will greet well-wishers near her Windsor Castle home, west of London, and later light a beacon, the first of 1,000 to be lit across the country and worldwide to mark the occasion. advertisement There will also be artillery gun salutes in the British capital at Hyde Park and the Tower of London, while parliament will be illuminated red, white and blue. "It's really sinking in now... just how much of a major milestone it is to have the queen celebrating her 90th, and after everything she's achieved it's quite a moment for the family," her grandson and future king Prince William said in a Sky News interview broadcast on Wednesday. Close aides say Elizabeth, who has been on the throne for 64 years, was far more interested in events to mark her 90th birthday than she had been about overtaking her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria last September as Britain's longest-reigning monarch. In May, there will be a four-day pageant at Windsor Castle, while in June there will be further events to mark her official birthday, including the Patron's Lunch, a street party for 10,000 guests on the Mall, the grand avenue leading to Buckingham Palace. Born on April 21, 1926 in Bruton Street in central London when Calvin Coolidge was U.S. President and Joseph Stalin had just taken control in the Soviet Union, Elizabeth shows no signs of retiring, and two surveys last week suggested the public do not want her to give up either. An Ipsos MORI poll found 70 percent wanted her to stay queen compared to 21 percent who thought she should abdicate or retire, while a BMG survey for the London Evening Standard newspaper showed 66 percent of Britons had a favourable view of her compared to 10 percent with a negative opinion. "You can't put your feet up. There is no pension plan in this job," the queen's youngest son Prince Edward told Sky. Prime Minister David Cameron is due to lead political tributes in a "humble address" in parliament, an occasion which could prove awkward for opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, an ardent republican. "She has served our nation with such dignity, with such ability for so many years. I know the whole country and the whole House (of Commons) will want to join me in saying 'long may she reign over us'," Cameron said on Wednesday. On Friday, the queen will be back to her usual official duties hosting a lunch at Windsor for U.S. President Barack Obama who described her as "a source of strength and inspiration not only for the people of Britain but for millions of people around the world" in a British TV documentary aired last month. advertisement --- ENDS --- 23. Yes, that's the number of times Ranveer Singh and Vaani Kapoor are going to lock lips in Aditya Chopra's upcoming film Befikre. By India Today Web Desk: Ranveer Singh and Vaani Kapoor are currently shooting for Aditya Chopra's Befikre in Paris. And in France, the actors are leaving no stone unturned in living up to when in France, do (read: kiss) as the French do. Ranveer and Vaani are apparently kissing 23 times in Befikre. ALSO READ: Vaani Kapoor begins shooting for Befikre in Paris advertisement ALSO SEE: Ranveer Singh and Vaani Kapoor's lip-lock in Befikre first look is too hot to handle While this piece of news might not be all too pleasant for certain prudes, the Befikre team doesn't seem harried by it all. Like the first look of the film so bluntly spells it out: "Who Cares Mon Amour"! A source close to the film unit informed Bollywood Life that the number of kisses in Befikre is 23. If the reports are to be believed, this Ranveer-Vaani film will certainly rank among those Hindi films with the maximum number of kisses. Back in the 2000s, when Mallika Sherawat shot to fame with her film Khwahish, she had locked lips with co-star Himanshu Malik 17 times. Pretty soon, Befikre might outdo that too. Ranveer, Vaani and Aditya are busy filming this love saga in the French capital. Befikre is Aditya Chopra's version of the Bernardo Bertolucci classic, Last Tango In Paris. The film will see Aditya Chopra on the director's chair after an eight-year hiatus. Befikre, Chopra's fourth film as a director, comes after the 2008 Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi. Befikre is expected to hit the screens on December 9 this year. --- ENDS --- Speaking to Karan Thapar on the show To The Point, BJP spokesman Syed Zafar Islam said that the party was not happy with the high court's verdict. By India Today Web Desk: The Modi government today suffered a stunning defeat when the Uttarakhand High Court struck down the declaration of President's Rule in the state. This is the first time that President's Rule has been struck down while it's actually still in operation. The Harish Rawat government will now face a floor test on April 29. The high court set aside the Centre's rule imposed last month, saying Article 356 was imposed in the state contrary to the law laid down by Supreme Court. advertisement The judgment accuses the Modi government of acting in blatant falsehood and behaving like a private party. The court said it was pained. Clearly Arun Jaitley's arguement that the government had lost its majority over the appropriation bill and the Attorney General's argument about horse trading did not convince the high court. In addition, the court has raised serious questions about the Prime Minister's judgment as well as President Pranab Mukherjee's behaviour. Congress spokesman and the lawyer who won this case Abhishek Singhvi said the government is expected to approach the Supreme Court against the high court's verdict but it will face defeat there too. "I have no doubt that the government will challenge this, but this appeal will be dismissed," Singhvi said. During arguments in court, Singhvi raised a question on whether a solitary instance of a speaker denying a division would be sufficient to impose Central rule. "What was the unearthly hurry? Could the Centre not wait till the floor test was held on March 28?" Singhvi told the court earlier today, adding that Article 356 was imposed in a "casual manner". Speaking to Karan Thapar on the show To The Point, BJP spokesman Syed Zafar Islam said that the party was not happy with the high court's verdict. "We will be approaching the Supreme Court against the judgment and we are confident that it will overturn the high court's verdict because the circumstance under which the government took the decision was justified," Islam said. Senior Supreme Court lawyer Sanjay Hegde pointed out that the observations made by the high court during the hearing were embarrasing for the Centre. "Normal practice is that court's do not use harsh words. But here is a constitutional authority exercising constitutional power. I don't think there can be a more damning indictment," Hegde said. BJD MP and Supreme Court lawyer Pinaki Misra was also of the view that the high court's criticism of the Centre was unprecedented. "We have not seen this kind of indictment by a court in recent times. My heart has gladdened by the courage shown by the high court today. The court used very harsh language and it was completely justified. The Centre took an obdurate stand. The court has shown the government that the law is above you," Misra said. advertisement "It's the government that ignored the law. Unfortunately, President did not follow the law strictly. We all were surprised at President Pranab Mukherjee's decision. He knows Constitution so well," he said, adding," It's evident that Attorney General's heart was not in this case. But it's not fair that Mukul Rohatgi should take the blame for a wrong decision taken by the Centre." "I just hope that the Supreme Court will maintain the kind of fearlessness that the high court has shown," Misra said. --- ENDS --- For a die-hard Transformers fan, this video of bulldozers fighting in China will be a sure shot treat to watch. By India Today Web Desk: This bizarre video of bulldozers battling each other on a dusty street seems like a scene straight out of Hollywood hit Transformers. If you are a die-hard fan of the movie, this is something you have to watch. So, what led to this madness on the streets of China? According to reports, a small brawl between construction crews, who are fierce rivals escalated into a royal rumble between heavy machinery . advertisement At the end of it, as the bulldozers try to ram into each other, one of the machines turns turtle. The video also shows one driver running out unhurt from his toppled bulldozer while another bulldozer tries to lift it back up. The construction workers were from two companies competing for business. The local police have not disclosed details about arrests or injuries This bulldozer face-off is also a result of the falling market in China's construction sector. China is one of the main drivers of construction worldwide, followed by the US and India, however, the business has hit an all new low with growth down by two-thirds from its peak a decade ago. The slowdown in this sector is having a ripple effect on industrial sectors such as steel, glass and cement, causing waves of layoffs. Watch the video below With inputs from AP --- ENDS --- Mehbooba Mufti's suggestion of allowing militants, who cross over to come back directly from PoK instead of the Nepal route, has not found favour with counter-terror agencies. Mehbooba's suggestion of allowing militants, who cross over to come back directly from PoK instead of the Nepal route, has not found favour with counter-terror agencies By Abhishek Bhalla : Surrendering terrorists returning from Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) could lead to hostility between the Centre and the Jammu & Kashmir government, in the wake of the PDP-BJP alliance coming out of a turbulent phase in government formation, following Mufti Mohammad Syed's death. Newly-appointed Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti's suggestion of allowing militants, who cross over to come back directly from PoK instead of the Nepal route, has not found favour with counter-terror agencies. advertisement Sources said, based on inputs from various agencies, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) is not inclined to make any changes in the existing policy. Militants, who had crossed over from Jammu and Kashmir and want to surrender, are brought back from the Nepal route. Those wanting to return, reach Kathmandu and then use the road that leads to the border, from where they are assisted to enter India. "Allowing those who want to surrender for the crossover from PoK directly, does not appear feasible. It will be like opening the flood gates. Monitoring those who return, will be a huge task," said a government official. At a recent meeting with Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Mufti suggested a change in the militant repatriation policy. As many as 1,253 people have returned from PoK via the Nepal route. These include 453 militants, who had crossed over for arms training, along with 197 women and 603 children. An estimated 4,000 more people from J&K are said to be across the border and several of them want to return. "An assessment needs to be made before allowing those wanting to surrender to come back. Only after clearances at different levels are given, can they be allowed to return," the official added. After almost a two-month stalemate, the PDP and the BJP formed the government leaving behind their differences. After the government formation, Mehbooba Mufti said that she is ready to take her father and former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed's ideas and legacy forward. In 2013, the Delhi Police arresting Liyaqat Shah - a former militant - who was returning as per the rehabilitation policy via Nepal, triggered a controversy. The case was finally handed over to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) that raised questions on the Delhi Police action. After the goof up in Shah's case, there came a view that the policy regarding the surrender of former terrorists through the Nepal border, needs to be streamlined and re-examined. Following the fiasco, sources claimed that there are better mechanisms in place to ensure smooth return of those who have been cleared. "There is better coordination and people at all levels are in touch to avoid any confusion," said a government officer. Also Read: Amidst revolt Mehbooba Mufti takes reins of Jammu & Kashmir --- ENDS --- advertisement Surge pricing debate between the AAP government and app-based cab aggregators has severely affected the daily commuters.Several were left without an option as fewer cabs were available across the city and the waiting time for which was endless. By Mail Today: Surge pricing debate between the AAP government and app-based cab aggregators has severely affected the daily commuters. Several were left without an option as fewer cabs were available across the city and the waiting time for which was endless. Now, the AAP government is mulling to fix fare of app-based taxi operators under a new policy, which may make the service expensive than existing rate of Rs 6 per kilometre. advertisement Mail Today did a reality check on cabs' availability at prime locations like south, central and east Delhi and found that mostly their websites said that cabs were not available. Acute crunch of cabs was also witnessed near railway stations, ISBTs and market places. Anger Commuters in large numbers vent their anger on social media websites. "I reached Delhi from Varanasi at 10 am and tried booking a cab for Noida for more than 30 minutes but couldn't find any. As autorickshaws from Delhi don't have the permit to enter Noida, I had to take a Metro with two suitcases and then take an auto from Noida to reach my destination," said 64-year-old Bharat Singh. According to experts, this situation is arising due to government's move to remove surge pricing. Surge pricing is a technique used by popular app-based cab services - Uber and Ola - to raise fares to provide drivers the incentive of keeping their cab running while also making it available for the user irrespective of the demand. The new-age operators offer extremely low fares during off-peak hours - only to make up with the rush-time surge pricing. The low rate varies from Ola's Rs 6 per km with a base fare of Rs 40 to Uber's Rs 7 per km with a base fare of Rs 50. Even autorickshaw rides are costlier in Delhi, at Rs 10 per km with a base fare of Rs 25. Autorickshaw drivers for long have been demanding ban on app-based taxi services claiming that that they are a threat to their livelihood. According to a senior government official, Delhi government impounded 50 cabs till Wednesday afternoon. All the cab drivers were found overcharging and of these, 35 cabs are registered outside Delhi. The government on Wednesday announced that all app-based taxi aggregators will have to charge fares being fixed under a new policy Transport Minister Gopal Rai said a policy will be soon introduced under which app-based taxi companies will have to charge fares fixed by the transport department. This move is already being taken by the Karnataka government which has banned the surge pricing by cab aggregators like Uber and Ola in Bengaluru. "We will fix fares for them as we have done in the case of radio, economy cabs and black and yellow taxis. All app-based taxi services will be regulated," Rai said. advertisement Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal too criticised surge pricing and termed it as a daylight robbery. "Overcharging and blackmailing won't be allowed in Delhi. Some taxis saying they will not provide cab if they are not allowed to loot. This is open blackmailing and government will not let that happen," Kejriwal wrote in series of tweets. In its reaction, Uber criticised the move, saying without surge pricing, there would be no cars available when people need them. "This (surge pricing) maximises the number of trips and minimises the number of people stranded. The drivers have other options as well. In short, without surge pricing, there would be no car available when people need it," Uber said in a statement. However, Kejriwal clarified that Delhi government was not against taxi aggregators. "We fully support them. They provide important service to people. But they will have to follow law," he tweeted. Soon after Delhi government announcement to cancel permits and impound vehicles of app-based car, service providers have temporarily suspending surge in Delhi with immediate effect. Also Read: 18 Ola, Uber cabs impounded day after Kejriwal warned against surge pricing --- ENDS --- advertisement By PTI: From Lalit K Jha Washington, Apr 21 (PTI) Denmark is a steadfast partner in global coalition efforts against ISIS and its contributions have been significant, the US has said, a day after Danish parliament approved the countrys expanded role in the fight against the dreaded terror group. "This weeks decision by the Danish Parliament to approve an expanded role in the fight against ISIL is a welcome contribution from a valued partner in the counter-ISIL coalition and another sign of the growing momentum for the campaign to defeat ISIL," US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter said yesterday. advertisement "Denmark is a steadfast partner in global coalition efforts. Its contributions, including strike aircraft, air defence radar and training and assistance to Iraqi forces, have already been significant. "This renewed and expanded role in the military campaign, including the authority to participate in the full spectrum of combat operations in Iraq and Syria, will further increase the military pressure on ISIL," Carter said. In addition, Denmark will provide important resources to help ensure security and stability in areas freed from ISIL control, an essential element in dealing ISIL a lasting defeat, he said. The State Department joined Carter in welcoming the Danish decision. "The US welcomes the vote yesterday by the Danish parliament and the announcement by the UAE to expand their contributions to the coalition to counter ISIL," State Department Spokesman John Kirby said. "Denmarks vote to increase authorised personnel on the ground and the redeployment of F-16 fighter aircraft for operations in both Iraq and Syria will complement their existing contributions to the coalition and will certainly complement the broader coalition kinetic efforts as well," Kirby added. Denmarks Parliament voted on Tuesday to expand its role in the 66-member global coalition combating the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to include a presence in Syria. PTI LKJ CPS --- ENDS --- During interrogation it was revealed that the SIM card that the accused was using was issued on the name of one Vijay Singh, who lives in Saudi Arabia. By India Today Web Desk: An engineering student has been arrested for hacking the Facebook profile and email account of Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad. Divyanshu Kumar alias Golu was held from Mehmadabad village in Vaishali district by the Economic Offences Unit of Bihar Police. Police have also recovered two mobile phones from him which he used to hack the leader's Facebook account. advertisement "He hacked the Facebook page twice on March 8 and 11 and posted objectionable comments on it," IG, Economic Offences Unit, JS Gangwar, said. Gangwar said that during interrogation it was revealed that the SIM card that the accused was using was issued on the name of one Vijay Singh, who lives in Saudi Arabia. Golu, who is a student of Patna Sahib Engineering College, has been sent to judicial custody. Lalu Prasad's son and Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Prasad Yadav had lodged an FIR with the Sachivalaya police station in Patna about the hacking. --- ENDS --- Shilpa Shinde talked about her ongoing tussle with the makers of Bhabi Ji Ghar Par Hai and took them on in a no-holds-barred press conference. By India Today Web Desk: TV actress Shilpa Shinde, who has been replaced by Shubhangi Atre as Angoori Bhabhi on the popular sitcom Bhabi Ji Ghar Par Hai, held a press conference today about the controversy surrounding her exit from the show. Amey Khopkar, President of Maharashtra Navnirman Chitrapat Karmachari Sena (cine wing of MNS) and Shalini Thackeray also addressed the press conference, along with Shilpa Shinde. While Shilpa claimed she opted out of the show due to health reasons, the producer of the show, Benaifer Kohli, sent a legal notice to Shilpa for breach of contract, terming her behaviour as unprofessional. Kohli also approached CINTAA to take action against the actress. advertisement Also read: Meet the new Angoori Bhabhi Shilpa, on the other hand, also filed a police complaint against Kohli, stating that she was being mentally tortured by the producers of the show. It was then reported that CINTAA had imposed a lifetime ban on Shinde, but later the representatives of the association denied banning her from acting on TV. Amit Behl, Chairman, Dispute Committee, CINTAA had told Mid-Day, "There is no ban. We are just issuing a letter from the federation, by the producers' body and CINTAA asking Shilpa to give an explanation and there has to be a monetary compensation because the channel and the producer have undergone a loss." While CINTAA has already held a press conference clarifying their stand, it was now Bhabi Ji's turn to present her version. Here are six things she said in the press conference. I didn't stop coming to the sets. I was told that I would be replaced. They asked me to stop coming and made me sit at home. When they started getting calls from media and channels, they called me back on the show. Meri bhi koi self respect hai. Kya main football hoon. Jab chaho bula lo, jab chaho bhej do. I have not been given a fair hearing by CINTAA. Why are they asking for damages. They should pay damages. I am sitting at home. They didn't even let me do The Kapil Sharma Show or any other new show. I'm just replying to notices. I am not worried about work. Nobody can stop me from working. CINTAA is saying they haven't banned me. They have not mentioned the word 'ban' in the letter but the contents of the letter suggest that they won't let me work unless I pay the damages amounting to 10-15 crore. They secretly conducted auditions. The moment they got the new actress, they replaced me. Sirf producer ko loss hota hai, artist ko nahi hota? "We don't value these federation(s). Nobody can stop Shilpa Shinde. If anyone stops her from working in Maharashtra, we will take action against the producers and channels in our own way. If they feel this is a threat, so be it," Khopkar said. --- ENDS --- The U.S. Treasury Department said on Wednesday that Tubman, who was born into slavery in the early 1820s and went on to help hundreds of slaves escape, would take the center spot on the bill, while Jackson, a slave owner, would move to the back. Harriet Tubman helped hundreds of black slaves to freedom and worked as a Union spy during the Civil War. (Photo: Reuters) By Reuters: Anti-slavery crusader Harriet Tubman will become the first African-American on the face of U.S. paper currency, and the first woman in more than a century, when she replaces former President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill. The U.S. Treasury Department said on Wednesday that Tubman, who was born into slavery in the early 1820s and went on to help hundreds of slaves escape, would take the center spot on the bill, while Jackson, a slave owner, would move to the back. advertisement Introduced alongside a slew of changes to the $5 and $10 notes as well, the redesign gives the Treasury "a chance to open the aperture to reflect more of America's history," Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said. A new $10 bill will add images of five female leaders of the women's suffrage movement, including Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to the back, while keeping founding father Alexander Hamilton on the front. The reverse of a new $5 note will show former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., officials said. Former President Abraham Lincoln will remain on the front. Lew said the designs should be unveiled by 2020 and go into circulation "as quickly as possible," although he declined to say when. He said the $10 bill was scheduled to go out first, citing security needs. The long-awaited decision to replace the seventh president of the United States with Tubman followed months of outreach by the Treasury regarding which woman should be featured on a bill. The debate began when the Treasury announced plans in June to feature a woman on the $10 note, prompted partly by a young girl's letter to President Barack Obama that criticized the lack of women on U.S. currency and a social media campaign last year called "Women on 20s." A MUSICAL Hamilton's growing celebrity status, due largely to a Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway musical about his life, "Hamilton," created by Lin-Manuel Miranda, propelled an effort to keep the first U.S. Treasury secretary on the $10 note and to replace Jackson on the $20 bill instead. Jackson, a hero of the War of 1812's Battle of New Orleans, was president from 1829-1837. But he has been criticized for his treatment of American Indians and ownership of slaves. After considering hundreds of candidates, Lew said Tubman was chosen for her leadership and work helping others. "It's the essential story of American democracy about how one person who grew up in slavery, never had the benefit of learning how to read or write, could change the course of history," he said. advertisement Tubman grew up working on a Maryland plantation and escaped in her late 20s. She returned to the South to help hundreds of black slaves to freedom and worked as a Union spy during the Civil War. She died in 1913. Women have not been depicted on U.S. bills since Martha Washington, who was on the $1 silver certificate from 1891 to 1896, and Pocahontas, who was in a group picture on the $20 bill from 1865 to 1869. On coins, Sacagawea, a Native American who assisted the Lewis and Clark Expedition, is featured on the gold dollar, and suffragist Susan B. Anthony is on the silver dollar. Deaf-blind author and activist Helen Keller is on the back of the Alabama quarter. Tubman became the top-trending hashtag on Twitter shortly after the news broke on Wednesday, with more than 100,000 tweets and mentions online. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who is campaigning to become the first female U.S. president, praised Tubman as "a woman, a leader, and a freedom fighter" on Twitter and said she could not think of a better choice. Some Twitter users applauded Treasury's decision to keep Hamilton on the $10 bill. advertisement Actress Mara Wilson (@MaraWritesStuff) tweeted at Miranda, the "Hamilton" creator, saying: "@Lin_Manuel First you win a Pulitzer, now you're affecting US currency. Get some rest!" --- ENDS --- The Indian Express, based on Mossack Fonseca records, said Umesh Sahai of Jersey-based corporate service provider City Management (now Minerva Trust) was one of the founder-directors of the four shipping companies and that he had appointed Bachchan as director and managing director in 1993. By Indo-Asian News Service: Even as a fresh report on the Panama Papers alleged Amitabh Bachchan "participated" in board meetings of two off-shore companies "by telephone conference", the actor himself has said his name was "misused" and that nothing illegal has been attributed to him. The Indian Express reported today that Sea Bulk Shipping and Tramp Shipping had passed a resolution each on December 12, 1994, in connection with a loan of $1.75 million from Dallah Albaraka Investment Company. advertisement The loan was for Constellation Ship Management for the purchase of all the shares issued by Tramp Shipping and held by Sea Bulk Shipping. Besides Tramp and Sea Bulk, the paper said Bachchan was the managing director for two other offshore entities -- Lady Shipping and Treasure Shipping. "Both resolutions recorded Bachchan's participation in board meetings 'by telephone conference'. In their certificate of incumbency issued the same day, both companies also recorded Bachchan as director. The companies had the same directors, including Bachchan, and officers," it said. In response, Bachchan's office sent a rejoinder, which was also posted on his Twitter account. "On Panama disclosures, I wish to state that queries continue to be sent to me by the media. I would humbly request them to kindly direct these to the GOI (Government of India) where I, as a law abiding citizen, have already sent, and shall continue to send, my responses," the post said. "I stand by my earlier statement on the 'misuse of my name' in the matter and in any event the press reports do not disclose any illegal act committed by me." The Indian Express, based on Mossack Fonseca records, said Umesh Sahai of Jersey-based corporate service provider City Management (now Minerva Trust) was one of the founder-directors of the four shipping companies and that he had appointed Bachchan as director and managing director in 1993. "He (Sahai) also signed the board resolutions that recorded Bachchan's participation in the December 12, 1994, meetings. Sahai did not respond to emails and phone calls seeking his comment on Bachchan's statement denying any knowledge of the companies," the newspaper said. Bachchan's name cropped up in the reports as part of a global expose of International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and over 100 global media organisations, based on millions of leaked documents of the Panama law firm Mossak Fonseca. A high-level probe team has been constituted, with members drawn from the various agencies of the finance ministry and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) based on the orders issued by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Indian authorities have already said not all off-shore funds are illegitimate. advertisement Also read: I'm a law-abiding citizen, co-operating with IT dept: Big B on Panama leaks Panama Papers leak fallout: Remove Bachchan from Save Tiger project, demands Congress --- ENDS --- The Enforcement Directorate today wrote to the MEA, seeking assistance in bringing back liquor baron Vijay Mallya to India through diplomatic channels. The Enforcement Directorate is seeking liquor baron Vijay Mallya's deportation after he skipped three summons in a money laundering case. By India Today Web Desk: The Enforcement Directorate today wrote to the Ministry of External Affairs, seeking assistance in bringing back industrialist Vijay Mallya to India through diplomatic channels to try him in a money laundering case. Mallya is believed to be living in UK since he sneaked out of India in March. Sources with the agency, which had last week asked for the suspension of Mallya's diplomatic passport, said the ED is seeking Mallya's deportation after he skipped three summons in a money laundering case. advertisement A special court had on Monday issued an undated non-bailable arrest warrant against the beleaguered liquor baron, who is also a Rajya Sabha MP, in response to an ED plea under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act. Following the warrant, the decks have been cleared for a red corner notice to be issued by Interpol against Mallya and he can also be arrested anytime and anywhere in the country. After he failed to appear in person on March 18, April 2 and April 9, Mallya sought time extension till May from the ED, as he is abroad since March 2 and reported to be in Britain. The ED's April 15 plea before the special court came soon after the central government suspended Mallya's diplomatic passport on that day. Yesterday, a court in Hyderabad issued non-bailable warrant against Mallya after he failed to appeared before it in connection with a cheque bounce case. Two cheque bounce cases amounting to Rs 50 lakh were filled by GMR Hyderabad International Airport Ltd (GHIAL), which runs Hyderabad's Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, against the grounded Kingfisher Airlines boss. --- ENDS --- "We live in the age of the selfie and because we see images of ourselves almost constantly on social media, we're much more aware of how our lips look," David Song from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) said. By Indo-Asian News Service: Want to click that perfect selfie with fuller lips for a flawless pout? Get a lip implant. According to a media report, 2015 set a record of one lip surgery every 19 minutes in the US. The findings, based on a survey of American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), showed that in 2015, a total of 27,449 lip implants on both males and females took place -- a jump of 48 percent since 2000, CNBC reported on Tuesday. advertisement "We live in the age of the selfie and because we see images of ourselves almost constantly on social media, we're much more aware of how our lips look," David Song from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) was quoted as saying. In Britain, a cosmetic dentistry firm has claimed that selfies have also changed the types of smile that patients are asking for. People are now asking for a new "selfie smile" which "benefits rather than suffers at the hands of the typically center-widening, periphery-narrowing properties of smartphone cameras," the report stated. "We have seen a 30 percent rise over 5 years in the number of patients sending in selfies through the website with concerns about the look of their front teeth, yet when the patients come in person, often the teeth don't look too bad at all," Tim Bradstock-Smith, a clinical director and cosmetic dentist, was quoted as saying. "A patient may not be ready to commit to something as dramatic as a facelift or eyelid surgery, but there are a variety of ways you can change the shape of your lips," explained Robert Houser, a plastic surgeon in Ohio, US. The ASPS commissioned a national survey of around a thousand women and found that the "subtle and sultry lips" of Hollywood actress Jennifer Lawrence were the most attractive celebrity lips that women wanted. --- ENDS --- The 20 students who were present at the Government Girls Higher Secondary School had formed groups to discuss tumultuous events that had taken place since April 12 when protests erupted against the alleged molestation of a minor girl by an Army personnel. By Naseer Ganai: As the Government Girls Higher Secondary School opened here on Wednesday as normalcy returned to the town after eight days of massive protests and curfew, only 20 students out of 1,150 enrolled were present. The 20 had formed groups to discuss tumultuous events that had taken place since April 12 when protests erupted against the alleged molestation of a minor girl by an Army personnel. advertisement The teachers too had formed groups. There was no class work today. "I don't think she will ever come back to this school," said a classmate of the minor, who refused to be identified. Her classmates joined her and agreed with her views. In the school record, the minor was born in October 2000. "She is not even 16. We don't know anything that has happened outside the school in the afternoon of April 12. But if she returns to the school, we will try to create a congenial atmosphere for her and we hope other students of the school will treat as they used to," principal of the school, Mir Manzoor Ahmad, said. The teachers expressed apprehension about her future and resented the decision of the police to circulate her statement in different social networking sites. They believe that the circulation of her video statement made the victim vulnerable as different people read different things from her statement. The minor in her statement to the police and to a magistrate has accused school boys of physical assault after she returned from a bathroom in the afternoon of April 12. The circulation of her message has also enraged some of her classmates, who say it is intriguing why she chose a bathroom mostly used by the army personnel. However, a student said almost all school bathrooms remain closed most of the time. Incidentally some six bathrooms of the school were locked on Wednesday. A female teacher said they were concerned about her mental well being. "I also have a 16-year-old daughter. How could they do it to a minor girl? How could they record her statement so brazenly in a police station and then show it to the whole world. They have played with her life," she said. The teachers said the army bunkers were staring at the school and the school authorities had sought their removal for past so many years. "We never thought they will be removed after killings of five people and injuries of so many others," a teacher, who is in school for over decade, said. Also Read: Handwara molestation: One of two accused arrested, 3 Army bunkers removed --- ENDS --- By PTI: By Charanjit Singh Hong Kong, Apr 21 (PTI) Pitching itself as a gateway to mainland China, Hong Kong today wooed Indian investors, asking them to set up business ventures here to take advantage of its world-class infrastructure and a stable tax system. "India is a very important market for us and we are hopeful that we can attract more Indian companies to Hong Kong this year," Invest Hong Kong, Associate Director General Jimmy Chiang told Indian reporters here today. advertisement Invest Hong Kong is a government department for attracting and facilitating foreign direct investment into Hong Kong. Highlighting advantages of investing in Hong Kong, he said the global financial hub offers world class infrastructure, low and stable tax system and independent judiciary to protect interest of investors. Asked about the potential sector for Indian companies to invest in order to tap China and Hong Kong, Chiang said Indians can look at tourism and hospitality, consumer products and logistics and industrial goods. "The key sectors for Indian investors are tourism and hospitality and its sub-sector food and beverage," he said. He further said, "Indian companies which are food suppliers and traders can look at the possibility of setting up sales offices here not only to cater to local needs of Hong Kong consumers but also make use Hong Kong as hub to sell products in mainland China." "Indian companies are very strong in doing jewellery, diamond and other luxury trading business and they can also make Hong Kong as hub for the same," he said. Other sectors include logistic companies, shipping as well as companies making industrial products, Chiang said. "These sectors demonstrate strong potential for our friends from India in terms of business development in Hong Kong and China," he added. He further said, "India is number one country for which we have received applications for work visas and this shows Indian investors are coming to Hong Kong to set up businesses." Chiang said last year, Invest Hong Kong assisted seven Indian companies to set up businesses in Hong Kong. "They were from consumer products financial services, tourism and hospitality as well as transportation and industry," he added. (MORE) PTI CHS PRB MR --- ENDS --- Madhuri will be seen judging the Indian version of popular show So You Think You Can Dance, along with choreographers Terence Lewis and Bosco Martis of Bosco-Caeser duo. By Indo-Asian News Service: Actress Madhuri Dixit-Nene, known for her graceful dance moves, says primarily she is a stage dancer but has a bit of street dancing in her as well. "I have stage (dancing) in me, because I learned Kathak which is a stage thing, but there is a bit of street (dancing) in me also, because when you do Bollywood dancing it is an amalgamation of all styles," Madhuri said, when asked which form of dance she preferred -- stage dancing or street dancing. advertisement Madhuri will be seen judging the Indian version of popular show So You Think You Can Dance, along with choreographers Terence Lewis and Bosco Martis of Bosco-Caeser duo. Madhuri is known for her dancing skills and for being capable of carrying off a mujra like Maar Dala as well as dance numbers like Ek Do Teen at the same time. SEE PICS: So You Think You Can Dance-Ab India Ki Baari: Star judges set off a new dance war So You Think You Can Dance will see a battle between the two forms of dance -- stage dancing, usually narrating a story and performed by trained artistes, and street dancing being slightly more non-professional and which happens on the streets and nightclubs. About her favourite dancers from the two forms, she said: "On stage, there are so many, there are classical dancers like Birju Maharaj. I think Terence Lewis is a wonderful stage dancer. Bosco is a fabulous street dancer. Govinda is a fantastic street dancer, Hrithik (Roshan) is a lovely stage dancer and can do any kind of dance." Madhuri had previously judged four seasons on dance show Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa. On the difference between the shows, she said: "In Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa, it was all celebrities and had a different journey since many of them had not learned dancing, and had a journey from a non-dancer to a dancer. "But here, it's the common man. It gave me a good feeling that I could connect with the common man, and interact with them. They are passionate dancers who have made numerous sacrifices, where families haven't supported them, they're all alone, but have tremendous passion for dance and don't want to leave dance." --- ENDS --- The court allowed the plea filed by Chief Minister Harish Rawat challenging the imposition of the President's Rule on March 26, a day before he was scheduled to prove his majority in the Uttarakhand Assembly. By India Today Web Desk: A day after it said even the President of India can go wrong, the Uttarakhand High Court today set the Centre's rule imposed last month aside, saying Article 356 was imposed in the state contrary to the law laid down by Supreme Court. In what is a big blow to the central government, the court further allowed the plea filed by Chief Minister Harish Rawat challenging the imposition of the President's Rule on March 26, a day before he was scheduled to prove his majority in the Uttarakhand Assembly. advertisement Victory for Uttarakhand: Rawat Describing the court's verdict as a victory of people of the state, Uttararakhand Chief Minister Harish Rawat criticised the BJP for the political crisis. "The whole country knows who were behind the political instability in Uttarakhand. BJP is becoming irrelevant in the state. I sincerely thank the court for vindicating the Congress party's position," Rawat said. "I still say that we are ready to forget this chapter and I appeal to Centre to support us in the development of the state," he added. Rawat has summoned all the Congress MLAs to Dehradun.The floor test is expected to be conducted on April 29 now. Meanwhile, it has been learnt that the Centre has decided to challenge the High Court's verdict in the Supreme Court. Earlier in the day, the court had asked the Centre for a definite assurance it will not revoke the President's Rule in the state for a week. "Why don't you give a definite instruction that you won't revoke the President's Rule for a week? Tomorrow, if you revoke President's Rule and invite somebody, it will be a travesty of justice," the court said. Continuing its hearing for the fourth day, the court also told the Centre that it could allow the ousted Chief Minister Harish Rawat's petition challenging the imposition of President's Rule and ensure that a floor test is held. The Congress, which has challenged the Centre's rule in the state, had expressed apprehension that the President's Rule might be revoked and the Governor might invite the BJP to form government before a verdict is pronounced or even reserved. "Is the government a private party? More than anger, we are pained that you can behave like this. How can you be playing with the court?" the court said in remarks that echo its sentiment on Wednesday when it ruled that even the President of India can "go wrong" in such matters. The Uttarakhand political crisis began when nine Congress legislators, including former Chief Minister Vijay Bahuguna revolted against incumbent Harish Rawat. The rebels then turned to the BJP for support. Also read: Even President can go wrong: Uttarakhand High Court to Centre You're cutting at root of democracy: Uttarakhand High Court tells Centre --- ENDS --- The 'India by the Nile' festival will see food festivals, photography exhibitions, Bollywood performances, theatrical productions, dance performances and much more. By Srijani Ganguly/Mail Today: From April 23 to May 7, the Nile basin will become the bed of not just one, but two very old and culturally rich civilisations. With Egypt as the host, 'India by the Nile' will celebrate the music, theatre, arts, food and dance of the civilisation born along the river Indus. Also read: 5 binge-worthy, melodious music shows from India and Pakistan that are not Coke Studio advertisement The cultural programme, which has been organised by the Embassy of India in Egypt and Teamwork Arts, will be held in Cairo, Alexandria, Port Said, Ismailia and Beni Suef in Egypt. On the performing arts front, India will be represented by none other than Indian Ocean (arguably one of the oldest bands of India) and renowned Odissi dancer, Dona Ganguly. Indian Ocean band members. The latter, who is looking forward to visiting the pyramids, says, "You learn dance to take forward the Indian heritage abroad. It is a great honour to do that. With Egypt, the honour is even bigger since it's one of the biggest and oldest civilisations began there." Ganguly's Odissi performance, which she says will feature "authentic items", won't be restricted to 'India by the Nile'. Later on, she has a dance drama planned for the Indian embassy, at the Cairo Opera House, on the occasion of Rabindranath Tagore's birthday. Other than Ganguly's Odissi performance, the programme will also include a Bollywood dance workshop by Gilles Chuyen. Dona Ganguly Bollywood will also be represented through the theatrical production Love Story-A Bollywood Musical, which is a Teamwork Arts production. There will also be a specially curated food festival by chef Vikram Udaygiri, which will run for a week at the Four Seasons Hotel, as well as a photo exhibition, on the festival of Holi, by Haran Kumar. Also read: Every creature from the Pokemon universe is getting a song of its own, thanks to this musician 'India by the Nile' will have a healing side to it as well, wherein visitors will be able to interact with ayurveda and yoga experts. "India by the Nile," says Ambassador of India to Egypt, Sanjay Bhattacharyya, "will bring people closer to one another, open new experiences to share and provide new opportunities to explore." During the festival, Bhattacharyya will host an important section of 'India by the Nile' which will feature the felicitation of prominent women of the Egyptian society. --- ENDS --- The Islamic State, known for its brutality, has reportedly executed 250 girls in northern Iraq for refusing to become sex slaves, according to a media report. By Press Trust of India: The Islamic State, known for its brutality, has reportedly executed 250 girls in northern Iraq for refusing to become sex slaves , according to a media report. The girls had been ordered to accept temporary marriages to the terrorists and were murdered, sometimes alongside their families, for their refusal to be sex slaves in Iraq's second largest city of Mosul. advertisement ISIS began selecting women of Mosul and forced them into marrying its militants, calling it temporary marriage since it has taken control over Mosul, and the women who refused to submit to this practice would be executed, said Kurdish Democratic Party spokesman Said Mamuzini. "At least 250 girls have so far been executed by IS for refusing to accept the practice of sexual jihad, and sometimes the families of the girls were also executed for rejecting to submit to their (ISIS) request," Mamuzini told London-based Kurdish news agency AhlulBayt. Another official from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) party Ghayas Surchi said that human rights were being widely violated in all IS-held territories, particularly the women's rights as they are seen as commodities and have no say in choosing their spouses. Surchi said that women were not allowed to go out alone in Mosul and cannot choose their spouses. The executions follows a spate of similar killings that took place last August in which 19 Mosul women were slaughtered for refusing to have sex with ISIS fighters, the report said. Up to 500 Yazidi women and girls were kidnapped and sexually abused by militants in August 2014. In October, more than 500 Yazidi women and young girls were reportedly abducted by the ISIS when they stormed the Sinjar region in northern Iraq. ISIS took control of Mosul in June 2014 after the fall of Iraqi army in the city and since then it has been slaughtering the residents for various charges, just to spread fear. US President Barack Obama said on Monday that he expected Mosul to be retaken from the ISIS "eventually". "My expectation is that by the end of the year, we will have created the conditions whereby Mosul will eventually fall," Obama had said. ALSO READ: ISIS terrorists looking to target European beach resorts, says intelligence As Islamic State's income drops 30 per cent, crazy fines imposed ALSO WATCH: Exposed: The ISIS sex slave racket --- ENDS --- advertisement Joker is about a 30-year old villager and his fury over the government and the political structures. He is considered as a joker for rebelling against the common notions, and for asking questions. By India Today Web Desk: After the heart-wrenching romantic film Cuckoo, Raja Murugan is back with a political drama: Joker. The film has Guru Somasundaram in the lead role. Somasundaram is well known for his brief roles in Aaranya Kaandam and Jigarthanda. ALSO READ: White trailer - Watch Mammookka romance Huma Qureshi in Uday Ananthan's film The story is about a 30-year old villager and his fury over the government and the political structures. He is considered as a joker for rebelling against the common notions. advertisement The political satire has debutant Ramya and Gayathri in the female leads. The film also stars Chelladurai and Balamurugan in supporting roles. Produced by Dream Warrior Pictures, the film has music by Sean Roldan. Here's the trailer of Joker: Karthik Subbaraj, who has worked with Somasundaram in Jigarthanda, took to Twitter to wish the cast and crew of Joker. #Joker trailer hits hard on politics. Starring, the acting teacher Somu.. All the best Raju murugan sir & team https://t.co/abjC2REz6R karthik subbaraj (@karthiksubbaraj) April 21, 2016 --- ENDS --- The hole, measuring one metre in diameter, was hidden underneath a large industrial dumpster. By Indo-Asian News Service: US federal authorities today confirmed the discovery of a tunnel, the longest cross-border passageway ever unearthed along California's border with Mexico, through which drugs were being smuggled. The 800-metre-long passageway extends from a house in Tijuana, Mexico, to a hole in a commercial lot in an Otay Mesa industrial park in California. The hole, measuring one metre in diameter, was hidden underneath a large industrial dumpster, EFE news reported. advertisement The sophisticated tunnel was equipped with lights, rails and a ventilation system, as well as an elevator from the passageway leading to a closet inside the house in Mexico, authorities said. As a result of the discovery, federal authorities took control of the tunnel and a parking lot where they planned to transfer nearly 6.356 tonnes of marijuana and over one tonne of cocaine, worth more than $22 million. "Marijuana is something we regularly see associated with these tunnels, but not cocaine. We believe this is the largest cocaine seizure ever associated with a cross-border tunnel," said US Attorney Laura Duffy. A seven-month US Border Patrol investigation resulted in the arrests of six people with suspected links to the drug transfer tunnel. The probe began when authorities detected suspicious activity, including vehicles entering and exiting the California lot late at night, as well as unusual commercial activities in the area. A Border Patrol spokeswoman said the drugs were transported in small packages so they could pass through the hole in the Otay Mesa lot. This is the third cross-border tunnel in Southern California that federal agents have discovered in recent weeks. In the past five years, they have unearthed more than 75 tunnels on California and Arizona borders. --- ENDS --- The couple from Chitehra village have failed to get their marriage registered even after six months, with officials allegedly saying the move may trigger a riot. By Shashank Shekhar: Authorities have allegedly refused to make official the marriage of a Hindu man and a Muslim woman in Uttar Pradesh's Dadri town, fearing a resurgence of last year's communal tensions sparked by the mob-lynching of 52-year-old Mohammad Ikhlaq over rumours that he slaughtered a calf. The couple from Chitehra village have failed to get their marriage registered even after six months, with officials allegedly saying the move may trigger a riot. advertisement Marrying out of faith is considered taboo in large parts of India where consenting adults who have broken no laws have been threatened and beaten up by religious vigilantes. Manjeet Bhati (24) and Salma (20), who later changed her name to Sapna Arya, fled from Dadri in Gautam Budh Nagar district to Allahabad city on October 19 last year on a motorbike. Three days later, Salma adopted Hinduism and they got married at an Arya Samaj temple. The couple allege that they have repeatedly visited government offices over the past five months and met senior district officers, but no one has helped them. They also say that the marriage registrar who refused to make their marriage official, demanded a bribe of Rs 20,000. The district magistrate of Gautam Budh Nagar, NP Singh, promised that the marriage will be registered and asked a senior officer to look into the matter. Marriage "If both of them are adults then there should not be any problem in registering their marriage. I cannot deny that they were told by a government officer that registering their marriage can ignite communal violence," Singh said, adding that the rule of the land should prevail. "A similar case happened in Meerut." Though prominent celebrities such as Bollywood stars Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan are Muslim men married to Hindu women, interfaith marriage remains a sensitive issue in the country. Bhati claims that he has met all the senior district officers, including the district magistrate, ADM, SDM and city magistrate, but received no support, following which he wrote to Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, asking him to intervene. "We went to the marriage registrar in January but he said that he will not register our marriage as I was a Hindu and my wife a Muslim and this could ignite violence in the area. I assured him that no local has a problem with our marriage and our village is quite peaceful, but still he refused and also demanded Rs 20,000," Manjeet said. The incident emerged close on the heels of a Hindu woman and a Muslim man in Karnataka solemnising their marriage this month despite howls of protest from hardline Hindu groups and caste leaders. advertisement Manjeet and Sapna said they initially feared attacks from the bride's relatives and she sought protection from the area's senior superintendent of police. "My parents died while I was quite young. I was living with some relatives who wanted me to marry an elderly man," Sapna told Mail Today. "But Manjeet and I were friends for long and we decided to get married." Her relatives filed an FIR against Manjeet in Meerut after she eloped with him. They said Sapna was a minor and he had kidnapped her. "As my relatives have threatened to kill us, we sought protection from police for a month and then we appeared before the magistrate in Meerut in December 2015," she said. "I produced my certificate and my medical test was done, which established I was an adult. The magistrate ordered that I was free to live with anyone and I chose my husband." Problem The couple say no one in their village has a problem with their marriage and residents see them as a symbol of unity. "After the mob-lynching incident, people in the area have become more sensitive," Manjeet said. "There were many rumours afterwards, but no violence happened." advertisement Also Read: Muslim couple beaten up in Madhya Pradesh over beef rumours --- ENDS --- By PTI: New Delhi, Apr 21 (PTI) External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj today said an Indian national working as a nurse in Oman was murdered and has asked the Indian Ambassador there for a report on the matter. "I am sorry to know about the murder of Ms.Chikku Robert - an Indian national from Kerala working as a nurse in Oman. advertisement "I have asked Indian Ambassador to ascertain all the facts and report. My heartfelt condolences to the bereaved family," Swaraj tweeted. According to reports, Robert (25) was stabbed to death while resisting a robbery bid. PTI PYK PRM PRM --- ENDS --- Giriraj Singh has proposed to revoke the voting rights of all those people who have more than two children. In the run-up to the 2014 election, Giriraj Singh had called for all those critical of Narendra Modi to be sent to Pakistan. By India Today Web Desk: In remarks that might trigger another row, Union minister Giriraj Singh, known for his controversial statements, has proposed to revoke the voting rights of all those people who have more than two children in order to check what he claims is the declining Hindu population in the country. "The Hindu population decline is worrying. There is a law needed on population control for all religions," the Minister of State for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises said, a day after he made similar remarks at an event in Bihar's West Champaran district. advertisement "Everybody must have one or two children. The voting rights of those who don't follow should be revoked," he added. On Wednesday, Singh, while addressing an audience comprising mainly of Hindu saints and RSS workers, had said "our daughters will not be safe and might have to be kept under the veil, like in Pakistan" if the two-child policy is not followed. "Hindus should have two sons; Muslims too should have two sons. Our population is coming down. Bihar has seven such districts where our population has gone down. Population rules have to be changed, only then will our daughters be safe. Otherwise, like Pakistan, we too will have to keep our daughters under the veil," the BJP MP from Nawada was quoted by the Indian Express as saying in Bagaha in West Champaran. Giriraj Singh is not new to controversies. In the run-up to the 2014 election, he had called for all those critical of Narendra Modi to be sent to Pakistan. Last year, he was caught on camera saying that had former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi married a "Nigerian woman" instead of the "fair-skinned" Sonia Gandhi, the Congress would not have made her its president. ALSO READ | Rahul Gandhi's language makes Pak and Hafiz Saeed happy: Giriraj Singh Sonia's skin colour made her Congress president: Giriraj Singh --- ENDS --- Making matters worse, India is grappling with severe water shortages and drought affecting more than 300 million people - a quarter of the country's population. Most of the heat-wave victims were laborers and farmers in the states of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa. (Photo: Reuters) By AP: Weeks of sweltering temperatures have caused more than 160 deaths in southern and eastern parts of the country , officials said, warning that any relief from monsoon rains was still likely weeks away. IN PICS Most of the heat-wave victims were laborers and farmers in the states of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa, though temperatures elsewhere in country have also hit 45 degrees Celsius. advertisement Schools were closed last week in Odisha until at least April 26. Officials in Andhra Pradesh were giving out free water and buttermilk to help people stay hydrated. And everywhere, people have been urged to stay indoors during the hottest hours of the day. YK Reddy, a state meteorological official, said the temperatures were about 4-5 degrees Celsius hotter than normal for April. "Normally such high temperatures are recorded in the month of May," he said. Source: IMD Police have reported 55 heat-related deaths in Odisha and at least 45 in Andhra Pradesh. Sixty-six were reported in Telangana, though the state's Deputy Chief Minister, Mohammed Mahmood Ali, said the causes of death were still being verified. Meanwhile, a 12-year-old girl in the drought-stricken Maharashtra died from the heat while fetching water on Wednesday. Making matters worse, India is grappling with severe water shortages and drought affecting more than 300 million people - a quarter of the country's population. Thousands of distressed farmers have committed suicide, tens of thousands of farm animals have died, and crops have perished, with rivers, lakes and ponds drying up and groundwater tables sinking. Scrambling to deal with the crisis, officials have sent water tankers to worst-hit regions in Maharashtra, banning people from drilling deep wells and ordering farmers to shift away from growing water-guzzling sugarcane crops. The heat wave in India coincides with record-high temperatures across the globe. On Tuesday, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said March's average global temperature of 12.7 degrees Celsius was not only the hottest March, but continues a record 11-month streak that started last May. Source: IMD For southern India, this is the second consecutive year marred by a deadly heat wave. Last year, around 2,500 people died in scorching temperatures before the monsoon rains in early June. But while heat waves are relatively common during summers, authorities have done little to ensure water security or prepare urban populations for the risks. --- ENDS --- The senior officers have been stripped of their ranks, and perks and privileges, however, they will continue to receive their pensions and medical facilities. By Indo-Asian News Service: In an unprecedented move, Pakistan Army chief General Raheel Sharif has sacked 12 army officers, including two generals, over corruption charges. The officers include one Major General, one Lieutenant General, five Brigadiers, one Colonel, three Lieutenant Colonels and one Major, media reports said. The move comes days after General Sharif called for uprooting corruption and for across-the-board accountability. advertisement Geo News, quoting sources in the military, said the senior officers were sacked after a long-running internal inquiry conducted within the army for more than one year. The officers served in the Frontier Corps (FC) in Balochistan. The top names in the list include former Inspector-General Frontier Corps (IG FC) Balochistan Lieutenant General Obaidullah Khattak, and Major General Ijaz Shahid. Geo quoted sources saying that the senior officers have been stripped of their ranks, and perks and privileges. The officers will continue to receive their pensions and medical facilities. However, there has been no official announcement as yet from the military in this regard. The unprecedented move comes days after General Sharif said the ongoing war against terrorism and extremism cannot bring enduring peace and stability until the menace of corruption is uprooted from the country. On Tuesday, Sharif said that across-the-board accountability is necessary for the solidarity, integrity and prosperity of Pakistan. The "ongoing war against terrorism and extremism being fought with the backing of the entire nation cannot bring enduring peace and stability unless the menace of corruption is uprooted. Therefore, across the board accountability is necessary for the solidarity, integrity and prosperity of Pakistan," the Pakistan Army chief said during a visit to the Signals Regimental Centre in Kohat. "Pakistan Armed Forces will fully support every meaningful effort in that direction, which would ensure a better future for our next generations," he said. The army chief's call for across-the-board accountability came after Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was named in the explosive Panama Papers, which claimed that the PM and his family members have undeclared foreign assets. Opposition leaders in Pakistan have been demanding Nawaz's resignation and thorough probe into the Panama Papers revelations. ALSO READ: Pakistan army chief accuses India of undermining China investment corridor Sharif vs Sharif: Did Pakistan army chief know about Pathankot attack? Baloch activist Naela Qadri's tale of Pakistan army torture --- ENDS --- The Bombay High Court has asked the Mumbai Police to report the progress made in the Pratyusha Banerjee death case, but hasn't agreed to transfer the case to the Crime Branch. By India Today Web Desk: The Bombay High Court has refused to transfer the Pratyusha Banerjee death case to the Crime Branch and has asked the Mumbai Police to report the progress made in the case. The late actress' mother Shoma Banerjee had filed a petition seeking a probe by the Crime Branch. Also read: Pratyusha Banerjee's mother moves HC, seeks probe by Crime Branch advertisement "The investigation being done by the local police is misleading and we fear that in future it would be scuttled. We are seeking for the probe to be transferred to the crime branch under the supervision of the Commissioner of Police," Shoma's lawyer K T Thomas had mentioned in the petition before a division bench headed by Justice NH Patil on Wednesday. Also read: Rahul Raj Singh discharged from hospital The bench, however, sought to know why the parents of the actress feel the police was not doing its job. "How do you (parents) know the probe is misleading? Let the police investigate. It's (suicide) a recent incident," Justice Patil said. Also read: Pratyusha Banerjee underwent an abortion days before her death Pratyusha's parents have been alleging that their daughter could not have committed suicide and that her partner Rahul Raj Singh must have murdered her. Rahul has not been arrested, and has been granted anticipatory bail by the court. Also read: CINTAA to take action against Dolly Bindra, Rakhi Sawant --- ENDS --- From the team that gets her ready to her tricks to avoiding a wardrobe malfunction, here are the Queen's best kept style secrets! By Hemul Goel: With the Queen celebrating her 90th birthday today--which seems quite a phenomenal number to live up to--the monarch has seen more than her fair share of changes in her lifetime. From the wars that ravaged Britain, to the changes in the constitution, from the death of her son's ex-wife--Princess Diana--to her grandson's wedding to commoner Kate Middleton, one can say that as one of the longest ruling monarchs in the world, the Queen's been through it all. advertisement And if you've ever wondered how she still manages to look so graceful and posed at all times, here's the answer: there's an entire team in place that does that. But if you hear of the effort that goes into making the Queen look effortless for all the appearances she has to put in as part of her royal duties, the sheer process is bound to make you go into a tizzy. Here, we decode the Queen's style: The dressers Till date, the Queen favours dresses by three people. The first is Norman Hartnell, who designed outfits for the major milestones of her life like her wedding dress and her coronation attire, the second is Hardy Amies, who took care of the Queen's wardrobe till the Golden Jubilee in 2002, and then there's Angela Kelly, the Queen's Personal Assistant and Senior Dresser, who's been in charge of her attire ever since. For major occasions, up to 12 people make up the Queen's wardrobe team, including Angela, three dressmakers, a milliner and four dressers. Also read: Kate Middleton goes from ravishing in red in Bhutan to wow in white at the Taj Mahal The iconic coronation gown The Queen's always had a knack for wearing clothing with deeper diplomatic messages as she proved with her choice of coronation gown worn on 2 June 1953. Out of the eight options proposed by Norman Hartnell, the Queen agreed on the last one provided that the gown was embroidered with the floral emblems of Commonwealth countries like the English Tudor rose, Scots thistle, Welsh leek, Irish shamrock, Australian wattle, Canadian maple leaf, New Zealand silver fern, South African protea, lotus flowers for India and Ceylon and Pakistan's wheat, cotton, and jute. Picture courtesy: Instagram/@coolest4fashion Picture courtesy: Instagram/@coolest4fashion The colour palette The Queen loves her colours as much as she loves prints, and for good reason too. She once famously said, "If I wore beige, nobody would know who I am." And in case you're wondering why she wears so many pop colours, there's a perfectly valid reason for it. Her attire is chosen in order to make sure that she is visible even from a distance.The hats After the Queen's favourite milliner Freddie Fox, who created more than 350 hats for the Queen in over 34 years, the baton passed on to Rachel Trevor-Morgan, who prepares the dyes for her hats in a saucepan. advertisement Also read: Headgear envy: Queen Elizabeth seriously has the best hat collection And before the final product is created, each hat is preceded by a prototype in straw. A matching headscarf is also provided to the Queen, in case her hat gets wet or damaged. Picture courtesy: Instagram/@thesrdc The jewels When you have a jewellery vault that includes some of the largest diamonds in the world, choosing everyday bling can become mind-boggling! Thankfully for the Queen, Angela Kelly presents her with a selection of three-four varieties of jewels on trays that once belonged to her grandmother Queen Mary. So that makes the process of choosing slightly easier. The hair A Royal Warrant holder, the Queen's hairdresser for the past 19 years, Ian Carmichael travels once or twice a week to the Queen's residence to do her hair and also accompanies her on her tours abroad. The beauty cheat sheet The Queen's favourite beauty products include skincare and red lipstick from Clarins, Elizabeth Arden's Eight Hour Cream, hairbrushes from Kent Brushes and Essie nail polish in Ballet Slippers--a nude shade that matches beautifully with her rainbow outfits. Picture courtesy: Instagram/@xuin10 advertisement The gloves The Queen's been known to wear gloves from Royal Warrant holder glove-making brand Cornelia James, since her wedding. The company's now run by Genevieve James, who told Daily Mail that "the Queen's gloves are brushed cotton for daytime. They help protect her hands when she's shaking so many, and of course they're washable. She'll change them several times a day. For evening she has nylon ones; I think she finds them lighter." The handbags The Queen is often spotted carrying bags from Royal Warrant holder luxury leather handbag brand, Launer. During the day the Queen uses a black, white or beige bag by the brand, while she switches to a dressier looking gold or silver bag for the evening. The bags come with long straps, so that they can be carried easily and aren't divided in the middle. With all her engagements, the Queen manages to go by with just one to two bags per year! While a lot's been written about the contents of the Queen's handbags--from lipstick to artificial sweeteners, family photographs and good luck charms to a perfectly folded GBP 5 or GBP 10 note for church, the more important part is the use of the object itself. According to a report published on The Telegraph, "Her Majesty's personal bag is used as much to send secret signals to staff as it is to carry personal items. If the Queen places her handbag on the table at dinner, it signals that she wants the event to end in the next five minutes. If she puts her bag on the floor, it shows she's not enjoying the conversation and wants to be rescued by her lady-in-waiting." advertisement Also read: Prince George poses for his first stamp ahead of Queen's 90th birthday The shoes The Queen prefers calf leather court shoes in black, beige or navy, with a 2 1/4 inch heel. Her evening shoes come in three different designs in satin, silver and gold. However, the Queen does take to wearing flatter shoes when she has to manoeuvre through rough terrain. The Queen's long-term designer, Stewart Parvin, once told the Sunday Times that the Queen's shoes are broken in by someone else to maximise comfort, as, "The Queen can never say 'I'm uncomfortable, I can't walk any more.' She has the right to have someone wear them in." The umbrellas The Queen has a collection of transparent umbrellas made by Fulton, each of which come with edging and handle in a shade that matches her attire. Picture courtesy: Instagram/@queen_elizabeth_fanpage The perfume With carnations being her favourite bloom, the Queen's favourite fragrance is White Rose from Royal Warrant holder perfumery Floris, according to a report published on Stylist. The log While we have seen the Queen recycle her clothes in a way that makes them look new time and again, the Queen's staff maintains a spreadsheet wherein every item she wears on an engagement is mentioned along with its time and date, so as to prevent the Queen from repeating a similar outfit or combination soon. The wardrobe malfunctions In her book, Dressing the Queen: The Jubilee Wardrobe, Angela Kelly revealed the way in which the team ensured that the Queen wouldn't be left red-faced because of a wardrobe malfunction. She wrote, "If we think this is a possibility, we will very occasionally use weights, discreetly sewn into the seams of day dresses." Also, a fan is used to test the way lightweight fabrics like chiffon, organza or silk will move when the weather's breezy. Kate Middleton, are you listening? Picture: Reuters Her outfits come with zips for ease of changing and splits or pleats are incorporated into fitted dresses for fluidity of movement. The care All the Queen's old garments are packed in black tissue paper to prevent metal threads from tarnishing. According to a Daily Mail report, the Queen's garments and accessories are usually stored at the Buckingham Palace in boxes and cotton bags, inside mahogany wardrobes with airtight doors. --- ENDS --- Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on Thursday said it that the Rafale deal is not complete as yet but is at an "advanced stage" and the intention is to "close it quite soon". By Press Trust of India: A day after BJP claimed the Rafale aircraft deal with France has been "finalised" at USD 8.8 billion (Rs 59,000 crore), Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on Thursday said it is not complete as yet but at an "advanced stage" and the intention is to "close it quite soon". In a lighter vein, he told reporters that the BJP tweet only indicates that journalists write stories very convincingly. advertisement BJP had on Wednesday tweeted a graphic, saying that the Rafale combat aircraft deal has been "finalised" and the Narendra Modi government had saved over Rs 21,000 crore in the "re-negotiation" with the French government. Defence Ministry sources had earlier said the deal was at an advanced stage and both India and France had narrowed down their differences over the pricing issue. "I can only tell you this much that while the deal is in quite an advanced stage, and we intent to close it quite soon, I still can't say that negotiations are totally cleared until we sign the deal or at least the deal is forwarded to the Cabinet for approval," Parrikar told reporters. The deal is expected to be finalised by May end. India has been bargaining hard with France over the pricing of the 36 fighter planes, a deal that was announced first by Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi in April last year. The cost of the 36 Rafales, as per the earlier tender while keeping the cost escalation into account, comes to around Rs 65,000 crore. India has been bargaining for a price that is less than 8 billion Euro (Rs 59,000 crore). "The deal to buy 36 state-of-the-art Rafale aircraft from France at 12 billion dollar (Rs 80,000 crore) was re-negotiated and finalised at 8.8 billion dollar (around Rs 59,000 crore)," the BJP tweet had said. The government "saved" public money and the deal resulted in gain of "technological knowledge" and "strengthening the air power to defend the border", it had said. Also read: Rafale deal finalised, says BJP --- ENDS --- Newlyweds Craig and Joan Lyons have known each other for the past 30 years. By India Today Web Desk: How big a part of your wedding dress are your tresses? Even on an average day, any girl would despise the idea of getting rid of her locks. So, it undoubtedly takes a lot of courage for a girl to do it on the day of her wedding. This is a touching story of a Liverpool bride, who, on the day of her wedding reception, decided to shed her locks in solidarity with her husband who is fighting cancer. advertisement Childhood sweethearts and newlyweds Craig and Joan Lyons have known each other for over 30 years, and have just got married. Craig and Joan were childhood friends and have known each other for more than thirty years. But according to Craig, he's always been in love with her, "I fell in love with her as soon as I set my eyes on her when we were 14," Craig told the Daily Mail. Also read: How a bread seller earned a modelling contract after photobombing a celebrity's shoot The couple had decided to get married a little later, but had to prepone the wedding when they learned that Craig's pancreatic cancer had became terminal, and thus decided to turn the wedding into a charity fundraising event. After shaving her head, Joan donated her hair to the Little Princess Trust, a charity that creates wigs for children who've lost their hair during cancer treatment. On donating her hair and the fundraising event, Joan said that she wanted to complete the head shave task in Craig's honour, and to honour and support those affected by the life-limiting illness. Joan Lyons getting her head shaved on her wedding day. Also read: This 11-year-old cancer patient's wish came true when she walked the NYFW ramp like a true supermodel "It was obviously the first time I had seen Joan without her hair and she looked beautiful, absolutely stunning," Craig told the Daily Mail. "She is the woman of my dreams." Wedding photographer Kimberley Struth shot the wedding. --- ENDS --- The professor of creative writing is out with another masterpiece, Before We Visit the Goddess. She gets candid about why she'll continue to have headstrong women in her novels, and what will come from her writing desk next. By Rishibha Gupta: Q. What inspired your latest work, Before We Visit the Goddess? I have been thinking a great deal about something that my mother (who has passed away now) used to tell me when I was growing up--that it was important for me to be an independent woman, a successful woman. In this book, I examine, through the lives of three generations of women--Sabitri the grandmother, Bela the mother, and Tara the daughter--what it means to be successful and independent, and whether this meaning shifts as we move from continent to continent, and from one period of time to another. Independence and success have their costs too, and I examine some of those in this novel. advertisement Q. The tale is about three generations of women, Sabitri, Bela and Tara fighting their own demons to be successful. Do you think irrespective of the times women live in, there is a common thread that binds them in overcoming everyday challenges? I think irrespective of the times women live in, they are impelled by similar desires: the desire to love and be loved, the desire to create a safe and happy home for their children, the desire to create something unique and of value, something artistic, a legacy to leave behind. But depending on the times that these women live in, the shape of the happy home or the thing that they wish to create (such as Sabitri's sweet shop) can be different. The relationship they have with the partner they love can also be different, especially in terms of the power balance within the relationship. This is certainly true if you compare the three women in Before We Visit the Goddess. Q. Is it a conscious decision to have headstrong women characters in your books, be it Tilo from The Mistress of Spices, Panchali of The Palace of Illusions or Sabitri of Before We Visit the Goddess? I am not sure if I would call it a conscious decision. I think it is more about something deep down in me being drawn to depict strong women over and over again. It may be a subconscious tribute I pay to the strong women in my life, such as my mother, who brought me up with difficulty as a single parent. It may also be my belief that in literature we need more portrayals of strong women; women who take control of their lives and refuse to be victims, no matter how difficult a hand fate has dealt them. We need more women role models that women readers can relate to. Some of the strong women I depict are headstrong also, and this is rich material for fiction because it often lands them in situations of drama, conflict and inner growth, and that makes their story interesting! Q. What is it that we will get to read next from your writing desk? advertisement I am working on a mystery novel set on a tea estate in a hill-town in the Himalayas! This is a different genre for me and I am excited. I am also researching a major novel on Sita, and that is also exciting for me. I envision it as a companion piece to my novel, Palace of Illusions. Q. You are both, a writer and a teacher of creative writing at the University of Houston. Which role do you enjoy more? That is a difficult question; it is like asking me which of my children do I love the most! I love both teaching and writing for different reasons. They give me different kinds of satisfaction and each one strengthens my ability to do the other. But ultimately, there is nothing that makes me as happy as writing. The creativity involved in such a task is at once exhilarating and humbling. Q. Do your students read your works regularly? What is the best compliment you have received from them? I don't teach my work, but my students do pick up my books from time to time and come to talk to me about them. Since I teach creative writing, students often ask me about the techniques I use in order to create a particular story or novel. So, usually we will have a craft-related discussion. But one of the compliments that I remember with fondness is when a student came to me and said that reading one of my stories, Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter, from my collection The Unknown Errors of Our Lives had made her much more sympathetic towards her grandmother, who had come to live with them. Until now, she had been very impatient with this grandmother, and often complained about her, but after reading this story, which is about an old woman who immigrates to America to live with her son, she completely changed her attitude and even went to apologise to her grandmother for not understanding how difficult it was for her to leave her own home and all her friends and come and stay with someone else in a different country. I have always believed that books are capable of changing people's perspectives and making them more compassionate, and this was a small example of that. It made me very happy. --- ENDS --- advertisement As more women discover the joys of travelling solo, three ardent travellers share their favourite destinations that are perfect for a solo escape. By Lipla Negi: Women find it liberating as well as soul calming. Travelling solo not just gives them a respite from their daily routine, it also helps them introspect and indulge in their own company, which on some of these occasions is the best company you can have. No wonder, from exploring an offbeat destination to simply signing up for a yoga retreat on the beach, the varied joys of solo sojourns are driving an increasing number of women to pack their bags and embark on a "meonly" holiday. advertisement Today, women see travelling solo as an uplifting expression. "When it came to travelling solo, I initially found the idea a bit intimidating. I had travelled far and wide on my own a lot of times but that was for work. And that's when I realised that I need to overcome this fear. Once I did that, I got hooked to it," says Neha Lidder, Marketing Director, DLF Emporio. It's also seen as embarking on a "road to rediscovery of the self ". You get self reliant, says Kanika Nevatia, Manager -Marketing Communication, ixigo. "It always helps you rediscover who you are as a person as you are not bound by someone else's interests, likes and dislikes. It also empowers you to challenge your fear and insecurities and forces you to be independent and self-reliant," she says. Experts look at it as a trend that will continue to experience an upward swing in the coming years. "While solo trips account for 13 per cent of all trips planned by women last year, now it is close to 19 per cent indicating the large interest," says Hari Nair, Founder and CEO, HolidayIQ. Other experts in the market agree. "Women are looking to explore new destinations that offer unique experience and help them enjoy in their own company. The urban women are looking to explore places like Goa, North-East, Pondicherry and Ladakh," says Sharat Dhall, President, Yatra.com. Anupama Dayal Fashion designer Solo escape: Nagaland Picture courtesy: Mail Today Why: It's the last word on the exotic. It gives you once in a lifetime experience. At the same time, it's a place for fearless explorers and adventurous foodies. The fact that you are out of your comfort zone helps you grow. What to do: Shop at the night markets in Kohima. Dance with the Naga tribes. Try some pottery with the locals. Buy some beautiful handicrafts. Take a short trip to the Dzukou valley of flowers. It is enchanting! Try and visit Nagaland during the Hornbill festival, which is held every year in the month of December. Everything comes in one place around this time. advertisement Where to stay: Wherever you get! I advise to book six months in advance. I stayed at Cimorb in Kohima; it's decent hotel. What to eat: The cuisine is totally different. You must try the puffed rice with sesame. Must try: There are lots of tribal villages around and people are warm and welcoming. Try staying with the Angami tribe and live their life for a couple of days. Deeba Rajpal Food blogger Solo escape: Banaras or Varanasi Picture courtesy: Mail Today It's the heart of India, and gives you a taste of the country's culture, colours, heritage and food. Everygali(street) has a fascinating story to tell. What to do: Morning arti, then sunrise at Assi Ghat with Indian music and visit Sarnath, Ramnagar Fort & Rajghat -Lal Khan Tomb. Shop at: Vishwanath ki gali, Gowdulia, Chowk. Must try: Go for Indian classical music concert at International Music Centre Ashram, on Wednesday and Saturday. Also, taste fresh cheese at the shop of Italian cheesemaker Emilio Marconi near Assi Ghat. Sagrika Mittal Goyal Fashion designer Solo escape: Goa Why: The place has magical languid appeal to it. The stress vacates the mind as soon as your flight touches the ground. advertisement What to do: Forget beach parties, How about yoga on the beach? Nothing can beat the excitement of catching the first ray of the sun. Goa today boasts of a new crop of restaurants where both good food and live music is served hot & fresh. Sign up for a belly dancing class, an amazing way to de-stress. Get hold of a juicy novel and head to the beach. Roam around the spice market. Where to stay: At any of the beach resorts on Patnem beach. What to eat: From fish curry to prawns, Goan food is amazing. Must try: Capture the sunrise and sunset from various beaches in Goa, as each offers a different view. --- ENDS --- By India Today Web Desk: After being diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, 16-year-old Catherine Malatesta passed away on August 2, 2015. But May 29, 2015 is the date we prefer talking about more. May 29, 2015 was the night of Catherine's junior prom, for which she stepped out looking gorgeous in a beautiful, blue prom dress. Reportedly, the teenager was released from the hospital just a night before, specially to mark her presence at the event that is said to be nothing short of a milestone event in a youngster's life. advertisement The night was all Catherine could've asked for. "She turned to me and said, 'Mom, for the first time in a long time, I actually feel beautiful,'" Catherine's mother Jennifer Goodwin told TODAY. Unfortunately, Catherine breathed her last just days after her prom night at Boston Children's Hospital, where she succumbed to her tumour on August 2, 2015. And now, to honour their friend Catherine, a group of girls have decided to wear the same beautiful, blue dress to their respective prom nights--something that they've named, The Sisterhood of the Travelling Prom Dress. Also Read: This girl got expelled from her sorority, so Tinder offered her a scholarship "It's really special that these girls were so passionate about wearing the dress. That was the last time they saw Catherine out-and-about with her radiant smile and having a great time at the prom so I think for them, it's pretty special," Catherine's father, Gregg Malatesta told ABC News. The sisterhood--which has the support and love of both Catherine's mother and father--is made up of "two girls from Catherine's hometown of Arlington, Massachusetts, and two that Catherine knew from camp in New Hampshire." Also Read: Why these before and after pictures of a 'fine' looking woman's anxiety attack demand your attention The prom dress has already started its new journey, with Jillian Danton, 17--Catherine's childhood friend from Arlington-- having worn it to her own prom at Arlington High School. "l definitely felt her with me the whole time and it was an experience I wouldn't trade for anything in the world. It's an extra memory of her that I have to hold on to," Jillian told TODAY. --- ENDS --- Roopa Ganguly is known for her role as Draupadi in BR Chopra's television serial, Mahabharat. By India Today Web Desk: A senior Trinamool Congress leader, who made a series of derogatory statements against actor-politician Roopa Ganguly at an election rally on Wednesday, has apologised for the remarks. "I am really sorry for making personal remarks against Roopa Ganguly. I apologise," Abdur Razzak Molla, who joined Mamata Banerjee's party after he was expelled by the Left in 2014, told ANI. advertisement During a rally in the state undergoing a six-phase Assembly election, Molla said he "knew the length of the cigarettes she (Ganguly) smokes" and that "she really is Draupadi". Roopa Ganguly is known for her role as Draupadi in BR Chopra's television serial, Mahabharat. The apology from Mollah came after the Election Commission issued a showcause notice againt him for the statements. "Presiding officer of Bhangar constituency has issued a showcause notice to him for making derogatory remarks against Roopa Ganguly. We are investigating the matter," additional chief electoral officer Dibyendu Sarkar said. Molla has been fielded by the TMC from Bhangar Assembly constituency in South 24 Parganas district. Ganguly is the BJP's candidate from Howrah North constituency. He had been issued the same notice earlier too and even issued a censure by the poll panel for violating the mode code of conduct. Meanwhile, the BJP and also the CPM questioned the silence of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee over the remarks. "From Presidency (student molestation incident) to Moonmoon Sen, Roopa ; physical attacks to verbal assaults by TMC goons and leaders continue. Mam CM, why are you silent?" CPM West Bengal secretary Surya Kanta Mishra said on Twitter. --- ENDS --- An army official said security forces began a search operation after they received specific information about the presence of militants in Putshai area of Lolab, and the area was cordoned off. By India Today Web Desk: At least three militants were killed today in an encounter with security forces in Lolab area of Kupwara in Jammu and Kashmir. An army official said security forces began a search operation after they received specific information about the presence of militants in Putshai area of Lolab, and the area was cordoned off. He revealed that as the search operation was going on, militants, who were in hiding, fired upon them and triggered a gunbattle with the security forces. advertisement The official added that the operation is still going on when reports last came in. Also Read: Kupwara encounter: 1 terrorist killed, AK 56 rifle recovered Twin encounters between terrorists, security forces in Jammu and Kashmir --- ENDS --- By PTI: Colombo, Apr 21 (PTI) Britain today raised concerns over Sri Lankas human rights record during 2015, days after the US detailed several reported violations from the Tamil-dominated North-East. "Sri Lanka isone of30 Human Rights Priority Countries (HRPCs); countries where the UK hasserious human rights concerns and hopes to engage positively to develop human rights performance," said a British Foreign office report. advertisement The report commends improvement in the human rights situation in Sri Lanka during 2015, while also noting that some concerns still remain. It recognisesthe positive steps taken by Lanka during 2015 to improve freedom of expression and freedom of movement, reduce inter-community tensions, and restore the independence of institutions such as the Human Rights Commission. It also notes the governments willingness while stating positive changes are less apparent in the north and east. Human rights defenders continued to report harassment and surveillance in 2015 and incidents of torture, and sexual and gender-based violence. British Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged 6.6 million pounds over the next three years to continue support for reconciliation and human rights. Sri Lanka was ranked alongside Afghanistan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Burma, Burundi, Central African Republic, China, Colombia, Democratic People?s Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Libya, Maldives among UKs 30 human rights priority countries. The US State Departments 2015 Sri Lankan Human Rights report details several reported violations from the Tamil-dominated North-East. "The major human rights problems reported during the year included harassment of civil society activists, journalists, and persons viewed as sympathisers of the banned terrorist group the LTTE as well as arbitrary arrest and detention, torture, rape, and other forms of sexual and gender-based violence committed by police and security forces," it said. PTI CORR ZH DK --- ENDS --- According to sources, Lucky, who was working with a software company, was depressed after he failed to successfully develop a social networking mobile application. By India Today Web Desk: A 33-year-old software engineer committed suicide by inhaling nitrogen gas at his residence in SR Nagar in Hyderabad on Wednesday. Lucky Gupta, a resident of DK Road, researched the easiest and painless method of suicide on the internet and finally decided to inhale nitrogen asphyxiation to end his life. According to sources, Lucky, who was working with a software company, was depressed after he failed to successfully develop a social networking mobile application. advertisement On Wednesday afternoon, his father grew suspicious as his son did not wake up at his usual time. When he entered Lucky's bedroom, he found him lying dead. Lucky was wearing a nose mask which was connected to a three-feet long nitrogen gas cylinder. Family members found a suicide note, which read that he inhaled the poisonous gas to end his life without undergoing any pain. The techie's body has been taken for a postmortem and a case of suspicious death has been registered under Section 174 of the CrPc. --- ENDS --- By PTI: From Lalit K Jha Washington, Apr 21 (PTI) The India-US Clean Energy Finance Task Force has met here to discuss ways for India to meet its ambitious energy targets for renewable energy by 2022. The Indian delegation included K S Popli, CMD of the Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency Limited (IREDA) and Taranjit Singh Sandhu, Deputy Indian Ambassador to US. advertisement In addition to the government-to-government meeting, the Task Force also convened a half-day, high-level dialogue on Scaling Clean Energy Investment in India with leading finance experts from commercial banks, developers, asset managers, institutional investors, and other entities working on clean energy finance in India. A presidential initiative announced by US President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Task Force is an innovative bilateral approach to clean energy financing. It seeks to help India meet its ambitious energy targets for renewable energy by 2022. "US and Indian government experts are working together to design a package of finance initiatives that will increase the flow of private capital investment for Indias renewable energy targets," the State Department said. During the meeting, the Task Force representatives underscored their commitment to launching these initiatives in India to assist the government?s efforts to scale clean energy investment, the statement said. The Task Force is co-chaired by Special Envoy Amos Hochstein and Indias Ministry of New and Renewable Energy Secretary Upendra Tripathy. It is complemented by the Indian private-sector led Clean Energy Finance Forum (CEFF), a multi-stakeholder group committed to finding the right mix of policy reforms and incentives to bring capital financing to the Indian renewable energy sector. PTI LKJ NSA --- ENDS --- By Press Trust of India: Amid the US push to expand cooperation with India in the space sector, the country's nascent private space industry has expressed its opposition to the large scale use of low cost ISRO launch vehicles for putting American satellites into orbits. Such a move, corporate leaders and officials of the fast- emerging American private space industry told lawmakers this week would be detrimental to the future health of the private sector US space companies as it would be tough for them to compete against low-cost Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launch vehicles, which they alleged are subsidised by the Indian government. advertisement "I think the concern about using Indian boosters is not so much the transfer of sensitive technology to a nation that is a fellow democracy, but rather whether the Indian launches are subsidised by the government to a degree that other market actors would be priced out of the market," Elliot Holokauahi Pulham, CEO of Space Foundation, said. Testifying before a Congressional committee, Pulham said there has been some discussion about allowing US built satellites to fly on boosters such as the Indian PSLV. Eric Stallmer, president Commercial Spaceflight Federation, opposed efforts to facilitate a government- subsidised foreign launch company. "In this case, India, to compete with US companies. Such policy runs counter to many national priorities and undermines the work and investment that has been made by the government and industry to ensure the health of the US commercial space launch industrial base," Stallmer said. He said the challenge right now is that the satellite manufacturers are making satellites at a quicker rate right now than the US has the launch capability. So a satellite is not making money while its sitting on the ground, he said. "Currently, the Indian launch vehicle PSLV has a sweet spot and has the capability of launching some of these satellites right now in a timely manner. We don't want to see US launches going overseas by any means, whether its to India, Russia or whomever else. But right now, from the satellite, you know, producers and manufacturers, they need to get their assets up in the sky as quick as possible," Stallmer said. Noting that the current policy with the waivers and the review is a sound policy, he said the US should stringently look at every launch that is taking place in every vehicle or every payload that the US are putting up on an Indian vehicle. "I think it really needs to be evaluated. We hope to phase this out as a new generation of launched vehicles come online," Stallmer said. --- ENDS --- People lined up in large numbers outside the polling booths, as voting began for the third phase of Bengal Assembly election involving 62 seats spread over four districts today. Polling begins for third phase of Assembly elections in West Bengal. By India Today Web Desk: The polling for the crucial third phase of West Bengal Assembly election began today at 7 am. Twenty two constituencies in Murshidabad, 17 in Nadia and 16 in Burdwan districts as also seven in north Kolkata are up for grabs in today's election. In Kolkata, it will be a big test for the ruling Trinamool Congress in Jorasanko constituency after the Vivekananda road flyover collapse last month. The Trinamool Congress, however, is hoping big on seven seats in Kolkata. advertisement Alongwith Kolkata, Congress state president Adhir Chowdhury's stronghold Murshidabad will also vote today. The other two districts are Nadia and Burdwan. Over 1.37 crore voters are eligible to choose their legislators across 16,461 polling stations, including 10 auxiliary booths, from a field of 418 candidates -- 34 of them female. Here are the highlights: - 67.80 per cent voting reported till 3 pm in the third phase of West Bengal Assembly polls. Polling percentage till 11 am Overall: 39.76 per cent Murshidabad: 42.99 per cent Nadia: 40.78 per cent Kolkata North: 32.71 per cent Bardhaman: 37.33 per cent -18.29 per cent voting recorded till 9 am. - Firing and bombing at booth no 78 and 83 of Ketugram area under Burdwan district; 3 voters injured, situation tense. Goons seen brandishing pistols in Burdwan as third phase of polling is underway in West Bengal pic.twitter.com/aAzRstlHP0&; ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 - A CPI-M activist was killed after being attacked by crude bombs in West Bengal's Murshidabad district, police said. The incident occurred in Domkal, one of the 62 seats in which polling for the third phase of Bengal assembly election spread over four districts is underway. - Congress-Trinamool Congress workers clash outside a polling booth. - Congress leader Somen Mitra casts his vote in North Kolkata's St.Paul's Cathedral College. Congress leader Somen Mitra casts his vote in North Kolkata's St.Paul's Cathedral College #westbengalpolls pic.twitter.com/88Zllwipdh&; ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 - People wait in large numbers outside a polling booth in Murshidabad for voting in the third phase of West Bengal election. - A differently-abled person arrives to cast his vote in North Kolkata's St.Paul's Cathedral College. A differently abled person arrives to cast his vote in North Kolkata's St.Paul's Cathedral College #westbengalpolls pic.twitter.com/pPbpVDSmno&; ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 - The ruling Trinamool, and the BJP are contesting in all the seats in this phase. - To avoid the scorching sun as the day progresses, many voters are ready to exercise their franchise early in the morning. - Voting began at 7 am in 16,461 polling stations and will go on till 6 pm. advertisement - Among the major candidates in this phase are state ministers and Trinamool contestants Rabiranjan Chattopadhyay, Sashi Panja, Sadhan Pandey, Subrata Saha, former state minister and CPI-M candidates Anisur Rahaman and Debesh Das, Congress legislature party leader Md. Sohrab and former state party president Somendranath Mitra and Ritesh Tiwari from the BJP. - Of the 418 candidates in the fray, 61 are crorepatis, 80 have criminal cases against them, with 65 of them declaring serious criminal offences like murder and rape against their name. - Key candidates whose fate will be sealed today include Trinamool ministers Shashi Panja and Sadhan Pande, BJP national secretary Rahul Sinha, five-time Congress MLA Md Sohrab, CPI-M MLA Anisur Rahman and retired IPS officer Nazrul Islam. - Polling will be held in three more phases ending on May 5. - So far, voters in 105 of the total 294 constituencies have exercised their right to franchise on three dates -- April 4, 11 and 17 -- in the first two phases. ALSO READ | Bumper voting in second phase of Assembly polls in Assam, West Bengal --- ENDS --- Election Commission officials have received over 1,500 complaints, including those of violence, voter intimidation and disruption of the poll process. At least 47 people were held in the metropolis itself. By Indo-Asian News Service: Amid incidents of violence that left one person dead and several others injured, West Bengal saw over 67 per cent votes cast in 62 constituencies during the first six hours on Thursday in the third phase of the assembly elections. Election Commission officials have received over 1,500 complaints, including those of violence, voter intimidation and disruption of the poll process. At least 47 people were held in the metropolis itself. advertisement The constituencies that went to polls on Thursday included 22 in Murshidabad, 17 in Nadia, 16 in Burdwan districts and seven in north Kolkata. Thursday's balloting marked the second and final round of voting in Burdwan, where nine constituencies went to polls on April 11. "Till 3 pm, overall 67.55 per cent polling was recorded. The turnout in Murshidabad was 70.32 per cent, Nadia 68.62 per cent, Burdwan 70.55 per cent and Kolkata 49.43 per cent," an Election Commission official said. Amid sweltering heat, incidents of violence were reported in Murshidabad, Nadia and Burdwan districts, leaving one dead and several others injured. Tahidul Islam, a Communist Party of India-Marxist activist, was killed when crude bombs were hurled at him in Domkal in Murshidabad district. While the Election Commission sought a report on the incident, CPI-M leader Anisur Rahaman blamed the Trinamool Congress for the killing, but the ruling party denied it. Trinamool's Domkal nominee Soumik Hossain claimed the death was a result of a clash between the CPI-M and the Congress supporters. Besides, at least four others were attacked in Domkal allegedly for casting their votes. "Last night, some people threatened me not to vote but I chose to ignore that. When I was returning after casting my vote, I was attacked," said one of the injured who was admitted to a hospital. Whistle-blower former Indian Police Service officer Nazrul Islam, who too is contesting from Domkal, accused the EC of being "intentionally incompetent". "The EC has chosen to be intentionally incompetent; the reason being a tacit understanding between the ruling parties at the Centre (BJP) and the state (Trinamool)," added Islam, a candidate of the Mulnibasi Party floated by him. Congress state president Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury alleged that central security forces were "absent" in many places in Murshidabad and said complaints to the EC have been made about the "district administration's biased role towards the Trinamool". Reports of violence were also received from Ketugram in Burdwan district where three people were injured after crude bombs were hurled near a polling booth. Several crude bombs were also seized from near a booth at Saguna in Nadia district. Voters in Chakdaha in Nadia district alleged they were "prevented from voting by Trinamool goons". advertisement At least four people were injured in Mangalkote of Burdwan with Trinamool's Siddiqullah Chowdhury accusing the CPI-M for the attack. Complaints of voter intimidation and scuffles between rival political activists were also received from several booths in Kolkata, including Beliaghta and Entally. A mediaperson was among the injured. At least 47 people have been arrested from the city, said a Kolkata police officer. Both the CPI-M and the Congress alleged their polling agents were assaulted and driven out in several booths. Booth-capturing and voter intimidation took place in a number of areas, they said. Over 1.37 crore (1,37,42,000) voters are eligible to elect their legislators across 16,461 polling stations, including 10 auxiliary booths, from among 418 candidates, including 34 women. Of the 62 constituencies that went to polls on Thursday, Trinamool and Congress had captured 29 and 16 seats respectively five years ago. Among the Left Front partners, the CPI-M won 14, and Revolutionary Socialist Party, Samajwadi Party and All India Forward Bloc, one each. The ruling Trinamool and the Bharatiya Janata Party are contesting all 62 constituencies in the third phase. advertisement The Left Front-Congress alliance is in fray for all the 62 constituencies. But the Congress nominees are also clashing with those from the Left Front in 11 seats - 10 in Murshidabad and one in Nadia. Among the major candidates in the third phase are state ministers and Trinamool contestants Rabiranjan Chattopadhyay, Sashi Panja, Sadhan Pandey, former state minister and CPI-M candidates Anisur Rahaman and Debesh Das, Congress legislature party leader Mohammad Sohrab and former state party president Somendranath Mitra, and BJP national secretary Rahul Sinha. Of the 418 candidates in the fray, 61 are crorepatis, 80 have criminal cases against them, with 65 candidates declaring serious offences like murder and rape against their name. So far, voters in 105 of the state's total 294 assembly constituencies have exercised their right to franchise on April 4, 11 and 17 in the first two phases. Polling in the fourth, fifth and sixth phases will be held on April 25, 30 and May 5 for 49, 53 and 25 constituencies respectively. Trinamool leader sorry for remarks against BJP's Roopa Ganguly --- ENDS --- The PM said he wants to spend A$230 million on 33 cybersecurity measures involving 100 new jobs. By Reuters: Australia set out a far-reaching cybersecurity strategy on Thursday, invoking the leaks of United States whistleblower Edward Snowden, terrorism and even the threat of war to push for a coordinated global approach to protection of online data. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who faces an election in July amid waning popularity, is trying to position himself as a leader who can transform Australia into a tech-savvy business hub as its economy deals with a commodities downturn. advertisement In a speech in Sydney, the former online entrepreneur said hacking attacks cost the country A$1 billion ($780 million) a year and unveiled a long list of measures - from appointing his own special cybersecurity adviser to having internet safety taught in schools - to make the online world freer and safer. "There's no global institution or infrastructure more important to the future prosperity and freedom of our global community than the Internet itself," Turnbull said, noting the Internet had spread "almost entirely without the direction or control of government". "The same qualities that enable us freely to harness cyberspace for prosperity can also provide an avenue for those who may wish to do us harm," he said. The country's Bureau of Meteorology and department store chain Kmart Australia Ltd, owned by Wesfarmers Ltd, both suffered online attacks last year, he noted. Turnbull acknowledged the public has become skeptical about government activity online since U.S. National Security Agency contractor Snowden leaked classified documents in 2013, and again this year when the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation sought access to an Apple Inc iPhone used by one of the shooters in killings in San Bernardino, California. But he said that "in certain very specific circumstances government will work with the private sector ... to fight serious online crime and extremism and to thwart terrorists and others who seek to hide their illegal activities online". Governments must also cooperate with each other, Turnbull said, otherwise "there is a risk that unexplained cyber incidents could escalate into conflict between states". Turnbull, who delivers his first budget in May, two months before the election, said he wants to spend A$230 million on 33 cybersecurity measures involving 100 new jobs, including extra resources for the government's Computer Emergency Response Team, and law enforcement agencies. He also plans to relocate the cybersecurity office of intelligence agency, the Australian Signals Directorate, outside the broader Australian Security Intelligence Organisation to make it easier to coordinate with businesses. Online security industry executives welcomed the strategy, noting it was Australia's first review of its cyber protection systems in six years. advertisement "Given the speed with which these things have moved, we are overdue, and strategy goes some way to making good progress," said Phil Vasic, the Australian managing director of U.S.-listed cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc, who was at the Turnbull speech. --- ENDS --- By Sahil Mohan Gupta : Earlier today we reported that Motorola was planning to give away the Moto 360 for free with purchase of each Moto X Force. The story was based on two different sources, who were aware of Motorola's plan. However, officially Motorola has denied that any such plan exists. Here is what Motorola says in its statement: "We have received an overwhelming response for Moto 360 and it is one of the best-selling smartwatches in the country today, we have no plans to give away Moto 360 for free with Moto X Force," said a Motorola spokesperson. advertisement --- Motorola is planning to give away the second generation Moto 360 smartwatch with the Moto X Force smartphone which recently received a massive Rs 15,000 discount. Motorola plans on offering the Moto X Force for the same price and bundle it with the 42mm Moto 360 smartwatch which is based on Android Wear. The 42mm model is the cheaper model priced at Rs 19,990 will be free with Moto X Force that is nowadays selling for Rs 34,999. The Moto 360 second generation has a 1.37-inch AMOLED screen with a resolution of 360x325 pixels. It is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 dual-core processor coupled with 4GB memory and 512MB RAM. It has a 300mAh battery. Also Read: Motorola Moto 360 (2nd gen) review: Imperfect, beautiful and best Android smartwatch The Moto X Force is Motorola's indestructible smartphone. It has a 5.4-inch AMOLED display with a shatter shield which is made out of 7 layers. It is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor, coupled with 3GB RAM. It has 32GB of storage and has a 21-megapixel camera on the back. The phone runs on Android Marshmallow. It is made out of metal frame with a kevlar back. Also Read: Motorola Moto X Force review: Meet the phone you can't break In addition to this, sources tell IndiaToday.in, that the leaked fourth generation model of the Moto G will not be called simply Moto G4, but Motorola is dabbling with a more complicated name. The new Moto G model is expected to come with front fingerprint scanner which will be a first for a Motorola branded phone. Lenovo, Motorola's parent company, has already said that in 2016 all Motorola devices will come with fingerprint scanners. Also Read: Moto G4 video and images leaked, India launch likely in mid-May --- ENDS --- Suspects involved in telecom swindle cases are escorted off an aircraft by the police at Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, Nov 10, 2015. [Photo/Xinhua] The visit by Taiwan judicial officials to the mainland, which started on Wednesday, was the first step in the right direction for the joint cross-Straits fight against telecommunication fraud. It came after some political forces on the island had made a public outcry following Kenya's repatriation to the mainland of 45 fraud suspects from the island last week. These forces accused the mainland of using the event to dwarf Taiwan both politically and judicially. But Kenya's repatriation was in accordance with international law, as almost all victims of the suspects' fraudulent activities live on the mainland. Politicizing such criminal cases serves neither side any good. It damages the trust built over the years between the two sides through cooperation in joint crackdowns on crimes, and gives the world the impression that Taiwan is a safe haven for fraudsters. Such an impression is not unfounded. On Saturday, when 20 fraud suspects were repatriated from Malaysia to Taiwan, as sought by some politicians on the island, they were immediately released by police upon arrival at the airport due to "a lack of evidence". Experience proves that sending telecom fraud suspects to the mainland to stand trial is the most efficient way to combat the crime, because many suspects are not punished at all when handled by judicial departments in Taiwan. The suspects set up new fraud rings once they were freed, making telecom fraud a never-ending nightmare for many on the mainland. Telecom scams are rampant on the mainland nowadays, with Taiwan fraud rings, often based in foreign countries and regions, playing a key role in such cases. Each year, billions of US dollars are siphoned from the mainland through such scams, which victimize tens of thousands of families, prompting calls for the authorities to take all necessary steps to remove this social ulcer. Based on a judicial agreement signed in 2009, the mainland and Taiwan have worked together to launch joint law enforcement operations and cracked thousands of fraud cases. The momentum in cooperation should not be derailed by a change of leadership on the island, or the recent controversy surrounding repatriation of Taiwan suspects to the mainland. Fraud criminals are the common enemies of all. So long as the spirit of the law is upheld and people's interests are put before political differences between the two sides, a solution can be found to prevent more people from becoming the victims of such scams. [April 20, 2016] Vectrus wins communications re-compete worth nearly $12 million COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., April 20, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Vectrus Systems Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Vectrus, Inc. (NYSE: VEC), has been awarded a telecommunications contract for the U.S. Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) worth nearly $12 million. The newly named Enterprise Legacy Voice and Information System (ELVIS) contract, a re-compete of the USAFE Communications Support Contract (UCSC), was awarded by the U.S. Air Force Installation Contracting Agency (AFICA), Ramstein AB, Germany, and includes base and option periods that will run from October 2016 through March 2021. "We are pleased to be selected as the ELVIS provider and look forward to continuing our nearly 20 year relationship with Air Force communications customers," said Ken Hunzeker, CEO of Vectrus. "Our customers at strategic locations in Europe and Asia rely on Vectrus not only for facilities and infrastructure support services, but IT and network solutions as well. We plan to leverage our existing geographic footprint in order to expand our IT and network services business while providing more value to our customers." The contract provides for integrated and reliable command and control, intelligence, and deployable communications support to manned and unmanned Air Force sites in Belgium, Germany, United Kingdom and Turkey. The work includes such tasks as operations and maintenance for secret and non-secure Internet protocol router networks (SIPRNet/NIPRNet), local area network and communications security administration, telephone maintenance, Armed Forces Network support, and command and control switching system services. "Winning th ELVIS re-compete is demonstrative of our ability to offer customers valuable IT and network solutions at a compelling price, and we look forward to building on this success," said Chico Moline, Vectrus vice president for IT and Network Communication Services. "We are looking forward to extending our great relationship with our USAFE customer by providing timely and affordable secure communications and IT support for their critical missions in the region." About Vectrus Vectrus is a leading, global government services company with a history in the services market that dates back more than 70 years. The company provides infrastructure asset management, information technology and network communication services, and logistics and supply chain management services to U.S. government customers around the world. Vectrus is differentiated by operational excellence, superior program performance, a history of long-term customer relationships, and a strong commitment to their mission success. Vectrus is headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colo., and includes more than 6,000 employees spanning 132 locations in 18 countries. In 2015, Vectrus generated sales of $1.2 billion. For more information, visit our website at http://www.vectrus.com or connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Contacts: Media George Rhynedance (719) 637-4182 [email protected] Investors Mike Smith (719) 637-5773 [email protected] To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/vectrus-wins-communications-re-compete-worth-nearly-12-million-300254685.html SOURCE Vectrus [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 21, 2016] Visterra Appoints Two Industry Leaders to its Board of Directors Visterra, Inc., a clinical-stage biotechnology company, today announced the appointment of Bernadette Connaughton, Head, European Markets, Canada and Australia of Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Steven Holtzman, former Executive Vice President, Corporate Development of Biogen, to the company's board of directors. Ms. Connaughton and Mr. Holtzman each bring more than 30 years of strategic, operational and management experience in the biopharmaceutical industry to Visterra's board and, in particular, experience in growing and leading companies and business units to generate significant value, as well as deep understanding of global pharmaceutical markets. "We welcome the broad and extensive industry knowledge that Bernadette and Steve bring to Visterra," said Brian J. G. Pereira, MD, President and CEO of Visterra. "We are thrilled to have these highly accomplished biopharmaceutical leaders join our board as we advance our product candidates for the treatment of influenza A and the treatment of Dengue, and as we continue to apply our proprietary Hierotope platform to build a pipeline of antibody-based therapeutics for infectious and non-infectious diseases." "I am excited to join Visterra's board of directors as the company establishes itself as an innovative new leader in biotech," said Ms. Connaughton. "Visterra has the foundation in place to build a great company, with outstanding leaders who know how to translate cutting-edge science into important new therapeutics." "I am impressed by Visterra's innovative technology that identifies highly-attractive sites for drug intervention and then enables the design and engineering of optimized antibody drug candidates that selectively target these sites," said Mr. Holtzman. "I look forward to sharing my insights and experiences to help advance this exciting technoloy in creating therapeutics to meet the increasingly important unmet needs in infectious diseases." Ms. Connaughton has spent her career at Bristol-Myers Squibb, where she currently serves as Head, European Markets, Canada and Australia. She has held a variety of senior leadership positions at Bristol-Myers Squibb, including President-Intercontinental; President-Japan, Pacific Rim and Canada; Senior Vice President-U.S. Cardiovascular/Metabolic Business Unit; and Senior Vice President-Primary Care Marketing. She has been on the European Markets and Patient Access Committees of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industry Associations since 2014. Ms. Connaughton received a BA from Johns Hopkins University and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Holtzman most recently served as Executive Vice President, Corporate Development at Biogen, where he was responsible for business development and program leadership and management of the company's late-stage product candidates and marketed products. Previously he was the founder, CEO and chair of the board of directors of Infinity Pharmaceuticals. Prior to that, Mr. Holtzman was an early leader and the Chief Business Officer of Millennium Pharmaceuticals, and was a founder, member of the board of directors and the Executive Vice President of DNX Corporation. He is currently a member of the board of directors of two private biotechnology companies, PMV Pharma and Molecular Partners. Mr. Holtzman received a BA from Michigan State University and a BPhil graduate degree from Corpus Christi College, Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. About Visterra Visterra is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company that uses its novel Hierotope platform to identify unique disease targets and to design and engineer innovative antibody-based therapies intended to be effective as a single-dose administration. Visterra's technology enables the design and engineering of product candidates which target a specific region of an antigen, or Hierotope, on a pathogen that is common across all strains of the pathogen and is resistant to mutation. The company believes these Hierotopes are critical to the structural and functional integrity of the pathogen, making them highly attractive therapeutic targets. The company is currently focused on developing therapeutics for infectious diseases and its lead product candidate, VIS410, is a human monoclonal antibody being developed for the treatment of hospitalized patients with influenza A, regardless of viral strain. The company's second product candidate, VIS513, is a human monoclonal antibody for the treatment of dengue that has been shown in preclinical studies to be effective against all four serotypes of the dengue virus. Visterra was founded on the research into the fundamentals of viral evolution and epitope characterization by our scientific founder, Dr. Ram Sasisekharan at MIT (News - Alert). For more information, please visit www.visterrainc.com. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160421005162/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [April 21, 2016] KAYAK Hacks Summer Travel: Tips On Where To Go, When To Book, And How To Get There STAMFORD, Conn., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Planning the perfect summer vacation can be daunting (so many places, so little time), but KAYAK is here to help: today, the world's leading travel search engine released its 2016 Summer Travel Hacker Guide to hack the where, when, and how to travel this summer. KAYAK data scientists and travel experts looked within the site's one billion annual searches to uncover both trending destinations (those seeing the greatest increase in searches) and most popular destinations (cities with the most overall searches) and paired the findings with practical advice to create the 2016 Summer Travel Hacker Guide. The Guide features four lists to satisfy every type of traveler The Trend Setter: Trending Destinations These international destinations are heating up with the greatest year-over-year increase in summer searches. With the big games fast approaching, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil took the top spot, seeing a 127% increase in flight searches versus the previous summer. Three Canadian cities also made the list Calgary, Montreal and Toronto- which may be driven by Americans looking to take advantage of the strong U.S. dollar without going overseas. Hacker Tip: If you're thinking about vacationing in one of these hot spots, the time to book is now: KAYAK data shows that you can score deals on airfare in the majority of these cities when booking six weeks to three months out. The Opportunist: Trending European Destinations A strong U.S. dollar also means this is a great time to vacation at one of these trendy European hot spots, marked by the greatest increase in searches since the previous summer. The list shows that Americans are craving scenic escapes: nine of the 10 destinations on the list re port cities, and three are located in the Nordic region, known for its natural beauty and long summer days boasting nearly 20 hours of sunlight. The cities also boast several must-see natural wonders, including hot springs just a short drive away from Reykjavik, Iceland and the famous fjords of Oslo, Norway. Hacker Tip: To experience the Midnight Sun natural phenomenon in Reykjavik, taking place in June, don't wait to book KAYAK data shows that best fares were found ten weeks out. The Maverick: Winter in Summer Destinations If you're looking for a nontraditional summer getaway, head over the Equator to jump from summer to winter (and scorching hot to moderate temperatures) in the span of a flight. The guide reveals that Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Santa Cruz, Bolivia and Zanzibar, Tanzania are among the top destinations in the Southern Hemisphere receiving the greatest increase in interest among travelers year over year. Since it is off-season or shoulder season in several of the locales that made the top 10, you'll beat both the heat and the crowds. Hacker Tip: Consider booking a pre-Memorial Day vacation to save some cash: nine of the 10 cities on this list have historically seen the best median airfare prices in May. If you're looking for a trip later in the summer, consider Auckland, New Zealand, whose median airfare prices were lowest in August. The Road Tripper: Summer Friday Destinations These easy weekend jaunts are perfect for a bachelor/bachelorette party (it is wedding season, after all), an impromptu family road trip or anything in between. The list, pulled from most searched places to stay for a Friday Sunday stint, shows that waterfront escapes are hot this summer: more than half of the destinations are shoreline cities. East Coast destinations are especially popular for long weekend getaways: the list features four cities up and down the coast from Atlantic City, NJ to Key West, FL. Hacker Tip: Make the most of these drivable destinations by planning ahead. KAYAK data shows that booking a rental car two weeks out may help you score the best deal. "We analyzed data from our one billion annual searches to empower travelers and equip them with the information they need to book the summer getaway that is right for them," said David Solomito, North America Brand Director for KAYAK. "Between low prices at the pump and a strong U.S. dollar, savvy travelers can score a great deal this summer, whether they're traveling abroad or staying closer to home." This year's Guide also includes tips on what to expect when you get to each destination, including average temperature and rainfall. Visit the 2016 Summer Travel Hacker Guide for full findings across all four lists, and visit KAYAK's website to plan and manage your next trip. For full methodology on the Travel Hacker Guide, visit www.KAYAK.com/summertravelhacker. ABOUT KAYAK KAYAK is the world's leading travel search engine. KAYAK searches other travel sites and shows travelers the information they need to find the right flights, hotels, rental cars and vacation packages. The company's website and apps also offer tools to help travelers plan and manage their trip, including price alerts, price forecasts and free itinerary management. Each year, KAYAK processes more than one billion searches for travel information and has local sites in more than 30 countries and 20 languages. KAYAK is an independently managed subsidiary of The Priceline Group. Media Contact: Jackie Miller Golin for KAYAK [email protected] 1 212.373.6056 Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160421/358286LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kayak-hacks-summer-travel-tips-on-where-to-go-when-to-book-and-how-to-get-there-300255420.html SOURCE KAYAK [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] A new statewide organization hopes to bring together leaders in the technology industry and other businesses to help boost Nebraska's tech workforce. The Technology Association of Nebraska will work with state government, the business community and education officials to promote technology careers, train tech specialists and attract workers from elsewhere. Companies in the state have more than 1,800 tech-related job openings, and industry leaders have said the lack of a skilled workforce is among Nebraska's biggest challenges. "These are great-paying jobs," Gov. Pete Ricketts said Thursday during a launch event at Fiserv's Lincoln campus at 14th and Old Cheney Road. The state needs to "make sure that we've got that pipeline of young folks who are going into the technology field." Twenty-two other states have statewide organizations similar to the one launching here. In addition to promoting the industry and pushing to get more workers trained, the Technology Association of Nebraska, or TAN, will seek to strengthen the state's existing tech "ecosystem," it's backers said. "There are lots of pockets of activity going on," said Joseph Knecht, TAN board president and managing director at VentureTech, a Lincoln venture capital firm that provides operational help to technology startups. The work starts with bringing various technology interests together to work toward a common vision, Knecht said. TAN's board also includes tech industry executives from firms such as First Data, Proxibid, Fiserv and Xpanxion. Its website is nebraskatech.org. The organization grew from an effort within the Nebraska Department of Economic Development before branching off to become a private entity. The goal is to attract more businesses that rely on technology and continue to grow the state's economy, said Stan Pierce, a former Fiserv senior vice president who is now TAN's executive director. "We have to create the environment to bring them here," Pierce said. Each of 11 senators departing the Legislature this year got a few minutes at the goodbye podium Wednesday before the body adjourned sine die. It happens every two years now that term limits are in place in the unicameral Legislature. Some departing classes are larger than others. This year it's the Class of 2009. Those departing include three women and eight men; three from the Lincoln area, three from Omaha, and five from more rural districts; seven Republicans and four Democrats. Eight are chairs of standing, select or special committees, or the speaker. All served a full two terms, except for Sen. Dave Bloomfield of Hoskins, who was appointed in 2010 by then-Gov. Dave Heineman and served six years. They each took five to 10 minutes Wednesday to say goodbye to colleagues, although their terms don't end until their replacements are sworn in next January. They thanked their spouses and families, and several of them invoked the names of others from their class who were no longer there: Dennis Utter, who died shortly before the start of his second term and who was replaced by Sen. Les Seiler of Hastings, and Jeremy Nordquist, who left last year to work for Rep. Brad Ashford in Washington D.C. "Gratitude is what I'm feeling today," said Sen. Kate Sullivan, who chaired the Education Committee. Many of them talked about how their time in the Legislature had changed them or added diverse experiences and knowledge to their lives. "This chamber does change you," said Lincoln Sen. Colby Coash. "It's a transforming experience to serve all Nebraska and its people. And being the voice of some of the most vulnerable in our state has been especially rewarding for me." Omaha Sen. Beau McCoy said it was an honor and privilege to serve in the nation's only unicameral Legislature. It's the first office he had ever run for and ever held. He thanked those that came before, remembering Utter. "That's what I'm thankful for is for all those who pour into us, so that when we leave this place hopefully not only have we left it better, but we've learned so much that we can enrich others with our lives later on," he said. Omaha Sen. Tanya Cook's fellow senators broadened her perspective, especially about the agriculture industry, she said. "I am a shameless city girl. I insist upon it," she said. "But with your help and your patience, you put water, wind energy and even trapping in the ditch on my radar." Her hope was that they also gained a certain perspective from her service as an African American female senator. Sen. Mike Gloor of Grand Island, who spent a career as a hospital administrator, had to start from scratch earning his stripes as a lawmaker. "That was very good for me. I think that would be very good for anyone, whether it's in your career, whether it's in your personal life, or the things (for which) you volunteer," Gloor said. It was important, he now realizes, to get out of his comfort zone and explore something foreign and unfamiliar. Omaha Sen. Heath Mello, who came to the Legislature at 28 and served his second term as Appropriations chairman, has had a lot of mentors before and since he's been in the Legislature. They have made a dramatic impact regarding how to look at the world, talk a bit slower and how to put forth arguments to former Appropropriations Chairman Lavon Heidemann, he said. Former Sen. John Harms, who served with him on that committee, was one of those who told him he needed to focus his passion. Nordquist was also a trusted friend and the godfather of his daughter. This experience wouldn't have been the same without them, he told senators. "That's the one thing I'd wish all of you as I leave, that you think through your time here in the Legislature, to really value those friendships. ... Those relationships no doubt will make you a better policymaker, make you a better leader, but more importantly make you a better person." Sen. Ken Schilz of Ogallala urged the senators with time remaining to not fall into the traps of east vs. west, rural vs. urban. "Work to understand the differences and then come together to find solutions that help all Nebraskans," he said. Lincoln Sen. Ken Haar was the member known most for his urging of his colleagues to pass legislation to improve the environment. A lot of that, he said, was because of his sons and grandchildren. "I want to leave them a world ... as good as the one I've got," he said. "As Bob Dylan said, 'The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.'" A Lincoln woman is accused of purchasing more than $190,000 worth of Apple laptop computers using stolen credit card information. The investigation began when a law enforcement agency in Wisconsin contacted the Lincoln Police Department on April 4 about a possible fraud case, Officer Katie Flood said Thursday. Someone had obtained credit card information from a Wisconsin business and used it to make purchases in Lincoln. During the investigation, officers discovered credit card information stolen from business accounts in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Illinois were also used in Lincoln by the same person, Flood said. Police said cards with the stolen account info were mailed to an address on Rancho Road, which was connected to 34-year-old Amanda Koeber. Surveillance footage from stores in Lincoln showed Koeber using the cards, Flood said. Koeber used the cards between Feb. 25 and March 23 to purchase $193,987.14 worth of Macbook Pros. The laptops haven't been found and police are attempting to determine what happened to them, Flood said. The manager of one of the computer businesses told police he remembers Koeber making a large purchase. He suspected fraud but didn't have the proof, so he helped Koeber load the laptops into her vehicle and took a picture of her and her license plate. Koeber was arrested Wednesday morning on suspicion of nine counts each of theft by deception and criminal possession of a financial card. Flood said technology is making it easy to catch suspected thieves in financial crimes since there is a paper trail. Lancaster County leaders want to establish a court similar to the countys drug court, but just for veterans. County Attorney Joe Kelly told the Lancaster County Board Thursday he would like to request approval from the Nebraska Supreme Court to set up a veterans court. The board agreed, and Kelly now plans to submit the proposal for a three-year pilot program. I appreciate your willingness to step up and be a leader on this, said Todd Wiltgen, County Board vice chairman. Kelly said the court would be available only to veterans whove suffered traumatic brain injury or developed post-traumatic stress disorder as the result of their service in a combat zone. County District Court judges would oversee proceedings of the veterans court. Much like the countys drug court, participants first would have to plead guilty to their crime before being allowed to enter the veterans court. If they completed the requirements set by the judges, their charges would then be dismissed. Lancaster County already offers a pretrial diversion program for veterans, though that program is overseen by the county attorneys office and doesnt require participants to plead guilty to their crimes first. The veterans court likely would serve mostly veterans whove plead guilty to felonies, Kelly said. Once they are allowed to participate in the court, veterans would receive a mentor and treatment services from local Veterans Affairs mental health providers. Kelly said he wont be asking for additional funding to support the program. He said hed be ready to launch the court by this fall. Last month, the Legislature approved a bill to establish a veterans treatment court pilot project in Douglas County. Kelly said the Lancaster County veterans court would be designed to make veterans feel more comfortable by providing them with mentors with similar backgrounds. The way theyre treated accounts for their service to the country, he said. The Nebraska Lutheran Campus Ministry wants to tear down its current home at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and build a new one. The ministry wants to demolish the Lutheran Center building at 535 N. 16th St. and build a new two- or three-story building and chapel in its place. Pastor Adam White said utilities and other aspects of the current Lutheran Center, opened in 1951, are often in need of repair. This building has endured the cheapest possible fix for six decades, he said. The ministry also wants to include a dozen housing units in the new building to provide the center with a dependable source of revenue, he said. We really see an opportunity to expand our ministry, he said. The citys Historic Preservation Commission voted Thursday to recommend the city-county Planning Commission approve a special permit for the project. It calls for construction of a two- or three-story main building that would be built adjacent to a chapel. Bruce Fischer, an associate professor of construction management at UNL and adviser to the ministry on the project, said the building's size likely would be determined based on fundraising. The ministry has raised about 40 percent of the $6 million it needs for the project. For more information on fundraising, visit lutherancenterunl.com. The two-story version would have administrative offices and a lounge on the first floor of the main building, with a dozen housing units and a living room on the second floor. A pantry that the Lutheran Center administers for UNL also would be on the first floor. Upper floors would be set back further than the first floor. The main building also would have three garages for staff and landscaping supplies on the north side, with a private entrance to the pantry. A basement would have a commercial kitchen and dining area. I do think this fits quite well, said Jim Johnson, a member of the Historic Preservation Commission. The Lutheran Center sits in the heart of Greek Row between Pi Kappa Phi and Sigma Phi Epsilon. The ministry plans to construct the building in 2018 and move into it the next year. I like the idea of having housing focused on faith and service, White said. It sure looked like a child version of Prince Nelson, the Minneapolis kid who would turn into an international music icon. But there was one issue. The reporter never asked for the kids name. The signature achievement of the 2016 session of the Legislature is creation of the $450 million transportation infrastructure bank. The impact of the new system for funding important projects will be felt for decades. One objective for the bank will be to finish the long-planned network of four-lane highways between Nebraskas major cities, as well as urgently needed local projects like the South Beltway. And by shoring up the states highway and street construction system it make it more likely that money can be found for local projects, like the list in Lancaster County. Credit Sen. Jim Smith of Papillion, who this year sponsored the bill that created the bank, and last year sponsored the bill that raised the state gas tax that will renew the banks balance every year. Also credit Gov. Pete Ricketts, who pragmatically accepted the decision of the Legislature last year to override his veto of the gas tax hike, and now appears to be fully engaged in properly implementing the new funding system. That spirit of cooperation between the legislative and executive branches of government is an example of how government should work for the good of the people. Other highlights and lowlights include: Dark Ages. The Legislature unwisely moved the selection process for University of Nebraska leaders behind closed doors. The new secrecy distances NU from the public, which pays most of the bills. Cronyism has a freer hand. Bad hiring choices are more likely. Nibble, nibble. After much debate, hard work and brainstorming on the part of Gov. Pete Ricketts and the Legislature, $20 million in property tax reduction was approved. The governor cautioned against those who would downplay the accomplishment. We dont want to be in that crowd. Incrementalism works. But we are impatient. Property tax relief is one of the editorial boards agenda items. Remember, if the Legislature wants to go big, it could sign on to a revenue-neutral shift to higher cigarette taxes and eliminating the tax on candy and pop. Cash reserve. Senators drew down the states rainy day fund: $50 million for the infrastructure bank, $13.7 million for levee improvements to protect the Offutt Air Force base, and about $27 million for corrections. That would leave a a projected $654 million in the rainy day fund by the end of the next fiscal year. Can senators next year resist the impulse to siphon more. Are those dark clouds on the horizon? Revenue this year is more than $18 million below forecasts. Climate change. Thanks to Sen. Ken Haar of Malcom a special panel of lawmakers will convene in the off-session to craft a strategic plan to address the effect of climate change on Nebraskas water resources, farming and ranching operations, the states ecosystems and urban areas. The committee will build on the work on the work of a landmark 2014 study by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a follow-up report. The committees task is important. Shortly after its approval NASA announced that global temperatures for March set a record for the 11th month in a row. Dreamers. The Legislature deserves praise for its pragmatism in voting to allow young immigrants covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival be issued professional licenses to work as nurses, electricians, etc. The senators who voted to override the gubernatorial veto acted in the best interest of the young Nebraskans and the rest of the state that will benefit from their hard work. I served the federal government for 39 years with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. I also served 20 years in the military, worked in the private sector while in high school and college as well as some part time civilian work during those years. I paid Social Security during all those non-federal years. When I retired, I learned how my Social Security benefit would be 50 percent less per month than my neighbors who had never worked for the federal government. This is because of the Windfall Elimination Provision under the Social Security law. Throughout my federal career, I held myself to a high standard and paid into our own retirement system but now, in retirement, I'm subject to a law that is not fair from my point of view. This provision unfairly reduces my Social Security benefits for no other reason than that I worked for the government. I paid the benefits in and now I should be able to draw them out. Legislation introduced by Rep. Kevin Brady, of Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means, would reform the WEP. The Equal Treatment of Public Servants Act, H.R. 711, recognizes the work I've done and the contributions I've made and would adjust my Social Security benefits accordingly. Plus, it would do so without costing taxpayers a nickel. Congressman Fortenberry won't sign-on as a cosponsor because its still in committee. That sounds like a weak excuse or dodge to me! OK Congressman, we will see you in the voting booth. Thousands of retirees in your district will remember this lack of action or concern too. Support fairness and equity now. Patrick McGrane, Lincoln WASHINGTON The Supreme Court is expressing doubts about laws in at least a dozen states, including Nebraska, that make it a crime for people suspected of drunken driving to refuse to take alcohol tests. The justices heard arguments Wednesday in three cases challenging North Dakota and Minnesota laws that criminalize a refusal to test for alcohol in a driver's blood, breath or urine if police have not first obtained a search warrant. Drivers prosecuted under those laws claim they violate the Constitution's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. State supreme courts in Minnesota and North Dakota upheld the laws. The justices pressed lawyers representing the states on why they can't simply require police to get a warrant every time police want a driver to take an alcohol test. Justice Stephen Breyer pointed to statistics showing that it takes an average of only five minutes to get a warrant over the phone in Wyoming and 15 minutes to get one in Montana. Thomas McCarthy, the lawyer representing North Dakota, said the state "strikes a bargain" with drivers by making consent to alcohol tests a condition for the privilege of driving on state roads. But Justice Anthony Kennedy said the states are asking for "an extraordinary exception" by making it a crime for people to assert their constitutional rights. He expressed frustration when McCarthy refused to answer repeated questions about why expedited warrants wouldn't serve the state just as well. Kathryn Keena, a county prosecutor representing Minnesota, suggested some rural areas may have only one judge on call, making it too burdensome to seek a warrant every time. She said even if a warrant were procured, a driver could still refuse to take the test and face lesser charges for obstruction of a warrant than for violating drunken driving test laws. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the state could simply change the law to make penalties more severe for obstruction. Several justices seemed to be searching for a middle ground. Some suggested to Charles Rothfeld the lawyer representing challengers to the laws that requiring a breath test without a warrant might be allowed because it's far less invasive than a blood test. Justice Elena Kagan called the breath test "about as uninvasive as a search can possibly be" and suggested it could be part of a permissible search during an arrest. Rothfeld insisted that collecting breath was just as intrusive as collecting blood. The Obama administration is supporting the states. Deputy Solicitor General Ian Gershengorn told the justices they should not assume warrants "are available 24/7." "That is not the case in the real world," Gershengorn said. He said it may be the case for terrorist attacks, but not for routine drunken driving cases. In the Minnesota case, William Bernard was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving and taken into custody and refused to take a chemical test at the police station after he was arrested. A divided Minnesota Supreme Court ruled the law was valid and that officers could have ordered a breath test without a warrant as a search conducted while performing a valid arrest. Under the Minnesota law, a first-degree count of refusal to take a breath test carries a mandatory minimum sentence of three years in prison. In North Dakota, refusal to take an alcohol test carries the same criminal penalties as driving under the influence. The state's highest court upheld the law against a challenge from Danny Birchfield, who was arrested after he drove his car into a ditch and failed a field sobriety test. He refused to take more tests and was convicted under the state's refusal law, which counts as a misdemeanor for a first offense. A second case from North Dakota involves Steve Beylund, a driver who was stopped on suspicion of drunken driving and consented to a chemical alcohol test. State courts declined to suppress the evidence from that test. Other states that criminalize a driver's refusal to take an alcohol blood test include Alaska, Florida, Hawaii, Kansas, Louisiana, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia. CULBERTSON Authorities say a driver was arrested after nearly 241 pounds of marijuana was found in his vehicle in southwest Nebraska. The Nebraska State Patrol said in a news release Thursday that a trooper pulled over an eastbound 2007 Saturn Outlook a little before 6:30 p.m. Wednesday for improper passing on U.S. 6 just west of Culbertson. The patrol says a Red Willow County sheriff's dog taken to the scene alerted officers to the odor of drugs, and a subsequent vehicle search turned up the pot inside two duffel bags. 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. A journey of a thousand miles We can only hope that the government will now adopt a more confident approach to reconstruction A wake-up call: Five qualities of a good doctor How can healthcare providers, especially doctors, find a common ground where trust, empathy, professionalism and care are valued tenets? Barbara Adams hospitalised Barbara Adams, 85, has been undergoing treatment at Grande Hospital for the last three weeks, her aide said. Chamling to be conferred Yugkavi Siddhicharan Prize Sikkimese Chief Minister and senior writer Pawan Kuman Chamling, a tireless craftsman of Nepali language and literature, will be conferred with the esteemed Yugkavi Siddhicharan Prize 2073 as per the decision of the executive committee meeting of Yugkavi Siddhicharan Foundation held on April 6 under the chairmanship of its president Professor Dr Mohan Lohani. Dilip Kumar gets discharged from hospital Veteran actor Dilip Kumar, who was admitted to Lilavati Hospital on Saturday morning for treatment of high fever and nausea, was discharged from the hospital on Thursday. Drought affects wildlife in Chitwan Water systems like ponds and lakes in the Chitwan National Park (CNP) are drying up due to a long dry spell, which could deal a blow to wildlife and other aquatic animals. Ethiopia army 'locates children abducted from Gambella' Ethiopia's army has surrounded the area in neighbouring South Sudan where it believes more than 100 abducted Ethiopian children are being held, local media report. Gautam Buddha Regional Intl Airport: Cabinet okays proposal to acquire more land The Cabinet on Tuesday approved the Tourism Ministrys proposal to acquire an additional 288 bighas of land for the expansion of Gautam Buddha Regional International Airport in Bhairahawa. Govt forms panel to find new IBN CEO The government has formed a panel to scout for a new chief executive officer (CEO) of the Investment Board Nepal, making a volte-face on its four-month-old decision to let Radhes Pan continue as the IBN head for the time being. Govt ready for constitution amendment to address problem: DPM Gachhadar Deputy Prime Minister Bijaya Kumar Gachhadar has said that the government would address the issues put forth by Madhesi Morcha through dialogue and discussion. Heat wave affects western Tarai districts Normal life has been greatly affected due to heat wave in western Tarai districts including Banke, Kailali and Kanchanpur for the past few days. Invisible work With changing gender relations, unpaid care work should now be given the attention it deserves JICAs aid scheme rekindles hope among quake survivors Earthquake survivor Sanchi Tamang of Irkhu-5, Sindhupalchok district has been trying for almost a year to get help to rebuild her home which was flattened by the April 25 tremor. Maoists against courts handling war-era cases A meeting of six Maoist parties on Wednesday decided to press the government to address all war-era cases through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons. NC Prez Deuba meets Indian Minister Swaraj in Delhi Former Prime Minister and Nepali Congress (NC) President Sher Bahadur Deuba, who is currently in New Delhi for the treatment of his wife, on Thursday held a meeting with Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj. NC sister wings prepare for conclaves The Nepali Congress (NC) has expedited preparations for holding conventions of the partys sister wings. Alisha Sijapati is an arts and culture reporter at The Kathmandu Post, primarily covering human interest stories. She is intrigued by history, culture and films. Before joining the Post in 2015, she worked as a journalist for The Himalayan Times and ECS Media. Nepal Telecom to launch 4G next year Nepal Telecom (NT) plans to launch the fourth generation (4G) mobile telecommunications technology in metropolis and sub-metropolis from the next fiscal year. NMA demands health secy with medical background The Nepal Medical Association (NMA) submitted a memorandum to Health Minister Ram Janam Chaudhary on Wednesday, warning of a stern protest including shutdown of health facilities across the country if the government does not appoint health secretary with medical background. Parliament Regulations: Plan to finalise rules set to hit snag again The Nepali Congress has taken exception to some government decisions, including Tuesdays ambassadorial recommendations, as a result the plan of Regulation Drafting Committee (RDC) of Parliament to finalise Parliament Regulations on Sunday is likely to hit a snag. Prohibition in Bihar creates bonanza for moonshiners Prohibition in Indias Bihar state has created an opportunity for smugglers and producers of illegal liquor at Nepal-India border points. RPP-Ns Lama for ASSt MIN Rastriya Prajatantra Party Nepal (RPP-N), a ruling partner in the CPN (UML)-led government, has recommended Resham Lama for the appointment as the Assistant Minister for Federal Affairs and Local Development. Two killed, three injured in separate road accidents An unidentified woman of around 35 years died on the spot in a road accident at Bardibas in Mahottari on Thursday. Undiplomatic move Much delayed ambassadorial appointments leave more room for concern than celebration Chinese Vice Premier Ma Kai, who is also head of the Leading Group for State-owned Enterprises Reform under the State Council, presides over the 18th plenary session of the leading group in Beijing, capital of China, April 8, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua] The ongoing State-owned enterprises' reform has a key role to play in the country's comprehensive economic transition, but it would not be right to overdo it, especially because the SOEs and society are not yet ready. In other words, owing to the ongoing economic downturn, SOEs in the competitive market should be given time and financial support to recover their losses, if any, instead of being told to contribute more to the country's fiscal revenue. In fact, it will cost more to press ahead with the SOEs' reform than in the past. Also, the risk of causing further economic turbulence is high if the authorities push for mergers and bankruptcies of enterprises suffering from overcapacity. The top priority at the moment should be to replace the obsolete development model with one that would be sustainable. Despite the difficulties associated with the ongoing reform, the SOEs still have great potential to make a difference, as the country's service industry is expected to grow by 10 percent or more a year in the coming years. That may allow some SOEs to focus on innovation, not just basic manufacturing, to develop in a service-oriented manner. For that to happen, the central government also needs to implement the hukou (household registration) reform and put in place a residence permit system as promised. The 2015 Central Urban Work Conference, the first of its kind since 1978, laid out plans to increase the urbanization ratio to 60 percent and speed up the assimilation of migrant workers into the urban population by 2020. Urbanization on such a scale would inevitably need huge amounts of investments from the SOEs. In general, Chinese people are spending more to get services, and domestic consumption contributed to more than 66 percent of China's economic growth last year. For urban dwellers, it is estimated their spending on services will account for about half of their total consumption by 2020, rising by 2 percent year-on-year since 2014. To meet their increasing demand for user-friendly services, traditional State-owned manufacturers should put in more efforts to make service-oriented products, such as housekeeping robots, which, in turn, can help expedite the SOE reform during the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20) period. China also has to raise the proportion of the service sector in the country's foreign trade, which is expected to rise from 12.3 percent last year to more than 16 percent in 2020, as well as break the monopoly that exists in the service sector. It will take time and forward-looking policies to deal with the structural contradictions and challenges facing the SOE reform. The implementation of certain proposals, such as recruiting managers in a professional manner and according to market norms, is of equal importance to the SOE reform. The Fifth Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China last year made clear the central government's ambition to develop a mixed-ownership economy by involving State-owned market players. To break fresh ground in this regard, the SOEs need more financial and institutional support to "go global" following the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative. The author is president of the China Institute for Reform and Development in Hainan province. 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 View Results Police said Thursday they have been able to verify the identity of a Chinese woman found dead on South Korea's resort island of Jeju last week thanks to a fingerprint of her left index finger. Investigators at the Seogwipo Police Station said the fingerprint, about 1 centimeter and invisible to the naked eye, was lifted from the badly decomposed body of the woman, whose name has been withheld. The body of the dead woman, 22, was discovered by a man gathering bracken near a barley field in the city of Seogwipo on South Korea's largest island of Jeju on April 13. It was partially covered by grass and soil, and badly decomposed. The woman, who entered South Korea as a tourist on Oct. 7, 2015, and overstayed the visa-free period to work, left the same fingerprint as the one collected on her immigration records. The police combed the area near the barley field on April 13-14 for any possible belongings but found nothing. A ray of hope was given the next day, when a coroner extracted the fingerprint, which was left intact about four months after her death, in an autopsy. It prompted police to scurry to the immigration office to do a cross-comparison of her fingerprint with those of foreigners who arrived on the island. On Friday night, the police successfully determined her identity with the help of the immigration office and found out she is a Han Chinese from the southern part of the country. Earlier this week, the police arrested a South Korean male suspect in connection with the murder but released him because of a lack of evidence. The suspect was a regular customer at a bar where she was working before she went missing around the end of last year. The Chinese woman was confirmed to have arrived on the South Korean island in October last year by taking advantage of the country's visa-free entry for Chinese tourists that allows foreign tourists aboard cruise ships to enter South Korea and stay here for 30 days without a visa. She is believed to have been dead for less than four months, because the owner of the barley field did not see the body when he planted barley seeds in December and January. (Yonhap) No Yes, a light case Yes, two or more light cases One serious case Two or more serious bouts Vote View Results Kendallville, IN (46755) Today Partly cloudy. Low around 55F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph.. Tonight Partly cloudy. Low around 55F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Area residents can become a Kansas City Barbeque Society certified judge, and they dont even need to travel to Kansas City to learn how to rate barbeque chicken, ribs, beef brisket and pork shoulder. They can get certified by taking a class in Onalaska. The Holmen and Valley View Rotary clubs are sponsoring KCBS judging and table captain classes at the Onalaska American Legion on Saturday, May 21. Sign-in begins at 9 a.m. and the classes will run from 10 a.m. until about 2 p.m. The table captains class will start at 3 p.m. and end about 5 p.m. Along with certified judges, KCBS competitions need table captains. The table captains round up and assist judges at contests, and in the event there is a shortage of judges, could be asked to step in to judge. The Rotary clubs are planning their second Rock-n-Ribs competition this year in conjunction with Celebrate Onalaska and are working to get the June 25 event KCBS sanctioned. To become sanctioned, the competition needs certified judges to taste-test the meats and give scores on the presentation as well as flavor. We want to promote barbeque and we are seeking folks throughout the tri-state area to become KCBS judges to judge all the local events that are popping up, said Laurie Tweten, event organizer and a KCBS judge herself. There are only six active judges listed on the KCBS site who live within La Crosse County. Through the judging classes, the clubs hope more local people will get certified to judge at their barbeque competition. The annual barbequing event is a fundraiser for the two Rotary clubs. Twenty-one teams entered last years inaugural Rock-n-Ribs event with teams coming from Minnesota cities of Lake Elmo, Le Sueur, Minneapolis, Owatonna and Stewartville as well as Mondovi and Elk Mound in Wisconsin and local teams from Sparta and West Salem. This years event will again be held at the Onalaska OmniCenter. Anyone who takes these classes will be certified that day and then has a chance to judge any KCBS event, including ours, Tweten said. Its also a good way for cooking teams to learn what judges are looking for with their BBQ. Pat Sake of La Crosse, a KCBS certified judge, travels throughout the country attending and judging BBQ events. If you think you can cook barbeque and want to have fun, consider becoming a judge, Sake said. Its the best food youve ever had. Everybody there is a barbeque enthusiast, and youll taste the best barbeque of your life. You better come to the class hungry. Started in 1985, KCBS is considered the leading name in barbeque competition. It sets the standard for judging contests, sanctioning over 450 competitions worldwide. A nonprofit with more than 20,000 members worldwide, the organization serves as the governing body for sanctioned barbeque events as well as a clearinghouse for information about all things barbeque. The cost for the Onalaska class $70 for KCBS members, $105 for nonmembers with one-year KCBS membership included. Registration forms for the judge and table captain classes can be found online at www.rotaryrocknribs.com. The form can be printed off, filled out and then mailed with payment to JRM CPA, Attn: Rotary Rock n Ribs, P.O. Box 277, Onalaska, WI 54650. Make checks payable to Rock n Ribs. He dismisses the concerns of innocent people caught in dragnets based on race, youth, gender or poverty, rationalizing that innocently targeted people will understand that they are serving the greater good. Most troubling was how it ends. While he doesnt say it directly, Swayne infers that local crime can be attributed to certain demographic groups also worthy of targeting, particularly those that statistically commit more crime. Lets call this column what it is: thinly veiled racism. Swayne is entitled to share his opinion, but hes wrong. Contrary to Swaynes assertion, the U.S. Constitution does not tolerate enforcement based on race, and its backwards to invite suggestion to the contrary. Two hundred and fifty words arent enough to describe the logical, factual and moral fallacies in Swaynes column, so Ill end with a question: Does Swayne honestly believe that he should ever have to worry about being arrested, accused or jailed because of his appearance? Should he lose his job, home or freedom because he is a number in a demographic? If not, then Swayne has no right to wish it on another. Are you in that evil one percent that Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton frequently discuss? Those capitalist pigs. If you make $35,000 annually ($17.50/ hour) you are in the top one percent of wage earners globally. If you have $3,500, you are in the top 10 percent in wealth holders worldwide. Look in the mirror, you capitalist dog, you Democrat devil. In order to be fair in this global economy, should you not take a pay cut so that your maximum wage is lets just say around $15 per hour? Now that is fair. Now you are only around the 85th percentile of wage earners globally, my socialist comrade friend. Be fair. Most of the world makes $1,300 a year or less? As I write, Bernie, is Rome discussing how rich, evil and unfair you are. Do you feel the Bern? The 400 richest Americans have $2.02 trillion. Corporations have just under $2 trillion in yet untaxed foreign accounts. That sounds like lots and lots of money. If Bernie and Hillary succeed in confiscating all of it, dude, these Dems would be out of money in less than one year. The federal budget is $4.2+ trillion. No amount will be enough. When Bernie and Hillary discuss making the rich pay their fair share, they mean you. The United Nations says that 500 people may have died when their boat sank in the Mediterranean Sea. On Monday, witnesses and survivors told VOA that a smugglers boat turned over with about 500 people on board. It happened on April 8. The Somali government says 200 of its nationals drowned. The United Nations refugee agency says the boat was bound for Europe from Libya. It carried people from Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Syria and Egypt. The accident happened somewhere between Libya and Italy as smugglers tried to move some people from a smaller boat to a larger, more crowded boat. The survivors swam to the original boat and were rescued after drifting in the sea for three days. A large ship took them to Greece. The United Nations says almost 180,000 refugees and migrants have reached Europe this year. Almost 800 have died or gone missing. Im Marsha James. Dan Friedell adapted this story for Learning English based on reporting by VOANews.com. Hai Do was the editor. What do you think about the cheating by Mitsubishi? We want to know. Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page. ______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story drifting v. to move slowly on water, wind, etc. smuggler n. a person who moves (someone or something) from one country into another illegally and secretly The United States government honored ten young people from around the world on Wednesday. The State Department praised the winners of the first-ever Global Emerging Young Leaders Award for making positive social change. Next month, the winners will visit the U.S. to attend a leadership program and meet with people who can support their work. Here are the winners: Basel Almadhoun, from the Palestinian territories, launched a debate club for young people in Gaza. He says the group gives teenagers a way to express their opinions and change their way of thinking. Hillary Briffa, from Malta, helped lead a campaign against violent extremism. She has also led after-school programs on conflict resolution. Jessel Recinos Fernandez of Honduras was raised in a city that has been called the murder capital of the world. Soon after becoming a gang member, he was shot. He later founded Skate Brothers, an organization that helps young people avoid gangs. Samuel Grzybowski, from France, founded Coexister, a group that invites young people with different religious beliefs to come together. The hashtag of the groups members, #NousSommesUnis (We are united), was the most re-tweeted French hashtag after the terror attacks on Paris last November. Asha Hassan, from Kenya, is an ethnic Somali. She uses youth-led groups to improve contacts among ethnic clans in her home community. She teaches children the value of life and warns them of the dangers of joining extremist groups. Ahmad Shakib Mohsanyar, from Afghanistan, founded a social media campaign called "Afghanistan Needs You." The campaign is aimed at disputing the idea that young people need to leave Afghanistan for a better life. Ahlem Nasraoui of Tunisia started a Peace Mediators program to oppose terrorism and extremism. The program teaches young people leadership, arts and mediation skills. She also helps women and girls set up their own businesses. Nino Nanitashvili, from Georgia, uses new technology to help support peace building and development. She leads a group for women in technology. She has spoken in parliament and at Googles headquarters in California about how technology can improve civic life. Thinzar Shunlei Yi, from Myanmar, works for Burmas National Youth Congress and the National Youth Network. She also helped organize the ASEAN Youth Forum. She also held a United Nations International Youth Day event that raised awareness about mental health issues. Zulfirman Rahyantel, from Indonesia, organized discussions about hatred, loss and other feelings among people in Ambon. The city experienced 10 years of violence between opposing religious groups. Im Mario Ritter. Nike Ching reported this story for VOANews.com. Kelly Jean Kelly adapted the report for Learning English. George Grow was the editor. ______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story positive - adj. useful or good club - n. a group of people who meet to take part in an activity teenager - n. someone between 13 and 19 years old gang - n. a group of criminals; a group of young people who often do illegal things together mediation - n. intervention between conflicting sides in support of a settlement or compromise With Cape Town having been awarded the title of World Design Capital 2014, can it be titled the design thinking capital of South Africa? Design thinking is a proven and reputable problem-solving methodology that any business or profession can employ to achieve extraordinary results. Successful organisations around the world have embraced and implemented it to help them succeed in ever-changing and complex socio-economic environments. Design thinking champions have an empathetic approach to solving problems by truly understanding the requirements of the target audience and developing human-centric solutions. In terms of design, there is much happening within the design community and Capetonians do a very good job at showcasing design through events, such as the Design Indaba and the hosting of the World Design Capital in 2014, says Robert Bloom, founder and managing partner of DesignThinkers Group in South Africa. I would venture to say that the penetration in terms of what design thinking is about is higher than anywhere else in the country." According to Bloom, design thinking plays a role when it comes to social impact'. World Design Capital Cape Town bore the slogan Live Design Transform Life. Having won the right to host World Design Capital is to bring about transformation and awareness on how design can affect the quality of human life. Many projects were run in and with communities to identify projects and solutions to social problems. Design thinking is now being used by many NGOs, government and corporates to look at how to sustainably produce positive impact. What sets Cape Town apart is that we are a very strong design community. Institutions such as the Cape Craft and Design Institute are very strong players within the design ecosystem, as they are responsible for implementing the Western Cape Strategic Plan to catalyse economic growth through design led innovation. Cape Town, over the last couple of years, has demonstrated its leadership in design thinking applying to a variety of social, health and business challenges, said Patrick Collings, South Africa MD of Idea Couture, a strategic innovation consultancy and global leader in the development and application of design thinking. "As far as South African cities go, Cape Town has a strong claim as design thinking capital of the country. However, despite our strong design culture and community, Bloom says that Johannesburg is a strong competitor by virtue of it being the economic capital. The design industry around Gauteng is very strong and organisations such as Standard Bank are starting to embed design thinking along its innovation ecosystems." Therefore, if Cape Town wants to be the leader in design thinking, corporates will need to get on board and start embedding design thinking along their innovation ecosystems, concludes Bloom. TOKYO - Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made an offering on Thursday to a symbol of past Japanese military expansionism, Yasukuni Shrine, despite neighbors China and South Korea's call to stop such provocative move. Abe has offered the "masakaki" trees during the shrine's spring and autumn festivals since he returned to power late 2012 and paid an unpopular visit in December 2013, prompting strong protests from China and South Korea. The United States also expressed its disappointment to the prime minister's Yasukuni worship. The controversial war-linked shrine honors 14 convicted Japanese war criminals during World War II and the Yushukan, a propaganda museum inside the shrine, spares no efforts to whitewash Japan's wartime wrongdoings. Abe never restricts his Cabinet ministers and lawmakers from his Liberal Democratic Party to pay homage to the notorious shrine. China has urged Japan to do more to improve bilateral ties that are scratched due to Japan's unilateral move over their territorial disputes and Abe's historical revisionism. The Yasukuni offering is apparently a move went opposite to enhance relations between China and Japan and will continue damage mutual trust. The Hrithik Roshan and Kanagana Ranaut legal wrangle doesnt look like it will end anytime soon. For the past few weeks, there have been reports that Hrithik has circulated the emails he seemingly received from Kangana, and that his lawyer Dipesh Mehta has submitted 40 emails allegedly sent by the actress (to Hrithik) to the Cyber Crime Cell of the Mumbai Police. However, Kanganas legal counsel Rizwan Siddiquee has contested the veracity of these emails purported to be from Kangana. It is a matter of record that Hrithik filed his FIR only on 5 March 2016 after my client claimed that her emails were hacked. It is therefore apparent that the emails that Hrithik is referring to or relying upon, in all probability are not genuine at all and could largely be fabricated, Siddiquee said. He also cautioned against accepting Kangana as the sender or author of any of these emails until the actress herself had a chance to verify their contents. Until such verification and acceptance on the part of my client, any emails circulated by Hrithik to the media in an effort to tarnish my client's name and image or to put pressure on her and/or to outrage her modesty should be treated as fabricated, Siddiquee said. Kangana, who will be soon recording her statement with Cyber Crime Cell as a witness, has alleged that her rumoured former beau Hrithik Roshan hacked her email accounts due to which she was forced to shut two of her primary email accounts more than eight months ago. These allegations were also contained in my counter notice-cum-reply dated 1 March 2016, to which Hrithik has still not replied to despite a lapse of more than 50 days, said Kanganas lawyer. Siddiquee said that if Hrithik was serious about clearing his public image, then he needed to respond to all the points raised in Kanganas notice. As per the information given by the actress legal team about a month ago, Hrithik allegedly wanted to delete all the intimate correspondence he had exchanged with Kangana and had her email account hacked for this purpose. Hrithiks legal counsel was not available for comment. When this writer contacted DCP (Cyber Crime) M Rajkumar, he refused to comment on the status of the investigation into the case. The 12th NIBM convocation speech by Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor, Raghuram Rajan, is a must read to Narendra Modis growth-rate obsessed finance minister, Arun Jaitley. Also, to all those who are celebrating Indias new-found status of China-beating, worlds fastest growing economy, even when one third of Indian population still live in poverty. The speech, titled as Words Matter but so Does Intent would teach the reader/listener (here Rajan sounds more like a professor than a central banker) why one shouldnt live in a fools paradise merely looking at the GDP growth numbers as a tool to assess the countrys economic growth but not paying attention to the ground realities. Jaitley, responding to Rajans comment of equating India to a one-eyed King in the land of blind made in an interview to a foreign publication, said, a 7.5 percent GDP growth rate would be a reason for celebration for any other country, indirectly asking the governor why he is ignoring the high growth rate. "Compared to the rest of the world we are growing much faster, in fact the fastest. Compared to our own potential, we can do better. So at 7.5 percent growth, any other country in the world would be celebrating," Jaitley said. In the speech, Rajan tells Jaitley and all those ecstatic about the growth figure what is wrong with uncorking the bubbly only looking at the growth number, by listing out four distinct reasons to substantiate his point. These are: 1) Growth is just one measure of performance. The level of per capita GDP is also important. We are still one of the poorest large countries in the world on a per capita basis, and have a long way to go before we reasonably address the concerns of each one of our citizens. 2) I cannot get euphoric if India is the fastest growing large economy. Our current growth certainly reflects the hard work of the government and the people of the country, but we have to repeat this performance for the next 20 years before we can give every Indian a decent livelihood. 3) We are still the poorest country on a per capita basis among the BRICS. We need to change perceptions by delivering steadily on our promise for a long time by implementing, implementing, and implementing. We cannot get carried away by our current superiority in growth, for as soon as we believe in our own superiority and start distributing future wealth as if we already have it, we stop doing all that is required to continue growing. 4) We are often compared with China. But the Chinese economy, which was smaller than ours in the 1960s, is now five times our size at market exchange rates. The average Chinese citizen is over four times richer than the average Indian. The sobering thought is we have a long way to go before we can claim we have arrived. No one has, so convincingly, exposed the futility of creating a mirage of a super-growing economy going by the GDP growth figure. Remember, the high numbers happened after a change in methodology in calculating the GDP and is still being contested by economists for lack of correlation with other key economic parameters. Rajan deserves credit for exposing the growth myth of his boss (technically RBI governor reports to finance ministry). One-eyed controversy Rajans comment that India is like a one-eyed King in the land of blind hadnt clearly gone down well with senior ministers in Modis cabinet. Besides Jaitley, commerce minister Nirmala Sitharaman and minister of state Jayanta Sinha too expressed reservations against the comment saying Rajan could have used better words. Rajan apologisednot to the ministers, but to the blind accepting that the reference would have hurt the blind. Shortly after Rajans comment, Sitharaman had said. I may not happy with his choice of words. I think whatever action is being taken by this government is showing results. Here too, Rajan has a fitting reply. How much of our language is tinged with meaning that is liable to misinterpretation? How forgiving should we be of a bad choice of words when the intent is clearly different?. Did Rajans words were taken out of context by media or the politicians? Rajan, in his speech, said his words are hung to dry out of context, as in a newspaper headline but agrees that to be fair, they (newspapers) also offered a surrounding context, but few read beyond the headline. The statement doesnt appear to take a potshot at media, nor can anyone blame the journalist for only reading the headline and not the context. Its only natural if a headline-worthy phrase from the RBI governor catches a reporters attention. Beyond the one-eyed controversy, what one must note here is this: In a scenario, where the economic growth is solely assessed looking at the GDP growth number, Rajan has busted the myth with convincing arguments. Its an eye-opener for Jaitley to look beyond the GDP numbers. The GDP growth is a myth unless the fruits of economic growth reaches the poorest in the country and the government has the ability to guard the farmers, who are still solely dependent on seasonal rains to irrigate their crop, making them vulnerable to drought. According to this analysis in Mint, the official statistics measuring the poor in India might have understated the problem in the past with nearly half of Indians surviving on less than Rs 38 a day in 2011-12. The debate on defining the poor India is still on and we dont have any updated numbers. But, one thing is sure. Its not yet time to uncork the bubbly just looking at the GDP figure. With data contribution from Kishor Kadam Nashik: Signalling a major social change, women on Thursday morning were permitted entry to the Trimbakeshwar temple here, one of the 12 'Jyotirlingas' (a devotional object representing Lord Shiva) in the country. A group of three women activists of the Swarajya Sanghatana led by Vanita Gutte, was allowed to enter the temple amidst tight security. Bhumata Ranragini Brigade President Trupti Desai, who started the campaign for women's entry to all places of worship in January, welcomed the development and announced she will visit the temple on Friday. This sigificant development came 13 days after women were permitted entry to the Shani Shingnapur temple in Ahmednagar district on 8 April. However, on 20 April, women activists were allegedly manhandled by a group of locals while they were trying to enter into the sanctum sanctorum of the famous Trimbakeshwar temple on Wednesday, following which the police booked 200 persons. Former president of Trimbakeshwar Municipal Council Anagha Phadke is also among those booked, police said. Talking to reporters, Vanita Gutte, president of Pune-based Swarajya Sanghatana said, "I was standing along with our women activists in the queue since 5 am to gain entry into the sanctum sanctorum of the temple. We also followed the dress code wearing wet cotton clothes for the purpose." "The entry into the sanctum sanctorum is restricted between 6 am and 7 am, the time that has been fixed by the temple trust. However, some local priests and women deliberately stood in the queue before us and obstructed us from entering the sanctum. They also manhandled us," Gutte added. Thereafter, the activists lodged a complaint with Trimbakeshwar police against the priests and women. "Two hundred persons, including the former municipal president of Trimbakeshwar, have been booked under IPC sections 354 (assault or criminal force to woman with intent to outrage her modesty), 341 (wrongful restraint), 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of the peace), and 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention)," Inspector of Trimbakeshwar police station HP Kolhe said. Police will go through the CCTV footage and will take action in this regard, he said. The Trimbakeshwar Devasthan Trust recently decided to allow women into the famous Lord Shiva temple's 'garbha griha' (sanctum sanctorum) for an hour everyday, but with a rider that they must wear wet cotton or silk clothes while offering prayers in the core area. On 14 April, based on a complaint by Gutte that they were being obstructed from entering the temple, police had registered offences against nearly 250 people, including members of the temple trust, some local priests, and temple workers, under relevant sections. with inputs from Agencies Kadapa: Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu on Thursday said it was the responsibility of the Centre to safeguard the interests of the state and fulfil promises made during its bifurcation in 2014. "It is the responsibility of the Central government to safeguard and protect the interests of the new (residuary) state," he said while talking to reporters on his second day of visit. The Centre has to fulfil all the assurances given to the state under the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2014 which led to the creation of Telangana, Naidu said. The TDP-led government has been demanding special category status for AP, a special development package, funds for the new capital and incentives for industries, among other things. Talking about development in the native district of YSR Congress President Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy, Naidu said "a lot has to be done to develop Kadapa district." He said the Government is working out modalities to take up developmental works in Kadapa in a big way. In this context, Naidu will again visit Kadapa on 25-26 April. Sri Kodanda Rama Swamy Temple located in Ontimitta town near here will be developed as a 'holy city' as well as a tourist spot, the Chief Minister said. Srinagar: Demanding revocation of Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), opposition National Conference leader Farooq Abdullah on Thursday said the Centre should demonstrate political will and imagination to usher Jammu and Kashmir into an era of peace, stability and progress. "Revocation of AFSPA is the need of the hour. New Delhi should put in sustained and serious efforts to address the political alienation in Kashmir and provide a hope of reconciliation and inclusiveness to the youth of the state," he said addressing party workers at a function in Anantnag district of south Kashmir. The function was organised to commemorate the first death anniversary of veteran party leader and former minister Abdul Gani Shah Veeri. "Our young men and women excel in talent, wisdom and hard work and deserve to thrive in a political environment that nurtures their dreams. "Hostility cannot be countered with denial or further hostility. New Delhi should walk the extra-mile in addressing the trust-deficit among our youth and should explore every possible opportunity to empower them as the torch-bearers of peace and progress in the state," the former Chief Minister said. He said National Conference is committed to strive for the political resolution of the Kashmir issue and would ever shelve its demand for the restoration of Autonomy and the pre-1953 status. "These are our principled stands and we believe this is the most feasible model of resolving the political issue and would also satisfy the aspirations of our people. Others have a right to advocate their own solutions and there is absolutely no problem with that," he said. Abdullah said any solution acceptable first and foremost to the people of Jammu and Kashmir and also to India and Pakistan would be a credible solution. "While there might be differences in opinion and ideology, I doubt anyone could possibly deny the necessity of resolving the political issue," he said. The National Conference chief asked party workers to ensure participation and empowerment of educated youth in the political processes that define the state's future. "We should encourage the young generation to come and voice their grievances and aspirations from within the democratic system. "This would be a productive medium of channelizing their passion for their state and also their commitment to stand up for the rights and dignity of their people. "It's imperative they are groomed, nurtured and empowered," Abdullah added. Srinagar: Three militants were killed on Thursday in an encounter with security forces in north Kashmir's Kupwara district, the army said. One more militant has been killed in the operation in north Kashmir, an army official said. He said the security forces also recovered three AK 47 rifles from the encounter site. Giving details of the operation, the official said a search operation was launched in Putshai area of Lolab in Kupwara district on Thursday morning after receiving specific information about the presence of militants in the area. He said as the search operation was going on, militants fired upon the forces resulting in the gunbattle. The operation was still ongoing, the official said, adding the identity and the group affiliation of the slain militants could not be immediately ascertained. Dehradun: A horse was buried with "police honours" after dying from injuries suffered in an attack allegedly by an Indian politician, with his death triggering renewed outrage. The police horse, called Shaktiman, became the subject of a weeks-long row between rival political parties in India after his injured hind leg turned gangrenous and had to be amputated. Ganesh Joshi, from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was briefly arrested last month on charges of cruelty to the horse which was wounded during a party protest in the northern state of Uttarakhand. Shaktiman was fitted with a prosthetic limb reportedly rushed in from the United States and every detail of the animal's road to recovery was covered by the Indian media. But Uttarakhand police announced on Wednesday that Shaktiman had gone into shock and died after being given anaesthesia to treat another infection. "The doctors had administered anaesthesia to him as they needed to treat an infection but he could not handle the anaesthesia," senior superintendent Sadanand Datte told AFP. Datte said the animal was buried with "full police honours" in state capital Dehradun late Wednesday. Shaktiman was wrapped in a white cloth in a ceremony watched by politicians and police, an AFP reporter at the funeral said. The news triggered fresh anger, with national minister and animal rights campaigner Maneka Gandhi calling for those responsible to be thrown in jail for "killing a police officer". BJP state lawmaker Joshi again denied he had attacked the horse with a stick during the protest. "If I am found guilty, then cut my leg," Joshi was quoted as saying by The Times of India. The Uttarakhand government, run by the rival Congress party, had spared no expense in treating the horse, with the creature becoming a cause celebre. Shaktiman had been treated to repeat visits from the state's chief minister and an American veterinary surgeon had reportedly been flown in from Bhutan to provide treatment, in what some critics saw as a case of political point-scoring. Indians took to Twitter on Thursday over the death, some accusing politicians of "using #Shaktiman as a political tool". Bollywood actor Neha Dhupia said: "We are sorry #Shaktiman. U didn't deserve this... It's us... What's the human race coming to." At the centre of the Handwara crisis is a 16-year-old girl a minor in the protective custody of the Kashmir Police. There is no doubt that had the police not taken her into custody, she would have been assaulted by people, following the death of three people in the first two days. But why the police is hell-bent on not releasing her even 10 days after the incident is a 'secret' known only to the top brass of the state police. It will take months, if not days, for the truth to emerge. And as truth become the first causality in any conflict, maybe the real story will never become known at all. Kashmir is a graveyard of reputations and this minor has already been orchestrated for life. Name-calling began after the police allegedly released the confessional video. She became an informer in the next hour, according to some social media users, and a prostitute with two cell phones according to others, and then, a victim a day later. Kashmiri society has developed a disturbing trait over the past two decades of conflict: If you speak to a police officer, you are an informer. Worse yet, if you are seen in a casual conversation with an army officer, you are tagged as Mukhbir for life. If you demand your rights you will be tagged an "Azadi walla" inside and a Pakistani by the rest of the country. But let's revisit a very important fact that has become lost in all the rancor. This is a 16-year-old girl. Give yourself a moment to let that sink in. In the girl's hometown, in the school in which she studies, in the society she inhabits and in every nook and cranny of the Valley, people are only discussing what is happening to her, her character, and that battered truth has so many versions. The hypocritical among the majority of us would never like to believe that this girl even if she was a minor could have had a relationship with an army soldier, who could well be a Kashmiri or a Tamilian. And then, why only blame the police? Why not Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, and her journalist-turned-politician friend Nayeema Ahmad Mahjoor, the chairperson of the State Women's Commission (SWC)? Mahjoor has thus far failed to facilitate free access to this minor girl who continues to be under the strict surveillance of the police to her legal team. Mahjoor said on Wednesday that the minor was not in police custody but at her relatives home with one or two cops staying put at the place. But on Thursday, she told Firstpost that the police told her that if the family of the girl doesnt need security, we can withdraw it. Im working in close consultation with the police. I have to make sure that she feels safe and is not pressurised by anybody When I spoke to the girl, she was mentally disturbed. I also spoke to the chief minister and told her that we cannot put the girl in a cage and she should be given the choice to do what she wants, she said. After her identity was revealed, it is unlikely that the girl will ever be able to return her home which remains padlocked and guarded by the police, said a women in the press colony during a protest organised to demand the release of the girl. There is no doubt the Jammu and Kashmir Police is not feeling the heat with some top officials feeling embarrassed" for allegedly releasing the confession video of the minor Handwara girl publicly and putting her life in danger, a senior minister in PDP-BJP government said. There is a lot of pressure on the police for exposing the identity of the minor girl by releasing her video publicly. They have put her life in danger. She can never resume her normal life, the minister told Firstpost on condition of anonymity. The minister said some top police officials are being questioned about the handling of the entire situation that ended with the killing of five people by security forces, imposing of curfews and strikes and the snapping of internet services in Kashmir last week. The situation could have been handled easily but the mishandling of the situation by the police in the first place turned the situation ugly. To save its skin, the police wants to pass the buck by arresting people, the minister said. The girl, in the video allegedly leaked by police and later officially released by Army, had exonerated the army of molestation and accused locals of instigating protests. According to the school record, the minor was born in October 2000. She is not even sixteen, principal of her school, Mir Manzoor Ahmed, said. It is illegal to expose the identity of a minor according to Juvenile Justice Act. The government is yet to file a case against army or police for exposing the identity of this girl, Parveez Imroz, her council, said. After initial four days of protective custody, Imroz was allowed to meet the girl in a house in Handwara. For four days, she had remained inside a police station after that was taken to a local policemens house, when we meet her there were four policemen inside. When we insisted that we need some privacy they left for two minutes only to come back and drive us out of the town so that we dont come back, Imroz said. The Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Societies (JKCSS), a Srinagar-based right advocacy group, had last week accused the police and state government of denying the minors access to her counsel and pressuring her to give statement in a certain way. They stated that they have been kept in illegal detention and wrongful confinement. They have been intimated, abused and kept under constant surveillance, a statement issued by the group said. In a video statement issued by JKCSS, the mother of the minor said that her girl was forced to make statement under police pressure. Following this, the state High Court had ordered the Superintendent of Police to allow the minor girl to meet her legal team. The state government on Wednesday had to face a protests by students in Srinagar and in Kashmir University over the illegal detention of the minor girl. They demanded her immediate release and unhindered access to legal aid. At the centre of the protests in Handwara sparked by the molestation of a young school girl, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court directed the police superintendent to allow the minor to meet her mother and lawyers. Protests erupted in Handwara town after allegations of molestation by an Army solider on 12 April, two people died and a women was hit by a bullet. However, the case has taken on different turns since then. Initially, an army personnel was accussed of molesting the girl, however in her video statements to the police and the chief judicial magistrate under Section 164-A of CrPC, she absolved the armyman of any wrongdoing. The girl named, Hilal Ahmed Bandey as one of the persons who molested her after she she came out of a public restroom. In her statement before the Judicial Magistrate, she said that on 12 April, after school hours, while proceeding to her home with her friend, she entered in a public lavatory near main chowk in Handwara "As soon as she came out of lavatory she was confronted, assaulted and dragged by two boys and her bag was snatched. One of the boys was in school uniform. The production of the girl along with her father before the Chief Judicial Magistrate, Handwara was to comply with the order of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court," police had said. According to The Hindustan Times, the girl was being kept in "illegal police custody"and a Habeas Corpus writ was heard by the High Court. A statement by the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Societies (JKCCS) quoted in the paper reads, "The consequence of todays proceedings is six more days of illegal police custody for the Handwara minor girl. But, the direction to SP Ghulam Jeelani Wani will ensure that for the first time since being detained the minor girl and family will have unhindered access to legal counsel." The girl's counsel claims that her statements to the police and CJM were not made voluntarily. He said the girl, who did not blame any army personnel for molestation as alleged earlier, had been pressured to testify in a manner directed by the police. He said the girl's statement before the chief judicial magistrate, Handwara on Sunday was recorded in the absence of her father and her lawyers. "The minor girl's statement under Section 164-A CrPC was recorded before the judicial magistrate at Handwara. Her father was not present in court during the recording of the statement. No lawyer was present in court accompanying her. "In the courtroom, besides the judge, there were four other persons who the minor girl could not identify," the spokesman said. JKCSS also maintains that the girl was being kept in detention illegally, in a "jungle-like place." The JKCCS has also written to Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, director-general of Jammu and Kashmir Police, IGP Kashmir, DIG North Kashmir, divisional commissioner Kashmir and DC Kupwara for "unhindered access of the legal counsels to the family". But, so far, "the government has chosen to not respond," he said. With inputs from PTI The garment workers' violent stir in the beginning of this week in Bengaluru may have died down, with the central government withdrawing the provident fund amendment, but what is apparent is that this was one protest that was just waiting to happen. The workers in this unorganised sector, living and working in pathetic conditions, were looking for a just such a trigger to erupt in rage. The protest was not organised by any trade union; it was spontaneous and leaderless and started innocuously outside a factory gate in Bommanhalli, a suburb near Electronic city, the IT hub of Bengaluru. Within hours it had spread like wildfire, drawing nearly 10,000 workers from the surrounding five factories. By Tuesday, the protesters had turned violent, pelting stones, burning buses and other vehicles in major hubs, including Hosur road, Tumkur Road, Jallhalli. Protests were also happening in Madur and Mandya. Several people, including policemen were injured. Two of them were struck by bullets when the police fired in the air to control the mob. Bengaluru may primarily be known as the IT capital of India, but there are almost 1,200 garment factories in and around the city. Many international brands source from these factories. Nearly 90 percent of the garment workers are women and many are migrant workers from rural Karnataka and North India. Many maids working in houses now have at one time or the other worked in garment factories. To get a better sense of what ails the industry, Firstpost reached out to the Garment Labour Union (GLU), founded by women garment workers. The GLU has only women workers as members and collaborates with other trade unions, civil society organisations and campaigns to improve the working conditions in the garment sector. Highlighting the problems in the garment industry, Yashoda PH, general secretary of the GLU told Firstpost, The factories have high production targets, this is a major issue. If workers dont reach their targets, theyre abused verbally and even terminated. Theres also sexual abuse, although nobody will complain openly. Workers cant take leave, if they do, when they return theyre summarily sacked. Security will be told that the worker should not be allowed in and their tokens will be confiscated. Once a year they are allowed 15 days to a month to go home, but when they return theres no continuity of service. They have to take a new appointment. Talking about the pathetic living conditions of the 15,000 to 16,000 workers from North India, Yashoda says, They have no freedom, they are housed in hostels, where there are no newspapers and no TV. They cant go out and are allowed to go out for about two to three hours on Sundays. The hostel warden and the factory executives keep a track of the time it takes for the workers to reach the factory from the hostel and back. For instance, the hostel warden will tell the factory manager or supervisor or whoever is in charge, I am sending 25 people it will take them 15/20 minutes to get to the factory'. The factory executive will do the same when the workers leave the factory to go back to the hostel. GLU was involved in the tripartite meeting called by the Minimum Wage Board between the government, manufacturers and unions to discuss minimum wages of the workers for 2013-2014. Yashoda explains what transpired at the meeting. We asked that wages be increased by Rs 500 per day from Rs 196 per day. But it was hiked to only Rs 252 per day inclusive of DA for 2014. In 2015 this was raised to Rs 272 per day inclusive of DA, Yashoda says. Firstpost also contacted Cividep India, which is doing a lot of work in the industry. Cividep India attempts to educate workers about their rights and campaigns for corporate accountability with other like-minded organisations and individuals. Gopinath Parakuni, general secretary and founding member of Cividep India told Firstpost that it was quite a complex situation. There are so many brands involved, with a global supply chain and some 100 different operations are going on. Designing, building, marketing and image building for a product is going on in Europe, while the manufacture is happening in different countries, including India. Fundamentally its a trade issue, but a colonial hangover rules the industry. It took nearly 40 to 50 years for the manufacturing to move to Asia. Talking about the unorganised work force in the garment industry, Parakuni says, They are a vulnerable workforce, perhaps they spend four to five years in school. They come from feudal backgrounds and suddenly they find themselves in a city and have to fend for themselves. There are no long term employees in the industry. Theres a high attrition rate, workers stay in one company for a maximum of two to five years. Talking about the low wages, he says, Its a race to the bottom, where the market led by leading brands like H&M, C&A, GAP, Inditex, Tommy Hilfiger, Mother Care dictate pricing. They try for the cheapest manufacturing cost and wages are thus determined by suppliers in negotiation with the smaller trade unions. Theres no formal collective bargaining, as the factories never allow a trade union to be formed, from lessons they learnt from the textile industry in Mumbai. And they are well within their rights not to recognise a labour union. Asked why the state government wouldnt step in and conduct inspections, he said, "Theres no political will. They have to favour both the manufacturers and the workers. They do inspect when they get complaints or memorandums are submitted by the workers. But these are not effective and not on scale. There are no prosecutions or convictions. Meanwhile, lets not lose heart. Its not as though no action is taking place. The Economic Times reported in March this year that Indian firms who supply apparel, even if it is to foreign brands such as Gap, H&M and Marks & Spencer, will now be scrutinised for unfair trade practices. This decision was taken after a consortium of international agencies, including Unicef, Stop Child Labour and Solidaridad, signed an agreement on this issue. This agreement was in response to a paper published by The India Committee of the Netherlands (ICN) in January 2016. Titled Unfree and Unfair, the paper highlighted how young migrant garment workers live in appalling conditions. Unfree and Unfair studied the conditions for migrant workers in four garment factories K Mohan, Texport Industries, Arvind Ltd Exports and Shahi Exports. It is high time the Karnataka government stepped in and took action before another protest takes place. It should not allow human rights violations to carry on in the industry and should prosecute and convict the offenders. For, Make in India comes with responsibility. Imphal: The BJP's Manipur unit plans to hold a series of protests to demand the resignations of Chief Minister Okram Ibobi Singh and Congress state unit president T.N. Haokip over the alleged involvement of their kin in drug trafficking. The Central Bureau of Investigation has already filed a charge sheet in an Imphal court in the 2013 case. Bharatiya Janata Party legislator Khumukcham Joykishan said: "In 2013, the Special Investigation Unit of the Manipur Police seized drugs worth several crores at the Tulihal airport here. Since the CBI has named chief minister's nephew Okram Henry in the charge sheet, he should resign on moral grounds." "Seikholet Haokip, son of Congress MLA and now party's state unit president T.N. Haokip, was one of the main accused in the seizure of drugs valued at over Rs.30 crore, which were being smuggled out by an army officer. It is shocking how Haokip was made the Congress state unit chief," the BJP leader added. Joykishan said that if the Congress legislators and ministers failed to demand the resignations of both Ibobi and Haokip, it will be assumed that they too support drug trafficking in the state. On the other hand, Henry's supporters dubbed the whole thing a "political conspiracy". "Framing of the charge sheet is not a court verdict. The charge has been made in view of the coming local body and assembly elections," one of Henry's supporters said. Haokip, whose son was arrested along with the army officer and some others on drug trafficking charge in 2013, maintained that his son was staying separately and that the law will take its own course. Imphal: The legalised border trade between Manipur and Myanmar was brought to a standstill on Thursday due to the 12-hour shutdown called by several voluntary organisations in the northeastern state. The shutdown was called to protest five bomb blasts triggered near Hollenphai village in Manipur on Wednesday that injured three troopers of Assam Rifles. The troopers are, however, out of danger. All private and commercial vehicles along the trans-Asian highway from Manipur's capital Imphal to the border town of Moreh were off the road. While hundreds of tourists and traders could not leave Imphal on Thursday, many others, who were to return to the state capital, were stranded at Moreh. Police sources at Moreh told IANS that there was no untoward incident during the strike. People remained indoors and police and paramilitary personnel patrolled the highway and village roads to maintain law and order. This Firstpost series that began with highlighting how private water sellers are doing sound business in the midst of severe economic downturn in the water-parched region; the toothless laws, lack of enforcement and ineffective irrigation network which has led to the exploitation and depletion of water levels in the dams; crop failures triggering farmer suicides; the regions sugarcane addiction, and climate change manipulations affecting the agricultural produce, provides a vantage point on the agrarian crises of Marathwada. The next step, however, should be damage control. Environmentalists, water conservationists and agricultural scientists have long been suggesting ways like watershed management, changing cropping pattern, focussing on agro-forestry, tree-farming and allied sectors like poultry and dairy to mitigate drought. It is now that the region is facing severe water crisis in years, the state has actively started implementing measures like Jalyukt Shivar to conserve water. What must change? Cropping pattern: The challenge lies in motivating farmers to change their cropping pattern. Drought-resilient crops like jowar (sorghum), bajra (pearl millets), oil seeds like groundnut and safflower have replaced water-guzzlers like cotton, sugarcane and soybean that yield high returns and are easy on labour. Although initially this improved the returns, it also subsequently increased the demand of water. According to experts, with only 12 percent area under irrigation, opting for sugarcane and soybean has turned out to be a bad idea. Not only does it affect the farmer, but it also affects the fodder availability for cattle as well. Drastic fall in jowar and bajra has hampered the availability of dry and green fodder. The chart below explains the drastic changes in cropping pattern Kishor Tiwari, chairman of state-run Vasantrao Naik Sheti Swavlamban Mission, tells Firstpost: Farmers should not have been allowed to grow sugarcane this year given the intensity of the drought, yet about nine to 10 sugar factories were seen operating smoothly. Faulty political leadership at the local level has caused havoc. Farmers are misguided about cropping patterns; they have to first change their mindset, only then we can find our way out of this problem. According to Udhavrao Alse, agronomist of Vasantrao Naik Marathwada Krishi Vidyapeeth (VNMKV), the tendency of farmers favouring mono-cropping should be replaced with intercropping. Instead of growing a single cash crop like sugarcane or soybean, farmers should grow jowar along with tur in a 4:2 ratio or bajra and tur in 3:3 ratio. This minimises the risk of production. Legumes like pea, cow or chick pea, masoor, beans etc are considered most ideal for this practice, he said. Exploitation of groundwater: Groundwater extracted in huge quantities from private tube wells is mainly used for farming purposes (read for cash crops) instead of drinking water, say experts. Such kind of exploitation has become rapid now. The expansion of area under horticulture and sugarcane is largely driven by the extraction of groundwater, said B Venkateswarlu, VNMKVs vice-chancellor. Ignoring to recharge the groundwater has now caused major depletion in its level. Agricultural scientists observe that digging of borewells for extracting groundwater not only ruins the fertility of the soil but also depletes groundwater level. The groundwater drawn from a single borewell in a farm creates shortage for other farms in the vicinity. Vaibhav Sahane, a farmer from Nanded, has an 85-foot borewell which has been supplying water to his seven-acre land sufficiently since May last year. However, Sahanes neighbour who owns a three-acre land gets no water even with two borewells. The problem is there are laws but no enforcement at the grassroot level, experts point out. Sugarcane crushing: The practice, which usually begins in October, requires tremendous amounts of water. According to this report by SANDRP, a factory that can crush about 2,500 tons of cane per day on an average needs 25,00,000 liters of water per day. The report further states that Gangakhed Sugar Factory in Parbhani needs a whopping 45 lakh litres of water each day from Masoli Dam. With a huge 42 percent rainfall deficit in 2014, crushing took place unhindered in more than 46 sugar factories in all eight districts of Marathwada in 2015. This explains how sugar factories exploit availability of water to their advantage. In August 2015, the state government had floated an idea of banning sugarcane crushing to protect drinking water supplies which, however, remained only an idea due to the strong opposition by the parties concerned. A probing question to be asked here is that why sugarcane and soybean farming is so widely promoted? Why there are subsidies provided by the state for sugarcane growers despite the fact that these are water-guzzling crops that destroy the fertility of the soil? asked Vasant Futane, a 65-year-old organic farmer from Amravati district. Water literacy: Water management as an effective short-term strategy has been widely suggested. Conserving water with techniques like watershed management, contour bunding, water revival, building farm ponds and effective irrigation methods like drip and sprinkler and use of large-scale mulching technologies can work wonders when it comes to retaining rainwater. With May heat approaching and a month to go for monsoon showers, The top most priority of farmers should be to economically manage drinking water for them and fodder for their cattle. Using available dry fodder with mineral supplements for cattle can prove beneficial for the cattle for next couple of months till monsoon arrives, said B Venkateswarlu. Water literacy and budgeting at the grassroots should be widely and actively promoted, he added. When state schemes are implemented, it is important that the farmer must be simultaneously educated on how to use such effective farming practices. Only if schemes like integrated watershed management were implemented effectively, Marathwada would have been capable of facing the severity of the crisis, Futane said. Although there have been independent network of volunteers working towards beating the water scarcity and managing water, these efforts should be implemented on wider scale, he said. Mihir Mathur, an Associate fellow working with The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), who worked on watershed management in various places in Maharashtra for five years, stresses on water budgeting and changing the water pattern to their cropping pattern. There has to be a proper water budget for a community which falls under watershed area. Based on the quantitative assessment like how much water falls on the land, water percolation rate, how much rainwater is retained the communities need to be informed about what kind of crops can be grown and livestock to rear. This has to be done through a local channel. How many farmers are actually aware of what changes in crops could benefit them and how many are motivated to accept changes? Even today majority of the farmers take offence when an expert explains them to change their cropping pattern or tips them on water management. Their age-old farming techniques is what they hold dear and take pride in, said Udhavrao Alse. Who has the time to understand the technical stuff these scientists preach. Most of the experimental farming fields in the vast expanse of 3,000 acres of agricultural universitys campus are lying completely barren. They should first show us results in the university campuses and then we will decide if we can use and invest in their methodology, says 58-year-old Sudhakar Patil, a small farmer from Parbhani district, who grows cotton and soybean on his five-acre land. Organic farming: The organic farmers Firspost spoke to suggest that non-chemical or natural farming, which focuses on improving the fertility of the soil by using crop residues, compost and manure, can be considered as one of the plausible long-term measures. With no use of chemical fertilisers, the crops dont contaminate and reduces the pollution of the environment, food and water, they said. Farmers should refrain from using genetically-modified crops which are harmful to the ecosystem, says Futane, whose 12-acre land at Rawala village of Amravati district is populated with trees like mango, shindi, babul, ber, bamboo, neem, coconut etc which not only help in retaining soil fertility and rainwater but also bring down the rising temperature. He also grows jowar or sorghum along with green gram, and wheat along with fenugreek. Futane has implemented techniques like contour bunding a practice of ploughing or planting across a slope following its elevation contour lines that helps in increasing the level of water table, maintaining soils fertility and retaining rainwater in the fields and tree-farming for over 10 years. He converted his wasteland into fertile farmland by making it a zero tilling farm then planting as many trees as possible. If the state promotes policies involving agro-forestry, it would definitely help increase the minuscule 2.5 to three percent of forest cover Marathwada has, he said. Vidya Baburao Rudraksha, a 49-year-old farmer from Beed one of the most water-deprived districts also said that organic farming has helped her 15-acre farm stand green in the face of drought. Although water scarcity has depleted the level of water in her well, she has been economically using water to feed her cattle and for personal use. She has been using methods like drip irrigation and sprinklers for nursing her Kharif and Rabi crops. We dont use cotton as we see to it that crops that are grown on my farm are useful to us as well as my cattle. Crops like wheat, tur, jowar chickpea and millets have sustained the drought, she said. Rudraksha, who is also Microbiology major, has been using home-made compost and green fodder generated from her farm to feed her cattle. She uses gobar gas generated from the cow dung and milk for her family. For these two months, my only aim is to curtail the liberal use of water. Mango, turmeric, garlic trees are drought-resilient and we are economically using the produce, thats how we manage in this crisis. Groundwater recharge: Research scientists working on a project under dryland agriculture technology at Vasantrao Naik Marathwada Krishi Vidyapeeth invented a borewell recharger which enables groundwater recharge. This recharger pulls in diverted stray rainwater from the rooftops and surface with the help of filter beds using percolation tanks, nala bunds, individual open wells and borewells. Groundwater recharge is extremely necessary today. In the last two years, the average rainfall in Marathwada was less than 50 percent that has led to drying up of open wells as well as borewells. Initially people exploited the available water by bringing as much area under irrigation for cash crops as possible with an intention of high profits and assured income. However, neglecting the recharge of groundwater has caused depletion in water levels, says Professor Madan Pendke, senior scientist with VNMKV, dryland agriculture department. Allied sectors: Promoting allied sectors like livestock and poultry reduces farmers dependency on his farm produce, observe experts. Even as drought deals a heavy blow on the cattle in Maharashtra, states like Rajasthan which usually gets 100-200 mm of rainfall, supplement the fodder for their cattle over the fallen leaves of resilient trees like khejri. Growing of such trees can be really helpful in many ways, they suggest. Protected cultivation: Another strategy gaining popularity in Maharashtra is protected cultivation, which is done with the help of green houses and shade nets. This helps in protecting the crops during hail storms, frosts, heat and cold waves. This is not only a climate resilient strategy but also makes maximum use of water and nutrients. Research and development: Agricultural scientists have been grappling with an acute shortage of manpower. State should also look into strengthening research and development team in agricultural universities which will not only help in bringing together scientists for new ideas and policy formation but also create an action plan for drought management, Professor Pralhad Jaybhaye of VNMKV said. Stressing the need to empower the farmers today, Dr Nerkar, former Vice-Chancellor of Mahatma Phule Krishi Vidyapeeth in Rahuri, says: Drought is not the only problem a farmer has to grapple with. With no financial backing in the face of consecutive droughts crushes the morale which leads to suicidal tendencies. There is an urgent need of empowering our farmers. Recently, the government with the aid of World Bank advocated to establish a company for individual and group of farmers for group farming. Such initiatives will definitely boost the morale of farmers and help in lowering suicide rates. If companies or a community plant trees as a part of their social responsibilities, they are awarded carbon credits. But there is no such motivation or say any credits granted to farmers if they plants more trees. Today trees are no longer farmers best friends. They are ruthlessly cutting trees and exploiting nature purely for commercial purposes. Drought cannot change overnight, but there has to be proper implementation of measures and enforcement of laws, says Futane. Read the previous parts of the series here: Part 1: Region is parched, impoverished and desperate, but it's a crisis of its own making Part 2: In the midst of severe economic downturn, private water sellers reap profits in Latur Part 3: Drought has brought the economy down and is forcing farmers to leave the region Part 4: Water scarcity has created a region where trust has eroded and left the social fabric frayed Part 5: Maha has the most dams in the country, but the least effective irrigation network Part 6: A surveyor of suicides tells the story behind the statistics and the lonely struggle of Indian farmers Part 7: Will outreach help reduce farmer suicides? Part 8: 'Toothless' laws lead to water exploitation Part 9: Shirpur, Jal Biradari projects show impact of small local initiatives Part 10: Why debt-ridden farmers are deemed least creditworthy Part 11: Crop insurance for farmers not adequate to cover cultivation costs Part 12: How climate change has destroyed agriculture and ruined farmers Part 13: History of state's sugarcane addiction long precedes the water crisis Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently had a private meeting with his wax statue at New Delhi and Twitterati, of course, could not contain their humour. While it is definitely exciting to meet yourself face-to-face, Twitter could not get enough of Modi giving his wax model some last minute touches. He is also seen with a palette and brush, almost looking like his masterstroke was the only thing missing from the statue. I know Modi was always a fan of Indira, is that why he had his wax statue made, so he too could be a "goongi gudiya"? Omair Ahmad (@OmairTAhmad) April 21, 2016 Genius Modi ji cleaning the earwax of his wax statue. pic.twitter.com/JcpZMPuOOM Gabbbar (@GabbbarSingh) April 20, 2016 all I want is for someone to look at me the way Modi looks at Wax Modi pic.twitter.com/53PxLI8d4y Rega Jha (@RegaJha) April 20, 2016 The one with paint brush in hand must be the Wax Statue. Real Modi is looking at the Camera pic.twitter.com/YNmBSrYoYr Joy (@Joydas) April 20, 2016 Apparently, Modi's wax statue at Madame Tussauds is more intelligent and better educated than he is. lindsay pereira (@lindsaypereira) April 20, 2016 Amazing stuff #MadameTussauds. Modi's wax statue is bang on accurate because it can find the camera with ease. pic.twitter.com/xDYkjajhgK Devaiah Bopanna (@devaiahPB) April 20, 2016 Modi's wax statue must be wearing higher heels and Fair & Lovely cream. pic.twitter.com/AOXK1PPj3T Anup Kaphle (@AnupKaphle) April 20, 2016 One of them keeps mum on lynching, black money, intolerance and social issues..., other one is a wax statue.#Modi pic.twitter.com/1jeCb235ny (@PARITHITAMIL) April 20, 2016 Can we trade the Madame Tussauds wax #Modi for the real one?? It will be more productive. Fish & Chips (@abasithhasan) April 20, 2016 The wax statue looks uncannily like a cross between Modi and MMS. Perhaps, the artist's impression. #MadameTussads https://t.co/IUiBOmaQhb TheGhoseSpot (@SandipGhose) April 20, 2016 Madame Tussauds "Wax ho ya real , Modi always knows where the cameras are!! " Pappu Gandhi (@punnydjoker) April 20, 2016 When Modi is busy hiding his wrinkles, because No Marks doesn't work on wax. pic.twitter.com/PP28Zo7m2Y Parth Vader (@PastasaurusRex) April 20, 2016 Mumbai: Seeking bail for former media baron Peter Mukerjea, his lawyer on Thursday claimed in a court here that his client had nothing to do with the murder of Sheena Bora. Peter's wife and Sheena's mother Indrani is the prime accused in the case. Peter's lawyer, advocate Aabad Ponda, on Thursday argued in the court of special CBI judge H S Mahajan that CBI picked up sentences from the statements of witnesses shorn of context to claim that Peter wanted to kill Sheena. Peter was not against the relationship between Sheena and Rahul (his son from earlier marriage) and in fact he blessed them when they got engaged, Ponda said, adding that Indrani, on the other hand, was against this relationship. "It is because of (Peter's) `karma' and fate that he got Indrani as his wife,' the lawyer said. About the allegation that Peter and Indrani were in constant touch during the period when crime took place (April 2012), Ponda said these were normal calls between husband and wife. "Strangers including police officers are called by (Indrani), CBI did not find it suspicious, but calling her husband is suspicious," Ponda said. Peter was in Rome during this period with Vidhie (Indrani's daughter from her relationship with former husband and co-accused Sanjeev Khanna) and many calls were just casual `good morning/good evening' conversations, he said. Indrani spoke to both Vidhie and Peter, he added. "If talking on phone is an offence, then many witnesses in the case such as police officers, psychiatrists and Indrani's personal assistant should have been named as accused," Ponda said. The arguments will continue tomorrow. Peter's bail application has been rejected once earlier. He was arrested on November 19. Other arrested accused are Indrani, Sanjeev Khanna and her driver Shyamvar Rai. Indrani, Rai and Khanna allegedly strangled Sheena (24), Indrani's daughter from earlier relationship, inside a car in April 2012. The crime came to light last August. According to CBI, the crime was linked to financial transactions New Delhi: A day after the BJP claimed the Rafale aircraft deal with France has been "finalised" at USD 8.8 billion (Rs 59,000 crore), Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar said on Thursday that it is not complete as yet but at an "advanced stage" and the intention is to "close it quite soon". In a lighter vein, he told reporters that the BJP tweet only indicates that journalists write stories very convincingly. BJP had on Wednesday tweeted a graphic, saying that the Rafale combat aircraft deal has been "finalised" and the Narendra Modi government had saved over Rs 21,000 crore in the "re-negotiation" with the French government. Defence Ministry sources had earlier said the deal was at an advanced stage and both India and France had narrowed down their differences over the pricing issue. "I can only tell you this much that while the deal is in quite an advanced stage, and we intent to close it quite soon, I still can't say that negotiations are totally cleared until we sign the deal or at least the deal is forwarded to the Cabinet for approval," Parrikar told reporters. The deal is expected to be finalised by May end. India has been bargaining hard with France over the pricing of the 36 fighter planes, a deal that was announced first by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in April 2015. The cost of the 36 Rafales, as per the earlier tender while keeping the cost escalation into account, comes to around Rs 65,000 crore. India has been bargaining for a price that is less than eight billion Euro (Rs 59,000 crore). "The deal to buy 36 state-of-the-art Rafale aircraft from France at 12 billion dollar (Rs 80000 crore) was renegotiated and finalised at 8.8 billion dollar (around Rs 59000 crore)," the BJP tweet had said. The government "saved" public money and the deal resulted in gain of "technological knowledge" and "strengthening the air power to defend the border", it had said. Jodhpur: The lawyer of Bollywood superstar Salman Khan, arguing for setting aside the actor's five-year jail term in a chinkara poaching case of 1998, told the Rajasthan High Court on Thursday that no case could be made out against him as the main prosecution witness was not with him at the time of the incident. Khan's counsel Mahesh Bora told Justice Nirmaljit Kaur that main prosecution witness Harish Dulani was not with the actor during the alleged poaching of two black bucks on 1-2 October, 1998, so how by relying on his statements could the forest department and police register two separate cases against Khan. "Dulani, had, in his statements, said that he had only dropped the vehicle at the hotel and returned on the night of 1 October. After the forest department interrogated him, he mentioned two more poaching incidents had taken place one each on 26 September, 1998 and 28 September, 1998. Since he was not present himself anywhere, who could he be relied upon. Hence no case could be made out against Khan for alleged poaching, Bora said. He was arguing on the appeal moved by Khan in the High Court against a five-year sentence in a case of poaching of one chinkara in Mathania on 1-2 October, 1998. He contended that Dulani was under illegal custody of the Forest Department, which has been established by the statements of the vehicles owner, and was released on 14 October, 1998 after recording of statements before the magistrate. "This leaves nothing to doubt that he was forced to give statements against Khan and thus was planted as a key witness", argued Bora in the court adding that this was the reason why Dulani did not turn up in the court after that for the examination. Bora also questioned that none of the witnesses in the case has either seen the poaching taking place or seen any carcass being transported by Khan. Then how can Khan be implicated while all other co-accused acquitted, he said. The defence also pointed to the pellets which were recovered from the vehicle and said they were planted. "It was strange to note that the pellets mentioned belonged to an air gun and could not be fatal for any animal," he argued. "Moreover, the vehicle owner has changed his statements wherein he first said that he had found the pellets in the vehicle while cleaning whereas later, he had said that Dulani had told him so," contended Bora. The court would continue with the arguments on Friday. Srinagar: Two unidentified militants were killed today in an encounter with security forces in north Kashmir's Kupwara district, the army said. Acting on specific information about the presence of militants in Putshai area of Lolab in the district, security forces cordoned off the area and began a search operation today, an army official said. He said as the search operation was going on, militants who were hiding there fired upon the forces resulting in a gun battle. Two militants have been killed in the operation so far, the official said. He said the identity of the slain militants could not be immediately ascertained. The operation was still ongoing. Khartoum: Stepping onto a Khartoum stage and launching into their first song, The Nightingales Sudan's best-loved girl band still raise whoops and cheers from adoring fans, 45 years after their debut. Sisters Amal, Hadia and Hayat Talsam were known in their 1970s heyday as the "Sudanese Supremes" for their stylish bobs, matching dresses and their soulful ballads, changing the image of female artists in Sudan forever. Their outfits may have changed a little at the January concert in Khartoum, the sisters appeared in long robes and loose headscarves but the audience's adoration has only increased, with fans dancing and singing in front of the stage. Their vintage brand of Sudanese pop, songs of longing and youth blending elements of folk music with their driving vocals aim to show the world another side to Sudan. "We want to travel the globe and offer our art to all the peoples of the world," Amal said after the concert at the family home, sitting beside her sisters. "We could show a beautiful side of Sudan to the outside world," said Hadia, the oldest of the sisters, grinning. Although they haven't got round to planning their tour, they do have some prior experience. 'Vibrant period' The Nightingales were formed in 1971, when a family friend came to their home in Omdurman, Khartoum's twin city, to ask their father if he could pick three of his seven daughters to perform a song he wrote. The trio performed so well that they made the arrangement permanent and they were picked to tour Sudan with president Jafer al-Nimeiri, a socialist-leaning army officer who seized power in 1969. "It was a very, very vibrant period for culture and art," said Hayat, the quietest of the sisters. Amal said she was 15, Hadia 17 and Hayat just 13 years old when they started touring, building a region-wide fan base. But in socially conservative 1970s Sudan, not everyone was pleased at the three young women travelling unaccompanied and singing and dancing in front of crowds. But the sisters won acceptance by force of character and with support from their family. "The Nightingales changed the way people looked at female artistes in Sudan," said Hadia. The group did nothing to change their looks and even appeared on the state broadcaster performing their songs. Other female artistes had preceded them but their music had been more traditional. Neighbours, friends and even some relatives criticised their father for their on-stage and television appearances as their fame grew. "Our father wasn't interested in any of that and he used to encourage us a lot," Hadia said proudly. "We were able to stand firm and fight back against people who were against us and our progress and our presence on stage proved that there was nothing wrong with it," Amal added. By the 1980s, the group had cemented their reputation as one of the country's best loved groups ... but Sudan itself was changing. Nimeiri grew increasingly paranoid and repressive toward the end of his 16-year reign, declaring sharia Islamic law in 1983 and igniting another civil war with southern rebels. 'Better than the Supremes' The Nightingales kept playing but in 1988, with all three married and other commitments, they played their final concert in Khartoum. Amal and Hadia left for the Gulf with their families, before moving to the US, while Hayat stayed in Khartoum. The next year, now-president Omar al-Bashir seized power in an Islamist-backed coup and his military authorities imposed a curfew that lasted for years, putting limits on musical performances. But in 2007, Hadia and Amal performed in New York's Central Park at a festival of Sudanese music and people urged them to return to Sudan for a full reunion. Apprehensively, Hadia and Amal returned the next year and organised a concert with Hayat at the officers' club in central Khartoum, unsure whether their fans would remember them after 20 years. When they arrived, the streets were jammed with expectant fans. "The only thing that changed was they liked it much more and it was a huge success," Amal said. Now, the Nightingales tour Sudan when they are all in the country together, drawing hundreds of spectators of all ages to their shows across Khartoum. They have lost none of their glamour, singing in matching outfits, with performances punctuated by mid-set costume changes and a quick cigarette break. Amal, Hadia and Hayat are confident they can win more fans abroad and are keen to arrange their tour. And would the comparison with the Supremes help draw foreign crowds in? "Honey, we're better than the Supremes," Amal shot back in American-accented English. "We came to their country, but they never came here". New Delhi: Signalling a stormy start to the second half of the Budget Session on Monday, Congress on Thursday gave a notice to Rajya Sabha chairman Hamid Ansari seeking passage of a resolution condemning the Modi government for "destabilistion" of the Uttarakhand government and imposition of President's Rule in the state. The development came hours after the Uttarakhand High Court ordered reinstatement of the Harish Rawat government, setting aside the Presidential proclamation imposing Central rule. Congress's deputy leader in the Rajya Sabha Anand Sharma gave the notice to Rajya Sabha chairman Hamid Ansari under Rule 267 for taking up the resolution after suspending all business. The resolution seeks to "deplore" the "destabilisation" of the democratically elected government in Uttarakhand and "disapprove" the "unjustified" imposition of President's Rule there under Article 356 of the Constitution. Delivering a major blow to the Modi government, the Uttarakhand High Court gave a fresh lease of life to the government headed by Rawat, who has been asked to prove his majority in the Assembly on 29 April. Coming down heavily on the Centre for the 27 March proclamation, a division bench of the court headed by Chief Justice KM Joseph said the imposition of President's Rule was contrary to the law laid down by the Supreme Court. Ever since the dismissal of the Rawat government and clamping of Central rule, Congress had mounted an offensive against the Narendra Modi dispensation. The party had started 'Loktantra Bachao, Uttarakhand Bachao' (Save Democracy, Save Uttarakhand) campaign to mobilise public support against the Centre. Buoyed by the high court order, Congress is likely to make it a major issue in Parliament when it reconvenes on 25 April. It is also likely to raise questions over the imposition of President's Rule earlier in party-ruled Arunachal Pradesh. PTI Kolkata: Dissatisfied by his reply to the show-cause notice, the Election Commission on Thursday ordered a police case against Trinamool Congress candidate Abdur Rezzak Mollah over his "objectionable" remarks about BJP's actress-turned-poll nominee Roopa Ganguly. "Mollah replied to the show-cause notice but it was not satisfactory. The returning officer did not find his reply to be satisfactory. So a first information report has been lodged against him under section 509 of the Indian Penal Code," said state chief electoral officer Sunil Kumar Gupta said. The section deals with outraging the "modesty of woman" and carries a maximum punishment of one year simple imprisonment. The EC on Wednesday had issued a show-cause notice to Mollah, who is contesting the West Bengal assembly polls from Bhangar in South 24 Parganas, after the Bharatiya Janata Party moved it, seeking action against Mollah for his remarks which had cast aspersions on the character of Ganguly, famous for portraying Draupadi in the TV series Mahabharata. Known for making controversial remarks, Mollah, a former state minister, was expelled from the Communist Party of India-Marxist in 2014 for "anti-party activities". Mollah had been censured and show-caused earlier by the poll panel for some of his utterances. It isn't a big surprise that Uttarakhand politicians killed Shaktiman. When politicians themselves are being traded like cattle calling them horses would be an insult to Shaktiman lives of animals at their mercy become cheap. Shaktiman died on duty, remained steadfastly loyal to his job, did not trade his allegiance and remained dignified in both life and death. He didn't give up till the last moment, kept eating, going through his daily routine before dying in the stable he had joined 10 years ago as a part of the police force. It is a shame none of these attributes fit the Uttarakhand politicians currently in the bazaar for the highest bidder. No, nobody wants his alleged murderer's leg or life in return. "Very sad. I already said that I am not at fault, if found guilty then cut my leg, Mussoorrie MLA Ganesh Joshi, the politician accused of attacking Shaktiman with a stick, told ANI on Wednesday. Mr Joshi, a leg for a leg may be the credo of humans, especially of the intolerant breed you represent. But animals do not seek vengeance. I am willing to bet had Shaktiman lived on, if the prosthetic leg people from across the world were trying to fit on him had worked, she would have merrily cantered along the hills of Mussoorie with you on her back. She may have even saved your life someday by valiantly charging at a crowd thirsty for your blood for some reason. Joshi can keep both his leg and tears. Even if he gets a clean chit from courts, pleads innocence or prevaricates, the biggest punishment for him is this: For the rest of his life people would remember the MLA as the beast that treacherously attacked a horse on duty. In the history of India, several men are known for their bravado against wild animals. Dozens are known as Sher Khans, Sher Afghans and Sher Singhs for fighting with tigers and lions with their bare hands. Just as they remind us of man's bravery, Joshi would remind everyone of humanity's enormous penchant for treachery, cowardice, bestiality and impotent rage that is vented out on the meek and the helpless. Shaktiman, on the other hand, would become a legend. Like Rana Pratap's warhorse Chetak, the brave white mare from Dehradun, will become immortal, a part of lore. It is said of Chetak that when Rana Pratap was retreating from the Battle of Haldighati, the brave Kathiawari horse ran for almost five kilometres in spite of being injured in the leg. When it came across a wide river, Chetak jumped over it and saved the Rana's life from the enemies chasing him, but died in the process. The grateful Rana built a cenotaph in the memory of the horse at Haldighati. In his death, Shaktiman has given us the opportunity to ponder the plight of animals, the treatment meted out to them by humans they serve. On Indian roads, we see hundreds of them suffering because of lack of care and their misuse as bearers of burden. Hundreds of frail horses, ponies, oxen drag overloaded carts through Indian bazaars and roads. Some of them are sole breadwinners for huge human families. But, they get just the bare minimum to eat and are discarded once they become useless. The biggest tribute to Shaktiman would not be a statue, a cenotaph or even a park Joshi is threatening to build if he comes to power. Let us enact new laws for welfare of animals, stricter punishment for cruelty against domesticated animals. And call it the Shaktiman Act. Dehradun: Police horse Shaktiman, which suffered multiple fractures on its hind leg during a BJP protest in Dehradun triggering widespread outrage, died on Thursday after battling infection and other complications for over a month. "The horse passed away at 5.30 pm. He was suffering from medical-related complications. The exact cause will be known only after post-mortem," IG Garhwal Sanjay Gunjyal said. Shaktiman's story stirred many across the country after it was seen in television visuals taking multiple blows and dragging its broken, mangled limb in excruciating pain during the protest on 14 March. The 13-year-old didn't respond well to a prosthetic leg brought from the US, doctors said. It spent the past few weeks at the police lines in Dehradun. It was a well trained horse and part of Uttarakhand Mounted Police for years. It had participated in several parades. "Shaktiman was injured on 14 March after which we had to operate on him. He was later fitted with an artificial leg. But he was unable to fully recover from an infection," SSP Dehradun Sadanand Date said. BJP MLA Ganesh Joshi, accused of instigating the brutal attack on the horse, said, "I am very sad. I was not at fault, not even 0.1 per cent. If I am found guilty, then cut my leg." The lawmaker was arrested and later let off on bail last month. In a sharp reaction, Union minister Maneka Gandhi said, "Shaktiman was a police officer on duty and the person who put him through so much pain and ultimately killed him should be arrested for killing a police officer." "Horses should no longer be part of our police system," she said, adding,"They serve no purpose and in every crowd engagement they are at the mercy of any vicious person who is too cowardly to do anything but injure the defenseless animal". Expressing shock over the demise of the horse, former Uttarakhand Chief Minister Harish Rawat said,"It was a brave soldier of Uttarakhand and died while performing its duty." The horse had lost its leg after it was brutally beaten during clashes between BJP protesters and the police on 14 March. "Though the artificial limb was put on Shaktiman, it was not working well and he was putting his entire weight on the other leg. That is why the infection spread. Today also a lot of care was taken and about eight doctors attended to the horse. It is sad that we could not save him," R S Meena, IG Law and Order, Uttarakhand, said. Across the country, people have stood by Shaktiman and have demanded that action be taken against the BJP MLA. Many had argued that Shaktiman should be euthanised because of the pain and discomfort as he struggled to get used to his prosthetic leg. Rawat said at one stage in recent weeks it appeared that the horse was getting well and trying to stand. Shaktiman was dragged into a raging political row in the weeks before Uttarakhand was placed under President's rule, a decision challenged by Rawat in the Uttarakhand High Court. The BJP had then attacked the Congress accusing it of using the horse to target its lawmaker and to try to keep him away from assembly proceedings and possible voting. BJP's Shaina NC said this was not an issue to be politicised. "It is the loss of life of an animal," she said, adding animal lovers across the country feel that a wrong has been done. "I think we all need to own this up at our own end," she said. The state BJP chief Ajay Bhatt accused the Congress of politicising the issue to target the BJP and defame its MLA. Animal rights activist Gauri Maulekhi said, "Shaktiman died the same day when it was attacked and its leg broken. Horses with such weight have very little chance to live on three legs. We were mentally prepared for this but political parties are playing blame games." Neha Joshi, the BJP MLA's daughter, claimed many television channels have proved that her father did not harm the horse in any manner. "He has regretted the incident involving the mob," she said. The BJP MLA is out on bail. Claiming that Shaktiman was essentially killed the day his leg was broken, Peta India called for strengthening laws to save other animals from similar cruel deaths. "Our equine veterinarian always warned his quality of life would be forever damaged and he may not live. "We urge the government to act fast to ensure other animals are spared from cruelty and horrific deaths by strengthening the current weak penalties for cruelty to animals," it said in a statement. It was just over a year after Narendra Modis BJP steamrolled 26-out-of-26 Lok Sabha seats in Gujarat obliterating whatever little was left of an opposition party, when a spirited 23-year-old boy exploded on to the political horizon out of nowhere, demanding by a public movement a slice for his affluent Patidar community in the reserved OBC (other backward classes) cake. Coming from the powerful community that gave birth, nurtured and lent invincibility to the Bharatiya Janata Party, Hardik Patels Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS) should have shaken the ruling dispensation out of its stupor at the very first sight. It did not. The BJP should have had its ears to the ground to check the approaching demon in its baby steps. It did not. Ten months on, the Anandiben Patel government just does not know what to do with the young army of Patidars that has kept on exploding on its chest at regular intervals. Rallies, meetings, letters to the chief minister, threats being issued through the media, among other things, have been pointers to the simmering storm. The last was on Sunday, when hordes of supporters of the Sardar Patel Group supported by Hardiks PAAS laid siege to district jails in Mehsana, the home district of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Surat followed by clashes with the police, stone-pelting, and arson. The key targets were cabinet Minister Nitin Patel, who heads the seven-member ministerial committee appointed by the CM to resolve the Patel issue, and Rajni Patel, minister of state for home, both of whom are from Mehsana. Their camp offices were set on fire and Rajni Patels unoccupied house in Mehsana was put to flames the next day. This was besides the office of Mehsana MP Jayshree Patel. This was a jail bharo (court arrest) programme, which had been announced in advance, and preceded by a day-long token fast in Surat on 13 April to remind the government about the demands of the agitating Patels. Over 500 people from the community from across the State, including two local BJP MLAs Praful Pansuriya (Kamrej) and Kumar Kanani (Varachha), former minister and the partys Kisan Morcha general secretary Gordhan Zadaphia, Surat Mayor Asmitaben Siroya and several ruling party corporators of the BJP-ruled Surat Municipal Corporation, attended the event organised by the Patidar Sangh. Several such events have been happening over the last few months. What was the governments response to the fracas on Sunday? Oh, is there an agitation here? Such things keep on happening, Chief Minister Anandiben Patels said, when confronted by reporters after a government function in Valsad. Then there was a meeting -- yet another -- called on Monday between the ministerial committee and senior representatives of leaders of various community organisations, but the leaders of the agitating bodies were not invited here. And what was decided at the meeting? To call another meeting. And this was not the first meeting, there have been several such but without a result. The next response to Sundays incidents was lodging an FIR against 25 people allegedly involved in it. Speaking of the last ten months, what has the seven-member ministerial committee done so far? Last heard, it was to submit a report to the chief minister. Between this, Congress legislator-turned-BJP MP from Porbander Vithal Radadia, a powerful Patel leader from Saurashtra, stepped in as a mediator and met jailed Hardik Patel several times. Every time he emerged from a meeting with Hardik, he said an end to the Patel agitation was round the corner and that a compromise had almost been struck. Nothing happened, except that the Patel leaders only reiterated their resolve not to relent till their demand for reservation is met and action taken against Minister of State for Home Rajni Patel and scores of policemen, including officials, for the violent crackdown on the Patels after the huge 25 August Ahmedabad rally attended by three to four lakh people from the community. Twelve people had died in the clashes then. The third demand of the Patels is to withdraw police cases against their leaders, including withdrawal of sedition charges against Hardik Patel and two others. To begin in the start, after initial procrastination the Anandiben government decided to get tough with the young turks with its unabashed use of the police machinery and threw Hardik and others in jails invoking sedition charges on them. This cost the BJP dearly in the elections to 323 local self-government bodies, shattering the myth that they were sitting pretty on the formidable foundation laid by Modi, who left it with a 26-of-26 victory. For the first time in three decades, the party was dealt with a shocker in semi-urban and rural areas in the elections -- it won only eight out of all 31 district panchayats in its control and managed to get only 73 taluka (tehsil) panchayats while the Congress party won 131. It is only after this that the Anandiben Patel Government has been trying to negotiate a settlement, but have been unable to bring anything to the table. (The writer is Editor, Development News Network) Panaji: A group of young Congress leaders on Thursday wrote to the All India Congress Committee (AICC) seeking the disbanding of two panels, set up ahead of 2017 Assembly elections, which they said have "resurrected" those leaders who were rejected by people in the 2012 polls. In a letter faxed to AICC, the leaders have expressed their "shock and dismay" over the formation of the Election Committee and the Coordination Committee recently. "A recent development related to our party in Goa has compelled us to pen this letter to you. "It is our sincere effort to communicate to you the shock and dismay that all of us, including most members of the party in Goa, specially the youth, have felt at the compositions of election committee for 2017 and co-ordination committee, which were announced by AICC a couple of days ago," Goa Pradesh Congress Committee (GPCC) secretary Durgadas Kamat said. The letter, which was signed by the GPCC secretary Durgadas Kamat and others, was faxed to AICC headquarters in Delhi on Thursday. Disclosing the contents of the letter to media, Kamat said, "it is obvious from most of the names figuring in the above lists that the AICC is being totally misled by the state leaders who seem to be interested only in promoting themselves and their children". Kamat said the names appearing on the panels show that there is no concern for the issues and problems being faced the people of Goa. "None of these names have either protested or taken part in any movement or agitations against the BJP government's various misdeeds over the last four years (sic)," Kamat said. He said the Congress leaders in the coastal state do not seem to have learnt any lesson from the drubbing the party received in the 2012 Assembly elections. "Many of the faces which were then rejected out rightly by the people of Goa are being resurrected in the committees," he said. The letter requested dissolution of these committees so as to make way for the fresh, young and aspiring leaders. "We urge you to act early and decisively in the matter and ensure that the party in Goa is seen as a representative of the Goan youths rather than old fogeys, as is perceived today," the letter read. In the 2012 elections, the BJP had won 21 seats - a simple majority on its own - while the Maharashtravadi Gomantak Party (MGP) won three seats. The Congress won only nine seats while its coalition partner Nationalist Congress party (NCP) had drawn a blank. The imposition of Presidents Rule in Uttarakhand has proved to be one big political and constitutional misadventure for the Modi government. The High Court has trashed the Presidential proclamation under Article 356, and made several observations that couldnt have been music to the ears of the BJP top brass. Even worse for BJP is the fact that the High Court ruling, delivered on a petition filed by the ousted Chief Minister Harish Rawat, would serve as a moral victory for Congress. The Rawat government will now have to take a vote of confidence on the floor of the State Assembly on 29 April. The High Court judgment - besides its legal, constitutional and political implications - would always stand out for the fact that it was delivered within a span of 20 days, from the day the Centre had challenged the single judges order to hold a floor test, even as the state continued to be under Presidents Rule. The courts have usually taken a much longer time, stretching months and even years before arriving to a conclusion on such critical issues. The Uttarakhand High Court judgment shall ever serve as a reminder to the political leadership at the Centre. While the Centre may move the Supreme Court, as its lawyers indicated in Uttarakhand when the judgment was pronounced, one could always argue that last word on the subject has not yet been spoken. But, there is no denying the fact that this is a huge setback for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah. The BJP leadership had taken a tough stand and had tried to justify their actions by stating that the Speakers action, of not allowing a division (voting) on the appropriation bill (annual budget) and passing it by voice vote despite being in minority (27 of BJP and 9 Congress dissidents opposing in a House of 70 MLAs where 67 were present that day), amounted to constitutional breakdown. They had taken the plea that as per the constitutional norms, the government falls if it fails to pass a money bill - an appropriation bill in this case. The division bench of the Uttarakhand High Court, obviously, was not convinced by its arguments. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, the most articulate voice in the Modi Government and a legal luminary, wrote about the subject in his blog titled 'A state without a budget' that Uttarakhand was a fit constitutional case for Presidents Rule to be imposed: There are strong facts to suggest that the Appropriation Bill was actually defeated. As a consequence, the Government had to resign. On 18 March the majority was declared to be a minority and vice versa, and on 27 March the composition of the House was attempted to be changed in violation of the Constitution to convert a minority into a majority, Jaitley wrote. This is an unprecedented case of a Speaker declaring a failed Appropriation Bill as passed and then failing to certify falsehood. This leaves the State without any approved financial expenditure with effect from 1 April 2016. What better evidence do we need of a breakdown of Constitution? The Congress Government of Uttarakhand was murdering democracy every day from the 18 to 27 March, Jaitley wrote in a blog. His arguments have fallen flat now, unless the Supreme Court takes a different view on the judgment than the Uttarakhand High Court. What makes matters worse for BJP is that the nine rebel Congress MLAs, who were disqualified by the Speaker, cant participate in the trust vote on 29 April. They might still have a window of hope as the Court will rule on their petition challenging the Speakers order in the next eight or nine days. The Congress, meanwhile, is trying hard to lure them back into their fold. An alleged sting conducted revealed a video of Harish Rawat bribing MLAs in order to gain their support. But all this has already been taken into consideration by the High Court. Politically, it leaves BJP in an awkward situation, more so because the Assembly elections in the state are due in the next eight to nine months. The election campaigning would pick up momentum in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand once the current round of elections in Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry are over. Harish Rawat is already donning a halo of innocence and if he succeeds in convincing the voters that he was wronged by the Centre, the political damage could be even higher for the BJP. The vote of confidence in the Uttarakhand Assembly on 29 April would surely decide Harish Rawats fate; however, its implications will have a far greater bearing on the Modi government. Kolkata: A CPM polling agent was killed and four other party workers were injured as incidents of violence on Thursday marred polling in 62 seats in the third phase of West Bengal Assembly election which saw 57 per cent turnout till 1 p.m. The body of a 35-year-old CPM polling agent, identified as Tahidur Islam, was found outside a polling booth at Shibapara area of Domkal assembly seat in Murshidabad district. Four persons were injured in separate incidents in polling booths in Ketugram constituency. The ear of a CPM worker was slashed and leg of another party supporter was fractured in a scuffle in front of booth no 78. Another two CPM workers were injured at booth no 48 when bombs were reportedly hurled at them. District Returning officer Soumitra Mohan said four persons have been arrested in this connection. While the CPI(M) candidate and former minister Anisur Rahman claimed that Islam was killed when bombs were hurled outside the polling booth, district superintendent of police C Sudhakar said the murder was not related to the polls. Left parties have blamed the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) for the killing and alleged that it has unleashed a reign of terror to intimidate voters. TMC on the other hand said the death was a fallout of infighting between the alliance partners Congress and Left Front. There were complaints of voter intimidation outside polling booths in Beleghata assembly seat in Kolkata after which seven people were detained by the police, officials said. Reports from Burdwan said bombs were hurled in front of a booth at Bankati village in Galsi constituency. Trinamool Congress and CPI(M) blamed each other for the incident. Meanwhile, the highest turnout of 60.07 per cent was recorded in 17 seats of Nadia district and the lowest of 44.14 per cent was recorded in the metropolis till 1 PM. The voting percentage in 22 seats of Murshidabad was 58.06, while in 16 seats of Burdwan it was 58.74. The overall average was 57.21 per cent. Polling is being held under tight security with one lakh security personnel deployed. Voting began at 7 a.m in 16,461 polling stations and will go on till 6 p.m.. Key candidates in this phase include TMC ministers Shashi Panja and Sadhan Pande, BJP national secretary Rahul Sinha, five- time Congress MLA Md Sohrab, CPI-M MLA Anisur Rahman and retired IPS officer Nazrul Islam. The Election Commission has identified 3,401 hamlets in this phase as vulnerable Bengal jobs scam: SC rejects TMC MLA Manik Bhattacharyas plea against arrest The ED had arrested Bhattacharya on October 11 after night-long questioning in connection with the irregularities in the recruitment of primary teachers. Bhattacharya, the former chairman of the West Bengal Board of Primary Education, was arrested for allegedly not cooperating with the probe Kolkata: The Congress and the Left Front (LF) on Thursday demanded a repoll in 15 polling booths of Domkol constituency in West Bengal's Murshidabad district, accusing the ruling Trinamool Congress of indulging in "massive rigging" and booth-capturing there. LF spearhead Communist Party of India-Marxist state secretary Surjya Kanta Mishra said there were disturbances in six-seven of the 62 constituencies voting in phase three of the assembly polls. "We think there should be repoll in 15 polling booths of Domkol constituency. One person died and two others were injured in violence perpetrated by the Trinamool Congress in Domkol. In rest of the Murshidabad district, there were no reports of any serious incidents," he said. In Nadia district, there were disturbances in the municipal areas of Gayeshpur and Chakdah, he said. "However, the maximum violence happened in Kolkata, the capital city. Four constituencies including Entally, Beleghta, Kashipur-Belgachia were affected," he said. "The trouble erupted in a number of booths. We have registered complaints with the Election Commission. The steps which should have been taken in Kolkata were not taken," he added. However, he expressed overall satisfaction over the role of the Election Commission in the third phase. "EC has tried to discharge its responsibilities. But the real credit goes to the people, for the way they put up resistance." State Congress president Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury also demanded repoll in the 15 polling booths of Domkol. However, he said The Trinamool would not be able to win any of the 22 seats in Mushidabad. Chowdhury predicted the Congress-Left Front will win 65-70 percent of the 62 seats where polling took place during the day. "Please stop this vote," she blurted out in between her sobs. "I cannot stay without my abba. He used to put me to sleep every night," said the girl, weeping. "Now who will put me to sleep? Tell me?" The camerapersons and journalists gathered around her to take the sound bites, of course, had no answer. Their story of the day was done. One dead in West Bengal poll violence, the headlines will say and we shall move on. But the journey of life has ended for Tahidul Islam and shall remain suspended for the members of his family. The CPM worker was hacked to death in Jitpur village of Domkal constituency, which falls under the state's troubled Murshidabad district. A Congress stronghold, Murshidabad was identified as one of the very sensitive areas with Election Commission fielding three police observers, a departure from the usual practice of one for every district. According to reports in local TV channels, Jitpur in Domkal saw heavy bombings since voting started at 7 am. ANI report says Tahidul had stepped out of booth No. 173 when a crude bomb was hurled at him by alleged Trinamool Congress workers. West Bengal: One CPI(M) worker dies after a crude bomb was allegedly hurled by TMC workers in Jitpur village is Domkal(Murshidabad district) ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 The injured CPM agent was then dragged to a spot nearby and slashed with sharp weapons which caused his death. His leg was also broken in apparent signs of torture, said TV channel reports. An inconsolable Tahidul's daughter and irate villagers blamed local TMC workers, a charge reiterated by CPM leader Anisur Rahaman. The finger of suspicion was pointed at one Kamarujjaman, the panchayat pradhan's husband who earlier used to be a CPM activist but had recently defected to the TMC, but the ruling party would have none of it. TMC's Domkal nominee Soumik Hossain denied the charges, blaming the death on infighting between the Left Front and Congress. "There is no alliance here. They know they will lose even their deposit in this seat which is why out of frustration they have indulged in violence which led to the killing," Hossain was quoted as saying in 24 Ghanta. Later in an election rally, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, too, refuted the charges, saying her party "had nothing to do with the murder". Following the incident, however, Kamarujjaman is on the run. The report submitted by Murshidabad SP to the Election Commission, however, says Tahidul was not a CPM agent and nobody is suspected of carrying out the murder, blaming the death on 'unknown persons'. The report says the killing has nothing to do with polls. Domkal emerged as the hotbed of violence with news of three more people injured in clashes, following the death of Tahidul. CPM workers Akhtarul and Rintu were shot at by alleged TMC goons in Shiropara area while TMC's Shariful Islam also took a bullet in fresh outbreak of violence. The injured, among which one is said to be critical, have been admitted to Murshidabad Medical College hospital, according to reports. In other instances of violence, in Kalyani, a Kalna Polytechnic College professor suffered fractured hands when alleged Trinamool Congress activists attacked him while he tried to cast his vote, according to Kolkata TV. Shibu Das's wife Tultuli was also attacked while the couple stepped out to exercise their democratic right. "Some TMC workers threatened us last night not to step outside during the day of the polling. We still didn't think it'd come to such a pass. Just as we neared the polling booth, some TMC goons attacked us and tried to hit me on the head with bamboo sticks. I tried to save my head and took the blows on my hands. Both my hands are fractured," Das was quoted, as saying by the TV channel. Das's wife said she was also not spared. "They tried to beat me up too but I made a lucky escape," she said. The couple are yet to file a police complaint, however, fearing more attacks. In Kolkata, journalists were roughed up as goons tried to snatch away their cameras when they went about doing their jobs in Beleghata area. In Cossipore, local TMC leader Anwar Khan was arrested after day-long drama. Khan, a local tough with murder charge against his name, had recently been released from bail. He was caught on TV camera badmouthing the Election Commission and inciting party workers right in the front of the police. Funnily enough, when the EC ordered his arrest, he managed to give cops the slip though he was supposed to be under round-the-clock surveillance. The TMC leader was finally caught after a four-hour operation by five special Kolkata Police teams from the same area from where he had apparently "disappeared". As polls came to a close, there were many reports of injuries and clashes from different parts of the state. CPM workers were beaten up in Chakdah and Ketugram and in each cases, TMC was blamed though the party denied the charges. In Nadia district's Gayeshpur, ETV News Bangla showed reports of villagers being threatened if they step near the polling booth. Reports also emerged of two CPM workers suffering head injuries in clashes. The tradition of violence continues unabated. The day's proceedings were a stunning contrast to Trinamool Congress's full-page advertisement in morning newspapers which portrayed West Bengal as an idyllic state which has hit top spot in all benchmarks. The poor is now out of penury, youths have jobs, there is peace and prosperity all around after the dark days of violence under Left rule. The TMC missive asks voters to choose between "development or destruction." Caught between the devil and the deep sea, voters in West Bengal have little to choose from. Kathmandu: The violence of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake left countless towns and villages across central Nepal in a shambles. Almost one year later, a shambles they remain. The country has made almost no progress in rebuilding hundreds of thousands of homes, schools and government buildings, as well as some 600 historical structures, including ancient Hindu and Buddhist temples, monuments and palaces. Nearly a million children still have no school to attend. Millions of villagers were forced to winter in flimsy pop-up tents and corrugated tin shacks, erected haphazardly at high altitudes and across the rolling plains. The government's reconstruction agency has so far approved zero projects. Some citizens have started rebuilding on their own, but most are still waiting either because they are afraid of running afoul of new, promised building regulations, or because they still hope to receive government grants. Many of them are still living in rows of temporary shelters made from salvaged wood covered with corrugated metal sheets that are likely to be their only protection when rainy reason returns in two months. "This has been home for all of us for the past year and it looks like we are going to be here for a long time. All we hear is the government is going to give us money to rebuild our homes, but when is that going to happen? Our kids are getting sick and we have no money, job or a government that is going to come to our rescue," said Keshar Narayan, a farmer living with eight family members in a tin shed on the outskirts of Kathmandu. The government was quick to promise help after the 25 April, 2015, earthquake, which killed nearly 9,000 people, but a year later only a few families in Dolkha district have begun to get the money. They have each received Rs 50,000 ($467), the first installment of the Rs 200,000 promised by the government to each family who lost their home. Dolkha was among the hardest-hit districts and the epicenter of another major quake that struck on 12 May. As they wait for help, even prayer can be dangerous. Many in the deeply spiritual Himalayan nation seek comfort in now-ramshackle stone temples left standing askew, sometimes held up just by wooden beams. "Every time I come to pray in the temples, I am not sure if I will even leave in one piece. We have to risk our lives just so we can pray," housewife Shanti Shrestha said in Kathmandu while holding her temple offering of a stick of burning incense and a marigold flower. "We all are very angry ... for a year nothing has been done." The lack of progress isn't for want of money. Nepal, facing an estimated $6.6 billion reconstruction bill, has received $4.1 billion in pledged donations so far. The problem, officials and aid workers say, is tangled bureaucracy and government malaise. Some frustrated donors have simply given up. "We just lost a donor who wanted to give $400,000," said Unesco's representative to Nepal, Christian Manhart. "Everything seems to be blocked because there are very lengthy government procedures." The Unesco office alone has about $1.8 million budgeted for Nepal, still waiting to be spent. The government has been embroiled in political infighting while facing months of ethnic protests in which more than 50 people were killed. Since the earthquake, there has been a change of government and a new constitution that took seven years to craft. It took nearly nine months for Nepal just to set up a department to deal with quake reconstruction. But there are still no guidelines for how to approach the task. It also isn't clear which buildings are even being considered for reconstruction funds. A Nepalese law requiring that government contracts go to the lowest bidder is also a problem, said Suresh Suras Shrestha, head of the world conservation section at the government's Department of Archaeology, which is charge of monuments and heritage sites. The lowest bidder may not have the skills or knowledge to take on structures dating back to the 5th or 6th century. "The donors who want to rebuild our monuments need to follow our rules and procedures," Suresh Suras Shrestha said. They will also have to keep waiting to find out what those rules and procedures are. The Department of Archaeology has defended its efforts, noting that its workers have reinforced some buildings that weren't heavily damaged. It has also opened the public bidding process for 39 projects, and expects about $20 million in funding to be released for the first phase of work once the contracts are finalized. There is no clear indication of when that might happen. Restoring all monuments is expected to cost about $200 million. "The politicians just don't care about our temples. If the king was still ruling these temples and palaces would have already been built," Hindu priest Ram Singh said, referring to the monarchs who acted as guardians of Nepal's monuments until the monarchy was abolished in 2008. Piles of crumbling red brick are all that remain of the four-story Kastamandap, the 10th-century temple from which the capital of Kathmandu got its name. Just to the east of that, hundreds of devotees still visit the temple palace of the Kumari, a girl revered by both Hindus and Buddhists as a living goddess, though its brick walls are precariously propped up by dozens of wooden beams. The Kumari, who continues to live in the temple palace, is among dozens of girls who have held the honor for the past four centuries; each steps aside once she reaches puberty. Bricks, stones and splintered wood collected from the rubble left by the collapse of Kathmandu's 10th-century Durbar Square palace remain in storage until architectural experts can sort through them and put them back in place. Nothing has been done to fix the damaged palace in the medieval town of Bhaktapur, east of the capital. Many of the small Buddhist temples, stupas and monasteries surrounding the 5th-century hilltop shrine of Swayambhunath lie in ruins. It is also called the "monkey shrine" for the thousands of monkeys that congregate on the spot at the northwest edge of Kathmandu. One of its damaged dome-shaped stupas, Tashi Golma, remains covered in wire mesh and corrugated tin to protect it from deteriorating further and from theft. In Nepal, where majority of the people are Hindu, these monuments and temples are important for cultural, religious and historical reasons. People visit temples regularly and go there for festivals, weddings and coming-of-age ceremonies. Tired of waiting for government help, some local officials and communities are doing what they can on their own. Residents of Bhaktapur are already rebuilding a 17th Century temple to the Hindu god Vishnu, relying on volunteer labor and funds. It's unclear how much it will cost, said local heritage department official Ram Govind Shrestha, but local officials plan to solicit donations and start charging tourists for visiting. "It is really difficult to look at our damaged heritage," he said. "So we just decided to begin." Beijing: Besides the border question, India and China discussed issues related to counter-terrorism including Beijing's blocking of India's bid in the UN to ban Pakistan-based JeM chief Masood Azhar, National Security Adviser Ajit Doval said on Thursday. Doval, who wrapped up the 19th round of the two-day boundary talks called on Chinese Premier Li Keqiang here and discussed the outcome of the discussion with his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi. Welcoming Doval, Li recalled his meeting with Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar two days ago during which the both sides discussed the progress in bilateral ties. "These meetings show smooth communication and close engagement between our two countries in political and security affairs. It also shows how both sides attach great deal of importance to ensure steady growth of China-India relations," Li said. Later in a brief chat with PTI, Doval said that in the border talks with Yang, the two sides discussed the boundary question and other issues like counterterrorism. Asked whether Masood Azhar issue figured, he said: "Yes, obviously when terrorism is discussed". India in recent weeks was vocal about criticising China for putting a "technical hold" on India's recent bid in the UN to bring about a ban on Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) chief Azhar for his involvement in the Pathankot terror attack. Regarding Azhar, India's UN Permanent Representative Syed Akbaruddin spoke of "hidden veto" at a meeting at an open debate in UNSC on 'Threats to International Peace and Security Caused by Terrorist Acts' in New York on April 16, while External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar called for a review of China's decision to strike a common stand against terrorism in their meetings this week with their Chinese counterparts. For its part, China continued to stick to its stand, saying that its decision is based on facts and fairness. On the talks over boundary, Doval said both sides want peace and tranquillity at the borders. About India's emphasis that 3,488 km-long Line of Actual Control (LAC) be demarcated to prevent tensions between troops on both sides patrolling the area aggressively, Doval said New Delhi's stand is the same for quite some time. There is nothing new about the suggestions, he said. Ahead of the talks, Parrikar told his Chinese counterpart Chang Wanquan that clarity over the LAC will bring down tensions between the troops on both sides which aggressively patrol the areas to assert their control. "We are insisting it should be done in order to really ensure a very stable border as all the issues take place because of perception," he said. Marking the LAC is "one of the preconditions of smooth border operations. Without that everything goes by perceptions, which has caused problems sometimes", Parrikar said. This was highlighted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi both during the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to India in 2014 and his own trip here last year. But China was averse to accept it and for its part suggested a code of conduct. About the border talks, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement here last night that both countries have agreed to adhere to "peaceful negotiations" to settle the vexed border issue and reach a "fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution". Both Doval and Yang had an "extensive, deep and candid" discussion on the LAC. Both sides agreed to adhere to "peaceful negotiations to settle the boundary question". They will make efforts to reach a "fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution", it said. Besides the border issue, Doval and Yang, the designated Special Representatives, also have a larger mandate to discuss all contentious bilateral, regional and international matters of mutual concern. On the border dispute, officials on both sides say the protracted boundary talks made progress and that they also made attempts to avert tensions along the disputed border. While China says that the boundary dispute is confined to 2,000 kms, mainly in Arunachal Pradesh in eastern sector which it claims as part of southern Tibet, India asserts that the dispute covered the whole of the LAC including the Aksai Chin occupied by China during the 1962 war. When the Special Representatives were appointed in 2003, the two sides set off a three-stage process. The two countries first reached an agreement on the guiding principles and setting political parameters for the settlement in 2005. Officials say the two sides are currently in the second stage which focusses on working out a framework of settlement to be followed by final step drawing the boundary line based on framework agreement. Doval and Yang are also reported to have discussed a range of issues including India's concern over USD 46 billion trade deficit with China in about $70 billion bilateral trade. Kaduna (Nigeria): Suspected Boko Haram gunmen on horseback killed at least 11 people in northeast Nigeria this week, two civilian vigilantes assisting the military said on Thursday. The attack on Zango village, in the Gulani district some 150 kilometres (94 miles) south of the Yobo state capital, Damaturu, happened overnight on Tuesday to Wednesday, said Aisami Mamman. It came two weeks after a similar attack on two nearby villages left at least 20 dead, he added. "They (Boko Haram) came around midnight (Tuesday) and started firing gunshots in the village. This prompted residents to flee into the bush," Mamman told AFP. "They pursued them, shooting at them while others set fire to the whole village. The whole village was burnt. Eleven people were killed and several others were injured, six of them critically. "They were brought here to Damaturu where they are receiving treatment for gunshot wounds." The motive for the attack was not immediately clear but previous strikes have seen Boko Haram steal cattle or foodstuffs. The hit-and-run attack has been a trademark of the Islamic State group affiliate but such incidents have become rarer because of a concerted military counter-offensive in the northeast. Troops have over the last year wrested back territory lost to the militants in 2014, scattering fighters and cutting off their supply lines. Boko Haram fighters have conducted a number of attacks on remote villages after arriving on horseback and even bicycles because of a shortage of fuel for vehicles or motorbikes. Mamman suggested the attackers in Zango came from the Sambisa Forest area of neighbouring Borno, where Boko Haram has long had camps. "Exactly two weeks ago there was a similar attack on two villages nearby. They attacked Gurum and Dokshi villages," he said in an account of both incidents supported by another militia member. "They burnt them completely and killed more than 20 residents." Boko Haram has killed nearly 1,900 people since President Muhammadu Buhari took office in May last year, according to AFP reporting. Overall, an estimated 20,000 people have been killed since the start of the insurgency in 2009. NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Nations on the verge of eliminating malaria risk falling short of their goal, just as it lies within reach, due to funding being shifted elsewhere, researchers said on Thursday. Global aid has moved to areas where malaria remains widespread, while internal domestic funding gets diverted to fighting other diseases perceived as more urgent, said researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, in a study published in The Lancet medical journal. Once a leading cause of death and illness, malaria has been wiped out in half the world's countries, experts say. Nations on the verge of eliminating the disease include China, Mexico, Turkey and South Africa, the study said. Overall, such countries where eliminating malaria is within reach are expected to face a one-third drop in international funding, the research said. The biggest financier in the fight is the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which receives funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates organization also provided grant money for the University of California study. Nations that recently eliminated the mosquito-borne illness include Armenia, Morocco, Turkmenistan and the United Arab Emirates. Malaria can prove troublesome because quasi-eradication can be followed by resurgence, Richard Feachem, the paper's senior author, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview. More than 60 resurgences of malaria have occurred since about 1930, failures he attributed to emboldened politicians and governments willing to cut budgets for fighting the disease. "It becomes out of sight, out of mind," he said. Looking at 35 countries with current low malaria transmission, the study found signs of diminishing political and financial commitment. That amounts to "the greatest threat to malaria elimination," the paper said. Europe on Wednesday became the world's first region to wipe out malaria entirely, a milestone announced by the World Health Organization. Last year, there were 214 million cases of the disease, and it killed 438,000 people, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. World leaders committed to ending the disease by 2030 when they adopted the Sustainable Development Goals last year at the United Nations. (Reporting by Sebastien Malo, Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit news.trust.org) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. In an unprecedented move, Pakistan's Chief of Army Staff General Raheel Sharif has dismissed around a dozen military officers over corruption charges. There are conflicting reports, but between 11 and 13 officials were dismissed on Thursday. The development comes two days after Raheel said that "across the board accountability is necessary for the solidarity, integrity and prosperity of Pakistan", reports ARY News. The most prominent among the terminated officers is former Inspector-General Frontier Constabulary Lieutenant-General Ubaidaullah Khattak, reports Daily Pakistan. The call comes after the controversy surrounding Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif following the Panama Papers. Nawaz and his family are accused of holding undeclared offshore assets. Opposition leaders have demanded a probe into the scandal, with some calling for Nawaz to step down. Close aides say that the Pakistani prime minister is determined to have his three children cleared of accusations of money laundering and tax evasion in the aftermath of Panama Papers leak. Whether or not the chief of army staff's 'purge' of tainted officers spreads to the civilian government remains to be seen, but keep watching this space. KANDAHAR, Afghanistan Drones fired more weapons than conventional warplanes for the first time in Afghanistan last year and the ratio is rising, previously unreported U.S. Air Force data show, underlining how reliant the military has become on unmanned aircraft. The trend may give clues to the U.S. military's strategy as it considers withdrawing more troops from the country, while at the same time shoring up local forces who have struggled to stem a worsening Taliban insurgency. U.S. President Barack Obama said in 2013 that the Afghan drawdown after 2014 and progress against al Qaeda would "reduce the need for unmanned strikes", amid concerns from human rights groups and some foreign governments over civilian casualties. On one level, that has played out; the number of missiles and bombs dropped by drones in Afghanistan actually fell last year, largely because the U.S.-led NATO mission ceased combat operations at the end of 2014 and is now a fraction of the size. Yet as the force has shrunk, it has leant on unmanned aircraft more than ever, the Air Force data reveal, with drone strikes accounting for at least 61 percent of weapons deployed in the first quarter of this year. "In recent months it's definitely flowed more," Lieutenant Colonel Michael Navicky, commander of the Air Force's 62nd Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron, said of the tempo of both drone strikes and surveillance operations. "We've seen increased weapons deployment in the past few months, and the demand is insatiable," he told Reuters at the operations center of a U.S. air base in the southern city of Kandahar. The longer term shift towards drones has gone largely unnoticed amid the large conventional air campaign. Data reviewed by Reuters show strikes by unmanned aircraft accounted for 56 percent of weapons deployed by the Air Force in Afghanistan in 2015, up dramatically from 5 percent in 2011. The role of drones is likely to form a key part of a review underway by U.S. General John Nicholson, head of NATO troops in Afghanistan, as he prepares to report to Washington in June on how many soldiers he thinks should stay on. Nicholson declined to discuss details of the review in a recent interview with Reuters. The current plan is to roughly halve the U.S. presence to 5,500 troops by 2017, most involved in counter-terrorism operations. The training and advising mission would be largely wound down. U.S. MILITARY "REVERSED COURSE" In 2015, drones released around 530 bombs and missiles in Afghanistan, half the number in 2014 when weapons dropped by unmanned aircraft peaked. The 2015 total is, however, almost double the number of bombs and missiles released by drones at the height of the "surge", when the NATO mission expanded to well over 100,000 troops after 2009, mainly Americans. Like much of the U.S military machine in Afghanistan, the drone operation had been winding down in line with plans for further withdrawals, Navicky said. At the end of 2015, however, military commanders "hit the brakes and reversed course" on the drone reduction, and have since ordered more air strikes, especially against Islamic State militants who pose a threat in the east, he said. The Taliban have also forged closer links with al Qaeda, Nicholson said, potentially blurring the lines between what is a legitimate target and what is not, while the Taliban themselves have made gains in the north and south. Around 300 weapons were deployed by the Air Force in the first quarter of the year, with drones accounting for 61 percent. The data cover strikes conducted by the Air Force, which handles the majority of Afghan air operations. The CIA, U.S. Army, and special operations units also have smaller fleets of drones and other aircraft, so the Air Force data may reflect a redistribution among different organizations, although they tend to coordinate closely on missions. "BLIND SPOT" FOR DRONE ANALYSIS Because the Islamist militant Taliban movement, the main threat to security in Afghanistan, is not designated a terrorist outfit by the U.S. government, the bulk of armed drone attacks are aimed at other jihadi networks like al Qaeda. But Taliban insurgents are gaining territory, and, in extreme circumstances, U.S. raids have been conducted against them. Expanding the authority of U.S. forces to attack the Taliban is currently under review by Nicholson. Afghanistan's own air force, meanwhile, is being built from scratch and will need support for years to come, officials say. Drone missions are secretive and have been widely criticized in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where locals and officials have blamed them for unnecessary loss of civilian life. In the latest instance, residents in Paktika province complained that a series of air strikes in April, which locals said were from drones, killed nearly 20 civilians. The U.S. military said it was still looking into the incident. Activists and investigators have focused on covert air operations in places like Pakistan and Yemen, leaving Afghanistan as "really a blind spot for drone analysis," said Sarah Kreps, a professor at Cornell University who studies unmanned aircraft. "The strikes in Afghanistan are one of the most under-reported aspects of drones." Despite resources being sent to battle Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the mission in Afghanistan is still significant, accounting for nearly 20 percent of the 60 armed drone missions the Air Force can have in the air in the world at any one time, officials said. In a time of troop limits imposed by leaders in Washington, the drone squadron is especially useful as only about 200 of nearly 1,000 personnel who support and operate the aircraft are deployed to Afghanistan, Navicky said. "Remotely piloted aircraft mean more flexibility with fewer people and aircraft," he said. "Because they are unmanned, sometimes you can accept more risk. All that is always going to be valuable." (Additional reporting by John Walcott in WASHINGTON; Editing by Mike Collett-White) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. New Delhi: Even as a fresh report on the Panama Papers alleged Amitabh Bachchan "participated" in board meetings of two off-shore companies "by telephone conference", the actor himself has said his name was "misused" and that nothing illegal has been attributed to him. The Indian Express reported on Thursday that Sea Bulk Shipping and Tramp Shipping had passed a resolution each on December 12, 1994, in connection with a loan of $1.75 million from Dallah Albaraka Investment Company. The loan was for Constellation Ship Management for the purchase of all the shares issued by Tramp Shipping and held by Sea Bulk Shipping. Besides Tramp and Sea Bulk, the paper had said Bachchan was managing director for two other offshore entities Lady Shipping and Treasure Shipping. "Both resolutions recorded Bachchans participation in board meetings 'by telephone conference'. In their certificate of incumbency issued the same day, both companies also recorded Bachchan as director. The companies had the same directors, including Bachchan, and officers," it said. In response, Bachchan's office sent a rejoinder, which was also posted on his Twitter account. "On Panama disclosures, I wish to state that queries continue to be sent to me by the media. I would humbly request them to kindly direct these to the GOI (Government of India) where I, as a law abiding citizen, have already sent, and shall continue to send, my responses," the post said. "I stand by my earlier statement on the misuse of my name in the matter and in any event the press reports do not disclose any illegal act committed by me." T 2232 -My statement to media yesterday re Panama not come out in some papers. Here it is : On the Panama (cont) https://t.co/Q4batdnedY Amitabh Bachchan (@SrBachchan) April 20, 2016 The Indian Express, based on Mossack Fonseca records, said Umesh Sahai of Jersey-based corporate service provider City Management (now Minerva Trust) was one of the founder-directors of the four shipping companies and that he had appointed Bachchan as director and managing director in 1993. "He (Sahai) also signed the board resolutions that recorded Bachchans participation in the December 12, 1994, meetings. Sahai did not respond to emails and phone calls seeking his comment on Bachchans statement denying any knowledge of the companies," the newspaper said. Bachchan's name cropped up in the reports as part of a global expose of International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and over 100 global media organisations, based on millions of leaked documents of the Panama law firm Mossak Fonseca. A high-level probe team has been constituted, with members drawn from the various agencies of the finance ministry and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) based on the orders issued by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Indian authorities have already said not all off-shore funds need be illegitimate. Islamabad: Pakistan's army has fired several senior officers over corruption charges, senior military sources told AFP Thursday, in a rare display of accountability by the country's most powerful institution. "I can confirm the sacking of at least six senior officers which include a lieutenant general," said a senior officer based in military headquarters, crediting popular army chief Raheel Sharif with launching the investigation leading to the dismissals. Another source confirmed the sackings. It was unclear when the officers were fired, the precise nature of the charges, or whether they would face criminal proceedings in a civilian court. The move was hailed by commentators because wrongdoings committed by the army, which has ruled Pakistan for around half of its existence and continues to exert control over foreign policy, rarely come to light. "It's an extraordinary development," retired general Talat Masood told AFP. "The military has taken the lead in punishing corrupt officials and has set an excellent example. It will have a very serious impact and very positive impact in the future. Those who are corrupt should be worried now." The news comes as Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif faces pressure over revelations made in the so-called Panama Papers linking his family to a series of offshore companies. Earlier this month he announced the formation of a commission to investigate the allegations in the documents from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca that have exposed how some of the world's most powerful people secrete their assets offshore. Masood added that the court martials would increase pressure on the prime minister to clamp down on corruption, which has long held back the South Asian economy, in the civilian government. London: The Islamic State, notorious for its brutality, has reportedly executed 250 girls in northern Iraq for refusing to become sex slaves, according to a media report. The girls had been ordered to accept temporary marriages to the terrorists and were murdered, sometimes alongside their families, for their refusal to be sex slaves in Iraq's second largest city of Mosul. Islamic State began selecting women of Mosul and forced them into marrying its militants, calling it temporary marriage since it has taken control over Mosul, and the women who refused to submit to this practice would be executed, said Kurdish Democratic Party spokesman Said Mamuzini. "At least 250 girls have so far been executed by IS for refusing to accept the practice of sexual jihad, and sometimes the families of the girls were also executed for rejecting to submit to IS's request," Mamuzini told London-based Kurdish news agency AhlulBayt. Another official from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) party Ghayas Surchi said that human rights were being widely violated in all Islamic State-held territories, particularly the womens' rights as they're seen as commodities and have no choice in choosing their spouses. Surchi said that women were not allowed to go out alone in Mosul and cannot choose their spouses. The execution follows a spate of similar killings that took place in August 2015 in which 19 Mosul women were slaughtered for refusing to have sex with Islamic State fighters, the report said. Up to 500 Yazidi women and girls were kidnapped and sexually abused by militants in August 2014. In October, more than 500 Yazidi women and young girls were reportedly abducted by Islamic State militants when they stormed the Sinjar region in northern Iraq. Islamic State took control of Mosul in June 2014 after the fall of Iraqi army in the city and since then has been slaughtering its residents for various charges to spread fear. US President Barack Obama said on Monday that he expected Mosul to be retaken from the militants "eventually". "My expectation is that by the end of the year, we will have created the conditions whereby Mosul will eventually fall," Obama had said. Riyadh: President Barack Obama said on Thursday that there is a need for better communication with America's Gulf Arab allies, and that summits like Thursday's in Saudi Arabia are a step in that direction. Obama's comments come after meetings in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, with leaders from the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council. The president said that the formation of a new government in Libya and peace talks to end fighting in Yemen along with last year's nuclear deal with Iran wouldn't have been possible without support from the Gulf states. Obama said that there was a need for "consistent, institutionalized communication" with countries in the region because "the possibilities of misunderstanding increase when there's so much activity taking place." He added that the United States and Arab allies remain united in their efforts to destroy the Islamic State group and will continue to increase their contributions to the fight. The president also said that the leaders had agreed to enhance humanitarian efforts in Iraq and Syria, including continuing to monitor violations of a fragile cease-fire agreement in Syria and that they agree the road ahead there must have a transitional government, a new constitution with free elections and a move away from President Bashar Assad. Obama also noted that the leaders also continue to have serious concerns about the behavior of the Iranian government. RIYADH President Barack Obama pledged to "deter aggression" against Gulf Arab allies increasingly concerned about Iran's influence in the region but did not shy away from raising sensitive issues in talks aimed at addressing recent strains in U.S.-Gulf ties. Obama's visit to Riyadh to meet Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) leaders was aimed at allaying fears in Saudi Arabia and its neighbours that Washington's commitment to their security had diminished. The president also hoped to use his fourth and probably final trip to the kingdom to dispel some of the frustration felt by Gulf countries toward his administration, in what one senior U.S. official said was a chance to "clear the air". "I reaffirmed the policy of the United States to use all elements of our power to secure our core interests in the Gulf region and to deter and confront external aggression against our allies," Obama said after the summit on Thursday. However, he also raised the issue of sectarianism, for which he has chided Gulf states in the past on grounds it fuels Islamist militancy, saying "the prosperity and stability of the region depends on countries treating all their citizens fairly and ... sectarianism is an enemy of peace and prosperity". Saudi Arabia's King Salman lauded the summit as "constructive and fruitful", according to the Saudi Press Agency, and pledged the "desire and commitment" of GCC countries to continue developing their ties with the United States. Footage and photographs aired on state media showed the leaders at a large circular table under a chandelier, with Obama sitting with King Salman on his left and the Abu Dhabi crown prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahayan on his right. The Middle East is mired in a contest for influence between a bloc of mostly Sunni countries, including the conservative, pro-Western Gulf monarchies, and revolutionary Shi'ite Iran and its allies. Most of the GCC states, which include Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, have been bitterly disappointed in Obama's presidency, during which they believe the United States has pulled back from the region, giving more space to Iran. They were also upset by Obama's remarks in a magazine interview that appeared to cast them as "free-riders" in U.S. security efforts and urged them to "share" the region with Tehran. In his remarks after the talks, Obama acknowledged the strains that have afflicted ties between Washington and its Gulf partners, even as they have worked together on shared concerns such as the wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. "What is true between the United States and the GCC, as is true with all of our allies and friends, is that at any point of time there are going to be differences," Obama said. But he also said: "I think that a lot of the strain was always overblown". CLEARING THE AIR Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser, said a two-hour meeting with King Salman on Wednesday was the longest the two leaders had shared and included a "very open and honest discussion" that included issues which were a source of tension, without specifying them. "I think they both agreed that it was good to essentially have this opportunity to clear the air," he told reporters at a briefing in Riyadh. The American president has said he wants Gulf allies to offer more democratic reforms and improve human rights, and he discussed that with King Salman on Wednesday. Adding to tensions is a bill proposed in U.S. Congress to lift Riyadh's immunity if any Saudi officials are found to have been involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Obama has said he opposes the bill because it could lead to cases directed against the United States in foreign courts. The United States remains deeply enmeshed in Gulf security, cooperating closely with the monarchies to strengthen their armed forces and share intelligence aimed at countering Islamist militant groups. Obama said the United States shared the Gulf countries' concerns about what he called destabilising activities by Iran, which agreed with major powers in July 2015 to curb its nuclear programme in return for the lifting of some sanctions. "Even with the nuclear deal we recognise collectively that we continue to have serious concerns about Iranian behaviour," he said. The underlying strong relationship was underscored in a cartoon published on Thursday in the pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat, owned by King Salman's branch of the Al Saud ruling family. It showed a Shi'ite cleric in black turban and robes, marked "Iran", sweating with alarm as he read a newspaper headlined "Obama in Riyadh". All the Saudi newspapers published several pages of photographs of Obama's meetings with Salman and other princes. In keeping with a noticeably low-key approach by Saudi Arabia's government, however, neither that photo opportunity, nor the GCC meeting's opening statements, were broadcast on live television, as has often been the case before. (Writing by Angus McDowall; Editing by William Maclean and Sonya Hepinstall) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. Pedernales: Ecuador announced drastic economic measures late Wednesday, including a hike in some taxes and mandatory wage contributions, to deal with the aftermath of the devastating earthquake that killed more than 500 people and injured over 5,000. Saturday's 7.8-magnitude quake was the worst to hit the South American country in decades, causing hundreds of buildings to collapse and damaging roads and other key infrastructure in tourist areas. The official death toll currently stands at 525, with 5,733 injured and 163 still missing. But aside from the staggering human cost, the quake comes as a big economic blow to oil-producing Ecuador, which has already taken a huge hit from the drop in global crude prices. President Rafael Correa, in an evening address to the nation, estimated that rebuilding could come to as much as $3 billion and knock two or three points off the country's GDP. Correa went on to announce a series of measures to help cover the costs, including an increase in the country's value added tax from 12 percent to 14 percent for a year. He also announced mandatory wage contributions people earning $1,000 a month will have to pay the equivalent of a day's salary for a month, those earning $2,000, one day's worth for two months, up to those earning more than $5,000 who are being asked to contribute one day's salary for five months. And anyone whose assets exceed $1 million will have to pay a one-time contribution of 0.9 percent of their wealth, he added. He also said unspecified state assets would be sold. New quake sows panic Correa's address ended a day that began before dawn with panic as a new 6.1-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast. The latest quake caused no damage or casualties, but shook the ground forcefully in the dark of night, sending terrified residents running into the streets in the devastated resort town of Pedernales. Meanwhile, the toll from Saturday's quake continued to rise as emergency workers untangled the masses of rubble, often by hand or with basic tools. "The death toll will continue to rise, unfortunately, but at a slower pace. Many bodies have already been recovered," Correa warned. At least 11 foreigners were killed in Saturday's quake, which struck a Pacific coast region popular with tourists. They included citizens of Britain, Canada, Ireland and several Latin American countries. Ecuadoran authorities called the latest quake an aftershock one of more than 500 since Saturday, they said. Losing hope Saturday's quake is the worst to hit Latin America and the Caribbean since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which killed between 200,000 and 250,000 people. Hope of finding more victims alive was fading fast. One of the bodies pulled from the ruins was that of six-year-old Jose David Eras, a Colombian-Ecuadoran boy trapped beneath the rubble of a hotel in Pedernales one of around 800 structures toppled in the quake. Both countries had been on tenterhooks awaiting news of his fate after rescue workers detected signs of life in the debris using a special scanner. But the Colombian foreign ministry said his lifeless body had been found. Pope Francis sent Ecuadorans a message of solidarity, his second since Saturday's quake. "I want to express our closeness and our prayers to our Ecuadoran brothers," he said during his general audience on Saint Peter's Square at the Vatican. Relatives of the missing have voiced frustration with the pace of the rescue operation. "Ecuador is not prepared for such a catastrophe," said 27-year-old Samantha Herrera, who was searching for her missing brother Tuesday near a ruined hotel. Looting fears Many businesses up and down the coast have closed their shutters, fearing looters -- which has made it all the more difficult to find food and basic necessities. Fears rose for thousands of people left homeless, prey to disease-bearing mosquitoes and dirty drinking water. "We have no water, no food," Andres Mantuano told AFP in the port of Manta. Hundreds of emergency workers from Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador, Spain and other countries were helping overwhelmed Ecuadoran officials. "There are no tents for people who have been left with no roof over their heads. We need them," said Joffre Gordon, an air force officer leading emergency operations at a base in Manta. Also in Manta, more than 200 volunteers readied food rations and basic supplies such as diapers or toilet paper for desperate residents. A similar scene unfolded in Pedernales. According to the latest official bulletin, "significant progress" had been made in restoring power, telecommunications and the dispatch of water and fuel to the affected areas. The Inter-American Development Bank announced it would extend Ecuador an emergency loan of up to $300 million. Florida: The messy fight for the Republican presidential nomination is shifting to a luxury seaside resort in Florida as Donald Trump and chief rival Ted Cruz quietly court party leaders ahead of another set of high-stakes delegate contests. Cruz conceded publicly for the first time that he doesn't have enough support to claim the nomination before the party's summertime national convention, but he also vowed on Wednesday to block Trump from collecting the necessary delegates as well. The Texas conservative predicted a contested convention that many party loyalists fear could trigger an all-out Republican civil war. "What's clear today is that we are headed to a contested convention," Cruz told reporters in between private meetings with Republican National Committee members gathered at the Diplomat Resort & Spa for the first day of their three-day annual spring meeting. Both Trump and the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton, were pushing ahead toward Northeast primaries on an increasingly direct path to party nominations after trouncing their challengers Tuesday in New York. Clinton, now 81 percent of the way toward clinching the Democratic nomination that eluded her eight years ago, can lose every remaining contest and still prevail. Advisers to rival Bernie Sanders offered no signs of the Vermont senator giving up before the Democrats' Philadelphia convention. Trump is increasingly optimistic about his chances in five states set to vote next Tuesday: Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. He is now the only Republican candidate who can possibly collect the 1,237 delegate majority needed to claim the nomination before the party's July convention. Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich have been mathematically eliminated, yet both contend they can win the nomination at the convention. Campaigning in Indiana, Trump railed against his party's leadership, even as his senior lieutenants courted Republican officials behind closed doors in Florida. "It's a rigged, crooked system that's designed so that the bosses can pick whoever they want and that people like me can't run and can't defend you against foreign nonsense," Trump said. Roughly at the same time, Trump's newly hired political director, Rick Wiley, was hosting a series of private meetings at the Florida resort with party officials from states set to vote in the coming weeks. The veteran political operative, who previously worked for the RNC, is tasked with helping Trump play catch-up in the complicated state-by-state nomination process. Trump's top aides were set to deliver a private briefing to RNC members Thursday afternoon outlining his path to victory. The side-by-side Republican efforts at this late stage with Trump amassing primary victories while Cruz digs for the support of delegates who could settle the nomination are unprecedented in recent presidential campaigns and add to the deeply uncertain nature of the race. Hanoi: A US official on Thursday questioned China's intentions with its massive land reclamation projects in the South China Sea and urged it to follow international laws. "The United States and Vietnam share an interest in maintaining peace and stability in the region," said US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken. "So does China. But its massive land reclamation project in the South China Sea and increasing militarization of these outposts fuel regional tension and raise serious questions about China's intentions." China claims virtually the entire South China Sea, an area that contains some of the world's busiest sea lanes and is believed to be rich in oil and gas deposits. Its claim is disputed by other countries in the region, including Vietnam and the Philippines. "The United States will defend our national interest and support our allies and partners in the region. We are not looking for bases, but we will continue to sail, to fly, to operate anywhere that international laws allow," Blinken said in a speech at Vietnam's National University in Hanoi. Amid tensions over China's reclamation work including the construction of airstrips, ports and radar stations and the positioning of surface-to-air missiles on at least one new island Beijing's Defense Ministry on Thursday appeared to confirm a test of an intercontinental missile. A three-sentence statement posted on the ministry's website posed the question of whether China had fired an ICBM "in the South China Sea area." In its response, the ministry said China maintains that "technological research experiments conducted according to plan within China's boundaries are normal and are not aimed at any specific nations or targets" a standard ministry response to questions about testing of military hardware. The statement follows a report in the US newspaper Washington Free Beacon that quoted unidentified Pentagon officials as saying China tested its longest-range DF-41 missile with two multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles on Tuesday. The report did not say where the test took place, but referenced recent tensions between China and the US over Beijing's actions to shore up its claims to the South China Sea. Chinese military analyst Ni Lexiong said the ministry appeared to be seeking to advertise China's capabilities and boldness while leaving room for speculation about its actions and intentions. That approach aims to show that China is "prepared for conflicts and even combat, though unwilling to see it actually happen," said Ni, who teaches at Shanghai's University of Political Science and Law. Blinken said the United States welcomes China's peaceful rise and that he hopes China will "act in accordance with international norms and rules and laws," because that would benefit China as well as other countries. Ignoring those rules and laws would alienate many countries and diminish, not expand, China's power over time, he said. Blinken's trip comes ahead of a visit by President Barack Obama to Hanoi in late May. Obama is expected to discuss a range of issues including the South China Sea and human rights. Blinken said the Vietnamese government should release all political prisoners and stop arresting people who are "exercising their internationally recognized rights." Editor's Note: The United States will withdraw from the international climate agreement known as the Paris accord, President Trump announced on Thursday. Here are some of the key elements of the Paris deal, which is the first agreement requiring all countries to join the fight against global warming. This article was originally published on 21 April, 2016. Temperature goal The objective of the agreement is to keep the global temperature rise "well below" 2C (3.6F) compared with pre-industrial times. At that level, scientists believe the worst effects of climate change can be avoided. The agreement also includes an aspirational goal of limiting the temperature rise to 1.5C (2.7F). Temperatures have already risen by almost 1C (1.8F) since the industrial revolution. Individual targets Countries are required to set national targets for reducing or reining in their greenhouse gas emissions. Those targets aren't legally binding, but countries must report on their progress and update their targets every five years. The first cycle begins in 2020. Only developed countries are expected to slash their emissions in absolute terms. Developing nations are "encouraged" to do so as their capabilities evolve over time. Transparency There is no penalty if countries miss their emissions targets. Instead, the agreement relies on transparency rules to motivate countries to fulfill their pledges. All countries must report on their efforts to reduce their emissions. But some "flexibility" is allowed for developing countries that need it, which was a key demand from China. Money The agreement says wealthy countries should continue to offer financial support to help poor countries reduce their emissions and adapt to climate change. It also encourages other countries to pitch in on a voluntary basis. That paves the way for emerging economies such as China to contribute, even though it doesn't require them to do so. Actual dollar amounts were kept out of the agreement itself, but wealthy nations had previously pledged to provide $100 billion annually in climate finance by 2020. Loss and damage In a victory for small island nations threatened by rising seas, the agreement includes a section recognising "loss and damage" associated with climate-related disasters. The US long objected to addressing the issue in the agreement, worried that it would lead to claims of compensation for damage caused by extreme weather events. In the end, the issue was included, but a footnote specifically stated that loss and damage does not involve liability or compensation. Withdrawal The agreement will enter into force 30 days after 55 countries accounting for at least 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions have completed the ratification process. It's possible to withdraw from the treaty, but not in the first three years after it enters into force. There's also a one-year notice period, so the earliest a country could drop out is four years after the agreement has come into effect. MEXICO CITY A massive explosion rocked a major petrochemical facility of Mexican national oil company Pemex in the Gulf state of Veracruz on Wednesday, killing at least three people, injuring dozens more, and pumping a cloud of noxious chemicals into the sky. Luis Felipe Puente, head of federal emergency services, told Reuters that three people had died in the blast and as many as 45 were injured. The governor of Veracruz state, Javier Duarte, told local television that more than 60 people were injured. Pemex said the explosion, which sent a huge, dark plume of smoke billowing upwards, occurred just after 3 p.m. (1600 EDT) at the facility's chlorinate 3 plant near the port of Coatzacoalcos, one of the company's top oil export hubs. Local emergency officials said hundreds of people had been evacuated from the site. Television footage showed an initial burst of flames followed by a tower of thick smoke. A company official said local oil exports were not affected. What caused the blast was unclear, but Pemex warned local residents to keep their distance from the site due to what it described as a dissipating cloud of toxic fumes. TV footage showed rainclouds gathering above the plant as evening fell. Pemex Chief Executive Jose Antonio Gonzalez was traveling to Coatzacoalcos late on Wednesday to oversee the response. Petroquimica Mexicana de Vinilo, or PMV, a vinyl petrochemical plant that is a joint venture between Pemex's petrochemical unit and Mexican plastic pipe maker Mexichem (MEXCHEM.MX) was the facility hit by the blast. Operated by Mexichem, the plant lies within Pemex's larger Pajaritos petrochemical complex. Mexichem said in a statement the explosion occurred in an ethylene unit at the plant. The company could not be immediately reached for further comment. In February, a fire killed a worker at the PMV plant, which makes vinyl chloride monomer, also known as chloroethene, an industrial chemical used to produce plastic piping. The incident occurred just weeks after three workers were killed and seven injured when a fire broke out on a Pemex oil-processing platform in the Gulf of Mexico. It also came as Pemex implements deep cost cuts to cope with a sharp drop in oil prices, and seeks to stem a slide in output. Mexico is in the midst of a historic push to lure private investors to revive its oil industry. Pemex, which enjoyed a decades-long monopoly over Mexico's oil and gas sector until an energy reform opened up the sector in 2014, has experienced a series of high-profile accidents. In 2013, at least 37 people were killed by a blast at its Mexico City headquarters, and 26 people died in a fire at a Pemex natural gas facility in northern Mexico in September 2012. A 2015 fire at its Abkatun Permanente platform in the oil-rich Bay of Campeche affected oil output and cost the company up to $780 million. Pemex said last year it had reduced its annual accident rate in 2014 by more than 33 percent. But a Reuters investigation found that Pemex was reducing its accident rate by including hours worked by office staff in its calculations. (Reporting by David Alire Garcia, Gabriel Stargardter, Liz Diaz, Dave Graham and Anna Yukhananov; Editing by Simon Gardner, Peter Cooney and Andrew Hay) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. KUWAIT Talks aimed at ending Yemen's civil war opened in Kuwait on Thursday, with Kuwait's foreign minister appealing to both sides to "turn war into peace" after more than a year of conflict which has killed 6,200 people and caused a humanitarian crisis. The talks, bringing together the Houthi group and its General People's Congress party allies with the Saudi-backed government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, were originally scheduled to start on Monday. They were delayed over alleged truce violations and disagreements over the agenda for the negotiations. Kuwait's foreign minister Sheikh Sabah al-Khalid al-Sabah, in an opening speech, urged Yemenis to "turn war into peace and backwardness into development". The talks are based on U.N. Security Council resolution 2216 which calls for the Houthis to withdraw from areas they seized since 2014 and hand heavy weapons back to the government, U.N. special envoy to Yemen Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed said. "The choice today is one of two options: a safe homeland that ensures security for all of its citizens... or remnants of a land whose sons die everyday," Ould Cheikh Ahmed said in an opening speech. The talks are expected to focus on creating a more inclusive government and restoring state authority over the country, which is now divided between the Houthis and Hadi's administration. The crisis began in September 2014 when the Iran-allied Houthis seized the capital Sanaa. A Saudi-led Arab alliance intervened last year, launching a campaign of mostly air strikes against the Houthis in support of Hadi's forces. The Houthi group and the GPC had accused the Saudi-led coalition and Hadi supporters of failing to honour a truce that began on April 10, and refused to send their negotiators to Kuwait until the truce was consolidated. They agreed to join the talks following intervention by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. (Reporting by Mohammed Ghobari; writing by Sami Aboudi; editing by Dominic Evans) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. WASHINGTON The United States on Thursday called for an impartial and comprehensive investigation into the death of an Italian student in Egypt and said it had pressed the point in private talks with Egyptian authorities. "We have reiterated that the details that have come to light since his death have raised questions about the circumstances of his death that we believe can only be answered through an impartial and comprehensive inquiry," State Department spokesman John Kirby told a briefing. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry travelled to Cairo this week to raise human rights concerns with Egypt's leaders. Kirby would not say whether the case of the student Giulio Regeni was raised during that meeting. (Reporting by Lesley Wroughton and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Bernard Orr) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. London: The UK government today announced it is willing to acquire 25 per cent stake in Tata Steel's UK operations to help potential buyers eyeing ownership of the Indian steel giant's loss-making plants. The money "worth hundreds of millions of pounds" is being put up jointly by the UK and Welsh governments and will be made available to potential buyers as part of a support package for the crisis-hit steel industry, according to the business department here. Business Secretary Sajid Javid had earlier said any money would be offered on commercial terms, quashing talks of nationalising the industry. At least two potential buyers have shown interest in buying the business. One option is a management buyout backed by the chief of Tata's Port Talbot factory, the UK's largest steel operation, the BBC reported. Steel company Liberty House, owned by Indian-origin Sanjeev Gupta, has also said it was interested in buying parts of the business. New Delhi: Aiming a "world free of leprosy" by 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday launched a global strategy to combat the disease, a move critical for India which is among the three countries that account for more than 80 percent of newly diagnosed leprosy cases. WHO called for stronger commitments and accelerated efforts to stop disease transmission and end associated discrimination and stigma to achieve a "world free of leprosy". "The new global strategy is guided by the principles of initiating action, ensuring accountability and promoting inclusivity. These principles must be embedded in all aspects of leprosy control efforts. "A strategy can only be as good as its implementation," Poonam Khetrapal Singh, Regional Director, WHO South-East Asia Region, said at the launch of the global strategy for 'Accelerating Towards a Leprosy-free-world' here. "The strategy aims to, by 2020, reduce to zero the number of children diagnosed with leprosy and related physical deformities, reduce the rate of newly diagnosed leprosy patients with visible deformities to less than one per million. "...And ensure that all legislations that allow for discrimination on the basis of leprosy is overturned," the global health body said in a statement. WHO said out of the 2,13,899 new leprosy cases in 2014, 94 percent were reported from 13 countries - Bangladesh, Brazil, Congo, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Madagascar, Myanmar, Nepal, Nigeria, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Tanzania. "India, Brazil and Indonesia account for 81 per cent of the newly diagnosed and reported cases globally," WHO said. It said several key interventions needed to achieve the target of detecting cases early before visible disabilities occur, with a special focus on children as a way to reduce disabilities and reduce transmission. Interventions should also target detection among higher risk groups through campaigns in highly endemic areas or communities and improving health care coverage and access for marginalised population, it said. Beijing: Bolstering his status as China's most powerful leader in decades, Chinese President Xi Jinping has assumed a more direct role as head of the country's powerful armed forces with the new title of commander in chief of its Joint Operations Command Center, state media and analysts said Thursday. Xi's new position was revealed in news reports that featured prominently on national news broadcasts Wednesday and Thursday in which he appeared publicly for the first time in camouflage battle dress wearing the joint center's insignia. During his Wednesday visit, Xi called on the center's staff to "closely follow the trends of global military revolution and strive to build a joint battle command system that meets the need of fighting and winning an informationized war," the official Xinhua News Agency said. Officers should "change their ideas, innovate and tackle difficulties, in a bid to build a joint battle command system that was absolutely loyal, resourceful in fighting, efficient in commanding and courageous and capable of winning wars," Xinhua quoted Xi as saying. Battle command capacities should be measured by "the standards of being able to fight and win wars," Xi said, stressing the need to prepare for conflicts, analyze possible security risks, and handle effectively "all sorts of emergencies." The joint center, reportedly located underground in the western outskirts of Beijing, is under the direct supervision of the ruling Communist Party's Central Military Commission, which is headed by Xi and oversees the 2.3-million-member People's Liberation Army, the world's largest standing armed forces. Xi was accompanied on his visit by the commission's two vice chairmen, Gen. Fan Changlong and Gen. Xu Qiliang. Among his several other titles, Xi is also leader of the ruling Communist Party and chair of a recently created National Security Council, which gives him greater control over the domestic security services. As head of the military, Xi has overseen a reorganization of the PLA's command structure into five theater commands aimed at better integrating the different services. He has ordered a 300,000-person reduction in forces that will see the elimination of many outdated and non-combat units, and shift the emphasis further from ground forces to the navy, air force and missile corps. Xi's appearance in battle dress with insignia Wednesday emphasized his more direct role in military affairs. When appearing simply as head of the Central Military Commission he routinely wears olive green tunics, shirts and trousers without insignia or decoration, as did his predecessors. Xi's new choice of apparel "indicates that he not only controls the military, but also does it in an absolute manner, and that in wartime, he is ready to command personally," said Ni Lexiong, a military affairs expert at Shanghai's University of Political Science and Law. Three years since taking on the presidency, Xi is widely seen as having accumulated more power and authority than any Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping in the late 1980s. A cult of personality has also sprung up around him to rival that of the founder of the communist state, Mao Zedong, with his slogans, sayings and signature political themes widely disseminated in the media. Yet his reputation has also been called into question by anonymous letters, allegedly from Communist Party members, calling for his resignation. Revelations in the international media about vast wealth accumulated by members of his extended family have meanwhile flown in the face of his relentless campaign against corruption in the party, military and state industries. Xi's new title and his visit to the joint center were "more political than military" in significance and don't imply he will take charge of the day-to-day running of the PLA, said Andrei Chang, Hong Kong-based editor of the magazine Kanwa Asian Defense and a close observer of Chinese military affairs. "Throughout Chinese history, political power has always been founded on control of the military," Chang said. "This was a visit to show off his muscle to his potential enemies and show that he is tough and in charge." Xi's new title and appearance in battle dress may also be a deliberate message to China's chief rivals, including the US, Japan, the Philippines and the self-governing island of Taiwan that China has vowed to conquer by force if necessary. "The combat uniform is not only to show he is in charge of the military, but also shows that China is ready for a fight amid a tense external situation. It is a bit like telling China's opponents that he is ready for a combat," Ni said. Along with his structural and personnel reforms, Xi has highlighted the PLA's importance with frequent, highly publicized visits to military bases and a massive parade last September that saw the army's latest equipment wheeled through the center of Beijing while warplanes and helicopters roared overhead. Xi enjoys special cachet with the armed forces, partly due to his late father's status as a military commander and Xi's own brief service as a uniformed aide to a former defense minister, but also because his muscular foreign policy is popular among Chinese nationalists and the defense establishment. That's been especially true in the disputed South China Sea, which China claims virtually in its entirety and where it has constructed island airfields on former coral reefs and sought to limit the US Navy's ability to operate in the area. Xi has remained resolute in that approach despite it being blamed for raising tensions with China's Southeast Asian neighbors and prompting the US to devote more resources to Asia and strengthen its cooperation with traditional allies and even former foe Vietnam. "The most important message he meant to send to the world is that he will not make a concession on the issue of territory even at the cost of a war," Ni said. IKEA is urging Australian mums and dads to secure its popular chests to a wall, after a third child was crushed to death in the US when a six-drawer unit toppled over. It comes as new data shows there has been an average of one death a year since 2000 involving furniture falling on children under nine years of age in Australia. The Swedish furniture giant says it has no plans to recall the Malm chests of drawers. Instead, it will continue with its safety campaign about anchoring the chest to a wall, launched last July, after two boys were killed in separate incidents in 2014. In the latest tragedy, 22-month-old Ted McGee was found dead under a fallen Malm six-drawer unit at his Minnesota home in the US in February. Police have allegedly uncovered a million-dollar fraud racket while investigating the Sydney terrorist cell allegedly responsible for the murder of police accountant Curtis Cheng. Rafat Alameddine, 25, was arrested during a dawn raid at his family's Merrylands home on Thursday morning. The Alameddine family home in Lockwood Street was raided at least three times last year in relation to the supply of firearms for separate alleged plots around Sydney. His younger brother, Talal Alameddine, was charged last year with supplying the handgun used by schoolboy Farhad Jabar to kill Mr Cheng outside Paramatta police headquarters in October. The post refutes claims his organisation had faked success stories on its website. Reporter Tara Brown, centre, sound recordist David Ballment, left, and Sally Faulkner, right, after being released from a Beirut jail. Credit:Nine Network In the months before the bungled recovery, Mr Whittington's website had been aggressively insulting and attacking some of his British-based rivals. Under a "Warning" heading, the web page named two recovery agents as "con artists" and urged parents not to use them. Craig Michael remains in detention in Beirut. One of the named competitors has told Fairfax Media he is suing Mr Whittington for defamation over the claims. Both have vigorously disputed the claims. Ali Elamine says he knew the abduction attempt was coming. Credit:ABC The CARI post also says its operatives left behind in Beirut "are strong and well". Mr Whittington's wife, who did not give her name, also posted on the page attacking critics of her husband and saying he was "an honourable and brave" man and called for authorities to be lenient in their treatment of him. "Adam is receiving some bad press at the moment and he is being accused of being a liar and a fraudster," she wrote. "Adam is a former military man and police officer. He is honourable and brave and a man who stands up for what he believes in. "He feels passionately that it is wrong for one parent to take unilateral action and remove children from their custodial parent and from their home. That is exactly what this father did in this case. "Adam is a good hearted family man who was trying to help a desperate mother." She said leniency should have been shown to her husband. "I cannot comment on the details of the case but if the outcome is that Adam has committed a crime he will accept that and respect the Lebanese legal system and their right to punish him," she said. "For my part I hope that any punishment is as lenient as possible. He has not committed a crime against humanity." Earlier, Mr Whittington's and Mr Michael's lawyer, Joe Karam, claimed bank records showed the Nine Network directly paid for the botched child operation and hit out at the media company's "unethical" decision to exclude those who carried out the plot from a deal that secured the television crew's freedom. While the Australians have gone free, Mr Elamine will pursue personal charges against Mr Whittington and Mr Michael and two Lebanese men who assisted with the plot. "Ethically it wasn't appropriate for Channel Nine to arrange for a deal and not include the man they asked to execute for them something," Mr Karam told reporters outside the Palace of Justice. Mr Karam said bank records would show Nine directly paid CARI $69,000 in one of two expected instalments. "That shows that they did ask him to provide an investigation in a missing child which is not buying a story; they asked for what happened. "They were all a team; they came altogether and I think they should leave altogether," he said. Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop said she was pleased the civil proceedings had been settled and that Ms Faulkner and the 60 Minutes crew were on their way home. She emphasised that, in situations such as these, Australia would "do what we can" on behalf of citizens, but ultimately they were in the hands of foreign laws and courts. "Australian governments cannot become involved in the sovereign legal proceedings of other countries," she said. "You have to abide by the law of the other country in which you are a visitor." Mr Karam has called on the Australian government to do more to assist Mr Whittington, who is a dual British-Australian citizen. Beirut: It was the personal anguish of Nine Network cameraman Benjamin Williamson and sound recordist David Ballment at not being able to see their children that led to Ali Elamine agreeing to drop personal charges against his estranged wife and the entire 60 Minutes crew after being detained for a botched child-recovery operation in Beirut two weeks ago. Presenter Tara Brown and her colleagues were freed from prison and Fairfax Media understands they have now departed Lebanon on a flight on Wednesday night, local time, under the deal, which was struck after hours of tense negotiations. They appeared before Judge Rami Abdullah on Wednesday along with Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner, whom Channel Nine paid to film her planned reunion with her children. But under the deal Ms Faulkner will relinquish her Australian rights to custody of the children and formally divorce Mr Elamine. Friends and media colleagues of the 60 Minutes crew freed from a Beirut jail have taken to social media to celebrate their sudden release overnight. But the sympathy appears to stop there, with talkback callers and social media users overwhelmingly unhappy with the botched child recovery operation, the perceived conduct of 60 Minutes and the huge payment made by Channel Nine to secure the crew's release. Many observers have gone further, calling the saga a new low for journalism and even wishing host Tara Brown and her three colleagues were left to languish in a Lebanese jail. Lieutenant General Hun Manet, eldest son of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, wrapped up his 10-day U.S. tour this week amid street protests by Cambodian Americans, leaving behind a community seemingly more divided than ever. Gen. Manet was forced to withdraw from the annual New Year's parade in Long Beach at the beginning of his visit when he was met with lively demonstrations. Im protesting because Im not satisfied with Hun Sen and Hun Manet for abusing and killing Cambodian people, selling land to the Vietnamese, and selling their consciences, said Khim Any Yorn, a protester at the parade April 10. We are not happy to let him join the parade in the U.S. because it's the land of democracy and his hands are stained with Cambodian blood, so we dont welcome him. Other protesters shared Any Yorns sentiment. I dont support the government [delegation] to attend our parade, said Kheng Song. Everybody knows the regime is a dictatorship. Protesters held placards bearing anti-Hun Sen logos and messages against land-grabbing, corruption and deforestation. Protests 'bring shame' In an exclusive interview with VOA Khmer, Gen. Manet, a senior military commander who heads the country's elite counterterrorism unit, explained why he withdrew from the parade. What benefit do I get if I attend? he said. Getting thrown at with eggs and stones is not important, but the most important thing is our whole nation. Tens of thousands of people will go to see the parade and there will be cameras there to take pictures of what is Khmer [culture]. Our people take that opportunity to showcase what Khmer [culture] is. If there is a protest, it will dominate what will be shown... Therefore, it brings shame to the whole nation. When asked if he was angered by the protests, Manet said it was the peoples right to demonstrate within the legal framework, if it does not cause violence to any member of the delegation or any participant at the ceremony to welcome [Khmer] New Year. This is their right. Im not angry. More than 200 people staged a protest at La Lune restaurant in Long Beach as a private reception was held to welcome Manet on April 9. Astra Mam, a protester from Long Beach, expressed his frustration. In fact, he does not come to unite Khmers in the U.S., Mam said. He is here to split Khmers, politically. Before the elections he needs to conduct a campaign among overseas Khmers to garner support for him. We who live overseas understand the value and suffering of Cambodians living in the country very well. Its because of the Hun Sen government that our people live in misery, getting jailed and losing land. Calls to release prisoners Demonstrators also demanded the release of jailed political activists. If Hun Manet is truly a good guy, he should release those whom his father has thrown in jails, said Navan Cheth, another protester from Long Beach. Only [if he does] so can Khmers overseas support him. Among those whom protesters demanded be released was Meach Sovannara, a U.S. citizen and former press officer for the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in relation to a protest following disputed elections in 2013. If he committed a criminal offense and is found guilty and was imprisoned, I dont mind, but his only crime was to promote democracy, to educate people to understand their freedom, said Sovannaras wife, Jamie Meach. Nowadays, Im by myself working to raise three kids, and sending money to take care of my husband in jail. Dr. Sam Keo, a psychiatrist who attended the parade on Sunday, said the cultural memory of the Khmer Rouge atrocities were still prominent in the minds of Cambodian expatriates. Psychologically, they still remember their hardship during the Khmer Rouge regime that killed their siblings and parents, and the current leader is one of those leaders, Keo said. Therefore, they are against the leaders. Defends fathers record Throughout his U.S. tour, Manet defended his father's record, saying people should remember the role the sitting prime minister played in bringing peace and national reconciliation to the country. His U.S. trip included stops in Olympia, Washington; Houston, Texas; and Lowell, Massachusetts. His last stop in Lowell was also met with a protest before he headed to Canada. This is to show him that when he abuses people in the country, he does not have an easy time when he is abroad, said Vannak Men, one of the protest organizers in Lowell. This report was produced in collaboration with VOA's Khmer Service. There has been a "deep and disturbing decline" in respect for media freedom at levels both regional and global, the media rights group Reporters Without Borders said in its annual report. The 2016 World Press Freedom Index, released by the group Wednesday, said the world is entering a "new era of propaganda" and a reluctance to engage in free debate. The group said many world leaders have developed "paranoia" about journalists and are cracking down on the media, while privately owned media outlets are increasingly under pressure from corporate interests. "The climate of fear results in a growing aversion to debate and pluralism,'' said Christophe Deloire, secretary-general of the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders. "All of the indicators show a deterioration. Numerous authorities are trying to regain control of their countries, fearing overly open public debate," Deloire said. He said new technologies allow leaders to appeal directly to the public, so there is a greater degree of violence against those who represent independent information. "We are entering a new era of propaganda where new technologies allow the low-cost dissemination of their own communication, their information, as dictated. On the other side, journalists are the ones who get in the way, Deloire added. Report findings: Reporters Without Borders said the situation is particularly grave in Latin America and cited institutional violence in Venezuela and Ecuador, organized crime in Honduras, impunity in Colombia, corruption in Brazil and media concentration in Argentina. Eritrea was ranked the worst worldwide 180th out of 180 -- in overall media freedom, falling below Syria, China and North Korea. Finland was ranked No. 1 -- for the sixth year in a row -- followed by the Netherlands and Norway. The U.S. ranked No. 41 in the report, with the report citing cybersurveillance as a major problem. Individual countries that rose most in the 2016 report include Tunisia -- to No. 30 from No. 96 due to a decline in violence and legal proceedings, and Ukraine to No. 22 from No. 107 -- because the conflict in the east of the country has abated. Individual countries that fell the furthest include Poland, to No. 47 from No. 29; Tajikistan, to No. 150 from No. 116; Brunei, to No. 155 from No. 121; and Burundi, to No. 156 from No. 145. The report attributed the declines to a rise in the authoritarian nature of some governments, such as those in Tajikistan, Egypt and Turkey; security situations that have become more dangerous, such as in Libya, Yemen and Burundi; blasphemy laws, such as in Brunei, and tighter government control of state-owned media, such as Poland. By region, Europe still has the freest media, followed by Africa, the Americas, Asia and Eastern Europe/Central Asia. North Africa/Middle East is still the region where journalists are most subjected to constraints of every kind. Self-censorship The effect of these obstacles to press freedom is self-censorship, Reporters Without Borders said. The group also noted that media freedom is damaged by governments that are quick to suspend Internet access to their citizens. The report said every continent has seen a decline in media freedom over the past three years. The index measures indicators such as media independence, self-censorship, the rule of law, transparency and the safety of journalists in 180 countries. Information for the study is based on questionnaires in 20 languages filled out by experts around the world as well as on quantitative data on abuses and acts of violence perpetrated against reporters. China has asked Indonesia to extradite four Uighur men in exchange for returning a graft fugitive recently arrested in Shanghai, the top Indonesian security minister said yesterday. Coordinating Minister for Politics, Legal and Security Affairs Luhut Pandjaitan said Indonesia will allow China to question the men, who are serving prison sentences for collaborating with Indonesias most wanted militant, Abu Wardah Santoso. He said Chinas request was made during negotiations for the deportation from China of corruption fugitive Samadikun Hartono. Pandjaitan said Indonesia would talk with China separately about the four members of Chinas Muslim Uighur minority because it is a different case. They were arrested in September 2014 in Central Sulawesi. Hartono fled from Indonesia in 2003 after the Supreme Court sentenced him to four years in prison for misappropriating government bailout funds during the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis. Indonesia expected he will be deported from China yesterday. Starting in around 2009, groups of Uighurs have traveled across Southeast Asia from their homeland of Xinjiang, a region in northwestern China, hoping to reach Turkey to claim asylum from what they say is persecution by Chinese authorities. AP The New Macau Association (ANM) yesterday presented a criminal complaint to the Public Prosecutions Office (MP) and requested that the public body investigate individuals who have allegedly obtained Macau identification cards through one-way permits sold by a Hebei official. According to an ANM statement, the submission of the complaint yesterday was in response to the unearthing of a case in which a Hebei province official, Zhang Yue, allegedly sold Permits for Proceeding to Hong Kong and Macau, or one-way permits, for between RMB1.5 million and RMB2 million each. Those who are granted one-way permits to Hong Kong or Macau may migrate to the territories and are eligible for non- permanent ID cards in the respective regions. According to Hong Kongs Passion Times, Chinas Central Commission for Discipline Inspection posted the accusations against Zhang on its website on the weekend, alleging a serious violation of discipline, but did not elaborate further. The same report says that Zhang was permitted to approve a certain number of passports every year via special channels of processing. ANM claims that one-way permit holders who illegitimately acquired their right to stay in the MSAR now have access to the same benefits as legitimate Macau residents. These include access to the cash-handout scheme and, after becoming a permanent resident, a Macau SAR passport that grants its holders greater access to many parts of the world than the Chinese passport. In light of this, ANM is requesting that the MP launches an investigation into the alleged criminal activities. To protect the common interests of legitimate Macau residents and to ensure fairness for all applicants for one-way permits, the New Macau Association hopes that the Public Prosecutions Office will bring Macau ID cardholders connected to the Zhang Yue case to justice, the association said in a statement. DB Pop superstar Prince, who was widely acclaimed as one of the most inventive musicians of his era, was found dead at his home on yesterday in suburban Minneapolis, according to his publicist. His publicist, Yvette Noel Schure, told The Associated Press that the music icon died at his home in Chanhassen. No details were immediately released. The man born Prince Rogers Nelson stood just 5 feet, 2 inches and seemed to summon the most original and compelling sounds at will, whether playing guitar in a flamboyant style that openly drew upon Jimi Hendrix, switching his vocals from a nasally scream to an erotic falsetto or turning out album after album of stunningly original material. Among his other notable releases: Sign O the Times, Graffiti Bridge and The Black Album. He was also fiercely protective of his independence, battling his record company over control of his material and even his name. Prince once wrote slave on his face in protest of not owning his work and famously battled and then departed his label, Warner Bros., before returning a few years ago. Whats happening now is the position that Ive always wanted to be in, Prince told The Associated Press in 2014. I was just trying to get here. In 2004, Prince was inducted into the Rock and Roll of Fame, which hailed him as a musical and social trailblazer. He rewrote the rulebook, forging a synthesis of black funk and white rock that served as a blueprint for cutting-edge music in the Eighties, reads the Halls dedication. Prince made dance music that rocked and rock music that had a bristling, funky backbone. From the beginning, Prince and his music were androgynous, sly, sexy and provocative. AP The Judiciary Police (PJ) yesterday arrested a Chinese citizen working in Macau for allegedly scamming the owner of an employment agency on the mainland. The man, aged 39, is a civil construction worker who managed to pull off a scam involving around 200 people, pocketing a large sum of money by following the same rules that brought him to Macau in the first place. During a press conference held yesterday, the PJ explained that the suspect had searched for the services of an employment agency located in the city of Jiangmen back in 2014. Through the agency, he managed to find a job in the civil construction sector in Macau. In 2015 the suspect contacted the victim, the agency owner, saying that due to his position he could easily help to introduce new people to the contractor to help them get a job in Macau, saying that he could place around 200 of them. In exchange the suspect was asking for RMB4,000 per person as a commission and document-handling fee. According to the victim, the agency paid the suspect around RMB720,000, both in cash and via bank transfers, between August 2015 and April 2016 in order to support the fees of around 170 people whom they had recommended to take the jobs in the territory. However, those people never got their jobs. In addition to sending the payments, the agency also sent to the suspect all the requested personal documents such as passports, ID Cards and others. Tired of delays and evasive answers from the suspect and suspecting that something was not right, the agency owner filed a complaint with the PJ on April 15, which initiated the process. On April 20, with the help of the Public Security Police Force (PSP), the suspect was intercepted at the Cotai border crossing. Once in custody the suspect confessed to the scam, stating that he had already gambled away the money he received. A further search to the suspects house revealed a total of 195 Chinese passports as well as other documents that match the ones that the agency on the mainland claimed to have sent. The investigation is not yet closed, and the PJ suspects that the number of victims of the scam might continue to grow. Journalists unions in Hong Kong said yesterday they were troubled by the dismissal of a veteran editor of a newspaper that published a report on the Panama Papers document leak revealing offshore business dealings of the rich and powerful, exposing new concerns about press freedoms in the semiautonomous Chinese territory. A statement of concern from the Ming Pao Staff Association followed the dismissal of Keung Kwok-yuen, the papers No. 2 editor, on Wednesday, purportedly to save operating costs. Expressing extreme dissatisfaction and anger, the association questioned whether the dismissal was actually about punishing staff members who have different opinions on editorial issues. On Wednesday, Ming Pao carried a front page report on Hong Kong politicians and businessmen named in documents leaked from a Panama law firm and published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which have been reported by newspapers around the world. The union didnt mention the Panama papers in the statement posted on its Facebook page. Eight other Hong Kong journalist associations said in a joint statement that they were shocked by Keungs dismissal and that Ming Paos management owed its readers and the public an explanation. Mr. Keung is a veteran journalist who has spearheaded the coverage of major controversies in Hong Kong in the past decades, the statement by the eight unions, including the Hong Kong Journalists Association, said. Hot-button issues covered by the paper have included mass street protests calling for electoral reform and opposing a national security law, and a proposed public school curriculum criticized as an attempt to boost support for the communist government in Beijing. If a journalist as moderate and professional as Mr. Keung cannot be tolerated, what does it say about the press freedom of Hong Kong? We are deeply disturbed and worried, the statement said. Recent years have seen growing anxiety among many Hong Kong journalists and politicians about the growing influence of Beijing on the Hong Kong, which retained its own civil liberties when handed over from Britain in 1997. Media groups with close business and personal ties to Beijing have been accused of soft-pedaling their coverage of issues potentially embarrassing to China and its allies in Hong Kong. In January 2014, Ming Paos then chief editor Kevin Lau was abruptly dismissed, sparking fears that the newspapers owners were moving to curb aggressive reporting on human rights and corruption in China. A month later, he was attacked with a cleaver in a daylight attack. Two men who fled to mainland China subsequently received 19-year prison terms for theft and causing grievous bodily harm with intent. They said they had been paid to carry out the attack but refused to say by whom. AP A landmark commitment by one of the worlds largest producers of tissue and paper to stop cutting down Indonesias prized tropical forests is under renewed scrutiny as the company prepares to open a giant pulp mill in South Sumatra. To fanfare more than three years ago, Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) promised to use only plantation woods after an investigation by one of its strongest critics, Greenpeace, showed its products were partly made from the pulp of endangered trees. Greenpeace welcomed the announcement as a breakthrough and the company, long reviled by activists as a villain, rebranded itself as a defender of the environment, helping it to win back customers that had severed ties. At the same time, it was pressing ahead behind the scenes with plans to build a third pulp mill in Indonesia. When it went public with its plans for the OKI mill in 2013, APP announced it would produce 2 million tons a year and then earlier this year acknowledged the mills capacity could in the future increase to 2.8 million tons. New research released yesterday by a dozen international and Indonesian environmental groups estimates that APP will face a significant shortfall in its supply of plantation-grown wood after the new mill begins operating, even at a 2.0 million ton capacity. The company could then face a choice between using higher-cost imported wood or looking the other way as its suppliers encroach upon virgin forests. APP, while it has been presenting itself as a champion of zero deforestation, is building one of the worlds biggest pulp mills, said Christopher Barr of Woods & Wayside International, one of the organizations involved with the report. There will be a great deal of pressure to ensure it receives adequate supplies of wood to keep it operating at full capacity, he said. Our analysis shows the groups existing planted area in South Sumatra is unlikely to produce the volumes of wood the mill is expected to consume at projected capacity levels. How the mill, which could operate for more than half a century, is fed will be a factor in the survival of Indonesias tropical forests and the endangered wildlife they shelter. More generally, the draining and destruction of peatlands for forestry or agriculture will over decades release vast amounts of carbon that could jeopardize Indonesias ability to meet its emission reduction targets under an international agreement due to be signed within days. The report estimates that APPs plantations in South Sumatra have never produced half of the wood needed to feed a 2.0 million ton a year pulp operation. That shortfall is compounded by devastating forest and peatland fires across Indonesia last year that destroyed more than a quarter of APPs planted trees in South Sumatra, according to an on-the-ground survey by Hutan Kita Institute and other civil society groups. Greenpeace forests campaigner Andy Tait said APP has maintained it will only supply the mill with plantation or imported wood. But he acknowledged that APPs assessment that its plantation wood supply is adequate predates last years horrendous fires, which heavily affected the company. We dont see any sign of APP pulling back from its commitments on no deforestation at this stage and it would obviously be commercial suicide for them to do so, he said. But this mill construction raises a number of critical questions that need to be addressed. The company said it would it respond to concerns about the mill. Stephen Wright, Jakarta, MDT/AP Lance Clow is kicking off his re-election campaign with a night of magic at the Turf Club next week. Clow, a Republican House member from Twin Falls, is seeking his third term. He is unopposed in the upcoming primary and is facing Democrat Dale Varney, who also ran against him in 2014, in the general election. Lance loves magic. We decided to open up the 2016 campaign with another magical evening, said Clows wife, DeeDee. With a little encouragement, Professor Clowdini may also make an appearance. The fundraiser at the iconic banquet hall/event venue on Falls Avenue will run from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Friday, April 29, and will feature the magic of Ken Vaughan, Keone Valdez, Al Herren, and Dan Abracadan Geddes, the new president of the Magic Valley Magicians, according to a news release from Clows campaign. The Elect Lance Clow Committee is sponsoring the fundraiser. A $20 donation is suggested but not required, and Clow said supporters are welcome regardless of whether they contribute. Mutual UFO Network TWIN FALLS Start-up meeting at 1-3 p.m. Saturday at the Community Room at KMVT, 1100 Blue Lakes Blvd. N. in Twin Falls. Anyone interested in talking about UFOs is welcome. For more information call 208-736-1671. Twin Falls County Gem Club to Meet Today TWIN FALLS The purpose of the Magic Valley Gem Club is to promote the study of mineralogy, allied Earth sciences, lapidary and faceting arts. Monthly meeting will be held today from 7 p.m. to 9 at the Rosenaus Community Room, 2826 Addison Ave E. Scholarships Available for Minico High Seniors RUPERT The Minidoka County Education Association is offering multiple scholarships for the 2016-2017 school year. Graduating seniors from Minico High School intending to enter the education profession and Minico alumni in their junior or senior year of the education program are eligible for the award. If interested, students can pick up applications at the Minico High School Counseling Center. Applications and essays must be completed and submitted to Robert Ryan at Minico High School, 292 West 100 South, Rupert, ID 83350 by April 18, 2016 for consideration. Eastern Oregon University Announces Winter term Deans List LA GRANDE, Ore. Eastern Oregon University named 570 students to the deans list for the 2016 winter term. Qualifying students achieve and maintain a grade point average of 3.5 or higher on a 4.0 scale while completing a minimum of 12 hours of graded coursework for the duration of the term. Cristian Anguiano Marin of Burley earned this distinction: DeMary Memorial Library Book Notes Fiction: Flawless by Heather Graham Theres a pub in New York City thats been in the Finnegan family for generations. Now Kieran and her three brothers own it. Kieran Finnegan is also, as it happens, a criminal psychologista fitting reaction, perhaps, to her less-than-lawful teenage past. Fantasy: Fire Touched by Patricia Brigss Mercy Thompson is back, and shell soon discover that when the fae stalk the human world, its the children who suffer Fiction: The Bachelor Girls Guide to Murder by Rachel McMillan In 1910 Toronto, while other bachelor girls perfect their domestic skills and find husbands, two friends perfect their sleuthing skills and find a murderer. Mystery: Treachery at Lancaster Gate by Anne Perry Fiction: The Obsession by Nora Roberts Fiction: Gone Again by James Grippando Fiction: The Steel Kiss by Jeffery Deaver Fiction: Reluctant Duchess by Roseanna White Fiction: The River Rages English by J.G. Jakes Fiction: Back in the Saddle by Ruth Henre Fiction: What Happened on Beale Street by Mary Ellis Drivers The Senior Assisted Services (SAS) program at CSIs Office on Aging is looking for volunteer drivers for their transportation department. The volunteers will transport the programs senior clients to doctor appointments, shopping, and personal necessities. Information: Kathy, 208-736-2122. Volunteers The Foster Grandparent Program at the CSI Office on Aging has openings for volunteers, age 55 and older, to read to children ages 2 to 9 and assist with their academic and social skills. Placements are available throughout the Magic Valley in Head Start programs and public elementary schools. Information: Marisol, 208-736-2122 or toll free, 800-574-8656. Volunteers The Senior Companion Program at the CSI Office on Aging needs volunteers, age 55 and older, to assist homebound seniors by providing friendly visits and transportation as needed. Information: Marisol, 208-736-2122 or toll free, 800-574-8656. Volunteers Interlink Volunteer Caregivers provides volunteers to help elderly, disabled and chronically ill people live safely and independently in their homes. Volunteers assist with transportation to health-related appointments and essential errands, light housekeeping chores, friendly visits, yard maintenance and simple home repairs. Carpenters and handymen are also needed. Volunteers are reimbursed for mileage and covered with excess auto liability insurance. Commitment is flexible with no minimum hours required. Information: Edie, 208-733-6333 or ivcofmv@gmail.com. Drivers The American Cancer Society is looking for volunteer drivers for its Road to Recovery program in Twin Falls. Volunteers will drive patients to and from medical treatments. Commitment is flexible. Information: Renae Delucia at renae.delucia@cancer.org or 702-891-9023 Volunteers Volunteerism is an intricate part of the Twin Falls Senior Centers ability to serve the community. Volunteer opportunities include being a driver for Meals on Wheels, a center volunteer, or to help a senior do some yard work or home maintenance. Information: 208-734-5084. Volunteers The Twin Falls Senior Center has a group called The Crazy Quilters who are looking for individuals to put finishing touches on quilts as a group while socializing at the same time. The quilters meets from 9 a.m. to noon every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. All quilt project proceeds are given to the Twin Falls Senior Center. Information: 208-734-5084. Volunteers Idaho Home Health and Hospice needs volunteers who will bring compassion, support and dignity to those facing a serious, life-limiting illness and their families. Volunteers can choose between offering respite to family caregivers or provide support with administrative tasks. Information: Heidi Walker, 208-734-4064 or Heidi.Walker@LHCgroup.com. Volunteers St. Lukes Home Health and Hospice needs volunteers to share compassion and increase the quality of life for patients and their families. The program is designed to offer companionship and socialization to patients, plus respite and support for the caregivers. Information: Marie Sharp, 208-814-7603 or sharpm@slhs.org. PAUL The Mini-Cassia Drug Task Force has arrested three people in a methamphetamine sting. Julie Marie Dewitt, Ozvaldo Ramirez and Doug John Nelson were arrested Tuesday by law enforcement officers from the Minidoka County Sheriffs Office and the Cassia County Sheriffs Office. Dewitt, 48, of Filer, was charged with conspiracy to traffic methamphetamines and failure to purchase a drug tax stamp. Her bail has been set at $25,000. Ramirez, 22, of Twin Falls, was also charged with conspiracy to traffic methamphetamines and failure to purchase a drug tax stamp. His bail has been set at $50,000. Nelson, 49, of Pocatello, was charged with conspiracy to traffic methamphetamines and failure to purchase a drug tax stamp. His bail has been set at $100,000. The 49-year-old also had a $100,000 warrant from Twin Falls County for trafficking, unlawful possession of a firearm and drug paraphernalia. Police said the trio conspired to traffic a quarter-pound of meth. TWIN FALLS | One of two men charged with robbery in a bizarre pre-Christmas attack at the Magic Valley Mall pleaded guilty to a lesser charge Wednesday and agreed to a five-year prison term despite a judge questioning his acceptance of the pretty heavy sentence. Ricardo Tobias Jr., 21, of Buhl said he felt the five-year sentence was a blessing after facing a lengthier sentence and a more serious charge. As part of the plea deal, prosecutors reduced his felony robbery charge to a felony burglary charge and Tobias agreed to serve all five years in prison without eligibility for parole. Mr. Tobias, normally it is not my business why a defendant makes a decision to accept a plea agreement, District Judge Randy Stoker said Wednesday. But Im going to ask you in this case, because this is a pretty heavy sentence Stipulated five years to serve thats significant. Is there a particular reason why youre doing that? Tobias said hes had four months in Twin Falls County Jail to think, during which time he assumed he'd be sentenced somewhere closer to 10 or 15 years in prison. So to get it down to five years, I thought, what a blessing, Tobias told Stoker. The way I had it in my mind, if Im going to prison, I dont want to do any parole afterwards. So the five flat fixed was what I asked for. That was my counter offer for the prosecution. Twin Falls County Deputy Prosecutor Rosemary Emory said her office thought five years was appropriate given the original robbery charge and that it was very likely a jury would have convicted Tobias of robbery based on the evidence. Stoker said he appreciated Tobias' desire to make changes in his life and hopes he spends his time in prison well. You are a young person, the judge said. You can come out of the penitentiary better, the same, or worse. You know that. That ones up to you, its not up to me or anybody else. Tobias and 23-year-old Ricky Jimenez Jr., of Wendell were arrested Dec. 18 outside the Magic Valley Mall after a Jerome man said they stole his keys at knifepoint. They never demanded money but stole the mans car keys and another set of keys from his passenger seat. Jimenez is the one accused of wielding the knife and is set for trial May 4 on felony charges of robbery and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. I thought I was going to get stabbed, said the victim, Miguel Borrayo, outside the mall the night of the incident. Borrayo told police Tobias slammed on his window and yelled at him before Jimenez held the knife to his chest. I reached into the victims car and grabbed his key chain with a set of keys on it, Tobias said Wednesday. Then I proceeded to flee. Tobias and Jimenez ran into JCPenney when another driver called 911. Jimenez was later arrested inside the store where police say he threw his knife to the ground, while Tobias was found hiding in the back of an SUV huddled underneath a large coat. While sitting in the back of a police officers SUV, Tobias repeatedly slammed his head on the window, opening up a large gash on his forehead. He appeared in court for his arraignment the next Monday with bandages on his head and covered his face and whispered under his breath as a judge set his bond at $150,000. Tobias was calmer and more at ease Wednesday as he took responsibility for his actions. Im still young, Tobias told the judge. Im still young enough to where I can get out and still be able to proceed with my life once Im out. I hope that you spend your time in prison well, Stoker told Tobias. Good luck to you, sir. BURLEY Leonel Velgara, convicted of malicious injury to property in his involvement in a robbery over a four-wheeler in 2009, will be back in Cassia County Thursday for a probation violation arraignment after picking up an unrelated disturbing the peace charge. On June 15, 2009, guns blasted and SUVs barreled down the road after a sale of the four-wheeler at a church in Declo turned into a robbery. Velgara previously met the victim at the El Dorado 2000 club in Burley, where they discussed the four-wheeler, court documents said. Some time later, the victim ran into Velgara at the former Albertsons in Burley and they agreed he would borrow and test ride it to see if he would buy it for his kids. Velgara later contacted the victim, arranging to meet at the church in Declo. At the church on that day in June, the victim also met an armed David Prano, the owner of the four-wheeler, and another man, Kenneth Kaiser, who had a shotgun, court documents said. The victim told detectives that while he was with the four-wheeler and Velgara, two other people appeared. One ordered him to get on the ground while another took $2,000 from his pocket. Kaiser, who was hiding in bushes by the church while Prano and Velgara were with the victim, described Velgara as the middleman and that drug dealers had taken Pranos four-wheeler, court documents said. Velgara, he said, was there to meet the owner of the four-wheeler who was to be paid for drugs. Kaiser told detectives he heard Prano order the victim to get on the ground. Prano then called out to Kaiser and they, along with Velgara, took the four-wheeler, he told police. Kaiser said a man in a Chevrolet Tahoe, coming straight at Prano, then drove by the church with a shotgun hanging from the window. He told police the man in the Tahoe shot at him and that he shot back as the vehicle crossed the intersection by the church. He said he also heard shots coming from what had to have been Pranos gun. The gun fire took out the Tahoes back windows, and hit the front windshield and radiator. According to court documents, Prano admitted to shooting at the SUV. I did the shooting, he said. Ill take the blame I guess. Kaiser told police the shot that hit the radiator likely came from Velgara. Velgara was charged with two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, robbery, grand theft and unlawful discharge at a vehicle. All were dismissed except one count of aggravated assault, which was amended to malicious injury to property. Velgara pleaded guilty to the amended charge and paid restitution to the driver of the Tahoe. He was ordered to probation for 24 months. On Thursday, he will be sentenced in his disturbing the peace case and then arraigned for probation violation. HAILEY Syringa Mountain School is taking another step toward becoming an innovation school under a new state law. A work session is slated for May 3 between Syringa and Blaine County School District trustees. To become an innovation school, Syringa a public charter school in Hailey must have a written agreement with its charter authorizer. Thats the Idaho Public Charter School Commission. But Syringa wants to be overseen by the Blaine County School District instead. Syringa leaders say they need more state funding something they could achieve by affiliating with the Blaine County district. Extra money would allow Syringa to offer more programs for its students. Were eager to sit down with them on May 3 to talk about the specifics about how this might work, said Syringas board chairman Greg Bloomfield. A decision wont be made during the work session. School leaders are reviewing academic, financial and operational information Syringa has provided, said Heather Crocker, spokeswoman for the Blaine County School District. On Tuesday, about 40 families from Syringa attended a Blaine County school board meeting. Former Syringa administrator Mary Gervase spoke during a public comment period. She spoke eloquently about what the school is trying to do and how this new law is a huge opportunity for both Syringa and the school district to come together and create something that hasnt been created before, Bloomfield said. Earlier this month, Syringa announced it wants to become an innovation school under new state legislation. The Local Innovation School Act allows schools and districts flexibility from laws and policies that impede local autonomy, according to the bill. Gov. C.L. Butch Otter signed it March 31 and the new law goes into effect July 1. Becoming an innovation school would allow Syringa to have more control over its curriculum, policies and operations. It would still be required to participate in standardized testing. And it must follow laws related to safety, accreditation and prohibiting discrimination. Each year from 2016 through 2021 up to 10 Idaho public schools can be innovation schools, for a total of 50. Syringa hopes to be included in the first round of schools, Bloomfield said. Syringa Mountain School which opened in 2014 has about 130 students in kindergarten through sixth grades. The public Waldorf school has a nature-oriented approach that de-emphasizes technology, with the goal of developing students imagination. Children learn through methods such as storytelling, puppetry, songs, poetry, movement and hands-on projects. The purpose of attending Tuesday nights Blaine County school board meeting was to introduce the innovation school discussion to the public, Bloomfield said. He said he doesnt think the Blaine County School District has made a statement on the topic. We want the public to know its going on. Several communities in southern Cassia County cropped up about the time Mormon pioneers settled Oakley. Among the communities were Island, Trout, Basin, Marion, Golden Valley and Churchill. Churchill sat about seven miles north of Oakley, along the Idaho Southern Railroad connecting Milner and Oakley. It sounds good to hear the whistle of the iron horse in Oakley; it makes one feel as if he is coming nearer in touch with a greater civilization, the Oakley Herald quoted an observer in 1910. Not much ever became of Churchill. It was simply a stop along the road to somewhere else, as evidenced by an early photo by an unknown photographer. William McGhie Boam, born in 1859, visited with his family in about 1920 on their way home to Millcreek, Utah. TWIN FALLS It took Mackensy Hiatt weeks, but she finally found the perfect dress. Perfect in color, style and price. Mackensy, 17, tried on the sapphire blue dress Tuesday afternoon at Christas Dress Shoppe and Tuxedo in Twin Falls. But before she wears it Saturday at Filer High Schools prom, it needs to be altered to her height. She originally found the same dress in red online. The dress cost $1,700. Way more than her mother Shannon Koyle who stood near the entrance of the fitting room was willing to spend. So Mackensy was happy when she found the exact same dress at Christas for a more affordable price. The dress cost about $350. And after trying on the blue version in the store, she also decided she liked this color better. That was more achievable, her mother said. Unfortunately, I have two more girls. Preparing for prom can be a time thats both enjoyable and stressful for parents and teens. Thats because the price of prom seems to increase every year. In 2015, a nationwide survey by Visa said the average teen would spend $919 for prom. This includes the price of dresses, tuxedos, limousine rentals, tickets, flowers, pictures, dinner and after-party festivities. The study found families who make less money often spend more than wealthier families. Families who make more than $50,000 will spend an average of $799, the survey said. Those with a total household income below $50,000 a year plan to spend $1,109 on prom, the survey said. Families making less than $25,000 will spend $1,393 on prom. The start of the prom dress shopping season in the Magic Valley starts as early as February and goes to about mid-May. The majority of local proms taking place in April. Koyle went to prom in 1989. She estimated she spent $50 on her dress. Her oldest daughter spent about $150 on her prom dress five years ago. So to cut back on costs, Koyle said, her oldest daughter will fix Mackensys hair and makeup. Liyah Babayan, owner of Ooh La La Boutique in downtown Twin Falls, said she understands the need to cut costs. She helps girls afford the dress of their dreams by trading good grades for in-store discounts. This is the sixth year she has offered the good grades discount. In some cases, she has covered the cost of dresses. And other people have followed her lead. Babayan said a man bought a $50 anonymous gift card to go toward a dress for a girl who couldnt afford a full price. And girls who built up store credit from good grades often pay those forward to others. Its not just me that wants to see these girls go to their prom, she said. Community members have asked her how they can help as well. Im not the first to notice theres such financial inequality for girls versus boys, Babayan said. Even before I had a daughter and really had to think about it. The guys just go and rent the tux. The mom that has two to three daughters, thats a couple of thousand dollars just for dresses. Mackensy said her date bought his tuxedo at JCPenney for about $100. Jonathan Milke of Filer was at Christas on Tuesday picking out his tuxedo. His tuxedo was originally $152, but after a prom promotion at the store, he paid $76 for a tan tuxedo to match his girlfriends dress. Even though his tuxedo cost less than her dress, he said, the cost evens out because he is also paying for other aspects of the night. The tickets cost $35, a flower corsage was $30 and he expects to spend $40 on dinner. He saved money from his job working as a box boy. For him, its all worth it for the memories. Its a once in a lifetime thing, he said. Christa Hannold, owner of Christas, went to prom in California in 1987 with her now husband, Jay. A framed black-and-white photo of them sits on a shelf in the store. Hannold said that night was special for her. Not only because she attended the dance with her high school sweetheart, but also the generosity she experienced in order to attend. My dates father bought my dress because I didnt have money, Hannold said. Her dress was metallic pink and cost $99. Back then, Hannold said, that was considered expensive. It was a gift she never forgot. Dresses in Hannolds shop cost between $199 to $599. The price goes up with the amount of handmade bead work on the dress. We dont deal with just our schools locally, Hannold said. We get kids from Sun Valley all the way to Burley, Elko and Mountain Home. Its also common to have students on spring break vacation stopping in to shop from states like Washington. Hannold said girls often try to save money by buying from online knockoff sites, but sometimes thats a gamble. Theres a lot of fraud, she said. Often, girls wont get their dresses in time or at all. And when they do receive them, they are cheap replicas of the online versions. Hannold said many of these websites take photos from designer websites. Now shes lost her dress and money, Hannold said. In addition to the beaded dresses, another popular style was two-piece dresses. We couldnt keep them on the shelves, Hannold said. It just shows a little belly. It was exactly the type of dress Elizabeth Ramirez, a junior at Jerome High School, wanted to buy. But everywhere she looked, stores either didnt have the style of dress or her size. Then Elizabeth found the perfect dress a black two-piece, mermaid-style gown. It took me three weeks to find my dress, Elizabeth said. Its so stressful. Then there was another road block in her path to prom. The cost of the dress. The dress at Christas cost $316. Elizabeth put down a $100 deposit, but when she realized she couldnt come up with the rest, she went in to get her deposit back. Thats when Hannold told Elizabeth she would cover the rest. She was so kind, Elizabeth said. I started crying and we were both in tears. Elizabeth said she felt like a princess Tuesday as she tried on her gown for alterations. She said her mother gave her the $100 deposit, which was a huge sacrifice for her family. Elizabeth said her mother also cried after hearing Hannolds offer. I mean for regular people, $100 doesnt seem like a lot, Elizabeth said. But to us, its a big deal. Elizabeth said without Hannold, she probably wouldnt have been able to attend prom. It was amazing and Im forever grateful. Tubing the Bliss Rapids was not quite suicidal, but close. Forty-eight hundred cubic feet of water-per-second goes rushing through a narrow, 60-foot channel of canyonand you? You are sitting in this flimsy little inner tube, your backside numb from hanging in freezing water. For a while you float along the Snake River peacefully, and then suddenly theres the roar of a low flying jet overhead. Looking up in the sky and seeing nothing you realize that roar was no jet engine but the wild and vigorous Snake, angrily tumbling and tossing its way past river rock and boulders. I cannot think of a state so defined by one river as Idaho is by the Snake River. The Mississippi belongs to at least seven states equally and the Columbia is shared by both Oregon and Washington. But Idaho houses and harnesses the Snake as it threads its ways east to west, from American Falls to Hells Canyon and up to Moscow. Its made that wide strip of desert to the south, the pan of the panhandle, bloom. The Snake provides habitat to a wide variety of creaturesman being just one of them. Boise may have the Greenbelt thanks to the Boise River, but Idahos greenbelt comes compliments of the Snake. The Snake River though, like all of Idahos water resources, is at risk due to climate change and over allocation. Indeed, the state of Idaho has a big job maintaining the integrity of the Snake and the natural habitat surrounding it, while balancing the commercial, agricultural and recreational benefits of the river. The State has made some attempts to respond to various interest groups, for example when Idaho purchased 75,000 acre-feet of water right near Bliss from the Bell Rapids faming cooperative in order to improve salmon runs. As the value of Snake River water has increased, a whole cadre of entrepreneurs and middlemen see an opportunity in buying and selling water rights. Dry land today can go anywhere from $500$1,000 an acre in Idaho, but a good Snake River water right is worth about $3,000 an acre, depending on the seniority of the right and whether or not theres a seasonal application. Water rights generally follow the age-old water law of first in time, first in right and if the right pre-dates the 1970s or better yet, the 1950s, it could be very valuable. If the water right contains a long seasonal application, say March through October, a great growing season for Idaho farmers raising sugar beets, it would be worth more. My home sits about 30 feet above the river on an embankment. This river is a wonder to watch. Ive seen deer float across and cormorants and pelicans swoop for fish. In the summer on our patio I can hear the river pump bringing up water for the alfalfa field. One evening I looked out my window and watched a couple of fishermen on a boat casting their rods when I heard the phone ring. It was a water broker from Twin Falls. He wanted to know if we had any water we were willing to sell. There was something about his tone and the crassness of his solicitation that struck me wrong as I watched the peaceful Snake River float by. I felt like interrogating him. What agency was buying the water right? How much money was he going to make? Snake River water seems too precious to manipulate in this fashion. It feels like were brokering our children. King Mohammed VI has stressed the importance Morocco grants to its relations with Arab Gulf countries, saying their security and stability are part of the North African Kingdoms security. What hurts you hurts us, and what affects us affects you, said the Moroccan Sovereign in the address he made Wednesday in Riyadh at the 1st Morocco-GCC Summit, a historical event showing the special bonds and strategic ties existing between Rabat and the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council made of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman. To defend our security is not only a shared obligation, but it is also a collective, indivisible one, stressed the sovereign, noting that Morocco has stood up with GCC countries against all threats in the region. He recalled in this regard Moroccos participation in the First Gulf War, the operation in Yemen to restore legitimacy and the ongoing security and intelligence cooperation. We are facing conspiracies which seek to undermine our collective security, added King Mohammed VI, saying conspirators endeavor to destabilize the few countries which have managed to safeguard their security, stability and political systems. We are all facing the same perils, the same threats, though their origins and manifestations may differ, stressed the Monarch, warning that the hostile plots which seek to undermine our stability are continuing and will not stop. After having destabilized and destroyed several countries in the eastern part of the Arab world, the plotters are now focusing on the western part and the most recent of these conspiracies has been hatched against the territorial integrity of your second home, Morocco, said King Mohammed VI, making reference to recent hostile remarks made by UN SG Ban Ki-moon on the Moroccan Sahara. The Morocco-GCC Summit is being held at a difficult time, added the Sovereign, noting that the Arab region is being rocked by attempts to change regimes and divide states, as is in Syria, Iraq and Libya. After the destruction, chaos and human tragedies caused by the Arab Spring, now we are witnessing a calamitous autumn, with attempts to lay hands on what remains of Arab countries resources and spoil successful experiences, like that of Morocco, by undermining its outstanding national model, said King Mohammed VI. Though it remains committed to its strategic relations with its allies, Morocco has, in recent months, sought to diversify its partnerships at political, strategic and economic levels, added the Sovereign, noting that the Morocco-GCC summit is not targeting any party in particular, least of all our partners. It is a natural and logical initiative seeking to defend common interests and shared strategic goals for a common brighter future. King Mohammed VI has hailed the unwavering backing of GCC countries to Moroccos territorial integrity currently targeted by some enemies seeking to destabilize the North African nation which has weathered Arab Spring storms. The question of the Moroccan Sahara has always been the cause of Gulf countries as well. And this is hardly surprising, said the Sovereign in a speech made Wednesday in Riyadh at the 1st Morocco-GCC Summit. In 1975, delegations from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates took part in the Green March, said the Sovereign, recalling that Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, was among participants at the Green March while he was only 14 years old at the time. Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan represented the United Arab Emirates at the Morocco-GCC summit hosted by King Salman of Saudi Arabia. Since then, the Gulf States have spared no effort to uphold Moroccos just cause and defend the kingdoms sovereignty over its entire territory, added the Monarch, noting that this position was reaffirmed during the recent crisis with the UN Secretary-General. Only this time, the situation is serious. It is also unprecedented in the history of this artificial dispute over the Moroccan Sahara, stressed the Sovereign. What we are witnessing, in fact, is a proxy war, in which the Secretary-General of the United Nations is being used to infringe on Moroccos legitimate, historical rights in its Sahara, through biased statements and unacceptable behavior regarding the Moroccan Sahara, added King Mohammed VI. This should not come as a surprise, for there is something that might explain it all! Indeed, what can one expect from the Secretary-General when he himself admits that he is not fully informed on the Moroccan Sahara issue nor is he on many others? He is unaware of this issues intricate developments and its real background, said the Sovereign, wondering: What can the Secretary-General do while he is a hostage in the hands of some of his aides and advisers who have personal agendas. They are politically motivated and they serve other parties interests violating their UN mission which requires respect of neutrality and objectivity. The UN SG is supposed to be a peace-maker and observe neutrality in any conflict. But Ban Ki-Moon, whose second & last term expires December 2016, has betrayed his neutrality when he made inappropriate and offensive comments for Moroccans on Sahara during his latest visit to the region early March. After the blatant bias he showed through his reckless remarks, Morocco decided to suspend its $3 million voluntary contribution to the MINURSO, and to reduce drastically the missions civilian staffers. Many influential members of the Security Council expressed support to Morocco in its row with Ban Ki-moon. The King made it clear that Morocco does not have a problem with the United Nations Organization, of which it is an active member; nor does it have a problem with the Security Council. Morocco has a problem with the Secretary-General, and more particularly with some of his aides, because of their hostile positions towards my country. As regards this artificial dispute over our territorial integrity, Morocco has always liaised with its traditional friends that include the United States, France and Spain, and with Arab sister nations, especially the Gulf States, as well as with African countries, such as Senegal, Guinea, Cote dIvoire and Gabon, said the Moroccan King. King Salman of Saudi Arabia who delivered the opening address at the summit, reaffirmed, on behalf of all the member States of the Gulf Cooperation Council, their total rejection of any act that may affect Moroccos supreme interests on top of which the Moroccan Sahara issue. The 205-page policy statement of the Egyptian government led by Prime Minister Sherif Ismail received the vote of confidence of the parliament on Wednesday. 90% of the lawmakers present voted in support of the governments program after a 10-day debate. The grateful Prime Minister warned after the approval of the program that the country is still in a state of danger and all state institutions and citizens should join forces to stand up to the challenges. The disapproval of the program would have forced President Sisi to appoint a new Prime Minister to form a government within 60days and some members of parliament admitted that despite their harsh criticism of the government due to its shortcomings in economic and security matters, they voted to maintain the countrys stability and avoid constitutional vacancy. Ismail is aware of the daunting task that lies ahead. He told the parliament that the governments biggest challenge will be achieving economic reform and social justice at the same time. The reforms are unlikely to be favorable to the upper economic class as he hinted that the poor citizens have suffered so much and for so long and the middle class will be supported and conserved at all times. Subsidies will go to those who deserve them only. Social demands and unemployment are still high while the economic and financial situations have made it uneasy for the government to overcome them as foreign investors continue to be wary of the security risks in the country especially the bomb attacks and the insurgency of extremist groups in the Sinai. We do not have the luxury of choosing between two options; success or failure, reform or corruption, and winning the war of the future or being defeated before the forces of the past, Ismail stated before assuring the parliament that its recommendations regarding the cabinets program will be implemented as obligations with all required transparency and seriousness. He informed the lawmakers that the government is preparing to present the strategic sustainable development plan until the year 2030. Major General Yair Golan has revealed that there is an unprecedented level of cooperation in intelligence matters between Israel, Jordan and Egypt as they try to fight a common enemy: extremist Islamist groups. He said the threat posed by the extremist groups have led to a strong feeling in the region that we have to put aside past animosities and concentrate on mutual interests and working together. Arab States are usually shy about their dealings with Israel due to their support to the Palestinian Cause as Israel continues to occupy Palestinian territories. Golan said Egypt is fighting extremist groups in the Sinai and Jordan is terrified by the presence of such groups in its cities and towns and Israel is cooperating with them in order to contribute something to their security. He said Israels contribution consists mainly in providing our intelligence which is the most important element in the whole system. The senior Israeli military official said the intelligence cooperation thats between defense establishments should not be considered as some sort of reconciliation between the people but was quick to add that it is a good starting point and Im quite optimistic concerning that. The latest political spat over attempts to openly mend ties with Israel took place in March when an Egyptian member of parliament invited Israels ambassador to his home for dinner and discussed ties between the two countries. His colleagues reacted by dismissing him from the parliament. Jordan joined the war against the Islamic State after one of its pilots was captured and burnt alive. Egypt and Jordan signed peace treaties with Israel in 1979 and 1994 respectively but the Egyptian and Jordanian peoples are strongly against it. They are the only two Arab countries to have signed treaties with Israel. Neither Egyptian nor Jordanian authorities have reacted to the revelations made by Golan. Bahraini Parliamentarians called for a declaration of war against Hezbollah, and other radical and terrorist organizations operating in the region. They also singled out Iran and its allies alleging that their risky practices pose a threat to Arab countries especially member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. This came in a statement the MPs released at the end of their weekly session on Wednesday. Bahrain has accused Tehran and Hezbollah which are close allies of trying to destabilize the country by supporting terrorist activities on its territory under the sectarian Iranian political system called Welayat al Faqih. The Majority of Bahrains population is Shia but power is concentrated in the hands of the Sunni minority strongly backed by Saudi Arabia. Iran and Hezbollah are accused of waging terror attacks against local security forces to serve their foreign agenda, destabilize Bahrain and endanger security in the country. The statement signals that Bahrain could be implementing reforms to take a stronger position in fighting terrorism within its territory and calls are already being made for the death penalty to be enforced on those found guilty of terrorism. The latest terrorist attack in Bahrain dates back to Saturday. Among the lawmakers calling for a tougher punishment is Jamal Buhassan who lamented that about 19 policemen have been killed in attacks since 2011 and the accused are languishing in jails despite being sentenced to death. He criticized authorities for not referring the matter to the King for ratification because enforcing Qisas (death penalty) on terrorists is a public demand. The last time the death penalty was enforced is more than a decade ago. Buhassan said Bahrain should not be concerned about the views of foreign human rights watchdogs because terrorist acts are destroying our country and we should take necessary measures to eradicate it. He said failing to enforce the death penalty will encourage terrorists to continue their barbarous acts. The King of Morocco has called on Islamic scholars from different jurisprudence schools to engage in an in-depth dialogue to correct misrepresentations, convey the true image of Islam and uphold the tolerant values of this religion. In a speech he delivered Wednesday during the first Morocco-GCC summit held in Riyadh, King Mohammed VI said when dealing with the current juncture in the Arab world and the scourge of terrorism that The Arab world is going through a difficult period. What some States are experiencing is not exceptional; it is all part of well-planned schemes that target us all. Terrorism does more than just tarnish the reputation of Islam and Muslims; it is also being used by some people as a pretext to divide our States and foment strife in them, he said stressing the need for the different schools of Islamic jurisprudence to engage in a frank, in-depth dialogue to correct misrepresentations, convey the true image of Islam and uphold, once again, the tolerant values of our faith. Morocco has been exerting for years relentless efforts to promote moderate Islam as a means to counter extremism and fanaticism and to foster security and stability at home and beyond. For the North African country, the best other war against terrorism is the war of ideas to explain to the would-be jihadists the true message of Islam and the best means to counter fanatical propaganda is to disseminate an Islam of the middle path doctrine, a vision of religion based on tolerance, intercultural dialogue and respect of other faiths. Multiple myeloma (MM) is a hematological cancer that frequently acquires resistance to chemotherapeutic drugs. Additionally, many patients experience disease relapse, but these patients are difficult to treat as the cancer is often resistant to the previous treatment regimen. Combination therapies are frequently successful at treating relapsed, treatment-resistant MM, leading researchers to seek out new therapeutic targets. In this issue of JCI Insight, Yoichi Imai and colleagues at Tokyo Women's Medical University in Tokyo, Japan, demonstrate that MM cells express high levels of the protein phosphatase PPP3CA, a subunit of the signaling protein calcineurin, which can be targeted by the drug FK506. Using a MM mouse model, Imai and colleagues showed that calcineurin is required for multiple myeloma cell growth and that inhibition of calcineurin with FK506 promoted MM cell death. Moreover, treatment of MM mice with panobinostat, which is currently FDA-approved for treatment of MM, and FK506 reduced MM growth in mice. These findings indicate that PPP3CA and calcineurin may be suitable therapeutic targets for the treatment of MM. Explore further Prevalence of folate deficiency 14.1 percent in multiple myeloma More information: Yoichi Imai et al, Histone deacetylase inhibitor panobinostat induces calcineurin degradation in multiple myeloma, JCI Insight (2016). Yoichi Imai et al, Histone deacetylase inhibitor panobinostat induces calcineurin degradation in multiple myeloma,(2016). DOI: 10.1172/jci.insight.85061 Finally, the warm weather has arrived. And with it, no doubt, a return to the outdoors for neighbourhood kids who can't wait to get out there and burn some energy. Or maybe not. Studies show that over 90% of Canadian youth are not getting the requisite one hour of heart-pumping physical activity per day a statistic that's both alarming and unacceptable to Brian Timmons, associate professor of pediatrics. So, with the help of an $80,000 John R. Evans Leaders Fund award from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), Timmons will be gathering his owns statistics by tracking the physical activity of hundreds of local children in an effort to determine the effects of physical activity in the early years on long-term health. The funds will allow Timmons and his team to purchase as many as 500 accelerometers devices designed to more accurately record physical activity movements as well as the software to analyze the results. "Think Fitbit on steroids," says Timmons, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Child Health & Exercise Medicine, when describing the accelerometer. While it's the "gold standard" for physical activity measurement, Timmons says there are still big gaps in how best to analyze the copious amounts of data derived from the devices gaps he intends to fill through his research. Timmons will monitor the activity of local children both those who are living with a pre-existing, chronic medical condition and those who are otherwise healthy to determine how much physical activity children really need, how much is safe for those with underlying conditions, and the correlation between being active as a kid and being healthy as an adult. "What's ideal about the accelerometer is that it's non-invasive and extremely accurate," says Timmons of the device that's worn around a child's waste, comparing it to traditional ways of measuring activity which relied on self-reporting and questionnaires, neither of which is ideal for accuracy. "Our research program will be one of only a few in the world able to study the physical activity-to-health connection in children," he says, noting the results will give a more precise understanding of physical activity behaviours and what they mean for health. The findings will enable researchers to create safe and effective physical activity strategies for health promotion and clinical rehabilitation. "We're so excited about our outcomes informing policies and shaping physical activity guidelines for Canadian children, says Timmons. "I'm a firm believer that exercise is the best medicine." Explore further Activity monitoring devices provide reliable records of activity The Arkansas Mississippi Delta, where this photo was taken, is a region characterized by strained race relations, a stagnant economy, high unemployment, low incomes and high emigration. Credit: Ann Cheney, UC Riverside. Cocaine use has increased substantially among African Americans in some of the most underserved areas of the United States. Interventions designed to increase connection to and support from non-drug using family and friends, with access to employment, the faith community, and education, are the best ways to reduce substance use among African Americans and other minorities in low-income, resource-poor communities, concludes a study led by a medical anthropologist at the University of California, Riverside. The study, which analyzed substance-use life history interviews carried out from 2010 to 2012, focused on urban and rural locations within the Arkansas Mississippi Delta - a region characterized by strained race relations, a stagnant economy, high unemployment, low incomes and high emigration, and where the population is predominantly African Americans living in poverty. "African Americans within such contexts often face multiple obstacles to accessing formal drug treatment services, including access to care and lack of culturally appropriate treatment programs," said lead researcher Ann Cheney, an assistant professor in the department of social medicine and population health in the Center for Healthy Communities in the UC Riverside School of Medicine. "Despite these obstacles, many initiate and maintain recovery without accessing formal treatment. They do so by leveraging resources or what we refer to as 'recovery capital' - employment, education, faith community - by strategically connecting to and obtaining support from non-drug using family and friends." The study, published this week in the journal Substance Use and Misuse, illustrates that social networks and the resources embedded within them are critical to reduce substance use among minorities in resource-poor communities. "Recovery without treatment, also called natural recovery, is common and perhaps even more prevalent among ethnic and racial minorities than among Whites," Cheney explained. "Cocaine use varies along racial lines and social class and is increasingly a problem among African Americans in rural Arkansas." Fifty-one African American current cocaine users participated in the study. They were between the ages of 18 and 61, represented by men and women about equally, and reported no formal drug use treatment/counseling in the past 30 days. Each provided information that included his/her perception of substance abuse in the community, cocaine use history, attempts to cut down or stop cocaine use, and treatment experiences. Cheney and her colleagues found that nearly three-quarters of the participants (72 percent) reported at least one attempt in their lifetimes to reduce or quit cocaine use, motivated by: Social role expectations (desires to be better parents or caregivers and responsible persons, prevent harming their children, become more present in their children's lives, prevent hurting loved ones). Fatigue (participants were tired of the drug lifestyle and its effects on their physical and mental health). Criminal justice involvement (incarceration forced participants to quit cocaine use). Access to recovery capital (most participants accessed substance use treatment programs or self-help groups at some point in their lives). Abstinence-supporting networks (these helped participants reduce cocaine use and/or achieve temporary recovery outside of rehab). Pro-social lives and activities (participation in church, leisure-time activities were critical to reducing cocaine use). Religion and spirituality (faith in the divine helped participants reduce or quit cocaine use). "Our analysis showed that recovery without treatment largely coincided with lifestyle changes and shifting social relationships," Cheney said. "African Americans, especially those in rural areas, often face personal, cultural, and structural barriers to accessing formal treatment programs. This makes reducing or quitting cocaine use without formal treatment a more feasible alternative and encourages reliance on existing networks of support. Interventions that are culturally appropriate and feasible within their resource-poor communities are needed. While accessing resources in faith communities is normative among African Americans in the South, other minority or underserved populations may hold different values and find valued resources within other social spaces." According to Cheney, ideally, the best approach would be for interventions to increase users' access to resources that would allow them to live more conventional lifestyles (e.g., employment, stable housing) and meaningful lives (e.g., non-drug using friends, faith or supportive communities). "This approach is ideal in resource-poor communities - as long as interventions are tailored to local contexts and cultures," she said. Cheney was joined in the research by Brenda M. Booth and Geoffrey M. Curran at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock; and Tyrone F. Borders at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. The research was supported by grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health. Cheney is continuing her focus on the role of social networks in substance use outcomes and recovery among minority populations. Next, she will systematically examine the role of social networks in substance use risk among Latinos in southern California's Inland Empire. Explore further White delinquent youth more likely to abuse hard drugs than blacks More information: Ann M. Cheney et al. The Role of Social Capital in African Americans' Attempts to Reduce and Quit Cocaine Use, Substance Use & Misuse (2016). Ann M. Cheney et al. The Role of Social Capital in African Americans' Attempts to Reduce and Quit Cocaine Use,(2016). DOI: 10.3109/10826084.2016.1155606 Machine learning has come of age in public health reporting according to researchers from the Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. They have found that existing algorithms and open source machine learning tools were as good as, or better than, human reviewers in detecting cancer cases using data from free-text pathology reports. The computerized approach was also faster and less resource intensive in comparison to human counterparts. Every state in the United States requires cancer cases to be reported to statewide cancer registries for disease tracking, identification of at-risk populations, and recognition of unusual trends or clusters. Typically, however, busy health care providers submit cancer reports to equally busy public health departments months into the course of a patient's treatment rather than at the time of initial diagnosis. This information can be difficult for health officials to interpret, which can further delay health department action, when action is needed. The Regenstrief Institute and IU researchers have demonstrated that machine learning can greatly facilitate the process, by automatically and quickly extracting crucial meaning from plaintext, also known as free-text, pathology reports, and using them for decision-making. "Towards Better Public Health Reporting Using Existing Off the Shelf Approaches: A Comparison of Alternative Cancer Detection Approaches Using Plaintext Medical Data and Non-dictionary Based Feature Selection" is published in the April 2016 issue of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics. "We think that its no longer necessary for humans to spend time reviewing text reports to determine if cancer is present or not," said study senior author Shaun Grannis, M.D., M.S., interim director of the Regenstrief Center of Biomedical Informatics. "We have come to the point in time that technology can handle this. A human's time is better spent helping other humans by providing them with better clinical care." "A lot of the work that we will be doing in informatics in the next few years will be focused on how we can benefit from machine learning and artificial intelligence. Everythingphysician practices, health care systems, health information exchanges, insurers, as well as public health departmentsare awash in oceans of data. How can we hope to make sense of this deluge of data? Humans can't do itbut computers can." Dr. Grannis, a Regenstrief Institute investigator and an associate professor of family medicine at the IU School of Medicine, is the architect of the Regenstrief syndromic surveillance detector for communicable diseases and led the technical implementation of Indiana's Public Health Emergency Surveillance System - one of the nation's largest. Studies over the past decade have shown that this system detects outbreaks of communicable diseases seven to nine days earlier and finds four times as many cases as human reporting while providing more complete data. "What's also interesting is that our efforts show significant potential for use in underserved nations, where a majority of clinical data is collected in the form of unstructured free text," said study first author Suranga N. Kasthurirathne, a doctoral student at School of Informatics and Computing at IUPUI. "Also, in addition to cancer detection, our approach can be adopted for a wide range of other conditions as well." The researchers sampled 7,000 free-text pathology reports from over 30 hospitals that participate in the Indiana Health Information Exchange and used open source tools, classification algorithms, and varying feature selection approaches to predict if a report was positive or negative for cancer. The results indicated that a fully automated review yielded results similar or better than those of trained human reviewers, saving both time and money. "Machine learning can now support ideas and concepts that we have been aware of for decades, such as a basic understanding of medical terms," said Dr. Grannis. "We found that artificial intelligence was as least as accurate as humans in identifying cancer cases from free-text clinical data. For example the computer 'learned' that the word 'sheet' or 'sheets' signified cancer as 'sheet' or 'sheets of cells' are used in pathology reports to indicate malignancy. "This is not an advance in ideas, it's a major infrastructure advancewe have the technology, we have the data, we have the software from which we saw accurate, rapid review of vast amounts of data without human oversight or supervision." Explore further Regenstrief project assembles health information from different electronic medical records Arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy (ACM) is an inherited heart disease that results from mutations in genes that encode components of the cardiac desmosome, which forms the junction between cardiac muscle and the epithelium. Patients with ACM have an increased risk of sudden death due to the breakdown of the muscle wall of the heart with age. A previous chemical screen in a zebrafish ACM model identified a glycogen synthase kinase 3 (GSK3) inhibitor (SB2) that reversed disease. In this issue of JCI Insight, investigators led by Jeffrey Saffitz of Harvard Medical School and Daniel Judge of John's Hopkins School of Medicine examined the effects of the GSK3 inhibitor SB2 in two murine models of ACM. SB2 improved cardiac function, reduced fibrosis and inflammation, and improved survival in both ACM models. In cardiac cells from healthy mice, GSK3 was in the cytosol. However, GSK3 localized to intercellular junctions in mice with ACM. The same GSK3 distribution patterns were also present in cardiac cells from healthy individual and patients with ACM. The results of this study provide further evidence that GSK3 inhibition has potential as a therapeutic strategy for treating ACM. Explore further Zebrafish model helps identify compound that reverses a lethal form of cardiomyopathy More information: Stephen P. Chelko et al, Central role for GSK3 in the pathogenesis of arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy, JCI Insight (2016). Stephen P. Chelko et al, Central role for GSK3 in the pathogenesis of arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy,(2016). DOI: 10.1172/jci.insight.85923 Credit: Robert Kraft/public domain Researchers from the University of Liverpool and Florida State University College of Medicine have conducted a study on the effect the misperception of a child's weight by their parents can have on a child's actual weight. Parents of children who are overweight often fail to accurately identify their child's weight status. Although these misperceptions are presumed to be a major public health concern, little research has examined whether parental perceptions of child weight status are protective against weight gain during childhood. Dr Eric Robinson from the University of Liverpool's Institute of Psychology, Health and Society and Assistant Professor Angelina Sutin from Florida State University College of Medicine examined whether parental perceptions of a child's weight were associated with weight gain across childhood. The results of their study, entitled 'Parental Perception of Weight Status and Weight Gain across Childhood', have been published today (21 April 2016) in the Journal of Pediatrics. Parental perceptions Data from the 'Longitudinal Study of Australian Children' was used to assess parental perceptions of child weight status and to examine changes in researcher measured child BMI-Z (Body Mass Index) scores across childhood, from 4 to 13 years old. BMI-Z scores are measures of relative weight adjusted for child age and sex. Given a child's age, sex, BMI, and an appropriate reference standard, a BMI z-score (or its equivalent BMI-for-age percentile) can be determined. 3,557 Australian children and their parents participated in this study. Future weight gain Children whose parents perceived their weight as being 'overweight', as opposed to 'about the right weight', gained more weight (increase in BMI-Z score) from baseline to follow up in all analyses. This finding did not depend on the actual weight of the child; the association between perceiving one's child as being overweight and future weight gain was similar among children whose parents accurately and inaccurately believed their child was overweight. Dr Eric Robinson, said: "Contrary to popular belief, parental identification of child overweight is not protective against further weight gain. Rather, it is associated with more weight gain across childhood. "Further research is needed to understand how parental perceptions of child weight may counter-intuitively contribute to obesity." Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other brain imaging technologies allow for the study of differences in brain activity in people diagnosed with schizophrenia. The image shows two levels of the brain, with areas that were more active in healthy controls than in schizophrenia patients shown in orange, during an fMRI study of working memory. Credit: Kim J, Matthews NL, Park S./PLoS One. By turning skin cells into brain neurons, researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have identified that certain tiny molecules aiding in gene expression, known as microRNAs (miRNAs), are under-expressed in the brains of the 14 schizophrenia patients they studied. Their findings, published online today in the journal Cell Reports, show that one of these molecules, a miRNA known as miR-9, is a risk factor that controls the activity of hundreds of genes. The researchers, led by Kristen Brennand, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Gang Fang, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine, found that miR-9 was significantly under-expressed in cells from four schizophrenic patients, compared to six control participants. The findings were replicated in a larger sample, from the National Institutes of Health, of ten childhood-onset schizophrenic patients and ten controls. "Schizophrenia is a very complex disorder that is believed to be strongly genetically influencedthere are probably more than 1,000 genes contributing to its development, some or many of which will affect individual patients," says Kristen Brennand, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and one of the study's lead authors. "The better we are able to fill in the pieces to this very difficult puzzle, the more we can think about treatment, and, better yet, prevention." The genes controlled by miR-9 appear to play a role in the fetal development of neurons, and in where these neurons eventually settle in the brain. If these genes are not as active as they should be, the brain will likely be miswired, the authors suggest. miR-9 is only the second such powerful miRNA linked to the devastating psychiatric disorder, but researchers believe others may be involved. Dr. Brennand also says that based on their findings, as well as those of other researchers in the field, many genes recently found to be linked to schizophrenia tend to be genes that are expressed during fetal developmenteven though schizophrenia usually becomes symptomatic in adulthood. "The idea that children are born with schizophrenia should take the pressure off of parents," she says. "This is a heritable disease that runs in families, and it's no one's fault that someone was born with this genetic risk." Because the slow progress in decoding schizophrenia comes from the lack of live brain tissue to study, the research team combined expertise in stem cell biology, neurobiology, genomics, and systems biology to pioneer a new approach. They obtained skin samples from patients, reprogrammed them into induced pluripotent stem cells, and then differentiated these cells into precise subtypes of human neurons. "This has allowed us to begin to ask how and why neurons derived from schizophrenia patients differ from those derived from people who are unaffected by the disorder," Dr. Brennand says. "The goal of our research is to not just understand the genetic mechanisms contributing to schizophrenia, but ultimately to develop a screening platform that we can use to identify new therapeutics for the treatment of this debilitating disorder." The team faced some challenges at the beginning of the project. "miR-9 was not the only miRNA that is differentially expressed in cells from schizophrenia patients compared to control participants," said Gang Fang PhD, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and the other lead author of the study. "In fact, tens of miRNAs reached statistical significance and we wanted to identify a smaller number of key players. We took a systems biology approach, where we integrated miRNA expression, gene expression, global gene regulatory networks, and proteomic data". "This approach found evidence suggesting miR-9 has the most significant change of regulatory activity in addition to the expression change of itself," added Dr. Fang. "We hope this general approach will also help the discovery of additional genetic regulators of schizophrenia and other diseases." D. Brennand and Dr. Fang highlight that their team's findings validate results of an earlier study published March 9 in JAMA Psychiatry, in which a genetic screen, taken from the blood of 35,000 schizophrenia patients, found either low expression or mutations in the hundreds of genes that miR-9 controls. Explore further Computer modeling provides insight into cellular-level effects of schizophrenia risk genes This graphic relates some of the science behind a new technique that measures subtle oscillations in a person's posture while they stand on a "force platform." The approach might be used to diagnose neuromuscular disorders such as multiple sclerosis or impairment from concussions. Credit: James R. Chagdes A new technique might be used to diagnose neuromuscular disorders such as multiple sclerosis or impairment from concussions by detecting and measuring subtle oscillations in a person's standing posture. The approach detects and measures "limit cycle oscillations," or the tendency of a system to become unstable despite corrective efforts. In human standing posture, these LCOs are manifested by a person swaying because of excessive time-delay in neuromuscular response, which indicates impairment, said Arvind Raman, Robert V. Adams Professor of Mechanical Engineering and by courtesy a professor of materials engineering. "The clinical application is especially promising as the assessment takes less than five minutes, requires standard balance equipment and does not require a medical doctor to perform," he said. The Purdue researchers collaborated with Michael Cinelli, an associate professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, to study multiple sclerosis patients and athletes who had recently suffered a concussion. Research subjects were monitored as they stood on a "force platform" that records a shifting center of pressure. "The multiple sclerosis patients had mild symptoms, and yet we were able to measure a significant difference compared to healthy controls," said James R. Chagdes, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at Miami University and lead author of a paper about the research published online on March 24 in the Journal of Biomechanics. The technique, which might be used to diagnose and assess the severity of concussions, makes it possible to separate the LCOs from a person's natural postural sway. "Even if you are trying to stand still there is some fluctuation, a random component of postural sway that all people have," said Shirley Rietdyk, a professor in the Department of Health and Kinesiology in Purdue's College of Health and Human Sciences. "We have figured out how to robustly detect the limit cycle oscillations even though we've got this natural random fluctuation also going on." Findings show the LCOs occur intermittently, and the researchers have developed a new data-analysis technique that detects these intermittent LCOs using signal-processing tools called "wavelets." "LCOs are not only key to understanding postural instability, but also may have important implications for the detection of neuromuscular deficiencies," said Chagdes, a former Purdue doctoral student. The paper was authored by Chagdes; Rietdyk; associate professor Jeffrey M. Haddad and professor Howard N. Zelaznik, both in Purdue's Department of Health and Kinesiology; Cinelli and students Luke T. Denomme and Kaley C. Powers in the Department of Kinesiology & Physical Education at Wilfrid Laurier; and Raman. Findings showed 67 percent of people with multiple sclerosis exhibited intermittent LCOs, compared to 8 percent for controls; 44 percent of concussed athletes exhibited the LCOs, compared to zero percent for controls. Of the concussed athletes, one still exhibited LCOs after returning to play, suggesting he still had impairment. "The absence of LCOs in older adults affirms that dynamic instability in quiet stance arises specifically due to chronic or acute neurological deficit and not simply due to aging," Haddad said. The LCO measurement can be used not only for detecting neuromuscular impairment but also might facilitate diagnosis and treatment of specific disorders and used to assess the effectiveness of treatment. In future research, a new robotic platform will be used in attempts to increase the sensitivity of the method and determine the extent of the disease or condition causing the LCOs. The technique could become a prognostic tool, providing information about how far along a disease or condition is. Explore further Building a better concussion test More information: James R. Chagdes et al. Limit cycle oscillations in standing human posture, Journal of Biomechanics (2016). Journal information: Journal of Biomechanics James R. Chagdes et al. Limit cycle oscillations in standing human posture,(2016). DOI: 10.1016/j.jbiomech.2016.03.005 Georgia seeks to attract Irish tourists Georgia is taking actions to attract more Irish tourists by showcasing all the country has to offer - rich history and traditions, a unique culture and vast tourism opportunities.Georgias embassy in Dublin grasped a chance to present the country and engage with Irish travel at all levels owners, managers and frontline travel professionals - at the Irish Travel Industry Trade Show, a special tourism exhibition held in Dublin, capital of Ireland.Georgian officials show the countrys tourist sights and infrastructure with specially produced brochures and magazines on April 7, 2016.Irelands leading Travel Industry publication Travelbiz has already published a story about Georgia after the Trade Show.Travelbiz wrote that there were many similarities between Ireland and Georgia as they were both about the same size in terms of population and land mass. Also both countries had struggled for their freedom and independence from their stronger neighbours.Another association with Ireland is that for the past two years some famous Georgian landmarks have been floodlit in green on St Patricks Day, wrote Travelbiz.More than 100 international companies took part in the exhibition in Dublin, including some of the worlds leading airline and cruise companies, tour operators, hotels and leisure complexes.Promoting Georgias tourism potential to Ireland and attracting more Irish tourists is one of our priorities. We are actively involved in different exhibitions and events held in Ireland. Furthermore, on April 5 we hosted a presentation Welcome to Georgia at our Embassy which aimed to provide proper information about Georgia to Irish tourist companies, said Georgias charge d'affaires to Ireland Giorgi Zurabashvili.The National Tourism Administration reported Georgia hosted 272 Irish citizens in the first quarter of 2016, up slightly from the 221 people who came in the same period a year ago. Signs of Ivanishvilis influence By Messenger Staff There is ineffective pluralism in Georgia, the project director of the Freedom House annual report 'Countries in Transition', Nate Shenken, told the Georgian Bureau of Voice of America .In his interview, Nate Shenken talked about the Freedom House annual report for 2016.He believes that the main threat to the Georgian elections is severe polarization. According to him, the forces of the Georgian political system are trying to demonize each other, as a result of which, cooperation or constructive criticism becomes impossible."As we have seen in the region and other European countries, it could contribute to the strengthening of non-liberal parties that do not respect democratic principles and question the values of democracy, tolerance and acceptance of different view.I am not saying that such forces will be the main players, but they can gain more support and influence. We will closely follow this process," said Nate Shenken.He thinks that the main problem facing Georgian democracy is the politicization of the judiciary.When asked about Ivanishvilis informal ruling mentioned in the report, the project director said:It is difficult to exactly measure the influence of the billionaire standing behind the scenes on the governments decisions, but we are observing developments and see clear signs of his influence. Ivanishvili definitely has influence on the system, he said. The recent survey by the National Democratic Institute also revealed that many in Georgia believe billionaire Ivanishvili has an influence on political processes in Georgia.It was Ivansihvilis high ratings that ended the United National Movement party's nine-year rule in October 2012.The political parties he gathered for the parliamentary race initially were thought to have no chance against Saakashvilis United National Movement (UNM) party.Ivanishvili, who was initially only known for his philanthropic activities, revealed his interest in Georgian politics prior to the 2012 parliamentary elections and then kept his bizarre promise of leaving the Prime Ministers post one year after winning the elections.He stated then he wanted to move to the civil sector to empower the field and aid the government from the sidelines.However, as it appears he still influences government actions but not from the civil sector.Running the state from backstage will not bring any positive results to any true democracy. The News in Brief Ex-Chief of Military Police Charged with Ordering Murder of Renegade Georgian General in Moscow The Georgian authorities confirmed on Tuesday that the former chief of the military police, Megis Kardava, was charged with ordering the assassination of a former Georgian army general, Roman Dumbadze, who was shot dead in Moscow in May 2012, less than four years after he was released in a swap from a Georgian prison, where he was serving a lengthy jail term for treason. The Georgian State Security Service said that Kardava, who served as chief of the Georgian military police at the time when Dumbadze was killed, is accused of ordering the murder through a middleman. Kardava is wanted by the Georgian authorities on multiple criminal charges; in a cases related to the torture of detainees, Kardava was found guilty and sentenced by the court in absentia in 2014 to nine years in prison. Dumbadze was the commander of the Batumi-based military unit of the Georgian armed forces up until mid-April, 2004, when he refused to obey orders from the central government and pledged loyalty to the then-defiant leader of the Adjaran Autonomous Republic, Aslan Abashidze. Dumbadze was arrested after Abashidze was ousted in May, 2004; he was found guilty on several charges including treason - and sentenced to 17 years in prison. A week after the August 2008 war, when Russian troops were still occupying parts of Georgia beyond the breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Russian forces detained about two dozen Georgian servicemen in the port town of Poti. Some of them were released few days later, but 12 of them were freed on August 28, 2008 in a swap; in exchange the Georgian side released Dumbadze and handed him over to Russian forces. Dumbadze then lived in Moscow, where, according to the Russian media reports, he was granted Russian citizenship in 2010. In 2014, the court in Moscow sentenced four natives of Georgia to jail terms after they were convicted in connection to the murder of Dumbadze. The Russian media was reporting at the time that according to the verdict, the contract killing of Dumbadze was arranged through a middleman who was from Georgia. The Georgian State Security Service said on April 12 that the middleman, who was not identified, was arrested and convicted in Georgia. It also said that the case against Kardava has been classified as secret and the details will not be made public. The Georgian State Security Service made the announcement about filing criminal charges against Kardava in connection to Dumbadzes murder after it was first reported by Kardavas defense lawyer, Malkhaz Velijanashvili, who accused Georgian law enforcement agencies of acting in Russias interests. Describing the charges against his client as false, Velijanashvili also said that the Georgian authorities wanted to hide from the public that they pressed criminal charges against Kardava in connection to this case. Megis Kardava is accused of ordering and organizing murder of Roman Dumbadze Prosecutors say that the motive of the murder was that Dumbadze was a traitor. The case [against Kardava] is mostly built on information and evidence obtained from the Russian side. So it is easy to conclude that the prosecutors office is acting upon Russias interests and not Georgias interests, which is extremely alarming, he said. (Civil.ge) Saakashvili blames sex tape scandal on Bidzina Ivanishvili In a TV interview Tuesday, Mikheil Saakashvili blamed former PM Bidzina Ivanishvili of a series of sex tapes posted online with threats against politicians. A fourth video was sent to a Georgian media outlet the same day as the former Georgian president spoke to Rustavi 2s program Archevani. As before, the video showed a politician engaging in intimate acts and seems to stem from an archive of compromising material amassed by the intelligence service during Saakashvilis presidency. In the Rustavi 2 interview, the former president joked about the video threats, calling it pornocracy, and blaming it on former Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili. Have you ever heard of anything like that when I was in power? Have anyone thought that their private life videos would be shown to the world? Have you ever heard of such a conversation during my so-called ruinous nine year rule? When I was in power the topic was opening a new university, new roads, new facilities, employing people. Now the topics are whether a new scandalous video has been posted. This is not how we should live,, Saakashvili told the Georgian TV channel which is known for its sympathetic leanings toward him. When Saakashvilis United National Movement party lost power in 2012, the new government tried to destroy the dirty archive, but a deputy head of intelligence told parliament that the sex tape scandal indicates that someone managed to smuggle the material out of the country during the three weeks transition period between Saakashvilis National Movement government and Georgian Dream. Levan Izoria said data they have been given by Youtube, Google and Facebook indicated that the sex tapes were uploaded from Ukraine, Lithuania and Sweden. The Prosecutor Generals Office later confirmed that the videos were not uploaded from Georgia. The ex-president also criticized the Georgian Dream government for introducing universal health insurance. We left behind a prepared healthcare system and they introduced universal healthcare, for which they spent billions. Finally the result is that the country went into a deadlock and is ruled by a person who established pornocracy in Georgia, Saakashvili said. The former president claimed that the government has spent money which it inherited from his government instead of feeding people and building a future for the next generation. He said during the election campaign in 2012 that his party asked people one question, whether they lived better then than they did in 2003. They unanimously said yes. Now Mikheil Saakashvili says that people have to think of 2012 and ask themselves whether they live better than they did prior to the last elections. I believe the answer is clear and they have to vote accordingly, he said. (DF watch) @PatriciaMazzei For three days, the center of the Republican political universe will be in Hollywood, Florida, where the national GOP began a three-day meeting Wednesday ahead of the Julys presidential nominating convention. To voters, it might have looked like the campaign was elsewhere. Donald Trump held a big rally in Indiana, celebrating his rout in Tuesdays New York primary. Ted Cruz took a sweet trip to a chocolate factory in Hershey, Pennsylvania. But the behind-the-scenes action took place inside Hollywoods beachside Diplomat Resort & Spa, where longtime activists who form the Republican National Committee kicked off their spring meeting. Usually, the meeting attracts the attention only of political junkies interested in the inner workings of the party. But this is no usual year. And so the RNC gathering drew not only party stalwarts but also two presidential candidates John Kasich and Cruz, who flew down from Pennsylvania and Trumps campaign brass. Cruz and Kasich met privately with party members Wednesday afternoon; Trumps team, including former opponent Ben Carson, is scheduled to sit down with members Thursday. Though Trump further cemented his front-runner status with Tuesdays New York win, the celebrity businessman has yet to amass a majority of convention delegates to seal the nomination. Cruz and Kasich each tried to make the case that theyd be a better choice. More here. Photo credit: Wilfredo Lee, Associated Press @PatriciaMazzei Florida Gov. Rick Scott got a question in Hollywood on Thursday about Wednesday's momentous ruling against Florida Power & Light over its Miami power lines project. "I haven't seen it," the governor said. An appeals court found Scott and the Florida Cabinet failed to consider the city of Miami's development regulations in backing FPL's plan. U.S. Rep. Gwen Graham, D-Tallahassee, announced in a press release and video this morning that she might run for Florida governor in 2018. "I'm excited to tell you first I am seriously considering running for governor in 2018," she said. Graham, who said she won't seek re-election to her Congressional seat, would have faced a tough re-election after redistricting made her northern Florida district less favorable for Democrats. Republican Gov. Rick Scott is term limited so he can't run for re-election. Graham won her seat in Congress in 2014. She has name recognition beyond northern Florida because she is the daughter of former governor and U.S. Senator Bob Graham. Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn also seems to be feeling out a Democratic race. Other potential names mentioned include Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine and State Sen. Jeremy Ring who represents western Broward. On the Republican side, it has been speculated that Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam will run -- his political action committee raised more than $4 million in one year. There has also been considerable chatter that U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio will run even though he denied that a couple days after he lost the Florida presidential primary. Graham's challenge in a statewide Democratic primary will be explaining some right-leaning votes she took in her conservative district including in favor of the Keystone pipeline. Since her district was reconfigured by a court order, Graham has been rumored to be preparing to drop out of Congress and launch a campaign for governor in 2018. When U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown announced she would stay in the seat, Graham's options narrowed. This is considered more than a trial balloon but a warning shot to funders and potential foes. From her press release: The politicians, lobbyists and courts in Tallahassee have been working to redraw and divide the North Florida district I represent -- theyve turned what was an example of a fair district, into two partisan districts. This is a perfect example of how dysfunctional our state government has become, and its caused me to rethink how I can best serve the people of North Florida and our state. Im excited to tell you, first, Im seriously considering running for governor in 2018. Public servants must focus on the job theyre elected to do, so I will spend the remainder of my term fully representing you in Congress, but I will not seek re-election while considering this next step of service. Working together, I know we can bring common sense back to Tallahassee and make our state work for the people, again. Thank you for all the support youve given me in the past. I will continue looking to you for advice, support and inspiration as we build a stronger future for Florida. Photo credit Associated Press State Sen. Jeremy Ring of Margate confirmed Thursday that he is calling potential funders and conducting his own exploratory campaign for a possible run for the Democratic nomination for governor in 2018. "No door is closed for me. I am considering it, yes, and am in an exploratory phase. I can't imagine having a decision in 2016." Ring, whose is retiring from the state Senate because of term limits this year, said he saw Gwen Graham's video announcing her interest in running today and considered it "extraordinarily misleading." "If you were to do a 'pants on fire' thing, it would be an inferno,'' he said, referring to PolitiFact Florida's accuracy rating. "The redistricting was done by the courts and it's not a conservative court. To blame the legislature, was someone disingenuous when you think all the court battles out there. The court pretty much did the Legislature's job but in the video, she blames the Legislature." Ring said he interpreted Graham's video as a sign she is running, not just considering. "Everyone has a right to run, and to try to handicap races two years out is complete insanity." Ring, who was on the team that built Yahoo, left the Internet start-up in 2001 and moved to Florida in 2001 to start a new company, Collegiate Images, with a friend. His net worth is $13.7 million. He said that he will spend the next several months doing "what I need to do to be credible. I won't run if I'm not credible. I'm certainly exploring it but it is going to come down to after the presidential election if I think I can win. "In 2016, it comes down to fundraising. I feel I have the best bio of anyone who could possibly run. I have the best message of anyone who could possibly run -- bring the innovation economy to Florida. Can I bring people to support me?" Miami Herald reporters Amy Sherman and Kristen Clark contributed to this report. @PatriciaMazzei Marco Rubio sounded sure Wednesday that he could support Donald Trump as the Republican presidential nominee. In an interview with South Florida radio station WIOD-AM (610), Rubio said he'd back whomever GOP delegates choose at their July convention. "I've always said I'm going to support the Republican nominee," Rubio told host Jimmy Cefalo. "And that's especially true now that it's apparent that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic candidate." Last time Rubio was asked the question, though, three days before he dropped his own presidential bid, the Florida senator wavered on whether he could stand behind Trump. "I don't know," he said the Saturday before Florida's March 15 primary, his voice breaking. "Getting harder every day." Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine says he is focused on his city position but hasn't ruled out running as a Democrat for governor in 2018. "I haven't ruled out becoming president of a cruise line either," he quipped in an interview with the Miami Herald today. U.S. Rep. Gwen Graham, D-Tallahassee, announced this morning that she won't seek re-election and is seriously considering running for governor. Republican Gov. Rick Scott is term limited. Levine said he hasn't talked to Graham or any of the other potential Democratic candidates including state Sen. Jeremy Ring of Margate or Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn. Levine, a millionaire businessman who was elected to his second two-year term in Miami Beach, has raised his political profile in recent months. He's flown to primary states and appeared on cable news shows to stump for Hilary Clinton, and he recently traveled to Cuba with a group of university students -- a trip that attracted controversy in South Florida after he said he was open to hosting a Cuban consulate in the Beach. And he is one of the more visible politicians speaking out about the need to tackle climate change -- a serious and expensive problem for his coastal community. Levine's mayoral term expires in 2017. He hasn't yet said whether he will run for re-election as mayor. "I haven't ruled that out," he said. -- With Joey Flechas @PatriciaMazzei Ted Cruz challenged rival Donald Trump to another televised debate on Wednesday, preferably ahead of next Tuesday's primaries in a handful of northeastern states. "It's been 41 days since we've had a Republican debate," Cruz told reporters at the Diplomat Resort & Spa, where the Republican National Committee was starting its three-day spring meeting. "Because Donald Trump is unwilling to stand on stage and debate, because he cannot defend his positions or his policies." The Texas senator blamed the news media for not pressing for more debates, even though debates have been a ratings boon for television. "I don't recall seeing on FOX News a debate countdown: 41 days and counting," he said. "What does it say for Hillary Clinton, the embodiment of imperial Washington arrogance, is more willing to submit to the voters and agree to debate than Donald Trump?" Trump said after winning the Florida primary March 15 that he was done with debates. And the third remaining GOP contender, John Kasich, told reporters in Hollywood later Wednesday that he prefers one-on-one interviews where audience members ask questions, town-hall style. "Town halls are the most important thing," he said. "Debates are all about sound bites." Montana State Parks is hosting a Forest Health Day at Milltown State Park at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, April 30, with an educational tour and volunteer opportunity to plant native western larch trees. The educational workday is held in conjunction with a series of events observing Earth Week 2016. Join Montana State Parks staff and local experts for a tour and a chance to plant some tree seedlings donated by the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes. Attendees are asked to meet at the parking lot of the Overlook Trailhead. All of the planting materials and supplies will be provided. Volunteers are requested to bring gloves and suitable footwear for varying forest terrain. For Judson Miller, education matters isn't just a phrase used by teachers in Missoula, he saw it in action and that's why he wanted to come back to Montana. On Thursday, Missoula County Public Schools Superintendent Mark Thane announced to staff that Miller would become the next principal of Hellgate High School. Miller is currently the principal of North Kitsap High School in Poulsbo, Washington. He was chosen from a field of five finalists. "This is a lifetime move in a great community," Miller said. The former English teacher has also served as a dean of students, assistant principal and principal for the previous five years. Thane touted Miller's recent experience with implementing professional learning communities among high school staff that helped improve the craft of teaching as well as trying to improve student performance. "We are excited to find an educational leader who understands and appreciates the vision and the ambitions of our district, who has deep ties to Montana and who brings the excellence of his career in Washington to the staff and students at Hellgate High School," Thane said. Miller, a Michigan native, received his bachelor's degree from Montana State University. He has family living in the state and said this is really a homecoming. "The opportunities here are boundless," Miller said. "What inspired me was the dynamic leadership within the district and the connection our schools have with the university." He called Missoula on "the forefront of innovation," at the high school level. Miller said he will relish the opportunity to interact with students and work to build trust and rapport with current staff who have a deep connection to the school. Miller will begin on July 1. *** Thane also announced Elise Guest has accepted the position of Executive Director of Teach and Learning. Guest is a graduate of Missoula County Public Schools and currently serves as the upper elementary principal of the Stamford American International School in Singapore. She's also served as the principal of Menlo Park Elementary and vice-principal of David Douglas High School in Portland, Oregon. Despite Missoula County Attorney Kirsten Pabst filing a motion to dismiss the judgment in the 2002 rape conviction of Cody Marble, he remains incarcerated, with Missoula District Court Judge Ed McLean having yet to sign the order that would release him. On Wednesday, Judge McLean said he had two reasons for not taking action on the motion. After the motion was filed, he reached out to former county attorney Fred Van Valkenburg asking if he wanted to file a brief with the court on the matter. Van Valkenburg told him he was considering it. I have advised the judge that I may want to make an appearance as amicus curiae (Friend of the Court), Van Valkenburg wrote in an email to the Missoulian on Wednesday. He said he is working to gather additional information about the motion, and that if he chooses to take some sort of action, it could be in the form of either a filed brief on the matter or a court hearing. McLean said he also wanted to know what was the position of Montana Attorney General Tim Fox on the motion, but said he had not contacted Foxs office on the matter or asked Pabst or any other attorneys to inquire on his position as of Wednesday. McLean said he is considering issuing an order releasing Marble from custody without taking action on the motion. Thats something Ill consider doing in the next few days, he said. Marble originally was sent to prison for raping a 13-year-old boy while they were in custody at the Missoula County jail in 2002. In August, the Montana Supreme Court had remanded the case back to Missoula County District Court, asking it to re-examine Judge Douglas Harkins decision to deny Marble a new trial. Pabst announced she filed the motion to dismiss the case Tuesday, and at the time she and Larry Mansch, legal director of the Montana Innocence Project which has represented Marble, believed he would be released from custody in Shelby later that day. During her announcement, Pabst said since Marbles conviction, his victim as well as multiple witnesses to the rape had recanted their statements, and detention officers who were interviewed said they believed he had been set up by other inmates. After weighty consideration, I have concluded that Marbles (conviction) lacks integrity and in the interests of doing justice, it must be dismissed," Pabst said Tuesday. Marble, who was originally sentenced to 20 years in prison with 15 suspended, is in custody at a Montana State Prison facility in Shelby after having the suspended portion of his sentence revoked for probation violations. By the end of the day Tuesday, retired Judge McLean, who was given oversight of the case after Judge Harkin recused himself, had yet to sign the motion and make it official. Mansch said Marble's father Jerry had received two calls on Tuesday, the first saying his son was about to be released, the second saying something had come up and the process was now in limbo. "It was an up-and-down day," Mansch said. "We are waiting and we are still hopeful." In August, the Montana Supreme Court also remanded the case of Robert Wilkes, convicted of shaking his 3-month-old baby to death in 2010, back to Missoula County District Court to review Judge McLeans decision denying to grant him a new trial. PABLO A rather routine meeting of the Montana Land Board on Wednesday morning made history nonetheless. For the first time ever, the boards commissioners Gov. Steve Bullock, Attorney General Tim Fox, Secretary of State Linda McCulloch, Superintendent of Public Instruction Denise Juneau and Commissioner of Securities and Insurance Monica Lindeen conducted their business on an Indian reservation. The Flathead Reservation became the first of Montanas seven reservations to host a Land Board meeting. Appropriately, Fox noted, the half a dozen timber sales the board approved that will benefit Montana schools, universities and public buildings are all located in the traditional lands of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. The board usually meets once a month in Room 303 of the State Capitol, and To meet in another house where sovereignty occurs is something well all remember, Bullock said. No sooner had the board adjourned at CSKT Headquarters on the Flathead Reservation, than approximately 80 employees of the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation most of them foresters in western Montana began two days of cultural heritage training in the same CSKT Tribal Council chambers. Welcome to our homeland, CSKT Chairman Vernon Finley told the overlapping crowd at the two events. This is historic. *** About 300 state employees receive cultural heritage training in Helena each year from Jason Smith, director of Indian Affairs for the state, but to have that training occur on a reservation, with all the local resources available, is huge in my world, Smith an enrolled member of the CSKT said. Just as important as the training itself, said DNRC forest management planner Jessica Brown, are the connections that will be made between DNRC employees and tribal officials. The department that oversees 5.2 million acres of state trust land, manages the states waters and forests, and permits oil and gas wells, always faces the possibility that its work will take it to culturally important sites to Native Americans both on and off reservations. When scoping notices about DNRC projects are sent out, Montanas Indian tribes are all included. But when DNRC employees and tribal officials know one another, it works better, Brown said. Its not just, Heres the obligatory phone call, she said. There are real relationships. When they call Kevin in the (CSKT) preservation department, theyll know each other now. *** Kevin is Kevin Askan, contract manager of the Tribal Historic Preservation Department. He will be leading a Thursday session with the foresters, as will Rosemary Caye, Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act coordinator and a member of the Kootenai Culture Committee, and Katie McDonald, staff member of the Tribal Historic Preservation Department. The DNRC folks also heard from Salish-Pend dOreille Culture Committee head Tony Incashola on Wednesday. Youre not here to be turned into cultural resource experts, Bullock told the state employees. Youve been gathered to learn, listen and better understand tribal historic resources. Juneau, who said she asked if DNRC was doing enough to communicate effectively with tribal communities, encouraged those at the training to Do everything you can that, if youre asked if the relationship between DNRC and tribes is strong, the answer is yes. I did get that question from Ms. Juneau, DNRC director John Tubbs said of the superintendent of public instruction, an enrolled member of the Mandan and Hidatsa Tribes who grew up in Browning. I did feel a little challenged. But building those relationships is important, Tubbs said. Every square inch of Montana is Native land, he said, and Lewis and Clarks arrival here in 1803 is not that long ago in the history of this landscape. *** The goal is to offer similar training down the line to DNRC employees who work near Montanas other six reservations, on those reservations, Tubbs said. Its not often youll get these five to address you at the start of a training session, Tubbs said of Bullock, Fox, Juneau, Lindeen and McCulloch. Fox said he brought 40 of his top managers at the Department of Justice to the Flathead Reservation for a similar day of training a couple of years ago. It was an eye-opener for a lot of people, the attorney general said. We learned a lot about the Allotment Act, and the impact decisions that are made have on Native peoples. His department has done things big and small to recognize the importance of Montanas Indian tribes, Fox said, and the training session was only one of them. For the first time, if you walk into the Department of Justice in Helena, youll not only see an American flag and a state flag, youll see the flags of all of Montanas tribal nations, because we represent everyone in Montana, Fox said. And we worked closely with DNRC to get the (CSKT) water compact passed, because it was the right thing to do for the right reasons. Smith said he appreciates agencies that have stepped up their focus on training employees in Native American culture and traditions. Its people like the governor and attorney general who set the direction, Smith said, but its you people on the ground who make it happen. A University of Montana student from Tajikistan who was arrested in the fall for sexually assaulting another UM student after a tour of the campus in August pleaded no contest and was given a one year deferral of sentence for a single count of misdemeanor sexual assault. Fazliddin Sharipov also must pay $460 in fines and fees as part of a plea agreement with the city attorneys office. In September 2015, Sharipov was arrested and charged with five misdemeanor counts of sexual assault. In a court affidavit, prosecutors alleged that the then 27-year-old UM student attacked a female student whom he had invited to his apartment. The woman told police she met Sharipov on Aug. 27 when she was giving international students, including Sharipov, a campus tour. Prosecutors say Sharipov asked the woman to be friends with him on Facebook after the tour, then invited her to his apartment at the UM-owned international student housing that evening. The affidavit said at a certain point the pair began to kiss, after which Sharipov began to fondle her breasts. The woman told investigators she had pulled her shirt back down and said no to Sharipov. After repeated verbal requests for him to stop, Sharipov complied, according to the affidavit. She dressed herself and left, reporting the assault to UM Police that were near the apartment. Sharipov later sent her a message telling her not to come to his apartment anymore, according to the affidavit. As part of a deal with the city attorneys office, Sharipov pleaded no contest to one of the five misdemeanor sexual assault charges, with the rest of them being dismissed. During a sentencing hearing on March 23, Missoula Municipal Court Judge Kathleen Jenks imposed a one year deferral of sentence on the remaining misdemeanor, and ordered Sharipov to pay $460 in fines, surcharges and fees. His attorney Mat Stevenson said Sharipovs passport, which he was ordered to surrender following his arrest, has been returned and he is not under any travel restrictions. He also says his client continues to maintain his innocence in the matter. The thing here, if you read between the lines, theres no way you get a sentence like this if their case was strong, he said. While Stevenson said he was at least 90 percent sure Sharipov would have been acquitted at a trial, accepting the plea deal was the smart move to save his client from the risk of potentially being convicted. I continue to maintain it would be embarrassing, extremely embarrassing for the accuser if it had gone to trial, Stevenson said. Stevenson said Sharipov is still enrolled at UM. HAMILTON A Victor man allegedly armed with an AR-15 rifle and .357 magnum caliber pistol when he was arrested last week has been charged with felony assault on a peace officer. John David Newman, 47, appeared earlier this week before Ravalli County Justice Jim Bailey on the felony charge and a misdemeanor count of assault. Newman was arrested April 16 after Ravalli County deputies were dispatched to a residence on Bear Creek Trail near Victor for a report of a disturbance. When they arrived on the scene, a homeowner told the officers that he had been allowing Newman to live with him and his wife at their residence. Earlier that day, Newman allegedly had taken his wifes vehicle and driven it to Victor despite the fact he didnt possess a valid drivers license. The homeowner said Newman returned to the home visually intoxicated. When the Newman attempted to take the vehicle a second time, the homeowner confronted him, which led to Newman growing angry and first pushing the homeowner with both hands to the chest and then punching him in the face with a closed fist, according to a court affidavit. When the deputy arrived, he noted there was blood around the nose of the homeowner. The man told the deputies he believed Newman had gone to a neighbors home. As the deputies were attempting to make contact with the neighbor, a sheriffs sergeant heard a commotion in an unattached garage and he observed Newman attempting to get in the backyard through a door. When the officer yelled, Newman became frantic and ran away from the officers into the backyard, the affidavit said. At that point, Newman was standing one side of the door and the sergeant on other. The affidavit said Newman said youre trying to hurt me. When the officer next saw Newman, he noticed that man was carrying an AR-15. The officer holstered his Taser and drew his handgun. The sergeant ordered Newman to drop his weapon three times before he finally complied. As the officer walked into the backyard, he noticed a revolver was on the ground next to the AR-15. When the officers seized the guns, they found that the AR-15 had an empty chamber, but a loaded magazine armed with 25 rounds. The revolver was loaded with six .357 magnum rounds. Newman was transported to the county detention center, where a preliminary breath test yielded a .20 blood alcohol content. In Montana, a person operating a vehicle is considered impaired with a .08 blood alcohol content. Bailey set bail at $50,000. In an April 17 Ravalli Republic story, Greg Gianforte, a Republican candidate for Montana governor, says he doesnt support the transfer of public lands to states because its not attainable at this time. *** At this time? Transferring our public lands to states should never be an option. Not at this time or at any time when doing so might be attainable. Special interests are actively hawking the idea of transferring management of public lands to the states because they know darn well its the first step toward selling them off. They claim, along with Greg Gianforte, that the same federal government which is trillions of dollars in debt will pay for the counties to manage public lands. Gov. Steve Bullock last year vetoed legislation requiring the state of Montana to study the feasibility of assuming the cost of managing our lands. Bullock knows its a dangerous first step. Montanas Jennifer Fielder, a state senator from Thompson Falls, is the new head of an organization based out of Utah that openly advocates eliminating your voice in how our public lands are managed. Gianforte, hunters and anglers take notice when people like Senator Fielder publicly state how refreshing it will be to have a governor like you. No wonder were skeptical when you answer our question with not at this time. *** Simple math According to the Missoulian, Montana taxpayers would be asked to foot an additional bill of $500 million every year if our state were to take on management of federal lands, wiping out our rainy day savings. Likewise, the county commissions that Gianforte want to assume management are underwater and cant adequately manage the roads, noxious weeds and other responsibilities they have now. Gianforte and company know full well states cant afford the burden of managing millions of acres of land that all Americans own. Their endgame is to sell it off so millionaires and billionaires like Greg Gianforte, the Koch Brothers and the Wilks Brothers can buy it up, close it off and lock the gate. Sportsmen worry that under the leadership of someone like Greg Gianforte, the state of Montana would be forced to sell our public lands to help pay the bills. Its simple math. It means fewer places to find elk and deer and cutthroat. It means fewer opportunities for hunting, fishing and businesses. It means more harm to the robust, multi-billion-dollar economy and tens of thousands of jobs created by access to our public lands. *** Local control Montanans already have an outsized level of control on our public lands. Local sawmills and local conservationists work together to find a balance that benefits jobs and the environment. Sportsmen, hikers, motorized users and mountain bikers work together to craft travel plans that benefit and respect all uses. Gianfortes call for local control ignores the mountain of work already underway to better manage public lands and it smacks of ignorance to the real issues being faced by those of us who live, work and play here. When he says transferring is not attainable at this time, what we hear is: I support this dangerous idea, but Im waiting until its an easier lift. That doesnt fly with Montanans are involved in helping manage our public lands, and it doesnt pass the smell test when it comes to ensuring better access to public lands, or better health of our forests, sagebrush and other wildlife habitats. Montanas outdoor heritage is not something that belongs to the people who can afford to buy access. Yellowstone grizzlies do not know whether they are on the endangered species list. Nor do grizzlies understand the political borders humans draw. The Yellowstone grizzly knows its habitat, that which we humans call Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. The bear does not care. This is important to remember as scientists and advocates debate whether to take the Yellowstone grizzly off the list of protected species under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act. As the experts argue, more people are expected to visit the Yellowstone region this year than ever, as our nation celebrates the 100th anniversary of Yellowstone National Park. The hotels and vacation rental homes are booked. The recreational vehicles, rental cars and airplanes are gassed up and ready. Millions of people, many of them hoping to get a glimpse of a Yellowstone grizzly, are headed our way. There are more than 700 Yellowstone grizzlies in our region, with the population certain to increase, as more cubs will be born soon. This spring and summer, it is a certainty that some of the millions of tourists and local folks will encounter a Yellowstone grizzly, whether it be a sow and her cubs or an older male searching for his next meal. Without the vigorous effort of those of us who call the Yellowstone region home, tragedy is very possible, even more likely with so many new people coming to Yellowstone grizzly habitat. As residents of the Yellowstone region, it is our responsibility to help educate our guests and new people we meet during the upcoming tourist season. Government agencies are not well-equipped, nor do they have adequate budgets, to be certain that millions of people understand the importance of protecting themselves as they fish, hike, hunt and recreate in our wild lands and along our wondrous rivers. Being safe in Yellowstone grizzly country means being educated and proactive. Here are a few bear safety rules: Respect posted signs. When you see government signs indicating that an area is closed for bear management, that is government language for do not enter. By following the guidance of the posted signs, you may save your life. Be bear wise and alert at all times as you roam in the woods or along a waterway. A fresh pile of bear scat, an animal carcass or a set of grizzly tracks is natures way of warning you to get away from where you are. Protect yourself by making noise to make your presence known. Keep your campgrounds safe by storing food and all organic material in bear-proof bins or canisters. Be certain that you and everybody with you has easy access to bear spray every day, at all times. With so many newcomers and visitors to the Yellowstone region, it is important for you to share this bear wise ethic. Whether it be during a friendly conversation in line while ordering coffee or an extra post on your personal social media outlets, every one of us is responsible to help keep humans safe and Yellowstone grizzlies alive and thriving. The Montana Republican Party should reschedule their delegate selection committee to after the primary, and based upon the winning primary candidate. On May 14, the Montana Republican Party has scheduled a delegate selection convention. With the Montana primary being held on June 7, scheduling the delegate convention before the primary is a mistake. The results of the primary should determine the selection of the delegates. If Donald Trump or Ted Cruz win the most votes in the Montana primary, then the delegates selected should be individuals who support them. If there is a brokered convention, as expected, the second ballot and maybe even the third ballot could determine the winner. By hosting the delegate convention before June 7 no one knows the outcome of the primary. That means that all of the delegates selected early might even be supporters for Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan or Mitt Romney. They could easily vote for one of these three on the second and following ballots and maybe, just maybe, that could be the reason why delegates will be selected on May 14 and ahead of the primary. Gary and Joan Carlson, Victor HELENA Darren Ashby is a 50-year-old husband and father of two who is working to get his license as an addiction counselor. He'll soon have a masters in social work from the University of Montana. His late-blooming interest in education is encouraging, but wouldn't be terribly uncommon except that he's doing it all after years of battling addiction and serving time in the Montana State Prison. Ashby spoke Thursday about the struggles people like him face when being paroled or released from prison. To get out on parole, offenders need to have a job and housing. That's hard to do while incarcerated and you can't show up for a job interview. It's difficult to put down a deposit on an apartment before establishing an income. A statewide re-entry task force was created after the 2013 Legislature to explore making the transition easier. Montana has a recidivism rate of about 38 percent, and making the transition from prison to outside life less traumatic can lower that, said Adrianne Slaughter, Department of Corrections government relations director. The national rate is about 43 percent. Ashby said he was a functioning addict for years and by the time he turned 30 was using methamphetamine daily. In 2008 he and his wife were charged with making drugs in their Missoula trailer where they lived with their teenage daughter. He spent five years with the Department of Corrections and 10 years on probation. He did nine months of treatment and struggled to maintain hope while in a prerelease facility because of difficulty re-establishing himself in the community. After, he spent a year looking for work and lived with his wife, who supported him. "All of the time and money invested in me could have been a total waste," he said. "I would not be standing here if I had no place to live or a home waiting for me when I left prerelease." He lives in a rundown trailer in Missoula in "the worst part of town," but it's his home. He and his wife, who also is a recovering addict, are surrounded by illicit drug use and criminal behavior. They've built up strong social networks, and without them his neighborhood would be a "huge enabler." *** Housing is the biggest obstacle to success both in getting released and making it in the community, Slaughter said. Slaughter and others from the re-entry committee made several recommendations to lawmakers Thursday, including asking them to consider a model that provides housing first to prisoners being released, then focuses on other issues like setting up treatment and employment. Slaughter also asked the committee to examine finding ways to fund work done in communities to ease re-entry and look at ways to reduce the number of laws that work against convicted felons and make it hard to find jobs or housing. Moe Wosepka, president of Helena Community Reentry, works with offenders being released from the state prison and a contracted facility in Shelby. His organization has helped about 15 sexual and violent offenders, who struggle the most to find homes and jobs, in its first year. He has a good relationship with the local Job Service organization and landlords. He tries to start working with people before they are released. Many people get out on a 10-day parole, meaning they have 10 days to find a job and housing or are sent back to prison. "All that never happens in a 10-day period," Wosepka said of the typical job search. About 120 men right now are paroled but still living at the state prison in Deer Lodge because they cannot secure housing, a job, treatment or something else their release is contingent on. Those people mostly are sex offenders who can't find a place to live, Slaughter said. These people can end up serving out the remained of their sentence and then are discharged into the community. "We lose that time period to ease them back, to supervise them while we re-enter society," Slaughter said. *** For offenders who do get out, immediate support is important. "Those are critical times for guys getting out of prison," Wosepka said. "They're scared to death. People on the street are scared of these guys getting out, but these guy getting out of prison are scared. A lot of these guys walk out of prison with just the clothes they have on their back. Certainly that doesn't help them for job interviews." Reintegrating offenders can save the state money, he said. It costs about $20,000 to $30,000 annually to keep someone in prison, but it costs just $7,000 to keep them out, he said. Even better, he said, is "if they become taxpayers instead of tax consumers, there's an advantage to the state too." Many people leaving the Department of Corrections fall into the category of chronic homelessness, said Stacy Collette, Department of Commerce operations manager for the Board of Housing. "They bounce from neighborhood to neighborhood. In Montana from a housing perspective, I will tell you housing is very difficult. We do not have enough supply to meet renter demand." She wants the state to adopt a model that meets housing needs first, and then starts to address other issues like finding a job or chemical dependency treatment. Montana law sets up a broad requirement for the state to help offenders rehabilitate themselves and re-enter communities, but the state still has 569 collateral consequence, or rules that make it hard for people convicted of felonies to get jobs or take part in everyday life. That could range from an inability to get a license to do a certain type of work to being excluded from housing or programs. "There are three types of offenders: people who made a mistake, people who come to us broken and need resources for a large portion of their life and will be a regular drain on resources, and people who need to be incarcerated," she said. "We need to make sure as a state we are providing a community of support, housing and employment for those individuals who are capable of reintegrating back into society and not being a drain for years to come." BILLINGS - A report of people smoking marijuana in a Billings City Brew parking lot in February led to a man ramming a police car and driving off on a high-speed chase that reached 100 mph and ran other vehicles off the road, police say. Kevin Lee Foster, 42, faces one count of felony criminal endangerment, one count of felony assault on a peace officer, and misdemeanor counts of fleeing from or eluding a peace officer and of obstructing a peace officer. Judge Pro Tem Lance Lundvall set Fosters bond at $75,000 and ordered that he appear before District Court Judge Rod Souza at 9:30 a.m. April 28. At about 10 a.m. Feb. 12, a Billings police officer approached Foster in the parking lot of the City Brew located at 1640 Grand Ave. The officer was responding to reports of two people smoking marijuana there. The officer could smell marijuana near the gold Chevrolet Malibu, which had been backed into a spot near the coffee shops main doors and was occupied by Foster and a female passenger. After the officer knocked on the door to Foster's car, Foster locked the cars doors. The officer told Foster he would break the window if Foster did not open the door, and Foster lit a cigarette and continued to ignore the officers orders, according to court documents. The officer moved his patrol vehicle bumper-to-bumper with Fosters to avoid passersby coming between the vehicles in the escalating situation, according to court documents. When the officer approached Foster again, Foster put his car in reverse and accelerated, forcing both police officers to move out of the way to avoid being struck. Foster struck the officers patrol car, then another vehicle, before fleeing down 17th Street West at about 100 mph and running some vehicles off the road in the process. The chase was called off due to safety concerns, and a short time later units were dispatched to the area of 32nd Street West and Avenue F after reports of a male and female running across yards toward Zimmerman Trail. The female passenger, Katie Heitt, was found on the 1500 block of Golden Boulevard, and Fosters car was located at 3137 Avenue F. A witness said Foster and Heitt ran through his yard and that he questioned them. Foster told the man they were running from the cops because his brother and sister-in-law were fighting, the man said. Foster is also facing multiple traffic violations. He has been ordered to appear in Gallatin County District Court on or before April 30 regarding the revocation of a suspended sentence. Indonesias symposium this week to discuss the mass killings that took place during anti-Communist purges in 1965 and 1966 marked an important first step toward national healing. The government of President Joko Widodo deserves praise for its willingness, at last, to confront the past. What needs to follow is a process that will bring the guilty to justice, encourage national reconciliation and ensure that such horrors never again occur. The anti-Communist purges have been called one of the worst mass atrocities of the 20th century. The Indonesian Army and its civilian death squads slaughtered more than a half million people. As many as 1.7 million more were tortured or sent to camps, some for decades. Anyone who might conceivably have posed a threat to President Suharto a general who quashed an alleged Communist insurgency and then installed a brutal and corrupt military dictatorship that lasted until he was driven from office in 1998 was fair game, including intellectuals and ethnic Chinese Indonesians. In 2012, Indonesias National Commission on Human Rights demanded a criminal investigation into the 1965 and 1966 killings, but the government in power did not act. Mr. Widodos government, likewise, is ruling out a criminal inquiry, opting instead for a vague statement of remorse for past events. But an expression of remorse is hardly enough to heal the collective trauma that lingers more than a half-century later. Justice cannot be done without a full accounting of what happened. To that end, the United States, which played a role in identifying supposed Communist sympathizers and in arming the Suharto regime, should also release American records that could shed light on the killings, as it has done with truth-and-reconciliation processes in Latin America. The national commission has asked for these documents and the Widodo government should do the same. SEOUL, South Korea North Korea proposed on Thursday to send family members to meet with 13 North Korean restaurant workers who arrived in South Korea this month in what was described by the South as a rare group defection. The South immediately dismissed the offer as propaganda and reiterated that the North Koreans had defected of their own free will. North Korea, which has demanded their return, claims that the South kidnapped the workers 12 waitresses and a male manager from a restaurant run by the North Korean government in the Chinese city of Ningbo. On Thursday, the Norths Red Cross Society suggested that the South allow the workers to meet with relatives at Panmunjom, a village on the border between the two Koreas that serves as a contact point. Historian David Emmons will present "Ireland's Exiled Children: Butte's Irish, 1914-1923" on Saturday, April 23, at the Clark Chateau, 321 W. Broadway St. This is the fourth installment of the "Remembering the Rising" 1916 Centennial speaker series. Emmons, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Montana-Missoula, will discuss the role several Butte characters played in the Easter Rising, and related Irish revolutionary activities in Butte between 1914 and 1923. Saturday's schedule: 6:15 p.m.: Irish rebel songs performed by Dublin Gulch 7 p.m.: "Riders to the Sea" by Irish playwright John Millington Synge, performed by The Ballroom Players 7:40 p.m.: Lecture and Q&A with David Emmons Limited seating is available, and tickets are available at the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, 17 W. Quartz St. Tickets cost $15 for adults, $8 for students. Doors open at 6 p.m. "Remembering the Rising" is co-sponsored by Humanities Montana, The Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, Granite Mountain Bank, and The Root & The Bloom Collective. Sunday's schedule: On Sunday, April 24, the Clark Chateau will host an open house from noon to 4 p.m. commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Easter Riding. At 1 p.m., Chateau curator Callison Stratton will give a talk on Sen. James E. Murray and his role in the movement for Irish freedom, unveiling the Chateau's new exhibit on Murray's life and career. At 2 p.m., Tom Gammons, Chateau youth intern, will present "Aunt Ruby's Mandolin," an original composition inspired by his research on the Easter Rising and the experience of the Irish in America. Admission is free, but reservations are requested. Call the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives at 406-782-3280 or email clarkchateau@gmail.com to RSVP. After a three-month test run with flashing red and yellow lights, county officials want to remove all signals at the intersection of Broadway and Wyoming streets in Uptown Butte. It might be the first of many requests for removing signals at Uptown intersections, which Butte-Silver Bow administrators say will improve traffic flow and make driving more pleasant without compromising safety. Commissioners agreed without debate Wednesday night to send the proposal to the councils Public Works Committee. If approved there, it would come before the full, 12-member council for a vote. Also Wednesday night, commissioners agreed to keep changes made to Main Street in Uptown last fall remain in effect at least through the summer. The street was reduced from four lanes to two, a middle turn lane was established and a bike lane was added on one side. The changes were revisited recently because paint used to stripe the reconfigured street faded away much faster than Public Works officials anticipated. They will be repainted with temporary stripes soon, with more permanent markings made later if all goes well. The signal change at Wyoming and Broadway was part of a plan to expand angled parking and add bike lanes Uptown, which a majority of commissioners OKd last year. But officials agreed to seek signal changes on a slower trek. It improves traffic flow, it reduces expenses, it just makes sense, said Public Works Director Dave Schultz. The early stages of the Uptown street reconfiguration included removing all these signals but it became a little bit of a hill too far so we took that out of the plan and are going to address them one at a time. The change would remove signals at Wyoming and Broadway and replace them with stop signs on Wyoming and nothing on Broadway it would simply be a through-street for vehicles. County engineer Nick Sandford said a 2012 traffic analysis concluded that signals were not warranted there. The change was given a 90-day test, with blinking red lights at Wyoming for vehicles to stop and blinking yellow lights signaling through traffic on Broadway. The test-run began on Jan. 13 and Sandford said 90 days of observation still showed that signals are not warranted. It hasnt been the only Uptown intersection with recent changes. Signals at Main and Park streets were replaced with four-way stop signs that stayed up for months while construction on the new NorthWestern Energy building was under way. The Montana Department of Transportation, which has jurisdiction over the intersection, replaced the signs with blinking red lights when construction was completed and all barricades were removed earlier this year. They recently restored full traffic signals at the intersection. Sandford said traffic analyses have been or will be conducted on several more intersections Uptown to see if signals can be removed. They include Broadway and Arizona, Mercury and Arizona, Washington and Park and Idaho and Park. Signals at Granite and Montana and the one at Park and Main could be removed if MDT allows it. Council Chairwoman Cindi Shaw has voiced concerns about whether pedestrians will be safe if the signal at Wyoming and Broadway and at other intersections are removed. She said she wants to see the traffic analyses and proof pedestrians wont be at greater risk. The faded stripes on Main Street irked a few commissioners who questioned or opposed bike lanes being established Uptown last year. Public Works says the contractor used the paint specified in October but it faded much faster than county officials anticipated. They said frequent snowfall and plowing from November through January likely contributed to the problem. Besides the lane reduction, a bike lane was established going uphill on Main Street. Sharrows markings that indicated shared lanes between motorists and bicyclists were painted on the downhill lane and a new left-turn lane was created in the middle. County officials say the stripes were only temporary anyway and there hasnt been enough time to see if the changes worked. Commissioner Dave Palmer, who is among six people running for chief executive this year, asked that the changes be reconsidered given the faded paint. He said he was all for bike lanes but believes the single traffic lanes on Main Street now might be too narrow. Several residents urged commissioners Wednesday night to give the bike lanes more time. They noted that the lanes were painted on Main in October, just as winter weather was arriving, and there has been little chance for bicyclists or motorists to try them out. Cassie Wick said she rode her bike on Main Street to work and back on Tuesday and Wednesday and the bike lane shows people that somebody is there. I feel safer using it, she said, adding that its a quality of life issue. Palmer said he was OK giving the changes more time but suggested that after the summer, consideration be given to eliminating the turn lane on part of Main and making the single travel lanes wider. Montana is home to one of the top 10 emitters of greenhouse gases in the nation. The coal-fired power plant at Colstrip is by far the largest industrial source of greenhouse gases in Montana, according to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Nevertheless, thanks to the EPAs Clean Power Plan, Montana was finally on its way to charting a course for cleaner energy. In the past few years the state had put together a blueprint of sorts for complying with the plan, and earlier this year Gov. Steve Bullock announced the members of a 27-member advisory council charged with making recommendations on how to cut carbon pollution in the most environmentally effective, least economically damaging way possible. Then the Clean Power Plan got tangled up in the courts, coal began a steady global collapse and Montanas leaders seemingly abandoned efforts to help mitigate climate change in order to focus their attention on saving the Colstrip power plant. Montanas state and federal leaders have been spending a great deal of time talking about how to keep Colstrip viable. Bullock is even taking steps to put together a working group addressing Colstrips future. They are taking this train in the wrong direction. Regardless of how the Clean Power Plan plays out in court, Montana must get back on track. It must not commit public resources to propping up an industry that damages public health. Montanans must remind our governor and congressional delegates that the state still needs to plan for a future that includes a strong, diversified energy industry, good-paying jobs and most of all, clean air. Theres no reason to delay, and every reason to move forward with urgency. Montanans health depends on it. Just this month, the U.S. Global Change Research Program released a new report that links the effects of climate change with public health, and noted that if things dont change, Montana can expect to see more drought, soil erosion and dust activity, for instance. The report, The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: A Scientific Assessment, connects these outcomes to human activities including agriculture, livestock grazing, irrigation and the like. It also, of course, notes that Montana can expect more wildfires and more smoke and therefore, poorer air quality. In Missoula and Ravalli counties, poor air quality is particularly concerning. Although Missoula has made some headway thanks to local standards, it is still losing ground and its air quality continues to receive the poorest possible grade from the American Lung Association. The American Lung Association will be releasing its annual State of the Air report later this month. Last years report, which studied the years 2011-2013, showed that hotter, drier summers with their more frequent, more intense wildfires were responsible for increased particle pollution in places like Missoula and Ravalli counties. In Missoula County, for example, 86 percent of the poor air quality days were directly attributed to wildfire smoke. Consequently, Missoulians can expect to see more cases of chronic illness and respiratory disease. Children and the elderly, pregnant women, and people with heart or lung disease are especially vulnerable. Climate change is even extending the allergy season, including more and more potent airborne allergens. County-level air quality standards are effective, but they can only go so far. Montana must join the national push to mitigate wildfires by curbing greenhouse gas emissions, and it can accomplish this by dramatically reducing the use of coal as an energy source. And then what? Montana must continue to hold a statewide discussion that focuses on replacing polluting energy sources with cleaner ones, making use of new energy technologies and training a workforce equipped to overcome the inevitable challenges of such a massive transition. Recent polling data shows Montana residents want to do something about climate change, but are skeptical of the Clean Power Plan. A poll released last month by the University of Montana and Stanford University found that 54 percent of Montanans agree that climate changes effect pose a serious problem for the state. And a whopping 71 percent would prefer to see the state develop its own plan to reduce emissions instead of allowing the federal government to call the shots. Montanans can already see that climate change is costing us immensely, and we shouldnt wait to begin taking steps to reduce that threat by implementing our own standards. Bullock ought to reconvene the Clean Power Plan advisory council, and direct the group to continue working on this issue. The council should be given the support to continue to develop state-level solutions to the global problem of climate change. Montanans may remain divided on the Clean Power Plan, whether to lend public support to propping up Colstrip and, if so, how far to go. Regardless of those divisions, it would be wise to keep in mind that we all breathe the same air. -- The Missoulian MUSCATINE, Iowa There are ways that family members can come together to support one another in caregiving roles and area professionals are planning educational sessions that address challenges adult children face in supporting their aging caregiver parents. In May, the Iowa State University Extension and Outreach of Muscatine County office will host Caregiving Relationships: Conversations on Aging. The program addresses difficult caregiver questions through two, one-hour sessions held in Muscatine, Wilton and West Liberty. It is so important to start having open conversations early on before some type of crisis begins, said Barbara Dunn Swanson, human services specialist for the ISU Extension Outreach. If you start now, you will be prepared and be a valuable asset to your family when the time of need arises. Dunn Swanson will host the sessions and plans to base conversations around issues of safety, proper medical care, household tasks and how family members can make good decisions together. There will be no charge for the sessions and attendees can choose to go to one or both. The first session will cover changes that adult children and their aging caregiver parents will face and the second session covers tips for talking and building later-life caregiver relationships. Dunn Swanson said that, for example, sometimes one child becomes the sole care taker of a parent, or family members disagree on certain healthcare choices, but that making sure all voices are heard before that happens can make caregiving situations easier. Family members who can make good decisions together and who can communicate their needs will feel better prepared as the need to make even tougher decisions arise, Dunn Swanson said. Those interested in attending should register by calling 563-263-5701 or email KristaR@iastate.edu. Friday is a day of reckoning for Duane Buck. That's the day the Supreme Court will determine whether to hear his appeal for a new sentencing hearing. Buck is on Death Row in Texas. It is important to emphasize that he is not seeking a new trial. There's no question of Buck's guilt in the 1995 shooting deaths of his ex-girlfriend, Debra Gardner, her friend, Kenneth Butler, and Buck's stepsister, Phyllis Taylor. No, all he's asking is to be re-sentenced for the crime. There is, you see, a law in Texas that says you can't be sentenced to death unless a jury finds that you represent a future danger, i.e., that you are likely to hurt someone else if left alive. In Buck's case, psychologist Walter Quijano, a supposed expert testifying for the defense, no less, told jurors Buck represented just such a danger. Because he is black. If any of this rings a bell, it's because I wrote about the case three years ago. If you read that column, you may recall that one of the researchers on whose writings Quijano based his testimony says his work supports no such conclusion. Indeed, Quijano's claim was so outrageous that even Buck's surviving victim and one of his prosecutors think he should get a new hearing. In 2000, Sen. John Cornyn, who was then Texas' attorney general, conceded the state was wrong in allowing race to be used as a factor in sentencing. Quijano had given similar testimony in six cases. The other five defendants, all black or Hispanic, got new hearings. Buck was denied, based on a flimsy legalism, namely that the offending testimony came not on "cross," but on direct examination. In other words, it was first elicited by the defense. People keep telling me I'm wrong to believe the justice system is riddled with racial bias. They tell me the system has nothing against people of color, and that it is only evidence of their own native criminality that such people are stopped, frisked, arrested, tried and incarcerated in wildly disproportionate numbers. People keep promising me the system is just. And I keep being sickened by stories like this. I keep finding studies like the 2012 report by University of Maryland criminology professor Raymond Paternoster, which said that at the time of Buck's sentencing, the local DA was three times more likely to seek death for a black defendant than for a white one. It's worth noting, by the way, that these predictions of future dangerousness are not exactly unerring. Texas Defender Services, a nonprofit law firm specializing in capital cases, studied the records of 155 Death Row inmates and found that only 5 percent went on to commit assaults serious enough to warrant more than a Band-Aid. In a place where you can get written up for saving a seat in the cafeteria or having too many postage stamps, Buck has a clean disciplinary record dating back to 1998. So Quijano's testimony was not only racist, but also pardon the redundancy wrong. Look, I don't like the death penalty. If you know me, you already know that. But even if I did, I would want to be sure this severest of sanctions was imposed fairly. Plainly, it is not. And the fact that it is not cannot help but undermine the credibility of the entire system. If we countenance bias at this extremity, what confidence can anyone have in the system's fairness at any level, down to and including parking tickets? The racism here is not subtle. To the contrary, it is neon. To deny Buck a new sentencing hearing untainted by bizarre suppositions about the future danger he poses because of his skin color would shred even the pretense of equality before the law. So let us hope the Court does what it should. Because, yes, Friday is a day of reckoning for Duane Buck. But it's a day of reckoning for justice, too. Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com. Les emplois a Rennes sont abondants et varies. Il y a quelque chose pour tout le monde. Que vous soyez a la recherche dun emploi [] Les blattes ou cafards (Blatta orientalis) sont des insectes qui appartiennent a la famille des Blattoptera. Ils se caracterisent par leur forme allongee, leurs ailes [] Local bank customers must pay closer attention to their mobile security, the South African Bank Information Centre (Sabric) said on Thursday. Sabric, which is a non-profit company, was formed by the four major banks to assist banking and cash-in-transit companies combat organised crime in the country. Sabric CEO, Kalyani Pillay, said online banking fraud is on the rise owing to high levels of phishing and malware attacks in the country. Social engineering is manipulating people so that they can provide certain information without being aware that they are providing it to criminals, Pillay said. Cyber crime costs South Africa around R1bn a year, Pillay said referring to stats in the media. Meanwhile, South Africa is one of the top targets of cyber crime in Africa, according to Sabric. Pillay said that while banks continuously provide cyber security messages, criminals are also devising new ways to steal from customers. As more bank consumers migrate to online banking platforms, the risk is that smartphones and handheld devices are being compromised, Pillay said. Pillay said Sabric works closely with law enforcement to ensure a collaborative approach to fighting these crimes. Sabric has a campaign called Skelm to help South Africans to protect themselves against banking fraud. The campaign will provide various platforms on social media for the public to share their own experiences of being scammed in order to empower one another, Pillay said. She said consumers must be aware of these risks and take steps to safeguard themselves. This campaign is about creating cyber security consciousness and Sabric has also provided the following security tips for consumers: Secure your smartphone by enabling the lock screen and use a pattern password or fingerprint screen lock. Where possible dont save any sensitive information and bank account details on your electronic devices. Think before you download apps to your mobile or tablet devices. Do not bypass built-in security measures by rooting your device. Disable any wireless connection settings when youre not using it. And disable your push notification settings on mobile devices if not needed. News24 More on banking Old Mutual sends confidential banking email without password protection Absa Internet banking security concerns Netflix does not plan to reduce its prices in the countries that were part of its global launch in January. Thats the word from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. We really havent seen price be much of an issue, Hastings said during their Q1 2016 earnings call. He said they are currently serving English-speaking elites in the new countries they launched in, and for this target market the current price is fine. Well see over the coming years as we expand, we may need some flexibility eventually, but nothing in the short term. Rand support for Netflix Netflix told MyBroadband in early 2016 that it had no plans to price its services in South Africas local currency. South African subscribers who sign up through the Netflix website can currently only pay by credit card in US dollars. Apple shows Netflix pricing in rand on iPhones and iPads, but this is done through automated currency conversions. This means that regardless of how you subscribe to Netflix from South Africa, the monthly fee will be linked to the rand-dollar exchange rate. South Africans should not expect this situation to change in the short term. More on Netflix No Netflix rand support planned Online comments and Netflix regulation in South Africa have your say We will block Netflix in South Africa if they dont pay up: FPB Best movies and series on Netflix South Africa Netflix is keeping an open mind about adding a feature to let subscribers download videos for offline viewing, CEO Reed Hastings said in a Q1 2016 earnings call. As we expand around the world, where we see an uneven set of networks, its something we should keep an open mind about, said Hastings. In South Africa, OntapTV and ShowMax already offer offline viewing allowing subscribers to download movies or series to their mobile devices to watch later. Offline viewing typically lets subscriber store a limited number of titles for up to 30 days. Once you start watching something, you have 48 hours to finish it. In the United States, Netflixs main market, competitors Amazon Video and YouTube Red let subscribers download content to watch offline. More on downloadable video-on-demand content ShowMax download now, watch later feature on iPhone and iPad ShowMax now offers downloads for offline viewing ONTAPtv.com in South Africa for R89 per month Telkom and Vumatel are in discussions about a fibre-to-the-home partnership, which will significantly increase the reach of both companies. Telkom and Vumatel are growing their fibre-to-the-home footprints, and are currently in a land-grab for areas which are suitable for fibre deployments. Vumatel recently concluded a finance deal with Standard Bank that will see the fibre provider ramp up delivery and expand into new markets in South Africa. A challenge for these companies is that when a fibre provider is present in an area, it significantly reduces the attractiveness for a second player. The business case for Telkom to enter an area where Vumatel is already operating, for example, disappears. Telkom CEO Sipho Maseko highlighted this challenge in 2015, saying they face relentless pressure from smaller fibre providers who are nimble and cherry-pick the suburbs they want to service. An easy way to resolve this challenge is for the companies to partner, and according to two independent sources close to Vumatel and Telkom this is what the companies are discussing. Details about the potential fibre partnership are limited, and the two companies would not divulge much information about the discussions. Vumatel CEO Niel Schoeman told MyBroadband that the information is not far off the mark, but he is currently not in a position to comment further. Telkom spokesperson Jacqui OSullivan told MyBroadband the company engages with industry players on a regular basis, looking to see where partnerships or collaborations might add value to their customers. More on FTTH Vumatel and Standard Bank sign huge fibre expansion deal MWEBs 1Gbps fibre-to-the-home on Vumatel tested MWEB in big fibre-to-the-home push Cheapest 1Gbps fibre-to-the-home prices in South Africa The Microsoft Imagine Cup South Africa leg finals will take place at the CSIR on 26 April, where 15 teams will battle for top honours. Imagine Cup is an annual competition sponsored by Microsoft, and asks young technologists to help resolve some of the worlds toughest challenges. Imagine Cup competitors create projects that address the Imagine Cup theme: Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems. Teams compete in one of three categories: Games, Innovation, and World Citizenship. The top South African team in each category will compete in an online-submission World Semi-final in May, for a chance to participate at the World Finals in Redmond, Washington in July 2016. The South African leg of the Imagine Cup is open to all universities, and the University of Johannesburg excelled with 8 of the top 15 teams. Here are the 8 teams from the University of Johannesburg, with their project pitches, which aim to win the competition. Team BITSplease DIY dream computer builder BITSplease is an elite, innovative computer-building site. With an interactive DIY building interface, we provide drag-and-drop, step-by-step functionality that will allow users of any age and PC knowledge to build their own custom, dream computer. Each of our products include a detailed description, compatibility checks, benchmark tests, a user chat, and a visual of what the users final product would look like. Team Forensic Voice stress can tell the truth To date, the most common tool for detecting deception has been the polygraph. This can be costly and requires a lot of expertise and training. Voice Stress Analysis takes audio recordings and performs an analysis based on the frequency and pitch and determines whether the speaker is lying or telling the truth. Team Kodea Minibus taxis for novices For the commuter on the move who believes that saving money is a must. Pinglo is a mobile application that aids in simplifying South Africas unique public transport system the minibus taxi. Users who have never used this type of transport will be guided on how to do so. Team MealMe Caveman cash feeds hungry students Money in exchange for goods. The way cavemen did it. Entering this century is lighter without the burden of physical cash, so we let you buy food vouchers that can be redeemed at any physical (affiliated) store within the UJ Student Centre. Cool things happen once you sign up, whether you are a student or a store. Team Unerazz Clever drones to find lost people UAVSim seeks to evolve control systems for drones in the search and rescue domain. These control systems are evolved through the use of Gene Expression Programming owing to the lowered computational overhead associated with a decrease in the search space, and are comprised of decision trees representing the drones behaviour. UAVSim seeks to develop the complex behaviours that guide the drones in the search for objects of interest within a variety of simulated environments. Team Targarian Technologies Houston, we have an emergency Our project is an emergency management system which enables a civilian to report an emergency with a click of a button. It will send your details together with your location and the operator at a control room will acknowledge that you have reported an emergency and send you a reference number. Our system caters for deaf-mute individuals. A driver app will then help a driver with routes and also provide an estimated time of arrival. Team Kriterion Forward to tender transparency Eprok offers a way to streamline the tender procurement system, improve communication between contractors and the government, and provide project owners an informative and definitive basis for making decisions on who to award a tender to. Team Novo Visio Matchmaking homes and humans If youre starting a family, dont you worry about how child-friendly your home is? We have made a system that addresses property management, improving the way users search for homes. Introducing project Pad Nav. Because a home is about more than the number of bedrooms, bathrooms, and garages. And we make life easier for real estate agents too. More on software 5 awesome Google features you arent using Google VR view unveiled Here is what dominated South African Google searches in March At the moment, Khaligraph Jones is without a doubt the illest rapper in the Kenyan hip hop scene. His status as Kenyas hip hop king was compounded by his latest release, Mazishi. In Khaligraph Jones, a lot of Kenyan hip hop heads believe that Kenyan hip hop is headed in the right direction. However, a couple of years ago Khaligraph was just another ordinary chap in the streets of Nairobi looking for ways to make it big. He shared a photo on social media from back in 2008 when life was much different than it is today. Back then, he was not as heavily built as he is now and he definitely was struggling fashion wise. If this does not inspire you to chase after your dreams, I dont know what will. He captioned the photo: Thank You Lord for Bringing us this far. 2008 tulikua tunangangana mbaya sana. Khaligraph now: UK Parliament Recognises Genocide in Middle East Assyrian refugee girl from Baghdede (Qaraqosh), Iraq (2014). A government attempt to prevent MPs from declaring that Islamic State's treatment of Yazidis and Christians amounted to genocide was crushed on Wednesday, when the Commons voted unanimously to condemn their treatment and refer the issue to the UN security council. It is almost unprecedented for MPs collectively to declare actions in a war as genocide. Islamic State (Isis) has carried out a campaign of murder, violence and repression against Christians and the Yazidi ethnic and religious minority since seizing large swaths of northern Iraq and Syria. However, the Foreign Office directed ministers and parliamentary aides to abstain, saying it was wrong for the government to prejudge the issue or act as a jury on a case that may yet be referred to the international criminal court. Why won't the government recognise Isis atrocities as genocide? I have a hunch The United States Congress, the US administration, the European parliament and the Council of Europe have all declared the terror group's treatment of the Yazidi community as genocide, but the Foreign Office legal department has a long-standing policy dating back to the passage of the genocide convention in 1948 of refusing to give a legal description to potential war crimes. The government abstention policy was also designed to minimise the significance and size of the Commons majority, as well as to disassociate the executive from the MPs' vote. Tobias Ellwood, the Foreign Office minister, facing jeers and interruptions, said the immediate task was to compile evidence of the harrowing and unspeakable crimes, but it was wrong to declare now the nature of the crimes being committed against the Yazidis. He said he personally believed genocide had taken place, but said this was a matter for the courts and not politicians. He added that any referral to the international criminal court required the support of the UN security council and that such a reference was blocked by Russia and China in 2014. "This ultimately is a matter for courts to decide. It is not for governments to be the prosecutor, the judge or indeed jury," he said. He insisted that regardless of the precise legal description of the crimes, justice would be brought to bear on those responsible, no matter how long it takes, insisting the government was not washing its hands of the issue. Yazidi refugees return to Sinjar in Iraq -- a photo essay However, he gave no undertaking that the government would act on the motion, and in the past ministers have chosen to ignore such backbench moves. The shadow foreign office minister Diana Johnson responded to the vote by urging ministers to recognise the legitimacy of parliament and refer the issue to the UN immediately. Philippe Sands QC, the prominent human rights lawyer, insisted that the government was "free to characterise atrocities of this kind as it sees fit... Its view will not bind a court." "This will be taken as a further sign that the Conservative government of the UK has abandoned this country's long-standing commitment to the protection of human rights under the international rule of law," he said. Conservative MP Fiona Bruce said: "The proposers of this motion are here to insist that the overwhelming evidence of the atrocities of Daesh [Islamic State] in Syria and Iraq is recognised for the genocide it is and is considered as such by the UN security council and the international criminal court. This will support similar resolutions of other leading international and legislative bodies." She told how MPs had heard the "truly harrowing" personal testimony of a 16-year-old Yazidi girl, who was seized along with others from her community by Isis fighters and witnessed her father and brother killed in front of her. The teenager had spoken of how every girl in her community over eight including herself was imprisoned and raped. "She spoke of witnessing her friends being raped and hearing their screams, of seeing a girl aged nine being raped by so many men that she died," said Bruce. She said MPs heard from another woman who had come directly from Syria and spoke of Christians being killed and tortured, of children being beheaded in front of their parents and of mothers who had seen their own children crucified. Yazidis and Christians she said had been targeted explicitly because of their religion and ethnicity. Bruce said recognition of genocide brought obligations on the part of the international community to prevent, punish and protect. Conservative MP Derek Thomas said: "The British people are horrified by what they hear and see regarding the treatment of these minority groups in Syria and in Iraq, and they rightly expect that this House will use whatever tools are available to us to work to bring this to an end and achieve peace in this troubled part of the world. "A tool available to us today is to recognise these evil acts as genocide and to use our position as a permanent member of the UN security council so that this situation can be investigated by the international criminal court." Labour MP Stephen Pound said it would be a "double discrimination" and a "double death in many ways" to fail to recognise as genocide the suffering of people targeted by IS. Edward Leigh, the senior Conservative backbencher, said: "The attitude of the government up to now has been based on legal precedent. But I don't believe that precedent in this case is enough, given the horrors that are going on in the world. Vian Dakhil: Iraq's only female Yazidi MP on the battle to save her people "There's no point in the minister using his time in the House to condemn Daesh [Isis], to mention all the appalling acts that they're doing and then saying at the end of the speech: 'Well, I'm sorry, but because of all the legal precedent... because we the government think that it's for the court to take the legal initiative, that we don't think it is appropriate for the British government to take action. Enough is enough. I call on the government to act." Conservative MP Nus Ghani suggested the world must act now to stop history repeating itself. She said: "We failed to prevent genocide in Bosnia. In Germany, the Nazis were appeased while they targeted Jews. The death cult of misfits that we face now cannot be allowed to get away with this for any longer." SNP MP Ian Blackford suggested that the UK should follow the example set by the Allied governments in 1942 when they made a joint statement condemning genocide. "Just as we stood against genocide then and made sure that those responsible would face justice, we must now show the required level of leadership today when we are faced with genocide in Syria and Iraq," he said. "The British government must now urgently push the UN security council to immediately refer these crimes to the international criminal court." It appears the exchange of words pitting Larry Madowo against KFCB Boss Ezekiel Mutua is far from over. The NTV journalist has now launched a vicious attack on Mr. Mutua with a hard hitting article on his Daily Nation column. According to Larry, the controversial boss is a classic narcissist who is using his job as an opportunity to extend his personal brand. The attack has stemmed from a recent ban by the board on Coca Colas Taste The Feeling commercial. According to the KFCB CEO, a kissing scene in the ad was offensive and violated family values. Ezekiel Mutua is one person who puzzles me. He has taken his job as boss of the Kenya Film Classification Board (KFCB) as an opportunity to extend his personal brand. Yet every time he opens his mouth to make a statement, most sensible people cover their faces with their hands in utter embarrassment. He often appears to be passing off outdated ideas with the conviction of a priest and the naivety of a three-year-old. Larry Madowo writes. He went on to refer to Mr. Mutua as a shameless, agile, self-promoter who uses KFCBs Facebook page as a personal diary. A casual look at the boards Facebook page reveals the shameless, agile self-promoter that its CEO is. Before his arrival last October, it was a pretty standard page, with periodic updates on the ratings for movies and almost nothing else. Since the former information secretary took over, the official account has become something of a personal diary of what he is up to and who he meets, the article titled Who will save us from the KFCB CEO? reads in part. Last week, the two were involved in another online spat after Larry Madowo and The Trend panelist discussed the CEOs facebook post about being blessed as he flew as the only VIP passenger in a Kenya Airways flight. Ezekiel hit out at Larry saying, Talking of praising God in Business Class and VIP lounges, let me give Larry Madowo and his panel of experts more evidence: this was during the Kibaki regime, just before the 2013 general election that brought the Jubilee government to power. The then President Mwai Kibaki entrusted me and the former minister for Cooperative Development Joe Nyagah with his plane. Joe and I had been sent by Kibaki with a goodwill message to five Presidents in the region. We were nearing the 2013 general election and our neighbours were afraid that there could be a post election violence in Kenya and that that could affect the flow of goods to those countries. The President sent his trusted men to assure our neighbours that Kenya had put mechanisms in place to avert the 2007/8 like PEV, that the elections would be peaceful and that they would continue to get uninterrupted services through the port of Mombasa and our roads across the borders. So there we were flying from one capital to another and holding serious meetings with Heads of State. So Larry Madowo I am not seeing these things at KFCB. I have been to White House, I have visited nearly all the major capitals of the world and I have used nearly all major airlines on business and even first class. NOW SHOULD A BOY FROM A VILLAGE IN MWALA NOT PRAISE GOD FOR ALL THIS? If she is not posting nude photos on social media or sharing personal stories of her struggles with drugs and men, former KBC news anchor Elizabeth Irungu will once in a while blast people who have offended her. The outspoken and often-times controversial lass has a massive following on Facebook, and it is clear to see why. Her latest post has seen her hurl all manner of insults at a politician who asked her out on a date. As the story goes, the unnamed politician picked her up for the date and made a stop over at his baby mamas house on the pretext of picking something up, but according to Elizabeth, he was showing her off to his baby mama. This was her lengthy post: Someone offered to take me out for dinner wont say your name publicly coz you are suppose to be this respected politician in Kenya hahaha lol! what a joke! *yawwwwning* if only the citizens knew what A DOOCHEBAG & a LOOSER you really are! Who they see out there on tv banging tables at press conferences & who you really are behind closed doors is just unbelieveable! #Shaking_my_head They elected a boy to do a mans job coz behind closed doors,you really are just a scared little boy whose only sense of security is in bringing others down & intimidating them around! You are so scared of the world that you must be in political power inorder for you to feel complete as a human being! I sincerely pity you dude,nothing personal,i just feel sorry for you! You are nothing but a bully and the reason why you bully others sooo much is coz yourself you were a geek all through high school,not popular at all,wasnt into sports,werent cool amongst your peers back then & youve gotten bullied alot while growing up! Also i noticed you need constant approval from others (Unapenda nikikusifu) and attention hence the never-ending theatrics IN SHORT,YOU ARE ONE SICK BASTARD WHO NEEDS SOME SERIOUS HELP & I MEAN THAT!!! Infact i highly doubt that you joined politics to help Kenyans and make this country a better place as you so claim in your stupid little political rallies,i think you joined politics just to proove a point to yourself & to feel strong coz in reality you really are just a weak & timid piece of sh*t walking around town! (I do not need a degree in psychology to know all this about u! Just talking to you the few days that weve been chatting on whatsapp,reading your bio online and the fact that you surround yourself with goons to do your little dirty jobs for you,tells me everything that there is to know about you) Also its corny how you keep googling your own name! So anyway,this scumbag did the shadiest thing on earth,he picked me up from Westlands and as we were headed for our date,he stopped by his baby-mommas house (pretending to be picking something up from her) but kumbe just to show me off to her! He wanted her to see me and make her feel down,unpretty,lesser than me or wareva the heck! And kinda like indirectly say to her,hey umebeat check out my new upgrade & i thought to myself WHAT A KID this one!!! I just hopped onto the next taxi i could find & left him stranded there & confused! Have never returned any of his stupid calls since then! What good riddance pheew! Now you reading this probably wondering,WHY WAS I HANGING OUT WITH SUCH A LITTLE JERK IN THE FIRST PLACE??? WELL,COZ THAT IS ME! THATS WHO LIZ IS! I TRY TO CHANGE PEOPLE! I TRY TO HANG OUT WITH PEOPLE WHO I FEEL CAN BE CHANGED WITH LOVE & CARE! I TRY TO HELP PEOPLE! That is why i have dated some bad boys in the past! I try to help them & change them through love! Sometimes it back fires on me OBVIOUSLY *rolling my eyes* coz some people are just beyond repair and just need some Jesus in their lives!!! BOY YOU NEED SOME JESUS! So, 1)IF YOU KNOW YOU ARE READING THIS AND YOU ARE THE KIND OF GUY WHO USES ONE GIRL TO TRY & MAKE ANOTHER JEALOUS-GROW SOME BALLS & GROW THE F*CK UP WILL YAH?! I MEAN,WHAT ARE YOU IN HIGH SCHOOL? 2)IF YOU KNOW YOU ARE THE KIND OF LADY THAT GETS USED BY MEN TO PUT ANOTHER LADY DOWN,GROW A BRAIN! COZ CHIC YOU ARE FOOLISH! THE FACT THAT A N*GGA IS PARADING YOU AROUND HIS BABY MOMMA TRYING TO MAKE HER FEEL USELESS SHOULD TELL U THAT HE STILL HAS FEELINGS FOR HER! OTHERWISE WHY WOULD HE EVEN BOTHER??? THINK MAMACITA! Use your head to THINK & while you are at it,work on your self esteem too coz if you really feel good about yourself,you would never ever need to compare yourself to another female just to feel better or superior than her or wareva! You could be suffering from ALOT of inferiority complex mammi so yeah,JIJUE POA!!! #Team_sipendagi_Ujinga STOCKTON Police said the bodies of a man and a woman were found inside a car that was partially submerged in a Northern California slough. Stockton Police Officer Jose Silva told the Stockton Record that someone walking in the White Slough area Wednesday saw the upside down car and notified police. Silva said divers found the bodies and that authorities were investigating how the car ended up in the water. He said detectives were trying to determine if speed was a factor. Silva did not know the relationship between the two victims, and their identities had not been released late Wednesday. Two principals in American Canyon Marilyn Abelon at Donaldson Way Elementary School and Dan Scudaro at American Canyon Middle School were named Administrator of the Year by the Association of California School Administrators, Region 4. The region encompasses schools in Lake, Sonoma, Mendocino, Napa, Solano and Marin counties. It was wonderful to receive this recognition, said Scudaro, ACMS principal for eight years. Abelon, who has led Donaldson Way Elementary since 2012, said she was humbled and surprised by the award. She credited her incredible team of teachers and staff for helping her be acknowledged. The war over cannabis legalization is over, but in Napa county were still trying to add to the casualty list. The operator of a long-established medical cannabis dispensary in Vallejo is being prosecuted in Napa County Superior Court for actions that voters in California long ago determined are legal. This waste of public resources should offend anyones sense of fairness, no matter how you feel about medical cannabis. Voters passed the Compassionate Use Act by initiative nearly 20 years ago, giving residents the right to grow or possess cannabis with a doctors recommendation. In 2003 the Governor signed the Medical Marijuana Protection Act, which allows for the formation of patient collectives, or nonprofit organizations, to provide cannabis to patients. You may be among the dwindling minority who believe there is rampant abuse by the medical doctors who recommend cannabis to treat a variety of illnesses, but that is beside the point. Cultivation for an organization of such patients is legal under state law if no local ordinances are violated. Many patients are not able to grow and process the plants themselves and must rely on others in order to have the access to medicine that is their legal right. In Napa, we are about to put a man on trial who made every attempt to keep faith with the voters and do things the right way on behalf of his patients. Hakeem Brown has been operating a medical cannabis dispensary in Vallejo since 2009 and has thousands of patients with legal recommendations as members. Vallejo voters passed Measure C in 2011 by more than a three-to-one margin, mandating a 10 percent tax on gross sales of medical cannabis. Instead of implementing a regulatory ordinance to codify Measure C, the city helped conduct a series of raids by law enforcement personnel, and in April of 2012 Mr. Browns dispensary was targeted. The inventory was confiscated and their bank account was frozen. In the spring of 2013, the resulting attempts at legal actions against the raided dispensaries were tossed out of court and their funds reinstated. Needing to replace the lost inventory to serve their patients, Mr. Brown arranged to rent land near Lake Berryessa and began cultivation outdoors. The patient records and paperwork as required under state law were kept on the premises. His approach represents the desired alternative to organized criminal networks that degrade public lands with clandestine growing operations. Napa County had no ordinance of its own in place, which means the state laws applied, and Mr. Brown was in full compliance. So why would he be put on trial? Thats a good question for the District Attorneys office. In August of 2013, a raid was conducted at the Napa cultivation site, which included some familiar faces from the year before. The entire inventory was again confiscated and the authorities discounted the paperwork as fake. Apparently, they seized on the idea that a handful of patient addresses from cities like Los Angeles among the local addresses was somehow suspect. In fact, its not unusual or suspicious at all. Inexplicably, Mr. Brown will now go on trial in Napa County Superior Court on charges of cultivation and possession for sale as though this was a criminal enterprise, when he was following the rules laid down by voters and the State Supreme Court long ago. As taxpayers, the cost of this frivolous prosecution is bad enough, but on a personal level we also become complicit in an injustice done in our name. Not only is Mr. Brown the head of a large and long-established patient organization, he is the single father of a 13-year-old boy. We dont need any more casualties from this failed public policy, and incarcerating him or depriving him of his livelihood would do nothing to serve the public interest. Mr. Liebersteins office should drop all charges against Mr. Brown immediately in the interest of decency and fairness. This war is over. Jeff Carlson Napa Editor's note: The Register asked District Attorney Gary Lieberstein about the case, which began this week, and he responded: "As this matter is currently pending, it would be both inappropriate and unethical for me to comment on the specific merits of the case as both the People of California and the Defendant are entitled to a fair trial. Having said that, I can state generally that a felony case cannot proceed to trial without a prior finding by a judge that sufficient evidence exists to warrant that a jury may determine the legality of a particular defendant's actions." I have lived in St. Helena for more than 30 years, and have seen the changes that tourism has wrought, so I attended the White Barn presentation by Walter F. Kieser titled Impacts of Tourism on March 24 to see if there was a solution in sight. I was disappointed and discouraged. This session was sponsored by the Citizens Voice group, concerned about the revenue-producing venues suggested by the other concerned citizens group with the title of Rebuild St. Helena. Both appear to have the same goal keeping St. Helena a thriving community, just different approaches and philosophies. Among Mr. Kiesers consulting success stories that he presented were Aspen, Colorado, and Park City, Utah. I lived in Aspen for 12 years during the 1970s and 80s, running the hospital there, and have kept in touch with both middle-class worker colleagues as well as my upper-class friends. Although there has been some affordable housing built, the bulk of the middle class has moved down valley, resulting in a community of a few bona fide locals but primarily second-home, part-time residents. This phenomenon has taken place in Park City as well. I visited close friends there last month who have lived in Park City for the past 32 years. Of the 15 luxury homes on their street, they are now the only full-time locals all the rest are second-home owners whom they seldom see. I realize these are purely anecdotal observations but to me very poignant. My fear is that this is the direction that St. Helena is headed. The efforts to build a 20,000-square-foot community center, library annex, history center, and exhibition space appear a bit silly when there will be very few locals to use it. My former neighbor, Paul Dohring, provided guest commentary views in a recent letter to the St. Helena Star that promoted active citizen participation, and I support his conclusions. There are a lot of bright minds in this community. My hope is that those minds will engage and generate discussion points, if not a solution, for our town so that it does not meet the same fate as Aspen and Park City. Brigid Mulligan St. Helena Hey, hey, hey! Now here's a fun way to waste a few hours this weekend. The Google Street View team recently headed to Tennessee and mapped Dolly Parton's theme park Dollywood. That means fans can now visit the park virtually and check out what they've been missing. If theme parks are your thing, Disneyland Paris and Legoland California are both also available to visit from the comfort of your own computer. [Canoe.ca] Visiting Turkey on Thursday (21 April) NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Minister of Foreign Affairs Mevlut Cavusoglu, and Minister of Defence Ismet Ylmaz. Speaking alongside Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Mevlut Cavusoglu, the Secretary General commended Turkey for its strong commitment to the Alliance, addressed common security challenges and highlighted that NATO stands united in the fight against terrorism. The NATO Secretary General thanked Turkey for playing a crucial role in tackling human trafficking in the Aegean Sea. Referring to the NATO deployment, the Secretary General said that NATO ships have been collecting information and conducting monitoring in support of the efforts of Turkey, Greece and the European border agency Frontex. I appreciate the very good cooperation between NATOs Standing Maritime Group and the Turkish coastguard and navy, he said. Based on the information NATO provides, Turkey is taking action to help break the business model of the human traffickers, he added. Mr. Stoltenberg also welcomed the steps Turkey is taking to implement the agreement with the EU. The Secretary General thanked Turkey for the important contribution to the Global Coalition to counter ISIL, including by providing critical infrastructure at the Incirlik airbase. We stand united in the fight against terrorism. There can be no justification for the horrific attacks we have seen here in Ankara, in Istanbul, and elsewhere in Turkey", Mr. Stoltenberg highlighted. The Secretary General added that NATO continues to augment Turkish air defences through AWACS overflights and the Patriot deployment. He underlined that NATO has just started training Iraqi officers in Jordan and welcomed Turkeys offer to host such trainings in the future. He also commended Turkey for the valuable role as one of the framework nations in NATOs mission to train, advise and assist Afghan soldiers and police. Mentioning the NATO Summit in Warsaw in July, the Secretary General said that the Alliance must step up support to regional partners to build up their forces and project stability. We are grateful for Turkeys long-standing contribution to our Alliance in so many ways, he said. On Thursday the NATO Secretary General is visiting NATO flag ship FGS Bonn in the Aegean Sea. The NATO Secretary General, Mr. Jens Stoltenberg, will travel to Greece on Friday, 22 April 2016. The Secretary General will meet with the President, Mr. Prokopis Pavlopoulos, the Prime Minister, Mr. Alexis Tsipras and the Minister of Defence, Mr. Panos Kammenos. Media Advisory + 10:25 Joint press statements by NATO Secretary General and the President - Presidential Palace 11:30 Joint press statements by NATO Secretary General and the Prime Minister Hall outside Prime Ministers office Still and video images of the event will be available on the NATO website. Follow us on Twitter (@NATOPress and @jensstoltenberg) The programme of the visit is subject to change, please call the NATO Press office for more information Tel: + 32 2 707 50 41. (As delivered) Thank you so much, Minister Cavusoglu. Its great to be back in Ankara and to meet with you Mevlut, we have met many times and this is my fourth visit to turkey as Secretary General of NATO and I think that reflects the key role and the importance of the Turkish contributions to our Alliance. And I would like to thank you for Turkeys very strong contribution to the Alliance over so many years. Turkey is at the forefront of a very volatile region. From terrorism and conflict in the Middle East and North Africa to Russias destabilizing military activities. Turkey is playing a crucial role in tackling human trafficking in the Aegean Sea. Responding to the request by Turkey, as well as Greece and Germany, NATO took swift decisions to deploy ships to the Aegean in February. Our ships have been collecting information and conducting monitoring. In support of the efforts of Turkey, Greece, and the European border agency Frontex. I appreciate the very good cooperation between NATOs Standing Maritime Group and the Turkish coastguard and navy. Based on the information NATO and NATO vessels provide, Turkey is taking action to help break the business model of the human traffickers. And figures from different international organisations confirm that the numbers of migrants and refugees crossing the Aegean Sea is now going down significantly. And it confirms that our collective efforts are making a difference. We need to remain flexible because the people smugglers can shift their routes very rapidly. I also welcome the steps you are taking to implement the agreement with the EU. This is not easy, but it is important for a sustainable solution. The migrant and refugee crisis demonstrates how urgent it is to find a peaceful solution to the Syrian conflict. Despite the announced partial withdrawal, we see that Russia maintains a considerable military presence in support of the Assad regime in Syria. The Syrian ceasefire is under strain. But it remains the best basis for a negotiated, peaceful solution to the crisis. I welcome Turkeys important contribution to the Global Coalition to counter ISIL, not least by providing critical infrastructure at the Incirlik airbase and by supporting the Coalition in other ways. We stand united in the fight against terrorism. There can be no justification for the horrific attacks weve seen here in Ankara, in Istanbul, and elsewhere in Turkey. NATO continues to augment Turkeys air defences through AWACS overflights and the Patriot deployment. We have just started training Iraqi officers in Jordan. And I welcome Turkeys offer to host such training in the future. At our Summit in Warsaw in July, we must step up our support to regional partners to build up their forces and project stability beyond our borders. In the fight against terrorism, building local capacity is one of the best weapons we have. We see that every day in Afghanistan, where Turkey plays a key role. You are one of the framework nations in our mission to train, advise and assist Afghan soldiers and police. We are grateful for Turkeys long-standing contribution to our Alliance in so many different ways. As we face the most significant security challenges in a generation, NATO will continue to stand strong and united. Thank you. Q: [Translated from Turkish] TRANSLATOR: Turkish Aksam Daily and I have a question to both the Minister and the Secretary General. NATO is actually the largest security organization of the world and as the Secretary General has mentioned with respect to fight against terrorism there are a lot of fights that are taking place. In terms of sharing of intelligence between NATO allies do you think this is important and sufficient for the Alliance and is there any opinion of establishing such a joint intelligence mechanism within NATO in the coming days? We know that some NATO countries are objecting to the attitude of Turkey declaring PYD as a terrorist organization. They provide arms or they provide support in the field. How do you evaluate this, as the Secretary General of NATO? How does this affect or harm the joint ideology or the joint forces in NATO? Thank you. JENS STOLTENBERG (NATO Secretary General): We are sharing intelligence within NATO. We are also constantly assessing how we can do that even more efficiently. And we have different mechanisms for sharing intelligence and I think that the fight against terrorism just underlines the importance of NATO and the fact that NATO allies are working together in many different ways but also by sharing intelligence to fight terrorism. I think we have to understand - or it is important to remember - that to fight terrorism is about many different things. We have to have a comprehensive approach meaning that its about civilian efforts, police, civilian intelligence sharing, but also different military efforts. And NATO contributes to the fight against terrorism in different ways. We share intelligence but we also address the root causes by helping to stabilize the countries where we see ISIL, where we see terrorism and thats actually the reason why we are in Afghanistan - our biggest ever military operation is a direct response to a terrorist attack against a NATO ally - the United States, 9/11 2001. But we are also supporting the efforts of the coalition against ISIL. We have assurance measures, military presence in Turkey and we have started the training of Iraqi officers to help them increase their capability and capacity to fight ISIL. So everything from sharing the intelligence to build local capacity in the Middle East, North Africa; we stand ready to also support the new government and national accord in Libya to help them. All of this is important contributions to the fight against terrorism. Turkey of course has the right to protect itself against terrorist attacks, and we have seen horrific terrorist attacks in Ankara and Istanbul and elsewhere in Turkey and there is no justification for this kind of brutal terrorist attacks. And Turkey has the right to defend itself against terrorist attacks as any other country has the right to do so. We stand in solidarity with Turkey and Turkeys an ally which we are working very closely together with in the fight against terrorism. MEVLUT CAVUSOGLU (Turkish Foreign Affairs Minister): [Translated from Turkish]. TRANSLATOR: The sensitivity of sharing of information and intelligence is present in NATO and we do appreciate this but in terms of information exchange amongst the allies. I think this should be more effective especially the sharing of intelligence should be momentaneous [sic] and on in time. There are certain lacks on this especially with respect to foreign terrorist fighters and we see the ramifications of this like in the attacks in Brussels and other countries. If we have timely information we know what Turkey can do in terms of foreign terrorist fighters. We have seen this in origin [sic] countries and in destination countries. So amongst the allies and the countries the sharing of information should be improved within the NATO framework and NATO determinism. On the other hand, in terms of PYD/YPG we did provide information to the distinguished Secretary General on what kind of terrorist organization is this, and that there is no difference between PKK and this organization. And the leaders have been enlightened by the (inaudible) Administration, and when you look at the upper level echelons many of them stem from the representatives of PKK and in the terrorist attacks in Ankara the responsible people have been trained in PYD/YPG camps. They have an office in Moscow and the symbol is very clear, the old symbol of the ex-USSR. The ideology is clear. So in Iraq, in Syria and in some other areas, instead of supporting such terrorist organizations as the distinguished Secretary General has proposed, the allies and NATO should actually train in the local forces, increase their capacity, restructure them and we can have a much more healthy fight against terrorism. Q: [Translated from Turkish]. TRANSLATOR: Daily Sabah. This is a question to the Secretary General. As you have also mentioned in your remarks on 8th of March, Turkey has signed an agreement with the European Union and you indicated that there was important decreases in the immigrants in the Aegean Sea. NATO is currently conducting certain naval missions. Do you think that this mission should end taking into consideration the reduction in these figures? JENS STOLTENBERG: I think what we have seen is that NATO has contributed in an important way to the international collective efforts to cope with the migrant and refugee crisis in the Aegean Sea. And this is part of a broader approach where the aim is to cut the lines of human smugglers; the illegal trafficking. And to be able to return refugees but at the same time also make it possible for genuine refugees to go from Turkey to Europe in a safe and orderly and legal way. So this is one part of a broader package what NATO is doing in the Aegean Sea when we are cutting the lines of the illegal smugglers, human smugglers and their business models. We have seen a significant reduction in the numbers, but I think its important not to end this activity too early because we still see that the smugglers are trying to get people over the Aegean Sea and also we have to be prepared that if we leave then we can see a return of the high numbers of people trying to cross the Aegean Sea in an illegal and dangerous way. So we have to stay there as long as needed. We do this in very close cooperation with Turkey and Greece and the European Union Border Agency Frontex. And actually I think that one of the important reasons why NATO is doing this activities in the Aegean Sea is that we create an additional platform for cooperation between Turkey and Greece, and between Turkey and the European Union. And that adds and it makes an important contribution to the overall international collective efforts to cope with the situation. So we we are following the situation, we are in close contact with Greece and Turkey and the European Union, and then I think its important not to end the activities too early. Syunik governor in Frances Vienne, sister city of Armenias Goris, discusses implemented projects, future cooperation Climate protesters throw mashed potatoes at Monet painting in Germany museum There is chance for peace in Ukraine, Macron says US, Russia defense chiefs discuss Ukraine situation for 2nd time in last few days Turkey plans to set up 2 more military bases in northern Syria Germany wants to use Israel UAVs to protect its key infrastructures UK defense secretary holds phone talk with Russia counterpart US to attempt set Russia oil price cap above $60 per barrel? Russia, Turkey defense ministers confer about Ukraine situation Armenia official: Terms for buying, building houses for those displaced from Artsakh have improved Saudi Arabia forum set to draw American business leaders despite existing tensions Iran plans to increase natural gas exports to Turkey Iran army ground forces holding exercise in West Azarbaijan Province Sovereignty renunciation to be punished in Armenia with 12-15 years of imprisonment, as per justice ministry draft 2 pilots killed in Russia fighter jet crash Russia, France defense ministers discuss Ukraine Fighter jet crashes into house in Russias Irkutsk 150 residents of 3 Karabakh settlements handed over to Azerbaijan get compensation certificates Rishi Sunak confirms UK premier bid Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson hold talks Biden slammed for 'scary' long pause during interview Elite US troops conducting exercises on Ukraine border Iran MP: Military exercises on Azerbaijan border are decisive response to Israel Xi Jinping elected Communist Party of China Central Committee general secretary Armenia envoy presents credentials to Bosnia and Herzegovina Presidency chair Hungary to approve by years end Sweden, Finland petitions to join NATO US researchers debunk main theory for origin of life Iranian MP: Iran will conduct military exercises wherever it deems necessary Finnish delegation to visit Ankara to discuss NATO membership Social media giants are likely to oppose Turkey's new law Pastor steals $900,000 to buy stocks and car in U.S. Lithuanian President Nauseda is named most popular politician in country Charles III will embark on longest tour of world in history of royal family Deputy Director of Institute of Oriental Studies of RAS: Baku's goal is that Karabakh has no Armenian population Hurricane Roslyn in Pacific Ocean intensifies to third category Italy's new prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, begins forming government U.S. Treasury Department records budget deficit of over $429 billion in September Why does Baku need aggravation on border with Armenia? Skakov assesses likelihood of new aggression Iranian Foreign Minister: I had important meeting with Pashinyan in Armenia Johnson spotted in economy class on flight from Dominican Republic to Britain Armenian PM and European Parliament Resident Rapporteur for Armenia discuss Karabakh situation Authorities in Kherson urge residents to immediately leave city Russian expert: Baku's attempts to open corridor by force will cause negative response not only from IRI or Russian Telegraph: Britain to send about 60 old tanks to NATO base in Germany for exercises Artak Beglaryan: You will see me in new position Netanyahu: Iran nuclear deal could bring Russia 'hundreds of billions' Russia and Turkey begin to develop gas hub project PM Pashinyan discusses agenda of bilateral relations with Iranian FM Anna Hakobyan meets Armenians in Paris Sargsyan: Recognition of Artsakh people's right for self-determination must be reflected in legal documents Italy's first female prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, sworn in Private jet goes missing off coast of Costa Rica Times of India: India tests nuclear-capable Agni Prime missile Spiegel: German Foreign Minister and Defense Minister ask to allocate 2.2 billion for military aid to Kiev Deputy PM of Armenia and Head of Sharjah Heritage Institute discuss strengthening of Armenian-Emirati relations Biden allows participation in U.S. presidential election in 2024 Secretary of Security Council of Armenia and representatives of AIISA discuss security issues Kakhovka reservoir increases water discharges in case of possible destruction of HPP Pashinian's spouse: Yesterday at Elysee Palace I was received by dear Brigitte Macron At least 15 people killed in bus-truck collision in India Explosion at Uzbek Defense Ministry depot injures 16 people Armenian NA Speaker receives Iranian FM: Tehran opposes obstacles on border with friendly Armenia President Harutyunyan receives group of members of Union of Artsakh Reserve Officers NGO Newspaper: Armenia restores diplomatic ties with Hungary? China hit by 5.5 magnitude earthquake Armenian Defense Ministry denies Azerbaijani report on shelling, calling it disinformation Blinken: Moscow is not interested in stopping aggression against Ukraine Japan and U.S. will hold joint military exercises France withdraws from Energy Charter Treaty CNN: White House is in talks with Elon Musk to create satellite Internet service Starlink in Iran Baku outraged by Iran's statements and frightened by IRGC military exercises Who are main beneficiaries of 'Zangezur' corridor?: Another anonymous article by 'Haykakan Zhamanak' newspaper Ankara decides to stand up for Riyadh amid deteriorating relations between Saudi Arabia and U.S. French Foreign Minister considers it vital to keep lines of communication with Russia open Pentagon refuses to give details of conversation between Austin and Shoigu Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin: Head of Caucasus Muslims Department again made slanderous and false statements Erdogan denies using chemical weapons against Kurds and threatens those who dare to talk about it Saudi Arabia and China will strengthen their ties in energy sector Governor of Gegharkunik province receives representatives of OSCE fact-finding mission Penny Mordaunt runs for Prime Minister of Great Britain Sweden expects ratification of NATO membership application by Hungary and Turkey to be completed soon European Union will allocate 1.5 billion euros per month to Kiev in 2023 An Israeli-built flight school opened in Greece Russian Railways is negotiating with Azerbaijan and Iran to launch the Rasht-Astara route Overchuk: Construction of road through Meghri, whose sovereignty is not in question, depends on Armenia's position Armenian Defense Minister's working visit to India is over Hungary will not agree to limit prices for imported gas Iranian Foreign Minister: Iran considers Armenia one of most important transit countries Naribekyan participates in meeting of secretaries general of PACE parliaments Delegation from United Arab Emirates visits Armenia at invitation of head of MONKS: Two agreements signed Dollar, euro drop in Armenia Iran consul general in Armenias Kapan: We do not accept any change of borders Baza: Mobile military registration and enlistment offices will be removed on Russian-Georgian border Iranian Consul: Countries of region do not need presence of foreign armed forces Armenia FM: Iran consulate general in Kapan will be important for regional security Iranian Consul General advises Kapan residents not to worry anymore: Iran is here for Armenian people FM reaffirms Armenia plan to open consulate general in Irans Tabriz Turkey to open consulate in occupied Armenian Shushi city of Artsakh Turkish Ministry of Finance: Ankara can buy Russian oil without Western funding Armenia Security Council chief briefs European Parliament rapporteur on recent Azerbaijan military aggression The leading candidate for the US president from the Republican Party, Donald Trump, said that the electoral system in the United States is so flawed that he could easily buy the elections, if he wanted to, reports TASS with reference to ABC. "I could buy an election and more than once, said Trump. Believe me. I think that we have a very bad system. The system is indeed unfair. " The billionaire gave examples of technics which, according to him, election campaigns of some of the candidates use to get support of delegates at the partys conventions, who nominate the candidate for the presidency. "They can put delegates in planes, send them to the resort, arrange dinners for them. They can reserve hotels for them. All these say that they can buy elections, "said Trump. At the same time the billionaire said that if there was such a game "to buy elections", he, undoubtedly, would have been a winner. Trump is a leader in the fight for becoming the GOP nominee in the general election that will be held on 8 November. On Tuesday, the politician had a landslide victory in the election in his home state of New York. He received the votes of 89 delegates (out of 95) who will attend the party congress July 18-21 in Cleveland (Ohio). To be the Republican nominee, the candidate needs support of 1237 delegates. At the moment Trump has 845, whereas his rivals Senator Ted Cruz - 543, and Senator Marco Rubio - 171. STEPANAKERT. - The Human Rights Defender of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) has published an interim public report on the atrocities committed by Azerbaijani military forces against the civilian population of the NKR and the servicemen of the NKR Defense Army on 2-5 April 2016.In this connection, the Human RIghts Defenser issued the following statement: Dear Colleagues, On April 02, 2016 Azerbaijani military forces breached the Ceasefire Agreement of 1994 by a well-planned large-scale massive attack. The most serious and bloody military operation along the entire NKR-Azerbaijani line of contact for the last 20 years was initiated, that resulted in gross mass violations of human rights. Today, the Interim Public Report of the NKR Ombudsman on Atrocities Committed by Azerbaijani Military Forces against the Civilian Population of the NKR and the Servicemen of the NKR Defence Army on April 2-5, 2016 has been published. The Report is in English and it analyses the Azerbaijani hatred policy towards people of Armenian origin and its horrific consequences that violate all international human rights standards with certain examples of torture and humiliation. The Report provides international human rights organizations objective assessments of Azerbaijans policy of inciting hatred and violence towards people of Armenian ethnicity. It also presents hate speech in the Azerbaijani mass media and social networks. The Report also reveals Azerbaijani high officials and other public persons activities aimed at spreading hate speech and incitement to violence. The Report presents the violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law; cases of attacks on civlian population of NKR, cases of inhuman treatment, as well as cases of torture and mutilation of the NKR Defence Army Servicemen. The Report will be sent to international human rights organizations, ombudsmens international institutions and to respective foreign institutions. I would like to thank the human rights NGOs of the Republic of Nagorno Karabakh for their assistance in drafting the Report, as well as all mass media representatives that have revealed in their publications the brutal cases of gross human rights violations. 18+ Warning: The Report contains pictures and descriptions of brutality and mutilation committed by Azerbaijani military forces. The report reflects pictures largely disseminated in the media. Sincerely, NKR Human Rights Defender Hundreds of faculty, staff and students wore jeans April 20 for Emory Denim Day, an annual event designed to show support for survivors of sexual assault and the larger goal of ending sexual violence. The event raises funds to support survivors through Emorys Respect Program, which serves as a central hub for sexual and relationship violence prevention programs, as well as efforts to create a more survivor-supportive campus community. The Student Government Association has pledged to donate $1 for every participant who shared a Denim Day photo with the Respect Program via email, Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. Emory Healthcare was a new partner in the event this year, creating special denim pins available for employees who could not wear jeans due to hospital uniform requirements. Emory President James Wagner was honored this week with a tribute entered into the Congressional Record, the official publication of the daily proceedings and remarks in Congress. U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson, Georgia's senior senator, read the tribute on the floor of the Senate on Monday, April 18, and presented a copy to Wagner during a meeting in his Senate office on Tuesday. In the tribute, Isakson noted that Wagner would soon step down after 13 years as Emory's president. "I feel I would be remiss if I did not mark some of his achievements at Emory here in the Record, as the success of Emory University and its students has made a difference to our nation," Isakson said. Wagner described the tribute as "a humbling surprise." He is visiting Washington, D.C., this week for the annual Association of American Universities (AAU) presidents meeting. In addition to visiting with Isakson, Wagner also met with Sen. Tim Scott from South Carolina; Rep. Kathy Castor from Florida, who is an Emory alumna; and Emorys own congressman, Rep. John Lewis. Wagner also had the opportunity to introduce House Budget Chairman Tom Price from Georgia at the AAU meeting. Here is the text of Isakson's tribute to Wagner as published in the Congressional Record: Today I am honored to recognize in the RECORD James W. Wagner, a leader at the helm of one of Georgias great institutions of higher education, Emory University. After 13 years as president of Emory University, Mr. Wagner will soon be stepping down from his position. I feel I would be remiss if I did not mark some of his achievements at Emory here in the RECORD, as the success of Emory University and its students has made a difference to our Nation. Emory Universitys reputation as a private research university that has led in academic, research, and health care eminence extends far beyond its beautiful campus, which is headquartered in the beautiful Druid Hills neighborhood of Atlanta, GA. President Wagner has enhanced the schools reputation, recruiting a world-class and diverse community of scholars and researchers who have secured an increased number of appointments to national academies and an increased amount of external research funding that added up to more than $570 million in 2015. President Wagner guided the Emory community in developing the universitys first vision statement, which established the foundation for a 10-year strategic plan focused on strengthening faculty distinction, ensuring the highest student quality, enhancing the student experience, and exploring new frontiers in science and technology. President Wagner also led a fundraising campaign that resulted in the investment of $1.7 billion in support of the universitys initiatives in teaching, research, scholarship, patient care, and social action. In short, President Wagner has advanced all aspects of the universitys mission through the innovative design and construction of a number of new facilities to support health sciences research, science education, residential life, library resources, and patient care. I hope that President Wagner and I will remain in touch wherever his next step takes him, and I wish him and his wife, Debbie, the very best. 16:34 In other news, superstar Shah Rukh Khan wants his children, Aryan and Suhana to complete their education first and then have a career in showbiz. "I am a big believer in education, so they (his kids) have to finish studying first. My son will graduate. He has finished his 12th and he will have four years of college. My daughter is in school, she has two years of school and four years of college. The minimum requirement is to graduate," Shah Rukh told PTI in an interview. "If you have an undying passion for films then get into it, not because you are good looking or Shah Rukh Khan's kids or because I am an actor so they also have to be one. These are wrong reasons (to enter films)," the "Dilwale" star said. SRK's friend and frequent collaborator Karan Johar has often said that he would launch Aryan, but the actor says if his children choose to pursue acting then they should do something that will take the Indian cinema forward. "If they (kids) want to act, I would be very proud as it's my line of work and we will have something to chat about. When I came here, I got into theatre, did television and then I got into films. I have strangely studied for 10 years before becoming a film star," the 50-year-old actor said. "They (kids) will also have to do the same thing; develop a passion, get educated and come back and do something that will take Indian cinema forward. Don't come back or rely on it to take you forward. Indian cinema has helped your dad become a star, now it's the duty of his family to take it forward." 54 percent of voters support veterans courts CARBONDALE, Ill. -- A recent poll by Southern Illinois University Carbondales Paul Simon Public Policy Institute shows 54 percent of Illinois registered voters support creating veterans courts. The courts would offer veterans charged with crimes to have treatment options for post-traumatic stress disorder or drug and alcohol addiction instead of going to jail. On April 14, a bill to amend the Veterans and Service Members Court Treatment Act passed the Illinois House with 108 votes. This bill, HB5003, introduced by state Rep. Christine Winger, R-Bloomingdale, now moves to the Senate. The bill proposes changing one word in the current law that in effect would require chief judges in each judicial circuit to establish veterans court programs in their circuit instead of only authorizing them to establish these programs. Younger voters and women supported the idea while older voters and men tended not to like it. Veterans health issues are important public policy issues after 15 years of conflict around the world, David Yepsen, institute director, said. This poll indicates most Illinois voters want policy makers to give returning veterans all the help they can. The random participants in the statewide poll were asked: Some say military veterans charged with crimes should be processed in so-called veterans courts that could offer post-traumatic stress treatment and substance abuse treatment instead of incarceration. Others say veterans should be processed in the same courts as everyone else. Which comes closer to your view? Region: Support is uniform throughout the state at just over one-half. In both Chicago and the Chicago suburbs, including suburban Cook and the collar counties, 53 percent of voters stated that veterans should have special courts. Support is a bit higher through rural Illinois at 55 percent. Opposition to veterans courts was 40 percent, 39 percent and 40 percent in Chicago, the Chicago suburbs, and rural Illinois, respectively. Political Party: Democrats and Republicans seem more supportive and like-minded on this issue than independents. Democratic and Republican voters support veterans courts at 57 percent and 55 percent, respectively. Support drops significantly to 41 percent among independents. A majority of independents, 53 percent, oppose veterans courts. Thirty-six percent of Democrats and 41 percent of Republicans oppose veterans courts. Gender: A clear majority of women support veterans courts while support is evenly divided among men. Sixty percent of women support using these courts while less than one-third of female voters are opposed. Only 46 percent of men support while 48 percent opposed. Age Groups: There is majority support in each of four standardized age groups, but significantly more support among voters younger than 35. Nearly two-thirds, 65 percent, of voters younger than 35 years old, support veterans courts. The support dips among older voters. Of those 35 to 50 years old, 51 percent support veterans courts, and that support is the same for voters 66 and older. For voters 51 to 65-years-old, support is slightly higher at 56 percent. Delio Calzolari, institute associate director and one of the designers of the poll, said although most veterans return to civilian life without encountering the criminal justice system, many do not. Veterans court programs are an opportunity to address addiction and mental health issues stemming from military experience but these programs take resources, too. These are not get-out-of-jail-free cards, Calzolari said. If a vet fails to complete the program his or her case goes back to criminal court. Calzolari is a lawyer and a veteran. Poll results are available here. For more information, contact Calzolari at 618/453-4001. The margin of error for the entire sample of 1,000 voters is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. This means that if we conducted the survey 100 times, in 95 of those instances, the result would be within plus or minus the reported margin for error for each subsample. Live telephone interviews were conducted by Customer Research International of San Marcos, Texas, using the random digit dialing method. Potential interviewees were screened based on whether they were registered voters and quotas based on area code and sex (<60 percent female). Interviewers asked to speak to the youngest registered voter at home at the time of the call. Cell phone interviews accounted for 40 percent of the sample. A Spanish language version of the questionnaire and a Spanish-speaking interviewer were made available. Fieldwork was conducted from Feb. 15 through Feb. 20. No auto-dial or robo polling is included. Customer Research International reports no Illinois political clients. The survey was paid for with non-tax dollars from the institutes endowment fund. Crosstabs for the referenced questions will be on the Institutes polling website, http://paulsimoninstitute.siu.edu/opinion-polls/index.php. Simon Institute polling data are also archived by three academic institutions for use by scholars and the public. The three open source data repositories are: the University of Michigans Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (OpenICPSR; http://openicpsr.org/repoEntity/list), the University of North Carolinas Odum Institute Dataverse Network (http://arc.irss.unc.edu/dvn/dv/PSPPI), and the Simon Institute Collection at OpenSIUC (http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/ppi/). Note: The Paul Simon Public Policy Institute Poll, the Simon Poll and the Southern Illinois Poll are the copyrighted trademarks of the Board of Trustees of Southern Illinois University. Use and publication of these polls is encouraged -- but only with credit to the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at SIU Carbondale. Sam Oltman, a senior in mechanical engineering from of Putnam, front, and Olivia Taitt, a sophomore in mechanical engineering from Lebanon, fly through the course during NASAs Human Exploration Rover Challenge, held April 8-9 in Huntsville, Ala. (Photo provided) SIU teams finish in top 10 in NASA competition by Tim Crosby CARBONDALE, Ill. Two teams from Southern Illinois University Carbondale finished in the top 10 during this years Human Exploration Rover Challenge, held April 8-9 in Huntsville, Ala. The annual contest is sponsored by NASA. Previously known as the moonbuggy race and hosted by NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center, the SIU teams finished eighth and ninth overall in this years competition. The SIU teams also were finalists in the wheel design competition, said Tsuchin Chu, professor of mechanical engineering and energy processes, and faculty adviser for the teams. Both teams did very well, Chu said. I am proud of their resourcefulness during the race and their overall accomplishment. The event featured almost 70 teams of high school, college and university students from 18 states and Puerto Rico, as well as a strong contingent of international teams from Germany, India, Mexico, Italy, and Russia. Rafaelina E. Lebron Flores of Patillas, Puerto Rico, won first place in the high school division, while a team from Purdue University won the college division. Jess Pille, a senior in mechanical engineering and president of the club, said SIU bested teams from other top universities, including Arizona State, Ohio State, as well as universities from Germany and Russia. We were also top contenders in the tire design with several NASA and Boeing official judges interested in our work, said Pille, of Hanna City. The whole team was very motivated to compete this year and everyone had a helping hand in the construction of this years buggy. The competition is designed as a research project for students to investigate and test technologies that could potentially be used on future deep-space exploration missions. NASA made two new and important changes to the event this year, one of those being a requirement that teams design and fabricate their own wheels. Any component used to contact the course surface for traction and mobility had to be original and not an off-the-shelf or commercially available item. Second, NASA created an optional sample retrieval challenge in which teams teams attempted to use a mechanical arm or grabber designed and built by the team to collect samples of four different substances liquid, small pebbles, large rocks and soil in the fastest time. SIU both built a new buggy and brought an older one out of retirement for this years competition. Pille said both SIU buggies experienced problems with steering, which was a major contributor to some of the penalties the teams incurred. But we persevered and managed to get both buggies to run for a great finish, he said. A veteran of four such competitions, the silver buggy had won the best design award in 2013 and earned a second-place finish in 2014. The SIU team assigned to it won eighth place with a time of 9 minutes 56 seconds. It ran both days and was the last buggy on Friday to run, as well as one of the first to run on Saturday, Pille said. The team assembled the 216-pound buggy part of the competition requirements in just 10 seconds. The buggy ran the course in 7:35 on Friday, but was assessed three, one-minute penalties. On Saturday, it ran the course in 6:46, again with three, one-minute penalties. Michaela Lydon, from Houston, and Roger Mast, from Arthur, both juniors in mechanical engineering, were the primary drivers on the silver buggy. The silver buggy also participated in the sample retrieval challenge. The riders for this mission were Liz Popolizio, of Ridgecrest, Calif., and Jacob Churchill of Petersburg, both juniors in mechanical engineering. Both were first-timers at the event. This years new buggy, the bronze buggy, was designed by the 2016 senior design team. That team included Pille, Jacob Pacotti of Mackinaw, Lucas Fink of Dwight, and Sam Oltman of Putnam, who served as project manager. All are seniors in mechanical engineering. The bronze buggy, which finished ninth overall with a time of 11:08 including four one-minute penalties only managed to race on Saturday. Oltman, a veteran of three previous contests, and Olivia Taitt, a sophomore in mechanical engineering from Lebanon, rode the 204-pound machine. The bronze buggy weighed 12 pounds less than the silver buggy and ran a 22-second faster time, Pille said. Unfortunately we had failures in steering, ergonomics and drive, which many of these issues could have been resolved given more time to test. Regardless, the members of the club who will be leading the team next year say that they would like to improve the bronze buggy, and potentially retire the silver buggy, he said. Other members of this years SIU team included Michael Kiesewetter, a junior from Farmington; Marquise Rodgers, a senior from Bellwood; Evan Butler, a sophomore from Mundelein; Evan Gebhardt, a junior from Carol Stream; Austin Peterson, a senior from Rockford; and Ifreke Umana, a graduate student from Carbondale. All are mechanical engineering majors. China will strictly control credit available for new capacity additions in the steel and coal sectors, both of which are suffering from price sapping supply gluts, according to a government statement issued on Thursday. China's central bank, along with other government bodies, said China would also strengthen support for the export of coal and steel in a bid to ease domestic overcapacity. The government aims to speed up the handling of non-performing loans in the debt-ridden sectors, and extend direct financing to support their restructuring. It would also would work to deal with possible default risks in the two sectors as soon as possible.REUTERS PR VP1214 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0105-693660.Xml "The Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) conducted military operations against enemies in 13 of the 34 Afghan provinces. The ground forces were supported by the Afghan air force and artillery," Xinhua news agency reported quoting the ministry's statement. "The ANSF inflicted heavy casualties on the militants. Ten army soldiers were also killed during the raids," the statement said. Those killed included 21 Islamic State (IS) militants. At least 11 of the IS fighters also wounded after Afghan army and coalition forces launched airstrikes against an IS training centre in Achin district of eastern Nangarhar province, said the statement. The Afghan security forces have beefed up security operations against militants recently. The ANSF also seized weapons and defused several roadside bombs planted by the militants, the statement said. --IANS pgh/dg ( 168 Words) 2016-04-21-16:54:06 (IANS) Feroze Shah, deputy Inspector General Police, said the policemen were escorting teams giving polio vaccines to children in Orangi Town area when they came under attack, Xinhua news agency reported. He said the attackers first gunned down three policemen who were on foot and then opened indiscriminate fire at a police mobile, killing four more policemen and injuring three others. No polio worker was killed or injured in the drive-by shooting by four militants on two motorcycles. The attackers fled the scene. The police have launched a search operation in the area. The injured were rushed to a hospital where the medico-legal officer said they were in critical condition. The three-day polio eradication drive, which started on Monday, was suspended following the incident. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack yet. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif condemned the killings and directed hospital authorities to provide best possible medical treatment to the injured. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world where the polio virus is yet to be eradicated. The anti-polio campaign in Pakistan has been badly affected by militants who attack polio teams and threaten parents against allowing health workers to administer polio vaccine to their children. An estimated 80 workers have been killed by militants on polio teams since December 2012. --Indo-Asian News Service mr/ ( 260 Words) 2016-04-20-17:10:04 (IANS) The Prime Minister's awards for excellence in public administration have been instituted with a view to acknowledge, recognize and reward the extraordinary and innovative work done by officers of the Central and State Governments for the welfare of common citizen. These awards are given on civil services day. This time a new category of excellence in implementing priority programmes has been added to the Prime Minister's awards. It includes Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojna, Swachh Bharat Mission, Swachh Vidyalaya and Soil Health Card Scheme. A total of ten districts will be awarded this year under the four Priority Programmes. These awards will be given in three Groups, - the first group consists of eight North-Eastern States and the three Hill States of Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir. The remaining 18 States constitute the second Group while the third Group comprises of the seven Union Territories. (ANI) A terrorist has been neutralised in an encounter with security forces that is underway in Lolab area of Kupwara district in Jammu and Kashmir. The surrounding Puthshahi area has been completely cordoned off as the security forces are trying to smoke out the remaining two-three terrorists who are still hiding in the area. The Army and the Jammu and Kashmir police have launched a joint counter strike against the terrorist as a massive gunbattle is underway. More details to follow. (ANI) With drought continuing to hit the normal lives of the people all across the nation, farmers near Uttar Pradesh's capital city are left with nothing but to weep as they just look at the sky, hoping the rains would soon arrive and bring life back into their fields. With thousands of litres of water being used to ensure a dust-free makeshift helipad for Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, farmers in Lucknow have been hit hard by an early onset of summer which has damaged their crops. One of the farmers in Kakori District, distressed with the severe water scarcity in the region, says that the entire village is under a dry spell. "12-14 tube wells are present in the village but there is no water. All our crops have damaged," he told ANI. Another farmer in Bakshi Ka Talab area of the city says that his entire brinjal crop has been damaged due to shortage of water. "We can't do anything without water. Due to shortage, entire brinjal crop is damaged," he tells with tears in his eyes. Searing heat has disrupted the normal life, not only in Lucknow but Varanasi as well where temperature has hovered close to 44 degrees Celsius. Akhilesh Yadav had last week directed installation of additional 666 hand-pumps in the seven drought-hit districts of Bundelkhand region. Earlier, the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister had allocated Rs 867.87 crore for farmers in parched areas of the state. The Bundelkhand region is home to 18.3 million people as per 2011 census and is blighted with drought and unseasonable rains that has destroyed standing winter crops. In the last few years, several farmers lacking money for seeds and water for irrigation have committed suicide. (ANI) Total liquor prohibition in Bihar has come as a boon to the liquor trade in bordering areas of the Uttar Pradesh-Bihar border. Some people are terming this boom as a ' Daru tourism'. Ban in Liquor has given rise to illegal liquor business in these districts. Officials here today claimed that the sale and consumption of the country liquor (CL) in eastern UP districts bordering Bihar has shot up by 2,000 per cent. The Bihar government on April 7 had announced a total ban on liquor in the state. The sale of the India Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL) has also registered phenomenal increase in eastern UP districts. State Excise Commissioner Bhavnath confirmed here that the sale of IMFL has registered an increase of over 50 per cent across the state while in eastern UP districts, it has increased by several hundred per cent. "The sale of the CL has also registered a sharp increase in eastern UP districts and the actual data will be available only in the first week of the next month. After several decades, we will surpass the revenue collection target this financial year," he claimed. In eastern UP districts of Ballia, Deoria, Kushinagar, Ghazipur, Chanduli, UP excise department has not only increased the number of liquor vends it has also increased the Minimum Guarantee Quota (MGQ) for the CL shops in eastern UP districts. MGQ is the quantity of CL, the vendor is required to lift or pay the excise duty during the whole financial year as per the agreement with the excise department. In Ballia district, the MGQ of one CL liquor vend has increased to one lakh litre for the current fiscal against the annual MGQ of 6,000 litres in 2015-16. "The MGQ for CL released for this financial year 2016 2017 is for 1 lakh litre as compared to 5000 to 6000 litres in 2015-16. Besides, 7 to 8 new CL vendors have sought licenses and are operating in the district on the borders of Bihar'', said the district excise Officer of Balia, Bhuaal Singh. Similar is the story in Deoria, Kushinagar, Ghazipur, and Chanduli. Gorakhpur and Maharajganj. ''Tipplers from Bihar are coming in droves from Bihar to have their quota of spirits daily. They also manage to smuggle the small stocks of liquor to Bihar through various means,'' said an official of the excise department in east UP district. Besides the CL, the sale of the IMFL and beer has also increased by over 100 per cent in the month of April this year in all the districts bordering Bihar. The district excise office of Deoria is also happy with the 'change' brought by the prohibition in Bihar. "The MGQ for CL has been doubled in the district as compared to last financial year of 2015-16 and the number of liquor vends including IMFL and Beer has also increased in the district", said the excise officer of Deoria, Niresh Paalia. The district excise officer of Kushinagar has a similar tale to share. " People from Bihar are now regular visitors to our district and that is why the state government has also increased the MGQ for the country liquor in the district'', said OP Singh, excise officer of Kushinagar. "In April this year, the sale of all categories of alcohol has increased in the district as compared to last year with the CL showing sharp increase of over 70 per cent and I am confident that the we will exceed the target of revenue collection ", said Rajendra Kumar , the excise officer of Ghazipur. The state government has fixed a target of revenue of Rs 19,250 crore from the excise department for the current fiscal 2016 17 fiscal. The spurt in revenue collection is attributed to two reasons first the prohibition policy enforced by the Bihar government from April 7 and second is the 25 per cent reduction in excise duty on IMFL in UP from this fiscal 2016-17. The UP government in February had decided to reduce the excise duty of alcohol by 28 per cent from the new fiscal which commenced from April 1. The cut in duty has resulted in spurt in sales across the state. In the run-up to the 2012 state assembly elections, Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav had hit out at the then Mayawati government for increasing the price of liquor in the state. ''Is sarkar mein to aapki shaam ki dawa bhi mahengi ho gayi hai.Hum agar sarkar bayenge to yeh nishchit karenge ki aapki dawai to kum se kum mehengi na ho (In BSP government, prices of your evening medicine (liquor) have gone upIf I form government, I will ensure that your evening medicine's prices are not high),'' Mr Akhilesh Yadav had said without using the term liquor.UNI MB RSA SB 1149 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0196-693565.Xml The Election Commission has sought a report from Murshidabad district magistrate regarding violence and intimidation at a polling booth in which CPI(M) polling agent was today shot dead by miscreants at Shiropara under Domkal Assembly constituency where polling is underway for the third phase of Assembly elections. State election office sources said poll observers were sent immediately to file a separate report on the bloody violence as the third phase polls for 62 seats in four districts began at 0700 hrs. A report said voters in the troubled area of Domkol demanded stopping the process following the death of CPI(M) agent Tahidul Islam. However, polling was on under the tight security of the Central forces.Official sources said about 1,000 complaints of rigging, booth jamming, intimidation and violence have been received by the Commission in the first two hours. Majority of the complaints came from the opposition parties in North Kolkata and Bardhaman districts. Voting is on in Bardhaman(16), Nadia (17), Murshidabad (22) and North Kolkata (7) seats in the third phase polling in which some 13,742,000 voters, including 6,579,218 females, are expected to elect 62 candidates from among 418 aspirants in 16,451 polling stations in four districts. A report said that outsiders obstructed smooth voting at a polling booth under Jorasanko seat in the city where sitting TMC MLA Smitha Bakshi and BJP leader Rahul Sinha are in the contest. The EC put TMC leader Swapan Chakraborty of Belgachia under surveillance and he was asked not to go out of home before 1530 hrs. Bombs were hurled outside the booth number 80 in Ketugram (Bardhaman) where two CPI(M) agents were allegedly manhandled. A voter sustained injuries in the violence. Violence was also reported in Bardhaman's Khandoghosh where three CPI(M)workers and voters were allegedly thrashed by TMC men. Reports of violence were also received from Entally and Beliaghata in the city. Two Congress agents were allegedly kidnapped in Murshidabad's Hariharpara.UNI TEAM-PC PL SB 1118 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0211-693575.Xml Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on Thursday said the required documents, except the ones that affect the national security or involve another officer's name, will be given to Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Purohit. "The matter is in the court. So, I cannot decide on the merit of the case. But I have told the Army that except the country's name whatever documents he (Col. Purohit) wants will be given, except ones which affect the national security or involve another officer's name," Parrikar said on the sidelines of the Naval Commanders Conference here. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) yesterday said that Lieutenant Colonel Purohit was never an accused in the Samjhauta blast case, adding there is no proof against him. The case is to unravel a criminal conspiracy behind the bomb blasts in the Attari Express (Samjhauta) train near Panipat, Haryana, on February 18, 2007. 68 people were killed in the blast and the consequent fire. Lieutenant Colonel Purohit is also an accused in the bombing in Malegaon area of Maharashtra on September 29, 2008. Four people were killed while several others injured in the Malegaon blast. The probe was initially conducted by the Maharashtra ATS and later handed over to the NIA. (ANI) Official sources here today said that a decision was taken here last night and the order is expected to be issued soon. However, the state government was waiting on the decision pending in the Supreme Court on the matter for further action against the officer. Sources said that after the issuance of the suspension letter, the government will also complete the formalities of serving the chargesheet to the officer. Mr Rajiv Kumar surrendered before the special CBI court in Ghaziabad on Monday last after his bail was rejected by the Allahabad High Court. Earlier the special court had given him three years jail term in the Noida plot scam. As per the Service Rule an officer should be suspended within 48 hours if they go to jail.UNI MB SB RK1305 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0196-693675.Xml The Madurai Bench of Madras High Court (HC) has directed the Tamil Nadu government to conduct an extensive publicity campaign to make the physically-challenged aware of the need to obtain National Identity Card for differently-abled to avail various government benefits, besides conducting special camps across the state to issue the cards after medical examination of the applicants. A division bench comprising Justices S Manikumar and C T Selvam issued the direction on a writ petition filed by C Kathiravan who had accused the Virudhunagar District Collector and Differently Abled Welfare Officer of not issuing the ID Card to him though he made a specific representation. A single Judge of the HC Bench had referred the case to the division bench after finding that it involved public interest. The division bench while disposing of the petition, said though the Social Welfare Department had claimed to have issued ID Cards to 11,19,978 people in the State so far, after their disability was assessed to be more than 40 per cent in the medical examination, it had not given district-wise statistics. Similarly, no specific details were furnished with respect to awareness programmes conducted in the rural parts of the State, the judges said. The Judges ordered that publicity materials relating to ID Cards for differently-abled people should not be restricted to notice boards of Social Welfare Department offices in every district. Instead, they should be displayed in rehabilitation homes for children and the aged, hospitals where such people went for treatment and such other institutions and public places frequented by the differently-abled and their relatives. The bench also ordered that the higher education and school education departments should also be roped in for the job and necessary instructions should be given to all Regional Joint Directors of Collegiate Education and District Educational Officers to take necessary steps to create awareness of the need to obtain ID cards and display the details in the notice boards of all colleges and schools. Similar notices should be displayed in Offices of Civic bodies, Anganwadis, Noon-meal Centres and Special schools under the Department of Social Welfare. The Judges further directed the Tamil Nadu State Legal Services Authority to conduct camps at Taluk levels to assess the percentage of disability suffered by the physically challenged and make necessary recommendation for issuance of ID cards. UNI GSM RSA 1357 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0105-693779.Xml The Nagaland State Disaster Management Authority (NSDMA), Home Department, stated today that the recent tremors the North Eastern states have been facing must be treated as an urgent wake up call for each citizen to be prepared to face an earthquake. Secretary to the Government of Nagaland Khrienuo Metha, in a general awareness message has recommended keeping an emergency bag for such disasters. Cautioning that the recent tremors only reconfirms that the seismic faultiness of the eastern Himalayas are hyper-active, the NSDMA recommended that this bag be kept at the main door so that it can be picked up as one runs out during an earthquake. Meanwhile, Nagaland Police has started training police personnel to be prepared during any disaster throughout the state. Due to two frequent quakes in a day, people are also in panic, fearing the earthquake and frequent rumour and predictions, however, authority asks people not to panic and be ready to face any disaster. UNI AS AD AE AS1435 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0108-693830.Xml Shops and business establishments remained closed and traffic was also off the roads due to spontaneous strike. Work in government offices, banks and educational institutions was also affected. Security forces had a tough time to chase away the demonstrators, mostly youths, demanding immediate release of the arrested youth. The demonstrators alleged that security forces were conducting raids on the residence of several youths and trying to frame them in false cases of stone pelting. Additional security forces and state police personnel have been deployed to maintain law and order in the town. UNI BAS PR AS1408 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0153-693751.Xml Police sources said the incident occurred in Gaura village where one Santosh had a big fight with his wife Maya. During the fight, Santosh attacked his wife and three children with a knife. In the attack, Maya (26) and her daughter Roli(14) were killed on the spot while their other two children Monika and Prayansh were critically injured and rushed to the Trauma Centre in Lucknow. The accused has been arrested by the police.UNI XC-MB AE AS1436 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0196-693797.Xml Three members of a family, who were part of a wedding party, were killed and another was injured in an accident near Lauria stadium under Lauria police station area in West Champaran district. Police said here today that four members of a family were on way to attend a marriage at Pujaha Pirijarwa village when their motorcycle was knocked down by a speeding truck coming from opposite direction near Lauria stadium. Three people died on the spot while another sustained serious injuries, police said, adding that he had been sent to the Patna Medical College and Hospital (PMCH) for treatment. Those killed in the accident were identified as -- Paras Sahni, his son Santosh Sahni and son-in-law Sikandar Sahni. All the bodies hadbeen sent for post-mortem, police informed.UNI XC KKS PL SB CS1415 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0211-693795.Xml Police said here that criminals barged into a Math and opened fire onits head priest Brijnandan Das, injuring him seriously. He died while being rushed to a hospital. Soon after the incident, locals reached the spot and blocked the Purhania-Sheohar road to protest the killing, police said, adding Superintendent of Police P N Mishra persuaded the protesting locals to lift the blockade and assured them of arresting the killers. The motive behind the killing was being investigated, police adding that raids were on to nab the killers. UNI XC KKS PL AE AS1448 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0211-693851.Xml The Madurai bench of the Madras High Court has passed an interim order, directing the Centre to take steps to rescue 62 Tamil Nadu fishermen, who were stranded in Saudi Arabia and produce them in the High Court by April 28."It was the bounden duty of the Centre to ensure the safe return of the fishermen through diplomatic channels," observed a division Bench comprising Justices A Selvam and B Gokuldas after passing the order on a Habeas Corpus petition filed by G Thirumurugan, relative of one of the stranded fishermen. The petitioner claimed that the fishermen had been left high and dry in the foreign country and no help was rendered to them. The Court rejected the plea of a Central Government Standing Committee that sought four weeks time to file a counter affidavit to the petition. The petitioner stated that his uncle K Sethu Raja and other fishermen had gone to Saudi Arabia on different dates since 2013 to work under one Yusuf Khaleel in Al Jubail. However, they were cheated and ill treated by their employer who was refusing to return their passports. He claimed to have come to know of the stranded fishermen plight through a video on WhatsApp and sought court intervention on rescuing them. Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa had written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi early this month seeking his intervention to rescue the stranded fishermen. UNI GSM SW AE 1530 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0177-693915.Xml Article 356 of the Constitution must be used as the last resort and was imposed in Uttarakhand contrary to the laws laid by the Supreme Court, a division bench of Chief Justice K M Joseph and V K Bisht ruled. The landmark judgement was delivered on ousted Chief Minister Harish Rawat's plea against the imposition of President's rule in the hill state. Senior Congress leader Indira Hridyesh termed the decision ''historic''. Jubilant Congress workers were seen celebrating outside Mr Rawat's house and Congress party office. According to sources, the Centre was likely to challenge the decision in the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, both Congress and BJP have begun gathering their MLAs and were planning to meet the Governor KK Paul to claim right to form the government in the state. UNI JN RP1555 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0399-694085.Xml Official sources said security forces and state police personnel on a tip-off started a search operation at Newha village in Pulwama district. However, when the security forces were sealing the area, some firing shots were heard. Later people, mostly youths, took to streets and pelted stones on security force search party. Security forces resorted to lathicharge to disperse the demonstrators, who were raising '''pro-freedom'' slogans. Business and other activities came to a halt and traffic also went off the roads. However, no one was injured in the incident. Additional security forces and state police personnel have been rushed to the area, they said.UNI BAS AE AS1519 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0153-693952.Xml Talking to reporters here, PDP Kozhikode district president Adv K Sudhakaran said the five candidates are Central Committee members. The candidates are Razal Nandi, Naushad Kodiyathur, Ahammed Omassery, Naranath Mohammed. He said the party which had already launched its electioneering in the district, was highlighting failure of the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) government in various sectors, including agriculture, education, health, transportation, tourism, railways and coastal protection. The campaign also focused on corruption charges leveled against the government and stand adopted by the UDF and the CPI (M)-led Left Democratic Front on PDP Chairman Abdul Nazar Mahdani, jailed in Bangalore in connection with blast in Indian Institute of Science.UNI PCH DS AE 1621 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0177-694119.Xml Six people suspected to be involved in the 'jihadi activities' were arrested from lower Assam's Chirang district by the state police in the wee hours today, which triggered public protest from the locals in the area. In an early morning operation by a team of Chirang police, six suspected jihadist were apprehended from different locations in the district. The arrested were identified as Joynal Abedin, Imam of a mosque, Rezzak Ali, Kudibor Rahman,Soleman Sheik, Dilbar Rahman and Nur Islam, police sources informed. Assam police had intensified its operation against jihadi on reports that fundamentalist groups are setting up bases in lower Assam, predominantly inhabited by minority people of the state. The arrest of six people triggered a series of protests in the area as villagers ghearoed the local police station demanding the release of the accused. On Saturday night police had arrested four people from the same locations in Kokrajhar and Chirang districts, all said to be jihadis who were allegedly part of a module that had set up a training camp in Chirang that was busted by the police in September 2015.UNI ABI DS AE 1624 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0177-694146.Xml Veteran Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader and former Kerala Chief Minister V S Achuthandan today urged leaders of his party-led Left Democratic Front to avoid controversial statements. The Left leaders should refrain from making controversial statements that could lead to misunderstanding, the nonagenarian leader, spearheading the opposition front's election campaign from northern Kerala said. Cautioning left leaders, he said at a time when media persons were compelled to plant news, they would make use of such statements by the Left, he said in the post. The FB post was necessitated following Mr Vijayan's remarks, he said. This controversy should end here as Mr Vijayan came out with a denial stating ''the media had put words into his mouth.'' He was apparently referring to politburo member Pinarayi Viajayan's statement yesterday that a resolution adopted by the party describing Mr Achuthanandan anti-party, was still relevant. In his post, Mr Vijayan said a section in the media was creating false reports terming Achuthanandan as an anti-party activist. There was a deliberate attempt by a section of the media to sabotage virulent election campaign launched by the LDF, he added.UNI PCH KVV ADB1700 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0414-694283.Xml More than 67 per cent of votes were cast till 1500 hrs today as polling in 62 constituencies for the third phase of West Bengal Assembly elections was underway amid reports of sporadic violence that left one person dead and several injured. The Election Commission said an overall 67.55 per cent turnout was recorded in Murshidabad, Nadia and Burdwan districts, besides in north Kolkata. Burdwan district recorded the maximum turnout at 70.55 per cent, followed by 70.32 per cent in Murshidabad, 68.62 per cent in Nadia and 49.43 per cent in north Kolkata. According to official reports, the Election Commission has sought a report from the state's Chief Electoral Officer on the murder of Tahidul Islam, a CPI(M) polling agent, in Murshidabad's Domkal constituency. Tahidul was first beaten up and then shot dead in front of a polling booth in the Shiropara area, where armed miscrants went berserk, throwing bombs and firing from small arms. CPI(M) candidate from Domkal, Anisur Rahman, alleged that ruling party men had captured several booths in the constituency. Police said Anwar Khan, a local Trinamool Congress leader, was arrested following a directive of the Election Commission for making disparaging remarks about the poll panel in public. Khan, known to be a strongman, had been interned in his house following an order by the EC. But ultimately he was found to be out of his confinement. In Kolkata, Union Minister Babul Supriyo was heckled and abused allegedly by Trinamool Congressmen when he, along with his parents, went to cast vote at Aryakanya Vidyalaya under Jorasanko constituency. Few persons were held by security forces in this connection. The Minister himself chased one of them to hand him over to the police. In Khandaghosh constituency of Burdwan district, a presiding officer was removed following a complaint lodged by the CPI(M). Official reports said Mrityunjoy Chakraborty was removed by the EC on charge of conducting polls in booth number 104 in favour of the Bharatiya Janata Party. A CPI(M) supporter Lal Chowdhury, was seriously injured when alleged Trinamool Congressmen chopped off a part of one of his ears and broke one leg at Ketugram in Burdwan district. The incident took place when the man was going to the police station with his mother to lodge a complaint against some activists of the ruling party allegedly for preventing him from casting his vote. Three people were injured when a crude bomb was hurled near a voters' queue in front of a polling booth under Ketugram constituency in Burdwan district while in Khandaghosh under the same district when a CPI(M) supporter fractured his head in an attack by political opponents. In Chakdah under Nadia district a couple was allegedly assaulted by ruling party activists when they went to a polling booth to cast their votes. One person was injured in a bomb blast at Dakshin Para under Domkal constituency of Murshidabad while few Left party agents were attacked at Gayeshpur in Nadia district. Reports of stray incidents of bombing, assault and intimidation reached from Hariharpara in Murshidabad, and Raina in Bardhaman districts. Allegations of Left-Congress combine voters being intimidated came from Kolkata's Cossipore-Belgachia and Beliaghata constituencies. In most of the cases the accusations were made against the ruling party.(Eds. Here pick up suitably from earlier series).UNI TEAM.KDG-PC KK AE AS1800 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0343-694473.Xml ''Yaum-e-Ali (Imam Ali's birthday) was celebrated last evening at Masjid-e-Iranian or Mughal Masjid in Dongri. Since he was also cousin of the Prophet and his son-in-law, he had played a pivotal role in establishing the faith. Hence, we are using this occasion as a day to commit ourselves to uphold his teachings and fightextremism,'' said Mohammed Abbas Rizwan Khan, president, Muslims' Association for Peace and Harmony, which had held a meeting. At the meet, the Shia scholars, intellectuals and activists said terrorist outfits like Islamic State of Iraq and Syria posed a grave danger to humanity and teachings of pious religious leaders like Imam Ali would help fight the menace of terrorism. Shaukat Bharti, who heads World Wasila Front, an NGO, said ''The world should unite against the ISIS menace and Imam Ali's birth anniversary is a good occasion to reiterate our resolve to uproot this vice. ''Hazrat Ali's exemplary character can be used to fight terror and extremism ideologically,'' he added.UNI AAA SS PY AS1748 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0169-694330.Xml Wait for the halt of the Ajmer-Shatabdi at Bandikui station will be finally over as the express for the first time will make a stop there tomorrow.The stoppage would come as a relief to those who wanted to visit the famous Mehandipur Balaji temple.According to a railway official, the additional stoppage of the 12015/12016 New Delhi-Ajmer-New Delhi Shatabdi Express train would be on an experimental basis for six months and the stoppage time would be of two minutes. For the past many years, people, including Rajya Sabha MP Vijay Goel, have been raising the demand for a halt at Bandikui station.Mr Goel said the train would make a halt at Bandikui station on the auspicious occasion of Hanuman Jayanti and thanked Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu and Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje for the same. UNI RBE SW AE 1830 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0427-694492.Xml Union Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs and Minority Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi today said the Centre has been helping Uttar Pradesh and other states who have been suffering from the problem of drought so that this problem doesn't become a reason for suicide by the farmers who feed the nation. He charged that the UP Government has done nothing to improve condition of farmers and agriculture in the state. "This has resulted into deteriorated situation of the farmers," Mr Naqvi claimed. The Union Minister said the Centre has allotted thousands of crores of rupees from 2014 under various schemes for farmers welfare in Uttar Pradesh. "Each and every paisa of money given by the Centre to the states should be utilised honestly and peoples'representatives, farmers' organisations, self-help groups, political parties should become "guard and watchman" of farmers' interests. Gram Pradhans have a crucial role to play in this regard", he said during Gram Sabha meetings at Patariya, Shankarpur and Rathaunda villages here. Mr Naqvi was addressing the meetings at various places in the district under "Gramoday Se Bharat Uday" campaign, which was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on April 14, Babasaheb Ambedkar's birth anniversary. The campaign will conclude on "Panchayti Raj Diwas" on April 24. Mr Naqvi said the Narendra Modi Government has changed the system of compensation in case of loss of crops. Now, compensation will be provided to farmers even in the case of 30 per cent crops loss. He also informed the people about welfare schemes of the Modi Government and sought suggestions from them. " Purpose of this campaign is to ensure farmers' prosperity through social harmony in villages, strengthening Panchayat system and bring the balanced and over-all development of villages at ground level," he added said. Mr Naqvi informed the people about schemes aimed at socio-economic empowerment of villages and farmers which include Pradhanmantri Gram Sadak Yojana, MGNREGA, Pradhanmantri Gramin Awas Yojna, Pradhanmantri Suraksha Bima Yojna, Pradhanmantri Jiwan Jyoti Bima Yojna, Atal Pension Yojna, Pradhanmantri Jan Dhan Yojna, Sukanya Samriddhi Yojna, Beti Bachao-Beti Padhao Yojna, Deen Dayal Gram Jyoti Yojna, Pradhanmantri Fasal Bima Yojna and Pradhanmantri Krishi Sinchayi Yojna. He said the Central Government will provide Rs 80 lakh to every Gram Sabha of the country for development works per year. Mr Naqvi said the NDA Government under the leadership of the Prime Minister is dedicated to socio-economic-educational empowerment of villages, poor people, farmers, youths, women and weaker sections including Minorities. " The Modi Government's target is to double the farmers' income in 5 years. The General Budget 2016-17 is dedicated to farmers and villages.Such a Budget has come for the first time which is dedicated to over-all development and empowerment of villages, the poor and the farmers. This Budget has started a new chapter in farmers' welfare. Rs 35,984 crore have been allotted for agriculture and farmers' welfare," he said. The Union Minister said Rs 19,000 crore have been allocated for Pradhanmantri Gram Sadak Yojna. Electrification of 18,000 villages is being done within time frame of 1000 days. An amount of Rs 38,500 crore have been allocated for MGNREGA for 2016-17.UNI MB AE AS1811 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0196-694235.Xml Admitting that his sister Priyanka Vadra should enter active politics, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi today said that what ever he says in Parliament, the RSS and Prime Minister Narendra Modi get annoyed. "They( RSS and PM) do not like my statement anywhere and get annoyed whatever I say. You tell me, is this my fault. Then what should I say in the Lok Sabha," Mr Gandhi asked while interacting with the local villagers during the janata chaupal at Gohra village here to conclude his two-day visit to his constituency. The Congress vice-president expressed his desire for sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra to enter active politics. "I have requested her several times to join the active politics, but every time, she refused me. I am tired of hearing no from her. Now, I can only say that you people should convince her to join politics," he told the people, when they demanded that Priyanka should lead the party in Uttar Pradesh. After poll strataeist Prashant Kishore was roped in for the UP polls by Congress, there was speculation that Priyanaka might enter active politics. The local Amethi MP, while having snacks with the people in the chaupal, also cracked joke, with the children and even heard their stories. Asking the party workers to get prepared for the 2017 Assembly elections in UP and work for the win of the party, Mr Gandhi in the morning also held a Janata Durbar in Amethi, where he gave the party leaders and workers pep talk on how to serve the masses so that their candidates can win the polls. Before leaving for New Delhi, Mr Gandhi visited Bhadar to meet senior Congress leader Ashok Singh Hitler, who was injured in a road accident recently. The Congress vice-president also visited the residences of Om Prakash Singh, Grah Prakash Singh and Harinarain Singh to pay condolence to their families, who were killed in the same road accident. Yesterday on day one of his visit, the Congress vice-president boosted the morale of local Congress leaders in his Parliamentary constituency by making personal interaction. He also attended a reception ceremony of son of local District Congress President Yogendra Mishra last evening. However, on his arrival, local villagers and local public had also thronged to register their complaint of power and water shortage to their MP. UNI XC-MB RJ NS1836 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0196-694429.Xml Odisha government today decided to set up eight Advanced Skill Development Training Institutes (ASTIs) in various parts of the state at an estimated cost of Rs 1051 crore to impart skill training to two lakh youth in five years. The decision was taken at the first General Body meeting of Odisha Skill Development Society (OSDS), held here today under the Chairmanship of Chief Secretary Aditya Prasad Padhi. After the meeting, Skill Development and Technical Education Secretary Laxmi Narayan Gupta said out of the eight ASTIs, six would be set up on Demonstration mode with major investment from the government and two would be set up on PPP mode. The ASTIs are proposed to be set up at Angul, Balasore, Bhubaneswar, Berhampur, Jeypore, Bolangir, Jharsuguda and Rourkela. The institutes would impart skill training in 142 courses of 12 priority sectors of the government. The scheme targets to train two lakh youth, impart advanced and finishing skills to 50,000 ITI passouts and support skill training to 5000 people for self-employment. Besides, customised skill upgradation training and certification would be provided to 25,000 skill workforce in their respective trades under the Recognition of Prior Learning ( RPL) provisions. Mr Gupta said the targeted group of the scheme included unemployed IT passouts, unemployed engineers, general graduates and polytechnic graduates. The project has been designed for five years. The estimated cost of the project is around Rs 1051 crore, out of which State Government would provide one-third and the rest would be availed from the Asian Development Bank as loan. The OSDS would be the nodal agency for implementation of the project. For the purpose, a General Body has been formed under the Chairmanship of Chief Secretary with representatives from Banks, Industries, Government of India and concerned agencies. The Executive Committee has been formed under the Chairmanship of Development Commissioner. The meeting decided to constitute two sub-committees, namely Civil Construction Sub-Committee and Procurement Sub-Committee to look into various technical and financial aspects. The Chief Secretary directed to design the courses in alignment with the National Skill Quality Framework (NSQF), so as to facilitate smooth migration between vocational training and general education.UNI BD DP RJ NS1848 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0214-694501.Xml Pakistan today expressed serious concerns over the recent ballistic missile test from India's nuclear powered submarine INS Arihant.Describing the development of the nuclear submarine by India as a worrisome matter for the region, Pakistan foreign office spokesperson Nafees Zakaria said in Islamabad that this will impact the delicate strategic balance in the Indian Ocean."The Indian side did not notify Pakistan about the submarine-launched ballistic missile," the spokesperson was quoted as saying by Pakistan Radio. To a question he said Pakistan has briefed a number of countries about the alleged sabotage activities of the so called Indian agents and will continue to raise this issue at every fora. UNI MK SW AE 1909 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0101-694693.Xml : The Desiya Murpokku Dravidar Kazhagam (DMDK) which was allotted five seats by the Peoples Welfare Front, expressed their unwillingness to field candidates in the stipulated constituencies. Sources in the DMDK said the party leadership, led by R Selvaraj, has taken the decision after a meeting here on today. They conveyed their decision to the PWF alliance convener in the afternoon. The party had been originally allotted four seats after the seat-sharing talks held a few days back. The DMDK after consultation with Party chief Vijayakanth and others, urged for more seats. Following this, DMDK were given five seats, but the PWF did not agree to give the seats of Mudaliarpet, Ozhukarai, Oussudu, Kalapet, Ariyankuppam and Mannadipet. Instead they were alloted Nellithope, Indira Nagar, Kalapet, Ouppalm, Mannadipet and a seat in Karaikal, the sources said and added that even R Selvaraj, DMDK secretary of the party was not allotted the Ozhukarai seat he wanted to contest. As the party was not given the seats it wanted, the meeting decided not to field candidates at all, sources said. As many as 20 constituency secretaries of DMDK wrote to top party leaders, including Vijayakanth, in Chennai , informing that the party's unit here did not want to put up candidates. They also informed that they will wait for further instructions of the party leadership. It is not immediately known whether the DMDK would pull out from the PWF here or not.UNI PAB KVV ADB 2045 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0414-695028.Xml About 80 per cent voters exercised their franchise in the third phase of West Bengal Assembly elections defying sporadic violence, in which one person was killed and severalothers were injured. Two voters died of heatstroke in Burdwan district, but the vast majority of the 1.37 crore electoratecast votes beating the scorching sun in 62 constituencies of Murshidabad, Burdwan, Nadia and north Kolkata. The Election office said an overall 79.22 per cent voters cast their votes, when the latest figures were compiled. However, the final figure is likely to rise. While 81.62 per cent turnout was recorded in Nadia, Murshidabad witnessed 79.29 per centpolling, Burdwan registered 78.26 per cent and north Kolkata the lowest- 57.05 per cent. The polling, however, was marred by sporadic violence and incidents of assault, intimidationand malpractices in some places. In Murshidabad district, a CPI(M) polling agent was shot deadin Domkal and at least 10 other people were injured in different areas. Tahidul Islam (35), a CPI(M) polling agent, was first beaten up and then shot dead in front of apolling booth in the Shiropara area, where armed miscrants went berserk, throwing bombs andfiring from small arms. CPI(M) candidate from Domkal, Anisur Rahman, alleged that ruling party men had capturedseveral booths in the constituency. Sudarshan Chattopadhya, a 70-year-old, died of heatstroke after spending a long time in theopen under the blazing sun in Burdwan's Mangalkot constituency. Anil Das (45), also died undersimilar circumstances at Bainchi in the district. The Election office said seven presiding officers were removed, following allegations of favouritism.Of them, five were posted in Burdwan and two in Murshidabad. In Kolkata, Union Minister Babul Supriyo was heckled and abused allegedly by Trinamool Congress men when he, along with his parents, went to cast vote at Aryakanya Vidyalaya under Jorasanko constituency. One person was arrested by security forces in this connection. The Minister himself chased the man to hand him over to police. A CPI(M) supporter, Lal Chowdhury, was seriously injured when alleged Trinamool Congress men chopped off a part of one of his ears and broke one leg at Ketugram in Burdwan district. The incident took place when the man was going to the police station with his mother to lodge a complaint against some activists of the ruling party, allegedly for preventing him from casting his vote. Three persons were injured when a crude bomb was hurled near a voters' queue in front of a polling booth under Ketugram constituency in Burdwan district while in Khandaghosh under the same district, a CPI(M) supporter fractured his head in an attack by political opponents. In Chakda under Nadia district, a couple was assaulted allegedly by the ruling party activists when they went to a polling booth to cast their votes. One person was injured in a bomb blast atDakshin Para under Domkal constituency of Murshidabad, while few Left party agents were attackedat Gayeshpur in Nadia district. Police said Anwar Khan, a local Trinamool Congress leader, was arrested following a directive ofthe Election Commission for making disparaging remarks about the poll panel in public. Khan, knownto be a strongman, had been interned in his house following an order by the EC. But he was found tobe out of his confinement. Reports of stray incidents of bombing, assault and intimidation also reached from Hariharpara in Murshidabad, and Raina in Bardhaman districts. Allegations of Left-Congress combine voters being intimidated came from Kolkata's Cossipore-Belgachia and Beliaghata constituencies. In most of the cases, the accusations were made against the ruling party.(Eds, pick up suitably from earlier series)UNI KDG-AKM-BM RJ 2028 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0214-694939.Xml Revenue Divisional Commissioner (central division) AB Otta accompanied by the revenue officials today inspected the disputed iskon campus along the Western side of the Puri beach. The RDC examined the government land under occupation of the iskon and communication to the iskon complex. He too learned the area where the iskon wanted to raise a temple and other religious institutions. Earlier, the RDC had an elaborate discussion with the additional district magistrate Udhab Chandra Majhi, sub collector Madhusudan Dash and concerned tahasildars of Puri and Brhamagiri. The RDC was inquiring as to whether, the building plan approved by the Puri Konark development authority was in adherence to the building code or not and whether there was any flaunting of rules. The iskon proposes to construct another Jagannath temple in the complex. PKDA secretary Sanjib Kumar Mishra and planning member Lingaraj Pattnaik appraised the RDC over the building plan approval. The RDC examined the concerned records and is likely to submit his report to the state government. In the wake of hue and cry over the proposed construction of another Jagannath temple at the outskirts of Puri by the ISKON the state government had asked the RDC to inquire into the issue and submit a report. Senior BJP leader Bijay Mahapatra raised the issue of building a second Jagannath temple by the ISKON in Puri which evoked sharp reaction among the devotees.UNI XC DP SHS RJ NS2300 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0214-694985.Xml The 19th round of the border talks was being held in the backdrop of bitterness caused in the relationship of the two countries by Chinese veto on India's bid in UN to ban Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar. Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, who is also in China, had raised the issue of Masood Azhar veto with Chinese leaders on Monday. The two countries had reached a framework agreement on 'the Political Parameters and Guiding Principles for the Settlement of the Boundary Question' in 2005. The current negotiations are in second stage which focuses on framework of settlement to be followed by the final step of drawing the boundary agreement. The two countries share a 4,0457 km-long border with differences in perception, and had fought a brief war in 1962. There are two parts of the dispute 2000-km-long Aruncahal Pradesh, which is under India's control but China is laying claim to it, and the second part is 4000-km-along the Line of Actual Control in Ladakh, especially the Aksai Chin area occupied by China in the 1962. India and China have agreed to maintain peace and tranquility on the border till the final resolution of the dispute.UNI NAZ SW RSA 1432 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0091-692076.Xml Prime Minister Narendra Modi may visit the US on June 7 and 8, as the Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan has been requested by a group of top lawmakers to invite him to address a joint sitting of the Congress.However, there has been no official announcement from the White House or New Delhi. ''Given the depth of our relationship with India across a range of areasdefence, humanitarian and disaster relief, space cooperation, conservation and innovationwe believe this is an ideal opportunity for the Congress to hear directly from the prime minister,'' the Congressmen said in a letter to the Speaker last night.Representatives Ed Royacee, the chairman of the House committee on foreign affairs, Eliot Engel, high ranking member of the Demorcatic party, George Holding and Ami Bera said they expected that the Prime Minister if invited would accept the invitation.They sought to underline that the US-India partnership was based on foundations of shared values, including rule of law, electoral democracy and religious pluralism.''This renewed partnership has found champions in the leadership of both parties, including both President Clinton and President George W Bush and has been further emboldened in the United States by a strong, proud and growing Indian-American diaspora,'' the letter said.It would be great honour, Mr Modi would be getting as there have been only two invitations in the past yearone on September 24 when Pope Francis addressed the Congress and the second on April 29 last year when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was invited for the address. UNI XC NAZ SV SB 0928 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0105-691703.Xml The Philippines discouraged ransom payments today for captives held by Islamist militants in a bid to stop a kidnap "industry" emerging after a series of rebel seizures of Indonesian and Malaysian crew.A Philippine military spokesman was responding to media reports yesterday that quoted an Indonesian minister as saying a Taiwan firm would pay to free 10 Indonesians held by Abu Sayyaf rebels.A combined 18 crew from Indonesia and Malaysia have been taken captive in three separate attacks on tugboats in Philippine waters close to maritime borders with the two countries."The armed forces continues to encourage everyone to observe the government's no ransom policy," Philippine military spokesman Brigadier-General Restituto Padilla told reporters.He said the military wanted to "discourage this kind of growing 'industry'" and cut off funds that would ultimately strengthen the rebels.Indonesia's coordination minister for political, legal and security affairs, Luhut Pandjaitan, was quoted as saying a Taiwan firm was prepared to pay 50 million pesos ( 1.08 million dollars) to free a crew held since late March.The Philippines rarely publicises ransom payments and officials sometimes refer to them euphemistically as "board and lodgings".Padilla said there were ongoing military operations to rescue the captives. "The safety of the kidnap victims is our primordial concern," he added.Five other foreign nationals, including two Canadians, are also held on the remote southern island of Jolo, a stronghold of the small but violent al Qaeda-linked group, known for beheading, bombings and extortion.Neil Reeder, Canada's ambassador to the Philippines, expressed serious concern over an Abu Sayyaf threat to behead two of its citizens on April 25 if their families and government failed to pay 300 million pesos for each of them."We are very, very concerned about the situation of our nationals," Reeder told reporters in Manila."We are doing our best for their safety and security and we hope that they'll be safe and sound and released very soon."Security is precarious in the south of the largely Christian Philippines, despite a 2014 peace pact between the government and the largest Muslim rebel group that ended 45 years of conflict. (1 dollar = 46.1600 Philippine pesos) REUTERS JW BL1555 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0364-692345.Xml Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is set arrive in New York on Friday for the signing ceremony of the UN Paris Agreement on climate change. During Rousseff's trip, Vice President Michel Temer, who has been pushing for Rousseff's impeachment, will temporarily assume presidency, her office announced on Wednesday. On Sunday night, the Chamber of Deputies voted 367-146 to endorse impeachment against Rousseff, passing the matter to the Senate. Should the Senate decide within 24 days to begin an impeachment trial, Rousseff will have to step aside for 180 days for the trial to proceed. Vice President Temer will then take over as interim president. Rousseff will use her platform at the UN to address the impeachment process against her, which she describes as a coup attempt, Xinhua news agency reported. She will have five minutes to speak at the ceremony, during which she is expected to slam the "coup" and remind the world of Brazil's contributions to the climate change agreement, the office said. Rousseff has expressed reservations about leaving Brazil and allowing Temer to take over, but local media reports said her supporters shave advised her to inform attendees at the UN about the truth of the political crisis in the country. A day before the announcement of Rousseff's trip to New York, Temer sent Senator Aloysio Nunes, one of his loyalists, to meet in Washington with Thomas Shannon, the US under secretary of state for political affairs and a former American ambassador to Brazil, in order to present their side of the impeachment debate. Adopted by the 196 Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Paris Agreement sets a target of curbing the global average rise in temperature below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and preferably below 1.5 degrees. The agreement will be officially signed at the UN headquarters in New York on Friday. --IANS ksk ( 322 Words) 2016-04-21-08:14:05 (IANS) Chotoo gang, led by Ghulam Rasool, has ''surrendered unconditionally to the Army'', a military spokesperson said.Addressing a press briefing in Lahore yesterday regarding the ongoing operation in Rajanpur area, Lt Gen Asim Bajwa said, "The military has successfully completed operation Zarb-i-Ahan". Thirteen members of the notorious gang have surrendered, he said.He also confirmed that the 24 policemen taken hostage by the Chotoo gang have been rescued."The Army will not vacate this area until all the miscreant elements are neutralised," Bajwa maintained.The military media-wing chief said security forces will eliminate this 'no-go area' and any other such area across the country.Earlier it was reported that members of the Chotoo gang surrendered to the Army and at least 170 gangsters were taken into custody by the armed forces.According to Pakistan daily Dawn, the gang had been using the hostages as a human shield to protect their women and children.A search operation is also being conducted to secure Rajanpur's Kacha area.Police launched the Rajanpur offensive after a go-ahead from the interior ministry. After seven police officials were killed and 24 others taken hostage, the Army announced on April 16 that it would be taking over the operation.The Chotoo gang was given a deadline by the Army to surrender on Monday, failing which, the Army said it would begin a full-scale operation in the area.According to locals and police, Chotoo belongs to Bakrani clan of Mazari tribe of Rojhan area. He later developed differences with police over unknown reasons and established his own gang to carry out criminal activities.UNI XC RSA SB 1027 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0104-693537.Xml China will launch a "core module" for its first space station some time around 2018, a senior official told the state-run Xinhua news agency today, part of the country's plan to have a permanent manned space station in service around 2022.Advancing China's space programme is a priority for Beijing, with President Xi Jinping calling for the country to establish itself as a space power.The "core module" will be called the "Tianhe-1", the Chinese word for galaxy or Milky Way, Wang Zhongyang, spokesman for the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp, told Xinhua."Two space labs will be launched later and dock with the core module, 'Tianhe-1,'" he said. "The construction of the space station is expected to finish in 2022."The report provided no other details.China insists that its space programme is for peaceful purposes. However, the U.S. Defense Department has highlighted China's increasing space capabilities, saying China was pursuing activities aimed at preventing its adversaries from using space-based assets during a crisis.In a manned space mission in 2013, three Chinese astronauts spent 15 days in orbit and docked with an experimental space laboratory, the Tiangong (Heavenly Palace) 1. REUTERS PR PR0847 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0105-693452.Xml Front-runner Donald Trump showed signs of tightening his grip on the Republican US presidential nomination when chief rival Ted Cruz acknowledged his own only hope of wresting control is a contested convention.Trump delivered a crushing defeat of Cruz in Tuesday's New York Republican nominating contest while Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton broke rival Bernie Sanders' string of state victories with a definitive win of her own.Rebounding from a defeat in Wisconsin two weeks ago, Trump set himself up for another big night on April 26, when the Northeast US states of Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Maryland hold primaries."Ted Cruz is mathematically out of winning the race," Trump tweeted yesterday. "Now all he can do is be a spoiler, never a nice thing to do. I will beat Hillary!" Trump, 69, predicted some "amazing weeks" ahead for his campaign.Cruz, at a news conference on the sidelines of a Republican National Committee meeting in Hollywood, Florida, said neither he nor Trump will amass the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination without a contested convention in Cleveland starting on July 18."What is clear today is that we are headed toward a contested convention. Nobody is able to reach 1,237. I'm not going to reach 1,237, and Donald Trump is not going to reach 1,237," said Cruz, a US senator from Texas.New York boosted Trump's delegate tally to 845, while Cruz has 559 and Kasich 147, according to the Associated Press. Next Tuesday's contests offer 172 delegates for Republicans.CLINTON LEADS TRUMP -POLLIf Trump, a New York billionaire, and Clinton, a former US secretary of state, go on to secure their respective parties' nominations, a Reuters/Ipsos national opinion poll shows Clinton with a sizeable lead if the November 8 election were held today.In the latest poll of likely general election voters, 45 per cent said they would support Clinton while 35 percent would support Trump if the two were running against each other. The April 15-19 poll surveyed 1,334 people and had a credibility interval of 3.1 percentage points.A former reality TV star, Trump has adopted a more measured tone in recent days and appears to be trying to heal wounds inflicted by a campaign that has alarmed many in the Republican establishment. He sent campaign advisers to the party meeting in Florida that began yeterday."There's only two issues left for Republicans: Will Trump get 50 per cent of the delegates prior to Cleveland, and if not, how close will he be? New York gives him a nice boost, but it will take weeks before we know the answer," said Ari Fleischer, who was White House spokesman under President George W. Bush.Cruz, 45, came in third in New York. Ohio Governor John Kasich, 63, a long-shot candidate, sought to use his second-place showing in New York as proof he is emerging as Trump's central challenger.Trump won at least 89 delegates in New York, while Kasich got at least three, according to the AP. Cruz did not win any, prompting Trump adviser Sarah Huckabee Sanders to urge him on CNN yesterday to "get out of the way" once the math of delegate counts makes it impossible for him to prevail.CLINTON BEATS SANDERSThe win by Clinton, 68, makes it nearly impossible for Sanders, 74, to overtake her commanding lead in delegates needed to secure the nomination. Clinton clinched at least 175 out of 291 New York delegates, while Sanders won at least 106, according to the AP.A US senator from Vermont, Sanders has vowed to fight until the Democrats' nominating convention in Philadelphia starting on July 25.Democratic strategist Jim Manley said Clinton has the delicate task of trying to attract Sanders supporters drawn to his leftist campaign promises, while switching focus to the task of beating the eventual Republican nominee."She runs a risk. If she goes too far to the left she's going to upset independents and others that she's going to need in the general," Manley said.REUTERS PS AN0408 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0136-693423.Xml The US Supreme Court today ruled that almost 2 billion dollars in frozen Iranian assets must be turned over to American families of people killed in the 1983 bombing of a US Marine Corps barracks in Beirut and other attacks blamed on Iran.The court's 6-2 ruling dealt a setback to Iran's central bank, finding that the US Congress did not usurp the authority of American courts by passing a 2012 law stating that the frozen funds should go toward satisfying a 2.65 billion dollars judgment won by the families against Iran in U.S. federal court in 2007.Bank Markazi had challenged a 2014 ruling by the New York-based 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals that the assets, bonds held in a trust account overseen by former federal judge Stanley Sporkin, should be handed over to the more than 1,000 American plaintiffs.With the legal questions resolved, lawyers for the plaintiffs said all that is left is for a federal judge to allow Sporkin to distribute the funds.The lead plaintiff was Deborah Peterson, whose brother, Marine Lance Corporal James Knipple, died in the Beirut bombing. Peterson said for her the legal fight has never been about the just money."The mission was for those responsible for the bombing to be held accountable and for the world to understand what happened in Beirut," Peterson said.Ted Olson, the lawyer for the victims who argued the case before the Supreme Court, said the ruling brings "long-overdue relief to more than 1,000 victims of Iranian terrorism and their families, many of whom have waited decades for redress."Jeffrey Lamken, the Iranian bank's attorney, declined to comment.The plaintiffs have waged a long legal battle seeking compensation for attacks they say Iran orchestrated. Congress inserted itself into the dispute by passing the law to help the plaintiffs obtain the Iranian funds.The plaintiffs accused Iran of providing material support to Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shi'ite Islamist political and military group responsible for the 1983 truck bomb attack at the Marine compound in Beirut that killed 241 US service members.They also sought compensation related to other attacks including the 1996 Khobar Towers truck bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 US service members.Caragh Fay, a lawyer representing the victims of the Beirut attack, said it could take from three months to a year for the funds to be dispersed to plaintiffs, depending in part on recommendations Sporkin first has to make to the judge.Money will go to the estates of service members who died in the attack, their families and to those who survived the attacks. Payouts will range from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, Fay said.GINSBURG AUTHORED RULINGThe ruling, written by liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, said the US Congress did not violate the separation of powers principle enshrined in the US Constitution giving specific authority to the government's executive, legislative and judicial branches.Ginsburg said the 2012 law was "no threat to the independence of the judiciary" because it did not apply simply to one case, but rather "multiple civil actions" against Iran by numerous plaintiffs.The law simply set a new legal standard and left it to the courts to determine how that standard should be implemented, Ginsburg said. She also noted that courts generally give Congress and the White House greater leeway in foreign affairs.Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, criticized the ruling, saying Congress was "commandeering the courts to make a political judgment look like a judicial one." Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined his dissent.The ruling came during a delicate period in US-Iranian relations, following January's implementation of a landmark accord reached last year by the United States and five other world powers to lift economic sanctions in exchange for Iran accepting limits on its nuclear program.Democratic US Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, who authored the 2012 legislation in question, called the ruling "a long-awaited victory for justice.""So long as Iran continues its support for terrorism, its regime will be held liable for its actions," Menendez said.The Obama administration filed court papers backing the families.The assets held in New York were part of the Iranian bank's foreign currency reserves. They were traced to a Citibank account in New York held by Luxemburg-based Clearstream Banking, which acted as a intermediary for Banca UBAE, an Italian bank of which Bank Markazi is a customer. REUTERS PS AN0412 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0136-693425.Xml China is stepping up pressure on self-ruled Taiwan a month ahead of the inauguration of a president from a pro-independence party Beijing distrusts, signalling a rocky start for the leader of the island elected on a wave of anti-China sentiment.In the past few weeks, China has established ties with former Taiwan ally Gambia, sent a top general to inspect troops based in a frontline province and scooped up dozens of Taiwanese from Kenya wanted in China for fraud - a move denounced by Taipei as being more about politics than crime.And Taiwan said a hotline meant to expedite direct communication between the top government officials dealing with each other's affairs had not been answered by China twice at critical times of late.China regards Taiwan as a wayward province to be taken back by force if necessary and wants the new government to stick to the "one China" policy agreed upon with the outgoing China-friendly Nationalist government.Only 22 countries recognise Taiwan as the "Republic of China", with most, including Kenya, having diplomatic relations with the "People's Republic of China", with its leaders in Beijing.Taiwan is one of China's most sensitive political issues, and a core concern for the Communist Party, trumping even Beijing's claims in the South China Sea.Since Tsai Ing-wen and her Democratic Progressive Party won Taiwan's presidential and parliamentary elections by a landslide in January, Beijing has repeatedly warned it will be watching closely what she does. Tsai takes office on May 20.At risk are ties that had warmed considerably when Ma Ying-jeou of the Nationalists was elected Taiwan president in 2008, ushering in regular high-level exchanges and overseeing the signing of a series of landmark economic deals.China's Communist Party-controlled state media has not minced its words about what is at stake.Chen Qinhao, a Taiwan expert at Beijing's elite Tsinghua University, wrote in the official People's Daily this week that Tsai risks ending lines of communication between China and Taiwan if she does not explain her policy on China."It won't be a matter of there being a 'high season' or a 'low season' in cross-Taiwan Strait relations," Chen wrote. "When it comes to the authoritative consultation mechanisms between the two sides, I fear it will totally shut down."In Taipei, officials are reading the tea leaves, too.The island's normally secretive top security agency said the Gambia move was to pressure Tsai to "fall in line with China's expectations" once in office.Throughout, Tsai, who has said she wants peace with China and to maintain the status quo, has spoken only via her Facebook or through her party."Beijing has no right to represent us on matters involving the deportation of Taiwanese," she wrote on Facebook last week about the forcible deportation of Taiwan nationals to China from Kenya, even as her top national security adviser called China's move "completely unhelpful" for ties between the two sides."DELIBERATE INDIFFERENCE"?Taiwan says China has at times been deliberately avoiding talks.China's most senior official in charge of Taiwan affairs was not in his office when Taipei scrambled to raise Zhang Zhijun in March about the Gambia case on a hotline set up to expedite communication between the two sides.It took at least two days before a call could be connected last week about the Kenya matter, according to Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council."What is this? Deliberate indifference," said DPP senior Liu Shyh-fang.China's Taiwan Affairs Office did not respond to a request for comment.China, for its part, has been incensed by the uproar over the telecoms fraud cases, saying they are simply a criminal matter.China accused Taiwan over the weekend of disregarding Chinese victims in a case in Malaysia involving Taiwanese suspects after they were freed upon their arrival back in Taiwan. Taipei said it did not have enough evidence to detain the individuals.Some of the attacks in Chinese state media about the telecoms fraud cases have been deeply personal, even if Tsai was not directly named.The People's Daily, in a front page commentary in its overseas edition on Tuesday, lambasted "certain representatives of popular will who sit idly by on their high salaries and votes they've won" to portray themselves as saviours and heroes rather than thinking about fighting crime.Beijing wants Tsai to clearly state what her policy is on relations with China, but she is keeping quiet.In the background, China's military lurks.Xu Qiliang, a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission which runs China's military, last week visited Fujian province, which lies opposite Taiwan, urging troops to strengthen efforts to form strong armed forces.Last month, the military commemorated a key but little-known victory against Nationalist forces following their fleeing to Taiwan in 1949 at the end of the Chinese civil war, in a reminder China's military still considers the island one of its strategic priorities."We must shout out the words 'reunify Taiwan'," Wang Hongguang, a lieutenant general and former deputy commander of China's Nanjing military region, wrote in an online commentary last month. REUTERS PS AN0522 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0136-693428.Xml Venezuelan prosecutors have indicted local businessman Josmel Velasquez on charges of money laundering and criminal association as part of an investigation that followed local media reports on the leaked Panama Papers.Local website Armando.info reported this month that Velasquez's brother Adrian, a former aide to late President Hugo Chavez, had opened a shell company in the Republic of the Seychelles with 50,000 dollars. The report was based on the documents leaked from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.Prosecutors detained Josmel Velasquez and his mother Amelis Figueroa on Friday at an airport outside Caracas as they were attempting to leave the country, the chief prosecutor's office said in a statement. Raids on family properties had turned up luxury cars, motorcycles and diamond certificates, the statement said.Reuters was unable to immediately obtain comment from the Velasquez family.The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists obtained 11.5 million confidential documents with information on 214,000 offshore companies created by Mossack Fonseca that illustrate how individuals and corporations hide assets from public scrutiny and avoid taxes.REUTERS PS AN0641 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0136-693441.Xml Turkey has frozen the assets of former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, in line with a decision by the UN Security Council, the government said in its Official Gazette today. All of Saleh's assets in Turkish banks and other financial institutions, including safes, were frozen, it said. Saleh is suspected of amassing as much as $60 billion, equivalent to Yemen's annual GDP, during his long rule, and colluding in a militia takeover in 2014, UN-appointed investigators have told the Security Council.REUTERS PR PR1210 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0105-693656.Xml The European Commission wants to find "innovative" financial resources to address the root causes of migration in Africa and elsewhere, the EU executive's president Jean-Claude Juncker said in a letter to Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.Juncker's letter follows an Italian proposal for an EU "migration compact" aimed at stepping-up funding to bolster the economies of migrants' countries of origin, possibly financed by jointly issued European bonds.Europe is grappling with its largest migration wave since World War Two, as the traditional flow of migrants from Africa is compounded by refugees fleeing wars and poverty in the Middle East and South Asia. More than a million people crossed illegally into Europe last year.Renzi urged the EU to issue common bonds to fund a more ambitious migration policy in Africa - a funding method that is anathema to Germany, the EU's leading power."I agree with you on the need to look at innovative means to finance our external action in the field of migration," Juncker said in a letter to Renzi dated April 20, seen by Reuters. He did not specifically mention the sensitive idea of Eurobonds.With a reduction of the migrant flow in the route from Turkey to Greece since last month's controversial EU-Turkey deal, Rome fears that larger flows of migrants may come to Italy from war-torn Libya and other North African countries.While welcoming Renzi's proposals, Juncker underlined that there is already an EU-Africa fund, with a financial capacity of 2.03 billion dollar, meant to address the issues raised by Italy. The fund was agreed between EU and African partners last November at a summit in Valletta, Malta.Berlin, the biggest contributor to the EU budget, rejected the use of new EU funding following Renzi's letter.Juncker said the Commission was working on a new document on external aspects of EU migration policy as a basis for discussion at the next EU leaders' summit on June 28-29.REUTERS PY AS1419 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0298-693869.Xml 25-year-old Chikku Robert, who was reportedly five months pregnant at the time of her death, was an employee at the Badr Al Samaa hospital in Salalah along with her husband. "She was found dead in her apartment yesterday. She was supposed to be on duty by 10pm. As she didn't turn up to duty, her husband went to the apartment only to find her lying dead," Times of Oman quoted Manpreet Singh, the Indian consular in Salalah, as saying. The police have sealed the area and further investigation into the matter is on. (ANI) Indonesia fears piracy on a shipping route along its sea border with the Philippines could reach Somalian levels and has told vessels to avoid danger areas, officials said today, after a spate of kidnappings.Analysts say the route carries 40 billion dollars worth of cargo each year. It is taken by fully laden supertankers from the Indian Ocean that cannot use the crowded Malacca Strait.Concerns over maritime attacks by suspected Islamist militants are disrupting the coal trade, with at least two Indonesian coal ports suspending shipments to the Philippines.Up to 18 Indonesians and Malaysians have been kidnapped in three attacks on tugboats in Philippine waters by groups suspected of ties to the Abu Sayyaf militant network.Abu Sayyaf, which has posted videos on social media pledging allegiance to Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, has demanded 50 million pesos (1.1 million dollars) to free the Indonesian crew."We don't want to see this become a new Somalia," Indonesian chief security minister Luhut Pandjaitan told reporters, referring to the southern Philippine waters of the Sulu Sea, where the abductions took place.Piracy near Somalia's coast has subsided in the last few years, mainly due to shipping firms hiring private security details and the presence of international warships.The foreign ministers of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines will meet in Jakarta to discuss the possibility of joint patrols, Pandjaitan said.He said the armed forces chiefs of the three countries would hold talks in Jakarta on May 3.The Indonesian Navy has instructed all commercial vessels "to avoid piracy-prone waters around the southern Philippines", a spokesman for the Indonesian military said.The navy is increasing patrols around Indonesia's borders with Malaysia and the Philippines "to prevent acts of piracy and hijacking", Tatang Sulaiman told Reuters.The Kuala Lumpur-based Piracy Reporting Centre has also warned ships sailing in the Celebes Sea and northeast of the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo to stay clear of suspicious small vessels.COAL TRADE HITTwo Indonesian coal ports have blocked departures of ships for the Philippines and more suspensions are expected, said Pandu Sjahrir, chairman of the Indonesian Coal Mining Association, and a director of Jakarta-listed coal producer Toba Bara Sejahtera.Toba had suspended all shipments to the Philippines, Sjahrir said. Other companies had cancelled shipments "from both sides", he added.Indonesian state-owned coal miner Bukit Asam said it was diverting Philippine coal shipments to Hong Kong for the next three months. The company ships less than a million tonnes to the Philippines per year, Bukit Asam corporate secretary Joko Pramono told Reuters.One company with a fleet of 40 dry cargo ships saw a silver lining, however."If Indonesia bans tugs and barges from exporting coal then it will have to travel in larger cargo ships, of 32,000 to 64,000 tonnes," said Khalid Hashim, managing director of Bangkok-listed Precious Shipping."All this would of course be beneficial for shippers like us."Indonesia, the world's largest thermal coal exporter, supplies 70 per cent of the Philippines' coal import needs, which Indonesian data shows stood at about 15 million tonnes, worth around 800 million dollars, last year.Philippine coal importers, however, said they could import coal from other countries including Australia, South Africa and Russia and source more locally if Indonesian shipments dried up.REUTERS SHS NS2148 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0352-695112.Xml Russia will sign a joint manufacturing contract for 200 Ka-226T light utility multirole helicopters with India before the end of the year, a top official of Russian conglomerate Rostec has said. "So far we have an intergovernmental agreement, but we hope to draft and sign a contract with India before the end of the year. Accordingly, practical work on site will start from the beginning of 2017," Viktor Kladov, the head of the Russian state technology corporation Rostec's international cooperation department, told RIA Novosti on Thursday. He specified that the agreement, signed during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modis December 24 visit to Russia, details the production of at least 200 helicopters, Sputnik News reported. "We are ready to transfer to the Indian side all that India is able to manufacture domestically. The first batch of helicopters will be made in Russia, and the next will be assembled in India with a strong degree of localization," Kladov added. Introduced in 2002, the Ka-226 series of helicopters are designed by the Kamov Design Bureau, part of the Russian Helicopters company. The Ka-226T model is fitted with updated navigation and automatic control equipment, as well as an interchangeable mission pod, which allows for flexible equipment configurations. Kladov noted that the helicopters design allows it perform a variety of functions, including reconnaissance and target designation, search and rescue, as well as medical missions. --IANS rn/vm ( 244 Words) 2016-04-21-22:30:07 (IANS) US President Barack Obama on Thursday pledged to remain vigilant against Iran's destabilizing activities in the Middle East as he tried to comfort his Gulf allies. "None of our nations have an interest in conflict with Iran," Obama said in a brief press conference after meeting with leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries in the Saudi capital Riyadh. The GCC comprises Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The Persian Gulf nations, Saudi Arabia in particular, have repeatedly raised concerns that the nuclear deal reached with Iran last year will further empower the Islamic Republic to interfere in Arab affairs. The tensions reached a new high in January when Riyadh and a number of its Sunni Arab allies cut diplomatic ties with Tehran, after mobs ransacked the Saudi embassy in response to the execution of a prominent Shiite cleric in Saudi Arabia. "When we entered into negotiations with Iran on the nuclear deal there was concern that in the interest of getting a deal done we would somehow look the other way with respect to other destabilizing activities," Obama said. The US president said the deal has "cut off every single one of Iran's pathways to a nuclear weapon," but the United States continues to have "serious concerns" about Iran's behaviour in the region. During the US-GCC summit, leaders also committed to urgently undertake additional steps to intensify the campaign to defeat the Islamic State (IS) militant group and the Al-Qaeda, and reduce regional and sectarian tensions that fuel instability, said a White House statement. It's Obama's fourth visit to the oil-rich Gulf nation since taking office in 2009. The kingdom was seen as one of Washington's most strategic allies in the Middle East, but bilateral relations have been strained by the nuclear deal reached with Iran last year. A day earlier, President Obama met with King Salman bin Abdulaziz at Erga Palace. Obama underscored the importance of accelerating the campaign against the IS group and welcomed Saudi Arabia's important role in the coalition against the terrorist group, read a White House statement. The two leaders also discussed regional conflicts in Syria, Yemen and Iraq, and challenges posed by Iran's provocative activities. Almost a year ago, in May 2015, Obama hosted leaders of Gulf nations at the White House and the Camp David retreat, the first meeting of the Gulf countries after a framework agreement on limiting Iran's nuclear program. Except for Kuwait and Qatar, top leaders from four of the six-member GCC countries were absent from the 2015 summit. --IANS ahm/ ( 439 Words) 2016-04-22-01:58:05 (IANS) Oil prices wont rebound soon At a joint luncheon on Tuesday by the Rotary Clubs of Maraval and Port-of-Spain at Goodwill Industries Ltd, Port- of-Spain, Farrell said the Saudis who pushed down the price of oil and gas will keep them down, until they have driven the shale producers completely out of the market, because they can withstand it. Iran, which has now re-entered the market, he said, was ramping up its production from 2.8 million barrels a day to 3.2 and 3.4 million barrels a day. So, understand something, there will be no rebound in oil and gas prices. So while the previous administration, previous prime minister and the previous minister of finance were waiting for the rebound, there is going to be no rebound, he said. Oil and gas prices were going to remain at a low level for some time to come, he said, and TT has to internalise where it stands. Noting the oil and gas sector accounts for 85 percent of export earnings, and that the oil price has plummeted in recent times from US$100 a barrel to US$35 a barrel, he said, Frankly speaking, it does not matter how far down it has plummeted, we are in trouble. He said, Those people who are watching the price of oil every day and praying, hoping that it will rise by some miracle, that the Trinidadian God will put his hand and raise oil prices, it aint gonna happen. The problem, he said, was compounded by falling production. Oil production in 1978 was 228,000 barrels a day and now it was down to 78,000 barrels a day, and falling, while gas production was down from four bcf (billion cubic feet) to 3.8 bcf. With a sharp decline in income, he said, TT has the option to either use up the savings to maintain expenditure or bring expenditure down to maintain income. TT was not in a recession, he said, but was undergoing a period of structural adjustment. Recession, he said, refers to a slowing, and maybe contraction, of the growth rate of the economy due to falling demand. That may last for about six months to about two years. The economy is either self-corrected or stimulated to come out of that situation. In the circumstances we are facing, he said, you cannot stimulate yourself out of this situation. Noting the EDAB was tasked to work on the diversification of the economy as part of the adjustment process, Farrell said diversification was necessary, but it could only be achieved through a transformation of the mind. He said it also requires soft and hard infrastructure, and higher productivity from society. The population has not benefitted from the waste of billions of taxpayers dollars in hard infrastructure, he said, except for architects, engineers, contractors, workers, politicians, and people in the Panama Papers. Billions of dollars in investments, he said, were spent in unfinished or finished projects. They include a virtually empty Tamana Intech Park, an unopened Couva Childrens Hospital built with Chinese funding that has to be repaid, unoccupied Government Campus Plaza in Port-of-Spain, an unfinished Tarouba Stadium, Caroni Racing Complex which was stopped in the 1970s after millions of dollars were spent, and the newly- built National Aquatic Centre. The adjustment was going to be hard, contentious and challenging because the TT society was a rent-seeking society a society of handouts, he said. When people think about handouts, they think about CEPEP, URP. However, he said, trade unions, the private sector, non-governmental organisations, and religious bodies were all seeking their share. Everybody is saying to Government gimme, gimme, gimme in a society that functions like crabs in a barrel, he said. Are you following the leader? A strong culture can act as an effective regulator of behaviour. An established culture within an organisation affects the way things get done, how operations and stakeholder relationships are managed and, most importantly, how people behave when no one is looking. The financial crisis of 2008 revealed just how a failure to oversee behaviour and set the appropriate tone can negatively affect corporate conduct. But setting the right tone through the corporate culture can arguably channel behaviour more effectively than procedures and rules. Looking at the bigger picture, culture influences behaviour by giving direction and determining priorities, stating and protecting common values and reinforcing a sense of common identity. Corporate leadership can significantly influence behaviour by setting, embedding and promoting organisational values from the top down. While culture is difficult to define in practical terms, and its direct influence on behaviour is hard to demonstrate, findings from recent ACCA research, published as part of its Culture and Channelling Corporate Behaviour initiative, offer some direction for boards willing to set off on a journey of cultural change. The results from the survey, which received responses from 2,000 members, confirmed the critical role that leadership plays in channelling functional behaviour. For more than 60% of those who responded, the tone set at the top was the most influential driver of behaviours. Only 20% said incentives were most influential, and as few as 10% thought rules and procedures had most influence. The positive impact of corporate leadership was particularly emphasised by respondents from East Asia and the Pacific (mainly China, Malaysia and Singapore), although respondents from the rest of Asia (including the Middle East) ranked the influence of rules and procedures more highly. Many respondents also raised the importance of management practising what it preached or walking the talk, saying that the actions and values of leaders were a key to maintaining ethics and integrity in an organisation. The second most influential drivers of behaviour were identified by members as incentives and performance management generally. Half the respondents agreed that performance-related pay schemes help foster best performance, although nearly two-thirds (65%) suggested that such schemes might lead people to exaggerate or falsify their performance measures. But monetary reward is not the strongest motivator. When asked about what motivates them most, more than half of respondents cited recognition for their work; one-third cited earning more money. In terms of the rationality of managements judgment, nearly one-third of respondents neither agreed nor disagreed as to whether staff in their organisation were aware of such cognitive bias. Nonetheless, 78% of them recognised that these adversely affect decision-making and 76% suggested that teams, including boards, should be trained in better decision-making skills so that cognitive biases would have less effect. On average, about 40% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that senior management in their organisation was sufficiently aware of what was going on lower down in the organisation; almost half (48%) agreed or strongly agreed that senior management was accurately reporting information back to the board. Since the financial crisis, there has been fierce debate around the issue of corporate culture; the UK Financial Reporting Council is just one of the organisations exploring its impact. Those willing to engage in cultural change must, however, be aware that there is no one-sizefits- all solution and that change will not happen overnight. Changing culture is a challenge, and it takes time. There are a number of factors that influence work place culture, from the CEO who leads the organsiation, to family and friends and also someones personal motivations, their beliefs and their values. These numbers of factors influence our behaviour, from both our professional and personal lives. The balance of these will vary by culture and age group a Gen Z will probably have a very different view of their work place culture than someone from Gen Y. The clear advice from many management gurus and also ACCA is that organisations should look at the behaviours underlying the culture they seek before embarking on change, and make sure there is a robust plan in place. Follow that plan, and appraise it regularly. And always communicate change well, but thats a whole other issue about the growing rise and influence of internal communications in the work place. Author: Pauline Schu is policy and research officer at ACCA and manages ACCAs culture and channelling corporate behaviour work Brenda Lee Tang is a Fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants. As head ACCA Caribbean, Ms Lee Tang leads ACCAs business and key relationships in the Caribbean and is responsible for advancing ACCAs strategy in the region. Injured by prisoners, cop wins lawsuit Justice Ronnie Boodoosingh made the call after ruling in favour of PC Bunnie Kameel Ali, who was injured during fights among prisoners at the cell block of the San Fernando Magistrates Court on three occasions. There have been several incidents in different courts involving near riots and affrays in the court buildings, he said. Boodoosingh suggested the assessment identify whether the processes used and facilities contributed to unnecessary and heightened risks of police officers being attacked and injured. This is necessary to protect those who work there and who access the facilities on a daily basis be they prisoners, victims, witnesses, police officers, lawyers, judicial officers and members of the public, he said. Officer Ali was left vulnerable. The State must do its part to ensure that no one is injured in the future as a result of a failure to take responsible steps to ensure the safety and security of those who use our judicial buildings, he said. Ali suffered significant injuries to his back on October 5, 2009, again in December, and on a third occasion in October 2011, during fights among prisoners in the cell block. The judge has referred the assessment of damages to a Master of the High Court as Ali is still undergoing treatment for his injuries. He was represented by attorneys Jagdeo Singh, Michael Rooplal and Saira Lakhan while Tinuke Gibbons-Glenn, Stefan Jaikaran and Nisa Simmons appeared for the Attorney General in the lawsuit. In his testimony before the court, Ali said he only received first aid and self-defence training when he joined the TT Police Service in 1982, and none since then. In his ruling, Boodoosingh said it did not appear to have safety inspections of the facilities and the lack of fire extinguishers and first aid kits in addition to the description of the design of the cells raised unease. It goes without saying that we live in troubled times. There are more violent prisoners now than before. Prisoners remain in custody for very lengthy periods awaiting trial and the court facilities housing them in some localities are less than adequate, Boodoosingh noted. He also said the job of a police officer was a dangerous one with many risks and dangers involved. Some of these dangers and risks cannot be avoided or provided for, he noted, adding that despite the best efforts of the State, the tragic reality is that some police officers will be killed or injured in the course of their duties. The State as their employer owes a duty of care to them. This duty extends to providing adequate training, resources, facilities, equipment and support. The state must not be negligent in administering its duties. It must act reasonably in doing so, the judge stressed. He also noted that a lack of police manpower, as was the case when Ali was attacked, and the response time for control to be regained, was a deficiency which prisoners can use to their advantage. Continuing training or drills may help a police officer to consider the appropriate or best practice to respond, he said. Being prepared is essential, he added Man held with fraudulent documents The arresting officers included Insp Ken Lutchman, Cpl Randy Castillo, Cpl Khan and PCs Samuel, Buchoon and Daniel. Police officers were also assisted by Insp Rishi Singh of Fraud Squad. According to reports the suspect was allegedly securing bail for persons charged with various offences at the same court. Officers acting on information went to the court and detained the suspect who was found to be in possession of a false ID card, a Drivers Permit, fraudulent WASA bills and evaluation document for a piece of land in La Brea. When confronted, the man tried to run away but was pursued and held along Foster Road, near to the courthouse. Questioned by officers, he claimed the documents in his possession were authentic. He was taken to Sangre Grande Police Station. Investigating officers went to the land in La Brea and spoke to the owner who confirmed the documents in the suspects possession were false. Further checks revealed that the man was previously charged with firearm and narcotic offences. He was charged yesterday by WPC Linton with uttering false documents and possession of fraudulent documents. He will appear before a Sangre Grande Magistrate today. Explore valleys of the Northern Range The distance to cover is approximately 21.5 miles and will take the enthusiastic hiker between six to eight hours to complete. This hike is recommended for the experienced or physically fit people who are accustomed to walking long distances. During the 18th and 19th century when cocoa was the chief produce, these bench trails were built to connect the various estates and villages. The courses highest elevation is (2225 feet or 678 metres ) is located at the mountain crest that overlooks Brasso Seco/Paria to the north and La Laja to the south. This area is a junction that divides the ridges of the two highest peaks El Cerro Del Aripo (940m) and Mt Bleu (852m). Valley 1: Guanapo Valley to La Laja (1? - 2 hours) The trek begins at the Guanapo Quarry and the route is alongside the river heading north. The trail leads down to the river and interestingly in the middle of the forest, there is a fallen road sign that says Sambasson Trace. This area is within close distance to the mouth of the Guanapo Gorge. The path continues through the forest and ascends to a citrus estate that leads to the top of La Laja South Trace Road. The elevation at this point is 572m and in the distance panoramic views of the Guanapo Valley await. Valley 2: La Laja to Brasso Seco (1? hours). La Laja is a small agriculture settlement situated in the hills, seven miles northeast from Arima. The route is over the ridge of La Laja with a descent into Brasso Seco/ Paria Village. The walk continues for two km along the La Laja Main Road and turns left into La Laja Paria Trace to proceed over the mountain and down to the village on the Madamas Road. Valley 3: Brasso Seco to Paria Bay (2? -3 hours). Leg three of the expedition starts at the Brasso Seco Visitor Facility and continues northeast on the Paria Road to the Bay. The trek 13km long passes through the heart of the Paria Forest. The path although long is open and distinct with some gentle inclines. Valley 4: Paria Bay to Blanchisseuse Spring Bridge (2 hours). At Paria, there is an option to visit the falls for a quick refresher. During the months of March to July, turtles come ashore to nest and one may be lucky to see the hatchlings emerging from the sand. The final leg is eight km on the ever-popular coastal path located at the western end of the beach. The route to the newly constructed Spring Bridge passes Cathedral and Turtle Rock. On Saturday Fitness Walkers explores The Valleys of the Northern Range. Assembly: 6 am at Eric Williams Medical Complex Mt Hope. Rating: 8 challenging and recommended for experienced or physically fit hikers. Estimated hiking time six to eight hours Pre-register so adequate transportation can provided: Maxi transport to Guanapo Quarry Return transport from Blanchisseuse For bookings and details visit www.islandhikers. com Lifeguards drowning in problems Paul said they have had to work in broken down towers, leaking roofs, flooded toilets. Carl Hernandez, deputy chairman of the NUGFW and also a lifeguard, said he was fed up of hearing of missing equipment or lack of thereof. There are holes in the roofs, the windows are old and they fall off. The railings on the ramps are falling off, seats where we have to sit are broken. The towers are open to the public so sometimes they are dirty, he said. Paul also said the Tyrico Bay tower was in a dilapidated state, as was witnessed by the Newsday as we spoke to members of the Lifeguards Association of Trinidad and Tobago, yesterday, at their headquarters at Maracas Bay. In the toilet we have to put concrete blocks on the floor to get to the toilet because the toilet bowl is leaking and floods the area. The steps to the tower are slippery. The steps to come down is facing away from the beach so if you are going to make a rescue out in the water you have to take your eyes away from your bather to run down the steps and the bather could disappear during that time, he said. Paul said lifeguards have not had uniforms for over three years. He said the public was not able to identify lifeguards from other civilians. We wear different clothes not because want to dress that way, but it is because we do not have uniforms so lifeguards are not properly identified on the beach, he said. Gideon Valdez, Lifeguard II, said since lifeguards had been transferred from the Tourism Ministry to the National Security Ministry, they seemed to have been lost among the prisons and police services. We are still wearing uniforms with Ministry of Tourism on it. Right now it seems that we do not exist, we are just lost, he said. Valdez said they were severely short staffed and despite claims made by National Security Minister Edmund Dillon were misinformed. This he blamed on an official from the Lifeguard Association. The lifeguards expressed discontent with this official saying he was seeing about every position and responsibility except theirs. This official is feeding the ministry with wrong information. He is dragging the service right down. We have no manpower, it is just God and you alone out there. We need vibrant lifeguards, we cant be using the same lifeguards over and over. That is wear and tear to human beings, he said. Efforts to reach Minister Dillon for a comment last evening proved futile. Fired SSA directors seek answers They want to know under what circumstances was fired office manager of the agency rehired. According to the seven Bisnath Maharaj, Keron Ganpat, Doolam Rekha, Nyron Dookeran, Seukeran Singh, Carlton Dennie and Alanzo Flemming - fired office manager Sewrie Singh, who was also dismissed on the basis that the Minister of National Security Edmund Dillon, had lost confidence and trust in her ability to perform her duties, was rehired after approaching a deputy political leader of the ruling Peoples National Movement. In a pre-action protocol letter sent by their attorneys Anand Ramlogan and Kent Samlal, the seven who alleged they were unlawfully dismissed because of racial discrimination and failing to take part in same alleged Singh, after being fired, was escorted off the compound of the Agency by security guards. Her desk was cleared of her personal belongings and effects and she was advised not to return. Ms. Singhs sudden dismissal was surprising as she has served in the Agency under successive governments since 1995, the letter said. They also indicated that Singh sought the intervention of the Deputy Political Leader of the Peoples National Movement, Mr. Rohan Sinanan who promised to speak to the Minister of National Security and have her reinstated. I am further instructed that my clients were shocked to learn that Ms. Singh has in fact been subsequently reinstated. That such a development could occur after the alleged promise of political intervention by no less a person than the Deputy Political Leader of the ruling Peoples National Movement is an indictment of the political insularity and integrity of the Agency, attorney Samlal wrote. AMCHAM hails new US ambassador Amcham said that since its inception 24 years ago, it has enjoyed a close working relationship with the US Embassy, which remains important as the US maintains its position as TTs largest trading partner. Amcham President Ravi Suryadevara and CEO Nirad Tewarie recently met with Estrada. The statement cited Suryadevara saying their meeting had shown that Amcham and Estrada have shared priorities. His wide-ranging expertise on energy will undoubtedly amplify an already strong relationship that Amcham TT shares with the embassy, and further increase business and trade ties between our countries. Estrada, born and raised in Laventille, emigrated with his family to the US at the age of 14. Amcham saw Estrada as a true success story, with many professional achievements throughout his career. He has served as a presidentially- appointed commissioner on the American Battle Monuments Commission, a committee member of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, a board director for Operation Homefront, and on the executive committee for the United Services Organization. Mayors got payments from charity fund Tabled in Parliament last month, the report states Nagessar was paid $6,500. The report for the year ended September 2010 lists Natasha Navas as being among payees from the fund. According to this report, also tabled in Parliament, she was paid $7,800. The fund grew under Nagessar to about $274,500. Under Navas, it was $58,501. Nagessar yesterday could not explain why his name appears on the list of payees. I was above board, Nagessar told Newsday. I am the only mayor who had received so many donations. We had a fund called the Mayors Fund used especially for charitable purposes. During my tenure it was over $200,000. Nagessar said the mayor and CEO were the signatories to this fund and cheques were prepared by the Boroughs Accounting department. Of the $6,500, Nagessar said, I dont know what that was. It can be verified in the council. I would not have the facts, I cannot remember. Probably it could be some hamper I paid for, I cannot remember. Was it proper accounting procedure to record a reimbursement under the list of the funds payees? The accounts department is in charge of that, Nagessar replied. It goes to the CEO, he verifies and I give the final signature. No one person handles it all. So the mayor pays himself? It is done via accounting and is approved by the CEO, he said. Nagessar said around this period the corporation bought 50 wheelchairs. Navas did not immediately reply to queries. In his reports, the Auditor General presents qualified opinions of the accounts of the funds due to the lack of supporting documentation to support specific transactions, as well as the ostensible application of interest income to the fund, meant, under law, to be comprised completely of donations. NFM loses $2M due to theft Mahabir revealed this after committee member and Labour Minister Jennifer Baptiste-Primus asked how much revenue was lost through theft over the last ten years. However, Mahabir could not give that information but gave an estimate of revenue lost in the last two years. He described NFM as a large supermarket, noting that if controls were not put in place to ensure that the products are not taken, it will continue. What you need to know about the Octagon Art Festival on Sunday in Ames news U.S., Russia and China embroiled in hypersonic missile race with winner-take-all stakes (NationalSecurity.news) In terms of ballistic missile capabilities, a weapon designed to travel at hypersonic speeds would essentially become a game-changer overnight for the country that develops it first, given such a weapons ability to make obsolete even the most advanced ballistic missile defense systems. And right now, the U.S., Russia and China are locked in a dead heat to see which country can build and deploy hypersonic missiles that could also carry nuclear weapons and at a much faster pace than current conventional nuclear-armed missiles. As reported by the Daily Mail Online, the Pentagon would like to have a hypersonic missile deployed by 2020, and one that would carry only conventional warheads. However, several experts believe that other great powers currently developing such weapons want to equip them with nuclear warheads, which would give them a distinct first-strike advantage. Current ballistic missiles already travel at hypersonic speeds, and they are designed to carry both conventional and nuclear payloads. However, while they are capable of reaching outer space during flight, they cant maneuver. The Pentagons hypersonic missiles would be smaller, guided, and designed to carry conventional explosives for time-sensitive, rapid response in military theaters of operation. The missiles would also give warfighters the capability to launch hypersonic missiles from land, sea (including submarines) and air to strike time-critical targets at a longer range more quickly. Hypersonic weapons can be more survivable because of the extreme speed and high altitude. They would be hard to stop, J.R. Smith, director of Raytheons Advanced Land Warfare Systems, told the Daily Mail. For the Pentagon, at least, such weapons are being designed only to carry conventional payloads. Washington had always intended for the new hypersonic boost-glide weapons to remain purely conventional, wrote Yousaf Butt, a nuclear physicist and visiting research fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy in the Huffington Post. But Russia and China seem to be pursuing nuclear variants, he continued. If the hypersonic arms race heads in a nuclear direction, Washington may be pressured to follow. Nuclear-tipped hypersonic missiles would become dangerous first-strike threats, given the lack of technology to track and stop them at present. As reported by Defense One, the Defense Department is currently funding three hypersonic weapons designs. These include the Lockheed Martin Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 program, the Raytheon Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC), and the Raytheon/Lockheed Tactical Boost Glide. More: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has awarded Raytheon $20 million to develop the technology and Lockheed $24 million. Currently, planners want to test a hypersonic design by 2020. The Chinese, however, have already conducted about a half-dozen tests of hypersonic vehicles, as well as new anti-satellite missiles. In March, Defense Secretary Ash Carter revealed that the U.S. was engaged in high-stakes development of a next-gen hypersonic missile. During a speech in California Carter said that part of a nearly $72 billion package earmarked for weapons research and development will include funding for new hypersonic missiles that can fly over five times the speed of sound. Just days before, the WFB noted, Air Force Maj. Gen. Thomas Masiello, head of his services weapons research programs, also revealed that two technology prototypes of hypersonic strike weapons a scramjet-powered cruise missile and a hypersonic glider could be ready to deploy in four years. Because of their potential to start World War III, some scientists are urging that hypersonic missiles be banned. Hypersonic flight may sound like screaming good funbut its not meant for you, Mark Gubrud, a physicist and adjunct professor in the Peace, War, and Defense curriculum at the University of North Carolina, wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Its meant for weapons that would probably be used only in the opening salvos of a nuclear war. They could also carry nuclear warheads, and could fly in under the radars that watch for ballistic missiles, he continued. US strategists propose that hypersonic weapons could be used for conventional prompt global strike without the risk of being mistaken for a nuclear attack. Yet Washington alleges that China intends its hypersonics for nuclear delivery. See also: Daily Mail Defense One NationalSecurity.news is part of the USA Features Media network. Follow us on Google+. Submit a correction >> THEY ARE FOR WAR By Chuck Baldwin April 21, 2016 NewsWithViews.com [ NOTE: This article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the opinion of NewsWithViews.com, it's employees, representatives, or other contributing writers. NWV's supports the state of Israel, and the Jewish peoples' right to their Biblical homeland.] The Matriarch of the pro-life, pro-family, Christian Right movement is the elegant stateswoman Phyllis Schlafly. She has no peer; there is no close second. At age 91, she remains the icon of Americas pro-life community. Phyllis received her B.A. from Washington University, her J.D. from Washington University Law School, and she received her Masters in Government from Harvard University. She worked her way through college on the night shift at the St. Louis Ordnance Plant testing .30 and .50 caliber ammunition by firing rifles and machine guns and as a laboratory technician investigating misfires and photographing tracer bullets in flight. Mrs. Schlafly is an attorney admitted to the practice of law in Illinois, Missouri, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Supreme Court. She and her late husband are the parents of 6 children and the grandparents of 14 grandchildren. Phyllis personally taught all of her children to read before they started school. It is no exaggeration to say that Phyllis is the single person most responsible for defeating the Equal Rights Amendment and has been one of the most influential personalities in politics over the last half-century. She founded her Eagle Forum organization in 1972, and today over 80,000 people claim membership. One would think that the pedigree, accomplishments, and lifetime efforts of Mrs. Schlafly would speak so loudly and clearly that no one--not even her political adversaries--could question her sterling character and steadfast convictions. At age 91, and after all of her hard work, Phyllis should be enjoying the most happy fruits of her labor and the most heartfelt appreciation and respect of everyone who knows her--and especially of the Christian conservative community throughout this country. Guess again. As we speak, Phyllis Schlafly is the target of a hostile takeover by people within her own organization, including by her own daughter. They want Phyllis OUT. They want to throw her into the garbage bag like an old dishrag. After all of these years, after all she has done, after a lifetime of Herculean effort, they want Phyllis Schlafly GONE. What, you ask, could be the awful sin, the horrific iniquity, the egregious act of malfeasance Phyllis could have committed to warrant such an attack? Answer: she endorsed Donald Trump for president. Mind you, these attacks are not coming from the ACLU or the SPLC. They are coming from Christian conservatives within Eagle Forum. And from a political perspective, the people who want to destroy Mrs. Schlafly are, guess who: the Ted Cruz supporters, thats who. See this report here. Ted Cruzs base of support is comprised mostly of Israel-First evangelical Christians. Prophecy preachers from all over America have declared Ted to be Gods anointed presidential candidate. These end-time evangelicals see Ted Cruz as their Elijah or John the Baptist to usher in the Millennial Kingdom. However, the fact that Cruzs supporters are attacking Mrs. Schlafly in such a vile and vicious manner, shows that hell, not heaven, is in their hearts. I am reminded of the words of King David: I am for peace: but when I speak, they are for war. (Psalms 120:7 KJV) Whether people agree with Schlaflys decision to endorse Donald Trump is NOT the issue. To target Phyllis as an enemy because of her endorsement is the grossest and most vile attempt at character assassination that I can possibly imagine. Agree with her or not, Phyllis Schlafly is a paragon of integrity. This leads to a very serious and all-too-common current reality: a sizeable percentage of our so-called Christian community is filled with a heart of hatred and war. They like to talk about peace and love, but what they are really about is war and hate. I cant keep from saying I told you so at this point. When G.W. Bush and Dick Cheney began their propaganda war against Iraq and Afghanistan, I told my radio audience, Because G.W. Bush professes to be a Christian, and because he has so much support from within the Christian community, Bush is going to change the definition and character of the word Christian in this country forever. And that is EXACTLY what has happened. Ted Cruz is picking up right where G.W. Bush left off. The Christian standard used to be Blessed are the peacemakers. Today the standard is Blessed are the warmongers. These Bush/Cruz, Israel-First cultists are prepared to not only blow up the Arab world, they are prepared to blow up Eagle Forum or any other organization or personality that does not subscribe to their brand of Israel-First obsession. Believe me, if these divisive, hate-filled Christians could get away with it, they would be as bloodthirsty and violent as any Muslim terrorist. But since they are unable to behead people such as Phyllis Schlafly or Chuck Baldwin, however, they set out with all malice to destroy our work and reputations. Yes, I am dealing with many of these same hate-filled Christians, too. And I know that many of my brethren will recoil when they hear me say what Im going to say, but I have analyzed and studied this phenomenon for many years now, and there is a DEFINITE common denominator. Im talking about decades of church splits; pastors being savagely and mercilessly attacked from inside the church; pastors families being destroyed by members of their own congregations; and the most bitter, divisive, backstabbing, meddlesome, tale-bearing, discordant, mean-spirited actions and attitudes on the planet. All in the name of Christianity. All in the name of love. All in the name of Bible doctrine. All in the name of Jesus Christ. All in the name of truth. What is the common denominator? Almost without exception these haters and destroyers are Israel-First, end-time prophecy zealots. I cannot imagine another presidential candidates supporters attacking someone such as Phyllis Schlafly like the Cruz supporters are now doing. It is Ted Cruzs supporters who are engaging in this attempted destruction of Americas First Lady of The Pro-Life Movement, Phyllis Schlafly. And again, Ted Cruz is Mr. Christian Zionist. Cruz is to politics what John Hagee is to religion. Ted Cruz claims to be pro-life, but he is allowing his supporters to crucify the most influential pro-life American of the last half-century, Phyllis Schlafly. Remember, Ted Cruz is the one who is promising to make the sand glow in the Arab states--except not in Saudi Arabia, of course. Meaning he wants the United States to launch nuclear missiles against millions of innocent men, women, and children throughout the Middle East. Again, all in the name of Christian love. No, thats not exactly true: all in the name of ISRAEL and all in the name of Bible prophecy. And if hes elected president, Im sure he would make good on his promise. After over 40 years of labor and leadership in the liberty and Christian movements, and having personally witnessed the massive amount of death and destruction inflicted upon untold thousands of good and honorable men and women at the hands of these calloused and calculating beasts of prey, it is now (finally) becoming apparent what is behind all of this devastation. It is the same enemy that is trying to destroy Phyllis Schlafly. When the spirit of hatred and war take over the heart, no one is safe. Not even friends. Please pray for Phyllis Schlafly. P.S. Once again, I invite readers to obtain my four message series entitled The Church And Israel. It is available on ONE DVD. Titles include: * The Presentation And Rejection of The King * An High Priest For Ever After The Order of Melchisedec * Jesus: The Seed of David, The Seed of Abraham * Christs Last Words To Israel This series of messages will help people understand why the modern Zionist state of Israel can hold no claim to the promise given to Abraham in Genesis 12:3 and why the Israel-First theology of John Hagee and so many others is egregious Biblical error. And readers should also understand that I came to these conclusions after being trained in Israel-First theology and believing and preaching it for most of my life. But the longer I preached it, the more dissatisfied I became with it. I knew something wasnt right. And the more I studied the matter, the more I came to repudiate what I now know is patently false doctrine. To order my DVD, The Church And Israel. King Salman of Saudi Arabia has reaffirmed that the member countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council reject any act that may affect Moroccos supreme interests. In his opening address before the first Morocco-GCC summit held Wednesday in Riyadh with the participation of King Mohammed VI, King Salman reaffirmed total rejection by Saudi Arabia and the other member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council of any act that may affect Moroccan supreme interests, on top of which the Moroccan Sahara issue. Underlining that the leaders of the GCC member states all hold a great reverence for King Mohammed VI, for his country and for his brotherly people, King Salman said this first summit is but a reflection of the special and exceptional relations, binding GCC member states and Morocco. He asserted in his name and on behalf of the GCC member states leaders, the keenness to put their bilateral relations with Morocco, at the highest levels, in all political, economic, military and security-related aspects. This meeting will unify our stance, enhance our solidarity and expand our relations to more realms, to best serve the interests of our countries and peoples, King Salman said. King Salman also voiced appreciation for Moroccos support for the causes of the GCC countries, recalling, with reverence the North African Kingdoms participation in Kuwait liberation war, its initiative to take part in the Determination Storm operation, and its involvement in the Islamic Military Coalition to combat terrorism. All this, he said, confirms our solidarity and shared support of all political and security-related issues. In his speech before the summit, King Mohammed VI pointed out that Gulf countries, Morocco and Jordan, which are oases of peace and security for their citizens and a factor of stability in their respective regions are facing conspiracies which seek to undermine our collective security. We are all facing the same perils, the same threats, though their origins and manifestations may differ. Therefore, to defend our security is not only a shared obligation, but it is also a collective, indivisible one. Morocco has always perceived the security and stability of Gulf countries as an intrinsic part of its own security and stability. What hurts you hurts us, and what affects us affects you, he said, adding that Morocco has consistently sought to demonstrate this in all situations and circumstances. The aim has been to stand up to all threats in the region, as in the First Gulf War, the operation in Yemen to restore legitimacy and the ongoing security and intelligence cooperation, said the Moroccan King. King Mohammed VI voiced pride and appreciation for the constant support GCC members have been giving his country for the defense of its territorial integrity, saying that the question of the Moroccan Sahara has always been the cause of Gulf countries as well. The Sovereign recalled that in 1975, delegations from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the Sultanate of Oman and the United Arab Emirates took part in the Green March for the recovery of our southern provinces. The participants included my brother, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, who was 14-year old at the time, the king said, adding that since then, the Gulf States have spared no effort to uphold our just cause and defend Moroccos sovereignty over its entire territory. The leaders participating in the summit held afterwards a closed-door session before they took part in a dinner banquet hosted by King Salman. Egypt, Israel and Jordan should move beyond animosity and unite to confront IS, a senior top Israeli Wednesday said commending the military intelligence cooperation between the three countries. Major-General Yair Golan, deputy chief of staff told reporters Israel is providing intelligence to Egypt and Jordan to counter IS on their soils. Egypt fights ISIS in the Sinai peninsula. Jordan is terrified by the presence of ISIS in Jordanian cities and towns. And we try to work with them in order to contribute something to their security, he said. He deemed the cooperation unprecedented but said that it does not touch other areas. But thats between defense establishments, and I wouldnt describe that as some sort of reconciliation between the people. But it is a good starting point and Im quite optimistic concerning that, he told foreign journalists. Egypt and Jordan are the only Arab countries which signed peace treaties with Israel in 1979 in 1994 respectively but the accords have earned groans back home. Egypt has been wrestling with IS local affiliates mainly in the Sinai. The militants have stepped up attack against Egyptian forces since 2013, year al-Sisi led a military coup against Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. Jordan, sharing border with Iraq, Syria has been battling homegrown jihadists who seek to bring down the monarchy fighting the militants in Syria and Iraq alongside the US and other allies. Moroccan parliamentarian women from all political stripes Monday introduced a request demanding a better representation of women, at least one third of the parliament seats for the coming 2016 legislatives. Women lawmakers from the parties forming the governmental coalition and the opposition met with Interior Minister Mohamed Hassad and Junior Interior Minister Charik Draiss to discuss a better representation of women in the Moroccan House of Representatives for the coming legislative elections to be held next September, local Arabic daily Assabah reported. The womens objective is to receive backing from authorities in their quest of one third of the parliament seats; around 132 seats against 66 that they currently occupy. Interior Minister Hassad reportedly nodded to the womens request and a meeting has been scheduled in about two weeks. According to Assabah, the women intend to submit their request to Prime Minister Abdelilah Benkirane and to the Secretaries General of various political parties. The women union also seeks to obtain the cancellation of article 5 of the organic law, preventing a lawmaker to run again for legislatives. Moroccans will go to polls to elect new members to the 395-seat House of Representatives. The latest legislatives were held in 2011 with the Party of Justice and Development (PJD) winning a landslide victory with 107 seats. Malia Bouattia was elected Wednesday President of UKs National Union of Students after she beat incumbent Megan Dunn by narrow margin following campaigns marked by controversy. The Constantin-born young lady cruised to the top position of the National Union of Students (NUS) after she won 50.9 per cent of the vote at the national conference in Brighton. She beat the incumbent Megan Dunn with 50 votes. Bouattia is known for her support for the Palestinian cause which made her popular but at the same time an enemy in the eyes of her critics who say she is anti-Semitic. She also earned groans from her opponents in her fight against Islamophobia after refusing to endorse a motion condemning IS. Bouattia in her rejection of the motion argued that the wording of the motion was islamophobic. She also came under fire after allegedly saying that her alma mater, Birmingham University, as a Zionist outpost in higher education, and calling it the the largest Jsoc [Jewish student society] in the country. In an address following her election, Bouattia indicated that she was happy to be elected as NUS first Black woman president, she also promised to unify and strengthen the union to take up the several challenges facing students in UK. Malia Bouattia left Algeria at the age of seven during the darkest period of her country to migrate in UK with her parents. National Union of Students (NUS) is the largest and most powerful British student union created since 1922. The union claims more than seven million members, with 2.5 million in higher education and 4.5 million in further education. British Prime Minister David Cameron arrives at the Council of the European Union in Brussels last month. Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Three months from today Britain will hold a referendum on whether to leave or remain in the European Union. Two of the primary concerns of those who favor leaving are immigration and terrorism, and so yesterdays terror attacks in Brussels provided an opportunity for cries of Brexit! Allison Pearson columnist for the conservative Telegraph, best-selling novelist, and wife of New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane put it plainly in a tweet: Brussels, de facto capital of the EU, is also the jihadist capital of Europe. And the Remainers dare to say were safer in the EU! #Brexit. Among her 1,500 retweeters was Nigel Farage, leader of the right-wing nationalist U.K. Independence Party (UKIP), who in his own tweet on the matter was more tastefully vague: Im very upset by events in Brussels today and even more depressed for the future. Party spokesman Mike Hookem elaborated in a statement: The head of Europol said in February that 5,000 jihadists are at large in the EU having slipped in from Syria. There are 94 returned jihadists currently living in Molenbeek, Brussels. This fact alone should alert people to the fact that open borders are putting the lives of European citizens at risk. From the EU-friendly center there were the usual denunciations on grounds of shamelessness, led by Prime Minister David Cameron, who said it was not appropriate for UKIP to make such a crude link between immigration and terrorism at least not so soon. I was an immigrant in Britain when I was living in London as a sort of literary guest worker, with an editorial job and a visa, for four years and two weeks, from May 2011 to June 2015 (I never stopped counting the days). But not an immigrant of the sort that alarms UKIP and its supporters. Those would include radical Islamists uninterested in integrating into British society (i.e. those who want to take us over); immigrants with criminal records or HIV; and Romanians, Bulgarians, Poles, and others from countries that havent fully recovered from being behind the iron curtain. Preferable are immigrants from the former British Empire: New Zealanders, Australians, Indians, and so on, who are in some ways more likely to speak English, understand common law and have a connection with this country, as Farage put it in the run-up to last years election. Farage and UKIP have risen over the past three years by pandering to the sense that British identity is in crisis and a Brexit would bring that crisis to an end. But Ive never taken the prospect of a Brexit very seriously, at least not until recently, and I still dont take the multivalent British identity crisis, which might bring it about, very seriously at all. Like most of the foreigners I knew in London I was not infrequently reminded that I was a foreigner, and the constant British fretting over the crisis of Britishness seemed to me part of a core British identity whose integrity is in no danger at all. That crisis seems to me threefold. First, nostalgia for the lost days of empire and a regretful, or resentful, afterlife in which Britons on the world stage have become Americas streetwalkers, in the phrase of Bill Hayden, the Kim Philby-esque double agent in John Le Carres Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. But that ship sailed as long ago as the Suez Crisis, and whatever bitterness lingers in the special relationship is soothed by disproportionate pop-cultural victories across the pond by the likes of Adele and Eddie Redmayne. Second, theres the xenophobia at play in UKIPs rhetoric about immigration: Farage has said hed be concerned if a family of Romanians moved in next door (no doubt because they still secretly support Ceausescu). But generations of immigrants whose offspring are now thoroughly British (Farage himself is descended from French Huguenot refugees and Germans, has a German wife, and half-German children) signal that this xenophobia is a flimsy one. The third and most powerful element of the identity crisis is what the novelist James Meek, writing in the London Review of Books, has termed UKIPs general proposition that local power is being diminished while the power of remote, faceless authorities is growing. Working-class Britons are used to seeing the country run by high-cheekboned toffs like Cameron; the Queen sits above them all. The faces of the faceless in Brussels might very well be German or French, the traditional national rivals, some of whom might not share certain Anglo taboos. The British, for example, have a horror of horse meat, but the French incorporated it into their haute cuisine during the 1870 Siege of Paris, and some Germans eat it like meatloaf. The horse-meat-adulteration scandal that exploded in January of 2013 horse and pig DNA discovered in products marketed as beef in England and Ireland is more useful to thinking about the possibility of a Brexit than the opportunistic reactions to the attacks in Brussels. In London for some weeks the panic over frozen equine lasagna on supermarket shelves dominated the front pages and the airwaves. (It also coincided with a dip in the stock valuation of the chain store Tesco to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds.) But though there were genuine health concerns and violations involved including the presence of prohibited veterinary medicines in the public mind the scandal was less a matter of any risk of illness than of the murkiness of a food chain that extended from France and Luxembourg to, of course, Poland and Romania. At the time of the panic Farage was on the march. Hed been elected a minister to the European Parliament in 1999, and leader of UKIP since 2010, but was only now emerging as a figure of national prominence. UKIP scored its biggest-ever victory in the local elections of May 2013. From here Farage and his cohort would launch their first legitimate campaign for seats in the British Parliament. Not to say the rise of UKIP was simply a matter of tainted fast food. As much as he exploited Britains identity crisis, Farage was also rising because of general dissatisfaction with Britains three largest parties. Labour hadnt recovered from tagging along with the U.S. to Iraq and presiding over the financial crisis. The coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in power had put in place an austerity regime that only extended the suffering. UKIP dominated the national media for two years, and put a scare into all three parties. (There were frightening goings-on in Scotland, too, but thats another story.) In advance of the 2015 election, Labour which during the Blair years had been so enamored of the EU that it was ready to ditch the pound incorporated immigration restrictions in its five major pledges, which party leader Ed Miliband hawked on a ludicrous stone tablet in the week before the election. (Perhaps more embarrassing was a red party coffee mug with the slogan Controls on Immigration that became a minor meme.) Each party acquiesced to promising a Brexit referendum if elected in 2015. (Cameron had done so in January 2013, while the Tesco shoppers were eating cheeseburgers ground out of downed thoroughbreds.) For Cameron the strategy worked in the near-term. He managed to cut off UKIP on his right flank, and UKIP ate up disaffected former Labour voters on his left, while the Scottish National Party routed Labour in its former stronghold. The Lib Dems, formerly the protest party but now tainted by five ineffectual years sharing power, were effectively wiped out. But now the Brexit bill has come due, and, besides the shameless Farage, Cameron faces an insurgency within his own party. Its an intra-party war long in the making. It was the Tories who led Britain into the Common Market in the 1970s under Edward Heath. Their earlier attempts to join had been thwarted by Charles De Gaulle, who saw the British as a Trojan horse for inserting American interests on the Continent. (Its a thesis that still holds up: Barack Obama will soon be visiting Britain to urge against a Brexit.) The Tories remained the party of Europe in the 1980s, but membership exposed the contradictions in Margaret Thatchers outlook as the power of the European Commission in Brussels swelled. She was all for open markets, but the price of membership in Europe was diminished national sovereignty. Neoliberalism always corrodes its nationalist guises. Her successor John Major was softer on Europe, and it was during his administration that Farage and other disaffected Tories formed UKIP. But under Tony Blair, New Labour became the party of Europe, and the young Conservatives who entered office in opposition, like Cameron and his austerity-drunk wingman George Osborne, came up playing the euro-skeptic card for short-term political advantage. The most prominent defectors to the Leave side are former Education Secretary Michael Gove and outgoing London Mayor Boris Johnson, now an MP and a principal rival of Camerons for party leadership. If voters decide for a Brexit, it would effectively be a vote of no confidence in Cameron, and Johnson would stand a strong chance of becoming prime minister probably the main reason he stopped sitting on the fence and threw in with the Brexiteers this winter. What would a Brexit mean beyond the Conservative Party? No one is certain, and thats why the finance industry in the City of London prefers to remain. But the current political climate doesnt encourage the bankers to raise their voices. New trade agreements with the EU and with the dozens of countries to which the EU is bound in treaties would take an army of lawyers and years to negotiate. (Maintaining access to the single market would mean continuing to play by rules set in Brussels; its failures notwithstanding, Brussels is probably the most effective force in the struggle to keep horse meat out of British patties.) Restrictions on immigration could come quicker, but they might incur penalties in deals on trade with a spurned Brussels. Would any of this mean reining in the power of remote, faceless authorities? Probably not. As Meek writes, UKIPs appeal and the thirst for a Brexit more generally derives from a sense of helplessness that actually has little to do with Brussels. It has to do with global business and chainification. It has to do with the neoliberal political agenda: privatisation, jurisdiction-hopping, protection of inherited wealth and a shift of taxation from rich to poor. These are policies common to the Conservatives and New Labour over the past 35 years. Beginning the process of rolling them back would require kicking out the Tories and putting into power a party that looked very different from New Labour. Of course, as it happens, Labour is under new leadership: Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the party after his insurgent populist campaign drew energy from the left to overwhelm his Blairite competitors. (This was in part the result of new election rules meant to weaken trade unions in favor of centrists. It backfired: Under the new guidelines, anyone who wanted to pay dues and join the party was allowed a vote, and the centrists crumbled.) Think of Corbyn as a figure analogous to Bernie Sanders if he were set to contend as the partys candidate in a national election. Corbyn is no ally to Cameron in the Remain campaign. Its believed that he privately supports a Brexit. Last summer in the New Statesman, John King set forth The Left-Wing Case for a Brexit: The EU is fundamentally a corporate-oriented, anti-democratic body that has turned the likes of Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Cyprus into vassal states at the mercy of the Troika (a makeshift overlord run by officials from the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the IMF) while accelerating a housing crisis in the U.K. that has pushed working people from centers like London to the peripheries as housing stock increasingly becomes just another set of assets for foreign investors to park their money. Though he doesnt mention the Brexit, David Graeber, writing in the Baffler, makes a similar, and quite powerful argument about the Conservatives austerity regime, the housing market, and the selling off of London real estate to the global rich: [T]he historical defeat and humiliation of the British working classes is now the islands primary export product. By organizing the entire economy around the resultant housing bubble, the Tories have ensured that the bulk of the British population is aware, at least on some tacit level, that it is precisely the global appeal of the English class system, up to and including the contemptuous sneer of the Oxbridge graduates in Parliament chuckling over the impending removal of housing benefits, that is also keeping affordable track shoes, beer, and consumer electronics flowing into the country. Its an impossible dilemma. Its hardly surprising, then, that so many turn to cynical right-wing populists like UKIP, who manipulate the resulting indignation by fomenting rage against Polish construction workers instead of Russian oligarchs, Bangladeshi drivers instead of Qatari princes, and West Indian porters instead of Brazilian steel tycoons. Ill never be a British subject, and Im no longer a British resident, so I dont have any skin in the Brexit game. I suspect that, without a full-scale political realignment that brings to power someone very different from David Cameron or Boris Johnson, Brexit would amount to EU membership lite. But that doesnt mean the champions of the status quo arent scared. On Monday, in the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman worried that the forces of Brexit had taken on a momentum akin to that of Donald Trump, that the Establishment had been feckless in its resistance, and that the closet Brexiteer Corbyn would be no help. Polls from last week show something between a statistical tie and a 52-47 Brexit advantage when accounting for how likely respondents are to go out and vote. I doubt that terror attacks like yesterdays will be the deciding factor. Whatever the outcome, as long as they remain on their island, the British will never escape being British. A potentially weak presidential ticket is making the Republican defense of Senate seats even more difficult than before. Control of the U.S. Senate is a big and achievable goal for both parties this November. The stakes are high, no matter who wins the presidential race, with the power to control Judicial and Executive branch confirmation votes and to determine rules governing filibusters being the most obvious. If either party emerges with control of the White House and both congressional chambers, the Senate will be the staging area for a budget reconciliation bill that could remake the federal government by a simple majority vote. Right now Republicans control the Senate by a four-vote majority, which makes a drive for five net seat gain the overriding Democratic goal (four seats alone would ensure Democratic control if their party hangs on to the White House and the tie-breaking vice-presidency). All other things being equal, the landscape is strongly pro-Democratic, with Republicans defending 24 seats and Democrats defending only 10. In addition, seven of the GOP seats are in states carried twice by Barack Obama, while none of the Democratic seats are in states Republicans carried in 2008 or 2012. Three Republican and three Democratic incumbents are retiring. Complicating the picture is the very high likelihood that either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz will be the Republican presidential nominee; neither is considered a particularly strong top-of-the-ticket candidate at a time when ticket-splitting is at a relatively low frequency. This reality has boosted Democratic optimism while potentially putting a new set of Republican Senate seats into play. Looking at the Senate races by category, eight Democratic seats (in California, Connecticut, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington) and 11 Republican seats (Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Utah) are considered safe from any significant risk of partisan turnover. Among unsafe seats, the following are of most interest: 1) Blue-state Republicans Races for six of the seven Republican seats located in states carried twice by Obama are considered highly competitive. The most vulnerable is probably Illinois, where Mark Kirk, despite a relatively moderate voting record, is a ripe target for Democrats, with Asian-American Iraq War vet and double amputee Representative Tammy Duckworth the probable Democratic nominee. Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson is also an underdog in a rematch with former senator Russ Feingold; the Democrat has been leading solidly in polls for months. Two closer races involve New Hampshire senator Kelly Ayotte, whos being challenged by governor Maggie Hassan, and Ohio senator Rob Portman, being challenged by former governor Ted Strickland (who must get through a primary). In Pennsylvania, Senator Pat Toomey had been seen as a favorite in a rematch with former representative Joe Sestak, but now the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (with backing from the president and vice-president) has recruited former U.S. and state environmental official Katie McGinty to challenge Sestak. The Florida seat of Senator Marco Rubio is universally considered a toss-up with representatives David Jolly and Ron DeSantis and Lieutenant Governor Carlos Lopez-Cantera leading a large Republican field, while two congressmen, Establishment favorite Patrick Murphy and progressive gadfly Alan Grayson, are vying for the Democratic nomination. A seventh blue-state Republican, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, is in stronger shape than his peers, but former lieutenant governor Patty Judge has given Democrats a credible challenger with statewide name recognition. Grassley is among the Republicans who could be endangered by a very weak presidential candidate. 2) Other potentially vulnerable Republicans North Carolina is a competitive presidential state where Senator Richard Burr has never made himself a hard target. Exstate representative Deborah Ross has won the Democratic nomination, and the presidential/senatorial/gubernatorial races here could make the state a national party priority meaning a flood of money from both sides. Missouri is a stronger Republican state at the presidential level, but Democrats there have maintained some ticket-splitting appeal; Secretary of State Jason Kander, an Afghanistan veteran with some demonstrated fund-raising prowess, could give Senator Roy Blunt a serious challenge. And in Arizona, tensions between Senator John McCain and both potential presidential nominees, and a possible Latino backlash against the entire ticket, have made some Republicans nervous about McCain, who turns 80 this summer and will have a credible Democratic opponent in Representative Ann Kirkpatrick. 3) Democratic targets Barring a presidential albatross, Republicans have been reasonably optimistic about picking up two Senate seats in battleground states Colorado and Nevada. In Colorado, where Democratic senator Mark Udall lost in 2014, a host of GOP candidates expressed interest in taking on Senator Michael Bennet. Several, however, were eliminated in the recent Colorado State GOP convention when only one, county commissioner Darryl Glenn, received the percentage of votes necessary to be placed on the primary ballot. Four other candidates, none of them extremely well known, made the ballot by petition; the primary will be held in June. In Nevada, the race to succeed Harry Reid should be a barn burner with both parties recruiting their favorites: Representative Joe Heck for the GOP and former attorney general Catherine Cortez Masto for the Democrats. 4) Primary fights Aside from the above-mentioned free-for-all among Colorado Republicans, there are two open-seat Senate races that are mainly of interest because of very competitive Democratic primaries. One is in Maryland, where two prominent House members, Chris Van Hollen and Donna Edwards, are locked in a tight battle to succeed Barbara Mikulski that has aroused some ideological and racial tensions (Edwards is both African-American and an outspoken progressive, while Van Hollen is quietly being backed by the White House and the House Democratic leadership). In California, a host of Democratic and Republican candidates will compete in the states nonpartisan top-two primary on June 7 to succeed Democratic senator Barbara Boxer. Thanks to an obscure group of GOP candidates and the states partisan leanings, theres a very high probability that two Democrats, Attorney General Kamala Harris and Representative Loretta Sanchez, will make the general-election ballot, where Republicans will then play a potentially crucial role in electing their favorite from the opposition ranks. The scuttlebutt at present suggests the conspicuously centrist Sanchez could get enough business and Republican support to supplement her regional (Los Angeles) and ethnic (Latino) appeal and overwhelm the African-American progressive favorite Harris, who is from San Francisco. Once the dust settles on the Senate battlegrounds of 2016, a new cycle will begin with a landscape at least as strongly pro-Republican as this years is strongly pro-Democratic. So if Democrats do luck into a presidentially driven wave, it would behoove them to win as many Senate seats as possible in order to build a majority with a fighting chance of surviving the next cycle. Living that subsidized, euro-chic life. Photo: Austrian Archives/CORBIS I can sum up my experience of Austrian motherhood in one conversation with my midwife, Andrea. We were drinking herbal tea in her Vienna office while discussing how to insert oil into my vagina. When should I start pumping? I asked. At my 37th week, I feared missing the supposed window in which the baby might take the bottle and wanted my husband to get in on the feeding as soon as possible. Andrea gave me a look that was so perplexed I thought shed misunderstood my English. But where are you going? she asked. *** When I was a childless New Yorker, none of the bleak, well-documented difficulty and expense of raising babies in the city registered until my husband was offered a job in Vienna. With its free health care, subsidized day care and generous financial aid to families, Austria seemed to be everything the U.S. wasnt an ideal socialized haven in which to get knocked up. When the offer came in, I had just finished graduate school. My nascent writing career was flexible. I was also 34 and baby hungry. We jumped at the chance. I got pregnant almost immediately after our arrival, and the Austrian goods started pouring in. A gynecologist took care of the ultrasounds and blood work (for free, of course), and Andrea, our private midwife, was on call 24/7 until six weeks after the birth all for $1,900. Although the baby was 12 days late, Andrea was nonplussed. She was much more traumatized by the fact that after 28 hours of labor, the whole thing ended in a Caesarean, which cost us nothing. (Her C-section rate was 10 percent. In New York, one in three births end in surgery.) Once home from the hospital, Andrea showed up every afternoon for a month to check my scar, weigh the baby, and help with breastfeeding. Her ongoing presence single-handedly kept me from slipping into the quicksand of postpartum depression. Id heard all the horror stories from my new-mom friends back home, so I knew how truly good we had it. What I didnt expect, however, was for my experience of Viennese motherhood to change me and my relationship to my work so profoundly. *** I didnt foresee motherhood derailing my career or my ambition, but since my work options abroad were limited, my postpartum pie-in-the-sky plan was as follows: Have baby. At 4 months when shed be sleeping through the night, hahaha! get a babysitter and resume work on my book proposal. Sell book. Write it. (Go ahead: laugh.) I harbored no fantasies of being a SAHM. I knew I would go insane. I imagined a sitter coming 1020 hours a week. My husbands academic salary was small, but there was no pressure for me to return to paid work right away: I received 12,000 from the Austrian government for my year of maternity leave. This was more than the monthly salary Id made the previous year as an adjunct at a local university. (This government subsidy was, by the way, on the low end; women who had been employed full-time when they gave birth earned up to 70 percent of their salary, capped at 2,000, for up to a year, and their jobs protected for up to two years. If they got pregnant within those two years, their jobs were protected for two more.) * Four months came and went. I got a wonderful sitter for a meager six hours a week, but I could barely think. Writing went out the window. But more to the point, that book the book in which Id stupidly wrapped up all my ambitions seemed to have been written by another person, in another lifetime. With my baby forever at my breast and on my mind and with all of us shacked up in a foreign land I could not for the life of me find my way back into that old material. Instead, I reluctantly turned into the Primary Caregiver. I cooked; I laundered; I did all the nighttime shifts. My husband dove into his work, traveled around Europe to give talks, revised his book at a steady pace. Mine languished on my computer. Despite enjoying most of the time I spent with our daughter, I couldnt help feeling resentful. My career was just as important to me as my husbands was to him, but with my book in shambles and no clear job to return to the adjunct work was no longer cost-effective I felt trapped. Becoming a mother in a place where I didnt speak the language and had no professional contacts suddenly seemed monumentally shortsighted. It had stalled out my career before Id even gotten it off the ground. What was this time out turning me into? But my concern was out of step with my surroundings. Virtually every mother in Austria stays home for at least one year, if not two or three very few day cares accept children before 12 months and nannies are not the norm. All kids are guaranteed a subsidized spot at age three, but many kids start at 18 months or 2 years when maternity leave ends. Some women have the states blessing to work part-time until their children are 7, although this is often unrealistic: An accountant friend who tried to work 15 hours a week once her son turned 2 found it unmanageable clients expected her to be constantly available. She quit. It is virtually impossible to criticize a system as generous as Austrias, and I have never once dreamed of switching places with my friends in New York. But the result of these laws is that early parenthood here is particularly gendered: Few of my friends husbands were involved in the day-to-day childcare. Just two dads I knew took their lawful paternity leave usually two months to their wives twelve. Like in Sweden, Austrian fathers lose their allotted time if they dont use it, but for various economic and cultural reasons they are often the primary breadwinner and cant afford the pay cut (this was our situation) or they fear stigmatization at work very few take it. But unlike my husband and me, my expat friends didnt struggle over the gendered turn their marriages had taken. These women had already given up their careers upon moving to Vienna, or had always expected a year or two of paid leave with a new baby. They felt little anxiety about keeping their careers going or, like me, getting them out of the red. Why should they? By law, their jobs were protected. A few months in, I started to understand the question my midwife had posed when I asked her about using a breast pump. But where are you going? shed wanted to know, as if I were planning to abandon my child. The logic seemed to be: My husband had his job, and I had mine, which was culturally mandated and for which I was paid. What else could I possibly want? By and large, in this city it is mothers, not nannies, who hold court at the Spielplatz and pick up the kids at day care any time between 11:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. (Even if the center is open until 5 p.m., many caretakers discourage mothers from coming in later.) Vienna is known for its famously high quality of life, in large part because it makes living so easy for a young family. But this view of early parenthood not-so-subtly decrees that children are best off with their mothers even if this is not what the mother actually wants. As a friend of mine noted, Its a country that protects mothers, not women. When Austrian culture was new to me, I found this wildly problematic sexist even and on some level, I still do. I wish that my husband had been able to take paternity leave; research shows that fathers who do are much more involved in the childs care, long after the leave has ended, and that it has positive knock-off effects on the mothers career. But while I am massively grateful for the year my daughter and I had together it certainly made me question how anyone could perform their job properly on so little sleep and while leaking out of so many orifices I think that a year or two of maternity leave should also be a choice. Heres why: I have American friends who had no desire to stay home for a year; they were actually happier going back to work. (Many, of course, werent and most wanted to work part-time.) My best friend in New York put her daughter in day care at four months, was promoted during her first year of motherhood and now has her dream job. A year at home would have destroyed her and, within the American system, would have forced her to quit a job she had been working toward for over a decade. But I also see now that putting my daughter in full-time care at four months would have been wrong for me. It is, in fact, still wrong for me, and shes now almost 3. I cant imagine giving up our long afternoons at the park or fighting with my husband over who will take her to the pediatrician even if it meant Id be more successful or wealthier. Is this because Ive become Austrian in my approach to parenting? Probably. *** I thought that having a baby abroad would stall out my career and in the short term, it did. Fewer opportunities were available; Im not as far along professionally as many of my working-mom friends back home; I make less money. This causes my husband and me no small amount of anxiety, especially with a move back to the U.S. imminent. But because of one simple, life-saving amenity subsidized day care I have actually gotten my career back, without having to sacrifice too much time with my daughter. We pay less than $150 a month (yes, a month) for almost 30 hours of top-notch care a week. I have been teaching and tutoring part-time for over two years now, but I didnt have to go back to work, as so many American mothers do, simply to afford child care. I went back because, like my husband, I wanted the intellectual and financial rewards. The hours I now spend on that resurrected manuscript or even the ones I spent writing this are possible because of day care. And those hours are absolutely vital to me. Do they sometimes seem insufficient? Yes. Would I ask for more of them, if it meant having a more high-powered job? If it meant a more secure financial future? If it meant racing home at 6 p.m., hoping to catch an hour or two with my baby before bed? Right now, I wouldnt. And, luckily, I dont have to. And for that, I only have Austria to thank. Its a theater for clothes. Photo: Jason Schmidt In 2006, when artist Francesco Clemente converted a former factory in Greenpoint into a studio and storage space, his wife, Alba, a costume and set designer, thought to herself, Why bother just filling it with boxes? The space, designed by architect Richard Gluckman, featured a large, empty room, the perfect spot, Clemente decided, to store her designer treasures: around 200 pieces by Jean Paul Gaultier, Alaia, Moschino, Comme des Garcons, and others mostly from the 80s and 90s, when Clemente graced the citys most glamorous parties and was photographed everywhere she went. I was always overdressed! she says with a huge laugh. It was so much fun. But Clemente didnt just want a closet; she wanted a theater for her clothes. Illustration: Jason Lee I am obsessed by theaters, she says, and has been ever since the age of 7, when she put on puppet shows for her friends growing up on Italys Amalfi Coast. These days, she designs costumes, for shows like Chekhovs Platonov, performed at the Kitchen, and for the New York City Operas Powder Her Face. After asking Gluckman to draw up plans for the space, Clemente enlisted artist Jim Long to help her fully realize her vision. Long combed through photographs of theater interiors, all of them too big, until he found one that had been built in 1798 inside the palace of Caterina Cornaro in Asolo, Italy. He then installed red velvet curtains and canvas panels. To christen the studio, a performer did a burlesque show inside a balloon, and Clemente hosted her birthday there three years ago. The rest of the time, this is a sacred space where Clementes daughters come to try on their mothers clothes as well as a private spot where she can reflect on her most special things. I remember every piece and why I got it, she says. This space is like a tomb, a memory of my 35 and I hope more wonderful years in New York City. *This article appears in the April 18, 2016 issue of New York Magazine. Photo: Jason Schmidt The Pre-Entrance Architect Richard Gluckman designed the studio of artist Francesco Clemente, and Clementes wife, Alba, saw an opportunity to create storage space for her clothes under the mezzanine. Photo: Jason Schmidt The Closet With the Doors Shut Clemente staged a performance for her birthday party in the studioslashstorage space. I had butoh dancers dressed like Marie Antoinette, and then I made a huge fake cake. Photo: Jason Schmidt The Closet With the Doors Open The photograph on the doors shows the theater at the palace of Caterina Cornaro, after it was moved to the Ringling Museum in Florida and renamed the Historic Asolo Theater. Photo: Jason Schmidt Clemente at Her Vanity Every proper theater has a dressing room. Here, Clemente tucked one behind the closet door. Photo: Jason Schmidt The Entrance to Her Closet Clemente leading guests into her private space. Photo: Bloomberg/Getty Images New York simply cannot keep Essie nail polish on the shelves because its being stolen, maybe by the most well-manicured comic book villain of all time. Back in January, a thief made off with $1,632 of Essie nail polish from a midtown Manhattan Duane Reade, while another hit up the location a few weeks later and took $595 worth of the stuff (and some Sally Hansen to boot). DNAInfo also reports two separate incidents at other Duane Reades around the city, in which over $4,000 of Essie polish was nabbed. And then, on April 11, a man went to the original scene of the crime to take $1,581 of Essie bottles. But where where is all this nail polish going? We have some ideas. this is cute Reply Thread Link Maybe he should've started dating women who've accomplished a career that requires using what was accomplished through education and aren't just eye candy from the very beginning? (I don't follow his love life, but I remember him dating women who didn't exactly seem like the brightest candles) Reply Thread Link Yup, mte Reply Parent Thread Link He was going the way of Leo before he met her. Reply Parent Thread Link nah, don't blame the women for this. he didn't want to settle down, until he did. some people never settle down and that's okay, too. Reply Parent Thread Link true, but that doesn't change my perception of those women. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link He clearly wasn't interested in a serious, committed relationship before. Reply Parent Thread Link Or maybe he just wasn't interested in long term things until he met her. Acting like they were all dumb women is bad. Don't do it. Reply Parent Thread Link Plenty of women without an higher education can be in loving relationships and make their partner happy. Maybe *he* was the one incapable of being in a relationship and it took him 50 years to finally mature? This narrative "They were all stupid whores and it finally took an educated, classy woman to tame him!" is dumb. Edited at 2016-04-21 04:55 pm (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Eh, I don't think he really took dating seriously before, and sure he often dated women younger than him, but I don't think his dating history is equivalent to Leo's. He had several longer-term, public relationships, often with women that had their own careers, even if they were mainly in entertainment. Reply Parent Thread Link completely OT but i love your icon!!!!! #freebohmi Reply Parent Thread Expand Link An education does not reflect ones intelligence or their ability to love someone well, shut the fuck up, this was Clooney's choice and fault from day one, implying the other women were stupid and thus he didnt want them is such a gross thing to say. You have issues. Edited at 2016-04-21 06:11 pm (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I think he settled down when he wanted to. Based off what I know of his relationships he didn't seem to ever be in them for long haul anyway. I think many of those women were just for casual relationships. Reply Parent Thread Link There is no need to call those women stupid when you know nothing about them. This whole thread is you thinly veiling your misogyny. Women can be attractive and intelligent. Stacy Keibler is decently accomplished in her field. Then there is also Renee Zellweger, Kelly Preston, and Lucy Liu. You're also giving him too much credit. This is probably a whole act to get his political career started and look like a "family man." Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I didn't know she took his name. Reply Thread Link Whenever I see his face I want Nespresso. Reply Thread Link And whenever you see Nespresso you want George? That's fucked up! But top marks to Nespresso's advertising team. Reply Parent Thread Link Hdu, all I want is coffee. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Bruh, it's cuz you finally grew up and finally wanted a real relationship. Reply Thread Link Does not wanting a serious relationship mean you're not grown up? lol Reply Parent Thread Link Of course not. I guess I phrased that badly. I know a lot of single people that have their shit way more together than I do. :P I'm just saying he matured or grew up to find more in a woman than just her looks. :) Reply Parent Thread Link Right? I mean... It's nice to grow up and stop messing around with barely leagals but having a serious relationship doesn't make you a grown up. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Yeah she's like 37 or 38. So still a sizeable age gap. I would applaud him more if she was 45 or something, lmfao Reply Parent Thread Link It's just so common for men his age (especially in Hollywood) to be dating women with 20+ year age difference that 10-15 years age difference is now "close to his age". Reply Parent Thread Link Really??? Everyone I know is making fun of him for going for someone so much younger. I remember there was a huge backlash against the first wave of media reports that painted her as some lucky nobody and everyone was saying "Exceptional career woman settles for middle aged husband". Reply Parent Thread Link same. he was so smug in that meet the press interview too. ughh Reply Parent Thread Link Also, I find saying stuff like that to mags so weird. Didn't he date Stacy Keibler for like 2 years? Like not only has he experienced a love like this one, but no where near it! Not even close! Reply Thread Link They weren't married so why would it be weird Reply Parent Thread Link I feel like that shit always has to be hard for the exes to hear but on the other hand that's kind of the way it goes... I thought it was bad though when the Once Upon a Time guy and Ginnifer Goodwin got together and his divorce was barely final (they met on the show while he was still married) and he was doing interviews about how he's never been happier in his life and he's never loved anyone so much. It was nagl. Reply Parent Thread Link I don't know isn't that the sort of thing you hope people would say about their husbands/wives? LMAO can you imagine him going "I think I loved my other exes more but then I realized the possibility of dying alone was getting greater and greater so I latched on to Amal. She's alright I guess. One of my top 3 greatest loves of all time. Well, maybe top 5." Reply Parent Thread Link Lol. Ok I see what you mean. Reply Parent Thread Link This damn smug POS i really hope ppl turn on him and that his marriage crumbles tbqmfh /dontcomeatmebro Reply Thread Link I LOVE your icon! ;) Reply Parent Thread Link Awwww, what kind of dog is that? Reply Thread Link Pomeranian with a puppy cut. Reply Parent Thread Link I love Pomeranians cut like this but is it bad for them? I have a Japanese spitz and even though he would look adorable, I know trimming him like this would do a lot of damage to him but do Pomeranians not have the double coat, or does it just not matter with them? Reply Parent Thread Expand Link A Clooney. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link i honestly thought you were referring to clooney before i read the responses Reply Parent Thread Link lmao why esquire use every hood nigga's favorite filter on clooney Reply Thread Link There's no need to knock prior relationships to explain how happy you are now. Reply Thread Link Seriously, he's the one who chose to date those women. God, as I get older (30 next year ) I'm single but just...I hate men. They all sound like this. Reply Parent Thread Link If you aren't the happiest with your current s/o than you've been with others than maybe you shouldn't be with that person, lol. I'm not getting how that's knocking previous relationships either... Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Reaching for the stars. Reply Parent Thread Link I mean it's not like he's saying he was unhappy in those relationships? Reply Parent Thread Link Is there more to the quote? I wouldn't say that's knocking past relationships. I would expect that everyone who is in a good relationship with someone would say they are the happiest they've been in a relationship with the person they are currently with. Reply Parent Thread Link This, I hate when men do this shit. Like all the other women were trash until he found this golden woman. Fuck him tbh, he's the problem, not them. Reply Parent Thread Link agreed. and typically when people say this it's just a cover up Reply Parent Thread Link My mom hates him. Reply Thread Link That's what I say when I look at my pets too, George Reply Thread Link I have a bad feeling about this... Reply Parent Thread Link Hearing terrible news from a very inside source that Prince has passed. Zach Myers (@ZMyersOfficial) April 21, 2016 I know Prince employs a lot of workers. I'm nervous. No idea who this is but I pray they're wrong.I know Prince employs a lot of workers. I'm nervous. Reply Parent Thread Link no nope i'm out can't do this I am DONE Reply Parent Thread Link he was just in the hospital too. man, not prince... Reply Parent Thread Link oh no. Wasn't he just sick or hospitalized or something? Reply Parent Thread Link holy shitttttt Reply Parent Thread Link holy shit Reply Parent Thread Link It's confirmed now he is dead :((( Reply Parent Thread Link YES Reply Thread Link Oh goodness gracious I hope she + her family stay safe. Reply Thread Link Seems like she is the only one of her fam who is leaving. I didn't know Riley Keough (sp?) was in it tho. I enjoyed her role in Mad Max, now I'm disappointed :( Reply Parent Thread Link I'd heard Priscilla was staying in a while ago but I didn't know one way or another about Riley. :\ I hope they all get free, safely. Reply Parent Thread Link Couldn't happen to a bigger bunch of asshole bullies imo. Reply Thread Link About 80% of her Storm & Grace album sounded like a veiled threat to not come after her or else. Reply Thread Link Also a great, super underrated album. Reply Parent Thread Link Though I liked her rock stuff better, it was really solid. She is a vastly underappreciated song writer. Reply Parent Thread Link yep So Long and You ain't seen nothin yet especially Reply Parent Thread Link Terrible. Scientology is evil. Edited at 2016-04-21 06:15 pm (UTC) Reply Thread Link She better watch out for those nuts Reply Thread Link I hope it is juicy. Reply Parent Thread Link probably how they kidnap and torture people. Reply Parent Thread Link I'm going to try to not get my hopes up, but... Reply Thread Link but let's the bloodbath begin, right? Reply Parent Thread Link Pretty much lol. Though I hope she's got bodyguards around 24/7. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link The Scientology building downtown use to have a 2 way mirror on the side with cameras filming everyone walking by but the cops found out and told them to take it down. Reply Thread Link Just viewing out onto the street? Like, why even do that? So creepy Reply Parent Thread Link scientology likes to do "obvious/overt surveillance." they want people to know that those mirrors are suspicious, and they want people to feel threatened and watched by them. they thrive off of other people's fears. they're scum. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link The Hamilton theatre is RIGHT across the street from the NYC headquarters, and I did 43 live lotteries before they went online. O_____o It was nervewracking, I'll tell ya what. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link why tho? people on public property like the sidewalk don't have a guarantee of privacy. Reply Parent Thread Link I hope so. The Scientologists on Sunset Boulevard are so aggressive. Reply Thread Link I HATE THEM. they just wait there desperatly at the Metro station. UGH. I work on Sunset, and I have to deal with seeing their crap near my work and on my commute. :( I was giving a friend a ride home, he lived off Sunset and Normandie, and I would see this van with these people in suits.....the van would drop them off, this is 2am. My friend was drunk as shit and suddenly sobered up over how creeped out he was. Reply Parent Thread Link Yuck, I'm sorry bb. That has to be a nightmare dealing with them everyday. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Not in Cali, but here in Florida apparently my mom's friend once answered one of their ads on phone or something like in the 70s and she politely declined but they still to this day send her stuff about joining even though she's been like "leave me alone". Edited at 2016-04-21 07:20 pm (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Expand Link It's so strange, because my closest friend lives within a few blocks of the giant blue building (the former hospital with the world's biggest "SCIENTOLOGY" sign), and the apartment building next to his is literally entirely populated with them... We see them all the time, and it's like when they're not "working" (like they do, as you say very aggressively, on the corner of Sunset & Normandie), they completely mind their own business. Like, won't even really do more than nod, probably won't even talk to you. It did make me laugh once when he texted me at like 11 at night, from the taco place near him, and he was like, "There are a bunch of them all here together, and I don't know what their levels of uniform mean, this is pretty creepy" LOL. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link get him lisa no mercy for this abusive sociopath Reply Thread Link YASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS Reply Parent Thread Link where's that one glowstick gif Reply Thread Link MTE Reply Parent Thread Link ahhhhh Reply Parent Thread Link This should always be the first post. Reply Parent Thread Link Has anyone ever figured out who this man is? ONTD owes him so many edible arrangements Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Has anyone ever figured out who this man is? ONTD owes him so many edible arrangements Reply Parent Thread Link I was legit worried when scrolling that it hadn't been posted yet! Reply Parent Thread Link david had his own father followed by gun carrying dbags they got caught and confessed on tape david pushed his sisters away from his father he broke the family up doesn't care if his dad lives or dies Reply Parent Thread Link and following from above (lisa's involvement): ron (david's father) told lisa marie about being trailed by the father & son private investigators and how he was going to include it in his memoir. lisa marie decided that would be a perfect opportunity for scientology to dismiss the claims made by ron. so she contacted an attorney, specializing in media, and they fed the story about the PIs to different media outlets. Reply Parent Thread Link Miscavige is a psycho. LMP considered him a friend until 2014 when she learned about disconnection and the abuses. She is helping his father release info through her media connections. She's not done yet. I really suggest you read the article, bb. It's interesting. Reply Parent Thread Link Oh yeah. That' s exactly how I am now. Reply Parent Thread Link Justin Timberlake & Britney Spears To Duet At Her Vegas Show 15 Years After Breakup Report https://t.co/sXDM7Pif7w Hollywood News (@HollywoodNewsA1) April 20, 2016 - Britney called Justin to ask him if he wanted to join her on her on stage for a special performance. - Justin though it was a joke at first. - There's no animosity between them - They both think their fans will FREAK OUT. ( WE WILL ) - Poor Jessica. SRC I would die!!!!!!!! ONTD, were you sad when Justney broke up? Do you still ship them? really? you couldn't have one of the three not be white? (and don't start with the Allison Ng jokes) also wtf @ live-action Cruella. as if Emma and her struggle-acting could ever come close to Glenn Close Reply Thread Link honestly absolutely no one will be as great of a Cruella as Glenn Close. Reply Parent Thread Link I love Emma in comedies, so I'm here for this I'm hoping that Cruella film goes in development hell though. The animated movie is a classic, and we already got John Hughes' live-action remake, so this would be so unnecessary and indulgent. Reply Thread Link i'm p sure "unnecessary and indulgent" is disney's slogan at this point. or just hollywood's for that matter. Edited at 2016-04-21 10:58 pm (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Link Well I'm still excited for Moana, lol Reply Parent Thread Link should have called it White Women in Business Reply Thread Link not even a courtesy racial diversity hire? Reply Thread Link Of course there will be. Every movie needs people to be in the background. Reply Parent Thread Link Oh, Emma ... just go away Reply Thread Link Am I the only one who thinks that Kate McKinnon looks like a young Hayley Mills? Reply Thread Link I can see it Reply Parent Thread Link Kind of? Hayley's prettier. Kind of? Hayley's prettier. Reply Parent Thread Link I can see it in some pictures Reply Parent Thread Link Jake Szymanski seems to have a lot of projects, his "Mike and Dave" isn't even released Reply Thread Link I really loved 7 Days in Hell but that movie looks so bad :/ Reply Parent Thread Link The first trailer was funny enough, the second is just a repetition with some new scenes (altought unfunny), I also liked "7 Days in Hell" "indubitably" but I wouldn't say it was like an amaaaazing movie, the idea for "Mike and Dave" is great and apparently people is liking on the screenings they are doing Reply Parent Thread Link gonna need a pair of sunglasses bc this is bright with whiteness. Reply Thread Link If that was true what happened with Lupita? Reply Parent Thread Link idt she has one lol Reply Parent Thread Link so white Reply Thread Link lmao sheryl sandberg school of leaning in serious q. is there a WOC billionaire rn? or at least CEO of a large business? Reply Thread Link Shirley Anne Jackson is the highest paid USA private university president (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) She's shitty president from a student perspective (there's a lot of drama there) but she's incredibly accomplished in her field (physics) and she's on the Board of Directors for like a dozen organizations ETA: She's not a billionaire, but she's very powerful and makes a lot of money Edited at 2016-04-22 05:06 pm (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Link So tired of hearing Emma name for every project that comes out, her being everywhere this year will be so insufferable tbh Reply Thread Link As the world changes for Iran post-sanctions, its paying calls to those who benefitted from the countrys sanction shackles in one way or another, and Indiawhose refiners are said to owe Iran $6.5 billion worth of eurosis its first port of call. But its much more than that as Iran re-stakes its claim to oil-based power. Under sanctions, Iran was limited in how it could sell its oil and accept payment, but now that payment channels have been reopened, Tehran is seeking past dues in euros, particularly from Indian-based refiners such as Essar Oil, Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd (MPRL). And India, for its part, has every reason to pay these past dues if it hopes to take its new energy relations with Iran to the next level. Iran has made clear that it will continue to increase output until it has regained much of the market share it lost under sanctions. It wants to pump 4 million barrels a dayup from 3.3 million at present. Related: Forget Doha. The Fundamentals Are Moving In The Right Direction India is set to import at least 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) of Iranian oil in the year from April 1, with refiners looking to ramp up purchases in the post-sanctions environment. India's state refinersIndian Oil Corp, Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd, Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleumare willing to buy about 240,000 bpd in the year (starting from April). Among private refiners, Essar Oil is willing to lift about 120,000 bpd, they said, while HMEL has indicated it will buy a small quantity with an option to raise volumes. Reports indicate that India has already earmarked at least $20 billion for investments in oil and gas as well as petrochemicals and fertilisers sectors in Iran. India, too, plans to increase oil imports from Iran from the present 350,000 barrels a day. Indias Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Vikas Swarup was optimistic when he indicated that the energy partnership would go both ways as Iran was eyeing involvement in Indias refinery sector. Related: Saudi Arabia Kills Doha Deal, Talks Fall Apart Both countries had maintained close bilateral ties even when economic restrictions were in place against Iran. With the new found opportunities to speed up long-standing bilateral and multilateral initiatives that would boost Irans fledgling economy, pressure is likely to be on the production of oil, which might put more pressure on oil prices, which have dropped 70 percent since 2014. The latest achivement is the upcoming trilateral agreement with India and Afghanistan, which aims to offer access to both neighbouring countries through the strategically located Iranian Chabahar port in the Gulf of Oman. The port in southeast Iran will allow India to bypass Pakistan to transport goods to Afghanistan and the Central Asian region using a sea-land route. Chabahar port would provide a vital transport link for receiving unhindered natural gas imports from Iran to India. It may also play a role in finalising the proposed Iran-Oman-India pipeline. Related: Will China's Slowing Economy Stall The Silk Road Project? With world's fourth largest proven oil reserves, Iran is presently eyeing Indian shores as its main oil exporter country since demand in this energy-starved Asian major is expected to rise exponentially in the coming decades. So while there wont be any more freebies for India in terms of zero-cost oil shipping courtesy of Iran, were watching a new phase in Iran-India energy relations unfold, to boost the power of both and remap the South Asian energy route. But there will be some other hurdles along the path to power for Iran, and one of the hurdles for now is tanker capacity. Right now, the lions share of Irans oil tankers are busy storing crude, or simply not seaworthyso increasing exports is sometimes easier said than done. This year, Irans sales of crude oil will reach 2 million barrels per day, according to Iranian officials. According to Reuters, Iran has 55-60 oil tankers, but 25-27 of those are parked in sea lanes languishing with stored, unsold cargo. At the same time, Iranian lawmakers have endorsed the governments new $330-billion budget bill, which would allow the government to set the price of oil at $40 per barrel and to export 2.25 million barrels per day, so officials say. By Charles Kennedy of Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: In the Asia-Pacific LNG trade the largest buyers have been Japan, with between 70 and 90 Mtpa, followed by South Korea, and Taiwan third. All are island nations, if not geographically then politically, without sizable domestic sources of natural gas or pipelines bringing it from elsewhere. Recently the Japanese government started bringing back on line the nuclear power plants that had passed their safety inspections (1). In addition GDP growth in Japan has been puny, and seems likely to remain so. Together these factors make Japan a poor prospect for new LNG exporters. The outlook for growth in Europe is not good either. On the positive side, in the last couple of years a number of countries have become LNG importers, though their purchases will likely remain small. Hence the question: Where are the Sources of New LNG Demand? posed by a recent article in King & Spalding Energy Law, which warned: Japan predicts its LNG demand is [to] decline in one estimate, to 77 MTPA in 2020 as compared to 86 MTPA in 2014 (2). Kogas, the second largest LNG buyer in the world after Jera, has also revised its demand forecast downwards. Likewise, demand growth for China has dampened with recently lowered forecasts in one forecast, by 15 percent for the upcoming few years (3). Japans Jera and Koreas Kogas, the worlds largest LNG importers, have liquefaction contracts with new U.S. Gulf coast terminals. In October 2015, JP Morgan announced that both were emboldened by surging supply to demand concessions: These include breaking away from oil-indexed LNG supply deals, which tend to be costly, and abolishing restrictions that currently bar buyers from diverting or re-selling cargoes. Related: Oil Prices Up On Weaker Dollar, Declining Production Sellers may be forced to offer buyers contract offtake flexibility as demand growth slows, providing continued challenges to producer profitability especially those exposed to lower-tier buyers, JPM's head of Asia oil and gas equity research, Scott Darling, wrote in the Oct. 1 report (4). Lower-tier buyers are less creditworthy and more likely to default on their contracts, which will further reduce investors appetite for proposed LNG export terminals. Prime buyers like Jera and Kogas wont default unless they or the seller go bankrupt, but in this buyers market they will expect contract adjustments, mainly price concessions and the waiving of prohibitions on diverting or re-selling cargoes. Both will be unwelcome to an LNG exporter who hoped to sell his uncontracted capacity on the spot market where prices already have dropped way below his expectations, so he doesnt want his customers to become competitors. Speaking legally, the LNG exporter can refuse to make contract concessions, but he knows that, should the market improve, he will need his contract buyers goodwill to raise prices. While mentioning the construction of new LNG regasification terminals in China and India, along with a half dozen floating ones (FSRUs) being delivered elsewhere, the King & Spalding authors cited the IEAs prediction that by 2035 China and the Middle East will be the big centers of demand for gas, including LNG(5). 2035 is 19 years away, plenty of time for all kinds of events to interfere. But back in 2010 WoodMac had also raised its estimate of Chinas appetite for LNG, from 31 to 46 Mtpa by 2020 (6). That enthusiasm has waned, since by November 2015 new forecasts were cutting Chinese natural gas demand predictions between 14 and 28 percent. This had to do with . . . the previously runaway Chinese economy . . . decelerating.(7) It also had to do with alternatives. China has arrangements to buy cheaper pipeline gas from Russia and Central Asia, plus extensive domestic gas resources. In other words, Chinas energy needs are unlikely to call for much LNG. For now, the high in Chinas LNG imports may have been 2014, with 20 or 21 Mtpa. In 2015 it was less, though not much less(8). In 2014 China used only half of its LNG regasification capacity, and some of those terminals have been mothballed.(9) Finally, this February we learned that Chinas plans to replace coal with natural gas to clean up its air may be scaled back. Another factor blamed for Chinas reduced appetite for gas and LNG is its move away from manufacturing(10). Optimistic predictions about LNG demand in India have been deflated too. In April 2014 Platts reported that demand for natural gas in India was expected to grow at a CAGR of around 7 percent until 2030 due to increases in demand for power generation, fertilizer production and city gas distribution.(11) Of this, LNG imports were expected to rise as follows: India LNG Market Forecast and Opportunities, 2025, published in January 2016, reported that Indian LNG imports grew from 8.92 Mtpa in 2010 to 16.9 Mtpa in 2015, thereby exhibiting a CAGR of 13.71 percent during 2010-2015 (See below). Its not news that high CAGRs are easily achieved when starting from a low base. More importantly, the 16.9 Mtpa in 2015 was about half Platts 2016-17 forecast. To some LNG enthusiasts thats no reason to give up; after all, the unfulfilled potential remains. True; but the key to success has been elusive, as explained by a recent study by Poten & Partners, Unlocking the Indian Market: The development of the Indian LNG market has seen successes, most notably, the Dahej and Hazira import terminals and their associated imports. But efforts to develop the market have been distinguished by their difficulty. The Dabhol terminal is far underutilized, long after it was finally brought on stream. The Kochi terminal was just completed, but cannot deliver as the offtake pipeline was never builtand there is no indication when it will be. Other proposed import ventures could ring the subcontinent like a necklace, but remain on the drawing board.(12) I marked the four existing regasification terminals in red on the map, which came from Potens report. It also shows Indias gas pipelines, the two existing ones plus a lot more planned, unbuilt ones. It is no wonder that the Dahej and Hazira terminals are the only ones doing well; by way of the longest, largest of Indias two pipelines they are connected to most of its inland population centers. (Click to enlarge) There are other strange aspects to Indias gas infrastructure. In 2015 India, although often plagued by power shortages, had more than 20 gigawatts of installed gas generating capacity, most not being used. The reason was the cost of imported LNG, which far exceeded the cost of coal; and even though LNG prices had been dropping that year, the utilities had no prospect of recovering the cost (13). It seems that Indias politicians like to provide gas below cost or for free to their constituents.(14) The outlook for growth of Indias LKNG imports seems dismal in the short-term and murky in the long-term. In a paper presumably from 2011, Dr. A. K. Balyan, CEO of Indian LNG trader Petronet, predicted that by 2020 India would be the worlds 3rd largest LNG importer, since regasification capacity was planned to rise from 13.5 Mtpa to 47.5 Mtpa in 2015/16.(15) But as we know, the regasification capacity of import terminals is a poor indicator of demand; besides, in 2015 India imported less than 17 Mtpa. Nevertheless, another recent report predicted imports to grow to 81.1 Mtpa by 2025 (16). That is far more than even Platts predicted, and so far reality has not even been close to forecasts. Related: Oil Back On Track As Markets Dismiss Doha In December 2015 we were told: The Golden Age of Gas Flames Out. Noel Tomnay, head of global gas research at WoodMac, was describing the continuing slide of LNG prices as a train wreck happening in slow motion: Part of the reason is that Asians are turning to another, cheaper fuel source: coal. Power companies in India and elsewhere in Asia are turning back to coal because its cheap and domestically sourced. With local coal, there are no huge import bills [for LNG]. Asian power companies are building more than 500 coal-fired power plants this year alone. And more than a thousand are on the drawing board. . . . Many energy forecasters, including WoodMac, see LNG prices falling below $6 per million Btus, and perhaps as low as $4 per million Btus within a few years.That would lead to some LNG exporters in both the U.S. and Australia shutting down their operations because the price would be below their cash cost. . . . Ironic, isnt it? The biggest casualty of the war on coal may be the once up and coming LNG industry in the United States.(17) Mr. Tomnay may have put his finger on a classic example of government interference producing unintended consequences. The Obama administration launched a war against coal and for LNG exports, which would solve Americas political problems with Russia. But as the American coal business started circling in the toilet, it threw out a lifeline: lower prices! And some energy buyers picked up on it by buying coal, at the expense of LNG. Added Mr. Tomnay, hopefully: The global LNG market does not need all this LNG at the pace proposed. As companies confront this reality, a raft of project postponements will follow.(18) Either that or, as one commentator said: Some of these investors are going to get burned. (19) If they let themselves be talked into investing in an export project with low-quality sales contracts or no contracts, yes. But I dont know of such a thing is possible, since most people with millions to invest are not mentally deficient. Moreover, one key criterion applied by the FERC, which has the biggest clout in the LNG terminal approval process, is public need. Proof of public need consists of signed long-term delivery or liquefaction contracts. Personally I dont find the FERCs logic irresistible, but it is what it is. Recent proof of the absence of public need can be found in both Australia and the U.S. Woodside Petroleum took a $1.1 billion (Australian) write-off on its share of the postponed but likely abandoned Browse LNG terminal project. This greatly reduced Woodsides profits, with the company consequently reducing its dividend. (20) I have already mentioned the postponement of the fully approved Lake Charles terminal in Louisiana. Another example of a plan without contracts is the Jordan Cove terminal for Coos Bay, Oregon. Jordan Cove, a $7 or $8 billion greenfield project, has been promoted by Veresen, a Canadian operator of pipelines, power and gas facilities with a market cap of $2.2 billion. So far it has spent two or three hundred million on the convoluted approval process, all while promising to show customer contracts that turned out to be mere Heads of Agreement, which carry no legal obligations. After a spurt of market excitement over the approval of some of Jordan Coves permits, Veresens stock (TSX:VSN) has not done well, and on March 11 the FERC, citing Jordan Coves obvious inability to show contracts, denied its application because the needed 232-mile pipeline would have caused far more harm to local landowners than its prospects justified. That harm would be caused by the use of eminent domain, which the FERCs approval would have granted Veresen. Because LNG buyers are increasingly preferring short-term contracts, if they want contracts at all, the LNG market is expected to increasingly deal in spot cargoes, not long-term contracts; and even those are no longer safe. Last November, for instance, it was reported that one-third of Qatar's export LNG capacity remained unsold. Petronet, Indias LNG importer, had been buying spot cargoes elsewhere because it was saving so much money that it was willing to risk penalties for only buying 70 percent of the LNG called for by its 25-year contracts with Qatar (21). And in China, three buyers have switched to selling LNG cargoes that they had contracted for: An example is Sinopec, the dominant buyer for Origin Energy's Australia Pacific LNG venture, which is on the cusp of starting production. It is reported to be offering to resell cargoes it has signed up to buy from the Queensland plant. That means about 70 million tonnes a year of LNG still needs a buyer, which will weigh on the oversupplied Asian market potentially through to the mid-2020s . . . [LNG consultant] Dr Fesharaki describes those holding the contracts as desperate sellers that will provide stiff competition for producers seeking customers for new projects.(22) Related: A Lasting Solution To Low Oil Prices All this may explain why lately, experts worried about the LNG glut are using language as dramatic as the IEAs back in 2012, about the gas markets Golden Age but this time to warn of a Dark Age. Dr. Fesharaki himself has been predicting blood on the battlefield: Very bad things will happen in the next two or three years. In this market, something has to give. Until you get to the late 2020s you wont have any kind of supply issues.(23) By supply issues I take him to mean that the developing oversupply will last until the late 2020s, which must mean 2028 or 2029. It sounds as if Dr. Fesharaki and I are on the same page. Dr. Fesharaki revealed another big problem that has received little attention, but should. The prevailing assumption about liquefaction and sales contracts has been that they would be between the terminal owner and an overseas gas user. But it turns out that most contracts (including 60 percent of the volume under construction in the U.S.) are not with end users, but with LNG traders who would act as intermediaries for terminals looking for buyers. That would then be dumped on the spot market, leading to a substantial fall in world prices. (24) The other day market analysts at Goldman Sachs put it well: The struggle to create sufficient demand for LNG shows that energy policies have largely failed to deliver the promised Golden Age of gas.(25) 1. Japan LNG demand expected to fall by 2020 on nuclear restarts, renewables, Platts 15 December 2015; Japans LNG demand falls substantially OilPrice Intel, February 19, 2016. 2. Japan LNG demand expected to fall by 2020 on nuclear restarts, renewables, Platts, 15 December 2015. 3. Philip Weems and Monica Hwang: The Top 10 Questions Facing the LNG Industry in 2016, King & Spalding Energy Law Exchange, January 12, 2016. 4. JPMorgan paints bleak picture of global gas market in client note, Reuters Oct 6, 2015; http://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-gas-lng-j-p-morgan-idUSKCN0S00SF20151006 5. China, Middle East to be New Gas-Guzzlers by 2035, Bloomberg, Nov. 12, 2015. 6. Chinas LNG Demand Forecast Raised by 48% on Growth, Bloomberg Business, July 26, 2010. 7. NEWS China gas squeeze; demand may fall as supply ramps up, and Only the fittest will survive, ABC News (Australia) 30 Nov 2014. 8. Chinas weak natural gas demand cuts into LNG imports, ICIS, 7 October 2015; Chinese LNG demand falls for the first time on record, ABC NEWS (Australia), 4 February 2016. 9. The Uncertain Demand of LNG & Natural Gas in China & Asia, China LNG International Summit, March 2015; Chinese LNG demand falls for the first time on record, ABC NEWS (Australia), 4 February 2016. 10. Chinas Natural Gas Demand Feels the heat from Economic Slowdown, Rigzone, February 12, 2016.s 11. Indias natural gas demand to double to 516.97 mil cu m/day by 2021-22: Report, Platts 29 April 2014. The article gave all the numbers in millions of cubic meters: 44.6 Mm3 a day in 2012-13, 143 Mm3 a day in 2016-17 and 214 Mm3 in 2029-30. One m3 is .4049 tons, so I converted the Mm3 numbers to Mtpa by first multiplying the m3 per day by 365, and next multiplying that number by .405 to obtain Mtpa. The amounts cited in the India LNG Market Forecast and Opportunities, 2025 were 64 Mm3 a day in 2015, which translates to 16.9 Mtpa. At the 2010 starting point the daily cubic meter figure was 33.7, which was 8.92 Mtpa. 12. Unlocking the Indian LNG Market, A Multi-Client Study, Poten & Partners, 2015. 13. http://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/pressreleases/2015/june/despite-decline-in-oil-prices-natural-gas-demand-outlook-revised-down.html 14. Why Energy Will Determine India's Future, Stratfor Analysis, April 8, 2016. 15. Meeting Demand Challenges of an Emerging LNG Market: India, Dr. A. K. Balyan, MD, CEO of Petronet LNG Limited, India; undated, but the contents suggests 2011. 16. Demand for LNG in India to Grow at around 17% until 2025. Press Release, TechSci Research, January 2016. 17. The Golden Age of Gas Flames Out, Wall Street Daily, December 7, 2015. 18. Joseph Markman, Projects Progress Could Mena a World Awash in LNG, E&P Mag, September 8, 2015. 19. Is the World of LNG going Crazy, abarrelfull, 14 August 2014. 20. LNG oversupply could lead to blood on the battlefield, Business News (Australia) February 26, 2016. 21. LNG Golden Promise Fading for Goldman on Wave of Oversupply, Bloomberg Business, November 4, 2015. 22. Toil ahead for oil, but expect double trouble for LNG, Sydney Morning Herald Business Day, December 7, 2015. 23. LNG oversupply could lead to blood on the battlefield, Business News (Australia) February 26, 2016. 24. LNG oversupply could lead to blood on the battlefield, Business News (Australia) February 26, 2016. 25. LNG Golden Promise Fading for Goldman on Wave of Oversupply, Bloomberg Business, November 4, 2015. By Wim de Vriend for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: At some point hopefully sooner than most think the price of crude oil and natural gas will rise to levels reflecting full replacement cost, including the cost of capital. When this happens, the oilfield services (OFS) industry will get back to work at prices and activity levels not seen for what will soon be one and one-half years. Although which companies will participate in this recovery is not yet known, that there will be a recovery is assured. So what will it look like? Who will be the winners? If it doesnt happen soon, will the wait be worth the effort? Earlier this month the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) issued a news release which made national and international headlines. CAPP indicated capital investment by its members in 2016 would be only $31 billion, a massive decline from $81 billion in 2014 and the largest reduction in CAPPs history of data collection, dating to 1947. CAPP president and CEO Tim McMillan said in an interview with the Financial Post on April 7, We have had the largest two-year reduction that we have had at any time since we started keeping track. It is reflective on what are we seeing on the ground in Canada. At MNP, we measure the total OFS opportunity as revenue from all sources, not just exploration and production (E&P) company capital expenditures (CAPEX). The total OFS revenue pie includes E&P operating costs on producing assets which already exist and OFS CAPEX, funds spent by non-E&P companies to grow their business. These two revenue sources show the OFS industry is materially larger than many realize. To illustrate the importance of OFS CAPEX following is a table reporting what 20 of the larger publicly traded OFS companies spent on property, plant and equipment in 2014 and 2015. The numbers come from the consolidated statement of cash flows accompanying audited financial statements for the fiscal years ended December 31, 2014 and December 31, 2015. Some statements use the term purchase of property, plant and equipment and others classify this as capital expenditures. Either way, these are the funds invested by the OFS operators to upgrade or add assets to earn future revenue. The expenditures are financed internally by the company itself and therefore are investments completely outside of E&P company expenditures. They are important because much of the goods and services purchased is highly specialized and supplied by companies that would also be considered to be in the OFS supply chain. (Click to enlarge) Source: Company reports SEDAR 1) Precision Drilling, Ensign Energy Services, Savanna Energy Services, Trinidad Drilling, Western Energy Services. 2) Black Diamond Group, Horizon North Logistics, North American Energy Partners. 3) Secure Energy Services, Trican Well Service, Calfrac Well Services, Canyon Services Group, Canadian Energy Services & Technology. 4) Gibson Energy, Keyera Corp, AltaGas Ltd., Inter Pipeline, Pembina Pipeline, Enbridge Inc., TransCanada Corp, Veresen Inc. This data from the consolidated statement of cash flows contains no detail about the country in which the funds were spent. It also does not provide a detailed breakout of the nature of the assets, between capitalized maintenance for major upgrades and / or repairs on existing equipment or the purchase or fabrication of new capital assets. Most of these companies have operations outside of Canada and would source some or all of their CAPEX goods and services locally. Enbridge, for example, invested $10.5 billion in 2014 and $7.3 billion 2015. Much of their capacity expansion has been in the United States. Related: Oil Prices Up On Weaker Dollar, Declining Production Conversely, non-Canadian OFS operators also build equipment in Canada. This is not included above. Nor is the CAPEX of a myriad of smaller or private OFS operators. In the estimates below, the 2014 and 2015 OFS CAPEX figures have been revised materially downwards to compensate for the many unknowns and estimates associated with the above data, as have the 2016 and future estimates. But a provision has been added for investments by non-Canadian, smaller or other non-E&P operators. Expanding OFS CAPEX is reflective of a growing industry. The drillers were, for the most part, adding new generation drilling rigs required for faster and longer horizontal drilling. In construction and infrastructure, companies were adding bitumen ore-hauling trucks and remote housing. At the wellhead, OFS was adding frack spreads, coiled tubing units and wastewater handling and disposal assets. The largest single investment came from pipeline and midstream operators, which were building pipelines, processing plants and storage facilities for ever-growing crude oil and natural gas liquids production. All this was built to order under contract for E&P company clients or on spec in anticipation of future business driven by continued growth. The correction from 2014 to 2015 is significant. A lot of the investment decisions were made in prior years and continued through last year because of momentum and committed capital. There will be another significant decline in 2016. How much capital will be invested by these companies in the future can only be an estimate based on unknown commodity prices, resulting in unknown E&P company CAPEX and demand for goods and services. Using this information and CAPP figures, it is possible to build a reasoned estimate for 2016 and what the OFS macro opportunity might look like at some future point when commodity prices recover to a level which rekindles investment but does not approach the go-go days from 2010 to 2014. For the future case, the assumption is WTI stabilizes at about US$60 a barrel and AECO spot gas rises from current depressed levels to about C$2 per thousand cubic feet (mcf). This will be referred to hereinafter as the recovery scenario. (Click to enlarge) 1) CAPP Statistical Handbook for 2014, CAPP 2015 and 2016, MNP estimate for recovery scenario. 2) CAPP Statistical Handbook for 2014, CAPP 2015 and 2016, MNP estimate for recovery scenario. 3) Company reports (above) reduced for estimated Canadian investment only, plus estimate of other OFS CAPEX by foreign controlled companies in Canada and CAPEX by a multitude of other operators not included in the detailed analysis including the North West upgrader. 4) CAPP Statistical Handbook for 2014 and MNP estimates thereafter. In 2014 30 percent of spending goes to OFS, 33 percent in 2015, 37 percent in 2016 and 40 percent thereafter, reflecting growth in outsourced operating. MNP estimates for 2015 onwards are based upon declining operating costs because of lower service prices and flat production. 5) CAPP Statistical Handbook for 2014 and MNP estimates thereafter. In 2014 30 percent of spending goes to OFS, 33 percent in 2015, 37 percent in 2016 and 40 percent thereafter, reflecting growth in outsourced operating. MNP estimates for 2015 onwards are based upon production growth for oilsands projects still under construction, thus increasing operating costs. The recovery scenario figure for conventional E&P CAPEX is based upon an estimate of how much free cash for reinvestment producers would generate with oil prices 50 percent higher than current levels and natural gas prices twice what they are today. In past years, E&P spending has been supported by significant equity and debt capital inflows. With todays battered balance sheets, producers will not be able to borrow as much and equity markets will be unavailable to anyone except the top performers. E&Ps will invest 100 percent of their free cash to sustain production and grow it, if possible. Related: Forget Doha. The Fundamentals Are Moving In The Right Direction Oilsands E&P CAPEX will be for sustaining existing assets only and some expansion of existing facilities and operations. The recovery scenario does not include any major new greenfield oilsands projects. However, this is expensive production that is hard on equipment. It costs a lot of money to stay in the business and keep existing producing assets and operations working efficiently. OFS CAPEX is based on the assumption there will be no major additional assets required in the form of construction, transportation, drilling and service rigs, well servicing equipment, production infrastructure or pipelines to handle the anticipated level of business. However, there has been an addition of $4 billion for new oil, natural gas liquids and natural gas value-added processing facilities in the recovery scenario. Several new processing projects are being considered assisted by the injection of up to $500 million by the Alberta government to stimulate activity in this sector. How much of E&P conventional and oilsands operating costs flow to OFS remains an estimate. There is no granularity in the CAPP figures, nor do OFS companies report how much of their business comes from the creation of new oil and gas producing assets and how much comes from sustaining existing production. The CAPP figures include the purchase of natural gas for heat in bitumen recovery, none of which would flow to OFS, plus the operation of company-owned assets such as oilsands plants. But it also includes well workovers and repairs, product transportation (including crude oil hauling) and plant maintenance, which is all business for OFS. The data assumes 30 percent of the operating costs flowed to OFS in 2014, increasing to 33 percent in 2015, 37 percent in 2016 and 40 percent thereafter as E&P outsource more of their production operations to expert vendors to reduce total cost. With service prices down and production flat, the assumption is for conventional operating costs to decline from 2014 levels. But operating costs for oilsands will rise with output as the current projects under construction come on stream. Two startling and sobering conclusions emerge from this data presented this way. The first is the sheer enormity of the macro OFS opportunity in 2014. According to ARC Financial Corp., the value of all the oil and natural gas produced in Canada in 2014 reached an all-time record of $149 billion based on all-time record production volumes. The foregoing estimates how much money was invested by OFS to support E&P company activity in Canada at all levels to help make this production growth possible. While the $116-billion figure for 2014 above is only an estimate, that the total revenue opportunity for OFS is significantly larger than E&P company CAPEX alone is clear. The other item that is clear is the size of the contraction of the OFS opportunity in 2016 and beyond. It is not unreasonable to estimate the size of the OFS revenue pie will decline by some $40 billion a year. Related: Half Of Kuwaiti Oil Production Offline After Massive Strike The misery will not be evenly distributed. The majority - $24 billion - will come from a lack of new major oilsands projects. Companies which primarily supported this activity were fortunate in 2015 and remains so in 2016 because of work on existing projects. Sustaining capital investments will be significant. But the future order book is at or near zero and there are no indications this will change anytime soon. Companies supporting OFS CAPEX in all forms will be the next group affected. The major investments in the construction of new field processing plants, production equipment, pipelines, drilling rigs, well servicing equipment will be largely complete in the recovery scenario. It is highly unlikely the service sector will invest anywhere near the same amount of capital in the future as it has in the past. The companies least affected and those which will be going back to work as soon as commodity prices rise are those providing services for conventional activity; drilling completion workover. Because E&P companies that dont replace reserves are effectively going out of business as their asset value declines, those which can will get back to drilling as soon as access to capital and development economics permit. Canada is the fifth largest hydrocarbon producing jurisdiction in the world with output of 7 million barrels of oil equivalent per day of bitumen, conventional oil, natural gas liquids and natural gas. Whatever everyone hears and reads about a carbon-free world we are not going out of this business anytime soon. Regardless of the pace of growth, keeping what we have going is going to be big business and will remain the largest resource industry in the country by any measure. However, it wont be like it was. It is important for everyone in OFS to understand how different the future may be from the recent past. By David Yager by Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: A central tenet in the thesis by analysts about the oil markets rebalancing has been that as prices declined, oil companies would be forced into bankruptcy. That in turn would lead to declining production, and eventually a rebalancing of supply and demand in the market, followed by higher prices. That process is already taking longer than many expected, and it looks like more time is needed. That additional time to balance the market is being driven by an unexpected factor; bankrupt oil companies are still pumping. As oil prices have declined, the number of bankruptcies and distressed oil majors has quickly risen into the dozens. In fact, a recent Reuters analysis suggests little effect on production from when companies enter bankruptcy. Reuters cited Magnum Hunter as a primary example of this reality. Related: Oil Price Rally Unwinds As Strike In Kuwait Ends While Magnum Hunter filed for bankruptcy in December 2014, the firm has scrambled even in Chapter 11 to keep its oil flowing, resulting in O&G production rising by roughly one-third between mid-2014 and late 2015. The firm has used the protection bankruptcy courts to help stave off creditors while keeping the pumps flowing full tilt. Nearly all of Magnum Hunters 3000 wells are still producing crude, and that makes sense for several reasons. First, daily costs for operating wells remain well below current spot prices. While drilling new wells is not economical, it is perfectly logical to keep exploiting existing wells. Fracked wells usually start to see a significant decline in production after about two years of operations. So eventually Magnum Hunter and other companies will see their production fall, but two years can be a very long time to pump. Related: Lithium War Heats Up After Epic Launch Of Tesla Model 3 Second, creditors want to extract maximum value from the company and the best way to do that in the current environment is to keep the oil flowing. Bid-ask spreads on oil assets for sale are simply too wide for most companies to be interested in selling assets while in Chapter 11. Instead, creditors maximize the present value of their assets by continuing to pump oil. This oil can either be stored leading to a large risk free profit, or it can be sold on the spot market. Either way, Magnum Hunter and other bankrupt producers are acting in the best interests of their creditors by continuing to pump. Unfortunately, those actions are not in the best interests of the broader industry or energy sector stock investors. Third, management at bankrupt producers also have little reason to do anything other than keep the crude flowing. In the current energy market, getting a job is very difficult, especially for top managers coming from a bankrupt producer. As a result, managers rationally want to make sure they stay useful in Chapter 11 and that means trying to convince creditors to keep the company operating rather than converting to a Chapter 7 liquidation. Not all O&G firms should be kept operating some firms are better off being liquidated but creditors often lack the necessary industry expertise to be able to distinguish between firms that have a future after emerging from Chapter 11, and those that dont and are better off in a Chapter 7 sale. And again, management has very little incentive to put themselves out of a job by recommending Chapter 7. Related: Oil Prices Up On Weaker Dollar, Declining Production On the whole then, while the oil markets are slowly making progress in rebalancing, the process is slower than most investors would like. Bankruptcy alone cannot rebalance the oil markets. Instead, natural well depletion and a lack of new investment are the driving forces that are reducing production over time. Those forces will continue in the future, but for now investors will just have to be patient and not get ahead of themselves. By Michael McDonald of Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Unexpected move yesterday announced by one of the largest mining companies globally. Showing it may be bailing out of a country that used to be one of the worlds go-to minerals destinations. The firm is BHP Billiton and the place is Indonesia. With the major saying that it is considering a complete sale and exit from its Indonesian coal operations. Related: The Race For A Slice Of The Asian Natural Gas Market BHP spokespeople confirmed to Reuters that the company is looking at options for the sale of its IndoMet metallurgical coal division. Which holds seven licenses across Indonesias Central and East Kalimantan provinces. Such a sale would be a substantial about-face for BHP. Which last year appeared to be moving ahead full-steam with its Indonesian coal projectswhen the company started up the Haju mine here, and said it was moving forward with commissioning of a second mine across its coal licenses. At the time, BHP also said it was planning further exploration in Indonesia to expand on the 1.3 billion tonnes of coal resources already identified on its licenses. Related: Lithium War Heats Up After Epic Launch Of Tesla Model 3 All those announcements came in September 2015, a little over half a year ago. And it appears that in the months since, BHPs management has completely changed its mind on these projects. Some of that may have to do with recent political events in Indonesia. Including a high-profile battle between the government and Freeport-McMoRan over ownership and permitting for the Grasberg copper-gold mine. And the government may have recently sealed the deal in scaring away major miners like BHP. When spokespeople for President Joko Widodo said last Friday they are imposing a moratorium on new mining licenses across the country. Related: Worldwide Oil Production Outages Bump Up Oil Prices The government said the mining ban is likely to take effect this year. And there was no elaboration on how long the moratorium will last with officials simply saying it will be in place for an undetermined amount of time. Its conspicuous that the BHP turn-around on its Indonesia assets is coming so soon after this shocking announcement. Watch for more miners exiting Indonesia and the government response if it becomes clear this mining-dependent economy is losing its investors. Heres to pulling the pin By Dave Forest More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Having capitalized on the global commodity boom, and its proximity to a ravenous China, Mongolia has until recently seen rapid economic growth. As Chinese growth forecasts in the coming years sink towards the mid-single digit range, Mongolia enters 2016 skirting with recession. Mongolia seeks to bolster finances As commodity exports dry up, Mongolia is faced with a revenue shortfall. On March 14th, the government received a $250 million loan from Credit Suisse. Furthermore, Mongolia also recently issued $500 million in government bonds, in order to raise needed capital. Taken together, the new bonds and Credit Suisse loan represent efforts to raise funds equivalent to 6.5 percent of GDP. These are vital cash injections, as Mongolia has seen its GDP growth rate drop from a high of 17.5 percent earlier in the decade to just 0.7 percent for 2016 and 0.6 percent for 2017, according to the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Ayumi Konishi, director general of the ADBs East Asia department sums up the situation facing Mongolia. Consistent fiscal policy, effective continuing efforts to diversify the economy, and ensuring social protection are important challenges of economic management in Mongolia. In this light, the decline in the countrys consolidated deficit from 11.4 percent of GDP in 2014 to 7.9 percent in 2015 is a commendable achievement, although further steps are needed. Problems in the mining sector Mongolias mineral wealth is well documented, and accounts for 94 percent of the nations exports. This over-reliance was feasible during the days of heady commodity prices and double digit growth rates in China, but is increasingly causing problems. As commodity prices have dropped, foreign investment in Mongolia has effectively dried up. While economic factors are limiting extractive sector growth, political and public tensions are also exacerbating the issue. Related: A Lasting Solution To Low Oil Prices Divisions in Mongolias parliament saw the government block a development proposal from an international mining consortium (including Chinas Shenhua, and Japans Sumitomo) in 2015. On March 30th, thousands demonstrated in Ulaanbaatar, protesting the unequal distribution of wealth that has arisen in the wake of the nations mining boom. Opposition lawmaker Battulga Khaltmaa, spoke to the crowd, our wealth is being shipped outside of [the] country. Where is that money going? Despite the billions from mining concessions, one third of Mongolians still live in poverty, with Battulga arguing that around two dozen families associated with both the ruling Mongolian Democratic Party and opposition Mongolian Peoples Party are reaping the rewards. Through their ties with the state run Mongolian Mining Corporation, listed in Hong Kong, a small group of elite families are profiteering from Mongolias mining dependence. Battulga and his supporters are especially critical of Rio Tintos $5.4 billion Oyu Tolgoi copper mine, as the mines expansion has been bogged down by government demands for more money. Similarly, there is opposition to efforts to revive the Tavan Tolgoi coal mine, as mine income is seen as only benefiting local elites. This is not the first hurdle faced by Tavan Tolgoi, as the mine saw a $4 billion expansion deal fall through in Q3 2015 due to slowing demand in China. Related: Lithium War Heats Up After Epic Launch Of Tesla Model 3 Other efforts to jumpstart mining in Mongolia have met with similiar opposition, such as the governments plans for increasing uranium mining. In 2015 the government issued three uranium mining permits to French mining firm Areva, with production slated to begin in 2017. This endeavor has drawn protests from locals, and does not bode well for Areva, which was already forced to cease operations in 2013 due to local opposition. Environmentalists and local advocacy groups in Mongolia are also protesting efforts by the government to join the 1994 Nuclear Safety Convention and 1997 Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management. If Mongolia accedes to these treaties it will be obligated to accept and dispose of nuclear materials which originated from Mongolia. Opponents claim that Mongolia does not have the capacity or resources to do this. It is likely that the government is considering joining these conventions in order to make it attractive to Russia and China; two major nuclear energy users. Mongolia may be trying to position itself as an attractive location for nuclear waste management, thus seeking additional income from user countries. This may find fertile ground as environmental concerns among Chinese citizens pressure Beijing to export its waste to quell public anger. Mongolia seeks to diversify economy, faces hurdles Commodity price volatility has highlighted the need for Mongolia to diversify its economy. To this end, Mongolia has received a $60 million loan from the ADB to improve the countrys credit guarantee system. According to ADB country director for Mongolia, Robert Schoellhammer the project will helpMongolian SMEs get more access to finance from commercial banks which will help diversify the economy. With the ADBs help, the Credit Guarantee Fund of Mongolia will offer $432 million in SME sub-project loans. Related: Sanctions Lifted, Now Iran Wants To Get Paid Despite the monies from said fund, SMEs in Mongolia are facing many hurdles. For instance, Mongolian SMEs are facing headwinds from new government VAT legislation that came into effect January 2016. Under the new guidelines, businesses are able to recoup 20 percent of their VAT expenditures, yet must do so by providing receipts from a standardized cash register. Many small Mongolian businesses do not use receipts, and as such are unable to receive the tax refund. Furthermore, Mongolias tourism sector; which accounts for 9 percent of GDP, has potential yet requires more support. Tourism to Mongolia has risen from 55,000 in 1997 to 476,000 in 2012, with the government aiming for a million annual visitors by 2020 an ambitious target in a country of barely three million people. Currently, Mongolian tourism firms are facing a decline in visitor numbers are their two largest tourist source countries Russia and China are facing difficult economic times. Sanctions and low oil prices in Russia, and slower domestic growth in China are leading to fewer visitors. Furthermore, Mongolias relative isolation is a major problem for its tourism industry: Chinggis Khaan International Airport only has direct connections to nine destinations. That being said, flagship MIAT Mongolian Airlines is expanding its fleet by 40 percent, adding two Boeing 737-800s. Lastly, to add to Mongolias worries, the country is experiencing a zud or a severe winter in which many livestock die due to an inability to graze. Estimates of livestock death are around 1.2 million for the 2015/2016 winter, with Mongolia receiving UN relief to aid communities suffering from the die-off. Mongolia mineral wealth to population ratio gives it the potential to create prosperity for all its citizens, yet sustained flourishing remains predicated on stable economics and diversified risk. By Jeremy Luedi via Globalriskinsights.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Even as an avalanche of balloons rained down on the heads of the well-wishers in late 1992, many of whom reached out with both hands to try and nab one, there was some doubt in the air. While the roughly two-acre site of the new Downtown Transit Center 909 E. Michigan St., at Lincoln Memorial Drive had previously been little more than a surface parking lot, some skeptical Milwaukeeans thought the concrete bus depot was ill-suited to Milwaukees lakefront (ironic, perhaps, considering a giant parking structure was being built there, though that, too, drew some opposition). The Grand Opening balloon drop, 1992. (PHOTO: Milwaukee County Transit System) A year earlier, a Milwaukee County Transit System announced the federally funded projects groundbreaking by referencing an earlier structure nearby. "Located on the site of the old Chicago and Northwestern Depot, the design of the transit center features a central clock tower reminiscent of the old railroad station," the document noted. But while that stately old Romanesque station remains a treasured Milwaukee memory, the doomed Downtown Transit Center which is expected to be demolished beginning this summer to make way for the new $122 million Couture development has never captured the imagination of Milwaukeeans. (PHOTO: Milwaukee County Transit System) As early as 1988, four years before the depot's completion, the Milwaukee Sentinel called a plan to build a pair of transit centers one Downtown and another on Mill Road to improve connections on the citys far Northwest Side, "a great idea," but added, "there has to be a better place for a Downtown bus station than the lakefront." The paper preferred other options, such as locating it near the Amtrak station on 5th and St. Paul, or near Schlitz Park. But, in fact, the lakefront location was part of what made the project possible. The center under construction. (PHOTO: Milwaukee County Transit System) The federal government ponied up the bulk of the funding for the $33 million project, allowing the countys 20% contribution to come in the form of the valuable lakefront land it offered for the Downtown center. But, the site was selected for more than just the value of the land says Brian Dranzik, Milwaukee Countys director of transportation. "It wouldve been a little difficult at the Amtrak station because the routes were pretty much always going to start here," he says, as we stand in the deserted passenger waiting room at the Downtown Transit Center. "If they would have put it there the routes just would have dead-headed or run from there to here to get into service." And so, the Downtown Transit Center was built where it currently stands and where it has drawn moans and criticism from passersby ever since. The Mill Road center was also built as part of the plan, but was shuttered and sold by MCTS in 2010. The Michigan Street center, Dranzik said, had two goals. First, it was meant to be an off-street place for buses to layover, helping to ease congestion by removing the buses that were, back then, laying over on nearby streets. Second, it was expected to be a place where riders could hop on and off buses especially during pre- and post-work rush hours and wait for buses, too. While some may view the center as a failure because it never took off as a passenger depot Dranzik believes that it has, in fact, had mixed results. "It served a good purpose for laying buses over and taking them off the street and putting them in one spot," he says, noting that at the moment only seven routes utilize the Downtown Transit Center. "This has changed a lot. There are 22 bays out there for buses. There were more routes than there are today (using the station; many were phased out in route consolidation plans over the years). It served the purpose of getting the vehicles off the street." It is as a passenger station that the depot hasnt performed as expected, according to Dranzik. "It never really became a real point of origin for peoples trips. As the vehicles come out they get closer to the buildings like the U.S. Bank building," he says. "Thats where people are going out the door and right to the bus. This is a little far removed for that purpose. On occasion if it got cold youd see more people. But it never really got off the ground as anticipated." During a recent mid-morning, weekday visit, the bays in a dim garage with an eerie yellowish glow were mostly empty, but a handful of buses did pull in and their drivers availed themselves of the facilities and the well-stocked vending machines during their layovers, which generally last between a couple minutes and 10 minutes at most, depending on printed timetables and the real-world factors that affect them. But not a single person stepped into the passenger facilities while we were there, and we couldnt help noting that some of the rows of metal seats, which are more comfortable than they might appear, had begun to rust. The escalators were still useful only as non-moving staircases and the elevator switched off. Upstairs, there are meeting rooms, which are rented out regularly by Zilli Hospitality Group for weddings, events and meetings the largest served as Milwaukee Art Museum office space during the museum's recent expansion as well as a couple display cases full of interesting Milwaukee County Historical Society memorabilia tracing the citys rapid transit history. Outside, theres a park-like terrace that was empty on a warm and sunny spring late morning. But the terrace offers great views of the construction work below at the foot of the Hoan Bridge, the lakefront and of the new skyline rising nearby. It is that development occurring near the center 833 East Michigan and an adjacent new Westin Hotel; the new Northwestern Mutual tower and one that recently broke ground across the street; the Milwaukee Art Museum purchase of ODonnell Park and the museum's galleries expansion; a much-discussed lakefront redesign; talk of a new Johnson Controls building; etc. that has finally led to its demise. More than anything, it is the new Couture development that will erase the Downtown Transit Center. The stark white, 44-story residential tower that promises high-end retail and dining, along with about 300 luxury apartments, will get the bus turnaround site onto the tax rolls in a big way and make the kind of statement thats now expected at the lakefront. The Couture will also embrace transit, as a stop on the Milwaukee Streetcar line, with bus bays on the Clybourn Street side and a proposed station for a potential bus rapid transit line that is currently under discussion. According to Dranzik, the center will come down this year. "Somewhere in the August to September time frame," he says. "Its just the final legal work thats got to get hammered out." As for the buses that will be displaced from the center, Dranzik says, "The Couture site has those bays on what will be the backside of the building. A couple of the routes will go back to using on-street layovers. Some of the other routes may just get dispersed and layover in other locations. But likely in this general area. Theres just a lot going on here construction wise (right now), so its a matter of juggling that, too." The area, he adds, "will become a little differently functioning transportation hub. But there will still be activity." Reprinted from www.dailykos.com by Toby Ziegler As virtually everyone on this site knows Hillary Clinton soundly defeated Bernie Sanders in the New York primary tonight by anywhere from a 58-42 to a 57-43 margin. There is no doubt this was a severe blow to the Sanders campaign. There is now almost no doubt that Clinton will win the Democratic nomination after this defeat, especially since Pennsylvania and New Jersey which are both major states, are closed primaries. But that is not what this diary is about. There are plenty of diaries out there already celebrating Clinton's win or talking about it and that's fine. Just as Sanders supporters celebrated his Michigan upset the Clinton people have every right to be happy that their candidate won tonight. I do not want to rain on their well earned parade. What I want to talk about is something very different than what the pundits, social media, or the campaign surrogates are discussing. I want to talk about why I will continue to support Senator Sanders. I want to talk about why I will be going to my county convention in Washington as a proud delegate for Sanders. I want to talk about why I look him up at least twenty times today. I want to talk about why any of you who are Sanders supporters should continue to stand by him as well, instead of losing hope, getting depressed, and walking away. I want to talk about why the established forces should listen too. I am a millennial voter. Virtually every person I know, many of them fellow millennials, supports Sanders. We support Sanders by overwhelming margins. In the New York primary my generation supported him by a margin of 34 percentage points. I am far too tired to write a new section as to why but this old diary I posted, many months ago, more than speaks for itself: Click Here to Read Whole Article I am a direct descendant of one of the foremost leaders in the Suffragette Movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who worked alongside Susan B. Anthony to achieve the right to vote for women. I am absolutely certain if either Elizabeth, Susan, or any of their colleagues were alive today, they would not vote for Hillary Clinton. These women went through hell, sustaining decades of insults and injuries, just to get women the vote. They are not here to tell you NOT to support Hillary Clinton, but I certainly am! Who was Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Born in 1815, her Declaration of Sentiments, presented at the Seneca Falls New York Convention held in 1848, is credited with beginning the first organized women's rights and women's suffrage movements in the United States. She was an active abolitionist. In addition to going beyond women's voting rights -- including birth control, women's custody rights, property rights, divorce, income rights, and temperance -- Stanton and Susan B. Anthony declined to support passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. She opposed giving added legal protection and voting rights to African American men, while black and white women were denied those same rights. In 1902, she died, leaving behind The Woman's Bible, her autobiography, Eighty Years and More, in addition to hundreds of articles and pamphlets concerning female suffrage and women's rights. Back to 2016: it is common knowledge The Clinton Foundation accepts enormous sums from Saudi Arabia, a country with a record of appalling treatment of women, yet Hillary's supporters choose to look the other way and ignore this egregious failing. In addition, this female candidate, who we are supposed to entrust with fighting for our wage equality pays men 38% more than women within her Foundation. I am disappointed by how many female Clinton supporters sneeringly ask: "When Hillary gets the nomination, you'll support the party and vote for her, right? She's better than all the Republicans." If these supporters, who so righteously carry the DNC's golden mantle, are so concerned about women's issues and the fate of the party, perhaps they should consider calling on Clinton to suspend her campaign for the Presidency. Polls repeatedly show Bernie Sanders beating all Republicans in the General Election. However, there still remain glaring and profoundly disturbing questions of Clinton's truthfulness, the possibilities of her being indicted on several Federal charges, her terrible track record as a Secretary of State, her inconsequential lack of accomplishment as NY's US Senator, and what Bloomberg calls her "long, cautious record on women's rights." Is the Democratic Party prepared to be blindsided by more surprises about Hillary? What does her refusal to release the Wall Street transcripts imply about what else she must be hiding from all Americans? Next Page 1 | 2 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). Reprinted from Smirking Chimp Americans don't trust the media. In fact, studies show that we, like, really, really, really don't trust the media. A new survey from the Media Insight Project, for example, shows that just 6 percent of Americans "say they have great confidence in the press." Six percent! Just for some perspective, that's about the same number of Americans who say they have trust in Congress, which is about 4 percent. It's up for debate whether that reflects worse on Congress or the media, but one thing is clear: The US public's almost total distrust of the press isn't going away anytime soon. Public approval of the media has been declining for decades, and, according to some polls, has now reached record lows. This shouldn't be that surprising to anyone who's been paying attention. Thanks to the death of the Fairness Doctrine, the people who are supposed to report the news no longer have any obligation whatsoever to, you know, report the news. As a result, corporate media, especially corporate television media, has become almost completely indistinguishable from "infotainment." In many cases, it actually is infotainment. Combine that with the fact that the press has gotten it very, very wrong on the biggest issues of our time -- the Iraq War, for example -- and it's amazing that anyone trusts them to get any story straight. So, if Americans don't trust the traditional media, where are they getting their news? Well, many of them, especially younger Americans, are getting it from the internet and social media. This is having a big, game-changing effect on our democracy. Because of social media, politicians and activists now don't have to worry as much about getting their message across through corporate-controlled media. They can now actually work around traditional corporate media altogether by using sites like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to reach out to supporters and rally the public to their cause. This dynamic has played a huge role in the rise of Bernie Sanders. There was a "Bernie blackout" in traditional corporate media for the first six months of Bernie's campaign, and, at least initially, Sanders supporters could only find news about their candidate on Facebook and Twitter. This has changed recently, but there is still an obvious anti-Bernie bias out there in the corporate press, even at supposedly "liberal" networks like MSNBC. As a result, social media has continued to play a big role in the campaign, acting as a corrective of sorts to mainstream media. Today in many Muslim communities we can observe three phenomena: first, radical groups born and became popular in war-torn countries where the human psyche became brutalized and deeply hurt, second, Islam turned into an ideology of fighting or revolution or at least into ideology of resistance. Third, penetration of criminalization syndrome into the minds of Muslim youth, even a kind of nexus between criminal underground and violent radicalism, can be observed in many countries. A result of the above mentioned a kind of pseudo-religiosity and pseudo-Islamization generating and driven by negative emotions (which Islam came to cure), shocks and crises is underway in a number of Muslim communities around the world which in its turn is crushing down all remnants of multiculturalism and pluralism left after the authoritarian and police regimes. However, religiosity and fanaticism are completely different from each other. While religiosity in Islam is denoted by the concept "taqwa" (in a narrow sense piety), fanaticism is depicted as "taassub". Prophet Muhammad himself urged against any kind of "taassub", fanaticism. Truly, anyone who possesses a bit knowledge about Islam may wonder "Do radical Muslims know the lifestyle of Prophet Muhammad, main principles of his message beyond some dates and some normative prescriptions?" Prophet Muhammad never described any Muslim as an apostate, never did act rudely to anyone of different religion and never did "otherize" anyone. He maintained perfect personal conduct even with the most notorious hypocrites in Madina and never punished anyone including the bitter enemies. That is why almost all leaders of Meccan polytheists and the descendants of Madina hypocrites became Muslims, they were just melt away in the atmosphere of inclusiveness and xenophile. Verily Quran urges "We made the humankind honorable/ 'karim' and the Prophet through his lifestyle tried to inculcate the belief that "we are all humans and our human identity comes before our ethnic and religious identity" what was the clearest sign of inclusiveness of his life-style. To teach this to his followers the Prophet stood up for the funeral of a Jewish man out of respect for his humanity. Although, by and large Islam cannot be presented as a pacifist religion, because after the migration to Madina the permission to armed struggle was given. However, this permission came to be tied to very strict conditions. Even a scholar like Ibn Taymiyya [whose views frequently are used by extremist and radical groups to justify violence] acknowledged that Prophet Muhammad never began hostilities against any unbeliever and all wars of Prophet Muhammad was defensive. Hence, if to look holistically through the prism of the Prophet Muhammad's lifestyle, it can be seen that he fought only defensive wars and unbelief ('kufr') cannot be a reason of war-making. A holistic view of the Prophet Muhammad's lifestyle indicates defensive character of his military campaigns and their extremely small portion in entire period of his prophet-hood. The statistics show that out of eight thousand (8 000) days of his prophet-hood period the total amount of time spent in all active battles was only half of a day, only thirteen hours (!). However, it was the time of utmost barbarianism and Muslims were confronted with total war. Furthermore, there is no any reliable evidence suggesting that Prophet Muhammad himself killed anyone even in the battlefield: there was no stain of blood on his sword. Those who indulge in violence under Islamic slogans not only selectively invoke Quran and Sunnah but they act completely against the underlying aims, style of reasoning (mind-set) and psychology of Islamic teaching. On the whole, this kind of hijacking of Islam is probably the biggest crime against Islam. We cannot help but wonder if radical and extremist Muslims understand the essence of the lifestyle of Prophet Muhammad? To follow the lifestyle of Prophet Muhammad and first generations means to be inclusive and xenophilic (i.e. attraction to other people, cultures and customs) , but no way exclusivist, arrogant, let alone extremist and violent. Reprinted from Wallwritings The New York Times editorial board was absolutely right when it declared the day following the New York primaries, that it is too soon for Bernie Sanders and John Kasich to concede the nominations to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. In its editorial, the paper called on Kasich and Sanders to stay in their respective campaigns. The Times calls on them to "let the remaining states have their say." Furthermore, the Times writes, "This should be a wake-up call to leaders of both parties. They are missing something big about their own members' priorities, and their mood. "A spirited nominating season might teach them what voters actually want from their president. So far, voters are saying they aren't willing to settle for a party favorite, and don't want to be cheated out of a choice." After their strong victories Tuesday, Trump and Clinton called on their opponents to give up, and rally around the party flags for November. The post-primary narrative makers are asking, why should the two losers continue to fight? The answer lies in the song lyric, "It ain't over til it's over" We need to hear more from Bernie Sanders, a rarity in national life, an authentic, passionate socialist candidate who, over a lifetime, has drilled to the core of this nation's militaristic, empirical dark side. Sanders demands that we confess to this dark side, our national "id component" that succumbs to the corporate bread and circuses strategy that urges us to indulge our wants and shallow desires. At its best, politics can be a noble pursuit, but like the rest of us, politicians have their dark side. This "id component" of human personality, about which the Jewish intellectual/medical giant Sigmund Freud, warned us, lures us into such selfishness that it closes our eyes to the less unfortunate among us. That selfish "id component" also makes us susceptible to con artists who profess to do good when they intend us harm. On the international scene, Israel hides behind its ancient biblical name to build and sustain a military dictatorship which occupies and controls another people, not like them. Israel has its loyalists hidden within our institutions to promote the myth of its goodness, which disguises its quest for power. We are easily seduced. Candidate Hillary Clinton has long succumbed to this seduction, while Bernie Sanders, a secular Jew who as a young American lived for a time on an Israeli kibbutz, has openly rejected it. Clinton, a Goldwater volunteer in her Chicago suburban youth, was driven by a burning ambition to break from the suburban mom role she might have followed. White Bear noted that a long time had elapsed since the war between the clans of the Snake and the Bow and his people's subsequent migration to their current homeland in Arizona. The Hopi always keep alive the memories of important events even if the members of some clans prefer not to remember them, he said, evidence for his story having been located in the forms of drawings and sculptures. "As I already mentioned, a schism had occurred among the spiritual guides. Some wanted to continue to teach and to educate the young people in harmony with our important spiritual heritage. The Clan of the Snake formed part of it, but others like the Clan of the Bow did not want to continue this way," White Bear said. "This clan had already acted similarly when it took part in activities that led towards the destruction of the Third World. These facts are known by the Hopis. We also know the form of energy which was used during this combat. The scientists of many countries work on the development of such weapons today. The Clan of the Bow challenged the Clan of the Snake and other clans, declaring itself stronger and superior to the others, who accepted the challenge. Regarding the Clan of the Snake, White Bear said: "We Hopis are the only people to have as a symbol the snake with the six heads. One head is directed towards the east, one to the north, one to the west, one to the south, one upwards and the other downwards. They were the spiritual directions of the various Clans of the Snake of that period. Each of the six snakes had its own significance and its own tasks. I only want to explain the one that plays a part in this story--namely, that with the downward head, which acts under the surface of the ground. We all know a snake which buries itself under sand which we call "snake of sands" (i.e. "sidewinder", a desert rattlesnake). Because of the power of this snake, the Clan of the Snake 'was invited' to ensure the city's defense, and you will see soon why. The chiefs of the two sides met in order to fix the rules of the combat. There were important quarrels like today among heads of state. They agreed that the combat should begin two days after the end of the meeting and that each side would try during four days to conquer the city of the enemy. The Clan of the Bow wanted the Clan of the Snake to begin the hostilities, but the latter said, 'No, you challenged us. You, therefore, must start,' and that became the agreement. The combat was to begin each day with the rising of the sun and finish when the sun touched the horizon. It was not a war in which one fights man against man with bludgeons or bows and arrows. The cities were at a distance of 80 to 100 kilometers from one another, and it was a scientific and technological war between two very powerful groups. This is why the two clans do not like to speak about it even today. During the two following days all the preparations were undertaken and on the third day, when the sun appeared above the horizon, the combat started. The Clan of the Bow bombarded the city of the Clan of the Snake with the strongest and most destructive weapons it had. What was used is related today to electrical energy similar to lightning. This Clan of the Snake had prepared itself for it. The snake that I mentioned previously helped the people to go under the ground and to protect themselves with a powerful shield and a kind of electrical energy. During the day only the chiefs appeared from time to time under a shield to see the position of the sun. It was difficult for everybody, and everyone was relieved when the sun lay down and everything became quiet again. There was no more of this thunder each time the powerful force touched the shield. The shield was removed and everybody could leave the shelters. The Clan of the Bow knew that it had not caused any destruction in the Clan of the Snake and that the Snake Clan would attack the following day. And then it was Clan of the Bow's turn to make preparations for protection. The sun rose and the Clan of the Snake attacked the city of the Clan of the Bow. The weapons of the Clan of the Snake were so powerful that they looked like atomic explosions! But both sides had made important scientific progress, and the Clan of the Bow also had a powerful shield allowing it to survive this second day. On the third day nothing decisive occurred, and the Clan of the Bow lost its chance of victory. The fourth day arrived, which was the last chance of victory for the adversary. After a few hours in the afternoon the Clan of the Snake decided to try something else to show his power to the adversary. Shooting ceased, and they used the capacities of the snake to bury themselves. They built a tunnel below the fortifications of the Clan of the Bow. People of the Clan of the Bow were astonished that the bombardments stopped before sunset. They wondered if the Clan of the Snake had given up. They were still raising questions when the chief of the Clan of the Snake came out of the tunnel and said, 'We are here and you are overcome. We could kill you now, but we will not. But from now on your divinity, Saaviki, must carry a snake in the mouth at the time of your ceremony every four years.' It was the end of the combat. Palace at Palenque, Mexico (Palatquapi) (Image by Ricraider, Author: Ricraider) Details Source DMCA After these very turbulent times in Palatquapi and Yucatan, the clans became completely divided. Palatquapi was not destroyed by the war; people had left it when it lost its power, and it was finally destroyed by an earthquake. Many clans started to migrate again but were isolated from each other. "The Kachinas helped us only by showing us the way. We could not use spaceships any more. We really had to struggle if we were to deserve to have this new land," White Bear said, adding that the migrations aimed towards the four cardinal points. People had come from the south, and now on this part of the continent they were to move towards the north" east, or west. "Our people moved all over North America. Ruins and tombs on the whole of the continent attest to our movements. We are the only people who, even during the migrations, built our houses in stone. The Creator wanted it this way. We assembled neither tents nor light huts but only built true houses in which we remained, sometimes for several years before carrying on. Such settlements or their ruins showed the groups arriving after us that we had passed there a long time before them," White Bear said. "Some began the migrations and never finished them. Others remained on a spot when they found an area that they liked." However, he said, only a few groups remained true to the laws and transmitted the true traditions. The others no longer followed the original religion. They lacked the knowledge although Taiowa had created them all. Casa Grande Evidence of the clans can be found in the whole of Central and North America. The few clans that continued to respect the laws tried to find spiritual guides, looking for teachers because they knew they could not fulfill this role themselves. "Some spiritual leaders decided to bring together their clans in order to teach the young generations the highest level of knowledge concerning the relations between men and the Creator, and finally to transmit all of our marvelous traditions to them which, since the First World, remained alive through and despite the difficult migrations and times," White Bear explained. "At that time the marvelous city, which one today calls 'Casa Grande', was built." Apparently the four most important clans lived there, and today one finds there the symbols of the Clan of the Eagle, the Clan of the Snake, the Clan of Corn and the Clan of the Phantoms as well as symbols of other clans. I remember well a day, when I still went to school, that I sat close to my father. He asked me what I had learned in school and did not seem satisfied with my answer, so he started to speak me about this city. Later, when I was able to visit it with my father, I found it exactly the way he had described it to me. However, he had never been to this place, so how could he have described it so precisely? Obviously their fathers had spoken to them about it many times. It is this way we keep our traditions. The four clans tried hard to attract other clans, and eventually this city became an important center. Its end arrived when it was attacked by the Clan of the Spider. The clans that lived in the city defended it courageously, but when the enemy diverted the river that fed the city, they had to give up. They did not capitulate, however, because they had dug a tunnel by which they were all saved. This city was the last great gathering place before the final reunification in Oraibi. --end First story in the series can be found here at OpEd News. Next Page 1 | 2 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). Reprinted from To The Point Analyses Part I -- The "Fresh Perspective" Dan Illouz is an Israeli lawyer and a former legal adviser to both the Knesset's leadership coalition and the Israeli Foreign Ministry. He is also a big fan of Prime Minister Netanyahu. On 13 April 2016 he wrote an opinion piece for the Jerusalem Post entitled, "A Fresh Perspective: Understanding Netanyahu's Mind." Among the many synonyms of "fresh" offered by your average on-line dictionary are "unusual" and "undeveloped." Though Illouz would certainly not agree that these terms fit his effort to explain the prime minister's consciousness, it turns out that they actually do. For instance, there is his unusual claim that "Netanyahu is one of the deepest thinkers among world leaders." At the same time Illouz emphasizes that Netanyahu comes from a "very ideological" background bequeathed to him by both his Revisionist Zionist father, Benzion Netanyahu, and the American neoconservative worldview. As we will see, both outlooks are undeveloped one-dimensional frames of reference. It is true that our perceptions reflect a worldview structured by the aspects of family and society we choose to embrace, or rebel against. It could go either way. According to Illouz, Netanyahu has embraced the restricted worldview of a brand of Zionism that teaches that, if the Jews are to survive in the modern world, they must be militarily all powerful and remain unmoved by any and all calls for compromise with alleged enemies. Also, according to Illouz, Netanyahu sees the world through the myopic lens of the American neoconservative movement, which preaches that both the United States and Israel are allies in a never-ending battle of good against evil. The unalterable consequences of compromise in such a struggle have been taught to us by the history of the 1938 Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler. All such compromises in this imagined struggle must end up in catastrophe, especially for the Jews. Part II -- "Deep Thinking" The conclusions Illouz draws from this description of Netanyahu's mindset are, to say the least, baffling. Not in the sense that Netanyahu is cemented into a worldview that itself is modeled on a narrow slice of history. This indeed seems to accurately describe him. But rather in the claim that by seeing the world this way, the Israeli prime minister shows himself to be a "deep thinker." What does it mean to be a "deep thinker"? It should entail some capacity to break free of the structural framework or the worldview we start out with. For example, a degree of independent thought that allows us to discern when the past serves as a useful guide to the present and when it does not. This all adds up to an ability to be original -- to understand present circumstances in novel ways that lead to breakthrough solutions to problems, be they political, social or scientific. That is what it takes to think deeply. Does Benjamin Netanyahu qualify? No, he does not. He is no more a "deep thinker" than George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld or John Bolton. Then why does Illouz say he does qualify? Because this Israeli lawyer, who is himself no "deep thinker," mixes up profundity of thought with a skewed notion of "prudence" -- which, in this case, he interprets as a "reluctance to embrace a utopian view of the world that progressives push forward." Examples of such "utopian views" are peace agreements such as the Iran accord, and the notion of "unilateral withdrawals." In other words, Benjamin Netanyahu is a "deep thinker" because, in the name of "prudence," he shuts down all consideration of diplomatic compromise. For Illouz that also makes him one of the world's leading "realists." In truth, Illouz's assessment of his prime minister's mind is itself a product of the same narrow, static worldview shared by neoconservatives and Likudniks alike. For instance, according to Illouz, Netanyahu's refusal to withdraw from the Occupied Territories (OT) is stark realism motivated by a desire to "stop history from taking a wrong turn" -- as it did in 1938. The comparison of the Palestinian desire for an independent state in the OT and the Munich agreement of 1938 is so patently inane that I won't waste words on it. However, Israel's absorption of the territories can be judged as the very opposite of realism -- it is a utopian (actually dystopian) scheme that is in the process of doing untold damage to both Jews and Palestinians while isolating Israel from the rest of the world. Part III -- Conclusion There is a contradiction between profundity of thought and the ideologically determined worldview. To be in a position to achieve the former, one must, at the very least, eschew the dogmatic aspects of the latter. Neither Benjamin Netanyahu nor Dan Illouz are capable of doing this. Analyzing Illouz's presentation is not hard. His mistaken take on "deep thinking," the lessons of history, the notions of realism and utopianism are quite obvious. This being the case one might ask why the editors at the Jerusalem Post thought it proper to print such balderdash? Perhaps because they too see the world in the same one-dimensional fashion. If we are to believe the reports coming out of Israel, the Jewish majority there is undergoing an unchecked withdrawal into itself. The "us against the world" attitude that has always characterized some of world Jewry has now taken command in Israel. And, except for a small portion of the population that has managed to break free of this warped worldview (and as a consequence is being labeled as traitors), the mass of Israeli Jews are following their Pied Piper leaders into dangerous isolation. This state of detachment has led to a series of policy decisions that are anything but realistic. The continuing expansion of illegal settlements and destruction of Palestinian houses, the resulting ethnic cleansing, the utter barbarism of Israeli policy toward Gaza, and the labeling as terrorist behavior all reactions against these policies, mark an official, and internally popular, worldview that is increasing detached from reality. Dan Illouz's piece in the Jerusalem Post is a clumsy effort to rationalize this way of thinking and seeing. For a nation (and also individuals) in this state of mind positive change can only come from the outside. The resulting pressure is never pleasant and sometimes may become severe. However, in cases where the behavior of the offending state is criminal and often barbaric, change, be it easy or hard, must ultimately come. And, in fact, the Israelis and their supporters are in the process of learning the price of following the dictates of "Netanyahu's mind." Ted Cruz had a bad introduction to New York, as the candidate who tried to score points in other states by ripping humane and community-oriented "New York values" as somehow unappealing. Then he made things worse. So much worse, that the conservative candidate who was all the rage as the New York competition ramped up two weeks ago, finished out of the running Tuesday night. Republican primary voters responded to Cruz's New York (and New Yorker) bashing by absolutely rejecting the Texan. Billionaire Donald Trump was declared the winner of his home state just moments after the polls closed. With almost all of the New York Republican primary votes counted, Trump was winning over 60 percent, assuring that he would win the vast majority of the state's 95 delegates. Finishing in second was Ohio Governor John Kasich, with about 25 percent. Cruz was at just 14.8 percent statewide -- a devastatingly weak finish for a candidate who has billed himself as the only viable alternative to Trump. It was even worse for Cruz in key New York City boroughs where the Texan had campaigned and spent heavily in hopes of breaking conservative voters loose from Trump. On Staten Island, Cruz was at just 7.9 percent. Manhattan voters gave Cruz just 13 percent, while providing Kasich with a narrow lead over Trump (and the prospect of a few delegates for the Ohioan). Cruz was never going to win New York City. But the candidate who bashed "New York values" did not just lose. He collapsed. New York City gave the Texan no quarter. With a little humor and self-deprecation, Cruz might have been able to talk his way out of his "New York values" swipe at Trump by explaining that, hey, he was appealing to voters in South Carolina back in January. How could he have known that his ridiculously extreme and mean-spirited candidacy would survive long enough to compete in a New York primary in April? But Cruz had never been good at humor and self-deprecation. Click Here to Read Whole Article Reprinted from Consortium News So much for political bravery! Sen. Bernie Sanders had the audacity to say that the Palestinians are human beings, that there are two sides to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is "not right all of the time" -- and lost the New York primary by more than 15 percentage points. Obviously, there were many other factors, including the tightly closed rules for the New York primaries, requiring voters to have declared their party affiliation by last October or be barred from participating. But still New York Democrats did not appear to reward Sanders for breaking with Official Washington's orthodoxy on Israel, which holds that the only permissible political stance is total obeisance to Netanyahu and his government. Whether Sanders's stance hurt him may be debatable but the election result could resonate nonetheless with future candidates who might be more chary about taking a more even-handed position on Israel-Palestine. In one of the sharper exchanges from last Thursday's Democratic debate, Sanders, who is Jewish and once worked on an Israeli kibbutz, chided his rival, Hillary Clinton, for appearing before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last month and giving a speech that "barely mentioned the Palestinians." While political insiders gasped at his heresy, Sanders plunged on, "All that I am saying is we cannot continue to be one-sided. There are two sides to the issue. ... There comes a time when if we pursue justice and peace, we are going to have to say that Netanyahu is not right all of the time." By contrast, former Secretary of State Clinton and the three remaining Republican candidates, including front-runner Donald Trump, went politically prostrate before AIPAC , competing to see who could out-pander the others. Clinton Prevails Despite serious efforts by Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, Clinton appeared to come out on top in the pander-off, perhaps partly because she is more experienced at telling Israel's right-wing government what it wants to hear. She depicted Israel as an innocent victim in the Mideast conflicts facing unconscionable challenges from Iran, the Palestinians and global activists seeking to put pressure on Israel through a program of boycott, divestment and sanctions. "As we gather here, three evolving threats -- Iran's continued aggression, a rising tide of extremism across a wide arc of instability, and the growing effort to de-legitimize Israel on the world stage -- are converging to make the U.S.-Israel alliance more indispensable than ever," she declared. "The United States and Israel must be closer than ever, stronger than ever and more determined than ever to prevail against our common adversaries and to advance our shared values. ... This is especially true at a time when Israel faces brutal terrorist stabbings, shootings and vehicle attacks at home. Parents worry about letting their children walk down the street. Families live in fear." Clinton promised to put her future administration at the service of the Israeli government. "One of the first things I'll do in office is invite the Israeli prime minister to visit the White House. And I will send a delegation from the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs to Israel for early consultations. Let's also expand our collaboration beyond security," Clinton said, adding... "The first choice is this: are we prepared to take the U.S./Israel alliance to the next level?" Clinton's one-sided presentation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fit with her longstanding approach to the Middle East, where she has either actively supported or quietly accepted Israel meting out military retribution on the region's Arabs, even when justified by clear-cut bigotry. For instance, in summer 2006, as a Senator from New York, Clinton shared a stage with Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations Dan Gillerman while Israeli warplanes pounded southern Lebanon, killing more than 1,000 Lebanese. Gillerman was a well-known Muslim-basher who had once quipped, "While it may be true and probably is that not all Muslims are terrorists, it also happens to be true that nearly all terrorists are Muslim." At a pro-Israel rally with Clinton in New York on July 17, 2006, Gillerman proudly defended Israel's massive violence against targets in Lebanon. "Let us finish the job," Gillerman told the crowd. "We will excise the cancer in Lebanon" and "cut off the fingers" of Hezbollah. Reprinted from Paul Craig Roberts Website The Washington elite believe that the British people should serve Washington's interest and not their own. To this end, President Obama has been sent to London to emphasize that the UK must remain in the EU. Does this make you wonder why it is important to Washington for the British people to surrender their national sovereignty to the European Union? If not, it should. It is easier and less expensive for Washington to control the EU government than to control 28 separate governments. For example, if Washington wants to open up Europe to Monsanto, it is easier for Washington to bribe one EU government than to deal with 28 governments, especially as the European Commission is not accountable to the European people, whereas the individual populations of the countries would make their objections known to the national governments. The EU can open the door to Monsanto without accountability. Then there is the NATO consideration. NATO is cover for Washington's war crimes. Without this cover there likely would be arrest warrants for US officials and, if not, certainly much hostile publicity. The notion that Washington is bringing "freedom and democracy" when it destroys a country would no longer fly. If the UK leaves the EU, other countries are likely to follow. The desertion could spread to NATO, in which case Washington's hegemony over Europe and ability to threaten and destabilize Russia disappear. The neoconservatives cannot stand the thought. Just as have the Americans and Europeans, the British have been lied to, deceived, and brainwashed for so long that it is surprising that such a large part of the population and political element are in favor of the UK leaving the EU. It shows that despite the propaganda, many of the British recognize that being absorbed by the EU is the same as being conquered by the Germans, a fate that the British fought two world wars to avoid. The paid-off British politicians want to do Washington's bidding. Perhaps more need to be paid off, and the price is what Obama has gone to London to discover. Here us an RT report on the hostile reception Obama is receiving in the UK for his meddling in the internal affairs of a sovereign country. When I conducted an assessment of Senator Bernie Sanders' economic proposals and found that they could produce robust growth, the negative reaction among powerful liberal economists was swift and vehement. How much, I wondered, did this reflect personal disappointment being rationalized into a political economy of despair? Professional economists tend to embrace an economic theory that government can do little more than fuss around the edges. From that stance, what do they have to offer ordinary people for whom the economy is not working? Not a whole lot. How Gerald Friedman's assessment of Bernie Sanders economic proposals prompted a rare public political spat among economists It has certainly been a rough seven years for the liberal economists in the Obama Administration. Economic recovery has been slow, the slowest in the post-World War II era. Ambitious programs for reform of social insurance programs (such as unemployment insurance) and for public investment have been scaled back, and back. Yes, there is much that these economists who served Obama can be proud of: more people have health insurance, and the economy did not collapse. But the constant slog must have taken a toll. Having experienced so many compromises and disappointments, perhaps it is easier to say to those who expect more that it just can't happen. There is comfort in the Thatcherite phrase: There Is No Alternative (TINA). The angry reaction to my report revealed that by some combination of rationalization and the dominance of neoclassical microeconomics since the 1970s, liberal economists have virtually abandoned Keynesian economics, which supported the notion that governments can and must intervene in the economy to ensure the best results for society. These economists went back to pre-Keynesian thinking, where price fluctuations are supposed to equilibrate supply and demand at full employment with an optimal distribution of good and services. The very suggestion that government action can result in increases in growth rates or wages is now taken to be obviously wrong. Adopting the language of neoclassical micro welfare economics, everything is already as good as can be -- all that government can do is to make it worse. Criticisms of the orthodox model and its policies are deemed worthy of scorn, to be dismissed tout court because they are obviously at variance not only with textbook economics, but with what we need to believe to rationalize failure . The closing of the economists' mind The reaction to my paper -- the casual and precipitous conclusion that it must be wrong because it projects a sharply higher rate of GDP growth -- comes from the assumption that the economy is already at full employment and capacity output. It is assumed that were output significantly below full employment, then prices would fall to equilibrate the two. This is the political counsel of despair. It is based on classical economic theory and the underlying acceptance of Say's Law of Markets (named for the great Classical economist Jean-Baptiste Say), which says that total supply of goods and services and the total demand for goods and services will always be equal. The shoe market creates the right amount of demand for shoes -- it works out so neatly that the true measure of the supply of shoes, of potential output, can be taken by measuring actual output. This concept is used as a justification for laissez-faire economics, and the view that the market mechanism finds a harmonious equilibrium. It explains why even in the depths of the economic crisis, Christina Romer, former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration, who was always skeptical of fiscal policy and Keynesian economics, and why Jared Bernstein, former Chief Economist and Economic Adviser to Vice President Joseph Biden under Obama, who should have known better, wrote that the economy would return on its own to full employment. They predicted, quite wrongly, that the proposed Obama stimulus would accelerate this recovery by 6 months. The return of Say's Law has distorted the way liberal policy elites view the economy. Consider the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) decision in 2014 to explain away years of slow growth by dramatically revising downwards its estimate of potential output. No longer do we have an output gap of 9 percent; instead the gap was redefined as only 2 percent because the real level of capacity is reevaluated as the level actually produced on the assumption that we must be at full employment. And how do we know that we are at full employment? Because we are producing the capacity level of output. CBO has similarly downgraded estimates of potential GDP growth with historically low rates of labor force growth and slow productivity growth; instead of the 3 percent average annual growth of the 1959-2007 period, or the 4 percent growth 1947-73, we are to expect no more than 2 percent growth. While there is some referencing of demographic changes, these estimates conveniently align future growth projections with the otherwise-disappointing recent growth performance. This reevaluation says to policy elites, "Hey, we are doing as well as can be expected." To the general public it says, "Sorry, nothing more can be done for you." TINA. There is, of course, a politics as well as a psychology to this economic theory. If nothing much can be done, if things are as good as they can be, it is irresponsible even to suggest to the general public that we try to do something about our economic ills. The role of economists and other policy elites (Paul Krugman is fond of the term "wonks") is to explain to the general public why they should be reconciled with stagnant incomes, and to rebuke those, like myself, who say otherwise before we raise false hopes that can only be disappointed. But this approach leaves liberals like Hillary Clinton with few policy options to offer in response to the siren call of demagogues like Donald Trump. And it makes the work of self-proclaimed "responsible" elite economists that much more pressing. They have to work even harder to persuade the public that nothing can be done to head off the challenge of Trump and other irresponsible politicians who capitalize on the electorate's appetite for change. They have to slap down critics like myself. "Responsible" elite economists have to keep the party of "good arithmetic" from overpromising at all costs. Were the orthodox classical economists correct, then of course their politics would follow. But what if they are wrong? What if government action could, in fact, raise growth rates or narrow disparities? What would be the expected value of a higher GDP growth rate? Would it be worth some academic debate, even if it leaked into the public realm? Might this debate even serve a socially useful function by giving voters an alternative to the xenophobic political economy of Donald Trump? Many Americans believe that government action can improve economic conditions, especially for workers, and many of these support Trump because they see him as the only candidate who is even willing to consider government action to help working Americans. These voters can look long and hard at the "responsible" Clinton platform for some policy, for any policy to raise growth rates and narrow income disparities. But they won't find it, because policy elites have closed their minds to the possibility of change. An agenda for further research? I admit that I have always lived surrounded by people who agree with me. At Columbia, Harvard, and now Amherst, Massachusetts, I have sought friends and colleagues who largely agree with me. While I enjoy the comfort that comes from an affirming community, it may be that I was not well served by the homogeneity of views. While I knew intellectually that the mainstream had abandoned Keynes and reembraced Say's Law, I didn't take this shift seriously. It seemed too absurd to me; honestly, I thought they were only kidding. Since I have spent most of my life refuting classical economics, and since my colleagues and friends agreed with me, I assumed that everyone did. Had I included some mainstream economists in my narrow social circle, then I would have been better prepared for the substantive reaction to my report. On the other hand, as an intellectual activity, I was well served by the debate because it forced me to deal with ideas that I had previously rejected only too casually. I was helped in this by some of the orthodox folks who expressed second thoughts about my work (such as Kevin Drum). I am grateful to the Christina Romer and her husband David Romer, and to Justin Wolfers because, while they remain firmly opposed to my work, they took the time to explain their approach and helped me to articulate my own views more clearly. Our respectful exchanges allowed me to help them to understand the points of divergence in our models and gave me insight into the nature of my own approach. This engagement of alternative visions could be a useful basis for the type of rethinking of macroeconomics favored even by some who remain in the orthodox camp, such as Olivier Blanchard, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund,. The debate has identified certain areas for empirical investigation that might help us not only to choose between the models but perhaps to find times and places where one or the other approach may be more useful. At a minimum, we have a research agenda for many graduate student papers and dissertations. PROMOTING NBFCs WHAT: 3rd National Summit on "Non-Banking Finance Companies" WHEN: April 25, Mumbai WHAT TO LOOK FOR: NBFCs have commendable contributions towards financial inclusion, offering credit to retail customers in underserved and unbanked areas. The meet organised by ASSOCHAM in collaboration with Finance Industry Development Council will prepare a roadmap on innovations, diversification and regulatory measures for small and medium NBFCs to help authorities address issues raised by different stakeholders. Conference on World IP Day Celebration WHEN: April 26, Chennai WHAT TO LOOK FOR: The conference is aimed at helping users know about their rights on intellectual property and how it can enhance the value of their businesses, spur new technologies and creative content, and protect their ideas. It will also explore emerging issues, policies and practices in implementing an effective IP culture in organisations and academia. The fourth India Sustainability Conclave WHEN: April 26-27, New Delhi WHAT TO LOOK FOR: This edition of the Conclave aims at discovering the momentum that sustainability-related initiatives have gained in the corporate sector, in light of the financial, corporate and environmental regulations mandated by the Indian government in recent times. WHAT: 49th Annual Meeting of the Asian Development Bank WHEN: May 2-5, Frankfurt, Germany WHAT TO LOOK FOR: The ADB Board of Governors will hold the annual meeting to discuss developments in Asia and the Pacific, as well as institutional matters. Under the theme 'Cooperating for Sustainability', the meeting will connect finance and development professionals to exchange ideas and achieve tangible results. : CII Smart City Investors Meet WHEN: May 19, New Delhi WHAT TO LOOK FOR: With the objective to contribute to Government of India's Mission of building 100 smart cities, the Confederation of Indian Industry has entered into MoUs with five country consortiums and with 14 proposed smart cities. The conference will provide all stakeholders the opportunity to discuss the most recent innovations, trends, concerns, challenges encountered and solutions adopted for smart cities. Minister of Urban Development Venkaiah Naidu will be the chief guest. 12 serving officers dismissed on corruption charges RAWALPINDI: Chief of Army Staff General Raheel Sharif dismissed 12 army officers, including a three-star general, from service over alleged corruption on Thursday. A major general, lieutenant colonel, five brigadiers and a major are among those dismissed from service, said an intelligence official. Sources say the following officers are among those dismissed: Lt Gen Obaidullah, Inspector General Arms and Weapons at General Headquarters Maj Gen Ejaz Shahid Brigadier Rasheed Brigadier Asad Shahzada Brigadier Saifullah Brigadier Amir Brigadier Haider Lt Col Haider, Commandant Chaman Scouts Maj Najeeb The eight officers named above served with the Frontier Corps (FC) Balochistan and have been charged for corruption during their service with the paramilitary force. The others dismissed were junior commission officers who worked with those named above, said the intelligence official. Following the investigation conducted by then Adjutant Gen Zubair Mahmood Hayat on the orders of the army chief, the charged officers were asked to return all earnings accumulated through corruption, the official said, adding that all perks and privileges had been withdrawn from the officers except their pensions. Lt Gen Obaidullah also served as IG FC from 2010-2013, after which Maj Gen Ejaz Shahid was appointed IG FC, intelligence sources said. There has been no official confirmation regarding the move. The development comes two days after the COAS said "across the board accountability is necessary for the solidarity, integrity and prosperity of Pakistan", adding that the war against terror cannot be won unless "the menace of corruption is uprooted". Gen Raheel said "Pakistans Armed Forces will fully support every meaningful effort in that direction which would ensure a better future for our next generations." The army chief's call for across-the-board accountability comes as Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is embroiled in the explosive Panama Papers which count his family among other global political elite with undeclared offshore assets. Opposition leaders have demanded a probe into the scandal, with some calling for the PM to step down. Quarters close to the PMs Office say PM Nawaz is determined to have his three children cleared of accusations of money laundering and tax evasion in the aftermath of Panama Papers leak. PML-N's Zubair Umar said that although the army chief's move was laudable, only the PML-N and prime minister should not be targeted. He called for holding "corrupt elements" within the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) and PPP accountable as well. PTI's Shah Mahmood Qureshi appreciated the development, terming the move a signal that Operation Zarb-i-Azb and the war against corruption will not stop. "This action will bring more credibility to the state's security in carrying out an across-the-board operation." Qamar Zaman Kaira of the PPP said it was time for the PM and his family to come clean regarding the Panama leaks, adding that the opposition parties had "no differences over the initiation of a transparent inquiry". "Things done through consensus take time, and the Panama inquiry will also take some time." Jamaat-i-Islami's Ameer Sirajul Haq said the civilian leadership should stand united against "economic terrorism" like it stands against militancy and terrorism after Army Public School massacre. He said the government was "still confused about forming a commission over Panama Papers". Former president Pervez Musharraf also lauded the army chief's action. Defence analyst Hassan Askari said the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) and other agencies will be pressed to take similar action regarding bureaucracy. The army chief's actions will have repercussions for civilian institutions and corrupt politicians under the microscope would be probed transparently. Security analyst Talat Masood said the Army chief has "set an example for politicians to follow" and the decision would "build pressure on politicians as well as the judiciary to root out corruption". "This decision has come at a time when certain sections were apprehensive about the involvement of Pakistan Army in civilian matters," Masood. "Accountability per se is not a political issue, but then the national conversation at the moment is about the excesses of elected leaders. Perhaps a better way to interject itself into that conversation would have been for the military to start the so-called across-the-board accountability process itself. Surely in offering the military to greater financial scrutiny, a positive example would be set that politicians would be under legitimate pressure to follow. Yet, where the military errs, the political class inflicts damage on itself and the wider cause of democracy." Khawaja Asif gave an in-camera briefing on RAW activities 21 April, 2016 Related News Imran Khan distributed loan cheques under Kamyab Jawan Programme PTI govt to face all challenges coming its way: Imran khan More on this View All Tips for Taking Incredible iPhone Travel Photos Top 2021 Accessories We Know You Will Love Types of Casino Payment Methods Best Poker Hands ever played on a Casino Are Slot Developers Important for players? Hand Wash and Toiletries in Pakistan And the Role of DUPAS in Reshaping the Industry Woke Bingo ISLAMABAD: Minister for Defence Khawaja Asif on Wednesday gave an in-camera briefing to the upper house of the parliament about the arrest of a high profile spy of Indias Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) who operated across the country, especially in Balochistan. A senator who attended the briefing told reporters that there was nothing in the briefing, but could not say anything because it was kept secret. However, he said, senators questions embarrassed the government. The defence minister on Tuesday requested an in-camera briefing on the arrest of the RAW agent because it was a sensitive issue. He said he could not comment on it because an investigation was in progress. The minister termed the arrest of RAW agent Kulbhushan Yadav as a major breakthrough, which led to other leads and networks of foreign agents, which were being dismantled. He told the Senate that the government had indisputable and unimpeachable evidence about the Indian involvement in terrorism in Pakistan. Senators Mohsin Leghari, Azam Swati, Mohsin Aziz, Sehar Kamran and Hafiz Hamdullah had moved an adjournment motion for a discussion on the activities of the RAW in Balochistan and the arrest of the RAW agent in the restive province. The motion was adopted on the condition that the briefing would be held in-camera. Following the adjournment motion, the House was given in-camera briefing about the arrest of the Indian spy. Before the briefing, the chair admitted an adjournment motion for a discussion on the recent sit-in at D-Chowk. The House took up a Calling Attention Notice about non-payment of salaries to the employees of the Pakistan Steel Mills for the last five months. State Minister for Parliamentary Affairs responded to this notice. The House did not take up another Calling Attention Notice about the relocation of a summit on science and technology from Pakistan to Kazakhstan due to absence of the minister concerned. The House passed a motion under Rule 194 (1) seeking extension of 30 days to submit a report about a demand of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government. The chair suspended the proceedings of the House for sometime over absence of the federal minister for planning and development during the Question Hour. The Standing Committee on Defence chairman presented a report on the mid-year review of budget of the Ministry of Defence. During the Question Hour, the House was informed that the government had taken appropriate measures to discourage smuggling of goods in the country and during the last eight months Rs9.950 billion smuggled goods were confiscated. In 2014-15, the government confiscated Rs9.582 billion smuggled goods. Due to a strict monitoring system at borders, smuggling of goods minimized, said the Ministry of Finance while responding to a question during the Question Hour. Federal Minister for Finance Ishaq Dar said the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) was conducting a meaningful and robust survey with help of qualified experts to ascertain the quantum of smuggling and analyse its impact on the national economy. He said the survey would help the government chalk out an effective strategy to control smuggling. To control smuggling at the Pak-Afghan border, the minister said, anti-smuggling powers under Section 6 of the Customs Act, 1969 had been given to the FC, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and FATA. Similarly, the Political Administration of FATA had been given anti-smuggling powers. In a recent initiative of the Pakistan Customs, a comprehensive anti-smuggling strategy was chalked out. Available resources and manpower, although meagre, had been pooled up for optimum use. In this regard, he said, joint efforts, including intelligence sharing and operations, had been launched by Customs Collectorates and Directorates General of Intelligence and Investigation (Customs) with the help of other law enforcement agencies in the settled areas. All main roads leading to down country were being monitored. However, the minister said that Pakistan Customs operated through notified Customs Stations along Pak-Afghan border with sole purpose of regulating imports and exports and safeguarding the state revenue. It was an admitted fact that Customs had no physical presence on the international borders for control on smuggling, which normally takes place through unfrequented routes manned by other law enforcement agencies. Owing to the aforementioned reasons, it was difficult to ascertain the exact volume of smuggling. A study to this effect is being undertaken by the FBR. To another question, the House was informed that the total foreign and domestic debt stock as of end of January 2016 was Rs18.694.2 trillion. This includes foreign debt of Rs 5.573.6 trillion ($ 53.122 billion) and domestic debt of Rs 13.120 trillion. The present government has repaid foreign debt of $ 10.730 billion, including repayment of $4.415 billion to IMF from June 2013 to January 2016. Answering a question, Minister for Planning and Development Ahsan Iqbal said that work on the western route of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) was in progress and it would bring economic revolution in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. Replying to a question asked by Farhatullah Babar, Iqbal said there should be no ambiguity about the western route. It was never ignored. It was included in the monographic study on transportation sector of China and Pakistan, he added. He said the federal government did not fund the Orange Line project of the Punjab government. It was planned, financed and executed by the Punjab government. He said the Punjab government had obtained a loan from China for 20 years and would return it form its own annual development plan. The federal government had only approved the project. Senators also debated the Panama leaks and demanded constitution of the judicial commission under the chief justice of Pakistan to investigate the issue. Taking part in the debate, Siraj-ul-Haq said that Panama leaks were a serious issue and the judicial commission headed by the CJ should look into it. He urged reforms in the National Accountability Bureau to make it a powerful and impartial organisation. He said the country needed to launch a National Action Plan against corruption. Ilyas Bilour said that all political parties had been demanding judicial commission on the Panama leaks and wanted investigation under the chief justice and foreign audit and forensic experts. He called for an across the board accountability of people from all walks of life. Usman Saifullah said that verdicts were being given without any investigation into the Panama leaks. No offshore company was registered in his name, he claimed. Kalsoom Parveen said that parliamentary committee was a better forum to investigate the Panama leaks. She said that accountability should be carried out across the board. Abdul Qayum said that Panama leaks might be a targeted effort to malign the leadership of a few countries, including Pakistan. The issue should be investigated but there should be no violence, he added. Azam Swati said across the board accountability was need of the hour and demanded probe by the judicial commission. Mohsin Leghari said being parliamentarians they should set high standard of moral authority for others. He demanded an impartial inquiry into the issue. Daud Khan Achakzai said that an independent and impartial judicial commission should investigate the issue and the Parliament should be taken into confidence on the matter. Saifullah Magsi demanded an impartial inquiry, which was acceptable to people of the country. Shibli Faraz said that people should invest money in their own country, adding that Panama leaks issue should be investigated. Senator Hamza said that investigation should be conducted across the board. Najma Hameed said that Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) was using the Panama leaks issue for political purposes. Shahi Syed called for across the board investigation into the issue. PHUKET, THAILAND Amatara Resort & Wellness, one of Thailands most comprehensively equipped resort wellness and spa experiences, introduces The Retreat, a restaurant outlet dedicated to serving healthy and nutritious food and beverages. Previously known as The Club, the newly refreshed venue The Retreat better harmonises the resorts F&B offering with its high quality spa and luxury wellness programs and facilities. The Amatara wellness cuisine concept is deeply rooted in ancient traditions, making it a peaceful sanctuary to embrace authentic healing and living foods. The menu is based on local Thai cultural inspiration, which encourages the nurturing of harmony with spirit, the environment and to re-connect with one another. Amataras mind, body and spirit approach to wellness and wholefood supports an organic healing process to naturally heal and improve the body and state of wellbeing; a key part of this is of course superb nutrition. Amataras Wellness Director, Phoebe Boonkerd, explains, Through the guests experience of our simple, balanced, creative and delicious wholefood cuisine, it is our hope that the guest returns home feeling nourished and rejuvenated, and inspired to continue the journey of good health through optimal nutrition. The menu is designed by our head chef and our nutritionists; it offers a delicious and healthy composition of the highest quality local and imported ingredients, organic fruits, vegetables and free-range meat and poultry. General Manager of Amatara Resort & Wellness, Brice Borin, said, The Retreat is an exciting addition to our restaurant outlets and is a hidden gem for healthy food lovers. The Retreat opens for breakfast for Wellness Retreat guests and Pool Villa guests, as well as for lunch and dinner for all guests looking for healthy cuisine of exceptional quality. We recently launched the worlds first luxury Thai hammam experience at Amatara, as well as reinventing our premium spa and wellness programs. The Retreat is an incredible ocean-view dining outlet to blend perfectly with the Amatara Wellness guest experience. The Retreat will be serving a variety of healthy options including raw juice blends, superfood smoothie blends, salads, appetisers, soups, broth, main course, desserts, herbal tea and healthy coffee. These are delicately crafted in-house based on foundations of using real, unrefined whole foods, free range, coldpressed oil and avoiding additives, pesticides, toxins, refined sugars and extremes of temperature. The menu features seasonal, innovative cuisine with a diverse array of traditional and modern healthy eating influences. For example, the delicious-yet-healthy menus feature Soft Cured Ocean Trout with Organic Leaf Salad, Poached Prawns & Quinoa Salad with Ginger and Ginseng Dressing, Goji & Mussel Chowder Soup, Stir Fried Beef Tenderloin with Ginger and Yuzu Soy Sauce, Young Coconut Pudding and many more. For operating hours at The Retreat, breakfast is served from 06:30 10:30 a.m.; however, this is exclusive for Wellness Retreat and Pool Villa guests only. The Retreat will open to all guests for lunch during 11:30am 2:00pm and for dinner from 5:00 8:00pm. Half Board & Full Board guests are welcomed to dine at The Retreat for their meals following operating hours. Please reserve your stay through Amatara: a Destination Spa directly by calling (+66 762 00808 or extension 7701) or email reservations.phuket@amataraphuket.com For more information about Amatara Resort & Wellness, please call +66 (0) 76 200 800, +66 (0) 76 318 888, Fax +66 7620 0803, or visit www.amataraphuket.com or email sales.phuket@amataraphuket.com. Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers developed a fiber to adsorb uranium from seawater. Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory exposed the fibers to Pseudomonas fluorescens and used the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory to create a 3-D X-ray microtomograph to determine that the fiber structure was not damaged by the organism. Credit: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, US Dept. of Energy The oceans hold more than four billion tons of uraniumenough to meet global energy needs for the next 10,000 years if only we could capture the element from seawater to fuel nuclear power plants. Major advances in this area have been published by the American Chemical Society's (ACS) journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research. For half a century, researchers worldwide have tried to mine uranium from the oceans with limited success. In the 1990s, Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) scientists pioneered materials that hold uranium as it is stuck or adsorbed onto surfaces of the material submerged in seawater. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) initiated a program involving a multidisciplinary team from U.S. national laboratories, universities and research institutes to address the fundamental challenges of economically extracting uranium from seawater. Within five years this team has developed new adsorbents that reduce the cost of extracting uranium from seawater by three to four times. To chronicle this and other successes, the special issue focused on "Uranium in Seawater" amasses research presented by international scientists at ACS's spring 2015 meeting in Denver. Major contributions came from researchers supported by the Fuel Resources Program of DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy who coordinate an international effort involving researchers in China and Japan under agreements with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and JAEA. The DOE program is laying the technological foundation to determine the economic feasibility of uranium recovery from seawater. It supports researchers at national laboratories, universities and research institutes focused on developing and testing the next generation of adsorbents that will exhibit higher adsorbent capacity, faster binding and lower degradation over multiple use cycles in seawater. "For nuclear power to remain a sustainable energy source, an economically viable and secure source of nuclear fuel must be available," said Phillip Britt, who provides technical and outreach leadership for the DOE program. "This special journal issue captures the dramatic successes that have been made by researchers across the world to make the oceans live up to their vast promise for a secure energy future." Scientists from two DOE labs, Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington, led more than half of the 30 papers in the special issue. ORNL contributions concentrated on synthesizing and characterizing uranium adsorbents, whereas PNNL papers focused on marine testing of adsorbents synthesized at national labs and universities. "Synthesizing a material that's superior at adsorbing uranium from seawater required a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional team including chemists, computational scientists, chemical engineers, marine scientists and economists," said Sheng Dai, who has technical oversight of the ORNL uranium from seawater program. "Computational studies provided insight into chemical groups that selectively bind uranium. Thermodynamic studies provided insight into the chemistry of uranium and relevant chemical species in seawater. Kinetic studies uncovered factors that control how fast uranium in seawater binds to the adsorbent. Understanding adsorbent properties in the laboratory is key for us to develop more economical adsorbents and prepare them to grab as much uranium as possible." That teamwork culminated in the creation of braids of polyethylene fibers containing a chemical species called amidoxime that attracts uranium. So far, testing has been conducted in the laboratory with real seawater; but the braids are deployable in oceans, where nature would do the mixing, avoiding the expense of pumping large quantities of seawater through the fibers. After several weeks, uranium oxide-laden fibers are collected and subjected to an acidic treatment that releases, or desorbs, uranyl ions, regenerating the adsorbent for reuse. Further processing and enriching of the uranium produces a material to fuel nuclear power plants. PNNL researchers tested the adsorbents developed at ORNL and other laboratories, including universities participating in the Nuclear Energy University Program, using natural filtered and unfiltered seawater from Sequim Bay in Washington under controlled temperature and flow-rate conditions. Gary Gill, deputy director of PNNL's Coastal Sciences Division, coordinated three marine testing sitesat PNNL's Marine Sciences Laboratory in Sequim, Wash., Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and the University of Miami in Florida. "Understanding how the adsorbents perform under natural seawater conditions is critical to reliably assessing how well the uranium adsorbent materials work," Gill said. "In addition to marine testing, we assessed how well the adsorbent attracted uranium versus other elements, adsorbent durability, whether buildup of marine organisms might impact adsorbent capacity, and we demonstrated that most of the adsorbent materials are not toxic. PNNL also performed experiments to optimize release of uranium from the adsorbents and adsorbent re-use using acid and bicarbonate solutions." Marine testing at PNNL showed an ORNL adsorbent material had the capacity to hold 5.2 grams of uranium per kilogram of adsorbent in 49 days of natural seawater exposurethe crowning result presented in the special issue. The Uranium from Seawater program continues to make significant advancements, producing adsorbents with even higher capacities for grabbing uranium. Recent testing exceeded 6 grams of uranium per kilogram of adsorbent after 56 days in natural seawater - an adsorbent capacity that is 15 percent higher than the results highlighted in the special edition. The special issue captures a wide range of enterprises, including Uranium coordination and computer-aided ligand design (ORNL) Thermodynamic, kinetic and structural characterization of the adsorbent (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, ORNL, PNNL) Adsorbent synthesis using radiation to graft more polymer onto the polyethylene (ORNL, Brookhaven National Laboratory, University of Maryland) Adsorbent synthesis using a chemical method (ORNL, University of Tennessee) Adsorbent nanosynthesis (ORNL, PNNL, Hunter College, University of Chicago, University of South Florida, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, University of California-Berkeley) Laboratory testing and modeling of adsorbent performance (ORNL, Georgia Tech) Marine testing and performance assessment of the adsorbent (PNNL, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, University of Miami) Adsorbent durability and reusability (PNNL, University of Idaho) Adsorbent characterization, toxicity and biofouling studies (ORNL, PNNL, UI) Technology cost analyses and modeling (University of Texas-Austin) Green chemistry: Adsorbents prepared using marine shellfish waste (University of Alabama) Adsorbent deployment (PNNL, ORNL, MIT) Uranium from terrestrial sources can last for approximately 100 years, according to Erich Schneider of the University of Texas-Austin. As terrestrial uranium becomes depleted, prices are likely to rise. "If we have technology to capture uranium from seawater, we can ensure that an essentially unlimited supply of the element becomes available if uranium prices go up in the future," Schneider said. In July, experts in uranium extraction from seawater will convene at University of Maryland-College Park for the International Conference on Seawater Uranium Recovery. They will further explore the potential of uranium from seawater to keep the world's lights on. Explore further Technique could set new course for extracting uranium from seawater This artist's concept depicts a planetary system. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech (Phys.org)Using the SuperWASP-South Observatory in South Africa, a team of European astronomers has discovered seven new giant planets orbiting distant stars. According to a new study, the smallest of the newly detected alien worlds is about 38 times more massive than the Earth and has a radius nearly nine times greater than the radius of our planet. The discovery is reported in a paper published on Apr. 14 on arXiv.org. WASP, short for Wide Angle Search for Planets, is an international consortium conducting an ultra-wide angle search for exoplanets using the transit photometry method. The SuperWASP program employs two robotic observatories: SuperWASP-North at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in Canary Island, Spain, and SuperWASP-South, at the South African Astronomical Observatory, located near Sutherland, South Africa. These observatories are equipped with eight wide-angle cameras that simultaneously monitor the sky for planetary transit events, which allows monitoring of millions of stars at the same time. A team of European astronomers led by Coel Hellier of the Keele University, U.K., used SuperWASP-South to detect some interesting planetary candidates during an observation campaign between 2006 and 2012. Then they carried out follow-up observations of these targets, utilizing the 1.2-m Euler/CORALIE spectrograph and the 0.6-m TRAPPIST photometer, both located at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, to confirm their planetary status. "The overall task of finding transiting exoplanets is indeed challenging, as shown by the fact that most of the transit surveys have not been nearly as successful as WASP. The only survey to have found more planets is NASA's Kepler space mission, which costs 100 times more than our project. In the Southern Hemisphere, WASP-South has found over 90 percent of the exoplanets transiting bright stars," Hellier told Phys.org. The team detected a real variety of large planets, from 'super-Neptunes' to 'hot-Jupiters'. According to the research, all of the seven alien worlds orbit distant, bright sun-like stars. The most massive of the newly-found exoplanets is WASP-141b, a typical 'hot-Jupiter'a planet similar in characteristics to Jupiter, with high surface temperatures due to orbiting its parent stars very closely. WASP-141b has a mass of 2.7 Jupiter masses and is slightly larger than our solar system's biggest planet (1.2 Jupiter radii). The planet has an orbital period of 3.3 days. With only 0.12 Jupiter masses, WASP-139b is the lowest-mass planet yet found by WASP. It has a radius of 0.8 Jupiter radii and a low density that makes this planet a good target for atmospheric characterization. WASP-139b was classified as a 'super-Neptune'a low-mass gas planet more massive than Neptune, but smaller than Saturn. According to Hellier, the most interesting exoplanet out of these detected by the team is WASP-140b. It is a 'hot Jupiter' with a mass of 2.4 Jupiter masses and a large radius of about 1.4 Jupiter radii. It has an orbital period of 2.2 days and notably, its orbit is significantly eccentric. "I think that WASP-140b is the most interesting. Most 'hot Jupiter' planets are in circular orbits, since tidal interactions with their host star circularize the orbits on timescales much shorter than the ages of the systems. WASP-140b, though, has a small but definitely real eccentricity of 0.047," Hellier said. He noted that few other 'hot Jupiters' also have eccentric orbits, but of these WASP-140b has by far the shortest timescale for circularization, estimated at only five million years. In contrast, the host star is much older and seems to be about eight billion years old. "Thus, the planet must have moved into its current orbit very recentlyso recently that it is still circularizing its orbit," Hellier noted. Other new exoplanets described in the paper include 'warm Jupiter' WASP-130b, with an orbital period of 11.6 days, the longest yet found by WASP; a bloated Saturn-mass planet WASP-131b; WASP-132bone of the least-irradiated and coolest of WASP planets; and a typical bloated 'hot Jupiter' WASP-142b. "We will likely keep observing these planets. For example, WASP-131b is a very low-density planet with a 'fluffy' atmosphere. It is a Saturn-mass planet but bloated to a larger radius than Jupiter and it also transits a bright star. This makes it an excellent target for atmospheric characterization studies," Hellier said. More information: WASP-South transiting exoplanets: WASP-130b, WASP-131b, WASP-132b, WASP-139b, WASP-140b, WASP-141b & WASP-142b, arXiv:1604.04195 [astro-ph.EP] WASP-South transiting exoplanets: WASP-130b, WASP-131b, WASP-132b, WASP-139b, WASP-140b, WASP-141b & WASP-142b, arXiv:1604.04195 [astro-ph.EP] arxiv.org/abs/1604.04195 Abstract We describe seven new exoplanets transiting stars of V = 10.1 to 12.4. WASP-130b is a "warm Jupiter" having an orbital period of 11.6 d, the longest yet found by WASP. It transits a V = 11.1, G6 star with [Fe/H] = +0.26. Warm Jupiters tend to have smaller radii than hot Jupiters, and WASP-130b is in line with this trend (1.23 Mjup; 0.89 Rjup). WASP-131b is a bloated Saturn-mass planet (0.27 Mjup; 1.22 Rjup). Its large scale height coupled with the V = 10.1 brightness of its host star make the planet a good target for atmospheric characterisation. WASP-132b is among the least irradiated and coolest of WASP planets, being in a 7.1-d orbit around a K4 star. It has a low mass and a modest radius (0.41 Mjup; 0.87 Rjup). The V = 12.4, [Fe/H] = +0.22 star shows a possible rotational modulation at 33 d. WASP-139b is the lowest-mass planet yet found by WASP, at 0.12 Mjup and 0.80 Rjup. It is a "super-Neptune" akin to HATS-7b and HATS-8b. It orbits a V = 12.4, [Fe/H] = +0.20, K0 star. The star appears to be anomalously dense, akin to HAT-P-11. WASP-140b is a 2.4-Mjup planet in a 2.2-d orbit that is both eccentric (e = 0.047) and with a grazing transit (b = 0.93) The timescale for tidal circularisation is likely to be the lowest of all known eccentric hot Jupiters. The planet's radius is large (1.4 Rjup), but uncertain owing to the grazing transit. The host star is a V = 11.1, [Fe/H] = +0.12, K0 dwarf showing a prominent 10.4-d rotational modulation. The dynamics of this system are worthy of further investigation. WASP-141b is a typical hot Jupiter, being a 2.7 Mjup, 1.2 Rjup planet in a 3.3-d orbit around a V = 12.4, [Fe/H] = +0.29, F9 star. WASP-142b is a typical bloated hot Jupiter (0.84 Mjup, 1.53 Rjup) in a 2.1-d orbit around a V = 12.3, [Fe/H] = +0.26, F8 star. 2016 Phys.org Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has acknowledged cyber attacks on Australia's government agencies but stopped short of blaming it on China Australia unveiled a multi-million-dollar cyber scheme to combat hacking on Thursday, as Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull acknowledged an attack on the country's weather bureau but stopped short of blaming it on China. The Australian leader added that it was safe to assume "efforts are made by foreign actors, both governmental and non-governmental, to penetrate" local agencies. "I can confirm reports that the Bureau of Meteorology suffered a significant cyber intrusion which was first discovered early last year, and the department of parliamentary services suffered a similar intrusion in recent years," Turnbull said in Sydney as he announced Aus$230 million (US$180 million) in new government funding. "I don't have anything further to add than what I've said today," he replied when asked at a press conference if the weather bureau attack came from China. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation in December cited an unnamed official blaming Beijing for the major cyber attack, where hackers got inside computer systems at the bureau, which owns one of the nation's largest supercomputers and has links to the defence department. Turnbull said the new funding, which comes on top of an allocation of Aus$400 million over the next decade to strengthen cyber security, would include support for regular meetings between government, businesses and researchers on tackling emerging concerns. The additional money would also help to boost international efforts, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region, to take down cyber criminals. "The Australian Crime Commission estimates the annual cost of cyber crime to Australia is over Aus$1 billion in direct costs," the prime minister added. "But some estimates put the real costs to be as high as one percent of GDP (gross domestic product) a year, or about Aus$17 billion." Turnbull said the government was focusing not just on defensive measures but also offence, stressing that the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD)like allies the United States and Britainhad "very considerable capabilities", without elaborating. Regional superpower China, Australia's largest trading partner, has been accused of organised hacking against the US government and private firms, as well as other countries. In 2013, Chinese hackers were accused of stealing the top-secret blueprints of Australia's new intelligence agency headquarters. Two years earlier the computers of the prime minister, foreign minister and defence minister were all suspected of being hacked in attacks reportedly originating in China. Explore further Australian prime minister announces greener policies 2016 AFP Plant experts in the Netherlands can still become enthusiastic about a special variety of broomrape. Farmers in southern countries, however, are less impressed because broomrape and its 'sister' striga are considered a harmful weed in these regions. Research in the Laboratory of Plant Physiology of Wageningen University shows how useful insects that can control this weed may lend a helping hand in the future, namely via the plant's own aromatic substances. "You can also use a mixture of aromatic substances to distinguish various varieties of parasitic plants," says Harro Bouwmeester, professor in plant physiology. Several varieties of broomrape and striga are parasitic plants, requiring the root system of other plants to survive. As broomrape reaches its northern distribution limit in the Netherlands it is less common and causes fewer problems for farmers. In Southern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, however, the opposite is the case. There the parasitic plants can become a very harmful weed in crops such as tomatoes, sunflowers, maize and sorghum. Complex aroma In Israel tomato farmers are combating the broomrape with herbicides, for instance, but the plants themselves may offer a biological alternative. Each variety of broomrape emits a complex of over 100 types of volatile aromatic substances. Some of these aromatic signals are picked up by insects that are harmful to the plant as they lay their eggs in the ovaries, after which the larvae eat the young seeds. "If we can identify those specific aromatic substances, we would be able to lure the insects to the plants with extra aromas and deploy them as a potential biological control method," Harro Bouwmeester explains. Taxonomy While searching for useable aromatic substances, Peter Toth, post doc in Bouwmeester's group, discovered another practical application of the aromatic substances from broomrape: they can help identify one variety from another. In taxonomy (the science involving the description and classification of plants) there is still uncertainty about the description and classification of the various broomrape varieties: which genus do they belong to? By looking at the composition of the aromatic mix, Toth and his colleagues were able to classify a number of these 'disputed varieties' in the proper taxonomic genus. Their findings were described in the magazine Frontiers in Plant Science this month. Parasite or not? "In addition, we found a difference between the aromas of parasitic and non-parasitic broomrape varieties," Bouwmeester continues. "This may teach us something about how these varieties evolved into weeds. Some varieties that have yet to become harmful have an aromatic composition resembling that of the harmful varieties. We believe this means that these varieties, too, will eventually become weeds." Sustainable development In time Bouwmeester hopes that the research into the aromatic substances of broomrape will lead to biological control of the weed. "For farmers in Southern Europe it could mean an alternative to the herbicides they use now. For farmers in Africa, who often cannot afford herbicides at all, this could be a sustainable alternative to labour-intensive weed control. They now try to remove the weeds by hand, with large parts of the harvests being lost as a result." Explore further Corn could help farmers fight devastating weed Canada brought in stricter fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks, but an independent parliamentary official said on April 21, 2016 that the country will need to step up efforts to achieve its stated goal of reducing carbon emissions Canada will need to greatly step up its efforts to achieve its stated goal of reducing carbon emissions by 30 percent below 2005 levels, an independent parliamentary official said Thursday. The Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) noted in a report that the federal government has adopted measures to cut emissions in electricity generation and transportation. Several provincial governments have also announced a patchwork of programs. However, the PBO said: "Those measures, while substantial, are unlikely to achieve the target on their own. "Deeper reductions will be needed," it concluded. The PBOwhich is independent of the government and reports directly to MPscalculated that Canada's carbon emissions linked to global warming have stabilized at just over 700 million tonnes per year. But the reduction is 208 million tonnes short of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's commitment at the climate summit in Paris in December. On Friday, 160 nations will sign the agreement reached in Paris aimed at keeping a rise in global temperatures below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Trudeau will be present at the UN ceremony. So far, Canada has cut emissions from coal use and brought in stricter fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks. In its March budget, the federal government earmarked Can$2 billion (US$1.6 billion) for a climate strategy. But Trudeau failed in the same month to reach an agreement with provincial leaders on a national carbon pricing scheme. Canada's 10 provincial premiers also rejected calls for deeper greenhouse gas cuts, and insisted they would tailor plans for their respective regions. In the west, for example, two provinces have or plan to introduce carbon taxes, while in the east two provinces have joined a fledgling continental cap and trade system with the US state of California. The PBO suggested that the bulk of the emissions reductions would have to come from three sectors: electricity, oil and gas, and transport. It also noted that cuts can be achieved with technology currently available. Explore further Trudeau seeks climate consensus among Canada's 10 provinces 2016 AFP A depiction of the double helical structure of DNA. Its four coding units (A, T, C, G) are color-coded in pink, orange, purple and yellow. Credit: NHGRI Only a few years after its discovery, it is difficult to conceive of genetics without the CRISPR-Cas9 enzyme scissors, which allow for a very simple, versatile and reliable modification of DNA of various organisms. Since its discovery, scientists throughout the world have been working on ways of further improving or adjusting the CRISPR-Cas9 system to their specific needs. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, the Umea University in Sweden and the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig have now discovered a feature of the CRISPR-associated protein Cpf1 that has previously not been observed in this family of enzymes: Cpf1 exhibits dual, RNA and DNA, cleavage activity. In contrast to CRISPR-Cas9, Cpf1 is able to process the pre-crRNA on its own, and then using the processed RNA to specifically target and cut DNA. Not requiring a host derived RNase and the tracrRNA makes this the most minimalistic CRISPR immune system known to date. The mechanism of combining two separate catalytic moieties in one allows for possible new avenues for sequence specific genome engineering, most importantly facilitation of targeting multiple sites at once, the so-called multiplexing. CRISPR-Cas is part of the immune system of bacteria and is used to fight viruses. In the CRISPR-Cas9 system, the enzyme Cas9 cuts the virus DNA at a location specified by an RNA molecule known as CRISPR RNA (crRNA) in complex with another RNA, the so-called tracrRNA. This puts the pathogens out of action. In 2011, Emmanuelle Charpentier and her co-workers described that the system consists of two RNAs forming a duplex (tracrRNA and pre-crRNA), with tracrRNA maturing pre-crRNA to crRNA, in the presence of the protein Cas9 (formerly named Csn1). A year later Emmanuelle Charpentier and colleagues demonstrated that tracrRNA and crRNA together, be it in form of the duplex of two guide RNAs or a fused single guide RNA, are required to specifically guide the Cas9 enzyme to the matching target DNA sequence. Since then, CRISPR-Cas9 has taken laboratories by storm. Both scientists and clinicians have great hopes for it: the latter aims to use the enzyme scissors to cure severe genetic diseases. "Although the workings of CRISPR-Cas9 sound simple, the details of the mechanisms involved are rather subtle," says Charpentier, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology. Before the crRNA molecule can show the Cas9 protein the cutting point, it must be transformed into its final form itself: RNA-cleaving proteins are needed so that a functioning crRNA arises. One of these is RNase III. In 2011, Charpentier discovered that this enzyme is involved in the crRNA maturation process along with tracrRNA. A minimalistic CRISPR-system The researchers have now discovered that the immune defence mechanism of some bacteria is simpler in structure than CRISPR-Cas9. In addition to Cas9, these bacteria use the enzyme Cpf1 for cleaving foreign DNA. The results now show that Cpf1 can cut both RNA and DNA. Cpf1 first removes sections of the crRNA and thereby assists the maturation. Additional maturation enzymes like RNase III are not required. The mature RNA-molecule then guides Cpf1 to its target section on the DNA. Cpf1 thus has a dual function: it enables the functioning of crRNA and then cleaves the DNA in a sequence specific manner. In addition, unlike Cas9, Cpf1 is not depending on the help of a tracrRNA molecule to reach its destination. Consequently, it is even simpler in structure than CRISPR-Cas9. "CRISPR-Cpf1 is a plug-and-play system with no additional component needed. In contrast, CRISPR-Cas9 needs in its natural setting an assistant to activate the system," explains Charpentier. "If the CRISPR-Cpf1 system provides any tangible added value over the CRISPR-Cas9 system when it comes to eukaryotic gene editing remains to be elucidated. However, it is stunning to see how evolution has succeeded to yield a dramatically minimalistic but effective immune system to fight invading viruses", says Charpentier. "There may be more such systems to be found in nature in the future, the search for them is already in full swing." Explore further HIV can develop resistance to CRISPR/Cas9 More information: Ines Fonfara et al. The CRISPR-associated DNA-cleaving enzyme Cpf1 also processes precursor CRISPR RNA, Nature (2016). Journal information: Nature Ines Fonfara et al. The CRISPR-associated DNA-cleaving enzyme Cpf1 also processes precursor CRISPR RNA,(2016). DOI: 10.1038/nature17945 Basilea reports presentation of data on clinical oncology programs BAL101553 and BAL3833 at AACR meeting Details Category: Small Molecules Published on Thursday, 21 April 2016 09:23 Hits: 1921 Tumor checkpoint controller BAL101553 demonstrates pre-clinical activity in treatment-refractory glioblastoma models as single agent and in combination treatment PanRAF/SRC kinase inhibitor BAL3833 inhibits tumor growth in preclinical KRAS-driven cancer models BASEL, Switzerland I April 21, 2016 I Basilea Pharmaceutica Ltd. (PK5.MU) announced today that preclinical data on the oncology drug candidates BAL101553 and BAL3833 were presented at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting in New Orleans, USA, April 16-20, 2016. The tumor-checkpoint controller BAL101553 is currently in Phase 1/2a clinical development, and the panRAF/SRC kinase inhibitor BAL3833 is currently in Phase 1. At the AACR meeting, preclinical data were presented demonstrating anti-cancer activity of BAL101553 against glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), a highly malignant form of brain cancer that has very limited treatment options and often has poor prognosis. BAL101553 efficiently penetrates the brain in preclinical models and has previously demonstrated anti-cancer activity in treatment-refractory solid tumor models alone and in combination with radiotherapy.1 The data presented at the AACR were generated by the group of Prof. Jann N. Sarkaria (Mayo Clinic, Rochester) and demonstrate statistically significant single agent activity in a panel of in vivo GBM models after daily, oral administration, including models refractory to temozolomide (TMZ) and radiotherapy, the standard of care for newly diagnosed GBM. Moreover, using a model with reduced sensitivity to both radiotherapy and TMZ, BAL101553 combined with either radiotherapy alone or radiotherapy and TMZ together provided additional benefit, leading to statistically significant prolongation of survival as compared to the standard of care treatment regimens. These data indicate that BAL101553 alone or in combination may provide a survival extension in GBM patients, potentially offering an alternative therapeutic option in this area of high medical need. BAL101553 is currently being evaluated in phase 1/2a clinical trials with both oral and i.v. administration schedules. In a late-breaking research session, the groups of Prof. Caroline Springer (The Institute of Cancer Research, London) and Prof. Richard Marais (Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute, University of Manchester) reported that the novel panRAF/SRC kinase inhibitor BAL3833, also known as CCT3833, has anti-cancer activity in KRAS-driven in vitro and in vivo tumor models via inhibition of the RAF and SRC family kinases. KRAS is an important driver of tumor cell growth, with high rates of KRAS mutation found in several major cancer types, including pancreatic, colorectal and non-small-cell lung cancer. BAL3833 inhibits mutant BRAF as well as the CRAF and SRC protein kinases and was initially developed to address the increasing medical need of melanoma patients who progress on current mutant BRAF pathway inhibitors. The data presented show that BAL3833 may also be effective in non-melanoma KRAS-mutant cancers, potentially providing a new therapeutic option for these patients. Orally administered BAL3833 is currently being explored in a phase 1 clinical study in patients with solid tumors, including BRAF-mutant and BRAF inhibitor-resistant melanomas. BAL1011553 poster at AACR 2016 The novel tubulin-binding 'tumor checkpoint controller' BAL101553 has anti-cancer activity alone and in combination treatments across a panel of GBM patient-derived xenografts - Ann C. Mladek, Jenny L. Pokorny, Heidi Lane, Felix Bachmann, Mark A. Schroeder, Katrina K. Bakken, Brett L. Carlson, Paul A. Decker, Jeanette E. Eckel-Passow, Jann N. Sarkaria; Abstract 4781 BAL3833 poster at AACR 2016 Therapeutic efficacy of the paradox-breaking panRAF and SRC drug CCT3833/BAL3833 in KRAS-driven cancer models - Grazia Saturno, Filipa Lopes, Maria Romina Girotti, Ion Niculescu-Duvaz, Dan Niculescu-Duvaz, Alfonso Zambon, Lawrence Davies, Louise Johnson, Natasha Preece, Amaya Viros, Malin Pedersen, Robert McLeary, Ruth Knight, Rebecca Lee, Denys Holovanchuk, Alberto Fusi, Paul Lorigan, Nathalie Dhomen, Richard Marais, Caroline Springer; Abstract LB-212 For further information please visit www.aacr.org. About BAL101553 Basilea's oncology drug candidate BAL101553 (the prodrug of the small-molecule BAL27862) is being developed as a potential therapy for diverse cancers, including tumor types unresponsive to standard therapeutics. BAL101553 is currently undergoing clinical evaluation in patients with advanced solid tumors as an i.v. (phase 2a) and oral (phase 1) formulation. It has shown evidence of clinical anti-tumor activity in a phase 1 study during which the maximum tolerated dose was established.2 In previous pre-clinical studies, the drug candidate demonstrated in-vitro and in-vivo activity against diverse treatment-resistant cancer models, including tumors refractory to conventional approved therapeutics and radiotherapy.1, 3, 4 BAL101553 efficiently distributes to tumors and to the brain, with cytotoxic effects in glioblastoma (brain tumor) cell lines.5 The active moiety BAL27862 binds the colchicine site of tubulin with distinct effects on microtubule organization, resulting in the formation of the "spindle assembly checkpoint" which promotes tumor cell death.6 Potential biomarkers are being tested in early clinical studies in order to optimize dose selection and identify cancer patient groups more likely to respond. About BAL3833 BAL3833 (also known as CCT3833) is an orally available small-molecule panRAF/SRC kinase inhibitor targeting cell proliferation signaling pathways that are associated with tumor growth and resistance development to current therapies. It is the lead compound of a series of kinase inhibitors in-licensed by Basilea in April 2015 under an agreement with The Institute of Cancer Research, London, Cancer Research Technology, the Wellcome Trust, and The University of Manchester. BRAF is mutated in a range of cancers including melanomas, colorectal and serous ovarian cancer. Data from preclinical studies suggest that this class of compounds, targeting the BRAF, CRAF and SRC family kinases, are active in diverse patient-derived models resistant to standard BRAF as well as MEK inhibitor therapies.7 BAL3833 has progressed into a phase 1 study in adult patients with advanced solid tumors including BRAF-mutant and BRAF inhibitor-resistant melanomas. The compound originates from research at The Institute of Cancer Research and the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute, by scientists funded by Cancer Research UK and the Wellcome Trust. About Basilea Basilea Pharmaceutica Ltd. is a biopharmaceutical company developing products that address increasing resistance and non-response to current treatment options in the therapeutic areas of bacterial infections, fungal infections and cancer. The company uses the integrated research, development and commercial operations of its subsidiary Basilea Pharmaceutica International Ltd. to discover, develop and commercialize innovative pharmaceutical products to meet the medical needs of patients with serious and potentially life-threatening conditions. Basilea Pharmaceutica Ltd. is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland and listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange (PK5.MU). Additional information can be found at Basilea's website www.basilea.com. SOURCE: Basilea Pharmaceutica Oil and gas industry political action committees contributed $5,500 to the re-election campaign of U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-Willsboro, in the 1st quarter, bringing the industry's total contributions to her campaign this election cycle to $13,000, as of March 31, according to reports the campaign filed with the Federal Election Commission. GANSEVOORT | William Jacob Gifford Sr., 76, of 1 Gifford Lane, Gansevoort, died peacefully in his sleep Tuesday morning, April 19, 2016, at his family farmhouse on Gifford Lane. His wife, Linda, and son, William Jr., were with him at the time. William was born on Oct. 7, 1939, in Schuylerville. He was the only child of Raymond F. Gifford and Anna C. (Losaw) Gifford of Gansevoort. William married Nancy C. Deyette of Hudson Falls on June 6, 1959. They met at a square dance hosted by a local Grange Hall. Together they had five children, William, Nancy, Penny, Chan and Raymond. William married his second wife, Linda L. Valyer of Gansevoort, on Jan. 19, 1976. Together they had three children, Mae, Tessie and Wendy. William was born and raised on the family dairy farm of Raymond and Anna and worked it full time. Farming was in his blood. As a boy, Bill was active in 4-H winning awards in produce, poultry, and woodshop year after year. He attended Gansevoort Elementary School and graduated from South Glens Falls HighSchool in 1957 at age 17. After graduation, he worked full time on the family farm. While his parents ran the dairy business, Bill developed a small poultry and produce farm on some family property on Jewel Road. He worked many late nights building hen houses, planting vegetables, pulling weeds (while one of his kids held a lead-light or kerosene lantern) even after putting in a full day of work at his parents farm. During the 1960s, he developed a home delivery egg route selling eggs and produce door-to-door to customers throughout South Glens Falls, parts of Fort Edward, Hudson Falls, and Glens Falls. People used to refer to Bill as The Eggman during that period. After his father, Raymond, died unexpectedly in September 1969, Bill was thrust into running the dairy farm full time. Bill was like a new-born calf having little experience running a large operation on his own. This put great stress on his family but Bills grit, perseverance, and a few key people including George Pfeifer of Agway, and fellow farmers Dick Coffinger, Bud Vance, and Harry Thomas, appearing at various times helped him hold everything together and the farm expanded over the following decades under his management. Bill diversified the farms income among dairy, cattle dealing, produce, baled hay, custom baling, and building wood hay wagons and feedbunks. During the spring of 1976, William and a few other farmers got together and formed a farmers market in Glens Falls. The first Glens Falls Farmers Market opened July 21, 1976, with William and Linda Gifford as a charter producer. The farm under Linda Gifford now participates or helps run seven local Farmers Markets, including the one in Gansevoort. One of Bills loves was the calling of an auctioneer. During August 1970, he went to Millers Livestock Market in Argyle to sell a calf. Late that night he came home to tell his family he got a job sorting calves every Wednesday at Millers. This became a job he loved because of the excitement of cattle, auctioneering, wheeling-dealing, and trading. Mentors he met while working at Millers such as Rob Lee Miller, Gerald Connor, Joe Killian, Dr. John Meek, and Jimmy Sloan, helped him gain experience and how to read people. He worked every auction that Millers conducted from August 1970 until it closed around 2008. He missed only one day over that 38 year period and that was to attend the birth of his last child, Wendy, during June, 1983. Bills hobbies were county fairs, cattle and machinery auctions, Independence Day, and Christmas. Most non-essential work stopped so the family could attend local county fairs. Bill was known as having an ample gift of gab and would talk for hours if the topics were lively. He didnt drink, smoke, or imbibe in dirty jokes. Cursed a little. He didnt like putting on airs what you saw is what you got. He was a straight talker and could say a lot in a few words. Keeping things simple made him content. He also loved carpentry and building things from wood. All the buildings on the farm are built from lumber cut from the farm wood lot. His casket is made by his sons and grandsons cut from two Cherry trees felled from the family woodlot on the day he died. While he never took a vacation or traveled (he went to Vermont a few times for a fair or machinery auction) he could hold his own in debates on lots of national and world topics. His house was always open to friends, neighbors, and strangers. He had a dim view of politicians and felt that the people were best served if government power was held at local levels. About 16 years ago, a news reporter asked him if he ever considered running for political office. He deadpanned to the cameraman and said, May God strike me down if I do. William was an American in the true sense of Americas founding values. During Independence Day of 1975 his son, Bill Jr., had some fireworks to light. Bill Sr. invited a few close neighbors and friends, started a fire, cooked a few hot dogs and waited for twilight. Less than a dozen people watched a small firework show that night. Over the decades, William and his son, Bill, sponsored and organized the show with all labor and expense provided by the family. Now the show is viewed by thousands of people lining the country roads for miles around to view the fireworks among the lazy rolling green hills of Northumberland. During 1982, as Independence Day was nearing, Bill had an idea to build a few patriotic floats on hay wagons. He called a few neighbors and convinced them to do the same. Around noon on July 4, the handmade, thrown-together floats assembled along Gifford Lane. At 1 in the afternoon Bill touched off a homemade cannon and the first Gansevoort Parade was underway to the sudden surprise of the town as it meandered up and down the main streets of the village. It became a popular town function. The only rules were no commercial or political floats only floats made by families, or town and village groups. He believed that parades should be led not by politicians, but by Americans who had to pay the taxes. William believed this type of Independence Day celebration was better for all communities because of the absence of commercialization. It was a celebration planned by families, run by families, and for the benefit of all. William had a large open heart for all young people. Many teen-agers worked for William on the farm over the years. The ones who lasted more than a month went on to become responsible, hard-working, no excuse type of workers and are doing well. He expected best efforts with no excuses from his children. Hard work was a virtue. He believed it was child abuse to not make your child work. He lived it and he expected people around him to live it too or be left behind. All of his children were raised in this manner and they are better for it. As hard as that may sound, he was also a true Santa Clause with the kids. Christmas was his favorite holiday. He believed in the miracles and goodwill that abound at Christmas. Again, he opened his house to friends and neighbors by sponsoring a visit from Santa every year. Santa would come during mid-December at the Gifford house and delight the villages kids of all ages. All were welcome. He also opened his home to traveling pastors who were doing local tent revivals. The Rev. Hardy was a regular in the 1980s. So was Leroy Harwood in the 1970s He truly was an enigma in the sense that he was very humble and shied away from the spotlight disliking any attention and yet, he grew to be a larger-than-life character wherever he spent time and became known, but he especially touched many souls within Gansevoort and Northumberland. The soil and people of this area was his life. He raised his children and grandchildren to be the same. On Feb. 11, 2016, the Northumberland Town Board of Directors proclaimed July 4th to be William Gifford Day for Northumberland. William was grateful but didnt think he deserved it. From the way he looked at it, he was just doing his civic duty as a humble resident of a small town. William was predeceased by his father, Raymond F. Gifford, his mother, Anna C (Losaw) Gifford, first wife, Nancy C (Deyette) Gifford, and a son, Chan Sherman Gifford. Survivors include his wife, Linda (Valyer) Gifford of Gansevoort; two sons, William J. Gifford Jr. with his wife, Joan Gifford of Palm Harbor, Florida, and Raymond F. Gifford with his partner, Mark Ouellet of Manchester, New Hampshire; five daughters, Nancy L. Douglas, Penny A. Hargett and her husband, Eric Sr., Mae S. Gifford, Tessie I. Winslow and her husband, William, and Wendy L. Gifford all of Gansevoort; her daughter-in-law, Amy L. Bingham of Greenfield, and foster daughter, Lori Locke of Wilton; 18 grandchildren, Jennifer Enchasi of Gansevoort, Ryland and Luke Gifford of Palm Harbor, Florida, Matthew Douglas, Eric Hargett Jr., Nicole Cook, Bryan S. Gifford Bingham, Monica Bingham, Jeff Bingham, Noah Provost, Lilly Prouty, Aaron Prouty, Angelina Haese, William III, Jacob and Isabell Winslow, and Andrew Gifford all of Gansevoort, and six great-grandchildren, Wyatt and Mia Douglas, Adalia, Autumn and Eric Hargett III, and Catherine Bingham all of Gansevoort. Bill will also be missed by his closest surviving friends, Dick Coffinger, John Vance, Gary Lanphear, and Gwen Eastman all of Gansevoort. A graveside service will be held at 1 p.m. Saturday, April 23, at Gansevoort Cemetery on Route 50 in Gansevoort. A reception to celebrate Williams full life will follow at the Gansevoort Volunteer Fire Department at 1870 Route 32N in Gansevoort immediately following the services. The family suggests holding your donations and spend them on a non-related needy child at Christmas time in remembrance of Williams spirit or you may give to your local Hospice organization (Angels every one of them). Also, take your family to see an Independence Day Parade this year and remember William Giffords example. He would like that. Arrangements are in the care of M.B. Kilmer Funeral Home, 82 Broadway, Fort Edward, NY 12828. To view Bills Book of memories and post online. Inventory needs to be managed and managed well, or you are going to get in recurring trouble, and lose your credibility and hard-earned conversions, whether Read more Nii Bi Ayi-Bontey, the Legal Counsel for Jorbies Microfinance Company, made this known at a media briefing at Agona Swedru. He said the company did not run away as being speculated but had a problem with the landlord which forced them to close the office. Nii Ayi-Bontey said the company left Agona Swedru in 2013 as a result of administrative and other lapses beyond their control. He said Jorbies Microfinance Company had never abandoned their customers adding that it would be re-branded and come back to work in the area to improve the local economy. The Managing Director was arrested by the Agona Swedru Divisional Command of the Bureau of National Investigations after various reports were lodged with the Command by disappointed customers. The Jorbies Microfinance Company owed 25,000 Ghana cedis to its numerous customers but only GH18,000 had been paid to the 58 customers. The Legal Counsel said it was not the intention of the company to cheat the traders and other investors in and around Agona Swedru. Today, Im excited to announce that for the first time in more than a century, the front of our currency will feature the portrait of a woman, Harriet Tubman, on the $20 note, Lew told reporters during a conference call Wednesday afternoon. Her incredible story of courage and commitment to equality embody the ideals of democracy that our nation celebrates, and well continue to value her legacy by honoring her on our currency. Tubman was born into slavery in the 19th century. She later joined the antislavery movement and organised several slaves into freedom through the underground road network. Before she died in 1931, she became active in the campaign for women's suffrage. US Democratic presidential candidate hopeful Hillary Clinton hailed the decision as a "better choice." A woman, a leader, and a freedom fighter, Clinton tweeted. I cant think of a better choice for the $20 bill than Harriet Tubman. Hillary's rival for the Democratic nomination ,Sen. Sander, also tweeted I cannot think of an American hero more deserving of this honor than Harriet Tubman. He argues that the appropriate procedures had not been followed regarding the conversion of such institutions and that declarations by the president converting some polytechnics to varsities were only pronouncements. In the current state where the polytechnics are being converted to technical universities, I believe in the first place, in terms of law, it is not right, he told Accra FM. "It is political propaganda because there is a procedure to go through before a tertiary institution can be said to have been converted to a university, he addd. Prof Fobin adds that even before parliament consider and approve the bill seeking to convert polytechnics into technical universities, the president is out there doing so by "word of mouth." I hear there is a bill in parliament but the Education Committee has not seen the bill to deliberate on it to be considered for approval by parliament." "So, you cannot just say you have transformed any polytechnic to a technical university. Its not done that way, its not by word of mouth: presidential pronouncements do not make such institutions automatic [varsities]. That is not what is done, he said. Two polytechnics--Takoradi polytechnic and Sunyani polytechnic--have so far been converted into technical universities. Four other polytechnics have been selected for conversion across the country. According to Nana Adu Boafo, the aforementioned and several artistes are unable to have a successful music career because a spell has been cast on them. He asserted that it will take intervention to take off the shackles. Tell me these artistes are not talented They are so good but some of their songs have been compiled on CDs and buried together with their names at cemeteries. Some in Benin. Certain people in the industry see these people as the biggest threat to their career so no matter what these people do, it will be difficult getting to the standard they want unless divine intervention, he said on Pluzz FMs AM Pluzz on Thursday. Adding, Flowking Stone is the brother of Okyeame Kwame. Okyeame Kwame has been in this industry for a number of years and has people he can introduce his brother to, to help. Kwame has done his best, Stone is not a lazy rapper. He is a very good guy. But what is preventing him to get to where he wants to get to? There are a lot of things battling him; not only him but a lot of people. Nana Adu Boafo, however, did not disclose the artistes who have used sorcery on their fellows. Seminars are designed to delve into key subjects around the business of Fashion, marketing & trade, brand innovation and technology, Ethical Fashion and sustainable business development, business finance and start-up knowledge. As well as relative fashion industry insights and guidance. The Seminars offer a rare and valuable opportunity for an open dialogue led by dynamic Industry Experts of various backgrounds with extensive knowledge and skills in their fields of practice. Developing People through Sharing Knowledge, Skill and Guidance Our seminar panelists are passionate advocates of Africa who shares in our vision and understanding of our need to share knowledge, skills, support and guidance for development in Africa and advancement through social change to empower self, business and trade through the activation of successful dialogues within our nations. RELATED ARTICLES The school, SMK Pengkalan Chepa 2, was hit by mass hysteria last week, affecting more than 100 students - female and male - and teachers and it was shut down on Thursday, Malaysian media reports. Students and teachers have claimed to have seen paranormal beings, including ghosts. The Star/Asia News Network reported that a further eight female students have been struck this week by the described "mass hysteria" despite the work of several Islamic and Chinese spiritual leaders to rid the school of bad spirits. The girls were suddenly overwhelmed after two hours of reciting Quran verses and special prayers conducted by all the students at its open hall on Sunday, it was reported. Some students had photographed images of a white spectre resembling a ghostly figure through the school, it was reported, while another student said a schoolmate who was "possessed" the second time jumped off a flight of stairs at the third floor of the school, but her fall was broken by several male students who were at the bottom of the staircase. Another student told the Malaysian media she had been possessed, I could not move and fainted until I was revived by an ustaz". The school's principal said they had to close to enable the spiritual leaders to perform prayers, before the school reopens this weekend. Speaking on Ho-based Volta Star Radio on Thursday as part of his Accounting to the people tour in the region, President Mahama said the decision is currently being considered at the cabinet level. Like I said private training institutions that are turning out nurses, some of them are accredited, yes that is true, but others are not accredited but they are coming out and saying we are nurses we are unemployed. That needs to be streamlined that is because nursing training is still under the Ministry of Health. I think that we must move all training institutions under Ministry of Education and if that is done, then the Ministry of Education is better able to supervise accreditation of these institutions, the president added. Meanwhile, the Registrar of the Nursing and Midwifery Council of Ghana, Felix Nyante has directed all hospitals all over the country not to accept students from unaccredited schools for clinical attachment in their facilities. Its a giant. The brand new GE9X is a winner in several disciplines. Its front fan spans a full 11 feet in diameter (3.35 meters), a world record. The engine also has 3D printed fuel nozzles and the most extensive use of parts made from lightweight and ultra heat-resistant materials called ceramic matrix composites (CMCs). Additive manufacturing, popularly known as 3D printing, essentially grows parts from the ground up and allows engineers to design complex internal shapes that were previously impossible to achieve. These tunnels and caves are a closely guarded secret, says GE Aviation spokesman Rick Kennedy. They determine how the fuel moves through the nozzle and sprays inside the combustion chamber. CMCs operate in temperatures as high as 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit. The material is inside the combustor and the turbine. It allowed engineers to keep the heat higher inside the engine while reducing fuel burn and emissions. The hotter the engine runs, the more efficient it is, Kennedy says. The engine also includes 16 fourth-generation carbon-fiber fan blades at the front of the engine that feed air into an 11-stage high-pressure compressor with a 27:1 pressure ratio, which also boosts the engines efficiency. No other commercial engine in service has a pressure ratio thats higher. Although this is the first time the company fired up the whole engine, its beentesting individual components and systems for four years. Due to the significant amount of new technologies in the GE9X, we planned the testing program differently, says GE9X program leader Chuck Jackson. The early testing informed the design and manufacturing and allowed us to freeze the product definition and test the total engine as soon as possible. The GE9X was designed to generate 100,000 pounds of thrust. (One space shuttle main engine produces 375,000 pounds.) While that may seem like a lot, the world record belongs to the engines predecessor, the GE90-115B, which generated 127,500 pounds of thrust. When Boeing decided to build the 777X jet, the next-generation version of the 777 jet, it asked GE to develop an engine to power it. GE Aviation, which is the exclusive engine maker for the 777X, has received orders for more than 700 GE9X engines valued at $29 billion (list price) from airlines including Emirates, Lufthansa, Etihad Airways, Qatar Airways and Cathay Pacific. GE Aviation invested $10 million to prepare its Peebles Testing Operation for the GE9X. Some of the money paid for the largest bellmouth inlet duct, the white funnel attached to the front of the engine during testing. It measures 18 feet in diameter and 12 feet in length. Engineers also installed a fourth fuel tank to keep the engine well fed, fortified the bunker-like test stand to secure the engine and added new material to the testing stand air systems to withstand the high temperatures. We also upgraded our engine hoists and transporters to handle the GE9X and modified a wall in our prep building so the engine can be moved after final assembly to make its way to the test stand, said Brian DeBruin, plant manager for GE Aviations Peebles Test Operation. GE Aviation started testing the first GE9X in March and will continue for several months in order to verify aerodynamic, thermal and mechanical characteristics of the engine. The company will start testing the second GE9X next year. The engine is scheduled to enter service by the end of the decade. According to the paper, the boy was hanged on a tree, had a gun pointed at him and beaten up in order to force a confession out of him. After the boy subsequently fell unconscious, the soldiers are alleged to have melted plastic bags on his back until he regained consciousness. These revelations were made by the sister of the young man who claims her brother had gone to the military quarters to fetch water. When he was returning, he was called back and accused of stealing the mobile phone, it has been alleged. The boy has been reportedly receiving treatment at a hospital in Nsawam where his condition was described by hospital authorities as very critical, and that he required advanced medical examination at a higher facility to save him. According to the sister of the boy, the soldiers are demanding that the family pay for the phone. Deborah Ansah 19 stole the baby girl at Avenor in Accra and sent her to Achiansa Nubesu near Suhum in the Eastern Region, Detective Inspector Judith B who prosecuted the case said the complainant Aminatu Alhassan lived with her husband and their three month old baby girl at Avenor. Deborah who lived in the same area offered to assist Aminatu in catering for the baby. On February 26, 2016 Aminatu after breastfeeding her baby went to sleep and left the baby in the care of Deborah who run away with the baby to her hometown Achiansa Nubesu . READ ALSO : Two High Court Judges sacked According to Debora she was tormented by a spirit to replace her dead baby with the complainants baby. The court presided over by Ruby Naa Adjeley Quaison who convicted Deborah on her plea, noted that, she had shown remorse. The injunction by the Supreme Court will remain till the final determination of a substantive suit by GIBA which is seeking it to strike out the new law by the NMC. READ ALSO :GIBA heads to court over Criminal Libel law GIBA in their suit says the regulations are inconsistent with the 1992 Constitution which guarantees unfettered media freedom. ASP Tetteh narrated to the media that when the driver of the bus was arrested and questioned, he revealed that the ammunitions was bought in Bawku. Upon interrogation, he [Sayibu Sandow the driver of the bus] told us [police] that he bought the ammunitions from somebody in Bawku [in the Upper East region] some years back and that he was taking them to Kumasi to offer them for sale. So we took him to court and he has since been remanded, ASP Tetteh told Accra-based Joy FM. Welcome to the Pulse Community! We will now be sending you a daily newsletter on news, entertainment and more. Also join us across all of our other channels - we love to be connected! What has happened to all the resources that have come into this country in the last seven years? Have they been used in our collective interest? Records show that Ghanas debt at the end of 2015 stood at some GHc111 billion; judging from the fact that the NDC inherited a debt stock of GHc 9.5billion in 2009, this means a colossal of GHc101.5 billion has been added to our debt stock in the last seven years. The question therefore remains to be answered; why is the President accounting for project which in total cost is less than GHc30 billion when he has taken so much in borrowing. Where is the remaining GHc70 billion? Dont also forget that the projects undertaken with the GHc30 billion were mostly overpriced and ridiculously sole-sourced which has become a major vehicle for corruption under this government, he added. President John Dramani Mahama has recently justified his 'Accounting to the people tour' describing it as just a tour of the country to update Ghanaians on the projects and programmes his administration has so far embarked on. This is contrary to claims by critics, including the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), that the tour is part of his campaign processes to deceive Ghanaians and abuse his incumbency. Communications Minister Dr Edward Omane Boamah disclosed this in an interview on Accra-based Asempa FM on Thursday, April 21, 2016. According to him, President Mahama's Accounting to the People tour across the country was not a political campaign. This is contrary to claims by critics, including the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), that the tour is part of his campaign processes to deceive Ghanaians and abuse his incumbency. But, speaking at separate durbars in the Volta Region during the inauguration of the Dodo-Pepesu to Nkwanta section of the Eastern Corridor road and in the Hohoe municipality, President Mahama said It is prudent for me as the president, to update Ghanaians about projects and programmes this government has undertaken in the last three years."If you had been watching TV or listening to radio you would have heard that I went to the Western Region and from there I came to the Eastern Region and what I am doing is called accounting to the people tour to render account of what I have done to the people, he explained. I have not started campaigning yet. After the launch of the NDC campaign I will come back and I will be in full political battle," the president said. He said the police were mandated to enforce law and order as well as protect lives and property but not to act as political inter-party and intra- party conflict resolution agents, The Ghana News Agency (GNA) reported. DCOP Yaagy met with representatives of political parties and youth leaders in the Cape Coast Metropolis on Wednesday and asked them to use party structures to resolve conflicts or use Alternative Dispute Resolution both in court and out of court. However, he urged them to report early warning signals or any imminent incidence of violence to the police for the appropriate response. The meeting, attended by representatives and members of the New Patriotic Party, National Democratic Congress, Convention People's Party, and the People's National Convention was also to find ways to get to the 2016 general elections without using violence, acrimony or foul language, GNA reported. The West African nation is aiming to invest a total of around 30 trillion CFA francs from 2016 to 2020 as part of efforts to foster economic development and reduce poverty. Around 18 trillion CFA francs is expected to come from private sector investment with the government's contribution making up the remaining 11 trillion CFA francs. Bruno Kone said that an advisory group headed by President Alassane Ouattara will meet in Paris on May 17 and 18. Having emerged from a decade of political turmoil following the civil war in 2011, Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa grower and French-speaking West Africa's largest economy, is increasingly turning the heads of foreign investors. Under the stewardship of Ouattara, who won re-election in a landslide victory in October, its economy has expanded by an average of around 9 percent in each of the past three years. But the former senior International Monetary Fund official is under pressure to make that growth more inclusive in his second, and final, five-year term. I am happy to be associated with the brand called Slimtea, an enthusiastic Annie Idibia said, adding, "Through this partnership, I'm looking forward to helping many women on their weight loss journey. The wife of iconic pop legend, 2Baba recently shared an epic throwback photo from almost 10 years ago, gushing on her natural beauty. The Nollywood actress shared the throwback photo which she says was taken in 2006/2007, today, April 14, 2016, attributing her beauty to the colour of her skin. Annie who is married to Nigerian music legend, 2Face Idibia, is renowned for her natural, black beauty, in the midst of celebrities in the Nigerian industry who have been accused of altering their skin colours. Welcome to the Pulse Community! We will now be sending you a daily newsletter on news, entertainment and more. Also join us across all of our other channels - we love to be connected! Welcome to the Pulse Community! We will now be sending you a daily newsletter on news, entertainment and more. Also join us across all of our other channels - we love to be connected! According to the report, the woman who can only be identified now with her initials of LN, was arrested at the Dagen area, Yogyakarta, on Wednesday, April 20, following a tip off. BNN Chief Commissioner General Budi Waseso, said the lady who is suspected to be the courier for a syndicate based in Asia. "The case came to the light after we received a tip-off from members of the public that there would be a drug related transaction at a hotel in Yogyakarta. BNN sent its officer to monitor the hotel and found a person suspected of carrying drugs leaving the hotel for Jakarta by train. Shortly after arriving in Jakarta, the person, suspected of being a courier, went to the capitals western outskirts of Tangerang. The BNN foiled the bid to trade 688.7 grams of crystal meth in front of a house-shop in Poris area, Batu Ceper sub-district, Tangerang municipality, on April 14, 2016. We caught the suspect, identified by his initials as YAK (37), after he handed over crystal meth to a nother person identified as ISK. Based on information from YAK, BNN officers arrested the Nigerian woman at an apartment in Karawaci, west of Jakarta." Also Read: It was gathered that Jamiu and Oyewole who claimed to be cocoa merchants, had sent a text message on February 10, 2016, using the cloned number to the state Accountant General, asking him to remit the money into an account they had opened. Not satisfied wit the way the order came, the Accountant General contacted the Governor and knowing he did not send the message, Ambode ordered a covet investigation and it was soon discovered it was the handwork of Jamiu and Oyewole and two others who are now on the run. Ibrahim, a graduate of the University of Medina, Saudi Arabia and a one time staff of the Saudi Arabia Embassy before he was deported in 2011, was arrested after a CCTV footage in the bank revealed him stealing N1.5 million in the bulk room while pretending to make a deposit. A drug addict, Ibrahim was described by the State Police Commissioner, Fatai Owoseni, as an unrepentant and remorseless robber who had served jail terms in Plateau and Kaduna States for a similar offence. While confessing before newsmen, Ibrahim boasted that he has made over N20 million from his robbery spree across different states in Nigeria and does not regret his actions. I have made over N20 million since I started stealing in banks. I started the operation last year when I came to Lagos from Plateau State. I used the money I got from the banks to buy cocaine. I sell the cocaine in Abuja. I made double the price I bought the drug. Before I go into the bank, I have a friend called Segun, who prepares the ground for me with the assistance of an insider in the bank. On this particular occasion, I went into the bank to deposit money in the bulk room. When I got there, I discovered some amount of money was carelessly placed on the counter. I smartly took it without the female cashier seeing me. She was engrossed in a novel she was reading. I walked out of the bulk room and nobody stopped me. I got home and counted the money; it was N1.5m. The personnel of the internal security of that bank just dont understand their job. The bank where I stole the money is careless. They display their money without minding who comes into the banking hall. I have studied those at the bank; if I had another opportunity, I would love to go to the same bank branch to steal. The suspect identified as Alex Onuora, reportedly stabbed the twin brothers, killing one and leaving the other critically wounded their younger sister refused to have an affair with him. PM News reports that one of the twins had died on the spot while the other has been hospitalised at a hospital in Lagos state. One of the twin victims who had bled to death has been identified as Elvis Mekwa, a Mass communication undergraduate at Open University, while his twin brother is known as Kene. The duo had reportedly suffered their fate after engaging Onuora and his friend identified simply as, Alia in a fight over their younger sister. The incident is reported to have taken place in front of a hotel owned by the wife of a popular musician, Segun Adewale which is located at Liasu road at council bus stop in Ikotun area of Lagos. The suspect had allegedly stabbed Elvis with a broken bottle, on the neck causing him to bleed to death, while Kene who had suffered several stab wounds was reportedly rushed to a hospital where doctors are now battling to save his life. P.M.NEWS reports that the scuffles had ensued after their sister had rebuffed an approach by Onuora and Alia who had been trying to lure her into the hotel where they had been drinking, in order to have sex with her. Onuora had reportedly assaulted the girl who had gone home to report the issue to her older twin brothers on that fateful evening. Elvis and Kene had later approached Onuora to know why he assaulted their sister, which had led to exchange of heated words and the ensuing fight. The suspect had taken bottles from the hotel which he broke and used to stab the victims. Correspondents report that the parents of the twins living at no. 5 Olalekan Adekoye street opposite the hotel, off Liasu road in Ikotun, had confirmed the matter but declined speaking on it. Upon a visit to Onuora's residence at 51 Olalekan Adekoye street, his neighbours had revealed that he had fled after the incident. The matter was reported at the Ikotun police division although the DPO had not been present to comment on the matter. A police source at the station, confirming the incident, revealed that some arrests have been made, adding that, the manager of the hotel where the incident had reportedly taken place, Chibueze Anumudu and a woman identified simply as Blessing, have been arrested and detained at the station for interrogation. The police also revealed that the prime suspects, Onuora and Alia are still at large. The management has however appealed to residents of the state not to panic, also stating that they would ensure close monitoring of other infected patients. According to Channels TV, Dr. Darlington Obaseki, a senior management staff of the hospital, said six other patients have been isolated to limit the spread of the virus. Obaseki also mentioned that 7 other people who had come in contact with the victim have been tested. The Lassa Fever is the latest disease to have plagued the country since its last and successful fight against the Ebola Virus, which came into Nigeria through a Liberian diplomat. According to information, the baby girl who still had her placenta, was placed under some pile of rubbish and left to die but help came her way when some garbage collectors discovered her and alerted security officials. "SPAR is a family business and Nigeria gave our family the opportunity to develop the company and to develop ourselves in the process. It is vital to give back to Nigeria as a whole and specifically to our local communities. We want our SPAR brand to just continue to do bigger and better things for the livelihood of our customers and for Nigerians in general. - Karan Keswani, General Manager. Recently, SPAR put smiles on the beautiful faces of learners, teachers and caregivers at Radiant Achievers Schools Jakande, Lekki. It was a day of community outreach that engaged actual SPAR shoppers who volunteered to spend a day at the school; providing the school with nutritional surprise packages of freshly baked loaves of bread, butter, fruits, juices and water. The children were also treated to fun work out sections by a fitness instructor. As SPAR expands operation in Nigeria, it also strives to heighten its interaction with its host community. Corporate Social Responsibility is paramount in building and maintaining stakeholder trust from the beginning of a companys presence in the community. It strengthens consumer-client relationships and helps ensure long term success for both the business and its host community. SPAR has long recognized that investing in customers beyond the store doors is a key to investing in both its own, and in the local communitys future. 'Adding value beyond limits' remains SPAR and ARTEE Groups stance even in the face of industrial challenges that may have inhibited other brands. This is a feature by SPAR. A statement by Mr Adebayo Taofiq, Lagos State Taskforce Public Affairs Officer, said the two policemen were attached to the Lagos State Environmental Sanitation and Special Offences Unit ( Taskforce ). ''These two police officers, Insp. Abiona Hezekiah and Sgt. Ogunbiyi Agbabu recently recovered N5 million that fell-off a bullion van around Alausa, Ikeja. ''The money was discovered, after due investigation, to belong to Skye Bank Plc." The Governor, who was represented by the Commissioner of Police (CP), Mr Fatai Owoseni, made the presentation of the commendation letters and cash to the duo. The statement said that the CP commended the duo for their high sense of patriotism, honesty and integrity in the line of duty. "This heroic act and professional conduct, is in line with the 'Change Mantra' of the present administration which will ensure a renewed confidence in the Nigerian Police Force by the populace. ''I want to appreciate these officers for their honesty and commitment while discharging their duties at the Lagos State Taskforce,'' it quoted the governor as saying. The Upper Chamber had on Tuesday, April 19, dismissed reports that it bought 108 SUVs, clarifying that only 36 vehicles at N36.5m each were purchased, and meant to be distributed among Senators of the 36 states of the Federation. For the avoidance of doubt, I did not and will not accept any SUV. The only SUV, I, Ben Murray-Bruce will accept is a made in Nigeria car. The armys comments were contained in a statement released by Acting Director of Public Relations, Colonel Sani Usman today, April 21, 2016. It reads: The attention of the Nigerian Army has been drawn to a number of groups and individuals celebrating the routing out and decimation of Boko Haram terrorists on our soil. So much as we thank them for that, it is imperative to state that we do not begrudge such persons their desire to identify and associate themselves with this success. However, the Nigerian Army wishes to disassociate itself from such celebrations and solidarity rallies. We also would like to advice that they should tread with caution as this could be distractive to us. The public are please informed that the terrorists are surreptitiously fanning out of their last enclaves in Sambisa to cause havoc or seek refuge elsewhere. Therefore, there is need for all to be more vigilant and security conscious to enable us clear the remnants of these terrorists wherever they might flee. We would like to reassure the public that we will remain professional and focused in clearing the remnants of these criminals on the Nigerian soil. --------------------------------------------------------- Commander of the United States militarys Special Operations in Africa, Brig. Gen. Donald C. Bolduc, revealed that a convoy of weapons were seen leaving Libya for Chad. American military officials also say a shipment that was seized along the Chadian border on April 7, 2016, contained small-caliber weapons, machine guns and rifles. New York Times, reports that American Special Forces have been involved in training the African military team on how to fight insurgency. According to General Bolduc, The Lake Chad basin is ground zero in the fight against militant Islam in Africa." He also said "beyond Boko Harams pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State last year, the two groups were sharing tactics, techniques and procedures. Also speaking, Gen. Lamidi Oyebayo Adeosun, the Nigerian commander of the regional group of African countries, said Boko Haram has adopted a new strategy of using girls to carry out suicide bombings. Adeosun said They are appealing to the natural care you feel for a girl child. When you see a girl child, you will not feel that she could be carrying a bomb. They achieve maximum effect that way. The youths coalition under the aegis of the North East Coalition Against Terrorism (NECAT) expressed excitement for being able to return to their ancestral homes in peace. They said they can now sleep with their eyes closed. Speaking to the crowd, President General of NECAT, Babangida Halilu, said the period they were displaced from their homes was "utter despair completely devoid of hope." "They were days that we reckon our life expectancy in minutes and hours as we were never certain we will see the following day. This sense of helplessness was compounded in no small way by the diversion of the funds meant for equipping the military. Life was restored to the region with the coming of President Muhammadu Buhari, who true to his campaign promises, showed leadership and the political will to crush the terrorist group and end the reign of terror by the insurgents. Mr Presidents commitment found expression in his appointment of new Service Chiefs that have demonstrated the Armed Forces of Nigeria are to be reckoned with. The youths also urged the military to sustain the war against the insurgency until the last of them either surrenders, killed or arrested. "It is with joy that we inform you that the Armys achievement in the region has allowed state and local governments to be back to functioning while citizens are going about rebuilding their businesses," Halilu said. He also called on the Department of State Services (DSS) to live up to their responsibility. This Info-graphics below shows the reported cases involving Fulani herdsmen across Nigeria. Braimoh said The president needs to be courageous; we know him as a man of integrity, he will not be swayed away by myopic, parochial, religious and inglorious tendencies. We want him to protect his integrity. Fulani herdsmen have done a lot of havoc in Nigeria. Fulani herdsmen are aggressive and excessive, they wreak havoc on innocent citizens in various parts of Nigeria. The president needs to deal with the issue of Fulani herdsmen decisively. They have constituted nuisance across the country. This is coming on the heels of an undefinedby the herdsmen. The herdsmen told the soldiers that they were on a mission to recover their cows. See Pulse Photo-News gallery below. According to the spokesman for the House, Abdulrazak Namdas, who spoke to newsmen in Abuja, the President identified some "grey areas" in the document. "I can confirm to you that we are in possession of the letter from the president identifying grey areas," he said. Namdas said that the leadership of the House of Representatives and the Senate would meet to resolve the faulted areas in the budget, so as not to further delay the signing. It reads: We want to put it on record that the EFCC Liaison Officer to the National Assembly, Mr. Suleiman Bakari, and his team, applied for and subsequently paid a courtesy call on the Deputy President of the Senate in his Office on Tuesday, April 19, 2016. Mr. Bakari, amongst other issues he raised, solicited the support of the Senate and National Assembly towards the anti-corruption crusade of the present administration, and even presented a frame with a bold picture of President Muhammadu Buhari, bearing the inscription: If we dont kill corruption, corruption will kill Nigeria. Mr. Bakari also, on behalf of the Acting Chairman, management, and staff of the EFCC decorated Senator Ekweremadu as an Anti-Corruption Ambassador of the EFCC. It is also a fact that the visit and decoration was captured in both pictures and video. Taking cognisance of the command structure of the agency, we also wonder whether Mr. Bakari could have acted on his own or read from a prepared text without recourse to the Commission, which he represents, especially as the visit and decoration was never solicited for in the first place. We leave the rest to discerning members of the public to read in-between the lines and make their own judgments. However, Ambassador or no Ambassador, the Deputy President of the Senate will not back down from his legislative efforts and advocacy as captured in his several public statements and lectures over the years. He will continue to push for legal and institutional reforms such as Special Anti-Graft Courts; Security of tenure and financial autonomy for the EFCC and related agencies. Only such reforms would fast-track justice and insulate the anti-corruption agencies from external interference and self-reversals. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The lawmakers have frequently embarrassed the country with their brawls and extravagant lifestyles, but many expected the situation to change when the All Progressives Congress (APC) took control of the legislative chamber. However, despite the predominance of change-screaming senators, the Senate has continued to rub Nigerians the wrong way. The legislators first of all startled the country with their N8.64 billion wardrobe allowance despite the economic crisis in the country. After that was the purchase of cars worth N330 millionfor Senate President, Bukola Saraki and the planned purchase of 469 vehicles worth N47.5 billion for the National Assembly as a whole. The waste that has gone into cars, furniture, housing renovation in the past was mind-boggling and these were veritable sources of waste and corruption. That was why they were abolished. Bringing them back is inimical to the interest of Nigeria and Nigerians, former President, Olusegun Obasanjo said in reaction to the legislators plans. However, two events which occurred on Wednesday, April 20, 2016, have made it seem that some amount of common sense has begun to seep into the senate. On April 20, the upper legislative chamber suspended plans to amend the CCT/CCB Act and withdrew the summon it had issued to Justice Umar. The Senate was obviously forced to reverse its decisions, in both cases, due to the mass outrage they had elicited. However, before now, the Senate would have stuck to its guns no matter how much criticism it received, so the reversal is a step in the right direction. Nigerians have in recent times realized that changing the country will take more than just the right president, the Senate has to be involved as well. This is contained in the Nationwide daily PMS schedule release, on Thursday in Abuja. A total of 1,118 trucks (39,958,000ltrs) were loaded from various NNPC and major marketers Depots nationwide. Twenty import vessels laden with a total volume of 830.1 million litres have been confirmed to arrive in the month of April, 2016 for NNPC, it said. NAN reports that, NNPC import and shuttle vessels have been programmed to do Ship-To-Ship operation for onward discharge to inland Depots A breakdown of the distribution indicated that Lagos got 429 trucks, Abuja 131, Kano 23, Port Harcourt 42 and Kaduna 16. Others states that received include Anambra with 15 trucks, Ondo 23, Sokoto seven, Borno four and Katsina 22. According to the schedule, Oyo got 47 trucks, Kogi 13, Ogun 73, Kebbi 32, and Bauchi 21. Also, Delta and Bayelsa received 134 and five trucks respectively while Edo got 32 trucks. Meanwhile, long queues have resurfaced in the Federal Capital Territory. Speaking to newsmen in Abuja during her visit to the minister of foreign affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, the ambassador said she felt sorry for Nigerians when she saw long queues at filling stations on her way from the airport on Wednesday. I think this is something [about which] the embassy has promised to offer whatever technical advice, counsel and technical assistance that we can offer. But we know that some of the best minds in Nigeria are thinking about that, including the ministers in this government, she said. According to her, the US will discuss Nigeria on diversification of its economy, noting that the drop in oil prices is causing hardship in oil-dependent countries. The ambassador had earlier met with some civil society organisations, where her discussions bordered on the deteriorating condition in northern Nigeria, due to the threat posed by Boko Haram insurgency. In terms of our meeting with civil society, Nigerian civil society is one of the most vibrant, articulate and rigorous in the world, she said. What we heard a lot about was the question of how the conditions in the north are deteriorating because of the threat posed by Boko Haram. The economic hardship in the region has been exacerbated by the presence of Boko Haram and trade across the border has now come to virtual standstill. We heard about very difficult humanitarian conditions in Northern Nigeria and we will travel to northern Nigeria tomorrow (Friday) and we will try to get a feel of it for first hand. She said the meeting with civil society organisations also stressed on the solutions to abductions and kidnappings, particularly regarding the missing Chibok girls. High Court judge, Justice Olasunbo Goodluck had, on Thursday, April 7, 2016, ordered the EFCC to release Robert after describing his detention for more than two weeks as unconstitutional. This is regrettable, considering the fact that the government is one that has stated its commitment to respect for the rule of law and has pledged to prosecute the war against corruption within the ambit of the rule of law, Roberts lawyer, Gordy Uche said according to Vanguard. It must also be remembered that it is before the same courts of this country that your commission arraigns and will arraign suspects. We, therefore, request that you release our clients forthwith as ordered by the court. Permit us to add that we shall be compelled to commence committal proceedings before the court if the courts order is not complied with in line with your commissions motto that no one is above the law, he added. Roberts lawyers are suing the EFCC chairman for contempt of court due to the agencys continued detention of their client. Robert, who is the Managing Director of Katakar Civil Engineering Company, was arrested along with one Dakoru Atukpa in connection with a $40 million contract scam. -------------------------------------------------------------- The government had filed a five-count charge against the accused before Justice David Wyom. In the petition, Counsel to the government, Mr Bayero Diri said that the offences are punishable under Sections 97, 221, 102, 106 and 225 of the Penal Code Law, Laws of Kaduna State 1991. The government said that the offence was committed between December 12 and 14, 2015 in Zaria. It alleged that the suspects among other things shot dead one Cpl. Yakubu Dankaduna of the Nigerian Army "with a gun when he alighted from the convoy to disperse the IMN members." Section 102 of the penal code prescribes death sentence for such offence. The prosecution told the court that they intend to present 39 witnesses. The plea of the accused persons was not taken as the Judge adjourned sitting till May 16. ASP Bala Elkanah, Police Public Relation Officer in the state, made this known on Thursday during an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Minna. "On April 13, 2016 at about 6.00am one Gideon Ezechukwu of Dutsen Kura Gwari, Minna who dressed in women hijab was arrested by the police. "The suspect was arrested while trying to escape with an allegedly stolen red colour Jincheng motorcycle (rubber rubber), he said. Elkana said that the motorcycle belong to one Mohammed Idris of same area. Elkanah added that another suspect, Bala Usman served as spy for the suspected robbers before an operation. He said that three other suspects Nwoke Osita, Ogonna Peter and Onyeka Nnoli kept the alleged stolen items. Elkana said that items recovered from the suspects included a ladies Jincheng motorcycle, four bags containing wrappers, one washing machine, refrigerator, gas cylinder, DVD machine, charms, weaved artificial hair and hijab. A resident of Dutse Kura Gwari, Garba Bello, told NAN that most robberies in the area occur in the early hours of the morning. "There have been complains of robbery by neighbours whenever they come back from the early morning prayers. Unfortunately, nobody suspected him. "Most of the items caught with him were stolen from the house of his neighbour; the motorcycle, washing machine and generator. The youth group also frowned at what it called the continued persecution of the Senate President. The groups spokesman, Mallam Abdullahi Ibrahim said It has come to our notice that some powerful politicians are behind the witch hunting of Dr. Saraki, we as a group also condemned the silence of the party and Mr. President over the trial of Dr. Saraki. If not witch-hunting, how can a number three citizen be brought before the court over his asset declaration form 13years ago and the party he belongs to will not come out to show solidarity or support him. APC chairman, John Odigie-Oyegun recently said the possible removal of Senate President might be a sacrifical change. The group also took a swipe at Femi Falana over his comments on the summoning of the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) chairman, Justice Umar Danladi by the Senate. They said The senate is the highest law-making body in Nigeria. It has legitimate powers to invite anybody. Adding that Due process has never been followed in the trial process, and renowned legal practitioners like Falana should know that. Bukola Saraki, in what seemed to be a show of defiance, showed up at the venue of the CCT sitting over an hour later than the start time. Watch video report below. They called for measures to tackle the group before it caused havoc similar to that of Boko Haram in the country. They said there were other Shitte members across the country but that they were not known to be as violent as the members of IMN, led by Sheikh Ibraheem El-Zakzaky, now in DSS custody. The police were represented by the Area Commander, Zaria, DCP MD Shehu, while Mustapha Sani, the State Director of DSS, represented his agency. Both officials said IMN was being funded by local and international organisations as well as the Islamic Republic of Iran. They said Iran was the major financier of IMN in addition to locally generated revenues from taxes ranging from N50 to N500 placed on members all over the country. The police said they had evidence that the Lebanese community in Nigeria who were members of the movement also contributed to the funds of the group. The Divisional Police Officer, Sabon Gari, CSP Taofeek Sabiu, also told the commission that several invitations were extended to the leader for dialogue at the Area Command but he never honoured any. The officer said IMN operated independent of constituted authority as its members did not recognise the Nigerian Government but they believed they were under Iran. "The IMN have a leadership structure about 150 members always on duty in and around the IMN leader's residence and Gyellesu in Zaria. "There have been several complaints of activities of the IMN members to the division at individual and group levels accusing them of molestations and other violent activities but when you invite them to the police station they do not come. "Personally, I had a confrontation with a group and before a short time more than 1,000 members appeared, including women and children, and firearms could not be used. "IMN members have their military wing and other structures with flags and programmes during which they mount roadblocks and the police never tempered with such roadblocks." On his part, the State Director of DSS, said IMN remained high security concern to all security agencies in the country. Under cross-examination, Sani said IMN had similar tendencies with Boko Haram as the members did not believe in constituted authority in Nigeria and had a leadership structure like Boko Haram. The DSS official also agreed that just like the Boko Haram, IMN did not believe in secular Nigeria. He also said that IMN was being funded by various organisations both local and foreign like what obtained in Boko Haram. On the clash between IMN members and the Nigerian Army, the director said the service was not formally informed of the visit of the Chief of Army Staff but there was information about the passing-out Parade at the Army Depot, Zaria. The DSS confirmed it had information about IMN military training and how it sourced funds from Iran. Sani said he had written reports to Kaduna State Government about two times on the activities of IMN aside from deliberations during Security Council meetings. The panel directed the DSS to submit all available intelligence reports on the activities of the IMN to it as soon as possible. ALSO READ: undefined The actor joins cast which includes Elijah Kelley as Ricky Bell, Luke James as Johnny Gill, Algee Smith as Ralph Tresvant,Keith Powers as Ronnie DeVoe, and Woody McClain as Bobby Brown. The biopic will have three parts, and follow the band from middle school following the band from middle school through their high point in the 80's. Five of the groups members, Ricky Bell, Michael Bivins, Ronnie DeVoe, Johnny Gill and Ralph Tresvant, will co-produce the untitled project. The "New Edition" biopic will mark BETs first scripted music-focused TV movie. The miniseries which kicks off filming in May in L.A., is expected to debut on BET in 2017. We also shared five female actors we think will make a perfect Cookie Lyon. While its so hard to imagine any other female actor as the feisty, daring, dramatic, and strong Lyon, we were able to come up with these Nollywood actresses; undefined 57.8 percent of Pulse readers think Funke Akindele would make a perfect Cookie Lyon, 16% went for Nse Ikpe-Etim, 12.2% went for Bimbo Akintola, 8.4% went for Aigbe, while 5.5% went for Jumbo. READ : undefined ALSO READ: undefined Funke kicked off her acting career in 1997 as "Bisi" in United Nations TV series "I Need to Know." Funke got the name Jenifa from her the character in movie 'Jenifa,' and 'Return of Jenifa.' In 2016, the actress won the best actress in comedy at the Africa Magic Viewers Choice Award. ALSO READ: undefined With her high-drama level and charisma, the Lyon family matriarch Cookie Lyon is one phenomenal TV character that has initiated countless memes and conversations. In 2015, the character Cookie was named as the by Time Magazine. CAMIFF 2016 is holding its first edition and is already proving to be the event every film maker in Africa is looking forward to attend thanks to an enriching six-day program to entertain and train movie makers and fans across the continent. "We are very excited to be doing this [film festival] now," Agbor Gilbert, founder of CAMIFF tells DCODED TV. "CAMIFF is to give an opportunity for English-speaking Cameroonian film makers, to sell their movies without stress and allow the Francophones to also introduce their films to buyers from across the world." he adds. Abgor also emphasize the fact that the film festival could encourage employment within the six-day span of the event. "With the festival holding in this town [Buea], there will be employment for a lot of people. Hotels will make money, restaurants will make money, call box [phone call business] will make money and we could even have a foreign film maker collaborate with our local film makers to do co-production and expand distribution," he continued. CAMIFFis scheduled to hold in Buea, South West Region from April 25 - 30. Igbokwe made the comment in an article titled Nigerias mendacious Senate breaks my heart which was published on online platform, Sahara Reporters. Read the full article below: Let me sincerely tender an unreserved apology to the few decent men and women in the 8th Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria for using the above caption to describe them. I am led to use this caption because of the signals emanating from the 8th Senate since its inception last year. I am not trying to throw away the baby with the bathe water but to rebuke men and women who do not know what Nigerians need at this critical point in the nations history. I am trying to call to order these leaders who are yet to come to terms that Change is here to stay in Nigeria for the better. I am persuaded to call the Senators names because I have seen the Senate turning into a national broken mirror. A glimpse of what to expect from the 8th Senate came to the fore last year when it was time to elect the leadership of the Senate. While 51 Senators out of 109 Senators were putting heads together somewhere on the way forward in a venue very close to the Senates Red Chambers, their remaining colleagues played a fast one on them by going ahead to conduct the so-called election of Principal Officers that produced Senator Saraki as the Senate President. The leadership of APC screamed and screamed that this is the worst form of betrayal ever recorded in Nigerias history of party politics. But did Saraki listen to them? No, he did not. In the appointment of heads of committees in the Senate, Senator Saraki once again ignored the directives of his party to do the needful by accepting those the Party nominated for the positions. One thing led to another and today that travesty on the floor of the hallowed Chamber of the Senate has opened a can of worms that is tending to pitch Nigerians against the 8th Senate. That singular monkey business in the Senate that produced Saraki as Senate President and Ike Ekweremadu as Deputy Senate President has succeeded in putting a question mark on APCs Change mantra and the partys promise to fight corruption and impunity. For the avoidance of doubt what Saraki and his co-travelers who claimed to have elected him as the Senate President did on the floor of Senate is bizarre political corruption which has led to economic and social corruption. Today Saraki is facing corruption at the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) and the whole Senate is on trial. Under our own eyes, we have seen Saraki going to CCT with 90 lawyers and more than 60 Senators though the number of Senators reduced to 30 and then 10 as the trial progresses. We have seen the day to day proceedings in the Senate being disrupted as a result of Sarakis travails. The Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria has attempted to amend the Code of Conduct Tribunal law. The Senate has tried to invite Justice Danladi Umar of CCT to the Senate in an attempt to scuttle Sarakis trial. In the National Assembly (both Senate and House of Reps) the 2015 Budget has suffered lots and lots of mutilations and balkanization all in the bid to favour themselves, and not Nigerians and this has led to delays in giving Nigerians what APC promised. The crisis in the National Assembly especially the Senate has slowed down the business of governance; it has affected every Nigerian. It has proved to us that majority in the National Assembly are there to help themselves and not Nigerians. If more than 60 Senators can muster the courage to follow Senator Saraki to the CCT in the name of solidarity for a purely criminal offence, what are we talking about in this country? Can President Buhari fight corruption with these Senators in the Senate building? Can our courts function with this kind of criminal conspiracy and gang up? Can we deliver our change mantra under this criminal gang up?. Few years back somebody said Nigeria was governed by two kinds of leaders. A fool surrounded by idiots or an idiot surrounded by fools. Today we have moved away from this. President Buhari is no fool or idiot and those around him are no idiots and neither are they fools. Those who still think it is still business as usual in Nigeria cannot get it and mark my word they will burn their fingers. President Buhari is ready to rescue Nigeria but these agents of darkness are putting up road blocks. But when power meets power, then the weaker will bow. This useless Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria breaks my heart. About 6trillion appropriation bill was passed into law by the National Assembly of March 23 2015. This was presented to the President for his assent but the criminal gang did not attach the details of the Budget and as a consequence of this, President Buhari refused to endorse the document. It was later discovered that the shenanigans added more than 100billion naira in the budget which they criminally and illegally called funds for constituency projects. This is height of impunity and brigandage. The Senate of the Federal Republic is fast becoming a dumping ground for Governors, some who have gang- raped their States for two terms of 8 years. While still in office they rigged themselves to the Senate to continue to plunder Nigeria. They are going to be the beneficiaries of the 36.5 million Naira latest Toyota land cruiser purchased by the Senate leadership. These are Governors that have had it all, having many cars and SUVs in their fleet. I suggest that Nigeria should go the way of Senegal by disbanding the Senate because their minds, their thinking, their desires and aspirations are not on the same page with the yearnings and aspirations of Nigerians at a time like this. Let them go home. We no longer need the Senate. But there is light at the dark end of the tunnel. Nigerians are resisting the antics and criminal tendencies of our lawmakers. With the help of social media, Nigerians are doing what they have not been doing before. With the limitless, formidable, awesome and fearsome powers of the social media led by the indefatigable Sahara Reporters, Premium Times, The Cable, Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, PM News etc, Nigerians have taken their battles to the Senate given the Lawmakers a run for their money. Under my own very eyes I have seen their telephone numbers released to the public. I have seen everything being questioned and the details being demanded. Nigerians are taking back their country and this is a silent revolution. Nigerians have almost chased the Senators away from CCT. Nigerians have fought the Senate to a standstill as they tried to amend CCT law. Nigerians have forced the Senate to jettison a curious invitation they extended to Justice Danladi Umar of CCT. Nigerians are forcefully asking for more. Things will never be same again in Nigeria. --------------------------------------------------------------- Metuh also said that he will not be contesting for any office at the PDP National Convention which will hold in Port Harcourt, Rivers State on May 21, 2016, Punch reports. The PDP spokesperson made the disclosure via a statement released on Thursday, April 21, 2016. It reads: I wish to state publicly that I have no ambitions to continue as a member of the National Working Committee after the expiration of my current tenure as the National Publicity Secretary, a decision that is enjoying the support of my family. I therefore with every sense of responsibility confirm to all members of our great party that I will not run for any position whatsoever in the forthcoming National Convention irrespective of which office may be zoned to the South-East for that matter. What is paramount in my mind at this point is to continue to lift the image of our great party during the remaining part of my tenure as the image-maker of the PDP, a position, which by the grace of God, I have been able to dutifully deliver to the best of my ability despite daunting challenges. Metuh is currently which were brought against him by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) ----------------------------------------------------------------- The chairman of APC, John Odigie-Oyegun told Premium Times that the party will not allow the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) take over the leadership of the Senate if Saraki is removed. You will recall that Oyegun said the possible removal of Senate President might be a sacrifical change. Oyegun who said the comments he made earlier about Sarakis trial at the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT), was misunderstood, however cleared the air while speaking with journalists. He said That misunderstanding is still on? "Let me put it simply. There were basically two points that I was making. Number one, as a party of change even as a party, we cannot interfere in a judicial process that is ongoing. That was clear. And when they asked about the senate, I said under no circumstance can we compromise on the leadership of the senate. We are the majority party and the issue doesnt even really arise but unfortunately the way it was put, the misinterpretation has been a little bit too intense and that is clear. It just doesnt arise at all. The issue, the argument and the rest doesnt arise. If somebody wants to theorise and postulate, thats a different matter. It doesnt arise. Bukola Saraki is the President of the Nigerian Senate, and a member of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). Senator Oluremi Tinubu, wife of APC leader, Bola Tinubu also refused to shake Sarakis hand during her inauguration on Wednesday, June 10, 2015. Watch what Senator Oluremi Tinubu did to Bukola Saraki in this video below. According to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), the Assembly sworn in nine other lawmakers in Port Harcourt on Thursday, April 21, leaving out Nyeche. Nyeche exemption followed a petition from the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO), alleging that she was using the Assembly Letter Headed Paper before being sworn in. She has however vowed to seek redress in court. Congratulating the lawmakers, the Speaker, Rt. Hon. Tamuno Adams, reminded them that their election was a call to serve, adding that he business of lawmaking must be taken serious. Adams urged them to join hands to move the state forward. NAN reports that the state Assembly also confirmed the appointment of Justice Christy Nwankwo as the substantive President of the Customary Court of Appeal. Confirming the appointment, the lawmakers, who voted unanimously in favour of her appointment, described the Judge as a woman of substance and integrity in Rivers judiciary. Justice Nwankwo promised to introduce changes in the states customary laws in collaboration with the lawmakers. In an open discussion, most backed the question with the bible verse from Genesis 1: 29, which says, And God said, Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. One explained that Marijuana is a plant on earth and God has given us the permission to take it, but should be taken in moderation. Isaiah 18: 4-5 says, "The Lord said unto me, 'I will take my rest and I will consider in my dwelling place like a clear heat upon herbs" Another elaborated on its medicinal values and added that God is a healer and he provides us with spiritual, mental and physical healing. (James 5:14, 1 Peter 2:23, Psalm 103:2-4, 3 John 1:2) Using wine as an example, the bible mentioned wine on several occasions but emphasized on taking it in moderation. Galatians 5:19-21, Proverbs 23:29-30 Sure, achieving a First Class is never an easy road, but it is very doable with the right mindset. TheNation interviewed a few students who graduated with a First Class all around Nigeria and they share their major tips. 1. Surround Yourself With Success Salami Blessing, who is a first class graduate of Chemical Engineering from Covenant University said, "I was surrounded by highly inspiring intellectuals who had strong academic focus. I became like them as I watched them." 2. Believe In Yourself Ayodele Dada who graduated with a first class and a 5.0 CGPA from UNILAG said, I have a belief that to be the best, one has to be the best each day, and from one day to the next, that best would keep accumulating. You should be flexible also; the trick is to know yourself and what works for you regardless of what others are doing." 3. Do What Works For You Dada also said you should figure out a study plan that works for you and follow it. I didnt have a fixed number of hours for reading. I know some people used to intimidate me when they say they read for eight hours. I used to go and watch movies. I listened to music and even attended birthday parties. The smartest people are those who understand their strength, so it is important to discover yourself and stick to it," he explained. 4. Don't Bore Your Lecturers Dada emphasized the importance of keeping your lecturers captivated with your work. According to him, "if a lecturer is bored while marking your script your grade would be boring. This phrase sounds funny but it carries a lot of weight." 5. Dedicate Yourself Abdulraouf Rilwan, a first class graduate from Abubakar Tafawa Balewa who studied Geology had this advice: I understood what each lecturer wanted for anyone to pass their course; I took my assignments seriously; I never missed any lecture; I didnt see any test assignment or mark as insignificant; I usually read ahead of the class; I read journals and other materials that is related to Geology I did aim for 100 per cent in all my courses and prayed very well. 6. Use Your Time Well Bolarinwa Olawale, the best graduate of Adekunle Ajasin Univerisity wants you to make good use of your time. She said, "I didnt do anything special other than making good use of my time and with determination, I used to read before and after my lectures." 7. Never Settle For Mediocre With the major exception of language, both countries share a number of similarities by way of culture and lifestyle. Inspite of said similarities however, there are more than a few things that could catch a Nigerian travelling to Benin for the first time off guard. Here are a few important things to keep in mind when travelling to Benin Republic, especially if you're travelling by road. 1. Have an ID card: Ideally you must have your passport on you, and some other form of identification (ID) card. Don't make the mistake of travelling without a passport simply because you're going next door to Benin, this will only cause you unnecessary delay and expenses paying off border officials. 2. Carry loose cash: Anyone who's been through Seme border will know it's virtually impossible to pass through the border without parting with some money. There are a dozen and one things to pay for, not to mention border officials looking to extort from unsuspecting novices. Stay sharp. 3. Basic knowledge of French: Dig out that primary or secondary school French text book, and if you never had one, make Google your friend. It's very advisable to at least have a basic knowledge of French. 4. Know where you're going: Don't just go in blind, have a very good idea of where you're going and/or will be staying for your own safety. It will also minimise your chances of getting scammed by seemingly 'helpful' strangers. Tit-for-tat killings by supporters of President Pierre Nkurunziza and his political opponents have raised concerns that Burundi could slide back into conflict, after the country emerged from an ethnically fuelled civil war in 2005. More than 400 people have been killed since Nkurunziza said he would run for a third term last year. Opponents said he was violating the constitution and a peace deal that ended the civil war. A court ruled he could run, and he won re-election in July. In one incident on Wednesday, gunmen ambushed Colonel Emmanuel Buzubona as he travelled on the back of a motorbike to his home in Bujumbura, the capital, according to Moise Nkurunziza, deputy police spokesman. "The senior officer tried to flee but he didnt make it because the attackers finished him off by throwing a grenade," Nkurunziza told Reutershe said. The motorcyclist also died. The motive was not immediately clear. Buzubona's neighbours said he had returned in September from Tanzania, where he had been an instructor at a military college for officers from the East African Community bloc. He was awaiting a new assignment, army spokesman Gaspard Baratuza said. An ethnic Hutu, Buzubona had been a member of CNDD-FDD rebel force, which became the ruling party of the president. In the civil war, Hutu rebel groups such as CNDD-FDD fought the then-Tutsi-led army. The army has since been reformed to include both Hutus and Tutsis in all ranks. Leaders of a failed coup in May included both Hutus and Tutsis. In a separate incident on Wednesday, soldiers on patrol killed two people in a clash with an armed group in Kivumu village in Mugamba southern district, 60 km southeast of Bujumbura, said Christian Nkurunziza, regional governor of the districk where Mugamba is located. "As they were patrolling, soldiers exchanged fire with an armed group of eight men, killing two people," he said. Four members of the CNDD-FDD party were killed in the same village last week. At least 50 people were arrested after the demonstration on Thursday in the tiny West African country, according to the United Democratic Party (UDP), the country's main opposition party, in a crackdown that was condemned by the international community. Among those arrested were high-level members of the UDP including party leader Ousainu Darboe. Three people, including a high-level party official named Solo Sandeng, are feared dead, the opposition has said. Fifteen were released on Tuesday, but the rest remain in custody, UDP sources said on Wednesday. The High Court said on Wednesday it had charged 37 people, 18 of whom were accused on five counts: unlawful assembly, rioting, incitement of violence, interfering with vehicles and holding a procession without a permit. Sandeng's name did not appear on the court list. The cases have been adjourned until April 27 and lawyers for the defendants are expected to file for bail on Thursday. The Gambian government has not commented on the arrests. It has also not confirmed the release of any protesters or the reported deaths. Gambian police sources last week confirmed there had been some arrests but gave no number. The demonstrations were a rare act of defiance in Gambia and occurred while President Yahya Jammeh was in Turkey attending a summit of Islamic countries. The arrests appear to signal a heightened campaign by the government of President Mahamadou Issoufou, who said at his inauguration to a second term on April 2 that his main priority was to step the fight against corruption. "Eight officers in the public service and health ministries were charged and jailed for acts of corruption, examination fraud and criminal association," said prosecutor Samna Chaibou, adding that the results of the exams had been annulled. "The facts are extremely serious especially because they concern the health sector. Imagine 1,831 people entering the sector who have zero qualifications," Chaibou said on Tuesday, adding that 14,000 people had applied for the jobs. The Pahrump man charged with several felonies late last year learned his fate following a sentencing hearing before Judge Robert Lane on Monday. The Pahrump man charged with several felonies late last year learned his fate following a sentencing hearing before Judge Robert Lane on Monday. Jeffery Stevens, 46, was sentenced to 6-to-15 years in the Nevada Department of Corrections on aggravated stalking, resisting a public officer and violation of a protective order. He was also sentenced to 19 months to four years and five years probation on one count of unlawful use of a controlled substance. That sentence will be suspended with credit for time served. Stevens was arrested Dec. 17, after a struggle with Nye County Sheriffs deputies. Nye County Deputy District Attorney Michael Vieta-Kabell said the state felt Stevens should spend time in prison for the crimes he committed. Aggravated stalking is a very serious Category B felony, he said. Resisting a police officer with use of a firearm, while violating a protective order is a Category C felony. We believe that justice has absolutely been served. A week before his arrest on Dec. 10, deputies said Stevens went to the home of his estranged wife, who had an active extended protective order placed against him. Deputies reviewed the footage of the victims security camera and saw Stevens try to open the womans front door, then cover the camera lens with his hand. Sheriffs deputies were dispatched to the victims home again later on Dec. 10, as she heard loud banging on her sliding glass door. Upon arrival, deputies were unable to locate Stevens in the area. A day later, deputies were again dispatched to the womans home as she stated that Stevens was at her bedroom window begging for her to let him inside. Dispatchers said they could hear a faint voice that sounded like it was coming from outside on the line, according to deputies, but they failed to locate the suspect. On Dec. 15, a sheriffs deputy was dispatched to an address on Mayfield Ranch Road for a report of a disturbance. After arriving, the deputy made contact with the female victim and learned that Stevens was inside the residence. According to the arrest report, when the deputy entered the residence, Stevens attacked him, repeatedly punching and beating the deputy in the head and face. During the scuffle, Stevens repeatedly tried to remove the deputys weapon from its holster. The deputy was able to protect himself and the victim from further harm, while Stevens quit fighting and fled the scene. The deputy was transported to Desert View Hospital for non-life-threatening injuries. Two days later, the sheriffs office received a 911 call, alerting them that Stevens was threatening an individual at a Pahrump business with a shotgun while looking for his wife. Deputies responded to the business but found that Stevens had left on foot prior to their arrival. They eventually located Stevens along Dahlia Street near Basin Road and Highway 160. Additional officers arrived on scene as Stevens again resisted arrest. He was eventually placed under arrest and transported to Desert View Hospital for minor injuries sustained during the struggle with deputies, before being taken to the Nye County Detention Center. Contact reporter Selwyn Harris at sharris@pvtimes.com. On Twitter: @pvtimes A Davenport man is facing several charges, including arson, after he battered his girlfriend and then tried to burn or blow up the duplex in which the two have been living, police said. According to the arrest affidavits filed by Davenport Police officer Jennifer Brewer, Gramann Richard Barnes, 43, of 619 W. Locust St., got into an argument with a woman with whom he has been in an on-again-off-again relationship for 11 years. Barnes resides with the woman and her 2-year-old child. As they were arguing, Barnes grabbed the woman by the hair and a struggle ensued. During the struggle, the child was knocked into a cabinet and sustained an abrasion on the left side of his lower back. The woman grabbed the child and ran into a different room, according to the affidavit. Barnes ran after the woman and punched her in the legs. The woman and the child left the home, but when they returned they found that Barnes had broken several items, thrown weights through all the televisions and caused more than $10,000 in damage. Then, in an effort to either burn or blow up the duplex, Barnes placed paper towels inside the oven. He then fixed the burners on the stove so they would spew gas and removed the knobs from the stove. Before leaving the home, he turned on the oven. Neighbors in the upstairs portion of the duplex could smell the gas coming from the stove, according to the affidavit. Barnes fled the scene by stealing his fathers pickup. Barnes is charged with first-degree arson, a Class B felony under Iowa law that carries a prison sentence of up to 25 years. He also is charged with first-degree criminal mischief and first-degree theft, each of which carries a prison sentence of up to 10 years. He also is charged with child endangerment with injury, which carries a prison sentence of up to five years, and domestic assault, a misdemeanor. Barnes was being held Wednesday night in the Scott County Jail on a $100,000 cash-only bond. May 1, 2017 Remarks by the President The White House President Trump: I want to welcome all of my Cabinet secretaries here for this meeting. We have completed our first 100 days in office and already we have made America Great Again. Amazing! The best! I know everybody took a Big Gulp when I changed 9/11 to 7-Eleven last year. They thought I was a stupid person. A loser! Erin Gloria Ryan of Vocativ said I would start talking about the Japanese bombing of Pearl Jam and the Native Americans' Trail of Sears. Other terrible people -- the worst! -- thought I would refer to the eBay of Pigs, the Normandy landing on DQ Day, the Dodge Challenger disaster, Black & Decker Tuesday of 1929, the 1906 San FranCisco Systems Fire and the 1814 burning of the White Castle by the British. Wrong! Turning 9/11 into 7-Eleven was the beginning of something huge. Phenomenal! The people at 7-Eleven -- great retailer, decent coffee, convenient! -- loved it. Loved it! They said to me: Mr. Trump, if you could mention us and other corporations more often at unexpected moments, we think it would really help to Make America Great Again. And I said: We will do even better. We will Make America Great Again by selling some of our greatest assets to you and to America's other great corporations. We are meeting here in the MapQuest Room of the Trump National White House because our new Crate & Barrel Cabinet Room is being refurnished. Next we'll have a drink in the Johnnie Walker Blue Room, and we'll eat in the Allstate Dining Room. Look out the window there and you'll see amazing billboards going up on the Washington Mutual Monument, across the reflecting pool from the Lincoln Financial Group Memorial. In the distance you'll see the white dome of Capital One, the Tide Basin and Boeing National Airport. Huge! Jeff Sessions, our phenomenal secretary of Homeland Depot Security -- great guy! -- tells me Mexico has already paid for the wall. It's now the Aeromexico Wall -- "because the only way around it is over it!" Great slogan! We are making only the best deals, throughout the Federal Express government and across the entire United States of American Eagle Outfitters. They said I couldn't unify the Republican Party. But then I renamed the Navy the Ted Cruz Line. They said I couldn't hold on to the evangelical Christians. But then I renamed the Liberty University Bell and Niagara Falwells. Most of all, they said I couldn't get rid of the entire federal debt -- $19 trillion! -- in one year. They said I was stupid -- a loser! But I traveled this land, from the Redwood Inn forest to the Gulfstream G650, and knew that everybody wanted to buy American! So I sold the Treasury Department to Citigroup, the Pentagon to Lockheed Martin, the Food and Drug Administration to Pfizer, HHS to CVS, the EPA to Waste Management, the FBI to Apple, the NSA to Google and the Grand Canyon to GMC. Great deals! China gave up all $1.3 trillion of our debt -- and all I had to give them was the Walt Disney Company. Phenomenal deal! Now we are placing corporations' names in amazing places -- the greatest -- and we are winning, winning, winning, and we are making a lot of money. A lot. We are bringing out the best in America, the fast and convenient spirit of 7-Eleven, and I say: Oh, thank heaven. We are Making America Great Again. [APPLAUSE] SPRINGFIELD The Illinois Senate has approved a proposed amendment to the state Constitution that would change the way legislative and congressional districts are drawn but rejected one that would have eliminated the lieutenant governor's office. Sen. Kwame Raoul, D-Chicago, sponsored the redistricting amendment, which is similar to one the Senate approved in 2010 that failed to win approval in the House. Unlike a current proposal from House Democrats and another backed by the group Independent Maps, Raoul's measure would leave the task of redrawing boundaries largely in the hands of state lawmakers. "Here in the state of Illinois, we are fortunate to have a state with a diverse population," Raoul said, arguing that his measure would do the most to protect influence of minority voters. One way it would do that is by doing away with the requirement that each of the state's 59 Senate districts be divided into two House districts. This would allow a better opportunity for voters in communities such as Chicago's Chinatown to elect officials who represent them, Raoul said. Under his plan, the General Assembly would be required to adopt a map by a set deadline each decade following the U.S. census. If it failed to do so, each chamber would adopt its own map. If that failed, commissions appointed by the leaders of each chamber would get their turn. If the commissions failed, the two most senior Illinois Supreme Court justices of opposite political parties would appoint a "special master" to create the map. The measure also would require at least 10 public hearings across the state before a map could be adopted. The proposed amendment cleared the Senate on a 39-19 vote, with Republicans voting as a bloc in opposition, with the exception of Sen. Sam McCann, R-Plainview. Sen. Bill Brady, R-Bloomington, said he supports the Independent Maps proposal. "Simply summed up, (Raoul's proposal) still lets politicians draw their own maps, and we need to take it out of the hands of the politicians and put it in an independent body, which will draw maps to preserve the best interest of communities and the citizens of Illinois," Brady said. Sen. Tom Cullerton, D-Villa Park, sponsored the proposal to eliminate the lieutenant governor's office, which he billed as an effort to streamline government. He noted that it's a popular campaign talking point for members of both parties. "You've all said it. You've all riled your constituents up about it," Cullerton said. "Today's the day that it can get done." But it wasn't that day as the measure failed on a 21-28 vote with opposition from members of both parties. Sen. Dale Righter, R-Mattoon, voiced a concern that was heard from both sides of the aisle. Because the amendment would leave the attorney general as the next person in the line of succession should the governor's office become vacant, it could create a situation in which the top office is transferred from one party to another. "In any one governor's election, the voters make a choice," Righter said. "They make a choice between Democrat and Republican. They make a choice between differing ideologies." Letting the office transfer to the opposite party would be "a betrayal of what the voters said they wanted when they voted for the governor," he said. The redistricting amendment now requires approval from a three-fifths majority in the House in order to go before voters in the November election. The House must act on it before May 9, but Democrats in that chamber have their own proposal. A roundup of legislative and Capitol news items for Wednesday: ADJOURNMENT: Top leaders in the Iowa House and Senate were still operating under the expectation that the 2016 legislative session could adjourn this week, but they also were hedging their bets a bit Wednesday. Were going to pursue that, were going to push hard to get there, and if theres something that happens, which can, obviously, then well review it, said House Speaker Linda Upmeyer, R-Clear Lake. But right now, I think were on a path and everything is moving forward. Well see. Both the House and Senate passed fiscal 2017 budget bills between chambers with the expectation that a few would end up in conference committees to resolve, which could slow the process. Upmeyer and Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, D-Council Bluffs, said they expected that legislators would work Friday and possibly Saturday if they were near the finish line. Some time Friday, well make a judgment as to whether enough pieces are in play to finish, Gronstal said. Otherwise, legislators would come back for a 16th week of session. CAPITOL EARTH DAY: Iowa lawmakers plan to observe Earth Day at the state Capitol Building on Thursday. The midday event will highlight current environmental challenges, solutions and upcoming Earth Day activities across the state. Organizers say they hope to unite and move Iowans from awareness to action to promote a healthy, prosperous and sustainable future. After comments from legislative and environmental speakers, Sen. Rob Hogg, D-Cedar Rapids, will moderate a soap box program for Iowans to share their concerns and solutions for the environment and the future. Also Thursday, Iowa Interfaith Power & Light will release its 2016 Religious Leaders Statement on Climate Change. RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: Roughly 50 people gathered in the Capitol rotunda for a ceremony for religious freedom. Among the third annual events speakers were legislators and the Bishop of Des Moines. The previous week, Gov. Terry Branstad signed a proclamation declaring April 13, 2016, Religious Freedom Day. The proclamation says strong religious liberties work to secure other civil liberties through vigorous public debate where all participants may exercise such influence as their ideas engender and individuals have a duty to respect the rights of others in a pluralistic society. Some of the events speakers touched on those notes. Dr. Rizwan Shah, a Des Moines pediatric doctor and Muslim, praised Iowa for its welcoming atmosphere and said, In every religion we address the creator in a way we feel comfortable. FUEL PRICES: The price of unleaded retail gasoline in Iowa rose seven cents this week to $2.10 per gallon, according to AAA. That price was seven cents higher than one week ago and 33 cents a gallon lower than a year ago. The national average on Tuesday was $2.11 per gallon, up three cents from last week. Retail diesel fuel prices in Iowa were two cents a gallon higher with a statewide average of $2.09 compared to $2.62 in Iowa one year ago. On the heating fuels side, a weekly report from the state Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship reported that propane prices were a penny lower than last months prices for a statewide average of $1 per gallon. Home heating oil remained steady at last months figures, ending with a statewide average of $1.65 per gallon while natural gas prices were four cents lower at $1.90/MMbtu. DISASTER DECLARATION: President Barck Obama has made additional disaster assistance available by authorizing an increase in the level of federal funding for public assistance projects undertaken by the Omaha Tribe of Nebraska and Iowa as a result of flooding during the period of May 25 to Aug. 1, 2011. Under the presidents major disaster declaration issued for the state of Iowa on June 27, 2011, federal funding was made available for public assistance and hazard mitigation at 75 percent federal funding of total eligible costs. Under the president's order this week, the federal share for public assistance has been increased to 90 percent of the total eligible costs for the Omaha Tribe of Nebraska and Iowa. QUOTE OF THE DAY: I think were well positioned. I havent seen any bad news the last two days. Everything has gone well. Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, D-Council Bluffs, in sizing up progress toward adjourning the 2016 session. Cattle producers knew high prices wouldn't last forever, so many planned ahead and put money into savings to weather future financial storms. It's just how the industry works: When prices are good, ranchers sock away money for times when they again take a dip, which history has shown they surely will. Meade County rancher and business operator Gary Cammack said the cattle market remains in what he call a "plateau." Consumers saw a spike in beef costs last year but have now seen a bit of a dip. Cattle producers were treated much the same by the market. Cammack said the prices paid for calves last fall should remain about the same for the coming year, which is good since ranching has been a profitable endeavor lately. "It's still well above cost to production," said the Republican state senator from Union Center. "It isn't to the levels it was a few years ago, but there still is a profit to be made in the cow business. That's encouraging." James Neill, executive director of the Meade County Farm Service Agency, said the West River agriculture industry continues to be optimistic about the future despite the downturn in livestock and grain markets. "That's the farmer attitude there's always next year. It's always going to get better. Otherwise, they wouldn't be doing what they are doing," he said. Cammack, who with his wife, Amy, owns and operates Cammack Ranch Supply in Union Center, says they live and die with the cattle business. "It's certainly sustainable," Cammack said of the industry. Meade County rancher Jim Shaw has another view, however. He believes the cattle market is depressed. "The future market has a lot to do with it," he said. "It seems to be pure manipulation." The feeder cattle futures market on Tuesday showed prices about $128 per hundred weight. They fall to $114 for April 2017. "I just get disgusted when I hear it," said Shaw, a third-generation rancher. Shaw has hopes, however, that the market will rebound. "They keep telling people that meat is bad for you, but people like beef," he said. "You can only eat so much chicken and so much fish before you want to go back to a steak." Cammack said he has seen numbers that show per-capita beef consumption in the U.S. is on the rise. "It's a reversal of a trend that has been in place for several years," he said. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to provide beef to Canada and Mexico, but what had been a strong trading partner in China has waned with the downturn in that nation's economy, Cammack said. "China's got a big enough economy that whenever they catch a cold, everyone else sneezes," he said. Back in the U.S., the prices consumers pay for beef have dropped some since prices to producers fell last fall. "We were enjoying those high prices as producers, but there's got to be a certain amount of correction to come along to help any business stay healthy," Cammack said. Neill also says both livestock and grain prices are driven by the global economy. When things happen in Russia with wheat, it affects producers in the U.S. Currently, there is a glut of some crops on the international market, which has prompted local producers to modify their plans. Instead of going with wheat, they may plant oats, he said. The same holds true with beef. Neill agrees with Cammack in that it's not so much that the U.S. market drives the beef market but consumers around the globe. "Who's accepting our products has a lot more to do with what we can expect here when it comes to sales," he said. This bit of news made me feel old It was the death of former Rep. Frank Denholm, D-S.D., and pieces written about him and politics of his times. It wasn't the Dark Ages. I started reporting on South Dakota politics around the spring of '66. Gov. Nils Boe walked into the news room and everybody greeted the new gov. George McGovern also was a familiar face in the Mitchell newspaper in the mid to late 1960s when I was a reporter there. "Hi Milo... Hi Bruce... Hi Les..." Then again, my little sis and I had been Mitchell classmates of McGovern daughters. Those personal connections helped later with McGovern political coverage. He just plain knew who I was as a reporter and as a person. That's how community newspapers were then. The two famed South Dakota Lebanese political figures also were around in that era. James Abdnor arrived first as lieutenant governor, later in the U.S. House and Senate. James Abourezk is now pretty much the last of the "staying local" national political figures from South Dakota of that era, and served also in the U.S. House and then Senate. Larry Pressler is the youngest I remember from that era, the 1960s to mid 1970s. He's only a couple years older than I am. He got involved a bit later, the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s. Also about the same age are Tom Daschle and Tim Johnson. Daschle got into the U.S. House in '78 and then Senate in the mid '80s. Johnson didn't get into the "big time" national political seats until the mid 1980s. Anyway... I must be the only sometime political reporter who remembers Boe as governor. Then again, I also remember Boe's predecessor Archie Gubbrud (yup, grandfather of our Belle Fourche city attorney), Frank Farrar, Ben Reifel, Bill Janklow and a bunch more. Anyway, Rep. Denholm was running for his first term in the U.S. House when I first met him. It's hard to figure that was some 45 years ago. Frank was in his mid 40s and still had 20 years on me. Frank was an interesting guy, especially as a former sheriff and FBI agent. Here's where my "political writer" experience splits from most of the younger folks who write nowadays about South Dakota politics in the '60s and '70s. Most are pretty much considered to be writing as "left-leaning" folks. But in the older days, I was taught that a South Dakota reporter needs to be human with the other human beings who served in our higher-end politics. That doesn't mean softball questions that amount to free political advertising. Or "gotcha" questions to trap and clobber the "pol" if he or she is on the wrong side of the "newsroom" politics. The whole thing was different, at least mostly in South Dakota. It was an era when you could have coffee with a "politician." You could have a relatively normal talk like normal people instead of "Reporter versus Politician." I think that's seldom, if ever, true today. I'm sure that a dozen folks could come up with a dozen reasons. I might even agree with one or two of them. Back to Rep. Denholm: I think we both were frustrated with the political winds around 1970. It seemed he had about three standard answers to whatever question or variation that I had. On the other hand, that's also the era when "the media" were changing their longtime community connections. Local politicians and local media seemed increasingly more connected "elsewhere" than being neighbors with different viewpoints. Many years later I had a nice long talk with Frank. I had passed my own "mid 40s." He was long past them. The talk was among veterans of an earlier era in South Dakota politics; an era when folks could be on first name basis as if neighbors. I don't think it was just luck that I would be able to carry that perspective with Tom Daschle - several times breaking bread, even a libation in our home. Years yet later, ditto with Tim Johnson. Gov. Bill Janklow and I broke bread a cupla times in cafes where we could be ignored. At least that happened before his heart attack and he quit smoking. He seemed "harder" after that, at least as far as I could see; perhaps he was just healthier and I was grumpier. Thing is, we were people, not "reporter and Pol." We're always people; often neighbors. We're not always "reporter and Pol." One experienced "liberal" political blogger called Denholm a "forgotten man of the South Dakota Democratic Party." I'd say, yes and no. It's not that Frank was "forgotten" as much as simply ignored, and ignored especially by so many younger Democrats who were far closer to the left side of their party. To me it's more that we were in a different political climate and definitely a different political culture. I think many reporters tend to forget that the politician they're working for a hot "quote" is a human. In South Dakota, in ways he or she is also literally a neighbor. The last phone talk I had with Jim Abourezk went along the lines of "remember the wars of yesteryear" spoken as two veterans with some shared memories. I have to wonder whether an old journalist and an older politician in another 50 years will be able to put aside the roles and just be people, just neighbors. I'd hope so, but it's probably a good thing I'm not likely to hold my breath. Officials will be in Rapid City this weekend during the Youth & Family Services Kids Fair to encourage parents to register their children in a comprehensive child-identification program. SDCHIP generates packages of various identifying items of children for parents or guardians. The information includes dental impressions, a DNA cheek swab, a digital still photo, fingerprints and a video image interview. The South Dakota Child Identification Program is part of MASONICHIP, an initiative of the Masons. Attorney General Marty Jackley calls it a comprehensive child identification program designed to assist in the event a child goes missing. The event is from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday, April 22 and Saturday, April 23, and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday, April 24, at the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center. Admission to the Kids Fair is $5. Rapid City Superintendent Tim Mitchell has accepted a new job to run a small rural school district in his home state of Iowa. His first day will be July 1 as the new superintendent of Riverside Community School District, a system with 651 students that encompasses three rural communities about 22 miles east of Council Bluffs. By comparison, the Rapid City district has 23 schools and about 13,700 students. The Riverside Board of education made a formal offer to Mitchell during a special meeting on April 4. He was one of two finalists interviewed for the position. Mitchell announced his acceptance of the job offer this week, stating that he is looking forward to the move, which will bring him closer to his and his wifes family in Iowa. The situation is very much like Chamberlain, where I was previous to Rapid City, Mitchell said. Theres a lot of exciting things going on there. Its just a great opportunity, and theres some really good things to be part of in the future with that district. Mitchell became superintendent of the Rapid City Area Schools in 2010. Last spring, he announced that he would leave the district after the 2015-16 school year, and had some of his duties diminished by the school board at that time. Im very pleased for him, said Rapid City School Board Member Dave Davis. I think the way hes described it, the new opportunity he has in Iowa will be a great fit for him, and I wish him well. Mitchell, who is from Clarion, IA, spent his early years in Yankton, S.D., where he taught for 12 years. He continued his teaching career in Chamberlain as a middle school principal, eventually becoming the superintendent of the district in 1996. He served there for 15 years, then became the superintendent of the Rapid City school district in 2010. Though he was named South Dakota's Superintendent of the Year in 2014, Mitchell sometimes drew criticism during his tenure in Rapid City over his financial management of the district. After his announcement last spring, he handed the financial reins of the district to Assistant Superintendent Dave Janak as part of a one-year contract he signed. Mitchell has since refocused his efforts on academics. Rapid City School Board President Jim Hansen praised Mitchell for his performance as superintendent during a contentious time for education in South Dakota, which has the lowest average teacher pay in the nation. Dr. Mitchell came to Rapid city and the governor cut his budget by 10 percent, Hansen said. By the time we were done it was down to a 6.6 percent budget cut and he and the business manager kept the districts employees employed." Mitchells contract with the Rapid City school district ends on June 30 this year. His replacement, Lori Simon of Robbinsdale Area Schools in New Hope, Minn., starts the next day. Simon was hired recently after a national search. Hearings in criminal case against eccentric artist Pavlensky to begin on April 28 MOSCOW, April 21 (RAPSI, Diana Gutsul) Preliminary hearings in the criminal case against Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky, accused of setting fire to the Moscow headquarters of the Federal Security Service (FSB), will begin on April 28, Pavlenskys lawyer Dmitriy Dinze told RAPSI on Thursday. According to investigators, on the night of November 8, 2015, Pavlensky threw a petrol can upon the front door of the FSB headquarters in central Moscow which is a heritage building, according to the statement of the Prosecutor Generals Office. On April 5, Pavlensky filed an appeal against his detention with the European Court of Human Rights. Earlier, the Tagansky District Court in Moscow extended the detention of Pavlensky until May 5. The artist said that charges against him had been reclassified from vandalism to destruction of cultural heritage sites. Investigators reclassified the charges because many prominent men have been repressed in this building, Pavlensky said. The arson caused an estimated 480,000 rubles ($7,000) of damage. Pavlenskys lawyer Dmitriy Dinze told RAPSI earlier this move by the investigation cant be viewed as either easing or tightening of charges. Both articles of the Criminal Code provide the same maximum prison sentence of three years. Pavlensky has been found sane; he would not face compulsory treatment in a mental hospital. Eccentric artist Pavlensky was arrested on November 9, 2015, along with several other people who claim to be journalists that were invited to the artists performance. The next day Pavlensky was detained under a court decision. In late November, his detention was extended until May 5. Pavlensky is known for a number of controversial performances. In July 2012, he sewed up his mouth and stood at the Kazan Cathedral with a poster in support of Pussy Riot. In May 2013, Pavlensky lay down on the ground in front of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly naked with barbed wire around his body. In November 2013, also naked, Pavlensky nailed his scrotum to the Red Square pavement near the Lenin Mausoleum. In October 2014, he staged an eccentric stunt on the roof of the Serbsky Mental Institution in Moscow by cutting off one of his earlobes. In February 2015, Pavlensky and his accomplices burned car tyres, waved Ukrainian flags and banged sheet metal with sticks in a show of solidarity with the anti-government protesters in Ukraine. The performance was held near the Church of the Savior on Blood in St. Petersburg. Cypriot firm appeals against recovery of $30.5 mln in favor of Trust Bank MOSCOW, April 21 (RAPSI) Cyprus-based TIB Investments Limited has appealed against a court ruling ordering it to pay 1,996 billion rubles (about $30.5 mln) in favor of Trust Bank, according to court records. Yet in March, the court fully complied with the Trust Banks demand to recover the amount of the claim. At the same time, the court dismissed a counterclaim put forward by the foreign company, which sought to declare four deliverable forward contracts, subject to the banks monetary claim, void due to the allegedly fictitious nature of the transaction. According to the court papers, National Bank Trust petitioned to recover the amount of exchange difference with regard to forward contracts signed on June 23, 2009, as part of a general agreement on lending and foreign exchange transactions. Under these forward contracts, in 2009 and 2010 the bank transferred ruble-denominated funds to its sister (as defined by the court) affiliated company TIB Investments Limited to purchase dollars. The deal envisaged the delivery of purchased amounts of foreign currency in 2011 to 2016; however, the transaction had not been carried through. The claimants counsel maintained that these transactions were to disadvantage to the bank, since dollars were being bought at 35 rubles, whereas dollar market price was at 29 rubles. The former management of the bank, affiliated, according to the counsel, with the Cyprus-based company, was aware of this fact. In his turn, the representative of the Cypriot firm stated that the transactions he petitioned to declare void on the grounds of their fictitious nature resulted from an agreement between parties not to carry the deal through and that no movement of funds had ever occurred under these contracts. As reported earlier, in another lawsuit the court ruled that the deals made between the bank and TIB Investments Limited on June 23, 2009, were fictitious and aimed at the transfer of unrealized profits derived under TRS transactions to the sister company located in a low-tax jurisdiction. The court upheld the banks claim pointing out that the terms of forward contracts envisaged not only delivery of dollars on the part of defendant, but also delivery of rubles on the part of claimant on certain dates of currency valuation. Thus, the claimant was obliged to pay the defendant 2.39 bln rubles, whereas the defendant was obliged to pay the claimant $71,508 mln. As on March 19, 2015 (the date the defendant received notification), the exchange ruble/dollar rate was at 61.3483. Applying this exchange rate to the defendants liabilities, the amount thereof made 4.387 bln rubles, and, therefore, the difference was at 1.996 bln rubles. As concerned the counterclaim put forward by the foreign company, the court pointed out that the defendant could not contest some transactions as these moves were barred by the statute of limitations. The court dismissed the defendants arguments with regard to the fictitious nature of transactions. The court also noted that the ruling in another lawsuit could not prejudice this case as the Cypriot company had not participated in a tax dispute between the bank and a tax inspection office. For the first half of 2015, Trust bank filed about 20 lawsuits against companies registered in the offshore jurisdictions worth over 32 billion rubles ($464.5 mln) and over $94 million. Business media outlets reported that some of these companies were associated with the former owners of the bank. Midsized lender Trust Bank reported losses of 18.8 billion rubles (about $273 mln) in 2014 amid the financial crisis. As of December 1, 2014, its assets were estimated at over 290 billion rubles ($4.2 bln). The Central Bank estimated that the banks debts exceeded the value of its assets by 67.8 billion rubles ($984 mln). In late December 2014, the Central Bank of Russia decided to reorganize Trust Bank, which at that time was on the list of the top 30 Russian banks, placing it under the temporary supervision of the Deposit Insurance Agency. FC Otkrytie Bank, part of Otkritie Holding, was selected as a bridge bank. Russian senator proposes ban on using figures and symbols in names MOSCOW, April 21 (RAPSI) - Valentina Petrenko, member of the Federation Council, Russias upper house of parliament, has submitted a bill to the State Duma that would prohibit the use of figures, symbols, abbreviation and obscene words in names, RIA Novosti reported on Thursday. Current legislation gives full rein to parents in choosing names for their babies. Registry authorities are not entitled to deny registration of a childs name because of its injuriousness, roughness, disharmony or difficulties in pronouncing. At the same time, existing law does not include principles obliging parents to give their children only those names which do not violate their rights and interests. According to the registry authorities statistics since 1998, Nikolai-Nikita-Nil, Christamrirados, Dolphin, Yaroslav-Lyutobor, Luka-Shchastye (Luka-Happiness), Summerset Ocean, are among the strangest boys names. The most unusual girls names registered during this period are April, Polina-Polina, Princess Daniella, Zarya-Zaryanitsa (Dawn), Alyosha-Kaprina, Oceana, Sophia-Solnyshko (Sophia-Sunshine). The biggest uproar, now over 10 years old, involves parents who named their child BOC rVF 260602, which loosely means a biological object of the human species from the Voronin-Frolov family, born 26 June 2002. Little BOC, as he is called, has no documents up to date because the court ruled in favor of a Moscow civil registration office that refused to register the child with this name to protect his interests, Petrenko said. The proposed bill will make it possible to ensure more efficient protection of childrens constitutional rights and statutory interests to a name. Russian lawmakers propose to extend capital amnesty until June 2017 MOSCOW, April 21 (RAPSI) A group of lawmakers representing the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) submitted to the State Duma a bill that would extend capital amnesty until June 30, 2017, according to the database of the lower house of parliament. Amnesty for capital returning to Russia was announced in June 2015. In December 2015, President Vladimir Putin signed a law extending the amnesty until June 30, 2016. The law on amnesty for capital creates a legal framework to encourage the voluntary declaration of property and personal accounts by individuals, including those registered to nominal holders. The property as defined in the legislation includes real estate, securities, and shares and units of corporate capital and the declaration of foreign-controlled companies. The applicants are to be relieved from criminal, administrative and customs liability for property-related offenses, but only with respect to the declared property. We would like to take a moment and exercise our First Amendment rights (while we still can) for the well-being of our (divided) communities, and talk about the Muslim issue that has come into our valley. It is important to become educated, especially those who have been elected or appointed to boards, councils and panels, that are in a decision making position, that can affect the safety and welfare of the people that elected them to that position. We would strongly urge anyone, especially those in leadership, and even those who have a mindset to only hear only one side, to educate themselves, not by just listening to a Muslim professor, who has gone to a lot of trouble (creating anger and division) to present his agenda. I would strongly encourage those who say we and our children need to become educated and learn this culture. To anyone who honestly wants to become educated, Google jihad watch, and there you can watch some of gruesome videos, like a Muslim woman holding up a childs head she cut off, in the name of Allah. (Allah being the Muslim god) Or watch the video, of a lady being stoned to death after a short trial for adultery. And you can learn whats going on in the Muslim world by going to religion for peace. Or for a quick rundown, Google Muslim woman asks panel a question she probably wish she wouldnt have. This outstanding video shows an educated lady on a panel to discuss those who are dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization and how we should worry about the radicals, that behead and massacre and how this can happen when being deceived, with invasive peaceful cultures. This video starts out looking at some history which too many Americans know little or care about. And how their are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world with up to 25 percent being radical. That number being the population of the United States. It is then explained: most Germans were peaceful. Yet the Nazis with their agenda resulted in 60 million people dead. Most Russians are peaceful yet they were able to kill 20 million people. Looking at China, most were peaceful but yet the Chinese were able to kill 70 million people. Look at Japan before World War II most were peaceful yet they were able to butcher their way across southeast Asia, killing 12 million people, mostly killed with bayonets and shovels. Yet the peaceful majority were irrelevant. On 9/11 we had 2.3 million Arab Muslims living in the U.S., yet it took 19 radicals to bring America down to its knees, destroying the World Trade Center and attacking the Pentagon, killing almost 3,000 people but yet the peaceful majority were irrelevant. The 162,300,000 murders may only be a fraction. Putting those radical murders into perspective, is more than all of the population in Montana 162 times. America (who are now 4.4 percent of the worlds population and that being divided) needs to get their head out of the sand and educate themselves, before history repeats itself, and we are no longer safe in our own homes. How many times in past history have the (divided) peaceful been told by the radicals, were moving in and youre moving out. Now the peaceful have become refugees. And dont forget the words of Jesus. Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation. Larry and Sandy Rose Darby Sagarmatha Network Pvt. Ltd. is the organization dedicated in the field of printing, publishing service since 2001. As part of media, we've been publishing Review Nepal, an English medium weekly registered at District Administration Office (DAO) Kathmandu with registration number 130-162-163 and reviewnepal.com as an online digital newspaper, with registration number 849-075-076 at Department of Informational and Broadcasting (DIB) from Kathmandu, Nepal since 2003. King Mohammed VI of Morocco arrived on Tuesday in Riyadh to take part, together with the leaders of the six member countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, in the Morocco-GCC summit. The summit, the first of its kind, aims to give a new momentum to the multidimensional strategic partnership binding Morocco to its Gulf partners. It is also an opportunity to deepen consultation and coordination of standpoints to take up the challenges and threats facing the Arab region, to exchange views on regional and international issues of shared interest and to adopt common stands on these issues, especially in this delicate regional and international context, as highlighted in the statement issued Monday in Rabat by the Moroccan Ministry of the Royal Household, Protocol and Chancellery. At the geostrategic level, the close cooperation between Morocco and each of the six GCC countries proved to be very fruitful and mutually beneficial. Morocco is politically and militarily engaged, since March 2015, in the Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia to support the legitimate government in Yemen against the Shiite Houthi rebels. The Kingdom of Morocco was also asked to join the Arab Common Defense Force set up to address the terrorist threats and to face up any foreign conspiracy targeting any Arab country. On their part, GCC States do not skimp on providing all the necessary financial support to Morocco for its socio-economic development. On the political and diplomatic level, Morocco is assured of its Gulf partners firm support to the autonomy proposal for the Sahara, a support that was renewed earlier this month by the foreign ministers of the GCC countries at a meeting they held in Manama, Bahrain, with US Secretary of State John Kerry. These are some of the actions undertaken part of the strategic and multidimensional partnership sealed between Morocco and the six Arab Gulf countries since 2011. After the Riyadh summit, King Mohammed VI plans to pay brotherly and working visits to several Arab countries in the region. These visits are likely to further strengthen bilateral cooperation between Morocco and each of these countries. Here's what the new Docking State Office Building could look like If you are currently a print subscriber but don't have an online account, select this option. You will need to use your 7 digit subscriber account number (with leading zeros) and your last name (in UPPERCASE). Brennan Center provides a (suspect?) "final analysis" of crime in 2015 | Main | Federal district court declines to consider acquitted conduct at sentencing "based on the implication of Sixth Amendment guarantees" April 21, 2016 Economists explain "Why Mass Incarceration Doesnt Pay" Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, have this new New York Times commentary headlined "Why Mass Incarceration Doesnt Pay." Here are excerpts: Congress is considering bipartisan legislation to loosen tough sentencing laws. The bill faces resistance from some lawmakers. As economists who differ on many issues, we both agree that costbenefit analysis provides a useful framework for analyzing complicated questions. And in this case, we agree that the verdict of such analysis is clear: Our sentencing rules are failing and need to be changed. On the benefit side of the equation, prisons and jails play an essential role in managing violent criminals and reducing crime, particularly helping people in poor communities who are the most likely to be victims of murder, robbery or other violent crimes. But a general rule in economics the law of diminishing marginal benefits applies to incarcerating additional people or adding years to sentences. Research finds that more incarceration has, at best, only a small effect on crime because our incarceration rate is already so high. As the prison population gets larger, the additional prisoner is more likely to be a less risky, nonviolent offender, and the value of incarcerating him (or, less likely, her) is low. The same general principle applies to the length of prison sentences, which in many cases have gotten longer as a result of sentence enhancements, repeatoffender laws, three strikes laws and truth-in-sentencing laws. Longer sentences do not appear to have a deterrent effect; one study finds, for example, that the threat of longer sentences has little impact on juvenile arrest rates. Other studies have found that sentencing enhancements have only modest effects on crime. They are unlikely to meaningfully affect the overall crime rate or generate meaningful gains in public safety. Moreover, in many cases the analysis suggests that adding prisoners or years to sentences can be harmful. A growing body of research shows that incarceration and longer sentences could increase recidivism. Individuals may build criminal ties while incarcerated, lose their labor-market skills and confront substantial obstacles to reentry after release. A new study finds that each additional year of incarceration increases the likelihood of reoffending by four to seven percentage points after release. The bottom line: The putative benefits of more incarceration or longer sentences are actually costs. Those costs are not confined to the prison population. Time in prison not only means a loss of freedom, but it also means a loss of earnings, risks to the health and safety of the incarcerated, and prolonged absences from family that can strain marriages and increase behavioral problems in children. The probability that a family is in poverty increases by nearly 40 percent while a father is incarcerated.... Finally, more than $80 billion is spent annually on corrections, or over $600 per household. The annual cost of imprisoning one person averages approximately $30,000 for adults and $110,000 for juveniles, higher than the cost of a year of college. At the federal level, the Bureau of Prisons budget grew 1,700 percent from 1980 to 2010 and now devours more than 25 percent of the entire Department of Justice budget. There are other tools that can reduce crime more cost-effectively, including promoting employment and wage growth and investing in education. That is one reason that between 2008 and 2012, a majority of states were able to reduce incarceration and crime. Incarceration plays an important role in promoting public safety, and imposing prison sentences for criminal conduct has moral and practical dimensions. But the criminal justice system should be designed to ensure that the benefits of incarceration exceed the costs. Individuals incarcerated for nonviolent drug crimes 50 percent of the federal prison population pose a low risk, and the costs of incarcerating these people outweigh the benefits. Similarly, since criminal behavior declines and costs increase with age, releasing older individuals who have already served lengthy sentences is also likely to yield net benefits. April 21, 2016 at 12:08 PM | Permalink Comments Stiff sentences, and the threat of stiff sentences, was a big part of breaking the back of the Mafia in NYC. And what do these guys mean by non-violent drug dealers--are they only talking about the drug offense for which they are federally incarcerated? Wendell Callahan, a felon with a history of serious violence, was deemed to be a "non-violent drug offender." Doug, would you agree with that assessment of Mr. Callahan? I totally agree, btw, that a prison bed is a scarce resource and should be used wisely and that there are substantial "soft" costs associated with imprisonment, but there are a lot of soft costs with the decreased incapacitation. And anecdotally, there are so so so many stories about people who got lenient sentences for serious crimes and then went on to hurt others. Posted by: federalist | Apr 21, 2016 12:53:21 PM "was" s/b "were" Posted by: federalist | Apr 21, 2016 12:53:45 PM Mass incarceration does pay. The Catholics at Mass really can not leave until the plate has been passed and they all pay up. Posted by: BarkinDog | Apr 21, 2016 12:54:56 PM In my area, drugs are common. Locally they just build a rap sheet and give probation. Then when they really mess up, boom, send them to the Feds and their life is pretty much gone. 3 strikes for drugs, 3-4 of them. Within 1000 ft, difficult not to be. A school, play ground or park. Lots of rough areas were converted into plagrounds. Even though they were 800 ft away and playgrounds are out of sight, they get 2 levels. Psuedo converts to Marjuana equiv, its 5 times higher than street meth, not pure. So if theyve dumped the empty bluster packs, get a much lower sentence. Crack dudes got a 2 level drop with the 100-1 ratio. Meth should get a 2 level drop. I know a drugs -2 was just made retro active, but hey arent white lives important also. All I hear is the Naacp and how blacks are impovershed. The mandatories need to go. Bill Otis camp ie: Sen Grassley says they need them to for e terrorists to comply. Great, then make it be a requirement to only use them for terrorists. Federal inmates serve 5 times longer sentences than state inmates. That pretty much sums it up. Also Federal supervised release is 3-4 times longer than state parole/probation. Its very difficult to get out if the federal system, once your in. So, yes I Agree we over sentenceing terribly at the federal level. But look at how many jobs will be lost if lower sentences. Private corporTions that lobbly for longer sentences so they protect there livlihood. So thats another got ya. With the FSA they added 2 level i creSe for running a drug house. Posted by: MidWestGuy | Apr 21, 2016 6:58:16 PM Post a comment Economists explain "Why Mass Incarceration Doesnt Pay" | Main | "Restoring Human Capabilities After Punishment: Our Political Responsibilities Toward Incarcerated Americans" April 21, 2016 Federal district court declines to consider acquitted conduct at sentencing "based on the implication of Sixth Amendment guarantees" A helpful reader alerted me to a notable new federal district court opinion handed down yesterday by Judge Mark Mastroianni in US v. Buffis, No. 13-30028-MGM (D. Mass. April 20, 2016) (available for download below). The full opinion runs only eight pages and federal sentencing fans will want to read it in full. These snippets should highlight why: The government has filed a motion requesting the court sentence the defendant based on the totality of his misconduct. Specifically, the government is requesting the court sentence the defendant based on charged conduct for which he was acquitted by the jury, several incidents of uncharged behavior, and conduct initially charged but dismissed before trial. The superseding indictment against the defendant charged twelve counts; defendant was convicted of the first count, the twelfth was dismissed, and defendant was acquitted of counts two through eleven. The general nature of the Governments case against the defendant involves his extortion and theft of funds, while in his role as Chief of Police for the Town of Lee.... The government advocates for legally appropriate sentencing considerations to affect the defendants sentence on the one convicted charge. The governments motive, however, is to sentence the defendant based generally on its belief, after a largely unsuccessful prosecution, that the defendant is a longtime thief and a brazen liar.... [B]road recognition of a sentencing courts authority to consider acquitted conduct comes from the holding in United States v. Watts, 519 U.S. 148, 157 (1997) (per curiam).... The wisdom of interpreting Watts, under Sixth Amendment scrutiny, as even creating an available option for considering acquitted conduct at sentencing has been often questioned.... In Watts, the Court explained that consideration of acquitted conduct is not punishment for that conduct, noting the acquittal did not technically prove innocence, but, rather, is the causal increase of sentence based on the manner of commission of the crime convicted. Watts, 519 U.S. at 154-55. Established law under Watts allows a judge to decline to consider acquitted conduct at sentencing. This court has difficulty reconciling Watts with the burden of proof and presumption of innocence standards, which align an acquittal more naturally with factual innocence than with a guileful avoidance of justice deserving of a penalty. This court, therefore, declines to consider acquitted conduct in this case based on the implication of Sixth Amendment guarantees. Additionally, under the facts here, I am not satisfied the acquitted conduct has useful relevance to the consideration of the manner in which the defendant committed the crime for which he was convicted. This relevance of the crimes to the manner of commission is the connection emphasized by the court in Watts. 519 U.S. at 154-55. In this case the jury, by special verdict form, indicated the manner it found the defendant to have committed a single act of extortion. Based on the jury's verdict form, the court knows the manner of commission found by the jury for the only convicted charge. None of the acquitted charges speak to the manner of commission of the extortion. Rather, the acquitted conduct would describe a motive and pattern of scheming and dishonesty to accomplish theft generally. This is unlike relying on acquitted conduct at sentencing to find that a firearm was possessed at the time of a drug crime and connected to its commission. See Watts, 519 U.S. at 154-55; Gobi, 471 F.3d at 313-14. Nor is this a situation like that of a drug case where acquitted conduct could be relevant to the manner of commission by showing the total weight of drugs involved. United States v. Putra, 78 F.3d 1386, 1388-89 (9th Cir. 1996), reversed by 117 S. Ct. 633 (1997). Download Buffis - Court's sentencing decision April 21, 2016 at 03:29 PM | Permalink Comments Finally, a sentencing Judge with heart and common sense! When I was in prison, I saw people with life sentences, based upon the use of acquitted conduct (particularly drug quantities). Without the acquitted conduct, the sentences might have been only 10 years. Posted by: Jim Gormley | Apr 21, 2016 3:34:27 PM Watts has to be one of the most infamously wrong cases decided by SCOTUS in modern times. Unlike cases like Citizens United that had been telegraphed by prior precedents for years, this one is squarely at odds with a whole body of jurisprudence on related issues. Posted by: ohwilleke | Apr 21, 2016 5:50:49 PM Why is Watts wrong? Seems like an easy case to me--that conduct wasn't proven BRD doesn't mean a judge, when considering a sentence, cannot make a finding that it did, in fact, happen and hence increase the sentence. I agree that a judge can, and should, take into consideration the fact that a jury didn't see things the prosecution's way. It's real easy to complain about "acquitted conduct"--but the complaint really doesn't translate well into legal rules. What is the scope of the conduct that is "acquitted"--just the elements of the crime, the facts alleged to prove up the elements? What about inconsistent verdicts? And, are judges really supposed to ignore evidence put directly in front of them? That seems completely at odds with reality. And, are we going to then have legal rules on sentencing statements/judicial discretion--remember, if this is a Sixth Amendment right, then it would apply to all methods of sentencing. The objection to acquitted conduct being used seems to me to be more of an "it's not fair" foot-stomp than anything else. Posted by: federalist | Apr 21, 2016 6:00:04 PM Post a comment Horse and donkey shoes, whale bones, and a tooth from a prehistoric monster shark called a megalodon: The SF Public Utilities Commission dug all that up and more, but according to CBS SF, the scariest thing crews have found since they began work on the massive Calaveras dam project in 2011, moving nearly 7 million yards of dirt and rock, were sticks of dynamite. They called in the Alameda bomb squad for that one but the dynamite, which like donkey shoes came from the original construction crews long ago, were harmless. The $810 million dam construction project, a replacement of the existing dam as an earthquake safety measure, hit a milestone with the recent completion of a spillway. "The goal is to return the Calaveras Reservoir to its historic capacity of 31 billion gallons," Betsy Lauppe Rhodes of the Hetch Hetchy Regional Water System tells the Chronicle. SFPUC via Facebook "In 2001 we lowered the levels of Calaveras Reservoir to 40% out of seismic safety concerns for the existing 91-year-old dam," said Rhodes. "Restoring it to its historic capacity with a new dam is crucial in times of drought and also when Hetch Hetchy supplies are unavailable for any reason." For the project, which is set to be completed in 2019, there's still more dirt to move and perhaps treasure to be found. SFPUC via Facebook Related: Poster Lake Of The Drought, Lake Oroville, Gains 17 Feet Of Water In 10 Days While a move approved yesterday to increase ticket prices by 50 percent at two premiere San Francisco museums might be seen as something of an art heist, the de Young Museum and Legion of Honor are framing the situation as more of a Robin Hood deal thing. The Chronicle writes that the trustees who oversee the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, institutions owned and operated by the city and county, are justifying the coming price hike from $10 to $15 for general admission by arguing that the increased revenue will balance out a number of offerings. Those include free first Tuesdays, which are offered monthly at both museums, and access days, which grant free admission to people with disabilities on Mondays when the museum is closed to the general public. The piece de resistance? Following the example of SFMOMA, which will begin the practice when it opens on May 14, children under 18 will be admitted for free. In the past, tickets for minors were $6. Senior admission will also rise, from $7 to $10. Museum members, who pay an annual fee, will still receive free access at current prices. All ticket price changes go into effect on July 1. Nonetheless, the trustees note, admission to the de Young and Legion of Honor will remain cheaper than admission to SFMOMA: $25 general admission and $22 for seniors. Meanwhile, the museums' board will meet very quietly, to be sure to go over an investigation by state Attorney General Kamala Harris into a severance package provided to a retired engineer. That bit of unflattering attention was brought on by Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco President Dede Wilsey, who cut the check, and most recently, the retired engineer, who was married to a friend and employee of Wilsey's, died in Oakland, complicating matters somewhat. Related: Oh Dear, Dede: Recipient Of Contested deYoung Payment Dies, Prompting New Call For Reimbursement Here's What To Expect When SFMOMA Finally, Finally Reopens In May Attending City College would be free for San Francisco residents under a new proposal announced yesterday by Supervisor Jane Kim. The measure, which would need to be first approved by the Board of Supervisor before then being placed on the November ballot, could be implemented as soon as the fall of next year and would eliminate tuition fees for many. San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the world - the cost of living has increased exponentially," wrote Kim in a press release announcing the measure. "When students have to make the choice between paying rent or paying tuition, buying groceries or buying textbooks, we have to act. Higher education isnt a luxury - its a fundamental necessity if we want San Franciscans to be able to compete in the 21st century workplace and we have a plan that can fully fund this proposal to help over 20,000 students from all walks of life, of all ages, to pursue their dreams. City College used to be free, but over the years has increased its enrollment fees to $1,104, not including text books and other costs. When I attended City College, it was free," observed Supervisor Norman Yee in support of the measure. "When I taught at City College, it was affordable. However, over the past decades, the College has become less accessible to those who need it most." The Chronicle notes that this move might have the added benefit of helping the college build back up its student population, a number that has been on the steady decline ever since the school's struggles to retain its accreditation began in 2013. Under the plan, enrollment fees (as they're called) would also be waived for people who work at least half-time in the city. The plan is expected to cost $12.8 million, and, if passed, would be paid for via a so-called "mansion tax." According to the press release, the mansion tax "will increase the transfer tax in San Francisco by one-quarter of one percent for all property sales, commercial or residential, valued at $5M+ and creating an entirely new bracket of 3% for property sales valued at $25M+." People talk about inequality in San Francisco, and a big part of it is educational inequality," observed CCSF student Vivek Narayan. "This would be the most powerful tool in making strides toward greater opportunity for all." Related: City College Officials Say Facilities Need $270 Million Worth Of 'Emergency' Repairs They keep on coming: The San Francisco Metro Area saw an influx of 60,000 people last year, indicating that nothing not nationally scorned housing prices, not reports of the death of our culture, or whatever can keep them away. But where is everybody coming from? SpareFoot, a Texas-based storage company locator website, wanted to know, probably to recommend their services to those on the move. Using census data over the five year period from 2009-2013, these were their findings. #advertisement Check out SF's Best Movers First, the top five counties of origin for those moving from outside of California. 1. New York, NY (Manhattan) - 3.5% (of all movers) 2. King County, WA (Seattle) - 2.2% 3. Cook County, IL (Chicago) - 1.9% 4. Suffolk County, MA (Boston) - 1.6% 5. Middlesex County, MA (Cambridge) - 1.2% Next, for those making an intrastate move, these were the most common counties that new San Franciscans hailed from were: 1. San Mateo County - 11.8% 2. Alameda County - 10% 3. Santa Clara County - 9.35% 4. Los Angeles County - 7.1% 5. San Diego County - 4% So, between 2009 and 2013, according to Census data (it's actually American Community Survey estimates because there was only one Census in 2010, but...), 1,773 New Yorkers transplanted themselves here, while 1,115 people came from Seattle, 962 came from Chicago, and 3,583 came from LA. Also, a not inconsiderable 2,032 moved here from San Diego. Maybe it's all not much to worry about. After all, everyone who is anyone in tech is packing up and heading to New York right? Related: San Francisco Metro Area Population Grew By 60,000 Last Year Lots Of Tech Talent Trying To Leave SF For NY SIOUX CITY | While creditors line up for a possible foreclosure, the owner of the Riviera 4 Theatre is looking into options for the downtown movie theater's future. Owner Eric Hilsabeck said he could not yet discuss specifics about what may happen to the second-run theater, but an announcement could be made soon. "We are exploring several options with the future of the Riviera Theatre right now," Hilsabeck said in a statement Wednesday. Security National Bank has asked for a judgment of foreclosure and sale of the property at 714 Fourth St. to repay nearly $400,000 that Hilsabeck and Beck Theatres owes the bank. The bank filed a petition in Woodbury County District Court seeking foreclosure, saying Hilsabeck and Beck Theatres have defaulted on two loans. The city of Sioux City and a Delaware company also have taken legal action to recover money loaned to Hilsabeck. Hilsabeck reopened the Riviera as a second-run theater in 2004 after the building had briefly housed a night club. In 2009, the theater was renovated to increase the number of screens from two to four. According to its petition for foreclosure, Security National Bank loaned Beck Theatres and Hilsabeck $290,000 in December 2008, and a mortgage on the property was delivered to secure payment. Hilsabeck borrowed $145,000 from the bank in August 2012 to pay for digital equipment and accessories as part of an upgrade to digital technology in the theater. According to court documents, of the total $435,000 loaned by the bank, $371,719 plus $12,907 in interest was still owed as of Dec. 14. The city is hoping that if the property is sold, the sale price would be high enough to ensure it would recoup $20,000 it loaned to Hilsabeck and Beck Theatres. In October 2008, the city council voted 4-1 to loan $20,000 to Hilsabeck to help with the theater's renovation. Notice of default on that loan was sent to Hilsabeck in August, and court records show a current outstanding balance of $22,155. The city has turned the debt over to a collection agency. CAN Capital Inc., a Delaware corporation, also has filed a petition in Woodbury County seeking $37,915 it says Hilsabeck and Beck Theatres owe on a March 2015 loan. Hilsabeck and Beck Theatres purchased the Riviera property for $300,000 in 2008, according to city assessor's records. The land and building are currently assessed for property tax purposes at $408,600, according to the records. FORDYCE, Neb. | Officials have identified the man who died in a mobile home fire in northern Cedar County Wednesday afternoon as 70-year-old Daniel Leader, of Crofton. Cedar County Sheriff's Office, as well as fire departments from Yankton, South Dakota and Fordyce, Nebraska, responded at 2:30 p.m. Wednesday to a mobile home fire at 89520 Highway 81 in northern Cedar County, according to a news release from the Cedar County Sheriff's Office. Leader, the lone occupant of the mobile home, was located and pronounced dead at the scene, the release said. His cause of death has been ruled to be smoke inhalation. The fire remains under investigation by the Nebraska State Fire Marshal's Office and the Cedar County Sheriff's Office. SIOUX CITY | Fifty percent. Thats how much your chances of surviving a fire are improved when a working smoke detector is in the house, according to the Sioux City Fire Rescue. A blitz campaign of volunteers canvassing a neighborhood, going door-to-door to help install smoke detectors will be held on April 30. The American Red Cross event, the first of such a scale in Sioux City, will involve more than 100 volunteers visiting about 1,600 homes from Ninth to 18th streets, between Grandview and Floyd boulevards. Sioux City Fire Rescue Fire Marshal Mark Aesoph said those neighborhoods were chosen after analyzing fire call data. This area experiences a disproportional number of fires compared to the rest of the city, Aesoph said. The selected neighborhoods accounted for 7 percent of fires in 2015, and 13 percent from 2011 to 2014, despite being only 1 percent of the citys land mass. Tammy Lee, executive director of the North and Western Iowa Red Cross, said the local chapter works with local fire departments and community organizations for the door-to-door detector installation approach. Previous events have been held in Correctionville and Cushing. Volunteers include members of the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Sioux City Professional Firefighters Local 7 Association of International Firefighters Union. St. Florian Fire and Burn Foundation is also part of the event, and will host its second annual Burn Survivors Together that day. Two burn survivors and their families will also be visiting homes and helping with smoke detector installations. We know having a working smoke alarm is important toward survival if a fire happens at your home, Lee said. Detectors in rental housing are sometimes not installed properly or in the right location, or have had the batteries taken out after the alarm trips due to cooking, Lee said. Teams will have three to five volunteers per group, working with residents of the home, educating them on fire safety while another person installs the smoke detector. They will also talk to residents about an escape plan should a fire occur. We have 80 documented cases of people who were saved from one of these projects, Lee said. Between 2000 to 2015, there were 12 fire deaths and 114 fire injuries in Sioux City residences over 88 incidents, Aesoph said. Of those, only one death occurred in a home with a working smoke alarm and 16 injuries occurred in residences with working smoke alarms, most of which were burns from cooking fires, he said. Youve looked at your options for financing your new business and youve decided that your best bet is to find an angel investor an individual who invests his or her own money in your company. Now you have to find one. How do you do that? If you are looking for an accredited angel investor a person whose income or net worth exceeds thresholds that lead the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to view them as financially sophisticated and therefore exempt from certain disclosure requirements and other forms of government protection you have three choices of where to go: Angel groups Online platforms Individuals The process of finding each of these is different. How To Find An Angel Investor Finding an Angel Group Angel groups are organizations of individual investors who have invest together. According to the Angel Capital Association (ACA),the industry trade association, there are nearly 250 angel groups in the United States. Some of these are set up as funds and others as more loosely structured networks, but because they are organized groups, most of them have websites and a mechanism to submit funding requests to them. In fact, the ACA conveniently provides a directory that lists most U.S.-based angel groups on their website. Finding an Online Platform Online platforms are websites that provide information on businesses seeking funding. Angel investors use these portals identify businesses in which they would like to invest. Some of these platforms focus exclusively on accredited investors, while others will begin to allow non-accredited investors invest, beginning in late May when the SECs rules for non-accredited investor crowdfunding go into effect. In addition, some of these platforms are curated, and select only a small fraction of submissions for posting, while others are open and merely make the information about startups seeking financing available to potential investors. The ACA lists many of the platforms focused on accredited investors on their website. Some other online sources identify a variety of crowdfunding platforms, including non-accredited investor equity crowdfunding sites. Finding Individual Angels Most accredited angel investors are not part of an angel group or online platform. The ACA reports that the membership in angel groups is approximately 13,000 people, while SeedInvest, one of the larger accredited investor platforms, and one that I have invested through, reports roughly 17,000 investors. By contrast, the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire indicates that there were just under 150,000 active angel investors in the United States in the middle of 2015. Identifying appropriate individual angel investors is much more difficult than finding online platforms or angel groups. One strategy is to conduct an online search. AngelList is a website that matches investors and entrepreneurs and includes about 25,000 investors. Moreover, a search of the term angel investor on LinkedIn brought up just over 30,000 profiles at the time I was writing this column. Examining profiles on these two sites can help find entrepreneurs to identify and find an angel investor. Once entrepreneurs know which investors they want to reach, they can network to get a warm introduction to the financiers. A couple of my portfolio companies have used this approach to find me. Another strategy is to approach people you know who have connections to angels in your community. Promising targets are lawyers and accountants that do a lot of work with young companies, venture capitalists and angel investors, and directors of accelerators and incubators in your area. All of these people should know the angel investors in your area. 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 Daniel Phillip Brown, 19, of Waldorf. (Booking photo) LA PLATA, Md. Disclaimer: In the U.S.A., all persons accused of a crime by the State are presumed to be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. See: http://so.md/presumed-innocence. Additionally, all of the information provided above is solely from the perspective of the respective law enforcement agency and does not provide any direct input from the accused or persons otherwise mentioned. You can find additional information about the case by searching the Maryland Judiciary Case Search Database using the accused's name and date of birth. The database is online at http://so.md/mdcasesearch . Persons named who have been found innocent or not guilty of all charges in the respective case, and/or have had the case ordered expunged by the court can have their name, age, and city redacted by following the process defined at http://so.md/expungeme. (April 21, 2016)The Charles County Sheriff's Office released the following incident and arrest reports.CCSO DETECTIVES IDENTIFY AND ARREST ROBBERY SUSPECT: On April 14, detectives assigned to the CCSO Criminal Investigations Division arrested, in connection with three recent armed robberies of businesses. Sheriff Troy D. Berry said solid forensics work and good investigative skills led to the quick apprehension of the suspect. Brown is charged with robbing two convenience stores and a liquor store between April 12 and April 13. Evidence was recovered from the scene that led to Brown's identity. Detectives conducted a search warrant at Brown's house and recovered evidence linking him to the crime, to include a handgun. Det. C. Gregory investigated.CCSO INVESTIGATING TWO ROBBERIES / CHARLES COUNTY CRIME SOLVERS OFFERING CASH REWARD: On April 19 at 11:49 p.m., officers responded to the McDonald's Restaurant, located in the 3300 block of Leonardtown Road in Waldorf, for the report of an armed robbery. Investigation revealed a lone male suspect entered the restaurant, displayed a handgun, and demanded money. The cashier complied, and the suspect fled. A short time later, another robbery was reported at the Wawa in the 11500 block of Berry Road. In that case, a lone male suspect entered the store, displayed a handgun, and demanded money. He fled toward Route 228. Officers responded, canvassed the area, and recovered evidence. Investigators believe the same suspect is responsible for both robberies. The suspect is described as a black male in his late teens to mid-twenties, 5'8", and wearing dark clothing and a cloth garment that covered a portion of his face. Anyone with information is asked to call Det. J. Feldman at (301) 609-6474. Tipsters wishing to remain anonymous may contact Crime Solvers by calling 1-866-411-TIPS, texting CHARLES + the tip to CRIMES (274637) or submitting tips online at tipsubmit.com. Crime Solvers is offering a $1,000 cash reward for tips that lead to an arrest in this case. PRINCE FREDERICK, Md. Disclaimer: In the U.S.A., all persons accused of a crime by the State are presumed to be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. See: http://so.md/presumed-innocence. Additionally, all of the information provided above is solely from the perspective of the respective law enforcement agency and does not provide any direct input from the accused or persons otherwise mentioned. You can find additional information about the case by searching the Maryland Judiciary Case Search Database using the accused's name and date of birth. The database is online at http://so.md/mdcasesearch . Persons named who have been found innocent or not guilty of all charges in the respective case, and/or have had the case ordered expunged by the court can have their name, age, and city redacted by following the process defined at http://so.md/expungeme. (April 21, 2016)The Calvert County Sheriff's Office released the following incident and arrest reports.WEEKLY SUMMARY: During the week of April 11 through April 17, deputies responded to 1,537 calls for service throughout the community.CDS VIOLATION CASE #16-20791: On April 11, Deputy J. Livingston was dispatched to the Wawa located at Market Square Drive in Prince Frederick for a subject in the front parking spot slumped over the steering wheel. Upon arrival, a citizen approached and stated that the subject was now in front of the Petco. The subject, later identified as, was under the influence of CDS. She was transported to the CCDC and charged with CDS possession with intent to Distribute, CDS possession-not Marijuana (Suboxone, Methadone, Amphetamine and Alprazolam), driving a vehicle while impaired by CDS, and other charges.CDS VIOLATION CASE #16-20828: On April 11, Deputy B. Boerum observed a vehicle speeding on Hallowing Point Rd near Yardley Dr. in Prince Frederick. The driver,, was arrested for CDS possession-not Marijuana (Heroin) and CDS possession paraphernalia (spoon) and (syringes). Ms. Johnson was transported to the CCDC.CDS VIOLATION CASE #16-20858: On April 12, Deputy T. Holt was dispatched to the rear parking lot of Fastop in St. Leonard for a suspicious vehicle., was arrested for CDS possession-not Marijuana (Alprazolam) and was transported to the CCDC.THEFT CASE #16-21051: On April 12, Deputy J. Denton responded to the Giant Store on Rousby Hall Rd. in Lusby for the report of a theft., was arrested for Theft less than $100.00, CDS possession-not Marijuana (Heroin) and (Crack Cocaine) and CDS possession paraphernalia (syringe). Ms. Dudley was transported to the CCDC.THEFT CASE #16-21646: On April 15, Deputy B. Robinson was dispatched to Fox Run Shopping Center in Prince Frederick for an unknown problem., was lying in the grass. After further investigation, Deputy Robinson was provided a false name and located stolen merchandise from K-Mart. Ms. Woomer was arrested for Theft less than $100 and False Statement to Peace Officer.THEFT CASE #16-20337: On April 9, Deputy J. Buck was dispatched to the Calvert Marina on Dowell Rd. in Solomons for the report of a stolen boat trailer. Sometime between September 18 and October 22, 2015 the victim's 1984 boat trailer (23-ft Galvanized NTT with red turf skids) was stolen.THEFT CASE #16-20696: On April 11, Deputy R. Kreps responded to the Calverton School in Huntingtown in reference to a theft. Sometime between April 8 3:30 p.m. and April 10 10:00 a.m., an unknown suspect(s) stole a 4' x 75' navy blue vinyl banner with white letters that said, "CALVERTON SCHOOL." It was taken from left field of the softball field.MOTOR VEHICLE THEFT CASE #16-21022: On April 12, Deputy G. Shrawder received a call for a stolen auto at Tranquil Court in Prince Frederick. The victim was working on his 1999 White Isuzu Rodeo in front of his residence around 5:30 p.m. The victim ran inside for a few minutes and when the victim returned, the vehicle was gone.BURGLARY CASE #16-21496: On April 14, Deputy A. Woodford responded to Small Reward Rd. in Huntingtown for a report of a burglary. The victim advised he heard the door that leads from the garage into the house open. The victim saw a white male that he did not know in his house. The male ran through the garage and through the yard. The male then got into an unknown pickup truck (dark in color) and sped off. PRINCE FREDERICK, Md. Disclaimer: In the U.S.A., all persons accused of a crime by the State are presumed to be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. See: http://so.md/presumed-innocence. Additionally, all of the information provided above is solely from the perspective of the respective law enforcement agency and does not provide any direct input from the accused or persons otherwise mentioned. You can find additional information about the case by searching the Maryland Judiciary Case Search Database using the accused's name and date of birth. The database is online at http://so.md/mdcasesearch . Persons named who have been found innocent or not guilty of all charges in the respective case, and/or have had the case ordered expunged by the court can have their name, age, and city redacted by following the process defined at http://so.md/expungeme. (April 21, 2016)The Prince Frederick Barrack of the Maryland State Police (MSP) released the following incident and arrest reports.CORRECTION: Bonnie L. Anderson of Prince Frederick was incorrectly reported as being arrested for drug charges on 4/4/2016. Ms. Anderson was not arrested and was released.DRUG TAKE BACK DAY APRIL 30: The DEA will host a Prescription Drug Take Back Day from 10 AM - 2 PM on April 30, 2016 at the Maryland State Police Barrack, 210 Main St., Prince Frederick. The DEA, as well as the Maryland State Police and the Calvert County Sheriff's Office, in a continuing effort to keep prescription medications out of the wrong hands sponsor Drug Take Back Days throughout the year. There is a drug take back box located in front of the Maryland State Police for anyone wishing to drop off unused prescription medications. Keeping a household free of unused prescription medications is an important step to curtailing the prescription drug abuse issue in Calvert County.POSSESSION OF COCAINE & ALPRAZOLAM: On 4/12/2016 at 9:24 pm, Trooper Megelick observed a vehicle in the center median at Rt. 4 and Parkers Creek Rd. in Port Republic. When assisting the driver to get the vehicle to a safer location on Parkers Creek Rd., Trooper Megelick smelled the strong odor of marijuana emitting from inside the vehicle. A Probable Cause Search revealed Cocaine, Marijuana, Alprazolam and Modafinil., was arrested for possession of CDS and drug paraphernalia. He was incarcerated at the Calvert County Detention Center.THEFT OF HANDGUNS: On 4/12/2016 at 10:01 pm, Trooper Megelick investigated the theft of two handguns from a residence in Chesapeake Beach. The owner was uncertain when the guns were taken. Investigation revealed a family member removed them from the home and sold them in Annapolis. Case will remain open for further investigation.BURGLARY: On 4/14/2016 at 5:22 pm, Trooper First Class Barlow responded to the 12000 block of Bunkhouse Road in Lusby for a reported burglary. The victim reported when arriving at the house he observed the door partially open. Investigation revealed damages to the door attempting to gain entry. The homeowner advised the animals inside the residence may have scared the intruder(s) away.DESTRUCTION OF PROPERTY: On 4/14/2016 at 5:40 pm, Trooper First Class Bray responded to the 1400 block of Bidwell Lane in Huntingtown for a reported malicious destruction of property. The victim observed two basement window screen frame were damaged in a failed attempt to gain entry. Investigation continues.BURGLARY: On 4/15/2016 at 10:31 am, Trooper Warrick responded to the Autozone in Dunkirk for a reported trespasser. An employee found a person sleeping in the building sprinkler room that morning. Investigation identified the person to be. Case remains open pending warrant service of Keller for burglary.DANGEROUS WEAPON WITH INTENT TO INJURE: On 4/17/2016 at 9:55 am, Trooper Warrick responded to the Hair Cuttery in Dunkirk for a reported assault., struck an employee multiple times during an assault. Another employee, in an attempt to prevent Bergendahl from leaving the store, was tasered by Bergendahl. A warrant for use of a dangerous weapon with intent to injure has been issued for Bergendahl and she was arrested on 4/18/2016.Anja T. Sigurdsson, 44, of Owings, arrested on 04/11/2016 @ 12:57 pm by CPL. M. NewmanAndrew S. Clubb, 21, of St. Leonard, arrested on 04/13/2016 @ 10:30 pm by TFC S. BarlowChristopher O. Smith, 43, of Huntingtown, arrested on 04/14/2016 @ 12:28 am by TFC T. NewcomerPaul A. Shippert, 60, of Port Republic, arrested on 04/15/2016 @ 05:42 pm by TFC B. BrayKrystle E. Thompson, 30, of Fairfax, Va., arrested on 04/15/2016 @ 08:27 pm by TFC C. EsnesMcKenzie K. Cullins, 21, of Pr. Frederick, arrested on 04/16/2016 @ 11:04 pm by TPR. P. KaitzFrederick Smith, 59, of Cheltenham, arrested on 04/16/2016 @ 08:04 pm by TPR. N. RuckerWilliam T. Adams, 28, of Washington, DC, arrested on 04/16/2016 @ 10:03 pm by TFC S. BarlowFatmata B. Manneh, 37, of Washington, DC, arrested on 04/16/2016 @ 11:52 pm by TFC B. BrayTerrance A. Thomas, 29, of Lusby , arrested on 04/17/2016 @ 12:59 am by TFC T. Newcomer Tropical Cyclone Amos EUMETSAT This Composite image of tropical cyclone Twenty (Amos) is from 09:00 UTC on Wednesday, 20 April 2016. Infrared data from the geostationary satellites of EUMETSAT, JMA and NOAA overlays a computer-generated model of the Earth, containing NASAs Blue Marble Next Generation imagery. According to NASA: Tropical Cyclone 20P, now named Amos, has continued to organize and strengthen in the Southern Pacific and is now threatening Pago Pago. NOAAs GOES-West satellite captured an image of the storm on April 21 as a Flash Flood Watch continued for all islands in American Samoa. From its geostationary position over the Eastern Pacific Ocean, NOAAs GOES-West satellite captured an image of Tropical Cyclone Amos near Fiji on April 21 at 1200 UTC (8 a.m. EDT) that showed the storm had developed a more organized circulation. The image was created by the NASA/NOAA GOES Project at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Animated multispectral satellite imagery showed that the low-level circulation center was slowly consolidating and there were strong thunderstorms obscuring a ragged but defined center. Microwave data showed that a well-defined eye feature had developed underneath the cloud cover. JTWC forecasters noted This excellent low-level structure, in combination with the radial outflow, suggests an Imminent rapid intensification phase. At 0900 UTC (5 a.m. EDT) Tropical Cyclone Amos maximum sustained winds had increased to 45 knots (51.7 mph/83.3 kph). The Joint Typhoon Warning Center noted that the storm appears to be intensifying rapidly and is expected to become a hurricane by April 22. Amos was centered near 13.0 degrees south latitude and 179.3 degrees west longitude, about 507 nautical miles (583.4 miles/939 km) west of Pago Pago, Samoa. Amos was moving to the southeast at 4 knots (4.6 mph/7.4 kph). The National Weather Service in Pago Pago has issued a Flash Flood Watch for all islands of American Samoa through Saturday, April 23. The NWS noted increasing rainfall activities and thunderstorms are expected through the weekend. An active surface trough will linger over the Samoan Islandsand this trough will trigger numerous showers through Friday morning (Apr. 22) before the arrival of another series of rainfall activities associated with tropical cyclone Amos during Friday afternoon into Saturday night. The potential threat for flash flooding is possible. For updated warnings and forecasts, visit NWS, Pago Pago: http://www.weather.gov/ppg. Amos is forecast to accelerate eastward to southeastward as it tracks along the edge of a near-equatorial steering ridge (elongated area) of high pressure. NASA astronaut and Expedition 47 Flight Engineer Jeff Williams works with the Wet Lab RNA SmartCycler on-board the International Space Station. Wetlab RNA SmartCycler is a research platform for conducting real-time quantitative gene expression analysis aboard the ISS. The system enables spaceflight genomic studies involving a wide variety of biospecimen types in the unique microgravity environment of space. Credit: NASA. NASA Human research and life science studies took precedence on the orbital laboratory today. The Expedition 47 crew also checked out a spacesuit and transferred cargo from a pair of resupply ships. The Genes in Space study, a student-designed experiment, began on the station this morning. It is studying the linkage between DNA alterations and weakened immune systems caused by the lack of gravity. NASA encourages students to become future engineers and scientists to benefit Earth and promote exploration. As a result, students periodically design and interact with advanced research on the International Space Station. The crew is also recording its observations of their living area on the space station for the Habitability study. The crews inputs may help engineers design future spacecraft with better accommodations for astronauts on long-term space missions. The stations inventory is being updated as the crew transfers gear back and forth from the Progress 63 and the SpaceX Dragon resupply ships. A U.S. spacesuit is also being readied for return to Earth on the Dragon when it departs the station and splashes down in the Pacific Ocean May 11. On-Orbit Status Report Genes in Space: The Genes in Space experiment began this morning with retrieval of the miniPCR sample tubes from the Glacier and hardware setup in the maintenance work area (MWA). Sample processing was performed and data was downlinked. The Genes in Space investigation is a winning student-designed experiment to test whether the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) can be used to study DNA alterations aboard the ISS. Spaceflight causes changes to the human body including alterations in DNA and a weakened immune system. Understanding whether these two processes are linked is important for safeguarding crew health but DNA technology that can track these changes is relatively untested in space. Rodent Research 3 CASIS Injection Review: In preparation for upcoming RR-3 operations, crewmembers reviewed the Standalone Subcutaneous Injection material, discussed operations with the payload developer, and gathered hardware in preparation for the injection session this week. RR-3 studies molecular and physical changes in the musculoskeletal system that happen in space. Results expand scientists understanding of muscle atrophy and bone loss in space while testing an antibody that has been known to prevent muscle wasting in mice on Earth. NanoRacks Module-51: The crew documented the first of several statuses for the sub-experiments inside NanoRacks Module-51. A status will be provided consecutively for the next three weeks.The four different investigations within the module study: antibiotic use to inhibit Staphylococcus aureus bacteria; the rate at which yeast decomposes organic matter; whether steroid-enhanced plants could grow better in space than on Earth; and whether an enzyme derived from fireflies can cause bioluminescence in microgravity. Wet Lab RNA SmartCycler Session: The crew retrieved samples from the MELFI and completed a brief overview of procedures. They then began the Wet Lab RNA SmartCycler validation ops by processing a quality control sample to verify that the SmartCycler operates as expected in microgravity. Wetlab RNA SmartCycler is a research platform for conducting real-time quantitative gene expression analysis aboard the ISS. The system enables spaceflight genomic studies involving a wide variety of biospecimen types in the unique microgravity environment of space. NeuroMapping Operations: The crew set up and performed NeuroMapping operations, which included testing in two body configurations; strapped in and free floating. The investigation studies whether long-duration spaceflight causes changes to the brain, including brain structure and function, motor control, and multi-tasking abilities. It also measures how long it would take for the brain and body to recover from changes. Previous research and anecdotal evidence from astronauts suggests movement control and cognition can be affected in microgravity. The NeuroMapping investigation performs structural and functional magnetic resonance brain imaging (MRI and fMRI) to assess any changes that occur after spending months on the International Space Station. Dose Tracker: The crew configured the Dose Tracker application and completed entries for medication tracking. This investigation documents the medication usage of crew members before and during their missions by capturing data regarding medication use during spaceflight, including side effects, frequencies and severities. The data is expected to either support or counter anecdotal evidence of medication ineffectiveness during flight and unusual side effects experienced during flight. It is also expected that specific, near-real-time questioning about symptom relief and side effects will provide the data required to establish whether spaceflight-associated alterations in pharmacokinetics (PK) or pharmacodynamics (PD) is occurring during missions. Habitability Human Factors Directed Observations: The crew performed a session of the Habitability experiment by recording a walk-through video documenting observations of an area or activity to provide insight related to human factors and habitability. The investigation collects observations about the relationship between crew members and their environment on the ISS. Observations can help spacecraft designers understand how much habitable volume is required, and whether a missions duration impacts how much space crew members need. Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) 3011: A successful loop scrub was performed on EMU 3011 after which the suit was packed in the launch enclosure for return on SpX-8. The suit was last used during the SSU R&R in January 2016 when water was reported in the helmet. Mobile Servicing System (MSS) Operations: Last night, Robotics Ground Controllers operated the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS) to walkoff from the Lab Power Data Grapple Fixture (PDGF) onto Mobile Base System (MBS) PDGF1. The SSRMS was then maneuvered to a translate configuration and the Mobile Transporter (MT) was translated from Worksite (WS) #6 to WS2. Next, the SSRMS was maneuvered to the first position for the Starboard Solar Alpha Rotary Joint (SARJ) to Crew and Equipment Translation Aid (CETA) Cart Clearance Survey near WS1 and the survey at this position was performed. The SSRMS was maneuvered to the second position for the SARJ to CETA Cart Clearance Survey and this survey was also completed. The third and final operations were performed today to survey the Starboard SARJ for clearance analysis of the MT translation path to WS1 for the HTV-6 battery task. Todays Planned Activities All activities were completed unless otherwise noted. Biochemical Urine Test r/g 1974 URISYS Hardware Stowage Health Maintenance System (HMS) Tonometry Test Setup Auxiliary Computer System [???] Laptops Antivirus Scan Check and Status Report / r/g 8247 WRS Water Sample Analysis SREDA-ISS. Preparation Steps and Observation Start r/g 1987 RSE-Med laptop hard drive audit. Tagup with specialists / r/g 2002 Vision Test Progress 432 (Aft) Transfers and IMS Ops / r/g 1812, 1832, 1990 CIR Hardware Setup COSMOCARD. Preparation and Starting 24-hr ECG Recording / r/g 1988 WRS Recycle Tank Fill Tonometry Test, CMO Assistance Vision Test, Survey Questionnaire Completion BIMS. Operator Assistance During the Experiment / r/g 1989 Tonometry Test, Subject Soyuz 720 Samsung Tablet Recharge, initiate GIS. Maintenance Work Area preparation for Payload use Water Resource Management (WRM) Initiate Condensate Sampling BIMS. Experiment Ops. r/g 1989 SmartCycler (SCYC) Sample Retrieval from MERLIN-3 for Session 2 Ops Initiate EMU Cooling Loop Scrub Part 1 SmartCycler (SCYC) Experiment Procedure Review Power Switching Unit ???-1#10?=?457 swap assessment r/g 2003 SREDA-ISS. Closeout Ops / r/g 1987, steps 8-10 Water Resource Management (WRM) Terminate Condensate Sampling MOTOCARD. Experiment Ops r/g 1995 Tonometry equipment stowage Rodent Research (RR) Item gathering MOTOCARD. Operator Assistance with the Experiment / r/g 1996 Genes in Space (GIS). Sample Retrieval GIS. Sample Processing DOSETRK Data Export HABIT Procedure Review Cleaning FGB Gas-Liquid Heat Exchanger (???) Detachable Screens 1, 2, 3 GIS. Recording of a congratulatory message SmartCycler (SCYC) Session 2 Ops Prep for replacing ???? devices (plugs ??-12?, ???-2) r/g 1999 EMU Cooling Loop Post Scrub Water Sample EMU Cooling Loop Post Scrub Reconfig DUBRAVA. Observation and Photography using Photo Spectrum System (???) r/g 1991 Vacuum Cleaning of ??1 and ??2 air ducts in MRM2 Soyuz 720 Samsung tablet charge, terminate GIS. Closeout Ops with samples Rodent Research (RR) Injection Prep SmartCycler (SCYC) Video downlink TOCA Data Recording Video Footage of Greetings / r/g 1998 Fluid Shifts (FS) Urine Collection Hardware Setup EMU Cooling Loop Maintenance, EMU Reconfig Microgravity Science Glovebox (MSG) Activation HABIT Preparing for the experiment Urine Transfer from EDV-U to Progress 431 (DC1) Rodnik H2O Tank2 / r/g 1963 MRM2 comm config to support the P/L Ops IMS Delta File Prep Kulonovskiy Kristall Experiment Run r/g 1986 NeuroMapping (NMAP) Test Ops EMU Long Dryout Soyuz 719 Samsung Tablet Recharge, Initiate Rodent Research Crew Conference Short Extravehicular Mobility Unit (SEMU) Launch Enclosure (SLE) Return Preparation GIS. Hardware Stowage MRM2 Comm Reconfig for Nominal Ops GIS. MELFI Sample Insertion KULONOVSKIY KRISTALL r/g 1986 CONTENT. Experiment Ops / r/g 1992 EMU. Rotation of Short Extravehicular Mobility Unit (SEMU) Launch Enclosure (SLE) Fluid Shifts (FS) Blood Collection Hardware Setup CONTENT. Experiment Ops / r/g 1993 SmartCycler (SCYC) Experiment Session Setup EMU Rotation of Short Extravehicular Mobility Unit (SEMU) Launch Enclosure (SLE) EMU Conductivity Test NANO Hardware Status Check CONTENT. Experiment Ops / r/g 1994 Soyuz 719 Samsung Tablet Recharge, terminate MELFI Inserts Reminder Stow Syringes used in ?2? Conductivity Test Reminder Habitability Walk-Through Video Completed Task List Items None Ground Activities All activities were completed unless otherwise noted. MSS operations Nominal ground commanding Three-Day Look Ahead: Wednesday, 04/20: SPHEROIDS download, RR Casis, Protein Crystal Growth, Fluid Shifts Thursday, 04/21: JSSOD-M1 install Part 1, BEAM SSC deploy, ENERGY PFS setup Friday, 04/22: SPRINT VO2, ENERGY PFS ops, Protein Crystal Growth, BCAT QUICK ISS Status Environmental Control Group: Component Status Elektron On Vozdukh Manual [???] 1 SM Air Conditioner System (SKV1) On [???] 2 SM Air Conditioner System (SKV2) Off Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly (CDRA) Lab Override Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly (CDRA) Node 3 Operate Major Constituent Analyzer (MCA) Lab Idle Major Constituent Analyzer (MCA) Node 3 Operate Oxygen Generation Assembly (OGA) Process Urine Processing Assembly (UPA) Standby Trace Contaminant Control System (TCCS) Lab Off Trace Contaminant Control System (TCCS) Node 3 Full Up For more than a year, a law enabling the state to bypass the law on procurement has been in place and used to procure things for the EU presidency. Font size: A - | A + The Foreign Ministry remains silent on the circumstances surrounding the selection of the Agentura Evka agency which prepared the gala-evening to present the logo of Slovakias presidency in the Council of European Union. It seems that when selecting this company, an exception from the Law on Public Procurement was used. In the past, this exception was criticised for example by current Justice Minister Lucia Zitnanska of Most-Hid. Skryt Remove ad Article continues after video advertisement Skryt Remove ad Article continues after video advertisement Thanks to this exception, buying goods and services needed for the EU presidency can be secret, the Sme daily wrote on April 19. This means that the ministry does not organise a tender in which companies can apply but rather contacts directly one or more companies which could deliver the goods or service. The rules are OK If the ministry uses an exception, it is harder to get more detailed information on how the competition was organised, Jan Lazur of the Taylor-Wessing law agency told Sme. It is also more difficult to obtain information on what amount was spent on various deliveries of goods and services, thanks to the exception. If the ministry decides to use the exception it does not need to inform on the selection of the company in its bulletin of public procurement. People can find out only after the contractors contracts are published in the central registry of contracts. This procedure was used in the selection of the Evka agency. The tender for the gala evening could not found in the bulletin of the Public Procurement Office.; only the contract between the ministry and the agency in the central registry of contracts. For state bodies to use an exception, the amount for delivering goods and services cannot exceed 135,000. The ministry paid to Evka 130,000 without VAT (156,000 with VAT). Read also: Read also: Slovakia unveils its EU Presidency logo Read more The law which enables this exception has been in effect for more than a year. Government confirmed this exception also in its recent update, which is in effect since April 18. The reason to introduce this exception was allegedly lack of time to prepare for the presidency. The Foreign Ministry claimed, at the time when law was passed, that it cannot prepare the presidency if its had to allocate the related public orders through transparent competitions on all items. However, not even the lack of time should by an apology, according to Peter Kunder of the Fair-Play Alliance watchdog group. I consider it an open admitting the inability to manage and plan early enough and also an occasion to uncontrollably buy for overpriced sums from befriended contractors, Kunder summed up for Sme. No need to fear checks Currently, most tenders are checked by the Public Procurement Office. It checks the competition even if one of the participating firms files a complaint against the decision. This does not hold true, though, if ministries use an exception when selecting the company. If the Office got a motion concerning a potential violation of law, it would mostly scrutinise whether financial limits were not exceeded, Lazur explains. The Supreme Audit Office (NKU) can still check on such an order, as well as police or prosecutors office. The NKU selects whom to check based on risk analysis. When choosing, it takes into consideration several factors: the amount involved, the riskiness of the transaction, or of the expenses spent. Only after these factors have been assessed, the office decides whether it will examine the tender, NKU spokeswoman Daniela Bolech Dobakova told Sme. Post-election changes to the staff of the Police Presidium are planned, too, but president Tibor Gaspar will stay. Font size: A - | A + The Slovak National Party (SNS), one of the coalition partners, wants its nominee to be among the top leaders of the Police Corps. Speaker of Parliament and SNS chairman leader Andrej Danko does not rule out changes to various state administration posts but he rejects speculations that SNS wants to have its nominee take over the police, he told the TASR newswire on April 20. SNS would like to appoint Police Presidium specialised services department head Jaroslav Malik to the post of police vice-president, according to Danko. Skryt Remove ad Article continues after video advertisement Skryt Remove ad Article continues after video advertisement This department has activities that acquire, collect and evaluate classified information on crimes and perpetrators. Apart from police officers, the department also has a network of police agents, including civilian business people who infiltrate various interest groups, the SITA newswire wrote. The coalition council hasnt discussed nominees to the police corps or to individual financial and tax bureaux yet, Daniko explained. Our goal will be to de-politicise the state administration. I reject the media speculations, although I cannot rule out that personnel changes will occur on several posts. If these changes take place, they will be made by ministers and aimed at securing the independence of institutions, particularly the police. Its important, especially for the investigation of individual scandals, he said for TASR. He added, as quoted by SITA, that it is important to exclude political engagement and to guarantee impartiality of such institutions crucial for investigation of scandals and problems. An investigator of the National Criminal Agency (NAKA) wants to press charges against two former environment ministers Laszlo Miklos (Party of Hungarian Community-SMK) and Jaroslav Izak (Slovak National Party-SNS). Font size: A - | A + The reason is their refusal to allow the harvest of timber from the most strictly protected High Tatra valleys Ticha and Koprova in the wake of the 2004 wind calamity that destroyed 126 million square metres of the woods, Plus 7 Dni weekly reports in its latest issue. Skryt Remove ad Article continues after video advertisement Skryt Remove ad Article continues after video advertisement A file containing the proposal to press charges has been delivered to the Special Prosecutors Office, General Prosecutors Office spokesperson Jana Tokolyova told the weekly. After perusing the material, a prosecutor on duty will decide the next course of action. Both former ministers have faced prosecution since 2012 when charges of endangering and damaging the environment were brought against them. According to the file, the lack of action on part of the former ministers caused the subsequent overpopulation of the bark beetle that ravaged the High Tatra forests. Foresters claim, as quoted by the TASR newswire, that had the timber been harvested, the damages would not have been so extensive and the timber could have found a further use. If found guilty, Miklos and Izak could face eight years in jail. Slovak national film awards, the Sun in a Net prizes, were given out, with the Eva Nova movie garnering most of them. Font size: A - | A + At the Gala Ceremony on April 16, the best films and performances premiered in 2014 and 2015 were awarded, as well as two outstanding contributors to Slovak cinema director Juraj Jakubisko and cameraman Igor Luther. Skryt Remove ad Article continues after video advertisement Skryt Remove ad Article continues after video advertisement Eva Nova, the feature film directed by Marko Skop received five awards out of nine nominations: for the best feature film, best directing, best script (also by Skop), best actress (Emilia Vasaryova), and best actor (Milan Ondrik), the SITA newswire informed. Marko Skop, director and producer (L), Emilia Vasaryova, actress and Jan Melis, cameraman and producer of Eva Nova with prizes. (Source: Daniel Dluhy ) Other films that received Sun in a Net awards included Tak daleko, tak blizko (So Far, So Close by Jaro Vojtek) best documentary; Fongopolis (by Joanna Kozuch) best animated film; Koza (Martin Kollar) best camera; Cistic (The Cleaner) best film editing; Koza (Tobias Potocny) best sound; Hrana - 4 filmy o Marekovi Brezovskom (The Edge- 4 films about Marke Brezovsky, Marke Brezovksy in memoriam) best film music; Sedem zhavranelych bratov (Seven Ravens, Peter Canecky, Ondrej Masek) best stage designers/architects; Sedem zhavranelych bratov (Seven Ravens, Juraj Steiner) best costumes/masks. Overall there were Sun in a Net awards given for 14 categories. The films awarded were shown during the Week of Slovak Film which coincided with the prizes (between April 11 and 18). Some selected works of Jakubisko and Luther were screened on the weekend preceding the Week of Slovak Film (and the gala ceremony, April 9-10). All except the fairy tale Seven Ravens were shown with English subtitles. Director Juraj Jakubisko (Source: Miro Nota) Cameraman Igor Luther (Source: Miro Nota) The gala ceremony on April 16 marked the highlight of the Week of Slovak Film 2016, SITA wrote. The prize was first awarded in 2004, with historically the first prize for lifelong contribution to Slovak cinematography given to director Juraj Herz. The first awarding of Sun in a Net prizes took place on December 8, 2006 and it went to films made between 2004 and 2005 the best movie and also best directing went to the Sunny State film of Martin Sulik. Nine European countries wrote a protest letter asking Brussels to stop the Nord Stream 2 project; and Slovakia leads the revolting countries. Font size: A - | A + Nord Stream 2 should be built based on a contract between Russian Gazprom company and a consortium of five firms from western Europe. Slovakia is currently waiting for Brussels response, Foreign Ministrys spokesman Peter Stano said, as quoted by the Hospodarske Noviny daily. The European Comission's Commissioner for Energy Union Marian Sefcovic said that the EC is now preparing it. Skryt Remove ad Article continues after video advertisement Skryt Remove ad Article continues after video advertisement Meanwhile, neighbouring countries are launching preparations for the new pipeline. German company Europipe which has a contract with the Russians for the supply of the gas pipes, however, has allegedly already paid 40 percent of the contract. In total, the pipeline should cost 8.4-9 billion. The economic daily wrote on April 21. Read also: Read also: Russian gas continues to flow to the EU Read more The Czech Republic, which should become an important transit country after Nord Stream 2 is built, does not hesitate, either. Operator of Czech gas pipelines Net4Gas has started exploring how to increase transport capacities westwards. Currently, the project is waiting for approval from the European Commission but also from the German regulatory authorities. If the Nord Stream 2 pipeline was built, Slovakia and Ukraine would be the biggest losers; for Slovakia, the loss of the position of a transit country might mean a loss of about 400 million annually, according to Hospodarske Noviny. The 2016 edition of the London Coffee Festival was the biggest yet, packed with cafe pop-ups, two giant coffee competitions, innovative product launches, art galleries, DJs, and much more. But one of the most pleasant surprises for me was the extended House of Coffee & Company VIP suite, which this year was dedicated selected specialty cafes and a pop-up by Amsterdam-based cafe and restaurant Scandinavian Embassy. The pop-up was a fantastic opportunity to get a taste of the Scandinavian Embassys much-lauded approach to food and coffee pairings in London. Head Chef Rikard Anderrson and Head Barista Nicolas Castagno were there to interact with the guests throughout the tasting, explaining the concept behind each of the dishes and the flavor notes of the coffees. Some of that intimate atmosphere and connection between chef, barista, and customer that makes Scandinavian Embassys De Pijp cafe so special, was lost at the festival due to the large scale of the operation (they had around 3040 covers per sitting at peak times). However, the wonderful and clever pairings of coffee and food, that make Scandinavian Embassy unique, were all there. The pop-ups three-course meal featured an unlikely combination of coffee and seafood, drawing elements from dishes previously served at Scandinavian Embassy. Each dish brought out the complexities of the three coffees presented by Castagno. The first dish was a trio of espresso-smoked oyster, mussel with coffee-infused vinegar, and clam with cascara butter. It was paired with a chilled Colombian espresso from Finca El Paraiso in El Gigange, Huila, roasted by Koppi of Helsingborg, Sweden. The oyster brought out the roasted flavors of the espresso, while the mussel highlighted the acidic tones of the coffee. The clam pairing was all about buttery mouthfeel. The second dish was a scallop flambeed with Herno Gin (the best gin in the world according to Anderrson), stewed with cascara and topped with deep-fried coffee flowers. The matching coffeea hot Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Natural Tchembe Guji, roasted by Per Nordby in Gothenberg Swedenwas served in elegant wine glasses. The gin is used to soften the harsh seafood flavors so that the scallop pairs nicely with the bright, light-bodied coffee. The last dish was a herring and beetroot tartare served with a pour-over made from Ethiopian beans (Lomi Tasha, Yirgacheffe, also by Per Nordby). The round mouthfeel of the coffee created an interesting contrast with the smokiness of the beetroot. This coffee was served in a saucer (beautifully handmade by Scandinavian Embassy barista Daniella Nystrom), a way of drinking coffee which goes back to an old Swedish tradition. The saucer lets the coffee temperature drop more quickly; it makes you process the coffee differently in your mouth as the plate lets the coffee open and invites to slurp, and the smell of the coffee is also more prominent as the nose is closer to the coffee. The Scandinavian Embassy pop-up proved to be an interesting and popular addition to the festivals line up of events, especially for those discerning foodies looking for something more than coffee. Picking Scandinavian Embassy up out of the comfy confines of their Amsterdam operation, and putting them in front of hundreds of London Coffee Festival VIPs for a weekend was a bold move and quite a challenge. Andersson, Castagno and the team at Scandinavian Embassy rose to the occasion, and should consider this installation a success. Giulia Mule (@mulia) is a Sprudge.com contributor based in London. Read more Giulia Mule on Sprudge. The train station at Shinjuku, in the east of Tokyo, is widely considered the busiest transit hub in the world, with an astonishing 3.5 million people passing through it each day on average. So its no surprise that the newly renovated Shinjuku Station south exit is a bustling hub of activitynestled behind an open platform that watches over trains rolling in and out of the station, its a hive of fashion boutiques, restaurants, dessert shops, and cafes. And in this mix of brand new opens, sits a slice of California: Verve Coffee Roasters. The new store reflects the Verve style, says co-founder Colby Barrmeaning the design is light, welcoming, and residential, with equipment that mirrors what they have back home; a custom made Kees van der Westen espresso machine, Kalita Wave on the pour-over, and even nitro cold brew, a first in these parts. The coffee menu offers three different pour-over choicesat present its Alexander Martinez, Honduras; Karogoto, Kenya; and Elida Estate Green Tip Gesha, Panamaalong with the standard range of espresso drinks, Cascara cherry tea, and a Tokyo-only beverage theyre calling the Latte Valencia. Here in Tokyo to personally oversee his brands Shinjuku launch, Barr told me, We were talking about a signature Tokyo drink that ties to the California west coast, and I was thinking of the flavors of California, and I started thinking of wild flower honey and oranges. So the drink is espresso, with steamed milk or soy milk, with honey and some freshly squeezed Valencia orange and a bunch of shaved orange peel on the top. Six of the Japanese staff members began their training Stateside; Barr says they went through the Verve training course and worked shifts in Santa Cruz before returning home to prepare for the grand opening. At the same time, Barr sees the new cafe as a source of synergy and culture sharingwith California staff members making regular visits to Tokyo for two month stints. We dont want this to be a unilateral brand thing, he tells me, the hum and rush of opening day at the cafe buzzing around us. We arent just exporting California to Japan. For me, its more interesting if theres synergy. And I do feel that, in the appreciation for quality, lifestyle, design, and food. Theres so much in Japan and in Tokyo that can be brought back to California. Verves arrival in the Tokyo market feels like fortuitous timing; new wave coffee is becoming more and more common among Tokyoites, and its ushering in a further push for quality coffee. People are curious and interested, and hungry for knowledge and education. For Barr, theres an element of deja vu to it, reminiscent of Verves beginnings in 2007. Its kind of surreal because it feels like this happened once before, he says. When Verve entered the market, I felt the tipping point then, as well as in the brands around that were influential to us opening, and who inspired us. I could feel it, and I wanted to be a part of it. Now, coming to Japan, and before we agreed to do it, [when we were] investigating, I started having this deja vu, this feeling again of timing. Its a very interesting time, and I feel very fortunate to be part of it. The small space, with its modest counters and stools, feels like a microcosm of the Verve experienceeverything as it always is, but a little more compactbut Barr hopes the future will see them set up shop in a more residential area, where they can better create the space and relaxed vibes Verve is known for. But until then, Verve is happy to carve out their first home in the center of the busiest train station in the world. Its a chilled out space in the belly of the bustling beast, and a pleasant change of scenery. Hengtee Lim (@Hent03) is a Sprudge.com staff writer based in Tokyo. Read more Hengtee Lim on Sprudge. America's influential RAND Corporation, non-profit global policy think tank, and its sponsors from the US military-industrial complex are not losing hope to make NATO member states in Europe fork out more money. In the beginning of 2016 the think tank released a report that claimed that Russian military forces can overrun NATO's Baltic footholds in 60 hours and offered to spend about $2.7 billion on fielding seven NATO brigades in the region to "deter" a non-existent Russian threat. "Crafting this deterrent posture would not be inexpensive in absolute terms, with annual costs perhaps running on the order of $2.7 billion. That is not a small number, but seen in the context of an Alliance with an aggregate gross domestic product in excess of $35 trillion and combined yearly defense spending of more than $1 trillion, it hardly appears unaffordable, especially in comparison with the potential costs of failing to defend NATO's most exposed and vulnerable allies-that is, of potentially inviting a devastating war, rather than deterring it," the report read. "IAEA experts visit universities wishing to join the academy," he said. "This is needed to graduate high-class experts boasting a certain range of nuclear technology expertise in line with a standard format." The University of Manchester was the first to join this process, and MEPhI is next. According to Chudakov, Tokyo University will be the third to offer the program. Chudakov believes that the nuclear sectors sustained high level of safety and security depends on skillful decisions and the effective management of INMA-monitored processes. "Today his [Stepan's] classmates ridiculed him for his page on Vkontakte You're loser, nobody even gives you likes.' Stepa was very upset, almost cried. So please do me a favor those of you who have accounts on Vkontakte, could you please go to [Stepan's] page and give him some likes," Stepa's mother wrote on Facebook. Right after that thousands of Internet users began "liking" and sharing Stepan's page about dinosaurs. The boy immediately became a new Internet star with famous rapper Basta, the head of Russia's Republic of Tatarstan, Rustam Minnikhanov, and even NASA astronaut Dan Burbank liking his page and even sending him personal thumbs-up messages. "Hi, Stepa! My name is Dan Burbank. I'm an astronaut. I wanted to say good luck to you!," Burbank said in a video message addressed to Stepan, according to the official website of the US Embassy in Russia. Both Stepan and his mother were shocked this kind of reaction. On Wednesday, Stepan published a post on Vkontakte, thanking everyone for their support and promising to keep up his page about dinosaurs. "The trucks exact purpose remains unclear although it is worth noting that its location is similar to the spot where one, possibly two vehicles and personnel were observed three days prior to the February 12, 2013 nuclear test," 38 North said. According to the monitory website, satellite imagery shows that tunnel excavation operations at the site are about to resume, or have already resumed for the first time this year. "Excavation operations can be undertaken concurrently with preparations for a nuclear test, as was the case during the run-up to this Januarys detonation. Such a concurrent activity could be part of the Norths camouflage, concealment and deception procedures for the facility," 38 North explained. Last week, the monitoring website released satellite imagery of new developments at the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center suggesting that North Korea could be producing more plutonium for nuclear weapons. North Korea declared itself a nuclear power in 2005. The United States, Japan and South Korea, as well as Russia and China, took part in talks with North Korea on the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula between 2003 and 2009, when Pyongyang withdrew from the talks. On January 6 Pyongyang claimed it had successfully tested a hydrogen bomb. The United Nations previously imposed sanctions on North Korea for three tests it carried out in 2006, 2009 and 2013. Pyongyangs January hydrogen bomb test, as well as the launch, a month later, of a long-range rocket to allegedly place a satellite into orbit, in defiance of UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions, led to more sanctions having been imposed on North Korea by the UNSC and the United States. The 38 North website is maintained by the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. The blog, authored by its faculty and by guest commentators, analyzes various reporting on North Korea. Beijing deployed 2,000 troops to the border, according to a statement by The Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, a nongovernmental organization based in Hong Kong. According to the statement, many of the Chinese troops are tasked with measuring radioactive emissions in the event that North Korea follows through with their proposed nuclear test. Kidman was established in 1899 by Sidney Kidman who became known as Australia's "cattle king." They raise about 185,000 cattle at stations spanning 101,000 square kilometers, or about 1.3 percent of Australia's total land area bigger than Ireland. Security concerns have often been brought up to block the sale of Australian assets to Chinese-led consortiums, Chen Fengying, a leading economist at Chinas Institute of Modern International Relations, said in an interview with Sputnik. The hurdles erected in the way of Chinese companies ongoing effort to explore foreign markets reflect deep-seated Western fears of the so-called 'Chinese threat.' They see Chinese businesses as a threat to their comfortable existence, Chen Fengying said. She added that each time the Chinese buy real estate abroad their local partners warn that this would drive prices up. When China wants to acquire any assets abroad its foreign partners insist that these assets cannot be sold to a foreign buyer. They also fear that China would snap up some of their commodities and trademarks. In a word, they view us as a threat, even though the global acquisition and takeover of enterprises is an inevitable element of the ongoing process of global economic restructuring, she said. The process of economic globalization will continue and European and American energy and oil companies are likewise engaged in this process which helps make them more competitive. Wary as some countries are of Chinas participation in this process of mergers and takeovers, this is an objective economic development that simply cant be turned back, Dr. Chen said. According to the top sources in the Defense Ministry, during his meetings with his Chinese counterpart Ajit Doval conveyed that peace and tranquility along the border was a prerequisite to maintain a smooth and cordial relationship between the two countries. Frequent transgressions along the border would be a deterrent and in the long run would also impact bilateral, economic and political relations. India has also stressed that until the border problem was finalized both sides should maintain the status-quo. In fact, India wants to speed up the process of the "Special Representative Talks" to reach an amicable solution to the border problem. The last 18 rounds of talks between the Special Representatives of both countries have not been particularly fruitful hence, India wants the border talks to become more focused and move in the direction of finding a solution to the boundary problem. However, security experts do not sound very optimistic with China's approach and asserted that China is still sticking to its old strategy despite India's proactive approach. "The first thing is that China has said that it has no border with India in Jammu and Kashmir. This means they still treat the area of Aksai Chin as disputed territory. There is no change in Chinese policy, they don't want to disturb the peace and tranquility of the border but simultaneously they will keep showing their assertiveness along the border," Major Gen (Rtd) Afsir Karim told Sputnik. KUALA LUMPUR (Malasya) (Sputnik) Key decisions on the purchase of Russian Su-35 Flanker multirole fighters by Indonesia have been made and contract talks may start soon, a senior official from Russias Rostec state corporation said. Principle decisions have been made, we are expecting the start of talks, Viktor Kladov, the head of Rostec's International Cooperation Department, said in an interview with RIA Novosti. We are looking forward to the visit of the Indonesian defense minister to Moscow to attend an international security conference. We will have a meeting on the sidelines of this conference, we are making progress in this direction, Kladov said adding that the deal may involve up to 18 aircraft. KUALA LUMPUR (Sputnik) Russia will sign a joint manufacturing contract for 200 Ka-226T light utility multirole helicopters for India before the end of the year, the head of the Russian state technology corporation Rostecs international cooperation department said Thursday. "So far we have an intergovernmental agreement, but we hope to draft and sign a contract with India before the end of the year. Accordingly, practical work on site will start from the beginning of 2017," Viktor Kladov told RIA Novosti. He specified that the agreement, signed during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modis December 24 visit to Russia, details the production of at least 200 helicopters. KUALA LUMPUR (Sputnik) Malaysias capital Kuala Lumpur is hosting the 15th Defense Services Asia Exhibition and Conference (DSA-2016) on April 18-21. Over 300 products of the Russian military-industrial complex are being presented at the exhibition. "Not only Bangladesh, but also Sri Lanka, have expressed serious interest [in Russian Gepard-class frigates]. A delegation of this countrys [Sri Lankas] defense ministry came to our DSA-2016 stand, they expressed their interest," Kladov told RIA Novosti. Russia is ready to respond to a relevant request from Sri Lanka or Bangladesh as soon as it is submitted, Kladov said. NEW DELHI (Sputnik) The countries have been in talks on Rafales since 2012 but disagreements on the pricing and Indias demands for additional guarantees have hindered the signing. "From our side Rafale deal is quite in an advanced stage, still few points [remain] which we have to discuss," Parrikar said, adding the military hoped to close the deal "very soon." The agreement should also be cleared by the governments Defense Acquisition Council and approved by the cabinet, he added during a press event at the Naval Commander's Conference in New Delhi. Kristian Rouz Prominent investor George Soros spoke out on the latest developments in mainland China's economy, saying that the excessive indebtedness of local governments and the private sector might lead the nation into an economic crisis similar to that in the US in 2007-2008. Chinese companies and governments have indeed practiced large-scale borrowing in order to finance infrastructure development and investment projects as part of economic recovery in the recent years. Subsequently, the slowdown of the Chinese economy has been less dramatic, allowing for cautious adjustment reforms. Yet, as debt-fueled growth models are becoming increasingly obsolete throughout the world, China's economy might be facing hard times soon, a viewpoint Soros voiced support for. Similarities between the current state of affairs in the mainland's economy and that in the US in the mid-2000s are particularly evidenced by China's credit expansion figures for March, Soros said on Wednesday, speaking at an Asia Society meeting in New York. Just during that month, the mainland's total indebtedness added 2.34 trln renminbi ($362 bln), borrowed by firms and local governments. Thing is, all debts in China are ultimately guaranteed by the central government in Beijing. That "eerily resembles what happened during the financial crisis in the U.S. in 2007-08, which was similarly fueled by credit growth," Soros noted. "Most of money that banks are supplying is needed to keep bad debts and loss-making enterprises alive." On April 17, the world's major oil-producing countries, including both Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) members and non-cartel states, failed to reach an agreement in the Qatari capital of Doha to maintain output at current levels. Saudi Arabia cited Irans absence from the talks as the reason it could not support an output freeze. The news instantly triggered a sharp drop of about 4 percent in oil price. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev also added that Russian economic growth will stand at around zero in 2016, but will increase to around one to two percent in 2017-2019. "In the basic version [of the government's macroeconomic forecast], GDP growth this year will remain at around zero or be slightly negative. A slight growth of one to two percent is expected in 2017-2019," Medvedev said at a government meeting. MOSCOW (Sputnik) Russian First Deputy Energy Minister Alexei Teksler said earlier this week that Chinese investors were interested in buying Rosneft shares. "Yes, we are considering this," CNPCs Wang Zhongcai told journalists, adding the company had set up a working group to look into the matter. Under the state privatization plan, Rosneft is expected to privatize 19.5 percent of its state shares by the end of this year. The Russian government controls 69.5 percent of the shares. In early November 2015, the company offered $1,000 in gift cards and vouchers as well as three years of free roadside assistance as a goodwill effort after angering owners of some 482,000 cars who paid extra for the vehicles to be enviromentally conscious without loosing power. Volkswagen's management knew about emission test rigging as early as August 2015, a month prior to the start of the public scandal, according to the Bild newspaper reported. MOSCOW (Sputnik) Russias 51st humanitarian aid convoy for residents of Ukraines crisis-hit southeast has departed for the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, the Russian Emergencies Ministry informed early on Thursday. "Over 100 vehicles departed from the Donskoy rescue center of the Emergencies Ministry in the [Russian] Rostov region in the direction of the Russian-Ukrainian border. They are carrying about 1,200 tonnes [metric tons] of humanitarian cargo for residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions," a ministry spokesperson told RIA Novosti. The aid includes food, medicine, firefighting equipment and books. The first mistake was the decision to meddle in Syria, which resulted in the arrival in Turkey of almost 3 million refugees fleeing the civil war in the long-troubled Arab country. Thousands of them have drowned in the Aegean Sea, which many now call The Sea of Death. Would you like to spend your vacation in a seaside town with such an image? Would you sail into a sea whose bottom is littered with the bodies of dead children? Tezkan wrote. The second mistake was Ankaras failure to acknowledge the threat posed by the rising wave of jihadism. BRUSSELS (Sputnik) Muslims working at the Dutch airport, which was the scene of a deadly bombing attack on March 22, had their own place of worship inside the airport building. However, some radicalized employees chose to meet in secret and pray in the luggage claim area, the VTM television channel said Wednesday. The room was closed by airport authorities at police request. The Brussels airport was hit by a bomb explosion that killed 17 people, including two attackers who were linked to last year's Paris massacre. When we went out to sea in our Sea Watch-1 boat we hoped things would change for the better, that some political measures would be taken to legalize the refugees arrival to Europe. We also hoped that the authorities would make sure that these people never again use those illegal boats and would realize that refugees should be allowed to seek asylum without putting their life at risk, Ruben Neugebauer said. Ruben said that things hadnt changed much ever since and blamed the EU for the death of hundreds of migrants. They are turning a blind eye to the crises happening in the world instead of looking for ways to resolve them, he said, adding that the launch of the Sea Watch-2 boat symbolized the failure of this policy proving that the problem is still there. Previously, Yasri Khan attracted media attention by voicing support for former Housing Minister and fellow Green Party member Mehmet Kaplan, who stepped down earlier this week after a media firestorm, following press revelations about his anti-Semitic comments and alleged neo-Nazi contacts, Swedish Radio reported. During an interview with a female reporter from TV4 television channel, Khan, also the secretary general of the organization Swedish Muslims for Peace and Justice, placed his hand over his heart instead of shaking her hand in greeting, on grounds that it violated his Muslim faith. "The way I have been brought up, physical contact with the opposite sex is considered to be very, very intimate," Khan explained his faux pas. MOSCOW (Sputnik) This week a parliament member from Germanys Christian Social Union (CSU) party Alexander Radwan recommended the introduction of "church tax" for Muslims living in Germany, telling Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper that this could be done similarly to the "existing church tax for Catholics and Protestants". "We don't want [any] German tax agency to collect money for Muslim [cause], be it a local agent in Bavaria or a national agent in Berlin's ministry of finance. Faithful Muslims shall benefit as every religion from our religious freedoms, but not from taxpayers' money. They must fund their church by themselves," AfD spokesperson Ronald Glaser said in reaction to Radwans initiative. Nasrin Abdullah, supreme commander of the YPJ which numbers nearly 10,000 female warriors, is currently visiting Sweden. During her stay in the Nordic country, she will meet with politicians and government officials, as well as people who supported the Kurds through fundraising and relief efforts. Sweden has already been helping the Kurdish forces in northern Iraq with information sharing and military expertise. Nasrin Abdullah voiced hope that the Kurdish militia in northern Syria would be able to get similar support as well. "Daesh is the enemy that the Kurdish and the Swedish people have in common. I hope we will be able to achieve a good cooperation with Sweden in the battle against terrorism," Nasrin Abdullah told Swedish Radio last week, at the same time warning Europe of upcoming Daesh attacks. McDonald's France declined to comment on tax avoidance allegations and said: "McDonald's is one of the biggest payers of company tax in France and we're proud of it," adding that it paid US$1.36 billion in tax and invested another US$1.13 billion in France, creating more than 15,000 jobs since 2009. Investigations into the fast food chain's tax affairs have been going on since 2013 as part of the French government's decision to crack down on multinational companies moving their profits abroad. #TaxTransparency proposal on public reporting requirements for largest companies in EU https://t.co/n8xdONzSp2https://t.co/J9zUUco6PY European Commission (@EU_Commission) 12 April 2016 However eating McDonald's food in France is so popular it's become the second biggest market after the US with annual sales of US$4.9 billion. Meanwhile, the decision to ban McDonald's from the UK Labour party conference is due to its "failed" record of employment rights according to the party leader's spokesman. Jeremy Corbyn who doesn't eat meat has been accused of "vegetarian snobbery." Thousands of refugees are trapped in Greece right now. Demand Europe stands #WithRefugees! https://t.co/lYJeKCkx58 pic.twitter.com/KsLS8HQqSp AmnestyInternational (@AmnestyOnline) 18 April 2016 "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. The large-scale returns of Syrian refugees we have documented highlight the fatal flaws in the EU-Turkey deal." EUTurkey double-speak deal a mix of wishful thinking cynical thinking and desperate thinking. Can't respect rights & return 2 Turkey. Simple John Dalhuisen (@DalhuisenJJ) 18 March 2016 "It is a deal that can only be implemented with the hardest of hearts and a blithe disregard for international law," said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International's Director for Europe and Central Asia. Inhumane Conditions In its first assessment of how the EU-Turkey deal is proceeding, the European Commission admitted: "Further efforts are required by Turkey to make sure that those who need international protection receive the kind of support they most require." That is seen as diplomatic-speak, suggesting Turkey has a long way to go before its refugee camps meet international standards, providing shelter, food and humanitarian relief. "The first result of our cooperation with Turkey is that the message is starting to get through that turning to smugglers is the wrong choice to make. In the past three weeks we have seen a sharp decrease in irregular arrivals, which now needs to go hand-in-hand with opening up the legal channel of resettlement to those in need of protection," European Commission First Vice-President Frans Timmermans said. New Factsheet: The Facility for Refugees in Turkey https://t.co/Xdc6NpvDXR pic.twitter.com/b89teAjNAy Frans Timmermans (@TimmermansEU) 20 April 2016 Turkey has turned up the diplomatic heat over the deal as in return for agreeing the relocation plan Ankara wants its accession to the EU accelerated and visa-free travel for its citizens by June, 2016. However, many critics say Turkey fall short of international standards of human rights and is oppressing independent media. Lawmakers in the European Parliament have called on the European Commission and Council to reassess the whole strategy behind the accession process negotiations with Ankara. 1 month of #EUTurkeyDeal today& only 129 refugees have been relocated to N.Europe. RT if you agree this must change pic.twitter.com/1n0NWWLbzl IRC Intl Rescue Comm (@theIRC) April 20, 2016 Alexander Lambsdorff, Vice President of the European Parliament and shadow rapporteur on Turkey, said: "The rule of law, press freedom and freedom of expression are core values of the European family and the liberal group. Re-assessing the entire accession process, together with the demand to respect all life-styles, secular or religious, and the refusal to link the negotiation process with the refugee crisis, are among the most important messages to the Turkish government in this report. It is simply unacceptable to open new chapters when, at the same time, freedom of the media in Turkey is being restricted dramatically every day." Foreign Minister Brge Brende said Norway would provide a total of half a billion kroner (roughly 60 million dollars) for the UN refugee agency UNHCR's work in Syria and neighboring countries, Norway's broadcasting company NRK reported. "We need to assist the UN in helping the millions who have been displaced because of the war in Syria. Norway will thus be at the forefront with a significant contribution to the UNHCR for the coming years, totaling half a billion kroner, said Foreign Minister Brende of the Conservative party. Yet another scam involved the targeting of motorists female motorists in particular who were encouraged to leave their car on the basis of a flat tire, or the suggestion that a cat was sleeping underneath. Once the driver exited the vehicle, an accomplice would steal the woman's bag from the passenger side of the car. Whether or not these previous operations are related to the latest police uniform scam is uncertain, but travelers in Switzerland are being encouraged to exercise vigilance, and to check any official identification closely. As the target for these crimes tends to be tourists though, they are less likely to be able to spot flaws in uniforms or ID documents. UN Staff, some of whom have allegedly fallen victim to the confidence tricksters, have reiterated warnings issued in 2013; suggesting that in cases where there is doubt, individuals should not hand over any belongings and should call 117 for the Swiss Police. "Nowadays the Arab countries are destroying their writers and cultures as such, but not a word has come from Western intellectuals," argued 86-year-old Adonis, who is regarded as one of the most influential Arab writers of our era. The man who released his first collection of poems in 1957 is still writing. Various Islamic authorities and numerous scholars have issued death threats against Adonis for his criticism of Islam and have called for his books to be burned. Earlier, Adonis, who has a university degree from Damascus, had to leave his native country for Lebanon, since he was a member of a socialist party. As the civil war broke out in the 1980s, he moved to Paris where he has lived since. A question of interpretation Today's blog covers recognition for the Army and Navy, plus the latest on defence spending https://t.co/xXVzXnGVSQ pic.twitter.com/FvEkPWZnCh Ministry of Defence (@DefenceHQ) April 21, 2016 In making a comparison between defense spending in 2010 and 2015, the committee said the "criteria have been amended to include several significant items not previously included when calculating defense expenditure. "Since these items are instrumental in attaining the minimum 2% figure, the Government can be said to have 'shifted the goalposts' in comparison with previous years. "There is a risk that the promise of new money to defense could be undermined by the inclusion of items in the re-calculation of defense expenditure that previously had not fallen within the Ministry of Defense (MoD) budget." Wales Declaration According to the report, despite the UK's high ranking, in terms of defense spending, relative to other NATO members, UK defense expenditure has fallen far too low in the UK's national priorities. "It's good news that we have managed to achieve the two percent promise for Defense Spending but if the MOD has only achieved this by including things like war pensions or intelligence gathering which previously came under other budgets, you wonder what effective, battle-winning spending increases have actually been made. The MoD have shed insufficient light on this confusion," Defense Committee Chairman, Dr Julian Lewis MP, said. Dear friends, let us show our solidarity with and support for the authorities of the Polish town of Rzeszow, who refused to dismantle the Monument of Gratitude to the Red Army, Andrei Vypolzov, the editor of Newsbalt Internet portal, wrote on his Facebook page. Just write DZIEKUJEMY RZESZOWI ZA PAMIEC (Thank You Rzeszow for Not Forgetting), make a selfie and post it on your Facebook page with the address of the Polish towns official Facebook account (Rzeszow stolica innowacji)with the hashtag #thanks_Rzeszow, he added. An MRI examination of the knee joint is a relatively safe way to make a medical age assessment of underage asylum seekers. According to Lars-Torsten Larsson, department chief at the National Board, there is room for its implementation in Sweden. The MRI method has proven to be much accurate in comparison with other methods used today, with the margin of error within three percent for boys/men and seven percent for girls/women, he told Swedish Radio Last year, Sweden took in over 163,000 asylum seekers, of which over 35,000 are claimed to be underage. In reality, quite a number of them are suspected to be adults. Age verification determines the treatment of the new arrivals as well as their level of responsibility in case of trial proceedings, which have been quite numerous. A significant amount of age manipulation cases, the most outrageous of which even drew the media's attention, has given rise to the colloquial meme "Lofven's bearded children' after PM Stefan Lofven, who has been a stalwart supporter of the country's immigration policy, which is by many rejected as "over-lenient". The document states that organized crime costs the UK at least US$35 billion each year. Criminals deliberately try and obscure the ultimate ownership of these companies to distance themselves from the assets they really control and ensure law enforcement agencies, regulators, legitimate businesses and the general public are unaware of the true role the companies they control are performing Financial Crime UK Home Secretary, Theresa May said: "Britain's world leading financial system is at risk of being undermined by money laundering, illicit finance and the funding of terrorism. The laundering of proceeds of crime through UK institutions is not only a financial crime, it fuels political instability around the world, supports terrorists and extremism and poses a direct and immediate threat to our domestic security and our overseas interests. This action plan sends a clear message that we will not tolerate this type of activity in our financial institutions." According to Transparency International, more than US$258 180 million-worth of properties in the UK have been brought under criminal investigation as the suspected proceeds of corruption since 2004. This is believed to be only the tip of the iceberg of the scale of proceeds of corruption invested in UK property. Over 75 percent of the properties under criminal investigation use offshore corporate secrecy. "Bold rhetoric needs to be backed up by bold action" @TransparencyUK on new proposed #UK anti-money laundering law https://t.co/MuNdRTto7p Transparency Int'l (@anticorruption) April 21, 2016 36,342 London properties totaling 2.25 square miles are held by offshore haven companies. Of these, 38% in the British Virgin Islands, 16% in Jersey, 9.5 percent in the Isle of Man, and 9 percent in Guernsey. Almost one in ten properties in the City of Westminster (9.3 percent), 7.3 percent of properties in Kensington & Chelsea, and 4.5 per cent in the City of London are owned by companies registered in an offshore secrecy jurisdiction. Not just property market with concerns over laundering of dirty money. Art market also open to abuse + many others https://t.co/nx5tOBAlNy Transparency Int'lUK (@TransparencyUK) April 18, 2016 The concept of beneficial ownership, as distinguished from strict legal ownership is fundamental in English law and its origins lie in medieval times when land was given to A on his undertaking to hold it for the use and benefit of B, whilst B was, say, away on a crusade. Turkish media is actively discussing the issue of possibly creating a Crimean Tatar autonomous region in the Southern Kherson Region of Ukraine, right next to Crimea. The Crimean Tatar autonomy in Ukraine would have their own military units , likely comprised of foreign mercenaries and other radicals from around the world. Sel believes that a Crimean Tatar autonomy and the further rise of Tatar military brigades would lead to a big disaster in Ukraine: "Giving Crimean Tatars autonomy in the Kherson Region of Ukraine will be a serious threat, especially for peaceful Crimean Tatars living both in Kherson and Crimea, as well as other communities in the region." MOSCOW (Sputnik) According to the Politiko newspaper, Danish Justice Minister Soren Pind is set to propose the plan be put to a parliamentary vote. "I think it would benefit the Danish prison system if it used more of its energy on people who are worth making the effort for," Justice Minister Soren Pind was quoted as saying by the paper. TIRASPOL (Sputnik) The trilateral peacekeeping mission in the Moldovan breakaway republic of Transnistria requested Russia on Thursday to restore its helicopter squadron operating within the mission. "We deem it appropriate to appeal to Russia with the request to restore the valuable work of its helicopter squadron as part of the peacekeeping operation," the Joint Control Commission, operated by Moldovan, Transnistrian and Russian troops, said in a statement. It cited increasing unsanctioned and uncoordinated foreign aircraft flights over the buffer zone between Moldova and Ukraine as reason for the request. The Mague family sent the medals that were awarded to two of their own family members who fought Nazi soldiers during World War II. We give you the medals of our family we think it would be a good thing to return them to his [Prokhorenkos] family, the letter said. The Mague familys gift and letter to Prokhorenkos family arent the only gifts and gestures of support that the Russian embassy has received from French citizens. Some people sent money, asking to buy something for Prokhorenkos unborn child. Now all of this stuff is in the embassy. Were currently thinking how to transfer all of this to his [Prokhorenkos] family in Russia, a Russian embassy representative told RIA Novosti. BRUSSELS (Sputnik) The European Central Bank (ECB) believes that market volatility, linked to the possibility of Britain's exit from the European Union, may continue even after the UK Brexit referendum in June, ECB President Mario Draghi said Thursday. "We view the participation of the UK to the European Union as mutually beneficial Certainly, the discussion about this possibility [of Brexit] has already produced some significant consequences on the markets, for example a depreciation of the sterling, quite significant. We do expect a continuation of market volatility, certainly, until the referendum probably, even after the referendum," Draghi said at a press conference. At the same time, he added that the risk that the British referendum could undermine the economic recovery in the Eurozone was "very limited." Since the District of Golbas has only one judge, it should have been submitted to the duty of the world criminal court in Ankara. We re-filed the petition, which now must be sent to the court in Ankara. I believe that in this case tactics to delay the trial are being applied. The problem is that the decision to block the website in accordance with the law 5651 must be made by the court within 48 hours. Typically, it happens on the same day. Whereas, the situation with appeal is quite different as the appropriate application may be reviewed for a long period. Akdeniz said that there have been cases when the judge did not rule the petition of appeal for 2-3 weeks. This process is purposely delayed; it is fairly easy to do, since the law does not clearly define the term of consideration of appeals. If the Ankara court rejects our appeal, we will appeal to the Constitutional Court. On Wednesday, the chief editor of Sputnik News Agencys Turkish bureau, Tural Kerimov, was denied entry to Turkey, stripped of his accreditation and residence permit in Turkey. Kerimov entry ban comes a week after Turkish authorities shut the agencys Turkish-language website, citing "administrative measures." Turkey's crackdown on journalists and restrictions on freedom of speech have previously been criticized by the international community, including the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, Russia and the organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF). Turkey ranks 151th out of 180 countries in the RSF 2016 press freedom index. MOSCOW (Sputnik) Idriz's reaction comes in light of an initiative of Germanys Christian Social Union (CSU) member Alexander Radwan who proposed the introduction of the so-called church tax for Muslims living in Germany similar to existing taxes for Catholics and Protestants, as well as banning the foreign financial assistance to local mosques and Muslim religious activities in the country. "Such a prohibition should apply to all religious communities alike, which would certainly be difficult to imagine (especially with regard to the Catholic Church), anything else would be discriminatory under the Constitution," Benjamin Idriz stated. Mosques and Islamic kindergartens across Germany, a home to over four million Muslims, are mostly funded by foreign countries such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia. SKOPJE (Sputnik) Police troops, accompanied with special forces, are protecting the government buildings, while some 10 armored vehicles and water cannons were also reportedly on duty in Skopje, dividing the two rival rallies ongoing in the Macedonian capital. The 15,000-strong pro-government rally is being held near the building of the government, while some 5,000 people have gathered for an opposition protest, demanding resignation of the country's president, Gjorge Ivanov. The RIA Novosti correspondent reported that the supporters of the opposition were trying to break through the police cordons. BRUSSELS (Sputnik) EU member states want the proposed joint European Border and Coast Guard to be established already this summer, Dutch Migration Minister Klaas Dijkhoff, whose country holds the European Union's rotating presidency, said Thursday. "One of the measures that we have taken is the European Border Guard. We have recently reached an agreement on the Council level. We are in urgent need of means to better control our joint external borders. Today we agreed that we should negotiate with the European Parliament as quickly as possible and also start preparations for implementation. The European Guard should take off as soon as possible and it is our preference that it will be already this summer," Dijkhoff told reporters. In December 2015, the European Commission proposed to establish the European Border and Coast Guard to enhance EU external borders control and prevent migrants from outside the bloc to reach its frontiers. According to the proposal, some 1,500 border guards could work at the agency, which would be allowed to send undocumented migrants to their countries of origin. In corporate media, a coalition against retaining EU membership has been portrayed as ultra-right Islamophobic bigots, but careful analysis shows that British Socialists have always opposed the EUs brand of extreme neoliberalism. As the referendum campaign heats up, Loud & Clears Brian Becker sat down with Alex Gordon, the former president of Britains Transportation Union and a leader of the left-wing coalition advocating for Britain to exit the European Union the Lexit. Who is it that supports Britain leaving the EU? "The perception that is carefully cultivated by the mainstream media, including the BBC, the Guardian, and other important newspapers in Britain, is that those who oppose the EU are rightwing nationalists," explained Gordon. "It is a classic example of manipulating the narrative and the terms of the debate." Despite attempts by mainstream media outlets to frame the opposition in a negative light, Gordon thinks that the people are taking their cue from history. "One advantage of this referendum is that we are looking back to when Britain first voted on what was called the European Economic Community, the precursor to the EU back in 1975," said Gordon. James McGrory Chief Media Spokesperson from the UK StrongerIn Campaign and Jason White - an International Sales Manager share their points of view in this programme. Trade with the EU Jason White advocates that the UK will see a slacking of trade with the EU after Brexit, but this will pick up within one or two years. Britain will be able to realign its agricultural and fishing policies to its own advantage. James McGory argues that the EU is our largest trading partner, so why pull ourselves away from it? We are talking about real people losing real jobs, and there are no guarantees of long term benefits our trade is already increasing now, as part of the EU with countries like India and China, so I dont see the advantage of leaving, as we [now] have strength in numbers. The US trade government has categorically said that the US wants to negotiate a trade deal with Europe, not with the UK individually. Jason replied: we are the 5th largest country in the world, these countries are still going to want to trade with us. MOSCOW (Sputnik) The Russian Emergencies Ministry has sent a plane carrying 30 tonnes (metric tons) of humanitarian aid to Ecuador, where a powerful 7.8-magnitude earthquake occurred on Saturday. "Under the order of the President of the Russian Federation [Vladimir Putin] to the Russian Emergencies Ministry an IL-76 [Ilyushin or Candid] plane left for Ecuador from the Ramenskoye airfield near Moscow," a ministry spokesperson told RIA Novosti early on Thursday. The 30 metric tons of aid that the aircraft is carrying include food, tents and mobile power stations. MEXICO CITY (Sputnik) Mexicos state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) company has confirmed that three of its workers died in an explosion at its oil facility in the state of Veracruz. "So far, unfortunately, three workers have been confirmed dead," Pemex said on Twitter. According to the company, 136 workers were injured in the Wednesday accident. MOSCOW (Sputnik) Correa said as cited by ABC news on Wednesday that 526 of the 570 victims have been identified. Over 7,000 were injured by the quake, while 163 people remain unaccounted for, according to the president. A powerful 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit Ecuador on April 16. Correa said earlier this week that the damage caused by the natural disaster would cost as much as $3 billion. On Wednesday, Ecuadors president said as cited by ABC news that he planned to increase taxes and sell some state assets to raise funds to cover the costs of recovery efforts. IZRA (Sputnik) Packages contained flour, several types of grains, canned food as well as cookies and candies. Speaking at a meeting organized by the government of the Daraa province in the predominantly Christian town, Col. Yuri Zrayev from Russias reconciliation center stressed that Russia was mediating a lasting peace between Syrias warring parties. "The reconciliation process helps bring families divided by the war back together and return them to their homes," he stated. MOSCOW (Sputnik) The raid in Abu Dis, a town under joint control by Israelis and Palestinians, also uncovered raw materials for building pipe bombs and large quantities of ammunition, the Jerusalem Post newspaper said. France has been making plans to arrange an international conference on Israeli-Palestinian peace amid a resurgence of violence in Israel, mostly stabbing attacks on civilians and security forces linked to Palestinian radicals. Palestinians seek diplomatic recognition of their independent state on the territories of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, partially occupied by Israel, and the Gaza Strip. Israel has been building settlements on the occupied lands, despite objections from the United Nations. MOSCOW (Sputnik) Daesh has previously launched multiple attacks against Turkey's territory near the Syrian border, including the shelling of the Kilis province. The newly deployed tanks will aid existing units which use thermal cameras and cannons, Hurriyet Daily News reported, citing Turkish security officials. The mini drones are also being deployed to track the Katyusha rockets belonging Daesh militants, the media outlet added. Daesh a designated terrorist group that has captured large areas of land in Syria and Iraq, where it proclaimed a caliphate. The terror group is outlawed in Russia, the United States and in several other countries. MOSCOW (Sputnik) Earlier this week, Western media reported that Syrian government airstrikes had killed dozens of civilians at markets in northwestern Syria following the collapse of the intra-Syrian talks in Geneva. According to the reports, this has become the deadliest violence in the war-torn country since the Russia-US brokered ceasefire took effect in February. "I cannot comment and we have no information proving that these accusations are true. I think that our military could better comment on that issue," Peskov said answering the question whether the Russian authorities have discussed this issue with Syrian President Bashar Assad. Syria has been mired in civil war since March 2011, with government forces loyal to Assad fighting numerous opposition factions and extremist groups, such as Daesh and al-Nusra Front, which are banned in many countries including Russia. GENEVA (Sputnik) In April, the number if the civilians to whom the humanitarian aid was delivered stood at 450,725. "Since the beginning of 2016, the UN and partners successfully delivered multi-sectoral assistance through inter-agency operations, reaching nearly 561,000 civilians in beseiged, hard-to-reach and other priority cross-line locations with dire humanitarian needs," UNOCHA said in a statement. There have been 54 convoys and eight World Food Program (WFP)-led air drops since the beginning of the year. The aid is mainly delivered to Idleb, Damascus, Homs, Aleppo and Deir-ez Zor provinces. ANKARA (Sputnik) Celik was arrested alongside 13 others in the Turkish city of Izmir in early April on charges of illegal gun possession. The suspect previously said that he had not shot at Russian pilot Oleg Peshkov but had merely accepted the responsibility for the killing as a commander of a militant group. Celik insisted he had repeatedly ordered his men to take the Russian pilot prisoner, and not to shoot at him. "Yesterday we found out in the Prosecutor's Office what was going on. There have been no changes yet, the indictment has not been yet ready. Though, they informed us that the trial would start soon, literally within the next week," the lawyer told RIA Novosti. The Russian Su-24 combat plane 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, Oleg Peshkov, was killed by fire from the ground, while the second pilot survived and was later rescued. DAMSCUS (Sputnik) The Syrian prime minister said instead of helping in the settlement of the crisis, these countries are arming terrorists and sending in troops. The agreements reached between the friendly Russia and the United States of the so-called cessation of hostilities or ceasefire are being violated. In the end we see that Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar, as well as Western countries such as Great Britain and France have no real desire to move the process of the political settlement in Syria forward, al-Halqi said in an interview. The Syrian prime minister stressed that it's just the opposite, they are aiding in the escalation of terrorist activity and arming terrorists. Over the last week, more than 5,000 troops crossed the border with Turkey into the provinces of Aleppo and Idlib. MOSCOW (Sputnik) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Russian President Vladimir Putin in a meeting on Thursday that the Golan Heights would remain under Israels control. In regard to the Golan Heights, we cannot return to the days and times when our villages were shot at from the Golan Heights, therefore, whether within the framework of an agreement or without one, the Golan Heights will remain part of [our] sovereign territory, Netanyahu said. We are doing everything we can to stop the appearance of super modern weaponry coming from Syria does not end up in the hands of Hezbollah, Netanyahu added. At a constituent conference in Syria's northeastern Hasakah province on March 17, the Syrian Kurds announced the creation of a federal region in the country's north the so-called Federal Democratic System of Rojava and Northern Syria. Some 200 delegates from Syrias north, home to a predominantly Kurdish population, attended the conference. Later in March, Syrian President Bashar Assad told Sputnik in an exclusive interview that the Syrian people would not support the Syrian Kurds decision to create a federal region in the country's north. "We are the only side that has its own plan. We believe that all nationalities [in our country] should participate in the talks and we don't have any preconditions to join the talks. We don't seek power change, but the decentralization of the country," Muslim said. He added that the PYD believes that all delegates to the Geneva peace talks must be Syrian nationals to ensure the sides could cover all issues without someone dictating decisions from the outside. "We are against any outside interference," Muslim added. The Kurds are a Middle Eastern ethnic group numbering some 30-35 million and living mainly in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. The PYD, the main Syrian Kurdish party, has not been invited to the negotiations in Geneva. A new round of proximity talks between the Syrian government and opposition delegations began in Geneva last week. On Monday, the opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) walked out of the talks, citing ceasefire violations by government troops as the reason for the move. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) CENTCOM pointed out that coalition rocket artillery, bomber, ground-attack, fighter and remotely piloted aircraft were involved in the aerial attacks in Iraq. "Near Mosul, six strikes struck five separate ISIL [Islamic State] tactical units and destroyed seven ISIL assembly areas, three ISIL vehicles, an ISIL supply cache and an ISIL command and control node," the statement noted on Thursday. In Syria, the coalition carried out airstrikes against Daesh tactical units in two cities, destroying vehicles and a rocket system near Dayr Az Zawr and a battle tank near Mara. A third airstrike near Abu Kamal hit a Daesh oil well head. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) The Syrian ceasefire, reached with the help of the United States and Russia, remains tenuous, US President Barack Obama said in a press conference on Thursday. "The cessation of hostilities is very fragile and may be breaking down in part of the Assads regime continuous attacks," Obama stated. "As for the current constitution, it is expected that it will be in force until its validity ends, and then it is planned to reach an agreement on changing some articles of the constitution or adopting a new one and holding a national referendum on the issue," Halqi told Sputnik. The current Syrian constitution may remain unchanged following a referendum on the issue, or it may be changed partially or completely, the Syrian prime minister told Sputnik. Answering a question on what issues will be brought to the upcoming referendum, Wael Nader Halqi said: "The constitution. Everything that is related to changing various clauses." "The whole constitution, all clauses of the constitution have been brought forward for discussion. We can change some of the clauses of the constitution, we can change all of it. Constitution may stay the way it is now, but currently there is a wish to change some clauses," the minister explained. "We have sovereignty in Syria and it is up to people to make the decision. Sovereignty in Syria belongs to the people, not specific persons [discussing the draft constitution]. After these people are done with discussions, the draft constitution will be adopted. This will be a draft Constitution, not the constitution. To make this draft the constitution we need to hold a referendum. When the people approve it,it will become the constitution. Before that it is only a draft that can be discussed, negotiated, and which may be amended," he said. New Parliament Elections According to the prime minister, new parliament elections will be held in Syria following a referendum on a new constitution for the country. "After an expanded government has been formed, work will be done to study the constitution, amendments will be made. It is possible that some articles of the constitution will be changed or that a whole new constitution is adopted. It will then be voted on in a national referendum. Following that, preparations for parliament elections will begin," Halqi told Sputnik. The prime minister added that "candidates will be nominated by all parties and political forces" and can also include independent candidates, "as in any elections across the world." The new Syrian government must include representatives of the current cabinet, independent politicians, as well as the national opposition, Wael Nader Halqi noted. "Our current government includes various political forces. The cabinet includes the ruling Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party and a group of allied parties, which are united in the so-called National Progressive Front. This government, as previous governments, also includes independent politicians," Halqi said. "As for the extended government we are proposing as a compromise solution, it should include various forces, but the foundation must be the current government, as well as patriotic opposition parties, which should not include terrorist organizations or individuals affiliated with terrorists. As well as independent figures," he added. New Government The new Syrian government will be formed by the party that wins the elections, which may well be opposition. "As far as the electoral process is concerned, candidates will be nominated by all parties and political forces, as well as independent candidates, as in any elections across the world. A parliamentary faction which gets the most votes, independently or together with allied parties will form the government. If the opposition gets most votes at the parliamentary elections it will be responsible for forming the government. If the Baath party and its allies from political parties and the National Progressive Front win, then they will form the government. Therefore, the future government will be formed by whoever wins the elections. This will strengthen the principles of democracy in Syria," Wael Nader Halqi said. A new government in Syria can also include members of the foreign-based opposition, as long as they are not financed or controlled by other states, or affiliated with terrorists. "This should be patriotic opposition, regardless of whether it is based within the country or abroad. It needs to have a patriotic foundation, it cannot be affiliated with foreign countries or be financed or controlled from abroad, like some of those who claim to be foreign-based opposition currently are. These can also not be individuals who head terrorist groups. Some of them are present at the Geneva talks, by the way. Particularly persons affiliated with Ahrar ash-Sham and Jaysh al-Islam," Halqi said. DAMASCUS (Sputnik) The Syrian armed forces intend to begin preparation of a campaign to free Deir ez-Zor, the Syrian prime minister told Sputnik. "After we liberated Qaryatayn and Tadmur [Palmyra] with the help of our allies from Russia and the resistance, we intend to make the area around these regions secure and start preparing for new operations, with the direction of Deir ez-Zor among them, of course," Wael Nader Halqi said. "We seek to free all Syrian territory from terrorists at an appropriate time, so that Syria again becomes safe, stable and prosperous. A country of peace and development," Halqi said. DAMASCUS (Sputnik) Damascus awaits a delivery of a new batch of grain of 100,000 metric tons (110,231 US tons) from Russia, the Syrian prime minister told Sputnik. "Deliveries of food safety, especially grain deliveries, provided by the Russian authorities, Russian President [Vladimir] Putin have been a big factor in boosting the resilience of the Syrian people. The first batch amounted to 100,000 tones, the next one will also be 100,000 tones," Wael Nader Halqi said. The minister also noted Russias role in deliveries of humanitarian aid to the besieged city of Deir Ez-Zor. MOSCOW (Sputnik) Russian combat engineers have fully cleared of explosive devices the historical part of Syria's ancient city of Palmyra, Commander of Russian Engineering Troops Lt. Gen. Yuri Stavitsky said Thursday. "At this point, the tasks on the demining of the historical part of Palmyra have been accomplished in full," Stavitsky said in a report to President Vladimir Putin during a video conference call. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) All parties involved in the conflict in Yemen should fully implement the ceasefire agreement reached earlier in April, US State Department spokesperson John Kirby said on Thursday. "We are encouraged by the recent cessation of hostilities in Yemen that has largely held," Kirby stated. "We continue to urge all parties to comply fully with the terms of the cessation of hostilities and to enable humanitarian access throughout all parts of the country." Yemen has been engulfed in a military conflict between the government headed by President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and Houthi rebels, the countrys main opposition force, which have been supported by army units loyal to Saleh. The Yemen ceasefire agreement took effect on April 10. The Saudi embassy also paid for the airfare of Mohammed al-Qudhaeein and Hamdan al-Shalawi, Saudi students who allegedly participated in a "dry run" preparation for the 9/11 attacks during a 1999 flight. Following the revelations and the renewed push to hold Saudi Arabia accountable, by allowing surviving family members of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi government in a US court Saudi Arabias foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir threatened to divest the kingdoms $750 billion in US Treasury assets. Top US lawmakers, including Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT), denounced the Saudi threat, calling on the Obama administration to stand up to the regimes "blackmail." President Obama immediately vowed to veto any legislation that would provide 9/11 families the right to sue Saudi Arabia, and took a noncommittal stance on releasing the 28 redacted pages of the 9/11 report. The White House has found unlikely support among top Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who, with many other high ranking Republican officials, have moved to block the legislation. PRAGUE (Sputnik) The Czech Republic will send 4 million koruna ($170,000) of humanitarian assistance to Syria in the near future, Czech Deputy Foreign Minister Martin Tlapa said Thursday. "Two shipments of humanitarian aid to Syria for a total amount of 4 million korunas have been approved. These are things that people affected by the war need, medical supplies first among them," Tlapa said after talks with Syrian counterpart Faisal Mekdad. The Central European republic planned to send $8.34 million in humanitarian assistance to Syria in the next 3 years, subject to debate and approval by the Czech government, Tlapa added. Staffan de Mistura said also said that the talks will continue next week. "Of course," de Mistura told the RTS Swiss broadcaster, asked whether the talks would continue next week. The UN envoy added that the Russia-US-brokered cessation of hostilities, whose violations prompted the Saudi-backed delegation to suspend their participation and leave Geneva, needs to "resume." He underscored the need to be "more active" on providing humanitarian assistance to war-torn Syrians. "We should ask stakeholders to hold a joint meeting. We will do it," de Mistura stressed, referring to the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) co-chaired by Russia and the United States. "We should never exclude the possibility of a peaceful settlement of this horrible war in Syria. Intra-Syrian talks should continue," de Mistura told the broadcaster. "Russia and the US helped to implement ceasefire that lasts already for 48 days. It's a miracle," de Mistura noted. "But we should remember that we are limited in time, we are in a hurry," the UN envoy stressed, when asked what steps he expected the two countries to take next. De Mistura added that the International Syria Support Group, co-chaired by Russia and the United States, should convene for a joint meeting. MOSCOW (Sputnik) Russia's operation has helped to change the facts on the ground. The Syrian Arab Army, assisted by Russian warplanes and local allies, has managed to turn the tide of war by making gains against Daesh, al-Nusra Front and other terrorist groups in key provinces. Thanks to the Russia Aerospace Forces, the Syrian Army gained strategic initiative. Terrorist groups suffered considerable losses, Putin said. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) The United States should permanently station troops in Eastern Europe to build stronger relationships with its allies in the region, US European Command (EUCOM) nominee Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti said at a US Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday. "A permanent brigade gives you a brigade that establishes relationships with the supporting elements of all forces from the United States as well as a more permanent relationship and long-lasting relationship with all of our allies that they work with day-to-day, and that can be done over time better than a rotational force can do it," Scaparrotti told lawmakers. Gen. Scaparrotti was recently chosen by President Barack Obama to serve as the Commander of EUCOM and replace Gen. Philip Breedlove at NATO as the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) Russia is the biggest threat facing the United States, US Northern Command (NORTHCOM) commander nominee Gen. Lori Robinson told US senators at a confirmation hearing. "Russia is the greatest threat facing the [US] homeland," Robinson stated when asked what she thinks are the top threats to the country. MOSCOW (Sputnik) The Norwegian PEN, part of the PEN International global association, awarded Snowden the Carl von Ossietzky prize for raising awareness and sparking debate over global government surveillance on March 7 this year. "On behalf of Snowden and Norwegian PEN, Advokatfirmaet Schjodt has filed a petition to Oslo City Court in order to allow Snowden to travel to Norway without fear of extradition to the US, where he faces decades of imprisonment under the Espionage Act," the Norwegian PEN said. Norwegian PEN invited Snowden to receive the award in Oslo on November 18, stressing at the time that it "will do our utmost to ensure that Snowden may receive the prize in person." DAMASCUS (Sputnik) The presence of the Russian air defense systems does not allow anyone to violate Syrias airspace, the Syrian prime minister told Sputnik. "We are reassured by the fact of the presence of the modern air defense systems, S-300 or S-400. Because they are guarding the sovereignty of the Syrian airspace, not allowing aircraft of any modifications to violate Syrian airspace," Wael Nader Halqi said. Russia deployed S-400 missile systems at its airbase in Syria following the downing of a Russian Su-24 Fencer by a Turkish F-16 fighter on November 24. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) The general claimed that the methods used in Ukraine are below the level of what the United States normally considers to be conflict. "[Combatant Commanders] are working on how best to handle this [with] the authorities, the doctrine and the capabilities that we need in order to deal with this type of conflict," Scaparrotti told the US Senate. Earlier, Scaparrotti said the United States should permanently station troops in Eastern Europe to build stronger relationships with its allies in the region. MOSCOW (Sputnik) On Wednesday, a first Russia-NATO Council meeting at the level of permanent envoys in Brussels in two years failed to yield any significant results due to the sides disagreement on a number of geopolitical issues. "If NATO really wants to resume the dialogue on arms control, on strengthening Europe's stability and security on the basis of those developments, which for a long enough period served as the basis for maintaining stability in Europe, they should stop the process of strengthening its military presence along our borders. All [forces] that were sent to and has been rotating along our borders must be returned to the place of permanent deployment," Grushko told the Rossiya-24 television channel. According to the envoy, such moves would open a window of opportunity for a dialogue on the issues that the Alliance is interested in. Prosecutors also released an email in which Yu is alleged to have said that one of the devices she exported, an underwater acoustic locator, would be used on a Chinese underwater drone. If convicted, the Orlando resident faces 20 years in prison for each count of money laundering and a 10 year sentence for acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government. Yu is a Chinese citizen and lived in the US as a permanent resident. Gardner, professor and chair of the Department of International and Comparative Politics at the American University of Paris, called todays NATO-Russia Council a good step. At the same time, he said negotiations should have been started immediately following the US-backed coup in Ukraine. The subsequent Ukraine crisis and the downing of the Russian Su-24 jet by NATO-member Turkey brought the sides to the brink of war. These are very dangerous incidents: overflights at the NATO airspace and [NATOs movement] closer to Russian borders. Thats created a very dangerous war scenario that we all havent seen since the Cold War, he said. TOKYO (Sputnik) Japan is hosting a G7 summit of world leaders in the Kashiko Island in May and Obama is expected to attend. There have been calls for him to go to Hiroshima, which would be the first visit of a sitting US president since the Japanese city was levelled by an atomic bomb in 1945. According to Kyodo news agency, Matsui expressed hope that Obama would not only visit war-time memorials, if he travels to Hiroshima, but also meet survivors of the bombing. "Of course, we want to raise the issue of responsibility," Matsui told journalists. "But it [the bombing] happened 70 years ago and the succeeding generations should get over this problem." Obama came to Riyadh hoping to discuss how the United States and Saudi Arabia could confront the issues of terrorism and regional instability in the Middle East. When Obama stepped off the plane in Riyadh's airport, he had a chilly welcome. Saudi King Salman was not present at the airport to greet Obama personally, instead sending a lower-ranking royal to greet the president. Interestingly, when top officials from other Gulf nations arrived at Riyadh earlier, the Saudi king was shown on local TV personally greeting them at the airport. "Today it became clear just how strongly Obama angered the Saudis. He obviously had a cold welcome," German newspaper Der Spiegel said. STRASBOURG (Sputnik) The French National Assembly will discuss the possibility of lifting sanctions against Russia on April 28, French lawmaker Francois Rochebloine said. On April 28, the first vote on lifting the sanctions against Russia will be held in the French National Assembly, Rochebloine told RIA Novosti in an interview. He said that of the lawmakers decide to lift the sanctions, then this would show Frances stance. MOSCOW (Sputnik) Russia would be happy if the EU Association Agreement with Ukraine yielded any sort of success for Kiev, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday. Of course Russia is interested that its neighbors are predictable, economically independent, and, I would say, stable and flourishing. If this agreement helps Ukraine to reach some sort of parameter in reaching its goals, then obviously we would only be happy, Peskov told journalists. However, if the Ukraine-EU Association Agreement has negative effects on Russia, Moscow will take necessary steps to balance the situation, Peskov said. DAMASCUS (Sputnik) Damascus does not consider the current round of intra-Syrian talks in Geneva to be a failure despite the High Negotiations Committees taking a recess in them, Syrian Prime Minister Wael Nader al-Halqi told Sputnik on Thursday. The negotiations have not failed yet. The Riyadh delegation isnt the only delegation participating in the negotiations, there is a delegation from [the government of] Syria and a number of others and the Riyadh delegation isnt the only one representing the opposition, al-Haqi said. Damascus believes the Riyadh delegation in the intra-Syrian talks in Geneva is disinterested in the success of the negotiations and the HNCs decision to halt the talks proves this, Syrian Prime Minister Wael Nader al-Halqi said. MOSCOW (Sputnik) Later in the day, Netanyahu is expected to arrive in Moscow with official visit to meet Russian leadership. Netanyahu's visit takes place soon after the Moscow visit of Abbas on April 18. "The visit is very important in terms of discussing the entire range of Russian-Israeli relations, which are quite full and versatile, as well as in light of Abbas' recent visit and initiatives that have been voiced recently in regard to Middle East settlement," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. He added that the sides are unlikely to sign any documents during the Israeli leader's Moscow trip. MOSCOW (Sputnik) A new round of indirect talks between Syrian government and opposition factions began in Geneva last week. On Monday, the opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) walked out of the talks, citing alleged ceasefire violations by government troops. "The talks in Geneva have almost failed. There are sides that believe the crisis can be solved militarily, and we disagree with that," Saleh Muslim said at a press conference in Moscow. The Kurdish politician stressed that the Kurdish minority in Syria still believed that it was possible to sit down at the negotiations table in order to stop the five-year-long bloodshed. GENEVA (Sputnik) A source close to HNC told Sputnik earlier that there was a split in the HNC delegation over the necessity to continue the talks. Some HNC members have already left Geneva. On Monday, the HNC asked UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura to suspend their participation in the ongoing round of talks, blaming Damascus for violating the cessation of hostilities on the ground in Syria. "Among the promising areas of cooperation the energy sphere (Russian companies are interested in participating in the natural gas production projects on the Mediterranean coast of Israel)," the documents read. According to the materials, the promising areas of bilateral cooperation are aircraft construction, agriculture, pharmaceuticals and healthcare. GENEVA (Sputnik) Two negotiators from Syria's opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) will stay in Geneva until April 25, HNC adviser Ahmed Kamel told Sputnik on Thursday. "Four to five negotiators will stay until Friday. That includes [HNC head] Salem al-Meslet. But most of the delegation will leave on Friday. Two of the 15 negotiators will stay in Geneva until Monday," Kamel said. A new round of proximity talks between the Syrian government and opposition delegations began in Geneva last week. On Monday, HNC walked out of the talks, citing ceasefire violations by government troops as the reason for the move. GENEVA (Sputnik) The HNC delegation may return to the peace talks if it sees changes in humanitarian deliveries and power transition, according to Asaad Zoubi. "The international community has not fulfilled its role and has not put enough pressure on the regime in order to make it agree on the formation of a transitional governing body. It also failed to fulfill its obligations in humanitarian aid deliveries. If there are changes on these two aspects, then of course the HNC will decide to change its decision on their participation in negotiations process", Asaad Zoubi told Sputnik. A new round of proximity talks between the Syrian government and opposition delegations began in Geneva last week. On Monday, HNC walked out of the talks, citing ceasefire violations by government troops as the reason for the move. "More damagingly, the chancellor allowed the criminal case to go forward when she had the legal authority to stop it, claiming the judiciary is where the matter rightly belongs while promising to repeal the law under which the suit was brought," Stephens underscores. Erdogan's tough response to the comic show is hardly surprising. "The Turkish government is pursuing nearly 2,000 criminal cases against Turkish citizens accused of insulting Mr. Erdogan, some of which involve school-age children who posted material on Facebook," the journalist points out. Interestingly enough, it is not the first time that Ankara has fumed over Germany's media criticism of Erdogan. "One has to also recall that the Bohmermann case comes on the heels of Ankara's diplomatic demarche to have a video on German television, which parodied Erdogan as a basher of journalists who likes to build big palaces for himself, banned," prominent Turkish journalist Semih Idiz notes in his Op-Ed for The Hurriyet Daily News. Idiz emphasizes that in the eyes of the West Erdogan has earned the reputation of "the enemy" of freedom of expression and a press freedom. MOSCOW (Sputnik) Syria's Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) is the force that should represent the interests of the Syrian Kurds at peace talks in Geneva aimed at ending the devastating five-year civil war, a representative of the PYD in Russia told Sputnik on Thursday. "When the international community speaks about the representation of Kurds [at the Geneva talks], they have in mind the PYD. It is the force that has been fighting against Islamic State [militant group] for all five years of the war, so it is the PYD that represents the interests of the Kurdish people in Syrian Kurdistan," Abd Salam Ali said, answering a question about who is best placed to represent the interests of the Syrian Kurds at the Geneva talks. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) The United States and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members have most of their differences in relations with Iran, US President Barack Obama said in a press conference on Thursday. Probably the biggest area where there has been the tactical differences has been with respect to Iran, Obama said. What Ive said to them is we have to have a dual track. We have we have to be effective in our offensive and hold Iran into account where it is acting in ways that are contrary to international rules and norms. But we also have to have the capacity to enter into the dialogue to reduce tensions. GCC countries, largely opposed to the Iranian nuclear agreement, repeatedly raised concerns over the implications of an agreement on regional security. MOSCOW (Sputnik) Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed on Thursday with members of Russia's Security Council the political settlement of the Middle East crisis and the deterioration of the situation at the Syria proximity talks in Geneva, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. "The participants of the meeting discussed the settlement of the Middle East crisis in light with the president's recent talks with PNA leader Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu," Peskov said. "They also expressed serious concern over the deterioration of the situation at the Syria proximity talks in Geneva," he added. BELGRADE (Sputnik) Earlier this week, Croatia's top diplomat Miro Kovac said that Serbia should not have a law claiming jurisdiction over war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia countries because it is "a historical perversion" as Serbia was the state from where the plans on the 1990s Balkan wars originated. "The Serbian Foreign Ministry takes this opportunity to point out to the almost daily nationalist attacks and hate speech in the Republic of Croatia, which produces a sense of insecurity among the members of the Serb national minority a direct consequence of the avoidance of the Republic of Croatia's competent organs to adequately sanction and condemn such manifestations," the Serbian Foreign Ministry said in the protest note. The 1990s was notorious by a series of ethnic conflicts on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, which was then in the breakup process. The major conflicts included wars in Slovenia, Bosnia, the Croatian War of Independence, Kosovo war, insurgency in the Presevo Valley and the Republic of Macedonia. The truth of the matter is that last year Riyadh announced a plan to build a 950 kilometer canal, dubbed Salman Canal, connecting the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea. But what lies at the root of the plan? It is expected that the canal will allow ships to reduce their trip through the Strait of Hormuz almost by half. What is more important, Iran is keeping an eye on the strait. By bypassing Hormuz, Saudi Arabia hopes to overcome this "obstacle." "Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE could export their oil through this canal up to the Arabian Sea, thus avoiding the Strait of Hormuz," Gulf News reported in September 2015. In accordance with the plan, 630 kilometers of the canal will be built in Saudi Arabia and 320 kilometers in Yemen. "We agreed to name it Salman Canal, after the king of Saudi Arabia"https://t.co/7VdqLJXTM4 pic.twitter.com/UJK051lO6Q Taufiq Marhaban (@TaufiqMarhaban) 13 2016 . "The canal will add 1,200km of clean and splendid coasts in the Empty Quarter and will have 20 tunnels for cars and pedestrians on the Saudi side, while it will add 700km of waterfront to Yemen and revive the desert areas in the east of the country," Saad Bin Omar of the Riyadh-based Arab Century Centre for Studies said, as quoted by the media outlet. Despite the fact that Stoltenberg acknowledged that both sides are able to engage in dialogue despite the existing disagreements and suspended practical cooperation, the relations between Russia and NATO generally remain strained. "Whenever you point a gun at somebody, that somebody feels uncomfortable. And that is why we have to go back to the 1980s concept of Willy Brandt: we East and West, Russia and NATO we cannot be safe, cannot feel secure unless we have common security. We can only be secure together and not by confrontation, not by threats, not by exercising, not by provocation, not by a bad language, not by talking down to each other," Oberg stated. The NATO-Russia Council fell apart in June 2014, following the Ukrainian crisis. The meeting was designed to restore constructive relations between parties but failed due to differences in NATO and Russia's positions. "For NATO, enough has never been enough. It always wanted more expansion [] and now there is another player who is also doing things in Syria. And I believe that this is the time for recognition, for NATO saying: Ok, we made a mistake 25 years ago and it's time that we change this and take some confidence-building measures and build better relations. Also because nothing can be solved in Syria without Russia," Oberg argued. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) The United States is not planning to start active military cooperation with Russia in Syria, US State Department spokesperson John Kirby said in a press briefing on Thursday. For the purpose of safety, there has been the sharing of some tactical information with respect to the airspace over Syria. That continues, but there is not now nor other plans to actively cooperate militarily with the Russian military in Syria, Kirby stated. MOSCOW (Sputnik) Russia considers two ceasefire agreements signed between Azerbaijan and Armenia in 1995 and 1996 as the foundation of cessation of hostilities in the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh region, the Russian Foreign Ministry said. "In the context of the situation around Nagorno-Karabakh, the Russian side insists that the 1994 agreement on the ceasefire and the agreement on the strengthening of the ceasefire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh conflict reached in 1995 have no time limitations and continue to form the foundation of the cessation of hostilities in the conflict zone," the ministry said in a Thursday statement. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict began in 1988, when the autonomous region with a predominantly Armenian population sought to secede from the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. The region proclaimed independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, triggering a war that lasted until a Russia-brokered ceasefire in 1994. YEREVAN (Sputnik) Azerbaijan is attempting to stymie talks to settle the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the Armenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Thursday. Armenia strongly condemns Azerbaijans futile attempts to call into question the open-ended trilateral ceasefire agreement between Karabakh, Armenia and Azerbaijan signed in May 1994, the ministry said in a statement responding to the Azeri Foreign Ministrys previous remarks. Hikmet Hajiyev, spokesman for Azerbaijans Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said earlier on Thursday that a political settlement of the conflict is possible with the implementation of four 1993 UN Security Council resolutions calling for the withdrawal of Armenian troops from disputed areas. Saudis have lost some of their confidence in the ability of the United States to come to their aid, Ben-Meir, Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute, said in regard to the decline in relations between the two nations. Riyadh was particularly displeased with Obama making it clear that Iran is a fact of life and a major power, with which Saudis must share their neighborhood. Ben-Meir stressed that the standoff between the two Middle East countries could only be mitigated by peaceful means. Iran is high on the agenda, but so is the Senate legislation proposed by Democrats that would allow U.S. citizens to sue Saudi Arabia for possible involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Is the U.S-Saudi relationship experiencing serious friction? The Erdogan government in Turkey moves to shut down the Sputnik News hub in Turkey after the dramatic expulsion of Sputnik Turkey's editor-in-chief. Becker is joined by George Galloway, Ray McGovern and John Kiriakou to talk about what the latest suppression of the media in Turkey means. Britain gears up for the referendum on whether to leave the European Union that takes place in June with official campaigns launched last Friday for both the Stay and Leave sides. But there are other campaigns that did not receive official status in the campaign, such as the left-wing leave campaign dubbed Lexit. Alex Gordon, the former President of the RMT Union and an advocate of Lexit, joins Becker to discuss his views on the referendum. MOSCOW (Sputnik) The Russian president said that over 3,300 undocumented migrants were detained in Russia last year, and over 2,800 criminal cases were initiated over illegal border crossings. "The border service of Russia's FSB [Federal Security Service] is doing quite a bit of work [in this area] <> It is necessary to increase the analytic capacity and technical equipment of the border system and put an insurmountable barrier in the way of smuggling, undocumented migration and transnational crime," Putin said at a meeting with military officers. The Russian president underscored that the country's safety and security directly depends upon the competent work of the intelligence service, in particular, timely reports on potential external threats and forecasts on the development of the international situation in unstable regions. It is no secret that the Russian economy is struggling at the moment. The drop in oil prices, sanctions and decline in GDP, capital outflow and reduced turnover are some of the problems that the country hasnt seen since the 90s, so the word crisis is quite adequate. But this is no reason to draw conclusions about the collapse of the state, Van Hayyun stressed. First of all, it is too early to give up on the Russian economy the authorities are trying hard to turn things around and a positive outcome is becoming visible. The authorities even managed to stop the economic downturn last year. On the shelves in the stores there is still a large range of goods, and, in spite of the high prices, trade is still very much dynamic. In addition, Russia is a vast country, rich in natural resources, with great scientific and technical potential and has a relatively high level of education. Russia can provide for itself. In this time of crisis the country is firmly targeting import substitution and reindustrialization. According to many experts, the price of oil has fallen to its lowest mark and, therefore, will continue to recover gradually. This year is progressing successfully for Russian agriculture as well. So despite what some media are saying, Russians are fed and clothed and the crisis is not making them suffer from hunger and cold. Van Hayyun also mentioned the rapid development of relations between Russia and emerging economies, including China. Even with Europe, economic relations are unlikely to be sour for a long time because both sides are getting affected by it. MOSCOW (Sputnik) Half of the Russian nationals feel anxiety and fear because of the threat of a possible terrorist attack in Russia, a new poll revealed on Thursday. However, some 64 percent of those surveyed believe that the attacks can be prevented by the professional work of the security services, according to the Russian Public Opinion Foundation (FOM). Over half of the respondents see the performance of the Russian security services as good, 40 percent assess it as satisfactory, and 3 percent believe that the special services' job is done badly, the poll said. The ad contained a reference to a website of Fact Check Armenia, a group that describes the murder of some 1.5 million ethnic Armenians by Ottoman Turks as Armenian "propaganda." The website also argues that those massacred were collectively guilty of being "treacherous to the land." The Armenian genocide was a series of mass killings and starvation ordered by the Ottoman government during and after World War I. Ankara refuses to recognize the massacre as genocide, claiming that Turkish nationals were also victimized. The Carver County Sheriff's Office later confirmed, "When deputies and medical personnel arrived, they found an unresponsive adult male in the elevator." First responders attempted to revive him using CPR, but Prince was confirmed dead at 10:07 AM local time, according to an official statement. The cause of death is under investigation. Joe Coscarelli (@joecoscarelli) April 21, 2016 Following concerts in Georgia, on April 15, the artists private jet was forced to make an emergency landing in Illinois due to medical issues, but Prince performed a concert the next day and assured the crowd that he was all right. At the time, his representatives attributed the landing to the flu. Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) April 21, 2016 LeVar Burton (@levarburton) April 21, 2016 Prince was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on June 7, 1958, and has been an icon in the entertainment industry for over three decades. The star is one of the most popular artists of all time, having sold over 100 million records globally. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) FBI Director James Comey told the audience at the Aspen Security Forum in London that the agency paid more than he will earn in the remainder of his tenure at the FBI, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. The outlet explained that Comeys salary is $180,000 per year, and there are seven years remaining in his term, putting the cost of the tool to at least $1.26 million. The iPhone was used by Saeed Farook, a US citizen who, along with his wife, killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California on December 2, 2015. Proponents of the ban observe that uranium mining has been proven to cause cancer in those working the mines, as well as in Native Americans, whose water is contaminated by the process. I wish I could say I was surprised by this, but honestly I wasnt, Zimmerman told the Guardian. We know that these anti-public land efforts have a lot of money behind them. Its not surprising to learn that the Koch brothers and other wealthy, ultra-conservative industrialists are funding these efforts to roll back conservation measures across the American west. Arizona Republicans such as Governor Doug Ducey, Senator John McCain, Senator Jeff Flake, and Congressman Paul Gosar have also been fighting to sell the land for mining, claiming that the measure to protect natural resources will kill jobs and stifle development. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) A US Coast Guard boat crew had to return to base after being hit by a green laser while training in the US state of Washington, the agency said in a statement. "Boat and helicopter operators can be temporarily blinded by green laser lights during night operations," Coast Guard Sector Puget Sound Response Department head Cmdr. Brian Meier said on Thursday. Meier explained that such incidents could cause accidents or delay the crew to respond to an emergency. Also on the table was the ongoing Syrian civil war. Obama described the Syrian ceasefire as "very fragile," and in danger of "breaking down." While the President attempts to downplay any notion that the US may be on the rocks with its Gulf allies, evidence suggests there may be something to the rumors. Writing for AntiWar.com, Jason Ditz pointed out that Obamas arrival in Riyadh received a bizarrely underwhelming response from the Saudi government. "Saudi King Salman had been at the airport, broadcast on state TV greeting other arriving leaders for the GCC summit, by the time Obama got there, he and the local TV crew were long gone, and only the local governor was there to meet with him." Last month, a senior Saudi prince responded to comments made by President Obama in a recent interview with The Atlantic, in which the US leader mentioned his annoyance with allies that he dubbed "free riders." Several musicians, including stars like Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr and Bryan Adams, have cancelled concerts in North Carolina and Mississippi over the legislation. "It is heartening the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is becoming more LGBT responsive in their work, it's a good sign as it is an important issue in the UK," said Dr Felicity Daly, director of the LGBT Kaleidoscope Trust, cited by the Independent. "But," she added, "most people who identify as LGBT in the UK will already be aware of the nature of certain states." Matt Horwood of Stonewall, a charity, added that the situation in Mississippi and North Carolina is a reminder that "equality is never secure." "It's positive to see the UK government recognize this need and update its travel advice pages accordingly." Horwood said. The Foreign Office alert comes prior to a visit to the UK by US President Barack Obama. "It is unjustified and unfortunately just another instance of [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan willfully denying press freedom in his country," Henheffer stated. "Turkey is rapidly slipping into authoritarianism and free expression is suffering dramatically as a result." He added that the latest incident is part of a "very troubling trend that has already gone too far." "Democracy is on extremely shaky ground in Turkey as a result. Unfortunately, I think the current government there is all too happy to be slipping toward a dictatorship and that this could all very well end in disaster," Henheffer concluded. Kerimov entry ban comes a week after Turkish authorities shut the agencys Turkish-language website, citing "administrative measures." On Tuesday, a TV journalist from the German public broadcaster ARD was also barred from entering, prompting criticism from the German government. In March, Turkish authorities raided and seized control of the nations largest independent daily newspaper Zaman. Fourteen local journalists were recently imprisoned on charges of espionage and aiding terrorist groups. Turkey's crackdown on journalists and restrictions on freedom of speech have previously been criticized by the international community, including the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, Russia and the organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF). Turkey ranks 151th out of 180 countries in the RSF 2016 press freedom index. Canadian Journalists for Free Expression is a Canadian non-governmental Toronto-based organization that monitors, defends and reports on free expression and access to information in Canada and abroad. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau campaigned last fall on a pledge to legalize the recreational and medicinal use of marijuana, but the time frame has been uncertain. On Wednesday Canadian health minister Jane Philpott said at a special drug conference at the United Nations General Assembly in New York that Canada's approach to legalization will ensure that marijuana is kept away from minors, as well as organized crime. According to Trudeau, legalizing marijuana will contribute to removing the "criminal element" linked to the sale and distribution of the plant. "While this plan challenges the status quo in many countries, we are convinced it is the best way to protect our youth while enhancing public safety," Philpott said, "We will work with law enforcement partners to encourage appropriate and proportionate criminal justice measures." At the same, Head of Chinese Arctic and Antarctic Administration Wang Yong underlined the commercial importance of the existing Northern Sea Route for Chinese companies and described the prospects of China-Russia cooperation in an interview with Sputnik. The consequences of global warming made it possible for China to use a new sea route in the Arctic. The route will run along the coast of North America and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and open new opportunities for Chinese ships. "The use of the route on a regular basis can significantly change the system of maritime traffic and influence international trade, global economy and mining," a representative for Chinas Maritime Safety Administration said. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) The United States will eventually discuss Russian concerns over the Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement (PMDA) regarding changes in the means of plutonium disposal, US Assistant Secretary of State for Nonproliferation Thomas Countryman told Sputnik. "We have an agreement in place [with Russia] that says we can each change the means of disposal by agreement. So I expect at some point we will discuss that," Countryman said on Thursday. Under the US-Russian PMDA, originally signed in 2000, both parties agreed to dispose of at least 34 metric tons of weapons grade plutonium, enough to produce 17,000 nuclear bombs. Participants of the rally, organized in connection with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrovs visit to Armenia, demanded recognition of NKRs independence in accordance with the international law. The demonstrators were holding photographs of the victims of the recent violence escalation in the mountainous region. The violence in Azerbaijans breakaway region, mostly populated by Armenians, escalated early this month. Baku and Yerevan have accused each other of provoking hostilities. Azerbaijan and NKR agreed to a ceasefire on April 5, following days of clashes that led to numerous casualties on both sides. Cortright added that the effectiveness of unmanned weapons depends upon intelligence provided by people on the ground, and that opens the door to the manipulation and falsification of intelligence. There are also humanitarian and ethical issues that must be taken into account, as it is generally assumed that "targeted killing from a great distance makes war seem to be easier." The biggest problem, according to Cortright, is that the US is now continuing to pursue an aggressive military strategy in Afghanistan, a country already crushed by nearly 15 years of war since the Americans became involved. "Why would we pursue a military strategy that hasn't really worked in 15 years? And we have smaller number of troops on the ground," he said. "The thought that some weapons that we think are very accurate, the new technologies of drones, are going to make a difference in addressing the problems on the ground in Afghanistan, there's no basis for that. There's no interest, it seems, in a peace strategy." Bit Of A Legend was already a bit of a star before arriving in the U.S., but the New Zealand-born pacer has been adding to his legend this year with his performances in the George Morton Levy Memorial Pacing Series at Yonkers Raceway. A seven-year-old stallion, Bit Of A Legend went 5-for-5 in the preliminary rounds of the six-week Levy Series, which concludes Saturday with a $609,000 final at Yonkers. Since February, when he began racing for New York-based trainer Peter Tritton and owner Harry von Knoblauch, Bit Of A Legend has won seven of nine starts and earned $146,750. He is the richest horse in North America this year. Prior to being sold to his new connections in December, Bit Of A Legend won 20 of 63 races and earned $659,686 (U.S.) while competing Down Under. Among his exploits, he was the first male pacer to win Australian Breeders Crown finals at ages two and three. Hes the best horse Ive had. Hes always been a good horse, said Tritton, a 65-year-old Australia native who over the years has teamed with von Knoblauch to campaign a number of successful imports from Down Under. Hes always raced the best company and hes done a real good job. Yonkers really suits him because hes so good-gaited and you can drive him anyway -- leave, sit, come first over -- it doesnt matter. He just goes when you say go. Hes just a great little racehorse. In the Levys preliminary divisions, Bit Of A Legend won from off the pace in four of his five starts, including a rally from last place at the top of the stretch in the third week of the event. Last week, he finished in a dead heat for victory with Wiggle It Jiggleit, the 2015 Horse of the Year, after a duel neither horse wanted to lose. The time of 1:51.2 for the mile was a track record for a dead heat. That stretch drive was really something, Tritton said. Neither horse wanted to get beat. I thought Wiggle It Jiggleit had it halfway up the straight, but my little horse really fought hard. Tritton could have skipped last weeks round of the Levy because Bit Of A Legend already had enough points to qualify for the final. But Tritton didnt want to disrupt the pacers schedule. He thrives on racing, Tritton said. I thought if I didnt race him I might have to train him a couple of times hard and I wanted to stick to what I was doing. Bit Of A Legend, a son of stallion Bettors Delight out of the Sokys Atom mare Sokys Legend, came highly recommended to Tritton by Down Under horse agent Peter Larkin. Tritton also spoke with Bit Of A Legends former trainer, Cran Dalgety, prior to the sale. Hes one of the best trainers over there, Tritton said. He wins a lot of races and knows a good horse from a bad horse. He really educates the horses and looks after them. Still, Tritton has been pleasantly surprised with Bit Of A Legends fast start to his career in the States. Jordan Stratton has driven the horse in all of his races. I didnt know he would go through the series undefeated, Tritton said. You really wouldnt think he would be as good as he is, but he just relishes racing at Yonkers. And I think Jordan really suits him. Hes always tried to look after him and leave something in the tank. The entry of Bit Of A Legend and New Zealand-born stablemate Texican is the 5-2 third choice in Saturdays Levy final. The Ron Burke-trained entry of Take It Back Terry and All Bets Off is the 8-5 favourite, followed by the Jeff Bamond Jr.-trained entry of P H Supercam and Mach It So at 9-5. Take It Back Terry, last years Levy runner-up, and Mach It So had three wins in the preliminary rounds of this years series. P H Supercam and All Bets Off both had one victory. Bit Of A Legend will start from post two and Texican from post six. Take It Back Terry leaves from post one and All Bets Off from post five. P H Supercam and Mach It So have posts three and seven, respectively. I would have liked Texican to draw a bit closer, but Ive got to be thankful for what Ive got, Tritton said. Weve got a shot, theres no doubt about that. I think Jordan will stay up near the leaders and see if he can out-sprint them at the finish. If theres one thing (Bit Of A Legend) has got its real good speed. At the top of the lane, he can make up a length or two real quick. Its a good spot where he can work it out. Tritton also will send out New Zealand import Sell A Bit in Saturdays $309,800 Blue Chip Matchmaker Series final for pacing mares. Sell A Bit is 5-1 on the morning line. Last years Matchmaker champion Venus Delight, part of an entry with Krispy Apple, is the 2-1 favourite. I think she can win, I really do, Tritton said about Sell A Bit. You can do a bit of work with her early and shell just keep going. Shes a very good mare. Im quietly confident with her. (My horses) just need racing luck. Im hoping to have a good night. Even if you get second or third, you still make a fair amount of money. Having said that, it would be lovely to win. For Jordan too; it would be great to see him do it. Well keep our fingers crossed. $606,000 George Morton Levy Memorial Series final (Post Horse Listed Driver) 1 Take It Back Terry G. Brennan 2 Bit Of A Legend N J. Stratton 3 P H Supercam J. Bartlett 4 Texas Terror N Br. Miller 5 All Bets Off M. Kakaley 6 Texican N Y. Gingras 7 Mach It So Ti. Tetrick 8 Lucan Hanover B. Sears $309,800 Blue Chip Matchmaker Series final (Post Horse Listed Driver) 1 Lady Shadow C. Callahan 2 Regil Elektra Ti. Tetrick 3 Sell A Bit N J. Stratton 4 Yagonnakissmeornot D. Dube 5 Al Raza N D. Miller 6 Mach It A Par G. Brennan 7 Venus Delight Y. Gingras 8 Krispy Apple J. Bartlett This story courtesy of Harness Racing Communications, a division of the U.S. Trotting Association. For more information, visit www.ustrotting.com. Hattie, one of the greatest producers in the history of the breed, passed away yesterday (Wednesday, April 20) at Hanover Shoe Farms. The daughter of Abercrombie and the Albatross mare Albaquel was 24 years old. Hattie was a terrific race filly. She took a two-year-old record of 1.55.3 and earned $266,323 when both of those achievements were relatively exceptional. She was bred and trained by Doug Ackerman. Ironically, Hattie was scheduled to be retired after her 2016 foaling. Hattie delivered a healthy Bettors Delight colt on Tuesday, April 19, seemingly without complication. Unfortunately, she hemorrhaged the next day and passed on. Hattie left a huge legacy. From 14 living foals older than two, she is the dam of 4 in 1.50, 11 in 1.55, one $2-million winner, two $1-million winners and four $500,000+ winners. All 14 of her living foals raced, took records, and earned money. The best known of her foals are Meadowlands Pace winner Holborn Hanover p,2,1:58, 3,1:49, 1:46.4($2,070,648), Hyperion Hanover p,3,1:52f, 1:49.1($1,187,755), Hillbilly Hanover p,2,1:52.2f, 3,1:50.1f and Haverford Hanover p,2,2:01.1, 3,1:53.2, 1.49($510,295). Hattie was laid to rest at the Hanover Shoe Farms equine cemetery, where the ashes of her most notable son Holborn Hanover lay. Please join Standardbred Canada in offering condolences to the connections of Hattie. (Hanover Shoe Farms) Smith Bill to Protect Int'l Religious Freedom Passes the House Foreign Affairs Committee Legislation Ready for Vote of Full House Contact: Jeff Sagnip, 202-225-3765; chrissmith.house.gov WASHINGTON, April 21, 2016 /Standard Newswire/ -- A bill giving the Administration and the State Department new resources and training to help combat the escalation of persecution of Christians and anti-Semitism has been unanimously adopted by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Authored by Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ) with the lead co-sponsorship of Congresswoman Anna Eshoo (D-CA), the legislation enjoys widespread bipartisan support, garnering over 100 cosponsors. It is named the Frank Wolf International Religious Freedom Act (HR 1150), in honor of the former member of Congress and internationally recognized leader in the fight against religious persecution. "Eighteen years ago, Frank Wolf led and Congress had the foresight to make advancing the right to religious freedom a U.S. foreign policy priority," said Smith, Chair of the House Subcommittee on Global Human Rights. Click here to read excerpts of Smith's remarks. "My legislation strengthens our resolve and ensures that every administration integrates and advances religious freedom in its foreign policy objectives and actions." Specifically, Smith's bill: Requires that international religious freedom policies must be integrated into national security, immigration, rule of law, and other relevant U.S. foreign policy priorities; Creates a Designated Persons List of individuals sanctioned for participating or directing religious freedom abuses; Expands diplomatic training on international religious freedom for all State Department diplomats; Creates a "tier system" for International Religious Freedom reports on countries of particular concern and a special watch listsimilar to the tier system used in the Trafficking in Persons Report; Requires annual Presidential designations and actions on countries with severe religious freedom abuses; Gives the President the authority to designate "non-state actors" as severe violators of international religious freedom; and Requires that the Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom will report directly to the Secretary of State. "The world is experiencing an unprecedented crisis of international religious freedom, a crisis that continues to create millions of victims; a crisis that undermines liberty, prosperity and peace; a crisis that poses a direct challenge to the U.S. interests in the Middle East, Russia, China and sub-Saharan Africa," said Smith who has held more than a dozen hearings on religious freedom including the landmark October 15, 2016 hearing entitled "The Global Crisis of Religious Freedom." "It is increasingly clear that a robust religious freedom diplomacy is necessary to advance US interest in stability, security, and economic development. Research shows that where there is more religious freedom, there is more economic freedom, more womens empowerment, more political stability, more freedom of speech, and less terrorism," he said. The bill, which is supported by an large ecumenical group of religious organizations and representatives of ethnic minority groups and nongovernment organizations (NGOs) is expected to be considered by the full House of Representatives in the next few weeks. Smith has promoted religious freedom and other human rights issues as chairman and co-chairman of the U.S. Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the U.S. Commission on China. For the most updated version of this release click on: chrissmith.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=398886 Reach Beyond Rushes Medical Crews to Assist in Ecuadorian Earthquake Contact: Darin Campbell 512-785-8350QUITO, Ecuador, April 21, 2016 / Standard Newswire / -- Reach Beyond, a Colorado-based media and medical outreach ministry with broadcasting facilities and a hospital in Ecuador, will dispatch crews to help care for some of the 2,500 people hurt during last weekend's devastating quake. More than 410 people are confirmed dead, but this total is expected to rise in the coming days.Photo: Buildings and roads in Pedernales, Ecuador, were destroyed by the 7.8-magnitude earthquake this weekend. Photo supplied by La HoraThe initial crew, comprising four Quito-based physicians, is expected to arrive today at a local healthcare facility, Hospital Juan Carlos Guasti in the coastal city of Atacames. "The hospital is receiving a lot of trauma patients," said Reach Beyond missionary Hermann Schirmacher, a veteran of disaster response trips to Ecuador in 2008 and Haiti in 2010."We are organizing relief missions as quickly as we can," said Steve Johnson, communications director of Reach Beyond in Colorado Springs. "Roads were destroyed and communications equipment has been badly damaged in many areas, making it difficult to find out where help is most needed."Dr. Jack Pena, an orthopedic surgeon, is accompanying the team that also includes emergency physician Dr. Hugo Espejo and family physicians Drs. Steve Nelson and Joe Martin. After attending to trauma patients at Atacames, the team plans to move to Ecuadorian communities farther down the coast toward the quake's epicenter, including hard-hit Muisne. Future teams will also travel to Manta and Esmeraldas.Reach Beyond's 76-bed Hospital Vozandes-Quito in the capital city was undamaged by the quake and is also receiving patients being airlifted by the Ecuadorian government from coastal towns and cities.Reach Beyond's ministry workers throughout the country confirmed that they are safe, though they are concerned for the quake victims. "We are praying that the ground will stop trembling and that people who survived can receive help that they need," said one worker. Quichua radio programmer Franklin Ruchi learned today that five members of his wife's family perished in hard-hit Pedernales.Meanwhile, the ministry's local radio stations and repeaters in Ecuadorseven in all, including three in the quake zoneare broadcasting a message of hope to the traumatized population."Our repeater in Portoviejo, which is a place that suffered a lot of damage, is on the air and we have a listener who has confirmed that," said engineer Geoff Kooistra. "We have linked to all government notifications and have done our own special live programming a few times, giving news updates and praying for the situation and offering messages of hope from the Bible. We've also interacted with our listeners through Facebook, Twitter and SMS."Donations to help recovery efforts can be made at reachbeyond.org/ecuadorrelief?c=DM-EMR4 . Reach Beyond ( www.reachbeyond.org ) of Colorado Springs, Colo., uses media and medical technology to minister in difficult-to-reach places and with people groups around the world.To schedule an interview with key leaders, contact Darin Campbell @ (512) 785-8350 or dcampbell@inchristcommunications.com Billy Graham Rapid Response Team Chaplains Deployed to Houston Following Deadly Floods Contact: Erik Ogren, 704-401-2117, eogren@bgea.org CHARLOTTE, N.C., April 21, 2016 / Standard Newswire / -- Massive flooding inundated Texas over the weekend, with news reports indicating that several people died, more than 1,000 homes were flooded, and hundreds required emergency rescue. It is estimated that some 8.8 trillion gallons of water fell on the state in the last few days.In the wake of this disaster, crisis-trained chaplains from the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team have been deployed to assist those who lost homes and loved ones in the historic flooding.Jack Munday, the international director of the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team, said, "Flooding is a difficult tragedy, and it's hard to recover. A homeowner basically has to throw away everything they own. Very little if anything can be saved. Please pray for all of those who are hurting so badly right now."Al New, a veteran chaplain with the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team who arrived in the Houston area on Tuesday, said, "Residents are dragging their possessions, carpet and furniture out to the curb right now. It's been raining so much that there's not much else you can do."The Billy Graham Rapid Response Team is deploying in coordination with Samaritan's Purse , the Christian disaster relief organization also headed by Franklin Graham. Together the two ministries will address the physical, emotional and spiritual needs of those who have been affected.In addition to the deployment in Houston, the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team continues to work in the flood-impacted areas around Orange and Deweyville, Texas, as well as in West Monroe, La. The chaplains recently completed their ministry in Bossier City, La. (flooding) and Brussels, Belgium (terrorist attacks).For more information on the ministry, including videos, photos, news articles and an interactive map of former and current deployments, visit www.billygraham.org/rrt . Updates can also be found at www.facebook.com/RRTChaplains About the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team:The Billy Graham Rapid Response Team was developed by Franklin Graham and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It has since grown into a nationwide network of chaplains in 48 states who are specifically trained to deal with crisis situations. They have deployed to more than 215 disaster sites, including shootings, floods, hurricanes, wildfires and tornadoes. American Family Association Launches #BoycottTarget Initiative After Company Publicizes Bathroom Policy Contact: Deborah Hamilton, Hamilton Strategies, 215-815-7716, Media@HamiltonStrategies.com MEDIA ADVISORY, April 21, 2016 / Standard Newswire / -- American Family Association (AFA, www.afa.net ) is calling for a boycott of Target after the retail giant publicized its policy to allow transgender individuals access to opposite-sex store bathrooms and fitting rooms."Corporate America must stop bullying people who disagree with the radical left agenda to remake society into their progressive image," said AFA President Tim Wildmon. "Target's harmful policy poses a danger to women and children. We think many customers will agree."Target announced this week, "[W]e welcome transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity. Everyone deserves to feel like they belong."AFA pointed to the danger posed by predators and voyeurs who would take advantage of the policy to prey on those who are vulnerable."We want to make it very clear that AFA does not believe the transgender community poses this danger to the wider public," Wildmon said. "Rather, this misguided and reckless policy provides a possible gateway for predators who are out there."AFA also criticized the policy for ignoring the millions of customers who are simply uncomfortable with the presence of strangers of the opposite sex in a personal setting."When Target claims that 'everyone deserves to feel like they belong,' did they ask customers who don't want to use a bathroom with an opposite-sex stranger?" Wildmon asked. "Why doesn't 'everyone' actually mean everyone at Target?"Wildmon offered what he called a "common-sense approach and a reasonable solution" to the issue of transgender customers: a unisex option."Target should keep separate facilities for men and women," he said, "but for the transgender community and for those who simply like using the bathroom alone, a single-occupancy, unisex option could be provided."Wildmon said that risking the ire of customers was odd, considering that some estimate the transgender community at 1/10th of a percent of the general population. He said he also realizes a unisex bathroom option would be an additional cost for Target."But so will a boycott," Wildmon said. "If Target is truly committed to a solid policy that's good for businessfor everyoneand if they're truly committed to the transgender community, the company will spend the money for a unisex compromise. Anything else smacks of an agenda-driven publicity stunt that stands in complete disregard for people who reject the policy." One incumbent is running in the five-candidate race for two open seats. Ray Pohl, the husband of Clatskanie Mayor Diane Pohl, now owes more than $11,000 to the victim of his sexual offense after he pleaded guilty to two counts of indecent exposure Tuesday. Columbia County Circuit Court Judge Jenefer Grant sentenced Pohl, 64, to three years probation with no jail time for one charge of indecent exposure. Sentencing for the second count of indecent exposure was deferred for three years. The sentence may be dismissed if he completes a diversion program. Pohl was arrested on charges of 30 counts of public indecency on suspicion of exposing his genitals to a barista at a drive-through coffee stand regularly over the course of two years. The Daily News in October reported the victim said she finally came forward about the incidents after she was concerned for her daughters safety. It wasnt worth the repercussions I wouldve gotten, she said in an interview with The Daily News in October. Until he started following my daughter around. The victim reported the incidents to the Oregon State Police in September, when Pohl was arrested with a $30,000 bail. The complaint said Pohl exposed himself at least twice a week at the Flowers N Fluff Coffee Shop from October 2013 to September 2015. The Daily News does not publish the names of victims of sex crimes. You can imagine if I exposed the mayors husband what would have happened, the victim said. There was nowhere to turn him in. Its the way things happen in small towns. In the past few years, Clatskanie has seen a few high-profile allegations of sex crimes. In January the Clatskanie PUD settled $3.56 million of lawsuits from six former employees who said they were sexually harassed by a former manager. In October 2013, four families brought a $10 million case against the Clatskanie School District and a principal on charges of deliberately ignoring sexual harassment at school. tech2 News Staff Google.com awkwardly lists itself as a partially dangerous website. According to a report in Engadget based on a post by an eagle eyed Reddit user, that's exactly what the world's largest search engine is doing. The details of the security note explains that websites hosted on Google Groups may install malware on the user. It is not as absurd as it sounds, the Washington Post explains. Apparently, the tool flags the whole domain as unsafe if there is user generated unsafe content in any of the services hosted by Google. The safe browsing diagnostic tool, does seem to be confused over whether or not some sites are dangerous. In the Google.com check, it lists two sites hosted on Google groups as containing potentially malicious code. However, searching the same diagnostic tool with these flagged sites, shows the result as "safe". As the site status is not updated in real time, this could simply mean that the flagged content is now safe, but the top level domain, Google.com has not had its status updated. Google.co.in and Google.in in the same tool is flagged as safe. However, there is still a warning, that some pages on the website sends visitors to the following dangerous website: xda-developers.com. However, checking the status of xda-developers.com shows the site as safe. You can investigate more inconsistencies and embarrassments for yourself, using the security diagnostic tool known as Site Checker. hidden Aiming to provide innovative solutions, identify new business opportunities and create an environment congenial for growth, the much-awaited international technical textile event "TECHNOTEX India 2016" is all set to roll out its fifth edition in Mumbai from Thursday. Organised jointly by the ministry of textiles and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), the three-day event showcasing exhibitions, seminars and conferences will be held at the Bombay Exhibition Centre in Goregaon from April 21-23. "It gives me immense pleasure to announce the 5th edition of Technotex 2016. We have made substantial growth over the last few years, with larger and successful participation from Indian and international fraternity," said Santosh Kumar Gangwar, Minister of State for Textiles, in a statement. "We are hopeful of making Indian technical textile sector into one of the most promising sector around the world by its next edition," the minister added. Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Gangwar will release "i A-TUFS" software and guidelines, "Textiles Compendium 2014-15", standards, "Knowledge Report and Technotex 2016 Exhibition Directory" at the opening ceremony. Expected to draw in over 150 exhibitors, the event will see participation from countries like Korea, Switzerland, Japan, the US, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Russia, Britain, Spain and others. It will also showcase the country pavilions from Taiwan and China. While Gujarat and Karnataka are participating as partner states, the event will also have delegates from states like Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, among others. IANS tech2 News Staff With an aim to provide a convenient option for intercity and intra-city travel, startup Revv delivers cars to your doorstep. Revv claims to be the world's first 100 percent doorstep delivery self-driven car rental service. The company stresses on the fact that they have no excess kilometer charges or surge pricing. Revv was started by Anupam Agarwal and Karan Jain, two professionals with a background of a decade each at McKinsey. It bets on the pure-play 'doorstep delivery of cars' business model. Started in May 2015, Revv started operating in July in Delhi with its first round of funding from Ananth Narayanan CEO of Myntra, CEO of DEN Online, and more than 10 Directors and Partners from McKinsey. Revv claims to be Indias first car rental company that offers a pricing plan for unlimited kilometers. On the technology front, besides the common vehicle location tracking and remote keyless entry/exit features in its cars, Revv is piloting a couple of technologies called Driver Behaviour Monitoring (DBM) and On-Board Diagnostics (OBD) of the vehicles real-time performance, which has significant bearing on user experience and vehicle safety, says the company. With primary focus on SUVs and ultra-luxury cars, Revvs portfolio of cars includes approximately 150 cars with 60 per cent SUVs, 10 per cent ultra-luxury, 30 per cent sedans and hatchbacks. The car delivery executives use a foldable electric scooter that fits in the boot of the car to get back to the parking hubs. The services are currently available in Delhi NCR, Hyderabad and Bengaluru. French minister says, IS can be eradicated French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian reacts during a news conference at the French Defence Ministry in Paris, France. Reuters, paris :The conditions necessary to eradicate Islamic State in Syria and Iraq are "in the process of coming together", French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told France Info radio on Thursday."I note that Daesh (Islamic State) is retreating and that Daesh is retreating significantly," Le Drian said."Since Daesh's occupation of Syria and Iraq, since the attempt to attack Baghdad in June 2014, I think Daesh has lost between 30 and 40 percent of its territory."An international coalition is providing air support to Kurdish and Iraqi forces, which intend to liberate Mosul, in Iraq, and Raqqa, in Syria, by the end of the year, the minister added."We will need ... a lot of determination, but I think the conditions are in the process of coming together for eradicating Daesh," he said. "For the first time, I have this slightly optimistic message."Meanwhile, the US Air Force for the first time deployed a B-52 bomber against the Islamic State, the Pentagon said Wednesday as it ramps up a 20-month campaign to smash the jihadists.The bombing mission, in which a hulking B-52 destroyed a weapons storage facility south of Mosul, comes the same week that Defense Secretary Ash Carter visited Baghdad and announced extra US troops, cash and equipment for the anti-IS campaign in Iraq. In other signs of an increasing tempo, US commandos working with Kurdish troops conducted a raid targeting a senior IS group figure and the Pentagon said it has changed how air strikes risking civilian deaths are approved.Under the new rules, authority now comes from the commanding three-star US general in Baghdad, instead of going through a four-star at the US Central Command's headquarters in Florida.Baghdad-based military spokesman Colonel Steve Warren insisted the changes do not lessen oversight standards in determining when civilian losses are an acceptable risk. "This does not translate to more civilian casualties, this translates to a more rapid execution of strikes," Warren said.The Pentagon has acknowledged 26 civilian deaths due to US-led coalition strikes since the campaign began in August 2014 in Iraq, and credits the use of guided missiles in keeping the number relatively low -- though independent observers say the figure is far higher. Police arrested 18 alleged dacoits from city\'s Golapbagh area under Jatrabari thana along with 40 mobile sets, six laptops and some sharp knives from their possessions on Thursday. Cultivable land must be saved from industrial encroachment THE preservation of farmland and forests has become all the more important at a time when growing industrialization in the country is squeezing much of such land to a critical level. There is no doubt we need more industries to create jobs and income generation activities for the growing number of workforce joining the labour market every year. But protection to agriculture to produce enough food and forestland to preserve environment is equally important and that is what Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Tuesday said asking the authorities concerned to keep it in mind. Her suggestion to put a brake to indiscriminate setting up of industries and real estates destroying forest and cultivable lands makes sense. The message bears the note for those who are at work to grab valuable public and private land to set up industries and needless to say her party men are at the helm of such grabbing. Diverting farmland to industry has always been a contentious issue. Such attempt led to a bloody fight in Banshkhali Upazila in Chittagong district last month in which five people were killed in police firing as the locals tried to resist setting up of a power plant on their land. Occupation of farmland around the capital and other industrial cities and bloody resistance to such moves by locals often make headlines in the media. In many cases real estate owners are occupying arable land dispossessing the owners and destroying forests. In a country with over 160 million people continuous depletion of arable land has become a growing concern. It is really a highly paradoxical situation because we need more land for industries when local and foreign inevestments have already slowed down in absence of suitable land to set up mills and factories. Rapid expansion of human habitat is also adding to the pressure making land use a highly critical issue. The government's plan to set up several dozens special economic zones is then going to add more pressure on land but such expansion is also important to supply growing domestic and export markets. Given that the land scarcity is reaching the critical levels, we believe some basic rethinking about the land use must be at work. One of the good steps may be to have stringent laws, which will prohibit sales of arable land for non-farm activities and punish those who will encroach forestland. Dhaka-Chittagong highway shows big billboards of big business houses on both sides laying huge land unused. Its use must be ensured. Unused land in the premises of big state-owned enterprises such as jute mills may also be released for use by local and foreign investors. In our view a timely land use policy must be formulated now to allow industries to grow and farmland at the same time to be saved. Remove obstacles to trade union in RMG industry UNB, Dhaka :Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said Bangladesh government should urgently remove legal and practical obstacles to unionisation in its readymade garment industry."Garment workers face daunting challenges to unionisation, and remain at risk of interference and threats by factories three years after the Rana Plaza building collapse," said the rights body.The April 2013 building collapse killed 1,100 garment workers and injured many others. In July 2013, the Bangladesh government committed to a Sustainability Compact with the European Union, pledging to reform labor laws. Yet its laws and rules governing labor rights and export processing zones still have rigid union restrictions, in violation of international law, said the HRW. "Let's remember that none of the factories operating in Rana Plaza had trade unions," said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director."If their workers had more of a voice, they might have been able to resist managers who ordered them to work in the doomed building a day after large cracks appeared in it." Only about 10 percent of Bangladesh's more than 4,500 garment factories have registered unions. While many factory workers have tried to form unions, government authorities have frequently rejected applications. In an April 2016 Human Rights Watch meeting with Labour and Employment Minister M Mujibul Haque, the minister dismissed concerns raised about the difficulty of registering a union, saying, "Most who apply for union registration have no idea what a union is."Bangladesh labour laws and procedures pose formidable barriers to founding and operating a union. The labour law requires an unreasonably high 30 percent of workers in a factory to agree to form a union and mandates excessive registration procedures. "The government has vaguely defined powers to cancel a union's registration." Factories also threaten and attack unions and their members with impunity.Human Rights Watch has documented cases of physical assault, intimidation and threats, dismissal of union leaders, and false criminal complaints by factory officials or their associates against garment workers.The Bangladesh authorities have failed to hold factory officials accountable for attacks, threats, and retaliation against workers involved with unions, the global rights body claimed. "If their workers had more of a voice, they might have been able to resist managers who ordered them to work in the doomed building a day after large cracks appeared in it." They should also insist that all aspects of the Sustainability Compact have publicised timelines against which the Bangladesh government's record can be assessed.Unless such steps are taken and demonstrable progress made under the Sustainability Compact, it said, the EU should send a clear message to the Bangladesh government that it will initiate action to revoke the country's trade preferences under the Everything But Arms trade initiative. The EU and other donors should also insist that the Bangladesh government put in place a robust process for investigating and resolving cases of unfair labor practices, said the HRW. Global apparel and footwear brands that source from factories in Bangladesh, including those in the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Accord and the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, should also support efforts to ease legal restrictions on unions and stop factory union-busting activities.They should disclose their supplier and processing factories, and work with them to ensure they comply with international standards for workers' basic rights. "Thwarting independent garment worker unions is bad for businesses, workers, and Bangladesh's international reputation," Robertson said."Bangladesh needs to show it has political will to permit workers to exercise their rights by registering unions promptly and punishing factory owners who bust unions or fire their leaders," he said.Garment workers in Bangladesh face poor working conditions and anti-union tactics by employers including assaults on union organisers. 3rd phase UP polls starts tomorrow No extra security, widespread violence feared Sagar Biswas :The third phase election in the country's 620 Union Parishads is going to be held on Saturday amid apprehension of widespread violence and massive electoral misconduct.The candidates were extremely busy yesterday in last hour campaign. The contenders, both for 'Chairman' and 'Member' posts, were running door-to-door of the voters to get their support as the electoral campaign was scheduled to be ended on Thursday midnight, just 32 hours before the voting begins. Reports are coming from different unions about violation of the electoral code by the supporters of ruling party-backed candidates, but the Election Commission [EC] did not take additional security arrangement despite fear of violence among the general voters.And strangely, the law enforcement agencies have taken traditional three-tier security arrangement just like earlier two phases election.The situation has reached at such an extent that a delegation of ruling Awami League led by Joint General Secretary Mahabubul Alam Hanif yesterday met the Chief Election Commissioner [CEC] Kazi Rakibuddin Ahmed to convey the 'message' of the Prime Minister. Among others, Joint General Secretary Dr Dipu Moni, International Affairs Secretary Col [retd] Faruk Khan and Office Secretary Abdus Sobhan Golap were included in the delegation. "The PM has issued tough directives to EC.The PM categorically informed the EC that she doesn't want to see any type of misconduct, violence or other anomalies in the polls. I've conveyed the message of PM to CEC. We have also told the EC to take stern action those who will be found involve in violence," Mahabubul Alam Hanif said. The AL leader also said that his party would issue 'warning' to leaders and activists not to involve in the violence or other unlawful activities.Significantly, the EC has 'welcomed' the move of ruling party high-command saying that the commission would encourage such stance for the sake of free and fair election. "We have discussed the electoral issue with the Awami League delegation. The president of ruling party [PM] has assured us that she wants a free, fair and credible election..We've welcomed the move. At the same time, we've also asked the Awami League delegation to harness their rowdy activists, as they cannot take part in any violence," Election Commissioner Mohammad Shahnewaz said. In a dramatic move, the EC has ordered to withdraw Superintendent of Police in Gazipur district Harun-ar Rashid and Officers-in-Charge of Kapasia and Sreeepur police stations Mir Rakibul Haque and Md Asaduzzamn for their failure to control violence during the second phase of UP elections. The directives came following the death of a local Awami League leader and member candidate of Ward No. 9 at Prahladpur union under Sreepur upazila, who was chopped to death by the unidentified assailants on Wednesday. In a letter sent to Senior Secretary of the Home Ministry and Inspector General of Police, the EC also directed to appoint fresh officials in these posts. Meanwhile, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party [BNP] has claimed that police have been conducting mass arrest to nab its activists targeting the third phase of UP election. BNP also alleged that the ruling party men have attacked houses and establishments of their candidates in different districts. "The ruling party men along with the members of law enforcement agencies are threatening our candidates, poling agents and supporters, as they do not go to the vote centres on the election day," Ruhul Kabir Rizvi said yesterday. UN evacuates hundreds of people from four besieged towns Al Jazeera News : The United Nations has started evacuating hundreds of people from besieged Syrian towns in a rare sign of humanitarian progress that came as tens of thousands of civilians fled fresh fighting. Safe passage was secured for those in need of medical attention from four towns on Wednesday - a complex mission as a strained ceasefire appeared to buckle further. Spokesman Stephane Dujarric said plans were afoot to evacuate about 500 people, including the sick and wounded along with their family members from the four towns. People were evacuated from the rebel-held towns of Zabadani and Madaya near Damascus, and the government-held towns of Fuaa and Kafraya in northwest Idlib province. On the outskirts of Madaya, where dozens of residents starved to death last year, seven large white buses were used to take the people out. Dozens of men, women and children got out of the bus and were checked by security officials before boarding once more, the AFP news agency reported. "This rather large operation organised by the UN and the Syrian Red Crescent is in its final stages," Al Jazeera's Andrew Simmons, reporting from the Turkish city of Gaziantep close to the Syrian border, said. He added that a convoy came under fire while carrying out the operation. "Whether the attacks were directly aimed at the convoy carrying people from Madaya is unclear," he said. "People from predominantly Shia Zabadani and Madaya are mostly civilians, but there are also 25 soldiers being carried to safer areas in the country." In a separate statement on Wednesday, the UN said at least 40,000 Syrians had fled fighting near Aleppo, a northern city, in recent days as the government pressed an offensive against the opposition despite the truce. Four million people besieged The escalating violence has pushed people eastwards towards the strategically vital town of Azaz, which is on the border with Turkey, as well as the Bab al-Salam and Sijjou refugee camps, the UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs said. "We are extremely concerned at the intensification of fighting in northern Syria and its impact on civilians, as well as humanitarian delivery to the area, and continue to monitor the situation closely," Ariane Rummery of the UN refugee agency said. The medical charity Doctors Without Borders said that there were now more than 100,000 people trapped on the Syrian side of the Turkish border. It said that 35,000 of those had fled in the past week from camps that had been taken over by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or ISIS) or had become too close to a creeping frontline. Turkey has closed its frontier to all but the most seriously ill or wounded. More than four million people in Syria live in besieged or hard-to-reach areas, with limited or no access to food or medical supplies. The UN has long pressed the Syrian government to grant unrestricted access to these areas, and has asked all sides to end sieges. But, despite fierce criticism, the government frequently denies passage to aid convoys or limits what kind of assistance can enter cut-off areas. The opposition cited the dire humanitarian situation and the Syrian army offensive when it walked out of peace talks in Geneva this week, saying it needed a "pause". The future of Assad also proved a major sticking point. The already-shaky ceasefire between the government and some rebels was severely strained on Tuesday when at least 44 people were killed in air strikes on two markets in the northwest. The Geneva talks are aimed at ending the five-year war by fashioning a political transition, writing a new constitution, and holding fresh elections by September 2017. The war has killed at least 250,000 people and scattered millions of fleeing Syrians across the world. Fakhrul, 6 others get bail in sabotage case Court Correspondent : The Metropolitan Sessions Judge's Court of Dhaka on Thursday granted bail to seven BNP leaders, including the party's Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir and Standing Committee Member Mirza Abbas in a sabotage case filed with Ramna Model Police Station of the capital. Judge Qamrul Hasan Mollah granted bail to the BNP leaders after hearing. Earlier, they surrendered to the court in the sabotage case with bail pleas. The court fixed May 26 for hearing on framing charges against the accused. Five other leaders who got bail are BNP Standing Committee members Moudud Ahmed and Goyeshwar Chandra Roy, Vice-Chairman Abdullah-Al-Noman, Joint Secretary General Amanullah Aman and Joint Secretary General Barkatullah Bulu. The case was filed against them with Ramna Model Police Station in December of 2013. CID optimistic of unearthing motive Staff Reporter : The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of Police are optimistic of unearthing the clue and motive of Tonu murder. The CID officials questioned as many as 56 people, including Tonu's family members, in 23 days and gathered sufficient information'. CID Special Superintendent of Police Abdul Kahhar Akanda told the reporters, they are still verifying the pieces of information." We hope to reach a conclusion very soon," he said. SSP Kahhar Akanda was the investigation officer in many sensational cases including the Bangabandhu Murder, the August 21 grenade attack and the BDR mutiny. Now he is heading the team of investigators, who are assisting the main panel probing the murder case, which was handed over to CID on March 29. Sohagi Jahan Tonu, a second year history student of Comilla Victoria College and a cultural activist, was murdered near the Comilla Cantonment area on the night of March 20. Kahhar Akanda and his team from Dhaka went to Comilla and questioned four persons, including Tonu's relatives on Wednesday. Before returning to the capital in the afternoon, he said, "We collected a lot of information during the question hour." So far 56 people of the area including Tonu's family members were interrogated. Regarding quizzing her family over and over, Akanda said, "We have lots to learn from them, as they are the victims here. We are still trying to gather more information from them." The CID team on Tuesday again questioned the doctor, who conducted the first post-mortem on Tonu's body. Victoria Government College student Tonu's dead body was found several hundred yards from her home near the Comilla Cantonment area on the night of Mar 20. On seeing her corpse, police suspected that she was raped before the murder. Amidst raging protests throughout Bangladesh, forensic experts said they did not find any evidence of rape on her remains during examinations. A second post-mortem was conducted upon a court order 18 days ago, but these findings also have not been made public. After the murder last month, Kotwali police started the investigation. But soon the case was transferred to the Detective Branch before the CID was entrusted with the responsibility of unveiling the clue and motive of murder. Whistleblower Dan Collins continues his legal battle to hold accountable some current and former state officials who were involved in an elaborate scandal involving the spending of millions of taxpayer dollars in phony environmental projects by DNR. Whistleblower Dan Collins with his wife, Marian Pyle, left, and attorney, Crystal Bounds, after winning his long legal battle with DNR in December. Submitted Photo Louisiana landman and whistleblower Dan Collins continues his legal battle to hold accountable some current and former state officials who were involved in an elaborate scandal involving the spending of millions of taxpayer dollars in what he says were phony environmental projects by the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources. Collins has maintained that the scheme earned a small cabal of lawyers, landowners and oil and gas companies a small fortune while illegally dredging for oil in the Atchafalaya Basin under the pretense of water quality. A jury sided with Collins in December, awarding him $750,000. On Monday, Judge Wilson Fields of the 19th Judicial District in Baton Rouge heard the state's request to throw out the jury's verdict or grant a new trial, which is referred to as a Judgment Notwithstanding the Verdict or, alternatively, a motion for new trial. Fields denied the JNOV request by the state, which now has a 30-day window to appeal the verdict. Attorney Crystal Bounds with the law office of Jill L. Craft once again represented Collins at the hearing. Basically they were asking the judge to overturn the verdict arguing that there was not enough facts and evidence to support it, Bounds tells ABiz. That was denied, as well as their motion for a new trial. What the defendant had to essentially argue was that the facts and evidence were so strongly and overwhelmingly in their favor that no reasonable juror could have entered into a contrary verdict, which they clearly couldnt meet that burden, adds Bounds. She said the state seemed less concerned with the corruption initially identified in the case, instead trying to establish that Collins was not a public employee during his time working for LDNR while also ignoring the environmental violations, corruption and scandal that was eventually uncovered. Part of the argument was that the evidence didnt support the jurys determination that he was a public employee, but it was a unanimous decision on that element, Bounds says. All 12 members of the jury found that he should be treated as a public employee versus an independent contractor. I think the thrust of what they were arguing had to deal with the retaliation element that was adverse action taken against him as a result of his protected activities, she adds. Clearly the jury found that it was and all of the evidence supported it. It wasnt just his conjecture and speculation but it was all the evidence that backed up what he was saying. Read more about the case here. Hinting at a second special session that may start the day after the ongoing regular session ends, on June 7, Gov. John Bel Edwards made a personal appearance before the House Appropriations Committee last week to reveal his proposed budget changes to address $750 million in less revenue for next fiscal year. Were going to live in the real world, Edwards told lawmakers. In what used to be a rare occurrence under previous administrations, but is becoming the norm for this governor, Edwards took questions from the committee about the cuts he said amounted to $792 million in all. It is now the job of the budget-drafting committee, which has been meeting over the past week, to either approve the revisions to the spending plan that takes effect July 1 or alter them. In his questioning of the governor, Appropriations Chairman Cameron Henry, R-Metairie, attempted to make it clear that it could be the prerogative of the committee to shake up the priorities outlined in the governors plan. Regardless, the governor wants lawmakers to return in a second special session to come up with the revenue, possibly through tax increases, to rectify the cuts. We came up short in the (first) special session. We do need additional revenue, said Edwards, adding that he avoided contingencies, fund sweeps and other financial maneuvers that were commonplace in recent terms. Youre not going to see gimmicks. Were not going down that road. Many conservatives would still like to see the governor hold off on calling a second special session until late summer or the early fall. Conservatives are hopeful tax collections might pick up in the coming months, or that the revenue bills approved over the past year will bring in more money than anticipated. Some Democrats are also unhappy about the cuts to hospitals and health care services in the budget bills, inside HB 1, as it stands now with the administrations revisions. Lawmakers who voted with the governor on tax increases earlier this year were particularly displeased to see cuts to health care services in their districts. After the long hours his team putting into crafting the proposed budget changes that were announced this week, the governor will certainly not want to hear from the Democrats who are whispering about not even wanting to pass a budget in the regular session when a second special session will be needed to create the revenue needed to fully fund priorities. One set of votes to cut services in the regular session, followed by another set of votes to possibly raise taxes in a second special session, is not a preferred method of moving forward for many conservatives. By expanding Medicaid, Edwards said the budget will see $184 million in savings, of which $50 million is being directed to the TOPS scholarship program. Still, even with that infusion, TOPS is still short $183 million of being fully funded. The governor did say he was in favor of proposed legislation to cap TOPS, so that it doesnt grow alongside tuition and fee increases in the future. Higher education would suffer a 6 percent cut under the budget changes presented by the administration, while the judicial and legislative branches would be saddled with 10 percent reductions. Another $70 million is needed to right the budgets of the states safety-net hospitals and only five out of the nine have standstill funding. Its not my plan to close any of them, Edwards said, again urging for more money to be raised in the second special session. The Edwards administration held a private meeting earlier this month with the operators of Louisianas safety net hospitals to begin the arduous task of renegotiating the public-private partnership contracts that the state can no longer afford. State health care officials have hinted in recent weeks that new contracts could be part of a larger reform effort. The meeting attended by Gov. Edwards, DHH Secretary Rebekah Gee, DHH Undersecretary Jeff Reynolds, Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne and Chief of Staff Ben Nevers was described by those in attendance as congenial. Everyone remained in the room throughout the meeting. The governor asked the hospital operators who among them would be willing to change their contracts. Given that all nine of the hospitals have different needs connected to the $780 million in state and federal funding thats annually doled out, the providers were just as eager to hear what the administration is interested in changing. It was likely the first of many meetings, but all involved are under a tight timeline with budget talks just beginning and the fiscal year coming to a close on June 30. That the hospitals also have a 60-day notice walk-out clause in their contracts is only adding to the pressure. In related news, a tax reform task force that was created in the first special session of the year is currently meeting and it was charged with drawing up a policy agenda for the 2017 regular session. Edwards called upon the task force last week to generate some ideas ahead of the second special session thats expected. He said a down payment on tax reform is needed to go alongside whatever revenue lawmakers raise in early June. Edwards said he will present lawmakers with a policy roadmap several weeks before the second special session convenes. 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. SPRINGFIELD A group of Democratic lawmakers and school officials is calling on the General Assembly and Gov. Bruce Rauner to come to an agreement on an education budget for next year that brings more money to Southern Illinois districts. The bill funding elementary and secondary education was the only portion of this years budget that Rauner signed last summer, and hes called for an overall increase in funding for next year. But Senate Democrats have been pushing for an overhaul of the formula the state uses to dole out funding to school districts, arguing that it doesnt make sense to put more money into an inequitable system. Rep. John Bradley, D-Marion, said he and fellow Southern Illinois Democrats Rep. Brandon Phelps of Harrisburg and Sen. Gary Forby of Benton arent advocating for a particular legislative proposal at this time. We want to make sure the focus remains on protecting our schools and the people that educate our children in Southern Illinois, Bradley said Thursday at a Statehouse news conference. Phelps said that whatever agreement lawmakers and the governor reach, it needs to address the disparity in funding between wealthier districts in the Chicago area and poorer ones downstate. A child is a child and should be treated the same and should have the same amount of money, no doubt about it, wherever they live, Phelps said. ZIP code should not matter when it comes to a childs education. Matt Donkin, the regional superintendent of schools for Franklin, Johnson, Massac and Williamson counties, said the 22 school districts in his area know how to make do but depend highly on general state aid. They need certainty to be able to plan for next school year, he said. Were getting ready for the summer. People think, School doesnt start til August; no big deal, Donkin said. But there is no offseason in education administration. The legislators and Donkin were joined by school superintendents Michael Gauch of Harrisburg, Steve Webb of Goreville and Richard Towers of Christopher. All three districts would see increases in state funding next year under Rauners proposed budget $34,715 for Christopher, $34,259 for Harrisburg and $25,734 for Goreville. But Gauch noted that the much larger Palatine School District in the Chicago suburbs, which already spends nearly $2,000 more per student on instructional costs, would receive an additional $323,549. Based on 2015 enrollment figures, thats about $9.31 more per student than Harrisburg would receive. We need funding, without a doubt, but things have to be equitable, Gauch said, adding that his district cant afford to replace 19-year-old language arts textbooks without laying off teachers. While the others wouldnt comment on specific proposals, Gauch said he likes a plan from Sen. Andy Manar, D-Bunker Hill, that is designed to funnel more state funding to districts with high poverty rates and low property values. The Illinois State Board of Education is still working on projections for what Manars plan would mean for individual districts. Meanwhile, a proposed amendment to the Illinois Constitution that would have enacted a 3 percent tax on income of more than $1 million to fund education on a per-pupil basis was defeated Wednesday in the House. House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, sponsored the proposal. SPRINGFIELD The Illinois Senate has approved a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would change the way legislative and congressional districts are drawn but rejected one that would have eliminated the lieutenant governors office. Sen. Kwame Raoul, D-Chicago, sponsored the redistricting amendment, which is similar to one the Senate approved in 2010 that failed to win approval in the House. Unlike a current proposal from House Democrats and another backed by the group Independent Maps, Raouls measure would leave the task of redrawing boundaries largely in the hands of state lawmakers. House Democrats propose redistricting amendment SPRINGFIELD Illinois House Democrats are proposing their own plan for changing the way the Here in the state of Illinois, we are fortunate to have a state with a diverse population, Raoul said, arguing that his measure would do the most to protect influence of minority voters. One way it would do that is by doing away with the requirement that each of the states 59 Senate districts be divided into two House districts. This would allow a better opportunity for voters in communities like Chicagos Chinatown to elect officials who represent them, Raoul said. Under his plan, the General Assembly would be required to adopt a map by a set deadline each decade following the U.S. census. If it failed to do so, each chamber would adopt its own map. If that failed, commissions appointed by the leaders of each chamber would get their turn. If the commissions failed, the two most senior Illinois Supreme Court justices of opposite political parties would appoint a special master to create the map. The measure also would require at least 10 public hearings across the state before a map could be adopted. The proposed amendment cleared the Senate on a 39-19 vote, with Republican voting as a bloc in opposition with the exception of Sen. Sam McCann, R-Plainview. Sen. Bill Brady, R-Bloomington, said he supports the Independent Maps proposal. Simply summed up, (Raouls proposal) still lets politicians draw their own maps, and we need to take it out of the hands of the politicians and put it in an independent body, which will draw maps to preserve the best interest of communities and the citizens of Illinois, Brady said. Sen. Tom Cullerton, D-Villa Park, sponsored the proposal to eliminate the lieutenant governors office, which he billed as an effort to streamline government. He noted that its a popular campaign talking point for members of both parties. Legislature considering tweaks to state constitution SPRINGFIELD With an early May deadline looming, several proposals to amend the Illinois Co Youve all said it. Youve all riled your constituents up about it, Cullerton said. Todays the day that it can get done. But it wasnt that day as the measure failed on a 21-28 vote with opposition from members of both parties. Sen. Dale Righter, R-Mattoon, voiced a concern that was heard from both sides of the aisle. Because the amendment would leave the attorney general as the next person in the line of succession should the governors office become vacant, it could create a situation where the top office is transferred from one party to another. In any one governors election, the voters make a choice, Righter said. They make a choice between Democrat and Republican. They make a choice between differing ideologies. Southern Illinois lawmakers, school officials push for more funding SPRINGFIELD A group of Democratic lawmakers and school officials is calling on the General Letting the office transfer to the opposite party would be a betrayal of what the voters said they wanted when they voted for the governor, he said. The redistricting amendment now requires approval from a three-fifths majority in the House in order to go before voters in the November election. The House has must act on it before May 9, but Democrats in that chamber have their own proposal. JOHNSTON CITY Surplus funds for a city with nearly 100-year-old sewer lines unfortunately come in handy when those lines collapse, noted Johnston City Mayor Jim Mitchell on Thursday. Thats why you have surpluses in sewer and water because when something goes wrong, its going to be a big-ticket item, Mitchell said. Five years ago, we were in bad shape. Mitchell made his comments just blocks from where a main sewer line collapsed, detected after several basements were found flooded with sewage two or three weeks ago. The collapse occurred under Broadway Boulevard at Grand Avenue, or Illinois 37, the citys busiest intersection. Mitchell estimated the line was originally installed in the 1920s, one of the citys oldest. Work to replace the line began this week, closing about a block of Broadway to the east of the highway. Similar work will be done to the west. Mitchell said crews expect to drill under Grand, eliminating the need to close it. He estimated the work will run between $200,000 and $300,000, money he said the city has for contingencies. The savings came through cutbacks and rate increases over the years, he said. Mitchell said the city has been working on lines in sections across town but likely waited on the Broadway line because of traffic. We would have had to shut down the sewers. Five years ago we didnt have the money. Weve done an awful lot with that money situation to having it to work with, Mitchell said. The third "All Species Parade" kicks off on Friday in observance of Earth Day. It starts at 5 p.m. at the Carbondale Life Community Center, 2500 West Sunset Drive, and ends at Turley Park. Here are some other events happening this weekend: SIU Campus Tree Planting, 8 a.m. Friday, hosted by Beautify Southern Illinois. Participants should meet at Parking Lot No. 7; there are 90-minute work slots from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. To sign up to volunteer, visit http://www.signupgenius.com/go/20f054fa4ac2babf85-saluki. Cove Hollow/Cedar Lake Trash Blast!, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, hosted by Friends of Shawnee National Forest. Participants are to meet at the Cove Hollow Trail Head in Carbondale. To have questions answered or for more information, email info@shawneefriends.org. Earth Day Open House, noon to 3 p.m. Saturday at Town Square Market in Carbondale. Learn about acupuncture and how to eat healthy on a budget and meet local farmers and vendors. Stephanie Esters Alee Quick Local news editor Alee Quick is the local news editor for The Southern. Follow Alee Quick Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today The 2016 election cycles dirtiest phrase? Politically correct. Often said with a sneer, its guaranteed to rile old white men who are fed up with the Republican majority being forced to as a Saturday Night Live skit so astutely put it only imply racism, sexism, classism, ageism, pick-your-ism. The dog whistle of crime in Carbondale A shooting in Carbondale this past Easter Sunday left a man dead and another man injured, an Political correctness is out of control, pundits say. Political correctness is ruining the country, politicians lament. Meanwhile, young people on college campuses are discovering the power they hold when they speak in a unified voice, and are demanding safe spaces. The makeup of higher education institutions is starting to look a little more diverse, and students who are spending their (or their parents' or guardians') hard-earned money for a degree have this crazy idea that they shouldnt have to put up with people using racist, sexist or homophobic slurs in places they study. No doubt when an F-bomb is dropped in certain company, a speaker is met with raised brows. America prides itself on freedom of speech, but our culture expects a certain measure of politeness. Protests and conversations about inclusion on college campuses around the country (think Mizzou, Emory) have drawn the ire of conservative critics. Millennials have always been labeled as entitled, and now theyre the wimpy P.C. police, unable to process any offensive uttering. Beloved comedians including Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock have said in previous years they wont perform on college campuses because of the seeming over-sensitivity of students. It was no different when SIU student Leilani Bartletts Facebook video calling out racism she says she witnessed on campus touched off student protests on campus and an administrator listening session in response. Critics called protesters hyper-sensitive. Quick: Yes, that's my alma mater When I heard a swastika was drawn in a University of Missouri residence hall bathroom with h Granted, sometimes the pendulum swings too far. In all the hubbub at Mizzou my alma mater this past fall, professor Melissa Click lost her job because of her attempt to keep the press away from student protesters who were gathering in a very public part of campus. Political correctness and censorship are two very different things. Some people fail to understand this. Sometimes mob mentality can carry things over the line. Sometimes the pendulum swings too far. It has done so on both the P.C. and decidedly anti-P.C. sides of the conversation. But it always swings back. And the thing about free speech is its supposed to help us see the other side of things, and maybe meet in the middle. But on campuses around the country where protests and dialogues have sprung up, for the most part, the intent is not to completely silence dissent. The point is to say something when one sees something. Especially when one sees something over and over again. Sweet potato soup for the soul I swore off making New Years resolutions years ago in an attempt to avoid disappointing mys And theres a difference between being overly sensitive and simply not wanting to go through life constantly being profiled, put down and harassed at every turn. More often than not, protesters are making points that are uncomfortable for those of us whove benefited from the systems that have oppressed minority students. Free speech doesnt guarantee speech without consequences. Say what you will. Be as rude and offensive as you like. Just be prepared for someone else to disagree. Lets talk about perfect timing On the eve of a must win primary for Sanders in New York state we see a special bulletin on the news about the urgency to escalate military action in Iraq to recapture the city of Mosul from the Islamic State.. Now, Lets review. In February of this year the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Vince Stewart states that the fight to recapture Mosul is a long way off, certainly not this year. What could have possibly expedited this time line? Folks, you dont have to be a grand master chess player to know how pawns are moved. The South Carolina Ports Authority has once again proposed placing an inland port outside of Orangeburg County despite longstanding efforts to attract such a business to the region. The ports authority said Wednesday it would pursue an inland port in Dillon along the Interstate 95 corridor. Three years ago, the authority opened an inland port in Greer along the Interstate 85 corridor. SCPA explored and considered sites across the state, including ones in Orangeburg, before deciding to pursue Dillon as the next inland port location, authority spokeswoman Erin Dhand said in a prepared statement. At this time, Dillon offers a significant existing cargo base and opportunity to access a new intermodal network that will benefit our customers as well as the port. As manufacturing and population growth in the Southeast continue to grow, we look forward to more such opportunities and will carefully consider all alternatives as we look to expand the ports reach, Dhand said. The ports authority is looking at an industrial park between Dillon and Latta to develop its second inland facility where shipping containers can be transferred between trucks and trains serving the Port of Charleston about 140 miles to the south. Its more efficient to bring containers to ports by rail and helps reduce highway congestion with fewer truck trips. Sens. Brad Hutto and John Matthews, who live in Orangeburg County, met with ports authority leadership within the last ten days and were assured the county is still on their radar screen, Hutto said. Orangeburg County could still land an inland port in the future. The Dillon decision had to do with their proximity to Charlotte, Hutto said. There are three companies in the Charlotte area that have heavy shipments from the port and from Wilmington and Virginia. He said, This was a site where they had the traffic needed to justify the port. Orangeburg County leaders have said its access to major routes like I-95, I-26 and U.S. Highway 301 make it an ideal location for an inland port. The area has even been trademarked the Global Logistics Triangle in an attempt to showcase the countys close proximity to interstates and the port. They recognize the potential of the Global Logistics Triangle, Hutto said. Both the Greer and Dillon inland ports meet unique needs just like Orangeburg will meet one day, he said. The move does not mean Orangeburg County will never get an inland port. It is a matter of time before it happens, he said. Orangeburg County Development Commission Executive Director Gregg Robinson said, Weve known about the possibility of an inland location in the upper Pee Dee region for some time. Nothing has been solidified at this time. However, the main issues are container volume and CSX main line. Unfortunately, Santee isnt on a main line and our volume of containers is significantly lower than that of the upper Pee Dee and the proximity to cut-off volume to (the) Wilmington N.C. port. He said, This does not keep an inland location away from Orangeburg County. Please note that this is volume-driven based on current container opportunities. Orangeburg County Council Chairman Johnnie Wright said he has learned that patience and optimism are important. I am happy about potential growth anywhere in the state but everybody wants their area to grow, Wright said. But I feel like we are primed for growth and the potential for us to get some things in our area is just a matter of time. I feel it in my heart. He says the county is not going to give up. The best thing is to keep going and keep doing. You need to keep hope alive, he said. Hutto said in order for Orangeburg County to have an inland port sooner rather than later, it will continue to have to prove itself. We have to demonstrate that we have the volume of cargo that would use Orangeburg as a site, Hutto said, adding it will have to make economic sense for industry. He is confident that as Volvo begins operations in Berkeley County, Orangeburg County will be even more attractive as an inland port site. We are clearly on their radar screen because if we were not, they would not have met with us, Hutto said. Matthews could not be reached for comment Wednesday. Both Hutto and Matthews have been on the forefront of recent legislation to create a port enhancement zone that would include Orangeburg County. The bill is designed to encourage the use of the area near the intersection of interstates 26 and 95 as a distribution hub for cargo shipped to and from the Port of Charleston. The bill has passed the Senate and is now under consideration in the S.C. House. Orangeburg County has long wanted to develop the Global Logistics Triangle. The U.S. 301 and I-95 interchange in Santee is being improved to make the area more attractive to industrial growth. In addition, Santee is home to the 1,322-acre Jafza Magna Park, a planned logistics, manufacturing and distribution park. The park was announced by Dubai-based Jafza in 2007, but the global recession soon followed and there are no jobs associated with the project currently. In its Wednesday announcement, ports authority officials said they are working with CSX to determine the viability of Dillon as the location for the next inland port. They hope to finalize plans by the end of the year. The agency is pursuing federal infrastructure funding assistance through the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery program to supplement the capital investment required for the project. The inland port in Greer, which opened in 2013, is off I-85 and is served by Norfolk Southern. The Dillon County site is off the mainline of CSX, the other major railroad carrier serving the ports. The towns of Neeses and Norway were involved in voluntary trash pickups on Saturday, April 16, as part of litter cleanup initiatives launched by two different agencies. Neeses effort was in conjunction with the Adopt-A-Highway program, and Norways was in collaboration with PalmettoPride. The towns picked up a combined 1,575 pounds of trash 13 volunteers in Neeses collected 1,125 pounds and 10 volunteers in Norway bagged 450 pounds. Neeses Town Clerk Sonja Gleaton coordinated the Adopt-A-Highway Litter Pickup Day in her town. Her husband, Councilman Kenneth Gleaton, former Neeses mayor, started the Adopt-A-Highway group there. The group was named the Adopt-A-Highway Calhoun County Group of the Year in 2014. Even though the town is in Orangeburg County, Neeses is on Adopt-A-Highways Calhoun County District Route. Neeses holds at least four litter pickups a year more if needed, Mrs. Gleaton said. The reason we dont list names of volunteers is we usually have so many of them participating at different times, the clerk said. Our group has 25 members total. While 13 participated on (April 16), there are others who could not participate (that) Saturday who are still picking up trash this week. She said the group cleaned seven miles of roadway and picked up 75 bags of litter, each weighing approximately 15 pounds, during the April 16 litter pickup. Some of our members have adopted certain roads or streets, and they do a fantastic job of keeping those areas cleaned up year-round, Mrs. Gleaton said. Wilton Gleaton, one of the Neeses volunteers, said he participates in the litter pickups because, I just want to clean up the trash. Folks throw trash out everywhere. Thats the reason I am doing it to make the place look better. I live on Water Tank Road, and people throw out fast food trash there cups and straws. Norway Mayor Ann Johnson said she had been trying to get a PalmettoPride litter cleanup in her town. Last year, we had a good turnout. We decided to expand our efforts. We decided we would do the PalmettoPride challenge with our cleanup this year, she said. The Rev. Ben Harr, pastor of Willow Swamp Baptist Church and Norway volunteer, said, The cleanup keeps our town clean. It makes our town look presentable to the through-traffic. Eleven-year-old volunteer Champion Youmans, who attends Hunter-Tyler-Kinard Elementary, said, I want to clean it up. It helps the town. Other volunteers collecting trash in Norway on April 16 were H-K-T students Ashanti Mack, 12 and Zynesia Mack, 14; Norway Police Chief Scott Ward; resident Bobby Pooser; Councilwoman Bonnie Fogle; and Robert Williams of North. Ward provided water and soft drinks for the participants. Williams said he let the Norway group use six of his Litter Getters, which are trash pickup devices he invented. He said Johnson asked him to participate and to lend his Litter Getters to the effort. Officer Kyle Osteen of Orangeburg County Litter Control said PalmettoPride challenged all agencies in the state to pickup litter along any one-mile stretch of roadway. Norways volunteers cleaned up more than a mile, he said. In addition to participating in the PalmettoPride cleanup, Orangeburg County is conducting its own Zero Tolerance for Litter campaign during April, Osteen noted. Residents who observe trash being thrown from vehicles are asked to write down the vehicles tag number, the location where it occurred and the time and date it occurred and call 877-7LITTER (754-8837) with that information. We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking Accept, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies. Azerbaijan`s Consul General in Batumi Rashad Ismayilov has met the representatives of the county`s community. The Consul spoke about the recent developments in line of contacts of the Armenian and Azerbaijani troops. He said the Azerbaijani Armed Forces had to put the necessary step to ensure the security of civilians living near the front line, and repulsed the Armenian`s provocative and aggressive actions. The representatives of the Azerbaijani community reaffirmed that they would actively struggle for popularization of the country abroad. The Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is one of the main regional issues under the focus of Iran. There are many turbulence and wars in the region, and we cannot let another war break out, speaker of the Parliament of Iran Ali Larijani told journalists. We agree with our Russian friends that we can`t let the escalation of another war in the region. For this reason, Iran and Russia must use every efforts and opportunities to convince Azerbaijan and Armenia to settle the conflict politically. The speaker said he held productive negotiations with his Azerbaijani counterpart Ogtay Asadov on the sidelines of the Moscow meeting. Azerbaijan`s Ambassador to Ethiopia Elman Abdullayev has met State Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Taye Atske-selassie. The Ambassador provided an insight into the country`s potential, saying Azerbaijan played a leading role in implementation of the large scale projects in the region. Azerbaijan hosts several international events, the country is the leader state of the region, he added. Taye Atske-selassie said his country was interested in cooperation with Azerbaijan, adding there was great potential in his regard. They discussed developing prospects of relations between the two countries, as well as cooperation in the fields of economy, culture, tourism, science and education. The parties stressed the importance of arranging the reciprocal visits, as well as establishing the legal-agreement base for development of relations. Azerbaijan and Argentina have explored ways of developing the political and military cooperation as Azerbaijan`s charge d`affaires to the country Rashad Aslanov met with Argentinian minister of defense Julio Martinez. Mr. Aslanov informed the minister about the history, economic development and international relations of Azerbaijan. He also highlighted the current situation of Argentina-Azerbaijan ties, as well as opportunities for further strengthening of the cooperation. He stressed the importance of cooperation between the ministries of defense and defense industry of the two countries. The diplomat also briefed the Argentinian official on the history of the Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and noted that international organizations adopted documents supporting Azerbaijan`s position on the dispute. Julio Martinez underlined that Argentina tried to establish good relations with all countries, adding the strengthening of relations with Azerbaijan is important for his country. He also expressed hope that the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict would be settled peacefully. /By Azernews/ By Nazrin Gadimova The Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is one of the main regional issues under the focus of Iran. Ali Larijani, the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, made the remark as part of a meeting with the Speaker of the Russian State Duma Sergey Narishkin in Moscow on April 20. There are many turbulence and wars in the region, and we cannot let another war to break out, Larijani stressed, commenting on the recent escalation on the contact line of troops of the Armenian and Azerbaijani armies. Tehran agreed with Moscow on inadmissibility of the escalation of another war in the region, he added. For this reason, Iran and Russia must use every efforts and opportunities to convince Azerbaijan and Armenia to settle the conflict politically, Larijani believes. The Iranian official further said he held productive negotiations with his Azerbaijani counterpart Ogtay Asadov on the sidelines of the Moscow meeting. Iran, Azerbaijans southern neighbor and one of the main actors in the region, has repeatedly declared its readiness to help in resolving the long-lasting conflict that emerged as a result of Armenias aggressive policy towards Azerbaijan in early 1990s. Earlier, Javad Zarif, the Iranian Foreign Minister, called for truce, voicing Iran's readiness to act as a mediator between Yerevan and Baku to resolve the existing crisis. "We should join efforts to rule out witnessing new crisis in the region," ILNA quoted Zarif as saying. The current format of negotiations, being held in the framework of the OSCE Minsk Group involving Russia, France and USA for more than 20 years, did not bring any step towards peace. The rising tension on the contact line of the Armenian and Azerbaijani troops and human fatalities are another proof of failure. Against this background, Baku welcomes the real steps to solve the conflict and calls for urgent and effective steps to solve the long lasting-bloody conflict. /By Azernews/ By Nazrin Gadimova Azerbaijans Defense Ministry has disproved information about the tank that was allegedly destroyed by the Armenian military units. Baku remains committed to the truce since the agreement on ceasefire was reached between the parties to the conflict, said Vagif Dargahli, the spokesperson for the ministry. Therefore, Azerbaijans military units did not bring its tanks or other military equipment on the contact line of troops, he added. Dargahli believes that Armenians, who initiated hostilities in the front-line area, misrepresent the real facts and claim their own destroyed tanks as the Azerbaijani ones. "I can definitely say that this is a tank that was destroyed by the Azerbaijani Armed Forces during active military operations in early April, he stressed. By spreading such misinformation, they want to boost the morale of the Armenian soldiers." This is not the first time when Armenia resorts to different kinds of falsification to hide their losses and to mislead representatives of international organizations and community to pave a way for future provocations. Since the eruption of new hostilities on the frontline following the Armenian provocation, the enemy has been spreading false photos and videos on alleged losses of the Azerbaijani side. Earlier, the Defense Ministry announced that Armenians used the photos taken in the conflict zone in Ukraines Donbas as the evidence of the mass murder of the Azerbaijani Special Forces.By Nazrin Gadimova Azerbaijans Defense Ministry has disproved information about the tank that was allegedly destroyed by the Armenian military units. Baku remains committed to the truce since the agreement on ceasefire was reached between the parties to the conflict, said Vagif Dargahli, the spokesperson for the ministry. Therefore, Azerbaijans military units did not bring its tanks or other military equipment on the contact line of troops, he added. Dargahli believes that Armenians, who initiated hostilities in the front-line area, misrepresent the real facts and claim their own destroyed tanks as the Azerbaijani ones. "I can definitely say that this is a tank that was destroyed by the Azerbaijani Armed Forces during active military operations in early April, he stressed. By spreading such misinformation, they want to boost the morale of the Armenian soldiers." This is not the first time when Armenia resorts to different kinds of falsification to hide their losses and to mislead representatives of international organizations and community to pave a way for future provocations. Since the eruption of new hostilities on the frontline following the Armenian provocation, the enemy has been spreading false photos and videos on alleged losses of the Azerbaijani side. Earlier, the Defense Ministry announced that Armenians used the photos taken in the conflict zone in Ukraines Donbas as the evidence of the mass murder of the Azerbaijani Special Forces. President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has received a delegation led by Minister of Information and Communications Technology of the Islamic Republic of Iran, co-chairman of Azerbaijan-Iran State Commission on economic, trade and humanitarian spheres Mahmoud Vaezi. The head of state hailed Mahmoud Vaezi`s contributions to the development of friendly relations between the two countries, adding the Azerbaijani government and people appreciated this. President Ilham Aliyev said Minister of Information and Communications Technology of Iran Mahmoud Vaezi was awarded the Dostluq (Friendship) Order, one of the high state awards of Azerbaijan, for his contributions to the development of friendly and cooperative ties between the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Islamic Republic of Iran, and handed the Order to him. Minister of Information and Communications Technology of Iran Mahmoud Vaezi thanked the head of state for the Dostluq (Friendship) Order, and said he was proud to be serving their own people and the people of neighbouring Azerbaijan, which has the same religion. The head of state touched upon the groundbreaking ceremony of a railway bridge over Astara River on Azerbaijan-Iran border, and described this as a result of the works done over the last period. President Ilham Aliyev expressed satisfaction with the implementation of all agreements reached between the two countries. The head of state said he met with President of the Islamic Republic of Iran Hassan Rouhani in Istanbul, and discussed how to develop the bilateral ties. President Ilham Aliyev recalled with pleasure his visit to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Mahmoud Vaezi conveyed sincere greetings of President of the Islamic Republic of Iran Hassan Rouhani to President Ilham Aliyev. The Minister said President Hassan Rouhani hailed his meeting with President Ilham Aliyev in Istanbul. He said bilateral and international cooperation between the two countries was developing successfully under the leadership of the two presidents. The head of state thanked for the greetings of President Hassan Rouhani, and asked the Minister to communicate his greetings to the Iranian President. Despite slumping oil prices, the GCC consulting market performed well last year, growing 9.4 per cent to $2.7 billion, mainly spearheaded by Saudi Arabia, according to a report. The kingdom, which accounted for almost half of the GCC consulting market, drove much of this growth, expanding 14.8 per cent to $1.25 billion, said leading global consulting market analysts Source Global Research. Although the GCCs growth rate is still impressive in comparison to other global consulting markets, it is a markedly lower than the region has been used to (25 per cent in 2013 and 15 per cent in 2014), so the mood amongst its management consultants has changed as a result, staated the research firm in its findings. According to the report, low oil prices impacted the GCCs entire consulting market, but the effect was felt especially keenly in Saudi Arabia, where it has hastened an already urgent programme of economic reform and diversification. Consultants told the report that without public sector spending in Saudi Arabia, this surprisingly buoyant market might be anything but. Edward Haigh, the director of Source Global Research, and author of the report, said: "The scale of the challenge facing Saudi Arabia in diversifying its economy, is also a huge opportunity for consulting firms. However, the big question for consultants, is how long the Saudi government will keep spending against a backdrop of dramatically reduced oil revenues." Gerard Gallagher, the managing partner at EY, said: "Saudi Arabia has clearly been challenged by declining oil revenues, but in response, the kingdom is transforming itself on a scale and at a pace rarely seen on a national level." "The soon-to-be-rolled-out National Transformation Program should drive economic diversification and enable social and developmental change across the country. We expect the consulting industry to be actively engaged in this processm," he added. The report pointed out that in contrast, the UAE, the second largest GCC consulting market, grew by 4.3 per cent to $788 million. Although consultants are not benefiting as much in the UAE (as it already has a diversified economy and therefore less urgency to change), the report said that Saudi Arabia could do a lot worse than follow the example set by the UAE (or at least by Dubai) when it comes to diversification. Other growth rates recorded across the GCC in 2015 included Qatar - up 6.6 per cent to $329 million, Kuwait - up 3.7 per cent to $183 million, and Oman - up 6.9 per cent to $100 million. Public sector consulting continues at double digit growth across the GCC, stated the report. Saudi Arabias government isnt alone in turning to consultants, as the problems faced by governments across the GCC has once again led to double-digit growth - up 11.7 per cent to $856 million. However, growth has slowed (from 19.3 per cent in 2014) as governments scrap what is seen as non-essential work, but investment in building a physical and social infrastructure fit for the future continues. Digital is also playing an important role as governments explore how they can deliver services digitally as part of their reform agenda, said the report by Source Global. The regions high penetration of internet-capable devices encourages this and has led to initiatives around e-government, e-health and e-learning, it added. Public sector consulting continues at double digit growth across the GCC Saudi Arabias government isnt alone in turning to consultants, as the problems faced by governments across the GCC has once again led to double-digit growth - up 11.7 per cent to $856 million. However, growth has slowed (from 19.3 per cent in 2014) as governments scrap what is seen as non-essential work, but investment in building a physical and social infrastructure fit for the future continues. Digital is also playing an important role as governments explore how they can deliver services digitally as part of their reform agenda. The report says that the regions high penetration of internet-capable devices encourages this and has led to initiatives around e-government, e-health and e-learning. According to the report, consultants right across the region talk about a shift away from growth and towards efficiency. The fastest growing consulting service lines in the market in 2015 were technology, which grew 12.2 per cent to $895 million and operational improvement, up 12 per cent to $534 million. Operational improvement in particular is growing as clients, particularly in the all-important public and financial services sectors are looking to take cost out of their operations, it stated. Although it only makes up a small proportion, the healthcare, pharma and biotech industry was the fastest-growing part of the GCC consulting market in 2015, expanding 14.7 per cent to $174 million. The report said providing better healthcare is a central tenet of the social infrastructure agenda across the region, and theres significant investment in better hospitals, clinics, and the standard of care on offer. In a market in which projects are being cancelled, payments delayed and prices reduced, the big global firms are the ones doing best, it noted. Despite already having the biggest share of the GCC consulting market it was the 'Big Four' firms who grew faster than anyone else in 2015, expanding 13.7 per cent to $913 million, it stated. According to the report, their big balance sheets create internal stability where there is external disarray and mean they can weather storms much more easily than their small counterparts. Edward Haigh from Source said: If you want to understand why the GCC consulting market remains one of the fastest-growing in the entire world despite the impact of the low oil price then its not oil you need to focus on, its diversification." "Its not the fact that Saudi Arabia has spent close to 15 per cent of its entire foreign reserves in the last year alone to make up for a shortfall in oil revenues, its the fact that, for consultants, it currently represents the mother of all transformation projects," he added.-TradeArabia News Service Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Holding , the investment firm owned by billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, posted a 25.4 percent fall in first-quarter net profit on Thursday as income declined and finance charges increased. The investment firm has minority stakes in some of the world's top companies. These include Citigroup and microblogging site Twitter. Kingdom made a net profit of SR103.97 million ($27.73 million) in the three months to March 31, down from SR139.38 million in the same period a year earlier, it said in a bourse statement. It attributed the fall in net profit to a decrease in income from dividends, associates and joint ventures, as well as other income. The company also cited an increase in finance charges as another cause for its negative performance, which offset an increase in gains on investments and lower costs. Saudi companies issue brief earnings statements early in each reporting period before publishing more detailed results later. - Reuters Dubai has banned the use of all kinds of flammable materials in buildings including in cladding and facades in the wake of the recent fire accidents in the emirates, said a report. The municipality has issued a circular to all the consulting offices, contracting companies, suppliers and developers in Dubai in this regard. It prohibits use of any combustible material including paints, packaging materials, glues, fixtures used inside buildings and ceilings which are less resistant to ignition than walls, reported Arabic daily Al Bayan. The municipality confirmed that it would allow the use of such materials only when they meet the fire ratings in the code of civil defence or fire-fighting, US code (NPFA5000) in sections 5, 10, 8, 37, 3, 50, 48, and the accepted codes: 286, 221, 220. The decision comes within the framework of municipal efforts to raise the standard of construction by adopting highest global safety and security standards for the well-being of the residents and their properties, it added. The Abu Dhabi Education Council, in collaboration with Ernst and Young and Tribal Plant, has organised a forum called Digital Innovation in Education, which will be taking place on April 25 at the Mubarak bin Mohammed School in Abu Dhabi. As part of the event, Emirati students will take part in a new mobile platform called Citizen Science which promises to further enhance passion for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem), through equipping students with skills and ambitions necessary to help solve daily challenges facing the world in the next 50 years and beyond, said a press statement. Citizen Science aims to connect young people around the globe with each other, their local environment, the global scientific research community and their future employers. It will provide digital content, experiments and challenges developed by some of the worlds most renowned education and scientific institutions to encourage young people to experiment, learn and get excited about Stem disciplines, the statement added. Delegates at the event will include leaders across government, education and businesses in the UAE, world renowned scientists and digital visionaries. Some of the prominent keynote speakers at the event will include: Stephen Farrell, senior partner at Ernst and Young Mena; Jeff Martin, founder and CEO of Tribal Planet and visionary behind Citizen Science; and Scott Kelly, the US astronaut who recently returned from the International Space Station as the longest serving astronaut. Accompanying them on stage will be Dr Carol ODonnell, director of the Smithsonian Science Education Centre, who will share her perspectives on the critical need to develop the next generation of scientists and innovators. Josh Bernstein, science educator and explorer, formerly with the Discovery and History Channels, will present a special edition film, a pilot of Citizen Science in Abu Dhabi with 15 Emirati school children, the first children in the world to use the platform. TradeArabia News Service The Jeddah-based Islamic Development Bank (IDB) has signed a SR200 million ($53.3 million) deal to provide medical care for poor rural people with a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in India, according to a report. It is part of a SR1 billion donation from a Saudi benefactor to be utilised for the benefit of poor people across the globe, said the Arab News report. The Mumbai-based Rashtriya Institute of Skill and Education (RISE) will use it to fund 15 mobile health clinics, which the IDB will maintain for the first five years, it said. The NGO engages in promoting high-quality medical care for Indias rural poor in Rajasthan. The aid and assistance from IDB will help RISE buy sophisticated mobile health units that are custom-made for countries such as India. The mobile units will be connected to a centralised studio in Mumbai where specialists of top hospitals are present to provide solutions in real time. The IDB-funded programme will be rolled out initially in rural areas of Maharashtra where RISE already has mobile health units. - TradeArabia News Service Siemens Bahrain has confirmed Nael Ghali as its new chief executive at the recently held Annual Advisory Board Meeting, said a report in the Gulf Daily News (GDN), our sister publication. To read further, please visit GDNonline Dubai Trade, a premier cross-border trade facilitator, has revealed that 16,800 new companies were registered with the organisation last year. A total of 19.5 million transactions were carried out in 2015, a 5 per cent growth in total online transactions in comparison to the number of transactions in recorded in 2014, said a statement from the company. Dubai Trades secured ePayment gateway Rosoom recorded 1.1 million transactions amounting to Dh1.2 billon ($326.69 million), it added. In line with its vision to enable seamless trade, Rosoom has adopted the second generation of the e-dirham system as an additional payment mode, adding to its security and flexibility. Through its portal, Dubai Trade is also offering access to more than 820 integrated electronic services covering a wide range of services from manifest and cargo handling through to invoicing and payments for different users including traders, shipping lines, forwarding agents, hauliers and free zone licensees. Jamal Majid Bin Thaniah, chairman of Dubai Trade, said: Consistency and commitment have always been part of our success. We have adopted the most innovative technologies to stay ahead in the world of trade and be ready for any new challenge. Our courses and programmes have also encouraged the sharing of our expertise reinforcing Dubais position as a vital trade hub and business leader, he said. Dubai Trade provides high-quality training programmes to support the trade and logistics community as well as portal users. It was voted the Training and Education Provider of the Year at the Supply Chain and Transport Awards (Scata) 2015 for the third consecutive year as well as being internationally accredited by the Chartered Institute of Logistics & Transport, said the statement. In 2015, 132 e-Services training sessions were carried out with 1,532 candidates. More than 260 individuals were also officially certified by attending The Certified Trade and Logistics Professional (CTLP) programme. The year also witnessed the launch of the Certified Customs Broker (CCB), a professional course that provides an insight into customs laws and regulations in the region. Five sessions have been held with 65 graduates, it added. Meanwhile, Dubai Trades annual flagship event, the E-Services Excellence Award, announced a new theme and categories for smart services to encourage the use of mobile services alongside an innovation award to highlight the most innovative project in trade and logistics developed by companies based in the UAE, it said. To encourage innovation and trade and logistics processes, it also launched the Innovation and Idea Hub for staff. Mahmood Al Bastaki, CEO of Dubai Trade, said: We encourage our people to develop their capabilities and come up with creative ways of reaching our goals and believe employee engagement can contribute to our success. Dubai Trade is a role model and has expanded to new markets by replicating our services in Algeria. We will soon unveil an electronic trade window that integrates all DP World Sub Continent terminals in India. Dubai Trade will continue to work on projects to further enhance and streamline trading processes such as improving the functionality of its portal to enhance the customer experience. Upgrades to other services are also being developed. The Land Transportation Management System will also be offered soon for freight forwarders and shipping lines to match cargo transportation requirements and maximise truck availability. A new warehouse booking system providing an on-demand warehousing platform connecting companies that need warehouse space with warehouse operators is also in the pipeline, it added. TradeArabia News Service UAE-based DP World, a global operator of shipping terminals, said it is prepared for the implementation of the new International Maritime Organisation (IMO) Safety of Life at Sea (Solas) regulation which comes into effect on July 1. The new regulation mandates that shippers of goods must obtain the Verified Gross Mass (VGM) of laden export containers and communicate it to ocean carriers sufficiently in advance of the ship stowage planning, said a statement from the company. Ocean carriers and container terminal operators will be legally obliged to ensure that containers without a VGM are not loaded on to a ship in all 162 IMO member states that are required to enforce the new law, it added. DP Worlds global terminals will have certified weighing capabilities if this is permitted under the locally adapted implementation of the Solas regulation. Comprehensive weighing services will be offered for exporters to determine the VGM of each container so that they comply with the new legislation. The objective is to prevent serious accidents at sea where a ships stability is compromised by wrongly declared cargo weight, it said. Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem, group chairman and CEO, DP World, said: All our terminals will be ready to meet the obligations under the legislation by July and each one will have certified weighing solutions in place to serve exporters in the IMO member states where we operate. As an enabler of global trade, we are offering customers an efficient solution for this new mandatory international regulation. Safety of a container at sea means security and peace of mind for the shipper, he added. TradeArabia News Service Emirates Maritime Arbitration Centre (EMAC), the first centre of its kind in the Middle East for the settlement of maritime disputes, has commenced operations with the appointment of members of its board of trustees. EMAC will settle maritime disputes in accordance with legal frameworks and thoughtful and independent regulatory controls. The centre aims is to achieve the ambitious goal of making the UAE one of the most competitive maritime centres in the world. The decree appointing the board members was issued by HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of UAE and Ruler of Dubai. The board includes influential government, maritime, legal and business figures, namely, Ahmad Issa Al Falahi, Dr Ali Obaid Al Yabhouni, Dr Chi-Sang Kim, Mohammed Al Muallem, Capt Mohamed Juma Al Shamsi, Mohammed Saeed Al Kindi, Saadi Abdul Rahim Al Rais, Saeed Al Malek, Capt Jitendra Misra, Richard Briggs, Edward Newitt, Christopher Mills and Essam Bella. The launch of the centre is timely as maritime sector in Dubai and the UAE is currently witnessing outstanding development which requires the existence of a fundamental pillar for updating maritime regulations and operational strategies, it said. The centre is a significant addition to ongoing efforts to meet the urgent need for clear and sophisticated regulatory frameworks for maritime arbitration, as the world is witnessing an increasing number of disputes arising in conjunction with the steady growth in international maritime trade. The centre upholds a legal system that provides absolute freedom in the selection of litigation and multiple mechanisms of arbitration in accordance with the highest standards of confidentiality, transparency and efficiency. The centre also provides a wide range of legal options to resolve disputes related to various marine business operations, it added. Sultan Bin Sulayem, chairman of the Dubai Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corporation and president of Dubai Maritime City Authority, said: It is not surprising for Dubai to incubate the EMAC which is of special importance as a proactive regional initiative for the settlement of disputes according to developed arbitration mechanisms and thoughtful and independent legal frameworks and regulatory controls. We are confident that the centre will play a pivotal role in the organisation of maritime arbitration which has become an urgent need for improving the performance, safety, efficiency and competitiveness of the local maritime sector and for gaining the trust of regional and international investors in Dubais and UAE maritime sector with all its opportunities and promising prospects, he added. TradeArabia News Service More than 100 people are feared dead in India in an early-summer heat wave which forced schools to close and halted outdoor work like construction, government officials said on Thursday. Neighbouring Pakistan, which suffered its hottest spell in decades last year, plans to open 500 response centres to provide shelter and cold water to people if a heat-wave warning is issued, a government official said. No heat deaths have yet been reported. India's hottest months are May and June, but some states have already registered temperatures in excess of 40 deg C, forcing authorities to take emergency steps. In the southern Indian state of Telangana, 45 people have died from heat exposure, and another 17 in Andhra Pradesh, officials said. Some 43 were believed to have died in neighbouring Odisha, although an official there said each of the deaths was being investigated. Y K Reddy, a director at the Indian Meteorological Department, said Telangana has recorded its highest April temperatures since at least 2006. Reddy said there were worries the death toll in Telangana could rise and his department was issuing heat-wave warnings to advise people to stay indoors. Schools in Telangana were shut last week two weeks ahead of their summer holidays. As an emergency measure, Odisha has ordered schools to remain closed until April 26 and banned construction work during the hottest times of day. Some small-scale businesses were already suffering. "I am closing my shop before noon because it is too hot," said Tulu Sahu, a small grocery seller in Bhubaneshwar city in Odisha. "You cannot stay in the shop." Pakistan, where extreme heat killed more than 1,000 people during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan last year, has started gearing up to tackle any sudden rise of patients who report heat-related illnesses. "We have enough supplies and staff to meet the possible situation," said Seemin Jamali, head of the accident and emergency department at Karachi's Jinnah Hospital. - Reuters Telecom operator Zain Saudi reported a narrowing first-quarter loss on Thursday, narrowly missing analysts' forecasts. The company has yet to make a quarterly profit since launching services in 2008 and has battled to compete against better-resourced rivals Saudi Telecom Co (STC) and Etihad Etisalat (Mobily). Zain Saudi, 37-percent owned by Kuwait's Zain, made a net loss of SR250 million ($66.7 million) in the three months to March 31, according to a bourse statement. This compares with a net loss of SR257 million in the prior-year period. The average of three analysts polled by Reuters was for Zain Saudi to make a quarterly net loss of SR239 million. Quarterly revenue of SR1.77 billion was up from the SR1.68 billion recorded in the same period a year ago. In March, sources told Reuters that Zain was in the process of narrowing down potential bidders for Zain Saudi's mobile transmitter towers. If sold, the proceeds would be used to pay down some of the Saudi company's debt. Zain Saudi's chief executive confirmed later that month it was considering a joint ownership deal or a sale of its towers.-Reuters US President Barack Obama and Gulf Arab leaders started talks in Riyadh on Thursday at a summit aimed at forging joint action on perceived security threats from Iran and Islamic State, and at ironing out strains in their alliance. Obama, who arrived on Wednesday, hopes to allay Gulf countries' fears over Iranian influence and encourage them to douse sectarian tensions in an effort to confront the threat posed by jihadist militants like Islamic State. Saudi Arabia's King Salman yesterday received at his palace in Riyadh President Obama and the accompanying delegation. Meanwhile, the GCC countries and the US yesterday agreed to conduct joint patrols to stop any Iranian arms shipments reaching Yemen, Dr Abdullatif bin Rashid Al-Zayani, secretary general of the GCC, said following a meeting between GCC defence ministers and US Secretary of Defence Ashton Carter. At a joint press conference with Carter, Al-Zayani described the meeting as constructive in which military cooperation ties between the two sides as well as ways of enhancing joint cooperation in several fields, including missile defense system, maritime security, armament, military training and cyber space security were discussed. He added that the meeting was preparatory to the summit between GCC leaders and Obama. He explained that the two sides discussed the security situations in the region, citing the disputes and wars endangering the region as well as the international efforts to fight the IS. The GCC ministers expressed concern over Iran's efforts to destabilise the region's security and stability, its interference in the domestic affairs of the region's countries and support for terrorist organizations, he was quoted as saying by Saudi Press Agency (SPA). He added that the US Secretary of Defence has vowed to stand by the side of the GCC against such practices, and provide training to the GCC armed forces through joint bilateral or joint land, air, air defense and naval and military exercises to upgrade the battle preparedness of the armed forces of the GCC countries. He also cited the military medicine, supplying and communications as other areas for cooperation between the two countries. For his part, Carter stressed that his country's commitment to security in the GCC. "During our meeting today, we focused on a number of principles, including defeating Daesh, confronting Iran's activities aiming to destabilise the region and supporting efforts of stability and security in the Middle East," Carter added. - Reuters and other sources Renault, a leading international automaker, will launch its brand new D-segment SUV, the new Koleos at the Beijing International Automotive Exhibition on April 25. The new model will play a key role in Renaults product offensive that has seen a record-breaking year with the introduction of 10 new vehicles across the world. The new Koleos is designed and engineered with global appeal to play a part in boosting Renaults international growth, including in China where Renault opened a plant in Wuhan earlier this year. Renault chairman and CEO Carlos Ghosn will reveal the new Koleos at expo. The new Koleos delivers a blend of robust SUV design cues together with the refinement and features associated with large saloon cars. The SUV boasts a powerful stance that sets it apart from its D-segment SUV rivals and provides a refined, comfortable interior that boasts record room for passengers, the company said. It also delivers all-terrain ability while ensuring excellent ride and handling and stability. Renault, an international multi-brand group, sold more than 2.8 million vehicles in 128 countries in 2015. It employing nearly 135,000 people. - TradeArabia News Service With a peak output of 430 kW (585 hp), discrete suspension and the revised AMG Speedshift Plus 7G-Tronic transmission, new Mercedes-Benz GLS is the fastest seven-seater in the world, said a top official. Effortless superiority, confidence and elegance are just some of the characteristics of the new GLS. Compared with its predecessor, the new GLS demonstrates more dominance and character. It has been thoroughly updated and features a host of further advanced detail solutions, said Dirk Fetzer, vice president & director of Sales and Marketing at Mercedes-Benz Cars Middle East & Levant. The result is a premium full-sized luxury SUV with seven seats, generous space and a great ride quality under all conditions both on and off the road. The GLS is the car for those who strive for perfection in everything they do. It is the car for the modern family as well as for drivers who demand space, comfort and power. We are confident that customers in the Middle East will love this car as much as they did its predecessor. A new, dynamic exterior and revised, luxurious interior clearly underscore the impressive character of the GLS. On the exterior, the focus has been placed on a redesign of the front end, while the rear has been modernised primarily in the area of the bumper and taillights. Eye-catching highlights in the interior include the newly designed instrument panel with semi-integrated Media Display, the new 3-spoke multifunction steering wheel, the modified centre console with touchpad and also the new appointment colours and trim elements. The new GLS features chrome-look details such as the roof rails, underguard, shoulderline trim strips, luggage compartment handle and side skirt trim create attractive highlights. Accompanying the high exterior design quality is the revised interior, which underscores the first-class standards of the GLS. Individual highlights can be created in the GLS interior with the help of the wood/leather multifunction steering wheel, the ambient lighting featuring three colour shades or the wide range of generously proportioned trim elements on the instrument panel and door panels with coordinated retractable cup holder covers. Exclusive interior lines In addition to ambient lighting as well as trim elements in black piano lacquer or a variety of wood trim, the optional exclusive design and equipment line also provides five attractive interior colour concepts, exclusively in genuine leather: black, ginger beige / espresso brown, saddle brown / black, crystal grey / black or ginger beige / black. The equipment level of the new GLS in the area of active safety underscores Mercedes-Benz's high standards when it comes to taking the strain off the driver. Driver assistance systems fitted as standard include Collision Prevention Assist Plus, Crosswind Assist and Attention Assist, for example. Other systems available as standard on the GLS also include: the PRE-SAFE system, Brake Assist BAS, the electronic all-wheel drive traction system 4ETS, ESP with Curve Dynamic Assist, cruise control with variable Speedtronic speed limiter and the steering assist function Steer Control. The GLS 400 4Matic (only in Levant), GLS 500 4Matic and the Mercedes-AMG GLS 63 4Maticare available in the GCC. Pricing will start from $102,900 for the GLS 500 4Maticand $142,700 for the Mercedes-AMG GLS 63 4Matic. TradeArabia News Service State-run Saudi Electricity Company (SEC), the Gulf's largest utility firm, reported a narrowing first-quarter net loss on Thursday as higher tariffs boosted its operating income. The company, which the government aims to split into several components this year to improve efficiency, made a loss of SR1.37 billion ($365.32 million) in the three months to March 31, according to a bourse statement. This compares with a loss of SR1.94 billion in the same period a year earlier. NCB Capital had forecast of SEC would make a quarterly loss of SR1.28 billion. The utility cited increased operational revenues from higher tariffs and a reduced amount of energy bought from independent producers as the reason for its smaller loss. This is despite an 80 percent increase in the cost of fuel as a result of higher energy prices, the company said. Saudi Arabia's government has lowered utility subsidies, raising electricity, water and fuel prices. Saudi officials say these increases are unlikely to change the projected growth in demand, which has been at around 8 per cent per year. SEC has said the price changes would roughly balance out because the higher costs associated with higher fuel prices would be offset increased revenues from electricity sales. Saudi companies issue brief earnings statements early in the reporting period before publishing more detailed results later. SEC's results are acutely seasonal because of the big swing between power demand in winter and summer, when high temperatures lead to much greater use of air conditioning. - Reuters Oil-producing nations will discuss an oil output freeze at Opec's meeting in June, a senior Saudi oil advisor said on Thursday, keeping open the prospect of action to boost prices despite the collapse of talks on a deal in Doha. The deal, in the making since February, had helped oil prices to rise from a 12-year low reached in January. But it fell apart on Sunday in Doha after Saudi Arabia insisted Iran took part, raising fears in Opec of a renewed price drop. "Even though there was no agreement, the door for future cooperation remains open, and there sure will be further discussion at the next Opec meeting in June," Ibrahim Al-Muhanna told an oil conference in Paris. Opec Secretary General Abdullah Al-Badri, speaking at the same conference, said some ministers may bring up the production freeze issue in June, but that it was not on the Opec secretariat's agenda. The Opec meeting is on June 2. "Maybe the ministers will discuss it," he told reporters. Other Opec officials are still trying to get a deal. Nigeria's oil minister told Reuters he will hold talks with Saudi Arabia, Iran and other producers by May, hoping to reach an agreement in June. Oil prices initially fell on Monday after the collapse of the Doha talks. But Brent crude has since risen, reaching a 2016 high of $46.18 a barrel on Thursday, on signs that a supply glut which has weighed on prices may be easing. Even without a producer deal, both oil officials said there were signs of a stronger market. "Doha or no Doha, we see that the market is turning," Al-Badri said. "Maybe demand will be more than supply, and we see that the market by 2017 will turn around and it will be positive." The Saudi advisor was confident that production may be declining under market forces. "The total supply decrease may be as high as 1 million barrels a day in the second half of this year," Al-Muhanna said. "This decrease is expected to continue next year." Consumer countries should not rejoice about the current low oil price environment, which may increase instability and threaten the viability of key industries, he added. "Low oil prices is a negative sum game, by that I mean everybody is losing," he said. - Reuters Saudi Arabias consulting market expanded 14.8 per cent to $1.25 billion during 2015, accounting for almost half of the GCC consulting market, which grew by 9.4 per cent to $2.7 billion, a report said. Although the GCCs growth rate is still impressive in comparison to other global consulting markets, it is a markedly lower than the region has been used to (25 per cent in 2013 and 15 per cent in 2014), so the mood amongst its management consultants has changed as a result, added the new report from leading global consulting market analysts Source Global Research (Source). The report notes that low oil prices impacted the GCCs entire consulting market, but the effect was felt especially keenly in Saudi Arabia, where it has hastened an already urgent programme of economic reform and diversification. Edward Haigh, director of Source Global Research, and author of the report, said: The scale of the challenge facing Saudi Arabia in diversifying its economy is also a huge opportunity for consulting firms. However, the big question for consultants is how long the Saudi government will keep spending against a backdrop of dramatically reduced oil revenues. Gerard Gallagher, managing partner at EY, added: Saudi Arabia has clearly been challenged by declining oil revenues, but in response, the Kingdom is transforming itself on a scale and at a pace rarely seen on a national level. The soon-to-be-rolled-out National Transformation Program should drive economic diversification and enable social and developmental change across the country. We expect the consulting industry to be actively engaged in this process. In contrast, the UAE, the second largest GCC consulting market, grew by 4.3 per cent to $788 million. Although consultants are not benefiting as much in the UAE (as it already has a diversified economy and therefore less urgency to change), the report says that Saudi Arabia could do a lot worse than follow the example set by the UAE (or at least by Dubai) when it comes to diversification. Other growth rates recorded across the GCC in 2015 included Qatar - up 6.6 per cent to $329 million, Kuwait - up 3.7 per cent to $183 million, and Oman - up 6.9 per cent to $100 million. Public sector consulting continues at double digit growth across the GCC Saudi Arabias government isnt alone in turning to consultants, as the problems faced by governments across the GCC has once again led to double-digit growth - up 11.7 per cent to $856 million. However, growth has slowed (from 19.3 per cent in 2014) as governments scrap what is seen as non-essential work, but investment in building a physical and social infrastructure fit for the future continues. Digital is also playing an important role as governments explore how they can deliver services digitally as part of their reform agenda. The report says that the regions high penetration of internet-capable devices encourages this and has led to initiatives around e-government, e-health and e-learning. Efficiency drives growth in technology and operational improvement Consultants right across the region talk about a shift away from growth and towards efficiency. The fastest growing consulting service lines in the market in 2015 were technology, which grew 12.2 per cent to $895 million and operational improvement, up 12 per cent to $534 million. Operational improvement in particular is growing as clients, particularly in the all-important public and financial services sectors are looking to take cost out of their operations. Healthcare, pharma & biotech industry fastest growing GCC sector Although it only makes up a small proportion, the healthcare, pharma and biotech industry was the fastest-growing part of the GCC consulting market in 2015, expanding 14.7 per cent to $174 million. The report says providing better healthcare is a central tenet of the social infrastructure agenda across the region, and theres significant investment in better hospitals, clinics, and the standard of care on offer. Global firms perform well In a market in which projects are being cancelled, payments delayed and prices reduced, the big global firms are the ones doing best. Source says despite already having the biggest share of the GCC consulting market it was the Big Four firms who grew faster than anyone else in 2015, expanding 13.7 per cent to $913million. Their big balance sheets create internal stability where there is external disarray and mean they can weather storms much more easily than their small counterparts. If you want to understand why the GCC consulting market remains one of the fastest-growing in the entire world despite the impact of the low oil price then its not oil you need to focus on, its diversification, Haigh said. Its not the fact that Saudi Arabia has spent close to 15 per cent of its entire foreign reserves in the last year alone to make up for a shortfall in oil revenues, its the fact that, for consultants, it currently represents the mother of all transformation projects. TradeArabia News Service Towers Rotana, a four-star luxury hotel in Dubai, has welcomed Daniela Crovetto as the new director of food and beverage (F&B). Crovetto, who joins the team with over 15 years of knowledge and experience, will overseeing daily operations at the hotels fine range of dining outlets, including the award-winning fusion fine dining restaurant Teatro; the longest bar in the Middle East, Longs Bar; all day dining restaurant, Flavours on Two; and lobby bistro, Wraps Cafe. She will also be driving talent acquisition and training efforts, overseeing supplier relations, and supervising a team of over 100. Crovetto said: I am very thankful for the opportunity to grow within the company, and equally excited to be a part of Towers Rotana and privileged to lead the successful and award-wining food and beverage outlets." Prior to joining Towers Rotana, she was the assistant director of F&B at Al Ghurair Rayhaan & Arjaan by Rotana. Crovetto has worked in many hospitality brands across Switzerland, Germany, New York and the UAE. She is also fluent in German, Spanish, Italian and English. - TradeArabia News Service Chef W.A.P Sanjeewa is the new joiner at Downtown Rotana, as the stylish hotel in the heart of Manama prepares to open the doors to its signature, award-winning restaurant Teatro Downtown later this month. Teatro Downtown will launch in Bahrain at the end of April, as Downtown Rotanas premiere restaurant venue featuring an East-meets-West cuisine within a cozy ambience designed with contemporary flair. This is the third Teatro in the region to be opened by the Rotana Group following the chains tremendous success and bagging of multiple awards in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the most recent being Best International Restaurant 2015 at the TimeOut Awards. Originating from Sri Lanka, Chef Sanjeewa brings with him a wealth of experience in the culinary field, having worked with reputed international hospitality brands across the globe, in some of the worlds most exotic locations including the Seychelles, Maldives, Tokyo and Zanzibar. We are happy to welcome Chef Sanjeewa to Downtown Rotana and look forward to him launching Teatro Downtown in Bahrain and working with the team on-the-ground to turn this into Manamas most popular hotspot,, said Lilian Rogers, general manager of Downtown Rotana. With over 15 years working in the hospitality industry Chef Sanjeewa moved from his last post in Colombo to take on his new challenge at Downtown Rotana as specialty outlet chef in Teatro Downtown. He is tasked with managing the overall operation of the kitchen as well as supervision, management and development of staff to maintain the high standard of quality in food and service that the Teatro brand is known for across the region. This is my first stint in this part of the world and I want to seize the experience of working with such a visionary, fast-expanding brand as well as immerse myself in the culture and culinary splendors of Arabian cooking, said chef Sanjeewa. - TradeArabia News Service Chokecherry and Sierra Madre, the largest onshore wind farm planned in the United States, would annually kill 10 to 14 golden eagles, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service projected in a draft environmental study released Wednesday. That figure represents a substantial reduction from the 46 to 64 golden eagle fatalities estimated by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in 2012. Federal officials attributed the decline to several factors. The permit application submitted by the projects developer, Power Company of Wyoming, only considers the 500 turbines proposed in the projects first phase. A second phase calls for an additional 500 turbines. But the decrease is also the result of years of planning aimed at reducing eagle deaths, they noted. Power Company of Wyoming had not developed an eagle conservation strategy when the BLM released its projections in 2012. We appreciate the company took seriously the recommendations and advice we gave them as they were developing their eagle conservation plan, said Clint Riley, assistant regional director for the Fish and Wildlife Services Mountain-Prairie region. Eagle deaths have emerged as a sizable hurdle for would-be wind developers in recent years. A North Carolina power company was fined $1 million for killing more than 150 species protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act over a four-year period at a wind farm outside Glenrock in 2013. Industry officials and environmentalists have also clashed over the length of so called take permits granted to wind farms, which enable turbine operators to kill a certain number of eagles annually without being prosecuted. A Fish and Wildlife proposal to grant permits for up to 30 years was reversed by a federal judge last year. The current length is five years. Wind developers have filed a series of applications for take permits in recent years, but only one facility in the country has been permitted to-date. Chokecherry and Sierra Madre, a 3,000-megawatt wind farm proposed for Carbon County in south-central Wyoming, is the first facility in the Rocky Mountain region to have a draft environmental impact study completed. Power Company of Wyoming has developed two conservation plans aimed at mitigating avian deaths, one for eagles, the other for birds and bats. The Denver-based developer, an Anschutz Corp. subsidiary, has proposed designating 105,000 acres, or roughly a third of Overland Trail Cattle Co. ranch, where the project will be located, as turbine no-build areas. Those areas were identified following 5,000 hours of avian surveys between 2010 and 2015, said Kara Choquette, a Power Company of Wyoming spokeswoman. That kind of data was used to say what types of airspace do raptors use the most, and not use, she said. The company has also proposed putting 27,500 acres into a conservation easement. That move is aimed at bolstering sage grouse habitat, but could have an indirect impact on eagles, Choquette noted. Eagles prey on sage grouse, and more grouse in that area could help direct the birds away from the turbines, she said. The public will have 60 days to comment on the Fish and Wildlife Services draft findings. Public hearings are scheduled for Saratoga and Rawlins in June. The Fish and Wildlife Service did not identify a preferred alternative in its draft environmental impact statement, as the BLM often does in its reviews. Instead, the service sought to assess the potential environmental impact of the project, said Riley, the regional assistant director. The golden eagle fatality projection was based on a peer-reviewed model developed by a third party. The service expects one to two bald eagles would be killed annually, Riley said. After public comment is received and the environmental impact statement completed, Fish and Wildlife will decide whether to issue Chokecherry a permit. Friday support meetings Alcoholics Anonymous: 6:30 a.m., 917 N. Beech; 10 a.m., 328 E. A Street; noon, 500 S. Wolcott, Ste. 200; 5:30 p.m., 456 S. Walnut; 7 p.m., 500 S. Wolcott, Ste. 200; 7 p.m., Glenrock, 615 W. Deer (downstairs); 7:30 p.m., Douglas, 628 E. Richards; 8 p.m., 917 N. Beech, closed; 8 p.m., 328 1/2 E. A St. (upstairs). Unless otherwise noted, Casper info: 266-9578; Douglas info: 307-351-1688. Narcotics Anonymous: Noon, 500 S. Wolcott, 12-24 Club; 6 p.m., 500 S. Wolcott, 12-24 Club; 8:30 p.m., 302 E. 2nd Street, Methodist Church. Web site: www.urmrna.org. Al-Anon Family: Noon, 500 S. Wolcott, Ste. 200, 12-24 Club, all ages welcome. Info: 377-7260 or 258-1444. International Addictions Program: 7 p.m., Calvary Baptist Church, 1800 S. Conwell. Reformers Unanimous International is a faith-based addiction program with a complete curriculum for those with various addictions. Info: 266-5417. LGTBQ AA/NA: 7 p.m., A 12-Step AA/NA Recovery Group for gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual and questioning persons meets at the United Church of Christ, located at the corner of 15th and Melrose. Info: 259-5026. Dem garage sale Natrona County Democrats and friends, spread the word about the Stomping Grounds garage sale, an April spring fling event spearheaded by Mary Gilmore and her posse. The event features quality junk. The sale is from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Earth Day at the circle In honor of Earth Day, join Wyoming Food for Thought Project and the Casper Peace Collective for an afternoon of relaxation and enjoyment at the Bart Rea Learning Circle near the Tate Pumphouse. At 1:45 p.m., join a guided labyrinth walk with Elliott Ramage with a yoga class to follow by Theresa Roberts Wiegand. At 3 p.m., clean up at The Circle as we prepare for a great summer of yoga, meditation, nature, education, theater, music, art, and more in our new public gathering space on The Platte River Trails. Bring your yoga mat, gloves, and water. Parking and restrooms are available at the Pumphouse for this event. CTC performs To Kill a Mockingbird Casper Theater Company will present To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee April through Sunday at 735 CY Avenue. The performances are at 7:30 p.m., through Saturday and Sunday will be a matinee at 2 p.m. Tickets are available at Charlie Ts, 112 E. 2nd Street, Greater Wyoming Credit Union, 155 W. Collins, and Casper Senior Center,1841 E. 4th Street. The play is considered a Southern Gothic with intense subject matter involving loss of innocence, racial inequality including racial epithets. Casper Theater Company would like to express that we are producing the literary classic because it is a classic but also a way to spread the need for tolerance and the stand against prejudice. If you need more information please visit our website at www.caspertheatercompany.net or email us at caspertheatercompany@gmail.com or call 267-7243. Edible Book Fest deadline The entry deadline for Saturdays Edible Book Fest is Friday. Entry forms are available at the front desk at the main library as well as the Mills and Edgerton branches. You can also register online at natronacountylibrary.org/ediblebookfest. The Friends 2016 Edible Book Fest will be held on Saturday from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Natrona County Library. The event is free and open for the public to enter or attend. Any chef from beginner to professional can participate by making an edible reference to a favorite book. Competing chef categories are young (ages 8 and under), junior (ages 9-12), teen (ages 13-18), adult (age 19 and older), and professional (working in the food industry). For more information, please call Pam Jones at 258-4998. Murder mystery benefits museums The Fort Caspar Museum Association and the National Historic Trails Center Foundation (the not-for-profit support groups for the Fort Caspar Museum and National Historic Trails Interpretive Center) are presenting a Murder Mystery Evening fundraiser from 5:30 to 9 p.m. at the Ramkota Hotel. Join us for the new drama, Murder in the Sand Bar. Enjoy hors doeuvres and beverages as you become detectives in this fun-filled mystery evening. Guests are encouraged, but not required, to get into the spirit of the evening by wearing 1940s attire. A costume contest will determine the best outfit. Doors open at 5:30 p.m., and the mystery will begin at 6 p.m. The cost for the event is $35 for individuals and $60 for couples. Heavy hors deouvres and soft drinks are included, and a cash bar will be available. We will also be holding a 50-50 raffle. For more information, call Fort Caspar Museum at 235-8462, or visit our website at www.fortcasparwyoming.com, or call the Trails Center at 261-7700, or the Veterans Museum at 472-1857. Fort Caspar Museum is located at 4001 Fort Caspar Road, the Trails Center is located at 1501 N. Poplar Street, the Veterans Museum is at 3740 Jourgensen Avenue, and the Ramkota Hotel is located at 800 N. Poplar Street. Celebrate Recovery every Friday Looking for a nontraditional approach to recovery from your hurts, habits and hangups? Celebrate Recovery meets at 5:30 p.m. every Friday at Highland Park Community Church, just south of Elkhorn Valley Rehabilitation Hospital on East Second Street. We start with a family meal, followed by praise and worship. At 7 p.m., theres either a lesson from Celebrate Recoverys planned curriculum or a testimony by a person who has found recovery through Christ. Then, people go to gender-specific small groups until 8:30 p.m., when dessert and fellowship conclude the evening. Child care is available at no cost. For more information, contact Chris at 265-4073. Out of the Box fundraiser Join us at ART 321 at 6 p.m., for the Out of the Box annual gala and fundraising event. Tickets, limited to 200, are available for $75 each in advance and will be $80 at the door if any remain. It will be an evening of art, music, food, fun, and a live auction. We have secured several outstanding packages to be auctioned during this fun event. You may also bid on the beautiful and unusual out of the box artwork created by many area artists. Get your tickets by visiting the gallery or visiting our website. If you are unable to attend, you may also bid on the artwork anytime before the live auction by visiting our gallery from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Hypnotist at college Comedy hypnotist Frederick Winters will return to Casper College at 7 p.m. in Durham Auditorium, located in Aley Hall on the Casper College campus. The show is free and open to the public. Winters is making his 22nd appearance at the college. We continue to bring him back year after year because Frederick Winters is such a crowd favorite, said Nicholas Whipps, student activities coordinator at Casper College. Winters, a certified hypnotherapist, is one of the busiest performing hypnotists in the United States and has performed more than 2,000 shows and entertained more than 500,000 people. Those attending the show will detect from the moment Im introduced that theres no place Id rather be then on stage entertaining a college or corporate crowd. I sure have fun hypnotizing people, said Winters. Frederick has a great show that always entertains everyone in the house, noted Whipps. Friday Melrose music Melrose Coffee House welcomes Indefinite Moment to the stage. This group of young men describe themselves as Alternative, indie, infused with blues, and folk. You cant really put us in a box! As always there is no cover charge but tips for the band are encouraged. Espresso drinks and treats are available at a nominal price. Contact Dee for more information, 266-4447. Fools at Stage III Fools, a Neil Simon comic fable, will be presented at Stage III Friday and Saturday and April 29-30 and May 5-7 at 7:30 p.m., and May 1 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $12 adults, $10 seniors over 65 and students. Purchase tickets online at stageiiitheatre.org or at Cadillac Cowgirl, 147 S. Center. Season-ticket holders may call 234-0946 to make reservations. Natrona County District Attorney Michael Blonigen received a heart transplant last fall in Colorado, he revealed Thursday. Blonigen said he will plant a tree next week in memory of the man who donated his heart to him. The event coincides with National Donate Life Month. Somewhere out there is a young mans family and they did a remarkable thing and Im trying to repay that a little bit, Blonigen said by phone Thursday. If youve been lucky enough as I have to be on the receiving end, I think you really owe it to those people to speak up and encourage organ donation. In a letter to the Star-Tribune, Blonigen wrote that he received the transplant Oct. 4 at the University of Colorado Hospital Transplant Center. He underwent the procedure after experiencing several years of heart-related issues that followed a bypass surgery. My doctors tried various remedies including a pacemaker, stent and a defibrillator to try and patch the problems with my heart, he wrote. Last spring, I was told that all the bypasses had collapsed and there was nothing else they could do for me. At that point, Blonigen said his enlarged heart was only functioning at 10 percent and that lack of blood flow was affecting his kidneys. He said he considered resigning from his position as district attorney, but was able to receive the transplant before it came to that. He carried out his job electronically while he was not able to be in the office full time. Hes been working full time again since December. My family and I feel very blessed that I was given this wonderful gift that saved my life, he wrote in the letter. Blonigen said he doesnt think his absence affected the quality of work done by the District Attorneys Office. It did impact my ability to do my job, but not severely, he said. I have a very experienced staff and a very capable staff. I doubt anybody could identify a serious issue that arose when I was not there every day while I was dealing with that illness. Blonigen said he is healthier than he has been in years and is exercising six days a week. However, he is still unsure whether he will seek reelection in 2018. The tree-planting celebration is set for 1 p.m. April 29 at Meadow Park in Casper. In celebration of National Donate Life Month, trees will be planted across Wyoming and Colorado in memory of organ, eye and tissue donors from the region, according to Donor Alliance, the federally designated nonprofit that facilitates organ and tissue donation in Wyoming. The trees will be planted and dedicated by transplant recipients honoring their donors, and families of donors memorializing their lost loved ones. Donor Alliance has donated the trees that will be planted. Blonigen has served as district attorney since December 2003. During his tenure, he has successfully prosecuted several high-profile cold cases, including that of Dale Wayne Eaton, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 2004 for the 1988 rape and killing of 18-year-old Lisa Marie Kimmell. Two Wyoming Medical Center employees fell for phishing schemes in February, potentially exposing the information of 3,184 patients, the hospital announced Thursday. Wyoming Medical Center sent letters to the affected patients Wednesday, said Matt Frederiksen, the Casper hospitals chief compliance officer. We have received some phone calls, but its been very generic questions about whats happened, Frederiksen said. Nobodys made any allegations that their information has been compromised, and there is no credit card notifications that was contained in the email systems. Phishing emails are messages that appear to come from legitimate sources such as a bank, friend or colleague or business that attempt to acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords, credit card information, e-mail addresses or Social Security numbers. The first employee opened a phishing email and clicked on an attached link on Feb. 22. The second employee opened a phishing email three days later. Frederiksen doesnt know the identity of the people or group behind the phishing scheme. They had access to the employees emails for 15 minutes, he said. The hospital could tell the email systems had been compromised within minutes because the accounts had sent spam emails to other hospital employees. We knew right away, he said. We started taking immediate action updating passwords and ensuring the third party was locked out. The records in the email system contained patient names, medical record numbers, account numbers, dates of hospital service, birth dates and some medical information, and the hospital characterized the breach as serious in its announcement. However, patients addresses, Social Security numbers or insurance information were not in the records. No evidence indicates patients health information was viewed or copied from the compromised email accounts, and the hospital believes that no information was viewed or acquired because of the short time the emails were exposed, said Kristy Bleizeffer, spokeswoman for the hospital. As part of their job duties, the two employees communicate via email about patients in a general way to vendors doing business with Wyoming Medical Center. For instance, if a patient needs a knee implant, the employees could talk with a vendor who supplies implants to the Wyoming Medical Center. Such emails could contain the type of device and the name of the patient, Frederiksen said. They had access to limited patient information, Frederiksen said. They never had access to our electronic medical record system. Its taken nearly two months for the hospital to notify the public of the breach. We had to go through each individual email to identify which patients this could affect, Frederiksen said. That took several weeks to complete. We then had to prepare all of our notifications. We had to also verify because the information that was contained in the email may not have been comprehensive. We had to verify each one against our patient database records and we had to run reports to obtain the (mailing addresses) to do the notification. The hospital notified the U.S Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights, the government agency that oversees health privacy violations. The hospital will continue to review its email and electronic data policies, Frederiksen said. One of the patients affected was Vickie Diamond, the hospitals CEO, Bleizeffer said. Shes not worried about it. We feel like this is very low risk. Much of the information was deep into the email system. Attorneys representing Tim Stubson, a state lawmaker and candidate for the U.S. House, has filed a motion asking that former Wyoming schools chief Cindy Hill provide more specifics in her defamation lawsuit against him. Hill, former superintendent of public instruction, sued Stubson on Feb. 22 over comments he made about her on Facebook. An unidentified Fremont County journalist asked Stubson, the third-ranking House Republican, about his position on a 2013 bill that removed Hill, also a Republican, from the Wyoming Department of Education. The Wyoming Supreme Court struck down the law a year later. Stubson responded on Facebook that Hill, also a Republican, was out of control, had to be stopped and had committed many illegal acts not disclosed publicly. Hills suit claimed that the congressional hopeful made other statements on previous occasions that worked to harm her. Stubsons legal team wrote in the April 11 motion that it needed more details about those allegations. Separately, Plaintiffs Complaint contains immaterial and scandalous accusations that are plainly calculated to harass and embarrass Mr. Stubson, and are nothing more than an attempt to interfere with Mr. Stubsons ongoing congressional campaign, the motion states. The motion asks Laramie County District Court Judge Thomas Campbell to strike some of those portions of Hills suit, including a part in which Hill is asking the Wyoming Bar Association to sanction Stubson. Bar hearings are confidential and he has not been subject to any professional discipline, the motion states. The Denver law firm White and Steele is representing Stubson, a Casper attorney. Hill is being represented by Emblem attorney Rob DiLorenzo. The Star-Tribune reached out to Hill for a response to Stubsons motion. I will not try this case in the media, she said in a message. When Carole Robinson learned of Princes death on Thursday, her thoughts raced back 30 years to a summer night at the Holiday Inn ballroom in Sheridan. It was there in 1986 where Robinson watched the mega rock star perform for an eclectic crowd in a town of fewer than 11,000 people. And it remains one of the best shows Ive ever seen, the 54-year-old New Yorker said. Robinson was working for MTV at the time. The company was known for promoting outrageous call-in contests, and this was one of its best: the chance for your city to host the world premiere of Princes latest movie, Under the Cherry Moon, as well as a post-premiere party, sponsored by MTV and Warner Bros. The lucky 10,000th caller was Lisa Barber, a 20-year-old hotel employee from Sheridan. That meant MTV, national media and one of the biggest rock stars in the world headed to Wyoming. This was two years after Princes hit movie, Purple Rain, making Under the Cherry Moon a highly anticipated film. Barber was allowed to invite 200 of her friends to the premiere at the Centennial Theater in Sheridan. It was a unique event to say the least, especially in the 80s, a time before social media, before fans had a more direct relationship with their favorite artists. Prince rented an incredibly cool convertible. He was so all in, said Robinson, who made her first trip to Wyoming for the concert. He drove to pick (Barber) up himself and drove her to the movie premiere and sat with her. Prince was incredibly generous to Lisa Barber with his time. Theres a great rumor that he gave her his phone number, and said, If you ever need anything, call me. I dont know if its true, but I bet it was. He was just amazing. He was a guy who was private in a lot of ways, but he absolutely turned up for her and turned out for the crowd that was there. It was just unbelievable. It was a magical night. Afterward, Prince and his band, The Revolution, performed at the Holiday Inn ballroom for a crowd of all ages in typical Prince fashion. He just leaves everything on the stage. Hes just the most dynamic performer, Robinson said. His shows are epic. On Thursday, Prince (whose full name was Prince Rogers Nelson) was found dead at his home in Minnesota. He was 57. Robinson was a huge Prince fan. Like many around the world, she grieved the icons death. And then I thought, How lucky that I got to see (him) perform in Sheridan, Wyoming. Editor: Following a bypass surgery, I have been in and out of the hospital for heart related issues for the last four years. My doctors tried various remedies including a pacemaker, stents and a defibrillator to try and patch the problems with my heart. Last spring, I was told that all the bypasses had collapsed and there was nothing else that they could do for me. I had an enlarged heart that only had 10 percent function and the lack of blood flow was affecting my kidneys. My doctors recommended a heart transplant and I was airlifted to Denver. On Oct. 4, 2015, at the University of Colorado Hospital Transplant Center, I received a miracle and was given the gift of a new heart. My family and I feel very blessed that I was given this wonderful gift that saved my life. My new heart has given me a second chance at life, so this April, in celebration of National Donate Life Month and in memory of my donor, I will be giving life by planting a tree in Meadow Park on Friday, April 29 at 1 p.m. I invite my community of Casper residents to help me raise awareness for this important cause by attending my tree dedication and by joining in on the months other celebrations. Saying yes to organ, eye and tissue donation saves lives. Transplants offer patients a new chance at healthy and productive lives, returning them to their families, friends and communities. At the time of their death, just one donor can save up to eight lives through organ donation and save or heal more than 50 lives through eye and tissue donation. Wyoming residents can register their decision to be organ, eye and tissue donors at the time of death by saying yes each time they obtain or renew a drivers license or state ID, or at DonateLifeWyoming.org. Anyone can register to be an organ, eye and tissue donor, regardless of age, race, medical history, religion or income. Even those with chronic conditions, such as hepatitis and diabetes, can register to give the gift of life at any age. PHOENIX Former Chandler Mayor Boyd Dunn announced he will run for one of the three seats opening this year on the Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates utilities. Dunn, a Republican, is a retired Superior Court judge and served as an assistant attorney general. He worked in private practice at Yarbrough, Moll and Dunn. He served as Chandler mayor from 2002-11, and was vice mayor and a City Council member before that. The role of a commissioner is very similar to that of a judge, to be the impartial decision-maker based on the facts presented to you on each individual case, regardless of personal feelings or outside influences, Dunn said in a statement. Dunns entrance into the race means there are five Republicans and two Democrats running for three open seats. The commission has five members, who are elected in staggered, four-year terms. The other Republicans who have formed committees to run are Robert Burns, running for a second term; former state Sen. Al Melvin of Tucson; Rep. Rick Gray, R-Sun City; and Andy Tobin, a former lawmaker who was appointed earlier this year to serve on the commission to replace a Republican who resigned. The two Democrats with active committees are Tom Chabin, a former Coconino County supervisor and state lawmaker from 2007-12, and William Mundell, a former lawmaker and commissioner, who switched political parties. Mike Westphall received his coffee education a world away in Australia. For about 18 months, the former Florida businessman who moved to Australia after selling his hydrogeologic firm, ran a small outdoor bistro and coffee roasting shop Down Under. He moved back to the United States a few years ago, settling in Tucson. In February, he opened Pangean Coffee Roasters on North Wilmot Road in the small storefront space once occupied by the gourmet popcorn shop Prayerfully Popped. Westphall specializes in fair trade, organic beans. He roasts them to order, medium to dark depending on your taste, in a 3-kilo roaster from U.S. Roasters. He can roast up to 25 pounds of beans an hour, but most of his custom roasts are small batches. We had a guy come in here yesterday, and he liked the Guatemalan we had, but he wanted a much darker roast than we typically do, Westphall said. So he had a cup of coffee, and I roasted it darker in about 20 minutes. Westphall sources his beans from a major broker who deals in large lots of beans from Ethiopia, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Mexico. He also gets beans from New York-based Crop to Cup Coffee Importers, which Westphall said has relationships with some of the smaller outlying plantations that the bigger guys dont get to including in Kenya, the Congo, Tanzania and Burundi. Lawrence Schwartzwald At some point in history, the University of New Mexico was referred to as Harvard on the Rio Grande; the appellation can either be seen as a reference to the many Harvard grads in residence at the school as it advanced toward mid-century and beyond, or as an indication of the level of excellence the institution was trying to sustain. Nowhere on campus was the latter more evident than the English Department. With heavy hitters like Shakespeare scholar Mary Bess Whidden and Chaucer expert Patrick Gallacher, the department also included a world-class creative writing department that featured poetic notables in teaching and mentorship roles. Those folks included Rudy Anaya, Joy Harjo, Gene Frumkin and a fellow named Lee Bartlett. Bartlett was a first-hand participant of West Coast beat poetics who had affiliations with major players in the literary movement. His biographical research on William Everson, AKA Brother Antoninus, is still considered a formidable discourse. Bartlett also has daughters. Among them is Jennifer, a poet herself. Jennifer became part of the community of writers, researchers and teachers there. As she came into adulthood, she began her own journey as a poet, moving past UNM, influenced by the language poets and writing lyrically, with a hint of magical realism, about her life and the lives of other poets. Her latest book is titled Autobiography/ Anti- Autobiography. She is also continuing her work and research on the biography of postmodern poetry pioneer Larry Eigner. As a result of her cerebral palsy diagnosis, the writer recently focused her poetic gift to advance a discourse on disability; the result was 2014's Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, which she edited with Michael Northen and Sheila Black, a poet from Las Cruces, N.M. Bartlett just finished work on organizing the disability caucus at the Association of Writers and Writer's Programs Conference. Additionally her latest poems have just been published in Poetry Magazine. She's working on her fourth book while being deeply engaged in family life and American politics. Weekly Alibi caught up with Jennifer as she prepared to head off to the Split This Rock Poetry Festival in Washington, D.C.; she was the featured reader on Friday, April 15. Weekly Alibi: What's important to you right now, about your work? Jennifer Bartlett: For four years now, I've been writing a biography of the poet Larry Eigner, who was part of the Black Mountain College school of poetry. He was sort of adopted by the language poets. Right now, I am studying his work intensely, as well as other Black Mountain poetry. How did you decide you wanted to focus on biography and autobiography as a grounding aspect of your poetics? I didn't know much about Eigner's work, I knew he had severe cerebral palsy because I have cerebral palsy. So I was curious about what he wrote about. I always wanted to write biography, I've always been very interested in the lives of people I know. My father also wrote biographies. William Everson was his mentor. For a long time, Muriel Rukeyser was one of my favorite poets. Her life had a lot of intersections for me because she was bisexual, she had a child, she was a communist, she was part of the New York poetry scene. She also wrote biographies of some important historic figures, like English astronomer Thomas Harriot. Then I met Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan's biographer, she is a New York poet as well. I learned about Duncan at her house by reading her work on his life. One time I was in Portland for a reading of Charles Olson's Maximus Poems; that had a huge impact on my desire to write biographically. How did growing up in Albuquerque and going to UNM influence your work? I loved living in Albuquerque and going to UNM. I actually grew up in the English department, well sort of. We moved to New Mexico when I was 16, my dad was department chair at that time. When I got to UNM, I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know if I wanted to write fiction or poetry. They had this great writing faculty; I had Anaya for my fiction class and Harjo as a poetry instructor. My dad got me really interested in language poetry. Language poetry has never been something I completely understand, it can be very difficult to understand. But it expanded my mind, especially with regards to what a poem can be. I was very influenced by my father's colleague, the poet Nathaniel Tarn. I also took a lot of art history classes. The school had an amazing art history department at the time, with people like Flora Clancy teaching there. Also, UNM press and Albuquerque writer V.B. Price have been supportive and influential to my evolution as a writer. With that kind of background and experience, how did your work evolve? My first book was heavily influenced by the natural environments of Portland, Oregon and Albuquerque. It's about my husband and my son. My new book confronts disability directly how people perceive me. It's divided into two chapters, one about perceptions, the other a collage of themes related to disability. My current project is about me. It's a story told in the third person about a character named Jennifer. These are poems about human relationships. I did drawings for it and wrote about a friend of mine who died from a brain tumor. We named our cat after her. In one of the poems, the cat loves to chase birds who are laughing at her. My poems have a sense of magical realism to them. So, you're trying to navigate the world, physically and poetically, is that an accurate statement? Exactly. On a base level, it's like, oh, god, a pet poem, no way. But all these things go beyond the surface, they're important events in a life. You're much more direct about disability. How does that contrast with the other work you do? Those poems about disability are very clear, they'll reach a wider audience, I think, an audience that isn't so much involved with poetry but with the commonality of experience for those with disabilities. I'm sort of at a stopping point, but it was a new feeling to write poems that include drawings, that are in the third person. I'm not going to write poems about disability anymore. I'm just not. Those works exposed my activist side, but they sound so different from my other voice. My work doesn't fit into any neat categories. It's lyrical yet experimental, but people really like certain parts of my work, the more narrative parts. I'd like my poetry to reach a wider audience. Really, I can't believe that it happened [being a poet]. That's awesome. Cynthia Meier feels the pressure. Meier has adapted Thornton Wilders The Bridge of San Luis Rey for The Rogue Stage. The Pulitzer Prize-winning 1927 novel is, to this day, much loved. So theres pressure there. And, save for a theatrical production with puppets, its never been adapted for the stage. More pressure. Then there is this: Wilders nephew, Tappan Wilder, will be at the opening. Yup, pressure. It was scary when I heard he wanted to come to see it, says Meier. Im thrilled and honored that he wants to come, but it also makes me nervous. The story Wilders book at 138 pages, its more of a novella is an intensely spiritual piece. Though a few of the characters are based on real people, the story sprang from the writers imagination, not from facts. It takes place early in the 18th century in Peru. A rope bridge woven by the Incas collapses and five people plunge to their deaths. This is witnessed by a Franciscan monk, who becomes obsessed with why those five died. He is convinced their deaths are not accidents, that they are all part of Gods plan, and he is going to prove it. He spends six years compiling all the information about each that he can, from their births to their deaths. His findings brand him a heretic and lead to his own death. Thornton Wilder once said that the central question posed in the novel is this: Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individuals own will? The author Thornton Wilder was just 29 when he wrote the book. That was a little more than a decade before he wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Our Town. I cant imagine the kind of wisdom he had at that age, says Meier. Tappan Wilder points to his uncles family as the reason for the deep reflection. They lived life by reflecting on the big issues, life, death and what it means, he says. They were brought up like that, starting with the great literature they loved. The Bridge of San Luis Rey was Wilders second novel, and expectations were not great, says Tappan Wilder, the literary executor of his late uncles estate. It was published by a company who expected it would appeal to an upscale, sophisticated readership, he says, speaking by phone from his San Francisco home. He (Thornton Wilder) did not think it would be a popular book, but it would make enough to cover costs. In the first month, it went through nearly 20 reprints; it was a literary explosion. The permission About two years ago, Meier contacted the Wilder estate hoping to get an OK to write a stage version of the novel. Tappan Wilder had the final say on adaptations. He called her back. He said, Why do you want to do this? And I said, because I love the novel, says Meier. I love all the expressions of love. The descriptions of the different kinds of love, and everybody is seeking some connection, some love. Meier isnt the first to try an adaptation, says Wilder. People have found it a difficult play to adapt. X, Y and Z have tried it, and it hasnt come off. But I say, let 1,000 flowers bloom. Then Meier got the contract from the Wilder foundation. There were all these scary elements, and they had rights to change things, says Meier. Right before I turned the script in, I thought, Oh my God, what if they dont like it? She neednt have worried. Wilder didnt even read it. I dont want to read it, he says. I want to see it. The adaptation The biggest challenge was how much narrative there is, says Meier. We wanted to keep a lot of it because thats where the poetry and philosophy is. But how do you make that not boring or repetitive on stage? Wilder saw another challenge. In the novel, you have these extraordinary portraits of people, he says. How do you draw a kind of dramatic arc? Thats the challenge of anybody adapting it. And in the end The real message of The Bridge of San Luis Rey is the importance of love, says Meier. Not romantic love, not passionate love, but that real, enduring, First Corinthians love. Meier quotes the last line of the novel: There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning. I think one of the things Wilder is saying, says Meier, is lets look at how we are living our lives and forget about all those other things were chasing. Just look at one another and love one another. This years Baja Beer Festival is all about reinvention. Formerly the Baja Oktoberfest, the party is on Saturday, April 23, this year. It will feature more than 50 breweries and over 200 beers, including concoctions by 19 brewery-firefighter teams. The teams are part of the reincarnated Top Hops beer competition, which has been absorbed into the Baja Beer Fest. The Top Hops Beer Festival was born in 2010 when Northwest Fires Brian Sturgeon pitched the idea of a beer-based fundraiser to Steve Tracy, owner of Thunder Canyon Brewery, 7401 N. La Cholla Blvd. Sturgeon says a lot of his firefighting colleagues are homebrewers, and it seemed logical to use their brews to benefit Northwest Firefighters Charities. I think we just noticed that it was something that a lot of the guys really enjoyed, Sturgeon says. I think firefighters are notorious for wanting to be self-starters and create things on their own, and the whole craft brew idea is just that. You know, enjoy the process, learn how to do this, and those kind of things are what firefighters like to do in their spare time. Thats the local fire department where the Foothills Mall is, so a lot of those guys would just come in as guests and regulars, says Tracy. When they actually had the idea for the beer festival they approached us because they happened to know us. As a former Arizona Craft Brewers Guild president and treasurer, and long-time Tucson brewer, Tracy knew starting a beer festival would be no easy task. We kind of tried to scare them away a little bit at first, like, Are you guys sure? Tracy says. But the thing about them, theyre very well organized, because theyre firefighters. Everybody has a job, and they know what their job is and they get it done. They took care of all the logistics, the permitting and setup and all that, and we worked with the brewers to get brewer involvement. The first few years, Top Hops was a parking lot party outside Thunder Canyon, with food from the brewpub, live music and firefighters pitting their homebrews against each other to be judged by the local craft brewers selling beer at the event. Proceeds went to the Northwest Firefighters Charities, and as time went on, the event expanded in size and popularity. It was probably time for the event to grow, Tracy says. It needed to take that next step. It outgrew the parking lot at the Foothills Mall. Getting the (Arizona Craft Brewers) guild involved is big because that brings the breweries from all over the state. Tracy helps organize the Tucson chapter of the guild, called the Baja Arizona Brewers, who are helping to organize the Baja Beer Fest. Teaming up seemed obvious. They wanted to continue to support our charities, and we knew that the microbreweries and the guild itself was going to be the way to make the best event in the long run. So we figured, Lets just team up and do this together, says Sturgeon. This year, firefighter teams are paired with professional breweries to collaborate on competition brews from recipe to finished product. The first-time drafts will duke it out in a blind tasting before the gates of the festival open, and the winners will display a trophy. This is really kind of a cool experience for us. Its the first time weve ever been able to brew in a commercial brewery, and its been a great experience, says Brad White, a Mountain Vista firefighter and 20-year homebrewer. White and brewing partner Josh Johnson, brewing as 240 Brew Works, have competed since Top Hops first year in 2011. Their Old No. 3 stout won third place in last years contest. For White, the collaborations on the brews and the festival itself have propelled Top Hops to a whole new level. I think its better. I think its gonna be a bigger crowd, the competition as far as the firefighters is probably gonna be a little stiffer and first-time beers are always fun because you never know what youre gonna get, White says. Brewing on Thunder Canyons equipment has also made White and Johnson think more seriously about starting a brewery of their own. They wouldnt be the first to sprout from Top Hops. Golder Ranch firefighter Jeremy Hilderbrand decided to start Sentinel Peak Brewing Co., 4746 E. Grant Road, after his experience at the festival. It was completely no brewery plan yet, it was just: Hey, I have these beers. I wonder if people will like them, Hilderbrand says. But the positive feedback from the competition swayed him. Family and friends getting free beer will always like it, but these were complete strangers. The feedback was good enough that I thought I might have something here, he says. This year, Sentinel Peak is participating as one of the breweries, with a booth at the festival, and hosting three firefighter teams in the pro-am brewing competition. But one thing that hasnt changed is that the proceeds from the event will still go entirely to the nonprofits involved, Northwest Firefighters Charities and the Arizona Craft Brewers Guild. We always kind of try to pat ourselves on the back because 100 percent of the proceeds go to the cause, says Sturgeon. He says everyone working on the event is a volunteer, and Tracy says all the beer is donated. Sturgeon says that reflects another shared quality between the event and being a firefighter: giving back to the community they serve. One day while driving on a freeway, in an isolated part of Mexico, Celso Garcia came across a lonely road crew painting the thin yellow dividing line. The young movie director was in the middle of nowhere, but then thats where some of the best ideas are born. The context was almost immediate, said Garcia. My imagination took over. He wondered who were these men and what did they talk about? What where their stories and what were dreams while they methodically lay down the yellow stripe. The idea that came to Garcia was to make a movie, create imaginary characters, lives and dialogue. It sounded good to him when he completed his road trip. So Garcia, who had written and directed several short films, set out on a different cinematic road trip. He decided to write a full-length feature. The result, after more than a year of writing, was 2015s The Thin Yellow Line, staring Damian Alcazar, an award-winning work that will be screened Saturday, April 23, in Tucson ahead of its national release. Tucsons Hanson Film Institute and Cinema Tropical of New York City will host Garcia and the film at Saturdays Tucson Cine Mexico at the Harkins Tucson Spectrum 18 at West Irvington Road and Interstate 19. Garcia will receive Tucson Cine Mexicos Jaguar Award for Feature Directorial Debut. The film swept the Guadalajara International Film Festival in 2015 for Best Screenplay, Special Jury Prize, Audience Award, and Mexican Film Critics Award, and earned the Best Latin-American Film at the Montreal Film Festival and Grand Newcomer Award at the Mannheim-Heidelberg Film Festival. The Thin Yellow Line has screened at 33 film festivals worldwide and won 14 international awards. Not bad for a film whose premise was pooh-poohed by some of Garcias film friends. They thought I was crazy, said Garcia in a recent telephone interview. They suggested he do a short film. Writing a longer film about men painting a yellow line on a distant road, well, would not be that interesting. But Garcia, a patient and creative writer, followed his muse. He created a well-structured film, examining the lives of the workers and their musings, and well balanced between humor and seriousness. The 39-year-old said while writing his film, he received critical comments that spurred him on. Now with an armful of awards, he is likely to propel forward on a similar path that has been taken by other successful Mexican directors and screenwriters like Patricia Riggen (The 33, Under the Same Moon), Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (The Revenant, Birdman, Babel), Guillermo del Toro (Cronos and Hellboy) and Alfonso Cuaron (Gravity, Children of Men and Y Tu Mama Tambien). Sometimes when you end up in an unexpected place, it leads to a great experience. The Fobes family was looking for a big garage sale on a recent Saturday morning, when they instead found themselves at Leapin Lizards Family Day at Agua Caliente Park. We will definitely be going again, Mike Fobes says. That was fun, agrees Raquel Fobes, his wife. I enjoyed it. About five families arrived at the park that morning to participate in the 90-minute program hosted by Pima County Natural Resources Parks and Recreation. The park hosts family day once a month, with rotating subjects. It starts with a slideshow in the Rose Cottage Education Center, presented by Axhel Munoz, an environmental educator with Pima County. Whats that? Munoz asks the class, when a picture appears on the screen. A frog! No, not frogs. Toads, Munoz replies. He then describe the differences between the two, as well as other herps or frogs, amphibians, snakes and reptiles. If you find a snake, especially a rattlesnake, please dont pet them, Munoz says. The families laugh, but Munoz is giving a lesson on safety, prior to heading out to look for lizards. Are there snakes that, like, spit? asks Reegan Bundrick, 6. No, we dont have spitting cobras or anything here, Munoz assures her. We have lots of rattle snakes. The best way to deal with them is dont get close. If they rattle, that means back off. After a few more questions, its time to go outside. First thing well do is look for lizards and habitats of lizards and snakes, Munoz says. Then well come back here and Ill show you how to use a lizard stick and well catch lizards. If you see a snake, are you going to catch one? No! the group yells. The group stops in front of the small pond, alive with turtles and fish. Look, a turtle, shouts a child. Its coming over here. The kids and parents all look out at the water with their binoculars. Now, its lizard time. Munoz leads the group to a majestic mesquite tree to find tree lizards. Oh. I see a lizard, Munoz says, and shows the families. Its called an ornate tree lizard. A walk along the path through the mesquite trees provides several lizard sightings, much to the delight of the children in the group. Following a short break, families get to attempt to catch lizards with a special stick with a loop on the end. Remember, this is really hard, Munoz says. Almost nobody catches one. The families take off, sticks in hand, on a mission. But, the lizards have another idea. None are found, let alone captured. On another recent spring morning, Erin Sol, environmental educator with Pima County prepares to lead the Nuts About Nature Preschool Hour, which has recently begun at a second location Brandi Fenton Memorial Park after rave results at Agua Caliente. We wanted it to be a little more central for folks, Sol says. Each one-hour program starts with story time, then an interactive activity and a craft that focuses on a different aspect of the Sonoran Desert. This weeks topic? Lizards. There arent that many programs geared to preschool, Sol says. Its our first foray into this age group. Theyre so eager and enthusiastic. Zachary Van Devender, 3, and his mother, Anna arrive at the park. Do you like lizards? Anna asks. Thats my favorite animal, Zachary replies. The morning opens with Sol reading a book about lizards. They have eyeballs, too! Zachary says excitedly after seeing an illustration of a lizards anatomy. Next, Sol leads Zachary the only participant in todays class in a game, where he gets to pretend to be a lizard foraging for food and hiding from the elements. Plastic bugs are placed around the area as food and hula hoops serve as shelter. Where do you think lizards live? Sol asks. In the desert, Zachary says. The day ends in a craft, where Zachary gets to create his own foam lizard with big googly eyes. He names him Larry, like the example lizard Sol shows him. That way there can be two Larry the lizards, he says. Pima County Natural Resources Parks and Recreation hosts a variety of family-friendly activities each month, at least four a week. We have wonderful parks that we want people to get out and see and use, says Wendy Burroughs, environmental education program manager. And there are a lot of visitors in the area that may not be familiar with the environment, so we offer programs to help people get out into nature and enjoy it. The department recently implemented an online system for signing up for programs and leisure classes and for reserving ramadas at parks. It has also started a membership program for classes and public programs. With our outdoor programs we are offering a $50 annual membership annual from the day you pay that allows you reduced or free enrollment in the outdoor activities, Burroughs says. So those would be birding hikes, nature walks, Nuts About Nature and Family Outdoor Days...Most programs have a $5 fee and there would be no fee if you have the membership...We have a lot of people who do birding and they may go once or twice a week, so over the course of the year this could be a significant savings. Keep your eyes open for new outdoor programs. Were always varying them, Burroughs says. The newest thing were doing is programs at Colossal Cave Park...We did a wildflower hike and a geology nature hike...Were gonna be doing regular birding walks, about once a month...We expect to be expanding those programs throughout the summer and fall. Here are a few of Pima Countys upcoming events. Most are free for members and $5 for non-members. Registration is required. Find more at pima.gov/nrpr Go on a guided birding walk at Agua Caliente Park, 12325 E. Roger Road, to find wetland birds, hummingbirds, songbirds and raptors, at 8 a.m. every Thursday. No binoculars? No worries. You can borrow some at the walk. Wake Up with the Birds is for all ages. Explore the world of owls and other nocturnal birds at the Nature Night: Evening Owl Walk at 7 p.m. April 23 at Tucson Mountain Park Ironwood Picnic Area, 1548 S. Kinney Road. The walk is for all ages. Bring a headlamp or flashlight. Learn about the desert after dark at the Blacklighting for Bugs and Star Gazing at 7 p.m. April 30 at Tucson Mountain Park, Ironwood Picnic Area, 1548 S. Kinney Road. Pima County naturalists will be there to identify and talk about the insects that are attracted to blacklights. Youll also get to look at the night sky through a telescope with Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association volunteers. Bring a flashlight. The event is for all ages and is free to attend. Families with older kids ages 12 and over can go on a cactus hike at 7 a.m. May 13 at Tucson Mountain Park, 8451 W. McCain Loop. Youll hike two miles with botanist, Meg Quinn to learn about local cacti and their ecology and uses. Nuts about Nature Preschool Hour takes place bi-weekly at both Agua Caliente and Brandi Fenton Parks. Each session touches on a different aspect of the Sonoran Desert and includes storytime, an interactive activity, crafts and a take home. Classes at Brandi Fenton Park, 3536 E. River Road, are on the first and third Tuesday every month. Sessions at Agua Caliente Park are on the first and third Wednesday of the month. Bring the whole family to Outdoor Family Day: Exploring Aquatic Life at 10 a.m. May 7 at Agua Caliente Park. Youll learn about the diversity of life that inhabits the pond at the park. Youll use nets, skimmers and buckets to collect water samples and then look at it under the microscope. The event is geared toward families with children ages five through 12. A former Pima County sheriffs deputy is barred from working as a peace officer in the state, and another is at risk of losing his certification, officials said. The Arizona Peace Officers Standards and Training Board voted Wednesday to revoke John McClendon Jr.s state license for police work, said Sandy Sierra, AZPOST spokeswoman. In April and September 2015, McClendon failed breath tests after starting his shift, according to AZPOST documents obtained through a public records request. When McClendon was confronted by supervisors during the April incident, he said hed drank a bottle of tequila and six beers between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. that morning, then drove to work in his department vehicle, the document says. As a result, he was suspended for 15 days, reassigned to the civil division, ordered to complete alcohol counseling and subjected to monthly random breath tests, according to the document. In September, McClendon failed a breath test after arriving for work after returning from a two-week vacation. He resigned later that day. officer demoted in lieu of firing Another former deputy, Warren Croft, is also facing the loss of his certification, after the state board voted to initiate proceedings against him, Sierra said. Croft resigned from the sheriffs department in July 2014 after investigators found he had falsified a police report, leading to a mans arrest on domestic violence charges, AZPOST documents show. In January 2014, Croft began a relationship with the woman who cut his hair and who was in the process of divorcing her husband. In February, Croft created a false department report of a domestic dispute between the woman and her husband, which led to charges being filed against the man, according to the documents. A week later, Croft responded to the couples home to assist while the husband removed his personal belongings, even though the man had requested Croft not be there. In May, the husband filed a complaint against Croft with the sheriffs department, saying the deputy had acted in an unauthorized and biased manner against him because of the relationship, the documents state. At the conclusion of the departments investigation, Croft was voluntarily demoted to corrections officer in lieu of termination, but resigned before working a jail shift, the document said. The largest law enforcement agency in the country has made progress in sharing information after use-of-force incidents but theres still work to be done, the head of Customs and Border Protection said. We are doing better but I wouldnt say that given the vast geography and size of the organization that its all running as smoothly as I would like to see it, R. Gil Kerlikowske told the Arizona Daily Star a day before the agency held a news conference to discuss its latest shooting incident in Southern Arizona involving a Border Patrol agent. Since Kerlikowske was appointed to head the agency, which oversees the Border Patrol, he has pushed for greater transparency and accountability by releasing its use-of-force policy. More recently it also publicly disclosed the number of use-of-force incidents, which it said it will start to update monthly broken down by sector, agency branch and other measures. After a use-of-force incident, a high level CBP official is now supposed to make a statement to the public and release as much information as possible, even when the investigation is ongoing, he said, and cited recent examples where that has been done. Information about use-of-force incidents is often slow to be made public. For example, in January a Border Patrol agent shot and wounded an alleged drug smuggler near the Arizona-New Mexico border, but the agency provided minimal information after the initial news release. Neither CBP nor the Department of Justice had released the name or nationality of the person who was shot, nor the number of times he was shot. The U.S. Attorneys Office in New Mexico has said it cant provide information on a matter under investigation. On Tuesday, there was another shooting, the fourth in the Tucson Sector since October, but no injuries were reported. About 4:15 p.m., agents from Tucson Sectors Casa Grande Border Patrol Station were tracking a group of suspected marijuana smugglers near the village of Cowlic on the Tohono Oodham Nation when they were assaulted with rocks and an agent shot at one of them, the agency said in a news release. The rock thrower and one other person are in custody and several bundles of marijuana were seized, the agency said. The incident is being investigated by the FBI, Customs and Border Protections Office of Professional Responsibility and the Tohono Oodham Nation Police Department. At a Wednesday news conference, Beeson said the person the agent shot at was an 18-year-old Honduran national who had previously been deported from the United States. The agent fired twice at the suspect, but no one was injured. Our goal today is to be as transparent and proactive as possible in getting this information out to you as quickly and accurately as possible, Beeson said. He said the agent was a 12-year veteran of the Border Patrol, but did not give the agents name nor that of the person taken into custody. No weapons other than rocks were found at the scene. In response to a question from a reporter about the rarity of holding a news conference after an agent-involved shooting when no one was injured, Beeson said the agency is going to look at the circumstances of each shooting to determine whether to brief the press. In this particular incident, we felt like this was an appropriate course of action, he said, adding the agency certainly is going to be putting out information about our use-of-force incidents, especially when they involve the use of lethal force and firearms. When asked by the Star for more information about the January shooting, Besson said the suspect was in federal custody and charged with assaulting a federal officer. The agency declined to give the suspects name nor that of the agent who shot him. During a Q&A with the Star, Kerlikowske who has 40 years of law enforcement experience, including nine as chief of police in Seattle talked about his push for accountability and current hiring challenges. What did you first see when you took over and why was accountability and transparency a priority for you? I was already familiar with the issues and the amount of scrutiny and frankly that the Border Patrol was under, mostly the Border Patrol not always, but mostly the Border Patrol, for use of force. As a police chief you have to be very accountable to the public and in the Department of Homeland Security our accountability was shockingly limited. The statement after a serious incident would always be, Its under investigation and we cant tell you anything about it. Im fortunate to work for a secretary, Jeh Johnson, who strongly advocates and believes in accountability and transparency, and we changed pretty rapidly. Besides new directives to release more information, what else have you done? Weve done that along with improving a lot of the less lethal technology that was a bit limited. Training, new curriculum, scenario-based training done with simulators so particularly agents can experience things that have actually occurred in the field and then we recreate them in the video and use a simulator training. What is the status of the body-worn camera program? People should recognize we have thousands and thousands of cameras now, whether they are at the port of entry, within our Border Patrol stations, checkpoints, we are very camera rich now but we dont have body-worn cameras. When I talked to the agents who volunteered to wear them and test them we started in our academy in New Mexico and then we put them out in the field, what we did not find was a particular piece of technology that would last very long. I think it was about three months before those cameras were no longer working. So we are working now with the industry into other pieces of equipment or improvements to existing equipment that will withstand the rugged Border Patrol. Now that CBP has a lot more technology, manpower and several hundred miles of some sort of physical barriers, what else does the agency need? We have about 1,200 openings for Border Patrol agents so we are very actively recruiting trying to fill those positions and we continue to explore new technology as often as we can. Whether its repurposed Department of Defense technology, such as remote video or tethered aerostats, or any new technology thats being developed that can be helpful. What are the challenges when it comes to hiring? We didnt have requirements for polygraph examinations around 2007 and 08 and its very clear thats included in the law that our hiring standards need to be very high, they need to be very stringent and that makes it difficult at times to get the number of applicants that are going to be successful. And the training is hard and then frankly the areas that some of the people are assigned are pretty rugged areas. So someone who is very successful in going through all of the hoops that we put them through, background tests, drug testing and polygraph, etc., we are competing against the economy here in Tucson or the economy in some other city. Employers are going to look at them and say, Wow theyve gone through all of this, they are obviously good candidates, we should consider offering them a job in a police department or some other private sector organization. A car that was fleeing from police struck a fire hydrant and flooded a street in central Tucson Thursday, authorities said. One person is in custody, but police are still searching for another suspect, said Tucson police spokesman, Officer Dan Lucas. Officers were attempting to make a traffic stop on the vehicle in the area of North Alamo Avenue, between East Fifth Street and East Speedway Boulevard, when the driver fled, Lucas said. The vehicle didn't stop and fled from police, who chose not to pursue it, before the car struck a fire hydrant a short distance away. Two people ran from the vehicle, and a male in his 20s was apprehended nearby. Police are still searching for the second suspect, Lucas said. Sunnyside Unified School Districts assistant superintendent is leaving the district to become the top administrator for a district in the Tempe and Chandler area. Jan Vesely will be superintendent of Kyrene School District, which serves about 17,000 students in kindergarten through eighth grade in Tempe, Chandler, Guadalupe and the Gila River Indian Reservation. Im very excited for the new opportunity, but sad to be leaving Sunnyside, she said. Vesely was among 31 educators who applied for the top post at Kyrene. Four of them made it to the final round. The Sunnyside assistant superintendent was up against administrators from Mesa, Yuma and the Maricopa County Education Service Agency. She would replace David Schauer, who is retiring, and start on July 1. The Governing Board is confident that Dr. Vesely has the extensive experience, skills and exceptional leadership qualities to lead Kyrene into the future, the Kyrene district wrote in an announcement. Vesely has served as assistant superintendent at Sunnyside for about six years total since 2006. She left her post for four years in between for a senior vice president position at Pearson, an education publishing and assessment services company. She also worked as a principal for the Tucson Unified School District and an executive administrator of community schools for the Amphitheater School District. Her career as an educator started in 1977, when she began teaching at Amphitheater High School. She is a native of Tucson who has lived and worked in Tucson her whole life. Its very sad for me because this is my community, she said. But being a superintendent has always been my goal. Ive worked my entire career toward this goal. As superintendent, she said she hopes to help every student in the Kyrene district become successful. Vesely, while at Sunnyside, has been a visible figure to the teachers, support staff and administrators, said Anna Schwartz-Warmbrand, principal of Gallego Intermediate Fine Arts Magnet School, with whom has worked Vesely to open the new school. She is caring, the Gallego principal said of Vesely. She is direct. She is organized. She has incredibly high expectations and she always puts the students first. Many people in the district are sad to see her go, she added. They are very lucky to have her, Schwartz-Warmbrand said. I greatly enjoyed working with her. PHOENIX Rejecting Republican claims of political bias, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday there is nothing unconstitutional about how a commission drew the states 30 legislative districts. In a unanimous decision, the justices said the U.S. Constitution requires states to make an honest and good faith effort to construct legislative districts as nearly of equal population as is practicable. And they acknowledged the lines drawn by the Independent Redistricting Commission following the 2010 census created districts of unequal population. They even conceded the final maps actually created a situation that could be seen as making it easier for Democrats to get elected to the Legislature. But Justice Stephen Breyer said that does not mean the commission acted illegally. The Constitution does not demand mathematical perfection, he wrote for the court. Breyer said that in determining what is practicable, states can vary from the idea for legitimate considerations. And in this case, Breyer wrote, the evidence showed the redistricting commission drew the lines the way it did to comply with the federal Voting Rights Act. That law makes it illegal for states to alter voting practices including district lines in a way to dilute minority voting strength. And Breyer said there is evidence that the commission wanted to be sure to maintain at least 10 legislative districts where minorities would have at least an ability to elect someone of their choosing. Until 2000, legislative and congressional districts were crafted by state lawmakers. That often resulted in lines designed to benefit the majority party and its candidates. That year voters created the Independent Redistricting Commission of five members, four chosen by leaders of the two major political parties and those four selecting a fifth. The law requires commissioners to create districts that respect communities of interest, use county boundaries when possible, create as many politically competitive districts as possible and have districts of equal size. Using 2010 census figures, each legislative district should have an ideal population of about 213,000. But the commission, by its own admission, had districts ranging from 203,026 to 220,157. Attorney Mark Hearne, representing a group of individual Republican voters in the lawsuit, argued the disparities were purposely created for political purposes. He said the commission moved around lines in a way to remove Republicans from some districts. Hearne said that left those now-underpopulated districts with a higher proportion of Democrats, giving candidates from that party a better chance of getting elected. Breyer, however, said Hearne never proved that point, with the justices instead accepting the commissions arguments it was trying to achieve compliance with the federal Voting Rights Act, not to secure political advantage for one party. The justice did not dispute that the final maps may have given Democrats an edge. But Breyer said that was a logical outcome of the goal of creating as many legislative districts as possible where minorities might have a chance to elect someone of their choosing. That fact may well reflect the tendency of minority populations in Arizona in 2010 to vote disproportionately for Democrats, Breyer wrote. Secretary of State Michele Reagan joined the legal challenge when the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who argued on the states behalf, did not argue claims of partisanship. Instead, he told the justices such disparities are illegal, even to comply with the Voting Rights Act. Breyer rejected that argument, pointing out a long-standing rule that population differences of less than 10 percent will not be overturned by the court when a state can show legitimate reasons. And trying to meet the requirements of federal law, he said, is legitimate. Despite the clear defeat, Reagan declared Wednesdays ruling a victory. With a clear definitive 10 percent deviation rule we hope future IRCs will be less hyper-partisan, she said, ignoring the parts of Breyers ruling that said the 10 percent standard is not new and that no one ever proved the lines were drawn for partisan purposes. Brnovich was more restrained in his response to the 8-0 ruling in favor of the commission. I thought we made a compelling case, he said. He also said the decision barely 11 pages was narrow and tailored to the facts of this case. So Im not sure how much precedential value it will have in the future, he said. And Brnovich said that while the justices found what the commission did here legal, he believes it still leaves the door open for future claims of illegal partisanship gerrymandering, whether from Arizona or elsewhere. In arguing to the high court, Hearne cited Legislative District 8. It stretches from Casa Grande through Florence and the San Tan Valley, all the way to Globe in one corner and Oracle in the other. Some last-minute changes in the maps also put it below the ideal population, a change that Hearne said were designed to increase the electoral chances for Democrats. Breyer noted, however, that a specialist hired by the commission said making that change would create an 11th ability to elect district for minorities. That, in turn, would increase the odds that the Department of Justice would give preclearance to the maps, something that was required at that time. Breyer acknowledged that the Supreme Court subsequently voided that part of the Voting Rights Act that had required Arizona to get preclearance for its maps. But he said that did not invalidate the commissions decisions. At the time, Arizona was subject to the Voting Rights Act, and we have never suggested the contrary, he wrote. And as far as LD 8 turned out, the district is far from a Democratic lock. While voters elected Democrat Barbara McGuire to the state Senate, the two House seats are occupied by Republicans Frank Pratt and T.J. Shope. Help India! By TCN News, New Delhi: Several students bodies, alonng with Egypt the Solidarity Forum, today demonstrated outside the Egyptian Embassy in New Delhi against the military coup and massacre in Egypt. Support TwoCircles Along with Egypt Solidarity Forum students from JawaharLal Nehru University, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi University, students organizations like Campus Front of India, Democratic Students Union, Students Islamic Organization, Welfare Party of India and several other civil society members protested against the military coup and massacre in Egypt. Speaking at the occasion, Umair Anas, a research scholar from JNU, expressed his concern on military coup in Egypt against its first democratically elected civilian president of Egypt who was given full mandate by the people in a free and fair election. Omair Anas of JNU speaking during the protest. He condemned the declaration of suspending President, Parliament and the Constitution and efforts to restore Mubarak era. He said that the settlement of the crisis was possible within legitimate political process and it is very clear that the coup is aimed to restoring the deep state and remnant of deposed dictator Hosni Mubarak who have been generously called to join home ministry and security forces to deal with anti-coup protest. Anisuzzaman of the Campus Front of India also condemned the meddling of the outside forces and their failure to condemn the military coup, adding that the role of the Arab League and its member states was equally disappointing particularly Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates which have gone to the extent of supporting the coup and funding the coup according to media reports. He called upon the international rights based organizations to intervene to prevent future massacre and to conduct independent inquiry of this massacres. He also questioned the Indian governments silence over unfolding events in the region with grave concern which is also against Indias long term interest because Indias relation with the region is not only between the regimes but also between the two people. It is important for India to support peoples demand for justice, democratic rights and peace in the region. Sharique Ansar from SIO said that this is murder of humanity; and appealed to all Egyptians, liberals, Islamists and others to refrain from violence against each other and to protect Egypt from military dictatorship. & International community, including the Arab League, the United Nations and other countries to support civilian government elected by the people of Egypt and not to deal secretly with the military as they have done in the past. SQR Ilyas from Welfare Party of India, representatives from DSU, APCR also spoke at the occasion. Slogans against elbaradaie, AL-Sisi, Egyptian army, USA and Israel were raised. In his presidential address, the former judge of the Gujarat High Court, Mr. Justice Abdus Sattar Qureshi hailed the Amendment Act as very positive, especially the insertions of Section 104A and 104B in the principal Act. It may be recalled that while Sction 104A prohibits sale, gift, exchange, mortgage or transfer of waqf property, Section 104B stipulates restoration of waqf properties in occupation of government agencies to the Waqf Board. He called for protecting waqf properties worth Rs. 130 thousand crores in the country and stressed the need for finding out committed people who could save the waqf property from encroachment and misuse. He lamented that today the Muslim community is pitted against itself and the enactment of the amended law has afforded us an opportunity to put the waqf property to the use of umma. Ways must be found to save the waqf property and make better use of it. Emphasizing the need for creating awareness among the umma, he said a situation is bound to emerge in which the younger generation will take over from us. He pointed out that in the process of saving the property, cases may drag on in courts, but they must be pursued to seek justice. He praised the Indian legislation as the best in the world but regretted that its implementation was very poor. He struck a note of caution that hurdles are put up at every level, but we have to remain vigilant or else the progeny would not forgive us. Initiating the discussion Prof. Afzal Wani of the School of Law and Legal Studies, G.G.S. Indraprastha University explained that the very idea of waqf was visualized by the second Caliph, Hazrat Umar, who aroused the consciousness of society by stating that the waqf property was not meant for profit-making, but for nourishing society. He said the waqf should be managed in accordance with the Shariah without the least interference from the government. Dr. Zafar Mahmood, Chairman, Inter-faith Coalition for Peace remarked that the IOS had done an outstanding job in the field of waqf by undertaking comprehensive research. This facilitated the experts in Islamic jurisprudence, ulema and the leaders of the Muslim community to gather for useful suggestions. He was also all praise for the work by the Haryana Waqf Board. He emphatically said he was on the side of waqfs noting that about 70 percent of the recommendations made by the joint select committee, have been accepted and incorporated into the waqf amendment Act. Referring to the calculation of loss due to misuse of wakf properties made by the Sachar Committee, he said that it ran into billions of rupees. He suggested that the wakf premises be defined as per the recommendations of the Sachar Committee. He dwelt at length on the definition of encroachment on wakf property, alteration in its nature, acquisition and removal of encroachment on it, besides mutation of property. He wanted the government to ensure that the waqf properties occupied by the central government and the state governments are vacated by them and restored to waqf boards in compliance with the letter written by the then Prime Minister, Mr. Indira Gandhi to the Chief Ministers as far back as 1976. Point-wise contents of the letter dated March 26, 1976: State governments must ensure that wakfs are properly maintained and administered by the State Wakf Boards in terms of the Wakf Act of 1965. For a variety of reasons, including unsettled conditions after partition, a large number of wakf properties have gone into the adverse possession of private parties as well as state government departments and local bodies. The Wakf Board could well start legal proceedings against the concerned state government departments. Obviously, such litigation would not be desirable. Hence, you should settle the issue on an administrative basis. As far back as 1961, we had made three concrete suggestions for quick settlement of such cases: (i) Where feasible the Wakf properties should be vacated and handed over to the Wakf Board concerned. (ii) Where costly buildings have been put up on the land and their vacation is not feasible, the state government may enter into permanent leases with the Wakf Boards, after paying to the Boards the bulk of the market value as premium; or (iii) In the alternative, the state governments may arrange to make over the fair market value of the lands in the Boards, which will relinquish their rights over the land, if in their direct management, or obtain from the Mutawallis concerned with their consent, the necessary deeds on relinquishment. Most wakf properties are leased out on very nominal rent which can not be increased because of Rent Control Acts. In its Interim Report the Wakf Inquiry Committee has suggested that all public wakfs serving a religious or charitable purpose or for that matter all public trust and endowments belonging to any community, should be exempted from the provisions of the Rent Control Acts. The committee felt that Wakfs, which are not meant to benefit individuals, should be treated differently from individual landlords. The suggestions of the Centre, the states of Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have already agreed to exempt public wakf properties from respective Rent Control Act. Former Vice-Chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University, M. Naseem Ahmad, referred to the slackness of the government in respect of the matters relating to waqfs. He said the prevailing atmosphere is hostile and it is difficult to administer waqfs. To buttress his point, he said certain mosques in Haryana have been encroached upon and encroachers are running schools there. Some of the waqf properties are being looked after by Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee in Haryana and Punjab. Mr. Rizwanul Haque, former Secretary, Central Wakf Council, commended the Wakf Amendment Act, 2013 by saying it has gone beyond the Sachar Committee recommendations. He especially referred to the provision of penal action in the Act. Emphasising the need for amendment in the composition of the Central Wakf Council, he said the inadequacies in the presentation of the data be removed. He admired the skill and commitment of Mr. K. Rehman Khan. Mrs. Rana Siddiqui, advocate, pointed out that certain discrepancies in the use of words in Section 4 of the Act. She said that with the amendment in Section 14 of the principal Act, Section 13 has become redundant. Former judge of the Madhya Pradesh High Court, Justice Fakhruddin Ahmed observed that the overriding powers given to the tribunals should be debated. It opened scope for challenge in a court of law, he said. Former Chief Justice of India, Mr. Justice A.M. Ahmadi said there are a large number of properties, but some of them are managed properly and the rest are being mis-managed. Underlining the importance of implementation of the provisions in the legislation, he said the bottlenecks to it be removed. Prof. Z.M. Khan, Member of the Central Wakf Council and Secretary-General of the IOS was of the view that unless the beneficiaries of the wakfs are brought into light, the very purpose of the Act will be defeated. Calling for democratization of wakfs, he said a connect with the beneficiaries be established. He said the sociology of the wakfs demands that the beneficiaries be made aware. He cited the case of several countries, like Sudan, Kuwait, etc. where waqf properties are being successfully managed as per Shariah law adding that pieces of land are big revenue earners. Pointing out certain discrepancies in the amendment Act, he said waqf property is nobodys property. Therefore, it should be treated as pious and respected, he remarked. Help India! By Amit Kumar, TwoCircles.net Ladrymbai (East Jaintia Hills): For Mohammed Abdullah, May 15 is an important, and probably a life-changing, date. The 45-year-old, a resident of Barpeta, Assam, will return home having worked in and around the coal mines of East Jaintia Hills, Meghalaya, for the past nine years. He says he has had enough of the mines, and will go back to farming in his native village. However, this is not the result of a change of heart on the part of Abdullah; rather, he knows well that after May 15, once the government takes over all the over-ground coal reserves, he will have little to do here and sitting idle for even a day is not something that the father of three children can afford. Support TwoCircles Dumping grounds like this, in Kong Ong village, dot the entire district of East Jaintia Hills On n April 17, 2014, the National Green Tribunal in an interim order had banned the rat hole mining in Meghalaya, a sector that had for long been blamed for the environmental destruction of the once-pristine areas of the Jaintia Hills. Over the past two years, the mine owners, who are known to have powerful political connects, have appealed against the ban, which they believe has crippled the local economy and left thousands jobless. However, in December 2015, the NGT, after three extensions to transport all the coal on the ground, gave the final ultimatum to the miners: clear all remaining extracted and assessed coal from Meghalaya by May 15 because after that, the government will have the power to confiscate the rest of the coal left. Workers load coal into trucks. Any coal left on the ground after May 15 will be confiscated by the government as per NGT orders With no jobs in sight, labourers ill-prepared for future While Meghalya is often presented as an ideal destination for tourists, East Jaintia Hills, a district that was formed as recently as 2014, is slightly different. Vast meadows and lush landscapes are interspersed with mounds of coal lying across hundreds of dumping grounds. The coal and the economy it fuels, means that the district also has migrants from all over Meghalaya and other areas, like Assam, West Bengal, and even Nepal. But since the ban of coal mining came into force in 2014, thousands of workers have left the place in search of other job opportunities. Although mining in the area has been going for over 100 years, the activity has hardly been regulated and as a result, the impact on the local flora and fauna has been catastrophic; a point that was cited as one of the most important reasons for banning mining in the area. The top soil has been completely eroded and left unusable for any kind of agricultural activity and dried out dozens of streams in the area, leaving the main river, Myntdu, gasping for survival. The river, according to locals, is 75% dead and no longer carries any fish. Houses and building lined up against the National Highway are all covered in thick black smoke from trucks and fine coal deposits. One of the thousands of coal mines that are now disbanded Rat hole mining was made illegal in the 1970s, when India nationalised coal mines and gave state-run Coal India a monopoly. However, given Meghalayas location and the low quality of the coal, the governments, both local and central, did little to prevent thousands of people from taking enormous risks and extracting coal. The subsequent period saw thousands of people die in the mines. Impulse Social Enterprises, a non-profit organisation that filed a petition in the NGT leading to the ban, said 10,000 -15,000 people were believed to have died in rat holes between 2007 and 2014 in Meghalaya. Regardless, the sector continued to attract labourers, as there was good money to be made despite the risks. Given that the mining activity, at least officially, has ended, most labourers have been finding temporary employment in clearing the over-ground coal and loading them into trucks. A group of six to eight people are paid about Rs 200 each for loading a truck to its permissible capacity of nine metric tonnes. Before the ban, a worker could make almost Rs 1,000 daily doing this business, but after the ban they consider themselves lucky to make Rs 500 a day, while going empty handed on other days. While workers like Abdullah from Assam are lucky enough to have a backup option, other labourers, especially the local ones, have been left wondering what to do next. Diminal Rymbai, a resident of Wapung Soh, a village in East Jaintia Hills, has been working in the coal industry for the past four decades. Until 2014, he was employed as a truck driver, taking the coal from the district to Beltola, Guwahati. However, after the ban, he lost his driving job and had to become one of the labourers loading the trucks with over-ground coal. I am almost 50 years old and I cannot migrate now to find work, he says. I have eight children who attend schools and for the past two years, survival has been tough but we were able to make ends meet. After May 15, I do not know what to do, he says. Agriculture is no longer an option for Rymbai as he lost all his paddy fields to mines a long time ago. My entire village is dependent on coal mines for sustenance, and after May 15 we are all doomed, he says, in a tone of resignation. A defunct crane over a disbanded mine in East Jaintia Hills However, while local labourers can still count on having a home, the Nepali workers, most of whom arrived here in the 90s and have been here ever since, cannot claim even that much. Kamal Biskarma, a Nepali worker in his 50s, has been living around Lad Rymbai, the commercial capital of the region, for the past 24 years. With a family of five, he has little options at hand. Earlier, I could make about Rs 10,000 a month but now I struggle to make even Rs 4,000 a month. I have never gone back to Nepal after I came here, so I doubt that is an option for me, he says, standing next to a defunct crane towering over a disbanded rat hole mine. Anil Rai, his friend, says that given that they are Nepali, any possible government assistance will also elude them so for the time being, they are trying their best to find any possible source of income. For mine owners, a possible end to rolling in money It is important to point out that all coal miners are locals who have benefitted tremendously from the coal reserves. The districts of East and West Jaintia Hills are dotted with plush bungalows, almost all belonging to the mine owners. Sannio Siangshai, a local journalist, points out that the entire money made from the coal trade has remained with less than 5% of the population and these miners have been instrumental in ensuring that the NGT order gets regular extensions in the past. The miners, on the other hand, point out at how the local economy will be crippled and the loss of jobs for labourers to justify their mining activities. A mine owner who refused to be named because he was overloading his truck beyond the permissible limit of nine metric tonnes, spoke to Twocircles.net at one of the dumping grounds, said the end of mining activity has dealt a huge blow to their operations. Ever since the ban has come into place, we have been forced to get rid of our reserves and this has come at a huge loss for us. Because of the NGT order, we have been forced to sell the coal at very low rates. This coal would earlier sell for Rs 4,500-Rs 5,000 per tonne, but now we are forced to sell it for Rs 2,000 per tonne, he said. While acknowledging that the morning has caused damage to the environment, he said that regulation and not banning was the way forward. He justified his overloading by adding that this was the only way he could take out all the coal before May 15. According to mine owners, the low prices of coal have helped the local cement industries the most. Battle against mining an uphill task for new police force In Kheliehriat, the district headquarters of East Jaintia Hills, the Superintendent of Police S Thmar explained the uphill task the newly-formed district was facing in its efforts to implement the NGT order. For Kamal Biskarma (left) and Anil Rai, two workers from Nepal, the future looks bleak as they are unsure where to go next The district was formed around the same time as the NGT order, so initially it was a big challenge to implement the order as a lot of locals protested against the order, he told Twocircles.net. The police had constituted a special task force to check on violations. Since the Police were filing a status report to the NGT before the deadline, he refused to provide exact details on how many violations had taken place, but sources in the office told Twocircles.net that they had reported about 54 violations of extraction of coal and about 200 cases of overloading. The latest FIR had been filed on April 14 agsinst a local miner for use of explosives to extract coal. The SP however, added that given the plummeting prices of coal and the upcoming deadline, fresh extraction had fallen considerably. The ban on coal mining and its subsequent impact will only be clear after May 15, but as of now, the district of East Jaintia Hills, and its workforce, are not sure what their next move will be. IMAX films are always fun to watch. I'm not talking about the latest superhero franchise to be shown in IMAX, but rather the educational and entertaining short films that are filmed and shown specifically in IMAX theaters. These specific films always make it highly entertaining and fun to learn about a variety of subjects, whether it be animals or science related. Back in 2012, a Canadian filmmaker named Mike Slee, who is known for making these types of documentary films, wanted to tell the story of scientist Fred Urquhart, who discovered and researched the Monarch butterfly's journey from Canada to Mexico. Part nature documentary along with moments of re-enactments with actors, this film tells the story of how Fred Urquhart discovered this journey, as well as a Monarch butterfly family as they make their trek across three countries each year. With the short 44-minute runtime, this movie wastes no time getting started. 'Flight of the Butterflies' shows you the stages of a butterfly's life, from how they start off as caterpillars, and within two weeks, grow 2000 times larger, till their eventual whole transformation into the Monarch butterfly. It also shows how every few generations of the Monarch butterfly, there is a "super" generation that is stronger, faster, and bigger than previous generations in order to make the long trek across the countries. Meanwhile, you have Urquhart wanting to know just where all the butterflies go to in the winter from Canada, which has him and his wife, along with volunteer scientists tag butterflies and place editorials in newspapers around the globe, asking where all the butterflies have gone. They got some answers in Mexico. The film is wonderfully shot by Slee and the IMAX cameras, showcasing all the finest details on the insects and their lives. In addition to the educational aspect of the film and the beauty of the scenic locations, is the story this tells of Urquhart. It's very emotional, even in its 44 minute time frame, where I found myself saying, "I'm not crying, you're crying." Yes, that really happened and it's that good and heart warming. 'Flight of the Butterflies' offers something for everyone, whether it be some information on butterflies, an amazing story, or just some gorgeous scenery - this film has it all. The Blu-ray: Vital Disc Stats 'Flight of the Butterflies' comes with an UHD 4K Blu-ray Disc as well as a standard 50GB Blu-ray Disc from Shout! Factory and is Region A Locked. The standard Blu-ray has the option to view it in 3D or 2D. There is an insert for the digital download code as well. The discs are housed in a hard, black plastic case with a cardboard sleeve. Male factor contributes to 50%-60% of overall infertility but is solely responsible in only 20% of couples. Although most male factor infertility is ascertained from an abnormal semen analysis, other male factors can be contributory especially if the sample returns normal. Male infertility can be due to identifiable hormonal or anatomical etiologies that may be reversible or irreversible. This manuscript will highlight existing guidelines and our recommendations for hormone evaluation for male infertility and empiric therapies including multivitamins, estrogen receptor modulators (clomiphene), estrogen conversion blockers (anastrozole), and hormone replacement. Asian journal of andrology. 2016 Apr 12 [Epub ahead of print] Joshua D Ring, Aye A Lwin, Tobias S Kohler Division of Urology, Department of Surgery, Southern Illinois University, Springfield, IL 62794, USA. PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27072045 We hypothesize that the use of Hyaluronic acid-carboxymethylcellulose (HACM) adhesion barrier at the neurovascular bundle may hasten the return of erectile function after robotic-assisted laparoscopic prostatectomy. A retrospective review identified 462 consecutive patients who underwent a nerve-sparing prostatectomy between 2009 and 2012. The first 246 patients were administered the barrier film, while the next 216 patients, the control group, did not receive HACM. Postoperative erectile function and oncologic outcomes were compared. Independent t-test and Kaplan-Meier analysis were conducted, p < 0.05 was considered significant. The two groups were well matched, without significant differences in age, weight, operative time, prostate size, preoperative PSA, SHIM, or AUA symptom scores. The mean SHIM was significantly higher for the experimental group at 6 months (6.39 v 4.75, P=0.008), 9 months (7.32 v 5.44, P=0.006), 1 year (8.52 v 6.90, P=0.049), and 18 months (10.01 v 7.60, P=0.018). This effect was not noted beyond 18 months. A subgroup analysis of patients with initial SHIM scores 22 or greater demonstrated a higher rate of return to pre-operative SHIM score for the barrier film group, 23% vs. 12% (p=0.046). There was no significant difference in biochemical recurrence between groups, with a median follow-up duration of 18 months. HACM application at the neurovascular bundle during prostatectomy may decrease the time to return of erectile function, with improved SHIM at 6-18 months after surgery. This effect is more pronounced in patients with better baseline erectile function. There is no significant effect on BCR. Journal of endourology / Endourological Society. 2016 Apr 12 [Epub ahead of print] Rutveej Patel, Parth K Modi, Sammy Elsamra, Isaac Yi Kim Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, 12287, New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States ; ., Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, 12287, New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States ; ., Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, 12287, New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States ; ., Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, 12287, New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States. PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27072291 Family doctors get new emphasis Updated: 2016-04-21 08:06 By Wang Xiaodong And Shan Juan(China Daily) Govt to promote grassroots care to gain efficiency Family doctors can help ensure universal access to basic health and medical care across China and will receive new emphasis, according to senior leaders in the government. Priority groups to be covered by family doctors' services include the elderly, those with chronic diseases, those with serious mental health issues, pregnant women, children and people with disabilities, according to a statement released after a conference of leaders earlier this week. More efforts will be made to expand the availability of family doctors, such as making improvements to their career security, the statement said. The new focus will contribute to a better distribution of medical resources at the grassroots level, it said. As the average age in China increases, it is expected that family doctors will play a bigger role in the basic health and medical care available to most residents. Under a guideline to improve grassroots health services released by the National Health and Family Planning Commission last year, for example, every family in China is likely to have a qualified family doctor by 2020. The services of family doctors will be promoted among key groups first, starting with the elderly, the guideline said. The number of people 60 years of age or older in China hit 212 million at the end of 2014 and accounted for more than 15 percent of the population, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs. Prominent population experts estimate that by 2050 the older age group will account for as much as one-third of the country. Han Zhengzheng, director of the Desheng Community Health Service Center, in Beijing's Xicheng district, said the number of family doctors at the center has grown to 23 since it started offering such services in 2011. It now serves nearly 18,000 residents. "More than 90 percent of the patients that regularly see family doctors are over 60 years old," she said. "The family doctors mostly provide services aimed at common chronic diseases such as diabetes." A resident of the Desheng community praised the convenience: "It is very nice to have doctors near home," the resident, surnamed Ma, said. Ma, who has hypertension, said the health center is only a 10-minute walk from home, so she can easily visit her doctor, Fan Li, whenever she has problems. "I come here mostly to get checked up and get medicine. I don't think it is necessary to go to a big hospital, where I have to wait in a long line to see a doctor," she said. Unlike specialized doctors at big hospitals, Fan provides general healthcare and medical services, including health guidance. Recently Ma signed up her 6-year-old son with Fan for advice on nutrition, she said. Du Xueping, head of the general practice committee of the Chinese Medical Doctor Association, said promoting family medicine can optimize distribution of limited resources. Patients can solve many problems with a family doctor without turning to a big hospital first, Du said. Contact the writers at wangxiaodong@chinadaily.com.cn and shanjuan@chinadaily.com.cn Patients receive treatment at Desheng Community Health Service Center in Beijing on Wednesday. Doctors say more than 90 percent of the patients that regularly use the facility are over 60 years old. Jiang Dong / China Daily (China Daily 04/21/2016 page5) Former senior Taiwan affairs official expelled from Party Updated: 2016-04-21 21:57 (Xinhua) BEIJING -- A former senior official of the Chinese mainland's Taiwan affairs body has been expelled from the Party for serious disciplinary offenses, the authority said Thursday. Gong Qinggai was deputy head of the Taiwan Work Office of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) of the Communist Party of China (CPC) found that Gong had been involved in suspicious activities for a long time. He was found to have broken the rules on thrift. Gong did not honestly report his personal assets, accepted gifts and used his post to seek benefits for the businesses of others. He made use of luxury cars he did not own. Gong was expelled from the Party and from his post, with the approval of the State Council. His case has been passed on to the judiciary. China-India border talks open Updated: 2016-04-21 08:01 By Li Xiaokun(China Daily USA) Border disputes between China and India have been effectively controlled, special representatives from both countries said on Wednesday. State Councilor Yang Jiechi and India's National Security Adviser Ajit Doval made the remarks as they met at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing for the 19th round of talks between special representatives on the border issue. They also said that "the border area has been peaceful and stable in general", the Foreign Ministry reported in a news release. The talks are scheduled to end on Thursday. Indian newspaper The Hindu said the talks are taking place against the backdrop of a "sharp decline in border incidents, following Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to China in May 2015". Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Tuesday that the talks come at a crucial stage of negotiations on a settlement framework. She said the two countries will try to work out a fair and reasonable plan that is acceptable to both at an early date. The two nations began a three-stage process when the special representatives were appointed in 2003. They first reached an agreement on guiding principles and setting political parameters for a settlement in 2005. The countries are now at the second phase of working out a settlement framework, and the final step will be drawing a border line based on the framework agreement. Wang Xu, executive deputy director of Peking University's Center for South Asian Studies, said, "Both Beijing and New Delhi had a stronger will to consolidate bilateral ties after President Xi Jinping's visit (to India) in 2014 and reached higher consensus on controlling border conflicts. "Now what matters is the implementation of such controls," he said. India's Rediff News said Doval traveled to Beijing not merely as a special representative for the border talks, but in a much broader role as the prime minister's special envoy to discuss a wider range of bilateral relations. lixiaokun@chinadaily.com.n State Councilor Yang Jiechi and India's National Security Adviser Ajit Doval meet for the 19th round of talks on the border issue in Beijing on Wednesday. Wang Zhuangfei / China Daily (China Daily USA 04/21/2016 page3) Chaplin's life and work come together nicely in Swiss project Updated: 2016-04-21 08:24 By Agence France-Presse in Corsiersurvevey, Switzerland(China Daily USA) Imagine moving along the cogs of giant machinery like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, or tumbling down a cabin teetering on the edge of a cliff as he did in Gold Rush. An ambitious, immersive museum showcasing the life and works of the groundbreaking filmmaker that opened in Switzerland on Sunday, is now making it possible. Chaplin's World, 15 years in the planning, premiered in the picturesque village of Corsier-sur-Vevey on Lake Geneva one day after what would have been the British screen legend's 127th birthday. "He wanted people to remember him. That's why he did the films and he did it in such a perfectionist way," says Chaplin's 62-year-old son, Eugene. "I think he would be pleased." The museum is set on the vast estate of Manoir de Ban, about 26 kilometers from Lausanne, where Chaplin spent the last 25 years of his life until his death in 1977, aged 88. He had moved to Switzerland after being barred from the United States in the 1950s over suspicion that he had communist sympathies, at the height of paranoia about Soviet infiltration. On the Swiss Riviera overlooking the lake with a view of the Alps in the distance, the large manor where Chaplin lived with his wife, Oona, and their eight children forms half of the museum, retracing the filmmaker's private life. Chaplin's 70-year-old son, Michael, recalls what it was like living in the mansion, with around a dozen helpers. "It was like Downton Abbey, on a reduced level. For a child it was wonderful," he says, recalling all the great hiding places. A separate building has been built nearby as a large mock-up of a Hollywood studio dedicated to Chaplin's on-screen work that began around 1914. Visitors can also catch a glimpse of the artist's humble beginnings in London and his spectacular rise to become one of the biggest, most influential movie legends in Hollywood history. With clips from his iconic films flickering from a multitude of screens, visitors can walk down Easy Street, visit the barber shop from The Great Dictator and the restaurant where he ate his shoe in The Immigrant. "What really touched me is how they managed to make his films come alive again by inserting clips into decors," Michael Chaplin says, recalling how his father "was always in movement, and that part of the museum is in total movement, which is beautiful". Chaplin's World is also dotted with more than 30 wax figures created by the Grevin wax museum in Paris. The lifelike figures portray Chaplin as different characters, his wife, other actors and actresses from his films, friends and people who mattered to him like Albert Einstein, as well as artists inspired by his work like Michael Jackson and Woody Allen. "We worked very hard to make a museum that would be as true as possible," curator Yves Durand says. "We are there to tell a story about a real life that was Charlie Chaplin's life, and about a fictional life that was his work." In a narrow room resembling a Swiss bank vault, one can find some of the iconic objects associated with Chaplin's work, including his bowler hat and cane of his Little Tramp persona, and the ripped trousers and patched shoes he wore in The Kid. The museum project has faced numerous stumbling blocks over more than 15 years of drawn-out negotiations. It took seven years to get a building permit, and before that organizers had to wait five years to settle a lawsuit brought by a neighbor worried about the implications of the project. Eugene Chaplin admits the transformation of Manoir de Ban, where he was born in 1953 and lived until 2008, was difficult and says he had stayed away while the work was being done. "I didn't want to see the bulldozers digging into the grass. It's a lot of memories," he says. But he is thrilled with the final result. "This is the perfect place to show my father's films, to remember his work and his life, in a place where he was so happy." The silent film The Great Dictator is screened in Chaplin's World, an interactive museum in Switzerland. Reuters (China Daily USA 04/21/2016 page9) Yinchuan museum's love campaign Updated: 2016-04-20 14:53 By Lin Qi(chinadaily.com.cn) Artwork by a child in an orphanage in Yinchuan. [Photo provided to China Daily] The Museum of Contemporary Art in Yinchuan has launched a Mailing Love campaign, inviting people to send handmade postcards before July 5. Located in the capital city of Northwest China's Ningxia Hui autonomous region, the museum is also offering blank postcards to visitors, asking them to write and draw as creatively as they can. The museum's staff members have started selecting some works and will exhibit them at the venue later in July. The best pieces are likely to be incorporated into items to be sold at the museum's gift shop, said Yang Lan from the museum's department of public educational programs. Artwork by a student from Beifang University of Nationalities. [Photo provided to China Daily] Related: Beijing museum showcases Li Zhenjian paintings China's top legislator highlights food safety Updated: 2016-04-21 10:13 (Xinhua) China adopted a major revision to the food safety law in April 2015 that saw articles increase from 105 to 154, imposing heavier civil, administrative and criminal penalties for offenders and their supervisors.[Photo/Xinhua] China's top legislator Zhang Dejiang has urged government organs and the food industry to fully enforce and abide by the country's food safety law. Zhang made the remarks during a four-day law enforcement inspection tour in Central China's Hubei province on food safety law which ended Wednesday. The top legislator called for stepped up regulations on the use of pesticides and fertilizers and urged food-related enterprises to provide trust-worthy products for "safety is the lifeline of food companies," he said. Food safety watchdogs, meanwhile, must further improve the timeliness and accuracy in food product inspections, Zhang said. He stressed that the new food safety law must be fully implemented, and a strict, efficient governance system for food safety should be established. China adopted a major revision to the food safety law in April 2015 that saw articles increase from 105 to 154, imposing heavier civil, administrative and criminal penalties for offenders and their supervisors. It came into effect on Oct 1. Oscar-winning Japanese director Takita to shoot Chinese-language film Updated: 2016-04-21 13:49 (Xinhua) Yojiro Takita. [Photo/Mtime] Oscar-winning Japanese director Yojiro Takita is working on his first Chinese-language film with China's Magilm Pictures, the company announced on Wednesday. Wen Yan, which literally means "smell vapor," is scheduled to start shooting this year. It revolves around the relationship between a son and his father in their family bakery, according to Takita, whose 2008 drama Departures won Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. Magilm Pictures made the announcement with the director in town for the Beijing International Film Festival. Related: Joint cross-Straits actions only way to curb scams Updated: 2016-04-21 07:17 (China Daily) Suspects involved in telecom swindle cases are escorted off an aircraft by the police at Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, Nov 10, 2015. [Photo/Xinhua] The visit by Taiwan judicial officials to the mainland, which started on Wednesday, was the first step in the right direction for the joint cross-Straits fight against telecommunication fraud. It came after some political forces on the island had made a public outcry following Kenya's repatriation to the mainland of 45 fraud suspects from the island last week. These forces accused the mainland of using the event to dwarf Taiwan both politically and judicially. But Kenya's repatriation was in accordance with international law, as almost all victims of the suspects' fraudulent activities live on the mainland. Politicizing such criminal cases serves neither side any good. It damages the trust built over the years between the two sides through cooperation in joint crackdowns on crimes, and gives the world the impression that Taiwan is a safe haven for fraudsters. Such an impression is not unfounded. On Saturday, when 20 fraud suspects were repatriated from Malaysia to Taiwan, as sought by some politicians on the island, they were immediately released by police upon arrival at the airport due to "a lack of evidence". Experience proves that sending telecom fraud suspects to the mainland to stand trial is the most efficient way to combat the crime, because many suspects are not punished at all when handled by judicial departments in Taiwan. The suspects set up new fraud rings once they were freed, making telecom fraud a never-ending nightmare for many on the mainland. Telecom scams are rampant on the mainland nowadays, with Taiwan fraud rings, often based in foreign countries and regions, playing a key role in such cases. Each year, billions of US dollars are siphoned from the mainland through such scams, which victimize tens of thousands of families, prompting calls for the authorities to take all necessary steps to remove this social ulcer. Based on a judicial agreement signed in 2009, the mainland and Taiwan have worked together to launch joint law enforcement operations and cracked thousands of fraud cases. The momentum in cooperation should not be derailed by a change of leadership on the island, or the recent controversy surrounding repatriation of Taiwan suspects to the mainland. Fraud criminals are the common enemies of all. So long as the spirit of the law is upheld and people's interests are put before political differences between the two sides, a solution can be found to prevent more people from becoming the victims of such scams. Delivery drones cannot deliver the goods Updated: 2016-04-21 07:57 By John E Coulter(China Daily) LI FENG/CHINA DAILY The crisis caused by e-bike traffic bans in several Chinese cities makes one wonder if new generations of drones might take the place of urban couriers. Visions of some modern futuristic megacity with skies filled high, low and wide with nifty drones delivering South Korean cosmetics, urgent medicines and nanochip upgrades make for a nice place to live. Yet the e-bike crisis forces us to rethink. It is risky to ride and risky to cross the street. So the net to clean up this semi-organized chaos has severely deterred the couriers who had suddenly become ubiquitous in just the past 15 years. Seattle-based Amazon revolutionized electronic retailing under the bold inspiration of Jeff Bezos, and is now vigorously promoting drone delivery as a test concept. The principal target is delivery of packages weighing less than 2.2 kilograms within a radius of 15 kilometers. It is claimed this covers 86 percent of Amazon deliveries. The obstacles, though, may be insurmountable, beginning with flight rules that are increasing drastically as hobby drones for aerial photography become popular. To test technologies without US regulations Amazon is working on the Canadian side of the border and has another pilot study in Switzerland. YouTube promotions by Amazon are on the one hand tempting us to believe things we need could literally be coming down out of the sky, and on the other hand leaving us skeptically wondering why it looks so easy. China's Hainan sees robust tourism growth from foreign visitors Updated: 2016-04-20 16:06 (Xinhua) This year, Hainan will offer customized tours catering to tourists from different countries.[Photo/Xinhua] China's tropical island province of Hainan saw 173,300 overseas tourists in the first quarter, up 41 percent year-on-year, official data showed. The number of inbound tourists has climbed for five straight months, according to figures announced by the local government on Tuesday. The inbound tourism market of Hainan experienced a downturn due to a sluggish global economy and lack of air service until November 2015, when it showed signs of recovery after about 20 international air routes to the island were launched. From January to March, more than 16 million tourists flocked to the island for its warm climate, tropical forests and beaches, up 13.4 percent year on year. During the period, it took in 16.8 billion yuan ($2.6 billion U) in tourism revenue, up 14.2 percent from the previous year. Resume Six-Party Talks: experts advise Updated: 2016-04-21 22:30 By Hua Shengdun in Washington(China Daily USA) Democratic People's Republic of Korea's nuclear program, a seemingly imminent threat looming over the international community, was the focus of a panel discussion in Washington on Wednesday. "Provocative actions by any side could serve as the last straw that breaks the camel's back," said Su Ge, president of the China Institute of International Studies. "Confrontation would be a price too high for anyone to afford, so cool-headedness and restraint is a much needed policy." Su made the remarks at a panel where experts from China gathered at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies on Wednesday to discuss approaches to the disarmament of North Korea's nuclear program. The panel reiterated sentiment expressed by State Councilor Yang Jiechi earlier this month, CCTV news anchor Tian Wei said that the international community needs to "seek solutions through dialogue, and possibly the mechanism of Six-Party Talks". This has been a hot-button issue recently, commanding the attention of world leaders earlier this month at the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington. In March, the UN Security Council opted to put sanctions on the DPRK for its nuclear tests in January and February in the form of UNSC Resolution 2270, which was unanimously instated. The sanctions include restrictions on DPRK's exports, imports of fuel and diplomatic relations. The resolution has been seen as containing the toughest sanctions imposed in more than two decades, according to a press statement by US Secretary of State John Kerry. Sanctions are only one of the components listed in the UN resolution, according to Su. "This document also reiterates support for the Six-Party Talks. And it asks all parties concerned not to take further actions that might aggravate tensions. From China's view, this resolution must be implemented in its entirety," said Su. The Six-Party Talks are a dialogue started as a result of DPRK withdrawing from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in 2003. The six participating nations are China, Japan, the US, Russia, DPRK and Republic of Korea. Su believes these talks are imperative in dealing with the region's concerns. "The Six-Party Talks mechanism seems to be the most efficient platform for dialogue," Su said. "If conditions are not right for all six parties to come together, we will be flexible and willing to consider a dialogue consultation with less than all of the six parties." DPRK's recent aggressive actions have world leaders leaning further away from constructive diplomacy through sanctions or diplomacy, according to Yang Xiyu, senior fellow at the China Institute of International Studies, who believes DPRK is indirectly seeking talks, rather than trying to start a war. "Unfortunately, they've been approaching this by the wrong means," Yang said. "Their true intentions are to put pressure on the US to come back to the negotiating table. Behind this bad behavior, we need to look for the true nature of North Korea's intentions." Despite the intensifying tensions between the countries, Su believes constructive cooperation must be pursued. "Diplomacy is the art of building bridges between seemingly impossible terms. Means may differ, but the ends are to bring the nuclear issue on the peninsula back to the negotiation table," said Su. Allan Fong in Washington contributed to this story. Snowden sues Norway to seek safe travel to receive prize Updated: 2016-04-22 02:08 (Xinhua) American whistleblower Edward Snowden delivers remarks via video link from Moscow to attendees at a discussion regarding an International Treaty on the Right to Privacy, Protection Against Improper Surveillance and Protection of Whistleblowers in Manhattan, New York September 24, 2015. [Photo/Agencies] OSLO -- Fugitive US whistle-blower Edward Snowden has filed a lawsuit against Norway to ensure he can travel to the Nordic country to receive a prize without fear of being extradited to the United States, a Norwegian law firm said on Thursday. The Norwegian PEN organization awarded Snowden the Ossietzky Prize for 2016 and invited him to receive the award in Oslo on November 18, the law firm Schjodt said in a statement, adding that Snowden had a strong desire to come to Norway to personally receive the award. The firm said it had filed a petition on behalf of Snowden against the ministry of justice and public security to ensure he "can travel safely to Norway to receive the prize without risking extradition to the United States." "The purpose is to legally established that Norway has no right to extradite Snowden to the United States," the firm said in the statement. It said Snowden's alleged crimes were political in nature and, according to Norwegian and international laws, he cannot be extradited to the United States. Local media reported that the United States had previously asked Norway to extradite Snowden to his home country if he entered the country, but the Norwegian authorities did not take any clear stand on the issue. Snowden faces three felony charges in the United States, including espionage, after he disclosed a classified US intelligence project code-named PRISM in June 2013. Please turn JavaScript on and reload the page. Loading... Checking your browser before accessing the website. This process is automatic. Your browser will redirect to your requested content shortly. Please wait a few seconds. Albuquerque authors and friends Lynn C. Miller, Corran Harrington and Bev Magennis join forces at 3pm on Sunday, April 24, to talk about and read from their latest fiction releases. Miller is promoting her novel of trauma, The Day After Death; Harrington's new novel, set along the Rio Grande, is Follow the River Home; and Magennis contributes the Southwestern gothic Alibi Creek to the multiple-author appearance. Miller's effort is described as such: "After a minor car accident shatters her equilibrium, forty-three-year-old Amanda Ferguson wakes up to a memory of being terrorized by her older brother Adrian, whom she holds responsible for the death of her twin brother thirty years before. Their mother, Eva, blinded by devotion to her eldest son, has locked the truth inside her now-failing memory. When a client from work invites Amanda to a performance of Harold Pinter's Betrayal, a haunting series of events related to the play resurfaces, including the suicide of Amanda's college lover and mentor, Sarah Moore. As Amanda puts her fractured life back together, the present increasingly echoes her traumatic past, propelling her toward the truth about Duncan's and Sarah's deaths--and toward Adrian." Harrington's Follow the River Home is teased as such: "Daniel Arroyo has suffered a lifetime of guilt over the sudden death of his infant sister, who died when he was eight years old. He now lives his middle years between that guilt and worsening episodes of PTSD from a Vietnam he left thirty years ago. When a violent encounter on a dusty highway forces Daniel to face what haunts him, he finds himself pulled back to the neighborhood of his youth, where old houses hold tired secrets. What really happened on that steamy August afternoon? The answer comes spilling from the old neighborhood, and Daniel begins to find his way home. Corran Harrington takes the reader along the Rio Grande, from its headwaters to the sea." And in Magennis' Alibi Creek, charming and wily Walker returns to his family's New Mexico ranch following a two-year prison stint. "There his pious older sister Lee Ann is busy caring for their mother, raising two sons, and grappling with unethical workplace demands. Walker's illegal activities quickly incite chaos in the town and Lee Ann's marriage, leading to drastic transformations of beliefs, identities, and relationships." Miller, co-director of the ABQ Writers Co-op and co-editor of the literary journal bosque, was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin for 27 years. She is the author of The Fool's Journey: A Romance and Death of a Department Chair; co-editor of Voices Made Flesh: Performing Women's Autobiography; and co-author of Find Your Story, Write Your Memoir. Miller has performed a number of solo performance pieces and plays about Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Anne Porter, and Victoria Woodhull. She lives in Albuquerque. Harrington is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Santa Fe Writers Project finalist, a Hidden River Arts Eludia Award finalist, a Bosque Fiction Contest finalist, and a New Millennium Writings Award semifinalist whose short fiction (written also as Connie Harrington) has appeared in numerous literary journals. A former lawyer, Harrington also has a background in cultural and linguistic anthropology. She lives in Albuquerque. Magennis was born in Toronto, Ontario, and immigrated to the US in 1964. She received her MA in Art from the Claremont Graduate School in California. After a 35-year career as an artist, she started writing, inspired by the land and people in the New Mexico wilderness where she had lived. In 2009 she was accepted to the Iowa Writers' Workshop Summer Graduate Class, and in 2010 was awarded an eight-month Pen USA Emerging Voices Fellowship. In 2011 she received a Norman Mailer Writers Colony Fiction Fellowship. She lives in Albuquerque. Page One Books is located at 5850 Eubank Blvd NE, Suite B-41, in Albuquerque's Mountain Run Shopping Center (southeast corner of Eubank and Juan Tabo). The Miller, Harrington and Magennis event is free and open to the public. For more information, please call 294-2026 or visit www.page1book.com. Worker at a factory of Hanel. The company earned VND39 billion from an IPO hosted in Ha Noi today. Photo hanel.com.vn HA NOI Viet Nam News - Electronics firm Hanel One-member Company sold more than 3.9 million shares, or 20.4 per cent of the total 19.13 million shares offered in its initial public offering yesterday. According to the Ha Noi Stock Exchange, there were 42 individual investors at the auction, and the two institutional investors with the highest bid volume reached three million shares. The average bid price was VN10,004 (US$0.448), only four ong higher than the starting price. After the IPO, Hanel had earned more than VND39 billion. Earlier, Hanel approved Singaporean firm Sebrina Holdings and Vietnamese electrical designer VietTien Engineering JSC as its strategic shareholders. According to the companys equitision plan, VietTien will be the biggest Hanel shareholder with 36 per cent of shares, while Sebrina will hold 25 per cent. The Ha Noi Peoples Committee will hold 29 per cent of shares. The rest will be sold to employees. Hanel works in electronics production, information technology and telecommunications. It has nine subsidiaries and five associated companies, such as Ha Noi Telecom, which owns telecom provider Vietnamobile, and Daewoo Hotel on Nguyen Chi Thanh Street in Ha Noi. It has also built many real estate projects in Long Bien District, east of Ha Noi. In the first half of last year, the company earned VND123.6 billion in revenue and VND11.9 billion in after-tax profit. VNS Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc will to meet with the Vietnamese business community on April 29. File Photo HA NOI Viet Nam News - The first meeting between the newly-appointed Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and the Vietnamese business community will be held on April 29, nearly one month after he took the office. According to the Government Office, the conference, themed "Vietnamese enterprises - the countrys economic development force", aims to realise the Prime Ministers message that the Government will create favourable conditions for start-up businesses and boost the development of enterprises in terms of both quantity and quality. In the meeting, the Prime Minister will hear recommendations from businesses as well as discuss solutions to facilitate business operations and tackle difficulties and obstacles that enterprises face. To prepare for the event, Phuc has asked ministries and the peoples committees of cities and provinces to report solutions to difficulties and propose measures to improve the business environment. The Viet Nam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) was assigned to prepare a report on the operation of enterprises and to co-operate with Ha Noi and HCM Citys peoples committees to draft a commitment to create the most favourable, healthy and fair business environment for local enterprises. The agreement between the VCCI and the two committees are required to be signed with the Prime Minister as witness in the meeting. Chairing the first Government cabinet meeting as Prime Minister, Phuc highlighted the importance of tackling institutional obstacles that are holding back business development. He requested Government members to have action plans to solve problems, focusing on building and completing legal frameworks so as not to let the community weaken. VNS Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade o Thang Hai speaks at a forum on national branding held by the Ministry of Industry and Trades Viet Nam Trade Promotion Agency yesterday in Ha Noi. Photo dangcongsan.vn HA NOI Viet Nam News - Developing a national brand is a critical part of the countrys international integration efforts, Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade o Thang Hai said. Hai made the statement at a forum on national branding held by the Ministry of Industry and Trades Viet Nam Trade Promotion Agency yesterday in Ha Noi. The development of a national brand is key to cultural identity confirmation, especially in the context of integration, Hai said. The National Branding Programme, approved in 2003, requires long-term strategies and specific routes to accumulate experiences in promoting a national trademark. In addition to efforts by the Government and ministries, the business community should also accelerate effective measures to build and advertise their own products brand names. Hai said the business community has gradually increased its awareness about building brands and has become more involved in national branding. He attributed this improvement to close and effective co-ordination between the Government and enterprises, in addition to extensive assistance from the media in propagating the importance of branding acitivities. Nguyen Thi Thu Hien, Managing Director of the Ha Noi Trade Corporation (Hapro), whose brand qualified for the Viet Nam Value award, said the national branding progamme aims to help elevate the businesses statuses in the long term. Shortly after being officially recognised as a national-brand enterprise, Hapro leaders have been planning to connect the Viet Nam Value brand and the companys own brand, Hien said, adding that being given the National Value award helped the company earn consumers trust. Gustav Dahlin, the second secretary of the Political and Trade Committee of the Embassy of Sweden in Viet Nam, shared some national branding experiences during his presentation. He said Sweden emphasised the values of equality, sustainable development and creation, adding that those are criteria that are always focused on throughout the building of a national brand. Swedish enterprises see them as key messages in their branding activities, Dahlin said. He told Viet Nam News that Viet Nams population is now over 90 million, much bigger than Swedens of over 9 million, therefore, the business community and the whole country need to intensively promote the national trademark within the country first, and then spread it out regionally and internationally. Sweden is a part of the EU, which helps it accelerate plans to build up its national brand but also means it needs to help develop the EU brand, he said. The situation is similar for Viet Nam, as Viet Nam is part of ASEAN," he said. "You should be a vital part of ASEAN, contributing to the regional brand, but not to forgetting to distinguish yourself and to be outstanding." VNS HCM CITY Executives from 10 companies in Koreas Hamyang County yesterday met with 50 Vietnamese counterparts in HCM City to exchange information and explore business opportunities. The visitors specialise in supplying agriculture-based products like apple, pear, onion, strawberry, king oyster mushroom, bitter melon tea, Korean traditional black raspberry wine, wild ginseng drink, purple sweet potato drinkables, walnut-shaped songpyeon, white lotus naengmyeon, lotus leaf tea, and others. Im Changho, mayor of Hamyang, said through the meeting his county sought to promote its quality agricultural products and wild ginseng. Hoang Van Anh of the Viet Nam Chamber of Commerce and Industry said trade with Korea has grown rapidly and it is now one of Viet Nams largest trade partners. Korea is also among the largest foreign investors in the country, having more than 4,000 companies that employ more than 700,000 people, he said. The Viet Nam-Korea Free Trade Agreement that took effect last December is expected to open up businesses opportunities in the two countries, he said. In addition to business co-operation, Korean firms with their technological prowess could help Vietnamese firms develop agricultural products and export markets, he said. Hamyang and CEOLink Corporation, a pioneer in Viet Nam in offering online and offline B2B business models, signed an agreement to promote the countys products in Viet Nam. RoKs exports to Viet Nam The Republic of Korea (RoK) exported more to Viet Nam in the first quarter of 2016 compared to the same period last year, while its exports to other nations, particularly China, dropped significantly, reported the Korea International Trade Association (KITA). In the first three months, the RoK sold commodities worth US$7 billion to Viet Nam its third biggest importer representing a 7.6 per cent annual increase. By contrast, revenue of the countrys shipments to its number one importer China fell by 15.7 per cent annually to $28.5 billion, the biggest drop in the past seven years. Regarding the types of products imported to China, the number of conductors, flat screens, petrochemical products, auto spare parts and synthetic materials plunged during the given period. Park Jin-woo, head of KITAs market research office, said China had invested heavily in expanding local conductor manufacturing to reduce imports. He advised Korean firms to exploit the potential of the household-article market. Also in the first quater, the RoKs export value to the US and Japan decreased by 3.3 and 13.1 per cent to $16.8 billion and $5.5 billion, respectively. -- VNS Workers at the Chan May Gas and Oil Port in Thua Thien-Hue Province. Viet Nam and Russia signed an inter-governmental agreement on oil and gas survey and exploration in Russia under the Rusvietpetro joint venture company. VNA/VNS Photo Huy Hung HA NOI Viet Nam News - Viet Nam and Russia signed an inter-governmental agreement on oil and gas survey and exploration in Russia under the Rusvietpetro joint venture company, in Ha Noi yesterday. Vietnamese Minister of Industry and Trade Tran Tuan Anh and Deputy Minister of Energy of the Russian Federation, Yuri Senturin signed the agreement on behalf of the two governments. The two sides also signed a revised protocol of inter-governmental agreement on oil and gas survey and exploration in Viet Nam under Vietsovpetro joint venture on December 27, 2010. ang Huy Cuong, director general of the ministrys General Department of Energy said Rusvietpetro and Vietsovpetro are the two joint venture companies between the Viet Nam National Oil and Gas Group (PetroVietnam) and Zarubezneft. Vietsovpetro was established on June 19, 1981, and has been the leading firm in oil and gas survey and exploration in Viet Nam. The joint venture company has pumped 200 tonnes of oil and 30 billion metres of associated gas so far. Its total revenue reached US$74 billion contributing $47 billion to the State budget, Cuong said. Vietsovpetro was awarded the Labour Hero titles, Ho Chi Minh Medal, Golden Star Medal and several noble titles. He added that the Rusvietpetro was established on December 15, 2009. It has operated oil and gas survey and exploration in 13 oil fields in four blocks of Russias Nhenhexky autonomous zone. Its total output reached 13 million tonnes and revenue of more than $5 billion by the end of last year. The joint venture was also awarded the Friendship Medal. Speaking at the signing ceremony, Minister Anh said the two joint ventures have been well operated. Vietsovpetro has been an important partner for PetroVietnam in oil exploration while Rusvietpetro has seen encouraging results. We expect that the two companies would continue to operate effectively, he added. Yuri Senturin said the agreements signed today would be important documents in guiding effective bilateral co-operation between the two countries in the energy and fuel sector. The two companies have surpassed set targets in the context of the worlds economic difficulties, he said, and added that the signing would further contribute to the strategic relationship between the two countries. VNS On Thursday, April 28, the Friends of Vietnam Heritage will host a movie screening of Mua Oi (The Guava House) by director ang Nhat Minh at Hanoi Cinematheque, 22A Hai Ba Trung Street. The movie, made in 2000 based on Minhs own novel, traces the changing values of society in Viet Nam through the eyes of a gentle, kind-hearted man, Hoa (played by Bui Bai Binh). After a childhood accident left him mentally impaired, his sister looked after him for 30 years. Living as much in his beautiful memories as in the present, Hoa is drawn to return to his fathers house, now occupied by a businessmans young daughter. They build a quiet friendship together, but are challenged by misunderstandings of others. The film examines the complex layers of Vietnamese society a Buddhist majority with a Government slowly embracing western and other commercial values. All these competing factors have their positive and negative aspects, which are seen through the eyes of Hoa. After the screening, there will be a Q&A session with director-writer Minh. The 100-minute film will be presented with English subtitles. Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh said ASEM had developed into a key platform for policy dialogue and co-operation between Asia and Europe. Photo VNA HA NOI Viet Nam News - The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday hosted a conference on Enhancing the comprehensive Asia-Europe Partnership in the 21st century in Ha Noi to review two decades of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) and make proposals for the groups plans in the third decade. The proposals are to be submitted to the upcoming 11th ASEM Summit in Mongolia this July. Addressing the event, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh said ASEM had developed into a key platform for policy dialogue and co-operation between Asia and Europe. The deputy PM noted that entering the second decade of the 21st century, the need had arisen for ASEM to elevate its co-operation and strengthen its role in the world in the context of deep changes in todays global and regional settings. Amidst the trends of multi-polarisation and democratisation, partnerships and new-generation free trade agreements (FTAs) in the two continents are growing in both number and complexity alongside global challenges. It was beyond the capacity of any single nation to address those issues, Deputy PM Minh said, stressing that it was vital for ASEM to stay relevant by expanding connectivity and driving for development that fosters deeper, more comprehensive and multi-faceted collaboration. Minh asked participants to discuss ways to improve the effectiveness of ASEM in line with the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. He suggested that policy dialogue should focus on addressing challenges at both global and continental levels, particularly security threats. Speaking of economics and development, he urged the participants to push for economic restructuring and reforms, regional connectivity and the growth of creative economies to promote sustainable development. Sustainable social welfare systems were also needed with the emphasis on vulnerable people like children, women, people with disabilities and the elderly, he added. All initiatives and co-operation mechanism should be people-centred with the increasing participation of people, especially the youth and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the official said. Deputy PM Minh also hailed the significance of ASEM forum to Viet Nam, as the mechanisms membership includes 19 out of 25 strategic and comprehensive partners of Viet Nam. ASEM member states are also the source of 70 per cent of foreign direct investment in Viet Nam, 70 per cent of foreign trade and 80 per cent of international tourist arrivals. Fourteen out of 16 FTAs Viet Nam had signed or is negotiating are with ASEM partners, he noted. He pledged that Viet Nam would work together with other member states to upgrade the Asia-Europe partnership. During the conference, representatives from ministries, state agencies and businesses made recommendations on ways to liven up economic co-operation towards sustainable development and enhance the pragmatism of political dialogue. They also shared experience in joining ASEM co-operation and proposed ways for Viet Nam to take a bigger role in ASEM in the next decade. Participants opinions Speaking at the conference, Ambassador of Thailand to Viet Nam Manopchai Vongphakdi stressed the importance of expanding the co-operation scale between the two continents with greater connectivity. It should be the key focal point of the future agenda, he said, adding that the connectivity should be detailed by regulations, frameworks and institutions in ASEM. He said that ASEM should develop to ensure welfare, education and health to better serve peoples lives. The ambassador noted that ASEM needed to become an effective forum to support the people and improve the co-ordination of projects and programmes. In addition, the acting director of the Diplomatic Academy of Viet Nam, Nguyen Vu Tung, said it was important to see the role of ASEM in peoples lives. He said that so far, big countries still dominated international relations. The strategic competition between big countries still persists, making the situation more complicated, he said. As a result, ASEM needs to have a clear voice and stance with particular issues of peace, security and order, he said. "Otherwise, the members and the people will pose questions about the suitability of ASEM," he added. Tung questioned how to help the next generation become aware of ASEMs importance. The issue was also raised by the Italian ambassador to Viet Nam, Cecilia Piccioni, who said the forum should be more people-friendly. She said that it was important to make people understand how discussions would positively impact their lives. VNS Deputy PM Nguyen Xuan Phuc (R) receives Park Sam Koo, the chairman of Korean business group Kumho Asiana, yesterday in Ha Noi. Photo VNA HA NOI Viet Nam News - Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc appreciated Kumho Asianas contribution to the development of trade, investment, culture and education in Viet Nam during a reception yesterday for the groups Chairman Park Sam Koo. The PM affirmed that Viet Nam always treasured and created favourable conditions for all foreign enterprises and investors, including Kumho Asiana, to do business in the country. He expressed hope that Kumho Asiana would continue expanding its investment while increasing cooperation in culture and education. Viet Nam would further improve its investment environment to draw in more foreign enterprises, particularly RoK enterprises, the PM said. Chairman Park Sam Koo thanked PM Phuc and the Vietnamese government for facilitating the groups investment and trade activities in the country. He said besides trade, Kumho Asiana also paid attention to cultural and charity activities in Viet Nam, such as presenting scholarships to poor students. According to him, the group would implement more programmes and projects in the time ahead to contribute to boosting the co-operation and mutual understanding among businesses and people of the two countries. VNS T he Lao leaders were elected to the positions at the first session of the 8th National Assembly of Laos which opened in Vientiane yesterday. Photo VNA HA NOI Viet Nam News - President Tran ai Quang sent congratulatory messages to Laos newly-elected President Bounnhang Vorachit yesterday. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, National Assembly Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan, and Vice President ang Thi Ngoc Thinh also extended congratulations to their newly-elected Lao counterparts Thongloun Sisoulith, Pany Yathotu, and Phankham Viphavan, respectively. The Lao leaders were elected to the positions at the first session of the 8th National Assembly of Laos which opened in Vientiane yesterday. In their messages, the Vietnamese leaders expressed their belief that under new leadership, the Lao people will successfully implement the Resolution of the 10th Congress of the Lao Peoples Revolutionary Party and the countrys Socio-economic Plan for 2016-2020, thus promoting industrialisation and modernisation, and increasing the position of the nation in the international arena. The Vietnamese leaders affirmed that they will continue working closely with their Lao counterparts in further strengthening and deepening the traditional friendship, special solidarity and comprehensive cooperation between the two countries, for the interest of both peoples, and for peace, stability, cooperation and development in the region and the world. On the same day, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh sent his congratulations to the new Foreign Minister of Laos, Salomsay Commasith. VNS Scientists and environmentalists believe that the construction of the rang Phok Hydropower Plant at the would damage the ecological system of the Yok on National Park in the Central Highlands ak Lak Province. Photo cand.com.vn AK LAK Scientists and environmentalists across the country have raised their voice to strongly oppose the construction of the rang Phok Hydropower Plant at the end of this year in the Central Highlands ak Lak Provinces Krong Na Commune. As currently planned, the rang Phok Hydropower Plant will cover more than 308 hectares; including nearly 24 hectares of dipterocarp forest belonging to the core area of the Yok on National Park. The plant would have an estimated capacity of 26MW. The construction is scheduled to be implemented by the New Technology Application and Construction Investment Corporation (TECCO). It will be the eighth hydropower plant built along the Serepok River. The provincial Peoples Committee gave the green light to the plan in 2007. Professor ang Huy Huynh from the Viet Nam Association for Conservation of Nature and Environment, said encroaching on land inside the national parks core area would harm wildlife, especially the big animals as the dipterocarp forest was believed to be where the larger animals found food. ao Trong Tu, former vice general secretary of the Viet Nam National Mekong Committee, said the price we had to pay was very high if the hydropower plant was built. In principle, they must not build anything in the core area of a national park. The core area is a place seriously in need of preservation in every national park, Tu said. Vu Trong Hong, formerly of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, said it was unacceptable to build a hydropower plant in the core area of the national park. Hong said the current drought hitting the central highlands region was partly due to the region having built too many hydropower plants that store water from local rivers. He warned that the province would attract catastrophic consequences if it continued building hydropower plants. Tran Viet Hung, deputy head of the Central Highlands Steering Committee, said the province had to carefully consider destroying forest to build the hydropower plant, especially damaging forest located in the core area of a national park. Because we cant imagine its consequences, he said. Tran Tuan Linh, deputy head of the Yok on National Park, said the national parks ecological system would be damaged by the building of the hydropower plant. The Yok on National Park, the largest of Viet Nams nature reserves, has been gradually expanded and today encompasses 115,000 hectares with numerous species named in the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List. The national park contains the highest percentage of protected species in the country. It is estimated that dipterocarp forest accounts for about 93 per cent of the national parks area. The dipterocarp forest is typical for Southeast Asias tropical forest. VNS HA NOI The investigative police unit under the Ministry of Public Security prosecuted and put in custody Nguyen The Anh, former general director of Phuc Gia Bao 868 Company, for alleged fraudulent appropriation of assets in an apparent pyramid scheme. The company, which was started in September 2015, had many branches across Viet Nam. Police of Khanh Hoa Province on March 23 received complaints from residents accusing Phuc Gia Bao Company of fraudulence under a multi-level marketing platform. According to the investigative unit, Nguyen The Anh introduced his company as a partner of a US corporation seeking help building coffee shops, convenience stores chains and other establishments. He asked people who are interested to invest in his company, choosing between the VN 36.6 million (US$1,600) or the VN 72.2 million ($3,200) package. He also promised a rather high profit for such investment. Many people invested, but they received nothing in return. The Anh was able to appropriate more than VN 300 billion ($13 million). The Ministry of Public Security is conducting further investigations and calls on victims of The Anh to provide information by calling 068 3337888 or coming to 258 Nguyen Trai Street, District 1, HCM City.VNS BA RIA-VUNG TAU The Department of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs here has suspended two officials of a training centre, until their role in the mass escape of 447 drug addicts was determined. The two officials of the Labour Education and Vocational Training Centre, who were suspended for 15 days yesterday, are Tran Thien Chi, director of the centre, and Nguyen Van Chau, the centres deputy director. On the same day, the department appointed Pham Minh An, formerly a director of a nursing home, to the post of deputy director of the centre. Five other employees, mainly security guards, of the centre have also been suspended temporarily from work. The centre is located in Tan Thanh Districts Toc Tien Commune. The incident occurred in the evening on April 13 when over 400 trainees at the centre, who are drug addicts, attacked security guards and indulged in rioting. They broke open the gates and climbed the walls to escape. Hundreds of police personnel, belonging to different forces, were deployed on the streets to arrest the addicts. The drug addicts even broke into homes near the centre to steal clothes, stole the motorbikes of passers-by and hijacked cars so they could flee faster, according to local residents. As of Thursday, 250 of the 447 drug addicts had been sent back to the centre. Competent agencies in the province were continuing the hunt for the remaining trainees who were still on the loose and called on families of the drug addicts to cooperate. VNS A NANG A crewmember on the Korean-flagged Loihope cargo ship was found dead yesterday, having apparently fallen in the ships cargo hold. The a Nang-based Maritime Co-ordination and Rescue Centre No. 2 (MRCC2) said they received a message from the ships agent at around 12.20pm on April 20, notifying them that Thi Ha Tun, a citizen of Myanmar, had fallen and lost consciousness on the Loihope ship, located 130 nautical miles off the a Nang coast. A rescue ship from the centre was dispatched, transporting two doctors from the citys medical emergency centre. The rescue ship located the cargo ship two hours after leaving the centres port. However, doctors said the victim had died two hours before. The rescue ship carried the corpse to the citys General Hospital. Last year, an Indian captain was rescued off the coast of a Nang after suffering a heart attack on board the Hanjin California ship, which sails under the Liberian flag. VNS HA NOI Hailstorms and whirlwinds have plagued many localities over the past few days, causing a number of injuries and fatalities and damaging thousands of houses, officials reported. Hailstorms killed one person and injured two others in the northern mountainous province of Ha Giang on Tuesday, according to the provincial steering committee on natural disasters. The hail destroyed houses in Yen Minh District, killing a three-year-old boy and injuring a 23-year-old woman. Meanwhile, a 78-year-old woman from Meo Vac District was injured by a falling tree. The southern province of Binh Phuoc also suffered losses estimated at VN5 billion (US$225,000) due to the collapse of houses and other facilities, caused by the whirlwinds. On Wednesday, heavy rains accompanied by whirlwinds and lightning killed one person and injured two others in the northern mountainous province of Lai Chau, in addition to damaging 419 houses and 15 classrooms in the Muong Te and Tam uong districts. More than 50ha of crops were destroyed. Torrential rains accompanied by whirlwinds also damaged hundreds of houses, killed local cattle and destroyed dozens of hectares of crops in the northern mountainous provinces of Tuyen Quang and ien Bien and the central province of Thanh Hoa, as well as the central Highlands province of Gia Lai. Local authorities of these localities have sent working teams to the affected areas to provide timely assistance to the local people and guide prompt efforts to help them recover in the aftermath. In Thanh Hoa Province, local authorities provided households that suffered great losses from the disasters VN3 million each, while in Gia Lai Province, each affected household received financial aid of between VN500,000 and VN1 million. The National Hydro-meteorological Forecast Centre has warned localities in the north and northern central regions to stay alert for possible hailstorms and whirlwinds over the next few days and to take preparatory measures to reduce any damages. VNS Authorities inspect food safety at a canteen in inh Tram Industrial Park, Bac Ninh Province. Photo baobacninh.vn HA NOI Ha Noi and Bac Giang northern province have agreed a co-operation programme to develop safe agricultural product consumption from 2016-2020. At the seminar held in Ha Noi on Tuesday, Tran Thi Phuong Lan, deputy director of Ha Noi Department of Trade and Industry said it was an annual joint programme with three main contents: Bac Giang will set up an association from safe agro-product growing to consumption, select key agro-products that were produced in accordance with the biological safety process, and stabilise the supply to the capital city. Ha Noi will organise events to introduce the citys commodities at Bac Giang market. For this years plan, Ha Noi Department of Trade and Industry will hold two events for Luc Ngan litchis sales in the city (in mid June) and in Bac Giang Province (in November). Deputy Chairman of Ha Noi Peoples Committee, Nguyen Doan Toan said the city will create favourable condition for lorries weighing under 5 tonnes to carry Bac Giang agricultural products to the city. City authorities will support Bac Giang Provinces enterprises in expanding consumption market including at whole-sale markets, supermarkets and processing companies, he said. Duong Van Thai, deputy chairman of Bac Giang Peoples Committee said the programme would help Hanoians purchase safe agricultural products and help farmers. Bac Giang authorities determined creating safe products started from safe seed production and safe breeding. Besides establishing safe product trade names, Bac Giang enterprises will use brand- name stamps to attest to the origin of products. Toan said proving safe origins would ensure sustainable agricultural development with quality products. According to the Ha Noi Plant Protection Department, safe vegetable distribution in the city are through six forms: agricultural enterprises contracts with supermarkets (accounting for 1.5 per cent of total safe vegetable output), retail agencies (1.5 per cent), restaurants or collective kitchens (1.8 per cent). The other forms include whole-sale traders (12.6 per cent), farmers themselves carrying vegetable to sell at residential quarters market (26.8 per cent) or at whole-sale markets (55.8 per cent). The department has granted certification on safe vegetable production to 5,100ha in the city. Nguyen Duy Hung, the department director said safe vegetables without brand-name stamps were sold at residential areas and whole-sale markets. VNS ZABADANI, Syria The UN began evacuating hundreds of people from besieged Syrian towns in a rare sign of humanitarian progress, as the US Air Force for the first time deployed a B-52 bomber against the Islamic State group. In Geneva, where UN-brokered peace talks have faltered as a fragile ceasefire has come under strain, the Syrian government meanwhile said it was pushing on with indirect negotiations, calling the oppositions freeze on taking part "absurd theatre". The anti-government High Negotiations Committee this week suspended its participation in the talks, which do not include either IS or al-Qaedas Syrian offshoot Al-Nusra Front, until it could see progress on political transition and humanitarian issues. On the ground, the UN secured the evacuation of dozens of people needing medical attention from four besieged towns on Wednesday, as part of a complex humanitarian mission, while the US-led coalition upped the ante on the battlefield. Washington sent in a B-52 bomber to destroy a weapons storage facility south of Mosul, the Pentagon said, days after Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced extra US troops, cash and equipment for the anti-IS campaign in Iraq. In other signs of increasing tempo, US commandos working with Kurdish troops conducted a raid targeting a senior IS group figure. UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said plans were under way to evacuate some 500 people including the sick, wounded and their family members "in urgent need of life-saving medical attention" from four besieged towns. On the outskirts of the rebel-held town of Madaya, where dozens of residents starved to death last year, seven large white buses were used to evacuate residents. Dozens of men, women and children got out of the bus and were checked by security officials before boarding once more. The evacuations were taking place from rebel-held Zabadani and Madaya near Damascus, and the government-held towns of Fuaa and Kafraya in northwest Idlib province. Sieges continue Aid deliveries to the four localities always occur simultaneously and in equal amounts, and a similar stipulation applied for those being evacuated. More than four million in Syria live in besieged or hard-to-reach areas, with limited or no access to food or medical supplies. The UN has long pressed Damascus to grant unrestricted access to these areas, and has asked all sides to end sieges. The dire humanitarian situation has played a major role in the opposition walking away from the troubled peace talks in Geneva. An already-shaky ceasefire between the government and non-jihadist rebels was severely strained on Tuesday after at least 44 people were killed in air strikes on two markets in northwest Syria. The deaths of 37 civilians in a market in the city of Maaret al-Numan and another seven killed in nearby Kafranbel were some of the deadliest attacks since the truce took hold on February 27. On Tuesday, HNC coordinator Riad Hijab said the opposition delegation could not remain in Switzerland while Syrians were dying on a daily basis. AFP PEDERNALES, Ecuador A 6.1-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Ecuador on Wednesday, sowing new panic four days after a powerful quake killed more than 500 people and injured over 5,000. The latest quake caused no damage or casualties, but shook the ground forcefully in the middle of the night, sending terrified residents running into the street in the devastated resort town of Pedernales. Some families opted to spend the rest of the night outdoors for fear their homes could collapse like hundreds of buildings did in Saturdays 7.8-magnitude quake, said AFP reporters. The toll from that quake continued to rise as emergency workers untangled the masses of rubble, often by hand or with basic tools. President Rafael Correa said officials had now registered 525 people killed, 5,733 injured and 163 missing. "The death toll will continue to rise, unfortunately, but at a slower pace. Many bodies have already been recovered," he said. At least 11 foreigners were killed in Saturdays quake, which struck a Pacific coast region popular with tourists. They included citizens of Britain, Canada, Ireland and several Latin American countries. Ecuadoran authorities called the latest quake an aftershock -- one of more than 500 since Saturday, they said. The US Geological Survey said it struck at 3:33 am (0833 GMT) at a depth of 16 kilometers. Losing hope Saturdays quake is the worst to hit Latin America and the Caribbean since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which killed between 200,000 and 250,000 people. Rescue teams worked through the night in the wreckage of coastal towns such as Pedernales and Manta, where the stench of rotting bodies has been growing stronger in the tropical heat. Hope of finding more victims alive was fading fast. One of the bodies pulled from the ruins was that of six-year-old Jose David Eras, a Colombian-Ecuadoran boy trapped beneath the rubble of a hotel in Pedernales -- one of around 800 structures toppled in the quake. Both countries had been on tenterhooks awaiting news of his fate after rescue workers detected signs of life in the debris using a special scanner. But the Colombian foreign ministry said his lifeless body had been found. AFP Long before GVK Power and Infrastructure sold its stake in Bangalore International Airport to Fairfax India Holdings, it had become evident the group was looking to turn into a leaner version of itself. It exited a road project in 2014 and even put its power projects on the block, although it could not find a buyer amid the downturn in the sector. Burdened by mounting debt, GVK has been looking at asset sale as a strategy to generate additional resources. The interest expenses for the group rose almost 10 per cent to Rs 555 crore in the three months ending December 31, 2015, compared to the preceding quarter. For the full year, it is expected to exceed the 2014-15 outgo of Rs 1,398 crore. Read more from our special coverage on "GVK" GVK fails to pay $560 million for mines in Australia GVK Reddy GVK says once the transaction is complete, the debt burden of GVK Airports will stand reduced by around Rs 2,000 crore and will also result in savings on interest costs to the extent of approximately Rs 300 crore per annum. This is an important and successful milestone in deleveraging our balance sheet; all the proceeds from this stake sale shall be used to bring down our debt obligations to our lenders, GVKs Founder-Chairman and Managing Director GVK Reddy said in a statement in March. In addition, the deal with Fairfax, which will buy the stake through its wholly-owned subsidiary in Mauritius, also provide GVK an ally for future airport development projects. Reddy says, We would look forward to partnering with them in developing the Kempegowda International Airport (in Bengaluru) through its next stage of expansion as we develop a new world-class Terminal 2 and a new runway. The long-standing relationship between Reddy and Watsa was the key reason why GVK chose Fairfax as a strategic partner for the Bangalore International Airport from among a number of other offers. After the stake sale, GVKs holding in the Bangalore airport has reduced to 10 per cent. However, Watsa said G V Sanjay Reddy will continue to lead the management team as managing director of the airport and Reddy will continue as its co-chairman. Of all the major businesses GVK is present in power, roads, airports and hospitality the airport arm is turning in the highest profit for the group. However, the stake sale may not mark an end to GVKs debt troubles altogether. The groups Bangalore International Airport owns and operates the Kempegowda International Airport under a 30-year concession agreement, which could be extended by another 30 years by the government. Built under the public-private partnership model, the airport began operations in May 2008. In addition, the group also runs and manages the Mumbai airport, Yogyakarta airport in Java in Indonesia, and the non-aeronautical commercial operations of Denpasar in Bali. The stake sale, which was in the offing for years, has finally come at a time when the business has turned profitable. The airport business brought in Rs 353 crore of its segmented profit for the first three quarters of 2015-16. In contrast, it had reported a loss of Rs 174 crore during the same period in the previous year. At Rs 2,076.45 crore, the airport business accounted for 67 per cent share in the groups net sales of Rs 3,083.31 crore during the April-December 2015 period. Given its share in the revenue, the stake sale could hurt the groups overall earnings, even though it will result in savings on interest payment. Faltering growth The other businesses have been languishing for a while. The group is reportedly in trouble with its mining business in Australia. The Reddy family, which took over the Kevins Corner Coal Mines in Queensland from Hancock Coal for $1.26 billion in 2011, has reportedly failed to pay the final tranche of $560 million to Australian billionaire Gina Rinehart-owned Hancock Prospecting, putting a question mark over the future of the project. GVK was initially planning to invest $10 billion in developing three coal mines and rail and port infrastructure there. To an extent, its troubles stem from the steep fall in coal prices globally. Coal prices have dropped from $121 a metric tonne at the time of acquisition to around $50 now. In India, the group has about 1,200 Mw of operational power generation capacity and another 1,390 Mw under development. Its Goindwal Sahib Thermal Power Project in Punjabs Tarn Taran district has seen a 30-40 per cent cost escalation, says an analyst with a Mumbai-based brokerage who does not want to be quoted. Though GVK signed a memorandum of understanding with the Punjab government way back in 2000, the project got mired in trouble right from the beginning. Its captive coal block was also cancelled in 2014. The project continues to be a concern for the group till its petition for higher tariff is accepted, says the analyst. In the road sector, the group surrendered the 333-km Shivpuri-Dewas project in Madhya Pradesh in 2014. When the contract was awarded to GVK in 2012, it was valued at about Rs 2,815 crore. GVK now has projects totalling 1,500 lane-kilometres across Jaipur-Kishangarh (542.4 lane-km) and DeoliKota (332.16 lane-km) in Rajasthan, besides BagodaraVasad (611.4 lane-km) in Gujarat. While a questionnaire sent to GVK remained unanswered, the group has maintained it will remain a long-term investor in airport assets in India. GVK is bullish on the airport sector in India and shall continue to build iconic assets for the country, it said in March. However, given its debt woes, it is unlikely to bid for any new road and power projects. There are 10-odd suitors for Lafarge Indias 11-million tonne (mt) capacity cement business. This has to be sold, says the Competition Commission of India (CCI), if it is to allow the merger of the French giant with Switzerland-based Holcim as far as operations in this country. Lafarge Indias cement business is estimated to be valued at Rs 10,000 crore. The bidding criteria could change the Competition Appellate Tribunal (Compat) will be scrutinising the CCI order, after Dalmia Cements appeal against it. CCI had approved the merger for a second time, in February, after Lafarge had told the regulator it would sell the entire firm. However, Compat issued a stay order on the merger last week; it did so without hearing CCI, which it has given three weeks to respond. Dalmia Cement had appealed to Compat earlier this month, arguing the terms and condition for divestment in the main order have been wrongly incorporated in the impugned order. Dalmia Cement was referring to the threshold on operational capacity in the eastern region that CCI had set for bidders of Lafarges 5.15 mt business in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand in its first order, issued in March 2015. Lafarge India has a total capacity of 7.8 mt in the eastern region and of this, 5.15 mt was originally considered by the CCI for divestment to complete the global merger. Holcims ACC and Ambuja, respectively, have 6.1 mt and 4.6 mt capacity in the region. Cement is considered to be a regional product by the anti-trust regulator, as its transportation beyond a distance doesnt make economic sense. Hence, the CCI considered the divestment of 5.15 mt capacity of Lafarge sufficient to avoid an 'appreciably adverse effect on competition' (AAEC). For the same purpose it also put a restriction that the eligible bidder should not have operational capacity which is more than five per cent of the total installed capacity in the region. Which comprises the four states of Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh, with an aggregate capacity of 45 mt. Birla Corp first emerged as the most eligible suitor and successfully won the bid for 5.15 mt asset. However, the deal fell through as the mining rights for limestone reserves catering to these plants could not be transferred, due to a recentamendment in the Mines and Minerals (Regulation and Development) Act. The amendment prohibited transfer of mining rights in case of an asset sale. Lafarge then sent a revised proposal, to sell the entire business of close to 11 mt -- about 7.8 mt capacity in the eastern region and another three mt in the north. While CCI approved the complete sell-off in an order this February, it continued with the of five per cent market share threshold for the bidders that it had set in its first order, issued in March 2015. Dalmia Cement has questioned in its appeal whether CCI has taken into account the facts specific to the alternative proposal and assessed whether the alternative proposal adequately eliminates AAEC. The cement industry is seeing a lot of consolidation and the market dynamics might quickly change. If Compat directs CCI to look at the deal afresh, it might reconsider the five per cent market share restriction, says Karan Singh Chandhiok, partner at law agency Chandhiok & Associates. Moreover, LafargeHolcim might support such a move, as it means more bidders for its assets. Adds H M Bangur, managing director at Shree Cement, We will also bid for it if the five per cent threshold is brought down. But, we'd prefer to go by the rules than take the route of a legal battle. Dalmia Cement did not reply to Business Standard's queries, saying the matter was sub judice. Dalmia and Shree Cement have about 20 per cent and 10 per cent market share, respectively, in the region. HOW IT ALL UNFOLDED CHARLES CITY -- As a defendant, Doug Lindaman served as his own attorney. Now in the Floyd County jail awaiting sentencing for third-degree sexual abuse, Lindaman is looking for a lawyer. Jurors earlier this month convicted Lindaman, 60, of Charles City, for touching a 17-year-old boy in 2011. The young man and his brother worked for Lindaman as farmhands. Both testified at Lindaman's trial. Both said Lindaman touched or grabbed them. He faces up to 10 years in prison. A sentencing hearing for Lindaman is scheduled June 7 in Floyd County District Court. After the verdict was announced, Lindaman promised he would appeal and asked for a court-appointed attorney. Judge Gregg Rosenbladt advised Lindaman he must file an application. Lindaman in a three-page, handwritten document described his financial situation. "Family resources are directed to Liquidating Farm Equipment & Livestock to Satisfy a Bank debt of $245,000 which I am not a Party," Lindaman wrote. "The liquidation is due to my absence," he added. Lindaman said he owes $145,000 on 60 acres "but the Bank is unwilling to Advance Any Funds on Top of the original debt." He has about $400 in a checking account and owes $20,000 on a pickup owned jointly with his 90-year-old mother. Lindaman in his message to the court also lays out his expectations for a defense lawyer. "The appointment of Counsel would be only as a Second Chair attorney in this matter. I will continue as Lead Attorney. If this is unacceptable to the Court or the Appointed Attorney, then ignore my application," Lindaman wrote. Lindaman, a former attorney and magistrate in Floyd County, left the bench in 1983 because of alleged inappropriate advances toward a young man. He lost his law license permanently because of convictions in 1988 on two counts of committing lascivious acts with a child. Judge Rosenbladt has ruled Lindaman is eligible for a court-appointed attorney and assigned the case to the public defender's office in Mason City. Public Defender Susan Flander, however, hopes to decline, citing a conflict of interest. According to Flander, her office represented one of Lindaman's victims when the charge was filed against Lindaman. Flander on Tuesday asked the court to find Lindaman a different attorney. CEDAR FALLS Iowa Board of Regents President Bruce Rastetter has directed the states public universities to begin to look at tuition increases for the 2016-2017 school year. The Iowa Legislatures education budget chairs announced last week the public universities would get about a $5 million increase, but thats far less than what the Regents had requested about $20 million. Now, knowing the numbers I want to make clear weve asked the universities to move forward with that tuition discussion and those increases, Rastetter said Thursday. Rastetter has said previously anything below $8 million would lead to tuition increases. He also has said in an earlier statement the board was very disappointed with the figures announced last week by the lawmakers. Rastetter said he expects the Regents will know the final figures lawmakers approve by the next board meeting in June to further assess the extent of the increases. He said the universities would start to give an indication of what their future needs would be during the Regents August meeting. University of Northern Iowa President Bill Ruud did not discuss the budget picture during his remarks at the board meeting. The university had no comment following the discussion. The Regents had previously approved a tuition freeze for the 2016-2017 year, pending the Legislatures decision on the funding requests. The board had recommended increases of $7.7 million for UNI, $8.2 million for Iowa State University and $4.5 million for University of Iowa. The budget lawmakers are currently discussing would increase funding by $4.9 million total for all three universities. The universities were able to freeze tuition for nearly three years UNI and Iowa State had a 3 percent hike that began at the beginning of this semester, the first increase after two-and-a-half years. University of Iowa delayed that 3 percent increase until the start of the summer 2016 school year. Other items of note at the meeting include: The board re-elected Rastetter as board president and President Pro Tem Katie Mulholland to continue in her role. Both were re-elected to a two-year term that will begin May 1. The board approved a refinancing of UNIs academic building bonds. Wells Fargo was the winning bidder with an interest rate of 1.84 percent. It will reduce the debt service between 2017 and 2027 by an estimated $2.02 million, or about 200,000 each year during the period of the bond. The board also approved increases to its room and board rates. UNIs rates vary, but the proposal included a 3.5 percent combined increase for its most popular residence hall double room and meal plan. Ruud told the board the early indication for the fall school year would see a 16 percent boost in the number of incoming freshman, from 1,722 this year to more than 2,00 anticipated for next year. The board approved three new programs at UNI: a masters degree in athletic training, a bachelors of applied sciences program in criminal justice and a masters of business administration program in Mason City. It also terminated the accelerated master of public policy program for lack of interest. The board also approved a name change of the UNI departments school of health, education and leisure services to the school of kinesiology, allied health and human services. WATERLOO The Iowa Department of Transportation has offered the city $28 million to assume jurisdiction over University Avenue. Mayor Quentin Hart and DOT officials said the city is tentatively slated to receive the funding to take responsibility for the crumbling state highway running from U.S. Highway 63 to the Cedar Falls city limits. The city would use the money and other funding sources to rebuild its stretch of University. We went back and forth about the amount of money; its never enough money, Hart said. But when you look at the University Avenue corridor we need to move forward. My goal is to make sure we are consistently moving our (business) corridors forward. Pete Hjelmstad, field services coordinator for IDOTs District 2 office in Mason City, said the proposal involves $18 million in fiscal year 2017 and another $5 million in each of the following two years. The proposal has been made, Hjelmstad said. Now it is up to the highway commissioners and the city of Waterloo. The Iowa Transportation Commission will review the transfer of jurisdiction as part of its draft program in May and is expected to vote on the matter at its June commission meeting in the Waterloo-Cedar Falls area. Waterloo City Council members would then be asked to approve the agreement. The city of Cedar Falls received $20 million from the DOT in 2014 to take over its segment of University Avenue from the Waterloo city limits west to Iowa Highway 58. Work on the first phase of an estimated $32.5 million reconstruction project is underway. Waterloos portion of University Avenue would be 2.8 miles long and includes three bridges. The 2-mile stretch in Cedar Falls does not have any bridges. Hart said he was asked frequently on the mayoral campaign trail last fall why Waterloo wasnt working on University Avenue while work was underway in Cedar Falls. DOT officials had broken off negotiations with Waterloo last year due to funding constraints. Hart said he contacted DOT officials shortly after taking office and asked about starting the conversations, which culminated in the proposed transfer of jurisdiction. The Cedar Falls project generated controversy over the inclusion of roundabouts to replace several signalized intersections and narrowing the road from six to four lanes. While Waterloo has not designed its reconstruction project, a preliminary DOT study had proposed roundabouts at many intersections and reducing the road to four lanes. By Tim Brockwell Apr. 17, 2016 | 03:10 PM | PADUCAH, KY The City of Paducah is still waiting for an ordinance to be crafted to allow food trucks to operate in town. Mayor Gayle Kaler said that pretty much everyone she has spoken to about food trucks in Paducah is in favor of them, but it will be necessary to draft an ordinance before moving forward. Kaler said city leaders are busy working on the ordinance right now. "Steve Ervin in the planning committee is working on that ordinance. They have to be finely crafted. It's not something that we can just throw together, so we are being really diligent about that. We will have something brought before us soon." Kaler said. Kaler said she has been a strong proponent of food trucks for quite a while now. "I really do believe, and I've talked to all the commissioners, that everybody is in favor of it," kaler said. "I'm certainly pushing for it because it's something that I have wanted to see in Paducah for some time." At their February 16 meeting, the Paducah City Commission heard a presentation by Ervin about the possibility of expanding the area in which food trucks are allowed to operate. Right now food trucks are permitted to operate in Paducah only along a section of Hinkleville Road and part of Lone Oak Road. Ervin told commissioners that some individuals have expressed interest in expanding these areas. Ervin said the food truck industry is expected to grow into a $2.7 billion per year business by next year. "It is moving forward, and I think it's really exciting for Paducah. It's something we haven't really had before." Kaler said. If you would like to know more about the food truck industry in Kentucky, check out the Bluegrass Food Truck Association's Facebook page at the link below. On the Net: Advertisement By West Kentucky Star Staff Apr. 19, 2016 | WESTERN KENTUCKY By West Kentucky Star Staff Apr. 19, 2016 | 12:52 PM | WESTERN KENTUCKY Mike Pape and Jason Batts, two candidates in the First Congressional District Republican Primary, joined together Monday in demanding an apology from candidate James Comer for what they call insults to their supporters. Citing an email dated March 27 that was reported online and was supplied directly to the Pape campaign, Comer reportedly quoted a buddy who said his supporters might be the only ones who put up campaign signs, because "Michael Pape's supporters are too old to physically put signs up and the Batts boy's supporters don't own any property to put any signs on! Comer reportedly commented in the email that the theory has a lot of merit. This is yet another example of why James Comer is the typical establishment career politician, said Pape. His arrogance insults the people who would be his constituents, and he thinks he can get away with it. We demand an apology to the people of our district. "Jamie Comer owes all the voters an apology, said Batts. "Calling Kentuckians poor and old is what we'd expect from a Washington politician. After sixteen years running for one office after another, Jamie has forgotten the hard working Kentuckians he's trying to represent. His ignorant words are inexcusable." Attempts to confirm the content of the email and get a comment from the Comer campaign have not received a response. Advertisement By The Associated Press Apr. 19, 2016 | FRANKFORT, KY By The Associated Press Apr. 19, 2016 | 03:38 PM | FRANKFORT, KY Former Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear has called Republican Gov. Matt Bevin's investigation of his procurement practices a ``pathetic spectacle'' and says the accusations have no basis in truth. Bevin accused Beshear on Tuesday of issuing no-bid contracts to benefit friends and forcing state workers to make political donations. Bevin said he will hire a private law firm and give it subpoena power to help the Finance Cabinet investigate the allegations. Beshear said he never forced employees to donate to political campaigns and said he followed the spirit and letter of procurement laws. He said Bevin's investigation is an attempt to distract people from his own administration's problems. And he noted Bevin has refused to release his personal tax returns. Beshear released his tax returns while he was governor. Attorney General Andy Beshear says Bevin's decision to hire a private law firm to help investigate his predecessor is overstepping his authority under state law. Andy Beshear, Steve Beshear's son, says the Executive Branch Ethics Commission should be the one to examine any allegations of wrongdoing. Bevin is also calling on Andy Beshear to return campaign contributions from Tim Longmeyer, a former official in Steve Beshear's administration who pleaded guilty Tuesday to federal bribery charges. Andy Beshear says he did not know of Longmeyer's activities and plans to donate any left over money from his campaign to Common Cause, a government watchdog group. archives 11 Sep - 18 Sep (1) 14 Aug - 21 Aug (3) 7 Aug - 14 Aug (3) 17 Jul - 24 Jul (3) 10 Jul - 17 Jul (3) 19 Jun - 26 Jun (2) 12 Jun - 19 Jun (4) 22 May - 29 May (1) 15 May - 22 May (5) 1 May - 8 May (2) 17 Apr - 24 Apr (3) 27 Feb - 6 Mar (3) 13 Feb - 20 Feb (1) 30 Jan - 6 Feb (3) 2 Jan - 9 Jan (4) 26 Dec - 2 Jan (1) 5 Dec - 12 Dec (3) 28 Nov - 5 Dec (2) 14 Nov - 21 Nov (1) 7 Nov - 14 Nov (1) 10 Oct - 17 Oct (1) 22 Aug - 29 Aug (3) 15 Aug - 22 Aug (1) 8 Aug - 15 Aug (3) 1 Aug - 8 Aug (1) 25 Jul - 1 Aug (3) 18 Jul - 25 Jul (1) 11 Jul - 18 Jul (1) 27 Jun - 4 Jul (4) 20 Jun - 27 Jun (3) 13 Jun - 20 Jun (1) 30 May - 6 Jun (2) 23 May - 30 May (4) 2 May - 9 May (3) 25 Apr - 2 May (4) 4 Apr - 11 Apr (2) 28 Mar - 4 Apr (4) 28 Feb - 7 Mar (1) 7 Feb - 14 Feb (2) 10 Jan - 17 Jan (2) 27 Dec - 3 Jan (2) 13 Dec - 20 Dec (3) 6 Dec - 13 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If you are seeing this message, you are viewing the site on one of these unsupported browsers. We only support the recent versions of major browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. Thank you. (click to close and continue using this browser) Ethiopia Childbirth injuries continue to destroy thousands of womens lives in Africa each year. The problem persists substantially because low-resource countries lack medical professionals with specialized training in high-quality emergency obstetric care. Formal training programs with advanced education in specialty areas such as Female Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery are not widely available at African universities. Local physicians interested in such specialties routinely leave their countries to seek training abroad. Many do not return home, having established roots in the countries where they have trained. WFF is dedicated to improving the capacity of low-resource countries to address childbirth injuries by building local medical programs. Through local and international partnerships, we develop high-quality, in-country medical education. Since 2013, our local partner for in-country African medical education programming has been the College of Health Sciences at Mekelle University in Ethiopia. We have several programs designed to increase local medical expertise to prevent and treat childbirth injuries: Mekelle Medical Education Collaboration (MMEC) In 2013, WFF began holding annual medical conferences at Mekelle University to provide enhanced obstetrics and gynecology education to students, residents and faculty at the university. For one week each summer, WFF Founder, Dr. Lewis Wall, and guest experts in Obstetrics and Gynecology, Urogynecology, and additional specialties teach enhanced curriculum to benefit local medical professionals. Approximately 80-100 students, residents, faculty and visitors from other institutions attend each of the classes provided. This collaboration was a vital contributor to the Mekelle University OB-GYN residency program. In December 2016, the first five graduates chose to stay on as Mekelle University faculty to increase the institutions capacity to train future students while also providing patient care through the universitys Ayder Referral Hospital. The MMEC introduced numerous U.S. and International physicians to service in Ethiopia, many of whom remain engaged and made repeat trips. Guest lecturers at the MMEC have included: WFF Board Members (Dr. Rahel Nardos, Dr. Christopher Payne, Dr. Holly Richter, Theresa Spitznagle, Dr. Lewis Wall), Washington University in St. Louis faculty (Dr. Christina Chu, Dr. Jonathan Green, Dr. Jerry Lowder, Dr. David Schmidt), University of Ghana faculty (Dr. Anyetei Lassey), and Internationally recognized experts (Dr. Linda Brubaker, Dr. Jeannette M. Potts). Urogynecology Fellowship Training Program In 2015 and in partnership with Mekelle University, Hamlin Fistula Ethiopia and Footsteps to Healing at Oregon Health & Science University (FH-OHSU), Ethiopias first Urogynecology Fellowship Program was launched. The program provides Urogynecology sub-specialty education comparable to Western standards with the goals of enabling graduates to 1) establish clinical centers of excellence to treat women with all types of urogynecologic disorders (not limited to fistula) and 2) develop additional training centers for sub-specialists in urogynecology. Why Urogynecology? Urogynecology, also known as Female Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery, is a specialty focused on the care of women with pelvic floor dysfunction such as incontinence (urinary and fecal leakage), prolapse (bulging or falling of the vaginal tissues) and pelvic pain. Maternal mortality and obstetric fistula are the most traumatic and immediate effects of unsafe childbirth. Pelvic organ prolapse (POP) is a chronic, more common effect of unsafe childbirth in developing countries. A preliminary, ongoing survey of three regions in Ethiopia estimated that 5,000 to 6,000 women have obstetric fistulas, while over 250,000 suffer from POP. Pelvic organ prolapse can develop when a woman endures multiple, difficult deliveries. Over time, muscles supporting pelvic organs like the uterus and bowel weaken. The organs drop, push against the vagina and sometimes fall out. Training a New Generation of Urogynecologists Our partnership with Mekelle Universtiy and Hamlin Fistula Ethiopia allows us to provide both in-country medical training for Africans and to treat local women for injuries beyond fistula through multiple medical centers. Our first four Urogynecology Fellows in training were skilled fistula surgeons with Hamlin Fistula Ethiopia. Fellows are mentored in conducting clinical research and, in addition to classroom instruction; they receive surgical instruction while performing life-changing prolapse repairs. Since the start of this fellowship training program, our Ethiopian fellows have performed over 500 POP and incontinence surgeries. Dr. Fekade and Dr. Melaku, our first two graduating fellows have become the primary trainers. Dr. Renate Roentgen, an expert in female urology from Germany, served as the first Fellowship Director and as the primary urology instructor. Dr. Melaku, one of our first graduates, succeeded her as Fellowship Director in 2020 and the primary training location transitioned from Hamlin Ethiopias Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital to Ayder Regional Referral Hospital at Mekelle University. Dr.Fekade, another Fellowship graduate, is helping develop a Pelvic Floor Center of excellence at Ayder.WFF Board Member Dr. Rahel Nardos facilitates travel to Ethiopia throughout the year of expert instructors from partner institutions to provide our Fellows training and hands-on surgical instruction while performing POP surgeries. Masters of Physical Therapy Program WFF Board Director Dr. Tracy Spitznagle, Professor in Physical Therapy at Washington University in St. Louis, consulted on the Physical Therapy Masters Program curriculum being developed at Mekelle University in 2013. The university continuously struggled to enlist qualified PT instructors locally and requested help in 2015. Since 2016, Dr. Spitznagle has recruited experienced PT instructors for programming funded by WFF. By sponsoring international PTs to travel to Mekelle, WFF provides the university with top instructors who would be otherwise inaccessible. Why Physical Therapy? Pregnancy and childbirth cause changes to the musculoskeletal system that predispose women for pain and incontinence disorders. In developed countries, PT is readily available to assist in the care of women post-childbirth. Unfortunately, the specialized PT services women may need post-childbirth are difficult to find in the developing world. The trauma childbirth injuries cause can be extensive and PT is often needed to work in tandem with surgery for a woman to fully recover. Physical therapy is a critical piece of our holistic care model. In 2018, Mekelle Universitys inaugural class of 12 PT Masters students graduated and 5 chose to stay at the university to support the program. Critical Care & Quality Improvement Training While conducting clinical training over the years, our visiting experts realized that the local doctors, nurses and physical therapists did not work well as a team to optimize patient outcomes. In 2017, WFF, Mekelle University, Washington University in St. Louis and Footsteps to Healing at Oregon Health & Science University partnered to begin providing team training in Critical Care and Quality Improvement best practices. Substantial 2018-2019 WFF funding launched a specialized Critical Care training program. Programming highlights that every team member brings value to patient care in high-pressure situations such as complex surgery, childbirth or post-operative complications. It is critical for providers to understand that each discipline plays an important role in helping women heal and recover. Gestational Trophoblastic Disease (GTD) Center In 2015, WFF launched development of a GTD Center at the Ayder Referral Hospital of Mekelle University. GTD is a group of conditions in which tumors grow inside a womans uterus (womb). Clinical data from Ayder Regional Referral Hospital suggests that GTD is a relatively common problem in the surrounding Tigray region at 1 case per 110 deliveries one of the highest rates in the world. In a recent worldwide survey, mortality rates for patients primarily treated at a GTD center was far lower than rates for those who received treatment elsewhere. Patient mortality rates were 2.1% at a GTD center and 8% for those who received primary treatment elsewhere. The GTD Center in Ethiopia became fully operational in 2016, and the team was able to cure 65 of 66 women through their dedicated treatment that first year. The program became self-funded in 2020 with approximately 120 women treated annually. Images courtesy of Joni Kabana 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? 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You can test drive various casinos completely risk-free, so you can feel confident about your choice before you make a single penny deposit. The KiMo Theatre Art Gallery will open DISCERN, a new art exhibition on Thursday, April 28 with a free public reception for the featured artists from 5 to 8pm. Discern: to distinguish, pick out, detect, glimpse. An exhibition of work by two artists that seek to explore and capture events and spaces, real or imagined, through photography and printmaking. Featuring the works of Laurel Lampela and Tom Richardson, the exhibition will run through June 19. Wisconsin native and Air Force Veteran Laura Lampela holds a Master's degree in Art Education from Wright State University and a Ph.D. from Ohio State. She is Professor of Art Education in the College of Fine Arts at UNM. Her work has been featured in solo, juried and invitational exhibitions from East to West Coast, and in numerous shows in New Mexico, where she won top awards. Tom Richardson attended the University of Florida and received his BFA. in Photography in 2000. In 2001, he moved to the southwest to attend the M.F.A. program at the University of New Mexico. Since graduating with an MFA., he has taught photography at the University of New Mexico and for the past seven years, at Media Arts Collaborative Charter School. His photographs have been displayed in US galleries and abroad. Visit kimotickets.com or call 311/711for more info. Apr 20, 2016 | By Benedict A group of NASA researchers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is assessing the potential of aerosol jet printing (direct-write manufacturing) for creating 3D printed detector assemblies. The technology could also be used to print antennas and other hardware directly onto spacecraft. As we have seen over the last few years, NASA, along with its assortment of partners and contractors, has been at the forefront of many exciting additive manufacturing projects: there is now, of course, a 3D printer in space, and spacecraft rocket engines of could soon be partially 3D printed. Sometimes, however, 3D printing is best used to perfect the smallest things, such as highly complex, densely populated electronic assemblies. In order to pack all of the necessary electronic components onto a circuit board, it can be advantageous to print the board rather than piece its individual components together. Technologists at the Goddard Space Flight Center are currently investigating the use of a 3D printing technique called aerosol jet printing, or direct-write manufacturing, assessing its potential ability to produce new detector assemblies. These printed assemblies, many of which could not be made with traditional assembly processes, could be built in a much shorter time periodas little as a day or twothan is usually required to build an assembly. "If we succeed, aerosol jet technology could define a whole new way to create dense electronic board assemblies and potentially improve the performance and consistency of electronic assemblies," explained Goddard technologist Beth Paquette. Aerosol jet manufacturing builds components from the ground up, depositing layer upon layer of material in accordance with a digital 3D model provided by the user on a computer. The 3D printing technique is, however, much more complex than the kinds seen on consumer-level 3D printers. Rather than extrude and deposit plastic, the high-tech process uses carrier gas and print heads to deposit a precisely controlled aerosol composed of metal particles, including silver, gold, platinum, or aluminum. A 3D printer of this kind can be incredibly useful for building electronic components, particularly very small, dense, and potentially unusually shaped ones like detector assemblies. It can print around bends, on spheres or on something flat, or on a flexible surface, which then can be flexed into the shape you want, said Paquette. Being able to 3D print in such fine detail is allowing the NASA researchers to create impossibly small electronic assemblies, with wires between each component smaller than they have ever been. We can make these wires microns in width, Paquette added. These lines are very small, down to 10 microns wide. These sizes arent possible using traditional circuit board manufacturing processes. The investigation has thus far shown that the 3D printing technology holds promise for electronic assemblies, and could someday be used to print antennas, wiring harnesses, and other hardware directly onto a spacecraft. Posted in 3D Printing Application Maybe you also like: Apr 21, 2016 | By Tess The ancient Semitic city of Palmyra, which thousands of years ago was a hub for commerce and trade and which in more recent times has been known for its impressive ruins and stunning ancient colonnades, temples, and arches, has been at the center of many recent news stories. For those perhaps unfamiliar, the ruined city of Palmyra has become a crucial point in the fight against ISIS, as the militant group, which held the ancient city up until last month, tragically destroyed many of the historic sites buildings. Now, on a more positive note, many efforts have been made to help rebuild (both symbolically and literally) the ancient city in an effort to stand in solidarity against ISIS. One such effort is being conducted by French startup Iconem, which specializes in 3D scanning technologies and has dedicated itself to digitally preserving archaeological remains that are in danger of destruction or disappearance since its founding in 2013. The company, which is working in collaboration with Syrias Directorate-General of Antiquities & Museums, has been deployed to the recently recaptured city of Palmyra in order to 3D scan and digitally restore five monuments that were badly damaged by ISIS forces: the temple of Bel, the temple of Baalshamin, the monumental arch, the valley of tombs, and the Palmyra museum. Using a number of techniques and processes, including photogrammetry, drone 3d scanning, and image comparisons, Iconem is working on reconstructing 3D models of the monuments, from both before and after the violent damage, which will allow the restoration efforts to see where exactly damage occurred, even down to the millimeter. The process, which began just days after the Syrian army retook Palmyra, consisted of sending drones equipped with cameras to the scene to take as many photographs as possible to create a fully comprehensive 3D model of the city. Since beginning, the team at Iconem has taken about 20,000 images of the site, which they have been able to stitch together using photogrammetry processes. Using an algorithm and spatial properties from the photos and the drones, Iconem is able to effectively triangulate the space, rendering not only the physical form of the scanned monuments, but their texture and colors as well. In an interview about the 3D scanning process, Yves Ubelmann, the founder of Iconem, explained how shocking the damage to the ruins actually was. We were the first on the scene, even ISISs installations were still there, it was shocking. Between 2006 and 2009, I had worked on the construction of a room in the Palmyra museum, which I found to be completely ravaged this time around. Seeing this vandalized and pillaged version of what we had constructed just years earlier really made me realize the violence of the destruction as well as the transient nature of the monuments. We often think that archaeological sites are eternal, but this is false, and this is what truly justifies the work we do. The 3D models of the ancient Syrian city will be made available through Iconem's growing Syrian Heritage online database, which was launched on March 16th and where you can currently look at the Citadel of Palmyra in 3D. The company's page, which you'll notice features a number of "coming soon" boxes, will complete its collection of twelve Syrian monuments and heritage sites by May 2016. Currently, they are featuring Palmyra, the Jableh Theater, Ugarit, and the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. Notably, not only will the 3D models of Palmyra be available to the public to consult and even 3D print, but they will be used to help in the restoration process by providing detailed records of the before and after. The restoration of Palmyra's monuments is expected to take up to five years. Iconems restorative effort is just one of many recent projects aimed at reconstructing Palmyra. Earlier this week, for instance, a 20 foot tall replica of Palmyras Arch de Triumph, made using 3D imaging technologies and constructed from Egyptian marble, was unveiled at Trafalgar Square in London. The project, which was presented by Londons mayor Boris Johnson, was a joint effort between Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and Dubais Museum of the Future. The arch replica, which will first travel from London to New York and Dubai for display, is expected to eventually be erected in Palmyra near the site of the original arch. Additionally, another effort, known as #NewPalmyra, has gained popularity in the maker community, as it has as its goal the open sharing of digital files surrounding the Syrian citys monuments and archaeological ruins. The digital archaeology project is hoping that by having 3D scans and models of the ancient citys ruins available to the public, there will be a platform through which people can 3D print models of the ruins and create a productive discourse about Syrias cultural heritage. Posted in 3D Scanning Maybe you also like: Apr 21, 2016 | By Benedict According to the head of its national Center for the Study of Natural Substances, Russia could use 3D printing and a patented gyroscopic mill to build a habitable base on the polar region of the Moon. Settlers would create a powdered 3D printing material from processed lunar regolith. Map of the lunar south pole These days, the science of space exploration is so strongly concerned with Marsand whether humans might someday form a colony on itthat the lunacy of the twentieth century Space Race seems all but forgotten. However, while the prospect of sending a manned spacecraft to the Red Planet is an extremely exciting one, Russias Center for the Study of Natural Substances has refocused some of its attention on Earths only natural satellite, the Moon, in the hope that a human settlement could be established there. According to Vyacheslav Bobin, head of Russia's Center for the Study of Natural Substances, the possibility of forming a human settlement on the Moon is not as remote as some people think. Location, however, is critical: while Moon rovers have thus far been deployed near the 130 C lunar equator, it is the polar regions of the Moon which could potentially provide a more suitable human base. Some scientists have speculated that there could be enormous sheets of ice in these colder areas of the Moon, providing humans with the water and oxygen necessary to survive. If Russia could locate a suitable spot for a human settlement, Bobin believes that 3D printing could be used to create lunar homes. This idea was originally proposed by the European Space Agency," he told World Crunch. The walls of a lunar settlement built from regolith mixed with periclase (MgO) are capable of withstanding extreme temperature fluctuations and provide protection against meteors3D printers are already capable of constructing a lunar settlement of approximately 600 cubic meters in volumeall in just seven to 10 days. Perhaps the biggest challenge that scientists would face when attempting to build a 3D printed lunar settlement would be attaining a suitable material. While lunar regoliththe layer of loose rocks and dust covering the Moons surfacecould form the basis of such a 3D printing material, processing the regolith into a usable form would be extremely difficult. Bobin, however, believes that Russias patented gyroscopic mill could hold the key. "Instead of using gravity to crush soil samples, the mill uses gyroscopic force, which is not dependent on gravity." he explained. "If we adopt these technologies, then we can truly be ahead of the world by a decade. Artist's impression of the Russian Luna-Glob module Russias new lunar program, which could lay the foundations for a 3D printed Moon habitat, envisions four launches, the first of which has been named Luna-Glob, or Luna-25. Luna-Glob will, in 2019, land in the Boguslawsky crater near the Moons southern pole, in order to obtain samples. The following three Luna journeys will explore further areas of the southern pole in order to determine their potential habitability. Posted in 3D Printing Application Maybe you also like: Apr 21, 2016 | By Benedict A team of researchers from the Princeton campus of Siemens Corporate Technology has created a cluster of spider-like 3D printing robots. The spider-bots, dubbed SiSpis, have been designed to work autonomously and collaboratively, and can even recharge themselves. Any 3D printing business worth its salt knows that with great 3D printing power comes great responsibility. It is for this reason, perhaps, that Siemens Corporate Technology has allocated a chunk of time and resources to the creation of a cluster of 3D printing spider-botsmachines which can work in teams to achieve large and complex tasks. While the additive manufacturing industry as a whole has not exactly been crying out for such a product, researchers say these robo-arachnids, build almost entirely in-house, could potentially revolutionize manufacturing in the automotive, aerospace, and shipbuilding industries. We are looking at using multiple autonomous robots for collaborative additive manufacturing of structures, such as car bodies, the hulls of ships and airplane fuselages, project leader Livio Dalloro told The Engineer. So what exactly are these SiSpis that could soon be 3D printing bits of our cars, planes, and boats? According to the company, each robot is powered by Siemens NX PLM software and comes equipped with a 3D printing extruder, designed to print polylactic acid, a biodegradable thermoplastic which can be derived from corn starch, sugarcane, and other natural sources. However, unlike your average 3D printer, SiSpis are fully mobile, as they sport a multitude of articulated legs. Furthermore, each bot has an onboard camera and laser scanner for interpreting its surrounding environment. These sensory capabilities enable SiSpis to know exactly where they are in relation to the 3D printing task at hand. These 3D printing robots have been designed to work either individually or as part of a group, with the latter option proving particularly useful for large 3D printing projects which would otherwise require a much longer time period. To enable this robotic 3D printing collaboration, the group Siemens researchers used a series of algorithms that allow for multi-robot task planning. For a given task, the 3D printing area can be divided up into vertical boxes, with each robot assigned its own series of boxes. This division of robotic labor enables the machines to cover even the most complex geometries. One of the most useful features of the 3D printing SiSpis is their ability to autonomously return to a charging station when their batteries start to run low, a task they are able to perform thanks to their onboard positioning technology. Additionally, when this process occurs, the recharging robot is able tag out for a fully charged replacement, so that there is virtually no break in the 3D printing process. There is currently no indication as to when and where Siemens might deploy these 3D printing robots, should the German corporation choose to do so. Earlier this year, the company invested 20.4 million ($23 million) in Swedens first metal 3D printing facility, whilst continuing its relationship with Airbus to develop 3D printing technology in the aerospace industry. Posted in 3D Printing Application Maybe you also like: Apr 21, 2016 | By Alec Remember Otzi the Iceman? A caveman who died 5,300 years ago, he was discovered in 1991 by a pair of hikers on Tyrolean Alpine peak in northern Italy. To prevent further decomposition, he was quickly locked away in a freezer in Italy, which made it difficult to study him. Thats why US paleo artist Gary Staab recently teamed up with Materialise to 3D print medical-grade replicas for display and research purposes. Their work is now complete, and three Otzi replicas are set to travel to the US: one to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science, and two more will go to the Cold Spring Harbor DNA Learning Center in New York (DNALC). Otzi the Icemans story is very remarkable. Upon his discovery, he became an overnight media sensation for being one of the best naturally preserved mummies ever found. Recent forensic evidence revealed he was actually murdered by an arrow on a lonely mountaintop at around the age of 45. The caveman, who was 1.6 meters (or 53) tall and weighed just 50 kilos, was found with clothing and equipment (including a copper axe and a bow and arrows) on his person. His last meal consisted of venison and ibex meat, and he was lactose intolerant, arthritic and infested with parasites. Remarkably, he was also covered in 61 tattoos. All this data obviously reveals quite a lot about bronze-age life, and it is believed Otzi holds a lot more information we dont know about yet. Below: an earlier model based on the Ice Man. But that information is hard to reach. Though virtually all cavemen have just decomposed like the rest of the world around them, Otzi was miraculously preserved in glacial ice. Upon his discovery, he was locked in a frozen crypt in Bolzano, Italy, to prevent further contamination and decomposition. This was necessary but unfortunate, as it severely limited research and educational opportunities. Thats exactly why paleo sculptor Gary Staab was given the opportunity to make medical-grade replicas. To realize this ambitious project, the Ice Mans body was first scanned using a CT machine though some body parts were missing. These parts, including some of the ribs, were painstakingly filled in by Materialises modeling engineers by mirroring other body parts. The reconstruction of the hands was also a challenge, since they could not be captured on CT scans, added the spokesperson from the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology in Bolzano, northern Italy, where the final models were unveiled. But this whole process wasnt without its challenges either. When I tried putting him back together from the scanned slices, the pieces didnt seem to match, recalled project engineer Eric Renteria. So I did some research and found his total height and compared that to the total height of all the pieces I had reconstructed. Once I saw that there was a mismatch, I moved his head piece into the correct spatial location, which revealed that there was a gap missing. As can be seen in the clip below, Materialise subsequently 3D printed the replica on their largest stereolithography 3D printer. The final models were then completed by Staab. Materialise process-segmented all of the scan data, made a fantastic accurate print, and I was able to add the details over the top of the print to turn it into an accurate, life-like replica of the original. It was another fantastic 3D collaboration with Materialise and its team of engineers, Staab said of the project. The 3D printed models are currently housed in the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology, but are ready to go on tour. The first Otzi is set to become part of a travelling exhibition that will tour throughout North America, beginning in the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science in Raleigh in October 2017. The other two models, meanwhile, will become educational tools at the Cold Spring Harbor DNA Learning Center in New York (DNALC). Hopefully, they will be able to reveal a lot more about life, death and humanity at the eve of the earliest civilizations. Posted in 3D Printing Application Maybe you also like: Jacob Mikanowski at The Point: In 1949, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia decided to honor Stalin by building a monument to him in Prague. It was going to be the largest statue of its kind in the world. A contest was held to decide who would have the honor of designing it. Every sculptor in Czechoslovakia was required to participate. Most sabotaged their chances on purpose by portraying the great leader in unsuitable poses, smiling or spreading his arms like Jesus. Otakar Svec who learned the art of sculpture as a child from his pastry-chef father, took the extra precaution of getting blind drunk. Unfortunately for him, he won anyway. For the next four years, party dignitaries visited Svec every week in his studio to offer their advice on his vision. In Svecs design, Stalin stood at the head of a line of people, who symbolized the People. Behind him followed a worker, an agronomist, a female partisan and a Russian soldier. Every time they came, they tried to make Stalin taller, and the followers lower. Construction began, granite blocks were carved, and still the critiques kept coming. Svecs wife couldnt stand the pressure, and committed suicide. At long last, the monument was done. The night before the unveiling, Svec took a ride to inspect his sculpture. The cab driver told him he wants to show him something. The lady partisan is holding onto the Russian soldiers fly. Whoever designed that is going to be shot for sure, he told Svec. He killed himself that same night. For fifty days, no one found his body. more here. The study found that over 18 months, those with diagnosed hearing loss had 33 percent higher health care costs than those without hearing loss. Those with untreated hearing loss spent $14,165, while those without hearing loss spent $10,629. The study did not suggest a cause-and-effect relationship between hearing loss and higher health costs, merely a statistical association. The study also found that of the 280,882 study subjects with hearing loss, just 36,323, or 13 percent, had received hearing services. That's even lower than the federal estimate that only 20 percent of those who could benefit from a hearing aid actually use one. The study's lead author, Annie N. Simpson, an assistant professor of Health Care Leadership and Management at the Medical University of South Carolina, emphasized that the important finding was that the patients in the study were middle-aged, not 50+. The study shows, she said in a statement, that the negative health-related effect of hearing loss "may manifest earlier than is generally recognized and may affect use of health care across the continuum of care." The reason for the higher bills, said Simpson in an email to AARP, could be because hearing difficulties cause some patients to avoid seeking timely medical care due to the stress of "trying to communicate with medical providers." Putting off going to the doctor could lead to problems becoming worse, she said, resulting in "a sicker patient who needs more care." In addition, communication barriers could also affect how well those with hearing problems followed directions for taking medication or recognized "symptoms that signal the need to seek care." The isolation that often results from hearing loss may "reduce necessary communications about health problems to health care providers and family members," she added. Clintons vote continued its steady increase among older groups of voters. She led Sanders 53 percent to 47 percent among those 30 to 44, 63 percent to 37 percent in the 45 to 64 age group and 73 to 27 percent for 65+. In the unofficial and nearly complete overall vote, Clinton led Sanders 58 percent to 42 percent. Sanders has said that his relatively poor showing among older voters has been the weirdest thing in the world throughout the campaign. What really bothers me is I spent half my life in Congress helping to lead the effort for senior citizens, Sanders said in an interview with Hollywood director Spike Lee. So we have a lot of work to do in terms of reaching out to seniors all across the board. We're figuring out how you get the message out there. On the GOP side, Trump won 62 percent of the vote from those 65 and older, and 64 percent of those 45 to 64. Those two age groups cast 75 percent of the total vote, compared with only 58 percent of the vote among New York Democrats. Northern football player donates hair to Wigs for Kids Zach Bohnenkamp has been growing his hair out since he arrived at Northern. Thursday he had 12 inches of hair cut and donated to Wigs for Kids. Pilgangoora Tenement Acquisition & Project Update Perth, April 21, 2016 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Altura Mining Limited ( ASX:AJM ) ( ALTAF:OTCMKTS ) ("Altura" or the "Company") is pleased to announce the execution of transfer documents for the E45/2363 tenement at its 100% Altura owned Pilgangoora Lithium Project in Western Australia's Pilbara region. The additional tenement has been acquired from Atlas Operations Pty Ltd (Atlas) and provides further exploration ground to expand Altura's strategically located tenement package of 11,569 hectares (see Figure 1 over). Transfer documents have been submitted for approval by the Western Australian Department of Mines and Petroleum. ALTURA PILGANGOORA LITHIUM PROJECT (100% ALTURA) - Acquisition of E45/2363 from Atlas Operations Pty Ltd (Atlas) - Expanded tenement package now totals 11,569 hectares covering three (3) Exploration Licences, one (1) Prospecting Licence and two (2) Mining Lease Applications over highly prospective lithium ground - Diamond drilling program commenced to provide feedstock for further metallurgical testing and geotechnical data for the planned mining area - Evaluation underway on prospective areas of the overall tenement package The completion of the Feasibility Study (FS) was a significant milestone as the mining development is fast tracked towards production in Q3 2017. Altura would also like to take this opportunity to correct a statement in the ASX release of 11 April 2016 where the release incorrectly stated the Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS) would be completed in Q3 2017 - the DFS is scheduled for completion in Q3 2016. Altura has also commenced a drilling program at Pilgangoora with the immediate focus to deliver additional spodumene ore feedstock for additional metallurgical testing and geotechnical assessment to support the mine design parameters. In addition to the current drill program Altura has plans underway to conduct a multi-focus supplementary drilling program focussed on delivering the following: - Upgrading existing Inferred Resources to Indicated Resources within the initial pit shell - once upgraded to Indicated Resources, the Ore Reserve estimate can be expanded to include this inventory with the application of modifying factors - Resource extension and exploration drilling - given Altura's vast tenement holdings and increased knowledge of the spodumene rich pegmatite trends the Company will expand its focus in the northern and western tenement sections of E45/2287 with an aim to adding resources to the existing inventory Refer to Figure 1 in link below for resource target areas to be tested by further drilling and proximity to other Pilgangoora lithium discoveries. Significant potential exists to increase both the current mineral resource of 35.7 million tonnes (see Table 2) and ore reserve estimate via upgrading portions of the current inferred resources in order to convert to probable ore reserves and additional exploration drilling in previously untested areas of the tenements. Altura's Pilgangoora deposit will be extracted by open pit methods enhanced by the shallow and thick mineralisation allowing spodumene ore to be mined from the commencement of mining. The FS has highlighted a very attractive LOM strip ratio of 2.7:1 providing Altura with a very low operational mining cost. The project contains a Maiden Ore Reserve estimate of 18.47Mt of Probable Reserves (see Table 1) which underpins the initial 12+ year mine plan. Low grade ore stockpiled during mining will be processed after year 12 until Year 15. Altura believes that any remaining approvals required in order to commence the development can be achieved within the planned development timeline. Altura's Pilgangoora Lithium project is ideally located in the well established Pilbara mining region of Western Australia with close proximity access to port and Asian markets. Production is planned for third quarter 2017 after a nine month construction period which will place Altura in an elite group of near term lithium supply companies. The Pilgangoora Lithium Project area is approximately 123km drive from the town of Port Hedland. Road access to the site is via the Great Northern Highway and then Shire roads and station tracks. The Pilgangoora Mining Lease Application tenements, covering the resource modelling area, are M45/1230 and M45/1231 and cover an area of 394 hectares. The objective is to develop the Pilgangoora Lithium Project on the basis of a concentrator plant producing spodumene concentrate at 6% Li2O from an average feed to a plant of between 1.15 - 1.20% Li2O. The FS was completed at the end of Q1 2016 and then underwent rigorous internal and external peer reviews earlier this month before its public release on 11 April 2016. The Pilgangoora Lithium Project seeks to develop mining, processing, logistics and support infrastructure to commence mining and processing of 1.4Mtpa of ore to produce approximately 215,000 tonnes of lithium spodumene concentrate per annum, commencing Q3 2017. The overall life of mine (LOM) is expected to be 15 years, based on an indicated and inferred resource of 35.7Mt (JORC 2012). Concentrate will be exported by ship from Port Hedland to lithium producers, predominantly in China, for further processing into a wide range of lithium chemicals, including lithium carbonate (standard and battery grade), lithium hydroxide, lithium metal, and lithium chloride. For further information on the Feasibility Study, please refer to the ASX announcement on 11 April 2016. To view tables and figures, please visit: http://abnnewswire.net/lnk/48JVYA73 About Altura Mining Ltd Altura Mining Limited (ASX:AJM) is building a leading position in the independent supply of lithium raw materials, with a world class lithium project at Pilgangoora ready to set the platform and be the first new hard rock lithium product supplier in 2017. The Altura team has a track record of delivering mining projects with Pilgangoora the most advanced stage, near term producing lithium project; solid offtake partners and a market providing substantial growth opportunities to ensure positive shareholder returns. ACAs library of educational tools help members improve their business practices. ACA also holds the most popular industry conferences and offers credentialing for collectors, attorneys, and more. ACAs Training Zone subscription gives agencies access to almost all of our education for one low cost. IMGCAP(1)]Dean Dorton Allen Ford, a full-service accounting and consulting firm headquartered in Lexington, Ky., announced this week that Paula Hanson, director of tax services at the firm, has been honored with the Martha Layne Collins Leadership Award for 2016. The award looks to recognize Kentucky women of achievement who inspire other women of the state through their personal and professional lives. Hanson will receive the award at Women Leading Kentuckys 17th annual Womens Business and Leadership Conference next month in Lexington. Paula Hanson is much more than just a partner working at a regional accounting firm," said David Bundy, Dean Dorton president and CEO, in a statement. "She works tirelessly both as a dedicated business advisor to her clients as well as an enthusiastic and effective member of the community around her. She embodies the true spirit of leadership and philanthropy. Her passion to serve the clients and the community along with the will to make a difference is a truly unique quality. Paula is certainly a role model for her friends, family, and community. In addition to her tax planning and estate planning University of Kentucky Athletics Committee, member University of Kentucky School of Accountancy Advisory Council American Heart Association, board of directors Leadership Kentucky, board of directors Women Leading Kentucky, advisory board member The Fund for Transforming Education in Kentucky, board of directors Commerce Lexington, past chairman of the board, current board member Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, past treasurer of board of directors United Way, past chairman Junior Achievement, past president Lexington Forum, past president YMCA Metro Board, past treasurer Governors Scholars Program, past treasurer Leadership Kentucky, Class of 1995 The Martha Layne Collins Leadership Award was created in 1999 and first presented to former governor Martha Layne Collins for her contributions to the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Women across the state are nominated each year to receive the award, with an appointed committee reviewing each application to gauge nominee's contributions to her profession and community. For more on the Layne Collins Leadership Award, head to Women Leading Kentucky's site here. The House passed a bill Thursday prohibiting bonuses for IRS employees until the Treasury develops a better customer service strategy, the last of six bills passed this week affecting IRS bonuses, hiring practices and policies. H.R. 4890, the IRS Bonuses Tied to Measurable Metrics Act, sponsored by Rep. Pat Meehan, R-Pa., would prohibit the IRS from paying bonuses to employees until the Treasury Secretary develops and implements a comprehensive customer service strategy that puts taxpayers first. "When American taxpayers send a significant portion of their hard-earned paychecks to the IRS every year, they deserve high-quality customer service and the assurance that their dollars will be spent appropriately, said House Ways and Means Committee chairman Kevin Brady, R-Texas. His committee passed the four of the bills last week, and the House voted to approve those and two others Thursday (see House Committee Passes Bills Cracking Down on IRS). The other five measures passed were: H.R. 3724, Ensuring Integrity in the IRS Workforce Act of 2015, sponsored by Rep. Kristi Noem, R-S.D., would prohibit the IRS from rehiring employees who were fired for misconduct. H.R. 4885, IRS Oversight While Eliminating Spending Act of 2016, sponsored by Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., would repeal the IRSs current authority to spend the user fees it collects without congressional approval. The proposed legislation would restore to Congress full authority over how the IRS spends those resources. The proposal requires the Treasury to deposit the funds from user fees into a general fund that would be used for improving taxpayer services. H.R. 1206, No Hires for the Delinquent IRS Act, sponsored by Rep. David Rouzer, R-N.C., would suspend the hiring of new IRS employees unless the Treasury Secretary certifies that no IRS employees have serious delinquencies with respect to their own tax obligations. H. Res. 673, expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the IRS should provide printed copies of IRS Publication 17 to taxpayers free of charge, sponsored by Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis. H.R. 4903, to prohibit the use of funds by the IRS to target U.S. citizens for exercising any right guaranteed under the First Amendment to the Constitution, sponsored by Rep. Rick Allen, R-Ga. "The six commonsense proposals we passed this week will make the IRS more efficient, more accountable, and more professional, Brady said in a statement. I appreciate my colleagues' leadership on these bills. The Ways and Means Committee will continue to take steps to make sure the IRS focuses on its important missionserving the American people." Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich., the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, objected to the legislation tying IRS employee bonuses to the development of a customer service strategy and pointed to the White Houses opposition to the Republican-sponsored IRS legislation. The problem is not a lack of strategy, it is a lack of resources, Levin said in a statement. The House Republicans are trying to pass the buck because they are not providing the bucks necessary for adequate taxpayer services. To say no bonuses for any of the 80,000 IRS employees because the House Republicans are not doing their job is wrong. They are requesting approval of a plan by the agencys Inspector General that does not carry out this function. That is why the White House says in opposition: Legislation constraining the IRS's ability to retain and recruit highly qualified employees is not needed and could be counterproductive to the Service's mission. This place under Republican leadership has been bankrupt. There is a long list of things that this Congress has failed to get donestopping tax inversions, passing a budget, addressing Zika, helping the people of Flint, and the list goes on and on. So the Republicans come here and say the IRS isnt doing its job. Youre not doing your job. Dont go after an agency for not being able to answer the phone when youre cutting the lines of resources. Its outrageous. The blame is on your doorstep. Dont try and shift it. The Senate Finance Committee passed legislation Wednesday to protect taxpayers from identity theft and tax fraud, but without a provision for regulating tax preparers. The legislation, known as the Taxpayer Protection Act of 2016, includes provisions such as providing a sole point of contact for identity theft victims to help them recover their stolen or unfairly suspended tax refunds. Another provision would require the Internal Revenue Service to issue a report, in consultation with the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, to protect consumers from phone scams in which criminals pretend to be IRS agents. The bill would also reform the IRSs communications with whistleblowers, allowing the IRS to exchange information with whistleblowers when doing so would be helpful in an investigation and requiring the IRS to notify whistleblowers of the status of their claims. Another provision would prohibit rehiring IRS employees who have been suspended for misconduct and clarify that the IRS commissioner has the power to fire senior executives who have failed in their performance or committed serious misconduct. During the markup of the legislation Wednesday, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., reiterated his call for restoring a provision to the legislation giving the IRS authority to regulate tax preparers (see Senate Committee Drops Tax Preparer Regulation from Identity Theft Bill). Federal courts invalidated the IRSs earlier attempt to establish a Registered Tax Return Preparer program back in 2013 in the case of Loving v. IRS, saying the IRS lacked the statutory authority from Congress to mandate tax preparer testing and continuing education. The IRS has since established a voluntary program known as the Annual Filing Season Program. If this legislation, when it hits the Senate floor, doesnt allow for minimum standards to crack down on crooked, fraudulent, and incompetent return preparers, it will be one more example of lawmakers in Congress willfully failing to protect vulnerable taxpayers, Wyden said in a statement Wednesday. Right now there are no minimum national standards whatsoever for paid tax return preparers. No rules to prevent rank incompetence. No safeguards to keep con artists from falsifying returns and leaving their victims in financial ruin. It just doesnt pass the smell test to say everythings A-OK with a system that has taxpayers handing over their Social Security and bank account numbers to people who meet no standards at all. The committee chairman, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, conceded that the legislation doesnt go far enough, but pointed out that it has many important provisions. The bill well debate and hopefully report today consists of 18 separate provisions and represents a significant step forward in the effort to address and hopefully prevent stolen identity refund fraud, said Hatch. That said, none of us are under any illusions that this legislation will solve the problem entirely. For now, our goal is to make it as difficult as possible for fraudsters to get away with these types of crimes. The bill aims to put more tools in the proverbial toolbox, and, going forward, the committee will remain vigilant as we seek to identify additional measures that will allow us to detect and prevent stolen identity refund fraud. And, we will also continue to oversee the activities of the IRS and the private tax preparation and processing industry to ensure that these growing problems are adequately and appropriately addressed by using the tools that will be provided by this bill. Hatch pointed to a 2015 survey from the American Institute of CPAs in which 63 percent of CPAs said that at least one of their clients was a victim of tax identity theft in the 2015 filing season. With the theft of sensitive taxpayer information at large retailers, insurers, and other entities across the United States, as well as the recent breach of the IRSs Get Transcript and IP PIN tools, we will almost certainly see this trend continue in the future unless further action is taken, said Hatch. The continued and heightened threats to taxpayers and the tax system from cybercriminals that we heard about at our hearing last week is yet another reason for the committee to act today to move this bipartisan legislation forward. The AICPA issued a statement in support of the legislation and said it shared the goal of elevating the competency and ethical conduct of tax preparers. The AICPA welcomes the Senate Finance Committees action to prevent identity theft and tax refund fraud, said AICPA vice president of taxation Edward Karl. We have a longstanding position of supporting provisions that mitigate tax identity theft, including expansion of the Identity Protection PIN system to all taxpayers, making it a felony for a person to use a stolen identity to file a return, increased electronic filing of returns by paid tax return preparers, and reports to Congress by the GAO about identity theft and tax refund fraud. We also share the goal of the committee and its leaders to elevate the competency and ethical conduct of tax return preparers. The AICPA said it also backed Wydens proposal. We are especially grateful to Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the committees ranking member, for offering an amendment calling for a practical approach to preparer regulation, said Karl. His proposal contained many of the AICPAs recommendations to protect the public from incompetent and fraudulent tax preparers, including granting the IRS the authority to revoke Preparer Tax Identification Numbers (PTINs), requiring only those signing a return to obtain a PTIN and mitigating marketplace confusion by requiring unlicensed PTIN holders who advertise to direct taxpayers to the IRS website where differences between preparers are explained. We support the passage of the Taxpayer Protection Act of 2016 and we look forward to working with Chairman Hatch and Ranking Member Wyden to address preparer regulation and protect the interests of the American taxpayer. The Senate Finance Committee voted to pass the legislation Wednesday. Today the Finance Committee acted in a strong bipartisan fashion to advance commonsense legislation that will ensure better stewardship of taxpayer dollars and shield Americans from fraudsters seeking to steal identities and claim tax refunds that dont belong to them, said Hatch. Our efforts today further underscore the success weve had at the Committee this Congress, where weve now cleared nearly 40 bipartisan bills. I look forward to continuing to build upon this success and working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to advance smart legislation, like the measures we voted on today, and promote a strong, pro-growth agenda that will benefit the American people. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said the committee had approved several of his provisions, including better IRS treatment of tax fraud whistleblowers, enhanced rights of taxpayers whose personal information is improperly accessed by IRS employees, extended time for taxpayers to contest an IRS levy, greater protections for taxpayers where the IRS improperly levied a taxpayers individual retirement account, electronic record retention at the IRS, and requiring mandatory e-filing by tax-exempt organizations for greater transparency. The IRS needs to put out the welcome mat for tax fraud whistleblowers, not treat them like skunks at a picnic, Grassley said. With congressional oversight, the IRS has done a better job of whistleblower treatment than before but it still needs to communicate more with whistleblowers. These individuals are less likely to come forward if they know they might be in the dark about their case for years at a time. Also, employer retaliation of whistleblowers is a barrier. The provisions approved today will help with these problems. Separately, right now, taxpayers are often in the dark when IRS employees improperly access or distribute their confidential information. The fix approved today requires the IRS to notify a taxpayer when an IRS employee is disciplined for improper access. Thats a step in the right direction for respecting taxpayer rights. LinTeractive, the digital division of MullenLowe Lintas Group, has bagged the mandate for digital marketing of L&T across all its businesses, including performance media buys. After a multi-agency pitch that saw leading national agencies compete, L&T chose LinTeractive as its digital partner based on its strategic framework, which provides a roadmap for companies looking to be digital future ready in communications. Larsen & Toubro (L&T) is often referred to as the Builder of the India of the 21st Century, and the company that carries the flag of India Inc. across multiple geographies. For over seven decades, L&T has been making a critical contribution to high impact sectors of the economy Defense, IT, Infrastructure, Construction and Heavy Engineering. L&T was looking at the digital medium as a force multiplier for its strategic communications. Commenting on the appointment, Deepak Morada, Vice President - Corporate Brand Management & Communications, L&T, said, Digital is a key focus area and as a group we wanted to go beyond looking at it as just another medium, truly harnessing the power of digital to change the conversation. At L&T, were at the forefront of technology across multiple domains and industries we aim to provide anequally cutting edgeexperience to our customers, and we have reason to believe that LinTeractive possesses the requisite skills and experience. The challenges of digital for a large conglomerate is not a simple thing, but Sumanta Ganguly, Executive Vice President, LinTeractive, feels that it needs to start with changing how digital is perceived across themultiple stakeholders inside the organisation. On the state of digital marketing in India, Ganguly commented, The business of digital in India for most brands today remains an additional check box a thing to do. At LinTeractive we look at digital as a way of doing things instead. With L&T we sensed an opportunity to deploy the power of this concept in response to the increasingly digital world of today. On partnering L&T, Vikas Mehta, Group CMO & President Marketing Services, MullenLowe Lintas Group, said, In the past 70-odd years, the L&T Group has played a pivotal role in building things that are at the core of todays India. During these 70-odd years, Lintas has partnered hundreds of brands into becoming a part of Indias popular culture. The opportunity to collaborate with L&T, as they aim to re-imagine their businesses for a digital world, is a matter of great pride for the MullenLowe Lintas Group. We realise the tremendous responsibility that L&T has entrusted LinTeractive with. Omnicom Media Group India has appointed Sudhir Nair as Managing Director Digital. In his new role, Nair will drive the digital agenda for the network and its brands OMD and PHD as well as lead its growth and momentum. A digital evangelist with more than 15 years of experience, Nair moves to Omnicom Media Group from Grey Global, where he had set up their digital offering incorporating a holistic and comprehensive set of services for leading brands across multiple sectors. Post Grey, Nair set up a full service agency 21N78E. Prior to that, he had spent time at Duckshake.com, Booz Allen & Hamilton, Repro India and VANS Info & Investor Services. Nairs appointment is effective immediately and he will be based in Mumbai. He moves to the position vacated by his predecessor Avinash Jhangiani, who has taken the role Chief Innovation Officer within Omnicom Media Group India. Commenting on Nairs appointment, Jasmin Sohrabji, CEO India & SEA, Omnicom Media Group, said, As a network, Omnicom Media Group has witnessed a huge growth in digital across all platforms search, display, social and mobile offerings in India. Sudhirs proven track record of delivery will keep our momentum going with focus on further growth and innovation. Sudhir will work collaboratively with the business units and agency leads to further our digital mandate. As a network, we are committed to investing in talent to ensure that we are ahead of the curve when it comes to digital expertise and we are thrilled to have Sudhir on board. On his new role, Nair said, Digital has transformed the advertising and marketing industry for the better. Thanks to the digital revolution, customer engagement has been taken to another level, leading to more meaningful brand and customer connections. In this exciting landscape, I am delighted to join Omnicom Media Group, a network at the forefront of digital innovation. I am looking forward to working closely with both the experienced as well as young talent that exists within the agency to strengthen our offering and make it more future facing. The Prime Minister today announced a deal worth almost 1 billion to UK manufacturing and the aerospace industry, confirming an order with Garuda Indonesia for the purchase of 14 Airbus A330-900neos. Above: (left to right) Rolls-Royce President - Civil Aerospace Eric Schulz; CEO of Garuda Indonesia, Arif Wibowo; UK Prime Minister David Cameron; Airbus COO Tom Williams and President of Indonesia, His Excellency Joko Widodo pictured after signing the deal at 10 Downing Street in London. It was signed at Downing Street with the President of Indonesia, His Excellency Joko Widodo and will secure jobs at Airbus facilities in Filton and Broughton. The Prime Minister, Rt Hon. David Cameron MP said: This deal underlines the increasing importance of our ties with Indonesia - a fast growing economy and set to become the seventh largest in the world by 2030. We are the fifth biggest investors in Indonesia and our relationship has more untapped potential. We want to encourage more British businesses to seize on these opportunities and we will continue to support them by banging the drum for British skills and expertise. Airbus Chief Operating Officer Tom Williams said: We are delighted to welcome Garuda Indonesia as a new customer for the A330neo. The A330neo will bring a range of benefits from unbeatable operating economics including significant reductions in fuel consumption, lower maintenance costs and extended range capability. The aircraft will have Airbus all new Airspace cabin which will ensure the A330 continues to be a benchmark for passengers and airlines alike. Paul Everitt, Chief Executive of ADS Group says: Congratulations to Airbus, this order represents great news for UKs Aerospace industry which supports high-skill, high-value employment throughout the country. It also reinforces the UKs position as a global leader within aerospace, able to compete successfully in tough international markets. The deal is the latest milestone in a long standing partnership dating back more than 30 years, when the airline took delivery of its first Airbus A300. Arif Wibowo, CEO of Garuda Indonesia said: We are pleased to announce that we continue our long-standing relationship with Airbus. Both Garuda Indonesia and Airbus fully understand the aim of the deal as a long-term strategy to win the global challenge. Arif explained, The A330neo represents a more-efficient future for Garuda Indonesia. This order restructuring is believed to support our continued commitment to deliver the most modern, comfortable and excellent air travel service to all customers as well as to strengthen the sustained positive growth and business expansion of the company. Furthermore, we are confident that this latest technology aircraft will support us to compete better in the industry. Rolls-Royce also won an order worth $1.2 billion for Trent 7000 engines and TotalCare service support from Garuda Indonesia, signed in London by Mr M. Arif Wibowo, President and CEO, Garuda Indonesia, and Eric Schulz, Rolls-Royce, President Civil Aerospace and welcomed by Mr Widodo and UK Prime Minister David Cameron. The engines will power the 14 Airbus A330neo aircraft. The Trent 7000, the exclusive power plant for the A330neo, is the seventh member of the Trent family which has become the engine of choice in the wide body market over the last 20 years. The Trent 7000 is scheduled to enter service in 2017. The order replaces an existing order for seven A330-300 aircraft powered by Trent 700 engines. In recognition of the longer term growth potential of Garuda and Indonesian civil aviation, both parties also agreed to explore maintenance cooperation and skills development opportunities. Mr Schulz said: Indonesia has great economic prospects and we are committed to supporting its future growth in air travel. This year marks the 20th anniversary since we first provided Trent engines to Garuda Indonesia and we are proud to power this latest expansion to their fleet with the very latest member of our Trent engine family. In creating this family, we have benefitted from UK investment in innovation across materials, aerodynamics, noise, control systems and manufacturing technologies. Mr Wibowo said: This contract further deepens our relationship with Rolls-Royce and we look forward to bringing these new aircraft into service. Garuda Indonesia currently operates 24 Trent 700-powered A330 aircraft with a further two on order. B-52 integrates, trains with French allies A B-52 Stratofortress from Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, conducted a long-range training sortie April 20, to train and integrate with the French air force. The B-52 also participated in an aerial review near Paris to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the formation of the Lafayette Escadrille. This mission demonstrates the flexibility that defines the bomber leg of the triad by incorporating operational training with an important public commemoration of U.S. support to our oldest ally, said Adm. Cecil D. Haney, the U.S. Strategic Command commander. The integration of our strategic bomber force with the French air force is central to our shared commitment to promoting global security and stability in todays complex and dynamic environment. The Lafayette Escadrille was a squadron in the French air force during World War I composed of American pilots, who served as the core of experience for the nascent American Air Corps that was activated in Europe following U.S. entry into the war. One of nine Defense Department unified combatant commands, STRATCOM has global strategic missions, assigned through the Unified Command Plan, which include strategic deterrence; space operations; cyberspace operations; joint electronic warfare; global strike; missile defense; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; combating weapons of mass destruction; and analysis and targeting. US military delivers 30 tons of supplies for Japan earthquake relief The U.S. military has delivered more than 30 tons of supplies to help the people of Japan following two powerful, deadly earthquakes there, a Pentagon spokesman said here April 21. Since April 18, the U.S. military has supported the government of Japan's relief efforts with eight MV-22 Osprey sorties, four C-130 Hercules sorties and two UC-35 Citation sorties, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis told reporters. The supplies include food, water, and sanitation and shelter kits, Davis said. Heavy rainfall forced Osprey sorties in the Kumomoto area to be canceled April 21, although they are expected to resume tomorrow, he added. U.S. personnel, ships, aircraft support effort There are about 130 Defense Department personnel supporting the overall effort in Kumamoto, Davis noted. U.S. ships from Sasebo Naval Base, C-130s from Yokota Air Base, and Ospreys from bases in Okinawa are participating in the humanitarian operation, he said. "We are seeing a decrease in the number of requests for U.S. airlift and do expect that U.S. support operations should wrap up in the coming days," Davis said. A magnitude-6.5 earthquake hit the region of Kumamoto on April 14; and a magnitude-7.3 quake struck the southern island of Kyushu two days later. Buildings have collapsed, and the second quake triggered landslides. There has also been a series of aftershocks. Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, the closest U.S. airfield to the relief effort, is serving as a joint hub. In a statement, the commander of U.S. Forces Japan, Air Force Lt. Gen. John Dolan, said the U.S. military stands with Japan during this difficult time. "To the people of Japan and the region affected by this tragedy, we send our heartfelt sympathies," Dolan said. Introspection We were all created different. We think differently, perceive things differently and interpret success and failure through very different lenses. At each persons unique period in life, they begin to look back, wondering if they truly made a difference. For many, that difference can only be defined by ones self, regardless of achievements, big or small. The should have, could have and would have perspectives sometimes occupy our thoughts. During this sometimes lonesome period, even the highest achievers and strongest leaders also go through a period of introspection. Introspection has such a powerful impact on a persons life, not just the wise, but everyone -- even our lowest ranking Airmen or family members -- all have stories awaiting the best sellers list. As our great Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Welsh III has said, Every Airman has a story. Over my 53 continuous years with the Air Force, first as the son of a great senior NCO, and now as the longest serving enlisted Airman on active duty, to which I owe Welsh and Chief Master Sgt. of the Air Force James A. Cody my deepest gratitude, I've seen a lot of historic advances. It is through my own personal and professional introspection that I see many of our Air Forces greatest attributes of yesteryear and today being centered on its promises to the American public, sometimes despite tremendous odds. Through the diligence and dedication of our total force, we have always been successful. Those attributes and/or actions developed during the 1960s and 1970s, in my view, were about building our force with the best sustainable force to fight the current and future wars. We addressed warfighting, sustainment, readiness, quality of life and training and education, with the strategy to win indecisively. Not one Airman, nor his or her family members, was not aware of what alert status we were in, whether they were overseas or stateside, in church service or at a base matinee -- they knew! The 1980s and 1990s brought significant change, paved by all those professional service members serving before us and some with us today. The Berlin Wall came down and America began to reinvest precious assets elsewhere, sometimes contrary to the advice of senior Air Force leaders. History will determine if that calculus was right, but our Air Force never took its eyes off of America, Americans, or American interest, as witnessed in the multitude of named and unnamed operations, campaigns and task forces. We perfected the art of an expeditionary force with our speed, agility, flexibility and responsiveness being second to none. Our battle dress uniform was often mistaken for other services back then, but our objectives were successful and our honor remained humble to the American people. Todays Airmen are well versed on the contribution of being an expeditionary Airman, and so are their families. Former Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norty Schwartz once said, The importance of an Airman is not measured by their proximity to the target. That said, every Airman in the total force is important in todays fight and so are their families. The adversaries today believe they enjoy something more challenging than experienced by our forefathers and that is asymmetrical surprise, cheap cyber-attacks, strategic communications and hybrid warfare. Those adversaries have not read the last word of our motto -- win, and in order to do this we must never forget that every Airman is important and every talent is needed. One of our greatest focuses today is on our weapon system our human capital. Although transparent to some, tremendous efforts have been underway by our leaders in addressing fair and impartial inclusion, leveraging cultural strengths in specialties while balancing the force through gender and racial initiatives to name just a few -- all are solution and results focused. There are no smoking guns and leaders are transparent in saying we have much work to do. We are a reflection of the citizens we serve, and honing in on all talent, regardless of what you look like, are vital to remaining the worlds greatest Air Force. Looking back over the past several decades, we've grown as an Air Force, unmatched by no other. As an American Airman, whose introspect has made him a better person, I am mindful of the great opportunities my Air Force has given me, because through opportunities came success for me and the Airmen I stand side by side with! Aim high fly, fight and win! AF Reserve airlift squadron plays part in Saber Junction 16 The Air Force Reserves 815th Airlift Squadron returned here April 20 after participating in the U.S. Army Europes Saber Junction 16 exercise since April 5. Two crews from the 815th AS showcased the C-130J Super Hercules airdrop and air-land insertion capability by airdropping 112 of the 3,095 paratroopers and providing 60 of the 200 short tons delivered during the exercise. While Saber Junction took place in Germany, the 815th AS along with air assets from other nations as well as various Air Force active-component, Reserve and Air National Guard units were staged at Aviano Air Base, Italy. The annual exercise tests the readiness of the 173rd Airborne Brigade and this year it included the largest airdrop of personnel in Europe since World War II, said Lt. Col. Stephanie Brown, an 815th AS aircraft commander. Saber Junction is a large-scale exercise to demonstrate the 173rds combat capability and interoperability, Brown said. Our piece of this was to provide airlift to their paratroopers and to also do tactical insertion of their ground equipment onto a small STOL, or short takeoff and landing field. For the first portion of the exercise, Brown and her crew airdropped the 173rd AB commander and 55 Soldiers who were the logistics specialists to handle and protect the ground assets being air dropped, she said. Maj. Jeff Smith, another aircraft commander, and his crew took part in a five-ship formation of C-130Js, which included an aircraft from Britain. We made several passes dropping personnel, he said. It was awesome to see this mass insertion of troops. The last three days included tactical insertion, Brown said. Aircrews delivered heavy equipment to include five Humvees, three mortar carts and an additional 40 personnel. We landed on dirt strip in the middle of nowhere, Brown said. It was this tiny 3,000-foot strip surrounded by trees. We would off load as quickly as possible and take off again. Smith added that landing on the rough gravel runway with heavy loads of equipment was a challenge, but one the crews excelled at. The loadmasters did an outstanding job in off-loading aircraft really fast, he said. We were wheels down, wheels up in about 12 minutes. It was well executed. An H-model C-130 is limited to hauling about 30,000 pounds of equipment whereas the newer J-model the 815th AS fly brought in loads as heavy as 47,000 pounds. We can bring in more, and we can do it faster because of our times in route. And, its a lot safer from a combat perspective, because we can get off the ground faster, Brown said. There is a great deal of capability in what the 815th (AS) can bring to the fight. Reflecting on their training over the last couple of weeks, Brown and Smith said they were honored to take part in such a large-scale training event. To be part of something that magnanimous was amazing, Brown said. The Army put forth a lot of equipment and personnel and obviously dedication to enable this to happen. And then, of course, 21 aircraft from 10 different active, Reserve and Air National Guard units were key to the success of providing the Army the force and the supplies they needed. Morocco-GCC Summit : an engagement for a global partnership between the two parties Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud asserted the GCCs keenness to put their bilateral relations with Morocco, at the highest levels, in all political, economic, military and security-related aspects. This meeting is but a reflection of the special and distinct relations, binding GCC member states and Morocco, King Salman said in a keynote address as he chaired today at Al-Diryah Palace the summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) leaders and the King of Morocco. As we appreciate your fraternal countrys supporting stances for the causes of our countries, recalling, with reverence its participation, in Kuwait liberation war, its initiative to take part, in the Determination Storm, Islamic Military Coalition to combat terrorism, confirming our solidarity and support of all political and security-related issues, concerning your fraternal country, atop of which the Moroccan Sahara issue and our total rejection of any act that may affect Moroccan supreme interests, King Salman stated addressing King Mohammed VI of Morocco. Your Majesty, I would like to stress that we pay a great attention to tackle Islamic and Arab nations issues, including the Palestinian cause and the Syrian and Libyan crises, confirming our keenness on Iraqs security and stability, he added. In Yemen, King Salman said,We are keen to find a solution, in accordance with the GCC initiative, outputs of the national dialogue and the Security Councils resolution no. (2216), hoping that the talks, in Kuwait, would achieve positive progress, in this regard. This meeting will unify our stance, enhance our stances and promote our relations to more wider domains, to best serve the interests of our countries and peoples, King Salman concluded. King Mohammed VI of Morocco delivered a speech in which he expressed gratitude to Custodian of the Two Holy King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud for hosting this important summit and all the leaders of the GCC countries for their participation in it. The Moroccan king hailed the strength of the Moroccan-Gulf partnership and pointed out that todays meeting comes to give a strong impetus to this partnership. The king of Morocco stressed that the holding of this summit is not against any particular party, especially the allies. Moroccan-Gulf partnership derives its strength from a firm belief in the common destiny and the convergence of views on issues of common concern, King Mohammed VI said. The Moroccan-Gulf partnership is not the result of transient interests or calculations. Rather, it derives its strength from a firm belief that ours is a common destiny and that we hold the same views on issues of common concern, the Sovereign said in a speech delivered, Wednesday in Riyadh, at the opening ceremony of the Morocco-GCC Summit. The King said that thanks to their shared determination, Morocco and GCC countries have managed to lay the foundations for a solid strategic partnership, which is the result of fruitful bilateral cooperation. Despite the geographical distance, we are bound by solid relations that, in addition to language, religion and civilization, include a commitment to the same values and principles and the same constructive policies, the Monarch stressed. The Sovereign recalled that Morocco and GCC countries are also facing the same challenges and threats, particularly with regard to security. Regarding the Morocco-GCC Summit, King Mohammed VI noted that it reflects the solid fraternal bonds and mutual esteem between us, as well as the close cooperation and solidarity between our countries. He added, we are therefore meeting today to give strong impetus to this partnership, which has gained in maturity to the extent that we now need to lay down an institutional framework for it, and provide it with practical mechanisms. The King elucidated that there can be no better proof than this partnership that Arab joint action cannot be achieved through meetings and speeches, or formal periodic summits and ready-made, inapplicable resolutions. Rather, joint action requires serious endeavors, tangible cooperation and success stories which can be further consolidated and from which we can benefit; the pioneering GCC experience is a shining example in this regard, the Sovereign pointed out. It is a message of hope for ourselves and a strong signal to our peoples that we can develop common, rallying projects, the King stressed, expressing his thanks to GCC countries for the moral and material support you have been providing to Morocco to implement development projects and defend its just causes. He noted that we are facing plots that target our collective security, stating that the security and stability of the Arab Gulf countries and the security of Morocco are one and the same. He hailed support by GCCs countries for Moroccos territorial integrity. After the opening session of the summit, the leaders held a closed-door session and then, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud held a dinner banquet in honor of the leaders after the conclusion of the summit. GCC supports Moroccan territorial Integrity, and expresses the support of Moroccan historical rights over his Saharan territory The six-member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) voiced its support for Moroccos claim over Western Sahara during a joint summit in Riyadh, during which King Mohammed VI spoke of a proxy war being fought with Morocco through the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. What we are witnessing, in fact, is a proxy war, in which the Secretary-General of the United Nations (UNSG) is being used to infringe on Moroccos legitimate, historical rights in its Sahara, through biased statements and unacceptable behavior regarding the Moroccan Sahara, the king said. The statements referred to by the monarch constitute the use of the term occupation by the UNSG to describe Moroccos presence in the Western Sahara during his visit to the Tindouf refugee camps in Algeria last month. We stress our support to all political and security causes that are important for your brotherly country, mainly the Western Sahara, King Salman of Saudi Arabia said during the opening speech of the summit of regional leaders During the summit, King Salman also stressed the GCCs categorical rejection of any harm to the interests of Morocco over the disputed territory for which the Algieria-backed the separatist movement Polisario Front demands a referendum on independence. Earlier at the summit, Moroccos monarch had urged Gulf monarchies to support his country to defend it from plots against its territorial integrity, adding that the UN Security Councils yearly discussions on the Western Sahara taking place this month were being used to blackmail Morocco. This time, the situation is serious, he said. It is also unprecedented in the history of this artificial dispute over the Moroccan Sahara. The monarch and Moroccans alike rejected an explanation from Ki-moons office saying that his use of the controversial term in March was not deliberate and that he regretted causing the misunderstandings. As a political reaction to the Ki-moons inaccurate statements and behaviors , Morocco expelled the peacekeeping mission MINURSO from its offices in Laayoune and Dakhla and cancelled its USD 3 million grant to the operation. The U.N. established MINURSO in 1991 after brokering a peace deal between Morocco and the Polisario Front two sides that had been fighting for 16 years. Early this week, the UNSG submitted to the Security Council an inaccurate report on the issue of Sahara conflict. Several experts in international law judged it as biased in statements, controversial and non-professional in its languages, and frustrating in its concluding remarks Morocco maintains a close alliance with Saudi Arabia and the GCC in trade and military endeavors. In 2011, the GCC had proposed that Morocco and Jordan, both fellow monarchies, join the regional organization, but though the initiative failed, the bloc set up a USD 5 billion fund for projects in the two countries. So sweet! Gwen Stefanis divorce from Gavin Rossdale was finally settled, and to celebrate, Blake Shelton plans on whisking her away on a romantic getaway. Its time to celebrate! Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale finally settled their divorce, according to a new report, so Blake Shelton wants to take his ladylove on a romantic vacation to embrace the next new exciting chapter in her life. Blake is so happy for Gwen. Hes planning to whisk her away on a romantic getaway once her divorce is finalized. He has been there every step of the way helping and supporting Gwen and wants to celebrate her freedom and the next new exciting chapter in her life, a source said. Plus, now Blake can propose! Blake could propose to Gwen very soon, a source close to Blake previously revealed to Us Weekly. Gwen is everything he wants. They also reportedly have some lavish wedding plans already underway! An insider revealed to Life & Style that Gwen is planning a $2 million country wedding for later this year. So perhaps now that her divorce is finalized, theyll get engaged and start planning an epic wedding. Gavin agreed to take way less than he was entitled to in their split most likely to try and keep things amicable after 13 years of marriage. Rossdale COULD have fought for 50% of everything Gwen made during their union but opted to let her keep various assets she acquired. In addition to her music, Stefani also gets 100% control over her wildly successful fashion lines L.A.M.B. and Harajuku Lovers. Stefani agreed to put 25% of the profits from L.A.M.B. in a trust presumably for the benefit of their kids. As for real estate, Gwen gave up her rights to any of their property in Europe where the couple had 4 homes. She does get 50% of the profits from the sale of their Bev Hills house and also full control over 2 other L.A. homes. Neither of them gets child support or spousal support instead, they created an expense account for the kids in which they each sunk $1 MILLION. The also agreed to joint physical and legal custody of their 3 kids. Recently, mother and brother of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula, who committed suicide at Hyderabad Central University in January sparking strong protests across the country, embraced Buddhism on the occasion of Dr. B.R. Ambedkars 125th birth anniversary. Rohiths mother Radhika and Brother Naga Chaitanya Vemula, also known as Raja Vemula, were given deeksha. Since Rohit Vemula issue is grabbing headlines therefore media is giving wide coverage to his mothers conversion report. But there are many Dalits and people from oppressed communities who had adopted Buddhism. The caste system is a social evil which is taking our country backward. It is acting as a powerful social and political divisive force in our country at a time when it is absolutely essential for us to be united if we wish to face our nations challenges. It is a curse on our country which must be speedily eradicated if we wish to progress. Even, our politics is largely governed by caste vote banks. When the time comes for selecting candidates for the elections a study is made of the numerical caste distribution in a constituency, because voters in most areas vote on caste basis. Many castes are declared as O.B.C.s or Scheduled Castes, to get the benefits of reservation. Even some O.B.C.s strives to be declared as M.B.C.s (most backward castes) or Scheduled Castes. Fake caste certificates have become rampant, to get jobs or admissions in educational institutions. Caste has become curse on human lives. Some take advantage of it and some remain deprived. Even Muslims, Christians and Sikhs often have castes, although their religion preaches equality. The nature of Buddhism, which is viewed as a rational religion without much emphasis on giving centrality to God and the other world, which is organized more as a community rather than a hierarchy attracts Dalits. Other religions like Christianity in India have succumbed to the caste system and allow caste practices among those converted. There are churches with separate seating section for Dalits, and till very recently they could not become priests. Buddhism arose as a challenge to Hinduism, which opposed the principle of ritual purity and pollution and the stratification of society based on it. At the Yeola conference in 1935, B. R. Ambedkar declared that he would not die a Hindu, saying that it perpetuates caste injustices. Ambedkar was approached by various leaders of different denominations and faiths. Meetings were held to discuss the question of Dalits and the pros and cons of conversion. Buddhist monk Lokanatha visited Ambedkars residence at Dadar on 10 June 1936 and tried to persuade him to embrace Buddhism. Later in an interview to the press, Lokanatha said that Ambedkar was impressed with Buddhism and that his own ambition was to convert all Dalits to Buddhism. In 1937, Lokanatha published a pamphlet Buddhism Will Make You Free, dedicated to the Depressed Classes of India from his press in Ceylon. After publishing a series of books and articles arguing that Buddhism was the only way for the Untouchables to gain equality, Ambedkar publicly converted on 14 October 1956, at Deekshabhoomi, Nagpur. He took the three refuges and Five Precepts from a Buddhist monk, Bhadant U Chandramani, in the traditional manner, and in his turn administered them to the 600,000 of his followers who were present. Ambedkar asked Dalits not to get entangled in the existing branches of Buddhism, and called his version Navayana or Neo-Buddhism. Ambedkar would die less than two months later, just after finishing his definitive work on Buddhism. Many Dalits employ the term Ambedkar(ite) Buddhism to designate the Buddhist movement, which started with Ambedkars conversion. Many converted people call themselves -Bauddha i.e. Buddhists. Since then the Dalits of India, to protest against the caste system in Hinduism embrace Buddhism which does not have such an oppressive system of castes. (Any suggestions, comments or dispute with regards to this article send us on feedback@afternoonvoice.com) Chinese state media unveiled a new title for President Xi Jinping calling him commander in chief of the country`s new joint forces battle command centre, as he seeks to consolidate power over the military. State-run Xinhua news agency and state broadcaster CCTV both carried reports in English and Chinese referring to Xi by the new description for the first time after he visited the command centre on Wednesday. As well as president, Xi is general secretary of the Communist Party the position from which he derives his power and also chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC). Since taking office Xi has sought to increase his authority over the People`s Liberation Army, which is technically the armed force of the Communist Party rather than the Chinese state. Some of its top officers have been among those who have fallen in his much-publicised anti-corruption drive. The military should be absolutely loyal, he said during his visit, the official news agency Xinhua reported. Under Xi, China has taken a more assertive foreign policy stance, rapidly building up artificial islands in the disputed South China Sea and regularly sailing vessels into waters around Japanese-controlled islands in the East China Sea, raising fears of clashes. The military should be resourceful in fighting, efficient in commanding and courageous and capable of winning wars, Xi said. The joint command system should be efficient and active in both peace and war, Xinhua paraphrased him as adding. Xi donned fatigues for the visit, although his garb did not carry any rank insignia. He has generally worn a plain black or dark green uniform for formal military occasions such as a giant parade in Beijing last year. The command centre was established as part of a major reshuffle of China`s military structure, which also included the creation of a Rocket Force to operate its missiles. When the changes were unveiled in January Xi described them as a major policy decision to realise the Chinese dream of a strong army, state media reported. The military`s four powerful headquarters general staff, political, logistics and armaments were reorganised into 15 agencies under the CMC, which Xi heads. New battle zones were also established to focus on combat and joint operation command systems, replacing the former military regions which had separate command structures and significant administrative responsibilities. Beijing has been building up its military for years, with regular double-digit increases in its official budget. It has invested in an expanded fleet of submarines and its first indigenous aircraft carrier, as it seeks to build a navy capable of projecting power abroad. Xi has announced plans to slash China`s troop numbers by 300,000 to roughly two million to craft a more efficient fighting force. Often it has been observed that seaman lack knowledge about the tasks to be performed by them hence they fail to perform their job efficiently. We often hear in meetings and read articles that the Seaman of a particular nationality possesses a lot of attitude. Out at sea, we do not have any outside assistance to perform our work. We need to do these tasks ourselves. Some of us can be good electricians, good machinists, good metal fabricators, good in carpentry etc; and then we will be able to do most of the ships work. On one ship, a man came from Germany to fit grabs on our deck cranes. I tried to provide him assistance at many stages but he politely declined, except at times when some equipment was to be fetched or hoisted in place. He performed the remaining jobs himself and quite happily. I was amazed at his competence to do welding, fixing and connecting electrical wiring etc. This only shows that we must impart training to our boys and girls in various skills instead of making them mug up all sort of theories. The IMO must pay attention towards this task. We should teach our cadets Yoga for promoting good health and for calming the mind in Marine colleges. Simple yogic exercises involving stretching, bending and some correct breathing for 10-15 minutes do a lot of good for the mind and the body. The trouble with the IMO is that they dont listen to experienced seafarers and follows the instructions of governmental functionaries. We are not criticizing such government officials but it can be easily visualized that many a times they are rather far removed from on the spot realities, both, with regard to personnel and the work. A lot of good has been done by The Missions for Seafarers like Stella Maris and Flying Angel and yet we do not allow priests to visit seaman on board when the ship is in port. I believe we should make one more attempt this time when the soft snow falls over the Christmas trees hoping that they will grant us the favour. Failing which, dont you think that they can then be found to be displaying an attitude. May God bless us all. (The views expressed by the author in the article are his/her own.) Union Minister Giriraj Singh called for revoking the voting rights of those having more than two children for promoting the nations development. If Malaysia and Indonesia can make the law then there must be a strict law. The nation wont progress without population control. There must be a balance. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians all must have at least one to two children. Those who dont follow, their voting rights must be revoked, Singh said. He further stated the decline in Hindu population is worrying. A law is needed on population control for all religions if development is required. The people of the nation must express their thoughts and discuss it. The media showed the condition of the Hindus in Pakistan, he added. Singh yesterday said that if India did not change its population policy and enforce a two-child norm for all religions then the daughters will not be safe and might have to be kept under the veil like in Pakistan. The BJP MP from Nawada, who was speaking at a cultural yatra in West Champarans Bagaha, was reportedly referring to districts such as Kishanganj and Araria, where the Muslim population has been increasing at a faster pace than the Hindu population. This is not the first time he has courted a controversy with his unwarranted remarks. Earlier this month, Singh attributed the fatwa asking Muslim community members not to chant Bharat Mata ki Jai to a conspiracy by international powers to destroy India and divide it into bits and pieces. Last month, he had said that Akhilesh Yadavs government has turned Uttar Pradesh into a nursery of terrorism and alleged that it was not dismissing Azam Khan for fear of losing Muslim votes. In the run-up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, he had called for all those critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to be sent to Pakistan. US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday questioned Chinas intentions with its massive land reclamation project in the South China Sea during a visit to Vietnam. The United States and Vietnam share the interest in maintaining peace and stability in the region. So do China. But its massive land reclamation project in the South China Sea and increasing militarization of these outposts fuel regional tension and raise serious questions about Chinas intentions, Blinken said during a speech to several hundred students at Vietnams National University in Hanoi. China claims the entire South China sea, a water area believed to be rich in oil and gas and is one of the worlds busiest maritime lines. The territorial claim is disputed by other countries in the region, including Vietnam and the Philippines. The United States will defend our national interest and support our allies and partners in the region. We are not looking for bases, but we will continue to sail, to fly, to operate anywhere that international laws allow, he said. Blinken said the United States welcomes Chinas peaceful rise and that he hoped China will act in accordance with international norms and rules and laws, because that not only benefits China but also other countries. He said ignoring those rules and the laws would alienate many countries and over time diminish and not expand Chinas power. Blinkens trip comes ahead of a visit by President Barack Obama to Hanoi in late May, when he is expected to discuss a range of issues, including the South China Sea and human rights, with Vietnams leaders. Blinken said the Vietnamese government should release all political prisoners it is holding and stop arresting those who are exercising their internationally recognized rights. WASHINGTON, April 21, 2016 - Senate Democrats again successfully protected the Obama administrations embattled Clean Water Act rule, defeating a GOP attempt to stop the measure the measure from being implemented should it survive court challenges. A 56-42 vote on an amendment to block the waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule was short of the 60 needed for adoption to a fiscal 2017 funding bill for the Army Corps of Engineers. Four Democrats voted for the amendment, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. One Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, voted against the amendment, sponsored by North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven. The White House had threatened to veto the entire Energy-Water spending bill if the anti-WOTUS amendment were approved. Hoeven told Agri-Pulse before the vote that he plans to try to attach the amendment to the Interior-Environment bill, which funds EPA, when it is considered in the Senate Appropriations Committee. The rule, which was finalized nearly a year ago in response to Supreme Court rulings, defines what wetlands, streams and ditches are regulated under the water pollution law because they have a significant nexus to navigable waters, which are the laws primary focus. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., argued that lawmakers should let the court challenges to the rule to run their course. I strongly believe we should let the courts decide whether the executive branch has overreached in its interpretation of a federal statute, she said. The vote came the same day that the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals declined to grant rehearing of its earlier opinion regarding where the dispute should be adjudicated. Both industry and environmental groups had wanted the court to kick the matter to the district courts, but in a one-page order, the appeals court declined numerous petitions for en banc rehearing, which would mean all of the court's judges would reconsider the case. No judge asked for a vote on the en banc rehearing requests. Like what you see here? Agri-Pulse subscribers get our Daily Harvest email and Daybreak audio Monday through Friday mornings, a 16-page newsletter on Wednesdays, and access to premium content on our ag and rural policy website. Sign up for your four-week free trial Agri-Pulse subscription. The 6th Circuit issued a nationwide stay of the rule in October, saying that 18 states involved in one lawsuit against the rule were likely to win their case. A North Dakota federal judge had previously put the rule on hold in 13 other states. Hoeven argued that the court decisions made the case for congressional intervention. We have to stand up on this one when an agency overreaches and takes statutory authority that we have not provided, he said. Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said the administration wants to define navigable waters as all waters basically. As long as Obama is in the White House, there is little chance Republicans can kill the rule. Obama in January vetoed a congressional resolution of disapproval, and Senate Democrats last November blocked legislation that would have forced the administration to rewrite the rule. #30 WASHINGTON, April 21, 2016 - Regardless of the cause of a power outage, the cooperative difference makes all the difference in planning for and responding to major service disruptions, Claverack Rural Electric Cooperative President and CEO Bobbi Kilmer told a congressional panel recently. Kilmer made her remarks during a House Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee hearing on managing the aftermath of a cyber-attack or other disturbance to the electric grid. She spoke on behalf of Claverack, based in Wysox, Pennsylvania, and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA). Restoring service as quickly and safely as possible requires planning and coordination across the public and private sectors, Kilmer said. She emphasized the importance of knowing your community and noted that rural electric co-op employees live and work in the neighborhoods they serve. She also highlighted the importance of mutual assistance, agreements under which co-ops and other utilities lend crews or other resources to assist with another power providers restoration efforts. The vast majority of NRECA members participate in mutual assistance agreements, she says. For example, in preparation for Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Pennsylvania co-ops secured crews from as far away as Florida to help with recovery efforts. Electric utilities, including co-ops, have spent decades creating redundancies to enhance their security measures, but threats to both physical and cyber security are evolving, she told lawmakers. In response, industry continues to work together along with federal, state and local security and law enforcement agencies to enhance the security of its critical infrastructure. Kilmer noted that the Electric Sub-Sector Coordinating Council, the power industrys principal liaison with the federal government, coordinates policy efforts to prevent, prepare for and respond to incidents affecting critical infrastructure at the national level. Like what you see on the Agri-Pulse website? See even more ag, rural policy and energy news when you sign up for a four-week free trial Agri-Pulse subscription. At the local level, Kilmer said, Claveracks statewide association of electric co-ops joins forces with the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissions Critical Infrastructure Interdependency Working Group, which includes all utilities and services that would be affected by a major event within the state. Claverack tests its business continuity and disaster recovery plans annually, says Kilmer. Components of the plan include confirming communication channels for key contacts, reviewing methodology for assessing the situation and determining appropriate courses of action. When the lights do go out, Kilmer said, our goal is to minimize any service disruption to our members and the communities in which they live. #30 For more news, go to: www.Agri-Pulse.com WASHINGTON, April 21, 2016 - On behalf of the Energy Future Coalition, the Urban Air Institute and the Governors Biofuels Coalition, Boyden Gray and Associates PLLC recently submitted a formal Request for Correction of Information to EPA on the agencys lifecycle analysis for ethanol and gasoline under the federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), according to 25x'25, which also supports the request. Ethanol advocates have long called into question the data EPA has used in projecting the lifecycle analysis, notes 25x25. The agency has consistently used outdated thus inaccurate information that underrates ethanols performance as a cleaner, reduced-emission alternative in our nations transportation fuel supply, says 25x25, a group pushing for 25 percent of U.S. energy to be supplied by renewables by 2025. Here are some of the groups assertions and details of their request: EPA has failed to assimilate new evidence demonstrating significant improvements that have been made in ethanols lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, therefore the agency should update its findings to reflect that the lifecycle GHG benefits of the RFS are much greater than predicted. For example, says 25x25, data cited by the groups request show increased demand for corn causes much less land-use change and related emissions than EPA predicted in 2010. The evidence includes improved economic models and newly available land-use data from periods of increasing corn ethanol production, which show significant increases in yield but no significant increases in land use change. Improved agricultural practices and technologies are substantially reducing the carbon intensity of ethanol by increasing the ability of soil to capture and retain carbon deep below ground. Evidence includes updated science on soil organic carbon, which indicates that best tillage practices sequester more carbon in the soil than previously thought. The evidence suggests that many cornfields are net carbon sinks, capturing more carbon than land-use change and corn farming releases, says 25x25. These more efficient agricultural practices and technologies have also reduced the per-bushel amount of nitrogen fertilizer applied to the corn crop and eventually converted into the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O), the request states. Biorefineries have become much more efficient, using less natural gas and electricity to produce each gallon of ethanol, the groups point out. Biorefineries are also producing new co-products that reduce the carbon intensity of ethanol, including distillers grains, which is used as animal feed; corn oil, which replaces soy-based biodiesel; and other co-products that lower the carbon intensity of corn ethanol. By contrast, petroleum-based fuels are becoming increasingly carbon intensive, the request states. As a result, the gasoline carbon intensity baseline should be significantly higher than EPA suggested, increasing the comparative benefit of ethanol, the groups say. Not an Agri-Pulse subscriber? Get our Daily Harvest email and Daybreak audio Monday through Friday mornings, a 16-page newsletter on Wednesdays, and access to premium content on our ag and rural policy website. Sign up for your four-week free trial Agri-Pulse subscription. The groups submitting the request say they hope their appeal, coupled with an ongoing evaluation by the EPA Inspector General into EPAs treatment of ethanols GHG and air quality effects, will compel EPA to update its analysis and report its findings to Congress. #30 For more news, go to: www.Agri-Pulse.com WASHINGTON, D.C., April 21, 2016 The head of the American Farm Bureau Federation says agricultural producers across the country need to wave a flag to alert government officials to a possible crisis caused by delays in processing visas for foreign workers who tend and harvest Americas food crops. AFBF President Zippy Duvall was joined by farmers and state agricultural officials from California, Georgia, Massachusetts and Michigan today in a bid to call attention to the problem with the H-2A visa program, which they say could result in abandoned crops, higher consumer prices for fruit and vegetables as well as economic harm to rural communities. These crops are not going to wait, Duvall told reporters during a briefing at AFBF headquarters in Washington. They are going to continue to mature and rot in the field if we dont do something. Duvall said an informal survey of farm bureaus across the country revealed labor shortages in more than 20 states. And the participants in the briefing blamed the problem on delays by the Department of Labor and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in processing H-2A visa applications, which allow foreign nationals entry into the U.S. for temporary or seasonal work. Farmers depend on the H-2A program to fill gaps in the nations ag labor system, but, Duvall said, the program is far from perfect. Processing and procedural delays, such as the governments use of U.S. mail -- snail mail, he said -- instead of electronic communications, are leading to losses from unharvested crops. The H-2A system needs to be brought into the 21st century, Duvall said. The government agencies may need more cash to update their computer systems, or possibly more seasonal personnel to handle the growing number of applications being filed, he said. So far this year, AFBF said, farmers have requested just over 68,000 H-2A positions, already more than they sought during the entire year of 2006. Helping Duvall make his case, either at the briefing or via a phone connection, were Gary Black, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Agriculture; Jamie Clover Adams, director of the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development; Ed Davidian, president of the Massachusetts Farm Bureau Federation, and farmers Bill Brim from Georgia, Carlos Castaneda from California and Jen Costanza from Michigan. Each of the farmers described the challenges they face with securing adequate workers to tend and harvest this years crops. Castaneda said that California farmers may not have felt the labor shortage as badly last year as they do now because of drought, which cut deeply into production. But, this year, with the drought easing somewhat, farmers cant harvest all the crops they have planted. Some farmers are giving up more than a quarter of their crops, the said. Learn about the benefits of subscribing to Agri-Pulse. Sign up for your four-week free trial Agri-Pulse subscription. I dont believe theres a rock we havent turned over looking for an answer, he said. Ed Davidian, president of the Massachusetts farm bureau, said the situation is not just hurting farmers, but also people living in nearby communities. Phoning in his comments, Davidian said delays in processing applications for H-2A workers on his 150-acre fruit and vegetable farm are jeopardizing the jobs of up to 50 other people that he usually employs seasonally, working in roadside stands and other related operations. The foreign workers he needs three for spring planting and another three for harvesting are absolutely necessary, he said. Nobody here in Massachusetts is going to work in the fields, he said, absolutely nobody. #30 For more news, go to: www.Agri-Pulse.com WASHINGTON, April 21, 2016 Kevin M. Folta, a University of Florida molecular biologist who specializes in better strawberries but who became the target of anti-biotech crusaders for articulating the benefits of biotechnology, is the 2016 winner of the annual Borlaug CAST Communications Award given by the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST). The award will be presented to Folta Oct. 12 in conjunction with World Food Prize ceremonies in Des Moines. CAST, a federation of more than 20 food and agricultural scientific societies that is supported by several academic, government and industry groups, named the award for the late Norman Borlaug, the crop scientist credited with sparking the Green Revolution. Folta, who chairs Floridas Department of Horticultural Sciences, is the third consecutive winner of the award recognized by CAST for articulate advocacy of food and agricultural biotechnology. Last years went to plant geneticist Channapatna Prakash, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Alabamas Tuskegee University, who spoke at a ceremony here Thursday to announce the selection. The 2014 winner was Alison Van Eenennaam, Animal Genomics and Biotechnology Cooperative Extension Specialist at the University of California, Davis. The choice of Folta had tremendous support, said Mark Armfelt, an Elanco veterinarian who heads the CAST board of directors. CAST requires five letters of support for nominees; Folta had 17. He truly has a passion for communicating the truth about science and agriculture, Armfelt said. Folta and several other academic scientists at state-supported universities were targeted by the organic industry-supported U.S. Right to Know (USRTK) last year with a series of public records requests for email correspondence between them and the biotechnology industry. In Folta's case, the emails are being used to unfairly paint a public servant in science as a corporate stooge, Jack Payne, head of Floridas Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, wrote in the Tampa Bay Times. The USRTK campaign succeeded in getting a front-page article in The New York Times that described his emails with Monsanto and the GMOanswers.com web site. The article unfairly characterized Foltas relationship with Monsanto, Payne wrote. The newspaper presents a picture of corporations enlisting university faculty as their lobbyists. In reality, Monsanto donated $25,000 to the University of Florida, not to Folta, to cover travel expenses for his volunteer work speaking about the science of agricultural biotechnology. Payne wrote that Folta had become the target of multiple intrusive public records requests, adding that what universities have previously learned from episodes such as Climategate is that scientists emails can be cherry-picked and used out of context to confuse the public about issues around which there is solid scientific consensus. Folta received death threats after his visit to Hawaii last year to talk about the science of biotechnology. I had to sit with the FBI domestic terrorism task force investigating threats against Folta and his laboratory, Payne told Agri-Pulse in Washington earlier this month. Not an Agri-Pulse subscriber? Get our Daily Harvest email and Daybreak audio Monday through Friday mornings, a 16-page newsletter on Wednesdays, and access to premium content on our ag and rural policy website. Sign up for your four-week free trial Agri-Pulse subscription. The contretemps seems not to have silenced Folta. In a blog post last week, he mused, Over the last few years Ive watched battles brew and millions of dollars be spent on a silly proposition how do we legislate a means to separate good food from good food with a decoration on the box? The solution, he suggested, is voluntary labeling if the industry moves quickly enough before new legislation is on the ballot and before activists move the goalpost. He adds, The ball is in the court of food manufacturers. If a label that a few folks want and nobody will read is there, then there is no reason to force it by law, which leads to the clunky, expensive problems in logistics and testing. It also eliminates the mess of litigation inevitably to follow. The real advantage? Add a few words. Then we can start focusing on how to help people and the environment with technology instead of distraction with first-world problems. #30 For more news, go to: www.Agri-Pulse.com WASHINGTON, April 21, 2016 - USDA will grant $22 million for research on citrus greening disease - the pathogen that has devastated citrus production in Florida. Thanks to the continued, coordinated efforts between growers, researchers, and state and federal government, we are getting closer every day to ending this threat (of citrus greening), Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement. The funding announced today will help us continue to preserve thousands of jobs for citrus producers and workers, along with significant revenue from citrus sales. USDA will make the funding available through the Specialty Crop Research Initiatives Citrus Disease Research and Extension Program (CDRE). Since 2009, the department was invested over $380 million to address citrus greening, which was first detected in Florida in 2005. Today, all of Floridas citrus groves are affected by the disease, and 15 other states or territories have been fully or partially quarantined after the Asian citrus psyllid, a vector for citrus greening, was detected. At the end of 2013, USDA released a Multi-Agency Coordination framework aimed at fostering cooperation across federal and state agencies and the citrus industry to fight the disease. The framework was developed with help from USDAs Animal Plant Health Inspection Service, National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and Agricultural Research Service, in addition to the EPA and the state agriculture departments of California, Florida, Texas and Arizona. Read about other USDA news such as this. Sign up for a four-week free trial Agri-Pulse subscription for the latest ag and rural policy news. Since then, the group has invested $20 million into more than 30 research projects that led to the development of thermotherapy, soil acidification, biocontrol and other tools. According to USDA, the group is now mulling over how to spend the $5 million appropriation it received in 2016. In past years, USDA funded the following projects: The University of Florida and Washington State University received NIFA funding to grow the putative pathogenic bacterium in artificial culture. The University of Florida is working to develop bactericides to reduce or eliminate pathogen populations in citrus trees. The University of California is using virulence proteins from the pathogen to detect its presence before symptoms appear. Its also developing strategies to create citrus rootstocks that are immune the disease. NIFA will prioritize grant applications that propose multi-state, multi-institutional or trans-disciplinary projects that can be commercialized. Projects should also include an economic analysis of the costs associated with proposed solutions. Pre-applications are due May 16, and full applications are due Aug. 18. #30 For more news, go to: www.Agri-Pulse.com WASHINGTON, April 20, 2016 USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack will be in Japan this weekend to meet with agriculture ministers from the G-7 group of major industrialized nations. But, in an exclusive interview with Agri-Pulse, Vilsack says a lot of his time will be devoted to keeping the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal on track. Japan, host of this years G-7 meeting, has laid out an extensive agenda for the agriculture ministers when they meet Saturday and Sunday in the city of Niigata, but Vilsack said he will also be holding bilateral meetings with representatives of Japan and Canada, two of the 12 Pacific Rim nations in the TPP agreement. Vilsack said the planned bilateral meeting with his Canadian counterpart will be an opportunity for the U.S. to express the hope that as the new administration in Canada takes action relative to agricultural issues anything on dairy or any other issue that it does so consistent with the TPP framework so that theres no disruption in the potential benefits for dairy in this country from TPP. In a concession that has raised concerns by some in Canadas dairy industry, the country agreed to open its borders to increased milk, yoghurt, ice cream and cheese during the TPP negotiations that wrapped up in November. U.S. dairy groups including the National Milk Producers Federation, U.S. Dairy Export Council and the International Dairy Foods Association are strong supporters of the trade deal, but are also concerned that member countries might not uphold the TPP terms. TPP can help support the continued growth of a robust U.S. dairy industry, provided not only that the commitments captured in the text of the agreement are fully implemented, but also that countries are not allowed to backtrack on existing market access agreements to offset what has been granted via TPP, the three groups said in a letter to U.S. lawmakers earlier this month. U.S. Dairy Export Council President Tom Suber told Agri-Pulse that he appreciates Vilsacks efforts. Pressure needs to be applied to make sure Canada doesnt try to wiggle out of its commitments, Suber said. Canada has been fairly creative in the past at finding new ways to block imports to keep their supply management system fully intact. Canada, he said, went into this with a clear acceptance of the fact that they were going to provide access, so thats what we want to see come out the other end. In his talks with Japanese officials, Vilsack said he would reaffirm an understanding and sensitivity to issues in Japan relating to TPP, expressing the hope that [Japans] domestic policies are enacted respecting the framework that TPP has established. Japan agreed in the TPP deal to several measures expected to benefit U.S. agricultural exports, including a 50,000-ton duty-free quota for U.S. rice that would rise to 70,000 tons in 13 years, according to USDA reports. If asked by his Japanese and Canadian counterparts at the G-7 meeting if the U.S. Congress will ratify the TPP this year, Vilsack said his response will be positive. I will tell them that I believe that it will happen in the U.S. and I will tell them why I believe that, he said in the interview. I believe it because of the independent evaluations that are being done on this trade agreement as it relates to agriculture or as it relates to the economy as a whole, indicating increased exports and increased incomes for producers and American workers. Following trade? We cover it on Agri-Pulse. Sign up today for a four-week free trial subscription. Both the American Farm Bureau Federation and the Peterson Institute for International Economics have produced studies showing that the TPP offers substantial gains to the U.S. agricultural sector by increasing foreign markets for their products. If the TPP is ratified, the Farm Bureau concluded in its analysis, annual net farm income in the U.S. could rise by $4.4 billion. When the TPP is ratied and begins to take effect, nearly 32 percent of tariff lines in Japan, 31 percent in Vietnam, 92 percent in Malaysia, all but one tariff line in Australia, and 99 percent in New Zealand will be eliminated, and further market liberalization will be phased in over periods of 15 to 20 years, the Peterson Institute said in its report. These openings of market access far surpass the record established by past free trade agreements. #30 For more news, go to: www.Agri-Pulse.com Five films from AFME's 2016 program are interpreted through appetizers that represet each movie. Dishes are created by top New Mexico chefs. Must have a ticket to attend. Free for VIP Pass holders, Sponsors, and Filmmakers with movies in the festival. $25.00 for general public. Reel 2 Table is one of the most anticipated events at AFME as we spotlight five films that have been selected from AFME's 2016 program. The movies are showcased through this delicious presentation of tapas style dishes by the creative minds of top New Mexico chefs. Imagery of the silver screen will be interpreted through signature appetizers that represent each movie. Always a fun event just before hitting the night's movies! PRESENTED BY REELZ CHANNEL! SIGNATURE MOVIE COURSE PAIRINGS INCLUDE: NEVER - Italian Brezza Tirrena Italia Olive Oil Claudia travels to a small town in Sicily to get back together with her ex-girlfriend, Anna. She is not interested anymore and abandons Claudia in a town she doesn't know. Wandering around town Claudia meets Sandro, who questions all her believes. Sandro brings Claudia into a personal journey towards the acceptance and respect of herself. PO - Gourmet Mac n' Cheese O'Niell's Irish Pub When David Wilsons young wife falls victim to cancer, he is left a single working dad with the sole responsibility of caring for his sixth grade son with autism. Patrick, who prefers to be called 'Po,' is a gifted but challenged child who was very close to his mother and unable to communicate his own sense of loss. As father and son struggle to deal with life after mom, they each begin to withdraw into their own worlds. David into the high pressure job hes close to losing and Po drifting away from the school where hes bullied into his magical fantasy world, the Land of Color, where hes just a typical carefree boy with a rich cast of other worldly companions. The growing divide between father and son and the challenges of single parenthood of a special needs child threaten to separate David and Po permanently. Based on a true story, the bonds of love between a grieving father and son are tested in the most real way in Po DINNER AND A MOVIE - Beef sliders Vernon's Open Door A hilariously absurd modern take on the archaic silent film genre - tying together elements of fantasy, imagination, and the experience of watching films... all with just one line of dialogue. 2015 Shuffle Fest - One of six films shortlisted by director Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours), Peter Bradshaw (Guardian film critic), and Efe Cakarel (founder of MUBI - online cinematheque) 2015 Williamsburg Independent Film Festival 2015 NYC Independent Film Festival 2015 Chattanooga Film Festival 2015 Los Angeles Film Review LIVE FROM UB - Mongolian Beef Fan Tang In a country known for its nomadic traditions, a small group of rock musicians in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar give Mongolia a 21st Century voice. IN THE CLOUDS - Argentine dish Pasion Latin Fusion The difference between how we think romance should work and how it actually does is at the comedic heart of EN LAS NUBES, an exploration of cultural disagreements about intimacy, love, and marriage proposals in the age of YouTube. THE MERRY MAIDS OF MADNESS - Cupcakes! Trinity's Custom Desserts After walking out of her wedding for a sandwich, Beatrice decides to take a rest at Stratford Home for Rest and Rehabilitation. This is the story of what happened inside those walls. A feature length comedy inspired by the women of Shakespeare. Drink pairings by Sierra Nevada. April 21, 2016 If words could move borders, the State of Israel would extend from the river of Egypt as far as the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. On April 17, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, standing on the Golan Heights, declared, Golan was an integral part of the Land of Israel in ancient times [and therefore it is] an integral part of the Land of Israel in the modern era. What proves that the Golan Heights belonged, and still belongs, to the State of Israel? The dozens of ancient synagogues around us attest to this, said the prime minister. Thus, Netanyahu added, Its time, after 50 years, that the international community finally recognizes the fact that the Golan will remain under Israeli sovereignty permanently. The world, as it proved rather quickly, does not recognize ancient synagogues as border markers and is not impressed by highly publicized meetings that the Israeli government conducts on foreign soil. Not only did Israels two best friends, the United States and Germany, not finally recognize the unilateral 1981 Israeli implementation of its law on the Golan Heights, their foreign ministries were quick to condemn Netanyahus declaration and to make clear that their position was and remains that the Golan annexation law and the establishment of settlements in the area constitute a violation of international law. The European Unions November 2015 decision instructing member states to label settlement products also applies to products made on the Golan Heights. The same holds for the recent UN Human Rights Commission resolution calling for the compilation of a black list of companies operating in Israeli-occupied territories. Netanyahu did not really expect the festive declaration from the heights of the rocky plateau on his government's first anniversary to change the position of the international community on sovereignty over the Golan Heights. The choice of time and place for his declaration was linked to US and Russian efforts that same week to reach a diplomatic agreement on ending the bloodshed in Syria. At the negotiations in Geneva, the representatives of the Bashar al-Assad regime demanded that the arrangement include a return of the Golan Heights to Syria. At the festive Cabinet meeting, Netanyahu reported that he had told US Secretary of State John Kerry that Israel will not oppose a diplomatic settlement in Syria, on condition that it will not come at the expense of the security of the State of Israel. Just as Israeli opposition did not thwart the nuclear deal with Iran, Netanyahus stance on Syria will not hinder reaching an agreement to end the fighting in the neighboring country. The grand production on the Golan Heights was reminiscent of Netanyahus March 2015 speech of horrors to the two houses of Congress arranged behind the back of President Barack Obama. The prime ministers use of security arguments for territorial, ideological and political needs has greatly eroded their credibility. For example, in a 2001 conversation with a bereaved Israeli family, Netanyahu boasted that during his first term in office, from 1996 to 1999, he had undermined the Oslo Accord by declaring the entire Jordan Valley to be part of the security sites that the two sides had agreed would remain in Israeli hands. The Cabinet meeting on the Golan Heights will not benefit Israel in any sense. The prime ministers declaration of the Golan Heights as an integral part of the State of Israel will not change the stance of any state regarding the lands conquered by Israel in 1967. On the other hand, it has already caused damage. Quashing prospects of a diplomatic arrangement with Syria an agreement is infeasible without an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights was interpreted by the Arab League as a death blow to the Arab Peace Initiative. Arab media reported that in response to a Kuwaiti demand, Arab League members agreed to convene April 21 for an emergency session to debate Netanyahus declaration on the Golan Heights. The Arab Peace Initiative, adopted in 2002, offers Israel security arrangements and normalization of relations with Arab states in return for Israeli withdrawal from the lands captured in 1967, on all fronts. This does not mean that the Arab states expect Israel to hand over the Golan Heights right now to the faltering Assad government. On the contrary, the difficult situation in Syria enables countries like Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states to promote relations with Israel, to push for progress in negotiations with the Palestinians and to postpone negotiations on Syria until more favorable circumstances arise. The public pronouncement by the prime minister of Israel that the Golan Heights is not up for negotiation, however, precludes this option. In his Golan declaration, Netanyahu not only put the kibosh on the Arab Peace Initiative, but also on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which call for the territorial integrity and political independence of all the states in the region and recognition of their sovereignty and independence. These resolutions served as the basis for all negotiations between Israel and its neighbors, including the talks between Israel and Syria launched following the 1991 Madrid Conference (in which Deputy Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took part). The war in Syria and any diplomatic arrangement ending it will not change by one iota that the Golan Heights is an area under Syrian sovereignty. This principle regarding the territories captured by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967 is enshrined in the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, too. On the other hand, Israel actually appears to adhere very closely to certain parts of Resolutions 242 and 338. For example, the promise of free movement along international shipping lanes. Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon told military affairs correspondents April 12 that although the Saudis do not maintain official ties with Israel, they had promised to respect the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, under which the Straits of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba shall remain open to Israeli aircraft and sea vessels. It is to be hoped that the state that initiated the Arab peace plan, Saudi Arabia, will not apply Netanyahus famous rule regarding the imposition of Israeli rule on Arab territory If they give, they will get; if they dont give, they wont get and revoke Israels freedom of flight and shipping in response to Netanyahus provocation on the Golan Heights. April 19, 2016 The Palestinian Information Ministry in Ramallah has in recent months been compiling materials it claims are proof that the Israeli media incites hatred against Palestinians in general and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in particular. Many West Bank Palestinians share the feeling that Israel is conducting unbridled incitement, even though some of this is based on reports that were never published in the Israeli media or were misleadingly interpreted. Now many of these allegedly hatred-inciting reports are being bound in a thick file that is being updated daily since the current wave of terrorism began in October 2015. The so-called incitement file, prepared by the Palestinian Ministry of Information, currently comprises about 270 pages of newspaper clippings (including ultra-Orthodox Jewish newspapers such as Yated Neeman and Hamodia, to which most Israelis are never exposed) and transcripts of news reports aired on major Israeli television channels. You accuse us of incitement, but you would do well to put your house in order, Deputy Information Minister Mohammed Khalifa told Al-Monitor. Despite the ministrys tight budget, the issue is too important to be ignored. Thus, two Hebrew-speaking researchers have been hired by the ministry to analyze Israeli media stories that prove, in their view, the extent to which the reports distort reality and incite distrust and animosity against the Palestinians. Show me one news item published in Israel that reports on Abbas' efforts to quell incitement and on our media restraint in refraining from encouragement of terror attacks. What youll find in the Israeli media are the same slogans, over and over, recited by [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu who incites against us. The Israeli media quotes his comments without checking, Khalifa says. On our station you wont find a single word of incitement, nor on other stations, the manager of the popular al-Huriyah (Freedom) radio station in Ramallah, Majdi Arbid, told Al-Monitor. Support for an end to the occupation, yes, but not violence and not encouragement of terror attacks against you. On the contrary, we appeal to the youth and implore them not to do stupid things because their lives are important. According to Arbid, Abbas has urged the Palestinian media to act responsibly and it does. President Abbas doesnt want violence, but the Israeli media incites [animosity] against us and presents a distorted reality as if marginal radical voices represent the Palestinian mainstream or Abbas' views. Theres no mention in your reporting of the war against incitement being waged by the Palestinian Authority, he says angrily. Reading through the incitement file prepared by the Palestinians poses some difficulty. As an Israeli journalist, I found it difficult to understand why the PA regarded certain reports as incitement. For instance, opinion pieces or quotes and interviews with right-wing activists the Palestinians view these as incitement despite the fact that they do not represent the Israeli media. These reports are often accompanied by sharp [Israeli] criticism against the activity of the right. In the incitement file, I found a plethora of reports about the famous wedding video clip in which right-wing activists are seen dancing at a wedding and stabbing with a knife a photo of Ali Dawabshe, the baby who was burned to death in an arson attack on his home in the [West Bank] village of Douma. The video shocked most Israelis and led to the arrest of the rejoicing groom and some of his guests, but for the Palestinians the very report about the incident is regarded as wild incitement against them. Thus, for example, is the commentary that compared our crazies and their crazies. Commentator Yoaz Hendel wrote in Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, Theres no difference between them [the people of the radical rights] and the crazy Muslims around us. Arbid explains that generalizations by the Israeli media drive the Palestinians crazy. Another item in the incitement file is an editorial written by Reuven Berko in the daily Yisrael Hayom about global jihadi terror attacks in Europe. Theres no chief magician running global Islamic terrorism. This is a four-stage global production of the Islamic Prophets legacy, Berko wrote. Is this not incitement? ask the researchers of the Palestinian Information Ministry. During my April 14 conversation with the manager of the Ramallah radio station, Israeli media sites reported that right-wing radical activists Michael Ben-Ari and Baruch Marzel had set fire to a Palestinian flag near the gate of the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv. The prominently displayed item was accompanied by a video clip showing right-wing activists celebrating alongside a burning Palestinian flag with not an Israeli police or soldier in sight. How do you feel when an Israeli flag is burned at a Hamas or Islamic Jihad demonstration? asked Arbid. Would you air such photos as a news item or censor them? And what would you say about Abbas who failed to stop them? Another news story in the incitement file deals with the issue of Palestinian bereavement in light of the controversial comments made by radio host Razi Barkai in which he allegedly equated Israeli and Palestinian bereavement. And this is how Middle East scholar Mordechai Kedar was quoted in Yisrael Hayom: The shahids [martyrs] are not by way of being dead this apparently strange logic is based on the belief that the shahid is already in paradise, running around with the 72 virgins, and thats why hes sweating transferring the sweat [of the shahid] to them [the funeral participants] is their last opportunity to take part in these events in the paradise of the shahid. That same article also mentioned that Palestinian television supposedly praised the shahids. Youre confused, said Khalifa. What you portray as Palestinian television is actually Hamas television. Are you not aware of the fact that there was a revolution in Gaza, and that the West Bank is different from Gaza? Are you unaware of the fact that in Ramallah theres a Palestinian president putting out his hand in peace, whereas Gaza is ruled by Hamas that kicked Fatah out at gunpoint? Why cant you understand that we grieve for our despairing young who choose death in desperation? Arbid asks. We bemoan our fate and feel the pain of our young. This is not incitement. This is grim reality. In summing up, it would appear that each side the Israeli and the Palestinian only sees the flaws of the other. April 20, 2016 TEHRAN, Iran With the removal of nuclear-related sanctions on Iran, domestic opponents of the administration of President Hassan Rouhani have changed tack, shifting to criticism of his handling of the economy. In their latest attack, these critics are now questioning whether Iran has really been readmitted to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, known as SWIFT. The criticism has become so intense that Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, a senior member of Irans nuclear negotiating team, has stepped in to the aid of the Central Bank of Iran (CBI). Addressing critics on state television, Araghchi said, Anyone who has any doubts can go to the SWIFT room in the Central Bank of Iran and see for themselves that the banking system has already joined SWIFT. This is the first time that a Foreign Ministry official has come to the direct defense of Irans economic sector in this manner. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was signed between Iran and six world powers on July 14, 2015, and formally implemented six months later, on Jan. 16, 2016, leading to the removal of nuclear-related sanctions on Tehran. Now, more than three months later, Rouhanis opponents are using SWIFT as a tool to attack his government, despite the administration having repeatedly announced that Iranian banks have been reconnected to the global financial messaging system. Exactly one month after the JCPOAs formal implementation day, CBI Gov. Valiollah Seif said that nine Iranian banks would rejoin SWIFT as a result of sanctions relief. However, although the CBI soon announced the readmission of Iran to SWIFT, many observers claimed the news was false. Rouhanis critics, many of them members of parliament, say the JCPOA has given major incentives to the "enemy." Through affiliated media outlets, they have advocated the idea that the nuclear deal has achieved nothing for Iran. Meanwhile, media outlets that support the Rouhani administration have tried to convince the Iranian public otherwise, emphasizing that the entire Iranian political leadership backed the nuclear deal and that the leaders of the signatories to the agreement in fact removed the SWIFT sanctions. At the same time, some economists have joined forces with Iranian opponents of the JCPOA and become increasingly active on anti-Rouhani media outlets, voicing negative opinions about the governments economic performance as well as the SWIFT controversy. The rise in attacks and criticism ultimately prompted the CBI to invite a group of local reporters to visit its SWIFT department and observe a number of online transactions being made with the global financial messaging service. Meanwhile, it is not just Rouhanis political opponents and some economists who say the JCPOA has benefited no one. Some important Iranian private sector representatives share that view. Business magnate Asadollah Asgaroladi told the local media outlet Farheekhtegan, Before the JCPOA, everyone would find a way to make financial transactions with foreign countries. It was not possible to do this directly and most transactions were made through Dubai. But since the JCPOA, no monetary exchange has been made not even once. Also, nothing has been done to help the nongovernmental sector carry out its transactions after the deal. Pedram Soltani, the vice president of Irans Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture, shares this view. Soltani told Farheekhtegan, We work mainly in Asia, and in this regard trade is being done more or less in the same manner as it was done before. However, trading with Europe and some regional countries is still very difficult. New banks are gradually being introduced and currency exchange is being done, but at a very slow pace. Soltani added, Except for a select few countries such as China, India and South Korea, with which we have reconnected through SWIFT, the rest have yet to connect their financial system to Iran. As the domestic controversy over SWIFT rages, a strange silence seems to prevail on the issue outside of Irans borders. Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported, Bigger European banks remain on the sidelines alongside their US rivals, scarred by a string of multibillion-dollar fines for earlier sanctions breaches in Iran. The report argued that Irans banks are indeed being reconnected to SWIFT, from which Iran was excluded due to EU sanctions imposed four years ago. However, Iranian bank officials are quoted as saying that there have been too few transactions sent by Iranian banks via SWIFT, partly due to the need for software upgrades, but more importantly because foreign banks are worried about the risks of dealing with them. Commenting on his earlier remarks about nine Iranian banks having been admitted to SWIFT, the CBI governor said, The banks need a couple of days to install the necessary software. Nine Iranian banks had been disconnected from SWIFT [as a result of sanctions]. However, our other banks that were not under sanctions continue to benefit from the SWIFT system and have been doing so since the day the JCPOA was implemented. In this vein, CBI official Nasser Hakimi told the semi-official Iranian Students News Agency, Under normal circumstances, it would take between two to three months to reconnect to SWIFT since the network disconnects at different intervals to add new banks. But to reconnect Iranian banks, the network implemented a two-week process and so Irans banks were added outside the usual time frame and in about two weeks. So is Iran still not reconnected to SWIFT? The banks that were actively trading even during the sanctions era continue to maintain their business. However, nothing has so far changed for the bigger banks. The CBI is correct in saying that the reconnection process has been physically established. However, no major foreign bank has decided to engage with Iran yet. In the past six months, many economic delegations from Europe and Asia have visited Iran, sat down for negotiations and ultimately returned to their home countries to make decisions. As of now, no agreements have been signed that would require the reconnection of SWIFT. Regardless, the CBI is ultimately right in saying that Iran has been reconnected to the global financial messaging service. Hossein Yaghoobi, the director general of the CBIs International Affairs Department, told the Iranian Labour News Agency, Currently, 29 banks have joined SWIFT, but the three banks Saderat, Mehr and Ansar are still under sanctions. However, Yaghubi said, After the implementation of the JCPOA, which took place on Jan. 16, and up until now, there has been a positive growth in the amount of correspondent [banking] relations. April 21, 2016 WASHINGTON As Secretary of State John Kerry flies back from Saudi Arabia to New York for his second meeting this week with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on April 22, some US officials and outside experts are thinking about how the functional diplomatic channels that have been established with Iran over the past few years between the Obama and Rouhani governments might be maintained in the next US presidential administration. The channels established between the United States and Iran during the last three years of intense Iran nuclear deal negotiations that culminated in implementation of the landmark deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), in January, have included unprecedented one-on-one contacts most frequently between Kerry and Zarif and their top deputies, but also between other Cabinet chiefs US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and Iranian Atomic Energy chief Ali Akbar Salehi, and last week, for the first time, between US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and Iranian Central Bank governor Valiollah Seif, as well as consultations between dozens of midlevel diplomats and experts. Indeed, as Kerry meets Zarif in New York on the sidelines of the signing of the UN Paris climate agreement, new US Undersecretary of State Tom Shannon and Stephen Mull, the State Departments JCPOA implementation czar, will be meeting in Vienna with Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and others on the eight-member Joint Commission established to oversee implementation of the Iran nuclear deal. But for all the frequency and growing to almost normalcy of US-Iranian official contacts in recent years, after decades in which that was taboo, they have yet to be institutionalized by formal US-Iran diplomatic relations, which were broken off after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and subsequent hostage crisis. Whats more, US-Iran normalization is not a realistic near-term prospect, Obama has said, even as he has ushered in historic shifts with Myanmar and Cuba. The prospect of rapprochement is even more fiercely rejected by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who casts it as a fundamental threat to the nature of his regime. Obama is willing to engage with the Iranians when useful, and has shown he is willing to break old taboos when he traveled to Cuba in March, the White Houses Ben Rhodes said April 21. But from the White Houses perspective, it is Iran putting the brakes on deeper engagement with the United States, Rhodes said. The president [Obama] has always indicated that he is willing to engage the Iranian leadership if he believes that that can make progress on different issues, Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, told journalists traveling with Obama in Saudi Arabia on April 21. Hes spoken to [Iranian] President [Hassan] Rouhani on the phone. Rhodes said, The fact of the matter is, we haven't seen from the Iranians, I think, a desire for that level of engagement. Theyve really focused on the channel between our foreign ministers. And so that's where I think it's most likely to continue. Current US-Iran state of play: balancing act US officials describe a balancing act with Iran, continuing to engage with them quietly on nuclear deal implementation and, in certain settings, on regional issues such as Syria and Yemen, while pushing back on their destabilizing actions in the region, such as providing intelligence to interdict Iranian weapons shipments to Yemens Houthi rebels and to Hezbollah. The channels opened up as a result of the Iran [nuclear] deal have a meaningful effect, concrete already, a senior US official, speaking not for attribution, said, citing the example of the US sailors detained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps on Jan. 12 when their vessel strayed into Iranian waters; the sailors were released unharmed 16 hours later, after Kerry spoke with Zarif multiple times to quickly resolve the crisis. The deal created both of these things. Regarding US conversations with Iran on regional issues, such as Syria, They [Iran] are at the table, the official said, referring to Iran being a member, along with the United States, Russia and Saudi Arabia, of the 20-nation International Syria Support Group. There are quiet conversations on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen, with the caveat that Iranian officials are cautious not to go overboard until their government is through the election cycle (Iran has runoff parliamentary elections April 29). Iranian domestic political considerations have put a brake on the pace of more discussions with Iran on regional issues. With respect to Iran, I think our approach has been that we will engage with the Iranians where we see an opportunity to make progress, Rhodes said. The main vehicle for that engagement has been Secretary Kerry with Foreign Minister Zarif, not just on the Iranian nuclear issue but on Syria and other regional issues. He added, What were trying to foster is a dynamic where we can have a diplomatic dialogue with the Iranians on issues related to these regional conflicts. Precisely because Iran has had a role in these areas, we would like to try to move them in a more constructive direction. And that requires some amount of dialogue. It also requires vigilance. Prospects for dialogue going forward But even as officials such as Rhodes describe the desire to expand dialogue with Iran on regional issues in the coming weeks and months, while navigating domestic political constraints and deep disagreements on how they and their allies see the region, Iranian and US officials are aware that the clock is ticking on this administration, and uncertain if the next administration may seek to maintain relations at this level, if at all. Former member of the US nuclear negotiating team Richard Nephew said now that the taboo has been broken, he expects that the Obama administration will hand off to its successor a continued open channel with Iran. I think that now that the membrane has been broken and we have now got a relationship with them, albeit not a normal one, I dont see why it would change, Nephew, now a program director with Columbia Universitys Center on Global Energy Policy, told Al-Monitor in an interview. Even a Republican administration would maintain those avenues of communication, because they exist. The political risk involving opening a communications channel, we are through that now, Nephew said. There has proven some utility for it. I dont see any chance of that going away. But the strength of the channel, and whether it is used to just resolve problems such as the detention of the US Navy sailors or nuclear deal implementation issues, or expanded and deepened to discuss other areas, may largely depend on who is the next secretary of state, or deputy secretary of state, Nephew said. There will be a handoff from Kerry to his successor in terms of the communication channel with Zarif, Nephew anticipated. It will be an easier handoff if it is Kerry to a Democratic successor. It will be potentially more complicated if a Republican is coming in. Nuclear deal implementation will be basis for continued US-Iran dialogue Iran nuclear deal implementation is likely to be the core of the basis for continued US-Iran dialogue after the transition from the Obama administration to its successor, Ali Vaez said. The best instrument for institutionalizing the channel of communication is the JCPOA and its implementation, Vaez, a senior Iran analyst with the International Crisis Group, told Al-Monitor. Both sides have coordinators who will have to closely monitor the accord's implementation during its lifetime and meet regularly at the Joint Commission's sessions or on ad hoc basis. Vaez said, It is hard to imagine, given the level of skepticism and resistance in Tehran, that the Obama administration could take further steps, like staffing the US interest section in Tehran with Americans, before it runs out of time." He added, The only unilateral action that the administration could take is to dilute the no-contact policy. Both sides should also encourage regular contacts between their top diplomats at the UN level in New York, Geneva and Vienna. US-Iran ties may become more "bare bones" It is unlikely that the next US president is going to maintain this level of engagement with Iran beyond the bare bones of nuclear deal implementation, or expend as much political capital on it, at least initially, Gary Sick, a former National Security Council official in the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations, told Al-Monitor. I dont see Hillary [Clinton] walking away from the whole thing [nuclear deal], but I dont see her as exhibiting any enthusiasm on trying to build on that, or deepen the relationship, Sick, now a professor at Columbia University, told Al-Monitor. I think she does understand [the importance of the opening with Iran] and is surrounded by people like Wendy Sherman [the former US undersecretary of state and lead US nuclear negotiator] and Jake Sullivan [her former deputy chief of staff who was part of the back channel to Iran], who have personal relationships with the Iranians, and they do understand the importance of this, Sick said. They were part of it. He added, I dont see her or them turning around and walking away. But there is a difference between maintaining the bare bones, and taking advantage of what you got. Or as Obama has been prepared to do, be a little more forward leaning, make something more out of this, beyond just the JCPOA. Obama was prepared to put a lot of political capital in this. And I dont think Hillary is. Its a matter of degree. Zarif may provide continuity What may provide continuity and be even more important than Obamas and Kerrys successors in terms of maintaining a US-Iran opening is Zarif, and the breadth of contacts he has quietly made in the US foreign policy community over the years, going back to his time as Irans ambassador to the United Nations, former State Department policy planning official Suzanne Maloney said. If US-Iran ties last past the Kerry-Zarif channel is an interesting question that gets to the heart, to what extent is this a personality-driven relationship, at this point, Maloney, now deputy director of foreign policy programs at the Brookings Institution, told Al-Monitor. Or have sufficient institutional ties developed over the course of the past three years of intense diplomatic interaction that, in effect, they will sustain themselves irrespective of the coming and goings of specific individuals. I tend to lean to the latter, Maloney said. Despite the fact of the rapport established between Kerry and Zarif, Zarif has really well-established ties across Washington that predate his time as foreign minister, Maloney said. I imagine the constellation of folks in place who are in position to move into the secretary of state position have, if not prior direct exposure to him, they would be part of the community that has. I think there are countervailing impulses on the Iranian side, about broadening dialogue or expanding the basis for US-Iran talks, Maloney said. There is such high-level scrutiny and pushback in Iran about anything that appears to use the nuclear deal as a springboard for something that looks like rapprochement. It is more toxic there than here, and it is pretty toxic here. Al-Monitor has learned that in addition to his meeting with Kerry and signing of the Paris Climate Agreement in New York on April 22, Zarif is expected to quietly meet with some US lawmakers there, as he has occasionally done in the past. (When Vice President Joe Biden and former US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel were senators, among other lawmakers, both met with Zarif when he was Iran's UN ambassador in New York.) Zarif was as forward-leaning an Iranian diplomat as ever existed in the US-Iran relationship, Maloney said. The bigger question than who succeeds Kerry may be what will happen to the nascent US-Iran opening if at some point Zarif leaves the government amid Iranian domestic churn or fallout over the engagement with the West and the nuclear deal. April 21, 2016 Jordans pivot to Saudi Arabia, specifically over the latters hard-line stand on Iran and its alleged interference in Arab countries affairs, took a major leap forward following the visit April 10 by Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, where he met with King Abdullah in the port city of Aqaba. Mohammed, who is also Saudi Arabias defense minister, flew from Cairo where his father, King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, had concluded what was described as a historic visit to Egypt. In Cairo, Salman and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi oversaw the signing of strategic cooperation agreements covering economic projects and military cooperation between the two countries worth billions of dollars. Following Mohammeds short visit to Jordan, the royal court issued a joint statement that announced a package of measures intended to enhance cooperation between the two countries. Jordan and Saudi Arabia underlined the importance of political consultation between the two countries over regional issues and crises, stressing the importance of political solution as the best option to end them and the need to preserve the territorial unity, sovereignty and stability of the regional countries, rejecting interference in the internal affairs of these states. But what was more important is that the two sides stated their rejection of the policy of interference followed by Iran in the region, which incites sectarian sedition and fuels terrorism. The statement warned Iran against continuing with its present approach, which deepens disputes and conflicts in the region and jeopardizes its stability. This was the first time in recent years that Jordan had taken a clear position on alleged Iranian policies in the Arab region. By adopting the Saudi position, Jordan was not only abandoning a strategy of keeping all its options open, but it was now ready to follow its words with action. On 18 April, almost a week after Mohammeds visit, Amman recalled its ambassador in Tehran for consultations. Government spokesperson Mohammad al-Momani told Petra news agency that the decision was taken after Jordan had supported the nuclear deal between Iran and the international community. We had hoped that the deal would pave the way for improved Arab-Iranian relations based on good neighborhood relations and the principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of others, he said. But Momani added that following the signing of the nuclear deal Iran had acted in a way that represented unacceptable interference in the affairs of Gulf states, which we cannot accept because it leads to the destabilization of the region. Momani defended Jordans position in the aftermath of the attacks against the Saudi Embassy in Tehran in January. Jordan was criticized by Saudi commentators for not expelling the Iranian ambassador to Amman and opting to deliver a letter of protest instead. That incident and Jordans reaction to it highlighted an unprecedented phase of cool relations between Amman and Riyadh following the succession by Salman of his late brother King Abdullah last year. Jordans King Abdullah differed with Saudi downplaying of the threat of the so-called Islamic State (IS) last year, and opted instead to focus on Irans regional threat and the crisis in Yemen. Jordans royal court denied reports by Middle East Eye that Abdullah had belittled the importance of the Saudi-led Islamic military coalition, announced last December, in conversations with US senators in January. The Jordanian pivot to Saudi Arabia is a serious one, according to a number of observers. Abdullah and Mohammed discussed a number of agreements aimed at boosting the Jordanian economy. While no figures were mentioned, the two sides agreed to set up a joint investment fund, developing military cooperation, enhancing cooperation in the field of energy, uranium mining and generating electricity using nuclear power, and increasing trade exchange. This comes at a time when Jordans national debt has reached $35 billion and the economy continues to suffer as a result of hosting more than 1.2 million Syrians. Saudi Arabia has historically supported Jordan financially, and in the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring it led a $5 billion Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) grant to the kingdom. That grant is expected to be renewed this year for another five-year period. Former Prime Minister Taher al-Masri told Al-Monitor that both Saudi Arabia and Jordan continue to maintain their historic relationship, but now such ties are more important in light of Iranian vicious interference in Arab affairs and the dramatic changes that could take place where some countries may disappear from the map. Masri said that Jordan was never interested in establishing pioneering relations with Tehran, as it was clear that Iran had ambitions in Arab countries and Jordan knew that. His position was echoed by Adnan Abu Odeh, former chief of the royal court, who told Al-Monitor that Jordan and Saudi Arabia have a common interest in combating terrorism and stemming Iranian interference in Arab affairs. Jordan has adopted the Saudi position on Iran and that is what it believes, he said. King Abdullahs attendance of the military exercises [held in Saudi Arabia in March] is testimony to Jordans support of the Islamic military coalition led by Saudi Arabia, and it is a testament to the fact that Jordan and Saudi Arabia are on the same side, Abu Odeh said. Still, political commentator Sultan Hattab admitted that Jordan-Saudi relations had passed through a tepid stage before, but he said that Jordan and Saudi Arabia need each other at this stage, as Riyadh wages a full diplomatic offensive against Tehran. Jordan is protecting the frontiers of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region as a whole, Hattab told Al-Monitor. This is a fact that cant be changed, and while Jordan has tried to follow an independent path regarding Iran in the past that has now changed, he said. The reality, Hattab said, is that Jordan and Saudi Arabia need each other more than ever with regard to taking a common stand on Syria, Yemen, IS and Iran. In his view, Saudi Arabia has taken the lead in confronting these regional challenges and Jordan has decided to back Riyadhs position on all. What is certain is that the pivot to Saudi Arabia is a strategic decision by Amman that paves the way for increased financial backing of Jordan as Riyadh attempts to consolidate a common regional front against Iran. April 19, 2016 The fighting that broke out between Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State in Syria's Yarmouk refugee camp two weeks ago is compounding the already dire situation for several thousand families still inside the camp and many more previously displaced to the surrounding areas of Yalda, Beit Saham and Babila. The fighting that erupted on April 7 in what was once Syria's largest Palestinian refugee camp has placed several thousand civilians amid the frontline clashes between the two militant groups. Since July 2013, Yarmouk has been under seige by Syrian government forces, purportedly due to the presence of rebel factions inside the camp, resulting in civilian deaths from starvation and lack of medical supplies, according to a report by the UK-based Action Group for Palestinians from Syria. Hundreds of Palestinians were reportedly detained, disappeared or tortured to death by the security services. In April 2015, IS militants briefly gained control over much of Yarmouk, with the help of Jabhat al-Nusra, but the two jihadist groups have since turned against each other. Palestinian factions in the camp are divided between the pro- and anti-government camps. Following the latest outbreak of fighting, activists created the hashtag #yarmoukcampisburning after IS reportedly began burning down civilian homes. The message in general, however, also communicated the longstanding sense among the activists that the plight of Yarmouk, which has seen bombardment, siege and jihadist occupation since 2012, has often unfolded without attracting significant interest from international media. An April 18 statement by the Jafra Foundation, a local organization from Yarmouk that has been based outside the camp since IS entered Yarmouk last year, reported that civilians were facing "even more severe constraints" as a result of renewed fighting. "Families inside Yarmouk are completely reliant on humanitarian organizations to provide them with their basic need," Jafra said. According to Jafra operations manager, Osama Moussa, sniper fire has killed at least seven civilians and wounded several others during the latest round of clashes. Among the dead are two children. Hisham al-Zawawy, a member of the camps civil committee, reportedly died on April 16 after being shot in the head near his home. Moussa told Al-Monitor, Hisham was killed by a sniper, but also because there were no medical facilities available. Residents are now calling for cease-fires to allow for much-needed supplies to enter the camp. Before the latest clashes began, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency had been able to sporadically deliver aid to Yalda, a rebel-controlled area just east of Yarmouk, through coordination with the Syrian government. Since February, UNRWA had conducted 21 humanitarian missions to Yalda, providing food parcels and other items, such as blankets and hygiene kits. There have been no such missions since the latest clashes began. UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness told Al-Monitor that past aid deliveries to Yalda had significantly alleviated the shortages of food, partly because refugees still inside the camp were able to walk to a checkpoint between Yarmouk and Yalda to collect supplies. He added, however, The outbreak of fighting has already caused UNRWA to suspend humanitarian missions to Yalda this week [mid-April]. As long as the fighting continues, these missions will remain suspended. Beyond Yarmouk's immediate tragedy, the renewed fighting raises questions about the future of the camp. Speaking from a rebel-held neighborhood close to Yarmouk, Abdullah al-Khateeb, an activist who was forced to leave the camp last year, told Al-Monitor, Water supplies, education and medical assistance have stopped, leaving civilians to bear the brunt of the latest violence. Currently, IS wants to take control over the whole camp. Beyond that, we do not know whats next. On Dec. 24, the BBC reported that the United Nations was monitoring an inter-factional deal that would allow thousands of rebels and their families to safely leave Yarmouk and allow civilians trapped there to receive aid. The same day, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported that buses had started arriving in the nearby al-Qadam neighborhood, west of the camp, although it remains unclear if any fighters were actually evacuated. IS maintains a significant presence in Yarmouk, estimated around 2,000 fighters, according to activists. Nobody knows what IS' goals or motives are behind the latest clashes, said Musab Balchi, an activist who now lives outside Syria. There was a deal between the regime and IS, moderated by the UN, to allow IS to withdraw from Yarmouk to Raqqa. I believe that if IS can take the camp, very soon afterward the regime will make a deal with IS so that [they] withdraw to Raqqa. Then, the regime can take over Yarmouk. Salim Salama, from the Palestinian League of Human RightsSyria, told Al-Monitor that the latest clashes may actually represent the final battle for Yarmouk, part of preparations on the ground for a political settlement in Damascus. At the same time, he asserted that international organizations, particularly UNRWA, need to focus on protection and advocacy, rather than simply distributing food packages. He bemoaned the international communitys failure to provide reliable protection to Palestinians inside and outside Syria displaced since 2011, so that they can live a life of dignity. Salama said that stateless Palestinians in Syria face endemic vulnerabilities as well as immediate humanitarian needs. Yarmouk is testament to the risks facing Palestinians in Syria, much like those facing other civilians in the country. The Palestinians who are in Yarmouk are abandoned today, thats very clear, but so are the Palestinians in Beirut, Salama said. The only difference is that some are starving faster than others, some peoples rights are violated more than others. According to UNRWA, there are 42,000 Palestinians from Syria now in Lebanon and 18,000 in Jordan. Meanwhile, varying estimates suggest that anywhere between 50,000 to 100,000 Palestinians from Syria have left the Middle East, many of them making their way to Europe and seeking asylum there. Sanaa, a young Palestinian woman, fled Syria in 2012. Because of enhanced visa restrictions in Arab states for Palestinians fleeing the conflict, she was deported back and forth between Egypt and Lebanon before being held for half a year in al-Qanater Prison, north of Cairo. Sanaa eventually reached Sweden last year through Turkey. Yarmouk was more like a city than a camp. In Syria [before 2011], being Syrian and Palestinian used to be the same." she said. "I want to return one day. Now, though, everything has been destroyed," Sanaa told Al-Monitor. Montreal, Canada I was told to always look him in the eyes. He had a very heavy handshake, was very respectful and would always stand up to greet his guests, says Daniel Cote, recalling his first meeting with Raul Castro, Fidels brother and now leader of Cuba, in 1990. The colourful 64-year-old businessman and Elvis Presley fan has owned Ameublement Elvis, an iconic used-appliance store located on the corner of Montreals Marianne Street and Papineau Avenue, since 1976. But the neighbourhood store hides an unexpected business. For almost 30 years, Cote has been exporting all sorts of used merchandise to Cuba. An unexpected meeting He remembers how it started. Cubans would come to Montreal by boat to do business, he says. They would sell Cuban cigars, sugar, and all sorts of things here. They would also come to my store and buy up to 30 used appliances at a time. Thats what made me think that Cuba was probably a huge market for my merchandise. In 1990, Cote took part in an international commerce exhibition in Cuba. With the United States embargo and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba needed to be supplied with cheap goods. Cotes timing was perfect. While he was there, two representatives of the Empresa Importadora de Abastecimiento Tecnico-Material (EMIAT), an import-export firm owned by Cubas Interior Ministry, knocked on his hotel room door. They took him to see Raul Castro, the brother of Cubas then president, Fidel Castro. I brought an interpreter with me to the meeting, Cote remembers. The first thing Mr Castro said to me was that I was disrespecting him and his country. He said I should learn Spanish if I wanted to do business with him. I was so embarrassed. Then, the grandfather of seven admits: There are so many people called Castro in Cuba, I had no idea he was Fidel Castros brother. But despite this uncomfortable first encounter, Cote left Cuba having made a deal with the government. He soon started shipping containers full of not only used appliances but also buses, army boots, school furniture, and even fire trucks to the country. The end of an era Today, a quarter of Cotes business comes from his dealings with the communist state. And he has learned Spanish by translating songs with a neighbour who gave him lessons. When I went back to Cuba, Raul Castro told me I spoke like a Spanish cow and nicknamed me el bigote, which means the moustache, he says proudly. Cote says he met Raul Castro seven or eight times, but regrets never having meet Fidel. I saw him giving live speeches in front of hundreds of thousands of people, he says. He didnt have notes. He knew everything by heart. One can disagree on his policies but he was a very impressive and charismatic man. His speeches were like shows. At the back of the store, between used ovens and fridges, two of Cotes employees, one of whom is Cuban, are wrapping electric bicycles to be shipped to Cuba. But Cote knows his days of doing deals with the country might be numbered. In March, US President Barack Obama called on the US Congress to lift the decades-old trade embargo on Cuba during a historic visit to the island-nation. When the US lifts its embargo, I will be out of business in Cuba, Cote reflects. Its life. There is nothing I can do about it. It doesnt mean I wont keep dropping by [Cuba] from time to time to say hi. Photogallery BDS supporters in Berlin say Germans fear criticising Israel and being perceived as anti-Semitic due to legacy of WWII. Berlin, Germany When Sophia Deeg, a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, was protesting on the streets of Berlin in support of the Palestinian cause, one passer-by spat in her face. Others shouted,How can you do this? and accused her of being an anti-Semite. Of course Im not an anti-Semite, and anti-Semitism cannot be read out of anything I ever wrote or said, Deeg, a 63-year-old journalist and translator, told Al Jazeera. On the contrary, I feel hurt and attacked myself whenever I hear someone utter something racist or anti-Semitic. Deeg is undeterred. She continues to attend BDS protests, to publish articles promoting the BDS agenda, and to boycott products that have anything to do with the occupation or that in any way contribute to the systematic inequality in Israel and the occupied territories. But the movement Deeg supports which has been gaining support in the United States and in Italy, and stirring public debate in the United Kingdom, Canada and other countries is comparatively quiet in Germany. It has some supporters on the very left of the German political spectrum but not many more, according to Carsten Koschmieder, a political scientist at Freie University Berlin. The BDS movement has not or not yet achieved [recognition] as legitimate protest, Koschmieder explained. As long as they are not seen as a legitimate movement but as connected to anti-Semitism, they cannot achieve anything in the public sphere in Germany. Anti-Semitism is taboo in Germany because of the countrys history, explained Peter Ullrich, a sociologist at Technische University Berlin. Ullrich, who has written extensively (PDF) about anti-Semitism in Germany, said that being labelled an anti-Semite could damage a persons reputation and opportunities. It is a strong accusation indeed, one of the strongest, he said. The cofounder of the BDS Berlin branch, Doris Ghannam, is very familiar with the German resistance to a boycott of Israeli products. Ghannam boycotts products from companies that profit from what she calls the Israeli policy of colonisation, apartheid and occupation. She believes in the BDS movement because, she said: It has consistently adopted a rights-based approach and an anti-racist platform that rejects all forms of racism, including anti-Muslim racism and anti-Semitism. Anti-BDS initiatives Ghannam fears that the German government might try to criminalise support of BDS, following similar attempts recently in the United Kingdom, France and Canada. She became concerned after Israels Public Security Minister, Gilad Erdan, told the Jerusalem Post on April 4: We have been working extensively over the past half year to increase awareness among decision-makers in Europe and North America of the anti-Semitic, anti-democratic, and discriminatory nature of the BDS movement. This awareness is growing, and is increasingly being translated into counter-BDS legislation, legal rulings against BDS activities, and decisions by Western institutions to end their financial relationships with BDS organisations. On March 3, the German government stated in a response to an inquiry by the Greens party the BDS movement is not classified as anti-Semitic. But a recent pro-BDS lecture that was due to take place on the campus of Ruhr University Bochum, was cancelled because the school in principle, refuses to host any kind of boycott or any kind of call for boycott against people, groups, states, spokesman Jens Wylkop told Al Jazeera. Wylkop added that Ruhr University would host a critical, controversial discussion about the situation in the West Bank. According to Ghannam, earlier this month, a bank account in her name and used by the Berlin BDS group to raise donations for their work was terminated, for no apparent reason. The account was at a branch of DAB Bank. In response to Al Jazeeras request for comment, DAB Banks spokesman Jurgen Eikenbusch said the bank does not publish any information on individual customer accounts, but that there is no special policy regarding the BDS movement. Anti-Semitic? Ghannam admits that despite the efforts of BDS Berlin, and other initiatives throughout Germany, there is still little awareness of the movement among the German public. On April 13, when Ghannam hosted an event in Berlins Kruetzberg district, a hub for leftist political activism, featuring Palestinian activist Iyad Burnat who came to Germany to promote the global BDS campaign less than a dozen people showed up. Mainstream Germans have to understand that the non-violent, Palestinian-led BDS movement is an answer to the failure of the international community, which ignores Israels violation of international law and human rights, Ghannam said. The accusation that the BDS movement is anti-Semitic is completely unfounded, according to Ghannam, but Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, thinks differently. Schuster claims that the movement does serve an anti-Semitic sentiment and is an attempt to isolate Israel and the Jewish people. The BDS movement is a dangerous initiative whose sole purpose is the defamation and the de-legitimisation of the state of Israel. People should not let themselves be blinded by the pretended humanitarian goal of helping the Palestinian people, Schuster said. Everybody who has learned the lessons from the past should fight this outrageous trend. History lessons Deeg, the BDS activist, sees no contradiction between the historical lessons of the Holocaust and criticising Israel. She believes that those Germans, in particular, who feel a sense of responsibility over their nations recent history should express their concern about human rights violations or violations of international law, including those committed by Israel. If this really upsets you what happened here [during the Second World War], than you absolutely have to be for human rights for everybody, she said. Deeg is upset by comparisons between the BDS movement and boycotts against Jews in the Nazi period. She explained that BDS is not state-imposed as the Nazi boycotts were. Instead, she said, it is a boycott by oppressed people against state oppression just like in South Africa two and a half decades ago. She feels the views of her fellow Germans are blurred by the guilt they feel about the Holocaust, and believes that this stops them from criticising Israel. Ullrich, the sociologist, said that in Germany, BDS is still, for the most part, simply unknown. But he does see growing criticism towards Israeli policies. Many people are very critical, some even quite hostile towards Israel. And they are not becoming fewer, said Ullrich. So there is a sentiment pool potentially supportive of BDS. However, Ullrich emphasised, strong popular support for the BDS movement in Germany is unlikely as long as the political discourse is so cautious regarding Israel. Eritrea has received much attention in the midst of the refugee crisis, with traumatised citizens undertaking dangerous journeys to escape what has been described as a torturous life at the hands of a cruel regime. Human rights organisations have documented human rights abuses, arbitrary arrests and torture, as a result of which nearly 5 percent of the population has fled and 4,000 Eritreans continue to flee their country each month. But not everyone is willing or able to seek an alternative to their homeland, and those who remain focused on the positives. Eritrea is a curious mix from its capital Asmara, where the smell of real macchiato pervades Harnet Avenue, to its incredible port city of Massawa by the Red Sea, one of the oldest in Africa. The Italian colonial influences are visible throughout Asmara, in its architecture and the local culture, with its cafeterias and pizzerias. The landscape ranges from lush, cool highlands to hot and humid lowlands along the Red Sea coast. But, it is the Eritrean people who make a lasting impression. Despite their colonial past and the harsh political climate, Eritreans remain a most hospitable and resilient people. After a 30-year armed struggle, Eritrea gained independence from Ethiopian rule in 1991, and in May 1993, when Eritreans overwhelmingly voted for statehood in a referendum supervised by the United Nations, that independence was recognised internationally. Isaias Afewerki has been the countrys only president since independence. His government has postponed any future elections, indefinitely. Not much information slips out of Eritrea, as the government often jails independent journalists, and expelled its last international correspondent in 2007. These images from 2013 show a rare glimpse into the everyday lives of Eritreans. The GCC meeting with Obama in Riyadh will raise serious questions about US intentions and hidden agendas. Once again, the United States feels the urge to reassure members of the Gulf Cooperation Council that it is still their best friend and ally. Since its two-year secret negotiations with Iran that started in 2011 came to light in 2013, Arab trust in the US has been at its lowest level. It hasnt been so low since Saudi King Faisal bin Abdulaziz led the Arab oil embargo against the US and other Israel supporters, in 1973. It looks like President Barack Obama and his envoys multiple trips to Gulf nations, myriad meetings with Gulf leaders, and many statements, were nothing more than a mission impossible to explain the unexplainable. Saudi King Abdullahs meeting with the US president in March 2014 was frank, according to a US delegate. According to Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi ambassador to the US, it was beyond frank. In diplomacy terms, this translates to confrontation. The king was frustrated with the US betrayal of their Arab allies, in favour of Iran. According to Faisal, he banged on the table, telling Obama: No more red lines, Mr President. This means Saudi Arabia would no longer listen attentively to US advice. If it did, Bahrain would have been an Iranian province years ago. US reservations Again and again, Saudi Arabia decided to ignore US reservations and positions in Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Yemen. It stood firmly against US policies that would have brought more firestorms to a volatile region already on the verge of an explosion. Under the US watch, Iraq is close to becoming a failed nation. US-backed leaders handed the country to Iran, which has lots of interests to gain and accounts to settle there, and has used and abused religion to divide and rule. READ MORE: Saudi Arabia and Iran and how we got here Iranian policies created a friendly environment for extremists on all sides. Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group (ISIL, also known as ISIS) is an offshoot of al-Qaeda, and both are sponsored by Iran. In the other camp, Hezbollah is leading the Shia extremists in the region. The US seems to be looking for a new sheriff in the region who won't mind a partnership with Israel. by In Syria, the US has just let it happen. Iran wouldnt dare to get so close to Israels borders without a green light from Uncle Sam. In Yemen, the US supported Ali Abdullah Salehs government and his Houthi enemies at once. After the adversaries became allies, the US cooperated with both in a desperate bid to defeat al-Qaeda. It turned a blind eye to Irans heavy political, financial and military support of the new Yemeni alliance regardless of the danger they pose to its Gulf partners. Made-in-the-USA creative chaos is the brainchild of the neoconservatives led by George W Bushs vice president Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser and later Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Since Iran is the manager of this mess, one might wonder how much of a collaboration the US has had with Iran? The US seems to be looking for a new sheriff in the region who wont mind a partnership with Israel. Once found, it could then divert its attention to more interesting, peaceful and accommodating parts of the world, such as South Asia and South America, while resting assured that the region, US interests and Israels security are well taken care of. Sheriff Iran This scenario looks attractive for naive academics who dont realise that Sheriff Iran is not ruled by a pragmatic, logical leadership, but by ultra-fundamentalists obsessed with historical ambitions of a grand Persian empire. They would turn against the US at any moment when their interests diverge. They did it before, and will do it again. By then, traditional US allies would be gone. The GCC meeting with Obama in Riyadh, the third of its kind in less than a year, is expected to raise serious questions about US intentions and hidden agendas. More important is what is next. Are these policies institutional, or just the doctrine of a loner? Would these positions change with a new president come elections in November, or are they representative of new US trends? The answers depend to a great extent on who is behind the change of heart and attitude. Principles and long-term strategies cannot be revised so fast and easily by one man alone even a president. Therefore, what comes next for GCC countries and the Middle East should be read not only from the eyes and lips of the visiting US delegation, but also in the corridors of power, back in Washington. Khaled M Batarfi is a Saudi writer based in Jeddah. The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy. As long as state sponsors of terrorism such as Iran are involved in Yemen, a political deal remains remote. Luke Coffey is a research fellow specialising in transatlantic and Eurasian security at a Washington DC based think tank. He previously served as a special adviser to the British defence secretary and was a commissioned officer in the United States army. Earlier this month the US Navy confiscated about 1,500 Kalashnikov rifles and 200 rocket-propelled grenade launchers thought to be for Houthi rebels in Yemen. This follows the recent seizure of thousands of more weapons and rounds of ammunition by the French and Australian navies heading to Yemen. Iran has long been supplying Houthi rebels in Yemen with weapons and training. This is becoming such a problem that the United States and the Gulf Cooperation Council (minus Oman) announced this week that they will carry out joint naval patrols in the region to stem the flow of weapons from Iran. Iran aims to destabilise, or at least influence, the Middle-East with its export of terrorism, its supply of weapons, and its support for subversive Shia groups across the region. What is happening in Yemen is a great example of this. The situation there is perilous. Perilous situation During the early days of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadis newly elected government, Houthi rebels took advantage of an uncertain situation and took over large swaths of the country, including the capital of Sanaa which it still holds today. In true Iranian fashion, Tehran took advantage of the situation to arm the Houthis as part of a larger proxy war against Saudi Arabia. It was claimed that as soon as the capital was captured by Houthis, flights between Tehran and Sanaa quadrupled overnight, many of which carried weapons and military advisers. ALSO READ: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Great Game in Yemen In the ensuing chaos, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, once described as the most dangerous of all the al-Qaeda franchises, took over and now controls a large chunk of Yemen including a 560km stretch of the countrys coastline. Even the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group (ISIL, also known as ISIS) has established a presence in Yemen, albeit a minor one for now. In true Iranian fashion, Tehran took advantage of the situation to arm the Houthis as part of a larger proxy war against Saudi Arabia. by Saudi Arabia shares a long 1,600km border with Yemen equal to the straight distance between New York City and Tampa. When the ballistic missiles started to land inside Saudi Arabia it became clear that something had to be done. As the Saudi Ambassador to the US, Prince Abdullah al-Saud, recently commented: No country would accept a similar situation on its border. He is right. Inevitable clash Everything Saudi Arabia does in the region must be seen through the lens of a larger geo-political struggle in the Middle-East. Often this is framed as a Sunni v Shia struggle, but this is a simple explanation which does not paint the full picture. Underlying the Saudi-Iranian struggle is also an Arab-Persian struggle for dominance and control in the Middle-East. This is not the first time Iran has meddled in Yemen. In the year 570, the Sassanian Empire, the predecessor of modern day Iran, had its first foray into Yemen. Just as it does in Syria, Lebanon, southern Iraq, and up and down the Gulf; in Yemen, Tehran is seeking to re-establish its influence, or at least sow instability, over the dominions of the old Empire now in the Arab world. After all, Iran is the only country in the region whose constitution calls for the continuation of the Revolution at home and abroad. A clash is inevitable. As history has shown, and as Saudi Arabia is finding out, counterinsurgency operations are long, bloody and deadly affairs especially for innocent civilians. What makes the situation even worse in Yemen is that it is a civil war mixed with Iranian backing and transnational terrorism. This is a very deadly mix. Ceasefire talks are due to take place in Kuwait on April 21 but talks or no talks, it does not really matter. As long as state sponsors of terrorism such as Iran are involved, a political deal remains remote. Arab leadership The recent interception of Iranian arms heading to Yemen was not the first, and it will not be the last. For every ship that is seized with weapons it must be assumed that many more make it undetected. ALSO READ: Saudi Arabia draws the line in Yemen With the deal agreed last year over Irans nuclear programme, and the $100bn windfall for Tehran linked to the deal, expect more meddling in the region. Not only will Tehran have the money, but it now also has the confidence. Is the Saudi-led effort in Yemen going perfectly? No, but then show me a counterinsurgency and a counterterrorism campaign that was easy, quick, and bloodless. You may not agree with their tactics but at the end of the day it is only Saudi Arabia and its GCC allies who are willing to take meaningful action against the Iranian proxies and transnational terrorists operating in Yemen. The US sprinkles the countryside with a few drone strikes. Europeans issue communiques and then sit by idly. The West should want Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab world to start taking more responsibility for their own regional security. As Lawrence of Arabia said in 1916 during the Arab Revolt: Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Luke Coffey is a research fellow specialising in transatlantic and Eurasian security at a Washington DC based think-tank. He previously served as a special adviser to the British Defence Secretary and was a commissioned officer in the United States army. The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy. Government warns of a possible looming crisis as it blocks hundreds of people from moving forward en route to US. More than 600 people from several African countries are stranded after crossing the Atlantic by boat to Brazil and then passing through Colombia and Panama before getting stuck in Costa Rica en route to the United States. With more arriving every day so far from seven countries on the continent to the small border town of Paso Canoas, both the Red Cross and the government have warned it could turn into a crisis. The whole journey took the people four months. Its been bad, a lot of police in Colombia, Panama asking for money, Youleyni, a pregnant woman from the Democratic Republic of Congo, who travelled with her husband, told Al Jazeera. We havent had money for the bus and had to walk a long way. Wilson Camara, identified as a leader of the group, told Al Jazeera they chose the arduous route because it had become very hard to get to Europe. There is a problem of terrorism and the borders are closed [in Europe] and so it is difficult. We, Africans, cant get in. Americas easier to get to and seek refuge, Camara said. A new trail? The route to the US, though, was also closed to them since the Costa Rican government will not let them move forward. It says it is trying to plan a strategy since most of the people have no passports or other documents. We will evaluate each case. It could be deportation, refugee status, temporary residence, Mauricio Herrera, Costa Ricas communications minister, told Al Jazeera. There are a lot of options and meanwhile we will respect their human rights in a space where they cannot leave but which is not a jail. The people were now sleeping rough in a makeshift camp, surviving on food handouts. The Red Cross said it was trying to help, but was worried about what would happen if the route through Costa Rica became a new mass migration trail. They could be changing their route from Europe and going to America and so we could have a humanitarian crisis if we dont manage this right, Luis Jimenez, a Red Cross representative in Costa Rica, said. Jordans King Abdullah II is set to consolidate his powers through constitutional amendments that would give him sole constitutional control in areas of security, defence, foreign policy and the judiciary. The move, which triggered controversy in the past few days, began earlier this week with the government of Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour submitting a bill to Parliament, requesting approval of several constitutional amendments. The proposed changes will grant the king absolute powers to appoint his crown prince, deputy king, the chief and members of the constitutional court and the head of the paramilitary police force. They also include lifting the ban on Jordanian citizens with duel nationalities from holding public office. The Jordanian monarchy system is going through major changes and is taking a new form. by Journalist Fahd al-Khitan Although Jordan is officially a constitutional monarchy, where the king enjoys wide powers granted to him by the constitution, all of the current major appointments and decisions require the recommendations and the signatures of the prime minister and certain ministers. With the constitutional amendments, the king would no longer need the government to recommend nominees, or the signature of ministers or the prime minister. Jordanian journalist Fahd al-Khitan told Al Jazeera that the previous amendments, along with the proposed new ones have in effect liberalised the Jordanian constitution and will pave the way for parliamentary governments in the future. King Abdullahs long-term objective is to strengthen and insulate the monarchy by making it the guarantor of unity and stability of the country and lead it through a long transitional period, eventually leading to the establishment of a parliamentary government, al-Khitan said. Opponents, however, consider the move a rollback of gains and reforms that took place during the Arab Springs in 2011, when the king promised more reforms that would eventually limit his powers, not increase it. READ MORE: Jordan King given further exclusive powers The king has always enjoyed wide powers and often ruled directly, but retained a veneer of separation of powers and constitutional formalities that gave the prime minister official advisory and executive roles, attorney Ahmad al Najdawi told Al Jazeera. The new proposed changes would remove any veneer of separation of powers between the king and the executive and judicial branches. The king might expose himself to public criticism and discontent in case his choices commit mistakes or were involved in corruption by Opposition leader Husam Abdallat Former top aide to Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour Husam Abdallat pointed out that the drive to remove that veneer of formalities of government involvement in appointing the leaders of certain braches of power, is dangerous, even to the king. The king might expose himself to public criticism and discontent in case his choices commit mistakes or were involved in corruption, as was the case with two previous heads of the General Intelligence Department, he told Al Jazeera. Total nonsense Mohamad al-Hejuj, a member of parliament, said the opposition to the amendments is total nonsense, arguing that the amendments are within the spirit of the constitution because the king is the head of all three branches of power, the executive, the legislative and the judiciary. This is why I support the king here, he told Al Jazeera from Amman. The king is well within his constitutional right to drop the formalities of having the government recommend to him high-level appointees, and retain his constitutional right to do that without the government involvement, Hejuj added. The new amendments come on the heel of two previous amendments. The first, which came in the aftermath of the Arab Spring in 2011, limited powers of the king to dissolve and reconvene parliament. The second, issued last year, granting the king the power to individually appoint the head of militarys chief of staff and the head of the General Intelligence Department without the recommendation from the Council of Ministers and the prime minister. Follow Ali Younes on twitter @ali_reports At least three killed and over 100 others injured in blast at state-run petrochemical plant in southern Veracruz state. A massive explosion at an oil facility in southeastern Mexico has killed at least three workers, injured 136 and triggered evacuations, officials and state-run energy giant Pemex said on Wednesday. A huge plume of toxic grey smoke could be seen spewing from the plant, known as Pajaritos, in the city of Coatzacoalcos, in Veracruz state. The blast, which was felt from as far as 10km away, forced the evacuation of nearby schools and businesses. The cause of the explosion at the Petroquimica Mexicana de Vinilo plant, jointly owned by Pemex, was not immediately known. Javier Duarte, the Veracruz state governor, told Milenio Television that the blast killed three people at the plant. Another 58 people were hurt, according to Pemex. Duarte rushed to the scene of what he said was a very strong explosion, where fire crews had the blaze under control. People living in the vicinity should remain indoors as the cloud of chemicals dissipates, Duarte said. School classes in Coatzacoalcos and five nearby communities were suspended. President Enrique Pena Nieto said on Twitter that the government would help the affected workers and neighbours of the area. Fires at oil facilities in Mexico are fairly regular occurrences. In February, two people were killed and at least seven injured in a blaze at a Pemex oil platform off the coast of Campeche, also in the southeast. Pemex provides a fifth of the Mexican governments revenue but has posted huge losses amid crumbling production and oil prices. Troops cross into South Sudan in search of more than 100 children believed abducted in violent raid last week. Ethiopian troops have crossed into South Sudan in search of more than 100 children who were kidnapped and spirited across the border in a surprise attack that also killed 208 people. The attackers, who were armed with machine guns, killed anyone who tried to stop them from taking the children, including women, according to witnesses. They also took more than 2,000 livestock. Estimates of the number of children snatched ranged from 102 to 125. The army has been conducting reconnaissance missions in South Sudan and they have a clear idea of where the children are, Getachew Reda, the information minister, told the AFP news agency. We have sought approval of the government of South Sudan to conduct these operations. Al Jazeeras Catherine Soi, reporting from Gambela in western Ethiopia, where the incident took place, reported that witnesses said the men were well organised and dressed in military fatigues. READ MORE: Ethiopian defence forces are taking measures There is a lot of military action here now, Soi said. The whole area near the border with South Sudan is a security zone now. We cant access it at all. One survivor, spoken to by Al Jazeera at a local hospital, said seven members of his family had been killed. One female patient, who had been shot four times, said her three-year-old son was shot in the dead. Two of her children, she said, were among the group snatched across the border. Ethiopia began two days of mourning on Wednesday in memory of those who died in the attack, which happened late last week. Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn said in an address to the nation that Ethiopia was co-operating with the South Sudanese government to take joint measures against the attackers. On Wednesday, the European Union said it was in touch with South Sudanese authorities to offer help to ensure the immediate return of the children to their families. Ethiopian officials have blamed Murle tribesmen from South Sudan for a series of deadly attacks on Ethiopian villages in Gambela. Those attacked were from the Nuer tribe, a community that has often been in conflict with the Murle. Many survivors and witnesses to the attack told Al Jazeera that the men had Murle tribal markings. The Murle, a tribe from South Sudan based in the eastern Jonglei region near the Ethiopian border, often stage raids to steal cattle and abduct children but very rarely on such a large or deadly scale. A wave of anger The Addis Ababa government had already said that its army was hunting the attackers, but had not revealed that its troops crossed the border. According to Ethiopias state-run Fana radio, the army surrounded the area where the children were being held, but that has not yet been confirmed by the government. The raid has unleashed a wave of anger in Ethiopia and boosted fears that a civil war raging in South Sudan could spill over the border. READ MORE: South Sudan marks two years of ruinous war Ethiopia hosts more than 200,000 South Sudanese refugees who fled after war broke out in their country in December 2013. It is also home to Ethiopian and South Sudanese rebels who periodically attack government buildings and soldiers. Ethiopia has been heavily involved in the South Sudan peace process, partly because of the risk that the conflict could destabilise Gambela, which is only 50km from the border. After winning independence from Sudan in 2011, South Sudan descended into war two years later, setting off a cycle of retaliatory killings that have split the country along ethnic lines. Tens of thousands of people have been killed, more than two million forced to flee their homes, and millions made hungry as politicians failed to honour a series of peace agreements. A second round of the US-GCC summit is taking place amid shifting political and economic scenes. The second US-GCC summit comes at a time when the views of the United States and the Gulf Cooperation Council on regional politics are drastically different. Recent and open expressions of frustration by US President Barack Obama revealed some of the contentious differences on key issues. On Wednesday, Obama met Saudi Arabias King Salman to seek joint action on security threats including Iran and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group. On Thursday, Obama is expected to attend a GCC summit that comprises Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. According to the GCC spokesperson, the main issue on the summits agenda will be the Iranian interventions in regional politics. The US, on the other hand, is more concerned with the persistent GCC-Iran rivalry and the burden it places on the US to settle scores once it gets out of capacity and out of hand. Also high on the agenda, according to a White House official, is the fight against ISIL and other defence issues. READ MORE: Obama, will it be Iran or the GCC? The USs call for coexistence, after violence and aggression has taken precedence, can prove elusive. This is easily demonstrated after the bitter and costly confrontations in the region. Last May, Obama hosted the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council for a rare summit at the Camp David presidential retreat. He pledged then that the US would cooperate with them to address what he called Irans destabilizing activities in the region. The USs call for coexistence, after violence and aggression has taken precedence, can prove elusive. This is easily demonstrated after the bitter and costly confrontations in the region. The open, multilateral war in Syria enters its fifth year with massive humanitarian, political and economic ramifications. The latest Syrian Geneva peace negotiations is back at square one with the presented document of Basic elements for a political solution; described as bland and off the point by key observers. The situation across the region is hardly different. A revolution is fermenting in Egypt. Lebanon recently lost a promised $4bn Saudi military aid for not backing GCC side against Iran. Officials in Lebanon did not endorse an Arab League public condemnation of Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Lebanese armed militia. In Yemen, a Saudi-led GCC coalition war has entered its second year without a foreseeable resolution. Houthi rebels refused to attend a recent UN-backed negotiation in Kuwait for failure of the other party to commit to a ceasefire. The Yemeni negotiations are also obstructed by the Houthis demand to replace Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi as a president and by Yemens southern secessionist movement demand for immediate secession. The situation in Yemen is rapidly approaching the Syrian multilateral war scene. The domestic economic scene is another aspect that should not be neglected. While economic leverage was presumed to be the cushion that prevented social unrest in the GCC region, economic cuts as a result of the low oil prices are beginning to impact societies. A recent manifestation took place in Kuwait where oil workers began a strike on Sunday over public sector pay reforms. There are growing fears that the strike might extend to neighboring GCC countries, particularly in light of recent economic measures. Last week, top oil producers failed to reach consensus on a freeze of oil production; reflecting the growing tension between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The latter aims to increase production to compensate for its long years under sanctions. Also in anticipation of Obamas second visit, a group of human rights advocated have written an open letter to urge the president to pressure GCC leaders for political and civil reforms. However, such efforts are expected to be fruitless. Last year, the US-GCC summit received similar appeals. Understandably, it is hard to conceptualise the link between more freedom and civil rights in GCC and regional stability, as there are many variables involved in fostering and enabling regional violence. However, the most important ingredient remains to be an open political environment that enables people to freely express concerns, challenge violent ideologies and participate freely in political decision-making. It is, therefore, expected that any strategies aimed at achieving regional stability and economic reforms will need to apply measures of meaningful political reforms, not only to drive regional stability but also to reduce the effect of violent ideology fuelling the regional conflicts. It is not a question of luxury but of necessity to press for a space for a counter-discourse of moderation and modernisation, where the price of freedom of expression, and that of regional stability, is not paid in life or liberty. The writer is a Visiting Scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington DC A United States voter advocacy organisation has launched a lawsuit over systematic electoral irregularities in New Yorks presidential primary that led to more than 125,000 Democratic voters being dropped from poll rolls for unconfirmed reasons and denied their right to vote. Shyla Nelson, the spokeswoman for Election Justice USA, told Al Jazeera that the groups lawsuit, filed against New Yorks Board of Elections at the Federal District Court in Brooklyn on Monday, is calling for provisional ballots from reportedly disenfranchised voters to be counted before the primarys results are certified. We are preparing for a hearing that will happen next week, during which those provisional ballots will be reviewed, as well as all of the evidence that we collected from plaintiffs whose registration was in one way or another disrupted despite having proof of being registered as Democrats, Nelson said. They found their voter registration and party affiliation altered prior to the election, she said. And we have reports that at certain polling stations on Tuesday, people who requested provisional or affidavit ballots were told there was no such thing, which is false. Investigation launched New Yorks Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced on Wednesday that his office was launching an investigation into alleged vote irregularities after the states board of elections received a barrage of reports of disenfranchisements. Schneidermans office said it has received more than 1,000 complaints from voters across the state, a major rise from about 150 reports it saw in the 2012 general election. By most accounts, voters cast their ballots smoothly and successfully, Schneiderman said in a statement. However, I am deeply troubled by the volume and consistency of voting irregularities. READ MORE US elections: Its the system, stupid He also set up a hotline for voters to report any setbacks encountered at polling stations. Voting is the cornerstone of our democracy, and my office is deeply committed to ensuring equal access for all eligible voters on Election Day, Schneiderman said. I urge all New Yorkers to immediately contact my office if they face any barriers or issues that prevent them from casting an effective ballot. The New York Board of Elections has maintained its claim that no voters were disenfranchised, but said it was cooperating in investigations into the allegations. New Yorks Democratic primary was won by the partys frontrunner Hillary Clinton, which blunted the momentum of rival Bernie Sanders. The primary is seen as a pivotal one to win in order to clinch the nomination. READ MORE: Sanders last-ditch effort against Clinton Reports of voting irregularities and suppression have been reported across the country, with lawsuits also launched in Arizona and Ohio. Nelson said her organisation is also receiving complaints from upcoming primary states, including Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, California, Connecticut, and Kentucky. We are also focusing our efforts on the next primary states and doing what we can to initiate some kind of intervention and legal action to protect voters, she said. We were raised in a country where from our earliest schooling were taught that we lived in a democracy and the most sacred act in a democracy is the right to vote. And to have our young people denied that right because of what is being called clerical errors or mistakes by the [New York] election board is a travesty. Arcane system Jonathan Brater, of the Brennan Centre for Justice advocacy group at New York University School of Law, told Al Jazeera how the states arcane election system needs to be revamped. New York values may be a proxy for progressivism in our national politics but on elections, were shockingly out of date. This week was not the first time New York voters had a hard time at the polls, and its long past time we widened our lens and fixed our terribly arcane voting system, where voter disenfranchisement is too common. Automatic voter registration and other upgrades are the biggest piece of the answer. Instead of having to fill out a paper form to register, eligible citizens can be added to the voter rolls automatically and securely. In the seven years since its inception, El Negocito Records, based in Ghent, Belgium, has established itself as one of the most adventurous and far-ranging independent labels on the European new music scene. The phrase "new music" is operative here because the label concentrates on improvisation in all of its musical guises. There are modern jazz offerings (e.g.,'s amazing Drop Your Plans with drummer), free improvised outings (e.g.,'s Live at La Resistenza withand), and lots of music from undefinable, multi-hyphenated realms. Which brings us to the work of plectrist. To say he's an adventurous musician would be an understatement. He's literally and figuratively all over the map. All over the timeline, too. Listening to his last several albums, mostly drummerless collaborations with multi-instrumentalist(collectively the Machtelinckx / Jillings duo is known as Linus ), fellow guitaristsand, and reed player, makes it no less difficult to figure out exactly where Machtelincx' inspiration comes from. On his albums, Appalachian banjos rub shoulders with ambient electronic doomscapes and free-jazz saxophones, baritone guitar duets could provide the musical setting for a Van Dyck painting or the action in a hip 21st Century coffee bar, and jazzy conversations arise between tenor saxophones and delicate fingerstyle guitars. It's an endlessly fascinating aesthetic, and one that Machtelinckx has clearly put a great deal of thought and sweat into.On Linus + Skarb / Leroux, Linusthe Machtelinckx / Jillings duoworks with a pair of familiar and like-minded musicians: Frederik Leroux and. Like Machtelinckx, Leroux plays banjo and baritone guitar in addition to guitar. He's responsible for the electric end of the guitar spectrum on this disk. Skarb is a drummer and keyboardist. Here, he mostly sticks to drums and percussion, though he contributes striking Hammond B-3 textures to three haunting but brief group improvisations: "Vaag," "Vlaag," and "Vraag." Jillings, the other half of the Linus duo, is a really interesting jazz-based reed player who, like Machtelinckx, is totally at ease in a perplexingly wide variety of musical settings. Together, these musicians make some truly distinctive sounds which, as stated earlier, fuse folk, modern jazz, Medieval music, and experimental rock into something new and quite appealing; something cinematic, atmospheric, tuneful and soulful. What's really amazing about Linus + Skarb / Leroux is that this music is authentic unto itself. Despite the array of disparate influences, there's not a breath of pastiche or eclecticism.Both Jillings and Machtelinckx contribute compositions to Linus + Skarb / Leroux. Jillings' "Woodstock" is a pleasant ramble; a mournful bass clarinet melody framed by kitchen sink percussion over a repeating, overdubbed banjo / baritone guitar figure. "Sketch" is a formal, almost Asian-sounding, banjo duet. Machtelinckx' pieces are similarly diverse. The haunting "Down" utilizes a hypnotic minor key banjo ostinato to create a doomy, foreboding atmosphere; multiplied by relentless malleted toms and an overtone-laden bass clarinet solo. "Laboeuf" is almost the complete opposite: a warm and gentle ballad with Jillings' husky tenor out front. Skarb's drums cut in at the two-minute mark as the tune takes on the bucolic feel of a great lostcomposition from his ECM days. A baritone guitar / guitar duet forms the core of "Finco," as Skarb's brushes push the pace ever so slightly for Jillings' lush tenor. Is he improvising or playing a written melody? It's so beautiful that it hardly matters. And really, that's what this album is all about. Yet there's more to this tune; a cathartic electric guitar cuts across like a comet and eventually revisits the tenor saxophone melody, bringing some resolution.If jazz is truly the "sound of surprise," then Linus + Skarb / Leroux is the very definition of jazz. Surprises abound here. There's lots of improvisation, too. Yet, so much of this attractive, vibrant music seems rooted in the "other." This is not jazz-as-we-know-it. But it is profoundly fascinating. Can the entire history of a musical genre be encoded in one man's DNA? If that is possible, then reading the DeoxyriboNucleic Acid molecules in saxophonist Peter Brotzmann's body would yield all the information a musical scientist studying the development of free jazz would require. Since the 1960s, he has been in the center of the most powerful maelstrom in music, and maybe the most controversial sounds. From his Machine Gun (FMP, 1968) octet, to Last Exit, The Chicago Tenet, Sonore, Globe Unity Orchestra, The Wild Man's Band, to his duos with, Keiji Haino,, and on-and-on, he has been both witness and participant in a revolution music. But what to listen to, where to start? Maybe some of the old, new, and reissued covered below will help.Borah Bergman/Peter Brotzmann/Frode GjerstadLeftNot Two2016The world lost pianistin 2012. The seemingly always underrated improvising musician would have celebrated his 90th birthday in December 2016. One can, of course, rediscover his music from a scarce number of recordings like his solo work; A New Frontier (Soul Note, 1983), and Meditations For Piano (Tzadik, 2003) or his collaborative recordings with, and his two partners hereandThis live recording from the July 1996, Molde International Jazz festival in Gjerstad's home country of Norway is being heard for the first time. The tape, a very high quality DAT recording, was stuffed away in the saxophonist's drawer for years. His (and our) recent discovery, documents the first meeting between Gjerstad and Brotzmann, and, of course, allows us more of Bergman's music.The three lengthy pieces chronicle three musicians creating a consensus, or, at least for free jazz, settling on a musical treaty.The three would eventually record with each other in differing combinations; Brotzmann, Bergman and's Exhilaration (Soul Note, 1997) is outstanding as is the Gjerstad/Brotzmann session Sharp Knives Cut Deeper (Splasc(h) Records, 2003).The Left referred to in the title is for the pianist's legendary sinistral hand. He was an ambidextrous player, with the ability to generate ideas with both hands, seemingly independent of each other. His skills are on full display here. The opening track "Left Hand" acts as a sorting out. Brotzmann steamrolls his tenor to kick off the match. Soon Bergman matches strength-with-strength, and Gjerstad flexes, too. The first track mines mayhem with stretches of solo piano passages."Left Us" is more sympathetic. The trio is more comfortable with each other's approach and they cooperate in making, let's not say a melody, as much as a song. The music making is reciprocal, as if the three have decided they are equals. Interestingly enough, the final and longest piece "Left Out" at nearly 25-minutes, doesn't include Bergman until halfway through. He is content to sit back and listen to Brotzmann and Gjerstad perform a chamber-like recital before he enters. The music follows the narrative arc of a well-read classic story.Peter Brotzmann/Heather LeighEars Are Filled With WonderNot Two2016The intriguing new duo of saxophonist Peter Brotzmann and pedal steel guitarist Heather Leigh have released their first recording together, made during a 2015 live concert in Krakow, Poland. The encounter, brief at just 28-minutes in length, leaves a long-lasting impression.Leigh is a West Virginia-born, Texas-bred pedal steel guitarist who now resides in Scotland and sounds something like a cross between Thurston Moore, Loran Connors and Oren Ambarchi. She has the ability to match the harsh with the melancholy and maintain a hypnotic line that is a perfect foil to the free jazz pioneer's sound.The title Ears Are Filled With Wonder is taken, like many of Brotzmann's song titles, from a line of Kenneth Patchen's poetry. Like the poet's ferocious pacifist slant, there's nothing docile about this date. Brotzmann slowly enters with his vocalized overblowing, emptying his musical vessel before Leigh lays a quiet carpet of notes that she bends to her taste. The duo eschews the expected scuffle and brawl for what can only be described as a more pensive, meditative approach.Leigh seems to bring out a blues expression in the German's playing. Even when she increases her volume, there's a restrained suffering about this music. Leigh moves into sustained notes, almost stepping into the world of noise, like Jimi Hendrix surfed that edge, before steering back towards the blues. The music ends with an eerie supernatural soundtrack of bass clarinet and dizzying twisted electric. Truly electric.Peter Brotzmann/Fred Hopkins/Rashied AliSonglinesTrost2016This reissue of an FMP live recording at the Total Music Meeting 1991 in Berlin has long been out-of-print since its issuance in 1994. It is a disc that received criticism from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. You see, back in 1991, many writers and fans clung to the differences between American and European free jazz (some still do). The Europeans maintained a "kill-your-idols" approach to the New Thing in jazz, begun in the 1960s by, and. The Americans mostly scratched their heads, and pointed out the same divisions between British improvisation and that of Germany and The Netherlands. In October of 1991, the concerts featured three saxophonists, and, three bassists, and, and three drummers, and. Besides this disc, the concert produced the hallowed Touching' On Trane (FMP, 1993) recording by Gayle, Parker, and Ali.Let's let the free jazz figs argue the contrasts between the two continents (and an island) and we can celebrate the return, and remastering, of this gem.Songlines is a fantastic introduction to those new to the music of Peter Brotzmann. It is the free jazz equivalent of Coltrane's Ballads (Impulse!, 1963) recording. It acts as an easing into the heavy ideology the German created in the late 1960s. His trio is made up of bassist Fred Hopkins, a co-founder of the free jazz trio Air withandand a collaborator with, and Coltrane's last drummer. It is the only recording Brotzmann made with Ali, although he did record in 1991, The Atlanta Concert (Okka Disc, 2001) with Hopkins andThe music is very accessible, and not unlike Brotzmann's solo recordings No Nothing (FMP, 1991) and 14 Love Poems (FMP, 1984), he doesn't eschew intensity, but pays mind to melody and, dare I say, swing? Said pulse is provided by Hopkins, keeping time in a jazz expression, while Ali accents with his busy cymbal work. Brotzmann gives his collaborators plenty of room here, laying out when he sees fit. It's the blues we heard on his solo work. For certain, those who wished to divide free jazz fans by continent scoffed at this recordings. But listen fifteen years later to the great man's collaborations with his Chicago Tentet, Heather Leigh, Sonore, and Michiyo Yagi. You'll hear the same synergistic cooperation.Tracks and PersonnelLeftTracks: Left Hand; Left Us; Left Out.Personnel: J Borah Bergman: piano; Peter Brotzmann: tenor saxophone, clarinet, tarogato; Frode Gjerstad: alto saxophone.Ears Are Filled With WonderTracks: Ears Are Filled With Wonder.Personnel: Peter Brotzmann: tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, tarogato, b-flat clarinet; Heather Leigh: pedal steel guitar.SonglinesTracks: No Messages; Old Man Kangaroo; Man In A Vacuum;.......It Is Solved By Walking; Songlines; Two Birds In A Feather.Personnel: Peter Brotzmann: tarogato, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone; Fred hopkins: double bass; Rashied Ali: drums. 2005 .. AR's Editor Joe Shea Talks About Elections On Iranian TV Bear Stearns Saved By Fed As Lehman Bros. Falters; Major Bank Failure Looms Over Wall Street, Sends Markets Into 200-Pt. Dive Lie Upon Lie Five Years Into the Iraq War The Administration Still Churns Out Lies by Randolph Holhut A Small Tragedy Even at 90, As Friends Turn Cool She Knows the Show Must Go On by Joyce Marcel I'll Take Me Imagine John Wayne or Arnold In Heels, Silk and a Girdle by Elizabeth Andrews Sen. Nelson Calls For New Fla. Primary; Gov Crist Backs 'Do-Over' Who'll Win? Ask Spock Spock.com Engine Predicts Winners By Site Searches; It Can be Wrong by Jay Bhatti Chatting Up The Cat God Gave Me Dominion Over Him But I Think He's a Non-Believer by Constance Daley Death of a Thug The Life and Horrors of Suharto by Andreas Harsono ___________________________ This Just In Sierra Club: McCain Ducked All 15 Key Votes On Green Laws (AR) A Work By AR's T.S. Kerrigan Is Chosen As 'Best Poem' By Wordpress Site Murder At Mile 63 The Deadly Assault and Bush Administration Cover-Up by S. Eben Kirkesby and Andreas Harsono 5427 14th St. West, Bradenton, FL 34207 $6.99 Fish Fridays! Manatee Co.'s Only 24-Hr. FREE Wi-Fi Paid Advertisement On Native Ground AFTER 5 YEARS, WE'RE STILL LIED TO ABOUT IRAQ by Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Next week is the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And it is likely that sometime in the next couple of weeks, the 4,000th American soldier will die in Iraq. [MORE] Momentum OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD by Joyce Marcel DUMMERSTON, Vt. - It's 1931, and a 14-year-old girl is standing alone on a stage. She's small and lively with dark curly hair, widespread hazel eyes, slender wrists and an open, eager face filled with the wonder of performing. Her name is Rose, and one day she will be my mother. But now she is performing an Eugene O'Neill monologue called "Before Breakfast" for a ladies' club in a wealthy suburb of Long Island. [MORE] One Woman's World COMFORTABLE WITH MYSELF by Elizabeth T. Andrews CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- I'm not sure but I think I may be socially incorrect. [MORE] On Native Ground ENOUGH FOR A WAR, NOT FOR A PEOPLE by Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Last week, the National Governors Assn. met in Washington, D.C. One of the tasks the NGA had on its agenda was to ask President Bush to increase federal spending on roads, bridges and other public works projects as a way to stimulate the economy. He rejected their pleas out of hand, claiming that infrastructure projects wouldn't offer any short-term economic boost. [MORE] Brasch Words BEWARE THE SELF-REVERENTIAL PRESS by Walter Brasch BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Shortly before the primary votes this past week, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter called Sen. Barack Obama's surge to the Democratic nomination "inevitable." It also called for Hillary Clinton to "start her campaign for Senate majority leader." [MORE] Constance A CONVERSATION WITH MY CAT Constance Daley ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- Normally, when the cat starts his evening rant of meowing continuously until he makes his point, I just take it as long as I can, pick him up, and put him in the garage for the night. He doesn't want to go, but the meowing stops and I don't care if he likes it or not. [MORE] Momentum OUT OF STRUGGLE, ART by Joyce Marcel DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Here we are again at the crossroads of art and social change, having the opportunity to watch good and great films about the lives of women in support of the Women's Crisis Center. [MORE] Campaign 2008 HOW TO PREDICT SUPER TUESDAY II WINNERS? ONLINE SEARCH by Jay Bhatti NEW YORK, March 4, 2008, 7:00PM ET -- With the outcomes of the Texas, Vermont, Ohio and Rhode Island primaries to be decided tonight, how possible is it that online searching can predict who will win tonight's primaries? [MORE] One Woman's World DON'T VOTE; IT ENCOURAGES THEM by Elizabeth T. Andrews CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- Call me angry and disgusted but don't call me un-American because I won't be voting come November. [MORE] On Native Ground BUSH AND THE KEYBOARD COMMANDOS by Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- As the days tick down toward the eventual departure of President George W. Bush from the White House, it's a hopeful sign that most Americans are no longer moved by his Administration's constant exploitation of terrorism for political gain. [MORE] Momentum WHICH AMERICA DO YOU LIVE IN? by Joyce Marcel DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's a little confusing. [MORE] Make My Dat THE LAWYER THAT ATE NEW YORK by Erik Deckers INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I used to know a guy who, quite literally, didn't get hyperbole. He didn't understand exaggeration. As a result, he missed most jokes that came his way. [MORE] On Native Ground FIDEL RETIRES: NOW THE COLD WAR IS REALLY OVER by Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Maybe now, we can finally say the Cold War is over. [MORE] Make My Dat THE LAWYER THAT ATE NEW YORK by Erik Deckers INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I used to know a guy who, quite literally, didn't get hyperbole. He didn't understand exaggeration. As a result, he missed most jokes that came his way. [MORE] One Woman's World POLITICS IS NO PARTY by Elizabeth T. Andrews CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- Are you having a hard time focusing your eyes? Do you have faint red spots all over your body? Is there a ringing in your ears and do you see wavy lines when you look at your television set? Do your hands shake when you try to hold a cup of coffee? And have you recently been forgetting what day of the week it is - or what year? [MORE] Make My Day FOR BETTER OR WORSE ... A LOT WORSE by Erik Deckers INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "Marriage: It's Only Going to Get Worse." [MORE] Constance YOU CALL THESE RIGHTS? by Constance Daley ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- When you express an opinion you hope to persuade others to your point of view. It doesn't always happen but still, opinion writers try. [MORE] Momentum THE BRIDGE WOMAN by Joyce Marcel DUMMERSTON, Vt. - Out there in America - yes, still - is a generation of women who were born in the 1940s, raised in the 1950s, and who came to radical consciousness in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I am one of them. Hillary Clinton is one of them. [MORE] On Native Ground OBAMA AND MY GENERATION by Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I originally planned on voting for Dennis Kucinich in the Vermont Primary on March 4. [MORE] The Willies: WARNING: THIS MEDICATION MAY MURDER YOUR FRIENDS by Joe Shea BRADENTON, Fla. -- You've heard the warnings, haven't you? Stop Prozac and you may take a shotgun, an Uzi or an AK-47 and mow down your family and friends, or even a whole classroom full of your fellow students. You didn't? Well, that warning is not on the bottle, but like countless mass-murder incidents before it, Friday's shootings at Northern Illinois University, as well as the Virginia Tech shootings that killed 32 last year, was probably precipitated by the effect of stopping medications that suppress anger and other powerful emotions but do not relieve the underlying cause. Isn't it time we started warning people - or stopped prescribing these medicines? [MORE] One Woman's World DON'T KNOCK ON MY DOOR by Elizabeth T. Andrews CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- I wish I could feel delight in my poet's mansion being like Grand Central Station all the time, but I can't. And I wish my place was such a place that someone would one day write: "Her door was always open and she always made you feel all fuzzy and warm in her presence. She could make a cup of coffee seem like a banquet." [MORE] Reporting: Panama PANAMA'S VIOLENT LABOR UNREST INTENSIFIES Mark Scheinbaum PANAMA CITY, Panama, Feb, 15, 2008 -- After just one day of relative calm, wildcat construction strikes by some members of Panama's largest union flared up again Friday morning, four days after a police sniper shot one worker. More than 140 demonstrators have been injured and at least 500 arrested, authorities say. [MORE] Brasch Words TO STIMULATE ECONOMY, BUY A CHINESE-MADE U.S. FLAG by Walter Brasch BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Walking down Main Street, pushing a grocery cart loaded with clothes, toys, and appliances was Marshbaum. Fastened to the right front corner of the cart was an American flag tied onto a three-foot ruler. [MORE] Make My Day THE TOOTH, AND NOTHING BUT THE TOOTH by Erik Deckers INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- To commemorate the death of noted shark exploder Roy Scheider, and the "Jaws" movies that resulted in Erik never setting foot in the ocean again, we are reprinting this column from 2003. Shark Experts 0, Sharks 1 [MORE] Momentum THE WINTER OF MY DISCONTENT by Joyce Marcel DUMMERSTON, Vt. - As I write this, it's raining ice. Maybe a half a foot of snow and ice has already landed up here in the woods of Dummerston. Our cars are encased in it, and the door to the house is blocked. The satellite dish that brings in our Internet service quit about 20 minutes ago - frozen solid. [MORE] The Willies AMERICA TO HILLARY: GET OUT! by Joe Shea BRADENTON, Fla., Feb. 13, 2008 -- Sen. Hillary Clinton has adopted the Rudy Giuliani strategy, and it's working - for Sen. Barack Obama. It turns out to be the strategy all Democrats are seeking - an exit strategy. But it's not for Iraq. It's for her exit from the race for the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination. [MORE] Constance CONFESSIONS OF A DISAPPOINTED VOTER by Constance Daley ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- A week ago at just about this time, I completed an article and was about to submit it as scheduled to The American Reporter. I was feeling rather elated, ready to show up on Super Tuesday morning, firmly touch the X next to Rudy Giuliani's name and get on with my day. He was my choice; he would get my vote. [MORE] Reporting: Florida SIERRA CLUB SET TO SUSPEND FLA. CHAPTER by Joe Shea BRADENTON, Fla., Feb. 10, 2008 -- The national Sierra Club is set to suspend its Florida chapter after years of divisive infighting, the president of the national club told Florida members in a letter delivered to some this weekend. It is the first time in its 116-year history that such a step has been considered by the club, according to news reports. [MORE] One Woman's World PLANT A NEW WORLD THIS SPRING by Elizabeth T. Andrews CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- For a little while, the men will just have to toss and turn in their fear-free-women beds. For a small space of time Hillary Clinton will just have to trudge on toward the White House without my faint applause in the background. [MORE] On Native Ground VERMONT AND THE 5 STAGES OF CONSERVATIVE GRIEF by Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- First, Vermont tried to convince the nation to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney. [MORE] Make My Day REBEL WITHOUT A TONGUE by Erik Deckers INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Kids' brains work in amazing ways. At times, they can grasp complex concepts and make impressive discoveries. Other times, you have to wonder how we ever survived as a species. [MORE] The Willies FOR DEMOCRATS, NOW IT'S ABOUT RACE, INCOME AND GENDER by Joe Shea BRADENTON, Feb. 6, 2008 -- It's not a good time to be a Democrat. As the Super Tuesday results demonstrated, the presidential race between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton has divided the partly along clear racial, income and gender lines - the very distinctions the party has sought to erase in principle but has emphasized in its pursuit of diversity. [MORE] Momentum SUPER TUESDAY BLUES by Joyce Marcel DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Super Tuesday has come and gone and I still can't get excited about the upcoming presidential elections. [MORE] The Willies ON THE BRINK OF HISTORY, YOUR PUSH IS NEEDED by Joe Shea BRADENTON, Fla., Feb. 5. 2008 -- I'm expecting a sea change tonight. I believe that for the first time in this nation's history we will once and forever banish racism as the deciding factor in the destiny of African-Americans, and indeed adopt diversity as our path to the future. [MORE] Campaign 2008 AT 88, EVERY VOTE REALLY COUNTS by Ted Manna DENVER, Feb. 5, 2008 -- Pearl Turner will caucus for Mitt Romney tonight in Denver. [MORE] One Woman's World STAND BY YOUR WOMAN by Elizabeth T. Andrews CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- The black vote. The gay vote. The fundamentalist vote. The Hispanic vote. [MORE] An AR Special SUSPECTS IN BENAZIR ASSASSINATION HAVE TIES TO MUSHARRAF by Ahmar Mustikhan WASHINGTON, D.C. -- When Gordon Brown this past Monday feted coup-leader-turned-President Pervez Musharraf at 10 Downing Street, Britain's new prime minister probably didn't ask the Pakistani dictator a question that is now on many minds: Did you order the murder of Benazir Bhutto? [MORE] Momentum TO THE VERMONT DELEGATION: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR US LATELY? by Joyce Marcel DUMMERSTON, Vt. Back when President George W. Bush and Dick Vice President Dick Cheney were building up to their loathsome war in Iraq, very few people were brave enough to call the bullies' bluff. [MORE] On Native Ground IF BUSH HAS HIS WAY, WE'LL NEVER LEAVE IRAQ by Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. - In his final State of the Union address on Jan. 28, President Bush cautioned against accelerating U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq, saying that it would endanger the process that has been made over the past year. [MORE] Campaign 2008 CLASH OF COMMENTS AND PROTESTORS AT CLINTON, OBAMA RALLIES IN DENVER by Ted Manna DENVER, Feb. 1, 2008 -- At least four presidential campaigns of both partiers rolled into in Denver this week ahead of the Feb. 5 "Super Tuesday" primaries in 22 states, but it was the Democratic presidential contenders who drew the big crowds and duked it out Wednesday. If sheer numbers are any indication, Sen. Barack Obama - preceded by a buoyant and beautiful Caroline Kennedy - won the round handily. He is the overwhelming favorite to win the Colorado primary next Tuesday. [MORE] The Willies WHY THE FLORIDA PRIMARY STINKS by Joe Shea BRADENTON, Fla., Jan. 30, 2008 -- I was with my wife and daughter driving the back way from Miami home to Bradenton when we stopped at a McDonald's in Clewiston, the only big town along the vast shore of Lake Okeechobee, the state's precious freshwater reservoir. The McDonald's had three televisions at a central seating area, each tuned to a different network, and our table was in front of CNN as the very first election results started to pour in around 7:30PM. With them, almost as counterpoint, suddenly came such an overwhelming odor of cow plop that my wife started to throw up as we all ran to the parking lot. [MORE] Passings: Suharto DEATH OF A KEMUSU THUG by Andreas Harsono JAKARTA - A few minutes after hearing that former president Suharto had died in his hospital bed, Marco, a militia leader in downtown Jakarta, raced to Suhartos house, wearing his jungle camouflage and began guarding the Suhartos residence on Cendana Street. [MORE] Constance I REMEMBER YOU by Constance Daley ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga.. -- It seems to be more often lately that the sentiment is spoken but it's always been out there: "You never get over the death of your child." This is true. But the heartfelt expressions come from some who cannot fathom the notion of losing a child; their own child is who is in their mind, not another mother's child. [MORE] PLEASE NOTE! Due to the March 23, 2020 NM DOH Public Health Order, These Event Listings Are Not Accurate! All non-essential businesses are closed, public gatherings are prohibited! (One day some of these events will be rescheduled or will resume, but they are not happening now!) Thirty-five years is how long it takes to get to know someone in Burque. And it takes at least 20 years of going to the same restaurant to get an idea of whats so damn good about it, to leave an impression that will form memories, that will prove a model for the years to come. Anyway, thats what my friend Joseph tells me as I pilot the Bimmer down Zuni, towards San Mateo. We are going to have lunch at Loyolas Family Restaurant, a place hes been frequenting since the 90s. Long before the joint was made visible to the world at large thanks to popular teevee shows depicting it as a meeting place, as a staging area for fictional Burquenosboth those breaking bad and their associates who deal with the consequences of their fateful decisionsJosephs been coming to Loyolas to meet up with friends and family, get neighborly service and of course, to eat. Turn down this street, says Joseph, who is fiddling with the car stereo trying to make it produce sounds that are complimentary to hunger and suggest a filling outcome. I tell him that any kind of rock and roll music sounds good when one is hungry. As I point the car toward the edge of Nob Hill, Truckin by the Grateful Dead bursts out of the speakers, all candy-coated and rumbling like the clouds overhead, like the bellies we are going to feed. Joseph tells about the time in Santa Fe when we got lost for three days trying to find a way back from the tour. We somehow ended up near Placitas with nothing good to eat and an empty gas tank besides. Thank Hashem for hippies and the kindness of native New Mexicans, he says as I park the car in an over-full lot next to Loyolas. Inside the joint is bright and busy; nearly every table and all the counters are filled up with eaters who are reading, talking, visiting amidst a Southwest-themed dining room. There are big ceramic lamps hanging from the ceiling and an old-fashioned glass display case loaded with fruit pies up front. An attendant who comes to greet us at the door knows Joseph by name. She asks after his father too, wondering when the old man might stop by again. Somehow, it is my first time here. As we are seated, I admit to my friend how I am astonished and amused my father never brought me here but that his did. We blame it on the complexity of the synchronicity of lives bound up in the ritual of New Mexican dining and begin perusing our menus. Loyolas features a selection of traditional New Mexican food, its variations and a wide variety of comfort-inducing diner fare, like chicken fried steak, liver and onions, and tasty cheeseburgers, all hot off the grill. From the pleased looks of patrons indulging in any of that, I get the feeling any item here will satisfy, but order the Super Enchilada Plate out of habit. Joseph asks for Sarahs Special, which is a scrambled-egg burrito, covered in chile and accompanied by home fries and whole beans. Its a breakfast that reminds him of Sundays when Loyolas was open early and hed drive over to the restaurant from the student ghetto with his husband Manuel. Theyd order the same items every time, luxuriating in the slow and friendly atmosphere before continuing a journey that included finding the perfect local bookstore hidden somewhere in the cool confines of a neighborhood that practically and successfully stretched from Girard to San Mateo. Lunch arrives. Our conversation recedes into the background, ready to be instantly reactivated at another place and time, as has been the case since we were in high school at the golden city. The enchiladas are soft and pliant, coated in a red chile sauce that is surprisingly light and tangy. Neither the corn tortillas nor the hearty ration of sopaipillas suffer from the effects of oil; they have been fried up using a method that focuses on flavor while denying the greasy nature of the process. Also, the refritos are silky yet have a pleasing and solid texture to them. The rice, often an overlooked and undercooked aspect of Nuevo Mexicano cuisine passed muster with subtle, spicy overtones contributing to its success with my tongue. Best of all, the chefs at Loyolas take it easy on the cheese. The cook clearly knows best, I manage between bites, before asking about Josephs indulgence. Here is a meal fit for royalty, he intones with a smile, invoking the humble grandeur of a plate heaped up with fresh beans and potatoes, eggs cooked until their character is tantalizingly crispy; all smothered with green chile hot enough to make one sing such praises in a high register. Our waitress reminds us of a remedy for that wholesome heat: Natillas, a rich traditional custard of the most milky and eggalicious variety, is always available for dessert. When we are done, when all the food in front of us has disappeared through a grateful process, we remainfor a momentlost in the resulting reverie. My friend is busy remembering kind portions of his life as the door to Loyolas opens and closes. Im thinking about the next time I might have an hour to spirit myself away from things and get back here. In either case, we will be here again. Dateline: England A British court has ruled that a woman from Wales cannot name her baby daughter Cyanide. The woman, whose name was not published for legal reasons, gave birth to twins some eight months ago. She wanted to name the boy Preacher and the girl Cyanide. The woman later said in court she thinks Cyanide is a lovely, pretty name and that the deadly poison has positive associations because it was responsible for killing Hitler and Goebbels, and I consider that this was a good thing. Unfortunately for her, local officials objected. Back in September a family court judge ruled against the mother, saying she was not acting to secure her childrens welfare. The mother challenged that ruling, saying it was her human right to choose her childrens names. Earlier this month three Court of Appeal judges upheld the prior ruling. One of the justices, Eleanor King, said it was one of those rare cases in which judges should intervene. It is hard to see how ... the twin girl could regard being named after this deadly poison as other than a complete rejection of her by her birth mother, King said in her judgment. According to King, the woman has a chaotic history of drug abuse and mental health problems, and her children have been placed in foster care. The court ordered that the names of the twins now be chosen by their three older half-siblings. Dateline: Canada An indoor pool in Vancouver, British Columbia, opted to close down on Wednesday, April 20, in order to avoid an event organized by a group of marijuana enthusiasts at neighboring Sunset Beach that could have turn the pool into a massive hotbox. The 4/20 event was expected to draw approximately 25,000 peoplewhich sent staff at the Vancouver Aquatic Centre into a panic, fearing their maxed-out ventilation system would suck up the smoke, turning the building into a gaint water bong. Its not possible to shut down intake fans, park board chairwoman Sarah Kirby-Yung told the CBC. Given the tens of thousands of people expected to be around the Aquatic Centre smoking marijuana that day, we are sensitive to that intaking into the building. Organizers for the massive smoke out say the event has increased in size every year, which is why they decided to move the event from its 20 year home at the Vancouver Art Gallery to Sunset Beach. Kirby-Yung told the press she has been encouraging organizers to find a different location for several months. From the park boards perspective, and I really want to stress this, this is an unsanctioned event. This is a non-permanent event, and it is classified as public protest, said the board chair. It really doesnt fall under the jurisdiction of the park board. Dateline: Scotland A worker at the BrewDog craft brewery in Ellon, just north of Aberdeen, played a prank that got 200,000 cans of beer recalled. But instead of getting fired, he was named Employee of the Month. The UKs Mirror newspaper reports BrewDog packing manager Graeme Wallace got mad after the company was accused of not being punk enough. Taking matters into his own hands, Wallace changed the expiration date wording on the bottom of some 200,000 Punk IPA cans to read Mother Fucker Day. The cans were shipped out to the whole of the UK, and soon beer drinkers were posting images of the altered labels on social media. Have to take all these beers off sale because someone had a bad day, wrote one Imgur user. A spokesperson for BrewDog later confirmed, At another company someone responsible for a prank like this might have been given the heave ho. At BrewDog, Graeme was awarded Employee of the Month. Dateline: Florida A woman who allegedly attacked her husband after discovering his dildo will not be prosecuted for domestic battery, according to a court filing in Manatee County, Fla. According to the website The Smoking Gun, 48-year-old Chao Gao was arrested in mid-February on the misdemeanor charge following a confrontation with her spouse, Joshua Sinclair, that left him with bruises and scratches on his face. At the time of the incident police reported that Gao discovered the sex toy among her husbands belongings as the couple was moving residences. Sinclair admitted to officers that Gao attacked him after learning that a dildo she found was actually for me to use. Sinclair, who married Gao just over a year ago, said that his wife was driving to their new home when she began to beat and slap and pinch my face with her hand repeatedly. While Sinclair gave police a written statement detailing the battery, he signed a waiver of prosecution the next day. Earlier this month prosecutors in Manatee County filed a notice that they would not be pursuing a battery charge against Gao. PRINT | EMAIL | PERMALINK Newscity APD Staffing Problems Continue Robert Maestas An APD job fair last weekend attempted to remedy Albuquerque's officer shortage. The department currently has around 840 active officersshort of the budgeted one thousand. The shortage is having measurable negative effects. Response times to priority 1 calls went up to around 11 and a half minutes in 2016, a considerable increase over the 10 and a half minute response time of 2014. Earlier this month, the police officers' union released the results of a poll that found 98 percent of 330 officers believed the city is understaffed. Ninety-seven percent felt the low numbers compromise their safety. Finding qualified candidates seems to be one of the largest hurdles in the continuing effort to increase numbers. The department interviewed over a thousand applicants last year but only chose 31 of them to go on to training. Applicants were turned away if they had a poor credit score, if it was found that they had ingested marijuana in the past three years, if they had poor reading and writing skills, if they had a poor driving record or for various other reasons. The officers' union blames a low pay rate for the lack of quality interest, citing higher wages in comparable cities. UNM Students Call For Ban on on Official Seal Students at UNM are circulating a petition to remove the official university seal, which depicts a Spanish conquistador and a frontiersman. Native American advocacy groups like The Kiva Club and The Red Nation say the seal is offensive to descendants of those who were victimized by the US colonial and European invasion. The petition also calls for the university administration to ban racist art from campus, construct a Native cultural center and institutionalize the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples into UNM policy. A forum was held last Sunday to discuss the seal, where numerous students and residents voiced a belief that the seal glorifies the violent Spanish conquest of the Pueblo peoplea sentiment that is especially distasteful at a university with one of the largest Native populations in the country. Some students disagree with the movement, though, saying that removal of the seal will make it too easy to forget the state's bloody past. According to UNM policy, the seal can only be changed if it is voted on and approved by the board of regents, but students have yet to file an official complaint. The interests of Americans around the world are represented by the President of the United States. Where American interests lie is mostly geographical and sometimes political. The interests range from trade, defense of trade and, sometimes, defending the freedom of our friends. A few days ago, President Obama hosted a long-planned nuclear security summit in Washington, D.C. Leaders from over a fifty countries came. No Russians were there. As the conference finished, combat broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the latters Nagorno-Karabakh region, which has been under Armenian military occupation since 1994. The shooting broke a 22-year-long cease-fire. Armenia and its forces in the Karabakh region agreed to another cease-fire a few days later on April 5. The 1994 cease-fire left in place an Armenian occupation of one-fifth of Azerbaijan including the Nagorno-Karabakh region that has been and is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan. Nagorno-Karabakh has never been independent or part of Armenia. Who started the fighting is immaterial. It was fought on Azerbaijani territory. People died on both sides. It is claimed that Azerbaijan secured strategic heights in the few days before a cease-fire was agreed to. It is their internationally recognized territory. In the middle of the cease-fire was Russia, not the United States. By inserting itself into the situation to broker a cease-fire, Russia acted unilaterally, without the U.S. and France -- the other co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group, which is mandated to mediate between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The United States president did not even meet with the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan, when they were both in Washington, D.C. for the summit, or try to arrange their meeting. The lack of meaningful diplomacy in this instance is shocking. Why didnt the President of the United States intercede in this larger-than-a-firefight episode where it is said hundreds of soldiers and civilians died? While this may be news to the president, Azerbaijan has been a partner of the United States in fighting terrorism since 2002, when it granted permission for the U.S. to move troops and supplies through Azerbaijani air space to make war in Afghanistan. On top of that, Azerbaijani soldiers have served in Afghanistan as allies and are there today, in April 2016. Azerbaijan has also been crucial in providing energy security to the U.S. as well as its allies in Europe and Israel. It is one of Washingtons absurdities that the U.S. Congress passed a law (Section 907 to the Freedom Support Act) in 1992, rewarding Armenia for an illegal invasion and punishing Azerbaijan for defending itself. The law was adopted at the behest of the well-financed Armenian Lobby. The lobby and its supporters in Congress dismissed the fact that the war of occupation in Nagorno-Karabakh was commanded and controlled from and by Armenia. It fomented, financed, and ran the war with Russian soldiers fighting for Armenia. This ludicrous American law that punished Azerbaijan for defending its own territory was passed and never overridden despite United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding Armenian forces withdraw from Azerbaijani territory. Annual waivers by Presidents Bush and Obama have enabled Armenia to avoid punishment. At one point, Armenia was receiving the highest amount of American aid per capita of any country in the world, even as the country was illegally occupying Azerbaijan and forcing -- at gunpoint -- a million Azerbaijanis from their homes. Secretary of State John Kerry was nowhere to be seen while the shooting was going on between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Both Kerry and the president were MIA. So, how did a cease-fire come about that stopped the shooting? The Russians are back. Between the Russian Czars and Soviet Russian Communists, Azerbaijan was ruled by Russians for almost 200 years. They want it back. The old phrase spheres of influence has returned. Russia yearns -- craves for more influence in its former territories. It dominates Armenia with money and over 5,000 troops and border guards; it wants to do the same with Azerbaijan. Armenia was found guilty of an illegal invasion -- with Russian Army help -- and illegal occupation of Azerbaijani territory by the European Court of Human Rights in June, 2015. The fighting over the first April weekend would never have happened if Armenia had followed multiple United Nations resolutions to leave the one-fifth of Azerbaijan it has illegally occupied for 22 years. With Russian support Armenia has no reason to give up an inch of Azerbaijani territory and allow hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijani refugees to return to their homes. The U.S. administration should defy the Armenian Lobbys influence-peddling and support justice for Azerbaijan -- a true ally of America in the region. The 2016 primary campaigns should serve as a major civics lesson for those Americans concerned about their democracy. Because of the unusual length of these primary contests, Americans are beginning to better appreciate the complex byzantine structure of the parties primary systems and their delegate selection methods, and theres little about it that is democratic. Even guests on Fox News warn of the possible subversion of democracy. What is lost on many Americans is the nature of the American political party. On Fox News, Rep. Duncan Hunter Jr. (R-CA), an early Trump supporter, went so as to tell Gretchen Carlson this (short video): But, remember, the GOP establishment, the Republican Party, are the people that are voting for Trump. I am not the Republican Party. Paul Ryans not the Republican Party. The people that are voting for Trump in record numbers, they are the Republican Party. And thats why I dont understand the talk about the GOP falling apart or the dissension. The people who are out there voting and they are the party. Forgive Rep. Hunter for saying the GOP establishment are the people that are voting. Surely, he didnt mean to say that the voters are the establishment; thats nonsense and Hunter merely misspoke. But what Mr. Hunter shouldnt get a pass on is his repeated claim that the voters are the party. Are we to believe that Democrats, Alinskyites, radical leftists, and anarchists (who vote in the GOP primaries for Trump precisely because they think that a Trump candidacy would destroy the Republican Party) are the Republican Party? If Hunter really thinks that the voters are the party, then he should be required to take remedial civics lessons. Political parties are private organizations; parties arent even mentioned in the Constitution. But who are the establishment? Theres confusion on that score, too, but Id say that elected government officials, especially those in Congress, are whats meant by the establishment. So Duncan Hunter, you may not be the Republican Party, but you are a member of the Republican establishment. The establishment is worried that the wrong person at the top of the November ballot will end their careers. Responding to speculation that the establishment might parachute him in as a white knight to save the GOPs prospects, Speaker Paul Ryan said he wouldnt accept the partys the nomination. Ryan also opined that the nominee should be someone who has run in the primaries. That would seem to expand the list of choices to the original 17 candidates, which is better than just the final three. But why would delegates want to restrict themselves to 17? Many Americans dont really understand democracy. Democracy is the system where citizens get to vote on their government, especially their officials. But thats not what the primaries are about. The primaries are about choosing who the parties run to be officials. Real democracy happens in general elections. On April 14, the Wall Street Journal ran Let Me Ask America a Question by Donald Trump, and its a fine example of the confusion many Americans have in understanding democracy, political parties, and the primary system. Mr. Trump asks America: How has the system been working out for you and your family? The system to which Trump refers is the presidential primary system, and he doesnt like it. Neither do I, but for entirely different reasons. There is one public official that the entire American electorate gets to vote on, and thats the president. But because of the Electoral College, voting for the president in the general election isnt really democratic. And voting for a presidential nominee isnt democratic because the states have different systems. Some states have closed primaries, some have open primaries, some have caucuses, some have conventions, some are winner-take-all, some proportional, some have various mixes of bound and unbound delegates, some vote in February and some vote in June, and on and on it goes. How is the vote of someone in a winner-take-all state equal to the vote of someone in a proportional state? There never was much democracy in the primary system. If general elections were conducted like the primaries, everyone would clearly see the dearth of democracy. Mr. Trump seems to think the primaries should be more like general elections. Perhaps he wants direct democracy, (at least until hes elected). Perhaps Trump is running in the wrong party. But candidates for president arent required to run under the auspices of a political party. If Trump decides to run as an Independent, i.e. unaligned with a party, then, given his penchant for democracy, shouldnt the voters get to decide on whether hell be allowed on the ballot? Perhaps Trump is running in the wrong country. The system Trump prefers takes self-determination and autonomy away from the party. The Donald seems to think there should be some one-to-one correspondence between the primary vote counts and the bound delegates, (perhaps he doesnt think there should be any unbound delegates). But if all they do is rubberstamp the primary voters choices, why even have delegates? There are thousands of Republicans in the national, state, and local Republican committees. Therell be 2,472 delegates to the national convention in July, which is about five times the size of Congress. Are we to think that these people cant decide on a suitable nominee without the input of the voter? If folks dont like the nominee that convention delegates choose, then they can vote for someone else, or form their own parties, or even run for office themselves. Or they can be petulant boobs and sit out the election. Delegates to the Republican National Convention would do well to consider that it was primary voters who chose those oh-so-successful nominees Dole, McCain, and Romney. And each of them got majorities before their conventions, so delegates dutifully fell in line and merely ratified the voters choices. So, to echo Trump: How has the primary system been working out for you, GOP? Ive been exercised about the primary system for quite some time; it makes little sense to me. In a 2009 article at GOPUSA, I proposed that convention delegates ignore the result of the primaries, forget that theyre pledged to a certain primary candidate, and engineer open conventions where they can choose, or perhaps draft, the best person. Some delegates may be concerned about being faithless, as in not voting for the candidate theyre pledged to. But there are much higher things to be faithful to than a candidate, such as the future of ones party. In 2016, the most important Republicans in the entire nation are the delegates to the national convention. There, the 2,472 of them will pool their collective wisdom to put their hopes in one person. One hopes they wont be swayed by the blather being spouted about disenfranchisement and democracy. Rather than deferring to the will of the primary voters, convention delegates themselves should select the nominee who they think is the best exemplar of Republicanism, who is best for the cause of conservatism, and who can win. Jon N. Hall is a programmer/analyst from Kansas City. Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis is terribly upset that Illinois governor Bruce Rauner refuses to give the city's public schools a $1.1-billion bailout. The state is in the midst of its worst fiscal crisis in history, as the government has been operating without a budget since July 1, 2015. The impasse is the result of Rauner's plan to cut the budget in order to balance it and the Democratic leadership saying they want higher taxes and more spending. In truth, Illinois House speaker Michael Madigan can't even get his majority to back his tax plan. But he's blaming Rauner anyway, which is a popular pastime for all Democrats in the state these days. Lewis ratcheted up the insane rhetoric by calling the governor an "ISIS recruit" who is committing acts of terror against the poor. Chicago Tribune: "Yes, I said it, and I'll say it again," Lewis continued. "Bruce Rauner is a liar. And, you know, I've been reading in the news lately all about these ISIS recruits popping up all over the place has Homeland Security checked this man out yet? Because the things he's doing look like acts of terror on poor and working-class people." Rauner's office quickly denounced Lewis' comments. "This kind of rhetoric has no place in American public discourse and sets a terrible example for our kids," Rauner spokeswoman Catherine Kelly said in a statement. Lewis' remarks highlighted a day of political showmanship over the troubled state of Chicago's schools. Chicago Public Schools CEO Forrest Claypool made a bid for moving contract talks with the CTU to binding arbitration. House Speaker Michael Madigan called for higher taxes on wealthy residents to prop up education funding. And busloads of CTU members, joined by allied labor unions and supporters, descended on Springfield for a march on the Capitol and the Executive Mansion to call for more education funding. Lewis' City Club speech came four days after the union rejected contract recommendations of an independent arbitrator, opening the door to a strike as soon as next month. Lewis said the city is heading toward another teachers strike, but that no decision has been made on when a walkout might take place. The union has been in negotiations with the school board for well over a year to replace a contract that expired June 30. Lewis continued her attack, comparing Rauner to a hostage-taker: "I think he's holding people hostage," Lewis said of Rauner. "Who does that? You hold people hostage. You hold defenseless children, babies, infants, you hold defenseless mothers who are brand-new, you hold people who are disabled hostage. Because you can't get something else you want to have, that has nothing to do with a budget? You know, I mean, it's ideological. That's terrorism, that is pure ... terrorism." She wants a new "funding mechanism" for the schools, replacing the use of property taxes for that purpose. And the reason is simple: having Springfield directly fund schools out of the general budget would allow her and her union thugs to get as much taxpayer cash as possible. One teacher summed up the position of the union: "We're broke because they're allowing us to be broke," Osgood said. "And they want us to be broke, so they can do these things to our system and claim they have no other choice." The teachers' last contract gave them a huge raise at a time when the city was struggling with its own massive deficit. With no accountability for student outcomes, Chicago teachers can and will hold up the state for more pay increases while they continue to lie about graduation rates the worst of any big city in the country. A Princeton University economics professor highlights the darker sides of the reformers of the American Progressive Era in an interview. Hillary Clinton has repeatedly described herself as a progressive, and even as a proud, modern, American progressive, but the political history of American progressivism is neither widely known nor understood. Todays new progressives, neoprogs, appear to be rapidly abandoning the label of liberal and adopting progressive as a more favorable moniker. But the history of legacy American progressivism is less than worthy of praise. Dr. Thomas C. Leonards recently released book, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era, was reviewed here shortly before it was released. Now, in an hour-long YouTube interview with libertarian.org, Leonard has summarized many of the key findings of his research into the history of the American Progressive Era. One question his work provokes, but does not address, is this: is the abortion industry in America today an ideological derivative of the eugenics movement once championed by progressives? I am stunned at the reason Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel is seeking to borrow $1.2 billion, adding to the already crushing debt and debt-like pension liabilities his city faces. Just last year, Chicagoans endured a $700-million tax hike, with many more to come as the pension promises come due. It is not for anything that anyone could remotely term necessary with any honesty. Roman circuses come to mind as an appropriate comparison. Joe Kaiser of the Illinois Policy Institute reports: Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuels plan to house the George Lucas museum near McCormick Place calls for $1.2 billion in borrowing. Emanuels plan would borrow the money from the state agency that runs McCormick Place, and tack on five future consumption tax hikes to the more than 30 taxes Chicagoans already pay, all to construct the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Chicago has a plummeting credit rating and underfunded pensions, and the citys instability combined with the continued threat of tax hikes is causing residents to flee. In the midst of the citys financial crisis, its hard to understand how the mayor expects to find room for another expensive pet project. Fortunately: Emanuel must first persuade state lawmakers and the governor to allow his borrowing proposal. The mayor may need some Jedi mind tricks to convince state lawmakers the money is worth loaning, and to convince taxpayers to accept yet another tax hike. Many of the taxes he proposes tapping are related to tourism, presumably the rationale being used for constructing this urban bauble. But consider that many of the taxes will run for 50 years into the future. Maybe George Lucas will still be a draw then. But consider how many people would be drawn to a D.W. Griffith Museum a once famous filmmaker whose time has come and gone. The mayors proposal would extend five existing taxes past their current expiration dates to 2066, including: Extending the 2 percent hotel tax instead of letting it expire in 2032 Extending the 2.5 percent hotel tax for the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority past its current expiration date of 2060 Extending the 1 percent tax on downtown restaurants past its 2060 expiration date Extending the 6 percent tax on car rentals past its 2060 expiration date Extending the $4 fee on taxi rides out of OHare and Midway airports past 2060 If money were unlimited, this might be a nice attraction for Chicagoans. But for a city soon to be unable to pay its bills without crippling tax hikes, it is unconscionable. George Lucas is a multi-billionaire. If anyone should pay for a museum honoring his life, it is he. Update: Friends of the Parks, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving parkland and preventing development on it, has asked to have a voice: We are pleased that the mayor and the City recently opened the door to Friends of the Parks for more direct conversation about the Lucas Museum. Our intent, as it always has been, is to protect, preserve and promote parks and to ensure that everyone has the best possible access to lakefront land, while encouraging the City to find the right spot for the Lucas Museum, said Juanita Irizarry, executive director of Friends of the Parks. We continue to seek more information and clarification as we engage in discussions with the City. Hat tip: Peter von Buol Talk of Texas secession is heating up again. More accurately, the movement is growing and maturing from its rather primitive born-again roots in the 1990s. Support for Texas independence is high. The latest reliable polling data from late 2014 shows that more than 36% of the state's residents are in favor of secession, with another 18% that are not sure. This puts opposition to secession in the minority. The legalities of secession have been analyzed in detail by various commentators and, in particular, the secessionist organizations. In short, there is a very credible case that Texas could secede unilaterally and legally from the United States should a majority (i.e., the 50+1 rule) of its residents choose that route. Across all secessionist movements, Texas is the most credible in terms of being able to immediately form a world-class independent nation. The state's GDP is US$1.65 trillion, which would place it 12th among all nations if it seceded barely behind Canada and Russia, and ahead of Australia, South Korea, Spain, and Mexico. Its economy will likely surpass that of Canada in the near future, making an independent Texas the natural replacement for the Great White North in the G7 top industrialized nations. Its population size puts Texas in the range between Australia and Canada. In other words, into the viability category for a modern nation-state with an independent and influential foreign policy. As of 2014, Texas's per capita GDP in current dollars was about US$61,200, which would make it one of the top 10 wealthiest nations on the planet, equal to Australia. Most of this top 10 is made up of very small and geopolitically irrelevant nations (Liechtenstein, Qatar, Luxembourg, Bermuda, Norway, and Switzerland), meaning that it would be Texas and Australia as the two wealthiest among the serious players. An independent Texas would have the highest per capita GDP in the newly reconstituted G7. For perspective, Texas's per capita GDP is 12% higher than the rest of the USA's, 22% larger than Canada's, 28% larger than Germany's, 32% larger than the U.K.'s, 43% larger than France's, 72% larger than Japan's, and 77% larger than Italy's. Texas is already home to a massive manufacturing sector, especially in advanced technologies such as energy extraction and the defense industries. There would be little transition time needed for it to begin building its own military. If Texas spent just 5% of its GDP on defense, it would have the world's third largest military expenditures, bringing it into a tie with Russia and behind only the rest of the USA and China. Of course, Texas also has the technological know-how, manufacturing capacity, and access to fissile materials required to develop and deploy its own nuclear weapons. Texas has deepwater ports for a blue-water navy if it chose that route, as well as for global exports. Vast fossil fuel and renewable energy reserves are located on Texas territory, ensuring energy independence and prosperity in perpetuity. Food security is always critical for a newly hatched nation, and Texas can easily meet that with its abundant and fertile agricultural lands. Water will be a concern in the more arid regions, but this can be reliably and affordably met with appropriate diversion, retention, and transportation infrastructures in tandem with any needed nuclear-powered desalination plants along the Gulf Coast. The state famously, and wisely, has its own electricity grid, making secession and subsequent electrical decoupling from what remains of the USA far less complicated. But the key problem with the secession argument is what to do with the difficult areas of the state. The major cities have large liberal populations that probably would never want to secede and thereby be tied far more closely to the conservative rural body of the population. Even if secession occurred, the politics of these major cities including and especially the politics of the primary universities and the state's bureaucracy would be as bad as, if not worse than, that of the current federal government. The globalists and internationalists control these halls of power in Texas. To quote from The Patriot, "why should I trade one tyrant three thousand miles away for three thousand tyrants one mile away?" Think Obama's administration isn't to your liking? Look closely, and you will see that same culture in the statewide institutions. Local government doesn't make the problems better if it is filled with the same types as at the federal level. You are literally just trading tyrants in D.C. for tyrants in Austin. This aspect of the secession movement has received far too little serious discussion, and yet it is the most important. If anything, the state's love affair with immigration in recent decades has made secession more difficult, and the desired change after secession even less likely. Are Texans ready to close the doors and clean up the system? Texas's secession movement is unique, because it could in theory succeed and lead to a very wealthy and independent nation-state. In this, Texas can claim hold to the theoretical foundations that almost all other seccession movements fail on. The other cases for secession are often so absurd as to equate with a newborn attempting to live a fully independent life. Texas does not suffer from this fatal flaw. So there is a clear and viable path for an independent Texas, but the question is whether there is the will to follow the way and build something other than a smaller version of the same problems that exist in the current union. On this latter point, the verdict is far from certain. Wisconsin showed clearly how to stop Trump. It was not that hard. Governor Scott Walker, the talk show conservative media, and the voters all united behind Ted Cruz and gave him a majority. You want to defeat someone in politics, you unify behind the one viable alternative. There are no other paths to victory. If you dont unite, you let Trump, a 30- to 40-percent minority candidate, walk away with the nomination and likely give the country to a President Hillary Clinton. The GOP establishment and the #NeverTrump crowd are choosing to lose rather than actively support Cruz. The exit poll from New York shows that the anti-Trump voters dont really mean it. They preferred an empty protest vote for Kasich rather than to join Cruzs army of true conservatives that had given him a five-victory run in caucus states. #NeverTrump crowd in New York. Among the 24 percent of voters who said they would not vote for Trump if he were the GOP nominee, Kasich won a staggering 72 percent of them, far better than he had ever previously done with this demo. The GOP leaders and so-called moderate Republican voters talk the talk against Trump, but they are not willing to walk the walk. Romney says Kasich is a spoiler. Thats not enough. Has Romney endorsed Cruz? Is Romney on the campaign trail with Cruz? Jeb Bush has endorsed Cruz, but where is he? Is he fundraising for Cruz? Is he standing next to Cruz on the podium? Reince Priebus says there will be no white knight coming in to win a brokered convention for the establishment. But he refuses to say the nominee will be either Cruz or Trump, keeping open the idea that Kasich is also a viable candidate. Priebus is fighting to keep open the possibility of a rules change to favor Kasich who is currently not qualified to be considered at the convention, since he hasnt met the minimum of 8 state wins. Paul Ryan ditto. He stated clearly that he is not willing to be anointed presidential nominee with not a single vote to his name. But even worse than Priebus, Ryan is holding out the possibility the winner could be neither Trump nor Cruz nor Kasich when he insists that the nominee must be someone who ran this year. Rush Limbaugh says Cruz is the closest candidate we have to Ronald Reagan, and the only conservative running. But unlike the principled talk show hosts of Wisconsin, Rush talks up Trump for hours a day. Rushs self-justification is that the only important thing is to remain united behind whomever the convention nominates, in order to defeat Hillary. Rush doesnt buy that Trump is a passionately disliked, no-hoper candidate who cant even break above 50% in his own party. So Rush is daily undercutting Cruz, our once-in-a-lifetime chance to elect a small-government conservative to the White House. Trump threatens the GOP establishment with an election loss, something they weather with aplomb. They have chosen to coexist with Obama; they can do deals with Trump as well. He disagrees with them on immigration and trade, but he does not threaten their hold on power. As for Trump destroying fiefdoms in Washington, there is no doubt that he is highly unpredictable and that he is over-throwing conservatism as we have known it for decades, but its not as though hes going to show up in Washington and all the lobbying shops and law firms are going to disappear. In fact, Trump is much less of a threat to the Washington status quo than a conservative like Cruz is, since Trump is not promising to reduce the size of the federal government or significantly reform it, only to run it better and cut smarter deals. This is what the stereotypical Washington establishment exists to do. Its notable in this connection that Trump has tapped a lobbyists lobbyist, Paul Manafort, to stabilize his campaign. There will be more where that came from if hes the nominee, since he is evidently not liquid or rich enough to fund his own general-election campaign. Cruz threatens the Washington cartel with the end of their pork-barrel lifetime sinecures. No wonder they badmouth Trump while paving his road to the nomination. The Xiaomi Mi 5 is the latest and greatest this company has to offer. The Mi 5 was introduced during the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, along the likes of Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 Edge and the LG G5. The Xiaomi Mi 5 is a somewhat different approach by Xiaomi, this is the first Xiaomi-branded device to sport a physical home key, and it borrows some design cues from the companys Mi Note (Pro) phablet. That being said, the Xiaomi Mi 5 teardown has surfaced a while back, and now we have something else to share with you. The Mi 5 has been submitted to a torture test by JerryRigEverything, a YouTube user youre probably quite familiar with. This very same YouTube channel released various other torture tests, including the Galaxy S7, LG G5, Nexus 6P, etc. That being said, the Mi 5 has been submitted to a number of tests during the video you can check out down below. The first test performed on the phone is the scratch test, and the phone did fairly well, like many other currently available flagships. The Gorilla Glass 3 protection is implemented on both the front and the back of the phone, which certainly helps, and the camera lens is also well-protected. In addition to all this, theres glass on top of the home button as well, which is a good thing. Advertisement The second test performed is the burn test, and the Mi 5 did really well in this aspect too. The pixels turned black after fire came in touch with the display, but they recovered shortly after, and the phone performed fine afterwards. Now, the Mi 5 failed in the last test, the bend test. The Mi 5 broke in half really quick, and barely fought back. The device broke at its weakest point, at the bottom part of the power / lock key. Now, once the source opened up the device, he noticed that theres only one frame used here, Xiaomi did not use a second frame in order to make the phone more rigid, and it seems like they didnt use the premium aluminum like some other manufacturers, the phone was extremely easy to break it seems. Now, this might be a red flag for some of you, but if youre taking care of your smartphone this really shouldnt bother you too much, but it is certainly something to keep in mind. Xiaomi Mi 5 $382 Smartphones, for the most part, are available on all carriers these days. Right now, the only flagship device that is not on all four of the major US carriers, is the HTC 10. Its available at T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint in the coming weeks, but not AT&T. Wireless providers now use a ton of buzz words to try and market their plans and services to users, and many of them really dont make much of a difference. Thats where we come in. We are here to help you decipher all the marketing terms and find out which plan fits you the best. AT&T Advertisement AT&T has a few options now for customers, since they axed contracts. These include the ability to bring your own, or use AT&T Next to pay for it in monthly installments. These installment prices can be as high as $35/month depending on the phone and the AT&T Next plan you decide to use. Along with that, AT&T is also charging a $25 monthly access fee for smartphones ($15/month for those with a 15GB of larger plan). Other devices are a $10 monthly access fee (that includes tablets, wearables, laptops, hotspots and other connected devices). Now lets jump into the bread and butter of these plans. Data starts at 300MB per month which does include unlimited talk and text. And it goes all the way up to $375 for 50GB of data. For single lines, wed recommend grabbing the 2GB for $30 or 5GB for $50 depending on the amount of data you use. At 2GB that would put you at $55 for your monthly bill before your smartphone payment. If you decide to pick up the Samsung Galaxy S7, that will add another $23.17 onto your bill, effectively making it $78.10 before taxes. Those on the 5GB plan would see this go to $98.10 for your monthly bill before taxes. Advertisement Those on family plans can grab 15GB of data for $100, 20GB for $140, 25GB for $175, 30GB for $225, 40GB for $300 and 50GB for $375. These also include unlimited talk and text to Mexico and Canada. With family plans, the access fee applies to each line. For instance, if you have 4 smartphones on a plan, thats $60 in access fees. 3 smartphones and a tablet, thats $50. Looking at the 15GB plan with four lines, that would cost you $160 before your smartphone installment fees, which if you buy them elsewhere (like the Nexus 5X or Nexus 6P from Google) thats all youll pay. With 4 Galaxy S7s, that will cost you $252.68. Sprint Advertisement Sprint was second to get rid of contracts, behind T-Mobile, but they recently brought them back. The company stated that it gives their customers another way of paying for or getting a new smartphone on their network. There are four ways to buy your smartphone from Sprint now. One is to buy it at the full price, theres also the 2-year contract, 24-monthly installments and the 24-month lease (the difference between installments and the lease is that with the lease you have to turn the phone back in). Looking at the Galaxy Note 5, the full price is $739. On a two-year contract its going to be $249. With the 24 monthly installments its $0 down and $30.80/month. On the 24-month lease its $0 down and $25/month. Like Verizon, Sprint is now doing a set amount of data dubbed XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL and Unlimited. For XS you get 1GB for $20, S gets you 3GB for $30, M gets you 6GB for $45, L gets you 12GB for $60, XL gets you 24GB for $80, XXL gets you 40GB for $100 and finally unlimited gets you uncapped high-speed data for $75. Sprint also does $20 monthly access fees like AT&T. So if you choose the 3GB plan, which most looking for a single line do, thatll cost you $75 if you lease the Galaxy Note 5, per month. These data plans are essentially data buckets. So when you add more lines to your account, they share the data that is already there. For instance, if you were to get four Galaxy Note 5s, that would be $100 for the leases, $80 for the access fee and then if you decide to get the L data plan that would be $60. Added up thats $240 per month for four lines with 12GB of data. Now, where things get interesting is if you choose unlimited. Thats $150 for four lines and the access fees go away. Dropping the price to $250 for unlimited data for four lines. Advertisement T-Mobile T-Mobile seems to be the easiest to explain, on the surface, but boy do things get complicated. For new customers, they offer 2GB, 6GB and 10GB plans as well as their unlimited high-speed data plan. Priced at $50, $65, $80, and $90 respectively. T-Mobile doesnt do data buckets, so this is the data for each line you get with the carrier. You also still have your device installment rate, which can be as high as $25/month per line. At least the math is a bit easier here. Advertisement For example, well choose the Galaxy S7 which would cost you $0 down and $27.92 per month for 24 months. Pair that with the 2GB plan, that brings your total to $77.92 per month before taxes and other fees. Pretty easy to calculate. With a 5GB plan that would jump to $92.92 per month. When it comes to family plans, T-Mobile is almost always running some sort of special. Currently they are offering four lines of unlimited high-speed data for $150 per month (thats $50 per line with the fourth line free). We urge you to check their site to see their most up-to-date promotion for family plans. Now, T-Mobile allows you to adjust the data per line. So you can have everyone with 2GB or have someone with unlimited, two with 6GB and one with 2GB. Its all up to you. Since 6GB is the most popular, well use that for our example. Four lines with 6GB of data each is $160. Add on four smartphones and thats $271.68. Now that price is higher than Sprint, but its also twice the data. Its important to note here that T-Mobile currently has a promotional plan going for two lines of service. You can get two lines with 6GB of data per line (thats 4G LTE speeds, and reduced afterwards) for just $80 altogether. Thats a really good plan. As its actually only $5 more than one line with 6GB of data. Advertisement Verizon Believe it or not, Verizons plans are pretty straight forward as well. As far as their data plans go, we have S which is 1GB for $30, M which is 3GB for $45, L which is 6GB for $60, XL which is 12GB for $80 and XXL which gives you 18GB for $100. Access fees are $20/month for smartphones, $10 for tablets and hotspots and $5 for a connected device. Advertisement Here well use the Droid Turbo 2 as our example phone. The Droid Turbo 2 will cost you $624 full retail or $0 down and $26 per month on Verizon EDGE. Those looking for a single line with 3GB of data, that will cost you about $91 (data is $45, access fee is $20 and installment is $26). If you need a bit more data, perhaps the 6GB plan would be a better fit. It would come in at $106 per month. These prices are before taxes and fees as well. For family plans or just multi-line plans, things dont change too much. For four lines, thats $26 per line for a Droid Turbo 2, making it $108 per month. With 12GB of data thats $80, and four lines with access fees would also be $80. Making a total cost of $268 for four lines. And if you need the 18GB plan, that brings your total to $288 per month. Its also worth mentioning that every phone on the XL and XXL plans will get an additional 2GB of data per month for free, as long as you stick with Verizon. So on a family plan with four lines, that can really add up. Wrap Up The carriers pricing are mostly all the same. Youll see the Verizon is actually the most expensive for single line plans, but T-Mobile is the most expensive for family plans. And thats mostly due to the different data made available on the plans from all four carriers. Now while pricing is an important factor in picking out a new carrier if you want to switch. Arguably the more important factor is their coverage. While T-Mobile likes to say that they cover everywhere that Verizon does, thats not entirely true. No two carriers have the same coverage. And the carriers coverage maps can be a bit misleading. Wed urge you to check out Sensorlys maps, as these are crowdsourced maps that come from users like you and I. These are more accurate and pretty up to date. If youre a Google Maps user then you may be familiar with local guides, a feature integrated into the application that lets users share their experiences and thoughts on specific places or locations like restaurants, retailers and more so that other users can learn more details about them. Recently, Google has started sending out invites to a number of local guides to test out a new app that they have in the works which is meant for travelers. Google is calling this a travel assistant application, and it will be available on both Android and iOS platforms, but other that that Google hasnt shared much on what the app does or what sort of features it will have included. Google states that local guides who are level 2 or above will be among the first to test out the new travel app, mentioning that theyll be giving those particular users a sneak peak at the app and what it has to offer. Level 2 local guides and above should be receiving the email with a request to take a survey which allows the user to apply when completed. The survey asks questions like what type of mobile phone the local guide is using and includes answers like Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, BlackBerry or other. This suggests that Google may be developing the app for more than just Android and iOS devices although there is no confirmation on such a detail. Advertisement The survey also includes questions on if local guides are planning a trip soon, and where that trip is to and what kind of trip it is whether its for business or pleasure. Right now there is no other information on the new travel app and there likely wont be until Google begins to send out an early version for guides to try out. Google notes that theyll be sending out instructions for local guides on how to get the application and test it out sometime next week, but with no detail on which day that would be exactly. If youre a local guide level or above or if youre going to try and level up, starting now would be a good time for your best chance at getting selected. After releasing a couple of trailers for its 360-degree short movie Help in March, Google has finally released its latest monster film on YouTube in its entirety. Help is directed by Justin Lin, a Taiwanese-American filmmaker best known for directing hits such as Star Trek Beyond, Fast and Furious, Better Luck Tomorrow, and Community. The movie is just under five minutes long and depicts the events following the crash of an alien creature in the middle of Los Angeles. As for which events it follows specifically, thats actually up to the audience. By moving your device around, you can see different parts of the City of Angels reacting to new circumstances. Despite being a short film, Help isnt modest when it comes to production values. Its full of special cinematic effects and professionally edited, just as one would expect from a title made by Bullitt, one of the most renowned production companies on the planet. It gives us a glimpse of what huge virtual reality Hollywood movies could look like in the near future and definitely leaves us wanting for more. As you might have guessed, Help is a rather rewatchable experience as theres no way youll be able to see everything the movie has to offer in one viewing, which means that you can easily get lost in it while searching for new scenes and easter eggs you havent seen before. The movie was filmed in its entirety last year and all of the footage from it was stitched together using proprietary software developed by a famous VFX company Mill. Help is Googles first live-action film made for its Spotlight Stories YouTube series designed for offering immersive interactive video narratives on mobile devices. To watch it in its 360-degree perspective, either check out the YouTube video embedded below or launch it via a Spotlight Stories Android app which you can download from Google Play Store free of charge. Its hard to say whether Help is the future of film or are 360-degree movies simply too distracting and fourth-wall-breaking to really go mainstream, but this is nevertheless a really cool and interesting movie experiment worth watching. Not too long ago, HTC unveiled the HTC 10 which we recently reviewed here and not only did they release their best smartphone in years, but they also joined the USB Type-C club. Right now, this includes Googles own Nexus devices, the OnePlus 2, many devices out of China and of course, the LG G5. What makes the HTC 10 and the LG G5 so unique in this ever-growing club of Type-C devices however, is that they include both a Type-C port as well as QuickCharge 3.0 fast charging. Which, according to one Googler, presents a problem. Neither the HTC 10 or the LG G5 can be considered USB Type-C spec compliant due to the inclusion of QuickCharge 3.0. This is because the specification for the Type-C standard dictates that no more than 5V of power can be carried over the Vbus. QuickCharge 3.0 however, sends power at 9V and 12V at different intervals in order to push more power through the port and back into the battery quicker. Benson Leung, the Googler known for his informative and eye-opening Type-C cable reviews on Amazon, has stated that this renders any QuickCharge 3.0 charger or device i.e. the HTC 10 and the LG G5 non-compliant with the Type-C specification. Advertisement Theres a good chance that this is because the Type-C specification hasnt been updated yet, but more than likely this is just another case of manufacturers working out a way to add a new technology to something that already-existed. Whether or not this means that the HTC 10 or LG G5 are unsafe in any way is unclear, but considering the lengthy testing process these devices go through, we highly doubt it. Qualcomm, the same firm responsible for the Snapdragon 820 inside both devices, has been perfecting its QuickCharge technology for some time now, and we doubt they would be willing to have two of their biggest partners ship devices that were unsafe. After all, just because something doesnt line up 100% with whats written in a specification thats already a lot older than these two devices doesnt mean theyre unsafe or defective in any way. Even so, using the charger provided in the box by both LG and HTC would seem like a good idea until theres any word from either manufacturer. Unlike many smartphone manufacturers, Motorola does their announcements in the summer, and it feels like a long time since we saw anything from the Chicago-born firm, but rumors of a new Moto G device have been swirling recently. Rumor has it that the new Moto G 4 or a Moto G Plus will be announced later this year, and Lenovo themselves Motorolas most recent parent company may have let slip the possible release date for the new device. Earlier today, a subsidy of Lenovo, ZUK, released their new device and the Chinese firms CEO, Yang Yuanqing, had let the cat out of the bag regarding a June 9th release date. Unsurprisingly, no further details about the phone were announced during the launch of the ZUK Z2, but so far rumors have pointed to a possible pair of devices; one with a fingerprint sensor and one without. Following the trend of larger devices and their popularity in Lenovos home nation of China its no surprise to see the rumors and leaks showing a 5.5-inch device. What is surprising however, is the rumor price tag and the inclusion of just 16GB of storage. Motorola has been known for their high-value offerings, and wed have expected them to push that little bit further with this latest version of the Moto G. Theres also a chance that the rumored version of the device with a fingerprint scanner could be a new Moto X device, which is often the higher-end model from Motorolas line up. Advertisement Regardless, a summer launch for Motorolas new line up of device seems about right, and certainly lines up with what weve seen from them in the past. Lenovos CEO has promised an exciting device launch, so weve got our hopes up for something good. Considering that LG, Samsung and now HTC have all launched their flagships for the year ahead, Motorola have some catching up to do, but as they proved last year with the high-end Moto X Pure they know what theyre doing with their hardware and can trade blows with the best of them. Hopefully, Motorola will have something big in store for us, but as of right now the June 9th date could be for anything. The LG G5 is LGs latest flagship smartphone. This handset has been announced back in February during the Mobile World Congress (MWC) alongside the Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 Edge and the Xiaomi Mi 5. The LG G5 is considerably different than its predecessors, this is a semi-modular smartphone which not only looks completely different than the G2, G3 and G3, but you also get a completely different feeling when you hold it in the hand. The G5 is, unlike its predecessors, an all-metal smartphone which offers a replaceable battery. You can access the battery by removing the bottom chin of the device, and theres also a way for you to insert different modules down there, a handful of which LG announced during LG G5s press conference. That being said, the LG G5 still has very limited availability, the phone has been released in South Korea on March 31st, and it has rolled out in the US on April 1st. The company has said that many more countries will gain access to the G5 by the end of April, and while were waiting for more countries to come aboard the LG G5 train, it seems like the SE variant of the device has been announced in Russia, at least according to helpix.ru. The LG G5 SE (H845) is essentially a lower-end variant of the LG G5, a device fueled by the Snapdragon 652 64-bit octa-core processor, which is Qualcomms mid-range chip. The SE variant has been rumored for quite some time now (and was also certified by TENAA a while back), and it just became a reality it seems. Aside from the Snapdragon 652 SoC and 3GB of RAM on the inside, this handset is identical to the standard LG G5 model. The LG G5 SE also features a 5.3-inch QHD (2560 x 1440) display, 32GB of expandable internal storage, and a 2,800mAh removable battery. The 16MP and 8MP cameras are placed on the back of the device, and an 8-megapixel snapper can be found up front. Android 6.0 Marshmallow comes pre-installed on the device, and on top of it, youll find LGs custom UI. Advertisement The phone measures 149.4 x 73.9 x 7.3mm, while it weighs 156 grams. The fingerprint scanner is located on the back of this phone as well, and the Type-C USB port is available on the bottom of the device. The LG G5 SE also has the Always On functionality like the standard model, these two devices really are almost identical aside from the aforementioned differences in the hardware department. The source did not release any pricing or availability information at this time, well report back if more info becomes available. UPDATE: The listing appeared on LG Russia website, the link has been added down below. In the midst of a controversy involving union workers threatening to strike, criticisms from Senator Bernie Sanders and efforts to build up a new media empire with Hearsts help, Verizon have managed to post decent numbers for the first quarter of 2016. Although growth was somewhat minimal, they did manage to stay profitable. Specifically, they experienced revenue of roughly $1.06 per share, up from $1.02 per share in the first quarter of 2015. This is growth to the tune of about 3.9%, which may sound small, but is no small feat in todays economic climate for non-essential paid services. While the strikes and various controversies, as well as investments in their new media efforts, happened fairly recently, Verizon wont be reporting the results of those losses until their second quarter report, set to come out in July. Verizon has about 640,000 new subscriptions and less than one percent customer churn to thank for their decent numbers this quarter on the wireless front, while Fios showed 5 percent growth from last year, boasting roughly 96,000 new signups for internet and 36,000 new signups for video and cable services through Fios. Fios services churn, if present, was not mentioned. As for operating revenues, overall services and other categories experienced a small drop in revenue, about 1.4%. Wireless equipment revenue, however, more than made up for this, boasting phenomenal year on year growth amounting to 17.2%. Altogether, this led to a 0.6% growth in operating revenues, which contributed greatly to the total revenue growth figure of 3.09%. The biggest contributor to this figure was a 2.1% jump in net income. Advertisement Part of the revenue was Verizons sale of their landline businesses in Florida, California and Texas, which was used to pay down operating and equipment debts that had been hanging around. With the Hearst deal and the expansion of their Go90 service set to move more of their revenue and subscriber base to the highly profitable wireless side of the spectrum while Verizon goes through some exorbitant acquisition spending, just how good or bad the second quarter may look is, at this point, anybodys guess. The Royal Anguilla Police Force has arrested and charged 23 yr. old Shane Connor of Stoney Ground for burglary as well as other crimes as they continue their investigations into the spate of burglaries which occurred on Sunday 17th April, 2016. He was taken before the Magistrates Court today Thursday21st April, 2016 charged with six counts of burglary, one count of handling stolen goods and one count of possession of a control drug to-wit cannabis. The alleged offender who was unable to make bail offered by the court in the sum of EC $10,000.00 cash and EC $60,000.00 bond was remanded at Her Majestys Prison. He is due back in court on Thursday 16th June 2016 to answer to the charges. As the Police continue their investigations into these burglaries they are appealing to members of the public who may have been in The Valley in the area of The Herberts Commercial Centre and The Fairplay Commercial Centre during the night of Sunday 17th April 2016 and may have witnessed these burglaries or have any information regarding these burglaries to contact the Valley Police Station with such information. The telephone number is 497-2333 and asks for the Major Crime Unit or to speak to any Police Officer of their choice. Additionally information can be sent via the RAPF Tips Website by logging on to www.gov.ai/911 or email AXA911@yahoo.com which are both secure websites. We continue to urge the general public to be vigilant and to report any suspicious activity they may observe to The Valley Police Station for police immediate attention. The RAPF would like to remind the public that: a) The defendant is entitled to a fair trial; b) There is a presumption of innocence until proven guilty; c) Nothing would be stated or published which would prejudice a fair trial taking place; and d) Section 115(g) of the Criminal Code applies and which provides for an offence in respect of any person who, while a judicial proceeding is pending, makes use of any speech or writing misrepresenting such proceeding or capable of prejudicing any person in favor of or against any parties to such proceeding, or calculated to lower the authority of any person before whom the proceeding is to be held. Belize City, Belize, 21 April 2016 (CRFM)Eighteen professionals who have been working in Fisheries Management, Animal Health and Food Safety from across the CARIFORUM region, are currently overseas receiving specialized training in food safety and animal and plant health. The trainees are attending the Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Management Course, slated for 17-30 April 2016 in Reykjavik, Iceland, under the United Nations University Fisheries Training Programme (UNU-FTP). The two-week course, developed by the UNU-FTP in partnership with the Caribbean Regional Fisheries Mechanism (CRFM), is exposing the selected trainees to the full range of issues faced in fisheries value chain management, with special focus on the best SPS standards and the institutional arrangements required for the optimized performance of the fishing industry. Trainees will be involved not only in lecture sessions, but also in field visits to major Icelandic fishing companies, affording them a good opportunity to directly observe their operations. They will also have an opportunity to speak with key professionals about industry practices which keep Iceland at the cutting edge of fishing for profits. By the end of the course, trainees will have learned the A to Z of the most up-to-date science and practical applications in fish product quality management along the value chain, including cleaning and sanitation in the field and processing plants, traceability, value chain analysis, risk assessment, and optimizing the use of available fishery resources. Mr. Ferique Shortte, Senior Fisheries Assistant at the Fisheries Division in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, who is participating in the training, said: The first day of the session was quite fascinating. The presentation on Handling and Storage of Fish and Fish Products gave me fresh ideas for scientific work which I can undertake during my fish processing activities using the fish species found back home. Moreover, learning about the different microbes that affect fish and their impacts on health and safety of fish products gave me a new outlook on the fishing industry. Todays session also highlighted the impact of SPS measures on issues relative to international fish trade. At the close of the second days sessions, the Deputy Chief Fisheries Officer for Barbados, Ms. Joyce Leslie, expressed her satisfaction, saying: The SPS Management Course was already delivering its promise of exposing trainees to the most up-to-date available information on science and technology developments in fish product quality management and value chain analysis. The training course has been made possible through the EU-funded SPS project, designed to help CARIFORUM countries fulfill international sanitary and phytosanitary standards, to boost foreign trade. The UNU-FTP, which has worked previously with the CRFM to develop and deliver other types of short-term training courses suitable for Caribbean fisheries management situations, was awarded the contract to design and deliver this EU-sponsored SPS Management Course. Over the years, UNU-FTP has also trained fisheries professionals in CRFM Member States through its six-month training programme in Iceland. The SPS Project is a major intervention approved under the 10th European Development Fund Caribbean Regional Indicative Programmes (10th EDF CRIP), being implemented by the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), in partnership with the CARICOM Secretariat and the CRFM. The CRFM is responsible for delivering the fisheries component. (supersedes previous). (ANSA) - Rome, April 21 - Premier Matteo Renzi said Thursday "renewable energy is at 39%, our goal is to take it up to 50%. "It's a goal within our grasp, not with incentives but with a clear legal framework." Italy's new push in renewable energy will regard wind and water power more than solar energy, Renzi said. "We are already leaders in solar power," he said, while admitting ghat there was ground to be made up in wind and water energy plants. He was speaking at a press conference at the UN in New York. Italy is set to make a fresh push on renewable energy after a failed referendum on offshore drilling, Renzi said. "It's fundamental that no one should think that the environmental question has been put into a corner...We are here to announce that we are a leader in renewable energy sources and we ask the UN and the world to be more sensitive to these issues," he said. Italy in recent years has invested a lot in renewable energy sources such as solar energy and wind farms. Renzi also said EU migrant policy had changed compared to a year ago when Italy gelt alone in coping with an influx across the Mediterranean and tragedies at sea. A year ago Italy was alone in facing "the terrible shipwreck with 700 dead and there was the total solitude of Italy, only Malta was with us" but in a year "a lot has changed, also for the dynamics involving the Balkans and Turkey, in a year they have understood that when Italy asked for investments in Africa it did so for a political reason," he said. "I think the ship is changing tack. Ships don't spin around, they move slowly. But we are changing direction, the signs are interesting". Renzi said that the migrant issue "cannot be solved in a talk show or by someone shouting. It is a crisis that is only resolved by policies. We will handle the migrant question without shouting, that is the difference between those who interpret politics as attacks and insults and those who seek solutions". The controversial EU-Turkey deal returning migrants from Greece respects international law, Renzi said. "I think international law has been respected," he said. Rights groups have criticised the deal, in which one Syrian migrant is settled in Europe for every migrant returned from Greece. Renzi said that he had "very much appreciated (European Commission President Jean-Claude) Juncker's letter (on Italy's migration compact), I thank him for his sensitivity". He said the issue "requires awareness on the part of Europe...We note that there is a good atmosphere with European institutions compared to a few months ago". (see related) (ANSAmed) - Brussels, April 21 - Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said Thursday that Italy's proposal for a new migration compact was the right way for the European Union to go. "We presented a plan with an comprehensive approach and we think that it's the right road," said Alfano ahead of a meeting of EU interior ministers. "Today we'll discuss this and present our achievements and our aims". He added that the letter Jean-Claude Juncker sent to Premier Matteo Renzi welcoming the proposal showed it was valid. "It's proof that we are on the right road because we tackle both the issue of Africa and of how Italy must manage the refugees," he said. "I think it's an Italian success that will be consolidated at the next summit of (EU) heads of state and government". He added that Rome was not attached to the idea it has mooted of issuing eurobonds to raise money for tackling the migrant crisis. "The eurobond issue is overrated," Alfano said. "They are our proposal to find the money to finance the plan. If we get this money directly from Europe or from another road proposed by someone else, that's fine with us". (ANSA) - Rome, April 21 - European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has written to Premier Matteo Renzi to voice his appreciation for Italy's proposal for a migration compact for a new approach with dealing with asylum seekers, Corriere della Sera's online edition reported Thursday. "Dear Prime Minister, dear Matteo... I welcome with great favour your initiative that confirms the need for a European approach to the European issue of migration, the same (position) that I have supported since the start of my mandate," Juncker wrote. Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said Thursday that Italy's proposal for a new migration compact was the right way for the European Union to go. "We presented a plan with an comprehensive approach and we think that it's the right road," said Alfano ahead of a meeting of EU interior ministers. "Today we'll discuss this and present our achievements and our aims". He added that the letter Jean-Claude Juncker sent to Premier Matteo Renzi welcoming the proposal showed it was valid. "It's proof that we are on the right road because we tackle both the issue of Africa and of how Italy must manage the refugees," he said. "I think it's an Italian success that will be consolidated at the next summit of (EU) heads of state and government". He added that Rome was not attached to the idea it has mooted of issuing eurobonds to raise money for tackling the migrant crisis. "The eurobond issue is overrated," Alfano said. "They are our proposal to find the money to finance the plan. If we get this money directly from Europe or from another road proposed by someone else, that's fine with us". Alfano also said Thursday that the European Union's deal with Turkey to ease the asylum seeker crisis should be repeated with Libya once the national unity government there has taken a full grip on power. "I think that it was right to reach this agreement (with Turkey)," Alfano said on his way into a meeting of EU interior ministers in Luxembourg. "I think the model of the agreement could be replicated in Libya when the conditions are right". (By Denis Greenan). ROME - Premier Matteo Renzi on Thursday landed the key backing of European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker for Italy's flagship 'migration compact' proposal to ease the migrant crisis by helping sub-Saharan countries of origin and transit. Meanwhile, after landing in New York from Mexico, Renzi said at the UN that Italy had once again become a lead player on the world stage and was boosting its credentials, especially in the renewable energy sector. Juncker has written to Renzi to voice his appreciation for Italy's proposal for a migration compact for a new approach with dealing with asylum seekers, Corriere della Sera's online edition reported Thursday. "Dear Prime Minister, dear Matteo... I welcome with great favour your initiative that confirms the need for a European approach to the European issue of migration, the same (position) that I have supported since the start of my mandate," Juncker wrote. Renzi said at the UN that he had "very much appreciated Juncker's letter (on Italy's migration compact), I thank him for his sensitivity". He said the issue "requires awareness on the part of Europe...We note that there is a good atmosphere with European institutions compared to a few months ago". Renzi said he was "happy with the welcome for the Italian document". Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said that Italy's proposal for a new migration compact was the right way for the European Union to go. "We presented a plan with an comprehensive approach and we think that it's the right road," said Alfano ahead of a meeting of EU interior ministers. "Today we'll discuss this and present our achievements and our aims". He added that the letter Juncker sent to Renzi welcoming the proposal showed it was valid. "It's proof that we are on the right road because we tackle both the issue of Africa and of how Italy must manage the refugees," he said. "I think it's an Italian success that will be consolidated at the next summit of (EU) heads of state and government". He added that Rome was not attached to the idea it has mooted of issuing eurobonds to raise money for tackling the migrant crisis. "The eurobond issue is overrated," Alfano said. "They are our proposal to find the money to finance the plan. If we get this money directly from Europe or from another road proposed by someone else, that's fine with us". Leaving the meeting later, Alfano said the migration compact had met with the "consensus" not only of Juncker ("very important") but also "that of very many individual governments who, represented by their interior ministers today, said this approach was concrete, positive". He said they had voiced the hope it could be adopted by EU leaders. In New York, meanwhile, Renzi tweeted "we are back as protagonists" and said "renewable energy is at 39%, our goal is to take it up to 50%. "It's a goal within our grasp, not with incentives but with a clear legal framework." Italy's new push in renewable energy will regard wind and water power more than solar energy, Renzi said. "We are already leaders in solar power," he said, while admitting that there was ground to be made up in wind and water energy plants. Italy is set to make a fresh push on renewable energy after a failed referendum on offshore drilling, Renzi said. "It's fundamental that no one should think that the environmental question has been put into a corner...We are here to announce that we are a leader in renewable energy sources and we ask the UN and the world to be more sensitive to these issues," he said. Italy in recent years has invested a lot in renewable energy sources such as solar energy and wind farms. Renzi also said EU migrant policy had changed compared to a year ago when Italy gelt alone in coping with an influx across the Mediterranean and tragedies at sea. A year ago Italy was alone in facing "the terrible shipwreck with 700 dead and there was the total solitude of Italy, only Malta was with us" but in a year "a lot has changed, also for the dynamics involving the Balkans and Turkey, in a year they have understood that when Italy asked for investments in Africa it did so for a political reason," he said. "I think the ship is changing tack. Ships don't spin around, they move slowly. But we are changing direction, the signs are interesting". Renzi said that the migrant issue "cannot be solved in a talk show or by someone shouting. It is a crisis that is only resolved by policies. We will handle the migrant question without shouting, that is the difference between those who interpret politics as attacks and insults and those who seek solutions". The controversial EU-Turkey deal returning migrants from Greece respects international law, Renzi said. "I think international law has been respected," he said. Rights groups have criticised the deal, in which one Syrian migrant is settled in Europe for every migrant returned from Greece. 'Appreciate' Juncker letter on migration compact - Renzi Happy with reception of document (ANSAmed) - ROME, APRIL 21 - Italian Premier Matteo Renzi said at the UN Thursday that he had "very much appreciated Juncker's letter (on Italy's migration compact), I thank him for his sensitivity". He said the issue "requires awareness on the part of Europe...We note that there is a good atmosphere with European institutions compared to a few months ago". Renzi said he was "happy with the welcome for the Italian document". European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker earlier wrote a letter to Renzi thanking him for the migration compact aimed at helping origin and transit countries. ROME - "Unfortunately it did not go well. There is no inclination to reach a deal between Rajoy and the (Catalan) government," said Carles Puigdemont, president of Catalonia's government. Puigdemont was speaking during a news conference following his first official meeting with Spanish Premier Mariano Rajoy in Madrid on Wednesday. The Catalan president asked Rajoy to organise a "binding referendum" on independence of the autonomous regions, and the response of the premier, a firm no, came as no surprise. Puigdemont described their meeting as "cordial and friendly" but said their respective positions remained poles apart due to the "profound underlying disagreement over the political project of an independent state of Catalonia, in the heart of the EU". In another meeting with journalists, Rajoy reaffirmed that he was strongly against independence for Catalonia. After welcoming the start of dialogue between Madrid and Barcelona, Rajoy said "we are convinced that Catalonia is part of Spain and that the large majority of Spanish people share this vision, because we want to stay together and we will defend this political and personal position," he said. Rajoy confirmed that Puigdemont spoke to him about the binding referendum. He said: "I told him that I do not agree. He maintained his position and I maintained mine". The meeting lasted more than two hours. Puigdemont gave Rajoy a copy of the first edition of the second part of Don Quixote, including his journey to Barcelona and discovery of the sea. Rajoy greeted the Catalan leader next to the three flags of Spain, Catalonia, and the European Union. (by Stefania Fumo). Brussels - France, Germany and Spain said Wednesday at a meeting of ambassadors from the EU that they support Italy's proposed migration compact. Italy on Friday sent a wide-ranging 'migration compact' to the presidents of the European Commission and the European Council, Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk, asking the EU to offer financial incentives to countries in sub-Saharan Africa for them to curb migrant flows and readmit them after deportation. The document envisages a framework accord with countries of origin and transit and a big financial commitment by the EU, which could be achieved by redistributing already earmarked funds and also via possible Eurobonds - a notion Germany staunchly opposes. Italy said Wednesday it has no problem with weighing other options - such as Germany's idea of a fuel tax - as long as everyone understands the issue is structural as opposed to short-term, and as such requires a long-term response. Premier Matteo Renzi said in a letter accompanying the proposed compact that "the management of migrant flows is no longer sustainable without targeted and reinforced cooperation with the Third Countries of origin and transit". He said "much has been done, but we must do much more, quickly, if we want to avert the worsening of a systemic crisis." Using Eurobonds to fund the 'migration compact' is a "first conceptual idea about which we can talk in the future" European Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos said in the face of staunch German opposition to the idea. He said he had read the compact presented Friday by Italian Premier Matteo Renzi "with attention like everyone on the Commission, and I can say that it is fully in line with the EU's migration policy. It's a very responsible approach to the problem". On Friday, European Council President Donald Tusk took to Twitter to "welcome Matteo Renzi's migration compact". He said he agreed to "work on an ambitious plan in the EU and the G7 on cooperation with Third Countries to stem migration". BRUSSELS - Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said Thursday that the European Union's deal with Turkey to ease the asylum seeker crisis should be repeated with Libya once the national unity government there has taken a full grip on power. "I think that it was right to reach this agreement (with Turkey)," Alfano said on his way into a meeting of EU interior ministers in Luxembourg. "I think the model of the agreement could be replicated in Libya when the conditions are right". Berlin says OK to Turkey method for other routes German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said Thursday that he agreed with the principle of using the model of the deal between the EU and Turkey to combat the asylum-seeker crisis in other cases. "The agreement with Turkey is having an effect. Illegal migration is being substituted by legal migration," de Maiziere said at the margins of a meeting of EU interior ministers. "The method is right for alternative routes too, but realization is complicated and it's necessary to work on this aspect". BELGRADE - Electoral campaigning in Serbia ends at midnight on Thursday ahead of the national vote on Sunday. Friday and Saturday will be days of pre-election silence. Conservative Premier Aleksandar Vucic, leader of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), the majority power that is leading in all surveys, plans to hold a closing rally in the Kombank Arena. Speakers here will include former Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, who is President of the Italian Society for International Organisation (SIOI), an adviser to the Serbian government and to Premier Vucic over issues related to European integration. The vote in Serbia is being held two years in advance of the natural end of the current legislature, and is set to be monitored by more than 1,800 observers, including 1,687 locals and 196 foreigners. Observers will be present from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, and from varying foreign embassies in Belgrade including the Italian embassy. Serbs from Kosovo will also be eligible to vote (there are about 120,000 out of a total of 2 million inhabitants), in about ninety seats set up with the help of the OSCE. While election analysts are expecting success for Premier Vucic and his SNS party, a significant boost for the anti-EU, pro-Russia extreme-right forces is also potentially on the cards, following the acquittal of Vojislav Seselj, ideologist of Serbian ultra-nationalism, by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. (ANSAmed). Featuring a line up of industry leading speakers, the conference programme will address a range of topics affecting business aviation in the Middle East and North Africa region. Among the panels during the event will be Airports in the MENA Region: Coping with Increasing Demand and Dealing with the Grey Market. Attendees will take part in interactive discussions with detailed analyses of how to understand the market with stakeholder consultation, embarking on consumer awareness campaigns and preventing unexpected competition between the nations of the region. Business aviation professionals from around the GCC, Middle East and North African region can benefit from the sharing of knowledge and expertise from their peers, led by industry leaders such as Khader Mattar, VP Sales, Bombardier Business Aircraft and Faisal Alsaddik, Executive Chief Commercial Affairs, Saudia Private Aviation, among many others, beginning with a keynote address from the General Authority of Civil Aviation. For anyone involved in the industry, the MEBAA Conference provides an ideal forum to enhance their business and look to the future of the industry. The challenges facing the business aviation industry today are varied and far-reaching, says Ali Alnaqbi, founding chairman of MEBAA. From the limitations of market growth due to the grey market, to over-regulation and serious restrictions on sustainable and self-funding growth, there are a multitude of factors unique to business aviation that must be addressed. MEBAA Conferences seek to continue addressing the challenges facing the industry until they have been successfully resolved. The MEBAA Conference brings together experts from across the Middle East and North Africa to address issues related to specific areas of business. We are pleased that so many key industry professionals are already committed to speaking and chairing panels, and we look forward to the conference providing significant value to the attendees. Ali Alnaqbi, founding chairman of MEBAA The general assembly elected the new board during its annual meeting convened on April 14. It includes Suleiman Hafez, Basem Al Salem, Nofan Ajarmeh and Izzideen Kanakrieh; one other member will be named later. They all represent the Government Contributions Managing Company. The board also includes Imad Qudah, representing the Social Security Corporation, Michael Nazzal and Mohammad Ali Bdeir, as well as a representative of Mint Trading Middle East. During the meeting, which was attended by RJ President/CEO Captain Suleiman Obeidat, Hafez underlined the boards keenness to work as a team in coordination with the management and the staff in order to build on the companys last year achievements and help the airline grow further. He also said that the new board is expected to contribute all the factors of success and progress, and this will keep RJ in its outstanding position, as befits the national carrier of Jordan. Le CBD, cette molecule active du cannabis a aujourdhui le vent en poupe. Et cela est en grande partie du au fait quil permet... The incident occurred on Wednesday in Sangeetarai village. After initially losing consciousness, she continued to pray in front of a religious symbol, drawing a crowd of curious onlookers. Local authorities deputed a medical doctor to monitor her health. Raigarh (AsiaNews) An 11-year-old Indian girl on Tuesday cut off her tongue and offered it to Lord Shiva at a temple in Sangeetarai village, Raigarh (Chhattisgarh). When police and district authorities rushed to the scene to rescue the child, villagers prevented them from taking the child to hospital because they believe that she would recover without any medical aid with the blessings of the God, said Sub-Divisional Magistrate Prakash Sarve. The girl, who is still at the temple, was not ready to go home, he added. However, as a precautionary measure, a doctor has been deputed to monitor her conditions. Since the incident first occurred, people have been coming to the temple to catch a glimpse of Chameli Sidar, the girls name. Her father, Budheshwar Sidar, is a farmer. After going to a local temple on Saturday, she cut her tongue off with a knife in front of the Siva Lingam, a standing, cylindrical representation of the Hindu deity that symbolises generative power. Hindu worshippers traditionally burn incense in front of the phallic pillar, which is decked out with flowers on holidays. Although this is not the first incident of its kind, experts cannot explain the childs action. Still, what is more worrisome for a source that spoke to AsiaNews is the fact that the child was away from home for three days and no one bothered to alert the authorities. Her rights and welfare are at stake. by Piero Gheddo The PIME priest, who died a few weeks ago, spent 40 years in Japan translating books, studying the countrys culture, bringing Japanese values closer to the Gospel. Japans samurai code and nationalism are part of that experience; so are the temple of unborn children and guilt over abortion. The Japanese seek a God who can forgiveness. Milan (AsiaNews) On 4 April, Fr Luigi Soletta (1929-2016) died at the age of 86. For almost 40 years, he was a missionary in Japan for the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME). After Vatican II, he and two other PIME missionaries were tasked with broadening the dialogue with the Buddhist world, seeking the semina verbi, the seeds of the word, that the Holy Spirit planted among the worlds cultures, religions, and peoples, in preparation for the encounter with Gods word, Jesus Christ. Father Luigi was qualified in heart and mind for this task, and lived it with passion and dedication. He studied, taught and practiced Zen. He translated a dozen major classical works from Japanese literature, including Hagakure: The Secret Wisdom of the Samurai, a 17th century collection that reflects the ancient wisdom of the Samurai, written in ancient, hard to read Japanese. Soletta adapted it to modern Japanese, and in 1993 published it Italy with Editrice Ave. The book was reviewed favourably in the Il Sole 24 Ore newspaper by Mgr Gianfranco Ravasi who recommended it because it helps understand the Japanese and their worldview. The latest edition dates back to three years ago, by Editrice Einaudi. Hagakure: The Secret Wisdom of the Samurai was already known but after it was adapted into modern Japanese, it became, according to some experts, the best known and most controversial Japanese book of all times, and this for political reasons. At the start of the Second World War, triumphant Japanese nationalists adopted it as an inspiration and guide for young Japanese to serve the fatherland with their lives (kamikaze). This led more recently to a debate about Japanese militarism, nationalism, and rearmament. Hagakure: The Secret Wisdom of the Samurai is a collection of aphorisms that underscores the values of the samurai, and the human virtues of Japanese traditions, most notably, love of the fatherland, the ideal of service and obedience (in the samurais case to his lord, the daimyo), disinterested love for ones fellow human beings, control over ones passions, fighting for a noble cause, a spirit of humility and poverty, love for nature through which the divinity that has created the universe has revealed itself, etc. Interestingly, Va' dove ti porta il cuore (in English Follow your Heart), a novel by Italian novelist Suzanna Tamaro, takes its title from a passage in the Hagakure, as the author herself said during a trip to Japan years ago. Fr Soletta felt hurt a lot because his "pearls of oriental wisdom", which he read as "seeds of the Word" in Japanese culture, a sort of Little Flowers of Saint Francis (excerpts from the saints works), were and are still used in nationalist ideology and militarist propaganda. After he came back to Italy, he published Il sole splende a mezzanotte (The sun shines at midnight, by Editrice Missionaria Italiana, 2009), an autobiography of his 40 years of studies and inter-faith dialogue in Japan, which reveals a clergyman of profound evangelical spirituality and a missionary open to the human and religious values of the Japanese. The books title come from a Zen monk, and symbolises the enlightenment Father Luigi reached, after a long journey of asceticism and meditation, and made it is possible for him to dream of a sun shining at midnight. In an interview with Mondo e missione, he complained that the book had been criticised by those who, "seeing the cover, and lazily leafing through it, thought that it was about Zen. Of course, I am passionate about Japan and its culture. But I care above all about Christ and the Gospel, which I have tried to announce to the people of Japan. What is more, I try to show a profound harmony between some aspects of Zen spirituality and Christianity." In our secularised and materialistic world, to see such a passion for Japanese culture and religion in a missionary may seem eccentric or superfluous, but missionaries are often prophets who prepare bridges for an encounter between peoples and cultures, so as to reach a humanism with commonly held values, which for us Christians have as foundation in the person of Jesus Christ and his Gospel. In other cultures and religions, the seeds of the Word exist already; hence, there are values on the basis of which we can meet to reach a shared humanism. In autumn 1986 I visited Japan for the second time and I met Father Soletta at the PIME house in Tokyo. One night we talked a lot and I expressed my admiration for the passion and the tenacity with which he pursued his dream, i.e. seeking the seeds of the word in Japans culture and natural religiosity, which will facilitate the encounter between that people and Jesus Christ. I also asked him, What are the obstacles to such an encounter? He told me, Come to see me, and I shall you in actual practice. Fr Soletta was the chaplain at a convent in Kamakura, with a small church near the great Buddhist temple to the goddess Kannon (the goddess of mercy), also known as the "temple of unborn children." On the hill around the temple, hundreds of Buddha statuettes stand along paths in the woods; they symbolise children. Women who had abortions offer them to the temple, dressing them up like children, a toy in their hands or next to them. I saw young couples bring such statuettes, placing them at or near the temple, asking for forgiveness. They burn incense and prostrate themselves. This moving custom is not only a ritual, but the expression of forgiveness that sadly has no answer. "Abortion is seen as a grave offence Fr Luigi said. Non-Christians, who do not know the God of mercy and forgiveness, at times are burdened by a strong sense of guilt. They think that the unborn children have no peace, that they roam the cities and the countryside waiting to be reincarnated in another life. Their parents cannot give them peace. Sometimes non-Christian mothers and fathers come to me, tell me they have had an abortion, and ask whether the Christian god can forgive this sin. After so many years in Japan, I believe that nervous illness is more common here than in the West because of this pessimistic view of God, whom they do not know, and whom they think is unforgiving. Perhaps, the hardest thing for the Japanese in converting to Christ is the duty to forgive offences one received, because in their tradition, vengeance is a sacred act that is passed on from father to son. Couples who have had an abortion come to me, and I tell them that the Christian God forgives. I also explain how and why. I then give them a solemn blessing, and see them go off in peace." (Father Soletta is buried in his home village of Florinas, Sassari province (Italy). by Wang Zhicheng The school stands next to the site of three former pesticide plants. Groundwater and soil pollution levels are way above the safety limit. The authorities tried to hush up the problem. Government and business interests tend to protect polluting companies. Beijing (AsiaNews) Hundreds of students at a high school fell ill with bronchitis, thyroid problems, leukemia and lymphoma after their school was relocated to a campus next to a site where pesticides were made. Last September, the Changzhou Foreign Languages School in Jiangsu moved to its new location, reportedly near three former chemical plants. Since December, students and teachers at the privately run facility have complained of an unusual smell. At the same time, they began having rashes (see 2nd photo), coughs, headaches, and vomiting. Local officials said that a soil restoration project was underway at the site at the time of the complaints. An environmental-expert panel found that the air quality met national standards. However, state-run China Central Television (CCTV) noted that soil and groundwater in the area contained toxic compounds and heavy metals, with the level of carcinogenic chlorobenzene in the ground water nearly 100,000 times the safety limit. After parents sent 641 students for medical checks, 493 were found to have health problems, including bronchitis, blood and thyroid abnormalities, and in some cases lymphoma and leukemia. Before the TV expose, local authorities tried to keep the matter under wrap. Many doctors refused to examine the students to find the cause of their illnesses until parents and teachers began protesting in public (see 3rd photo) Environmental activist Wu Lihong told by Radio Free Asia that "In China, the environmental protection department is nicknamed the pollution protection department, because it's actually responsible for allowing a lot of the pollution by protecting polluting enterprises". Jiangsu rights activist Wu Shiming said the problems stem from a lack of checks and balances on the power of ruling Chinese Communist Party officials. "There are strong links between government and business in many locations, because of a lack of scrutiny of state power," Wu Shiming said. "In the end, its the ordinary people who suffer." "It is good for a Christians heart to remember their journey, for their path: how the Lord led me here, how He took me by the hand. And how often I have said to the Lord: 'No! Go away! I do not want to!'". Vatican City (AsiaNews) - The memory of the "good things" that God has done for us in the course of our lives and also of the obstacles, our rejections of Him strengthens the journey of faith, said Pope Francis at Mass celebrated this morning in Casa Santa Marta. Taking his cue from the First reading, in which Paul goes to the synagogue in Antioch on the Sabbath to proclaim the Gospel starting from the beginning of the chosen people, passing to Abraham and Moses, Egypt and the promised Land, to reach Jesus, the Pope reflected on the need for Christians to look back and store in their memories all the key moments and signs of Gods presence in their lives. He said we must memorize both the beautiful things done by God as well as the obstacles and rejections because God accompanies us and is not frightened off by our wicked deeds. We must look back to see how God has saved us, follow with our hearts and minds this path with its memories and in this way arrive at Jesuss side. Its the same Jesus, who in the greatest moment of his life Holy Thursday and Good Friday, in the (Last) Supper - gave us his Body and his Blood and said to us Do this in memory of me. In memory of Jesus. To remember how God saved us. Pope Francis went on to explain how the Church describes the Sacrament of the Eucharist as a memorial, just as in the Bible the book of Deuteronomy is the book of the Memory of Israel. And we must do the same in our personal lives, he said. Its good for the Christian heart to memorize my journey, my personal journey: just like the Lord who accompanied me up to here and held me by the hand. And the times I said to our Lord: No! Go away! I dont want you! Our Lord respects (our wishes). He is respectful. But we must memorize our past and be a memorial of our own lives and our own journey. We must look back and remember and do it often. At that time God gave me this grace and I replied in that way, I did this or that He accompanied me. And in this way we arrive at a new encounter, an encounter of gratitude. Concluding his homily, the Pope said our hearts should give rise to a sense of gratitude towards Jesus who never stops accompanying us in our history. How many times, he admitted, have we closed the door in his face, how many times have we pretended not to see him and not believe that He is by our side. How many times have we denied his salvation But He was always there. Memory makes us draw closer to God. The memory of that work which God carried out in us, in this recreation, in this regeneration, that takes us beyond the ancient splendour that Adam had in the first creation. I give you this simple advice: Memorize it! Whats my life been like, what was my day like today or what has this past year been like? (Its all about) memory. What has my relationship with the Lord been like? Our memories of the beautiful and great things that the Lord has carried out in the lives of each one of us. by mons. Lazzaro You Heung-sik* South Koreas newly elected 300-member National Assembly has 77 Catholic MPs. Our society is split in two, says Mgr Lazarus You Heung-sik, bishop of Daejeon. In his message to the new lawmakers, he calls on them to work for reconciliation showing with facts that you understand the precepts of the Gospel. Daejeon (AsiaNews) Following the election of 77 Catholics to South Koreas 300-member National Assembly, Mgr Lazarus You Heung-sik, president of the Episcopal Commission for Justice and Peace, issued a message to the newly elected lawmakers. Speaking to AsiaNews, the prelate said that election was a great result but comes with a huge responsibility. Hence, the new MPs must be missionaries in parliament, work for the reconciliation of our society, and show with facts that you understand the precepts of the Gospel. The full text of his message follows (translated from the Korean by AsiaNews). The popular sentiment expressed in the general elections is grave, because it showed everyone both ruling and opposition parties that the situation cannot go on like this. The day of the general election, 13 April, was for us a real day of celebration and change. I pray and thank all those who participated in the general elections for their interest and for the responsibility they took on as candidates. As I said before the vote, Catholics prayed for the election of MPs really concerned to work for peace, justice and the common good. I believe that MPs elected in this round are the fruit of our prayers and our desire. Let me cite what Pope Francis said at the Blue House in Seoul** on 14 August 2014, during the meeting with government authorities. Dear friends, the pontiff said, your efforts as political and civic leaders are directed to the goal of building a better, more peaceful, just and prosperous world for our children. Experience teaches us that in an increasingly globalized world, our understanding of the common good, of progress and development, must ultimately be in human and not merely economic terms. Like most of our developed nations, Korea struggles with important social issues, political divisions, economic inequities, and concerns about the responsible stewardship of the natural environment. How important it is that the voice of every member of society be heard, and that a spirit of open communication, dialogue and cooperation be fostered. It is likewise important that special concern be shown for the poor, the vulnerable and those who have no voice, not only by meeting their immediate needs but also by assisting them in their human and cultural advancement. So far, many MPs have spent far too much time and effort in the pursuit of their parties interests. Even though the number of Catholics is up, it is hard to meet people who work in the spirit of the Gospel, asserting their Christian identity. Many people, including Catholics, consider the interests of their parties "more important" than the spirit of the Gospel, which stresses the importance of peace and life so that we can live well together without any distinction. Please, new Catholic MPs, do not use your Catholic identity to achieve personal success or engage party politics. Become instead servants of the people working based on the identity that gives faith Pour new wine must into fresh wineskins (Lk 5:38), and work so that what you do becomes like a temple full of the Gospel. Our society is split in two, each hating the other. This disease has also entered the Church and threatens the identity of Catholics. This is a painful reality for the Church, which has become like a prisoner in the world. You, new Catholic MPs, do not become the seed that brings hatred and conflict. With an open heart, talk and understand others, and become politicians who engage in dialogue, i.e. politicians who heal conflicts and disagreements between South and North Korea. Become politicians who listen to and respect others. The Korean Catholic Church is sending you to parliament as missionaries. Be representatives of the Catholic Church beyond any ideology, idea, or party interest. Learn the Church's social doctrine and listen to the peoples voice. Especially, share in the pain of the poor. Please, be believers who boast not for your roles as MPs, but in the name of grace, i.e. as a Christian. To achieve this, being close to and meeting believers of the same faith are important. Please, actively participate in Dasanhoe and political unity meetings of Catholic MPs. Those who share purposes can work and act together, and have a greater impact. Dear sisters and brothers, dear MPs, we thank you for your hard work and pray for you may the grace of God always be with you. I pray that, through you, our political life may become the politics of love, which is love within love. Best wishes on your election! * President of the Episcopal Commission for Justice and Peace. ** The Blue House is the executive office and official residence of the President of the Republic of (South) Korea. The US President arrived in Saudi Arabia yesterday. King Salman did not meet him at the airport but at the palace where the two had a long tete-a-tete. Today, Obama and Gulf States leaders met terrorism and Iran. A US congressional report on 11 September could further strain US-Saudi relations. Riyadh (AsiaNews/Agencies) US President Barack Obama today met with Gulf leaders Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain in Saudi Arabia to push for an intensified campaign against the Islamic State (IS) group and al-Qaeda despite strains in US-Saudi ties. With a few months left before his term ends, Obama is trying to mend fences with Mideast states after the Iran nuclear deal gave Tehran a greater international leeway. The US president, who yesterday met for two hours with Saudi King Salman, came with a high-level US delegation that included Defence Secretary Ash Carter, Secretary of State John Kerry, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and CIA Director John Brennan. Todays agenda included three sessions. One is aimed at fostering regional stability. A second focused on counterterrorism efforts including efforts to defeat al-Qaida and IS. A third session was centred on Iran, which Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states see as a destabilising rival in the region. For many analysts and experts, the rise of jihadist movements and Islamic terrorism owes a lot to the ambiguous attitude of many Arab governments (like Qatar and the Saudis) towards such groups. For the US, along with fighting IS, rebuilding cities freed from Jihadis tops the agenda. Defence Secretary Carter asked the Gulf countries to play a political and financial role in such efforts, especially in the case of Iraq, which is going through severe economic crisis, and remains under the threat of extremist groups. Such aid would counter Iranian influence via Shia militias in Lebanon, Yemen, and even Iraq. Gulf leaders however have not forgiven Obama for his reluctance and ambiguity in addressing local issues (as well as his preference for other regions, like Asia-Pacific), not to mention the Iran nuclear deal. The war in Syria has not helped smooth relations either. Signs of a less-than-enthusiastic welcome for Obama were visible from the start if his visit to Saudi Arabia. Stepping off of Air Force One at King Khalid International Airport, Obama was greeted not by King Salman but by a lower-ranking royal, Prince Faisal bin Bandar Al Saud, the governor of Riyadh. Conversely and significantly, ahead of Obama's arrival, Saudi state television showed the king personally greeting senior officials from other Gulf nations arriving at the King Salman Air Base. For one security analyst, the unusual move was intended to send a clear message that the Saudis have little faith in the US president, and that they are waiting for the outcome of the upcoming presidential election at the end of the year. Meanwhile, a 28-page section of the congressional report on the 11 September attacks that some believe implicates Saudi Arabia in the planning might further complicate US-Saudi relations. The Saudis vehemently deny the charges, whilst the Obama administration is still reviewing its release. The attention in the United States on the withheld pages comes as Congress debates legislation that would allow the families of US terror victims to sue foreign governments if they are implicated in acts of terrorism, including Saudi Arabia. The US administration opposes the Justice against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. Obama himself has said he is against the bill because it could expose the United States to lawsuits from citizens of other countries. Damascus (AsiaNews) - The Christian community in Syria "has not forgotten" its bishops, because "every time we hold a joint prayer meeting we talk about them, we think of them." In recent days "a celebration was held in Beirut", and the same will happen today, "at the Greek-Orthodox Patriarchate", in the Lebanese capital, Melkite Patriarch Gregory III Laham, tells AsiaNews, commenting on the three years since the kidnapping of Msgr. Yohanna Ibrahim and Msgr. Boulos Yaziji in Aleppo, in northern Syria. Since April 22, 2013 there has been no news of the two prelates of the Syro-Orthodox and Greek-Orthodox church, whose fate remains shrouded in mystery. There abduction was "abnormal" because it was never followed up with claims or concrete negotiations to obtain their release. A serious blow to these Churches of the East, a symbol of interfaith dialogue, spiritual and intellectual enrichment for the region. Msgr. Yohanna Ibrahim, bishop of the Syriac Orthodox diocese of Aleppo and Msgr. Boulos Yaziji, Archbishop of the Greek-orthodox diocese were kidnapped before 6 pm in the village of Kafr Dael, about 10 km from Aleppo. According to witnesses the two prelates were negotiating the release of two priests Fr. Michel Kayyal (Armenian Catholic) and Fr. Maher Mahfouz (Greek-Orthodox), seized in February of that year. After they arrived at the rebel militias road block, the car carrying the two bishops was flanked by armed men, maybe Chechen jihadists, who opened fire on the vehicle, killing the driver deacon and seizing the prelates. Evidence gathered in the hours following the kidnap appeared to show that the group was made up of foreigners who did not speak Arabic. However, from that moment on the entire episode has been shrouded in silence. None of the rebel groups has claimed the abduction and to date there is no information about the fate of the two bishops, metropolitans of Aleppo, or if they are still alive. For this reason, the Syrian Orthodox Church and the Greek Orthodox Church organized a prayer meeting entitled "We do not forget", which was held on April 19 in Beirut with the aim of keeping the memory of the two religious leaders alive. The function was attended by political and religious leaders of Lebanon and the Middle East. These included president of the Syriac League, Habib Ephrem, who stated that "nobody cares about this kidnapping." Former government minister Faycal Karami had even harsher words and said that the kidnapping was "a premeditated act", a "message" to Christians to tell them to "leave the region", which he believes hides "the hand of Israel" even if the perpetrators are Muslim extremist groups. Speaking to AsiaNews, Syrian, Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, Gregory III, confirmed that "three years have passed and we know nothing of their fate" and so far any information they have received "has no basis, there is no real or credible news. It is "impossible", he confirms, to obtain "definite information." "What we can do - continues the prelate - is to renew the call to prayer, so that there is a general, international mobilization for peace in Syria". The hope, he adds, "is that their fate and their suffering is a reminder, an appeal to the world for peace. That these two martyrs are a sign of the future, a Cross on the path of the Syrian people. " The Melkite Patriarch strongly affirms that Msgr. Yohanna Ibrahim and Msgr. Boulos Yaziji "will not be forgotten" and "whenever we come together to pray, we talk about them." A long standing critic of Western (and regional) powers intervention first in Iraq and then in Syria, which he believes has only exacerbated the conflict, Gregory III hopes that "the world take interest in this matter, to take charge of the Syrian crisis, the drama of the faithful and of the nations people as a whole". This anniversary, he concludes, "I hope will be the occasion to launch an appeal for peace. We need a universal alliance for peace, not US, Arabic or Russian. What is required is a willingness to advance the talks and find a common point. Instead, there are those who attack, who want chaos, to feed the money markets, the arms markets, to feed personal interests ... Someone is making a lot of money out of this war!". by Nirmala Carvalho Mgr Sebastian Francis Shaw, archbishop of Lahore, visited the Indian capital with 16 priests from his diocese, where they were greeted so warmly. Despite being divisions and conflicts since 1947, A strong sense of brotherhood and communion binds our two peoples, and this calls for a new culture of mercy". Delhi (AsiaNews) Mgr Sebastian Francis Shaw, archbishop of Lahore (Pakistan), and 16 priests from his diocese performed a pilgrimage for peace and reconciliation between Pakistan and India. For us, this is very significant and fruitful, the prelate said. It was a great joy to be greeted so warmly by the archbishop of Delhi. A strong sense of brotherhood and communion binds our two peoples. The archbishop stressed that the trip was undertaken in the spirit of the Jubilee of Mercy, a spark for a new culture of peace and harmony. The pilgrims left Lahore last Tuesday and after a 13-hour bus ride reached Delhi, where they were welcomed by a delegation led by the citys archbishop, Mgr Anil Couto. When he met the visitors, Fr Joe Kalathil SJ, coordinator of the Pakistan-India peace mission, placed a garland of flowers on each. For years, Fr Kalathil has been working with children from various schools, in India and Pakistan, to promote a culture of peace. Hundreds of students from both countries have exchanged letters of friendship. The pilgrims from Pakistan left today. In meeting his guests, Mgr Couto said, "We warmly welcomed the archbishop of Lahore. Together we discussed the history of the Church of Lahore and the Church of Delhi. Our mother Church was Agra* but after independence in 1947** things changed". "Over the years, the [two] Churches have grown, developed, and taken a new turn, he explained. With Mgr Shaw we shared the joys of our faith and the challenges of the mission." For his part, Mgr Shaw said, "It is clear from the generosity with which we were received in all the historic places we visited that there is a culture that binds us. There is so much respect for one another, and this will lead to social harmony and peace, added the archbishop of Lahore. "In this Jubilee of Mercy, our pilgrimage to India acquires even greater significance. The Father, who is merciful to us, invites us to be with others. This is a call for a new culture of mercy". * Agra is a city located in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. It is home to one of Indias oldest archdioceses. ** In 1947, British India was divided into two separate states, India proper and Pakistan. They were supposed to start four days ago. Postponed by violations in truce. Talks sponsored by the UN. In over a year of conflict there have been 6400 deaths and nearly 3 million displaced. The presence of Al Qaeda and Daesh "allies" of the Saudi coalition. The Sisters of Mother Teresa and the kidnapping of Fr. Tom Uzhunnalil. Kuwait City (AsiaNews) - A delegation of Houthi rebels left the Yemeni capital yesterday travelling to Kuwait to participate in peace talks sponsored by the UN. The dialogue was supposed to start four days ago but was postponed because the rebels have accused the enemy coalition, led by Saudi Arabia, of violating the cease-fire in place since 11 April. In reality, both groups have violated the truce in recent days. In the last 24 hours 16 rebels and three government soldiers have been killed in clashes in Nahm, in the northeast region of Sanaa. Other clashes took place in Marib (east of the capital). For over a year the Saudi led coalition has been trying to quash the the Houthi rebels, who have managed to win over different parts of the territory and take control of the capital Sanaa. President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi, who fled first to Aden, has now taken permanent refuge in Riyadh. The Houthis are fighting for greater autonomy, and for more political rights and are allies of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The conflict is seen by analysts as yet another "proxy war" between Saudi Arabia, which supports Hadi, and Iran, which supports the Houthis. Many of the high-precision weapons used by the Saudis come from the US arsenals, which also offer intelligence services to Riyadh. The United Nations says that in more than a year of conflict, at least 6400 people have died and almost 3 million have been forced to flee their homes. The war has been made more violent by the presence of radical Islamist groups such as Al Qaeda and Daesh (the Islamic state), who are fighting against the Houthis and target the population. Victims of their fundamentalism also include four sisters of Mother Teresa killed in Aden on March 4 and Fr. Tom Uzhunnalil, the Salesian priest kidnapped more than a month ago, whose fate remains unknown. An inspiring short documentary about lawyer Vincent Shin, who practises in a Melbourne school, premiered in Brunswick last night. The 10-minute film, titled The School Lawyer Project, looks into how the project addresses the family violence epidemic at the coalface. Twenty eight-year-old Shin is the only lawyer in Australia to be employed by a school full time, helping students facing a range of social and financial issues. A victim of family violence himself, Shin, a clear favourite of the students, appears casually dressed and talks about the intimate details of his abusive upbringing, what inspired him to assist kids from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. I hope that I can inspire some of the kids at my school to really be tenacious with life, Shin told Australasian Lawyer. I feel like having my story out there and what Im doing including my personal story hopefully will encourage conversation about expanding the School Lawyer Project. With the Royal Commission into Family Violence just wrapping up and the Victorian Government pledging $500m in addressing the issue, the documentary is timely. Shin said hes in very early talks with Victorian Legal Aid which may look to expand the program. Speaking out about this will hopefully keep the conversation going for this disgusting social issue to just disappear, he said. I feel like its a good step forward in terms of tackling family violence to have people who are out there sharing their own intimate stories. One of the biggest misconceptions is that victims are from low socio-economic backgrounds, but this isnt always the case and the perception needs to change, Shin said. Inevitably its going to be uncovering a lot of family violence issues if there are more school lawyers, Shin said. And the hope is, keeping this conversation going about this school lawyer project and family violence will hopefully encourage other legal centres and other schools to look into a School Lawyer Project. Last nights premiere included a panel discussion with AFL star Jimmy Bartel and commissioner for children and young people Liana Buchanan, who both recently spoke publically about their own experiences with family violence. Watch the full PLGRM documentary below: The painting, titled Make America Great Again, has been so popular that it attracted bids over the hefty asking price just a week after it was put on display.Now the artist is being anonymously threatened with legal action if she sells it, The Guardian reported.Back in February, an image of the paining went viral after Gore published it on her Facebook page. But it has since been censored on social media and delisted from eBay after a Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice was filed against the artist.The painting was rejected from several galleries in the US over security concerns. Maddox Gallery in London offered to exhibit the paining and hundreds of visitors have since queued to see the work.The reaction, especially in the UK, has been incredibly supportive. Everywhere apart from America has been great, Gore said.Who knew it would be such a big deal? I think an artists job is to take the times were living in and then set the scene. It is a representation of where we are.The artist, who is based in LA, received thousands of death threats so headed to the UK to escape the frenzy.It only really got out of hand when Donald Trump referenced it in a debate, which sums up Trump and his ego. From there, everyone wanted to see this image, Maddox Gallery director Cordelia de Freitas said.According to a report by The Guardian, Gore said her work was inspired by comments made by Republican rival Marco Rubios comments made about the size of Trumps hands a rally in Virginia.And you know what they say about men with small hands? You cant trust them, Rubio said.[Rubio] referred to my hands, if they are small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there is no problem. I guarantee, Trump responded.Gore said that she will donate the money she makes from the paintings sale to an LA homeless shelter. Hi guys,I have visited Australia before, but always drived around with my spouse so I have no idea about public transport like buses, esp in Perth. So I will have a pretty long layover in Perth airport next week, from 10am to 4pm, my next flight will be at 6pm. I have planned to visit St George Cathedral and Kings Park by bus (route 37) from the airport, then have a lunch around there and get back to the airport by bus too.Questions,1. Is the trip worth the hassle? Can I rely on the public bus to/from the airport? Bus is the cheapest option ($4 each ride I checked), I have no plan to use taxis because of how expensive they are, especially my trip is very very short.2. Is there like..cheap food court near Kings Park? Or do you have certain recommendation?Really appreciate your help! Thanks heaps guys!! It all depends on your particular circumstances what is best for you.I usually advise clients to apply onshore, if they are already in Australia and are able to lodge an onshore application, provided they can meet the requirements for the visa. The obvious advantage is that you can remain with your partner in Australia during processing and will have full work rights, once your bridging visa comes into effect. Canberraman said: The OP shouldn't be considered as foreigner as he can stay in Australia indefinitely before a decision is made on his current visa application. So there is actually no time limit imposed by law on him as a decision has not been made with regards to his current visa application. The same is also true that he is an Australian resident for tax purposes. But then again, it is better for the OP to ask the State Revenue Office, they should know better. Click to expand... Australian resident for tax purposes (183 days) and other Australian resident definitions can vary a lot with the different government requirements.I quoted from the FIRB which deals with "Foreigners" buying property in Australia. In theory, that would override a state based decision. However the FIRB may decide who can buy, and a state revenue office can decide the extra that is paid or not.The wording "" would often be interpreted by the Government employee and could be different with different people. Many times people will get different answers from a government department, for the same question.A PMV visa holder, for example, has a date that they need to leave, unless they fill the Visa conditions and move to the 820 Visa. This one doesappear to fill the conditions for "Non Foreigner"An 820 Visa holder, who also has to fulfill conditions to move to the 801 Permanent visa, appears to be similar, but maybe is considered to be a "Non Foreigner".The earlier statement: "" does seem best Hi All, Just wanted to some guidance for my wife's spouse visa application. I am a permanent resident and visited India this march and got married. Now I am sorting documents for my wife's visa. I have arranged the following 1) Change of name in passport 2) Marriage certificates and photos 3) Stat Decs from friends and family from Aus and India 4)I am providing financial assistance to her starting this month which i can show the proofs for 5) photos of us together in social places and joint invitations from family and friends. 6) personal statements from each And all call history from social media Planning to lodge application in May and apply for tourist visa after applying 309. Can you suggest If i am on the right path. thanks We run through some of the most notable cars focused specifically on the world's biggest automotive market, China. More than 20 million cars were bought in China last year, making it the largest automotive market in the world. With so much money to be made, its unsurprising that many carmakers build vehicles specifically for the East Asian market. We run through 10 key China-focused cars that will be on display at the Beijing motor show (April 25 - May 4, 2016). LeEco LeSEE LeEco, the tech firm that shares one of its founders with Chinese EV maker Faraday Future, and will work collaboratively with Aston Martin on the upcoming RapidE electric vehicle, is bringing its own Tesla Model S rival to the Beijing motor show; the LeSEE short for Super Electric Ecosystem. The company revealed the car recently, and will unwrap more details at its official world Premier at the motor show next week. SenovaOffSpace Senova, a subsidiary of the Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Co (BAIC), will debut itsOffSpace SUV concept at the Beijing motor show. Given that the car has been previewed only in murky preview shots, both its technical and visual details remain little known so far. IAT SUV IAT, the Chinese automotive firm established in 2002, will bring its SUV to Beijing this year. Information regarding it remains tightly under wraps, to the effect that even its name isnt out yet. It is however rumoured to be six metres long. The car sports an angular, almost Origami-like design, reminiscent of the Lexus LF-NX concept. Geely Emgrand GS Geely has picked up momentum in the past few years, with its GC9, launched at last years Shanghai show, being named China's Car of the Year 2016. The GS (or Boyue as it is known locally) follows the new design language, but this time in the form of an SUV. The GS was officially launched in the Chinese market in March, but this is its first appearance at a motor show. Engine choices are a 143hp 2.0-litre petrol unit and a 1.8-litre turbo making either 163hp or 184hp. The latter gets a four-wheel drive, but the other versions are front-wheel drive only. Set to be a export model, the GS might make it way to Europe. Beijing Auto BJ90 Although there's no image for the BJ90, we know for a fact that this car is essentially the Mercedes GL-Class. Beijing Auto is Daimler Benzs joint venture partner in China and, under the terms of the agreement, it can use the platform and engines of the SUV. The interior is also heavily dependent on the German original, although the Chinese version has a larger touchscreen and new wood trim. Powertrains are lifted directly from the Mercedes, with a choice of a twin-turbo 3.0-litre V6 and a twin-turbo 4.0-litre V8 coupled to a seven-speed dual-clutch automatic gearbox and Mercedes 4Matic system. Zotye SR8 Another German SUV lookalike, but this time, its an all-out clone with no blessing from Porsche. Over the recent years, Zotye has developed a reputation for producing rip-offs, particularly with its SUV range. This year too, it doesnt disappoint with the near-identical Macan rip-off. Even the interior, bar the steering wheel badge, is difficult to distinguish from the real thing. Power comes from the Mitsubishi 2.0-litre turbo engine used in the infamous Evoque copy, the Landwind X7. With such blatant IP infringement, Zotye can forget any chance of exports. BYD Qin EV300 This is the second all-electric car from Warren Buffetts attack on the electric car industry. While no Tesla, BYDs first electric car, the e6, has found use as a taxi in many cities around the world, including London. The Qin was originally a plug-in hybrid and repackages the e6s electric technology into a more practical car for the masses. It has a claimed range of 306km. This car stands a real chance of fulfilling BYDs long-promised break into Western markets. Borgward BX7 Remember that well-known German brand Borgward? For some reason, BAIC thought that resurrecting the name made perfect sense to give its cars an air of exclusivity. However, other than name, this car has no connection with Germany. In fact, its based on the Senova X65 a brand that was kick-started using technology bought in from Saab. The BX7 was also designed by former Saab designer Einar Hareide and the 2.0T engine is likely to be based on the old Saab unit. Its possible that BAIC has ideas of exporting this brand. Qoros 3 estate crossover Nothing has been heard about the Qoros 3 estate since it was unveiled at Geneva motor show in 2014, and its no secret that things havent been going according to plan for Qoros. Despite producing well-engineered, essentially German cars in China, without a well-known brand, theyve struggled to sell. European sales, apart from the Slovakian test market, have failed to materialise. The estate as well as the sedan have received the crossover treatment in an attempt to create a larger range, but its still largely built around a one-car series and uses a 1.6-litre engine in naturally aspirated or turbo forms. Its unlikely that this car brings Qoros any closer to full-blown European sales. Beijing Auto electric supercar Coming hot on the heels of the Chinese Techrules AT96 supercar unveiled at Geneva, this is another electric supercar. Details are thin on the ground, but the as-yet-unnamed car was developed by BAICs R&D centre in Barcelona and is based on a Formula E racing car. Range is claimed to be 300km and top speed 261kph, with a 0-100kph time of 3.0sec. However, there is a question mark over whether this car will ever reach production. Roewe RX5 Roewe started off the back of intellectual property bought from the Rover collapse. Later, parent company SAIC regained the MG brand and many of the cars offered by the two companies are closely related and designed in the UK. Details of the RX5 are scarce, besides a couple of teaser shots, but we know its an SUV with a choice of 1.4-litre turbo and 1.6-litre petrol engines. This could mean that its the Roewe version of the MG GS, which is due to go on sale in the UK this summer. The 1.4-litre unit is likely to be the GM engine used in the MG GT. So far, it hasnt been offered in the UK, while the 1.6 seems to be a new engine for the group. Venucia T90 At the 2011 Shanghai show, one of the big stories was the creation of China-only brands by joint ventures, which are treated favourably by the government. Venucia, created by Dongfeng Nissan, has been one of the most successful ones. While it started off using old Nissan designs, the latest T90 is based on the current Murano. Spy shots show a good-looking X6-like SUV coupe. Power is likely to come from a 2.5-litre petrol or 2.5-litre hybrid. Sales in other markets are unlikely. Chery Tiggo 7 Along with Great Wall, Geely and BYD, Chery was once one of the best-selling Chinese brands. Sales, however, have fallen and the company largely survives on handouts from the local government. Spy shots reveal an attractive SUV, with engine choices likely to be 1.5-litre and 2.0-litre petrol units. Chery will need to seriously improve its quality, particularly when it comes to interiors, if it plans to rejoin the big league. Mark Andrews (Autocar UK) Currently under testing, the T6X is slated to become the first mass-market electric motorcycle in the country. Teslas Model 3 has shown that electric mobilitys arrival to the main stage is moving in leaps, if somewhat sporadically. The need to make electric transportation cool, practical and as affordable as conventional ones is a challenge that is being trumped by upstarts. Tork Motorcycles, an Indian company, is hoping to create a similar disruption in the field of electric motorcycles. A recent round of investment has given their plans to launch their first production electric motorcycle, the T6X, a big boost. If youre a huge racing fan, youve undoubtedly heard of Tork Motorcycles, or as they were known back then, Tork India, before. Founded by Kapil Shelke, a mechanical engineer by trade and racing nut by passion, Tork made waves when they scored a podium finish in their debut attempt at the TTXGP (the Electric TT race at the Isle of Man) in 2009. Since then, Kapil and his team have been making and constantly upgrading electric racing motorcycles for TTXGP and TT-ZERO races, and have even converted a Yamaha FZ16 to run on an electric motor and batteries as a proof of concept for a road-going electric motorcycle. Recently, this Pune-based company raised funds from angel investors including the founders of Ola cabs Bhavish Agarwal and Ankit Bhati, along with a group of angels led by Harpreet Grover, co-founder & CEO of CoCubes, to build electric motorcycles in India. T6X: future of Indian electric motorcycling After building five successful prototypes so far, Tork Motorcycles is looking to build their sixth bike and first mass-market electric motorcycle in the form of the T6X. While no technical specifications have been released about this bike at the moment, Tork says that this is being developed as a serious electric option to petrol-engine motorcycles. And the bike certainly looks the part. Kapil even mentioned the design was very critical for them as they wanted their bike to look like a proper motorcycle rather than a quirky e-bike. The T6X is designed to fit right into the lives of the modern day riders, with features like GPS, storage, cloud connectivity as well as phone charging. On a technical front, the bike will also features an IP over battery management system, control systems, motor tuning, drive train and overall product integration for over the air control on all aspects of the motorcycle. At the moment, the T6X is undergoing rigorous testing and certification procedures, and the company plans to have a fully working prototype ready by the end of this year. The production ready version of the T6X is slated to be launched early next year. Tork Motorcycles couldnt have chosen a better time to kick start the project as rising public concern over the pollution caused by internal combustion powered vehicles has brought in various government initiatives such as NEMMP 2020 (National Electric Mobility Plan) and FAME (Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of hybrid and Electric Vehicles in India) to boost innovation and interest in electric vehicles in the country. Electric vehicles are the future. Drop in battery prices, rising sensitivity around emissions and governments focus on the sector will fuel demand in India, added Harpreet Grover, Co-founder & CEO, Cocubes. There is expected to be a demand of about 1.3 million electric two-wheelers by 2020-21 and Tork Motorcycles seems to be poised just right to not just take advantage of this situation, but to be a driving force in it as well. ECU That is because the Slovenian manufacturer has prepared some neat goodies for your liter-class Ninja, in the shape of several aftermarket exhaust silencers and full systems that will add a significant boost in terms of both power and torque.The top-shelf Evolution Line Carbon will take your Ninja from 185.2 hp at 13,150 rpm to 195.1 hp at 13,200 rpm. However, the maximal power boost will already be available at 6,70 revs per minute. And this means a whopping 16.5 extra horsepower that will give you an edge on the track.Torque figures will also be improved after installing this exhaust system. Ex-works, the 2016 Kawasaki Ninja ZX-10R is capable of 108.8 Nm (80.2 lb-ft) at 11,500 rpm, but after the Akra upgrade, your two-wheeler will produce 113.4 Nm (83.6 lb-ft) a tad lower on the tacho, at 11,250 rpm.At the same time, the full Akrapovic system will also make your 1000cc Ninja 5.4 kg (11.9 lb) lighter. If figures are not telling you too much, we'll break this down for you: the stock exhaust system weighs 9.3 kg (20.5 lb), whereas this aftermarket unit tips the scales at 3.9 kg or 8.6 lb, and this means it is 58.1% lighter. Now we're talking, right?The Evolution Line Carbon also adds 6 dB to your bike's exhaust note, so it reaches now 102 dB at 6,500 rpm. Installation is easy and only takes 90 minutes and most likely this includes thereflash. A special map was developed for this system inspired by Tom Sykess and Jonathan Rea's World Superbike-winning machine.Slip-on silencers are also available for the 2016 Kawasaki Ninja ZX-10R, both in carbon and titanium. While they are Euro 4 compliant, the top-of-the-line Evolution and Racing system may not be street-legal. As for pricing and availability, youd better check with your nearest Akrapovic dealer. SUV The prototype in the photo gallery appears to have a larger body, but has not lost any points in style. We notice a set of headlights that look close to production, and the taillights appear to share the status.Meanwhile, the entire body is covered in camouflage that has a pattern used by automakers to deceive curious eyes. However, the mask on this model does not manage to hide the curves of the body, which is sculpted in a delightful fashion.Honda appears to have increased the front grille of the CR-V with the new generation, and the bumper is also part of the change. The window line looks unchanged when compared to the ongoing model.At the moment, there is no word on the engine range used by the upcoming CR-V. Most likely, Honda will continue to provide a mix of gasoline and diesel units in its portfolio, depending on the markets where the model will be sold. Since they are constantly updating the Earth Dreams suite of technologies, expect the new CR-V to be more fuel efficient. A plug-in hybrid version of this model should not be excluded, as these variants are grasping popularity even in the volume segment of compact SUVs.Naturally, the upcoming CR-V will come with more tech and safety features. Since the compactis a competitive segment, Honda is expected to provide the car with more semi-autonomous driver assistance systems. Upgraded multimedia elements, like a new infotainment unit with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, are expected of the new CR-V.The last update in the CR-V range was a facelift applied in 2015. The CR-V nameplate was launched in 1997, so the new generation would come two decades after the first ever CR-V. No, really! The Ukrainians are great at beating one car into the shape of another. More precisely, there's a company that can turn the old Mercedes S-Class into the current model. At first, I thought it was a hoax, but the discovery made by the guys at English Russia seems legit.They really did take a W221, with a two-tone paintjob we might add, and turned it into the sexy high-tech luxury limo that we know as the W222 S-Class.There's nothing wrong with the old S-Class. In fact, if I saw one of these in Russia, I would get out of the way, fearing that I'm about to be shot by the mob. However, Mercedes took a huge leap regarding design from one generation to the next one, so it looks dated.The transformation starts off at the front, where the grille, hood and bumper from the new mode are matched up. We would imagine that mounting and doing the wires for those LED headlights is also quite tricky.After that, the front and rear fenders get a skin graft that doesn't go all the way to the door to keep some of the structural rigidity. The whole rear of the W222 is then "glued" onto the older model, complete with reshaped trunk and sexy LED taillights. The last step is to sand it all down and apply a nice coat of white paint, popular among Mercedes fans. Some of them might still be able to tell what this is, due to the shape of the doors and roof, but it's a convincing transformation if you ask us.The only major question we have is why you would do this. The new body parts can't be from a write-off because none of them are bent. The only explanation we can find is that the new S-Class was stolen somewhere and can't be registered without proper papers. Using German plates, the four-wheeled oddity (we felt the need to mention it still has 4 wheels) attended the Top Marques Monaco event, parading around and making sure nobody would miss it. The details on this car speak for themselves, but we're here to focus on the splitter aspect. No, that rear wing, which is the size of Zuffenhausen, isn't matched by a front splitter, but this Porsche is definitely an opinion splitter.While many throw their prejudices out the power window and admit they adore the sheer insanity of the build, others wish this Porsche was taken to Port Hercules in the middle of Monaco and given the "sleep with the fishes" treatment.We're not here to take sides. Instead, we want to mention that it was only a matter of time until the Panamera followed the 911 down the extreme customization route. Let's take Rauh-Welt Begriff, for example.The Japanese tuner works on air-cooled Neunelfers and while that kind of selection might sound cool and all, the truth is that the more affordable nature of the 930s and 964s touched by RWB is a key factor in their accusation process.With a new Panamera setting you back at least eighty grand and the Porsche badge guaranteeing slow depreciation rates, most owners weren't willing to let their need for attention get the best of them.However, now that used Panamera prices are starting to become less astronomical, we're expecting more WTF-grade Panameras to follow. Heck, the original model's look has always been controversial, so pointing your finger at the custom car world for delivering examples such as the one we have here seems a bit wrong. SUV Looks like Model X resale value is holding up well :)https://t.co/4gedy9GCHA Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 20, 2016 Like most carmakers, Ford will probably test, examine, and compare the electricto its models. The company will surely benchmark it in controlled conditions against some of the cars in its portfolio, a task easily accomplished by this unit, as its a P90D with the Ludicrous Speed Upgrade, enough for a 0-60 MPH (96 km/h) time of 3.2 seconds.The first report came from Autotrader, a specialist website that tracked down the car by its license plate and VIN, and then discovered its selling price.The unit in question is the 64th Model X, and it is a Founders Series version. The white SUV was first owned by a California coin dealer, who obtained it through the companys customers-referral promotion.Having sold 11 Tesla cars, the Californian coin collector took delivery of the Model X in Chicago and sold it to a dealer. He managed to obtain a profit from the sale, and the car ended up being bought by Ford Motor Company last month.Contacted by Bloomberg , Fords representatives admitted that they bought the car, but did not specify the precise purpose of the acquisition and who is driving the vehicle. Reports stated that Lincolns chief designer was seen at the wheel, but Ford Motor Company officials refused to comment the possibility.Instead, Fords representatives explained that it is common practice for automakers to purchase production cars for testing as soon as they are released, and admitted that they sometimes pay over sticker price to obtain the cars faster. In other words, Ford confirmed both the fact that they bought the Model X, which already had plates registered to the automaker, and paying extra for the chance of owning it as soon as possible.Ford is not the only automaker to buy Tesla models for the benchmarking process. Tire manufacturers also buy or rent various cars for events and internal testing procedures. Most likely, other companies do the same in competitive industries, as the IT world, but those purchases are not so easy to discover. Honda closed the manufacturing facility for safety reasons. The Kumamoto region was hit by two earthquakes last week, a 6.5 and a 7.3 one, commanding a safety check-up of the entire factory. The inspections were meant to assess the structural integrity of the factory and to find out if there were any hazards to put the workers at risk.The Japanese manufacturer initially declared that, if everything was alright, the factory would reopen this Friday. Unfortunately, the inspections found out that the Kumamoto plant sustained damage and was in need of repairs.After analyzing the situation, Honda said that the closure should be extended until April 28. Even so, Honda has not laid out a precise course of action after this date, as changes could still appear as the repairs are carried on.It looks like the rest of the Honda facilities will resume production as scheduled initially, tomorrow, albeit one of their subsidiary, Yachiyo Industry Co., Ltd., will operate with certain limitations.Honda has not provided any information on the status of its parts suppliers, but if no bad news arrived on corporate channels, we could expect these companies to be okay.The Kumamoto factory is the place where some of Honda's top machines are being manufactured, most of them being sold in the developed international markets. The list includes the CBR1000RR Fireblade, GL1800 Goldwing, VFR1200G, NC750X, CRF250X, and the Silver Wing scooter."Honda has decided to extend the halting of production operations at its Kumamoto Factory (Ozu-machi, Kikuchi-gun, Kumamoto Prefecture) due to The 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake (from its previously announced date of April 22) until April 28, in view of the extent of facility damage."Production plans after April 28 will be determined according to progress in repairing the factory and component supply. Regarding other production facilities, Yachiyo Industry Co., Ltd., our subsidiary company producing mini-vehicles for Honda, will be resuming limited production from April 22. Other production facilities plan to operate normally. Gathering all strength of Honda, we are taking every step possible to resume operation at the affected factory as soon as possible," official Honda sources said. TDI The German carmaker has reached an agreement with the Department of Justice (Environmental Division), the Environment Protection Agency (EPA), and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) with the full involvement of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).Approximately 482,000 Volkswagen and Audi vehicles powered by the 2.0engine from the EA189 family and sold in the U.S in the last few years can now be bought back by the company.This is not all, as Volkswagen has also agreed to offer substantial compensation to the owners of said cars, regardless if they agree to sell their cars back or not. Numbers around $5,000 per owner have been reported by the press, but the U.S District Judge in charge of the proceedings issued a gag order for the media on the exact figures and other details.What is interesting is that approximately 90,000 3.0 TDI vehicles from VW, Audi and Porsche are not being included in the agreement, meaning that their issues will be resolved at a later date.The arrangements in the making in the United States will have no legal bearing on proceedings outside of the United States, a Volkswagen press release mentioned.Ongoing investigations by the Department of Justice, Criminal Division, and the State Attorneys General are not prejudiced by these agreements in principle, the release continued.In case it wasn't clear by now, this is just the beginning of the greatest crisis in Volkswagen's history, but at least the first step is somewhat in the company's favor. Once each of the affected customers in the U.S. agrees to either sell back his or her car and get the compensation, he or she will no longer be able to take part in a lawsuit against Volkswagen.That said, VW is not out of the woods yet, since the carmaker is still facing several investigations in other countries, including Germany, not to mention tens if not even hundreds of class-action suits that are yet to reach full speed.Some analysts estimate that the total Dieselgate cost could be much higher than what Volkswagen has anticipated since they will have to include fines, repair costs, settlements, and now those buy-backs. TDI According to the report, Volkswagen is expected to notify a federal judge in San Francisco about the signing of the deal, in which the German company would allow owners the possibility of selling their cars back to Volkswagen dealers.The solution would only be possible for the vehicles fitted with the 2.0-literengine of the EA189 family, the most affected by the Dieselgate scandal As Automotive News reports, Volkswagens shares in U.S. listings rose in value by up to six percent after the news reached the media. The German company is also considering a compensation of $5,000 for each owner of a Dieselgate-affected car sold in the USA.Volkswagens deadline to provide a settlement solution for the 600,000 US customers of vehicles affected by the Dieselgate situation ends today, so we should hear an official position from the company soon.Both solutions presented above are not official, as the companys representatives have not commented on the rumors and have yet to publish a press release. If the reports are correct, we suspect that Volkswagen would let owners choose between a buyback and a settlement of $5,000, but some sources say both options might be available to owners.In the case of the settlement payment, Volkswagen would probably include a fix of the vehicle with the deal so that the cars would then comply with emissions regulations.On the other hand, if the company buys back the affected vehicles, it still has to fix them so the units can be sold somewhere else. However, it is unclear whether Volkswagen will be allowed to sell those cars at a later date.Once an owner agreed to either solution, Volkswagen would probably be excused of any lawsuits that the former customer might start. It would make sense for the legal team of the German company to introduce a clause like this in the contracts related to Dieselgate settlements.However, the reports concerning the settlement do not mention any fix that was approved by authorities for the vehicles that were affected by the situation and have yet to be repaired to comply with legal emission regulations.Furthermore, Volkswagens problems in the United States of America are far from over, with the company still facing fines and lawsuits from several organizations and authorities, as the deceit and pollution caused by the cars in question will not go away with the settlement provided to their customers. BEV The Swedish brand seeks to accomplish this by supplementing its range with at least two hybrid versions of every model, as well as an all-electric car. The latter will come in 2019.Unlike the C30, which was an experimental model that Volvo used to discover the challenges and possibilities of this category of vehicles, the full-electric Volvo of 2019 might not resemble a production model.Volvos CEO Hakan Samuelsson is aware that the million electrified cars sold by 2025 are an aspiring target, but he explained that it is deliberately ambitious.After all, the Swedish company sold over 500,000 units last year, but selling that many hybrids and electric vehicles in less than nine years is a massive challenge.It took Toyota Motor Company a decade to exceed a cumulative global target of over 1,000,000 hybrids. It is worth mentioning that it took the Japanese brand this long because they were pioneers in this field and their hybrids had limited availability at the time of launch. By 2012, Toyota and Lexus sold over 1.2 million hybrids a year on a global level.Volvo Cars has been preparing for this ambitious goal for over five years. The Scalable Product Architecture and the Compact Modular Architecture have been designed from the start to accommodate hybrid and fully electric powertrains.The 90 and 60 series cars from Volvo are based on the SPA platform, while the upcoming new 40 series cars will be built on CMA. Each model will have electrified versions, and some of these will be fully electric vehicles. The first 100% electric production car from Volvo will be launched in three years time, but its platform was not announced yet.While Japans Toyota and Honda have already developed hydrogen fuel cell cars ready for production and sell them in some markets, Volvos Sustainability plans do not mention this category of vehicles. We suspect that the Swedish brand is considering this technology as well. The U.S. Senate has approved an energy bill that reauthorizes a federal program that works with truck manufacturers and suppliers to improve fuel efficiency. The Energy Policy Modernization Act was passed with a vote of 85-12, according to a press release. The bipartisan bill covered energy conservation across the board, including natural gas and electric power. It also included a provision from the Vehicle Innovation Act (VIA) that helped fund the research and development of clean vehicle technology. Michigan senators Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow joined Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander to co-authored the VIA, which reauthorizes and modernizes the U.S. Department of Energy's Vehicle Technologies Program, which conducts research on improving fuel efficiency. It also encourages the development of vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems in an effort to improve fuel efficiency and reduce traffic accidents. The energy bill will now go to the U.S. House of Representatives to reconcile their bill with the Senate bill before reaching the White House. If passed, this will be the first broad energy legislation since 2007. Photo courtesy of Volkswagen. Volkswagen has agreed to give buyers of nearly 600,000 vehicles with emissions cheating software the option of selling the cars back or getting them fixed, a judge announced April 21. Senior U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer provided few details about the settlement between the automaker and the federal government. The agreeement will include a fund for corrective efforts and Volkswagen will committ money to promote green vehicle technology, reports the Los Angeles Times. Volkswagen would spend just over $1 billion to compensate the owners. Volkswagen released a brief statement about the agreement. "Volkswagen is committed to earning back the trust of its customers, dealers, regulators and the American public." according to the statement. "These agreements in principle are an important step on the road to making things right. As noted today in court, customers in the United States do not need to take any action at this time." The car rental industry has a few problems it needs to sort out. In certain markets, worldwide customer service is suffering, especially in those with unsustainably low car rental rates, while competition from unscrupulous operators drags everyone down. In the U.S., used car prices are driving up holding costs. The recall bill will soon become law with a system in dire need of fixing. And everyone is trying to figure out how Uber is affecting it all. Is the sky falling? No, its not. If you surveyed operators 10 years ago, the problems would be different but just as dire. Understand that 10 years ago, we didnt have the same connectivity and transparency surrounding these problems, whether domestically or globally. Today we do. The sky is not falling, yet there is a new awareness of these global issues. The annual International Car Rental Show (ICRS), convened this week in Las Vegas, has evolved as the single most important platform to bring up these problems and begin to solve them. Its a testament to ICRS that so many operators are willing to travel to Las Vegas from around the world to discuss the issues that affect their domestic businesses, which today are so much more intertwined globally. This idea exchange is happening at ICRS, from the keynote addresses and exhibit hall interactions to the seminar Q&As and the cocktail conversations. And, for the first time in the history of the car rental industry, directors of car rental associations around the world from China, South Korea, Mexico, Brazil, New Zealand, Canada, and the U.S. gathered for a meeting around the same table. Representatives from these associations shared overviews of their organizations structure, constituency, mandates, and challenges. The constituency makeup of each association speaks to industry differences globally. As we all know, the industry in emerging markets is less consolidated. Brazil, for instance, is home to about 60 car rental companies with more than 1,000 cars. In China, there are 30,000 car rental companies (not a misprint) for a total fleet size of only 550,000 units. South Korea not an emerging market has about the same fleet size, though only 15 companies run fleets of more than 3,000 cars. Associations are also dealing with new business models under their umbrellas. South Korea has a robust carsharing market and a growing on-demand car rental platform. Chinese car rental companies, as well as those in South Korea and many Latin American markets, offer long-term rentals (commercial fleet in the U.S.). Some Chinese companies offer an Uber-like model with an owned fleet. The dire Brazilian economy is affecting outbound tourism, felt in the U.S., specifically in South Florida. Fewer Brazilian operators were able to make the trip to Las Vegas when your currency loses more than three to four times its value, business travel becomes a lot harder. Nonetheless, the Latin American meeting, now in its third year, had its largest attendance yet. China is the giant panda in the room, and that panda is only getting bigger. Our Chinese delegation is now a staple at ICRS. China is the largest source of outbound tourism of any country in the world, the single largest source of car rental customers in many markets. On the operator side of the fence, the 30,000 car rental companies in China are only beginning to sort out the best way to run their businesses. Chinese car rental companies are pre-teens when it comes to working knowledge of the industry, and they come to ICRS eager to learn. This information sharing was eye-opening and informative, and the meeting was the first step to formalizing open communication and sharing between the groups. Companies in the mature markets are showing their younger siblings in emerging markets how to make money while behaving responsibly. Meanwhile, those younger siblings are teaching their older brothers and sisters about new mobility business models that could shape the direction of car rental. Next year there will be new problems to be sure. The answers are never easy, but having a forum to discuss these issues eye-to-eye is the first good step to solutions. Originally posted on Business Fleet Duncan BMW has named David Duncan to head of corporate and special sales for the automaker in a role that oversees corporate fleet sales, executive allowance sales, and daily rental sales. The appointment is effective May 1. Duncan, who moves from his role as vice president of MINI Region Americas, will also be responsible for European delivery. As an 18-year BMW employee, Duncan has held various roles, including starting as an area manager for BMW Motorcycles in 1998. He has been with MINI since 2001, where he established the initial dealer network ahead of the 2002 launch of that brand. He has led MINI since 2014. In a related move, Thomas Felbermair steps into Duncan's former role. Felbermair will focus on driving sales, service, customer and dealer satisfaction, overseeing the business operations for the brand in the region. He most recently held a similar postion in Germany as vice president for MINI in the European region. Originally posted on Automotive Fleet The show featured several opportunities for networking, including a cocktail hour and networking coffee breaks. The 2016 International Car Rental Show (ICRS) brought together more than 700 attendees from across the U.S. and overseas to discuss and analyze the major issues facing the car rental industry today. Convened April 18 and 19 at Ballys Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, the event kicked off on April 17 with an evening cocktail reception, now an ICRS tradition. During the two-day event, attendees had several opportunities to spend time in the expanded exhibit hall, which featured exhibitors offering various services and products for the car rental industry. This year featured the first meeting of association directors from around the world, including China, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, New Zealand, Canada, and the U.S. Attendees traveled from 36 U.S. states and approximately 30 countries, including China, South Korea, New Zealand, Brazil, U.K., and India. This years show included special events for international attendees, including an international meet-and-greet networking session and the first meeting of association directors from around the world. The Big Issues On Monday morning, the show kicked off with a keynote panel of representatives from car rental and travel platforms. Entitled State of the Industry: The Aggregators View, the panel consisted of Imad Khalidi, CEO of Auto Europe; Bobby Healy, chief technology officer of CarTrawler; and Steve Matise, global head of supplier management for Travelport. We consider ourselves an intermediary between the car rental companies and the consumer, said Khalidi. We brokers need to bring incremental business to the car rental companies with the right product at the right price, the right moment, and the right location. The panelists also discussed the relationship between rental car prices and quality. Through our system, 62% of the cars that are rented arent the cheapest prices, said Healy. Price only affects a small part of the business; it really comes down to quality score. No amount of low pricing fixes a bad score. The opening keynote address featured a panel of representatives from car rental and travel platforms: (l to r) Steve Matise of Travelport, Imad Khalidi of Auto Europe; Bobby Healy of CarTrawler. The American Car Rental Associations general session covered specifics of the new recall legislation that passed as part of the 2015 transportation bill. Additionally, the session featured Bob Kolasky of the Department of Homeland Security who discussed threats of terrorism and how rental car employees can educate themselves on suspicious activity. Terrorists have used rental cars as a means to go out and attempt terrorist activities, said Kolasky. Train your employees to report suspicious activity such as someone providing multiple names on paperwork, someone using cash for large transactions, or if a vehicle is returned with unusual burn marks or odor. During Tuesdays breakfast seminar, Enterprise Holdings discussed its recent global expansion. Since 2012, Enterprise has expanded its brands to more than 75 countries through franchising, acquisition, and investment. Peter Smith, vice president of global franchising, focused on how Enterprise supports its franchise partners operationally and listens to what they need in each of their local markets. Our map is pretty full, but we still have a ways to go, said Smith. We still want to expand in Africa but we are now focusing on the Asia-Pacific region. So far, we have opened in China, Australia, and New Zealand. Attendees at one of several sessions during the two-day event. Concurrent sessions featured various topics including how to grow business-to-business rentals, how to use Graves Amendment to lower liability expense, tips for improving online marketing and phone sales, and how to motivate millennials in the workplace. One session took a deeper look at the new recall bill and how the law will impact rental car operations; it highlighted best practices on compliance and how to solve operational and customer service challenges. Niche Know-How Designed for car rental operators serving Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, the third annual Latin American meeting was held on Monday April 18. It featured seven seminars covering issues facing the Latin American market today, including trends on booking cars through online travel agencies and brokers, how to strengthen standards for the LATAM market, maintaining employee engagement, and the investors view of the Latin American car rental market. The show also featured a day of programming for another niche audience: auto dealers looking to strengthen their loaner programs. Opening with a view of the loaner market from representatives of four auto manufacturers, seminars covered topics such as tips for managing your rental and loaner business, how to develop a unique brand identity, and insight into the legal questions facing dealer rental programs. Connected Car is Coming Egan Smith of the U.S. Department of Transportation discussed the future of connected car technology and how it could impact the car rental industry. The show concluded with a session focused on the future of transportation: connected car technology. Currently, the U.S. Department of Transportation is working with stakeholders to implement this connectivity. Egan Smith, managing director of the U.S. Department of Transportations Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office, addressed the impact of the connected car on the car rental industry in the U.S. and globally in the seminar The Connected Car and Implications for Car Rental. A connected vehicle talks to other connected vehicles and advanced roadside infrastructure such as traffic signals. Basic safety messages are sent 10 times per second. Connected vehicles have the potential to reduce non-impaired crash scenarios by 80%, said Smith. It provides 360-degree awareness with a range of 300 meters. Currently, there are three pilot deployment programs testing connected vehicles in New York City, Wyoming, and Tampa, Fla. The 2017 International Car Rental Show will be held March 27-29 at Ballys Hotel and Casino. Story and photos by Amy Winter-Hercher The US market will be setting its sights on what could be the latest addition of new transportation services. And that would be a Chinese company's battery-operated bus. At last year's Shenzhen auto show, Chinese automaker BYD Co. had tipped the scales on sales of electric cars sold by GM and Tesla, according to TownHall magazine. This time, the company is slowly entering the overseas market with its line of electric buses. The Chinese company has decided to bank around costs and consumer sales' risk, prompting it to expand its business in the US by means of tapping environment-friendly transport companies with the rechargeable bus. Having opened its Los Angeles-based factory last 2013, BYD is expecting to release 300 of these buses this year alone. Its first attempt to break into the American market was its introduction of plug-in EV taxis in cities like New York and Chicago. Michael Austin, vice president of BYD USA, said that although consumer sales are imminent, the company still needs to decide on a time frame. The next two years could lay witness to the development of the company's sales network. He further added that when that time comes, the company's recognition as a brand is cemented because people have already experienced riding their buses. The Washington Post also reported on the Chinese company's rising success in the overseas auto market. The company's name, BYD, is short for "Build Your Dreams", and is slated to emerge as one of Chinese companies known to feed global demands of renewable energy subsidies and EVs. Cosmin Laslau of Boston's Lux Research said that BYD could take up to 5 or more years to be in the same league as Tesla, Nissan, or GM. However, he says that it is completely doable, according to the publication. Japanese automaker Mitsubishi recently admitted that they cheated on economy tests on Japanese K-cars. Over 600,000 cars were reportedly involved in the falsification scandal. Improper methods were allegedly used to make many Japanese domestic market models appear more fuel-efficient, although these may not actually have been deemed street-worthy. The wrongdoing was intentional. It is clear the falsification was done to make the mileage look better. But why they would resort to fraud to do this is still unclear, said president Tetsuro Aikawa. He added that he was unaware of the cheating until an investigation triggered by the Volkswagen dieselgate scandal was conducted and revealed the irregularities. Tetsuro and other company executives felt responsible for the issue and bowed before the media to apologize for the recent revelation. Mitsubishi is the sixth largest car manufacturer in Japan, but shares in the company dropped by 15 percent in Tokyo trading after the recent news. Car Magazine notes Mitsubishi in stating that it discovered evidence that the partial emissions and fuel consumption tests conducted by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) were faked on hundreds of thousands of Japanese domestic market K-cars. Mitsubishi confessed that they over-inflated the tires to alter their driving properties and flatten the mileage rates. Some models that were made for Nissan were also included. 468,000 Nissan Dayz and Roox tallboy city cars and 157,000 of the Mitsubishi eK Wagon and eK Space comprised the total. However, no UK models were allegedly involved in the falsification. Pending investigation, Mitsubishi has suspended the sale and production of the four models. The models are dubbed minicars, featuring small engines with great mileage. The cars were made starting in March 2013. According to Nissan, Mitsubishi admitted to them that the data were manipulated intentionally. Lance Bradley, UK managing director, assured customers that only Japanese-market cars were confirmed to have cheated on emissions tests. He continued that Mitsubishi acted quickly and decisively and that there is no evidence to suggest that models in Europe are affected. The Washington Post wrote that Mitsubishi stated that it will continue to investigate whether information was also altered for its vehicles sold abroad. It is possible that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will monitor Mitsubishi vehicles more closely in the U.S., although they will not be a priority because of their limited numbers. More updates and details on the Mitsubishi cheating scandal are expected soon. As Cirrus tends to the final details of its certification of the SF50 Vision Jet, the first production model is within days if not hours of its first flight, according to Pat Waddick, Cirrus president. Speaking at the Aero show in Friedrichshafen, Germany, Thursday, Waddick said four test aircraft have accumulated some 1700 hours and the test articles are completing the final stages of function and reliability testing and the type inspection authorization from the FAA. In a long-form podcast well publish later today, Waddick said Cirrus cant say when the first deliveries will be made because the company is still working on the FAAs schedule. But the first four Vision Jets are on the production line and nearing completion. Waddick said the Cirrus order book totals 600 and that it expects to deliver about 50 airplanes during the first full year of manufacturing, with 125 jets a year as the eventual production goal. The current price of the SF50 is $2 million, to include the CAPS whole-airframe parachute thats a trademark of the Cirrus piston line. AVweb and other news outlets recently reported that because the CAPS isnt considered a required safety system and isnt needed in lieu of spin certification, as it was for the SR line, the company isnt required to do extensive flight testing. However, Waddick showed test video of a full-size, full-weight mock-up SF50 under canopy after the test aircraft was dropped from a helicopter. Initial CAPS testing was done from a race car on a track. The SF50s unique automatic flight control system will be an integral part in the CAPS deployment sequence and will intercede to pitch the airplane into slower flight if the pilot commands a deployment outside the systems airspeed envelope. The helicopter deployment, Waddick said, was done in a near vertical attitude at a speed between 120 and 130 knots. The canopy itself is quite large; 88 feet in diameter and 6000 square feet. Waddick said it will have a vertical descent speed equal to or a little less than the systems used on the piston SR line. The jets seats are designed to absorb vertical loads to protect passengers from injuries. When asked if hes comfortable with the jet system having been tested less than the piston CAPS was, Waddick replied that it actually has been tested to the same standards, although it likely wont be deployed from an actual flying jet. He said the drop tests gave Cirrus equivalent test data so tests on the actual aircraft arent needed. These systems are highly complex. We happen to agree with FAAs special conditions. We need to demonstrate its intended function and that doesnt cause a hazard in normal flight, Waddick said. He believes Cirrus tests have achieved this. The Hawker jet that crashed in Akron, Ohio, in November, killing all nine aboard, was not flying a stabilized approach, as indicated by the cockpit conversation just before the accident. The NTSB released its investigation records this week as the probe into the cause of the crash continues. The voice recorder indicates the copilot was flying the Execuflight charter jet and had discussed with the captain that the weather at Akron Fulton International going to be at minimums for the Localizer 25 approach. They were also waiting for a piston aircraft arriving before them to cancel its flight plan when the captain seemed concerned about the airspeed indicating 140 knots. About a minute later, he said, Youre going 120. You cant keep decreasing your speed, because (were) gonna stall. There were seven passengers from a Florida real estate company on board. A couple of minutes later on the localizer, the pilot said, Youre diving. Youre diving. Dont dive and repeated two thousand feet per minute before telling the copilot to level off. Radar returns confirmed the descent rate, according to the NTSB reports. A sound similar to the aircraft stick shaker was heard twice, followed by the ground proximity warning system alert to pull up. The jet clipped power lines and hit structures and an embankment, its left wing striking the ground first, as shown on a surveillance video from a nearby business. Investigators also found that the jet had full flaps on the approach, although pilots in the aircraft were trained to use partial flaps on non-precision approaches until a landing was assured. The NTSBs documents also show that both pilots had been fired from their previous jobs for not attending training sessions. The copilots former employer said he had struggled with ground and simulator training for the Boeing 737 before being terminated. Solar Impulse 2 departed Hawaii Thursday morning bound for Mountain View, California, with one of the teams two pilots, Bertrand Piccard,at the controls of the single-seat aircraft. This leg is expected to last about two and a half days. The four-motor, single-seat airplane took a nine-month hiatus in Hawaii, where battery overheating issues from its last flight from Japan halted the project until replacements could be manufactured, installed and tested before resuming the trip. The aircrafts solar panels charge packs of batteries during daylight hours to allow flight to continue at night. Andre Borschberg, who last flew Solar Impulse 2 in July on a record-breaking five-day trip from Japan to Hawaii, told USA Today the project has shown what the aviation industry told him was not possible with current flight technology prolonged high-altitude flight using solar energy instead of fuel. Borschberg said the Solar Impulse team is now looking ahead to its next step, an unmanned aircraft that could fly for six months or a year in the stratosphere for communications, observation and scientific work. Thursdays flight progress can be tracked on the Solar Impulse website here. In the early days of automotive diesels, stinky and slow were joined permanently to the concept of diesel cars. Not anymore. Driving on the autobahn yesterday in my crummy little rental Twingo, an Audi blew past me doing a buck and half and it was a turbodiesel that European drivers have come to love. I wish I could say aerodiesel development cycles have been equally swift, but theyve tended to move on geologic time scales. So it was only with great restraint Wednesday that I kept from shouting finally! when Continental announced higher TBRs for its four-cylinder diesels, the CD-135 and CD-155. Ill get to the economics in a moment. Suffice to say Ive been waiting on tenterhooks since Frank Thielert told me in the summer of 2005 that the four-cylinder diesel would be at a TBR of 1800 hours by the end of the year. Ah, what an innocent time it was. Reality set in, as it always does, and more than a decade later, we finally see the high replacement times that have, at least partially, kept this technology from maturing and expanding. So the question now is will this expand the diesel market which has been, heretofore, tepid at best. When it bought into diesel in 2013, Continental was angling for a 20 percent market share within five years. By my calculation, diesel in total has half that at the moment. Lets run the numbers briefly. With Wednesdays announcement, the TBRstime between replacementon all of Continentals four-cylinder diesels rise to 2100 hours. Taking the worst case, the 155-hp CD-155 that previously had a 1200-hour TBR and costs $42,925 to replace, the hourly engine reserve cost drops from $35.77 to $20.44. Recall that these engines still require replacement gearboxes. That interval has been raised from 600 hours to 1200, so the engine needs just one $3191 gearbox on the way to TBR rather than two. That saves another non-trivial expense, at least on the CD-135, which had a 1500-hour TBR. Ill run more detailed numbers later, but this is a huge shift in diesels favor. Now it remains to be seen if it will be enough to ignite sales. We know OEMs other than Cessna and Piper have been flying if not offering diesels. Will the industry be able to get buyers to pay close enough attention to the economics on a $400,000-plus airframe to tilt toward diesel? Well see. Im not so sure compellingly lower operating economics are enough to do the trick, given how expensive the base airplane has become. Its like not buying a $240,000 Ferrari Italia because you hate putting $2.75 premium gas in the tank. Continentals Rhett Ross said that Cessna has finally decided to push the button and take orders for its Skyhawk diesel and Im sure theyll find buyers, especially in Europe. What they really need is a big U.S. institutional sale and maybe now with higher TBRs, theyll get one. But will it just cannibalize sales of avgas Skyhawks? My guess is yes. Hand It to Honda Aviation being an international business and all, you never quite know how cultural and language variations will cause people to react to questions from the press that we consider quite natural in the U.S. For example, at the HondaJet press conference here at Aero on Wednesday, CEO Michimasa Fujino was asked how much the HondaJet certification project had cost, in total. I dont remember, he quipped, getting a laugh from the reporters. Id have expected a more culturally circumspect route to a polite no comment. I think Fujino has been around aviation and the U.S. long enough for a certain wry fatalism to have rubbed off. Who can blame him? Fujino has spent almost three decades of his lifehes 54 but looks 30overseeing the HondaJet from conception to birth. The industrialization/certification alone took 10 years. By GA standards, much less the gotta-have-it-by-next-quarter demand of other industries, thats a lifetime plus. Any venture capital investor would be screaming for some ROI. But thats not Honda, which funded the project internally. Richard Aboulafia at Teal Group has said the glacial pace of the HondaJet cert means the project will likely never turn a profit. But then that wasnt the point; building a jewel that allowed Honda to stake a claim in the world of jet transportation was. The general press has gushed over the HondaJet as being revolutionary and some coverage has hinted that its a market changer. But not really. The company has about 100 orders on the books and while thats certainly impressive, its not a major market presence and probably wont be for some time, if ever. When asked about production rates to fill those orders, Fujino said the Greensboro, North Carolina, factory can produce up to three airplanes a month, but would eventually like to reach 100 a year. But in the same breath, he cautioned that this will take a very long time. Its always refreshing when someone in aviation is brutally honest about the realities of serial production when weve grown accustomed to people who arent. In a way unusual to the world of business jets, the HondaJet is, more than anything, a tribute to one guys patience and determination. Fujino was given a unique opportunity at Honda and he saw it through. 21 April 2016 10:18 (UTC+04:00) By Nazrin Gadimova The intense firing on Azerbaijani positions and settlements along the contact line of troops has caused great damage to the Azerbaijani civilians living in Terter, Agdam and Fuzuli regions. Terter regions infrastructure suffered most of all from the military operations launched by Armenian Armed Forces on April 2. Mustagim Mammadov, the head of the regions executive authority, said 163 houses and 5 administrative buildings were subjected to heavy shelling from the Armenian positions. As a result of the military operations 24 houses were totally destroyed and now are uninhabitable. Several journalists have made photo reportage as they visited the front line in Garadaghli, Gapanli, Duyarli villages in the Tartar region. The reporters took photos of the ruins after the area was shelled by the Armenians. Photos provide a description of the Armenians provocation, their targeting civilians and houses. Moreover, the enemy destroyed the first-aid posts in Yukhari Gapanli and Gapanli villages, as well as secondary schools (Garagaji and Gapanli villages) and a nursery school in Gazyan village. Mammadov added that Armenians disabled 2,350 meters of concrete channel, 4 kilometers of earthen canal, 12 hydraulic structures, 2 bridges, 2 kilometers of power lines, as well as 2 kilometers of the road over the canal. Gas lines in the villages of Duyarli, Kocharli, Gaynag, Gapanli and Garadagli were damaged as a result of the attack of the Armenian armed units, the head of the regions executive authority added. After the explosion of a large-caliber projectile near a water tank of 50 cubic meters tank supports were broken in several places by shrapnel. Mammadov said these defects were eliminated very soon so that to ensure gas and water supplies to population. -- Nazrin Gadimova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @NazrinGadimova Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 21 April 2016 14:03 (UTC+04:00) By Nazrin Gadimova Azerbaijans Defense Ministry has disproved information about the tank that was allegedly destroyed by the Armenian military units. Baku remains committed to the truce since the agreement on ceasefire was reached between the parties to the conflict, said Vagif Dargahli, the spokesperson for the ministry. Therefore, Azerbaijans military units did not bring its tanks or other military equipment on the contact line of troops, he added. Dargahli believes that Armenians, who initiated hostilities in the front-line area, misrepresent the real facts and claim their own destroyed tanks as the Azerbaijani ones. "I can definitely say that this is a tank that was destroyed by the Azerbaijani Armed Forces during active military operations in early April, he stressed. By spreading such misinformation, they want to boost the morale of the Armenian soldiers." This is not the first time when Armenia resorts to different kinds of falsification to hide their losses and to mislead representatives of international organizations and community to pave a way for future provocations. Since the eruption of new hostilities on the frontline following the Armenian provocation, the enemy has been spreading false photos and videos on alleged losses of the Azerbaijani side. Earlier, the Defense Ministry announced that Armenians used the photos taken in the conflict zone in Ukraines Donbas as the evidence of the mass murder of the Azerbaijani Special Forces. -- Nazrin Gadimova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @NazrinGadimova Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 21 April 2016 11:43 (UTC+04:00) By Nazrin Gadimova The Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is one of the main regional issues under the focus of Iran. Ali Larijani, the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, made the remark as part of a meeting with the Speaker of the Russian State Duma Sergey Narishkin in Moscow on April 20. There are many turbulence and wars in the region, and we cannot let another war to break out, Larijani stressed, commenting on the recent escalation on the contact line of troops of the Armenian and Azerbaijani armies. Tehran agreed with Moscow on inadmissibility of the escalation of another war in the region, he added. For this reason, Iran and Russia must use every efforts and opportunities to convince Azerbaijan and Armenia to settle the conflict politically, Larijani believes. The Iranian official further said he held productive negotiations with his Azerbaijani counterpart Ogtay Asadov on the sidelines of the Moscow meeting. Iran, Azerbaijans southern neighbor and one of the main actors in the region, has repeatedly declared its readiness to help in resolving the long-lasting conflict that emerged as a result of Armenias aggressive policy towards Azerbaijan in early 1990s. Earlier, Javad Zarif, the Iranian Foreign Minister, called for truce, voicing Iran's readiness to act as a mediator between Yerevan and Baku to resolve the existing crisis. "We should join efforts to rule out witnessing new crisis in the region," ILNA quoted Zarif as saying. The current format of negotiations, being held in the framework of the OSCE Minsk Group involving Russia, France and USA for more than 20 years, did not bring any step towards peace. The rising tension on the contact line of the Armenian and Azerbaijani troops and human fatalities are another proof of failure. Against this background, Baku welcomes the real steps to solve the conflict and calls for urgent and effective steps to solve the long lasting-bloody conflict. -- Nazrin Gadimova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @NazrinGadimova Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 21 April 2016 11:46 (UTC+04:00) By Nazrin Gadimova The Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, as well as further developments of cooperation between Azerbaijan and Japan was high on the agenda of the annual meeting of the Inter-parliamentary Friendship League. Addressing the event, Gursel Ismayilzade, Azerbaijans Ambassador to Japan, stressed that the long-lasting conflict, which emerged as a result of Armenias aggressive policy on the background of the Soviet breakup in 1991, could be resolved only within the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Azerbaijan. The ambassador further spoke about the recent developments in the contact line of the Armenian and Azerbaijani troops. The current status-quo is unacceptable, and existence of the Armenian Armed Forces in occupied territories of Azerbaijan is the main threat to ensuring the peace, Ismayilzade said. The Japanese parliamentarians, in turn, expressed concern over the escalation of the conflict and stressed the importance of peaceful settlement of the problem. Armenian troops staged provocations in the contact line of Azerbaijani and Armenian troops, which later grow into large military operations on April 2. After four-day war the sides reached an agreement to follow the ceasefire through the mediation of Russia. The sides discussed prospects of cooperation between Tokyo and Baku. As part of the meeting, Azerbaijans economic development and regional projects realized under the initiative of the country were highlighted. Azerbaijan and Japan established diplomatic relations in 1992, a year later after Azerbaijan gained independence. Japan was one of the first countries to support Azerbaijan's forward-looking oil strategy. Today two major Japanese companies Itochu and Impex are involved in the Contract of the Century, a large-scale international contract on joint development of three oil fields - Azeri, Chirag and Guneshli in the Azerbaijani sector of Caspian Sea. Leaders of Japanese business, Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Marubeni, and Sojits are involved in energy and infrastructure projects in the country. -- Nazrin Gadimova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @NazrinGadimova Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 21 April 2016 13:25 (UTC+04:00) By Fatma Babayeva Azerbaijan has recently submitted a new set of documents to the WTO in an effort to move forward in its aspiration to achieve a membership at the organization. The government has submitted the answers to questions of the member states and the documents related to the improvement of the legislation and the decisions taken in the trade and economic sphere to the secretariat of the World Trade Organization, Mahmud Mammadguliyev, Azerbaijani Deputy Foreign Minister, told Trend news agency. The documents were submitted to the WTO Secretariat to set a date for the next round of multilateral and bilateral negotiations with the member countries of the organization, said Mammadguliyev. Deputy Minister stressed that Azerbaijan also needs to submit new proposals on goods and services, as well as a new schedule on the domestic support to agriculture in regards to the changes happened in the agro-industrial complex of the country during 2013-2015. As the WTO does not have a practice of holding meetings of a working group without bilateral negotiations, it is very hard to say something about the date of the next meeting, Mammadguliyev added. If the secretariat makes an exception for Azerbaijan, then the country could hold multilateral negotiations on the answers to questions including talks on agricultural sphere. But in this case, changes applied to the agricultural subsidies over the last three years should be introduced to the organization prior to the negotiations. The last meeting was held in March 2015 in Geneva. The major talks covered the issue of domestic support for the agricultural sector. Azerbaijan stressed once again the importance of agricultural development for the country as the main non-oil sector of the economy. Last year, it was planned to hold another meeting but the preparation of the documents required longer time. The unification of legislative acts of the country is carried on an ongoing basis in accordance with the advent of new agreements. In addition, due to the large number of issues and proposals that have been presented to Azerbaijan by the WTO member countries following the last meeting of the working group, much time was needed to prepare all the document, as well as, to get familiar with the responses by the member countries of this organization. Azerbaijan is required to prepare new proposals on tariffs for industrial and agricultural products. WTO member countries including the U.S., EU, Norway, offer Azerbaijan to reduce bound tariffs on imported goods as part of their own interest. This list includes a large number of industrial and agricultural products, Mammadguliyev told Trend earlier. The task of the government during the negotiations process for the WTO membership is the maximum protection of national business and producers. Previously, Azerbaijan proposed average rate of primary-bound tariffs (that will be applied after joining the organization) during the accession process to the WTO at the level of 13.2 percent, and the final bound average rate at the level of 11.7 percent (at the end of the transition period). Moreover, the average-bound tariffs on agro-industrial complex was proposed at the level of 14.1 percent, while this figure stands at 22.8 percent in the developed countries, 12.7 percent in the developing countries and 15.4 percent in the less developed countries. In Azerbaijan, the average custom tariffs amount to 9.4 percent while it is 9.6 percent in the developed countries and 17.7 percent in the underdeveloped countries. Bound tariff is the maximum rate of customs duty on the import of certain goods which defined as one of the member country's commitments to WTO and cannot be changed unilaterally by the importing country. The status of the country is one of the major questions for Azerbaijan while having multilateral negotiations on the terms for WTO membership. Azerbaijan proves its claim to the status of a developing country with the fact that despite the rapid development of the economy, the country has one million refugees and IDPs. According to the requirements of the WTO, the country which has the status of a developing country can claim for 10-percent level [of GDP] of the agricultural subsidies versus to five percent for the developed countries. Azerbaijan holds a status as observer country at the WTO since 1997. The Azerbaijani working group under the WTO secretariat was established on July 16, 1997. Azerbaijan has begun negotiations with the WTO member countries in 2004. At present, the country is in the process of holding negotiations with 19 countries. The latest member of the organization Russia formally expressed a will to commence negotiations with Azerbaijan but the proposals from the country has not received as stated by the Deputy Foreign Minister. Azerbaijan has accomplished negotiations and signed protocols with Turkey, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. Azerbaijan is at the stage of signing the protocol with China and Moldova. --- Fatma Babayeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Fatma_Babayeva Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 21 April 2016 14:24 (UTC+04:00) UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has postponed the visit to the South Caucasus, the diplomatic sources told Trend April 21. According to the sources, during the visit, Ban Ki-moon planned to visit Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. Meanwhile, Ban Ki-moon was to take part in the 7th Global Forum of the UN Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC), scheduled for April 25-27 in Baku. A meeting with the participation of senior officials and around 30 sessions are planned to be held during the Forum. The Baku Declaration is planned to be adopted at a high-level meeting of the UNAOC. Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev signed a decree on July 24, 2015 to create the organizing committee for holding the 7th UNAOC Global Forum in Baku. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 21 April 2016 15:22 (UTC+04:00) By Aynur Karimova Azerbaijan is keeping the criminal case against the Swiss citizen Vartan Sirmakes in the limelight. This was stated by Hikmet Hajiyev, spokesman for Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry on April 20. The Azerbaijani Prosecutor General's Office initiated a criminal case against Sirmakes over his illegal activities on the Azerbaijani territories occupied by Armenia in October 2015. Sirmakes with a group of people was engaged in illegal economic activity in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan to propagandize the illegal regime in these areas at the international level. He took part in the opening ceremony of the gold mine in Veyneli village of the occupied Zangilan region without the consent of the relevant state body of Azerbaijan and without permission. He illegally crossed the state border, as well as committed malevolent acts, calling into question the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Azerbaijan. A criminal case was filed in the Investigation Department for Grave Crimes of the Prosecutor General's Office under articles 318.2, 281.2 and 192.2.2 of the Azerbaijani Criminal Code. The Prosecutor General's Office has also sent requests to Switzerland over the criminal case, Hajiyev told Trend. He noted that the report of the Foreign Ministry on "Illegal economic and other activities in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan" contains sufficient information gathered from the Armenian sources about the illegal activities of Sirmakes and his company Franck Muller on Azerbaijan's occupied lands. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan's Embassy in Switzerland has provided detailed information to the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs and other structures of that country about the latest escalation of situation on the line of contact as a result of the Armenian provocation and the atrocities committed by Armenians against Azerbaijani civilians. Unauthorized visits to Nagorno-Karabakh and other occupied regions of Azerbaijan are considered illegal and individuals who pay such visits are included in Azerbaijani foreign ministrys black list. Armenia captured Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding regions of Azerbaijan in a war that followed the Soviet breakup in 1991. More than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and nearly one million were displaced as a result of the war. 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. Despite repeated calls, Armenia defying all principles of the international law has been holding the Azerbaijani territories under occupation. So, currently these areas are temporarily out of the control of Azerbaijan. Therefore, any visit without Azerbaijans consent to the above-mentioned territories, which are internationally recognized as an integral part of Azerbaijan, is considered a violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Azerbaijan and a breach of both national legislation and the relevant norms and principles of international law. Baku has repeatedly warned foreign officials and diplomats against unauthorized visits to territories under Armenian occupation, stating that such visits violate international law. The country urges all foreign nationals to refrain from traveling to the occupied territories in and around the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan. -- Aynur Karimova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter @Aynur_Karimova Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 21 April 2016 16:41 (UTC+04:00) President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev received on April 21 a delegation led by Minister of Information and Communications Technology of the Islamic Republic of Iran, co-chairman of Azerbaijan-Iran State Commission on economic, trade and humanitarian spheres Mahmoud Vaezi, Azertac reports. The head of state hailed Mahmoud Vaezi`s contributions to the development of friendly relations between the two countries, adding the Azerbaijani government and people appreciated this. President Aliyev said he awarded Vaezi the Dostluq (Friendship) Order, one of the high state awards of Azerbaijan, for his contributions to the development of friendly and cooperative ties between the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Islamic Republic of Iran, and handed the Order to the minister. Vaezi thanked the head of state for the Dostluq (Friendship) Order, and said he was proud to be serving their own people and the people of neighboring Azerbaijan, which has the same religion. The head of state spoke the groundbreaking ceremony of a railway bridge over Astara River on Azerbaijan-Iran border, and described this as a result of the works done over the last period. President Aliyev expressed his satisfaction with the implementation of all agreements reached between the two countries. The president recalled his meeting with President of the Islamic Republic of Iran Hassan Rouhani in Istanbul, where they discussed the ways to develop the bilateral ties. Aliyev also noted with pleasure his visit to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Vaezi conveyed sincere greetings of President of the Islamic Republic of Iran Hassan Rouhani to President Aliyev. The minister said President Rouhani hailed his meeting with President Aliyev in Istanbul. He said bilateral and international cooperation between the two countries was developing successfully under the leadership of the two presidents. The head of state thanked for the greetings of President Rouhani, and asked the minister to convey his greetings to the Iranian president. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 21 April 2016 18:32 (UTC+04:00) By Nazrin Gadimova Russia as an international mediator is ready to render all possible assistance to the parties of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Maria Zakharova, the Spokesperson for Russia's Foreign Ministry, made the remark as part of the briefing held in Moscow on April 21. We are firmly convinced that the parties [of the conflict] should resume the negotiation process aimed at achieving a lasting settlement, she said. It is essential to intensify the work on reducing the war risk on the basis of the existing agreements. The parties to the long-lasting Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict are now required to exercise restraint and to engage in dialogue on the restoration of stability, Zakharova believes. As an international mediator we reaffirm the readiness in the interaction with other co-chairing states of the OSCE Minsk Group to assist the parties with all necessary aid in realization of this goal," she stressed. Moreover, Zakharova said that the crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh will be discussed during the two-day visit of Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to Yerevan. At the same time, Anti-Russian sentiments are gaining new pace in Armenia, as the country was upset with Russia's position in the last military operation on the frontline with Azerbaijan. As the countrys media reported, Yerevan will host a rally against the visit of Lavrov who plans to hold talks with the countrys president and foreign minister to discuss tense situation in Nagorno-Karabakh. The protesters will march to the countrys Foreign Ministry and the Russian embassy to voice their demands, the local media reports. Armenia staged provocations on the contact line of troops on April 2, thus making the Azerbaijani side to retaliate the mass attacks targeting not only military positions, but also civilians. Immediately after Armenia launched military operations against neighboring Azerbaijan, Russia, which enjoys great influence on Yerevan, expressed its concern over the situation. The scaly reply of well-equipped Azerbaijani troops to such sudden attacks revealed poor state of the Armenian army, which immediately blamed the countries, in particular Russia in sale of weapons to Baku. At the same time, Yerevan did not mention its own arms purchases from Russia. Moscow's response was sharp: deliveries of Russian arms to Armenia and Azerbaijan form a balance that keeps the region from military escalation. At that very moment, Yerevan understood that Moscow does not intend to maintain Armenia's interests unilaterally. -- Nazrin Gadimova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @NazrinGadimova Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 21 April 2016 20:21 (UTC+04:00) By Nazrin Gadimova The Armenian leadership has no common sense, Novruz Mammadov, the deputy head of Azerbaijani presidential administration, believes. He made the remarks while commenting on the Armenian Foreign Ministrys statement demanding to cancel the 7th Global Forum of the UN Alliance of Civilizations, which is scheduled to be held in Baku on April 25-27. Mammadov regarded Yerevan's accusation of Baku in "violation of fundamental principles of international law" as absurd amid Armenia's keeping under control over 20 percent of Azerbaijan's internationally recognized territory. "Armenia does not consider the occupation of Azerbaijans territories the violation of international law," Mammadov posted on his Facebook page. "At the same time, all international organizations and bodies, including UN Security Council, think this occupation is a flagrant violation of international law." Mammadov stressed that in fact, the leadership of Armenia, which has become a hostage to the authorities, is not able to see farther than its nose. The reason for such impudence is that behind them there are certain circles in some countries. When the world is in a stressful time, such actions of the Armenian leadership will never ensure the well-being of the country and its people. Armenia, which occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijans territory, has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on immediate withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. Moreover, the reigning Armenian leadership launched a furious attack on the Khojaly city late into night from February 25 to 26, killing 613 civilian Azerbaijanis with an unforeseen brutality. President Serzh Sargsyan led the aggressive operations in Khojaly, which is fairly recognized by many nations as Khojaly Massacre the tragedy of the 20th century. Armenian barbarians disabled some 1,000 people, eradicating eight families completely. About 25 children lost one of their parents and 130 were completely deprived of their parents in the wake of an ethnic cleansing in Khojaly. Moreover, 6 civilians and 31 soldiers were killed and dozens injured during the recent hostilities in Nagorno-Karabakh launched by Armenia on April 2. -- Nazrin Gadimova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @NazrinGadimova Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 21 April 2016 14:15 (UTC+04:00) By Aynur Karimova Azerbaijan and Iran have held a groundbreaking ceremony for construction of a railroad bridge over the Astara River on the border of the two countries. The ceremony was attended by Azerbaijan's Economy and Industry Minister Shahin Mustafayev and Iran's Minister of Communications and Information Technology Mahmoud Vaezi. The railroad bridge over the Astara River is a strategically important facility that will connect the railways of Azerbaijan and Iran. The bridge's construction is planned to be completed by late 2016. In accordance with an agreement signed by the Azerbaijani and Iranian sides, the border bridge will be built jointly. Meanwhile, Javid Gurbanov, the Head of Azerbaijan Railways JSC told Trend on April 21 that Iran will draw a loan to finance its part of the construction of the railroad bridge over the Astara River on the Azerbaijani-Iranian border, however, he did not specified the amount, source and timing of drawing the funds by Iran He said that Azerbaijan will finance the construction of its part itself. The length of the railroad bridge will reach 82.5 meters, while its width will amount to 10.6 meters. The bridge will become an integral part of the Astara (Azerbaijan) - Astara (Iran) railway, which is part of the North-South international transport corridor. At present, the sections of the Qazvin-Rasht and Astara (Iran) - Astara (Azerbaijan) railway are being constructed as part of the project. The Astara (Iran) - Astara (Azerbaijan) section is planned to be constructed in 2016, while the Qazvin-Rasht section in 2017. The Rasht-Astara railway will be under construction simultaneously. The Qazvin-Rasht-Astara railway is a part of the North-South transport corridor. Construction investments are estimated at $400 million. Initial plans call for transporting six million tons of cargo through the corridor a year, which is expected to reach 15-20 million tons per year in the future. Addressing the ceremony, Mustafayev said the construction of the railway bridge over the Astara River will become a milestone in the cooperation of Azerbaijan and Iran. Relations between Azerbaijan and Iran are developing rapidly in all directions, and multilateral relations, based on a solid foundation, have reached the level of strategic cooperation. The two countries are located in very favorable strategic positions that create great opportunities for benefiting from the bilateral ties, are engaged in the development of transport ties. Iran, which is situated in the Middle East region, has land borders with the South Asian, Central Asian, and Middle East countries, with access to the Gulf and Indian Ocean. Azerbaijan, in the cradle of the Caspian Sea is settled in between the West and East. The country plays a gateway role between not only the east and west, but also the north and south. The Land of Fire is positioned on one of the most important trade and transit routes to Europe. In this regard, the transportation sector is one of the main areas of cooperation between Azerbaijan and Iran. The North-South transport corridor, which will carry out transportation of millions of tons of cargo from India to Russia and Europe and vice versa, will pass through the territories of Azerbaijan and Iran. At the initial stage, it is planned to transport annually five million tons of cargo through the corridor, while at the next stage - more than 10 million tons. Mustafayev believes that it will allow Azerbaijan and Iran to realize their transit potential, to gain additional income, to create jobs and to strengthen the economic position in the region. Speaking at the ceremony, Vaezi said infrastructural works for the Qazvin-Rasht-Astara railway have been completed by 92 percent, and the railway's construction will end by late 2016. "Iran's government has increased the allocated budget for this project during the current fiscal year, and Iran is in talks with Azerbaijan and Russia to cooperate with them in the realization of the project's Rasht-Astara section," he added. Ties mulled Later, Mustafayev and Vaezi held a meeting, during which the Azerbaijani minister said that currently, Baku and Tehran are working on expanding the cooperation in the agriculture, tourism, pharmaceuticals, transportation, banking and other sectors. The parties also discussed the prospects for expanding the economic relations and cooperation between the two countries and increasing the effectiveness of the North-South transportation corridor. Later, speaking at a press conference dedicated to the results of the meeting, Mustafayev said that Azerbaijan and Iran are negotiating the possibility of connection of the Nakhchivan-Julfa-Tabriz and Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railways. He said during the meeting, the sides discussed the realization of the Baku-Astara-Tabriz-Nakhchivan and Nakhchivan-Tabriz-Tehran-Mashhad railways. Azerbaijan's southern neighbor Iran is one of the main trade partners of Azerbaijan. The trade turnover between the two countries increased by 53 percent in the first quarter of 2016, as compared to the same period in 2015 and stood at $41.4 million. Documents signed As part of the Iranian delegation's visit to Azerbaijan, the companies of the two countries signed four memoranda within the framework of joint projects' implementation in the field of medicine and vehicles manufacturing on April 21. The memoranda were signed between the Sumgayit Chemical Industrial Park, Azerbaijan Investment Company OJSC, Azersun Holding, as well as Iranian major pharmaceutical company Darou Pakhsh and leading vehicle manufacturer Iran Khodro. -- Aynur Karimova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter @Aynur_Karimova Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 21 April 2016 18:33 (UTC+04:00) By Fatma Babayeva Two banks of Azerbaijan, Bank Standard and the International Bank of Azerbaijan are in talks to merge their assets within the framework of the plan on consolidation of Azerbaijans banks, a source on the country's banking sector told Trend news agency on April 21. At this stage, no merger agreement has been reached yet, the source told. However, the issue of their consolidation will be resolved by the end of April 2016. Meanwhile, Bank Standard also appealed to the Financial Market Supervisory Body of Azerbaijan for the financial support. The supervisory body is currently examining the situation within the bank. Bank Standard, which is one of the largest private commercial banks operating in Azerbaijan, holds considerably high volume of deposits. Overall, the consolidation of the banks is likely to lead to financial recovery of the banks in the country as this ongoing process appeals to the interests of both owners and clients of banks. The International Bank of Azerbaijan is the largest bank and financial services group in Azerbaijan and the region. The Azerbaijan Ministry of Finance is the banks main shareholder, possessing a 50.2 percent equity stake. The bank holds from 40 to 50 percent of the Azerbaijan banking systems total assets. The Central Bank of Azerbaijan has terminated the licenses of Texnika Bank, the Caucasus Development Bank, Atrabank, Gandja Bank, Bank of Azerbaijan, United Credit Bank and NBCBank since the beginning of 2016. Texnika Bank was the last bank that the CBA revoked license on February 2, 2016. The consolidation process will allow to stabilize banks which have deliberately decided to merge, to increase their share in the market and to get more revenues. Moreover, the International Finance Corporation and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development support the consolidation of banks in Azerbaijan by evaluating it as a way leading to the financial recovery of the banks. In addition, the banks of the country have already experienced consolidation earlier. UniBank was formed through merging two commercial banks in 2002 - MBank and Promtexbank. The EBRD acquired a 15-percent share and 8.3333 percent is owned by the German Investment Corporation DEG during this merger deal. Besides, the Bank of Baku merged with IlkBank in 2005. --- Fatma Babayeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Fatma_Babayeva Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 21 April 2016 17:12 (UTC+04:00) The State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan sold $2.9 million to eight banks through the auction held by the Central Bank of Azerbaijan (CBA), SOFAZ said in a statement on April 21. SOFAZ offered $50 million for sale through the auction. SOFAZ will continue selling foreign currency through auctions in 2016. The foreign currency is sold as part of SOFAZ transfers to the Azerbaijani state budget, which are envisaged to stand at 7.615 billion Azerbaijani manats in 2016. SOFAZ was established in 1999 with assets of $271 million. As of January 1, 2016, SOFAZ assets reduced by 9.5 percent compared to 2014 ($37.1 billion) and were estimated at $33.57 billion. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 21 April 2016 17:16 (UTC+04:00) By Amina Nazarli Iran and Azerbaijan are considering to involve private sectors from both countries to contribute to the expansion of trade ties between the two neighbors. Minister of Communications and Information Technology of Iran Mahmoud Vaezi, who is on an official visit to Baku to discuss expansion of bilateral ties, said that industry and engineering services from both countries are among the sectors that are of priority for cooperation. Agriculture and commerce as well as health sectors are also proper fields for cooperation between the two friendly countries, Vaezi told Trend on the sidelines of a ceremony for inking a number of deals between companies of the two countries. Predicting that the ties between the two brotherly countries will be closer in the near future, he vowed support for private sector. Iran is one of the main trade partners of Azerbaijan, and currently about 439 companies with Iranian capital are operating in the country. The trade turnover between Iran and Azerbaijan has increased by 53 percent in the first three months of the current year. Meanwhile, Azerbaijans State Customs Committee reported that the country's export to Iran almost doubled to $14.4 million in 1Q16 year-to-year, while imports increased from $19.4 million in 1Q15 to $27 million in 1Q16. Vaezi further said that a major part of issues agreed between Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev, have been materialized over the past two months. President Aliyev concluded his visit to Iran in late February, which took place on the invitation of Hassan Rouhani. The high-level official visit resulted in conclusion of documents covering various areas of cooperation between Tehran and Baku. Azerbaijan and Iran, the two strategic partners and two neighboring countries with historically close links, enjoy cooperation in various fields. After the western sanctions were lifted from Iran, it has repeatedly expressed intention to improve trade with neighboring Azerbaijan in a bid to make up for the recent decline in trade turnover between the two countries. Cooperation in the framework of North-South transport corridor and designing a railway bridge over the Astarachay are a very important fact in the development of economic cooperation in transportation, tourism and trade sectors. Experts claim that during the past two years relations between the two countries are developing rapidly and have already reached the level of strategic partnership. -- Amina Nazarli is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @amina_nazarli Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 21 April 2016 18:47 (UTC+04:00) The second EU-Azerbaijan Business Summit will start in the Azerbaijani capital Baku May 18, EU Neighbourhood Info Center said. According to the center, agriculture and food, transport and logistics, as well as tourism development - are the three main topics on the event agenda. "The summit offers a platform for European and Azerbaijani companies to investigate business opportunities and establish business partnerships in Azerbaijan," the center said. According to the center, EU companies interested in doing business in Azerbaijan are invited to participate in the event. A business meeting will be held on the eve of the summit May 17 with the participation of representatives of Germany-Azerbaijan, France-Azerbaijan, Italy-Azerbaijan Chambers of Commerce, British Business Group, the European Investment Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. According to the center, the event is supported by the EU-funded regional trade facilitation project East-Invest. It supports economic development of the Eastern Partnership region and the improvement of its business environment. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 21 April 2016 14:44 (UTC+04:00) Baku City Circuit has issued a reminder with regards to VISA procedures for Formula 1s permanent media pack, FOM/FIA/Team representatives and all international fans traveling to Azerbaijan for the 2016 Formula 1 Grand Prix of Europe taking place the weekend of June 17-19. In addition, Baku City Circuit announced an update on how international race-to-race media can apply for their VISA ahead of the first ever F1 race weekend in Azerbaijan. Furthermore, information on how to secure smooth passage for all electronic equipment through Azerbaijani customs is included in the announcement. F1 Permanent Media, FOM/FIA/Teams representatives and International Fans: VISA Upon Arrival: The VISA process has been greatly simplified by the Azerbaijani government for all permanent F1 media throughout the duration of the race. All permanent F1 media and FOM/FIA/Teams representatives will now be able to have their VISA application processed at one of several VISA desks at Bakus Heydar Aliyev International Airport upon arrival as long as they have a passport and a permanent accreditation for the Grand Prix. This simplified process will also apply to all traveling F1 fans who will need to display their passport and either a ticket or proof of purchase for a ticket for the race in at the Baku airport VISA desk to gain entry to Azerbaijan. The dedicated BCC Airport VISA helpdesks will open as of June 1. A once-off payment of 35 will be charged for each VISA upon arrival at the airport. International Race-to-Race Media - VISA Application Process For all international race-to-race media wishing to visit Baku and cover the race this June, a simple and easy-to-follow VISA application process has been set up by Baku City Circuit. While race-to-race media may not receive accreditation confirmation for the race weekend until closer to the time, Baku City Circuit stressed the need for all applicants to ensure they begin the process of applying for their VISA into Azerbaijan well in advance. In order to apply for a VISA, BCC is asking all race-to-race media to send the following information to [email protected] no later than May 30: Filled in VISA application form (available via FIA/FOM and/or [email protected]); Clear, color, scanned passport copy (both pages); Clear, colour, passport sized (3x4) digital ID photo and Flight & hotel booking information (required before applying for VISA). A once off payment of $70 will be charged for each successful VISA application. For anyone wishing to apply for a VISA after the May 30 deadline, a special last minute VISA service is available for an additional fee. The turnaround for this application process will be three working days from the submission of a completed application. Media Equipment/Customs Control: For all media, in particular photographers and broadcasters, wishing to bring their own electronic/filming equipment into Azerbaijan, pre-approved permission for each individual item will be required to get them through customs upon arrival. As such, Baku City Circuit asks all media to send their list of equipment (inclusive of serial numbers) in an excel sheet for approval to [email protected] no later than May 30th 2016. Media Hotels: Baku City Circuit are still offering special rates on two remaining hotel options for F1 media during the Grand Prix. Please note these rooms are being offered on a first come, first served basis. To enquire about availability and book a room at either of these hotels, please email [email protected] For anyone who has yet to book their flights, BCC is able facilitate the flight booking via its local travel partner. Please contact [email protected] for further information. Furthermore, Baku City Circuit also asks that media include flight details in all hotel bookings so that shuttle transfers can be arranged according to arrivals. -- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 21 April 2016 15:00 (UTC+04:00) By Amina Nazarli On the 10th anniversary of the World Malaria Day, Azerbaijan is moving towards elimination of this life-threatening disease. Malaria, serious and sometimes fatal disease, is transmitted among humans by female mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles. When an infected mosquito bites a human host, the parasite enters the bloodstream and begins to rapidly multiply, attacking the red blood cells. This in turn causes fever, vomiting, and headache. Suleyman Mammadov, head of parasitology department at the Republican Center of Hygiene and Epidemiology told local media that neither this nor in previous years any indigenous cases of malaria have been registered in the country. He noted that its been four years that Azerbaijan has identified only imported cases of the disease, according to the World Health Organizations statistics. Only one imported case of tropical malaria was detected in the country in 2015. The citizen was infected with malaria in Cameroon and arrived in Azerbaijan, where the disease manifested itself later, he said. However, in distant past malaria was extremely widespread in Azerbaijan and threatening the country until the 20th century, when the morbidity and mortality from malaria were one of the fastest in the region. By the 1960s, in fact, malaria has been virtually eliminated in Azerbaijan. According to the Republican Hygiene and Epidemiology Center two cases of malaria were revealed in the country in 2012. One person was infected in Africa, and the second within the country. In 2013, in turn, four cases were detected and all of the infected picked up the tropical malaria outside Azerbaijan. No death cases have been recorded in the country from the malaria. Mammadov underlined that Azerbaijan has all the chances to apply to the WHO for the certification [as a malaria free region] in case the country will not register any infected case this year. To prevent the disease, the Health Ministry has done active work for total eradication of this disease. "In particular, tourists arriving in the country are carefully checked. Indeed, in recent years the number of tourists visiting malaria-endemic countries, is growing year by year. For Azerbaijanis tropical malaria pose a special danger, he said. Each year on April 25, the WHO and its partners unite around a common World Malaria Day theme under the strategy to dramatically lower the global malaria burden over the next 15 years. This years theme "End malaria for good" reflects the vision of a malaria-free world set out in the "Global technical strategy for malaria 2016-2030". Nearly half of the worlds population are at risk of malaria, however, according to the WHOs last report, there has been a major decline in global malaria cases and deaths since 2000. Progress was made possible through the massive expansion of effective tools to prevent and treat malaria, such as insecticide-treated mosquito nets, diagnostic testing and anti-malarial medicines. -- Amina Nazarli is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @amina_nazarli Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 21 April 2016 14:43 (UTC+04:00) Head of the SOCAR Energy Greece SA company Anar Mammadov has met Greek Deputy Prime Minister Yannis Dragasakis in Athens to discuss the works done on Trans-Adriatic (TAP) gas pipeline project which will transport Azerbaijani gas to Europe, Azertac reports. The sides exchanged views on the expansion of cooperation between the two countries, as well as the fourth meeting of the Azerbaijan-Greece Intergovernmental Commission for Economic, Industrial and Technological Cooperation to be held in Athens. Azerbaijani Ambassador to Greece Rahman Mustafayev also attended the meeting. The 870 kilometers long pipeline will be connected to the Trans Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) on the Turkish-Greek border Kipoi, run through Greece, Albania and the Adriatic Sea, before coming ashore in Italy's south. It is planned to start the pipeline's construction in mid-2016. TANAP project envisages transportation of gas of Shah Deniz field from Georgian-Turkish border to the western borders of Turkey. The groundbreaking ceremony will take place in Greek city of Thessaloniki. TAP's initial pipeline capacity will be 10 billion cubic meters per year, but it will be easily expandable to 20 billion cubic meters per year. TAP is designed for transportation of natural gas of Shahdeniz 2 to Western Europe through Greece and Albania. This pipeline will start to transport Azerbaijani gas in 2019. TAP shareholders are BP with 20 percent of stake, SOCAR with 20 percent of stake, Snam S.p.A with 20 percent of stake, Fluxys with 19 percent of stake, Enagas with 16 percent of stake and Axpo with 5 percent of stake. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 21 April 2016 11:55 (UTC+04:00) By Fatma Babayeva Kazgeology, Kazakhstan's national geological exploration company, signed a Memorandum on cooperating with the German engineering and consulting DMT GmbH & Co. KG, Kazakh company announced on April 20. The purpose of the memorandum is to realize cooperation between these companies in the establishment of a commercial lab which will study geochemical features of the samples obtained during geological exploration works. The memorandum will enable to begin preparation for a training program on reporting about the resources to CRIRSCO (Committee for Mineral Reserves International Reporting Standards) with participation of the experts of DMT GmbH&Co KG in accordance with international standards. German DMT GmbH & Co. KG specialized in the fields such as natural resources exploration, various mining services, construction and infrastructure, geo-engineering, product testing and building safety, industrial testing and measuring technology and so on. The memorandum was signed within the 7th Mining and Exploration Forum MINEX Central Asia 2016 on April 19- 21 in Astana which is one of the largest and most authoritative international events providing industry-wide discussion platform on mineral exploration and mining in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Recently, Kazakhstan is looking for enhancing bilateral relations with Germany not only in geological sphere but also in various spheres such as energy efficiency, subsoil and industry. Kazakhstan has taken measures to improve investment climate and is ready to further expand business relations with Germany. Overall, the foreign investment and German expertise will definitely contribute to the prosperity of Kazakhstan. --- Fatma Babayeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Fatma_Babayeva Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 21 April 2016 15:34 (UTC+04:00) By Fatma Babayeva Iran needs $15 billion in investment for the construction of a network of gas pipelines. Iran will build network of pipelines with a total length of five thousand kilometers in its territory during the next five years, said planning director of the national Iranian gas company Hassan Torbati Montazeri to SHANA news agency. Both foreign and domestic investments may be involved to the construction of new gas pipelines, Planning Director added. Earlier, the Petroleum Ministry of Iran said that $55.8 billion investment is required to implement gas transit pipeline projects by 2025. Furthermore, $27 billion investment is needed for the construction of gas distribution networks in Iran. Iran set a goal to export its natural gas to the EU in near future. However, the country lacks necessary export infrastructure to realize gas sales. There is no transit gas pipeline connecting Iran with the EU. Iran may build a gas pipeline through Turkey. Even, some experts previously suggested that Iran may use Southern Gas Corridor and build a connection pipeline to TANAP instead of building new one. Another option for Iran is to export its gas in LNG form. The NIOC said earlier that, Iran is aiming to build LNG facilities within two years, but this time frame seems unlikely. Iran also considers building gas pipeline to Oman where it can use already existing LNG facilities. Moreover, the country sees Kuwait and UAE as potential buyers of its natural gas supplies. During last months, Iranian officials stressed several times that they are negotiating with international companies about both renting and building the floating liquefied natural gas vessels. The country signed an agreement on building FLNG with a domestic company. Despite some of the sanctions related to the nuclear policy of Iran has been lifted, some of them still remain in place. Irans purchase of U.S. technologies is prohibited. At the present, Irans estimated gas reserves amount to 33 trillion cubic meters. --- Fatma Babayeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Fatma_Babayeva Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 21 April 2016 18:00 (UTC+04:00) Iran's deputy foreign minister Abbas Araqchi arrived in Vienna, Austria on April 21 to attend the third session of the Joint Commission established under the July 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and the six world powers. Representatives from Iran and the P5+1 (US, UK, Germany, France, China, Russia) will attend the session which is scheduled for April 22, IRNA news agency reported. The issues related to the implementation of the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action aka nuclear deal) will be discussed during the meeting. The Iranian delegation will also hold mutual meetings with some members of the P5+1 on the sidelines of the session. The second session of the JCPOA Commission was held last December in Vienna. Any problem arising from the implementation of the JCPOA, are addressed by the commission. Iran and the P5+1 group of countries agreed in July 2015 on a landmark nuclear deal to curb Tehran's sensitive nuclear activities in return for lifting of the sanctions on the Islamic Republic. The international sanctions on Iran were removed as the JCPOA entered the implementation phase on Jan. 16. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 21 April 2016 10:21 (UTC+04:00) By Amina Nazarli A tense situation between some countries hamper tourism sector in many tourist attractive counties. Director of Summer Tour travel company Aykhan Allazli claims that Azerbaijan can become a new destination for Russian tourists. He said that due to deterioration of the situation between Turkey and Russia, as well as recommendations of the Russian tour operators not to visit Egypt, Azerbaijan can take advantage of this situation to attract more Russian tourists. Russian market is quite extensive, and it is good starting point for Azerbaijan. In the future we will need to gradually increase the flow of tourists from other directions. Today Azerbaijan is visited by European and Asian tourists, but the flow is sufficiently low, he told Trend. Allazli also touched upon outbound tourism, noting that the number of the national tourists, wishing to visit Turkey, has increased significantly as compared to last year. So far, about 4,000 packages have been sold, while last year their number varied between 2,800 and 3,000, he said. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan has already taken steps to promote the country as an attractive tourist destination for Russians. The national travel offices have opened in Russia. Moreover, many Russian travel agencies are interested in tourism opportunities of Azerbaijan. Now after Turkeys and Egypt's beaches became inaccessible, Russian tourists seek new destinations for traveling. Popular Russian tourist service Travel.ru placed Bakus blue Caspian Sea among Top 5 most popular tourist resort destinations in the CIS countries. Baku is the only capital on the CIS area with the sea coastline and conditions for holiday stay. Warm sea, sandy beaches and Caucasian cuisine attract tourists to the beach resorts of Azerbaijan. Visiting to the ancient cities here can be combined with swimming in the sea. Now, Russian tourists make more than 30 percent of the total tourists visiting the country. Russians choose Azerbaijan as their travel destination for many reasons. First of all the Land of Fire does not require visa for Russian tourists to enjoy the country. Azerbaijan is also a perfect destination for Russian tourists, because of its peoples very friendly attitude towards Russia. Here Russian-speaking tourists have no problem with communication, as Azerbaijanis speak Russian well enough to help with any difficulties. -- Amina Nazarli is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @amina_nazarli Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 3.0 ( - - ): editor [at] bahrainmirror.com Thank you for reading! Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading. Yorkshire-based Bondgate Bakery was one of nine winners at the Farm Shop & Deli Awards 2016. The awards, in partnership with Olives Et Al, are now in their third year, and recognise the best specialist independent retailers in the UK. Bondgate Bakery of Otley, West Yorkshire was crowned Baker of the Year, with Dee Light Bakery in Balham, London, and Hambleton Bakery of Exton, Rutland also highly commended. The awards were judged by a team of experts from the world of speciality retail, fine food and food media. Shortlisted entrants were chosen, and the judges then carried out a series of undercover visits to see them in action, before selecting the category winners. Nigel Barden, chairman of judges, said: What stands out the most from the businesses we visited this year was a passion for customer service and continued innovation. Sally Hinchcliffe, owner of Bondgate Bakery, said: Were absolutely thrilled not for us but for the team, we really didnt think we would win! Retail and foodservice bakery group Finsbury Food has a new non-executive director in Zoe Morgan, and is to lose a non-executive director in Edward Beale. Effective as of 4 July, the start of the companys new financial year, Morgan will become a non-executive director of Finsbury Food Group. Morgan has 15 years of executive director experience, including as group marketing director of The Co-operative Group, HBoS Retail and Boots UK. For the last eight years she has held a portfolio of non-executive directorships, and is currently a board member of Moss Bros, Kind Consumer and The Good Care Group. Following more than 13 years of tenure, Edward Beale has announced his intention to step down from the board after the November 2016 AGM. Beale was appointed as a director of Finsbury when Memory Lane Cakes was reversed into the Megalomedia cash shell to create Finsbury in August 2002, and initially served as interim finance director until August 2003. Peter Baker, non-executive chairman of Finsbury, said: On behalf of the board and the wider group I welcome Zoe to the business. Her appointment comes at an exciting time in Finsburys development. I would also like to take the opportunity to thank Edward for his support and contribution to the group throughout this time, helping us to reach our current position in the market. Ingredients supplier Kudos Blends has been awarded The Queens Award for Enterprise 2016 in the international trade category. Kudos was given the award in recognition of its international sales the company began exporting in 2011 and, by 2015, 20% of its turnover was attributed to export sales. The company said: Focusing on the chemistry aspects of the bakery process has allowed Kudos to differentiate its product range from those offered by competitors. Dinnie Jordan, director of Kudos, said: I am both honoured and delighted for the company and my team to have achieved this award. Everyone has worked very hard for it. I never imagined wed export our products when I set up Kudos Blends and it has been a steep but enjoyable learning curve, with invaluable support from the UKTi [UK Trade & Investment]. The Queens Award for Enterprise is the highest award that can be given to any UK business it recognises a companys contribution to UK exports, but also looks at its role within the local community, environmental impact and the quality of its relationships with suppliers, partners, employees and customers. Last year, Kudos was a finalist in the Exporter of the Year category at the Herefordshire and Worcestershire Chamber of Commerce Business Awards. Getting heckled by a voter is a normal occurrence for most politicians. Although a concerned citizen's message is important, so is the way in which the politician handles the heckling. Gov. Rick Scott was attacked verbally by a woman with a message pertaining to public access to health care for women. She also focused on the lack of jobs. In response, the governor said, We got a million jobs. PolitiFact Florida heard the statement and gave it a MOSTLY TRUE rating. PolitiFact writer Josh Gillin said the numbers back up the governors claim, but there is a catch. One thing we need to keep in mind here is how much credit Rick Scott can take for is questionable. And its not just Rick Scott, its any governor, Gillin said. Gillin went on to say Florida was already projected to pick up at least a million jobs after the recession. For that reason, Scotts claim received a MOSTLY TRUE rating. SOURCES: Scott tells heckler state has created a million jobs One person is dead after a shooting at a Valrico bar early Thursday morning. According to the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, the shooting happened at 3:15 a.m. in the parking lot of the One Night Stand bar at 1602 East State Road 60. Col. Donna Lusczynski said the shooting happened after two off-duty bar workers got into an argument outside the bar. The argument escalated, and there was a shooting. When deputies arrived, they performed CPR on the injured man. However, that person died. The other man is speaking to authorities. Though his name wasn't officially released, the victim was identified by his family as 25-year-old Evan Godwin. They said he was attending Hillsborough Community College after serving in the Army and that he loved to ride his motorcycle and spend time with his nieces and nephews. Authorities are still investigating, and no further information has been released. Georgia authorities say they've filed a murder charge against a man described as a "career criminal" who led authorities to a body thought to be that of a missing Florida priest. The Rev. Rene Wayne Robert, 71, was priest in St. Augustine Steven James Murray, 28, arrested last week Investigators think the priest was killed April 10 Georgia Bureau of Investigation spokesman Scott Dutton on Thursday told The Associated Press that 28-year-old Steve James Murray, of Jacksonville, faces a first-degree murder charge. Dutton says an autopsy found that the victim thought to be the Rev. Rene Wayne Robert, of St. Augustine was shot multiple times. Dutton said the body was found in a heavily wooded area of Burke County, in east Georgia, where Murray is being held without bond. Police say Murray knew Robert and led authorities to the body in woods near Waynesboro, Georgia. Murray was arrested in South Carolina while driving the priest's Toyota Corolla. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate At sundown Friday, people of the Jewish faith will gather in their homes with family and friends and ask why this night is different from the rest. It is a question asked ceremonially since the second century of the common era of Judaism and Christianity and based on events cloaked in antiquity. It also is the holiday on the Jewish calendar that is most celebrated by Jews around the world. Passover celebrates the Jewish escape from bondage in Egypt and the oppression of the pharaohs who had conquered Judea and taken the Jews as slaves. It's the story of Moses leading God's chosen people to the promised land of Canaan and delivering to them the 10 commandments and entering the covenant with God. It's Exodus, the second book of the Old Testament, also called the Torah. When was the Exodus? "We don't know," said Rabbi Joshua Taub of Temple Emanuel. "No one has the answer and it's probably too deep to dig from the ground." Maybe it was 1200 BCE (Before the Common Era). Nothing is terribly accurate, Taub said. Another explanation is that Exodus didn't occur from Egypt, but it was an escape of the Northern Kingdom of Judea from the oppression of the Southern Kingdom. The Israelites of the north revolted and returned home, Taub said, according to that explanation. What is secure is that Passover celebrates liberation after oppression, he said. The Passover feast, the "seder," observes the traditional dishes of unleavened bread, or "matzah," which illustrates the haste in which the Jews fled Egypt because the dough had no time to rise. Also on the seder table will be "bitter herbs," thought to be horseradish, which reminds congregants of the bitterness of their captivity. The next essential ingredient is the pascal lamb, whose blood marked the doorways of the faithful in Egypt as the angel of death passed over to kill the first-born sons of the Pharaonic Egyptians after the pharaoh had ordered the first-borns of Jewish households to be cast into the Nile River because their numbers were growing. For Allison Nathan Getz, who is the Temple Emanuel president this year, Passover is an opportunity to show the rest of the community the Jewish historical perspective. "It's very timely," she said of the story of Exodus. "You can see oppression around the world. The Jews were the original slaves. We empathize." She said anyone who wants to attend the Passover seder at Temple Emanuel is welcome at 6:30 p.m. Friday. "Anyone who wants to come can share it with us," she said. "Passover is a story. You can sit down and listen to a story." Passover, like the Christian's Easter, moves around the calendar, according to the moon. Passover begins on the first new moon after the spring equinox. Traditions vary as to how long Jews will observe it. There are two seders on successive nights. Observance could last a week, as it does in Israel. "The story remains very real," Taub said. "It's about liberating oneself from your own personal pharaoh, whether it's TV or a smartphone." Taub cautioned, however, that the story is definitely about the struggle of the Israelites and Jews and should not be transformed by Christians. At its core, it's the ancient Israelites being led to the promised land and it resonates with other religions, other cultures, like in the powerful spiritual, "Let My People Go." Taub said Passover likely has pre-Israelite roots, starting as a farmer's feast to pray for fertile flocks. "It speaks to American values," Taub said. "But the Russian revolutionaries used it against the czar. The abolitionists used it to fight slavery. The civil rights movement used it. So did the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Exodus narrative is used as a metaphor for everyone's struggle moving toward redemption. Everybody's got a pharaoh." DWallach@BeaumontEnterprise.com Twitter.com/dwallach Staff members at outpatient care facilities do not follow recommendations for hand hygiene 37 percent of the time, according to a study published in the American Journal of Infection Control. Researchers from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and the New Mexico Health Department conducted a cross-sectional study of 15 geographically-dispersed outpatient facilities during the summer of 2014. Medical students assessed infection prevention policies and practices at the facilities. Each student was asked to observe 10 injections and 20 hand hygiene opportunities at their assigned outpatient practice. Here are four insights: 1. Medical student interviews with outpatient facility staff showed that 93 percent of recommended policies were in place across the 15 facilities. 2. However, when the medical students observed behaviors, the students noted only 63 percent compliance with recommended hand hygiene practices and 66 percent compliance with safe injection practices. 3. In 37 percent of hand hygiene observations, no hand hygiene was performed. 4. During the 330 hand hygiene observations, students reported hand hygiene supplies were available 100 percent of the time. "These findings support the need for ongoing infection prevention quality improvement initiatives in outpatient settings," the study authors noted. Here are seven updates: California jury awards Aetna $37.4M in ASC billing fraud scheme A California jury found Bay Area Surgical Management and its three co-founders overbilled Aetna for out-of-network procedures by giving referring physicians a substantial kickback. The jury awarded Aetna $37.4 million in damages after four years of litigation and a month-long trial. Aetna claimed Bay Area Surgical Management cost the payer $23 million for around 1,900 procedures in the past two years $20 million more than it should have been charged. UnitedHealth exits ACA marketplaces After suffering $475 losses on the ACA exchanges in 2015, UnitedHealth announced plans to exit most of its Affordable Care Act exchanges. The Obama administration claimed UnitedHealth is a relatively minor player in the marketplaces as it only accounts for 6 percent of all enrollees. Officials also argue the payer did not competitively price their coverage. ACA forces 36% of physicians to contemplate leaving medicine A recent CompHelath study found 36 percent of all physicians are considering leaving the medical profession because of the Affordable Care Act. Of those surveyed, 51 percent viewed the ACA unfavorably. Tri-County Vascular Center opens 5.8k-square-foot ASC Tri-County Vascular Center is opening a 5,800-square-foot ASC in San Jose, Calif. The center offers rooms for non-invasive interventional radiology and surgical procedures for patients in need of additional care. Healthcare CEO compensation reaches $3.95M In 2014, the average compensation for a healthcare CEO totaled nearly $3.95 million. Following healthcare CEOs, energy CEOs made an average of $3.94 million in 2014, followed by financial services non-banking CEOs ($2.71 million) and retail CEOs ($2.57 million). Wisconsin officials waited months to report Elizabethkingia outbreak WBAY obtained records which found the Wisconsin Department of Health Services waited until March to tell the public about the Elizabethkingia outbreak, despite the agency starting its investigation of the virus in December. The state health department said it reacted quickly to the reports concerning a potential outbreak and started an investigation. However, the agency said it did not want to alarm the public. 25 patients to sue Baystate Noble Hospital for potential exposure to HCV, HBV & HIV Of the 293 patients potentially exposed to hepatitis C, hepatitis B and HIV at Baystate Noble Hospital in Westfield, Mass., 25 patients plan to sue the hospital. In January, the hospital informed 293 patients who had undergone colonoscopies at the hospital between June 2012 and April 2013 they may have been exposed to hepatitis C, hepatitis B and HIV. More healthcare news: AAAHC elects Dr. Meena Desai board chair 5 things to know about Kenmore Mercy Hospital's new surgery unit 10 key notes on physician debt & net worth 70 percent live within their means Barry K. Wershil, MD, division head of gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition at Anne & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago and professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, and his colleagues are researching ways to develop a non-invasive test to diagnose and monitor eosinophilic esophagitis. Here are five highlights: 1. Currently, the only means to diagnose EoE is through upper endoscopy to obtain biopsies of the esophagus. This is done under general anesthesia and has to be repeated as often as three or four times a year to assess treatment response. 2. Dr. Wershil and colleagues are correlating a number of potential biomarkers with data gleaned from biopsies when participating patients undergo endoscopy. They are also evaluating how biomarker levels change over time in the same patient, especially in response to treatment. 3. The American Partnership for Eosinophilic Diseases is funding their research. 4. Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago is ranked fifth in the nation in pediatric gastroenterology by the U.S. News & World Report. 5. Dr. Wershil earned his medical degree from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and completed his residency at St. Louis Children's Hospital. He completed a fellowship in pediatric gastroenterology at Boston Children's Hospital. The California State Assembly Committee on Health on Tuesday passed a union-sponsored bill that would require hospitals and affiliated medical groups to file yearly reports on the compensation of their top paid executives, according to California Healthline. The committee approved the bill, proposed by Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez (D), by a vote of 11-6. Under the proposed law, hospitals and integrated health systems would submit reports on all executives whose total annual pay exceeds $250,000 to the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. Wages and salary, perks and benefits, bonuses, stock, options and any pay the executives receive for serving on boards outside of the hospital company would be subject to reporting, according to California Healthline. Many hospitals, but not all, are already required to report some of this pay information in their tax filings. The law would also require hospitals and affiliated medical groups with at least 100 employees to provide compensation information on non-executive workers by job type, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation. Supporters of the bill include labor union SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, gay and transgender advocates and Health Access, a consumer advocacy group. Opponents of the bill argued it is redundant because information on top executives' compensation is already available to the public. "We support transparency; we have no issue with that," Jan Emerson-Shea, a spokeswoman with the California Hospital Association, told California Healthline. "But this bill is very duplicative. We don't know the public policy purpose of it." Last April, to the relief of many providers, Congress passed the permanent "doc-fix" to repeal the flawed sustainable growth rate formula that determined Medicare physician fees. It was replaced with legislation the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, or MACRA that promises to pay physicians for value over volume in a way that jells with the goals of individual medical practices and patient-centered care. "It's unique it enjoys strong bipartisan support, unlike other healthcare proposals in the past few years," says Igor Belokrinitsky, partner at PwC Strategy&. "CMS is really taking the lead in transforming healthcare in a way that helps stakeholders, as opposed to kicking the can down the road." Comments from CMS Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt indicate the administration is truly trying to get it right this time. "The stakes are high for this program. As any physician will tell you, physician burden and frustration levels are real," Mr. Slavitt said in January at the J.P. Morgan Annual Health Care Conference. "Programs designed to improve often distract. Done poorly, measures are divorced from how physicians practice and add to the cynicism that people who build these programs just don't get it. MACRA is set to roll out in 2019, but 2017 could mark the start of performance measurements that will determine reimbursement in 2019. For physician practices that have been sitting back it's time to assemble a preparation plan and put it in motion. Here are answers to nine questions on MACRA basics. 1. What does MACRA entail? At its simplest, MACRA makes three major changes to Medicare reimbursements. First, it ends the SGR formula. Second, in its place it establishes a new framework to reward physicians based on performance and health outcomes other than volume. Lastly, it aims to combine existing quality reporting programs into one streamlined system. As part of this, it establishes an annual physician fee schedule update of 0.5 percent from 2016 to 2019. After that, the Medicare physician fee schedule will remain at 2019 levels through 2025. Beginning in 2019, qualified physicians and physician groups will opt to enter one of two new tracks for payment: the Merit-based Incentive Payment System or Alternative Payment Models. However, Rivka Friedman, practice manager of research and insights at The Advisory Board Company cautions providers that MACRA will not be a panacea for low reimbursements. "The biggest thing we have been telling providers is while SGR wasn't a wonderful architecture for payments, MACRA doesn't provide all that much relief in how much increase in payments providers will see," says Ms. Friedman. 2. How will physicians get paid under MIPS? MIPS will likely be the preferred choice of the two programs due to its familiarity, according to Mr. Belokrinitsky. Under this program, CMS is taking an incremental approach to linking fee-for-service payments to quality and value. MIPS will subsume the Physician Quality Reporting System, the Value-based Payment Modifier and the Medicare Electronic Health Record incentive program for eligible providers. These payment adjustments will be rolled into one program with four categories: quality, resource use, clinical practice improvement and meaningful use of EHRs. Clinicians' performance in each category will be compiled into a composite performance score that will ultimately determine their payment adjustment. Composite scores above or below the mean will translate into positive or negative payment adjustments to the base rate of Medicare Part B payments accordingly. The potential maximum adjustment increases each year from 2019 to 2022, when the maximum adjustment is a gain or loss of 9 percent. To keep MACRA budget neutral, it will allow the positive adjustment to be scaled up to three times greater. This means the swing how much a provider can lose or gain under MIPS ranges from gains of up to 27 percent to losses of up to 9 percent on payment adjustments by 2022, according to Ms. Friedman. What makes MIPS unique from prior programs is providers whose composite score is at the threshold will not have payment adjusted at all. This effectively eliminates the pass-fail, all-or-nothing approach of the old payment adjustments, as American Medical Association Board Chair Stephen Permut, MD, notes. "Under the MIPS, the aggregate financial risk is less than under the previous Medicare quality and reporting programs," Dr. Permut wrote in an AMA blog. The MIPS program may feel safer because it eliminates the pass-fail approach to payment adjustments and because providers are already familiar with the payment adjustment systems that make its foundation, but physicians should note lower risk does not necessarily make for higher payments. In particular for physicians who currently don't do well in PQRS, MU or other existing payment adjustments, MIPS may not be the breath of fresh air they expect. 3. How are payments determined for APM? "From a strategic perspective, everyone has to do some form of MIPS," says Mr. Belokrinitsky. "APM is more of a leap forward than an incremental step." APM builds off of existing value-based alternative payment programs like accountable care organizations, patient-centered medical homes and bundled payment programs. Under this track there are "APMs" and "eligible APMs." The key difference here is "eligible APMs" are more advanced, meet several criteria under MACRA and have a certain percentage of patients who are treated as part of the ACO, PCMH or alternative program of choice. Those eligible APMs, also called qualifying APM participants, do not receive MIPS adjustments and instead receive a lump-sum bonus for years 2019 to 2024. This lump sum will be 5 percent of the estimated aggregate expenditures under the fee schedule for the prior year. The lump sum will transition into a higher fee schedule update starting in 2026 and beyond. In 2025, eligible APMs do not receive a lump payment or higher fee schedule, according to CMS. APMs continue using their own method of rewarding value, making this the more lucrative track compared to MIPS. "Risk-based models have performance incentives baked into them. APM doesn't need to double those incentives, so the lump sum is meant to be a reward for qualifying as an APM," says Ms. Friedman, who describes the lump sum as a "bump for being at risk." That said, CMS says most physicians will be considered less-advanced APMs. Those participants will still receive their APM-specific rewards and will also be subject to MIPS payment adjustments. They receive favorable scoring for the clinical practice improvement category, of the four categories in the MIPS composite score, according to CMS. "APM encourages providers to take on more risk. And it's no small undertaking the average provider is still trying to figure out how to succeed under risk-based models," says Ms. Friedman. 4. Which track should my practice pick? This is a trick question. "An important thing to know and a source of misconception among many providers is you can't pick between the two models," says Ms. Friedman. "You have to qualify based on your book of business." Details are yet to come on what will categorize a provider as an APM or an advanced APM, but once those come out, organizations will be assessed to determine if they fall into one of those two categories. The rest of providers will fall into MIPS, according to Ms. Friedman. "Providers do still need to get educated about what each of the tracks entail and which they are qualified for because the payment schemes are meaningfully different," she says. 5. How does it affect meaningful use? Many providers were excited when Mr. Slavitt announced the end of MU in January. "We are now in the process of ending meaningful use and moving to a new regime culminating with the MACRA implementation," he said at the J.P. Morgan Annual Health Care Conference. "The meaningful use program as it has existed, will now be effectively over and replaced with something better." This statement was tempered a few days later in a CMS blog post Mr. Slavitt authored jointly with Karen DeSalvo, MD, acting assistant secretary of HHS. They wrote that MACRA is an opportunity to adjust EHR-related payment incentives, but it does not eliminate EHR-related payment systems, nor will it eliminate meaningful use woes overnight. While MACRA details are hammered out, meaningful use Stage 3 is still in effect. Mr. Slavitt and Dr. DeSalvo also underlined the fact that any changes to meaningful use under MACRA apply only to physicians and clinicians, not hospitals, as MACRA applies only to Medicare physician payments. EHR incentive programs for Medicaid and Medicare hospitals will not change as a result of this program, though CMS is working to improve them. 6. What are some other unforeseen impacts of MACRA? Some physicians may be bewildered at the thought of adding MACRA to the mix of payment frameworks they already deal with, including those from commercial payers, according to Mr. Belokrinitsky. "They will be saying, 'I wish these guys would all figure it out. Everyone has their own metrics and I wish it was a little bit simpler.'" Luckily for those providers, Mr. Belokrintisky sees MACRA as a future standard framework for payers to hang their metrics on. "I think [commercial payers] are happy it's happening. MACRA is putting more pressure on providers to use alternative payment instruments," he says. "The next step is how they can bring commercial reimbursement closer in line with what's being proposed here." He says CMS' newest initiative the Comprehensive Primary Care Plus model requires commercial payers to partner with CMS and Medicaid agencies, indicating more collaboration between private payers and CMS could be on the horizon However, Ms. Friedman disagrees. When asked if MACRA would inspire changes among commercial payers, she says, "Five years ago I might have said yes. We really expected private payers to follow Medicare's move to risk, and we have seen that to some extentbut generally speaking we have not seen a move to risk-based contracting on the private side to the extent we have seen it in Medicare." She says it's possible, but unlikely based on past behavior. 7. What does MACRA mean for smaller providers? Smaller providers may face more difficulty complying with MACRA metrics, in particular the EHR and technology-based requirements or some of the qualifying APMs that require greater capital or a patient population. Mr. Belokrinitsky says MACRA does not necessarily exclude smaller practices, though it could create an impetus for more provider affiliations. "What we've seen in our research is the larger organizations have not created the savings that everyone is hoping for," he says, also referring to research that shows physician-based ACOs tend to achieve more savings than those led by hospitals. "We do anticipate more consolidation, but more along the lines of loose affiliations," Mr. Belokrinitsky adds, noting that consolidation purely for the purpose of getting bigger will likely not be the answer. Future provider affiliations will be characterized by tight partnerships through which the entities can share capabilities, but not necessarily exchange capital, he says. Ms. Friedman agrees that MACRA does not necessarily pose challenges for smaller providers. Instead, smaller, independent practices may actually have more agility as the sole authority in crafting their MACRA strategy. "Independent medical groups have a degree more agency in what they do to respond to MACRA that medical groups associated with hospitals or health systems won't have," she says. 8. What can organizations do now to prepare? Mr. Belokrinitsky advises putting together a team of administrative, financial, IT and clinical staff to prepare. Though these are reimbursement models, all decisions have to lead with quality, he says. "That has to be reflected in the team you put together to do this. If your organization is trying to figure out how to move to these new models and no physician leadership is in the room, you are probably doing it wrong." He adds, "The second component is having tech leadership in the room. In some respect, moving to new reimbursement models requires determining your organization's technology roadmap, such as what new tech capabilities you are going to need to stand up to interoperability." As to what these parties should do once they come to the table, Ms. Friedman says she tells medical groups there are five key things to start with: First, medical groups should be participating, or at the very least, getting ready to participate in existing quality and EHR programs that create the baseline of MACRA. That includes PQRS, MU and VPM. "Those programs will be rolled into MACRA; they are not going away," she says. Second, she says the existence of APM and the associated bonus should be a major factor in medical groups' decisions to participate in risk-based models. Third, she again stresses the need for physician groups to get educated on which track they are likely to fall into. While not all the information is available yet, there is plenty to get started on. Fourth, Ms. Friedman recommends executives get involved. "Executives and folks steeped in policy are likely to dig into the details. Rank-and-file clinicians are not spending all their time digesting policy," she says. For this reason, a good part of the responsibility of education falls on executives' shoulders. It is their job to pass this knowledge on to clinicians because it will change the provider payment landscape. Fifth and lastly, Ms. Friedman says, "Stay tuned." There is still a considerable amount of information to come. 9. What details have yet to come out? Much of MACRA has yet to be fleshed out at a regulatory level. Once the final rule drops, a few details to look for include which exact measures will be included in MIPS and which risk-based models will be characterized as APM, according to Ms. Friedman. For example, while we do know the four categories of performance for MIPS, we don't know specifically within these categories which metrics CMS will choose to include, which will ultimately have meaningful implications on the payments a physician will receive, according to Ms. Friedman. Second, she says we still don't know all the requirements to be an advanced APM. According to CMS, MACRA defines an APM in general as a model under section 1115A or 1866C of the Social Security Act, or a shared savings program model under section 1899 of the Social Security Act. It says eligible APMs must have quality measures comparable to MIPS measures, use certified electronic health record technology and either bear more than nominal financial risk for monetary losses or be a medical home model expanded under the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. In other words, while we know what is generally required to be an APM, we don't know yet with absolute certainty which types of risk-based models will be considered advanced APMs. However, some of what is published suggests that one-sided ACO programs, like the Medicare Shared Savings Program, won't count due to a lack of downside risk exposure, according to Ms. Friedman. These details will be in the final rule, which does not yet have an expected rollout date, according to CMS. More articles on finance: John Stossel: 'My hospital's customer service stinks' This week's 5 must-reads for hospital CFOs Study: ACA appears to lead to decreased medical debt Coffee lovers take note: Seattle-based Starbucks is moving on to new horizons, this week opening its first location in South Africa, according to The Wall Street Journal. Eager customers began to line up at 6:00 a.m. for the April 21 grand opening of the coffee shop in Johannesburg. Starbucks plans to open 12 to 15 more stores in South Africa over the next two years, according to Carlo Gonzaga, CEO of Taste Holdings, Starbucks' licensee in the country. Other businesses are doing the same. Domino's Pizza has more than 75 stores in South Africa, while H&M and Krispy Kreme Doughnuts opened locations there last year. A physician has been charged with one count of unlawful surveillance for hiding two "spy pens" in a unisex bathroom in Syracuse, N.Y.-based Crouse Hospital's intensive care unit, according to The Post Standard. Jeffrey Gould, MD, admitted to police that he hid the two surveillance cameras. His lawyer, Edward Z. Menkin, told The Post Standard that Dr. Gould had hidden the cameras in an attempt to catch the person who had stolen the prescription drug Adderall and a GoPro camera from a bag he had left in a conference room of the ICU in late February. "This was terrible judgment in an effort to apprehend someone who had stolen his property," Mr. Menkin told The Post Standard. "He didn't think it through." According to a Syracuse police report, one camera was attached to a toilet paper dispenser and another was taped to the side of a trashcan in the bathroom. Hospital security contacted police after a custodian discovered the cameras March 1. When detectives first questioned Dr. Gould about the cameras at his apartment March 8, he said he had seen the cameras in the bathroom but had "just neglected to say or do anything about it," according to a report written by Syracuse Police Officer Peter Payne. Subsequently, a computer forensics detective found a video on one of the cameras showing the inside of an apartment. Officer Payne recognized the apartment as Dr. Gould's. According to Officer Payne's report, Dr. Gould believed the person who had stolen his Adderall was possibly a co-worker, and Dr. Gould thought he would catch the thief using the prescription drug in the restroom. Dr. Gould apologized to police and told detectives he is not a pervert, according to the report. No person can be identified in the footage, and neither camera was ever pointed at the toilet. As a result of the criminal charge, Crouse Hospital fired Dr. Gould. A hospital spokesman told The Post Standard that Dr. Gould was a Syracuse-based Upstate University Hospital resident doing a rotation at Crouse. Dr. Gould's case is pending in Syracuse City Court. He could face up to four years in prison for the criminal charge against him. More articles on healthcare industry lawsuits: Evidence against Florida 'teen physician' detailed in newly released documents Bon Secours, oncologist to pay $400k over improper billing Clinic CEO, physician convicted in massive drug trafficking scheme in Kentucky First Minister Arlene Foster on a visit to Hyster-Yale in Portadown to celebrate the companys 35th anniversary with Alan Little, vice president European manufacturing, Harry Sands, European MD and Jim Downey, plant manager Craigavon forklift firm Hyster-Yale has said it will continue making high-end products for European markets regardless of the outcome of the EU debate. The US-owned company has been manufacturing forklifts in the Co Armagh town since 1981 and now employs 574 people. It makes frames, front-end masts and guards for forklifts, and assembles the vehicles. Plant manager Jim Downey said many of its products are sold to Europe, some to the Middle East and Africa, and around 2% to the US - and it produces a special electric forklift for that market. Clients closer to home include wholesaler Musgrave Group. And despite exporting across Europe, including to Pepsi-Cola in Poland - and having operations in Italy and Holland - it won't be commenting on the EU debate ahead of the UK's referendum on membership of the EU on June 23. Mr Downey said: "We do a lot of our business in euros but because we are a US-based company we haven't really taken a position on the EU debate. There would be a lot of uncertainty but we haven't really taken a view, although we do have manufacturing in Italy and Holland. "All global uncertainty can have an impact so we just keep on trying to build the product to the highest quality." The company, based in Cleveland, Ohio, is celebrating 35 years in business in Craigavon this week - one of its 12 manufacturing sites around the world. It started out its operations here by manufacturing internal combustion engine (ICE) trucks. Mr Downey joined the company in 1988 as a factory worker. A year later, it was bought by Fortune 1000 company NACCO Industries, Inc. "Within Hyster-Yale, there's a lot of development work provided for everyone, and I took advantage of all those development opportunities. I progressed through all those jobs and was given opportunities to cross-train and work in different functions," he said. Out of its 574 staff, 33 have been with the firm since it started in Craigavon in 1981. Mr Downey said the company was hit badly in the recession, when the forklift market globally collapsed, but invested in its people during the tough times. "Rather than let people go, we invested in their future and when the recession was over, we came back a lot more agile." The Craigavon business became part of NACCO Materials Handling Group in 1994. And this year, NACCO Materials Handling Group changed its name to Hyster-Yale Group after it was spun off from NACCO Industries. Revenues at Hyster-Yale Materials Handling Inc in 2015 were $2.6bn (1.8bn) for 2015, down from $2.8bn (1.9bn) in 2014. In an outlook for the lift truck market this year, the company said the overall global market lift trucks was expected to be "roughly stable". Two top Northern Ireland manufacturers have won major Queen's Awards for enterprise in international trade. Co Antrim generator maker AJ Power and animal nutrition specialist Devenish Nutrition were honoured for their business achievements in today's announcement from the UK Business Secretary, Sajid Javid. Belfast-based Devenish was praised for its "outstanding growth in its overseas sales of 300% over the last three years". AJ Power - a spin-off from FG Wilson in Larne - has seen its overseas sales grow by 66% over the last three years, as it exports to 67 countries worldwide. The firms were the only two from Northern Ireland out of 243 businesses across the UK to receive an award this year. They join previous winners from Northern Ireland such as Norbrook in Newry; Allstate, which has offices in Belfast, Londonderry and Strabane, and Antrim-based fake tan brand Vita Liberata. Devenish's turnover is now over 15m, having started international trading in 2012. It makes nutritional products for the agricultural, livestock and equine sectors and sells in eight countries, including the US. Executive chairman Owen Brennan praised the firm's international team and the whole group for "the phenomenal growth of our export business". "We spend over 30m each year on innovation and this has proved to be a solid foundation for business growth, both locally and internationally," he said. "We have also invested heavily in developing new markets and expect to see this translated into further significant growth in the coming years." Craigavon-based AJ Power designs, manufactures and supplies diesel generating sets and associated equipment to customers across five continents. Since 2003, it has supplied generators to villages in the Andes, airports in Scandinavia and mines in Myanmar, (formerly Burma). AJ Power's managing director, Ashley Pigott, said: "Winning a prestigious Queen's Award offers all at AJ Power the opportunity to reflect on the significant export growth and overall business success we have achieved during the last three years. "We strongly believe that winning the award will help us to gain recognition and raise our profile throughout the world." Katy Best who is commercial and marketing director for Belfast City Airport Krakow, Poland, where this years Ruotes Europe will take place Belfast airport bosses are jetting into Poland this week in a bid to attract key new tourist and business routes - including a fresh German link - to Northern Ireland. Routes Europe - which will be held in Belfast next year - will see 100 airlines and around 1,200 aviation experts from across the globe, meet in Krakow. And both Belfast International and Belfast City airports will be trying to bring in fresh sun routes and open up new business links with the rest of Europe, and potentially further afield. Katy Best, commercial and marketing director for Belfast City Airport - who is making the trip to Poland - says she's hopeful of a new route to Germany and summer destinations for next year. "We will get to meet people of all relevant airlines and airports in Europe," she said. "Some conversations will be picking up on conversations we would have had over the last years - some meetings would be for the first time. "You would be hopeful what comes out of it would be scheduled services for summer of 2017. "We've been very open about what our strategy is, and we want to look beyond the UK network, and look at cities that we don't have in Northern Ireland at the moment. "That would be key German cities, and the likes of Madrid and Italian connections, and some of the other key business hubs." She said key German links could include Frankfurt, Dusseldorf or Cologne. And she stated that Belfast was "under-served" when it came to sun routes. Belfast International's managing director Graham Keddie will also make the trip this week, which runs for four days, with the event kicking off on Saturday. "As we continue to develop our route network this event will help us attract new airlines and routes, particularly in advance of the conference coming to Belfast in 2017," he said. There is also speculation that Belfast International Airport could be getting new direct air link to Dubai. A spokesman confirmed a delegation from Emirates had met with staff. As far as new routes go, Belfast City has added a direct flight to Belgium's capital with Brussels Airlines. But Ms Best says, despite the first flights having to be diverted elsewhere following the terror attack at Brussels Airport last month, the airline remains "committed" to Belfast. Belfast International secured a massive boost last month when Michael O'Leary's budget airline Ryanair returned to the city after a decade away. And by the end of 2016, it will be flying to eight routes. These include London Gatwick, Berlin and Milan. Just last month, Enterprise Minister Jonathan Bell announced the latest 4m package for the air route development fund. Both Belfast airports have benefited from previous funding streams from the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment. But some of those routes it pushed have since ended. Galantas Gold recorded a loss of CAN$1.8m (1m) for 2015 amid the continuing suspension of its Omagh mine, according to its annual result Galantas Gold recorded a loss of CAN$1.8m (1m) for 2015 amid the continuing suspension of its Omagh mine, according to its annual results. However, the company said it was still hopeful for a brighter future when a judicial review set for September will determine whether mining can resume at its site in Co Tyrone. If the review allows for the mining of gold, silver and lead to go ahead, it would mean a further 15 years of work at the existing mine at Cavanacaw. Galantas' president and chief executive Roland Phelps yesterday spoke of the company's "increased confidence" following its exploration efforts. "Our exploration efforts continue to bear fruit and demonstrate the potential of the area under license. "The true width (13 metres) of the recent high grade (9.9 g/t) gold intersect cored on Joshua vein gives us increased confidence that the geological model being developed will greatly assist our near term mining project." The 2015 loss was considerably less than its 2014 loss of CAN$5.3m (2.9m). And Galantas faced a small increase in its cost of sales compared to 2014 while recording a cash in bank figure of CAN$1.5m (0.8m) by the end of last year. Galantas has said it anticipates 130 people will be working on the mine with total wages of 4m when it is fully operational. A spokesman added: "The underground mine will be the first underground gold mine, of any scale, in Ireland. "The strategy is to establish the underground mine as soon as finance is available and look for further expansion of gold reserves on the property, which has many undrilled targets." An individual applied for a judicial review after the Department of the Environment gave planning permission in June last year. Minerals firm Dalradian Resources, which operates the Curraghinalt mine in Co Tyrone, has said that Northern Ireland has the world's seventh richest undeveloped seam of gold. xxx Ladbrokes said it suffered the worst Cheltenham Festival in "living memory" and warned it would also take a 3 million hit if Leicester City win the Premier League. The group - which is planning a 2.3 billion merger with rival Coral - became the latest to reveal the impact of a string of unfavourable results for bookies as it blamed the Cheltenham races for taking the shine off its first quarter performance. Its update also revealed a 3 million liability on the Premier League if Leicester win, despite a significant number of punters cashing out their bets already. The group said rivals "abandoned bookmaking principles" at Cheltenham, offering bets at levels that did not make business sense. William Hill warned over profits last month after describing the Cheltenham results as its "worst" in recent history. Jim Mullen, chief executive of Ladbrokes, said: "At Cheltenham we were reminded of the intense competition with offers and pricing at levels which, in our view, abandoned bookmaking principles. "We competed hard but refused to pursue unsustainable strategies and our stance remains that we will compete where we know we can get the right returns from the right customers." He said it was an "encouraging" start to the year in spite of Cheltenham and said the group was on track with full-year expectations. Shares rose 4% as first quarter trading came in better-than-expected, with net revenues jumping 10.6% year-on-year, while UK retail net revenue rose 4.1% and digital revenue surged by 36.5%. Mr Mullen also said the 33/1 Grand National winner, Rule The World, delivered a "welcome contrast" to Cheltenham. The update comes after Ladbrokes posted its first full-year loss in a decade in February after it was hit by investment costs and around 50 million in new online and gaming machine taxes. It slumped to a 43.2 million pre-tax loss in 2015 against profits of 37.7 million in 2014. Full-year results were also knocked by costs of its three-year investment programme to upgrade its UK shops and digital arm. Ladbrokes is attempting to complete a merger with Coral, but the deal still needs to get regulatory clearance and the pair are likely to have to sell shops to achieve the thumbs up from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). On Wednesday, the CMA put back its provisional report on the merger until mid-May. Steve Clayton, head of equity research at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: "Current trading at Ladbrokes is encouraging, but in truth, a little bit of a sideshow in the short term. "The real story here is whether the merger with Coral will be allowed, and for that news we must wait a while longer. If it does go through, the deal could be transformational for the group." Northern Ireland- 27th February 2014 Mandatory Credit - Photo-Jonathan Porter/Presseye. Talks continue at Stormont in east Belfast regarding the recent issue of letters being sent to republicans who were considered to be 'on the run' stating they would not be prosecuted if they returned to the UK. General view of Parliament Buildings at Stormont. Rebel Labour members have said history will judge the party leadership's failure to back election candidates in Northern Ireland and its threats to expel those standing for the Assembly. The eight Stormont candidates are being warned of expulsion after deciding to defy the National Executive Committee (NEC). The NEC pledged to "review" the party's long-standing stance not to contest elections here, but it was not completed before the deadline for candidates to lodge their nomination papers. Northern Ireland branch official Bikash Chudal said: "Labour Party NEC cannot go against around 2,000 members and supporters of the Labour Party in Northern Ireland. "Can anyone believe that the party which is waiting for the next Government of this great nation can be so indecisive? "No, Labour Party NEC and its leaders have no right to be indecisive on Northern Ireland Labour Party issues. History will judge the ability of leadership." A number of candidates - running under the banner of Northern Ireland Labour Representation Committee (NILRC) - have been sent letters warning them they could be kicked out of the party. The party branch in Northern Ireland launched a petition seeking public support and took out an advert in the Belfast Telegraph signed by around 1,000 members and supporters, including Baroness May Blood and former Women's Coalition leader Monica McWilliams. The advert stated: "There are now over 1,700 Labour Party members and registered supporters in Northern Ireland. "Many more help directly fund the Labour Party through trade union contributions. Despite this, members are currently not allowed to stand for election in Northern Ireland." But party general secretary Iain McNichol insisted: "We do not stand candidates in Northern Ireland, and (NI members are) not empowered to reverse this position." He warned the local branch - where membership is said to have more than tripled since Jeremy Corbyn became leader - it is in danger of breaching party rules. "Attempts such as this to force the hand of the NEC are unlikely to be looked upon favourably. The Northern Ireland (branch) does not have the authority to select candidates and must desist from this course of action," he added. Historically, Labour's NEC has regarded the SDLP as its 'sister' party in Northern Ireland and declined to run candidates against it. But Mr Chudal argued: "Who is responsible for this situation? NEC made this problem. Why didn't they give their review decision in time?" The eight NILRC candidates are: Kathryn Johnston, whose late husband Liam Clarke was political editor of the Belfast Telegraph; Peter Dynes; Brigitte Anton; Emma Hutchinson; Maria Lourenco; Abdo Thabeth, Erskine Holmes, Damien Harris. Mike Nesbitt has pledged to place libel reform in the negotiations for a Programme for Government in the next Assembly. The Ulster Unionist leader said it was time to sort out our decades-old legislation. Although the law on defamation was updated in England and Wales in 2013, Stormont stopped the changes coming in here. It has prompted warnings that our unreformed system poses a threat to freedom of speech. Mr Nesbitt said: "I will bring the issue of libel reform to the negotiations on the next Programme for Government and if there is no commitment to address it there, I will bring forward another Private Member's Bill in the next Assembly mandate to sort it out." A previous Private Member's Bill by Mr Nesbitt was blocked in the last Assembly. He referred the matter to the Northern Ireland Law Commission for consultation. It will make recommendations in the next Assembly session. But campaigners warn that without cross-party political support these proposals could be sidelined by a minority of MLAs. Campaigners have mobilised hundreds of people across Northern Ireland to urge libel reform. They are backed by writers, academics and scientists. Sile Lane, campaigns director of Sense About Science, said change was long overdue. "Thousands of citizens in Northern Ireland back the campaign and there is overwhelming public support for libel law reform," she said. "They want doctors to be able to discuss evidence for treatments, consumer magazines to be able to review products and journalists to investigate local issues without fear of being dragged into court if someone doesn't like what they say." Concerns over lack of protection for free speech in Northern Ireland have risen in recent times. Last year Sky Atlantic temporarily pulled a broadcast of Going Clear, an acclaimed Hollywood film about Scientology, across the whole of the UK over fears it could be liable for damages at the High Court in Belfast. For political anoraks, professional and amateur alike, election campaigns are manna from political heaven. Punctuated by even questionable opinion polls, they feed an appetite for news, views and opinion that seems insatiable. Such a feeding frenzy is, of course, encouraged by the condition of both inter-and intra-party dynamics. The current shenanigans within the SDLP in West Tyrone over the candidacy of Daniel McCrossan and the earlier brouhaha in the same neck of the woods concerning Michelle Gildernew's selection as a Sinn Fein Assembly candidate supply plenty of meat and drink for election watchers. By the same token Ruth Patterson's fall-out with the DUP and her decision to contest South Belfast adds particular spice to that inter-unionist battle, as does the more generalised remark by one of the UUP's candidates in Upper Bann, Doug Beattie, that he would "rather stick knitting needles in my eyes than vote DUP". Mr Beattie's stinging rebuke is of particular interest, not because it discloses his own antipathy to a member of the wider and dysfunctional unionist party family, but rather for the response it elicited from the DUP's deputy leader Nigel Dodds. Presenting his party as the chief advocate of an across-the-board pro-Union ticket, Mr Dodds warned of the "dangers of shredding the unionist vote" and conjured up the ultimate horror if his advice went unheeded: "The only way to ensure Sinn Fein does not become the largest party and Martin McGuinness is not elected First Minister is by rallying behind the only unionist party that can win: the DUP." This is by no means the first time that the DUP has brandished this prospect. It was a centrepiece of its last two Assembly campaigns and was renewed by Mr Dodds at the launch of the party's campaign in early April. In his speech on that occasion, he talked of "the chaos that would result without the DUP as the leading party at the heart of the Northern Ireland administration" - adding that the election would "crucially determine who the next First Minister will be". That role, he insisted, is "the public face of Northern Ireland" at home and abroad and "tells the world who we are and what values we hold". It certainly is the case that the prize of nominating the First Minister carries enormous symbolic value, even though the incumbent wields no more nor no less authority than the Deputy First Minister. There is, too, the practical advantage of holding the First Ministership, whereby the incumbent has the first ministerial pick in the d'Hondt-governed process of Executive formation. Depending on the respective seat-strengths of the DUP and Sinn Fein, the outcome of the election will also influence the overall communal balance of the new nine-member Executive, i.e. whether it has a unionist or a nationalist majority, or is equally poised. And, its composition is also contingent on whether the UUP and the SDLP choose to take their ministerial seats around the Executive table, or instead either, or both, decide to exercise the Opposition option, a choice that may also confront the Alliance Party. The final composition of the Executive, including the allocation of departments to the eligible parties, will not however become clear until the conclusion of inter-party negotiations scheduled to take place over a maximum period of 14 days after the election. Those negotiations, designed to achieve an agreed Programme for Government (PfG) will, among other things, clarify which of the "red lines" drawn in advance by the parties have been written in indelible ink, or merely pencilled in. Assuming that the eligible parties can accommodate one another's policy preferences, some of which are mutually contradictory, then it may lead to an uninterrupted period of stable devolved government: at the least, such an outcome will set an agreed course over the next five years. However, never discount the potential for that course to be derailed by events, not the least of which is the possibility of Brexit following the EU referendum in late June, just seven weeks after the Assembly election. The implications of a vote to leave the EU, though welcome to the DUP, will be hugely disruptive for the governance of the UK and a major distraction for all political leaders, including in Northern Ireland. The attendant economic and fiscal uncertainties of Brexit will extend long after the vote itself - certainly far longer than the formal two-year period provided for the disentangling of the UK's existing relationship with the EU - and as likely as not would inspire the SNP to press for a second independence referendum should the Scots vote emphatically in favour of remaining within the Union. In turn that would frighten the unionist horses here, fearful anew about the prospective break-up of the Union. For the time being this is to embark into the realm of speculation but, since this is a diverting pastime, let us speculate further. The planned process of Executive formation and the task of agreeing a PfG outlined above assume that the DUP does emerge as the largest party with Arlene Foster at the helm, and is ready and willing to re-enter another power-sharing Executive. But what if the prime position is secured by Sinn Fein and Martin McGuinness is poised to assume the role of First Minister? What then? While Mr McGuinness has, as before, sought to cushion this prospective blow to unionist sensitivities by proposing that he and Mrs Foster be styled as joint First Ministers - a redesignation that, incidentally, is not in his gift - such an outcome appears unlikely. It would require a surge in support for Sinn Fein, inflicting serious if not terminal injury to the SDLP and a corresponding boost to the UUP's fortunes at the expense of the DUP, bolstered by a fraying of the latter's vote to the benefit of the TUV, Ukip and, perhaps, the PUP. Though this scenario is extremely unlikely it isn't entirely unthinkable. So, if relegated to the runner-up spot, how would the DUP react? More to the point, how should it respond? In such a context it would have two choices: on the one hand, be prepared to nominate Mrs Foster as Deputy First Minister. On the other hand, refuse to nominate her or anyone else to that role. To opt for the latter would risk toppling Northern Ireland into a major political crisis. If, however, it decided to exercise the former option it would assure the restoration of devolution and, more significantly, signal its acceptance of the formal and co-equal nature of Executive leadership. Judging by the DUP's rhetoric to date, however, accepting what it regards as the minor role is, it seems, a step too far for it to take. Yet, in contemplating the alternative, its leadership should pause for very careful thought: party or country? Dr Richard Wilford is Professor of Politics at Queen's University, Belfast A woman has gone on trial accused of murdering her partner with a knife during a drunken row at a south Belfast apartment. The jury at Belfast Crown Court heard that Angeline Sara Jean Mitchell (44), of Lindsay Court, Belfast, has pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility but denies murdering her then partner Anthony Robin on May 11, 2009. Prosecution QC Liam McCollum told the jury of eight women and four men that the couple had returned to Mr Robin's apartment in Fitzroy Avenue off the Ormeau Road with a carry-out of alcohol after spending the afternoon dining and drinking at a nearby hotel. Trial judge Mr Justice Treacy heard that the couple had been in a relationship for three years which was described as "turbulent and volatile" and both consumed a large amount of alcohol during the course of their relationship. Mr McCollum said the 44-year-old deceased had been called away to the home of his former partner Rosena Oliver at nearby Farnham Street around 12.15am on May 11, after their son Anthony Robin jnr was arrested by police over a street disturbance following a heated row with his mother. After his son was taken away in handcuffs by police, Mr Robin returned to his apartment with his other son, Thomas. "At this stage, the defendant and the deceased started arguing over the arrest of his son," said prosecution counsel. "This argument was heated. After some time the defendant left the room followed by the deceased and heated exchanges continued between the two. "They made their way along the landing area and at some stage the defendant went into the kitchen and retrieved a knife. "The defendant then stabbed the deceased. "There were five knife wounds to his body, one of which caused his death, which was a knife wound to the right side of his chest of 20 centimetres in depth." Mr McCollum told the jury that Mr Robin had also suffered two knife wounds to either side of his scalp, one to an area around the back of an ear and a further wound to his back. "The knife that was used was taken from the defendant by other people in the flat. "The pathologist who carried out the post mortem examination states that the fatal wound could have been inflicted by 'medium force'." The court heard that an ambulance was called around 3.30am and paramedics noted on arrival that he "had stopped breathing and his pulse had gone". The jury was told that as Mr Robin was being put into the ambulance, Mitchell is alleged to have said: "He's putting that on." The prosecutor added: "CPR was administered on the way to the hospital, but life was pronounced extinct at 4.10am. "The defendant had earlier been arrested by police at the scene for attempted murder and following his death she was arrested for murder." During police interviews, Mitchell claimed that Mr Robin "had been arguing with a Swedish girl who had just left the flat". She alleged: "I did nothing... oh my God I tried to help him and I am going to get the blame. Oh my God, what you will find about this place." The court heard that during another interview Mitchell claimed that the row had moved between the living room, the hall and the kitchen and that Mr Robin had started to verbally abuse her before knocking her down and squeezing her throat. Later on, she told police that he attacked her with a canoe paddle in the kitchen and she grabbed a knife because she was "scared" and "lashed out" in an attempt to defend herself and to "get him away". Mr McCollum told the jury: "She accepts that she stabbed him, but only because she was attacked. "However, we say that she intended to cause him real serious injury and consequently we say she is guilty of murder." At hearing. The search will soon be on for a company to develop a cable car 'gondola' to ferry visitors up to the heights of the Mournes. The Donard Gondola scheme would carry visitors up into the mountains from the resort of Newcastle. The proposal was made in a tourism roadmap for the area called the South-East Master Plan, published by the Department for Social Development and local councils. Newry, Mourne and Down District Council says the proposal has been approved and the next step is to issue tender documents and identify possible locations. It had been suggested that the gondola would run from Donard Park at the foot of the mountain range to Millstone Quarry or Thomas Mountain Quarry, with a timeframe of five to 10 years. The original plan says: "To fully enjoy the Mournes the visitor must be reasonably fit, be prepared and have sufficient time to complete a trek. "The gondola would provide a facility to enable everyone, including families with young children and disabled users, to access the Mourne Mountains." A cafe may be built at the top of the cable car line. On Monday night, Newry, Mourne and Down Council agreed to press ahead with plans for the exciting development and put the gondola ride at the heart of its new tourism master plan The plan will identify detailed financial costings, with Tourism NI providing the local council with monetary support to produce the new document. Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close The Mourne Mountains. Submitted by Christina Price The Mourne Mountains. Submitted by Jim Fennell unknown Mourne Mountains from Murlough Nature Reserve. Submitted by Barry McQueen Mourne Mountains from Dundrum Castle. Submitted by Barry McQueen Mourne Mountains from Dundrum Beach. Submitted by Barry McQueen Mourne Mountains. Submitted by Chris Lennon Mourne supremacy: The Mourne Mountains in Co Down could be a contender for National Park status Brian Morrison Sheep brave the elements on an exposed hilltop in the Mournes Mark Pearce Bloody bridge in the mourne mountains. Submitted by Alan McDaid Mournes at dusk. The Mourne Mountains from St John's Point. 2012. Submitted by Kelvin Mourne Mountains Ian Gazzard's breathtaking picture of the Mourne Mountains from Slieve Binnian / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The Mourne Mountains. Submitted by Christina Price Council officials say the gondola would give people a chance to see the spectacular landscape of the area from a unique vantage point. A spokesperson for Newry, Mourne and Down Council said: "The next step for the council is to issue appropriate tender documents and appoint a company to deliver the visioning plan for Newcastle and the proposed gondola development. "Potential locations will be identified as part of this visioning plan." Newcastle councillor Willie Clarke said the cable car initiative has the potential to rival any tourist product in Ireland. "I am happy to support the proposal for a master plan for Newcastle with a focus on access into the Mournes and a chair lift to Thomas' Quarry," he said. Councillor Clarke said there are also opportunities to develop the forest at the foot of the Mournes for activity-based tourism projects and the area's industrial heritage needs to be expanded, building on the success of the existing granite trail, which could include providing an open museum on one of the older quarries in the mountain range. A crane hire company from the Republic of Ireland working at a wind farm in Co Fermanagh has pulled out, weeks after staff at an energy firm based at the same site were threatened in a letter containing bullets. East Cork Crane Hire had been operating as a contractor at the Slieve Rushen wind farm on the border between Fermanagh and Cavan. The wind farm, which had belonged to the business empire of fallen tycoon Sean Quinn, is owned by investment fund Platina Partners. A handwritten letter was sent to staff at energy firm Vestas last month warning them to "stay away" from the wind farm or "face the bullet". The letter, which contained three bullets, said it was a "final warning". Another worker at the wind farm was also threatened by a man with a rifle as attempts were made to block access. Days before that the sabotage of a lorry at one of the firm's factories at Ballyconnell Road in Derrylin resulted in 12,000 worth of damage. Aidan Kelleher from East Cork Crane Hire said he was not prepared to put his workers in danger. It is the second company to pull out of the area in as many years after a construction firm backed out of plans to buy a former Quinn Group business following a number of death threats and attacks on its property. And on Tuesday a placard was erected in Derrylin threatening executives who now run one part of the former Quinn Group. And signs appeared at roadsides along the Fermanagh border threatening 'Remove the UDA and UVF off our mountain or face the gun'. It's the second death threat to be aimed at Quinn Industrial Holdings Limited (QIHL) chief Liam McCaffrey within the past month. He has already been told by the PSNI to review his personal safety. Mr McCaffrey's name appears on the signs in Ballyconnell and Derrylin alongside other former Quinn Group executives Kevin Lunney, Tony Lunney and Dara O'Reilly. The PSNI and An Garda Siochana launched a cross-border investigation into the threat made against Mr McCaffrey, who was the chief executive of Quinn Group. The PSNI's Detective Inspector Brian Foster said: "Police are investigating this deplorable act of intimation against members of the local business community. "We would appeal to anyone who observed this sign being erected (to come forward). "We would also like to hear from anyone who noticed any suspicious vehicles or activity in the area. "We continue to work with An Garda Siochana and will investigate any incidents of criminality. "We understand the concerns of the local community and are working with stakeholders to address these." Foreign Affairs Minister Charlie Flanagan warned the Irish border was "a major symbol of normalisation and development in north-south relations" Dublin's Foreign Affairs Minister Charlie Flanagan has clashed with Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers over the future of the Irish border in the event of a Brexit. In the Irish parliament, Mr Flanagan said frontier controls would not be decided by London and Dublin alone if Britain voted to take itself out of the European Union. "The outcome would be the result of a wider negotiation involving all of the EU and therefore no-one can say with certainty that nothing will change with the border if the UK votes to leave," he said. His remarks will be seen as a rebuke to claims by Ms Villiers at the weekend that border arrangements between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland would not have to change in the event of a Brexit. Ms Villiers said the land border would remain as "free-flowing" as it was today because of a special status for Irish citizens in the UK as well as the common travel area which pre-dates EU membership by both countries. The senior Tory minister also attacked suggestions that Brexit could threaten the peace process as "scaremongering of the most irresponsible and dangerous kind". But Mr Flanagan warned the "practically invisible border is a major symbol of normalisation and development in north-south relations". "Any implications for the current border arrangements would only arise if the UK voted to leave and, in that event, their future would depend heavily on the terms and conditions of a new relationship between the UK and the EU," he said. "In other words, the border's destiny would not be determined by the sole wishes of the Irish and British governments." Mr Flanagan was speaking in the Dail, which set aside eight hours to discuss the implications for Ireland if Britain voted to leave the EU in the in/out referendum on June 23. "In the event that the UK voted to leave the EU, customs posts would not of course be set up overnight," he said. "A negotiation period of two years or more would apply. "Ireland would work hard with the UK and with our EU partners to avoid customs posts being established and to preserve the benefits of the common travel area as a whole." Mr Flanagan appealed for Irish people at home and in the UK to get actively involved in the debate over the coming weeks. Michael McGibbon's widow Joanne with their daughters Michaela (left) and Seana at a vigil which was held in Ardoyne on Tuesday night Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Widow Joanne McGibbon joins members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend. The widow of a murdered Belfast taxi driver said she feared the worst when he went out to be shot last Friday night. Michael McGibbon was blasted in the legs three times in a shooting by appointment thought to have been ordered by dissident republicans. He later died in his wife Joanne's arms. She described their last moments together. She told UTV: "I think Michael thought he was going down to have a word with them to sort it out, but yeah, deep down inside, I had a gut feeling what was going to happen. "The only thing I could think of the whole day was: 'I have to save him.'" As her husband prepared to face those who would ultimately take his life, Joanne said: "I just hugged him. I didn't even know how to look at him. The two of us just hugged each other." After he was shot she rushed to his aid. "I tried so hard to save him, but at the end, he spoke to his mummy and he looked up there and he smiled and I knew she was with him." For Joanne, he will always be the bravest man she has ever known. 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 Widow Joanne McGibbon (centre) with her daughters Michaela and Seana and Fr Gary Donegan joins members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend. Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye Michael McGibbon died after being shot by dissident republicans in an alleyway Photopress Belfast Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend. Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye Michael McGibbon and wife Joanne Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend. Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend. Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend. Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Widow Joanne McGibbon joins members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend. Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend. Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend. Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Widow Joanne McGibbon (centre) with her daughter Seana and Fr Gary Donegan joins members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend. Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Seana McGibbon joins members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend. Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Seana McGibbon and joins members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye Pacemaker Press 18/4/2016 The alleyway at Butler Place, Where Michael McGibbon was shot, The PSNI have said his killing carried the hallmarks of a paramilitary murder. A 34-year-old man is still being questioned. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Pacemaker Press 18/4/2016 PSNI officers near the Family Home (of Michael McGibbon) in the Ardoyne area in North Belfast on Monday, As they continue their investigation into the Murder of Michael McGibbon, 33, who died after an attack in an alleyway at Butler Place, with police saying his killing carried the hallmarks of a paramilitary murder. A 34-year-old man is still being questioned. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Pacemaker Press 18/4/2016 The alleyway at Butler Place, Where Michael McGibbon was shot, The PSNI have said his killing carried the hallmarks of a paramilitary murder. A 34-year-old man is still being questioned. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Pacemaker Press 18/4/2016 PSNI officers in the Ardoyne area in North Belfast on Monday, As they continue their investigation into the Murder of Michael McGibbon, 33, who died after an attack in an alleyway at Butler Place, with police saying his killing carried the hallmarks of a paramilitary murder. A 34-year-old man is still being questioned. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Pacemaker Press 18/4/2016 Graffiti near The alleyway at Butler Place, Where Michael McGibbon was shot, The PSNI have said his killing carried the hallmarks of a paramilitary murder. A 34-year-old man is still being questioned. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker PACEMAKER BELFAST 19/04/2016 Joanne McGibbon with her young daughter at the candle light vigil that was held at Holy Cross Church last night in support of her husband Michael who was murdered earlier this week PACEMAKER BELFAST 19/04/2016 Joanne McGibbon with her young daughter at the candle light vigil that was held at Holy Cross Church last night in support of her husband Michael who was murdered earlier this week Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Widow Joanne McGibbon joins members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend. Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend. Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland 19th April 2016 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend. Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Widow Joanne McGibbon (centre) with her daughters Michaela and Seana and Fr Gary Donegan joins members of the public at a vigil in the grounds of Holy Cross Church, Ardoyne, in support of the family of taxi driver and father-of-four Michael McGibbon who was shot dead in North Belfast at the weekend. "I'll remember him as who he was - just a fantastic husband and a fantastic father," she said. "He would have done anything for us and he proved it that night." Mrs McGibbon said the support from across the community had helped her deal with her loss, especially at a vigil on Tuesday night. "It just meant so much to me that the two communities even came together," Joanne said. "If only it could be more like this." She added: "I really hope that something good does come out of this. Our pain will never be away - but I just hope there's some good. "We're all the same - everybody's the same. We all have the same feelings and nobody needs to be fighting and torturing other people. "We're not complicit in this - we're the opposite to this. We're everything that is good and that is the message that we want to send out. 'Not in our name'." Yesterday his family paid tribute to "the best daddy and husband in the world" ahead of his funeral today. His remains will leave his house on the Crumlin Road in north Belfast for a 10am Requiem Mass at Holy Cross Church in Ardoyne. Joanne and their children Seana, Shea, Michaela and Corry-Leigh prepared this tribute: "You will always be remembered by us as the best daddy and husband in the world. You were so brave and strong for us because you loved us so much. "The children and I know how much you loved us and we will love you forever and ever. "You believed as I did that life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass, it's about learning to dance in the rain and as much as I know you hated dancing, I know you'll be dancing with us now. "Rest in peace with your mummy, love. We will be just fine xoxo." Mr McGibbon's father Alex wrote: "You are with your mummy now. Will be dearly missed by your loving father Alex, brothers Gerald and John, sister Mairead and nephew Matthew... Love you forever." His brother Gerald wrote: "To have had and then to part is the cruellest trial of the human heart. The tears in our eyes we can wipe away, but the pain in our hearts remains to stay. Rest in the peace you deserve." It was reported that Mr McGibbon had contacted police last Thursday, frightened for his life after two masked men came to his front door. Police have said they believe a number of other people have had similar visits in recent weeks. A convicted sex offender recently released from jail has been appointed to front a BBC youth talent show, an MP has said. Democratic Unionist Ian Paisley asked ministers if they had questioned corporation bosses about their logic for the appointment, noting the broadcaster had vowed to learn "from the mistakes of the past". Culture Secretary John Whittingdale advised the North Antrim MP to raise any concerns directly with the BBC. Speaking in the Commons, Mr Paisley - the DUP's culture, media, and sport spokesman - told Mr Whittingdale: "The BBC promised us that they were going to learn from the mistakes of the past. "Have you had any opportunity to assess or question the logic of those BBC bosses who have decided to appoint a recently released from jail sex offender to front a prime-time youth talent show on the BBC? "What were they thinking in that appointment?" Mr Whittingdale replied: "I hear what you say. "It is of course a matter of editorial judgment for the BBC but obviously the BBC has a duty to set an example and behave responsibly and I would simply say that I'm sure that the senior editorial management of the BBC will have heard what you have said, and I'd encourage you - if you have concerns - to express them directly to the BBC." The Houses of Parliament will be lit in red, white and blue to celebrate the Queen's 90th Officer Cadets from Tayforth Universities Officer Training Corp (UOTC) carry out a 21-gun royal salute to mark Queen's 90th birthday at Stirling Castle The King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery perform a 41-Gun Royal Salute to mark the Queen's 90th birthday in Hyde Park, central London Gun salutes and bells rang out as celebrations for the Queen's 90th birthday got into full swing across the nation. Military units fired 103 rounds in two traditional salutes as thousands of people gathered in central London to witness the spectacle. First, the King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery, wearing full dress uniform, rode their horses and gun carriages past Buckingham Palace to Hyde Park to stage a 41-gun Royal Salute at midday. The Band of the Royal Artillery played as the 71 groomed horses pulled the six First World War-era 13-pounder field guns into position, before firing blank artillery rounds at precise 10-second intervals. An hour later, the Honourable Artillery Company drove through the city in their liveried Pinzgauer vehicles to the Tower of London, firing a 62-gun salute across the Thames. The bells of Westminster Abbey, where the Queen was married and crowned, also sounded at 1pm. Later, th e Houses of Parliament, where MPs have paid tribute to the monarch, will be illuminated red, white and blue for the special royal anniversary through the night until dawn on Friday. In the evening of her milestone anniversary, the Queen will light a beacon - the first in a chain of more than 1,000 across Britain and the world. The Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall will accompany her. Local authorities around the UK will host lighting events throughout the country to create a network of flames in celebration. Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Two VIPs, both of whom celebrated their 90th birthday on the same day as The Queen (Thursday, 21 April), Albert Moore from East Belfast (left) and Austin Henderson from Stranmillis (right) assist Deputy Lord Mayor Alderman Guy Spence to light the beacon on the front lawn of City Hall. The Belfast tribute was part of a UK-wide beacon lighting programme marking the Royal birthday. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye Handout photo issued by Harrison Photography of a 21 Gun Salute at Hillsborough Castle, Belfast, to celebrate the 90th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II. PA PA Handout photo issued by Harrison Photography of a 21 Gun Salute at Hillsborough Castle, Belfast, to celebrate the 90th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II. PA PA Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 21st April 2016 A mural on Rockview Street in the Village area of south Belfast on the day the Queen celebrates her 90th birthday. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye Pacemaker Press Belfast 21-04-2016: A number of events are being held in Northern Ireland to celebrate the 90th birthday of the Queen. A 21-gun salute took place at Hillsborough Castle and at other venues across the UK at noon. Picture By: Arthur Allison. Pacemaker Press Belfast 21-04-2016: A number of events are being held in Northern Ireland to celebrate the 90th birthday of the Queen. A 21-gun salute took place at Hillsborough Castle and at other venues across the UK at noon. Picture By: Arthur Allison. Pacemaker Press Belfast 21-04-2016: A number of events are being held in Northern Ireland to celebrate the 90th birthday of the Queen. A 21-gun salute took place at Hillsborough Castle and at other venues across the UK at noon. Picture By: Arthur Allison. 21 gun salute at Hillsborough Castle to mark the Queen's 90th birthday. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye 21 gun salute at Hillsborough Castle to mark the Queen's 90th birthday. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye 21 gun salute at Hillsborough Castle to mark the Queen's 90th birthday. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye 21 gun salute at Hillsborough Castle to mark the Queen's 90th birthday. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye 21 gun salute at Hillsborough Castle to mark the Queen's 90th birthday. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye 21 gun salute at Hillsborough Castle to mark the Queen's 90th birthday. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye 21 gun salute at Hillsborough Castle to mark the Queen's 90th birthday. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye 21 gun salute at Hillsborough Castle to mark the Queen's 90th birthday. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye Pacemaker Press Belfast 21-04-2016: A number of events are being held in Northern Ireland to celebrate the 90th birthday of the Queen. A 21-gun salute took place at Hillsborough Castle and at other venues across the UK at noon. Picture By: Arthur Allison. / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Two VIPs, both of whom celebrated their 90th birthday on the same day as The Queen (Thursday, 21 April), Albert Moore from East Belfast (left) and Austin Henderson from Stranmillis (right) assist Deputy Lord Mayor Alderman Guy Spence to light the beacon on the front lawn of City Hall. The Belfast tribute was part of a UK-wide beacon lighting programme marking the Royal birthday. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye The beacons will be specially built gas-fuelled structures, traditional bonfires or braziers on top of a tall wooden post. Members of the Army Cadet Force will be taking beacons to the top of the four highest peaks in the United Kingdom - Ben Nevis in Scotland, Mount Snowdon in Wales, Scafell Pike in England, and Slieve Donard in Northern Ireland. Pageant master Bruno Peek, who was responsible for the Diamond Jubilee beacons, has been overseeing the plans. Heir to the throne Charles has written a message to beacon lighters. "It is a wonderful gesture which I know has deeply touched Her Majesty," he wrote. "Beacons are to be lit on mountaintops, on beaches, in farmyards and on church towers, uniting us all in our heartfelt appreciation of the Queen's lifetime of service to the United Kingdom and other Realms, and to the Commonwealth." There is a long and unbroken tradition of celebrating royal jubilees, weddings, coronations and birthdays in this way. In Edinburgh, a firework display will be staged over the Royal Yacht Britannia. Meanwhile, a chocolate sculpture of Buckingham Palace and a birthday message written on the hair of a corgi were among the more unusual ways people marked the occasion. Chocolatiers at Cadbury World in Birmingham took four days to create the 132lb (60kg), 27.5in (70cm) tall edible model of the palace, complete with gates and chocolate soldiers standing guard. And scientists at the University of Nottingham used a focused ion beam with nanoscale precision to inscribe the words "Happy 90th Birthday Your Majesty" on a single strand of hair from the Queen's favoured dog breed. The letter which was sent from teaching union INTO to its members The crisis at a troubled school in west Belfast has deepened, after the largest teachers' union at De La Salle College instructed members to boycott the principal. A leaked document from the Irish National Teachers' Organisation (INTO) last night revealed that the union has sanctioned teachers to adopt a policy of "non-co-operation" with the under-fire school head, Clare White. Parents - already concerned about how their sons will cope with the impending exam season - have described the move as unprecedented. They are also in the dark over the whereabouts of Ms White, who is said to have been absent for around one week. However, they have expressed relief that teachers will not be taking part in a full-blown strike. The Concerned Parents of De La Salle protest group have also been heartened by the efforts of a new school troubleshooter, associate principal Imelda Jordan, to resolve the long-standing dispute. A statement from the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools said it was aware of the latest development. It said it would "continue to work closely with the trade unions and the school authorities" to continue to implement a "strategy plan" devised recently "and to ensure that any action will not impact on the education of the pupils". The decision to boycott Ms White follows a ballot by INTO - which represents 57 of De La Salle's 70 teachers - for industrial action. Afterwards, the union membership held a meeting at which they "indicated their lack of trust and confidence in the leadership of the school as discharged" by Ms White, according to the leaked letter. It goes on: "The action that they have requested, which has now been sanctioned, is one of non-co-operation or engagement with Ms Clare White, Principal." Expand Close The letter which was sent from teaching union INTO to its members / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The letter which was sent from teaching union INTO to its members The INTO letter, signed by the union's northern secretary Gerry Murphy, states that from Monday, its members are "directed not to undertake any instruction or advice given by Ms Clare White either in oral, written or electronic form". They are also advised not to attend meetings requested by her or any at which she is present. They have also been told "not to undertake any teaching roles if Ms Clare White, Principal, is present or enters their classroom". Staff were further told to deny "any information or data pertaining to their teaching or managerial responsibilities" to her. Kieran McCormick, vice chair of the Concerned Parents group, said he believed the situation was "unprecedented. This situation is total chaos," he said. He claimed that Ms White had been absent from her post for a week without any official reason being given. "Nobody knows where she is," he said. Turning to the INTO letter, leaked anonymously, he said parents were "not very surprised" by its contents, but were happy a strike had been avoided "because that would be catastrophic for the kids". "This is a very strong message," he added. Praising Ms Jordan for the extra resources channelled into the school to try to limit the damage to pupils' education, he said: "There have been improvements; there has been progress made". However, he said that looming exams presented a very anxious time for pupils and their parents. Expand Close De La Salle College has been hit with staffing issues. / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp De La Salle College has been hit with staffing issues. "There is real anxiety ahead of August when the exam results are out and the impact this all may have had on the young people," he said. Last month, De La Salle's head boy Peter Heenan said the dispute had distressed pupils in both "an emotional and educational sense". Difficulties at the school first came to public attention last November, after mass absenteeism by teachers. Relations between staff and management have continued to deteriorate ever since. The Concerned Parents group has demanded a full and independent investigation into the school's management. However, Education Minister John O'Dowd has refused. On Monday, Ms Jordan launched a daily briefing for parents to enhance communication and has also started a homework club to reassure students. Further Reading A sixth person has been arrested over the TalkTalk cyber attack probe A teenager has become the sixth person to be arrested in connection with the alleged data theft from TalkTalk. A 19-year-old man from Staffordshire was arrested on suspicion of computer misuse offences on Wednesday. He handed himself at a police station in the county and has been bailed to a date in late May, Scotland Yard said. Telecoms firm TalkTalk said it was the target of a cyber attack on October 21 last year in which the personal details, bank account numbers and sort codes of thousands of customers were accessed. The five other people arrested in relation to the alleged theft of data includes a 15-year-old boy from County Antrim, Northern Ireland. He was arrested on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act offences on October 26 2015, taken into custody at a County Antrim police station and bailed to return pending further inquiries. A 16-year-old boy was arrested at an address in Feltham on October 29 and is currently on bail until a date in early May. Detectives arrested a 20-year-old man in Staffordshire on October 31 . He returned on bail on April 20 and has been re-bailed to mid-June. On November 3, a 16-year-old boy was arrested in Norwich and is currently on bail until early May. An 18-year-old man was arrested in Llanelli, Wales, on November 24 on suspicion of blackmail. He is on bail until mid-June. The Irish Blood Transfusion Service (IBTS) is to ask the Department of Health to approve its position in June before regulators are asked to give the green light to any changes Health chiefs are expected to advise next month that there is no evidence of increased risk of HIV infections by lifting the ban on blood donations from gay men. The Irish Blood Transfusion Service (IBTS) is to ask the Department of Health to approve its position in June before regulators are asked to give the green light to any changes. A two-day conference in Dublin heard other countries have not recorded any significant increase in risk from HIV or other infectious diseases if the ban is lifted. Sexually active gay and bisexual men are permanently barred from giving blood in Ireland, unlike other countries such as the UK where a one-year deferral period has been in place since 2011. Dr William Murphy, IBTS medical and scientific director, said the board could conclude from evidence that moving to a one-year ban for donations does not lead to increased risk. But he cautioned: "This is a country that does not accept the presence of an incinerator on your doorstep. "We are extremely averse to technological risk, so we have a bit to go yet." The blood donation ban for sexually active gay men came into force in the mid-1980s in an attempt to reduce the risk of HIV infections in blood transfusions. Options being considered for new rules on donations include a five-year deferral period for sexually active gay men, which could potentially reduce to one year. No time frame has been offered for the ban to be lifted. Dr Murphy said Ireland was heralded as a liberal nation after last year's gay marriage referendum but other countries which also maintain the ban on blood donations from gay men are not considered discriminatory. "I don't think it will make a huge difference outside of Ireland (if the ban is lifted)," he said. "Many countries have changed, some have not. Some are going through the process of reviewing the law - Belgium, Germany, Denmark, where bans are in place - but we would not consider them homophobic countries." The IBTS will detail its policy on donations to its board next month before sending it to the Department of Health in June. It may be sent to the Health Products Regulatory Authority (HPRA) for approval before coming into effect. Sir Roger Casement was a humanitarian and a great patriot, President Michael D Higgins has said President Michael D Higgins arrives at Banna Strand in Co Kerry for the Sir Roger Casement commemoration President Michael D Higgins has led a day of commemorations for Sir Roger Casement by describing him as a great Irish patriot and one of the 20th century's great humanitarians. Wreaths were laid at the monument dedicated to his role in the 1916 Rising beside Banna Strand and also at a State ceremony overlooking the sea where the rebel arrived in a German U-boat. Thousands of people attended the event with every vantage point taken on the dunes above the beach. The President said the commemoration was about taking pride in Casement's idealism, his exposure of exploitation by empires and his commitment to the cause of freedom in Ireland and abroad. Mr Higgins said the centenary is a chance to engage with the fundamental questions he raised about power and human rights, the rights of communities and indigenous peoples and foreign policy and international trade rules. "It is only now, despite the pioneering humanitarianism of such as Casement, that the degradation of indigenous peoples has grew into a central issue in human rights discourse," he said. "At the same time, it is in those very regions visited by Casement that we continue to see today the greatest damage to ecosystems and communities - and where, outrageously, once again immunity is being sought by irresponsible but powerful commercial interests in sectors such as logging and mining." Casement was hanged in Pentonville Prison, London, on August 3 1916 after being found guilty of treason. His remains were returned to Ireland in 1965. After years working for Britain's foreign service, and exposing abuses in rubber plantations run by Belgium's King Leopold II in Congo, he was knighted. In 1914 he exposed similar human rights issues in Brazil. At the same time was a member of the Irish Volunteers and helped in the Howth gun running of that year. After spending 18 months in Germany while the First World War raged he travelled on U19 under Captain Raimund Weissbach to rendezvous with The Aud, a ship carrying 20,000 guns to Kerry for the Rising. The link-up did not go as planned and Casement came ashore at Banna with Captain Robert Monteith and Daniel Bailey on Good Friday, April 21. The Aud was intercepted by the British Navy and was scuttled by its captain, Karl Spindler, off Cork. Casement was arrested while holed up in McKenna's Fort near Banna suffering from the affects of malaria. His grandniece Lesley McNaughton laid a wreath in his honour at the monument near Banna before the State ceremony took place. A descendant of Captain Weissbach, Christian Weissbach, accepted an invite to the commemoration. The German and British ambassadors to Ireland, Matthias Hopfner and Dominick Chilcott, also attended. The deaths of Con Keating from Caherciveen, Donal Sheehan from Newcastle West and Charlie Monahan from Belfast on Good Friday 1916 were also remembered at Ballykissane Pier, Killorglin. They drowned in an aborted Irish Republican Brotherhood mission to to seize wireless radio equipment from the Atlantic College in Caherciveen. President Higgins, who laid a wreath at the anchor from the Aud in front of Banna Strand, also opened the country's first major exhibition on Casement at the Kerry County Museum. He described him as a full-blown Irish revolutionary. "Today we must also recall how, in a true Republican spirit, Roger Casement's generous vision for the Ireland of the future was one that included all of the people of Northern Ireland, in the diversity of their beliefs, origins and history," the President said. "This was a vision which Casement recalled in that same speech from the dock, when he said: 'We aimed at uniting the Ulster Volunteers to the cause of United Ireland. We aimed at uniting all Irishmen in a natural and national bond of cohesion based on mutual self-respect'." A tycoon jailed in Britain for stealing mi llions from his business empire is due to be transferred to prison in Turkey. Asil Nadir was convicted in August 2012 of 10 charges of theft amounting to 28.8 million from his Polly Peck International (PPI) business empire in the late 1980s. He was jailed for 10 years after a trial at the Old Bailey, and ordered to pay 5 million in compensation. After repaying the money, as well as 2 million in legal aid, Nadir will now be removed to Turkey "imminently", the Ministry of Justice said. A spokesman said: "It is right that foreign criminals are properly punished but not at the expense of British taxpayers. "This Government is committed to removing foreign criminals to their own countries. "Since Asil Nadir has now repaid the 2m he owed the Legal Aid Agency, plus 5m in compensation he paid earlier, arrangements were made with the Turkish government for his removal as part of our Prisoner Transfer Agreement." The former fugitive fled Britain for his native Northern Cyprus in May 1993 but returned voluntarily in August 2010 to face trial. He had been a wealthy man and had an extravagant lifestyle when he stole millions from his business empire. Following Nadir's conviction of 10 counts of theft from PPI between 1987 and 1990, Judge Mr Justice Holroyde told him: "It seems to me that you already had an extravagant lifestyle as a result of your success in business. "It follows that you were a wealthy man who stole out of pure greed." Four months after his conviction he was ordered, despite his claims that he was penniless, to pay back some of the millions that he stole or face more time behind bars. Birthday wishes have flooded in for the Queen as her 90th birthday celebrations begin today. A letter from the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, the Rt Rev Dr Ian McNie, praised the Queen as "a constant in our time". It read: "On behalf of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, I write on the occasion of Your Majesty's 90th birthday, offering the greetings of the General Assembly and our warmest congratulations." In a message from the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, grand master Edward Stevenson said: "I would like to offer our warmest congratulations to Her Majesty on reaching such a momentous milestone. "Her Majesty's grace, wisdom and charm have endeared the public and an entire nation; none more so than here in Northern Ireland where she is held in the highest of esteem and affection." Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt said: "Her Majesty has been a constant fixture in the life of the nation for many decades. She has been served by 12 Prime Ministers and everyone, whether a royalist or a republican, must surely recognise that this constitutes a phenomenal shift of public service." US President Barack Obama will offer birthday wishes at a lunch with the Queen at Windsor Castle tomorrow. Last month he said he was "glad to be the very first President of the United States to wish a British monarch a happy 90th birthday". He added: "For nine decades Her Majesty has been a source of strength and inspiration, not only for the people of Britain, but for millions around the world." The move followed another visit to Mumbai by Business Secretary Sajid Javid The Government has offered to take a 25% stake in Tata Steel's UK business as part of a package of support worth hundreds of millions of pounds. The money will be made available on commercial terms to potential buyers of the company, the UK and Welsh governments announced. The move was welcomed by industry and union leaders and was viewed as a positive development by sources close to a potential management buyout of the business. Business Secretary Sajid Javid met Tata's chairman Cyrus Mistry in Mumbai on Tuesday where the minister said progress on the sales process had been made. It is expected that all, or the large majority, of the support package, will be through the provision of debt financing. Other options include providing hybrid (convertible debt) or alternative forms of financing and s upporting a purchaser's financing by taking a minority equity stake of up to 25% to support any sale. The Government said it was actively working with Tata Steel and the British Steel Pension Scheme's trustees to find a solution that will help minimise its impact on a potential purchaser, and potentially separate it from the business. Mr Javid said: "This Government is committed to supporting the steel industry to secure a long-term, viable future and we are working closely with Tata Steel UK on its process to find a credible buyer. The detail of our commercial funding offer is clear evidence of the extent of that commitment." First Minister of Wales Carwyn Jones said: "We're committed to supporting any credible bid to secure steel making in Wales. We have worked with the UK Government to put in place this significant package of support and we believe that this will help secure a successful sale of Tata Steel's operations in Wales and the rest of the UK." In addition to the support package, the UK and Welsh governments said they will also be willing to consider additional grant funding support, for example to support the development of power plant infrastructure, energy efficiency and/or environmental protection measures, R&D and training. A management buyout has emerged as a potential saviour of Tata and thousands of jobs which depend on the steel industry. Stuart Wilkie, managing director of Tata's Strip Products, based in Port Talbot in south Wales, has canvassed workers about joining a bid. The investment he is seeking from employees could be as much as 10,000 each, according to sources. Private investors and Government support would also be needed. The Prime Minister's official spokeswoman said the support would come in the form of debt financing. "It would be supporting a potential buyer in order to keep the operation safe. We would work alongside a potential buyer to make sure that the Government is doing what it could to support a viable sale. "If we were to take an extra stake it would be a minority one with the aim of supporting the purchaser in delivering a long term future for the business, we are certainly not seeking to be controlling the company." Asked if it was part-nationalisation, she replied: " I am not sure we would accept the concept of 'part' nationalisation. We will be investing on a commercial basis. We would not see this as nationalisation. We would not be seeking to acquire a control in the business. We don't think that nationalisation is the right answer." Roy Rickhuss, general secretary of the Community union, said: "Today's announcement is a positive step forward. This is a clear commitment to financially assist the UK steel industry as it seeks new ownership. "We welcome the willingness of Government to support debt financing and that they remain open to taking a 25% share in the business." Gareth Stace, director of UK Steel, said: "This is a positive first step which will provide the certainty and continuity that should enable credible investors to come forward and provide a sound future for steel making in the UK." Angela Eagle, shadow business secretary said: "Whether you call this 'co-investment' or part-nationalisation, it is a long-overdue recognition of the need for Government support for the sale process." GMB union national officer Dave Hulse said: "We welcome the announcement that the UK and Welsh Governments are prepared to take a minority equity stake of up to 25%. "This gives us confidence that all credible potential new owners will be encouraged to come forward. "It demonstrates that the Government are ready to support a credible buyer for Tata Steel UK and this would offer finance on commercial terms to support ongoing operations and deliver long-term investment in the business." As many as 3,000 more refugees will be brought to Britain under a new resettlement scheme, the Government has announced. The majority of those arriving over the next four years will be children, with some accompanied by their families or carers. It was billed as the "largest programme in the world" for children from the Middle East and North Africa and is in addition to the commitment to resettle 20,000 Syrians by 2020. However, the move failed to ease pressure on the Government over demands for the UK to give refuge to youngsters who are stranded alone in Europe. Former Labour minister Yvette Cooper said: "This is the same announcement as the Government made back in January and includes nothing new to help the thousands of child refugees alone in Europe who are at risk of trafficking, sexual exploitation and abuse. "As we said at the time, we welcome vital support for children and families at risk in the Middle East and North Africa, but we also cannot turn our backs on the thousands of children who are going missing in Europe because children's homes in Italy and Greece are full, and other countries can't cope with this crisis alone." Lord Dubs, who called for the relocation of 3,000 unaccompanied refugee children to the UK from Europe, welcomed the proposal but vowed to continue pressing the Government for more action. He added: "You also have to wonder whether the use of the '3,000' figure is a deliberate ploy to muddy the debate." The Government described the new scheme as the largest resettlement effort aimed specifically at children at risk from the Middle East and North Africa region. Several hundreds will be resettled over the next year, with up to 3,000 being given refuge over the lifetime of the Parliament. The initiative will not only target unaccompanied children but will be extended to vulnerable children at risk - such as those threatened with child labour, marriage and other forms of abuse or exploitation. It will be open to all at-risk groups and nationalities within the region and will be reviewed after two years. Immigration Minister James Brokenshire said: "The UK Government is committed to providing life-saving support and assistance to the vulnerable children who have been unjustly impacted by this ongoing humanitarian crisis. "We have always been clear that the vast majority of vulnerable children are better off remaining in host countries in the region so they can be reunited with surviving family members. "However, there are exceptional circumstances in which it is in a child's best interests to be resettled in the UK." He said the new scheme complements "ongoing work within Europe to assist vulnerable migrant children". Anne Longfield, Children's Commissioner for England, welcomed the announcement. She added: " Other countries in Europe also need to fulfil their moral and legal responsibilities to child migrants, providing protection and immediate care for children in their countries and helping them to reunite with close family members." David Simmonds, of the Local Government Association, said: "Councils have a strong track record of supporting refugees, including children at risk, travelling alone or those in extended family groups. "It is right that the increased resettlement programme is phased in over time and is subject to review, given the vulnerability of the children councils will be welcoming into their communities. "These new measures must be planned in full partnership with councils and be effectively funded to ensure that services are able to cope with any additional demand and meet children's needs." Over three-quarters of Which? members said they believed it was wrong for retailers not to highlight when products were reduced in size, but continued to be sold at the same price. Over three-quarters of Which? members said they believed it was wrong for retailers not to highlight when products were reduced in size, but continued to be sold at the same price. You may not have noticed, but going to the loo in your own house has become more expensive. That's because the UK's leading toilet roll manufacturer has been caught shortening some of its best-selling products. Indeed, new research from Which? reveals that although a standard four-pack roll of Andrex has shrunk by 8% from 240 to 221 sheets, the price has not, with customers still paying an average of 2. Similarly, the company's Puppies on a Roll brand, that used to have 221 sheets per roll, now has 190 - or 14% less than in 2006, according to the consumer watchdog. But toilet roll is just one of a range of items Which? found had become smaller, with prices remaining the same - or, in some cases, increasing. Other notable examples of shrinking groceries and toiletries include coffee, toothpaste, biscuits, bathroom wipes and orange juice. Which? discovered that McVitie's dark chocolate digestive biscuits had shrunk by 10% from 332g to 300g, but the price in Tesco had risen by 10p to 1.69. It also found that Dettol's pure bathroom wipes saw an 11% reduction from 36 to 32 wipes, however the cost of the product rose by 3p to 2.03 in one supermarket after the change. One of the biggest downsizing manoeuvres was in tubes of Sensodyne's total care extra fresh toothpaste, which shrank by 25% from 100ml to 75ml. The consumer watchdog also found that Tesco had the toothpaste on offer at "2.40, was 3.60" before the product was reduced in size, but then the price soared to 3.49 after downsizing, making it more expensive per 100ml. Richard Headland, the editor of Which? magazine, said its aim was to demand better transparency for consumers from retailers. "Shrinking products can be a sneaky way of increasing prices," he said. "We want manufacturers and supermarkets to be upfront about shrinking products so consumers aren't misled." Over three-quarters of Which? members said they believed it was wrong for retailers not to highlight when products were reduced in size, but continued to be sold at the same price. Which? said that when it contacted the brands following its research the majority of them said that pricing was a matter for the supermarkets. The consumer group added that the manufacturers refused to disclose whether they had charged the supermarkets a lower wholesale price for their smaller products. Kimberly-Clark, the American company that owns the Andrex brand, said its focus was "on meeting and exceeding the needs of consumers". "Before the sheet count change we invested significantly in improving our product strength and softness," said a spokesman. "Reducing the roll by a very small number of sheets helped make this multi-year, multi-million pound investment in product quality possible." Experts said that suppliers tended to cut sizes because they were under pressure to maintain profits to keep shareholders happy and believe, given the choice, customers prefer smaller products to price increases. Holidaymakers lay flowers on Marhaba beach in Sousse, where 38 people were killed in last Fridays terror attack on June 30, 2015 in Sousse, Tunisia. British police have been deployed to the area in one of the biggest counter terror operations since the London bombings on 7 July 2005. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images) Isis is planning to massacre more Western tourists at some of Europe's most popular beaches this summer, according to Italian intelligence reports. The militant network has "concrete plans" for terrorists to pose as people selling ice cream, drinks, souvenirs and T-shirts at popular tourist hotspots in the south of France, Italy and Spain, according to sources cited in German newspaper 'Bild'. It claims terrorists from the Boko Haram group in Nigeria are intent on carrying out attacks at popular beach resorts, such as the massacre of 38 people at the Tunisian resort of Sousse last June which killed three Irish holidaymakers. Athlone couple Larry and Martina Hayes, along with Lorna Carty from Co Meath, were among the victims - 30 of whom were British holidaymakers. They were gunned down by Islamic State terrorist Seifeddine Rezgui, who fired at holidaymakers using a Kalashnikov semi-automatic rifle hidden in a beach umbrella at the Riu Imperial Marhaba Hotel resort. According to the report, members of the terror group and sympathisers from Africa who regularly travel to Europe will be called to take part in the terror campaign. The warning comes from a tip-off from Italian intelligence from what the newspaper described as a "credible source" in Africa. The sickening plot involves terrorists blasting holidaymakers with high-powered automatic weapons at crowded beaches and waterfronts. The plans also involve suicide bombings and detonating explosive devices that have been buried in the sand between sun loungers. Seck Pouye, police chief of the Senegalese town of Saly, told a reporter: "These people travel regularly to Italy and other places with visas and documents. Expand Expand Previous Next Close Laurence and Martina Hayes, from the town of Athlone in Co Westmeath, who died in the terror attack in Sousse, Tunisia (Irish Independent/PA) A book of condolence for husband and wife Laurence and Martina Hayes is signed in Athlone Civic Centre following their deaths in Tunisia / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Laurence and Martina Hayes, from the town of Athlone in Co Westmeath, who died in the terror attack in Sousse, Tunisia (Irish Independent/PA) "They are not illegal, because they are viewed as business people and traders. That is what makes them so dangerous." Pat Dawson, CEO of the Irish Travel Agents' Association, said the threat of terrorist attacks has already had an impact on the European holiday market, and is increasing demand in southern European destinations. Rather than seeing a decrease in bookings from holidaymakers, popular resorts in southern Europe are now filling up fast due to increased demand from Russians and northern Europeans, like Germans and Scandinavians, who would normally spend their summer holidays in Turkey or Egypt. But following the high level of terrorist threats in those countries, they are booking out resorts in France, Spain and Italy this year instead. As a result, Irish tour operators are having a hard time finding reasonably-priced holiday packages because prices have shot up, he told the Irish Independent. "The problem our agents have is getting the right booking at a reasonable price," he said. He added that Irish bookings for summer package holidays are actually up by 12-14pc compared to last summer. "We have had no reports of people wanting to cancel their bookings. The opposite is happening, and people are scrambling to get bookings," he added. Irish Independent Rohingya Muslims carry a body after a boat capsized off the coast in Sittwe, Myanmar. Bangladesh has begun capturing Rohingya and returning them to Myanmar, April 19, 2016. Updated at 6:29 p.m. ET on 2016-04-25 Bangladeshs border guard this month repatriated at least 340 Muslim Myanmar nationals more commonly known as Rohingyas without any resistance from Myanmar border police, the head of the agency said Thursday. Over the last 20 days, we caught illegal Myanmar nationals, photographed them and sent 340 of them back to their homeland, Lt. Col. Imran Ullah Sarker, commander and chief executive officer of the Cox's Bazar Battalion of the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB), told BenarNews. The latest batch of 20 Rohingyas was sent back Wednesday with no obstruction from the BGBs counterpart on the Myanmar side of the border, after these members of the neighboring countys Muslim minority were caught trying to cross into Bangladesh without proper papers, Sarker said. On Saturday, Myanmar disputed Sarkers assertion that Bangladesh had sent back hundreds of Rohingyas without resistance from Myanmars border police. Zaw Htay, spokesman for the Myanmar President's Office, said his office had heard nothing about the case and that his country's border guards would have had no authority to accept Rohingyas without consulting with the president. "The Presidents Office has no knowledge of the case in question," Zaw Htay said in a post on his Facebook page. "To take back over 300 Bengalis without scrutiny, the immigration authorities would need permission from the President's Office and they cannot do it of their own will," the presidential spokesman added, using the term by which Myanmar refers to its Muslim nationals in the western part of the country. "Hence, let it be known that it is not true that over 300 Bengalis were taken back without objection and any security checks," Zaw Htay said. The President's Office could not be reached for clarification on whether he meant the Rohingya were not repatriated at all or whether they were returned after security checks. There was no information about the fate of the 340 people the head of Bangladeshs border guard told BenarNews had been sent back in April. Very unusual The process of catching and sending Rohingyas back to Myanmar has, in fact, been occurring over the past several months, leading to a slight reduction in the number entering Bangladesh, he added. This is very unusual that the Myanmar border police have allowed the Rohingyas in, former Bangladeshi ambassador Ashfaqur Rahman told BenarNews. The Myanmar border guard allows the Rohingya Muslims to go out of the Buddhist- majority Myanmar, but they had been very tough on repatriation as they [label] the Muslim minority as illegal Bangladeshis or illegal Chittagongians, he said. Rahman, a former ambassador to Germany, China and Singapore, served in the 1970s as chief administrative officer in Coxs Bazar, a district in southeastern Bangladesh where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees are now concentrated. The influx of Rohingyas from neighboring Rakhine started in the 70s but swelled in 1992 and 2012, when thousands of Rohingyas spilled across the border to escape from religious violence. Though the number of returnees is very small compared with the huge number of illegal Rohingyas living in Bangladesh, this repatriation is significant. But we have to wait to see whether this happened due to the change of government in Myanmar or for other factors, Rahman added. Rohingyas, who are mostly concentrated in Rakhine, a state in western Myanmar that borders Bangladesh, for many years fled abroad by land and sea to escape from persecution at the hands of Myanmars Buddhist majority. Last year, more than 3,000 Rohingya Muslims and Bangladeshi migrants came ashore in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand after the Thai government imposed a maritime blockade on human-trafficking boats sailing in from the Bay of Bengal. Many were fleeing from Myanmar, where Rohingyas are not recognized as citizens. On Wednesday, the death toll from a boat that capsized off Myanmars coast while carrying Rohingyas rose to more than 20. The accident occurred on Tuesday as the overloaded vessel approached Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine, in rough waters. A softening in Myanmar? Delwar Hossain, a professor of international relations at Dhaka University, told BenarNews that the recent change of government in Myanmar may have softened the attitude of that nations border police. The exit of a military-backed government brings in some hopes among the people. So, the ascendency of Aung San Suu Kyis democratically elected government may have brought some hope among the Rohingyas, though we do not see any significant change in the government policy on them, Hossain said. According to a report in the Myanmar Times that cited information from the U.N.s refugee agency, as many as 500,000 Rohingyas are living in Bangladesh, but their repatriation has been stalled since 2005. Of the total, 30,000 Rohingyas have refugee status and live in two camps in Coxs Bazar. Meanwhile, a survey done by a parliamentary committee in 2013 estimated that more than 300,000 Rohingyas were living illegally in Coxs Bazar, where they live in shantytowns. The Nasaka threatened to kill me Mohammad Hashem, a Rohingya Muslim in his seventies who fled to Coxs Bazar to escape Buddhist attacks on Muslims in 1992, told BenarNews that he would like to return home to Sittwe to see his wife, daughter and grandsons. I tried at least 100 times over the years to see them [in Sittwe]. But the Nasaka threatened to kill me. Instead they sought money from me to push my wife and daughter into Bangladesh, said Hashem, who works as a vendor in Coxs Bazar. Nasaka, Myanmars notorious border patrol force, was replaced in 2013 by the new border police. I would go back if the Moghs (Buddhists) do not torture us, he said. This version adds comments from Myanmar officials. An earlier version misidentified Imran Ullah Sarker as chief executive of the Border Guard Bangladesh. Indonesian President Joko Jokowi Widodo, shown speaking to reporters while campaigning in 2014, was called disappointing by Reporters Without Borders in its 2016 World Press Freedom Index, July 22, 2014. Pinning blame on leaders in Indonesia, India, Thailand, and Malaysia, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) placed those four countries along with Bangladesh in the bottom third among 180 nations evaluated in its 2016 World Press Freedom Index. The index released on Wednesday had Indonesia, at 130, ranked highest among the five Asian nations, followed by India the worlds most populous democracy at 133; Junta-ruled Thailand, at 136; Bangladesh at 144; and Malaysia at 146. The annual index reflects the intensity of the attacks on journalistic freedom and independence by governments, ideologies and private-sector interests during the past year, Paris-based RSF said in releasing the 2016 index. Writing about the Asia-Pacific region, the report specifically cited India and Bangladesh for taking little action in response to violence against journalists and writers. Wherever they work, Indian journalists are exposed to growing violence. As well as frequent verbal and physical violence, attacks by armed groups are on the rise in several states and the local authorities have had little success in reining it in, RSF said in a press release. RSF said there was almost one attack on an Indian journalist each month and four journalists were murdered in 2015, including at least two in connection with their work. The Committee to Protect Journalists identified those Indian reporters killed in four separate incidents last year as freelancers Jagendra Singh and Sandeep Kothari, Aaj Tak reporter Akshay Singh, and TV24 reporter Hemant Yadav. India saw its ranking improve by three spots from last year, yet RSF criticized Prime Minister Narendra Modis apparent indifference on the issue of press freedom. Journalists and bloggers are attacked and anathematized by various religious groups that are quick to take offense. At the same time, it is hard for journalists to cover regions such as Kashmir that are regarded as sensitive by the government, the report said. Modi seems indifferent to these threats and problems, and there is no mechanism for protecting journalists. Instead, in a desire to increase control of media coverage, Modi envisages opening a journalism university run by former propaganda ministry officials, RSF added. Regarding Bangladesh, which moved up two spots to No. 144 on the index, RSF alluded to threats against secular writers or anyone who questioned the official religion. It is a bad idea to criticize the constitution or Islam, the state religion. Journalists and bloggers who refuse to submit to censorship or to censor themselves on these subjects risk life imprisonment or the death penalty, RSFs report said. Last year alone, five secular writers were hacked to death by suspected militants in Bangladesh. Indonesia shows improvement Although Indonesia ranked 130th out of 180 nations and showed significant improvement by moving up eight spots on the index, RSF criticized President Joko Jokowi Widodo for not doing enough to uphold press freedom in his country. Sometimes dubbed the Indonesian Obama, President Joko Widodo has disappointed. His presidency continues to be marked by serious media freedom violations, including lack of access to West Papua, an information black hole, the report said, referring to a restive province on the eastern end of Indonesia. Journalists and fixers trying to work there are liable to be arrested. The problem is compounded by Indonesias visa law, which discriminates against foreign journalists. At the same time, many poorly paid journalists accept bribes in return for positive coverage, RSF said. Thai junta challenged The report also took aim at the military leadership in Thailand, which dropped two spots on the index, to 136. RSF called the junta ubiquitous and all-powerful, claiming it exercised permanent control over journalists and citizen-journalists. Its leader, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha, is given to frequent verbal attacks and even death threats against journalists. He is a new predator of information, the report claimed. In November, RSF published a separate report claiming that the junta had created a reign of terror over the Thai media since seizing power in May 2014. The juntas obsessiveness with peace and order or its use as a pretext, has stripped journalists and independent civil society representatives of the media freedom and freedom of information that they had won at great cost during the previous decade, the November report said. Malaysia crackdown In Malaysia, RSF criticized the countrys leader for ordering police crackdowns on the media amid corruption scandals overshadowing his government. Prime Minister Najib Razak wages a personal war against independent media and does not hesitate to order police raids on newsrooms. These heavy-handed operations often result in arbitrary arrests, the report said. The persecution of outspoken journalists extends to the Internet, where sites such as Sarawak and The Edge have been blocked for reporting alleged corruption involving government officials. Measuring the data In compiling information for its index that gauges press freedom worldwide, RSF devised and distributed a questionnaire to journalists, lawyers and sociologists in the 180 countries. The criteria evaluated in the questionnaire are pluralism, media independence, media environment and self-censorship, legislative framework, transparency, and the quality of the infrastructure that supports the production of news and information, RSF explained. In addition, a team of specialists kept a detailed tally of abuses and violence against journalists and media outlets. Scores are calculated on the basis of the questionnaire responses combined with the data on abuses and violence against journalists. Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha (left) blesses an official during a Thai new years ceremony at Government House in Bangkok, April 12, 2016. The former secretary of a government team negotiating with southern rebels to re-open formal peace talks was removed from his post because of a routine reassignment of duties, Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha told reporters in Bangkok on Thursday. It is a normal reshuffle. He was in the position for many years, and it will not impact peace talks because another person can also do [the job], Prayuth said during a news conference at Government House. The Thai junta chief was referring to Army Lt. Gen. Nakrob Boonbuathong, who was the only member of the Thai team involved since 2013 in efforts to negotiate a peaceful solution to a long-running separatist insurgency in Thailands Deep South. A civilian-led government was in power when peace talks with southern rebels stalled in December 2013, but a military coup led by Prayuth toppled it in May 2014. Prayuths comments came a day after Nakrob confirmed to BenarNews that he was no longer the secretary of the nine-member Thai negotiating team and was being reassigned. Ive been verbally informed that Ive been removed from the post, Nakrob told BenarNews on Wednesday. He said someone else from the team would assume his duties, which involved negotiating details of demands and terms between the Thai side and MARA Patani, an umbrella body representing Deep South rebel groups and factions in Malaysia-brokered discussions aimed at restarting formal peace talks. Informal talks have been underway since last year and another round of these talks between the Thai team and MARA Patani was still expected to take place in Kuala Lumpur sometime next week, officials from both sides told BenarNews. Violence linked to the conflict in the predominantly Muslim and Malay-speaking region has claimed more than 6,500 lives since the insurgency flared up again in 2004. A recent spurt in rebel attacks has killed at least 30 more people over the past two months. One of the rebels main demands, which led to the previous round of talks stalling in 2013, is for Thailands central government to grant autonomy to the Deep South. But at Thursdays news conference, the prime minister bristled when he was asked about whether Thailand might agree to create a special autonomous zone in the southern border region. Dont talk about governance , Prayuth told reporters, adding that the government could provide the region with all of its development needs. ein Google-Unternehmen Google-Dienste anzubieten und zu betreiben Ausfalle zu prufen und Manahmen gegen Spam, Betrug und Missbrauch zu ergreifen Daten zu Zielgruppeninteraktionen und Websitestatistiken zu erheben. 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For Immediate Release, April 21, 2016 Contacts: Jean Su, Center for Biological Diversity, (510) 844-7139, jsu@biologicaldiversity.org Darcey OCallaghan, Food & Water Watch, (202) 683-2523, docallaghan@fwwatch.org Virali Modi-Parekh, Rainforest Action Network (510) 747-8476, virali@ran.org Tim Judson, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, (301) 270-6477, timj@nirs.org Karen Orenstein, Friends of the Earth U.S., (202) 640-8679, korenstein@foe.org Allison Fisher, Public Citizen, (202) 454-5176, afisher@citizen.org Brandon Wu, ActionAid USA, (202) 906-0378, brandon.wu@actionaid.org Katherine Sawyer, Corporate Accountability International, (617) 695-2525, ksawyer@stopcorporateabuse.org Tom Athanasiou, EcoEquity,(510) 859-4864, toma@ecoequity.org Elaine de Leon Ahn, Institute for Policy Studies, (202) 787-5271, elaine@ips-dc.org Obama Administration Urged to Do Fair Share to Fight Climate Crisis U.S. Must Transition to Clean Energy Future, Provide Climate Finance to Developing Nations NEW YORK As Secretary of State John Kerry prepares to celebrate the signing of the Paris climate agreement with other world leaders in New York, public-interest leaders today urged the Obama administration to take immediate, aggressive action in order to give the world a fighting chance to meet the agreements goals. The Paris agreement acknowledges the urgent need to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels to avoid catastrophic climate change, but the greenhouse gas pollution-cutting pledges of signatory countries fall critically short of meeting this goal. The United States has played a major role in the agreements inadequacy. It has refused to do its fair share and take responsibility for the countrys historical contribution to todays global climate emergency. Instead the country has unjustly shifted this burden to the developing nations in the Global South. Along with other developed countries, the United States is also falling far short of providing its fair share of financial support to enable developing countries to take meaningful climate action. To fight the climate crisis, the United States must keep fossil fuels in the ground, undertake a clean-energy revolution, and provide the Global South with the financial and technological assistance demanded by science, equity and justice. Said Kassie Siegel, director of the Center for Biological Diversitys Climate Law Institute: After saying yes to the Paris treaty, President Obama must say no to the fossil fuel industry's plans to drill, mine and frack America into climate chaos. He's got to stop auctioning off public lands to oil companies and take emergency action to halt crude exports. The United States just can't do its fair share to fight global warming unless we keep the vast majority of our dirty oil, coal and natural gas in the ground. The president has just months left to take stronger, bolder action that will protect our climate for generations to come and support America's claim to real climate leadership. The Paris Treaty is largely symbolic and wholly toothless in dealing with the threat of climate change. The only thing that will avert climate catastrophe is swift action on behalf of global leaders to keep fossil fuels in the ground and move decisively towards renewables and increased energy efficiency. False solutions' like market-based schemes and carbon pricing will only keep us using and abusing fossil fuels when what we need is a clean-energy revolution, said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. The Paris agreement acknowledges the urgent need to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, but lacks the clear roadmap the world desperately needs to get us there. Avoiding the worst impacts of climate change is a moral imperative that will require transformational change. We call on President Obama to keep fossil fuels in the ground and provide the regions of the world most impacted by climate change with finance and technology to support a just transition to clean energy, said Amanda Starbuck, program director of Rainforest Action Network. The commitments in the Paris agreement must move beyond symbolic goals to eliminate emissions of greenhouse gases and the use of fossil fuels and other dirty energy sources. We have the tools to power the world 100% with clean, renewable energy, the costs of which are dropping while the environmental and economic costs of fossil fuels and nuclear power are increasingly unsustainable. Secretary Kerry and other global leaders simply need to commit to a carbon-free, nuclear-free path to reducing emissions, said Tim Judson, executive director of Nuclear Information and Resource Service. The pitiful outcome on climate finance must not be lost amidst the euphoria surrounding the signing of the Paris Agreement. Developed countries fell painfully short of their moral and legal obligation to provide money for developing countries to take climate action, in line with what science and justice demand. With the Paris Agreement, the worlds poorest and most vulnerable got the short end of the stick, which is no cause for celebration, said Karen Orenstein, senior analyst at Friends of the Earth U.S. The Paris climate agreement needs to be accompanied by bold and immediate action. In the U.S. we need to knock down the barriers that stand in the way of this mandate starting with defeating obstructionist lawsuits that delay implementation of even the most modest actions to reduce climate disrupting pollutants. Big polluters and their allies need to be put on notice that people and the planet, not corporate profits, drive our leaders decision-making, said David Arkush, climate director of Public Citizens Energy and Climate Program. The Paris Agreement is a breakthrough but not yet a success. Not by a long shot. It marks the end of a long international stalemate, but the emergency mobilization we need is still only a hope. What we know for sure is that the Paris regime is nationally driven. As the wealthiest nation on Earth, the U.S. has the responsibility to lead. We certainly have the capacity, and the technology, to do so. The question now is if we can wrest back control of our democracy, and finally act, said Tom Athanasiou, executive director of EcoEquity. We must be under no illusion that the job is anywhere near complete with the signing of the Paris Agreement. The emissions cuts that all countries committed to in Paris last December, and the money that rich countries have pledged, fall far short of whats needed to protect the lives of the worlds poorest people who are already feeling the impacts of the changing climate. As the worlds leading historical polluter and the worlds wealthiest nation, the Obama administration and the U.S. must make good on the promises we made in Paris, but we also have to do much more than weve currently committed to do, said Brandon Wu, senior policy analyst at ActionAid USA. The U.S. signing the Paris climate agreement is like an addict admitting he has a problem. Its a good first step, but it in no way guarantees the problem is solved. The United States has to break its addiction to fossil fuels, evolve quickly past a dig, burn, dump economy, and harness the clean power innovation emerging from communities across our nation. And, as the wealthiest nation on earth, we must keep the promise made in Paris to move money in support of communities in the global South who are most impacted by, but least responsible for, the unfolding climate crisis. Avoiding the worst consequences of climate change is not just an environmental issue, its a moral imperative, said Janet Redman, climate policy program director at the Institute for Policy Studies. While the Paris Agreement was an historic diplomatic achievement, the true historic moments are to follow when Parties not only implement the agreement, but increase national action and ambition beyond the agreement. In order to ensure this rapid implementation and ambitious action is taken, governments must first eliminate the primary obstacle to progress: the corrosive interference of big polluters like the fossil fuel industry. Only then can we be sure that policy processes hold people and the planet over corporate profits, said Katherine Sawyer, senior international organizer at Corporate Accountability Internationals Kick Big Polluters Out campaign. The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 990,000 members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places. For Immediate Release, April 21, 2016 Contact: Taylor McKinnon, (801) 300-2414, tmckinnon@biologicaldiversity.org Presidential Candidates Asked for Positions on Climate, Public Lands Fossil Fuel Leasing WASHINGTON The Center for Biological Diversity today issued a questionnaire to all major presidential candidates seeking their positions on ending federal fossil fuel leasing on public lands and oceans and asking them to describe other measures they would undertake to combat the climate crisis. The questionnaire asks candidates whether they would support ending new federal fossil fuel leasing on public lands and oceans as one way to address climate change, and, if so, when they would do so. It also asks candidates to describe their other key proposals for addressing the climate crisis. The climate crisis is the most urgent and far-reaching problem of our time, and the American public deserves to hear specific plans from all presidential candidates, said Taylor McKinnon with the Center. The role that Americas public lands and oceans play in fossil fuel development and pollution has become a key point in climate discussions. This is a chance for all our potential presidents to weigh in. Scientific studies show that greenhouse gas pollution must be urgently reduced and at least 80 percent of existing fossil fuels reserves must be kept in the ground in order to keep global warming to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, as agreed to by the United States and nearly 200 other nations in Decembers Paris agreement on climate change. One policy option available to U.S. presidents, as outlined in a 2015 Center for Biological Diversity report titled Grounded, is to stop new federal fossil fuel leasing and subsequent exploration on public lands and oceans. Halting new leasing would remove up to 450 billion tons of greenhouse gases up to half of the potential emissions from remaining fossil fuels in the United States from the global pool of potential pollution. Were eager to hear how presidential candidates from all parties will address climate change, said McKinnon. Its critical that voters be as informed as possible on where candidates stand on the issues, and climate change including the role that Americas public lands and oceans will play is no exception. Download a copy of the questionnaire here. The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 990,000 members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places. Lagos, Nigeria's populous megacity, is undergoing a transformation. Massive infrastructural development and efficient social services have changed the city's image. Lagos, Nigeria An oft-told tale of Lagoss once-notorious traffic jams is that of a taxi passenger stuck in a snarl-up who left the vehicle, wandered into a roadside restaurant to eat, drank a beer, took a nap and returned to the vehicle that had not moved an inch. He reached his destination several hours later. First-time visitors to Lagos about 10 years ago were warned, this is Lagos. That meant that you should not expect help from anyone but brace up for hard times ahead. Fast-forward to 2016 and the traffic congestion, high crime rate, clogged gutters and roads filled with garbage could soon become just a bad dream. These days Lagosians still regale each other with anecdotes of the dystopian city even as positive changes can be seen in Africas most populous city, with 21 million people. These days the greeting Welcome to Lagos portends better news. Transformation foundation The transformation of Lagos started during the tenure of Bola Tinubu, Lagos State governor from 1999 to 2007. Tinubu set forth a rescue operation that his successor, Babatunde Fashola, later continued. There were political and economic benefits for such efforts. Lagos is Nigerias richest state, producing about $90 billion a year in goods and services, making its economy bigger than that of most African countries, including Ghana and Kenya, noted the Economist. A fast-growing population (600,000 people added annually), without commensurate improvements in social services such as housing, water and transportation, had pushed Lagos to the cliffs edge. Manhattan rises offshore There have been impressive infrastructural developments, but the plan to create a new city at the edge of Lagos is probably the most audacious. Dubbed the Manhattan of Africa, Eko Atlantic on Victoria Island consists of 10 million square meters of land reclaimed from the ocean and protected by an 8.5 km seawall. Construction began in 2008, and it consists of seven districts along the oceanfront, including a business district that is expected to host major banks and insurance and oil companies, as well as the Nigerian stock exchange, once construction is fully completed. Lagoss government reduced crime rates by providing logistical support to the police force run by the federal government. It installed closed-circuit television in most parts of the city and established skills acquisition programmes for the area boysyouths, mostly jobless, who extort money from drivers and passengers. It also set up mobile courts to summarily try cases. Oshodi market, located about five miles from Murtala Mohammed International Airport, used to represent the good, the bad and the ugly of Lagos: thousands of people to-ing and fro-ing; a cacophony of voices at the highest decibels; rickety buses meandering through a sea of human beings; pickpockets on the prowl; people fighting at one end, others dancing to loud music at the other end. Currently, most of what used to be Oshodi market has been demolished, to make way for a world-class bus terminus, according to government officials. The place [Oshodi] was harbouring criminals and a number of untoward activities, said Steve Ayorinde, the current Lagos state commissioner for information and strategy, according to the Nigerian newspaper, Vanguard. Fashola himself regards Oshodis transformation as a watershed moment. During his tenure, he often reminded Lagosians that, having transformed Oshodi, there was nothing they couldnt achieve. Lagos is becoming a clean city. Thousands of workers can be seen late every night sweeping the roads and taking away the dirt. An efficient garbage collection service supports the cleaning efforts. More than one million tons of waste was deposited in public landfills in 2015, up from 71,000 tons in 2004. About 72% of Lagos residents currently use a government-regulated waste disposal service; in 2005 only 42% used such a service. Nigerians are generally in disbelief regarding the new Lagos. This is not the Lagos I used to know, reports Sanusi Turay, who manages a private security firm in the city. The new Lagos is a bit of an anomaly, Turay explains, with a tinge of sarcasm. But, honestly, we are very happy things are changing for the better. Just before Tinubu took over as governor in 1999, the BBC reported that the realities of Lagos may thwart Mr Tinubus ambitious plans; the city is collapsing as fast as it grows, disappearing under a mountain of rubbish. But after 15 years of painstaking efforts, that image of Lagos is slowly changing. Fasholas strategy After Tinubu exited, Fasholas strategy was focused on three fronts. First, he solicited citizens support for a new vision of Lagos. The slogan Eko o ni baje (Lagos must not spoil) rallied Lagosians against the status quo. Second, he reformed the tax system, which resulted in an increase in tax revenues to $115 million per month in 2015, up from $3.2 million in 1999. Tax compliance increased to 80%, up from about 30% in 2005. Thirdly, Fashola used the tax revenues to undertake ambitious transportation and sanitation projects, including the creation of a rail network, bus lanes and a waste collection system, as well as massive road rehabilitation. Under the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, Lagos transportation became faster, safer, predictable, relatively cheaper and more comfortable, reported Vanguard. The BRT itself created jobs for 2,500 people. Most of Lagos notoriously old and dangerous commercial buses, called Molues, were replaced by swanky new ones that use designated bus lanes. With support of private operators, the government procured about 1,300 taxicabs to run in the city. In addition, an ambitious multibillion-dollar light rail project that began in 2010 is set to be completed by December of this year. The project consists of seven lines, which, on completion, will further ease Lagos city traffic. The journey is not finished Nowadays Fasholas efforts have won bipartisan praise, a phenomenon rarely seen in Nigeria. Nobel laureate and social critic Wole Soyinka says, Fashola diagnoses the problems and goes at it like a skilled mechanic. There is no finish line in this journey, says Fashola, whose term expired in 2015 and who now oversees Nigerias federal ministries of energy, works and housing. Both he and his predecessor, Tinubu set a high bar. The jury is still out on the current governor Akinwunmi Ambode, who took the reins in May 2015. But for Lagos, the city of the late Afrobeat icon Fela Kuti and the city from which Africas richest person, Aliko Dangote, manages his business empire, the mantra continues to be Eko o ni baje indeed. Source: Africa Renewal The South African Revenue Service (Sars) has done over 100 inspections of "cash and carry" businesses in Gauteng in the past month, it said in a statement on Wednesday. About half of the businesses inspected did not comply with Sars rules regarding registration, filing or payment. "Sars is closing in on those who under declare on their tax liability, both individuals and companies. We encourage all taxpayers to ensure their affairs are in order and they are contributing their fair share towards the cost of running the country." commissioner Tom Moyane said in the statement. The inspections of cash and carry businesses had seen several audit cases concluded, raising tax assessments for the past financial year by more than R600m. "There is a significant risk of under declaration due to poor record keeping and high volumes of cash transactions in this sector," Sars said in its statement. Registrations were now being conducted, with follow-ups on outstanding returns, collection of outstanding debt and further risk profiling for full audits where there was evidence of under declaration and collection of outstanding debt. Astrapak, a manufacturer of plastic packaging material, has no immediate plans to enter other African economies, despite tough operating conditions in SA. Astrapak CEO Robin Moore.Image credit: BDlive Instead, the company, which reported on Wednesday a return to profitability in the 2016 financial year, said it would leverage off expansion plans of major multinational clients who were pursuing growth on the continent. Astrapak exports of its packaging products to Angola have declined in the 12 months to February, as the economy of Africas second-largest oil producer deteriorated with the slump of Brent crude oil. The Angolan operation, however, contributed only marginally to the business. "At this stage, we have no plans of expanding into Africa directly," Astrapak CEO Robin Moore said on Wednesday. "However, we are talking to some of our customers, who are global multinational companies moving into Africa and we would be willing to support their growth there," he said. Astrapak has a number of multiyear contracts with domestic and international customers. It invested a combined R136m in two new contracts in the personal care and fast-moving consumer goods sectors, which should have enhanced earnings further in the current financial year, but did not, due to delays in coming on-stream. The company said optimal volumes and profitability from these contracts would be achieved in the 2017 financial year. Mr Moore said Astrapak had also been positioned on a more profitable path, following the completion of a "rationalisation process". In the year under review, Astrapak had exited the highly competitive flexible packaging and polyethylene terephthalate plastic bottle market, realising gains of R176.6m from the sale of those businesses. Astrapak had shut its Bronkhorstspruit factory in Gauteng, relocating production to KwaZulu-Natal. It would soon also relocate its Johannesburg head office to Durban on the coast. Ian Cruickshanks, chief economist of SAs Institute of Race Relations, raised doubts about whether Astrapak could realise significant gains in the future in the current economic environment. "They operate in a highly competitive market, and there is no economic activity in SA to sustain an advance beyond the initial turnaround," he said on Wednesday. The Basic Conditions of Employment Act sets out some clear, realistic laws governing overtime that all employers must heed. This legislation does a good job of balancing the rights of employees and the needs of businesses to avoid contention between employers and employees. Andrea De Martin 123RF.com Who must be paid overtime? According to a determination from Minister Mildred Oliphant, all employees who earn less than R205,433.30 a year are entitled to be remunerated for overtime worked. In this case, earnings mean gross pay, before deductions but excluding the employer's contributions to worker's retirement fund or medical insurance. Who is excluded? You do not have to remunerate all classes of employees when they put in overtime hours at your request. The following categories of employees are not entitled to overtime pay: Anyone earning more than R205,433.30 a year Senior managers Sales representatives who travel to customers' premises and who regulate their own hours of work Employees who work less than 24 hours a month for you However, if you have agreed to pay your employees overtime in your employment contract, then you must do so or else you will be in breach of contract. How much must you pay for overtime hours? You should pay employees at least 1.5 times the usual rate of pay. Alternatively, with the employee's agreement, you can trade overtime for paid time off on another day. Working on a public holiday is only with the worker's agreement. If he or she is asked to work on a public holiday, remuneration should be paid at least double the rate. Time worked on a public holiday is exchangeable for other paid days off by mutual agreement instead of payment. It is a good idea to write your rate of overtime pay or the agreement to trade overtime for paid leave into your employment contracts. How many hours of overtime can an employee work each week? You should not require - or even permit - workers to work more than three hours overtime a day or 10 hours overtime a week, according to South African labour law. Can you force employees to work overtime? This is a complex question, but the bottom line is that you cannot usually force employees to work overtime, unless there is an agreement to that effect. With an agreement in place, a refusal to work the agreed overtime amounts to misconduct. Put a clause about overtime into all of your employment contracts in case you will need it. The Basic Conditions of Employment Act does offer you some leeway If you have work that must be done immediately, because of circumstances you could not reasonably make provision for and which your team will not be able to complete in their usual hours of work, you can oblige employees to put in the overtime. If they refuse, that could be grounds for disciplinary action. If employees collectively refuse to work agreed overtime, it effectively amounts to industrial action. The HumanKind principle - that 'Creativity has the power to transform human behaviour....' was adopted in 2014, when we merged Owen Kessel with global brand Leo Burnett, but before that, our mantra was 'Do the right thing'. Its one thing to have a driving philosophy, as the stated mantra for your business, but such words will naturally ring hollow if they are not applied to your employees as well as your clients. The philosophy must be applied to the business culture overall. When Vaughan Owen and I co-founded Owen Kessel, we were aware of a few significant issues that needed to fit in with our mantra of doing the right thing. On the surface, they may seem to be disparate elements but ultimately they segue together in the quest to root employees within the right culture, which in turn works to build a successful organisation. For me, these elements are the importance of family, making sure that our employees love their jobs and finding clients that are a fit with the agency. To put it into practical terms, the layers that I work with are as follows: To have a successful business you have to have the best people You have to have a culture that works with your business This must inform your business processes Attracting, keeping staff This may not be revolutionary but to produce the worlds best work, I must have these three things working together in tandem. So how do we attract and then keep the best people? Certainly, acknowledging the importance of family to our employees makes them feel appreciated, valued and understood, while those who enjoy the ins and outs of their work are further inclined to stay. Look at the process and not the outcome, I often tell people, because the outcome takes care of itself if you love the process. Only if you love what you do can you achieve the exceptional, which then informs your culture further. Finally, I believe that finding clients that are a fit with your business philosophy works to keep alive and nurture the sparks of the culture you have worked to define and create. Not only about clients Life which brings with it children, illness, death and divorce happens. I strongly believe that employers need to show empathy during individual crises and, where possible, allow employees the relevant time off to deal with the situation. We also encourage our employees to come to us with their work goals annually, which we agree on together and then to check on progress through the year. We also track against our own cultural imperatives, even when measuring ideas. We ask questions such as, Do you love it? Is it something that you feel right about? In short, we try to care for, nurture and understand the real needs of our employees, both inside and outside the business, so we can help them in tough times, and benefit from them in good ones. Growing operations with clients We have always been keenly aware of the importance of choosing our clients carefully, because they are our future. For example, Amstel was one of our founding clients, for whom we have won a number of awards, and they are still with us after nine years. They believe in our creative philosophy. They are a fit with us, and we with them. Over time, the way we have changed in terms of certain systems and processes has also been largely driven by our clients and their specific needs. We began by adopting a media agnostic approach, and were one of the first to do so. This has now become the standard that everyone talks about. Using Amstel as an example, we began with below the line work, then we moved into above the line and then into digital. We have grown our structures, functions and operations as an agency with our clients because it was the right thing for us to do at the right time. Moving our clients requirements into our decision-making processes became a cultural centre point for the agency. Moving forward As our journey continues, so have our central tenets of doing the right thing, being in partnerships with our clients and co-creating our own futures with our clients. However, we have moved from being focused on doing the right thing to trying to figure out exactly how we go about doing this right thing. We work out what our clients need and then structure ourselves to service them. When you start asking how to do this right thing, you end up in an interesting place. In solving business problems for our clients, we work on including an understanding of the very human side of things to be able to create wonderful work that will affect behaviour of their audiences and customers. By looking towards, and caring deeply about, the human side, we derive insight. When you start unpacking what drives behaviour, you begin to understand that how people behave is a manifestation of their beliefs. In this way, we find out which clients we connect well with. It is not possible to have a purpose without a philosophy that underpins it. At Owen Kessel, it means consistently trying to do the right thing, for both our clients and our employees. In this way, I feel we are significantly more enabled to keep on improving the work that we put out into the world, with, in turn, the great knock-on effect that the love of what we do keeps on growing. A team of men and women in chef's whites will be flying the South African flag when they compete against over 40 nations in the IKA Culinary Olympics in Erfurt, Germany, in October this year. The IKA Culinary Olympics is the oldest and most prestigious global culinary competition; an event that, like the sporting Olympics, takes place only once every four years. The South African National Culinary Team is honoured to participate once again. We have been hard at work for four years, fine-tuning and practicing our Olympic menu to prepare ourselves for one of the toughest challenges on the culinary calendar, explains the manager of South African National Culinary Team, Heinz Brunner of Crown Outsourcing Consultants. The chefs on the South African national culinary team are: Henrico Grobbelaar of Southern Sun The Cullinan Dion Vengatass of Belmond Mount Nelson Hotel Blake Anderson of 3SIXTY and Billy G, Montecasino Kirstin Hellemann of Belmond Mount Nelson Hotel Minette Smith of HTA School of Culinary Art Arno Ralph of Lindt & Sprungli SA The South African National Culinary Team from left are: Arno Ralph (Lindt & Sprungli SA), Kirstin Hellemann (Belmond Mount Nelson), Minette Smith (HTA School of Culinary Art), Dion Vengatass (Belmond Mount Nelson), Henrico Grobbelaar (Southern Sun The Cullinan), and Blake Anderson (3SIXTY and Billy G, Montecasino). Advisors to the team include Chef Garth Shnier, executive chef of Sandton Sun, Sandton Convention Centre and InterContinental Johannesburg Sandton and member of the World Association of Chefs Societies Culinary Guidelines Committee (advisor on competition rules, guidelines, and cold kitchen). Chef David Higgs, chef patron of Marble Restaurant (hot kitchen advisor); and Martin Kobald, owner of ChefMLK School of Cooking (international trends and judging). Follow their journey In the spirit of the wording on the team emblem Masakhane - which means lets build each other the South African National Culinary Team is inviting the nation to follow their journey to the IKA Culinary Olympics on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram under their newly-launched hashtag #SAOlympicChef. A strong show of support and interest on social media by our fellow South Africans and foodies will give our team a tremendous boost towards bringing home the gold. Messages of encouragement should include the hashtag #SAOlympicChef, adds Brunner. The South African National Culinary Team brought back a gold medal in the Hot Kitchen section in 2008 the first gold to be won by South Africa in 16 years. In the same year, the South African National Culinary Team was awarded the official South African team status by the Department of Arts and Cultures Bureau of Heraldry. The 2016 Culinary Olympics will take place from 22 to 25 October in Erfurt, Germany, with about 40 countries competing. The teams will have five-and-a-half hours to prepare their three-course menus to serve 110 people. The South African National Culinary Teams Olympic menu features: Starter: Cape Crayfish Malay poached crayfish, pressed carrot terrine, carrot mayonnaise, and Malay curry sauce. Main Course: Springbok Masakhane pan-roasted loin of springbok, rolled veal sweetbreads, red cabbage and cider puree, savoy cabbage and Boulangere potato. Dessert: Textured Splash of Raspberry, Rose, Coconut and White Chocolate - coconut sand, coconut sorbet, coconut sponge, rose jelly, rose meringue, raspberry mousse, and raspberry jelly. Team SA - White chocolate and coconut mousse, rose gel, coconut sorbet and pulled sugar In mid-March, the South African National Culinary Team prepared their menu for a group of celebrities, media, bloggers and foodies, who continue to share news about the team and their various activities on their different social media platforms. Leading up to the Olympics The teams itinerary leading up to the Olympics in October includes displaying the cold table at Food & Hospitality Africa expo at Gallagher Convention Centre on 3 May, on 20 June the team will be preparing a by-invitation-only dinner for 110, on 18 July the team will be preparing another by-invitation-only dinner for 110 at the Mount Nelson Hotel, and finally, the team practice concentrating on the Cold Table will take place on 19 and 20 September respectively. We are going to the Olympics as proud ambassadors of South Africa and representatives of a great heritage of culinary excellence in this country, says Brunner. We will put in all the necessary hours to do our country proud and were delighted at the growing support we are getting from people within the culinary industry and from the general public. Its inspiring! The South African National Culinary Team will be participating in the IKA Culinary Olympics under the auspices of the South African Chefs Association. Their participation has been made possible through the generous sponsorship of headline sponsor LSC/Imperial, along with partners City Lodge Hotel Group, ChefWorks, Turn n Slice and N1 Restaurant Suppliers. With the release of benchmarking research, conducted by fleet consulting firm Mobilitas in collaboration with Standard Bank Fleet Management, into how well local fleets are managed, the map of the largely uncharted world of fleet management in South Africa becomes a little clearer. Oliver Sved via 123RF The research paints a worrying picture of the state of fleet management in South Africa. More than a third did not have a fleet management policy, let alone one that is fully implemented and reviewed regularly. On the other hand, the research provides, perhaps for the first time, a clear yardstick with which fleets can measure their management standards against their South African peers. A lack of preparedness One of the most striking facts to emerge from the research is just how real the dangers are of the present levels of South African fleet management. The research was conducted in a relatively small but broadly representative sample of 61 fleets, totalling just over 21,000 vehicles. Yet, among them, they reported no fewer than seven deaths over the preceding twelve months, twelve serious injuries and 469 accidents. Against this background, the lack of preparedness in South African fleets that emerges from the research is remarkable. Half of the fleets surveyed were not aware of the international standard for road traffic safety management and more than two-thirds have never conducted road safety awareness training for their drivers. The nature of fleet management The research report provides fascinating insights into the nature of fleet managers in South Africa, hinting at possible underlying causes of much of the problems of the local industry. The research strongly suggests that fleet management in South Africa is mostly a part-time activity. Only 3% of the respondents had fleet management as their only focus. Three-quarters of them devoted less than half of their time to fleet management duties. Most of these part-time fleet managers have as their main duties accounting, human resources management and office administration functions. When asked what their main preoccupations were when it came to their fleet management duties, most respondents said keeping down costs, and preventing fraud. In contrast to this narrow focus, the report argues that internationally there has been a shift away from purely managing vehicle operating cost, towards a more holistic approach to managing vehicle fleets in a sustainable way.The social, environmental and economic impact, not only productivity and profitability, has become the international norm for measuring excellence in business, and no less so for the fleet activities of companies. Excellence in fleet management For this reason, Mobilitas has developed a multi-faceted yardstick to measure fleet management excellence that shines a light onto every dark corner of fleet management, exposing mostly dusty, outdated fleet policy documents or no policy at all. Excellence in fleet management, the researchers propose, has at least four pillars: managing the risks facing the fleet, managing the people who operate the fleet, managing the impact of the fleet on the environment and managing the administrative systems of the fleet. The researchers have developed a scoring system measuring all of these factors, enabling them to rate the overall excellence of a fleet's management, or to benchmark the average level of fleet management in a specific industry or country. The scale they use ranges from Innocent (for those fleets that score less than 10%), Aware (up to 30%), Developmental (up to 50%), Competent (up to 60%), Effective (up to 80%), and Excellent (up to 100%). South African fleet in development While they have found rare examples of local fleets that operate in the Excellent range, the researchers say the average South African fleet operates squarely in the Developmental range, no matter what specific facet of fleet management is measured. The South African industry average score for vehicle management and driver management stands at 35% and comes in only marginally higher for environmental and road traffic safety management at 38% each. In order to arrive at a score, the model measures aspects such as the awareness of the fleet manager of international standards, the existence of policies in the company based on such standards, how often the policies are updated and communicated and the rigour with which the policies are implemented. The "grey fleet" The Fleet Excellence model expands the usual parameters of fleet management further by introducing the concept of grey fleet, those vehicles that do not belong to the company but to its staff who use them for business purposes. According to the research, some 38% of the participating fleets have a grey component. Predictably, given the novelty of the idea that these vehicles actually have to be managed, the scores for grey fleet management came in low. Only 43% of the companies with grey fleets kept a driving licence and vehicle register, only 35% had their grey vehicles insured for business purposes, and a paltry 17% inspected their grey vehicles. It is clear that South African fleet management has a long way to go before it can be described as mature, and getting there is no simple undertaking, but at least now we have a tool to measure our progress, says Dr David Molapo, head of Fleet Management at Standard Bank. In the next chapter of its mission to change the way people travel, Airbnb is rolling out an updated app with a range of new features and launching a global brand campaign to encourage people to change the way they experience the world around them. Don't just go there, live there With over two million homes, Airbnb is already one of the worlds largest accommodation providers - more than 80 million people worldwide have already had a unique experience by staying in someones home when they travel. Having opened the doors to homes around the world, these new developments will go further in helping travellers live like a local in the neighbourhoods around them. The newly updated Airbnb mobile app has personalisation at its heart, created with a brand new design language. The new product includes an innovative matching system designed to understand travellers preferences and then match them with the homes, neighbourhoods and experiences that meet their needs. A new Guidebooks feature will unlock local insights, giving travellers access to millions of insider tips from Airbnbs global community of hosts. Travellers want to experience local Airbnb is also launching its largest brand campaign to date called Live There, designed in response to the growing dissatisfaction and disappointment with standardised tourist offerings that have become the hallmark of modern tourism. In an online poll of US travellers commissioned by Airbnb, it becomes clear how much modern tourism misses the mark when it comes to globe-trotting. Respondents said they felt overwhelmed with the crowds at tourist attractions with people finding it as stressful as going to the dentist (48 percent) or doing their taxes (52 percent). Something is clearly missing from modern tourism as only a quarter (26 percent) of travellers felt their last vacation exceeded their expectations. The number one reason people chose to travel on Airbnb is they want to live like a local. They dont want to be tourists stuck in long lines, fighting the crowds to see the same thing as everyone else, said Brian Chesky, Airbnb co-founder and CEO. Our hosts offer more than just generic hospitality - they welcome travellers from around the world into their communities. Today is the start of an exciting journey to help people not just go somewhere, but truly live there. Bespoke matching Travel is more than just seeing and doing. Its the feeling of truly living somewhere. With this launch, Airbnb has reengineered its search functionality to be more personalised for hosts and guests. When looking for homes, each traveller will see different results based on their unique preferences and the best match to a host. The new app starts a conversation with travellers about their ideal trip and, based on their preferences, Airbnb will reveal the hosts, homes, and neighbourhoods that will give travellers a sense of truly living in a destination. The app is constantly learning and adapting to find out what types of properties a traveller is interested in from cabins to castles, the type of experience they want and will even prompt people with additional filters such as pools, price range, and other suggestions to create the perfect trip. Get to know neighbourhoods The new app features an innovative neighbourhood matching system that will find the right neighbourhood to make any traveller feel like they are living like a local. Launching with 691 neighbourhoods in 23 cities around the globe, Airbnb will showcase the spirit of a neighbourhood through rich photography and content. When booking a trip to London for example, travellers who want to stay with their family somewhere residential might be matched with a neighbourhood like Kensington or, if a traveller is looking for interesting nightlife, the system might match them to Soho or Camden Guidebooks - authentic recommendations To help travellers break free of the limits of cookie-cutter travel, Airbnb is launching Guidebooks, created by Airbnb hosts to showcase local tips on the very best their neighbourhoods have to offer, including the best restaurants and bars, attractions, off the beaten track ideas and more. Instead of checking off a To Do list, Guidebooks help travellers find local gems not only in every city but on every city block. Guidebooks give travellers a passport to local culture, such as how travellers can enjoy the market at the Old Biscuit Mill in Woodstock, Cape Town. Distinct Design The new app is built with a proprietary Design Language System, which simplifies the process of developing features by giving designers ingredients to compose an app interface. The new system creates consistent, yet iconic designs that can enliven apps across all devices. Introducing Live There - Airbnbs largest, global brand campaign Airbnb is also launching its largest brand campaign to date called Live There. The new campaign throws out the notion that people want templated experiences that dull the senses and prevent people from seeing the world with a fresh perspective. Instead, Airbnb will inspire travellers to reimagine what it is to travel, showcasing the authentic and magical experiences made possible through Airbnb and its community of over two million homes. At the heart of the campaign is Airbnbs antidote to commoditised travel, including living in the heart of local neighbourhoods, experiencing the hospitality and local expertise of hosts, and enjoying the comfort of every home. The global campaign launched on 19 April and features :15, :30 and :60 second TV spots, as well as digital, out-of-home, and print creative. The spots will showcase Airbnbs community while contrasting standard tourism with the Airbnb experience and language that suggests that when people head to Paris, they dont just go to Paris, and dont tour Paris, but they instead live in Paris. Jose Dos Santos, the CEO of Cell C, could have burnished his image when he said during a radio interview on leadership that he wanted a woman to succeed him. After all, South African male CEOs seldom strike a blow for gender equality. Image via How South Africa But Dos Santos' comments on online radio station CliffCentral rapidly degenerated when he explained that women managed differently because they had a "bitch switch". He said that Cell C had "good-looking women, clever women and smart women" in senior positions - presumably he could choose from among them for his successor. And in his experience from working on the rest of the continent, African women had a higher tolerance level than men. Women had a "different way of managing, they have a different way of engaging in meetings it creates a different dynamic". Predictably, the comments caused a storm on social media. Dos Santos said that while his comments were taken out of context, he regretted the choice of words. "As a CEO with a strong track record in the empowerment of female employees in SA and in many other African countries that I have worked in, I am saddened that my stance has been taken out of context," he said. "I regret my choice of words which I realise were offensive." In the interview, Dos Santos said 60% of Cell C staff were women. That was up from 42% when he joined the company in 2012. Dos Santos said: "I have seen instances where women do not support each other to get to the top." This was his observation, "and perhaps one of several reasons why women are underrepresented in leadership positions. This is not an environment that was created by women, but one that has been entrenched in the general workplace." Though Dos Santos was widely panned for being sexist, marketing analyst Chris Moerdyk did not agree, blaming the outrage on political correctness. "I find it incredibly sad that today so many critics are so quick to play the sexist card," Moerdyk said. "I truly believe Jose Dos Santos was genuinely being complimentary of the obviously high level of management skills of the modern businesswomen." Cell C sponsors the Miss SA pageant and the Take a Girl Child to Work day. Source: Business Day South Africa will commemorate the 22nd anniversary of the first non-racial, all-inclusive, national election in its history on 27 April 2016. Freedom Day carries many memories and emotions for all citizens. For some it was the culmination of years of struggle for freedom; for others it brought wistfulness for those who would not know this day because they had paid the ultimate price for freedom; for yet others it brought hope, promise and relief. The future was bright; the price had been worth it, the country stood intact. In that moment of our country, the heady, euphoric ones that followed as South Africas democracy was being built and equally those which highlighted the magnitude of the challenges that the new political dispensation had inherited, what always stood out was the great resilience of the South African citizenry. The citizens of this country both the oppressed and the privileged worked to embrace the new texture of South Africa. The citizens of South Africa at the southern-most tip of Africa showed the world the power of forgiveness and tolerance. The citizens of South Africa give the most expression to the South African story. The citizens of this country gave birth to the concept of South Africa as a rainbow nation. It is the citizens of our country who highlighted the depth and width of the South African miracle. It is easy - in a living, evolving democracy one characterised by a multitude of political, socio-economic and cultural challenges to forget the power of citizens as motive forces of change. It is easy to forget that the best agreements and political settlements in the world will have limited, if not, no success without the will of the people to move these agreements and settlements from the pages on which they are written to reality. This is what the citizens of South Africa were able to do move the political settlement beyond rhetoric to reality. This is important because the exercise to build a cohesive nation brand is one that requires all hands on deck. Moreover, it will be this approach that builds the most resilient nation brand. Optimism, pride remains intact As we commemorate 22 years of democracy and freedom, the headlines suggest that we may have moved away from national pride, optimism and hope. Research undertaken by Brand South Africa however suggests that the essence of the South African citizenry its optimism and pride remains intact. According to its National Perceptions Study, pride and patriotism remains an enduring quality with over 80% of 2536 respondents saying they are extremely proud to be South African. With the social cohesion level standing at 76% and an active citizenship level of 61%, the research also shows that South Africans are committed to the country and will work to ensure it is successful. As we commemorate the 22nd year of our democracy, this is something all citizens should embrace, nurture and celebrate. All citizens contribute to the South African nation brand and are critical to building a successful and resilient brand. As long as our citizens remain proud and patriotic, active and committed to building a cohesive South Africa, the country remains on a solid footing. Subscribe to daily business and company news across 19 industries SUBSCRIBE MTN has introduced a new mobile and web app called WebPhone that is an alternative cost-effective way of communication for frequent travellers and those living in the diaspora. The app is ideal for business travelers and those doing business outside the country that make frequent calls back home; and offers the same call rates as local call charges, to any network in Uganda. Users can make calls over the internet either from a PC, laptop, tablet or smartphone, by signing up for a virtual WebPhone number (032), which then becomes the username that is used to sign in to the mobile or PC application. The mobile apps sleek interface offers the user quick access to their phone contacts, as well as the option to make calls using either the WebPhone number (Phone Call) or the number of the SIM used in the mobile device (Regular Call). The benefit of using the WebPhone number while calling from outside Uganda is that it is significantly cheaper than any of the currently available alternatives for making international calls to Uganda, making it a solution for the business traveller. We are pleased to introduce a product that offers convenience to our customers outside Uganda while dramatically reducing the cost of communication. This is in line with our commitment to offer our customers more value on all offers, said the general manager, MTN Business, Reginald Kafeero. Ability to call non-smartphone users While WebPhone relies on the internet, its users have the unprecedented advantage of making calls to people without smartphones. This offers a key difference between WebPhone and other existing Voice over IP (VoIP) apps. With MTN WebPhone you can use the internet to make calls to any Ugandan number from anywhere in the world at local rates, allowing you to spend only as much as you would spend while calling from an MTN fixed line in Uganda, he added. The MTN WebPhone app can be downloaded from http://mtn.co.ug/mtnwebphone and is available for Windows PC, Android and iOS devices. According to the government forces, at least one battalion commander and few other officers were killed on 16 April, while confronting the Arakan Army rebels in the western State of Myanmar. However, the government forces succeeded in confiscating various communication equipments and crude mines from the possession of the banned armed outfit. At least two encounters reported on Saturday from Lawrama mountain locality near Warr New, which is situated in the middle of Rathidaung & Punna Gyunt townships and also from Nat Tharay village near Taw Phyar Chaung, which is located in between Punna Gyun & Kyauk Taw townships. The Arakan Army publicity in-charge Khaing Thu Kha claimed that MajorMyo Minn Tun, temporary battalion commander of LIB 232 based in Sittwewas killed in the encounter. He also added that few more military officers were killed in the battle ground. The Arakan Army had around 100 armed rebels on the frontline area. They were with the mission to establish transit camps at Plet Wa and Kyauk Taw localities in Burma-Bangladesh border areas. The casualty in the government forces indicates that the tension in Arakan would continue for few more months. Chin State Chief Minister Pu Lian Luai said that one of the new Chin State Government's first priorities will be constructing the Chikha to Paletwa Highway to link northern and southern Chin State. He said: "Currently there is no highway in Chin State so our ministry will construct the first highway between the townships of Chikha and Paletwa. After that we will build roads to link villages to the highway." There will also be links connecting the new highway directly to India and Bangladesh. Between Chikka, one of the northern most points in Chin State and Paletwa one of the southernmost points in the state, there are about 400 miles of mountains. The delegation was led by Pu Lian Luai, the newly appointed Chin State Chief Minister. It visited Thantlang Township on 14 and 15 April and visited villages in Falam Township and Rihkhawdar Sub-Township from 16 to 18 April, according to U Shwe Thiau, the Chin Minister of Transport who was also part of the delegation. He said: "We have had field visits to find out the needs of the people and how far we can support them in achieving their needs. The main reasons for meeting people in these areas is to find out the conditions of transportation, electricity, drinking water, education and health. We heard about road transportation, water and electricity [needs] from them. Some of these can be solved directly by our new government, but some cannot be, those we will do step by step for them." When the delegation visited the Falam Sub-Township of Rihkhawdar on the Indo-Myanmar border it was warmly welcomed by representatives of Mizo organisations from the Indian state of Mizoram, which borders Chin State. The delegation also visited the Surbung Airport Project in Falam Townon 19 April. The members of the delegation were: Pu Lian Lua, the Chin State Chief Minister; Pu Zobawi, the Chairman of the Chin State Parliament; Pu Shwe Tiau, the Chin Minister of Transport; Pu Zung Hlei Thang, an MP for Falam Township; Pu Tala He, the Director of State Municipalities; Pi Siami, an MP for Kalaymyo in Sagaing Region; and Pu Lal Thawng Thang, the Minister of Chin Affairs in Sagaing Region. Edited in English by Mark Inkey for BNI The appointment was made during an emergency meeting of DKBA commanders held at Sone See Myaing from 19 to 21 April. Colonel Saw Soe Myint, a DKBA commander who attended the meeting said: The Commander-in-Chief is the former Deputy Commander-in-Chief. This is fixed. The Commander-in-Chief will continue to make things better in line with the directives set down by Phoo Lah Pwe (Saw Lah Pwe). Over 70 military leaders attended the three-day emergency DKBA commanders meeting and they all unanimously agreed to appoint Saw Mo Shay as the new DKBA Commander-in-Chief. Quarter-Master General Saw Isaac from the Karen National Union (KNU) told KIC he believes that the KNU will have no problems carrying out joint tasks with the DKBA after General Saw Mo Shays appointment. Commander Brig-Gen Saw Steel, the DKBA No. 1 Military Operations Commander was also promoted to DKBA Deputy Commander-in-Chief at the commanders meeting. Also discussed at the meeting were military organisation, reforms and the assigning of duties. Translated by Thida Linn Edited in English by Mark Inkey for BNI It looks like you have reached this page in error ... The content you are looking for has either moved, or if you typed in the address there might have been a mistake. If you believe there has been a technical error please let us know. Most Popular Destinations The United States Supreme Court has sided with Arizona's independent board for drawing legislative districts and against the Republicans who challenged the commission's legitimacy. Ironically, the Republican plaintiffs essentially argued that smaller districts have too much power. A unanimous Supreme Court says an Arizona commission did not violate the principle of one-person, one-vote when it redrew the state's legislative districts in a way that created some with more residents than others. The justices on Wednesday rejected a challenge from a group of Republican voters who claimed the state's Independent Redistricting Commission illegally packed GOP voters into some districts while leaving other Democratic-leaning districts with smaller populations. Not coincidentally, the smaller districts are home to large numbers of Hispanic voters. Why is this ironic? Because the shoe is on the other foot. In most cases, commissions controlled by the local GOP create districts drawn along lines of race and class that ultimately benefit Republicans. Republicans are accustomed to disenfranchising poor and minority voters by artificially reducing the amount of influence their district holds. In this particular case, the average difference in population between the new districts created by the independent commission is only 2.2 percent according to the Associated Press. The plaintiffs filed a lawsuit over spilled milk because they're used to getting their way. Gerrymandering is on a bit of a losing streak having lost high-profile cases in Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona. Two state officials and one city official have been charged with various crimes in connection with the poisoning of Flint's water supply. Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette unveiled the charges this morning that target two employees of the state's equivalent of the environmental protection agency and one local city official. Multiple charges were filed by Michigan's attorney general against Mike Glasgow, 40, of Flint, the city's laboratory and water quality supervisor; Mike Prysby, 53, of Bath, a Michigan Department of Environmental Quality official; and Stephen Busch, 40, of DeWitt, the suspended Lansing district coordinator for the DEQs Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance. The charges were authorized by District Judge Tracy Collier-Nix in a Flint courtroom this morning. The charges include felonies of misconduct in office and conspiracy related to tampering with evidence. Among other things, the officials are accused of "manipulating monitoring reports" and in some cases actually removing test samples from official reports. I have mixed feelings about these charges. Theses officials may be indeed be guilty of a crime, but charging low to mid-level managers for what was clearly known at the highest levels of the state government for more than a year before it was discussed publicly is exactly how I suspected this would play out. Public records and emails have clearly shown that the governor's office knew the water was not safe to drink so the idea that these officials are solely responsible for obscuring the threat posed by the water seems like a bit of a stretch. I would not be surprised if those records play a significant role in their legal defense. National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and his Chinese counterpart and State Councillor, Yang Jiechi at the India-China 19th boundary talks in Beijing on Wednesday. Photo: PTI. BEIJING (PTI): India and China on Wednesday agreed to adhere to "peaceful negotiations" to settle the vexed border issue and reach a "fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution", amid negativity over Beijing's blocking of India's bid in the UN to ban Pakistan-based JeM chief Masood Azhar. The decision was taken during the annual 19th round of boundary talks here between National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi to discuss the way forward to resolve the dispute which has bedevilled the relations between the two countries. Both the leaders had an "extensive, deep and candid" discussion on the 3,488 km-long Line of Actual Control (LAC), which remains undemarcated resulting in tensions between the two sides. Both sides agreed to adhere to "peaceful negotiations to settle the boundary question". They will make efforts to reach a "fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution", according to a Chinese Foreign Ministry statement. Besides the border issue, Doval and Yang, the designated Special Representatives, also have a larger mandate to discuss all contentious bilateral, regional and international matters of mutual concern. Welcoming Doval, Yang in his opening remarks at the meeting said: "Your visit fully signifies the importance Indian side attaches to this meeting and the efforts to further promote the strategic partnership between China and India. "China-India relations carry special significance. China stands ready to use this important occasion to have a broad- ranging in-depth and candid discussion with Indian side on the bilateral relations, boundary question, regional and international issues and other issues of shared interest." Doval in his response spoke about the importance of informal talks between him and Yang, saying "not talking from the mind but also from the heart". The statement, carried by state-run Xinhua news agency, said that the two sides will properly manage differences and safeguard peace and tranquility in the border areas so as to create favourable conditions for development of their ties. Both sides shared the view that China-India relations have broad prospects and Beijing and New Delhi have far more common interests than differences. Bilateral ties have entered a new era of comprehensive and rapid development since Chinese President Xi Jinping paid a successful visit to India in 2014 and Prime Minister Narendra Modi travelled to China in 2015, it said. Both sides should implement the important consensus between the leaders, enhance high-level interactions, tap the potential of cooperation, and promote China-India relations to a higher level, it said. The issue of China putting technical hold on India's recent bid to bring about a UN ban on Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) chief Azhar for his involvement in the Pathankot terrorist attack was also said to have figured during the talks. Terming 2015 during which Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited China as a "very positive year" in bilateral ties between the two countries, Doval said: "It started a process about which we feel very satisfied. There has been an improvement in the bilateral exchanges between the two countries in various fields." He also conveyed greetings by Modi to Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang. Barring the opening remarks, officials maintained total secrecy on the proceedings and Doval himself declined to speak to the media. Ahead of the talks, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar - who concluded his visit to China on Wednesday - highlighted India's stand that there should be clarity about the LAC. It was highlighted by Modi both during Xi's visit to India in 2014 and his own trip here last year. But China was averse to accept it and for its part suggested a code of conduct. Last year, Deputy Director General of the Asian Affairs at the Chinese Foreign Ministry Huang Xilian highlighted China's reservation on the clarification of LAC, saying "whatever we do in the border area it should be constructive. That means it should be a building block for the process of negotiations, not a stumbling block." In the meeting with his Chinese counterpart on Monday, Parrikar said clarity over LAC will bring down tensions between the troops on both sides which aggressively patrol the areas to assert their control. "We are insisting it should be done in order to really ensure a very stable border as all the issues take place because of perception," he said. Marking the LAC is "one of the preconditions of smooth border operations. Without that everything goes by perceptions, which has caused problems sometimes", he told the media here. Parrikar also highlighted India's concerns over China's projects in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) especially the USD 46-billion Economic Corridor going through the disputed territory. This issue too reportedly figured in the Doval-Yang talks. On the border dispute, officials on both sides say the protracted boundary talks made progress and that they also made attempts to avert tensions along the disputed border. While China says that the boundary dispute is confined to 2,000 kms, mainly in Arunachal Pradesh in eastern sector which it claims as part of southern Tibet, India asserts that the dispute covered the whole of the LAC including the Aksai Chin occupied by China during the 1962 war. When the Special Representatives were appointed in 2003, the two sides set off a three-stage process. The two countries first reached an agreement on the guiding principles and setting political parameters for the settlement in 2005. Officials say the two sides are currently in the second stage which focusses on working out a framework of settlement to be followed by final step drawing the boundary line based on framework agreement. On the 19th round boundary talks, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said yesterday that "we have been working to resolve territorial disputes through negotiations and consultation. China completely settled territorial disputes with 12 of the 14 land neighbours". Regarding Azhar, India's UN Permanent Representative Syed Akbaruddin spoke of "hidden veto" at a meeting at an open debate in UNSC on 'Threats to International Peace and Security Caused by Terrorist Acts' in New York on April 16, while External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar called for a review of China's decision to strike a common stand against terrorism. For its part, China continued to stick to its stand, saying that its decision is based on facts and fairness. Defending China's stand, Hua said that "we oppose double standard in counter terrorism campaign. We have been dealing with the listing (of terrorists by UN) matter in accordance with the facts and relevant resolutions. "We are also in sound communication with all relevant parties including the Indian side," she said. Significantly Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in his meeting with Parrikar yesterday said disputes should be handled properly and ties with New Delhi to be boosted, state-run China Daily reported Wednesday. China will properly manage disputes while boosting bilateral cooperation with India, making contributions to Asia's economic growth, Li said. Doval is scheduled to call on Li tomorrow which makes it a rare occasion for a Chinese premier to meet two top officials in such short time. Doval and Yang are also reported to have discussed a range of issues including India's concern over USD 46 billion trade deficit with China in about USD 70 billion bilateral trade. A file photo. NEW DEHI (PTI): Most of the hitches in the multi- billion Euro deal for 36 Rafale fighter planes have been addressed and the remaining ones will be cleared in the next meeting of the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), Minister of State for Defence Rao Inderjit Singh said recently. Hoping that the Rafale deal would be inked soon, Indian Air Force Chief Arup Raha said, "It is at a very advanced stage." Singh told reporters here, "I can only tell you this that most of the hitches that were there, have been addressed. A few (remaining) issues will be addressed, when possibly the matter comes up before DAC. They shall be addressed in the next DAC. And thereafter I think the road shall be clear." He was asked as to when the deal is likely to be signed. When the same question was put to Air Chief Marshal Raha on the sidelines of an IAF seminar, he said, "We have seen so many years go past. How can I give an assurance? But it is in a very advanced stage." The junior defence minister brushed aside a suggestion that at least six indigenously made Light Combat Aircraft Tejas can be bought for the price of one Rafale plane, saying both the aircraft were totally different in nature and that IAF needed both. India and France could firm up the order for the purchase of 36 Rafale combat planes as both the countries have managed to narrow down their differences over pricing. The development comes nearly four months after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Francois Hollande signed a memorandum of agreement to purchase 36 Rafale aircraft. The Indian side has been negotiating hard to bring down the price with Parrikar refusing to buckle under pressure even as questions were raised about the delay in signing of the contract. Sources said the price for 36 Rafales, as per the UPA government's tender, keeping the cost escalation and dollar rate in mind, comes to a little over Rs 65,000 crore. This includes the cost involved in making changes India has sought in the aircraft, including Israeli helmet-mounted display and some specific weaponry. "The effort is to bring down the price to less than Euros 8 billion (Rs 59,000 crore)," the sources said. The final deal may be clinched by May-end. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 21/04/2016 (2376 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. A pair of workshops next month aims to provide community members with a greater understanding of Islam and the Muslim culture, as more Syrian refugees are expected to settle in Brandon. The city is organizing a morning session (9 a.m. to noon) and an evening session (6 p.m. to 9 p.m.) on May 11 at Assiniboine Community Colleges east campus. Islamic Social Services Association co-founder Shahina Siddiqui will be the featured speaker. She is a renowned speaker on this topic. Were very fortunate that shes positioned in Winnipeg, said Sandy Trudel, director of economic development. The Province of Manitoba is committed to welcoming 1,500 to 2,000 refugees this year as part of Canadas response to the crisis. One government-sponsored family has settled in Brandon so far, and several more are expected to come to the Wheat City. When we welcome newcomers into the community, our goal is to have them stay long-term, Trudel said. So the best way to achieve that obviously is to ensure that you are able to deliver services to them in the most effective way possible. Siddiqui put on a similar presentation in Brandon last month at a Child and Family Services workshop. The sessions on May 11 are for service providers such as health care, education, justice and family services as well as the general public. Really what its focused on, for lack of a better term its understanding Islam and Muslims 101, Trudel said. Its helping you understand their culture, their religion, what drives them, and then how does that maybe differ from what might be out in the public realm for a variety of other reasons, and helping you then be more effective in how you deliver service to this population. Trudel stressed that pre-registration for the workshops is an absolute must, and spots are filling up quickly. The morning session is nearly full, but there are still openings for the evening session. The presenter likes to make sure that the group is small enough that she can interact with everybody, she said, adding its a first-come, first-serve basis. To register for the training session, email econdev@brandon.ca or call 204-729-2132. jaustin@brandonsun.com Twitter: @jillianaustin Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 21/04/2016 (2376 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Whether the discussion revolved around health on northern reserves or bringing in a provincewide uniform, members of the Manitoba Nurses Union showed passion this week. Nurses from across Manitoba came to the Keystone Centre Tuesday and Wednesday for the MNUs 41st annual general meeting. More than 450 delegates discussed things such as bringing clean water to northern communities, one uniform scrub colour for nurses across the province and contracts. MNU president Sandi Mowat said the unions contract with the province expires March 2017. That means bargaining and bringing issues like mental health care to the table. Samantha Samson/The Brandon Sun Renate McGowan thanks her friends and other nurses for the Yellow Ribbon Award at the 41st annual general meeting of the Manitoba Nurses Union at the Keystone Centre. More than 450 delegates gathered for the last day of the AGM on Wednesday. Mostly, we talk about workload and safe patient care, she said. We also talk about mental health in the workplace. Its become apparent nurses are exposed to mental health issues, predisposed to compassion fatigue. What weve found now is that we need to have more support in the workplace to deal with it, so well lobby for that as well. The bargaining would have happened regardless, but now that the Manitoba Progressive Conservative party is in power, the conversation might be a bit different. Premier-designate Brian Pallister has stated hes not ruling out privatizing health care, which would bring lots of changes to the MNU. Were likely in for some turbulent times, but together were strong, said Cindy Murdoch, Manitoba regional representative from the Canadian Labour Congress. And strong works. Another issue members discussed was raising the wage that licensed practical nurses receive in Manitoba. Right now, Mowat said the difference between a registered nurses wage and a licensed practical nurses wage is around 26 per cent. The argument is LPNs are getting more training and are able to do more, so they should be earning more, too. (An LPNs) scope of practice has increased quite a bit and weve lobbied lots to get them back into acute care facilities, Mowat said. They feel the difference in wage between RNs and LPNs is too wide. There wasnt really a debate, it was all mostly supportive. We as nurses value the work we all do. Once the business was over, certain members of the MNU were given the Yellow Ribbon Award, a recognition of grassroots advocacy in hospitals throughout the province. One of those members was Renate McGowan, a RN from Bethesda Regional Care Facility in Steinbach. Many nurses at that hospital were leaving due to poor management, she said. McGowan, however, decided the nurses were stronger as a group, and inspired many staff members to stay. We all kind of made a pact that wed stick it out, McGowan said. We were losing a lot of nurses and we just pulled together and said lets do this together. I did what everybody wanted, I was just their voice. The nurses who won the Yellow Ribbon Awards were given standing ovations from the crowd. But whether the colour in question is yellow or blue, Mowat said nurses work hard for patient care. Im optimistic well be able to work together, Mowat said of the new government. At the end of the day, we have the same goals. Im hopeful the government of Manitoba will want to advocate for healthy Manitobans and thats what nurses always want to do. ssamson@brandonsun.com Twitter: @samanthassamson Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 21/04/2016 (2376 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Rural Citizens on Patrol programs have formed or re-formed in response to a spurt of thefts and break-ins in recent months. Spruce Plains RCMP Acting Staff Sgt. Mark Morehouse says his region has been hit hard by thieves over the past while. A lot of people are getting fed up and they want to try to help out, said Morehouse, whose area includes Minnedosa, Neepawa and Gladstone. Since last fall, snowmobiles, ATVs, motorcycles and vehicles have been stolen. Sheds and garages have also been broken into. Morehouse said a few groups of thieves may be at work, but police say its not clear yet whether those groups are working together. There have been 13 thefts in Neepawa, nine to 10 in Minnedosa, four to five in the Riding Mountain area and a few near Glenella. In some cases, owners left keys in their vehicle or snowmachine. The good news, Morehouse said, is that Mounties have tracked down some of the stolen goods and made arrests. The Dakota Ojibway Police Service assisted in the investigation. Morehouse said his officers used their own snowmobiles and ATVs to follow the tracks of stolen machines. The tracks of one stolen snowmobile stretched from Minnedosa, to the Rolling River First Nation, and then to the Sandy Bay First Nation where some of the stolen property was found. That included an ATV, snowmobiles, and a pickup truck that had more than $20,000 damage done to it. A couple of Sandy Bay men have been charged with possession of stolen property, Morehouse said, and warrants have been issued for a pair of other suspects. In another case, an RCMP police dog tracked a Portage la Prairie man who was suspected of stealing two ATVs for 14 kilometres to make an arrest. Morehouse said Arden residents, who had seven to eight thefts from their community in one day, are starting a Citizens on Patrol group. Both Eden and Gladstone have revived their programs. Morehouse said things seem quieter now, and hopes the programs will be a deterrent to thieves. With people out there and around, it does help curb some of the actions of the people coming in, he said. Shoal Lake and area has had the same problem, said Yellowhead RCMP Staff Sgt. Bob Chabot. Since Sept. 1, the region has had 19 vehicles stolen, most of them ATVs and snowmobiles. Most of them have been found. Some were located near St. Lazare, two in Lenore, a couple were in Minnedosa, and the majority in particular, snowmobiles and ATVs were in Keeseekoowenin First Nation. Sandy Lake was especially hard hit by snowmobile thefts this year. Vehicles were rummaged through in Strathclair as recently as Tuesday night. Again, keys being left with vehicles is a problem, Chabot said, although some were hotwired. Citizen on Patrol groups are great, Chabot said, but they need to be consistent. At times they tend to fade, only to resurface during crime sprees. The best thing citizens can do is call police immediately when they spot suspicious people and activity. In some of these cases, residents heard a snowmachine being taken in the night, but waited until morning to call police. If people see a suspect, or somethings not right, we encourage them to call us right away, Chabot said, adding police have suspects and hope to lay charges. Its always better just to call us. The rural region around Brandon seems to have been spared from the theft spree, Blue Hills RCMP Cpl. Mike Boychuk said. Carberry and Souris both have COP programs. ihitchen@brandonsun.com Twitter: @IanHitchen Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 21/04/2016 (2376 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. This past February, at a Change of Appointment Ceremony for the 2520 Royal Canadian Army Cadet Corps, Chief Warrant Officer Ryan Jenkins handed his pace-stick to the next Regimental Sergeant Major who would follow in his footsteps in Brandon and Shilos army cadet program. The Neelin High School graduate turned 19 in March, thus aging out of the cadet program. However, Jenkins is about to enter into a new chapter of his life joining the Canadian Forces. Jenkins recently packed his bags for basic training, which began this week at the Canadian Forces Leadership and Recruit School in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec. Betty Froese/For the Sun Chief Warrant Officer Ryan Jenkins (middle) during a field training exercise at CFB Shilo. He is attending the Basic Military Qualification course over 12 weeks to learn the core skills and necessary knowledge to succeed in a military environment. This training emphasizes basic military skills, weapons handling, first aid and ethical values, with a large part of the course focused on fitness training. Upon completion of basic training, Jenkins will head to CFB Gagetown, New Brunswick, to begin his training in combat engineering. Combat engineers have a host of responsibilities, their task being to ensure that troops can live, move and fight on the battlefield. CWO Jenkins has been involved in the cadet program for close to four years, but his decision to join the Canadian Army has been inspired by more than his participation in army cadets. He says he is following in the footsteps of two very important men in his life. My dad was in the military and my great grandfather fought in the Second World War, and its always been an interest of mine ever since I was a kid, Jenkins said. His father served with 3rd Regiment, Royal Canadian Horse Artillery in CFB Shilo, and his great grandfather, Ernest Edward Haggerty, served with the Queens Own Cameron Highlanders of Canada in the Second World War. Betty Froese/For the Sun Jenkins (at right) with map and compass at CFB Shilo during field training. Jenkins attributes his better understanding of the military to the cadet program, as well as developing his skills in mentoring and leadership. The cadet program is challenging but well worth it for what you gain, he said. I originally wanted to join cadets to get the experience. But as time went on it wasnt so much about getting the experience as it was about having loyalty to my corps and fellow cadets. Its about being a good role model. You just have to be what you expect those under you to be. And you need to just be yourself. Jenkins summarizes his role as a senior cadet and Regimental Sergeant Major of his corps, saying that a good leader needs to be relatable and relational. You need to treat others how you would like to be treated, and then lead how you would like to be led. Betty Froese/For the Sun 4- CWO Jenkins with the new Regimental Sergeant Major, WO Evan Dyson (left). The cadet program is a national program for young Canadians aged 12 to 18 who are interested in participating in a variety of fun, challenging and rewarding activities while learning about the sea, army and air activities of the Canadian Forces. Cadets are encouraged to become active, responsible members of their communities and make valuable contributions to Canadian society on a daily basis in terms of environmental, citizenship and community activities. Cadets also learn valuable life and work skills such as teamwork, leadership and citizenship. 2520 RCACC parades every Wednesday evening from 1830hrs to 2100hrs at the Brandon Armoury and at the Multi Purpose Training Facility in CFB Shilo. For more information visit 2520armycadets.com or cadets.ca 2nd Lieut. Betty Froese is the unit public affairs representative for 2520 RCACC 71 Bty RCA Cadets Already have an account? Log in here On March 22, the guest speaker at the Kiwanis Club of Brandon regular meeting was Scott Lancaster, who is with the Canadian Ski Patrol. We need your support! Local journalism needs your support! As we navigate through unprecedented times, our journalists are working harder than ever to bring you the latest local updates to keep you safe and informed. Now, more than ever, we need your support. Starting at $4.99/month you can access your Brandon Sun online and full access to all content as it appears on our website. or call circulation directly at (204) 727-0527. Your pledge helps to ensure we provide the news that matters most to your community! Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 21/04/2016 (2376 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Less than 24 hours after the polls closed on election day, two Manitoba political scientists said Liberal Leader Rana Bokharis days are numbered. Brandon University political scientist Kelly Saunders said the Manitoba Liberal Party squandered a golden opportunity in the 41st general election and will have to take responsibility for the failures by stepping aside. Its hard to get that media attention that you need as a leader if youre not in the house asking questions, Saunders said referencing Bokharis third-place finish in Fort Rouge, where NDP star candidate Wab Kinew won with 36.8 per cent of the vote. Progressive Conservative candidate Audrey Gordon came in second with 26.7 per cent, while Bokhari captured 20.9 percent and the Greens and Manitoba Party split the remaining 15 per cent. A look at the popular vote secured by the winning parties since 1969. The last time a party secured more than 50 per cent of the popular vote was in 1915, when the Liberal Party formed a majority government. She cant even justify a squeaker loss. Theres no question the party will need to rebuild, and it wont be under her leadership. For the interests of her party, she really needs to step down sooner than later. Chris Adams, a political scientist based at St. Pauls College, echoed Saunders comments. Their leader wasnt up to the job, Adams said. She didnt do well locally and she didnt do well provincially. This election held promise for the Liberals, which havent held more than three seats in any election since 1995. When the campaign started, the Grits were projected to win as many as a dozen seats across the province, according to some polls. Campaign blunders and an inexperienced leader proved costly, however, according to Adams, as the Liberals won only three seats and once again failed to gain official party status in the legislature. Despite the challenges, Adams said Greg Selingers decision to step down as the leader of the New Democrats means there will most likely be a byelection in the near future. The Liberals could have a new leader by then one that could challenge for Selingers St. Boniface seat. Selinger captured 42.4 per cent of the vote, PC Mamadou Ka garnered 25.9 per cent and Liberal candidate Alain Landry received 19.4 per cent. With Selinger out of the way, there is a path for the Liberals to win the seat, according to Adams, but it will take a strong, experienced leader. The Liberals have people who wouldnt have entertained the leadership back when Rana applied because the federal and provincial Liberals were nowhere, Adams said. Now, the Liberals have a tiny caucus. A federal party in power in Ottawa. And an NDP that has been decimated. Liberal Cindy Lamoureux, who won Burrows with 46.4 per cent of the vote, has already been mentioned as a possible candidate for leader. Adams said it would be a mistake to promote the 24-year-old Lamoureux following an election where the partys biggest criticism was its lack of experience in the top job. The NDP collapse also signalled the end of an era in Manitoba politics, Adams said. Since 1999, the NDP have racked up majority wins in the province largely based on a connection between the party and the middle class in the seat rich provincial capital. This is the end of the alliance between Gary Doers NDP and the urban middle class in Winnipeg, Adams said, crediting David McLaughlin for running a relatively flawless campaign for the PCs. McLaughlin was the former chief of staff for then-prime minister Brian Mulroney in 1993. Both Adams and Saunders were shocked by the popular vote, which was a landslide for the Tories at 53.7 per cent. You have to go back to 1915, when Liberal Tobias C. Norris won a majority government to find the last popular vote over 50 per cent, according to Adams. Equally as remarkable was the record number of voters who voted for none of the above. More than 4,000 voters declined their ballots, choosing not to support any of the candidates listed, according to Elections Manitobas unofficial results. With approximately 440,000 votes cast, it represented nearly one per cent of the popular vote. We knew there was a large undecided vote heading into the election and I think it really showed that the voters didnt have a high comfort level with the leaders, Saunders said. In 2011, only 440 voters declined their vote, but there was more media attention on the option in this election. As for the Tories, which swept Westman including both seats in Brandon, Saunders is interesting in seeing who will be selected to make up premier-designate Brian Pallisters cabinet. Brandon has done a lot of heavy lifting for the party and weve long advocated for a cabinet post, Saunders said, adding that she believes Brandon West incumbent Reg Helwer will be named to the cabinet. ctweed@brandonsun.com Twitter: @CharlesTweed Lack of support upsets Godon Reaction from the 2016 provincial general election continues to trickle in as some candidates took to social media to thank volunteers and voice their displeasure with the results. Manitoba Party candidate for Arthur-Virden Frank Godon wasnt pleased with his showing in his hometown of Boissevain. On Facebook, Godon said he received 63 out of a possible 718 ballots cast in local polls. The no show NDP got more voted (sic) than I did, he said, referencing NDP Lorne Topolniskis 74 votes in the community. Topolniski was a candidate on paper only for the NDP who didnt run much of campaign in the constituency. Way to support one of your own, Boissevain, Godon said. Maybe I should remember this when I decide where I should spend my money ot support businesses or volunteer in different community events. Godon said it really hurts that less than eight per cent of his total 828 votes came from his hometown. The Brandon Sun Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 21/04/2016 (2376 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. OTTAWA Heres an abridged chronology of the Senate expense scandal at the heart of the Duffy trial: Dec. 22, 2008: Then-prime minister Stephen Harper announces Duffys appointment to the Senate as a representative of Prince Edward Island. Duffy is sworn in the following month. December 2012: Questions are raised about how much time Duffy spends at his declared primary residence in P.E.I., since he claims living expenses for his longtime Ottawa-area home. Dec. 4, 2012: Duffy says he got an email from Nigel Wright, the prime ministers chief of staff, saying it appeared that Duffys residence expenses complied with the rules. Feb. 5, 2013: Reports emerge that Duffy applied for a P.E.I. health card in December 2012 and that he does not receive a resident tax credit for his home on the island. Feb. 8, 2013: Senate hires external auditing firm to review residence claims of Duffy and two other senators. Feb. 11, 2013: Duffy sends email to Wright apparently containing advice from his lawyer. It outlines certain scenarios for repayment of the expenses and the assurances he would require. Feb. 13, 2013: Duffy says he met Harper and Wright after a Conservative caucus meeting. Harper tells Duffy he must repay questioned housing expenses. The prime minister agreed I had not broken the rules but insisted I pay the money back, money I didnt owe, because the Senates rules are, in his words, inexplicable to our base,' Duffy says in an October 2013 speech in the Senate. Feb. 21, 2013: Duffy agrees to follow what he later describes as a PMO-drafted plan to cover up the source of a $90,000 payback to the Senate, including a story that he borrowed the money from RBC. Feb. 22, 2013: Claiming confusion with the rules, Duffy pledges to pay back the expenses. Feb. 27, 2013: Harper says all senators meet the requirement that they live in the area they were appointed to represent. Mar. 26, 2013: $90,172.24 is transferred to Duffys RBC bank account, and his cheque for $90,172.24 is delivered to the Senate. The cheque cleared Duffys bank on Mar. 28. April 19, 2013: Duffy confirms he has repaid more than $90,000 in Senate housing expenses. I have always said that I am a man of my word. In keeping with the commitment I made to Canadians, I can confirm that I repaid these expenses in March 2013. May 8, 2013: In a meeting with people from the Prime Ministers Office, Conservative senators and staff discuss the altering of a committee report on Duffys residency and expenses. Negative language is removed. May 12, 2013: RCMP says it will examine Senate expense claims. May 15, 2013: The PMO confirms a media report that Wright personally footed the bill for Duffys housing expenses because Duffy couldnt make a timely payment. May 16, 2013: The Canadian Press reports that Duffy submitted travel expense claims to the Senate on the same days that he was campaigning for Conservative candidates in 2011 and claiming expenses from them. He resigns from the Conservative caucus. May 19, 2013: Wright announces his resignation as Harpers chief of staff, a move Harper says he accepts with great regret. Wright is replaced in the chief of staffs role by Ray Novak. In October, Harper says Wright was dismissed. May 28, 2013: Senate internal economy committee holds a public meeting to review Duffys travel expenses. Senate finance officials say theyve detected a pattern that concerns them. The committee votes to send the matter to the RCMP. June 13, 2013: The RCMP confirms it has launched a formal investigation into Wrights involvement in the expense scandal. July 5, 2013: Harper is accused of misleading Canadians after repeatedly insisting Wright acted on his own when he gave Duffy $90,000 to reimburse his invalid expense claims. The RCMP says in a court document that Wright told three other senior people in the PMO about the transaction. Oct. 8, 2013: RCMP alleges Duffy awarded $65,000 in Senate contracts to Gerald Donohue, a friend and former TV technician, who did little actual work for the money. Oct. 17, 2013: Claude Carignan, the governments new leader in the Senate, introduces motions to suspend Duffy, Sen. Pamela Wallin and Sen. Patrick Brazeau from the Senate. The motions call for the three to be stripped of their pay, benefits and Senate resources. Oct. 21, 2013: Duffys lawyer, Donald Bayne, alleges Harpers staff and key Conservative senators were behind a scheme to have Duffy take the fall for wrongdoing that they agreed he had not committed. Oct. 22, 2013: In an explosive speech in the Senate, Duffy accuses Harpers office of orchestrating a monstrous fraud aimed at snuffing out controversy over his expenses. Duffy accuses the prime minister of being more interested in appeasing his Conservative base than the truth. Oct. 28, 2013: Duffy delivers another speech, this time saying the Conservative party arranged to cover his $13,560 legal bill. He also casts doubt on whether Wright actually paid the $90,000: I have never seen a cheque from Nigel Wright. Nov. 5, 2013: Senators vote to suspend Brazeau, Duffy and Wallin without pay but with health, dental and life insurance benefits intact for the remainder of the parliamentary session. Jan. 29, 2014: Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau expels the 32 Liberal senators from his caucus in what he calls an effort to reduce partisanship in the upper chamber. He says if he becomes prime minister he would appoint only independent senators, chosen through an open public process. April 15, 2014: RCMP tell Wright he will not face criminal charges. July 17, 2014: Duffy is charged with 31 counts of fraud, breach of trust and bribery. April 7, 2015: The trial begins with Duffy formally pleading not guilty to all charges. Deputy Crown attorney Mark Holmes says Duffy billed the Senate for thousands in secondary residence expenses though he did not live in Prince Edward Island and was just commuting from his Ottawa home. Holmes also says Duffy claimed travel payments for Senate business when he was attending family events. Defence lawyer Donald Bayne says Duffy operated within the often-fuzzy Senate rules. April 15, 2015: Witnesses testify they received payments for various services from Duffy through cheques issued by Maple Ridge Media, a company run by Duffys friend Donohue. April 22, 2015: Court is told that after his appointment to the Senate, Duffy moved quickly to declare a P.E.I. cottage as his primary residence, allowing him to claim more than $80,000 in housing expenses over the years. May 7, 2015: Three Conservative MPs testify they recruited Duffy to speak at fundraising events in their ridings because his star power would help rally the troops. June 9, 2015: Duffys former executive assistant testifies it was common practice in his office to have him sign blank travel expense claims in order to facilitate paperwork. June 16, 2015: A forensic accountant testifies that Duffy was withdrawing more money from his bank account than was deposited, with the difference made up from a line of credit. June 18, 2015: The forensic accountant tracks the $90,000 Wright payment from an American account to a Canadian account, to an Ottawa law firm to Duffys bank account. The Receiver General of Canada then received $90,172.24 from Duffy. Aug. 2, 2015: Harper calls a federal election. With the dissolution of Parliament for the Oct. 19 election, Duffys Senate suspension is no longer in force. Aug. 12, 2015: Trial resumes with Wright starting his testimony. Aug. 16, 2015: Both Trudeau and NDP Leader Tom Mulcair make electoral hay with trial testimony about the $90,000 payment, Harper shrugs it off as old news. Aug. 18, 2015: Testimony that says other PMO staffers knew about Wrights planned payment to Duffy leaves Harper facing repeated grilling on the campaign trail. Aug 21, 2015: Twitter says the Duffy trial is becoming the most tweeted-about election topic. Aug. 26, 2015: Trial adjourns to November. Oct. 19, 2015: Trudeau and the Liberals win a majority government, Harper declares his intention to quit as Conservative leader. Nov. 19, 2015: Duffys friend Donohue testifies he received $65,000 in contracts from Duffy. In turn, he wrote cheques to other Duffy service providers including an intern, a makeup artist and a speechwriter. The Crown called the $65,000 a slush fund. Duffys lawyer said the system was unorthodox, but not criminal. Dec. 8, 2015: Duffy starts to testify in his own defence, beginning with a lengthy account of his life and career. Dec. 17, 2015: Duffy ends six days of testimony and two days of cross-examination and the defence rests its case. Feb. 23, 2016: Crown and defence arguments conclude after two days. April 21, 2016: Duffy cleared of all 31 charges. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 21/04/2016 (2376 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. HAMILTON The former girlfriend of a man facing murder charges in the death of Tim Bosma testified on Thursday that her boyfriend told her it was his friend and co-accused who shot and killed the Hamilton man. Marlena Meneses, one of the Crowns star witnesses, told court her boyfriend, Mark Smich, and his friend, Dellen Millard, picked her up the morning after Bosma disappeared nearly three years ago. They were just really happy, saying they wanted to celebrate, Meneses told court. Dellen Millard (left) and Mark Smich appear in court in front of Justice Andrew J. Goodman in Hamilton, Ont. on Monday, Jan. 18, 2016. The former girlfriend of Smich, facing murder charges in the death of Tim Bosma, says her boyfriend told her that it was his friend - and co-accused Millard - who shot and killed the Hamilton man. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Alexandra Newbould Bosma vanished on May 6, 2013 after taking two strangers for a test drive of the truck he was trying to sell. The Crown alleges Bosma was shot at point-blank range inside his truck and later his body was burned in an animal incinerator. Smich, 28, of Oakville, Ont., and 30-year-old Millard, from Toronto, have pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in Bosmas death. Meneses, 22, said she was watching television with Smich, whom she had been dating for about a year, when Millards name popped up on the screen. The newscast said hed been arrested in connection with Bosmas disappearance. She told jurors she freaked out and asked Smich about Bosma. He told me that Mr. Bosma was gone, gone, said an emotional Meneses. He just said that Dell (Millard) murdered him. Did he say how? asked Crown attorney Craig Fraser. That he shot him, she said. Bosmas widow, Sharlene, broke down in tears in court, as did many other family members. Smich looked straight ahead while Millard stared at his co-accused, looking at him up and down. Fraser asked if she knew what happened to Bosma. I believe (Smich) told me that they burned him. When asked why she didnt go to police, Meneses said she should have I was stupid. Did you ever ask Mr. Smich why Mr. Bosma was shot and killed? Fraser asked. No, she said. I didnt want to know. I didnt want to know anything. Meneses said she continued to plead with Smich to go to police in the days that followed. I said he had to come clean, go to the police because there is a family out there with a missing father and thats not fair and you need to go and give this family the proper closure, she said. The Crown also asked about a gun they allege was hidden inside a toolbox that Smich picked up after Millard had been arrested. He told me that he wrapped it in duct tape and buried it somewhere, she said. Somewhere in a forest. Court has previously heard that police found the shell casing from a bullet in Bosmas truck, along with gunshot residue. Gunshot residue was also found in the toolbox, which police located after Smich was arrested on May 22, 2013. But the toolbox was empty. Meneses also told court that she overheard Smich and Millard talking about stealing a truck in the days before Bosma disappeared. She said she tried to discourage her boyfriend from going through with the theft. I said some things to try to change his mind, Meneses said. But he didnt listen to me. Smich and Millard were close, she said, like brothers. Mark cared for Dellen more than any other person, she said. He was in love with him. Meneses said she was really worried about their plan to steal a truck. She said she spoke to Smich on the phone around 9 p.m. on May 6, 2013, which is the same time court heard that Bosma left his house in rural Hamilton with two men. Smich told her he couldnt talk because he was driving. Meneses said she found that unusual because Smich didnt have a driving license. I was very scared, she said. I knew that they were going to go steal a truck. I didnt know if he got hurt or what was going on. Meneses said Smich and Millard picked her up around 8 a.m. the next morning, and they were both very happy because the mission went well. Meneses later described being arrested alongside Smich on May 22, 2013, saying Smich was emotional, yelling and screaming, telling me not to say anything about what hed told her about Bosma. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 21/04/2016 (2376 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. OTTAWA Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be dragging plenty of baggage to the United Nations on Friday when he joins some 150 other countries in signing the Paris climate accord. A new report from the Conference Board of Canada released Thursday ranks Canada 14th among 16 peer countries when it comes to environmental performance, with only the United States and Australia doing worse. And the parliamentary budget office has crunched the national numbers to find that Canadas emissions of greenhouses gases currently are on track to increase through 2030, with a cost of between one and three per cent of gross domestic product to ratchet emissions down to our existing international commitment. We have lots of work to do, Trudeau acknowledged under questioning Thursday from students at New York University. But that work does not include pulling the plug on expanding Canadian oil production or future pipelines, Trudeau told the students after fielding a question about still putting money into dirty oil sands. Trudeau said he supported the since-rejected Keystone XL oil pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast and he continues to favour oil-and-gas-driven economic growth on the path to a low-carbon future. Do I agree that in the future were going to have to get off fossil fuels? Absolutely, said the prime minister. Is that future tomorrow? No its not. In Canadas here and now, the Conference Board awarded the country a D grade based on nine indicators covering climate change, air pollution, and freshwater management. With 20.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emitted per capita every year, Canadas greenhouse gas emissions are among the highest of its peers, said the report. Most of Canadas provinces ranked poorly in the agency assessment, with only Ontario earning a B grade. Quebec, British Columbia, and P.E.I. were given a C grade, Manitoba scored a D and Saskatchewan, Alberta, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick were rated D-minus. The Conference Board said some of Canadas poor grades can be explained by a large land mass, cold climate and a resource-intensive economy, but the results suggest there is a long way to go towards improving environmental performance. However, Canada did receive an A rating for low-emitting electricity generation. Nearly 80 per cent of Canadas electricity is generated from sources such as hydro and nuclear power, ranking Canada behind only Norway, Switzerland, France and Sweden. These results show that Canada needs to encourage more sustainable consumption, said Conference Board vice-president Louis Theriault. Protecting the environment from damage is not a problem for tomorrow but a challenge for today. The parliament budget office report released Thursday is somewhat more sparing of government efforts. It finds Canadas emissions trend, while rising, isnt on as fast an upward track as Environment Canadas own assessment, mainly because the PBO uses slightly lower economic growth projections to 2030. Canada has committed internationally to cut emissions 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, which the PBO estimates will require cutting 208 million tonnes of carbon dioxide or its equivalents. The cost will be around $100 per tonne, says the report, but those costs can be carried in a growing economy without major economic impacts on Canadian households. One lesson is that faster growth is beneficial, even if it leads to a higher baseline level of emissions. This is because incomes will also be higher to deal with any increased need for abatement, said the PBO report. In that respect, the budget office bolstered Trudeaus contention that oil and gas wealth will help Canadas transition to a low-carbon economy. As Trudeau told the New York University students: Were very much better off doing that from a position of having a capacity to invest and research than doing it by firelight in a cave 100 years from now, when weve reached a collapse. Follow @BCheadle on Twitter Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 21/04/2016 (2376 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. HALIFAX After more than a decade of public pressure over deplorable conditions that include leaky pipes, vermin and undrinkable water, the Nova Scotia government says it will demolish two buildings at Atlantic Canadas largest research hospital. Under a plan announced Thursday, health services will move from two buildings at the aging Victoria General Hospital in Halifax beginning later this year. The Centennial and Victoria buildings will be taken out of service beginning in 2020 and demolished beginning in 2022. The Victoria General has been plagued by heating issues, rodents, bedbugs and floods that have cancelled hundreds of surgeries. The water pipes are fouled by Legionnaires disease and there are regular elevator failures and a lack of air-conditioning. Premier Stephen McNeil fields questions at a news conference in Halifax on Thursday, April 21, 2016. The Nova Scotia government has announced plans to demolish two buildings at a downtown hospital with plans for redevelopment of the aging Victoria General site over the next five to seven years. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan The situation has prompted numerous patient complaints over the years and at least one nurse has described the conditions as like working in a Third World country. Premier Stephen McNeil promised Thursday the entire project would be on budget and on time, but he wouldnt say how much it would cost. It would be inappropriate for me to tell you that now, said McNeil. When we put the design work out, well make sure that (cost) will be part of that and then we will look at financing models to make sure that this facility is paid for and in place. McNeil said he sees the redevelopment as an opportunity for the province to change its health care delivery model. This is not about the last 50 years, its about the next 50 and beyond. Janet Knox, CEO of the Nova Scotia Health Authority, said officials dont want to simply replicate the buildings being replaced. So the work that we are in the midst of involves a number of different locations, some small changes, some major renovations, some new construction, said Knox. She said the redevelopment plan is a complex one involving most of the facilities at the two major sites that comprise the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre. The most complex and specialized services, such as organ transplants, will move from the Victoria General to the nearby Halifax Infirmary site, where designs are underway to add and reconfigure inpatient beds, operating rooms and intensive care units. A new specialized outpatient building will be built near or connected to the Halifax Infirmary and a community outpatient centre will be built at a site to be determined on the outskirts of Halifax for services that dont need to be delivered in a hospital. Officials said there is a need to construct the second building outside of the downtown core because 40 per cent of the people who use the hospital live outside Halifax. The Nova Scotia Cancer Centre at the Victoria General site will be expanded and renovations costing between $132 million and $138 million will continue at the Dartmouth General Hospital, creating four additional operating rooms and 48 beds. Five palliative care beds from the Victoria General will be moved to a planned 10-bed residential hospice in Halifax and its estimated up to 800 surgeries per year could be performed by reopening a second operating room at the Hants Community Hospital in Windsor, N.S. In addition, talks are underway to see if more minor surgeries can be accommodated by the privately-operated clinic Scotia Surgery, where doctors employed by the public system perform orthopedic surgeries three days a week. Officials said the overall project timeline is between five and seven years. McNeil said the project isnt contingent on federal funding and that planners would consider whether public-private partnership funding could be used for certain building aspects of the overall plan. Weve not made a commitment to that, but it will certainly be part of how we look at it, he said. In its budget released earlier this week the government said it would spend $3.7 million on design plans for the replacement work. The QEII complex is the leading research, teaching and surgical care centre in Atlantic Canada and sees almost one million patient visits a year, including nearly 23,000 from New Brunswick, P.E.I., and Newfoundland and Labrador. The hospital is also home to 1,200 active research projects. The Victoria Building was built in 1948 while the Centennial was constructed in 1967. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 21/04/2016 (2376 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. BANFF, Alta. A walking trail fit for a queen in one of Canadas most well-known national parks is Albertas 90th birthday present to the Queen. The Commonwealth Walkway is to be created in the town of Banff in Banff National Park in honour of the monarch reaching the milestone. Shes a wonderful individual, a true leader, and the kind of leadership and approach shes taken toward being a head of state not just for Canada is something we should all be proud of and certainly thats the situation with me, said Bill Fisher, chairman of the Banff-Canmore Community Foundation. The idea came from Alberta Lt.-Gov. Lois Mitchell, who wanted to celebrate the Queens reign and Canadas long-standing role as a member of the Commonwealth. This project also celebrates an important part of our heritage while encouraging current and future generations of Canadians to get outside and enjoy the benefits of walking, Mitchell said in a news release. Fisher said the United Kingdom organization The Outdoor Trust has a goal of creating walkways across all the Commonwealth countries. Banffs Commonwealth Walkway is to feature bilingual bronze plaques along existing trails and at points of significant local interest. The plaques will bear the Queens personal royal cipher and include details about royal connections to the mountain parks and Canadas Commonwealth history in general. On your smartphone you could have an application that you could download, and it would explain the point of interest youre looking at. It could be an historic building, a particular event that took place there. It could be a viewpoint that has a spectacular view, Fisher said. Its really variable from walkway to walkway, but in Banff were quite keen to explore our options of having several walkways that would emanate from a point in downtown Banff. The final route wont be decided until next year. The walkway is to be unveiled in September 2017 as part of events to mark Canadas 150th birthday. By Bill Graveland in Calgary. Follow @BillGraveland on Twitter Opinion Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 21/04/2016 (2376 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Doer is pragmatic. He doesnt want to win debates over public policy, he wants to win elections and implement change on a gradual basis. Political Studies Prof. Paul Thomas One day after Manitobas Progressive Conservative Party swept to a historic victory over Greg Selingers New Democrats, pundits around the country simply were unable to hold back their vitriol against the provinces new premier-designate, Brian Pallister. According to Gary Mason, a Vancouver-based writer with the Globe and Mail, Pallister has a personal image problem that he is going to have to tend to immediately. Mason suggests that Pallister is not the most comfortable or natural politician that has graced the Manitoba legislature, and takes pains to mention that he was caught in a lie in that he was in Costa Rica and not, as he told a Winnipeg Free Press reporter, at a wedding in Alberta. But thats tame, compared to the opening line of a column penned by James Wilt with Vice.com that suggested Manitoba had just voted in the most conservative premier in the country: A very tall 61-year-old man who is afraid of Halloween, lives in a $2-million mansion, and unironically described non-believers as infidel atheists is going to be next premier of Manitoba. OK, so maybe Mr. Pallister does have an image problem. But apparently these blots on the mans personality were not enough to dissuade Manitoba voters, who handed the Brandon University alumnus one of the largest victories in Manitoba history. In fact, the Tory seat count last night 40 matches the record for seats in the Manitoba legislature set more than 100 years go by the Liberal party. Thats a pretty convincing win. And as much as left-wing pundits may be gnashing their teeth this week as a result, Pallister has the mandate to move forward, given to him by Manitobans who were growing tired of the NDP after 17 years in power. But for all those outgoing NDP who were warning of the dire consequences of electing a Tory government with threats of privatization, anti-union action, cuts to health care and a dearth of investment in the economy and in communities, they seem to have misunderstood why they have been shown the door. There was a reason, for example, why former NDP leader Gary Doer remained among one of the most popular leaders in the country for his day. His was a government that was defined by pragmatism rather than ideology. But that very pragmatism a useful and sustainable political tool all but vanished when Greg Selinger took over the party machinery in 2009. Its a philosophy that has also found favour from other recently elected governments Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Alberta NDP Premier Rachel Notley have both come out as obvious pragmatists in their governing style. And while Pallister is decried as a far right leader who learned his tricks of the trade under former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, we suggest Manitobas premier-designate already has his eye on the next provincial election. If he is to be more than a one-term premier, Pallister will have to govern from a more moderate standpoint, no matter his personal feelings or political leanings. For nearly 17 years, the Tories were shut out of power because they could not make inroads into Fortress Winnipeg, and voters who rejected a right-of-centre party and favoured a more socialist one. Looking now at a map of Manitoba constituencies, Pallister and his team made huge inroads into Winnipeg, leaving the NDP mostly taking up the capitol citys downtown, plus Flin Flon and The Pas. In order to keep these two dichotomies rural and urban from working at odds with each other, it will require some finesse. This is no time for the Tories to adhere to strict ideology. Should pragmatism rule Pallisters government, he may well be in power for several years. If not, it will be a short honeymoon. A new report has warned that the rising cost of doing business in Ireland could damage our recovery. The Costs of Doing Business in Ireland 2016 Report said that the economy is under threat from a hike in property and insurance prices. Sunday April 24 is Census Night and while we know youre very excited for it, there are some things you need to remember before you uncap your favourite pen and line your family up to be counted. The last census was on Sunday April 10, 2011 and recorded Irelands population at 4,588,252. But that has likely changed with all the coming and going the nation has seen since then. This years date fortuitously falls on the actual centenary of the 1916 Rising and more than 2.3 million census forms have been printed in advance of Sundays national headcount. By now, you should have your form - 4,660 enumerators have been busy delivering them over the last few weeks - but if you havent received yours yet, you should contact the Central Statistics Office (CSO) at locall 1850 2016 04, freetext 'FORM' to 50400 or visit www.census.ie. Who has to fill out the form? On Sunday evening, you should complete the form which has 30 questions in respect of each person in your household and sign the declaration at the end of the form when it is complete. Deirdre Cullen, from the CSO has this advice: "Where you are on the night of Sunday 24, you go on that Census form. But if your spouse is away on the night you put them down as an absent person so then you still have the family unit. "Foreign visitors to Ireland on Census night will be on the Irish Census. People in hospitals, nursing homes, people on cruise ships, the Irish Census is everybody who is in Ireland on the night of Sunday 24." Yes, you absolutely have to fill out the form There is a legal requirement to complete the form, and anyone who fails or refuses to do so, or who knowingly gives false information on the form, may be prosecuted and could be fined up to 44,440. Five people were prosecuted, following the 2011 census. Why do we need the Census Because its good to keep track of everyone. The census is important as it provides up-to-date information needed for planning at local, regional and national level. Population statistics are necessary for the adequate provision of healthcare, education and employment while regional data informs government policy. And by looking at the results of successive censuses and by taking account of the number of births and deaths that have occurred over the same period, we get an accurate measure of net migration. Who will have access to the data? Your personal Census details are protected by law under the Statistics Act 1993 and the CSO guarantee that the information you give will be treated as strictly confidential and will only be used for statistical purposes However, everyone will have access to the general data that the Census provides. The preliminary population data will be published within 3 months of census day and over the following 18 months a comprehensive range of statistics will be released covering the topics on which census data has been collected. You can view the 2011 data here When will the completed forms be collected? Your enumerator will call again in the 2-3 weeks after census day to collect your form. If your form hasnt been collected by May 23, you can return in a large envelope to Central Statistics Office, PO Box 2016, FREEPOST F4726, Swords, Co. Dublin. For more information, visit Census.ie Revenue officers in Dublin Port seized almost 250,000 cigarettes yesterday, it has emerged. The smuggled cigarettes, branded Marlboro Gold, Marlboro Red and Winston Blue were concealed in a heavy goods vehicle that arrived in Dublin Port from Rotterdam. As the Polish-registered tractor unit disembarked, hauling heavy farm machinery on a low-loader, customs detector dog Casey indicated interest. Officers scanned and searched the vehicle, uncovering the cigarettes concealed in the trailers chassis rail. The driver, a Polish man in his 30s, was questioned and Revenue seized the truck and the trailer. Investigations are ongoing. In a separate intervention at Dublin Airport on Sunday, 9,300 Kent branded cigarettes were discovered in the baggage of a 23-year-old Moldovan man who had arrived in Dublin from Frankfurt. The man was arrested and appeared before Judge Cormac Dunne in the Criminal Courts of Justice on Monday morning charged with the illegal importation of cigarettes. He was remanded in custody to appear in court again on Friday. The total value of the seized cigarettes is approximately 135,000 representing a potential loss to the Exchequer of 116,250. Foreign Affairs Minister Charlie Flanagan has clashed with Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers over the future of the Irish border in the event of a British exit from the EU. Speaking in the Dail Mr Flanagan said frontier controls would not be decided by London and Dublin alone if Britain voted to take itself out of the European Union. "The outcome would be the result of a wider negotiation involving all of the EU and therefore no-one can say with certainty that nothing will change with the border if the UK votes to leave," he said. His remarks will be seen as a rebuke to claims by Ms Villiers at the weekend that border arrangements between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland would not have to change in the event of a Brexit. Ms Villiers said the land border would remain as "free-flowing" as it was today because of a special status for Irish citizens in the UK as well as the common travel area which pre-dates EU membership by both countries. The senior Conservative minister also attacked suggestions that Brexit could threaten the peace process as "scaremongering of the most irresponsible and dangerous kind". But Minister Flanagan warned the "practically invisible border is a major symbol of normalisation and development in north-south relations". "Any implications for the current border arrangements would only arise if the UK voted to leave and, in that event, their future would depend heavily on the terms and conditions of a new relationship between the UK and the EU," he said. "In other words, the border's destiny would not be determined by the sole wishes of the Irish and British governments." Mr Flanagan was speaking in the Dail, which set aside eight hours to discuss the implications for Ireland if Britain voted to leave the EU in the in/out referendum on June 23. "In the event that the UK voted to leave the EU, customs posts would not of course be set up overnight," he said. "A negotiation period of two years or more would apply. "Ireland would work hard with the UK and with our EU partners to avoid customs posts being established and to preserve the benefits of the common travel area as a whole." Mr Flanagan appealed for Irish people at home and in the UK to get actively involved in the debate over the coming weeks. Two hundred new jobs have been announced in Waterford. The jobs will be created at Eirgen Pharmaceuticals which is based in the Westside Business Park. A parent company of Opko Health, EirGen specialises in the development and commercial supply of specialised pharmaceutical products used in cancer treatment. The highly skilled positions are expected to be filled over the next five years. Eirgen workers, Patsy Carney and Tom Brennan, at the plant in Waterford. Opko, which bought EirGen almost a year ago, said it plans to expand manufacturing in Waterford and set up an R&D centre. Jobs Minister Richard Bruton made the announcement and claimed the South East is now enjoying the fastest rate of jobs growth in the country. Two state regulators and a city employee have been charged with official misconduct, evidence-tampering and other offences over contaminated water supplies in Flint, Michigan. The Flint water crisis, which saw the city's water supply contaminated with high levels of lead, has alarmed the US and led to claims of racism. For nearly 18 months, the poor, mostly black city of 100,000 used the Flint River for tap water as a way to save money - a decision made by a state-appointed emergency manager - while a new pipeline was under construction. But the water was not treated to control corrosion, which meant lead was released from ageing pipes and fixtures as water flowed into homes and businesses. Governor Rick Snyder failed to acknowledge the problem until last autumn when tests revealed high levels of lead in children, in whom the heavy metal can cause low IQs and behavioural problems. The crisis - and state officials' slow and dismissive response to complaints about the water from experts and Flint residents - led to allegations of environmental racism, emerged as an issue in the presidential race during Michigan's Democratic primary in March, and sent other cities around the US rushing to test their water. "This is a road back to restoring faith and confidence in all Michigan families in their government," Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette said. He warned there will be more charges and added: "No one is off the table." Michael Prysby, a district engineer with the state Department of Environmental Quality, and Stephen Busch, a supervisor in the department's drinking water office, were charged with misconduct, conspiracy, tampering with test results and misdemeanor violations of clean-water law. The crimes carry maximum penalties of four to five years in prison. They were accused of failing to order anti-corrosion chemicals added to the water to coat the pipes and prevent them from releasing lead. Flint utilities administrator Michael Glasgow was also charged Wednesday with tampering with evidence for allegedly falsifying lead water-testing results and with wilful neglect of duty. Busch is on paid leave. Prysby recently took another job in the agency. "They failed Michigan families. Indeed, they failed us all," Mr Schuette said. "I don't care where you live." For months, people in Flint have been relying on filters and bottled water. Some still do not trust what comes out of their taps, even though the city rejoined the Detroit-area water system last autumn and anti-corrosive phosphates are being added to the water. The governor filled a few jugs of filtered Flint tap water and pledged to drink it for 30 days to show it is safe. "It's a good first step but it's a small step," Flint resident Melissa Mays said of the criminal charges. "These are lower-level people, and I want to know who was instructing them to do what they did. "I think it's important that we can see some form of accountability being laid out, but at the end of the day we still can't drink or bathe in our water safely." Most US cities stopped installing lead pipes in the 1930s to carry water from main lines under the streets and into homes. But a survey by the American Water Works Association found that 6.5 million of these pipes are still in use. Some researchers question whether chemical treatment and routine testing for lead in the water are enough, arguing that the only way to remove the threat is to replace the pipes. But the cost could easily be hundreds of millions of dollars or more. A spurned lover has been jailed for 19 years for stabbing his ex-girlfriend and her 86-year-old fiance to death after trawling the internet for Breaking Bad poison, a court heard. Paul Mallin, 51, armed himself with a meat cleaver and 10in (25cm) carving knife before attacking great grandfather John Down and Karen Reid, 53, at the sheltered housing complex where they all lived. He admitted carrying out the killings on September 5 last year and appeared to be sentenced by Judge Richard Marks QC at the Old Bailey. Outlining the facts, prosecutor Riel Karmy-Jones QC told the Old Bailey that Mallin's relationship with wheelchair-bound Ms Reid, who had a muscle-wasting condition, had ended in February last year and she transferred her affections. Mr Down, who suffered from a degenerative eye disease, had met Ms Reid after he moved into the sheltered accommodation having broken his hip in a fall. The couple got engaged and she moved into his flat at Fernways in Ilford, north-east London. In April, Mallin had argued with Ms Reid and stabbed the wall of Mr Down's flat with a knife after becoming upset about gifts he had bought her in the past. The following month, the defendant was punched in the face by a member of Ms Reid's family although no charges were brought, the court heard. Mr Down complained to staff that Mallin had been to his flat when he was not welcome, and during discussions about it, he was spat at by the defendant. It was later noted on Mallin's tenant record that he appeared to be "bitter" about the relationship. Just hours before the killing, the defendant became upset in the lounge area. He said: "I want to kill them" after Ms Reid told him she hated him, the court heard. Later that evening, an agency staff worker found Mr Down's blood-stained door ajar and, looking through the crack, saw Mallin standing over Ms Reid and repeatedly stab her with the carving knife. She asked him what he was doing, and he replied: "I have stabbed them both." When police arrived, Mallin was sitting in the office area in blood-soaked trainers and jogging bottoms looking "sweaty and flustered", Ms Karmy-Jones said. Officers found Mr Down slumped behind his front door with multiple stab wounds to the body, neck and stomach. His dentures were found on the floor beside him. Ms Reid was sitting in an armchair opposite him, also fatally injured. After Mallin was arrested, police searched his flat and discovered a torn page from a notebook with "Dirty John" written down and then scrawled out. They found a large amount of pornography and more than 300 internet searches on poison including "Ricin - Breaking Bad" and "So I gotta kill this guy and get away with it". Mallin, who moved to the unit in Cecil Road after his parents died, denied murder but pleaded guilty to manslaughter, which was accepted by the prosecution in light of reports on his mental state. The court heard he had never had a job and had suffered from depression, anxiety and schizoid personality disorder. In victim impact statements, Mr Down's heartbroken daughters described him as a "gentle giant" who always meant to live to 100. Pamela White said he was contemplating marriage again at the age of 86 but his happiness was "snatched away". Ms Reid's sister Maxine Orr said she was a "very happy person" who had suffered in later years. Despite that, she said: "In John I feel she finally found someone who really loved her and looked after her." In mitigation, Sallie Bennett-Jenkins QC said Mallin was full of remorse and had remarked: "It's terrible, terrible. This is not me." Don't Miss the Latest News Subscribing is the best way to get our best stories immediately. Copper prices fell on Thursday as the US dollar strengthened, making greenback-priced metals more expensive and less... PARIS: For Afghan refugee cyclist Masomah Ali Zada, it will be a bittersweet moment. For the first time in five... LONDON: Liz Truss came to 10 Downing Street vowing to be a disruptor. She U-turned on almost everything else, but... Drug manufacturers and dealers, not drug users, are the target of a new campaign to shatter the ice supply chain, the ACT's top police officer says. ACT Policing and Crime Stoppers are recruiting members of the public to help bring drug dealers and manufacturers to justice, in the latest frontier in the war against the drug ice. Crime Stoppers ACT chairman Bryan Roach, along with Rudi Lammers, ACT Chief Police Officer, want Canberrans to dob in their drug dealers. Credit:Graham Tidy The Dob in a Dealer campaign will allow people to anonymously provide information on people involved in making and selling illicit drugs in Canberra. ACT Policing Chief Police Officer Rudi Lammers said their focus is on supporting rather than prosecuting drug users. Prosecutors have voiced concerns over killer Danny Klobucar's transfer to Calvary Hospital's mental health unit, arguing security at the facility was "inadequate" and he should be behind bars. Klobucar, 27, was last month found not guilty by way of mental impairment of the brutal bashing death of Canberra grandfather Miodrag Gajic, 71, on New Year's Day in 2014. Danny Klobucar was found not guilty of murder by way of impairment, but it was estimated he would have received a 20-year sentence if guilty. A jury found Klobucar to be the killer, but agreed with overwhelming psychiatric evidence that he was suffering a mental illness, namely paranoid schizophrenia, and did not properly understand his actions were wrong. That verdict meant Klobucar would be held in a secure facility, for a length of time to be decided by the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal, until he was no longer deemed a threat to himself or the community. A man charged over a spate of burglaries throughout Canberra's northern suburbs this week is behind bars. Aubrey James Agostino, 26, faced nine charges including burglary, driving unlicensed, drug driving, failing to stop for police and dangerous driving in the ACT Magistrates Court on Thursday. Police located the car on the Tuggeranong Parkway. Credit:ACT Policing He was also charged with driving an unregistered and uninsured vehicle, using number plates calculated to deceive and having an unsafely maintained vehicle over the alleged crime spree. Agostino did not apply for bail and Magistrate Beth Campbell granted him a four-week adjournment to seek legal advice. But the ACT has its own, separate ban on spouse travel, which Clerk Tom Duncan believed should take precedence , resulting in some controversy over the trip. Mrs Dunne took her husband Lyle Dunne to a Commonwealth Parliamentary Association committee meeting in Malaysia last year, combining the trip with a family holiday. For that trip, she converted the business class airfare into two economy fares to take Mr Dunne, which is allowed under the association's rules. Mrs Dunne arrives back from the 10-day trip on May 2, just in time for Liberal preselection in her seat of Ginninderra that day. Speaker Vicki Dunne is off to London for the fourth time in two years. But this time she is paying for her husband herself after running into trouble last year for taking him on a paid trip. She is attending another Commonwealth Parliamentary Association meeting this month, but this time her business class airfare will be paid by the association and her husband's trip will be funded privately. She is away for 10 days even though the London meeting is only four days long. Remuneration Tribunal rules require parliamentarians to pay a percentage of the trip if they spend more than 40 per cent of it on private business. But Mr Duncan said when travel time was taken into account, Mrs Dunne's private component did not exceed the 40 per cent threshold, so she was not required to make a contribution. Mrs Dunne said the minimum period she could be away just for the meeting was eight days, allowing for a rest day. She would meet her own costs for the private days. As president of the ACT branch of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, Mrs Dunne has had a busy term of overseas travel, with four visits to London in two years, as well as a visit to the Cayman Islands in 2013, to Cameroon in 2014, to Wellington in 2015, and to Malaysia in 2015, all on association business. This month, Mrs Dunne declared the gift of chairman's lounge membership from Qantas for herself and her husband - an invite-only exclusive benefit that has so far only been bestowed on ministers in Canberra, not speakers. Presumably, her frequent overseas travel played a part in Qantas's gift. The University of Canberra will sign a development deal worth an estimated $1.7 billion to build up to 3,300 new residences on campus over the next two decades. The deal is with national developer Peet Limited, which has a Canberra based wholly owned subsidiary, CIC Australia. UC vice-chancellor Stephen Parker said architecture, landscape architecture, building and construction management and urban planning students will be involved in project. Credit:Rohan Thomson The sustainable residential development will provide a mix of units and townhouses. The UC has agreed with the ACT Government that a maximum of 200 dwellings will be released each year starting in 2017, so as not to flood the market. With regulators including the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority upping the pressure on banks to consider how their remuneration plans influence conduct and culture, and after the Trowbridge report highlighting a range of concerns about commission-based pay in the life insurance industry, bank bosses realise that paying staff commissions for selling banking products needs to be pulled back to ensure customers are not sold products that are not suitable to their needs. "Each bank commits to ensure it has overarching principles on remuneration and incentives to support good customer outcomes and sound banking practices," the ABA said in a statement. The banks will also develop their own principles on remuneration and incentives applying across each bank. The work on establishing the review will be carried out through an industry group led by Gina Cass-Gottlieb, a partner at law firm Gilbert + Tobin. An independent expert will be appointed to oversee implementation of the plan within a month. The banks said they will publish public quarterly reports on their progress, with the first coming out in three months. It is understood that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has been approached by the banks, who want to ensure their proposal to work together does not fall foul of competition laws. Australian Bankers' Association chief executive Steven Munchenberg said that overall levels of banker pay should not be reduced by any changes that are made. "We are not going to be reducing peoples remuneration, but expect there to be some restructuring," he told Fairfax Media. He said that the level of concern among the members of the ABA had grown in recent weeks as the sector came under sustained criticism, and "has become such that the industry absolutely needs to respond substantially, and we feel we have done that today." The banks response goes further than the measures announced by Treasurer Scott Morrison on Wednesday. With the government's package of reforms to strengthen oversight of the banks not containing any measures to strengthen whistleblower laws, the banks on Thursday they will "standardise the protection of whistleblowers across banks, including independent support, and protection against financial disadvantage". After the government said on Wednesday it would create a "one stop shop" for handling bank complaints by consolidating various ombudsman services, the banks said they would also boost processes for handling complaints by installing an "independent customer advocate" inside each bank for customers in disputes with their lender. The banks also said they will implement an industry register to identify rogue advisers and bring forward a review of the Code of Banking Practice to be completed by the end of the year. The banks will also work with ASIC to "enhance the current breach reporting framework", the ABA said. It came as new figures showed customer satisfaction with the big banks fell in the first three months of the year, after fallout from the industry-wide hikes in home loan interest rates late year year. Roy Morgan research said the average proportion of satisfied big four customers had dipped to 80 per cent, from 80.9 per cent at the end of last year, and calls for a royal commission could could dent the banks' reputations further. Bank bosses response ANZ Bank chief executive Shayne Elliott said in a statement that while some of the work was already underway, it was a" public commitment from the entire banking industry that we are going to work harder and more consistently to improve the way we deal with customers and resolve issues." "It's also a recognition that we need to work harder to improve the way we respond when things go wrong and it gives our customer reassurance that they will be dealt with fairly and transparently in their dealings with the bank," Mr Elliott said. Westpac Banking Corp chief executive Brian Hartzer said in a statement banks have given a lot of thought to how conduct and culture be strengthened across the industry. He said the framework would cover making sure product-based payments are aligned to good customer outcomes; ensuring customer complaints are dealt with efficiently and effectively; and making sure a safety net is in place in the form of a strong regulator. "The plan includes a number of practical measures that will empower customers, enhance standards and increase transparency across the industry," Mr Hartzer said. "We believe these actions will lift standards across the banking and financial services sector and bolster the existing strength of our regulatory framework." National Australia Bank chief executive Andrew Thorburn said the proposals announced on Thursday are designed to reinforce standards of service, integrity, trust and ethics and pledged to push for legislation to enforce the findings of the review into remuneration. "This announcement today is to make sure that no matter what bank you bank with, customers are safe in the knowledge that each bank puts their customers first," Mr Thorburn said in a statement. "We believe that our customers deserve the peace of mind that our employees are rewarded for recommending the right products and services for the customer. We intend to strengthen the alignment of remuneration and incentives to customer outcomes. We will work with regulators to implement changes and, where necessary, seek regulatory approval and legislative reform." A high-profile senate committee has called for a major overhaul of Australia's corporate whistleblower laws, saying current protections are "unacceptable" and do little to help or encourage whistleblowers to come forward. Incentives or rewards for whistleblowers, a new public whistleblowers advocate and better shielding whistleblowers from victimisation and dismissal have all been flagged as potential changes as well as allowing whistleblowers to be protected if they contact the media, politicians or unions with their concerns. In a detailed paper examining the shortcomings of the current laws, the senate economics committee has called for private sector laws to be placed on a par with those protecting public sector whistleblowers, which were substantially bolstered in recent years. Australia's laws also lag behind those of other OECD countries, including the US and UK. Volkswagen is apparently setting aside $US10 billion ($13 billion) to settle all US claims against it for cheating on emission tests. As part of the settlement, it's offering American VW owners $US5000 each or a buyback of their cars. If a deal with US regulators and plaintiffs has indeed been reached on these terms, it's a high price to pay to maintain a presence in a relatively unimportant market, especially since paying it will result in losses to its reputation in bigger markets. The US is not huge for VW, which has struggled and failed to break into the big leagues there. In 2014, the last full year before the emissions scandal, it made $US36.7 billion in revenue in North America. Applying the company's 5.2 per cent net income margin would mean a profit of about $US1.9 billion, less than 13 per cent of the global total. Even assuming that VW's sales in the region don't drop following the emissions scandal, $US10 billion is more than five years' worth of American profits for the company. Essentially, it's agreeing to operate at cost, or at a loss, for half a decade just to lay the scandal to rest. VW is winning back in market capitalisation whatever it stands to lose in cash terms from the settlement. Credit:Getty Images Apart from the direct outlay and the opportunity cost of not being able to use those resources in more receptive markets - for example, in Asia and Latin America - there's collateral damage that is hard to quantify. In Europe, VW is not offering car owners buybacks or $US5000 bonuses. There's a technological reason for that: less stringent European regulations didn't require cars to be fitted with nitrogen oxide (NOx) traps or selective catalytic reduction systems, as in the US, so a software fix or a cheap mechanical one makes the cars regulation-compliant on VW's home continent. In the US, compliance requires a more expensive fix that is tricky from an engineering point of view: it involves fitting the cars with an extra liquid tank for urea, a NOx-reducing chemical. Still, European consumers are reluctant to go into these details: they have been cheated just as much by VW's "clean diesel" marketing as the US buyers, and they'd like equal compensation. Proud memory On April 23, 1564, William Shakespeare was born; on the same date 52 years later he died. "Tomorrow, therefore, is a day of proud memory. For the British nation in especial it envelopes the glory of the greatest of all its great men. For the world at large ... it recalls the one name among all the named of modern history that is enshrined, above the rivalries of race, for homage universal and undisputed." A 1893 edition of Shakespeare's poems and plays, held by the State Library. Credit:James Brickwood Future farmers and soldiers The Herald reported: "The scheme devised by the executive committee of the Dreadnought Fund for obtaining boys from England, and training them to agricultural pursuits, has received practical application in so far that 12 fine strapping young fellows have reached Sydney, and have received a very cordial welcome. They were selected by the Central Unemployed Society from a large number of applicants." Everyone loses in the tawdry, dangerous and eminently preventable scandal over the role of 60 Minutes in a kidnapping in Beirut. The two children involved have endured torment beyond what they had experienced during their short lives of family dysfunction. Their names have been published and faces shown something illegal in Australian family court matters. The bungled attempt to snatch them from their father would be seen as unconscionable if tried by a paid vigilante justice agency with media complicity here. What was a private and emotionally fraught family matter has become a salacious debating topic globally. Money has changed hands for what was an attempt to bolster ratings by playing to base instincts; by dividing audiences with an invitation to back the mother or the father; by trying to place journalists as heroes in some supposedly honourable crusade for justice. Except it went terribly and predictably wrong. All the adults involved stand condemned for an illegal violent action in grabbing the children from their grandmother. And to top it off, it seems money was required to get the crew and the mother out of danger. A vulnerable, gullible and desperate woman who fought for 18 months to get two of her children back to Australia has probably lost any small chance she had of doing so. Awww, bless. The hits keep coming! And she's not the only Liberal candidate making life exciting for the party strategists as they face the coming election: Malcolm Turnbull supporter and Cabinet Secretary Arthur Sinodinos is all set to face a senate inquiry into Liberal political donations. The worst bit about this new inquiry isn't just that it goes over the already-politically-problematic evidence from Sinodinos' appearance before the NSW ICAC investigation last month, in which the NSW Liberal Party have had $4.4 million in election funding withheld until they provide evidence that $693,000 anonymously donated to the party's "Free Enterprise Foundation" before the 2011 state election wasn't from prohibited donors, such as building developers, since Sinodinos was the NSW Liberals' treasurer and finance director at the time. No, it's that the only reason there's going to be a Senate inquiry into this at all is because Parliament was recalled early to not-pass the ABCC bill - aka the trigger for the double dissolution election we're about to get - and Labor senator Penny Wong moved a snap motion while they had some time to kill. "Malcolm Turnbull and [Attorney-General] George Brandis have repeatedly refused to respond to questions on Senator Sinodinos' involvement in the Free Enterprise Foundation," she explained on Tuesday night. "If Senator Sinodinos has nothing to hide why have senior ministers used every procedural trick in the book to resist scrutiny of the Senate?" The motion was passed with the support of the Greens and the crossbench, and it's not going to look great for the PM if Sinodinos becomes the fourth of his ministry to resign under a cloud, following Mal Brough, Jamie Briggs and Stuart Robert. It's been a storied few months, really. ASIC and tired! There has been one win, though - the government have gone some way to neutralising the whole "royal commission into the financial sector" thing that Labor and the independents are currently calling for. The government removed $120 million from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission in 2014, but now treasurer Scott Morrison has announced that there'll be a $127 million boost to funding, almost all of which will be coming from the banks themselves. "No longer will it be the case that taxpayers will be hit to fund this regulator, this enforcement authority, this cop on the beat," ScoMo declared, slamming Labor's plan for a royal commission. "What Bill Shorten is committing to do is spend 50-odd million dollars, $51 million of taxpayers' money, for something that might write a report and might make recommendations, perhaps make these recommendations two years from now. That's not going to give anyone an outcome." And that looks like a great result - you know, with just a couple of teensy-tiny concerns. Those concerns, elucidated First up the financial sector are paying for the body that regulates the behaviour of the financial sector? Doesn't that sounds a little bit like a situation that might leave itself open to, y'know, something less than complete independence and transparency? That's certainly the opinion of former ASIC chief economist Alex Erskine, who explained that "if the government's [soon] going to be paying no part in ASIC's costs then in the end the government's voice [over] ASIC risks being reduced and industry's voice over ASIC risks being increased." Also, according to the plan, "banks, super funds, insurance companies and publicly listed companies will cover ASIC's budget - now about $330 million a year". And while Scozz has insisted that the banks won't pass those costs on to consumers, that's not really something that's within his control. But most of all, all this colour and movement assumes one very important thing: that ASIC are capable of policing the banks. And the evidence for this is let's go with "patchy". Take the single largest financial scandal of recent times: that of the Commonwealth Bank's financial planning services, which were revealed to be on-selling customers on expensive internal products that were not in their best financial interest, by advisors encouraged by handsome commissions. Kiera Lindsey lectures in Australian history at the University of South Australia and won the inaugural Greg Dening memorial prize. Her biography The Convict's Daughter (Allen & Unwin) follows the scandalous abduction trial that followed her great-great-great aunt Mary Ann Gill's attempt to elope in 1848. My Family and Other Animals Winner of the Greg Dening Memorial Prize: Author Kiera Lindsey. Credit:Brian J. Marshall Gerald Durrell Aged 10 I read this sprawling autobiography of an English boy who moved with his family to Corfu in the 1930s. It recalls his encounters with animals human, mammal, reptile as he negotiates life on a Greek island with an eccentric family constantly on the brink of spontaneous combustion. It's familiar territory for Bourne fans, all right: exotic European cities, high-speed, white-knuckle motorbike chases through narrow alleyways, people smashing through apartment windows, a fair few punches thrown and gunfire. Lots of gunfire. Bourne is back. And most importantly, Matt Damon is back as rogue government assassin Jason Bourne, returning to the franchise for the first time since 2007. In the first full trailer for the latest instalment, Jason Bourne, Damon is back alongside Julia Stiles on the run amid a hacking plot that could be "worse than Snowden" and wrestling with his continuing identity crisis. Paul Greengrass also returns as director, after bowing out after helming The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) in the hugely popular series based on the thrillers by Robert Ludlum. However, he struggled throughout the entire interview to provide answers that were clear and direct, resulting in more questions being raised over the case during the course of the conversation with the two TV hosts. Appearing on The Project on Skype from Beirut, Ali Elamine told Waleed Aly and Carrie Bickmore that his main concern had been to stop Nine using any footage of the events and that the children's mother, Sally Faulkner, drop the custody charges in Australia. In an extremely cagey interview, the father of the two young children at the centre of the botched 60 Minutes child-recovery operation has claimed no money was involved in the decision to drop charges against the TV crew and his estranged wife. When asked directly if there was any money involved in the deal, he replied, "Negative. I've been hearing more than 3 million, I've heard 10 million at one point." He added: "I didn't sign on any money, none of that happened. What my initial thing [for] Sal and Channel Nine was [that] Sal drops the custody charges in Australia and Channel Nine ... don't use that footage that they filmed in the process ... And [that they] don't bring up the kids' names." When pressed on whether any money had been discussed by any parties connected to the case, he said he couldn't comment and then diverted to saying he looked at the issue "from a political side" as the Australian government had "pushed hard" for the release of the 60 Minutes crew. Speculation has been rife that a financial settlement had been involved in Wednesday's deal to drop charges between Elamine and the Nine Network, with amounts varying form "several hundreds of thousands of dollars" to reports it could be in the millions. Elamine avoided a direct answer to the question as to why the children were taken to Lebanon on a holiday in May 2015 but not returned to Australia, although he stated he didn't do anything illegal. "I didn't break any laws. We're still married, first of all," he said. Fourteen months after he was knocked off his motor scooter near his Woolooware home leaving him with life-changing brain injuries, Glenn Wheeler returned for the first time to his old Channel Seven television stomping grounds on Thursday. Wheeler returned to the Martin Place studio's for a special appearance to mark his 56th birthday, and while his speech was a little slower than how viewers remembered him, the sparkle was definitely still in his eye as he cracked jokes with The Morning Show host Larry Emdur. Deborah Anne Levy, 60, was high on cannabis when she ploughed into Wheeler in her Mitsubishi Starwagon in Woolooware in February last year. A Labor government would accept the decision of the Fair Work Commission on Sunday penalty rates, even if the commission opts to reduce them, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten says. Mr Shorten's comments came as reports suggested the commission could hand down its decision by July, potentially lobbing it into the middle of a knife-edge election campaign. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten told 3AW's Neil Mitchell that while Sunday penalty rates should not be cut "just like that", he would accept the independent tribunal's decision on the issue. The concession would appear to undermine Labor's ability to use penalty rates as a political weapon, in which the Coalition is accused of plotting to cut penalty rates and Labor is cast as their protector. It also threatens to put Labor at odds with its key union backers, who have pledged to fight any adverse decision. Fair Work is reviewing penalty rates for seven retail and hospitality awards, and will evaluate demands by employers to bring Sunday rates down to Saturday levels. Asked on Melbourne's 3AW whether a Labor government would accept the commission's decision, Mr Shorten said: "Yes." The practice of paying international students below the minimum wage is endemic, a new study has revealed. The survey of more than 1400 students by the University of Sydney's business school found that 80 per cent of international students working in restaurants across Sydney were being exploited, with up to 35 per cent of students being paid as little as $12 an hour. Overall, 60 per cent of international students living in Sydney were paid below the federally mandated minimum wage of $17.29 per hour across all industries. Retail was the worst offender, with 90 per cent of international workers being underpaid. The back and forth between Jackie Trad and Rob Pyne continued in the Queensland Parliament, with Speaker Peter Wellington referring the former Labor MP to the Ethics Committee following a complaint from the Deputy Premier. Last month, Ms Trad referred herself to the Parliamentary Ethics Committee in the interests of having the matter settled, denying she had "bullied" Mr Pyne but admitting to "robust" conversations after the two clashed over his concerns with how local government complaints were handled. Queensland Deputy Premier Jackie Trad. Credit:Glenn Hunt Mr Pyne had not made his own complaint and originally said he had no intention of making one, but on Tuesday, signalled his intention to make a complaint, attempting to table documents which outlined his allegations against Ms Trad, having decided he wanted his side of the story told "on my own terms". Mr Pyne also made a complaint against Government Whip turned Public Works Minister Mick de Brenni for, among other complaints, allegedly attempting to obstruct him from entering the parliamentary chamber. A truck rollover south of Brisbane has closed a busy feeder road, causing major congestion in surrounding streets. Electricity has also been cut to nearly 100 homes in the area, after the truck brought down a power pole. The gravel truck rolled on Mount Cotton Road at Burbank near the intersection of Marawah Street about 6.15am, its dog trailer spilling its cargo across the road and blocking it in both directions. The driver was not injured. A fake tourist passed 26 cocaine "pellets" after being busted trying to smuggle the drug inside his body, police allege. The 52-year-old Finnish man flew in to the Brisbane International Airport on Monday but the Australian Border Force suspected something and hauled him in for questioning. A 52-year-old Finnish man has been charged with importing cocaine "internally". Credit:Canberra Times Officers inspected the man's bags, decided he was not a genuine tourist and cancelled his visa before referring him to Australian Federal Police. "He later passed 26 pellets containing cocaine," AFP alleged in a statement. After cleaning up its legislation, the Queensland Labor government won the right to force resource companies to clean up their sites - even in the event of administration - with the bill referred to as the "Clive Palmer legislation" passing in the early hours of the morning, with the support of the LNP. Environment Minister Steven Miles had introduced the bill last month, in the wake of the Queensland Nickel situation, with the intention of forcing resource companies, using Mr Palmer's Townsville refinery as an example, to meet their environmental responsibilities, even if they go bust. Previously, taxpayers were left to foot the bill for environmental clean-ups on mine and related sites if the resource company which ran the project entered administration. Credit:Michael Chambers Previously, taxpayers were left to foot the bill for environmental clean-ups on mine and related sites if the resource company which ran the project entered administration. Mr Palmer, whose Yabulu refinery workforce was laid off last month, was ordered by the government to ensure enough staff were left at the plant to ensure it met its environmental protection obligations. In the early hours of the morning, Labor managed to close one of the state's most fraught chapters, passing its racing reforms despite fierce opposition from the LNP and sections of the industry itself. Following the greyhound racing baiting scandal, the Palaszczuk government, then with Bill Byrne as racing minister, moved to instigate a review into the industry as a whole. The new board takes the place of all those former boards, with one of the state's top cops, Ross Barnett, established as commissioner. Credit:Joe Armao The resulting report, led by the now Crime and Corruption Commission chair Alan MacSporran, recommended a stand-alone integrity commission be established to oversee the industry, as well as the establishment of a new seven-member board, which would run all three codes of racing in Queensland and include four members with "no relevant connection" to the industry. A grieving Queensland father who lost his wife to childbirth has shared a beautiful photo with his newborn baby girl cradled in his arms. Amanda Sheppard died in Rockhampton Hospital on Monday after giving birth to baby Willa through a caesarean. Friends congratulated her husband, Glynn, on his "beautiful" and "precious" daughter as family friend Teagan Govaars, who set up an online fundraiser for the family, thanked more than 300 donors for their love, support and more than $20,000 worth of donations. "To darling little Willa may all the stars shine on you sweetheart," Tash Fraticelli wrote. A woman at the centre of a possible abduction on the Gold Coast has been returned to the scene by a garbage truck driver. Police received reports of the possible snatch from Ensenada Court in Broadbeach Waters about 8am. The woman was reportedly assaulted and there were reports gun shots were fired before she was driven away. A Queensland Ambulance Service spokeswoman said paramedics were called to the scene about 9.10am, where they have treated the woman for facial injuries. Kelly O'Dwyer, the Minister for Small Business and Assistant Treasurer, announced on Thursday that sole traders and contractors will be eligible to use the myTax tax return from July 1 this year. More than 1.5 million individuals lodged tax returns last year using myTax. The expansion to sole traders and contractors will mean up to 3 million people will use the online system. Kelly O'Dwyer: MyTax will be open to sole traders and contractors. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Ms O'Dwyer said myTax will allow sole traders and contractors to have a "quicker and easier experience" dealing with the Australian Tax Office. Users will be hoping the increased numbers trying to access the system will not lead to the same system performance issues experienced last year. Melbourne had its own Moby Dick. And even as whales go, this one was huge. The ocean giant's size and bulk, estimated to be about 18 metres long and 40,000 kilograms, has been measured thanks to the chance discovery of a fossilised whale tooth found on a suburban beach. Artists' impression of the Beaumaris killer sperm whale hunting. Credit:Brian Choo Measuring an impressive 30 centimetres long and weighing about three kilograms, the ancient tooth is the largest ever collected in Australia. It comes from an extinct species of sperm whale that would have hunted other whales. A teenager accused of killing a Melbourne mother in a mini-motorbike crash allegedly breached his bail and fled from police. But Caleb Jakobsson, who spent the last two nights in custody, has been given a second chance. Caleb Jackobsson outside court before an earlier hearing. Credit:Fairfax Media The 19-year-old is on bail after being charged with culpable driving causing the death of Andrea Lehane, 34, who was struck on a zebra crossing at a shopping centre carpark in September last year. Mr Jakobsson was granted bail last year with conditions which included him staying with a relative in country Victoria and abiding by a nightly curfew between 10pm and 9am. A brazen thief has been caught on video stealing a motorbike in broad daylight as a crowd of university students watch. The motorbike was stolen from a car park at RMIT's Bundoora campus in Melbourne's west sometime on Thursday. The video was uploaded to Facebook late on Thursday night and has since been watched more than 50,000 times. Victoria Police has confirmed it was made aware of the video and is investigating. Who is Paul, and why is he bankrolling Robert Doyle's re-election campaign to the tune of $50,000? The lord mayor made his first disclosure on Thursday morning of a donation to his campaign for re-election for a third term in October. And he has also, for the first time, said he will likely no longer take donations for re-election from property developers. Questioned by 3AW's Neil Mitchell over whether he had received any campaign donations since declaring his intention to run for lord mayor a third time, Cr Doyle said he had taken one so far. Hospital beds across Victoria will be closed as nurses vote to launch large-scale strikes unless the government makes a "respectful" wage offer in the next 15 days. In a secret ballot, a majority of the state's 40,000 nurses and midwives have endorsed taking industrial action including rolling strikes that could cause strife across public hospitals if they do not receive pay rises of up to 20 per cent a year. Australian Nurses and Midwifery Ferderation EBA meeting at Moonee Valley Racecourse. Credit:Justin McManus The government's latest wage offer of 3 per cent a year is well below the 4-20 per cent that the nurses' union says is needed to lift Victorian wages to the same rate as New South Wales. The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation on Thursday held a statewide meeting in Melbourne, where members agreed to give the Andrews government a deadline of midday on May 5 to make a better offer, before walkouts begin. WA has been left flushed with embarrassment in a national competition to find the best public toilet in Australia. There was not one WA entrant in the "Best Bathroom Award" at the Total Facilities Conference in Melbourne - open to Australia's 17,000 public rest rooms. Australia's best public loo: the Changing Places Restroom, Ringwood Lake Park in Victoria Credit:Joe Armao The crown was won by Victoria's Maroondah City Council for the best throne or as they call it, a "Changing Places Facility" at Ringwood Lake Park. They took the title from cleaning products supplier X02 which won the 2015 award for its bathroom facility that featured "touch point elimination, aromatherapy, controlled usage technology, sense management and inspirational music". They had been detained in Lebanon for two weeks for their part in a bid by Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner to retrieve her two children from Lebanon where they have been living with their father Ali Elamine since May 2015. Beirut: The judge investigating whether charges should be laid over a failed child-abduction plot says the Nine Network's 60 Minutes crew could still be recalled to Lebanon to face charges. Mr Elamine, who on Monday said that Channel Nine had "dropped the ball big time" and "shouldn't have gotten involved in family matters", said on Wednesday that the crew were just doing their job and did not take part in the physical abduction of his children on April 6. David Ballment, Tara Brown and Sally Faulkner have been released from a Lebanon jail. Credit:Nine Network He agreed to drop personal charges against the Nine crew, insisting a display of emotion from Wilkinson and not a financial settlement had sealed the deal. But Judge Rami Abdullah warned that the Nine crew's freedom and departure from Lebanon did not necessarily spell the end of the matter as he still had to decide whether there would be a public prosecution over the kidnapping. "There was a crime that happened and everyone had a role in the affair, so they will be treated as each one, what he did in this crime., Jerusalem: Israel said it had uncovered a new network of Jewish extremists in the Israeli-occupied West Bank that was responsible for several recent attacks against Palestinians, including the attempted arson of at least one home as people slept inside. The announcement, by the police and Shin Bet, the country's domestic security agency, on Wednesday, came amid heightened tensions after a July arson attack in the West Bank village of Duma that killed a Palestinian boy and his parents. Two young Israeli Jews were charged in January in connection with the attack. Relatives of 18-month-old Ali Saad-Dawabsheh mourn in July, 2015. The baby was killed by an arson attack on the family home in the Palestinian village of Duma. Credit:Getty Images Describing the newly identified group as a "Jewish terrorist network", authorities said in a statement that six members had been arrested in recent weeks, five of them residents of Nahliel, an established settlement north-west of Ramallah in the West Bank. United Nations: Singapore has blasted widespread calls to make the worldwide fight against illicit drugs less punitive, using a major meeting at the United Nations to argue that a "soft approach" would cause a flood of narcotics to the island state. Singapore is well-known for punishing drug-related offences with harsh penalties including death. By contrast, European delegates railed against the idea of executing people for drug infractions. Singapore a drugs-free haven, its leaders insist. Credit:Bloomberg "We believe that drugs will destroy our society," said Singapore Minister for Home Affairs and Law, Kasiviswanathan Shanmugam. "With 200 million people travelling through our borders every year, and given Singaporeans' purchasing power, a soft approach will mean our country will be washed over with drugs". Latest News NAB reveals six market megatrends for brokers More opportunities for investors, first home buyers Firstmac shifts up a gear on auto loans National sales manager appointed to pursue growing market The nations largest mortgage lender, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia ( CBA ), has announced that it is tightening its criteria for home loans for foreigners.The CBA will no longer approve applications for home loans that cite self-employed foreign income, according to a note sent to mortgage brokers this week.The bank also says it will no longer accept the foreign-currency income of temporary Australian residents. These individuals can also only borrow up to 70% of a propertys value, compared with the previous rate of 80%.Home loan applications from foreigners make up a "significantly low proportion of our total home loan applications" according to a CBA statement, adding, We constantly review and monitor our home loan portfolio to ensure we are maintaining our prudent lending standards and meeting our customers' financial needs."The fact that home loans for foreigners make up a relatively small segment of the market means CBA's new policy should not have major consequences for mortgage brokers, according to principal at Ocean Home Loans, Brad Kirwan.This is a very small part of the overall market, he told Australian Broker. Self-employed foreign investors are an even smaller part of that market. Most lenders wont accept foreign self-employed income anyway Id suggest that CBA are aligning their policy with the other major banks so as not to be over-exposed to one particular type of applicant.When asked what steps brokers might take in response to CBAs changes, Kirwan added, There are several large brokerages that focus entirely on the Chinese market and have done very well over the past few years, they will obviously have to reassess how they do business in the future, for the majority of mortgage brokers it will be business as usual. Sign up for our amNY Sports email newsletter to get insights and game coverage for your favorite teams Dozens of Brooklynites gathered at a candlelight vigil in Bushwick on Tuesday to commemorate the more than 600 people who died in a massive earthquake in Ecuador last weekend. Borough President Adams, who organized the event, offered his condolences and a message of solidarity with those mourning the loss. No earthquake, no matter how strong, can shake our resolve and solidarity with our global family, said Adams. Their pain is our pain, our strength is their strength. Bushwick is home to thousands of Ecuadorians the largest population in the borough, followed by Williamsburg and Sunset Park and around 100 people, many of whom knew people in the South American country who had been affected, came out to show their support, according to the Beeps office. Adams says he is looking for ways to raise funds for the country. latest news October 3, 2022 Dee Gambit Hundreds if not thousands of new and returning TV shows and movies are released every month your options of what to watch are endless. Variety, they say is ... Rochester resident, grassroots activist becomes UBs first Truman Scholarship winner Madelaine Britt has been named UB's first Harry S. Truman Scholar, the nation's most prestigious academic honor for undergraduate students. Madelaine is a remarkable individual. She is a thoughtful and insightful leader. She is passionate about grassroots activism and its ability to impact how neighborhoods are planned and protected. BUFFALO, N.Y. Madelaine Britt, whose family roots fueled a fierce commitment to urban revitalization activism, became the University at Buffalos first Harry S. Truman Scholar today, an honor UB officials say is the countrys most prestigious academic honor available to undergraduates. Britt, 20, a double major in environmental design and political science who will finish her junior year in May, was one of 54 students selected from 200 finalists to receive the Truman Scholarship following a rigorous multi-stage selection process. Britt will receive a $30,000 scholarship toward graduate school and the opportunity to participate in a professional development program next summer in Washington, D.C., to help prepare for a career in public service leadership. The 200 finalists were chosen from among 775 candidates for the award nominated by a record 305 colleges and universities. The Harry S. Truman Foundation, which administers the scholarships, was created by Congress in 1975 to be the nations living memorial to President Harry S. Truman. The foundations mission is to select and support the next generation of public service leaders. The awards target individuals aiming to be leaders and agents of change in the public sector, which includes education, government and non-profit work. I am so pleased that Madelaine has been awarded the very prestigious Truman Scholarship, said Elizabeth Colucci, coordinator of fellowships and scholarships at UB, whose office has fostered a dramatic increase in the number of UB undergraduates chosen for nationally competitive scholarships. She is UBs first winner and truly deserving of this scholarship. The competition for this scholarship is very competitive. Madelaine is a remarkable individual. She is a thoughtful and insightful leader. She is passionate about grassroots activism and its ability to impact how neighborhoods are planned and protected. This past year UB students have won a Marshall Scholarship to the United Kingdom, a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, six National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships, three National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowships, a Boren Scholarship to India, a Goldwater Scholarship, two Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Awards and a Critical Language Scholarship. Britts selection as a Truman Scholar means UB now has a student who has earned what Colucci called the most prestigious undergraduate academic honor in the U.S. Truman Scholars are selected because of their potential to be leaders in the future based on their current work. They are committed to work in public service, says Colucci. Madelaine exemplifies what it means to be a Truman Scholar. She wants to change the world through public service to others and has a passion for making a difference at a community level. Britt is the daughter of Margaret and Eric Britt of Rochester, which she considers her hometown because so many members of her family live there. She graduated from Marcellus High School in suburban Syracuse when her parents lived there. She and the other Truman Scholars will receive their awards in a ceremony at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Liberty, Missouri, on Sunday, May 29. I couldn't be happier to represent my hometown Rochester and now my newfound home of Buffalo as a Truman Scholar, said Britt. The love and support I have received from both cities has been outstanding, and I can't wait to bring what I learn back to my own community. Thank you, everyone at UB, who has helped get me here. Britts passion and commitment revolve around urban revitalization activism centered on community-oriented solutions. She says she would like to work in the District of Columbias Department Housing and Community Development, eventually earning a dual degree in urban planning and law. She is determined to help low-income people find access to safe and affordable housing. Britt then wants to return to Rochester, and run for the Rochester City Council. Britts honors and activities while a UB student include: Deans List, named a Western New York Prosperity Fellow and co-founder of the University Community Laboratory, or CoLab, which provides free, skill-based training classes for University Heights residents. Britt organized a hugely successful volunteer fair while a summer associate for AmeriCorps Vista working at Rochester Cares, a non-profit agency that connects volunteers with agencies that need their help. Britt served as student sustainability coordinator with UBs Campus Dining & Shops. She also helped start a tenant association while working as an intern for the Southeast Neighborhood Service Center in Rochester. Britts mother grew up impoverished, and her grandmother instilled a passion for helping low-income urban residents by telling her granddaughter stories of the hardship of raising a family as a single mother. I pursue public service almost selfishly, Britt wrote in her Truman Scholar application. I dont understand why Ive been fortunate to receive what I have. I can picture my mother there, and I realize that Im separated by just a generation. A career in community development allows me to feel in some strange way a sort of control of the situation, giving me the ability to feel as if Im part of a solution for mothers and grandmothers like my own. It hammers away at that pit in my stomach, and reminds me of the importance of knowing where you come from and where you need to take your story next. Campus News BAND Against Bullying music and arts competition returns to UB BAND Against Bullying gives students the chance to demonstrate their musical and artistic skills in a live, performing arts competition while also promoting a message of awareness, prevention and dignity for all. By CHARLES ANZALONE Students in schools are vital to spreading the message about the importance of treating others with dignity and respect, and to stand up against bullying. UBs Alberti Center for Bullying Abuse Prevention again will join forces with Hodgson Russ LLP, M&T Bank and Ingram Micro for another BAND Against Bullying school arts competition to be held at 7 p.m. April 26 in the Center for the Arts, North Campus. The event fast becoming a spring fixture for UB and area schools will bring students to the university to demonstrate their musical and artistic skills in a live, performing arts competition. It also is an opportunity for students to promote the theme of dignity and respect for all students, raise community awareness of bullying-related issues and rally support for anti-bullying education efforts. Eight local high schools and one middle school will send representatives to perform a musical, artistic or dramatic piece that the students produced themselves. The public is encouraged to attend and support the students performing. Bullying is an issue that affects people in schools, communities and society, says Amanda B. Nickerson, director of the Alberti Center. Students in schools are vital to spreading the message about the importance of treating others with dignity and respect, and to stand up against bullying. BAND Against Bullying is a wonderful venue for students to raise awareness and spread this positive message, while also celebrating their talent in the performing arts. This years event will feature KISS 98.5 personalities Janet Snyder, who will host the event, and Nicholas Picholas, who will serve as one of the celebrity judges. Other judges will include former boxer Baby Joe Mesi, Buffalo Sabres alumnus Andrew Peters and Lauren Hall from News 4 WakeUp at WIVB-WNLO TV. Joining them on the judges panel will be Nickerson and Ed Suk of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The presenting sponsors for this years event are M &T Bank, Hodgson Russ LLP, Ingram Micro and the Alberti Center. Tickets are $5 each and available at the Center for the Arts box office. For more information, visit the events website. Arch rivals H&M and Zara are heading for a face-off in Mumbai. H&M, the Swedish fashion retailer, has announced it will open its maiden store in Mumbai this autumn. According to sources, it has booked space in the citys malls for two stores. Zara had four stores in Mumbai and was opening three more, sources said. H&M is opening a 30,000-sq ft store in High Street Phoenix in Lower Parel and a 37,000-sq ft store in Phoenix Marketcity, Kurla. Both properties are owned by Phoenix Mills. According to sources, H&M is also in talks with Inorbit Mall in Malad to open a store there and has booked space in L&T Realtys mall in Seawoods. When contacted, Inorbit executives declined to comment. L&T Realty executives could not be contacted for comment. H&Ms store will be adjacent to Zaras 25,000-sq ft store in Palladium, the luxury mall owned by Phoenix Mills, in Lower Parel. Zara also has a 36,0000-sq ft store in Phoenix Marketcity, Kurla, where H&M will be opening a store. Sources said H&M had worked out a special revenue sharing deal with Phoenix Mills. An H&M spokesperson declined to talk about individual mall deals. In India, we see a great potential to open many stores and we look at many different options. Our expansion strategy is to always open at the best business location, the spokesperson said. Zara has been present in India for six years and has 16 stores in the country. After a landmark leasing deal in south Mumbai, where it booked 50,000 sq ft space near Hutatma Chowk for which it will pay Rs 2.5 crore rent per month, the fashion brand is in talks with Oberoi Mall in Goregaon to open a 28,000-sq ft store. Oberoi Mall executives could not be contacted for comments. Zara had also taken space in L&Ts mall in Seawoods, sources said. A mail sent to Zaras parent Inditex did not elicit any response. Mumbai has limited good quality mall space and brands have to look at the same set of malls, said a mall operator who did not wish to be named. According to Mukesh Kumar, vice-president, Infiniti Malls, both Zara and H&M are poised to do well in Mumbai. While Zara is more premium and sells fast fashion, H&M is more affordable. Mumbai has space for both brands, he said. Zara and H&M co-exist in Select CityWalk in Delhi, the No 1 mall in the country in terms of sales, and in Ambience Mall in Gurgaon. H&M is also opening a 37,000-sq ft store in DLFs Mall of India in Noida on Saturday, which will be its 4,000th store. H&M had in December 2013 received approval from the Foreign Investment Promotion Board to invest Rs 720 crore in India, becoming one of the biggest foreign investors in single-brand retailing in the country. Our stores must always be in the best business location in a city. This is so important that we would rather wait until the right location becomes available, the H&M spokesperson recently told this newspaper. The company has said it plans to open 50 stores in India. According to industry sources, Zaras 17,000-sq ft store in Select CityWalk pulls in about Rs 10 crore a month, or around Rs 6,000 per sq ft. H&Ms 25,000-sq ft store makes Rs 12.5 crore a month, or about Rs 5,000 per sq ft. BATTLE OF THE GIANTS Broadcast Audience Research Council or BARC, now the worlds largest television audience measurement service, has completed a year. After its joint venture with TAM, it is now the only ratings body in the Rs 54,200-crore Indian TV sector. Vanita Kohli-Khandekar spoke to BARC Chief Executive Officer Partho Dasgupta on what the year has been like. Edited excerpts. Where is BARC currently on homes, meters, total audience covered and so on? BARC measures viewership habits of Indias 153.5 million TV households. Of these, 77.5 mn are in urban India, and 76 mn are in rural India. Currently, 22,000 homes are seeded with BAR-O-Meters. In the second year of operation, we will expand our panel homes by 10,000, as mandated by government guidelines. What are the big gaps? India poses a huge challenge for any audience measurement system due to its vastness and heterogeneity of population. Added the fact that India is used to very segmental data, globally unprecedented. A channel or genres viewership could be very low and yet they would do hair-splitting analysis in spite of our advisories on the contrary. This poses a big challenge for our statisticians. The second is the practice in India of knowing why and not only what from the data. This is also something that we dont see in other countries. When we set up BARC India, we did not anticipate the quantum of manpower needed. This impacted our capability to respond quickly to queries from subscribers, who were also coming to terms with the new system. But, we were able to quickly take corrective steps. How many subscribers does the BARC data have? What proportion of the industry uses the currency? There are currently over 3000 BARC Media Workstations (BMW) deployed in the industry, running our software, crunching our data and giving insights to our subscribers. In terms of coverage, there are over 460 channels that have adopted our watermarking technology; this accounts for over 97% of Indian TV viewership and adverting revenue. If you include language feeds, we are actually tracking about 523 TV channels. Agencies deciding 90% of advertising revenues are also a part of BARC India system. We are seeing increasing interest for our data from advertisers as well. The big learnings? The biggest for us and the industry is that the past cant predict the future. Content drives ratings. But, along with content changes, viewership is extremely sensitive to various external stimuli like distribution, events/incidents that happen in real time and so on. When we began reporting data, as it was, it did take the sector some time to understand and accept it. When Kapil Sharma is absent on his show or whether Arnab (Goswami) on Newshour, the ratings drop. When there are severe power cuts in Karnataka, the ratings drop and it comes up when the power situation improves. The kids genre predictably shows increase in viewership as schools go on vacation and again drops when they restart. How does the TAM JV help? What stage is it at? The industry was looking for a single TV viewership measurement body. The JV agreement is in place, and the joint meter management company, Meterology Data Ltd (MDL) has been formed. Uninstalling of TAM Peoplemeters is currently underway, post which they will be re-deployed in BARC India panel homes, as per our panel design. Once re-deployment is complete, data from 30,000 panel home will begin flowing to BARC India servers. They will be fused and ultimately published through our BMW software. Is what the data shows, on broad trends significantly different from TAM? Why or why not? The two are not comparable as the technology we use is totally different. Also our coverage (All India urban plus rural) is vastly bigger, and we report data on the basis of the New Consumer Calssification System (NCCS) which is unlike the old Socio-economic Classification (SEC). BARC reports viewership of 658 million individuals as compared to TAMs 277 million individuals. The minister for communications, Ravi Shankar Prasad made some remarks about the inadequacy of rating systems, even under BARC, at FICCI-Frames. Comment? BARC India strictly follows government guidelines on the matter. We have expanded the coverage - with a doubling of sample homes to 20000 within the first year of launch, and inclusion of rural India for the first time ever. We have plans for expanding as per government guidelines too. We are a joint industry body. The number of our meters are dictated by industrys appetite for data vis-a-vis capacity to spend on data gathering. We feel that at this stage, our sample size is adequate to meet those twin considerations. However, accuracy, robustness and fidelity of data derived from sample surveys is dependent not just on sample size but also on level of sophistication of statistical and modelling tools deployed. One of the big issues with TAM was the sample size, allegations of data fixing at ground level and of cherry-picking by broadcasters. How has BARC fared on these fronts? We have a sensitive tracking mechanism that helps us quickly identify unusual viewer behaviour, backed by a vigilant on-ground team which escalates any such issue. Whenever we see suspicious behaviour, we first quarantine those homes and investigate further. We had recently found out about a few panel homes that had been compromised, and we immediately took them out of the reporting system and declared the same to subscribers. At the end of the day, however, we are a joint industry body, engaged in measurement of TV viewing and data analytics. If we are to learn from the past and avoid pitfalls, the industry (and we are a part of it) has to come together and ensure steps that are preventive in nature. There is consensus within sector on matters of integrity and I will not be surprised if we slowly move towards self-regulation on this aspect, just like how the BCCC (Broadcasting Content Complaints Council) operates on the content side. Where is BARC on the issue of niche/speciality channels not getting enough of a sample for robust data to be generated about them? First of all, globally, such channels are not measured the way we do with all granularity. For example, some of the largest global English news brands use quarterly reports to understand viewership. These are not even metered audiences. At BARC, we spend a lot of time analysing these genres and channels since they are more difficult to measure owing to lower incidence of viewing. The thing to be recognised is that this is a sample study and not Census. In case of niche channels, which have low viewership, we always advise taking a much larger period to come to any derivative conclusions. When you slice and dice the data for a niche channel, the relative error increases, thus showing volatile numbers which effectively provide no meaningful insights. There are many countries which do not report data for channels below a specific threshold and even if they report, they do not report at a weekly frequency. In India, the issue is multiplicity of channels which accentuates with the habit of analysing granular data which makes no statistical sense. However, we also recognise needs of niche channels, for instance English news, infotainment, lifestyle and so on. Their viewership base is concentrated in six mega-cities, and among higher NCCS (New Consumer Classification System) strata. To address their specific needs, we launched a monthly bouquet service called Alpha Club in November last year, and it has been received very well. We have also been engaging with them constantly to figure out other solutions. Do broadcasters react badly if they don't like what the data shows? How do you handle situations like those? We as a Joint Industry Body listen to our stakeholders. When the data doesnt show the results that the broadcasters expected, they obviously are upset. But, this was more so in the early days, when they were still understanding our data, which was high on fidelity. Over time, they have understood that we present the data as it is, and any changes only reflect the nature of the TV viewer. Fidelity is good and broadcasters now understand this. "How much of your job is handling the egos of the big broadcasters since the Indian Broadcasting Foundation is one of the shareholders?" (laughs) We all have egos isnt it? As long as we know where to draw the line its fine. Where is BARC on digital measurement and how will this be fused with linear TV data? The goal of our digital measurement initiative is to measure gross and de-duplicated consumer media exposures across platforms, across devices. Regardless of where and how content is consumed, we will be in a position to measure it. We are currently at the request for proposal stage. Vendor evaluation will start this month. Glenmark Pharmaceuticals says it has addressed concerns raised by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in February, following the latters inspection of its manufacturing unit at Pithampur, in the Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh, 30 km from Indore. The US regulator had issued what are termed Form 483 observations, on deviations from good manufacturing practices. After issue, the company in question must take remedial measures if export from the unit is to be allowed to the US. Glenmark said on Thursday it had done this. The Indore (Pithampur) plant was inspected by FDA in February and we received three observations from them, which were responded to in March. Subsequently, we received two product approvals from this plant and we have no outstanding items with the FDA regarding this plant, it stated. According to a media report, the FDA observations were on lacunae in control procedures for assuring uniformity and homogenity in tablets, absence of procedures describing warehousing of products and lack of appropriate controls over computers. The US market contributes about 30 per cent to Glenmarks consolidated revenue and the company expects big growth from here in FY17. In this financial year, it will launch Zetia, a cholesterol drug, and says it expects substantial growth from this product. As Intel begins to eliminate around 12,000 jobs globally, close to 11 per cent of its total workforce, the chip makers operations in India may also take a hit. However, the impact on India might not be felt immediately. India is one of the important research and development (R&D) sites for Intel globally, with more than 70 per cent of its local workforce around 7,000, including McAfee engaged in research. While the employees in India have been communicated about the global job cuts, site-specific impact is still not clear. Intel is known as one of the most employee-friendly technology companies across the world. We are not providing site-specific information at this time, and we are still evaluating our plans, an Intel India spokesperson said in an email response to Business Standard query. Overall, however, we expect that these actions will result in a reduction of up to 12,000 positions globally by mid-2017 through site consolidations, a combination of voluntary and involuntary departures, re-evaluation of projects, and an increased focus on efficiency in a variety of programmes. Staff layoff is a pre-emptive measure by Intel as the personal computer (PC) market is in declining globally. The California-headquartered company derives more than half of its revenue by providing chipsets for PCs. According to Gartner, the worldwide PC shipment declined by 9.6 per cent in first quarter of 2016 to 64.8 million units with all major regions showing year-on-year decline. Intel is challenged because of the sharp decline in the PC shipments and thats why they are having to restructure. This, among other things, includes layoffs, said Jaideep Mehta, managing director, IDC India and South Asia. Intel has not been able to crack the mobile chipset market which is dominated by players like Qualcomm and Taiwanese chipmaker Mediatek. Further, giants like Samsung, Apple and Huawei are turning to in-house chip designs, reducing the market prospects for Intel. Intel started its India R&D unit more than 15 years ago while server and client development works commenced here around a decade ago. Then, slowly, the company added all-in-ones, tablets, phones, IoT and the wearables in its ambit of R&D activities. Industry experts, however, believe that while the companys business prospects for the upcoming Internet of Things (IoT) wave look good, the sector is still not large enough to bail out the troubled company. Another IoT challenge will be making high volume, low processing power and low-cost chips. While announcing the restructuring, Intel has said the move is to accelerate its evolution from a PC company to focus more on cloud and upcoming IoT wave. The data centre and IoT businesses are Intels primary growth engines, with memory and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) accelerating these opportunities fuelling a virtuous cycle of growth, the company said. CHIPPING OFF Murugappa Group Executive Chairman A Vellayan has invested in his personal capacity into Chennai-based Trimed, a chain of integrative medical treatment centers that combines allopathy with the traditional systems of treatment for a holistic wellness. While the company says that he is the anchor investor holding shares in the company, Vellayan and the company refused to reveal the quantum of investment. Trimed, started as a pilot in 2010 and launched in 2011 officially, is into management of chronic disease and preventive and wellness services through neighbourhood centres with doctor (allopath), ayurveda, naturopathy, physiotherapy, pilates, psychologist, nutritionist, yoga therapist. It offers treatments in 11 therapy verticals - acupressure, acupuncture, ayurveda, hydrotherapy, magneto therapy, mud therapy, physiotherapy, pilates, psychological counseling, reflexology and yoga. "I am not a big angel investor and not an e-commerce man. I have invested in and my whole family has invested, because I am a believer in holistic healthcare," said Vellayan. He said that the model is good and that he believes in the founder. "I believe in the concept and it is in a way nearest to holistic - a combination of physiotherapy and massage among others. There will be a segment of population who will be prepared to pay this price and the convenience in the place they are located. Some elder people in our family is using it and they are benefited from this," he added. "The value of investment is not a big worry, but I think the concept is certainly worth support," he added. He advised the company to have a doctor in each centre, watch the cash flow and to start home service, which the company has implemented. Speaking about the investment, Ennapadam S Krishnamoorthy, founder of the company said that Vellayan is the anchor investor of the company, who invested almost 18 months back along with some others from the friends and family. The company raised around Rs 1 crore in this round of funding from a few investors. Vellayan also catalysed the next round of funding, of around $3,00,000 from a Singapore-based angel investor now, in the second round of funding, said Krishnamoorthy. The fresh round of fund raising will help the company to mainly develop technology including e-consulting and e-process platform, apart from expanding presence from current four centres to six centres by the end of the current fiscal year, probably entering into Coimbatore and Bengaluru markets. At present, it has presence only in Chennai. Following this, the company would look at a Series A funding to support growth to about 20 centres in around six cities, along with a strong mobile presence as well, between 2017 to 2020. The company implemented its own electronic patient record system around 20 months ago and from then on, it has treated over 2,400 patients and they have received over 42,000 interventions with . In a second blow to Supertech, the Greater Noida Industrial Development Authority (GNIDA) has ordered sealing of more than 1,000 flats in the formers Czar project, citing violation of rules. Some residents of Czar in Sector Omicron-1 went to GNIDA and complained about alleged violation of the sanctioned plan. GNIDA passed the order to seal 1,009 flats. Of the total units, half have already been sold. The authority had asked the builder to seal all housing units beyond the sanctioned 844 units. The notice was given on April 11 and the company has been given 30 days to implement it. Supertech claims it has not violated any rule and had purchased Floor Area Ratio (FAR) from the authority in 2014. Chairman R K Arora said: We had applied to purchase additional FAR in 2014 and also given revised plans. Going by the building by-laws, the given plan shall be deemed to have been approved in 60 days in case no refusal or sanction is given by the authority. Therefore, the company undertook the construction of additional flats, which is legal and tenable under the law, Arora said. He said the matter was expected to be resolved shortly. The company said none of the 1,853 units, which is either ready or being constructed on the 20-acre housing project, is unauthorised. This is the second such case when Supertech has been hauled up. In 2014, the Allahabad High Court had ordered demolition of two 40-storeyed towers in Supertechs Emerald Court project in Noida because the company had built more floors than permitted. The company challenged the order in the Supreme Court, where the matter is pending. In a reply to the GNIDA notice, Supertech said, As far as the additional units constructed over the said plot, it is submitted that the company vide its letter dated December 23, 2014 applied for purchasable FAR along with request for increase in population density on the plot and has submitted the revised building plan to accommodate all 1,853 units constructed or under-construction. Now the company is ready to pay the cost of additional units over and above the 844 units, which is permissible going by the aforesaid notification of the government of Uttar Pradesh. The buyers activism is on the rise for last few years as several housing projects have been delayed repeatedly. In many case, buyers came on the streets and protested against the developers. So far, the realty sector was devoid of any regulator. With the passage of the Real Estate Regulatory Bill in the first phase of the Budget session in Parliament, things are expected to improve in the future. Real estate market is in a slowdown phase where developers are struggling with low sales and high inventory. Amol Gupte has just finished narrating the story of a kid who is a secret agent. The creator of Taare Zameen Par and director of Stanley Ka Dabba starts shooting this summer for a December release. At Eros International's Trinity Pictures, which is producing the film, the sense of anticipation is sharp. Eros releases 65-70 films annually, but this is not just another film. With Gupte's forthcoming film, along with three others, India's largest film company is taking the first few steps towards backward integration. Eros became a Rs 1,442-crore behemoth by acquiring and co-producing films such as Bajrangi Bhaijaan or Bajirao Mastani. Its competency, as one analyst puts it, is getting deals and distribution. Trinity, its in-house production arm set up 15 months ago, attempts to change that. The idea is to have control over intellectual property (IP) and in turn generate better returns. "Out of our outlay of $200 million plus (Rs 1,320 crore) in content investment for the year, $25-30 million (Rs 165 crore to Rs 198 crore) will be towards Trinity. We will ramp this number up to around $50 million (Rs 330 crore) in two years," says Jyoti Deshpande, group CEO, Eros International. She reckons that Trinity will over time deliver up to six films a year. But these will "be among the top 15 revenue generating films of the year for Eros as well as the industry," she adds. Trinity has 10 films going on the floor over the next two years. That is roughly what a regular Indian studio would produce in a year. "It (Trinity) is absolutely the right thing to do. All studios should own IP and should be involved in production," says Ajit Andhare, chief operating officer, Viacom18 Motion Pictures. Viacom18, Eros, Disney, Yash Raj Films and Fox-Star are among the handful of serious studios that corporatisation has thrown up in the Rs 13,800-crore Indian film industry. "Trinity is to Eros what Marvel is to Disney," says Ajit Thakur, CEO, Trinity Pictures. "Earlier we were funding storytelling, now we are bringing storytelling and creation within Eros," says he. After Trinity was set up in 2015, the first thing Thakur did is look for a team of writers. Trinity's eight writers today are developing characters and scripts from scratch. There are three filters that Trinity uses to greenlight a project: Is it franchisable? Is it in an unexplored genre? And can it hit Rs 1,000 crore in revenues as a franchise? Take each of these. "Franchise films make for more discipline in storytelling, it works only if you invest in developing a character. The plots may run out but the characters live on and the economic viability of franchises is very clear," says Thakur. Globally, six to seven of the top ten grossers over the last couple of years have been franchises: films such as Avengers, James Bond's Spectre, Fast and Furious or The Hunger Games. This is because more than half of Hollywood's revenues now come from outside of America, notably from markets such as China or Korea. Known characters, with a built-in awareness, increase the appeal of a film and cut marketing costs. That explains why Deshpande brought David Maisel, founder of Marvel, on the Eros board. "A franchise puts a studio in a better position to negotiate," reckons Andhare. Two, there is focus on unexplored genres: Gods and kings, mythological characters, animation and live action for kids and supernatural themes. Bollywood is not conventionally known for these genres; these have huge audiences but little content. Notice the popularity of the Chhota Bheem movies or of The Jungle Book. "Most of these genres lend themselves to franchises," says Shailesh Kapoor, CEO, Ormax Media. Ormax is helping Trinity test concepts and scripts. "We will not do comedies, love stories and drama," says Thakur. The third filter, on becoming a Rs 1,000 crore franchise, says Thakur, is more a statement of intent of ambition. Top grossing Indian films do anywhere between Rs 50 and Rs 400 crore, whereas in China it ranges from Rs 500 to Rs 3,000 crore and more. The idea therefore is to look at scripts that can with two films in, say about three years, generate Rs 1,000 crore. Of Trinity's four films going into production this financial year, two are Indo-China co-productions. The first one is a bilingual, directed by Kabir Khan with Indian and Chinese stars, which Thakur thinks could reach Rs 1,000 crore. The challenges Haven't other studios attempted to replicate the independent spirit within? Thakur doesn't agree. "Trinity is not about small films, we don't want it to be Spotboy (Disney) or Y Films (Yashraj. It is as mainstream as possible," says Thakur. But there is scepticism about Eros' ability to pull off such a feat. "They are deal-makers signing cheques for acquisitions with a weak understanding of production," says an analyst. "When we came in 2006, we were in the land-grab phase. We gave advances for two to three years for films to create a slate. But now we are a content company. We are trying to change the mix to movies where we are involved from the writing of the script onwards," Deshpande had told Business Standard when Trinity was launched. The process of creating a film is painful and expensive; the first Trinity film will go on the floor more than 18 months after the launch of the studio. Most independent producers usually lose steam by then and sell it to whichever studio is willing to pick it up. But Trinity also has an advantage. "Unlike an independent, once I green-light a project, we can go all the way to distribution and marketing," says Thakur. As one analyst puts it, the rationale and design of Trinity is absolutely correct. Now for execution. Taxi aggregators Uber and Ola may have to permanently stop surge pricing, around which their business models are built. In a series of messages on micro-blogging site Twitter, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal accused Uber and Ola of daylight robbery. "Surge pricing is daylight robbery. No responsible govt can allow that. This is open blackmailing n govt will not let that happen," he tweeted. To a suggestion on Twitter that the suspension of surge pricing should continue even after the odd-even scheme, Kejriwal replied, "Yes, we will do it." There's nothing official from the Delhi government yet on banning surge pricing after the odd-even drill is over. Recently, the Karnataka government had set a cap on surge pricing. Airlines, railways and hotels offer dynamic prices. For taxi aggregators, the technology ensures real-time tracking of demand and supply, but airlines and hotels use revenue management tools to balance tariffs. Sources said repeated requests by Uber and Ola to meet Delhi government officials had been turned down. "No one from the government has given us time. We are getting to know of all these developments from tweets or press conferences held by Transport Minister Gopal Rai," said a taxi aggregator who did not wish to be named. "If the cost of operation is going down per cab as the demand is high why should they charge a premium?" said Siddhartha Pahwa, CEO, Meru Cabs. "We believe the CM has taken the right step by capping the maximum fare radio taxis can charge," he added. Ola on Wednesday said it would offer free rides for its shuttle bus service on April 22 and 29. Since Tuesday, 75 taxis working for Uber and Ola have been impounded. PRICING FOR PROFIT HOSPITALITY: In peak holiday seasons, hotel tariffs typically rise because of surge in demand. The industry uses dynamic pricing to raise or lower cost of rooms and packages, based on supply and demand. This helps hotels maximise revenues by attracting customers at different price points In peak holiday seasons, hotel tariffs typically rise because of surge in demand. The industry uses dynamic pricing to raise or lower cost of rooms and packages, based on supply and demand. This helps hotels maximise revenues by attracting customers at different price points AVIATION: Airline companies decide on which fare slabs should be displayed for sale, as well as number of seats in each slab. As seats get sold in lower priced slabs, the costlier ones are displayed. In addition, pricing is event-specific. In the past, the government has threatened airlines against jacking up prices, but has not intervened in pricing matters so far Airline companies decide on which fare slabs should be displayed for sale, as well as number of seats in each slab. As seats get sold in lower priced slabs, the costlier ones are displayed. In addition, pricing is event-specific. In the past, the government has threatened airlines against jacking up prices, but has not intervened in pricing matters so far RAILWAYS: The Rail Budget in February said that dynamic pricing based on demand would stay. Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu said independence of Rail Development Authority will be ensured to enable fair pricing of services. Prabhu's comment followed criticism of the excessive high train fare during dynamic pricing Price gouging at its worst in other sectors The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has begun extradition proceedings against industrialist in connection with money laundering probe against him and Kingfisher Airlines. Confirming the development, an ED official told Business Standard, The agency had placed an extradition request in this regard before the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) for extraditing Mallya which is expected to be subsequently sent to the authorities in United Kingdom (UK) for his deportation to India. Extradition is the official process whereby one country transfers a suspected or convicted criminal to another country. The enforcement sleuths also requested MEA to start the process of Interpol notices which will be through the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The move came after the Special Court for Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) cases issued non-bailable warrant (NBW) against Mallya on April 18. Business Standard reviewed the copy of NBW order by PMLA court. The order read: Vijay Mallya, accused in the case stand charges with the offence punishable under Section 4 of PMLA has failed to appear before investigation officer since in spite of issuing necessary process. This Court having good and sufficient reasons to believe that the said accused will not appear before this court unless compelled to do so. ED is hereby directed to arrest Mallya and produce him before me. The warrant shall remain in force until it is cancelled by the court who has issued it or until it is executed, said the order. Mallya failed to appear before the agency despite three summons sent to him. A special court for Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) cases issued a non-bailable warrant (NBW) on Monday against liquor baron Vijay Mallya. With the warrant issued, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) is likely to send an official request to Interpol through the Central Bureau of Investigation for Mallyas arrest within a week, a senior ED official told Business Standard. An Interpol notice is an international alert, allowing police in member countries to share critical crime-related information. The preparation for sending a letter rogatory request to ministry of external affairs (MEA) for foreign judicial assistance is also at an advanced stage and will be despatched in a week, said the ED official. The ED had moved the court last Friday seeking NBW after Mallya failed to appear before the agency despite three summons sent to him. Soon after this, his Kingfisher Airlines filed an application in the court on Monday, claiming the allegations made by the enforcement agency that Mallya had diverted Rs 430 crore of an Bank loan to acquire assets outside the country, was false and incorrect. The special court rejected Kingfisher Airlines plea. Kingfisher Airlines counsel Amit Desai argued the alleged Rs 430 crore was utilised in legitimate expenses and was noted in the balance sheet of the company. He claimed former group chief financial officer R Nedungadi and Kingfisher Airlines CFO A Raghunathan appeared before the enforcement agency on behalf of the company and furnished audited accounts of Kingfisher Airlines for 2009-10. Desai also told the court that the Kingfisher officials had also provided details of foreign remittances done by the airline during the year. Responding to the arguments, the ED counsel Hiten Vengaonkar said, You cant monitor my application and its purpose, and for verification of the documents in person appearance is required. The ED, in the special court, also pointed out the secret details of the money lying in Mallyas overseas accounts in the respective period when the loan was sanctioned. Business Standard reviewed the copy of the warrant application filed before the court by the ED. MALLYA ON ED RADAR ED to send request to Interpol via CBI for Mallyas deportation Also preparing letter rogatory to get Mallyas foreign assets and bank account details, via MEA Had issued three summons for a personal appearance to Mallya, which he skipped Alleged Rs 423-crore Bank loan was siphoned off to create properties Identified recipients/beneficiaries along with their bank accounts Submitted list of Mallyas domestic and foreign properties, bank account details to PMLA court THE STORY SO FAR Oct 2015: CBI files criminal case against Mallya, Kingfisher Airlines,A Raghunathan and officials CBI files criminal case against Mallya, Kingfisher Airlines,A Raghunathan and officials Dec 2015: CBI questions Mallya CBI questions Mallya Mar 2016: Mallya leaves for London Mallya leaves for London Mar 7, 2016: ED registers an ECIR under PMLA against Mallya, KFA and others ED registers an ECIR under PMLA against Mallya, KFA and others Mar 18, Apr 2 and Apr 9: Mallya does not appear in person at ED Mallya does not appear in person at ED Apr 15: MEA suspends Mallyas passport for four weeks MEA suspends Mallyas passport for four weeks Apr 16: ED seeks non-bailable warrant against Mallya ED seeks non-bailable warrant against Mallya Apr 18: PMLA court issues warrant It said, out of the total loan of Rs 950 crore, sanctioned and disbursed by IDBI Bank, Rs 423 crore had been remitted out of India. The agency submitted crucial details in a sealed envelope, which comprised a list of properties abroad which Mallya created from the proceeds, bank account details of 2009-10 and statements of Kingfisher Airlines and others admitting how Mallya diverted IDBI Bank loan for his own activities. The application explained that the restructuring of the IDBI Bank loan was carried out in December 2010 and during the restructuring, an amount of Rs 1,303.2 crore was initially converted into convertible preferential shares of Rs 553.10 crore and non-convertible preferential shares of Rs 750.1 crore. These were later converted into equity shares of Kingfisher Airlines. The warrant application given to investigative officer of this case quoted one of the Kingfisher official saying, Whenever Mallya calls, he calls from his UK number. The warrant application also stated that the Kingfisher official had submitted various documents pertaining to the company and also details of Mallyas properties located in India and abroad. The application highlighted how Mallya evaded appearing in person despite three summons and had informed the ED that he was outside India to attend to certain prior commitments in Europe which were planned earlier and requested for permission to appear in the ED office in early April 2016. Mallya also said he was in active negotiations with various European entities for honouring his offer of one-time settlement with the consortium of banks, which had given loans to Kingfisher Airlines, and hence he was required to remain in Europe to achieve the crucial objective. In its concluding remarks in the NBW application, ED said that Mallya had been actively involved in generation of proceeds of crime through the scheduled offence and subsequent layering and laundering of the same. So far, scrutiny of the documents by ED officials in this case revealed that the loans sanctioned were not backed by quality collateral. These apart, the brand value of Kingfisher was one of the collaterals, which was valued at Rs 3,406 crore, which appears unreasonable and is not in sync with the general trend. There is a possibility that these properties are acquired from the proceeds of crime involved in the present offence and also there is possibility that Mallya may alienate and/or dispose of the same, thereby creating hurdles in the investigation completely frustrating the proceedings under anti-money laundering acts, according to the application. Pakistan Rangers on Thursday resorted to unprovoked firing at a border security force (BSF) outpost on the international border in Jammu region's Samba district. This is the second by Pakistan Rangers since Tuesday. On Tuesday, the troops had fired at a BSF border outpost (BOP) in Samba district. "After a gap of two days, Pakistani troops earlier in the morning resorted to along the international border," a senior police official told IANS here. "Pakistani Rangers fired two to three bursts of small arms near BOP 6-R around 4.30 a.m." "BSF troops, guarding the borderline, retaliated. There were no reports of casualty or damage," the official added. --IANS sq/ksk Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan is said to have taken part as a director in board meetings of two offshore firms listed in the through a telephone conference, The Indian Express reported on Thursday. The development comes weeks after he had denied knowing these companies and suggested that his name was misused. The meetings involving Tramp Shipping Limited (Bahamas) and Sea Bulk Shipping Company Ltd (British Virgin Islands) were held in December 1994. As per new records, the meeting was held to discuss a $1.75 million loan from Dallah Albaraka Investment Company (DAICO), a Jeddah-based investment firm. The loan from DAICO was to be given to Constellation Ship Management (Bahamas) Ltd for purchasing all shares issued by Tramp Shipping and held by Sea Bulk Shipping. For the said loan, a ship owned by Tramp Shipping MV Sea Tramp was mortgaged to DAICO, the publication reported. The resolutions during the meeting recorded Bachchan as a participant in by telephone conference. Bachchans name was also recorded in the list of directors and office bearers on the Certificate of Incumbency that was issued by both the companies. On the Panama disclosures, I wish to state that queries continue to be sent to me by the media. I would humbly request them to kindly direct these to the GoI (Government of India) where I, as a law abiding citizen have already sent, and shall continue to send, my responses. I stand by my earlier statement on the misuse of my name in the matter and in any event the press reports do not disclose any illegal act committed by me, Bachchans publicist said in a statement to The Indian Express. Even as the government has chosen to remain tight-lipped on the price bargain related to the purchase of fighter jets from France, the BJP on Wednesday announced on its official Facebook page that the deal has been finalised at $8.8 billion. An image posted on the Bharatiya Janata Party's Facebook page said the Narendra Modi government "saved $3.2 billion (Rs.21,000 crore) out of the $12 billion (Rs.80,000 crore) deal". "The deal to buy 36 state-of-the-art aircraft from France at $12 billion (around Rs.80,000 crore) was re-negotiated and finalised at $8.8 billion (around Rs.59,000 crore)," said the post, which also had an image of Modi. The defence ministry refused to comment on the figure. "When the deal is finalised, an announcement will be made. We have never given out any figures (related to the deal)," said an official from the ministry. A BJP leader, meanwhile, said the government version on the deal should be considered as accurate, and was unsure how the post was published. On Tuesday, Minister of State for Defence Rao Inderjit Singh said most of the roadblocks in negotiations on the deal had been overcome and it was likely to go to the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) soon. Earlier, sources said the negotiations on pricing had almost concluded, and the deal would be final soon. The defence ministry has not officially quoted any figure for the deal for the fighter aircraft, which is one of the most expensive in the world. In January this year, both sides signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the purchase during the visit of French President Francois Hollande to India. ALSO READ: Most hitches in Rafale deal addressed: MoS defence Shaktiman, an Uttarakhand Police horse that lost a leg in an attack by a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislator last month, died on Wednesday, days after it got a prosthetic limb, an official said. Animal rights activists reacted sharply and asked the government to take action against the accused BJP leader, Ganesh Joshi. Vets attending the 13-year-old animal said it had not responded to a prosthetic leg brought from the US. The horse died on Wednesday afternoon, they said. It was at the police lines in Dehradun, where a group of policemen and an international animal rights activist from the US, Jamie Vaughan, were looking after it. " lost its battle with life after a brave fight of 37 days. I salute its bravery and also Dehradun police,doctors and Jamie who looked after Shakti and wanted it to live," filmmaker Vinod Kapri told IANS. Kapri recently made a documentary on life and the struggle of the horse. "It's not a death of a horse but a child in home. We treated like our own child," an emotional Kapri said. PETA India chief executive Poorva Joshipura said that the country should frame more stringent laws against animal assaulters so that peolple like Joshi refrain from being cruel to them. "We urge the government to act fast to ensure other animals are spared from cruelty and horrific deaths by strengthening the penalties for cruelty against animals." Joshipura said the horse "was essentially killed the day its leg was broken". "Our equine veterinarian always warned his quality of life would be forever damaged and he may not live." Joshi, the legislator from Mussoorie, attacked and severely injured during a BJP protest against the Harish Rawat government here on March 14. Badly injured in the attack, Shaktiman's leg had to be amputated later. A few days back, another US resident Tim Mahoney travelled all the way from Kentucky to Dehradun at his own expense to deliver a prosthetic limb for the injured horse. At a meeting with ministers in March, Prime Minister Narendra Modi handed out a report card to each of them. Each of the reports, in a sealed cover, contained an analysis of how the minister had performed on the social media, including the number of followers on Twitter and Instagram, friends on Facebook, and posts made by them on these platforms. Instead of the old-school summoning of ministers and issuance of veiled threats of reshuffling portfolios, what the ministers were confronted with was data from social media. The second part of the exercise was stiffer - ministers with a score of less than 100,000 followers were asked to be more active on social media. And, all of them, irrespective of their presence, were told to set up a social media unit within their ministries. These units would be in addition to the social media cell in the ministry of information and broadcasting (I&B), it was decreed. Even as ministers Arun Jaitley, Piyush Goyal and Smriti Irani pepper the social media with their comments extensively, there are others like Mahesh Sharma, J P Nadda and Narendra Singh Tomar who are relatively inconspicuous on such platform. The initiative is not only about pushing ministers to build scores on the social media. Ten per cent of the Indian population was on social media by the end of 2015, according to a report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India or IAMAI. Leaving out the population below 10 and above 70 years, the concentration is dense. With social media leading the dialogue on every conceivable topic, ministers have a key role in ensuring the government's point of view finds prominent space. ( TWITTERATI MINISTERS ) This comes at a time when the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government is about to complete two years in office. The social media scores are a ready reckoner, said one source privy to the exercise, to see how ministers have fared. Robin Jeffrey, visiting professor at the National University of Singapore, who has analysed Indian media trends for decades, says, "Today, especially in North India, where there is illiteracy and semi-literacy, 140-character messages with lots of pictures and sound have huge potential to capture people's attention. Cheap 3G and 4G phones are making this widely possible." He says the technology is a "force multiplier" when allied with a clear message and cadres who are true believers. Senior officers in the government, whom Business Standard approached for this story, refused to be quoted but confirmed details of the exercise. According to one of them, from now on, the ministers have to virtually work with the new social media teams till the next general election. Ministers have also been allowed to hire agencies to manage their social media accounts. Former I&B secretary, Bimal Julka said the focus on technology was driven by the PM. "It has been a revolutionary change. As of now, training programmes for the ministers and their staff are on. The plan is to tap the two-way flow on information the social media platforms." Rakesh Thukral, managing director of Edelman India, which claims to be the largest public relations firm in the world, said, "This is not a new trend and should be seen as specialists being brought into the fold. The polio campaign in the past and more recently Make in India, and COP 21 are examples. Whether it is messaging, integrated campaigns, international outreach, social media or creative inputs, I see an increase in the role of the specialists in the future." He is referring to the same phenomenon as Jeffrey - the role of clear messaging that acts as a force multiplier. "When technologies change, there is a first-mover advantage for politicians who already have substantial support and who quickly work out how new technologies can be used. Theodore Roosevelt saw how an American president could get into millions of homes once the telegraph enabled his activities to be published every day in attractive, rapidly produced mass magazines and newspapers," Jeffrey adds. An officer associated with the exercise said, unlike a conventional press release issued through the Press Information Bureau (PIB), publicity arm of the government, the ministers would be now forced to take direct responsibility for the messages that appear under their names on social media. It would, in turn, make them see the response and demand clear results from their departments. This exercise has already begun in the health ministry. "We are scarcely out of one report when the next one surfaces. These have all begun in the past two months," said one secretary-level officer. He said he had brought the issue to the notice of the minister who had declined to relax the pace of information flow. A report released by IAMAI this week claims of the 294 constituencies in the West Bengal assembly elections, as many as 70 have good presence on social media to influence the results. Admittedly on a thin base, the survey found "more than 42 per cent (were) sharing articles related to elections/politics on social media and 31 per cent commenting on political issues". It concludes there is a good chance of focused, elections-related content reaching them. An adverse impact of Modi government's exercise could be on the future role of PIB. Julka said while the communications platform used by it and other media units have improved of late, they still lack a cutting-edge look and feel. R K Pachauri, disgraced former director general of The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri), was sacked by the governing council of the research institute in a meeting earlier this week, the Hindu reported on Wednesday. The governing council, according to the report, decided to sever the organisation's association with Pachauri despite the fact that his employment contract expires in 2017. The report adds that it was decided to "pay all the dues for the remainder of the tenure and bring an immediate end to it (contract)". Additionally, according to the report, it was decided that his term on the council, which ended on March 31, would not be renewed. As a result, Pachauri will no longer be the executive vice-chairman a post created for him specifically. The decision was made despite an earlier claim by Ajay Mathur, the director-general of Teri, that Pachauri's contract had no early-exit clause. Speaking to Business Standard in February this year, Mathur said: "Dr Pachauris contract like that of all of us are time-bound contracts so his contract is for a five year period that ends of July 2017 if I am not wrong. I think it is correct that this contract did not have a early exit-clause. So yes the short point is these are the realities within which the governing council, Dr Pachauri and Teri had to operate." Speaking to the Hindu, Teri's spokesperson said, ...Dr. Pachauris term as a Member of the Governing Council of Teri ended on March 31, 2016. As the post of executive vice-chairman is co-terminus with this membership, his role as executive vice-chairman also ended along with his membership of the Council. The decision comes even as, earlier this month, a third woman came alleging that she had been sexually harassed by Pachauri. Speaking to a television channel, the woman said she had worked under Pachauri for four months in 2008 at Teri, which was headed by him then. She alleged that during this time, Pachauri repeatedly behaved inappropriately with her. While the identity of the woman was withheld, it was said she is a foreign and currently lives in Europe. In July, 2015, Pachauri, who headed Teri for 35 years, was removed from the post of director general by the council four months after an FIR was filed against him alleging sexual harassment and criminal intimidation. Last year in February, a 26-year-old researcher at Teri had taken Pachauri to court saying that soon after she joined in September 2013, he began harassing her via email, WhatsApp and text messaging, and persisted despite her requests that he stop. Pachauri denied all charges. In February, this year, another former Teri employee alleged sexual harassment by Pachauri between 2003 and 2004. Even as the fresh allegations emerged, on February 12, Pachauri proceeded on leave from his recently gained position of executive vice-chairman of Teri and former Competition Commission of India chief Ashok Chawla was appointed the chairman by the governing council. In March this year, the Delhi Police chargesheeted Pachauri on charges of sexually harassing and outraging the modesty of a former colleague. Pachauri was also accused of stalking and criminally intimidating the victim, with gesture or act intended to insult her modesty, according to the 1,400-page chargesheet. Metropolitan Magistrate Shivani Chauhan had fixed the document for consideration on April 23, 2016. The High Court on Thursday quashed the Centre's proclmation imposing President's rule in the state and ordered a fresh floor test on April 29. The order, which has reinstated Harish Rawat as the chief minister of the state, came after the court, earlier on Thursday, said it would be a "travesty of justice" if the Centre recalls its order imposing President's rule in the state and allows someone else to form a government now. Continuing its hearing for the fourth day, the court also told the Centre that it could allow ousted Chief Minister Harish Rawat's petition challenging the imposition of President's rule and ensure that a floor test is held. Thursday's decision came after the court, just a day before, said that the legitimacy of the President's decision to suspend the Assembly was subject to judicial review as even he could go wrong. The ' crisis' has seen the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) duke it out in the hilly state across the months of March and April. Here is a how the events unfolded: 1) March 18: Then Chief Minister of Uttarakhand, Harish Rawat, on the night of March 18, 2016, faced a rebellion from nine of the 36 ruling party legislators in the 70-member state assembly. The nine MLAs were seeking his dismissal. The nine Congress members joined the 28 BJP members in demanding dismissal of the Rawat government, saying he'd lost the majority. They also sat on a dharna in the well of the House. Led by agriculture minister Harak Singh Rawat, the MLAs walked over to the BJP camp. 2) March 19: Barely a day after the rebellion, the BJP had said that the Uttarakhand government, led by Chief Minister Harish Rawat, has lost the confidence of its legislators and should be dismissed. "The governor should dismiss the Rawat government in Uttarakhand. It has no moral right to remain in power as it has lost the confidence of its MLAs," BJP secretary Srikant Sharma had said. On the same day, then chief minister Rawat had said that the Congress in the state was ready to prove majority in the House. The whole affair, was of course far from being over, even as Uttarakhand Governor Krishna Kant Paul wrote to Rawat that very day, asking him to prove majority in the House by March 28. 3) March 20: Uttarakhand Legislative Assembly Speaker Govind Singh Kunjwal issued notices of expulsion to the nine rebel MLAs, asking them to reply in less than a week's time. These notices were pasted on the walls of the houses of these MLAs. The BJP and the rebels, on their part, served a notice for removal of the speaker, saying that he had lost the confidence of the House. 4) March 21: The first indications that the BJP would go for President's rule in the stae camne when, on March 21, BJP leaders from the state, along with the nine rebel Congress leaders, met President Pranab Mukherjee and asked him to dismiss the state government. "Will tell the president to dismiss the current government in Uttarakhand as they have lost majority. Harish Rawat is now trying to buy people in a fit of desperation to gain support, but he will not succeed. It is his streak of corruption that has led to this situation," BJP leader Kailash Vijayvargiya had said. Rawat, for his part, responded by rubbishing the allegations of corruption made by the BJP and described the part's activities in the state as the "murder of democracy". 5) March 26: Former Uttarakhand Chief Minister Vijay Bahuguna, who was heading the rebellion against Chief Minister Harish Rawat, demanded the dismissal of the state government and sought imposition of President's Rule in the state. The BJP also renewed its demand for the government's removal after citing a "sting operation" in which Rawat was purportedly shown bargaining with rebel party MLAs to win over their support during the floor test in the Assembly on March 28. 6) March 27: Uttarakhand was brought under President's rule by the Centre on grounds of "breakdown of governance". President Pranab Mukherjee signed the proclamation under Article 356 of the Constitution, dismissing the Congress government headed by Harish Rawat and placing the Assembly under suspended animation on the recommendation of the Union Cabinet. The Cabinet had held an emergency meeting last the previous night and come up with the recommendation. The political situation in Uttarakhand is a "textbook example of breakdown of governance," Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had said on that very day. The Congress condemned the move and termed it as a "black day" for the country and "murder" of democracy. The very same day, the speaker of the House cdisqualified all the nine Congress rebels from Uttarakhand Vidhan Sabha. 7) March 28: Former chief minister Harish Rawat moved the Uttarakhand High Court seeking revocation of President's Rule in the state and restoration of his government. Additionally, Rawat termed the Modi government's decision to impose President's rule as a "brazen display of high-handedness and authoritarianism". 8) March 29: The Uttarakhand High Court told former chief minister Harish Rawat to take a floor test in the Assembly on March 31. 9) March 30: The Centre moved the Uttarakhand High Court challenging an interim order by a single bench directing a floor test in the Assembly on March 31, days after President's Rule was imposed in the state. In response to the Centre's petition, a two-judge division bench of the Uttarakhand High Court stayed the floor test on the Assembly floor. 10) April 20: Questioning the Central government's assertion on the political crisis in the hill state, the Uttarakhand High Court told the ruling dispensation that even the president can go wrong. "There is no decision like that of king, which can't be subject to judicial review. That's the essence of Constitution. Even the President can go wrong, everything is subject to judicial review," the High Court said. The talks suggested by the Supreme Court to solve the deadlock between the department of telecommunications and private telecom operators over call drops having failed. The Attorney General on Thursday began arguments justifying the policy of charging Re one for three call drops. Attorney General Mukul Rohtagi assailed the telcos alleging that they have formed a cartel to resist a consumer-oriented policy. The investment made by them was not on par with the revenue generated. Their revenue was Rs 250 crore per day. The government is not insisting on ploughing back the revenue to improve infrastructure; but the penalty for causing inconvenience to the consumers is the least they must comply with,counsel told a bench conmprising Justice Kurian Joseph and Justice R F Nariman. The Delhi high court had earlier upheld theorder of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) imposing the penalty.The telcos like Airtel, Idea and Vodafone under the umbrella of Cellular Operators Association of India and Association of Unified Telecom ServiceProviders of India have appealed against it. According to them, call drops arenot their fault and there are several factors beyond their control which cause thefault for which they should not be penalized. The Attorney General took the whole day torebut the arguments of the telecos point by point, citing technical data andcomparative laws in foreign countries. Rohtagi said that the telcos were takingexamples from difficult regions to show that the fault was not theirs. Theyshould consider the national average. For instance, there are places wherethere are jammers installed for security reasons, but that is not the caseeverywhere. Refuting the contention of the telcos thatthey cannot technically track the sourceof the fault, counsel said that there are equipment which can do this but theservice providers are not interested in revealing the facts. The Attorney General also opposed the argumentof the telcos that shortage of spectrum contributed to the call drops andasserted that enough spectrum isavailable. Only the telcos must attempt to reach higher efficiency. The arguments will continue next week. Besides the border question, India and China discussed issues related to counterterrorism including Beijing's blocking of India's bid in the UN to ban Pakistan-based JeM chief Masood Azhar, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval said Thursday. Doval, who wrapped up the 19th round of the two-day boundary talks called on Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in Beijing and discussed the outcome of the discussion with his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi. Read more from our special coverage on "MASOOD AZHAR" India takes up Masood Azhar veto case with China Welcoming Doval, Li recalled his meeting with Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar two days ago during which the both sides discussed the progress in bilateral ties. "These meetings show smooth communication and close engagement between our two countries in political and security affairs. It also shows how both sides attach great deal of importance to ensure steady growth of China-India relations," Li said. Doval said that in the border talks with Yang, the two sides discussed the boundary question and other issues like counterterrorism. Asked whether issue figured, he said: "Yes, obviously when terrorism is discussed". India in recent weeks was vocal about criticising China for putting a "technical hold" on India's recent bid in the UN to bring about a ban on Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) chief Azhar for his involvement in the Pathankot terror attack. Regarding Azhar, India's UN Permanent Representative Syed Akbaruddin spoke of "hidden veto" at a meeting at an open debate in UNSC on 'Threats to International Peace and Security Caused by Terrorist Acts' in New York on April 16. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar called for a review of China's decision to strike a common stand against terrorism in their meetings this week with their Chinese counterparts. For its part, China continued to stick to its stand, saying that its decision is based on facts and fairness. On the talks over boundary, Doval said both sides want peace and tranquillity at the borders. About India's emphasis that 3,488 km-long Line of Actual Control (LAC) be demarcated to prevent tensions between troops on both sides patrolling the area aggressively, Doval said New Delhi's stand is the same for quite some time. There is nothing new about the suggestions, he said. Ahead of the talks, Parrikar told his Chinese counterpart Chang Wanquan that clarity over the LAC will bring down tensions between the troops on both sides which aggressively patrol the areas to assert their control. "We are insisting it should be done in order to really ensure a very stable border as all the issues take place because of perception," he said. Marking the LAC is "one of the preconditions of smooth border operations. Without that everything goes by perceptions, which has caused problems sometimes," Parrikar said. This was highlighted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi both during the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to India in 2014 and his own trip here last year. But China was averse to accept it and for its part suggested a code of conduct. About the border talks, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement here last night that both countries have agreed toadhere to "peaceful negotiations" to settle the vexed border issue and reach a "fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution." Both Doval and Yang had an "extensive, deep and candid"discussion on the LAC." Both sides agreed to adhere to "peaceful negotiations to settle the boundary question." They will make efforts to reach a "fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution," it said. Besides the border issue, Doval and Yang, the designatedSpecial Representatives, also have a larger mandate to discuss all contentious bilateral, regional and international matters of mutual concern. On the border dispute, officials on both sides say the protracted boundary talks made progress and that they also made attempts to avert tensions along the disputed border. While China says that the boundary dispute is confined to 2,000 kms, mainly in Arunachal Pradesh in eastern sector which it claims as part of southern Tibet, India asserts that the dispute covered the whole of the LAC including the Aksai Chin occupied by China during the 1962 war. When the Special Representatives were appointed in 2003, the two sides set off a three-stage process. The two countries first reached an agreement on the guiding principles and setting political parameters for the settlement in 2005. Officials say the two sides are currently in the second stage which focusses on working out a framework of settlement to be followed by final step drawing the boundary line based on framework agreement. Doval and Yang are also reported to have discussed a range of issues including India's concern over $46 billion trade deficit with China in about $70 billion bilateral trade. Domestic air traffic grew 25.25 per cent in March on a year-on-year basis as carriers flew 7.8 million passengers in the month. In the same month last year airlines carried 6.2 million passengers, according to the data released by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation on Thursday. Average industry-wide passenger occupancy rose to 80.7 per cent last month compared to 78.8 per cent in March 2015. Travel demand remained strong as fares remain low due to weak oil crude pil prices. SpiceJet reported the highest load factor (91.1 per cent), followed by GoAir (86.6 per cent) and IndiGo (85.1 per cent). IndiGo continued its leadership growing its market share to 38.4 per cent in March. The market share of IndiGo and GoAir showed growth on a month-on-month basis while it declined or remained flat for others. Jet Airways along with JetLite was second with 20.2 per cent market share and national carrier Air India had a share of 14.7 per cent in March. Both the Tata-group airlines AirAsia and Vistara had zero flight cancellations. Vistara also topped the on time performance at metro airports with 91.5 per cent on time flights. "Air fares are stable as oil prices are down and that continues to drive passenger demand," said Sharat Dhall, president of online portal Yatra.com. Air travel has been growing at 20 per cent in the past few months. Data from International Air Transport Association show that demand growth in India was the highest among Australia, Brazil, China, Japan, Russia and the US. As price of pulses has started climbing again after last Octobers steep rise, the government has taken several counter-measures. These include releasing stocks from the buffer, empowering states to impose stock limits, conducting tax raids on traders in Maharashtra, and sharply increasing the margin on chickpeas futures.The Centre on Friday decided to release 10,000 tonnes of pulses, mainly tur and urad, from buffer stocks. States have been asked to release stocks available with them and they can approach the Centre for more. The Security and Exchange Board of India has told the National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange to levy a special margin of 25 per cent (in cash) on the long side and 5 per cent (in cash) on the short side on all running and yet to be launched chana contracts from Friday. This is second action by Sebi on chana. The regulator on April 13 had imposed five per cent special and five per cent additional margin. The total margin on chana comes to 50 per cent. In October last year, Sebi had imposed virtually 100 per cent margin on chana futures. Sebi has taken this action to control the speculative interest in chana contract, so that the price discovery does not get distorted. Our surveillance system is closely monitoring the contract to ensure market integrity, said Rajeev Agarwal, whole time member, Sebi. The Union food and consumer affairs ministry has informed state governments to focus on the rise in pulses prices. The income tax department searched several traders across the country to unearth possible links between hoarding of pulses and the price rise. Sources said tax officials conducted searches at 22 locations in Mumbai, Delhi, Jalgaon and Indore.Between December and March, vegetables are available cheap and the demand for pulses declines. Between April and June, vegetable supply decreases, resulting in a surge in demand for pulses. Unless supply is managed, pulses prices will continue to remain firm, said Bimal Kothari, managing director, Pancham International, an importer of pulses. Tur prices have moved up by Rs 50 a kg in 10 days despite the Centre procuring 50,000 tonnes as buffer. The government feels traders are hoarding again in anticipation of a weak rabi harvest due to drought in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. Government agencies have imported only 15,000 tonnes of pulses so far against annual imports of 500,000 tonnes. Traders believe price will remain elevated till the new crop arrives. Government agencies have imported only 15,000 tonnes of pulses so far against annual imports of 500,000 tonnes. Traders believe price will remain elevated till the new crop arrives. THE PULSE PLAN The government has amended the route dispersal guidelines to enhance air connectivity to Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Under these norms, airlines should deploy 10 per cent of their metro routes capacity on category-II routes to Jammu and Kashmir, the northeast, Lakshadweep, and Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Further, one per cent of the capacity on metro routes has to be deployed within Kashmir and the northeast. The government has now included airports in Himachal Pradesh (Shimla, Kullu and Dharamshala) and Uttarakhand (Dehra Dun) in the category-II routes. These airports were on the category-III list with all other non-metro routes. More destinations in category-II routes will make it easier for airlines to comply with norms. The move comes against the backdrop of an ongoing petition on the lack of air connectivity to Shimla and the Supreme Court criticising the government on the issue. Air India stopped operations to Shimla in 2012 and there are no scheduled flights to the city. Shimla airport runway can handle only an ATR-42 aircraft. No other scheduled airline flies ATR-42-type of plane at present. Air India Regional (Alliance Air) connects Delhi with Kullu and Dharamshala with ATR-72 aircraft. Apart from Alliance Air, IndiGo, Jet Airways and SpiceJet fly to Dehra Dun. In February, the ministry told the Supreme Court that Air India could lease ATR-42 aircraft to start a service to Shimla. But that would require viability-gap funding from the state government to bridge the gap between costs and revenue. The government also said Air India did not have a spare ATR-42 aircraft and hence it would have to take these on lease to start flights to Shimla. IMPROVING CONNECTIVITY On a day when Japanese automobile giant Mitsubishi Motors is in the eye of a storm for a fraud involving energy efficiency norms, the 'Transforming India' agenda of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government has set the current financial year as the deadline for for vehicles. The government also wants to offer incentives for construction of energy efficient buildings. After almost four months of Prime Minister Narendra Modi creating groups of top bureaucrats, including "two months of overall process from ideation to action", Amitabh Kant, chief executive officer, NITI Aayog, made a presentation on the actionable points on Thursday at Tenth Civil Services Day here. ON THE ANVIL Third-party scrutiny of road projects implementing agencies by December Incentive mechanism for contractors for early completion of projects Dispute resolution board for PPP road projects Nationwide toll collection system for highways Incentives for construction of energy efficient buildings Source: Secretaries' presentation In the road sector, the government would introduce third-party scrutiny of road projects execution agencies by December 2016. An incentive mechanism for contractors for early completion of road projects would also be put in place. A dispute resolution board for public-private partnership road projects would also be set up by September 2016. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had announced setting up of such a board on the recommendation of the Vijay Kelkar-headed expert panel on PPP. Besides, a nation-wide toll collection system for highways would also be put in place by September. The National Highways Authority of India had taken up a pilot for seamless movement on the Delhi-Mumbai National Highway 8 through a touch card that works on all booths, but the system has not been very successful so far. The government would also attempt to put in place a sales module of coal-net to generate electronic delivery orders by March 2017. Some of the recommendations made by 11-member secretaries' group on energy conservation and efficiency including amending tariff policy to mandate purchase of power from waste-to-energy plants and treatment of waste water by thermal plants do not find a mention in Kant's presentation but the ministry of power is already working on these. Piyush Goyal, minister of state for coal, power and renewable energy, had said on several occasions last year that transmission would be the next sunrise industry and the government would auction projects worth Rs 1 lakh crore during 2015-16.As the power sector enters a new financial year with a record generation capacity in conventional and renewable energy, investment in transmission is clearly lagging. Of the committed Rs 1 lakh crore, projects worth Rs 18,000 crore were tendered out.Aimed at power evacuation mainly in east and south India, these were inter-state transmission corridors in Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and some parts of north India.A total of 13 projects went under tariff-based competitive bidding during 2015-16 at a cumulative estimated cost of Rs 18,300 crore. Three projects each were won by Sterlite Grid, Essel Infra, Adani Power and state-owned Power Grid Corporation of India. One was won by Kalpataru Power. These projects were shortlisted by the Central Electricity Authority. Power Finance Corporation and Rural Electrification Corporation conducted the auctions.In the next 12 months, at least Rs 1 lakh crore of transmission capacity will be bid out. And, I see global players coming to India. Its a great annuity business, Goyal had told this newspaper in June 2015. While auctioned projects witnessed close bidding, many players left the business for lack of opportunities, said a Delhi-based power sector expert. Whether it is European major Isolux Corsan or Indian companies like L&T, most of the noted names have either slowed down or stopped participating because big projects are not being offered, he said. Power transmission was opened up to the private sector in 2010 with the award of the western regional system strengthening to Reliance Infra and the east-north interconnection line to Sterlite Energy. The CERC in 2011 ruled power transmission projects should be awarded through competitive bidding like generation projects. Power Grid was the only company operating in this area till then. The recently amended National Tariff Policy requires projects apart from those of strategic importance, which are to be nominated to Power Grid, be auctioned. The tariff policy does not mention the demarcation, but the government is working towards awarding as many projects through bidding, a power ministry official said. A government statement recently said Power Grid commissioned transmission projects worth Rs 30,300 crore during 2015-16, the highest ever by the company. Power Grid executives said it would continue to participate in auctions because nominating a project was at the discretion of the government. Six projects totalling over Rs 9,000 crore will be auctioned in 2016-17. The first phase of the green corridors costing Rs 40,000 crore is being built by Power Grid, nominated to it last year. The second phase of the green corridors costing Rs 50,000 crore is likely to be auctioned. TEPID RESPONSE Project Date of Award Estimated cost (Rs cr) Bidder Gurgaon 2016 March 1,000 Sterlite Grid NRSS 36 2016 March 500 Essel Warangal 2016 Feb 3,000 Essel OPGC 2015 Dec 1,000 Sterlite Grid Beyond Vemagiri 2015 Nov 3,000 PGCIL HEPs Bhutan 2015 Nov 1,200 Essel ATS Tanda 2015 Oct 350 KPTL Maheshwaram 2015 July 400 Sterlite Grid Chhatisgarh A 2015 July 1,100 Adani Chhatisgarh B 2015 July 1,500 Adani Sipat 2015 July 750 Adani Gadarwara A 2015 April 2,300 PGCIL Gadarwara B 2015 April 2,200 PGCIL Total FY16 18,300 Source: PFC & REC Three major steel companies have sought anti-dumping duties (ADDs) on cold rolled steel products. Alongside, Vedanta and Hindalco have sought imposition of safeguard duty on import of unwrought aluminium. Investigations have begun on both. On an application filed by JSW Steel, Steel Authority of India and Essar Steel, the Directorate General of Anti-Dumping & Allied Duties (DGAD) has initiated the investigation, said a person privy to the development. The investigation has started even after safeguard duty and minimum import prices (MIPs) on various steel products have been levied by the government. We have initiated investigation on CR steel products from China, Japan, Korea and Ukraine, a government official confirmed. In the case of aluminium, the Directorate General of Safeguards (DGS) has initiated a probe into increased import of unwrought aluminium allegedly injuring the domestic industry. The period of investigation is 2011-12 till 2015-16. The application, filed by Vedanta, Bharat Aluminium Company (Balco) and Hindalco, has sought immediate imposition of a safeguard duty on the imports of unwrought aluminium for four years, both for alloyed and non-alloyed wrought aluminium products. As reported earlier by this newspaper, DGAD is also investigating another complaint by five major steel companies on products of one category, hot rolled (HR) flat products of non-alloy and other alloy steel, in coils of a width of 600 mm or more. Apart from the three previously mentioned, these five major companies include Jindal Steel & Power and Tata Steel. In September, the government had imposed a 20 per cent safeguard duty for six months on various products of the HR category. Last month, it extended the duty for two and a half years, saying increased imports threatened serious injury to domestic producers. In February, the government had also imposed an MIP for six months on 173 steel products, to protect domestic companies from cheaper import. And, the steel ministry is working with the finance ministry on a financial package for the sector. Both the anti-dumping applications, for the HR and CR steel products, were sent within a small time interval, said the source. DGAD is also investigating a complaint by Jindal Stainless for imposition of countervailing duty on various stainless steel products. The steel ministry said imports were down 25 per cent over a year before in the first 11 months of 2015-16. In 2014-15, imports were 9.3 million tonnes; in 2015-16, these would be seven mt. In the latest available data, China has had 166 anti-dumping investigations intitiated against it, with duty imposed on 134 of those. There are 11 new cases currently being investigated in the case of China, of a total of 32. While the department of commerce recommends an ADD, it is the finance ministry which levies it. The petitioners should account for at least 25 per cent of total domestic production to appeal for an investigation. The probe normally takes a year and may be extended by six months. Preliminary findings are normally to be made within 60-70 days and a provisional duty may be imposed, for six months and extendable till nine months in certain circumstances. The domestic aluminium industry has asked for an increase in import duty to 10 per cent from the current 7.5 per cent. It was five per cent till revised in this years Union Budget. The import of aluminium rose 78 per cent between 2011-12 and 2015-16, touching 432,000 tonnes. Domestic production rose 43 per cent in the period, to reach 1.5 mt. The applicants have said, The profitability of the domestic industry has deteriorated in the recent year (2015-16) and the domestic industry is now suffering financial losses. The application, reviewed by Business Standard, also said the market share of imports had increased to 15 per cent from 11 per cent over four years. The DGS notice for investigation said, After examining the application on different economic parameters, it is seen that prima facie, despite improvement in productivity, increased imports of PUC (alloyed and not alloyed unwrought aluminium) in absolute terms have caused losses to the domestic industry and are threatening to cause serious injury to domestic producers of PUC. Safeguard duty is allowed under World Trade Organisation rules as a temporary measure. The purpose of ADD is to rectify a trade-distortive effect when goods are exported by one country to another at a price lower than its normal value. In June last year, India imposed ADD of up to $316 a tonne on import of certain steel products from three countries, including China. Real estate group Wave on Thursday announced its entry into healthcare industry with SENS - a multi-specialty age management clinic. Sanjay Sachdeva, executive director, SENS, talks to Deepak Patel about the company's focus on preventive health care and subsequent expansion plans. Edited excerpts: Why has the Wave group decided to enter the health care sector now? There is never a right time to enter a sector. Wave group has at various stages entered different businesses. The time has come to get into health care. We have been planning to do it for about a year now. What would SENS do? What are the areas it would concentrate on? The areas would range from preventive healthcare to treatment of disease through nutrition and a new field, called 'functional and regenerative' medicine. There are no allopathic medicines or invasive tests involved here. The treatment would be nutrition, nutraceuticals and lifestyle management. This is the first time someone is doing internal body treatment for anti-ageing. Ayurveda has been doing it for the last 6,000 years, but, it has not been marketed appropriately. We have brought the wisdom of Ayurveda and blended it with western research. It is purely a natural form of healing. Once your internals are healed, it would take you towards an external body experience taking care of skin, hair, eyebrows, eyelashes, make-up. If your spiritual quotient is low, you continue to age very fast. We have a spiritual programme, involving meditation and yoga to address that issue. Apart from wellness centres, are you planning to open any hospitals? No, we are against hospitalisation. That's the opposite of what we want. We don't want people to get into hospitals. We want people to get well before they get sick, before they catch any disease. If they have any disease, we want to reverse it through nutrition and natural methods of healing. There are other wellness centres coming across India right now. How is SENS different? Others are not doing preventive healthcare. They are treating diseases, what we call reactive management of diseases. We are saying, we will predict disease before it strikes. Because of your genetics, lifestyle etc, you could be moving towards diseases. We will tell people, how to prevent that without any invasive medicine, steroids or chemicals. If you do 1000 tests, you will found 200 not so correct in your body. Then the treatment is anti-biotic, hospitalisation, allopathy. There is no treatment taking you towards nature. The United Nations refugee agency has said 500 people may have died in the choppy waters of the Mediterranean last week, when a large boat packed with migrants from Africa and the Middle East capsised between Libya and Italy, The New York Times (NYT) reported. If the reports are confirmed, it would be the worst humanitarian calamity in Europe's migrant crisis since more than 800 people died last April near Libyan shores while trying to reach Italy. The NYT report mentioned,that the agency based its findings on interviews with 41 survivors of the shipwreck, although it was not able to verify the episode independently .The migrants - 23 Somalis, 11 Ethiopians, six Egyptians and a Sudanese - were picked up by a merchant ship near Greece on April 16 after days of drifting at sea. They were transferred to a migrant camp in Kalamata, a city on the Greek mainland. Their stories helped lift a cloud of confusion about the episode ever since rumors of the sinking emerged over the weekend. But they did not resolve the questions of where the ship went down or what the ultimate death toll may be. No national coast guard has reported finding the boat. If accurate, however, the testimonies suggest that human smugglers are operating as aggressively as ever on the Mediterranean route even as a recent European Union deal with Turkey has stemmed the flow across the Aegean Sea. A file photo of a Syrian refugee holding a baby in a life tube swims towards the shore after their dinghy deflated some 100 metres away before reaching the Greek island of Lesbos. And while there is no indication that Syrians and others who had been trying to reach Greece are now employing different routes, it is clear that Africans and others remain willing to risk everything to flee repression, poverty and war. A deal that went into effect on March 20 to deport migrants reaching Greece from Turkey has reduced the number of people coming over the Aegean, a perilous voyage that killed around 800 last year. But the policy appears to have prompted smugglers to return to previously abandoned dangerous routes through Libya to Italy - the same path used by the 800 migrants who drowned in an overloaded boat a year ago. According to the survivors in Kalamata, a similar situation unfolded late last week, although the exact date was not clear, said William Spindler, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Smugglers had arranged for a so-called mother ship to leave the Libyan coast and head toward Italy, loaded with "hundreds of people in terribly overcrowded conditions." A group of investors in Japanese mobile giant SoftBank has called on the board to dismiss president and COO Nikesh Arora, second-in-command to billionaire founder Masayoshi Son, reports Bloomberg. The investors have sent a letter questioning Arora's track record and qualifications as president and heir-apparent to Masayoshi Son. The investors raised questions about Aroras role as a senior adviser to the private equity firm Silver Lake and pointed at a conflict of interest there, the Bloomberg report said. In the letter, they criticised his allegedly poor investment performance and a series of questionable transactions during his tenure However, SoftBank today hit back at the bid to unseat the former Google executive, calling the allegations unsubstantiated, reports AFP. In a statement made available to Bloomberg, Masayoshi Son said: I have complete trust in Nikesh and one thousand percent confidence in him and know he will continue to do great things for SoftBank in the future. The letter was sent to SoftBanks board on January 20 from American law firm Boies Schiller & Flexner. Bloomberg reports: The investors are demanding that the boards at SoftBank and Sprint conduct an internal investigation by an independent firm. We believe that an independent investigation will establish compelling grounds for the boards of SoftBank and Sprint to dismiss Mr. Arora from his executive and board positions. The Senate on Wednesday passed the first broad energy Bill since the George W Bush administration, a bipartisan measure to better align the nation's oil, gas and electricity systems with the changing ways that power is produced in the United States. The Bill, approved 85 to 12, united Republicans and Democrats around a traditionally divisive issue - energy policy - largely by avoiding the hot-button topics of climate change and oil and gas exploration that have thwarted other measures. Its authors, Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, chairwoman of the Senate Energy Committee, and Maria Cantwell of Washington, the panel's ranking Democrat, purposely stepped away from any sweeping efforts to solve or fundamentally change the nation's core energy challenges. Still, the measure, known as the Energy Policy Modernization Act, would respond to the rapidly transforming energy landscape. It includes provisions to promote renewable energy, improve the energy efficiency of buildings, and to cut some planet-warming greenhouse gas pollution. It would also speed the export of domestically produced natural gas. House and Senate negotiators will now try to forge a compromise between the Senate Bill and a similar measure that passed the House last year. Passage would represent the first time since 2007 that a significant energy Bill reached the White House for the president's signature. "What we'll be moving now is what was achievable in the Senate," Murkowski said in an interview. "Most people thought we couldn't achieve anything, but we have demonstrated that we can legislate - and we can even legislate, oh my gosh, in an election year." Since passage of the last major energy law, the United States has gone from fearing oil and gas shortages to becoming the world's leading producer of both fuels. The use of wind and solar power is accelerating as those sources become cheaper than fossil fuels in some parts of the country. And President Obama's environmental regulations are reshaping power systems as electric utilities close coal-fired power plants and replace them with alternative sources. But the nation's energy infrastructure has not kept pace with those changes. The Bill would promote renewable energy by requiring operators of electricity lines, transformers, and other elements of the electrical grid to upgrade the system, with a focus on large-scale storage systems for electricity to better accommodate the expanding production of wind and solar power. The Bill would create and strengthen several programs devoted to improving energy efficiency in buildings. It would also deliver a long-sought victory to conservationists by permanently authorising the national Land and Water Conservation Fund, a program for protecting and maintaining national parks and wilderness sites. It would give a victory to fossil fuel producers by requiring the Energy Department to accelerate approval of permits to build coastal terminals for shipping American natural gas abroad. And it includes provisions to address the threat of cyber attacks on the nation's electrical grid. "There's so much change going on in the energy sector now, we need to have an energy Bill every year," Cantwell said. "The speed of the transition in energy now is like telecom in the '90s." The Bill has drawn support from a wide range of business and environmental groups, including the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the Alliance to Save Energy and the Pew Charitable Trusts. But some environmental groups offered only grudging responses to the measure. "This Bill is the VHS tape of climate policy: tolerable in the '80s or '90s, but not in tune with the scientific realities of 2016," said Jason Kowalski, the policy director for 350.org, an environmental advocacy group that led protests against the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline between Canada and the United States. "We need Congress to get with the times and stop writing Bills that prop up the fossil fuel industry that's wrecking our climate," he added. Murkowski acknowledged that almost no one is completely happy with the measure. "To have a Bill that everybody likes is not only unusual, it's just not going to happen," she said. The measure came to the Senate floor in January, but it stalled for three months after Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan, sought an amendment to provide $600 million to aid the victims of lead poisoning in Flint Michigan, and deal with the ongoing water crisis there. Republicans opposed her. Last week, Stabenow and a handful of other senators relented and lifted their blockade of the energy Bill. Stabenow said that she would continue to push for a vote on the Flint aid. 2016 The New York Times News Service Shares of Equitas Holdings surged as much as 34 per cent during their first day of trade on Thursday. Microfinance lender Equitas is India's first small finance bank licence holder to make a stock market debut. Shares of the company ended at Rs 136, up 23 per cent over its issue price of Rs 110 per share. The stock touched a high of Rs 147 and a low of Rs 134 on the NSE (National Stock Exchange). Over Rs 2,300 crore worth of shares changed hands on the NSE and the BSE (formerly Bombay Stock Exchange). Equitas's good debut follows robust demand for its shares during its IPO (Initial Public Offering of shares) earlier this month. The company's Rs 2,170-crore IPO saw over 16 times more demand than the shares on offer, despite no participation by FIIs (Foreign Institutional Investors) due to lack of legroom. "FIIs that were not able to invest in the IPO have come in through the secondary market. Equitas has a diversified business model and a strong management. It operates in verticals like SME (small and medium enterprise) lending, vehicle financing, and affordable housing, where banks don't have too much presence," said Ajay Saraf, executive director, ICICI Securities. "Being the first small finance bank licence holder to list, Equitas created a lot of excitement among all categories of investors," adds Saraf. Equitas IPO was bought over 15 times in the institutional (or big money) category; 57 times in the high networth individual (HNI, or super rich) segment; and 1.3 times in the retail (or small investor) segment. At the IPO price of Rs 110, Equitas was valued at 1.7 times its estimated FY17 book, lower than peers such as SKS Microfinance and Cholamandalam Investment, which trade at 3.8 and 3.3 times, respectively. "After the IPO, the FII shareholding has fallen to 35 per cent and that has created some legroom for foreign investors," said Sanjay Bajaj, head, equity capital markets, HSBC Securities. Investment bankers said Equitas's good listing would help improve sentiment towards the primary market. The IPOs of Ujjivan Financial Services (another licence holder of small finance bank) and diagnostic chain Thyrocare Technologies are hitting the market next week. Investment bankers said the IPO pipeline in the near term was strong. "Last year, the Indian equity capital market saw over 20 listings, and we expect more companies to come to the market this year," said Bajaj. "The IPO market will remain strong in the current year," added Saraf. Stocks swung between gains and losses as lenders offset declines in software exporters and property developers. State Bank of India (SBI) and ICICI Bank surged after the central bank pared the list of companies whose loans need to be provided for against the risk of default. Wipro, the third-biggest technology company, plunged the most in three years after its net income missed estimates. Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, the largest, slid more than one per cent each. The S&P BSE Sensex added 0.1 per cent to 25,880.38 at the close, after changing direction six times. The gauge came ... In a meeting with representatives of stock brokers on Thursday, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has raised concern over loss-making brokers operating in the cash segment. The regulator discussed the data which showed how a high compliance cost had forced 85 per cent of brokers having capital between Rs 1 crore and Rs 10 crore to shut shop. The number of brokers in the cash segment has halved in the past eight months declining volumes in this segment and the high compliance costs have led to 3,187 brokers shutting shop, shows market data. The meeting was part of the regulators effort to increase penetration of capital markets by improving the technology, to make the Know Your Customer (KYC) checking process fully electronic and the severity of penalties on regulatory offences by brokers. The meeting was attended by representatives of the BSE Brokers Forum and the Association of National Exchanges Members. Sebi also said it is in advanced talks with the Reserve Bank of India for a common KYC for the banking and capital markets, to reduce paperwork, said a broker representative who attended the meeting. Sebi had ensured a single licence for equity and commodity brokers during this year, a move that will help the broking community reduce costs. In the meeting, it also said it was investigating the complaints received on High Frequency Trade (HFT) in derivatives. Algorithmic trading or HFT refers to the use of electronic systems which can potentially execute thousands of orders on the stock exchange in less than a second. Sebi told brokers it wasn't against HFT but wanted a level field for all. It is also working on enacting new cyber laws for the capital market. Ideas were also exchanged on how business can be improved on exchanges, especially in the cash segment. The issue was also discussed at Sebi earlier this month. Sources said equity brokers had proposed a level playing field between non-banking finance companies and margin trading. At present, margin trading is charged at 15 per cent and it's 10 per cent in the futures and options segment. Sebi is to meet commodity brokers on Friday, to theit proposals and concerns. KEY TAKEAWAYS Indian steel producers are considering raising prices by Rs 1,500-2,000 a tonne for May, to cover a part of the sudden spike in the cost of inputs. After the imposition in February of a minimum import price (MIP) to protect them from cheaper import, producers had raised prices by four per cent. The trade says raw materials have since continued to move up. Since mills had cut prices over the past two years to match cheaper import, they are not in a position to absorb the rising input prices. "The industry is already under financial stress, said H Shivramkrishnan, chief commercial officer, Essar Steel. The basic raw material, iron ore, is costlier by 53 per cent over the past four months. The benchmark 62 per cent iron content for delivery in North China is quoted at $65.35 a tonne, as against $42.70 a tonne on January 1. The price of hard coking coal has risen by 25 per cent to $95.25 a tonne and of met coke with 62 per cent iron content by 20 per cent to $145.5 a tonne. Most of these input prices have surged after the government imposed an MIP on 173 steel products on February 5, to curb shipments from China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. We will have to keep observing the movement in raw materials and the international prices of steel and then take a call. In general, prices have gone up. In China, prices have risen even more than $100 a tonne. The volatility in both raw materials and steel prices in the past few days has been very sharp. We will take a view in the next few days, said Jayant Acharya, director (commercial and marketing), JSW Steel. Demand from the construction and infrastructure sectors has been on the rise since the above normal monsoon forecast this year. It is difficult to ascertain actually where we are heading. We will be watchful for a little more time and then take a call. The raw material price rise should reflect in terms of price increase to the extent markets absorb, said Acharya. Similar growth was seen in cold rolled coil, to Rs 47,500 a tonne. Since January, all varieties of steel products have become costlier by 12-20 per cent. By contrast, the HRC price in China has jumped by 35 per cent to $460 a tonne, from $300 a tonne early this year. All categories of steel, in fact, have become costlier by 35-45 per cent this year, which shows further room for growth of Indian steel prices, said Sahil Verma, an analyst with OreTeam Exim, a Noida-based consultancy. Even with current levels, manufacturers say they're seeing a strain on pricing and margins, especially small scale players, and this warrants a further increase in prices by eight to 15 per cent.Indias steel demand is estimated to rise six per cent this year from a little over 80 million tonnes in 2015-16. Financial Services, granted an in-principle licence from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for a Small Finance Bank (SFB), plans to raise Rs 882 crore via an Initial Public Offer (IPO) of equity.While Rs 358 crore will be raised by a new issue, the rest will bean offer for sale of 24.9 million equity shares to existing shareholders. The issue opens on April 28 and closes on May 2; the price band is Rs 207-210. The company raised Rs 292 crore in a pre-IPO placement. After this, the foreign shareholding will come down to 45 per cent (including employee stock options) from the earlier 77 per cent. Some lenders such as and Equitas had to tap the even before they launched operations to reduce their foreign shareholding to below 49 per cent as mandated by RBI. This is because the foreign shareholding rules for SFBs are the same as the foreign direct investment (FDI) one for private sector banks. At present, private banks can have foreign shareholding of up to 49 per cent through the automatic route and can go up to 74 per cent after approval from the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB). At end-December 2015, the assets under management of were Rs 4,540 crore and gross non-performing assets were 0.15 per cent of the total. The management said their market share in the segment was 11.15 per cent, the third largest non-bank finance company/micro finance institution in loan disbursement as of end-September 2015. We are looking at starting of operations by the first quarter of the next financial year. We will be building on our strengths and also build a core banking system and treasury operations, said Sudha Suresh, chief financial officer. In the near term, she said, profitability at the bank might be under pressure but will benefit from the reduced cost of funding. The IPO proceeds will be used to augment the capital base. Kotak Investment Banking, Axis Capital, ICICI Securities, IIFL and Karvy are the lead book-managers. Last year, RBI had granted SFB licences to 10 of 72 applicants. These SFBs will be similar to existing commercial lenders and will undertake basic banking activities such as accepting deposits and lending to the un-served and under-served sections. With the Centre coming down heavily on the Congress Party over the encounter case, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Anurag Thakur is set to escalate the attack by raising the issue in the upcoming Parliament session. This move comes after BJP MP Kirit Somayya gave a notice to discuss the same in the Lok Sabha today. Earlier, BJP questioned the Congress party's silence over reports claiming that former union home minister P Chidambaram had signed the first affidavit in the Ishrat case, and accused the grand old party of hatching a conspiracy against the people of India with a political agenda. "Latest revelation on has actually nailed Chidambaram and the Congress because of the dubious way with which they wanted to implicate Narendra Modi. They have done great disservice to the country," Prakash Javadekar said. Echoing similar sentiments, Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju alleged that there could be more people involved in it. "Chidambaram was the home minister, who was responsible for India's security. And if the home minister starts playing with the country's security, what will happen to the nation. I am asking how a home minister can absolve a terrorist on his own, there must be a grand design behind that, in which more people will be involved. A responsible home minister can't play such a big game with the nation's security," Rijiju. Media reports revealed that Chidambaram had in fact signed the first affidavit, which declared Ishrat and three others as terrorists, but gave all four a clean chit a month later as serious amendments were made in the second affidavit also signed by him. The first affidavit in the encounter case stated that Ishrat was a LeT operative, who was part of a plot to assassinate the then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi. Chidambaram had initially claimed that the first affidavit declaring Ishrat and three others as terrorists was filed in the court without his approval, adding that he had made some editorial changes to avoid misinterpretation when the matter was brought to his notice. Chidambaram, however, completely altered his stance in the second affidavit, saying that intelligence inputs on Ishrat and the three others did not constitute conclusive proof and favoured a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe in the encounter. Notwithstanding the Uttarakhand High Court's striking down President's Rule in the state, Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi on Thursday said the Centre would challenge the court's verdict in the Supreme Court on Friday morning. "We are filing an appeal, which is being prepared. It will be lodged in the Supreme Court tomorrow (on Friday) morning, and we shall be mentioning to the senior most judge since the Chief Justice is not holding the court tomorrow for listing of the appeal for hearing tomorrow itself, may be in the afternoon or may be as soon as possible," he said. When sought his response the HC's on observations, Rohatgi said, "We don't have even a copy of the judgment, so till I read the judgment I cannot say what observations are there or not. But, certainly we shall be asking for the stay of the judgment, saying that the President notification cannot be quashed in this fashion." Talking about the petition filled by disqualified MLAs, he said "The Central Government is nothing to do with the case of the disqualified MLAs. They filed their own petition that petition is pending in the high court. They will argue their petition. They may be filing an appeal in the court tomorrow. I do not know. I have nothing to with that." In a setback to the Bharatiya Janata Party-led NDA government at the Centre, the court on Thursday set aside President's rule proclamation in the state. Allowing ousted chief minister Harish Rawat's petition challenging the imposition of President's Rule, the court fixed April 29 for the floor test for him. Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone has triggered yet another controversy on social media by stating that women racing drivers would not be taken seriously in the sport. The 85-year-old Briton raised doubts whether a women racer would physically be able to drive an F1 car quickly as compared to their male counterparts, Sport24 reported. His comments elicited strong reaction on micro-blogging site Twitter, with IndyCar driver Pippa Mann responding quickly by saying women have enjoyed success in the series' despite driving harder cars to drive. Earlier, Ecclestone had stirred controversy when he compared women to domestic appliances. The high-octane motor-racing sport has not had a woman driver start a grand prix since 1976. Nepal's Federal Alliance has prepared the programmes of protest, hoping to intensify Kathmandu-centric agitation in the next three weeks. The Federal Alliance has 27 constituents, including the constituents of the United Democratic Madhesi Front. Sadbhawana Party general secretary Manish Kumar Suman said the alliance will unveil its protest programmes after holding an interaction with diplomatic corps tomorrow. Suman said that the alliance would brief the representatives of the diplomatic missions based in the capital about its 22 point common concept paper issued by the alliance on April 17. Suman said the alliance will hold rallies and mass meetings in all 75 districts and ensure that similar protest programmes are organised in all districts. He also said that the alliance would launch its protest programmes within a few days in all districts. "We hope to build momentum for Kathmandu-centric protest programme in three weeks," The Himalayan Times quoted Suman as saying. He added that the alliance would form separate committees and sub-committees to carry out the protest programmes. Prime Minister's Press Adviser Pramod Dahal said that the leaders of the alliance should respond to the Prime Minister call positively since he had invited them twice for the talks. He also said that the talks committee formed by the government had been talking informally to the alliance leaders but they had not responded so far to the talks offer. In its 22-point common concept paper, the alliance has demanded to create autonomous provinces on the basis of identity and economic capability guaranteeing two provinces in the Tarai. Nepali Congress leader Bimalendra Nidhi said that his party had not been able to take the lead to initiate dialogue with the agitating forces due to its general convention and some other party activities but now the party was free from those tasks. Seems like Sonu Sood and Farah Khan had a gala shopping time during the Beijing schedule of Jackie Chan's upcoming movie 'Kung Fu Yoga.' The 51-year-old choreographer, who made the 'Rush Hour' actor groove to her tune, took to her Twitter handle yesterday to share a snap of them during hopping the storesand helping "China's economy to bloom." "From Great Wall of China to Great Mall of China..! @SonuSood keeps the economy of China happy!" she wrote. The 42-year-old actor too wrote in reply, "Malls in China had to be closed early today as Farah bought everything! No stocks available.China's economy booms." 'Kung Fu Yoga,' directed by Stanley Tong, features Amyra Dastur, Aarif Rahman and Sonu Sood in lead roles along with Jackie Chan. Reportedly, it was then Sonu convinced the 62-year-old actor to do a song in the film and suggested Farah Khan to be the choreographer for it. Earlier, Chan was in Rajasthan for a 15-day shooting schedule. In fact, the 'Happy New Year' actor had sent a chartered plane to bring Farah and Geeta Kapur to Jodhpur to make him dance. This movie is a part of the three-film agreement signed between the two countries during Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to India. Alarming increase in Diabetes cases among Indians calls for high-impact public interventions to check and prevent this lifestyle disease. Stakeholders of the sector gear up to extend full support to the government in this battle. Being the apex platform representing the healthcare sector, NATHEALTH, in its reports and recommendations, has been emphasizing the need for high-impact interventions, multi-stakeholder engagement and effective awareness programmes to check this life threatening disease. Rahul Khosla, President, NATHEALTH said, "Immediate steps are necessary to ensure the transformation of India's healthcare system, and we need to scale up and expand current programmes to control NCDs, such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer, with care offerings that integrate screening, prevention, treatment and follow-up, enabled by partnerships, both private-private and public-private and across the delivery, insurance, technology and pharmaceutical sectors of the healthcare industry." Anjan Bose, Secretary General, NATHEALTH said, "Government is focusing on ensuring multi-stakeholder engagement for prevention, check and care to make India a healthy country. Government's recent announcements in the Union Budget were commendable. Announcement of National Dialysis Service programme is a welcome measure for the sector 15 percent increase in government spending on the social sectors with focus on healthcare should go a long way in ensuring universal health coverage. It will further strengthen the Government's vision for a better and healthy India." "We need to adopt a long-term vision and roadmap to prevent and control lifestyle diseases. Rolling out high-impact public health interventions is certainly one of the key requirements to battle diabetes," emphasizes Bose. NATHEALTH's Aarogya Bharat Report reveals that there has been an increase of over 100 percent in diabetes cases since 2000. India has its 38 million urban population diabetic and more than 80 million Indians are pre-diabetic, making every fifth diabetic in the world an Indian. Prevention and early diagnosis are the most cost effective ways to control non-communicable diseases. Prevention at primary stage is essential but there are major loopholes in the treatment cycle which makes drop-offs in diagnosing issues, treatments and appropriate care and awareness among people. "There is an immediate need to be aware about symptoms and effects of diabetes enabling prevention and initiate diagnoses at an early stage. Today, late diagnosis is the norm, and it imposes a high cost of treatment. Treating diseases early improves survival rates and results in lower costs," said Bose. According to the report, if a Type-II diabetic takes the treatment in early stages then the total spending on treatment is as low as Rs. 2500. At the same time if a diabetic patient goes for diagnosis with major complications, he/she has to spend 10 times more on diagnosis and treatment i.e. Rs. 25000. This results in creating major loss to the economy. "It is estimated that non-communicable disease will cost India USD 6.2 trillion by 2030. A 10 percent rise in chronic disease will result in 0.5 percent lower rates of annual economic growth," the NATHEALTH Report revealed. Nepal ranks second among the nine South Asian countries as far as press freedom in the region is concerned, as per the annual rankings released by the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders. The Index ranks 180 countries on indicators such as media independence, self-censorship, the rule of law, transparency and abuses. This year's report ranks Nepal 105th behind Bhutan, which is ranked 94th in the world with a score of 30.73. Nepal was ranked 105th last year as well, but its score of 32.62 is 0.09 point less than the previous year, which means press freedom has slightly improved in Nepal. Among the other South Asian countries, India is ranked 133rd with a score of 43.17, Afghanistan 120th (37.75), Pakistan 147th (48.52), Sri Lanka 141st (44.96), Maldives 112th (34.17), Myanmar 143rd (45.48) and Bangladesh 144th (45.94) respectively. Among the lowest ranked countries were Syria at 177th place out of 180, just below China (176th) but above North Korea (179th) and last placed Eritrea. While Europe remained the region with the most press freedom, Reporters Without Borders warned that the misuse of counter-terrorist and counter-espionage measures and conflicts of interest had put it on "a downhill course". In Europe, the threats to journalists were linked to rising nationalism which saw death threats in Sweden, which dropped three places to 8th. Nepali Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba met External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj here today. "An important visitor from Nepal. EAM @SushmaSwaraj meets Sher Bahadur Deuba, ex PM & President of Nepali Congress," tweeted Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) official spokesperson Vikas Swarup. This is the first meeting between Deuba and Swaraj after he was elected to the post of party president. The Nepali Congress President is on a week-long private trip to New Delhi. As close neighbours, India and Nepal share a unique relationship of friendship and cooperation characterized by open borders and deep-rooted people-to-people contacts of kinship and culture. There are regular exchanges of high level visits and interactions between India and Nepal. Nepalese Prime Minister Sushil Koirala visited India to attend the swearing-in ceremony of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on May 26, 2014. In 2014, Prime Minister Modi visited Nepal twice - in August for a bilateral visit and in November for the SAARC Summit - during which several bilateral agreements were signed. India and Nepal have several bilateral institutional dialogue mechanisms, including the India-Nepal Joint Commission co-chaired by External Affairs Minister of India and Foreign Minister of Nepal. A recent study has developed a novel prediction method to forecast monsoon significantly earlier than previously possible. A team of scientists developed the method based on a network analysis of regional weather data, and will propose this approach to the Indian Meteorological Department. The heavy summer rains are of vital importance for millions of farmers feeding the subcontinent's population. Future climate change will likely affect monsoon stability and hence makes accurate forecasting even more relevant. "We can predict the beginning of the Indian monsoon two weeks earlier, and the end of it even six weeks earlier than before - which is quite a breakthrough, given that for the farmers every day counts," says Veronika Stolbova from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the University of Zurich, the lead-author of the study to be published in the Geophysical Research Letters. "We found that in North Pakistan and the Eastern Ghats, a mountain range close to the Indian Ocean, changes of temperatures and humidity mark a critical transition to monsoon," explains Stolbova. Conventionally, the focus has been on the Kerala region on the southern tip of India. Information about monsoon timing is key for Indian farmers to determine when to carry out the sowing crops like rice, soybean and cotton that normally grow during the June to September monsoon rainy season. The scientists tested their method with historical monsoon data. It gives correct predictions for onset in more than 70 percent and for withdrawal in more than 80 percent of the considered years. The main advantage of the proposed approach is that it allows to improve the time horizon of the prediction compared to the methods currently used in India. In addition, the new scheme notably improves the forecasting of monsoon timing during years affected by the global weather phenomenon El Nino - Southern Oscillation (ENSO), particularly in its La Nina phase. This phenomenon significantly alters monsoon timing and decreases the prediction accuracy in existing methods. In an unexpected and sudden move, Pakistan's army chief, General Raheel Sharif, dismissed 12 officers on charges of corruption today. Five brigadiers, three colonels and a major general are among those dismissed, the Dawn reported. However, an official confirmation is yet to be announced. The development comes two days after General Sharif had said "across the board accountability is necessary for the solidarity, integrity and prosperity of Pakistan", adding that the war against terror cannot be won unless "the menace of corruption is uprooted". General Sharif said 'Pakistan's Armed Forces will fully support every meaningful effort in that direction which would ensure a better future for our next generations.' The army chief's call for across-the-board accountability comes after Prime Minister Sharif and his family was named in the explosive Panama Papers for possessing undeclared offshore assets. Opposition leaders have demanded a probe into the scandal, with some calling for the Prime Minister to step down. Prime Minister Sharif has rejected any allegations of money laundering, claiming that his children have legitimate businesses abroad, and has called for the establishment of an inquiry commission. A student of Pakistan's Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH) School of Nursing committed suicide by hanging himself from the ceiling fan of the dormitory in the main hostel. Waseemullah, the son of Hussainullah and a native of Gilgit, was a second year BSc student of the Nursing School at the AKUH. According to SP Gulshan-i-Iqbal Dr Fahad Ahmed, Waseemullah committed suicide due to 'family problems', reports Dawn. AKUH spokesperson Fabeha Pervez said Waseemullah was on full scholarship with a guaranteed job after the completion of his course. She further said the deceased was also an active participant in extracurricular activities in the college, adding the reasons behind his death remain unclear. Medical schools are often associated with high levels of stress, which many students are aware of when they take admission. According to reports, AKUH had started a faculty mentorship program to deal with such issues at that time. Pakistan and Britain have decided in principal to enhance bilateral cooperation to tackle strategic challenges facing both countries. According to The Nation, Sartaj Aziz, Adviser to the Pakistan Prime Minister on Foreign Affairs, met with Sir Mark Lyall-Grant, British National Security Adviser (NSA) and Sir Ciaran Devane, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), British Council, as part of the review of Enhanced Strategic Dialogue (ESD), between Pakistan and the UK, on Monday. Aziz briefed his British counterpart on security issues being conflicted by his country on its eastern and western borders and also the hurdles in normalising relations with India and Afghanistan. Both NSAs agreed to continue their cooperation in the areas of counter-terrorism, organized crime and illegal migration. Aziz appreciated the UK's support and assistance in countering extremist threats. During his meeting with Sir Devane, the two sides discussed and reviewed the whole spectrum of activities under the existing education and cultural road map signed in 2014, with particular focus on British Council's work in Pakistan. Aziz, according to The Nation, said there was a need for reinvigorating the cultural and educational connections between the two countries. Both sides decided to expand British Council's activities in Pakistan with opening libraries and cultural centres in Karachi and Lahore along with a digital library available to millions of Pakistanis. To enhance cultural engagement, it was also agreed that a new cultural road map would be signed between Pakistan and the UK that would focus on collaboration in arts, archaeology, and research and develop partnerships to support heritage, museums and the creative industries. Aziz also attended a lunch with British Pakistani Parliamentarians hosted by Syed Ibne Abbas, High Commissioner for Pakistan at the British Parliament. Aziz was on a three-day official visit to the UK to participate in the third Ministerial Review of the Pakistan-UK Enhanced Strategic Dialogue from 18 - 20 April 2016. Union Minister Giriraj Singh, who is known for his controversial statements, on Thursday proposed to revoke the voting rights of all those having more than two children in order to help develop the nation. "If Malaysia and Indonesia can make the law then there must be a strict law. The nation won't progress without population control. There must be a balance. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians- all must have at least one to two children. Those who don't follow, their voting rights must be revoked," Singh told ANI. He further stated the decline in Hindu population is worrying. "A law is needed on population control for all religions if development is required. The people of the nation must express their thoughts and discuss it. The media showed the condition of the Hindus in Pakistan," he added. Singh yesterday said that if India did not change its population policy and enforce a two-child norm for all religions then the daughters will not be safe and might have to be kept under the veil like in Pakistan. The BJP MP from Nawada, who was speaking at a cultural yatra in West Champaran's Bagaha, was reportedly referring to districts such as Kishanganj and Araria, where the Muslim population has been increasing at a faster pace than the Hindu population. This is not the first time he has courted a controversy with his unwarranted remarks. Earlier this month, Singh attributed the fatwa asking Muslim community members not to chant 'Bharat Mata ki Jai' to a conspiracy by international powers to destroy India and divide it into bits and pieces. Last month, he had said that Akhilesh Yadav's government has turned Uttar Pradesh into a nursery of terrorism and alleged that it was not dismissing Azam Khan for fear of losing Muslim votes. In the run-up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, he had called for all those critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to be sent to Pakistan. Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has assured that the proposed increase in the Value Added Tax (VAT) would not be a burden on low income earners. The Prime Minister, who met with a group of United National Party (UNP) Parliamentarians at the Temple Trees on Wednesday, said the government would not allow taxes to be a burden on low income families, reports Lanka Page. He told the MPs that the previous Rajapaksa regime had given tax concessions to a few rich people, while heavily burdening the masses. Wickremesinghe added that a decision to increase the VAT had to be taken because of the heavy loans taken by the previous regime. The Prime Minister said that he would brief the UNP MPs and ministers soon on the present economic situation and the tax reforms proposed to increase the government revenues as well as future plans. He also discussed the preparations for the upcoming UNP May Day rally to be held at the Campbell Park in Colombo. India's diversified natural resources company, Vedanta Ltd. has achieved the landmark of becoming the first company in the Indian aluminum and power industry to be awarded the ISO 55001 Vedanta's Aluminum and Power unit in Jharsuguda received the certification by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The certification covers the facility's 1.75 MTPA aluminum smelter, 9X135 MW Captive Power Plant (CPP) and 4X600 MW Independent Power Plant (IPP). The Aluminum and Power in Jharsughuda is the second in the Vedanta Group and 3rd in India to have achieved this success. Vedanta Group began the conceptualization and implementation of Asset Optimization framework. ISO 55001:2014 Asset Management system, which aims to take this journey a notch up by aligning Asset Optimization practices with the International Standards in terms of pro-actively managing life-cycle of assets, balancing cost and associated risks and satisfaction of stakeholders' expectation efficiently. "Vedanta has envisioned the need to value its assets. We strive for benchmarking with the best in the Aluminum industry. The ISO certification is a testimony to Vedanta's relentless drive towards implementation of benchmark management systems to enable better integration and audit processes," said CEO Aluminium Vedanta, Abhijit Pati. "Vedanta's Jarsughuda business unit has demonstrated that it adheres to high global standards in achieving consistency as well as sustainability across our businesses. This recognition encourages us at Vedanta to continue adapting more efficient management systems that ultimately boost our bottom-line along with our social license to operate (SLIO)," said Tom Albanese, CEO Vedanta. Continuing the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) vigorous campign in poll-hit West Bengal, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will today address rallies in Howrah district and Basirhat south in North 24 Parganas. First, he will address a rally at Howrah north where actor-turned politician Roopa Ganguly is the party candidate. He would then fly to Basirhat to address a public meeting where party candidate Samik Bhattacharjee was elected in the by-polls last year. The Prime Minister on Sunday had addressed two public meeting- Krishnanagar and Saheed Minar in the city, when Bengal had second phase poll for 56 assembly seats. Meanwhile, polling is under way for the third phase for 62 assembly seats in four districts of Burdwan, Murshidabad, Nadia and north Kolkata. Imports of counterfeit and pirated goods are worth nearly half a trillion dollars a year, or around 2.5% of global imports, with US, Italian and French brands the hardest hit and many of the proceeds going to organised crime, according to a new report by the OECD and the EU's Intellectual Property Office. Trade in Counterfeit and Pirated Goods: Mapping the Economic Impact puts the value of imported fake goods worldwide at USD 461 billion in 2013, compared with total imports in world trade of USD 17.9 trillion. Up to 5% of goods imported into the European Union are fakes. Most originate in middle income or emerging countries, with China the top producer. The report analyses nearly half a million customs seizures around the world over 2011-13 to produce the most rigorous estimate to date of the scale of counterfeit trade. It points to a larger volume than a 2008 OECD study which estimated fake goods accounted for up to 1.9% of global imports, though the 2008 study used more limited data and methodology. The findings of this new report contradict the image that counterfeiters only hurt big companies and luxury goods manufacturers. They take advantage of our trust in trademarks and brand names to undermine economies and endanger lives, said OECD Deputy Secretary-General Doug Frantz, launching the report with EUIPO Executive Director Antio Campinos as part of OECD Integrity Week. Fake products crop up in everything from handbags and perfumes to machine parts and chemicals. Footwear is the most-copied item though trademarks are infringed even on strawberries and bananas. Counterfeiting also produces knockoffs that endanger lives - auto parts that fail, pharmaceuticals that make people sick, toys that harm children, baby formula that provides no nourishment and medical instruments that deliver false readings.\ The report covers all physical counterfeit goods, which infringe trademarks, design rights or patents, and tangible pirated products, which breach copyright. It does not cover online piracy, which is a further drain on the formal economy. It notes that emerging economies tend to have the infrastructure for large-scale trade but often suffer from governance gaps and may lack the institutions and enforcement capacity to effectively tackle counterfeiting. While China is the top provenance of fake goods, its most innovative companies also fall victim to counterfeiters. The top countries whose companies had their intellectual property rights infringed in the 2011-13 seizures were the United States, whose brands or patents were affected by 20% of the knock-offs, then Italy with 15%, and France and Switzerland with 12% each. Japan and Germany stood at 8% each followed by the UK and Luxembourg. Postal parcels are the top method of shipping bogus goods, accounting for 62% of seizures over 2011-13, reflecting the growing importance of online commerce in international trade. The traffic goes through complex routes via major trade hubs like Hong Kong and Singapore and free trade zones such as those in the United Arab Emirates. Other transit points include countries with weak governance and widespread organised crime such as Afghanistan and Syria. The report shows trade routes change greatly from year to year as counterfeit gangs spot new weak points. Powered by Capital Market - Live News Tide Water Oil (India) rose 3.13% to Rs 6,422 at 10:05 IST on BSE after the company said it acquired 100% stake in UK-based Price Thomas Holdings for GBP 9.59 million. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 20 April 2016. Meanwhile, the BSE Sensex was up 211.42 points, or 0.82%, to 26,055.60. On BSE, so far 1,684 shares were traded in the counter, compared with an average volume of 2,181 shares in the past one quarter. The stock hit a high of Rs 6,580 and a low of Rs 6,360 so far during the day. The stock hit a record high of Rs 8,317.25 on 7 January 2016. The stock hit a 52-week low of Rs 3,400 on 8 June 2015. The stock had underperformed the market over the past one month till 20 April 2016, sliding 7.58% compared with 3.57% rise in the Sensex. The scrip had, however, outperformed the market in past one quarter, rising 8.42% as against Sensex's 7.41% rise. The small-cap company has an equity capital of Rs 1.74 crore. Face value per share is Rs 5. Price Thomas Holdings (PTHL) was incorporated on 14 May 1998. PTHL along with its subsidiary is a manufacturer and supplier of lubricants & car care products in the UK and few overseas automative markets. It is a small sized company and has operations primarily in UK. Apart from UK, PTHL exports its products to Ireland, Sweden and Bulgaria. PTHL registered profit before tax (PBT) of GBP 0.87 million on gross revenue of GBP 10.92 million for the year ended 31 December 2014. No governmental or regulatory approvals are required for the acquisition as it falls within automatic approval route of Reserve Bank of India (RBI) policy. The share purchase agreement has been signed on 19 April 2016. The post acquisition formaliities are expected to conclude shortly. The proposed acquisition is envisaged to result in competitive product pricing of Tide Water Oil in the European market. Tide Water Oil (India)'s net profit jumped 86.5% to Rs 26.33 crore on 4.8% growth in net sales to Rs 245.75 crore in Q3 December 2015 over Q3 December 2014. Tide Water Oil is one of the leading players in the Indian lubricant industry. It manufactures and markets Veedol brand of lubricants. Powered by Capital Market - Live News Wipro's consolidated net profit fell 2% to Rs 2240 crore on 12% rise in gross revenue to Rs 13630 crore in Q4 March 2016 over Q4 March 2015. The results are as per International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). The result was announced after market hours yesterday, 20 April 2016. Revenue from IT services business rose 2.4% to $1,882 million in Q4 March 2016 over Q3 December 2015. On sequential basis, the company expects 1% to 3.02% growth in revenue from IT services business at between $1,901 million to $1,939 million in Q1 June 2016. On an annualized basis, the employee attrition rate dropped to 14.9% in Q4 March 2016 from 16.3% in Q3 December 2015. Wipro's board of directors approved a proposal to buyback up to 4 crore equity shares of the company for an aggregate amount of up to Rs 2500 crore, being 1.62% of the total paid up equity share capital. The buyback will be through the tender offer route at Rs 625 per share. The promoters of the company have indicated their intention to participate in the proposed buyback. TCS announced the release of a new TCS Intelligent Urban Exchange (IUX) application for Intelligent Water. The new urban analytics application offers pre-built 'use cases' to cost-effectively reduce Non Revenue Water (NRW) loss and ensure delivery of safe, reliable water. The application leverages IUX's scalable analytics platform to allow cities and partners to easily integrate and localize, in order to accelerate the deployment of smart city solutions and enable a future-ready infrastructure for cross domain urban solutions. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 20 April 2016. Among prominent earnings, Hindustan Zinc and IndusInd Bank are scheduled to announce their Q4 March 2016 results today, 21 April 2016. Tata Steel in a press statement with regard to media news of a potential management buyout bid for Tata Steel UK said that Tata Steel Europe welcomes credible expressions of interest for Tata Steel UK's operations. It is the company's policy not to mention, confirm or comment on any potentially interested investor or bidder at this point, Tata Steel said. All expressions of interest, including any management buyout proposals, will be considered when received, it added. In the interests of all stakeholders every credible expressions of interest will enter the same rigorous assessment process to ensure the best value and prospects of sustainability, Tata Steel said in a statement. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 20 April 2016. Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) announced that India Ratings and Research (Ind-Ra) has affirmed the long-term issuer rating of M&M at 'IND AAA' with a 'stable' outlook. The rating on its Rs 800 crore non-fund-based bank lines has also been reaffirmed at 'IND A1+'. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 20 April 2016. Jay Bharat Maruti's net profit rose 26.64% to Rs 12.69 crore on 1.22% growth in net total income from operations to Rs 339.31 crore in Q4 March 2016 over Q4 March 2015. The result was announced after market hours yesterday, 20 April 2016. Tide Water Oil (India) announced that it has acquired 100% stake in Price Thomas Holdings (PTHL), a UK based company for GBP 9.59 million. PTHL was incorporated on 14 May 1998. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 20 April 2016. PTHL along with its subsidiary is a manufacturer and supplier of lubricants & car care products in the UK and few overseas automative markets. It is a small sized company and has operations primarily in UK. Apart from UK, PTHL exports its products to Ireland, Sweden and Bulgaria. PTHL registered profit before tax (PBT) of GBP 0.87 million on gross revenue of GBP 10.92 million for the year ended 31 December 2014. No governmental or regulatory approvals are required for the acquisition as it falls within automatic approval route of Reserve Bank of India (RBI) policy. The share purchase agreement has been signed on 19 April 2016. The post acquisition formaliities are expected to conclude shortly. The proposed acquisition is envisaged to result in competitive product pricing of Tide Water Oil in the European market. Stone India said that it has bagged on 20 April 2016 an order for supply & installation of 9,090 units of bio-toilets to Government of Chattisgarh valuing Rs 28.70 crore via its business associate, Cranberry Westlink T & D Inc. This is the single largest order of bio toilets for Stone India. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 20 April 2016. Powered by Capital Market - Live News At least 25 Al-Shabaab militants were killed in heavy fighting between the militant group and Somalia National Army (SNA), an official said on Thursday. District Commissioner of Elbur, Abdi Hassan, told journalists that the joint forces gained military victory over the battle which took place in the military bases in Budbud and Ulajarad regions, Xinhua news agency reported. "The joint forces killed 25 members of the militant group during the battle. We also fully control the areas where the fighting occurred and the troops are advancing to new locations in the region in order to liberate more areas from remnants in the region," Hassan said. Al-Shabaab militants are yet to make any comment. --IANS pgh/dg The Australian government on Thursday launched a $180 million cyber security strategy, in an effort to shore up Australia's defence against cyber attacks and online fraud. According to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, the investment would assist individuals, businesses and the government in defending the nation from cyber crime, which some experts believe costs the economy more than $13 billion every year, Xinhua reported. The plan would be implemented over the next four years, with the government focusing on establishing a national cyber security partnership with businesses and government, creating strong cyber defences, taking a global leadership role to advocate a "free" internet, and implementing an awareness campaign highlighting the risks of cyber attacks. Speaking to the media, Turnbull said the internet must be a place in which all Australians feel safe. "A secure cyberspace provides trust and confidence for individuals, business and the public sector to share ideas and information and to innovate online," Turnbull said on Thursday. Also announced as part of the new cyber security strategy is offensive capabilities which would allow Australia to undertake its own cyber attacks, something the prime minister said was borne out of necessity. Turnbull said that Australia was a prime target for hackers and cyber criminals, and a threat of strong retaliation could deter would-be hackers. "Australia's offensive cyber capabilities enable us to deter and respond to the threat of cyber attack," Turnbull's statement, released on Thursday, reads. In addition to the new strategy, Australian government will feature a new cabinet position, with an Assistant Minister for Cyber Security to be announced as part of the package. --IANS vr/ Australia's iconic Phillip Island Penguin Parade, one of the nation's leading tourist attractions, is set for a $40 million facelift. Most of the money will go toward a major upgrade of the visitor centre, while the rest has been put aside for the restoration and preservation of the penguin's eight-hectare beach sanctuary, Xinhua news agency reported. The penguin parade, which happens every night at sunset as the flightless birds return to shore, pulls in 600,000 international and domestic tourists each year. The Victoria state government said the new funding can help the nightly penguin parade, which takes place 90 minutes outside of the state capital of Melbourne, boost its annual visitor numbers by 20 percent over the next decade. Victoria's Environment Minister Lisa Neville on Thursday said investing in the parade made both economic and environmental sense. "Anyone who has visited the Penguin Parade knows just how special this natural spectacle is. It's only right that they have the facilities to match," Neville said. "Tourists to Phillip Island directly fund world class conservation research. The announcement will ensure that the longest continuous seabird study in the world can keep doing its vital work." Under the plan, the "outdated" 1988 visitors' centre will be moved to give the birds a chance to set up a new breeding ground in the vacated area. By 2019, it is expected that a larger, more environmentally-friendly facility will be erected further down the beach closer to the fairy penguins' sand-dune burrows. It is estimated to be completed by 2019. Phillip Island Nature Parks, the operators of the penguin parade, will also contribute around $8 million as part of the redevelopment. --IANS ksk Bird population in India and across the world faces unprecedented threats, a new book says. "Feathers of Vellayani", a publication of the Kerala State Biodiversity Board, says that the largest threat to Indian avian diversity was habitat destruction. "The loss of forests, plains and other natural systems to agriculture, mines, urban development, draining of swamps and other wetlands reduce potential habitat for many species," says the 180-page book. "Unfair alteration in habitat due to introduction and invasion of exotic species is also proving a threat to birds. Another is path-barriers that claim millions of migratory birds every year. "Poaching, predation, weather and other natural and anthropogenic barriers prove devastating for birds... Bird populations are threatened as never before," the book says. The well-produced book, costing Rs.250, is a rich collection of colour photographs of numerous birds, mainly those which populate the Vellayani Lake and adjoining wetlands in Thiruvananthapuram district. Vellayani Kayal, as the lake is known in Malayalam, is a vast picturesque rain-fed lake surrounded by lush greenery and situated to the southeast of the Kerala capital. The birds in the lake include Lesser Whistling Duck, Blue Rock Pigeon, Asian Koel, Indian Cuckoo, White Breasted Waterhen, Great Cormorant, Painted Stork, Indian Pond Heron, Cattle Egret, Pacific Golden Plover, Common Sandpiper, Greater Spotted Eagle, Brahminy Kite, Barn Owl, Small Bee-eater, Lesser Pied Kingfisher, Amur Falcon and Rose-ringed Parakeet. Kerala is home to some 500 species of birds, 24 of them coming under the various threatened categories, the book says. India itself has 1,168 bird species and has been ranked the ninth in the global list of bird wealth. According to the book, the existence of such a large number of species of birds at Vellayani "will surely come as a surprise to many of the inhabitants of Thiruvananthapuram". The book lists the birds seen in the area after observations over a period of over one year. The topography of Vellayani is such that it is always water logged. The vast expanse of wetlands bordering the lake includes marsh, ponds, swamps and fields. Experts estimate that more than 125 species of birds, including migratory ones, frequent the Vellayani lake and adjoining wetlands. The book's authors are Oommen V. Oommen, an eminent zoologist and conservationist, K.P. Laladhas, an expert in the field, and Linda John, a bird watcher. All three are attached to the Kerala State Biodiversity Board. --IANS mr/py/ky In a major blow to the BJP-led central government, the Uttarakhand High Court on Thursday set aside President's Rule in the state, restoring Congress leader Harish Rawat as the chief minister, nearly a month after he was ousted. The dramatic decision, also asking Rawat to prove his legislative majority in the 70-member assembly on April 29, triggered Congress celebrations while the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) called it a "huge embarrassment" for the Narendra Modi government. On the other hand, the BJP-led central government decided to challenge the high court order in the Supreme Court on Friday. Experts felt the ruling made it clear that the status quo ante should prevail and Rawat should be henceforth considered as the chief minister. The court came down heavily on the central government for its March 27 move to dismiss Rawat under the much-contested article 356 that empowers the union cabinet to impose President's Rule in a state. The case "brings to the fore a situation where 356 has been used contrary to the law", said the bench of Chief Justice K.M. Joseph and Justice V.K. Bist, adding the article should only be used as a last resort. "The proclamation of March 27 stands quashed," said the court in the "status quo ante" order, meaning the previously existing state of affairs was being restored. A visibly pleased Rawat hailed the decision as "a victory for the people". "Uttarakhand has got justice. I stand vindicated," he told the media shortly after the verdict. Uttarakhand was plunged into political uncertainty after nine Congress legislators, including former chief minister Vijay Bahuguna, whom Rawat replaced, revolted and turned to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The crisis peaked on March 18 when the assembly passed the budget Appropriation Bill by voice vote even as the opposition, including the rebel Congress members, sought recorded voting. But Speaker Govind Kunjwal declined the request, leading the BJP to cry foul. Rawat was then asked by Governor K.K. Paul to prove his majority on March 28. Just a day before, the central government ousted the Rawat-led government by imposing President's Rule. Rawat immediately went to court. On Thursday, Rawat said the ruling to restore his government had begun a "new phase" in the state and asked the Modi government to honour its stated policy of "cooperative federalism". The BJP claimed the court ruling was not a surprise. Its general secretary and Uttarakhand affairs in charge Kailash Vijayvargiya, who played a key role in the developments leading to Rawat's ouster, insisted that Rawat won't be able to prove his majority. "We will prove on April 29 that (the Rawat government) was and is in minority," he said in New Delhi. After ouster of Rawat, Vijayvargiya had claimed that Congress-led governments in Himachal Pradesh and Manipur were on their way out -- like it happened earlier in Arunachal Pradesh. But another senior BJP leader, Subramanian Swamy, slammed Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi and Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar for the fiasco. "Time to get a new AG and SG for the BJP government... We can win the Uttarakhand case," Swamy tweeted. At the end of hectic parleys between top BJP leaders including BJP chief Amit Shah and union ministers Arun Jaitley and Rajnath Singh in the capital, the government decided to move the Supreme Court to challenge the ruling of two-member bench of the High Court. "We will move the Supreme Court tomorrow at 10.30 am and urge the court to hear the matter urgently," Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi said. An overjoyed Congress called the court ruling a victory for democracy and the judicial system "to whom alone aggrieved citizens can turn for relief". "The imposition of President's Rule was unconstitutional," spokesman Abishek Singhvi said in New Delhi. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said the court verdict was "a huge embarrassment to the Modi government". "Till now the Modi government used to declare our orders null and void. Today, the high court has declared their order null and void." Experts were divided on the verdict's implications. Former Rajya Sabha MP and noted columnist Kuldip Nayyar told IANS that the "decision is welcome and it will strengthen democratic institutions and constitutional propriety. The ruling makes it clear that Harish Rawat was wrongly removed as chief minister. His position as the leader of the house and the chief minister has been restored now". On the other hand, there were others, who disagreed on Rawat's current status "pending revocation" of the President's Rule by the governor or the president, and said the court has "recommendation powers" and the executive can abide by it or has the liberty to challenge it in a higher court. --IANS team-nd-bns/vd Brasilia, April 21 (IANS/EFE) Brazil's Supreme Court on Wednesday decided to postpone discussions on whether former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva can assume a key position in his successor's cabinet. Justice Teori Zavascki, one of the tribunal's 11 members, successfully argued that the meeting should be moved from Wednesday to another date so that all the complaints filed against the erstwhile head of state's appointment could be considered jointly. As a result, it remains unclear if Lula will be able to take over as chief of staff to President Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached by the lower house of Congress on Sunday and could face a trial in the Senate on charges she used loans from state-owned banks and other fiscal maneuvers in 2014 and 2015 to disguise the size of the budget deficit. Rousseff named her political mentor as chief of staff on March 16, saying the appointment was aimed at helping the government respond to a severe political and economic crisis. But two days later Supreme Court Justice Gilmar Mendes blocked the appointment, ruling that the move was purely aimed at ensuring Brazil's ordinary courts have no jurisdiction over any legal case involving the former president. Mendes based his ruling on court-ordered intercepts of phone calls involving Lula, including one in which Rousseff told her predecessor that she had sent him a copy of his appointment "in case it's necessary." The opposition and Mendes interpreted that remark as proof the president named Lula to her Cabinet to shield him from prosecution. The full high court had been scheduled to rule on Lula's appointment on Wednesday. The former president, who is under investigation for alleged money laundering and misrepresentation of assets in a case linked to a massive bribes-for-inflated contracts scandal centered on state-controlled oil company Petrobras, would only be able to be investigated and tried by the Supreme Court as a Cabinet minister. Police raided Lula's home outside Sao Paulo and detained him for questioning for several hours in early March - just days before the Cabinet appointment - over his alleged role in the Petrobras scheme. --IANS/EFE vr is set to launch a core module belonging to its first space station around 2018, a Aerospace Corporation official said on Thursday. Two space labs will be launched later and dock with the core module, "Tianhe-1," said Wang Zhongyang, spokesperson with a key research institute attached to the corporation. Construction on the space station is expected to finish around 2022, Xinhua news agency quoted Wang as saying. The space station is expected to consist of the core module, and the two attached labs, each weighing about 20 tonnes. In 2017, the country's first cargo ship Tianzhou-1, which literally means "heavenly vessel," will be sent to dock with Tiangong-2 and test some of the important systems. After the space station is in operation, the country also plans to launch a space telescope similar to the Hubble Space Telescope, which will be on a separate space unit and share orbit alongside the space station, Wang said. launched its first space lab, Tiangong-1, in September 2011 and conducted two dockings with the module the following two years. The Tiangong-1, which ran for four-and-a-half years, has fulfilled its mission and ended service in March. It still remains in orbit and will descend gradually in the coming months until it burns up in the atmosphere. The commerce and industry ministry on Thursday launched a 'Twitter Seva' to address queries and grievances on matters relating to the ministry. "Through this Twitter Seva, queries on matters relating to Department of Commerce (DoC) and Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) will be answered," the ministry said in a statement. The service was launched here by union minister Nirmala Sitharaman. "All officers have been sensitized to respond to the tweets within a short time frame," she said. Anyone desirous of assistance from the ministry can use the hashtag #mociseva. An institutionalized mechanism with a special Twitter cell has been created in the ministry manned by officers, who will monitor and direct all the tweets to the concerned officers. Queries regarding SEZs, tea, coffee, rubber and spices boards will be addressed by the ministry while that on manufacturing policy, industrial corridors, investment promotion, Make in India, Start-up India, Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB), FDI, Intellectual Property Rights, patents, trade marks, copyrights, light engineering industry, cement and rubber industry will be addressed by DIPP, the statement said. --IANS mm/rn/vm Veteran actor Dilip Kumar, who was admitted to Lilavati Hospital on Saturday morning for treatment of high fever and nausea, was discharged from the hospital on Thursday. Saira Banu's manager Murshid Khan told IANS: "Dilip sir has been discharged and he is back home. He is feeling better now." The veteran actor suffered high fever and vomiting on Saturday morning following which he was rushed to Lilavati Hospital. was last seen in the film "Qila" in 1998. He was honoured with the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 1994 and Padma Vibhushan in 2015. Authorities in southwestern Cambodia's Kampot province have started distributing clean water to drought-stricken villagers in several districts, officials said on Wednesday. Kampot provincial police chief Mao Chanmathurith said the operation was a collaborative effort between the government and military police in delivering clean water to more than 500 families in Kampot town's Andoung Khmer commune on Wednesday, Xinhua news agency reported. "The provincial governor, Chan Chesda, ordered our working group to deliver the clean water to the villagers in eight districts and towns. We will help to provide water until they tell us they have enough water to use and if they still need more water, we will still help them," he said. Mao said residents have water for taking baths or washing clothes, but they do not have clean water for drinking and cooking food. Northwestern Banteay Meanchey province's Mongkol Borei district is also facing shortages of clean water, with residents having to buy extra supplies. Sy Dy, district police chief said villagers have to spend 40,000 riel ($10) for a 2,000-litre bottle for bathing and need to buy fresh water for drinking. Meanwhile, the northwestern Siem Reap provincial authorities also distributed clean water to more than 1,600 families in three districts and towns where there are shortages and will continue to provide water to other drought-hit villagers. --IANS ksk/vt The Sri Lankan government on Thursday said the European Union has lifted a ban imposed on Sri Lankan fisheries products, thus paving the way for fish exports to the EU. Fisheries Minister Mahinda Amaraweera told Xinhua news agency that following lengthy discussions between the Sri Lankan government and EU officials, the EU had informed the government that the ban had been lifted. "The EU has decided to lift the ban with no conditions. They have officially informed us and we can begin our fish exports to the EU once again," Amaraweera said. An EU statement released in Colombo on Thursday said that the European Commission decided to propose the lifting of the ban on fish exports from Sri Lanka to the European Union, while warning Kiribati, Sierra Leone and Trinidad & Tobago with yellow cards as they risk being uncooperative in the fight against illegal fishing. The European Commissioner for Environment, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, Karmenu Vella, quoted in the statement said that Sri Lanka now had a robust legal and policy framework to fight illegal fishing activities. The EU ban took effect in January last year over the failure of the previous government to prevent local fishermen from violating international fisheries laws. The Sri Lankan government said that it was facing a loss of over $100 million per year because of the ban. The country's fish exports to the European Union make up 68 percent of its total fish exports The remaining 32 percent is sent to the US, Japan and other non-EU countries. --IANS pgh/dg A fire broke out in a first-floor room of the Lady Hardinge Hospital in central Delhi on Thursday, damaging an air conditioner and some medicines, fire officials said. A fire official told IANS: "The fire office received information about the incident at 12.20 p.m. and four fire tenders were sent to the spot immediately." Officials suspect electrical short-circuiting caused the fire. The fire broke out in the medicine wing room on the first floor. An air-conditioner and some medicines kept there were damaged in the blaze. The fire tenders doused the flames in 40 minutes. There were no injuries. --IANS aks/rn/vt Even as a fresh report on the "Panama Papers" alleged Amitabh Bachchan "participated" in board meetings of two off-shore companies "by telephone conference", the actor himself has said his name was "misused" and that nothing illegal has been attributed to him. The Indian Express reported on Thursday that Sea Bulk Shipping and Tramp Shipping had passed a resolution each on December 12, 1994, in connection with a loan of $1.75 million from Dallah Albaraka Investment Company. The loan was for Constellation Ship Management for the purchase of all the shares issued by Tramp Shipping and held by Sea Bulk Shipping. Besides Tramp and Sea Bulk, the paper had said Bachchan was managing director for two other offshore entities -- Lady Shipping and Treasure Shipping. "Both resolutions recorded Bachchan's participation in board meetings 'by telephone conference'. In their certificate of incumbency issued the same day, both companies also recorded Bachchan as director. The companies had the same directors, including Bachchan, and officers," it said. In response, Bachchan's office sent a rejoinder, which was also posted on his twitter account. "On Panama disclosures, I wish to state that queries continue to be sent to me by the media. I would humbly request them to kindly direct these to the GOI (Government of India) where I, as a law abiding citizen, have already sent, and shall continue to send, my responses," the post said. "I stand by my earlier statement on the 'misuse of my name' in the matter and in any event the press reports do not disclose any illegal act committed by me." The Indian Express, based on Mossack Fonseca records, said Umesh Sahai of Jersey-based corporate service provider City Management (now Minerva Trust) was one of the founder-directors of the four shipping companies and that he had appointed Bachchan as director and managing director in 1993. "He (Sahai) also signed the board resolutions that recorded Bachchan's participation in the December 12, 1994, meetings. Sahai did not respond to emails and phone calls seeking his comment on Bachchan's statement denying any knowledge of the companies," the newspaper said. Bachchan's name cropped up in the reports as part of a global expose of International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and over 100 global media organisations, based on millions of leaked documents of the Panama law firm Mossak Fonseca. A high-level probe team has been constituted, with members drawn from the various agencies of the finance ministry and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) based on the orders issued by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Indian authorities have already said not all off-shore funds need be illegitimate. --IANS ap/hs/vt Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad on Thursday said the government was "wholeheartedly" working towards reviving the economy. Speaking at the inaugural session of the 10th Mindmine Summit organised by Hero Corporate Services, he said: "India is changing and evolving for good every second. The government is working towards connecting nearly 2,50,000 panchayats with optical fibres and very soon India will be home to 500 million smartphones. These initiatives are bringing people together for mutual growth." Citing numerous initiatives taken by the central government, he said: "One such initiative - virtual mobile networks - will help consumers not just get more choices for voice and data services, but also allow telecom companies to monetise the unused airwaves." The two-day summit will see participation of a mix of leaders from political, corporate and societal landscape. NITI (National Institution for Transforming India) Aayog Chief Executive Officer Amitabh Kant spoke about the importance of building world-class infrastructure to achieve and sustain 9-10 percent gross domestic product growth over the next few decades. "India needs to plan and invest in mega transportation hubs which will ensure greater, faster and more efficient transportation of goods and people across the country," Kant said. On the contrary, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh expressed concerns over safeguarding the environment while aiming for higher GDP growth. "Environment and sustainability will play major factors in Indian economic growth. Vulnerability of climate change in India is maximum; we need to manage these issues while trying to be the leaders in consumption and production," the former union minister said. Mindmine Summit is organised annually by independent think tank Mindmine Institute set up by Hero Corporate Service. --IANS av/tsb/vm An official of the Islamic Hamas movement said on Wednesday that a committee has been formed to deal with the issue of the Israeli soldiers held by the group. "Hamas is confident that a prisoner swap deal with Israel is coming," leading Hamas figure Mushir al-Masri told an event in Gaza in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, Xinhua reported. He added that Hamas will not initiate negotiations with Israel unless it admits the previous deal, referring to the demand to release Palestinian prisoners. He stressed that Al Qassam Brigades, Hamas military wing, will not accept but for an honourable deal. On April 1, a spokesman for the Al Qassam Brigades in Gaza showed pictures of four Israeli soldiers, said to be missing in the Gaza Strip since 2014. "There is no contact with the occupation (Israel) in relation to the missing soldiers in Gaza and we won't give free information," he said, adding that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lied to his people when he spoke about his prisoners. In the summer of 2014, Israel waged a large-scale military operation on the Gaza Strip that lasted for 50 days. The offensive left 2,200 Palestinians and 70 Israelis dead and four Israeli soldiers missing. Hamas refused to say whether the four Israeli soldiers were dead or alive. However, Israel had repeatedly announced that the soldiers were killed during the offensive and asked Hamas to bring their corps back. --IANS vr/ Although India has seen a steady decrease in the amount of spam originating from its land, it continues to rank as the third top source of overall malicious activity, including malware, phishing hosts and bots, a new report said on Thursday. According to Symantec, global leader in cybersecurity, after ranking sixth in 2014, India now ranks 18th as a source of spam. However, the country continues to be a top source as well as destination of cyber attacks, said Symantec's "Internet Security Threat Report". "The report reveals just how lucrative India is for cybercriminals," Tarun Kaura, Symantec director, solution product management for Asia Pacific and Japan, said in a statement. "In fact, India is the second most favoured destination for Ransomware in Asia with the average number of attacks per day increasing 114 percent to 15 attacks per hour. Almost 10 percent of these attacks were crypto-ransomware posing a threat to consumers and enterprises alike," Kaura added. November was the busiest month for cybercriminals in India last year, and across the globe an average of 2.5 targeted attacks per day were being aimed at the Indian enterprises in the month. Last year, India witnessed a 156 percent increase in the percentage of social media scams. Every sixth scam impacted an Indian, making it the most targeted country in Asia and second in the world. The report also mentioned that new professional cybercriminals are extending the reach of enterprise and consumer threats and fuelling the growth of online crime. "Advanced criminal attack groups now echo the skill sets of nation-state attackers. They have extensive resources and a highly-skilled technical staff that operate with such efficiency that they maintain normal business hours and even take the weekends and holidays off," Kaura noted. "We are even seeing low-level criminal attackers create call centre operations to increase the impact of their scams," added. The report added that globally, one new zero-day vulnerability is discovered on an average every week in 2015 -- that is 54. This is 125 percent increase from the year before. --IANS sku/na/vt Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will travel to Moscow on Thursday to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, his office said in a statement on Tuesday. Netanyahu's office did not elaborate on which issues the two leaders will be discussing in their meeting. The office said that Netanyahu and Putin spoke by telephone on Monday over "regional issues" that included Syria, Xinhua news agency reported. The meeting will be held five days before Israel's April 9 election in which Netanyahu is seeking to be re-elected for a fifth term. Shifting from a long-held US foreign policy, President Donald Trump last Thursday recognized Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a territory Israel captured from Syria in a war in 1967 and later annexed. The move triggered international condemnations. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is fighting rebel groups in Syria's eight-year civil war, with Russian support. --IANS soni/vd (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy on Thursday asked the health authorities to take steps to ban the use and sale of e-cigarettes in the state. A statement issued from Chandy's office said that after reports about the dangers associated with e-cigarettes and the increase in its sale in the state, the chief minister wanted necessary steps to be taken to see that the item is banned. E-cigarette is a hand-held, electronic cigarette-shaped device that vaporises a flavoured liquid and is believed to affect the general health of its user. --IANS sg/pm/vm US federal authorities on Thursday confirmed the discovery of a tunnel, the longest cross-border passageway ever unearthed along California's border with Mexico, through which drugs were being smuggled. The 800-metre-long passageway extends from a house in Tijuana, Mexico, to a hole in a commercial lot in an Otay Mesa industrial park in California. The hole, measuring one metre in diameter, was hidden underneath a large industrial dumpster, EFE news reported. The sophisticated tunnel was equipped with lights, rails and a ventilation system, as well as an elevator from the passageway leading to a closet inside the house in Mexico, authorities said. As a result of the discovery, federal authorities took control of the tunnel and a parking lot where they planned to transfer nearly 6.356 tonnes of marijuana and over one tonne of cocaine, worth more than $22 million. "Marijuana is something we regularly see associated with these tunnels, but not cocaine. We believe this is the largest cocaine seizure ever associated with a cross-border tunnel," said US Attorney Laura Duffy. A seven-month US Border Patrol investigation resulted in the arrests of six people with suspected links to the drug transfer tunnel. The probe began when authorities detected suspicious activity, including vehicles entering and exiting the California lot late at night, as well as unusual commercial activities in the area. A Border Patrol spokeswoman said the drugs were transported in small packages so they could pass through the hole in the Otay Mesa lot. This is the third cross-border tunnel in Southern California that federal agents have discovered in recent weeks. In the past five years, they have unearthed more than 75 tunnels on California and Arizona borders. --IANS ksk/vt Malayalam superstar Suresh Gopi on Thursday offered prayers at a temple here and thanked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for nominating him to the Rajya Sabha. "This is not a political decision, it's a non-political one... our prime minister has nominated me," the 56-year-old Gopi, who has worked in over 250 films, told the media. He was accompanied to the temple by former union minister and BJP leader O. Rajagopal. "This should have come earlier, but now that it has come, it's good," said Rajagopal, who was a Rajya Sabha member and a minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. Gopi was promised the post of chairman of the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) last year, but it failed to materialise. The BJP also tried to field him in the upcoming assembly polls, but the actor was non-committal. He, however, agreed to campaign for the party in Kerala. Of the 12 nominated members in the upper house of parliament, there are seven vacancies at the moment and Gopi will be one of the new entrants. Gopi was last week summoned to Delhi and his name was finalised after a meeting with BJP president Amit Shah. The BJP's national leadership feels the nomination would give the much needed boost to the party to open its account in the 140-member Kerala assembly, as all top leaders of the party in the state, including Rajagopal, are contesting the polls. --IANS sg/pm/vt A 35-year-old CPI(M) supporter was today killed and his body was found lying outside a polling booth at Shibapara area under Domkal Assembly seat in Murshidabad district where polling for the third phase is underway. CPI(M) candidate and former minister Anisur Rahman said that the man identified as Tahidur Islam was killed when bombs were hurled outside the polling booth. Murshidabad Superintendent of police C Sudhakar, however, said the murder was not related to polls.Tahidur was stabbed somewhere else and his body was dumped near the booth, the SP said.Rahman also alleged jamming of booths by Trinamool Congress supporters.Congress candidate of Hariharpara Assembly seat in the same district Mir Alam Gir alleged that two party supporters were beaten up allegedly by Trinamool Congress workers at Hosseinpur.Trinamool Congress, however, denied the charges.Polling is being held in 22 Assembly constituencies of the district out of the total 62 seats, where polling is underway. Haryana Finance Minister Abhimanyu on Thursday questioned the "silence" of Congress president Sonia Gandhi and vice president Rahul Gandhi on the violence during the Jat agitation in the state in February. "I want to ask why Rahul Gandhi, who has a habit of spot visits after any small happening, remained mum when Haryana was burning," Abhimanyu told the media here. He also questioned Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Haryana Congress president Ashok Tanwar and former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda as to "why they remained silent on the Congress role" during the agitation by Jats who were demanding quota in government jobs and educational institutions. He said that arson at his house, and other places in Rohtak were a "political conspiracy", adding that evidence emerging from investigation clearly indicated to a political link behind the violence. "Those who have come under the scanner have direct relation with a group within that political party (Congress)," Abhimanyu said. Asked about his (minister's) photographs with Sandeep Kalkal who is accused of violence, Abhimanyu said Kalkal was closely linked to Congress politicians and his family members benefitted during Bhupinder Singh Hooda's government. The minister indicated that more violence took place in areas where Congress leaders had good influence. --IANS js/tsb/vm Six splinter groups of Nepal's Maoist party are demanding withdrawal of civil war-era cases against UCPN-Maoist chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal 'Prachanda' and other leaders from regular courts and repeal of Supreme Court verdicts, saying there was a conspiracy to derail the peace process. Maoist rebels had launched an armed camapign against the monarchy in 1996 that lasted till 2006, after the Maoists were not allowed to participate in a national election. According to a peace accord signed in 2007, it was agreed that all war-era cases would be dealt by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and not by regular courts. The Maoists later became the largest party in the Constituent Assembly after the 2008 elections. Two transitional justice mechanisms -- TRC and the Commission on Enforced Disappeared Persons (CEDP) -- were set up which sought complaints from victims of the decade-long war to find out the truth and deliver justice to the survivors. Now, the six Maoist splinter groups are pressing the government to address all war-era cases through the TRC and CEDP and not by regular courts. Sources said the demand has come as the Maoists feel they may be jailed if cases of abuses are proven against them by the courts. The Maoists, in a statement, have urged the government to forward the cases handled by police and courts to the two commissions. According to a press statement, the six parties said they have decided to establish a joint legal desk to study the war-era cases and offer recommendations to the government. On Wednesday, Sabitri Chiwal, the widow of Ganesh Chilwal of Lamjung distinct who was allegedly killed by the Maoists, filed a complaint against Prachanda at the TRC's Kathmandu office, saying her husband was killed under Dahal's directions. After the TRC and CEDP sought complaints, hundreds of people -- victims and families of deceased, people who said they were tortured or raped -- reached the 75 offices at the district headquarters to lodge complaints against the Maoists and security officials involved in human rights abuse. Over 9,000 cases of human rights abuses have been registered by various international agencies. Sources said that Prachanda is now taking the lead to bring all Maoist splinter groups under one roof and asked them to be vigilant, saying any kind of conspiracy can be hatched against them. A joint statement issued on Thursday by the Maoists said that there was a conspiracy to derail the peace process. Many cases against top Maoist leaders are being looked at by the Supreme Court. The six groups are demanding withdrawal of cases against Forest Minister Agni Sapkota, repeal of the Supreme Court verdict against former Maoist lawmaker Bal Krishna Dhungel, and withdrawal of cases against Prachanda and other leaders. (Anil Giri can be contacted at girianil@gmail.com) --IANS giri/pm/vm Swara Bhaskar-starrer "Nil Battey Sannata" will be tax-free in Uttar Pradesh, state Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav announced on Thursday. Yadav shared the news on Twitter. "Touched by the story of 'Nil Battey Sannata', which was filmed in Agra. We have made the film tax-free in UP," he tweeted. Hoping that the news will motivate the people to watch the film, Swara shared her excitement. "I am very grateful and excited with this news. That the state government found the film worthy of being tax-free on Day One which is very rare and adds a lot of credibility to our film. I hope the audiences are motivated now to go in large numbers and watch our film," the "Prem Ratan Dhan Payo" actress said in a statement. Produced by Anand L. Rai and Ajay Rai, the film also features actors Ratna Pathak, Pankaj Tripathi and Ria. The film releases on Friday with its Tamil remake "Amma Kanakku". --IANS ks/nv/dg The probe into a controversial arms deal has found no evidence that there were any improper motives in the deal, South African President Jacob Zuma said on Thursday. "There was also no basis whatsoever for disbelieving the evidence submitted by the members of the Inter-Ministerial Committee in this regard," Xinhua news agency reported quoting Zuma. The Commission of Inquiry concluded that there was no room for it to draw adverse inferences, inconsistent with the direct, credible evidence presented to it, in respect of all material aspects of the Terms of Reference, Zuma said. He was speaking on the release of the report of the Commission of Inquiry into allegations of fraud, corruption, impropriety or irregularity in the Strategic Defence Procurement Package. Zuma has been haunted by the Strategic Defence Procurement Package, known as the arms deal, for years. He set up a commission in 2011 to investigate the multi-billion-rand arms deal of the late 1990s, when Thabo Mbeki was deputy president and later president. The arms deal, initially estimated to cost about $3 million (43 million rands) , is believed to have escalated to billions of dollars now to buy military equipment from Europe. --IANS pgh/vt US President Barack Obama met on Thursday in Riyadh with leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states to mend strained ties, with no major announcements coming out of the summit. Obama pledged to remain vigilant against Iran's destabilizing activities in the Middle East, as he tried to comfort his Gulf allies after bilateral relations were strained by the nuclear deal reached with Iran last year. "When we entered into negotiations with Iran on the nuclear deal, there was concern that in the interest of getting a deal done we would somehow look the other way with respect to other destabilizing activities," Obama said in the Saudi capital in a brief press conference after meeting with leaders of the GCC countries. The GCC comprises Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In April 2015, Iran and six world powers, including the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany, reached an initial agreement to limit Iran's nuclear activities for a specific period in return for relieving the economic sanctions imposed on Iran over its nuclear program. The US president said the deal has "cut off every single one of Iran's pathways to a nuclear weapon," but his country continues to have "serious concerns" about Iran's behaviour in the region. A day earlier, the GCC defence ministers and their U.S. counterpart, Ashton Carter, discussed in Riyadh military cooperation and the latest developments in the Middle East, agreeing to carry out joint patrols to stop any Iranian arms shipments reaching Yemen. The Persian Gulf nations, Saudi Arabia in particular, have repeatedly raised concerns that the nuclear deal reached with Iran last year will further empower the Islamic Republic to interfere in Arab affairs. The tensions between Iran and the Gulf nations reached a new high in January when Riyadh and a number of its Sunni Arab allies cut diplomatic ties with Tehran, after mobs ransacked the Saudi embassy in response to the execution of a prominent Shiite cleric in Saudi Arabia. At the summit, Obama and the GCC leaders also committed to urgently undertake steps to intensify the campaign to defeat the Islamic State militant group and the Al-Qaeda, and reduce regional and sectarian tensions that fuel instability, said a White House statement. It is Obama's fourth visit to the oil-rich Gulf nation, one of Washington's most strategic allies in the Middle East, since taking office in 2009. "Oil is the basis for the whole issue, as oil is so essential for the United States," Hani Khallaf, political expert and Egypt's former assistant foreign minister for Arab affairs told Xinhua. "The US-Gulf ties allowed Washington to establish large military bases in the region," which is a great advantage for the Americans too," Khallaf stressed. However, no major announcements came out of the summit as Obama is already a lame-duck president, said Saeed al-Lawindi, political researcher and expert of international relations at Cairo-based Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies. "Obama's visit to Saudi Arabia is for reassurance about Iran in the first place, yet his administration is going through a 'lame duck' stage, and so it cannot make a significant change in the US policy in the Arab world," said al-Lawindi. The summit came on the heels of Obama's criticism of Saudi Arabia's regional role, which prompted a strong rebuke from the Saudi royal family. In a recent interview with The Atlantic, Obama described Saudi Arabia and other allies as "free riders" on US foreign policy, and criticized what he saw as Riyadh's funding of religious intolerance. Almost a year ago, in May 2015, Obama hosted leaders of Gulf nations at the White House and the Camp David retreat, the first meeting of the Gulf countries after a framework agreement on limiting Iran's nuclear program. Except for Kuwait and Qatar, top leaders from four of the six-member GCC countries were absent from the 2015 summit. --IANS ahm/ Actor Pankaj Tripathi feels that an actor should maintain a balance between both commercial and off-beat cinema. He says where commercial films give a chance to actors to showcase their talent to a wide audience, indie films help actors to fulfill their dreams of doing something for their society. "I like working in both commercial and off-beat cinema. Commercial films have a much wider reach. They are shown across the world. For 'Dilwale', I used to get messages from Romania and Greece. Through commercial cinema, your work reaches to wider audience," Pankaj told IANS. In a decade old career, Pankaj has worked in various types of films like "Apaharan", "Agneepath", "Gangs of Wasseypur", "Fukrey", "Manjhi: The Mountain Man" and "Masaan". "People in my village only get to see commercial cinema. I come from a small village in Bihar. There people only get to see Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan films. Films like 'Masaan' and 'Manjhi - The Mountain Man' don't get screened there," Pankaj said. "Being an artist, you need to maintain a balance between both commercial and off-beat cinema. Reaching to a wider audience to showcase my talent is not only my liability. I also want to do films which are in favour of the society. Off-beat cinema fulfills our societal dreams," he added. Pankaj will next be seen in "Nil Battey Sannata", which is slated to release on Friday. "'Nil Battey Sannata' is a very inspiring story. Its kind of a film that will make you laugh and cry. It will inspire them that everything is possible in life. "Usually we don't get to see a single mother stories in Bollywood. It has nothing larger-than-life and is a meaningful cinema," Pankaj said. He added that he will be handling the "entertaining quotient" in the film through his character. "Those who have studied in government schools will recall their childhood memories through my role. I'm playing the principal of a school," he said. The film also features Swara Bhaskar and Ratna Pathak Shah. --IANS sas/nv/dg The singular credit for conceiving and championing the Nuclear Security Summits unarguably goes to US President Barack Obama. In 2009, he called nuclear terrorism one of the greatest threats to international security and initiated global dialogue. The first summit was held in 2010, when about 50 world leaders drew the Washington Work Plan to contain, prevent and counter nuclear terrorism by better protecting nuclear radiating sources from theft and misuses like making 'dirty bombs'. The unique feature of the fourth and last NSS on April 1 was not that it was taking place a few months before Obama says goodbye to his tenure, nor was it taking place at the backdrop of deadly terror attacks in Paris, Brussels and Lahore. It is not even that the threat of 'dirty nuclear bombs' is looming large due to non-state IS army and unending intimidation by a state actor, North Korea. The most harrowing backdrop of the NSS, ironically, is the impending threat of 'runaway' climate change. The perils of dirty carbon bombs are now more deadly than dirty nuclear bombs. 'Carbon-warhead' is no longer a symbolic phrase. Such warheads are in the making for the last two centuries without any abatement thanks to the fossil fuel addiction of all the state actors. The global efforts to arrest the carbon proliferation by the UN have failed miserably. Runaway climate change is now considered the real tipping point in accelerated global warming, signaling a chaotic climatic disaster of planetary proportion. It is predicted to happen when, for example, melting of the polar ice and Siberian snow would allow green house gases (GHGs) like methane and carbon dioxide, hitherto buried under the permafrost, to escape into atmosphere and trigger sudden and rapid climate change and rise in global temperatures - causing catastrophic havoc. Just in about four months after the Paris climate agreement, there have been rapid-fire impacts due to the human induced carbon missiles launched in the atmosphere over more than two centuries since the advent of the industrial revolution. In the beginning of this year, the World Meteorological Organization reported that 2015 was the hottest year on record. Fourteen of the 15 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000. Scientists predicted with unusual certainty that 2016 would be yet another record hot year. In February, flooding due to rise in sea level in American cities like Miami and Charleston and floods in Europe caused much more disruption in daily life than the flood of migrants. In March, well known climatologists, including James Hansen, known for his advocacy of action to avoid runaway climate change, alerted that the impact of climate change would be so abrupt that most of humanity would be caught napping with little time to protect from tidal flooding, severe droughts and other extreme events. Come April and we are presented with yet one more horrifying prediction: If carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels continue unremitting , West Antarctic ice would disintegrate, causing the sea to rise by five to six feet by 2100, destroying many of the coastal cities habited by more than 70 percent of global population, apart from sinking low-lying island nations within the lifetimes of children born today. The Arctic winter that just ended has seen annual ice coverage hit its lowest level ever recorded over last two winters due to sustained global warming, as observed by the European Space Agency. Just 21 days after the fourth NSS in Washington which many believe to be the last, yet another swan song will be played at the UN headquarters in New York on April 22 by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who is also ending his tenure in 2016. He has convened a signing ceremony for the Paris Agreement on climate change that was adopted unanimously. We are yet to record the achievements of more than two decades of the series of climate summits under the UN as there are not many. The tragedy is that there is no guarantee that signing ceremony will consummate the universal climate deal agreed in Paris. Will it be the song of a dying swan? (21.04.2016 - Rajendra Shende is an IIT-alumnus, former director of the UNEP and chairman of the TERRE Policy Centre. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at shende.rajendra@gmail.com) --IANS shende/vm A satellite to monitor execution of development projects under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is set to launch in June 2018. The Pakistan Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO) and the China Great Wall Industry Cooperation (CGWIC) signed an agreement for the development and launch of the "Pakistan Remote Sensing Satellite (PRSS-1) System", Dawn online reported. Minister for Planning, Development and Reform, Ahsan Iqbal and CGWIC President, Yin Limping signed the agreement here on Wednesday. Iqbal said that bilateral cooperation between the two countries in space domain would open new vistas of socio-economic and scientific cooperation, giving boost to the historic bilateral cordial relations in other fields. Space technology is fundamental in socio-economic development, infrastructure upgradation, agriculture production, urban planning in new age, he added. The minister said that the agreement would also transfer space technology to Pakistan and the PRSS-1 is yet another flagship project between China-Pakistan relations after CPEC. It would go a long way to redefine the bilateral relations, he said. Iqbal said that the new project would also help Pakistan in national security arena by strengthening border security and surveillance apparatus. The CPEC is a collection of projects worth $46 billion currently under construction. --IANS ksk Want to click that perfect selfie with fuller lips for a flawless pout? Get a lip implant. According to a media report, 2015 set a record of one lip surgery every 19 minutes in the US. The findings, based on a survey of American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), showed that in 2015, a total of 27,449 lip implants on both males and females took place -- a jump of 48 percent since 2000, CNBC reported on Tuesday. "We live in the age of the selfie and because we see images of ourselves almost constantly on social media, we're much more aware of how our lips look," David Song from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) was quoted as saying. In Britain, a cosmetic dentistry firm has claimed that selfies have also changed the types of smile that patients are asking for. People are now asking for a new "selfie smile" which "benefits rather than suffers at the hands of the typically center-widening, periphery-narrowing properties of smartphone cameras," the report stated. "We have seen a 30 percent rise over 5 years in the number of patients sending in selfies through the website with concerns about the look of their front teeth, yet when the patients come in person, often the teeth don't look too bad at all," Tim Bradstock-Smith, a clinical director and cosmetic dentist, was quoted as saying. "A patient may not be ready to commit to something as dramatic as a facelift or eyelid surgery, but there are a variety of ways you can change the shape of your lips," explained Robert Houser, a plastic surgeon in Ohio, US. The ASPS commissioned a national survey of around a thousand women and found that the "subtle and sultry lips" of Hollywood actress Jennifer Lawrence were the most attractive celebrity lips that women wanted. --IANS ish/kb/vt South African President Jacob Zuma will lead a high-level delegation on a state visit to Iran to cement bilateral ties, the Presidency said on Thursday. The visit, scheduled for April 24-25, is an important structural catalyst in elevating bilateral and economic relations into a substantive strategic partnership and serves as evidence of the friendly relations between the two countries, Xinhua news agency reported quoting the Presidency. Zuma will be accompanied by various cabinet ministers and a high-level business delegation. The visit will serve to cement the strong fraternal relations between the two countries that originated during the apartheid era when Iran refused to oil the apartheid machinery and cut ties with apartheid South Africa, presidential spokesperson Bongani Majola said. Following the end of apartheid in 1994, Iran lifted all sanctions and the two countries re-established diplomatic ties. Since then, the two countries have enjoyed mutually beneficial, fraternal and strategic relations. But the imposition of nuclear-related sanctions against Iran impacted negatively on trade relations between the two countries. At the end of 2011, South Africa imported one third of its domestic oil requirements from Iran, however by June 2012 South Africa could no longer import crude oil from Iran. Overall, South African exports to Iran declined from 1.27 billion rand (about $89.4 million) in 2008 to 270 million rand (about $19 million) in 2014. --IANS pgh/dg Srei Infrastructure Finance Limited on Thursday announced it has received a total amount of Rs.2,931 crore for selling its stake in Viom Networks Limited to American Tower Corporation (ATC). "The overall transaction amounting to over Rs.7,600 crore, resulted in a total foreign direct investment inflow of Rs.5,856 crore into the telecom infrastructure of the country, out of which Srei has received a total amount of Rs.2,931 crore; which will spur economic growth, besides fostering inclusiveness and equity," the company said in a statement. Earlier in the month, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA), chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, approved the transaction wherein ATC Asia Pacific Pvt Ltd, Singapore acquired 51 percent equity shareholding in Viom. The transaction is one of the largest foreign direct investments in the Indian telecom sector in the last few years, the company said. "Post the receipt of all regulatory approvals, the transaction has been completed and wehave now received the entire consideration for our stake sale. "This will lead to substantial cash inflow into Srei, which will lower its debt and reduce interest cost, thereby augmenting capital and improving future profitability," company's vice chairman Sunil Kanoria said. The Kolkata-based infrastructure company, along with other shareholders of the telecom tower entity, had entered into a definitive agreement with ATC on October 21 last year, for selling its stake in the company. The tower company owns and operates over 42,000 wireless communications towers across India. --IANS bdc/ssp/vd Swiss watch exports in March 2016 totalled 1.5 billion CHF (about $1.55 billion), down 16.1 percent from last year, the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry reported on Thursday. Representing the lowest March figures since 2011, the federation indicated in a statement that "the scale of the downturn is also unusual since we must go back to the crisis of 2009 to find rates of variation of this order", Xinhua news agency reported. Exports to all major markets bar Germany declined last month, with exports to China's Hong-Kong and the United States dropping by close to 38 and 33 percent respectively. Meanwhile, Swiss watch exports to the Chinese mainland fell by 13.7 percent. According to the federation, exports of watches costing between 500 and 3,000 CHF showed a smaller decline than timepieces whose prices were either inferior to 200 CHF or above 3,000 CHF. The 200 to 500 CHF price-range fared the worst, falling as much as 27.1 percent both in terms of value and volume. ($1 0.97 Swiss Franc). --IANS pgh/dg Tanzanian authorities on Thursday launched a nationwide special campaign to clean up Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa which attracts more than 50,000 tourists annually. The campaign dubbed 'leave the mountain clean, conserve environment so that they can protect you' came at the time when the Africa's roof is overwhelmed with a number of challenges such as land degradation, non availability of good water, loss of biodiversity, frequent forest fires and pollution, Xinhua news agency reported. Speaking at the official launch of the campaign, Kilimanjaro Regional Commissioner, Said Meck Sadick said the mountain is an important cornerstone when it comes to Tanzania's tourism industry. The mountain, which is a biosphere reserve and a world heritage site, generates nearly $30 million income annually and employs more than 300,000 people. "We want this campaign to be successful and sensitise climbers to respect and conserve the environment in the Kilimanjaro National Park," the regional chief said, urging tour operators to take responsibilities of conserving environment of the park, which is the lifeline for many people. Sadick described Mount Kilimanjaro as one of the national values, vowing to take stern measures against illegal loggers in the park. --IANS pgh/dg Three militants were killed on Monday in a daylong gunfight in Jammu and Kashmir's Badgam district. Defence Ministry spokesman Colonel Rajesh Kalia said that searches were still going on in the area. The exact identity of slain men was being ascertained, police said. Security forces had started a cordon and search operation on Monday in the Hapatnar forests of Chrar-e-Sharief area of Badgam following information about the presence of militants there. The militants fired at the security forces, triggering a gun battle. Meanwhile, protests broke out near the gunfight site between civilian protesters and security personnel who used tear smoke canisters to quell the mob. Authorities suspended mobile Internet services in Badgam district as a precaution. --IANS sq/mr (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Parvati Adhikari and Sandhya Kumari, washing clothes and filling their 'gagri' (water pot) at a tap connected to a natural spring here, are worried over the drying up of the springs -- considered a 'lifeline' in villages in Nepal's mid-hills. The consequent spectre of water scarcity is something they never even dreamed of till a few years ago. "We can't think of life without springs here as a large number of them are drying up. It is a bad sign for our life in the mid-hills," said Parvati, resident of Dapcha village in Nepal's Kavre district, placing a medium-sized 'gagri' filled with spring water on her back in a wicker basket to carry home that is situated on a steep slope surrounded by green cover. At a time when an acute water shortage across India is making news headlines, drying springs in Nepal's mid-hills hardly make one take note. But the reality is that water scarcity is a big challenge here -- during the dry season at least. Sandhya pointed out that springs have been providing them water for ages to sustain the needs of households, farms and livestock. "Drying springs is a bad omen for us, as we have relied on springs all our life and are fully dependent on them for livelihood also." In fact springs are found all around the hill slopes close to the villages in mid-hills. The springs are fed by groundwater, which accumulates in underground aquifers during the monsoon, effectively turning the hills into water towers. "The springs that rise in the hills are critical to survival, supplying water for drinking, irrigation and livestock and generally sustaining domestic needs and the rural economy, especially during the long dry season. But many are now drying up, threatening a whole way of life," said Santosh Nepal, water and climate expert at Kathmandu-based ICIMOD (International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development). But there is a ray of hope for villagers in Nepal's mid-hills. Taking serious note of drying springs, ICIMOD, along with its partner Nepal Water Conservation Foundation (NWCF), has started an action research project in 2013 at Dapcha and Tinpiple villages, some 35 km from Kathmandu, to understand this phenomenon and attempt to revive drying springs. "We are working with the intention of tracking local water processes and finding ways to best use water in order to replenish the drying springs," said Nilhari Neupane, another expert. According to researchers, the springs are the lifeblood of the hamlets in Nepal's mid-hills. Springs can be relatively short lived, providing water for a certain period after the monsoon when the groundwater levels are high or perennial, when they are fed from a level below the dry season water table. "Our experiments have shown that it is possible to increase the life of springs by increasing recharge rates during the monsoon through the construction of pits and ponds and improving vegetation cover." Dipak Gyawali of NWCF said the two-year study found that traditional ponds that existed in the past above the springs played an important role in sustaining the springs below. "It was a result of this that villagers of Darauni Pokhri at Dapcha reported the period of drinking water shortage was reduced significantly after the construction of a recharge pond." Loss of springs leads to increased domestic drudgery, with water having to be fetched from more distant sources and increased stress for those whose livelihoods are based on farming. Loss of water can be a significant factor in the outmigration of rural labour and youth from the mid-hills to cities or abroad for permanent or seasonal employment. The resultant labour shortage in the mid-hills is leading to a sharp decline in food production on the terraced farmlands -- a vital national resource built over centuries -- and is increasing Nepal's vulnerability to food insecurity. Experts point out that springs, which are central to village life, have rarely been properly mapped. The action research showed that even a small area of a few tens of square kilometres around a hill water tower had over a hundred large and small, seasonal and permanent springs. Santosh Nepal said the per capita water availability in Nepal is more than 8,000 cubic metres but it is hardly good news for the people living in the mid-hills. The reason is simple -- most of the rivers or streams lie at the bottom of steep mountain slopes and do not provide water needed for sustaining daily life due to prohibitively high cost of carrying by hand pump or pumping uphill. And in recent years, the local springs, too, have been drying up. A study conducted by scientists of ICIMOD and NWCF found that the mid-hills are richly endowed with local springs -- but as many as 30 percent have dried up in the last decade due to biophysical, technical and socio-economic factors. After the April 2015 earthquake, most springs in the area yielded less water during the past winter season than in previous years and some have completely dried up. Although springs are the main water sources in the area, they have been all but neglected in local development plans. The implication of this is far reaching -- drying springs reduce agricultural harvests and force outmigration from the villages, Santosh Nepal said. Navraj Adhikari, local leader at Depcha, said: "After last year's earthquake, many springs dried up, many became mere trickles. The amount of water of a main local spring in the village has come down." Binod Sharma, a water expert at NWCF, said the earthquake that jolted Nepal in April last year had shifted the ground and affected the springs. "Some dried up, while others became more plentiful. We will have to start mapping the springs all over again." "Our research showed some major surprises: Nepal's mid-hills are rich in springs but they are dying. There are approximately five to seven springs per square kilometre but as much as 30 percent have dried up over the past 15 years," Sharma said. He said migration of people as a result of chronic lack of water in their villages has accelerated from the hills and mountains. "The springs that once used to flow profusely have now started to dry up, raising serious concern about the sustainability of water sources in these regions," Sharma said. (Imran Khan was in Kathmandu at the invitation of ICIMOD. He can be contacted at imran.k@ians.in) --IANS ik/dg Two policemen were killed in a bomb attack in Afghan province of Kunar on Thursday, police said. "Two Afghan Local Police (ALP) members died following an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) in Marawra District Thursday morning," provincial police chief Gen. Abdul Habib Sayyedkhel told Xinhua news agency. The government established the ALP, or community police, in 2010 to protect villages and districts where army and police have limited presence. He blamed the Taliban militant group for the attack in the mountainous province bordering Pakistan. --IANS pgh/vt Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday said money allocated for MGNREGA should be used for "water harvesting" to battle drought. Speaking at the 10th Civil Services Day awards ceremony, Modi also called for a "spirit of healthy competition" among district administrations to foster an atmosphere conducive for positive change. "Everyone wants to change life in the villages. So much of money is being spent on MGNREGA," the prime minister said, referring to the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act. "I know about the drought situation in the country. There is a shortage of water. But it is also true that a good monsoon is predicted. "Why can't we use the MGNREGA money to run a campaign for harvesting water in the months of April, May and June? "Why can't we do desilting, dig new ponds and clean canals and use these for water harvesting? This will help in making ends meet even if there is no rain," Modi said. "Initiatives have succeeded when 'Jan Bhagidari' is embraced. Engaging with civil society is very important," he added. The government on Tuesday conceded in the Supreme Court that 256 districts with a population of about 33 crore spread over 12 states were affected by drought. Modi also said: "There should be healthy competition among the district administrations in the country in the discharge of duties. "If their districts lag behind and don't get noticed for good work, then those heading them must ask themselves why." The prime minister said the district administrations must try to win the trust of the people and be proactive. "Only being an administrator and controller is not enough. Everybody at every level has to become an agent of change. Let us create an atmosphere where everyone can contribute. The energy of 125 crore Indians will take the nation ahead," he said. The prime minister urged people to view every hurdle as an opportunity. "Only those people will be able to prosper in life who don't get worn out and take every hurdle as an opportunity," said Modi. --IANS sid/rn/mr When government intervention is based on a failure to understand the basic tenets of economics and/or to pander to vote banks, it is necessary to call it out. The Delhi government is at it again and by doing so, it is inadvertently signalling to the world that it is clearly not open for business. This week's announcement - or rather threat - to app-based taxi companies Uber and Ola to cancel surge pricing or have their cars impounded is yet another example of how Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is willing to overlook the basic principles of economics to appease a vocal section of his vote bank. As much as Kejriwal may want Delhi's citizens to believe that he represents the aam aadmi, this new announcement should cement his position as another uninformed politician. After Prime Minister Narendra Modi "met" his wax counterpart, which will now find a place at Madame Tussauds in London, the pictures of the rendezvous went viral. The Twitteratti, characteristically, chipped in with humour. One @Trendulkar posted a picture of the real and the wax Modi, their hands folded in a namaskar, with the caption "SRK and Gaurav" - an obvious reference to the Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Fan, where the actor plays a Bollywood star and also his obsessed admirer. Another user, @AisiTaisiDemocracy, posted a picture of the PM with a palette and a paintbrush in his hands, adding a final touch or two to the statue, with the caption: "When photoshop licence on your laptop expires but you still gotta do it." This was possibly a reference to the 2015 incident of the Press Information Bureau (PIB) releasing a touched-up picture of Modi conducting an aerial survey of flood-hit Chennai. When it was revealed that the picture had been photoshopped, PIB took it off its website. Is India a Hindu nation? In most other countries, a question of this nature would be straightforward enough. If some 85 per cent of the population of a country is classified as Hindu, then surely it would be a Hindu country. Yet, in India, things are never so simple. Here, the question elicits impassioned (violent?) - and diametrically opposite - responses. For many in the Westernised elite, the question itself is an affront to their vision of a tolerant and secular country, home to many faiths and hospitable to many more. For many Indians, however, their country is the cradle of Hindu civilisation and culture and all who call it home are heirs to this heritage, whatever be their religious beliefs. The rise of anti-trade populism in the 2016 US election campaign portends a dangerous retreat from the United States' role in world affairs. In the name of reducing US inequality, presidential candidates in both parties would stymie the aspirations of hundreds of millions of desperately poor people in the developing world to join the middle class. If the political appeal of anti-trade policies proves durable, it will mark a historic turning point in global economic affairs, one that bodes ill for the future of American leadership. In a huge embarrassment to the Narendra Modi government as well as for the Amit Shah-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Uttarakhand High Court on Thursday quashed the imposition of Presidents rule in the state. A Division Bench of the High Court, comprising Chief Justice K M Joseph and Justice V K Bist, said the March 27 proclamation of the Centre to put Uttarakhand under Presidents rule was contrary to the law laid down by the Supreme Court. The Bench restored the Harish Rawat-headed Congress government but asked it to prove its majority in a fresh floor test on April 29. The Centre is likely to move the Supreme Court at the earliest to challenge the High Court's order, government sources said. Dealing a blow to any chances the BJP might have to defeat the Rawat government, the High Court said the nine rebel Congress legislators have to pay the price of committing the constitutional sin of defection by being disqualified. The disqualification of the nine Congress legislators reduces the strength of the 71-member assembly, which includes one nominated member, to 62. Both the Congress and the BJP have 27 legislators each, while the Progressive Democratic Front, comprising six MLAs from smaller parties as well as Independents, said on Thursday that it continued to support Rawat. The scenario, at least on paper, favours Rawat to win the trust vote, but BJP National General Secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya insisted that the Rawat government was in a minority and the April 29 floor test would bear this out. We arent the least bit surprised by the high court verdict, Vijayvargiya said, pointing to the series of adverse comments the Division Bench had made in its last three hearings on Rawats petition, challenging the Presidents rule. Vijayvargiya, BJP President Shahs pointsperson for Uttarakhand, termed it strange that the court had reinstated Rawat whom the world saw indulging in horse trading and which also proved that his government was in a minority. He said several decisions of the Speaker of the Assembly were not according to the rulebook, including his ignoring the demand for a division of votes on March 18 on the passage of the Appropriation Bill and later when he disqualified the rebel Congress legislators half an hour before the Centres proclamation of Presidents rule in the state. The BJP leader also found it intriguing that the court should have commented on the fate of the nine rebel Congress MLAs, when the case relating to them was pending with a single-judge bench and scheduled to come up for hearing on April 28. It is for legal experts to deliberate upon whether the Chief Justices comment on the fate of nine Congress rebels was justified or not. It is a moot point whether this statement will prejudice the mind of the single-judge bench, Vijayvargiya said. The Congress described the court verdict as a victory of democracy. The development emboldened the party to push for a notice in the Rajya Sabha for a resolution to condemn the government over its attempt to destabilise the Uttarakhand government. The government is in a minority in the Rajya Sabha. The session begins on Monday. Congress spokesperson and lawyer Abhishek Manu Singhvi said: This judgment teaches and reminds us that those eyeing Himachal Pradesh or Manipur must learn to control their greed and must realise that power is available only through democratic means and not the misuse of Article 356. After Uttarakhand, the Congress has been alleging that the BJP was attempting to dislodge its governments in Himachal Pradesh and Manipur as well. It lost its government in Arunachal Pradesh, earlier in the year. While celebrations were underway in Dehradun, Rawat said: We remind you (Modi government) of cooperative federalism you talk about and to request you to let the state do its work. AAP chief and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal tweeted, This is a huge embarrassment to Modi government. He should stop interfering with elected governments and respect democracy. The Left parties also slammed the government. Senior ministers and BJP leaders like Shah, Arun Jaitley, Vijayvargiya and others were in consultations to decide the future course of action. 'Hindu daughters' need protection and the only way to ensure that is to enforce a two-child policy for all religions, Union minister was reported as saying on Wednesday by The Indian Express. "Daughters will not be safe and might have to be kept under the veil, like in Pakistan, said the Bharatiya Janata Party leader, according to the report. The minister of state for micro, small and medium enterprises was speaking at a cultural yatra in Bagaha, West Champaran, and, according to the report, various Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh workers were present in the audience. It would not be a stretch to say that Singh was specifically taking aim at the Muslim community, despite trying to couch his comment as something which should be applicable to all religions. The threat, in Singh's mind, emanates from one particular community. In his speech, Singh referred to seven districts in Bihar where "our" (Hindu) population has ostensibly "gone down" and the Muslim population grown. He tried to emphasise his point by warning that if the situation continued unabated, then Hindus would have to keep their daughters under the veil like in Pakistan. According to the report, he was referring to districts "such as Kishanganj and Araria, where Muslim population has been increasing at a faster pace than Hindu population". Singh finds himself in the news, often, for remarks made in bad taste. Earlier this month, Singh attributed the fatwa asking Muslim community members not to chant 'Bharat Mata ki Jai' to a conspiracy by "international powers" to destroy India and divide it into bits and pieces. Last month, he had said that Akhilesh Yadav's government has turned Uttar Pradesh into a "nursery of terrorism" and alleged that it was not dismissing Azam Khan for fear of losing Muslim votes. Singh, in February this year, hit out at Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi alleging he was using language that would make Pakistan and Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Saeed "happy". Singh's remarks had come after Gandhi had said that he did not need a certificate from anyone to prove his patriotism. Singh's penchant for shooting from the hip has not dulled over the years. Last year, in the run up to the crucial Bihar Assembly polls, Singh jumped head first into a political fist fight with Lalu Yadav. In October, 2015, Singh found himself explaining the difference between beef and mutton to former Bihar chief minister Lalu Yadav. Furthermore, Singh went on to describe the veteran politician as "senile". In a tweet by ABP News Hindi, Singh was quoted as saying The difference between beef and mutton is the same as the difference between our relationship with our mothers and our wives. A week before Singh's remark, Yadav had said that Hindus also consumed beef and that there was no difference between goat meat and beef. The statement had come against the backdrop of a 52-year-old Muslim man being lynched by a mob in Uttar Pradeshs Dadri, allegedly for storing and eating beef in his house. The member of Parliament from Nawada, Bihar, first shot to fame, also for the wrong reasons, when during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections he declared that critics and opponents of then prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi should go to Pakistan. The remarks resulted in police cases against him and Election Commission censures. Of course, apparent religious bigotry is not Singh's only flavour, he had landed himself in another political controversy in April last year when he racially targeted Congress President Sonia Gandhi. Singh asked jocularly whether Sonia's "white skin" had been her ticket to securing the top job in the Congress Party. Stoking the controversy further, he had asked, "If Rajiv (Gandhi) had married a Nigerian, things would have been different." The political firestorm his remarks created aside, the Nigerian High Commission in India did not take too kindly to his remark. The acting High Commissioner of Nigeria had said that a complaint could be filed with the External Affairs Ministry as Singh's comments were in "very bad taste". "We expect the minister to withdraw the comments and apologise to the Nigerian people. We will notify our government about the issue," he had said. In a major setback to the central government, the Uttarakhand High Court on Thursday set aside the imposition of President's rule in the hill state. After two consecutive days of hearing on a matter filed by ousted chief minister Harish Rawat, the court said the proclamation of central rule in the state stood null and void. It has also called for a floor test in the Assembly on April 29. Meanwhile, the Centre is likely to challenge the High Court verdict in the Supreme Court. Congress leader and former finance minister Indira Hridayesh said her party "saluted the judiciary for upholding truth and law". Earlier today, the Uttarakhand High Court said it would be a travesty of justice if the Centre recalls its order imposing President's rule and allows someone else to form a government now, strong words that came after its counsel was unable to give an undertaking till a verdict is given in the present case. Continuing its hearing for the fourth day, the court also told the Centre that it could allow the ousted Chief Minister Harish Rawat's petition challenging the imposition of President's rule and ensure that a floor test is held. "Should we consider their application for stay moved on April 7? It was expected that till the judgement is pronounced, Central government will not recall (Article) 356. If you recall 356 and call someone else to form a government, what else would it be other than travesty of justice," a bench of Chief Justice K M Joseph and Justice V K Bist said. The strong words of the court came after the Centre's counsel said it was not in a position to give an assurance that the government would consider putting on hold the recall of its order imposing President's rule for a week. It gave the government's counsel some time to take instructions. The bench observed, "Otherwise you can do this in every state. Impose President's rule for 10-15 days and then ask someone else to take oath. More than angry, we are pained that you are behaving like this. That the highest authority - Government of India - behaves like this. How can you think of playing with the court." "What if we allow the petition? Then things would go back to what it was prior to the President's rule and the state government will only have to prove majority by way of floor test. Can you take exception to that also?" the bench asked the Centre. A CPI(M) supporter was killed and ten were injured in sporadic violence during the third phase of polling for 62 Assembly seats of West Bengal which saw an estimated 79.22 per cent turnout. The Election Commission said in New Delhi that the turnout could be more as the figures were based on text messages sent by polling officials from the field till 5 pm. Heavy turnout of 81.62 per cent was recorded in 17 seats of Nadia, 79.29 per cent in 22 seats of Murshidabad and 78.26 per cent in 16 seats of Burdwan. However, the seven constituencies of northern Kolkata, registered only 57.05 per cent votes. Though polling ended at 6 PM, officials said the final turnout figure would be known tomorrow. Deputy Election Commissioner in charge of West Bengal Sandeep Saxena said in Delhi that in the 2011 assembly polls, the voter turnout stood at 84.83 per cent, while it was 81.80 per cent in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls in the constituencies which went to poll today. The body of a 35-year-old CPI(M) supporter, identified as Tahidur Mondal, was found about 500 metres away from a polling booth at Shibapara area of Domkal Assembly seat in Murshidabad district. No arrests have so far been made in connection with the incident. Asked whether the incidents of violence in the third phase were the highest in this phase, Saxena said the Commission "cannot compare" the number of incidents in each phase. Police said an FIR has been filed against 20 persons alleging that Trinamool supporters killed Mondal. In another area of Domkal constituency, four people were hurt, two of them seriously, in a clash between rival political workers for which 25 people have been detained. Three other incidents of clashes were also reported from Burdwan in which crude bombs were used. ADG (law and order) Anuj Sharma said the police made 169 arrests during the day out of which 162 were under preventive sections all over the state. Altogether 63 preventive arrests were made from Kolkata including 52 from Beleghata area where there were complaints of voter intimidation. A government official on poll duty, who was maintaining the queue at a booth in Burdwan district, died of sun-stroke. Altogether seven presiding officers were removed from duty during the day in Burdwan and Murshidabad, West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer Sunil Gupta said. Union Minister Babul Supriyo was allegedly heckled at a polling booth in Jorasanko constituency in the city when he went to cast his vote along with his mother. In Kolkata, Trinamool leader Anwar Khan was arrested following instructions from the Chief Electoral Officer after he was shown on TV channels abusing the poll panel while talking to a party worker over phone. During the day, the poll panel received over 2,700 complaints, many of which were related to booth-capturing, false voting and voter intimidation. A college student was killed and five others were injured when the van in which they were travelling rolled down on the Yercaud ghat road near here today, police said. The B.Pharm students from Namakkal were returning here after attending the marriage of the brother of one of their collegemates when the van capsised while negotiating a hairpin bend, they said. All the six were injured and admitted to the government hospital here where Satheeshkumumar died without responding to treatment. Two men who were among 41 people picked up over the weekend from a boat found adrift in the Mediterranean Sea today described surviving what they say was a shipwreck that might have killed up to 500 people. If confirmed, the sinking, which would have taken place sometime last week, would be one of the deadliest migrant boat sinkings in the Mediterranean. So far, there has been no independent confirmation of a mass casualty tragedy at sea. The coast guard authorities of Italy, Greece, Libya and Egypt haven't confirmed a sinking, and there haven't yet been any reports of bodies or debris washing ashore. Muaz Mahmud Aymo, a 25-year-old Ethiopian, and Mowlid Isman, a 28-year-old Somali, said they had been heading to Italy, leaving the Libyan port city of Tobruk at night on a boat with about 200 people on board. They said smugglers forced them onto a larger boat, which they said already had about 300 people on board although it was dark and they couldn't see inside. The larger boat sank during the transfer of people from the smaller vessel, they said, and all died except 31 people who were still on the smaller boat and 10 more, including the two of them, who were picked up from the sea by Somalis who were still on the smaller boat. "The people all, they die on that ocean," said Aymo, who said his 2-month-old baby and 20-year-old wife were among the fatalties. Isman said he lost his sister and his sister's baby. Aymo said the smugglers had told them the journey, for which each passenger paid USD 1,800, would be safe. "They say: 'You are gonna go to Italy. Today. Tonight. No problem. You are safe,'" he told reporters in Athens. But the smugglers forced them onto the larger boat, which he described as a wooden vessel of about 30 meters. Both said they saw those on board struggling in the water and dying. "We saw the dead people with our eyes," Isman said, speaking through an interpreter. They managed to swim to the smaller boat and get on board, but the smuggler who was navigating refused to wait and help others still struggling in the sea, the two said. Instead, he motored away, ignoring the pleas from the crying survivors and at one point brandishing a knife at Aymo and threatening to kill him, he said. Pakistan's two senior Generals were among 11 top officers dismissed by Army Chief General Raheel Sharif on charges of corruption, a rare move in the country where the military wields enormous power. A Lieutenant General, one Major General, five Brigadiers, three Colonels and one Major were dismissed by the Army Chief on corruption charges, security officials said. Two soldiers were also dismissed on similar charges. Gen Raheel's move came days after he demanded "across the board accountability", saying the ongoing war against terrorism and extremism cannot bring enduring peace and stability unless the menace of corruption is not uprooted. "Therefore, across the board accountability is necessary for the solidarity, integrity and prosperity of Pakistan," he had said. So far no official announcement was made but all local TV channels also reported the sacking of the officers. Gen Raheel's move to dismissed the top officers assume significance in the wake of raging scandal in Pakistan over embattled Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's family offshore wealth after the Panama Papers leak mentioned his children's name for having shell companies. Sharif's two sons and one daughter were mentioned in the Panama papers for offshore account and companies. Opposition leaders have demanded a probe into the scandal, with some demanding Sharif's resignation. It is believed that decision by the Army Chief may have impact on the political government and demand of Sharif's resignation might increase. Pakistan is a powerful institution and has ruled the country for more than half of its history since Pakistan was created in 1947. With the last three hearings in the the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack case being adjourned, Pakistani officials have warned that the trial, going on for six years, could face further delay if India does not send 24 Indian witnesses to Pakistan to record their statements. "The hearing of the case is adjourned without any proceedings during the last three consecutive weeks (hearings) April 6, 13 and 20, because the Pakistani government is still awaiting its counterpart's response about sending (Indian) witnesses to Pakistan for recording statements in the case," a court official said today. He said the case may further be delayed if India does not send witnesses to Pakistan. Pakistan has asked India to send all the 24 Indian witnesses to depose before the anti-terrorism court holding the Mumbai attack trial. According to the prosecution, the trial court had completed recording the statements of all Pakistani witnesses in the case which has been underway in the country for more than six years. "Now the ball is in India's court. The Indian government should send all Indian witnesses of the Mumbai case to Pakistan to record their statements so that the trial could further move ahead," a prosecution lawyer had said. On the other hand, theAnti-Terrorism Court Islamabad has not yet announced its verdict on the application of prosecution requesting to make amendment in the charges against the suspects, including LeT Operations commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, in abetment to murder of each individual in the carnage. The court which isholding the trial of the seven suspects in the Mumbai attack case last month hadreserved the verdict after the prosecution and defence lawyers completed their arguments on (prosecution) plea that amendment in the charges against all the seven suspects in abetment to murder of each individual in the Mumbai attack should be made. The prosecution had sought the amendment to the changes "for further strengthening the case against the suspects". It had pleaded for including the postmortem reports of those killed in the attack. The prosecution said India should be asked to send the postmortem reports of each victim of the Mumbai terror attack while the defence lawyers opposed it. Lakhvi, Abdul Wajid, Mazhar Iqbal, Hamad Amin Sadiq, Shahid Jameel Riaz, Jamil Ahmed and Younis Anjum are accused of abetment to murder, attempted murder, planning and executing the Mumbai attacks. Lakhvi, believed to be the mastermind of the Mumbai attacks, is living in undisclosed location after he was released from jail on a bail a year ago. The other six suspects are in Rawalpindi's Adiala Jail. Three drug peddlers including a Nigerian national have been arrested in separate raids leading to recovery of fine-quality heroin and cocaine estimated to be worth Rs 1.70 crore in the international market, police said today. A Crime Branch team caught Nigerian Omokhogie Sunny, 49, on specific inputs from Janakpuri district centre, with 55 gram cocaine worth Rs 35 lakh. He was also carrying Rs 1.14 lakh in cash at the time of his arrest, Joint Commissioner (Crime) Ravindra Yadav said. Sunny who had come to India for doing business, in December 2015 took to drug peddling after suffering heavy losses. He lived at Mahavir Enclave in Palam and his daughter is studying in Hyderabad, the officer said. The Crime Branch sleuths arrested one Nawab, a resident of Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh, near Kashmere Gate ISBT and found 200 gram of fine-quality heroin on him. The contraband carried by him was worth Rs 60 lakh in the international market, he said. Another drug peddler Om Prakash was arrested by the Crime Branch from Nangloi in west Delhi. He was found to be carrying 260 gram of fine-quality heroin worth Rs 75 lakh, Yadav said. Nawab and Om Prakash received drug from Bareilly based suppliers for delivery in Delhi. Sunny had received 100 gm cocaine from a fellow Nigerian in Mumbai and had already sold 45 gram of it. Further investigation is on to unearth linkages of the arrested drug peddlers, the officer said. Dozens of Taiwanese deported from Kenya over allegations of fraud have admitted their guilt and will stand trial in China, state media reported today. Kenyan police expelled 45 Taiwanese citizens to China this month over charges they were part of a vast telephone fraud network, according to China's Xinhua state agency. Taiwan reacted furiously, accusing China of "abducting" its citizens, and dispatched a delegation of government officials to Beijing for talks with police. Chinese state media last week showed the deportees apparently admitting to crimes under police interrogation, in what has become a common sight in such cases. Chen Shiqu, an investigator with China's ministry of public security, said all 45 suspects have already "admitted their guilt". "The suspects specifically targeted people on the Chinese mainland and their victims are from the mainland," Xinhua quoted him as saying. "Many of the suspects are themselves from the mainland. They will thus be investigated, prosecuted and tried in accordance with mainland law," he said. Last week, China's minister of public security said the mainland had legal jurisdiction over the case. China considers Taiwan to be one of its provinces awaiting reunification, by force if necessary, even though the island has ruled itself since 1949 following a civil war split. Observers say China is stepping up pressure on Taiwan's president-elect Tsai Ing-wen, who is set to take office in May, as Beijing does not trust her historically pro-independence party. Five Nepalese nationals have been arrested from southern Nepal on charges of trafficking girls to India, police said today. Sher Bahadur Chepang and his wife were arrested from Madi Municipality in Chitawan district yesterday after the couple handed over a 12-year-old girl to a man to traffic her to Delhi on the pretext of marrying her, they said. However, the girl was rescued with the help of the police and Maiti Nepal, a non-governmental organisation working against girls trafficking, from Kanchanpur district in far- west Nepal. In a separate incident, three other traffickers including Govinda Mahato were arrested on Tuesday from Kaule village of the same district on charges of trafficking a 16-year-old girl to Mumbai. The three had tried to sell the teenage girl to a Mumbai brothel, according to police. Pakistan feels it has potentially lost a great opportunity to build strategic trade ties with regional economies owing to Afghanistan's preference for a trilateral agreement with India and Iran via Chabahar port, a media report said today. The report carried in 'The Express Tribune' said that Pakistan is set to lose lucrative trade deal with Afghanistan as Kabul appears to have lost interest in it and is eager to develop an alternative route via Iran which is close to being finalised. Iran, Afghanistan and India on April 11 finished negotiating the details of the trilateral transport and transit pact, meant to provide legal framework to operate trade corridors via Iran's Chabahar port, the report said. This development could possibly downgrade Pakistan's importance from being the primary facilitator of India-Afghanistan trade to a mere back-up, meaning that Pakistan has potentially lost a great opportunity to build strategic trade ties with regional economies, it said. Officials in the Ministry of Commerce told the the paper that Afghan authorities were slower in responding to the proposed bilateral and transit trade related matters and it seemed that they were least interested towards Pakistan and would rather devote their time and energy towards materialising the trilateral agreement with Iran and India. "All this happened because Pakistan refused to include India in the Pak-Afghan transit trade agreement," the official claimed. Afghanistan insists that India must be part of the transit trade agreement in the same way as Pakistan uses Afghan soil to reach Central Asian states, the report said. The officer cited a draft agreement pertaining to the Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) that the ministry had sent months ago. He insisted that there has been no response from Kabul. "We have learnt that they have shared the draft agreement with their security agencies for clearance, which is surprising for us," the official said. Moreover, the maiden meeting of the Pak-Afghan Joint Business Council (JBC) has not been held even after its establishment around five months ago to discuss issues and to devise strategies for enhancing bilateral trade, it said. The JBC was supposed to hold its first meeting in February last year, but it could not take place. The crime branch of city police today brought Alamzeb Afridi, an alleged Indian Mujahideen operative and a key accused of the 2008 Ahmedabad serial blasts case, here through a transfer warrant from Bengaluru. Police got his custody yesterday. "Since Alamzeb Afridi was wanted in the 2008 blasts case here, we sought his custody from Bengaluru court for his interrogation....We will seek his police remand from a court here," Deputy Commissioner of Police Deepan Bhadran said. Afridi, resident of Juhapura here, was arrested by the National Investigation Agency in Bengaluru on January 29 in the Church Street blast case there. NIA said Afridi was also wanted in a case related to holding of a terrorist training camp at Waghamon in Kerala by the Students Islamic Movement Of India (SIMI). He allegedly absconded after 18 blasts rocked Ahmedabad in July 2008, killing 56 people and injuring over 150. Afridi, as per the FIR, conducted recce of the blast targets and planted a bomb on a bicycle. With the aviation sector continuing to see a spurt in traffic, many domestic airlines posted good growth as they ferried 78.72 lakh passengers in March with no-frills carrier IndiGo carrying most passengers during the same period. While the overall passenger growth stood at around 5.3 per cent, the market share of IndiGo jumped to 38.4 per cent in March, followed by Jet Airways at 17.6 per cent and Air India (14.7 per cent). Latest data from aviation regulator DGCA released today showed that local airlines carried 78.72 lakh passengers last month compared to 74.76 lakh in February. Over the past several months, more number of people have been travelling by air. In terms of Passenger Load Factor (PLF) -- an indicator of filled seats -- SpiceJet was on top with 91.1 per cent, followed by GoAir (86.3 per cent), IndiGo (85.1 per cent), AirAsia (82.7 per cent) and Air Costa (82.1 per cent). Among other airlines, the PLF of Jet Airways was at 79.1 per cent while that of JetLite and Air India stood at 77 per cent and 75.7 per cent respectively. According to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), PLF of airlines slightly decreased last month, primarily due to the end of tourist season. Except for IndiGo, GoAir and Trujet, rest of the carriers saw their market share either decline or remain flat in March. IndiGo's market share rose to 38.4 per cent compared to 36.8 per cent in February while that of GoAir rose to 8.3 per cent from 8 per cent during the same period. Market share of Jet Airways fell to 17.6 per cent from 18.4 per cent. Air India saw its share drop to 14.7 per cent last month from 15.4 per cent seen in February. In the case of SpiceJet, the market share slipped to 12.8 per cent in March from 13.1 per cent in the previous month. Start-up carriers AirAsia and Vistara's market share remained unchanged at 2.2 per cent and 2 per cent, respectively in March. "Passengers carried by domestic airlines during January-March 2016 were 230.03 lakh as against 185.46 lakh during the corresponding period of previous year thereby registering a growth of 24.03 per cent," DGCA said. The figures are based on passengers carried by 11 airlines -- Air India, Jet Airways, IndiGo, JetLite, SpiceJet, GoAir, Air Asia, Vistara, Air Costa, Air Pegasus, and Trujet. Meanwhile, the overall cancellation rate of scheduled domestic airlines stood at 1.29 per cent in March. "During March 2016, a total of 737 passenger-related complaints had been received by the scheduled domestic airlines. The number of complaints per 10,000 passengers carried for the month of March 2016 has been 0.9," DGCA said. The Allahabad High Court has asked the central government to clarify within four weeks whether it has powers to extend or relax the date for submission of annual returns of assets and liabilities of central government employees, including IAS and IPS officers under the Lokpal and Lokayukta Act. "We are of the view that it is necessary for the court to be apprised of the position of the Union Government on whether the period which has been prescribed statutorily under Section 44 (4) can be relaxed or extended by means of the rule making power," said the Lucknow bench of the High Court. The Division Bench of Chief Justice Dhananjay Yashwant Chandrachud and Justice Rajan Roy directed the central government to file a counter affidavit (reply) within four weeks in this matter. The directive came on a petition filed by suspended IPS officer Amitabh Thakur who raised the issue that the last date for filing annual property returns by public servants was extended again and again. Quoting various provisions of section 44 of the Lokpal and Lokayukta Act 2013, the petitioner said every public servant is supposed to provide the property returns of himself along with his spouse and family members by 31st July every year. He sought direction for the Central government to explain on what basis it extended the last date of submission of annual assets return. The petitioner alleged that the last date for 2013-14 has been extended six times and that for 2014-15 has been extended 3 times and recently it was extended once again on 12 April 2016 for the same, which was improper. The court fixed May 18 as the next date of hearing the matter. The death toll from Ecuador's earthquake was set to rise sharply after authorities warned that 1,700 people were still missing and anger gripped families of victims trapped in the rubble. Three days after the powerful 7.8-magnitude quake struck Ecuador's Pacific coast in a zone popular with tourists, 480 people are known to have died, the government said yesterday. Read more from our special coverage on "ECUADOR EARTHQUAKE" Ecuador earthquake: Death toll rises to 413 Sniffer dogs and mechanical diggers were busy at work in the wreckage of coastal towns such as Pedernales and Manta as the stench of rotting bodies grew stronger under the baking sun. rescuers and aid groups rushed to help victims as searchers dug for families trapped in the debris of homes, hotels and businesses. "We have 2,000 people listed that are being looked for, but we have so far found 300," Deputy Interior Minister Diego Fuentes told reporters in the capital Quito. Some 4,605 people were injured, according to the latest government figures. In a glimmer of good news as he toured the affected areas, President Rafael Correa said that 54 people had been rescued alive from the rubble. Still, hope of finding more victims alive was fading fast as the crucial three-day mark was reached late yesterday. Locals in devastated towns such as Manta - population 253,000 - started to lose patience. "The rescue has been very slow and precious lives have been lost. We relatives have been waiting here since Saturday night," said Pedro Merro, who said his cousin was under the wreckage of a three-floor market in Manta. Luis Felipe Navarro said he was sure there were people alive in the concrete and twisted metal of a building he owned - one of around 800 structures toppled in the quake. "I have received messages on my telephone. They say there are 10 of them in a cavity," he said. "But the rescue teams will not listen to me." "It is very hard but we are moving forward," Correa said in Manta, where he handed out food and water in what resembled a war zone. Hundreds of emergency workers from Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador, Spain and other countries were helping overwhelmed Ecuadorian officials. Fears rose for thousands of people left homeless by the quake, prey to disease-bearing mosquitoes and dirty drinking water. Firefighting captain Freddy Arca pointed to the ruins of a hotel in Manta as drills and jackhammers rattled around him. "We know that there is a man, his wife and their two-month-old baby in there. And there may be up to nine other people," he said. UNICEF warned that 150,000 children were affected by the disaster. Australia unveiled a multi-billion-dollar cyber scheme to combat hacking today, as Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull acknowledged an attack on the country's weather bureau last year but stopped short of blaming it on China. The Australian leader added that it was safe to assume "efforts are made by foreign actors, both governmental and non-governmental, to penetrate" local agencies. "I can confirm reports that the Bureau of Meteorology suffered a significant cyber intrusion which was first discovered early last year, and the department of parliamentary services suffered a similar intrusion in recent years," Turnbull said in Sydney as he announced Aus dollar 230 million (USD 180 million) in new government funding. "I don't have anything further to add than what I've said today," he replied when asked at a press conference if the weather bureau attack came from China. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation in December cited an unnamed official blaming Beijing for the major cyber attack, where hackers got inside computer systems at the bureau, which owns one of the nation's largest supercomputers and has links to the defence department. Turnbull said the new funding, which comes on top of an allocation of Aus dollar 400 million over the next decade to strengthen cyber security, would include support for regular meetings between government, businesses and researchers on tackling emerging concerns. The additional money would also help to boost international efforts, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region, to take down cyber criminals. "The Australian Crime Commission estimates the annual cost of cyber crime to Australia is over Aus dollar 1 billion in direct costs," the prime minister added. "But some estimates put the real costs to be as high as one percent of GDP (gross domestic product) a year, or about Aus dollar 17 billion." Turnbull said the government was focusing not just on defensive measures but also offence, stressing that the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) - like allies the United States and Britain - had "very considerable capabilities", without elaborating. Regional superpower China, Australia's largest trading partner, has been accused of organised hacking against the US government and private firms, as well as other countries. In 2013, Chinese hackers were accused of stealing the top-secret blueprints of Australia's new intelligence agency headquarters. Two years earlier the computers of the prime minister, foreign minister and defence minister were all suspected of being hacked in attacks reportedly originating in China. A Bangladeshi national was today arrested at the domestic airport here for allegedly misbehaving with an air hostesses on board an Indigo flight. The incident took place on the Kolkata-Mumbai Indigo flight 6E 326. When the air hostesses were serving, four of the passengers started clicking their pictures with mobile phones, a co-passenger said. As they kept taking pictures despite being requested not to do so, the air-hostesses approached the pilot, following which their mobile phones were confiscated by a crew member, he said. The airport control room was also informed, and upon landing, the security held three of them, while one managed to escape, he said. DCP Virendra Mishra said based on the complaint filed by one of the air-hostesses, only one passenger, Ashim Bhumik (38), a Bangladeshi national, was arrested under section 354 (assault or criminal force to woman with intent of modesty) of IPC. The airline spokesperson was not available for comments. Amid a raging row over recovery of soured debt from tycoon Vijay Mallya, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley today said it was responsibility of banks to ensure no defaulter manages to get away. A special court in Mumbai on Monday ordered the arrest of Mallya, days after government suspended his passport in a bid to force his return from abroad and make him repay dues. Jaitley said he would not comment on court proceedings. "You have investigative agencies looking into criminal law matters (and) you have banks looking into settlement matters. I think both are extremely competent institutions who can act strictly within the parameters of law," he told ET Now. As banks moved to recover Rs 9,000 crore that his collapsed Kingfisher Airlines owed them, Mallya left India presumably for London. "As far as the banks are concerned, its their responsibility based on commercial considerations to make sure that no defaulter manages to get away," Jaitley said. "Merely by escaping the geographical boundaries of India you don't run away from the liabilities that you owe to the public system." The Supreme Court has asked Mallya to declare all his assets by April 21 after a group of lenders turned down his proposal to repay as much as USD 900 million. Banks want entire amount due, including interest to be paid back. Mallya has previously termed shutting down of Kingfisher Airlines as an "unfortunate commercial failure" due to macroeconomic factors and government policies. He said he did not flee the country and was not an "absconder." "They (investigating agencies and banks) are sending a very strong signal that public debts owed to commercial banks, you cant just run away from liability if you have responsibility to pay and banks will ensure that banks are reimbursed," Jaitley added. Mahatma Gandhi's granddaughter Tara Gandhi Bhattacharjee has been decorated with one of France's top honour The Order of Arts and Letters for her contribution in promoting peace, solidarity, culture, education, and development. On behalf of the French President Bhattacharjee, 82, was conferred the Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) honour here late last evening by French Ambassador Francois Richier. Accepting the award Bhattacharjee said there was need "to learn the fearlessness of Gandhi." "The fearlessness of Gandhi was different. His was made of love and compassion. I remember his room, his doors were always open. One hardly had to take an appointment to meet him. "I remember politicians coming out of the room saying they disagree with his view. They probably didn't change their view, but did become his friends for sure. That's the fearlessness we need today, " she said. "This honour comes in recognition of Bhattacharjee's remarkable work for promoting peace, solidarity, culture, education, and development through her commitment to perpetuating the memory and legacy of her grandfather, Mahatma Gandhi," a statement by the Embassy said. The daughter of late Devadas Gandhi and the late Lakshmi Devadas Gandhi, is the widow of the late Jyoti Prasad Bhattacharjee, a leading economist. For the past 28 years, she has been working for the Kasturba Gandhi National Memorial Trust, founded by Mahatma Gandhi in memory of his wife to serve needy women and children of rural India. The L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) is a French government distinction for "persons who have distinguished themselves by their creativity in the field of art, culture and literature or for their contribution to the influence of arts in France and throughout the world." Some noted Indian recipients of this honour in the past include Bharti Kher, Subodh Gupta, Shahrukh Khan, Pt Hariprasad Chaurasia, Aishwarya Rai, Raghu Rai, Ebrahim Alkazi, Habib Tanveer, and Upamanyu Chatterjee. Leading independent brokerage and financial services player Centrum Group today appointed Jaspal Bindra, ex-Asia Pacific CEO Standard Chartered Bank, as its new chairman in place of Chandir Gidwani who will continue to be the main promoter. Gidwani has divested around 25 per cent of his personal holdings in the group he set up over 20 years ago to Bindra who has spent three decades working at MNCs, sources told PTI, who, however, could not confirm the value of the stake sale. For 55-year-old Bindra, who was one of the poster boys of the Indian management talents in global financial markets for over three decades, this is a home coming. He will be the executive chairman at the diversified Centrum Group and with his considerable stake in the company this is also an entrepreneurial journey for him. The Centrum Group, set up in 1995 by Gidwani and Khushrooh Byramjee, has 125 branches spanning 48 cities and offers integrated financial services to corporate and retail clients with its investment banking (equity & debt), wealth management, institutional broking and forex services, serving over 1 million customers. The group also has an NBFC for retail lending and has applied to NHB for a licence to foray into housing finance. "This is the perfect time for Jaspal to come in as our executive chairman. With his rich and extensive global experience, I am sure he will be able to accelerate our growth. His strategy and execution track record will be extremely helpful as we enter the next chapter of growth," Gidwani said. Bindra's last position at Standard Chartered was as the chief executive of the Asia Pacific region. In February 2015, the bank announced that he would be leaving the company in major global revamp. "With its reputation, commitment to values, profitable growth track record, large client base and a national presence, the Centrum Group is well-poised for higher growth. I look forward to working closely both with the promoters and the proven executive team," Bindra said. Out of the successful global career of over 30 years, he has spent 18 years with StanC alone. He joined the Asia-focused British bank in 1998 and became a director in 2010. He has served in leadership roles in Mumbai and several other Southeast Asian centres heading treasury, capital markets, investment and consumer banking. He is among a handful of Indian-born executives who have reached the pinnacles of the global financial industry. Bindra, who grew up in Calcutta, joined Bank of America after an MBA from XLRI Jamshedpur in 1984. He later joined UBS and moved to StanC in 1998 as chief executive for India. He is credited for making StanC India one of the three largest international banks in the country by assets and its third-largest profit and revenue driver. Thamizhnadu Brahmin Association, known as 'Thambraas', today said it would support the ruling AIADMK in the May 16 Assembly polls. In a press release, State President of Thambraas, N Narayanan said the "association has decided to support the AIADMK candidates and its alliance candidates in election to the TN State Assembly." He said the association's district units and branches across the state would work for the victory of the AIADMK. Earlier this month, another Brahmin outfit, Tamil Nadu Brahmins Welfare Sangam had extended support to the DMK. DMK had said Sangam functionaries called on DMK treasurer MK Stalin and extended support. Britain today celebrated Queen Elizabeth II's 90th birthday with gun salutes, musical bands and church services across the country, as Prime Minister David Cameron led the nation in paying tributes to the UK's oldest and longest-serving monarch calling her a "rock of strength" for the country and the Commonwealth. The monarch was at one of her palaces outside London in Windsor Castle for her big day, where she and husband Prince Philip took a round of the town in an open top royal vehicle, waving at cheering crowds of thousands of her subjects lined up on the streets. She sliced into a three-tier birthday cake created by Bangladeshi-origin British chef Nadiya Hussein, winner of the 'Great British Bake Off' show, especially for the 90th celebrations as the crowds sang 'Happy Birthday'. "Thanks you for the lovely warm wishes on The Queen's 90th Birthday," Buckingham Palace said in a statement. The Queen, dressed in a spring green outfit, remarked that it was a "lovely day" as she unveiled a plaque marking "The Queen's Walkway" at the foot of Castle Hill during a walkabout the town of Windsor. The Walkway was designed by the UK's Outdoor Trust to symbolically recognise the moment that Elizabeth II became Britain's longest reigning monarch on September 9, 2015 after more than 63 years on the throne, linking 63 significant points in Windsor. Prime Minister David Cameron led the tributes by referring to the Queen as a "Rock of strength" while Prince Charles, the Queen's heir, recorded a special birthday message for his mother in which he reads an edited passage from William Shakespeare's Henry VIII for radio broadcast during the day. To mark the queen's birthday, gun salutes of 21 shots, the standard royal gun salute, rang out at locations including Hillsborough Castle, Cardiff Castle, and Edinburgh Castle. In London, the King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery staged a 41-gun salute at midday in Hyde Park. The Honourable Artillery Company fired a 62-gun salute across the Thames from the Tower of London at an hour later. After the Queen lights the first beacon in Windsor, more than 900 beacons across the UK and the Commonwealth will be lit up to mark her birthday. Members of the UK's Army cadet force will take beacons to the top of the highest peaks of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In an address to the House of Commons to mark the occasion, Cameron said the queen had been "steadfast, a rock of strength for our nation, for our Commonwealth and on many occasions for the whole world". He said Britain was "uniquely blessed" to have her and praised the Queen's "unshakeable sense of duty". A photograph of the monarch with young Royal Family members has been released. The image, one of three taken by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, shows the Queen surrounded by her five great-grandchildren and her two youngest grandchildren. (REOPENS FGN 21) Royal Mail yesterday issued a set of 10 special stamps to mark the occasion, featuring four generations of UK monarchy with the Queen, Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince George. The group family photograph taken last year appears as a stamp sheet, with perforations positioned to create a first class stamp for each of the four royals. The celebrations will carry on tomorrow when US President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama will be joining the Queen for lunch at Windsor Castle. The Queen's official birthday celebrations for the nation are scheduled for the second weekend of June, which will include a grand charity street party near Buckingham Palace. The queen was born Princess Elizabeth on April 21, 1926 and became queen on the death of her father, King George VI, in 1952. A majority of Britons have lived under no other monarch. The Centre is hopeful of achieving the complete roll-out of broadband network across 2.5 lakh village panchayats in the country by 2018, telecom secretary J S Deepak today said. Speaking on Bharat Net programme, which aims to provide broadband connectivity to all panchayats in the country, Deepak said all panchayats will have an ecosystem that will further boost the connectivity and bridge the digital divide in the country. All village panchayats in the country will be connected through fibre optic network by 2018, he added. The government had earlier set deadline of December 2016 to roll out optical fibre network across all panchayats. He was speaking at Global Exhibition on Services here. Deepak said the pace of digitisation is accelerating and impressive but a lot still needs to be done. The Telecom Secretary highlighted three areas that needed focus to bridge this divide -- connectivity, language and digital illiteracy, and said the government and industry must work together to address the same. On challenges in terms of language, Deepak said that at present most of the mobile communications are taking place in English but by January 1, 2017 mobile devices will be enabled for English, Hindi and one vernacular language. A Chhattisgarh Armed Force (CAF) jawan was today killed in a pressure IED (improvised explosive device) blast, allegedly laid by Naxals, in the state's insurgency-hit Sukma district. The incident took place near Dharampenta village under Kistaram police station limits when a team of security personnel was patrolling in the region to ensure security to an under-construction culvert, Sukma Superintendent of Police D Shravan told PTI. The culvert is being constructed on Gulab nullah near Dharampenta, located around 500 km from the state capital Raipur. While the security personnel were cordoning off the spot, constable Dinesh Baghel, belonging to CAF's sixth battalion, inadvertently stepped over a pressure landmine triggering the explosion injuring him critically, the SP said. He was immediately taken to a nearby hospital where he succumbed to his wounds, Shravan said, adding a combing operation has been launched to trace the assailants. A "cartel" of 4-5 telecom firms having a billion subscribers are making Rs 250 crore a day but not making investments on their network to improve services to check call drops, government told the Supreme Court Thursday. "There is a cartel of four-five telecom having billion subscribers, who are making Rs 250 crore a day from outgoing calls. They have stupendous growth but they are making minimum investment on their network to improve the quality of service on their network to curb call drops," Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi said. Rohatgi, appearing for TRAI before a bench of justices Kurian Joseph and R F Nariman, also defended the penalty imposed by the regulator on the telecom firms, saying it will be around Rs 280 crore and not thousands of crore as was being claimed by the service providers. "They are making around Rs one lakh crore a year from calls and the impact of penalty will be Rs 270-280 crore and not thousands of crore as claimed by them," he said. The Attorney General further said there was growth of 61 per cent in the subscriber base for telecom from 2009 to 2015 and they were diverting part of the spectrum to data for making more money. "Data service cost more than the calls. None of these telecom are here for charity. They are here with billion subscribers for profit. They charge for everything," Rohatgi said. COAI, a body of Unified Telecom Service Providers of India and 21 telecom operators, including Vodafone, Bharti Airtel and Reliance, have challenged the Delhi High Court order upholding TRAI's decision making it mandatory for them to compensate subscribers for call drops from this January. The Attorney General said the telcos often cite shortage of spectrum as a reason for call drops but the radiowave remained unsold during the recent auction in 700 Mhz band. "Whether you (telcos) get the spectrum or less spectrum, that is not the problem of TRAI. If you have less spectrum, then you have to either restrict your subscription or you will have to invest on technology. No one has come forward to say my hands are full and I can't have more subscribers," he said. The Attorney General said that in India, the investment by telcos during the past five years has been Rs five billion, while it was Rs 50 billion in China during the same period. "They (telcos) say my investment should be minimum but growth should be maximum because we are only four-five in number to have billion subscribers. These companies don't want to invest in technology. Rate of investment in China is ten times more than us," he said. The bench then asked the Attorney General, that why the regulator or the government cannot ask the telecom companies to make investments on their networks. "That approach of asking the telcos to invest will be invasive. What is currently being done is a polite way of asking them to pull up their socks, as, if the conditions don't improve, more things can follow," he said, adding regulation was brought to protect the consumers' interests. Contending that the allegation of telecom companies that they are not allowed to put up cell towers on buildings, Rohatgi said in New York and Iceland, there are no mobile towers but they still have quality cellular service due to investment in technology. He said the percentage of reasons not attributable to the telcos for call drops was much less than the percentage of reasons attributable to them. Rohatgi also said there was no substance in the telcos' claim that no technology could ascertain the reasons for call drops and said it can indeed be done through equipments where reasons for every is recorded. He further alleged that telcos make money through call drops as more number of times you call, more you are charged irrespective of per second pulse. The day-long hearing in the matter remained inconclusive and will continue on April 26. On March 31, the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) had told the apex court that TRAI cannot levy penalty through regulations as they have never exceeded the two per cent threshold limit set by the telecom regulator. The Delhi High Court had last month upheld the October 16, 2015 decision of TRAI, making it mandatory for cellular operators to pay consumers one rupee per experienced on their networks, subject to a cap of Rs 3 a day. The court had said the regulation was made by TRAI "keeping in mind the paramount interest of the consumer". (Reopens LGD34) The telecom firms had moved the high court seeking quashing of TRAI's regulation, terming it as a "knee-jerk reaction" which penalised them without proving any wrongdoing. The telcos had termed the regulation as "arbitrary and whimsical", contending that providing compensation to consumers amounted to interfering with their tariff structure which could be done only by order and not regulation. Earlier, TRAI had told the high court that consumers have a right to get compensated for call drops and this was different from the quality of service guidelines that cellular service providers have to follow under the licence conditions. TRAI had on December 22 last year told the court that no coercive steps would be taken against telecom firms till January 6 for not complying with the compensation norms. The Centre is not averse to appointing senior IPS officer J K Sharma as the next Director General of Tihar Jail even though he has stepped down from the post saying the AAP government did not seek prior approval from Lt Governor Najeeb Jung for his appointment. Home Ministry sources said it was a rule to take prior approval of the competent authority, the LG, before appointment of senior officers in the Delhi government, a formality the Arvind Kejriwal government did not fulfil prior to Sharma's appointment. If the rules are followed and the formalities are completed, there are no reasons for the central government to oppose appointment of Sharma, the sources said. Sharma, a 1982-batch IPS officer, who is DG (Home Guard), was given additional charge of DG (Prisons). Sharma has stepped down as DG of Tihar Jail contending the AAP government did not seek prior approval from the LG. In his letter to the Principal Secretary (Delhi Home Department) S N Sahai, Sharma said that since his appointment order has not been issued with the approval of competent authority (Lt Governor), the charge taken over by him is returned to the earlier officer who was holding it. Children's Film Society of India (CFSI) is organising a 4-day 'Summer Bonanza of Children's films' in the city from April 23 to 26. Some of the acclaimed films produced by the CFSI will be screened at the state-of-the-art screening theatres at Films Division Complex at Pedder Road in South Mumbai, says an official release here today. A similar three-day event will also be held in Delhi where the films will be screened at the Siri Fort auditorium during the same period. Speaking about the initiative of the CFSI, Information and Broadcasting Secretary, Sunil Arora said "CFSI has been producing landmark children's films over the past 60 years and some of them have won national and international awards". "Summer bonanza is an event aimed at engaging children with entertaining and educative content," he said. CFSI will screen some of its most popular films like "Gattu", "Krish, Trish & Batliboy", Shilpa Ranade's animation film "Gopi Gawaiya, Bagha Bajaiya", "Pappu Ki Pagdandi" and Mizo feature film "Kima's Lode". China said today it was "normal" to carry out ballistic missile launches, after a US media report accused Beijing of having test-fired an intercontinental weapon last week. US media site Washington Free Beacon, citing unidentified Pentagon officials, reported that China had carried out a test of its DF-41 long-range missile on April 12. The report linked the tests to tensions between Washington and Beijing over the South China Sea, noting that it came three days before a visit by US Secretary of Defence Ashton Carter. The DF-41 missile has a range of some 14,000 kilometres (8,700 miles) and could, according to some experts, carry up to 10 nuclear warheads. In a brief response, China's defence ministry did not deny a test had been carried out, but dismissed media reports of a specific location as "pure speculation". "It is normal for us to carry out scientific research tests in our own territory, according to our plans, and they are not aimed at any specific nations or targets," said a statement on its website. China claims nearly all of the South China Sea, which is home to some of the world's most important shipping lanes and is believed to contain vast oil reserves. But many of its Southeast Asian neighbours have overlapping claims, and tensions have risen over China's construction of artificial reefs in the disputed waters. On Monday, China's defence ministry gave its first confirmation that Beijing had landed a military flight on the Fiery Cross reef in the Spratlys archipelago, also claimed by the Philippines. On the day of Carter's trip, Beijing said that one of its top military officials had visited a South China Sea island. The founder of China's Internet giant Tencent will donate $2 billion in shares to charity, the company said one of the largest gifts ever given in a country whose new super-rich have no tradition of philanthropy. Pony Ma, Tencent's chief executive, will give the shares to a new foundation for mainland projects in health, education and environmental conservation, among other issues, his company said. The donation which will vest over several years appears to be the largest ever by a single individual in China, where there is great public mistrust of charitable organisations battered by years of scandal. "After 10 years of exploration and participation in philanthropic activities, I increasingly feel that a longer-term and more organised way is needed to give back to society," Ma said. is the 34th richest man in the world, with a net worth of $20.2 billion, according to Bloomberg's ranking of billionaires. China's top businessmen fall far behind their Western counterparts in corporate social responsibility. In 2014, Jack Ma and Joe Tsai, co-founders of rival Internet behemoth Alibaba, pledged to establish a philanthropic trust funded with shares in the company estimated to be worth $3 billion at the time. But the country's most generous donor last year was He Xiangjian, founder of appliance maker Midea, who gave 400 million yuan ($61.7 million), according to data compiled by Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. "In China, both donors and recipients have to pay taxes on donations. Many entrepreneurs find it hard to find a qualified charitable trust to manage the donations," the state-run Global Times on Thursday quoted Song Houliang, chief editor of China Philanthropist magazine, as saying. "Such problems have dampened their enthusiasm for giving," he added. China passed its first charity law in March, which sought to increase public confidence in giving while tightening its control of the sector. It will take effect on September 1. China is the world's second-largest economy but ranks 144th out of 145 countries for giving, according to a study last year by the Charities Aid Foundation. Chinese citizens donated just $16 billion in 2014, according to the most recent data from the China Charity Information Centre less than 0.2% of annual GDP. In the US in 2014, giving accounted for 2.1% of GDP, according to the National Philanthropic Trust. The issue is partly driven by a lack of legal framework for charitable trusts and taxes, analysts say. "Donations can be made only when the fundamentals are all in place, and that's why I think giving to charities is more difficult than earning money," the Global Times cited Jack Ma as saying in a speech at Peking University last year. Following their emphatic victories in New York primary, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump have moved closer to bagging their respective parties presidential nomination, but the Republican Party in all likelihood is headed for a contested convention. This is because, political pundits here believe, Trump despite having the largest number of delegates (845) in his kitty is still far short of the magical figure of 1237 delegates he needs to have before the Cleveland convention in July to become the Republican presidential nominee. Trump, a real estate tycoon, is now eyeing at the Republican primaries next Tuesday in the States of Maryland (38), Pennsylvania (71), Connecticut (28), Delaware (16) and Rhode Island (19), where 172 delegates are at stake. Latest polls indicates that Trump is leading in most of these states. Well aware of the high stakes, the Republican front- runner is scheduled to campaign heavily in these states. Even if he does not do so, in all likelihood he would enter the July Convention with the largest number of delegates. The entire strategy of Trump's two remaining rivals Senator Ted Cruz (559 delegates) from Texas and Ohio Governor John Kasich (147) is to prevent Trump from hitting the target of 1237 delegates. Both of them are unlikely to cross this mark. By doing do, the Cruz and Kasich campaigns hope that given Trump's rhetorics and his antipathy with the establishment, the delegates would vote against him thus opening up opportunities for them. On the Democratic side, Clinton appears to be all set to become the party's presidential nominee after her victory in her home state of New York. Clinton, who was the former First Lady, former New York Senator and former secretary of state, would thus be the first woman presidential nominee of a major party in US history. Clinton now has 1,428 delegates from the primary elections and another 502 super delegates, who are mainly party officials, have pledged their support to her. But they can change their vote even at the last moment. However, with pledged super delegates, her total is 1930 and she needs 2382 delegates. Her sole rival Senator Bernie Sanders has won 1151 delegates during the primary season and has support of just 38 super delegates. Sanders campaign believes that they can still manage to get the necessary delegates in the rest of the states to win the party's nomination. The campaign managers argue that they are short of just 277 delegates and once they overcome this gap, the super delegates can switch sides to go with the popular mandate of the party. Latest polls show, Clinton is leading in most of the Democratic primaries to be held in states of Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. : The Congress government in Karnataka had implemented a majority of schemes promised in its election manifesto and would come to power for a second term after two years, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said today. Speaking after laying the foundation stone for four projects in the city at a function here, he listed his government's achievements including the free ration scheme to the poor. The projects for which he symbolically laid the foundation stone are construction of Deputy Commissioner's office complex at nearby Padil,construction of a new blockat government Wenlock hospital, a swimming pool ofinternational standards and building of 168 quarters forhousing police personnel. The government had sanctioned Rs 41 crore for the proposed DC's office complex at Padil, which would house all district offices. On the request from people's representatives toupgrade the Wenlock hospital into a medical college, he saidthis would be considered in the next year's budget. ForestsMinister and district in charge Ramanath Rai and Health Minister U T Khader were among those present at the function. Earlier, police took into custody six anti-Yettinahole activists who were planning hold a black flag protest against the chief minister on his way at Suratkal near here. Global beverage major Coca-Cola witnessed a double digit volume growth in India in the first quarter ended March 31. The company, which posted a 4 per cent decline in net operating revenue at USD 10.28 billion for the quarter, also reported a double digit volume growth in the South West Asia market. Atlanta-headquartered company's consolidated gross profit declined 5.97 per cent to USD 6.21 billion during January-March quarter of 2016 as against USD 6.6 billion in the same quarter of last year. For the Asia Pacific region, the Coca-Cola Company and Subsidiaries had a net operating revenue of USD 1.24 billion during the first quarter, down 3.89 per cent as against USD 1.28 billion of Q1 2015. "Unit case volume growth in the quarter reflected double-digit growth in both our India & South West Asia and ASEAN business units and 4 per cent growth in Japan, partially offset by a 2 per cent decline in China," it said. Commenting on the result, The Coca-Cola Company Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Muhtar Kent said: "Amidst a challenging global macro environment, the continued focus on our five strategic initiatives enabled us to gain global value share in the first quarter and deliver positive top-line growth and strong underlying margin expansion". He further said: "Our operating results are driven by our commitment to sustainable growth, and we are confident that we have the right strategies in place to achieve our full-year outlook and drive long-term value for our system and shareowners." The company has gained global volume and value share, both in still beverages and sparkling beverage during the period. "We gained global volume and value share in sparkling beverages in a challenging macro environment. Value share grew ahead of volume share, emphasising our focus on accelerating our revenue growth management strategies. Sparkling beverage volume was even in the quarter," the company said in its Q1 results. However, "juice and juice drinks which registered a small decline in the quarter," it added. Over the outlook, the Coca-Cola Company said:"The company continues to expect organic revenue to be up 4 per cent to 5 per cent in 2016, in line with our long-term target". BJP MLA Vijender Gupta today rejected the allegation of having committed breach of privilege by favouring "abolition" of Rajya Sabha in an article but said he was ready expressing regret, as he responded to a notice by the Delhi Assembly Speaker on the issue. Gupta said the allegation made was "vague" and that there was not even a prima facie case for drawing an inference that he had committed a breach of privilege of the Upper House. He contended that the provision of privilege cannot be used to "suppress and silence" reasonable criticism and opinion. Delhi Assembly Speaker Ram Niwas Goel had last month sought an explanation from Gupta following a communication from Rajya Sabha chairman Hamid Ansari to initiate necessary action against him for allegedly favouring "abolition" of the Upper House. Ansari had asked the Delhi Speaker to take necessary action against Gupta holding that "the matter seems to involve prima facie question of privilege", while acting on a complaint by JD(U) MP K C Tyagi, who accused the BJP MLA of casting aspersions on the members of Rajya Sabha. Referring to a newspaper article written by Gupta, who is the Leader of Opposition in the Delhi Assembly, Tyagi alleged that the BJP MLA sought to underline the differences between the two Houses of Parliament and had suggested abolition of the Rajya Sabha. "I had absolutely no ill will or disrespect either towards the honourable institution of the Upper House or for that matter against any of its honourable members. I hold the both in my highest esteem. "However, if any statement made by me in the article has inadvertently offended the sensibility of the House or any of its members in particular then I deem it appropriate to clarify that it was not written with the intention to defame or otherwise bring disrepute to any member of the house qua their performance as a member of the house," Gupta said in his reply. Gupta said if the article unwittingly hurt the sentiments of Tyagi, then he has no hesitation in expressing "regret". In his privilege notice to Ansari against Gupta under Rule 188 of conduct of the business in the House, Tyagi had held that the views expressed by the BJP lawmaker amounted to "breach of privilege and contempt of the House." In his communication to Delhi Assembly Speaker, Ansari said since one House cannot claim or exercise any authority over members of the other House, he was referring the matter to Goel for further necessary action. There were indications that Goel may refer the case to Assembly's Privileges Committee and, based on its report, a final decision on the fate of the BJP leader will be taken by the Speaker. The row has come at a time when a number of leaders have raised the issue of role and relevance of Rajya Sabha in the wake of the Upper House not clearing a number of bills passed by the Lok Sabha where the government has majority. The NDA does not have a majority in the Upper House. In his complaint, Tyagi had also noted "for last few weeks, questions have been raised over role and relevance of Rajya Sabha. There is a demand to bring necessary change in the Constitution to limit the powers and role of the Rajya Sabha". Gupta, in his reply, said constitutionally bestowed power of the August House is to be used "extremely sparingly" and not to undermine or discourage expression of ideas and raising of legitimate concerns. Signalling a stormy start to the second half of the Budget Session on Monday, Congress today gave a notice to Rajya Sabha Chairman Hamid Ansari seeking passage of a resolution condemning the Modi government for "destabilistion" of the Uttarakhand government and imposition of President's rule in the state. The development came hours after the Uttarakhand High Court ordered reinstatement of the Harish Rawat government, setting aside the Presidential proclamation imposing central rule. Congress's deputy leader in the Rajya Sabha Anand Sharma gave the notice to Rajya Sabha Chairman Hamid Ansari under Rule 267 for taking up the resolution after suspending all business. The resolution seeks to "deplore" the "destabilisation" of the democratically elected government in Uttarakhand and "disapprove" the "unjustified" imposition of President's Rule there under Article 356 of the Constitution. Delivering a major blow to the Modi government, the Uttarakhand High Court gave a fresh lease of life to the government headed by Rawat, who has been asked to prove his majority in the Assembly on April 29. Coming down heavily on the Centre for the March 27 proclamation, a division bench of the court headed by Chief Justice K M Joseph said the imposition of President's rule was contrary to the law laid down by the Supreme Court. Ever since the dismissal of the Rawat government and clamping of central rule, Congress had mounted an offensive against the Narendra Modi dispensation. The party had started 'Loktantra Bachao, Uttarakhand Bachao' (Save Democracy, Save Uttarakhand) campaign to mobilise public support against the Centre. Buoyed by the High Court order, Congress is likely to make it a major issue in Parliament when it reconvenes on April 25. It is also likely to raise questions over the imposition of President's rule earlier in party-ruled Arunachal Pradesh. Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar may have got the backing of RJD on the former's possible projection as a PM candidate but grand secular alliance's other prominent constituent Congress today struck a discordant note terming the exercise as 'premature' one. "This is not the right time to talk on the issue as Lok Sabha elections will be held in 2019 and much waters would flow from river Ganges in the coming three years," Education Minister Ashok Choudhary told PTI. Choudhary, who is also the president of Bihar Pradesh Congress Committee, said that it was a number game and which ever party will have numbers with all India stake (presence) will be able to form government at the Centre. "We (Congress) have a nationwide stake and will have more numbers than any other party (in comparison to parties doing secular politics)," he said while citing the example of Bihar where Congress agreed to contest 41 out of 243 assembly seats leaving 100 each seats for JD(U) and RJD which have larger stakes in Bihar. "There is nothing wrong in it that every party wants to see its leader as PM. RJD wants Lalu Prasad as PM, TMC wants Mamata as PM. Similarly, Congress party wants its leader Rahul Gandhi to be the Prime Minister," the Bihar Congress chief said. So far as debate over PM candidate is concerned, Nitish Kumar has himself categorically stated that he was not the claimant for the PM's post, Choudhary said while referring to Nitish's assertion that no alternative alliance was possible without Congress. Earlier, party General Secretary Shakeel Ahmed had virtually ruled out an alliance at the national level in the next Lok Sabha polls. "By the time 2019 approaches, things will make a downslide so much for the Modi dispensation that there will be no need for any alliance," he said, adding that people of India will themselves pitch for an 'RSS and BJP-mukt bharat'. A 37-year-old police constable was today killed inside the high security city crime branch office here allegedly by a suspect of loot case, who escaped from the scene after committing the crime. The incident comes as an embarrassment to the image of the elite force, which has a high reputation of solving crimes, happened despite three-layered security deployed at the crime branch. The body of the constable was found almost three hours after the incident from the interrogation room, this morning. Constable Chandrakant Makwana (37) was murdered by a history-sheeter and a man involved in narcotics trade Manish Balai, police said. According to police inspector (crime branch) R R Sarvaiya, between 2 AM and 4 AM, Makwana was interrogating Balai. The cop was hit on head and face by an iron rod by the suspect. "The murder took place early this morning inside the squad office where Balai was detained," he said. We will come to know about the exact time of murder through post mortem, but his body was found nearly three-four hours after the murder as his blood had dried up, Sarvaiya said. Balai, after committing the murder managed to flee from the crime branch office, he said. Sarvaiya said that Balai was brought to the crime branch office in connection with a loot incident that took place in Vejalpur area two days ago. He was not placed under arrest but was being interrogated as a suspect. Balai was also involved in narcotics trade, he said. "We are investigating the matter and all efforts are being made to arrest the accused," he said. Cooking gas connection would be provided to every household in Haryana within the next one year and the state would be made kerosene-free, Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar said today. He said this at a gram sabha meeting organised under the 'Gram Uday se Bharat Uday' campaign in Shyamtoo village of Panchkula district. The campaign, to promote rural development and social harmony, is being run in 5.5 lakh villages of the country, including more than 6,000 villages in Haryana. It was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the 125th birth anniversary of Bhim Rao Ambedkar on April 14. Describing gram sabha as a strong unit of democracy, Khattar asked people to actively participate in its meetings and draft a framework for development works and future schemes. The Prime Minister would address all gram panchayats through television and radio from 4.30 PM to 5.30 PM on April 24 on the occasion of Panchayati Raj Day. The broadcast would also be shown at Vikas Rally to be organised in Panchkula that day, the Chief Minister said. He announced construction of a gymnasium in Shyamtoo village, a community centre between Kanauli and Shyamtoo villages and assured resolving power, water and flies problems. Panchkula MLA Gian Chand Gupta, said villages would be strengthened through the gram sabhas being organised under the 'Gram Uday se Bharat Uday' campaign and development works would be identified and executed with people's assistance. Diagnostic services provider Core Diagnostics is planning to raise USD 10 million (about Rs 66 crore) in series B funding by the end of next month to expand its business in the country and overseas. "We plan to raise around USD 10 million in our next round of funding that will be completed by end of next month. It will be a series B funding," Core Diagnostics Managing Director and Founder Zoya Brar told PTI. The funds will be used for the company's expansion plans both within the country and abroad, she added. "In India we will be opening one lab in South and will also expand our reach to 100 cities by end of next year from the present 59 in which we collect samples for testing," Brar said. The company will be entering are Coimbatore, Kota, Mathura, Vadodara, Sitara, Shimla, Darbhanga and Coonoor, among others, she added. Core Diagnostics is already present in major cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Kochi. When asked about the overseas countries the company is looking to expand, Brar said: "Overseas we are planning to foray in South Africa, Oman, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan." The company already has presence in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Dubai apart from the US, she added. "We are focused on bringing the most advanced testing techniques and expertise to India, and our goal is to be the destination for all high-end diagnostic testing," Brar said. The company has already had two earlier rounds of funding, raising a total of Rs 50 crore from Silicon Valley-based Artiman Ventures. India's textile export remained flat at USD 40 billion in the last fiscal, as compared to USD 41.4 billion in 2014-15, Union Minister Santosh Kumar Gangwar said here today. "Despite poor market conditions, the textile industry did well as compared to other sectors on export front. Our textile exports remained at USD 40 billion in 2015-16," the Minister of State for Textiles told PTI after the inauguration of Technotex 2016 conference here. In 2014-15, textile export stood at USD 41.4 billion. Export during last fiscal was however lower than the target of USD 47.5 billion set by the government for textile and clothing. The subdued trend in export was due to recessionary trend in Europe and the US markets, industry experts said. About the technical textile sector, he said the country sees a huge growth potential in the sector. "This (technical textile) sector is still at its nascent stage but it has been recognised as the fastest growing segment of the textile sector by the government and industry stakeholders alike. "These functional textiles are used for their inherent performance enhancement properties in various field ranging from protective services, steel manufacturing, construction, agriculture, sports, nation security, food security etc," he added. Gangwar pointed out that the growth rate of technical textile sector is expected to be much higher. "Based on past trends of growth and estimated end user segment growth, the Working Group on Technical Textiles for 12th Five Year Plan (FYP) has projected the market size to Rs 1.58 lakh crore (USD 28.82 billion) for the year 2016-17 with a growth rate of 20 per cent," the minister added. According to the minister, Technotex exemplifies the immense potential for trade and investment between India and foreign countries in technical textile sector. Meanwhile, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, who was also present on the occasion said the technical textile sector in the country also has tremendous potential for generating employment. "It is consistently being looked upon for the future growth of the country. While the (state) government has taken concrete initiatives in the area, the industry players also need to bring in large scale innovations," he said. The 3-day exhibition and international conference Technotex 2016 has attracted over 150 exhibitors, looking to showcase a varied collection of technical textiles from the various sub sectors of the industry. Gujarat and Karnataka are participating as partner states in the event. The killing of a CPI(M) polling agent in Murshidabad district today kicked off a blame game between CPI(M) and TMC, with the Left party alleging that TMC had unleashed a "reign of terror" while the Election Commission was only acting as a "mute spectator". The TMC denied the allegations and said the killing was a fallout of differences between CPI(M) and Congress. The 35-year-old CPI(M) polling agent, Tahidul Islam, was today killed and his body was found lying outside a polling booth at Shibapara area under Domkal Assembly seat in Murshidabad district where third phase polling is on. An earlier report had identified Tahidul Islam to be a CPI(M) supporter. CPI(M) candidate and former minister Anisur Rahman said that Tahidur Islam was killed when bombs were hurled outside the polling booth. A furious CPI(M) state secretary Surya Kanta Mishra lashed out at TMC. "The blood of martyr Tahidul Islam will not go in vain. We will continue to protect the booths with the last drop of our blood. People will oust TMC. The gruesome murder of CPI(M) polling agent Tahidul Islam in the polling premises of Domkal by TMC points out to the reign of terror in Bengal," Mishra said. The TMC leadership, however, denied the allegations. "Sad news of a death in Domkal. It is a result of CPI(M)-Congress infighting," TMC leader and candidate Shoumik Hossain said. State Congress president Adhir Chowdhury said people will give a befitting reply to the TMC for its "terror tactics". "The TMC has unleashed a reign of terror. People of Murshidabad will give a befitting reply to TMC terror tactics," Chowdhury said. Murshidabad Superintendent of police C Sudhakar, however, said the murder was not related to polls. Tahidur was knifed somewhere else and his body was dumped near the booth, the SP said. The EC is understood to have sought report on Tahidul Islam's killing. Delhi government has identified 32 points on the national capital's roads where traffic snarls frequently take place, set up a helpline and decided to send volunteers to help police to clear traffic congestion during the second phase of odd-even car-rationing scheme. Transport Minister Gopal Rai said that after getting complaints on helpline number 8588833521, government will send volunteers and inform traffic police personnel at the spot to clear traffic jams. "We have identified 32 points on the city's roads where traffic congestion is reported. To deal with the situation, we will deploy volunteers at these stretches to manage the traffic," Rai told reporters here. The Arvind Kejriwal government has already denied that odd-even scheme was causing traffic jams on some city roads, saying it was due to construction and repair work being carried out by Delhi Metro, PWD and Delhi Jal Board (DJB). Rai had recently directed Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC), Public Works Department (PWD) and DJB to carry out construction and repair works at night during the ongoing second phase of the fortnight-long odd-even scheme. The three municipal corporations in Delhi have signed an MoU with Canada's capital city Ottawa to boost tourism and facilitate exchange of technical expertise and students between the two sides, among other areas. The document recognising a mutual desire to enhance and strengthen Ottawa-New Delhi ties was signed by the three Mayors -- Subhash Arya (South Delhi), Ravinder Gupta (North Delhi) and Harshdeep Malhotra (East Delhi ) -- and Mayor of Ottawa Jim Watson at the Canadian Embassy here yesterday, Arya said. The MoU will also involve the civic bodies of two countries to promote Delhi and Ottawa as tourism destinations. In the area of municipal administration the two cities will exchange technical information and experiences in areas such as urban planning, environmental protection, public transit and infrastructure that support Smart Cities. The areas identified for ongoing dialogue and cooperation include trade and investment, education, tourism and municipal administration, Arya said. The civic bodies have sought approval of the Ministry of Exernal Affairs which is likely to be received soon paving way for starting the work on the MoU, he said. The civic bodies of Delhi and Ottawa will also endeavour to improve and strengthen linkages among the municipalities in the primary education sector, the MoU said. It will be achieved through supporting education promotion activities and encouraging local students to visit each other's city to conduct training, exchange and learning programmes, it said. Additional Commissioner (I) of SDMC and the Department of Economic Development and Innovation, Ottawa city, will ensure regular communication and coordination for implementing the MoU which will be valid for 5 years. Among other areas, trade and investment between two cities will be promoted by supporting companies looking for businesses particularly in IT, clean technology, urban planning, transportation and infrastructure. Denmark is a steadfast partner in global coalition efforts against and its contributions have been significant, the US has said, a day after Danish parliament approved the country's expanded role in the fight against the dreaded terror group. "This week's decision by the Danish Parliament to approve an expanded role in the fight against ISIL is a welcome contribution from a valued partner in the counter-ISIL coalition and another sign of the growing momentum for the campaign to defeat ISIL," US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter said yesterday. "Denmark is a steadfast partner in global coalition efforts. Its contributions, including strike aircraft, air defence radar and training and assistance to Iraqi forces, have already been significant. "This renewed and expanded role in the military campaign, including the authority to participate in the full spectrum of combat operations in Iraq and Syria, will further increase the military pressure on ISIL," Carter said. In addition, Denmark will provide important resources to help ensure security and stability in areas freed from ISIL control, an essential element in dealing ISIL a lasting defeat, he said. The State Department joined Carter in welcoming the Danish decision. "The US welcomes the vote yesterday by the Danish parliament and the announcement by the UAE to expand their contributions to the coalition to counter ISIL," State Department Spokesman John Kirby said. "Denmark's vote to increase authorised personnel on the ground and the redeployment of F-16 fighter aircraft for operations in both Iraq and Syria will complement their existing contributions to the coalition and will certainly complement the broader coalition kinetic efforts as well," Kirby added. Denmark's Parliament voted on Tuesday to expand its role in the 66-member global coalition combating the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to include a presence in Syria. US President Barack Obama said today that Washington and Gulf Arab states were united against the Islamic State group as he sought to overcome strains on Iran to boost efforts against the jihadists. In Riyadh for talks hosted by Tehran's arch-rival Saudi Arabia, Obama said the United States still has "serious concerns" about Iran, but insisted no country has an interest in conflict with the Shiite power. Obama, on likely his final presidential visit to America's historic Gulf allies, was in Riyadh seeking to reduce tensions with the Sunni Arab states rooted in US overtures to their regional rival Tehran. With the IS jihadists suffering a series of recent setbacks in areas under their control in Syria and Iraq, Washington is seeking more help from the oil-rich Gulf monarchies to keep up the pressure. Speaking at the close of the summit of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Obama played down any divisions and vowed continued cooperation in the battle against the extremists. "We remain united in our fight to destroy (IS)," he said. "Given the ongoing threats in the region, the United States will continue to increase our security cooperation with our GCC partners including helping them improve their own capacity to defend themselves," Obama said. Seated beside Saudi King Salman inside a Riyadh royal palace, Obama said concerns remained about Iran's "destabilising activities" despite its landmark nuclear agreement with world powers and the lifting of sanctions. "Even with the nuclear deal we recognise collectively that we continue to have serious concerns about Iranian behaviour," Obama said. He warned, however, of the risk of confrontation with Tehran. "None of our nations have an interest in conflict with Iran," Obama said. Iran's emergence from international isolation following the nuclear deal has worried the Gulf monarchies, who fear Tehran will be emboldened to seek a still bigger regional role. Gulf Arab states and Iran back opposing sides in a range of Middle East conflicts, including in Syria and Yemen. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states belong to the US-led coalition that has been carrying out air strikes against IS in Syria and Iraq since mid-2014. But US officials have urged them do to more, especially to support Baghdad, which is battling political chaos and an economic crisis as well as the extremists. Ben Rhodes, a close adviser to Obama, said there were "political steps that can be taken," as Iraq would need assistance to hold on to and rebuild areas reclaimed from IS. Obama said a cessation of hostilities in Syria is "obviously under tremendous strain" as fighting has intensified in some areas despite efforts to hold peace talks in Geneva. R&B star Beyonce Knowles will be joined on her upcoming tour by DJ Khaled, the producer has announced on Instagram. The 40-year-old producer will be the opening act on 34-year-old Beyonce's "Formation" world tour, which will kick off in Miami, Florida on April 27, reported Female First. "Today I proudly announce a major milestone in my career. Today's announcement is a major accomplishment in my life. In other words it's a major achievement alert!!!! I am proud to announce that I, DJ Khaled will be on tour with the icon, Beyonce!!!!! Fan luv, when I tell you that prayer is the so powerful, please believe me," he wrote. This is Beyonce's first solo tour since the 'Mrs Carter Show' tour in 2013. She also teamed up with husband Jay Z for the "On The Run" tour in 2014. Buoyed by the High Court verdict reviving its government in Uttarakhand, Congress today said "those eyeing Himachal Pradesh and Manipur with avaricious eyes must control their greed". The party also made light of BJP's claims that the Harish Rawat government remains in a minority which will be proved on April 29 when it takes the floor test. "If that was the case, why did they not allow the floor test earlier planned on March 28?", party spokesman Abhishek Singhvi asked at the AICC briefing. Singhvi, who represented the Congress in the Uttarakhand High Court as senior advocate, asserted that "those eyeing Himachal Pradesh and Manipur with greedy eyes, avaricious eyes must learn to control their greed." "They must realise that power is available only through democracy and not through Article 356", Singhvi said in a blistering attack on the Narendra Modi dispensation over its "misuse" of Article 356 in Uttarakhand. He insisted that the action by the Modi government in Uttarakhand was unprecedented. "Never in the history of independent India central government invoked President's rule to stay the order of the Speaker when the floor test was to be held within 10 days". "Never before in the history of Independent India that 356 has been invoked on a Saturday, just 48 hours before the inevitable effect of the disqualification process would have been felt on Monday morning", he said. He said it was a "blatant intervention through misuse of Art 356" when the Governor had ordered a floor test and Speaker had started disqualifcation proceedings. He brushed aside a question whether President Pranab Mukherjee should resign in the wake of the High Court observation that the President could go horribly wrong. He suggested to the questioner that the media has the privilege to make any comment. The Department of Telecom is considering sale of 15 Mhz of 3G spectrum, currently held by the Defence, along with other frequencies in the auction to be held in July this year. "The DoT is working with Defence to get 15 Mhz of spectrum in 2100 Mhz band (3G) under swap agreement. These airwaves may be put for auction in July if freed from Defence," a source told PTI. Telecom ministry had proposed to exchange 15 Mhz spectrum it holds in 1900 Mhz band with same quantum of airwaves held by Defence in 2100 Mhz. The 2100 Mhz band is currently used for 3G services. The Cabinet had approved swapping of spectrum between Ministries of Telecom and Defence in January 2015 and process was to be completed in a year as part of harmonisation of all radiowaves among all ministries. All ministries and departments like Aviation, Space, Prasar Bharti, Defence, Telecom etc that are holding spectrum were asked to harmonise radiowaves among themselves, identify timeline by when will they be able to vacate spectrum not marked for them in 4-5 years. For 3G spectrum in 2100 band, Trai suggested pan-India base price of Rs 3,746 crore. The Defence Ministry and the DoT had signed a pact in 2009-10 under which the former had agreed to vacate 25 megahertz (MHz) of 3G spectrum and 20 MHz of 2G in phases. In return, DoT had committed to set up an exclusive defence network for its communication services. The Defence Ministry had vacated 15 MHz of 3G spectrum which was auctioned in 2010. It had also vacated 15 MHz of 2G spectrum, which was allocated to new operators in 2008. Under the pact, the remaining spectrum - 10 MHz in 3G and 5MHz in 2G - was to be vacated only after alternative communication network is completed. Though alternative communication network for Defence is yet to be completed, it provided 5 Mhz of 3G spectrum which was auctioned across 17 circles in 2015 fetching bids worth Rs 10,115 crore against estimate of Rs 17,555 crore. The inter-ministerial panel Telecom Commission is expected to meet on April 30 to discuss spectrum auction modalities. It is expected suggest final base price for spectrum to be auctioned which will need cabinet approval. The auction is scheduled for July and has potential to fetch Rs 5.36 lakh crore to the government exchequer. Government has set target of about Rs 99,000 crore from telecom sector this fiscal. Delhi University which was gearing up for establishing six entrance examination centres outside Delhi is now planning to also conduct admission exams for MPhil and Phd courses there. Earlier the admission process for Mphil and PhD courses used to go on till September as departments used to conduct their entrance exams individually. However, if this happens the exams might be conducted simultaneously. The vice chancellor has constituted an 18-member standing committee, comprising deans of various faculties, which is deliberating upon the proposal of introducing six examination centres in Varanasi, Nagpur, Kolkata, Chennai, Jammu and Ahmedabad. "Outstation Delhi University aspirants may not have to visit the national capital to write entrance examinations for Phd and Mphil courses with the university planning to come up with six centres outside Delhi," a committee member said. "Earlier there was a plan to conduct the exams for postgraduate courses at these centres. However, now we are thinking of holding the exams for research courses as well as a major chunk of applicants are from outside Delhi," he added. The admission to PhD and MPhil programmes is through an entrance test and a personal interview. However, hose who have qualified NET (National Eligibility Test) and have JRF (Junior Research Fellowship) can directly appear for interviews. With the committee yet to come up with final recommendations, the registration process for admissions to 66 postgraduate courses , which usually happens in April, has also been delayed. Once the committee submits its recommendation the vice chancellor will take a final call in this regard and the schedule for the admissions will be announced. A magnitude-6.1 aftershock set babies crying and sent nervous residents pouring into the streets, fearful of yet more damage following the deadly earthquake over the weekend. The pre-dawn jolt yesterday was the strongest aftershock yet since Saturday's magnitude-7.8 quake that killed more than 500 people. Some people in Portoviejo abandoned their homes, even those with no apparent damage, and headed to a former airport where temporary shelters have been set up. The government said the number of known dead stood at 553, but officials expected more bodies to be found. About 7,000 were injured. At least 11 foreigners were among the dead, including two Canadians and three Cuban doctors who had been on a medical mission to Ecuador. The final toll could surpass casualties from earthquakes in Chile and Peru in the past decade. Among the survivors, the situation was growing increasingly tense. While humanitarian aid has been pouring in from around the world, distribution is slow. In Manta yesterday, people waited for hours under the tropical sun for water and food supplies. Soldiers kept control with fenced barricades. "They looted the store. I'm taking out what little remains," Jose Encalada said as he cleaned up his paint store in Pedernales, one of the hardest-hit towns. Reflecting some of the desperation, residents in Manta could be seen scavenging through the rubble, no longer looking for loved ones but trying to salvage metallic objects and other items of value. Grief mounted as families buried loved ones, but people held out hope of finding some of 163 people the government said were still missing. Since Saturday, 54 people have been rescued from rubble alive. Rescuers who have arrived from Mexico, Colombia, Spain and other nations said they would keep searching for survivors, but cautioned that time was running out and the likelihood of finding more people alive grew smaller with the passage of every hour. As authorities begin to shift their attention to restoring electricity and clearing debris, the earth continued to move. Local seismologists have recorded more than 550 aftershocks, some felt 105 miles (170 kilometers) away in the capital of Quito. Saturday's earthquake destroyed or damaged about 1,500 buildings and left some 23,500 people homeless, the government said. It was the worst temblor in Ecuador since one in 1949 killed more than 5,000 people. A helicopter flyover of the damage zone yesterday showed the scale of the devastation, with entire city blocks in ruins as if they had been bombed. Some 13 nations and 32,000 volunteers are involved in the relief effort. Cuba sent more health workers. Venezuela has flown in food and the US government said it would send a team of disaster experts as well USD 100,000 in assistance. Ecuador's President Rafael Correa has announced that he is raising sales taxes and will charge a one-time levy on millionaires to rebuild cities devastated by country's worst earthquake in decades. In a televised address, Correa said damages from the 7.8-magnitude quake will likely run into the billions of dollars, adding to already heavy economic hardships triggered by the collapse in world oil prices in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries nation. The task of rebuilding shouldn't fall only to communities along the coast in the quake's path but will require sacrifices from all segments of Ecuadorean society according to their ability to contribute, Correa said on Wednesday. "I know we're at the most difficult stage right now but it's just the beginning," he said. Using authority granted by the state of emergency he declared after Saturday night's quake, Correa said sales taxes would increase to 14% from 12% for the coming year. People with more than $1 million in assets will be charged a one-time tax of 0.9% on their wealth, while workers earning over $1,000 a month will be forced to contribute a day's wages and those earning $5,000 a month will contribute the equivalent of five days' pay. Taxes on companies will also go up, and Correa said he will look to sell certain state assets that he didn't specify. He is also drawing on $600 million in emergency credits from the World Bank and other multilateral lenders. The tax hikes come as the scale of devastation continues to sink in. A helicopter flyover of the damage zone Wednesday showed entire city blocks in ruins as if they had been bombed. On Wednesday, the government raised the death toll to 570. Officials listed 163 people as missing while the number of those made homeless climbed over 23,500. The final death toll could surpass casualties from earthquakes in Chile and Peru in the past decade. Even as authorities turn to restoring electricity and clearing debris, the earth continued to move. A magnitude-6.1 aftershock before dawn Wednesday set babies crying and sent nervous residents pouring into the streets. Local seismologists had recorded more than 550 aftershocks, some felt 105 miles (170 kilometres) away in the capital of Quito. Rescuers who have arrived from Mexico, Colombia, Spain and other nations said that they would keep searching for survivors, but cautioned that time was running out and the likelihood of finding more people alive grew smaller with the passage of every hour. Egypt today slammed the UN chief for calling for a fair trial for two prominent rights activists accused of illegally receiving foreign funds for their non-government organizations the latest sign of Egypt's growing impatience with criticism of its human rights record. Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid said in a statement that comments by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon were an attempt to intimidate Egypt's judiciary and meddle in its affairs. A spokesman for Ban said in a statement yesterday that he was "following closely" the government's legal case against NGOs over the foreign funds issue and that the two activists Gamal Eid and Hossam Bahgat should "benefit from all due process and fair trial standards." Ban's comments, said Abu Zeid, are "attempts to intimidate the Egyptian judiciary and influence its work, which does not fall within the mandate or responsibilities of the entity from which they are issued, and does not conform to its consistent claims of respecting the rule of law and judicial independence." Eid and Bahgat appeared today before a criminal court in Cairo that was to decide whether to freeze their assets. The court ruled to postpone the case until May 23. Eid is the founder and director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information. Bahgat, founder of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, is now among Egypt's most prominent investigative journalists. President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi's government has placed restrictions on civil rights groups at a time when criticism is growing of the country's human rights record, particularly police abuse. The case of an Italian doctoral student abducted, tortured and killed in the Egyptian capital earlier this year has fueled the criticism and poisoned Cairo's close ties with Rome. Italy has withdrawn its ambassador from Egypt in protest against what it says is the lack of full cooperation by Egyptian investigators in the case of the student, Giulio Regeni. Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar today asked naval commanders to ensure maritime security in the Indian Ocean which has become a region of high economic activity. Addressing top naval officers at the Commanders Conference here, Parrikar also complimented the force for ensuring greater women participation in the force, a day after Navy announced that seven women officers of Short Service Commission batch of 2008-09 have been granted permanent commission. "My point was very clear. Indian Ocean region is becoming a region of high activity, not necessarily activity that are a risk to our security but they could become a risk," he told reporters. Parrikar said with greater economic interest in the area, there are more chances of either a mishap or some disaster like oil spill happening. "Some pirates can think it is a better place. There are various possibilities that can happen with increased frequency of various commercial interest and presence of navies of other countries. We need to have enough strength to ensure we can protect ourselves," he said. He said India should create capabilities and capacities which it was slow in acquiring. Asked about presence of Chinese submarines in the Indian Ocean, he said, "We watch everything, not specifically China but, we watch everything". The conference will review various aspects involving operations, acquisition of assets, personnel and logistics issues. The three-day conference will primarily focus on reviewing the combat readiness and operational preparedness of the Navy including coastal security, to address the dynamic security challenges in the Indian Ocean region. Citing deaths of some persons due to suspected sunstroke, during election rallies, Federation of Tamil Nadu Agriculturists Associations (FTAA) today urged the Election Commissin to ban campaign under scorching sun. It was the bounden duty of the Election Commission to protect the voters, who were under "wrongful confinement" of political parties under the hot sun, FTAA Secretary S Nallasamy said in a statement here. The people were being brought in vans from farflung areas, like cattle and were 'lured' with food and liquor, he alleged. Considering their 'pathetic situation', the EC should immediately take note of such 'confinement' and should allow campaign only in the evenings, Nallasamy said. Demanding revocation of Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), opposition National Conference leader Farooq Abdullah today said the Centre should demonstrate political will and imagination to usher Jammu and Kashmir into an era of peace, stability and progress. "Revocation of AFSPA is the need of the hour..New Delhi should put in sustained and serious efforts to address the political alienation inKashmir and provide a hope of reconciliation and inclusiveness to the youth of the state," he said addressing party workers at a function in Anantnag district of south Kashmir. The function was organised to commemorate the first death anniversary of veteran party leader and former minister Abdul Gani Shah Veeri. "Our young men and women excel in talent, wisdom and hard work and deserve to thrive in a political environment that nurtures their dreams. "Hostility cannot be countered with denial or further hostility. New Delhi should walk the extra-mile in addressing the trust-deficit among our youth and should explore every possible opportunity to empower them as the torch-bearers of peace and progress in the state," the former Chief Minister said. He said National Conference is committed to strive for the political resolution of the Kashmir issue and would never shelve its demand for the restoration of Autonomy and the pre-1953 status. "These are our principled stands and we believe this is the most feasible model of resolving the political issue and would also satisfy the aspirations of our people. Others have a right to advocate their own solutions and there is absolutely no problem with that," he said. Abdullah said any solution acceptable first and foremost to the people of Jammu and Kashmir and also to India and Pakistan would be a credible solution. "While there might be differences in opinion and ideology, I doubt anyone could possibly deny the necessity of resolving the political issue," he said. The National Conference chief asked party workers to ensure participation and empowerment of educated youth in the political processes that define the state's future. "We should encourage the young generation to come and voice their grievances and aspirations from within the democratic system. "This would be a productive medium of channelizing their passion for their state and also their commitment to stand up for the rights and dignity of their people. "It's imperative they are groomed, nurtured and empowered," Abdullah added. Filing of nominations for the May 16 Assembly polls in Kerala will start tomorrow even as parties in the Congress-led ruling UDF, CPI-M headed LDF and BJP alliance have intensifed their campaign. The notification for the assembly polls would be issued tomorrow and last date for filing of nominations is April 29. Scrutiny would take place on April 30 and last date for withdrawal is May 2. Meanwhile, the Election Department said it would roll out several monitoring and reporting mechanisms such as a mobile app based poll monitoring, web casting and video recording with the help of Kerala State IT Mission. The poll day monitoring process starts the day before the actual polling. Smooth flow of poll related information from polling booths to officials, including Chief Electoral officer and Election Commission of India, will be ensured using an android and SMS-based mechanism, an official release said. Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, spearheading the UDF campaign along with KPCC President, V M Sudheeran and Home Minister Ramesh Chennithala, has already completed one round of electioneering across the state. 93-year-old CPI-M stalwart, V S Achuthanandan, who has started campaigning from North Kerala, is the main campaigner for his party-led LDF. On the other hand, BJP is approaching voters by presenting itself as the 'third alternative' to UDF and LDF. Chandy and 18 of his cabinet colleagues, eight from Congress and ten from other UDF constituents figure among those fielded for the election. Congress is contesting 86 of the 140 Assembly seats in the state, leaving the rest to its partners. IUML, second largest UDF partner, has been alloted 24 seats, followed by KC-M 15, JD-U seven, RSP five, KC-J 2 and CMP one seat. In contrast, CPI-M has fielded candidates in 92 constituencies, CPI-27, JD(S) five, NCP four, Congress (S) 1. Other parties supporting LDF from outside-Janadhipatiya Kerala Congress four; INL three; Kerala Congress (B), a CMP faction, Kerala Congress scaria, RSP (Leninst)-- one each. BJP has forged an alliance with Bharat Dharma Jana Sena (BDJS), a new party formed by Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam (SNDP), a social organisation of backward Ezhava community, allotting it 37 seats. BJP would contest in 97 seats while for the remaining six seats, it has reached an understanding with small parties. BJP's key candidates include 86-year-old former Union Minister O Rajagopal, state President Kummanon Rajasekharan, V Muraleedharan, C K Padmanabhan, P K Krishnadas and P S Sreedharan Pillai and firebrand woman leader Shobha Surendran. A total of 35,946 electronic voting machines would be used during polling. There would 21,498 polling stations which is 3.5 per cent more than the last polls in 2011. At least 1.50 lakh officials would be deployed for polling process, officials said. Describing Konkani as a 'sister language' of Kannada, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah today said the contribution of Konkani-speaking people in building Karnataka was noteworthy. Speaking after laying the foundation stone for a Konkani museum at nearby Shaktinagar, he said the language was spoken by people belonging to three regions from Gujarat to Karnataka and it had a special bond with Kannada. He said the government would consider the demand of the Konkani Sahitya Academy to give importance to the language at the pre-university level along with high schools and graduation levels. The government had already sanctioned Rs 2.5 crore for the project and would extend more financial help in the future, he said. NRI entrepreneur Ronald Colaco, who also spoke, said Konkani had a history of several thousands of years and was spoken by around 50 lakh people. Karnataka had become the home for a majority of Konkani speaking people, he said. The project is being undertaken at a cost of Rs 30 crore by Konkani organisation 'Mandd Sobhann. An influential American lawmaker today called for an end to violence against atheists, secularists, Hindus, Buddhists and other religious minorities in Bangladesh. "In Bangladesh, discrimination and deadly violence against atheists, secularists, Hindus, Buddhists, and other religious minorities has unfortunately become a regular occurrence," Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard said in a statement on the House Floor. The two-term Democratic lawmaker from Hawaii, Gabbard is the first Hindu to be elected to the US House of Representatives. "This underscores the absolute necessity of not only defeating this global wave of intolerance, but standing up and fighting for the right of others to freely express their views regardless of whether you agree with those views or not," she said. "In Bangladesh, the horrendous, brutal street assassinations of members of minority religions, secularists, and atheists violate every single value we hold dear," she said. Just two weeks ago, 28 year old Nazimuddin Samad was hacked to death in Dhaka, Bangladesh after speaking out against the persecution of religious minorities on social media, she noted. Union Minister Giriraj Singh kicked up a controversy with his remark that if the country's population policy is not changed to mandate a two-child norm across religions then "our daughters" will not be "safe" and might have to be kept "under the veil" like in Pakistan. Opposition parties today slammed Singh, a senior BJP leader and a party MP, for his remark made yesterday, saying his basic puropose is to create a "divide" between the Hindus and the Muslims for "short term political gains" and virtually demanded that he be sacked from the government. "Hindus should have two sons, Muslims, too, should have two sons. Our population is coming down. Bihar has seven such districts where our population has gone down. Population rules have to be changed, only then will our daughters be safe. Otherwise, like Pakistan, we too will have to keep our daughters under the veil," he said while addressing a cultural event in Bagaha in West Champaran. "There should be such a law in the country that same number of children should be allowed for families across religions whether Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or Christian," he said, adding, "The population policy should be the same for all. And if you want our country to be a developed nation, population control is necessary." Under attack, Singh today sought to defend his remark, saying it was said in the interest of the country. "I said this in the interest of the nation like how China brought the population control law in 1979...Today Malaysia, Indonesia and Bangladesh have brought this law. There should be strong law in India also that should apply to all families across religions whether Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or Christian," he said. "I said in many districts and states the Hindu population is declining which is a matter of worry because we need to maintain social harmony. So there should be strong law like if Hindus can have two children then Muslims, Sikhs or Christians should also have two each." JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav said Singh's remark was in bad taste and that he should first ask his governmetn what it thoght about the population control issue. Another JD(U) leader Pavan Varma said Giriraj Singh's devotion to Hindutva is an "inversse proportion" to his knowledge of demography. "His basic puropose is to create a divide between the Hindus and the Muslims on the basis of cooked up facts for short term political gain," he added. RJD spokespersond Manoj Jha said Giriraj Singh does not have any understanding of the demography of the country. "If hate speech has any kind of award then it should go to Giriraj Singh," Jha said, adding the prime minister should look into why this kind of minister should be in the ministry. "This kind of people should not have any space in public life," he said. Realty firm Supertech has been asked to seal over 1,000 units at a housing project in Greater Noida by local authority GNIDA for allegedly constructing them without approval. The Greater Noida Industrial Development Authority has issued a notice on April 11, 2016 to the realty firm in this regard. Supertech claimed however that all the 1,853 units which are developed or being developed at the 20-acre housing project 'Czar' in Greater Noida are not unauthorised and are "completely safe and legal". This is the second time that Supertech has faced such crisis. In April 2014, the Allahabad High Court had ordered demolition of the company's two 40-storey towers in a Noida housing project. Supertech has challenged the order in the apex court. The authority had asked the builder to seal all the housing units developed by the company beyond the sanctioned 844 units. GNIDA warned Supertech of action if the firm failed to seal the extra units in 30 days. In reply to the notice, Supertech has said that: "As far as the additional units constructed over the said plot, it is submitted that the company vide its letter dated December 23, 2014...Has applied for purchasable FAR along with request for increase in population density on the plot and has submitted the revised building plan to accommodate all 1,853 units constructed/under construction." The request was made in consonance with the prevailing rules and regulations applicable to GNIDA, it added. The excess units are well within the permissible limit and fully covered under a notification issued by the UP government on April 4, 2016, Supertech said in its reply. "Now the company is ready to pay the cost of additional units over and above the 844 units which is permissible as per aforesaid notification of government of Uttar Pradesh," the company said in its reply. When contacted, Superetch Chairman R K Arora said: "We had applied to purchase additional FAR (floor-area ratio) in 2014 and also submitted revised building plans." "As per the building bye-laws, submitted plan shall be deemed to have been approved in 60 days in case no refusal or sanction is given by the Authority. Therefore, the company undertook the construction of additional flats which is legal and tenable under the law," Arora said. "Hence there is no unapproved/unauthorised construction of flats undertaken by the company and any requirement of sealing of flats under construction," he said. Arora expected the matter to be resolved shortly and said there was no need for buyers to "panic". Over 250 delegates from different parts of the world will arrive in Goa to participate in the International Seminar on Wheat and Wheat Products to be held in July. "The 8th International Seminar on Wheat and Wheat Products is scheduled to be held on July 17-18 in Panaji. The theme for this year's seminar is 'New Ideas and Innovation for Growth'," chairman,Wheat Products Promotion Society (WPPS), Ratan Gupta, told PTI. Gupta said at least 260 delegates, including international participants, will attend the conference. "Wheat being one of the cereal crops that takes care of a large part of the food requirement of people, presenters (wheat product makers) of the seminar are committed to provide nutrition and food security and align themselves to the dynamic environment," he said. The seminar will open on July 17 witha presentation on the theme, followed by inaugural addresses by key speakers. "The two days are full of valuable information and updates on new development in the area of wheat production and has been divided into five sessions," he said. An exhibition ofwheat andwheat-based products will also be held. WPPS has been organising a number of seminars for past many years on relevant themes concerning wheat value chain encompassing farm to plate, he said. The seminar is being co-presented by Roller Flour Miller Federation of India, The Society of India Bakers, All India Bread Manufactures of India, Karnataka Roller Flour Mills Association andMaharashtra Roller Flour Mills Association. Assocom India is co-ordinating it. Budget carrier GoAir today joined its peer group in upwardly revising its ticket cancellation charges, which now stands at Rs 2,225. The ticket cancellation fee for GoAir flights have been increased to Rs 2,225 from Rs 1,900 earlier, a GoAir spokesperson said. The new cancellation charges are effective from April 21, the spokesperson said. The airline, has however, kept its ticket cancellation charges slightly lower than those by IndiGo and SpiceJet, which recently hiked it to Rs 2,250 per ticket. This is the second round of hike affected by these carriers as most of the domestic carriers, including IndiGo, had increased the cancellation charges by a significant amount in February this year. At the time of IndiGo hiking its ticket cancellations charges, apex air passengers body, APAI had warned the airlines of moving to fair trade regulator CCI, alleging cartelisation. "We are preparing to petition to the Competition Commission of India (CCI) to probe the recent hike in the ticket cancellation charges by the Indian airlines. The way these airlines have announced the increase one-by-one, the pattern definitely suggests an anti-competition practice," Air Passengers Association of India (APAI) president D Sudhakara Reddy had said. The Gujarat government has said all 203 small, medium and large dams in the state, including the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada river, are now having 3503.87 million cubic meters of water in them, which is just 21.74 per cent of their actual storage capacity. Looking at the acute water crisis prevalent in various parts of the state due to deficient rainfall last year, the Gujarat government has announced to keep water in 56 dams reserved for providing drinking water to people, an official release said today. Till now, the state government has declared 994 villages of parched Saurashtra and Kutch region as 'partially scarcity- hit'. According to Gujarat Education Minister Bhupendrasinh Chudasama, who heads a sub-committee of ministers for the assessment of scarcity, adequate measures are being taken to ease the sufferings of people. Earlier today, the committee held a meeting at Gandhinagar to assess the water crisis and discuss steps to be taken by the government. After the meeting, the state government said as many as 317 villages in 14 districts have been given water through tankers at present. As the water crisis is expected to worsen in coming days, another 468 villages will be given water through tanker, it added. Looking at the current situation and growing demand of water, state government has also announced to increase the water supply through Narmada canal network. At present, 1100 million liters per day (MLD) water is distributed through Narmada canal network. Now, additional 900 MLD of water will be given, taking the total supply to 2000 MLD, the release said. To stop the illegal fetching of water from Narmada canals, around 150 jawans of State Reserve Police Force (SRPF) have been deployed along the canal in various parts of state. Gujarat government has also announced to distribute cattle fodder at concessional rates to the farmers and cattle rearers in Rajkot, Jamnagar, Devbhoomi-Dwarka, Porbandar and Kutch, which are the worst hit regions. According to government, over 1.37 lakh persons of scarcity hit areas are currently given employment under the MNREGA scheme, for which, they have been paid Rs 43.67 crore in the current financial year, it said. (REOPENS BOM20) From now onwards, the sub-committee will meet on every Wednesday after the Cabinet meeting and assess the scarcity situation, Chudasama told reporters. He also said the state government has filed it's affidavit in the Supreme Court on the drought situation and the steps being taken by the government to alleviate the suffering. "We have filed our affidavit today in the Supreme Court and apprised the honourable court about various steps taken by the government to ease the sufferings of people" the Minister said. Earlier, the Gujarat government faced flak from the Supreme Court on late declaration of affected villages as scarcity hit due to deficient rainfall in the state. Supreme Court had slammed the Gujarat government for submitting a note instead of an affidavit on the drought situation and directed it to file a detailed affidavit by April 21. The Madras High Court has directed the Centre to rescue 62 Tamil fishermen stranded in Saudi Arabia and produce them by April 28. A division bench of the court's Madurai bench, comprising justices A. Selvam and B. Gokuldas, gave the interim direction while hearing a Habeas Corpus petition, filed by G. Thirumugan, a relative of one of the stranded fishermen, last evening. The bench rejected the plea of counsel for the central government who sought four weeks time to filea counter-affidavit. The court said it was the Centre's duty to ensure the safe return of the fishermen through diplomatic channels. The petitioner said his uncle K Sethu Raja and other fishermen had gone to Saudi Arabia on different dates since 2013 to work in the company of one Yusuf Khaleel in Al Jubail. He alleged that the employer had cheated them and was refusing to return their passports. Even Chief Minister Jayalalithaa had written to the Centre to rescue them, counsel for the petitioner said. The Madras High Court today directed officials of the Madurai Central prison to provide proper medical care for Ravichandran, a convict in the Rajiv Gandhi Assassination case, who is lodged in the prison. Hearing a plea filed by Rajeswari, mother of Ravichandran, a division bench of the court's Madurai bench, comprising justices A Selvam and Gokuldass, directed the prison superintendent to provide proper treatment for Ravichandran. Rajeswari contended that her son's health was deteriorating due to various complications and his physical condition was worsening due to lack of treatment. The judges asked government to file a counter on the plea. Delhi High Court today agreed to hear on May 5 the arguments on a petition seeking cancellation of the registration of the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD). The petition, which was earlier transferred by a bench headed by Chief Justice G Rohini, came up for hearing before a bench of justices Pradeep Nandrajog and Mukta Gupta today. "The matter has been received on transfer. List it for arguments on May 5," the bench said. The Election Commission of India (EC) had earlier sought dismissal of the public interest litigation (PIL) seeking cancellation of registration of SAD in the high court. EC's counsel had said the poll panel did not want to file their replies as the allegation levelled in the petition that SAD was "a religious organisation and not a secular political party", was "baseless". Socialist Party of India Vice President Balwant Singh Khera had alleged in his PIL that the SAD had obtained its registration by "fraud" and it should be cancelled. Khera's counsel had earlier claimed that neither the EC, nor SAD had filed replies to the plea which was filed in 2010. The petitioner has underlined that SAD had signed an undertaking at the time of its registration to uphold the Constitution. "One of those undertakings is that it shall be secular, but its activities are not secular in nature," the petition had said, pointing towards the party's admitted participation in gurdwara elections. The petitioner had also claimed that his right to equality and non-discrimination guaranteed under Article 14 of the Constitution, and the right to freedom of religion guaranteed by Article 25, were being repeatedly violated as "religion is being admittedly introduced into the politics of Punjab by SAD, yet the state through its authorised body (EC) has repeatedly refused to take necessary action to restore/ guard these rights". "They (SAD members) have been contesting gurdwara committee elections as a religious body and their party specifies that all members must be practising Sikhs," the plea said. Pitching itself as a gateway to mainland China, Hong Kong today wooed Indian investors, asking them to set up business ventures here to take advantage of its world-class infrastructure and a stable tax system. "India is a very important market for us and we are hopeful that we can attract more Indian companies to Hong Kong this year," Invest Hong Kong, Associate Director General Jimmy Chiang told Indian reporters here today. Invest Hong Kong is a government department for attracting and facilitating foreign direct investment into Hong Kong. Highlighting advantages of investing in Hong Kong, he said the global financial hub offers world class infrastructure, low and stable tax system and independent judiciary to protect interest of investors. Asked about the potential sector for Indian companies to invest in order to tap China and Hong Kong, Chiang said Indians can look at tourism and hospitality, consumer products and logistics and industrial goods. "The key sectors for Indian investors are tourism and hospitality and its sub-sector food and beverage," he said. He further said, "Indian companies which are food suppliers and traders can look at the possibility of setting up sales offices here not only to cater to local needs of Hong Kong consumers but also make use Hong Kong as hub to sell products in mainland China." "Indian companies are very strong in doing jewellery, diamond and other luxury trading business and they can also make Hong Kong as hub for the same," he said. Other sectors include logistic companies, shipping as well as companies making industrial products, Chiang said. "These sectors demonstrate strong potential for our friends from India in terms of business development in Hong Kong and China," he added. He further said, "India is number one country for which we have received applications for work visas and this shows Indian investors are coming to Hong Kong to set up businesses." Chiang said last year, Invest Hong Kong assisted seven Indian companies to set up businesses in Hong Kong. "They were from consumer products financial services, tourism and hospitality as well as transportation and industry," he added. "This year we are expecting more Indian companies to set up business here," Chiang said. Invest Hong Kong is eyeing to assist 390 foreign companies to establish their ventures this year. "Last year, we assisted 375 foreign companies from different parts of world. This year, our target is 390 and it is pretty ambitious target given the current global economic situation. But we are optimistic that we can achieve our target," he said. He further said Hong Kong attracted foreign investment of USD 103 billion in 2014 across the world, which is just second to the mainland China that attracted USD 129 billion in the same year. "Hong Kong is super connector between China and rest of the world," he said. He further said that close to 8,000 companies have offices in Hong Kong, of which 3,798 companies have regional offices. He further said in about 2-3 years time, integration between Macau and South China will be strengthened which will bring more opportunities for investors. Chiang asserted that there is a sound legal system and independent judiciary in Hong Kong. Talking about the tax system, he said, "Hong Kong has simple and low tax system. But we are not a tax haven because profitable companies need to pay some tax to government, which is 16.5 per cent of their profit," he added. There are no VAT, GST, capital gain tax and tax on interest, he said. He further said there are no import tax except in case of cars, tobacco and petrol. Notably, there are 12 Indian companies with regional headquarters in Hong Kong, 15 with regional offices and 37 with local offices, mainly engaged in trading, banking, IT and logistics. India is the fourth largest export market for Hong Kong and ninth largest source of imports in 2015. Hong Kong's total exports to India expanded 8.1 per cent to USD 13.1 billion in 2015, with export items including telecom equipment, pearls, precious stones, among others. Hong Kong's imports from India totalled USD 10.6 billion in 2015 with major import including jewellery, leather, among others. Human Rights Watch accused Egyptian police today of detaining and torturing 20 people, including eight children, saying there was a pattern of abuse in the North African country. The New York-based group said in a report that six people arrested in the coastal city of Alexandria in February had reported to relatives that they were tortured with electric shocks and beatings. They had been accused of protesting without a permit, vandalism and arson, and joining an illegal group. A police official told AFP that the allegation in the report "was illogical and clearly fabricated." HRW said that police had initially refused to admit they were holding the detainees for more than a week. When the detainees appeared in court a week later, police said in a report to the prosecutor they had just been arrested. "Some Egyptian officials have disappeared children and apparently tortured them, then faked arrest records to cover it up," the report quoted HRW's children's rights director Zama Coursen-Neff as saying. "The authorities have turned a blind eye to the reports of abuse and refused to investigate." It said six of the detainees told relatives they were suspended by their arms, electrocuted in the genitals and punched. They had been arrested after an alleged arson attack on a police vehicle and a garage. "The arrests fit a wider pattern of abuse and violations by officers of the Interior Ministry's National Security Agency," the report said. "Since 2014, Human Rights Watch has documented National Security officers' frequent use of enforced disappearance and torture, as well as a failure by prosecutors and judges to investigate these violations when defence lawyers raise them. Haryana Finance Minister Abhimanyu today described the incidents of arson at his home, schools, and other establishments in Rohtak during the recent pro-quota reservation by Jats as a "political conspiracy". "The evidences and proofs emerging from the investigation clearly indicate a political conspiracy behind the whole incident," he said here. He said those who have come under the scanner of the investigators, have a "direct relation with a special group in a political party". Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar during his recent visit to Rohtak had said those found guilty of perpetrating violence during the agitation would not be spared. Khattar had also said entire episode smacked of a political conspiracy. The Chief Minister had paid a visit to to the house of Abhimanyu, which was burnt by miscreants. Meanwhile, Abhimanyu questioned why the top leadership of the Congress party had "remained silent" during the stir. "Why Mr Rahul Gandhi, who has a habit of visiting the spot in the event of any small happening, remained mum when Haryana was burning," Abhimanyu asked. Abhimanyu said that besides Virender Singh, ex-political advisor to former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, "many other names have also surfaced during the investigation for their role during the Jat stir". He said incidents of arson and violence happened in Jhajjar and Beri whereas nothing happened in adjoining Bahadurgarh and Badli. "The Parkash Singh Committee is investigating the facts and if found guilty, the state government would not hesitate in taking action against personnel from the rank of Inspector General to Constable and officers of civil administration. The state government's intention is to present real facts before the people honestly," he said. He said he was deeply hurt over the death of innocent people during the agitation and also damage caused to property including houses, shops and business establishments of thousands of people. Human limbs may have evolved from the gills of fishes such as sharks and skates, according to new study that provides evidence to support the century-old but widely discounted theory on the origin of limbs. Unlike other fishes, cartilaginous fishes such as sharks, skates and rays have a series of skin flaps that protect their gills. These flaps are supported by arches of cartilage, with finger-like appendages called branchial rays attached. In 1878, German anatomist Karl Gegenbaur proposed that paired fins and limbs evolved from a structure resembling the gill arch of cartilaginous fishes. However, nothing in the fossil record has ever been discovered to support this. Now, researchers at the University of Cambridge have reinvestigated Gegenbaur's ideas using the latest genetic techniques on embryos of the little skate and found striking similarities between the genetic mechanism used in the development of its gill arches and those in human limbs. Scientists said it comes down to a critical gene in limb development called 'Sonic hedgehog', named for the videogame character. The new research shows that the functions of the Sonic hedgehog gene in human limb development, dictating the identity of each finger and maintaining growth of the limb skeleton, are mirrored in the development of the branchial rays in skate embryos. It shows aspects of Gegenbaur's theory may in fact be correct, and provides greater understanding of the origin of jawed vertebrates - the group of animals that includes humans, said Andrew Gillis, from the University of Cambridge. "Gegenbaur looked at the way that these branchial rays connect to the gill arches and noticed that it looks very similar to the way that the fin and limb skeleton articulates with the shoulder," said Gillis. In mammal embryos, the Sonic hedgehog gene sets up the axis of the limb in the early stages of development. "In a hand, for instance, Sonic hedgehog tells the limb which side will be the thumb and which side will be the pinky finger," said Gillis. In the later stages of development, Sonic hedgehog maintains outgrowth so that the limb grows to its full size. To test whether the gene functions in the same way in skate embryos, researchers inhibited Sonic hedgehog at different points during their development. They found that if Sonic hedgehog was interrupted early in development, the branchial rays formed on the wrong side of the gill arch. If Sonic hedgehog was interrupted later in development, then fewer branchial rays formed but the ones that did grow, grew on the correct side of the gill arch - showing that the gene works in a remarkably similar way here as in the development of limbs. The findings were published in the journal Development. Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra has expressed gratitude for her inclusion in Time magazine's prestigious list of 100 most influential people. The 33-year-old "Bajirao Mastani" star has been wooing the international audience post her debut American show "Quantico" and the actress recently bagged the leading role in Hollywood film "Baywatch". "What a way to start the day! #Time100's list of achievers! Humbled, overwhelmed and feeling so blessed!" Priyanka tweeted. Actor-producer Dwayne Johnson, who has shared screen space with Priyanka in "Baywatch", described the actress as a "star rising higher", lauded her "drive, ambition, self-respect, and said she knows there's "no substitute for hard work." "Before ever meeting Priyanka Chopra, I had heard her name coming out of Bollywood and was impressed: she was beautiful, talented, had made nearly 50 movies, earned multiple awards-a massive star. When we connected around the time she started Quantico, we immediately hit it off. "We always quote the saying, 'Wear your success like a T-shirt, not like a tuxedo,' and she really does-as big a star as she is, as global as she is, as beautiful as she is, there's this interesting quality of relatability." Johnson said he is lucky to be co-starring Priyanka in the movie and finds her inspiring. "Now I'm lucky enough to be working with her on 'Baywatch'. It's an amazing time to watch as she pierces the US market. She has an ability to inspire people to do more and achieve more. "When I look at her success from the 50,000-ft view and see everything that Priyanka has already done, is currently doing and has the desire and the bandwidth to do, I can see that her impact is going to be invaluable. The Indian Medical Association (IMA) has issued a circular to all its 2.5 lakh members warning them not to advertise "No Cure No Payment" or "guaranteed cure" stating both are violations of Medical Council of India (MCI) Code of Ethics Regulations as well as Drugs and Magic Remedies Act. The circular comes in the wake of the ongoing case against a doctor couple running an IVF clinic in Mumbai's Colaba whose licenses were suspended by the Maharashtra Medical Council (MMC) for three months following complaints that they were promised of guaranteed pregnancy on their clinic website and even offered refund if the treatment failed. The Advertising Standards Council of India had filed a complaint against the doctor couple with MMC in 2014. A division bench of justices S C Dharmadhikari and G S Kulkarni of the Bombay High Court has refused to grant interim relief to the doctor couple. "Soliciting patients directly or indirectly by medical professionals is not permitted under the MCI rules and regulations. A doctor cannot also guarantee the results of their treatment," said Dr K K Aggarwal, Secretary General of IMA. The IMA has also launched an awareness programme to educate its 2.5 lakh doctors across the country on ethical practices. "Given its serious implications, we have been constantly making an effort to educate all our members on what is allowed and what is not allowed and ways to safeguard oneself and ensure delivery of a transparent service. "There is also an urgent need to educate patients about how the success of all treatments cannot be guaranteed. They must understand that doctors are committed to saving lives and helping solve health issues. They, however, are humans and guaranteeing results is not possible," said Dr Aggarwal. Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump today exuded confidence that he will earn the party's nomination for the November elections and said he is in a "good shape" to go against "crooked" Hillary Clinton. "It has been a very tough battle. I was being hit from every angle on every side. And I had to be very tough coming back. I mean, there is no question about that. I had to be very, very tough. And in some cases I had to be very nasty," Trump told Fox in an interview. "Now it looks like we are in very good shape to go, you know, right to the end and then I will take on as I say crooked Hillary. Hillary is crooked. I call it crooked Hillary. But I will take on Hillary Clinton and I think we are going to win. I think we are going to win," said Trump who appeared to be oozing with confidence after his massive victory in New York primary. Trump bagged 89 of the 95 delegates at stake in New York and is currently way ahead of his nearest rival Senator Ted Cruz from Texas in the delegate count. The real estate tycoon from New York said that he would be able to defeat Hillary Clinton in the November presidential elections, "Yes. Yes. A lot of people think I will beat her. A lot of people think I will put states into play that will never be in play like I will win Michigan. No other Republican is going to even compete in Michigan, I'll win Pennsylvania. I will win states that nobody else and guess what, I am going to win New York." In another interview to NBC News, Trump said people of the country would vote for him because of his policies. "When people see that I'm going to bring jobs back to this country, when they see that I'm going to strengthen up the military, when they see that I'm going to have strong borders like nobody else can have and we will build a wall. And Mexico will pay for the wall, by the way. But when they see that we're getting rid of Obamacare, which is a total disaster and we're going to be replacing it with something good," he said. "When they see we're going to get rid of Common Core, which is also, likewise, a total catastrophe, and we're bringing education locally, so it can be run by local communities and the parents of the children. And it's going to be wonderful and beautiful and much better," he said. India and China today held the 19th round of talks to resolve the vexed border dispute amid a growing discord between the two nations over Beijing blocking India's bid to get JeM chief Masood Azhar banned by the UN. National Security Advisor Ajit Doval held the annual talks with Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi to discuss the road ahead to resolve the dispute which has bedevilled bilateral ties. Besides the border issue, Doval and Yang, the designated Special Representatives, also have a larger mandate to discuss all contentious bilateral, regional and international issues. Considering their mandate, the second attempt by Beijing in an year to block India's bids to get the Pakistan' terror group's leaders banned is expected to figure in the talks. Last month, China had vetoed India's bid to get the Pathankot attack mastermind designated as terrorist by the UN Sanctions Committee, maintaining that the case "did not meet the requirements" of the Security Council. The Chinese action evoked a strong reaction in India which said that it was "incomprehensible" that while Jaish-e- Mohammed (JeM) was banned by the UN, its chief was not. Indian officials say while Azhar's listing was cleared by the four other UN Security Council permanent members, China has put a "technical hold", like it did in the case of Mumbai terror attack mastermindZaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi earlier. Since China, the veto wielding UNSC member, put a technical hold on Azhar issue, India has voiced its protests. While India's UN Permanent Representative Syed Akbaruddin spoke of "hidden veto" at a UNSC open debate on 'Threats to International Peace and Security Caused by Terrorist Acts' in New York on April 16, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar called for a review of China's decision to strike a common stand against terrorism. For its part, China continued to stick to its stand saying that its decision is based on facts and fairness. Defending the stand, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying yesterday said "we oppose double standard in counter terrorism campaign." "We have been dealing with the listing (of terrorists by UN) matter in accordance with the facts and relevant resolutions. We are also in sound communication with all relevant parties including the Indian side," she said. Considering the heat generated over it, the issue was expected to figure prominently between Doval and Yang. India will appeal against WTO panel's ruling that the country's power purchase agreements with solar firms were "inconsistent" with international norms, in the next few days. The February ruling came in the wake of a US complaint before the global trade body alleging discrimination against American firms. "Next few days," said Power Minister Piyush Goyal when asked by when the country will be appealing against the decision. Rulings of the dispute settlement panel can be challenged at the WTO's appellate body. "We have found some 16 programmes in the United States where states are giving support to their domestic manufacturers," he said while talking to PTI on the sidelines of an event hosted by CII here. He was of the view that this would support India's case. The US had dragged India to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on the issue in 2014, alleging that the clause relating to domestic content requirement (DCR) in the country's solar power mission was discriminatory in nature and "nullified" the benefits accruing to American solar power developers. This was the second case where India has lost against the US at WTO. In June 2015, India lost a case when WTO ruled that the Indian ban on import of poultry meat, eggs and live pigs from the US was inconsistent with the global norms. The appellate body is a standing entity of seven persons that hears appeals from reports issued by panels in disputes brought forward by WTO members. The body can uphold, modify or reverse legal findings and conclusions. Its reports, once adopted by the Dispute Settlement Body, must be accepted by the parties to the dispute. To a question if the government will provide incentives or hand-holding to investors in offshore wind installations, the minister said: "Of course, at initial stage, we would support this thing and try to look at technological innovation and fast-track the development." There are worries that the offshore wind segment will get tepid response from investors in view of higher costs compared with onshore and other clean sources. The Union Cabinet had last year approved the National Offshore Wind Energy Policy for harnessing this clean source of energy by setting up wind mills in the sea as well as research and development activity. India added 3,300 mw of wind power generation capacity last fiscal as against the targeted 2,400 mw, jacking up the total wind power capacity to 26,744 mw as on March 31. India will host the first-ever ministerial-level energy summit with the UK that could become the defining feature of a new type of engagement between the two "natural partners", Power Minister Piyush Goyal has said here. The minister of state for power, coal, new and renewable energy, who is in London to hold talks with his UK counterparts this week, said the summit will help strengthen India-UK ties further. "We discussed with the UK government about the first ministerial summit on energy to be held sometime in June-July in India. The final dates will be worked out jointly and we have invited the energy ministers of UK to come to India and participate in the first-ever summit, which will help us to further strengthen the ties between the UK and India on the energy side," Goyal said yesterday. The minister, who is accompanied by a Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) delegation to hold meetings with potential investors in London, said the two countries share "several synergies" in their energy agenda. "India and the UK share a rich history that we are natural partners in any and everything we do. In that sense, the energy partnership can also in years to come become the defining feature of a new engagement at an absolutely different scale," he said. The minister also informed the "Green Investors" meet that India will soon tie up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US to develop clean coal technologies. "Coal will remain the mainstay of our energy, but as a responsible nation we are looking at cleaner coal technologies so that we don't do what the West has done to the environment over the last 150 years," he said. From London, Goyal will be travelling to New York for the signing of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and hold meetings on the International Solar Alliance launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Paris last December. Britain's longest-serving Indian-origin MP Keith Vaz today welcomed the Indian government's clarification over the Koh-i-Noor diamond that it intends to make all efforts to bring back the precious stone in an amicable manner. "Previous statements and reporting on the Solicitor General of India's comments to the Supreme Court are puzzling. I welcome the clarification by the Indian government that it intends to make all efforts to bring back the Koh-i-Noor diamond in an amicable manner," Vaz said in a statement. "I hope that the Indian Government will be in a position to convey its intentions to the Supreme Court soon," he added. Last year, Vaz had called for the Koh-i-Noor to be returned to India during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the UK in November 2015. "There is no excuse for not returning precious items such as the Kohinoor diamond, a campaign I have backed for many years," Vaz had said last July. Earlier this week, following the Solicitor General of India's remarks on the famous diamond being a gift to Queen Victoria, he had said: "This draws a line under this particular campaign. There may of course be other issues that need to be pursued. I am sure Her Majesty the Queen will be pleased as she celebrates her 90thBirthday. Israeli police said today a Hamas militant carried out a "suicide" bus bombing in Jerusalem that wounded 20 people, in the first such attack since a wave of violence erupted in October. The attacker, a 19-year-old from Beit Jala near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, died from his wounds yesterday, two days after the bombing. Hamas had previously said he was a member of the militant group and that he had carried out the attack, while his mother told AFP he had idolised an assassinated bombmaker from the Islamist movement. Israeli police lifted a gag order on elements of the case today, confirming Abdel Hamid Abu Sorur as the assailant and specifically calling it a "suicide attack". The police also said they made several arrests of Hamas militants suspected of helping to plan the bombing. Monday's bus attack is the first suicide bombing in a nearly seven-month wave of violence. Most of the attacks have been stabbings, while car-rammings and shootings have also occurred. While Hamas praised his actions and hailed him as a martyr, the Islamist movement that runs the Gaza Strip did not formally claim the attack. It said his death "will continue to fuel the uprising". Hamas officials in Gaza declined to comment today, only welcoming the attack. His mother, Azhar Abu Suror, told AFP in an interview that she did not know he was a Hamas member. On Monday before the bombing, she said "he was normal and we ate lunch together and he was laughing. Then he told me he was going out to buy something and will come back." "Everyone was with the resistance and supporting the resistance," she said. "But for him, his role model was Yahya Ayash. President Sergio Mattarella today reaffirmed Italy's "commitment" to resolve the four-year dispute involving two Italian marines accused of murdering two Indian fishermen. "I express my closeness to Salvatore Girone and Massimiliano Latorre and I confirm the commitment to resolving a dispute that has dragged on for too long," Mattarella was quoted as saying by the Italian ANSA agency. The two marines Latorre and Girone on board ship 'Enrica Lexie' are accused of killing two Indian fishermen in 2012 off the Kerala coast after mistaking them for pirates. While Latorre is in Italy on medical grounds since September 2014, Italy has been seeking Girone's return as well. However, Italy has repeatedly contested India's jurisdiction amid long delays and last year it took the case to an international court of arbitration in The Hague. Last month, at the 13th India-EU Summit in Brussels, the two sides failed arrive at any understanding on the dispute as they stuck to their respective position and expressed their confidence in the arbitration procedure on the case currently underway in the framework of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), to which India and Italy are strongly committed. Jammu and Kashmir Governor N N Vohra has stressed on building a large volunteer pool and ensuring grassroots participation in order to to enable Red Cross Society to function effectively. Vohra, who is also the President of the Indian Red Cross Society's state unit, exhorted commisioners and deputy commisioners to create an environment for mobilizing resources for humanitarian activities of the Society, including organization of more Red Cross fairs, particularly at district level. Referring to valuable services rendered by Red Cross during disasters, he said sustained support from public and private organisations is required to enable it to discharge its duties effectively. The Governor was chairing the 173rd State Managing Committee (SMC) meeting of the Indian Red Cross Society, J&K State Branch, at Raj Bhavan here today. He appreciated the programme launched by the IRCS for providing first aid training to commercial vehicle drivers and police recruits. He said medical training camps should be organised on a regular basis to train people in first aid and other life-saving techniques. Defending move to appeal against the Bombay High Court verdict in the Rs 8,500-crore Vodafone transfer pricing case, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley today said the case had nothing to do with retrospective tax issue and no company is immune from paying taxes. "Why should the government not file an appeal when it thinks that it is an appealable order," he told ET Now. "There is no company in the world that is immune from paying taxes." Jaitley was responding to a question on the tax department deciding to challenge an October 8, 2015 decision of the Bombay High Court in the Supreme Court through a Special Leave Petition (SLP). "There are important questions of law which go to the Supreme Court. This case has nothing to do with the retrospective tax issue," said Jaitley, who is here on a seven-day official tour. Vodafone had got favourable verdicts from the Bombay High Court in two tax cases last year. The first one pertained to the High Court rejecting tax authorities claim that Vodafone priced the shares of its stakes in its Indian companies sold to other arms of Vodafone in a way to avoid taxes. The Income Tax Department had sought Rs 3,000 crore in taxes. In the second case, the High Court had on October 8 ruled that the Department did not have the jurisdiction on the sale of Vodafone's call centre business to Hutchison Whampoa Properties and assignment of call options to Vodafone International Holdings BV in 2007-08. The Income Tax Department has decided to appeal against the second verdict. It has, however, decided not to appeal against the first case alongside a similar transfer-pricing case won by Royal Dutch Shell. Besides the two cases, Vodafone is fighting a separate larger case relating to imposition of taxes using retrospective legislation over its 2007 acquisition of an Indian telecom group. The case is awaiting international arbitration. "There can't be a principle that a company had once an issue of retrospective taxation, this company is immune from other forms of taxation. So If there are legitimate issues with regard to other areas, it is between the company and department to sort them out," Jaitley said on Vodafone case. He said retrospective tax is an issue of the past. "It is an issue which the previous government has created. It is an issue which we have resolved. For one or two cases which are pending, we have given several options of resolving these issues," he said. The Minister was referring to his Budget proposal to waive interest and penalty if the companies involved in retrospective tax cases like Vodafone and Cairn Energy plc of UK paid the principal tax amount. "We want a predictable tax regime. Therefore, the predictability of tax regime is ensured by not having retrospective taxation and that is the clear policy of the government," he said. Investors, he said, are very clever people who understand the sea change that has taken place in India. "I don't have to smoothen any nerves, investors are very enthusiastic and bullish about India. The death toll from a lethal Taliban attack in Kabul has more than doubled to 64, officials said today, the deadliest attack in the Afghan capital in recent years. The brazen assault yesterday in a densely packed Kabul neighbourhood marked the first major Taliban attack in Kabul since the insurgents announced the start of this year's fighting season last week. A powerful Taliban truck bomb tore through central Kabul and a fierce firefight broke out, sending clouds of smoke billowing into the sky and rattling windows several kilometres away. "It is with regret that I announce that 64 people were killed and 347 others wounded in yesterday's Kabul attack. Most of them are civilians," ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi told reporters. The ministry had earlier put the death toll at 30. Tuesday's attack was one of the deadliest in Kabul for years. In December 2011, more than 50 people were killed in a suicide attack during the Shiite holy day of Ashura. The Taliban on Tuesday last week announced the start of their spring offensive, even as the government tries to bring them back to the negotiating table to end the drawn-out conflict. The insurgents warned they would "employ large-scale attacks on enemy positions across the country" during the offensive -- dubbed Operation Omari in honour of the movement's late founder Mullah Omar, whose death was announced last year. The Taliban's resurgence has raised serious questions about the ability of Afghan forces to hold their own and prompted calls for the US to reconsider its troop withdrawal schedule, already delayed once by President Barack Obama. World number two spirits producer Pernod Ricard said today a falloff in Chinese demand left its sales woozy but hearty US thirst enabled it to toast nine- month sales growth of 4 per cent. In the three months to March, the third quarter of the company's financial year, sales slipped 3.0 per cent to 1.8 billion euros (USD 2.1 billion) on currency tailwinds without which Pernod would have managed a 1.0 per cent rise, the French company said. "We can class this quarter as resilient," CEO Alex Ricard told AFP. "That allows us to confirm our annual growth objective for full year organic growth (excluding acquisitions) of between 1.0 and 3.0 per cent," Ricard added. But Chinese sales were "worse than forecast," according to analysts at Bryan Garnier, and Pernod Ricard shares were off 6 per cent in late morning trading on the Paris bourse. A strong dollar enabled "a dynamic US" to cushion the Chinese tipple dip as American gains hit 5 per cent to USD 529 million in the third quarter for a 7 per cent gain over nine months, the group said. The group's top brand Jameson whisky was a particular bright spot with a 23 per cent rise over nine months according to Nielsen data, with Ricard saying marque innovation and "operational excellence" had boosted efficiency. Pernod added it was working on Chinese growth, with Ricard expressing medium-term confidence despite the "tough current context" as "the fundamentals are there." Pernod said an early Chinese New Year had hit Asian sales but registered what it termed dynamic growth in India and Africa. Scotch was on the rocks compared to cognac, which Pernod said had been proving "much more resilient" in China. Ricard said "China remains for us an extremely profitable market -- our margins remain well above the group average" there despite a 10 per cent sales tailoff over nine months. In contrast, sales raced ahead 14 per cent in India and 16 per cent in Africa and the Middle East. European sales in the year to date were stable, highlighted by an 8 per cent rise in Spain while Passport and Priority Premium Wines were up 4 per cent pushed by strong demand in Britain and, further afield, Australia. Malaysia Airlines' CEO came under fire today for quitting his job early, as a union blasted him for "abandoning ship" saying his departure threatened the ailing flag carrier's recovery. Christoph Mueller was picked last year to rescue the airline after it was hit by two disasters in 2014 involving its planes. But yesterday he said he was leaving before the end of his three-year contract for unspecified "personal reasons". The National Union of Flight Attendants Malaysia (NUFAM) issued a statement accusing Mueller of "abandoning the ship". "It's like now there is a huge crack in the ship and when there is a leak, all hell will break loose again," it said, warning darkly of "another chapter of leakages." had run up huge losses for years but was pushed to the brink of bankruptcy after a terrible 2014. Flight MH370 disappeared in March that year with 239 passengers and crew aboard, and four months later MH17 was blown out of the sky by a suspected ground-to-air missile over Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers and crew. Mueller's departure has sparked speculation over why he would leave a year after launching a drastic rescue plan in which he slashed thousands of jobs and trimmed the airline's route network. Mueller earned the nickname "The Terminator" following previous restructurings of other airlines that also involved hefty job cuts. One of his plans was to seek the renegotiation of unfavourable contracts with service providers and suppliers, which analysts have said likely raised hackles with politically connected Malaysian businesses. The first-ever foreign boss of Malaysia's flag carrier had been hampered by "legacies and politics", the union said, adding that some of the German's decisions and proposals were dropped "without proper consultation (with) Mueller." A spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment. Aviation analysts have long blamed Malaysia Airlines' failure to stay competitive on unwise business decisions including over-reaching on long-haul routes, unfavourable supplier contracts, and government meddling. State investment fund Khazanah Nasional, which took over the airline in late 2014 and is now its sole shareholder, has also been criticised in the past for poor management, including picking a revolving-door of past CEOs who lacked aviation industry experience. Aviation analyst Shukor Yusof of Endau Analytics said he believed Mueller likely struggled against "the mindset of Khazanah," adding that deep structural problems remained. "The structural problems cannot be solved until there is the political will to change the shareholder. They cannot have Khazanah," he said. Mueller had previously helped turnaround Irish flag carrier Aer Lingus and occupied top positions at German national carrier Lufthansa and the former Belgian airline Sabena. Malaysia, Australia and China will hold a ministerial meeting on missing Malaysia Airlines plane MH370 in June end to discuss the next steps to be taken regarding the tracking of the jet mysteriously disappeared over two years ago. The meeting would, among others, discuss whether to proceed with phase 4 of wreckage recovery process or continue with current search efforts led by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), Malaysia's Deputy Transport Minister Ab Aziz Kaprawi said today. "A total of 103,000 sq km out of the 120,000 sq km of the designated search area at the Southern Indian Ocean have been covered so far. It will take about two more months to complete the whole area," he said. He said Malaysia would also seek assistance from Mozambique, where the debris said to belong to MH370 was found. Malaysia would request for Mozambique authorities advice if there was any further discovery of debris there and to decide on whether it would send its team there, he said. "Other than the flaperon and other debris found so far, there is no new discovery (apart from those mentioned in the report) including the stenciled key words and numbers on the horizontal stabiliser and the wing, which fully matches the font used by Malaysia Airlines," he said. The Joint Agency Coordination Centre MH370 Operational Search in its latest update yesterday stated that the governments have agreed that there will be no further expansion of the search area in the absence of credible new information that leads to the identification of a specific location of the aircraft. The Boeing 777 jetliner vanished from radar screens en route to Beijing after taking off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8 2014 with 239 people, including five Indians, aboard. Australia is leading the underwater search effort to find the plane in the southern Indian Ocean. Diageo on Thursday challenged the Debt Recovery Tribunal (DRT)s power to direct it to deposit $40 million, a part of $75 million payout package signed with liquor baron Vijay Mallya, who is facing a multi-agency probe including for alleged money laundering. The company contented before the tribunal that the amount was paid outside India. The amount of $40 million, which is a part of $75 million payout package between Mallya and us, was paid outside India and hence the DRT does not have power to direct us to attach the money before the tribunal. Such a deal does not fall in the jurisdiction of DRT, Diageo argued. As soon as the proceedings began at the tribunal here, Diageo counsel submitted the copy of the objections filed against State Bank of India-led bankers memo, seeking depositing of $40 million before the DRT. The consortium led by SBI had filed a memo putting a claim on the payout to Mallya by Diageo as part of the sweetheart deal. According to the deal, Diageo agreed to pay Mallya $75 million in five installments in lieu of the liquor baron stepping down from the post of chairman of United Spirits. An amount of $40 million was paid immediately after Mallya quit from chairman's post. Making submissions before DRT presiding officer C R Benakanahalli, Diageos counsel prayed that the tribunal should reject the memo for its inconsistent claims on relief. Diageo also argued that $40 million was paid to Mallya on February 25, much before DRT's March 7 order, and hence the attempt of the bankers to recreate liability is questionable and untenable. DRT, in its March 7 order had barred Mallya from withdrawing $75 million exit payment from Diageo till the disposal of the case over the loan default by his Kingfisher Airlines. It also had restrained Diageo and United Spirits Ltd, owned by the UK-based firm, from temporarily disbursing the amount to Mallya, who worked out the deal under a severance package. Diageo also argued that the remaining $35 million to be paid to Mallya was subject to certain conditions, which means it is not a guarantee that it would be transferred to him and hence there does not arise any question of attaching the money before the tribunal. Diageo also contended that DRT will not have any jurisdiction over the transfer of remaining $35 million to Mallya because the amount will be paid outside India. The bankers, on the other hand, sought time to consult on the interim order passed by the Bombay High Court, asking the Service Tax Department to attach the sale of proceedings of Mallya's private aircraft parked at Mumbai airport. They had on April 13 filed an application, seeking attachment of the sale proceedings of Mallya's private aircraft by the Service Tax Department, whichis going to auction it on May 12 and 13 to recover their duesestimated to be nearly Rs 535 crore. Last month, the department had claimed in a petition to the Bombay High Court that Mallya's total disputed liability in respect of service tax was to the tune of Rs 535 crore. It was also claimed that Mallya had collected a large sum of money as service tax from flyers of the now-grounded Kingfisher Airlines on behalf of the government, but the same was not deposited in the government treasury. Mallya, whose now-defunct group company Kingfisher Airlines owes over Rs 9,000 crore to 17 banks, had left the country on March 2 and is believed to be in the UK. Benakanahalli posted the matter for next hearing on April 29. A local court today sentenced a man to life imprisonment for raping a physically and mentally challenged minor girl and ordered West Bengal government to pay her compensation. Birbhum Additional District and Sessions Judge, Mahananda Das, sentenced Shyam Burman (48) to life imprisonment for raping the girl in October last year and slapped a fine of Rs 10000 on him. The court also ordered the state government to pay the girl Rs five lakh as compensation. The girl had gone with her mother to witness Durga idol immersion in Bolpur area in October last year when Burman took her away to a nearby forest and raped her. With the girl missing, her mother raised a hue and cry and villagers launched a search for her. The girl was found in the forest and Burman standing at a distance. Initially, he denied his involvement but confessed to his crime when he was beaten up by the angry villagers. He was then handed over to the police. Pune police today said as the officials of Maple Group, accused of cheating people with misleading advertisement of an ultra-cheap housing project, were "not cooperating", the investigating officer had been asked to decide on making arrests based on the evidence. Forty persons who had registered for the project have now approached the police with complaints, while the company today claimed it had refunded registration fee of 13,500 applicants. But police claimed that only 1,200 applicants had got their money back. Deepak Sakore, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Economic Offences Wing), who is monitoring the probe, said, "Despite notices to the accused, they are still at large and not cooperating with police. So we have given instructions to the investigating officer to take the decision (of arrest) on the basis of evidence." A day after police appealed the people who had registered for the project to come forward, 40 person approached the police and their statements were being recorded, he said. "Besides, we have received calls from over 400 people from various parts of the Pune district," the DCP said. As per the investigation, the group had received around 20,000 applications for the houses. The company claimed that over 500 people refused to take the money back, putting their faith in the company. The corporate office of the group here saw long queues of people seeking their money back and private security guards deployed. The company is accused of cheating people with misleading advertisement which promised one BHK flat for a mere Rs 5 lakh on the outskirts of the city under the Pradhanmantri Avas Yojana (PAMY). It also featured pictures of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and district guardian Minister Girish Bapat. Handwara, the epicentre of last week's unrest over alleged molestation of a girl, again witnessed clashes today between locals and security forces but no one was injured. About 30-40 students of Government Higher Secondary School Handwara assembled in the main chowk and protested against the recent incidents, a police official said. Some students pelted stones on the security forces deployed there resulting in minor clashes, he said. Later, the protesting students were chased away by the forces, the official said, adding no one was injured. Handwara in north Kashmir's Kupwara district was the epicentre of week-long unrest triggered by alleged molestation of a girl on April 12. In the cycle of violence that followed, five civilians lost their lives and curfew-like restrictions were imposed in Handwara and several other parts of Kashmir. Three persons, including a woman, were killed in firing by security forces on protesters on April 12 while two more persons were killed in separate security forces's action against protesters on April 13 and at Drugmulla and on April 15 at Nathnusa. Terming the Uttrakhand High Court order setting aside President's rule in the state as a "huge embarrassment" to the Narendra Modi Government, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal today said the Prime Minister should stop "interfering with elected governments and respect democracy". "This is a huge embarrassment to Modi Govt. He shud stop interfering wid elected govts and respect democracy (sic)," Kejriwal tweeted. The Uttarakhand High Court today quashed the imposition of President's rule in the state and revived the Congress government headed by Harish Rawat, who has been asked to prove his majority on April 29. Coming down heavily on the Centre for the March 27 proclamation under Article 356 of the Constitution, a division bench of the high court headed by Chief Justice K M Joseph said the imposition of the President's rule was contrary to the law laid down by the Supreme Court. (Reopening DES 12) Senior AAP leader Sanjay Singh said the High Court order was a "befitting reply" to the Centre's decision of imposing President's rule. "The Centre needs to think over it (the imposition of Uttarkhand) after the High Court judgment. They tried to do a similar thing in Arunachal Pradesh. But the High Court gave its judgment against a dictatorial government. "The country also needs to think whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi has become a threat to the world's largest democracy," Singh said. Singh also raised concerns over a possible horse-trading ahead of floor test on April 29. North Korea today crowed over the recent shock electoral defeat of the South's ruling party, calling it a political "death sentence" handed down on President Park Geun-Hye. Last week's ballot saw Park's conservative Saenuri Party lose its parliamentary majority for the first time in 16 years, as voters registered their dissatisfaction with the her economic record and soaring youth unemployment. The result handed the country's three centre-left opposition parties a combined 167 seats in the 300-seat legislature. The crushing defeat left Park, who has less than two years left of her single, five-year term, a lame duck leader who will struggle to push through her reform agenda. For North Korea, which has stepped up its personal attacks on Park to extreme levels in recent months, it was a result to revel in. "Through the elections, the South Korean people placed a death sentence on the confrontational policies of the Park Geun-Hye forces that drove North-South relations to catastrophe," said a spokesman for the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea (CPRK). The defeat left Park a "vegetable president" and one of the political "living dead," the spokesman said in a statement carried by the North's official KCNA agency. If Park felt any genuine remorse or responsibility for the defeat, she should "apologise a hundred times" to the people of South and North Korea and step down from her post, the statement said. Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu today laid the foundation stone for the Elcina Raaga Mayuri Electronics Park at Chilamattur village in Ananthapuramu district in the Rayalaseema region of the state. The Park, which will come up on a 50-acre site on the National Highway close to Bengaluru, will be the largest electronics manufacturing cluster in the country, state government officials said. Taken up in collaboration with Electronic Industries Association of India (Elcina), the park will be developed by the KJR Group which has already entered into memoranda of understanding with several manufacturers for setting up electronic component manufacturing units for defence, aerospace and other sectors. An initial investment of Rs 350 crore is expected for these units while the overall investment may touch Rs 2,000 crore when the Park is fully developed. The state government will create infrastructure like roads, power and water supply and also establish a training centre, an official release said. The Electronics Park will have high-rise buildings of 30 to 35 floors each and provide employment to thousands of people, it added. About 10,000 persons are expected to secure jobs in the first phase and the total employment could be 40,000 once the Park is fully ready in the next couple of years. AP Minister for Information Technology Palle Raghunatha Reddy, Hindupur MLA Nandamuri Balakrishna and others attended the event. More and more people are set to explore the outer space in the coming years with technology offering greater chance than in the last six decades, NASA astronaut Scott Parazynski said here today. He was speaking on the topic 'Human Destiny in Space: Current & Future Prospects' at the Physical Research Laboratory here. "It is a very exciting time in the history as we are going to fly many more people, both scientists as well as tourists, into the space than we did in the last six decades," said Parazynski, who has travelled into the space five times as a NASA scientist. "If 550 people travelled into the space in the last six decades, we can expect 5,000 people to travel there in the next decade," he said, while sharing his experiences as an astronaut who has stayed in the space for more than eight weeks and spacewalked for 47 hours. "Imagine 5,000 people flying in the next one decade, and 50,000 in another decade. Space tourism promises short trip to the space which will become possible in the next two-three years," he said. "Next generation of spacecraft will fly from Delhi to JFK (in the US) in six minutes...In a few decades, this is going to be a reality," he said. "Roughly 10 years ago, a group created a carrier aircraft with spaceship and allowed them to fly with a single pilot. Now, the same technology is being applied to a larger vehicle, so in the next two-three years, many people are going to do this. While the cost is high now, if more people do this, the cost will come down," he said. To prevent possible manipulations in trading activities, Sebi Chairman U K Sinha today told brokers that there should be a level-playing field for high frequency trades and cautioned that strict action will be initiated against such violations. During his meeting with brokers, Sebi chief discussed a range of issues, including cyber risks, ways to attract more retail investors into the capital market and boost commodity derivatives trading. According to sources, Sinha discussed in detail high frequency trading (HFT), also known as algo trades, and emphasised that the capital market regulator is not against HFT, but expects a level-playing field in this regard. "Sinha said Sebi would take action in case it finds lack of level-playing field for all players," one of the brokers who attended the meeting said. The market regulator already has strict norms in place on such trading. Recently, concerns have been expressed in certain quarters that some entities might be at an advantage in carrying out HFT. Besides, the brokers' community have been assured that they would soon be allowed to trade in equities as well as commodity derivatives from the same broking platform. "He (Sinha) told us that some time during this year, we will be allowed to trade in commodities as well as securities from the same broking platform," a broker said. The move would help investors as the procedure for brokers is same with regard to equities and commodity derivative trading activities. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has been taking steps to streamline norms for commodity derivatives with those of equities since the merger of the Forward Markets Commission (FMC) with itself last year. The matter of online registration facility for commodity brokers was also discussed. Among others, Sinha sought suggestions from brokers on ways to increase retail participation in the securities market. "Some brokers suggested penetrating into tier 3 and tier 4 cities as capital may be adequate in these regions post monsoon... Besides, we suggested that margins in the cash market be reduced," a broker said. Issues pertaining to the National Spot Exchange Ltd (NSEL) also came up for discussion at the meeting. In the nearly Rs 5,600-crore payment crisis at the bourse, some brokers have also come under the scanner for alleged violations, the sources said. Urging brokers to be alert against cyber threats, Sinha also asked large brokers to prepare their systems and technology against cyber attacks. Discussions also touched upon having a common KYC (know-your-client) mechanism for the entire finance sector. In this regard, Sebi is in talks with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). A group of 15-20 stock brokers, including members of BSE Broker Forum, Association of National Exchanges Members India (ANMI), Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Kotak and JMFL, participated in the meeting. High ambition, organisation building, market awareness and keeping oneself updated about trends are among the mantras that Nepal's first billionaire industrialist Binod Chaudhary spells out for entrepreneurial success. In his autobiography "Making it Big" (Penguin Random House), the 61-year-old Nepali businessman of Indian origin talks about banking on his experiences to "make decisions that even a Harvard professor would recoil from without several rounds of surveys". The chairperson of Chaudhary Group (CG), a conglomerate of 122 companies that include banking, insurance, finance, hotels, food, real estate, retail and electronics and has collaboration among others with the Taj Group, is famed for creating the Wai Wai brand of instant noodles, which has expanded into India. The story of Wai Wai, says Chaudhary began around 35 years ago when a friend noticed large quantities of the noodles arriving on the Bangkok-Kathmandu flights into a market that imported a large quantity of Nestle India Limited's Maggi. Chaudhary ventured into the market and grew into a company that has "sold more than a billion packets in India" and sells in over 35 countries. The baron writes about how he used a four-pronged approach to fight challenges by launching many cheaper brands, producing creative advertisements and creative programmes and changing the organisational structure to include more locals to create a company with an annual turnover of Rs 250 crore. The creation of his first multinational venture Taj Asia and the struggles in his partnership with the Taj Group are also detailed. There is also mention of the part played by Chaudhary in reuniting Nepali migrant boy Jeet Bahadur with his family in Nepal in 2012. In the memoir, Chaudhary also traces the origins of his family, particularly his grandfather who was born in Shekhawati in Rajasthan and who moved to Nepal when he was less than 20 years old to open a textile store. Chaudhary's father set up Nepal's first department store and Chaudhary joined the business at age 18 and went on to be listed in the Forbes's list of billionaires. Filmmaker Aanand L Rai's production venture "Nil Battey Sannata" has been made tax free in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. The social drama, starring Swara Bhaskar, Ratna Pathak, Pankaj Tripathi and Ria, will hit theatres tomorrow. "After watching the poignant story of a mother and her daughter, Delhi and UP state authorities praised the movie for being an entertainer and socially relevant to our time and unanimously decided to make the film tax free so that such heartwarming and inspiring stories can reach to maximum people," the makers said in a statement. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav made the announcement on Twitter. "Touched by the story of 'Nil Battey Sannata', which was filmed in Agra. We have made the film tax free in UP," Yadav wrote. Rai said he is grateful to Delhi and UP government for making Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari-directed "Nil Battey Sannata" tax free. "It's a heartwarming story that promises to both entertain and educate. Hopefully, such encouraging support will inspire more filmmakers to come up with stories like 'Nil Battey Sannata'," Rai said in a statement. Swara added, "I'm very grateful and excited with this news, that two state governments found out film worthy of being tax free on day one which is very rare adds a lot of credibility to our film. Seeking to give a "Marathi" angle to the replacement of Shilpa Shinde with another actress on a popular show, the cine wing of the Raj Thackeray-led MNS today said they will take "action" against those producers and channels who will not let the TV star work in the state. Shilpa, best known for her role as 'Angoori Bhabi' on "Bhabi Ji Ghar Par Hai", had sparked a controversy when she announced that she had quit the popular series and accused the makers of mentally torturing her. CINTAA (Cine & TV Artistes' Association) then sent the actress a letter asking her to bear the cost of financial loss incurred by the producer or channels. Ameya Khopkar, President of Maharashtra Navnirman Chitrapat Karmachari Sena, said they will take action in their "own way" if anyone tries to stop Shilpa from working in Maharashtra. "We don't value these federation(s). Nobody can stop Shilpa Shinde. If anyone stops her from working in Maharashtra, we will take action against the producers and channels in our own way. If they feel this is a threat, so be it," Khopkar told reporters here. According to Shilpa, the problem started when the makers wanted her to sign a contract which would bar her from doing other shows. On the other hand, the makers had alleged unprofessional behaviour on Shilpa's part and said the actress had demanded a pay hike and wanted her own designers on the show. Shilpa said it was a legal matter between her and the producers and the federation should not have come in between. "They (producers) bad mouthed me saying I used to throw tantrums. CINTAA didn't ban me but the letter states that unless I pay the damages to the producers, I won't be allowed to work. This is happening to an artist in Maharashtra. "The matter is first legal. The federation shouldn't have come in between. If I have signed a contract and crossed that, why bring the federation... I am going through legal process because I have been wronged," Shilpa said. Well-known television actress Shubhangi Atre will now essay the character of Shilpa on the sitcom. Shilpa was approached by the makers of "The Kapil Sharma Show" but the actress said she has not signed the show yet. One year after receiving them at Camp David, US President Barack Obama meets Gulf leaders again today, hoping they can more strongly commit to the fight against jihadists. At the same time, with nine months left in his term, the president must again seek to reassure his Sunni allies upset over American overtures to their regional rival, Shiite Iran. Obama attends the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) summit in the Saudi capital after reporting progress in recent months against the Islamic State group of Sunni extremists who seized large parts of Iraq and Syria. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations belong to the US-led coalition which carries out air strikes against IS. Around 4,000 American troops are in Iraq as part of that mission which trains and assists local forces fighting the militants. The research group IHS said on Monday that Islamic State had lost about 22 per cent of its territory in the past 15 months. In a bid to accelerate gains against the jihadists, Defence Secretary Ashton Carter -- in Riyadh with Obama -- announced on Monday that the US will send more troops and Apache attack helicopters to Iraq. Washington also wants to emphasise the reconstruction of cities taken back from IS. On Wednesday, Carter pleaded for greater Gulf financial and political involvement in Iraq, which is battling an economic crisis as well as the extremists. Carter made the comments after meeting his GCC counterparts. "I encourage our GCC partners to do more, not only militarily as the Saudis, as the UAE have been doing... But also politically and economically," Carter said. Sunni support for "multisectarian governance and reconstruction" in Shiite-majority Iraq will be critical to ensuring the defeat of IS, the Pentagon chief said. But Gulf leaders are offended by Obama's perceived reluctance to get involved in the region's problems, and in particular his tilt towards Iran, their rival which they accuse of widespread regional interference. They worry that Iran will be further emboldened after the lifting this year of sanctions against it under a US-supported deal to curb Tehran's nuclear programme. Riyadh leads an Arab military coalition that for 13 months has supported Yemen's government in its battle against Iran-backed Shiite Huthi rebels. Obama adviser Rob Malley said it is important to settle the regional conflicts in Yemen and Syria not only because of their devastating humanitarian consequences. US President Barack Obama met Gulf leaders in Saudi Arabia today to push for an intensified campaign against the Islamic State group, despite strains in ties with Washington. Making what is likely his final presidential visit to America's historic allies, Obama posed for a summit photo with the six regional leaders, including Saudi King Salman, before beginning about four hours of talks at a royal palace. With nine months left of his term, the president is also again seeking to reassure his Sunni allies upset over American overtures to their regional rival, Shiite Iran. The summit comes after Washington reported progress in recent months against the Sunni extremists of IS, who seized large parts of Iraq and Syria. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states are part of the US-led coalition which has been carrying out air strikes against IS. In a bid to keep up the momentum against the jihadists, Defence Secretary Ashton Carter - in Riyadh with Obama - announced on Monday that the US will send more troops and Apache attack helicopters to Iraq. Washington also wants to emphasise the reconstruction of cities taken back from IS. Yesterday, Carter pleaded for greater Gulf financial and political involvement in Iraq, which is battling an economic crisis as well as the extremists. Carter made the comments after meeting his Gulf Cooperation Council counterparts. "I encourage our GCC partners to do more, not only militarily as the Saudis, as the UAE have been doing... But also politically and economically," Carter said. Sunni support for "multisectarian governance and reconstruction" in Shiite-majority Iraq will be critical to ensuring the defeat of IS, the Pentagon chief said. On the eve of the summit, US Secretary of State John Kerry was also in Riyadh, where he held talks with Deputy Crown Prince and Defence Minister Mohammed bin Salman. Bahrain's King Hamad said in a statement that the summit "clearly reflects outstanding relations between the GCC countries and US". He hoped the talks "would come up with results that would help handle the grave regional and international challenges, (and) boost regional peace and security. US President Barack Obama met Gulf leaders in Saudi Arabia today to push for increased efforts against the Islamic State group, despite strains in their ties with Washington. Making what is likely his final presidential visit to historic American allies, Obama is seeking to overcome recent tensions with Sunni Arab Gulf states rooted in US overtures to their regional rival Iran. With IS suffering a series of recent setbacks in areas under its control in Syria and Iraq, Washington is seeking more help from the oil-rich Gulf monarchies to keep up the pressure. After bilateral talks with Saudi King Salman the day before, Obama posed today for a summit photo with six leaders of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries before heading into four hours of talks at a royal palace. In a highly unusual move, Saudi state channel Al-Ekhbaria did not broadcast the start of the meeting, just as it did not show Obama's airport arrival on Wednesday. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states belong to the US-led coalition that has been carrying out air strikes against IS in Syria and Iraq since mid-2014. But yesterday US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter -- in Riyadh with Obama -- urged them "to do more". He pointed specifically to Iraq, calling for more support for Baghdad, which is battling political chaos and an economic crisis as well as the extremists. Sunni support for "multi-sectarian governance and reconstruction" in Shiite-majority Iraq will be critical to ensuring the defeat of IS, the Pentagon chief said after meeting Gulf counterparts. In Baghdad earlier this week Carter announced that the United States would send more troops and make Apache attack helicopters available to Iraq as its forces push a renewed fightback against the jihadists aimed at eventually retaking the IS hub of Mosul. Analysts said Syria would also be on the table at the summit, with Washington likely pushing Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies to influence the Syrian opposition, which they have long supported, to abide by a ceasefire. "I think Syria will obviously be a big focus, ensuring that the Saudis focus their diplomatic energies on the ceasefire, perhaps soliciting more Saudi support on refugees. But then also asking the Saudis to do more on the Islamic State," said Frederic Wehrey of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Washington hopes the ceasefire, and peace talks in Geneva, can help resolve Syria's broader conflict to focus attention on the fight against IS and other jihadist groups. US Secretary of State John Kerry also joined Obama in Riyadh, where he held talks with Saudi Arabia's powerful Deputy Crown Prince and Defence Minister Mohammed bin Salman. A 35-year-old CPI(M) supporter was today killed and his body was found lying outside a polling booth at Shibapara area under Domkal Assembly seat in Murshidabad district where polling for the third phase is underway. CPI(M) candidate and former minister Anisur Rahman said that the man identified as Tahidur Islam was killed when bombs were hurled outside the polling booth. Murshidabad Superintendent of police C Sudhakar, however, said the murder was not related to polls. Tahidur was stabbed somewhere else and his body was dumped near the booth, the SP said. Rahman also alleged jamming of booths by Trinamool Congress supporters. Congress candidate of Hariharpara Assembly seat in the same district Mir Alam Gir alleged that two party supporters were beaten up allegedly by Trinamool Congress workers at Hosseinpur. Trinamool Congress, however, denied the charges. Polling is being held in 22 Assembly constituencies of the district out of the total 62 seats, where polling is underway. (Reopens CAL2) In Burdwan district where third phase Assembly election is on in 16 seats, four persons were injured in separate incidents in polling booths under Ketugram Assembly constituency. The ear of a CPI(M) worker identified as Seltu Sheikh was slashed and leg of another CPI(M) man was fractured after an altercation led to a scuffle in front of booth no 78. Both the injured were rushed to Ketugram Block Primary Health Centre. District returuing officer Soumitra Mohan said four persons have been arrested in this connection. In another incident, two CPI(M) workers were injured at booth no 48 under Ketugram Assembly seat when bombs were allegedly hurled. The injured were taken to Ketugram Block Primary Health Centre. While CPI(M) alleged that Trinamool Congress supporters were involved in the incident, the latter denied the charge. In a separate incident, Central Forces obstructed Trinamool Congress candidate in Purbasthali Uttar seat of the district, Tapan Chattopadhyay, from entering booth no 20 due to a "communication gap". He was later allowed to enter after he showed valid papers. Two EVM machines were replaced after it started malfunctioning at a polling booth under ward no 3 of Katwa Assembly seat. Polling was delayed by 45 minutes as a result of this, district election official said. One UNLF cadre identified as Ningthoujam Priyananda Singh alias Amutombi was arrested by a combined team of the Police and troops of Assam Rifles and the Army from Wangoo area in Thoubal district of Manipur on April 19, the police said today. The 30-year-old militant was found to be in possession of one Chinese Hand Grenade, and one .32 pistol along with a magazine loaded with two live rounds of .32 ammunition, an officer said. Earlier, on April 18, two activists of the National Revolutionary Front of Manipur, a breakaway faction of KCP, were arrested from Tera Sadokpam Leikai by the police. Identified as N Lakhen (45) and N Sanjoy (45), the two activists have been involved in extortion activities, they said adding one motorcycle and incriminating articles were seized from them. Environmentalist R K Pachauri, accused of sexual harassment by his former women colleagues in the recent past, has stepped down as a member of the Governing Council of TERI "to get engaged in other interests". The announcement came on the heels of a media report which said the green body has decided to "sever" its association with Pachauri even though his employment contract with TERI expires in 2017. It said the Governing Council had also decided to pay all the dues for the remainder of his tenure and bring an immediate end to it. Pachauri, however, maintained that his term as a member of The Energy and Resources Institute's (TERI) Governing Council ended on March 31, 2016 and he felt it was time "for me to move away and get engaged in other interests which I have harboured over the past few years for activities at the global level". When contacted for comments, a TERI spokesman did not confirm the contents of the media report, saying,"The Governing Council of TERI met on April 18, 2016. Several decisions were taken in the meeting. The minutes of the meeting are currently awaiting approval." The report had quoted the spokesperson as saying: "Dr Pachauri's term as a Member of the Governing Council of TERI ended on March 31, 2016. As the post of Executive Vice Chairman (EVC) is co-terminus with this membership, his role as EVC also ended along with his membership of the Council." Pachauri said he was issuing the statement "to provide the media with information" about his "stepping down" from TERI's Governing Council, suggesting the decision to call time on his association with the organisation was voluntary. In his statement, Pachauri said the TERI staff was its "greatest treasure" which under the new Director General will take the Institute to much greater heights in the years ahead. "I have had the good fortune of leading TERI for three decades and a half and have received the priceless contribution from thousands of colleagues over the years in building up this Institute to level of an outstanding organisation. "I began with TERI as the articulation of my dream and humanity's call for a major intellectual resource, which has now grown to a size and spread straddling the whole world, with a staff strength of around 1200 professionals and world class infrastructure and expertise," he said. Pachauri said he had "greatly" benefited from the support the green body had "always" provided. "I have also benefited greatly from the support I have always received from TERI's Governing Council, and would like to place on record my gratitude to them, beginning with the late Darbari Seth, my inspiration and leader in the initial years of TERI's development," he said. Pachauri was removed from the post of Director General last year after an FIR was filed against him following a complaint of sexual harassment made by a junior woman colleague. The Delhi Police had charge-sheeted him in the case early this year. Despite the controversy, the green body's Governing Council created a fresh post of Executive Vice Chairman for Pachauri, triggering an outrage, following which he was asked to proceed on leave. Earlier this year, two more former employees of TERI, one of them a foreign national, had also accused him of sexual harassment. Former Finance Secretary Ashok Chawla was recently appointed Chairman of TERI's Governing Council. Pakistan and China have signed an agreement for the launch of a special satellite to monitor the development of the USD 46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) projects. Minister for Planning, Development and Reform, Ahsan Iqbal on behalf of Pakistan Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO) and China Great Wall Industry Cooperation (CGWIC) President Yin Limping signed the agreement here yesterday. The two sides agreed for the development and launch of the 'Pakistan Remote Sensing Satellite (PRSS-1) System' and in this regard launch a satellite in June 2018, Dawn reported. Speaking on the occasion, Iqbal said that bilateral cooperation between the two countries in space domain would open new vistas of socio-economic and scientific cooperation, giving boost to the historic bilateral cordial relations in other fields. Space technology is fundamental in socio-economic development, infrastructure upgradation, agriculture production, urban planning in new age, he added. The minister said that the agreement would also transfer space technology to Pakistan and the PRSS-1 is yet another flagship project between China-Pakistan relations after CPEC. It would go a long way to redefine the bilateral relations, he said. The new project would also help Pakistan in national security arena by strengthening border security and surveillance apparatus, Iqbal said. The CPEC is a USD 46 billion project launched with the help of China to connect western China to southern Pakistan's port city of Gawadar, giving Beijing an opening to the Arabian Sea. India has been protesting the corridor's passing through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir ever since the project was kicked off by President Xi Jinping during his visit to Islamabad last year. Upping the ante against India, Pakistan has claimed that the Indian spy agency Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) is running a "special cell" to sabotage the multi-billion-dollar China-backed China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project. Defence Secretary Lt Gen (retd) Alam Khattak told the senate standing committee on defence on Wednesday that had set up a 'special cell' to sabotage the ambitious CPEC. Khattak said this during an in-camera briefing to the committee on R&AW's alleged involvement in subversive activities in Pakistan. His statement came a day after army chief Gen Raheel Sharif accused India of openly challenging the CPEC and blamed the country for "destabilising" Pakistan. A member of the committee said the defence secretary told the meeting that Indian consulates in Afghanistan were providing money, weapons, training and other logistic support to agents for carrying out subversive activities in Pakistan, particularly in Balochistan and the tribal areas. The senate panel was also informed that was closely coordinating with Afghan intelligence agency National Directorate of Security (NDS) for "anti-Pakistan activities". Sharif had said R&AW was "blatantly" involved in destabilising the country, adding that Pakistan will not allow "hostile intelligence agencies" to create unrest. Pakistan recently claimed to have arrested an Indian spy, Kulbhushan Yadav, in Balochistan near the border with Iran. Yadav, who is a former Indian naval officer, has allegedly confessed to have been working for R&AW to create instability in Balochistan as well as in Karachi. New Delhi has said that Yadav was a former navy officer but insisted that he had no connection with the Indian government or R&AW. As many as 170 countries are expected to sign the Paris Agreement on climate change tomorrow in a symbolic triumph for a landmark deal that once seemed unlikely but now appears on track to enter into force years ahead of schedule. UN officials say the signing ceremony tomorrow will set a record for international diplomacy: Never before have so many countries inked an agreement on the first day of the signing period. That could help pave the way for the pact to become effective long before the original 2020 deadline possibly this year though countries must first formally approve it through their domestic procedures. "We are within striking distance of having the agreement start years earlier than anyone anticipated," Brian Deese, an adviser to President Barack Obama, said in a speech last week at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. The US and China, which together account for nearly 40 per cent of global emissions, have said they intend to formally join the agreement this year. It will enter into force once 55 countries representing at least 55 per cent of global emissions have done so. "There's incredible momentum," former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, who heads the UN Development Program, told The Associated Press. "We're moving as quickly as possible to action." She said her agency is working with more than 140 countries on climate change-related issues, and that financing to make the Paris Agreement a reality is "critical, and let's hope everyone lives up to commitments made." The agreement, the world's response to hotter temperatures, rising seas and other impacts of climate change, was hammered out in December outside Paris. The pact was a major breakthrough in UN climate negotiations, which for years were bogged down with disputes between rich and poor countries over who should do what to fight global warming. The mood was so pessimistic after a failed 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, that UN climate chief Christiana Figueres said she thought a global deal wouldn't happen in her lifetime. Now she expects the Paris Agreement to take effect by 2018. Under the agreement, countries set their own targets for reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The targets are not legally binding but countries must update them every five years. Key Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam has been charged over a deadly shootout with police in Brussels a week before the suicide bombings in the Belgian capital, his lawyer said today. "He has been charged with attempted murder either alone or jointly" over the gunbattle at an apartment in the Forest district of Brussels on March 15, lawyer Sven Mary told AFP. An Algerian Islamist suspect was killed and four police officers were wounded in the shooutout, which led to Abdeslam's arrest three days later in the Molenbeek area of Brussels after a four-month European manhunt. Abdeslam, 26, is due to be extradited to France in coming days over the November Paris attacks, in which he is believed to be the last surviving member of the terror squad that killed 130 people. But Belgian police have also tried to question him over his links to the three suicide bombers who struck Brussels airport and metro on March 22, killing 32 people and injuring hundreds. The Islamic State group has claimed both attacks. Asked if Abdeslam admitted being present at the Forest shootout, Mary said: "We won't discuss that, I won't comment." Abdeslam will appear before a Belgian court again on April 28 and his extradition to France will come "perhaps two days after his court appearance," Mary added. Abdeslam and alleged Paris accomplice Mohamed Abrini, who has also charged over the Brussels attacks, were moved to different jails in Belgium last week. Abrini, 31, has confessed to being "the man in the hat" caught on video with suicide bombers at Brussels airport. Abrini was also linked to the November 13 Paris massacre after being caught on video at a motorway gas station with Abdeslam. Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar today said he has asked the Army to provide Lt Col Prasad Purohit with all the documents he has sought to prove his innocence in the Malegaon blasts case, with paras inimical to national security redacted. Maintaining that the matter was in court and he cannot decide on the merit of the case, Parrikar said he has told the Army to give all information sought by Purohit, one of the main accused in the Malegaon 2008 blasts case. "Except for words of people and names of countries, whatever document he wants, except when directly it impacts security of the nation or it involves names of some other officers, that can be blacked out, the info has to be given to him," Parrikar told reporters here. He said it should help Purohit prove his innocence based on what he is saying. "The final decision has to be that of the Court," he said. Purohit had earlier this month written to Parrikar requesting restoration of his honour by way of rank. In his letter dated April 4, he claimed he has been falsely implicated in the case and has been behind the bars for more than seven years now. "I have been robbed of honour, dignity and rank and punished for serving the nation," he said. Purohit claimed he had infiltrated groups like SIMI and Naxals as a military intelligence operative and added that he had shared every detail of his operations with his seniors. This is not the first time that Purohit has written to Parrikar. In November 2015, he had written to him requesting for copies of the Court of Inquiry against him by the Army. He finally got copies of the CoI proceedings following court's intervention. "It remains a matter of fact, which one may care to pursue from the CoI papers, now with the Sessions Court in Mumbai, that as many as 14 reports were initiated by me during my tenure in Maharashtra after successfully infiltrating SIMI, IM and Naxals operating in Northern Maharashtra," he had said. Two explosions had ripped through powerloom town of Malegaon in Maharashtra in September 2008 killing seven people. Taking a dim view of JD(U) and RJD endorsing Nitish Kumar having 'PM material', LJP supremo and Union Food and Consumer Affairs Minister Ramvilas Paswan today described the issue as "frivolous." "It's a frivolous question...I don't wish to comment on it," he said in reply to a question on his views on JD(U) and RJD endorsing Kumar having 'PM material'. "What is the material" about it? Paswan shot back at reporters when pressed further for his views on the issue. Paswan said that he had been given mandate to make Bihar a crime-free state, but murder, including that of police officers, had become the order of the day. "There is a murder taking place everyday....Even police officers are falling prey to criminals," he said, adding that three policemen were killed by criminals in the state. Paswan, however, said that nobody was stopping one from projecting oneself as PM candidate. JD(U) leaders have been egging on Kumar to take forward his prime ministerial ambition by describing him as 'PM material' ever since he has taken over the post of the party's national president from Sharad Yadav recently. RJD supremo Lalu Prasad and his Deputy Chief Minister son Tejaswi Yadav also endorsed the chief minister's prime ministerial ambition. AAP government today termed as "motivated" the PIL in Delhi High Court seeking scrapping of the appointment of the Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission (DERC) chairperson. A bench of Chief Justice G Rohini and Justice Jayant Nath was told that the petition, which alleged that the appointment was in violation of rules, was "aimed at deriding the efforts" of Delhi Government which "ensure a democratic and efficient governance of electricity" in the national capital. "The writ petition is a motivated petition which has been instituted masquerading as a PIL, in fact it relates to a service matter and this court as well as the Supreme Court of India in several cases has held that the petition in matters of service laws impugning the appointment etc. Of persons in government service are not liable to be entertained under the garb of the PIL," Delhi government said in their affidavit filed through advocate Sanjoy Ghose said. It further said "there is no merit in admitting and entertaining the PIL and therefore it is prayed that the same may be dismissed with exemplary cost". "The petition only exposes that the present petitioner is engaged in a motivated litigation aimed at deriding the efforts of Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (GNCTD) who ensure a democratic and efficient governance of electricity in GNCTD," the affidavit said. The response came in the backdrop of the court's notice issued on a PIL that AAP government has made the appointment without seeking the Lieutenant Governor's approval. The court was hearing a plea by A Mishra, who sought quashing of the appointment of Krishna Saini, alleging that it was in violation of the February 20, 2004 notification issued of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) under Article 239 (1) of the Constitution read with section 2 (5) (b) and Section 85 of the Electricity Act, 2003. A 1981 batch Indian Revenue Service officer, Saini assumed office on March 4. The petition has contended that in the past, all DERC chairpersons have been appointed with the consent of the LG, but the Delhi government made this appointment without seeking the LG's approval. "The MHA notification of February 2004 has delegated and enabled the LG to discharge powers and functions of the state government under the Electricity Act 2003. The delegation of power contained in the notification will continue to operate unless superseded or the Parliament by law provides otherwise. "The Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (GNCTD) Act 1991 does not in any way affect the validity of delegation contained in presidential notification issued under Article 239," the petition has said. However, Delhi government in its affidavit said that the new chairman of DERC was appointed on the recommendation of the selection committee constituted under Section 85 of the Electricity Act, 2003. It claimed that "the appointment follows permission granted by the High Court of Delhi in its order dated February 24, 2016. The appointment would be subject to the result of the writ petition... Pending before the High Court." The petitioner, an advocate, has also sought quashing of January 6 order of the AAP government constituting Selection Committee under Section 85 of the Electricity Act 2003, as the same was in violation of the MHA notification. It sought direction to quash November 11 last year notice by which application for the post were invited. The plea has said the LG should be directed to constitute appropriate Selection Committee afresh exercising his power. The high court's February 24 direction came during the hearing of a different PIL by Delhi resident Raman Suri challenging Delhi government's December 2015 notification seeking applications for the post of DERC chairperson and one member. The Delhi government had told the court the notification had been issued under the existing provisions which allow the appointment of a sitting or former judge as the chairperson, if so decided by the government. The Uttarakhand High Court's verdict setting aside imposition of President's rule in the state today spurred an elated Congress to attack the BJP, demanding an apology from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah for "trampling" democracy and "murdering" constitution. The verdict is a slap on face of BJP for trying to dislodge an elected government, it said. Terming the court's verdict as a victory of people of Uttarakhand, democracy and constitutional norms, AICC Incharge Communications Randeep Singh Surjewala said Prime Minister Modi and Amit Shah should learn a lesson from this "decisive and resounding verdict. "This is a victory for the people of Uttarakhand, democracy and constitutional norms. This is also a slap on the face of those in BJP who sought to dislodge an elected government, elected with the mandate of people in Uttarakhand. "Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah will be well advised to now tender an unconditional apology to the nation and also to people of Uttarakhand for trampling upon democracy, murdering constitution norms and subjugating the will of people to their blind quest to dislodge Congress governments. We welcome the verdict," Surjewala said. He said that it proves the full majority which Congress enjoys and the "sinister conspiracies" which are being hatched from Arunanchal Pradesh to Uttarakhand and many other states to dislodge elected governments by "foul means, use of money and muscle power" should now at least come to an end. "Prime Minister Modi and Amit Shah should learn a lesson from this decisive and resounding verdict," he said. Putting up a brave front, BJP claimed the Harish Rawat government in Uttarakhand is in minority and that this will be proved on April 29. The kind of observations the state High Court has been making for last three days, we are not surprised by its order, BJP General Secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya said. Union Minister and BJP leader Kiren Rijiju said that blaming the central government for something which was a creation of the Congress is "unfortunate". "We all respect the court verdict. I have nothing to comment on it but just to blame the central government for a particular situation which has been created by Congress party, that is unfortunate. It is congress party's creation, not ours (BJP)," he said. Dealing a major blow to Modi government, the Uttarakhand High Court today quashed the imposition of President' rule in the state and revived the Congress government headed by Harish Rawat, who has been asked to prove his majority on April 29. Coming down heavily on the Centre for the March 27 proclamation under Art 356, a division bench of the high court headed by Chief Justice K M Joseph said the imposition of the President's rule was contrary to the law laid down by the Supreme Court. In Dehradun, an upbeat Rawat all set to get back to office, said his government does not want to fight with the "mighty, powerful and broad-chested" Centre, but asked it to work in a spirit of cooperative federalism. Asking the Modi government to forget the recent developments and cooperate, Rawat said he has also asked his colleagues to let go off the bitterness and work together to take the state forward on the path of development. Left parties lambasted the Modi government, saying the high court verdict was a "slap to the subverters" of the Constitution. "The anti-constitutional juggernaut of BJP's central government has been halted in its tracks by the judiciary in Uttarakhand. It is a slap to the subverters of the Constitution," CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury said. Rijiju, the Minister of State for Home, was dismissive about whether it was a "mistake" on BJP's part and blamed the Congress for creating such a situation in the state. "Its not a question of embarrassment or mistake on our part. It was the situation created by the Congress party. They were in the government, they were having a majority with support of some MLAs. There was a revolt by 9 MLAs, reducing the government to a minority. How is BJP responsible for that situation? "With regards to observation of the court, I do not have to say anything because we all have our defined role. We in the executive have our own role to play and judiciary has its own role to play. We do not have to comment on each other's observations or judgements. We honour whatever decision has been passed by the court," he said. Asked about BJP's role in a similar situation in Arunachal Pradesh, he said that the situation in Uttarkhand and Arunanchal Pradesh was "not comparable". "There are slightly different situation within the Congress party. In Arunachal Pradesh, it is the Chief Minister who had lost the majority. They had disqualified some of the MLAs by using the Speakers position. "In Uttarakhand, it is just a simple revolt within the Congres party where the finance bill was not supposed to pass without majority and they forcefully tried to pass it by voice vote. It is not a comparable situation in case of Arunanchal and Uttarakhand," he said. Former Union Minister and senior Congress leader Anand Sharma said the Prime Minister, the Central government and the BJP stood "exposed" for "abusing their authority". "The Prime Minister, his government and the BJP stand exposed for abusing their authority, misusing the provisions of the Constitution, destabilising democratically-elected governments, using questionable undemocratic means and methods, huge resources and allurements. "The Prime Minister and the Home Minister need to apologise for the sin that was committed. BJP also stands condemned for its double standards, its hypocrisy and brazen political opportunism," he said. Asked about BJP's claims of challenging the High Court verdict on the plea that they had the majority, Sharma said, "they needed this time apparently to manufacture something." He said if they had the majority, then why President's Rule was imposed on a Sunday, a few hours before the trust vote was asked for by the Governor of Uttarakhand and after the Speaker had convened the session. Senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel said, "The verdict of the Uttarakhand High Court is not just a victory for the Congress party but a victory for democracy." Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi said, "Power is available only through democratic means not through misuse of Art 356." He added, "This judgement reminds us that those eyeing other states with avaricious eyes must control their greed....This deplorable process of debasing federalism & democracy is arrested by this judgement." "As we said, we are giving horses a bad name. Ultimately the law is clear. That law was violated by the Centre," he also said. Reacting to High Court verdict, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal tweeted, "This is a huge embarrassment to Modi Govt. He shud stop interfering wid elected govts and respect democracy (sic)". (Reopen Del 51) Shyam Jaju, BJP's in-charge of Uttarakhand, said Congress will lose in the floor test claiming that a majority of MLAs are with his party. Jaju defended the imposition of President' rule and said the party was hopeful that the Supreme Court, where the Centre will tomorrow an appeal against the High Court order, will stay the judgement. (REOPENS DES53) Reacting to the High Court verdict on Uttarakhand, former Attorney General Soli Sorabjee today said President's Rule is not beyond judicial review. "President can be wrong and Central government can be wrong. The court has jurisdiction to enquire into imposition of President's Rule. President's Rule is not beyond judicial review," Sorabjee said. "I must congratulate Abhishek Manu Singhvi for the arguments presented before the court. At the nightfall of the day, the appeal by the government is certain. See what happens when the appeal is filed," he said. Police in Colombia's capital are on maximum alert after two nearly simultaneous explosions rattled residents but caused no injuries. Daniel Mejia, the head of security for Bogota, says the first explosion took place outside the office of a health care insurer yesterday. Shortly after that, another blast occurred closer to downtown in an area where Mejia says several health care providers also have offices. He says there have been no reports of injuries and nobody has claimed responsibility. An animal rights campaigner has written to the Chief Controller of Explosives, Nagpur, and the Director of Project Elephant alleging violations of Wildlife Protection Act and Sound Pollution Regulation Rules in the recently concluded Thrissur Pooram. Centuries-old Thrissur Pooram festival concluded on Tuesday with thousands witnessing the parade of richly-caparisoned elephants and performance by over 500 percussionists amid tight security. Thrissur-based Heritage Animal Task Force wrote in a letter that two elephants, aged 86 and 50 years, were "forced" to stand near the site where thousands of kgs of high-decibel crackers had been burst as part of fireworks display on the concluding day of the Pooram festivities. "Compelling elephants to stand amidst fireworks is a violation of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1960, Wildlife Protection Act 1972 and Sound Pollution Regulation Rules 2004," HATF secretary V K Venkatachalam said. "All these violations took place with direct support of Kerala government," he alleged in the letter, released to media. The letter alleged that the organisers of the Pooram had also paraded 74 elephants for 36 hours on April 17 and 18 as part of the festival, who had wounds all over their bodies due to torture for compelling the jumbo to stand and walk. These elephants had no opportunity to drink water or take food for 36 hours, it said. "This type of organised crime against elephants was a violation of Supreme Court August 18, 2015 order which specifically authorise the Kerala Forest Department to arrest all the persons who are party to torture any elephant as part of any elephant parade," the letter said. The order also specifically authorises the department to seize all the elephants, being paraded without any valid ownership certificate duly issued by Kerala Chief Wildlife Warden during 2003 before the expiry of 18th October. All the 74 elephants do not have any valid ownership certificate, the letter said, adding, that the three-layeredstructure of the western 'gopuram' (tower) of Vadakkumnathan Temple, in front of which Pooram was performed, was also destroyed in the event. Senior Congress leaders and poll strategist Prashant Kishor today held day-long interaction with party workers and heads of its frontal organisations here to review preparations for the 2017 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections. "Party workers should not just contest the upcoming Assembly polls merely with the aim of increasing seats but should strive to form the next government," AICC General Secretary and UP in charge Madhusudan Mistry told the meeting. Mistry said the aim of forming the next government in the state can be achieved only when members of all the cells and departments wholeheartedly contribute to the task of working to resolve the problems faced by people. "It has always been Congress' aim to work for the state and the country and all need to contribute in this direction," he said. Noting that almost 50 districts in the state are drought-affected, Mistry said party workers should start helping common people and also carve a niche for the party in their hearts. Kishor asked Youth Congress workers to prepare at least one dedicated worker for every booth who will be provided with I-cards and mobile phones and they will be made to meet top leader to convey the ground situation. After helping landslide victories for Narendra Modi in 2014 Lok Sabha elections and JD(U) in Bihar Assembly polls, Kishor has been entrusted with the task of reviving electoral fortunes of Congress in the 403-seat UP Assembly elections. UP PCC chief Nirmal Khatri asked Youth Congress leaders and workers to give suggestions for strengthening the party and improving the tally in the coming elections. The speakers stressed on giving more representation to youths, active participation of senior leaders and avoiding nepotism in ticket distribution, a party release said. The Congress leaders later met activists of the SC/ST department during which Kishor asked them to connect with 10,000 people in each Assembly constituency. A meeting with leaders and workers of remaining frontal organsiations, departments and cells will be held tomorrow by these leaders who will elicit suggestions to draft the party's strategy for the 2017 elections. President Pranab Mukherjee will travel to China next month setting off a series of high-level bilateral visits as the two countries seek to deepen their engagements despite irritants in ties over issues like Beijing blocking India's bid to get a UN ban on JeM head Masood Azhar. Mukherjee's visit was announced by National Security Advisor Ajit Doval when he called on Chinese Premier Li Keqiang here today. "We have had a series of interactions in 2015. We are looking forward to the visit of President of India shortly next month," Doval, who wrapped up his two-day visit to attend the 19th round of border talks with China, said in his opening remarks during his meeting Li. Dates for the visit, expected to take place next month, would be announced simultaneously by both the countries later, officials said. Mukherjee was expected to visit Beijing and Chinese industrial city of Guangzhou which has stronger trade links with India. His visit, which was a reciprocal visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to India in 2014 will be followed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Chinese city of Hangzhou to attend the G20 leaders summit in September. Xi was expected to travel to India to take part in the Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, (BRICS) summit scheduled to be held in Goa on October 15-16. Modi made a high-profile visit to China last year. The visits at the highest level make 2016 a unique year, officials said as they help widen the contacts between the two countries. This itself is a progress in India-China context, one official said. Such higgh-level contacts were expected to help iron out irritants like the China's repeated move to block India's bid to ban Jaish-e-Muhammad leader Azhar in UN. China has put a technical hold on the India's move setting off strong reactions from New Delhi. The issue figured in this week's meetings between External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar and Doval with their counterparts. Amid reports that the prices of pulses have started moving northwards, Union Food and Consumer Affairs Minister Ram Vilas Paswan today said adequate measures have been taken to keep rates under control this season. "We are aware of reports that prices of pulses are shooting up again, but this time there is no chance of prices rising beyond the normal level as adequate measures have been taken to contain prices," he told reporters on the sidelines of a meeting of states and Union Territories of eastern region to review performance of consumer courts, BIS, NTH, legal metrology and price monitoring. Paswan said the Food Corporation of India has procured 50,000 tonnes of pulses from farmers and imported another 25,000 tonnes to meet the domestic demand. In addition, one lakh tonne pulses will be procured from farmers this season to create a buffer stock, he said. Paswan said the food and consumer affairs ministry has written to the states to inquire about their demand for pulses but none has reported specific requirement. Referring to rise in dal prices last year, he said hoarders were responsible for creating shortage. "But this time lessons have been learnt and no price rise will be allowed to take place as adequate buffer stock will be maintained in addition to the produce available in the market at any given time." On the surge in sugar prices recently, the union minister said he expected no further increase given the abundant availability of the produce. He, however, said the increased price at present rate reflected a fair value of the commodity against input and other cost of farmers. The government had increased import duty on sugar to 40 per cent against 15 per cent earlier and allowed export of the commodity, besides use of sugarcane for production of ethanol so that the farmers could get fair price, Paswan said. Priyanka Chopra may be flying high in Hollywood but the actress is also a strong emotional and physical support to her cousin Meera Chopra back in Bollywood. "Priyanka is a great emotional and physical support for me in the industry. She has said, 'whatever happens, I am always there'. This industry can be very scary for a newcomer but if you have someone like her, who will take care of you, it is a huge support," Meera told PTI. "Because of her I take a lot of liberties which a newcomer might not take because I know at the end of the day somebody is there to take care of it," she added. Meera made her Bollywood debut with "Gang of Ghosts" and will be next seen in "1920 London", a horror film opposite Sharman Joshi. The actress, who has worked in many South Indian films, did not take any acting advice from Priyanka but was touched when the "Bajirao Mastani" star called her and said she was proud of her. "Priyanka saw the trailer of '1920 London' and said, this is the first Hindi film trailer she found really scary. She said she is really proud of me. Priyanka has always told me don't do something I will not be proud of. I wish she was here, I could show her the movie." Directed by Tinu Suresh Desai, "1920 London" is the third instalment in the "1920" horror franchise. It is slated to release on May 6. On being quizzed that Meera can star with Priyanka and her other cousin, Parineeti Chopra, in a film, the actress quipped that Priyanka will not come to India for the next two years. "I think that is very difficult because Priyanka won't even come to India for the next two years. Honestly, I feel she will be very successful in Hollywood because I know how she is. She is very aggressive in her work and confident. In the next two years she will be conquering Hollywood." Priyanaka is currently shooting in Los Angeles for her Hollywood film "Baywatch" and was recently in India to receive Padma Shri award. Meera said it has become a routine for the 33-year-old actress to bag honours. Tremendous progress achieved in Afghanistan has made the US safer, but still a lot of work has to be done in the war torn country for the advancement of national security interests, the White House has said, a day after a Taliban bomb blast in Kabul killed 30 people. "There is no denying that tremendous progress that we have made in Afghanistan, it has made America safer. But there are years of work, decades of work that still needs to be done in that region of the world to continue to advance our national security interests," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters at his daily conference yesterday. The White House remarks came as the Afghan capital Kabul was hit by a major terrorist attack. "The US strongly condemns the cowardly attack on Afghan forces and civilians in Kabul this morning that killed dozens and wounded hundreds. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families and their loved ones," he said. At the outset of this year's fighting season, the US remain committed to support the Afghan people and their government, Earnest said as he called on the Taliban to pursue a pathway of peace instead of continuing a military campaign responsible for the senseless deaths of Afghan civilians. "We remain steadfast partners with Afghan security forces as we work to promote peace and stability in the region and as we counter the threat of terrorism that affects all of us. "I do not have an updated assessment in terms of what if any impact this attack would have on our military posture going forward. Obviously the President had an opportunity to talk about this at the end of last year. And this will be among the important policy decisions that the incoming President, President Obama's successor, will have to make," Earnest said. When Barack Obama took office in 2009, he did so vowing to follow through on a campaign promise to ensure that the US and the international community was focused on the terror threat that was emanating from this region of the world, he said. "And the sense was - not just the sense of President Obama, but also the sense of the American people - was that our attention had drifted from Afghanistan and been diverted to the situation in Iraq. "Obama vowed to recalibrate that situation and to ensure that we were reinforcing our efforts in Afghanistan and in that region of the world where we know the al-Qaeda leadership, under the protection of the Taliban, had carried out the 9/11 attacks against the US," Earnest said. Obama, he said, has executed a military and diplomatic strategy that has decimated core al-Qaeda, that took Osama bin Laden off the battlefield, and that has supported an Afghan government that is committed to the kind of security approach that we're supporting. At least 30 people were killed and hundreds injured when a Taliban truck bomb tore through central Kabul yesterday. A group of dalit residents who have been protesting against the opening of a liquor shop in their locality have claimed that they have converted to Buddhism as the state administration has ignored their demand. The residents ofSant Ravidas Colony in Bhadasia suburb of Jodhpur have been protesting for three weeks now against the liquor shop. Some of the protesting residents have also got themselves tonsured. Ashok Balotia, one of the protesters who shaved his head, said that they would continue their movement against the liquor shop "come what may". "We had warned of conversion from Hinduism and since we are followers of B R Ambedkar, we have adopted Buddhism like him," he said. Bhagwanti from the same locality said that they were ready to go to any extent to stop the opening of the liquor shop and would not settle for anything less than the cancellation of the shop licence. Districtcollector Vishnu Charan Mallik said that they are looking into the issue and would soon come out with a solution. "We are up to it in order to come out with a mutually acceptable solution and hope that in a day or two, the issue would be resolved," said Mallik. Depositors queued up in front of the office of Maple Group here today as the firm, accused of misleading people to promote its low-cost housing scheme, started refunding money following registration of a case for cheating. The people, mainly from low income groups, lined up to recover Rs 1,145, which they paid for registration for the one-bedroom flats priced at Rs 5 lakh each in the advertisement. The firm yesterday apologised for the "confusion and inconvenience" caused to people through its advertisements. Maple Group had recently published advertisements promising a one-bedroom, hall, kitchen (1 BHK) flat for just Rs 5 lakh on the outskirts of the city. The advertisement carried pictures of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Pune Guardian Minister Girish Bapat, apparently to "mislead" people into believing the project, titled 'Maharashtra Housing Day', was a part of Pradhan Mantri Aawas Yojana (PMAY). The firm, headed by Sachin Agarwal, deployed bouncers to deal with restive depositors who expressed their resentment at the government's "negligence in allowing" the builder to roll out the dubious scheme. Around 20,000 people had enrolled for the scheme that was to carry out registrations till May 1, Investigating officer of Economic Offences Wing Dipak Sakore said, adding, "Around 1,200 people reclaimed their money today." Booking was done both online and physically. The promoters could face arrest depending on the evidence collected in the case, he said. Bapat is being targeted by the opposition parties over the dubious scheme. Congress, NCP and MNS have demanded his resignation alleging that the firm indulged in the "fraud" with his blessings. Bapat has already denied the charge, saying he never had any personal contact or meeting with Agarwal and the government has taken a swift action in freezing accounts of the firm, initiating police action and ensuring refund of people's money. A day after BJP claimed the Rafale aircraft deal with France has been "finalised" at $8.8 billion (Rs 59,000 crore), Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar said Thursday it is not complete as yet but at an "advanced stage" and the intention is to "close it quite soon". In a lighter vein, he told reporters here that the BJP tweet only indicates that journalists write stories very convincingly. BJP had yesterday tweeted a graphic, saying that the Rafale combat aircraft deal has been "finalised" and the Narendra Modi government had saved over Rs 21,000 crore in the "re-negotiation" with the French government. Defence Ministry sources had earlier said the deal was at an advanced stage and both India and France had narrowed down their differences over the pricing issue. "I can only tell you this much that while the deal is in quite an advanced stage, and we intent to close it quite soon, I still can't say that negotiations are totally cleared until we sign the deal or at least the deal is forwarded to the Cabinet for approval," Parrikar said. The deal is expected to be finalised by May end. India has been bargaining hard with France over the pricing of the 36 fighter planes, a deal that was announced first by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in April last year. The cost of the 36 Rafales, as per the earlier tender while keeping the cost escalation into account, comes to around Rs 65,000 crore. India has been bargaining for a price that is less than 8 billion Euro (Rs 59,000 crore). "The deal to buy 36 state-of-the-art Rafale aircraft from France at 12 billion dollar (Rs 80000 crore) was re-negotiated and finalised at 8.8 billion dollar (around Rs 59000 crore)," the BJP tweet had said. The government "saved" public money and the deal resulted in gain of "technological knowledge" and "strengthening the air power to defend the border", it had said. Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu today travelled in a 'local' train, interacted with commuters and also got invited to a wedding by a passenger. Prabhu, who attended an event at the Central Railway's prestigious Matunga Workshop, boarded the local train at Currey Road station and alighted at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST). Prabhu interacted with commuters during the journey. A commuter gave him a wedding invitation and requested the minister to accept it. The Minister later left for Mantralaya (state secretariat), where he, along with Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, briefed media on upcoming rail projects in the state. Pakistan today said it was ready to talk to India when the latter is ready. "Pakistan will be ready to talk when India is ready," Foreign Office spokesman Nafees Zakaria said when asked about resumption of peace process. "This question has been repeatedly asked and I would not enter into the debate of what words were used by both sides," he said at the weekly briefing. To another question, he said that Pakistan and India are the two neighbors which "must live in peace and harmony". On the Pathankot terror attack probe, he said relevant departments were dealing with the finding of JIT which visited India and once the investigations had been completed and a report compiled, "we will share with you the shareable information." About an Indian NIA team's visit to Pakistan, he said, "I am not aware of any official request in this regard." Commenting on reported test of a Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile by India, Zakaria said the development of a nuclear submarine fleet would "impact the delicate strategic balance of the region." On Kashmir, Zakaria said Pakistan highlights the alleged human rights violations of Kashmiris at all the forums. He said the arrest of alleged "Indian agent" Kulbushan Yadav vindicated Pakistan's longstanding position that India has a hand in terrorist incidents taking place in the country. He also claimed that based on Yadav's confessional statements, "arrests have been made". He, however, refused to share the details of those arrests. When asked to comment on Col. Purohit, arrested on charges of planning and carrying out the Samjhauta Express blast in 2007, he said the train attack mastermind Swami Aseemanand in public named Purohit and other officials. "We will not go by media reports. Our requirement and request of sharing details of the Samjhauta Express terrorist attack investigations is pending with the Indian government. Despite promises, the investigations have not been shared. Let's see when will they get back to us about the outcome of the investigations of this incident in which a lot of innocent Pakistanis lost their lives," he said. Reliance Defence has sought the Commerce Ministry's approval to manufacture defence equipment at its special economic zones (SEZs) in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. "The proposals of Reliance Defence Ltd for grant of industrial licences for manufacturing of defence products...Is placed before the BoA for a decision," the Commerce Ministry said in a note. An inter-ministerial Board of Approval (BoA), chaired by Commerce Secretary Rita Teaotia, will consider these requests on April 28. Different arms of the Reliance Defence Ltd, including Reliance SED Ltd and Reliance Land Systems, have sought industrial licences to manufacture different items like amphibious vehicles for military use, all types of ammunition and fuses, small arms, heavy weapons and electronic warfare systems. Its two SEZ units are in Pithampur, Dhar (Madhya Pradesh) and Mihan, Nagpur (Maharashtra). In its comments, the Department of Defence Production has recommended these proposals, subject to standard terms and conditions of licensing and the extant FDI policy guidelines applicable to the defence sector. Maharashtra government has also recommended the proposals but has put conditions like 80 per cent of recruitment to be done locally, the agenda note said. RIL's telecom arm Reliance Jio Infocomm has trimmed its net loss to Rs 11.40 crore during six months ended March 2016. In the corresponding six months to March 2015, the company's net loss was at Rs 15.44 crore. Total income from operations during the October-March period of 2015-16 stood Rs 2,00,000 (Rs 0.02 crore) which remained unchanged from the year ago period, the company said in a regulatory filing to the BSE. For the full year ended March 2016, Reliance Jio's net loss stood almost flat at Rs 23.88 crore as against Rs 23.12 crore a year earlier. The corresponding income for full fiscals-- 2015-16 and 2014-15-- were constant at Rs 4,00,000 (Rs 0.04 crore). Reliance Industries, which promotes Reliance Jio, has invested over Rs 1 lakh crore to rollout 4G mobile services in the country. The company has made an advance payment of Rs 2,860 crore to Reliance Communications Ltd (RCom) towards change in allotment of agreed spectrum in the 850 Mhz band in nine service areas which in included in capital advances, it said. "The completion of the transaction is subject to obtaining final approval from the DoT which is pending March 31, 2016", it added. RCom will trade CDMA grade spectrum in 800 MHz band in nine service areas where Jio doesn't have radiowaves. In 17 circles, the two companies has signed spectrum sharing agreement. RCom has already paid Rs 5,383.84 crore to liberalise its spectrum in 16 circles which include Delhi, Mumbai, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, UP East and West, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Kolkata and Bihar. A liberalised spectrum allows telecom operators to use any technology to deliver mobile services like 3G and 4G. Besides, they will be able to introduce new technologies and share and trade it with other operators for its efficient use. During the year, the company has issued and allotted 1,500 crore equity shares of Rs 10 each, at par to Reliance Industries Ltd, its holding company, it added further. Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya today urged Health Minister J P Nadda to reconsider the mandated pictorial warnings covering 85 per cent of the packaging space on beedi packets, a move that threatens the livelihood of 1.50 crore workers. Dattatreya today also held tripartite consultations on the notification issued on October 15, 2010 and its impact on the beedi workers and the industry. From April 1, 2016, Health Ministry's notification came into force for implementation of the Cigarettes and other Tobacco Products (Packaging and Labeling) Amendment Rules, 2014. It prescribes larger pictorial warnings, covering 85 per cent of packets on tobacco products. In a letter to Nadda, the Labour Minister said that the notification has invited "severe criticism" from stakeholders in spite of the government's noble intentions. Dattatreya raised concern over impending loss of livelihood opportunities to beedi workers, which mostly comprises home-based and piece-rate workers who earn their living solely from beedi rolling or packaging. "It is my understanding that the poor and illiterate beedi workers of our country are not ready at the moment to migrate to an alternative occupation, which will ensure a decent livelihood," he wrote in the letter. He said that the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Subordinate Legislation has made a recommendation for reconsideration to bring down the size of the pictorial warning to 50 per cent. Meanwhile, the RSS-backed trade union, Bhartiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), said during the tripartite consultations the Labour Minister asked the Health Secretary to reconsider the notification in the interest of 1.5 crore beedi workers and the 5 crore people who are dependent on them. The union has asked the government to reconsider its decision regarding the notification, it said in a statement. Earlier this month, All India Beedi Industry Federation, a body of over 240 manufacturers controlling over two-third of total branded beedi production, said the loss due to stopping production will be around Rs 200 crore a day. The overall beedi industry in India is estimated at around Rs 7,500 crore, with members of AIBIF members contributing around Rs 5,000 crore. Union Minister Kiren Rijiju today defended the Centre's decision to impose President's rule in Uttarakhand that was set aside by the Uttarakhand High Court, saying the crisis had erupted in the hill state due to "division" in Congress party. "There is no set back for the Central government. Everything had happened due to the division in the Congress party," he told PTI here. Rijiju, Minister of State for Home, said the Congress party should apologise to the country as the current political turmoil had erupted in Uttarakhand due to the rebellion by nine Congress MLAs. Delivering a major blow to the Modi government, the Uttarakhand High Court today quashed the proclamation of President's rule in the state and revived the Congress government headed by Harish Rawat, who has been asked to prove his majority in the Assembly on April 29. Coming down heavily on the Centre for the March 27 proclamation under Art 356, a division bench of the High Court headed by Chief Justice K M Joseph said the imposition of President's rule was contrary to the law laid down by the Supreme Court. A sum of Rs 1.34 crore being illegally taken to Kerala was today seized from two persons travelling in a bus at the city bus-stand. The seizure was made during intensified vehicle checks in the early hours by election department and police officials to prevent money being taken for bribing voters. The amount was kept in two bags, each containing Rs.67 lakh and the two passengers, proceeding to Kerala in a Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation bus, were taken into custody for questioning as they were unable to provide proper documents for carrying the money, police said. The amount would be handed over once proper documents are produced, police added. (Reopens MES2) Meanwhile, a Karaikal report said a Flying Squad led by Deputy Collector Manikandan seized 10.1 lakh from an individual during the vehicle check last night. The checking at Vanchoor check post was made in view of the May 16 assembly polls. Rajya Sabha Chairman Hamid Ansari has referred the issue of CPI-M general secretary Sitaram Yechury allegedly receiving threat calls over his participation in a discussion in the House on the JNU row, to Privileges Committee for investigation. "Chairman, Rajya Sabha has referred a question of breach of privilege arising out of the complaint of Sitaram Yechury, who has allegedly received threatening calls and derogatory messages as a result of his participation in a discussion in the House on February 26 this year to Committee of Privileges for examination, investigation and report under rule 203 of the Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business in Rajya Sabha," a communique from the Upper House said today. Yechury had earlier said in February that he received threat calls and text messages for allegedly saying "wrong" things about Goddess Durga in the Rajya Sabha. Yechury had complained about having received threats in connection with his stance on the JNU row allegedly from right-wing forces. During his speech in the Upper House, Yechury had taken on HRD Minister Smriti Irani for quoting certain Facebook posts purportedly written by Hyderabad University research scholar Rohith Vemula, who committed suicide, which were critical of the CPI(M) leader, and accused her of making "all foul fair". He had questioned the veracity of the Facebook account that she had claimed to be that of Vemula. Yechury had later said he got around 1000 calls and 500 text messages on his personal phone during the day. The Rajya Sabha member had earlier claimed to have received threat calls on CPM head office's landline number on February 15 in connection with the varsity row. Delhi police had taken suo moto cognizance of the reports of alleged threats to Yechury and also asked for a complaint which his office had lodged. Even as major parties have announced their strategy for the Puducherry Assembly polls on May 16, the ruling AINRC is yet to spell out its plans with the polling process to be set in process tomorrow. Chief Minister N Rangasamy is yet to announce the strategy of his All India N R Congress. BJP, which contested the 2014 Lok Sabha polls in alliance with AINRC, is likely to contest on its own. Meanwhile, Congress and DMK have firmed up alliance with the former being allotted 21 seats and the latter got the remaining nine segments. However, identification of the constituencies has not been completed despite several rounds of talks among the leaders of these two parties during the last few days. DMK's arch rival AIADMK has announced candidates for all 30 seats in the Union Territory. The five-party People's Welfare Alliance has also finalised the number of seats to be contested by them. Meanwhile, some candidates seeking election or re-election have started offering worship in various temples, particularly Manakula Vinayakar shrine here, with the polling process to be set in motion tomorrow with publication of the statutory notification. Filing of nomination papers would also commence on the day. Top leaders of various parties from Tamil Nadu would address rallies in the next few days in Puducherry. Puducherry has 23 assembly segments, Karaikal (five) and Mahe and Yanam one each. Election authorities have been going ahead with full-fledged arrangements to record cent per cent polling in the Union Territory. Several programmes under the Systematic Voters Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP) have been conducted in the Union Territory disseminating the message that the 'votes are not for sale' and to encourage ethical voting. SAD MP Prem Singh Chandumajra today sought urgent and renewed diplomatic initiative by the Centre to secure a direct two-way access controlled corridor from Dera Baba Nanak in India to Kartarpur Sahib in Pakistan to enable Sikhs visit the holy place associated with the life of Guru Nanak Dev, their first guru. Chandumajra, the Punjab's ruling party MP, welcomed the efforts of Punjab-based Society for Promotion of Peace (SPP) and National Press Club (NPC), Pakistan, in this regard. He sought prompt resolution to this emotive issue to enable the millions of devotees from India and abroad to pay obeisance at Kartarpur Sahib. Kartarpur Sahib Gurdwara was one of the most revered places of Sikhs and is situated just three kms from the International Border on the Pakistan side. Chandumajra impressed upon the Union Ministry of External Affairs to take up the issue with the federal authorities in Pakistan. Lok Sabha MP Prem Singh Chandumajra today said SAD would file defamation suit against Congress leader Sunil Jakhar for alleging a scam worth Rs 20,000 crore on account of misappropriation of food grains. "Akali dal will file a defamation suit against Jakhar soon," he said He claimed that the issuance of Cash Credit Limit (CCL) by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has vindicated the stand of SAD-BJP alliance that there was no misappropriation of even a single grain in the state. He slammed former Chief of Congress Legislature party Jakhar for indulging in cheap politics over this sensitive issue. The Lok Sabha MP said that had there been a bit of embezzlement in food grains than the RBI would not have issued the CCL to the state. Chandumajra said that in their mad race to emerge taller than their rivals within the party, the Congress leaders were indulging in mudslinging against the ruling alliance thereby misleading the people of the state. Global financial markets would be destabilised if Saudi Arabia decides to sell off the USD 750 billion worth of American assets it holds in protest against a controversial legislation that would allow 9/11 victims to sue the kingdom, the White House has warned. "What I'll just say in general is our concern is that a hypothetical transaction or series of transactions like this would destabilise the global financial markets," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said. Earnest said this when asked about the reported Saudi threat that the kingdom would sell its stakes in the US if the controversial Congressional legislation is passed, and what kind of damage it may cause to the American economy generally. "That kind of instability and that kind of volatility is not in the interest of any of the advanced economies around the world. Both the US and Saudi Arabia would be in the category of advanced economies that would not benefit from a situation like that," he said. "Given our shared interest in protecting the stability of the global financial system, I suspect it's not something that would be considered for long," Earnest said. Authored by Senators John Cornyn and Charles Schumer, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act would allow victims of the September 11, 2001, massacre and other attacks to sue nations supporting terrorism. The Obama administration has lobbied Congress to block the bill's passage, according to Obama administration officials. The officials have warned senators of diplomatic and economic fallout from the legislation. Obama is headed to the Saudi Arabia later this week. Earnest said the administration has worked effectively with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) partners to add important resources to their campaign to counter the Islamic State (IS) group. "We have worked closely with the Saudis and the Emiratis and other GCC partners to shut down ISIL's efforts to finance their operations," he said using another acronym for the IS. "Some of the countries that the President will be meeting with have capitals who are a regional financial center, and by blocking or at least countering ISIL's ability to access the services available in those capitals is important to our longer-term success," Earnest said. There are a variety of ways in which the partnership between the US and Saudi Arabia has been enhanced under Obama's leadership in a way that is good for the US, that is good for US national security, and that's good for homeland security. "That's always what the President is focused on when he's making these kinds of decisions and when he's engaged in this kind of diplomacy. This is a good example of the President focused on the right goal in pursuit of the kind of common ground that benefits the citizens of both the United States and Saudi Arabia," Earnest said. A senior Delhi Police officer's private car was allegedly stolen from outside his residence in south-west Delhi's Dwarka area today, police said. The incident took place in the afternoon when unidentified auto-lifters targeted the Toyota Innova SUV of the officer, posted as Deputy Commissioner in Delhi Police's security unit and made away with the vehicle without anyone noticing it. It was the officer's personal car, which he had parked outside his residence, police said. "A case has been registered at Dwarka (South) Police Station and we are searching for the stolen vehicle," DCP (southwest) Surender Kumar said. Being a private vehicle, the SUV had no beacon light or any sticker for special access to restricted zones as such, a senior official said. He further said, it is quite possible that the auto- lifters did not even know that the car they targeted belongs to a senior police officer. Cadabra will be deployed across ZAP to improve the car ownership experience and help the owner save costs and reduce accidents. "Audi has always been committed towards pioneering mobility solutions, embodying 'Vorsprung durch Technik'. Zoomcar represents both visionary car rental and modern mobility. It's no secret that the Audi Q3 is one of the most popular models in our product portfolio. We are pleased to see that luxury aficionados in the country can now experience our youngest SUVs in India in such a flexible way," said Mr. Rahil Ansari, Head, Audi India. Zoomcar is targeted towards the segment of urban dwellers who don't want to own a car, so, the company has launched 'KLE' - keyless entry, which allows consumers to unlock the cars through an app and can pick up the car and drop them off at various points across your neighbourhood. If you can't find your keys, simply use your smartphone. If you can't find your phone, use your car keys. If you want to loan your car to a friend or rent it to a paying stranger, you send an access code to their phone. The phone talks to the car via GPRS and Bluetooth. The device sits under the bonnet and doesn't require any modifications to the vehicle itself. Zoomcar will work closely with the Audi team to develop even more innovative mobility solutions for urban consumers in the months ahead. Both companies are dedicated to improving urban mobility through the introduction of more convenient, flexible, and engaging product offerings. Zoomcar recently raised $24 million in its Series B round of investment. The investment was led by Ford Smart Mobility LLC, a subsidiary of Ford Motor Company, with existing investors Sequoia Capital, Empire Angel, Nokia Growth Partners, OurCrowd and Cyber Carrier CL also participating in the round. A Sikh-American teenager, who penned a book about bullying of children from the community, was forced to remove his turban by airport personnel in the US state of California, according to a media report. Karanveer Singh Pannu, an 18-year-old high school student from New Jersey, had gone to talk about his book 'Bullying of Sikh American Children: Through the Eyes of a Sikh American High School Student' as an inspirational speaker to address the kids participating in the annual Sikh Youth Symposium in Bakersfield, California. "After going through the metal detector at the airport, I was asked to do a self-pat down of my turban and a chemical swab test for explosive material. After a positive swab test, I was taken to a secondary screening room to be given a full pat down and was asked to remove my turban to be further scanned," Pannu was quoted as saying by NBC.Com. "I refused at first but when they threatened me that I could not fly, I agreed, provided they gave me a mirror to retie my turban," he added. "Before I removed my turban, Agent Hernandez asked the dreaded asinine question, 'Is there anything we need to be aware of before you remove your turban?' I politely answered that there is a lot of long hair and something called the brain underneath." The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) declines to comment on the specifics of any individual passenger's screening experience, but that all TSA officers and contracted screeners are trained to treat all passengers with dignity and respect and receive periodic training regarding cultural and religious sensitivities, A TSA spokesperson told the network. When additional screening requires the removal of religious apparel, officers offer a private room. In 2007, TSA revised its screening procedures for head coverings based on discussions with the Sikh community, the spokesperson said. Pannu said he felt "utterly humiliated, shaken, distraught" by the experience. Senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha today demanded a probe by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) into the incidents in Hazaribagh and its surrounding areas on Ram Navami festival on April 17. "The entire incident that took place on Ram Navami festival should be inquired by the NIA," Sinha told a press conference here. Visiting the incident sites, the former External Affairs minister said he would meet Chief Minister Raghubar Das to seek a proper inquiry by the NIA. Sinha, who visited the spots with local BJP MLA Manish Jaiswal, claimed that as per information "seventy powerful bombs and bomb-making materials were supplied to a particular group in Habibinagar colony of Khirgaon locality by a person from Kolkata who came by bus for creating disturbances in Hazaribagh". Claiming that the intelligence sources had tipped-off the administration, Sinha pointed out that the Khirgaon locality "is known for notorious activities by anti-social elements". Curfew was clamped in Hazaribagh and its surrounding areas on April 17 after two groups of people clashed, torched shops and pelted stones at policemen injuring many of them on the last day of the Ram Navami festival. The trouble started when objectionable recorded slogans were played in a Ram Navami procession triggering clash between the two groups near Hazaribagh railway station. Terming the central governments flagship Smart City project "insufficient and inadequate" for ensuring overall progress of the country, Rajasthan Governor Kalyan Singh stressed the on need to make villages smart. "Villages rather than cities need to be made smart for the overall progress and development of the country," Singh said yesterday at the 6th convocation of Rajasthan Technical University (RTU) at UIT auditorium in Kota. Singh argued the real nation dwells in the villages and hence the country cannot develop and progress by making only the cities smart. "Without making the villages smart, nation cannot become developed and progressive," he said. Singh, who was earlier with the BJP, said he himself belongs to a village and still laments the poor infrastructure and absence of essential amenities like drinking water, electricity, and roads there. The Governor said he had recently asked the state's chief secretary to take the developmental projects and government schemes to the villages to turn them smart. He appreciated the girl students of the RTU for bagging maximum number of medals and degrees and asked the boys to study hard to improve their performance. The Governor gave away 18 gold medals and 80 degrees which were largely shared by girl students. Singh said committing suicide is a sin and an act of cowardice, and added parents should assess their children's ability before deciding what they study. He also expressed concern about poor campus placement. He said only 28 per cent of the students could secure jobs during campus interviews and asked the varsity authorities to take it seriously. The students of the universities should be connected to initiatives like Start Up India and Stand Up India and an adequate package on placement needs to be ensured, he said. All the 23 cities and towns from as many States and Union Territories that were given an opportunity to participate in the 'Fast Track Competition' under Smart City Mission submitted their revised plans today. According to a Urban Development Ministry release, the deadline for submission of Smart city proposals ends today. The revised plans of these 23 cities, including 15 capitals, would be evaluated by May 15 this year and those meeting the benchmark set by the winning cities in the first round of Smart City Challenge Competition will be announced for extending central assistance. Bhubaneswar was ranked number one and Bhopal stood last in the first list of 20 mission cities announced earlier on January 28, 2016. Since only 12 States and UTs were represented in the first list, the Ministry offered another opportunity to the unrepresented 23 States and UTs to participate in Fast Track Competition in pursuance of the principle of urban transformation across the country. After evaluation of Smart City Plans of 97 cities in the first round of competition and announcement of the first list, the remaining were informed of the deficiencies in the plans. The inadequacies identified included, lacunae in assessment of cities, disconnect between citizens' aspirations and vision documents, disconnect between vision document and SWOT analysis, too ambitious nature of plans, mismatch between costs and resource mobilization, lacunae in implementation plans and result orientation. A day after the announcement of the first list of 20 smart cities, Cabinet Secretary P K Sinha had interacted with the Chief Secretaries of all the States and UTs and Municipal Commissioners of all 97 mission cities on the principles of preparation of smart city plans and urged those cities not included in the first list not to lose heart and instead to revisit their plans for addressing deficiencies. During the video-conferencing by Cabinet Secretary, several cities admitted to lacunae in different aspects of plans and assured to correct the same. Urban Development Ministry held a Consultation Workshop for the 23 cities and towns participating in Fast Track Competition besides holding several Studio Workshops wherein respective Smart City Plans were 'read out to rectify'. The 23 cities that submitted their revised Smart City Plans under Fast Track Competition along with respective rank in the first round of competition are: Warangal, Telangana (23), Chandigarh (24), Lucknow (29), New Town in Kolkata (30), Goa (32), Pasighat in Arunachal Pradesh (39); Dharmashala (59), Faridabad (60); Raipur, Chattisgarh (62); Bhagalpur, Bihar (65), Shillong (70); Namchi, Sikkim (71), Port Blair (73), Diu, Daman & Diu (74), Oulgaret, Puducherry (75), Silvassa, Dadra & Nagar Haveli (78), Imphal, Manipal (83), Ranchi (84), Agartala (85), Kohima 90), Kavaratti, Lakshadweep (95) and Dehradun (97). The regular second round of City Challenge Competition for the remaining 97 cities included in the Smart City Mission got underway on April 1st and these cities will have to submit revised smart city plans by the June end this year. The 23 cities which were included in the Fast Track Competition and failed to be selected can also join this second round of competition, the release said. While 20 smart cities were selected during 2015-16 as per the Mission Guidelines, another 40 would be selected during 2016-17 and the remaining 40 during the next financial year. Each city selected in different rounds of competition will be given central assistance of Rs 200 cr in the first year and Rs 100 cr each during the subsequent three financial years. State governments and respective urban local bodies will provide matching funds to the same amount. Accordingly, each mission city would get a total assistance of Rs 1,000 cr over a five-year period. A Norwegian law firm says it has filed a lawsuit asking an Oslo court to ensure that Edward Snowden can travel to Norway to receive an award without risk of being extradited to the United States. Lawyers at the Schjodt law firm in Oslo said today they filed the petition on behalf of Snowden and the Norwegian PEN group, which has invited him to receive its Ossietsky Prize in November. Attorney Halvard Helle told the AP that the petition seeks a "declaratory judgment" stating that Snowden, currently in Russia, cannot be extradited to the US. The former National Security Agency contractor in 2013 leaked details of a secret government eavesdropping program and left the country. He faces US charges that could land him in prison for up to 30 years. A group of investors of Japanese mobile giant SoftBank has sought probe and possible sacking of its India-born COO Nikesh Arora over potential conflicts of interest tied to his role as an adviser to a private equity firm. But SoftBank has stood by the Banaras Hindu University- graduate who is seen as heir-apparent to its billionaire founder Masayoshi Son. New York firm Boies Schiller & Flexner, acting on behalf of unidentified shareholders, wrote to the board questioning Arora's existing role as a senior adviser to private equity firm Silver Lake and alleged past wrongdoing and generally poor business decisions. Another latter to Sprint Corp, which SoftBank controls, asks for his removal as a director for similar reasons. SoftBank, however, stood by Arora, the third-highest paid executive in the world with a pay package of USD 135 million. He is President & Chief Operating Officer of SoftBank Corp. Acknowledging receipt of letter from the US law firm, SoftBank in a statement said, "Mr Arora remains a highly valued leader with proven investment abilities and we are confident he will continue to make great contributions at SoftBank in the years ahead." Son, one of Japan's richest men and the chief executive of SoftBank, backed the former Silicon Valley executive. "I have complete trust in Nikesh and one thousand per cent confidence in him and know he will continue to do great things for SoftBank in the future," Son said in a statement. Arora, 48, denied allegations as baseless. "I take my fiduciary responsibilities seriously and have acted appropriately and in the best interest of shareholders throughout my tenure at SoftBank and Sprint, just as I have conducted myself throughout my professional life. I am completely confident the allegations in the letter are baseless," he said in a statement. Arora -- who gave up a high-profile post at Google to join the Japanese firm in 2014 -- last August said he would buy 60 billion yen of the company's shares, worth USD 483 million at the time to show his confidence in its prospects. That was the largest insider purchase by an executive in Japan for at least 12 years. "We can confirm we are in receipt of a letter from a US law firm claiming to represent unidentified shareholders. The letter makes unsubstantiated allegations against Mr Arora," SoftBank said. "The Board takes its duties seriously and is in the process of reviewing the letter." The unnamed shareholders have alleged conflicts of interest, poor performance in making investments for SoftBank and excessive compensation at the company without sufficient disclosure. The conflict-of-interest allegations center on Arora's role as a senior adviser at Silver Lake, a position he has held since 2007 when he worked at Google. SoftBank said that it is aware of Arora's involvement with Silver Lake and takes care to thoroughly vet any potential conflicts. (Reopens DCM49) In May last year, Arora was elevated to President and COO of the Japan-based group, the first time in 35-year history of SoftBank that anyone was given the president post. At that time, Son had mentioned Arora as the most likely candidate to succeed him in future. Arora received a pay package of about USD 73 million (Rs 500 crore) last fiscal, becoming one of the highest-paid business leaders globally. After his resignation, Arora said "All good. Masa wanted to be CEO for longer, I did as promised, time to move on. I am not sad. I learnt a lot, sitting with Masa at dinner and chatting about life in the future." Arora, who has been responsible for global operations, has led SoftBank's investments in India's e-commerce provider Snapdeal.Com, ride-hailing service Ola Cabs, real-estate website Housing.Com, hotel-booking app Oyo Rooms and Grofers. Arora was reportedly criticised by a SoftBank investor for pumping huge money in India and one of the investment went through rough weather in a reality business based web portal. SoftBank's investment in India has crossed the USD 1 billion mark and has recently stated that its investment in the country will cross USD 10 billion in coming years. In June last year, SoftBank along with contract manufacturing giant Foxconn, had partnered with Bharti Enterprises with plans to invest USD 20 billion in solar power projects in India. Brushing aside worries over any spillover effect of SunEdison's debt woes on India's solar power plans, Renewable Energy Minister Piyush Goyal today set the record straight, saying some firms not doing well will not impact the programme's success. "There are always certain cases of firms failing all over the world in every industry. There was a point of time where very large airline companies failed in different parts of the world. You have a failed steel sector in the UK. It doesn't mean that the whole sector collapses," he said when asked about the debt problems being faced by SunEdison. Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of an event organised by industry body CII here late yesterday, Goyal said there are one or two instances of companies which don't do well or may have some problems. "But it's not as if only these one or two firms brought the tariffs down. We have 50 companies who brought tariffs down even below what Sun Edison or Sky Power quoted. So, I don't think it deters us or deflects the success of the solar programme at all," the minister said. India has very large corporations, both domestic and international, which have won contacts in the solar energy field at even more competitive prices than (Sun Edison and Sky Power), added Goyal, who also holds the portfolio of power and coal. "And should there be a problem with one or two companies, others will take over those projects... Investors need not be worried about it, bankers are not worried about it. There is enough interest in the market for much larger volumes than what they have taken up in India." Earlier this month, reports had surfaced that the Adani group is in talks with the US-based renewable energy major SunEdison to acquire the latter's Indian assets. The group led by billionaire Gautam Adani has asked bankers to sound it out on whether SunEdison is also putting on the block its solar power projects in India. On the use of coal to generate electricity, Goyal said the dry fuel will continue to be important. "It's the base load of power in India. We will continue to have coal and newer coal plants coming in. But India is a very responsible global citizen and we working on clean coal technologies," he added. "We have research going on with Australia on clean coal. I will shortly be tying up with MIT in Cambridge for developing clean coal technologies... Coal will remain mainstay of our energy, but we are open to looking at cleaner coal technologies so that we don't do what the West has done to the environment over the last 150 years. Peace talks between Yemen's warring factions are on hold pending the arrival of rebel representatives to the UN-backed negotiations, diplomats said today. The talks were initially scheduled to start on Monday, and any further delay could dash hopes of ending Yemen's war after the government delegation threatened to pull out if meetings did not begin immediately. "According to the latest information, the rebel delegation should arrive in Kuwait by the end of the day," said one diplomat close to the talks. "As a result, the talks could be delayed further until Friday," another diplomat said. Yesterday, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said negotiations would begin in Kuwait today. The rebels only agreed to join the talks after they said they received assurances from the United Nations that pro-government forces would respect a ceasefire which has been violated by warring parties since it came into effect on April 11. There was still no word today from the rebels on their expected time of arrival. Representatives of the Iran-backed Huthi insurgents and their allies left Sanaa yesterday for Oman and they are expected to continue on to Kuwait. But they were still in Oman today morning, according to diplomats. In Yemen itself, fighting wore on on several fronts, military sources said, as each side blamed the other for truce breaches. The rebels late yesterday fired a Katyusha rocket on the loyalist-held city of Marib, east of the capital, according to an AFP journalist there. Pro-government military sources reported heavy fighting in Nahm, northeast of Sanaa, as well as sporadic clashes in the northern Jawf province, Taez in the southwest, and central Baida province. The rebels meanwhile claimed on their sababnews.Net website that a Saudi-led coalition fighting them in support of the Yemeni government carried out two air strikes on Nahm and flew sorties over Sanaa, Marib, and Jawf. The talks are the most important attempt yet to resolve Yemen's devastating conflict, which the UN says has killed more than 6,400 people and forced almost 2.8 million forced from their homes. In the backdrop of closure of foreign liquor bars in three- and four-star hotels as part of new liquor policy in Kerala, the State Intelligence has warned of a possibility of flow of spurious liquor in the coming days. A report in this regard was submitted to the government by Additional Director General of Police (Intelligence) A Hemachandran, who has also asked the Excise and other enforcement departments to enhance vigil. There was a possibility that people who were aggrieved by the new liquor policy might try to exploit the situation and create trouble, the report said. There were chances of spurious liquor being sold in festival places and tourist spots in the state, it said. The report also called for steps to be initiated to prevent the flow of liquor and illicit liquor from neighbouring states. As India gears up to raise funds to meet renewable energy target, state-run companies like NTPC, Power Finance Corp and REC are likely to launch masala bonds worth USD 1 billion in the UK in the next four months. The bonds, which will be in range of USD 150-250 million, are likely to be limited to a band of five to seven years. "Companies, including NTPC, Neyveli Lignite Corporation, Power Finance Corporation, Power Trading Corporation and Rural Electrification Corporation are likely to launch these Masala Bonds totalling USD 1 billion in the next three or four months in the UK to gauge investor appetite," Power Minister Piyush Goyal said today. These will be subject to decisions made by the Boards of the PSU energy companies, the Minister said at a roundtable -- Financing Renewables and Energy Efficiency -- organised by the City of London here. Goyal informed investors that the Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency is coordinating a billion-dollar equity fund, perhaps the largest in renewable space. This will be professionally managed by an independent international fund management company. Indian public sector companies have already committed USD 315 million, he added. As India gears up to meet its ambitious renewable energy targets of 175 GW of installed capacity by 2022, the country is exploring international mechanisms of funding and is evaluating new and innovative tools to finance the renewables sector. Haryana Minister Ram Bilas Sharma today said strict action would be taken against institutes involved in "commercialisation of education". It has been brought to notice that some schools are selling books, stationery and uniforms to students within their premises. A probe would be conducted into this, the state education minister was quoted as saying in an official release. Sharma, who was in Panipat today, also said a high-level meeting of the Education Department has been convened tomorrow in which "significant decisions" would be taken. Shiromani Akali Dal President Sukhbir Singh Badal today asked the SAD student wing leaders to publicise the "pro-people" image of the party by undertaking an aggressive publicity campaign in the state. In a meeting here, with all the district presidents and office bearers of students' wing of SAD, Students Organisation of India (SOI), he asked them to make their presence felt by guiding college students about the "various welfare schemes so that masses in large numbers get to know about pro-development policies and programmes of the party". The Deputy Chief Minister said the office bearers of SOI must carry their identity cards and SAD badges having 'Proud to be Akali' every time and they should take pride in showing their Akali identity. He also laid stress on publicising every achievement of the SAD-BJP combine government on social media. (REOPENS NRG 21) Sukhbir also announced the SAD-BJP alliance would give sugar and 'ghee' at subsidised rates to all blue card holders along with the atta-daal scheme, if voted to power. Addressing a public gathering at Jandiala in favour of party candidate Dalbir Singh Verka, the SAD president said the next coalition government would give five kilograms of sugar at Rs 10 per kg and one kg of ghee at Rs 25 per litre to all blue card families. Badal said welfare pensions including old age pension would be increased to Rs 2,000 per month. "We will also increase the amount given under the shagun scheme from Rs 15,000 to Rs 51,000. All blue card holders would also be eligible for free gas connections". SAD president assured that all under privileged sections among the general category would also be eligible for all social welfare schemes of the state government. Sukhbir also announced that the medical facility available to blue card holders, small farmers, petty traders and construction workers would be increased from the present Rs 50,000 to Rs 1 lakh. The SAD president said anyone who doubted that any of these promises would not be implemented only had to look at the past track record of the alliance government. "We said we will give you free power. We did. We have also successfully implemented the Atta daal scheme. In direct contrast Amarinder withdrew the free power facility as chief minister. He also withdrew the shagun scheme. How can you ever trust such a person," he added. Revenue minister Bikram Singh Majitha while speaking on the occasion, said the Congress party would face a humiliating defeat in the Majha region as the people had understood its real nature. "People have decided to vote for development and a better future for themselves and their future generations," he added. Japanese auto major Suzuki's premium hatchback Baleno, which is manufactured only in India by Maruti Suzuki, has received a three-star rating in crash tests with standard equipment by automobile safety agency Euro NCAP. However, in tests with safety pack the global model of the Japanese firm received a four-star rating. As per Euro NCAP, which has created the five-star safety rating system to help consumers, three star rating means "average to good occupant protection but lacking crash avoidance technology". As per the report compiled by the Euro NCAP, the passenger compartment of Baleno remained stable in the frontal offset test. Dummy readings indicated good protection of the knees and femurs of both the driver and passenger, it noted. "In the full-width rigid barrier impact, protection of the driver was rated as good except for the chest, protection of which was adequate," it added. Dummy readings of chest compression indicated marginal protection for this part of the body but good or adequate protection elsewhere, it said. In the side barrier test, dummy numbers showed good protection but the score for the head was penalised as the side curtain airbag was deemed not to have deployed in the correct manner in the side pole test, Euro NCAP said. "In the more severe side pole impact, dummy readings of lateral rib compression indicated weak chest protection and the head protection was downgraded to adequate as a result of the incorrect airbag deployment," it noted. The front seats and head restraints demonstrated good protection against whiplash in the event of a rear-end collision. A geometric assessment of the rear seats also indicated good protection. However, the optional 'Radar Brake Support' was not included in this assessment, Euro NCAP said. The agency gave a four-star rating to the Baleno fitted with safety pack of radar brake support. As per Euro NCAP, a vehicle with four star rating offers overall good performance in crash protection and additional crash avoidance technology may be present. While refusing to comment on NCAP findings, a company spokesperson said: "In recent months Maruti Suzuki has systematically introduced enhanced safety equipment comprising dual airbags and ABS with EBD as standard in certain models, and as option across all variants of most models. Alto comes with a driver airbag option in all variants". Last month, Suzuki Motor Corporation (SMC) had launched the Baleno in the Japanese market. It is for the first time that Maruti Suzuki India-made model is being exported to Japan where SMC is based. Maruti had launched Baleno in domestic market last year. The premium hatch is being manufactured at the company's Manesar plant. A group of Taiwanese nationals accused of fraud were arrested on the island today, officials said, after Beijing demanded they stand trial in mainland China and criticised Taipei for not charging them. The latest bout of diplomatic sparring between the rivals kicked off last week, when Malaysia deported 20 Taiwanese implicated in fraud that Chinese authorities say took place on the mainland. Beijing had insisted the group should be sent to China rather than returned to Taiwan, but following negotiations they were deported to Taipei. The suspects, however, were freed soon after they arrived on the island, as police said Malaysian authorities had not provided enough evidence to arrest them. The decision irked China, with state media labeling Taiwan "a haven of frauds". Taiwanese authorities then appeared to make a U-turn, as a district court in the central city of Taichung issued arrest warrants for 18 of the suspects and barred the other two from leaving Taiwan. "After checking what the suspects told police and the evidence we got, we found they were deeply involved in the fraud cases," a prosecutor told reporters. China considers Taiwan to be one of its provinces awaiting reunification, by force if necessary, even though the island has ruled itself since 1949 following a civil war split. Observers say China is stepping up pressure on Taiwan's president-elect Tsai Ing-wen who is set to take office in May as Beijing does not trust her historically pro-independence party. Taipei last week blasted Beijing for being "rude and violent" over the deportation of 45 of its citizens from Kenya to China where they also face investigation for fraud. A group of 10 Taiwanese government officials, police and prosecutors are in Beijing negotiating the return of the 45 suspects. Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao has been invited by the Governor of California to attend a meet on clean energy. Edmond G Brown Jr, Governor of California, has invited Rao to the 'Sub-continental Clean Energy Ministerial' to be held in San Francisco in June, an official release said here today. US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, Nisha Biswal handed over the invite to K T Rama Rao, IT Minister and son of the CM, during her visit to the city today. "Both Telangana and California are facing similar challenges in terms of rainfall shortage and reduced green cover in their respective states. In this context both the states should work jointly to overcome these challenges," the release said, quoting Brown in the invite. Meanwhile, Rama Rao explained to the visiting US official about the initiatives being taken by the Telangana government for the promotion of industrial growth in the state. Taking strong note of lack of air connectivity to Shimla, the Supreme Court today directed the competent authorities to tell it by May 4 whether air services to the Himachal Pradesh capital would be launched and warned of issuing an order if the answer is "no". "If 'no' is the categorical answer, we will pass an order against those responsible for this," a bench headed by Chief Justice T S Thakur said. The bench also directed the competent authorities, including the Civil Aviation Ministry, to place the copy of direction issued by them before the bench takes up the matter for next hearing on May 4. It said that its interim order, issued on December 16 last year, shall not prevent these authorities from enforcing the obligation of providing ten per cent of the capacity deployed on Category-I routes (trunk routes) to Category-II routes. Under the government's Route Dispersal Guidelines, Category-I routes are the busy routes connecting major metros like Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai, while Category-II are those in remote and difficult parts of the country, including Jammu and Kashmir, Northeast and the island territories. Counsel representing various competent authorities like the Ministry and aviation regulator DGCA said all of them favoured launching of these services. To this, the bench said "we hope there is no political game in this." The apex court had last week taken exception to the lack of air connectivity to places in the North East and Shimla's Jubbarhatti airport and rapped the government and Air India for "promoting interests" of private operators. "Is it not part of your policy guidelines to provide services to far-flung places like North East and Shimla," a bench comprising the Chief Justice and Justice R Banumathi had asked, charging the government with "only promoting interests of operators" and not thinking about connectivity. The bench, which had earlier sought a status report from Air India on feasibility of air service connecting Shimla with Chandigarh and Delhi, was unimpressed and said, "we do not want this dilly-dallying. We thought you will do something, but things remained as they were." Additional Solicitor General P S Patwalia, appearing for the state-run carrier, sought time and said Air India would come out with a response. The court then posted the matter for further hearing for today. Earlier, the apex court had wanted to know from the airline about its "ultimate plan" to connect Shimla with New Delhi and Chandigarh and had asked Air India CMD to place a report within six weeks. It had however ordered maintenance of status quo on the December 7, 2015 direction passed by the Himachal Pradesh High Court asking Air India, Airports Authority of India and others concerned tostart scheduledflightsona trialbasis from Jubbarhatti airport, 22 km from Shimla. Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar, who had appeared for Air India CMD, submitted that the airline is examining the suggestions to at least connect Shimla and Chandigarh with 40- seater aircraft as the runway at the Airport was very small. The Solicitor General had explained various constrains, including the non-availability of refuelling facility in Shimla and certain security hazards. He said the issue of economic viability was also there. He had also told the bench that two tourist towns -- Kullu and Dharamsala -- were already connected by air. Air India had challenged the Himachal Pradesh High Court ordertostart scheduledflightsontrialbasis. It had said that other objections andviability gap funding, if any, will be sorted out later. The high court had passed the order on a petition by a local resident on the possibility of resuming Delhi-Shimla flight service from Jubbar-Hatti airport, which remains non-operational for past three year. The government is in the process of finalising a draft civil aviation policy, which proposes changes in the route dispersal guidelines dealing with flying to remote destinations that could be socially important but not economically viable. Three over-ground workers (OGWs) of Lashker-e-Toiba militant outfit were arrested from the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir today. "Three OGWs of LeT outfit were apprehended at a check-point established by a joint team of police and paramilitary CRPF at Rajbagh in Srinagar," a police official said. He said the arrested have been identified as Ubaid Untoo and Yawar Muzaffar Bhat - both residents of Sopore township in north Kashmir's Baramulla district and Altaf Hussain Lone, a resident of Lashtiyal area of Kupwara. A Chinese pistol, two pistol magazines, eight pistol rounds, four hand grenades and a GPS device were recovered from their possession, the official said. He said the police have registered a case in this regard. A Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader was arrested in the city today for allegedly abusing the Election Commission during polls. TMC leader Anwar Khan from the Cossipore area was caught on camera allegedly speaking to partymen over his mobile phone and asking them to "hit the EC on its face with a shoe" this morning. Following this, Chief Electoral Officer Sunil Gupta called up Kolkata Police Commissioner Soumen Mitra to arrest Khan, who was already under police surveillance owing to his "influence" in the Cossipore-Belgachia constituency where polling was held today. The TMC leader had, however, managed to flee. A team of police, led by DC North Subhankar Singha Sarkar, went to Cossipore and led a search operation at several places, including his house but failed to arrest him which forced Kolkata Police to announce him as "absconding". Later, acting on a tip-off police finally nabbed Khan from Dumdum area, which is close to his residence. In view of Left Democratic Front (LDF) in Kerala promising to construct a new Mullaperiyar Dam in Idukki district in its poll manifesto, if it came to power, Thanthai Periyar Dravida Kazhakam today sought to know the stand of the CPI-M Tamil Nadu unit on the matter. The Supreme Court has already given its verdict on the reservoir allowing Tamil Nadu to raise the height of the dam, TPDK General Secretary K Ramakrishnan told reporters here. However, LDF in its manifesto has promised to construct a new dam at the place for safety of the people, a contentious issue between the two states for the last few years, he said. In view of this, CPI-M in Tamil Nadu should make its stand clear on the issue, whether it was supporting its counter part, a major constituent of the front in Kerala, Ramakrishnan said. Trash-talking Philippine presidential favourite Rodrigo Duterte has warned he is prepared to cut diplomatic ties with the United States and Australia after their envoys criticised his comments about the jailhouse rape of a missionary. Duterte also told the ambassadors to "shut their mouths", as controversy raged over his comments last week in which he said he wanted to have been the first to rape the Australian woman who was brutalised and murdered in a 1989 prison riot. "If I become president, go ahead and sever (diplomatic ties)," Duterte, 71, said on the campaign trail yesterday night, referring to the relationships with the United States and Australia, two of the Philippines' closest allies. Duterte, who while campaigning has called the pope a "son of a bitch" and promised to kill tens of thousands of criminals, recounted at a recent rally the attack on the Christian missionary as part of his tough-on-crime pitch to voters. "I was mad she (the missionary) was raped but she was so beautiful. I thought, the mayor should have been first," she told the crowd. Duterte was at the time mayor of Davao, a major city in the southern Philippines where he is accused of running vigilante death squads that have allegedly killed more than 1,000 people. The front runner has at times on the campaign boasted about running the death squads, claiming they killed 1,700 people, but also denied any links to them. Duterte has similarly offered varying responses to the rape comments, with his media team releasing a statement in which he apologised. But on the campaign trail, he has repeatedly told reporters he would not say sorry. Australian ambassador Amanda Gorely criticised his remarks this week, saying on Twitter: "Rape and murder should never be joked about or trivialised. Violence against women and girls is unacceptable anytime, anywhere". US ambassador Philip Goldberg later agreed with her. "Statements by anyone, anywhere that either degrade women or trivialise issues so serious as rape or murder are not ones that we condone," Goldberg said in an interview with CNN Philippines television. Duterte has repeatedly expressed anger at what he regards as their intervention in domestic politics. "It would do well with the American ambassador and the Australian ambassador to shut their mouths," Duterte told reporters yesterday. A US embassy spokesman told AFP Thursday there was no immediate response to Duterte's remarks about the ambassadors. An Australian embassy spokeswoman said there would be no comment. Incumbent President Benigno Aquino today also criticised Duterte's remarks, while warning the policies of certain candidates could reverse the high rates of economic growth the country had seen during his six-year rule. Buoyed by his massive New York primary win, the Republican presidential front-runner is aiming to secure 1,400 delegates before the July convention and secure an outright nomination, according to a media report. Internal documents show that the Trump Campaign advisers are projecting the 69-year-old tycoon-turned-politician to have 1,400 delegates when he goes to the Cleveland Convention, the Washington Post reported. This is more than the 1,237 delegates required to win the Republican presidential nomination. The projections were part of an internal memo sent by his campaign Tuesday night with talking points to his surrogates. "The RNC has a lot to answer for as do those who are part of the donor class and the party establishment. We will get most of the delegates and we will, in just another week, close the door on other candidates getting to 1,237 before the convention," the memo said. "Speaking of delegates we are working every delegate elected just as hard as the other campaigns the Cruz spin machine produces more lies than anything else. Our projections call for us to accumulate over 1,400 delegates and thus a first ballot nomination win in Cleveland," the internal memo was quoted as saying. However, his rival Senator Ted Cruz from Texas disagreed claiming that Trump would not be able to reach the 1,237 figure before the convention. "We are headed to a contested convention at this point. Nobody is getting to 1,237," Cruz told Philadelphia radio. Two ATM service agents, who were "robbed" of Rs 53 lakh here early this week, were in fact part of the gang which executed the crime, police said today as it arrested them and four others besides recovering the entire stolen amount. ATM service agents A Sreenivasulu (27), a resident of Vemula mandal, and Y K Vikram, who hails from Gunakanapalli village, were the main conspirators of the robbery that took place near a SBI branch here on April 18, Kadapa SP Naveen Gulati said at a press conference here. With the help of four others, they planned the robbery and executed it, he said. The other accused were identified as P Venkata Ramana (40), P Veeranjaneyulu (27), N Ambrish (26) and Narayanachari Siva (22). Veeranjaneyulu and Siva are originally from Bengaluru. Acting on a tip-off, police arrested all of them this afternoon from near a temple on the Pulivendula-Kadiri Road where they had assembled to distribute the stolen booty among themselves. The entire stolen amount was recovered and four vehicles used by them were seized, the SP said. Sreenivasulu and Vikram, employed with Logicash, a cash management service provider, were "robbed" of Rs 53 lakh by two motorcycle-borne men on Monday. The bike-borne men threw chilli powder on the duo's eyes and beat them with iron rods when they were taking the cash to refill 9 ATMs of SBI under their service area. Gulati said the service agents have confessed they have misappropriated more than Rs 60 lakh from the ATMs under their jurisdiction in the last four years. Explaining their modus operandi, the SP said the duo, after receiving the confirmation message of loading the ATMs from their head office, would again open the machines using security keys and withdraw cash. At least two people have been burned to death in Zambia during riots targeting Rwandan-owned shops over allegations that foreigners were behind a string of ritual killings, police said today. The violence erupted earlier this week in slum areas of the capital Lusaka after the recent murders of at least seven people, whose body parts such as ears, hearts and penises had been removed. Hundreds of residents stoned houses and shops owned by foreign nationals, with some foreigners seeking refuge at police stations as looters took food, drinks, refrigerators and other electrical appliances. "The official number of people who have died from the time the looting started is two. These are the ones who were burned to death on 18 April 2016 in Kanyama," police spokeswoman Charity Chanda said in a statement. Police said 62 shops had been looted, but they were unable to confirm the nationality of Monday's victims, who were burned with firewood and vehicle tyres. Home Affairs Minister Davies Mwila has blamed the riots on false allegations that a suspected ritual killer of foreign nationality had been released from police custody. He said that more than 200 people had been arrested. "Elements in Lusaka with criminal intent took advantage of the pain and grief we all felt over the suspected ritual killings," Mwila said in a television address on Monday evening. Several thousand refugees from Rwanda, which was embroiled in genocide in 1994, live in Lusaka. They run many of the shops in the affected parts of the city, and residents have accused them of using the body parts for witchcraft. No rioting was reported overnight or today morning, with police reinforcements on street patrol in trouble-hit areas. In South Africa last year, mobs in Johannesburg and in the port city of Durban targeted migrants, ransacking their homes and burning shops. At least seven people died and thousands were displaced, with citizens from Zimbabwe, Malawi and Mozambique among those affected. Two off-duty police constables successfully chased an armed robber and recovered Rs 1 lakh which he had allegedly looted. Anant Shirsath (26) and Abhijeet Salukhe (28) caught hold of the robber, who is in his 20s, after chasing him in narrow lanes and bylanes of Khetwadi in South Mumbai at around 9 pm yesterday, police said. The robber, whose identity was disclosed, was later handed over to VP Road Police station, where a case against him was registered, said police, adding he was armed with a chopper. Meanwhile, police have decided to reward the two, who were not on duty at the time of the incident, for their heroic act. Shirsath and Salukhe, room partners in police quarters, were leaving for market on their bikes after returning from duty when they saw a man screaming for help. The duo rushed to help the person and noticed a youth in his 20s running from the spot with a bag in his hand which he had snatched. The bag contained Rs 1 lakh in cash and it was recovered, police said. Shirsath joined the force in 2011 and is currently posted at local arms department at Worli. He earlier served in security detail at the Chief Minister's official residence 'Varsha' in Malabar Hill area. Salunkhe is attached to BKC Police Station in western suburban. Police today arrested two gangsters after a brief encounter and recovered arms and ammunition from them near Sidhwan village here. District police Chief Diljinder Singh Dhillon said a police party conducted a raid after getting specific information about two gangsters hiding in the house of one Amritpal Singh. Dhillon said the two opened fire as they saw the police party and the forces retaliated. He said the two then fled towards a brick kiln and again started firing on the police. The police then cordoned off the area and overpowered them a two-hour-long encounter, he said. A double-barreled gun, a pistol, magazine and 250 gms heroin were recovered from them. Dhillon said the gang had kidnapped Aman Mittal of Patiala in Ludhiana on April 11 and got a ransom of Rs 5 lakh. Their accomplice, gangster Amarvir Singh alias Gopi was arrested by Ludhiana police on April 11. (REOPENS DES14) Meanwhile, a court in Rajpura today remanded Kumar to one-day police custody. However, Kumar denied the charges levelled by police against him. With operation of app-based taxis in the national capital on Delhi government's radar due to surge pricing, some officials of taxi-aggregator Uber today met Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and apprised him of his business model. "Some officials from Uber today met the Delhi Chief Minister at Delhi Secretariat and discussed a range of issues including surge pricing, diesel cars and permits," an official said. Sources said that apart from surge pricing, government has objection on per minute charge and vehicles which are registered outside Delhi. Transport minister Gopal Rai today again clarified that ban on surge pricing will continue. Yesterday, Kejriwal had termed as "daylight robbery" the surge pricing by app-based taxi operators, and said overcharging and blackmailing won't be allowed in the national capital. "Surge pricing is daylight robbery. No responsible govt can allow that," he had tweeted. He said some taxi operators were resorting to blackmailing, saying they would not provide cabs if they were not allowed to loot and made it clear that his government would not allow that. Britain today raised concerns over Sri Lanka's human rights record during 2015, days after the US detailed several reported violations from the Tamil-dominated North-East. "Sri Lanka isone of30 'Human Rights Priority Countries' (HRPCs); countries where the UK hasserious human rights concerns and hopes to engage positively to develop human rights performance," said a British Foreign office report. The report commends improvement in the human rights situation in Sri Lanka during 2015, while also noting that some concerns still remain. It recognisesthe positive steps taken by Lanka during 2015 to improve freedom of expression and freedom of movement, reduce inter-community tensions, and restore the independence of institutions such as the Human Rights Commission. It also notes the government's willingness while stating positive changes are less apparent in the north and east. Human rights defenders continued to report harassment and surveillance in 2015 and incidents of torture, and sexual and gender-based violence. British Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged 6.6 million pounds over the next three years to continue support for reconciliation and human rights. Sri Lanka was ranked alongside Afghanistan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Burma, Burundi, Central African Republic, China, Colombia, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Libya, Maldives among UK's 30 human rights priority countries. The US State Department's 2015 Sri Lankan Human Rights report details several reported violations from the Tamil-dominated North-East. "The major human rights problems reported during the year included harassment of civil society activists, journalists, and persons viewed as sympathisers of the banned terrorist group the LTTE as well as arbitrary arrest and detention, torture, rape, and other forms of sexual and gender-based violence committed by police and security forces," it said. Pointing to stronger China-US cooperation on North Korea, a US envoy said today the two nations are united in their opposition to the North's nuclear tests and worked together to develop the tough sanctions imposed in March. Sung Kim, the US government's top envoy for North Korea, told reporters in Beijing that China took as much part in drafting the UN Security Council's March resolution as Washington or the Security Council did. Both countries "remain united in our firm opposition to North Korea's provocative and irresponsible behaviour," Kim told reporters after meeting his Chinese counterpart, Wu Dawei, over strategy toward North Korea. Kim declined to give details of their discussions. The most recent sanctions include mandatory inspections of cargo leaving and entering North Korea and a ban on the export of coal and iron being used to fund its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes. They were imposed in response to North Korea's conducting its fourth nuclear test and a long-range rocket launch earlier this year in violation of Security Council resolutions. US officials in the past have implied that Beijing was coddling its neighbour and Chinese officials at first appeared reluctant to agree to punishing new sanctions. That reluctance appeared to melt in February in the face of the North's vows to conduct more tests despite sanctions and the condemnation of the international community. Kim said the US and other nations that had previously joined in six-party talks aimed at ending the North's nuclear programs were still open to "credible and meaningful diplomacy" with Pyongyang. Analysts say a fifth nuclear test could happen before North Korea holds a Workers' Party congress in early May, providing Kim Jong Un with an opportunity to burnish his image as a powerful leader and further cement his grip on power. Kim, the US envoy, said he hoped the congress, the first in 36 years, would help propel North Korea in a "much more constructive direction... In terms of undertaking serious economic reform, in terms of caring better for their own citizens. A 21-year-old man, who vandalised a gurdwara with hateful anti-ISIS graffiti following the San Bernardino shootings, has been sentenced to 80 hours of community service at the place of worship he targeted and 240 hours of graffiti cleanup. Brodie Durazo pleaded guilty to misdemeanour vandalism and vandalism of religious property charges in exchange for serving 80 hours at the Gurdwara Singh Sabha at Buena Park, a suburb of Los Angeles, as well as 240 hours of graffiti removal elsewhere. Deputy District Attorney Jess Rodriguez told the judge that temple leaders had agreed to allow Durazo to work there for his community service. "They believe it can be a productive result, having him learn about them and their beliefs. They wanted to see something positive come from this," Rodriguez said at the hearing on Tuesday. Japnaam Singh, a longtime member of the Gurdwara, said the sentence seemed just in light of Durazo's apology to the congregation. "In our religion, forgiveness is a virtue, and something we abide by every day," Singh was quoted as saying by The Orange County Register. Durazo sprayed graffiti, including references to the Islamic State terror group, on a parking lot wall and a parked truck at the Gurdwara. The graffiti was discovered December 6. The incident came just days after Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, a married Pakistani couple living in the city of Redlands, targeted a San Bernardino County Department of Public Health training event and a holiday party, killing 14 people. Shortly after his arrest, Durazo read an apology letter to the congregation, denying that he meant the vandalism as hate speech. "I know your guys' faith and church have nothing to do with the Muslim religion or Islam, that is why I did not write the profanity on your walls or temple," Durazo said to the congregation in remarks videotaped and posted on Facebook by the Sikh Coalition. "The only reason I wrote what I wrote on the truck was because I was intoxicated and I figured the truck travels through the state and through the country," he said. "I have shed so many tears to my daughter and fiance. I cannot imagine the amount of stress or tension I have brought upon your temple, especially with what is going on in this world at this time," Durazo said. He was initially facing felony charges in connection with the vandalism. However, a judge downgraded the charges to misdemeanours, over the objections of prosecutors. Durazo will be on probation for three years and is required to pay an unspecified amount of restitution back to the temple. Iran today said that the US Supreme Court's decision to deduct USD 2 billion from Tehran's frozen assets to compensate American victims of terror attacks amounted to theft. "The ruling is considered stealing the Islamic Republic of Iran's properties and naturally the onus of compensation of damages to Iran ... Falls on the US administration," foreign ministry spokesman Hossein Jaber Ansari said. The spokesman said the decision went "against international law". The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that Iran must hand over nearly USD 2 billion in frozen assets to survivors and relatives of those killed in attacks blamed on the Islamic republic. The attacks included the 1983 bombing of US Marine barracks in Beirut and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia. The decision affects more than 1,000 Americans. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the court's opinion rejecting the Iranian central bank's efforts to block payments to victims and relatives. "We are extremely pleased with the Supreme Court's decision, which will bring long-overdue relief to more than 1,000 victims of Iranian terrorism and their families, many of whom have waited decades for redress," said Theodore Olson, a former US solicitor general who represented the relatives of the victims. The US is watching with "great interest" the outcome of an ongoing court case with regard to the LGBT community and their rights, a senior Obama administration official has said. "We of course are watching the outcome of the court case with great interest. We remain in contact with civil society groups and the government to share our views of our global policy on LGBT rights," Special US Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBT Persons Randy Berry told reporters here yesterday. About a year ago, Secretary of State John Kerry had created this one of its kind position in the US Government. Taking over the position in April last year, Berry has travelled to 42 countries around the world including Jamaica, Turkey, Uganda, Indonesia, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Holy See and Israel among others. "I have not had a chance to travel to India yet. But I would characterise from the reports we received from - not just from India, but from the region, is that the global progression that we see is a very, very uniform in some ways, that I believe that there is a more open public dialogue. "One thing that is interesting is of the countries that I visited over this first year, there is not a single one that I would single out as saying that they are somehow either immune from what I believe is truly a global movement," he said. "That is not because we are doing anything particularly to make it so. I think it is happening quite organically. Nor do I think there is any place that necessarily it is impossible to have a conversation on these grounds. I think it can be delicate," he said. Berry said the American diplomatic mission in India certainly does engage with the government and with civil society groups there. "I think we have to proceed with great care and make sure that oftentimes that we are making sure that we are conducting our diplomacy with our counterparts in government and not necessarily through the press as an opening salvo. "I think that those conversations are entirely possible. I think they carry the capacity of being fundamentally productive, as long as we engage in a careful and reasoned way; that I really think that there is great value in a constructive conversation that talks about issues of basic humanity, freedom from discrimination and violence. I think that is a very hard proposition to argue with in almost any country," Berry added. In February, the Supreme Court held an open court and referred to a five-judge bench a curative petition challenging its verdict criminalising homosexuality in India. One of the three Uyghurs who have been put on a special watch list after Thailand's worst attack at a popular temple here last year visited the country twice last month, authorities said today. Immigration Bureau chief Nattorn Prohsunthorn said the man wasidentified as Ali Yalcin Ergin, a Turkish passport holder. A source told Bangkok Post that Ergin was allegedly plotting to attack Chinese interests in the ASEANregion. 20 people mostly Chinese tourists were killed and over 100 injured at the bomb blast at the Erawan Brahma shrine here. Nattorn said that Ergin first flew into Thailand from Singapore on March 18 on an AirAsia flight, spent four days here and then took an AirAsia flight to Cambodia. "Records show that two days later, he again took an AirAsia flight back to Thailand, and spent four days here," he said. In his second trip, Ergin went to Phuket from where he took a flight to Kuala Lumpur, he added. Officials have checked the places he stayed at in Thailand, including in the tourist resort of Phuket town, he said. "The National Intelligence Agency had alerted the Immigration Bureau to keep a watch for three radical ethnic Uyghur Turkish passport holders - Ergin, Hid Yet Dursan and Ali Talcin," the Bangkok Post quoting unnamed sources said. "They are apparently plotting to attack Chinese interests in the Aseanregion," the paper said. Nattorn added that the three Uyghurs were already on the Immigration Bureau database and in its watch list. General Thawip Netniyom, secretary-general of the National Security Council, said Singapore had issued a warning about the three Uyghurs. Uyghur Muslims complain of heavy-handed rule and ethnic discrimination under Chinese rule in China's Xinjiang region. Hundreds of people have been killed in unrest in Xinjiang in the recent past. China blames the violence on Islamist militants who want to establish an independent state called East Turkestan for minority Uyghurs. Recession-wracked Venezuela is to ration electricity in 10 of its most populous and industrialized states, including metropolitan Caracas, the socialist government has said. It is the latest drastic measure to alleviate a severe electricity crisis which President Nicolas Maduro and his government blame on the El Nino weather phenomenon that causes drought. Critics say it's the result of years of economic mismanagement. Luis Motta Dominguez, minister for electric power, made the announcement during a televised broadcast and said further details would be released in the coming days. Maduro is under growing pressure from the center-right opposition, which vowed to oust him when it took control of the legislature in January after winning elections, blaming him for the crippling economic crisis. Venezuela's economy has plunged along with the price of the oil on which it relies for foreign revenues. Shortages of medicines and goods such as toilet paper and cooking oil are widespread. Maduro blames the collapse on an "economic war" by capitalists. Last week, his government said it was shifting its time zone forward by 30 minutes to save power. Other measures include giving government workers an extra day off each week for the next two months, and Maduro has urged Venezuelan women to stop using their hairdryers. "The greatest power consumption is residential," Motta said, speaking at the Guri hydroelectric plant. The water level in the dam feeding the facility in Venezuela's southeast, which supplies 70 per cent of the country's grid, "continues to decline steadily and is approaching the minimum operating height," he added, saying it left authorities no option but to ration. Maduro said yesterday that residential energy-saving targets had not been met, necessitating the rationing that "will save the Guri" from collapse. Water levels in the country's 18 hydroelectric dams have dropped to dangerously low levels, and citizens regularly suffer blackouts and water rationing. Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil reserves, but the government has resisted using crude to generate electricity, calling it inefficient. Maduro's other measures to cut electricity use include reducing the workday to six hours for ministries and state companies and ordering them to lower their electricity consumption by 20 per cent. He has also ordered shops and hotels to ration electricity, obliging them to generate their own power for several hours a day. Shopping centers have cut back their hours since that plan was introduced. Thirteen years after the Iraq war, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton today said that voting in favour of the Arab nation's invasion as the then Senator was her "greatest regret" and a "mistake". "I guess my greatest regret was voting to give (the then) President (George) Bush authority in Iraq," Clinton told Good Morning America of the ABC in an interview. "It did not turn out the way that I had thought it would, based on what he had said. I regret that and I've said that it was a mistake and, obviously, it's something that, you know, I wish hadn't turned out the way it did," Clinton said. The former First Lady, who was also the former Senator from New York and served as the Secretary of State in the first term of the Obama Administration, is on her way to become the first woman to be nominated as a presidential candidate by a major American party. During the interview, Clinton said women are still not being treated fairly when it comes to their salaries. "It's 2016 and we're still facing the reality that women are not paid equally to men," she said. "This is not just a woman's issue. This is a family issue and an economic issue. If you have a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, you are being cheated, because if you don't get equal pay, then that affects your whole family income," she said and promised to change it if voted to power. "First and foremost, we should pass the Paycheck Fairness Act which I co-sponsored, sponsored, spoke for all during the time I was in the Senate. We should also work to demand more transparency from businesses, because when they are willing to be transparent, they often find that they have some problems," she said. Clinton said she is not a natural politician. "I know I'm not a natural politician and I know that it sometimes is more difficult to navigate through the politics and the campaigning than I wish it were," she said. "But when I have a job, like being senator from New York, being secretary of state, people really count on me and I do my very best to deliver for them. I ran that hard campaign against Senator Obama. We finished. He turned around. He trusted me enough to be his secretary of state," she asserted. "I served for eight years as a senator from New York. The people here trusted me. They voted for me twice and then again in the primary. So I think it's a difference between the give-and-take of politics, because, for whatever reason I do attract a lot of attacks - and I understand that - and actually doing the job because, when I'm here today, this is like a giant job interview," she said. Iran today said it was examining "very accurately" the issue of arrest of an ex-Indian Navy officer by Pakistan on charges of planning "subversive activities" in Balochistan after allegedly entering the country through Iran. Iranian envoy Gholamreza Ansari, in an interaction with the media, also ruled out any possibility of the Iran-Pakistan -India gas pipeline project taking off, saying "we should forget about it". When asked about Jadhav's arrest, he said, "First of all we are trying to complete our own information about the case. And I don't think I am in a position now to say any word about that. But definitely we are looking into this issue very accurately." Jadhav was arrested last month by Pakistan, which described him as an officer of the Indian Navy, a claim debunked by the Indian government. India said he had no link with the government since premature retirement from the Navy. Official sources had said here that Jadhav owned a small ship and used to carry cargo from Bandar Abbas and Chabahar ports in Iran and other adjoining areas to various locations. Asked about Prime Minister Narendra Modi's possible visit to Iran, the Iranian envoy did not give any timeline but said talks on it are on. "The sooner the Prime Minister visits Iran the better it will be," he said. The Iranian Ambassador pitched for deeper bilateral cooperation between India and Iran in a range of areas, saying Indo-Iran ties were was becoming increasingly important in the regional as well as international stage. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had paid a two-day visit to Iran last week during which both sides had decided to step up engagement in oil some other sectors. On the IPI project, Ansari said those who have invested in the LNG (liquified petroleum gas) projects in India will not allow the pipeline venture among India, Iran and Pakistan to take off. "People who have invested in LNG in India, I don't think they will let any pipes to come in. Americans are looking for the Indian market for the future and any sort of pipeline will put and end to these investments. So I don't think pipeline can be a serious project. I am sure Americans will not let this project go ahead," he said. India has been boycotting formal talks on the project since 2007 over security concerns as the pipelines would have to pass through Pakistan. Asked about terror from Pakistani soil targeting Iran, he said it was a challenge and the two countries were trying to cooperate to deal with the scourge. "This is something that happens...We are trying to cooperate and talk to the Pakistanis on how we can stop this sort of difficulties on our border...We are trying to encourage Pakistanis to reciprocate these efforts to stop this sort of activities," he said. Asked about the Chabahar port on which proposals to develop it have been cleared by the NDA government recently, Ansari said it was very important for Iran as well as India from connectvity point of view. "It will give a good access to Indians to Afghanistan, to Central Asia, Russia and North Europe. According to a test that was done recently, it would be 40 per cent cheaper for Indian goods to go to Europe...But I don't think Americans will be able to use that," he said. Asked about how Iran is balancing Chabahar and Gwadar, which is situated in Pakistan's Balochistan province, the Iraninan envoy stressed that the two were not "competing issues". "I don't think Chabahar and Gwadar are competing against each other. We are not looking at Chabahar this way and Chabahar is not a new offer to the Indians. The first time it was directly offered it was 2003. And maybe in the future these two ports can be linked as well," Ansari said. He identified the areas of energy, connectivity and metals as ripe for cooperation between India and Iran. Throughout his interaction, Ansari repeatedly underlined that Iran believes that its "new approach", that of economic and people-to-people cooperation, was the only solution to the issues plaguing the Middle East region including the raging conflicts. "We should change the paradigm in the region," he said. However, Iran was "not happy" with American behaviour post the lifting of sanctions following its talks with the P5+1 group. He also accused the US of holding double standards and said a new US President would not change the current template of relations. A woman cadre carrying a reward of Rs 4 lakh on her head, surrendered before rural police today along with two associated citing "frustration" with the naxal movement and harassment by some top cadres. According to police, the woman ultra, identified as Korra Gasi (27) alias Jhansi, was involved in the abduction of then Malkangiri district Collector Vineel Krishna in 2011, and in a string of cases including firing on police. "The Maoist militia members namely Buturi Appa Rao (45) and Velusuri Lakshmaiah (30) cited ill-health and their frustration with top leadership of the movement as the primary reasons for their surrender," said Superintendent of Police (Visakha Rural) Dr Koya Praveen. Gasi, operational in Koyyuru under Vizag Agency area, has been associated with the banned CPI (Maoists) since 2007 and was involved in as many as 24 offences in Vizag district. "Apart from having worked as the ACM (Are Committee Member) of East Visakha Joint Division, Gasi had also worked on Andhra-Odisha border. She used to double up as a small-time doctor for her outfit," the SP said. Addressing reporters, Gasi cited her frustration with the Naxal movement and ill-health as the reasons behind her surrender. She claimed that some cadres were being denied medical attention due to the policies of the top Maoists and that many ultras will turn themselves in before police in coming days. A 65-year-old woman was charred to death after being set ablaze allegedly by her two sons over property dispute in Islamabad locality of the district, police said today. Waheedan was set on fire by her two sons Fazil (30) and Luqman (30) yesterday, as they were upset over giving a major chunk of property to their younger brother Rehman, SP (City) Ram Mohan Singh said. The deceased has six sons but was living with her son Rehman, the SP said, adding, the victim was taken to the district hospital yesterday where she succumbed to her injuries today. While Luqman has been absconding, Fazil was arrested following a complaint registered by Rehman, Singh said. President Xi Jinping has assumed a new title of "Commander in Chief" of China's new joint forces battle command centre, in his latest move to exert greater control over the world's largest army and consolidate his status as China's most powerful leader in decades. 62-year-old Xi is already General Secretary of the ruling Communist Party and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, which manages the People's Liberation Army (PLA). Xi is now Commander in Chief of the military's Joint Operations Command Centre, state media reported, showing him visiting the centre wearing camouflage fatigues. The Xinhua agency and the state broadcaster CCTV both carried reports referring to Xi by the description for the first time after he visited the command centre on Wednesday. "The current situation requires battle command to be highly strategic, coordinated, timely, professional and accurate," Xi said, urging staff at joint battle command centers at both CMC and theater command levels to bear in mind a sense of crisis and adapt to the strategic demands of national security. Xi told the officers to closely follow the trends of global military revolution and strive to build a joint battle command system that meets the need of fighting and winning an informationised war. "All must be done with the ultimate goal of improving battle command capacities and measured by the standards of being able to fight and win wars," Xi said, urging a focus on solving conflicts and problems limiting joint battle command. Xi also called for "extraordinary methods" to foster joint battle command talent, stressing that "a major breakthrough should be achieved as soon as possible." The command centre was set up as part of a major revamp of China's military structure, which also included the creation of a strategic rocket force to operate its missiles. China's foreign policy has become increasingly assertive in recent years, especially on its claims to disputed territories in the resource-rich and strategic South China Sea. However, analysts say his new title indicates he wants to be seen as a leader capable of commanding the military directly. During his visit to the centre on Wednesday, which was widely publicised in state media, he said the armed forces should be "absolutely loyal" and "capable of winning wars". Experts say his appearance in military fatigues may also be a display of strength aimed at China's rivals. China and several of its neighbours are locked in a territorial dispute over the South China Sea, which Beijing claims almost in its entirety. The PLA is the world's largest military force, with a strength of approximately 2,285,000 personnel. (Reopens FGN9) Meanwhile, the establishment of a joint battle command capacities improve military capabilities and the outcome of conflict, the PLA Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese military commented today. The commentary noted that the "possibility of turmoil and conflict on the nation's doorstep was increasing," citing factors such as inter-related traditional and non-traditional security threats, disputes over territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests, and terrorism. The article urged military authorities to heighten their sense of crisis and adapt to the strategic demands of national security. It said China's joint battle command system should support the needs of fighting and winning an informationised war and fulfil its missions and tasks efficiently. The article also asked military personnel to strengthen their theoretical study, training and command disposal drills. "If they did not grow to be experts of joint battle command, it would be difficult for the army to keep a firm grip on the future developments in conflicts," it warned. UN-brokered peace talks on Yemen's war were set to finally set to kick off today as a rebel delegation arrived at the crucial negotiations in Kuwait after three days of delay. The United Nations has been pushing the talks that it hopes will end a conflict that has been exploited by jihadists and sent tensions between Iran and its Gulf rivals soaring. More than 6,400 people have been killed and almost 2.8 million displaced since a Saudi-led coalition began operations in March 2015 against Iran-backed rebels who have seized swathes of territory, including the capital Sanaa. The talks were originally supposed to start on Monday but were delayed after the rebels failed to show up in protest against what they described as Saudi violations of a ceasefire, in effect since April 11. "They (the rebel delegation) have arrived in Kuwait just a few minutes ago," Charbel Raji, spokesman for UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, told AFP. Insurgents have sent representatives from the Shiite Huthi group and members of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh's General People's Congress party. A member of the Yemeni government delegation confirmed that the talks were to open at 1600 GMT. President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi had sent a message to UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed demanding the "negotiations open today evening" and rejecting "rebel conditions to modify the agenda agreed on," according to a member of the government delegation. Hadi's people arrived in Kuwait at the weekend and threatened to pull out if meetings did not begin today. Mahdi al-Mashat, a representative of rebel leader Abdulmalik al-Huthi, said yesterday that the rebels had been assured that the agenda for the talks would be "clear and tackle issues that could help achieve peaceful solutions". Writing on Facebook, Mashat warned however that "we will have the right to suspend our participation" if the assurances are not met. Diplomats say that rebels are demanding an end of the Arab coalition operations and a naval blockade on Yemen that began more than 13 months ago. They also want UN sanctions against some of their leaders, including Saleh, to be lifted. Saudi ally Turkey said today that it has frozen assets belonging to Saleh and his son, in line with the sanctions. Saleh amassed billions of dollars through corruption and stashed assets in at least 20 countries during his 33 years in power, according to a UN report released last year. A BJP worker was shot dead by five scooter borne assailants in a market here with police suspecting that the incident was a fallout of a dispute over a girl. The incident has triggered furore with the BJP traders' body giving the police, an ultimatum of 24-hours to arrest the culprits, failing which they would stage a protest. Mohit (28), son of Sunderlal, a resident of Pallavpuram used to run a snack shop in Shastrinagar Central market. He was also the treasurer from ward number 47 of the BJYM, the youth wing of BJP, a police spokesperson said. The incident occurred last night when Mohit, along with a staff member of his shop, was on way to his shop. Five assailants seated on two scooters signalled him to stop and fired indiscriminately at him. The assailants fled away from the spot as soon as the locals rushed after hearing the noise. The locals rushed Mohit to a nearby hospital where he was declared dead. Based on the complaint of father of the deceased, an FIR has been registered against the five accused for murder. One Monu Agrawal has been named the prime accused in the case. So far two men have been taken into custody for interrogation, Meerut SP(city) Om Prakash told PTI. Asked the reason behind the murder, the SP said, "prima facie issues regarding money-transaction and love affair appears to be the reason. However, the actual cause of the murder can only be ascertained after arrest of the accused." Meanwhile, the State convener of UP BJP traders body Vineet Aggarwal Sharda has threatened to stage a protest if police fails to nab the culprits. Britain said on Thursday it could take an equity stake of up to 25 per cent in Tatas UK steel assets as part of a package of hundreds of millions of pounds of financing to help support a potential buyer. The Indian group announced plans to exit its entire British steel operation last month, leaving the government battling to save a once mighty industry that has been hammered by a surge in cheap Chinese imports, soaring costs and weak demand. The government said the support it provided would be on commercial terms and would depend on the purchaser. It said this was most likely to be debt financing but taking an equity stake was also an option. If we were to take an equity stake it would be a minority one with the aim of supporting the purchaser in delivering long term future for the business. We are certainly not seeking to be controlling the company, a spokeswoman for Prime Minister David Cameron said. The Business Ministry said in a statement the government could take a stake of up to 25 per cent in the assets. The government also said it was working with the pension scheme trustees of Tata Steel and British Steel to minimise any pension impact on the purchaser. The UK government is actively working with Tata Steel and the British Steel Pension Schemes Trustees to find a solution that will help minimise its impact on a potential purchaser, and potentially separate it from the business, the ministry said. Senior staff at Tatas Port Talbot site in Wales, Britains biggest steel works, said earlier this week they were seeking to launch a management buyout plan with the support of staff, investors and the government to save the loss-making plant. Shares of the automaker rose after it said first-quarter net income more than doubled to $2 billion, closing up 1.5 percent at $32.66. Earlier the stock briefly topped the $33 price of the company's 2010 initial public offering, which followed a U.S. government-backed bankruptcy. The share price has not significantly surpassed that level in the past year despite GM's three straight quarters of record-breaking pretax profits. Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra has stepped up efforts to persuade skeptical investors that GM can deliver consistently strong earnings - and return billions of dollars to shareholders - through the ups and downs of the industry's sales cycles. U.S. auto sales set a record last year and are on pace to top that in 2016, but many investors see signs of the start of a cyclical drop off, which has pressured share prices. Excluding a one-time expense for litigation settlements, GM's first-quarter earnings were $1.26 a share, beating analysts' estimates of $1.00. The company said pretax income, excluding one-time items, was a record for the first quarter. GM said it still expected full-year earnings of $5.25 to $5.75 a share before special items, up from $5.02 in 2015. Revenue for the first quarter rose 4.5 percent to $37.3 billion. Adjusted profit margins increased to 7.1 percent of revenue from 5.8 percent a year earlier. North America accounted for 85 percent of GM's earnings before interest and taxes, reflecting robust profits from sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks, whose sales benefited from low gasoline prices. Profit margins in the region, however, dipped to 8.7 percent from 8.8 percent a year earlier. Chief Financial Officer Chuck Stevens attributed the decline to restructuring costs and more U.S. union members taking packages to retire. Stevens said the company still expected North American margins of more than 10 percent for 2016. In Europe, GM broke even, reversing a year-earlier loss of $200 million. Stevens backed the company's target for 8 percent margins in Europe over the next several years but said the possibility that the United Kingdom will leave the European Union was a concern. The automaker narrowed losses in South America. Income from joint ventures in China was flat at $500 million. Barra has led GM's efforts to bolster investors' view of the company, including a $9 billion share buyback program that runs through 2017. The company has also made moves to keep up with self-driving vehicles and other technological advances. In January, GM said it would invest $500 million in ride-sharing company Lyft Inc. On Thursday, Barra said the company expected to close its deal to buy Cruise Automation, a self-driving vehicle startup. (Reporting by Joseph White and Bernie Woodall; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Lisa Von Ahn) ZURICH (Reuters) - Swiss watch exports took their biggest fall at the start of this year since 2009 as China's economy stumbled and Hong Kong retailers focused on working off existing stock instead of placing new orders. The Swiss watch sector's exports in March alone fell nearly 17 percent in real terms, when adjusted for working days, to 1.5 billion Swiss francs ($515 million), data showed on Thursday, the lowest level for that month in five years. It was the fourth consecutive quarterly fall and the biggest since the global financial crisis. Demand for luxury watches has been hammered by a Chinese government crackdown on bribery, a drop in tourist shoppers to Europe and, at lower price points, the rise of smartwatches. Manufacturers like Swatch Group, Richemont and LVMH have responded by demanding price cuts from suppliers and taking more production in-house. "There have been no signs of improvement in Swiss watch exports, in particular into Greater China," Citigroup analyst Thomas Chauvet wrote in a note to clients. "On the contrary, the mood amongst watch retailers seems to have deteriorated in recent months." While China is only the third-biggest export market, Chinese mainland travellers shopping in Hong Kong, Macau, Europe and other destinations lead watch demand. Fewer Chinese travelling to Hong Kong -- paired with high inventory levels at retailers there -- led to a 32 percent nominal decline in the quarter, while declining Chinese tourism to Europe meant sales there largely stagnated. At 4.7 billion francs, first-quarter exports fell nearly half a billion short of 2015 levels, a 12 percent drop in real terms, the Federal Customs Office said on Thursday. The drop worsened from January through March, when all but one of the six key markets fell. "China was clearly negative (-13.7 percent), undermining the recovery which had begun to take hold at the end of last year," the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry said of March, referring to the nominal drop. "Germany was an exception and registered a level of growth (2.2 percent)." Shares in Swatch and Richemont fell as much as 2 percent after the data, while Richemont's shares recovered to trade down 1.5 percent by 1130 GMT. Vontobel analyst Rene Weber said a steep fall in exports to the United States last month was a "negative surprise" but was partially explained by very strong comparable figures in 2015. "Hong Kong is still by far the most important market," Weber said, and remained the industry's biggest concern. "We are still optimistic that we will see improvements in the coming months," Weber said. ($1 = 0.9722 Swiss francs) (Reporting by Brenna Hughes Neghaiwi; Editing by Ruth Pitchford) Surge pricing debate between the AAP government and app-based cab aggregators has severely affected the daily commuters. Several were left without an option as fewer cabs were available across the city and the waiting time for which was endless. Now, the AAP government is mulling to fix fare of app-based taxi operators under a new policy, which may make the service expensive than existing rate of Rs 6 per kilometre. MAILTODAY did a reality check on cabs' availability at prime locations like south, central and east Delhi and found that mostly their websites said that cabs were not available. Acute crunch of cabs was also witnessed near railway stations, ISBTs and market places. Anger Commuters in large numbers vent their anger on social media websites. "I reached Delhi from Varanasi at 10 am and tried booking a cab for Noida for more than 30 minutes but couldn't find any. As autorickshaws from Delhi don't have the permit to enter Noida, I had to take a Metro with two suitcases and then take an auto from Noida to reach my destination," said 64-year-old Bharat Singh. According to experts, this situation is arising due to government's move to remove surge pricing. Surge pricing is a technique used by popular app-based cab services - Uber and Ola - to raise fares to provide drivers the incentive of keeping their cab running while also making it available for the user irrespective of the demand. The new-age operators offer extremely low fares during off-peak hours - only to make up with the rush-time surge pricing. The low rate varies from Ola's Rs 6 per km with a base fare of Rs 40 to Uber's `7 per km with a base fare of Rs 50. Even autorickshaw rides are costlier in Delhi, at Rs 10 per km with a base fare of Rs 25. Autorickshaw drivers for long have been demanding ban on app-based taxi services claiming that that they are a threat to their livelihood. According to a senior government official, Delhi government impounded 50 cabs till Wednesday afternoon. All the cab drivers were found overcharging and of these, 35 cabs are registered outside Delhi. The government on Wednesday announced that all app-based taxi aggregators will have to charge fares being fixed under a new policy. Transport Minister Gopal Rai said a policy will be soon introduced under which app-based taxi companies will have to charge fares fixed by the transport department. This move is already being taken by the Karnataka government which has banned the surge pricing by cab aggregators like Uber and Ola in Bengaluru. "We will fix fares for them as we have done in the case of radio, economy cabs and black and yellow taxis. All app-based taxi services will be regulated," Rai said. Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal too criticised surge pricing and termed it as a daylight robbery. "Overcharging and blackmailing won't be allowed in Delhi. Some taxis saying they will not provide cab if they are not allowed to loot. This is open blackmailing and government will not let that happen," Kejriwal wrote in series of tweets. In its reaction, Uber criticised the move, saying without surge pricing, there would be no cars available when people need them. "This (surge pricing) maximises the number of trips and minimises the number of people stranded. The drivers have other options as well. In short, without surge pricing, there would be no car available when people need it," Uber said in a statement. However, Kejriwal clarified that Delhi government was not against taxi aggregators. "We fully support them. They provide important service to people. But they will have to follow law," he tweeted. Soon after Delhi government announcement to cancel permits and impound vehicles of appbased car, service providers have temporarily suspending surge in Delhi with immediate effect. It was announced today that OPKO Health plans to create 200 highly skilled jobs over the next five years through expanding the EirGen Pharma facility in Westside Business Park in Waterford and establishing a new Product Development Centre in the Waterford Business and Technology Park. The diversified healthcare company is locating in the IDAs newly built Advance Technology Building (ATB) on the park. The construction of 11 ATBs around the country forms part of the Governments Regional Jobs Plan, and todays announcement is supported by the Department of Jobs through IDA Ireland. OPKOs planned growth of EirGens presence in Waterford over the next five years involves the expansion of EirGens existing manufacturing facility in Westside Business Park and the establishment of the R&D Centre with manufacturing capabilities for new sterile fill finish and dry powder inhalation products. The company focuses on the development and commercial supply of specialised oncology products for global markets. Chairman and CEO of OPKO Health, Phillip Frost said, "Todays announcement marks a significant milestone for EirGen Pharma and this investment underpins our strategy to establish Ireland as a Centre of Excellence for R&D and supply chain activities. He added, "We appreciate IDAs efforts to create an attractive business environment for companies like ours, and we look forward to expanding our workforce by drawing upon the regions highly skilled labour pool." Source: www.businessworld.ie International digital marketing company, Search Optics, plans to create more than 100 jobs in Dublin over the next two years with the announcement of their EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa) hub in the Irish capital. Search Optics provide integrated digital marketing platforms to many of the worlds leading blue chip companies, delivering sales leads, with the aim of generating demand for a clients brand. Search Optics, which was founded in 1998, has corporate offices in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Ireland, Mexico, the United Kingdom and the United States. The companies new EMEA hub will be located on Fumbally Square, Dublin 8. Welcoming todays announcement, Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Richard Bruton TD said, Todays announcement that Search Optics, a leading company in the rapidly-growing area of digital marketing, is establishing its EMEA headquarters in Dublin and creating 100 jobs here is a very encouraging move. Having companies like Search Optics here helps us to attract other international tech companies to come to Ireland." Search Optics Global CEO, David Ponn added, We are dedicated to providing real results for our clients, backed by local employees in Ireland, and, with our new EMEA home in Dublin supporting us geographically, economically and culturally, we are excited to join the Irish business community." Source; www.businessworld.ie An initiative aimed at connecting the medical technology sector in the Southeast region with potential employees who need some specialised training has been hosted by Bausch + Lomb Waterford. The Bausch + Lomb event provided an opportunity to explore the possibility of running a programme for the medical technologies companies based in the region, similar to one currently underway in Sligo to train candidates for process technician posts in the medical devices and precision engineering companies in the Northwest. Representatives of Abbott, EirGen, Nypro, Eurofins, IDA Ireland, Irish Medical Devices Association, Skillnets and the Department of Social Protection all attended the event. General Manager at Bausch + Lomb, Damain Finn said, "Bausch + Lomb is currently undertaking a capital investment programme of 115 million which will have created an extra 175 jobs by the end of next year." He added, "This expansion project is currently on track. Due to exceptional demand for the range of Biotrue contact lenses made in Waterford, we constantly need high-calibre people and we are currently recruiting across a broad spectrum of engineering and other skills." Source: www.businessworld.ie Irish citizens should use their influence with friends and family in Britain to help make the case for continued membership of the European Union, Taoiseach Enda Kenny said today. Brexit would damage Ireland's exporters, undermine the European Union and deal a blow to Northern Ireland, Kenny told parliament ahead of Britain's June 23 referendum on whether to remain in the bloc or leave. Kenny stopped short of calling on British voters to vote to stay, saying the referendum is "entirely a matter for the UK electorate." But he called on the Irish people to use their influence. "I urge all other members of the House to use their connections and influence to reinforce the case," Kenny said. "This is a matter on which we should be united. "I also hope that people in Ireland will also reach out to family, friends and business colleagues in Britain." In addition to the 1.2 million eligible voters in Northern Ireland, there were 120,000 UK voters living in Ireland, Kenny said. Irish "In" campaigners in Britain are also targeting over 600,000 Irish-born voters who live there. Kenny dismissed suggestions that Ireland might be forced to follow the UK out of the European Union, saying the country would remain a committed EU member whatever the result. But he said the beneficial economic relationship between the UK and Ireland, which trade 1.2 billion euros of goods and services each week, would be at risk ,with trade in food and energy particular areas for concern. The common travel area between the United Kingdom and Ireland which has existed for almost a century "cannot be guaranteed" either if the UK leaves, Kenny also said. That warning contradicted recent comments by Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Theresa Villiers, who is campaigning for the United Kingdom to leave. Deutsche Bank this week described Brexit as "the single biggest source of uncertainty facing the Irish economy in the near-term" beyond the formation of a new government. The parliamentary debate on Brexit was one of the first since an inconclusive Feb. 26 election left the country without a government. Finance Minister Michael Noonan today said parties were edging towards agreement on forming one. (Reuters) Source: www.businessworld.ie Support for the transatlantic trade deal (TTIP) has fallen sharply in Germany and the United States, a YouGov survey indicated this morning, days before Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Barack Obama meet to try to breathe new life into the pact. The survey, conducted by YouGov for the Bertelsmann Foundation, showed that only 17 percent of Germans believe the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is a good thing, down from 55 percent two years ago. In the United States, only 18 percent support the deal compared to 53 percent in 2014. Nearly half of U.S. respondents said they did not know enough about the agreement to voice an opinion. TTIP is expected to be at the top of the agenda when Merkel hosts Obama at a trade show in Hanover on Sunday and Monday. Ahead of that meeting, German officials said they remained optimistic that a broad "political agreement" between Brussels and Washington could be clinched before Obama leaves office in January. The hope is that TTIP could then be finalized with Obama's successor. But there have been abundant signs in recent weeks that European countries are growing impatient with the slow pace of the talks, which are due to resume in New York next week. On Wednesday, German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel described the negotiations as "frozen up" and questioned whether Washington really wanted a deal. The day before, France's trade minister threatened to halt the talks, citing a lack of progress. Deep public scepticism in Germany, Europe's largest economy, has clouded the negotiations from the start. The Bertelsmann survey showed that many Germans fear the deal will lower standards for products, consumer protection and the labour market. It also pointed to a dramatic shift in how Germans view free trade in general. Only 56 percent see it positively, compared to 88 percent two years ago. "Support for trade agreements is fading in a country that views itself as the global export champion," said Aart de Geus, chairman and chief executive of the Bertelsmann Foundation. In the United States, leading candidates for the presidency, including Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Bernie Sanders, have been sharply critical of free trade deals, although most of their ire has been been focused on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) pact, which has already been negotiated and is awaiting a vote in Congress. (Reuters) Source; www.businessworld.ie LOGAN Utah State University students were looking forward to another End of Year Bash. The annual event, which was scheduled for Saturday night, usually brings a big name into the Spectrum for a concert, but it wont be happening this year. Past concerts have included Sean Kingston, MKTO and American Idol winner Scotty McCreery, but this years headliner Charlie Puth announced Tuesday he would not be able to attend. Im extremely upset to have had to cancel all of our shows this week. Unfortunately, Ive been sick for the last week and am unable to sing, let alone speak without vocal pain, Puth said in a in a statement to the university. Puth is well known for his songs Marvin Gaye and See You Again. He said he hopes to make it up to the students soon, and USUs Student Events Office said they are working to reschedule. According to the university, all purchased tickets will be refunded. If a ticket was purchased with a card online, it will automatically be refunded. Anyone who purchased a ticket in person will need to return to obtain a refund. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. Armenpress presents on the air of Lratvakan radio all that you will read, hear and see in todays news. The Government has developed a poverty reduction program in Tavush. The Government will hold a daily session on April 21 where they will discuss the adoption of 2016-2019 socio-economic development program for Tavush district. The program aims to contribute to the reduction of poverty, development of infrastructure and creation of favorable conditions for the development of SMEs. Another issue will also be discussed relating to the restoration of school military cabinets. On April 22 INVEST ARMENIA 2016 conference will be held in Yerevan the aim of which is to present the investment opportunities and prospects of Armenias economy and try to attract foreign entrepreneurs. Before the conference the President of the Union of Industrialists and Enterpreneurs Arsen Ghazaryan and INVEST ARMENIA 2016 Project Coordinator Vruyr Penesyan will speak about the details of the conference and the possible cooperation and prospects of Armenia-Iran-Eurasian Union in an interview with journalists. The worlds first memorial will be opened in Ring Park, Yerevan devoted to the memory of innocent victims of Yazidi people Genocide in Sinjar province, Iraq. Swiss people support the border villages of Armenia. The members of Aid Armenia charitable foundation Board of Trustees will summarize the work done so fair and will present their future plans. The recent events in Artsakh, the possibilities and consequences of military operations in the region: the 101th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide: Editor-in-chief of Azdak newspaper in Lebanon Shahan Gantaharyan, the director of the Institute of Oriental Studies of NAS, an expert in Turkish studies Ruben Safrastyan, the Director of the Institute of History of NAS Ashot Melkonyan will speak about these topics. Doctor in Historical Sciences, Professor Edik Minasyan will speak about the process of international recognition of the Armenian Genocide, the current achievements and future steps. Armenia is on 74th place among 18O countries in the Media Freedom rankings, Journalists without borders international organization reports this. Our country improved its ranking by 4 point compared to the previous report. Armenia is ahead of Israel, Italy, Greece and Cyprus. The President of Yerevan Press Club Boris Navasardyan will present the steps conducted for achieving that result. You can read about these and other topics on armenpress.am and listen to the news on the air of LRATVAKAN. Follow us on TWITTER and FACEBOOK. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. The Ministry of Defense of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic informs that Azerbaijan made 70 ceasefire violations along the entire length of frontline, Armenpress was informed by the Press Service of NKR Defense Army. The NKR Defense Army statement reads: No changes were observed in the contact line situation during the night of April 20-21. Azerbaijan violated the ceasefire agreement more than 70 times by firing various caliber weapons along the entire contact line. More intensive ceasefire violations were registered in the southeastern (Hadrut), eastern (Akna) and northeastern directions. Azerbaijan also fired 60mm mortars (2 shells) and AGS-17 grenade launchers (2 shells) in the southeastern direction. The Defense Army forces confidently continue ensuring reliable protection of the border. CALLER-TIMES file Residents review maps during a Plan CC 2035 meeting in June 2014. SHARE By Kirsten Crow of the Caller-Times A proposed comprehensive plan intended to help chart Corpus Christi's future won't return to a city board for discussion until mid-May, instead of early May. It was thought in March that the draft documents, known as Plan CC 2035, would be considered in the Planning Commission's meeting Wednesday. It was announced earlier this week that the discussion was pushed back to May 4 to give city staff additional time to prepare materials for the commission's review. The item is now scheduled for the commission's May 18 meeting, officials said Wednesday. Moving the item to May 18 will ensure the materials are finalized and made available to the public and the Planning Commission two weeks ahead of the meeting, city staff said. Those documents are expected to be posted on the Plan CC website, www.plancc2035.com, the evening of May 4. Plan CC 2035 is intended to serve as a guideline for the city for the next 20 years, addressing topics that include area development and economic diversification. The City Council sent a previous draft of Plan CC back to the Planning Commission with comments. It's expected that the commission will make revisions to the proposal, then return it to the council for further discussion. Twitter: @CallerCrow SHARE Caller-Times file In this clipping from the May 2, 1965 Caller-Times, Mayor McIver Furman (left photo) is unceremoniously dumped in the bay by Buc Days pirate queens, while Mayor Pro Tem Jack Blackmon (right photo) takes a more professional dive shortly after Furman. Related Photos City leaders make Buc Days splash By Allison Ehrlich of the Caller-Times With apologies to current Mayor Nelda Martinez, who hasn't had the urge to tell the mayor to take a long walk off a short plank? Corpus Christi just might be the only town in Texas to carry through with that threat, and we've been doing it for over 60 years. A search through the archives found on May 13, 1955, Buccaneer Days festivities kicked off with Mayor Farrell Smith enduring a dunking at the L-Heads, "as several thousand pirates crammed the sea wall to view the unprecedented plank walking." The Buc Days pirate tradition began in 1938, when attorney Marcellus Eckhardt dressed as Alonzo Alvarez de Pineda led a band of gun bearers to shore to capture the city. Mayor A.C. McCaughan and other city dignitaries presented Alonzo with a key to the city (which doesn't sound like a proper capture to me). Alonzo was replaced the following year with generic buccaneers and eventually pirate queens who overrun the city and demand the surrender of the city. In 1953, Mayor Albert Lichtenstein responded to the pirates' cries of "Mayor, we want the city," with the zinger "You can have it." The article reported it sounded like the pirates were doing Lichtenstein a favor. Not all of the city's mayors have endured a dip in the drink. In 1956 Mayor Farrell D. Smith was granted last-minute clemency due to a cold. The tradition evolved to where a mayor who was unable (or unwilling) to take the plunge could appoint a stand-in. Seventy-year-old Mayor Gabe Lozano in 1979 had City Councilman Joe Holt make the leap in his place. Mayor Mary Rhodes had a stand-in for each of her years in office from 1991 to 1997. She suffered from Raynaud's disease, a sensitivity to cold temperatures that causes pain and numbness in the extremities. Some of the pirates' victims have more style than others. In this Caller-Times clipping from May 2, 1965, Mayor McIver Furman was unceremoniously dumped in the bay, while Mayor Pro-Tem Jack Blackmon took a more elegant headfirst dive. Feet-first seems the preferred route for most plank-walkers, although City Councilman Kevin Kieschnick pulled off an impressive front flip in 2010, and City Councilman David Loeb opted for the always fun cannonball in 2012. The tradition continues at 6 p.m. Thursday with the dunking of Mayor Nelda Martinez in front of Joe's Crab Shack on the Lawrence Street T-Head. Come join the pirate queens as they send our mayor into the briny deep. Allison Ehrlich is the archive coordinator for the Caller-Times. Contact her at allison.ehrlich@caller.com and follow her on Twitter @CallerArchives. IF YOU GO What: Buc Days Dunking of Mayor Nelda Martinez When: 6 p.m. Thursday Where: Joe's Crab Shack on the bayfront SHARE By Beatriz Alvarado of the Caller-Times Four Tuloso-Midway ISD teachers suspended last week pending an investigation into an Instagram post returned to work Thursday, according to a district news release. An Instagram post seen by Tuloso-Midway ISD Superintendent Sue Nelson prompted the suspension of the longtime teachers and several students who went on a trip to Hawaii together, she said. The teachers, who are women and have been employed by the district more than 10 years, were suspended with pay April 13 after Nelson initiated an investigation by the district's personnel department, she said. Nelson declined to detail the photo and to say if the group in the photo were engaged in illegal activity. Nelson said 29 Tuloso-Midway High School students who are members of the Discovery Club and teachers were on a school-sponsored trip to Hawaii when the photo was taken. The club is an interdisciplinary project focused on teaching outside the classroom. They visited Hawaii for a geography lesson, Nelson said. The news release states the investigation into "alleged student behavior during the Discovery Club trip" concluded Thursday. "Not all on the trip were involved in misbehavior," the news release states. The district is "refining procedures for future student trips," according to the release. Nelson declined to say how many students are or will be suspended and declined to elaborate on the news release Thursday. A phone call to the club's sponsor and the school board's president were not returned Thursday. Suspension lengths and other consequences for students, like not being allowed to attend prom, will vary, she said. Those involved in the incident captured in the photo do not face criminal charges, she added. Twitter: @CallerBetty YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. Prominent musician and political activist, Serj Tankian has composed a special track called Auroras Dream. The composition will be the theme music for the upcoming inaugural Aurora Prize ceremony to be held in Yerevan, Armenia on April 24, 2016, Armenpress was informed by the IDea Foundation. The Aurora Prize was born of the 100 LIVES initiative, which is rooted in the inspiring stories of courage and survival during the Armenian Genocide one hundred years ago. The subject is dear to Serjs heart as Tankians own family would not have survived without the American missionaries who ran the orphanage in which his grandfather was raised. Tankians maternal grandmother Varsenig survived the massacres thanks to the bravery of a Turkish mayor, who put his life on the line to hide her and her family. This righteous Turkish citizen refused to carry out the governments orders to kill or deport Armenians; many who undertook similar acts of selflessness at this time were executed by the Ottoman government for defying authority. Commenting on the release of the new song, Serj Tankian said, Of all the tracks Ive composed and produced over the last few years, Auroras Dream is my favorite. Im glad it was for the Aurora Prize and 100 LIVES initiative - an organization doing wonderful things by bringing attention to devastating tragedies and the real heroes that rise to the occasion. Arman Jilavian, CEO 100 LIVES and the Aurora Prize said, We are grateful to Serj for the creativity, enthusiasm and passion he brought to our project. Above all, his beautiful composition acts as a tribute to Aurora, the woman after whom the prize was named and who bore witness to the horrors of the Armenian Genocide and bravely told the world her story of survival to raise awareness for the 1915 atrocities. Through the Aurora Prize, we aim to raise awareness of the men and women who are courageously saving lives around the world today. SHARE By Beatriz Alvarado of the Caller-Times Taft High School transformed its campus into an emotionally safe and connected place for students, staff and parents, according to a College Station-based professional development organization. The Flippen Group, founded by educator, psychotherapist, and New York Times best-selling author Flip Flippen, named the school a Capturing Kids' Hearts National Showcase School. School officials partnered with the Flippen Group to bring Capturing Kids' Hearts strategies to its campus, according to a news release. Teachers and staff learned processes to increase student connectedness with peers and adults on campus. The school was chosen based on a site visit by Flippen, significant improvement in attendance, discipline, climate/culture, or academics and interviews with students, teachers, administrators and parents. Since 2012, when Flippen strategies were adopted, data shows that more Taft high students are graduating with college credit hours, according to the release. Taft high also increased the percentage of students graduating on the recommended and distinguished graduation plans. "Campus expectations reveal that the faculty and staff are committed to the success of their students," the release states. Twitter: @CallerBetty COURTNEY SACCO/CALLER-TIMES The Galvan Ballroom was awarded the Texas Treasure Business Award on Wednesday, April 20, 2016. SHARE COURTNEY SACCO/CALLER-TIMES The Galvan Ballroom was awarded the Texas Treasure Business Award on Wednesday, April 20, 2016. COURTNEY SACCO/CALLER-TIMES State Reps. Abel Herrero (second from right) and Todd Hunter (right) present members of the Galvan family who own Galvan Ballroom the Texas Treasure Business Award on Wednesday, April 20, 2016. Caller-Times File The Galvan Ballroom is in the second floor of the Galvan Building, above the Galvan Music Co. Photo courtesy of Rafael, Sr. and Virginia Reyes Galvan Family Photographs, Special Collections & Archives, Bell Library, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi Duke Ellington (center) with Ralph Galvan Jr. (left) and Rafael Galvan Sr. in February 1952 at the Galvan Ballroom. By Fares Sabawi of the Caller-Times Rosie Gonzalez Collin spent most of her childhood in the Galvan Ballroom. She would stay up to watch the bands as long as she could. "My parents would put two chairs together so I could lay down," Gonzalez Collin said. "It was a wonderful time of family and community." The ballroom, which has been a staple in the city's westside since 1950, received special recognition Wednesday. State legislators presented the Galvan family with the Texas Treasure Business Award from the Texas Historical Commission. The award is reserved for businesses that have been operating for at least 50 years. The family exchanged memories with members of the community as big band music played. The Galvan Ballroom has played host to several well known musicians through the years, including Duke Ellington and the Dorsey Brothers. Music is not the only thing the ballroom is known for. Since Rafael Galvan opened the venue, it has stood as a symbol of racial equality despite being threatened with boycotts. "This building was pretty much the first integrated place in Corpus Christi," said 94th District Judge Bobby Galvan Jr. "It was integrated before our schools were." In June, the Galvan Ballroom was included in the National Register of Historic Places, making it a protected landmark. "It's a testament to how important it was to our family," Gonzalez Collin said. The ballroom is still open for business, and families rent it out every weekend for weddings and birthday parties. When his father decides it's time to step away from the business, Bobby Galvan Jr. said he'll be ready to run the operation. "I'm going to keep it going," he said. "We're making new memories here." SHARE CONTRIBUTED/KIIITV-NEWS Richard Longoria By Julie Garcia of the Caller-Times Richard Longoria has a piece of advice for recently hired reporters and photographers. "We're TV journalists, but we're also citizens. We have to care about what we work on," Longoria said. "You can't take your heart out of where you live. That brings much more depth to the work." After decades in the news industry and 13 years in Corpus Christi, Longoria will retire as news director from KIII-TV News. His final day is Friday. A Corpus Christi native and graduate of Corpus Christi Academy, the former boys Catholic school, Longoria initially wanted to become a priest after high school. "After two years, they said 'You're better made for the world,' " he said. He received a degree in English from the University of Houston and spent one year in graduate school before joining the United Farm Workers Union during the Civil Rights era and traveled from Texas to New York to Denver in his positions with the union. Eventually, he returned to Texas to teach English composition to freshmen part-time at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio and took a job at WOAI, a radio station. "They told me my voice was pretty good, and asked if I would like to be a reporter. I said 'Sure, why not?' " he said. Longoria worked in Houston for 20 years before becoming news director at KUSI, a TV station in San Diego. He returned to Corpus Christi in 2003 to work at KIII and help care for his parents. A few years after his return, Longoria hired a reporter working in Jackson, Miss., who had dreams of being a news anchor. KIII anchor Katia Uriarte said he blessed her with not only an amazing job, but an unforgettable career. "I thank him because he really gave me my life," Uriarte said. She said that Longoria is different from other news directors. "He's not about being sensational, but quite the opposite." Uriarte said. "He's always very thoughtful about who the story is going to affect." As a deacon at his Catholic church, Longoria said he has plenty of work to do. "This really is the best place. The living is easy, the beach is good. The summers are pretty hot, but you get in the shade, you'll be fine," he said. "The future is very bright for Corpus Christi." Twitter: @Caller_Jules Contributed photo Sherwin Alumina SHARE Contributed photo Sherwin Alumina By Chris Ramirez of the Caller-Times The Port of Corpus Christi has put in a bid to buy the property of Sherwin Alumina Co., now wrestling with bankruptcy and a nearly two-year-long labor dispute, federal court records show. The nation's fifth-largest port has offered a bid totaling $20 million, and already has made a $2 million "good faith deposit" with a bank to move the process forward, according to documents filed Monday at U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston. The port also looks to spend $13 million in capital, deferred maintenance, and environmental improvements in the area if Sherwin Alumina or another company continues to operate the nonport assets in the production of alumina. The Port Authority on Tuesday authorized its staff to close the purchase of the land. In a letter included in the court filing, John P. LaRue, the port's executive director, said Sherwin Alumina would be a "natural fit" for the navigation district's portfolio. He described its bid as a "white knight" option for the company, which is restructuring under Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The purchase, if approved, could help solve a problem for the port a shrinking supply of waterfront property. It has become increasingly scarce around the port in recent years, with the construction of various industrial plants. That's especially true near Gregory, where Cheniere Energy's $11 billion liquefied natural gas facility and TPCO America Inc.'s $1.3 billion pipe manufacturing operation. Located on State Highway 361 in Gregory, the Sherwin Alumina plant opened in 1953, but was acquired in 2007 Swiss-based multinational Glencore. Alumina's uses includes airplanes, beer cans, fire-retardant carpet, seat cushions, toothpaste, deodorant, antacid and artificial marble. Thursday marked the 653rd day that 450 unionized Sherwin Alumina employees have been locked out of their jobs. The labor contract that covered them expired in September 2014. Plant employees and their union rejected the company's final contract offer Oct. 10, 2014. Replacement employees have worked on the site ever since. The United Steelworkers Local 235A union declined to comment when reached Thursday. Sherwin Alumina filed bankruptcy in January. It cited a troubling combination of low alumina demand and an oversupply of it from China had crushed its bottom line. The company announced plans to sell its assets in exchange for forgiveness of $95 million in debt plus $250,000 in cash. The plant is capable of producing 1.65 million tons of alumina annually, but produced just under 1.4 million tons in 2015. Its projected net operating losses were $42.1 million. Sherwin Alumina owes between 1,000-5,000 creditors, and listed assets and liabilities each between $100 million and $500 million, court records show. Twitter: @Caller_ChrisRam EDITOR'S NOTE: An earlier version of this report incorrectly reported the amount the port bid on property owned by Sherwin Alumina. The port offered $20 million for the property. Sherwin Alumina timeline 1950: The Reynolds Metals Company of Richmond, Virginia selects Gregory as a site for a new Bauxite refinery. 1951: A total of 1660 acres of the former "Taft Ranch" were purchased, and construction of the Sherwin Alumina Plant and its companion, the San Patricio Reduction Plant, begins. 1953: Sherwin Alumina plant opens. 1965: Plant begins expansion. 1991: Plant installs two gas suspension calciners, a move the company says helped modernize the facility. May 2007: Sherwin Alumina acquired by Glencore, a public company that employs around 200,000 people including contractors. September 2014: Labor contract covering 450 of the plant's 650 employees expires. October 2014: Plant employees and their union reject Sherwin Alumina's final contract offer. Employees are locked out of their workplace. Port Bid on Sherwin Alumina Land GABE HERNANDEZ/CALLER-TIMES Assistant Manager Lisa Callin at Home Depot rearranges a table that displays the items for the Tax Free Weekend sale Thursday. SHARE GABE HERNANDEZ/CALLER-TIMES Items that will be tax free this weekend are on display Thursday at the Home Depot on South Port Avenue. GABE HERNANDEZ/CALLER-TIMES Assistant Manager Lisa Callin at Home Depot views information on a gas powered generator as they prepare for the Tax Free Weekend sale Thursday. By Matt Woolbright of the Caller-Times There's just over a month before hurricane season officially begins in the Coastal Bend, but there may not be a better time to get equipped and be prepared should disaster strike. This weekend, emergency preparedness items, including batteries, manual can openers, emergency ladders and portable generators, will be sold tax-free under a new law passed by the 2015 Legislature. "It's a way to make people aware we are constantly exposed to weather events like hurricanes, wild fires hail, and so on," Hinojosa said of the tax holiday. We want to encourage and help people be prepared to protect themselves in the event of a real disaster." Hinojosa authored SB904 and helped usher the bill into law after 2014 saw damaging hail storms, flooding, tornadoes, wild fires and snow storms affect much of the state. While the timing coincides with the looming hurricane season, the sale is designed to help Texans prepare for the gamut of weather phenomenon the state faces. The sale starts at midnight Saturday and runs through Sunday. Unexpected disasters like the costly hailstorm that hit San Antonio earlier this month or the floods Houston is dealing with this week reinforce the need to be prepared before the weather gets bad, Hinojosa said. "It's better to be prepared than be sorry, because weather, especially here in Texas, is unpredictable," he said. "As much as we like to make weather forecasts, it's more of an art than a science." One place Corpus Christi shoppers can go to stock up on emergency supplies is the Home Depot on South Port Avenue. Store officials will have a sample of the applicable sale items on display so shoppers don't have to guess what does and what doesn't qualify for the tax break. "We watch people get in trouble every day from weather-related events," said Lisa Callin, the operations assistant manager at the store. "While we are a retail store, we want to help protect our customers and their property, too. "These are things that help people stay calm when disasters do hit and the natural reaction is to panic," she added. The display includes things like batteries, a portable generator, first aid kits, tarps and other emergency preparedness items. While the savings on small items may not be much, buying a $3,000-portable generator which shouldn't be operated indoors, Callin urged would save the customer about $250 this weekend. In the next month or so, and again if a hurricane appears to be approaching the region, one of the Home Depot stores in the area will be putting on a hurricane preparedness class for free, department manager Victoria Salinas said. The company also has plans for employees to volunteer to respond to a natural disaster with tools from the store's rent-a-tool program if needed, Callin said. Twitter: @reportermatt Hurricane sale items Last year, Texas Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa championed SB904, which created a sales-tax-free weekend for emergency supplies and hurricane-preparedness items. This weekend is the annual sale. Here's what you can buy without paying any sales tax and how much you can spend on each item: Less than $3,000 Portable generators Less than $300 Hurricane shutters Emergency ladders Less than $75 Batteries First aid kits Fuel containers Ground anchor systems and tie-down kits Hatchets Axes Mobile telephone batteries and mobile telephone chargers Nonelectric coolers and ice chests for food storage Nonelectric can openers Portable self-powered light sources (hand-cranked flashlights) Portable self-powered radios, including two-way and weather band radios Reusable and artificial ice products Smoke detectors, fire extinguishers and carbon monoxide detectors Tarps and other plastic sheeting Source: Texas Comptroller's Office When it comes to developing a strong brand story, gender has always been seen as one of the key ingredients. By using gendered semiotic cueslike blue for boys, or pink for girlsbrands provoke familiar and deeply engrained associations to help create brand personalities. Think of the iconic Marlboro man; a perfect example, if there ever was one, of a brand leveraging gender to conjure up a powerful brand identity. From the consumers point of view, a gendered approach not only helps understanding of the brand story but also functions as a cognitive shortcut to navigate the thousands of commercial messages they are confronted with dailyand knowing whether whats on sale is actually meant for them. The problem with this binary approach, however, is that historically it has meant that certain desires are off limits (think of men desiring men, or women desiring women, or men desiring to be women who desire men and vice versa). In an increasingly fluid world, this doesnt rub well, and ultimately, we are witnessing such rigid demarcations fade. Today many societies are progressing from an either/or to a both/and understanding of gender. Millennials particularly dont want to be told what/who they should/shouldnt desire or who they are/arent allowed to be. Not only that, a recent VoxBurner poll showed that 63 percent of young people feel negatively towards companies who target them based on their gender. In keeping with this movement, many mainstream brands have begun to reflect an increasingly nuanced understanding of gender. Companies like Facebook and Google+ have introduced infinite gender options for their users, acknowledging gender fluidity. Louis Vuittons recent collaboration with Jaden Smith, in which he is photographed in a skirt and a mesh fringed tank top (above), has successfully made the brand appear millennial-sensitive and forward-thinking, as has Lynxs Find your Magic campaign, which features a black male dancer wearing stilettos. Rather than focusing on the things that distinguish males and females, progressive brands are tapping into individuals unique passion points irrespective of where they fall on the gender spectrum. when will we move past this notion that genderless clothing simply = plain t-shirts/sweatpants? why is this "bold"? https://t.co/j5SyO3Z0go Tyler Ford (@tywrent) March 4, 2016 Brands today know its more important than ever to be relevant, and riding this social movement is one way for them to do this. But its not necessarily easy to get it right. Consumers today are likely to question motives. For example, Zara recently found itself the object of much criticism, having launched its Ungendered collectiona range of unisex clothing, including hoodies and tracksuit bottoms. The problem seems to be that everyone knows these kinds of clothes are genderless anyway. And so the prevailing sentiment emerged that Zara was not really interested in furthering the intention of the movement at all, rather, simply riding its coattails in a cynical marketing ploy. This article is part of the Cultural Radar series Pantone is another case in point. The international colour authority has, for the past 26 years, given us a colour snapshot of what we see taking place in our culture. In 2016, for the first time, the company chose not one colour but two, as its Colour of the Year: both blue and pink. The rationale: to coincide with societal movements towards gender equality and fluidity. This caused some controversy. For sure, the intention may have been simply to reflect cultural changes, but the impression left, for many, was derivative. For brands, the danger is that just as male or female now appear anachronistic, genderless or gender-fluid may become tired co-options. Deployed in the service of edge and cool, yet lacking heart. Perhaps the lesson is that brands really look cool when they play with and push the boundaries of culture or blur and blend categories in imaginative, authentic waysnot when they recycle existing ideas, and not when they reflect the status quo. View the 2016 China Digital A-List here Campaign Asia-Pacific is unveiling the 100 A-Listers with an exclusive cocktail reception to honour their achievements tonight in Shanghai, following today's Digital360China conference. (Please stay tuned for photos and coverage tomorrow.) The 100 individuals who make it to the Digital A-List have been selected by Campaigns editorial panel following a round of nominations from their peers and colleagues in the field. The response has been tremendous, with a significant increase in the number and quality of nominations over previous yearswhittling down the selections to just 100 A-Listers has been no mean feat. This years list honours talent in seven key areas of expertise which are driving growth and development in the industry today: data analytics; digital content; ecommerce; hardware innovation; retail technology; programmatic; and social media. The varying demand for some of these fields said much about the state of the industry today: almost half of all nominations were for people working in digital content; only a few were bold enough to claim to be hardware innovation or retail tech specialistsbut those who did were of exceptional calibre. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. Political scientist Hrant Melik-Shanazaryan stated that he does not expect any serious changes over the issue of Nagorno Karabakh conflict from the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrovs upcoming visit to Yerevan. In an interview with Armenpress, the political scientist stated that to wait for serious changes in Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement after Lavrovs visit is not correct. We see that political processes are multifaceted, and at this moment issues related to the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict are being discussed at different platforms. It is obvious that the issue will not be solved in the nearest future, therefore, we should not expect any serious changes from Lavrovs visit to Yerevan, said the political scientist. There is a need of some clarification in the Armenian-Russian relations. I think that Armenian-Russian relations should be clarified. Armenia expects Russias clear stance on Azerbaijani actions. These visits are in the form of consultations that can have a positive impact in the conflict settlement in the future, however, currently they are at the preparatory stage, and we should not expect any serious developments in the conflict settlement, said Melik-Shahnazaryan. Referring to the Russian media releases which say that intensive negotiation process will be restarted over Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement that will discuss the issue of yielding some of the territories, he stated that this information does not match with the reality. I think that information is different from the reality. We see now media war is underway, and moreover, this issue is also a topic of discussion in abroad, thats why media tries to act as a knowledgeable source. It is obvious that there are no negotiations at this point and also it is clear that the Armenia side will not change its stance after the Azerbaijani military operations. In my opinion, there are no and will not be any talks about the yielding of territories since we see that situation has changed in the negotiation process, the political analyst added. At the end Shahnazaryan noted that if previously Armenia was ready to go for some compromises for the peaceful settlement of the conflict, now it will match its stance in accordance of the current situation created as a result of Azerbaijani recent actions. Fang Fang, senior marketing manager at Skyscanner Greater China, compares the role to running a startup. We are divided into country squads, Fang told Campaign Asia-Pacific. Youre basically the CEO of that country. You wear many hats. You work on the product and you work with the commercial team." Skyscanners engineers sit under a regional features squad and are expected to understand the marketing teams product metrics as well. In other words, when the engineers make an adjustment to Skyscanners product, they are mindful about it serving a marketing purpose as well. The engineers help us create dashboards for gathering data in real time from the site. Using SQL [Structured Query Language], the data can be brought into Excel, says Fang. The best way to make your team more data driven is to democratise data and let everyone use it. Thats how you turn more people into data experts. Fang said the data-driven approach to marketing and the business itself comes from Gareth Williams, the CEO and co-founder of Skyscanner. The idea for Skyscanner was born out of a frustration with finding cheap flights, which led Williams to start the company in his bedroom with a simple spreadsheet that consolidated booking information. Our marketing focus is actually about solving the users problem and achieving that through our product, said Fang. Founded in 2003, Skyscanner currently works with over 1300 partners and serves approximately 50 million users per month according to the company. Here are some of Skyscanner's approaches to marketing and data that may be useful to other marketers. Growth-hack marketing: Skyscanner takes a performance-driven approach and believes in running campaigns in small batches and short cycles that focus on EBITAS. Rather than throwing a budget into a big idea the company prefers to start small and see what works in a market before building up campaigns. They run a lot of ad tests and look at their data. For example, with EDMs, Fang said if Skyscanner simply assumed when the best time to send out a newsletter in Hong Kong would be, they might think that people would want to see Skyscanners travel-related content on Monday because of Monday blues. However, from testing over a period of time they found that Tuesday 10pm was the most active time for people to browse the Internet on mobile. Sending emails at that time also had the highest open rate. We rely a lot on our data to tell stories, said Fang. A longer-term view of marketing: When Skyscanner considers its marketing activities in a market it takes a longer-term strategic view. The questions it asks as a company is: Whats our position? Are we mature enough? Is the market mature enough? For example, when Skyscanner launched in Hong Kong their first consideration was whether the product was good enough or not for Hong Kong users. Again they asked more questions: Is it useful? Is it easy to use? Skyscanners strategy when going to market is to build the foundations of the localised product and wait until its good enough to promote. When we saw that traffic to our site stable and that the quality and conversion rate was good, we started to really position ourselves, said Fang We then focused then at looking at the external environment like competitors and the best channels to market further. Branding is about the details: Skyscanner doesnt like to do big integrated campaigns about Skyscanner. Instead the company prefers to focus on the details. For example, Fang said most marketing decisions relate to Skyscanners user experience. We have over 1300 partners working with us. Sometimes their prices might not be accurate, says Fang. In our system, if a user sees a cheap price and clicks on it and doesnt get the price they see, its a very bad user experience. We monitor that vigilantly to make sure prices are accurate. Thats how we protect our brand and our users. Another point is transparency. For example, listed prices include tax. While users can filter flight information by price, duration, and other variables Skyscanner tries to ensure that data isnt manipulated or that fees are hidden. It goes back to creating a bad user experience, says Fang. Your value propositions have to be true. Thats the focus. For us this starts with something as simple as price accuracy. Thats the first step before you do any branding campaigns. Using data: Skyscanner uses data to try to improve key areas of its business including product experience, utility benefits, commercial value and insights. At the core of Skyscanners approach is a flywheel strategy, in which the premise is that the more partners and users Skyscanner can acquire, the more traffic it can deliver to it partners. However, Fang said that increasingly its not just about traffic, its about helping Skyscanners partners improve their performance. Skyscanner has a user satisfaction team that collects feedback from users. Whether users book with a specific airline or OTA, they might have an experience they liked or didnt like, says Fang. We collect all the specific data to find out what the customer problem was. It could relate to anything, for example, luggage or cancellation fees. We give these insights to our partners so they can improve their service, reputation and conversion rate. Using data to give users more utility is another important area. For example, users can search when the best time of year is to book flights for their specific routes based on historical data. By connecting up more data points, we can find new ways of using the data, said Fang. Data is also used for cross-selling services on Skyscanner. For example, if a person started booking a flight, what are they likely to do next? Probably look for a hotel. Thats the kind of data that is useful to our partners, Fang added. Content marketing is data-driven: At the most basic level, when it comes to crafting content, Skyscanner monitors search terms and search volumes to create stories on the go. "How to holiday in Japan on a budget" is one such such example. It goes back to our motive, which is to help users and solve a problem that they have, said Fang. Ad Nuts strong, sparkly teeth draw regular compliments from human friends. But this time round, its Ad Nut who is impressed. Ad Nut is a sceptical creature when it comes to videos produced by humans. But this one is backed up by a study of 6,000 people. Half of them used Listerine, and the other half didnt. The Listerine users are apparently the bolder lot: they are more likely to skydive, volunteer, or stand up to a bully. Ad Nuts hero certainly fits the profile. He wows women everywhere he goes with his strong bite. Its not quite what you might expect. Swilling Listerine everyday apparently helps him dispose of retail tags, pull stubborn corks from bottles, and yeseven crack open nutsall with his teeth. He is currently demonstrating his powers in Japan, as you can see below. Other markets to have witnessed this phenomenon include Korea and Taiwan, and it will air in Thailand, Hong Kong, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam soon. He's viewable in English with a couple of friends at J. Walter Thompson's Singapore site. Ad Nut was of course also impressed by the chicken and crab-chomping ability female Listerine users have, but will stick to chestnuts, thank you. Here's the biggest news you missed this weekend The Biden administration's student debt relief program is on hold. And a Texas trooper who responded in Uvalde was fired. It's the weekend's biggest news. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. 16 incidents of ceasefire violations occurred overnight April 20-21 in the northeastern part of the Armenia-Azerbaijan state border. Azerbaijan opened irregular gunfire from various caliber weapons and sniper rifles at Armenian positions. As Armenpress was informed by the Information and Public Relations Department of the Ministry of Defense, the Armenian Armed Forces displayed restraint and took response actions only in case of strict necessity. Armenian forces are confidently monitoring the border situation. According to the NKR Defense Army, overnight April 20-21 the situation in the NKR-Azerbaijan line of contact remained the same. Azerbaijan violated the ceasefire agreement more than 70 times by firing various caliber weapons along the entire contact line. Intense violations occurred in the southeastern (Hadrut), eastern (Akna) and northeastern (Martakert) directions. Azerbaijan also fired 60mm mortars ( 2 shells) and AGS-17 grenade launchers (2 grenades) in the northeastern direction. The Defense Army forces are monitoring the border and take measures according to the developments in the line of contact. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. A government attempt to prevent MPs from declaring that Islamic States treatment of Yazidis and Christians amounted to genocide was crushed on April 20, when the Commons voted unanimously to condemn their treatment and refer the issue to the UN Security Council, Armenpress reports citing The Guardian. It is almost unprecedented for MPs collectively to declare actions in a war as genocide. Islamic State (Isis) has carried out a campaign of murder, violence and repression against Christians and the Yazidi ethnic and religious minority since seizing large swaths of northern Iraq and Syria. However, the Foreign Office directed ministers and parliamentary aides to abstain, saying it was wrong for the government to prejudge the issue or act as a jury on a case that may yet be referred to the international criminal court. The United States Congress, the US administration, the European parliament and the Council of Europe have all declared the terror groups treatment of the Yazidi community as genocide, but the Foreign Office legal department has a long-standing policy dating back to the passage of the genocide convention in 1948 of refusing to give a legal description to potential war crimes. The government abstention policy was also designed to minimize the significance and size of the Commons majority, as well as to disassociate the executive from the MPs vote. Tobias Ellwood, the Foreign Office minister, facing jeers and interruptions, said the immediate task was to compile evidence of the harrowing and unspeakable crimes, but it was wrong to declare now the nature of the crimes being committed against the Yazidis. He said he personally believed genocide had taken place, but said this was a matter for the courts and not politicians. He added that any referral to the international criminal court required the support of the UN Security Council and that such a reference was blocked by Russia and China in 2014. This ultimately is a matter for courts to decide. It is not for governments to be the prosecutor, the judge or indeed jury, he said. He insisted that regardless of the precise legal description of the crimes, justice would be brought to bear on those responsible; no matter how long it takes, insisting the government was not washing its hands of the issue. "I tried for the last few months to save her," Mr Broers said. " She looked like she was coming through, then in the last week she got really bad. We picked up her front feet, there were traces of blood coming through, that means her pedal bone has dropped inside her hoof, so I had to put her down," he said. Your digital subscription includes access to content from all our websites in your region. Access unlimited news content and The Canberra Times app. Premium subscribers also enjoy interactive puzzles and access to the digital version of our print edition - Today's Paper. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. The United States and Saudi Arabia support the political settlement of the Syrian conflict and are convinced that President Bashar Assad should resign, Armenpress reports, the Press Service of the White House informs this summarizing the results of negotiations between the US President Barack Obama and the King of Saudi Arabia Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. They discussed ways to strengthen the ceasefire regime and expressed their support for the political transformation of the government without Assad, Press service reports. According to it, the US President stressed the need to activate the military campaign against the Islamic State terrorist group and appreciated the important role of Saudi Arabia in international coalition which struggles against the Syrian and Iraqi Islamists. The US President and the King of Saudi Arabia exchanged views over regional conflicts, in particular over the situation in Yemen and Iraq. Moreover, they also discussed issues related to the Israel-Palestine conflict, Irans provocative actions and the socio-economic situation of the region, TASS reported. She is away for 10 days even though the London meeting is only four days long. Remuneration Tribunal rules require parliamentarians to pay a percentage of the trip if they spend more than 40 per cent of it on private business. But Mr Duncan said when travel time was taken into account, Mrs Dunne's private component did not exceed the 40 per cent threshold, so she was not required to make a contribution. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS: "Armenpress" was informed by the Department of Public Relations and Mass Media of the Presidential Administration that President Serzh Sargsyan sent a congratulatory letter on April 21 on the occasion of Peoples Artist of Armenia Robert Elibekyans 75th birthday. "You are among representatives of the generation of artists who went against the stereotypes of the time, and opened a new page in the history of art. Being a worthy follower of Armenian artists and artistic traditions of your family, you have been able to create a unique world of colors and forms that have won recognition not only in Armenia, but also in prestigious international exhibitions. Also worthy of high praise are your stage works, which greatly contributed to the development of theater and cinema of Armenia. Once again I congratulate you and wish you good health and new creative achievements and all the best, the Presidents message reads. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. Official Germany first and foremost is guided by its own interests in the process of the legislative decision-making for the Armenian Genocide leaving behind the humanitarian concerns. However, the German ruling circles have already stated in their speeches that they recognize the fact of the Genocide committed in the Ottoman Empire, German famous genocide scholar Tessa Hofmann said this in an interview with Armenpress". German scholar spoke about the denial of the Armenian Genocide by Turkey, the stance of international community and in particular Germany over this issue and the possible adoption of the resolution of the Armenian Genocide in Bundestag. -Mrs. Hofmann, more than a century later after the Armenian Genocide the Turkish state continues to refuse from the historic truth and tries to close others eyes on this issue. How would You comment on this official position of Turkish Republic? -Most of all, this attitude is dangerous for Turkey and its society. Not only does official Turkey deny the genocides that had been committed against more than three millions indigenous Christians during the last decade of Ottoman rule, but it worships the perpetrators. Public squares, boulevards, schools, kindergartens and even mosques are named after Talat, Enver, or Cemal Azmi, governor of Trabzon in 1914-1917, and CUP rapist of Armenian girls. Turkish curricula and school books still contain denial and blame the Christian victims instead of the perpetrators who are venerated as role models of antiimperialist patriotism. Thus, genocide appears as a mean of solving domestic problems or issues in nationalities and minorities policies. This becomes a severe obstacle for the prevention of crimes against humanity, and a repetition of deportation and massacres must be feared, this time against the Kurdish population. -How would you evaluate the position of international community in general and Germany in particular on this issue? -Throughout all 2015, the international community and German society have been extremely interested in a crime that was committed 100 years ago. This remarkable response includes intense media coverage of several weeks by all print media in Germany, tremendous activities by artists, theatres, NGOs, educational and church institutions. Subsequently, the main problem of the 1915/6 genocide is not international forgetfulness (despite the sad fact that numerous and even quantitatively larger genocides have been committed since 1915), but legislative acknowledgment. So far, Germany has failed in this aspect. In 2015, German consideration for Turkish interests was of higher priority than the legal evaluation of the Armenian genocide by the Bundestag, i.e. the issuance of a resolution. Nevertheless, speakers of all parliamentary fractions articulated recognition in their speeches of 24 April 2015. The massive immigration of civic war refugees from Syria, Iraq and other countries to Germany in the second half of 2015, however, led to an even more Turkey focused German policy, for the Chancellor perceives president Erdogan as Europes doorkeeper against further influx of refugees/immigrants. This resembles the official German policy during WW1, when the Ottoman-German military alliance was of higher priority for the Reichskanzler than any humanitarian concern for the persecuted and murdered Ottoman Armenians. -Today Turkey arms the terrorist groups that are committing crimes against humanity in the Middle East. Dont you think that this kind of activities of Turkey come from the impunity for committing the first Genocide of 20th century? -Religiously motivated terrorism Islamic State, Boko Haram and similar receives direct and indirect support by predominantly Sunnite states like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others. I do not quite see a direct link with the Ottoman genocide, although the CUP authors of that genocide relied to religion and religious antagonism in order to conduct their genocidal agenda. But throughout the second half of the 20th century, Western states, in the first place the USA, likewise exploit Islamic terrorism for their interests (Indonesia, Afghanistan etc.). -The draft resolution on the Armenian Genocide will be discussed in the German Bundestag on June 2. What are your expectations? -The chairman of the ruling conservative fraction recently mentioned in an interview that the Bundestag is going to discuss and perhaps vote on a still unpublished draft resolution on 2 June. Against the above mentioned background of negative experience, this remains to be seen. The German government is all too ready to sacrifice such projects and to interfere into the business of legislation if alleged necessities materialize. But given that this time a legislative recognition will be indeed issued then it is not the end, but the beginning of a lot of further work. For then we shall have to discuss the inclusion of the Ottoman genocide into school curricula of genocide awareness education and the representation of this and other cases into the general representation of genocide. We also have to deal with the veneration of genocide perpetrators in wide circles of the Turkey born diaspora of Germany and the cult of the graves of Cemal Azmi and Dr. Bahaeddin Sakir on the Islamic Cemetery of Berlin, or the renaming of the Enver Bridge in Potsdam. The movement for parliamentary genocide recognition in Germany has started 16 years ago as a joint petition initiative by German human rights defenders and Turkey born activists, including ethnic Turks and Kurds. However, since 2005 we observe an increasing influence of lobbyist structures and NGOs in this movement, weakening the human rights focus of previous years. But to solve the tasks in history and memory politics as described above, we have to return to the initial focus of integrated and independent German, Turkish, Armenian and other civic and human rights defenders. Interview by Araks Kasyan [Your Business Name] Contact Info Phone: Fax: Email: Web: CAPITOLHILLCUBANS.COM Business Overview Geographic Area Line of Business Brands We Carry Products and Services Discounts Offered Additional Information Business Hours Timezone We Accept YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. On April 20, Minister of Economy of the Republic of Armenia Artsvik Minasyan received the delegation led by the State Minister of Trade and Industry of Singapore Koh Poh Koon, Armenpress was informed by the Department of Information and Public Relations of the Armenian Ministry of Economy. Welcoming the guests, the Minister noted that the first visit of the State Minister of Trade and Industry of Singapore Koh Poh Koon to Armenia will enable to raise the cooperation between two countries to a new level. Presenting the current economic situation of Armenia, Artsvik Minasyan noted that as a small country, Armenia is interested in Singapore's model of economic development. During the meeting the reference was made to information technologies, tourism, aviation and other sectors. The possible cooperation between the Agency of "Standards, Productivity and Innovation Committee" affiliated to the Ministry of Trade and Industry of Singapore and the National Center of Innovation and Entrepreneurship of the Ministry of Economy of Armenia was presented during the meeting. The Minister of Singapore welcomed the proposals, noting that there is a potential for growth in trade and investment relations. The views were exchanged on custom procedures, the Eurasian Economic Union, the possibilities of import of Singaporean products to the European and Iranian markets through Armenia, as well as export of the Armenian products through Singapore to the Asian markets. They gave an importance to the mutual visits of businessmen. At the end of the meeting the State Minister of Trade and Industry of Singapore Koh Poh Koon invited the Minister of Economy of Armenia Artsvik Minasyan to Singapore, which will also enable the signing of agreements on discussed issues. Three college students who first met while attending a Catholic high school in Florida have launched a scholarship fund to help others experience faithful Catholic education at a Newman Guide college. As we went off to different colleges, we kept in touch and found time to catch up whenever we returned [] Our Promise: Welcome to Care2, the world's largest community for good. Here, you'll find over 45 million like-minded people working towards progress, kindness, and lasting impact. Care2 Stands Against: bigots, racists, bullies, science deniers, misogynists, gun lobbyists, xenophobes, the willfully ignorant, animal abusers, frackers, and other mean people. If you find yourself aligning with any of those folks, you can move along, nothing to see here. Care2 Stands With: humanitarians, animal lovers, feminists, rabble-rousers, nature-buffs, creatives, the naturally curious, and people who really love to do the right thing. You are our people. You Care. We Care2. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. On April 19 a delegation of the Joint Armenian Organizations (Federation of Armenian Organizations in the Netherlands (FAON), Dutch Armenian Committee for Justice and Democracy (Hay Dat) and other organizations) submitted a petition to the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Dutch Parliament, Mrs. A.M.C. Eijsink; Armenpress was informed by the Joint Armenian Organizations. Practically all factions in the parliament attended the submission of the petition. On behalf of the organizations Mrs. Inge Drost thanked the members of the Commission, who visited Armenia in May 2015, for their involvement with the Armenians. Like last year, many of them will this year attend the commemorative events in the Netherlands on 24 April. Representatives of various organizations (Federation of Armenian Organizations in the Netherlands (FAON), Dutch Armenian Committee for Justice and Democracy (Hay Tad), Armenian Youth Organization AJO, Armenian Students Association Gladzor and Armenian Youth Association Garegin Njdeh) presented portions of the petition, which included the demand for full recognition of the Armenian Genocide by the Dutch government, implementation of the motion by Rouvoet, condemning discrimination and hate speech by representatives of Turkish and Azerbaijani organizations against Armenians, and fighting the involvement of "long arm of Ankara" in Dutch politics and society. Also was raised the question of restoration of individual and communal rights and legitimate interests of Armenians as result of the genocide as stated in the Declaration on the Centennial of the Armenian Genocide. The Minister, who spoke of an extremely worrisome development, could not confirm the latter, because of the fact that independent military supervising mechanisms are still lacking. Therefore there is no good view on the cause of the renewed fighting and compliance with the ceasefire. The OSCE investigates these matters. For the time being he did not assume a determinating role of the neighboring countries in the violent outbreak, although Turkey has explicitly expressed its support for Azerbaijan and Russia, while playing a positive role in calling both parties to stay calm, is known for its sympathy for the other party. Mr. Koenders believes that the long absence of a solution has caused a lot of frustration. On coming Saturday the Joint Armenian Organizations will hold a rally and demonstration in the center of Amsterdam on the occasion of 101st anniversary of Armenian Genocide. On Sunday 24 April, commemorative meetings will take place at the Armenian memorials in the Netherlands. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moons Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan visit is postponed, Armenpress was informed about this by the Information officer of the Public Information Department of the UN Armine Halajyan. The visit has delayed. He will visit the region, however, the exact days are not known yet. We were informed about this by the Secretary Generals Spokesperson and we knew his regional visit was desirable. However, as a result of urgent works, he had to visit to another place Armine Halajyan informed this citing the information provided by the UN Secretary Generals Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric. Earlier Armenpress informed that Ban Ki-moon will pay an official visit to Armenia on April 25. He was planning to pay first official visit to Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the second visit to Georgia at the end of April. Auto manufacturers want to integrate a number of electrified vehicles in their range and Volvo is no exception. The Swedish car company aims to sell a total of up to one million electric-assisted vehicles by 2025. It plans to do so by offering at least two hybrid variants of every model in its range and releasing its first all-electric car in 2019, as president and chief executive Hakan Samuelsson explained. It is a deliberately ambitious target. It is going to be a challenge, but Volvo wants to be at the forefront of this shift to electrification. Needless to say, Volvo already has a head-start in the business (compared to other car manufacturers), preparing itself for the significant adjustment for the better part of the last five years or so it says. It has even developed two all-new modular vehicle architectures for larger and smaller cars Scalable Product Architecture (SPA) and Compact Modular Architecture (CMA) that are designed to incorporate hybrid or full-electric car technology. The SPA platform will be the base of Volvos larger 90 and 60 series, while the CMA will soon launch a global range of smaller 40 series, all of which will have at least one electrified model. PHOTO GALLERY Volkswagen has announced a deal for hundreds of thousands of American VW diesel owners hoping to put Dieselgate to rest. In front of Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco, VW is said to have a plan to buy back TDIs and offer a compensation plan, according to an attorney who is defending customers who bought some of the affected diesel-engined vehicles. The Law Office of Thomas L. Young sent us the following statement: This morning attorneys for the United States, plaintiff lawyers representing consumers, and the Defendant Volkswagen announced a program where VW will buy back affected vehicles as well as compensate owners for their trouble. The deal will allow the German manufacturer to bring some certainty back to its operations, while also providing relief to disgruntled drivers. Judge Charles Breyer, who oversees the massive multi-district litigation from his San Francisco courtroom, had strongly urged the company to come to todays hearing with a plan in place. He intimated that failure on Volkswagens part to do so could lead to an expedited trial this summer over the issues. Judge Breyer has called the payment to consumers substantial compensation. The exact terms and payment amounts remain confidential. Todays announcement does not include damages that may be levied against VW by the many state and local governments that have sued the automaker. Those governmental entities are seeking additional billions from Volkswagen. In addition, Volkswagen dealers have not yet resolved their issues with the company. According to Automotive News, the agreement only affects roughly 482,000 cars with the 2.0-liter TDI in the U.S., not around 80,000 3.0-liter V6 TDI models from VW, Audi and Porsche, a resolution for which, has yet to be agreed upon. Update VW issued the following statement saying it has reached an agreement in principle with the US authorities In connection with the diesel issue, Volkswagen AG confirms that an agreement in principle with the Department of Justice (Environmental Division), the Environment Protection Agency (EPA), and the California Air Resources Board (CARB), with the full involvement of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), has been reached in the United States. This agreement in principle will be incorporated into binding consent decrees by the Department of Justice and the FTC in the coming weeks. Furthermore, Volkswagen has reached an agreement on the basic features of a settlement with the class action plaintiffs in the lawsuit in San Francisco. This agreement will be incorporated into a comprehensive settlement in the coming weeks. The judge presiding over todays court hearing in San Francisco, Charles R. Breyer, expressly welcomed this development. The arrangements in the making in the United States will have no legal bearing on proceedings outside of the United States. Ongoing investigations by the Department of Justice, Criminal Division, and the State Attorneys General are not prejudiced by these agreements in principle. Photo Gallery YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. Thousands of Armenians will gather outside the Turkish consulate in Los Angeles within the framework of commemorative events of the 101st anniversary of Armenian Genocide. As Armenpress reports, the protest will begin at 13:00 local time. The protesters will raise their voice against injustice, theft, mass violence and Genocide. In 2015, more than 150,000 people participated in a rally in Los Angeles on April 24, commemorating the Armenian Genocide. Photo: Wall Street One of the top concerns of retired people is wondering whether they will outlive their money. With medical advances increasing our life expectancies and the changing nature of markets, employment opportunities, and predictable benefits like defined benefit pensions and healthcare, its no wonder people are concerned. In days gone by you retired at 65, took your company pension, Canada Pension, what savings you had, and the extended health benefits that continued on, and you comfortably enjoyed the golden years. Today more and more people are self employed, the defined benefit pension has been replaced with the defined contribution pension, and health benefits often dont exist when you are employed, let alone after you retire. The world is in the midst of dramatic shift. The age of technology is rapidly changing our habits, our downtime, and our working life. All this change, while it may be bringing about a great new world, is creating a lot of uncertainty, fear, and anxiety in people as they look to their futures. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of strategies and solutions out there designed to improve peoples financial lives, each with the implicit promise of being the one solution to all your problems. Truth is, there are really only three things you can do that will affect your financial life: Make more money, spend less money, or change your expectations. Make more money For those still working, the potential to increase income is a real one. They can manage their employment careers, work more, or create additional sources of income. For some, that may be a small business, for others a real estate investment property. For others still its the long term performance of investment portfolios. Spend less money Spending less money is the more painful choice for many. It involves budgeting, understanding where the money goes, then making hard decisions on what expenses will stay and which have to go. Its unpleasant and involves discipline. For some, though, there is an element of humility. Too often our self-worth is tangled up in our lifestyle and our possessions. Wants and needs become blurred, the definition of necessity has become increasingly vague. Food, shelter, love and safety used to be the needs, everything else was optional. Today, everything is a need, the lines are blurry at best and for many non-existent. Changing expectations Managing expectations is more complicated, and requires us to question the things we think we need versus the things we actually need. For some it can be difficult, after a lifetime of comfort and convenience. Revaluating things in your life is always hard, but when it is forced by a lack of financial resources, it makes the task that much more challenging. Minimalism and back to basics movements are growing, though, and people are questioning their lives and the material desires that drive them. The generations following the baby boomers are in the process of reinventing the world their parents created. The world whose movie antihero, a man named Gordon Gekko, famously extolled, Greed is good. Creating a successful retirement will always be more than just about the money. Often solutions to our financial challenges are the ones that make us happier people in the long run. Working hard and building successes, cutting out the things that neither make us happy nor fulfilled, and keeping a grounded perspective: These are some of the building blocks of a good life. They also happen to be the keys to a balanced financial life. This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet. Photo: supboardscanada.com By Tara Panrucker Stand-up paddleboarding is no longer a strange new water sport for active Canadians. A rare sight only a few years ago, paddlers can be seen exploring lakes, rivers and oceans across B.C. and beyond. Competitive SUP races are a growing phenomenon, as well. If you've been bitten by the paddling bug, look no further. Following is a list of upcoming B.C. events scheduled for what promises to be an exciting season. 'Round Bowen Challenge, Howe Sound, Bowen Island Save the Date: Saturday, June 25 The Gist: The 16th Annual Round Bowen Challenge began strictly for kayaking, but now includes eight SUP classes. Each class requires a minimum of five registrants entered in order to go ahead. Participants may race solo or as part of a relay team. A dock party, awards ceremony, and salmon barbecue take place end of day in the Bowen Island Marina. Contact: www.bowenislandkayaking.com West Kootenay SUP Race, Castlegar Save the Date: Friday-Sunday, July 1-3 The Gist: In its fifth year, events take place over three days with a focus on paddling on moving water, starting with River SUP clinics Friday. Registration for the weekend includes prizes, dinner, camping (within walking distance from the Slocan River), and T-shirt. Awards take place Sunday afternoon after the one-kilometre Slocan River SUP cross. Contact: www.endlessadventure.ca Board the Fjord, Deep Cove and Indian Arm Save the Date: Sunday, Sept. 25 The Gist: Open to all levels of competitors, paddlers will navigate around seven islands in North Americas southern-most fjord. Racing takes place in Deep Cove and Indian Arm, with a 7-km and 14-km race. Prizes and awards presented at the end of the days festivities. Contact: www.boardthefjord.com Newcastle SUP Race, Nanaimo Save the Date: Saturday, Aug. 27 The Gist: This race is limited to 25 paddlers per race, so register early. Two races around two islands (4 and 11 km) start and finish near the campground on Newcastle Island. Food and beverages will be available, with an awards ceremony taking place after each event. Contact: www.viendurance.net/newcastle-sup-race/ Rattlesnake Island Paddleboard Race, Peachland Save the Date: Saturday, Aug. 27 The Gist: The first Rattlesnake Island SUP Classic took place in 2013. The main race totals 7 km, crossing Okanagan Lake from Peachland, around Rattlesnake Island and back. Younger or novice participants have a 2.5-km race option. Competitors meet at Beach Avenue in Peachland to register for this one day event, which includes pre-race snacks and lunch. Unpredictable wind and wave conditions in the area add to the challenge. Contact: www.rattlesnakerace.com Tofino Paddle Surf SUP Invitational, Tofino Save the Date: Friday-Saturday, Oct. 21-23 The Gist: In its third year, there were eighty-five serious SUP competitors last year and fifty surf competitors. Awards banquet to be held after races. This event is the authorized Canadian Surf Associations qualifying event for representation at the International Surfing Association World SUP games. Contact: www.tofinopaddlesurf.com Vancouver SUP Challenge, Vancouver Save the Date: Saturday, Aug. 13 The Gist: Vancouvers biggest SUP race takes place at the Jericho Sailing Centre in Vancouver. There is a 5, 3, and 2-km course, with a new race added this year for youths 16 and under. Travis Grant and Shannon Bell participated in last years event, so the chance of meeting a world class athlete is high. A three-person relay wraps up the fun before a barbecue, music and awards presentation complete the day. Contact: www.supchallenge.ca SixPack SUP Race Series, Vancouver Island Save the Date: Check website for race dates, first event takes place Saturday, April 30 The Gist: Vancouver Island hosts this fun race series with events for all levels of paddlers. Races begin from various locations April to September. Draw prizes are included. Contact: http://sixpackraceseries.wix.com/sixpacksup Kalamalka Classic SUP Festival, Vernon Save the Date: Saturday-Sunday, Sept. 3-4 The Gist: The seventh annual Kalamalka Classic SUP Festival is lauded as the biggest (and most fun) in Canada on its website. Scheduled events are family friendly, for all ages and skill sets. Sunset Dinner on the beach will be held in conjunction with a rewards ceremony and live music. Cash and other prizes will also be presented after Sundays events. Contact: www.kalamalkaclassic.com Sundog Semiahmoo SUP Classic, White Rock Save the Date: Friday-Sunday, July 29-31 The Gist: The race is part of the Annual White Rock Sea Festival taking place over the BC Day long weekend. Three SUP races and an all-day SUP Expo will feature demos from a variety of board companies. Family activities and food vendors will add to the fun, along with a fireworks display, live music, and parade. Contact: www.whiterockseafestival.com/events/stand-up-paddle-board-classic Photo: mckinley burkart A brew pub proposed for the former Paramount Theatre site on Bernard Avenue will pay homage to the past. Developers of the site, Ronmor Developments, have agreed to retain the iconic Paramount sign at the urging of city staff. Planning manager Ryan Smith said developers are also planning to retain a portion of the marquee. Plans, which city council will get a chance to review sometime next month, call for a subdivision of the 14,000-sq.-ft. space. Craft Beer Market would occupy the larger space on the west of the building, while a commercial/retail tenant would take over the rest. Smith said the brew pub would take up approximately 75 per cent of the space. There are also plans for a rooftop patio. The development application includes a seating capacity of 482 people. That includes 230 on the main floor, 48 on the mezzanine and 204 on the second floor patio. Craft Beer Market has locations currently in Vancouver and Calgary. "We are seeing more of these," said Smith of the brew pub concept. "It's kind of a hybrid. It's not really a nightclub, it will probably be similar to BNA where there is food service available." The licence would be food primary as opposed to liquor primary. There's no time frame on when construction would begin if approved by council. Photo: Deborah Pfeiffer The case of an alleged Mexican drug smuggler arrested in the Osoyoos area continues to move slowly through the courts. Alexis Garcia Palomino, who is facing charges of importing/exporting a controlled substance and possession for the purpose of trafficking, made a brief appearance by video in Penticton court. Speaking through an interpreter, the court learned Palomino does not yet have a lawyer. Lawyer Bob Maxwell said he had contacted legal aid but wasn't able to find out if a lawyer had been appointed. The matter was adjourned to April 27. Photo: Deborah Pfeiffer A non-profit biker organization that advocates against child abuse is holding a kids party and fundraiser this weekend. The Urban Bulldogs Against Kids Abuse event is set to take place Saturday at the Roll n Stones Fun Centre in Penticton. "It's to show the public that we are here and to come and meet the members," said national president Ed Stacey. The non-profit, known as UBAKA, is an international organization that is devoted to child protection and advocacy. All of the full members are bikers and they have registered volunteers. Locally, they are active in the community, most recently holding a January food drive in the city. On Saturday, there will be pizza for kids, a barbecue and a bouncy house. The bowling alley is also giving a discounted rate for bowling for the day, Stacey said. A visiting chapter from Alberta plans to attend the weekend event and membership applications will be available. The party will be from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Its not been mentioned in the dialogue so far, but the Bluff location just up the hill from the bridge would be a fabulous location for the Tourism/Visitor centre. There is convenient highway access, plenty of space for RV parking and the like, gorgeous panoramic views of the whole valley from an excellent vantage, and it would add a pleasantly designed structure to replace the hideous array of billboard ads (including the highly dangerous LED screen with completely blinding glare on a wet road wonder how long till someone gets hurt, sued, or both) currently greeting visitors to the area. Heck, they could even plan in a nice event centre for concerts and events. Even add in a small ferry service from the tourism centre to downtown as an attraction and a pleasant way to enjoy the view from the lake if you dont own a boat. You could even park your RV outside of town and then ferry over to downtown to explore. Seems like a good compromise of benefits with some unique possibilities not possible otherwise. James Tomelin Photo: Deborah Pfeiffer A Penticton councillor would like to see changes made to the current council meeting schedule after several recent meetings have lasted hours. Coun. Helena Konanz suggested this week that staff research the schedules in other communities and come back with alternative suggestions. "The length has gone up and down over the years, but just recently it has been extreme," she said. Part of the problem is the lengthy public hearings held before the regular meetings, which can often take up much of the evening. As an example, Konanz cited three public hearings being slated for May 2. "I just think we've outgrown our situation," she said. "We have the same schedule as much smaller communities, so we need to start looking at what larger communities are doing, so we can be more efficient." One option, she added, would be for council to meet during the day and the public hearings to be at night. Mayor Andrew Jakubeit said staff had already started researching how other city councils conduct their meetings and public hearings. This includes frequency, time of day, length of meetings and other processes to make it more of an efficient and effective use of staff, council and the community's time and ability to contribute or participate, he said. The motion will be debated at the next council meeting on May 2. Photo: Twitter - @BCGovFireInfo British Columbia is deploying water bombers early this year to counter the quick start to the fire season in northern B.C., despite more-favourable conditions on the horizon. There are currently six "fires of note" burning near Fort St. John, five of which began on Monday due to high temperatures and strong winds in the area. The largest of these fires, and the largest in B.C., is northeast of Fort St. John, at an estimated 5,500 hectares in size. Because of these early fires, the province is mobilizing their bomber crews weeks early to get an upper hand on the currently uncontained blazes. One-hundred-forty-three fires since April 1 is certainly above average for this time of year, said Kevin Skrepnek, chief fire information officer. Given the activity weve had already, the decision was made by the province to bring our air tanker fleet online early. One heavy air tanker will be fire-ready by Wednesday afternoon, based out of Fort St. John, and a second tanker group will be ready Thursday, based out of Prince George. A third group will be coming online in Williams Lake next week. Skrepnek says under normal circumstances, the first tanker group would not be active until the last week of April, with subsequent groups coming online a week at a time. While the province will be keeping the famed Martin Mars bomber on the ground this year, they will be using a large, jet-powered air tanker, the Avro RJ85, for the first time this season. Conditions in northern B.C. have calmed down a bit and have become more favourable for fighting fires. Temperatures are sitting at 11 C near Fort St. John, significantly less than Mondays high of 28 C and rain is expected in the area near the end of the week. While the BC Wildfire Service has yet to determine the cause of the fires in the area, they are assuming they were human-caused, as there were no reports of lightning in the area. While there are no longer any evacuation orders in the province at this time, five of the 143 fires burning currently carry an evacuation alert for nearby residents. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. Within the framework of the annual Individual Partnership Cooperation between the Ministry of Defense of Armenia and NATO, the JFC Brunssum Mobile Training Team of NATO visited Armenia from April 18-21; Armenpress was informed by the department of Information and Public Relations of the Defense Ministry. The purpose of the visit was to conduct training on the process of operational planning for the command and staff students of the Military Institute after Vazgen Sargsyan. Photo: CTV The coroner's office has confirmed that the severed remains found behind a butcher shop in Toronto are human. Spokeswoman Cheryl Mahyr says an autopsy of the remains is underway and authorities hope it could shed some light on what might have happened to the victim. Mahyr says the autopsy could also yield clues to the person's identity, as well as information on what tool might have been used to dismember them. The remains, which police said were believed to be part of a human torso, were found in a garbage bag behind the store when an employee was taking out the trash on Tuesday morning. Police say they believe the remains were not outside the butcher shop for very long, and are asking the public to be on the lookout for suspicious packages that may contain other body parts. They say there could be a variety of explanations for what happened to the person involved. "The circumstances surrounding the death of this person are completely up in the air right now," said Det. Sgt. Terry Browne. "We certainly have what appears to be an indignity to a body." As police wait for results of the autopsy, Browne said they are also looking into cases of missing persons in the area. "Once we get a better sense of who this person is, this should give us some focus for the investigation," he said. Photo: fcscafeine Bill C-14 - medical assistance in dying In two previous MP reports, I have asked for feedback on the subject of medically assisted dying, in response to the Supreme Court decision that has in effect legalized this action pending legislation from Parliament. To summarize I would like to summarize Government Bill C-14, technically known as An Act to amend the Criminal Code and to make related amendments to other Acts (medical assistance in dying). The goal of this act is to enable doctors, as well as nurse practitioners and those who assist them, to help eligible citizens end their lives without facing criminal charges for doing so. This naturally raises the question of who is deemed to be an eligible citizen for the purposes of this legislation. The criteria includes a number of factors: A citizen must be at least 18 years old, and have made a voluntary request with informed consent to be considered eligible for medically assisted dying. In addition, the person must have a serious and incurable disease or disability that is in an advanced state and considered irreversible. It would need to be demonstrated that the disease or disability in question was at a stage causing intolerable suffering, with death being the most reasonably foreseeable outcome. How would this work in practice? A citizen who believes they meet the criteria above can make a written request to receive medical assistance in dying, provided this request is signed by two independent witnesses. If a citizen is unable to write this request because of a disability, a representative can do so on that persons behalf, provided two independent witnesses verify the request. Once the request has been submitted, two independent doctors or nurse practitioners would evaluate the request for eligibility. During this time, a mandatory 15 day reflection period would be in effect, unless death or a loss of capacity was imminent. Understandably, a citizen could withdraw the request at any time during this 15 day period. It is also proposed that provincial health authorities would maintain confidential lists of doctors and nurse practitioners who are willing to participate with assisted suicide. The list would be made available to citizens seeking this assistance. The bill recognizes that there are medical professionals who do not support medical assistance in dying, and who may choose not to offer these services. It is further proposed that the Federal Government will collect and analyze data on the use of this program, although it is unclear what information would be made public. My thoughts The bill clearly would enable medical assistance in dying as directed by the ruling from the Supreme Court. While there are some safeguards proposed, ultimately the bill makes an assumption that an individual requesting medically assisted suicide is not coerced or otherwise requesting this assistance out of guilt or obligation. This assumption is solely based upon two individuals witnessing the request. This process is somewhat concerning, as there is little consideration shown for those who may be suffering from an undiagnosed mental health condition such as depression. Although I have other concerns, ultimately our Supreme Court has made this ruling, and to date the majority of the feedback that I have received from citizens has been supportive. My vote on Bill C-14 will be guided by the input I receive from the citizens of Central Okanagan-Similkameen-Nicola. Given that the consensus so far has been largely supportive, this is the direction that I am following while I continue to actively consult with local citizens. Comments, questions, concerns I welcome your comments, questions, or concerns on this or any matter before the House of Commons. I can be reached at [email protected] or toll free at 1.800.665.8711. This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet. Photo: Google Street View A one block stretch of Robson Street in downtown Vancouver will be closed to traffic. Permanently. City council voted Wednesday to close the one-block stretch between Howe and Hornby streets. "There are more pedestrians than drivers travelling through this block of Robson Street, and having a permanent public square will encourage year-round programming," the city said in a statement reported by CTV. The idea was first conceived 40 years ago and, in recent years, the city has experimented with temporary closures for summer festivals. The one-block public square would be the largest open space downtown, apart from Stanley Park and the seawall. No time frame has been determined for the transformation, as staff begin the process of getting public input on a design for the square. with files from CTV Vancouver Photo: The Canadian Press One of the Liberal Party's most talked about promises during the federal election was to legalize marijuana. On Wednesday, Health Minister Jane Philpott announced Canada's legislation to begin the process of legalizing and regulating marijuana will be introduced next spring. However, that doesn't seem fast enough for some. In a newly released policy paper, prominent think-tank C.D. Howe Institute said the federal government should consider pardoning people convicted of pot possession and drop any outstanding charges to free up much-needed resources for legalization of the drug. Read more. Photo: Interpol UPDATE: 11:55 a.m. A prosecutor has asked for a five-year prison sentence for a British Columbia man notorious for images of himself abusing young boys in Southeast Asia. But even if a B.C. Supreme Court judge agrees with the Crown's request, Christopher Neil would serve about 10 months after time he has already served awaiting trial. Neil pleaded guilty in December to five charges including counts under Canada's rarely used child-sex tourism laws. Neil was dubbed Swirl Face by international media after authorities unscrambled online child-sex abuse photos leading to the B.C. man's arrest in Thailand, where he was imprisoned for four years on separate charges. He was freed under strict conditions when he returned to Vancouver in October 2012, but was arrested on 10 new charges in March 2014 and has been in custody ever since. The charges include two counts of sexual interference in Cambodia in 2003, one charge of possessing child pornography in Maple Ridge, B.C., in 2007 and two charges of accessing child pornography in Vancouver in 2013. ORIGINAL A convicted pedophile who served four years in prison in Thailand for sexually assaulting young boys is scheduled for a sentencing hearing in New Westminster court today. Christopher Neil, 41, pleaded guilty in December to five charges including counts under Canada's child-sex tourism laws. The charges include two counts of sexual interference in Cambodia in 2003, one charge of possessing child pornography in Maple Ridge in 2007 and two charges of accessing child pornography in Vancouver in 2013. Neil gained notoriety after a global manhunt launched by international police service Interpol led to his arrest based on an online photograph of someone abusing boys. The suspect's face was disguised with a swirl but police unscrambled the image to reveal Neil, who was branded Swirl Face by international media. Neil was allowed free under strict conditions when he returned to Vancouver in October 2012, but arrested on 10 new charges in March 2014 and has been held in custody ever since. Photo: The Canadian Press Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson at a news conference in Ottawa. When a tiny town in northeast British Columbia couldn't get federal funding for bicycle lanes, Greg Moore says it fudged the paperwork. Officials applied to pave the roads again instead, and when the cash flowed from Ottawa the town made over its streets with wider shoulders to circuitously achieve its goal, said the mayor of Port Coquitlam, who was told about the quandary in confidence. The anecdote illustrates how cities are at the mercy of Canada's higher-levels of government because of a lopsided fiscal and power dynamic, say some experts. "You're always chasing their programs, which might not be best for your community," said Moore, who is also the chairman of Metro Vancouver, the regional government representing 23 local authorities. "But there's a strong argument that local governments should be funded appropriately and allowed to make the decisions that are right for their community." Providing infrastructure and services without adequate financial tools has been a major stress for municipalities of all sizes, and that's not the only obstacle they face, said Moore. Mayors have used the change in the federal government to call for more autonomy for cities, which are straining under the weight of downloaded responsibilities from rental housing to daycare. Earlier this year, big-city mayors met with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and urged Ottawa to directly fund building projects, bypassing the provinces altogether. International urbanism consultant Brent Toderian said consensus is growing that Canadian cities are the key to national success, but they are not positioned to succeed. "Cities are the engines of our economy, the overwhelming home for our populations, the centres for creativity, the solutions to sustainability," said Toderian, a former chief planner for Vancouver and president of the Council for Canadian Urbanism. "Yet we treat them like a third-class citizen, at best." Cities face barriers when it comes to delivering public facilities and services that are structural, financial and political, the experts say. Canadian cities are dubbed "creatures of the province," referring to the 19th century constitutional legacy that granted their powers. The provinces dictate which tools they can use to generate revenue in most cases only property taxes and user fees. "It's very difficult for municipalities under the current fiscal regime, but also in terms of the kinds of legal powers they have to do the things that are really necessary," said Prof. Warren Magnusson, who specializes in urban government at the University of Victoria. A prime example of obstructed municipal power is a failed transit plebiscite in the Vancouver area in 2015 that asked citizens to vote on a sales tax to fund rapid transit, more busses and a bridge replacement. Toderian believes the "province threw the cities under the bus" by forcing the vote in a compressed time frame of 10 weeks. Voters snubbed the tax, despite numerous businesses, unions and environmental organizations advocating fiercely for its benefits. Gordon Price, who directs The City Program at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., said cities in Canada should be reimagined, but he doesn't have high expectations. "Cities are cash cows for provinces, but they don't need to be nice to the cow," he said. "In fact, they can show contempt for the cow." Shifting power has its limits, he said, because cities tend to only manage their own interests. Provinces would argue the only way to build infrastructure like roads and bridges is to think provincially. Another cautionary tale comes from the United States, where cities like Detroit were allowed run deficits and went bankrupt, Price said. "That doesn't tend to happen in Canada," he said. "But that's because of the discipline imposed by the senior government." There are examples across the globe where cities are gaining greater independence, said Price, citing Norway where an equal level of services is guaranteed in urban areas, and Denmark and Sweden "where cities really do have significant more power." The U.K. government has steadily devolved key powers to some cities in England, said Toderian. He also highlighted the Ministry for Cities created in Australia by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who declared urban planning a matter of quality of life. The move at least recognizes the importance of urban regions, Price said. In Canada, the Liberal party's recent budget announced plans to boost a funding formula so that Ottawa covers up to half the cost of public transit projects, and water and wastewater systems. Before its share was one-third. Magnusson said the Liberals' promise to run deficits to fund new local infrastructure could signal that the government sees a need to shift the balance of power. "Maybe things have gone too far in the direction we've been going in the last 30, 40 years," he said. "Some kind of course correction is required." Photo: Dave Ogilvie UPDATE: 11:45 a.m. A West Kelowna woman was fined following a three-vehicle chain-reaction rear-ender this morning that slowed the morning commute into Kelowna. On April 21 at 8:18 a.m., West Kelowna RCMP responded to a report of a three-vehicle collision on Highway 97 South near the Westside Road overpass. Police learned that two vehicles, a grey Toyota Rav 4 and a red Mini Cooper, were stopped in traffic when a red Toyota Echo rear-ended one of them causing a chain reaction crash, explains Const. Jesse O'Donaghey. Paramedics attended, treating all three drivers at the scene. The driver of the Echo, a 31-year-old West Kelowna woman, was charged under the Motor Vehicle Act for following too closely, a charge that carries a $109 fine, adds O'Donaghey. UPDATE: 10:15 a.m. Emergency personnel have cleared the scene and traffic is moving through the area. ORIGINAL 8:40 a.m. A multi-vehicle crash on Highway 97 at the top of Bridge Hill near the Westbank First Nation Band office is slowing the morning commute into Kelowna. Emergency personnel are at the scene. The extent of the incident or injuries is not yet known. Commuters heading into Kelowna are backing up along Highway 97 as far as Westlake Road. Castanet will have more details as they become available. Several shoulder-high mounds of black garbage bags on Vancouver's Sunset Beach were all that remained Thursday morning after the city's annual 4-20 cannabis rally. A crowd estimated by police at about 20,000 crammed onto the beach Wednesday. Vancouver Police Sgt. Randy Fincham said no arrests were made, although the marine unit rescued one person from the middle of False Creek, and shooed an overloaded dinghy back to shore. Vancouver Coastal Health says 16 patients were treated in hospital, all for minor ailments, while Fincham said paramedics handled 25 calls at the scene. Last year, health officials said that more than 60 people were treated in hospital for complaints of symptoms ranging from upset stomachs to acute anxiety and psychosis. Three-quarters of them had consumed edible marijuana products. It was the first time the 4-20 event has been held at Sunset Beach, after sheer numbers of revellers and construction outside the Vancouver Art Gallery uprooted the event from its downtown site. Park Board Commissioner Sarah Kirby-Yung said the unsanctioned celebration was not wanted and would not be welcomed back, while staff say a report on clean up and other costs should be ready within days. Photo: CTV A neonatal expert says some, if not all, of the six infant bodies found concealed in a Winnipeg storage locker were born alive. Dr. Michael Narvey is testifying at the trial of Andrea Giesbrecht, who is charged with concealing the babies' remains. Narvey says the infants were all at or near full term 34 to 42 weeks. He also says the remains showed no obvious signs of congenital defects, and the odds of a woman having six stillborn babies are "extremely improbable." Court heard on Wednesday that DNA tests indicate Giesbrecht and her husband were likely to be the parents of the infants. Medical records show Giesbrecht had at least 10 legal abortions between 1994 and 2011. No one has yet been able to say how long the remains were in the U-Haul storage locker before they were discovered by an employee in October 2014. Photo: CTV A low-rise building on Nelson Street sold for $68 million. Imagine buying a piece of property, doing nothing to it and then selling it one month later for $8 million more that's exactly what a group of investors in Vancouver pulled off. According to CTV Vancouver the two small buildings on Nelson Street near Burrard Street were bought in 2014 by the prominent developers behind the Wall Centre: Peter and Bruno Wall. At that time, the Walls bought the property for $16.8 million and had plans to replace the buildings with a 60-storey skyscraper. That plan was set until the pair were reportedly offered a deal they could not refuse from SunCom, a commercial real estate investment company that offered $60 million for the property. That is $43.2 million more than they had paid, the Walls took that deal in January. Then, one month later, the purchaser flipped the property for $8 million more. Colliers International vice-president David Taylor told CTV That the spike in value was largely due to changes in the zoning plans for the West End, which would allow for "significantly taller" buildings to be built in the area. This spiked interest in redevelopment in the West End is how former real estate agent Julia Lau got involved. Last year, she took to Facebook to find investors, posting: "Whoever wants to invest has to prepare the deposit with bank draft tomorrow. The shares will be sold out on Monday." A few days later, she posted again, writing that the $60-million project had sold out in just two hours. A month after purchasing the property, SunCom then flipped it for $8 million more than they'd paid. Taylor, who represented the Walls during the negotiations, tells CTV the deal has sparked huge interest from developers and area residents. "It seems pretty crazy that we're seeing those types of price increases, but of course, we're seeing that in all segments of the market," he said. This bizarre SunCom deal has also attracted the attention of the B.C. Securities Commission, which is reportedly reviewing whether the company violated any regulations. Taylor told CTV the deal is also sparking interest because no property transfer taxes were paid. He said the property is held as a bare trust, and investors avoid taxes when they sell the shares. "It is a common strategy to avoid property tax," he said. - With files from CTV Vancouver YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. Member of the Armenian Delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Levon Zurabyan condemned Azerbaijani provocative actions against the Artsakh people during the Assembly plenary session. As Armenpress reports, Zurabyan recalled in his speech that on April 2 Azerbaijan conducted large-scale military operations in Nagorno Karabakh line of contact which was the first serious outburst of war after the 1994 ceasefire. The four-day war caused many human losses to both conflicting sides and strongly threatened the security of the region. Trying to solve the conflict by military means Azerbaijan once again showed its limitless contempt towards the rights of Nagorno Karabakh people (those people whom they consider as Azerbaijan citizens) to live secured and to freely determine their faith. That is what that led to the rise of this conflict, said Zurabyan. He stated that after Nagorno Karabakh decided to declare its independence from Azerbaijan in a legal way, including the 1988 decision of its Parliament and the 1991 referendum on its independence, Azerbaijan continued to suppress that self-determination of people with ethnic cleansing, massacres and military operations. In 1991 Azerbaijan in cooperation with the Soviet troops exiled the Armenian people from 24 villages of Karabakh, and in 1992 Stepanakert bombing led to more than thousand human losses. As a response to such kind of actions, Nagorno Karabakh self-defense forces created a security zone around Azerbaijan, Zurabyan said. He added that the current program of peaceful settlement submitted by the Minsk Group Co-Chairs, plans to recognize the right to self-determination of Nagorno Karabakh people which should be expressed through the internationally recognized referendum on the final solution of the conflict, and it also aims to ensure international security guarantees combined with the security zone. Azerbaijan, however, refuses to start negotiations, rejects the direct negotiations with Nagorno Karabakh and the steps for the maintenance of ceasefire agreement which include the removal of snipers from the frontline and the strengthening of monitoring mission, MP noted. He stated that Azerbaijan for ten years was engaged in military preparatory works, the major goal of which was to eliminate Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh, rather than to go to reconciliation with them. The international community should ensure that Azerbaijan respects one of the major fundamental principles of international law which is the refusal of the use of force or the threat for the settlement of conflict. Photo: CTV The former girlfriend of a man facing murder charges in the death of Tim Bosma says her boyfriend told her that it was his friend and co-accused who shot and killed the Hamilton man. Marlena Meneses says her boyfriend, Mark Smich, and his friend, Dellen Millard, were happy and wanted to celebrate after a successful "mission" the morning after Bosma vanished. Meneses says Smich had told her he was planning to steal a truck in the days leading up to May 6, 2013, when Bosma disappeared after taking two strangers for a test drive in his truck. His body was found more than a week later burned beyond recognition. Smich, 28, of Oakville, Ont., and 30-year-old Millard, from Toronto, have pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in Bosma's death. The Crown alleges Bosma was shot at point-blank range inside his truck and later his body was burned in an animal incinerator. An emotional Meneses, one of the Crown's star witnesses, says she was watching television with Smich when Millard's name popped up on the screen. The newscast said he'd been arrested in connection with Bosma's disappearance. She told jurors she "freaked out" and asked Smich about Bosma. "He told me that Mr. Bosma was gone, gone," said an emotional Meneses. "He just said that Dell (Millard) murdered him." "Did he say how?" asked Crown attorney Craig Fraser. "That he shot him," she said. Bosma's widow, Sharlene, broke down in tears in court, as did many other family members. Smich looked straight ahead while Millard stared at his co-accused, looking at him up and down. Fraser asked if she knew what happened to Bosma. "I believe (Smich) told me that they burned him." When asked why she didn't go to police, Meneses said she "should have I was stupid." Meneses told jurors she tried to discourage her boyfriend from stealing the truck after overhearing Smich and Millard talking about it beforehand. "I said some things to try to change his mind," Meneses said to a packed courtroom. "But he didn't listen to me." She described Smich and Millard as close, like brothers. "Mark cared for Dellen more than any other person," she said. "He was in love with him." Meneses, 22, said she was really worried about their "mission" to steal a truck, adding that she didn't hear from Smich until early in the morning on May 7. "I was very scared," she said. "I knew that they were going to go steal a truck. I didn't know if he got hurt or what was going on." She testified Smich and Millard picked her up around 8 a.m. the next morning. "Can you describe the mood?" asked Fraser. "Very happy," Meneses said. "They were just really happy, saying they wanted to celebrate." She didn't say what they were celebrating, except that "the mission went well." Photo: Contributed A man who was stabbed during an altercation in the Downtown Eastside has died in hospital and police are now looking for witnesses. Officers interrupted an assault at Main and Hastings Street on March 20. According to the Vancouver Police Department one man involved in the fight suffered a deadly stab wound. The victim has been identified as a 38-year-old Vancouver man who was wearing distinctive blue shorts, with a horizontal red stripe and a dark jacket. Police were unable to detain those involved in the altercation as the suspects fled the scene. Its unclear how many people were involved or responsible for the stabbing. Investigators are interested in speaking with anyone who may have seen the incident. Its believed several drivers and pedestrians had to avoid the fight in the street at the time. Anyone with information about this homicide is asked to call the Vancouver Police Homicide Unit at 604-717-2500. Photo: Google Street View A boil water notice has been issued for about eight properties served by the Star Place water system. The Regional District of Central Okanagan, in consultation with Interior Health, issued the notice Thursday. This replaces a previously issued water quality advisory. Due to higher water levels and flows from spring runoff, turbidity in the water system source has resulted in a poor turbidity water rating. Its recommend that all Star Place water customers drink boiled water or a safe alternative. Water intended for drinking, washing fruit and vegetables, mixing baby formula, making beverages or ice, or brushing teeth should be brought to a rolling boil for at least one minute. Interior Health recommends the following water purification procedures: Bring water to a rolling boil for one minute or, Disinfect water by adding two drops (.1 ml) of unscented household bleach per litre of warm water (double the bleach for cloudy water) and let stand for at least 30 minutes before drinking. You should notice a slight chlorine smell after 30 minutes. If you dont, add another two drops and let the water stand for another 15 minutes. This boil water notice will be rescinded when turbidity levels return to normal levels within acceptable guidelines. Photo: CTV Police have found the vehicle believed to have been involved in the fatal hit-and-run that killed a skateboarder in Vancouver. Two men were skateboarding at about 2:30 a.m. on April 17 on the west side of Vancouver in the area of Heather Street and West 54th Avenue when one of the men was hit by a northbound car. The driver of the vehicle left the scene without stopping. Ryan Barron, 30, who was a warehouse worker and musician from Ontario, died in hospital a short time later. On April 19, police located the vehicle believed to have been involved in the collision at a home on the east side of Vancouver. That vehicle has been seized by police and is being processed by the Vancouver Police Forensics Unit. Police are continuing to work to identify the driver of that vehicle. The cause of the collision has yet to be determined. Anyone with information and who has not yet spoken to the police is asked to call the Vancouver Police at (604) 717-3012 or Crime Stoppers at 1 (800) 222-8477. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. One of the priority issues of Foreign Ministry of the Republic of Armenia is the strengthening of such an approach withing international community that Nagorno Karabakh people can be committed to genocide in case of yielding territories, Armenpress reports, in an interview with journalists the Director of the Institute of History of NAS Ashot Melkonyan expressed such an opinion. If Azerbaijan will strengthen its positions in liberated territories of Artsakh, the next step will be the attack against the Nagorno Karabakh, meaning against the Armenian populated areas.The Armenian side firstly should explain Russia and also the international community that such step can lead to genocidal consequences, said Ashot Melkonyan. Melkonyan gave an importance to the fact that in recent decades the world community for the first time started to speak from the European high platforms about the threat against Artsakh people at an MP level, and emphasized that the world community sees the recognition of NKR as a way to avoid from that threat. The recent hostilities unleashed by Azerbaijan in cooperation with the Islamic State terrorist group recall that a genocide can be committed against the Artsakh people, and after 100 years what happened in 1916 can be repeated with Armenian people. It is important to hear the speeches by European MPs who say that the only way of saving Artsakh people from genocide is the recognition of Nagorno Karabakh Republic. I think that the first task of Armenian Foreign Ministry should be the continuation of this approach in the world community, historian added. Within this context Ashot Melkonyan highly appreciated the recognition of NKR by several US states noting that the states are, of course, not the subjects of international law, however, they can can have a strong impact in delivering a message to the public. Editor-in chief o fLebanon Azdak newspaper Shahan Gantaharyan agreed with Ashot Mekonyan and stated that the Armenian Foreign Ministry and the Armenian National Committee should speak publicly about Azerbaijan as a military criminal and as a terrorist state unit. According to him, we should not forget about Turkey which is the major terrorist production unit and a threat to the whole world for supporting and serving as a corridor to dangerous terrorist groups. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. The Union of Armenians of Russia will hold a rally in Moscow on April 25 devoted to the memory of the victims of Armenian Genocide in Turkey and to the support for the international condemnation of that crime to avoid from the future genocides. As Armenpress reports, the picket will be held at 12:00 in front of Turkish Embassy to Russia. At 14:00 near 1905 street metro station Russian public political rally will be held with the participation of a number of Armenian organizations of Russia. All citizens regardless of ethnicity can participate in the rally. We would like to recall that the President of Russia Vladimir Putin personally took part in the commemoration ceremonies in Yerevan on April 24, 2015, and the message of Russian President to the participants of World without genocide memorial night which has been organized by the Union of Armenians of Russia on April 22, reads: The day of April 24, 1915 is one of the painful days in the history of mankind related to the one of the most horrendous and dramatic events, the Armenian Genocide. After 100 years we pay tribute to the memory of all the victims of that tragedy which we always perceived as our own pain and tragedy in our country. Russias stance has been and remains impartial and consistent: the massacres on the basis of nationality cannot be justified. The international community is called upon to do everything to ensure that such atrocities never repeat. The statement on The condemnation of the Genocide of Armenian people committed in 1915-1922 which was unanimously adopted by the Russian State Duma on April 14, 1995, condemns the perpetrators of killing Armenians in 1925-1922 and considers April 24 as a memory day of the Genocide victims. Discussion Findings of increasing prevalence with age and a higher prevalence among males were expected and consistent with other research (2,4,8). Industry results highlight the high prevalence of hearing loss within the noise-exposed working population and the need for continued prevention efforts, especially in the mining, construction, and manufacturing sectors. The proportion of mining sector employees exposed to hazardous noise (76%) was the highest in any sector (3), and studies have consistently indicated elevated risks for occupational hearing loss within this sector (2,4). Occupational hearing loss risks have also been established within the construction sector (2,4); however, current noise regulations do not require audiometric testing for construction workers (2). Without testing to identify workers losing their hearing, intervention might be delayed or might not occur. Although a comparatively smaller percentage of manufacturing workers are noise-exposed (37%), this sector accounts for the most noise-exposed workers in the United States (3), and, as expected, the largest number of workers with hearing impairment. Some manufacturing sub-sectors, such as wood product, apparel, and machinery manufacturing, have been found to have occupational hearing loss risks as high as those in the mining and construction sectors (4). Another study using earlier GBD Study hearing impairment definitions also found the heaviest burdens of hearing impairment were in the mining, construction, and manufacturing sectors, indicating the most healthy years were lost in these sectors (8). Approximately 78% of the healthy years lost were attributable to mild or moderate hearing impairment. Preventing any occupational hearing loss is the best way to reduce worker hearing impairment over a lifetime, because even mild-to-moderate impairment during working years can culminate in more healthy years lost during retirement. Prevention also has short-term benefits; persons with even mild hearing loss experience reduced audibility (loudness), reduced dynamic range of hearing (the difference between the softest and loudest perceptible sounds), and increased listening fatigue (2). They also often experience difficulties understanding speech, especially in the presence of background noise (2). Other effects include degraded communication (2), cognitive decline (9), and depression (2). In the general population, the prevalence of impairment also sharply decreases at higher levels of impairment, and severe impairment is not typically caused exclusively by noise. Some workers with a substantial hearing impairment might transfer away from noisy jobs because of difficulties communicating in noisy environments, or from jobs where hearing is critical for productivity and safety. For example, although the public safety sector had fewer older workers (lowering the prevalence), hearing impairment might have resulted in attrition because of the hearing-critical nature of many occupations in this sector (2). The findings in this report are subject to at least seven limitations. First, this was a convenience sample and might not be representative of all noise-exposed workers tested in the United States. Second, not all noise-exposed workers are tested in the United States, especially in industries with high proportions of mobile or temporary workers, such as the construction and agriculture sectors. Third, in the absence of additional information, such as medical records, hearing impairment caused by occupational exposures can only be inferred. However, this inference was strengthened by studying exposed workers and excluding audiograms indicating nonoccupational exposures. Fourth, GBD Study disability weights were developed using international surveys asking respondents to compare life limitations posed by different health conditions, and to compare the value of preventing certain health conditions to the value of preventing death (5); respondents might not be able to appreciate the impact a disability can have on quality of life if they do not have that disability. Fifth, GBD Study audiometric definitions for impairment levels are conservative, with stringent requirements to reach even mild impairment. In addition, no impairment is identified when there is a total loss of hearing in one ear, and the impairment in the other ear can be lessened by hearing aid use. These limitations might have lowered impairment estimates, and worker impairment might be higher than reported here. Sixth, workers in the Occupational Hearing Loss Surveillance Project who wear hearing aids did not wear them during testing. However, few persons wear hearing aids during working years (9), so no adjustments were made for hearing aid use. Finally, no information was available on other conditions, so healthy years lost because of hearing impairment were not adjusted for comorbidities (5). Occupational hearing loss is a permanent but entirely preventable condition with todays hearing loss prevention strategies and technology (2). Concurrent with prevention efforts, early detection of hearing loss by consistent annual audiometric testing, and intervention to preclude further loss (e.g., refitting hearing protection, training), are critical. Although lost hearing cannot be recovered, workers can benefit from clinical rehabilitation, which includes fitting hearing aids, learning lip-reading, and adopting other compensation strategies to optimize hearing. Study results support beginning rehabilitation at a mild level of hearing impairment. Prevention, and early detection, intervention, and rehabilitation, might greatly improve workers quality of life (2,9). USA: Cemex fined US$400,000 over negligence at Kosmos Cement ICR Newsroom By 21 April 2016 Cemex-owned Kosmos Cement has pleaded guilty to negligence over its failure to comply with health and safety standards , which contributed to the death of a contractor. The company was fined US$400,000, of which US$200,000 is payable immediately. The remaining US$200,000 will be waived if Cemex upgrades the facilities at its plant in Louisville, Kentucky, to the required standard, adopts a written maintenance control programme and allows on-site inspections by state officials. According to the US Department of Justice, agents and employees of the company were aware that an elevator at its old finish mill was defective, but had not moved to fix the fault. This resulted in the death of a contractor in February 2014. United States Attorney, John Kuhn, said: "This is one of the worst cases of negligence on the part of a company, adding improper maintenance resulted in an employee's death. Published under India: local residents in favour of Jorabat cement plant ICR Newsroom By 21 April 2016 Plans to set up a 500tpd cement plant near Jorabat, Assam, India, have received the support of local residents. The Pollution Control Board Assam has conducted a public hearing in the premises of Ambher LP School at 12th Mile, near Jorabat, on the issue of setting up of a proposed cement plant. The majority of the local people and residents supported establishment of the works on the condition that the plant would contract staff locally, reported the Assam Tribune. Another condition given by the villagers was that the pollution control system of the factory must be efficiently and regularly monitored. The factory authorities have affirmed that they would abide by the conditions of the villagers. Published under Tunisia: Ciments de Bizerte completes quay ICR Newsroom By 21 April 2016 Ciments de Bizerte is scheduled to complete the development project of its shipment quay by June 2016. The upgraded quay will enable the company to expand its clinker and cement exports as well as enable the unloading of petcoke for the entire domestic cement industry. Published under YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. Deputy Foreign Minister of Armenia Shavarsh Kocharyan said during a press conference that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will visit Armenia to discuss a wide range of issues of Armenia-Russia relations. Naturally, after the recent Azeri aggression the NKR settlement issue cannot be avoided during the discussion, Armenpress reports Kocharyan saying. Answering to a question that the Russian Izvestiya agency published information that allegedly a special document is ready for the NKR negotiations, Kocharyan said that various newspapers publish various things, the majority of which is false. You have to be guided by official announcements, statements, not by so called media, Kocharyan said. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. The charitable exhibition-sale of painter Alexander Mkrtchyans works will donate all profits to the family of Hrachya Muradyan, soldier who was killed by the Azerbaijani aggression. As Armenpress reports, the exhibition will open on May 3 in Leo 52 Club. The Band acoustic quartet is the special guest of the event. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. First Deputy Defense Minister of Armenia Davit Tonoyan had a meeting with NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow on April 21 in the NATO headquarters. As Armenpress was informed by the department of Information and Public Relations of the Defense Ministry, Tonoyan presented details of the Azerbaijani April aggression against Nagorno Karabakh, in particular the premeditated attack operations and evidence of international humanitarian rights violations. Tonoyan noted that the self determination right of NKR cannot be suppressed by military force:It is reinstated, that Armenians worldwide are mobilized and will protect this right with all measures. The people of NKR have the right to self defense and improvement of its security environment. Armenia-NATO cooperation was also discussed during the meeting. Ambassador Vershbow highly appraised the current NATO-Armenia cooperation level and expressed hope that the cooperation will continue developing. Davit Tonoyan will participate in the discussion of Armenia-NATO Planning and Review process document on April 22. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. On April 20, Council of City and County of Honolulu, state of Hawaii, adopted a resolution 16-78, CD1, encouraging and supporting the Nagorno Karabakh Republics continuing efforts to guarantee its citizens those rights inherent in a free and independent society and urging the President and Congress of the United States to support the international communitys efforts to reach a just and lasting solution to security issues in the South Caucasus region, Armenpress was informed about this by the Information Department of NKR Foreign Ministry. The resolution reads. WHEREAS, Nagorno Karabakh, also known as Artsakh, is a land-locked region in the South Caucasus that historically has been Armenian territory and is populated by an ethnic Armenian majority; and WHEREAS, in 1921, the region was severed from Armenia and placed under the Soviet Azerbaijani administration as the Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Region; and WHEREAS, February 20,1988, marked the beginning of the national liberation movement in Nagorno Karabakh, as the elected legislature representing the people of Nagorno Karabakh adopted a resolution returning Nagorno Karabakh to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia; and WHEREAS, on September 2,1991, in accordance with its enacted law, the legislature of NagornoKarabakh declared formation of the NagornoKarabakh Republic; and WHEREAS, on December 10,1991, the people of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic voted in favor of independence, and on January 6,1992, the democratically elected legislature of the republic formally declared independence; and WHEREAS, since proclaiming independence, the Nagorno Karabakh Republic has built a democratic nation with a free-market-oriented economy and a vibrant civil society that has held presidential and parliamentary elections that have been assessed by nongovernmental international monitors as free and fair; now, therefore, BE IT RESOLVED by the Council of the City and County of Honolulu that it encourages and supports the Nagorno Karabakh Republic's continuing efforts to guarantee its citizens those rights inherent in a free and independent society; and BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Council urges the President and Congress of the United States to support the international community's efforts to reach a just and lasting solution to security issues in the strategically important South Caucasus region; and BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED that copies of this Resolution be transmitted to the President of the United States, the President of the United States Senate, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, and to each member of Hawaii's congressional delegation. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. Minister-Chief of the Government Staff of Armenia Davit Harutyunyan met the delegation headed by the Director General of the Universal Postal Union Bishar Abdirahman Hussein on April 21, who arrived in Yerevan to participate in the 31th plenary conference of the National Postal Operators Association of Europe (PostEurop), Armenpress was informed about this by the Department of Information and Public Relations of the Government of Armenia. We would like to inform that this is the first plenary conference of the PostEurop Association in the Caucasus region and it is being held by the Armenian National Postal Operator HayPost's initiative. Davit Harutyunayn highly appreciated the cooperation between Armenia and the Universal Postal Union which contributes to the development of postal services. He stated that the Government continues to conduct reforms in this field which are aimed to raise the affordability of services, to distribute modern technologies and to develop e-government system. Bishar Abdirahman Hussein stressed the importance of holding this conference in Yerevan and stated that it is a good platform for the exchange of international experience and the intensification of cooperation in the postal field.He highly appreciated the quality of postal services stressing that he is very impressed by the progress and future development programs of Armenias postal communication sector. Issues were discussed relating to the exchange of experience and the expansion of cooperation in the field of postal services during the meeting. The parties stressed the importance of the cooperation development especially towards the development of financial services and e-government system. Minister-Chief of the Government Staff of Armenia informed that Armenia conducts legislative reforms in the field, and the discussion of the respective bill is underway. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. Nagorno Karabakh Republic (Artsakh Republic) Human Rights Defender (Ombudsman) has published a report on atrocities committed by Azerbaijani Armed Forces against the civilian population of the NKR and the servicemen of the NKR Defense Army during the period of 2-5April 2016. As Armenpress was informed from the press service of NKR Ombudsman, the announcement reads as follows,, Dear Colleagues, On April 02, 2016 Azerbaijani military forces breached the Ceasefire Agreement of 1994 by a well-planned large-scale massive attack. The most serious and bloody military operation along the entire NKR-Azerbaijani line of contact for the last 20 years was initiated, that resulted in gross mass violations of human rights. Today, the Interim Public Report of the NKR Ombudsman on Atrocities Committed by Azerbaijani Military Forces against the Civilian Population of the NKR and the Servicemen of the NKR Defence Army on April 2-5, 2016 has been published. The Report is in English and it analyses the Azerbaijani hatred policy towards people of Armenian origin and its horrific consequences that violate all international human rights standards with certain examples of torture and humiliation. The Report provides international human rights organizations objective assessments of Azerbaijans policy of inciting hatred and violence towards people of Armenian ethnicity. It also presents hate speech in the Azerbaijani mass media and social networks. The Report also reveals Azerbaijani high officials and other public persons activities aimed at spreading hate speech and incitement to violence. The Report presents the violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law; cases of attacks on civlian population of NKR, cases of inhuman treatment, as well as cases of torture and mutilation of the NKR Defence Army Servicemen. The Report will be sent to international human rights organizations, ombudsmens international institutions and to respective foreign institutions. I would like to thank the human rights NGOs of the Republic of Nagorno Karabakh for their assistance in drafting the Report, as well as all mass media representatives that have revealed in their publications the brutal cases of gross human rights violations. 18+ Warning: The Report contains pictures and descriptions of brutality and mutilation committed by Azerbaijani military forces. The report reflects pictures largely disseminated in the media. Sincerely, NKR Human Rights Defender. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian and Greek communities of the USA have jointly done great job for the progress of the country. Armenpress reports former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis expressed such an opinion in a lecture delivered at the American University of Armenia. In his words, particularly the Armenian community of Massachusetts made huge achievements. The Armenian community had a very positive stance on Governor Michael Dukakis. Dukakis mentioned that thank to the efforts made by his wife, a special place was allocated to the theme of the Armenian Genocide in the Museum of the Holocaust. The former Governor detailed on the domestic and foreign policy of the USA during the lecture, particularly made a special reference to the campaign of presidential elections. Michael Dukakis, is former Governor of Massachusetts and a former Democratic Presidential candidate. He is a staunch supporter of Armenian Genocide recognition, a professor of political science at Northeastern University and a visiting professor in the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research. The son of Greek immigrants, he studied law at Harvard University and served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1963-70. He was governor from 1975-79 and from 1983-91. In 1988, he was the Democratic nominee for president. As Governor, he was vocal in his support of the recognition of the Armenian Genocide hosting an annual April 24th event at the State House in conjunction with then Speaker of the House, George Keverian. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. Iran recommends its partners Armenia and Azerbaijan to find such solutions which will not end in a war. Armenpress reports speaker of the Iranian Majlis (parliament) Ali Larijani told about this in an interview with TASS commenting on the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. "One of the existing mechanisms is the OSCE Minsk Group. We recommend our Armenian and Azerbaijani partners not to allow a new war in the region, because the consequences will be very painful. The Defense Ministry of Iran has contacted with its colleges in Baku, Yerevan, as well as Moscow over that issue, Larijani said. He stated that both Armenia and Azerbaijan are neighbors and the numerous victims will generate new wave of hatred, which will be very difficult to overcome in the future. We all must make efforts to find a political solution to this problem, the Speaker of the Majlis said. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. French President Francois Hollande on April 21 discussed with the Georgian leader Giorgi Margvelashvili the situation in the South Caucasus, issues of bilateral relations and the international agenda. As Armenpress reports citing the official website of the Elysee Palace. "The President of the Republic received the President of Georgia Mr. Giorgi Margvelashvili, who is in France on a return official visit The heads of states discussed the entire range of bilateral relations, reads the statement. The administration of Hollande stated that one of the main topics of the talks was the prospects of economic cooperation between France and Georgia. "They also discussed the international agenda, in particular, the situation in the South Caucasus", the Elysee Palace informed, adding that France supports the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Georgia. The sides also discussed issues of cooperation between Georgia and the EU in the framework of the Association Agreement, signed in June, 2014. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. Nagorno Karabakh Republic Permanent Representative to France Hovhannes Gevorgyan delivered a speech on April 19 at a panel discussion on Nagorno Karabakh: Escalation of Tension with Azerbaijan organized by the Swiss Press Club of Geneva. The discussion was dedicated to the large-scale military aggression unleashed by Azerbaijan against Artsakh in early April and other regional issues. As Armenpress was informed from the press service of NKR MFA, in his speech, the NKR representative briefed on the probable reasons for the recent developments and their consequences. He emphasized the importance of Artsakh's return to the negotiation table, the need for the international recognition of the NKR, and the significance of realization of the NKR people's right to self-determination. The NKR representative also answered the numerous questions of the participants. Armenian and foreign diplomats, experts, journalists, and members of the Armenian community of Switzerland participated in the event. YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. France-Artsakh friendship circle uniting over 50 French politicians has issued a press release over another propaganda fraud by Azerbaijan. As Armenpress was informed from the Department of Press, Information and Public Relations of MFA Armenia, the statement reads as follows, France-Artsakh friendship circle applied to the Secretary of State for Veterans and Memory of the Ministry of Defense of France Jean-Marc Todeschini on March 15 for checking the reliability of the information spread by the Azerbaijani Embassy. According to the mentioned information, an event dedicated to the memory of the victims of Khojaly allegedly took place on February 26 in Paris, near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Triumphal Arch. It is already several years the Baku propaganda cynically uses the civilian victims of Azerbaijan for defaming the liberation forces of Nagorno Karabakh, at the same time keeping silence over the civilian losses of Karabakh, president of France-Artsakh friendship group Francois Rochebloine and Vice Presidents Rene Rouquet and Guy Tessier explained. In his response on April 8 Jean-Marc Todeschini denied and officially condemned the false information spread by Azerbaijans embassy. The Secretary of State mentioned that a number of unions were present at the event, and the Ambassador of Azerbaijan really put a wreath with a note Embassy of Azerbaijan in France on it, an act that is regularly conducted by many other officials representing foreign countries under the auspices of the Committee of Fire. Mr. Todeschini mentioned that the information about the event spread by Azerbaijani embassy through its own website id false. The Secretary of State concluded his letter with the following, I am sorry and condemn the speculation made by that internet website referring to the Fire burning ceremony of February 26. History and memory deserve to be transparent, true and reliable. We are responsible in front of those victims in honor of whom we organize such events. These exposures documenting the duplicity of the Azerbaijani authorities come to surface immediately after Azerbaijan unleashed a military aggression against Nagorno Karabakh. When a country is able to shamelessly cheat the French and international publics over an incident that took place in the centre of Paris, how can one believe of what it tells about something happening far away in South Caucasus. The incident near the Triumphal Arch proves the existing regime in Azerbaijan is neither reliable nor credible, Francois Rochebloine said, adding that this dangerous strategy hampers the peaceful settlement of the conflict, as Azerbaijan regularly disseminates anti-Armenianism and hatred among its public. This service applies to you if your subscription has not yet expired on our old site. You will have continued access until your subscription expires; then you will need to purchase an ongoing subscription through our new system. Please contact The Chanute Tribune office at 620-431-4100 if you have any questions The door closed behind him as he surveyed the crowd of top government officials and other intelligence officers already there. They were in twos, threes chattering to each other, slightly raising their voices over the roar of conversation. The atmosphere was serious. There was something else he sensed. Something he hadnt thought to expect; abject fear. It clearly showed on their faces and worried voices. After thanking the guard that had escorted him to the room, Vagi Balau opened the door and walked through. It was 11:32am. For a second, no one spoke. The NIO Chief was as if gathering his thoughts, he was now fully awake. Pat? Yes thats him; just get him to come to the state house. Ok. Meet me in an hour at the state house, left wing, fired the Chief. Do you remember this young engineer from National Statistics Office who had 57 including the crew, said Launa. After almost 3 hours of intense communication check, they were declared missing at 0300 hours. I would have informed you first thing, but there was a mix up concerning THE PHONE RINGS. Mekosen snaps awake up and checks the time. 4:08 am. Just into his second year with the National Intelligence Organisation as Chief, he was already used to these late night awakenings and, at this time of hour, he was sure it was one of his officers. Sitting up and letting out a sigh, Mekosen Roni reached out and picked up the phone. Yes? Balau felt that he didnt belong but, who cares, thinking to himself. He was briefed over the phone on the current situation. Apparently, he thought Pat was bluffing but as soon as the guards of the government house gate let him through and ushered him up to the planning room, he believed him. Balau announced; Is there anything I can do? Nobody looked up or even noticed him speaking from the door way. Most of these officers knew nothing of him. They thought of him as another skinny engineer. Those few who did know him well believed him to be their best and perhaps their only chance to finding the missing ship. Balau repeated his question. This time, someone answered: As it is, we have not made much progress; we dont know where it is. If theres anything you can do with respect to that, do it. The NIO Chief approached Balau from across the room. This is what we have right now, handing him a folder with the title Operation Tahua printed across it. He turned to walk. Then as if remembering something he looked back and said, This could be our worst or otherwise. Whatever the turn out, I want your best. The chief took a deep breath and exhaled, God help us. Down at the Coastline shipping wharf, friends and families of passengers on MV Montoro waited, waited for their friends and relatives, waited in a tropical drizzle that washed the dock clean. They were all unaware of the frantic radio messages tearing through the air around them. Chatter and laughter filled the terminal; everyone was happy, except, one girl. Mary Mouna was waiting for her father. She had contacted him last night like every other night since the vessels dispatch off the Lae wharf 4 days ago. Only this time, their conversation was disrupted by a blasting sound. He said he would check it out and call back but that seemed to be the last she heard. She didnt want to think the worst. Daddys coming, she told herself. But as minutes turned to hours, fear mounted. She didnt want to. No. She couldnt. He was all the family she had. She leaned back to the wall as her eyes welled up with tears. And when the Coastline staff told them to go home, telling them that Montoro had been delayed, she began to sob. Balau scanned through the Operation Tahua file. The only lead he could use was the phone conversation between a girl and her father, the passenger. There was an indication of a blast, probably an explosion. If this turns out to be true, this meant one thing; few survivors. Balau thought of the explosion, the sound it generated. Hydrophone, he smiled to himself. Balau placed a call to Motupore Island, PNGs state of the art marine research centre. The centre also housed an oceanographic laboratory and his friend, a Danny Sereva, once mentioned something about their lab being equipped with hydrophones. There was a click. Hello! Hey Danny, would you happen to have any hydrophones in the water for the past 2 days? Ugh gimme a sec, sounds of paper shoving and rustling came from the other end. Youre in luck, yes There was a pause. Why do you need it? You will soon enough, just email me the charts of the last 24 hours please, its urgent. Danny gave him his ok and hung up. Vagi Balau leaned back on his chair and sighed heavily. Meanwhile, the news of the missing ship had been made public and down at the Coastline HQ, phones began to ring. A phone near an accounts clerk was the first to go; two others from a cubicle rang at the same time. All the phones began ringing, even their cell-phones started to go. There were more phones ringing than there was people to answer. The three floor office complex was becoming chaotic. A routine business operation had turned to a missing persons helpdesk or more so a very busy call centre. Families and friends of the missing enquired, others demanded answers. The press was having a feeding frenzy. Reporters wanted details. They began calling in, newspapers joined in, magazines, TV and radio stations, the whole interlude. Coastline boss Josephine E Cox was in her office. Although the aircon was on, she was sweating. This was nothing shed ever experienced. Her cell-phone and landlines were ringing but she ignored them. She was replaying in her mind what the PM had just told her. I just got word from the Navy, they couldnt find anything. Our planes and choppers searched the 5km radius of Montoros last contact, looking for signs of a shipwreck, floating wreckage and oil slicks but found nothing. The PM waited for this news to sink in. What my people are doing right now is trying to locate the ship so we can gather data on its cause. After he conveyed his heartfelt sorrow, he hung up. For the third time, Balau went through the hydrophone records he just received from Sereva. The peaks and blips were lines left behind by a pen running across the width of the page, responding to sounds picked up by the hydrophones. Higher peaks meant larger sounds. And thats what he was looking for, a sound big enough to tear apart the steel hull of a ship. There were seven. With only one set of records, Balau had no way to come up with a geographical fix on any of the blasts. To do that, he would need to triangulate three separate recordings from three different hydrophones set up in three different points. Since he didnt have the data, Balau worked backwards, charting the times of the explosions against Montoros known path and speed. Balau came up with five mid ocean locations. Bathymetric charts showed all five sites deeper than a thousand feet. Acting on Balaus data, the government hired and sent a deep-sea mining vessel MV Taubada to search all five spots. Three weeks later, Taubada found Montoro exactly 22 metres away from Balaus point of highest probability. She was broken in two, both parts barely held together by a piece of metal. Taubadas cameras, dangling 5-10 metres above Montoro, took several shots of the sunken ship. They were of no real value; they appeared to have been taken through thick fog. By then, the government had already declared all the crew and passengers of the ill-fated vessel MV Montoro legally dead. The court of inquiry looking into the disaster later concluded that after six months of thorough investigations, no cause could be determined from any evidence available. Until today, MV Montoros disaster remains a mystery. It was a national tragedy that day, the countrys worst. Life was slowly returning. But one thing was sure; those affected would continue on in life with broken hearts. Alois Seneka (27) was born in Port Moresby. He is a general labour clerk with Port Services (PNG) Ltd. He is married with a young son. He is an avid reader of novels, counting John Grisham, Robert Ludlum and James Patterson as favourite authors Their ability to magically fit into a relatively small office space on Kennedy Road is not the only puzzling fact about the subsidiaries of the Malaysian group, Rimbunan Hijau. Out of the 30 above mentioned companies, 16 subsidiaries that are directly involved in logging or agribusiness have one other thing in common. All but two of these 30 companies have the same registered address at 479 Kennedy Road in the national capital, Port Moresbythe headquarter of the RH group in the country. The former is the managing director of Rimbunan Hijau (RH) PNG and son-in-law of RHs founder Tiong Hiew King; the latter is executive director of RH PNG Ltd. JAMES Sze Yuan Lau and Ivan Su Chiu Lu must be extremely busy men. Together, they are listed as directors of some 30 companies involved in various activities and services related to logging or agribusiness in Papua New Guinea. According to their financial records, they dont make a profit. Most of them have been working at a loss for over a decade. During the 12 years for which financial records were available to the Oakland Institutes researchers, all together, the subsidiaries declared an average loss of about US$ 9 million every year. How the group the largest logging operator in PNG manages to operate at a loss for so many years, and yet still remains in business? If it were unprofitable to log and export timber from PNG, why would these companies continue their operations? These are some of the critical questions raised in a report released in February 2016, The Great Timber Heist: The Logging Industry in Papua New Guinea, by the Oakland Institute. The report exposed massive tax evasion and financial misreporting by foreign logging companies, allegedly resulting in non-payment of hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes. Recovering tax revenue would be certainly welcomed by PNG given the acute budget crisis the country has been facing in recent months. Yet, it is unclear whether the government of PNG will decide to take action following these revelations. After all, despite the promises made by the Prime Minister, still no action has been taken two and a half years after the damning report on recent land leases, produced by the Commission of Inquiry, which identified all sorts of malpractices and irregularities and concluded that most leases were illegal. A first step for any government would be to start monitoring the declared sale prices of exported timber. PNG prices are much lower than those of other exporters of tropical timber (nearly 50% cheaper in 2014), which suggests that logging companies undervalue their exports and therefore their profits. But the recent statements by the Forest Minister in denial of the findings of the report, and given the well-documented deficiencies of the PNG Forest Authority, there is little hope of decisive action by this agency. Another level of action is the enforcement of tax compliance by the Internal Revenue Commission, the government agency in charge of tax collection. However, although many RH companies are conveniently located at the same address, it may prove difficult for tax auditors to ascertain the extent of their wrongdoings. The Group has been built as a complex and opaque financial structure: almost all RH holding companiesthe parent companies of those operating in PNGare located in tax havens, primarily the British Virgin Islands, known for facilitating illicit financial flows. Moreover, the use of multiple subsidiaries in logging operations makes auditing even more complex to conduct. For instance, in one single project in West Pomio, Gilford Ltd.s records indicate financial transactions with 16 other RH subsidiary companies. This interrelation facilitates transfer pricing as companies of the same group can charge each other an artificially high price for goods, equipment, and services, thereby increasing the sister companys operational expenses, and artificially reducing their profits. This interrelation would require investigators to not just focus on individual logging companies but to extend their audits to the larger RH Group. But who would they go after? RH is controlled by Tiong Hiew King, one of Malaysias richest men. Although logging is the core business of the group Rimbunan Hijau ironically means forever green in Malay, his empire covers a multitude of sectors, and all continents from fisheries in New Zealand, timber in Siberia, to Chinese speaking newspapers in California. RHs grip over PNG goes far beyond the forests, as it is present across all sectors of the economy. The companys most recent investment in the capital Port Moresby is a project known as Vision City, which contains the largest shopping mall in the Pacific Islands region and is expected to be expanded to include an office tower block, service apartments, a hotel and convention centre. It also owns The National, the largest of the two daily newspapers in PNG, an airline, Tropicair, as well as shipping and logistics companies. Whereas the group appears as PNGs superpower, citizens are left powerless. As documented in 2013 Oakland Institutes report and film, logging in PNG hides a multilayered tragedy of daylight robbery, whereby local communities are being deprived of their resources and their rights, with the complicity of their own government. RH has often been accused in the past of connections within the political elite in the country and of involvement in corruption and violence in relation to its logging operations. In a number of occasions, local police forces have been used to intimidate and arrest local landowners opposed to logging and land grabbing by RH subsidiaries. A single corporate group, RH, thus materialises the betrayal of the unique constitutional protections that PNG citizens are supposed to enjoy. The 1975 Constitution guaranteed peoples land rights and upheld national sovereignty, self-reliance and the preservation of natural resources as key principles for the country. It called on the State to control major enterprises engaged in the exploitation of natural resources. Ironically, today a major enterprise has turned the statement around and appears to be controlling the state and the countrys natural resources. Will Papua New Guineans eventually decide to put the things back in place? The Tennessee Aquarium summer day camps still have spots available for school-age children through ten years old:Tadpole camp is for ages 5-6 year-olds who have already been to kindergarten. "Tadpoles" explore animal adaptations, create crafts, play outside games and splash in the Aquarium stream. Each day campers will get up-close to Aquarium animals, sometimes getting to feed or touch them. This year, their exploration will also take them to High Point Climbing and on a full-day nature excursion to Reflection Riding.Polliwog camp is for 7-8 year-olds.These older campers will explore deeper into Aquarium ecosystems and even go behind the scenes. One day theyll even hop like frogs across the Walnut Street Bridge to play in Coolidge Park. On the last day of camp, they pretend to be Mudskippers at Reflection Riding by getting in their mud hole. "Campers are a little skeptical about getting in a mud pit at first, but its rare that they wont dive in to join the fun. Many Polliwog campers rate mud day as their favorite day of camp," officials said.There are also a few spaces left in the July Bullfrogs camp for 9 and 10 year-olds. In addition to all the activities at the Aquarium, "Bullfrogs" raft down the Hiawasee River and try their hand at spelunking on a guided caving trip. Bullfrogs also get to spend one night at the Aquarium, falling asleep beside the giant freshwater fish in River Giants."The Aquariums Summer Camp is consistently rated as excellent on parent surveys. One parent stated, 'I love the way you offer so many different excursions and how you change them from year to year so each year the kids experience something different.' 96 percent of summer camp parents rated 2015 camp counselors as good or excellent in their professionalism and rapport with children," officials said.Visit www.tnaqua.org/summer-camp for more information and to register. Any questions can be sent to summercamp@tnaqua.org. Aquarium members receive a 25% discount on summer camps in addition to other member benefits. BASF has signed an agreement to acquire the assets of Guangdong Yinfan Chemistry Co., Ltd. in China. With this acquisition, BASF will establish a stronger coatings production footprint by gaining access to a state-of-the-art automotive refinish coatings plant in China. It will also enable BASF to broaden its automotive refinish portfolio in Asia Pacific by adding the Yinfan line of products to its global brands including Glasurit, R-M, baslac and Norbin. The acquisition underlines our strong commitment to growing our automotive coatings business and further investing in emerging markets, said Markus Kamieth, President of BASFs Coatings division. With this acquisition, we will broaden our portfolio and gain access to a strong distribution network, which will strengthen our position in the fast-growing Chinese automotive aftermarket. The closing is expected in the second half of 2016, subject to necessary regulatory, statutory and other approvals. Both parties have agreed not to disclose financial details of the transaction. We have identified seven reasons why this is a dangerous move and must be rejected. Most importantly, under the government plan, customary landowners will still lose control of their land which is a vital resource for them and the illegal logging will be allowed to continue. The Department of Lands is drafting amendments to the Lands Act which will allow the government to endorse the unlawful SABL land grab, said program manager Effrey Dademo (pictured). THE Papua New Guinea government is planning to convert unlawful SABL (special agriculture and business leases) leases into registered land and community advocacy group Act Now! says there are strong reasons why the governments plan is wrong and should be rejected. One: Changes to the Lands Act will take away customary rights The government wants to amend the Lands Act so the SABL leases can be converted into registered land and then subleased. This will deny customary landowners their constitutional right to decide what happens on their land. Currently, only the landowners themselves can decide to register their land and to sub lease. These decisions can only be made after a lengthy and intensive process of consultation and empowerment. The government proposal will remove these rights. Two: Customary landowners will still lose control of their land Land registration and sub-leases mean landowners will still lose control and use of their land. It is just another form of land alienation, which will deprive rural people of their most vital asset, which they rely on for their daily subsistence and cultural heritage. To make things even worse the land registration will be in perpetuity, meaning it is forever. Customary landowners will never get their land back. Three: Land area far too large The SABL leases cover a huge area, over five million hectares in total. That is 12% of the whole of PNG. On average, each leases covers some 65,000 hectares. This is far more land than is necessary for any agriculture project. The three genuine leases identified by the Commission of Inquiry, covered less than 425 hectares in total! Most of the SABL leases have been acquired for logging or land speculation, not genuine agriculture activities. There can be no justification for registering 5 million hectares of customary land as the government is proposing. Four: Conversion will allow the illegal logging to continue Many of the unlawful SABL leases are being used as a cover for illegal logging. More than five million cubic metres of logs valued at over $500 million have been exported from SABL areas. Converting the SABL leases to registered land will allow the illegal logging to continue. Five: Leaseholders not fit and proper persons The current SABL leaseholders did not follow proper processes and procedures to obtain their leases. In many cases the Commission of Inquiry found evidence of fraud and in some cases recommended criminal investigation. These companies are not fit and proper persons and should not be allowed to retain control of the land or be issued with any new leases. Six: Conversion would undermine the Constitution Land registration and sub-leasing to corporations defeats third National Goal in the Constitution. Customary landownership is central to the concepts of National Sovereignty and Self Reliance. Converting the SABL leases will further disenfranchises local people to the benefit of big-business and foreigners. Seven: Lands Department dysfunctional and corrupt The Department of Lands is too centralized, dysfunctional and corrupt to be trusted to administer customary land at the current time. Rural landowners have no way of approaching or consulting Lands Officers in Port Moresby or challenging their decisions. The SABL leases are just one example of the unlawful and often corrupt activities of the Department. What is required is a total overhaul of the Department, removal and prosecution of those involved in unlawful activity and a completely new system of land administration, not just some token staff changes, before any further land acquisition is attempted or any new titles issued. Act Now! says rather than trying to endorse the unlawful SABL land grab the government should revoke the leases and give the land back to its customary owners, as recommended by the SABL Commission of Inquiry. As detector assemblies get smaller and denser -- packed with electronic components that all must be electrically connected to sense and read out signals -- it's becoming increasingly more challenging to design and manufacture these all-important instrument devices. A team of NASA technologists at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, however, has begun investigating the use of a technique called aerosol jet printing or direct-write manufacturing to produce new detector assemblies that are not possible with traditional assembly processes. "If we succeed, aerosol jet technology could define a whole new way to create dense electronic board assemblies and potentially improve the performance and consistency of electronic assemblies," explained Goddard technologist Beth Paquette, who is leading the R&D effort that began last fiscal year. Furthermore, aerosol jet printing promises to slash the time it takes to manufacture circuit boards, from a month to a day or two, she added. Important Distinction As with other 3-D printing techniques, aerosol jet manufacturing builds components by depositing materials layer-by-layer following a computer-aided design, or CAD, drawing. However, jet aerosol printing offers an important difference. Instead of melting and fusing plastic powder or some other material in precise locations, as in the case of many 3-D printers, aerosol jet printing uses a carrier gas and printer heads to deposit a fine aerosol of metal particles, including silver, gold, platinum, or aluminum, onto a surface. Aerosol jet printers also can deposit polymers or other insulators and can even print carbon nanotubes, cylindrically shaped carbon molecules that have novel properties useful in nanotechnology, electronics, and optics. "It can print around bends, on spheres or on something flat, or on a flexible surface, which then can be flexed into the shape you want," she said. These attributes make the technology ideal for detector assemblies, particularly those that need to be shaped differently or are very small, yet dense because of the large number of tiny components that must be electrically wired or linked together on a circuit board -- an inescapable reality as instruments get smaller and smaller. "We can make these wires microns in width," Paquette said. "These lines are very small, down to 10 microns wide. These sizes aren't possible using traditional circuit board manufacturing processes." (By way of comparison, the average human hair measures between 17 and 191 microns in width.) Other Applications However, the technique's use isn't limited to detector electronics. Technologist Wes Powell, who specializes in electronics at Goddard, envisions a time where instrument developers could use aerosol jet technology to print antennas, wiring harnesses, and other hardware directly onto a spacecraft. Paquette's research involves NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the University of Maryland's Laboratory for Physical Sciences, the University of Delaware, Georgia Tech, and the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. In addition, several industry groups are involved, including the United Technologies Research Center, East Hartford, Connecticut; NanoDirect LLC, Baltimore, Maryland; Raytheon, Waltham, Massachusetts; and Optomec, Albuquerque, New Mexico. So far, the team has found that the technology holds promise, and is now evaluating the technique's repeatability and robustness particularly for a spaceflight application. "Aerosol jet printing has the potential for many configurations, but the deposits have not yet been assessed under typical flight conditions. That's what we're doing here," she said. This Coca-Cola bottling plant in Niles, photographed in 2015, has been sold to a subsidiary of Reyes Holdings, along with plants in Alsip; Milwaukee; Detroit; Grand Rapids, Mich.; and Eagan, Minn. (John J. Kim / Chicago Tribune) Reyes Holdings announced Wednesday plans to acquire Coca-Cola plants in Niles and Alsip, along with four other facilities in the Midwest. Rosemont-based Great Lakes Coca-Cola Distribution, a subsidiary of Reyes Holdings, has signed a letter of intent to buy the plants from the Coca-Cola Co. and take over production. The other facilities are in Milwaukee; Detroit; Grand Rapids, Mich.; and Eagan, Minn. Terms of the deal, expected to close by the end of 2017, weren't disclosed. Advertisement When asked if the deal would result in layoffs, Meredith Simpson, a Reyes Holdings spokeswoman, said the company doesn't "expect that there will be any changes to the workforce." In January, members of Teamsters Local 727 voted to approve a three-year contract with Coca-Cola, ending contentious negotiations that included a strike that lasted nearly a month. The contract covers 319 production and warehouse workers and transport drivers at the two Illinois plants. Advertisement "We expect that the existing deal will be honored," Simpson said. In the fall, the union negotiated a contract with Great Lakes Coca-Cola Distribution for about 500 members at distribution facilities in Chicago and Alsip, said Maggie Jenkins, spokeswoman for Local 727. In general, the union's had a "very smooth relationship" with Great Lakes, Jenkins said. "We imagine that's only going to continue with Great Lakes taking over operations at the plants in Alsip and Niles," Jenkins said. In October, Great Lakes Coca-Cola Distribution announced its expansion in the Midwest. By the end of 2017, the company will have exclusive rights for sales and distribution of Coca-Cola beverages in Michigan, most of Wisconsin, southern Minnesota and portions of northeast Iowa and northern Illinois, Reyes Holdings reported Wednesday. The announcement marks Great Lakes' first foray into production in the Midwest. "The agreement allows Reyes Holdings and our family of businesses not only to grow our partnership with Coca-Cola, but also to become a producing bottler for the first time," said Chris Reyes, founder and co-chairman of Reyes Holdings, which is also based in Rosemont. The deal is part of a broader strategy by the Coca-Cola Co. to refranchise its North American bottling operations. Coca-Cola also announced Wednesday the expansion of three other bottling companies and the addition of a new one. gtrotter@tribpub.com Twitter @GregTrotterTrib Maribel and Richard Tinimbang walk through the lobby of the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse on April 21, 2016. The two are accused of health care fraud, money laundering and conspiracy to obtain forced labor. They have pleaded not guilty and were freed on bond. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune) A young north suburban couple accused of keeping their nanny as an indentured servant while they allegedly funded their own "lavish" lifestyle with a $45 million Medicare fraud were freed on bond Thursday, despite prosecutors warning that they present a flight risk. Richard Tinimbang, 38, and his wife, Maribel Tinimbang, 40, were ordered by U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer not to try to contact the nanny whom they allegedly brought to the U.S. from the Philippines on a fraudulent visa, then threatened to have deported without pay if she quit. Advertisement "No contact ..." Pallmeyer told them. "Do you understand?" The couple who pleaded not guilty but face up to 85 years and 60 years behind bars, respectively, if convicted on all counts were making their first appearance in court since they were charged earlier this month with health care fraud, money laundering and conspiracy to obtain forced labor. Advertisement They spoke in meek voices only to acknowledge they understood both the charges against them and their potential punishments. Prosecutors allege the Tinimbangs amassed a small fleet of luxury SUVs, a 5,000-square-foot McMansion in Lincolnwood and riches including $1 million in Facebook stock by paying kickbacks for patient referrals and fraudulently inflating Medicare bills for their home health care business, Patients First, between 2008 and 2014. While Richard Tinimbang on Thursday posted his equity in his South Loop condo to satisfy his $50,000 bond, his wife posted just $20,000 in cash. Maribel Tinimbang's attorney, Dan Collins, argued that she should be allowed to walk free without posting a bond, saying she had deep ties to the Chicago area, including her twin 5-year-old sons. But Assistant U.S. Attorney Brooke Harper convinced the judge to order Maribel Tinimbang to deposit $20,000 after warning she posed a "substantial flight risk to the Philippines." Not only was Maribel Tinimbang born and raised in the Philippines, but she also had family there as well as a mother-in-law, Josephine Tinimbang, who was previously charged in the case but fled to the Philippines to evade justice, Harper said. "Mrs. Tinimbang is presented with the example of a relative who has managed to evade" the law, said Harper, adding that Maribel Tinimbang's savings would go further in the Philippines and that "if I was Mrs. Tinimbang, knowing that there was an escape hatch to the Philippines I might decide to go now with my children rather than wait." She also noted the couple's 2009 wedding was described as "lavish" and "splashy" in the Filipino press. Pallmeyer ordered the Tinimbangs to give up their passports. The judge said she would prefer that both of them post real estate as a security, but said she understood that was not possible given the small amount of equity they had. She ordered them both to stay out of the home health business while they fight the case. Advertisement kjanssen@tribpub.com Twitter @kimjnews Fewer than half of the workers in the United States can take paid time off to care for a new baby. The rest either find a way to make it work scale back at the office, drain savings, enlist relatives or slip into poverty. With no guaranteed income during one of life's priciest events comes a flood of proposed solutions, mostly from the left. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has called for 12 weeks of partly paid leave. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has proposed the same. San Francisco this month became the first U.S. city to require businesses to cover six weeks of parental leave at full wages. Advertisement And a group of conservative thinkers in Washington wants to deviate from these concepts, promoting an alternative that shifts responsibility from taxpayers and companies to the individual. Think of it as a 401(k) but for maternity leave. Advertisement The recommendation is part of a bundle of family-friendly policy proposals from the Independent Women's Forum, a right-leaning think tank in Washington. Such a report is rare, because Democrats have traditionally focused on the struggles of working mothers and because Republicans have long argued that boosting the economy will boost everyone. (For context, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida made history last year when he became the first Republican candidate to release a paid-leave plan.) But liberals shouldn't continue to dominate the discussion, said Sabrina Schaeffer, IWF's executive director. Republican lawmakers ignore reality when they gloss over parents' needs, she said, and it's also a political blunder to let one side own an increasingly hot issue. "We're responding to the progressive feminist and Democratic ideas about how to best help women in the workplace," Schaeffer said. "We want to recognize that people's lives aren't static and give them flexibility." IWF proposes that states, which can move more nimbly than the federal government, create their own gender-neutral Personal Care Accounts for potential parents to fill with tax-free savings, with as much as $30,000 during a lifetime. Workers would be allowed to store the equivalent of 12 weeks pay per year, capped at a maximum of $5,000 annually. They could cash out only when they're eligible for extended leave under the Family Medical Leave Act, which provides most workers with 12 weeks of job-protected time off to care for a new child, tend to a sick relative or recover from an injury. The act, though, does not guarantee pay during that time. Employers would also have the option to match contributions. The approach resembles America's most popular way to save for retirement (and similar models that encourage people to put away funds for education and medical care), although the period to accrue interest would be much shorter. If a worker never uses the money, the fund would essentially become an Individual Retirement Account. Advertisement The accounts, of course, couldn't help women who don't have money to contribute or those who become pregnant before a reservoir of cash accumulates. The accounts mostly would lift people who already have resources to stash and grow. "Not everything is going to help every person," Schaeffer said. She and her colleagues also suggest giving tax breaks to small businesses that offer generous family-friendly benefits and simplifying the tax code to benefit families. The IWF report argues that these strategies would take the burden off the employers and shield women from the social consequences of one-size-fits-all policies. The authors point to a 2015 study in Chile, which showed that, after the government told companies to provide child care to working mothers, women's wages dropped. They also cite research from Cornell University economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn, who found that women in European countries offering lengthy maternity leaves were promoted much less often than their American counterparts. Jeffrey Hayes, program director of job quality and income security at the Institute for Women's Policy Research, questioned the effectiveness of IWF's proposal, saying more attention should be paid to young parents with the least financial security. Some work part time or for small firms that supply no benefits. Others carry thousands of dollars in student debt. "Pregnancy tends to happen early in the life course," Hayes said. "You don't have time to build up much money." Advertisement About 88 percent of employees in the private sector have no access to paid family leave, leaving low-income workers with few options when a newborn arrives. Some women return to work a week after giving birth, he said. Some return before the incision from a Cesarian section heals. Momentum to tackle the issue continues to grow nationwide. While California, Rhode Island, New Jersey and New York are so far the only states to offer new parents partial pay, advocates say lawmakers in at least 18 other states are considering implementing some form of the benefit. Local government in Washintgon, D.C., could soon follow San Francisco's lead, with council members working on legislation that would provide new parents with 16 weeks of paid leave. In these heady days for airlines, when they "own" hub cities and can charge $500 to change a ticket, one might wonder what happened to entrepreneurs the people who sketch route maps on cocktail napkins (Southwest) or split from their former airlines and start new ones (Air Florida, People Express, JetBlue). Despite cheap fuel and financing, almost no new, well-capitalized airlines with national aspirations have appeared since the wave of bankruptcies and consolidations of the past decade. And Virgin America, which began flying in August 2007, plans to merge with Alaska Air Group. It's largely because the U.S., the world's most mature airline market, has become an ocean of whales, with scant space for small fry. Even a smaller operator such as Spirit Airlines has 84 planes in its fleet and serves most of the largest U.S. cities, plus more than a dozen nations abroad. Anyone who wants to launch an airline faces high hurdles, given the scarcity of gates and terminal facilities at most airports, not to mention the capital costs, said Robert Mann, president of aviation consultant R.W. Mann & Co. in Port Washington, New York. On top of all that, the larger airplanes a startup would choose, such as a Boeing 737 or Airbus A320, create "far greater capacity risk and risk of competitive response by incumbents," Mann said. As a result, new airlines "have been few and far between since 2008, really since 1999" as JetBlue's founders were preparing their launch. In the past, new airlines have appeared whenever the industry began to overreach on price or leave various cities or regions underserved. Right now, despite consolidation, neither situation has materialized, except for some smaller markets. Even with record profits goosing labor costs at the majors, new airlines wouldn't wield the same kind of cost advantage over them that they once did, said Seth Kaplan, managing partner of Airline Weekly, an industry journal. "When (David) Neeleman launched JetBlue in 2000, he was able to pick on some very sick legacy airlines with bloated cost bases and tired old products, in which they couldn't afford to invest," Kaplan said. Airline executives have been adamant in telling investors that the U.S. industry has changed fundamentally as a fragmented business has coalesced into four dominant carriers with roughly an 85 percent market share, and an economic recession would no longer mean a flood of red ink for airlines. Given the resulting capacity reductions, though, fares are expected to rise, presenting an opportunity for upstarts. Advertisement Meanwhile, entrepreneurs are taking small jets and flying them strategically, filling niches the behemoths have either abandoned or left ripe for competition. That means primarily smaller regional markets where businesspeople are keen to avoid security clogs and big-airport hassles. That's the path OneJet and others, such as Elite Airways, are pursuing. Still other models, such as Surf Air , offer monthly membership costs for unlimited flights on private aircraft or unlimited flying on commercial airlines for a monthly subscription fee, as a startup called OneGo is doing. Into this arena flies private jet operator JetSuite, which on Wednesday began regular daily flights via a public charter called JetSuiteX between Burbank, Calif., and Concord, east of the San Francisco Bay Area. Concord last had commercial service 24 years ago, when USAir's PSA subsidiary quit. On weekends, JetSuiteX will connect Concord and Las Vegas. Service between San Jose, Calif., and Bozeman, Mont., starts June 30. The airline doesn't plan flights longer than about 75 minutes, but JetSuite's chief executive officer, Alex Wilcox, says the model could work in other parts of the country. JetSuiteX introductory fares begin at $109 each way, with the top prices around $300. The company is targeting a fare of about $1 per mile for most of its expansion. Passengers also can earn JetBlue's TrueBlue frequent flier points. Neeleman is a JetSuiteX investor. The Irvine, California, company has bought 10 Embraer E-135s. The E-135 is a 37-seat regional jet that once flew under the livery of American Eagle, the regional carrier at American Airlines Group, and fell rapidly out of favor with airlines due to its operating economics. It has become extremely cheap on the used-jet market. Wilcox, a former executive at JetBlue and Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd. who began his career as an intern at Southwest Airlines Co., declined to reveal the price of the planes. JetSuiteX will fly these with 30 seats, the maximum allowed under its federal operating certificate, which governs charter and on-demand flight services. It spent an additional $1 million per plane to install new seats, power outlets, Wi-Fi, and other amenities. The company sees potential in these markets, citing a decrease of 3 million annual passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco from 2000 to 2013. The Los Angeles-Las Vegas market lost 1 million annual passengers during that period, according to JetSuiteX, while Los Angeles-Phoenix was down by 800,000. The carrier will focus on operating scheduled flights with more of the amenities common to a charter-jet experience, such as faster security screening at its own terminal. Huge airport terminals and security queues have become "the lowest common denominator, and you have to have the same experience as everyone else," Wilcox said of airline travel. Nationwide, thousands of travelers miss their flights each day due to security delays caused by thin staffing, American Airlines President Scott Kirby said in an April 7 interview. It is "inevitable" that someone will launch a new U.S. airline, given the opportunities that industry consolidation has presented, Wilcox said. "Capital is available, gas is cheap, airplanes are available," he said. "The biggest barrier, I think, is airport real estate. The legacies have definitely staked their claims, and no one's tried to break that up in a meaningful way in a lot of these hubs." A gradual "cost creep" he sees at the legacy carriers also makes a new entrant more likely, Wilcox said. If so, where are the Rollin Kings, Juan Trippes, and David Neelemans of today, ready to establish a new U.S. airline? "If Neeleman wanted to do that," Wilcox said, "I think he could raise $200 million in a week." Jonathan Lehrer unpacks his family's heirloom Passover dinner plates Thursday at his Lincolnwood home. He and his wife will have some kitniyot dishes for Passover, but guests who prefer not to eat kitniyot will have enough other options (Michael Tercha / Chicago Tribune) This Friday night, Jews will gather at the Seder table and read from the Haggadah, a book full of questions, biblical passages, rabbinic tales and songs woven together around the themes of suffering and liberation. But this year, Jews will surely bring a new question to the Seder table. Why on this night can we now eat kitniyot? Advertisement Since the 13th century, the Passover custom among Ashkenazic Jews has been to prohibit kitniyot, or legumes, rice, seeds and corn. Chickpeas, popcorn, millet, lentils, edamame, corn on the cob: These have all been off the table. But last December, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS), the legal body of the Conservative movement, voted on and passed two separate papers, allowing the eating of kitniyot on Passover. Advertisement That means this will be the first Passover in hundreds of years that Ashkenazic Jews will be able to put a bowl of rice on the Seder table. A platter of corn. Favas. Lentil soup. The chickpea and sesame seed paste we know as hummus. Kitniyot foods include red lentils, clockwise from top, millet, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, cornmeal and brown rice. These foods, once forbidden for Passover to Ashkenazic Jews, are now OK to eat. (Chicago Tribune) "My quick take?" said Beth Kopin, a congregant from Highland Park's North Suburban Synagogue Beth El. "This is a great decision. It should've happened a while ago. Corn chips! Green beans! Rice, popcorn and sushi! We couldn't have that before. In Israel, they eat that way, all blended. It's good." "For some, it may be psychologically difficult to see some of these foods on Passover," said Rabbi David Lerner, president of the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis and senior rabbi of Temple Emunah in Lexington, Mass. "But there is no reason not to enjoy them! The ruling is long overdue. It's time to embrace healthier options and save kosher customers money." Rabbi Amy Levin, the interim rabbi for Congregation Rodeph Sholom in Bridgeport, Conn., co-authored one of the teshuvot (Jewish papers) with Rabbi Avram Israel Reisner, rabbi emeritus of Congregation Chevrei Tzedek in Baltimore and an adjunct professor at the Baltimore Hebrew Institute at Towson University. "Since it is recognized that Sephardim (Jews who have roots in the Mediterranean basin) permit the eating of kitniyot on Passover, although Ashkenazim traditionally do not do so, might kitniyot be permitted to Ashkenazim?" Levin and Reisner posed this question, and their argument for permitting these forbidden foods was deep and convincing enough to get an overwhelming approval in favor of lifting the kitniyot ban. What has happened in the United States, Levin explained, is a demographic shift in which Jews from Israel, southern Europe and North Africa are living together. They are transforming the face of the American Jewish community, which is looking more and more like Israel, where the Sephardic Jews are permitted to eat kitniyot. The second paper, authored by Rabbi David Golinkin of Israel, is "Rice, Beans and Kitniyot on Passover Are They Really Forbidden?" and was also approved by a majority vote. Golinkin revised his earlier 1989 paper, which was aimed at Israel's Ashkenazic Jews, to make a case today for Ashkenazic Jews everywhere to dispense with the custom. Advertisement "This custom was mentioned for the first time in France in the 13th century," Golinkin wrote. "From there it spread to various countries and the list of prohibited foods continued to expand." Many rabbis called it a "mistaken custom" and a "foolish custom." The explanation that rabbis are giving to their congregants is that kitniyot are not and never were hametz, the five forbidden grains in the Torah: wheat, barley, rye, oats and spelt. But centuries ago, hametz was often found mixed with these grains in the same bins. Or they were harvested and processed and ground into flour just like hametz. Also, because cooked kitniyot porridges looked very similar to hametz, or because it was customary to prepare kitniyot and hametz together, the custom from the Middle Ages to avoid legumes took root. In a recent email to her congregants, Rabbi Annie Tucker of Beth Hillel Congregation B'nai Emunah in Wilmette asked: "Why must we still be bound by the restrictive practices of our ancestors?" Given current agricultural methods, we can now easily and accurately separate out hametz with food labeling and production, Tucker wrote. This "foolish" custom, many rabbis say, detracts from the joy of the holiday by limiting the number of permitted foods. There's a lack of healthy packaged foods and an extremely inflated cost of products under Passover supervision. It causes unnecessary divisions among Jewish ethnic groups. Eat. Watch. Do. Weekly What to eat. What to watch. What you need to live your best life ... now. > But will Conservative Jews take advantage of the new ruling? "It was interesting to hear about," said Fran Shapiro, who agreed that all the arguments made sense to her. "But family tradition is very powerful. It's not going to change things for me. What I do makes me feel connected to my parents and grandparents." Advertisement Jonathan Lehrer, past president of Beth Hillel Congregation B'nai Emunah, said that he and his wife "respect and honor Jewish tradition, but as Conservative Jews, we respond to changing times." They will have some kitniyot dishes, but guests who prefer not to eat kitniyot will have enough other options. Others say they'll do whatever the rules allow, even though they're still confused. Many couples are split: He wants to add kitniyot, for instance, and she doesn't. Levin has heard the entire range of voices, from "'Thank you, thank you; we've been waiting for this forever' to 'I intellectually understand what the case is that you're making, and I intellectually agree with you, but I don't think I could actually put rice on my Seder table.'" And of course, Levin has heard the dissenting opinion. "Say whatever you want, but we're Ashkenazic. We're proud to be Ashkenazic, and we're not going to cross over to the dark side of kitniyot." Peggy Wolff is a freelance writer. Before long our institutions will be completely useless because elected leaders have neglected their duties to stand up against the current manipulations by leaders holding high offices. People of Papua New Guinea must not tolerate elected leaders who are condoning the actions of the ONeill regime by remaining silent, Sir Michael said in a statement. Silence means acceptance of the glaring abuses of processes that are taking place around us. PAPUA New Guineas founding prime minister Sir Michael Somare has called on members of parliament to represent the interest of their electorates and the true intent of the Constitution to protest against the current and continued manipulation and deterioration of the institutions of state. I support whole heartedly the call by another former prime minister, Sir Mekere Morauta, for Mr ONeill to stop disrespecting the countrys highest office. Throwing the word integrity around to conceal abuses is absolutely deceitful and wrong. To have integrity is to submit yourself to processes of law and the State of Papua New Guinea. I thus call on Mr Peter ONeill to respect the Office of the prime minister and surrender to police and appropriate authorities so they can carry out their duties without obstruction and interference. Sir Michael said that calling members of the Royal PNG Constabulary vigilantes was intolerable when officers of the law were merely carrying out their Constitutional duties. No person including myself is above the law, he said. I now appeal to Mr Peter ONeill to do the same and submit to our laws to uphold the integrity of the Office of the Prime Minister. It saddens me to state that, in the same manner Mr ONeill steadfastly held on to office after the Supreme Court declared twice in 2011 and 2012 that his government was illegal, that he continues to exhibit the same characteristics through the ongoing rhetoric and manipulation. In order to clear charges against him relating to the Paraka Case, Mr ONeill must submit himself to the orders of our courts so that others who also have pending arrest warrants can do the same. In the interest of the people of Papua New Guinea Mr ONeill must stop eroding the institutions of government for the sole purpose of defending himself. Sadly our Police Constabulary is in disarray. The previous two commissioners who defended Mr ONeill have been set-aside with contempt charges against them. And Mr Bakis continued defiance of court orders in defence of Mr ONeill is on a collision course with the judiciary. Needless to say all eyes are on our judiciary to continue to uphold our Constitution and protect the rights of all citizens even the prime minister if he has been wronged. It is the obligation of every citizen of Papua New Guinea to be vigilant and observant about the rule of law and not tolerate breaches and abuses by any individual especially elected representatives. I therefore urge Mr ONeill to respect the people of Papua New Guinea who are all watching their institutions of state being played for the convenience of a few. If you are innocent, surrendering to agents of the law is the only way that any charges against you can be cleared, Sir Michael said. One Protein Bar location in Chicago has a new menu that it's been testing since April 7. This week we tasted the best-sellers on the working menu, picked with the help of an in-store greeter, plus new Asian-inspired items, all at the River North restaurant the company calls the Idea Greenhouse (352 N. Clark St.). Why the test? Protein Bar, the healthy food mini-chain with locations in Illinois, Washington, D.C., and Colorado, is adding a new restaurant concept, though the name and details are still under wraps, figuratively speaking -- though wraps are current fan favorites and on the secretive menu too. The expansion is poised to take advantage of the fast-casual, healthy-food niche, which is growing quickly, just like the number of paleo, gluten-free and/or vegan customers. Advertisement The new restaurant will open in May at 39 S. LaSalle St. in the Loop, reported Tribune food business reporter Samantha Bomkamp. The address is also the site of the new Kimpton Gray Hotel, with its own Latin American street-food-inspired restaurant (Lola Braza), a lobby bar (Vol. 39) and a new Fifty/50 Restaurant Group restaurant (Steadfast). At Idea Greenhouse, the testing menu with 15 items, plus a "make your own plate" option ($9.99), is only available at lunch, staff members said. We visited anonymously and paid for our own lunch. Advertisement Here are tasting notes for the eight items we tried: Kale Caesar ($6.99): with avocado, grana Padano cheese, grape tomatoes, crispy Parmesan crumbles and Greek yogurt Caesar dressing; optional chicken, roasted firm tofu or turkey bacon ($2.99). The crumbles look surprisingly like crunchy honeycomb candy but taste like all-cheese croutons, and they make what's otherwise a good kale salad. But it, in no way, is a Caesar. Avo-Farro Ensalada ($8.99): chicken, salsa, farro, corn, black beans, kale, grape tomatoes, cotija cheese, avocado and Cholula vinaigrette. Generous servings of chicken and farro, but the salsa overwhelms everything in this bowl, which thankfully includes the allegedly roasted corn kernels, though they are as pale as a Midwesterner in spring. The Mindful Club: chicken, turkey bacon, avocado, pickled red onions, grape tomatoes, seasonal greens, Greek yogurt ranch dressing. The Mindful Club Wrap ($8.99): chicken, turkey bacon, avocado, pickled red onions, grape tomatoes, seasonal greens and Greek yogurt ranch dressing. All the flavors of a classic club, again generous, in a fine, nicely textured and structurally sound wrap. Thai Coconut Curry soup ($7.99): shiitake mushrooms, carrots, red bell peppers, bamboo shoots, lemon grass, spicy coconut curry and organic quinoa-wild rice blend. Advertisement Well-seasoned hot and sour soup, but you better love bamboo shoots, which fortunately we do -- though unfortunately they are unappealing in appearance. My Zen ($9.99): Jenny's local roasted tofu, snow peas, cilantro, mint, grape tomatoes, toasted almonds and Thai vinaigrette. This salad is a veggie jumble. The elements don't quite pull together. And the dressing was forgettable. Jenny's Noodle Bowl: Jennys local roasted tofu, miso clear noodles (carb-free, negative calories), baby spinach, edamame, fermented Asian pickles, organic quinoa-wild rice blend, cilantro, toasted almonds, napa cabbage, carrots, Sriracha drizzle. Jenny's Noodle Bowl ($9.99): Jenny's local roasted tofu, miso clear noodles ("carb-free, negative calories"), baby spinach, edamame, fermented Asian pickles, organic quinoa-wild rice blend, cilantro, toasted almonds, napa cabbage, carrots and Sriracha drizzle. This noodle dish was the favorite of the dishes we tried, mostly because of the sesame dressing. The vegetable mix, though, proved to be another jumble. Still, we would order this if it makes it to the menu. Eat. Watch. Do. Weekly What to eat. What to watch. What you need to live your best life ... now. > Not Fried Falafel Wrap ($8.99): baked carrot-chickpea falafel, hummus, grape tomatoes, cucumbers, seasonal greens, pickled red onions, tahini and feta cheese. Advertisement The wrap is decent, although not better than other versions out there. The hummus inside is good, and the fresh vegetables provide crunchy contrast. The flatbread is very thin, which we like because we don't want too much bread in a wrap, but it tears easily. Veggie Chili ($5.99): vegetarian chili with yellow hominy, poblano peppers, grape tomatoes, veggie protein, ancho chili and spice blend. The soup was not really chili. Just tomato soup. Again, rather forgettable. Overall, there is nothing on the testing menu that would make us walk out of our way. But Protein Bar stands out as different in the marketplace, with flavors and textures that draw us back, so we're still hopeful for the new concept. lchu@tribpub.com Twitter @louisachu The freedom the narrator craves is evident in many of the arrangements. "FunkNRoll," also the title of a track on "PlectrumElectrum" (where it's a fairly conventional funk-rock track), opens with guitar fanfare, dives into the shadows beneath percussion that sounds like a dripping faucet, slows down and then speeds up behind gothic keyboards. "Art Official Cage" zigs and zooms across time, with its booming EDM-style rhythm track and funk rhythm guitar flowing across dance-music history as if to one-up the concept on Daft Punk's Grammy-winning 2013 album, "Random Access Memories." The distant percussion in "Way Back Home" sounds like sheet metal flapping in a strong wind amid a matrix of sci-fi effects, and there's the illusion of clinking cutlery on "Time," which closes with a voracious bass line. The guitar is more sparing on this album, certainly less of a focal point, but its presence is crucial, particularly in the deft fills on "This Could Be Us" and the finger-snapping seduction of "Breakfast Can Wait." Post-World War II Jerusalem is the provocative setting for Stewart O'Nan's atmospheric thriller that centers on a 1946 hotel bombing considered one of the most heinous terror attacks of its time. Blending historical accuracy with a richly-imagined story, "City of Secrets" is informed by the British mandate that limited to 75,000 the number of Jewish refugees who could immigrate to Palestine over a five-year period beginning in 1939. Britain was given temporary rule over Palestine by the League of Nations. Advertisement Jossi Brand, a Latvian Jew (his real surname is Jorgenen), is one of thousands of illegal refugees hiding in plain sight in Jerusalem in 1945. With help from a resistance group, Brand was smuggled into the city and is working as a cab driver. The Zionist underground has even provided him with an aged Peugeot. A concentration camp survivor, Brand joins resistance fighters and conspires with them to carry out a series of attacks on British government property. He has no idea that blowing up train tracks and power stations is leading toward a deadly attack, one that the terror cell is keeping secret from him. Through Brand, O'Nan tells the story of thousands of men and women who survived the concentration camps yet continue to feel more dead than alive. He's wracked with survivor's guilt. He's the only member of his family who wasn't killed. For Brand, post-war terrorism is a form of atonement: "While he vowed he would never forget the dead, this was his war now." Advertisement O'Nan spares us none of Brand's pain as he remembers the past. "There was always the question of what to do with his old life, memory seething inside him like a disease. Not only sorrow, but the guard stomping on Koppelman's face, the dog shaking the child, the wheels of the train slicing the idiot Gypsy boy in two atrocities so commonplace that no one wanted to hear them. Everything he witnessed was his now, indelible yet unspeakable. His best chance was to forget, and so he kept on, letting the meaningless present distract him." On the outside, "the meaningless present" doesn't look so bad. He's in love with a prostitute who works for the resistance, but he spends his time with her fantasizing about his dead wife, Katya. When he's helping the terror cells, he fantasizes about "blowing up the gates and guard towers of the Riga ghetto where he and thousands of others were imprisoned or killed" in Latvia. The past, for him, remains an "open grave." As violence against the mandate escalates, Brand continues to shuttle tourists around Jerusalem and its environs. Through his eyes we see Absalom's Tomb, the Damascus Gate, the Church of the Dormition and the grotto of the Church of the Nativity, and stand on the Mount of Olives to watch the sunset. In many scenes, we witness the mindset of a community perpetually under attack. Roadblocks, checkpoints and armed soldiers are everywhere. Places of business, like the Barclays bank, have installed blast-proof shutters. And, of course, the King David Hotel, where the British have set up their administrative headquarters, is aggressively guarded. As in other great novels inspired by actual events, readers may know the story's outcome, but a dynamic storyteller like O'Nan can still make us reel with shock. O'Nan's ability to place us with Brand in front of the King David Hotel as the bombs go off fills us with horror. Brand watches "the face of the south wing swell and tremble, its skin splitting, cracks spewing white puffs of dust like a dam about to burst." And then: "Groaning, the girders twisted and gave way. The balconies tipped and pitched forward spilling their occupants, and with a roar the front of the building buckled, slumped and, then plunged to the ground." It's like watching a video of a present-day attack. In reliving this terrible event, in which 91 people died and dozens were severely wounded, recent attacks in Paris and Brussels come to mind. We wonder what goes on in the minds of the perpetrators, and, like the people living in Jerusalem in 1946, we wonder when the next attack will occur. This slim, relevant novel, O'Nan's 16th, may be one of his best. Its strength lies in his ability, as always, to take us inside the minds and souls of characters, real or imagined. O'Nan's "West of Sunset" imagines the final years in the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and "Last Night at the Lobster" tells the story of a fictional chain restaurant worker on the brink of losing his job. Through Brand's powerful story, we are forced to feel the weight of the sorrow of generations. O'Nan, writing of the past as he evokes the present, reminds us terrorism is as old as it is new. Carol Memmott, who lives in Virginia, also reviews books for the Washington Post and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "City of Secrets" Advertisement By Stewart O'Nan, Viking, 208 pages, $22 Warning: Video contains graphic content. On Feb. 7, 2016, Marques Gaines was punched and knocked unconscious into a crosswalk outside a 7-Eleven on the Near North Side, where a taxi ran over him while he lay in the street. The Chicago Tribune edited this content for length. (Chicago Tribune) (Chicago Tribune/Chicago Tribune) Surveillance video released Wednesday captures the last moments of a popular hotel cocktail server who was punched and knocked unconscious, landing in a Near North crosswalk. The footage also shows more than a dozen bystanders failing to come to his aid in the nearly two minutes before a cab accidentally drives over him. Marques Gaines, 32, died at an area hospital after the incident about 4:20 a.m. Feb. 7 outside a 7-Eleven store in the 400 block of North State Street. Advertisement At a Thursday morning news conference, Gaines' family members and their attorneys spoke to reporters about details of a recently filed lawsuit, gathering outside the 7-Eleven where Gaines was fatally injured. Marques Gaines' family members and their attorneys spoke April 21, 2016, about details of a recently filed lawsuit, outside the 7-Eleven where Gaines was fatally injured. (Armando Sanchez/Chicago Tribune) (Armando Sanchez / Chicago Tribune/Chicago Tribune) Attorney Chris Hurley said the 7-Eleven's operator knew the area surrounding the store suffered from high street crime and should have had well-trained security that could have prevented the actions that led to Gaines' death. Advertisement "The simple reason we're here is that a corporation that keeps its stores open 24 hours a day and invites the public in that knows that it's targeted by criminals needs to provide decent, competent, basic security, and that wasn't done here," he said. Hurley also pressed for more police action in finding Gaines' attacker, who remains at large. Marques Gaines was killed Feb. 7, 2016, outside a 7-Eleven store in the 400 block of North State Street. (Ryan Cosens) "There's a clear photograph of the aggressor and a clear video of him attacking Marques Gaines. He hasn't been arrested, and we don't know why," Hurley added. Gaines' cousin Drexina Nelson said she and her mother, Phyllis, watched the video of Gaines for the first time Wednesday evening and were shaken. "It was gut-wrenching," Nelson said. "We had heard over the course of these past few three months what happened, but to actually see it with our own eyes was devastating." Gaines' aunt Phyllis Nelson, who had been too upset during the news conference to speak, said afterward that she couldn't imagine strangers passing by an injured person in her native Georgia. Listen to audio from the 911 call following the Feb. 7, 2016, assault of Marques Gaines outside a Near North Side 7-Eleven store. During the call, Gaines, who lay unconcious on a crosswalk, was run over by a taxicab. (Chicago Tribune) (Chicago Tribune) "I've never heard of anything like this where people just walk by a person lying in the street and nobody help," she said. "I just don't understand it." Attorneys for the family released grainy footage from a Chicago police pod camera that captures Gaines falling to the ground after a heavier man wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants and white sneakers apparently knocked him out with a single right-handed punch. Gaines, who had just bought chips inside the 7-Eleven, could be seen running away from his pursuer before he was struck. Advertisement Especially troubling for Gaines' family was that bystanders didn't help as he lay in the crosswalk. At least one person believed to be a 7-Eleven employee called 911. Others walked past him without trying to pull him out of the street or block traffic. Within seconds of the punch, a half-dozen people gathered around Gaines, including two men who appeared to have rifled his pockets. Gaines' family said his cellphone and debit card were stolen. After a minute, the group and his attacker left the scene and as seconds ticked away, individuals and groups of people walked by Gaines without trying to pull him out of the street. Who leaves a person in the street for that long? That's devastating to me -- the fact that he could have been saved. He could still be here with us. Drexina Nelson, cousin of Marques Gaines That no one came to her cousin's aid or tried moving him to safety on the sidewalk was too much for Drexina Nelson. Nelson and her mother, who raised Gaines after his parents died, live in Georgia. "We as people, as humans, we should care for one another," Drexina Nelson said as she sat with her mother and their attorneys at their Loop law offices Wednesday afternoon. "Who leaves a person in the street for that long? That's devastating to me the fact that he could have been saved. He could still be here with us." Last month, attorneys representing the Nelsons filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court against several entities, including Chicago Taxi and the driver who struck Gaines. But this week, a judge allowed the attorneys to amend the complaint to add 7-Eleven to the lawsuit as a defendant. The Nelsons' attorneys also released footage outside the store that captures the confrontation between Gaines and the attacker, who is seen getting into the victim's face and pointing. Advertisement "Marques never would have been laying in the street if he hadn't been attacked by somebody who had just been in the 7-Eleven," Hurley said Wednesday. He put blame on a security guard and a store employee who he said stood by and watched but did nothing to get Gaines to safety. "All they had to do was wave down cars and stand in front of him to keep him safe," Hurley said. "Or maybe (make) some effort to help him off the pavement. But just to stand there and watch him get run over? Their customer? It's not acceptable." Daywatch Weekdays Start each day with Chicago Tribune editors' top story picks, delivered to your inbox. > The Nelsons and their attorneys are also hopeful that bringing attention to the case will draw eyewitnesses who could help bring Gaines' attacker to justice. "We would love to find the assailant," Drexina Nelson said. She and her mother believe murder charges should be filed against the attacker. In addition to 7-Eleven, Chicago Taxi and the driver, Medhi Seyftolooi, the lawsuit also names Mother Hubbard's Cupboard, the local corporation that owns the State Street 7-Eleven, as a defendant. Seyftolooi and 7-Eleven couldn't be reached for comment. Prior to the attack, Gaines spent several hours at a neighboring pub, also called Mother Hubbard's, dancing and drinking with co-workers. Gaines and his two friends all went their separate ways about 20 minutes before the incident. Advertisement Gaines' cause of death is still pending the police investigation, according to the Cook County medical examiner's office. wlee@tribpub.com Twitter @MidNoirCowboy A high-ranking Chicago Fire Department official was under the influence of alcohol when he wrecked a department-issued SUV early Wednesday on Lake Shore Drive near North Avenue, according to officials. Fire Department Deputy Commissioner John McNicholas resigned his command position Wednesday and "has since agreed to full separation from the Fire Department," according to Larry Langford, spokesman for the department. Advertisement "The investigation thus far has found that McNicholas was operating his city vehicle outside of department policy, and that following a mandatory breathalyzer test that morning, McNicholas was driving under the influence of alcohol," according to a statement released by Langford. Chicago Fire Department Deputy Commissioner John McNicholas has resigned his command after he crashed a department-issued SUV on Lake Shore Drive. It was determined he was under the influence of alcohol. (WGN-TV ) Chicago police issued a citation to McNicholas for "negligent driving," Langford said, but it's not clear whether McNicholas cooperated with police after the crash. Chicago police didn't release any information. Advertisement McNicholas has since sent a letter to Fire Department Commissioner Jose Santiago resigning from his deputy position effective immediately, Langford said. McNicholas "has been fully cooperative with the Internal Affairs Division of the department," Langford said. He said the investigation is ongoing. Two days after Donald Trump won the New York Republican presidential primary, he picked up an endorsement from the state's top GOP leader. New York Republican Chairman Ed Cox backed Trump and lauded his ability to energize voters who "have felt disenfranchised by a government that hasn't worked for them." "He has a record of cutting through bureaucratic dysfunction and his message to 'Make America Great Again' is exactly what we need after two failed terms of President Obama," Cox said of Trump. Cox added, "Donald Trump has remarkable potential to not only beat Hillary Clinton, but to restore the American dream by jumpstarting our economy and creating jobs, fixing our nation's finances and building a strong national defense." In a statement, Trump said he's "honored" to have Cox's support. The state GOP explained that Cox and the committee didn't endorse before the primary to ensure that Trump and his two opponents, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, felt comfortable campaigning in the Empire State. Before Tuesday's primary, all three candidates campaigned throughout the state. Each made several stops in upstate New York, including the Syracuse area. Cruz and Trump held central New York rallies less than a week before the primary. Kasich held two town hall meetings in Syracuse suburbs over the past couple of weeks. But Trump's advantage in his home state couldn't be topped. He held big leads in the polls leading up to the primary and received more than 60 percent of the vote on Tuesday. With strong performances in nearly all of the state's 27 congressional districts, it appears he'll win at least 90 delegates. That will give him a big boost as he aims to secure the party's nomination before the GOP convention in Cleveland. Almost every year, lawmakers in Springfield vote on whether to phase out the office of lieutenant governor. And every year they do so, the legislation gets tangled in politics. Roughly $1.6 million annually that could go toward crucial needs instead gets sucked into a bureaucracy that Illinois does not need. Just ask the current lieutenant governor. Advertisement Wait. Can you name the current lieutenant governor? We didn't think so. Her name is Evelyn Sanguinetti and she was Gov. Bruce Rauner's running mate in 2014. She recently said she supports efforts in the General Assembly to dissolve the office she now holds. The dissolution would require a change to the Illinois Constitution. Lawmakers would have to approve putting it on the November ballot by a deadline of May 7. Advertisement Rauner, Sanguinetti and scores of Democrats and Republicans in the legislature pinkie-swear that they support government consolidation. They admit Illinois has too many layers of government more than any state in the country and that taxpayers are pleading for relief. They acknowledge the office of lieutenant governor is superfluous. There's a reason almost everyone in the Capitol's corridors of power has long derided the office as "lite gov." We've noted that the Illinois Constitution gives lite govs two duties: Wait around in case the governor dies, quits, can't serve or is removed from office, and do whatever the governor tells you to do. Several states survive nicely without this office. And no one even noticed when Illinois went without a lieutenant governor for a year during former Gov. Pat Quinn's transition to the governor's office in 2009 following Rod Blagojevich's impeachment. House Speaker Michael Madigan himself pushed legislation in 2010 to abolish the office. So it will be interesting to see what happens, perhaps as early as Thursday, when two proposals to eradicate the office get called for votes in the House and Senate. Rep. David McSweeney, R-Barrington Hills, and Sen. Tom Cullerton, D-Villa Park, are sponsoring separate but identical bills that would phase out the office by 2019. This is a bipartisan effort. An overdue effort. A please-do-the-right-thing effort. Enough with the delay games. Lawmakers need to vote on this before the ballot gets packed with other initiatives. A maximum of three proposals for constitutional amendments generated by the legislature as opposed to the rare amendment proposal generated by citizens who petition can be on the ballot at one time. Voters have been waiting for four decades for a chance to vote on this issue. The first movement to eliminate the office began in the 1970s. Then in 1981, Republican Dave O'Neal resigned the lieutenant governor's post, citing boredom. "A person of average intelligence could learn it in a week," he said. He left behind a 23-page memo suggesting the position should either be made meaningful or abolished. Instead, it sat empty until the next election. Advertisement In 1994, near the end of his first term as lieutenant governor, Republican Bob Kustra tried to resign to become a talk radio host. But then-Gov. Jim Edgar underwent bypass surgery, and it looked like Kustra might be called on to fulfill one of those two constitutional duties to step up if a governor, well, can't govern. Under the bills moving through the House and Senate, in the future the attorney general would fulfill that role. So let's get moving. McSweeney, Cullerton: Call your bills for a vote. Lawmakers have no remaining excuses. Put it on the ballot. Empower voters. And save them $1.6 million every single year. Follow the Editorial Board on Twitter @Trib_Ed_Board and on Facebook. Harriet Tubman will become the new face of the $20 bill after all. The U.S. Treasury announced Wednesday several changes to paper currency, including Tubman replacing Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said Jackson and an image of the White House will appear on the back of the note. Lew also revealed that Alexander Hamilton will remain the face of the $10 bill. The back of the money will be redesigned with images of five women's rights leaders Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Alice Paul, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth. And the $5 bill will be revamped to recognize events that occurred at the Lincoln Memorial. The rear side of the currency will feature Marian Anderson, Martin Luther King Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt. Abraham Lincoln will remain in the front of the $5 bill. Lew unveiled plans last year to place a "notable woman" on the $10 bill. He requested feedback from the public to determine which woman should be recognized on the money. In a letter published online Wednesday, Lew said the response was "powerful." Some of the feedback suggested that the Treasury skip the $10 bill redesign and focus on the $20 bill. Others recommended exploring changes to other bills. From the input the agency received, Lew said he's directing the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to accelerate plans to redesign the $5, $10 and $20 bills. "We already have begun work on initial concepts for each note, which will continue this year," he said. The target date to release the new bills is 2020 the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Lew also explained why the Treasury decided to make Tubman the new face of the $20 bill. He said the agency received thousands of responses from Americans who pushed for Tubman to appear on paper currency. "I have been particularly struck by the many comments and reactions from children for whom Harriet Tubman is not just a historical figure, but a role model for leadership and participation in our democracy," he said. "You shared your thoughts about her life and her works and how they changed our nation and represented our most cherished values." When Lew first announced plans to alter the $10 bill, there were critics who said it wasn't good enough that a woman or women should appear on the $20 bill. Others were concerned with the possibility of Hamilton being removed from the note. The effort to keep Hamilton on the $10 bill gained more attention with the success of "Hamilton," a hit Broadway musical. Before Treasury announced its initial plan to change the $10 bill, Women on 20s, a group which formed with the goal of putting a woman on paper currency, held an online vote to determine who should replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill. While it was a symbolic vote, Tubman won the competition. Tubman, an abolitionist and civil rights icon, was born on Maryland's Eastern Shore and spent the latter half of her life living in Auburn. Cayuga County sites associated with Tubman's life, including her residence and the Home for the Aged on South Street, will become part of the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park. The park is in the process of being formally established by the National Park Service. Harriet Tubman Home Executive Director Karen Hill said the Treasury's announcement is a cause for celebration. "This helps us with our park in Auburn," she said. "It's all coming together very nicely." Laurel Ullyette, president of the Harriet Tubman Boosters Club, said Tubman having a prominent place on paper currency will help bring more attention to her story. "It's going to be a constant reminder to people of the importance of her work and the work that still needs to be done," she said. Cayuga County's federal representatives praised the Treasury's decision to put Tubman on the $20 bill. U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer called it a "double win for New York Hamilton on the $10, Tubman on the $20 linking upstate and downstate." U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said in a phone interview that it's an exciting development for Auburn. "To be on the $20 bill is a testament to not only New York's history, but the civil rights movement and how much she did for America and our history," Gillibrand, D-N.Y., said. U.S. Rep. John Katko, who represents Auburn, was a proponent of putting Tubman on U.S. paper currency. He introduced legislation last year to place the abolitionist's likeness on a denomination of money. In a statement, Katko, R-Camillus, said the Treasury's decision is "tremendous news" for Auburn and central New York. "This designation is a fitting tribute to a woman who escaped slavery and devoted her life to advancing the freedom and equality of African Americans and the rights of women," he said. Gov. Andrew Cuomo echoed that sentiment. "Just as her home in Auburn, Cayuga County, stands as a landmark to her incredible history, this distinction will ensure that Harriet Tubman's legacy endures for generations yet to come," he said. Hundreds of students came to Fermilab Wednesday night for the annual Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Career Expo where professionals in science-related fields talked about their work. (David Sharos / The Beacon-News) Students with a hankering for a career in science had the opportunity for some serious face time with those already in the field Wednesday at Fermilab in Batavia. The lab offered the annual Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Career Expo in the atrium of Wilson Hall. It brought together Fermilab scientists and engineers as well as local companies and research organizations in order for teens to learn about careers in math and science. Advertisement Organizer Susan Dahl of the Fermilab Office of Education said the expo was being offered for the ninth year and that the total number of people involved averages about 1,000. "Probably 700 to 800 of them are students from throughout the Chicago area and the Midwest," she said. "Not only are all the high schools represented, but we've had people from Rockford, the city of Chicago and even from Indiana. We also have about 150 STEM professionals that will be here to talk with students." Advertisement Interest in science, she said, has been on the rise. "Maybe it's because of where I work, but I feel like there is a lot more science information out there in the news every day and certainly a lot of changes in our lives," she said. "As far as careers go, people with a STEM background have a lot more potential in terms of being hired and the salary they can make." Parking lots and the circle drive around Wilson Hall were jampacked well before 6 p.m. Wednesday and buses loaded with students made drop-offs at the entrance for the expo. "I've noticed an increase in the number of students that come to this event and I think that's fantastic," said Linda Valerio, a mechanical engineer who said she has worked at Fermilab for 16 years. "This is an opportunity for students to talk to people in their field. I think students continue to come with better questions and this gives them an opportunity to find out about a career an opportunity I never had." Dave Harding, a physicist and also a deputy division head at Fermilab, said he had "only missed one year of the expo" and that students learn "it's not just elementary particle physics that we do here." "An undergraduate degree in physics prepares students for a huge number of careers," Harding noted. "As a physicist, you can go into research or industry, but also a great many other things because of the logical thinking you develop. People with this background are greatly valued by medical schools, law, finance because of the calculations you do." One of the new companies to appear at this year's expo was General Mills. General Mills employee Paulina Bukanowska said students were surprised Wednesday to learn how engineering is a large part of food manufacturing. "We have been talking to students about how the food they see on the shelves in the grocery store is made," Bukanowska said. "The first question kids ask is, 'what do engineers really do?' and we talk about maybe baking cookies in your oven at home versus having to bake thousands at the plant. When they think about how big a project that is, it really sparks their interest." Advertisement Students generally said they heard about the expo from their teachers at school and enjoyed having the opportunity to meet with people in science-related fields. "My chemistry teacher talked about the expo in class, and I think this is very convenient and it's free," said Yanni Gu, a student at Timothy Christian High School in Elmhurst. "I'm looking at going into the medical field and want to listen to a panel discussion being held later." Kyra Hays of DeKalb High School said she, too, was interested in the medical profession and said her anatomy teacher suggested students check the expo out. "I'm interested in science and medical things," she said. "I think opportunities in science-related fields are growing and kids today are learning more advanced things because of the influence of technology." David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News AUBURN Frustrated by the number of unfunded state mandates falling onto their laps, Cayuga County legislators called state Assemblyman Gary Finch, Assemblyman Robert Oaks, Sen. John DeFrancisco, Sen. Mike Nozzolio and Sen. James Seward to the county's Ways and Means Committee meeting Wednesday night. Finch along with his staff member William Barlow and a representative for Assemblyman Robert Oaks, Terry Wilbur were able to attend the meeting. "We need your advice," said Vice Chair of the committee Aileen McNabb-Coleman. "We need your direction, and your continued support." She discussed the latest state mandate, part of the New York State Commission on Legislative, Judicial and Executive Compensation, requiring raises for county district attorneys. In Cayuga County, the raise adds approximately $30,000 to District Attorney Jon Budelmann's salary. This unfunded mandate adds to a growing list including increased eligibility for indigent defense and increased eligibility for the state's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. "These three items are in fact examples of good government," McNabb-Coleman said. "But who has decided? The answer, of course, is that our state representatives made these decisions, and we, as a local government and local taxpayers, must write the checks." She also mentioned the property tax cap is about .73 percent, less than half of what it was in 2015. Finch said a bill is being drafted for the state to pay the counties' district attorneys' salary increases. He expects the bill to be released Friday, though he does not know how it will be received in the state Legislature. As for the several other mandates, Finch blamed Gov. Andrew Cuomo's unfulfilled promise to form a committee to examine the tax cap. He said often legislation and mandates are passed without warning. "We know you have a problem," Finch said. "You have a tax cap. We're going to push everything we can. Sometimes we spend too much time passing laws, and not understanding what the consequences are." Finch called for legislators to continue to pass resolutions, be their own advocates and to set up meetings with representatives. Chairman of the Legislature Keith Batman said that method doesn't seem to be enough. "If I had a dollar for every resolution we've passed and sent to you all, I would pick up the pay increase of the district attorney," he said. "We do resolutions all the time. It's ludicrous that we have to do a resolution to tell you that we can't afford another $25,000 or $30,000 unbudgeted mandate. But we will. One of the things we need from you is what we need to do to impact the process. It's clearly not enough that we send resolutions." Batman also mentioned the county's research into potential new taxes including a local mortgage tax and a county transfer tax, in order to raise revenue. "Some of those require legislative approval," Batman said. "We've been told it won't be approved. It won't even be sponsored." Batman called on Finch to sponsor those actions. Finch didn't directly respond to that, although he said getting angry and continuing to voice concerns helps get people to listen. In other news: The county Legislature's full meeting will take place at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 21 at the Cayuga County Office Building, 6th Floor, 160 Genesee St., Auburn. When Vladimir Putin caught the world by surprise and brought his planes and troops to Syria last fall, American policymakers sneered at the decision, confidently predicting that Putin was being sucked into a quagmire. Now, having failed once again to predict one of Putin's tactical moves this time, withdrawal they have been heard to congratulate themselves on their prescience, seeing Putin's retreat as presumptive proof of failure. The available evidence suggests otherwise. As an earlier column explained, Putin's goals in Syria were simple and circumscribed, never quite what U.S. officials said they were. First and foremost, Putin was acting for domestic Russian consumption, burnishing his image as a bold and decisive leader commanding attention and achieving success on the world stage. The Russian economy might be faltering, and dissent stifled, but Putin sought to convince the Russian public he could restore the lost glories of a mythical Soviet past. Advertisement Second, Putin sought to demonstrate to the world, and especially to those countries in the Middle East shell-shocked by American timidity and its decision to curry favor with Iran, that Russia was a power on which its allies could rely. Putin was bolstering his ally Bashar Assad and, while claiming to be fighting "terrorists," as the world said it wanted, cynically stretched that definition to include all of Assad's enemies, including those Western-backed rebels seeking to topple a regime that President Obama himself insisted must go but would do little to topple himself. Third, following a strategy outlined for the U.S. by General David Petraeus, Putin's goal was not to restore Assad's rule over his whole country, but rather to secure an enclave for Assad from which he (and Putin) could continue to operate and command events in the rest of Syria. This enclave included, not just Damascus and Aleppo, but, not coincidentally, both the Latakia air force base and the Tartus naval port that are vital installations for Russian forces in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. Advertisement Finally, Putin, though no longer ruler of a real superpower, wanted to secure the head seat at the table in determining Syria's and arguably the entire Middle East's future. This included any subsequent campaign against the Islamic State, those areas controlled by the Kurds and even Iraq, now almost an Iranian client state. Putin's announced exit from Syria which has neither been total nor really happened yet signals Putin's view that he has accomplished his aims. And, by all appearances, he has. His popularity at home, notwithstanding IS's downing of a Russian airliner in retaliation, is close to an all-time high. Putin's show of force has had more than a little domestic theater about it, including launching missiles from far-distant launch sites, in a show of Russian military prowess. The Russian public, reassured daily by domestic propaganda, has lapped it up. Second, the effect on the region has been electrifying. Putin has become a kind of master of ceremonies, as shown by his dominance of the recent ceasefire talks. It has made others edgy and focused. Witness Turkey's overreaction to the minor invasion of its airspace by a Russian aircraft. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu beat a hasty path to Putin's door to ensure no misunderstandings. The Iranians, using their Lebanese proxies from Hezbollah, have enjoyed the accommodating air cover provided by Russian planes and have fought with free rein in Syria while continuing their dominance of Iraqi affairs. Third, with Russian aircraft having pummeled the rebels in Aleppo and elsewhere, Assad has his enclave. He and the sizable remaining Russian forces have reserved to themselves the right to continue fighting even in the face of the recent ceasefire, which is "holding" mostly in the sense that Assad's adversaries, restrained by a West rightly concerned about the humanitarian cost of war, are no longer shooting even as Assad continues to do so. Finally, for the future, it seems inevitable that Putin will join Assad in calling for a grand coalition (not including anti-Assad rebels, of course) to fight against IS. How will the U.S. resist? All of its potential allies in the region the Saudis, the rebels, even the Kurds have paid a heavy price for U.S. fecklessness. As of this writing, it is Assad and his Russian allies that have taken IS-held Palmyra. Putin's Russian forces purport to be leading the crusader army against the IS infidels abhorred by moderate Islam and Westerners alike. Reasonable goals achieved. No quagmire in sight. The West stunned and wrong-footed at every turn. And left to deal with the difficulty of a migrant crisis that, despite humanitarian aid now reaching the refugees, seems unlikely to abate. Not bad for a tin pot dictator of a fading empire. Putin had some advantages the West did not have, such as, in the Assad regime, a clearly-identifiable proxy power to support. But it seems more Putin's smarts and farsightedness, particularly in the face of the incoherence and smugness of American policy, allowed him to succeed. In the midst of a continuing American policy vacuum in the Middle East and elsewhere, it will be interesting to see where he takes his successful, and unmistakably malevolent, policy next. Robert E. Shapiro is a practicing trial lawyer and an adjunct professor of political philosophy at Saint Xavier University in Chicago. AUBURN A 73-year-old man pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography Thursday in Cayuga County criminal court. Richard Scott, of 34 Hillside Lane, Weedsport, was charged with two felonies in May 2015: possession of a sexual performance by a child and tampering with physical evidence. Scott waived his right to a grand jury indictment Thursday morning and pleaded guilty to both counts. According to Cayuga County District Attorney Jon Budelmann, the defendant watched a video on his computer of a 7-year-old child having sex with an adult male. Scott then admitted to trying to delete the video and hiding the hard drive. "I had a video on the computer," Scott said. "I knew the police were probably coming and I panicked." Judge Thomas Leone continued Scott out on bail until sentencing June 23. Leone is expected to sentence Scott to one to three years in prison for each count. That sentence is to be served consecutively. Scott will also have to register as a sex offender in Cayuga County. Also in court: A Moravia man will spend the next decade on probation as a registered sex offender. Micah Bevier, 29, was released from Cayuga County Jail Thursday after Judge Leone assessed the defendant's risk to the community. Leone registered Bevier as a level 2 sex offender for having oral sex with a 15-year-old girl. Bevier, of 193 N. Main St., pleaded guilty to third-degree criminal sex act and endangering the welfare of a child in October. He was sentenced to six months in jail and 10 years probation. A Cayuga County man with a history of DWI will spend 60 days in jail for driving while his ability was impaired by drugs and alcohol. Albert Janes III, 33, pleaded guilty to DWAI and aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle Thursday. Janes, of 9025 Oakland Road, Port Byron, admitted to driving under the influence of alcohol and marijuana in Auburn last year. "I had a few drinks and I smoked," he said. Budelmann said the defendant then had an accident on Grant Avenue in Auburn. Officers determined Janes had a BAC of .08 percent and was impaired by marijuana. Leone also said Janes was driving with a suspended license at the time. Janes had his license suspended in Oswego County in June 2011 after being convicted of DWI in the Town of Schroeppel. Leone is expected to sentence Janes to 60 days in jail to be served on weekends. Janes will also have his license revoked for one year and is required to complete felony drug court. He is currently seeking treatment at Confidential Help for Alcohol and Drugs in Auburn. Sentencing is scheduled for June 21. The Fox Lake mayor who led the village when police conducted a manhunt for the killers of Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz and the subsequent discovery the presumed murder was a suicide has announced his intentions to run for re-election. Mayor Donny Schmit told the crowd at a Wednesday meet-and-greet that he hopes to "break the 'Fox Lake curse'" by winning a second term. He would be the first Fox Lake mayor since 1985 to hold the office more than four years. Advertisement Schmit originally won the seat from incumbent Ed Bender in 2013 after running on a platform that the village was missing opportunities to grow. His tenure saw the move to extend the life of a special taxing district along Route 12, multiple referendums aimed at bringing in more revenue and the hiring of Anne Marrin, the village administrator who started the audit of the Police Explorers program that Gliniewicz is suspected of stealing money from. Advertisement The previous village administrator served as human resources director for three years, but Schmit said at the time that the village wanted a replacement with a strong background in community development and finance. Authorities said it was Marrin's audit that led Gliniewicz to fear his thefts from the youth program would be discovered and his decision to stage his suicide look like a homicide. His wife, Melodie Gliniewicz, currently faces charges related to the alleged thefts. "That was an unforeseen thing that got thrown at all of us," said Marge Otway, a Fox Lake resident who attended Schmit's Wednesday event. "I think that he handled that as best that he could. He did step up to the plate." Schmit also faced criticism following the death, in part for taking a trip to San Diego to see a Bears game with former Police Chief Michael Behan, who announced his retirement from the post just days after being placed on paid administrative leave as the village began an investigation a December 2014 verbal and physical altercation involving a Fox Lake police officer and a 36-year-old man arrested for public intoxication. Schmit had also called Gliniewicz, who had a troubled tenure with the Fox Lake Police Department, a friend even after investigators announced Gliniewicz had staged his death. In the months that followed Gliniewicz's death, the Village Board approved the hiring of a new chief and Schmit has pushed to find new revenue that could lead to the hiring of additional police officers, one of the recommendations made by the interim police chief. Schmit pointed to increased development and bringing in more retail as his continuing priorities, and touted his policies of increased transparency and looking beyond Fox Lake for grants, advice and opportunities to collaborate. "I don't want to wrap ourselves in a cocoon," Schmit said. "If we don't learn from history, we're doomed to repeat it. Doing the things the way we've always had has gotten us a town where we've got our empty storefronts, where we can't buy shoes and pants in our town. We've got to try different things." Advertisement emcoleman@tribpub.com Twitter @mekcoleman President Xi Jinping urged the Chinese military on Wednesday to continue to improve its joint command capability. Chinese President Xi Jinping, also chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects the commission's Joint Command Headquarter in Beijing, on April 20, 2016.[Photo/Xinhua] Xi, also chairman of the Central Military Commission, gave the instruction on an early-morning visit to the commission's Joint Command Headquarters in Beijing. During the visit, it was announced that the president had become commander-in-chief of the CMC Joint Command Headquarters. Xi told officers at the headquarters to concentrate on studying the art of command and operation and to build a professional and efficient joint command system. He told them to regard their positions at the headquarters as their combat positions on the battlefield, ordering them to effectively handle any kind of contingencies and to resolutely safeguard the country's sovereignty, security and development interests. Xi said one of the major goals of the ongoing military reform is to strengthen the capabilities of the CMC Joint Command Headquarters. He stressed that headquarters officers must have a clear sense of crisis and hone their ability for "informationized warfare". "We will take special measures to train professionals for joint operations ... and speed up the development and deployment of advanced military technologies," he told senior commanders and officers. Xi also told the headquarters to improve personnel grouping, streamline operational procedures and share its experience with regional joint commands. The president wore a camouflage uniform during his visit, which was the first time a Chinese president had inspected a top military body in a combat uniform and the second time Xi had appeared in public in such a uniform. Xi wore a camouflage uniform for the first time in January 2014 when he inspected a border defense regiment in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region. Xu Liangcai, a senior officer at the Joint Staff Department under the People's Liberation Army Southern Theater Command, said modern warfare features a high level of joint operation and sophisticated command, requiring a joint command system with good control of information and excellent precision in maneuvers. You are here: Home It's being reported that construction of the largest aiport in West China is going to start after getting approval from the National Development and Reform Commission. The file photo shows the blueprint of the Chengdu Tianfu International Airport. [Photo: ifeng.com] Chengdu Tianfu International Airport has a total investment of some 71.8 billion yuan or around 11 billion U.S. dollars. Located in Jianyang city in Southwest China's Sichuan province, the new airport will be just over 50 kilometers away from the provincial capital Chengdu. Once completed, the airport will have six runways and a terminal building covering 1.26 million square meters, which is more than twice the size of Chengdu Shuangliu International Airport. The new airport is expected to accommodate 90 million passengers each year. China is to make HIV self-testing kits more widely available in an attempt to diagnose as many people as possible and provide them with timely treatment. An HIV positive patient, not pictured, receives a blood pressure test in Weishi county, Central China's Henan province in this Nov 30, 2015 file photo. [Photo/Xinhua] The development was disclosed by the nation's leading AIDS specialist in an exclusive interview with China Daily. Wu Zunyou said all possible outlets, from online shopping platforms to brick-and-mortar drugstores, would be approached in the initiative, which is scheduled to begin soon, although no starting date has been released. Despite policy restraints, "we will pilot and then promote HIV self-testing by making the kits easily accessible", said Wu, head of the National Center for AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Disease Control and Prevention. "Current screening practices appear to have lost momentum in detecting patients." China's health authorities have long urged the public to seek free HIV screening at the 2,000 government-operated voluntary counseling and testing clinics nationwide. However, many people are reluctant to be tested, fearing their HIV status will be confirmed and become widely known, which could result in discrimination. While the number of HIV tests performed rose by more than 400 percent between 2007 and last year, the detection rate fell by about 50 percent, according to Wu, citing data from the Nationwide Epidemic Surveillance Network. Last year, more than 100 million tests were carried out, mainly in government-run outlets, such as voluntary counseling and testing clinics and public hospitals. Wu hopes the greater anonymity offered by the new outlets will encourage more people to be tested. "Self-testing could provide a solution and reach out to those under the radar, helping to link them to care, such as counseling and treatment," he said. A recent sales report by online medical provider Ali-Health, a subsidiary of e-commerce giant Alibaba, showed a substantial rise in sales of HIV self-testing kits that use oral swabs to collect saliva, particularly among men age 20 to 29. Kit prices range from 30 yuan to 200 yuan ($4.60 to $31). However, the initiative could prove controversial, because the kits are only approved for use by medical professionals, and Wu said that selling them to individuals online remains a gray area. "We are in discussions with the drugs authorities to fine-tune the rules and facilitate sales of self-testing kits, both online and in drugstores," he said. Ling Yu, sales manager for the Aware brand of self-testing kits, said the products have been widely available online since 2012, and sales continue to rise. "Our major targets for individual purchases are sexually active young people who use the internet a lot," he said. Wu said online platforms, such as social networking services, are seen as efficient tools for delivering information and support to self-testers, but further research and investigation are needed to introduce self-testing to more people. Pilot projects in which the kits will be available at selected drugstores are underway in the Shijingshan district of Beijing and in a number of cities in Yunnan province that have a high prevalence of HIV. The findings will be helpful in guiding further expansion nationwide, Wu said. A gay man in Beijing, who identified himself as "Xiao Tian", said he had bought testing kits online several times. "That freed me from going to the testing clinic. I don't want to be seen there. AIDS discrimination is still rife in China," he said, adding that he is concerned about the accuracy of the self-testing kits. "I have had negative and positive results from two separate tests conducted with the same kit," he said. Some 700 teachers from China's developed regions have been despatched to 20 schools in southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region for a three-year program to improve the quality of education. The first group of 76 teachers have arrived in Tibet, ready to take up positions in the regional capital of Lhasa, and in more remote areas such as Xigaze, Nyingchi, Shannan and Qamdo. Sponsored by the ministries of education, finance, human resources and social security, the program will improve education in Tibet, which is dependent on both central and regional government funding to ensure education for farmers and herdsmen. Fang Lingmin, vice chairman of the regional government, said the teachers from 17 municipalities and provinces, including Beijing and Jiangsu Province, will be divided into 20 groups to assist with teaching in the schools. Four hundred teachers will also be selected from Tibetan kindergartens and schools every year to receive training and hands-on experience in schools in developed regions. The central government has carried out various programs to support Tibet's development. Under the assistance scheme, teachers from developed areas are encouraged to sign short contracts at Tibetan schools to help improve the quality of local education. Tibet has 1,855 schools and more than 600,000 students. The region was the first in China to offer a 15-year free education program for all children from kindergarten to high school, which has helped increase the enrollment rate of primary, junior high and high schools to 98 percent, 96 percent and 74 percent, respectively. However, schools in remote areas still lack basic infrastructure to ensure a stable power supply and access to clean drinking water. China has taken a variety of measures to ensure Tibetan students' schooling. Some have been offered the chance to study at high schools in eastern cities since 1985. The government has helped train a large number of professionals for the underdeveloped plateau region and boost Tibet's development. Female pilots will fly the Chinese Air Force's FBC-1 bombers for the first time, according to the PLA Daily on Wednesday. A photo shows Gao Fuyu, who is among the first batch of female pilots to fly the FBC-1 bombers for China. China's first batch of female combat pilots of the "Flying Leopard" bombers had their very first train session at night in southeast China recently. [Photo: People's Daily Online] The FBC-1 fighter jet, also known as the Flying Leopard, is independently developed and manufactured by Xi'an Aircraft Industry Corp. in northwest China. The aircraft contains two cabins, with the forecabin holding the cockpit while the rear cabin controls the weapons. Until now, the cockpit has been occupied only by male pilots. The Air Force of the People's Liberation Army has decided to modify the jet's cockpit to better accommodate female pilots. The Air Force is now training women to fly the jets at an air base in northeast China. The pilots will also carry out night formation flight drills for future combat missions. Follow China.org.cn on Twitter and Facebook to join the conversation. Chinese mainland's population has increased to 1.373 billion by last November, 33.77 million more than in 2010, when the sixth national census was conducted, the National Bureau of Statistics said yesterday. According to a sample survey conducted by the bureau, the annual average growth rate was to 0.5 percent over the past five years (2010-2015), lower than the 0.57 percent growth rate during the 2000-2010 period. Males accounted for 51.22 percent of the total population, while females made up 48.78 percent, the survey found. The male-to-female ratio was 105.02, lower than the 2010 ratio of 105.2. The population living in urban areas totaled 767.5 million, or 55.88 percent of the total, up by 6.2 percentage points from the 2010 figure, while the population categorized as rural fell to 605.99 million. The survey covers 21.31 million people, accounting for 1.55 percent of the total population. In a separate development, authorities yesterday warned that China's gender ratio at birth remained high, and vowed to tighten controls on medical equipment and medicine that could be used in pre-birth gender tests and sex-selective abortions. China has the worst gender imbalance in the world. The National Health and Family Planning Commission said this was a direct result of illegal pre-birth gender tests and sex-selective abortions. The country's birth sex ratio stood at 113.51 in 2015, down from 121.18 in 2004. A ratio between 103 and 107 is considered normal. Hu Xuna, from China's southern city of Guangzhou, used to hate taking her child to the doctor. But she dreads it less now that she can skip the long lines and pay the bill with a few taps on her smartphone. Going to a hospital, especially a big one, in a country with a population of 1.3 billion is a challenge. While seeing a doctor might take only minutes, waiting in line for an appointment, tests, and paying the bill can take hours. "It used to take me almost half an hour just to get the bills paid before I could get the medicine," said Hu. "Now I can just walk away without paying anything." The simplified process was made possible by Ant Financial, the financial arm of China's Internet giant Alibaba Group. By partnering with Guangzhou Women and Children's Medical Center, one of the country's biggest hospitals specializing in women's health and pediatrics, Ant Financial is offering patients with high credit scores the option to pay after leaving the hospital through its Alipay, a popular online payment app similar to Paypal. As the country expands health insurance coverage and establishes a "social credit system" that gives every citizen a reputation score, the Chinese hospital experience is improving. Hu no longer needs to wait in line to pay bills thanks to her high score on Sesame Credit, a credit-scoring system used by Ant Financial for its 400 million users. The score is based on data such as a user's online purchase history, income level and educational background. Anyone who scores above 650 on Sesame, representing the top 30 percent of all users, is considered eligible to let Alipay deduct hospital expenses from their linked bank account after treatment. "It's like Uber, where you leave the car without taking out your wallet," said Zhang Zhiyao, vice director at Guangzhou Women and Children's Medical Center. "You see the doctor, walk out of the hospital, and it's done." Unlike Uber, medical bills are usually much higher, raising the question: what if patients default? "The risk is containable," said Zhang. "It's interesting that we Chinese always save for potential sickness." Since the hospital started the service in February, 950 high-credit patients have chosen the option to pay after leaving the hospital, and there has yet to be a default case. To reduce the risks, the pay-later option can only be used for expenses under 3,000 yuan (US$464) and anyone who defaults will have a decreased credit score. A lowered credit score can harm one's ability to obtain travel visas and rent a car or book a hotel without upfront charges. Sesame Credit is one of eight institutions approved by China's central bank to conduct personal credit reports as the country works to build a nationwide "social credit system." The central bank itself has also established its own "credit reference center," which has created credit profiles for more than 860 million people. As the credit system continues to improve, more patients, especially those in big cities, may be able to avoid long lines at hospitals to pay their bills, according to Zhang. Pakistans Ambassador to China Masood Khalid met with Cai Mingzhao, President of Xinhua News Agency China's national news agency and global news and information network, in Beijing today. Pakistans Ambassador to China Masood Khalid meets with Cai Mingzhao, President of Xinhua News Agency at Xinhua headquarters in Beijing on 21st April 2016. [Photo provided to China.org.cn] During the meeting, they reviewed the status of cooperation between Xinhua and Pakistani news media and discussed ways and means to further promoting and enhancing mutual cooperation. Ambassador Masood Khalid appreciated Xinhuas close and longstanding collaboration with Pakistani news media. He expressed his gratitude to Xinhua for promoting friendship between Pakistan and China through positively highlighting various aspects of Pakistan, its economy, culture and history. The Ambassador said that China and Pakistan have enjoyed longstanding friendship and China was regarded as a close friend by Pakistani people. He lauded the achievements of the Chinese people and Chinas transformation of the last three decades including that in the field of media. Ambassador Masood said that media played an important role in moulding public opinion and in promoting people-to-people interaction. Talking about the China Pakistan Economic Corridor, Ambassador Masood Khalid expressed satisfaction over the progress on its implementation and stressed the need for increasing people-to-people contacts and further strengthening media linkages between the two countries. In the context of the 65th year of establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Pakistan, this year, Ambassador Masood and President Cai discussed mutually cooperative ventures between Xinhua and Pakistan side. Xinhua President Cai Mingzhao said that Xinhua news agency through its objective, and comprehensive reporting acted as a bridge between the peoples of the two countries for furthering communications and exchanges and played a positive role in promoting bilateral relations between the two countries. He apprised the Ambassador that Xinhua news agency and Pakistani mainstream media had a longstanding cooperation and several Pakistani media were Xinhuas clients. He expressed the hope that more extensive and in-depth communication and exchanges between Xinhua and Pakistani media would be carried out in the future. He said that Xinhuas branch in Pakistan, set up in early fifties, was one of the earliest branches of Xinhua and had received strong support from the Pakistani side. He said that last year with President Xis visit to Pakistan both countries had elevated their relationship to all-weather strategic cooperative partnership. He said the Belt and Road and China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) initiatives had added new dynamism to China Pakistan relations. You are here: Home China will provide 1 million U.S. dollars to help Suriname cope with the Zika virus, the Ministry of Commerce said on Thursday. The Zika epidemic in Suriname broke out at the end of last year. China's humanitarian aid will help the South American country with medical supplies and funding, according to the ministry. Flash China is strongly dissatisfied with senior British official Hugo Swire's comment on the South China Sea, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said on Wednesday. Hugo Swire, British minister of state for the foreign office, said on Monday that growing tensions in the South China Sea are driven by China's assertive actions. He said Britain will stand alongside the U.S. in supporting an upcoming ruling by an international tribunal on a complaint lodged by the Philippines and that any ruling "should be binding on both parties." "Mr. Swire's comment neglects facts and is full of bias. It breaks Britain's commitment that it does not take sides on issues involving territorial disputes. China is strongly dissatisfied with this," Hua said at a regular news briefing. Hua said the United States and the Philippines colluded to create an illusion of tension on the sea, while what people see is "more than 100,000 vessels passing safely through the region every year as usual." The only difference is the more frequent and high-profile appearance of U.S. military ships and planes in the region. The U.S. ambassador to the Philippines said recently the U.S. will give Manila an observation blimp and military equipment worth 42 million U.S. dollars, Hua said. "Facts show that the U.S. is the biggest driver behind tension on the South China Sea. The U.S. is calling white black by blaming China," Hua said. Manila unilaterally initiated an arbitration case against China over the maritime disputes at an international tribunal in The Hague in early 2013 under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). "The Philippines' attempt to deny China's sovereignty over the Nansha Islands is obviously a result of instigation behind the scene and political manipulation," Hua said, calling the Philippine move "an abuse of international law". China has repeatedly said it will not accept nor participate in the process. The South China Sea disputes between China and the Philippines lies in territorial and maritime demarcation. China declared in 2006 that arbitration and other compulsory dispute settlement procedures do not apply to issues like maritime delimitation, which was outlined in Article 298 of the UNCLOS. Flash Number of illegal refugee crossings from Turkey to Europe is shrinking after a deal sealed with the European Union (EU), Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Wednesday. "Number of refugees illegally crossing from Turkey to five Greek islands, which was nearly six thousand per month, has decreased below 100," Cavusoglu said at a joint press conference with his visiting Polish counterpart Witold Waszczykowski. But there is a problem with payment of three billion euros (3.4 billion U.S. dollars) due to red tape that the EU has pledged to give Turkey, the minister said citing to the bloc's promise to help Ankara stop the flow of refugees to Europe. Cavusoglu recalled that his country gives shelter to nearly three million Syrian refugees, saying that Ankara has spent 10 billion U.S. dollars. Turkey is a major transit country for refugees and migrants seeking to enter Europe via the Aegean route. Under the refugee action plan, the EU agreed to offer three billion euros to Ankara to meet the needs of refugees in Turkey, visa liberalization for Turkish citizens and speeding up EU accession talks in exchange for Turkey's consistent efforts to stop the flow of refugees. Flash A China-Arab friendship forum opened on Wednesday in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. Ambassador Ali Yousif, secretary general of the Arab-China Friendship Societies, told the opening of the two-day forum the gathering tried to promote the understanding of China's belt and road initiative among all the participants. Xiong Liang, a Chinese official with the Chinese-Arab Friendship Society, said the economic and commercial cooperation between China and the Arab world has achieved a tangible progress these years, noting that China has become the second biggest commercial partner for the Arab countries and the most important investment partner thanks to the joint efforts by the two sides. He also said stressed the importance of having the forum, particularly after China published its policy paper towards the Arab countries earlier this year. Flash About 500 Syrian civilians are expected to be evacuated on Wednesday from hotspots besieged by both rebels and government forces, a military source told Xinhua. An agreement was reached for the evacuation of 250 from Shiite towns of Kafraya and Foa, which are besieged by the rebels in the northwestern province of Idlib, and in return, government forces will allow 250 civilians to leave the rebel-held towns of Zabadani and Madaya in the northern countryside of the capital Damascus. The deal and its entire technicalities have been reached under the help of the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations, including the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC), said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The evacuees are expected to leave within the next few hours, he added. Kafraya, Foa, Zabadani and Madaya have witnessed several instances where conditional aid and evacuation of civilians took place over the past months. The UN has repeatedly urged the warring parties in the Syrian conflict to lift the sieges and facilitate the flow of food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies to civilians. You are here: Home Flash Israeli security forces arrested 33 Palestinians in predawn raids in West Bank cities and East Jerusalem, and demolished a house in a refugee camp in northern Jerusalem, Palestinian sources said on Wednesday. Twenty-five Palestinians were detained from the East Jerusalem town of Issawiyeh, while the rest from the West Bank cities of Bethlehem, Hebron, Nablus and Jenin, Palestinian Prisoners Club media officer Amani Sarahnah told Xinhua. Israeli sources were not immediately available to comment on the arrests. Menawhile, Palestinian sources told Xinhua that Israeli forces demolished the internal walls of a house of a Palestinian attacker in Qalandia Refugee Camp, north of Jerusalem city. The house belongs to Hussein Abu Ghosh, who was killed by Israeli forces on Jan. 25 after an alleged double stabbing attack against settlers near Ramallah. The sources said that the forces raided the camp, surrounded the house and started the demolition process. The move sparked clashes with youths in the camp, leaving three injured by live ammunition and five others with rubber coated bullets, while dozens suffocated due to tear gas used by the Israeli forces, the sources added. A recent wave of tension broke out between Palestinians and Israel last October, killing over 200 Palestinians and 30 Israelis. Flash NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday said that NATO allies and Russia held a "frank and serious" discussion. Stoltenberg made the remarks after a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council, which had been suspended for almost two years. "I have just chaired a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council. And we all agree that it is in all our interest to keep political channels for political dialogue open," said Stoltenberg. Both sides discussed three topics, including the crisis in and around Ukraine, issues related to military activities, transparency and risk reduction, and an assessment of the security situation in Afghanistan, including regional terrorist threats, according to the NATO chief. "Political dialogue among nations that share the same Euro-Atlantic area is both necessary and useful, especially in times of tensions as we experience now," he said. "However, this does not mean that we are back to business as usual," he said. "We had a frank and serious discussion. NATO Allies and Russia hold very different views. But we have listened to what each of us have to say," said Stoltenberg. Stoltenberg noted that NATO and Russia have "profound and persistent disagreements" and "Today's meeting did not change that." "NATO Allies remain firm that there can be no return to practical cooperation until Russia returns to the respect of international law. But we will keep channels of communication open," he said. "Especially when tensions are high, political dialogue is necessary to discuss our differences and to reduce the risk of military incidents," he said. The NATO-Russia Council (NRC), which was established in 2002, was conceived as a mechanism for consultation, consensus-building, cooperation, joint decision and joint action. Within the NRC, the individual NATO member states and Russia have worked as equal partners on a wide spectrum of security issues of common interest. According to NATO, all practical civilian and military cooperation under the NRC with Russia was suspended in April 2014 in response to the Ukraine crisis. Flash Several vehicles of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) came under rebel fire inside Madaya, as around 250 people were set to be evacuated from rebel-held town north of Damascus, a military source told Xinhua. The SARC team survived the shooting, as their convoy withdrew from the vicinity of Madaya, the source added on condition of anonymity. However, the operation of evacuating the civilians will continue, the source said. Under a deal reached with the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations, including the SARC, about 500 Syrian civilians were set to be evacuated on Wednesday from hotspots besieged by both rebels and government forces, according to the same source. In accordance with the agreement, 250 civilians would be evacuated from the Shiite towns of Kafraya and Foa, which are besieged by the rebels in the northwestern province of Idlib, and in return, government forces will allow 250 civilians to leave the rebel-held towns of Zabadani and Madaya in the northern countryside of capital Damascus. The source said six big buses, two ambulances and a truck for carrying luggage have started moving to exit Kafraya and Foa, as part of the deal. Kafraya, Foa, Zabadani and Madaya have seen several instances where conditional aid and evacuation of civilians took place over the past months. The UN has repeatedly urged the warring parties in the Syrian conflict to lift the sieges and facilitate the flow of food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies to civilians. Flash The European Union (EU) on Wednesday hailed "good progress" that has been made in the implementation of the EU-Turkey Agreement on managing the refugee crisis. On March 18, EU Heads of state or government and Turkey agreed to end the irregular migration from Turkey to the EU and replace it instead with legal channels of resettlement of refugees to the EU. "This new approach has started to deliver results, with a sharp decrease seen in the number of people irregularly crossing the Aegean from Turkey into Greece," the European Commission, or the EU executive body, said in a statement, while presenting a report on the implementation of the EU-Turkey Agreement. The return of irregular migrants to Turkey started on April 4. So far, 325 irregular migrants arriving in Greece via Turkey after March 20 have been returned to Turkey in accordance with the agreement, the statement added. The first resettlements from Turkey following the statement took place on April 4-5. So far, 103 Syrian refugees have been resettled to the EU under the 1:1 scheme. "Standard Operating Procedures for resettlement have been developed in close cooperation between the Commission, Member States, EASO, UNHCR and Turkey, and now need to be finalized," the Commission said. The Commission said it will present its third visa liberalization progress report for Turkey on May 4 and, and if Turkey takes the necessary measures to fulfill the remaining benchmarks, the report will be accompanied by a legislative proposal for transferring Turkey to the visa-free list. Frontex has deployed 318 escort officers and 21 readmission experts to the Greek islands to support the return operations. In addition, a total of 25 Turkish liaison officers have been deployed in the Greek hotspots and five Greek liaison officers to arrival points in Turkey. The Commission will present its second report on the implementation of the EU-Turkey Statement in early June 2016. In line with the EU-Turkey Statement, from March 20, 2016, all new irregular migrants and asylum seekers arriving from Turkey to the Greek islands and whose applications for asylum have been declared inadmissible should be returned to Turkey. This temporary and extraordinary step is designed to end human suffering by showing clearly that there is no benefit in following the route offered by the smugglers, according to the EU. Under the agreement, the EU will resettle a Syrian from Turkey to the EU for every Syrian returned to Turkey from the Greek islands. Priority is given to migrants who have not previously entered or tried to enter the EU irregularly, within the framework of the existing commitments. You are here: Home Flash The death toll from Saturday's earthquake in northern Ecuador has climbed to 525 by Wednesday morning, and the figure might continue to rise significantly, Ecuador's government said. According to the country's Interior Ministry, over 4,000 people have been injured in the earthquake, with 231 more still missing. A fresh tremor of 6.1 magnitude struck off the devastated beach town of Muisne before dawn on Wednesday, which further rattled the coast region of Ecuador. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the tremor was centered offshore, 15 miles (24 km) west of Muisne, at 3:33 a.m. local time (0833 GMT). Authorities in the capital city of Quito called the latest quake an aftershock. There was no immediate report of further damage or casualties, and no tsunami warning was issued. A preliminary count showed that 20,503 people remained in shelters, while 805 buildings were completely destroyed and 608 more damaged. Public services were progressively being restored in the affected areas. International rescue teams and aid are flooding into Ecuador. The Red Cross Society of China has provided 100,000 U.S. dollars in cash for emergency assistance, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Tuesday. The Chinese government is speedily working on a humanitarian assistance plan and will provide satellite pictures to Ecuador for relief efforts, said the spokeperson. Flash The UN refugee agency said on Wednesday as many as 500 refugees and migrants may have lost their lives this past week after a boat sank in the Mediterranean Sea between Libya and Italy. The incident, if confirmed, could be one of the worst tragedies involving refugees and migrants in the past 12 months. The 41 survivors of the incident -- 37 men, three women and a three-year-old child -- were rescued by a merchant ship and taken to Kalamata, in the Peloponnese peninsula of Greece, on Saturday, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said in a press release. The UNHCR team "has interviewed survivors of an overcrowded boat that sank in the Mediterranean in what could be one of the worst tragedies involving refugees and migrants in the last 12 months," UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters. Those rescued include 23 Somalis, 11 Ethiopians, six Egyptians and a Sudanese, the spokesman said. With summer approaching and the seas becoming calmer, this tragedy may be a harbinger of a deeper emerging crisis, reports said. So far this year, around 25,000 refugees have reached the shores of Italy from North Africa, according to Italian authorities. While those numbers are slightly more than the 24,000 who arrived during the same period last year, the United Nations and other refugee organizations are expecting more people to take rickety boats plying the risky routes across the Mediterranean to Italy. The survivors told UNHCR staff that they had been part of a group of between 100 and 200 people who departed last week from a locality near Tobruk in Libya on a 30-metre-long boat. "After several hours at sea, the smugglers in charge of the boat attempted to transfer the passengers to a larger ship carrying hundreds of people in terribly overcrowded conditions," UNHCR said in the statement. "At one point during the transfer, the larger boat capsized and sank." So far this year, more than 179,000 refugees and migrants have reached Europe by sea across the Mediterranean and Aegean, and at least 761 have died or gone missing attempting the journey, Dujarric added. The survivors include people who had not yet boarded the larger vessel, as well as some who managed to swim back to the smaller boat. They drifted at sea possibly for three days before being spotted and rescued, the agency said. UNHCR visited the survivors at the local stadium of Kalamata, where they have been temporarily housed by local authorities while they were undergoing police procedures. Meanwhile, the UN agency also reiterated a call for increased regular pathways for the admission of refugees and asylum-seekers to Europe, including resettlement and humanitarian admission programmes, family reunification, private sponsorship and student and work visas for refugees. "These will all serve to reduce the demand for people smuggling and dangerous irregular sea journeys," the UNHCR said. By the end of last year, refugees and migrants fleeing to Europe by sea have passed 1 million, according to figures released by the UNHCR, many on perilous trips aboard inadequate vessels run by people smugglers, with at least 3,735 more believed drowned. In 2015, the UNHCR said 1,000,573 people had reached Europe across the Mediterranean, mainly to Greece and Italy, half a million of them Syrians escaping war in their country, with Afghans accounting for 20 percent and Iraqis for seven percent. You are here: Home Flash At least 30 workers were injured on Wednesday when an explosion hit a petrochemical complex of national oil company Pemex in eastern Mexico. A column of smoke rises from the site of an explosion at Clorados 3 plant in the Pajaritos complex in Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz state, Mexico, on April 20, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua] The explosion shook the Pajaritos complex, located in the eastern town of Coatzacoalcos in the eastern state of Veracruz, Governor Javier Duarte said on Twitter. Pemex, via its Twitter account, said at least 30 workers had been injured, up form an initial three, when the blast hit the Clorados III plant, owned by PMV, a Pemex joint venture with Mexichem. However, it did not provide details about the conditions of the injured. The blast was felt within the town and a large column of smoke could be seen rising above the port of Coatzacoalcos from several kilometers away, according to Mexican daily El Universal. Local emergency officials were evacuating hundreds of people from within the Pajaritos complex and the entire port has been closed off. Governor Duarte said that the authorities have started public safety measures in nearby towns. State authorities have recommended that residents of Coatzacoalcos and neighboring towns stay indoors to avoid inhaling or coming into contact with toxic gas while all schools in the zone have been suspended. Traffic along a section of the Coatzacoalcos-Villahermosa highway was also suspended. The Clorados III plant suffered a serious explosion on March 11, 1991, killing four people and injuring over 300 people, according to Pemex data. Pemex and Mexichem began an alliance in 2013, establishing the joint-venture PMV dedicated to the production of vinyl chloride products. Flash The Yemeni peace negotiations will start on Thursday in Kuwait under the auspices of the United Nations, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters Wednesday. The delegations will focus on the implementation of the Security Council resolution 2216, Dujarric said at a daily news briefing here. "They are expected to develop a framework that paves the way for a peaceful and orderly process based on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) initiative and the outcomes of the National Dialogue Conference," he said. On Tuesday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged all parties to the peace process in Yemen to "engage in good faith" with his envoy, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, so that "talks can start without further delay." "The secretary-general is convinced that seizing this opportunity to move the process forward will help resolve outstanding issues and bring the end of this prolonged conflict closer," said a statement issued here by Ban's spokesman. "The Yemeni people and the region deserve no less." On Monday, the secretary-general's special envoy for Yemen announced that the start of the peace negotiations had been postponed. The Kuwait talks are the third round of negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations, after two previous ones in June and December of 2015 failed to yield any progress. It is hoped that the latest talks would end more than a year of Yemen's civil war and a Saudi Arabia-led military intervention, which have claimed more than 6,400 lives, over half being civilians, and displaced millions, according to UN statistics. A latest cease-fire kicked off on April 10 and was supposed to pave the way for Monday's talks, but both warring sides have complained of violations by the other side, including continued heavy shelling and air strikes. The crisis in Yemen started in 2011, when former President Ali Abdullah Saleh was forced to step down from his 33-year rule and handed power to his then deputy Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, as part of a wave of protests and political turmoil that swept the whole Arab world. Flash U.S. President Barack Obama met on Wednesday with King Salman bin Abdulaziz in the Saudi capital of Riyadh ahead of a summit with leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Obama underscored the importance of accelerating the campaign against the Islamic State (IS) and welcomed Saudi Arabia's important role in the coalition against the terrorist group, read a White House statement. The two leaders also discussed regional conflicts in Syria, Yemen and Iraq, and challenges posed by Iran's provocative activities. It is Obama's fourth visit to the oil-rich Gulf nation since taking office in 2009. The kingdom is seen as one of Washington's most strategic allies in the Middle East, but bilateral relations were strained by the nuclear deal reached with Iran last year. Hours before Obama met King Salman, U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter held talks with his Gulf Arab counterparts on military cooperation and the latest developments in the Middle East, including what were described as Iran's destabilizing activities and the IS terrorist group, said GCC Secretary General Abdullatif al-Zayani. The GCC countries and the United States have agreed to carry out joint patrols to stop any Iranian arms shipments reaching Yemen, al-Zayani told a press conference. The U.S. defense chief urged the GCC members to be more engaged in helping the Iraqi government fight IS and to rebuild areas where the militants have been pushed out. The GCC comprises Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The summit comes on the heels of Obama's criticism of Saudi Arabia's regional role, which prompted a strong rebuke from the Saudi royal family. In a recent interview with The Atlantic, Obama described Saudi Arabia and other allies as "free riders" on U.S. foreign policy, and criticized what he saw as Riyadh's funding of religious intolerance. Almost a year ago, in May 2015, Obama hosted leaders of Gulf nations at the White House and the Camp David retreat, the first meeting of the Gulf countries after a framework agreement on limiting Iran's nuclear program. Except for Kuwait and Qatar, top leaders from four of the six-member GCC countries were absent from the 2015 summit. Flash South Sudan peace deal monitors have called on South Sudanese parties to urgently demonstrate flexibility and spirit of compromise to implement the August 2015 peace deal by forming the unity government. The Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission (JMEC) Chairman Festus Mogae warned in a statement received in Juba on Wednesday that the peace deal aimed at ending the more than two years of civil war in the world's youngest nation is at risk. "The agreement is at risk. Having come so close to the formation of the transitional government of National Unity, all parties must ensure that the spirit of reconciliation, compromise and dialogue embodied by the agreement should be protected," Mogae said. Mogae whose JMEC brokered the peace deal expressed "his deep disappointment "that the rebel leader failed to travel to Juba on the chartered aircraft provided by international partners on Monday and Tuesday. The former vice-president was expected to arrive in Juba to take up the post of vice-president in a new unity government on Monday but delayed it to Tuesday. His officials later told journalists on Tuesday that Machar's long-awaited return to Juba has been cancelled due to logistical reasons since President Salva Kiir had earlier refused to clear airspace for his chief of general staff Simon Gatwech Dual's plane to fly in. Sources said that Machar's arrival in Juba has been delayed because of a disagreement over the number of opposition troops travelling with Machar and his chief of staff, Dual, who is under U.S. and UN sanctions. The opposition has demanded that Dual's return to Juba along with the return of Machar whose subsequent swearing-in as vice president are seen as key steps towards implementation of the August 2015 peace deal. The South Sudan government on Wednesday responded to Machar with Acting Foreign Affairs Minister Bashir Gbandi telling journalists in Juba that "we have accepted as a government that Machar should come with the 195 forces accompanying him and his chief of staff." In his statement, Mogae who is the former Botswana president called on the government of South Sudan to ensure its full cooperation in ensuring the return arrangements for the First VP-designate are amicably agreed. Mogae expressed his hope that Machar's flight could be rescheduled within days, without further conditions, to ensure the timely formation of the Transitional Government of National Unity. Machar's advance team and 1,370 bodyguards including 22 Police high command have arrived in Juba with their light rifles despite continued clashes between the two rival troops in Bahr el Ghazal and Equatoria regions. Fighting erupted in the world's youngest oil-rich nation two years after it gained independence from Sudan in 2011, when President Salva Kiir accused Machar of plotting a coup, an allegation the rebel leader has denied. Since then tens of thousands of people have lost their lives and over two million people fled their homes, destroying properties and livelihood. Flash Indonesia held a national symposium titled "Membedah Tragedi 1965, Pendekatan Kesejarahan" (Dissecting 1965 Tragedy, Historical Approach) on April 18-19 to speak about the 1965-66 massive killings that targeted communists, ethnic Chinese and alleged leftists, but the effort, the first time anything similar has been supported by the government, to face the taboo topic was weakened by a minister's downplaying of the actual death toll, which many scholars claim exceeded 500,000. Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, coordinating minister of Political, Legal and Security Affairs of Indonesia, claimed on April 18 at the symposium that the number of victims could not have exceeded 1,000. "I'm intrigued with the high number [of the death toll]," said Luhut, insisting that the actual number was much lower and demanding evidence. "Can you prove it by showing us one mass grave? Show me and I'll go there," he said. "I don't believe the number was more than 1,000, probably even less." In fact, 500,000 is only a conservative figure and many have estimated the actual death toll to be as high as 3 million, reported the Jakarta Post, citing an allegation by Colonel Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, chief of the Indonesian Army's Special Forces (Kopassus), who headed the purge. The official death toll has never been accessible because details from the period are still shrouded in mystery and no one has yet been capable of publishing statistics acceptable to everyone. Luhut insisted that the government would not apologize for the incident. We are not that stupid. Don't even think that the government will apologize for this and that. We know what we are doing and what is best for this country," said the 68-year-old retired army general. Luhut added that there would be no criminal investigations, although the government shared deep regret over what happened. The government's refusal to apologize and the protest outside the symposium's venue giving rise to fears that such symposiums could revive communism in Indonesia are both signs that indicate how difficult it is for this once-banned topic to be openly discussed. The symposium was possible in part because Indonesian President Joko Widodo had promised to resolve human rights abuses in the past, including the 1965-66 massacre. But the Joko administration's refusal to issue a formal apology dampened his resolution to improve human rights conditions. A Jakarta Post report says that the symposium did not aim to blame the perpetrators of the 1965-66 purge, citing retired army general Agus Widjojo, head of the symposium committee. Instead, the discussion sought to have the assailants and victims jointly open up about it in order to prevent similar things from happening in the future. Flash A four-year-old girl in the port city of Manta had been trapped in debris for eight hours before she was rescued after a deadly earthquake jolted the Pacific coast of Ecuador on Saturday. The girl was almost at her last gasp when she was rescued, but all nearby hospitals were either too-badly damaged or too overcrowded to treat her. During the emergency crisis the rescue team turned to the ECU911 system made by Chinese experts, and the girl was transported to a hospital in Guayaquil City of Guayas Province by a military helicopter. She is now out of danger after timely treatment, Minister of Security and Coordination Cesar Navas told Xinhua. During this deadly earthquake, China's ECU911 emergency warning and monitoring system has helped save a number of lives, Navas added. The ECU 911, designed and built by Chinese companies, connects Ecuador's various security and disaster relief agencies, such as police forces, fire departments, transportation, paramedic units and the Red Cross, to aid reaction speed to emergencies via a single telephone number, 911. By Tuesday afternoon, the 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Ecuador had claimed 499 lives, leaving over 4027 injured and 231 missing. Covering the entire country via 16 command and control centers, the ECU911 is playing a key role in handling emergency needs from the quake-struck regions and coordinating rescue work. ECU911 is an integrated system of police services, video surveillance with thousands of cameras, GPS, geographic information, and a smart analysis of resources, among others. In ECU911's headquarters in Quito, the red lights of the several telephones keep flashing with incoming calls. Information like the caller's location, a digital map and emergency briefings pop up within seconds on monitors after the SOS call. With all this data at their disposal, coordinators can efficiently allocate resources and arrange rescue missions. During the first two days after the killer quake, ECU911 handled at least 17,888 emergency cases. "After the earthquake, we are operating at 100 percent to help grant the coverage the country needs," said Francisco Rolayo, Director of the ECU911 Quito Center. "Our crisis center regroups help at all levels of government, to send food, rescue materials and other necessities while we also coordinate the planes being sent to help in relief efforts, mainly to the province of Manabi," Rolayo told Xinhua. ECU911 regional centers for the quake-struck areas like Esmeraldas, Portoviejo, Santo Domingo and Machala are also available to provide necessary services, he added. Meanwhile, the government response continues. In Portoviejo, Manabi's capital, President Rafael Correa met with cabinet ministers on Tuesday to draw up an ongoing response plan. He said searching for survivors and caring for the wounded and displaced remain top priorities. Some 12,000 food rations will be sent daily to the people affected by the earthquake, the Public Administration's Secretary Pedro Solines announced on Tuesday. Twenty-six flights will transport food, water, tents and staff to help the earthquake victims in Manabi, the region hardest hit by the disaster, according to Solines. International organizations and a number of countries have also activated their humanitarian aid plans for Ecuador. Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a message to President Correa on Monday. In the message, Xi mourned extended condolences to families of the victims and those injured. China's Red Cross has provided 100,000 U.S. dollars in cash for emergency assistance to its Ecuadoran counterpart, said Hua Chunying, spokesperson of China's Foreign Ministry, on Tuesday. The Chinese government is also drawing up a humanitarian assistance plan and will provide satellite pictures to Ecuador for relief efforts, Hua said. In ECU911's headquarters, over twenty Chinese technicians are working day and night to ensure this life-saving system runs well at this critical moment. "They came to the ECU911 center soon after the earthquake," said Sixto Heras, director of the Resources Coordination Department of ECU911, "and have been working with us side by side. I'm quite moved by their braveness. Thank you, my Chinese friends." Flash Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff will travel to New York on Friday for the signing ceremony of the UN Paris Agreement on climate change, her office announced Wednesday. During Rousseff's trip, Vice President Michel Temer, who has been pushing for Rousseff's impeachment, will temporarily assume the presidency. Rousseff will use her platform at the UN to address the impeachment process against her, which she describes as a coup attempt. She will have five minutes to speak at a UN ceremony, during which she is expected to lambast the "coup" and remind the world of Brazil's contributions to the climate change agreement. Rousseff had expressed reservations about leaving Brazil and allowing Temer to take over, but local media said her collaborators seem to have advised her to tell attendees at the UN about the truth of the political crisis in the country. A day before the announcement of Rousseff's trip to New York, Temer sent Senator Aloysio Nunes, one of his loyalists, to meet in Washington with Thomas Shannon, the U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs and a former American ambassador to Brazil, in order to present their side of the impeachment debate. Adopted by the 196 Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Paris Agreement sets a target of curbing the global average rise in temperature below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and preferably below 1.5 degrees. The agreement will be officially signed at the UN headquarters in New York on Friday. Flash About 41 militants have been killed and 23 others wounded during clashes with security forces and airstrikes within the last 24 hours, the Afghan Defense Ministry said on Thursday. "The Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) conducted military operations against enemies in 13 of the 34 Afghan provinces in past 24 hours. The ground forces were supported by the Afghan air force and artillery. The ANSF inflicted heavy casualties on the militants. But 10 army soldiers were also martyred during the above raids," the ministry said in a statement. Those killed included 21 Islamic State (IS) militants. Some 11 of the IS fighters also wounded after Afghan army and coalition forces launched airstrikes against an IS training center in Achin district of eastern Nangarhar province, said the statement that provides daily operational updates. The Afghan security forces have beefed up security operations against militants recently as spring and summer known as fighting season is drawing near in the country. The ANSF also seized weapons and defused several roadside bombs planted by the militants, the statement said. The death also included three Taliban insurgents' local leaders named Eidi Mohammad, Mullah Khabeer and Mullah Qyyam, who had been killed after engagement with security forces in northern Badakhshan province on Wednesday. The militants respond by bombing and armed attacks. On Tuesday, a Taliban truck bombing and ensuing shooting against a national intelligence agency in central Kabul left 64 people dead and nearly 350 others injured. Flash U.S. President Barack Obama met on Thursday with leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states in the Saudi capital Riyadh to mend strained ties and seek more consensus. The GCC comprises Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The White House said the U.S.-GCC summit would be an opportunity for leaders to discuss issues such as the fight against the IS group, regional conflicts, and sectarian tensions. It is Obama's fourth visit to the oil-rich Gulf nation since taking office in 2009. The kingdom is seen as one of Washington's most important strategic allies in the Middle East, but bilateral relations were strained by the nuclear deal reached with Iran last year. A day earlier, President Obama met with King Salman bin Abdulaziz at Erga Palace in Riyadh. Obama underscored the importance of accelerating the campaign against the Islamic State (IS) and welcomed Saudi Arabia's important role in the coalition against the terrorist group, read a White House statement. The two leaders also discussed regional conflicts in Syria, Yemen and Iraq, and challenges posed by Iran's provocative activities. Also on Wednesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter held talks with his Gulf Arab counterparts on military cooperation and the latest developments in the Middle East, including what were described as Iran's destabilizing activities and the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group, said GCC Secretary General Abdullatif al-Zayani. The U.S.-GCC summit comes on the heels of Obama's criticism of Saudi Arabia's regional role, which prompted a strong rebuke from the Saudi royal family. In a recent interview with The Atlantic, Obama described Saudi Arabia and other allies as "free riders" on U.S. foreign policy, and criticized what he saw as Riyadh's funding of religious intolerance. Almost a year ago, in May 2015, Obama hosted leaders of Gulf nations at the White House and the Camp David retreat, the first meeting of the Gulf countries after a framework agreement on limiting Iran's nuclear program. Except for Kuwait and Qatar, top leaders from four of the six-member GCC countries were absent from the 2015 summit. The Persian Gulf nations, Saudi Arabia in particular, have repeatedly raised concerns that the accord will further empower Iran to interfere in Arab affairs. The tensions reached a new high in January when Riyadh and a number of its Sunni Arab allies cut diplomatic ties with Tehran, after mobs ransacked the Saudi embassy in response to the execution of a prominent Shiite cleric in Saudi Arabia. Flash China and the Republic of Korea (ROK) will hold talks on maritime demarcation in Beijing on Friday. The talks, the first round between working groups of the two countries, is the first to be held following delegations from the two countries reaching a consensus in Seoul in December, according to Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying. Hua told a regular press briefing that a reasonable and fair solution between China and the ROK through negotiation and consultation is of great importance to the peace and stability of the waters between them, as well as their friendly cooperative relations. "This also embodies China's consistent stance to solve disputes through negotiation with directly related countries, on the basis of historical facts and in accordance with international laws," Hua added. She noted that China hoped to have a reasonable and fair settlement of the overlap of maritime rights and interests with the ROK through friendly negotiations, and hoped such practice would set a good example for regional countries to handle similar issues. Flash South Korea's top envoy at the long-stalled six-party talks will visit China on Friday to talk with his Chinese counterpart about the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)'s nuclear program. Seoul's foreign ministry spokesman Cho June-hyuk told a press briefing on Thursday that Kim Hong-Kyun, chief South Korean envoy for the six-party dialogue to denuclearize the Korean peninsula, will visit China on Friday to meet with Wu Dawei, China's special representative on Korean peninsula affairs. Kim and Wu will share an assessment on the Korean peninsula situations based on the results of China-South Korea summit held in Washington on March 31 on the sidelines of nuclear security summit, the spokesman said. The two diplomats will also discuss comprehensive cooperation ways between the two countries regarding the DPRK's nuclear program, according to the spokesman. The six-party talks, which involve South Korea, the DPRK, China, the United States, Russia and Japan, have been halted since late 2008. Flash Tanzanian authorities on Thursday launched a national wide special campaign to clean up Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa which attracts more than 50,000 tourists annually. The campaign dubbed 'leave the mountain clean, conserve environment so that they can protect you' came at the time when the Africa's roof is overwhelmed with a number of challenges such as land degradation, non availability of good water, loss of biodiversity, frequent forest fires and pollution. Speaking at the official launch of the campaign, Kilimanjaro Regional Commissioner, Said Meck Sadick said the mountain is an important cornerstone when it comes to Tanzania's tourism industry. The mountain, which is a biosphere reserve and a world heritage site, generates nearly 30 million U.S. dollars income annually and employs more than 300,000 people. "We want this campaign to be successful and sensitize climbers to respect and conserve the environment in the Kilimanjaro National Park," the regional chief said, urging tour operators to take responsibilities of conserving environment of the park, which is the lifeline for many people. Sadick described Mount Kilimanjaro as one of the national values, vowing to take stern measures against illegal loggers in the park. Director General of the Tanzania National Park Allan Kijazi said the campaign is meant to make Mount Kilimanjaro remain as it is and continues to lure more tourists. According to Kijazi, the Kilimanjaro National Park leads the 16 national parks in terms of revenue collection, adding that tourism sector contributes 25 percent of the country's foreign exchange and 17 percent of the national GDP. "So, we must ensure that these tourism destinations are protected for the benefit of the country and the world at large." The seven-day clean-up campaign is to involve more than 100 tourism stakeholders. Cleaners will be working on all the entrance and exit gates of Mount Kilimanjaro. Flash The international coalition fighting the Islamic State (IS) plans to retake Mosul in Iraq and Rekka in Syria, the group's main strongholds in the region, by the year-end, French defense minister said on Thursday. Speaking to France info radio, French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian estimated that conditions were "coming together" to uproot IS fighters. "I think the conditions are in the process of coming together for eradicating Daesh (Arabic acronym for IS). I say that cautiously but for the first time, I have this slightly optimistic message," the French minister said. "I note that Daesh is retreating significantly," he added, arguing that the cell had lost between 30 and 40 percent of its territory in Iraq and Syria since their attempt to attack Baghdad in 2014. Yang Hua poses with his family in an undated photo. (Photo: China Aid) China Aid By Brynne Lawrence (Guiyang, GuizhouMarch 26, 2016) Authorities in Chinas southern Guizhou province allowed the lawyers of an incarcerated pastor to meet with their client on Wednesday after multiple denied requests. On the morning of March 23, the local Procuratorate phoned Chen Jiangang and Zhao Yonglin to inform them that their requests to meet with Yang Huaa pastor of Huoshi Church who has been arrested and charged with divulging state secretshad been granted. According to Yangs wife, Wang Hongwu, they met with him later that afternoon. Previously, officials had not allowed them to meet with Yang. Zhao reported that although Yang had lost some weight and missed his family, he seemed mentally peaceful. Wang told China Aid that officials had not tortured her husband in an attempt to force him to confess; however, she learned that they repeatedly said, We know we cannot change your beliefs. However, we control everything and can completely succeed in painting you as a greedy pastor, causing you to lose all of your reputation. Government personnel charged Yang with the crime of obstructing justice and gathering a crowd to disturb social order and sentenced him to five days in administrative detention for each charge on Dec. 10, 2015. When Wang arrived at the detention center to collect her husband on Dec. 20, she witnessed his head being covered in a black hood as officials forced him into a vehicle without a license plate. She learned that his charge had been changed to illegally holding state secrets, and that he had been criminally detained. On Jan. 22, the Procuratorate authorized Yangs formal arrest, changing his charge to divulging state secrets. China Aid reports cases such as Yang Huas in order to promote religious freedom and rule of law in China. China Aid Contacts Rachel Ritchie, English Media Director Cell: (432) 553-1080 | Office: 1+ (888) 889-7757 | Other: (432) 689-6985 Email: [email protected] Website: www.chinaaid.org Workers make snacks in a duck meat processing factory in Zouping, Shandong province. DONG NAIDE / FOR CHINA DAILY After spending half his lifetime building the family snack food company in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, Yao Weizhong had run out of steam. His 22-year-old son showed little interest in the business, and Yao needed fresh capital and expertise to keep it growing. So Yao, 48, chose a path taken by a growing number of Chinese entrepreneurs these days: He sold a controlling stake in his company, Yaotaitai, to a private equity firm. "The company is hitting a bottleneck," Yao, who sold the stake in December to Shanghai-based Lunar Capital Ltd, said last week by phone. "I don't have enough energy at this age, and my kid is reluctant to take over. I can't force him to like it." From the financial hub of Shanghai to the northern coal-rich Shanxi province, Chinese entrepreneurs facing the twin challenges of succession and a slowing economy are becoming more willing to cede majority ownership to buyout firms. Printer maker Lexmark International Inc has agreed to be taken private by a group of investors led by China-based Apex Technology Co Ltd and PAG Asia Capital in a deal valued at $3.6 billion, the company said. Reuters reported earlier this month that Apex, which manufactures ink cartridge chips, was in negotiations to buy Lexmark. Like other printer makers, Lexmark has struggled to adjust as corporate clients slash costs and consumers shift to mobile devices from personal computers. Lexmark said the deal will help its efforts penetrate the Asia-Pacific market. The deal, which is expected to close in the second half of 2016, is subject to regulatory approvals in the United States, including by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. CFIUS is an interagency committee of the US government that reviews mergers to ensure they do not compromise national security. Western Digital Corp said in February a unit of China's Unisplendour Corp Ltd terminated a deal to take a 15 percent stake in the company after a decision by CFIUS to conduct an investigation. Lexmark had announced in October that it was exploring strategic alternatives, including a sale, and that it had hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc as an adviser. Lexmark will remain headquartered in Lexington, Kentucky, and Chairman and Chief Executive Paul Rooke is expected to continue to lead the company. The deal will be financed through equity contributions by the consortium and debt financing. Legend Capital Management Co Ltd, the venture capital arm of Legend Holdings Corp, is also the part of consortium. Goldman Sachs is acting as financial adviser to Lexmark, and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz is its legal counsel. The consortium is being advised by Moelis & Co financially along with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom while King & Wood Mallesons is acting as the legal counsel. Fujian Pilot Free Trade Zone is looking to innovation, March 6, 2015. [Photo/IC] China's central bank has issued detailed regulations on expanding cross-border use of the yuan in the China (Fujian) Pilot Free Trade Zone. It will bring more business opportunities to commercial lenders in Fujian province, bankers said. Qi Yun, deputy general-manager of Bank of China Ltd's Xiamen branch, said: "We've been waiting for detailed regulations on cross-border use of the yuan for a long time. "The People's Bank of China did open up certain policies this time. It will bring a lot more business opportunities for banks as well as more financial services and products for individuals and companies in the free trade zone." He said it is not easy for the central bank to make such a step forward at the present stage, considering that the Chinese economy is facing downward pressure. Lian Gengsheng, director of the administration of the Xiamen Area of the Fujian free trade zone, said under the new rules, individuals who work or live in the FTZ will be allowed to make overseas direct investments. A banker who declined to be named said it means that from now on, individuals can make direct investments in overseas companies although the central bank is unlikely to allow them to invest directly in stocks and real estate in another country. The upper limit on overseas direct investments by individuals still remains unknown, according to a notice issued last week to banking institutions by the Xiamen central subbranch of the PBOC, the central bank. Before the new move, cross-border yuan settlement for these individuals was restricted to trade in tangible products and in services. The PBOC will also widen the scope of two-way cross-border yuan cash pooling for multinational corporations by lowering the entry threshold. As a modern instrument of cash management, cash pooling enables companies to centralize liquidity management and optimize interest income. Multinationals are allowed to choose a member of the group that is registered in the Fujian FTZ as the leading company to set up a two-way cross-border yuan cash pool. Members of the group participating in cash pooling must have been operating for more than a year. Previously, a Chinese member of the multinational group that is allowed to join the cash pool was required to post an operating revenue of no less than 1 billion yuan ($154 million) in the previous year, while the minimum requirement for an overseas member was 200 million yuan. But now, both figures are cut in half. Furthermore, the ceiling for cross-border yuan capital net outflows or net inflows is raised from half to the equivalent of the owner's equities of the group's members participating in the cash pool. "Through building a two-way cross-border yuan cash pool, we'll lower the operating costs for the corporations with subsidiaries both in and outside China and will improve the use efficiency of funds," Qi said. Bank of China is looking forward to expanding its business in two-way cross-border yuan cash pooling. After receiving the notice of the central bank, the BOC Xiamen branch opened a cash pool account for a subsidiary of Xiamen Financial Investment Group. The maximum size of the cash pool is 18.5 billion yuan. Yang Zhanpeng, general manager of the BOC Fujian branch, said the branch provided cross-border yuan settlement service worth a total of 276 million yuan for nine companies on Friday. The BOC Pingtan branch at the Fujian FTZ helped two individual clients transferring yuan funds from Taiwan to their personal current accounts with the bank on Monday. The notice also listed several other detailed regulations, including a rule that will allow financial institutions and companies in the Fujian FTZ to use the funds flowing back to China after the money is raised through the issuance of offshore yuan bonds. A worker manufactures rims for tires at the Pirelli & C SpA tire factory in Jining, Shandong Province. [Photo/Agencies ] Pirelli & C SpA, one of the world's top five tire makers, is looking for opportunities to work with Chinese homegrown automotive manufacturers to provide tailored products, amid booming demand for high-end SUVs and electric cars, said a senior company manager. "It is very important to work with local car playersthat is a traditional business model for Pirelli," said Gregorio Borgo, director of general operations of Pirelli. Citing the success of working with Fiat in Italy and Ford Motor Co in the United States, Borgo said Pirelli needed to localize its strategy, focusing on the booming the SUV and electric-vehicle sectors in China. "Demand for SUVs and electric cars in China is growing very fast, and they are both good in quality and technology," said Borgo. Sales of Chinese self-developed SUVs increased 58 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2016, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. "I know there have been a lot of beautiful SUVs and electric cars developed in China in recent years. We need to provide better tires for them," said Borgo. Borgo said China's automotive market is in volatility, but demand for premium cars is still growing rapidly. According to Borgo, the Chinese market for prestige cars including Porsche, Ferrali and Lamborghini, which are partners of Pirelli, grew by 26 percent year-on-year in 2015. Also, sales of premium cars in China, including BMW, Audi, Volvo and Mercedes-Benz, grew 7.5 percent year-on-year in 2015, according to Borgo. Gregorio Borgo, director of general operations of Pirelli. [Provided to China Daily] "So, we are still expecting rapid growth in the Chinese tire market due to the growing demand for luxury cars," said Borgo. Borgo made the remarks after Pirelli launched its latest P Zero tire in the Asia-Pacific region in Shanghai on Tuesday. Also, Pirelli, the official Formula One tire supplier, launched a new variantDragon Sportto address the local needs in the Asian market. The Dragon Sport tire, a product fully developed and manufactured in Pirelli's Yanzhou plant in Shandong province, is the company's answer to the growing needs of brand sensitive owners of midrange class and synergic vehicles, said Borgo. Guiseppe Cattaneo, chief executive of Pirelli Asia-Pacific, said the company would expand its retail network considerably to take advantage of the growing demand for privately owned cars. "The tire replacement market in China has not been fully explored yet. This is both a challenge and an opportunity for Pirelli," he said. China National Chemical Corp's acquisition of a controlling stake in Pirelli, which was announced about a year ago, would certainly push forward the development of its business in China, said Cattaneo. BEIJING - Chinese bank loans to small businesses grew in March as government policy continued to support such firms to bolster jobs and growth, the central bank said on Wednesday. Outstanding loans extended to small businesses in China rose by 14.5 percent year on year to 18.75 trillion yuan ($2.8 trillion) by the end of March, up 0.6 percentage points from the end of 2015, according to the People's Bank of China (PBOC). The growth was two and five percentage points higher respectively than the growth rates of loans received by large- and mid-sized businesses by the end of March. The loans to small businesses accounted for 30.3 percent of China's total loans to enterprises as of the end of March, up 0.6 percentage points from the same period last year, the PBOC said. Chinese authorities have encouraged banks to support the development of small businesses, which have difficulty accessing bank loans. The banking regulator has implemented differential regulatory policies to improve the coverage of loans for small businesses and reduce their financing costs. Workers at Shenyang Machine Tool Co Ltd prepare for a youth vocational skills contest. WANG NAN / FOR CHINA DAILY Shenyang Machine Tool Co Ltd, China's leading machine tool manufacturer, has set up a 3 billion yuan ($463.2 million) fund for the development of smart machine tools. The company made headlines last week by launching the world's first intelligent integrated machine tool. Shenyang Machine Tool, which is transforming itself from an industrial manufacturer to an industrial service provider, also plans to build 30 smart factories this year. The new factories will provide a range of services, including leasing of machine tools and production line design. The company said that 1.38 billion yuan, or 46 percent, of the fund will be used to upgrade existing industries with intelligent machine tools, thus converting them into smart plants equipped with Shenyang Machine Tool's i5 series products. Once upgraded, they will likely have a capability to lease 4,000 smart machine tools. The fund will allocate 345 million yuan toward building a platform for technology innovation. The company said its projects are in tune with the national policy for innovation and its own larger strategy to boost profitability and competitiveness. "The fund will help Shenyang Machine Tool Co Ltd to consolidate its leading position in the industry. Also, it will help the company manage risks better by optimizing the asset structure," said Liang Qidong, vice-president of Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences. Shenyang Machine Tool's i5 series is its key product, a result of much research and development and an investment of 1.15 billion yuan. It is capable of intelligent programming, graphic diagnosis and simulation, and online analysis. i5M8, the latest product in the series, was launched last week at the Ninth China CNC Machine Tool Fair in Shanghai. The company created its machine tool leasing model in 2014. Under this model, it provides intelligent machine tools for use by small and medium-sized companies, allowing the latter to pay for the service by either the duration of the use or output. BEIJING - Before high-level government officials from nearly 30 countries and international associations of the steel industry gathered in Brussels for a three-day meeting on Monday, China was set to be blamed for the sector's grave ills. Last week saw tens of thousands of German steel workers go on strike over steel products from China, and Indian giant Tata's closing of mills in Britain also drew a media flurry against so-called dumping from China. Analysts said it's convenient for the West to point the finger at China and indulge in domestic populism for its own good. But such a poorly thought out strategy won't help lift the world out of its steel woes and serve instead to strengthen the protectionist bent of some developed economies. China: culprit or scapegoat? The fact that China is the world's largest steel producer and consumer has made it vulnerable to Western critics. But Zhang Ji, assistant minister of China's Ministry of Commerce (MOC), blamed "the slow recovery of the world economy" and "sluggish demand" for the current steel glut. "In recent years, 85-95 percent of steel produced by China has been for domestic consumption. China's annual steel consumption accounts for 45 percent of the global in total," he said Monday in an interview with Xinhua. In order to rein in production, China has stopped issuing new licenses for steel projects and begun shutting down outdated facilities. China also announced earlier this year that it will continue to reduce crude steel capacity by 100 million to 150 million tons in the next five years. Doing so would cost China 100 billion yuan in re-employing over 500,000 laid-off steel workers. "None of the money will subsidize steel exports," said Zhang. "China has no subsidy policies to stimulate steel exports; instead, it has leveraged export tariffs on some steel products ... The export tariff for billet is 20 percent and for hot-rolled wire rod 15 percent." In this context, China's crude steel production in 2015 has decreased 1.92 percent year on year, the first annual decline since 1981, with the capacity utilization rate souring to 71.2 percent, higher than the global average of 69.7 percent. To boost domestic demand, Zhang revealed that China has began large-scale infrastructure projects like the rebuilding of dilapidated houses. The automobile, machinery equipment, power and shipping sectors will see their consumption of steel rise as well. Expect demand for steel to soar to ensure China's Belt and Road Initiative becomes a reality. Westerm solution: protectionism, period Analysts said the West's solution to the current steel issue is riddled in protectionism and China bashing. At the Brussels gathering, Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker and Trade Representative Michael Froman attributed the "fundamental structural problems" in the global steel industry to China, threatening "trade action" by "affected governments including the United States," if Beijing does not take actions "timely and concrete" enough to satisfy Washington's demands. The situation on the other side of the Atlantic hasn't been much better. The European Commission issued a policy paper in March, vowing to implement trade remedies and proactive regulation regarding steel imports. In an overt gesture to single out China, the agency has 16 protective measures aimed directly at China; six of ten steel products under its investigation are related to China; the organization is investigating three Chinese mills and inflicting punitive tariffs on two steel imports. Moreover, China's exports to European nations, such as Britain and Germany, account for a small fraction of their imports both in volume and sales, not to mention that its exports are mostly of the low value-added variety, such as ordinary steel rods and plates, which many European countries no longer make and have to import anyway. Furthermore, Europe's accusations are ignorant of the fact that the fundamental reason for its undynamic steel companies and low profits lies in high costs including labor. Experts say that the United States and Europe should be more constructive in solving the industry's problems rather than engaging in a war of words with China. Excess capacity is a "shared problem" that "needs to be tackled through joint efforts," said a position paper disseminated by the Chinese delegation during the Brussels meeting. "Frequent use of trade remedy measures and other import-restrictive measures does not address the root cause of global steel overcapacity, and is detrimental to the division of labor and cooperation," noted the paper, adding that China champions free and open international trade for the steel industry. BRUSSELS - According to statistics of the World Steel Association, world output of crude steel in 2015 was 1.62 billion tons, and average capacity utilization rate 69.7 percent, 3.7 percentage points lower than the 73.4 percent in 2014, which shows that the overcapacity of the world steel sector is increasing. In view of the significant and growing capacity that exists in the global steel industry, governments of countries with big steel industries are taking immediate action to address the issue. However, due to the divergence of views on the root of the crisis, endeavors from China, the United States and the European Union (EU) play out differently. China taking concrete measures, stimulating demand Addressing a high-level conference in Brussels, China's Assistant Minister at the Ministry of Commerce Zhang Ji said: "It is the slow recovery of the world economy that causes a sluggish demand for steel products, which further leads to the overcapacity issue in the steel sector." Zhang added that any other analysis or judgment that deviates from this perception will lead to failing to find the proper solutions. China's output of crude steel in 2015 was 804 million tons, and capacity utilization rate is 71.2 percent, higher than the world average level. China is hence making great efforts to cut excess capacity in the steel sector. The Chinese government has ceased to license steel projects and started to close outdated plants and eradicate "zombie" companies. China has so far cut over 90 million tons of obsolete capacity during the 12th Five-Year period. Fixed asset investment in the steel sector has kept declining in the past two years. Fixed asset investment in the ferrous metal smelt and extrusion industry in 2015 dropped by 11 percent year-on-year. Furthermore, market competition and environmental constraints have forced a number of steel mills to exit. The State Council, China's cabinet, announced earlier this year that crude steel production capacity will be slashed by 100-150 million tons over the next five years. It is estimated that 500,000 laid-off workers will have to be resettled. "To make sure that excess capacity will be eliminated in an orderly manner, the central government has allocated an earmarked fund of 100 billion yuan ($15.45 billion), which will be used to resettle workers," Zhang said. "Not a penny of the money will be used for subsidies," he stressed. Moreover, rather than dumping steel in other countries, the Chinese government has in recent years implemented measures such as export tariffs on some steel products to reduce exports. "The export tariff for billet is 20 percent and for hot-rolled wire rod 15 percent," he said. The Chinese government is also committed to vigorously expanding the demand for steel products, Zhang said. On this front, China has taken a lot of measures such as embarking upon necessary large-scale infrastructure development projects. "In the future, China will promote the use of steel structures in buildings and greatly increase the proportion of steel structures when rebuilding shanty areas and dilapidated houses and implementing anti-seismic housing projects," he said. Currently, only 5.6 percent of Chinese buildings use steel structures. China plans to increase that proportion to over 20 percent, which would need an extra 20 million tons of steel products a year. On the international level, China's Belt and Road Initiative with a vision to strengthen connectivity and infrastructure development of countries along the route will fuel demand for steel, and delivered win-win outcomes through social and economic development, Zhang said. US, EU efforts: blaming China, using protectionist measures Besides China, steel-producing countries and regions like the United States and the European Union have also been plagued by overcapacity to different degrees. However, the EU and United States seem to be focusing their efforts on blaming China and frequently employing trade protectionist measures. US Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker and US Trade Representative Michael Froman jointly issued a statement after the high-level steel meeting in Brussels, accusing China of preventing a global solution. "Unless China starts to take timely and concrete actions to reduce its excess production and capacity in industries including steel, and works with others to ensure that future government actions do not once again contribute to excess capacity, the fundamental structural problems in the industry will remain and affected governments -- including the United States -- will have no alternatives other than trade action to avoid harm to their domestic industries and workers," their statement warned. The world's second largest steel producer, the EU, echoed the United States on this perception. Ignoring that the competitive position of the European steel sector has deteriorated significantly in recent years, the EU attributes their difficulties on China and trading practices. "Excess production of steel in third countries such as China has increased exports, depressed prices, and given rise to an unprecedented wave of, distorting the global level playing field," the EU Trade policy department said after the meeting. Last month, an European Commission report set out how the European steel sector could overcome its serious challenges, largely due to global overcapacity. The report, named "Steel: Preserving sustainable jobs and growth in Europe," contained new short-term measures to strengthen the EU's trade remedy measures to restrict steel imports. The EU is already imposing a record number of trade remedy measures. The bloc has over 100 trade defense measures in place, 37 of them targeting imports of steel products, 16 of which are from China. On Feb 12 this year, the EU opened three new anti-dumping investigations on steel products originating in China. On the same day, the EU imposed provisional anti-dumping duties on another steel product from China and Russia. Currently, there are ongoing investigations for 10 steel products, six of which concern China. Chinese steel mainly for domestic use In reality, Chinese steel products make up a tiny proportion of US and EU steel imports. As a major producer and consumer of steel, China's steel products are mainly for domestic use. "In recent years, 85-95 percent of steel produced by China have been for domestic consumption. China's annual steel consumption accounts for 45 percent of the global total," Zhang said. China used to be a net importer of steel before 2005 and is still the fifth-largest importer of steel in the world. "China imported the equivalent of 13.57 million tons of crude steel in 2015," he said, adding that China has thus contributed to the stable development of the global steel industry. Experts have said as steel excess capacity has become an acute global challenge, governments and steel-related organizations should take collective action to address the situation. All steel-producing, consuming and trading economies and raw material supply economies should step up communication and policy coordination and join hands in the endeavor to tackle the challenge of steel overcapacity. Zhao Congzhuo poses with some paper-cuttings in Shenyang, Liaoning province, April 19, 2016. [Photo/VCG] Zhao Congzhuo is a senior student in a college in Shenyang, Liaoning province. Four years ago, a flood destroyed his hometown, and his family suffered a loss that put it under more than 100,000 yuan ($15,440) debts. In order to pay for tuition and support his family, Zhao decided to start paper-cutting business when he was a freshman in college. In 2012, he set up an organization to attract nearly 300 students to join his paper-cutting business. Because Zhao's team can provide special patterns based on customers' demand, their business expanded fast. In 2013, his team signed a 40,000 yuan agreement to make paper-cutting for a company. Now, Zhao has registered his own paper-cutting firm, and also help his family to repay 50,000 yuan debts. China is pushing forward the legislation of a Credit Law that aims to strengthen the individual and corporates' credit tracking system and consolidate parallel tracking systems, according to a high-profile official. Lian Weiliang, vice-chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, the top economic planner, said on Wednesday that the Credit Law is in the making, and the current parallel credit report systems will be unified. "Fraud has become ever more common in the society. Companies and individuals have been the victim of fake products, business fraudulence and scams, loan swindle and debts escaping, academic cheating. Swindlers have to pay a price," he told the Inaugural Social Credit Construction Forum, organized by China Chengxin Credit Rating Group. Currently various credit report systems exist, such as those set up by State Administration for Industry & Commerce, People's Bank of China, Ministry of Commerce and so on. Swindlers have been able to take advantages of the cracks between different systems. Lian said China is considering unifying these systems and roll out a single "credit code" for individuals and companies. The work should be completed before end-2017, he said. BEIJING - Concerns about China's debt levels reaching a critical threshold and posing a systemic risk are overblown and the country's high debt-to-GDP ratio must be put into perspective, according to a report by an investment bank. Outstanding loans extended by China's financial institutions amounted to 98.56 trillion yuan ($15.21 trillion) by the end of March, up 14.7 percent year on year, according to data from the People's Bank of China (PBOC) on Wednesday. Some argue that China's debt-to-GDP ratio has already reached a point that could lead to systemic risk and derail growth, but we disagree, said Qu Hongbin, chief China economist with HSBC, in a report on Thursday, adding that simply comparing China's debt-to-GDP ratio with other countries was misleading. China's debt-to-GDP ratio is indeed high, and is reported to reach about 250 percent at the end of 2015. Yet this must be seen in the context of China's unusually high savings rate, which has stayed above 40 percent for two decades, Qu pointed out. HSBC's regression analysis, which uses debt data from the Bank for International Settlements, suggests that every 1 percentage point increase in the national saving rate implies a 3.6 percentage points rise in the debt level. From this perspective, China's debt levels are consistent with its high saving rate. Another factor is a financial structure dominated by banks, which means the household sector's surplus savings have been transferred into corporate investment through bank lending rather than equity financing, leading to faster debt accumulation. Equity financing accounted for less than 5 percent of total financing in the economy in the last decade, according to the report. Economic data in Q1 showed that policy easing is still effective, efficient and necessary. Some worry that stimulus will allow Beijing to abandon reform, but recent data suggests that most of the easing has gone to support infrastructure investment and mortgage lending instead of adding to overcapacity, the report said. Outstanding loans extended to small businesses rose by 14.5 percent year on year to 18.75 trillion yuan by the end of March, up 0.6 percentage points from the end of 2015, according to PBOC data. "We believe reform and reflation are not contradictory. In fact, as policy easing can help contain the risks of a 'debt deflation trap,' it can help facilitate the reform agenda by making it easier to reallocate labor and capital resources in the restructuring process," the report added. A visitor studies a model of airplane manufactured by ATR at the ongoing 16th edition of Beijing International Aviation Expo in Beijing, the capital of China on Sept 16, 2015. [Photo/Chinanews.com] China will likely see a demand of 2,300 business jets over the next five years, sending the market scale to $103.5 billion, said Minsheng Financial Leasing and Hurun Research Institute in a joint report. Such forecasts come despite the ground reality that only 300 business jets operate in the country against a total of 1,420 affordable buyers. "Business aviation in China has enormous potential," said Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman of Hurun Report, a study targeted at Asia's high net-worth individuals, adding that the market demand will increase from 1,750 to 2,300 over the next five years. Major reasons hindering the purchase include difficulties to locate flight plan approval and landing rights, and being caught under the spotlight amid the anti-corruption drive, according to the 2016 China Business Aviation Special Report. Among Chinese business jet buyers, time efficiency and sense of independence are factors they value most, added the report. "China's business jet market is growing steadily," said Jean-Michel Jacod, CEO of aviation company Dassault Falcon. The bullish view also comes as Huren Institute estimates China to have 970 dollar billionaires and 5,600 individuals with net worth over $300 million. The number of billionaires who can afford an average $45 million jet will likely reach 1,850 by the year 2021. A visitor takes a close look at the smartwatch unveiled by Lenovo Group Ltd in Beijing, May 28, 2015. [Photo/China Daily] Chinese consumers ranked the companies in the financial and technology industries as the most authentic brands while those in the education and real estate sectors the least authentic, a survey by global communications agency Cohn & Wolfe showed on Thursday. The survey, which revealed the 100 most authentic brands in China and globally, was part of the firm's global study on the authenticity of the brands in the eyes of consumers. Financial brands including Bank of China and China Merchants Bank as well as technology brands including Huawei, Alibaba and Baidu made the China Top 100 list. Traditional Chinese medicine brands Tong Ren Tang and Yunnan Baiyao were also ranked high on the list. On the global basis, Disney, Amazon, Apple, Samsung and Lego broke into the top 10 on the Global Authentic 100 brands while no Chinese brand made in the list, the survey showed. Nearly 12,000 consumers in 14 markets in the United States, Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East were surveyed in the 2016 authenticity study. The study defined authenticity based on three major attributes: reliable (delivers on promises, high quality), respectful (treats customers well, protects privacy and data) and real (genuine, communicates honestly, acts with integrity). The survey showed that Chinese consumers are the least cynical toward brands as 36 percent of them believe that brands and companies are "open and honest" while the number is 23 percent in the US, 13 percent in Singapore, 7 percent in Germany and 5 percent in Sweden. The attribute of "being real" ranked more important in China than elsewhere, indicating that Chinese consumers put more value on being genuine and acting with integrity, the survey showed. Potential homebuyers examine a property project model in Nanjing, East China's Jiangsu province, Feb 28, 2016. [Photo/VCG] China's second-tier cities have come to the fore in home price front following tightened regulation in some first-tire ones. The latest statistics on housing prices released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) indicate that Xiamen took the lead in increase in new commercial house price in March, replacing the former top runner Shenzhen. New home prices in the coastal city Xiamen in Southeast China's Fujian province rose 5.4 percent from February, followed by a 4.6 percent increase in Hefei, capital of East China's Anhui province. Moreover, Hefei overtook Beijing and Shanghai to secure the top place in home resale prices with a 9.3 percent month-on-month increase. Behind the rise The dazzling performance of the second-tier cities came after Shenzhen and Shanghai took measures to rein in the red hot property market by raising down-payment loans for second-hand houses and lifting the threshold for second-hand home buyers. The frenzy in first-tier cities have spread to other major cities, said Zhang Dawei, chief analyst with Centaline Property, a real estate agency, as quoted by 21 Century Business Herald. In Zhuhai, South China's Guangdong province, residential home prices have kept rising since the beginning of this year, hitting a record high of 14,668 yuan ($2,264) per square meter, according to statistics by Centaline Property. The average housing prices in Xiamen exceeded 20,000 yuan per sq m in the first quarter, higher than the first-tire city Guangzhou. In some areas in Nanjing, capital of East China's Jiangsu province, home prices reached up to 40,000 yuan per square meter, raising concerns of local pricing authorities. Property developers' zest for land in second-tier cities is another major factor driving local housing prices. In the first three months, key property developers spent 63.65 billion yuan on land acquisition in second-tier cities, representing 53.6 percent of the total land purchase expenditure, according to Centaline Property. The land premium rate in second-tier cities have reached a three-year high of 53.07 percent in Q1, noted CITIC Securities, a securities broker, in a real estate research report. Destocking in process The boom in the property market has driven up China's GDP to a certain extent. It also showed that the governments' "de-stocking" policy have taken some effects. According to the NBS' preliminary estimates of Q1 GDP, the amount of real estate industry came to 1.08 trillion yuan in absolute terms, up 9.1 percent year on year, the largest rise among all sectors. The fast rises in home prices mainly existed in first-tier and some of the hotspot second-tier cities, and the prices in the remaining second-tier cities and the third-tier ones were relatively flat, said Liu Jianwei, senior statistician with the NBS. In general, a majority of provinces and cities are still trying every means to destock, he added. Further regulation in pipeline? Following the rapid rises in home prices, some local authorities have started to take action. On March 19, the local land authority in Nanjing announced its land supply plan for 2016, which increased the annual supply by 30 percent from the previous year. On March 28, the banking regulator of Jiangsu province issued a document, asking for strict examination of the sources of down-payment loans and alerting potential financial risks in cities like Nanjing and Suzhou. Market players are guessing whether Nanjing will follow the suit of Shenzhen to raise down-payment loans for second-hand homes. Frequently refreshed land-bidding price records, coupled with the fact that land prices were even higher than the existing housing prices in some areas, may make some second-tier cities the next target of stricter regulation, said Zhang. The first advertisement by a top Chinese internet celebrity was put under hammer on Thursday. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn] The first advertisement by a top Chinese internet celebrity was put under hammer on Thursday, with a top bidder offering to pay a record high 22 million yuan$3.4 millionfor for advertising in one online video clip. The auction, dubbed the first of its kind in China's new media sector, was for sales of the post-credits advertisement in one video clip by Papi Jiang. Papi Jiang, whose real name is Jiang Yilei, gained 11.59 million fans on Sina Weibo by producing and posting funny video clips of one-woman sketches. The auction was held both online and offline simultaneously. The bidding started at 217,000 yuan and closed at 22 million yuan within 7 minutes. The highest bidder is a Shanghai-based cosmetic firm, Lily& Beauty. The jaw-dropping auction is an the tip of the iceberg of China's booming web star economy-a business that allows cyber personalities to monetize their fame by using their influence on fans. The 29-year-old Papi Jiang received a 12 million yuan investment from venture capital firms in March. Papi Jiang didn't show up at the auction in person. But her business partner, Yang Ming, said at the event that they are going to donate all of the net income from the auction to their alma mater -the Central Academy of Drama. Zhang Quanliang,a former hostess at China Central Television and a partner of venture capital firm Zijiu Foundation, said that timing is important for a web star. Not all people who can produce attractive content can become a celebrity online, she said. There are also risks in policy. Earlier this month, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television ordered Papi Jiang to take her videos offline because of her use of "swear words and insulting language". The modified videos were available again on Monday, and Papi Jiang also released a new one talking about weight loss - without salty language. BEIJING - Chinese Vice-Premier Wang Yang welcomed US enterprises to strengthen exchanges with their Chinese counterparts in high and new technology on Wednesday. Wang made the remarks when meeting with Chuck Robbins, Chief Executive Officer of American tech-giant CISCO. As China is promoting the Internet Plus drive, the country is welcoming CISCO and other US businesses to have in-depth cooperation with Chinese companies, enhance exchanges in high and new technology and grasp market opportunities, Wang said. Wang hoped such cooperation would bring mutual benefit and contribute to building a new type of major-country relations between China and the United States. President Xi Jinping greets personnel on Wednesday at the Central Military Commission's Joint Command Headquarters, where he called on the Chinese military to continue improving its capabilities for joint command.[Photo by Zhou Chaorong/China Daily] Officers told to study art of command and operation, build an efficient system President Xi Jinping urged the Chinese military on Wednesday to continue to improve its joint command capability. Xi, also chairman of the Central Military Commission, gave the instruction on an early-morning visit to the commission's Joint Command Headquarters in Beijing. During the visit, it was announced that the president had become commander-in-chief of the CMC Joint Command Headquarters. Xi told officers at the headquarters to concentrate on studying the art of command and operation and to build a professional and efficient joint command system. He told them to regard their positions at the headquarters as their combat positions on the battlefield, ordering them to effectively handle any kind of contingencies and to resolutely safeguard the country's sovereignty, security and development interests. Xi said one of the major goals of the ongoing military reform is to strengthen the capabilities of the CMC Joint Command Headquarters. He stressed that headquarters officers must have a clear sense of crisis and hone their ability for "informationized warfare". "We will take special measures to train professionals for joint operations ... and speed up the development and deployment of advanced military technologies," he told senior commanders and officers. Xi also told the headquarters to improve personnel grouping, streamline operational procedures and share its experience with regional joint commands. The president wore a camouflage uniform during his visit, which was the first time a Chinese president had inspected a top military body in a combat uniform and the second time Xi had appeared in public in such a uniform. Xi wore a camouflage uniform for the first time in January 2014 when he inspected a border defense regiment in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region. Xu Liangcai, a senior officer at the Joint Staff Department under the People's Liberation Army Southern Theater Command, said modern warfare features a high level of joint operation and sophisticated command, requiring a joint command system with good control of information and excellent precision in maneuvers. China is committed to fighting drug crime and will continue to support the work of UN anti-narcotics agencies, according to State Councilor Guo Shengkun. Guo said the country will play an "active part in international and regional cooperation and jointly combat ... transnational crimes". He was speaking at a special United Nations session convened on Tuesday to discuss the global drug problem. UN member states are addressing international drug control at the session, which began on Tuesday and will end on Thursday. World leaders, public health officials and human rights activists are calling for reforms to an objective proposed during a special session on drugs convened in 1998, which focused on eliminating illegal drugs. Guo said countries should avoid political factors in anti-narcotics efforts or using drugs as a pretext to interfere with nations' internal affairs, adding that developed countries should provide funding and technical assistance to developing ones. China's efforts to combat illegal drugs include seizing more than 750 million tons of drugs in the past decade and prosecuting more than 1 million drug cases. "We are ready to work with the international community to build partnership for mutual benefit, advance the cause of drug control, and work tirelessly for the health, safety and well-being of mankind," Guo said. A county in Nantong, Jiangsu province, suspended operations at 28 chemical factories after parents said pungent emissions had sickened their children. The case follows the sickening of hundreds of students at another school in the province recently. Since mid-April, many parents of children at Hai'an Chengnan Experimental Elementary School, located near the plants, have complained that their children experienced nosebleeds, skin rashes and coughs. "My daughter keeps saying that the air at the school smells funny and her nose is itching," said Li Caixia, the mother of a 9-year-old. "Many parents gathered in front of the school to protest the air pollution," she said. "I'll stop sending my child to school if the air quality doesn't improve." According to the online news outlet ThePaper.cn, more than 20 of the 50 students in a second-grade class have shown symptoms of health problems. On Monday, representatives of parents met with the head of the elementary school and urged the school to solve air quality problems. "We want the environmental protection bureau to monitor the air quality on a daily basis," said Yue Qiuyi, a mother whose daughter attends second grade. "The government should make it clear to us whether the symptoms are connected to the air pollution." The local government has formed 23 teams to inspect the 28 chemical factories and make sure they have stopped production as ordered. A professional inspection company has also been invited to test the air. The results will be released to the public as soon as possible, the government said. Patients receive treatment at Desheng Community Health Service Center in Beijing on Wednesday. Doctors say more than 90 percent of the patients that regularly use the facility are over 60 years old. Jiang Dong / China Daily Govt to promote grassroots care to gain efficiency Family doctors can help ensure universal access to basic health and medical care across China and will receive new emphasis, according to senior leaders in the government. Priority groups to be covered by family doctors' services include the elderly, those with chronic diseases, those with serious mental health issues, pregnant women, children and people with disabilities, according to a statement released after a conference of leaders earlier this week. More efforts will be made to expand the availability of family doctors, such as making improvements to their career security, the statement said. The new focus will contribute to a better distribution of medical resources at the grassroots level, it said. As the average age in China increases, it is expected that family doctors will play a bigger role in the basic health and medical care available to most residents. Under a guideline to improve grassroots health services released by the National Health and Family Planning Commission last year, for example, every family in China is likely to have a qualified family doctor by 2020. The services of family doctors will be promoted among key groups first, starting with the elderly, the guideline said. The number of people 60 years of age or older in China hit 212 million at the end of 2014 and accounted for more than 15 percent of the population, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs. Prominent population experts estimate that by 2050 the older age group will account for as much as one-third of the country. Han Zhengzheng, director of the Desheng Community Health Service Center, in Beijing's Xicheng district, said the number of family doctors at the center has grown to 23 since it started offering such services in 2011. It now serves nearly 18,000 residents. "More than 90 percent of the patients that regularly see family doctors are over 60 years old," she said. "The family doctors mostly provide services aimed at common chronic diseases such as diabetes." A resident of the Desheng community praised the convenience: "It is very nice to have doctors near home," the resident, surnamed Ma, said. Ma, who has hypertension, said the health center is only a 10-minute walk from home, so she can easily visit her doctor, Fan Li, whenever she has problems. "I come here mostly to get checked up and get medicine. I don't think it is necessary to go to a big hospital, where I have to wait in a long line to see a doctor," she said. Unlike specialized doctors at big hospitals, Fan provides general healthcare and medical services, including health guidance. Recently Ma signed up her 6-year-old son with Fan for advice on nutrition, she said. Du Xueping, head of the general practice committee of the Chinese Medical Doctor Association, said promoting family medicine can optimize distribution of limited resources. Patients can solve many problems with a family doctor without turning to a big hospital first, Du said. Contact the writers at wangxiaodong@chinadaily.com.cn and shanjuan@chinadaily.com.cn Earlier this month, Peter Reis, senior vice-president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation in the United States, visited gay men who frequent Mudanyuan Park in north Beijing. Free HIV tests were being offered by mobile HIV-testing vehicles sponsored by the foundation in partnership with the YouAn Hospital. A young man approached one of the vans for a rapid test conducted with an oral swab. The result, which was ready in about 15 minutes, showed he was HIV-negative. "I come here almost every week to meet friends and usually have a test," he said. "I play around too much so I need regular HIV screening." According to Cheng Xiang, who heads a community-based anti-AIDS organization, sexually active gay men should take the test every three months. "But we never turn down a request for a test," he said. Reis said it's good for people to actively seek HIV tests because one's health status is an individual right. In Los Angeles, where the foundation is based, five mobile testing vans travel around the streets providing free rapid tests. To improve public access to its services, the foundation also provides tests at facilities such as stores and pharmacies. In the US, more than 80 percent of people with HIV/AIDS have been diagnosed, but it is estimated that 32 percent of people with the disease in China remain undiagnosed. The first step to containing the disease in China is to identify the patients and provide them with timely treatment, according to Xiao Dong, who heads the mobile-testing team at Mudanyuan Park. Also, a higher proportion of patients in China are diagnosed late, which means they miss the "golden period" for treatment. The team now has five electric minivans in the Chinese capital, manned by 15 volunteers. They provide free tests, particularly to young gay men, and help to link those in need with follow-up treatment, Xiao said. The vans travel to areas frequented by gay men, such as bars, bathhouses and parks, to provide intervention and care. "Some of the volunteers speak English, so foreigners are welcome to come for free tests too," Xiao said. Testing kits that use oral swabs and blood samples can usually provide a result in 15 minutes, he added. Follow-up counseling and treatment referrals are given to those who test positive. China's gay men population has been hard hit by HIV/AIDS. "They don't like going to government-run clinics for tests because the government workers don't know the community well," he said. Wu Zunyou, head of the National Center for AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Disease Control and Prevention, said that to better provide tests and intervention for the high-risk group, the health authorities have increased cooperation with community-based organizations and outsource AIDS-control services to them. He welcomed the pioneering initiative: "It will help to supplement the current testing methods and reach out to the most-susceptible more actively." Reis said the AIDS Healthcare Foundation is now planning to bring more testing vehicles to Beijing. Experts say faster testing methods and earlier treatment are essential to curb an epidemic spreading among young gay men, as Shan Juan reports. Almost every day for the past seven years, "Old" Peng has visited a hillside pavilion in Beijing's Dongdan Park. The 60-something gay man is usually looking for a casual sexual encounter, but he also spends time listening to gay men who are struggling with their sexual orientation, and distributing condoms and tips on how to prevent becoming infected with HIV. Although the number of young gay men visiting the park, a well-known haven for the gay community, has fallen in recent years, Peng and five fellow volunteers from the Dongcheng district disease control and prevention center still performed about 6,000 rapid HIV tests last year. The park, 2 km east of Tian'anmen Square, has long been a popular venue for gay men from across China looking to land a date and experience a sense of belonging, according to Peng. In recent years, an increasing number of young gay men have moved from physical meeting places to gay dating sites, and now about two-thirds of the men who regularly visit the park are middle-aged or older. The move to the internet is one of Peng's biggest concerns: "It makes it even harder now to reach young gay men and provide AIDS intervention, but the HIV epidemic is exploding among them." Wu Hao, a leading AIDS specialist at the Beijing YouAn Hospital at the Capital Medical University, said nearly 90 percent of HIV/AIDS cases reported in Beijing last year involved gay men. In 2013, the figure was around 70 percent. Nationally, the incidence of HIV among gay men has soared to 8 percent from less than 1 percent in 2003, according to statistics from national sentinel surveillance sites, which measure the incidence of disease via a limited network of carefully selected sites. By contrast, the national incidence of HIV is less than 0.1 percent. "An HIV epidemic is exploding among the nation's gay men population," Wu warned. Higher risks Experts estimate that China's gay men population is 25 to 30 million, but the number is not recognized by the government. Same-sex marriage has not been legalized, which makes it hard for gay men to settle down with a partner, according to Peng. In addition, many practice anal sex, which carries a far higher risk of HIV transmission than other sexual activity. Shang Hong, director of the HIV/AIDS key lab at the National Health and Family Planning Commission, said a survey conducted in 11 major cities last year found that the HIV prevalence rate among 8,943 men who have sex with men was 9.9 percent. Furthermore, only 4.9 percent of men with HIV informed casual sexual partners of their positive status, and nearly 46 percent reported having unprotected sex. Intravenous drugs users are at greatest risk, she added. Despite growing public tolerance of gay men, discrimination and social stigma still exist, and about 20 to 30 percent marry to mask their true sexual orientation, according to a 2014 study conducted by Shang's team. Gay men in this situation are more likely to seek sex with male prostitutes, increasing their chances of contracting HIV, Shang said. "Their wives and children are at risk as well," she added, noting that many married gay men conform to social pressures by having sex to produce children, thus further increasing the chances that their partners and offspring may contract the disease. She warned that without effective intervention, the epidemic could spread to the wider public. A small tornado swept through a track and field meet at a primary school in Guazhou county, Northwest China's Gansu province, at 4:25 pm on Wednesday. [Photo/Sina weibo account of CCTV] Chinese President Xi Jinping, also head of the central Internet security and informatization leading group, presides over a symposium on cyberspace security and informatization in Beijing, capital of China, April 19, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua] President Xi Jinping on Tuesday called for "more tolerance and patience" toward netizens and welcomed online criticism, "whether mild or fierce", as long as it arises from goodwill. Xi made the remarks at a rare, high-profile meeting as the country's 700 million internet users got more say in social governance and public events. The president also urged speeding up legislation of a cyber-law, improving legal supervision and preventing risks caused by the internet. Xi's speech resonated greatly among entrepreneurs, experts and officials. Shen Yi, deputy chief of cyberspace management research center at Fudan University, believes spring of the internet is coming, referring to how the speech addressed the internet's development in China and its strategies. Jack Ma, founder and chairman of Alibaba Group, said, "This is the first high-profile meeting in the internet field for our country. Not only does the meeting show how much China values the internet as a national strategy, but the country has a quite high level in both practice and theory on the development of the internet. I'm firm about the internet development in China after the speech." Xiong Huang, a researcher at Communication University of China, said the speech is a framework for the development and application of the internet in the future, to benefit the people and nation better. Zuo Xiaodong, vice president of the China Information Security Research Institute said "The firm leadership helps guarantee cyber security and informatization, concerning the nation's long-term development." And he also said "There will be a new phase for internet development in China." Lu Zhengyao, chairman of UCAR Technology Inc, said internet companies assemble the most innovation, talent, creativity and ideas, which can contribute more to society. Tang Xujun, director of the Institute of Journalism and Communication at CASS, said "China is transforming its role from a follower, a peer into a leader in the development of internet information. The internet has been playing a growing, crucial role in economic development in China." Zheng Lei, assistant to the dean in School of International Relations & Public Affairs in Fudan University said: "To develop our internet industry, we can do so much more in fields like big data, integration between online and offline, data share and access, shared economy and others." As a tech veteran in R&D of fundamental technology in internet and information, Yao Hongyu said he was inspired by the speech. He said financial benefit is not the only goal when it comes to network security or information technology. "We have to focus on our fundamental technology and basic theoretical research to enhance the internet development in our country," Yao said. Xiao Xinguang, chief technology officer at Antiy Labs, a Chinese company specializing in antivirus engines, said he was elevated by the speech on network security. "I would lead the team to create better products for internet security, increasing the ability of internet security defense that was emphasized in Xi's speech," Xiao said. The Communist Party of China and political parties of Arab countries should take the lead in helping China and Arab countries build a "community of shared destiny", an official in charge of the CPC's international exchanges suggested today. Song Tao, minister of the International Department of the CPC Central Committee, made the remarks in the opening ceremony of a two-day dialogue between the CPC and political parties in Arab countries. The dialogue, which has attracted delegates from 16 Arab countries, most of whom are members of political parties, was launched in Yinchuan, Ningxia Hui autonomous region. Song, the CPC official, said China is willing to share its experience in development with Arab countries, and hopes to learn from the latter's time-honored civilization and development practice. He called for political parties in China and Arab countries to facilitate "pragmatic cooperation" between China and the Arab world by dovetailing the Belt and Road Initiative and Arab countries' efforts to diversify their economies, and to contribute to China-Arab counterterrorism cooperation. By always treating each other with respect and openness, China and Arab countries "set up an example of how countries of different civilizations, institutions and faiths can coexist in harmony", Song said. He added that political parties from both sides should advocate for tolerance and exchanges, and prevent extreme ideas from causing estrangement between different civilizations. Former Egyptian prime minister Essam Sharaf said through the interpreter that he looked forward to "China's wisdom to stop the situation of the Middle East from deteriorating, and that the CPC's practice has inspired political parties in the Arab world. "The achievements China, a big country, has obtained are closely linked to the CPC," he said. He added that there is great room for China-Arab cooperation to grow, and that the Belt and Road Initiative is the best way to enhance the cooperation to the expected level. President Xi Jinping delivers a speech for the opening day of the World Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21) at Le Bourget, near Paris, France, November 30, 2015. [Photo/Xinhua] As President Xi Jinping's special envoy prepares to sign the Paris Agreement on climate change on Friday in New York City, international environmental groups are praising China for significantly increasing the chances that the agreement can take effect before the 2020 deadline. China will sign the historic climate agreement with the United States the two countries account for 38 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions and about 160 other nations. The signing of the agreement, which was reached in December, will take place at United Nations headquarters on Friday, which is also International Mother Earth Day. The president's special envoy, Vice-Premier Zhang Gaoli, is also scheduled to meet with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and some state leaders about further cooperation. After the signing ceremony, China will begin the legal process to join the agreement and will ratify it as soon as possible, said Su Wei, director of the Department of Climate Change of the National Development and Reform Commission. Countries that don't sign the agreement on Friday will still have a year to do so. Countries that sign must then have the agreement ratified by their own legislative procedures. At least 55 countries, representing at least 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, must ratify the agreement before it can take effect. The agreement aims to hold the increase in the global average temperature to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to work toward limiting the increase to 1.5 C. China and the US have announced that they will join the agreement this year. There are indications that more countries will also join this year. President urges new agencies to improve PLA's combat capability and readiness China has reshuffled its top armed forces agency, the Central Military Commission, as President Xi Jinping accelerates the massive, multilevel reform of the People's Liberation Army. The previous four military headquarters - staff, politics, logistics and armaments - were dismantled and their functions and duties are now shared by 15 new agencies under the Central Military Commission. The silent film The Great Dictator is screened in Chaplin's World, an interactive museum in Switzerland.[Photo/Agencies] Imagine moving along the cogs of giant machinery like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, or tumbling down a cabin teetering on the edge of a cliff as he did in Gold Rush. An ambitious, immersive museum showcasing the life and works of the groundbreaking filmmaker that opened in Switzerland on Sunday, is now making it possible. Chaplin's World, 15 years in the planning, premiered in the picturesque village of Corsier-sur-Vevey on Lake Geneva one day after what would have been the British screen legend's 127th birthday. "He wanted people to remember him. That's why he did the films and he did it in such a perfectionist way," says Chaplin's 62-year-old son, Eugene. "I think he would be pleased." The museum is set on the vast estate of Manoir de Ban, about 26 kilometers from Lausanne, where Chaplin spent the last 25 years of his life until his death in 1977, aged 88. He had moved to Switzerland after being barred from the United States in the 1950s over suspicion that he had communist sympathies, at the height of paranoia about Soviet infiltration. On the Swiss Riviera overlooking the lake with a view of the Alps in the distance, the large manor where Chaplin lived with his wife, Oona, and their eight children forms half of the museum, retracing the filmmaker's private life. Chaplin's 70-year-old son, Michael, recalls what it was like living in the mansion, with around a dozen helpers. "It was like Downton Abbey, on a reduced level. For a child it was wonderful," he says, recalling all the great hiding places. A separate building has been built nearby as a large mock-up of a Hollywood studio dedicated to Chaplin's on-screen work that began around 1914. Visitors can also catch a glimpse of the artist's humble beginnings in London and his spectacular rise to become one of the biggest, most influential movie legends in Hollywood history. With clips from his iconic films flickering from a multitude of screens, visitors can walk down Easy Street, visit the barber shop from The Great Dictator and the restaurant where he ate his shoe in The Immigrant. "What really touched me is how they managed to make his films come alive again by inserting clips into decors," Michael Chaplin says, recalling how his father "was always in movement, and that part of the museum is in total movement, which is beautiful". Chaplin's World is also dotted with more than 30 wax figures created by the Grevin wax museum in Paris. The lifelike figures portray Chaplin as different characters, his wife, other actors and actresses from his films, friends and people who mattered to him like Albert Einstein, as well as artists inspired by his work like Michael Jackson and Woody Allen. "We worked very hard to make a museum that would be as true as possible," curator Yves Durand says. "We are there to tell a story about a real life that was Charlie Chaplin's life, and about a fictional life that was his work." In a narrow room resembling a Swiss bank vault, one can find some of the iconic objects associated with Chaplin's work, including his bowler hat and cane of his Little Tramp persona, and the ripped trousers and patched shoes he wore in The Kid. The museum project has faced numerous stumbling blocks over more than 15 years of drawn-out negotiations. It took seven years to get a building permit, and before that organizers had to wait five years to settle a lawsuit brought by a neighbor worried about the implications of the project. Eugene Chaplin admits the transformation of Manoir de Ban, where he was born in 1953 and lived until 2008, was difficult and says he had stayed away while the work was being done. "I didn't want to see the bulldozers digging into the grass. It's a lot of memories," he says. But he is thrilled with the final result. "This is the perfect place to show my father's films, to remember his work and his life, in a place where he was so happy." Online songs can no longer be downloaded free of charge. [Photo/IC] "China has vowed to better protect the music industry by ending the free online music sharing and downloading era," said Yan Xiaohong, deputy director of China's National Copyright Administration (NCAC) on April 19. Chinese Internet users have long been fond of downloading the latest chart-topping songs from music websites or online portals, as most sites offer the tunes for free. Therefore, most people have yet to develop the habit of paying for what they listen to and the music websites are used to illegally uploading music without permission. In tackling the issue, the administration has issued the Notice for the Online Music Providers on the Shutdown of Unauthorized Music Distribution Service on June 8 last year. A total of 16 music websites or apps have acted in strict accordance with the notice with over 2.2 million illegal songs have been pulled out from the music websites within two months. For instance, Baidu MP3, a music sharing platform, has taken down a number of over 642,000 tracks after the copyright clean-up. American filmmaker John Hughes speaks at a signing ceremony in Beijing, April 19, 2016. [Photo/chinanew.com] American filmmaker John Hughes, who has led his colleagues to win six Oscars and been responsible for visual effects in some 100 Hollywood movies, plans to set up a filmmaking center in Beijing. Hughes signed an agreement with the administrative committee of the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area on April 19, marking the official launch of a visual effects company and visual arts center, both named after him, in Yizhuang of Daxing district in the southeastern suburbs of Beijing. Dubbing himself a "white-collar worker", Hughes has been learning Chinese for five consecutive years and even has a Chinese name - Zhang Chi. Today's filmmaking is an integration of art and technology, and a strong technological background is a must-have, he said. Hughes expressed his hope that the Beijing filmmaking center will bring US technologies into China and promote Chinese movies on the international market. So far, his Beijing visual effects company has finished registration procedures and will begin with visual effects making, visual product development, education/training, as well as virtual reality-related hardware, software and content development, he said. The art center will be co-funded by Hughes' Beijing company and FTC Global, a leading venture incubator. They will work to build a filmmaking ecosystem covering early development, content, post-production, visual effects, education/training, and financial services. The center will also serve as a bridge to facilitate cooperation between Beijing and Hollywood in film and TV. Liang Sheng, director of the administrative committee of the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, welcomed the move, saying the project will help improve the overall capability of Yizhuang's technology-oriented cultural industry. Hughes and his colleagues have won the Academy Visual Effects and Scientific & Technical Awards six times. They grabbed the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for Life of Pi in 2013. Other movies they have worked on include The Golden Compass, Batman, The Fast and the Furious, The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter film series. They were also responsible for HD production of Germany's Harry Potter theme park, as well as animation software development for DreamWorks and Walt Disney. Musicians from China play drums at the opening ceremony of the 4th International Festival for Drums and Traditional Art in Cairo, Egypt, April 19, 2016. The International Festival for Drums and Traditional Arts is part of the 2016 Sino-Egyptian Culture Year jointly launched by Egypt and China to mark the 60th anniversary of the establishment of their diplomatic relations in a bid to intensify their already strong cultural ties. [Photo/Xinhua] The UN Chinese Language Day was created by the UN to pay tribute to Cangjie, a mythical figure who is credited with having invented Chinese characters around 5,000 years ago.[Photo/Xinhua] Through the network of Confucius Institutes in the country, Colombians are joining those in other Latin American countries to celebrate the United Nation's Chinese Language Day on Wednesday. Colombia has three Confucius Institutes, two in Bogota at the Los Andes and Jorge Tadeo Lozano universities, and one in Medellin, tied to the EAFIT and Antioquia universities. Marta Ferro, coordinator of the institute at Jorge Tadeo Lozano University, told Xinhua that Colombians are increasingly keen on learning Chinese. "The growth has been incredible in the last three years. We are seeing annual growth of between 80 and 90 percent. Over half of our classes are for students in our university and half for others," explained Ferro. She also feels that the Confucius Institutes in Colombia have encouraged the country's students to travel to China as "classes also serve to understand Chinese culture, the teachers also discuss history and culture, which creates enthusiasm. Forty-five of our students have already been to China to take part in summer camps." One of the students in the institute, Karen Marin, who is studying marketing and Chinese, said "it is very enriching to learn Chinese as we are used to learning other languages, like English. At the same time, we also learn a lot about Chinese culture. The most difficult thing until now has been studying characters, but I enjoy it." A food expo was held in Beijing to promote farm products from Wuzhong, Ningxia Hui autonomous region. [Photo by Jiang Dong/China Daily] An exhibition to promote food products and agricultural produce from Wuzhong city, Ningxia Zhuang autonomous region, was held recently in the Cultural Palace of Nationalities in Beijing. Located in the central part of Ningxia, Wuzhong city has a population of 1.43 million, of which half is Muslim. With a favorable natural environment and climate, the city is famous for its agricultural produce. The exhibition area of more than 1,400 square meters, featured the city's signature produce including wine, organic food, beef and mutton. This year, Wuzhong city also plans to hold similar exhibitions in 16 cities including Shanghai, Xiamen in Fujian and Guangzhou in Guangdong province, to promote its agricultural products. Related: Popular eatery's duck tastes flight online I first discovered China Daily a few years ago. It was my first visit to China, and I was waiting for my tour guide to arrive. I sat down in the lobby of the St. Regis hotel in Beijing, and picked up an English-written newspaper with the title (in its famous capital white and blue letters) CHINA DAILY. I opened the newspaper, and from that day on, in every hotel I visited, when the staff asked me, "Would you like a newspaper delivered to your room?" I would always answer, "Do you have China Daily?" And if they said no, there would be no newspaper in my room the next morning. Why had I immediately taken a liking to China Daily after just one reading of it? I think that China Daily is a very influential newspaper for many reasons. First of all, China Daily writes about both Western and Chinese culture, so both sides of the world can learn something about their cultural traditions. An example to support this reason is an article I read just the other day: When the Bard met his Chinese Match. This article is about how both China and the UK will honor their most famous playwrights with a series of events this year. The playwrights are, William Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu. Both the wonderful playwrights died in 1616, and China Daily wrote an article about the events to honor these writers this year. The newspaper managed to compare two influential playwrights from China and the UK. The Northern Arizona Intergovernmental Public Transportation Authority is creating a citizen review commission to provide input on the agencys proposed 2016 transit tax renewal. The CRC is comprised of representatives from various industries and organizations across Flagstaff, many of whom participated in a similar CRC for NAIPTAs 2008 ballot initiatives. The role of the current CRC will be to review results from a survey of likely voters and make recommendations to NAIPTA staff and consultants on the best path forward for a transit tax renewal. The first CRC meeting will be held on Thursday, April 21 from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. and is open to the public. The meeting will be held at NAIPTA Office, VERA Room, 3773 N. Kaspar Drive, Flagstaff, AZ 86004. NAIPTA is the transit agency in northern Arizona operating the Mountain Line, Mountain Lift and Mountain Link systems in Flagstaff. NAIPTA also coordinates services with Campus Shuttle Service at Northern Arizona University. Visit www.naipta.az.gov for more information. Chinese and US navy officers pose on Dec 13 in a "shaka" gesture, a Hawaiian way to say "hello", onboard the PLA Navy's Ji'nan flagship. From left: Captain Stanley Keeve; Defense Attach Major General Xu Nanfeng from the Chinese Embassy in the US; Commander Wang Jianxun; Political Commissar Ye Jianlin; Captain Kevin Brand; and Senior Captain He Bing. [Photo/China Daily] China's efforts to build some strategic support bases overseas have drawn the attention of the international community. The construction of logistics facilities in Djibouti, in particular, has caused serious anxiety among the US-led Western countries, and some have expressed concerns over the establishment of such a "naval base" by China in the East African country. China's navy has actually kept a low profile around the world. Its presence cannot be compared to that of the United States, which has military bases distributed throughout the world. However, because of this, the Chinese navy cannot effectively protect China's economic interests, which now extend across the world. Hence, its efforts to establish some strategic strongholds overseas are not only necessary for it to safeguard its overseas interests, but also essential for China to actively fulfill its international responsibilities and obligations as a responsible power. The completion of the logistics facilities in the port of Djibouti will help China's navy more effectively undertake such missions as fighting pirates, conducting rescue and relief operations and transporting refugees. Their construction will also enable Chinese warplanes to play a bigger role in peacekeeping missions in conflict-stricken areas in the Middle East and Africa. The establishment of supporting strategic bases in southern Asia will also enable Chinese vessels bound for the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea to bypass Malacca for effective replenishment and maintenance. Given that 75 percent of China's oil and other strategic materials are transported via Malacca, to successfully bypass the Malacca gateway will to a large extent lower the risks associated with the transportation of essential resources to China. The building of overseas bases is a move that will enable China to safeguard its national interests and make more contributions to world development, it should not be viewed as a sign Beijing intends to challenge the US-led Western establishments.--Beijing News A deliveryman of S.F. Express is deliverying package in Zhengzhou April.19,2016.[Photo/IC] Wang Wei, CEO of the leading Chinese logistics company S.F. Express, has pledged to hold accountable a Beijing taxi driver who recently slapped one of the company's employees when his delivery cart bumped into the taxi. China Youth Daily commented on Wednesday: The 57-year-old taxi driver should have exercised restraint instead of slapping the deliveryman, who did not fight back but kept apologizing. But it would be equally wrong for anyone to take "revenge" on the taxi driver, who has already been given 10 days in detention by the Beijing police. In response, S.F. Express has stressed more than once via Sina Weibo, China's Twitter-like social media platform, that the taxi driver should be held accountable and the deliveryman he assaulted is not supposed to accept reconciliation. The CEO of the company Wang Wei also promised to "get to the bottom" of the incident, saying that otherwise he would be "unfit to lead the company" any more. Wang's anger toward the driver is understandable, but he should respect the deliveryman's decision, be it reconciling with the cabbie or accepting money as compensation. It is the deliveryman who should decide whether to take the driver to court, not his employer, which is apparently very concerned about the dignity and legal interests of its employees. However, the company should not step into the dispute. Both the CEO and his company are on shaky legal ground in regard to their online statements that repeatedly encourage the deliveryman to refuse any sort of reconciliation with the driver. The deliveryman has received due public support and attention, and the company has secured a decent reputation for defending its employees. Wang and his colleagues should now respect the decision of the deliveryman as well as his legal rights. A classroom of Jilin University of Finance and Economics.[Photo/IC] Jilin University of Finance and Economics based in Changchun, capital of Northeast China's Jilin province, recently launched new rules to regulate the daily schedule of students including the hours students can access the internet in their dormitories. Every student was asked to sign their acceptance of the new rules. China Youth Daily commented on Wednesday: It seems the university in Jilin province is pulling students back to high school. Yes, the university is supposed to be a quiet ivory tower, and students should be hard-working and well-mannered. But the problem is that there is no need to control campus life to such an extent. It is not necessarily a good thing to insist on strict control. Not all elements of the new rules and regulations have sparked controversy. For instance, in accordance with the new rules, students in general cannot bring food into the classroom and cannot send text messages or use social media during classes, which has aroused few complaints from the students for the sake of their studies. And it is agreed that students must do more physical exercises. But the students do not appreciate the university management's good intentions in bringing order to the campus. They hate being managed in such a way. Students at military schools expect to be regulated from when they wake up to when they go to bed, but students at other universities don't expect to lose their "freedom". LI FENG/CHINA DAILY The crisis caused by e-bike traffic bans in several Chinese cities makes one wonder if new generations of drones might take the place of urban couriers. Visions of some modern futuristic megacity with skies filled high, low and wide with nifty drones delivering South Korean cosmetics, urgent medicines and nanochip upgrades make for a nice place to live. Yet the e-bike crisis forces us to rethink. It is risky to ride and risky to cross the street. So the net to clean up this semi-organized chaos has severely deterred the couriers who had suddenly become ubiquitous in just the past 15 years. Seattle-based Amazon revolutionized electronic retailing under the bold inspiration of Jeff Bezos, and is now vigorously promoting drone delivery as a test concept. The principal target is delivery of packages weighing less than 2.2 kilograms within a radius of 15 kilometers. It is claimed this covers 86 percent of Amazon deliveries. The obstacles, though, may be insurmountable, beginning with flight rules that are increasing drastically as hobby drones for aerial photography become popular. To test technologies without US regulations Amazon is working on the Canadian side of the border and has another pilot study in Switzerland. YouTube promotions by Amazon are on the one hand tempting us to believe things we need could literally be coming down out of the sky, and on the other hand leaving us skeptically wondering why it looks so easy. The picture is taken when she was in Shanxi with China Daily in the program "Shanxi in the eyes of foreigners" on May last year. [Photo/China Daily] My acquaintance with China Daily started a couple of years ago when I was doing my internship with "The World of Chinese" magazine in Beijing, and was responsible for writing and uploading blogs onto the website. At that time, I was a newbie in the media world. My job was about gathering information from various media outlets focusing on China and compiling it into blogs. What I did excited me a lot, and the biggest source where I got most of the information from was China Daily. It was a trustworthy news giant where you would expect to find any timely information, local and global news, opinion, photos, polls etc. I was so impressed by the quality of the material, its openness to the audience and interest in attracting new authors, that, being an English author myself, I felt like I needed to make my contribution to the newspaper. So, here my China Daily story began. My first work was published in 2014 and was titled "Meeting the master" in their section "My China Story" which welcomed foreign authors to share their story on China. It was published a couple of months later after I had submitted it and was featured on State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs official website as well. That was a surprise for me because I didn't expect much success. The article was about my Chinese martial arts master whom I had been lucky to know some five years ago when I had been working as an interpreter. That same year I started my blog on China Daily Forum platform and met other nice authors and the managers of the platform. The author, Anastasia Sukhoretskaya poses a photo in Shanxi on May last year. [Photo taken by courtesy of Stephanie Tay provided to chinadaily.com.cn] For me, the China Daily Blog platform provided the opportunity to share with the readers the topics I was interested in myself: culture, traveling, life in China, interviews with interesting people in China that I did for "International Talent" magazine etc. I took part in the China Daily blog competition and won second place. More than that, a couple of meet-ups were organized last summer that brought together both bloggers and readers. Last autumn I interviewed Mr. Raymond Zhou, who is a columnist and writer with China Daily. He is a famous movie critic and it was such a pleasure to talk with him about Chinese, American and Russian movies. He gave me an insight into what it's like to be a movie critic. Personally, I admire his style in reviews and articles. His language is very precise and coherent. To continue, my two-year cooperation with China Daily has been quite fruitful. Last year I was chosen as one of the participants for a trip "Shanxi in the eyes of foreigners", and again, my articles appeared on the China Daily website. At the end I would say, maybe no other media helped me develop professional qualities needed for a writer, enriched my knowledge about China and brought so many new interesting friends into my life, as China Daily. It has been in the media arena for 35 years, broadcasting China news to the world and bringing two poles together, taking its firm place among other media giants. We would sincerely hope that it would broaden its international influence and get more representatives in other countries, for example, Russia; give opportunity to young journalists to showcase their abilities and continue to serve locally and internationally. If you also want to share with us your story with China Daily, please join us and click China Daily,35 years on: your memories. Expiring land use rights is a nationwide issue related to people's actual interests, and as such has drawn widespread public concern. According to media reports, the right to use some land in Wenzhou, East China's Zhejiang province, for residential purposes has already expired, but at present there is no law or regulation covering this issue. The area has been among the comparatively developed in the Chinese mainland. The media reports suggest that the fee charged residents to extend their rights to use the land may be as much as one-third the price of their housing, which has triggered heated public controversy. But in fact, it is only the estimate of the local land resource authority according to current relevant regulations, and the authority hasn't charged anyone up till now because there is no legal basis for doing so. Experts say there must be automatic extension of land use rights after the 70-year right to use the land expires, but whether the authority will charge for the extension depends on the State Council, the country's Cabinet. On Wednesday, a joint investigation group of the Ministry of Land and Resources and the Zhejiang provincial department of land and resources went to Wenzhou to investigate and research the issue. " We donated her organs so that her life will be prolonged in a different way. Now it feels like she is still alive and will never fully leave her." Zhao Wanhai, the father of Shao Ziyan, a 21-year-old mother who passed away after giving birth to twins. Protesters support former New York Police Officer Peter Liang outside a Brooklyn courthouse before his sentencing for manslaughter in the killing of Akai Gurley, in New York, April 19, 2016. [Photo/Agencies] American Chinese police officer Peter Liang was found guilty of second degree manslaughter and official misconduct for the accidental death of an African American man Akai Gurley by a grand jury in New York on February 11. Liang did not mean to shoot Gurley. An inexperienced officer, he was in service for less than a year when he was assigned to petrol Louis H. Pink House at 2724 Linden Boulevard. There was no lighting in the building at the time. He had to hold a torchlight in one hand and his gun in the other. His inexperience caused him to discharge his weapon when he heard some fast approaching steps. The bullet from his gun bounced from the wall, and accidently killed the 28-year-old Gurley. The American law allows right to possess arms. As a result, gun violence is a common occurrence in the US. It is not very uncommon that police officer exchange gun fire with suspects in the US. For that reason, American police officers are apt to shoot when they feel that their own life is at danger. Nine people are killed by police everyday on average in the US. Rarely have any police officers been held responsible for these deaths. This wanton violence has spurred several protests by African communities recently. When the accidental death of Gurley took place, the African American community was understandably upset and angry. Too many of their people are targeted and killed by police in the country. They feel the injustice of the system toward their people. They wanted to see justice being done by punishing Liang. But in the eyes of Liang and the Chinese community in the US as well as the defense lawyers, the officer was not guilty of the crimes he was charged with. He did not mean or intend to kill anybody. He discharged his weapon out of his lack of training and inexperience in a dangerous neighborhood and in dangerous circumstances. The property owners should have provided light in the buildings. The city police authorities should have provided better training for its officers, and should not send inexperienced officers to petrol dangerous neighborhood like that. Therefore when the guilty verdict was announced on February 11, the Chinese community in New York City and elsewhere were incensed. They felt that the officer was being made a scapegoate to calm the African American community in the country already incenses by the police violence. Liang should bear the burden of police violence in the country for this accident. Therefore, the American Chinese community held a nationwide demonstration to air their support for Liang on February 19, 2016. This was the first time that the community had taken to the streets to protest over the injustice of the legal system. The Flagstaff City Council officially approved higher rates for most city utilities Tuesday night by a 4 to 3 vote. The citys water rates will increase by 4.4 percent annually, sewer rates by 7 percent annually and stormwater rates by 6 percent annually for the next five years. Council also directed staff to set aside $140,000 for appliance rebates and other water conservation initiatives. However, Vice Mayor Celia Barotz and Councilmembers Eva Putzova and Coral Evans said they dont feel that Council has done enough to encourage conservation and were disappointed that the citys reclaimed wastewater system was not included in the rate increase. City staff plans to address a rate increase for reclaimed wastewater users at a later date with Council. All three said that the city should increase utility rates in order to pay for the demand on the system and infrastructure needs. However, I cannot support the water and wastewater rate increase ordinance presented to council because the policy choices reflected in the majoritys decision reflect shortsighted thinking and important missed opportunities, Barotz said. She said she was disappointed that a discussion was not held on the possibility of creating a tiered commercial water rate system, which could have incentivized businesses to conserve water. She called the one example the citys consultant, Willdan Financial Services, provided for tiered commercial water rates, flawed. Its too bad council didnt even have the chance to see an example of how they could work and then have a meaningful discussion about it, Barotz said. She also criticized the majority of Council for not considering an increase in new water connection rates for new development. A well-designed connection charge could incentivize more water-efficient building, she said. Evans also criticized not increasing water connection fees in order to help provide funding for the future Red Gap Ranch project. Red Gap Ranch is a property the city purchased about 35 miles east of the city in order to provide a future source of water for the growing city. The city is negotiating a pipeline path from the ranch to the city with the Arizona Department of Transportation. The city has not yet set aside funding for the pipeline but traditionally the city has required new growth to pay for improvements to the water system. Barotz also chastised the majority on Council for letting staff put off the discussion of reclaimed wastewater for another day. Potable and reclaimed water are part of the same system, so as part of the utility rate discussion council should have discussed whether the city should require users of A+ reclaimed water to pay something for this water as it enters the distribution system and whether this charge would impact water and wastewater rates. I fail to understand the logic behind punting on the decision on reclaimed water for another day, understanding that we may have to re-open the discussion of the new water rates depending on what council decides to charge for reclaimed water, she said. Putzova agreed and said that by looking at the water, sewer and reclaimed rates at the same time, the city could possibly have come up with a lower rate increase for water users by raising reclaimed wastewater rates and encouraging conservation at the same time. Councilmember Jeff Oravits said he didnt like the idea of raising rates but saw the increase as a $36 million investment over five years into the citys water and sewer systems and a $140,000 investment in to the citys water conservation program. Putzova said the $140,000 set aside for the citys conservation program was very little and Council could have done a better job by encouraging conservation through a better water and reclaimed wastewater tiered rate structure. A tiered system charges more per gallon for higher use. Councilmember Karla Brewster pointed out that Flagstaff is probably one of the most water conscious cities in the state. While increasing that level of conservation would be great, she didnt see the need to address it at this time. The cost of repairs and maintenance to the citys water and sewer infrastructure, she said, were more important to her. Council also deliberated a request from Mayor Jerry Nabours to put a discussion about eliminating the requirement that surrounding property owners pay into a fund for the Lone Tree Road/Interstate-40 interchange. He also requested a discussion on what to do with the fees that Pine Canyon had paid into a fund for the interchange. Nabours said he put the request on the agenda to give the Regional Transportation Plan steering committee a better idea of what funds might be available for the interchange and Lone Tree Road. The committee is working on a list of recommended road improvement plans and projects for the Flagstaff Metropolitan Planning Organization. The city is part of the FMPO along with ADOT, Coconino County, and a number of other local organizations. The majority of council said they didnt want to eliminate the requirement entirely, but a discussion about the future and progress of the interchange project with ADOT might be in order. Nabours will bring back the expanded discussion of the interchange as a new future agenda item request at the next Council meeting. Putzovas future agenda item request to discuss ways the city could implement the climate change goals in the citys Regional Plan was shot down by a 4 to 3 vote. Council also unanimously approved a series of ordinances that would annex city-owned land within the city limits and zone them as open space/parks. The properties include 640 acres of land on Observatory Mesa, 77 acres of Picture Canyon, 26 acres adjacent Buffalo Park, 1 acre of Guadalupe Park and 5 acres of land at the end of Highland Avenue. Council will start discussion on the citys 2016-17 budget during two full-day meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday of next week at City Hall, 211 W. Aspen Ave. Myanmar foreign minister Aung San Suu Kyi smiles during a press conference, April 5, 2016. [Photo/Agencies] YANGON - Myanmar's new foreign minister Aung San Suu Kyi will clarify the new government's foreign policy with foreign diplomats in Nay Pyi Taw on Friday, the Foreign Ministry said on Thursday. Invitation has been sent to 93 foreign embassies at home and abroad including a United Nations agency. Aung San Suu Kyi's official meeting with foreign diplomats as a foreign minister will be the first after the new government of the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) took office on April 1. According to deputy director-general of the Political Department of the Foreign Ministry U Ko Ko Shein, Myanmar government's foreign policy is oriented to the protection of national interests, security, economic development, justice, stability and environmental sustainability. The policy also holds in high esteem such virtues as freedom, sovereignty, culture and tradition and national solidarity, he said. There has been a dramatic shift of emphasis in Myanmar's foreign policy from "bilateral relations" to "regional integration" and "multilaterialism". Myanmar's constitution stresses that the country practices independent, active and non-aligned foreign policy. Quoting Suu Kyi, the official said the new government's foreign policy is aimed at enabling cooperation with neighboring countries in an effort to maintain peace, regionally and globally. Aung San Suu Kyi also holds the post of the government's State Counselor and Minister of the President's Office. Queen Elizabeth II arrives at the Queen Elizabeth II delivery office in Windsor with Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh on April 20, 2016 in Windsor, Britain. The visit marks the 500th Anniversary of the Royal Mail delivery service. The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh are carrying out engagements in Windsor ahead of the Queen's 90th Birthday. [Photo/Agencies] LONDON - Britain's Queen Elizabeth turns 90 on Thursday with beacons and gun salutes heralding the birthday of the world's oldest monarch, who still performs hundreds of engagements a year and shows no signs of losing her appetite for the job. Usually her birthday passes with little ceremony but to mark Thursday's landmark Elizabeth will greet well-wishers near her Windsor Castle home, west of London, and later light a beacon, the first of 1,000 to be lit across the country and worldwide to mark the occasion. There will also be artillery gun salutes in the British capital at Hyde Park and the Tower of London, while parliament will be illuminated red, white and blue. "It's really sinking in now ... just how much of a major milestone it is to have the queen celebrating her 90th, and after everything she's achieved it's quite a moment for the family," her grandson and future king Prince William said in a Sky News interview broadcast on Wednesday. Close aides say Elizabeth, who has been on the throne for 64 years, was far more interested in events to mark her 90th birthday than she had been about overtaking her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria last September as Britain's longest-reigning monarch. In May, there will be a four-day pageant at Windsor Castle, while in June there will be further events to mark her official birthday, including the Patron's Lunch, a street party for 10,000 guests on the Mall, the grand avenue leading to Buckingham Palace. Born on April 21, 1926 in Bruton Street in central London when Calvin Coolidge was US president and Joseph Stalin had just taken control in the Soviet Union, Elizabeth shows no signs of retiring, and two surveys last week suggested the public do not want her to give up either. An Ipsos MORI poll found 70 percent wanted her to stay queen compared to 21 percent who thought she should abdicate or retire, while a BMG survey for the London Evening Standard newspaper showed 66 percent of Britons had a favourable view of her compared to 10 percent with a negative opinion. "You can't put your feet up. There is no pension plan in this job," the queen's youngest son Prince Edward told Sky. Prime Minister David Cameron is due to lead political tributes in a "humble address" in parliament, an occasion which could prove awkward for opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, an ardent republican. "She has served our nation with such dignity, with such ability for so many years. I know the whole country and the whole House (of Commons) will want to join me in saying 'long may she reign over us'," Cameron said on Wednesday. On Friday, the queen will be back to her usual official duties hosting a lunch at Windsor for US President Barack Obama who described her as "a source of strength and inspiration not only for the people of Britain but for millions of people around the world" in a British TV documentary aired last month. An aerial view is seen of Pedernales, after an earthquake struck off Ecuador's Pacific coast, April 20, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua] QUITO - Ecuador continued its recovery efforts amid strong afterschocks on Wednesday, after a powerful 7.8-magnitude quake on Saturday devastated several coastal provinces. A magnitude-6.1 aftershock rattled residents along the coast Wednesday. But rescuers still pulled out three people who had been trapped by rubble in the town of Pedernales, the epicenter of the quake. The death toll stands at 525, but is expected to rise as 163 remained missing, while the number of injured has reached 5,733, according to state news agency Andes. As part of efforts to facilitate the recovery efforts, the Ecuadorian government set up a website and a toll-free telephone number for those who want to make a donation: www.ecuadorlistoysolidario.com or 1-800-002-002. Both provide information for making donations from anywhere in the world and in any currency. Donations can also be made to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), which said it delivered a 60-ton cargo of aid to Ecuador on Wednesday via a chartered plane, or directly to the Ecuadorian Red Cross: www.ammado.com/nonprofit/172557/donate. "We are working on a very big operation in six provinces that are among the most affected," the IFRC's regional director for the Americas, Walter Cotte, said in a press release. "The Ecuadorian Red Cross will focus its response in rural and remote areas and on providing support to vulnerable groups, wound management and psychosocial support," Cotte added. The Red Cross aid included 6,000 blankets, 3,000 tarpaulins, 1,500 tents, 1,000 hygiene kits, 1,000 cleaning kits, and 600 household kits. International response to what Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa described as the country's "biggest emergency in almost 70 years," has been notable, Andes said. Some 942 rescue workers from 20 countries were taking part in the recovery efforts, alongside Ecuadorian police and armed forces. BRASILIA - Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff will travel to New York on Friday for the signing ceremony of the UN Paris Agreement on climate change, her office announced Wednesday. During Rousseff's trip, Vice President Michel Temer, who has been pushing for Rousseff's impeachment, will temporarily assume the presidency. Rousseff will use her platform at the UN to address the impeachment process against her, which she describes as a coup attempt. She will have five minutes to speak at a UN ceremony, during which she is expected to lambast the "coup" and remind the world of Brazil's contributions to the climate change agreement. Rousseff had expressed reservations about leaving Brazil and allowing Temer to take over, but local media said her collaborators seem to have advised her to tell attendees at the UN about the truth of the political crisis in the country. A day before the announcement of Rousseff's trip to New York, Temer sent Senator Aloysio Nunes, one of his loyalists, to meet in Washington with Thomas Shannon, the U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs and a former American ambassador to Brazil, in order to present their side of the impeachment debate. Adopted by the 196 Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Paris Agreement sets a target of curbing the global average rise in temperature below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and preferably below 1.5 degrees. The agreement will be officially signed at the UN headquarters in New York on Friday. Zhang Jixing, president at Sinopec America and chief representative at Sinopec USA Representative Office, is confident about the new direction Sinopec is taking. MAY ZHOU / CHINA DAILY Since its first coming to the US in 1988 as a trade company, Sinopec's US operation has developed considerably in 28 years. Now there are eight subsidiaries doing business from upstream to downstream. Last year, an umbrella management company named Sinopec America, Inc. was created to consolidate and supervise all of Sinopec's subsidiaries in the US. "In the past, the eight subsidiaries operated independently of each other. With our long and complete production chain here in the US, we found it necessary to consolidate our resources for our sustainable development here," said Zhang Jixing, president at Sinopec America and chief representative at Sinopec USA Representative Office since August 2015. Zhang said that Sinopec America functions as a consolidated platform with one voice, one policy, one name and one brand. "In the past when people wanted to do business with Sinopec, they were confused as to who to talk to because each subsidiary represents itself and part of Sinopec, but not Sinopec. Now, people can come to me and I will direct them to the proper one," said Zhang. Beginning last year, Sinopec's subsidiaries scattered in different locations in Houston and New York started to move to Sinopec's office building in Houston. Acquired in 2014, the high-rise building is located in the prestigious business and financial district Galleria. The move is expected to be completed in late 2016. Five divisions have been created for Sinopec America to coordinate its US operations: Administration, Legal & Risk Control, Accounting, HR and strategy & branding, according to Zhang. "Our function is to consolidate and optimize all the resources in the states, ensure compliance of regulations, and provide support to all the subsidiaries so that they can focus on business development," said Zhang. In house and an arbitrator at China International Economic and Trade Commission, Zhang joined Sinopec in 1985 and has had well-rounded experiences within the company. For the past three decades he worked in various careers: legal consul, finance and accounting, international trade and business, project management, foreign affairs and legal management. Prior to coming to Houston, Zhang was the Director General at Sinopec's legal department for five years. He was named one of Top Eight General Consul by Asian Business Law in 2013. Thanks to his effort, Sinopec was selected the Best Chinese "In House Team of the Year" for five consecutive years by China Law & Practice magazine. Sinopec's legal department was also ranked No. 1 among China's large SOEs. Zhang is not a stranger to Houston. "I worked in Houston in late 1980s. The city has not changed much. To me a lot of things are just like a recall." Zhang had worked as Deputy Director General at Sinopec's foreign affairs department for a decade. He was involved in exchanges with top senior international oil executives and governmental officials. Such experience acquainted him with many senior executives in major oil companies in Houston before his current career. It gives Zhang an edge in bringing Sinopec's US operations to a new level. Among China's SOEs, Sinopec America as an umbrella management company is a first. "I do feel somewhat pressured because there is no prior model. It's a new path we are exploring. If we succeed in creating an efficient platform with integrated resources, we can replicate the model for our operations in other regions around the world," said Zhang who is optimistic about the new direction Sinopec is taking. Besides internal management, another major task for Zhang is to promote Sinopec in the US. Representing Sinopec, Zhang participated in various business events in Seattle, Washington D.C. and New York during Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit in Sept 2015. He also met with local and federal officials on various occasions. Locally, Sinopec was one of the title sponsors along with three other major US companies including ExxonMobil for the reception hosted by Asia Society Texas Center in honor of Chinese Vice Premier Liu Yandong last year. Zhang also attended Houston's annual Consular Ball, among many other events. In contrast to its quiet practice in the past, Sinopec's image began to be more visible with the creation of Sinopec America. Ranked No.2 on Fortune's Global 500 list in 2015, Sinopec Group is one of the largest integrated energy and chemical companies in the world. Its principal operations include the exploration and production, storage, transportation, sale and import & export of oil and gas as well as oil products, petrochemical products, coal chemical products, synthetic fiber, fertilizer and other chemical products, and other commodities; and research, development, application, sale and import & export of technologies. As a multinational company, Sinopec operates in 76 regions and countries with about one third of its asset and revenue coming from its international business. Sinopec's US operation ranges from gas and oil exploration and development to commodity trade, import and export of equipment and material, R&D, EPC contracting for petrochemical plants and public relations. Besides its US headquarters in Houston, Sinopec maintains offices in New York, Washington and Oklahoma. "Our US operation focuses on assets and resources with a relatively complete production chain. In upstream, we have a total of six blocks of oil and gas fields in the US" said Zhang. Its three trading companies conducts trade of equipment, materials, technology, oil and chemicals with business extending north to Canada and south to Brazil. Its R&D focus on both upstream E&P technology and downstream refinery technology in close collaboration with eminent partners. For engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contracting, Sinopec Engineering Group America is working as the EPC contractor for a PTA/PET project in Texas. The project will be the world's largest single line PET plant with a capacity of 1 million tons per year upon completion. Zhang summarized the company's 2015 operation in a nutshell: "In 2015, we produced 2 .36 million tons of crude oil, and traded 13.71 million tons of crude oil and oil products. Our 2015 revenue was $12.5 billion." In 2015, for Sinopec corp. as a whole, its total revenue reached $312.3 billion (converted from RMB 2,018.9 billion) with operating profit of $8.82 billion (RMB 57.0 billion). Its refinery throughput increased slightly to 236.49 million tons over 235.38 million tons in 2014. Its oil and gas product reached 471.91 million barrels, slightly down from 2014's 480.22 million barrels. mayzhou@chinadailyusa.com US President Barack Obama meets with Saudi King Salman at Erga Palace upon his arrival for a summit meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia April 20, 2016. [Photo/Agencies] RIYADH - US President Barack Obama on Wednesday met with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz here in efforts to mend ties with the old-time ally before leaving office in January next year. Obama underscored the importance of accelerating the campaign against the Islamic State and welcomed Saudi Arabia's important role in the coalition against the terrorist group, read a White House statement. The two leaders also discussed regional conflicts in Syria, Yemen and Iraq, and challenges posed by Iran. It is Obama's fourth and very likely last visit to the oil-rich Gulf nation. He will also attend a summit with leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. The kingdom is seen as one of Washington's most strategic allies in the Middle East, but bilateral relations were strained by the nuclear deal reached with Iran last year. Hours before Obama met King Salman, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter held talks with his Gulf Arab counterparts on military cooperation and the latest developments in the Middle East, including what were described as Iran's destabilizing activities and IS, said GCC Secretary General Abdullatif al-Zayani. The GCC countries and the United States have agreed to carry out joint patrols to stop any Iranian arms shipments reaching Yemen, al-Zayani told a press conference. The US defense chief urged the GCC members to be more engaged in helping the Iraqi government fight IS and to rebuild areas where the militants have been pushed out. The GCC comprises Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. China and India should handle their disputes before finding fair and reasonable ways that can be accepted by both sides, Premier Li Keqiang said today. The two countries should be dedicated to maintaining peace and tranquility in the border region through diplomatic means, Li said while meeting with visiting Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval at the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing. Li called on the two countries to enhance practical cooperation in multiple areas, strengthen communications in international and regional affairs and send a positive signal of peace and development of economy. Doval spoke highly of the current bilateral ties. He said that the two sides should work together in multiple areas and handle disputes properly. On Wednesday before the meeting, Doval attended the 19th round of talks between Chinese and Indian special representatives on boundary issues. During the talks, senior officials from China and India had an "extensive, deep and candid" discussion on boundary issues, according to a press release from the Chinese Foreign Ministry. Both sides agreed to adhere to peaceful negotiations to settle the boundary question. They will make efforts to reach a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution, the press release said. They will properly manage differences and safeguard peace and tranquility in the border areas so as to create favorable conditions for development of bilateral ties, it said. Both sides shared the view that China-India relations have broad prospects and Beijing and New Delhi have far more common interests than differences. Bilateral ties have entered a new era of comprehensive and rapid development since Chinese President Xi Jinping paid a successful visit to India in 2014 and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited China in 2015, the press release said. Both sides should implement the important consensus between the leaders, enhance high-level interactions, tap the potential of cooperation, and promote China-India relations to a higher level, the press release said. BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN -- Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Thursday that the "dual-track" approach is a practical and feasible way to solve the South China Sea issue. The peace and stability of the South China Sea is in the interests of both China and Brunei, Wang told a press conference. After an in-depth exchange of views on the situation of the South China Sea, Wang said both sides reached consensus and agreed to push forward the "dual-track" approach -- disputes should be resolved peacefully through negotiation between the parties directly concerned, and China and ASEAN countries should work together to maintain peace and stability in the South China Sea. The Chinese minister said the "dual-track" approach complies with the peaceful settlement of disputes through negotiation advocated by the UN Charter and the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC) between China and ASEAN countries. Parties directly concerned in the maritime disputes could find a solution acceptable to them through consultations, Wang said. "Pending a settlement, they could also discuss and shelve their disputes for joint exploration and development, and constructively manage the differences," he added. China and ASEAN nations should earnestly implement the DOC while accelerating consultations on the Code of Conduct (COC). Running counter to the "dual-track" approach, the overall interest of ASEAN would be harmed or hijacked by certain members for their own gains, and the peace and stability of the South China Sea would be jeopardized by the intervention of countries outside the region, Wang warned. Noting that the "dual-track" approach was first initiated by Brunei, the Chinese top diplomat believed that China and ASEAN nations are capable of managing the maritime disputes and building the South China Sea as a sea of peace, friendship and cooperation. Wang arrived here on Thursday for a visit to the sultanate, the first leg of his three-nation tour which will also take him to Cambodia and Laos. DAMASCUS -- China's envoy to Syria, Xie Xiaoyan, stressed on Thursday that China will continue to help push all parties in Syria to reach a solution for the long-running conflict. "China will continue to exert efforts to push all parties to reach a solution to the Syrian issue with thoughts and wisdom," Xie, who is currently on a visit to Syria, told reporters here in Damascus. He said all parties must cling to dialogue and negotiations to reach a political solution, and most importantly they should have patience and trust. "All parties must undertake all measures to tighten the gap so that they could find a solution taking into consideration all concerns of the Syrians," he said. The envoy's remarks came after his meeting with Syria's Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem, who stressed that the Syrian government and people are carrying on with the war on terror. China appointed Xie Xiaoyan as a special envoy for the Syrian issue late last month, indicating a more active role in addressing the conflict. Xie, former ambassador to Iran and Ethiopia as well as China's representative to the African Union, has a rich understanding of Middle East affairs. American whistleblower Edward Snowden delivers remarks via video link from Moscow to attendees at a discussion regarding an International Treaty on the Right to Privacy, Protection Against Improper Surveillance and Protection of Whistleblowers in Manhattan, New York September 24, 2015. [Photo/Agencies] OSLO -- Fugitive US whistle-blower Edward Snowden has filed a lawsuit against Norway to ensure he can travel to the Nordic country to receive a prize without fear of being extradited to the United States, a Norwegian law firm said on Thursday. The Norwegian PEN organization awarded Snowden the Ossietzky Prize for 2016 and invited him to receive the award in Oslo on November 18, the law firm Schjodt said in a statement, adding that Snowden had a strong desire to come to Norway to personally receive the award. The firm said it had filed a petition on behalf of Snowden against the ministry of justice and public security to ensure he "can travel safely to Norway to receive the prize without risking extradition to the United States." "The purpose is to legally established that Norway has no right to extradite Snowden to the United States," the firm said in the statement. It said Snowden's alleged crimes were political in nature and, according to Norwegian and international laws, he cannot be extradited to the United States. Local media reported that the United States had previously asked Norway to extradite Snowden to his home country if he entered the country, but the Norwegian authorities did not take any clear stand on the issue. Snowden faces three felony charges in the United States, including espionage, after he disclosed a classified US intelligence project code-named PRISM in June 2013. This scholarship provides free tuition for 60 credit hours at the recipient's choice of one of three state universities: University of Arizona, Arizona State University, and Northern Arizona University. Alexa Greer and Rachel Soumokil have both been recognized as All-Arizona Academic Team members (second team). The two CCC students are both graduating in May and will be attending University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University in the fall respectively. Beijing and Seoul will begin their first round of maritime demarcation talks in the Chinese capital on Friday, aiming to resolve overlapping claims through negotiation. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying confirmed the schedule at a regular news briefing on Thursday. "To fairly and properly demarcate the China-ROK maritime boundary through negotiations and consultations is of great significance to upholding tranquillity and stability of the waters and to consolidating and growing friendly bilateral cooperation," Hua said. She said she hoped that China and the Republic of Korea will set a good example for regional countries in addressing similar issues. China and the ROK have overlapping claims on exclusive economic zones, one of the few concerns in their thriving relations. President Xi Jinping and his ROK counterpart Park Geun-hye agreed to start the talks in July 2014 during Xi's visit to the ROK. Beijing believes that the ownership of Suyan Rock, a submerged feature in the East China Sea in the exclusive economic zones claimed by both China and the ROK, should be determined through negotiation. The countries agree that the rock does not have territorial status, the Foreign Ministry has said. Zhang Liangui, an expert in Korean studies at the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, said the absence of maritime demarcation between the two neighbors has resulted in numerous disputes, mainly involving fishing vessels. "Despite the disputes, the two countries share a good political atmosphere, while top leaders of both have made clear that cooperation is the key to the demarcation issue," Zhang said. However, he added, any settlement will be a long-term process. Shi Yongming, an Asia-Pacific studies researcher at the China Institute of International Relations, noted that the talks come at the same time as discussions by Washington and Seoul about possible deployment of the advanced THAAD missile defense system in the ROK. The proposal has drawn great concern from China and Russia. "And that makes it the right moment for us to do something positive," he said. WASHINGTON -- The number of taxpayers the IRS referred for criminal prosecutions fell last year to the lowest levels of the Obama administration, and the agency said it expects numbers will continue to drop in coming years. Data compiled by TRAC, a Syracuse University-based database of federal records, showed that the rate of criminal referrals from the IRS fell nationally by almost 30 percent over the last two years. In Arizona, the number of prosecutions stemming from those referrals also fell, TRAC data showed, from 69 in 2010 to 19 last year. One tax watchdog said the agency is likely finding other ways to enforce tax laws without hauling people into court. But the IRS said the math is simple: Several years of steep budget declines have left the agency with too few investigators. There are many different ways to look at our criminal investigation statistics, the IRS said in a statement Tuesday to Cronkite News. From any perspective, its clear these numbers show that less agents mean less cases that can be worked and fewer criminals are brought to justice. The statement said that staffing in the IRS criminal investigations division is at its lowest level since the 1970s, with the 2,316 special agents on board at the end of fiscal 2015 representing a 6 percent drop from the year before. The agency said the 45 agents it had hired in the last three years have barely allowed it to keep up with attrition. The statement said the IRS saw numerous enforcement categories reach their lowest levels in a decade last year, including criminal investigation. The TRAC report said the number of criminal investigators at IRS fell 16 percent from 2010 to 2015. It linked the drop in staffing to the drop in criminal prosecution referrals, which fell from 13.3 cases per million people in fiscal 2013 to 9.2 per million in fiscal 2015. But Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said the lack of support for the IRS is a problem of their own making. Its not surprising that if you reduce the funding to the IRS you reduce the funding for enforcement then youre going to get reduced numbers of enforcement actions, Ellis said. Another tax watchdog said the IRS has been starving the one department that it should be funding if it wants to head off criminal prosecutions in the first place: taxpayer services. You might get better compliance with the tax laws by putting more money into services for taxpayers, helping them to understand the law so that they will comply voluntarily in the first place, said Pete Sepp, president of National Taxpayers Union. A court referral, a prosecution is probably the last stop, the last place we want IRS enforcement dollars to go, Sepp said. Because that means that all other efforts before have failed. PHOENIX -- State lawmakers are moving to alter two controversial abortion laws. Members of a House-Senate conference committee voted Wednesday to repeal a bill signed just last month by Gov. Doug Ducey that made it illegal for doctors to use RU-486 to induce an abortion beyond the seventh week of pregnancy. Lawmakers also agreed to rescind a requirement that doctors tell women considering a medication abortion that the procedure may be reversible. A federal court already has blocked the state from enforcing that 2015 law which was challenged by Planned Parenthood as "junk science." But the action by lawmakers does not repeal the law outright. Instead, it requires a doctor to tell a woman who has taken the first of two pills designed to terminate a pregnancy that the single pill does not necessarily result in an abortion. And that, in turn, could encourage women who might have second thoughts to seek out a small group of physicians who contend the abortion might be halted with large doses of the hormone progesterone. Bryan Howard, president of Planned Parenthood Arizona, said the move to repeal the laws is "a victory for women's health." But he said the new language of what women have to be told about medication abortions is no better than the law that the federal court has enjoined. He said, though, no decision has been made whether to challenge that if it becomes law. At the heart of both issues are efforts to limit medication abortions. In the first case, Arizona doctors have routinely used mifepristone, known as RU-486, through the ninth week of pregnancy despite the FDA labeling it as safe through the seventh week. There is nothing illegal about such practices. And gynecologists said they have found the drug to be safe and effective through nine weeks, and at a lower dosage than the FDA labeling. A 2012 law required Arizona doctors to follow the FDA label, with offenders facing possible loss of medical practice. That law was overturned last year by a state judge who said legislators could not simply defer to whatever the FDA wanted. So last month lawmakers voted to limit use to what was the FDA standard as of the end of last year, meaning seven weeks. But days later the FDA approved the 10-week standard and lower dosage. Ducey signed the seven-week measure anyway, but acknowledged changes might be necessary. The more complex issue surrounds the 2015 law, which requires doctors to inform women at least 24 hours before the procedure that "it may be possible to reverse the effects of a medication abortion if the woman changes her mind by that time is of the essence." Doctors who do not comply face suspension or revocation of license; clinics found in violation can be closed." That law also requires the Department of Health Services to provide a list of doctors who are willing to try to stop the procedure after the first pill, RU-486, was taken. The new version approved Wednesday eliminates the pre-abortion advisory but instead requires doctors to tell women that RU-486, by itself, does not always result in an abortion. (Photo : Sean Gallup/Getty Images) An Apple MacBook Pro laptop computer with Retina display stands on a table at a Gravis Apple retailer on Nov. 6, 2012 in Berlin, Germany. Apple is hoping for a strong Christmas season. Advertisement While consumers may have been disappointed that there were no announcements yet about the MacBook Pro 2016 model during the Apple event last month, recent rumors might just bring back their excitement. According to Mac World UK, the new version of this particular variant of the Macintosh portable computer is expected to come out in the United Kingdom by June 13 at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference. Like Us on Facebook Advertisement It can be recalled that the anticipating Mac users only witnessed the unveiling of the new iPhone SE, the smaller screen iPad Pro and the new Apple Watch straps. The tech site's MacBook Pro 2016 rumors hinted that there could be more Apple products that will be launched soon, especially that the American tech giant discreetly introduced on April 19 its 12-inch MacBook 2016. Following this announcement, does it mean that the new MacBook Pro will already be the one to be featured in the next launch? When it comes to specs, the latest news claimed that the highly-anticipated unit will be boasting of "significant graphics upgrade," considering that AMD and NVIDIA are reportedly working on new GPU products. Accordingly, AMD is coming up with GPUs based on Global Foundries 14 nm FinFET processor node, while NVIDIA is trying to release the 16 nm FinFET Plus model, something that is a bit larger than that of AMD's. With these expected enhancements in the model's graphics performance, gamers could just be the happiest. Based on Mac World UK's MacBook Pro 2016 rumors, the cheapest Retina version will have a tag price of 999 in the UK. Advertisement Tags MacBook Pro 2016, Retina MacBook Pro, release date, specs, rumors (Photo : Getty Images/ China Photos) China attempts to be a global gold price setter by launching a Yuan-denominated gold price fix Advertisement Being the world's top gold producer, China launched a Yuan-denominated gold price fix on Tuesday in its attempt to become a price setter in the London and New York markets. The Shanghai Stock Exchange derived the gold benchmark on a 1-kilogram contract and was fixed at 256.92 yuan per gram, Reuters reported. Like Us on Facebook Advertisement According to Bloomberg, 18 trading members will be setting the benchmark twice a day. Twelve companies will take part in the gold benchmark price fixing namely the: Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Bank of Communications, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, Ping An Bank, Bank of Shanghai, Standard Chartered Bank(China),Australian and New Zealand Bank while the remaining 6 companies - China National Gold Group Corp, Shandong Gold Group, Shanghai Lao Fen Xiang, Chow Tai Fook, Bank of China (Hong Kong) Ltd and MKS (Switzerland) SA will serve as reference price members of the gold benchmark. China's goal is to increase its influence in the global market while making the yuan a viable competitor to the US dollar. However, some analysts think that the new fix won't affect the global pricing benchmarks on London and New York immediately. On the upside, the analysts believe that a fully convertible Chinese Yuan will most likely boost Beijing's pricing power in the London Bullion Market Association. Marwan Shakarchi, chairman of Swiss Trading House MKS, said that the ever increasing gold consumption in China supports the set-up of the fix. "To have a benchmark price in renminbi will help both consumers and producers in this part of the world," said Shakarchi. Shakarchi pointed out that even though the gold fix can only apply to a closed monetary system for the moment, other opportunities will come as soon as the Yuan reaches full convertibility. "Ultimately, I see them uniting the (offshore yuan) CNH and CNY (onshore yuan). The currency will be fully convertible and it will be easier to import gold into China," he added. Advertisement Tagsyuan, price fix, china, gold fix, price setter, influence (Photo : ChinaFotoPress/ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images) Two foreigners view an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle model exhibited on the Aviation Expo China 2015 (16th Expo) at China National Convention Center on Sept. 16, 2015 in Beijing, China. Advertisement Demand for China's military drones continues to soar, with the highest recorded in 2015. According to China Daily, the CH series of the country's drones are among the most popular arms products in the international market. "The total value of contracts we signed in 2015 could definitely be one of the highest in terms of armed drone deals made last year on the international market," Shi Wen, chief drone designer at the China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics in Beijing, told the news site. Like Us on Facebook Advertisement The report noted that the drone family which carries the name Cai Hong (literally means "rainbow" in Chinese) is being considered as one of the "most lethal drones on the planet," and the academy, which is part of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp, is one of the country's largest military drone developers. In fact, its CH models were sold to 20 military users from more than 10 different markets worldwide, making it the biggest brand of military drones that China has exported. "Our best-selling type so far is the CH-3, while the CH-4 has also received many orders," Shi shared. The CH-3 and CH-4 are the larger drone models being produced by the academy. As described by China Daily, the former is a "mid-range combat and reconnaissance drone," while the latter is a "mid-altitude, high-endurance armed drone." The CH drones' success was attributed to the fact that these buyers have considered them because they are powerful yet affordable. Meanwhile, it was learned that many other countries are keen about purchasing China's CH military drones but they reportedly cannot do it now yet because of their "sluggish economies." Advertisement TagsChina Military Drones, china, CH Drones (Photo : Getty Images/ Central Press) Chinese government employees are warned against falling for suave foreign men Advertisement China celebrated its first National Security Education Day last Friday by setting up posters in Xicheng, warning women against falling for handsome foreign men who might turn out to be spies. The comic book-styled posters titled "Dangerous Love" recounted the story of an attractive Chinese civil worker named Xiao Li who meets David, a red-haired scholar, at a dinner party. David soon started to woo Li with gifts, flowers and romantic walks in the park. Little did Li know that David who claims to be a student is actually a foreign spy tasked to steal Chinese State documents. Like Us on Facebook Advertisement One day, when they were walking in the park, David asked Li to show him internal government memos, telling her that it would help him in his academic work. Li hands David a notebook in a Western Dinner and tells David to return it as soon as he's done with it, but the police caught up with David before he had the chance to take advantage of the state secrets. It was only a matter of time before Li was also arrested. The story ended with Li sitting in an interrogation room with a police officer telling her she is a government employee who has shallow respect for state secrecy. A Beijing district government employee said that the purpose of the poster was to educate government employees about the importance of keeping state documents confidential as well as reporting any spying activity that they may notice to state security agencies. He added that the campaign is an eye-opener for government employees to espionage. Huang Yu, a former state employee, was sentenced to death by the Chengdu court on Tuesday after he stole state documents and sold them to an anonymous foreign intelligence service. His wife and brother-in-law who assisted him were also sentenced to five and three years in jail, respectively. Advertisement Tagsspying, National Security Education Day: Lesson on Espionage, National Security Education Day, espionage, dangerous love (Photo : Getty Images) China has stationed thousands of troops at the North Korea border in response to a possible fifth nuclear test of Pyongyang in the region Advertisement In anticipation of North Korea's fifth nuclear test, China deployed around 2,000 troops along its border with Pyongyang and would continue to send more military forces to the area in the coming months. A Hong Kong-based human rights group announced Wednesday that Beijing dispatched around 2,000 soldiers to the border with half of them responsible for measuring the radioactive material that would be produced in case of another nuclear test by North Korea. Like Us on Facebook Advertisement The Chinese military said Pyongyang could be preparing for its fifth nuclear test in May to coincide with its Seventh Party Congress and Beijing does not want to be caught unarmed. This was not the first time China established troops along its border with North Korea. Beijing sent 3,000 military personnel to the northeast region following Pyongyang's missile tests in January. China also stationed troops along the border during a landmine crisis between the North and South in 2015. In the latter part of 2013, China deployed thousands of soldiers to the military hotspot after the execution of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's uncle. More Chinese soldiers were also posted at several major observation outposts who patrol the areas on a 24/7 basis. Chinese experts Recently, Chinese international relations experts said Beijing, which was once North Korea's closest ally, was highly unlikely to defend Pyongyang in the event of a war or conflict. The experts said the "Friendship Treaty" signed by both countries 55 years ago became null and void the moment Pyongyang started to develop its nuclear programme. Under the treaty, China was expected to defend the North in case of an attack by outside forces. Advertisement TagsNorth Korea, Chinese troops, North Korea's fifth nuclear test, Korean peninsula, radioactive material, Beijing, landmine crisis, King Jong-Un, cold relations (Photo : Getty Images/ChinaFotoPress) China is planning to have its permanent space station up and running by 2022. Advertisement China wants its permanent manned space station up and running by 2022 by launching its core module in 2018, Xinhua reported. The core module for the space station is likely to be called Tianhe-1, which stands for Milky Way or galaxy in Chinese. "Two space labs will be launched later and dock with the core module, 'Tianhe-1. The construction of the space station is expected to finish in 2022," said Wang Zhognyang, spokesman for the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation. Like Us on Facebook Advertisement China is increasing its focus on space exploration as President Xi Jinping urged the country to become a space power. It plans to launch space craft Shenzhou 11 and Tiangong 2 which can carry two astronauts this year. In 2017, the country plans to experiment with its first cargo ship, Tianzhou 1, to get it docked with Tiangong 2. China claims its space exploration measures to be peace oriented. It aims to build its presence in space for scientific, commercial, and military purposes. Its Jade Rabbit moon rover reached moon in 2013. The country also plans to launch a Hubble Space Telescope clone in space. The telescope is said to "be on a separate space unit and share orbit alongside the space station," Wang stated. Advertisement Tagsspace exploration, china, Tianzhou 2, missile, Satellite (Photo : Getty Images/Alex Wong) It is presumed that the authorities may be interested in flight records, location or even the videos shot. The company said that it would inform the users about the data transfer if the deal pushes through. Advertisement The world's largest manufacturer of civilian drones, SZ DJI, said that it is holding talks with the Chinese government that is ardent to access data collected by its airborne devices. It is presumed that the authorities may be interested in flight records, location or even the videos shot. The company said that it would inform the users about the data transfer if the deal pushes through. Like Us on Facebook Advertisement Zhang Fanxi, a spokesperson for DJI said that the company's private policy states that personal data may be transferred to and from servers in the US, Hong Kong, and China. The Chinese government keeps a tight rein over its media and internet sectors. DJI is not the only company which has acceded to demands made by the government. All companies operating in China are required to follow these rules. In a recent report, Apple stated that it received nearly 1,000 such data request from Chinese authorities during the second half of 2015. The number is pretty tame compared to the US authorities which made about 4,000 requests to Apple during the same time period. As per projections made by the Teal Group, Global drone market is likely to double over the next decade from $6.6 billion in 2013. DJI is best known for its Phantom line of drones and has offices in Los Angeles and Beijing. Advertisement Tagschina, drone, DJI Drones The community of Sanders is not much more than a cluster of homes off Interstate 40 in far eastern Arizona. Its a crinkled island of nontribal land surrounded by the Navajo Nation. And for more than a decade, dozens of residents had no idea that their water was contaminated with concentrations of uranium that far exceeded federal limits. It wasnt until last summer when Northern Arizona University Ph.D. student Tommy Rock tested the communitys main water supply and called a public meeting to give residents the news. Tests from 2003 through 2015 showed the average concentration of uranium in the water was nearly 50 parts per billion way above the 30 ppb federal limit for drinking water. Before that meeting neither the state nor the utility, Arizona Windsong Water Company, had given residents any notice about the uranium tainted water, and looking back, many locals believe they would still be drinking from the tap were it not for the NAU students work. Rock, too, doubts that without his testing, the truth would have been brought to light. Looking at the way it was handled by Windsong and (the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality), it was like nothing was going to happen, Rock said. Without our sampling happening I think people would still be left in the dark to this day. The majority are Navajo and I think that's how it was handled, like, Oh, a bunch of Navajos; don't worry about it. DIGGING INTO URANIUMS LEGACY Rock is Navajo himself and grew up in Monument Valley, just north of the Arizona-Utah state line. His home is half a mile from an abandoned uranium mine. His grandfather worked at another uranium mine in the area and Rock has seen many of his family members, including his grandfather, die from cancers likely linked to the radioactive element. After graduating from Arizona State University, Rock began to steer toward his passion. He completed a master's degree in sustainability from NAU in 2008, worked as a research scientist at the University of New Mexico, then as a water systems supervisor with the Navajo Nation EPA until he got frustrated and resigned. Later he returned to NAU, where he is pursuing a doctorate in earth science and environmental sustainability. After growing up and seeing firsthand uranium minings toxic aftermath, Rock felt compelled to delve deeper into the issue during his second stint at NAU. His dissertation looks at the bioaccumulation of uranium in sheep on the Navajo Nation and he aims to work with tribal leaders to form recommendations for amounts of that meat tribal members in mining-affected areas can safely eat. The Sanders testing came about as part of a side project Rock was working on under an EPA Environmental Justice Grant. The group was testing unregulated wells that were potentially being used for drinking water along the Puerco River, a tributary to the Little Colorado River. The river has a long history of contamination, with uranium mines near Church Rock, N.M., discharging to the river between 1960 and 1986 and a 1979 dam breach that spilled tailings into the waterway from the Church Rock Uranium Mill. Residents from Sanders got word of Rocks well testing project and asked for their water to be tested as well, he said. They had suspicions that something was off. The test results came back in early June, showing that uranium concentrations were 43 parts per billion -- well above the EPA limit. Rock said he contacted ADEQ and officials told him they would make the information public, but it wasnt until August that the agency issued a notice telling residents about the water contamination. Records show the state agency has issued dozens of violation notices to Arizona Windsong since 1995. The company has repeatedly failed to do proper testing, maintain its groundwater well to state standards and notify the public about water quality violations. The company now serves 76 customers. Under federal law, it is the companys responsibility to notify its customers of water quality issues through public notices and consumer confidence reports. The state currently has no requirement to make those notifications, but in response to the Sanders incident, ADEQ is developing a process to issue public notices for drinking water violations if a public water system fails to do so itself. Last summer, instead of waiting for action from ADEQ, Rock and his fellow researchers organized a community meeting to tell residents about their testing results. Rock estimated about 100 residents packed into the room. There was a sense of betrayal, said Stuart Noggle, a longtime Sanders resident and local educator who was at the meeting. People were saying, How could this have gone on for so long without anybody telling us? Noggle said. It felt like we were just getting ignored in our corner of Arizona. HEALTH CONCERNS ADEQ has told Arizona Windsong customers the water is safe to drink for everyone except infants under the age of 1 and people with certain health concerns. Rock and his research partner Chris Shuey of the Southwest Research and Information Center have been communicating a very different message. They are recommending residents stop drinking the water because they have already been exposed for so many years. There is now hope on the horizon after the Arizona Corporation Commission earlier this month approved a plan for the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority to construct a new pipeline and provide drinking water to Sanders. But until that happens, residents are hauling water or buying bottled water. They created a webpage on the online fundraising site Go Fund Me to raise money for those expenses. Rock said Arizona Windsong and ADEQ should share the blame for years of keeping the water contamination hidden from residents. For a very long time nothing was being done by regulators until NBC broke the story, Rock said, referring to the NBC affiliate in Phoenix that recently aired an investigation into the contamination. Its sad it has to come to that. There are certainly parallels between the water contamination in Sanders and that in Flint, Michigan, he said. Its government agencies failing to protect minority populations in the face of a major health threat. But theres also a big difference, Rock said. Flint had a lot of publicity and there's big old outcry but for Sanders there's nothing, he said. (Photo : Getty Image) Mitsubishi revealed that its workers manipulated data to impress mileage rates on over 600,000 (157,000 of its own units and 468,000 for Nissan) vehicles. Advertisement Japanese authorities raided the office of multinational automotive manufacturer Mitsubishi Motors on Thursday after the carmaker admitted that it falsified its fuel economy data. Mitsubishi revealed that its workers manipulated data to impress mileage rates on over 600,000 (157,000 of its own units and 468,000 for Nissan) vehicles. Like Us on Facebook Advertisement "This has critically damaged consumers' trust and it won't be tolerated," Yoshihide Suga, a spokesperson from the top government, said. "It's an extremely serious issue." Officials searched its plant in Okazaki on Thursday morning. The company was also asked to submit a full report of the falsified fuel-efficiency tests on Wednesday. "We would like to reveal the extent of the inaccuracies as soon as possible," Suga said. "We will deal with the situation in a strict manner and would like to make sure of the safety of cars." The false data were discovered after Nissan found inconsistencies on how vehicles were being tested. Mitsubishi then investigated separately and indeed found that its data were tampered with. Meanwhile, the company said it would stop the production and sales of the affected models, namely, Mitsubishi eK Wagon and eK Space, and the Nissan Dayz and Dayz Roox. Shares of the Tokyo-listed firm plummeted up to 16 percent on Wednesday morning even before reports confirming about the misconducts happened. Although the automaker's top executives said it would take some time to determine the extent of the damage, Akira Kishimoto, an auto analyst from JPMorgan, said that the falsification could possibly cost nearly 3 billion yuan ($450 million), including payments to clients, costs for parts replacements and Nissan's compensation. Advertisement TagsMitsubishi, emission tests, volkswagen, Volkswagen emission scandal, automotive industry, Japan (Photo : Kevin Frayer/Getty Images) Chinese President Xi Jinping is now China's military Commander in Chief. Advertisement Chinese President Xi Jinping has added a new role to his list of responsibilities as head of the country he has also taken the role of being commander in chief of the Chinese military, reports say. Mr. Xi took on the position after visiting the Joint Battle Command of the Peoples Liberation Army, reports Xinhua. He reportedly told the PLA that it should be "absolutely loyal, resourceful in fighting, efficient in commanding, and courageous and capable of winning wars." Like Us on Facebook Advertisement The Chinese President wore a camouflage uniform complete with insignia, which is what the PLA officials wear as uniform. This new role is added to his current roles as head of state, the General Secretary of the ruling Communist Party, and the Central Military Commissions chairman and is considered to be at the same level of authority as Chinese leaders Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong, analysts told NBC News. Earlier, when appearing as the head of the Military Commission, Mr. Xi often wore simple green clothing without insignia or decoration. By showing himself in a decorated uniform, analysts say that Mr. Xi is proclaiming a message that he remains and is the highest person in authority over the largest nation in the world. Political Authority Yet despite the militaristic appearance, President Xis role remains to be more on the political side instead of the militaristic side, notes Kanwa Asian Defense magazine editor Andrei Chang. Chinas history shows that political power has always been [grounded] on control of the military," Chang explained. "[President Xis visit] was a visit to show off his muscle to his potential enemies and show that he is tough and in charge," he said. This visit is also considered by experts as Mr. Xis display of strength over Chinas rivals, notes BBC. Advertisement Tagschina, Xi Jinping, Central Military Commission, People's Liberation Army, South China Sea (Photo : Getty Images) President Obama met with officials in Saudi Arabia to talk about ISIS and Iran, making no mention of Saudi Arabia's reported involvement in the 9/11 terror attacks. Advertisement President Barack Obama met with Saudi king Salman bin Abdulaziz on Thursday and addressed concerns regarding the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Iran's recent actions. The meeting came as former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani called on the president to release secret documents that are suspected to implicate Saudi Arabia as having a role in the 9/11 attacks. Like Us on Facebook Advertisement Obama wrapped up the fourth visit of his presidency to Saudi Arabia, saying of the US and the Gulf Cooperation Council, "we remain united in our fight to destroy" ISIS. The president said the council would "increase their contributions to the fight." President Obama went on to defend his administration's nuclear deal with Iran, while also admitting concerns over the country's "destabilizing actions in the region." "Even as Iran was calling us the Great Satan we were able to get a deal done that got rid of their nuclear stockpiles," he said. The president also stated that the US and its Gulf region allies "continue to have serious concerns about Iranian behavior," referencing Iran's recent ballistic missile tests and illegal arms shipments to Yemen. In a statement released by the White House, there was no mention of Saudi Arabia's involvement in the 9/11 terror attacks, a role that has recently come into question as lawmakers attempt to pass a bill that would allow American citizens to sue foreign countries over attacks on the US. The White House has said that Obama would veto the legislation, as Saudi Arabia threatened a mass sell-off of US assets in response to the bill. There have been reports that a classified 28-page portion of a lengthy congressional report on the September 11th terror attacks contains details regarding money trails - some of which could lead to Saudi Arabia. Giuliani, who was mayor of New York City during 9/11, said that "the American people need to know exactly what was the role of the Saudi Arabian government in the attacks...we are entitled to know who killed our loved ones and who almost killed all of us." The former mayor also recounted a story about tearing up a $10 million check a Saudi prince offered him after the attacks. "His money he can keep and go burn it in hell," Giuliani said. Advertisement TagsObama, ISIS, Saudi Arabia, Iran, 9/11 attacks, terror attacks, secret report The dire headline on your story about Havasupai horses is a bit misleading. It implies that Leland Joes treatment of his animals is typical. This falls into the same pattern that past journalists used when they relied on limited information and hearsay to assert one mans crime proves Havasupais are dangerous, lawless people. The story of Havasupai horses is more complicated than willful mistreatment, and I know something about this because I owned horses in Supai Village. There are plenty of responsible Havasupai horses owners who treat their working animals as valuable resources that can serve them for years, properly cared for. Havasupais are not ignorant of horse management; they have been a horse-centered culture for at least 250 years. Havasupai is not Xanterra, with corporately owned livestock supplied directly by truck and tended by wranglers, all based conveniently on the rim. Havasupai livestock owners reside on the bottom and have to take their animals up to the rim and pack their own feed back down. This side of the equation is pure expense. Resourceful packers always try for trips packing tourist gear out so they can use the same horses to bring feed back. If the trip is for riders either way, they often must bring extra horses just to pack feed. Havasupais did not choose to operate this way. Over a century ago we forced them into confinement in Havasu Canyon, and they have made some ingenious adjustments to cope. No longer able to live and operate from the rim, for many years they grew abundant alfalfa in Havasu Canyon for their horses. Now the increase in their population and housing has left too little farmland to supply the animals, so they have been forced to rely on imported feed. But Havasupai packers do choose to work with horses; it is a life they love. Successful packers, and there are plenty of them, have enough horses that they rotate the strings of horses they use. This usually means belonging to a multi-generational family of horse packers. Leland Joe grew up in Nevada and was new to Havasupai horse culture. He tried to get started without enough stock to rotate and not knowing enough about horses. Now he and his family will pay the price for that. It is always a temptation when bringing in feed to try loading three 80-pound bags on the pack saddle, especially if the other animals are already devoted to carrying visitor gear. Heavily laden pack saddles are unforgiving during the first mile downhill and slide forward onto the withers. Given time, packers reset the loads at the bottom of the cliffs, but if theyre trying to meet the gear owners in the village or the campground, some cut corners. This is where the saddle sores start. Working animals are not sleek and fat; neither are they pets or companions witness sled dogsbut they should be lean and healthy. I wasnt always happy that some packers couldnt keep their horses up to that standard until the summer season was over, but I also knew in most cases they were doing the best they could in a challenging situation. While Havasupais manage basic carehoof care and shoeingveterinary care has always been difficult for them to obtain. Installing a water tank at the rim is a good thoughtprovided someone has an idea how to fill it in a place with no water. What is not a great idea is the campaign to boycott Havasupai pack horses and bring economic ruin to every family who keeps horses, responsible or not. These people work harder to provide for their familiessummer and winterthan most of us could. Dershowitz: I could have gotten Jesus off the hook 21 April, 2016 by Gregory Tomlin , | LOS ANGELES (Christian Examiner) Alan Dershowitz is one of the most brilliant legal minds in the United States and regarded as an expert on appellate practice by conservatives and liberals alike, but he might think more highly of himself than he ought. Stopped by a camera crew from the celebrity gossip-binge show TMZ, Dershowitz was asked if there was ever a legal case he regretted not being able to argue. He responded that there certainly was such a case. He regrets, he said, that he had no opportunity to serve as a lawyer to Jesus. "I would have loved to be the lawyer for Jesus in front of the Sanhedrin," Dershowitz said. "Imagine a Jewish lawyer winning the case for Jesus and getting him acquitted. Oh, my God. I mean, he was exercising his First Amendment rights as a preacher, a religious preacher. So I would have loved to have been Jesus's lawyer." This isn't the first time Dershowitz has opined on Jesus. In the late 1990s, he appeared on Geraldo Rivera's talk show with Rev. Jerry Falwell, then the leader of the "Moral Majority," the country's largest Christian voting bloc. Then, Dershowitz said Jesus was an innovative and thoughtful rabbi. "He's just not my Messiah," Dershowitz said. Dershowitz is professor emeritus of law at Harvard University. Shock: ABC fairy tale shows Dorothy of 'Wizard of Oz' kissing 'Little Red Riding Hood' Guest Reviewer | 21 April, 2016 by Michael Foust LOS ANGELES (Christian Examiner) A major pro-family group is urging supporters to speak out after ABC's fairy tale program "Once Upon a Time" showed two legends of childhood lore Dorothy from "The Wizard of Oz" and the girl in "Little Red Riding Hood" engaging in a lesbian kiss. The group, One Million Moms, called the scene "completely unnecessary" and another example of Disney pushing an agenda. The show, in its fifth season, spotlights fairy tale characters who have been transported into modern-day times in fictional Storybrooke, Maine. It airs Sunday nights at 8 Eastern/7 Central. "Many families watch the program based on beloved children's fairytales, but unfortunately, ABC has distorted and twisted the storylines in these fables," One Million Moms wrote in a Wednesday press release. In the series, the girl in "Little Red Riding Hood" is named Ruby, and in the latest episode, she was under a sleeping curse. As Dorothy kissed her to "magically" wake her, the munchkins from Oz watched in joy. The organization is urging concerned parents to contact advertiser TJ Maxx and ask them to pull their sponsorship. One Million Moms added that the series is "a far from innocent fairytale entangling favorite Disney characters in a new, modern storyline." "When it debuted in 2011 it was called 'the most family-friendly drama on any broadcast network in the past ten years' and Common Sense Media rated it for children 12 and up," the press release said. "So naturally, with its family-friendly 8:00 pm ET/7:00 pm CT Sunday night time slot, it attracts younger viewers and parents who still think of Disney as wholesome. Of course, 1MM knows that Disney has not been wholesome for some time and, once again, they are purposefully pushing a gay agenda. "Homosexuality continues to be over-represented in the media because producers want people, and especially kids, to think it's normal and everyday life," 1MM says. "In reality, that is their fairytale." U.S. commission belittles religious freedom laws, says they discriminate against transgender and gay communities 21 April, 2016 by Gregory Tomlin , | WASHINGTON (Christian Examiner) The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which has no legislative or enforcement authority but influences federal policy, has condemned the spate of recent laws which have sought to keep biological males out of multi-occupancy female restrooms and safeguard the religious liberty of those who object to supporting same-sex marriage with their labor. In a statement April 18, the Commission said it opposes the laws because they "target members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender ('LGBT') community for discrimination" under the guise of "so-called 'religious liberty.'" In particular, the statement hits at North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory who signed HB 2 into effect earlier this month. The preamble to that law made it clear that the provision applied only to government institutions in the state, but also addressed the use of multi-occupancy restrooms only. Those born biologically male are prohibited under the law from using multi-occupancy female restrooms, and those born biologically female are prohibited from using multi-occupancy male restrooms. The law also specifically addressed the state's supremacy in law making, ruling that individual municipalities could not establish regulations that overruled state law. According to the USCCR, however, the law "repeals existing municipal anti-discrimination laws which protected LGBT people from bias in housing and employment" because it added "biological sex" as a category under which no discrimination could take place. The law, USCCR said, jeopardizes the dignity and "actual physical safety" of transgenders "whose appearances may not match societal expectations of the sex specified on their identification documents." The Commission also hit and Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, who signed a sweeping religious liberty law into effect (HB 1523). That law protects citizens who object to same-sex marriage on religious grounds and do not wish to participate in supporting the practice with their labor or ministerial duties. According to the USCCR, it also "clears the way for employers to cite religion in determining workplace policies on dress code, grooming and bathroom access. The physical safety concerns for transgender people are the same as in North Carolina." More laws like those in North Carolina and Mississippi are waiting in the wings, the Commission said, as part of "a larger alarming trend to limit the civil rights of a class of people using religious beliefs as the excuse." A larger report will follow in the days to come, the statement said: "The Commission recently approved a report, which will be released shortly, on the issue of religious liberty. In our findings and recommendations the Commission makes clear: Civil rights protections ensuring nondiscrimination, as embodied in the Constitution, laws, and policies, are of preeminent importance in American jurisprudence. Religious exemptions to the protections of civil rights based upon classifications such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability status, sexual orientation, and gender identity , when they are permissible, significantly infringe upon these civil rights. sexual orientation, and gender identity Overly broad religious exemptions unduly burden nondiscrimination laws and policies . Federal and state courts, lawmakers, and policy-makers at every level must tailor religious exceptions to civil liberties and civil rights protections as narrowly as applicable law requires ." The Commission's chairman, Martin R. Castro, claimed in the statement that religious freedom had been used in the past to block racial desegregation and other anti-discrimination laws. "Those past efforts failed and this new attempt to revive an old evasive tactic should be rejected as well. The North Carolina and Mississippi laws, and similar legislation proposed in other states, perverts the meaning of religious liberty and perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, marginalizes the transgender and gay community and has no place in our society," Castro said. Castro, a Democrat, is a former campaign bundler for President Barack Obama and one-time chair of the Illinois Human Rights Commission. The Presbyterian Church of Americas Coalition of Korean Churches, also known as PCA-CKC, hosted its fifth annual forum for English-speaking pastors, this year at Siloam Korean Church of Atlanta. Over 50 pastors from various places throughout the country attended this years forum. Though the forum for the English-speaking (EM) pastors used to take place simultaneously with the Korean-speaking (KM) pastors annual conference, this year the two groups have their gatherings separately. The forum for the EM pastors took place first from April 18 to 20, and the KM pastors will have their conference next week from April 25 to 28. This years forum also stands out from the previous four in that it featured the most speakers since the forums inception, as well as the most amount of PCA staff among those speakers. Lloyd Kim, the coordinator of the PCAs mission agency called Mission to the World; Stephen Estock, the coordinator of the PCAs Committee on Discipleship Ministries; Danny Kwon, the pastor of youth and families at Yuong Sang Presbyterian Church; Henry Koh, the coordinator of Korean ministries for the PCAs Mission to North America; and Min Chung, the senior pastor of Covenant Fellowship Church, who has also been featured as a speaker for all of the PCA-CKCs English-speaking pastors forums, spoke during this years event. The forum, which was themed Making Disciples of All Nations: Discipleship and Missions in the Local Church, started out on Monday by focusing on the role of the pastor, and then proceeded to discuss discipleship and missions during the second day. The last day of the forum featured a session regarding leadership opportunities within the denomination. The annual PCA-CKCs forum for English-speaking pastors began in 2012 with the aim to encourage and strengthen PCA EM ... pastors, licentiates, and candidates for ministry through mentorship, discussion, and fellowship, and has explored such topics as The Past, Present, and Future of English Ministry, Mentoring Men, and The Heart of a Pastor. When most people hear the name "Garfield, odds are that James Abram Garfield, the United States 20th president, doesnt come to mindif anything, they probably think of a certain orange cat who just hates Mondays. Beyond the fog of post-Civil War history, though, there are two surprising facts that make Garfield a person of note for ministry leaders: he was the only President to also serve as an ordained minister, and he never actually aspired to be President in the first place. Garfields presidential candidacy came as a surprise even to himself. In 1880, he was selected to give the Republican National Convention stump speech for his fellow Ohioan and hopeful nominee John Sherman. Looking out at the contentious Chicago convention hall, Garfield started his speech by addressing the party's divisiveness: This assemblage seems to be a human ocean in tempest . . . but I remember that it is not the billows, but the calm level of the sea, from which all heights and depths are measured. The audience was hypnotized. As Garfield settled into the rhythm of his speech, the tone of the room noticeably changed. After building the necessary lead-in for Sherman's nominating motion, Garfields voice rose: What shall we do? Someone broke the silence with an unexpected shout: Nominate Garfield!" Shocked, Garfield demurred, trying to rebuild the momentum for Sherman. But the seed was planted. Despite Garfield's attempts to stop the stampede, the scales had decidedly shifted. On the thirty-sixth ballot, the humble man from Ohio found himself chosen by his party to run for the highest office in the land without ever giving consent. As the celebratory guns fired from Chicago's lakefront, Garfield excused himself, got in a carriage, and left the convention hall, trying to understand what had just happened. Whelmed by the weight of his impending influence, he went back to his modest hotel room, closed the door, and sat in silence. Garfields modesty would make him seem wildly out of place in today's political arena, but it fits his role as a lay-minister well. Of the church leaders Ive known, those who have contributed the most to those in their care have achieved their influence as a result of character thats unseen and humility thats steady. Its never been done through declarative muscle; instead, like Garfield, they faithfully followed the humble path and have inspired others to do the same. Theyre the pastors who hang around after everyones gone, get out the mop, and clean up red Kool-Aid stains in the church kitchen without thought of recompense or recognition. Theyre the tired-but-tireless Sunday school teachers who are in their fifth decade of helping children understand what Jesus meant when he said, Take up your cross and follow me. Theyre everywherebut rarely rewarded. And thats probably how they want things to be. Garfields relative anonymity in history shouldnt surprise usan assassins bullet tragically ended his life less than seven months into his term. His legacy, however, is important because his story relates an enduring lesson: true, dignified influence is often achieved not through force or compulsion, but through quiet humility. Recommended for further reading: The Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard Dark Horse by Kenneth Ackerman Reach Beyond Rushes Medical Crews to Assist in Ecuadorian Earthquake Ministry's Hospital, Personnel Responding to Many Victims Contact: Darin Campbell, 512-785-8350 QUITO, Ecuador, April 20, 2016 /Christian Newswire/ -- Reach Beyond, a Colorado-based media and medical outreach ministry with broadcasting facilities and a hospital in Ecuador, will dispatch crews to help care for some of the 2,500 people hurt during last weekend's devastating quake. More than 410 people are confirmed dead, but this total is expected to rise in the coming days. Photo: Buildings and roads in Pedernales, Ecuador, were destroyed by the 7.8-magnitude earthquake this weekend. Photo supplied by La Hora The initial crew, comprising four Quito-based physicians, is expected to arrive today at a local healthcare facility, Hospital Juan Carlos Guasti in the coastal city of Atacames. "The hospital is receiving a lot of trauma patients," said Reach Beyond missionary Hermann Schirmacher, a veteran of disaster response trips to Ecuador in 2008 and Haiti in 2010. "We are organizing relief missions as quickly as we can," said Steve Johnson, communications director of Reach Beyond in Colorado Springs. "Roads were destroyed and communications equipment has been badly damaged in many areas, making it difficult to find out where help is most needed." Dr. Jack Pena, an orthopedic surgeon, is accompanying the team that also includes emergency physician Dr. Hugo Espejo and family physicians Drs. Steve Nelson and Joe Martin. After attending to trauma patients at Atacames, the team plans to move to Ecuadorian communities farther down the coast toward the quake's epicenter, including hard-hit Muisne. Future teams will also travel to Manta and Esmeraldas. Reach Beyond's 76-bed Hospital Vozandes-Quito in the capital city was undamaged by the quake and is also receiving patients being airlifted by the Ecuadorian government from coastal towns and cities. Reach Beyond's ministry workers throughout the country confirmed that they are safe, though they are concerned for the quake victims. "We are praying that the ground will stop trembling and that people who survived can receive help that they need," said one worker. Quichua radio programmer Franklin Ruchi learned today that five members of his wife's family perished in hard-hit Pedernales. Meanwhile, the ministry's local radio stations and repeaters in Ecuadorseven in all, including three in the quake zoneare broadcasting a message of hope to the traumatized population. "Our repeater in Portoviejo, which is a place that suffered a lot of damage, is on the air and we have a listener who has confirmed that," said engineer Geoff Kooistra. "We have linked to all government notifications and have done our own special live programming a few times, giving news updates and praying for the situation and offering messages of hope from the Bible. We've also interacted with our listeners through Facebook, Twitter and SMS." Donations to help recovery efforts can be made at reachbeyond.org/ecuadorrelief?c=DM-EMR4. Reach Beyond (www.reachbeyond.org) of Colorado Springs, Colo., uses media and medical technology to minister in difficult-to-reach places and with people groups around the world. To schedule an interview with key leaders, contact Darin Campbell @ (512) 785-8350 or dcampbell@inchristcommunications.com. Share Tweet Billy Graham Rapid Response Team Chaplains Deployed to Houston Following Deadly Floods Contact: Erik Ogren, 704-401-2117, eogren@bgea.org CHARLOTTE, N.C., April 21, 2016 /Christian Newswire/ -- Massive flooding inundated Texas over the weekend, with news reports indicating that several people died, more than 1,000 homes were flooded, and hundreds required emergency rescue. It is estimated that some 8.8 trillion gallons of water fell on the state in the last few days. In the wake of this disaster, crisis-trained chaplains from the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team have been deployed to assist those who lost homes and loved ones in the historic flooding. Jack Munday, the international director of the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team, said, "Flooding is a difficult tragedy, and it's hard to recover. A homeowner basically has to throw away everything they own. Very little if anything can be saved. Please pray for all of those who are hurting so badly right now." Al New, a veteran chaplain with the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team who arrived in the Houston area on Tuesday, said, "Residents are dragging their possessions, carpet and furniture out to the curb right now. It's been raining so much that there's not much else you can do." The Billy Graham Rapid Response Team is deploying in coordination with Samaritan's Purse, the Christian disaster relief organization also headed by Franklin Graham. Together the two ministries will address the physical, emotional and spiritual needs of those who have been affected. In addition to the deployment in Houston, the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team continues to work in the flood-impacted areas around Orange and Deweyville, Texas, as well as in West Monroe, La. The chaplains recently completed their ministry in Bossier City, La. (flooding) and Brussels, Belgium (terrorist attacks). For more information on the ministry, including videos, photos, news articles and an interactive map of former and current deployments, visit www.billygraham.org/rrt. Updates can also be found at www.facebook.com/RRTChaplains. About the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team: The Billy Graham Rapid Response Team was developed by Franklin Graham and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It has since grown into a nationwide network of chaplains in 48 states who are specifically trained to deal with crisis situations. They have deployed to more than 215 disaster sites, including shootings, floods, hurricanes, wildfires and tornadoes. Share Tweet A Full Size Replica of The Ark of Noah Plans to Sail to Brazil PASADENA, Calif., and ROTTERDAM, Netherlands, April 21, 2016 / Noah's Ark will be in Fortaleza for the 2016 Olympic Games and Rio de Janeiro for the Paralympic summer games. The Ark is a massive replica that is interactive, informative, cultural Biblical event center. Noah's Ark provides a Judeo-Christian, Bible based experience for young and old. Once in Brazil the Ark will be using techniques that include virtual and augmented reality to tell original different biblical themes and stories in an interactive and challenging way. Brazil has a total population of over 190 million people who are 28% Protestant and 60% Catholic. The builder of the Ark, Johan Huibers, is extremely excited to see that one of his visions gets realized. In his autobiography "The Unsinkable Dream" the builder speaks about his dream in which he sees the "Ark" in the port of Rio de Janeiro. The Ark of Noah Foundation together with its partners are actively involved in financing the entire project. The US crowd funding campaign starts now, private investors and international donors will be approached shortly as well. Noah's Ark opened its doors in July 2012 for the general public and has been on display for four years already. This construction has the real dimensions of the Ark mentioned in the Bible; about 95 feet wide, 75.5 feet high and 410 feet long and weighs about 2500 tons. It is envisioned to use the proceeds of the use of the Ark of Noah in Brazil to build Ark of Hope centers throughout the country. These centers will provide social, educational and practical support to the underprivileged people in Brazil. Share Tweet Contact: Katherine Cordon, 818-391-9823PASADENA, Calif., and ROTTERDAM, Netherlands, April 21, 2016 / Christian Newswire / -- The Ark of Noah Foundation in Pasadena has entered into a strategic collaboration with the owner of the full size replica of the Ark of Noah to move the Ark to the cities of Fortaleza and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.Noah's Ark will be in Fortaleza for the 2016 Olympic Games and Rio de Janeiro for the Paralympic summer games. The Ark is a massive replica that is interactive, informative, cultural Biblical event center. Noah's Ark provides a Judeo-Christian, Bible based experience for young and old.Once in Brazil the Ark will be using techniques that include virtual and augmented reality to tell original different biblical themes and stories in an interactive and challenging way. Brazil has a total population of over 190 million people who are 28% Protestant and 60% Catholic.The builder of the Ark, Johan Huibers, is extremely excited to see that one of his visions gets realized. In his autobiography "The Unsinkable Dream" the builder speaks about his dream in which he sees the "Ark" in the port of Rio de Janeiro.The Ark of Noah Foundation together with its partners are actively involved in financing the entire project. The US crowd funding campaign starts now, private investors and international donors will be approached shortly as well.Noah's Ark opened its doors in July 2012 for the general public and has been on display for four years already. This construction has the real dimensions of the Ark mentioned in the Bible; about 95 feet wide, 75.5 feet high and 410 feet long and weighs about 2500 tons.It is envisioned to use the proceeds of the use of the Ark of Noah in Brazil to build Ark of Hope centers throughout the country. These centers will provide social, educational and practical support to the underprivileged people in Brazil. home US Louisiana's Pastor Protection Bill gets 80-18 vote in House of Representatives The Louisiana House of Representatives passed a bill that would protect religious leaders should they refuse to conduct a wedding that violates their religious beliefs. House Bill 597, titled The Pastor Protection Act, states that members of the clergy of a legally recognized church, faith, or religious organization or their employees who are acting within the scope of their employment "may not be required by the state to solemnize a marriage, nor provide access to facilities, services, accommodations, goods, or privileges of the church, faith, or religious organization for a purpose related to the solemnization, formation, or celebration of the marriage, if the actions would be contrary to church doctrine, practice or in violation of the religious beliefs and principles of the clergy, church, or religious organization." Simply put, churches and religious organization can refuse to conduct same-sex marriages if it goes against their religious beliefs, without fear of reprisal. They cannot be penalized by the government, such as witholding benefits, for not agreeing to officiate theh marriage. And, according to a Q&A page about the bill on Louisiana for Liberty, since there are many others who would be willing to conduct such services, then it would not be right to force a pastor or priest to conduct it if it goes against his conscience. The page says, "Most Americans recognize that the right of conscience is the most fundamental freedom that a person has, and none of us want a government that imposes penalties for a person's religious opinions." However, according to Christian Today, there is already an existing religious freedom law in the state as well as the U.S. constitution that protects the clergy from being made to officiate same-sex marriages. Thus, the bill is viewed by critics as something unnecessary that only indulges conservative pressure groups. The bill, spoonsored by representative Mike Johnson, received an 80-18 vote in the house. The senate has received and has done a first reading, and is scheduled for a second one. According to The Times-Picayune, Governor John Bel Edwards has indicated that he would not veto the bill. "I don't see anything in the pastor protection bill that causes me concern, except that it's unnecessary," Edwards said. "I don't believe we have pastors today who are under threat of anything adverse happening to them if they don't officiate a gay wedding." home World Migrants pose threat to Europe's Judeo-Christian foundation, deems Germany's former chancellor Former chancellor of Germany Helmut Khol has expressed his views on the current refugee crisis -- that Europe does not hold the answer for those in need -- and implied that migrants pose a threat to the Judeo-Christian foundation of the continent. "The solution lies in the regions concerned. It is not in Europe," Kohl said. "Europe can not be the world into a new home for millions of people in need." His statement came from the preface he wrote for the new Hungarian translation of his work titled "Out of concern for Europe: An appeal." German news site der Tagesspiegel received a copy of the manuscript prior to the publication of the new edition. Breitbart reports that the former chancellor, who was the architect behind the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990, expressed that migrants and refugees are "from different cultural backgrounds. They follow in significant part, faiths other than Judeo-Christianity, which is one of the foundations of our values and social order." Kohl holds a view quite different from his successor, Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose open-door policy toward migrants has been criticized for having redirected global migration flows into Europe. According to FT, the 86-year-old former chancellor met with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Tuesday. Orban, who has been critical of Merkel's approach to mass migration, has been firm in his stance toward this issue. He has been criticized by other European countries for refusing to host refugees, and he has even built a razor wire fence on Hungary's border with Croatia and Serbia to keep refugees out of its territory. Last year, he met with Horst Seehofer, Bavarian conservative leader, who also wants more strict migration policies. "I know I agree with my friend Viktor Orban," Breitbart quotes Kohl as saying. The former chancellor also reportedly called the prime minister of Hungary a "European with heart and soul." "We are aware that we have something to lose and that it is worth fighting for the European project for peace and freedom," Kohl wrote, referring to Orban, as quoted by DW. The publication, citing Koh'ls allies, reported that the former chancellor's meeting with Orban is not an affront to Merkel. home World Rome's Trevi Fountain to be dyed red to recognize modern-day martyrs One of Rome's most famous tourist attractions will be dyed red later this month to recognize all the Christians whose lives have been taken because of their faith. According to the Catholic News Agency, the Trevi Fountain will bear the red color on April 29, an initiative organized by Aid to the Church in Need, in order to "call attention to the drama of anti-Christian persecution." The aid group, said the report, wants to stir a concrete and long-lasting reaction so people of this age can go back to "fully enjoying their natural right to religious freedom." They want the violation of people's -- especially Christians' -- right to religious freedom to "become the central issue of the public debate." The initiative is timely, considering the increase in the number of Christians being targeted worldwide. In a report by the World Watch Monitor covering the period between November 2014 and October 2015, more than 4,000 Christians were killed and almost 200 churches were destroyed in Nigeria alone because of faith-based reasons. In Maiduguri in Borno State, more than 5,500 people -- a majority suspected to be Christians -- were killed by Boko Haram. Last month in Pakistan, a bomb that was meant for Christians blew up at a park, also killing many Muslims. A church-run elderly home in Yemen was attacked in March with the nuns killed save for one. Persons have been assaulted and killed simply because they are Christians. The stories seem endless, with droves of internally displaced people, refugees, and asylum-seekers telling of what they have experienced and witnessed. Pope Francis, on April 7, called these modern-day martyrs "the lifeblood of the Church." "It is the witness of our martyrs of today a so many! a chased out of their homeland, driven away, having their throats cut, persecuted: they have the courage to confess Jesus even to the point of death," the pope said, as quoted by CNA. Antoine Audo, the Chaldean Catholic Bishop of Aleppo in Syria, and Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, the international president of Aid the Church in Need, will be the speakers at the event. Caritas Italy, Communion and Liberation, the Christian Workers Movement, the Focolare Movement, pro-life groups, and other organizations have reportedly joined the project. home US Texas school district removes Bible verse from website, Christian parents launch 'Our God is Bigger' T-shirt campaign A school district in Texas has removed a Bible verse from its website and, in response, Christian parents launched an "Our God is Bigger" T-shirt campaign. "I know that lots of hands are tied, but as parents and students our hands are not," Christian parent Cindy Carnes wrote on Facebook, as quoted by Raw Story. "We can take something that was meant to stand against God and use it for His glory by getting our kids involved in taking a stand for God and exercising our freedom to actively praise and worship Him." The line from the Old Testament, "As Goliath moved closer to attack, David quickly ran out to meet him" (I Samuel 14:48), used to be in the Troup Independent School District's website, but non-profit organization Freedom from Religion Foundation wrote a letter of complaint and demanded to have it removed since it violates the United States constitution. The January letter to Superintendent Stuart Bird from FFRF staff attorney Sam Grover said that no public school may promote religion, and they may not "urge religious viewpoints on students by granting special status to a religious text like the Bible." The FFRF press release in its website says quoting a Bibical verse shows preference to Christianity and Judaism over other religions or non-religion, which, in turn, excludes, among others, 30 percent of Americans who are not Christian. "Under the federal constitution, a government entity like a school district can't endorse one religious belief over others or religion generally over non religion," FFRF attorney Sam Grover said. Brittany Taylor, another parent of a Troup ISD student, said they support and are fighting for the school since "they kind of had their hands tied in the situation." The T-shirts reportedly cost $7 each, and Tyler Morning Telegraph says the parents intend to take photos of kids wearing them and then send those to FFRF to show their point. "It will be in our children's hearts and they will not stop praising God because a group told them to," said Taylor. Archbishop of Canterbury sends birthday greetings to the Queen The Archbishop of Canterbury has today paid special tribute to the Queen, the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, to mark her 90th birthday. Archbishop Justin Welby, who regularly meets the Queen as part of his official duties, said: "I wish Her Majesty a very happy 90th birthday. I am thankful to God for her ceaseless and faithful service, rooted in deep Christian faith." Welcoming the Queen to the General Synod of the Church of England last November, the Archbishop said: "As we seek to take counsel together here to discern the mind of Christ for the Church of England, and for those whom we serve in this land, we shall draw strength from knowing that Your Majesty's prayers will be with us." He continued: "For our part it will remain our earnest concern to pray that Almighty God will continue to replenish Your Majesty with the grace of the Holy Spirit, enduing her plenteously with all heavenly gifts." A few days ago, the Archbishop also took part in a video recording at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Lusaka, Zambia, where he had been meeting other church leaders at the latest Anglican Consultative Council. On behalf of the worldwide Anglican Communion, the delegates gave a rousing "three cheers for Her Majesty". Also last year, the Archbishop and the Queen attended the 800th anniversary celebration of the Magna Carta at Runnymede in Surrey. Archbishop Welby said: "The vision of the dignity of the human being, however limited that vision is, in Magna Carta sets a standard for our consideration of all human beings however important or unimportant, near or far, they may seem to be." He admitted: "In the centuries since, how often the Church and others have failed to uphold these most noble qualities, to be an advocate for those members of our community for whom the rights and liberties of Magna Carta have remained a distant hope. "From the support for enclosures to the opposition to the Great Reform Act, to the toleration of all sorts of abuse, with humility we recognise these failings. "But I pray that today will be a moment of opportunity in which our commitment to the liberty and flourishing of one another, the bond between us that allows us to recognise our individual human dignity, is renewed and will never again fail." He also noted: "As the path to Magna Carta and our history since lays bare, the relationship between the Church and the State has not always been easy. In my own cathedral in Canterbury, at the Altar of the Sword's Point, the site of the martyrdom of Becket, I am reminded of what happens when this relationship collapses. "Together, as critical friends, we must seek the principled and active betterment of society as a whole, ensuring that all the rights and liberties afforded to them, both in our legal system and in our inherent worth as children of God, are, in the words of Magna Carta, enjoyed in their entirety, with lasting strength, forever." Bethlehem students to paint new display for Lichfield Cathedral A new set of Christian images in Lichfield Cathedral will be painted by Palestinian artists from Bethlehem. The students will take part in residential camps over the next two summers to complete the project, according to Lichfield Live. The work will include images of Archangel Gabriel and St Chad and will go on display in the Cathedral's Nave when finished. The Very Revd Adrian Dorber, Dean of Lichfield, described the project as "exciting and creative". He said: "The Bethlehem Icon Centre is training young Palestinian artists in a form of Christian art that first began in the Holy Land. Our commission benefits the centre by providing an important UK venue for its work, but it links us in Lichfield with an unbroken form of Christian art that speaks engagingly and beautifully of the Christian story. "As a place of pilgrimage and worship, I believe these icons will help all our cathedral visitors to pray and get a glimpse of God's generous love his invitation to align our lives with his. "We also hope that by having the staff and students in Lichfield for the whole summer, local people can get to hear of the struggles people in Bethlehem face but also learn much from the students' faith and resilience." The project will be overseen by the director of the Bethlehem Icon School, Ian Knowles. The project will also include workshops on iconography, Christian culture and identity in the Middle East. Bodnariu family on 'right side of history' as thousands of Christians protest children's removal The Christian Bodnariu family are on the "right side of history" according to a pastor who acts as their spokesman after the removal of their children by Norwegian authorities sparked a global protest movement. The evangelical family had their five children removed by Norway's child protection service last November. Marius, a Romanian, and Ruth, a Norwegian, were suspected of parental child abuse and religious indoctrination after one of the daughters told her headteacher that they spanked the children as a disciplinary measure. The Norwegian authorities have said they were acting in the best interests of the children. Tens of thousands joined more than 50 protests around the world against the Norwegian protection authority, known as the Barnevernet, on April 16. Activists accused social workers of removing the children without justification. Cristian Ionescu has acted as a spokesman for the family. In a post on Monday he said that history was on their side and the case had been a "catalyst that united" conservative Christians "in a common cause that inspired us to witness for the values that represent us". He continued: "When the Norwegian Minister Madame Horne said that the system will be firm and not crack under the international pressure, I couldn't help but smirk... not in a condescending way, but I confess feeling pity for her ignorance." Earlier this month a judge ruled that Ezekial, the baby son of Marius and Ruth, should be reunited with his parents and that they should see their two older boys twice a week. Ionescu wrote in a statement: "This ruling is a step in the judicial process and does NOT end the Bodnariu's appeal or fight to regain full and unhindered custody of ALL of their FIVE children. The battle for the children continues!" Christianity and cannabis: Does legalising it make it OK? The Liberal government of Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is to push for the legalisation of cannabis. If it succeeds and in spite of its majority it will face determined opposition it will make Canada the largest Western democracy where the drug is legally available for recreational use. Trudeau has pledged to keep the drug out of the hands of children and the profits out of the hands of organised crime. So I can go to Canada and smoke pot? In due course, perhaps so. But you can already smoke it in many countries around the world, including the US. I thought it was illegal in the US? It is, at a federal level, but some states have legalised it. How does that work, then? No one's quite sure. But the confusion over cannabis in the US is a reflection of the whole cannabis debate. In many countries like the UK it's seen as a dangerous drug. But more and more countries are legalising it on the grounds that it's not that dangerous. Other countries distinguish between cultivating and using it privately and selling it, while others put a limit on the amount a person can have in their possession. So is it dangerous? That's a good question. It is mildly carcinogenic, though not as much as tobacco. The main danger comes through its active ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which activates areas of the brain responsible for memory, pleasure, coordination and time perception. It also stimulates the brain to produce dopamine, associated with euphoria. Sounds rather nice, actually, not much different from alcohol. Well, not everyone approves of alcohol, which is also a drug. But high levels of THC found in many modern strains of the drug can induce delusions. In young people they can impair development. Long-term use can result in depression and loss of motivation, as well as loss of the ability to concentrate. According to the Royal College of Psychiatrists, "those who use cannabis particularly at a younger age, such as around the age of 15, have a higher than average risk of developing a psychotic illness, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder". Oh, and it's addictive. Now it sounds appalling. Yes. Many campaigners worry that those arguing for its legalisation are not taking account of the fact that modern 'skunk' is so much more potent with two or three times the level of THC and is very different from what they might have tried in their misspent youth. It's difficult to see how one type could be made legal and other types criminalised. On the other hand, campaigners for legalisation argue that the law is widely flouted, so makes sense to try to control cannabis use rather than trying to ban it. Let's go back a bit. If it's legal to smoke cannabis does that mean it's OK for a Christian? All sorts of things are legal, but that doesn't mean you should do them. In the case of cannabis, there are serious problems for Christians that are arguably quite different from alcohol. For one thing, while alcohol is responsible for a great deal of harm through increased violence, deaths and injuries through drink-driving and many premature deaths and wasted lives through alcoholism, it's perfectly possible to consume it in moderation without being affected by it. In using cannabis the euphoric effect is the whole point. That doesn't necessarily make it wrong, but Christians value self-control and moderation. You say it's not necessarily wrong? We shouldn't go beyond Scripture, which doesn't mention cannabis. However, drunkenness the abuse of alcohol is explicitly condemned in the Bible. It's hard to see why the biblical writers would have made an exception for cannabis or other mind-altering drugs. Some people argue that it has a medicinal use. Yes, they do. Various trials have shown that the active ingredients might be helpful in treating cancer and epilepsy and controlling chronic pain. Campaigners say this medical use is being hindered by fears over opening the floodgates for recreational use. It's a hard one. Yes. Christians should be very, very slow to get involved in something that has the potential to affect their bodies in unhealthy and unhelpful ways. On the other hand, we should be led by the evidence. If medical marijuana really can help people we shouldn't just be saying, "marijuana is bad". And just because we're aware of the dangers of cannabis, it doesn't mean that the answer is to maintain a ban on it. Perhaps legalising it and controlling it is the best way forward. But that doesn't mean Christians can smoke it? I really don't think it's wise. Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods Jesuit Priests call for action concerning refugees after Pope's visit to Lesbos Following Pope Francis' visit to Lesbos, the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) has written four proposals to aid refugees stranded in Greece. The JRS, who were present when Pope Francis visited Lesbos and the Moria refugee camp, have called for the acceleration of the resettlement and for family reunification in all European countries for the 55,000 refugees in 40 camps across Greece. They drew attention to the fact that refugees are currently in limbo, living in fear of deportation to Turkey, and subsequently called for a revision of the Turkey-European Union accord of March 18. This is a suggestion that has been also made by a number of NGOs and UN bodies. In connection with this, the JRS asked what will happen to those who are deported from Greece to Turkey. A statement from the group said that it hoped "That the large question mark which remains over those persons returned to the camps in Turkey is addressed. There is no information and no possibility of follow-up, even by the UN. It is essential to guarantee that their fundamental rights are respected and to ensure their access to proper legal protection." The JRS also called for better collaboration between Greek authorities, the UNHCR and NGOs, "so that all essential services may be provided, but also in order to ensure the protection and education of children". Pope Francis visited Lesbos earlier this month "to shed light on the major humanitarian problem" presented by the refugee crisis. While there, he greeted hundreds of refugees. "I want to tell you that you are not alone," he told them. "In these weeks and months, you have endured much suffering in your search for a better life. Many of you felt forced to flee situations of conflict and persecution for the sake, above all, of your children, your little ones." John Stott's classic 'Basic Christianity' under fire A publisher has hit back at claims that a revised edition of John Stott's classic Basic Christianity changes the book's meaning and is "a bad imitation of the original". Basic Christianity was first published in 1958. A second edition followed in 1971 and the book has sold millions of copies. Stott, who died in 2011, was an influential Anglican evangelical who inspired several generations of Christians. A revised edition was undertaken by IVP in the UK and published in 2008. It was published in the US by Eerdmans. Barton Swaim says on the conservative First Things website that Stott's book has been "bowdlerised" for a modern readership. "Two out of every three sentences, I estimate, involve some new wording," he claims. Blaming Eerdmans rather than IVP, Swaim objects to the revisers dropping references to hymns that were well known in 1971 but are less so today, and to the way in which Stott's language has been updated. He criticises a rewriting of Stott's description of atonement which stresses 'reconciliation', saying: "The newer text leaves the reader free (or freer) to think of the reconciliation Christ has accomplished as the sort of therapeutic fence-mending urged on brawling high-schoolers by their guidance counselors." He says: "The editor and publisher had no right to transform Stott's book as they did, whether or not the author granted his permission." Swaim's critique was picked up on social media and widely shared. What Eerdmans did to John Stott's "Basic Christianity" is an insult to both the book's author and its readers https://t.co/VGNclwj5nU BetweenTwoWorlds (@between2worlds) April 15, 2016 However, it received a robust rebuttal from Wm B Eerdmans' editor in chief, James Ernest, who pointed out that Stott himself approved the rewrite and hit out at "incomplete research and careless re-tweeting". Ernest said: "John Stott did not see himself as the author of a classic. He wanted to and did author a little book that served a practical, evangelistic purpose. And, stellar preacher and communicator that he was, he understood that what communicates effectively in one time and place must be changed to communicate effectively in another." He continued: "First Things and Barton Swaim published an essay that appears designed to provoke readers and score culture-war points all at the expense of Eerdmans's reputation. They did so without bothering to ascertain certain relevant facts, which we would have gladly supplied if they had asked us." The chief executive of IVP-UK, Sam Richardson, told Christian Today: "The new edition was undertaken with John Stott's approval and I know he was happy with the approach taken. "I see it as an update rather than a substantial revision. The update re-established the book as one of IVP's best-selling titles and as a result it continues to impact the lives of many people." First Things issued an apology for Swaim's errors but defended his overall critique of the book. 'Mosque tax' proposed for Muslims in Germany A tax on mosques in Germany has been suggested by politicians as a means to cut off foreign funding. Alexander Radwan, member of the Merkel-allied Christian Social Party (CSU), has called for the so-called "church tax" to be applied to Muslims in Germany. "If you stop foreign funding of mosques, of course you have to provide sufficient funding here in Germany," said Radwan, a member of the European Parliament for Bavaria, in the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. He added this could be done in a similar manner to the "existing church tax for Catholics and Protestants". In Germany members of churches have to pay a tax on top of their total income tax to fund church activities. The recommendation comes a week after Andreas Scheuer, the general secretary of the Christian Social Union (CSU), spoke of the need to promote a European kind of Islam through barring overseas funding of mosques. Among others suggestions he told Die Welt daily that "German must become the language of the mosques". He said: "We cannot tolerate a situation in which extremist views are imported from abroad... Europe must cultivate its own Islam." A so-called "Islam law" would mean money for mosques from countries such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia would be curbed. "All imams need to be trained in Germany and share our core values," said Scheuer. "Those who are not integrated cannot stay here. We must put an end to this integration romance. Multiculturalism has failed. Those who are not integrated, must expect departure [from Germany]," he added. The CSU is the Bavarian ally to the German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Party. Pastor urges Southern Baptist Convention to stop displaying Confederate flag An African American pastor has called on the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) to prohibit the public display of the Confederate flag. Pastor Dwight McKissic of Cornerstone Baptist Church, Texas, has submitted a resolution urging individuals and institutions to stop using the Confederate flag "as a step in good faith toward racial healing" in America. The flag is one of the most inflammatory icons of American culture, and is often thought to be a symbol of racism and hatred. "Racial tensions and ongoing bigotries are inflamed" by its use, as it has been "utilised as a symbol of racial, ethnic, and religious hatred, oppression and murder which offends untold millions of people", Mckissic told Baptist News. The June 17 murder of nine black Christians at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston by Dylann Roof, who was often pictured wearing a Confederate flag, last year reinvigorated action against the flag and what it stands for. The state of South Carolina consequently decided to permanently remove the Confederate flag from the state Capitol. It had flown there since 1962. Now McKissic is asking the Southern Baptist Convention the second largest religious denomination in America to follow suit. He urged them to acknowledge "the controversial and necessarily divisive symbol of racism conveyed by [its] ongoing display" and to "work diligently to remove vestigial symbols of racism from public life as evidence of the fruits of repentance that we have made for our past bigotries." Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, has said it is inappropriate to fly the Confederate flag, however he has not removed the names of slave-holders from campus buildings. Robert Moore, the head of the SBC's Ethics and Religious Liberty Committee, said that displaying the flag "is out of step with the justice of Jesus Christ". McKissic's resolution has been submitted for possible consideration at the SBC annual meeting in June. He said the removal of the Confederate flag is not the solution to racial tensions still present in America, but "it does symbolise another development in ongoing efforts to eliminate systematic racism that has divided our people for too long". Philippines: Christian leaders condemn presidential hopeful over rape comments Top evangelical leaders in the Philippines have condemned presidential hopeful Rodrigo Duterte's recent comments about a Christian missionary who was raped and murdered in the country in 1989. Jacqueline Hamill was working in a prison in Davao City in the southern Philippines when she was held hostage, gang-raped and killed during a riot. Duterte, who has been mayor of Davao for 22 years, recently referred to the incident at a rally. He said: "They raped all of the women... There was this Australian lay minister... when they took them out... I saw her face and I thought: 'Son of a bitch. what a pity'... they raped her, they all lined up. I was mad she was raped but she was so beautiful. I thought, the mayor should have been first." A video of his remarks went viral over the weekend, and sparked mass condemnation. He later apologised, saying in a statement: "There was no intention of disrespecting our women and those who have been victims of this horrible crime. Sometimes my mouth can get the better of me. My life is an open book. I am a man of many flaws and contradictions." However, in a letter to Duterte, Bishop Noel Pantoja, national director of the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches, and Bishop Efraim Tendero, secretary general of the World Evangelical Alliance, said they were "taken aback and aghast" that Hamill's death "became a laughing matter to your supporters and some of the viewing public". Writing on behalf of 33,000 evangelical churches and millions of members, the two admitted that Davao has progressed under Duterte's leadership. However, they added: "With due respect, sir, your derogatory statement as an aspiring father of our beloved country about a woman victim of the heinous crimes of rape and murder in the performance of ministry work for the spiritual well-being of our people, while it may be an expression of utter anger or a joke, is an insult, is offensive and sacrilegious to her family, the Christian Church, the missionary-sending country and the mission society who saw her death as the ultimate sacrifice. "We are not demanding apology or seeking retribution," the bishops continued. "We will leave it to your judgement on how you will respond to this letter in the listening ears and watchful eyes of millions of devoted followers of Jesus Christ in our country. "Ultimately, all our actions and deeds will be weighed by God, but the public and the religious are concerned how you treat situations such as this and the way you handle yourself as a leader. "While you claim to speak the language of the masses, as an aspiring President of our country, your comments, remarks, jokes and verbal expressions will be heard around the world as first representative of all Filipinos, as it has already been in this case. Whatever you say will bode well or ill for the country." Duterte, 71, is currently the frontrunner in the race to replace current president Benigno Aquino III, who has been in office since 2010. He has been criticised by human rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch over his links to extrajudicial killings. The election is scheduled to take place on May 9. Rome's historic Trevi Fountain to be dyed red in remembrance of martyred Christians Rome's historic Trevi Fountain will be dyed red in recognition of Christian martyrs around the world. Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) is organising the demonstration on April 29 to "call attention to the drama of anti-Christian persecution". The Chaldean Catholic Bishop of Aleppo, Antoine Audo, will share testimony of the persecution Christians face in the Middle East, alongside other witnesses to Christian massacres in Yemen, Pakistan, Turkey, Kenya and Nigeria. ACN said it hopes this will mark "the start of a long lasting, concrete reaction everywhere so that the persecuted people of the 21st century can as soon as possible return to fully enjoying their natural right to religious freedom." It is crucial, the charity said, that "the systematic violation of the right to religious freedom, especially that of Christians... become the central issue of the public debate." The international president of ACN, Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, will introduce the event. The initiative is supported by a number of organisations including Communion and Liberation, Caritas Italy, the Christian Workers Movement and the Focolare Movement. The atrocities committed against Christians, Yazidis and other minorities in the Middle East by ISIS were labelled a 'genocide' by the House of Commons on Wednesday. The European Parliament passed a similar motion unanimously in February and the US secretary of state John Kerry declared ISIS was "genocidal" in March. 2015 saw "the most violent and sustained attack on Christian faith in modern history", according to Christian persecution organisation Open Doors. "The persecution of Christians is getting worse, in every region in which we work and it's getting worse fast," said Lisa Pearce, Open Doors' CEO. Russia a greater global threat than ISIS, says Poland, citing Moscow's potential to destroy countries Poland's Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski said Russia is a greater threat to the world than the Islamic State (ISIS) because it has the potential to destroy countries. Speaking at a recent security conference in Bratislava, Slovakia, Waszczykowski described Russia as an "existential threat" and called on NATO to immediately deploy troops to guard its eastern flank against Moscow's aggression, the Daily Mail reports. He said he would appeal to NATO directly when the organisation holds its summit in Warsaw in July. "We have existential threats and non-existential threats. Of course the Russian activity is kind of an existential threat because this activity may destroy countries," he said during a media conference. "And we have non-existential threats like terrorists, like massive wave of migrants," he added. "It is a very important threat but it is not an existential threat for Europe." Poland, one of Moscow's staunchest critics, was one of the first countries to express alarm when Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea peninsula in 2014 and supported armed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Waszczykowski expressed hope that the July NATO summit would "address an inferior level of security" on its eastern flank. In 2014, the Polish Foreign Minister described the "offensive action" taken by Russian armed forces in the southern regions of Donetsk as an aggression by international law. He called on NATO countries to deploy troops on NATO's eastern flanks to show Moscow the Western alliance's determination to defend its territory. However, Russia has warned that the deployment of significant NATO forces close to its borders would violate the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act. The Bible will not be Tennessee's official book after veto override fails A bid to override the veto of a bill that would make the Bible the official book of Tennessee failed in the state House on Wednesday. The bid only got 43 of the required 50 votes to turn back the veto. Republican Governor Bill Haslam vetoed the bill last week. He said it "trivialises" what he considers to be a sacred text. Haslam, a committed Christian, also said the bill would violate the federal and state constitutions. "If we believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, then we shouldn't be recognising it only as a book of historical and economic significance," he said. "If we are recognising the Bible as a sacred text, then we are violating the constitution of the United States and the constitution of the State of Tennessee by designating it as the official state book. Our founders recognised that when the church and state were combined, it was the church that suffered in the long run." The sponsor of the bill, former Baptist minister Rep Jerry Sexton, immediately filed to override the veto. He argued that having the Bible as the state book would honour the economic and historical impact of the Bible in Tennessee history. "It doesn't force anyone to read it, it doesn't force anyone to buy it, it doesnt (force) anyone to believe it," he said. "It's simply symbolic." Each house had to vote against the veto by a majority for the bill to have gone through. According to The Tennesseean, the last time a veto override was successful in the state was in 2010. The Moses of her time: Who was Harriet Tubman? Often described Moses of her time, the Christian former slave and prominent abolitionist Harriet Tubman is set to replace former slave owner on the front of the new US $20 note. Born into slavery in Maryland, America in the 19th Century, Tubman walked to freedom in 1849, before going back to liberate hundreds of others. She said she relied entirely on God as she walked the near-90 miles from Dorchester County, Maryland to Delaware. "I always tole God, 'I'm gwine to hole stiddy on you, an' you've got to see me through.'" Although her exact route is unknown, it is thought she would have walked along the Choptak river, guided by the North Star. When she realised she had crossed the invisible state line to Philadelphia, the beginning of the free North, she described looking "at my hands to see if I was de same person now I was free. Dere was such a glory ober de fields, and I felt like I was in heaven." It was not long before Tubman returned to rescue others from the hell she had escaped, risking her own freedom in the process. She made 19 trips to the South, helping to deliver at least 300 other slaves, despite there being a $40,000 reward for her capture. She would tunnel them through the so-called "underground railroad", a series of safe houses used to transport slaves from the South up to the free North. Fearless, Tubman's motto was simply, "I can't die but once". She later became a Union Spy in the Civil war and prominent in the woman's suffrage movement, but her beginnings were as a slave. In September 1849, the death of her master prompted the then-27-year-old to gather her two younger brothers, Ben and Henry, and they escaped. They hid for three weeks, with the help of their recently freed father. After a $100 bounty was made for each of them, the boys became fearful and returned, but Harriet pressed on. Born Araminta Ross, Tubman took her mother's first name and her husband's surname in order to evade capture. John Tubman was a free man, who stayed in South as she fled North. The first of her rescues was a personal affair. Upon hearing that her niece, Kessiah Jolley Bowley, was set to be auctioned, Tubman set her sights on rescuing her. In collaboration with Bowley's husband, they managed to surreptitiously place the winning bid for Bowley and her three children. Fleeing the state, the family continued through USA up to Canada. This began a long train of rescues, in which she would contact slaves and arrange to meet them eight to ten miles from their plantations. They would always flee on a Saturday night, as they would not be missed until Monday morning, because of the Sabbath. When their owners did post missing signs often not until Monday, Tubman had people in place to take them down. Tubman would listen carefully to the voice of God for direction, only going where she felt he lead. "I never met any person of any colour who had more confidence in the voice of God," fellow abolitionist Thomas Garrett said of her. Although Tubman boasted that she "never lost a passenger", she was not a soft touch. She was armed with a revolver and openly admitted that she would be willing to shoot a reluctant escaped slave. "Yes, if he was weak enough to give out, he'd be weak enough to betray us all and all who had helped us, and do you think I'd let so many die just for one coward man?" Although she never actually did it, she came close once: "I told the boys to get their guns ready, and shoot him. They'd have done it in a minute; but when he heard that, he jumped right up and went on as well as anybody." Dubbed Moses by the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrisson, Tubman finally freed her three younger brothers Ben, Henry and Robert in 1854, and rescued her parents in 1856. In 1863 she led Union forces in the Combahee River Raid which led to 700 slaves being liberated in South Carolina. "I nebber see such a sight," she said. "We laughed, an' laughed, an' laughed." Trump's popularity among Catholics has risen since Pope Francis suggested he's 'not Christian' The popularity of Donald Trump among church-going Catholic Republicans has risen since Pope Francis called into question his faith. A new Ipsos Mori poll has indicated that the proportion of church-going Catholics supporting Trump in the 50 days after the Pope's comments was almost 10 per cent higher than in the 50 days that preceded them. Pope Francis called into question the Republican frontrunner's faith on February 18 in response to a question about Trump's plans to build a wall on the Mexican border. Francis said: "a person who thinks only of building walls, wherever they may be, rather than building bridges, is not Christian". A spokesperson for the Vatican later said the Pope was "in no way" singling out Trump, who had branded the comments "disgraceful". Trump has averaged support among 47.9 per cent of Catholic Republicans since Francis made his remarks, compared to 39.8 per cent previously. "Many Catholics probably felt that the pope's comments were not a directive on how they should vote or who they should support, and still others may never have been aware of the pope's comments to begin with," Mark Gray, a senior research associate at Georgetown University, told Reuters. The rise in Catholic Republicans supporting Trump may well have be caused by other factors, including the fall in number of candidates remaining in the race. However Fr William Paul McKane, a Catholic priest who supports Trump, told Reuters he felt the Pope's comments had damaged his reputation among his followers. "I call it paradoxical, to put it gently, that the pope said that, when he lives behind walls that are about 40 feet high and 40 feet across. That comment hurt his credibility with my parishoners," he said. McKane explained that he was voting for Trump because of his clear lines on issues such as security. "Trump's verbiage does not sound compassionate. I don't hold him up as a paragon of Christian virtue, but I'm not looking for that in a candidate. I'm looking for someone who is prudent and can make good political decisions," he said. The Reuters/Ipsos poll questioned 1,117 church-going Catholic Republicans. The Catholic population is a sizeable US voting bloc, making up around one quarter of the electorate, according to Georgetown University's Centre for Applied Research in the Apostolate. UK has an 'obligation' to declare ISIS atrocities genocide, says Christian MPs Christians, Yazidis and other minorities are victims of a genocide by ISIS according to MPs from all parties in a unanimous vote on Wednesday. The House of Commons passed a motion by 278-0 which recognised genocide has been committed and called on the government to refer the matter to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). However the government refused to support the motion and ordered all Tory MPs who are on the payroll to abstain. This meant 40 per cent of Conservative MPs were barred from voting. Foreign office minister Tobias Ellwood said in response that he believed acts of "genocide had taken place" but added the term had a "legal definition and the government is not the judiciary". He repeated the Prime Minister's argument that genocide is a matter for international courts and not governments. However the Christian MP Fiona Bruce who tabled the motion called this a "circular argument" because the International Criminal Court (ICC) cannot intervene until it is instructed to do by the UNSC, of which the UK is a permanent member. In retaliation Ellwood said the last time the UNSC had made a referral to the ICC was in 2014 and it had been voted by Russia, another permanent member. After the debate Bruce told Christian Today the example in 2014 was on a "completely different issue". She said: "It was not about the genocide of Daesh [ISIS] which in my view no country would condone. "I believe the referral should be made without comparison to 2014 and am confident it will not be vetoed." David Burrowes, trustee of the Conservative Christian Fellowship (CCF), agreed and said the decision was "about the principle". He told Christian Today after the debate: "Just because there is a prospect of a veto it does not mean you do nothing. Just because it may be challenged, it can't mean you do nothing. "Once the threshold of genocide has been reached, as it clearly has, we have an obligation." He added the "overwhelming vote... sends a very clear unanimous voice of the House of Commons that the government needs to take action. "This issue will not go away. The payroll was ordered to abstain from the vote and no doubt many of them would have supported the motion as well." Labour's faith envoy Stephen Timms also spoke to Christian Today in the aftermath of the debate, which he described as "powerful". The MP for East Ham acknowledged Ellwood "did use the word genocide which is a step further than any other government minister has gone so far". He said the government was "changing what it is saying" but added: "I am not sure what sort of response it will be and I don't know how full it will be. "I am concerned it won't be as full as the Commons expected." Why Pope Francis said fundamentalists shouldn't be trained as priests It's a very, very sobering comparison. Pope Francis told a Vatican gathering sponsored by the Congregation for the Clergy, which oversees the training of priests and deacons, to be careful about who they admit to seminaries. Some promising candidates are hiding serious psychological problems, he said. He spoke of his own experience of teaching Jesuit novices in Argentina. One candidate didn't pass a psychiatric examination. The psychiatrist said to him: "These boys are fine until they have settled, until they feel completely secure. Then the problems start. Father, have you ever asked yourself why there are policemen who are torturers?" Francis told the conference they should think twice about about admitting young men who were "too confident, rigid and fundamentalist". "There are mentally ill boys who seek strong structures that can protect them," he said, instancing "the police, the army and the clergy". At one level it's very heartening that this is acknowledged in the Church, and it's very much in tune with what we expect of this particular Pope. He is and this can't be over-stressed in the face of the Guardian-reading liberals who think he is secretly one of them theologically and personally conservative. However, he displays a generosity of spirit that lifts him on to an entirely different level from the Catholic culture warriors. It comes as a considerable shock to realise just how unpopular he is with a substantial number of his flock. A contributor to the conservative Rorate Coeli website described his widely praised Amoris Laetitia as "catastrophic". The site condemned his proposals last year to "decentralise" authority in the Church, describing them as an "obvious attack on the authority of the Apostolic See and the unity of the universal Church". US "Tea Party Catholics", as right-wing Catholic activists have been called, are deeply suspicious of his modernising agenda and regard him as a sell-out. His intervention in Cuba, credited with helping the rapprochement between the island and the US, was regarded with fury by right-wing Florida Catholics. Sites like the Most Holy Family Monastery, which regard all post-Vatican II Popes as frauds, are on the extreme end of this tendency, but there are plenty of conservatives who are deeply unhappy that Francis isn't talking the language of conflict and resistance. They'd like him to be far more definite about homosexuality and abortion, for a start and in a sign of just how deep these feelings go, the highly respected editor of the Catholic News Service was asked to resign last week because of his criticisms of so-called 'bathroom bills' targeting transgender people. It's this wing of the Church that would be all in favour of the sort of Catholic fundamentalism Francis critiques. We need more of that, not less, they'd say; enough with the watery liberalism, we need people who'll stand up and fearlessly declare the Church's teaching no matter whether people agree with them or not. To Francis' credit and it's worth saying that he was talking about an incident several years ago he is standing firm against that approach. He is aware of the dark side of certainty. Yes, it's the responsibility of priests to teach the historic faith of the Church, but this has to be done humbly, with self-reflection, by people who are committed to the gospel of Jesus rather than those who are using the Church and its structures to meet their own psychological needs. Francis knows that human motivation is a complicated thing. Of course the Church will support the emotional and psychological needs of its priests and members. But if young men are just seeking "strong structures that will protecct them", their loyalty is to the structure and it becomes a substitute for Christ. And if anyone thinks evangelical Protestants are immune from such temptations, they should consider recent history, and church leaders who have been seduced by the power and influence of their offices. As the psychiatrist said: "These boys are fine until they have settled, until they feel completely secure. Then the problems start. Father, have you ever asked yourself why there are policemen who are torturers?" Screening out potential torturers is easier said than done. But it begins with an acknowledgment that the ideal candidate for ministry is not the one who knows all the answers, but the one who's humble enough to live with a lifetime of questions. Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Shortly after news broke that Prince had died at his Minnesota home Thursday morning, social media exploded with tributes and reaction to the music legend's passing. The grief expressed across the Twittersphere crossed generational divides and demographics. Everyone from Ellen Degeneres to Spike Lee sent out tweets of shock. Many shared their favorite Prince memories and photos. His publicist, Yvette Noel-Schure, told The Associated Press that the superstar "died at his home this morning at Paisley Park." The local sheriff said deputies found Prince unresponsive in an elevator late Thursday morning after being summoned to his home, but that first-responders couldn't revive him. No details about what may have caused his death have been released. Prince postponed a concert in Atlanta on April 7, after coming down with the flu, and he apologized to fans during a makeup concert last week. President Barack Obama released a statement Thursday saying he and his wife "joined millions of fans from around the world" in mourning Prince's sudden death. Click through the gallery above to see how celebrities around the world are reacting to news Prince has died at the age of 57. The Associated Press contributed to this report. UPDATE: An 8-year-old boy missing from south Houston was found at about 1:45 p.m. Thursday, according to the Houston Police Department. No details were immediately available on how he was located. EARLIER: Authorities are searching for an 8-year-old boy who disappeared late Wednesday night from an apartment complex in south Houston. DNA evidence has linked a suspect to the stabbing death of a 38-year-old man 28 years ago in southeast Houston. Alex J. Beller, 57, is charged with murder in the death of Carl Douglas Steele on April 13, 1988, at 3952 Alabama, according to the Houston Police Department. Police said Beller, who was charged Tuesday, is being held in a Texas state prison on an unrelated charge. Steele, police said, was found dead in his apartment. At the time of the stabbing, a witness told investigators he saw Beller with Steele the night of the killing. Investigators questioned Beller, but he denied any involvement, and no charges were filed against him. Detectives with the HPD Cold Case Unit recently reviewed the investigation. DNA evidence gathered at the time of the slaying could not be processed, but advances in technology have allowed such material to be tested. Following the tests Beller was identified as a suspect. A federal judge granted a partial delay Thursday in a civil lawsuit brought by the family of Sandra Bland, who died in the Waller County jail after being detained following a traffic stop. U.S. District Judge David Hittner ruled that Trooper Brian Encinia, who initiated the 2015 traffic stop that led to the 28-year-old black woman being jailed, may delay his deposition in the federal case until his criminal case is resolved in state court. It is important every worker takes personal stock in daily behaviors that might not reflect so highly on them. Everyone has bad habits (some people have many) and while the job is still getting done, how well it gets done often comes into play if co-workers and bosses start to pick up negative quirks. Forbes recently spoke to career experts on some of the most damaging bad habits an employee can exhibit in the workplace. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate The Webster's highly anticipated grand opening brought more than a bevy of emerging designers to Houston's reimagined Galleria area. With the few hours of fleeting sunshine, a wave of Francophiles, Manhattan "it" girls, and bit of South Beach crashed into the Bayou City for one-night only. Simon mall insiders have allegedly dubbed the former parking lot space the "jewel box," and fittingly so. The newly constructed building's sleek exterior is as sparkly as the $745 Dolce & Gabbana phone cases inside. Leading the charge of Wednesday's pretty young things was The Webster's CEO, founder, and Parisian transplant, Laure Heriard-Dubreuil; her husband notable New York artiste, Aaron Young was never far behind. "I had requests from Houston women who came to Miami during Art Basel," Heriard-Dubreil said of the Texas store's origins. "It's kind of like a new market. Clients here are a mix of both (the New York and Miami) customer. She's looking for a curated selection and is very sophisticated and refined." As if on cue, Lynn Wyatt appeared in a cloud of black satin and Art Deco accessories. "I'm so excited to meet you," Heriard-Dubreil gushed. Afterwards, Wyatt gave the boutique's decor high marks for wallpaper and art installations that are "alike, but not too alike." Diane Lokey Farb received the muted tones and sequins memo and dressed accordingly, almost perfect blending in with one coral and rose corner. Phoebe Tudor and Carla Valencia also donned glittering cocktail garb in matching paillette pants; none, however, shone brighter than the multi-hyphenate editors, DJs, and designer muses who flooded into the room with a flash of bulbs and hashtags. "W" magazine's Rickie de Sole, style consultant Kate Foley, mix master and brand ambassador Harley Viera-Newton, and designers Monique Pean and Karla Martinez (jewelry and pajamas, respectively) did their squad thing while the party effectively split. Half of the crowd lingered behind to shop while a privy few moved on to destination number two, an exclusive "supper" at Susan and Fayez Sarofim's entertaining residence in River Oaks. The latter festivities were unmistakably Texan. Upon arrival, guests chose between a duo of regional staples: margarita or Corona. City Kitchen played to the crowd which included a Laura Arnold cameo - with passed empanadas, crab claws, jalapeno tostada bites, and a fajita bar. A mariachi band took requests and led a poolside conga line until Heriard-Durbeil gave the final toast, 100-year old LOUIS XIII de Remy Martin. "My family originally made the cognac we're having tonight," she shared before thanking legendary hostess Allison Sarofim and Stuart Parr. "It's the best of the best of the best and I'm not biased at all." Attendees departed with The Webster candles and an assortment of notebooks, no doubt for scribbling down a summer shopping wish list. A pregnant woman in Fort Bend County who came from El Salvador earlier this year has tested positive for the Zika virus, Legacy Community Health announced. The case is believed to be the first confirmed positive test in an expectant mother in the Houston region. It's not clear whether she contracted the virus from a mosquito bite in El Salvador or through sexual contact with a male partner, Legacy officials said. The woman's case came to light when she sought medical care at a Legacy health clinic in Fort Bend County. Retired state employees have gone 15 years without a cost-of-living adjustment, with no relief on the horizon next session. In an exchange with a House Appropriations Committee subcommittee today,Keith Brainard of the National Association of State Retirement Administrators said only five states address pension plans in their constitutions, and four of those provisions are related to adequacy. Texas -- unlike Arizona, Louisiana, Maine and Montana has set constitutional limits on how much the state will contribute to pension plans: no less than 6 percent and no more than 10 percent of the plans cost. Texas is the only state in which the constitution limits the states ability, the employers ability to adequately fund its pension plan, Brainard said. That point is critical because of the mounting obligations of the four current pension plans for state employees, of which only one is a pay-as-you-go plan. According to the Employee Retirement System, the debt obligation is $8 billion and growing. Two rounds of benefit adjustments and an infusion of state cash last session under House Bill 9 have only slowed the growing obligation. Outgoing Appropriations Chair Rep. John Otto, R-Dayton, has pressed hard on the issue of a lump sum appropriation, or increased contribution, to defray the cost of current obligations: The Legislative Budget Board has said no while ERS has said yes. What is not in doubt is the heavy blow long-term financing will be. Porter Wilson, the new executive director of ERS, noted the current trajectory of funding would pay off current obligations in 2048, at a cost of $29.1 billion. Pump in $1 billion and that obligation drops to $20.7 billion; $4 billion will be $11.7 billion; and an $8 billion infusion would cost $9.5 billion and actuarial soundness in 2018. Brainard told the subcommittee it should take a long-term view of funding pension obligations. He did not define a lump sum payment to the system as a contribution; instead, he defined it as prepaying down a debt obligation. Thats what it really is, for all intents and purposes, Brainard said. No cost-of-living adjustment is projected for long-term retirees for the next four years. During public testimony, retired employees talked about those in the system who had to rely on public charity because pension funds did not stretch to cover living costs. The average retiree is paid $20,000 a year, or $1,600 a month. ERS estimates a 3 percent cost-of-living adjustment for retirees who have been retired for 20 or more years would be a $59.1 million unfunded obligation to the pension fund. That would cover 16,700 retirees, about 16.7 percent of those in the pension system. All three hearing presentations can be found here. Copyright April 21 2016, Harvey Kronberg, www.quorumreport.com, All rights are reserved. This story is presented as part of the Houston Chronicle's collaboration with Quorum Report. For inside information on Texas politics and government and to sign up for real-time updates, go here. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Two days after a foot of water invaded his Katy home, Glenn Heathcock still was just beginning the cleanup on Wednesday. An orange 10-yard Dumpster sat in his driveway. Floorboards, sections of carpet and a tattered mattress lay nearby. Heathcock, who lives on the corner of Avenue D and Magnolia Street near the city's downtown, woke up at 4:30 a.m. Monday to several inches of water inside his four-bedroom house. It would only rise. Soon after, Heathcock would realize that he is one of the thousands affected by Houston's historic floods, which devastated various areas of the region early Monday and continue to affect local families. "I didn't think it would be that bad when I first saw it, but then it rose," Heathcock, 72, said. "It was dark, so we couldn't do anything." Monday's floods impacted 70 homes and 25 businesses in the city of 15,500, with the numbers expected to grow, according to City Administrator Byron Hebert, who estimated damages totaling $8 million. Avenue D is one of the city's worst-hit areas, and more than 2 feet of water covered the segment between First Street and Katy Hockley on Monday. Other city streets that flooded included stretches on Kingsland Boulevard and George Bush Drive, where the city's Veterans of Foreign Wars post received a foot of water that caused $30,000 in damages, Hebert said. The VFW is the only city property damaged. Heathcock had to wait hours until a family member came to the rescue using a Jeep. He lives with his sister, Beverly Watkins, and their 91-year-old mother, Ina Watkins, who made it safely out despite needing a walker to get around. Some neighbors were saved by air boats used by Texas game wardens, who are officers from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. "I've lived in Katy for six years and (have) never seen something like this," Heathcock said. "Thank God I have flood insurance. Others around me aren't so lucky." Some 12 to 17 inches of rain fell over the Katy area during the recent storm, according to Harris County Flood Control District meteorologist Jeff Lindner. Most of the floodwater had receded by Wednesday in both the city and surrounding area, but it was still present in streets close to South Mayde Creek, on Texas 6 between Interstate 10 and Clay Road (where the Addicks Reservoir is), and on Kingsland Boulevard at Buffalo Bayou Bridge. Public safety officials responded to about 20 high-water rescues inside the city on Monday, according to Hebert. Another 60 rescues occurred in the area, mostly north of the city along Katy Hockley Road, near the inundated Cypress Creek. Along with game wardens, the Katy Fire Department, the Harris County Sheriff's Office, the Houston Police Department and the Katy ISD Police Department assisted with rescues while the city police department tended to other needs. Those rescued were transferred by a Katy ISD school bus to the city's senior center on Fifth Street to be picked up by relatives and friends, Hebert said. Neither the city nor the school district opened a shelter, but one exists at Royal High School in nearby Royal ISD, where about 75 people stayed Tuesday night. The Katy area is defined by Katy ISD's boundaries, which stretch from about FM 2855 east to Eldridge Road and is split among Harris, Fort Bend and Waller counties. Because the district is split by several jurisdictions, the number of flood-affected homes in the area won't be known for several days, Lindner said. About 309,556 people live in the Katy area. Katy ISD will be closed Thursday and Friday. None of the district's 60 schools, or any of its facilities, suffered flood damage, according to district spokeswoman Denisse Coffman. There's still high concern for the area's east end, where both the Addicks and Barker reservoirs, located along Interstate 10 and Texas 6, are likely to begin flooding nearby roads, according to Lindner. Subdivisions such as Bear Creek Village, which are still recovering, could be hit again. "We are very worried about Addicks and Barker pool levels," Lindner said. "A point that needs to be made is that even when the rain stops and water starts being released, it's going to be weeks and weeks and weeks before these reservoirs are able to drain." A Houston city councilman on Wednesday urged some Kingwood residents to evacuate before the San Jacinto River crests this weekend. Water already was in at least 60 homes Wednesday afternoon and 30 people already had been rescued by Houston Fire Department personnel, said Councilman Dave Martin, whose District E includes Kingwood. Those taking heed of the voluntary evacuation can be housed at a civic center in nearby New Caney, at 21679 McCleskey, Martin said. "Most of them are choosing to stay, though," Martin said. "They're just going from first floor to second floor, but it's going to rise. I'd rather they get out to safe ground, go to one of these shelters before they can't get out and then we're forced to do more rescues." He said the San Jacinto River already had passed 57 feet Wednesday, four feet higher than it reached last Memorial Day. The waterway is not expected to crest until this weekend. Martin said he had spoken with the governor's office to inquire about slowing the rate of release from the waterways that feed into the Lake Houston area. Lake Conroe was releasing 7,000 cubic feet per second, Spring Creek was releasing 29,000, Cypress Creek was releasing 14,000 and Lake Creek was releasing 9,000. "The problem is we can't send enough water through the Lake Houston dam out into the gulf at the rate we're taking it on," Martin said. "We just can't get rid of it that fast. I'm trying to figure out how we monitor these levels. It's a mess." The Conroe Independent School District is juggling salary increases, rising health care costs, and a major slash in state financing in order to keep the district afloat for the 2016-17 school year. The largest hole in the budget is an expected $28.3 million drop in funding from the state, said CISD Chief Financial Officer Darrin Rice at a recent budget workshop in early April. The decrease is due to the "Robin Hood" tax, where Texas "recaptures" funds from school districts deemed property wealthy and redistributes the money to struggling districts across the state. The decrease in state funding for CISD matches dollar-for-dollar the property value increase in the district in the 2015-16 school year over the payback threshold. A funding formula to determine each district's threshold is provided in Chapter 41 of the Texas Education Code. "This did occur last year, but was offset slightly by the state when they added money to the school funding program during the legislative session," Rice said. Payment can be wired to the state comptroller's office. Though $28.3 million is a lot for CISD to pay out to the state - that's equal to about 6.4 percent of its budget for the coming school year - the school district is offsetting the revenue decrease in two ways. First, CISD expects an additional $7.3 million in state funding for its projected student enrollment growth of about 1,400 kids for the 2016-17 school year. That puts the net state revenue decrease at $21 million. CISD also expects to defray the revenue drop through a projected six percent property valuation growth within its boundaries, which would rake in $18.6 million and bring the total net revenue loss to $2.4 million. A six percent growth in property values for residential and commercial real estate is a conservative projection, Rice said. If property valuations are higher, the district could potentially be in the black. "We expect revenue to actually exceed projected amounts once our property values are certified. We are using very conservative numbers for our property value increase," Rice said. The total expected expenditure for the 2016-17 school year is expected to be $439.3 million, considering the slash in state funding and rising personnel and student enrollment costs. This represents a $22.7 million overall budget increase over the previous school year. With conservative projections of revenues, the district is expected to break even with expenditures, coming in at $439.3 million in revenues. "Having been associated with CISD since November 2010, I have seen the district always has a balanced budget, which has been able to provide the district with sufficient funds to meet the needs (of students)," said CISD trustee Ray Sanders, who is also the president and Chief Credit Officer at Woodforest National Bank in The Woodlands. While revenues have grown year-over-year, the tax rate for the 2016-17 academic calendar is not expected to change even while CISD has sold $135 million in bonds. The tax rate for the 2015-16 school year was $1.28 per $100 of a home or property's appraised value. The median value of single-family homes in The Woodlands during the first quarter of 2016 was $318,500 and was $249,000 for all homes within the CISD boundaries, according to the Houston Association of Realtors Multiple List Service. Voters approved a $487 million bond during the Nov. 3 elections that included two elementary, an intermediate and a high school in the Oak Ridge feeder zone. Other planned construction include a junior high school in Conroe, major renovations to Conroe High School and Austin Elementary, expansion at Knox Junior High and robotics labs at The Woodlands College Park and Caney Creek high schools among other projects. CISD isn't the only school district in the area impacted by the Robin Hood funding system. Houston ISD, the largest school district in the state, anticipates a $107 million gap due to the state funding system. HISD trustees have considered dissolving a teacher bonus program, reallocating program funds, cuts to per-pupil funding and more to close the gap. Other districts in the Houston-area who have paid back to the state under this system include Spring Branch ISD and La Porte ISD. State funding cuts at CISD come at a time when the district is mulling over ways to close a $6.15 million gap in its employee health care coverage, increase salaries to meet market rates and add personnel to its fast-growing schools. Though a budget isn't expected to be finalized before August, the district is considering a $750,000 increase to its health care plan to meet the shortfall. The board of trustees approved a new benefits plan that would have tighten the gap by $1 million but would increase in co-pays, deductibles, prescription costs among other actuarial changes to employee health care plans. An additional $4.5 million to close the $6.15 million health care funding gap will come from increased employee contributions to plans, according to a 2016-17 benefit plan recommendation presented by Terry Brown, a consultant from T. Ross Brown & Associates. The plan was approved during the April 19 board meeting without changes. Even with an increase in employee contribution, CISD is expected to pay $25.4 million to its employees $18.6 million for the 2016-17 school year if the board of trustees approve the recommendations. The district may consider an administrative change, meaning it would not require board approval, to ensure working spouses of CISD employees pay for health care coverage through their own employer rather than be covered under a CISD plan if such coverage is available to them. CISD is also considering a $12 million salary increase for existing personnel to match current market rates, but the board has yet to deliberate on increases. Overall, annual teacher salaries at the district range from $1,000 to $2,000 below what other local school districts pay their employees, particularly among veteran teachers who have been at CISD for 10 or more years. "Providing competitive compensation for our district employees helps assure we have quality for our students. As a trustee, I will continue to monitor and provide input into the budget to assure our taxpayers get the best education possible at the most efficient cost," Sanders said. Other recommended increases for the upcoming 2016-17 school year budget include an additional $7.4 million for additional personnel and $2.6 million for continuing education, supplies and a new K-2 reading test system. Want to know more? CISD expects to hold two public hearings prior to approving the 2016-17 district budget during a regular board meeting on Aug. 16. The public hearing dates are scheduled for 6 p.m. on July 19 and Aug. 2, according to CISD. Residents who wish to direct comments to the board must register in advance with the district to speak during the allotted public comment time slot. For more information, visit conroeisd.net. The catch of a lifetime. That's how Ryan Hein of St. Petersburg describes the 400-pound Goliath grouper he caught last week. The bait: a lure he made out of a number-11 wrench. Hein made the gig out of the metric spanner he didn't get much use out of in his garage in Florida. After landing the grouper, Hein caught a couple of more fish before losing the lure. Now he's testing out a 14mm variation, "we're stepping it up a little bit," he told WFTX in Fort Myers. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Texas is home to the best high school in the United States, according to a new ranking released Tuesday by U.S. News and World Report. RELATED: These are the best high schools in Texas, according to Newsweek In its 2016 rankings of the nation's top high schools, the magazine lauded the School for the Talented and Gifted in Dallas for reaching a 100 percent graduation rate, a 15:1 student-teacher ratio and a score of 100 on its college readiness index. "The School for the Talented and Gifted follows the state's Distinguished Achievement Program and places an emphasis on Advanced Placement curriculum a minimum of 11 AP courses are required for graduation," the report said. The report continues, "Students at the School for the Talented and Gifted may conduct field research via partnerships with local universities, take electives such as Web mastery and enroll in mini-courses like ballroom dancing or glass blowing during interim terms." RELATED: Texas places 43rd among states in national education ranking Two other Texas high schools broke into the report's top ten: the School of Science and Engineering in Dallas and Carnegie Vanguard High School in Houston. In total, 19 Texas schools cracked the list's top 100 U.S. high schools. Scroll through the slideshow to see if your child's school is among the 20 best high schools in Texas. RELATED: These are the top 100 high schools in the San Antonio area for 2016, according to Niche The magazine analyzed data from roughly 19,000 public high schools and ranked them based on four criteria: Students at the school performed higher than the average student in that state Disadvantaged students at the school were outperforming disadvantaged students in the state Schools met or surpassed a basic benchmark for graduation Schools cleared the magazine's criteria for college readiness RELATED: List ranks the top 100 elementary schools in San Antonio area jfechter@mySA.com Twitter: @JFreports Two men who operated three clinics in Houston pleaded guilty in federal court Wednesday to orchestrating a Medicare fraud scheme that collected $3.3 million in government funds. They agreed they hired patients to claim they had fictional symptoms and the government was billed for tests that never happened or were not medically necessary. "You're pleading guilty to lying, cheating and stealing?" U.S. District Judge Lynn N. Hughes asked the men, when it appeared they were backpedaling on their pleas. They told Hughes they were ready to move forward. Zaven "Mike" Pogosayan, 37, flew in from his home in Glendale, Calif. to enter a guilty plea on all 43 federal counts he was facing. His colleague, Edvard Shakhbazyan, 40, who also traveled in from Glendale, pleaded guilty to the same 43 counts. Assistant U.S. Attorney Albert A. Balboni clarified to the judge that neither man got a plea deal. The men are both from Armenia. Pogosayan is a U.S. citizen and Shakhbazyan has residency status. Both remain free on bond pending a July 25 sentencing date. According to the indictment, the two men admitted they set up three clinics at 2112 Pease St., 2110 Jefferson and in a suite at 6892 Southwest Freeway where nursing home patients were recruited to come in and complain of particular symptoms that could trigger a request for an anorectal manometry test, which is used to evaluate fecal incontinence or constipation. Some patients visited multiple clinics, where they were instructed to check off a box indicating they were new patients. The prosecution contends the clinics billed Medicare for $5.6 million and collected $3.3 million in payouts. Three doctors and another clinic employee face a jury trial June 14 for conspiring and participating in the Medicare scheme. Two co-defendants reached plea deals with prosecutors. Frank "Bones" Montgomery took a plea agreement in February 2014, telling the judge he was guilty of conspiring to take kickbacks for recruiting the patients. And Seryan "Sam" Mirzakhanyan, accepted a plea deal in July 2014 agreeing he was guilty of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and aiding and abetting to make monetary transactions related to the scam. Both will be sentenced Oct. 11. During Mayor Sylvester Turner's press conference to address Houston's disastrous flooding on Tuesday there was one person who stood out among the city's officials. But it wasn't a politician, member of an emergency agency, or a press officer. It was the sign language interpreter the city hired. Ashley Henderson is an energetic interpreter who often works with the city, especially during televised press conferences that take place during disasters. She was there during last year's flooding and again this year. She's employed by the Nightingale Interpreting firm in Houston. MORE NEWS: Supreme Court to swear in large group of deaf lawyers Her signing style became the subject of a Reddit.com post on Wednesday. It was hard to miss her enthusiastic facial expressions, and most people who commented on the post pointed out how that's just how effective sign language works. "Yes, it may look funny to those who don't use or know sign language," Henderson told Chron.com. "But it would look funny to (American Sign Language) users if there weren't any. Basically, if I talked English with no affect, intonation, pauses, it would be difficult for someone listening to pull the correct meaning, or to even be interested at all," she explained. "Expressions are the lifeblood of ASL and provide the much needed grammar, tone, structure and meaning into an interpretation." TAKE A LOOK BACK: Worship at deaf church shows signs of faith Henderson said she's been getting steady work assignments for city government in Houston for three years. She received her training at Lone Star College and became a certified sign language interpreter about six years ago. She enjoys her work but said sometimes people just don't get the importance of what she does. "Some people complain about having to watch the interpreters next to whoever is speaking on TV because if you don't know the language it can be distracting," she said. "Obviously, there are captions available on TV's, but I think we can all agree that most of the time the captioning quality during a live event can get jumbled, making it difficult to read in general, and it makes for a disadvantage to a significant number of Houstonians who need pertinent lifesaving information." This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Kingwood-area residents kept a wary eye Thursday on the rising San Jacinto River as runoff from days of flooding continues to push toward the Gulf of Mexico. Police Thursday blocked off Hamblen Road at Forest Cove after water had flooded the parking lot of a nearby strip center. At the Coastal Gas Station, Juancarlos Crane was watching the rain fall, and sizing up the river water rushing across the roadway. The flooding began about two days ago, he said, fed by rain dumped north and west of Kingwood. About 30 people were rescued by the Houston Fire Department earlier this week, and water was in at least 60 homes Wednesday afternoon. Houston Councilman Dave Martin has urged residents to evacuate before the river crests this weekend. By midday Thursday, the parking lot of the gas station where he works as a mechanic had flooded slightly. Still it was nothing compared to previous rainstorms, especially one four-day event in 1994 when the whole area was inundated with more than nine feet of water. "That was cruel," said Crane, a 53-year-old mechanic who commutes to the gas station, which his brother owns, from his home in southwest Houston. Rains there had kept him and his family cooped up at the beginning of the week, and then apparently followed him to work. "Basically we haven't been able to do anything all week," he said. As other parts of the county continue to dry out, he didn't anticipate the flooding dropping anytime soon. "We collect all the water, he said. "It might have receded up there, but we'll have high water for another few days." This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate A Galena Park man has been arrested in connection with the deaths of a transgender woman and a man in Midtown earlier this month. Tariq Lackings, 23, was arrested Wednesday, charged with capital murder in the fatal shooting of Shante Isaac, 34, and the stabbing death of Willie Sims, 33. Both were pronounced dead at the scene after being assaulted at 1100 Dennis Street about 11:15 p.m. on April 10, according to a release from the Houston Police Department Witnesses told police a half-dozen people approached Isaac and Sims, who was a recent friend, that night. One of the people apparently pulled a gun and fired at Isaac, hitting Sims instead as he tried to pull the transgender woman from harm's way. Then, according to a witness, the attackers pulled out metal pipes and began to beat Sims and Isaac, who is identified in court records as Robert Isaac. The deadly assault led to concerns about a possible hate crime from LGBT advocates. Friends and family of Isaac have said the incident stemmed from a dispute between Isaac and one of her attackers, another transgender woman, over a man. Lackings, who remains in the Harris County jail without bail, is scheduled to appear in court Friday. Intentionally killing two people is a capital crime. If convicted of capital murder, he could face the death penalty or life in prison without parole. The decision over whether to seek death is typically made months after an arrest. Investigators believe there are additional suspects involved. Anyone with information in this case is urged to contact the HPD Homicide Division at 713-308-3600 or Crime Stoppers at 713-222-TIPS. brian.rogers@chron.com twitter.com/brianjrogers A northeast Houston man is in jail, accused in the April 10 kidnapping and sexual assault of a 19-year-old, and now authorities are searching for the man's younger brother. The victim was on her way home about 11:30 p.m. when someone grabbed her at gunpoint on I-45 near Spring Cypress. She was sexually assaulted at gunpoint and later robbed after the attackers took her to an ATM machine, Harris County sheriff's deputies said. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate A burst pipe in the Waller County elections office earlier this week left voting equipment drenched, causing concern for how it will function when residents head to the polls in the coming elections. After a security alarm went off, Waller County Elections Administrator Dan Teed arrived to his basement office Sunday to find "water was running everywhere, including on and through our voting equipment," he wrote in an email to local news media. Meanwhile, one of the worst storm's in Waller County's history was bearing down on the greater Houston region. Teed says they don't believe the heavy rainfall caused the pipe to burst, but the storm necessitated close attention from county officials as the equipment crisis also unfolded. Metal reinforcing the ceiling had to be cut through to reach the problematic pipe. About 60 pieces of voting equipment were removed from the office and opened to dry, Teed wrote. Officials had planned to use the machinery in several city elections for which early voting begins Monday, as well as in the county's primary runoff, which has early voting beginning May 16. While the equipment will be tested before use -- officials were waiting for it to completely dry first -- it is supposed to continue to work even if it gets wet. Neither money nor time seemed immediately available to replace the damaged pieces. An estimate for replacing the equipment was about $800,000, an amount Teed wrote that a small county would be hard-pressed to find. In his email, sent late Tuesday, Teed asked media agencies to "spread the word about what has happened, and tell people we want them to be on the lookout regarding odd behavior by the machinery." Even with the plans to test it, Teed wrote, "we don't want to take anything for granted." Waller County has long faced scrutiny for alleged attempts at disenfranchising voters, an issue that surfaced late last year and continued into 2016 with debate over whether an early-voting polling place should be opened at the student center of Prairie View A&M University, a historically black college that represents a large minority, Democratic voting bloc. Reached by phone Wednesday, Teed was at work to file an insurance claim. "Our priority has to be getting ready for the elections," he said. Officials asked that any problems observed with the voting equipment be reported to vote@wallercounty.us. SAN ANTONIO - An insurance industry group says a hailstorm that struck the San Antonio area last week proved to be the costliest in Texas history. The Insurance Council of Texas says hailstones as big as grapefruit caused estimated insured losses to motor vehicles expected to reach $560 million. Damage to homes and businesses is expected to reach $800 million. Robert Crosby, executive director of Independent Insurance Agents of San Antonio, said uninsured losses were also expected to high. The $1.36 billion damage estimate beats the $1.1 billion in damage caused by a May 5, 1995, hailstorm in Fort Worth. Police are continuing to search for the person who shot a musician Tuesday night at a nightclub near downtown Houston. The man was shot about 9:30 p.m. outside the Status Lounge, 3708 Dowling. The gunman fled in a tan-colored four-door sedan. The shooting victim was taken to the Texas Medical Center with a non life-threatening gunshot wound to the shoulder, Houston police said. Witnesses told police the gunman was the owner of the nightclub. HPD officials identified him only as a 40-50 year old black man. He weighs 220-250 pounds and is about 5-foot-11. According to the witnesses, the victim and the assailant got into an argument about how long the band was going to play that night. HPD officials said the quarrel spilled out into the parking lot. The accused gunman struck the man with a pistol then fired several shots before fleeing. Anyone with information is asked to contact Crime Stoppers at 713-222-TIPS. VICTORIA- A federal wildlife survey has determined that at least 329 endangered whooping cranes spent the winter along the coast of South Texas. The Victoria Advocate reports that compares to 308 whooping cranes from a year ago's count centered on the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. Details are from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service winter survey of whooping cranes, released Tuesday. Another nine birds were discovered this year beyond the primary wintering area, which stretches from the middle of Matagorda Island south to San Jose Island. One pair of adult birds was spotted as far north as the Mad Island Marsh Preserve in Matagorda County. Coordinator Wade Harrell says officials are encouraged that whooping cranes can make jumps across bay systems if the habitat is appropriate. FALFURRIAS - Border Patrol agents in South Texas have found more than a ton of marijuana hidden in boxes inside the trailer of an 18-wheeler. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials say the driver was detained following the $1.7 million drug bust. Federal authorities on Wednesday announced details of the seizure at the Falfurrias (fal-FYOO'-ree-uhs) checkpoint. An agency statement says the rig was being inspected Monday when a drug-sniffing dog drew attention to the trailer. Officials examined a number of boxes and found bundles of marijuana inside. Agents seized about 2,200 pounds of pot. Details were not immediately available on charges pending against the driver. The marijuana was turned over to the Drug Enforcement Administration. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Mayor Sylvester Turner faced roughly 1,000 victims of the flood-ravaged Greenspoint area at a community meeting Wednesday afternoon, many of them frustrated and angry after Monday's deadly deluge forced them to abandon their homes and wade through chest-deep water to safety. Earlier in the day, the mayor apologized for what several Greenspoint residents said was a sluggish city response in their neighborhood, where an estimated 17 apartment complexes were damaged. "Do I apologize to anyone who believed that we didn't respond to them in time?" Turner said earlier after a City Council meeting. "Absolutely. I'm the CEO and manager of the city, absolutely." The mayor sought to reassure residents that the city would help by assigning additional police officers to the area and trying to secure temporary housing for the displaced by the end of the week. FEAR AND CHAOS: Harrowing encounters with rising waters Among those angry at the city's response was Philip Johnson, whose family waited in their flooded Rockridge Bend apartment for 12 hours Monday, perching on counter tops to stay clear of the thigh-high water. Johnson, who was sleeping at the M.O. Campbell shelter, said he called city emergency lines for help a dozen times before a city dump truck arrived to rescue his family. "The whole response overall was poor," said Johnson, 41. "They're supposed to be first response, but it was like we wasn't the first on their agenda." Houston Fire Department spokesman Ruy Lozano stressed that firefighters had to prioritize life-threatening incidents over relocating other flooded residents. "We have to try to save as many lives as possible," Lozano said. "Once we know all those life-threatening calls have been satisfied, now we're coming back and relocating. So, if they start relocating themselves prior to us hitting that second phase, that's very much a possibility." Lozano said the Houston Fire Department was able to relocate close to 300 people from the Greenspoint area on Monday. The agency sent at least 100 of its 845 responders to Greenspoint on Monday, according to Assistant Chief Richard Mann, with the city allocating 11 boats, 12 dump trucks and two high water vehicles to the area. VIDEO: Victim drives around barrier and into floodwaters As of late Wednesday afternoon, county officials said almost 900 buildings had been damaged, with a rough estimate of $8.1 million. Turner did not dwell on what happened during the meeting at Greenspoint's Harvest Time Church, focusing instead on the steps the city planned to take going forward in the area where residents have little in the way of extra resources. He addressed topics such as when next month's rent would be due and whether renters or their landlords should be tasked with pulling up waterlogged carpet. "We're not just here today and gone tomorrow. I just want you to understand that," Turner said. "There's nobody that's little, nobody that's big. Everybody's important." Turner was accompanied by several city department directors and their staff, who interviewed attendees for more than an hour after the city's presentation. "Where we supposed to live?" 62-year-old Willie Williams pressed Turner as he took questions from throngs of flood victims. "They ain't doing nothing nobody's really trying to help us." Turner told Williams that he already had asked the owner of her Brekenridge apartment complex to provide her with a letter detailing the cleanup that would be taking place in her unit. "They're coming back to take away that sheetrock, to move all that stuff out of there," Turner said, before directing her to a city staffer. Back in the audience, Guillermo Seminario said he was satisfied with the city's efforts thus far. "So far, so good," said Seminario, a 58-year-old cab driver still living in his flooded apartment. "I don't have any place to go." Dozens of attendees are living in the M.O. Campbell shelter, while dozens more indicated they had remained in their apartments, despite believing their units were unsafe. The vast majority were renters. Mark Loethen, who oversees code enforcement for the city's Public Works Department, said the city met Wednesday morning with the owners of four Greenspoint apartment complexes, none of which had structural damage. However, many of the units had electrical and air conditioning problems. City officials encouraged flood victims to express their unique concerns, instructed them to place wet clothes and furniture in dumpsters and said that an additional 36 police officers had been tasked with patrolling Greenspoint's heavily damaged areas. SCHOOL SCHEDULES: 2 districts cancel classes for the rest of the week City Councilman Jerry Davis said he is researching how much it would cost to equip targeted fire stations with inflatable rafts and equipment to wade into deep water. "One of the best practices I saw that day was citizens just jumping out with regular inflatables," Davis said. Moments Johnson, a 44-year-old nurse's aide whose car was inundated with water on Monday, lauded the city for its quick response. "As soon as the floods started coming, they didn't wait," Johnson said. A second meeting with Mayor Turner drew a small crowd in Meyerland, where low-lying areas have been hit hard by flooding twice in less than 12 months. Residents on Wednesday were most upset about drainage in their neighborhood close to Brays Bayou, a key watershed. A few dozen homeowners and renters turned out to the information session at Mark Twain Elementary School. Many residents saw their homes flooded last Memorial Day, only to suffer through similar damage again this week. In some cases, it was after they shortly moved back in, or were poised to return to renovated homes. Turner encouraged homeowners to stay in the area. "The city of Houston will be diminished if you make the decision that this is not where you want to be," Turner said. "We're going to do everything we can to get you to stay." RELATED: State decides on whether students have to make up flood days Most homeowners at the meeting said they were relatively satisfied with the city's flood response, and only upset about long-term delays to improving drainage. But renters in the area, where most of those affected are eligible for grants and other services for homeowners, felt left out. Hua Wang, who lives in an apartment on Brompton Street near North Braeswood, said her complex is overrun by sewage. It happened in October too, during heavy rains, and her management isn't doing anything about it during this flooding. Gus Useche, a vice president for construction at a property company, said 91 first-floor units at the company's Meyergrove Apartments were badly damaged. New tenants had just moved in within the past few months, after previous tenants were released from their leases because of damage last May. Staff writer Emma Hinchliffe contributed to this report. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate At any given moment, the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission regulates about 49,000 license holders. Agency officials are reminding the adults who hold those licenses that making alcohol available to minors, even during prom season, could result in major consequences. Roughly 20 percent of TABC license holders have businesses in Houston and since Sept. 1, agents in that region have conducted 2,292 unannounced inspections involving minors. During those sting operations, a cooperating minor tries to purchase alcohol from a bar, restaurant or convenience store with an agent watching the interaction. >> Click the gallery above to see the cities that have served minors the most so far this year, according to TABC violations. "We're not showing up at minor parties writing tickets," Major Marc Decatur, regional director of Houston's TABC office said. "We look at the people we have issued a license to and we hold them accountable for the public's safety. We're more focused on changing the behavior of people who have the licenses while police focus on enforcement." Perhaps it's working. The region, which once held an 89 percent compliance rate with licence holders now sits at 92 percent as of April 14. RELATED: See recent Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission violations across Harris County Decatur credits much of that to the region committing resources to stings that focus on age-related violations, intoxication issues, hours of operation, narcotics, breaches of peace and human trafficking. "Because of our concentrated efforts and saturation of resources in these areas, I believe it's helped increase our compliance rate," Decatur said. RELATED: These are the most popular bars in Texas In the TABC offices in North Texas, officials doubled the number of undercover operations in the Dallas area during the prom season. "These occasions should be some of the happiest moments in a young person's life," North Texas regional supervisor Victor Kuykendoll said in a news release sent to the Dallas Morning News. Who's had TABC violations involving minors in your area this year? Search the database below "Adding alcohol to the equation greatly increases the risk of serious injury or death through incidents such as vehicle accidents or assault. Making alcohol available to a minor is a class A misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of up to $4,000, up to a year in jail, or both. Additionally, the violator's driver's license could be suspended for 180 days upon conviction. Selling alcohol to a minor carries the same punishment. The Klein Independent School District has announced that classes will be cancelled on Friday after officials assessed updated weather and road conditions along with the forecast for more rain. Spring ISD schools and offices also will be will be closed Friday, citing "continuing weather and roadway concerns." Royal, Sealy and Wharton school districts will be closed Friday as well. WASHINGTON Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, wading into the battle over President Barack Obama's nominee to fill the Supreme Court vacancy caused by the death of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, said Thursday that high court "deserves to be swept up into the political process." Abbott, siding with Senate Republicans who have refused to hold hearings on Merrick Garland, also took a shot at Chief Justice John Roberts, who was appointed to the court by former President George W. Bush. "Chief Justice John Roberts is the tip of the spear in playing politics," Abbott said. "Chief Justice John Roberts knowingly, clearly and unabashedly re-wrote Obamacare twice. What we are seeing is nothing more than naked politics being played by the United States Supreme Court." Abbott's criticism of Roberts, echoing that of Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, came during a press roundtable at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank where the governor promoted his idea of leading a convention of states to amend the U.S. Constitution to limit the power of the federal government. The first-term Republican governor also criticized Obama's executive orders on immigration, now under review by the Supreme Court in a Texas-led lawsuit. Abbott, a litigant before the Supreme Court, expressed his hope for at least a partial victory for Texas in its legal challenge, even as he accused the justices of playing politics in past rulings, particularly in upholding Obama's health care overhaul. "Now, more than ever the United States Supreme Court has shed its clothing as being guardians of the law," he said. "The United States Supreme Court is more of a political body than it has ever been in the United States of America. And because, on its own, by its own fault, as an institution, it has chosen to be a political body, it deserves to be swept up into the political process." Abbott said that includes resisting Obama's efforts to fill the Scalia vacancy "for political reasons," by not holding hearings or voting on the president's nominee. "Why should they go through a dog and pony show when they have concluded that they are not going to consent to confirming this nominee?" he said. Asked if that meant the U.S. Senate is under no obligation to undergo a deliberative process to consider the nominee, Abbott answered, "Show me in the United States Constitution where that process is." Republicans as well as Democrats including Obama have sometimes criticized Court decision they dislike. But few have embraced an openly partisan strategy in the selection of Supreme Court justices, who serve lifetime appointments. Democrats in Washington and Texas have accused Republicans of politicizing the Supreme Court in the case of Garland. "It is shocking that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is shamelessly encouraging Senate Republicans to ignore their constitutional obligation, cash in a paycheck from the American taxpayer, and sit idly by," said Texas Democratic Party Deputy Executive Director Manny Garcia. "Every single day Texans get up and do their job. They expect everyone in government, Democrat and Republican alike, to do theirs as well." Republican leaders in Congress, including Texas U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, have called for Scalia's replacement to be made after the 2016 presidential election. While the Senate GOP majority has the power to sit on Obama's pick, Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada has said he is considering a rare parliamentary maneuver to force a vote. "There are many procedural things we can do," he told reporters earlier this month. Republicans argue that giving the pick to the next president would give voters a greater voice in the matter. But a new NBC-Wall Street Journal poll suggests that Democrats are winning the public relations battle. The poll released Monday, found a 52 percent majority of Americans now believe the Senate should hold a confirmation vote on Garland this year. In February, that figure was 43 percent. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Meeting GOP leaders at a coastal resort Wednesday, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz locked down his prediction that the party's nomination will be decided in a historic series of floor votes at its July convention. Cruz joined top aides from his rival Donald Trump's campaign in Hollywood, Florida for a meeting of the Republican National Committee, according to media reports. There, party leaders are talking about how to manage a contested conventiona rare possibility that has become a probable outcome of this primary race. RELATED: Anticipation heats up for trouble at GOP convention For Cruz, it seems a certainty. "What is clear today is that we are headed to a contested convention," he said in his plainest assertion of the looming convention contest yet. "Nobody is able to reach 1,237 (delegates)." That was also Cruz's first blatant admission that he won't win the nomination in the primary vote, which requires 1,237 delegates. Trump still stands a slim chance at breaking that threshold. RELATED: Despite streak, Cruz still headed for convention clash with Trump If neither candidate does, then the delegates will cast a series of ballots on the floor of the party's national convention in Cleveland in July until a winner emerges. It's a complicated process because delegates are bound by the varying rules of their states, but it's a process largely thought to favor Cruz and his politically astute campaign. In the first vote, the assembly of 2,472 delegates will be mostly bound to vote according to the results of their state primary. If no candidate wins a majority, the delegates will vote again. States' rules will allow some delegates to start switching their vote from their official obligation to their personal preference, and the handful of delegates won by fledgling campaigns of Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Ben Carson will get behind either Trump or Cruz. RELATED: Growing chance of contested convention puts added focus on delegates By the third ballot, all delegates should be free to vote as they please, meaning designated Trump delegates could switch their votes to Cruz. Experts give Cruz the upper hand in the process because his support base includes many of the party activists who help run the delegate selection process. Running or voting for delegates requires a high degree of familiarity with the Republican Party apparatus, and active attendance at local party functions. RELATED: Team Cruz works to draw Texas delegates So far the Cruz campaign has dominated the delegate game while the Trump campaign has remained almost entirely absent. That forebodes a convention situation in which throngs of delegates awarded to Trump switch their votes to Cruz at the first opportunity, giving the freshman senator an upset win over the primary frontrunner. That situation depends largely on the convention rules, which won't be officially locked down until the week before the convention. In Florida, RNC leaders will discuss potential suggestions of changes to convention rules, including one committee member's plan to give the delegates more power on the floor. But bold suggested changes are unlikely, because any tweak to the high-stakes convention rules could be seen, or at least decried, as party bias towards one candidate or another. Controversy and division are already nipping at the GOP after this heated primary, and RNC Reince Priebus this weekend took to TV to advise that a rules committee not make any changes. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate AUSTIN -- A criminal investigation into Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller has just begun, and while it is far too early to speculate about its result, one candidate is putting his name forward for any opening necessitated by a resignation: Jim Hogan, the Cleburne farmer who opted not to campaign when the Democratic Party nominated him to run against Miller in 2014. Hogan said in an interview that he has been closely following the news about Miller and believes it could end in him being appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott to fill the position. "Well, of course," Hogan said. "If you had a tournament and the first guy was disqualified, wouldn't you pick the guy that got second? Why would you pick someone who got out in the quarterfinals?" Miller, a first-term Republican, is under an investigation by the Texas Department of Public Safety for allegedly spending state money for personal gain. The probe centers on two February 2015 trips -- one to Oklahoma, where he appears to have gotten a medical injection known as "The Jesus Shot" and one to Mississippi, where he competed in a rodeo. Miller used campaign money to repay the state for the Mississippi trip a few weeks afterward. He repaid the state for the Oklahoma trip after the Houston Chronicle began asking questions. For Hogan, the spending is troubling, but he said he also was disturbed by another aspect that had not gotten very much attention -- the fact that both trips took place during work days. "I'm just different," Hogan said. "If I wanted to go to a rodeo, I guess I'd find one on a Saturday." Hogan was best known during the 2014 election for running the most unconventional "campaign" in recent years. The Cleburne farmer and insurance salesman did not hold any events or do any advertising, and he was just as shocked as anyone when he beat out two prominent Democrats in the primary. Despite the investigation into Miller, Hogan said he did not regret his 2014 campaign. "I ran it my way. I wanted to run it without money," said Hogan, who said he voted for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders in last month's Democratic presidential primary. "I wanted to set a good example." Hogan said he hoped Miller would survive the investigation and avoid drama in the future because he just wants the best for the Texas agriculture industry. "I just hope it turns out OK," he said. "But if something did happen, I think the governor should give me a call." -- SIREN: Foster care in Texas facing budget shortfall, by the Chrons Samantha Ketterer. An increase in the number of Texas kids with mental illnesses needing child protective services has fueled an unexpected budget shortfall that soon could reach $40 million, adding to the states problems in fixing a foster care system a federal judge deemed broken. John Specia, head of the state Department of Family and Protective Services, informed lawmakers of the shortfall Wednesday, saying it was not anticipated and would require a legislative response. -- An important point to remember as lawmakers try to find a way out of this crisis, from our partners at Quorum Report: An increasing amount of the 30,000 children under state conservatorship at any given time now 7 percent has high needs, meaning they are medically fragile, have intellectual or developmental disabilities or other special needs like behavioral issues, Specia said. The higher level of services comes at a higher price tag, he said, now costing $71 million, or 19 percent of the agency's budget. On the upside, more children now 40 percent of those in state care are being placed with relatives, according to DFPS. But the children who remain in the system, Specia said, have higher-level needs and stay in longer. For some high needs children, the state's only option for placement is in a state hospital, Specia said. -- SOMETHING TO WATCH: FDA continues to block Texas from importing execution drugs, by the Chrons Mike Ward.For the second time in a year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has blocked Texas prison officials from importing a drug intended for executions as a hedge against dwindling supplies that could thwart the use of deadly injections. At issue is about $27,000 in drugs ordered by the state that federal agents seized last year and still hold. Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark said Wednesday the latest tentative ruling by the FDA to block Texas' importation of sodium thiopental will be appealed. -- Bernie unlikely to flip many Texas superdelegates, per the Texas Tribunes Abby Livingston. On the heels of Sanders' loss in the state's Democratic primary, operatives from his campaign are vowing to pressure a special class of party elders known as superdelegates on a one-on-one basis to flip their support from Clinton. If Sanders has a shot at the nomination, some of those hundreds of superdelegates would have to be from Texas. But according to a handful of interviews among the states power brokers on Wednesday, turning on the former U.S. secretary of state will be a hard sell in the Lone Star State. CAPITOL DAYBOOK THE SENATE 9:00 a.m.: Health & Human Services [ Senate Chamber ] SPEED READ Texas Take: Choose your narrative, Houston Chronicle Cruz on Trumps big win: So what? Politico Texas hamstrung when it comes to properly funding employee pensions, Quorum Report Texas foster care facing budget shortfall as problems mount, Austin American-Statesman Grieder: Texass case against Obama, Texas Monthly Trump says bathroom laws discriminatory, Associated Press Native groups open new front against border coal mine, Texas Observer Lawsuit accuses El Paso of operating debtors prison for Texans who cant pay traffic tickets, The Dallas Morning News Texas teachers sue state over new evaluation method, The Dallas Morning News Cornyn on Republican National Convention: I wouldnt miss it for the world, The Dallas Morning News As flooding recedes, city and county struggle to assess damages, Houston Chronicle Texas Democrats see opportunity in Trumps emergence, Fort Worth Star-Telegram As flooding recedes, city and county struggle to assess damages, Houston Chronicle Deer-breeder drops suit against state over disease tactics, San Antonio Express-News Texas Water Development Board executive to head Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority, San Antonio Express-News Stalemate over U.S. ambassador to Mexico close to breaking, San Antonio Express-News Chinese companies invest big in Texas, Houston Chronicle QUOTE TO NOTE Do I apologize to anyone who believed that we didn't respond to them in time? Absolutely. I'm the CEO and manager of the city, absolutely." -- Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner after a City Council meeting Wednesday >> MORE: Turner to appoint a flooding czar, Houston Chronicle RACE TO THE WHITE HOUSE -- THE COMMONWEALTH: PA GOP prez delegate chase adds to mystery, by APs Marc Levy. Pennsylvania, long an afterthought in presidential primary stakes, may emerge as a key player in crowning this year's Republican presidential nominee. Pennsylvania will send a whopping number of delegates to July's unsettled Republican National Convention who, under a state party rule, can vote for whichever candidate they choose. As a result, Pennsylvania's April 26 statewide primary election is relatively meaningless a beauty pageant. What is meaningful, however, is whom primary voters will select to send to Cleveland as the 54 uncommitted delegates. -- Clinton: Sanders young supporters will unite behind me, Politicos Nick Gass. During a discussion on ABC's GMA, Clinton was asked by uncommitted superdelegate Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) how she would keep younger voters, particularly those who have enthusiastically supported Sanders and opposed her during the primary process, in her column in November. I think Ill make the case, and from everything Ive seenboth personal conversations and research that has been done, just as it was with me when I dropped out, you know, the vast majority of Sen. Sanders young supporters will look at the choice, Clinton said. -- Where Trump stands now, per Politico: Senator Ted Cruz has been MATHEMATICALLY ELIMINATED from race. He said [John] Kasich should get out for same reason. I think both should get out! Trump tweeted Thursday morning, minutes before taking to NBC's Today show for an interview with his family and a town hall event. Trump referred to Cruz as senator in this tweet, as he called him during his Tuesday night speech following his blowout victory in the New York primary. But on Wednesday afternoon, Trump returned to using his Lyin' Ted moniker. -- The Cruz strategy, by CNNs Teddy Schleifer. Ted Cruz on Wednesday sought to dampen any momentum that could come from Donald Trump's rout in New York, arguing the billionaire was no likelier to win their party's presidential nomination than he was. The Texas senator appeared more certain than ever that the Republican primary was headed toward a contested convention, expressing confidence that no candidate -- including himself -- would win the 1,237 delegates needed for a first-ballot clinch. It's an argument Cruz took personally to party elites in Florida later Wednesday, when he pitched himself to members of the Republican National Committee. GOP rival John Kasich is also expected to brief RNC members. 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. Peste 300 de liceene s-au inscris in Startup School si sunt gata sa invete bazele antreprenoriatului tehnologic. Vezi cum a fost la evenimentul de lansare a programului national de educatie antreprenoriala Cyclone Pam tore through Vanuatu in the South Pacific in March 2015, destroying or damaging 17,000 buildings and displacing 65,000 people from their homes. Shortly after the storm, humanitarian first responders and journalists began flying drones over the affected area to document the devastation. Drones have become an increasingly important tool for quick, comprehensive damage assessment after natural disasters, but such footage can be invasive. As Matt Waite, who runs the Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska, points out, a lot of these houses had their roofs ripped off but the walls still intact. In video NBC news shot after the storm, you can clearly see inside. What if newlyweds decided to do what newlyweds do at that particular moment you happen to be flying along? Waite asks. Many in the humanitarian community have adopted a voluntary code of conduct that lays out some guidelines about how to fly drones safely and gather information in a way that respects peoples privacy. But there is no such code of conduct for the growing number of private and commercial entities that use drones, including news outlets, which are resisting even non-binding guidelines that might restrict access to the air. Heres why we need such guidelines: Legal scholars argue that airspace is neither wholly private nor wholly public, but something in between. By resisting any privacy safeguards in this nebulous space, media organizations and their representatives may be facilitating massive violations of privacy by large corporations under the guise of protecting free speech. Concepts like privacy, nuisance, and trespassing are defined in common lawthe accumulation of court decisions over decadesas opposed to laws passed by Congress. In coming years, courts will define and interpret these concepts in a world full of drones. But courts can, at best, figure out what is legal and illegal; they arent equipped to restrain what might be technically legal but ill-advised. Voluntary guidelines can protect privacy in a way that courts cantand vice versa. Just over a year ago, President Barack Obama called on interested members of the public to collaboratively develop and communicate best practices for privacy, accountability, and transparency as they relate to drone use. The goal is to come up with guidelines for commercial and private drone operators that would allow the budding unmanned aerial vehicle industry to develop while also preserving the right to privacysomething like what the humanitarian community has already done, but for all non-governmental drone users. Sign up for CJR 's daily email Obama put an agency of the Department of Commerce called the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, known as the NTIA, in charge of organizing the process. The NTIA is not supposed to write the guidelines itself, but only to nudge participants toward consensus. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is the agency that has authority to make binding rules about who can fly where, and Congress is currently debating a new law that will revamp what the FAA is supposed to do with respect to drones and more generally. The Senate passed a version of the bill this week that sets a mid-2016 deadline for completion of the NTIA process. Meanwhile, a quiet battle between the First and Fourth Amendments has been unfolding in a Washington conference room, pitting news organizations that want unfettered access to the view from the air against privacy advocates and even lobbyists for big technology companies, who want at least some rules to keep drones out of peoples personal lives. The NTIA group has met five times, and has scheduled a sixth meeting for mid-May, at which participants hope to agree to a finalized set of guidelines. A previous NTIA-mediated attempt to come up with guidelines for the use of facial recognition software broke down last year when the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and other groups walked out, in protest that companies wouldnt even agree to the most modest measures to protect privacy. This time around, it is lobbyists for media companies who have the strongest objections to guidelines that would protect privacy. We have a real problem with privacy rights groups trying to say that you have a privacy right when you are out in public, says Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel of the National Press Photographers Association. For news organizations, the rationale for not restricting drone use is simple. You dont need a persons permission to photograph them when they are out in public, says Osterreicher. The rules should not be any different, he says, if a photographer is using a camera attached to a drone: We should not be creating new laws based solely on the fact that it involves a new technology. Even voluntary standards can be problematic, some media representatives say. A company can be sued for not following such standards, even if it never agreed to them, warns Chuck Tobin, a partner at Holland & Knight, a DC lobbying firm that represents a large coalition of media companies, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Associated Press, Thomson Reuters, NBC, ABC, and Advance Publications. Tobin and Osterreicher argue that there shouldnt be any privacy-related restraints on drone use in public, while in private spaces, drone operators should pay attention to their subjects reasonable expectation of privacy. But this laissez-faire approach is bad for the newspapers and magazines they represent, and for the public at large. The First Amendment protects information-gathering because it guarantees both freedom of speech generally and freedom of the press in particular. If Im not allowed to take a picture, according to a 2012 decision by a Federal appeals court in Chicago, then I cant exercise my free speech right by publishing it, so a restraint on picture-taking is a restraint on speech. The same logic applies to the freedom of the press. However, as the Supreme Court found in a 1965 case, the right to speak and publish does not carry with it an unrestrained right to gather information. Our skies are filling with cameras. The American public bought almost a million drones in 2015. The millions of drones in private hands are being joined by tens of thousands flown by corporations. Some companies, like Amazon and Google, plan ambitious national drone delivery networks. This means that, in much of the country, a drone owned by one of those mega-companies may soon be overhead almost constantly, on its way to your neighbors house to deliver a package. Any commercial drone flight requires a special FAA exemption. Almost 5,000 such exemptions have been issued as of April 18, of which just over 200 mention newsgathering as at least one of their missions. Additionally, after a year of lobbying by media lawyers, the FAA announced in May 2015 that journalistic organizations may use drone footage or images recorded by third parties without such an exemption. The only restriction is that the journalist must not have had operational control of the drone. The proliferation of drones will change American day-to-day life in profound ways. Drones are increasingly able to loiter indefinitely overhead, and to photograph events in the murky boundary between private and public space. Take, for instance, a movie set. Actors in last years Star Wars reboot wore heavy robes over their costumes and hid their faces as they walked from movie trailers to the set, Waite notes, because paparazzi were using drones to snap pictures of the actors. Producers reportedly resorted to hiring their own teams of counter-drone drone operators. For all the promise of drone journalism, there are relatively few examples of drones having been used in the US in a journalistically noteworthy way. This is partly because the FAA still makes it relatively difficult to get permission to fly. But it might also be because their significance for journalism has been exaggerated. Tobin, the media lobbyist, cites a New York Times video from Greenland, TV footage of a frozen Niagara falls, a CNN video taken in Selma, Alabama, and footage taken after a tornado. All of these are nice enough, but none is transformative. Theres every reason to believe drones will become only a useful niche tool for journalisma new sort of telephoto lens. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of drones is, of course, not an isolated phenomenon. The sky isnt the only place filling with cameras. CCTV cameras on street corners in major cities, wearable cameras, and cameras on mobile phones are changing the nature of privacy. Clear-cut cases in which a drone, say, loiters outside someones bedroom window, are indeed easily resolved with existing common law precedents against trespassing, nuisance, and harassment. But what about examples that arent so obvious, like using a drone with a telephoto lens flying hundreds of feet in the air to surreptitiously take pictures of protesters at a demonstration? Our general rubric, Tobin says, is if its in a public place, and the public can see it, the public has a First Amendment right to record it and disseminate it to other people. Tobins view puts him at odds with legal scholars and some Supreme Court justices. As the film set example points out, there are many instances in which a drones capabilities can enable it to infringe on privacy in novel ways. Because the constitutional protections for information-gathering are implicit rather than explicit, different Federal courts have drawn the line in different places, and scholars and judges disagree about how strong the protections are. As a result, according to an article in the William and Mary Law Review, there is considerable uncertainty over First Amendment protection of information-gathering. In a recent and widely-cited opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor made the point that recording and aggregating the history of movements even in public, enables the Government to ascertain, more or less at will, [peoples] political and religious beliefs, sexual habits, and so on. Though individual data points, such as my presence on a particular street corner at a particular time, might be perfectly innocuous, she asked, is the same true of a compilation of everywhere Ive been today, or over the last week or month? A recent report by the Congressional Research Service pointed out that government agencies cant use drones for domestic surveillance unless they figure out the Fourth Amendment implications. Technically, the Fourth Amendment doesnt affect what private citizens or companies can do with drones (or anything else). It only applies to searches (and seizures) by government agencies. But as the William and Mary law review article points out, It will be hard for people to argue that they are unsettled and made insecure by police drone use in a world where they expectand have adapted tobeing subject to drone surveillance by everyone else. This means that if we want Fourth Amendment protection against police use of drones, we might also have to accept some limits on what other people, including journalists, do with drones. This doesnt, as the William and Mary law review article says, mean doing away with the First Amendment. It just means balancing two elements of the Bill of Rights. Privacy rights, the article argues, should depend on what type of recording is being made (for instance, whether its a video recorded by a surveillance camera or a work of art); who is recording (a credentialed journalist or a marketing company); what the recording is about (is it a matter of public interest?); and whether the governments restriction is intended to muzzle speech (by, say, giving preferential privacy protections to a company that has political influence). None of these distinctions is necessarily clear cut, but these are sensible questions to ask. Take, for instance, the case of William Meredith and John David Boggs of Bullitt County, Kentucky, south of Louisville. Boggs was flying a drone, a common consumer model, and Meredith shot it down with a shotgun. Meredith was charged with criminal mischief and wanton endangerment, but a local judge dismissed the charges, ruling that the drone was flying low enough to violate Merediths privacy, based on eyewitness testimony. Boggs, though, released video to news outlets that appears to show he was flying much higher than Meredith said he was, and therefore wouldnt have been able to effectively spy on Meredith (who he calls the drone slayer). In January, Boggs sued Meredith for destruction of property. The courts will likely take years to definitively resolve their case. In late March, an Arkansas man shot down a drone with a rifle because, he told police, he feared the drone was taking pictures of his kids, who were jumping on a trampoline in the backyard. Rather than waiting for the courts, it makes sense to craft guidelines that proactively parse difficult territory and balance conflicting rights. The process Obama set in motion last year has been underway since August, culminating with the NTIAs most recent meeting in Washington in late February, when Tobin and his colleagues proposed a set of guidelines that give commercial drone operators carte blanche to write rules for themselves. According to the Holland & Knight guidelines, commercial drone operators should be guided by the standards and practices of the organizations for which they work, both in how they use drones and in how they use the data drones gather. If that organization has well-thought-out standards and practices, this works out swimmingly. But what if it doesnt? What if that organization, instead of being a civic-minded newspaper, is a gossip website, or a shady marketing company? Tobin says he and his colleagues became reluctant craftspeople. They put pen to paper, he says, because other drafts that had circulated at the NTIA meetings gave insufficient attention to the First Amendment. Other groups, including the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), an advocacy group, and Hogan Lovells, a law firm whose clients include the National Association of Broadcasters, have been trying to write a consensus draft. (Disclosure: I have been present at the NTIA meetings as an interested observer and participant, and have given comments to both CDT and Hogan Lovells on their drafts, as well as to lawyers working for Amazon who have combined the two drafts.) That consensus calls for drone operators to avoid knowingly retain[ing] personal data longer than reasonably necessary to fulfill the purpose for which the data were collected. This means journalists who want to can, within the guidelines, keep pictures for as long as they think they need to, but that if an Amazon delivery drone films everything it sees while delivering a package, Amazon should delete that footage after the package is successfully delivered. Tobin says guidelines like these infringe on the First Amendment. To us, the First Amendment is a foundational principle, he says. To understand what the non-binding guidelines might look like, its helpful to think of Googles Street View. Googles cameras take pictures of people, cars, and the fronts of buildings in what are clearly public spaces. But Google voluntarily blurs the faces of individuals and the license plates of vehicles because these constitute personally identifiable information. Some still see Street View as an invasion of privacy, but blurring mitigates the privacy harm, even if Google has the right under the First Amendment to take such pictures. This type of voluntary redaction is a good idea. It doesnt make Street View any less useful for its intended purpose of helping people navigate, and it makes it a little less intrusive. It doesnt eliminate unintended privacy consequences: even though his face was blurred, this guys wife still famously caught him sneaking a cigarette in a Street View picture. Data retention in the context of journalism can be a tricky question. As Holland & Knight point out in an NTIA filing, pictures of O.J. Simpson taken in 1993 were used in his trial years later to show that he owned Bruno Magli shoes that he claimed he never owned. That is one reason the CDT-Hogan Lovells draft doesnt place hard restrictions on how long data should be retained. It just points out that its worth thinking carefully about whether data ought to be retained. The Hogan Lovells-CDT draft, put together by a loose coalition of industry representatives and privacy advocates, tries to place voluntary limits on the use of persistent surveillance drones for marketing, or say, credit or health care treatment eligibility. The best practices are voluntary, and liberally sprinkled with caveats. As in the Street View example, they call for drone operators to avoid displaying data unless it is necessary to the task at hand. But it doesnt prohibit them from doing so, it just says that they should make a reasonable effort to blur images. Similarly, it calls on commercial operators to make reasonable efforts to protect personal data from hackers. It says that unless there is a compelling need, drones shouldnt be used to gather data for monitoring peoples eligibility for employment, credit, or health care treatment. For example, your health insurance company should be discouraged (though not prohibited) from monitoring your exercise habitsdid you really go running by the lake this morning?using a drone. By contrast, the Holland & Knight document proposes that, [i]n public spaces, UAS operators may use UAS without limitations to capture data or images as with any other technology. There shall be no limitations or restrictions on the subsequent use of data or images gathered by UAS in public spaces. In plain terms, this means that if you are in public, Holland & Knight think anyone has the right to use a drone to keep track of where you are going, and where you have been, for any length of time. Waite, the journalism professor, was one of the first people to use drones for journalistic purposes in the US, and hopes to continue doing so. I have no interest in the government getting involved in speech issues, he says. Even if some media outlets take their First Amendment missions seriouslyand try to do this the right way, others use the First Amendment only nominally, as a tool to push the boundaries in pursuit of profit. Voluntary guidelines that seek to balance privacy and the right to gather information are reasonable, Waite says. Balancing the right to gather information with the right to privacy has never been easy. New technologies for image and data gathering and analysis, like drones and facial and voice recognition software, make finding the balance even harder, in part because such innovations change what is realistically possible. In the past, the high cost of, say, loitering in front of someones door for weeks at a time and filming video the whole time would have made it effectively impossible for journalists and law enforcement to do what a drone will be able to do very cheaply in the near future. Tobin says that just as people got used to film cameras in the late 19th century, they should, and will, get used to perpetual surveillance today. In 1890, Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren published a landmark essay called The Right to Privacy. The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual, they wrote. Solitude and privacy are at least as important to journalists themselves as they are to the public at large. As the William and Mary law review article says, the First Amendment itself is arguably conflicted as greater recording leads to greater amounts of expression, but can chill freedoms of association and personal development that make for meaningful expression and deliberative participation. Their arguments echo those of Julie Cohen of Georgetown University Law Center, who has pointed out that privacy shapes the structure of our economy and society in subtle, but vital ways, and that as privacy is diminished, democracy is threatened. Despite growing recognition of the importance of privacy, with drones as with other technologies, privacy violations that might seem unwise to most people will be allowed by law. Just because you can fly over someones ruined house and film them inside it, should you? Voluntary guidelines can hardly solve all the dilemmas provoked by the intensity and complexity of modern technology, but they can be a start. It may well be that this attempt to find a consensus will fail as the previous NTIA process around facial recognition did. That would be a loss for the public at large, and for journalists in particular. Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today Konstantin Kakaes is a fellow at New America and author of The Pioneer Detectives, an e-book. Follow him on Twitter @kkakaes. The twin earthquakes that struck southern Japan were having ripple effects far beyond the disaster zone, forcing Toyota to suspend production at most of its factories across the country, and affecting other manufacturers as well. The quake damaged Hondas motorcycle plant in Kumamoto, the largest city affected by the two quakes that hit late Thursday and early Saturday, killing at least 42 people. Japans Nikkei 225 stock index tumbled more than 3 percent Monday in part on worries over quake repercussions as well as a spike in the yen and a drop in oil prices. But the economic impact is nowhere near as large as the havoc wreaked by the 2011 quake and tsunami disasters, which slammed supply chains so badly that Japanese automakers production was halted even in the U.S. They learned the hard way about their vulnerability to such interruptions, especially from second- and third-tier suppliers, and have worked to create contingency plans. Disasters tend to hobble Japans mighty manufacturers because they are supported by small machine shops that provide components to bigger suppliers, which in turn supply bigger players. That kind of lesson has been learned, said Nissan Motor Co. spokesman Dion Corbett. We now have maps that show where exactly the suppliers are. Nissans two plants in Kyushu were temporarily shut down after the quakes for checkups. The checks found damage was minor, allowing the plants to be resume operations on Monday, Corbett said. Some of the worst-affected areas are deep in the mountains surrounding Mount Aso, Japans largest active volcano, an area renowned for dairy farming. But one of the hardest-hit cities was Mashiki, a center for semiconductor fabrication and other manufacturing. Sony Corp. said its sensor and device plant in Kumamoto was closed. Although the buildings structure was intact and no employees were injured, the precise nature of the production processes requires that delicately calibrated equipment must be checked carefully. The impact to near-term economic activity looks inevitable, while the comprehensive picture is difficult to gauge now, particularly due to the continued aftershocks, Masamichi Adachi of J.P. Morgan said in a commentary. Overall, the risk to the outlook for growth is to the downside, he said. In trading Monday, Toyotas shares lost 4.8 percent, Nissan lost 2.8 percent and Sony shed 6.8 percent. Renesas Electronics Corp.s computer chip plant in Kumamoto city was also shuttered, spokeswoman Makie Uehara said. It was unclear when production would resume. Gases that can be dangerous are used to maintain antiseptic conditions for chip production, and so safety had to be confirmed before other damage could be checked. Toyota Motor Corp., the most heavily affected of the big car makers, has stopped production not only at a factory in Kyushu but at 15 others in Japan through Friday. Output will resume depending on the availability of parts. Toyotas Japan output will drop by 50,000 vehicles in April, or about 7 percent of Japan production, according to a report on the quakes effects on automakers by SMBC Nikko. Toyota declined to comment on that estimate. Critically affected parts include door frames, door hinges and cast-aluminum engine parts, said Toyota spokesman Itsuki Kurosu. The maker of the Camry sedan, Prius hybrid and Lexus luxury models was working hard to get substitute parts, he said. Honda Motor Corp.s motorcycle plant was severely damaged. Due to repeated aftershocks, it was unsafe even to go inside to carefully inspect the damage, said company spokesman Teruhiko Tatebe. Production has been stopped until at least Friday. So far, production at Hondas auto plants has not been affected, Tatebe said. The company did not rule out future supply problems. (Associated Press Business Writer Elaine Kurtenbach contributed to this report.) Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Organizers of a major Gulf Coast sailboat race are making changes to improve safety a year after the regatta ended in chaos and death when a powerful storm struck Alabamas Mobile Bay while dozens of boats were on the water. Six sailors died when a thunderstorm with winds near hurricane-force slammed the coast at the end of the Dauphin Island Race in 2015, overturning multiple boats. About 100 boats carrying 470 people were on the water at the time and a search for missing victims went on for days. On Saturday, boats competing in the 58th annual regatta off Alabamas coast will be tracked by an online program using cellphone GPS signals to keep up with their locations, and race officials also will require a list of everyone aboard each boat. Fewer than 10 boats participated in a warmup race Saturday, but the tracking system worked. The principal race officer, Tom Batty, said organizers also have added links for key weather websites on a single page to give captains a single source for weather updates, and everyone on board a boat will be required to wear a life preserver at the start of the 18-mile race. That way everyone on board will know where their life jacket is even if they decide to take it off five minutes later, Batty said. Sailor Tom Long plans to return to the race this year even though his sailboat lost its mast as the storm hit last year. I was fortunate, said Long, of Leesburg in northeast Alabama. If wed have had sail up wed have been swimming, too. The Coast Guard has yet to release a final report on the incident, but Batty said many of the changes made so far this year resulted from meetings with the agency. A lot of this comes through the Coast Guard helping us with being very proactive with this race, finding out where people are and who they are, he said. Batty said race officials expect more than 100 boats to participate in the race this year, and he and other organizers have been watching the weather for days. The competition can be postponed or canceled if skies are too threatening, he said, but the forecast calls for clear skies and calm winds on race day. Yacht clubs rotate sponsorship of the race each year, and the Mobile club is putting on the regatta this year. The Fairhope Yacht Club was in charge last year when the race turned deadly, but Batty said organizers werent to blame for what happened. I wouldnt do anything different this year than they did last year, he said. It was just one of those things that happened. Long said three boats from his sailing organization, the Rome Sailing Club, entered the race last year, and two sank. He said the weather that erupted that day was a freak storm, and he is happy with changes made this year. Its safety-oriented. I dont see any downside, he said. Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. A half mile below the Chihuahuan Desert, the air is still and quiet in the dark passages of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Around 25 employees worked Friday in the underground to improve safety at the New Mexico site and maintain its constantly shifting salt walls, floors and ceilings. Two years ago, 120 employees were doing the same work. The Current-Argus got a glimpse of the underground as the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Waste Partnership led the first media tour into the mine since the 2014 fire and radiological incident shut down underground operations. The tour was guided by Mark Pearcy, deputy operations manager for the underground for the Nuclear Waste Partnership. After a 5-minute, 2,150-foot descent in the waste hoist, safety signs are immediately visible, along with TV screens displaying messages to workers in the underground. In another area, one reads, Accidents never just happen They are caused! The air underground is stuffy and stagnant because airflow in the mine has been much lower since the release incident in 2014. The supplemental and interim ventilation systems are not yet online. Workers were seldom seen in the 12 miles of tunnels throughout the mine, something that Pearcy said is much different compared to before the 2014 incidents. Of the workers in the underground on Friday, some were inserting bolts into walls and ceilings to stabilize the salt that is continually closing in. Other employees focused on operating salt and waste hoists. Some guarded contaminated areas, like Panel 7, which is where the radiological release occurred in 2014. Lockers are spaced out sporadically throughout the tunnels. Some contain workers valuables while others have self-contained self-rescuers. There are 400 self-contained self-rescuers spread around for just under 100 employees to use in case of an emergency. Before going underground, Pearcy demonstrated the use of a self-contained self-rescuer in case of lack of oxygen or in case of the presence of carbon monoxide, something workers and visitors must also now demonstrate. Many workers had trouble putting them on when a salt truck caught fire underground in February 2014. I dont want the first time for you to operate one of these, if its in the heat of the moment, to be completely flustered and not recognize the simplicity of this, Pearcy said. Before the fire, workers were verbally trained on how to use the devices, but never actually got hands-on experience with them. Pearcy said now, all workers are tested annually on how to use them. He said they are also randomly tested on their use as well. Another added safety precaution are color-coded reflectors attached to the walls, or ribs of the mine. Green indicates the quickest way to a hoist, red indicates an alternate route and white indicates that you are moving away from an exit. Pearcy said the reflectors have always been in place, but they have been installed at different heights since the fire so that those crawling on the ground to avoid smoke can also see the markers. As part of their decontamination efforts, workers covered the floors with sheets of yellow plastic near the end of last year. The edges of the plastic can be seen at the base of the salt walls. The plastic, known as brattice cloth, serves to block any radioactive material that may have settled on the floor. That material was then covered with salt. Pearcy said the yellow material will serve as a warning to workers, should the salt floor be worn away and it becomes visible underfoot. It will then be re-covered with more salt. The stretch of drift (access tunnel) where the brattice cloth is installed is known to workers as the Yellow Brick Road, Pearcy said. Todd Shrader, manager of the Carlsbad Field Office of the Department of Energy, said cold operations should begin in the next six weeks. Cold operations will last eight weeks and will provide training and drills for workers before waste emplacement begins again in December 2016. Then, WIPP officials hope, the quiet tunnels of the underground will again bustle with activity as radioactive waste is transported to its final resting place. Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Building in flood zones is about to get harder across much of Oregon, due to new federal recommendations. The government published the recommendations, called a biological opinion, in response to a lawsuit from environmental groups. The Audubon Society of Portland, National Wildlife Federation, Northwest Environmental Defense Center and Association of Northwest Steelheaders had argued that federal flood insurance was encouraging development detrimental to threatened salmon. Will Stelle, regional administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the agency recommends FEMA make several efforts to change the flood insurance program. The first effort is a mapping effort, Stelle said. The second effort is development standards to try to steer development out of harms way, in order to protect those most important habitat functions for salmon and steelhead. The biological opinion does not directly ban development in flood plains along salmon-bearing waterways. But there is a no net loss policy, requiring that developers or property owners mitigate any lost salmon habitat with new habitat. FEMA said that 251 Oregon communities have flood plain areas along salmon-bearing rivers and streams out of 271 communities with flood plains. Affected areas are up and down the coast, throughout the Willamette Valley, east to the Idaho border and into much of central Oregon. Some Oregon communities and leaders have expressed concern about the effect rules could have on property owners and potential development near salmon-bearing streams. FEMAs regional branch chief for Floodplain Management & Insurance, John Graves said that his agency will work with the state of Oregon and local governments on implementation, including new maps and how rules may work on the ground. Oregon Congressman Peter DiFazio garnered support in the U.S. House for legislation potentially blocking FEMA from following the recommendations. For over a year and a half, I have worked with local officials and directly engaged with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to stop a bureaucratic overreach . that could supersede Oregons land-use laws and prohibit development on tens of thousands of acres across the state, DiFazio said in a statement supporting the FEMA amendment. We can protect our endangered species without dictating unworkable solutions for communities in flood prone areas. Environmental groups have signaled their support of the biological opinion, and optimism that the changes to flood insurance could improve recovery efforts for threatened salmon and steelhead. It has been a long time coming, but we are very pleased that the National Marine Fisheries Service has outlined sensible improvements to FEMAs flood insurance program to help recover listed salmon and steelhead, said Bob Sallinger Conservation Director for the Audubon Society of Portland, one of the environmental groups to file the lawsuit in 2009. The two agencies at the center of the changes NOAA and FEMA do not see eye-to-eye on all aspects of what about the federal flood insurance program should change. As NOAA regional administrator Will Stelle explained on a conference call with reporters, the two agencies differ in at least two areas. One is where edge areas, what he called erosion zones, are concerned. NOAA believes those areas should be included in FEMAs new mapping efforts. FEMA has said those areas are not within flood zones and should be treated differently. The other difference of opinion relates to map revisions that property owners can request, if, for instance, theyre filling in an area. Stelle and John Graves with FEMA said the two agencies agreed to discuss those situations on a case-by-case basis. FEMA and NOAA have been down this road before, in response to a similar lawsuit in the Puget Sound area, and implementation ran into some difficulty on the ground. How the recommendations will play out on the ground is on the minds of environmental groups. Now it is time move forward and ensure that FEMA works with Oregons state and local governments to manage floodplain development in ways that protect salmon and make our communities more resilient in the face of increasing threats from extreme weather events, said Andrew Hawley, staff attorney for the Northwest Environmental Defense Center. Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Christopher O'Riley Turns Radiohead into Classical Music for the Multitude American musician Christopher O'Riley is renowned in the classical music world for his piano renditions of popular alternative rock recordings. His discography includes two volumes of prolific British band Radiohead's music arranged solely for keys. The artist persists in his purpose of piano for the proletariat. Also the host of NPR's From the Top, a radio program highlighting young musicians, the pianist strives in multiple mediums to introduce classical music to a new era of listeners. In a recent interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune, O'Riley affirmed his melodious vision to increase knowledge across generations of music lovers: "I've always been excited about the idea of sharing music that people are not familiar with, whether it be one genre or another -- any music that I find spectacularly beautiful," he says. Both editions of Christopher O'Riley Plays Radiohead, 2003's True Love Waits and its 2005 follow-up, Hold Me to This, exhibit a profound knack for reinterpretation of the rock behemoth's vast catalogue. With pieces covering a wide range of the band's output, each cover version is a deft classical take on a captivating composition. Speaking to Under the Radar magazine at the release of Hold Me to This, the pianist explained his appreciation of Radiohead's inventive, collaborative songwriting: "[O]ne of the nice things about Radiohead is that you have five members of the band not just chucking away on chords, but with each contributing a very specific part of the puzzle to every song. So it's not just melody and harmony; it's really counterpoint -- the interweaving, the voices intermingling." Additionally, O'Riley has gone on to release a full album of late artist Elliott Smith's compositions, as well as a volume of assorted variations on popular bands like Nirvana, Portishead and the Smiths (2009's Out of My Hands). Out of My Hands also included an additional Radiohead cover, further underscoring the artist's admiration for the quintet's inspirational catalogue. O'Riley recently performed a set of Radiohead's work in San Diego on April 20. He will be taking part in a collaborative concert with cellist Matt Haimovitz on Friday, April 29 in Ashland, Oregon. We want to hear from you. Let us know your favorite of Christopher O'Riley's Radiohead covers in the comments section below. 2016 The Classical Art, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. TagsChristopher O'Riley, Radiohead, Elliott Smith, Nirvana AKRON, Ohio -- Akron police are looking for a man who lived at the home where two people died in a fire that investigators said was set on purpose. Police said Ronald Garrett, 66, is wanted for questioning. He lived in the basement of the home in the 700 block of Fultz Street. No one has seen or heard from him since the fire. Lindell Lewis and his girlfriend of 20 years, Gloria Hart, died Monday in Lewis' home. The Ohio Fire Marshal investigated and ruled the fire an arson. Someone set fire to the home's front porch. No arrests have been made. Lewis and Hart were found dead in an upstairs bathroom. Another man who lived in the basement of the home escaped unharmed. Lewis had hip-replacement surgery in March and Hart was staying with him to help him. Akron police are asking anyone who knows of Garrett's whereabouts to call detectives at (330) 375-2490. AKRON, Ohio -- Two Church's Chicken restaurants were robbed at gunpoint Wednesday afternoon less than two hours apart. Akron police said it's possible the same person robbed both restaurants. The first robbery happened about 2:30 p.m. at the restaurant in the 1200 block of Copley Road. The second happened about 4 p.m. in the 700 block of South Arlington Street. The robber first walked into the Copley store and pulled out a black handgun, police reports say. He demanded money from the 23-year-old woman working at the register. The woman told police she had trouble opening the register. She slid the register to the robber who opened the drawer and stole about $200. Less than two hours later, a man wearing a black bandanna around his face and blue latex gloves walked into the restaurant and pulled out a black semi-automatic handgun from his sweatshirt pocket. "Y'all know what this is! Open the g-- d--- register!" he said, according to police reports. A 35-year-old woman and a 46-year-old woman were working at the time of the robbery, police said. The 35-year-old woman opened the register. The man grabbed about $700 and walked out of the front door and went northbound on South Arlington Street, police reports say. Both employees told investigators the robber seemed young and calm. They also told police that a customer had been in the restaurant an unusually long amount of time. The man was on his cellphone and walked out of the restaurant moments before the robber walked in. Akron police interviewed the man, who was uncooperative. He was not arrested. The restaurant gave Akron police surveillance video of the robbery. No arrests have been made. If you'd like to comment on this story, please visit the cleveland.com crime and courts comments section. AKRON, Ohio -- The pilots of the plane that crashed in Akron killing all nine on board acknowledge the aircraft's rapidly decreasing speed as they prepared to land at an Akron airport about four miles away. Flight instructors interviewed by the National Transportation Safety Board said that large wing flaps opened as part of the landing process were likely opened too wide as the plane approached the airport. One told investigators it would "be nuts" to open the large flaps so soon. The new details and interviews are contained in some 1,100 pages of the NTSB's investigation of the Nov. 10 crash. The report, released Wednesday, does not contain an analysis of the investigation or determine what caused the crash. The cause will be determined in the coming months. The Hawker 125-700 twin-engine charter, owned by Augusto Lewkowicz of Execuflight in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, crashed into an apartment building in the 3000 block of Mogadore Road killing the two pilots and seven passengers. The passengers worked at Pebb Enterprises of Boca Raton, Florida. The real-estate company was scouting new locations for shopping centers. They were flying to Akron Fulton from Dayton-Wright Brothers Airport. No one on the ground was injured. The plane's captain -- Oscar Chavez, 40, of Miami, Florida -- performed the duties of a second-in-command while the co-pilot, Renato Marchese, 50, of Boynton Beach, flew the plane. Typically, co-pilots for Execuflight only fly trips with no passengers, according to the report. Both were fired earlier in the year from their previous employers, the report says. Marchese was fired for overall poor performance and Chavez was fired for missing mandatory training. Execuflight hired them both in June and told NTSB investigators they were unaware of the pilots' issues at their prior jobs. The pilots in the final minutes leading up to the crash discussed the low visibility and concerns about the plane's loss of speed during its decent. An air traffic controller cleared the pilots to land at Akron Fulton. The pilots opened the wing flaps to a 45-degree angle about 2:49 p.m. while they were still four miles away from landing, according to the report. Chavez mentioned hearing a high-pitch sound. The two pilots argued about the decreasing speed and drag they experienced. Chavez said he was worried the plane was going to stall. Two minutes later, Chavez said: "You're diving, you're diving, don't dive" and "Okay, level off guy." "Oh, oh, oh," is the last thing anyone could be heard saying on the plane before it crashed. The NTSB report focused a section on asking flight instructors who specialize in Hawker 700s about opening the wing flaps that early in the flight. The instructors said opening the flaps at that altitude and speed would cause "a lot of drag." The large flaps opened at a 45-degree angle are "like barn doors," another said. "It would be 'nuts' to do that since it would involve a lot of power, with a lot of drag, and if the pilot was not paying attention to his speed, the airplane could slow and stall," the report says. Another instructor said the flaps would quickly destabilize the plane and slow it down. None of the instructors were ever trained to open their landing gear that soon, according to the report. Hawker's own manual, quoted in the report, says: "Lowering the flaps to 45-degrees causes a nose down change in altitude, and because of the extra drag, rate of descent will be increased unless power is added." Another factor investigators are looking it is the poor visibility the day of the crash. Visibility at the time was about 1 3/4 miles, according to the report. The clouds allowed for the pilots to the see the ground after they descended to 600 feet from the ground. They came out of the clouds at the lowest allowable level. The pilots also miscalculated the plane's weight by about 600 pounds and were going too fast for how much the plane actually weighed before the decent, the report says. They also never created a required alternative flight plan in the event the weather kept them from safely landing. The report says the conditions the day of the crash would have warranted the pilots using the alternative plan. Attempted burglary, Weatherstone Drive: A Weatherstone man believes someone tried to break into his house at about 2 a.m. April 14. The man awoke to the sound of his dog scratching the bathroom door, which was closed. When the man opened the door, his dog lunged toward the bathroom window. The man, peering through the window, saw a silhouette of a person outside. The man grabbed his firearm and ran outside. His dog dashed after someone or something a few houses away. The man ordered the dog back to him and called police. Officers checked the area but found no one. They did find two Post-It-note-size holes in the bathroom window. The homeowner said the holes were not there before. Marijuana possession-contributing to the delinquency of a minor, Front Street: A Cleveland man, 32, was arrested at about 9:30 p.m. April 10 after police caught him with marijuana. Officers patrolling on North Rocky River Drive near Front checked the license-plate number of 2012 Volkswagen traveling southbound. An arrest warrant had been issued for the car's owner, so police stopped the car in the parking lot of Valero on Front. The Cleveland man was a passenger in the Volkswagen. A woman, not the car's owner, was driving. The man's two boys, 9 and 7, were in the backseat. The woman said they were driving home from the IX Indoor Amusement Park. Police discovered the Cleveland man was wanted by Aurora police. Officers searched the Volkswagen and found marijuana, a digital scale and a half-full bottle of liquor. They also found marijuana in the 9-year-old's pocket - his father had asked him to hide it. Operating a vehicle under the influence, West Bagley Road: A Macedonia woman, 48, was arrested at about 1:35 a.m. April 8. The woman was driving 43 mph on West Bagley near Lindberg Boulevard, a 25-mph zone. Her speech was slurred but she denied drinking. Police discovered she had been arrested several times in the past for OVI. When an officer asked her to count backwards from 53 to 39, the woman said, "You don't have to be a mathematician to do that," but she was unable to perform the task. She failed additional field sobriety tests. The woman smelled of alcohol. Police found several pill bottles, a cup of alcohol and a marijuana pipe in her car. She was placed in handcuffs, but somehow slipped out of them. At the police station, the woman prophesized a future revolution against police. She signed a fingerprint card with a profanity. The woman then took a wine-bottle opener from her pocket and bragged that officers had not found it earlier. Disorderly conduct, Sprague & Priem roads: A Berea woman, 52, was cited after police found her stumbling and drunk at about 7:30 p.m. April 14 near Sprague and Priem. The woman's hand was bleeding and her jacket was dirty. Police believed she had fallen several times. Officers took her home, but only after she refused a ride to the hospital. Her boyfriend's mother agreed to drive over and stay with her. Criminal simulation, Front Street: Police are trying to identify two females who passed a fake $50 bill at about 8:30 p.m. April 13 in Pick Wick Food Mart, 450 Front. The females used the counterfeit bill to make a 99-cent purchase. The cashier gave them change in real money. Shoplifting, West Bridge Street: Police are trying to identify and arrest a shoplifter who stole more than $100 in steaks at about 3:30 p.m. April 10 from Giant Eagle, 50 West Bridge. Security video shows the shoplifter enter the side door of Giant Eagle. He filled a handbasket with six or seven steaks, then left through the side door. Fraud, Weatherstone Drive: A Weatherstone man said someone stole his credit card information to make about $7,700 in purchases between April 11-14. The man learned about the thefts when PNC Bank, his credit-card provider, sent him a letter regarding a change-of-address notification. The new address was in Florida, but the man said he never submitted a change-of-address notification to PNC. Petty theft, Front Street: Someone stole a package that was delivered to a front porch between 9:45 a.m. and 4:45 p.m. April 4. The package contained a $100 Bellabeat LEAF Fitness Tracker. Petty theft, Edgewood Circle: About $5 in change was stolen between 9 p.m. April 11 and 6 a.m. April 12 from an unlocked pickup truck parked in a driveway. Petty theft. Wayne Drive: An MP3 player, checkbook, auxiliary cable and about $90 in cash were stolen late April 11 or early April 12 from an unlocked pickup truck parked in a driveway. If you would like to discuss the police blotter, please visit our . CLEVELAND, Ohio -- FirstEnergy's victory to have customers pay higher electric bills to protect the company's aging and less competitive Davis-Besse and Sammis power plants could be short-lived. Several out-of-state power companies competing for Ohio customers already have cases pending before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. They are asking the agency to declare that Ohio has overstepped its authority by guaranteeing profits for power plants competing in interstate electric markets. These markets are overseen by the FERC. The companies are still hoping that the FERC will overturn the deal approved three weeks ago by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. FirstEnergy asked for the unprecedented subsidy precisely because the old plants cannot always compete well with new gas-fired power plants have significantly lowered wholesale market prices. The FERC is expected to take note of a U.S. Supreme Court decision this past week overturning a Maryland-approved subsidy for a new power plant that would also sell power into wholesale markets. FirstEnergy's opponents may also try to convince a federal judge to halt the PUCO-approved deal until it can be challenged in a federal court, using the same Supreme Court ruling. But such a challenge to the Ohio case has yet to be filed. In the Maryland case, the Supreme Court ruled against 20-year contracts that Maryland's utility regulators ordered the state's local power delivery companies to sign with a company building a new power plant. Worried that the state did not have enough power for future needs, the state wanted to make sure the new power plant would be profitable. The fatal flaw in the Maryland arrangement, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled, was that the contract linked the amount of the subsidy to the price the new power plant could win offering its electricity into the interstate high-voltage grid. In other words, the new plant would receive a guaranteed income for its power no matter what it could win in competitive bidding into the interstate grid. Sound familiar? It should. Both FirstEnergy and Columbus-based American Electric Power in a subsequent "me too" case argued that their old plants could not compete well with new gas-fired plants that now dominate wholesale power markets. Both cases, which the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio approved March 31, will require that the customers served by their local distribution companies pay the difference between the price of electricity from the old power plants and the price it can fetch in wholesale markets. Dayton Power and Light has filed a similar request. In the case of FirstEnergy, the Illuminating Co., Ohio Edison and Toledo Edison will buy all of the power that Davis-Besse and the W.H. Sammis coal-burning plant generate -- at whatever that cost is plus a 10.38 percent profit -- and immediately bid that power into the interstate high-voltage grid. The difference in price will then be collected from -- or as FirstEnergy says, eventually credited -- to customers. That would happen later during the eight-year contract. FirstEnergy argued before the PUCO that in the long run -- when natural gas gets more expensive and drives up wholesale power prices -- the arrangement will actually save customers money in the form of a monthly credit. The Ohio Consumers' Counsel countered in its filings before the PUCO that the arrangement forcing customers to guarantee the profitability of the power plants could cost FirstEnergy customers an extra $100 to $110 a year for the next eight years. The PUCO rejected the OCC's basis for that prediction -- namely that the price of natural gas will remain low for many years. The OCC is still analyzing the Supreme Court's decision. The Electric Power Supply Association, a trade group representing the power companies that filed complaints about the PUCO with the FERC, did have a carefully worded reaction. "EPSA is very pleased with the unanimous Supreme Court decision," EPSA President and CEO John Shelk said in a written statement. "The unanimous decision strengthens FERC's hand at a critical time when it comes to properly defining the appropriate roles for federal and state actions impacting wholesale power markets." FirstEnergy this week issued a statement saying it finds the court's ruling in the Maryland case supportive. "FirstEnergy was encouraged by the Supreme Court's decision. The ruling supports our position that a regulated utility can take contractual ownership of unregulated generating assets, and bid those resources into PJM's annual capacity auction," the company said, a reference to the fact that Maryland's utilities are regulated, and that the court's decision did not question that aspect but rather focused on the issue of the special subsidies. Shannon Fisk, a lawyer with the firm Earthjustice, which has represented the Sierra Club in the FirstEnergy case, said the Maryland decision "raises serious questions" about future of the PUCO's decision. Fisk said any of the groups who opposed the deal in the case before the PUCO could use the Supreme Court ruling to file a case in federal district court. "We're still evaluating the decision, but the Supreme Court's 8-0 ruling striking down out-of-market subsidies for power plants in Maryland certainly raises serious questions about whether PUCO's approval of the bailout of FirstEnergy's plants is pre-empted by federal law," he said. Bricker & Eckler, a law firm representing the Northeast Ohio Public Energy Council in its opposition to the FirstEnergy proposal, posted a short legal analysis Wednesday of the court ruling. The analysis does not mention NOPEC or what the firm might do on NOPEC's behalf. Instead, it focuses on the legal significance of the court's decision. "The ripples from the Court's decision may well affect two cases recently decided by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio also involving subsidized power purchase agreements between regulated utilities (American Electric Power-Ohio and FirstEnergy Corp.) and their unregulated generation affiliates," the article begins. Noting that "the Court recognized that FERC has exclusive jurisdiction over wholesale electricity prices under the FPA [Federal Power Act], the analysis predicts that "the significance of the Court's decision will be felt in Ohio." This article has been edited for clarity by the author. poloish3.JPG The Polish Constitution Day parade in 2010. This year's celebration is over three days, April 29 - May 1. (Tim Harrison, Special to the Plain Dealer) CLEVELAND, Ohio - It's time for another Polish party in the streets. Fast on the heels of Dyngus Day and Paczki Day another holiday is bringing the spirit and food of Poland to Cleveland. This one one has much deeper roots in the Cleveland area. The 68th annual local Polish Constitution celebration will take place April 29 to May 1 in Parma's Polish Village. The events honoring the signing of the Polish Constitution on May 3, 1791 have been celebrated by the Polish American Congress in Cleveland since the group formed in 1948. The celebration has moved from the Kosciuszko Monument at University Circle, to City Hall downtown, to Slavic Village and now to Parma. It was adopted on May 3 by the opted by the Great Sejm of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Polish Constitution was Europe's first written constitution. It sought to establish a democratic constitutional monarchy with political equality between townspeople and nobility. The weekend events include: Friday, April 29: Mixer at the Parma Ridgewood Inn, 5759 Ridge Road, Parma from 6 p.m. until 11 p.m., known for their classic fish fry. Saturday, April 30: Miss Polonia Contest and dance at St. Charles Social Hall, 5891 Ridge Road, Parma. Tickets are $10. Call Allan Szuflada at (330) 659-9465 or Mark Relovsky at (216) 970-0507. Sunday, May 1: The main celebration will include a wreath laying, Mass, parade, and party. The laying of wreathes will take place downtown at Casimir Pulaski Monument, next to Cleveland City Hall, at 9 a.m. Mass will be held at St. Charles Church (5891 Ridge Rd, Parma) at 10:30 a.m. There will also be a pancake breakfast sponsored by the St. Charles Youth Group from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. at the St. Charles Parish Hall. Funds raised will go toward their World Youth Day trip to Poland this summer. Parade: The annual parade will begin at 2 p.m. at Parma Circle, north of the Shoppes at Parma, and will proceed north toward intersection of Ridge and Snow Roads. A formal program after the parade will be held behind Unity Catholic Credit Union (5839 Ridge Road) with Polish food and drinks from local vendors. Not enough Polish flavor for you? The Slavic Village area will also hold a Constitution Day parade at 1 p.m. May 1 on Fleet Avenue's Warszawa Historic District around East 65th Street. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- At the intersection of Bolivar Road and Prospect Avenue in Downtown Cleveland sits a behemoth sandstone and red brick building that's engulfed in history and patriotism. The three-story Romanesque Revival castle, with towering turret, black-gated windows and a gate that lowers to shield the front entrance, is the Cleveland Grays Armory Museum, home to the Cleveland Grays volunteer militia that was founded by 118 men in 1837. The armory's bulk and its stark contrast to the subdued, grayish architecture around it makes it impossible to miss. And even though it has long been open to the public for tours and special events, lots of people pass by and have no idea what's inside. "Three years ago we had our cornerstone event. We had an all-day open house and about 400 people came through," says Mary Beth Rauzi, the armory's outreach coordinator. "People said to me, 'We thought this was a condemned building.' Some people thought this is a warehouse. I had one lady tell me she thought it was an orphanage. This place surprises people, but it's a pleasant surprise." From top to bottom, the enormous building erected in 1893 (the militia's previous armory was destroyed by fire in 1892) houses countless pieces of military uniforms and dress uniform adornment, firearms, military memorabilia, and military-related sketches and posters that include recruiting posters dating back to World War I. "We actually have a World War I helmet that was mailed to the armory with the address stuck on it," Rauzi recalls. Veterans dating back to the Civil War and American luminaries such as Abraham Lincoln, Dwight D. Eisenhower, General Norman Schwarzkopf and many others are highly honored in photos and sketches. Stepping inside feels like slipping back in time. In the bright red-carpeted lobby is a quaint ticket booth that's original to the armory. Off to the right rests a canon from the Civil War that was taken by the North and displayed at Camp Cleveland in what is now Cleveland's Tremont neighborhood, says Rauzi. The canon was fired every hour the day the Civil War ended. It finally circuitously landed at the armory. Next to the canon is a figure of a veteran wearing the Grays original uniform. Off the lobby is a two-story locker room with the original wood lockers in which even members today don their uniforms. A Ladies Lounge exists because women weren't allowed past the first floor. The Drill Hall on the first floor these days is used primarily for weddings and other special occasions, says Rauzi. The Cleveland Orchestra staged its first concert in the hall in 1918. The first Cleveland auto show, with 17 cars, took pace in the Drill Hall in 1903. Visitors get a kick out of the Wurlitzer theater pipe organ, also in the hall, that was built in 1930. These organs accompanied silent films from small movie houses to grand theaters. The Drill Hall currently is being renovated and will be ready in time for July's Republican National Convention gatherings that will take place there. The first and second floors of the armory are swept in rich mahogany wood, including the walls, the grand staircase railing and posts at either side of the bottom of the staircase, each of them carved from a single piece of wood and engraved with CG, for Cleveland Grays. The second floor is broken into the large Club Room where members relaxed, imbibed and smoked, and still get together without smoking; the Billiard Room that's decorated with a deer head and antlers brought in by members; an anteroom, and the Pioneer Room. "This room (Pioneer) was for men who were Civil War veterans," says Rauzi. "Or you could be invited in here." On the third floor is a ballroom where smaller weddings and receptions take place. There's also the Harold Hitz Burton Mess, a bar essentially, with little cupboards where members stored their hooch before the armory got its liquor license. It's named after the 45th mayor of Cleveland. A firing range that security and other companies use for training is situated in the basement. These days the 150 or so Grays primarily serve ceremonial roles in parades and other public events. New members, including women, are still welcome, and being a veteran isn't a requirement. Some good news for the armory Recently, the armory personnel received some exciting news. As part of the convention, Rauzi says the Republican Party of Cuyahoga County is paying in part to have the armory air conditioned, which it never has been. In exchange, the party will use the armory for convention events, but the armory will benefit long after that. "We have all of these uniforms and artifacts and no temperature and climate control," says Rauzi. "It's a big stone insulated building so once heat gets in it just builds and builds. By the time tourists got to the third floor they were dripping in sweat." More great news: The state of Ohio has included in the 2017 state budget $350,000 for the armory to kick-start funding for an elevator that will go to all three floors so guests can meet tour guides at the top floor. "We are finding that a lot of our veterans, even Vietnam veterans, are having trouble with the stairs," says Rauzi. "There are 44 stairs, which is equal to four stories in a normal home because the stairs are very steep. Some of our older community groups want to come for tours but they can't because of the stairs." With its mission to preserve its history and advance the military heritage of Greater Cleveland through public awareness, the armory offers tours from noon to 4 p.m. the first Wednesday of the month. Private tours also are available. Tours are $8 for adults; $5 for students, seniors and the military. The telephone number is 216-621-5938. The exact address 1234 Bolivar Road. The armory plans to participate in "Open Doors Ohio," a two-week, statewide event that will highlight historical places around the state. The armory's program is scheduled for 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, September 10. Rauzi has been with the armory for three years and enjoys making Greater Clevelanders aware of this downtown historical gem. "She (the armory) is a grand old dame and I just can't tell you enough things about her," she says. With its mission to preserve its history and advance the military heritage of Greater Cleveland through public awareness, the armory at 1234 Bolivar Road offers tours from noon to 4 p.m. the first Wednesday of the month. Private tours also are available. Tours are $8 for adults; $5 for students, seniors and the military. For more information, call 216-621-5938. lorainccc.jpg Lorain County Community College has named a new president to succeed Roy Church, who is retiring after 29 years. (Lorain County Community College) Marcia Ballinger ELYRIA, Ohio - Marcia Ballinger, provost and vice president for learner services at Lorain County Community College, has been named president of the two-year school. Trustees announced Thursday that Ballinger will replace Roy Church, who is retiring after 29 years. Ballinger began working at the college in 1991. She has served as vice president for strategic and institutional development and director of marketing and media relations. She received her bachelor's degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, an MBA from Kent State University and a doctorate in higher education from Walden University. Ballinger was one of three finalists. Others considered were Ray Michael Di Pasquale, who retired as president of the Community College of Rhode Island where he served for nine years, and MaryAnn Janosik, head of school for Stanford Online High School in Palo Alto, California. Janosik, a Lorain County native, began her studies at LCCC and received a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College. The three candidates met with faculty, students and community members at the college. "The reason I believe that this college has been so successful is because in it has taken the time to really become not just ingrained in the community, it is because it is part of the entire community and it is created to serve the changing parts of the community," Ballinger said in a forum, according to the college's newspaper, The Collegian. "As I look at change, I look at it in terms of the community's needs. As a learning organization we can't stop. We are continually changing and innovating." Ballinger was recently chosen for a fellowship to prepare community college leaders for presidencies. "Dr. Ballinger has been instrumental in spearheading the college's strategic initiatives that have led to increased educational opportunities and student success," said Church after the Aspen Institute announced the fellowship. "She has been a tireless champion working on behalf of Lorain County Community College on the local, state and national level on all fronts: student success, workforce development, economic growth and contributing to the vitality of our community." In recognition of Church's service, the Lorain County Community College Foundation established the Roy and Bobbi Church Visionary Leadership Institute. The institute will host a speaker series that will include programs and workshops. The first event on April 25 features Michael Porter, a professor at Harvard Business School. Porter will deliver the keynote address at the Legacy of Leadership Gala to honor Roy Church. More information about the gala can be found at lccclegacy.org. purdue2.jpg Purdue University has introduced an innovative way for students to finance a portion of their education. (Purdue University) WEST LAFAYETTE, Indiana - A program that awards money for college to students who pledge to repay with future earnings has been developed at Purdue University. The "Back a Boiler" agreement would provide an annual $5,000 award to juniors and seniors. Students will be chosen based on cumulative debt and other factors. Students who receive the funds from the Purdue Research Foundation will pay back a set percentage of their salary over nine years or less. Students do not begin repayment until six months after graduation. No additional payments are required after nine years, even if they haven't paid back the total. Purdue gave this example: A student received $10,000 and graduated with a history degree. Based on an anticipated salary of $35,000 the student would pay 3.97 percent of the salary for nine years. At the end of nine years, the student would have paid back $13,655. The total is higher because the percentage does not change but his income is expected to increase. The public university in West Lafayette, Indiana said a traditional, private loan of $10,000 at 9 percent interest (without a co-signer) would cost $17,124 at the end of a 10-year term. All of the money students pay back will be used to replenish the fund for future investments. Purdue is the first American university to experiment with so-called income share agreements in more than 40 years. If successful, the school could mainstream a novel alternative to private student loans, the Washington Post reported. "Back a Boiler is designed for students who have economic need beyond what they can get from grants and subsidized federal loans," Brian Edelman, chief operating officer at Purdue told the Post. The university has an online comparison tool that lets students enter information including their major and expected graduation date to see potential repayment terms. Students in high-earning fields would pay a lower percentage of their income for a shorter period. High-earning graduates would not pay more than 2.5 times the amount of money they received, Edelman told the newspaper. Edelman said university would not require payments for graduates who earn less than $20,000 a year. Purdue is offering five years of deferment for those who go on to attend graduate school as well as those who exit the job market to care for an ailing parent, raise a child or volunteer. thunderstorm-pedx.JPG Showers and thunderstorms are possible Thursday in Northeast Ohio. (Thomas Ondrey, Plain Dealer file photo) AKRON, Ohio -- Clouds have moved into the Akron area, with showers likely and chances of thunderstorms. It will remain warm, with a high of 70 degrees. The chances of showers and thunderstorms will continue overnight and into Friday, which will have a high of 64. The skies will clear Saturday but it will be cooler, with a high of 57. Here's the seven-day forecast from the National Weather Service: Thursday: Showers likely, then showers and possibly a thunderstorm after 11 a.m. High near 70. South wind 9 to 13 mph. Chance of precipitation is 80 percent. New rainfall amounts of less than a 10th of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms. Showers and possibly a thunderstorm overnight before 9 p.m., then a chance of showers and thunderstorms between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m., then a chance of showers after 10 p.m. Low around 52. Southwest wind 7 to 11 mph. Chance of precipitation is 80 percent. New precipitation amounts between a tenth and quarter of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms. Friday: Showers likely, mainly before 3 p.m. Cloudy with a high near 64. Southwest wind around 8 mph becoming northwest in the afternoon. Chance of precipitation is 60 percent. New precipitation amounts between a 10th and quarter of an inch possible. A chance of showers Friday night before 8 p.m. Mostly cloudy with a low around 39. North wind 7 to 10 mph. Chance of precipitation is 30 percent. New precipitation amounts of less than a 10th of an inch possible. Saturday: Mostly sunny with a high near 57. Mostly clear overnight with a low around 36. Sunday: Mostly sunny with a high near 68. Partly cloudy Sunday night with a low around 47. Monday: A chance of showers after 2 p.m. Partly sunny with a high near 71. Chance of precipitation is 40 percent. Showers likely Monday night. Mostly cloudy with a low around 46. Chance of precipitation is 60 percent. Tuesday: A chance of showers. Mostly cloudy with a high near 60. Chance of precipitation is 40 percent. Mostly cloudy Tuesday night with a low around 38. Wednesday: Mostly sunny with a high near 63. * Complete 15-day forecast * Ohio radar | Ohio satellite * Upload your weather-related photos Long-time restaurateur Scott "Grumpy" Lindell" has turned Sachsenheim Hall, a venerable club in the Stockyards neighborhood for Transylvanian Germans, into a multi-ethnic hub. Cleveland creds: lived here from 1983 to 1985 and again since 1987 Currently lives: Stockyards Age: 59 Schooling: attended University of Pittsburgh Family: single Favorite locally owned restaurants (besides his own): Bruno's, Spotted Dog, Villa Y Zapata. How'd you get your nickname? Grumpy: When I first got a restaurant in Tremont, I was remodeling and fell through a staircase. I broke my ankle and spent the whole summer remodeling on crutches. The nickname stuck. Where are you from? Grumpy: South of Erie, a little town called Lander. When did you move here, and why? Grumpy: I came in '83 to do the food service for Red Oak Camp at the Holden Arboretum. Then I worked in L.A. and Lake Arrowhead. I came back in '87 and worked at the Watermark in the Flats. I opened the Calorie Gallery on Carnegie in '90. I was the chef and manager. I opened Grumpy's in '94. Tremont was kind of the wild, wild West. I had to chase drug dealers and prostitutes off the corner. Then all the sudden restaurants started sprouting up everywhere down there. The area got yuppie. It just wasn't as much fun as when I first opened. I like it a little more edgy. I sold Grumpy's to Kathy Owad, who'd been a waitress there. She's kept the name. [She also moved it after a fire.] How'd you end up at the Sachsenheim? Grumpy: I'd been catering parties at the Sachsenheim while I still had Grumpy's. It'd been a private club for 100 years. It needed public support to stay open, so they hired me to run it. When I first got here in '03, I had guys breaking in. I keep a Samurai sword in the office, and I chased several of them out. I haven't had any incidents in the last couple years. Word must have spread about your sword. Grumpy: They've redeveloped a lot of the neighborhood. I see constant improvement. Most of my customers are from the suburbs. Are they edgy? Grumpy: I think I've had one fight in my 13 years here. But we used to have a jagerfest here. Two young couples ended up getting married and having children conceived at the Saschenheim. Why didn't you stick to serving brats and schnitzel here? Grumpy: I started Taco Tuesday to get rid of chicken scraps. Now it's our busiest day. We run 26 different kinds of tacos. We generally sell 600. Wednesday night we run wings, and Thursday hamburgers and hot dogs. Fish fry goes crazy during Lent. But every Saturday we cook German food. I make over 20 kinds of bratwurst. I do a lot of German parties here, too, and a beer and sausage festival. And we feature a lot of good German beer. We also host the SNOBS: the Society of Northeast Ohio Brewers, the first Monday of every month. There's 160 of them. What are your hours? Grumpy: We open at 4 p.m. every day. We close at midnights six days and 9 p.m. Sundays. Celebrity diners? [State] Senator [Michael] Skindell is a member here. When I had the Calorie Gallery, Tom Hanks took it over for a weekend, and I served his whole cast and crew. Ed Asner stopped in for Sunday brunch at Grumpy's and talked to all the old ladies that came in. The cast of "Telling Lies in America" was eating at Grumpy's almost every day. Maximilian Schnell sat with the older folks and had coffee with them. But Kevin Bacon wouldn't give them autographs. I've fed a lot of the Indians over the years. I cook here and bring the food to the park. They all liked our empanadas and steak. How good's our food scene? Food's changed a lot in Cleveland in the last 10, 15 years. It was a meat and potatoes town, and they wouldn't try anything new. Now they're looking for a little more spice. The notoriety of Michael Symon and some other chefs has helped. [Food writer] Michael Ruhlman has helped a lot. Favorite local restaurants you haven't run? Grumpy: I like Bruno's. I generally get the eggplant parmigiana. If I go get a drink, I generally go to the Spotted Dog on Clinton. I love Villa y Zapata on 85 and Madison; it's probably the best Mexican food in the city. Other hangouts? I love the art museum. I love the Impressionists. I loved the Van Gogh exhibition. What else do you like about Cleveland? Grumpy: I love the ethnicity of the city: the Irish areas, the German, the Italian. For a long time, the clubs from different parts of Germany were almost feudally divided. Now they're finally showing a little camaraderie. But it seems young people don't embrace their culture any more. That's why a lot of these clubs are dying out. I'm part German and Scotch. When I was younger, I threw the hammer and pole in the Scottish Games in Oberlin. I always felt comfortable in Cleveland. You've got the advantage of it being a good-size city but not overly large like New York City, where you're lost and not really knowing anyone. Here I go to Dave's or any market, and they all know me and talk to me. SPRINGDALE, Arkansas -- What started as an attempt to sneak some soda into a water cup at a McDonald's ended with a teen facing a felony robbery charge, police say. According to 4029tv.com, Cody Morris, 18, of Springdale, and two others went through the restaurant's drive-thru Monday and asked for large cups of water. After receiving the water, they parked their vehicle and dumped their cups. The three suspects then filled the cups with soda inside the restaurant, police tell 4029.com. A manager spotted the suspects and asked them to empty their cups. Two of them did, but one reportedly refused. When they attempted to leave in their vehicle, the manager blocked their way. Police say the car was put in reverse and hit the manager. The manager tried to get the keys out of the vehicle but was again struck by the vehicle, reports say. Morris was arrested and booked into jail. He is scheduled to appear in court Friday. If you'd like to comment on this post, please visit the cleveland.com crime and courts comments section. portman-brown.jpg U.S. Sens. Sherrod Brown (left) and Rob Portman (right) are set to attend a U.S. Senate committee hearing in Cleveland on Friday about the impact of the opioid epidemic in Ohio. (Sabrina Eaton, cleveland.com) U.S. Senate panel to hold Cleveland field hearing on Ohio's drug epidemic: U.S. Sens. Sherrod Brown and Rob Portman, along with the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, have set a 10 a.m. public hearing at University Hospitals of Cleveland on the impact of the opioid epidemic in Ohio. The speakers list includes Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine and Carole Rendon, acting U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio. State officials to celebrate Earth Day in Columbus: To celebrate Earth Day, Ohio House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger, Ohio Environmental Protection Agency Director Craig Butler and others plan to speak and attend a tree-planting ceremony outside the Ohio Statehouse at 11 a.m. Statehouse ceremony planned for new women veterans license plate: The heads of the Ohio Department of Public Safety, Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles and Ohio Department of Veterans Services are slated to attend a 2 p.m. Statehouse ceremony on the first day that Ohio offers a specialty license plate to women military veterans. Kasich to campaign in Connecticut: Ohio Gov. John Kasich is slated to hold a "town hall" meeting in Glastonbury, Conn. Others to watch: Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders plan to campaign in Pennsylvania. Donald Trump has a rally scheduled in Delaware. csuhome.jpg Cleveland State University President Ronald Berkman's new home in Cleveland Heights, purchased by the university foundation recently for Berkman, and future university presidents. (Keller Williams Realty) CLEVELAND -- Cleveland State University President Ronald Berkman lives alone. Soon he'll be living in a place large enough to accommodate the Brady Bunch -- courtesy of a taxpayer-financed university whose special mission is to educate urban-area residents, many of whom cannot afford to attend college anywhere else. That unique place in the nation's higher education community, coupled with Berkman's wanderlust, obliterates the argument by CSU that lavish living quarters have become a necessary fact of life for college presidents. As I've suggested before, CSU's governing board is comprised of smart, successful, civic-minded people. But they are clearly oblivious to the anger roiling the nation this election year, as people from all walks of life are quick to take umbrage at the tone-deaf nature of their leaders. CSU's ongoing accommodations of Berkman's living needs is a textbook example of the conduct that fuels that anger. Berkman will soon move into his third living quarters in two years, all of them paid for by a public university where the average graduate leaves $24,856 in debt. In his new digs, Berkman will be home alone. But he'll have plenty of room to roam. His new house will have six bedrooms, each with a bathroom. The Cleveland Heights beauty, a 5,486-square-foot mini mansion on Fairmount Boulevard, was snatched up in a deal engineered by the trustees for $800,000-plus. But if you think that price was a steal, chances are time will prove you wrong. Berkman's new residence was on the market for 192 days before CSU came along and bought what was clearly a not-very-hot property. No one should begrudge Berkman his large salary, which may hit $600,000 this year. He has an important and difficult job. But what's impossible to justify is the willingness of CSU trustees to underwrite any housing change Berkman desires, then worry about the fallout later. This time that fallout has damaged the institution. Faculty, alumni and taxpayers are angry at the we-know-what's-best attitude of CSU's governing body. The Cauldron, CSU's student newspaper, has ridiculed and mocked the trustees. And a student-generated online petition opposing the trustees' decision received more than 1,000 signatures. Stung by that reaction, CSU trustees have fought back. And, of course, dug themselves in deeper. In an April 8 email to "alumni and friends" (I'm one of the former, not the latter), trustees borrowed a page from the Donald Trump playbook, blaming the media messenger for the public outrage over their actions. "Contrary to inaccurate media reports, the previous presidential residence in Shaker Heights did not cost the university $1.2 million. The home (on Eaton Road in Shaker Heights) was purchased in 2009 for $808,000 and sold in 2014 for the same amount, resulting in no financial loss to the university." As cleveland.com reporter Karen Farkas noted a handful of times in news stories, in addition to the $808,000 purchase price, CSU spent about $400,000 in improvements and repairs to the house. Nevertheless, trustees want the public to believe CSU broke even on the Eaton Road house because the $400,000 didn't count. Believing them requires ignoring that paying for those repairs and improvements involved making $400,000 in withdrawals from a CSU bank account. The trustee email correctly noted that the need for "entertaining large groups" wasn't feasible at Berkman's present residence, a two-bedroom downtown apartment at The 9. But they surely knew that in late 2014, when they allowed Berkman to move from the Eaton Road house to the $3,600-a-month unit on East 9th Street. At the time, Berkman was in the midst of a messy divorce. But the stated reasons for his move downtown were a desire to live in Cleveland and, most importantly, to live near the campus. A CSU spokesman said the school searched for a house in Cleveland, but couldn't find one that met their needs. Tough as that may be to believe, that's CSU's story. As for Berkman's desire to live near the campus, the place on Fairmount hits the jackpot. It's close to a couple. John Carroll University and Case Western Reserve University. Brent Larkin was The Plain Dealer's editorial director from 1991 until his retirement in 2009. To reach Brent Larkin: blarkin@cleveland.com State delegations start getting hotel assignments here Admission to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum will be free the week of the Republican National Convention, officials said this week. (Thomas Ondrey, The Plain Dealer) CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame will limit its hours, but offer free admission during the week of the Republican National Convention as a result of a sponsorship with AT&T, officials said this week. From July 17-21, the museum will be free and open to the public from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. (The museum typically closes at 5:30 p.m., except for Wednesdays, when it stays open until 9 p.m.) The museum will close early that week to set up for invitation-only, convention-related events. The Ohio Republican Party is among the groups that have reserved the iconic, lakefront space for invitation-only, nighttime events during the GOP convention. While the evening GOP convention sessions are the primary attraction for convention visitors, the Rock Hall hopes to fill down time for some of the 50,000 delegates, media members and others who will come to Cleveland that week, according to museum President and CEO Greg Harris. "It's my understanding there are entire state delegations that have itineraries for what they do all week," Harris said. "We want them to come to the museum, and we want them to go home and tell everyone in their state about it." Harris did not share the specific financial terms of the deal with AT&T, but said it will cover what the Rock Hall normally would take in during those days and then some. "It has elements of underwriting all our typical admissions," he said. "But it also includes a significant sponsorship of the museum." The general terms of the sponsorship were first reported by Crain's Cleveland Business. While the free-admission offer stands for anyone, getting to the Rock Hall during the GOP convention during could be tricky, due to crowding, as well as security restrictions -- including possible highway closures -- that are expected to be imposed during the convention. Officials helping plan the convention have said they hope Cleveland residents will come downtown to take in the atmosphere of the event. But to what extent that will actually happen remains to be seen. The free admission will cover admittance to the Rock Hall's planned "Louder than Words" exhibit, which premiers May 20. The exhibit will highlight the intersection of music and politics, including artists ranging from from Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan to Lady Gaga and Kendrick Lamar. Is there irony that the exhibit will be so prominently highlighted during the GOP convention, given that many of those musicians generally rail against conservative causes like ones supported by the Republican Party? If so, Harris didn't bite. He said rock and roll historically has shaped politics "on both sides of the aisle." "It's the voice of freedom around the world," Harris said. "Rock and roll has been an incredible voice in some of the strongest movements of the 20th century: women's rights, civil rights the fall of the [former Soviet Union's] Iron Curtain. That's the story of rock and roll, and that cuts across all party lines." In a statement, AT&T Ohio President Adam Grzybicki said the company is "thrilled" to work with the Rock Hall. The company is a major sponsor of the convention, and is boosting its wireless service in downtown Cleveland to prepare for the deluge of convention guests. "It is our hope that as many visitors as possible can visit the museum and see first-hand what a unique institution it truly is,' Grzybicki said. Jeff Larson, the leader of the Republican Party's convention-organizing committee, said the Rock Hall is on the minds of GOP delegates who are planning their trips to Cleveland. He said the topic came up Wednesday during a convention-related briefing at a Republican National Committee meeting in Florida. "I think our delegates will be extremely happy the Rock Hall will be open and free to the public," he said. HOLLYWOOD BEACH, Fla. -- Ohio Gov. John Kasich is no longer the only Republican presidential candidate predicting that Cleveland will witness history this July. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who was mathematically eliminated on Tuesday from clinching the nomination during the GOP primary season after Donald Trump won his home state of New York, now says there's only one possible outcome for the Republican National Convention. "What is clear today is we are headed to a contested convention -- nobody is able to reach 1,237," Cruz said Wednesday, referring to the number of delegates needed to win the nomination. Cruz's comments were an about face for him, which Kasich relished pointing out later. "There is a sound bite of [Cruz] talking about the fact that if somebody doesn't have a legitimate path to the nomination, they ought to get out," Kasich told reporters. "He now doesn't have a legitimate path to the nomination. So maybe he ought to go back and listen to his own words." Cruz and Kasich addressed reporters Wednesday at the Diplomat Resort & Spa on Hollywood Beach, Fla., about 20 miles north of Miami, where the Republican National Committee is gathering this week for its quarterly meeting. Members on Wednesday also received updates from Cleveland-based staff on the progress of convention-planning efforts. On Thursday, a GOP committee will consider whether to recommend changes in convention rules. After winning all but a handful of New York's 93 delegates, Trump needs to win roughly 52 percent of the remaining delegates between now and June 7, the final day of primary voting. (He so far has won about 49 percent.) If Trump misses the mark, Cleveland would host the first GOP convention without a clear nominee since 1976. And if an initial vote fails to produce a winner, most delegates would be freed up to support whomever they want. Many political observers believe Trump, a colorful first-time candidate who has bucked his party's conservative orthodoxy while making inflammatory statements about Mexican immigrants, women and the disabled, would be at a disadvantage in a contested convention. But regardless of the outcome, a contested convention could attract an unprecedented amount of national attention to Quicken Loans Arena, and local boosters hope, Cleveland itself. Meanwhile, Cleveland police are preparing for crowds of up to 50,000 people, and possibly a significant number of protesters. Trump has darkly predicted "riots" if he's denied the nomination, while a former aide has called for "Days of Rage" in Cleveland to discourage the GOP from picking another candidate. Both Cruz and Kasich traveled to South Florida to appeal directly to the 168 members of the RNC, all of whom are voting delegates in the convention, scheduled for July 18-21. And both argued that they alone -- and certainly not Trump -- could beat Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner, in a general election. Kasich said RNC members were receptive to his candidacy, and none have encouraged him to drop out of the race. Cruz has tried to argue that by staying in the race, Kasich is serving as a spoiler who makes a Trump nomination inevitable. "My message to the delegates is that I can win. It's reflected in every poll, and an uplifting message is one that provides energy to the party," Kasich said. "And it becomes very attractive to people by addressing how we can fix these problems." But Cruz had his own assessment: "John Kasich has no path whatsoever.... His plan apparently rests on losing 49 states, going to the convention and having the delegates say, the guy who lost every state in the union besides his home state, that guy should be our nominee." To begin his news conference, Kasich revealed he'd been grappling with a difficult decision regarding his candidacy. "I've had to decide whether to continue my campaign," he said, before pausing for dramatic effect. "Or whether to run for mayor of New York." Kasich placed second in New York primary, winning four delegates for his efforts, while Cruz finished last. But Kasich showed Wednesday he might not be ready to wear the New York crown after all. He initially described his recent appearance before the editorial board for the "Dayton Daily News." "Sorry," Kasich said, fumbling for a minute, looking to his campaign staff. "I meant the New York Daily News." watch now The President has gone to Saudi Arabia at an interesting time, former Defense Secretary William Cohen told CNBC on Wednesday. Cohen's comments come as President Barack Obama met with King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday amid tensions regarding a proposed bill in Congress, which could make the Saudi government vulnerable to civil lawsuits. The president visits the Kingdom ahead of 2016's Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Summit, where Cohen considers gulf leaders will have an opportunity to "lay out some of their complaints." Saudi Arabia, a member of the GCC, has many concerns of its own, the former official said during an interview with "Closing Bell." Among these are: U.S.-Iranian relations and the nuclear deal, what the Saudis consider a lack of reaction from the U.S. to ISIL, intervention in Yemen, oil and of course, the bill at Congress, he said. The White House reported on Wednesday that the two leaders, President Obama and the King, discussed accelerating campaigns against ISIL, hostilities in Yemen, the stabilization of certain Iraqi areas and "the challenges posed by Iran's provocative activities in the region," among other mutual concerns. The report did not say if the countries discussed the 9/11 bill proposed in Congress. The bill would make it possible for Saudi officials to be held responsible for terrorist attacks in the United States related to 9/11. The families of victims are urging for the bill to be passed. Many government officials including President Obama have spoken out against the bill. Cohen agreed and told CNBC on Wednesday that he thinks "we have to take care here that we don't do something that's going to open Pandora's box." "I think the president is correct to say 'this is for the government to resolve.' If there's any allegation that's supportable, on the evidence that the Saudis were at the governmental level involved in 9/11, well, that would require the U.S. to take action against the Saudis, but it's not up to individuals to do that," he said. At the same time, Cohen contended that while it's important to clear the air about the Saudis' role in the terrorist attacks, the 9/11 commission already concluded that no government or high-ranking Saudi official was involved. watch now Russia said on Wednesday it was prepared to push oil production to historic highs, just days after a global deal to freeze output levels collapsed and Saudi Arabia threatened to flood markets with more crude. Venezuela predicted prices could crash in the next few weeks if producers failed to resume dialogue and urged that non-OPEC participants be observers at a June OPEC meeting, as the specter of oversupply loomed once more. OPEC member Venezuela and top non-OPEC producer Russia had been the main proponents of the output freeze deal, in the making since February, until it collapsed on Sunday in Doha after Riyadh said it would not sign unless Iran took part. The deal had been meant to help the market rebalance by removing a large chunk of oversupply and a stockpile glut. But Saudi Arabia said it could jack up output instead - by as much as 2 million barrels a day to over 12 million, which would allow it to overtake Russia as the world's largest producer. watch now "They (Saudis) have the ability to raise output significantly. But so do we," Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak told journalists on the sidelines of an international energy conference in Moscow. He said Russia was "in theory" able to raise production to 12 million or even 13 million bpd from current record levels of close to 11 million bpd. Russian oil output has repeatedly surprised on the upside over the past decade, rising from as low as 6 million bpd at the turn of the millennium. Oil experts have repeatedly predicted an unavoidable decline but it has yet to happen. Oil prices crashed to below $30 per barrel in January from as high as $115 in mid-2014 after Saudi Arabia decided to raise output to drive higher-cost producers such as the United States out of the market. The kingdom, OPEC's de facto leader and the world's top exporter, has been pumping unprecedented volumes above 10 million bpd for a year. Saudi Arabia says it has enough spare capacity to push output to more than 12 million bpd. It has never tested such levels, however, hence the market has little insight about its ability to do so. "Of course they (Saudis) can increase output. They have been steeply raising drilling volumes recently," said Lukoil Chief Executive Vagit Alekperov, whose firm has been drilling for gas in Saudi Arabia. Adding to the glut, Iran said it was determined to raise output to regain market share after the lifting of Western sanctions on the Islamic Republic in January. New price crash Alekperov said Russia's government needed to approve new legislation to ease the tax burden on mature fields in Western Siberia and encourage exploration of other regions, otherwise raising production would be impossible. "Our industry is at a very mature stage of development. We haven't launched a single new oil province since the end of the Soviet Union except for Northern Caspian," Alekperov told a panel with Novak. Saudi Arabia has one of the lowest costs of oil extraction and its oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, has long argued that Russian output would soon fall because of ageing fields. Alekperov said he believed oil prices had bottomed and should hover at around $50 a barrel this year, rising from 2017, because of a looming deficit as investment in crude production had fallen too steeply and too fast. But Venezuelan Oil Minister Eulogio Del Pino said prices could crash and that discussions needed to restart. The country's proposal "for now" is that non-OPEC producers who participated in the Doha meeting attend a June OPEC meeting as observers. watch now Chinese steel prices are enjoying a powerful rally, but the gains may just be a false dawn as the issue of excess capacity remains unresolved. Rebar futures in Shanghai soared 6 percent on Wednesday, extending a three-day winning streak to close at a 14-month high. Prices are more than 40 percent higher year-to-date thanks to a period of tightened supply and healthy demand from the real-estate market, which accounts for 50 percent of Chinese steel consumption. The rally represents a turnaround from a more somber mood last year as concerns over China's economic health caused prices to tank. Mainland steel companies were making huge losses last year so they cut back production quite sharply, resulting in mills, traders and end users in the manufacturing sector rapidly using up existing stocks towards the end of 2015 and early this year, explained Paul Bartholomew, senior managing editor at Platts. That led to stronger-than-usual seasonal restocking typically seen over the Lunar New Year period, reflected in March data showing the world's biggest steel producer churning out a record 70.65 million tonnes of output. Meet JetBlue's green chief Sophia Mendelsohn, head of sustainability for JetBlue Source: JetBlue JetBlue didn't have a sustainability department until Sophia Mendelsohn came along in 2013. Since then, she's revolutionized the airline's green practices and helped reduce its carbon footprint.The company has offset around 2 billion pounds of greenhouse emissions since 2008 by planting trees in California and capturing methane in Utah among other measures. Before landing at Jet Blue, Mendelsohn worked in China, helping a furniture manufacturer go green. She is also accredited in fields like green energy and ecology. Mendelsohn's entrepreneurial spirit drives her success at Jet Blue. Her passion for the environment is matched only by her commitment to protecting it. She is convinced that economic growth and environmental protection can co-exist. By CNBC's Josh Weiss Posted 21 April 2016 Terminal 5 rooftop garden JetBlues rooftop T5 garden Source: JetBlue Outside Terminal 5 at JFK International Airport sits JetBlue's sustainable rooftop vegetable farm. The project was the result of a collaboration between JetBlue and the Port Authority, and Mendelsohn's vision. "I thought, how can we add greenery to the space and make it productive. I was inspired by all these startups growing things all around New York," Mendelsohn said. Rooftop crops JetBlue garden Source: JetBlue Over 24,000 square feet, the farm's crops include potatoes, kale and garlic, grown in containers. Employees volunteer and then get to pick the crops to take home to their families. But how do you sustain a rooftop garden at an airport? Hint: it's in the soil. Composting Columbia secondary school waste Source: McEnroe Organic Farms Composting is another eco-friendly program taking place at Terminal 5. Food scraps are collected by Royal Waste Services and sent to New York-based McEnroe Organic Farm. Making fertile soil Columbia secondary school picks strawberries Source: McEnroe Organic Farms Food scraps from Terminal 5 and other Royal Waste customers are combined with manure and straw bedding to become fertile growing soil at McEnroe Organic Farm (pictured). The process takes around 7 to 10 months, according to the McEnroe's head of education Andrea Caruso. JetBlue then buys the farm's compost and soil blends. "Coming full circle, some of the dirt for our farm is purchased through that program," said Mendelsohn. Hot Bread Buns Source: Hot Bread Kitchen "Food made in New York has become a huge trend, and we're helping to promote that too," said Mendelsohn. She launched a program called "Bluebud" that mentors local food manufacturers. The first partner in the program is Hot Bread Kitchen, a non profit that teaches women and minorities how to be "culinary entrepreneurs." Hot Bread (L) Sophia Mendelsohn, head of sustainability for Jet Blue in the Hot Bread Kitchen Source: JetBlue Hedge funds have suffered their worst quarter in seven years after more than $15 billion was pulled out by investors starting to fight back against the high fees being charged across the industry. The total amount invested in hedge funds fell to $2.86 trillion in the first three months of the year, marking the first time since 2009 that the sector has faced two consecutive quarters of net outflows, according to data from Hedge Fund Research. Sharp market moves have wrongfooted many firms, leading to poor performances in the first quarter from funds such as Bill Ackman's Pershing Square , and rankling investors already disgruntled over fee structures charging 2 per cent for management as well as 20 per cent of profits. A broad index of hedge fund performance fell 0.7 per cent in the first quarter, according to HFR. Fed up with paying "exorbitant fees" for poor returns, the New York City Employees' Retirement System has cut its $1.5 billion program, pulling money from managers including Perry Capital and Brevan Howard. The shift comes about 18 months after California's pension scheme also scrapped hedge funds from its portfolio. watch now McDonald's France has been sent a bill for alleged unpaid taxes, as part of a crackdown by French authorities on multinational companies that shift their profits abroad. According to people familiar with the case, the French finance ministry has taken issue with the amount of money McDonald's France paid to a Luxembourg-based affiliate for services including its use of the fast-food restaurant brand name which helped to reduce McDonald's taxable profits in the country. McDonald's France declined to comment on reports of the bill, which some media reports have suggested could be as high as 300 million including 100 million in fines. Instead, the company said in statement: "McDonald's is one of the biggest taxpayers in France and we are proud of it." It added that McDonald's and its franchises had paid 1.2 billion in taxes since 2009, invested 1 billion and created more than 15,000 jobs in France. France's finance ministry declined to comment on the matter, pointing out that it was governed by tax secrecy rules. News of the tax bill, first reported by French business magazine L'Expansion, follows a European Commission investigation into a deal that McDonald's struck with tax authorities in Luxembourg. In December, the commission accused Luxembourg of establishing a tax scheme for McDonald's that allows the US fast-food group to pay no tax on its European royalties, either in the US or in the Grand Duchy. Margrethe Vestager, competition commissioner, said at the time that Luxembourg had acted against the spirit of a US-Luxembourg double taxation treaty. "A tax ruling that agrees to McDonald's paying no tax on their European royalties either in Luxembourg or in the US has to be looked at very carefully under EU state aid rules," she said. "The purpose of double taxation treaties between countries is to avoid double taxation not to justify double non-taxation." France's move against McDonald's comes as the EU continues a broader crackdown against aggressive corporate tax planning. Brussels issued its first verdicts in tax cases in October, ordering Luxembourg and the Netherlands to claw back tens of millions of euros of underpaid tax from Italian carmaker Fiat and US coffee shop chain Starbucks . A report published last year entitled "Unhappy Meal" also claimed that McDonald's and its subsidiaries had undertaken an aggressive European restructuring in 2009 that "led to the avoidance of significant amounts of tax across the continent". This report, written by several trade unions and the charity War on Want, claimed that the restructuring could have meant the French government missed out on up to 713 million in taxes between 2009 and 2013.\ More from the Financial Times : China stock market: the 29 minutes that shook the world Google and McKinsey to mine Kazakh data It is time for China to tackle its bad debts France now represents a big market for McDonald's thanks to the rise in popularity of fast food in the country over the past few decades. According to its website, the French business had outlets at more than 1,000 locations in the country in 2014, more than in the UK. Sending it a tax bill appears to be part of a bigger push by the national government to scrutinize the tax practices of multinationals. In February, the country's Socialist government ruled out the possibility of a tax deal with Google only days after the US search engine struck a 130 million settlement with the UK government over back taxes. Convincing European governments to invest in Indonesian infrastructure has likely been at the top of President Joko Widodo's mind as he tours the region this week, but his counterparts may have a more pressing concern. "The worry, of course, is terrorism," said Colin Chapman, founder and editor-in-chief at think-tank Australian and ASEAN Strategies. Europe is aware of the potential Southeast Asia's largest economy offers in terms of increased foreign direct investment and trade but counterterrorism could overshadow discussions Widodo holds in Germany, England, Belgium, and the Netherlands, Chapman said. The 54-year old leader, commonly known as Jokowi, is in Europe from April 18-22, and met with German President Joachim Gauck on Wednesday. From Paris to San Bernardino to Brussels, a string of global terror attacks in recent months have shaken governments, fueling a renewed focus on intelligence sharing as a terror prevention tool. Europe, especially, is on high alert due to the huge influx of refugees and migrants entering its borders from war-torn regions including Syria and Iraq. Indonesia, home to the world's largest Muslim population, is no stranger to extremist violence and foreign companies operating in the country have long factored security into their decisions. National police recently stepped up a crackdown on extremists following bomb attacks and shootings in Jakarta in January. Richard Graham, a U.K. MP as well as trade envoy to Indonesia, said the two nations shared a strong interest in counter-terrorism. Univision will take control of Fusion after a deal to buy out ABC from the millennial-focused cable network and website, the companies said Thursday. Univision will take immediate control of distribution and ad sales and assume editorial control, with the final transaction expected to close soon. "Our companies have gained valuable knowledge from each other over the past several years and we are proud of what we have built together in a short period of time," they said in a statement. There were reports late last year that ABC parent Disney was in talks to end its joint venture with the Spanish language broadcaster. Fusion has posted tens of millions of dollars in losses since the network launched in 2013, even with a number of high-profile on-air and online hires. Start-up Airbnb and the SEIU, one of the nation's largest labor unions, are in talks for a potential alliance. The San Francisco-based home rental company offers a platform and income stream for home renters. The Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, represents some 2 million workers. The union has also been a major force and financial supporter in the fight for a $15 minimum wage. Now as the SEIU and activists work to expand support for higher pay in the absence of congressional action, the large union seems to be making friends in unlikely circles in pursuit of more $15 union jobs. The SEIU has generally been willing to make even unlikely alliances if they think it will benefit workers and help them build their membership ranks. Chris Tilly University of California, Los Angeles professor Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky (l) and Mary Kay Henry, international president of the 2 million-member Service Employees International Union. Getty Images "We actively and regularly engage in conversations with companies who are committed to doing right by their workforce by paying better wages and giving them a voice at work through their union. Airbnb is one such company," said Sahar Wali, an SEIU spokeswoman. "However, there is no formal relationship or agreement between SEIU and Airbnb," she said. Airbnb, meanwhile, is considering how it might leverage its vast online platform to help generate good paying union jobs. "We have been engaged in conversations with organizations and community leaders about how to best help working families find solutions to economic inequality, including creating specific ways we could leverage the Airbnb platform to help create quality union jobs that pay a livable wage," according to Christopher Nulty, an Airbnb spokesman. So what would Airbnb and the union get from a potential deal? At the very least, some good will and publicity. And in the case of the SEIU, broader support, including union-paying members. Co-founded and led by chief executive Brian Chesky, Airbnb has allowed many people to rent homes for income, especially during the recession. Out-of-work Americans are using the rental platform to help create a patchwork of income in a growing freelance economy, sometimes referred to as the gig economy. But in cities like San Francisco, Airbnb has triggered controversy as critics charge it is displacing long-term tenants as some people convert scarce rental property into essentially motels and hotels for travelers all without paying local hotel taxes, or meeting regulations as required for the hospitality industry. Seeking 'unlikely alliances' The other figure in this potential relationship is the SEIU, led by international president Mary Kay Henry. The union, with the help of local activists, has been able to transform a broad, sometimes confusing message about economic haves and have-nots (dating back to the Occupy Wall Street movement) into a focused campaign for higher mandated pay. In 2015, the SEIU spent at least $20 million on the "Fight for $15" movement, according to analysis by the Center for Union Facts, a nonprofit that seeks accountability in America's labor movement. "The SEIU has generally been willing to make even unlikely alliances if they think it will benefit workers and help them build their membership ranks," says Chris Tilly, an urban planning and sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Speaking with the Guardian in April 2015, SEIU international president Henry said the Fight for $15 campaign was worth the investment. "There is not a price tag you can put on how this movement has changed the conversation in this country," she told the newspaper. Members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1021 in San Francisco. David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images Unions are seeking ways to boost members as participation has declined over the decades. Attitudes about unions have shifted among generations. "I think unions are a standard piece of American democracy," said Tilly in a separate interview last summer. "But I think that's disappeared from the public discourse." More recently, the Los Angeles city council on Tuesday approved expanding paid sick leave for workers. But the city council took action on the paid sick leave policy without a union-backed clause that would have exempted unionized workers from an hourly $15 minimum wage. Union officials have argued the clause would have allowed them to negotiate better overall contracts, while some critics said the exemption would have created an uneven playing field for pay thresholds. At first take, this sounds confusing. Unions broadly support workers' rights and higher pay. But a handful of cities including San Francisco have pursued strategies that include union waivers in minimum wage laws. Balancing wages against other compensation such as health care is actually not a new concept. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a push for "big box" retail stores like Wal-Mart and Home Depot to pay slightly lower mandated wages if they also offered health insurance. But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce described such union-backed exemptions from minimum wage increases as "escape clauses." What's at stake: New union members While the union clause was eventually dropped in the push before the L.A. city council, unions and activists have already been influential in the "Fight for $15." According to the Center for Union Facts, the $20 million the SEIU spent last year is likely much higher, as it excludes some staff salaries, expenses paid for legal services, as well as money paid to minimum wage advocacy groups such as the National Employment Law Project and the Economic Policy Institute. SEIU's funding and support have helped yield results through a region-by-region, city-by-city push for higher wages in the absence of federal action. The federal minimum wage stands at $7.25 an hour. Gov. Jerry Brown of California recently signed a bill that will raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2022. New York City will see $15 hourly wages by the end of 2018, with slower increases elsewhere in the state. Dozens of states, and the District of Columbia, have moved to lift mandated pay above the federal threshold. Alastair Campbell, political aide to former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, remains positive about the prospect of Britain remaining in the European Union, telling CNBC he believes people will "make the right decision" and vote to stay in. "The longer this campaign has gone on, the more I think that's what's happening is thatlots and lots and lots of people in the middle really are genuinely confused and they are no longer listening that much to politicians or to the media," he said on Thursday. "I think they're going to be persuadedby each other," he added. mbbirdy | Getty Images On June 23, the U.K. decides in a referendum if it want to remain a member of the 28-country bloc, or leave a choice which has come to be known as Brexit. Campbell, best known for his role as Blair's spokesman and press secretary, also advised the Better Together campaign against independence for Scotland. "Most of our media, particularly our newspapers, don't want people to know the truth about the European Union," Campbell said. "I understand why people might not like David Cameron and might not like the European Union, but we've got to move beyond that and try to engage in the really, really serious arguments about trade, about business, about environmental protection, about where power lies. And be honest about that: that Britain would become a much less powerful country. " Speaking from Dublin where he was addressing a conference about Brexit, Campbell said there were 660,000 Southern Irish-born people living in Britain who will be entitled to vote plus 1.5 million who have varying degrees of "Irish blood and identity". A salmon fisherman. Over half of the nations commercially harvested fish comes from Alaska. Alaska's $3.5 billion deficit roughly two-thirds of its budget reads like a classic boom-bust tale. With the collapse in crude prices, lower oil revenues are hitting Alaska hard. Roughly 90 percent of the state government and one-third of all state jobs comes from oil money. But weaning Alaska off oil revenues won't be a straight shot. And the pain won't be uniform. The effects of budget solutions will vary among Alaska's diverse population. In many ways, the Last Frontier State is a collection of regions and micro economies each with its own constellation of employers and local price swings for everything, from a gallon a milk to a gallon of fuel. With most of the money used to pay for state government gone in just fours years, according to regional economists, the state is considering a personal income tax proposal for the first time in 35 years. There's talk of reducing annual dividend checks from a state savings fund, when oil money was flush. "Dividend cuts would take more from poor people than rich people because rich people would pay less taxes if their dividend was cut," said Gunnar Knapp, a top economist on the region at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska Anchorage. On the other hand, "an income tax would put the burden of paying for new revenue on the highest income Alaskans." watch now Beyond oil and gas, the engine of Alaska's economy runs on other major industries, including tourism, fisheries, mining, forestry and corporations led by Alaska Native populations. But those sector drivers might not be enough in the face of lower oil revenues. Existing industries and regional economies are spread across a state that's massive in geographic scale. Imagine superimposing a map of Alaska over a map of the U.S. If Alaska's westernmost point were in San Francisco, its easternmost edge would stretch like a vast web, all the way to Florida. Alaska is twice as large as Texas. The state population of 730,000 residents is varied, too. Anchorage houses about 41 percent of the state's residents, leaving the majority of Alaskans in towns, villages and clustered settlements. Some areas are extremely remote, reachable only by small planes and boats. They operate in a near-cashless, subsistence economy, anchored by fishing and hunting. This is a vastly different quality of life than a worker at Costco in Anchorage, or an employee at one of the city's malls that feature big brands like Sephora, Starbucks andMichael Kors . So while the prospects of budget cutbacks may trigger smaller class sizes in schools in the capital, Juneau, less money to fund state government can mean closing entire schools or hospitals for more remote communities. Alaska economist Gunnar Knapp, director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research, talks about a wheel with several potential prices for oil and its effects on the state's budget . Rashah McChesney | AP "The state is huge. Huge," said Knapp. "And the economies are very much regionalized." Originally from Maryland, Knapp, then 27, moved to Alaska for economics. Some 35 years later and 62, he has raised a family and has seen the shifts that came with the last big downturn in the 1980s. Residents moved and uprooted families for access to jobs and services. "A lot of people remember the '80s and wonder if we'll see the same thing," he said. Long-time Alaskans remember many feast-famine periods. The boom in the mid-1970s with the construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline. Then came a recession, followed by a government-spending and construction-fueled boom in the 1980s. Like an actor promoting a movie release, Knapp has a busy schedule of appearances. Repeatedly and with patience, he objectively explains the state's fiscal options. His audience is diverse: the state legislature, chambers of commerce, economic development groups, the Alaska Federation of Natives, churches. "The first question I got was, 'When should I sell my house?'" said Knapp, recalling a gathering a few weeks ago. "There's a lot of concern," he said. "Most people are not economists, and all they know is there's a real serious fiscal problem." Beyond the pie charts and bar graphs of fallen oil prices and oil production that's leaving the state, there's a wariness among Alaskans. Many of them are independent and risk takers. You have to survive and thrive in a terrain where chores like getting food and fuel can take hours if not days. The cost of living is high as goods are shipped from the Lower 48 states. Every task seems difficult. And that's a fair bargain, say residents who prefer sparse populations and the region's beauty. Read MorePainful transition for energy states as oil revenues evaporate Now the state's unique regional diversity the very essence of what lured and anchors them to Alaska threatens to make the unraveling of oil money a painful and uneven experience. "It's one of the things that really hasn't been discussed a lot," says Mouhcine Guettabi, assistant professor of economics at the institute. "We're not just one, homogeneous place." Regions with job and industry diversity are poised to better withstand the coming budget cuts. Says Guettabi: "The diversity of the sources of money and the reliance on government will determine the winners and losers." Besides oil and gas, Alaska runs on other major industries, including tourism that continues to grow. Nearly a million visitors arrived in Alaska by cruise ship in 2014, according to the Resource Development Council for Alaska, a statewide business association. Tourism is the second-largest private sector employer, and accounts for 1 in 8 Alaskan jobs. Direct visitor spending is more than $1.8 billion annually, excluding fares paid to travel. And 1 in 3 Alaska visitors are repeat visitors. Downtown tourist shopping in Juneau, Alaska John Greim | LightRocket | Getty Images A higher sales tax could deter visitors and local spending and place the burden of filling the budget gap on nonresidents. That's in contrast to dividend cuts that would come out of Alaskans' pocketbooks, said Knapp. As the budget gets hammered out in Juneau, small business owner Erica Pryzmont is as busy as ever. She's the owner and operator of Pingo Bakery-Seafood House in Nome that's located on the western edge of the state. Nome's population of around 3,800 expands three fold for the end to the annual Iditarod sled dog race finish line in March. "For our business, it's like having another month of summer-like business but packed into a week and a half," she said. Erica Pryzmont, Pingo Bakery-Seafood House in Nome, Alaska Source: Michael Dinneen Is Pryzmont worried about the state budget? "I still get up and go to work. It's not going to change my daily schedule." She's too busy baking apricot, pistachio white chocolate chip cookies and coconut cinnamon rolls. Pryzmont's savory specialties include roasted halibut pizza and a Norton Sound Red King Crab Leg section, when crab is in season. For now, Pryzmont says local seafood prices have been holding steady. She sources her food through local fisherman and fisheries. "Fishermen have been getting good prices for crab," she said. A big exposure to fishing and mining Many in Alaska have a deep connection to fishing given the state's abundance of lakes, rivers and coastline. Alaska is the only state to have coastlines on three different seas: the Arctic and Pacific oceans and Bering Sea. More than half of the nation's commercially harvested fish come from Alaska. The state also benefits from what's known as "back haul" for shippers that primarily bring goods and supplies north to Alaska. One major shipping company estimates freight rates to the state would be 10 percent higher without the back haul of seafood shipped out of Alaska, according to Resource Development Council. More than $3 billion in fish and shellfish was harvested in state waters in 2011, as a reference point. Seafood is also a top export commodity. And in some pockets of the state, fish harvesting and processing are the only sources of private sector jobs, especially in coastal communities. Bigger picture, Knapp stresses prices for seafood like salmon ultimately are set in the global markets. But in the near term, budget cuts could lead to more conservative management of fisheries, which receive state funding. "We could potentially have less, well managed fisheries," he said. In the fiscal year 2016 general fund budget, about $66 million is earmarked for fish and game spending, according to institute data. Beyond income and sales taxes, state leaders are discussing other potential new sources of state revenue, including raising taxes on the fisheries and mining industries. Many of Alaska's roads and docks were originally constructed to serve mining. The sector produces zinc, lead, copper, gold, silver, coal, as well as construction minerals such as sand, gravel and rock. Direct and indirect jobs total about 9,100, generating $630 million in payroll, according to the Resource Development Council. Running a small business, just in case Based in Sitka, Robert Miller makes one-of-a-kind hats and gloves from local animal furs. Also a fisheries biologist for the government, Miller hopes his business will offset any potential budget cutbacks. Source: Michael Penn As lawmakers hash out budget details, oil price fluctuations already are being felt in local economies. Alaska Native artist Robert Miller owns and operates Sea Fur Sewing, based in Sitka. He produces handmade, custom items including hats and gloves made from sea otters' dense fur and seals' skin for waterproof qualities. As a Tlingit Indian from the Kiksadi clan, Miller is legally allowed to produce and sell finished products made of marine mammal fur under federal laws. He learned the craft from his grandmother. Miller can boast that four-time Iditarod champion Lance Mackey has worn hat and gloves he has made. In and around Sitka, Miller can see the impact of oil price swings first-hand as he interacts with local hunters. Some hunters can spend hours on 16-foot skiff boats that can require lots of fuel. Alaska has some of the most expensive gasoline prices in the country, along with California. The average fuel price in Alaska is around $2.33 a gallon compared with a high of $4.70 in July 2008, according to AAA. But Miller and other business owners say fuel prices can fluctuate depending on where you live. "The hunters in state I pay to hunt for me are from rural communities in southeast Alaska," Miller said. "And finding a job in rural Alaska is difficult unless you work seasonal jobs." Beyond exposure to local fuel prices, Miller for the most part is buffered from oil shocks and the possibility of a higher sales tax. His goods essentially are luxury items. The majority of his online customers are from the Lower 48 and are willing to pay $500 to $850 for custom hats and gloves, with specialty items fetching more. "The product I sell, if they want it, they're going to buy it anyway," he said. "It's a handcrafted, high-end product." Beyond his one-man online fur business, Miller has a daytime government job as a fisheries biologist for the U.S. Forest Service. And if for some reason that government job disappeared, Sea Fur Sewing could offer a cushion. "I feel a sense of relief that I have my own business and I can fall back on it full time if I have to," Miller said. Population shifts Others residents face all-or-nothing scenarios, with little sector diversity and most job prospects pegged to the government. Fourteen of the state's 29 boroughs have at least 40 percent of their employment coming from state and local government, said institute economist Guettabi. "There are communities or boroughs that are heavily, heavily dependent on government," he said. "So if we are to go through with some of the cuts that we are currently discussing, then those communities that don't have a basic industry that's driving them, that's generating jobs, that's retaining qualified individuals, then those communities are going to be considerably more vulnerable," Guettabi said. And if there's no industry diversity and government jobs disappear, moving for work and services might not be so easy for some Alaskans. A key difference from the '80s downturn is expanding households. Alaskan families have grown to three generations from two. More Alaskans are 65 and older and are considering staying. "Grandparents staying in state after retirement is fairly new," said Guettabi. The average Alaska household size is 2.7 people, according to state figures. "There's more stickiness." Compare this with North Dakota, where young oil workers have left "man camps" vacant, as shale oil work has fallen. Workers have already moved on to the next hot commodity play. Read More How cheap oil has hit one shale boomtown Uprooting a few kids is easier than relocating a three-generation household. So the choices for some Alaskan families, if and when spending cuts are implemented, will be difficult. Difficult choices ahead for state ConocoPhilips in Anchorage, Alaska Brad Quick | CNBC This cat is now on the loose overseas. A Barclays analyst who lost his job after being criminally charged with torturing his roommate's cat has left the United States, and now faces a possible third arrest. Declan Garrity Sam Costanza | New York Daily News Declan Garrity, 24, was supposed to show up in New York City court on Tuesday to be arraigned on charges he repeatedly abused the 8-pound feline named Lucy, who belonged to his roommate on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Garrity, a Northern Ireland native, also was due to be arraigned the same day on a charge of having that he violated a protective order issued after the February cat torture arrest by returning to the apartment to retrieve his belonging without a police escort. But Garrity failed to appear in court as required, according to authorities. A judge then issued a bench warrant and revoked his $6,000 bail. Garrity's lawyer reportedly told the judge that Garrity had left the United States and returned home after consulting with an immigration lawyer who told him he risked arrest for immigration violations if he remained in the U.S. Garrity had been employed by Barclays since October 2014 under a work visa, and had been responsible for ensuring that all new and existing client relationships had appropriately undergone "Know Your Customer" screening, which is done to verify the identity of clients. According to the New York Daily News, Barclays fired Garrity on March 4, on the heels of his arrest for allegedly torturing Lucy the cat, and told him he had one month to leave the country given that he no longer had the job that was the subject of his work visa. A human resources letter cited by the News said, "It is your obligation to comply with the immigration regulations by either departing the U.S. or applying to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for a change in status to another nonimmigrant visa category as soon as possible." The newspaper reported that Barclays paid for Garrity's plane trip back to Belfast. Under U.S. immigration law, if a person on a work visa was terminated before their visa's expiration data, the employer is responsible for "for the reasonable costs of return transportation of" the ex-worker to that person's "last place of foreign residence," according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service.A source familiar with the situation told CNBC that Barclays gave Garrity only enough money to get home, and nothing more. You could forgive Carlos Sainz Jr a few covetous glances to the other side of the Toro Rosso garage. Here is a guy who has earned his way into Formula 1 through the Red Bull Junior programme, been a champion at the level just below in Formula Renault 3.5, and scored points on his F1 debut. Yet it's the teenage sensation in the other car hogging the limelight. The rise of Max Verstappen is the perfect story for Red Bull. It picked up a raw talent with less than a year of single-seater racing experience under his belt and thrust him into F1 before he was old enough to pass his driving test. Sink or swim. And so far he's been swimming strongly, which is a great way to try promoting energy drinks to a new generation. A boy among men who can show the old guys how it's done. There have been sensational turns of speed, strong results and some spectacular overtaking moves. No wonder Verstappen has stolen so much of F1's media spotlight over the past 12 months or so. For 20-year-old Sainz, it has been harder to stand out. Like Max - son of '90s F1 journeyman Jos Verstappen - Sainz is of motorsport family stock. In fact they don't come much bigger than 'King' Carlos Sainz, twice World Rally champion and hero of Spain. But reaching F1 has at least allowed Carlos Jr to shrug off the 'son of Sainz' tag that followed him through his junior career. Now he faces the challenge of standing out against Verstappen, without the publicity benefit of an unconventional rise through the ranks. Make no mistake, Verstappen earned his chance by being sensational in karting and European Formula 3. Red Bull would not have signed him from under the nose of Mercedes on a fixed three-year contract otherwise. But Sainz's story is more conventional - Formula BMW, F3, GP3, FR3.5, and now F1. Sainz has produced excellent performances of his own, but hasn't enjoyed such strong results, hasn't been able to use that extra experience to dominate Verstappen, and hasn't made quite the same immediate impact. Autosport puts this to Sainz as we sit down for a catch-up in the paddock, and he reveals it is something that has played on his mind at times. "It's a good topic and a difficult topic to answer too," he says, pondering the dynamic as he adjusts the Red Bull cap on his head, no longer the lucky grey one he kept from his 2014 FR3.5 title winning season that Fernando Alonso threw into the Spanish GP crowd last year. "It's not easy, but first of all Max deserves the recognition and attention. He's doing a good job. "From my personal side the first thing I care about is what Red Bull thinks about me, what Franz Tost thinks about me, what Helmut Marko thinks about me, and I know at the moment what they think after my first year is very positive. "At the beginning of 2015 no one spoke about me. I didn't exist! If I don't get the same recognition and media attention because of not being the same age as Max, or whatever, in the end I have to live with it. I cannot eat into my mind about this fact. I'm not going to lie, sometimes it can get frustrating, but you get used to it!" He points out that people began to notice him more as last season went on. He is right to do so. That debut campaign was very successful in its own way, it just wasn't as obviously outstanding as his team-mate's. Sainz put in some great drives, but suffered the brunt of Toro Rosso's unreliability in 2015, including four consecutive engine-related retirements in the Austrian, British, Hungarian and Belgian Grands Prix - all races in which he could realistically have scored points. Nevertheless he was neck-and-neck with Verstappen in the intra-team qualifying battle and made a quiet, understated impression on Toro Rosso. "He's a brilliant guy to work with and he's performed above expectation," reckons Toro Rosso technical director James Key. "Carlos has come with this very mature plan of what he wants to achieve. "It gives Max a good reference point on what sort of feedback is perhaps expected at this sort of level. Carlos just stepped into that and gave us the feedback we needed. "We've been super-impressed by him actually. I wasn't here when [Jean-Eric] Vergne and [Daniel] Ricciardo started it, so it's difficult to compare from the beginning, but I was here when [Daniil] Kvyat started and he was rated incredibly highly, and it's a similar deal with our drivers now." People rightly talk about Verstappen's maturity - and he is extraordinarily mature for an 18-year-old - but Sainz is arguably a cut above in this regard. The way his 2015 races repeatedly unravelled through no fault of his own, but also the way he refused to let this sink him, made people take notice. The way he maintains a level head, shrugs off disappointment and moves on to the next challenge displays the sort of fortitude that Red Bull and Marko relish seeing in their drivers. And it's this sort of reaction to adversity that earns public respect. He is also a gregarious guy, willing to see the funny side of bad situations. "He's a very mature, collected character," adds Key. "Not easily fazed, there's no baggage there, he doesn't hold a grudge, he's super-easy to work with, lovely guy, and he has been slightly below the radar, and deserves slightly more recognition than perhaps he's got." Sainz had so many setbacks last season - his Renault engine going bang regularly, a huge crash in practice in Russia, a stupid shunt in the wet in qualifying in the United States - but he always rebounded instantly. Back in the car, straight back on it, immediately back to quietly impressing Red Bull with the quality of his driving. To Red Bull it's performance that counts above results. And much of that is tied up in attitude. If you act like a spoiled brat Red Bull is going to lose patience with you pretty quickly. That's why Verstappen was so sensibly quick to apologise for his radio rants in Australia. In that race he became too focused on his team-mate and things rapidly went south. This is a real potential danger for both drivers, which comes with the inevitable fact they are ultimately fighting each other for a future in F1 with Red Bull. "Sometimes you see that, because a) they're still young and it's only their second year, and secondly there's been a lot of very positive things said about them from last year," explains Key. "So of course there's that pressure, and the Red Bull pressure. "It's natural to be in competition with your team-mate, but the best way to progress is to worry about yourself. Look at Daniel Ricciardo when he went to Red Bull. He concentrated on his thing and he matured massively. That's what our guys have been urged to do as well." Sainz already seems to be showing the requisite focus. The first races of this season have not exactly gone to plan, so once again he must remain resolute and avoid getting frustrated. It must help enormously that he has one of the most focused individuals in the paddock to look up to. Double world champion Alonso - a fellow Spaniard - is something of a mentor figure to Sainz, who is determined to follow his great childhood hero's example of how to succeed in F1. "My learning process from Fernando has been very strange, because he would never tell me directly how to do a corner, or how to arrive to a track and [figure out] the technical side of the track," explains Sainz. "It's more going to dinners with him, watching his killer attitude. "You can see he's looking into every detail. You talk to him about something during a lunch and you see he talks about a detail you maybe wouldn't have even thought about, to do with the starts or the first lap positioning. "Suddenly you realise, wow! This guy is broad and is thinking about every single thing. He's so hungry for winning, and just by having these conversations with him - not necessarily about racing or cars - you learn that to beat him, or be a world champion, you must be a bit like him in your own way. "You need to be as hungry, as methodical, as detailed. He's a benchmark in behaviour, both on the personal side and the technical side." Alonso, while not perfect, is a pretty good template for a young driver looking to carve out a long and successful career at the pinnacle of single-seater racing. Sainz may not have made as many waves as his younger team-mate Verstappen thus far, but in his own quiet way he is still giving Red Bull and the rest of the F1 paddock some serious food for thought, and certainly making sure that he cannot be ignored. Under the pretext of attending a United Nations event on climate change, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff - currently undergoing an impeachment trial - will travel to New York on Thursday. She will attend the U.N. event on Friday where, while world leaders sign the COP21 accord, she is expected to denounce the attempt to impeach her as illegal, according to Reuters. Rousseff has called the process that could see her forced from office within weeks a "coup d'etat without weapons," said Reuters. Brazil, in the midst of its deepest recession in 25 years, is facing an unprecedented political crisis. Nine ministers of Rousseff's cabinet have resigned since she was accused of manipulating state funds to run her 2014 presidential campaign. She denies all charges. Her vice-president, Michel Temer, whom she accuses of trying to overthrow her, will ironically be handed power of the country while she is abroad. Michel Temer listens during an interview in New York, U.S. Jin Lee | Bloomberg | Getty Images Brazil's vice-president Michel Temer has rejected allegations from President Dilma Rousseff that he is conspiring to launch a parliamentary coup against the leftist leader. After a vote by the house of congress on Sunday night in favor of her impeachment, Ms Rousseff is to fly to New York on Thursday night for a UN meeting on Friday where she is also expected to give media interviews portraying the impeachment process as unconstitutional and a coup. "There is no coup whatsoever happening here in Brazil," Mr Temer, who has otherwise largely stayed out of the front lines of the impeachment battle, told the Financial Times in a rare interview. "Various ministers of the Supreme Court have said the possible impeachment of the president of the republic would not represent a coup. It is a constitutional process." The comments mark an escalation of the impeachment battle as an increasingly desperate Ms Rousseff seeks international support to avert her possible removal from power as early as next month. Struggling with a deep economic recession and a sweeping corruption scandal at state-owned oil company Petrobras , Ms Rousseff and her Workers' party, the PT, are facing the potential end of 13 years in power. watch now If the senate agrees to accept the impeachment process, under which Ms Rousseff is accused of manipulating the national accounts, she will be suspended and Mr Temer, as vice-president, will become acting president. If she is eventually impeached, with a decision from the senate expected by the opposition as early as June, Mr Temer would take office until the next elections in 2018. The impeachment process follows a civil war in the ruling coalition that has pitched Ms Rousseff and the PT against their former main coalition partner, the PMDB. The party is headed by Mr Temer but early this month he temporarily stepped down to avoid the appearance of involvement in the process. More from the Financial Times : China stock market: the 29 minutes that shook the world Google and McKinsey to mine Kazakh data It is time for China to tackle its bad debts A 75-year-old constitutional lawyer and veteran politician, Mr Temer said he had stayed quiet during the battle. But he said he was making an exception this time to speak to the international media in protest against Ms Rousseff`s expected comments during her forthcoming visit to New York. Ms Rousseff, during a press conference in Brasilia earlier this week, described him as a "conspirator" against her government. He said proof there was no coup was that Brazil would be operating normally while Ms Rousseff was in New York. watch now He would assume the acting presidency while she was away, as is normal under the law. When she returned on Saturday, she would resume the presidency. "So then, what kind of coup is this?" he said. He said political and popular support for impeachment was also overwhelming with the 513-seat lower house of congress voting by 367 votes for the motion, well over the two-thirds, or 342 votes, required for it to pass, and polls showing 60 to 70 per cent of Brazilians were in favour of Ms Rousseff`s constitutional removal. "Therefore, I ask, when she accuses me of being a conspirator or a coup-monger do I really have the capacity to influence 367 deputies [congressmen] and 70 per cent of the Brazilian population? It's entirely without foundation this claim." He said Ms Rousseff should defend herself in the senate instead of creating problems for Brazil by making false declarations outside the country. watch now JUNEAU, Alaska "Every Alaska governor spins the oil price wheel," joked the current governor, Bill Walker, during an interview in his office last month. When predecessor Sarah Palin was in office, the wheel came up to $144.59 the high price set by North Slope crude oil in July 2008, and the inspiration for Palin's chant during that year's presidential campaign: "Drill, baby, drill!" Walker, an Independent, has not been so fortunate. The price had already dropped to around $74 a barrel when he took office at the end of 2014. By this past Jan. 20, it plunged to a painfully low $26.23, according to the Alaska Department of Revenue. The price has rebounded a bit since then, but not nearly enough to get Walker and the state out of the mess in which they find themselves. The Alaskan legislative session, which was scheduled to wrap up Sunday, has gone into overtime, with no end in sight. Walker and state lawmakers are trying to close a staggering $4.1 billion budget gap. To put that in perspective, total state spending last fiscal year was less than $14 billion. "With the oil price coming down, there is no shock absorber for that," Walker said. "So it's very dramatic." Historically, Alaska has relied on oil for as much as 90 percent of state revenue. The industry accounts for roughly a third of all jobs in the state. But now, even after a recent recovery has pushed prices to above $40 per barrel, producing oil in Alaska is solidly a money-losing proposition. "For the North Slope, the average cost to produce a barrel of oil before we pay any tax, whether it's to the federal government or to the state government, is about $52 a barrel," said Kara Moriarty, president and CEO of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, an industry trade group. The result has been massive cutbacks by large and small oil companies. The state's largest oil producer, ConocoPhillips , has laid off about 10 percent of its Alaska workforce, Moriarty says. BP has cut employment by 17 percent. Royal Dutch Shell in September announced it would cease offshore exploration in Alaska "for the foreseeable future," while other companies are cutting back or delaying exploration projects. "That's going to have a significant impact in both operations and production," Moriarty said. Clogged artery Production cuts are also creating enormous headaches for operators of the Trans Alaska Pipeline System, which transports oil from the North Slope, through 800 miles of some of the harshest conditions imaginable, to the port at Valdez. Betsy Haines, an engineering supervisor for Alyeska Pipeline Services in Anchorage, said the line is running at about a quarter of its 2 million barrel-per-day capacity. That means that while it would normally take about four days for a barrel of oil to make the trip, it now takes about 18 days. That reduced flow creates some serious engineering challenges. "Half of our line is above ground, half is below ground, and we go through some very cold areas in the winter," Haines said. "And there is some water in the crude oil, and there's this potential for ice." Engineers have experimented with heating the line, but that doesn't address another effect of the low flow difficult-to-detect globs of wax, a natural byproduct of the oil, that can coat the inside of the pipeline like plaque in an artery, potentially doing long-term damage to the line. Haines said that even if engineers can manage the issues, every solution costs money. "I will tell you that I have woken up worried about the future end of the Trans Alaska Pipeline System because, again, it's not just technical, it's economic," Haines said. Alaska Governor Bill Walker Brad Quick | CNBC As painful as all of this may seem, the governor told CNBC he remains optimistic. "If we fix this once, when oil prices rise we don't need to change anything. It's all on the positive side," Walker said. But exactly when oil prices will rise and by how much remains a multibillion dollar question here. Long term, there are proposals for a new pipeline from the North Slope, this one carrying natural gas. There is also perpetual talk of diversifying the state's economy. But that will take money, which unlike oil is in short supply here. A new normal? Alaskans have seen lower oil prices than these, and have always seen them rebound. But there appears to be a growing belief that this time is different and could represent a new normal. Not only is worldwide demand down and energy efficiency on the rise, but Alaska faces new competition from shale oil and improved technology like fracking. So the conversation in Juneau has focused on ways to reduce the state's dependence on oil, or at least its vulnerability to the changing price. "What we have done as a state, we've said let's live off one commodity," Walker said. "So I say let's get off of this." Walker's plan which would be considered an act of political suicide in any other year and may still prove to be one this year involves tapping into the state's already accumulated oil wealth, the $50 billion Alaska Permanent Fund. Established by a state constitutional amendment 40 years ago, the fund is also the source for annual dividends paid to every man, woman and child living in the state. Last year, those payments hit a record $2,072, meaning a family of five would collect a check of $10,360 just for living in Alaska. Under Walker's proposal, those payments would be reduced. watch now watch now watch now "I'd like to not see that go away," said Diane Antaya, a teacher in Juneau. "I see a lot of my students and families are very dependent upon it." Indeed, the Permanent Fund Dividend is a major reason that despite rising income inequality nationwide, Alaska led the nation for equality, according to 2014 figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. But beyond that, the dividend plays a part in basic financial planning for nearly every Alaskan. "I know that for my own child, it's going to help him get to college," Antaya said. Republicans, who control both houses of the legislature, have proposed a similar restructuring of the fund, including dividend cuts, while guaranteeing a minimum annual payment of $1,000. Balancing act Walker says his plan, which uses earnings from the fund as an ongoing budget cushion, would move the state from 90 percent dependent on oil to around 21 percent. But he insists the plan does not work unless the state also raises or adds a broad array of taxes. That includes imposing a state income tax for the first time since 1980, which Republicans oppose. Democrats, meanwhile, say that before individuals are hit, businesses must kick in including reforms to the state's generous tax breaks for oil exploration. "How are we going to fund schools? How are we going to help seniors? How are we going to help people with disabilities and build a state that people want to stay in?" asked Rep. Les Gara, who sits on the state House Finance Committee. Indeed, state spending has already been drastically cut, and the head of the state's largest school system the 48,500-student Anchorage School District is bracing for things to get even worse. "We're at a point now with this year, we're going to have to make reductions that are going to have a direct impact to the classroom," said Superintendent Ed Graff. Jim Cramer believes that the world is getting better, thanks to a rebound in China. Apparently Las Vegas Sands did not get the memo, when it told a tale of woe in its conference call about Macau. "What this market really needs right now is for Steve Wynn, CEO of Wynn Resorts , who also has a ton of Macau exposure, to say that Las Vegas Sands doesn't know what it is talking about," CNBC's "Mad Money" host said. When Las Vegas Sands COO Robert Goldstein was asked about Macau in the conference call, the large Chinese gambling center, he responded by stating that he thinks Chinese tourism and consumer numbers are depressing across the globe and were softer than he had hoped in Macau. Don't give up on Mattel just yet, CNBC's Jim Cramer said Thursday. "On the conference call, it sounds like everything's fine, but the underlying notion is that Mattel has reverted to its old ways. I think that's wrong," Cramer said on "Squawk on the Street." They're using Salesforce; they've got some great data on what people want." Shares of the toy maker fell more than 9 percent Thursday, a day after reporting a bigger-than-expected quarterly loss due to weak sales of its toys such as Barbie, Monster High and American Girl that are aimed at young girls, and loss of a lucrative Disney license. "Barbie was up 11 percent domestic, but down 7 percent international. But I've got to tell you, this is a tale of who has Disney and who doesn't. Hasbro has Disney and shut the lights out, Mattel doesn't," Cramer said. Closely followed market watcher Dennis Gartman said Thursday he likes two metal commodity plays. First, the founder and publisher of The Gartman Letter told CNBC's "Squawk Box" he's long on shares of aluminum giant Alcoa, which has been up nearly 9 percent year to date. But over the past 12 months, the stock has fallen about 20 percent. "I've liked Alcoa for quite a period of time. ... I want to own things that if I drop them on my foot will hurt," he said. "I looked at the chart of Alcoa and it looks awfully strong. More and more aluminum is going into airplanes ... [and] automobiles." "Aluminum is absolutely incumbent in global economic growth. And the economy is growing," he said. He added that concerns over slowing demand for commodities in China is overblown. "There's been ... too much lack of optimism on the circumstances in China." The company said that the new structure will have five business units and one dedicated customer group for "Industry and Society". The changes will make it easier "for our customers to do business with us", Ericsson said in a statement. Ericsson reported a 2 percent year-on-year decline in net sales in the first quarter of 2016 of 52.2 billion Swedish crowns ($6.4 billion), below a Reuters forecast of 54.6 billion. And while operating income rose 63 percent year-on-year to 3.5 billion Swedish crowns, it was below market expectations. Hans Vestberg said that the new structure is necessary to help the company's profitability. "I think that we are of course in a big transformation, the whole industry is in a transformation. We have invested in some new areasnow we put a structure so we can accelerate strategic execution on it so we also can improve our profitability and enhance our possibility to grow. So that's a long-term plan and now we're putting that new structure in place," Vestberg told CNBC in a TV interview on Thursday. Ericsson's earnings were hit by a weak environment in Europe and some emerging markets. The company is also facing heightened competition from Nokia after the Finnish firm merged with Alcatel-Lucent earlier this year. Sales in Ericsson's core networks business fell 2 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2016. "On the network side we have gone from 15 competitors and now we are down to threeso of course, here we have seen a dramatic transformation in ten years. I don't think any industry has gone from 15 competitors down to three in such a short period," Vestberg said. The fallout from the Panama Papers scandal will not help the art auction market as some buyers try to avoid having their investment scrutinized, Jean David Malat, art dealer and director of the London Opera Gallery, told CNBC. Therefore, private collectors would rather buy from a gallery, where their investments can be more discreet, he explained. Although owning art has always been an attractive investment, the art market has seen mixed fortunes in the last year with global sales falling 7 percent to $68.2bn, according to the European Fine Art Foundation. However, art sales in the $1 million-plus market have grown 400 percent in value in the past decade. Malat said that 2015 was still "a very good year for us internationally." The Opera Gallery, which counts 12 locations worldwide including London, Paris, Dubai, and Miami, among others, also recently opened galleries in New York and Aspen. Many entrepreneurs will tell you that they knew from day one what they "had to do." I, on the other hand, graduated from Brandeis University in 2005 without that passion-filled direction. I simply wanted a job. Having already learned Chinese, I got caught up in the buzz about off-shoring and outsourcing, and before I knew it, I was working in Shanghai, China. Living in China was an exhilarating dream, but it seemed that the pollution was worsening by the month. Working in the export industry, I got to see one of the main source of the pollution (factories) first-hand. When a friend shared stories about the dozens of people he knew who now had asthma or lung cancer, I realized the human price we were paying to manufacture everything from disposable plates to fast-fashion was too high. The decision to bring antitrust proceedings against U.S. tech giant Google was not politically motivated, Europe's competition chief told CNBC, a day after the company was accused of abusing its dominance in the mobile market with its Android operating system. On Wednesday, the European Commission the executive arm of the European Union (EU) said it had informed Google that the company is in breach of the bloc's antitrust rules relating to Android. The Commission said Google's requirement that device manufacturers to pre-install Google services such as Search and its Chrome web browser was hampering competitions. Android is open-source and run on over 80 percent of the world's mobile phones. This is not the first regulatory clash between Google and the EU. The internet giant is already battling EU charges of promoting its own shopping service in Internet searches at the expense of rival products, a case which has dragged on since late 2010. But European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, said this is not a politically motivated attack on Google or U.S. companies. "Even if anyone had a political goal or had feelings or a passion about companies, well our test is with the courts eventually and the court will hear nothing about feeling and politics, they want the facts of the caseand therefore we cannot interfere politicallybecause otherwise we risk to lose it," Vestager told CNBC in a TV interview on Thursday. "It would be a big problem if we had a bias. I am here to protect competition, to protect the consumerthis is not about companies, this is about how companies behave in the European market, no matter their flak, no matter their ownership." "What's going on inside the X labs is the stuff of science fiction, but increasingly the stuff of next quarter, next year's revenue," said Max Wolff, chief economist at Manhattan Venture Partners in an interview with CNBC on Thursday. Google parent company Alphabet reports earnings after the bell Thursday, but investors may be paying more attention to what's ahead for the company's various "moonshots." Wolff said he hopes to hear an update on Alphabet's self-driving car development and virtual reality technology during the earnings call Thursday. Developments in VR, along with artificial intelligence, should be amajor focus for Google as well as other major tech companies, Wolffsaid. "I think the era of the smartphone is mostly behind us," Wolff said. "And the era of the messaging system, the chatbot and virtual reality is here. They need to be front and center. ... If that is in any way not the case, that would be a big worry." watch now A renowned New York City hospital has agreed to pay the federal government a whopping $2.2 million to settle a probe into alleged "egregious disclosure" of protected health information of two patients during filming of ABC News health series. New York Presbyterian Hospital, among other things, "allowed the ABC crew to film someone who was dying and another person in significant distress, even after a medical professional urged the crew to stop," the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department said Thursday in announcing the deal. OCR said the filming was done without obtaining the prior consent of the individuals. In addition to the $2.2 million settlement for potential violations, New York Presbyterian agreed to a "comprehensive corrective action plan" and to be monitored for two years by the Office of Civil Rights to make sure the hospital complies with federal rules, commonly called HIPAA, that protect the privacy of patient health records. The ABC crew was at the hospital in April 2011 to obtain footage for the show "NY Med," an eight-part ABC News series that aired in 2012, and then again with new episodes in 2014. The Office of Civil Rights said that it it received a complaint against the hospital in 2013 about filming that was done on April 28, 2011. That is the same date that a Manhattan man named Mark Chanko was filmed while dying at the hospital after being hit by a garbage truck, according to a cease and desist letter Chanko's son sent to the hospital in 2012, which is on the ProPublica news site. Chanko's son Kenneth complained to HHS about HIPAA violations by the hospital after his mother, Mark's widow recognized her dying husband while watching an episode of NY Med even though Mark's face had been blurred by the show, the New York Times reported last year. ABC later scrubbed "the segment involving Mr. Chanko from its website, DVDs and future viewings," the Times reported. Last month, the highest appeals court in New York State allowed the Chanko family's suit against New York Presbyterian, which alleges a breach of patient-doctor confidentiality, to proceed. But the court dismissed ABC News as a defendant against claims of intentional infliction of emotional distress. HHS's Office of Civil Rights found that New York Presbyterian "failed to safeguard protected health information and allowed ABC film crews virtually unfettered access to its health care facility." That access effectively created "an environment where [protected health information] could not be protected from impermissible disclosure to the ABC film crew and staff." "By allowing individuals receiving urgent medical care to be filmed without their authorization by members of the media, NYP's actions blatantly violate the HIPAA Rules, which were specifically designed to prohibit the disclosure of individual's [protected health information] including images, in circumstances such as these. " "This case sends an important message that OCR will not permit covered entities to compromise their patients' privacy by allowing news or television crews to film the patients without their authorization," said Jocelyn Samuels, OCR's Director. "We take seriously all complaints filed by individuals, and will seek the necessary remedies to ensure that patients' privacy is fully protected." watch now U.S. presidential and congressional candidates may be falling over themselves to disavow the freshly negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), but the trade deal isn't dead, John Negroponte, a storied former U.S. diplomat told the Credit Suisse Megatrends conference in Singapore Thursday. The TPP is a trade and investment agreement among Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the U.S. and Vietnam. The accord includes several policies that would make trade and investment run more smoothly between Pacific countries key among them is lowering tariffs. "Trade is a politically tragic issue in our country and it has to do with globalization and this sort of apprehension in the minds of people that somehow jobs are being lost as a result of globalization. That is not a new preoccupation," Negroponte, who was ambassador to Mexico from 1989-1993 and was involved in the negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), said. That deal was also a political hot potato, with then candidate Ross Perot famously claiming it would result in a "giant sucking sound" as U.S. jobs were sent to Mexico. Trade ministers from a dozen Pacific nations in Trans-Pacific Partnership Ministers meeting post in TPP Ministers "Family Photo" in Atlanta, Georgia October 1, 2015. Trade ministers from a dozen Pacific nations meeting in Atlanta extended talks on a sweeping trade deal until Saturday in a bid to get a final agreement on the most ambitious trade pact in a generation. USTR Press Office | Handout | Reuters But Negroponte, who served multiple administrations over his more than 40-year career as a diplomat, said the rhetoric was more pronounced this time around. Despite the opposition, Negroponte still expects the deal to be ratified. "We have a window in the lame duck after our elections and before the new congress takes office for getting the TPP ratified. I think we have a good chance of getting it done even though there's been a lot of political verbiage surrounding the issues," he said. That period runs from early November through January 20. watch now watch now watch now watch now watch now One of the world's most famous monarchs, Queen Elizabeth II, is turning 90 and when it comes to royal occasions, this family is renowned for its festivities. On April 21, the Queen celebrates her 90th with the Duke of Edinburgh in Windsor, where they are expected to unveil a plaque marking "The Queen's Walkway", followed by the Queen lighting the first beacon of more than 900, that are to be lit up across the U.K. and overseas. This milestone isn't just fixed to 24 hours either. On Wednesday, the Queen visited the Royal Mail Windsor delivery office to mark the U.K. Postal Service's 500th anniversary. Celebrations are to then be extended into May and June to celebrate the Queen's 90th and her "Official Birthday", which takes place annually on a Saturday in June. Mark Cuthbert | UK Press | Getty Images Celebrations include those at Windsor Castle's private grounds during May 12th to 15th. Some 25,000 tickets went on sale for this last November, only to sell out hours later. "Royal weddings, anniversaries, births, these are occasions for national rejoicing and get huge international coverage," Richard Fitzwilliams, royal commentator told CNBC via email. The family itself attends around 2,000 official events nationally and internationally every year, which not only gives these events a "high profile" but is extremely important for the U.K. economy. "As a symbol of national unity the monarch's presence at certain events is expected (at 89 she attended over 300 in 2015), there are anniversaries and jubilees that help bind the nation together," Fitzwilliams said. "The Queen is [the U.K.'s] most traveled monarch and trips abroad by members of the Royal Family are funded by the taxpayer (or host country) and they promote goodwill, British trade and cultural exchanges." Popular events or tourist attractions linked to the family like Royal Ascot, Windsor Castle generate a huge economic boost for the U.K. The monarchy is worth an estimated 56.7 billion ($81.3 billion) to the economy, Brand Finance, a consultancy firm reported in 2015. The future of the monarchy Ahead of the Queen's 90th, questions have been raised as to how popular the monarchy is and whether it will last in decades to come. The royal family looks on during the annual Trooping The Colour ceremony on June 13, 2015, in London. (L-R) Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall; Prince Charles, Prince of Wales; Prince George of Cambridge; Prince William, Duke of Cambridge; Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge; Queen Elizabeth II; Prince Harry; Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh; Prince Andrew, Duke of York. Samir Hussein | WireImage | Getty Images In a recent commentary piece published on the Daily Mail website, Dr Anna Whitelock, historian and director at Royal Holloway's London Centre for Public History, said it was possible that the Queen's longevity and faithfulness could "disguise much deeper misgivings" about the monarchy's role in the 21st century. "There is no absolute guarantee about the monarchy's long-term survival," Whitelock said, making reference to potentially influential factors on the monarchy's future such as Prince Charles, and the family's connection to the public, such as the younger population. Despite the concerns raised, Fitzwilliams remains confident that the monarchy will continue and the Queen will not abdicate. "I see the monarchy as part of Britain's DNA, and look at the national and international fascination with it. Why should it ever be abolished? It will change, as times do, and the House of Windsor has shown a remarkable capacity to reinvent itself," said Fitzwilliams, noting the Queen's involvement in the London Olympics, and the family's adoption of social media. A recent Ipsos MORI survey backs this up, with results revealing support for the monarchy still remains strong. Seventy five percent surveyed said the monarchy did have an important role to play in the country's future, while less than 20 percent said they'd prefer the U.K. to be a republic. "The U.K. public admires the Queen's dedication to duty and commitment which she first made in 1947 in the broadcast from Cape Town when she was 21. They appreciate that she will never let them down," said Fitzwilliams. "She will not abdicate. The public feel (the Queen) has been a pivotal symbol of continuity in fast changing times." Smaller countries' historical disadvantages have largely disappeared, and in terms of economic growth, there's actually a "triumph of the tiny," said Alex Salmond, the former first minister of Scotland. "The average economic performance of small countries has been better than that of larger countries," Salmond said Thursday at the Credit Suisse Megatrends conference in Singapore. He added that the optimum size for the population is probably around the 7-8 million mark. Scotland's population is a bit over 5 million. "For most of the period of human existence, if you are a successful small country, what would happen is you were taken over by a larger country," Salmond said. "Although we still live in a very troubled world, by and large, in most areas of the planet, you can be a successful small country and still have security and not be taken over by a larger country." Meanwhile, markets will be considering the economic impact and watching for indications of whether the "Brexit" campaign is gaining momentum. Over the next two months, British citizens worldwide will weigh the benefits of staying a member of the European Union or walking away. Using Kensho, we looked at trading action around events where the Brexit movement gained support, going back to May 8 when the Conservative party won a majority in the U.K. election and pledged to begin work on a referendum. Government officials and business leaders are warning of a period of instability and uncertainty ahead of the vote. But if history is any guide, the markets may take the lead-up to the referendum in stride. Since then, there have been 16 more such events, or "Brexit indications." A few examples: When Queen Elizabeth announced the EU referendum bill in a speech to Parliament shortly after the Conservative victory in May; when the U.K. independence party launched its Brexit campaign in September and when London mayor Boris Johnson announced his support for an EU-exit in February. Around these events, markets have moved in some surprising and unsurprising ways. Predictably, the British currency, the pound , comes under pressure as investors worry about the economic fallout of a Brexit. On days of Brexit indications, the pound loses ground against the the U.S. dollar more than 75 percent of the time. And one month later, the GPB/USD has been lower by 0.7 percent on average. As of a few days ago, the pound had lost nearly 8 percent against the greenback since May. But equity markets suggest something different that many investors either aren't spooked by the prospect of Britain leaving the EU, or they simply don't think it's going to happen. Unlike currencies, stocks haven't yet priced in much of a Brexit discount. On the day of Brexit indications, the has traded higher more than 75 percent of the time. Even the U.K.'s benchmark index, the FTSE 100 , has traded positive 65 percent of the time. British ADRs, however, have been rattled when Brexit fears rise. Big U.K. names listed on U.S. exchanges, such as Barclays and Aviva , have reliably underperformed the broader markets one week after Brexit indications. Neither billionaire businessman Donald Trump nor Texas Sen. Ted Cruz reflect the "broad perspective of the American people," House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer told CNBC on Thursday. The Maryland Democrat said on "Squawk Box" he looks forward to either candidate getting the Republican presidential nomination. "Trump or Senator Cruz will be opponents that we will be able to take on very effectively," said Hoyer, the second-most powerful Democrat in the House. "Trump is a lot rhetoric, but no solutions and simply conclusions." While making the case for Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Hoyer said voters can see they both have vision. "But what they also see in Hillary Clinton is strategy and policies to realize a vision." "She's tough. She's focused. She's able," Hoyer said. She's "savvy enough to work with the political structure in Washington, D.C., to get things done." United Continental 's new board will help the airline fix ongoing issues, CEO Oscar Munoz said Thursday, a day after adding two new directors as part of an agreement with activist investors. "I think they can do a lot, frankly. We've really reconstituted the board with some great experience across technology, innovation, certainly the airline experience, that's important," Munoz told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street." The airline added two new board members Wednesday as part of the agreement with hedge funds PAR Capital Management and Altimeter Capital Management. "The reconstituted board will do great. I'm going to miss some of the members of our board that are leaving. Certainly, we had a great run, but at the end of the day, I think it's going to work out," said Munoz, who returned to his position last month following a heart transplant. watch now watch now watch now After Saudi Arabia's sudden insistence that Iran be part of a meeting in Doha last weekend to discuss an oil production freeze, global market analysts are scratching their heads over what the oil-rich kingdom's next move could be. Oil analysts and market watchers have noted with interest this week that Saudi Arabia's policy when it becomes to oil has become a lot less predictable than it seemed in late 2014. Back then, the de-facto leader of oil-producing cartel OPEC refused to cut production in order to retain market share in the face of rival producers, notably in the U.S. Eighteen months later and its strategy has appeared to pay off, with data showing that shale oil producers are closing down rigs every week and oil output is dropping. Although its own strategy has damaged the government revenues of all 13 countries within the OPEC family, which tends to rely on oil exports for the majority of its wealth, it has enabled the so-called cartel to retain its market share of just under 40 percent. Saudi Oil Minister Ali Ibrahim Al-Naimi in Doha, Qatar. Justin Solomon | CNBC What's Iran got to do with it? There appears to be trouble brewing closer to home for the group, however with a highly-anticipated meeting of OPEC and non-OPEC producers in Qatar last weekend, at which it was hoped a production freeze could be agreed, failing due to growing friction between Saudi Arabia and fellow OPEC member Iran. The Islamic Republic did not attend the meeting and had consistently said it is not willing to freeze production as it wants to restart its oil industry and economy after years of economic sanctions. Oil prices fell following the meeting and Saudi Arabia was quick to lay the blame at Iran's door but the country knew about Iran's unwillingness to cut and so analysts are now questioning just how much Saudi's regional rivalry with Iran is driving its latest strategy over oil. "I agree with the near-consensus among the commentariat that Riyadh's seemingly sudden decision not to support a freeze was clearly motivated by other factors," Alastair Newton, head of Alavan Business Advisory and former political analyst at Nomura, said in a note on Thursday. "And that by far the most likely of these was the ongoing decline in cross-Gulf relations with Iran." -c with -w : IBM Knowledge Center[ ^ ]: -c | /c Execute command following the -c option in a new DB2 command window, and then terminate. For example, db2cmd -c dir causes the dir command to be invoked in a new DB2 command window, and then the DB2 command window closes. -w | /w Execute command following the -w option in a new DB2 command window, and wait for the new DB2 command window to be closed before terminating the process . For example, db2cmd /w dir invokes the dir command, and the process does not end until the new DB2 command window closes. "These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer I need to send out email notification once all file export completes. I am still unable to control on Process.Waitforexit(); It will immidiatly send an email even though file export in progress. its not working after Process.Start(); Am i missing something in below code? objProcStartInfo = new ProcessStartInfo("cmd.exe"); objProcStartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true; objProcStartInfo.UseShellExecute = false; objProcStartInfo.CreateNoWindow = false; objProcess.StartInfo = objProcStartInfo; //Starting Process to export files on directory. objProcess.Start(); //Wait For Next Action Till File Export Get Completed.. objProcess.WaitForExit(); objSendUnloadEmail.SendEmailNotificationForUnload(); please advise this article[^] seems to suggest that you need to use both options ( -c and -w ) at the same time. C# Copy Code objProcStartInfo = new ProcessStartInfo( " db2cmd.exe" , " -c -w -i db2 connect to " + strMasterdatabaseName + " user " + strserviceAccountUserName + " using " + strserviceAccountPassword + " &db2 -f " + strexportFilePath + " > " + strexportLogFilePath + " " ); "These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer Database system used: Oracle11g /ADO.net Hi, in the dataset Wizzard for the TableAdapter, the option "Create methods to send updates directly to the database" is disabled. The database table is a single Oracle table that is simple queried with Select *, and has a PK with IDENTITY column. Oddly, the update Anwweisung is generated, and the update also works. The DB has added the record and increments the PK value. However, the IDENTITY column is not displayed in the DataGrid / no refresh - what is the real problem. Question: what could be wrong? How can the Identitiy value to retrieve updated / displayed? LG Nicole I have the following code C# 2008 want to switch to the C#2005 Net2.0 after his move has been an error, thanks to the help available tracks. [CODE] //C# 2008 namespace Example1 { public partial class Form1 : Form { Control draggingControl = new Control{ BackColor = Color.Green, Visible = false }; // warning error here public Form1() { InitializeComponent(); // ... } // ... } } [/CODE] [CODE] //C# 2005 //... Control draggingControl = new Control(); draggingControl.BackColor = Color.Green; // warning error here draggingControl.Visible = false; // warning error here //... [/CODE] Any chance of getting to see the error? Control ? Every day, thousands of innocent plants are killed by vegetarians. Help end the violence EAT BACON http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28878310/custom-paint-splitter-control-in-c-sharp-winforms I'm copy them, but it's not run, want to converter to C#2005 (.Net 2.0) If you're asking me to rewrite the code for you,that's not going to happen. I've got my own code to write and I've got a few hours work left before I can go to sleep tonight. A guide to posting questions on CodeProject Click this: Seriously, do it. Dave Kreskowiak Click this: Asking questions is a skill Seriously, do it. an example of the SplitterMoving event[^]. Take a look at the event handler there and compare it to yours. This space for rent This space for rent I have currently migrated my application from 2.0 to 4.0. What i suggest is try to build your code from target framework 4.0 to 2.0, also setting up the cpu type as x86 for 32 bit platform. Also, if there are some client side validation, you need to do settings in pages element attribute controlRenderingCompatibilityVersion=2.0 in web.config for the asp.net controls. -Mayank Pant This space for rent I just replied to your thread. That was not my intentions. Thank you for correcting me . Cerner Corp. expressed concern when it was announced that R. Bowen Loftin was to have a position at the Tiger Institute for Health Innovation after stepping down as MU chancellor. Loftin's new job was outlined in a transition agreement signed Nov. 9. Ellen is an assistant city editor for spring 2017. She has reported on the Missouri General Assembly and Columbia city government for the Missourian. Reach her at: eccg25@mail.missouri.edu or in the newsroom at (573) 882-5720 Follow this search Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today The Missourians Opinion section is a public forum for the discussion of ideas. The views presented in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Missourian or the University of Missouri. If you would like to contribute to the Opinion page with a response or an original topic of your own, visit our submission form Drone attacks on Kyiv rattle family of MU Ukrainian student Iranian drones are striking Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. It's where the parents and sister of University of Missouri Ukrainian student Vlad Sazhen live. Dec. 15, 2010 -- Kevin Scott, then-president of Electrolux Major Appliances in North America, announced the move to Memphis, and the promise of 1,240 jobs. SHARE By Kevin McKenzie of The Commercial Appeal One of the largest economic development prizes for Memphis since the Great Recession, an Electrolux appliance manufacturing plant, has exceeded goals for jobs and investment that accompanied a tax break approved in 2011, officials said Wednesday. By the end of last year, Electrolux employed 1,393 workers and had made a total investment of $286 million in real and personal property, Reid Dulberger, chief executive of the Economic Growth Engine for Memphis and Shelby County said. The reported figures were higher than the 1,240 jobs and $195 million in real and personal property that Electrolux promised with a 15-year, $38.7 million PILOT granted by Memphis and Shelby County to help lure the Swedish manufacturer's investment. April 14, 2016 -- masterIT CEO Michael Drake is an advocate of mental health needs in the workplace. (Stan Carroll/The Commercial Appeal) SHARE By Kevin McKenzie of The Commercial Appeal Michael Drake wants more top executives and employers in Memphis to start conversations about mental health. As chief executive officer of the information technology services company masterIT, he'll be among some 500 people expected Thursday morning at the second annual Living Well Network Mental Health Breakfast. The breakfast benefits the Dennis H. Jones Living Network, begun four years ago at Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare. Drake is a founding board member. "Twenty-six percent of employees in the workforce are in need of mental health care," said Drake, citing National Institutes of Health data. "Sixteen percent are abusing drugs or alcohol." Kay Warren, co-founder of California-based Saddleback Church with her husband and pastor, Rick Warren, will provide the keynote conversation at Thursday's event. The couple's son, Matthew, committed suicide in 2013 and struggled with mental illness. Drake, 53, said his grandmother committed suicide and his mother struggled with depression all of her life, "so I've seen it first hand." By website (thelivingwellnetwork.org) or telephone, the Dennis H. Jones Living Network is a gateway to help for anyone suffering from anxiety, depression, risky drinking and even suicidal thoughts, Drake said. Dennis H. Jones, a retired FedEx chief information officer who bought an information technology company that competed with Drake's, suffered from depression and committed suicide in 2009. Drake said he had known Jones since seeking him out in 2006 for advice about starting up his company. Jones' widow, Debbie Jones, in 2012 pledged $1 million over four years to start the network. Removing the stigma from mental health issues, which if treated can reduce the rise and cost of physical ailments, requires steps including transparency about the issue and resources such as the living network and an employee assistance program, Drake said. "This is a culture issue, it's a productivity issue, it's a bottom-line issue, it's many things rolled into one," he said. Donna DiClementi, director of the Dennis H. Jones Living Well Network and Methodist Healthcare Employee Assistance Program, said that typically 3 percent to 5 percent of workers and their families use employee assistance programs. Awareness of behavioral health, a term she prefers to mental illness, is growing. That's thanks in part to last year's speaker at the Memphis breakfast, Patrick Kennedy, the former Rhode Island congressman who spearheaded passage in 2008 of the federal Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act to boost health insurance coverage. DiClementi said she expects behavioral health screenings and services to become more common in primary care doctor's offices. "What we're working toward is to be able to place behavioral health clinicians in our primary care practices so people can be treated in place, right now," she said. Drake said workplaces also are a good place to combat the stigma that still prevents conversations about mental health needs. "I think we have a lot of walls to bring down and that's why I'm an advocate to de-stigmatize the issue," he said. Local Harley-Davidson owner Chris Best demonstrates how 600 fellow Harley owners will pose at Graceland during the statewide rally in Memphis May 31-June 4. SHARE By Thomas Bailey Jr. of The Commercial Appeal As many as 2,000 burly motorcyles will descend on Memphis May 31-June 4 when the Tennessee State Hog Rally returns to the city for the first time in 13 years. Memphis may remember this as the summer of two-wheelers; the Vespa Club of America will hold its annual Amerivespa rally June 23-26. From 500 to 1,000 "scooterists'' are expected for that event. The last time Harley-Davidson owners held their statewide get-together in Memphis was 2003, said Chris Best, a local Harley blogger and marketing chairman for the event. Headquarters will be the Sheraton in Downtown. Not only will Harley owners come from Mississippi and Arkansas and Alabama, some will arrive from all over the nation and even Canada, Best said. Events include an opportunity to pose for photos with their bikes at the steps of Graceland, and excursions to Tupelo, Crowley's Ridge and Johnny Cash's birthplace in Arkansas and Shiloh National Military Park. For more information, visit tnstatehogrally.com Over the years, anytime I went anywhere people of different faiths were gathered together in Memphis, I ran into Eunice and Chip Ordman. They were more than a couple. They were a pair. Fellow travelers. Cultural explorers. Interfaith emissaries. During their 32 years of marriage, they traveled with microlenders in Peru, medical missionaries in Malawi, teachers in Poland and Ukraine, artists in Cuba, students in China, peace activists in the Middle East, and medical supply smugglers in Thailand. They shared meals and prayers with Buddhists in Bhutan, Hindus in India, Muslims in Morocco, Jews in Israel, and Catholics and Protestants in Europe and South America not to mention members of all major and minor faiths in Memphis. "Eunice and Chip, Chip and Eunice," Rabbi Feivel Strauss, one of their rabbis, said at Eunice's memorial service Wednesday afternoon. "Chip and Eunice, Eunice and Chip," Dr. Nabil Bayakly, one of their imams, said at the service. "They were always there together, on behalf of all of us," Rev. Carla Meisterman, one of their pastors, said at the service. When was the last time you attended a memorial service led by a minister, a rabbi and an imam? Wednesday's memorial service was the first for me. Eunice died over the weekend. She was 91. At Wednesday's service, she was remembered for her courage, compassion and commitment to people of all faiths. The service was held at Balmoral Presbyterian Church, where the Ordmans were members. They also were members of Temple Israel. After 9/11, they also began attending regular prayers and events at Masjid As-Salaam, their neighborhood mosque. "I was a Jew who loved to study the New Testament and other holy scriptures," Edward 'Chip' Ordman, Eunice's husband since 1983, explained. "She was a Christian who loved to study the Old Testament." A match made in heaven. Eunice and Chip were fellow scientists and professors. They met in New England in the 1970s and moved to Memphis in the early 1980s to teach at the University of Memphis. It was her third marriage, his second. Together they had nine children by birth, marriage or adoption, 13 grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and several "honorary" children. "It is probably the way society works, but women are too often underestimated," Chip said. "She was the one who knew how a large, complex, blended and extended family worked. She was the one who knew where the wires went inside the computer and made my professional career a success. "She was the one who, when we were both active in our church and our synagogue, said it's time we started attending our neighborhood mosque. "She was the one who proposed the colorful travel, and the one who understood the stock market well enough to be able to make significant charitable donations. "I've long regarded her as one of the great colorful characters of the world, and I have felt it a privilege to go along for the ride." Several years ago, on a trip to Israel, Eunice was mugged and her arm was broken in three places. "The first emergency room doctor said, 'She's 83. She may have limited use of her right arm," Chip recalled. "I pulled out a small picture book showing her rowing a rowboat in the ocean and white-water rafting. 'She's not that kind of 83-year-old,' I said." Eunice Eleanor Breckenridge Niles Stetson Ordman wasn't limited at any age. She was born in New Jersey in 1924. She counted passengers on the Mayflower among her ancestors. Her grandfather was a pioneer in the telephone industry. Her father worked for legendary Bell Labs. Eunice wrote her own history. She taught physics at the dawn of the atomic age and computer science at the dawn of the digital age. She helped start computer science programs at two colleges. She did most of her traveling and exploring after she retired. She was white-water rafting in her 60s and 70s, and continued ocean rowing into her 80s. Five years ago, doctors discovered the lining in Eunice's aorta was torn. She was 86 and already suffering from aortic stenosis. Her prognosis was not good. "I've had a very full life. Life doesn't owe me anything," she told her doctors. "But I'm having much too much fun to leave." April 16, 2016 -- Beale Street is loaded with music, neon lights, and food. (Yalonda M. James/The Commercial Appeal) By Jennifer Biggs of The Commercial Appeal Broadway. Rodeo Drive. Bourbon Street. Beale Street. Say the name of these iconic streets, and images immediately come to mind: marquees, mannequins, beads, blues. Beale Street is officially this by a 1977 act of Congress the home of the blues. The storied street that begins at Second Street and ends, for our purposes, at Fourth Street, packs a slew of history into those two blocks. There's plenty of good food in that stretch, too, and we'll get right back to that. (AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS STORY, FIND OUR OTHER EAT THE STREET FEATURES) First, a brief stroll down another iconic street, good ol' Memory Lane. The 1920s were the first heyday of Beale, though the street (originally Beal Avenue, with no "e") was created in 1841. In the 1860s, traveling black musicians took to performing on Beale, and by the turn of the 20th century, many businesses on the street were owned by African-Americans. In the '20s, businesses were a mix of retail, restaurants, nightclubs and theaters. In 1909, W.C. Handy wrote "Boss Crump Blues," and it caught on in the bars; Handy and his band played at the Pee Wee Saloon, and other musicians who would become famous began playing the street: Furry Lewis, Albert King, Memphis Minnie and B.B. King. (HEAR JENNIFER BIGGS AND CHRIS HERRINGTON DISCUSS EAT THE STREET: BEALE STREET AND MORE IN THEIR GO EAT PODCAST) The glory days came to an end, and while Beale Street was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966, by then it was all but over; only A. Schwab's remained open. By the late 1970s, the city and later local businessman John Elkington came up with a redevelopment plan. Today, we have a bustling tourist attraction, a place where music rings out from open doors and parks, where the Beale Street Flippers make hand springs look effortless, where you can stroll with a drink in your hand (though you can't take it into a bar or restaurant with you), and where here we are you can find a good meal where you might not expect it. You don't have to go to a sit-down restaurant to eat, as you'll find turkey legs, wings, funnel cakes and the like sold from walk-up counters here and there, including one right by Handy Park and another, which will soon become a permanent place but now is open only on the weekends, in the space just east of Miss Polly's Soul City Cafe. And you can grab wings and such anywhere you can find a beer. But for full service, you have plenty of choices from burgers to barbecue to fine dining. Hard Rock Cafe (126 Beale St., 901-529-2007) is the first stop if you approach from the west, taking up the northwest corner of Beale and Second. Burgers a specialty of the house are served on brioche buns and dressed all sorts of ways, from the Mexican-inspired Fiesta burger to the Hickory Barbecue Bacon cheeseburger. The Veggie Leggie patty is topped with a grilled portobello mushroom, zucchini, yellow squash and roasted red pepper. You can even get salad with kale in it, though don't get the idea that the Southern salad, with fried chicken and candied bacon, is health food. Want to snack? Split a jumbo combo starter, a platter of wings, onion rings, Tupelo chicken tenders (crunchy and spicy; very nice), Southwestern spring rolls and bruschetta. There's a nice patio on the second floor, too. Right across Second, there's Blues City Cafe (138 Beale St.; 901-526-3637), one of the most popular spots for dining on Beale. Tamales Delta style, of course can be excellent, among the best in town. (But they can have an off day.) The steaks, which even come family style in different cuts ranging from 2 pounds to almost 7 pounds, don't disappoint (you can also order a still big but more reasonable rib-eye steak or strip). There's plenty of barbecue on Beale, but the ribs are Blues City are a cut above; get a combo meal with fried catfish and ribs. Good stuff. Directly across Beale, there's a twofer. Enter B.B. King's Blues Club on the bottom floor (143 Beale St.; 901-524-5464) and on the third, find Itta Bena (145 Beale St.; 901-578-3031), Beale's fine dining restaurant. B.B. King's was recently the only Tennessee restaurant to make OpenTable's list of "100 Hottest Restaurants in America for 2016." You're bound to find something to eat from the huge menu. Something different? Get fried green tomatoes (everywhere on Beale) with onion marmalade, herbed cream cheese, strawberry jelly and basil oil. Need familiarity? There's a good cheese and sausage plate and fried dill pickles (also de rigueur for Beale, it seems), and the ribs are good here, too. But walk up the stairs to Itta Bena if you want a whole other Beale Street experience. First: Love the tinted windows, which filter all the neon from Beale and cast a soft blue light through the restaurant. Second: Double love the she-crab soup. Think you're going to share this? Do you really love anyone that much? The Abita BBQ shrimp is good, but it's very rich and spicy; be warned. Of course, you'll find fried green tomatoes, because Beale, but these are topped with plump spicy shrimp. Music is quiet; a nice respite. More burgers, wings and sandwiches (pizza too) at Club 152 (152 Beale St.; 901-544-7011) which is more about the music than the food. But three words: Rotel Chicken Fetuccine. Rotel spaghetti, people. There's your late-night fuel. Miss Polly's Soul City Cafe (154 Beale St.; 901-527-9060) serves all-day breakfast, chicken and waffles (the fried chicken is generally fabulous), barbecue, some fine home cooking (catfish, meatloaf, pot roast) and has the best name for a salad in town: Pork Salad Annie. King's Palace (162 Beale St.; 901-521-1851) serves steaks, seafood, pasta and even fried alligator in a cool and quiet spot. Go for a feast, either the Cajun Feast, with shrimp and crawfish etouffee, gumbo, blackened catfish, voodoo chicken and fried green tomatoes (of course), or the King's Feast: ribs, pork shoulder, gumbo, crabcakes, voodoo potatoes and coleslaw. You can order for two or up to six. A. Schwab (163 Beale St.; 901-523-9782) stands true to its slogan that "if you can't get it at Schwab's, you don't need it." At least that's the case if you're jonesing for ice cream or liquor. Get a sundae, a banana split, a milkshake, a phosphate. They stock Sweet Magnolia products, so it's top notch. And it is surely the only soda fountain in town with a full bar behind it. Pig on Beale (167 Beale St.; 901-529-1544) serves up a mighty fine pulled pork sandwich, one as good as you'll find in some of the best barbecue joints in town and better than others. Smoky, tender, fresh creamy coleslaw on top, spicy sauce dripping down it and big enough to require two hands, for sure. With a group? Get the BBQ Lovers Feast or the Super Feast and throw in ribs, smoked thighs and hot legs with that pork. Rum Boogie Cafe (182 Beale St.; 901-528-0150) has a nice plate lunch until 2 p.m. during the week, and I've eaten it many times over the years. But I just missed it last week and ended up ordering something I haven't eaten there in maybe 10 years: red beans and rice. I'd forgotten how good it is. Spicy, creamy, served with the right amount of rice and topped with green onion. Excellent. And we ordered the fried green tomatoes, because when on Beale you're going to eat either them or the fried pickles. Here they come with a small tub of decent pimento cheese. Eat up. Silky O'Sullivan's (183 Beale St.; 901-522-9596) is the only place you'll see goats in the courtyard. Live goats, who amble around their playhouse and catch crackers thrown by tourists. Just don't give them a beer; a tragic lesson was learned years ago. Silky's menu is large, with lots of barbecue (decent ribs; the late Sullivan was very proud of them), sandwiches and seafood. The big courtyard gives Silky's a New Orleans vibe on Beale, and you can't possibly find anything wrong with that. Alfred's on Beale (197 Beale St.; 901-525-3711) has a full menu of hot wings, fried thises and thats, sandwiches and burgers. But what you want to eat here is Mr. Bennie's plate lunch. The chicken-fried steak is hand-battered and fried to order, turnip greens are totally legit, and these fried green tomatoes are completely worth it: Thinly sliced and cornmeal battered, this is how your grandmother rolls. No strawberry jelly with these. Dyer's on Beale (205 Beale St.; 901-527-3937) is ground zero for the greasy burger, and we couldn't love 'em more. Get the double double, two small patties fried in the legendary grease with two slices of gooey American cheese oozing around them. Hand-cut fries make it even better, and now and again, go for a hot dog. But just every so often, because at Dyer's, it's burger time. Jerry Lee Lewis' Cafe & Honky Tonk (310 Beale St.; 901-300-6788) is a huge place and has an extensive menu of Southern stuff: Fried catfish, gumbo, barbecue and sandwiches. Here the Mississippi frickles (that's what a lot of the places call their fried pickles) are made with hot and sweet pickles instead of dills, and the fried tomatoes are marinated and quartered romas, battered and deep fried. Tin Roof (315 Beale St.; 901-527-9911) is a newish addition to the Beale lineup and OK, so what? They came from Nashville. Sink your teeth into their Nashville hot fried chicken sandwich and quit your bellyachin'. It's a fried chicken breast, dipped in a fiery sauce and served with a cooling dollop of potato salad and sliced dill pickles. On the sandwich. Potato salad ON the sandwich. Lew's Blew Note Bar & Grill (341 Beale St.; 901-577-8387) was the Blue Note until recently (resurrecting a name from old Beale), but as the server said, "they have another one, like in New York or somewhere." They changed the spelling to avoid a lawsuit but kept the music and the menu that includes tacos, wings and a very, very good burger, cooked as requested and served on toast. Almost a patty melt, but not quite. Worth noting: Lunchbox Eats has box meals available at the New Daisy (330 Beale St.; 901-525-8981) when it's open for shows (though otherwise no food is served there), and King Jerry Lawler's Hall of Fame Bar & Grille is scheduled to open at the end of the month at 159 Beale; food will be served, but the menu is unknown. It goes without saying that drinks flow freely, from craft beers to frozen drinks, wine and cocktails to Divers at Silky's. And the music is just as abundantly served. Just like frickles and fried green tomatoes. PREVIOUS EAT THE STREET FEATURES Madison Avenue offers four miles of diverse dining From barbecue to barbacoa, snacks to shacks, Summer Avenue has it all South to North, Main is walkable, edible, potable treat Busy Germantown Parkway is full of dining surprises SHARE By Katie Fretland of The Commercial Appeal Several Shelby County criminal court judges have issued orders suspending two Memphis bonding companies from writing bonds. The orders by Judges Robert Carter, Paula Skahan, Glenn Wright, James Lammey, John Campbell, Chris Craft and James Beasley, Jr. state allegations that Memphis Bonding Company and A-24 Hour Bonding withheld taxes from the Tennessee Department of Revenue have "been proven by a preponderance of the evidence." The court was "not persuaded" by arguments the companies were confused about the tax's collection. Memphis Bonding Company kept $332,820 and A-24 Hour Bonding kept $50,640 in collected taxes, the judges determined. An evidentiary hearing was held before the judges. Judges Mark Ward, Lee Coffee and Carolyn Blackett were recused. Last week, the Shelby County District Attorney Generals' Office announced two officials at the bonding companies were indicted on theft charges. Angela Bryant, 41, manager of 24 Hour Bonding Company of Memphis LLC, and George Austin Hitt, 38, president of Memphis Bonding Co. and Tennessee Bonding Company, were indicted by a grand jury. Bryant was indicted on theft over $10,000, and Hitt was indicted on theft over $250,000. ---------------------------------- SHARE Gary Cone William Groseclose By Jody Callahan of The Commercial Appeal Editor's note: This story was updated to reflect who was notified of the prisoners' deaths. Two notorious Memphis killers have died while behind bars, state officials confirmed Wednesday. Gary Bradford Cone, who brutally murdered an elderly Midtown couple in 1980, died Tuesday at a Nashville hospital of natural causes, TDOC spokesman Alison Randgaard said. He was 67. William Groseclose, who hired two hit men to kill his wife Deborah in 1977, died last Aug. 23 of natural causes at the Lois DeBerry prison hospital in Nashville. He was 67. A spokesperson for the Tennessee Department of Corrections said the families of the victims were notified of the deaths in both cases as were the prisoners' next of kin and the District Attorney General's office. Cone had been on Death Row at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution near Nashville, but was moved to the DeBerry facility last May, Randgaard added. Groseclose's case began on July 4, 1977, when his wife's badly decomposed body was found stashed in the trunk of her convertible. The car had been abandoned with the top down in the parking lot of the former library at Peabody and McLean. Deborah was 24 at the time, working as a receptionist for a neurosurgical group. She had a 6-year-old daughter from a previous marriage and a 1-year-old son with Groseclose. That son, Nathan Davis, declined to speak with media Wednesday, family said. Groseclose, then 29 and a Navy recruiter, reported Deborah missing on June 29. Although he met with the media and claimed that he'd frantically searched for her, Groseclose and two other men Ronald Rickman and Phillip Britt were eventually charged with her death. At the trial, it was revealed that Groseclose gave Rickman and Britt about $1,000 to kill his wife. The couple had been having marital problems, and Groseclose wanted the money from her $32,000 life insurance policy. Rickman and Britt each raped Deborah, then stabbed, beat and tried to strangle her. She eventually died from the heat after being stuffed in the trunk of her car. Groseclose was sentenced to death, but after a retrial in 1999 that was changed to life in prison. Rickman and Britt were also each sentenced to life in prison. Both remain behind bars, with Britt due for a parole hearing in August and Rickman in 2019. Cone's case began on Aug. 9, 1980, when he stole $112,000 in merchandise from the Brodnax jewelry store in Poplar Plaza, then led police on a high-speed chase through Midtown. Cone abandoned his car in the Poplar-Evergreen area, then opened fire during a chase, wounding a police officer and a citizen. The next day, Cone broke into the home of Shipley Todd, 93, and his wife, Cleopatra Todd, 79, in the 100 block of Evergreen. Cone struck the man 16 times, mostly in the head, and hit the woman 22 times in the head. Both died from their injuries. Cone then shaved his beard, cut his hair and fled Memphis for Florida. Police found the bodies on Aug. 13, and Cone was arrested in Florida the same day after a robbery and shootout with police. SHARE Lt. Rodney Eddins By Yolanda Jones of The Commercial Appeal The funeral for Lt. Rodney Eddins, a Memphis firefighter who died after battling a house fire last weekend, will be Friday at Bellevue Baptist Church. Eddins, 57, a 30-year veteran of the city fire department, will have a "Class 1" funeral, this is a service designated for firefighters who died in the line duty, said fire spokesman Lt. Wayne Cooke. "The medical examiner has not ruled on the cause of death at his time," Cooke said. "It will be a Class 1 funeral, a full honors funeral for Lt. Eddins." Eddins and his fellow firefighters from Fire Station 37 responded to a house fire in the 4500 block of Marigold Lane in the Westwood area of Southwest Memphis late Saturday night. Eddins and his crew were looking for hot spots in the home when he collapsed and had to be carried out by firefighters who began CPR in the front yard of the home. Eddins was taken to Methodist South Hospital in Whitehaven where he died after doctors could not resuscitate him. Eddins leaves behind a wife and an adult daughter. Visitation for Eddins is scheduled from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday at Bellevue Baptist at 2000 Appling Road. The funeral will be at 11 a.m. Friday also at the church. Burial will follow at West Tennessee Cemetery-Forest Hill Irene, 4000 Forest Hill Irene. By Linda A. Moore of The Commercial Appeal A divided Shelby County Commission committee voted 2-3 against a funding request from Dist. Attny. Gen. Amy Weirich to pay for additional staff to handle the work generate by the Memphis Police Department's body camera program. Weirich made the request of $86,0577, which would be increased by 75 percent in matching funds for the Public Defender's office, as required by state law. It's money the city of Memphis should be paying, said Commissioner David Reaves, listed the education costs that the "inept government" has dumped on the county. "I'm so sick of them dumping on the county. It just frustrates me to no end how much stuff they dump on us," Reaves said. Weirich's request would help cover the cost of salary and benefits for five full-time video paralegals, who would review all of the body camera video generated by MPD's program. It would also pay for the "stuff," the desk, computers and technology, she said. Her office handles 180,000 to 200,000 cases a year. The body cameras will produce about 53,000 hours of video evidence that must be reviewed, redacted and "maintained in our office forever," Weirich said. This should be Memphis' problem, said Commissioner Heidi Shafer "I don't' want us to be the first adopters on this. If the city of Memphis wants this adopted then they need to provide the funding to have it fully implemented," Shafer said. And if other municipalities "jump into this" the county would be left to help fund their needs as well, she said. In fact, Millington is exploring a body camera program, Weirich said, although the number of cases that originate from Millington compared to Memphis is "incomparable." However, Commissioner Melvin Burgess, "an African American male" and the son of a former MPD director, pointed out that the need for body cameras blossomed out of real concerns for citizen safety. "If I'm a parent whose child got arrested or a whose child got killed by some means, I would want everything done with fidelity to make sure the case can be proven for my child," Burgess said. "And we see what's going on out here." In addition, being a law enforcement officer is hard job and they need the cameras too, Burgess said. Also, with the county administration planning to present the fiscal 2017 budget to the commission on May 4, this is not the best time to present an increase request, said Harvey Kennedy, county CAO. Burgess and Commissioner Van Turner voted for the funding increase, while Shafer, Reaves and Commissioner Mark Billingsley voted no. The full commission will vote on the resolution on Monday. Gov. Bill Haslam (AP Photo/Erik Schelzig) SHARE By Michael Collins of The Commercial Appeal WASHINGTON The mayors of New York City, Washington, DC, San Francisco and six other cities are calling on Gov. Bill Haslam to veto a bill that would let mental health therapists deny services to clients based on the counselors' religious beliefs. In a letter to Haslam, the mayors warned the legislation would allow therapists to broadly discriminate against potential patients and argued it would legally sanction intolerance in Tennessee. "While clearly aimed at LGBT individuals, the legislation as written would allow for discrimination against patients based on many factors, including race, religion, and gender," the mayors wrote. "In fact, a therapist opposed to United States military policy could conceivably refuse treatment to a veteran based on 'sincerely held principles.' "This type of government-sanctioned intolerance simply has no place in our country." The mayors sent the letter, dated April 19, as part of a coalition called "Mayors Against Discrimination," which they said was formed "to stand up against bigotry and prejudice in cities and states across the country." The letter was signed by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio; Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser; San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee; Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti; Seattle Mayor Edward Murray; Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney; Eugene, Ore., Mayor Kitty Percy; Santa Fe Mayor Javier Gonzales; and Royal Oak , Mich., Mayor Jim Ellison. April 21, 2016 -- Joe DiPietro, UT system president. (Stan Carroll/The Commercial Appeal) By Jennifer Pignolet of The Commercial Appeal University of Tennessee President Joseph DiPietro touched on the growth of UT Health Sciences in Memphis and recent moves by the Legislature regarding diversity funding and guns on campus during a Thursday visit with The Commercial Appeal Editorial board. "We really like having a health science center here," DiPietro said. "We see it as the flagship health care educational enterprise in the state." Despite the growth of educational health programs under the UT system throughout the state, DiPietro and UT Health Sciences Chancellor Steve Schwab said Memphis will remain the home base. Schwab said 800 of the 1,300 students in the UT residency program are in Memphis, and the university has invested $300 million in the Memphis campus over the last four years. Four of the eight hospital systems that partner with the university are in Memphis. "All our colleges are spreading across the state, dentistry, pharmacy, but Memphis is, and forever will be, the home campus," Schwab said, adding he sees the city of Memphis as a neutral factor when it comes to recruiting. The university leaders' visit came on the same day the Legislature diverted for a year about $436,000 from UT's office of diversity and inclusion. "We've done a good job of making our campuses diverse," DiPietro said. "We can always do more. I think where we've had trouble is in making inclusion and civility part of the fabric of our institutions. And that's what these offices of inclusion and diversity are meant to do." DiPietro said the university has had incidents that prove a need for those services. "We've had cotton balls in front of black cultural centers, we've had bananas thrown at black students who come in for a preview -- you know, it can go on and on," he said. "And that says to me that we have a lot of work to do with our own house, and it's faculty, staff and students, to make them more competent around multicultural inclusiveness as part of the fabric of what we do." DiPietro said the Legislature, as a funding body of a public institution, has the right to hold him accountable, but that "the reality is, I do believe the Legislature needs to realize we have a board that governs us, and that the board is the instrument by which we receive direction about our programs and where we want to go." On Wednesday, the House also gave final legislative approval for faculty and staff at Tennessee's public colleges and universities who have carry permits to have a concealed weapon on campus. DiPietro opposed the legislation but said they were able to put in provisions that help, such as requiring staff who exercise that right to notify the local law enforcement agency with primary jurisdiction over the campus of their intent. The guns also can't be brought into sporting events or meetings about staff discipline or tenure. "We would prefer not to have any guns on campus," DiPietro said. April 19, 2016 -- St. George's student Ben Stamps helps install an exhibit on the World War II era in Collierville at the Morton Museum, an exhibit that he and fellow AP history students at the school researched and designed through the school year. (Jim Weber/The Commercial Appeal) SHARE April 19, 2016 -- St. George's student Noah Pope helps install an exhibit on the World War II era in Collierville at the Morton Museum, an exhibit that he and fellow AP history students at the school researched and designed through the school year. (Jim Weber/The Commercial Appeal) By Jane Roberts of The Commercial Appeal Like every small town in America, Collierville sent young men off to World War II and collected scrap tin. But its people, including African-Americans whose lives are missing from newspaper accounts of the early 1940s sacrificed in ways now almost lost to history. For the past three months, it's been up to juniors in Dr. Marianne Leung's U.S. history class at St. George's Independent School in Collierville to find the fragments of valor and the primary sources to flesh out the details. Their work a textured, personal odyssey through the war years most had only read about opens tonight in the Morton Museum of Collierville History with 12 curated panels of narrative, photography and memorabilia. "It's kind of surreal that small towns had as big an impact on World War II as they did," Chloe Booth, 17, said. "No one thought that going into this." They found a "tractorette" class, initially an effort introduced by International Harvester Co. to address the farm labor shortage created by war mobilization, was offered for women in Collierville. A team interested in fashion learned that war efforts limited the number of pleats in women's skirts to save fabric. Another found proof that while President Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802 prohibited racial discrimination in war industries, only white women were allowed to apply for jobs in a shell (ammunition) loading plant opening in Cordova. All 64 students in three sections of U.S. history chose an aspect of life during the war and dug into digital archives of The Collierville Herald owned by the museum to find the context and begin hunting down sources. For some, the work had a steady, even pace. Ben Stamps, 16, a fifth-generation Collierville resident, has grown up hearing the stories of the town's history. Some of the exhibit's memorabilia, including a military uniform, came from his grandparents' home. "To see what it was and how it contributed to the war effort through the schools, the people who went to war and the people at home, was interesting. I was seeing it from the perspective of a viewer," he said. "We struck gold mines at times. We'd get a name and call them up, and they'd give us all this information," Stamps said. Students unearthing the contributions of African-Americans looked blankly at Census pages, hoping to see something they had missed the day before. "There was nothing. The people there had either died or moved," said Makayla Smith, 16. "We asked Dr. Leung. She didn't know." As a stab in the dark, Smith and Noah Pope, 17, reached out to Edith Caywood, daughter of Lucius Burch, an attorney who worked on behalf of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to have the U.S. District Court injunction lifted against a march to support the sanitation workers in 1968. The two later found Thomas Brown, an African-American resident who was a child in Collierville when the U.S. joined the war. "He told us that black families collected cans and bought war bonds. But he also said, 'We didn't have the resources that white kids did.' Most African-American households didn't have radios. They didn't know much about the war. When they signed up to fight, they didn't know where they were going; they just knew they were going off to fight for their country," Pope said. According to 1940 Census, African-Americans represented a third of Collierville's population. But because the details of their lives beyond lynchings and details in crime blotters are missing from newspaper accounts, one of the students' most-used primary sources, "You would think they didn't do anything," Pope said. A panel in the exhibit notes the black community, under the leadership of O.L. Armour and his wife, Minnie, gave $18 in a Red Cross drive in November 1941, "with the meager incomes at the time, this was quite a contribution." The work also turned up details of the efforts of the women of Collierville, including identifying Nina Stamps, who the class thinks may be the town's lone WAVES (Women Accepted to Volunteer Emergency Service). Her descendants in California sent her dogtags for the exhibit. "One of our points is we don't historically know much about small communities in the United States because it is hard work," Leung said. "When you have to spend a day and half to get this much information," she said pinching her finger and thumb together, "it's so easy to go the other way and focus on urban areas. "If you want to reconstruct what happened, you have to be more creative. We could read The Collierville Herald and fish for the stories (on what white people were doing.) That was easy." The interviews students conducted will be added to the museum's oral histories on YouTube. "We are a repository for community history," said museum director Ashley Carver. "Now, it is a fuller picture, including African-Americans and women." The exhibit, which closes May 28, opens with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. SHARE The launch of a major initiative today to improve the quality and availability of pre-K education in Memphis and Shelby County marks another milestone in a growing recognition by community leaders that it will take a collaborative effort to effectively deal with a seemingly intractable problem. The PeopleFirst Shelby County Early Childhood Education Plan has a goal of having 90 percent of young children kindergarten ready by 2025. Only about 32 to 33 percent are now. That goal is an important step in having young children reading at grade level by third grade. That benchmark is crucial because studies show that a student who cannot read at grade level by third grade is four times less likely to graduate from high school. That statistic is exacerbated when poverty is added to the mixture, which increases the odds that the student will not graduate. PeopleFirst Partnership is a branch of Memphis Fast Forward, which supports a number of initiatives that promote economic growth, prosperity and improved quality of life through job growth, developing an educated workforce, quality public education, safe neighborhoods, healthy citizens and government fiscal strength. The nonprofit PeopleFirst is a collaboration of business, government, academic and civic leaders dedicated to strengthening Memphis and Shelby County's cradle-to-career pipeline. Lora Jobe, the organization's executive director, visited The Commercial Appeal's editorial board Tuesday to discuss the plan. Jobe, a former president and vice president of the Memphis City Schools board, was accompanied by Daphanie Swift, the Early Childhood director; Mary McDaniel, vice chairperson of the plan's implementation committee; committee member Al Bright, a local attorney, and Garrett Guynes, PeopleFirst communications manager. The group emphasized that the Early Childhood Education plan is not designed to replace what already is being done on the pre-K front, but rather aims to fill in the gaps with a uniform blueprint that makes sure all children in pre-K classrooms are receiving equal instruction. That is a key point after a Vanderbilt University study of Tennessee's voluntary pre-K program found diminished positive academic impacts as pre-K children advance in the lower grades. That prompted pre-K critics to call for Gov. Bill Haslam to push for scaling back the $90 million program. The governor wisely resisted, opposing cuts in funding and joining pre-K supporters in calling for finding ways to sustain the program's early gains. The PeopleFirst plan includes metrics to measure its effectiveness, and philanthropists have provided funding to hire a staff to make sure the plan is fully implemented in five years and that pre-K providers are held accountable. Working with Shelby County Schools, whose board adopted a resolution Wednesday night supporting the plan, along with an impressive list of other community stakeholders, PeopleFirst has a challenging task. Last year, only 32 percent of SCS third-grade students were proficient in reading, based on TCAP scores. There are about 54,000 children in Memphis and Shelby County age 3 and under. Forty-seven percent of those children live in poverty, which spurs of host of child brain development inhibitors that result from adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress. It is crucial for the community's safety and economic well-being that children achieve in school that they graduate ready to enter college or a career. PeopleFirst has a comprehensive plan in place to intervene early in a child's life to make sure that happens, and everybody rich or poor should pull for its success. SHARE By Renee Frazier and Antony Sheehan, Special to Viewpoint It is easy for voters to be frustrated with the incessant partisan rhetoric and political posturing. All too often, we appear so thoroughly divided that it seems silly that we call ourselves the United States of America. Occasionally, however, opportunities arise when Republican and Democratic lawmakers can join together to pursue policies that are important to everyone, regardless of political preference. Insure Tennessee, Gov. Bill Haslam's plan to provide health coverage to 280,000 of our fellow Tennesseans with very low income, is our opportunity. Since its proposal, Insure Tennessee has enjoyed resounding bipartisan support from nearly 70 percent of Tennesseans, and for obvious reasons. This is a plan built by Tennessee for Tennessee, by a conservative governor on conservative principles. Insure Tennessee will have zero impact on the Tennessee state budget 100 percent of the cost of the plan is covered by Tennessee hospitals and by funds set aside by the federal government for our state. In fact, every other state that has provided this coverage has experienced a net economic benefit from providing health coverage to uninsured individuals. Additionally, Insure Tennessee is estimated to add 15,000 new jobs to the Tennessee economy. Insure Tennessee is also a lifeline for Tennessee hospitals in crisis. Five Tennessee hospitals have closed already and another will close in May. An additional 40 or more are at risk of closure, in large measure due to rising rates of uncompensated care. When those hospitals close, uninsured patients go to other hospitals and the burden of that uncompensated care is simply shifted to other vulnerable institutions. The governor's plan would provide much-needed financial stability to all of these hospitals and the communities they serve. Tennesseans don't view Insure Tennessee as a red issue or a blue issue. They view it as sensible and compassionate. That's why 78 percent of Tennesseans polled say that they want Insure Tennessee to come to a full vote in the legislature. Insure Tennessee presents the perfect opportunity for our legislators to fulfill their duty to uphold the Tennessee Constitution: "That all power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority, and instituted for their peace, safety, and happiness." Additionally, Article I, Section 23 provides: "That the citizens have a right ... to instruct their representatives, and to apply to those invested with the powers of government for redress of grievances, or other proper purposes." In accordance with these constitutional mandates, Tennesseans are "instructing their representatives" to bring Insure Tennessee to a full vote in the legislature. We should be able to skillfully find sufficient common ground to do what is best for the people. We cannot make Insure Tennessee a zero-sum game one side need not lose for the other to win. If Insure Tennessee fails, it's not a political party that loses, but the whole state. Our economy loses, our hospitals lose, our businesses lose, our low-income workers lose, and employers looking for a healthy workforce lose. We urge all Shelby County legislators to fulfill their obligations by listening to, and acting upon, the will of 78 percent of Tennesseans. We urge them to act now to pass Insure Tennessee. Don't wait until more hospitals close, more of our tax dollars are wasted, more families enter bankruptcy, and more Tennesseans die. Renee Frazier is the retired chief executive officer of Common Table Health Alliance. Antony Sheehan is the president of the Church Health Center. SHARE By Noah Feldman Ever wanted to sue the tax man? Usually you can't but Gilbert Hyatt found a loophole, and the Supreme Court gave him a symbolic victory Tuesday while depriving him of most actual damages. Acting out the fantasies of anyone who's ever been audited, Hyatt sued California tax authorities in a Nevada court and won a jury verdict of $388 million, later reduced to $1 million. The high court justices split 4-4 on whether his suit should've been permitted at all a tie that allowed Hyatt's moral victory to stand. But then they said the Constitution restricted his damages to $50,000, the maximum he could have gotten if he had sued a Nevada official in Nevada court. The case is fascinating, and not just because it's pleasurable to think about turning the tables on the auditors. At stake is the deep question of how states should be able to relate to other states, and the meaning of the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution. The facts are your typical tax nightmare. In 1991, Gilbert Hyatt sold his house in California, rented an apartment in Nevada, registered to vote there, and opened a bank account. He claimed Nevada residency on his 1991 and 1992 tax returns, saving millions of dollars because Nevada has no income tax. The California Tax Franchise Board smelled a rat and came after Hyatt hard. According to Hyatt, the California auditors looked into his windows and his garbage, contacted estranged family members, and discussed his affairs with the media, his business contacts and even his place of worship. Hyatt says one auditor spoke of him in anti-Semitic terms and took "trophy-like pictures" in front of his house after the audit. When all was said and done, the California tax board concluded that Hyatt wasn't really a Nevada resident and assessed him as owing more than $10 million. Hyatt is still fighting the bill in California after he lost an 11-year administrative appeal of the audit. Here's the part where Hyatt struck back. You can't sue the Internal Revenue Service, which is part of the federal government. And in California, you can't sue state tax auditors. But Nevada is different. In that particular slice of heaven, you can't sue the state government for negligence, but you can sue state officials for intentional wrongs they've committed against you. So in 1998, Hyatt sued the California tax auditors in Nevada court, alleging fraud, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. California maintained that the Nevada court should apply California law, which would bar any suit against it. But after the Nevada court said it would apply its own laws, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 approved the suit. The high point of Hyatt's odyssey came when a Nevada trial court ruled for him against the auditors. A jury, no doubt riled up and also aware that Nevadans wouldn't be paying a penny for it, awarded Hyatt $1 million for fraud, $52 million for invasion of privacy, $85 million for emotional distress, and $250 million in punitive damages. The Nevada Supreme Court knocked out all but the fraud claim, which still left Hyatt with a $1 million verdict in his favor. The California tax board cried foul and went to the U.S. Supreme Court. The auditors advanced two different arguments. First, they said that one state shouldn't be able to subject another state to a suit in its courts without the first state's consent. Second, they said that if, indeed, the suit could go forward, California auditors shouldn't be subject to greater damages in Nevada court than Nevada auditors would be under the same Nevada state laws. The first claim was the bigger one and on that, the court tied, which means Hyatt won because the court had to uphold a previous Nevada decision. A precedent from 1979, also involving California being sued in Nevada courts, says the Constitution allows such suits. At the time, the liberal justices wanted to allow the suit while some of the conservatives were against it. That makes sense in light of the general conservative preference for what Justice Anthony Kennedy has called the dignity of states, which ordinarily can't be sued for money damages in their own courts or the federal courts without their consent. Presumably, if Justice Antonin Scalia had been alive, there would have been five votes to reverse the 1979 precedent. In truth, if states can't be sued in federal court without their consent (which is wrong, but it's the law), it makes no sense that they can be sued in other state courts without their consent. But allowing Hyatt's suit didn't guarantee that Hyatt would get paid. The justices held 6-2 that Nevada had to treat California auditors the same way it would treat its own. Nevada state law restricts damages against state officials to $50,000, so the court knocked down Hyatt's $1 million by 95 percent, leaving him a symbolic victory only. The basis for the court's conclusion was that the full faith and credit clause, as construed by the court's precedents, prohibits states from acting inhospitably toward one another. The majority opinion, by Justice Stephen Breyer, said that differential treatment was hostile. That seems right. Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Clarence Thomas, dissented. He was silent on whether Hyatt's suit should be allowed in the first place, even though he and Thomas presumably think it shouldn't have been. Roberts rather said that the full faith and credit clause doesn't require fair treatment of one state by another. Differential treatment is only hostile, he said, if there's no reason for it. And Nevada had a reason to treat California differently: It wants to protect its citizens from intentional attacks from the outside. This is a bit odd, since Nevada should have an equal interest in protecting citizens from unjust auditors within. But Roberts did at least give some voice to Hyatt's aspiration to be protected from auditor abuse. Hyatt will have to appreciate that, since his $50,000 won't buy him much else. Bloomberg View columnist Noah Feldman is a professor of constitutional and international law at Harvard University. Six months after U.S. retailers began assuming liability for debit and credit card fraud, only a fraction of the nation's in-store payment terminals can accept the highly secure chip-enabled cards. As a result, customers often face confusion and delays at checkout counters when trying to make payments. Many small, mid-sized and independent retailers still rely on insecure magnetic-stripe cards, despite the warnings of banks and card companies that those cards can be defrauded by criminals who surreptitiously skim customer account information and then use the customer's credit card information to buy goods illegally. "Consumers don't know what to do at checkout and don't understand the chip technology and didn't feel the need for chip cards pushed upon them. They are now being caught in this mix. They don't know whether to swipe or insert a card, or sign, or use a PIN. They are dealing with longer lines, and retail staff are still learning about the cards and how they work," said Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the nonprofit EMV Migration Forum, in an interview Tuesday. The forum represents a 170-member cross-section of banks, merchants and card payment technology companies. EMV, which stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa, is a global industry standard for chip cards and the technology that supports them. Chip cards, sometimes called smart cards, are already widely used in other countries. The fraud liability shift and causes for delays Starting Oct. 1, banks and card companies said U.S. merchants would have to assume liability for fraudulent transactions if their payment terminals weren't updated to support chip cards. Of the 12 million payment terminals in the U.S., an estimated 5 million to 7 million have been converted to chip-ready hardware, but just 1.2 million of those terminals and the required software are certified to accept chip cards by hundreds of different payment processing companies, Vanderhoof said. Data from Visa tends to confirm his calculation. Visa said recently that 1.025 million merchant terminals in the U.S. could accept chip cards as of March. About three-fourths of those those terminales are in small and medium-sized businesses. However, software certifications of chip-enabled systems are accelerating, Vanderhoof said. By the end of 2016, half of all installed terminals will be certified as ready to take chip cards. "That 50% mark is considered critical for fraud to go down," he added. Banks vs. merchants, again The delays in chip card certifications have led to a battle royale between merchants and banks (and their surrogate card companies), which have been enemies for decades over credit and debit card "swipe" fees that merchants must pay banks to allow their customers to use the cards. On the one hand, the National Retail Federation blames card companies -- and indirectly the banks behind the cards -- for failing to push processing companies to certify chip-card equipment faster. Banks and card companies, meanwhile, say merchants didn't adequately prepare for the Oct. 1 liability shift, which was first announced in late 2011. There were subsequent adjustments to the requirements for chip-enabled debit cards and to meet new federal requirements, but merchants still had years to prepare, the banks said. Nearly a year ago, major industry players undertook a program to streamline and simplify the EMV testing and certification process for resellers and software vendors. That hasn't stopped the NRF from accusing card companies of mishandling the process. "At this point, the majority of major retailers have either implemented EMV [payments] or are in the process, and for the most part, retailers have done their part, but the holdup is the credit card companies who have dropped the ball and haven't certified the [software and] equipment, and that's frustrating for retailers," said NRF spokesman J. Craig Shearman in an interview on Tuesday. "It's a lack of planning and preparation on behalf of the card industry," Shearman added. "Card companies will tell you they announced the liability date a year or two ahead, but the truth is they didn't provide all the technology details and standards until a few weeks [before the Oct. 1 deadline.] Retailers didn't have years to prepare. It was a 'hurry up and wait' process." To add insult to the conversion confusion, many retailers are also reporting 10-fold or larger increases since Oct. 1 in "chargebacks" from banks for fraudulent charges that the banks no longer will pay because of the liability shift, he said. As a result, some retailers, who used to get $10,000 in chargebacks, are now facing $100,000, he said. "There's been a dramatic increase in chargebacks no relationship to EMV or not," Shearman said. Two Florida retailers sue banks, card companies Visa, MasterCard and other card companies and major banks have stood by their position that merchants and the rest of the payments industry have long known the liability shift would take place last October. They have argued that the card industry took steps to streamline certification and have even disputed some of the chargeback claims by retailers. The position of the card companies and banks is partly laid out in a 34-page legal memorandum filed in federal district court for Northern California on Monday. The memorandum asks a judge to dismiss an antitrust lawsuit (Case number 3:16-cv-01150-WHA) over the fallout following the chip card conversion filed by two Florida-based retailers against four card companies and nine major banks in March. A hearing is scheduled for June 2 before Judge William Alsup. The two retailers, B & R Supermarket and Grove Liquors, said in the lawsuit that they have seen a 20-fold increase in their bills from banks for fraudulent transactions since the Oct. 1 deadline. In response, the banks and card companies said the two retailers have not alleged sufficient facts to "establish a conspiracy to restrain trade." Their memorandum adds: "Plaintiffs [B & R and Grove Liquors] have one central gripe: It used to be that card-issuing banks bore the cost for the fraudulent credit card transactions, but now, merchants who have not timely adopted fraud-reducing technology in the form of EMV-chip-reading point-of-sale systems allegedly bear that cost until compliance. Plaintiffs blame this on decisions by the payment card networks American Express, Discover, MasterCard and Visa each to impose an Oct. 1, 2015 deadline for merchants' adoption of that fraud-reducing technology." The memorandum also says that the retailers failed to secure certification of their newly installed chip card systems before the deadline, but "claim this occurred because of a conspiracy among defendants who allegedly control the certification process." Nonetheless, some merchants were able to complete their conversion and certification in time to avoid liability for fraudulent charges, the defendants added. Patent trolls are a big enough problem that they've attracted the attention of the White House, but there's little consensus on how to stop them. A new tool from artist and engineer Alexander Reben looks to algorithms for help. Patent trolls are companies that buy up patents with the primary goal of pursuing infringement claims in court, while doing little or no technology development of their own. The practice has been a particularly big problem in the world of software, but Reben -- a graduate of the MIT Media Lab -- has developed a system he thinks could help. Tapping the concept of prior art -- which is simply evidence that an invention is not original, putting a damper on its patentability -- Reben's All Prior Art project mines text from the entire public database of U.S.-issued and published patents. From there, it mashes up random sentences and phrases to create entirely new potential "inventions" and creates prior art for them. If someone later were to try to patent those ideas, they'd find themselves out of luck thanks to the prior art Reben's algorithms have created. That's the thinking, anyway. Many of the project's "inventions" are a little wacky, Reben acknowledges. One describes a ventilation system for footwear that includes a shoe and a ventilation device. Another describes a retractable speed bump; yet another, an apparatus and mechanism for fileting fish. The site has created and published roughly 4.2 million ideas so far, but even if most of them come to nothing, Reben isn't worried. "The cost to computationally create and publish millions of ideas is nearly zero, which allows for a higher probability of possible valid prior art," his website explains. Finding prior art is one of the biggest problems when it comes to fighting off patent trolls, said Jim Burger, a partner with Thompson Coburn LLP who focuses on intellectual property in the tech industry. If Reben's system contains even 20,000 or 30,000 good examples, that could be a great help, Burger said. The bigger issue, though, is making sure they're easy to find. "The golden chalice is search," he said. "Otherwise, that's 4.2 million more documents that no one is ever going to look at." Assuming Reben's prior art can be found by those who need it, Burger sees no reason courts would object simply because it was generated by algorithms. "It's always about publication," he said. Thomas Edison tried thousands of different filaments before he came upon the right one for his lightbulb, Burger noted. "It isn't necessarily genius -- it's that you created a new way of doing something," he said. "There's all this stuff waiting to be discovered -- maybe by genius, or maybe by a computer program." Descriptions of All Prior Art's ideas are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License to prevent commercial use of the text along with restricting derivatives. The intent isn't to prevent truly innovative patents from being filed, Reben hastens to say; it's "to take the obvious and easily automated ideas out-of-play. If an idea is truly creative and innovative, a computer should have difficulty coming up with it." Reben hopes others will pick up his work and run with it. At least in theory, a large institution could dedicate multiple servers and tap technologies like deep learning to "flood the prior art space" even further, Reben suggests. "It is not unforeseeable with current technology (along with sufficient cash for fees) to flood the actual patent application process itself with sufficiently advanced patent applications based on this concept." He invites others who want to do "something interesting with this data" to contact him if the Creative Commons license he chose is a problem. In the meantime, Reben is attempting a similar feat in the claims arena with a sister website dubbed All The Claims. Opera Software today released a developer preview of its namesake browser that includes a full-featured VPN (virtual private network) client and free access to the service. "We are the first major browser maker to integrate an unlimited and free VPN or virtual private network," boasted Krystian Kolondra, Opera's head of engineering, in a Thursday post to a company blog. Although VPNs are most commonly used by corporate workers to access company data when they're outside their firm's network perimeter, Opera stressed the anonymous browsing they can provide. Opera's baked-in VPN will let users access sites blocked in their countries, or by their employers or schools. It will also anonymize the user -- the VPN disguises the actual IP address of the user -- by making it appear that the browser originated elsewhere. In a public setting, such as a coffee shop's Wi-Fi network, a VPN also provides a secure "tunnel" to the destination, preventing theft of credentials and personal information like passwords. Opera's VPN is likely based on the network of Toronto-based SurfEasy, which the Norwegian browser maker acquired last month. SurfEasy currently offers VPN subscriptions, including a plan that costs $6.49 per month when paid annually. Opera users will, in effect, be able to use a VPN without having to pay subscription fees like SurfEasy's. The VPN addition came on the heels of the March debut of an integrated ad blocker in the developer preview of Opera. Kolondra argued that features like the ad blocker and VPN are what today's customers want. "We realized that people need new features in order to browse the web efficiently in 2016," Kolondra said. "It also became apparent to us that what people need are not the same features that were relevant for their browsers 10 years ago." Computerworld downloaded and installed the Mac version of Opera's preview, enabled the VPN, and successfully browsed to numerous websites. Some, however, took a very long time to load, at least on the first instance. The inclusion of a VPN could also be set in the context of Opera's sale to a group of Chinese companies, including Beijing Kunlun Tech, a mobile game maker, and Qihoo, known for its search and anti-malware business in the People's Republic of China. That deal was urged on shareholders by Opera Software's board of directors in February. After several postponements of the deadline for a shareholder vote, a new date of May 24 was set last week. Interestingly, Opera's chief financial officer, Erik Harrell, resigned last week, and left the company immediately. Chinese users have often tried to circumvent their country's blocking efforts using VPNs, although the Communist Party-controlled government has cracked down on the technology using both official directives and technical means. While the VPN can now be accessed only from within the latest Opera developer build on Windows, OS X and Linux, Kolondra said that the tool and service would reach the production-grade browser in a "few weeks." Sure, robots and intelligent machines are likely to replace jobs in the not so distant future. The situation, though, isn't as dire as some would have you believe, according to Tom Davenport, co-author of Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines. The book is due out in May. Instead of stealing humans' jobs , artificial intelligent systems and robotics will help many people do their jobs better. "We have a new generation of technologies and we need to work with them if we're going to be productive and effective," Davenport said in an interview. "I think that in many cases, we'll be working with these machines as colleagues... I think the people who prosper will be the ones who like working with machines." Tom Davenport Tom Davenport, co-author of "Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines." There have been a lot of worried headlines and panicky warnings that robots are coming to take everyone's jobs. The robot uprising, some predict, may end with machine overlords but could begin with robots taking over as as firefighters, mail carriers, hotel concierges, fast food cooks and taxi drivers. Last November, the chief economist at the Bank of England warned that robots could take over 50% of jobs in both U.S. and British workforces over the next two decades. That would mean the loss of roughly 80 million American and 15 million British jobs. A few months before that, the Boston Consulting Group predicted that by 2025, robots will go from performing 10% of manufacturing jobs, as they do now, to 25%. Davenport, who wrote his book with journalist Julia Kirby, also has written Big Data at Work and Thinking for a Living. He said people shouldn't panic. "We are relatively optimistic, though people shouldn't be too complacent about it," said Davenport, who is a Fellow of the MIT Center for Digital Business and an Information Technology and Management professor at Babson College. "Jobs don't get replaced by robots or cognitive technologies. Tasks do. Many knowledge worker jobs will have tasks chopped away, but we tend to do a lot of things within our jobs.... We'll see some marginal job loss - maybe in the range of 10% to 20%, but we'll see some new jobs created too." Those job losses are expected over the next 10 years or so, according to Davenport. "These things take a lot longer than anybody usually predicts," he said. "As container ships become mega ships, we'll need robotic help to unload them quickly. But the longshoremen's union, in the U.S. anyway, has been very hostile to that. If you're a longshoreman, it's not good to become complacent. But we're not going to see millions of people being replaced anytime soon." Manufacturing and labor-intensive jobs aren't the only ones at risk. Davenport noted that knowledge workers' tasks could be taken over by robotics or smart machines. Over the next 20 years, that could affect fields like law, medicine, accounting, marketing and yes, even journalism. "Those are the areas being targeted by IBM's Watson and other cognitive technologies," said Davenport. "They involve so much knowledge that humans just can't deal with it anymore. Oncology, for instance, is so complex, and with genomics, how do you keep track of all the cancer genes?" That means people should think about working with robots and smart systems. "I think that in many cases we'll be working with these machines as colleagues," explained Davenport. "In insurance, a human underwriter might do the more difficult cases where some research is required or some data is missing.... In other cases, the machine might do work you used to do and you're just making sure it's done well. Or it'll be like they're working for you." Those who accept that kind of change and embrace it are likely to do well. "I do think it's not unreasonable that as we see particular tasks being taken over, we get quite nervous about it," he added. "Work is pretty important to us humans. To take that away is kind of scary. For knowledge workers, which are at the higher end of the food chain, that's pretty scary." For those doing the jobs expected to be taken over by machines, it's time to look at how they can oversee the robots or find different tasks once they're freed up from more mundane chores. They could also consider moving into positions where they're building robots, supporting them or marketing them. If you want to avoid robots, then you need to select a profession carefully. Davenport recommends TV comedy writing. "There is plenty of room for optimism," said Davenport. "The machines will take over tasks that were not that exciting to begin with. And if they're diagnosing cancer faster or making suggestions for better cancer treatments, how do you object to that?" Yahoo's annual payments of $375 million to Mozilla for making the search provider Firefox's default in the U.S. increasingly looks like a bad deal for Yahoo as Firefox's user and usage shares continue to contract. According to documents filed with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), Yahoo paid Mozilla $375 million in 2015, and is obligated for the same amount each year through 2019 under a five-year contract. Yahoo's annual payment was about $100 million more than Google paid Mozilla during their last deal, which ran from late 2012 to late 2014. Mozilla ended its association with Google in November 2014 when it switched to Yahoo to generate revenue. Computerworld arrived at Google's annual payments of $275 million using Mozilla's financial statements, the most recent of which portrayed 2014. Charles Arthur, formerly the technology editor for The Guardian, first reported on Yahoo's $375 million payments to Mozilla in a piece published on Tech.pinions. Arthur had mined Yahoo's annual report, which was filed with the SEC on Feb. 29, in which the Sunnyvale, Calif. company spelled out its traffic acquisition costs, or TAC. But as Computerworld has noted before, Firefox's user and usage shares, both global and U.S. only, have been in a long-term slump. With a diminished share, Firefox makes a less effective search vehicle for Yahoo. Since the November 2014 Yahoo-Mozilla deal went into effect, Firefox's global user share as measured by Net Applications has fallen 2.7 percentage points, representing a 21% decline. Firefox's slide has not been as dramatic in the U.S., according to another browser metrics source, Irish analytics firm StatCounter, which portrays usage share based on page views. StatCounter's data is more analogous to activity rather than estimates of the number of users who run a specific browser, as is Net Applications'. By StatCounter's figures, U.S. usage of Firefox fell by more than one and a half percentage points, representing a decline of about 12%. During the November 2014-March 2016 stretch, both Yahoo and Firefox initially saw their usage shares climb in StatCounter's tallies. Yahoo's search share peaked at 10.2% in January 2015, a two-month growth rate of 15%; in April 2015, Firefox hit a high of 18%, representing a 19% increase over November 2014. But since those crests, Yahoo and Firefox shares have slid: Yahoo's U.S. search share was 6.6% in March, off 23% from November 2014 and down 35% from its height. By March 2016, Firefox was down 25% compared to its April 2014 zenith. For 2015, Yahoo said that the deal with Mozilla had turned a profit. In its annual report, it stated that the contract resulted in an additional $394 million in revenue. By subtracting the $375 million payment, Yahoo's return was $19 million, for a profit margin of about 5%. Whether that can be repeated in 2016 is unclear; at the moment it appears doubtful. In the first three months of this year, Firefox's U.S. usage share was down 10.2% from 2015's annualized share. If that drop-off is maintained throughout 2016, and Firefox's lower share resulted in a corresponding decline in the revenue generated by Yahoo from the partnership, Yahoo would recognize $40 million less than last year, putting it in a $21 million hole on the deal. As Arthur pointed out, also unknown is what may happen to the Yahoo-Mozilla contract if or when Yahoo unloads its core businesses, as it is currently exploring. Computerworld was unable to find any SEC filings by Yahoo that spelled out the contract with Mozilla to, for instance, determine whether it had a cancellation clause. If the deal did not provide for cancellation, Yahoo's new owner will owe Mozilla $1.5 billion over the next four years. The fact that Yahoo said it "is obligated to make payments" through 2019 to Mozilla hinted that a buyer would be committed to maintaining the contract and the $375 million annual payments. Steve Bradbury opened up Litherman's Limited Brewery in Concord two weeks ago. Bradbury began as a homebrewer and has been a longtime member of the Concord Area Homebrewers. ELODIE REEDMonitor staff Steve Bradbury opened up Litherman's Limited Brewery in Concord two weeks ago. Bradbury began as a homebrewer and has been a longtime member of the Concord Area Homebrewers. ELODIE REEDMonitor staff Steve Bradbury opened up Litherman's Limited Brewery in Concord two weeks ago. Bradbury began as a homebrewer and has been a longtime member of the Concord Area Homebrewers. ELODIE REEDMonitor staff Steve Bradbury, owner of Lithermans Limited Brewery, puts labels on his beer bottles Tuesday. He opened in Concord two weeks ago. BELOW: The warehouse at Great North Aleworks in Manchester, which opened last fall and is run by Rob and Lisa North. Photos by ELODIE REED / Monitor staff Great North Aleworks, a craft brewery owned by Rob and Lisa North in Manchester, is one of numerous local breweries to open recently in New Hampshire. ELODIE REED / Monitor staff Great North Aleworks in Manchester is one of many craft breweries in New Hampshire that began at home. ELODIE REEDMonitor staff The warehouse for Great North Aleworks in Manchester, which opened up last fall and was begun by Rob and Lisa North, members of Brew Free or Die. ELODIE REEDMonitor staff Great North Aleworks sales and marketing manager Brian Parda shows off some of the Manchester brewerys craft beer Tuesday. ELODIE REEDMonitor staff Move over, Vermont: New Hampshire is making its way onto the craft brewing scene. The Granite State is at least in the process. While Vermont ranks first in the nation for craft breweries per capita (9.4 for every 100,000 adults over 21), New Hampshire ranks ninth. It has 4.5 breweries per capita, according to the Brewers Association. Of the New England states, Maine is doing well, too ranking fifth in the nation with 5.9 breweries per capita. But back to New Hampshire. The Granite State may not be as saturated with craft beer as its neighbors, though its not for a lack of enthusiasm or hard work. Just two weeks ago in Concord, Northwood resident Steve Bradbury opened Lithermans Limited Brewery, one of the states newest breweries. With the help from his friends at Concord Area Homebrewers, Bradbury went from basement brewer to a three-barrel operation in an industrial space on Hall Street in Concord. Bradbury and partner Michael Hauptly-Pierce already distribute to six stores and serve samples of six different beers in their small tasting room. Its something I always wanted to do, he said Tuesday. He added that being a part of a homebrewing club helped his business a ton. Its that type of supportive atmosphere thats helping New Hampshires craft beer scene take off. Scott Schaier of the nonprofit Brew NH said new craft breweries are opening all the time. When Schaier looked up the current number of licensed brewers in New Hampshire, he said there were 55, 11 more than 2015. Then he looked at the breweries licensed at the federal level by Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. Their number of approved businesses was higher by 16, Schaier said, adding those would most likely soon become state licensed, too. One boost to the industry was a law passed in 2014 that allowed nanobreweries to become state licensed for just $240, as long as they produced fewer than 2,000 barrels of beer each year. And then theres been the increasing attention to craft beer in the state. In contrast to Vermont, Schaier said, the Granite State hasnt been great at promoting local beer and connecting its various brewers in the past. People in New Hampshire tend not to be very braggy, he said. But Schaier and friends were sitting at a bar three years ago, wondering whether there was a way to spread the word out about locally made, locally consumed beer. Then, they sketched out a plan for their nonprofit Brew NH on the back of a cocktail napkin. The organization now has a website, connects distributors, craft brewers and consumers, and keeps an eye on beer-related legislation. Its one stop, Schaier said. Theres no way to sort of scientifically determine how much effect there is. It gets people talking, it gets people interested. He added, I think thats made a big difference. Getting the word out there is half the battle. The beer The other important thing, of course, is brewing the beer. When it comes to New Hampshires craft breweries, Schaier said, Someone being a homebrewer is the most common denominator. And thats where homebrewer clubs come in. Brew Free or Die began in 1991, and has been one of the largest and most active homebrewer clubs in the state. Based in the Manchester area, the club hosts brewing competitions, does fundraisers and, most importantly, hosts monthly meetings so members can trade sample homebrewed beer batches and give each other feedback. Brew Free or Dies president, Mike Rego, said the clubs membership at 150 active members has grown by about 50 percent over the past decade. And in the time since it began, several members have turned their hobby into a business. The homebrewing scene has really contributed a lot to those breweries that have popped up, Rego said. He cautioned that not every brewery makes high quality beer, but those that can afford quality assurance can. One example is Great North Aleworks, a Manchester brewery that opened last fall. Owners Rob and Lisa North joined Brew Free or Die after they moved into a house in Manchester, and it was then that they wanted to take what was originally a hobby for Rob to the next level. My wife and I looked at each other and asked, Why arent we trying to support ourselves with what fills us with passion? Rob said Tuesday. He left his job in information technology in 2012, worked as an assistant brewer in Newburyport, Mass., and then the couple put together a business plan for their own craft brewery. They now have a staff of six plus one part-timer (including a quality assurance manager), make three year-round brews plus seasonal beers, and run a tasting room in their industrial park property. They brew about 60 barrels of beer each week, and through an agreement with Amoskeag Beverages, distribute to about 300 stores in cans and 120 places on tap. Brew Free or Die helped to spark what would eventually become a business, Rob said. Working together Rob North said in general, everyone in the industry encourages and lends help to emerging, homegrown breweries. As they opened Great North Aleworks, he said other, already-established businesses gave advice, lent equipment, shared distributing accounts and even sometimes ingredients. I guess the big thing weve found is the craft brewing community is really tight knit and we typically help each other out, Rob said. Ed Ramshaw, the founder and president of the Concord Area Homebrewers group, said Tuesday thats because craft breweries are still emerging and are trying to carve their place in the beer industry. Nationally, craft beer comprised just 12 percent of beer sales in 2015, according to the Brewers Association. Ramshaws group makes an effort to bring homebrewers and beer fans, too from all across New England together with an annual brewing jamboree, which will take place for the 20th year in a row this fall. Rather than looking at it as competing with one another, we see whats good for you is good for me, Ramshaw said. You dont see that in many industries out there. Thats perhaps due to the nature of beer, which tends to pull people together, Ramshaw said. Beer is sort of everyones friend, he said. In that spirit, Great North Aleworks will be participating in a tasting event at Barbs Beer Emporium on Route 106 in Concord on Thursday. The tasting will be held from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. (Elodie Reed can be reached at 369-3306,ereed@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @elodie_reed.) Adam Simmonds is the Police and Crime Commissioner for Northamptonshire In the highly successful American political drama, The West Wing, Sam Seaborn, the White House deputy director of communications, pretends to take a very negative view of schools and teachers. This is in order to prepare the fictional President of the United States for a debate about education. Its a great episode and it speaks to my heart when Sam seemingly reverses his position and sets out what he really thinks. He says, Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We dont need little changes; we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defence. Thats my position. I just havent figured out how to do it yet. This is where I am. This is why I am a fierce believer in our countrys Free School programme and what it represents. To me the programme is about breaking down monopoly. Its about releasing teachers to do more and go further and innovate. Its to remove control from local bodies who havent successfully managed education for a long time. Its to allow competition and a new sense of opportunity to be grabbed by all those willing to make a difference. There shouldnt be the local school in 21st century Britain. There should be a market-filled array of schools that parents and young people can choose from, and where teachers can work. As people seeking the very best for our young people, as people looking to work in the best environments and deliver the best service and education, we need a system that constantly challenges itself (supported by good quality inspection) and which allows innovation. Innovation can be in the schools unique vision. It can mean innovation in the manner the curriculum is delivered. It can mean in the size of the classes. As a police and crime commissioner, I have seen at first hand just how important our schools are in the local community. Not just in terms of the children the school produces at the end, but while the young people are attending the school; the role of the school in the community as a source of energy and opportunity. Our teachers often know which young people need help and intervention ahead of anyone else. They know about the bullying, the victimisation, the anger and disruptive potential; they are made aware of the home-life and the direction of travel. How many teachers would say that they can tell which children will come into contact with the police and the justice system in later life? I do not want generations of young people being identified as potentially at risk of poorer life chances and nothing done about it. I dont want our schools to be limited in their capacity to intervene early enough in the lives of young people that need just that bit more time. I want schools to exist that change the curriculum to meet the needs of the client. I want schools to exist in the state system which can be small enough and organised in a way to ensure genuinely that every child matters. I want to see police and crime commissioners, just as the Home Secretary highlighted recently, that seek to galvanise new and interesting sponsors of schools universities, businesses, police forces, faith organisations, industry. In Northamptonshire I have been very publicly supportive of the Northampton Free School Trust which is seeking to open a new kind of school. This school will have a USP which is crime science. It will run the Cambridge International Curriculum and it will also focus on volunteering, citizenship, and have a close relationship with the emergency services. It will work with the Institute for Public Safety Crime and Justice to study the schools impact on each young person that attends the school, during their time at the school and beyond. The school will be an all-through school and it will seek to be the kind of school that seeks to understand each childs needs and shape the curriculum around the child. As police and crime commissioner I have championed this particular school idea because I believe what it is offering parents and young people is the opportunity of the kind of education that will do more than produce exam results; it will develop young people fit for the world around them. It is when you understand the impact of a school in a local community, that you begin to answer the question of why a police and crime commissioner should be involved or interested in education. We know that children who are permanently excluded from school are more likely to enter the justice system. We know that young people have a genuinely short time-window in which we as adults can help them. If we are interested in prevention and early intervention, the getting involved before anything goes wrong rather than only dealing with people and events after somethings happened then, like Sam Seaborn, I believe education and schools are the silver bullet. Victor Hugos famous quote that, he who opens a school door, closes a prison is just as insightful today as it was when he said it. The idea that if we get education and our schools right, that we then wont need our prisons is a powerful message for the continued motivation for reforming education and for the increasing involvement of our police and crime commissioners in building that momentum. In Northamptonshire we are building a programme of intervention and prevention under the banner of Safest Generation because thats our ambition. Our work is worth a look. Garvan Walshe was National and International Security Adviser to the Conservative Party until 2008. Will they fight like in Fallujah? must be the question running through the Iraqi governments mind. It took 10,500 US Marines over six weeks to retake the town of 300,000 that had become the headquarters of the first Iraqi insurgency. Last year, the current Iraqi army, supported by a collection of largely Shia auxiliary militias, known as the Popular Mobilisation forces, retook the Sunni town from ISIS: the latest iteration of the Baathist-Islamist rebellion. The irony that the invasion of Iraq forced the remnants of Saddams regime into alliance with a religious jihad is not lost on the conflicts Western observers, still obsessed as they are with their own error, to the neglect of the people who must live with it. Kurdistan aside, free thanks to the war, its now some 70 years since Iraqis have had an administration capable enough to keep order, without setting records for brutality unsurpassed in that region by anyone not a member of the Assad family. Shocking though ISs terror is, it should not come a surprise from an organisation peopled by ex-officers of Saddams secret police and the rougher elements of al-Qaeda in Iraq. More shocking still is that its barbarism has always been able to count on a decent element of toleration from the central Sunni towns that formed the bedrock of support for the old regime, and even from the Sunni population in more northerly Mosul. In this the comparison to the Nazis is, for once, not misplaced. ISIS are not, according to available opinion research (and there are very brave people who carry it out) exactly popular, but they are not seen as orders of magnitudes worse than the Popular Mobilisation Forces that they replaced. Not a few of the internally displaced people who have fled to Kurdistan say they fled not from Daesh, but from the Iraqi governments own auxiliary militia, whom they accuse, with justification, of sectarian atrocities. In the last few months, forces assisted by US advisers have begun to be assembled for Mosuls liberation. Peshmerga from the Kurds, the PMF, Christian and Turkmen militias sheltering in territory under Kurdish control, and shiny, American-equipped regular Iraqi government troops. Their first engagement, to take outlying villages to Mosuls south-east was not an unqualified success. That they were repulsed by a small force of ISIS fighters points either to the incompetence of regular Iraqi personnel or to ISs intention to dig in. This looks like being a long campaign, as ISIS seem determined to hold territory. It is essential that Iraqs Western backers, keen for a quick success, dont push the Iraqi forces into a fight for which they are not ready. They risk getting bogged down, or, worse, rebuffed altogether. Of even more importance is acting on the recognition that a place needs to be found for Sunnis in Iraq. Without it, even if IS is defeated, some other outfit, perhaps even worse, will take its place, promising to resist Shia and Iranian domination. Donors in the Gulf will be sympathetic, for strategic as well as sectarian reasons. An unbroken arc of Shia influence stretching from Beirut, through Damascus and Baghdad, would not unreasonably be seen as threatening. It is quite likely that even if ISIS is successfully defeated, a well-funded replacement will soon be ready to take its place. The critical question is whether that replacement will be able to gain the support of the local population. The temporary success of the US-backed Awakening shows that it is possible to win the support of Iraqs Sunni population. They however feel they have been abandoned by the Americans and need to be reassured that they wont be left alone between the Iran-backed Shia and its PMF auxiliaries, and a renewed Islamist-Baathist post-ISIS insurgency, once Western attention fades again. Should the mission to liberate Mosul be successful, its administration will be a central test of whether this can be done. Plans already exist to establish a power-sharing administration involving Sunnis, Kurds, Shia and Christians in the city. The Government of Iraq claims to be working towards just this. It remains however to be seen whether they are serious about it. If they are not, ISIS or its replacement will come back and the days of an unitary multi-sectarian Iraq will be numbered. Close Abortion pill that will allow women to kill their babies early during pregnancy is given approval in Canada. After one of the lengthiest processes ever on record the drug was approved and will be available for use starting this July. The drug when used within 49 days of pregnancy it induces abortion typically like a natural miscarriage. The drug sold in Canada with the name Mifegymiso, comes with a two-step regimen, first and second being mifepristone and misoprostol respectively. However, Health Canada's restrictions have it that women will not have access to the pills at the drug stores as prescriptions won't be handed over to them by the doctors. Moreover, under restricted drug access program doctors that get certified after completing an online training program only will be allowed to prescribe and dispense the pills. The drug has received criticism from all over the country for different reasons. Women health advocates are displeased with Health Canada's restriction over the drug as it denies the opportunity of women in having an early abortion. The usage of the Mifegymiso might also have restrictions like that of suspected drug diversion or misuse as women might require being in doctor's surveillance while taking the first dose. "There is no evidence in any jurisdiction that women would seek and obtain a mifepristone prescription, yet not use it," said Dr. Wendy Norman, a leading researcher in sexual and reproductive health at the University of British Columbia, according to National Post. "This requirement is medically unnecessary and demeaning to Canadian women." Norman also noted that most of the physicians are not planning for prescribing the pills since it is tedious for them to order and stock the drug at their expense. The doctors have to take the payment for the pills from the patients themselves, which is estimated to cost them $270 per package. "There are all kinds of reasons why it's better for women to have access to professional medical care" said Vicki Saporta, president of the National Abortion Federation, US, while sharing her opinion on self-induced abortion, reported Life News. "But when that is not available, and there is a desperate situation, these drugs are very effective, and women can safely terminate a pregnancy," she added. See Now: What Republicans Don't Want You To Know About Obamacare The Kneeling Touch! By Mohammad Ashraf 21 April, 2016 Countercurrents.org (Instead of applying the much touted Healing Touch to the suffering people, the PDP has gone for the Kneeling Touch to BJP and RSS with disastrous results for the Kashmiris!) The Peoples Democratic Party was formed during the worst ever oppression seen by Kashmiris in the nineties. The main thrust of the party was to reach the suffering people in different parts of the valley and try to give some succor to them.Mehbooba Mufti had made it a point to visit the home of every victim of violence. She used to console the relatives of the victims. She even regularly visited the homes of slain militants. Many a times she participated in protests and demonstrations against the wanton killings by the security forces. In a number of photographs she is shown holding placards saying, Stop the killings! In fact, during the first tenure of Mufti Sayed on her initiative a number of measures were taken to give some Healing Touch. The notorious Task Force was disbanded. Harassment of youth was lessened and the nocturnal raids were discontinued by the security forces. A number of bunkers were removed from different places in the city. However, in spite of the Healing Touch, there were still incidents of killings and harassment. Atal Bihari Vajpayees famous quote of solving Kashmir problem within the bounds of Humanity (Insaniyat kay dairay main) appeared to be taking some shape! The Cross LOC Bus for relatives on two sides was started. Trade between two parts of Kashmir commenced. As a goodwill measure, there were some exchanges of traders between the two parts of Kashmir which gave good signs of a sub-continental thaw! There seemed to be some movement forward on the PDPs Agenda of the so called Self-Rule. However, the completion of the Healing Touch and the realization of the so called Self-Rule remained unfinished as the Congress refused to concede PDPs demand to allow Mufti Sayed to have a full tenure of six years and Ghulam Nabi Azad became the Chief Minister as per the terms of coalition agreed upon way back in 2002 when the two parties cobbled up an alliance. The PDP which along with the Congress defeated Farooq Abdullahs NC that had won the election with an absolute majority in 1996 was alleged by some to have been propped up by Delhi with massive financial and other assistance. It is alleged that the rule of Farooq Abdullah had become very infamous globally due to massive corruption. Moreover, allegedly Delhi considered Farooq Abdullah to be unstable and untrustworthy especially after the passing of the Autonomy Resolution in the State Assembly. The Congress-PDP coalition itself was finally swept away by the 2008 Amarnath land agitation. Farooq Abdullah with his style of an expert demagogue and the master of histrionics went back to the people for another chance. The people did give him another chance but not Delhi! They forced him to crown his son Omar Abdullah in spite of his own declaration of being the next Chief Minister of the State. Omar Abdullahs rule was a total disaster especially because of the 2010 Intifada resulting in killing of 120 youth by trigger happy security forces and his alleged connivance in the hanging of Afzal Guru. The rule was finally swept away by the worst natural disaster of the century with a comic ending of the Chief Minister throwing Bananas to the marooned people from the State helicopter, giving him the epithet of a Banana Chief Minister! In the meantime, Delhi had been swept by BJP and RSS. Incidentally, Narendra Modi whom Google had put in the category of the ten top most criminals of the world became the Prime Minister. Incidentally, recently he has been put in the category of the most stupid Prime Ministers of the world! Kashmir had been devastated by the worst flood in a century which had left the capital city of Srinagar in particular, in total shambles. People needed immediate succor and rehabilitation. Had the Central government been sincere towards the people of Kashmir they would have postponed the elections and directly taken in hand the rehabilitation and restoration process. However, they perceived it to be the best opportunity to realize their Kashmir Agenda which they had been pursuing since 1947. A massive political assault was mounted on Jammu and first time inroads were made into the Kashmir valley. This Hindutva intrusion alarmed the people of the valley and a wave to resist the onslaught was generated. PDP led by its dynamic ground leader Mehbooba Mufti spear-headed the campaign for halting the Hindutva intrusion into the valley. For the first time millions came out to vote with the sole aim of keeping the Hindutva Brigade out of the valley. They gave the largest number of seats (28) to PDP. All BJP candidates except one lost their deposits. People expected PDP to take a determined stand against the Hindutva wave. However, the reverse happened. Mufti Sahib disregarding the popular sentiment tried to bring the North and South Poles together by hugging the Delhi bear. He gambled with the idea of Development for which, the Healing Touch had to be replaced by the Kneeling Touch! True to a Kashmiri parable, the Kakun Haaput, the Delhi bear fatally mauled him. Mehbooba Mufti having seen the fate of her father hesitated and dithered but was forced by some of her party colleagues to hug the Delhi bear even if it meant giving a Kneeling Touch. The immediate result has again been disastrous with the Delhi bear going berserk and fatally mauling innocent people left, right and center. NIT events and Handwara happenings are just a beginning. The worst may be still to come. However, the extreme alienation of the new generation giving rise to a new wave of militancy with common masses coming out openly in support of the militants suggests that it is not going to be honky, dory for the fanatic Hindutva Brigade of BJP and RSS to realize their long pending Kashmir Agenda! On the contrary, unless they rein in the trigger happy security forces, they may light the fuse for an unprecedented upheaval which may go beyond the borders of Kashmir! Mohammad Ashraf, I.A.S. (Retired), Former Director General Tourism, Jammu & Kashmir At 80, Failed Abbas Is Probed, Derided And Scapegoated By Ramzy Baroud 21 April, 2016 Countercurrents.org We wont act like them, we will not use violence or force, we are peaceful, we believe in peace, in peaceful popular resistance. This was part of a message issued by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in October, only days after a few incidents took place in which Palestinian youth were accused of attacking Israeli soldiers and settlers with knives. The message would have carried some weight were it not laden with contradictions. On one hand, Abbas supposed peace quest has only entrenched the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank, and all but completely isolated illegally occupied and annexed East Jerusalem. Moreover, what peaceful popular resistance is Abbas, 80, referring to? What war of peaceful national liberation has he been leading? And how could a leader, ever so unpopular, be leading a popular resistance anyway? Just two weeks before Abbas made that statement in which he referred to some illusory 'popular resistance' under his command, a poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah revealed that a majority of Palestinians, 65% of respondents, want him to resign. Of course, while Abbas continues to prophesize about some non-existent peace as he has done for most of his lucrative career Israel continues to wreak havoc on Palestinians, using every means of violence at its disposal. Granted, Israels propensity to maintain its violent occupation cannot be blamed on Abbas. It is Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his rightwing coalition that should be blamed squarely for the Occupation, the mistreatment and humiliation of Palestinians on a daily basis. However, such truth should not detract from Abbas terrible legacy and ongoing misconduct. In fact, some urgent questions must be asked in that regard: If Abbas is such a peacenik, why is his military budget so disproportionately large? According to information published by Visualizing Palestine, 31% of the PA budget is spent on the military and policing of the West Bank. Compare this to 18% on education, 13% on health and only 1% on agriculture. The latter percentage is particularly troubling, considering that Palestinian land, orchards and olive groves are the main target for Israel, which usurps the land in order to expand its military zones and illegal settlements. The huge discrepancy between funds allocated to Palestinian security forces - which never confront Israel's military occupation, only Palestinian Resistance - and those spent to assist farmers in their sumoud (steadfastness) while their land is being targeted and confiscated daily, is a testament to the mixed priorities of Abbas and his Authority. Even Israel, which is obsessed with its security, and manages several fronts of war and military occupation spends only 22% of its total budget on the military, which is still quite high by average standards. Abbas peace is, of course, quite selective. He rules over Occupied Palestinians with an iron fist, rarely tolerates dissent within his party, Fatahs, ranks, and has done his utmost to isolate Gaza and sustain a state of conflict with his enemies in the Hamas movement. More recently, and due to mere criticism levelled at him by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a prominent Palestinian faction and PLO member, Abbas decided to choke them of funds. In Abbas peaceful world, there is zero room for tolerance. The PFLP criticism was a response to statements he made on Israeli television. In a recent interview, he insisted that security coordination with Israel is a top priority for him. Without such coordination, the PA will find itself on the brink of collapse, he told Israel Channel 2 on March 31. Apart from apprehending suspected Palestinian resisters, the security coordination includes searching school childrens bags for knives, according to the Palestinian leader. Our security forces are entering schools and checking if students are carrying knives. In one school, we found 70 students with knives, and we told them that this was wrong. I told them I do not want you to kill someone and die; I want you to live and for others to live, too. Abbas statement on life and death does not, in the least, address the context of oppression, the humiliation of military occupation and the prevailing sense of despair that exists among young Palestinians, caught between a belligerent, violent Occupation, and a submissive leadership. Convincing them not to kill someone and die, involved the security forces arresting the students who were found with knives, questioning them, torturing them and threatening their families, wrote Palestinian commentator, Munir Shafiq. We only need to listen to the experiences of many who were tortured by the Israeli Shabak and the Palestinian security agencies, who said that the Palestinian security agencies are harsher, more barbaric and more brutal than the Shabak, Shafiq wrote in Arabi21. So much for being peaceful and believing in peace. Writing in Rai al-Youm, Kamal Khalf wonders if it is time to look into the legitimacy of Mahmoud Abbas, a man who has ruled with an expired mandate for years. While refraining from any personal attack on Abbas, Khalf raises the possibility whether the PA Presidents emotional and psychological well-being in his old age ought to be questioned, especially when one considers some of his latest statements: attacking Palestinian Resistance, searching childrens schoolbags and avowing his love for Israeli music. When Abbas Zaki, the well-respected member of Fatah's Central Committee, returned from a recent visit to Tehran, he was attacked by Abbas who "accused him of receiving $50 thousand from the Iranians and he demanded the money be given to him instead, he wrote. The number of Abbas bizarre actions and strange statements seem to be increasing with age. It is no secret, of course, that there has been much discussion about succession within Fatah and the PA, once Abbas is no longer in the picture. Until then, such eccentricity should be expected. However, it is essential that the discussion does not entirely focus on Abbas, for he is merely representative of a whole class of usurpers who have used the Palestinian cause to advance their own positions, wealth and prestige. There is little evidence to suggest that Abbas current position - soft on the Occupation, hard on the Palestinians - is new, or motivated by age and mental health. For the sake of fairness, the arbitrator of the Oslo accords has been consistent in this regard. Since Arafats death in 2004, and his advent to power through a questionable democratic process in 2005, Abbas has worked laboriously to co-exist with the Israeli Occupation but failed to co-exist with his own Palestinian rivals. True, it has been a decade of unmitigated Palestinian leadership failure, but it certainly took more than Abbas to manage that political fiasco. Now, at 80, Abbas seems to have become a scapegoat for a whole class of Palestinians which has worked to manage the Occupation and benefit from it. Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include Searching Jenin, The Second Palestinian Intifada and his latest My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gazas Untold Story. His website is www.ramzybaroud.net. The Act Of Seeking Forgiveness, One Sorry At A Time By B.F. Firos 21 April, 2016 Countercurrents.org 23 December, 1969. Back in Canada for the third time in seven months John Lennon and Yoko Yono had fifty-one-minute private conference with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in Ottawa. They later described him as more beautiful than we expected and added that if all politicians were like Trudeau there would be world peace. Unfortunately not all politicians are like Trudeau. But his son is one. Justin Trudeau, the current Prime Minister of Canada, is eminently living up to the exalted pedigree left behind by his father, who was loved by the Canadians. One of the first presidential decrees Justin signed after taking over as PM was letting the first batch of Syrian refugees into his country. He made it a point to personally receive them at the airport, a gesture of humility and humanity at a time of barbed wires, closed borders and threats of giant walls. Now Justine will say sorry at the House of Commons for the KomagataMaru incident. KomagataMaru, a vessel that reached on the shores of British Columbia on May 23, 1914 with 376 Indian migrants, was turned away by the authorities despite two months negations. Technically, seeking forgiveness for past sins doesnt change a thing. But the act goes a long way in healing the collective wounds current generations of past victims harbour. First and foremost, it involves the graceful act of admission of guilt. It takes a lot of courage and sense of justice to do that. It should come from the heart. Brains of bloated diplomatic ego wont be able to do that. Australian PM Tony Abbott refused to say sorry to the Aborgins. That said, in 2008 the then Australian PM Kevin Rudd had apologized to the stolen generation of Australia. British queen, in whose name all the horrible sins were committed all over the world, and her political progeny owes a series of apologies to India over the truckloads of colonial atrocities. Alas, one need to jolt out the Indian media that goes orgasmic over the royal weddings and the queen's birthdays. The Indian list of apology-worthy events is pretty long. Expecting a sorry for Gujarat genocide from the globe-trotting Modi will be asking for the moon! May be that Rs 15 lakhs deposit he promised to every citizen's bank account can happen. Never an apology. If Rahul Gandhi can offer sincere apologies to the Sikhs for the 1984 anti-Sikh killings, not an utterance of stilted or insincere words, that can indeed take the burden of guilt off the partys shoulder. He should atone for the sins of his father who made that now-infamous and tasteless earth-shakes-when-big-tree-falls comment. That should go in tandem with disowning the likes of JagdishTytler and Sajjan Kumar, who according to witnesses, took active part in the riots. Rahul Gandhi can take one or two lessons from Justin. He has his heart in the right place, but needs to go the extra mile to reinvigorate the Congress party trapped in its effete ideology and languid existence. May be a sincere sorry can create wonders. (The writer is a Dubai-based journalist. firosbf@gmail.com) Civilians Under Fire As Islamic State Seizes Yarmouk By Maureen Clare Murphy 21 April, 2016 Electronic Intifada Thousands of civilians in Yarmouk refugee camp near Damascus are once again in immediate danger as fierce fighting between rival groups has trapped families in their homes, preventing access to food and water. The Palestine Liberation Organizations envoy to Syria said Tuesday night that Islamic State militants were in control of 70 percent of the camp and were beheading and raping residents. Control over the remainder of the camp is split between Jabhat al-Nusra and allied Palestinian fighters, on the one hand, and the Syrian government, on the other, according to the Jafra Foundation, a Palestinian relief group in Syria. The Palestine Liberation Organizations Anwar Abd al-Hadi told the Maan News Agency that Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaidas affiliate in Syria, had allowed Islamic State fighters to infiltrate the camp last year, but the two extremist groups had since turned on one another, and [Islamic State] now held the majority of the camp, the agency reported. [Abd al-Hadi] said at least 20 people in the camp had been beheaded and buried before anyone was able to identify them, Maan added. Food and water shortages An estimated 6,000 families remain in the camp, according to UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees. The continuous, highly intense fighting is not only causing civilian casualties and fatalities, but has also acutely aggravated shortages of food and clean water, UNRWA stated last week. The agency was unable to deliver aid between late September last year and mid-February this year, causing severe food shortages. Once home to 150,000 residents, Yarmouk was formerly the largest Palestinian population center in the country before it became an arena of fighting in December 2012. Thousands fled after rebel forces entered the camp and its central mosque was hit in government airstrikes. Since then, electricity and water supplies to the camp have been cut and a complete siege was imposed by government forces and allied groups in July 2013. Dozens in the camp starved to death that following winter, and many more have been killed during clashes and ongoing shelling and strikes on Yarmouk. The Jafra Foundation said in a statement on Monday that the latest bout of violence erupted after Islamic State fighters seized a checkpoint between Yarmouk and the neighboring suburb of Yalda, completely cutting off civilian access to any and all supplies. Seven civilians, including two children, were killed by sniper fire, Jafra said. The group added that one of those slain, Hisham Zawabe, was a relief worker who was shot outside his home. Residents are unable to evacuate the dead and wounded from the streets due to continuous sniping, the group said, adding that two civilians were beheaded by Islamic State fighters. No doctors, medical supplies The camp currently lacks functioning medical facilities and doctors to treat injured persons. Palestine Hospital, the main medical center in the camp, has no fuel to operate equipment, Jafra stated, and Basel hospital, the only other facility in the camp, was lately destroyed by Islamic State fighters. Amputation has become a common form of treatment to save lives, as surgical tools and equipment are unable to be used and no doctors remain in the camp, the group added. Jafra warned that there is a great need for drinking water and water treatment tabs in the camp, where the groundwater is contaminated and residents have been cut off from drinking water service for more than 500 days. The Action Group for Palestinians of Syria meanwhile called for an immediate end to the fighting and for the evacuation of civilians to safer areas of the camp, and a lifting of the siege and the entry of medical aid and emergency relief. The monitoring group also called on the Syrian government and the Palestine Liberation Organization to intervene to save what remains of Yarmouk and ensure the protection of civilians there. Maureen Clare Murphy is the managing editor of The Electronic Intifada and lives in Chicago. Development: A Noose Around Keralite's Neck By K.P. Sasi 21 April, 2016 Countercurrents.org The political parties have started preparing for the election campaign for the Kerala State Assembly elections. It is everybodys guess that BJP will score more in Kerala this time. The left may criticise Congress for the progress of BJP in Kerala. But many activists may claim that both the left and the Congress have failed to check the growing communalisation in Kerala in appropriate situations, with a clear political and secular perspective. The reason the lack of clear and effective work against the growing communalisation could be the fear of losing Hindu votes since there is a general feeling that Hindutva agenda in its overall schemes is opposed, there is a possibility of losing Hindu votes. At a popular level, the result of such a dynamics is that Hinduism is more and more getting defined as Hindutva. The agenda of Sangh Parivar to spread such a consciousness among the people of Kerala has been more successful during the last few years, even if their increase in votes in the coming elections does not make a big surprise or a shock for the secular forces. But the main issue for elections is `development as usual. This terminology called `development has been subjected to a mass level debate during the last four decades in India. Unfortunately, the political parties still do not appear to have heard of such debates initiated by activists, peoples movements and many organic intellectuals in this country. The question `development for whom and at whose cost is still unrecognised by our politicians. Or rather, it could be just a pretension that they have not heard of such debates. But there is a slight improvement in recent times. Those who are branded as `anti-national and anti-development activists have succeeded in changing the tone of public statements by the politicians. The politicians in Kerala today would say that we need `environment friendly development which destroys the environment and `people friendly development which destroys people. This certainly is a remarkable step for the future! The term for the UDF rule in Kerala is getting over. The claims by the Ommen Chandy Government is that they have brought in so much of `development for Kerala and therefore people should vote for further `development. It is time for the electorate to assess the cost-benefit analysis of `development which the UDF Government has achieved during the last few years in Kerala. As uncritical observers, let us say that the claims of the UDF Government are true, to begin with. Let us assume that the thousands of crores of rupees offered as charity to Adani by the UDF Government for the construction of Vizhinjam Transit Harbour is `development. Let us assume that when the sea hits on 25 fishing villages affecting not just thousands of fisher people, but also worship places of different religions with all secular principles of equality of faith on the northern side of this mega construction, is `development. Let us assume that the destruction of the only wedge bank in India out of 20 wedge banks in the world, consisting of one of the richest biodiversity regions with a number of threatened species in the ocean a destruction facilitated by the Vizhinjam Transit Harbour Project is `development. Let us assume that the destruction of two hills from the Western Ghats in order to fill the Indian Ocean for four kilometres for this construction is `development. Let us assume that the idea of the UDF Government to construct so many airports in a small state of Kerala comprising of a length of 590 km, boiling down to one airport in every 60 km at an average, is `development. Let us assume that the decision to provide 100s of acres of land for an airport in Wayanad instead of fulfilling the promise of providing land for the Adivasis is `development. Let us assume that the dozens of malnutrition deaths among the Adivasis in Attappadi during the governance of the UDF Government is `development. Let us assume that the money that people have to pay as toll taxes for their basic right to travel in Kerala is `development. Let us assume that the huge corruption stories which were exposed in public during this time of governance by the UDF is `development. Let us assume that the speed in which you travel on a metro forgetting to look back on what you have lost is `development. Let us assume that while the Government is refusing the basic responsibility of providing the facilities of clean water, education and health for the people of Kerala, the tendency to turn essential services as a commodity in the open market is `development. Let us assume that all the unmanaged wastes filling up in villages around the towns and cities of Kerala is an indication of `development. The assumptions can be many which need not be entirely listed here at the moment. But the central question before the electorate in Kerala, even if one forgets the social, ecological, economic and cultural costs of this `development of the people for generations to come, is why `mega development projects are pushed by the politicians. There is certainly a growing interest among the politicians to push mega development projects on the throats of people using public money. They are usually pushed with wild and unrealistic claims. One of the most unarticulated and yet obvious interest is corruption. Corruption has been a subject of public debate during the last few years. UDF Government has been accused of various corruption scandals during this term. But these are all small time corruption scandals catching the headlines of newspapers for weeks or months. It is time now to understand that the real corruption is in mega development projects comprising of investments of thousands of crores of rupees. Even the opposition parties may not dare to question mega development projects. I do not wish to go into the reasons for such behaviour here. But it is time today for the electorate to ask questions to any politician about the `priorities of development and what kind of `development people really need. And this is the best opportunity to ask such questions when they come to houses for votes. Because the politicians are at the mercy of people today till the coming elections! The other important question before the electorate in Kerala, is `what kind of treasury is UDF Government leaving behind while facing the electorate again?Let us also look into this question through the claims of achievement of the UDF Government in simple economic terms as per their own words. Because it is here that we can really understand the achievement of any Government by analysing how public money is utilised. The fact that Oommen Chandy has certainly taken up development as a `serious business during his rule in Kerala can not be refuted. And what is the net result? The total debts of the state has increased to 1,35,440.4 crores during the UDF regime in Kerala as per the Legislative Asseembly Reports published by Malayala Manorama on Febrruary 10, 2016. Keralas population is 3.4 crores. If we go by an assumption that an average family in Kerala has four members, then the debt of every family in Kerala is an amount of Rs. 1,59,340 (One Lakh Fifty Nine Thousand Three Hundred and Forty) plus interests on this amount. Most of the farmers who committed suicide so far in India had suffered a debt of only less than 1.5 lakhs (One Hundred and Fifty Thousand rupees). It just means that the UDF Government in such a short period has pushed every Keralite to the verge of suicide, since the responsibility for such a debt is due to the rule of UDF during this period. And if UDF can name this as `development, then there is something fundamentally wrong in their perception of politics. Therefore, if a Keralite conducts a cost benefit analysis of the present governance and its impact on oneself, it would be clear that along with the increase in taxes and and a decrease in social welfare subsidies, the average Keralite has increased burden of debt which has to be paid with more taxes and further reduction of social welfare services in future. Hence it is too clear that along with the destruction of social, environmental and livelihood fabric of people in this state due to the present model of `development, the people of Kerala are also getting into more and more debts due to irresponsible governance. In such a context, it would be more appropriate to say that an average Keralite is facing a noose around his or her neck, just due to an irresponsible governance a governance which keeps on increasing the debts for its people! So, the concluding question facing is: `Who will return this debt? Will Oommen Chandy return this amount of Rs. 1,35,440.4 crores from his own pocket? Or is it going to be another burden for the people of Kerala? Who will return the loans from ADB and World Bank? Who will pay the burdening interests from such loans? The UDF model of development is all fine. But finally, the people of Kerala will have to bear this burden from their own pockets. Every Keralite must remember this basic reality before casting votes. If this question is not asked forcefully today, there is no need to crib in future about the increase in taxes, increase in prices, decrease in subsidies and social welfare and a decrease in all other areas of `peoples development where a government is morally responsible to pay. The only relief is that Narendra Modi is better than Ommen Chandy in tightening the noose of `development much more effectively at a national level. The foreign travels for offering subsidies to corporate companies to take away the precious natural resources of the country, providing a free hand for the communal forces and keeping a blind eye to all issues of peoples movements are a clear indication for this. And there is not much competition between UDF and BJP on the basic perspective of `development. If Oommen Chandy is offering thousands of crores to Adani as `charity for Vizhinjam Transit Harbour, Narendra Modi is also as charitable to Adani for the same project. And the left is confused as usual. Even after four decades of the successful struggle against the Silent Valley Project and a number of historical struggles against destructive mega development projects, the left is still wandering in the darkness of fear to take a proper political position to defend environment, culture and the growing number of millions of development refugees in this country. The tragedy is that the noose is always on the necks of people. Perhaps the only solution is to pray to the Development God! To save us from these development seekers! K.P Sasi is a well known film maker. It has been far too many years since the Woke theology interlaced its canons within the fabric of the Indoctrination Realm, so it is nigh time to ask: Does this Representative Republic continue, as a functioning society of a self-governed people, by contending with the unusual, self absorbed dictates of the Woke, and their vast array of Victimhood scenarios? Yes, the Religion of Woke must continue; there are so many groups of underprivileged, underserved, a direct result of unrelenting Inequity; they deserve everything. No; the Woke fools must be toppled from their self-anointed pedestal; a functioning society of a good Constitutional people cannot withstand this level of "existential" favoritism as it exists now. Thanks to what has been described as global decline in press freedom, India has improved its ranking in the Press Freedom Index (PFI) from 140 in 2014 to 136 in 2015 and 133 in 2016. Ironically, the improvement has come about alongside deterioration of its overall PFI from 40.34 in 2014 to 40.49 in 2015, and 43.17 in 2016. The calculation is based the criterion higher the figure, the worse the situation Released on Wednesday, the 2016 edition of the Paris-based not for profit Reporters Without Borders (RWB), its Global PFI ranking suggests, the only consolation for India is, four of the neighbouring countries China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Burma have been given a worse ranking. Thus, China is at virtually at the rock bottom, ranking 176 out of the 180 countries, Pakistan 147, Bangladesh 144, Burma 143, and Sri Lanka 141.Interesting though it may seem, Afghanistan is found to rank better than India, at 120, and so do Nepal at 105 and Bhutan at 94. Singapore, often projected as a "heaven", ranks 154.Commenting on India, RWB blames the Modi government for its indifference to threats against journalists, saying, Journalists and bloggers are attacked and anathematized by various religious groups that are quick to take offence.It says, It is hard for journalists to cover regions such as Kashmir that are regarded as sensitive by the government. Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems indifferent to these threats and problems, and there is no mechanism for protecting journalists.Instead, it adds, In a desire to increase control of media coverage, Modi envisages opening a journalism university run by former propaganda ministry officials.It blames the government for taking little action in response to violence against media personnel, adding, it was found sometimes directly involved in violations of their freedom.According to RWB, Frequent lawsuits against journalists by local officials and draconian legislation on defamation and online publications impose major constraints on the media.It adds, Violence has emerged as the main brake on media activity in recent years, especially for reporters in the field and investigative journalists.Wherever they work, Indian journalists are exposed to growing violence. As well as frequent verbal and physical violence, attacks by armed groups are on the rise in several states and the local authorities have had little success in reining it in, it underlines.Among comparable BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries, other than India and China, Russia scores 148, down 15 points as against India, though South Africa scores a high 29, and Brazil 104.On China, RWB notes, adding, The Communist Party took repression to new heights. Journalists were spared nothing, not even abductions, televised forced confessions and threats to relatives.Scandinavian countries are found to be among the best performers, with Finland topping the global PFI, followed by the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark. United Kingdom ranks 38, United States 41, France 45, and Japan 72.RWB notes, The global indicator decline since 2013 is 13.6%.The global indicator has gone from 3,719 points last year to 3,857 points this year, a 3.71% deterioration.The RWB works out its ranking based on pluralism, media independence, environment and self-censorship, legislative framework, transparency, infrastructure and abuse. The chancellor and president of the University of Missouri were pressured to resign by student demonstrators because they did not prevent unknown persons from uttering and writing racial slurs that unsettled many of the black students on campus. A scheduled talk by policy analyst Charles Murray at Azusa Pacific University was canceled by the president because of a controversial book Murray co-authored many years earlier on group differences in IQ scores. Harvard and Princeton abandoned the name "housemaster"-a term derived from usage at venerable English boarding schools, and like "master carpenter" and "masters degree," going back to medieval universities and medieval artisan guilds-because certain African-American students say they associate the term with the "master/slave" narrative of the antebellum South. Angry students at Williams College forced the cancellation of a scheduled talk by Suzanne Venker, an outspoken critic of feminism, who was invited as part of a program designed to enhance viewpoint diversity on campus. After criticizing certain Williams students for forcing the cancellation of Venker's talk, Williams president Adam Falk canceled the scheduled talk of "alternative right" blogger John Derbyshire, saying that Derbyshire's views on race and immigration "cross a line." When it comes to race and gender, our major colleges and universities can usually be expected to come to the wrong conclusions and make unwise, often outrageous decisions. Just consider the recent past:The news from our campuses, however, is not all bad. Earlier this month Princeton University's Board of Trustees resolved an issue that in the fall of 2015 provoked angry student protests, including a 32-hour sit-in demonstration in the university president's office led by a group called the Black Justice League.The most controversial question dealt with the legacy of Princeton past president Woodrow Wilson, who is honored in many ways, including a public policy institute and one of its residential colleges that are named for him. Students from the Black Justice League demanded several changes be made, the most contentious being the removal of Wilson's name from all places of honor at the university on the grounds that Wilson was a bigoted racist.A great debate about Wilson's past ensued, most of it poorly informed. Princeton's president, Chris Eisgruber, did what university presidents usually do in such situations-he created a committee to look into the matter. But his appointees were unusually distinguished and contained some people-including the historian A. Scott Berg-who knew something about the complex life of Princeton's early twentieth century president.The committee solicited opinions from all segments of the Princeton community, and most importantly, sought extended input from scholars and historians like Berg. The input of these scholars persuaded the committee that Wilson did many valuable and praiseworthy things for both Princeton and the nation, ones that are consistent with the values the university supports today.While Wilson's views on race relations were seen as retrograde by contemporary standards (e.g. like most Southern-born Democrats, he supported racial segregation, wanted Princeton University to remain all-white, and pushed black Republicans aside in the federal civil service in favor of whites), the many positive things he did in his public career as Princeton president, Governor of New Jersey, and President of the United States were believed to outweigh by a considerable margin the many negative things."When you look at the pluses and minuses," said committee chairman Brent Henry, "we didn't feel that the minuses were enough to eliminate his name." (Henry, who is black, is a 1969 graduate of Princeton and was a member of Wilson College during his student days). President Eisgruber approved the committee's findings, saying that achieving a more inclusive community at Princeton is best served "not by tearing down names from the past but rather being more honest about our history, including bad parts of our history."Despite his flaws, it was entirely fitting, the committee seemed to believe, that Wilson's legacy was honored in the past and should continue to be honored in the present-with clear acknowledgment of Wilson's many shortcomings. The committee opposed changing the name of either the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs or Wilson College. The committee also supported greater efforts towards "diversity and inclusion," and improving the pipeline for "underrepresented groups" in Princeton's Ph.D. programs and diversifying the art and iconography displayed on campus to better reflect the more demographically diverse current Princeton community.The Black Justice League's response to the trustees' endorsement of the committee's report was predictably negative, though perhaps not as intensely hostile as many anticipated. "Shallow words and hollow promises" was how the group summed up the committee's recommendations.I had mixed feelings about the committee's report. Members got it right on the preservation of Wilson's name on Princeton buildings, but could have better explained Wilson's views within the context of the culture and values dominant in his time. It would have been impossible for any Princeton president in 1905 to admit significant numbers of black students to Princeton, which had the largest contingent of Southerners of any Ivy League institution at a time when support for racial segregation among Southern whites was near unanimous and particularly intense.The Virginia-born Wilson, who invited the black leader Booker T. Washington to his presidential inauguration, and as U.S. president strongly condemned lynching in the South, had views on race that placed him within the more moderate segment of white Southern opinion. Many of the popular and powerful Southern politicians of the early decades of the last century, including U.S. Senator Theodore Bilbo and Mississippi governor James Vardaman, were outspoken proponents of white terror to maintain segregation, black subordination, and white supremacy in the South.Contrary to a widespread claim, Wilson never thought highly of the Ku Klux Klan, which in the 1920s included among its three million members many of the most prominent Southern Democrats, including the Alabama Senator and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black.What got lost in the discussion of Wilson's legacy as president of both Princeton and the U.S. was the fact that in many ways he did more than most leaders of his time to expand beyond white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant men to include a broader representation of humanity. Princeton president Wilson appointed the first Jew to the faculty (Horace Kallen) and the first Catholic (William McCabe); and against sizable opposition, when U.S. president, he appointed the first Jew to the Supreme Court (Louis Brandeis).He would later become a hero to many of the suppressed and subordinated ethnic minorities of Europe and the Mideast-Poles, Slavs, Arabs, Kurds-when at the Versailles Peace Conference after WWI he championed the cause of self-determination for all peoples. At the same time he backed the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution expanding voting rights to women.That Wilson did not expand the circle of human empathy to include more people of African and East Asian ethnicity is surely to be regretted. But much of the criticism heard on the Princeton campus last fall was ill-informed and self-righteous.The Wilson Legacy Committee deserves praise for recognizing the one-sided inadequacy of those who would simply dismiss Wilson's long and complex public career with the ugly epithet "racist." For a variety of reasons-including his vast expansion in the size and scope of a Leviathan government-Wilson has never been one of my favorite presidents. Libertarians and classical liberals have good reason to despise his Big Government legacy.But Woodrow Wilson was a decent and humane man who hated no ethnic or religious group, and tried to bring greater justice and peace into a troubled world according to his best lights. He should command our respect on that account, and we should reject those who would vilify his name. Alexandra Richey, left, and Francis Lawrence, rehearse one of their dances for Evansville Ballet Theatre's upcoming production of "Aladdin." Photo by Daniel Knight/Studio B SHARE Alexandra Richey and Francis Lawrence rehearse their roles in Evansville Ballet Theatre's upcoming production of "Aladdin." Photo by: Daniel Knight/Studio B Francis Lawrence, a guest artist from from the Dance Theatre of Harlem, rehearses his role as Aladdin in Evansville Ballet Theatre's upcoming production of "Aladdin." Photo by Daniel Knight/Studio B By Abbey Nickel, abbey.nickel@thegleaner.com / @abbeynickel Mark Bush, artistic director of Evansville Ballet Theatre, already knew who he wanted to play Jasmine when he first had a vision for an interpretation of the classic fairy tale "Aladdin" several years ago. This weekend, that vision will come to life as 16-year-old Alexandra Richey, a Henderson High School student, takes the stage playing the leading role as the Disney princess in the ballet company's premiere of "Aladdin" this weekend at the Henderson Fine Arts Center. "She's a senior, and this is her farewell performance, but when you look at people as they grow, I always thought this role would be a great vehicle for her," Bush said. "It's a great learning tool for her, and it's a chance a lot of young dancers don't get." The Aladdin to Richey's Jasmine is guest artist Francis Lawrence, from the Dance Theatre of Harlem. "This has really given me a sense of importance, and it's given me a lot of experience for my future dance career in terms of partnering and acting," Richey said. The performance also features another guest artist, Alfredo Solivan, portraying Genie, who has danced with the Dance Theatre of Harlem Ensemble and Continuum Contemporary Ballet. Bush said being able to correspond the right music with the dances has been a critical part of the process. "The music is what tells the story," he said. There are other components to the performance that are unique and a first for several of the performers, which includes a flying carpet. "I'm really nervous, but really excited about that," Richey said of the "floating" floor material. Bush said Richey has fit into the role of Jasmine perfectly. "This entire production has been kind of like a love letter to her," Bush said. Richey plans to pursue dancing after graduation, and the work that has gone into "Aladdin" will help her with that journey, even the more challenging parts. "There's always challenging moments with any performance you do," she said. "For example, the first act in this production introduces all the characters, but there is a part where I go to meet Aladdin, and there are five back to back dances. And they are really quick, and they take the wind out of us But that has helped build our stamina and cardio which is something we always need to work on." Now that Bush has the "perfect blend" of the right dancers, the right music and the right sequencing he says he's ready for show time. "We had our first couple of 'aha' moments last week, where everything just comes together beautifully," Bush said. And for Richey, she said the show will deliver a unique take on the classic fairy tale. "This is a really different production and has its own uniqueness to it," Richey said. "Everything is going to be so beautiful." It's also going to be quite bittersweet for Richey. "I'll definitely be shedding a few tears," she said. "This has been my home away from home, and to end my six or seven years (with Evansville Ballet Theatre) on this note is everything I could have asked for." IF YOU GO What: Evansville Ballet Theatre presents "Aladdin" When: 7 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. Where: Henderson Fine Arts enter, 2660 S. Green St., Henderson. Tickets: Prices range from $15--$25 with student tickets priced at $15. Tickets may be purchased by phone at 270-831-9800, at the fine arts center or online at HendersonFAC.com. SHARE Continuing 'Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice' Batman (Ben Affleck) and Superman (Henry Cavill) clash over differing philosophies about what kind of heroism is needed to protect the world, while the public they're defending is becoming increasingly mindful of the damage that superheroes and masked vigilantes cause. The duo are soon forced to confront an even greater threat created by nefarious billionaire Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg). (PG-13) 'barbershop: the next cut' As their surrounding community has taken a turn for the worse, the crew at Calvin's Barbershop come together to bring some much needed change to their neighborhood. Stars Ice Cube, Regina Hall and Anthony Anderson. (PG-13) 'the boss' A titan of industry is sent to prison after she's caught for insider trading. When she emerges ready to rebrand herself as America's latest sweetheart, not everyone she cheated is so quick to forgive and forget. Stars Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Bell and Peter Dinklage. (R) 'criminal' In a last-ditch effort to stop a diabolical plot, a dead CIA operative's memories, secrets, and skills are implanted into a death-row inmate in hopes the he will complete the operative's mission. Stars Kevin Costner, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot. (R) 'Deadpool' A former Special Forces operative turned mercenary (Ryan Reynolds) is subjected to a rogue experiment that leaves him with accelerated healing powers, adopting the alter ego Deadpool. (R) 'The Divergent Series: Allegiant' After the earth-shattering revelations of Insurgent, Tris (Shailene Woodley) must escape with Four (Theo James) beyond the wall that encircles Chicago to finally discover the shocking truth of what lies behind it. (PG-13) 'god's not dead 2' When a high school teacher is asked a question in class about Jesus, her reasoned response lands her in deep trouble and could expel God from the public square once and for all. Stars Jesse Metcalfe, David A.R. White, Ray Wise and Melissa Joan Hart. (PG) 'gods of Egypt' Mortal hero Bek (Brenton Thwaites) teams with the god Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) in an alliance against Set (Gerard Butler), the merciless god of darkness who has usurped Egypt's throne, plunging the once peaceful and prosperous empire into chaos and conflict. (PG-13) 'the jungle book The man-cub Mowgli (Neel Sethi) flees the jungle after a threat from the tiger Shere Khan (voiced by Idris Elba). Guided by Bagheera (voiced by Ben Kingsley) the panther and the bear Baloo (voiced by Bill Murray), Mowgli embarks on a journey of self-discovery, though he also meets creatures who don't have his best interests at heart. (PG) 'Kung Fu Panda 3' Continuing his "legendary adventures of awesomeness," Po must face two hugely epic, but different threats: one supernatural and the other a little closer to his home. Stars the voices of Jack Black, Angelina Jolie and Dustin Hoffman. (PG) 'miracles from heaven' A young girl suffering from a rare digestive disorder finds herself miraculously cured after surviving a terrible accident. Stars Jennifer Garner, Kylie Rogers and Martin Henderson (PG) 'my big fat Greek wedding 2' A Portokalos family secret brings the beloved characters back together for an even bigger and Greeker wedding. Stars Nia Vardalos, John Corbett, Elena Kampouris, Michael Constantine and Lainie Kazan. (PG-13) 'race' Jesse Owens' (Stephan James) quest to become the greatest track and field athlete in history thrusts him onto the world stage of the 1936 Olympics, where he faces off against Adolf Hitler's vision of Aryan supremacy. (PG-13) 'the revenant' Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a 19th century fur trapper who seeks vengeance against the companions who robbed him and left him for dead following a vicious grizzly bear attack. (R) 'ride along 2' As his wedding day approaches, Ben heads to Miami with his soon-to-be brother-in-law James to bring down a drug dealer who's supplying the dealers of Atlanta with product. Stars Ice Cube, Kevin Hart and Tika Sumpter. (PG-13) '10 cloverfield lane' A woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) discovers the horrifying truth about the outside world while living in an underground shelter with two men (John Goodman, John Gallagher Jr.). (PG-13) 'whiskey tango foxtrot' A journalist recounts her wartime coverage in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Stars Tina Fey, Margot Robbie and Martin Freeman. (R) 'zootopia' In a city of anthropomorphic animals, a fugitive con artist fox and a rookie bunny cop must work together to uncover a conspiracy. Stars the voices of Ginnifer Goodwin, Jason Bateman and Idris Elba. (PG) The following was a nightlife column written by Evansville Courier correspondent Joni Hoke in January 1998. Some background: Prince (at the time referred to as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince or just a symbol) scheduled a tour stop at Evansville's Roberts Stadium. The show drew 8,300 people. A $15-per-person "mini show" for Prince's charity was announced at Harpole's, a bar at the Main Street exit of the Lloyd Expressway. Prince came, but there was no show. His appearance on the stage at Harpole's could've been measured in seconds. It was a unique moment in the history of Evansville nightlife. Harpole's, which later became Woody's, was destroyed by fire in 2009. A shell of the burned-out building still sits next to the Lloyd Expressway. Every election season, it becomes a hanging place for campaign signs. This year, it's Donald Trump. *** We felt special when The Artist decided to stop in Evansville on tour. We felt even better when we heard at the concert that he was holding an aftershow party at Harpole's Main Street Exit. Better, that is, until we were $15 lighter and three hours older, realizing that all we would be seeing of The Artist was a flash of gold ear cuff and the fur trim of his coat. The cover charge proceeds were to go to Love 4 One Another Charities, a gathering pot of monies to be distributed as The Artist sees fit, said publicist Frances Pennington. Some examples include Coat-A-Kid in Cleveland, or the Smith-Robertson Foundation in Jackson, Miss. Most, she said, are geared toward youth advancement or fostering music study. "The parties are to raise funds for these causes," Ms. Pennington said. "They're never contingent upon (his performing)." The Artist and "his people," identified by matching ear cuffs, sunglasses and laminates around their necks, overestimated the turnout of the party, telling club owner Danny Harpole late Monday afternoon to expect 1,000 people. So Harpole overstocked all his coolers and prepared to shut down business on the upper floor. By his estimate, 300 people came. And for a long time, none of them was The Artist. No one would say exactly what was going to happen, so everyone stayed. Finally, around 2:45 a.m., His Highness was shuffled in through the back, straight upstairs to his secured area, where, Harpole said, The Artist looked to round up a game of pool. A tour bus rumbled in the parking lot, just to keep hopes high. Harpole said of the encounter, "I thought, `There are people down there waiting for you.' And then he didn't even want to pay 75 cents for the pool game. "He had his assistant tell me he didn't want me standing nearby while he was playing pool. I told them, `He can get out his big checkbook and cut me a check for the bar right now, call it Prince 's Main Street Exit, and then I'll stand where he wants me to. In the meantime, I'll stand here.' "It was a bunch of prima donna stuff I could have done without." Just a few people noticed The Artist being whooshed upstairs, and a few minutes later, Terry Mosley said, "That's all you're going to see of him. I'm friends with a bouncer, and he heard from `his people' upstairs that we'll be lucky if he even makes a trip down here." "No way!" someone exploded. "Hey, my fifteen's gone, too," said the easygoing Randy Craddox. "It's for charity." "I give to charity," said Dee Liddle bitterly. "Tonight I planned to do some taking." At about 2:55 a.m., The Artist appeared on the stairwell, doing that cute eye-rolling thing he does so well, was swooped onto the stage, and stood there looking around long enough to blink a few times. His appearance at Harpole 's lasted about as long as the one in "Fargo." In a flash, he was gone. The lights went up, and everyone was herded out. "You couldn't get a straight answer," lamented Lynn Kyle. "We were very upset, ready to start screaming, and when it was over, there was no one to complain to." I had been to a party like this before. It was 1983, my friends and I were in the seventh grade, and it went exactly the same: people stood around dancing for three hours to Prince songs, then the lights came on, and everyone left feeling frustrated. "If you want my honest opinion," Harpole said, "he ripped people off. "I was really disappointed in what he did to the fans here. They didn't get what they paid for, and it made my club look bad. I apologize to anyone who paid $15 to see someone for 30 seconds. "I just hope the money goes to the right place. The smartest thing I saw anyone do," he said, "was pay with a check. The guy did tell her a foundation to make it out to. " SHARE Photo furnished ToniMarie Marchioni Photo furnished Michael Lewis and Denise Wilson of Traveler's Dream. Paul Gregoire By Abbey Doyle of the Courier and Press Paul Gregoire had to leave Louisiana to start playing Cajun music. Now away from his south Louisiana roots of Dulac for 27 years, Gregoire said keeping the tradition, culture, flavor and fun of home alive and spreading it to others is his passion. He's one of several performers that will be a part of a musical journey Saturday as part of the New Harmony Music Festival & School's "From The French Court To The Cajun Kitchen" concert, offered both at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Thrall's Opera House. The festival concert will trace music from ancient France across the Atlantic, through Quebec, Wabash Country, down the Mississippi and to the "Cajun-land" in Louisiana. It will feature Gregorian chant, French baroque oboe music, bagpipes and end with a Cajun hoedown, according to festival and school founder Christopher Layer. He described the concert as a "music party from start to finish." "This is a rare opportunity to experience authentic French traditional music and songs collected from Burgundy, in France, French Canada, the Midwest and Louisiana," he said in a release. "Much of this music is still with us to this very day." Gregoire, now with Nashville, Tennessee-based Roux du Bayou Cajun Band, will be performing on the Cajun accordion, le Petit foie (triangle), frottier (scrub board) and piano. "I love to be able to blend different kinds of cultural music all in one place," he said. "That's what I'm most excited about is bringing part of Louisiana there. People can sit there and experience all of these cultures and learn." Gregoire is fluent in Cajun French and said much of the music will be in French. Festivals such as this one are important to keep these different cultures alive. He's doing his best to teach his son, Paul III, to sing and speak Cajun French and to play the traditional Cajun instruments. And he laughs when he hears the 5-year-old singing along with "J'ai Vu Le Loup, Le Renard Et La Belette." "It's important to keep sharing and playing the music to keep it alive," he said. Denise Wilson has known Layer for several years, first meeting him when they were teenagers playing in a historical drum and fife corps. The Lafayette-based musician will be singing and playing the Irish flute and whistle. She's toured for several years around the Midwest playing Old French and Celtic music. Layer will be performing the French flute and bagpipes with her as well. "I was so enchanted to learn that the Midwest had French history and so enjoyed traveling to French historic sites throughout the Midwest that I ended up majoring in French and history when studying at Purdue." Wilson's doctorate in history has an emphasis on the French in the Midwest and her dissertation has a focus on Vincennes and its founding. "This concert will be like a homecoming," she said. "It is going to be a great group. It is rare to hear this quality of so many different kinds of French music together. The diversity in style and instrumentation is amazing. It is going to be a lot of fun. There will be a great connection with those on stage and the audience." ToniMarie Marchioni, who will perform Baroque oboe music, said communal concerts such as this festival concert are among her favorite experiences. "Experiencing art together in any form is so important to keeping us alive as people," she said. Other scheduled performers include Wade Bernard, Michael Lewis and Roger Barhart. If you go What: From the French Court to the Cajun Kitchen When: 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday Where: Thrall's Opera House, New Harmony, Ind. Tickets: $15 for 2 p.m. show, $25 for 7:30 p.m. show, $25 for both shows. Call 812-472-4321 or visit newharmonymusicfest.com for more information or to order tickets. SHARE By Mark Wilson of the Courier and Press An Evansville man who pleaded guilty to charges in a fatal drunken driving crash Thursday was playing drinking games at a Burdette Park gathering before the collision occurred. Vanderburgh County Deputy Prosecutor Malcolm Gwinn said that had Michael Gann's case gone to trial next week there would have been evidence that Gann had been drinking shots of hard liquor and that he was seen vomiting before getting in a Jeep and driving away. The information came to light during a Vanderburgh Circuit Court hearing in which Gann pleaded guilty to killing Evansville teenager Logan Brown and injuring two other teens in a 2015 crash. It was, in the mind of Logan's father Charles Brown, an inevitable conclusion whether or not the case went to trial. "This is just a formality. We were fully prepared to for it to go to trial," he said. "It was going to happen either way." However, Charles Brown said he couldn't say whether he felt justice had been served until after Gann's sentencing, which is set for 8 a.m. June 28. Until then, Gann will remain on electronic home detention with alcohol monitoring as he has been since his initial court hearing in April 2015. "This is an average guy. He is a good husband, father and employee who had a horrific lapse in judgement and is accepting responsibility for his actions," said Shaunda Lynch, Gann's attorney. Gann, 39, pleaded guilty to causing death while operating a motor vehicle with a blood-alcohol content equal to or greater than 0.15 percent, a level 4 felony; as well as two counts of operating a motor vehicle causing serious bodily injury with a blood-alcohol content equal to or greater than 0.08 percent, level 6 felonies. As an "open" plea, Gann's sentence will be determined by Judge David Kiely. Although he could receive up to a 12-year prison term for the level 4 felony, the recommended sentence under state law is six years. Gann also faces up to 2 1/2 years for each of the level 6 felonies, sentences that could be ordered served concurrently with the sentence for causing a death. He also pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, a class B misdemeanor, for reportedly striking a parked vehicle at a gas station before the fatal collision. Gann was traveling south on University Parkway on March 14, 2015, when his vehicle crossed the grass median into the northbound lanes and struck a vehicle driven by Kurt Osborne. Brown and Hannah Miller were passengers in Osborne's car, according to police. In court Thursday, Gwinn said that Gann's blood-alcohol level at the time of the crash was "at least" 0.27 percent. However, Lynch said that Gann's blood alcohol level was 0.27 percent but was not, as Gwinn said, "at least" 0.27 percent which she said implied it could have been higher. Lynch also said that Gann was sober when he arrived at the party, only stayed for 25 minutes and that the alcohol was provided by another person. She said Gann's plea was delayed by defense efforts to depose witnesses and uncover what happened before the crash because Gann had no memory of it himself. "It was very, very important to find out what happened that night, specifically at a party prior (to the crash) at Burdette," she said. Lynch said that it was important for Gann and everybody involved in the case but especially for the families of Logan Brown and the injured teenagers. "We can't give them closure. We can't give them healing bit we can give them the how and why," she said. Last Month, The Air Force Only Met 61% Of The Army's Paratrooper Jump Requirements Parachute Jumps at Fort Bragg March 2016 Required Exited % of Required Parachute Jumps 10,000 6,144 61% Tillis on the Pentagon's strategically flawed decision to dismantle the 440th Airlift Wing: "In the 15 months that I have had the privilege to represent North Carolina in the Senate, I've made the readiness of the XVIII Airborne one of my top priorities. In fact, you'd think it would be everybody's top priority. But I've watched budget cutters in the Air Force slowly chip away at the abilities of commanders at Fort Bragg to adequately train their paratroopers at Pope Army Airfield. This year the Air Force began dismantling the one Air Force tactical unit at Pope, the 440th Airlift Wing, capable of providing daily and ad hoc support for Fort Bragg soldiers. I said at the time that the removal of the 440th created unreasonable risk to the readiness of critical airborne units. They must be prepared to respond to a range of contingencies in very short time frames. I pointed out repeatedly that the deactivation of the 440th comes at a time when the nation is facing growing uncertainty and increasing threats abroad that could require a military response, and it's a response that only forces at Fort Bragg can fulfill." [WATCH HERE] Tillis on the Pentagon "suspending disbelief" to justify its decision: "Air Force leadership stated that after any deactivation of the 440th, out-of-state aircraft would support all airlift requirements for Fort Bragg units at Pope. The Air Force asked me to suspend disbelief. They told me to accept that it is more cost effective for units to fly from Little Rock, Arkansas, or McChord Air Force Base in Washington State rather than have planes stationed at Fort Bragg. I did my best to ensure that the Air Force understood what the Army's requirements were and I promised them that if they moved the 440th I would be monitoring their ability to meet requirements for as long as I'm in the U.S. Senate." [WATCH HERE] Tillis keeping the pressure on the Pentagon to meet the Army's training requirements: "I hope the Air Force knows that I have their back as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. But, in this case, this is about fulfilling the Army's requirements. This is about having their back. This is about making sure that the men and women who will be asked at a moment's notice to assemble on the Green Ramp at Pope Army Airfield and to go wherever they must to defend freedom are at their highest state of readiness. The performance to this point suggests that the Air Force is failing its customer service commitment for the Army. No business in America would survive if the supplier dictates to the customer how and when they're going to get their product. But that's exactly what's happening with the Air Force's relationship with the Army, and they're failing. I will ask Senator McCain to inquire as to when the Air Force expects to meet the needs of the Global Response Force...If they can't answer that question then it is time for us to consider other options." [WATCH HERE] WASHINGTON, D.C. Today, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) delivered a Senate floor speech to provide an update on the Pentagon's failure to meet the Army's paratrooper training requirements at Fort Bragg.Earlier this year, the Pentagon announced it would be dismantling the 440th Airlift Wing at Pope Airfield, claiming that it would be more cost effective to fly in planes from other parts of the country to serve the XVIII Airborne Corps and would not compromise the Army's training and readiness.However, the Air Force has subsequently fallen woefully short of fulfilling the Army's training requirements for paratrooper jumps. The Air Force only fulfilled 61% of the Army's required number of jumps in March of 2016, one month after failing to meet its requirements in February. The March numbers were 1,300 jumps below that of February. The Army had to augment the lack of paratroop support by having an additional 375 jumps from Army helicopters.The XVIII Airborne Corps has been clear that it requires 10,000 parachute jumps a month to be proficient. Army regulations state that 8,000 jumps a month are the minimum to keep the Sky Dragons and the All American Division current. The Air Force has failed to meet the 8,000 chute minimum, much less the 10,000 jump requirement Fort Bragg says it must have.The inadequate number of jumps are illuminating considering that Fort Bragg had outstanding flying weather during the first three months of the year, raising concerns over how much further the Air Force will fall short of the Army's requirements during the thunderstorm season of summer.Senator Tillis has been leading the effort with the North Carolina Congressional delegation to protect the C-130H presence at Fort Bragg and ultimately ensure that the Army's training requirements are being met. During his speech, Senator Tillis stated he will be working with Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain to push the Pentagon to answer when they expect to meet the training needs of the Global Response Force. SHARE Karen Waterbury By Len Wells of the Courier and Press Karen Waterbury, a science teacher at St. Mary's Catholic School in Mount Carmel, Illinois, has been named the 2016 American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) teacher of the year. Waterbury, who has taught fourth- and fifth-grade science for 39 years, was chosen as the top teacher by a panel of national judges. Her award includes a $6,000 prize, half of which will be given to Waterbury for personal use and the other half to St. Mary's School for educational use under her supervision. She also receives a trip to the 2016 AAPG convention and exhibition in Calgary, Canada in June. Waterbury was one of six finalists for the award. Each was selected as the top geoscience educator in their respective geographic regions. The remaining semi-finalists each received honorable mentions and $500 awards from the AAPG Foundation. SHARE By Adam Beam, Associated Press FRANKFORT, Ky. Republican Gov. Matt Bevin removed the chairman of the Kentucky Retirement Systems board of trustees Wednesday, saying one of the country's worst-funded public pension systems needs a "fresh start." Thomas K. Elliott was re-appointed to the board by former Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear last year. His term does not expire until 2019. The board is scheduled to meet Thursday morning, when Elliott could be re-elected as chairman. But Bevin issued an executive order late Wednesday afternoon immediately removing him from the board. Bevin spokeswoman Jessica Ditto said the governor removed Elliott because, under Elliott's leadership, the Kentucky Retirement Systems opposed a bill in the state legislature that would have required it to disclose investment fees, contracts and staff salaries on its website. And it would have required the systems to use the same competitive bidding process used by the rest of state government. "KRS needs a fresh start and more transparency," Ditto said. Attempts to reach Elliott were unsuccessful. Kentucky Retirement Systems Executive Director William Thielen said Elliot will attend Thursday's board meeting and the board will "conduct business as usual." He said Bevin does not have the authority to remove Elliott. Elliott is an executive with Old National Bank. "As an attorney, it would be my view that the governor has exceeded his authority in trying to do that and will probably end up in a some kind of a litigation over it," Thielen said. The Kentucky Retirement Systems is among the worst-funded systems in the country. It has an unfunded liability of more than $19 billion. Bevin campaigned on fixing the problem, and as governor he proposed $650 million in spending cuts to begin paying down the debt. State budget talks almost imploded over the issue of how much money to pay toward the debt over the next two years. And the Republican-controlled state Senate passed a bill it said would make information about the struggling system publicly available. But the bill died in the Democratic-controlled state House of Representatives. Thielen, the executive director, sent a letter to lawmakers saying they should not pass the bill until the state completed a comprehensive audit of the retirement systems. "I don't think they have any clue of the impact of the proposals," Thielen said. "They needed to wait until that audit was conducted before they made major changes to the system." Bevin's office cited a Kentucky state law that says the governor can remove any officers appointed by him "for any cause the governor deems sufficient." The exceptions are the board of trustees for public colleges and universities, the Council on Postsecondary Education and the state Board of Education. They also cited a 1934 state appellate court decision upholding the right of then-Gov. Ruby Laffoon to remove a member of the state highway commission without giving a reason. This is the second time Bevin has removed the political appointees of his Democratic predecessor. Last month, he removed Kentucky Horse Park Commission chairwoman Alston Kerr from her unexpired term and replaced her with Louisville attorney Tandy Patrick. Democratic lawmakers protested, and House Speaker Greg Stumbo asked Attorney General Andy Beshear to issue an opinion. Beshear said Bevin did not have the authority to make the change, but the opinion was not binding and Kerr was removed. SHARE Richard Moss By Richard Moss, Special to the Courier & Press I am pleased to have the opportunity to introduce myself to the readers of the Evansville Courier-Press at this critical time. I am seeking the nomination for Congress for the 8th Congressional district in the May 3, 2016 Republican primary. Like many of you reading this and millions of Americans across the land, I am deeply concerned that Republican leadership in Washington has strayed from the voters that sent them there. One cannot avoid the obvious reality that Republican primary voters over the last six months have rejected the preferred candidates of the "Republican Establishment" beginning with Jeb Bush, but then as well Chris Christy, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich, who stays in the race despite having no mathematical path to the nomination. Instead, they have settled on two "outsiders," Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. It reflects the wave of frustration and discontent that I and millions of others feel not just with the federal government but specifically with our party, the Republican Party in Washington DC. We Republican grass roots activists, the conservative base, the American people, delivered unto the Republican Party a historic landslide wave election victory in 2014, a stunning repudiation of President Barack Obama and his policies. We took both houses of Congress and overwhelming majorities of governors and state legislatures. We sent our representatives to Washington to do a job: to stop Obama from doing any more damage to the country. We did not send them there to capitulate. But on too many major issues, capitulate is exactly what they have done. On the debt, spending, "Cromnibus," Obamacare, Amnesty, the EPA, Import-Export, Fast Track, Planned Parenthood, and the Iran Nuclear deal, Republicans in Washington have given President Obama all that he has asked for. Congressman Larry Bucshon has gone along with much of this. We have, in effect, two liberal parties running the country. We have a hard left Marxist Democratic Party and a big government, big spending liberal progressive Republican Party. The trajectory is all to the left: more debt, more government, more socialism, more tyranny. The nation will not sustain this. I hold that the Republican Party must be the vehicle through which we save the nation. But it must be a new, revitalized Republican Party, a party of as Ronald Reagan called for "of bold colors not pale pastels." We must have a credible, passionate, and principled conservative party if we are to undo the damage of the Obama years and restore our nation to greatness. I present myself as your conservative alternative in this race. I will stand for liberty, limited government, balanced budgets, the rule of law, and American sovereignty. I will defend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, including religious liberty, the 2nd amendment, states' rights, and the tenth amendment. I believe in the free enterprise system, term limits, and family values. I would oppose amnesty and would build a wall and protect the rights of American citizens and American workers. I would stop the EPA and its war on fossil fuels, our economy, and tens of thousands of jobs. I would rebuild our military. I refer to this as my legislative agenda for Indiana's 8th Congressional district, the state, and the nation. It is available in more detail on my website rmoss4congress.com By way of background let me to share the following. I am a board certified specialist in Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery (Ear Nose and Throat). I earned my undergraduate degree in Biology at Indiana University and completed my Doctor of Medicine degree at the I.U. School of Medicine in Indianapolis. I have been in private practice since 1991 with offices in Jasper and Washington for over 20 years. Between 1987 and 1990, I traveled extensively throughout Asia, serving as a visiting surgeon on a voluntary basis at major medical centers in Thailand, Nepal, India, and Bangladesh. Although I received little or no compensation during these three years, I consider them among the most rewarding periods of my life. I have been a conservative columnist, radio talk show host, maintain a conservative blog (exodusmd.com) and recently authored a memoir about my mother (Matilda's Triumph), which chronicles her struggles raising her five children as a single parent in the Bronx. I founded and owned the "Bronx Bagel," a bagel shop and deli in Jasper I have been happily married to Supit Moss for 26 years. We are proud parents of four children, Arielle (23), Noah (21), Adina (13), and Isaiah (12). Arielle is a recent graduate of I.U. Bloomington and a Fulbright Scholar teaching in Morocco where she now resides. Noah is currently studying Business Management at I.U. Bloomington. Adina and Isaiah attend Jasper Middle School. We are members of the Temple Adath B'nai Israel (a synagogue) in Evansville. I seek office because of profound concerns over the direction of the country and the behavior of the federal government. I feel that both parties have failed the American people. Indiana's 8th Congressional district deserves a strong new conservative voice in Washington. I believe that conservative leadership in the Republican Party is required if we are to build a better future for ourselves, our children, and future generations. ECU hosts 5th annual High School STEM Day Kyle Reitzel showed students a pick and place robot. High school students from Greene Central high school participate in robotic demonstrations during STEM Day in the Science and Technology Building. Brandalyn Watts showed an ECU student-built robot used to compete in a ATMAE (Association of Technology Management and Applied Engineering) competition. (Photos by Cliff Hollis) East Carolina University welcomed 300 high school juniors to campus Friday, April 8, for hands-on learning in STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), as part of the 5th annual High School STEM Day. Attendance included 16 high schools from nine counties across eastern North Carolina.said Simon Curtis, a teacher at D.H. Conley High School in Greenville who brought 20 students interested in health sciences, math and science to STEM Day.said Kelly Burden, social worker at John T. Hoggard High School.Jim Figliolia of Mosley Performance Learning Center, who participated in STEM Day as a chaperone to a group of about 40 high school students from the Wilmington area, said,Twenty students from each area high school were divided into two groups. An ECU student chaperone majoring in a STEM field, who could discuss their experiences, led each group of high school students around campus.said Margaret Turner, director of marketing and outreach for the College of Engineering and Technology and STEM Day event organizer.Throughout the morning, high school students traveled to different classrooms and labs around campus and participated in three out of 15 possible hands-on sessions directed by current ECU faculty and students. Sessions were offered in atmospheric science, biology, chemistry, computer science, construction management, engineering, geography, geological sciences, mathematics, math education, physics and technology systems.said ECU physics senior Jonathan Gill, who helped present one of the hands-on physics sessions.said first-time session leader Jonathan Molai, an ECU freshman double majoring in biology and philosophy.College of Education students helped facilitate the math education session during STEM Day. Participants worked to solve geometry problems using software called Geometer Sketch Pad. At the end of the session, the education students shared why they decided to pursue a career in high school math education.said Rebecca Pool, an ECU junior math education major.Pine Forest High School student and STEM Day participant, Rebecca, who is considering studying forensics when she attends college, said this is a good experience. During one of the biology sessions, she was able to test phosphates in a water sample and she learned about GIS technologies and mapping in the geography session led by Dr. Thad Wasklewicz.STEM Day participant and Hoggard High School junior Christian is interested in majoring in technology, specifically networking, when he attends college. He said the hands-on sessions provide a good example of what one can do in their career.High School STEM Day is an important part of the STEM initiative at ECU and helps to promote the variety of opportunities available for students, according to organizers. The annual event, co-sponsored by ECU's Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Education and the College of Engineering and Technology, is free to attendees and includes lunch, campus tours from the Office of Admissions and goodie bags with items and informational materials donated from various departments across campus.said William M. Downs, dean of the Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences. Sussex News Story Saved You can find this story in My Bookmarks. Or by navigating to the user icon in the top right. A familiar sight on Upper Goose Creek: Above. photo by Stan Deatherage Click image to expand. Please join us this Saturday, April 23 at 2:00 pm for Swamp Life Discoveries as we participate in the North Carolina Science Festival. Please see the attached for more details regarding the program.As always, our programs are free to the public and we hope to see you at one soon. Please let all your family & friends know about the program.Goose Creek State Park will present "Swamp Life Discoveries" on April 23rd at 2:00pm at the park's visitor center. "Swamp Life Discoveries" is an official event of the 2016 North Carolina Science Festival presented by the Biogen Foundation.Swamp Life Discoveries will include a .75 mile hike through a typical North Carolina swamp and marsh. Throughout the hike there will be multiple stops to observe, catch and study some of the critters that call the swamp "home". For more information about Swamp Life Discoveries, contact Goose Creek State Park at (252) 923-2191.As an official 2016 North Carolina Science Festival event, Swamp Life Discoveries is among hundreds of community-based events that are showcasing STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) activities for the citizens of North Carolina.Founded in 2010, the North Carolina Science Festival is the first statewide science festival in the United States. Through a two-week series of community-based events each spring (hosted by schools, colleges, libraries, museums, parks, businesses and other local organizations), the Festival celebrates the economic, educational and cultural impact of science in North Carolina."Science is fun, science is everywhere, science is for everyone - that's what the North Carolina Science Festival is all about," said Jonathan Frederick, Festival director. "In 2016, we have a special focus on 'Science in the Great Outdoors' in partnership with North Carolina State Parks, with events from April 8 through April 24."The North Carolina Science Festival is presented by the Biogen Foundation and produced by Morehead Planetarium and Science Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For more information, visitVanessa FischerGoose Greek State Park2190 Camp Leach RoadWashington, NC 27889Phone: How long should an iPhone last? That's not a rhetorical question - like how many roads must a man walk down? or would you like to make Yahoo your default search engine? - it turns out it's a real question with a real answer. And that answer, according to Apple, is three years. This may come as a surprise to mobile networks that routinely offer iPhones and its rivals on contracts that last for just two thirds of that time before offering you an 'upgrade', but that's what Apple claims in its new environmental Q&A section of the website. It suggests the same lifetime for Apple Watches, and a year extra for MacBooks and iMacs, at four years. "To model customer use, we measure the power consumed by a product while it is running in a simulated scenario, the company explains. Daily usage patterns are specific to each product and are a mixture of actual and modelled customer use data. Years of use, which are based on first owners, are assumed to be four years for OS X and tvOS devices and three years for iOS and watchOS devices. The same page goes on to outline some of the elements that it doesn't use in its products and provides a little explanation as to how it calculates the Greenhouse Gas contribution of each product over its life. Although Apple themselves would admit that this is far from environmentally perfect, the company seems to be doing more than just giving lip service to the fact that our thirst for faster gadgets and biannual upgrades is doing horrible things to the planet, and simply isn't sustainable. By being transparent about their own environmental policy, they are both forcing a conversation on the issue, and hopefully encouraging others to follow suit. At the same time, it's quite hard to square off the circle of a company that clearly is concerned about climate change and the environment, while simultaneously releasing improvements to its hardware every 12 months like clockwork. This cognitive dissonance is visible even within the company presentations. The launch of the iPhone SE devoted a huge amount of time to the company's green credentials at the start, before Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Apple described the fact that there are over 600 million five-year-old PCs in use as sad. A planet with finite resources ensures something has to give eventually. 600 million PCs over 5 years old is "really sad"... that doesn't sit well with the whole environmental message from earlier. #AppleKeynote Alan Martin (@alan_p_martin) March 21, 2016 Images via LWYang and Yutaka Tsutano used under Creative Commons Dell has handed its entire enterprise portfolio to Avnet, forming a strategic partnership in Australia. Avnet previously only sold Dell software and thin-client devices from its Wyse brand, but now has access to the entire range - including servers, storage and networking. The new agreement wont impact Dells channel with Ingram Micro, which was the first Australian distributor to be granted access to the full enterprise portfolio in November 2014, and followed this up with the addition of Dell end user devices in May 2015. Geoff Wright, Dell's general manager ANZ channels and alliances, told CRN it wasnt a new deal, but rather an activation of the existing partnership. Its not just Dell coming to a distributor, its actually Dell and Avnet going to market together, said Wright. Were on this journey where we started with 3,000 partners buying from Dell a year ago, which represented a small part of our business. You cant operate like that; what you need is to have focus within your channel, working out who your key partners are and invest in those partners together and build a very strong relationship. It really is a value offering to bring those two brands together, so its pretty exciting. Darren Adams, Avnet vice president and general manager Australia and New Zealand, told CRN that Avnet is all-in with its strategy with Dell. The two companies will go to market together, with Avnet incorporating Dells networking products into its 'Powered by Avnet' label. When we sell something to somebody, I would describe that as a marketing, sales and engineering conglomerate, said Adams. We want to sell a solution for an ERP environment; we want to sell a high-availability solution; we want to sell backup and restore. Powered by Avnet is where we package up great technology from Dell servers, storage, network, software, whatevers really needed to provide a solution to that [customer] but we use Avnets capital combined with Avnets services, such as helpdesk services, integration services or asset tagging services, with Avnets brand. Adams and Wright said that in the 30 days since the new deal was activated, they had already signed multimillion-dollar contracts with a customer, though declined to reveal the name. The deal with Dell follows Avnet's appointment last year as a distributor for EMC the distie is also leveraging its Powered by Avnet service to bring its financial muscle to the storage company's push for more midmarket customers. Dell is set to acquire EMC, meaning Avnet and Ingram will go head-to-head across the entire portfolio. While Dell has in the past been known for going direct to customers, the vendor has been working over the past few years to transform into a channel-focussed company. Dell wants to be the underlying technology for those partners managed service business, said Wright. Because Dell doesnt have the channel penetration as other vendors, theres a lot of net new business out there for both of us. The agreement comes as Dell prepares to launch its new AdvantEdge partner program in Australia. The program rewards individual sales partners with prizes for sales, as well as completing certifications. AdvantEdge was extended to cover Dells storage product line and products developed with other vendor partners. Today MSC Cruises marked an important construction milestone in the building of MSC Seaside with the celebration of the traditional maritime coin ceremony held at Fincantieris shipyard in Monfalcone, Italy. MSC Seaside, set to come into service in December 2017, will sail year-round from Miami and is being designed with the North American market in mind, said MSC in a prepared release. Gianni Onorato, MSC Cruises Chief Executive Officer commented: MSC Seaside combines FINCANTIERIs Italian flair and excellence in design with MSC Cruises global vision and focus on innovation for both hardware and product. This prototype is significantly different to anything we have ever built before as this is a ship dedicated to cruising in warm seas. The design of the ship embodies our passion for the sea with innovative features to enhance the enjoyment of the open water and sunshine for our guests . With the highest ratio of outdoor spaces on any of MSC Cruises ships, guests will also enjoy an increased number of balcony cabins, sea views and public areas. Giuseppe Bono, CEO of Fincantieri, said: MSC Seaside, the biggest ship ever built in our shipyards, will strengthen our leadership as the most innovative shipbuilder in the cruise industry. This new concept will provide owner with more revenue-generating solutions, with more cabins than a comparable, contemporary design, more open-deck space and an increase in performances, being significantly more efficient. The Maryland Port Administration (MPA) today announced a new contract with Royal Caribbean International that will extend the cruise lines year-round departures from the Helen Delich Bentley Port of Baltimore through June 2020. Royal Caribbeans Grandeur of the Seas will continue to offer a wide range of cruising experiences from Maryland to the Bahamas, Bermuda, the Caribbean, and New England/Canada. "Our administration is pleased that Royal Caribbean has made a long-term commitment to Maryland and to the Port of Baltimore," said Governor Larry Hogan. "Through this partnership, vacationers will continue to have a popular and convenient cruising option that provides a significant boost to Maryland's economy for years to come." The Grandeur of the Seas will continue offering five, nine and 12-night roundtrip itineraries from Baltimore, including a new nine-night voyage to Nassau. "Royal Caribbean is pleased to renew our contract with the Port of Baltimore, said Michael Bayley, president and chief executive officer for Royal Caribbean International. Baltimore is a fantastic departure point for our guests who live in the Mid-Atlantic States, the northeast and beyond, and the city continuously provides our guests with a wonderful start to their cruise vacation. In 2015, nearly 200,000 passengers sailed on 90 cruises from the Port of Baltimore. The Port ranks 6th on the East Coast, 11th in the U.S. and 20th in the world for cruise passengers. Aleksandr Andreevich Panin, the Russian developer of the SpyEye botnet creation kit, and an associate were on Wednesday sentenced to prison terms by a court in Atlanta, Georgia, for their role in developing and distributing malware that is said to have caused millions of dollars in losses to the financial sector. Panin, who set out to develop SpyEye as a successor to the Zeus malware that affected financial institutions since 2009, was sentenced by the court to nine and half years in prison, while his Algerian associate Hamza Bendelladj got a 15-year term, according to the Department of Justice. After infecting victims' computers, cybercriminals were able to remotely control these compromised computers through command-and-control servers, and steal the victims personal and financial information using techniques such as Web injects that introduce malicious code into a victims browser, keystroke loggers that record keyboard activity and credit card grabbers. The information sent to the servers was then used to steal money from the financial accounts of the victims. A Northern District of Georgia grand jury returned in December 2011 a 23-count indictment against Panin, who had yet to be fully identified, and Bendelladj. Panin pleaded guilty in 2014 to one count of conspiring to commit wire and bank fraud for his role as primary developer and distributor of the malware, while Bendelladj pleaded guilty in 2015 to a number of counts relating to conspiring to wire and computer fraud and abuse. Operating from Russia from 2009 to 2011, Panin was charged with conspiring with others, including Bendelladj, also known as Bx1, to develop, market and sell various versions of SpyEye and component parts on the Internet, the DOJ had alleged. In July 2011, Panin negotiated and agreed to sell SpyEye online to a federal undercover law enforcement officer, according to a filing by the DOJ in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, Atlanta division. He uploaded a version of the toolkit on file delivery service Sendspace.com after receiving the payment. Before that, Panin and Bendelladj had been found trying to promote the kit online on the Darkode.com criminal Web forum that was dismantled last year. Bendelladj even advertised his own version of SpyEye on YouTube, according to the government. The DOJ has described SpyEye as a "preeminent malware banking Trojan" from 2010 to 2012, which was used by a global cybercrime syndicate to infect over 50 million computers and cause close to US$1 billion in financial harm. Panin is said to have received in 2010 the source code and rights to sell Zeus from Evginy Bogachev, also known as Slavik, and included many components of it into SpyEye. Bogachev, who is the FBIs most wanted cybercriminal, remains at large. Panin was planning to release a new version of SpyEye, called SpyEye 2.0, which would have been "one of the most prolific and undetectable botnets distributed to date" if it had been released, according to a statement by the DOJ. Panin was arrested by U.S. authorities in 2013, when flying through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, while Bendelladj was extradited from Thailand in the same year after he was apprehended while in transit at an airport in Bangkok. FarmDrive is excited to partner with CTA to build the capacity of young Kenyan farmers and stakeholders and support them to access finance. In Africa, young farmers face many hurdles in trying to earn a livelihood from agriculture. Lack of access to capital, among other constraints, is a major challenge that most young farmers face. Nonetheless, with the right capital and skills, agribusiness can be profitable for youth. FarmDrive is a technology platform with a suite of applications aimed at increasing the availability of capital to smallholder farmers. In partnership with CTA, FarmDrive is organising 20 mobile training sessions dubbed Apps4Ag Learning Opportunities. These sessions will help young farmers learn how to use FarmDrive's financial management tool to keep farm records, receive agronomic recommendations, benefit from mobile money payments, and access loans and other digital financial services. The workshops will be held across different regions in Kenya and will provide hands-on experience to a total of 500 young farmers and other agricultural stakeholders. FarmDrive will create comprehensive credit profiles for the young farmers who can then apply to receive credit from lending partners through their mobile phones. The Apps4Ag Learning Opportunity will also help the FarmDrive application, which was developed through CTA's AgriHack initiative in Eastern Africa, to gather knowledge that will help strengthen its business model. Successful initial workshop The first Apps4Ag Learning Opportunity workshop was held on 12 February 2016, in Manga village in Borabu county, Kisii Region. The one-day session was attended by 29 young farmers, the district agronomist, Borabu village elders and three successful farmers from the community who came to share their experiences of accessing credit through FarmDrive's technology. The participants were trained on how to register for the FarmDrive platform on their mobile phones and keep accurate farm records. Most of the youth admitted to not keeping proper farm records, which means that they do not know if or how they are making profits/losses from their farming activities. They are not even aware which agricultural activities are the most viable in their area. The young farmers were delighted at the prospect of being able to apply for loans and receive the funds via their mobile phones. In addition, they were excited to hear that by using their records, they were able to gain access to favourable loan terms that correlate with their farming activities. The credit is coupled with insurance to mitigate against financial losses. Cleophas Onyiego, one of the young farmers, stated that: "Most of us are afraid to take loans because we are scared that we'll lose our property, like motorbikes, to banks if the crops fail. For some of us, we don't own any land. It belongs to our parents therefore we don't have collateral that the banks want. With FarmDrive's solution, our village has the potential to grow and we can supply food to the population." The enthusiasm and curiosity of the participants was palpable as they all tried out the technology to gauge its potential impact on their activities. FarmDrive is proud to partner with CTA on this project and looks forward to supporting CTA's efforts in the uptake, utilisation and upscaling of innovative and tested apps for agriculture among end-users, especially the youth. This activity falls within the framework of CTA's Agriculture, Rural Development and Youth in the Information Society (ARDYIS) project. Tom Campbell If you've lived on this planet more than 20 years you've experienced constant changes. We constantly hear that the only thing that remains the same is change and nowhere is that change more evident than in the world of media.We reaffirmed the changing face of media when the Publisher of Raleigh's News and Observer recently retired, reminiscing that when he first took over, the N&O had more than 1200 employees. Today there are about 350. We counted on our newspapers to inform us but with the declines in readership and reporting staff they have neither the circulation nor authority they once enjoyed.Radio began eating into newspaper dominance in the 1930s and 40s with its ability of immediacy and reception into every farm home and hamlet. The 1950s and 60s saw the explosion of television, adding both the immediacy and pictures. Can you remember when the local newscast was only fifteen minutes? So were national newscasts, featuring John Cameron Swayze, Douglas Edwards, Huntley and Brinkley and Walter Cronkite. As viewership increased television quickly expanded their coverage and size of their news staffs.Two big game-changers exacerbated the media changes. People laughed in 1980 when a brash Ted Turner announced to the world the inception of the Cable News Network. Now viewers could get news 24 hours a day, but had to subscribe to cable and we so did in large numbers. Over the air television viewership declined as cable subscribers exploded.Turner's CNN spawned imitators. To fill 24-hour news cycles they covered news events exhaustively, also adding talk shows. Viewers can now self-select the spin they want by choosing between the major networks, CNN, MSNBC or Fox News. The race for ratings resulted in talk shows becoming more partisan and bombastic. Moderators have become celebrities, sometimes blurring the lines between being the news and reporting it.When the Internet came along the media pie became even more divided and news content changed just as dramatically. When I first started writing and commenting on public policy events news articles focused on the "who, what, when, where, and how" of a story. Opinions were confined to the editorial page. Now the Internet and social media provide anyone with a laptop or smartphone the opportunity to comment about anything and anyone, whether factual or not.CBS Newsman Bob Schieffer often says that when you watch or read something on accredited media sources it has been vetted by more than one source. On the Internet that's not the case and it is difficult to separate fact from opinion.Watergate was a major turning point in the coverage of news as journalists and editors recognized they had not been diligent enough in pursuit of misconduct by public officials, corporations and charities. They shifted from just from factual reporting to an intentional and intensive effort for investigative reporting. Simultaneously, in order to win the war of readers and viewers the media moved to humanize stories and started delivering more personal, touchy-feely news reporting.All these changes aren't necessarily good or bad, but in this new media world our responsibility is to be more deliberate, evaluating and discerning the difference between factual reporting and opinion. We can only imagine the changes we will observe in the next decade. We can't seem to find the page you are looking for. You may have typed the address incorrectly or you may have used an outdated link. Lindsay Perry / Lindsay Perry The Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation released details on a Giving Tour to assess philanthropic needs in middle America states, via a weeklong bus trip from Chicago to Las Vegas starting April 24. The foundation is among the largest in Fairfield County with assets totaling more than $500 million, with Steven Cohen the founder of SAC Capital and Point72 Asset Management, among the largest financial industry employers in Stamford. The Advocate reported plans for the tour on April 6. HARTFORD An estimated 1,000 undocumented state residents who were brought from other countries as children could have access to the financial-aid pools available for in-state college students under legislation that was approved in the state Senate on Wednesday night. The bill, which heads to the House after the 21-13 vote, is similar to a bill that also cleared the Senate last year but died on the House calendar. The Senate debate included opposition from Republicans who claim the so-called dreamers would put extra strain on the aid pools, which are funded by diverting 15 to 18 percent of student tuition. Sen. Dante Bartolomeo, D-Meriden, co-chairman of the Higher Education and Employment Advancement Committee, said the bill gives those who attended Connecticut high schools and are already paying in-state college and university tuition, a chance to obtain the same aid as others. But Republicans led by Sen. Rob Kane, R-Watertown, said the bill isnt fair. Either less people will get it or people will get less money, said Kane, whose district includes Seymour and Oxford. We have a small population of people who are undocumented and are finding many challenges to obtaining a higher education, at the same time we have citizens of the United States who are struggling to afford college, said Sen. Michael A. McLachlan, R-Danbury. Why dont we figure out how to get the students on the path to citizenship? Were not fixing the core problem. Bartolomeo noted that under previous legislation, undocumented immigrants have to pursue legal status as part of their eligibility in obtaining in-state tuition, which was vetoed by then-Gov. M. Jodi Rell in 2007 and approved by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy in 2011. There are about 30,000 University of Connecticut students, plus 90,000 in the regional state universities and community colleges. Bartolomeo could not pinpoint the exact number of undocumented students who pay in-state tuition, but suggested they may range between 200 and 1,000. Others who spoke against the bill included Sen. Toni Boucher, R-Wilton and Sen. Tony Hwang, R-Fairfield. How do we keep those students who are high-performing, with great merit and allow them also to compete? Boucher said. Many of us would like to have equal access for all individuals, but unfortunately there are legal processes and theres other processes that do not follow the legal path. Hwang, who was born in Taiwan and is a naturalized citizen, warned that the legislation would send the wrong message to U.S. citizens. At the end of the day, were going to give financial aid, and give access without any consideration for you being a Connecticut resident, Hwang said. I struggle with that. Also voting against the bill was Sen. L. Scott Frantz, R-Greenwich. We have already invested a great deal in their education, said Senate President Pro Tempore Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven. It doesnt make any sense in our own future to put any roadblocks in the way to their success. These young people are really American in every sense except for the accidents of their birth. They grew up among American kids and their peers. What we should be doing is nurturing everyone in Connecticut. On Thursday, undocumented immigrant students plan to hold a Rally to Afford To Dream in attempt to lobby lawmakers for the bill. The event is scheduled for 1:30 on the north steps of the Capitol. kdixon@ctpost.com; MILFORD A free screening of the documentary Enough to Live On: The Arts of the WPA will be held Tuesday, May 17, 7 p.m. at the Center for the Arts on Railroad Avenue. Directed by Connecticut-based independent filmmaker Michael Maglaras, the film was created to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Federal Art Project, the New Deal initiatives that employed thousands of artists. The Federal Arts Project spurred the countrys artistic Renaissance, said Marion Morra, curator of the citys art colletion, which includes WPA murals. Maglaras and producer Terri Templeton will be on hand to introduce their film and answer questions after the screening. This showing of the documentary about the 1930s public arts projects is one of the events being held as part of the One City One Story program. The non-fiction book The Boys in the Boat, selected for the community reading program, details the 1936 U.S. rowing team that won a surprise gold medal at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The showing of Enough to Live On also celebrates the Milford Arts Centers campaign to raise money to restore Milfords WPA mural, We Shall Pass This Way But Once, which hung for nearly 40 years in the lobby of Central Grammar School, Morra said. When the school was demolished in 1986, a fragment of the mural, about 8x5 feet was rescued by former arts center director Bill Meddick and Frank Vespi, who at the time was arts coordinator for the Board of Education. When it is restored, the mural will be displayed at the Milford Public Library, Morra said. For more information or to make a donation to the campaign, go to http://milfordarts.org/visual-arts/adopt-a-mural/ This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 3 1 of 3 Autumn Driscoll / ST Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Brian A. Pounds / Hearst Connecticut Media Show More Show Less 3 of 3 MILFORD U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy said that a subcommittees appropriations bill approved Thursday includes more than $20 million in federal funds for Long Island Sound programs, and $200 million for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has a research lab in Milford. Murphy is a member of the appropriations subcommittee of the U.S. Senate committee on Commerce, Science, Justice, and Related Agencies. The funding, in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, would support critical aquaculture research and improve regulatory permitting that supports over 700 local jobs and helps to improve the health of Long Island Sound, Murphy said. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate STAMFORD More than 50 unionized electricians gathered outside Stamford Hospital Wednesday to complain about what they say are unlicensed laborers performing some of the work on the $450 million project for the new hospital complex. Our shop steward came out here and tried to find someone with a license and couldnt find anyone, said Thomas Hegarty, an apprentice with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 3. They avoided the question, added Joe Onolfo, another apprentice. Stamford Hospital officials declined to comment, instead referring questions to the hospital projects general contractor, Skanska. A spokesman for the contractor said the piping work performed by the non-union laborers did not require a specialized license since it did not involve actual electrical wiring, just the installation of underground conduits for communication. As one of the largest union employers in the tri-state region, Skanska has a long and proud history of employing local labor on our construction projects," the company said in a statement. "In the past year alone, we have hired more than 400 union workers at the new Stamford Hospital facility. We always use licensed and certified union labor when required and our work for the project is no exception. But one union electrician said the new workers on the site installed the couplings, or pipe joints, backward. Skanska officials said that was not possible. "The couplings in the trenches are impossible to put on backwards," the company said. "Skanska can confirm they were installed correctly and have been inspected and approved by the local building authorities." As required in Connecticut, 80 percent of the project has involved union jobs. The non-apprentice electricians, who declined to give their names for fear of losing their jobs, said they were hired to fix another group of non-union laborers work on the hospital project. We still have a lot of members unemployed who could have done the work, said Ryan Henshaw, another Local 3 apprentice. In an email, Skanska acknowledged it replaced its original workers. "Skanska did replace its original electrical subcontractor for the new Stamford Hospital project after that company went into default," the company said. "Because of the default, the original electrical subcontractor did not complete the full scope of the electrical work. The replacement subcontractors are completing the work in accordance with all codes and requirements." The new $450 million hospital will feature 180 private rooms on the top five floors, an emergency room more than twice the size of the ER at the existing hospital and a cardiac-care unit that is three times larger than the current one. Hospital officials told The Advocate last week the construction is about 85 percent complete. The 11-story building is scheduled to open in September. ktorres@scni.com; 203-964-2265 NORWALK The owner of Pennys Diner is categorically denying any connection to racially offensive Twitter posts that were ostensibly tagged with the name of the East Norwalk restaurant. David Koskerides, the owner of the establishment, says the posts, which appeared on Twitter Wednesday night and spread across social media, are an out-and-out hoax. This is an absolute hoax, Koskerides said. We dont have a Twitter or Facebook account, we never had an account. Were not on social media at all. The tweet follows news first reported by Politico that Harriet Tubman, an African-American abolitionist born into slavery, will be the new face on the $20 bill. The leader of the Underground Railroad is replacing the portrait of Andrew Jackson, the nation's seventh president and a slave owner, who is being pushed to the back of the bill. Tubman will become the first African-American on U.S. paper money and the first woman to be depicted on currency in 100 years. One of the tweets, which appears to have come from Pennys Diner III, shows a picture of Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill with the following: Quick Poll: who is this? @MichelleObama, #HarrietTubman or @officialmutombo(Dikembe Motombo) #AllLookTheSame. A second post shows the same picture of Tubman with the following comment: We wont be accepting 20s anymore and its not because #HarrietTubman is a woman. This is very offensive, Koskerides said. We absolutely did not post this. Koskerides met with a Norwalk police officer to file a complaint Thursday morning. Pennys operates another diner in Fairfield. I have no clue who would have done this, he said. Hopefully the police will find out. What they said was theyre going to try to locate the server and see who is behind this. Koskerides said he first heard about the posts from his shift manager on Wednesday night. I was astonished, he said. People were calling and cursing. Im not computer literate, and I wasnt even able to see this until today. We arent on any kind of social media. I have no idea who would have done this. Koskerides said that he has a call in to his attorney as well. Weve been in business since 1968, Koskerides said. We welcome everyone and always have. On Thursday morning, the telephone at the diner was ringing nonstop, and the diner manager was fielding calls from angry residents. The phone hasnt stopped, the manager, who identified himself as John, said. I dont understand it. We have never been on any kind of social media. Currently Reading Is your neighbor for Bernie or Hillary? Donald, Ted or John? BRIDGEPORT Chief Armando Perez said Wednesday an arrest warrant is being prepared for the man police say caused a fatal East Side collision. We are keeping an eye on him, and police expect to arrest Geraldo Maldonado next week, Perez said. On Monday, Maldonado, 20, of Forestview Road, was being pursued by police when his car crashed into a sport utility vehicle driven by David Anderson, 22, of Seymour, at the intersection of Barnum Avenue and Pembroke Street, police said. The impact of the crash flipped Andersons SUV, and Anderson was thrown from the vehicle, police said. He suffered severe injuries to the head and died at Bridgeport Hospital, police said. Anderson had been the states key witness in the conviction of Raashon Red Dreads Jackson and Roderick Little Ricky Rogers for the murder of one man and the wounding of four other people on Reservoir Avenue two years ago. Perez said Maldonado fled the crash scene Monday and was caught a short time later, hiding on a mound of sand. The chief said Maldonado was brought to the Bridgeport Police Department, where a captain halted booking and ordered the man taken to the hospital for blood tests to determine whether he had been drinking or doing drugs. That was the captains call, Perez said. He was in charge of the situation and had the right to make that decision, and thats what he should have done. Maldonado was not under guard when he was treated at and then released from the hospital. Perez said procedure called for police to release Maldonado, then prepare a warrant for his arrest. On Tuesday, Perez said the department did not consider Maldonado to be a flight risk. Maldonado had been free on a $50,000 bond following his arrest by Trumbull police in February on charges of first-degree burglary, carrying a dangerous weapon and interfering with police. In that case, he was arrested near his home following the lengthy foot pursuit by Trumbull police that resulted in several schools being locked down. During the Trumbull chase, police said, Maldonado dropped a handgun. Police said the weapon was later found to be a BB gun. He is scheduled to be in court on the Trumbull case on May 3. Berlin, Windber and North Star bring plenty of momentum into Week 10 Check out what we learned in Week 9 of the high school football season across Somerset County. 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. Full-time university and college employees may soon be packing heat on campuses across the state. A The Tennessee legislature passed the aGuns on Campusa bill, which will allow full-time employees of public universities and colleges to carry a gun on campus, provided they have a state permit. The Senate voted 28-5 in favor of the bill. The bill passed the House on a 69-24 vote.A The campus carry bill now goes to Gov. Bill Haslam, where it will move one step closer to naming Tennessee the 10th state to allow concealed carry on campuses. So far, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Kansas, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Mississippi and, most recently, Texas allow concealed carry on campuses, according to the website armedcampuses.org. The governor has expressed concerns over campus carry, preferring to allow each university the option to make the decision on their own. However, Haslam has not indicated whether or not he would veto the bill. Several students, faculty and law enforcement agencies have taken a stance against the bill ever since it started making its rounds in legislation. A survey released Tuesday of faculty members at several University of Tennessee campuses indicated faculty members would be concerned if the bill passed. Speaking about the survey, Rep. Mike Stewart, D-Nashville, said many professors said they would quit their jobs if the bill passed. aShouldnat we be worried about passing a bill that would encourage our faculty members to leave the state?a Stewart said. aI think we should tread very lightly. We should be very hesitant to impose our beliefs on these institutions.a Rep. Rick Womick R-Murfreesboro, said this bill is about keeping the campuses safe. aThis is about self defense,a Womick said. aTo the professors who say they will leave, I say good riddance.a At the U of M, Campus Police Chief Bruce Harber and President M. David Rudd both took a stance with a mass email sent out to students and employees. The pair stated the school would no longer be safe for anyone if concealed campus carry was allowed, and police would have a difficult time responding to a crisis. aA major concern I share with my colleagues across the state is a tactical concern,a Harber said in an e-mail to theA Daily Helmsman. aAt a time when law enforcement is trying to do everything possible to speed up responses to such events, the presence of additional weapons will have the opposite effect. Every second can be critical to saving lives.a When asked about Rudd and Harberas stance, Stuart Dedmon, Tennessee state president for Students for Concealed Carry, disagreed. aHis intuitions are understandable and not invalid,a Dedmon said. aHowever, in any serious domain of inquiry, people make decisions based upon the observable facts, rather than their gut feelings. The facts are on the side of campus carry advocates.a While the bill would allow armed campus carry, workers and faculty would still be banned from carrying firearms at other collegiate locations: stadiums or gymnasiums while school-sponsored events are in progress, meetings where disciplinary or tenure issues are being discussed, hospitals or offices where medical or mental health services are provided and any location prohibited by another law such as at day care centers or elementary schools located on campus. The bill also requires firearms to be concealed, not openly carried, and any faculty member interested in carrying a weapon on campus would be required to notify the law enforcement agency with jurisdiction over the property. aCampus carry is not about public safety, but rather personal safety (i.e. a student walking to their car or apartment after a night class),a Dedmon said. aThe assumption that allowing permit holders in general to conceal on campus would pose a greater threat to students is simply a false narrative. In the states allowing permit holders to conceal on campus, it has become a non-event.a Lifestyle | Daily Life | News | The Sydney Morning Herald Were sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. Were working to restore it. Please try again later. Dismiss As President Obama touches down in Britain today, he need have no fear that Air Force One will be hit by a stray drone, as happened last Sunday to a British Airways aircraft over London. In order to ensure the safety of the President, the UK's National Air Traffic Service has placed a restriction on the flying of drones in large parts of the capital from this morning until Sunday evening. Tens of thousands of people fly into London every day without the National Air Traffic Service imposing a ban on drones. Their lives would appear to be taken less seriously by the authorities than the single life of the President of the United States. But then Barack Obama is the head of state of our closest ally, and as such is treated more reverentially by our political class than any other person on the planet. We are grateful to be noticed by any American President, and love to be taken seriously. Obama's main mission is to persuade the British people in the most tactful way not to vote to leave the European Union. There will be much talk of 'the special relationship', a phrase only ever trotted out for credulous British ears in order to flatter us. As President Obama (pictured) touches down in Britain today, his main mission will be to persuade the British people in the most tactful way not to vote to leave the European Union He will say we are stronger and richer and more important as members of the EU than we would be standing by ourselves in isolation. A similar point was made yesterday in a letter signed by eight former U.S. treasury secretaries, which was presumably orchestrated by No. 10. My suspicion is that although the message will be welcomed by the majority of the political class which wants us to remain part of the EU, it will go down much less well with many British people, who do not like to be told what to do by the leader of a foreign country, even one as historically close to Britain as the United States. Most people will surely grasp the truth, which is that in urging us to stay in the EU, President Obama and the eight ex-treasury secretaries are thinking not of what will be best for us, but of what is best for the United States. It suits America to have Britain which, let's face it, is in many ways a client state as a kind of bridge into the European Union, which is made up of countries often less malleable and well-disposed towards the United States. France, for example. We speak English. We share intelligence. The Americans sell us nuclear missiles. We have fought a succession of wars together, with Britain as a progressively junior partner. Of course, Washington wants us on the inside of this unruly and disputatious club of strange foreigners who may sometimes harbour anti-American feelings. It is obviously in U.S. interests for us to remain members, but it doesn't follow that it is in our interests. I'm afraid it only shows how much we are taken for granted that an American President can come here and think it seemly to tell us what to do. If the United States ever thought of forming some sort of union with, say, Mexico, no British Prime Minister would dream of uttering a public word of protest or advice. Obama (left) will say we are stronger and richer and more important as members of the EU than we would be standing by ourselves in isolation But then it is inconceivable that America would ever think of sharing her sovereignty with any other nation on Earth. This is not primarily, if at all, because it is a vast and powerful country. Even when she was weak, the United States was proudly and defiantly independent. What was America in 1776, when she broke away from the mighty colonial power that was Britain, but a motley collection of undeveloped and under-populated states occupying a portion of a still largely undiscovered country? America is grounded in an almost sacred idea of separateness, a belief that she was chosen by God to be unique. Only after 1941, when she entered World War II, did she divest herself of her deep isolationist principles to the great benefit of civilisation and the free world. Yet despite having assumed her responsibilities as a world power, America has remained fiercely protective of her sovereignty. It is not impossible to imagine her withdrawing from her role as the world's policeman, but it is inconceivable that she would ever voluntarily cede an ounce of sovereignty. Boris Johnson recently made the same point, and was attacked by the Labour MP Stephen Kinnock, who claimed the United States has pooled its sovereignty by being part of Nato, whose members undertake to come to one another's aid if attacked. He's wrong. Forming an alliance with one or more countries is not the same as putting oneself at the mercy of a foreign jurisdiction. The United States would never accept the rulings of a court based in Vancouver or Bogota as we are required to obey the rulings of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. American lawmakers could not conceive of being obliged to adopt a policy they didn't like, as frequently happens to the United Kingdom when we are outvoted in Brussels. President Obama (left) and the eight ex-treasury secretaries are thinking not of what will be best for us, but of what is best for the United States Why is America, which so zealously defends her own sovereignty and independence, so blind to Britain's predicament? Why does she urge us to accept shared arrangements which her own history of rugged self-determination would lead her to reject? The answer is that the United States is being selfish, and thinking only of what is best for her. This is hardly surprising. It's what countries do. Though America is our closest and most reliable ally, there have been several occasions in the past half-century or so when she has overridden or ignored British interests. For example, after the Anglo-French invasion of Suez in 1956, President Eisenhower forced British and French troops to withdraw, humiliating Britain and ending her status as a major Middle-Eastern power. Eisenhower later regretted what he had done. And when American forces invaded Grenada in 1983, much to the dismay of the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Reagan administration couldn't care less that the tiny Caribbean island was a member of the Commonwealth and its head of state the Queen. Equally, before the 1982 Falklands war, there was strong pressure within the Reagan administration for the British to accept a compromise peace plan, and in some quarters outright opposition to our re-taking the islands from the Argentinians. Admittedly, the United States finally provided valuable strategic support. It is also the case that during the Northern Irish troubles, successive American administrations declined to clamp down on the funding of the IRA for fear of offending the powerful Irish-American lobby. None of this is especially discreditable to the United States, which was only acting in accordance with what she believed were her own interests. It is clear, though, that in these instances, American interests were not the same as British ones. Nor are they now, though craven Tories long accustomed to bending the knee can't see the difference. Our assigned role in the world should not be to act as a bridge for America into the European Union. We should carefully assess what is best for us, in the knowledge that if we do withdraw from the EU, we will still be seen by the United States as her strongest and most dependable ally in Europe. Two theories have been put forward to explain the worrying increase in the numbers out of work the first in almost a year, which some suggest may mean the recovery is running out of steam. One, advanced by the scaremongers of the pro-Brussels Remain camp, is that employers are so frightened of Brexit they are putting recruitment on hold. If this is true (a big if), the europhiles have nobody to blame but themselves. They are the ones, after all, who claim the sky will fall in if we leave the EU. After devoting so much energy to scaring us, it seems somewhat rich to wail: 'We told you so! Jobs are suffering because people are scared!' Scaremongers in the pro-Brussels camp claim the worrying increase in the numbers out of work on Brexit, but employers themselves blame rising costs for a reluctance to hire staff But, no. For the more plausible explanation of these disappointing figures, listen to employers themselves. Strikingly, firms of every size from the Federation of Small Businesses to the rabidly pro-Brussels CBI blame rising costs for a reluctance to hire staff. And not least of these burdens, of course, is George Osborne's National Living Wage. Is it any wonder that employment growth slowed between December and February, when employers knew that from April 1, they would have to pay 50p an hour more to minimum wage staff? Nor should it be any surprise that women whom the living wage was supposed to help most, since they are more likely to have low-paid jobs were in fact hardest hit, with the number in work falling by 40,000. True, the living wage wrong-footed Labour when Mr Osborne pulled it out of his hat in last year's Budget. But as this paper has repeatedly warned, businesses and job-seekers face a heavy price for the Chancellor's theatrical triumph. Indeed, far more than the irresponsible fantasy of the Remain camp's scares, it is the hard fact of these higher staffing costs that threatens jobs. One of the burdens faced by employers is George Osborne's National Living Wage But isn't there another drawback to the living wage, which the europhiles seem barely to have considered? The truth is that it adds significantly to the pull factors drawing European migrants to Britain, far outweighing the deterrent of any benefit curbs Brussels may allow us to enforce. Indeed, isn't this yet another reason for having more to fear from staying in than pulling out? NHS sticking plasters Receptionists to decide if patients are ill enough to see the doctor pharmacists and science graduates to handle cases deemed minor patients to be urged to seek medical advice online, instead of troubling the GP What has the NHS come to, if its chief executive is driven to such measures to rescue surgeries burdened by soaring immigration, an ageing population and a mass exodus of family doctors? True, there is good sense in some of Simon Stevens's proposals, such as recruiting 5,000 more GPs, luring others from retirement and offering incentives for working in understaffed areas. But aren't others downright dangerous mere cost-cutting sticking plasters to hold together a creaking system designed for an earlier age? With many waiting weeks to see a GP, the days are long gone when the NHS could claim to be the envy of the world. If it is ever to recover that reputation, putting life-or-death decisions in unqualified hands is not the answer.. The BBC royal correspondent Nicholas Witchells revealing interview with Prince William marks a thaw in relations after Prince Charless 2005 Klosters outburst in front of William and Harry, when he said: I cant bear that man. I mean, hes so awful, he really is. Witchell, 62, pulled no punches asking about workshy William. Says my royal source: After recent criticism, Williams team took a calculated decision to promote his image. Thats why the ducking royal duties question was allowed. Before, it would have been off limits. Scroll down for video The BBC royal correspondent Nicholas Witchells (pictured) revealing interview with Prince William marks a thaw in relations after Prince Charless 2005 Klosters outburst in front of William and Harry Michael Portillo will not be invited to help the Queen blow out her birthday candles. The former Tory defence secretary is still blamed for the loss of her beloved royal yacht Britannia. Then PM, John Major wanted to build a new one. Miguel finally brokered an agreement for a replacement just before the 1997 election but fatally forgot to involve the Opposition in the plans, something obligatory on royal matters. Prince Philip told his biographer Gyles Brandreth: Major was blocked by Norman Lamont (Chancellor) and didnt get the Opposition on board. And then Portillo got involved and made a complete b*****ks of it. Absolutely idiotic. US-based English rose Emily Mortimer, 44, pictured, is keen to celebrate the Queens 90th birthday across the Atlantic. My mum just bought me a couple of commemorative plates, she gushes. Her father, the late champagne socialist Sir John Mortimer, liked to be considered a republican, but proved less than convincing. I remember watching on television the royal wedding in 1981, Emily has recalled. My mother and father, who were totally anti-royalist, were crying. Something about these events turns everyone into hypocrites. US-based English rose Emily Mortimer, 44, pictured, is keen to celebrate the Queens 90th birthday across the Atlantic. My mum just bought me a couple of commemorative plates, she gushes The universities and science minister Jo Johnson has a tricky problem. Does he override the public will expressed in a free vote on naming the new 200million research ship Boaty McBoatface? It might depend on whether a member of the royal family will be asked to formally name the craft. One cant imagine the Queen solemnly intoning: I name this ship Boaty McBoatface. On the other hand, they could always ask Harry hes usually game for a laugh. Or maybe the semi-royal Ant and Dec might do the honours. Comic Victoria Wood, who has died at the age of 62, refused the chance to write her memoirs. No thanks, she insisted. If I ever did write one, Id want it to be really, really good. Not: And then I did this and then I did that and then I met [co-star] Julie Walters. Comic Victoria Wood, who has died at the age of 62, refused the chance to write her memoirs. No thanks, she insisted. If I ever did write one, Id want it to be really, really good. Not: And then I did this and then I did that and then I met [co-star] Julie Walters. Parliament's thesaurus had taken a battering. MPs were saluting the Queen on her 90th birthday. It is not easy to pull off this sort of tribute. There is a danger not avoided by everyone yesterday of sounding the most terrible groveller before the royal diadem. Red carpet fever is as obvious as chicken pox. Her Majesty was both 'valuable' and 'invaluable', said David Cameron and others. She was 'wise' and 'patient', 'extraordinary', 'without parallel', 'rare', 'unshakeable', 'firm', 'formidable', 'experienced' and 'extraordinary' again (plus about eight more times). She was even, said Jeremy Corbyn, an Arsenal supporter. What? Not Millwall? Mr Corbyn made a charming speech which quite avoided chippiness yet still managed to signal his republican principles 'Steadfast' was given repeated outings. We had one 'gleaming' (from Sir Nicholas Soames), a few 'wonderfuls', a 'gracious', a couple of 'warms' and an 'unfailingly courteous', said with such wonderment that it was almost as if the Speaker had expected our Monarch to be as rude and pouty as Posh Spice. Mr Cameron had a good tale about how she once drove a visiting head of state around Balmoral and thus became 'the only woman ever to have driven the King of Saudi Arabia around in a car'. I can't see that one making the Riyadh gossip columns. Mr Cameron added, for the benefit of Fleet Street news editors and perhaps Sir Brian Leveson, 'I have that story sourced from both participants'. Mr Corbyn made a charming speech which quite avoided chippiness yet still managed to signal his republican principles. 'May I say,' he began, 'as a relatively young whippersnapper, that I am fully in favour of our country having leaders of a finer vintage?' Laughter. He said that 'whatever differing views' might exist, 'the vast majority' valued the Queen's 'public service'. If that possibly made her sound like a Blackpool tram, Mr Corbyn squashed any suspicions about his attitude by speaking about HM at proper length in an affectionate tone. Her Majesty (was both 'valuable' and 'invaluable', said David Cameron while Jeremy Corbyn, a self confessed Republican, said she was a 'highly respected individual' He also paid tribute to two nonagenarians from his constituency, Iris Monaghan and George Durack, both of whom were sitting in the downstairs VIP gallery and glowed modestly as Mr Corbyn hailed them and other members of 'the Queen's generation my parents' generation'. The Labour leader did himself a dose of good with this gentlemanly speech. Soamesy was a vision, his brow corrugated by that heavy, chesty grandeur which assails ageing courtiers venting huzzahs about their Sovereign. He thanked Mr Cameron for his speech but omitted to do the same to Mr Corbyn, which was a pity. We were reminded that Elizabeth II was 'crowned in that same abbey church as William the Conqueror' and we heard a long, not unfamiliar account of Sir Nicholas's grandfather, Winston Churchill, toasting the Queen at a No 10 dinner in 1955 when he praised the 'wise and kindly way of life, of which our Majesty is the young and gleaming champion'. Sir Henry Bellingham, Tory Member for the Sandringham ward, had by this point removed his spectacles and was flourishing a handkerchief. I do believe the old boy was wetting up around the goggles. Sir Gerald Kaufman (Lab, Gorton), Father of the House, made a less moving oration. As happens, it was as much about him as the Queen. The Chancellor, George Osborne, slunk out before midday. Mr Cameron had a good tale about how she once drove a visiting head of state around Balmoral and thus became 'the only woman ever to have driven the King of Saudi Arabia around in a car' During a speech of possibly over-strenuous awe from Sir David Amess (Con, Southend W), Mr Cameron and his neighbour Chris Grayling fought to suppress mirth. The only person purpler and plummier than Amess with his assertions was 'Sir' Michael Ellis (Con, Northampton N), so ostentatiously loyal that we can suppose his tooth mug bears an image of the late Queen Mary. 'Sir' Michael the knighthood can be but days away was subjected before and during his speech to mockery from the Speaker, who groaned heavily as he called the man. Let this sketchwriter be first to suggest that this was no day for low sarcasm. As Britain's longest-reigning monarch the Queen, who is 90 today, has lived an extraordinary life after being crowned at just 25 years old. And now a new website allows you to compare your achievements with Her Majesty's, revealing exactly what she was doing at your age. To celebrate her milestone birthday, a brand new interactive website Keeping Up With The Queen has been created in her honour. New website, Keeping up with the Queen allows you to compare your current achievements with what the her majesty was doing at your age Curated by a crack team of royal researchers, the site calculates what Elizabeth II would have been putting her royal touch to at your age and enables you to find out if your achievements match up. By typing your age into Keeping Up With The Queen you will be reminded that she has seen more than you could ever dream of. It is all there - whether it be meeting the iconic Marilyn Monroe, addressing the Unites States congress, receiving her first corgi or being crowned Queen of England in her 1953 glittering coronation. By entering your current age on the site you can discover what the Queen has achieved at your age and at 26 she had been crowned Queen of the United Kingdom The site was curated by a crack team of royal researchers. Pictured: The Queen at her coronation in 1953 Once calculated, you can share with your friends and family just what you could have achieved had you been heir to the throne. The royal researchers have even predicted what might be in store for the Queen in the future. Those who are aged between 91 and 99 will be met with the following message: 'What do we see in the Queens future? Watching Coronation Street on the telly and a cup of Earl Grey. God Save The Queen!' At the age of 50 (left) the Queen visited the Commonwealth country of Canada to enjoy the summer Olympics For the year 2026, the site points out that the monarch will have reached the same landmark age as her mother. It says: 'If she reaches 100, will she write herself a letter to congratulate herself? Who knows but cometh the day, the country will grind to a celebratory halt and take to the streets to party, much like they did for the Queen Mums 100th. Cmon Your Highness, we all want to see you make the century!' Unfortunately those who have exceeded their centenarian birthday will not be able to compare themselves with the royal as the site only ranges between 0 and 100. At the age of 75 (left) the Queen's grandson Prince William met his wife-to-be Kate Middleton Advertisement A major display of the Queen's dress and accessories opens to the public today to mark her 90th birthday. The exhibition - Fashioning a Reign: 90 Years of Style from The Queen's Wardrobe - will be unveiled at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, followed by shows at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle later in the year. The first display will focus on significant events in the Queen's life, her support of British craft and design and tartan in royal dress. Scroll down for video A major display of the Queen's dresses opens to the public to mark her 90th birthday. Pictured: This dress was worn in 1962 for the King of Norway's visit, pictured right Her Majesty wearing the dress Among the dozens of outfits on display will be the elaborate embroidered gown worn by the Queen for the wedding of her sister Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones in May 1960. The showstopping turquoise dress and matching bolero jacket were designed by Norman Hartnell, the British couturier who created Princess Margaret's wedding dress. Hartnell, who first worked for the then Princess Elizabeth in the 1940s, also created the evening gown worn by the Queen with a sash of Royal Stewart tartan for the Gillies Ball at Balmoral Castle in 1971. It will also form part of the exhibition. The exhibition - Fashioning a Reign: 90 Years of Style from The Queen's Wardrobe - opens today at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. The Queen wore this gown with a sash of Royal Stewart tartan for the Gillies Ball at Balmoral Castle in 1971 Originally introduced by Queen Victoria, the ball is given for neighbours, estate and castle staff when the monarch is in residence. Another centrepiece of the show will be the outfit worn by the Queen for the official opening of the Scottish Parliament on July 1 1999. She looked resplendent in a purple coat made of a silk-wool blend with a green silk-crepe and lace dress, and a shawl of purple and green Isle of Skye tartan, woven on the Isle of Lewis. The Sandra Murray-designed outfit was teamed with a matching hat by milliner Philip Somerville, trimmed with a bow and dark green feathers. The collection also houses the traditional robes worn by the Queen at the Order of the Thistle, a ceremony honouring men and women who have held public office or who have contributed in a significant way to national life and is the highest honour in Scotland The collection will also play host to the traditional robes showcased by the Queen during the Order of the Thistle. The silk cape and feathered hat are worn at the ceremony, which honours men and women who have held public office or who have contributed in a significant way to national life, and is the highest honour in Scotland. It is second only in precedence in the UK to the Order of the Garter. Clothing from her childhood will also feature, including double-breasted coats worn by then Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret during an official visit to the Palace of Holyroodhouse with King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in 1937. As well as the monarch's historical outfits some of her beloved hats will also go on display at the exhibition. As well as the monarch's historical outfits some of her beloved hats will also go on display at the exhibition The Queen's green cap by Simone Mirman (left) and an ornate floral bonnet that was also worn by the monarch (right) feature in the display The Queen wore this elegant ivory dress with embroidered gold detailing to a state banquet in Bangkok in 1972 when she was 46 Following the exhibit in Edinburgh, the dresses will be displayed at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle later in the year. Pictured: The jewelled ballgown from when Her Majesty visited America as a guest of President Eisenhower, right A vintage green cap decorated with white flowers by Simone Mirman worn by her majesty on tour in Australia in 1973 can be seen in a glass cabinet. In the same display is an ornate floral bonnet worn by the Queen in Australia three years earlier. She and the Duke of Edinburgh visited the country to celebrate the bicentenary of Captain Cook's landing. The Holyroodhouse display will be followed by shows at Buckingham Palace from July 23 and Windsor Castle from September 17. In total, around 150 outfits worn by the Queen will go on display to the public across the three venues. The Queen's purple silk-wool blend coat and green dress with matching hat which the monarch wore to open the Scottish Parliament in 1999, right, are on display For Her Majesty's meeting with Pope John Paul II in 1980, Ian Thomas designed a black silk-velvet and taffeta dress, which the Queen wore with the traditional black silk-tulle veil or mantilla, right The exhibition includes a pink silk dress and white jacquard coat by Stewart Parvin, with a hat by Philip Somerville which her Majesty wore to a garden party, right For the Commonwealth Heads of Government reception held at the Palace in 1997, Her Majesty wore a silk evening dress designed by John Anderson, covered in beads and sequins An elegant turquoise gown designed by Norman Hartnell was worn to Princess Margaret's wedding in 1960 It should be easy to spot a black and white panda among hundreds of dogs - but this brain teaser is harder to solve than it sounds. The latest in the Where's Waldo-esque craze of drawings, kicked off by Hungarian cartoonist Gergely Dudas late last year, was created by Matthew Merrill from Fresno, California. The illustration features a number of different coloured and sized dogs, with a few wearing bows and others with long shaggy hair, making them even more difficult to differentiate between. Scroll down for the reveal The illustration, created by Matthew Merrill from California, features a number of different coloured and sized dogs, with a few wearing bows and others with long shaggy hair, making them even more difficult to differentiate between Among the hundreds of dogs is a cheeky-looking panda. But the black and white creature shares several similarities with its fellow hounds including jaunty ears and a black nose. With every breed represented and a few mutts as well, it's quite a challenge to spot the bear hiding amid the giant pack of dogs. But if you look closely you'll see it sandwiched to the middle of the right hand side of the drawing. The animal is far less easy to spot than the corgis pictured with giant ears, or the white showdog with its hair in a pink bow. Once you've spotted the bear, you can then see how long it takes you to find the various breeds featured. The black and white creature is sandwiched between various pooches in the middle of the right hand side of the drawing There's a Hungarian puli - the dreadlocked pooch owned by Mark Zucker - as well as a labradlor, husky, shar pei, mastiff, doberman, a schnauzer, spaniel, pointer, great Dane, chihuahua and poodle. But it seems that the teaser is a little too easy for the web's tastes with commenters saying it took them a mere two seconds to find the panda. One wrote: 'In an instant,' to describe the length of time it took her to find the animal. This new visual game follows on from a teaser posted two weeks ago by Mashable's Watercooler, created by Max Knoblauch. The drawing features a number of hamsters in various states of happiness, with a few dressed up in wacky costumes to throw off guesses. Among the crowd of hamsters is a potato - which blends in surprisingly well with its furry friends. Can you spot it? The illustration, created by Max Knoblauch, features a number of hamsters in various states of happiness, with a few dressed up in wacky costumes to throw off guesses There's bridal hamster, complete with a veil and a smile, a rodent in a red clown nose, and one even wearing a Mets jersey. But nestled behind two hamsters that aren't dressed up at all is the potato in the fourth row from the bottom and four spots from the right. In another Knoblauch illustration, the reader is challenged to find Doc Brown, Christopher Lloyd's character in the Back to the Future films, amid dozens of Bernie Sanders. But nestled behind two hamsters that aren't dressed up at all is the potato in the fourth row from the bottom and four spots from the right In another Max Knoblauch illustration, the reader is challenged to find Doc Brown, Christopher Lloyd's character in the Back to the Future films, amid dozens of Bernie Sanders But people may find this one a little easier, as Doc Brown's circular glasses are a dead giveaway in the sea of Sanders. Hungarian cartoonist Gergely Dudas is to credit for the surging trend of sweet and silly illustrations sweeping the internet and asking people to find the likes of eggs, pandas and owls. Dudas most recently released an Easter-themed image that disguised an egg among a cluster of bunnies. The image was shared more than 7,000 times after Dudas posted it on his Facebook page last week. People may find this one easier, as Doc Brown's circular glasses are a dead giveaway in the sea of Bernies Hungarian cartoonist Gergely Dudas challenged fans to find the Easter egg hidden in this group of bunnies As it typical with his drawings the cartoonist, who goes by the name of Dudolf, has thrown in a few red herrings to keep those trying to solve the puzzle distracted. One of the rabbits wears a top hat, two others hold a tin of paint while a fourth munches on a carrot, drawing the eye away from the real prize - the elusive egg. The peach-colored egg is actually located towards the left hand edge of the drawing, two rows up from the bottom, hiding behind a white rabbit's head. Since being posted on hid Facebook page on Friday morning the image has attracted almost 4,000 likes and has been shared more than 2,000 times Dudas, or Dudolf as he is known when drawing, spawned the Where's waldo-style internet puzzle craze back in December last year when he asked fans to find the panda hidden in these snowmen Jan Josleyn wrote: 'I am always very good at these but ... I sure can't say that NOW. this one almost got the best of me!' Meanwhile Peggy Prawdzik praised the artist, saying: 'Dudolf - You're the smile this world needs. Thanks for your posts!' Dudolf first found fame in December last year with his drawing of a crowd of snowmen with a panda hiding in their midst that was shared hundreds of thousands of times. The image of the panda was shared hundreds of thousands of times as it captivated internet users who eventually found him here Capitalizing on his new-found fame, Dudolf quickly followed up with this image of wide-eyed owls, this time challenging people to find the cat concealed among them The Where's Waldo-style cartoon was quickly followed up by another featuring cats and owls, before several imitators added their contributions. Reddit user Oneste stuck with the panda theme, but this time drew the fuzzy creature hiding among a group of Stormtroopers to mark the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. There amongst Imperial troops including Stormtroopers, Speeder Biker riders and Snowtroopers, is a single panda with the same black and white colouring as the other figures. Then, in February this year to mark Oscar season, illustrator Michael Rogalski hid a golden statuette among a group of C3PO droids from the Star Wars films and drove the internet mad looking for it. The key to tracking the elusive feline down proved to be the difference between the owls' beaks and the cat's Y-shaped mouth (pictured) The popularity of Dudolf's illustrations quickly spawned imitators, including illustrator Michael Rogalski who tasked people with finding the Oscar among these C3POs The statuette's different facial expression turned out to be the key to finding him in this drawing Reddit user Oneste also got in on the act by hiding another panda in among this group of Stormtroopers He has followed her around the world to places like Abu Dhabi, Canada and the USA, and he was there when her great-granddaughter was christened. Now, as Queen Elizabeth celebrates her 90th birthday, royal photographer Chris Jackson has chosen his favourite images he's taken of the monarch - and says that, even as she enters her tenth decade, her 'elegance and authority' are what makes her unique. 'Photographing the Queen is one of my favourite parts of the job,' Chris told MailOnline. 'Its a real privilege. Scroll down for video As Queen Elizabeth celebrates her 90th birthday this week, veteran royal photographer Chris Jackson has chosen his favourite images he's taken of the monarch - praising her 'elegance and authority' 'Every member of the royal family is different to capture on camera, and enjoyable for different reasons. You become familiar with their nuances and personalities over the years. 'The Queen, however, is someone who Im always excited about photographing. No matter what the engagement, be it the opening of a school, to a high-profile foreign State Visit, there is always an opportunity to capture an iconic image of someone who is instantly recognisable around the world.' The Getty Images photographer added: 'There is a reassuring consistency to the Queen's behaviour - the minimal interaction with media or feedback makes the job all the more challenging and exciting. 'Predicting how the light will fall or what the monarch may do next is all part of the challenge. 'Keeping sharp is important - any deviation from this can often make a great picture, the flashes of humanity, natural smiles and 'ordinary' behaviour are rare with her ultra-professional demeanour, but what you look to record - is something people connect with. The veteran photographer captured this image of Her Majesty as she arrived at Joze Pucnik, Slovenia. 'This was on arrival into Joze Pucnik airport on the first day of a two-day tour of Slovenia in 2008,' he recalled Royal photographer Chris Jackson travels the world photographing the Queen for Getty images 'Her timeless elegance and authority still mean she is unique and like no other Royal to capture on camera.' THE QUEEN MAKES AN ENTRANCE, OCTOBER 2008 Chris captured this image of Her Majesty as she arrived at Joze Pucnik, Slovenia. 'This was on arrival into Joze Pucnik airport on the first day of a two-day tour of Slovenia in 2008,' he recalled. 'I was fortunate she looked up and in the right direction at the top of the steps. Just an example of trying to create something a little bit different.' A SPOT OF POLO, JUNE 2009 'Capturing the Queen in such a natural moment such as smiling or laughing is rare,' says Chris, who snapped this photo at the Queen's Cup final at Guards Polo Club in June 2009. 'I just love the energy and joy in this moment at the polo The Queens Cup in 2009 - it must have been a very good joke.' The Queen enjoys a spot of Polo in 2009. Chris says: 'There is a reassuring consistency to the Queen's behaviour - the minimal interaction with media or feedback makes the job all the more challenging and exciting' A GREY DAY IN CANADA, JULY 2010 The Queen looks on as she arrives at the site for Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg, Canada. 'As the Queen of Canada, Elizabeth II, has visited Canada on numerous occasions,' Chris says. 'I love our trips there; we even have a Mountie assigned to look after the media, a friendly chap we have got to know over the years.' Her Majesty during a state visit to Canada, 2010. Chris says: 'I love our trips there; we even have a Mountie assigned to look after the media, a friendly chap we have got to know over the years' 'I love the simplicity of the situation in this photo - the grey skies and the strong looks remind us of the Queen's commitment to duty and her realms overseas.' DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER, JULY 2010 This photo of the Queen wearing crystal-encrusted sunglasses while watching a 3D display during a visit to Pinewood Studios in 2010 in Toronto caused quite a stir. Chris recalls: 'The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh visited Pinewood Studios in Toronto and had specially made 3D glasses with a Swarovski 'Q' embellished on the side. 'Very bling! I have no idea what she made of the presentation but it certainly made a good photo.' Diamonds are forever: This photo of the Queen wearing crystal-encrusted sunglasses while watching a 3D display during a visit to Pinewood Studios in 2010 in Toronto caused quite a stir A GOOD OLD KNEES-UP, SEPTEMBER 2010 Chris says the annual Braemar Highland Games in Scotland are one of his favourite events to photograph. 'The Royals tend to be creatures of tradition and every year they will attend this colourful and friendly highland event,' he explains. 'Towards the end, the Queen and Prince were watching Balmoral compete in the tug-of-war, something that often provides much hilarity. 'I loved this brief moment as the interaction reminds us all that they may be the Queen and future King, but above all, they are just mother and son.' 'Above all, they are just mother and son': Chris says he loves this picture of the Queen and Prince Charles in 2010 at the annual Braemar Highland Games in Scotland, an event that Chris always enjoys documenting BLENDING IN, ABU DHABI, NOVEMBER 2010 The Queen wore a headscarf during a five-day tour of the Middle East. 'The Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi is a mind-blowing and impressive building,' Chris says. 'The Queen was visiting as part of a State visit. 'Always respectful of the sartorial demands of different religious establishments, the Queen wore the gold ensemble with her trademark white gloves and headscarf looking incredibly elegant.' The Queen visits a mosque in Abu Dhabi in 2010. Chris says: 'Always respectful of the sartorial demands of different religious establishments, the Queen wore the gold ensemble with her trademark white gloves' MEETING THE PRESIDENT, MAY 2011 'As the first black President of the United States, Obama is an iconic figure,' says Chris, who captured this shot at Buckingham Palace. 'To be able to capture two such powerful and iconic characters in the same frame was always going to make a great shot - they seemed to get on famously at this State Banquet in 2011 and I loved the relaxed feel of this image despite the formality of the situation.' The Queen hosts President Obama at a Buckingham Palace state dinner. 'To be able to capture two such powerful and iconic characters in the same frame was always going to make a great shot,' Chris says HER FIRST BIG WIN, JUNE 2013 'This was a special moment,' Chris recalls. 'The Queen's passion for her horses is legendary so when she became the first reigning monarch to win the Gold Cup at Ascot in the 207 year history of the race with her horse 'Estimate' it was an incredible moment. 'The public were all behind her and the atmosphere as Estimate romped home to victory was electric. She couldn't conceal her delight as the cup was handed over by the Duke of York. 'I just love the look of pure joy as the gold reflects the light into her beaming face.' Going for gold: 'When she became the first reigning monarch to win the Gold Cup at Ascot in the 207-year history of the race with her horse 'Estimate' it was an incredible moment,' Chris says A MOMENT OF REFLECTION, OCTOBER 2014 The Queen takes a moment to look at the poppies at Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, an art installation at the Tower of London to commemorate the centenary of the First World War. 'This was an incredible installation - something the public really connected with so when the Monarch got a chance to visit and walk through the field of ceramic poppies it made a strong and poignant image,' Chris says. 'I chose a low perspective and shallow depth of field to blow the poppies out of focus and create more of a surreal effect. The backlit sun added an extra dimension.' The Queen looks at the poppies at Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red at the Tower of London in 2014. Chris called the photograph a 'strong and poignant image' ONE'S FIRST TWEET, OCTOBER 2014 'Embracing social media is common among younger members of the Royal family, but a couple of years ago I photographed the Queen sending her first tweet during the London Science Museums Information Age gallery launch. 'I'm not sure how many tweets she has sent since, but as a Royal photographer, historic 'firsts' are all part of the job. 'When they involve the contrast of an 88-year-old woman and a relatively new form of communication it's a great story (and picture!)' One's first tweet: 'When they involve the contrast of an 88-year-old woman and a relatively new form of communication it's a great story (and picture)' Chris said of this photo taken at London's Science Museum HOLDING HANDS, MARCH 2015 'This was a touching moment as the Queen and Prince Philip descended the steps of St Paul's after a service honouring lives lost in the Afghanistan Campaign. 'Not only did it remind me of their frailty but also it was symbolist of the role the 93 year old (at the time) Duke has been playing his whole life. The Duke is stalwart support for the Queen. 'I certainly dont remember photographing a moment like this before.' 'I certainly dont remember photographing a moment like this before': Chris said this March 2015 image captured a 'touching moment' between the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh leaving St Paul's cathedral TIME FOR A SPOT OF CAKE, JUNE 2015 'I photographed this event soon after a BBC journalist had mistakenly announced the Queen had been taken into hospital. The WI meeting at the Royal Albert Hall was a lively affair and I think at one point I was the only guy in the room (by room I mean Royal Albert Hall!). 'At the end came the cake-cutting and the Queen was surrounded by ladies from the WI as well as her daughter-in-law, the Countess of Wessex and her daughter the Princess Royal. 'These are the natural moments I look for in my job; not a posed situation, just a human interaction between mother and daughter. The Queen was having problems cutting into the cake and Princess Anne had to step in and help eventually.' 'I was the only guy in the room': Chris took this photo at a celebration for a WI meeting at the Royal Albert Hall, and recalls the Queen had trouble cutting into the cake - and was forced to enlist the help of her daughter TROOPING THE COLOUR, JUNE 2015 'Trooping the Colour, the Queen's official birthday parade, is an important event in the Royal calendar every year. 'Last year had a whole new (and very sweet) dimension when the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge brought Prince George. He was unsurprisingly wide-eyed as he looked out at the throngs of public around the QVM below. 'With the Duke of Cambridge keeping a tight grasp, George even performed one of his first public 'Royal waves'. For me the best photo was during the fly over as a bemused George looked up at the noisy spectacle, the smile on the Queen's face clearly shows the new addition to the balcony was a very welcome one.' 'The smile on the Queen's face clearly shows the new addition to the balcony was a very welcome one': The royal family watch the Trooping of Colour from the balcony at Buckingham Palace, joined by Prince George A DAY AT THE RACES, JUNE 2015 'I have photographed the Queen and Prince Phillip arriving into the parade ring hundreds of times over the years. 'In the parade ring is a beautiful bronze statue of four-time Gold Cup winner, Yeats, by celebrated sculpturer Charlie Langton, and I was keen to integrate this into my picture. 'After pre-empting where the carriage would drive I positioned myself amongst the crowds at the right height and combined with a little luck managed to capture the image I was looking for.' Chris captured this image of the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh arriving at Ascot in 2015 DONNING HER TIARA, JUNE 2015 'It's always special for a Royal Photographer when the Queen wears her full State regalia,' Chris says. 'Her elegance and power cannot be understated. 'Combining this formality with something as natural as a smile is not always easy but being patient and waiting for the right moment often pays off.' 'Her elegance and power cannot be understated': The photographer says that capturing the Queen in her State regalia is always 'very special' WITH GEORGE AT PRINCESS CHARLOTTE'S CHRISTENING, JULY 2015 'This was one of my favourite events to photograph last year - a real family occasion,' Chris says. 'Anything involving the children always makes for more natural interactions and less formality. 'It was a privilege to see firsthand the interaction between little George and his great grandmother. The Queen clearly adores him and has time for his curious questions about her hat!' 'The Queen clearly adores him': For Chris, it was a 'privilege' to see the interaction between Prince George and his great-grandmother at Princess Charlotte's christening REMEMBRANCE FESTIVAL, NOVEMBER 2015 'There is clearly a strong bond between the Queen and her grandson who will one day be King. Conversely, he clearly has a huge amount of respect for her. 'This was a great sequence as the Queen was trying to dig out her glasses to watch a Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall and William shared a joke with her.' The photographer says there is clearly a 'strong bond' between the Queen and his grandmother, and that WIlliam has 'a huge amount of respect' for the monarch ROYAL BLUE, MARCH 2016 'This was taken during a visit by the Prince of Wales and Queen to the Prince's Trust headquarters. 'I noticed the striking colour of the wall when I arrived at the venue before the Queen - great natural light in the room too - exactly what I look for in a portrait. 'It was a total bonus that the Queen was wearing a complimentary colour. All I had to do was line myself up and wait for the right moment.' Think you are good at skateboarding or dancing? Try doing them both at the same time like Korean longboard sensation Hyojoo Ko. This mesmerising video shows the young woman shimmying across the concrete of Seouls Han River Park while effortlessly executing a fluid dance routine on the board. Smiling and carefree with her long hair flowing in the breeze, Hyojoo shows off her light feet as she twirls and flicks the board around without ever slowing down. The mesmerising video shows the young woman shimmying across the concrete of Seouls Han River Park while effortlessly executing a fluid dance routine on the board The video became her most popular yet after it was shared on Facebook by Korean hip hop star Kero One, whose music plays in the background The avid skater regularly entertains her 107,000 Instagram followers with other videos of her and other skilled longboarders performing similar moves around the world. This one became her most popular yet after it was shared on Facebook by Korean hip hop star Kero One, whose music plays in the background. His post was viewed 4.5million times and attracted more than 42,000 shares and 8,300 comments. Hyojoo makes frequent trips to Europe and Asia to film videos, promote skating equipment, and attend longboarding events. She just returned from Berlin and Barcelona and has previously traveled to Taiwan, Amsterdam, Madrid, and Paris. The avid skater regularly entertains her 107,000 Instagram followers with other videos of her and other skilled longboarders performing similar moves around the world Hyojoo shows off her light feet as she twirls and flicks the board around (pictured mid-way) without ever slowing down When she is not dancing her way across the globe, Hyojoo works in Seoul as a user interface designer for popular mobile messaging app Line. Last year she was part of a team that won a Red Dot Award for communication design for Lines B612 selfie app. She wrote on Facebook about her love of skating: I chose what I wanted to do every time, and I have never regretted what I gave up. I first chose the longboard because it can make my life happy and enjoyable. She wrote on Facebook about her love of skating: I chose what I wanted to do every time, and I have never regretted what I gave up'. I first chose the longboard because it can make my life happy and enjoyable' Han River Park is popular with longboarders because of its long, smooth concrete boulevards and the fresh wind and river air. Students and couples walk along the park or sit eating chicken and drinking beer, and it hosts regular free Korean pop concerts. It hosts one of the worlds biggest firework festivals, with a million people turning up to watch the 40-minute show. She just returned from Berlin and Barcelona and has previously traveled to Taiwan, Amsterdam, Madrid, and Paris Starting your adult life with crippling student loan debt is undoubtedly stressful, but one college student found the humor in her predicament and posed for a provocative graduation photoshoot while surrounded by all of her bills. Maigan Kennedy, a senior at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina, had some fun with her graduation photos and drew attention to the fact that she - like many other college students - will be leaving school thousands of dollars in debt. In the images taken by Areon Multimedia, Maigan set out to prove that 'debt is sexy' while simultaneously apologizing to her parents for getting a bachelor of arts degree in theater. Debt is sexy! College graduate Maigan Kennedy, who studied at Meredith College, in Raleigh, North Carolina, decided to highlight the sky-high cost of her education, while posing for graduation photos Something different: The theater student also took the chance to apologize to her parents - to whom she dedicated this image in particular - for not choosing a different major A bit of everything! In addition to the funny photos, which also saw Maigan posing with a trophy to mark her debt, the college graduate also posed for some more serious shots When she shared the images on Imgur on Tuesday, she explained that she had her graduation pictures taken the day before while noting that the photoshoot 'started out pretty chill' before they 'got artsy'. 'This one's for my Mamaw, [sic]' she captioned one of the more traditional photos of herself posed in her cap and gown. However, the images took a unique spin as she posed with a small trophy that has the word 'debt' splashed across the front. 'I got a prize,' she wrote. 'But I don't want it.' Another picture sees her holding up a cardboard sign that reads: 'Will run lines for food.' 'Sorry about the BA in Theatre, mom and dad,' she wrote. Strike a pose: The images were shared on Imgur, where they quickly gained hundreds of thousands of fans You win! 'I got a prize, but I don't want it,' Maigan said of her debt trophy Overdue! Maigan found herself being contacted by plenty of other graduates who wanted to share their own stories of debt, including one person who said they had an 'MA in English and Games Studies' But the best images from the series are the ones where Maigan is posed lying on the ground surrounded by her 'overdue' student loan bills. Maigan cleverly captioned the images: 'Debt is sexy' and 'Sallie Mae centerfold', referencing the student loan company. 'Void of my arts commentary, the shoot stands to represent the state of many (dare I say most?) American college students upon graduation,' she explained in the comments section of her post. The images have been viewed more than 197,000 times, and many noted that they also chose majors they loved rather than those that would increase their earning potential. The fight starts at the breakfast table the day my 13-year-old daughter Eadie goes back to school after the Easter holidays. She's had a growth spurt, and you can tell. 'Your skirt's too short,' I say. 'No it's not. Everyone else's skirts are way shorter.' 'No they aren't. And I know that for a fact. I see them at the school gates most days.' Fiona thinks that her daughter, Eadie, wears her school skirt too short - but Eadie says that she's slut-shaming her (stock photo) 'What are you, the Skirt Police?' she says, rolling her eyes, bristling with impertinence. 'When you walked up the stairs I could see your knickers. That proves it's too short. Now take it off so I can let the hem down.' Eadie then accuses me of 'shaming' her, parroting (and editing, for my benefit, presumably) that awful phrase 'slut shaming'. It's a hideous term spouted out endlessly nowadays by girls far too young to understand its meaning. Originally, to 'slut-shame' a woman was to admonish her for a perceived transgression of accepted, and draconian, codes of sexual conduct. To make her feel ashamed about the way she dresses and behaves. Only now it's gone too far. Reality TV star Kim Kardashian, for example, trotted it out in response to criticism of her latest stark-naked selfie, with a request that commentators stop 'body-shaming and slut-shaming' her. While, Monica Lewinsky used a similar lament during an internet talk about her seedy goings-on in the White House with Bill Clinton. The headmistress of Lord Grey Secondary School in Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, (pictured) who, on the first day of the new term, sent home 29 girls because their skirts were deemed too short or their trousers too tight This leaves us mothers with a problem. While the 'you're not going out dressed like that' argument is as old as time, we now have a generation of girls fizzing with a self-righteous belief in their own 'right to self-expression' and cod feminism. This is all thrown into the already bubbling melting pot of surging hormones and plain, old-fashioned bolshiness. I find myself torn between wanting to support this new wave of feminism, teaching girls to stand up for themselves and fight for their right to wear what they like without fear or shame, and the protective instincts of a mother who just cannot stomach the sight of her daughter walking out the house with a pelmet where her skirt should be. Fiona Mcintosh says that if her 13-year-old daughter Eadie gets detention for having her skirt too short, she'll just say 'I told you so' And I really could do without this debate at 7.15 on a Monday morning. As I tried to explain to Eadie, I am a long way off being a prude. But, at 13, she is still a child and therefore my responsibility. She is too young to be charging on to the feminist battleground, with her underwear on full display, in the name of self-expression. Of course, she can wear what she likes at home, but when she goes to and from school on a public bus, it's my duty to draw the line somewhere. And that line is one inch above the knee - not four. That's why I have a certain amount of sympathy for Dr Tracey Jones, the beleaguered headmistress of Lord Grey Secondary School in Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, who, on the first day of the new term, sent home 29 girls (parents say it was closer to 70) because their skirts were deemed too short or their trousers too tight. As I tried to explain to Eadie, I am a long way off being a prude. But, at 13, she is still a child and therefore my responsibility 'We have had a strict uniform policy for quite a few years now,' she wrote to parents. 'However, since then, for some students standards have slipped. 'This is particularly noticeable with many of the girls because the current fashion is for short, tight skirts or for very tight trousers or jeggings. 'We have a tower block with six flights of stairs,' she added. 'The last thing we want is boys peering up girls' skirts while they are climbing the stairs.' Perhaps she could have phrased it better, but to me, it all seemed totally reasonable and sensible. However, the outraged girls being sent home to change didn't see it that way. Days later, Tracey made a very clumsy attempt to justify her decision by claiming tight clothing was 'unflattering' for larger girls because it 'emphasised their heftiness'. She really should have quit while she was ahead This sent their already enraged parents off the deep-end. One furious parent, who did not want to be named, said: 'This is a breeding ground for anorexia. No headteacher should comment on size and shape where teenage girls are concerned.' Another said: 'So larger girls at Lord Grey who experience bullying about their size should not expect the school to tackle the bullying, but should instead purchase looser clothes and hope the bullies are fooled into thinking that they've lost weight?' Headteacher of Lord Grey Secondary School Dr Tracey Jones was criticised for sending girls home because she thought their skirts were too short It was only a matter of time before a surly teenage girl played the 'fat-shame' or 'size-shame' card. One 16-year-old student called Chloe Hirst said: 'The boys never get any hassle, they are so sexist about it. I feel it's disgusting how the women are asked to dress modestly.' You could almost see her folding her arms and giving you a death stare as she said it. And while I can understand - indeed fully expect - teenage girls reacting with indignation when their choices are challenged by authority, what I cannot comprehend is the parents backing them up. Since when do parents challenge pretty basic school rules designed to protect young girls? Learning how to dress to suit your body shape is a useful lesson. So is the lesson in how to dress appropriately to suit an occasion. If you don't teach pupils there's a time and a place for mini-skirts and spray-on jeggings, how do you expect them to cope with the world outside school? Ensuring children don't walk around with their knickers showing is not a 'disgusting' anti-feminist statement, it's plain common sense. It amazes me that any mother can't see that. Besides, it's a school we're talking about. You know, that place where you knuckle down and learn stuff? My daughters - the oldest is 15 - go to an all-girls school, where boys peering up skirts isn't an issue, yet . But I not only support the school's diktat on skirt length, I positively welcome it. For, strangely, at all-girls schools, skirt length is even more of an issue - and wearing micro-skirts is all about fitting in with friends rather than male attention. Thirteen-year-old girls are notoriously tribal and will do anything to claw their way into the cool set: I've often had a group of Year 8 girls in my kitchen hilariously wearing exactly the same Topshop jeans and tops - regardless of their size or shape - because no one wants to be left out. At school, when they are forced to wear the same uniform, it's how you wear it that signals your status. Once out of that Year 8 and 9 cesspit of jealousy, bitchiness and one-upmanship, they thankfully emerge as much nicer creatures who don't give a second thought to their skirts. My 15-year-old sees her hated school tartan kilt as nothing more than a functional piece of clothing - she can't wait to get rid of it as soon as she hits the sixth form. And as I wait for Eadie to reach this milestone, she knows that if she flouts rules on skirt-length (rolling up the waistband is a classic trick I remember doing myself) she will be punished by the school. As her parent, instead of banging on the headmistress's door and shouting about 'shaming' my daughter, I'll simply flip Eadie an 'I told you so' and let her serve her time in detention. Exactly as my mother did to me whenever I ducked past wearing contraband make-up or a ridiculous hairstyle. Minutes before Eadie was due at the bus stop, I was manically unpicking the hem of her skirt as she wailed: 'Noooooo'. I asked her why she wanted her skirt super short. 'Er, so I don't look like a loser to my friends,' she said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. 'Only boring girls wear long skirts. Everyone knows that. 'And I have to wear ankle socks,' she added. 'Not those long things you got me, they're just weird.' To this 13-year-old, a short skirt has nothing to do with boys or sexual politics and everything to do with innocently wanting to belong to her Year 8 tribe. If you haven't seen it on the menu yet, chances are you soon will. Alpaca meat is rising in popularity, with the Gold Coast Bulletin reporting about 70 restaurants across Australia feature the meat in their dishes. Among them is Melbourne restaurant Pastuso, whose head chef appeared in a video by the Australian Alpaca Association to discuss how diners have embraced the cuisine. Scroll down for video Dished up: On the menu at Pastuso is Tartare De Alpaca - 30 day dry aged alpaca loin tartare with black garlic and Peruvian caper berries Growing industry: The alpaca meat industry is growing in Australia, with about 70 restaurants featuring the meat on their menu Lean protein: Alpaca meat is said to taste like a combination of beef and lamb and is a healthy meat Alejandro Saravia, who is a Peruvian chef at Pastuso, has cooked with alpaca meat for four years and described the taste as similar to beef or lamb. 'Alpaca has been very well embraced from the Australian public,' he said in the video. 'Flavour wise it's very easy to understand, between beef and lamb, so it's not so challenging, and also it's very healthy meat. Leading the way: Peruvian chef Alejandro Saravia has cooked with alpaca meat for the past four years Chaning pallates: Mr Saravia, who is head chef at Melbourne restaurant Pastuso, said the meat had been well embraced by the Australian public Healthy option: Alpaca meat is a good source of protein with little saturated fat and cholesterol 'The future of breeding alpaca for human consumption will be just going better and better.' The restaurant features dishes such as Tartare De Alpaca: 30 day dry aged alpaca loin tartare with black garlic and Peruvian caper berries. Renowned chef Matt Moran, who owns some of Sydney's leading restaurants, previously wrote an article for The Daily Telegraph to discuss his experience cooking alpaca meat. Moran said he had never tried the meat until he visited an alpaca farm, and described the flavour as 'very tasty', especially the meat from the neck. Celebrity following: Renowned chef Matt Moran has previously spoken about his experience cooking alpaca meat Low impact: Alpacas are environmentally sustainable to produce and have less of an impact on the soil and ecosystem Alpaca has also starred in dishes at the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, with the The Age reporting in 2013 about 20 Australian restaurants served the meat, a number which has grown considerably since. Melbourne restaurant San Telmo head chef Mike Patrick trailled an alpaca dish, and said the response from foodies was mixed. 'It was 50/50, some people were "oh wow - what are you cooking that for? No thank you" and others thought "this is really cool and something different and I want to give it a shot",' he said. 'The people who tried it loved it. It's a point of difference and people like that.' Hardy herd: Alpacas are able to withstand dry conditions better than other livestock In Australian alpacas are primarily farmed for their fleece, but the Australian Alpaca Association website said farming alpacas for meat is a growing industry. Alpaca meat is a good source of protein with little saturated fat and cholesterol, it is also environmentally sustainable to produce. Alpacas are able to withstand dry conditions for longer than most livestock, and their soft feet cause minimal damage to the soil and ecosystem. A newlywed couple from New Zealand has shared the powerful moment thirty guests along with the groom and members of the bridal party, performed the haka at their wedding. Jackson and Jennifer Tamaariki, from Auckland, had the traditional dance performed at their wedding at Orakei Bay on 3 April and uploaded a video of the performance to YouTube. The haka is a traditional dance performed by the Maori, who are the indigenous people of New Zealand. Impressive performance: Jackson and Jennifer Tamaariki had the haka performed at their wedding on 2 April 'It was emotional': The haka was performed by around 30 male guests, including the groom (above) The most famous version of the haka is the 'war dance' which was performed by Maori warriors before a battle, but there are many reasons for a haka to be performed. Bride Jennifer Tamaariki explained that they decided to have the haka performed at their wedding to pay tribute to her husband Jackson's cultural heritage. 'It was emotional,' Mrs Tamaariki told Daily Mail Australia. 'A lot of the guests were very overwhelmed and emotional too. It wasn't something some of them had witnessed before.' Melting pot of culture: The couple said that they had the haka performed because they wanted to incorporate their diverse backgrounds into the wedding Fighting fit: The haka is a traditional Maori dance performed for a number of reasons, including by warriors before battle Quite a show: Mrs Tamaariki said a number of guests were 'overwhelmed and emotional' after seeing the haka performed The bride explained that the couple has different backgrounds, and they wanted to have them both represented at the wedding. 'The haka gave me an insight into Jackson's culture,' Mrs Tamaariki explained. 'We come from diverse cultural backgrounds. Jackson is Maori and Cook Islander, and I'm from a Kurdish background.' Not only was the haka performed, but after the couple had their first dance the bride's mother and her bridal party performed a traditional Kurdish dance. Traditional and modern: The wedding also featured Kurdish dancing, as Mrs Tamaariki is of a Kurdish background Unique: The haka was a combination of three different hakas from different tribes, and was composed by the couple's friend Takoha Rotati 'The haka gave me an insight into Jackson's culture': Mrs Tamaariki said that she enjoyed being able to witness the dance and understand Maori and Cook Islander tradition The haka itself was unique too. A close friend of the groom, Takoha Ropati, composed a special version of the haka for the wedding which was a combination of hakas from three different tribes, the Ngati Whatua, Tainui and Ngapuhi. The three tribes were all represented in the 30 wedding guests who performed the dance at the wedding. 'This haka, done in this way, by these men, for this kaupapa, has never been seen before and will never be seen live again,' the mother of the groom, Donna Tamaariki said. Popular: A video of the haka performance has been uploaded to YouTube, where it has gotten more than 7,000 views The big day: The wedding brought elements of the couple's backgrounds, Maori, Cook Islander and Kurdish, together for a beautiful combination of cultures Diversity: Mr Tamaariki's mother said that the wedding showed a 'freedom for cultures to be fully expressed and celebrated' Mrs Tamaariki also said that the haka, and the other cultural elements of the wedding, was truly special. 'It was a cultural expression of the love and respect that they each have for one another,' she said. ' The Cook Island drums, the haka, the Kurdish dancing, traditonal dress all demonstrated a freedom for cultures to be fully expressed and celebrated,' Spring can be a stressful time for those of us who have kept our legs covered up for months. Soon well have to peel off our black tights and face the horror of pale, hairy limbs as scaly as old kettles. Most women will have taken off their tights by mid-May, so theres only a month to go - and your need may be even more urgent if youre jetting off on holiday in the next few weeks. Alice Smellie digs out the latest treatments to give you sexy summer legs, as the countdown to tights off begins. Scroll down for video Spring can be a stressful time for those of us who have kept our legs covered up for months A MONTH TO GO GOODBYE SCALY SKIN Skin on legs is more resistant to wrinkling than facial skin as its slightly thicker, says consultant dermatologist Dr Anjali Mahto, of Londons Cadogan Clinic. But in winter central heating and the cold collude to create very dry skin. This gives a scaly appearance. Heavy-duty moisturiser and creamy shower products help, of course, but theres a cunning tip that internet users are raving about that may help you de-scale faster: acne pads. These spot-fighters, such as Clearasil Ultra 5-in-1 Cleansing Pads (3.99, Boots), are designed to battle teen face spots. But the active ingredient, salicylic acid, also helps to remove dead skin cells, so your legs will look far less scaly and cream will sink in better. Just swipe them over your legs before moisturising. Most women will have taken off their tights by mid-May, so theres only a month to go - and your need to improve them may be even more urgent if youre jetting off on holiday in the next few weeks Clearasil Ultra 5-in-1 Cleansing Pads (3.99, Boots) WAX WORKS Every pair of legs has 17,000 hairs and not one is welcome. Ideally, leave leg hair for four to six weeks before removing it, says hair removal specialist Arezoo Kaviani. Then you can get it all off at one go, rather than several hairs sprouting just when youve finished because theyre on a different growth cycle to the rest. Around the menopause, hormonal changes can cause leg hair to sprout in surprising places, so keep an eye out for dark hairs in new areas on your limbs, such as the backs of thighs. The most efficient way to get rid of hair is waxing. Shaving will leave the root of the hair under the skin, so if youre dark-haired you may see it shining through like a black pinprick. Contrary to popular myth, shaving doesnt make hair grow back thicker. Waxing removes the entire hair, though, so eventually the follicle will die off, meaning hair becomes sparse over time. The night before you wax, exfoliate and moisturise your legs. The next morning, wax them, but dont apply fake tan until the next day. If you apply it too soon, your pores may still be open and will absorb the tan, leaving you with unsightly brown marks. Liz Earle Body Brush (8.50, uklizearle.com). Fancy doing it yourself? Try new Professional Warm Wax With Natural Beeswax by Veet (9.99, boots.com) which comes in a little pink microwaveable pot. CANKLES CRACKED Worried about cankles - the dreaded chubby ankles? There are non-invasive treatments to break down fat and firm up flesh. Harley Medical Groups i-LipoXcell (150, harleymedical.co.uk) uses a laser to break down the contents of fat cells into fatty acids and glycerol, which can be used up as energy. Massage helps move it all into the lymphatic system to be excreted as sweat, then high- frequency radio waves are used to tighten skin and stimulate collagen production. Ideally, have eight treatments, twice a week for a month. Its expensive, but youll see an immediate improvement. G5 is a salon treatment (75, one a week for a month, nevillehairandbeauty.net) that painlessly applies ultrasound and infrasound to the area, firming and reshaping wobbly bits. HIT THE BARRE Ballet-inspired workouts have been touted as one of the best ways to build bone density in older women, as they are low-impact and help flexibility. Niki Rein, of Barrecore, the class that supermodels such as Jourdan Dunn use to get in shape, recommends doing the exercise below four times a week for a month to lengthen the look of the upper thigh and tone calves. Stand up straight and hold on to a kitchen island or something else that is stable and hip-height (the back of a strong chair will do), with one leg stretched out to the front, toe pointed, and the other leg slightly bent. Pull in your tummy and raise the extended leg to hip height without moving the hips (or as high as you can do comfortably). Garniers Summer Body (2.74, boots.com) Lift and lower slowly for 20 repetitions, then hold the leg at hip level for ten seconds. Repeat on the other side. The lifted leg needs to be kept perfectly straight - it should start to quiver if youre doing the exercise correctly. TWO WEEKS LEFT WASH AND BRUSH-UP Body brushing gets rid of dry, flaky skin and stimulates circulation, which improves skin tone, says Dr Mahto. New Magnitone Full Monty Body Brush (130, magnitone.co.uk) taps into the trend for electric brushing and can be used every day in the shower to wobble dirt out of pores and boost blood supply. Results will be seen quickly. You dont have to invest in gadgets, says Dr Mahto. Dry brushing with a wooden brush and basic bristles is fine. Try Liz Earle Body Brush (8.50, uklizearle.com). BANISH THIGH WOBBLES Quadriceps - the large muscles in the thighs - are easy to shape up fast, says celebrity personal trainer Cornel Chin. Shaveworks Pearl Souffle shave cream (18.90, SpaceNK) Even walking more than usual will add some extra tone. But if thighs are wobbling above the knees and spread too wide when you sit down, he suggests doing 20 squats a day, in two sets of ten, to firm up muscles rapidly. Put a chair or bench behind you to ensure you go down to 90 degrees. This is vital to activate the muscles sufficiently. Stand with feet parallel and hip-width apart. Fold arms and bend knees, slowly lowering the buttocks and keeping weight in the heels, not the toes. Go down slowly, lightly touch your bottom on the chair and slowly extend upwards again without locking the knees, says Cornel. Two weeks will make a real difference. TAN-TASTIC Though instant tans are possible, a gradual tan, achieved with a moisturiser/fake tan hybrid, is more likely to give even colour. Garniers Summer Body smells spring-fresh, works brilliantly and is cheap (2.74, boots.com). St Tropez Gradual Tan (9.67, boots.com) gives a high-quality glow. M&S Autograph Self-Tan Spray-On Tights (9.50, marksand spencer.com) A DAY TO GO THE ACID TEST Dont panic. Believe me, theres still plenty of time to get your legs looking good. First, shave them - but dont just use foam or the first blob of shower gel that comes to hand. Shaveworks Pearl Souffle shave cream (18.90, SpaceNK) contains glycolic acid to exfoliate dead cells on the skin surface to give a closer shave and make skin look brighter. Follow this with E45 Fast Acting 24H Spray Moisturiser, which hydrates instantly and all day. LAST MINUTE SHAVE ON THE RUN Youre in black tights and out and about when the weather does that peculiarly British trick of suddenly turning hot. First, try BodyVerde Speed Shave To Go (12, body-verde.com), a razor with shave lotion in the handle for water-free shaving. Bioderma Photoderm Mineral Spray SPF 50+ (9.20, escentual.com) Keep it in your handbag or the car glove compartment for last-minute touch-ups. HINT OF A TINT M&S Autograph Self-Tan Spray-On Tights (9.50, marksand spencer.com) is a quick-dry spray covering freckles and veins and giving a long-lasting blast of colour. Alternatively, the new LOreal Paris Sublime Bronze Dream Legs Airbrush (9.99, boots.com) is a pretty and water-resistant body mist. SLAP IT ON Women can get melanoma (skin cancer) on their lower limbs. Legs are the most common site because melanoma is linked to intermittent and high-intensity sun exposure, says Dr Mahto. So, if you have bare legs, always use a sunscreen such as Bioderma Photoderm Mineral Spray SPF 50+ (9.20, escentual.com). There are few better ways to pass the time in an airport than standing by the luggage carousel and matching travellers to their bags. That monogrammed Louis Vuitton set? Picked up by a well-to-do man and his designer-clad wife, fresh out of business class. The garish animal-print wheelie case? Owned by the perma-tanned woman off on a package holiday with her five squealing friends. The tatty backpack? Sleek silver Samsonite with a lock? Or that pale pink weekend bag with dog motifs? Scroll down for video Assistant to the Duchess of Cambridge's Private Secretary Sophie Agnew, left, and the Duchess of Cambridge's PA and Stylist Natasha Archer, right, carry the bags, cases, boxes and suit carriers that were offloaded from the Duke and Duchess of Cambridges private jet during the Royal tour of India and Bhutan Even the most unseasoned traveller knows that luggage says a lot about the person whos carrying it. It speaks volumes about you, explains Sarah Bryans, a leading travel expert at The Luxury Travel Bible. Its almost as personal as your thumbprint. And so eagle-eyed royal watchers have been poring over pictures of the bags, cases, boxes and suit carriers that were offloaded from the Duke and Duchess of Cambridges private jet during the Royal tour of India and Bhutan this week. The Duchess of Cambridge's Hairdresser Amanda Cook Tucker arrives in India. The luggage is neatly labelled with colour-coded tags (Williams are red and Kates yellow) Neatly labelled with colour-coded tags (Williams are red and Kates yellow), there were carry-on bags of all shapes and sizes, and no doubt several more hefty suitcases in the hold. But what did they tell us about their famous owners? We dissect the royal luggage collection - and ask the experts to analyse what your suitcase says about you ... Kate makes no secret of her obsession with these nylon holdalls by French luxury brand Longchamp 1. UBIQUITOUS LONGCHAMP BAGS Kate makes no secret of her obsession with these nylon holdalls by French luxury brand Longchamp. She, sister Pippa and mum Carole own several hues and sizes, and she never travels without one. The bags on the arms of Kates hairdresser Amanda Cook Tucker, assistant Sophie Agnew and stylist Natasha Archer are all the standard Le Pliage style - practical, roomy and effortlessly elegant. Amanda and Sophie both carry the large travel bag design (61), perfect for squeezing in hair tongs, rollers and brushes to prepare the Duchesss glossy locks for arrival. Natashas is a small tote bag in aniseed green (57), no doubt containing the rest of Kates in-flight essentials. Christine Gray, editor of LuxuryTravelMagazine.com, says Kates enduring affection for these bags stems from their simple, un-flashy nature. Not only do they hark back to her country roots, but their plain block colours are easy to pair with an outfit. Theyre also foldable and wipe-clean - just right for a busy mother-of-two. The colours are subdued and the materials are sturdy and timeless, adds Christine. Its a sensible, classic style. This box appears to be a vintage model of the Moneypenny Leather Vanity Case by upmarket brand Globe-Trotter 2. MYSTERY BLACK BOX Spotted previously on the Duke and Duchesss tour of New Zealand, this black leather box has puzzled royal watchers, who cant work out what it is. It appears to be a vintage model of the Moneypenny Leather Vanity Case by upmarket brand Globe-Trotter. The latest version, which has an internal mirror and jewellery tray, costs 640. Made from black leather, it has an elasticated handle, gold clasp and cotton lining. As its carried by Kates stylist, the box is thought to contain her jewellery, far too precious to be put in the hold. As a brand, Globe-Trotter, explains Sarah Bryans, is a staple of the Queen and was also beloved by Sir Winston Churchill. Steamer trunk luggage - carried by wealthy travellers aboard long-haul ships - is a favourite among royals, as is traditional leather, she adds. Its understated luxury -nothing too recognisable. By holding it in plain sight, the stylist is making sure we know theres something special inside - a dazzling cargo worth tens of thousands of pounds - and shes the one trusted to transport it. This carrier is with the letter W under a small crown, clearly labelling them as Williams 3. MONOGRAMMED CLOTHES COVERS These royal blue carriers - one for a suit and the other for a pair of black patent Oxford-style shoes - are monogrammed with the letter W under a small crown, clearly labelling them as Williams. The larger cover, carried by Sophie Agnew, has been spotted on the tarmac before - when the couple landed in Australia in 2014 - and William has three in the same colour. A pale blue C can be seen on the black dress bag draped over Natasha Archers arm, showing that it contains a gown belonging to Kate. Sam Hood, founder of luxury brand Amara, says carry-on clothes covers are favoured by high-end travellers. Theyre especially useful when excess luggage isnt an issue, she adds. Marking luggage with an official insignia is a regal trait. The Queen and Prince Charles - who has a silver plaque bearing his title on his suitcase - also travel with their initials on show. Monogrammed luggage is traditional among the upper classes, explains Sarah Bryans. The real elite traveller prefers small and discreet lettering, rather than big bold colours. Its a subtle reminder of how important they are -and, in Kates case at least, using unbranded covers avoids ruining the surprise when she unveils her next outfit. The bag, an Albemarle Executive style in grained leather, is made by luxury British designer Thomas Lyte and costs 395 4. BATTERED BRIEFCASE This dark brown leather case belongs to William - he was spotted carrying it on to the plane himself (along with Kates Longchamp bag and Prince Georges adorable kangaroo rucksack) as the couple left Australia in 2014. Its business-like appearance suggests it contains important documents, such as the Dukes official correspondence or a laptop. The bag, an Albemarle Executive style in grained leather, is made by luxury British designer Thomas Lyte and costs 395. It has room for a 13 in laptop, a mobile phone, a separate pocket for paperwork and pen slots, and is made from fine calf leather with a cotton lining. Its functional, but high-quality, fittingly from a brand that has a Royal Warrant, so its no wonder its become one of Williams travel staples. This suitcase, in a fashionable olive colour, costs 319 and is available at Selfridges 5. HIGH STREET SUITCASE This innocuous-looking bag has no identifying tag - the blue label says billeted in hold, which marks where it is placed during the flight - so its most likely shared between the Duke and Duchess. Weve seen it before, carried off the plane by a royal aide in New Zealand two years ago, so this well-travelled case has been around for a while. Its a 65 cm four-wheeled suitcase from the Life collection of Italian travel brand Brics, made from suede-effect material that is stain resistant and durable, with a leather trim and handles. The bag, in a fashionable olive colour, costs 319 and is available at Selfridges. Sam Hood says the Cambridges have chosen this model because its unfussy and long-lasting. Compared to some luggage brands, pieces from Brics offer subtle branding favoured by a more sophisticated traveller, she adds. While some of the other bags are designed to be on show, this case is likely to contain most of the couples casual clothes for their off-duty wear. In an age where a single selfie is enough to 'break the internet' an Australian company has taken self-portraits to the next level. Tech company IoT Group has created the flying selfie stick a drone-like device that users simply chuck in the air to take photos of themselves. Once in the air the camera hovers around your face and uses face recognition technology to take photos, making Kim Kardashian West's selfies look amateurish by comparison. Scroll down for video Next level selfie: The 'flying selfie stick' combines drone technology with a camera to capture the perfect selfie Incredible: The device, known as the ROAM-e, is simply chucked in the air where is hovers and takes photos Selfie star: With celebrities such as Kim Kardashian West (pictured with Hillary Clinton) fueling the selfie phenomenon, the flying selfie stick is sure to be popular IoT Executive Director and global marketing expert Ian Duffell told Daily Mail Australia the camera, called the ROAM-e, can follow you from 10 metres away. The flying selfie stick takes photographs at 360 degrees, meaning you can fit more in to one frame and the photos can be streamed directly to your Facebook, phone or hard drive. 'If you want to take wider shots than a selfie stick could take the ROAM-e is the way to do it,' Mr Duffell said. Candid shots: The flying selfie stick can take photos of you from as far away as 10 metres Breaking the internet: Mr Duffell said the ROAM-e would have helped Ellen DeGeneres fit everyone in to her epic star-studded Academy Awards selfie Epic: The stars were 'all leaning in to the shot', meaning some of them were cut out The technology, Mr Duffell said, would have been a useful tool for Ellen DeGeneres whose epic star-studded selfie at the Academy Awards broke Twitter records. Mr Duffell said the celebs were 'all leaning in to the shot' something they would not have had to do with a flying selfie stick. As it was, Brad Pitt's head was half cut out of the frame, while only one of Jared Leto's eyes made it in. Fan crazy: Kylie Jenner takes countless selfies in the mirror and with her fans to post on social media Strike a pose: Miranda Kerr (right) posed for a glamorous selfie with her beautiful pals HOW A FLYING SELFIE STICK WORKS The ROAM-e is compatible with IOS and Android smart devices. It travels at speeds of 25km/h and at distances of 25 metres with a flying time of 20 minutes. A built in GPS function means it detects and avoids objects. It's speed is controlled by your speed or throttle. Advertisement The flying selfie stick is about the size of a small water bottle, so it can easily fit in to your pocket or bag. Built in GPS technology means it detects and avoids objects, and the 'Follow Me' function allows it to track you through the air. ROAM-e inventor, IoT founder Simon Kantor, described the device as 'the selfie stick on steroids'. The product is set to be launched in June, and Mr Duffell said it would be sent to all the world leaders. Self portrait: The selfie craze appears to be driven by the Kardashian/Jenner clan Going global: The ROAM-e will be sent to the world's leaders, including Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Malcolm Turnbull and US presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are all set to receive the devise, as well as selfie-crazed celebrities. 'I think all of those celebrities who are famous for selfies will be getting the first products,' Mr Duffell said. A Dad has helped deliver his son in a hospital car park and promptly snapped a selfie to commemorate the occasion. Martin Havel, from the Gold Coast in Australia, posted the picture to Facebook with an update on the birth of his son on Monday. The 43-year-old told Daily Mail Australia that the birth was 'very surprising' because the baby wasn't due for another week. Picture perfect: Martin Havel took a selfie with his newborn son (above) after he helped deliver the baby in a hospital carpark Dramatic arrival: Mr Havel's wife went into labour and then gave birth in their car in front of the Gold Coast University Hospital in Australia After his wife went into labour at their home on Sunday afternoon, he got their things ready to drive them to the nearby hospital. Although the hospital was only a 15 minute drive from their home, around halfway there Mrs Havel's waters broke. 'At that point I put on my hazard lights, and put my foot to the floor. Luckily people gave way for me.' He and his wife, Hana Havel, were also caught off-guard because Mrs Havel's first labour, to deliver their daughter, went for 12 hours, so the couple didn't expect their second baby to come so quickly. Desperate to arrive: Mr Havel pulled up in front the hospital where he said he 'rippped off' his wife's underwear to see the head crowning 'Wow': Mr Havel posted the selfie to social media and had a hilarious reaction from family and friends When they pulled up to the hospital, Mr Havel raced around to the side of the car to help his wife. I ripped off my wifes underwear off and saw the head crowning,' he said. The 43-year-old had the experience too, as he had delivered the couple's first child during their water birth a few years previously. 'I delivered our first baby, and I knew it could do,' Mr Havel explained. 'So I was ready to catch the baby.' Luckily, hospital staff arrived to help him finish the job. After the birth Mr Havel got to cut the umbilicial cord and was handed his son to hold. 'I was ready': After baby Tomas (above) was delivered, Mr Havel got to cut the umbilical cord. Staff then gave him his son to hold, when he snapped the picture Help on hand: Hospital staff arrived just in time to help Mr Havel with the delivery. He had helped deliver his first child, a daughter (above) a few years previously 'They gave him to me so I took a selfie,' he said. 'My wife asked the nurse if the baby was okay and she said "the baby must be okay the dad is already taking selfies!"' The couple also had a great reaction from their friends online, after Mr Havel posted the selfie to social media, with people amazed that the baby was actually born in a carpark. While many new mothers feel the pressure to 'get their body back' after having a baby, one personal trainer is taking a different approach to pregnancy and postpartum fitness. Dana Landgren, 26, from the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, is a qualified personal trainer and mother who focuses on helping mothers get their strength back by adapting fitness into everyday routines. Ms Landgren started her Instagram account 16 months ago after the birth of her son Rex, and runs her website and blog Active With D, where she shares eBooks and workouts. Scroll down for video Inclusive: While many new mothers feel the pressure to 'get their body back' after having a baby, one personal trainer is taking a different approach to pregnancy and postpartum fitness Simple: Dana Landgren, 26, from the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, is a qualified personal trainer and mother who focuses on helping mothers get their strength back by adapting fitness into everyday routines Proud mum: Ms Landgren started her Instagram account 16 months ago after the birth of her son Rex, and runs her website and blog Active With D , where she shares eBooks and workouts 'I share exercises new mothers can do without wetting their pants essentially,' Ms Landgren told Daily Mail Australia. 'I was following all these accounts after pregnancy and noticed all of these workouts designed that revolved around high intensity interval workouts and all those sorts of things... so I wanted to put together pregnancy and postpartum options for women.' The workouts involve a lot of stretching and importantly, also allow women to include their children. Simple as that: 'I share exercises new mothers can do without wetting their pants essentially,' Ms Landgren told Daily Mail Australia Impressive: On Tuesday, the flexible brunette shared a photo of her pulling an impressive pose in the kitchen while cooking dinner Mum and bub time: 'I do all of my workouts with my son... it's important for mothers to let go of the idea that they need their own time to workout,' she said 'I do all of my workouts with my son... it's important for mothers to let go of the idea that they need their own time to workout. A lot of women think this. It's very easy to include your kids!' Ms Landgren, who is studying exercise science at university, said. 'Things like chasing them while doing lunges or playing peekaboo while doing pushups are all things that make it easier. Plus you're also being a positive role model for them and showing them the importance of being active... and you're bonding and becoming closer!' Ms Landgren is a firm believer in mothers following their own journeys after pregnancy, and stresses that looks shouldn't play a part their a desire to work out. WHAT ARE THE BEST STRETCHES TO DO IN PREGNANCY AND POSTPARTUM? These are Ms Landgren's favourite 'go to stretches that she does daily: Advertisement Prioritise: Ms Landgren is a firm believer in mothers following their own journeys after pregnancy, and stresses that looks shouldn't play a part their a desire to work out Keep it regular: Ms Landgren works out six to seven times a week for 20 minutes and occasionally does seven minute workouts 'I never felt pressure to get back into shape... I had other things like post-natal depression to deal with,' Ms Landgren said. 'It's so important instead to do it to be healthy and fit and strong and be able to carry your child around and ultimately, it leads to reduced aches and pains too. 'That's why stretching and flexibility plays such an important part in my workouts and daily routine. I make sure to stretch every evening for a minimum of 10 minutes.' Ms Landgren works out six to seven times a week for 20 minutes and occasionally does seven minute workouts which can be found here. Make the most of your time: Ms Landgren said she often does leg raises or walks around with ankle weights on around the hours and says kitchen workouts are her 'saving grace' Little things: 'Things like chasing them while doing lunges or playing peekaboo while doing pushups are all things that make it easier. Plus you're also being a positive role model for them,' she said The young mother recently showed off what she liked to call a 'lazy uni student workout' and shared a video of herself exercising while reading over her lecture notes. 'I just finished class and totally ready for a sleep but Rexie is ready to wake up,' she wrote on her Instagram account. 'I did 15 reps a side for the first two exercises and as many calf raises as I could each side. I completed 3 rounds before I had to run out the door.' New role: 'Being a mother doesn't have a pause button. It's not a matter of babysitting for an hour here or there, it is a full time job,' she said Multi-tasking: 'You're responsible for a life, for their health, wellbeing and happiness,' Ms Landgren said On Tuesday, the flexible brunette shared a photo of her pulling an impressive pose in the kitchen while cooking dinner. 'Kid, this is the sort of stuff you can do when you're an adult and have your own kitchen. Mid cooking, "mum can you take a photo" haha,' she wrote on Instagram. She then did an impromptu bodyweight workout as she cooked. Ms Landgren said she often does leg raises or walks around with ankle weights on around the hours and says kitchen workouts are her 'saving grace.' New passion: 'Prior to falling pregnant I thought I wanted to be a pilot but my heart is now with you all. Motherhood is such a special badge of honour and I want to help as many mothers as I can,' she said All about stretching: 'All the workouts I upload, I do. Teaming the workouts with extra special attention to stretching daily is what enables me to live the active lifestyle I do,' she said 'Being a mother doesn't have a pause button. It's not a matter of babysitting for an hour here or there, it is a full time job. You're responsible for a life, for their health, wellbeing and happiness,' she wrote on the picture. 'Prior to falling pregnant I thought I wanted to be a pilot but my heart is now with you all. Motherhood is such a special badge of honour and I want to help as many mothers through their special journey as I can.' Ms Landgren's workouts are designed specifically for women, are Diastasis Recti and pelvic floor friendly and are low impact workouts. He made his first public appearance two days ago as he left hospital with his proud parents Princess Sofia and Prince Carl Philip of Sweden. Now the youngest member of the Swedish royal family has a name - Prince Alexander Erik Hubertus Bertil. The news was revealed by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden at a cabinet meeting this morning, during which he announced that the new baby has been given the title Duke of Sodermanland - a historical province on the south eastern coast of Sweden. Scroll down for video Happy family: Princess Sofia and Prince Carl Philip of Sweden smile as they leave the hospital with their newborn son on Wednesday afternoon Earlier in the day, an official document announcing the baby's name was signed at Drottningholm Palace, which traditionally takes place at a royal birth. Speaker Urban Ahlin, Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, Marshal of the Realm Svante Lindqvist, stateswoman Anna Hamilton, Chief Sophia Brismar Wendel and midwife Anna Stahl were witnesses. Prince Alexander was born on Tuesday at 6:25 p.m weighing at 7lbs 9oz. and measuring 19.3 inches long at Danderyds Hospital in Stockholm. Hours after the birth, Carl Philip held a press conference at the hospital to announce the new arrival. Hours after the birth, Carl Philip spoke to reporters in a press conference to announce the new arrival and admitted he'd cried during the birth 'When asked if he had cried during the birth, the prince replied, according to People magazine: 'Yes, actually. Of course. Couldn't stop. 'For me and my wife, this is obviously a great day with a lot of emotion. Words cannot describe.' Members of the royal family have offered official messages of congratulations to the couple on the birth of their first child, who is fifth in line to the throne. In a statement, King Carl and Queen Queen Silvia said: 'We are extremely happy for Prince Carl Philip and Princess Sofia, and are delighted to have become grandparents again. Although a name is yet to be decided on sources have revealed that they have welcomed a baby boy. Pictured: The couple during Sofia's pregnancy 'We hope the new parents enjoy a time of peace and quiet together with their son.' Crown Princess Victoria and her husband Prince Daniel added: 'We hope Carl Philip and Sofia enjoy these wonderful first few days with their new-born son, and we share the new parents' joy.' A message from Princess Madeleine and her husband Christopher O'Neill said they were 'delighted to welcome a new member of the family'. Sofia's parents Marie and Erik Hellqvist also sent a special message to the royal couple. Sweden's Princess Sofia has today become a mother after giving birth to her and Prince Carl Philip's first child The couple's baby comes at an exciting time for the Swedish royal family who have recently welcomed a new baby, Prince Oscar Carl Olof (pregnant Sofia and Carl Philip pictured in Stockholm last month) 'We are so pleased that Prince Carl Philip and our daughter Sofia have had their first child. 'We have longed for a grandchild for a long time, and we are both extremely proud and happy. 'We wish them great happiness together with the new member of the family, and we will provide help and support as grandparents.' And of course the Prince's proud aunts Lina Hellqvist and Sara Hellqvist, Princess Sofia's sisters, were keen to offer their congratulations. 'We welcome this tiny new member of the family with great joy and love,' they said. 'We have been looking forward to becoming aunts, and we will enjoy getting to know our nephew. The happy couple, who married last June in the royal palace's chapel (pictured), first announced their pregnancy in a Facebook status in October last year 'We wish the new family the very best of luck!' Prince Carl Philip, 36, and Princess Sofia, 31, shared the happy news of the pregnancy last year via an official statement released on Facebook. 'We are so happy and excited to announce that we are expecting our first child. We are very much looking forward to it,' it read. SWEDISH ROYAL FAMILY TREE King Carl XVI Gustaf, 69, who has reigned since 1973, is married to Queen Silvia, 66. Crown Princess Victoria is their elder daughter. She married Prince Daniel in 2010 and the couple have two children, four-year-old Princess Estelle and new arrival Prince Oscar. The King and Queen's only son is Prince Carl Philip, who is married to Princess Sofia - a former model and reality TV contestant. Princess Madeleine is their youngest daughter and is wed to Christopher O'Neill, an American stockbroker. The pair have two children Princess Leonore and Prince Nicolas. Advertisement The birth of the couple's baby comes at an exciting time for the Swedish royal family who have recently welcomed a new baby, Prince Oscar Carl Olof. Sofia's sister-in-law Crown Princess Victoria, sister of Prince Carl Philip, gave birth to her second child in March. Former glamour model Sofia Hellqvist married the prince last June. The elegant brunette is known for her infectious gap-toothed smile and easygoing ways. They dated for five years before walking down the aisle and now live together in the upmarket Djurgarden district of Stockholm. They married in the royal palace's chapel, with the bride wearing a lace wedding dress created by local designer Ida Sjostedt. But thanks to Princess Sofia's reality TV and glamour modelling past, Carl Philip's choice of wife initially proved controversial. The now Duchess of Varmland's first shoot aged 20 saw her posing topless in a pair of camouflage print bikini bottoms and clutching a snake to preserve her modesty. Unsurprisingly, when news of Carl Philip's new relationship emerged in 2010, the Swedish Royal Family were initially put 'on the defensive' as sources revealed at the time. Since then, however, Sofia has gone out of her way to tone down her image. Advertisement It may be her great grandmother's big day, but two-year-old Mia Tindall well and truly stole her thunder in the Annie Liebovitz portrait released this morning to mark the Queen's 90th birthday. The adorable toddler is seen proudly clutching the handles of her great grandmother's 1,020 Launer handbag in a moment, according to a royal source, that was totally unscripted. The moment with Mia was completely spontaneous, it was not staged at all. She just picked up her great-grannys handbag and that was it, they said. Mia, the only child of the Queen's granddaughter Zara and husband Mike Tindall, has won hearts on Twitter with the adorably cheeky display, with many declaring that she'd totally usurped Prince George as the cutest young royal. Scroll down for video Two-year-old Mia Tindall stole the Queen's thunder in the Annie Liebovitz portrait released this morning by proudly posing with her great grandmother's handbag. The children are: James, Viscount Severn (left), 8, and Lady Louise (second left), 12, Mia Tindall; Savannah (third right), 5, and Isla Phillips (right), 3; Prince George (second right), 2, and in The Queen's arms, Princess Charlotte (11 months) 'Oh wow Mia Tindall totally steals the show on that photo,' Sary18 tweeted, 'Mike Tindall your daughter is gorgeous #handbag.' Collette Naden said Mia holding the queen's handbag had 'made her day', while Lucy Mapstone said she was 'obsessed'. 'This is how I hold my bag on the Tube out of fear', she explained. RoyalHats couldn't handle the cuteness, saying: 'ADORE that little Mia Tindall picked up the Queen's handbag. It's charming beyond words.' Royal fans took to Twitter to gush over adorable moment, saying Mia had completely stolen the show RoyalObsessedinU.S was even more effusive. 'I'm dying. I'm dead. Mia Tindall killed me while holding great granny's purse,' she tweeted.' How CUTE is little Mia Tindall holding great granny's purse? Oh my goodness. It's too cute for words!' Anna Kleimann said she had to admit the portrait was 'too adorable', adding 'move over George'. Callmekateblog agreed that Mia was stealing the show, as did ArmyWagBlog who said: 'Move over George, this photo is all about Mia Tindall.' Royal watchers declared that chubby-cheeked Mia had stolen Prince George's spot as cutest young royal Annette Hardy added: 'Mia Tindall holding her great grannys handbag will melt the coldest of hearts.' Kelseymartin_ said it was an 'amazing photo' because of Mia holding the Queen's trust accessory, before poising the eternal question: 'Wonder what the Queen keeps in her bag.' Chubby-cheeked Mia is the daughter of former royal rebel Zara Phillips and her England rugby player husband Mike Tindall. The two-year-old is no stranger to the world of horses thanks to Olympian Zara and was sitting on her first pony even before she could walk. Zara Phillips and daughter Mia Tindall pose for a photograph after husband Ex England rugby star Mike Tindall finished the grueling Artemis Great Kindrochit Quadrathlon in Loch Tay Scotland in Aberfeldy, Scotland Mia with her mother at The Festival Of British Eventing at Gatcombe Park in 2015. The youngster is no stranger to the world of horses thanks to Olympian Zara and was sitting on her first pony even before she could walk More used to jeans and wellies, she wore a rose-pink knitted cardigan, jean skirt and smart party shoes with pretty frilled socks and her hair swept to one side. Zara gave birth to Mia, the Queen's fourth great-grandchild, on January 17 2014. She is 17th in line to the throne, but like her mother, she does not hold a royal or aristocratic title. As when Zara herself was born, Mias name was a break from tradition as it had no precedent in the royal family. The group portrait is one of three released today, the other two being of the Queen and her beloved dogs, and a rare and surprisingly warm shot of the Queen with her daughter Princess Anne. Mia, pictured with her mother at the Gatcombe Festival of British Eventing, is 17th in line to the throne after her mother, but neither hold a royal or aristocratic title Mia as a six-month-old baby with hr mother. Her name is a break from tradition and has no precedent in the royal family There was a very definite idea behind the set, said a royal aide. The Queen wanted a portrait of the youngest members of the family, the other end of the generational spectrum. You have the two youngest grandchildren, who are quite a lot younger than the others, and the great-grandchildren. THE QUEEN'S FAVOURITE HANDBAG Launer London, which has held the Royal Warrant since 1968, says his company has provided more than 200 of the Launer bags to the Queen. The classic totes come with a price tag of up to 1,650 but are worn again and again by the royal, who recycles them for engagements and even has the fittings repaired rather than splash out on new models. Her Majesty usually carries the black-patent Traviata, costing 1,550. She also owns several different versions of the Adagio in black and patent cream, both 1,300, the Bellini, costing 1,250, the Royale, sold at 1,650, the Lulu in cream, priced at 740, and the Encore handbag in black calf leather. The bag Mia is clutching in the picture is the 1050 black leather Lydia tote. Advertisement It was a happy, nice, relaxed afternoon. There was a lovely feeling to it. All the parents were helping to get the shot right a classic composition, rather like an Old Master but with a modern twist. For the portrait, Mia joined her cousins Prince George and Princess Charlotte, and Isla and Savannah - the daughters of Zara's brother Peter Phillips and his wife Autumn. Also in the portrait were the Queen's grandchildren James, Viscount Severn and Lady Louise Windsor, the children of Prince Edward and Sophie, Countess of Wessex. James is the eight-year-old second child of the Earl and Countess of Wessex. Born at Frimley Park Hospital in Surrey, he is currently tenth in line to the throne. He was, in 2008, the first to be christened in a replica of the gown originally used by Queen Victoria for her children, commissioned by his grandmother the Queen, which has since been handed down the generations. A slightly shy and cautious child by nature, as demonstrated by his sweet but awkward hands-in-pockets pose, James, like his sister Louise, goes to a small local school close to his parents Surrey home. Lady Louise Alice Elizabeth Mary Mountbatten-Windsor, Jamess protective elder sister who, despite a traumatic premature birth, is maturing into a confident and pretty young girl. Louise, 12, who is 11th in line to the throne, was a much longed-for child for Edward and Sophie. She was born four weeks prematurely in an emergency caesarean operation during which her life was in peril. She now bears an uncanny resemblance to her grandmother at the same age. Last year her mother Sophie revealed that premature babies can often have squints because they are the last thing in the baby package to really be finalised. Louise required surgery to correct it but now she can see perfectly. Princess Charlotte, sitting on the Queens lap, is the newest addition to the Royal Family and fourth in line to the throne. She appears as ladylike as her doting father, Prince William, says she is, sitting bolt upright and crossing her legs. She is wearing a flowered dress made by Spanish boutique m&h, which costs 21 and was a gift from her nanny, Maria Borrallo. Her 11 pale pink tights are by Amaia and the outfit is completed by a cardigan matching Mias. Charlottes brunette hair is swept to one side in a pretty pink bow, and she appears to be holding a plastic toy horse. Savannah Phillips, elder daughter of Peter Phillips and his Canadian wife Autumn, is the eldest of the Queens great-grandchildren and 14th in line to the throne. Savannah, five, who was not given any title at birth at the request of her parents, lives in what has been called the family commune at Gatcombe Park. A woman who lost nearly 400lbs since having weight loss surgery was able to try on a pair of jeans for the first time since high school after having 46lbs of excess skin and fatty tissue surgically removed from her stomach. Susan Farmer, 39, from Eddy, Texas, went from 607lbs to 340lbs over the course of a year, and on Wednesday night's episode of the TLC reality series My 600lb Life: Where Are They Now? she worked to shed another 35lbs in order to qualify for a skin removal surgery that would drastically change her quality of life. Despite her staggering weight loss, Susan had a heavy lymphedema hanging from her stomach as well as a second piece of excess tissue hidden behind the mass on her stomach. Amazing transformation: Susan Farmer, 39, from Eddy, Texas, weighed 607lbs (left) before she lost 397lbs (right) after having gastric bypass and surgery to remove the excess skin on her stomach Hard to handle: Although Susan had lost nearly half her body weight, she was still plagued by the the heavy lymphedema on her stomach Susan, who first appeared on the documentary series in February 2015, lost 267lbs after having gastric bypass surgery on the show. But Susan's amazing progress left her with extra skin on her stomach that pulled on her body and gave her back pain. 'I am trying my hardest to make sure I will get [my weight] down there because I don't think that I can live a normal life without surgery,' she told the cameras. And while the skin is physically bothersome, there is another reason why Susan couldn't wait to have it removed once and for all Staying focused: After getting down to 340lbs during her first appearance on My 600lb Life, Susan's goal was to lose another 40lbs in order to qualify for surgery to have the excess skin on her stomach removed 'It sounds kind of silly, but the first thing I am going to do once the skin is removed is that I am going to get a pair of jeans because I haven't worn a pair of jeans since high school,' she admitted. 'This whole belly just needs to go,' she adds. 'Having it gone will be like being set free from prison.' When fans of the show first met Susan, she could barely walk around the grocery store without having to sit every few minutes, but now she says she can walk a couple of miles without any problem. On last night's episode, Susan revealed that in addition to her walking, she had also spent the past month going over a friend's house and swimming for exercise. Pushing herself: In order to lose more weight, Susan would do workouts in her friend's pool Painful mass: Susan can be seen showing the cameras the heavy lymphedema that hangs from her stomach as she explains that there is a second piece of excess tissue hidden behind the large mass 'They've been really supportive of me losing the weight,' she said. Susan's weight loss journey as been far from easy; just weeks after she underwent gastric bypass surgery, she was told by doctors that she risked being permanently paralyzed as a result of her weight. She was diagnosed with a nerve condition known as neuropathy, which often affects people who are overweight or obese, leaving them with severely damaged nerves. The condition must be treated immediately after diagnosis, otherwise the sufferers are at risk of permanent paralysis. Prior to her surgery, doctors warned Susan that she was at serious risk of severe illness, injury - and even death - as a result of her obesity. Back in the day: When fans of My 600lb Life first met Susan in February 2015, she was unable to walk around the grocery store without having to sit down every couple of minutes New woman: Susan said she can now walk a couple of miles without having any problems She explained in the 2015 episode of the TLC series that life had become completely 'miserable', and that she was unable to look at herself in the mirror because she hated her own reflection so much. Susan's mother Nita admitted that her daughter first began putting on weight at an early age, after turning to food as a form of comfort in reaction to her parents' unstable relationship. Despite her mother's belief that her daughter would grow out of her over-eating, Susan continued to indulge, turning to food whenever she came up against a problem in her life - a dangerous habit which left her severely overweight and at serious risk of a variety of health issues. And while Susan began to see some progress in the short weeks following her gastric bypass surgery, she admitted that being diagnosed with a condition which meant she was unable to move around left her feeling unable to make any further progress. So close: When Susan and her mother Nita visited Dr Younan Nowzaradan for her weigh-in, it was revealed that she weighed 305lbs Moving forward: Despite missing her goal by 5lbs, Dr Nowzaradan approved her for the life-changing surgery Dramatic difference: Dr Nowzaradan removed 46lbs of excess skin and tissue from Susan's stomach during the procedure But after putting on some of the weight which she had lost following her surgery - prompting a serious lecture from her doctor - Susan finally found the motivation that she needed to continue her weight loss journey and lose nearly 300lbs. 'I've been thinking about being in a wheelchair, and using that as motivation to keep going,' she says, shortly after being submitted into a rehabilitation facility, where she had to learn how to walk all over again. 'The surgery was my second chance at life. And I'm not going to let a setback like this take that from me. I'm going to fight. I'm going to do everything I possibly can to get better. When she returned to the series, Susan hoped to get her weight under 300lbs, so Houston-based surgeon Dr Younan Nowzaradan would consider removing the painful lymphedema on her stomach. Looking to the future: Susan celebrated after her recovery by going shopping for a pair of jeans Wonderful accomplishment: It was the first time Susan was able to put on a pair of jeans since she was in high school Enjoying her weight loss: After purchasing her new jeans, Susan went horseback riding with friends 'I just hope that I have lost enough weight when I see the doctor where we can get this done,' she said before her weigh-in with the doctor. And while Susan missed her goal weight by 5lbs, Dr Nowzaradan still approved her for surgery. The doctor successfully removed the massive 46lbs of skin from her stomach, however, recovery wasn't easy for Susan. Several weeks after her surgery, her stitches tore, and she was in so much pain she had to go back to the hospital for more surgery. Despite her setbacks, Susan slowly recovered with the help of her mother, and her weight dropped down to 210lbs. Slow and steady: Bettie Jo Elmore, 26, from Houston, Texas, weighed 654lbs (left) before she got down to 412lbs (right) Agonizing choice: Bettie and her husband Josh had to decide if she would live with a potentially paralyzing mass on her spine or risk the life of her unborn child by having it surgically removed To celebrate her 397lb weight loss, Susan bought and wore a pair of jeans for the first time since she was a teen and went horseback riding with friends. Last night's episode also featured Bettie Jo Elmore, who was struggling with a heart- wrenching dilemma just a year after she shed more than 200lbs from her 654lb frame on the reality series. After struggling with depression and previously trying to commit suicide nine times, the 26-year-old told Dr Nowzaradan that she was moving from Houston to Missouri to be near her family and see her psychiatrist. And while Bettie came out of her depression and became pregnant, her and her husband Josh's happiness was short lived after it was revealed there was a massive bone mass pressing on her spine. The expectant mom, who still weighed about 445lbs despite her ongoing workouts, admitted in that ''its been a really hard couple of weeks'. Difficult decision: 'I'm already a high-risk pregnancy, so a lot of things could go wrong,' Bettie explained Trying to get healthy: Instead of having surgery, Bettie focused on working out with her trainer and losing more weight Impossible choice: Bettie and Josh ultimately decided to schedule the surgery after their baby was born 'I went to the emergency room because I was sick, and my stomach was hurting. After doing a CT scan, they noticed a large mass on my spine,' she explained. 'Because I'm pregnant, the bigger the baby gets, the more he presses on the bone mass on my spine.' Bettie went on to say that there was a chance she could become paralyzed if it went untreated, but if doctors operated, she could lose her baby. 'I'm already a high-risk pregnancy, so a lot of things could go wrong,' she said. 'Having a baby is a dream come true, but I need to be able to take care of that baby. 'I don't understand why this is happening, and I don't know how I'm going to make this decision.' Despite getting numbness in her legs, Bettie opted to wait to have the surgery. Instead, she focused on losing weight and dropped another 33lbs. The episode ended with Bettie and Josh scheduling her surgery for after their baby was born. She then went for an even more severe crop, showed off at the January debate in Iowa - which Trump refused to attend Megyn, 45, debuted a much shorter hairstyle in October last year, having first fought Trump in the GOP debate in August Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly has opened up about her dramatic short haircut which she said reflected her state of mind when she unveiled it earlier this year. The 45-year-old presenter of The Kelly File first cut her hair short in October last year before debuting an even shorter crop in Iowa in January, on the same night that she moderated a Republican debate which Donald Trump refused to participate in because of their ongoing feud. But while the mother-of-three has not previously revealed the motivation behind her latest style change, she recently admitted to People that it came as the result of her 'stronger mood', which prompted her to take the plunge and go for the dramatic new look. Scroll down for video Chop: Megyn Kelly, 45, pictured left on October 13, 2015, and right on October 23, 2015, has revealed why she decided to chop off her long blonde locks Going for broke: In January, at the Iowa debate which Donald Trump refused to attend, Megyn showed off an even shorter style Bold: Megyn, pictured left interviewing Republican Ted Cruz, right, after the debate on January 28, said her short hairstyle reflected her strengthened mental state Time for change: Megyn, pictured center with fellow Fox News anchors Chris Wallace, left, and Bret Baier, right, during the first GOP debate in August 2015, debuted the short hairstyle in Iowa in January Referring to it as 'the big chop', Megyn said the side-parted slicked back look was a response to her changing circumstances. She added: 'We change when we get in a different phase... I think I was just in a stronger mood.' But she admitted the move was a wrench as she claimed that hair is 'emotional' for women. The former lawyer said: 'I think hair is sort of emotional for all women.' She said she finds the shorter haircut liberating because of the exposure it gives to her face. 'There's something about putting your whole face out there that is just empowering: Here I am, have at it,' she said. It was not just her hair that detracted attention from politics during the debate in Des Moines, in which she famously referred to Trump as 'the elephant not in the room'. Her eyelashes became the subject of a social media frenzy with viewers branding them 'ridiculous' and 'fake'. Nemesis: She first revealed the new style on the night that Donald Trump, pictured during the August debate where the row first started, refused to attend the January debate she was moderating Center of attention: Megyn, pictured, turned into a viral sensation during the Iowa debate thanks to her very long eyelashes, which some viewers criticized Confident: Megyn, pictured in-between Bret, left, and Chris, right, said the new style is 'empowering' Wave: The mother-of-three used to have long hair, pictured when she was a guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live in 2014 Megyn has attracted a growing fanbase in recent months as she became a target for the Republican frontrunner as a result of their long-running feud. His criticisms have included his claim that she had 'blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her whatever' when she questioned him during a debate and last month he called for viewers to boycott her show and branded her 'crazy'. Writing on Twitter he said: 'Everybody should boycott the show. Never worth watching. Always a hit on Trump! She is sick, & the most overrated person on tv.' Fox News released a statement backing Megyn against his 'vitriolic attacks' and accused him of having an 'extreme, sick obsession with her'. Open: Megyn, pictured left last year at the Time 100 Gala in New York, and right, earlier this month, said she likes that the new style exposes her whole of her face Important: Megyn, pictured earlier this month at the Women in the World Summit in New York, claimed hair is an 'emotional' issue for women However, in recent weeks their frosty relations have appeared to be thawing after she recently visited him at his private residence in Trump Tower to 'clear the air' and to talk about a special broadcast to air on Fox News next month. She claimed Trump was 'gracious' during their hour-long meeting which she said had been called 'at my request'. Earlier this month, Megyn talked about the media's treatment of him - suggesting that his high poll numbers were due to coverage he has received. A mother born with two sets of reproductive organs has spoken about how her two children were conceived in separate wombs. Faye Wilkins, 31, from Plymouth, was diagnosed with a rare condition called uterus didelphys - causing her to have two sets of reproductive organs. Doctors warned Faye that her chances of carrying a baby to full term was minimal but miraculously, after six miscarriages, she went on to have two children - one in each womb. Faye Wilkins, 31, from Plymouth, was diagnosed with a rare condition called uterus didelphys - causing her to have two sets of reproductive organs, but now has two 'miracle' children, Molly, 7, and George, 2 After giving birth to two healthy babies, Molly, seven and George, two, Ms Wilkins is now sharing her story to raise awareness about the condition. Ms Wilkins, a healthcare assistant, said: 'At the age of 14 I couldnt believe it when doctors told me I was born with two vaginas, two cervixes and two wombs. 'I was in complete shock as Id never noticed the condition before as the differences were only internal. 'All my friends had started their periods but I was only suffering from stomach cramps but nothing else. 'As the pain got worse my mum, Polly, took me to the doctors thinking I had an ovarian cyst because a lump had formed but no-one would scan me. 'At least eight months later and multiple visits to my GP, my uterus ruptured when I went to the toilet and I heard a huge pop and knew something inside me had exploded. 'I was in agony, there was so much blood and I rushed to hospital where doctors examined me and finally diagnosed me with UD. 'The condition had caused a blockage and my menstrual blood to build up, which had reached 12cm in size. Scroll down for video Ms Wilkins pictured in hospital following the eagerly-anticipated birth of her son, George, in 2014 These compelling ultrasound scans show both George (left) and Molly (right) in their separate wombs Ms Wilkins, pictured here in 2009, after the unexpected birth of her daughter Molly - which shocked doctors 'Within two months I had surgery to make my two vaginas into one to prevent my uterus rupturing again. I was warned after my diagnosis that it would be difficult to conceive due to reproductive organs being half the size they should be, making implantation harder. 'Thankfully though I have my two little miracles now and Im just so pleased they were born healthy.' WHAT IS UTERUS DIDELPHYS? Uterus didelphys, also known as a double uterus, is a condition where a woman is born with two uterus, to separate cervixes and sometimes two vaginas, though this is not always the case. It occurs because in a female foetus, the uterus starts out as two small tubes. As the foetus develops, the tubes normally join to create one larger, hollow organ the uterus. Sometimes the tubes don't join completely and each one develops into a separate hollow organ so the woman is born with two wombs. It often only becomes noticeable after puberty and is diagnosed with a physical exam or an ultrasound scan. In terms of physical anatomy, the two wombs are often slightly smaller than average in order to fit, though they can be as big as a 'normal' womb. Uterus didelphys, also known as a double uterus, is a condition where a woman is born with two uterus, to separate cervixes and sometimes two vaginas, though this is not always the case It also makes it possible to be pregnant twice at the same time - with a baby in each womb. Some women are also born with two vaginas, although they can have sex and menstruate in the same way as people with just one. 'They may know they have two and be able to find them, or they may not realise,' Dr Leila Hanna, a consultant gynaecologist & Obstetrician at BMI The Sloane Hospital, told MailOnline. 'It can be painful because there are two squashed in the same area, so sometimes we do an operation to join them together, but its not necessary. 'They could also have abnormalities of their kidneys and the tube which bring the urine from the bladder.' Women will frequently have a slightly higher risk of late miscarriage, premature delivery and bleeding during pregnancy. Often Caesarean sections are recommended, to reduce the risk of complications. There is no treatment or cure for the condition. Advertisement As well as uterus didelphys causing recurrent miscarriages it can also in extremely rare cases cause a woman to fall pregnant in both wombs at the same time - both babies can then be delivered days apart. After suffering from five miscarriages, Ms Wilkins detached herself from the idea of motherhood. But then finally during her sixth pregnancy in 2008 she was over the moon when she surpassed the 12-week mark. After learning she was carrying the baby in her left womb, Ms Wilkins went on to have a cervical stitch to help prevent Molly being born too prematurely. Five years later, after another miscarriage, she went on to have George, who developed in her right womb, with her now partner, Lee Welch, 37. Ms Wilkins said: 'Unlike most mums, falling pregnant was actually a difficult time for me and I learnt to not even celebrate the news. 'Doctors had warned me it would be difficult to conceive and after the first miscarriage I didnt allow myself to get excited. 'With Molly I had a cervical stitch to stop her being born too prematurely as my womb is split in half its half the size, meaning its much weaker. 'Thankfully she was a little fighter and she held on for as long as she could before being delivered by a C-section seven weeks and two days early. 'I split from her father during the pregnancy as we wanted different things but I was overwhelmed when the doctor placed her in my arms, I was so happy, I was finally a mum. 'Then, after meeting Lee, we decided we wanted another child, but I miscarried again before falling pregnant with George. 'This time I was given steroids to speed up Georges growth so when he was born seven weeks and two days early again he was stronger than Molly meaning he was out of neonatal care sooner.' Despite having the unusual condition, Ms Wilkins has never been embarrassed to talk about it and is now trying to raise awareness so other women arent ashamed. She said: 'Ive always been upfront and honest with men Ive dated, I wanted them to know that I may never fall pregnant and uterus didelphys is just a part of who I am. 'Having UD doesnt make you any less of a woman, your internal organs have just formed slightly differently. 'Ive gone on to lead a relatively normal life, I only have one kidney too which is related to the condition but again I havent let this hold me back. 'I want to raise awareness as many medical professionals are unaware of the condition and every time I go for a smear it always amazes me how little people know, and how many weird questions I get asked. 'I dont have plans for any more children, I already have two beautiful kids and couldnt be happier - Im the luckiest woman in the world.' Professor Keith Edmonds a Consultant Gynaecologist at the Queen Charlottes and Chelsea Hospital in London, said: 'Uterus didelphys is a rare condition when the two parts that make the uterus and vagina develop separately. 'There are therefore two half uteruses and two half vaginas in UD and it is even rarer to have one vagina obstructed. 'Surgery to unite the two vaginas to form one is often necessary and the results are very successful. 'It is not a dangerous condition but the expertise to perform some of the surgery is limited so any patient with this condition should seek expert advice. 'There is no place for trying to unite the two half wombs as they function perfectly well as they are. 'Pregnancy is more than possible and pregnancies may occur in either side or for some women only on one side.' Youngsters who excessively use their smart phones could be damaging their eyes. According to researchers in South Korea, children who frequently use the devices are at greater risk of temporary convergent strabismus - or going 'cross-eyed'. Experts at Chonnam National University Hospital, Seoul, found a link between the two after examining 12 children, aged 7-16, who used their phones for 4-8 hours a day. Experts at Chonnam National University Hospital in Seoul found a link between the two after examining 12 children, aged 7-16, who used their phones for 4-8 hours a day The children also held their phones between eight and 12 inches from their faces, meaning proximity could also be a cause. The researchers told Yonhap News that the condition - which sees the eyes focus inwards - has rarely been diagnosed in South Korea, but is now increasingly prevalent. It was reported that medics were able to reverse the symptoms in nine of the children by discontinuing mobile phone use for two months. They also recommended that users should limit the time they stare at phone screen to 30 minutes intervals. In 2014, a team at Baylor University, Texas, found that many teenage students spend up to ten hours a day on their mobile phones. Some of whom feel stressed if their phone is not in sight. The study revealed that female students spent an average of ten hours a day texting, emailing and on social media while their male counterparts spent nearly eight. Fortunately, it's reported that medics were able to reverse the symptoms in nine of the children by discontinuing mobile phone use for two months n 2014, a team at Baylor University, Texas, found that many teenage students spend up to ten hours a day on their mobile phones. Some of whom feel stressed if their phone is not in sight Lead author James Roberts said the idea of becoming addicted to using a mobile phone was an increasingly realistic possibility. The online survey asked 164 students how long they spent using different functions or apps on their phone. When asked, 60 per cent said they might be addicted to their mobile. Overall, they spent the most time texting, at an average of 94.6 minutes each day. They spent 48.5 minutes using email and 38.6 minutes checking Facebook, while the internet claimed 34.4 minutes and listening to music took 26.9 minutes. Some functions - among them using apps such as Pinterest and Instagram - are associated significantly with mobile addiction, but others that might logically seem to be addictive - such as internet use and gaming - were not. Women spent more time using their phones. Men sent roughly the same number of emails as women, but spent less time on each one. Junior doctors are plotting to stage a strike of no return, leaked emails reveal. Union bosses are considering walking out indefinitely on the 8th of June less than seven weeks time. Next Tuesday and Wednesday doctors will cause further chaos by carrying out the first ever total strike in the history of the NHS. They will walk out of A&E, maternity units and intensive care with consultants and nurses being expected to cover the gaps. But senior members of British Medical Association (BMA) are planning on how they can escalate the action afterwards and cause even more disruption. Senior members of British Medical Association (BMA) are planning on how they can escalate the action afterwards and cause even more disruption One option under discussion would see doctors stage permanent industrial action, starting on Wednesday 8th June, until the Government agrees to renegotiate their pay. The union would not confirm whether doctors would still treat emergency patients or whether it would be a total walkout. But the start date is highly significant as it is when junior doctors are due to receive their controversial new contracts, which will see them paid less for working Saturdays. The terms of these contracts, particularly Saturday pay, have triggered four strikes by junior doctors since January leading to 25,000 cancelled operations. Leaked emails obtained by Health Service Journal reveal that the indefinite strike was proposed by the head of the BMAs Junior Doctors Committee Johann Malawana last week. In a message to other union officials ahead of a committee meeting next month, he wrote: The main question I want you to think about is what happens after the next action. Therefore, I have listed below the possible actions and want to discuss if there are further actions we consider and what we put to the JDC meeting in May. Junior doctors are due to walk out for a fifth time next week - the first where they stop providing emergency care - but leaked emails have revealed this could be escalated further His first option was escalate further with indefinite action starting on either 8th June, the 23rd June after the EU referendum or the 1st August. He also suggested doctors simply accepted the new contracts or offered to negotiate on accepting lower rates of pay on Saturday the sticking point of the dispute. But these options were dismissed by other members of the committee according to the emails who were mostly in favour of the indefinite strike starting on the 8th June. They include Dr Zoe Greaves, a public health doctor in Teeside, who hailed the option as our greatest escalation. The bitter dispute centres on the new contract Jeremy Hunt says will be imposed on junior doctors Dr Arrash Arya Yassaee, who works for the Faculty of Medical Leadership think tank in London, urged junior doctors start warning the public they were about to walk out indefinitely. I am now of the view [we] should be openly mentioning this before the first [all out full walkout], even if as a casual well maybe if it gets really bad all the juniors will walkout forever. Next weeks total strikes will take place between 9am and 5pm on Tuesday and Wednesday and consultants and senior nurses will be expected to fill in. Earlier this week the General Medical Council warned doctors that some hospitals would be overwhelmed and struggle to cope. The regulator said that although doctors couldnt be struck off for striking alone, they could be investigated if a patient suffered harm on a ward theyd deserted. The row centres on a new contract proposed by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt which will see them carrying out more weekend and overnight shifts, for lower rates of hourly pay. But the main issue concerns Saturdays with junior doctors demanding they are paid at premium rates, which are 30 per cent higher. The contracts will be sent to junior doctors to sign at the end of June, so the new terms can take effect from August. In a statement referring to the emails, Dr Malawana added: Throughout this process the BMA has done everything its power to end this dispute through talks, including a clear and genuine offer to the Government this week, calling on it to lift the imposition at which point next weeks action would be called off. Let me be clear, junior doctors do not want to have to take any action. They would rather be in work, treating patients, but by refusing to get back around the table and address junior doctors outstanding concerns the government has left them with no alternative. What happens after next weeks action is entirely down to the Government. No decision has yet been made about future action but junior doctors will, of course, have to consider what options are open to them if the government refuses to re-enter talks. The crucial message however is this; it is not too late to end this dispute and call off next weeks action entirely. Researchers have created a new molecular map of Zika - and say it could show them how to target the virus with drugs. The study reveals in unprecedented detail the Zika virus structure, and researchers say they have already been able to identify potential sites on the virus to target with therapeutics. Researchers say the knowledge will help worldwide efforts to fight the poorly understood virus, which is a currently a public health and research priority. Using thousands of images, researchers reconstructed a high-resolution cryo-electron microscopy structure of the Zika virus INSIDE ZIKA The high-resolution structure of the Zika virus showed that the overall virus architecture is similar to other flaviviruses such as the West Nile and dengue viruses. However, the team found that the Zika virus is more thermally stable than the dengue virus, and is also structurally stable even when incubated at 40 degrees Celsius, mimicking the body temperature of extremely feverish patients after virus infection. Advertisement 'This is exciting, as our structure will provide important clues to other researchers around the world who are working to find therapeutic agents against the Zika virus,' said Associate Professor Shee-Mei Lok from the Emerging Infectious Diseases Programme at Duke-NUS, who led the research. Researchers imaged the Zika virus under a cryo-electron microscope from a large number of purified viral particles. By using thousands of images, they reconstructed a high-resolution cryo-electron microscopy structure of the Zika virus. The high-resolution structure of the Zika virus showed that the overall virus architecture is similar to other flaviviruses such as the West Nile and dengue viruses. However, the team found that the Zika virus is more thermally stable than the dengue virus, and is also structurally stable even when incubated at 40 degrees Celsius, mimicking the body temperature of extremely feverish patients after virus infection. The structure also revealed that the Zika virus surface proteins have tighter interactions compared to the dengue virus, therefore making it more stable than the dengue virus. This may explain its ability to survive in harsh conditions such as semen, saliva and urine. In addition to transmission by the bite of an infected mosquito, the structural stability of the virus makes it more resilient, which likely explains its special ability to transmit through sexual contact. Similar viruses, such as dengue and West Nile, do not spread through sexual contact. Overall, the findings suggest that antibodies or drugs that destabilise the structure of the Zika virus may help to reduce the severity of the disease or limit the spread of the virus. In addition to transmission by the bite of an infected mosquito, the structural stability of the virus makes it more resilient, which likely explains its special ability to transmit through sexual contact, the researchers say. 'Additionally, we have shown that the Zika virus contains structures that are unique from the viruses in the same family that affect brains, such as the West Nile virus, and also those that cause fever, such as the dengue virus. 'These structures can be mutated to better understand how they influence the Zika virus infection in humans and can also potentially lead to the development of a safe vaccine that has reduced side effects.' Assoc Prof Lok's next step is to understand the effect of potent antibodies on the Zika virus. By examining the structure presented in this study, her team will work to determine how the antibodies could be used to kill the virus. They also hope to identify which potent antibodies could be used to treat people in emergency situations, such as a sudden outbreak or in the case of infection during pregnancy Earlier this year, a molecular map of the Zika virus shows important structural features that may help scientists craft the first treatments to tackle the disease. The map details vital differences on a key protein that may explain why Zika attacks nerve cells - while other viruses in the same family do not. Zika is very similar to other members of the flavivirus family - including dengue, Yellow Fever and West Nile, according to Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Scientists have revealed a molecular map of the Zika virus, which shows key differences in proteins on the outer shell. The finding may explain why Zika attacks nerve cells, while other viruses in the same family - such as dengue, Yellow Fever and West Nile - do not, and could lead to new treatments or drugs for the virus Yet, variations in proteins on the outer shell - or envelope - of the virus may explain how Zika enters human cells, and could lead to the development of new drugs or vaccines. The structural difference could also potentially explain the link between Zika and two disorders - the birth defect microcephaly and the paralyzing autoimmune ailment Guillain-Barre Syndrome. Dr Fauci told Reuters: 'There was one very discreet stretch of the protein on the envelope that is really different than the other flaviviruses. That is like a big red flag.' A team of Purdue University scientists conducted the study, published in the journal Science. They sought to understand why Zika behaves so differently from related viruses. To do so, they created a picture of a mature Zika virus particle, using a technique that provides a very high resolution image of the pathogen. The scientists found that the difference in Zika's structure, in comparison to similar viruses, was seen in a region of the envelope protein that flaviviruses potentially use to attach to human cells. The protein is also a key target of the immune system's response to the virus - which means it could be potentially useful in vaccine development. Determining the structure greatly advances our understanding of Zika - a virus about which little is known Dr Richard Kuhn, of Purdue University Lead study author Dr Richard Kuhn said: 'The structure of the virus provides a map that shows potential regions of the virus that could be targeted by a therapeutic treatment, used to create an effective vaccine or to improve our ability to diagnose and distinguish Zika infection from that of other related viruses. 'Determining the structure greatly advances our understanding of Zika - a virus about which little is known. 'It illuminates the most promising areas for further testing and research to combat infection.' Dr Fauci added: 'They haven't proven it yet, but it's a very important first clue.' Zika has been rapidly spreading through Latin America and the Caribbean in recent months. It has been linked to thousands of cases of microcephaly - a disorder marked by small head size and underdeveloped brains in babies - in Brazil. The difference may also explain the link between Zika (which is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, pictured) and two disorders - the birth defect microcephaly and the paralyzing autoimmune ailment Guillain-Barre Syndrome So far, Brazil has confirmed more than 900 cases of microcephaly, and is investigating over 4,000 suspected cases. The link between microcephaly and Zika has not yet been proven - but the mounting evidence is strong enough that the World Health Organization declared the Zika outbreak to be a global health emergency in February. Experts believe Zika is neurotropic - which means it specifically attacks nerve cells. It is the only mosquito-borne virus ever linked to a birth defect. ON SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS edited by Hannah Crawforth and Elizabeth Scott- Baumann ON SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS edited by Hannah Crawforth and Elizabeth Scott- Baumann (Bloomsbury 12.99) With April 23 marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeares death, it was an original and inspired idea to invite 30 leading poets to respond to his sonnets with their own poems. Specific ones by Shakespeare are printed alongside the contemporary poems they inspired making this a cornucopia of riches. For me, the most successful contributions are those which respond within the sonnet form: Andrew Motion, Jackie Kay, Douglas Dunn, Paul Muldoon, John Fuller and Wendy Cope are some who triumph. Roger McGough pulls off a terrific coup by taking 14 lines from the Bard and reassembling them into a sonnet of perfect sense. But Simon Armitage disappoints by coding Sonnet 20 into irritating trickery. This exciting collection reminds us that themes of ageing, love, lust and emotional cruelty transcend time and suggests, too, that poets sometimes write best within a tight structure. 40 SONNETS by Don Paterson 40 SONNETS by Don Paterson (Faber 14.99) Don Paterson responds skilfully to Shakespeare in the previous book; in this brilliant collection he demonstrates his own mastery of the sonnet form. It shows courage and confidence to produce work as thrilling and varied as this (even if theyre not all strictly sonnets) and Paterson proves he deserves all the prizes going. From knockabout humour (Requests and An Incarnation) to the most agonising, angry poem about the fatal wounding of a boy in Gaza, he pushes emotional boundaries while displaying a ruthless, intellectual command of his craft. The Roundabout is a quietly heartbreaking poem about a fathers day out with his sons after separating from their mother, while Mercies is as brilliant and moving a description of the death of a beloved dog as I have read. In the future, Patersons Funeral Prayer will be spoken at many a gathering of grief and bring comfort: . . . yet of all the words / we knew, his name was the most dear. / We give thanks he was spoken here. THE ART OF FALLING by Kim Moore (Seren 9.99) Its always exciting to discover a new poet, especially one who speaks of experiences beyond the usual province of poetry. In one, Moore identifies My People: I come from scaffolders and plasterers and shoemakers and carers, the type of carer paid pence per minute to visit an old ladys house. With blistering honesty she says: In the time of casual racism, some of my people would and will join in. This is real life and poetry needs its truths. In its sometimes pretentious world, this is refreshing. Most impressive is a dark, passionate and painful sequence called How I Abandoned My Body To His Keeping, which evokes the terror and anguish of a woman caught in a controlling and violent relationship. While the liquor ban in Bihar came as a blow for the booze-loving fraternity, it has given the excise department of the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh something to cheer about. With a new target of Rs 19,250 crore for the 2016-17 fiscal, the officers of the excise department are quite confident of reaching it - or even crossing it. The first reason is a liquor-free Bihar, and the second is the reduction of alcohol prices by up to 25 per cent in Uttar Pradesh. With a liquor ban in Bihar, residents are paying regular visits to the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh The bordering districts of UP and Bihar have suddenly become a prosperous milking ground for the excise department since April 1. The districts include Balia, Deoria, Ghazipur, Kushinagar, and Chandauli. The Minimum Guarantee Quota (MGQ) for country-made liquor released for this year (2016 2017) is for 1 lakh litre as compared to the last (2015 2016) year consumption of 5,000 to 6,000 litre. Besides, seven to eight new country liquor shops have sought licenses and are operating on the boarders of Balia, excise officer of Balia, Bhuaal Singh told Mail Today. There has been an increase of 64 per cent sales in the sale of liquor (country-made, IMFL and beer) since April 1 in the district, and the number of shops has also increased, he added. As well as the Balia Excise Officer, those in other neighbouring districts are also quite confident of achieving their targets for this fiscal. The MGQ for country-made liquor has been increased to 9.5 per cent as compared to 4 per cent of last year, excise officer of Deoria, Niresh Palia, said. People from Bihar are now regular visitors to our district and that is why we have increased the MGQ to 6.5 per cent, informed OP Singh, excise officer of Kushinagar. The Ghazipur excise officer came up with more precise figures. As compared to the last year's April sales, our sales have shot up by 15 per cent (beer), 64 per cent (IMFL), and over 70 per cent (country-made liquor). We expect to exceed our target (for this fiscal) by over 10 per cent, said Rajendra Kumar, the excise officer of Ghazipur. Similar reactions were expressed by other officers in the neighbouring districts of Bihar. Meanwhile, the decision of the UP government to reduce liquor prices by up to 25 per cent has also boosted sales. I used to buy my brand for Rs 340 and now a higher brand is available for the same price. Why should I go for a lower brand? a customer in Allahabad said. Women across India should take a cue from these girls from rural Bihar, who have found their voice to protest against the scourge of dowry. These women are rejecting grooms chosen by their families not only for demanding money, but also for making unkind remarks about their looks. Kusum Kumari, a resident of Khotahwa village of West Champaran district, was all set to get married to Ajay Kumar from Naurangia in UP on Sunday, when a commotion took place at the venue. Women in Bihar are standing firm in the face of insults to their family's dignity, or nasty comments about their personal appearance (file picture). The wedding party led by Ajays father asked for Rs 5,000 - which Kusums father Biran Choudhary had allegedly promised before the ceremony. Choudhary had reportedly paid Rs 20,000 as dowry already. The grooms family insisted on immediate payment and threatened that the wedding would not be solemnised otherwise. When the bride heard about it, she put her foot down and refused to marry Ajay. This forced the grooms family to change their stand. They gave the go-ahead for the wedding - but the bride said that she would not spend the rest of her life in a family that had humiliated her father for Rs 5,000 only. The brave young woman said she would prefer to look after her parents all her life instead of getting married to a dowry-seeker. In another incident at Mangalpur in Bagaha, a bride took offence to an insensitive remark made by the groom about her complexion. According to eyewitnesses, the groom demanded money from her parents saying she was too dark, causing a rumpus at the event. The brides family then held the grooms family hostage. The local police intervened and both sides agreed to fix a fresh date - but the bride refused to marry her bad-mannered groom. Authorities have allegedly refused to make official the marriage of a Hindu man and a Muslim woman in Uttar Pradeshs Dadri town, fearing a resurgence of last years communal tensions. The town became notorious when 52-year-old Mohammad Ikhlaq was killed by a lynch-mob over rumours that he had eaten beef. The couple from Chitehra village have failed to get their marriage registered even after six months, with officials allegedly saying the move may trigger a riot. No recognition: Married couple Manjeet Bhati and Salma, who changed her name to Sapna Arya. The pair say they are considered an emblem of unity in their village - but officials fear their story could trigger riots. Marrying out of faith is considered taboo in large parts of India, where consenting adults who have broken no laws have been threatened and beaten up by religious vigilantes. Manjeet Bhati, 24, and Salma, 20, who later changed her name to Sapna Arya, fled from Dadri in Gautam Budh Nagar district to Allahabad city on October 19 last year on a motorbike. Three days later, Salma adopted Hinduism and they were married at an Arya Samaj temple. The couple allege that they have repeatedly visited government offices over the past five months and met senior district officers, but no one has helped them. They also say that the marriage registrar who refused to make their marriage official demanded a bribe of Rs 20,000. The district magistrate of Gautam Budh Nagar, NP Singh, promised that the marriage will be registered and asked a senior officer to look into the matter. Marriage If both of them are adults then there should not be any problem in registering their marriage. I cannot deny that they were told by a government officer that registering their marriage can ignite communal violence, Singh said, adding that the rule of the land should prevail. Though prominent celebrities such as Bollywood stars Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan are Muslim men married to Hindu women, interfaith marriage remains a sensitive issue in the country. Bhati claims that he has met all the senior district officers, including the district magistrate, ADM, SDM, and the city magistrate, but received no support - after which he wrote to Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, asking him to intervene. Manjeet and Sapna initially sought protection from the areas senior superintendent of police after eloping together by motorbike We went to the marriage registrar in January but he said that he will not register our marriage as I was a Hindu and my wife a Muslim and this could ignite violence in the area. I assured him that no local has a problem with our marriage and our village is quite peaceful, but still he refused and also demanded Rs 20,000, Manjeet said. The incident emerged close on the heels of a Hindu woman and a Muslim man in Karnataka solemnising their marriage this month despite howls of protest from hardline Hindu groups and caste leaders. Manjeet and Sapna said they initially feared attacks from the brides relatives and she sought protection from the areas senior superintendent of police. My parents died while I was quite young. I was living with some relatives who wanted me to marry an elderly man, Sapna told Mail Today. But Manjeet and I were friends for long and we decided to get married. Her relatives filed an FIR against Manjeet in Meerut after she eloped with him. They said Sapna was a minor and that he had kidnapped her. As my relatives have threatened to kill us, we sought protection from police for a month and then we appeared before the magistrate in Meerut in December 2015, she said. I produced my certificate and my medical test was done, which established I was an adult. The magistrate ordered that I was free to live with anyone and I chose my husband. Problem The couple say no one in their village has a problem with their marriage and residents see them as a symbol of unity. After the mob-lynching incident, people in the area have become more sensitive, Manjeet said. The Union Health Ministry is digging into its pockets to retain a slew of experts, fearing an exodus after the Centre recently dismissed dozens of foreign-funded consultants. The move was seen as a Government bid to clamp down on the influence of international agencies and NGOs on public policy. With the order, the health ministry remains the worst hit as the public health sector has perhaps the highest number of such experts in various fields, ranging from tuberculosis and family planning to AIDS, said a senior health ministry official. Troubling: While many consultants have already been asked to leave, others will soon get their marching orders. Expects in every area from family planning to AIDS are at risk of leaving the country. (File picture) While many consultants have already been asked to leave after completing three years, others will soon get their marching orders. The concern is serious as work will get affected if these experienced people leave. We are considering the possibility of creating a separate fund for this so that we can pay the salaries of these experts in the future, the official said. We have been asked to make a list of those who are about to complete three years. We will talk to authorities to find a way to retain these experts at our own expense. More than 363 consultants work in the health ministry, but get salaries from external agencies such as the UK's Department for International Development (DFID), the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), along with aid groups like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Health-oriented international agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF also have consultants in the ministry. With several health plans such as AIDS control programmes under the National AIDS Control Organization (NACO), Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme (RNTCP), malaria, immunisation, family planning and mother and child health programmes, there is a dire need of health experts for guidance, said a senior health official. Not many posts have been sanctioned by the Centre so we are dependent on foreign agencies to fund these experts. Over half of these consultants have already served the government for more than three years, said officials. For those who have joined recently, we can extend their services annually, up to three years, after seeking permission from the finance ministry by giving them a valid reason. But these experts will start looking for other avenues if they dont see any financial gains in future. The final approval for the existing consultants will come after the approval of the new screening committee, an official said. According to the health ministry, as many as 90 of its consultants will have to leave by the end of June. Around 120 work with NACO. We have already started searching for new experts in the respective fields and their salaries will be taken care of by the health ministry, said the official. Vijay Goel was fined for driving without a licence and insurance papers The odd-even scheme is all set to face more political warfare as BJP leader Vijay Goel, who was fined for driving without a licence and insurance papers, will offer flowers to all 67 MLAs of the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) to highlight the shortcomings of the plan. Goel, who defied the scheme, said the AAP is misleading the public by misusing taxpayers' money on massive advertising. Permanent roles for Navy women The Navy has joined the Army and the Air Force in giving permanent commissions to women officers. The force is also gearing up to open new avenues for them. It will soon come up with the policy for women officers to serve on select warships. Women are not currently allowed on warships, but the policy is being amended. The Navy has already started having women pilots to fly maritime reconnaissance planes. Goyal in UK for business deals Power minister Piyush Goyal is visiting the UK. He is accompanied by a strong business delegation to carry forward pacts signed during visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit to the UK in November in 2015. On day one, minister met officials from Natgrid and UK Power Network who briefed the Minister about their functions and capabilities and on how they can contribute on enhancing grid stability in India. BJP fails to identify its own candidates The Delhi BJP, which was forced to field newcomers for the MCD by-elections, had a tough time introducing its candidates at a press conference on Wednesday. The BJP leaders failed to recognise their own candidates. Delhi BJP president Satish Upadhyay could not place Sudesh Tokas, a candidate from Munirka. Nitin Sharma from Nanakpur met with a similar fate. Nitin Sharmas father, Lakhi Ram, is an old BJP hand. India and China talk borders yet again India and China on Wednesday held the 19th round of talks on arriving at a framework settlement on the long-running boundary question, and also discussed a range of strategic issues as their two NSAs met in Beijing. After two hours of talks followed by a close to two hour banquet at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, NSA Ajit Doval told Mail Today the talks went very well. The police horse Shaktiman, which suffered multiple fractures to its hind leg during a BJP protest last month, triggering widespread outrage, died on Wednesday. Shaktiman was injured on March 14 after which we had to operate on him. He was later fitted with an artificial leg. But he was unable to fully recover from an infection, SSP Dehradun, Sadanand Date said. The 13-year-old horse was given a prosthetic leg and was confined to the police lines. It was a well-trained horse and part of the Uttarakhand Mounted Police for years. Former Uttarakhand chief minister Harish Rawat pays tribute to police horse Shaktiman The horse passed away at 5.30pm. He was suffering from medical-related complications. The exact cause will be known only after post-mortem, IG Garhwal Sanjay Gunjyal said. Expressing shock over the demise of the horse, former Uttarakhand chief minister Harish Rawat said: It was a brave soldier of Uttarakhand and died while performing its duty. The horse had lost its leg after it was brutally beaten during clashes between BJP protesters and the police on March 14. BJP MLA Ganesh Joshi, who was accused of assaulting Shaktiman, was arrested after national outrage over the incident. RS Meena, IG Law and Order, Uttarakhand, said the artificial limb fitted to help Shaktiman was not working well, and the horse was putting his entire weight on another leg - which caused the infection to spread. I have always been fascinated by the story of Kadak Nath, India's only black chicken species and one of just three types across the world. Its cousins - China's Silkie and Indonesia's Ayam Cemani - command astronomical prices and are hailed as "super-birds" in America. Our very own Kadak Nath, however, is barely known outside Madhya Pradesh, where the Bhils and Bhilalas of Jhabua district have been nurturing the chicken for centuries. Its high-protein, low-fat black meat is said to be packed with healing properties. Food historian and TV presenter Ashish Chopra is the 'brand ambassador' of Kadak Nath, one of just three black chicken species in the world The bird is fortunate, though, to have an ardent champion in Ashish Chopra, who started life as the Youth Congress general secretary overseeing the northeast in 1986-89. Nowadays Chopra is one of the country's most well-thought-of culinary historians, known for his passion to explore the cuisines of communities that 'mainstream India' gets to know about only when there's an insurgency or Maoist 'trouble'. Chopra's 'NE Belly' (2006) was the first book to document little-known recipes from the north-east, a region he got to know closely during his stints with the Governor of Mizoram and then Assam Rifles, and in the course of a research project at Majuli Island on the Brahmaputra. He has just completed documenting the cuisines of the tribal communities, and also a soon-to-be-aired series titled Biki's Gastronomy, for the TLC channel. In his famous library, you'll find gems such as the first Marwari cookbook ever written. It spills over with game meat recipes, because 'Marwari' in this context doesn't refer to the vegetarian mercantile community from Shekhawati when it left Rajasthan. Also present is the 300-year-old recipe book of the Diggi Palace family now famous because of the Jaipur Literature Festival. You can imagine my excitement when Chopra invited me to sample the Kadak Nath he was getting cooked in the Mangalorean gassi style at the newly-opened Sana-di-ge restaurant at the Malcha Marg Market. Kadak Nath chickens are high in protein, low-fat in fat, and their black meat is said to be packed with healing properties How did Chopra become Kadak Nath's brand ambassador? A long time back, he was going to meet his childhood friend Pushpraj Singh Judeo, wildlife conservationist and head of the royal family of Rewa, when he stopped by to say 'hello' to the late Maharaja of Panna, who introduced him to Kadak Nath. The jungle fowl taste of the meat stuck to this palate and he was mesmerised by the aromas released by the bird as it was being cooked, with skin on, for two hours. "Just the thought of it makes me salivate," he says. It would have remained just a delicious memory, had the cameraman with whom Chopra shot the TLC series not invited him to Bareilly, where the Indian Veterinary Research Institute (IVRI) is breeding Kadak Nath. The latter is a challenge because the chickens are very poor breeders (the hens refuse to sit on the eggs they hatch!) and they have a high mortality rate. His interest piqued, Chopra launched his search for the real Kadak Nath. Initially he met people who claimed to be breeding Kadak Nath, but the birds turned out to be cross-bred with country chicken. Then at long last, he met Satish Kumar, a young engineer-turned-chicken breeder, who is as passionate about Kadak Nath as Chopra and breeds them at his farm, Rudra's Breeders, at Jolarpettai in the shadow of the Nilgiris in Tamil Nadu. It was a bird from Rudra's that we dug at Sana-di-ge. The bird's skin, meat and bones looked like they'd been injected with squid ink. The gassi had been cooked - by a Garhwali named Uday Rawat! - on the previous night so that its juices could go deep into the meat and bones. The elaborate cooking process involved repeated roasting, boiling and then cooking the bird in its own stock. It was a treat that will be hard for me to forget - the juiciness of the meat and the meatiness of the gravy, which I mopped up with a sannas and a neer dosai, complemented each other like two pieces of a symphony. India needs to discover Kadak Nath, and the joy of eating it. Is organic the next big thing? What 'big idea' is going to drive a new generation of restaurants in India? I asked a prominent hotelier this question, and he said it is going to be restaurants that offer only organic and freshly cooked dishes. It is impressive to see initiatives underway to popularise organic farmers and their products, but these are still individual efforts that cannot deliver the scale of production required to keep restaurants well-stocked. It is impressive to see the initiatives underway to popularise organic farmers and their products, but these efforts cannot deliver on the scale of production required to keep restaurants well-stocked A 100 per cent organic restaurant therefore seems like a pie in the sky, at least at this moment - but one where all the dishes are cooked live for the guests to see and savour is eminently doable. Look at how wedding receptions now have a panoply of live stations, serving everything from chaat to laksa, pastas to paella, biryani to grills. Add to this the luxury of choosing your own ingredients and seeing them getting cooked. Imagine recreating this entire experience under one roof at one restaurant, complete with chutney stations and live classical desserts, such as crepes suzette. Or what about starting the experience with a gol gappabar, followed by an ensemble of tacos with an array of different fillings (or burger and hot dogs), and then the entire shebang? The possibilities are mind-boggling. As India cools off to fast food, Wendy's takes up the challenge I have just finished watching a Wall Street Journal news video, which carries a wake-up call for the quick service - 'fast food' - restaurants (QSRs). Restaurants that continue to nurture high hopes from the Indian market, judging from the recent steady trickle of brands such as Johnny Rockets, Taco Bell, Burger King, Wendy's and Carl's Junior. After showcasing the new products that the QSRs have rolled out - from the McDonald's Chicken Maharaja Mac to the 'exotic Italian pizzas' that Domino's launched in 2015 with Vikas Khanna - the video reports that the growth of sales at Domino's has slowed down from 50.4 per cent in 2010 to 19.7 per cent in 2015, that of McDonald's (West and South) from 43.5 per cent to 3.2 per cent, and of Yum Brands (KFC and Taco Bell) from 29 per cent to minus-5 per cent. Coincidentally, I had a conversation along similar lines with Jasper Reid, who has brought Pizza Express (owned by the Airtel Mittal family), Wendy's and Jamie's Italian, whose master franchisee is Sanjay Chhabra of Rollatainers, a leading packaging firm in Haryana. Speaking with me at the fourth Wendy's outlet, which has opened at the back of Building No.10 in DLF Cyber City, at the far end of Cyber Hub, Reid said India is turning out to be a "super-challenging market" for international QSR chains because the disposable income of the middle class isn't going up and consumers are increasingly demanding higher quality at lower prices. Wendy's has responded to the challenge by launching a new 77-item menu topped by the scrumptious Railway Cutlet Burger priced at Rs 39. Even as it takes on McDonald's with its competitive pricing, Wendy's is positioning itself, to quote Reid, as the "Zara of QSRs". You are served on the table and on regular crockery; the new menu features salads as well as melts and smoothies; coffee is freshly brewed; and soon, you'll be able to have beer and wine at Wendy's, DLF Cyber City. Mehbooba had suggested allowing militants to return to India from PoK without going via Nepal Surrendering terrorists returning to India from Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir (PoK) could be a cause for hostility between the Centre and the Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) government. Newly-appointed Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti suggested allowing militants who cross over to come back directly from PoK, instead of taking the Nepal route. But the idea has not found favour with counter-terror agencies. Sources said that based on inputs from various agencies, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) is not inclined to make any changes to the existing policy. Militants who have crossed over from Jammu and Kashmir and want to surrender, are brought back via Nepal. Those wanting to return reach Kathmandu and then use the road that leads to the border, where they are assisted to enter India. Allowing those who want to surrender for the crossover from PoK directly, does not appear feasible. It will be like opening the floodgates. Monitoring those who return, will be a huge task, said a government official. At a recent meeting with Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Mufti suggested a change in the militant repatriation policy. As many as 1,253 people have returned from PoK via the Nepal route. These include 453 militants, who had crossed over for arms training, along with 197 women and 603 children. An estimated 4,000 more people from J&K are said to be across the border, and several of them want to return. An assessment needs to be made before allowing those wanting to surrender to come back. Only after clearances at different levels are given, can they be allowed to return, the official added. After almost a two-month stalemate, the PDP and the BJP formed the government leaving behind their differences. After the government formation, Mehbooba Mufti said that she is ready to take her father and former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeeds ideas and legacy forward. In 2013, the Delhi Police arrested Liyaqat Shah - a former militant - who was returning as per the rehabilitation policy via Nepal, triggering a controversy. The case was finally handed over to the National Investigation Agency (NIA), which raised questions about the Delhi Police action. Security jawans stand guard during a strike call given by several separatist leaders against alleged attacks on Kashmiri students studying in various colleges outside Kashmir After the goof-up in Shahs case, a view emerged that the policy regarding the surrender of former terrorists through the Nepal border needs to be streamlined and re-examined. Following the fiasco, sources claimed there are better mechanisms in place to ensure the smooth return of those who have been cleared. The NIA is yet to take a call on whether Purohit will be charged under MCOCA for the Malegaon case One of the key witnesses of the Maharashtra ATS in the Malegaon 2008 blast case has accused the investigating agency of coercing him to implicate Lt Col Prasad Srikant Purohit. Mail Today has accessed the complaint made by Capt Nitin Joshi, a former infantry officer working as an instructor at the Bhonsala Military School to the Maharashtra State Human Rights Commission. Maharashtra ATS officers coerced me to say that I saw Purohit bringing in RDX that he used for both the Malegaon 2008 and the Samjhauta blast. "ATS officers threatened to implicate me in false cases and to bodily harm my family if I didnt implicate Purohit, Joshi told Mail Today. In his complaint against the state human rights commission, Joshi says that on several days, ATS officers compelled him to say that Purohit gave him illegal arms and ammunition to keep and that he saw RDX in Purohits house. I did not see RDX in his house and told them so. They beat me up and threatened my family. Purohit was a fine officer and they fixed him in false cases, he added. Joshi says he came into contact with Lt Col Purohit at the Bhonsla Military School and claims he was impressed with the military intelligence officers personality. He concedes Purohit introduced him to the Abhinav Bharat group and its members, but he didnt know them well. When I came to know that Purohit had been arrested in connection with the Malegaon 2008 blasts, I was completely taken aback. Soon, ATS officers came to our school and on October 31, 2008, they asked me to come to their office, says Joshi. He claims that he was forced to fix Purohit. I told them I had no idea about the Malegaon blasts, but they said that I was not cooperating with them. They also threatened to jail me. They dictated a letter to me, saying Purohit confessed to have supplied the RDX for Samjhauta, he adds. KP Raghuvanshi, the then chief of ATS, said that the force had done its job well and filed a charge-sheet. Carnage: The Samjhauta Express terror blast left 67 people dead A witness can turn hostile, and it is for the court to then decide which testimony is reliable, he said. Raghuvanshi, however, denied that the Maharashtra ATS had linked Purohit and the RDX to the Samjhauta blast. The case was subsequently transferred to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) which is still to file a charge-sheet in the case. Sharad Kumar, DG, NIA told Mail Today that the investigation is in its final stages and the charge-sheet is expected to be filed within the next four to six weeks. The JD(U)-led mahagathbandhan swept the Bihar Assembly election last year. Can a national mahagathbandhan do a repeat in the 2019 Lok Sabha election? Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar clearly thinks so. After anointing himself president of the JD(U) on April 10, Nitish has set his sights firmly on Delhi. His new slogan: 'Sangh-mukt Bharat.' Should Prime Minister Narendra Modi be worried? A united opposition would present a formidable challenge to the BJP. Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has set his course for Delhi with the new slogan 'Sangh-mukt Bharat'. But uniting non-BJP parties under the JD(U)s patchwork umbrella will prove a lot harder than forging a mahagathbandhan in Bihar. Coalitions Nitish has begun to build his regional party as a national centripetal force ranged against the BJP. The Congress has reacted coolly to the idea, though it is open to state-wise coalitions in 2019. AICC general secretary Shakeel Ahmad said: 'Certainly, India should be freed of the RSS and BJP. But when it comes to the question of alliances, they are state-specific. Thats because a particular party which has presence in one state does not have much presence in the neighbouring states. So parties go for state-specific alliances.' Three political 'federations' will contest the next general election. First, the BJP-led NDA. Second, the JD(U)-UPA mahagathbandhan. And third, neutral regional parties which will not align with either front. The secular mahagathbandhan will comprise a loose assembly of anti-BJP forces. Among them: the JD(U), Congress, DMK, RJD, NCP, AAP, NC, the Left Front and a host of small regional parties. A united opposition would present a formidable challenge to Modi's BJP, but its feasibility depends on many factors The problem for Nitish is that the big regional parties will likely remain aloof from the mahagathbandhan: BSP, SP, TMC, BJD, TRS and AIADMK. Between them, these powerful regional satraps hold over 100 seats in the current Lok Sabha. They will individually support either the Modi-led NDA or the Nitish-UPA front, depending on the numbers the 2019 Lok Sabha election throws up. Several states will see a straight battle between the BJP and the Congress. These include Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. Here, Nitishs mahagathbandhan will not work. Even in states where there are multiple players, the index of opposition unity (IOU) will wear thin. For example, in UP, the vote will be split five ways between the BJP, Congress, SP, BSP and MIM. In the south and east too, the JD(U)s 'secular' alliance could be snubbed by regional parties. Elections The ongoing state elections in Assam, Kerala, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu as well as the Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat Assembly elections in 2017 and the Karnataka poll in 2018 will reveal some clues. Before doing the 2019 Lok Sabha math, some assumptions: the BJP wins Assam, Gujarat and Karnataka. Mamata and Jayalalithaa retain West Bengal and Tamil Nadu respectively. The Left Front retakes Kerala. AAP wins Punjab. Mayawati regains UP. Lets look more closely at the numbers of the three principal alliances. An analysis of vote share and seats in the last five Lok Sabha elections between 1998 and 2014 reveals that a party needs a national vote share of over 30 per cent to win more than 250 seats. In 2014, the BJP won 282 seats with a vote share of 31 per cent. In 2009, the Congress won 206 seats with a vote share of 28.55 per cent. To form a government at the Centre, the mahagathbandhan will need the support of virtually all the regional parties. With the TMC unlikely to join a front comprising the Left, and the SP and BSP rabidly antithetical to each other, the possibility of a Nitish-led coalition government in 2019 could dissolve in a clash of egos. To complicate matters, Rahul Gandhi will support such a coalition only from outside, in much the same way the Congress supported (and brought down) the United Front governments of HD Deve Gowda and Inder Gujral in 1997 and 1998. Majority The BJP-led NDA is also likely to fall short of an absolute majority. The NDA may need a regional party like the AIADMK or the BJD - and several independents - to form a government with a wafer-thin majority in 2019. Much, of course, can happen in the next three years. The BJPs electoral planks going forward will be nationalism and development in place of the 2014 planks of Hindutva and Parivartan. Hindutva has fading appeal. Parivartan has proved a false hope. The silver lining for the BJP is that if it defeats the Congress in Assembly elections in Assam, Karnataka, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, the NDAs Rajya Sabha numbers will climb to well over 100 seats, giving it flexibility to pass legislation in the Upper House. But if the economy doesnt prosper and if nationalism doesnt coalesce the Hindu vote behind it, the BJPs math may come unstuck. There are several warning signs the BJP can ignore at its peril. The Patidar agitation in Gujarat could tilt the balance of power in Modis home state. The irascible Shiv Senas support for the BJP in Maharashtra could crumble. Disaffection with Modis reluctance to act against UPA-era scams, especially those involving the Gandhis and Robert Vadra, might alienate the BJPs core support base. Internal machinations by the partys old '160 club' could be revived to sabotage a second Modi term. The ruling Congress in Karnataka wants to reverse the quashing of FIRs against BS Yeddyurappa It's less than a week since the BJP appointed former Chief Minister BS Yeddyurappa as the head of its Karnataka unit, and he is already facing a new challenge. The ruling Congress in Karnataka has decided to appeal to the Supreme Court against the quashing of 15 FIRs registered against him in connection with various alleged land scams when he was the CM between 2008 and 2011. The High Court of Karnataka had quashed all the 15 FIRs registered against him in January - one of the main reasons the BJP sent Yeddyurappa to Karnataka to consolidate its position as elections to the Assembly are two years away. On Wednesday, the Additional Advocate General AS Ponnanna submitted his report to the government recommending the filing of an appeal in the Supreme Court. The report was discussed in the Cabinet meeting, where it was decided that the government will question the quashing of FIRs by the High Court in the apex court. Yeddyurappa was accused of causing loss to the state by denotifying lands acquired by government agencies, such as Karnataka Industrial Area Development Board and the Bengaluru Development Authority for development projects and housing schemes. Avuncular ex-Aquascutum boss and British Fashion Council chairman Harold Tillman (why not Sir Harold?) tells pals that he has struck up a platonic friendship with fiery supermodel Naomi Campbell. The always immaculately tailored Tillman, 70, who sold Jaeger to private equity shark Jon Moulton in 2012 for 20million, recently got chatting to Campbell, 45, at a cocktail party she held in London when he reminded her that they both grew up on the same street, Drewstead Road in Streatham. How touching. Wonder if jet-setting Naomi, 45, cared for being reminded of her umble Sarf London roots? Should the Brexit campaign be weaponising Formula One billionaire Bernie Ecclestone ahead of Junes referendum? During a discussion with combative WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell, 71, organised by Advertising Week Europe, he described himself as a 100 per cent outer and said there was no economic benefit at all of remaining in Europe. He then added alarmingly: Putin should be running Europe. We should get rid of Brussels and he should just be in charge. 'He does what he says hes going to do and gets the job done. On second thoughts, it might be better to keep the irascible cockney hobbit, 85, bound and gagged until after polling day. Time was when the Duke of York regularly rubbed shoulders with mega-rich plutocrats as Britains trade envoy. His audience was much sought at the World Economic Conference in Davos. That was until the Government relinquished his globetrotting role, no doubt spooked by his links to US paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. On Tuesday, Andrew was tasked with cutting the ribbon at the opening of accountancy firm KPMGs new regional offices in central Leeds. They are not long those days of wine and roses The worlds biggest asset manager, Blackrock, is revealed to have spent 10million hiring political lobbyists to get its own way in Washington. Thanks to its investment, senior executives are now said to be on a first-name basis with the US Treasury secretary. Blackrocks London office has cheaper and more direct access to Britains financial levers of power. Since last year, it employs Rupert Harrison, 37, ex-chief of staff to George Osborne, as a 150,000 a year strategist. Cleverclogs Old Etonian Harrison (he was head boy), spent nine years as the Chancellors most trusted adviser. Hes known to Treasury wonks as Osbornes brain. Most hideous use of financial jargon this week goes to US credit agency Moodys, which has published in-depth research on Transport for Londons revenues. PUB HOPES Punch Taverns has sold a clutch of boozers to help pay down its debt mountain. The debt-laden pub chain reported a fall in pre-tax profit for the 28 weeks to March 5 to 54.7million. However news it had sold many of its less profitable pubs boosted its share price. Shares jumped 11.9pc or 11.5p to 108.5p. PROFIT target Metro Bank has cut losses as it targets a profit by the end of the year. Metro posted a 7.9million loss for the first quarter of 2015. This is a 600,000 improvement on the same period a year earlier. The challenger bank increased its loan book by 17 per cent to 4.1billion in the quarter. It now has 41 branches and 717,000 customers. ENGINEER LIFTS Shares in engineer GKN rose 0.59p to 296.29p after divisions providing parts for car makers performed strongly. The firm, which also has defence clients, said this offset flat sales at its aerospace divisions which saw lower military sales. PANAMA PAPERS American authorities have opened a criminal investigation in the wake of the so-called Panama Papers tax leaks. The Justice Department has said it will look for evidence of tax avoidance in the leaks, which detail efforts by law firm Mossack Fonseca to help the super-rich hide their wealth. Preet Bharara, the US Attorney for Manhattan, has written to the investigative journalism group which first exposed the scandal to ask for more information. CARD BOSS Barclaycard has appointed Amer Sajed as head of the credit card business. Sajed was already acting chief executive of the division, a position he took up when previous boss Val Soranno Keating left in May. The former Citigate banker led Barclaycards UK and US operations before taking his current role. AIRLINE CUTS The private equity group that stepped in to save Tata Steels Scunthorpe steelworks is to lay off 120 engineers at another of its investments Monarch Airlines. Greybull Capital bought the firm in 2014 but is to close the maintenance hangar at Manchester Airport. FUND LOSS Hedge fund Paulson & Co has lost 1.4billion of value in five months as a result of bad bets placed by its high-profile manager. The UK Government has promised financial backing to buyers interested in Tata Steel equivalent to a 25 per cent stake in the foundering company. Business Secretary Sajid Javid said the money would be offered on commercial terms, but the government would not take any control over the business. The surprise commitment comes after details of a proposed management buyout bid for Tata Steel's Port Talbot plant emerged last night. Senior managers are attempting a move which would also see thousands of steel workers asked to contribute around 10,000 to safeguard their jobs at the troubled plant. Rescue plan: The plan to save the Port Talbot steelworks would see workers asked to contribute around 10,000 each The managers have won backing from Welsh billionaire Sir Terry Matthews' Canadian investment firm Wesley Clover to try to save the plant which directly employs 4,000 workers. A package of support worth hundreds of millions of pounds will be made available on commercial terms to potential buyers of Tata Steel, The UK and Welsh governments have announced. The Business Department said the financial support package will be tailored to the purchaser's strategy and financing needs. The majority of the backing will be through the provision of debt financing - but other options include providing hybrid (convertible debt) or alternative forms of financing and supporting a purchaser's financing by taking a minority equity stake of up to 25 per cent to support any sale. The move followed another visit to Mumbai by Business Secretary Sajid Javid to meet Tata's chairman Cyrus Mistry this week where the minister said progress on the sales process had been made. The Government said it was actively working with Tata Steel and the British Steel Pension Scheme's trustees to find a solution that will help minimise its impact on a potential purchaser, and potentially separate it from the business. Mr Javid said: 'This Government is committed to supporting the steel industry to secure a long-term, viable future and we are working closely with Tata Steel UK on its process to find a credible buyer. The detail of our commercial funding offer is clear evidence of the extent of that commitment. 'Ministers have visited Tata Steel sites across the country and the pride and dedication of the highly skilled men and women working there is obvious to see. We have already delivered on energy compensation, on tackling unfair trading practices and on procurement of British steel, and we will keep on going further to support this vital industry.' Matthews is putting together a consortium of investors which also includes Steve Phillips, chief executive of the local council. Matthews arrived in the country yesterday to lead talks. Port Talbot was put up for sale last month by Indian owner Tata who decided to pull out of the UK altogether after rejecting a 100m rescue plan because it was unaffordable. It would mean up to 7,000 staff and contractors at the South Wales plant will lose their jobs if a buyer cannot be found. Tata issued a sales memorandum last week that was distributed to 190 potential buyers. Senior managers at Port Talbot led by boss Stuart Wilkie who has begun work on a bid. On Monday they met with Simon Gibson, chief executive of Wesley Clover at the Celtic Manor hotel in Newport, which is owned by Matthews, to develop proposals to create a new stand-alone UK business. Threat: Port Talbot was put up for sale last month by Indian owner Tata after it decided to pull out of the UK, putting at risk the jobs of about 7,000 staff and contractors at the South Wales plant A spokesman for Tata Steel said: All expressions of interest, including any Management Buy Out proposals, will be considered when received. Separately the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) put out a statement yesterday (Wed) on behalf of eight governments expressing disappointment and frustration at China for refusing to address the problem of a glut of supply of steel. Pay row: Bunzl, current chief executive Michael Roney is retiring but received 3.6m last year The anger of shareholders over fat cat pay grew yesterday as two more stock market giants faced revolts. FTSE 100 outsourcing firm Bunzl saw 26 per cent of investors vote against the pay deal for its board. Meanwhile, 12 per cent of shareholders revolted against the pay at financial website Moneysupermarket. The rebellions came as top City executives conceded that boardroom pay in the UK was broken and not fit for purpose. A report by senior figures including the Sainsburys chairman David Tyler and Legal & General chief executive Nigel Wilson demanded an urgent overhaul to restore public confidence in British business. They warned that there is an increasing disparity between average wages and executive wages. Today, Mark Cutifani, who earns 3.4million as chief executive of miner Anglo American, will become the latest boss to face anger over pay. It is expected a large number of shareholders will vote against remuneration at the miners annual meeting. And it signals the growing head of steam that boardrooms are facing over pay following oil giant BPs annual general meeting at which nearly 60 per cent of shareholders voted against the 13.9million pay package of chief executive Bob Dudley. At Bunzl, current chief executive Michael Roney is retiring but received 3.6million last year which was down from 4.7million in the previous year. This was made up of a bonus of 887,000 and included long-term incentives of 1.7million. New boss Frank van Zanten who starts today gets a relocation package when he moves from Amsterdam, including assistance with the cost of his home, removals and school fees. His salary and pension allowance will be lower than Roney at 800,000. Moneysupermarket chief executive Peter Plumb earned 2.7million last year, including a bonus of 803,000 and a salary of 459,000. He also picked up long-term incentives of 1.4million. Plumb faced a revolt despite taking a pay cut of 700,000 on the previous year. EDFS directors have been warned they face legal action if the beleaguered power company pushes ahead with building an 18billion nuclear plant in Somerset. A letter from managers in the French firm said board members could be held personally responsible if their support for the Hinkley Point C project led to a destruction of value. It came as French president Francois Hollande met ministers to discuss financing for the plant, which would produce enough power for 6million homes. Frances government owns an 85 per cent stake in the company. Doubts: A letter from managers in the French firm said board members could be held personally responsible if their support for the Hinkley Point C project led to a destruction of value The anonymous letter was supported by about 500 EDF managers, according to the Financial Times. It asked bosses to carry out further research and hold a special shareholder meeting before approving the scheme. Most EDF directors are expected to back Hinkley, with a decision due on May 11. But there have been fears the company simply cannot afford to finance the scheme, which will cost about the same as its entire market value. The Next boss has been given a 100,000 pay rise despite warning of the toughest year since 2008. Lord Simon Wolfson, 48, received 4.8million, the firms annual report revealed. He received a 503,000 bonus about 50 per cent less than in previous years while a share scheme gave him a 680,000 boost. He also got 2.45million from a long-term incentive plan and his basic salary rose from 743,000 to 751,000. Wolfson became boss of Next in 2001 aged 33. Con artists were successful in scamming more than 5,000 people into sending them money via bank account transfers last year. That was a 71 per cent increase on the previous year and meant that losses from this form of fraud amounted to 126million - an average of 25,000 for each victim. Fraudsters were able to con bank account holders into diverting planned payments to them, rather than the company they were meant to be paid to. Account fraud: There was a 71 per cent rise in reported fraud whereby victims transferred planned payments to fraudster's bank accounts There were 5,480 of these cases recorded in 2015, up from 3,206 the previous year, according to figures from City of London Police given exclusively to Radio 4s You & Yours programme. Of those affected by this kind of crime, also known as 'mandate' or 'invoice' fraud, 35 per cent said it had a severe or significant impact on them. While this type of fraud can happen to anyone, the City of London Police highlighted two specific areas where theyve seen a rise in it occurring. These are both happening by fraudsters using workplace email accounts to con employees out of cash. The first works by the criminals infiltrating a companys IT system and then sending emails to employees asking for changes to standing orders or demands for payment for items that havent been ordered. The second is through CEO fraud whereby criminals impersonate email accounts of chief executives to trick staff into wiring payments to overseas accounts. These typically work by a fraudster emailing a member of staff in a companys finance department demanding they transfer money quickly to a certain bank account. As these are usually sent to junior members of staff, theyre likely to respond quickly and send the money to the fraudsters. Fight back: Keeping bills out of sight and verifying caller details can help you avoid being a victim We reported earlier this year that this kind of crime has cost firms $2 billion, or 1.43 billion - around the world, according to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. Action Fraud has sent warnings to UK businesses to be extra vigilant against this kind of crime and it says nearly 1,000 reports of this kind were reported between July 2015 and January 2016 with 32 million lost in Britain. Protecting yourself from fraud may seem easy to some but criminals are always looking for new ways to scam innocent people. When it comes to mandate or invoice fraud, Action Fraud warns people to be extra vigilant with keeping bills and details of standing orders and direct debits out of sight. If you are in the position to verify a financial agreement at work or at home always check youre dealing with the company directly using established contact details you have on file. You can check if the call is genuine by asking the caller to give you the main switchboard number for you to be routed back to or you can hang up and call back with the number you already have. Finally, if you think youve been a victim of fraud act quickly. Check your bank statements and if you see anything unusual report it to your financial institution as soon as you can. Advertisement The smell hits you long before you even see it: an acrid mix of poisonous smoke and rotting food, animal faeces and sweat. Step through the gates, and the full extent of the horror is revealed. A vast, brown expanse littered with broken glass, rusted wire and scraps of material - some hellish wasteland, pockmarked with craters of fire spitting out their thick blanket of smoke, intensifying the already unbearable heat. This is no place for children. And yet, here they are, picking their way through the things everyone else in Freetown has discarded, looking for the scraps which might if they are lucky make them less than a 70p for a full day's work. Scroll down for video Wasteland: This is one of Freetown's dump - a place where people live and work, like Kadi, 17, pictured, who went into labour here Desperation: Kadi found herself at the dump after she was chased from her home for getting pregnant. But she had slept with the boy because he offered to help her with money - which her uncle's new wife demanded she get 'anyway she could' The dump - or 'Bomeh', as it is known locally - is where you can find some of Sierra Leone's poorest residents, quite the claim in a country where 60 per cent of people live below the poverty line. These are the people who have fallen between the cracks, those who have no choice but to send their children out onto the dump, wearing donated flip flops long past their best, because, if they don't, there will be nothing to eat tonight. Which is how Kadi ended up going into labour on the dump when she was still just a child herself. Kadi had been sent to Freetown aged 11, to live with her aunt. But her world crumbled when her aunt and uncle divorced, and she was left with her uncle - and his new wife, a woman who demanded she earn her keep by selling items on the street. 'This woman was pressuring me to sell water on the streets,' she explained, telling her story to MailOnline as charity Street Child launches its ambitious new Girls Speak Out appeal. 'One day I went to the street to sell water but I lost the money. 'She was furious, she asked me to find the money at any cost.' It was then Amy met a boy who offered to give her some of the amount, which she offered to the aunt. But it wasn't enough. 'She chased me out, and I went back to the boy and slept the night,' she said. Kadi returned home in the morning, but when her uncle discovered what she had done he drove her from the house forever. At just 14, she found herself alone and, as she was soon to discover, pregnant. By the time she was full term, she was working alongside her sister, picking rubbish from the dump - a place many who live in the city have never seen up close, despite it being in the heart of Freetown's east end. Hidden behind high walls, the thousands who pass it every day on the noisy, busy road which runs alongside could almost pretend it doesn't exist - if not for the smell. Kadi could do no such thing. The dump had become her lifeline, despite its dangers. 'I was scared for my baby, I was scared for myself,' she told MailOnline. Her terror was compounded when, one day amid the rubbish, rats and strangers, she went into labour. 'I was so afraid,' she said. 'I was scared to give birth in this place.' Fear: Kadi was terrified for her child, and for herself - a terror compounded when she went into labour while working here one day Hidden danger: The smoke, which rises from pockets of burning rubbish spread out across the dump, are full of cancer-causing fumes. Here, plastic bottles burn alongside kitchen waste - causing yet another hazard for the children forced to make a living here Trapped: The families who live here - some literally on the dump (shacks pictured back) - are trapped in a cycle of poverty. They have so little they need their children to work so everyone can eat, but then they don't go to school and learn - so can't ever get away Babies and toddlers are not an uncommon sight on the dump. When there is so little to spare, mothers are forced to bring their children with - mothers like Isata. For five years, she made her living on the dump. Her two youngest were tied to her back the first time she brought them along. 'I could earn 20,000 leones on a good day, and 10,000 on a bad,' she told MailOnline. 'The children would always come with me.' These people are poor, they have no education no opportunity. They look for the easiest way to make money. You sell, you eat, and then the next day you do it again. Sia Lajaku-Williams, operations director, Street Child of Sierra Leone At best, that meant the mother-of-five had 2.50 a day to support her growing family on. Isata had little choice, however. She had grown up during the years of the civil war, which raged across the country from 1991 until 2002, and at 35 was unable to read or write. 'I was just doing it because I had no alternative. I didn't want to bring the children, but what could I do?' she asked MailOnline. Sia Lajaku-Williams, operations director of Street Child of Sierra Leone, recongises her story. It is one she and her team see time and time again. 'These people are poor, they have no education no opportunity,' she said. 'They look for the easiest way to make money. You sell, you eat, and then the next day you do it again. 'And the children are joining you but if you do this, they are also missing out. They won't have the opportunity to learn. It just goes on and on.' Frances' little girls were trapped just like this, in an endless cycle of poverty: Zainab, 10, and Mariama, eight, were just seven and six respectively when they first stepped foot here. 'It was bad,' Zainab said. 'I was very, very sacred. It was more dangerous because of the different objects. They hurt my feet. 'And the bad smell... so bad.' Vulnerable: Zainab, 10, and her little sister Mariama, eight, were tiny the first time they went with their mother to the dump. They too were scared, but what they mainly remember is how sick they used to get, every single month Regrets: The girls' mother Isata knew it wasn't a good place to take her children - but told MailOnline she had no other choice, unable to afford school or find childcare. But things changed for this family after a Street Child social worker found them, and put Isata on their family business scheme Troubled: Sierra Leone is one of the world's poorest countries, and is battling to recover after an Ebola outbreak killed thousands last year The smell is, in part, thanks to the burning plastic, emitting poisonous chemicals which have been shown to cause respiratory diseases and cancer - dangerous for adults, but surely 10 times worse for growing children. 'It is very smokey,' said Sia. 'It is not good for the child. Sometimes even as adults we can hardly bare to stay for an hour. 'But there are also the sharp objects. The children often don't have good shoes, and they step on broken bottles. Sometimes the plastic is burning on their feet. I saw a film where a woman was very poor and dreamed of becoming an air hostess. And she did it. Now I want to be an air hostess. I want to fly to London and Australia far away. Isatu, 13, who worked on the dump 'There are also issues around sexual abuse boys are hanging around the dump. It just goes on and on.' Zainab thinks she and her sister were sick at least once a month during the years they spent at the dump, years in which they weren't regular attenders at school. Isatu was also trapped working on the dump, but, at just 10, she was there alone. It was the beginning of the Ebola outbreak, and her father had just died. Isatu's mother knew she could not afford to keep her, and feed the younger children. 'Her mother asked me to take her,' explained Fatu, the young woman who took Isatu in. 'I told her I had nothing, but she insisted. She thought things would be better in the city.' Fatu was barely surviving as it was, living in a small, windowless two room shack, just a few moments from the dump. So, when Isatu arrived, it made sense that she would make her living here, working from 8am until 5pm every day, collecting pieces of plastic which could then be shipped up the coast to Gambia, where they are recycled and made into household items. 'We come here to collect plastic,' Isatu told MailOnline, pointing to the ground. 'Plastic like this piece here. Then we put it in a bag. And go to sell it in town. Then we eat.' Brighter future: Fatu was also struggling to support her family, and send the children to school - but her life changed after social workers found Isatu, the young girl she had taken in to help a friend despite having nothing, working on the Bomeh Horrific: Children like Isatu, 13, work alongside the adults, risking their health and attacks to earn less than 70p a day Little: Isatu ended up on the dump after her father died, and she was sent to live with family friend Isata - who didn't have enough money to care for her. She was just 10, and all alone when she first went picking for plastic and materials Isatu clung to a small group of friends, who stuck together for fear of the groups of older men who worked the dump, threatening them when they infringed too much on their own earnings from the dump. 'It was not really too good at the dump site,' Isatu she added, with the characteristic understatement of the Krio language. And so it could have gone on, for all of these girls, if they hadn't been noticed by social workers working with the charity Street Child. Now, instead of spending their days on the dump, the younger girls are all in school - thanks to the help their parents and carers got setting up new businesses, taking them away from the dump. It is a tried and tested method: more than 7,000 families were helped to set up a small business in 2015, with the vast majority now supporting their children through school. 'When we send a child to school, that is an income lost,' explained Sia. 'The families need something to replace that.' So Fatu and Isata were set up with a grant, allowing them to set up their own small businesses - as well as a little bit of training on things like 'not to sell umbrellas in the dry season', as well as how to save. Women like Fatu set up movable businesses, selling whatever is in season or what is popular that week - while Isata sells fried food around the neighbourhood. Both are making far more than they ever did on the dump: both are fiercely proud of what they have built so far. And for the next year until their businesses are properly established their children will be supported in school by Street Child. After that, it is hoped they will be able to support them themselves, like so many before them. Isatu, she has her sights set on a future as far away from the dump in Sierra Leone as she could possibly get. 'I saw a film where a woman was very poor and dreamed of becoming an air hostess,' she told MailOnline. 'And she did it. 'Now I want to be an air hostess. I want to fly to London and Australia far away.' The sisters beam with pride as they show off their uniforms, listing their favourite subjects. But then they are asked about the children they still know, working on the dump. A list of names follows: Aminata, Aisha, Ramatu. All girls with little or no access to education. Kadi, whose family live in the shadows of this horrendous place, their home looking out at the burning pile, the small stream which runs along behind teeming with plastic, food and rats, is also being helped by Street Child - and is hoping to soon be back in education or training, one of 500 pregnant teens the charity hopes to help, thanks to the new appeal. Future: Isatu is now back in school, as are the two young sisters (pictured), who are thrilled to be learning once more. But they speak sadly of the children they left behind who have not had their good fortune Ambitious: Street Child want to help another 20,000 young people like the sisters get back to school through its new Girls Speak Out appeal, which could help 5,000 families start up their own business to break the cycle of poverty And Street Child is hoping to help many more families like this, with its new Girls Speak Out appeal, which aims to raise 1million. 'The Bomes in Freetown are a brutal place for anyone to try to exist,' said Tom Dannatt, Street Child's chief executive. 'But, for many families, they are the only potential income source they know, however grim. As a result, girls who may otherwise be able to gain an education that will help lift their own family from poverty are left scavenging to help make ends meet. 'If we can raise enough money through this Girls Speak Out appeal, we will be able to offer 5,000 families the chance to benefit from a grant and small business training that will help them gain a secure income and, vitally, ensure that their daughters can benefit from a sustainable education. 'Every year a girl gets in school dramatically changes their life prospects - each year adds up to 25 per cent to expected lifetime earnings. 'It is Street Child's hope that MailOnline readers will really get behind this appeal and help us ensure that thousands of girls' families are not forced to rely on child labour to survive. And with the government doubling every pound we raise through this appeal, together, we have the chance to achieve twice as much.' Motorcycle gunmen have shot dead seven policemen guarding a polio vaccination team in Pakistan. A team of eight carried out the killings in two waves of attacks in the Orangi Town area of Karachi in the south of the country. The brazen attack in Pakistan's economic hub left three officers lying dead in the street before a further four were gunned down in a police mobile van a few streets away. Pakistani relatives mourn the death of policemen killed in an attack by gunmen, outside a hospital in Karachi Abdul Kareem, an official in Abbasi Shaheed Hospital where the bodies were taken, also confirmed the casualties. The polio workers, who were unharmed in the attack, were on the third day of an immunisation drive. Provincial home minister Sohail Anwar Siyal told the private Dunya TV channel: 'The policemen sacrificed their lives to protect the polio workers.' A faction of the Pakistani Taliban, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar late Wednesday claimed responsibility for the attack. 'We claim responsibility for this attack on police in Karachi, this was a part of ongoing attacks on police and law enforcement agencies,' said group spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan in a statement sent to AFP by email. Islamist outfits including the Pakistani Taliban say the polio vaccination drive is a front for espionage or a conspiracy to sterilise Muslims. Police and rangers later cordoned off the areas where their colleagues had been killed. Pakistani security personnel gather around a police van after an attack by gunmen on officers guarding a polio vaccination team in Karachi Pakistani security personnel on the streets of Karachi after gunmen shot dead seven policemen guarding a polio vaccination team The interior of the police van was heavily soaked with blood, with an officer's cap lying on the front seat. Speaking to the media, provincial police chief Allah Dino Khawaja announced a $50,000 reward for the arrest of the gunmen, as well as $20,000 compensation to each of the victims' families. Pakistan is one of only two countries in the world where polio, a crippling childhood disease, remains endemic. Attempts to eradicate it have been badly hit by militant attacks on immunisation teams that have claimed more than 100 lives since December 2012. In 2014 the number of polio cases recorded in Pakistan soared to 306, the highest in 14 years, before falling to 54 in 2015. The most recent attack came in January, when a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a polio vaccination centre in the southwestern city of Quetta, killing 15 people -- two civilians and 13 security officials. Authorities want to vaccinate 35 million children under the age of five, wiping out the disease by the end of 2016. In Karachi, a heaving metropolis of around 20 million, authorities have enlisted 2,500 female 'neighbourhood vaccinators' drawn from local communities to support the programme. Islamist opposition to all forms of innoculation grew after the CIA organised a fake vaccination drive to help track down Al-Qaeda's former leader Osama Bin Laden in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad. The terror chief was killed during a US special forces raid in 2011. What is your preferred mode of transport? Space rocket, speed-walking, limousine or teleportation? This is one of the bizarre questions the Government is asking unemployed people to help them find a job. Jobseekers are also asked whether they would like to be a kangaroo, a dolphin or a beaver; which of Mother Teresa, Stephen Hawking or Alan Titchmarsh they would like to have a coffee with and which cartoon characters they like the most. After answering seven multiple-choice questions, the quiz tells you which profession you are best suited to. Bizarrely, the Department for Work and Pensions quiz asks unemployed people what would be their preferred mode of transport The quiz asks unemployed people which cartoon character they are most like, giving four options: Inspector Gadget, Marge Simpson, Road Runner or Elsa from Frozen So if you want to have a coffee with Stephen Hawking, wish you were a kangaroo, your favourite mode of transport is by space rocket, your ideal holiday is 'kicking back on a beach in Thailand', your favourite film is Grease, the cartoon character you are most like is Marge Simpson and you prefer listening to Dr. Dre over Blur, you would apparently make a very good 'concierge'. 'You know what keeps people happy. Maybe take a look at the hospitality industry,' the quiz result tells you if you selected these options. Other results recommended going into acupuncture or a window dresser. Labour slammed the quiz as a 'complete and utter waste of money' but the Department for Work and Pensions said it only took a member of staff a couple of hours to create. The DWP pointed to the latest labour market figures yesterday that showed the employment rate remains at a record high of 31.4 million in work. Jobseekers are also asked whether they would like to be a kangaroo, a dolphin, a bee or a beaver in their search for a job Unempoyed people are asked which of Tracey Emin, Mother Teresa, Stephen Hawking or Alan Titchmarsh they would like to have a coffee with If you want to have a coffee with Stephen Hawking, wish you were a kangaroo, your favourite mode of transport is by space rocket, your ideal holiday is a beach in Thailand, your favourite film is Grease, the cartoon character you are most like is Marge Simpson and you prefer listening to Dr. Dre, you would apparently make a very good 'concierge'. Other results recommended going into acupuncture or window dresser Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Owen Smith told MailOnline: 'When the DWP is cutting support for low paid working families, what on earth are they doing wasting cash on pointless gimmicks like this? 'Just yesterday new statistics show unemployment rising, so Tory ministers at the department should worry less about what people's favourite animal or films are and concentrate instead getting people in to jobs.' A DWP spokesman said: 'We created a short quiz to communicate the latest employment figures to a wider audience. There were no costs because we developed the quiz in house using a free online platform.' Yesterday's Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures showed a slight rise in unemployment - the first rise in nearly a year, with the jobless total jumping 21,000 between December and February to 1.7 million. It is the first rise since last summer. The number of people claiming unemployment-related benefits increased by 6,700 in March to 732,100, the first monthly rise since last August. The quiz for jobseekers asks them what their ideal holiday would be. Labour slammed the decision as a 'complete and utter waste of money' The quiz asks respondents whether they like Edward Scissorhands, Grease, The Shining or the English Patient And it asks whether they like Florence & the Machine, Dixie Chicks, Blur or Dr. Dre, before giving a result Employment increased by 20,000 in the latest quarter to 31.4 million, the smallest rise for almost a year. New Work and Pensions Secretary Stephen Crabb suggested fears over Britain's membership of the EU were to blame for the rise in unemployment. He said uncertainty among companies and investors was having an 'impact' as he responded to the latest figures. Mr Crabb said: 'We remain in a position of strength, with a record employment rate, wages continuing to grow steadily and three-quarters of a million vacancies available in the labour market. But he also warned that the 'question mark' over the UK's future relationship with the single market could have affected yesterday's figures. 'Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, has also said that the question mark hanging over Britain's relationship with the European single market is having a real-terms impact on the British economy and impacting on sterling exchange rates, impacting on investment decisions,' he told the BBC. Unemployment has risen for the first time in nearly a year, according to official figures that were released yesterday 'There will be companies right now yesterday who have been looking at major investments into the UK who are hanging back and considering whether that's the right thing to do. So of course that will have an impact. 'Now, I'm not saying that the increase of 21,000 in unemployment is as a direct result of that but it's an example of the kind of really gritty questions that those people who say Britain should leave the single market need to respond to and explain why their vision of coming out of the single market actually makes the picture better and enhances job opportunities for British workers.' But Tory backbencher Stewart Jackson told MailOnline: 'Stephen Crabb is in danger of losing credibility over these silly claims. 'There is no academic or empirical evidence to substantiate these foolish assertions. 'He would be better off focusing on the big issues facing him in the Department for Work and Pensions.' ONS statistician Nick Palmer said: 'It's too soon to be certain but, with unemployment up for the first time since mid-2015, and employment seeing its slowest rise since that period, it's possible that recent improvements in the labour market may be easing off.' The figures showed that 14.6 million women in work, down by 40,000 on the previous three months and the first fall since the autumn of 2012. The quarterly reduction in women's employment was the biggest for five years. In contrast, male employment was almost 16.8 million, the highest since records began in 1971. Average earnings increased by 1.8% in the year to February, 0.3% down on the previous month, mainly due to lower bonuses in the financial sector. There were 8.8 million people classed as economically inactive, including those on long- term sick leave, looking after a relative or who have given up looking for work - 121,000 fewer than a year ago and the lowest since mid-2003. The inactivity rate of 21.7% was the joint lowest on record. The UK's unemployment rate is now 5.1%, down by 0.5% on a year ago and the lowest since 2005. Other data from the ONS showed that the number of self-employed workers increased by 120,000 to a near record 4.6 million, while people on government training and employment programmes fell by 9,000 to 102,000. The Supreme Court is expressing doubts about laws in at least a dozen states that make it a crime for people suspected of drunken driving to refuse to take alcohol tests. The justices heard arguments Wednesday in three cases challenging North Dakota and Minnesota laws that criminalize a refusal to test for alcohol in a driver's blood, breath or urine if police have not first obtained a search warrant. Drivers prosecuted under those laws claim they violate the Constitution's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. State supreme courts in Minnesota and North Dakota upheld the laws. The justices pressed lawyers representing the states on why they can't simply require police to get a warrant every time police want a driver to take an alcohol test. Justice Stephen Breyer pointed to statistics showing that it takes an average of only five minutes to get a warrant over the phone in Wyoming and 15 minutes to get one in Montana. Scroll down for video The justices heard arguments in three cases challenging North Dakota and Minnesota laws that criminalize a refusal to test for alcohol in a driver's blood, breath or urine if police have not first obtained a search warrant Drivers prosecuted under those laws claim they violate the Constitution's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. State supreme courts in Minnesota and North Dakota upheld the laws (file photo above) Thomas McCarthy, the lawyer representing North Dakota, said the state 'strikes a bargain' with drivers by making consent to alcohol tests a condition for the privilege of driving on state roads. But Justice Anthony Kennedy said the states are asking for 'an extraordinary exception' by making it a crime for people to assert their constitutional rights. He expressed frustration when McCarthy refused to answer repeated questions about why expedited warrants wouldn't serve the state just as well. Kathryn Keena, a county prosecutor representing Minnesota, suggested some rural areas may have only one judge on call, making it too burdensome to seek a warrant every time. She said even if a warrant were procured, a driver could still refuse to take the test and face lesser charges for obstruction of a warrant than for violating drunken driving test laws. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the state could simply change the law to make penalties more severe for obstruction. Several justices seemed to be searching for a middle ground. Some suggested to Charles Rothfeld the lawyer representing challengers to the laws that requiring a breath test without a warrant might be allowed because it's far less invasive than a blood test. Justice Elena Kagan called the breath test 'about as uninvasive as a search can possibly be' and suggested it could be part of a permissible search during an arrest. Rothfeld insisted that collecting breath was just as intrusive as collecting blood. The Obama administration is supporting the states. Deputy Solicitor General Ian Gershengorn told the justices they should not assume warrants 'are available 24/7.' 'That is not the case in the real world,' Gershengorn said. He said it may be the case for terrorist attacks, but not for routine drunken driving cases. In the Minnesota case, William Bernard was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving and taken into custody and refused to take a chemical test at the police station after he was arrested. A divided Minnesota Supreme Court ruled the law was valid and that officers could have ordered a breath test without a warrant as a search conducted while performing a valid arrest. Under the Minnesota law, a first-degree count of refusal to take a breath test carries a mandatory minimum sentence of three years in prison. Courtesy FOX 23 Other states that criminalize a driver's refusal to take an alcohol blood test include Alaska, Florida, Hawaii, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia In North Dakota, refusal to take an alcohol test carries the same criminal penalties as driving under the influence. The state's highest court upheld the law against a challenge from Danny Birchfield, who was arrested after he drove his car into a ditch and failed a field sobriety test. He refused to take more tests and was convicted under the state's refusal law, which counts as a misdemeanor for a first offense. A second case from North Dakota involves Steve Beylund, a driver who was stopped on suspicion of drunken driving and consented to a chemical alcohol test. State courts declined to suppress the evidence from that test. The bodies of four people killed when a small airplane crashed on Wednesday and burst into flames have been recovered from a heavily wooded area north of Anchorage, officials said. The airplane crashed around 9am shortly after takeoff from Birchwood Airport, a small plane facility about 20 miles north of downtown Anchorage. The post-crash fire 'takes away a lot of our evidence,' Shaun Williams, a National Transportation Safety Board investigator, said at a news conference. Scroll down for video The bodies of four people killed when a small airplane crashed on Wednesday (scene pictured above) and burst into flames have been recovered from a heavily wooded area north of Anchorage, officials said Among those killed were the pilot, George Kobelnyk, 64, (picutred right in a Facebook photo on Monday) and co-pilot, Christian Bohrer, 20, (lef) Anchorage police said in a statement Also killed were the two passengers, Sarah Glaves, 36, and Kyle Braun, 27 (pictured). Their hometowns were not immediately available 'There was quite a bit of fire damage.' Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Allen Kenitzer said the Cessna 172 aircraft went down under unknown circumstances. Among those killed were the pilot, George Kobelnyk, 64, and co-pilot, Christian Bohrer, 20, Anchorage police said in a statement. Police initially said Kobelnyk was 54 years old. Also killed were the two passengers, Sarah Glaves, 36, and Kyle Braun, 27. Their hometowns were not immediately available. The crash initially sparked concerns about a possible wildfire, but Anchorage Fire Chief Denis LeBlanc said the blaze was contained to the location. Wreckage from the crash shown from an aerial view of the scene. Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Allen Kenitzer said the Cessna 172 aircraft went down under unknown circumstances The post-crash fire 'takes away a lot of our evidence,' Shaun Williams (pictured), a National Transportation Safety Board investigator, said at a news conference Police got a call from a citizen who said they thought they heard a plane crashing near a road. 'A few moments later, they observed smoke,' Anchorage police spokeswoman Jennifer Castro said. The plane's destination was not immediately known. The NTSB and the Federal Aviation Administration are investigating the incident. Kobelnyk was a former investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and a retired Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) manager, according to KTUU. His LinkedIn account indicates he worked for the FAA for 14 years and investigated 750 aviation accidents over more than a decade while with the NTSB. 'He was a really good pilot and he even gave one of my students a check ride the other day and he had a zest for life, lets put it that way,' Rick Ruess, a friend of Kobelnyk's and an instructor with Arctic Flyers told KTUU. 'I just couldn't believe it was him.' The aircraft was registered to Kobelnyk and his co-pilot Bohrer, had a commercial pilot certificate issued in May 2015 as well as a flight instructor certificate that was issued in September 2015, according to the Alaska Dispatch News. Kobelnyk's wife, Susan, described her husband as a 'very experienced aviator' who flew daily, according to the Alaska Dispatch News. 'Otherwise, he's just a guy who loved his family,' she said. Bohrer, who lived in Chugiak, hraduated from Chugiak High School and traveled to Juneau with his 4-H Club where Representative Bill Stoltze got to know him, the Alaska Dispatch News reported. Stoltze remembered Bohrer as thoughtful and smart. Investigators examine the scene of the crash on Wednesday. The airplane crashed around 9am shortly after takeoff from Birchwood Airport, a small plane facility about 20 miles north of downtown Anchorage Investigators pictured at the scene. The plane's destination was not immediately known and the NTSB and the Federal Aviation Administration are investigating 'One of the good things about this job is getting to work with young people and Christian Bohrer was just one of the most outstanding young people I ever got to encounter,' he said. Stoltze added: 'He's somebody (who) would have accomplished a lot of good things. 'He was just one of those all-American good kids. His parents were proud of him.' While it was not clear why the passengers were onboard the plane that day, a family friend of Braun told the Alaska Dispatch News that he might have been flying for work. Braun, who grew up in Butte, graduated from Palmer High School and worked as a drafter, taking Wednesday flight's for his job, according to Kelli Hyden. She said he had been caring for his mother since his father died about a year ago. The New York 'Ninja Burglar' - also a convicted rapist - has confessed to committing more than 100 burglaries in the last decade. Robert Costanzo, 46, pleaded not guilty Wednesday to three counts of felony burglary. But Staten Island District Attorney Michael McMahon says Costanzo will be back in court Thursday and is prepared to plead guilty. The district attorney says the statute of limitations expired on the other burglaries. Scroll down for video New York 'Ninja Burglar' Robert Costanzo (right and left) has confessed to committing more than 100 burglaries in the last decade Costanzo, 46, pleaded not guilty Wednesday to three counts of felony burglary (pictured) but is expected to plead guilty in court tomorrow Costanzo is accused of committing burglaries in upstate New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Prosecutors say Costanzo mainly broke into occupied homes and tended to targeted wealthy neighborhoods on Staten Island, and made off with a total of $4 million in stolen property, He gained notoriety after a robbery in Dongan Hills back in 2007, where the intruder was wielding nunchucks and dressed as a ninja, was connected to him. Prosecutors said Constanzo always struck at night, often wore all black clothing, covered his face and often used a ladder to climb through a second- or third-floor window or terrace. Staten Island District Attorney Michael McMahon told New York Daily News: 'There's no question that when he plied his craft, if you will, he was very good at it and did not leave a trace behind.' Constanzo often used a ladder (pictured on surveillance) to climb through a second- or third-floor window or terrace. Prosecutors said Constanzo always struck at night, often wore all black clothing and covered his face (pictured - items of his clothing seized by police) The daring burglar would also return to the home for a second time if he spotted a safe and also spent time 'observing' people at home, following the break-in, according the site. McMahon told the Daily News authorities were able to break the case in October 2014 when a meeting of law enforcement officials from New York, New Jersey and Staten Island discovered they were investigating similar burglary patterns. Up until his arrest, the serial burglar had been living what appeared to be a 'normal life' and was living with a woman and had had a child within the last few years. If convicted, he faces up to 15 years in prison. The 46-year-old is also a registered sex offender, who raped a woman in New York on Sept. 29, 1989 and also admitted to raping four women in Florida in the 1990s. Staten Islanders were relieved that the burglar had been caught after his 10-year spree, with one resident, Anna Brunk, telling NBC News: 'Now we can sleep a little better at night.' Costanzo's attorney hasn't responded to a request for comment. An elite Melbourne girls school caught up in a drug scandal at its Year 12 formal is now working with police over rumours that students were also planning to spike drinks at the after party. Three students at Melbourne Girls Grammar were found with marijuana, ecstasy pills and alcohol at the formal on Friday night. One of the girls has been expelled and the other two have been suspended. A director of the security firm that monitored the after party reported the drink-spiking fears to police, who are now investigating, the Herald Sun reports. One student has been expelled and two have been suspended from Melbourne Girls Grammar The trio were found with drugs at their Year 12 formal on Friday night (file photo) The former police officer, Naomi Oakley, said: 'Parents said to me they were phoned by the school on Friday morning after information came to light about multiple students planning to spike drinks with drugs. Thats the rumour. Principal of the elite girls school Catherine Mission confirmed discovery of the drugs and expulsion 'This is very worrying from a criminal point of view. 'I am concerned something tragic could happen if there are young people that potentially think this is funny.' Catherine Mission, the principal of the prestigious school, has confirmed the 'discovery of illicit substances' in a statement. 'The School has zero tolerance for illicit substances and as soon as security staff contracted by the venue uncovered the substances, they removed them, isolated the people involved and immediately advised the senior school staff in attendance,' she said. Ms Mission said the parents of those involved were immediately notified and 'no further incidents occurred' at the The Park reception centre in Albert Park, where the formal was held. 'As a result of the events at the formal, the School acted swiftly, and following an immediate School investigation, one student's enrolment has been terminated and two students have been suspended with additional special conditions imposed upon them on their return to the School. 'The School will be actively supporting these girls once they are back at school,' Ms Mission said. The students had been planning to spike students' drinks at the after party, according to reports (stock image) According to reports one girl was found with marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol, while another had 'a number' of pills on her. On Wednesday Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton told ABC radio while the school were not obliged to report the incident to authorities, police would offer assistance if asked to. 'We have diversion programs for low-level drug possession which are non-conviction-based referrals, so there's support and help than can be given to people,' he said. 'If there's trafficking, (we would be) more than interested because that is where we will make criminal charges so our local police will be in touch with the school, I'm sure.' Mr Ashton also said schools can sometimes be 'too quick' to suspend, and urged schools to support students. Melbourne Girls Grammar can cost over $32,000 in fees per year, and a number of shocked parents said they felt sorry for the family of the expelled student. 'They've paid for this wonderful education and now she's been booted out mid-year 12. They've spent an absolute fortune for nothing,' one parent told the Herald Sun. Advertisement The commuters do their best to ignore the mattresses and brightly-coloured tents set up underneath a station in northern Paris. Washing lines are hung between trees, and men sit chatting in groups as their clothes dry. It all looks peaceful enough during the day, but at night this grimy traffic island by the Stalingrad Metro stop is the scene of pitched battles between far-Right vigilantes and refugees. Some 500 asylum-seekers plotting their routes to Britain have taken part in fights using metal poles, planks of wood, broken bottles and stones. Scroll down for video Grimy: Hundreds of migrants have set up camp next to Stalingrad metro station in Paris, where some of those who were living in Calais have chosen to make their home following the destruction of vast swathes of 'The Jungle' earlier this year 'Better life': Sudanese student Adan is one of those. Despite spending five months in a squalid refugee camp in Calais trying and failing to reach the UK, he believes his dream of studying in the UK is achievable Violence: But this new makeshift camp is no peaceful place, and has become the scene of almost nightly clashes between migrants and far-Right vigilantes. Last week, four migrants were injured in a riot which was captured on camera Last week a particularly vicious clash was caught on video, with riot police forced to use tear gas and baton charges to restore order. The police were pelted with debris when they arrived at the station, in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. Many of those caught up in the trouble suffered serious injuries and 'four migrants were taken to hospital', said an investigating source. Among them was 20-year-old Sudanese student Adan, who has set up a makeshift bed next to the Metro, which is named after the Second World War Battle of Stalingrad, in Russia. There are violent people who want to punish us for trying to make our lives better, but we have to keep struggling, said Adan, who hid his face, and asked for his surname to be kept a secret as he spoke to MailOnline. I spent five months in Calais trying to get across to England, but it is getting harder all the time. This is why so many of us are basing ourselves in Paris. From here we can get on trains to other ports like Cherbourg, or else get lifts in lorries or cars heading towards England. My dream is to get finish my studies in London or Birmingham, and then to get a job, said Adan, who is single. Camp: MailOnline visited the makeshift camp close to next to Stalingrad metro station in Paris, which has become home to hundreds Home: A group of men sit on cardboard boxes and a dirty mattress close the metro station in France's capital. Many told MailOnline they preferred Paris to Calais, and believed there were more opportunities to reach Britain from the capital city than from the port town Waiting: The camp is mainly made up of men, some of whom have tried to board lorries, ferries and even the train to get to the UK Adan, who had previously been living in a camp in Calais, is one of thousands of migrants who have converged on the French capital as it slowly becomes the principal staging post to the UK. From here we can get on trains to other ports like Cherbourg, or else get lifts in lorries or cars heading towards England. Sudanese student Adan, 20 Like many of his fellow travellers, Adan claims to be from Darfur, the war-torn region of Sudan that has been in a state of humanitarian emergency for well over a decade. There is no hope for me in Darfur, but England will provide me with a chance of a better life, said Adan, who said he was exploring options concerning getting to Britain. These include taking a train or hitch-hiking to other Channel ports, such as Cherbourg or Dieppe, where he can stow away on a ferry to England or Ireland. Whatever I chose to do, Paris is a good place to wait and plan, said Adan, who was with a group of around six young men. There are plenty of places to sleep and find food in a big city, and we can keep away from the police, and others who are trying to stop us. Better security in Calais and the razing of shantytowns has made the town a far less attractive place for migrants in recent weeks. In January, French authorities began the demolition part of the notorious Jungle camp in Calais, which was home to around 6,000 people. Thousands are still expected to arrive in Calais over the summer, but high-speed trains from Paris mean they can get there in less than two hours. Squalid: The camp was evacuated by the authorities last month because of the threat it posed to public health Location: High-speed trains from Paris mean migrants can get to Calais in less than two hours. They can also get trains to other ports Handouts: Charities including the United Migrants group bring food and other essential supplies most days, while police stand by Losing battle: Police say officially they are dismantling camps, but the reality is that there is little they can do to prevent them appearing We will still use Calais as our final entry point, but living rough is easier in Paris, said Mohamed, a 22-year-old who was travelling with Adan and two other young men. We can travel backwards and forwards from Paris to Calais, while working out our options for the future. My dream is to start a new life in Birmingham, and nothing will stop me doing that. The Stalingrad camp in Paris was officially evacuated by the authorities last month because of the threat it posed to public health. But those living there - who are mainly men - returned within a few days, and now there are hundreds sleeping on discarded mattresses and in small tents at any one time. Charities including the United Migrants group bring food and other essential supplies most days, while police stand by. We are officially dismantling the camps like this all over Paris, but there is often very little we can do, said an officer at the scene. When the order is given to evacuate, we have to have a shelter to take the migrants to. If we dont, then we have to abandon the operation. Armed and dangerous: Scores armed themselves with planks of wood, metal bars and debris during clashes at the metro station last week Violence: The incident was caught on camera, showing the ferocious battle, which was only ended after police used tear gas (left) Many of the council shelters are well out of town, and far away from the stations which the migrants use all the time. Few want to claim asylum in France, and so try to avoid being processed by the local authorities. Like Adan and Mohamed they have made journeys of thousands of miles from Africa, the Middle East, and central Asia, and see no reason why they should stop before the UK. The child recovery agency at the centre of a botched attempt to grab Sally Faulkner's children off a street in Beirut on April 7 has blamed rivals for the failed operation. Former Australian soldier Adam Whittington, 40, who runs Child Abduction Recovery International (CARI), and tattoo artist Craig Michael, 36, remain in jail facing kidnapping charges. In a Facebook post the group alleges their plan only came undone because a competitor revealed 'confidential' details. 'It has come to our attention that one of our competitors has actively undermined this operation, by passing on confidential information,' it states. 'These malevolent actions have resulted in the detention of those involved.' Scroll down for videos Adam Whittington (left) and Craig Michael (pictured right after the recovery of his daughter in Poland in 2014) remain in a Beirut jail facing kidnapping charges after allegedly leading the failed child recovery operation for Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner on April 7 The moment Sally Faulkner (right) and 60 Minutes reporter Tara Brown (left) walked free from Lebanon's Baabda Prison after Ali Elamine dropped 'personal charges' of kidnapping against them 60 Minutes reporter Tara Brown and Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner (front) pictured walking free from jail in Beirut on Wednesday and to a waiting minivan Tara Brown looks inside the van to find her 60 Minutes colleagues Stephen Rice, Ben Williamson and David Ballment Cameraman Ben Williamson pictured inside a van (left) after his release from jail in Beirut and Stephen Rice (right) hugs Sally Faulkner Cameraman Ben Williamson embraces Sally Faulkner after her release from Baabda Prison in Beirut The 60 Minutes crew including Tara Brown pictured inside the van with Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner Tara Brown along with Sally Faulkner and the 60 Minutes crew inside the mini-van after their release from jail The father at the centre of 60 Minutes child abduction case, Ali Elamine (pictured), revealed that he dropped the charges because he did not want his children to think he left their mother in jail. There are claims he was paid compensation of up to $1 million Ali Elamine, 32, agreed a deal on Wednesday for the release of his estranged wife Sally Faulkner from a Lebanese prison after the Brisbane mother agreed to give him full custody of their two children. She walked free along with the 60 Minutes TV crew and reporter Tara Brown two weeks after the failed bid to kidnap her children from her ex-husband's family on a street in Beirut on April 7. But the deal did not extend to Mr Whittington and Mr Michael and the CARI group believes that's the fault of rival groups. 'As a consequence, there are now many more children separated from their parents, as all those incarcerated have children and families,' the CARI statement continued. 'All parties are aware of this individuals self-serving actions, which are nothing short of despicable and were designed purely to bring down one of the only trustworthy, honest and reliable organisations operating in this difficult area.' But Col Chapman from one rival group, Child Recovery Australia, said the CARI team had only themselves to blame for being caught. 'They were followed from day one, they tipped everyone off, they booked the boat in their own name, they came in as a group - it is farcical in the extreme to blame anyone else,' he said. 'This is just a tactic of blame everyone else, a sign of desperation instead of taking it on the chin and saying "we stuffed up". Adam Whittington (left) and Craig Michael (right) remain in custody in Beirut after a failed attempt to recover Sally Faulkner's two children on April 7. The CARI group insists a rival revealed their plan 60 Minutes reporter Tara Brown is pictured being forced into a police car in handcuffs on Monday as she was taken back to a Lebanese jail after reappearing in court - she is now on her way home to Australia Images after Tara Brown's court appearance on Monday appeared to show a Lebanese policeman forcing her into a car. The 60 Minutes TV crew has since been released Tara Brown and her 60 Minutes colleagues along with Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner were arrested on April 7 after the botcher recovery operation on a Beirut street - they spent almost two weeks in prison CARI has also previously issued warnings against two other rival organisations on its website and according to Fairfax Media at least one British group is taking legal action. Mr Chapman alleged that 60 Minutes had originally approached him to carry out the mission, before they chose to go ahead with the CARI group. He says he advised Sally Faulkner and Channel Nine not to go ahead with the plan. '(CARI) turned on Channel 9 too and the authorities have come out and said "we knew who you were and where you were from day one", Ali [Elamine] was tipped off when they landed and he had access to her [Sally Faulkner] emails. 'He got a heads up as soon as she [ex-wife Sally Faulkner] arrived, she arrived with company not on her own.' CARI also denies it has faked successful cases. 'All our cases are genuine. Our credentials are bona fide,' the post claims. 'We do not use violence or weapons. We are supported by the many parents we have assisted.' Mr Chapman said the Beirut operation was doomed from the outset. 'They may have cleverly booked his [Mr Elamine's] time at 7 in the morning keeping him busy, but it was just a reverse sting,' he added. Mr Elamine admitted his children were behind his decision to drop charges against his ex-wife Sally Faulkner and the 60 Minutes TV crew - it has also been reported that the surf shop owner was paid up to $1 million in compensation by Channel Nine 'I think Ali actually let the abduction go ahead because it was a sting in reverse - the authorities, they just ring the area.' It has been reported that Mr Elamine, the father at the centre of 60 Minutes child abduction case, cut off communications with Ms Faulkner after discovering emails on the family iPad exposing her plans. It's believed that local police were able to track down the 60 Minutes crew, including veteran reporter Tara Brown, after Ms Faulkner sent Mr Elamine a message confirming that the children were safe with her. The children were taken to a safe house south of Beirut but Ms Faulkner and the recovery team were soon arrested along with the 60 Minutes crew who were filming the operation. Mr Elamine revealed that he dropped the charges because he did not want his children to think he left their mother in jail. He said the children, Lahela, 5 and Noah, 3, would be living with him in Lebanon - but he insisted that his ex-wife would have access. Mr Elamine also revealed that he dropped that charges against the 60 Minutes crew because he felt they were not personally responsible for the kidnapping at the southern Beirut bus stop. 'They were just doing their job,' Mr Elamine said. The Australian reported that Nine bought their freedom with a multi-million dollar payout. Mr Elamine is thought to have received a payout in the 'low single-digit millions' - but he insisted that he 'did not sign anything, did not get anything'. He is still pressing charges against Mr Whittington, who was allegedly in charge of the operation, as well as Craig Michael and the two Lebanese people involved. Tara Brown (right) and Sally Faulkner (obscured in front) led away in handcuffs during their two-week ordeal in Lebanon. They were released from jail on Wednesday after almost two weeks in custody Teenagers in a deprived borough will soon have nowhere local to do A-levels because the areas only sixth form is being axed. This is because so few pupils are doing the exams the prerequisite for university courses and many of the best jobs that it is no longer financially viable. Those who would have gone to Halewood Academy in Knowsley, Merseyside, will have to travel to neighbouring areas. Teenagers in a deprived borough will soon have nowhere local to do A-levels because the areas only sixth form, at Halewood Academy (pictured), is being axed The Labour-run local authority said that since the school is an academy, which answers directly to central government, it cannot intervene. Knowsley, which has around 150,000 residents, is the worst-performing area in the country for educational attainment. All its secondary schools are rated substandard by Ofsted, and only 37 per cent of pupils got five or more good GCSEs last year 19.7 percentage points below the national average. Critics said the closure of the sixth form would make it even harder for youngsters in the area to succeed in life. It is not right that those pupils who want to continue their education beyond 16 should have to leave the borough, said the areas Labour MP Maria Eagle. While responsibility for schools has been removed from Knowsley council, the council must stand up against these proposals. I have spoken to many parents who are rightly angry and frustrated. ITS BEST AND BRIGHTEST Knowsley has produced its fair share of bright and influential figures: Alan Bleasdale, 70, the playwright who wrote the 1980s TV series Boys From The Blackstuff, was born in the area and was a teacher at Halewood Comprehensive, now Halewood Academy, in 1974 and 1975. Phil Redmond, 66, the creator of Brookside and Hollyoaks, was brought up in Huyton in the borough. Dramatist Willy Russell, 68, the writer of Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine, was born in Whiston, also part of Knowsley. Actor Sir Rex Harrison, who began his stage career in 1924 and went on to win a best-acting Oscar in the 1964 film My Fair Lady, was born in Huyton. Sir Thomas Beecham, who founded the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1932, grew up in Huyton. Advertisement Last month the governors at Halewood Academy said the sixth form should be closed next year because of funding cuts that made it financially unsustainable to continue with so few students. There are just 83 across the two year groups of the sixth form. The school will make a final decision this week after a consultation ended at the weekend. A statement on the school website said governors proposed to stop entrants to the lower sixth from September and devise suitable options and alternatives for those entering the upper sixth to complete their education. Principal Gary Evans said the academy had been working with the council to ensure individual pupils were catered for. Local resident Colin Ascott said: That is scary. These privately-run academies can do whatever they want and nobody can do anything. Knowsley has some of the lowest university entry rates in England, and parents fear the closure of the sixth form could block the ambitions of their children. Vanessa Pointon, a parent at the school, told the BBC: This is letting down the children of this community. There are people who want to go to university, lots of kids who want to do well. Sir Peter Lampl, chairman of the Sutton Trust, which campaigns for social mobility, said: It is important that young people have the opportunity to access a good choice of A-levels wherever they live. Knowsley council said: Whilst we do work with all our local academies to help them improve education standards, as an academy the school is ultimately accountable to the regional school commissioner, and not the local council. The Department for Education said that if the school wanted to go ahead with the plan, it must make the case to the Education Funding Agency and the regional school commissioner that post-16 provision in the area would not be adversely affected by the closure before it can be given permission to close it. The news comes after Sir Michael Wilshaw, the head of Ofsted, criticised politicians in key northern cities for failing to fire on all cylinders in education. A poll of residents in Sydney's eastern suburbs has overwhelmingly found they want their municipality named 'Beachy McBeachface'. Results of The Sydney Morning Herald poll, launched ahead of a merger of three councils in the area, found 61 per cent of residents voted for the strange name, reports Mashable. Residents were clearly inspired by a similar poll in Britain, which asked residents to suggest a new name for a polar research ship. The name which received the most votes was Boaty McBoatface - with 124,109 votes, or three times the closest contender Since the three councils in Sydney's east are joining together, Waverley and Randwick Councils also started running a competition to decide what would be the best name for it. Scroll down for video The SMH poll for what the new council should be named shows that Beachy McBeachface Council is the clear winner by getting 61 per cent of the vote Boaty McBoatface officially topped a poll over the name for a new polar research ship (artist's impression pictured) launched by the Natural Environment Research Council After the poll closed on Wednesday, Beachy McBeachface claimed a massive 61 per cent of the vote, with Eastern Beaches Council coming in a long way back in second place on 20 per cent and Ocean Wave Council third on six per cent. TOP COUNCIL NAME SUGGESTIONS 1. Beachy McBeachface 61 per cent 2. Eastern Beaches Council 20 per cent 3. Ocean Wave Council six per cent 4. Amaroo Council three per cent 5. Guruwin Council two per cent Advertisement The name follows swiftly on the heels of a poll in Britain that found a polar research ship's most popular name was Boaty McBoatface. It was put forward by former BBC radio presenter James Hand, who has since apologised and said the storm it created had 'legs of its own'. 'It's bloody cold here' came in fourth place, ahead of 'David Attenborough'. Jo Johnson, the British government's science minister, will have the final say on the name for the ship though. The popular Beachy McBeachface new council name is also not guaranteed to be used either as a disclaimer on the poll makes clear. These polls are not scientific and reflect the opinion only of visitors who have chosen to participate, the disclaimer reads. The wacky name for the council also comes at a sensitive time for the area as an angry dispute brews among the community in Bondi about a controversial new development to renovate the Bondi Pavilion. Beachy McBeachface easily topped a poll for the name of three councils in Sydney's east that are joining together, which includes Bondi beach above Bondi beach is known throughout the world, but many would like to see it as part of Beachy McBeachface council The wacky name for the council comes at a sensitive time for the area as an angry dispute brews among the community in Bondi about a controversial new development to renovate the Bondi Pavilion Waverley Council voted in favour of a $38 million redevelopment of the landmark building on Tuesday night (artist's impression of the new Bondi Pavilion) The current structure will be torn down and modern extensions will be put in their place (artist's impression of the new Bondi Pavilion) Waverley Council voted in favour of a $38 million redevelopment of the landmark building on Tuesday night. The current structure will be torn down and modern extensions will be put in their place, with the theatre within the original building moved, and cafes and eateries introduced. However, the new plans have annoyed many residents including actor Michael Caton, who has lived in the area for more than 30 years The theatre within the original building will be moved, and cafes and eateries introduced (artist's impression of the new Bondi Pavilion) Famous for his role as Darryl Kerrigan in 1997 film The Castle, Caton is in full support of locals fighting the plans. Caton said the pavilion was in need of being spruced up, but that the new plans were 'over-the-top'. Waverley Mayor Sally Betts has also came under fire over the plans, saying she has even received death threats at a community meeting recently over the new proposals. Actor Michael Caton (left, and as Darryl Kerrigan in 1997 film The Castle, right) said the pavilion was in need of being spruced up, but that the new plans were 'over-the-top' 'I don't know what to tell you... I'm praying for you guys,' she joked Actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus was 'dumbstruck' the mock slogan was used American actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus says it was 'alarming' to learn Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had adopted a slogan from her US comedy, Veep. Mr Turnbull was mocked earlier this year for using the phrase 'continuity and change' during an interview on ABC 7:30 - because Louis-Dreyfus' character, Selina Meyer, used almost the same slogan, 'continuity with change', during her fictional campaign for President of the United States. 'I don't think they stole it, I think they thought it was a good idea and that's actually much more alarming,' Louis-Dreyfus told the Sydney Morning Herald. Scroll down for video American actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus (left) says she was 'dumbstruck' to learn Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (right) had adopted a slogan from her US comedy, Veep 'When we wrote 'continuity with change' the intention behind it was to write something as empty and as moronic sounding as possible and that is what we came up with. So I don't know what to tell you. I'm praying for you guys over there.' Louis-Dreyfus also jokingly praised Mr Turnbull for 'making (the slogan) his own'. The popular actress made her comments while promoting the upcoming season of Veep, which premieres next week. It comes after Mr Turnbull and two members of his cabinets were taunted for using the satirical slogan. Louis-Dreyfus' character, Selina Meyer (pictured), used almost the same slogan, 'continuity with change', during her fictional campaign for President of the United States Mr Turnbull (pictured) was mocked earlier this year for using the phrase 'continuity and change' during an interview on ABC 7:30, as it is almost identical to the 'meaningless slogan' in Veeo 'I don't think they stole it, I think they thought it was a good idea and that's actually much more alarming,' Louis-Dreyfus said of Mr Turnbull using the satirical slogan (pictured) Mr Turnbull told ABC 7.30 that 'as you go from one Liberal prime minister to another, you have continuity and you have change', during an interview last month. He also told ABC radio that 'the bottom line is there is continuity and there is change'. Employment Minister Michaelia Cash and Finance Minster Mathias Cormann were also caught using the 'meaningless slogan'. Simon Blackwell, a producer on the Emmy award winning show, mocked the Prime Minister for lifting the line from Veep. 'In S4 of Veep we came up with the most meaningless election slogan we could think of. Now adopted by Australian PM,' Mr Blackwell wrote. 'I don't know what to tell you. I'm praying for you guys over there,' Louis-Dreyfus said after learning Mr Turnbull (pictured) had almost mimicked her character's catchphrase Louis-Dreyfus (right) also jokingly praised Mr Turnbull (left) for 'making (the slogan) his own' by using it during an interview on ABC 7:30 'When we wrote 'continuity with change' the intention behind it was to write something as empty and as moronic sounding as possible and that is what we came up with,' Louis-Dreyfus said Patients will be told to see pharmacists and therapists rather than GPs under major reforms for crisis-hit surgeries. NHS bosses also plan to recruit thousands of paramedics, science graduates and nurses to free up doctors to treat the most seriously ill. The proposals are part of a rescue package for surgeries struggling to cope with soaring levels of migration, the ageing population and an exodus of retiring GPs. Patients will be told to see pharmacists and therapists rather than GPs under major reforms for crisis-hit surgeries Other measures aimed at reducing the pressures on surgeries include: Patients urged to seek medical advice online rather than making an appointment; Receptionists trained to decide if patients really need to see a GP; 'Golden hellos' offered to trainee doctors and retired GPs to encourage them to work in unpopular areas; The recruitment of an extra 5,000 GPs including 500 from overseas by 2021. NHS chief executive Simon Stevens said the reforms would enable many more patients to get an appointment. But there are fears they may not get the right treatment if they are seen by someone who is not a fully-qualified doctor. Many now have to wait three or four weeks for a consultation or face queuing outside surgeries early in the morning to be seen that day. Mr Stevens said: 'The ultimate goal is to improve patients' access to GPs and primary care. This is the part of the system which is most under pressure but least visible. If general practice fails, the whole NHS fails. The proposals are part of a rescue package for surgeries struggling to cope with soaring levels of migration (file photo of pharmacy) 'Rather than ignore these real pressures, the NHS has at last begun openly acknowledging them. Now we need to act, and this plan sets out exactly how.' But Joyce Robins, of Patient Concern, said: 'Once again, the NHS is trying to get round problems on the cheap. When patients phone their GP they expect to see a doctor, not a less qualified substitute. If you want to see a pharmacist, you can do it yourself by going to the chemist. 'They are as helpful as they can be, but they are not doctors.' In total, the NHS hopes to recruit an extra 1,500 pharmacists to work in GP surgeries over the next five years to see patients with hayfever, colds and other minor ailments. Once again, the NHS is trying to get round problems on the cheap. When patients phone their GP they expect to see a doctor, not a less qualified substitute. Joyce Robins, of Patient Concern They will also undertake some appointments for the elderly who are on an array of medicines which may interact and cause side effects. Officials plan to hire 3,000 more mental health therapists to work in surgeries and treat patients with depression, stress and anxiety. They also want to recruit 1,000 physician associates science graduates with two years' medical training to see patients with minor illnesses. Receptionists will be sent on courses to teach them to decide whether patients need a GP appointment or can get by with seeing a pharmacist. They will be expected to undertake more form-filling and letter writing to free doctors up to treat patients. Surgeries will be urged to improve their websites to offer health advice and direct patients with minor ailments to pharmacists. The NHS also plans to recruit an extra 5,000 GPs by 2021 including 500 from overseas. Trainee doctors will be offered golden hellos of up to 20,000 to encourage them to work in remote, understaffed areas including the Lake District and Isle of Wight. In December 2014 the Daily Mail exposed how patients were lining up at 7am outside an oversubscribed surgery in Sunbury-on-Thames (pictured) Retired GPs will be given incentives to entice them back to understaffed surgeries, even if only part time. Annual funding for surgeries will increase by an extra 2.4billion by 2021 to a total of 12billion a year, from 9.6billion now. To reduce bureaucracy, surgeries rated 'good' or 'outstanding' by the Care Quality Commission will only be inspected every five years. Speaking on the BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Dr Coulthard, a London GP who recently turned part time, welcomed the measures as she says GPs are under increasingly unbearable pressures. The work load was unsustainable and the stress of seeing so many patients just made me fatigued. I didn't feel able to practice the quality of medicine I wanted to practice and it took the joy out of the job for me Dr Coulthard, a London-based GP Describing her own experience, she said: 'I was a full time partner and felt that the work load was unsustainable and the stress of seeing so many patients and talking to so many patients on a daily basis just made me fatigued and when I was fatigued I didn't feel able to practice the quality of medicine I wanted to practice and it took the joy out of the job for me. 'Medicine has always been a tough job. When i qualified as a GP 20 years ago there were demands on my time but they have steadily got worse and worse. She continued: 'We have an ageing population who have more complex healthcare needs and I think we have seen a transfer of care from hospitals to general practice and now we are very short of people to actually do the work. 'If I did not go part time I think I would have made myself very ill indeed. In December 2014 the Daily Mail exposed how patients were lining up at 7am outside an oversubscribed surgery in Sunbury-on-Thames, Surrey. And only last month a study in the Lancet by Oxford researchers warned that GP services in England were reaching 'saturation point'. But Jetstar is refusing to pay and is One of two major Australian airlines facing $750,000 in fines over misleading customers through 'drip pricing' is refusing to pay up. Last year the Federal Court found that Virgin Australia and Jetstar contravened consumer law by failing to mention an 'infuriating' online booking charge until the end of the transaction. This week Virgin agreed to pay a $200,000 fine over the deceptive fees, however Jetstar has refused their penalty of $550,000 recommended by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). Jestar is contesting a $550,000 fine over 'drip pricing' Virgin Australia provided a joint submission with the ACCC stating that an appropriate penalty would be $200,000. On Wednesday the Federal Court accepted this submission. 'Virgin Australia is committed to ensuring that its Booking and Service Fee is fair and simple for consumers to understand, whilst providing a fee-free payment option on the Virgin Australia website and mobile website,' a Virgin Australia spokeswoman said in a statement. 'We note that the Federal Court has accepted our joint submission with the ACCC and that this matter has now been concluded.' Jetstar has been asked to pay a higher penalty of $550,000 because they implemented drip pricing on the website and mobile site, compared to Virgin's fees just on its main site, The Advertiser reported. 'The Federal Courts ruling relates to the disclosure of the booking and service fee on our web and mobile sites more than two years ago,' a Jetstar spokesman told the Daily Mail Australia. 'We want customers to clearly understand all fees and charges associated with their booking and thats why weve made changes to make it clearer at every step of the booking process what charges may apply. Their case has been adjourned for consideration regarding the fine. Virgin Australia provided a joint submission with the ACCC stating that an appropriate penalty would be $200,000. On Wednesday the Federal Court accepted this submission WHAT IS DRIP PRICING? AN EXAMPLE OF THE EXTRA CHARGES YOU COULD PAY WHEN BOOKING ON A JETSTAR FLIGHT FROM SYDNEY TO BRISBANE ONLINE Initial fare cost Checked Baggage - 20 kilograms Add meal Choose your seat Front of plane Extra leg room Ticket Insurance Carbon offset charge Credit Charge or Paypal surcharge $119 $17 $10 $5.50 $12 $25 $12.95 $1.04 $8.50 Extras total $91.99 TOTAL COST $210.99 Advertisement Drip pricing is where an advertised price becomes unavoidably higher as the online transaction progresses with additions such as baggage fees and seat allocation costs. A look at Jetstar's online booking system revealed that through each step customers have some add-ons automatically selected for them, such as checked baggage. This means if a passenger wants to avoid these costs they are required to un-check the boxes. Other additions such as meals are optional. A fee of $5.50 applies if you want to choose your seat, there's a $12 cost if a passenger wants to sit near the front of the plane and customers can fork out $25 for extra leg room. Optional ticket insurance and carbon offset charges are also offered to customers during the last step of booking. There is an $8.50 surcharge if a passenger uses a credit card of Paypal to purchase their tickets. The only way to avoid this fee is to use a Jetstar credit card or their own payment system, Poli. In an example Jetstar flight from Sydney to Brisbane a customer could expect to pay almost double the initial fare. 'By offering just a seat and giving customers the choice to add the optional extras they want, it helps keep our fares as low as possible for everyone,' a Jetstar spokesman told Daily Mail Australia. Britain met the Nato target of spending two per cent of national income on defence because of 'creative accounting', senior politicians said last night. MPs suggested the Government had 'shifted the goalpost' when it came to calculating how much money is spent on protecting the nation. They added an extra 2.2billion to its total figure by including war pensions, peacekeeping missions and security elements for the first time, it was revealed. This pushed the spending to 2.08 per cent when it would have otherwise fallen below the target at just 1.97 per cent. Britain met the Nato target of spending two per cent of national income on defence because of 'creative accounting', MPs said (file photo of RAF Tornado GR4 warplanes from RAF Marham, Norfolk) Following pressure from defence chiefs and world leaders such as President Barack Obama, Chancellor George Osborne announced the UK would hit the target in last year's budget. Military chiefs applauded the decision and the Chief of the Defence Staff said it was a 'great day for our country'. But the report warned that while the 2 per cent figure was valuable as a 'political statement' of the UK's commitment to defence, it did not guarantee that the country would have the resources it needed to protect itself from the various threats to British and Nato security. The new figure included items such as more than 1 billion of pension payments, and funds from a Joint Security Fund on cyber and intelligence. It also includes some of the 1billion cross-departmental fund known as the Conflict Pool, which is used to support fragile and wartorn states rather than military operations. The report said: 'We note that the Nato minimum would not have been fulfilled if UK accounting practices had not been modified, albeit in ways permitted by Nato guidelines.' It said it was difficult to identify the new figures included in the 2015 breakdown of expenditure, compared with 2010. The report added: 'It has been argued that the Nato 2 per cent minimum has been achieved as much by moving the goalposts as by the introduction of new money. 'If the MoD is to disprove the assertion that its 2 per cent figure is substantially dependent on 'creative accounting' it must set out in detail the exact proportion of the 2 percent that constitutes 'new' money.' It said the Government's revised accounting strategy conformed to Nato's guidelines. But it added: 'It incorporates items such as more than 1billion in war pensions and MoD civilian pensions not previously included in the defence budget.' MPs suggested the Government had 'shifted the goalpost' when it came to calculating how much money is spent on protecting the nation 'We believe that this 'redefinition' of defence expenditure undermines, to some extent, the credibility of the Government's assertion that the 2 per cent figure represents a significant increase in defence expenditure.' The committee chairman Julian Lewis said: 'It's good news that we have managed to achieve the 2 per cent promise for defence spending but if the MoD has only achieved this by including things like war pensions or intelligence-gathering which previously came under other budgets, you wonder what effective, battle-winning spending increases have actually been made. 'The MoD have shed insufficient light on this confusion.' Shadow Defence Secretary Emily Thornberry accused the government of 'fiddling the books': She said: 'It's increasingly clear that the 2 per cent commitment is being delivered not through increases in front-line defence spending but by fiddling the books.' A MoD spokesman said the report confirmed that all UK spending on defence - including intelligence, cyber and war pensions - fell within the Nato guidelines. 'When defence spending will increase by 5 billion over this parliament, it is nonsense to suggest there is no new funding,' the spokesman said. Security giant G4S has been reprimanded by a judge after running up huge parking fines and trying to use them to cut its tax bill. The company criticised for botching its 2012 London Olympics contract tried to avoid 580,000 in corporation tax from December 2007 to December 2010. It claimed parking fines incurred when delivering large amounts of cash were a legitimate business expense, as it tried to keep staff safe by parking as near to the premises as possible, sometimes on pavements. G4S, the security company criticised for botching its 2012 London Olympics contract tried to avoid 580,000 in corporation tax from December 2007 to December 2010, a judge has ruled But a judge blocked the firm from claiming the fines as a business expense after a tax tribunal ruled in HMRCs favour. Judge Anne Scott rules that G4S staff consciously and deliberately decided to break parking restrictions for commercial gain. G4S had argued that the fines were a legitimate business expense as it tried to keep its staff and customers safe by parking as near to the premises as possible. It pointed out there are around 1000 attacks every year on security staff carrying cash and valuables. Around three quarters of these occur on the pavement when the van is leaving or arriving at its destination. The criminals - often carrying weapons including guns - use a wide range of techniques including ram raids, vehicle hijackings, snatch attacks and kidnapping. It claimed parking fines incurred when delivering large amounts of cash were a legitimate business expense, as it tried to keep staff safe by parking as near to the premises as possible Judge Anne Scott acknowledged this often happens in public places and can put the general public and customers employees at risk. But she backed HMRC, which has insisted that fines for breaking the law cannot be used to reduce a tax bill. Jim Harra, director general of business tax at HMRC said: Weve always said fines incurred for breaking the law are not tax deductible. The tribunal has now established a clear precedent for rejecting any future such claims. A G4S spokesman said: Transporting cash is inherently dangerous and our cash teams are regularly subject to criminal attacks. By parking closer to pickup destinations, we better protect our staff, customers and the public, but in so doing we regularly incur parking infringements. We find it outrageous that HMRC would suggest we are seeking commercial gain by protecting our colleagues from the hundreds of criminal attacks they suffer every year. G4S came under fire almost four years ago when it could not provide enough guards for the London Olympics. Voters would prefer that money to be spent on the NHS instead An overwhelming majority of the British public think Britain is getting 'bad value for money' from being inside the EU, a Daily Mail poll reveals. Voters would prefer the net 8.5billion which the UK is forced to hand over to Brussels ever year to be spent on the NHS instead. David Cameron and the Remain campaign have insisted that Britain is better off forking out huge membership fees in return for access to the single market. In its controversial 'propaganda leaflet', sent to every UK household, the Government claimed: 'For every 1 paid in tax, a little over 1p goes to the EU. An overwhelming majority of the British public think Britain is getting 'bad value for money' from being inside the EU Voters would prefer the net 8.5billion which the UK is forced to hand over to Brussels ever year to be spent on the NHS instead 'The Government judges that what the UK gets back in opportunities, job creation and economic security from EU membership far outweighs the cost.' But, in a ComRes poll for the Mail and ITV News, voters rejected the idea that the EU is good value for money. Some 56 per cent think that Britain's net contribution is bad value for money. Less than a third think it is good value for money. For Tory supporters, the difference is even more stark 63 per cent to 27 per cent. If the money were not spent on the EU, an overwhelmingly majority of the public 57 per cent - would most like to see the money spent on healthcare and the NHS. The poll of more than 1,000 voters shows that, as the contest heads into the final two months, Remain holds a lead of 11 points 51 per cent to 40 per cent. Nine per cent are still undecided. Last month, the lead was seven points. After likelihood to vote is taken into consideration - and don't knows are excluded the In camp leads by 58 per cent to 42 per cent. If the money were not spent on the EU, 57 per cent would most like to see the money spent on healthcare and the NHS Despite a series of controversies facing Mr Cameron including holding shares in an off-shore investment scheme run by his later father the PM's standing in the referendum debate remains unaltered. Some 34 per cent of Britons say that he will be important when deciding how to vote, the same as in March. But, in a boost for the Out camp, Boris Johnson's position has strengthened some 32 per cent say he will be important in their decision, up from 29 per cent. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who gave a lukewarm endorsement of the EU last week, is considered important by a quarter of voters. More Britons continue to think that leaving EU will be a big risk to the economy than think remaining in the EU would be, by 33 per cent to 19 per cent. Cabinet minister Michael Gove, an Out campaigner, said 'the amount we give to the EU is due to go up - and up - and up.' 'From 19.1 billion this year to 20.6 billion in 2020-21. Since 1975, we have already sent the staggering sum of over half a trillion pounds to Brussels. If we vote to stay we will send about another 200 billion to Brussels over the next decade. 'I acknowledge that some of the money we send over we get back - whether in support for farmers or scientists - although we don't control exactly where it goes. Despite a series of controversies facing Mr Cameron, the PM's standing in the referendum debate remains unaltered 'We don't know how efficiently that money is allocated to those who really need it because of the opaque nature of the EU's bureaucracy.' The findings on whether the EU is value for money are a fillip to Leave, which has focussed on how the UK's annual contribution could be better spent elsewhere. In 2014, NHS chief Simon Stevens said the NHS would need 8billion more in real terms by 2020/21 and would have to make 22billion of efficiency savings. Police are hitting the streets to sell The Big Issue magazine to help raise money to tackle the rising problem of homelessness. Officers from Brisbanes City Station are sporting hi-vis Big Issue vests alongside vendors to help sell this week's edition of the not-for-profit magazine which raises money for the homeless, marginalised and disadvantaged. Queensland Police said they jumped at the opportunity to support the cause, saying Brisbane City police are 'focused on using empathy and a personal approach to dealing with vulnerable and homeless people'. Brisbane police hit the streets to sell The Big Issue, a magazine which raises money for homelessness Officers sporting hi-vis Big Issue vests team up with those selling the magazine Police are acutely aware of the issues that lead to someone being unable to undertake mainstream employment and are very supportive of people who are making the effort to help themselves,' Queensland Police said in a statement. Launched in 1991, The Big Issue is an important source of income for thousands of homeless people across Australia, Britain, Ireland, South Korea, South Africa, Japan, Namibia, Kenya, Malawi and Taiwan. Profits from the magazine go towards homeless charities in the respective countries where they are sold. Brisbane Police will be selling the pink Elvis edition of the independent magazine all this week. Queensland Police said they welcomed the opportunity to support the cause Parents have been left outraged after a teacher's handbook emerged on social media revealing how children as young as ten are being taught to act out scenes of a beheading from a historic storyline. Connect's Upper Primary C1 teacher's manual - which is widely used across Queensland schools - has highlighted how Year 5 and 6 students would perform the tale of David and Goliath, including the gruesome ending. As part of the semester's religious studies class, teachers are asked to convert their classrooms into battlefields and choose students to act out parts for the role play. After providing scripts to the students to revise, the teacher narrates and directs the plot in the background as Goliath of the Philistines curses David by his gods. Children as young as ten are being taught to act out gruesome scenes of a beheading from David and Goliath (pictured: David with the head of Goliath following the beheading) During the performance, the teacher narrates and directs the storyline in the background as Goliath of the Philistines curses David by his gods (stock image) 'Ill knock you down and cut off your head and feed the bodies of the other Philistine soldiers to the birds and wild animals,' the student who plays 'David' would say. The narrator then says: 'Then Goliath moved towards David, but David ran at him, grabbed a stone from his bag, and slung it at him. It hit Goliath right in the forehead. And Goliath fell on his face on the ground.' The children are then asked to carry out a mock execution in front of their pupils. 'Then David took Goliath's sword, killed him and cut off his head,' the manual reads. The manual then instructs the teacher to 'Supervise "David" and stand nearby to ensure the actions remain sensible when acting out this part'. 'You may need to verbally remind your students to be sensible. There are sure to be a few laughs as your students act out the scene, but keep students focused on the narrative.' The teacher's manual has highlighted how Year 6 students would perform the gruesome ending of the tale The moral of the lesson is to teach students to 'recognise that it was God who defeated the Philistines through David' and 'appreciate that God saves his people in unexpected ways' (stock image) Parents have expressed their opinions, with some saying the 'inappropriate' content should not be taught The moral of the lesson is to teach students to 'recognise that it was God who defeated the Philistines through David' and 'appreciate that God saves his people in unexpected ways'. The content surfaced on the Queensland Parents for Secular State Schools' Facebook page last Friday, warning parents about the performance being taught. Alison Courtice, from Queensland Parents for Secular State Schools, has urged parents to question the principals if they genuinely think the content is appropriate for state school classrooms. 'If you don't know if your school uses Connect, send this link and say you need to know if it is the RI [religious instructions] program at your school,' she said. 'We need parents to let schools know this is not OK and that something needs to change, soon.' Connect's Upper Primary C1 teacher's manual has been widely used across Queensland primary schools Children are then asked to carry out a mock execution in front of their pupils in the classroom (stock image) Several concerned parents have expressed their opinions, with some saying the 'inappropriate' content should not be taught in schools. 'It's an admission that their religious beliefs glorify violence and depravity. And therefore should have no place in public schools,' one parent wrote. Another posted: 'This role play is especially unsuitable for Australian classrooms.' And another said: 'Notice that the value this is really teaching is that if someone insults your 'god' (AKA your beliefs), you are within your rights to kill them. Considering how literal children are, this is a horrendous lesson to teach them. Not the values of reason and ethics that I want my kid to learn.' Several concerned parents have expressed their opinions, with some saying the 'inappropriate' content should not be taught in schools (stock image) A Department of Education and Training told Daily Mail Australia: 'If parents of participating students have concerns with the content or delivery of religious instructions (RI), they are encouraged to raise this with their school principal. 'RI programs are provided by a religious denomination or society (known as a faith group), not the Department of Education and Training,' the spokesperson said. 'RI is only to be provided to students from Year 1 in state primary, secondary and special schools whose parents have nominated the faith group on enrolment, or to students whose parents have given written permission for their child to attend. Politicians in Queensland have been flooded with thousands of emails from Uber supporters after a plan to ban the service was revealed. The Brisbane Times reports that Queensland MPs received more than 8500 emails overnight from Uber supporters as Parliament prepares for a bill by the Katter Australian Party to have the ride-sharing service banned with severe penalties for drivers. In response to the Katter Party's move, Uber asked its customers to contact Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and their MPs, urging them to vote down the proposed bill. Scroll down for video Uber may be banned in Queensland due to severe penalties for its drivers Uber said at least 8500 emails were sent between 6pm on Tuesday and midday on Wednesday. A parliamentary debate will take place next Wednesday about the issue. Queensland Uber General Manager Sam Bool said it was a 'critical day' for Queenslanders. The Katter Australian Party put through its private member's bill for Uber drivers to lose demerit points each time they are caught driving for the company, and loss of licence after receiving three fines. However, a parliamentary review committee examining current regulations for ride-sharing services including Uber did not let the legislation pass. While its review into ride-sharing in Queensland is underway, members of the parliamentary committee have asked for the Government to forcibly crack down on Uber. But the review is not due to return until August, and any legislation passed as a result will take another couple of months before it can be implemented. Robbie Katter of KAP, son of party leader Bob Katter, said it was not good enough and Queensland taxi owners and drivers were counting on the parliament to make the right decision and support them, The Brisbane Times reports. He hoped the major parties would support his call to 'enforce the laws'. Bob Katter (left) has put through a private member's bill aiming for Uber drivers to lose demerit points each time they are caught driving for the company The Katter party says the bill is 'about sending a message to Queenslanders' 'They'll [parliament] see the face of anger if we don't get it up because the review will still run its course. This is about sending a message to Queenslanders, pharmacy owners, hotel owners that the government is serious about enforcing the laws that we make in parliament and not allowing people to blatantly disregard those with disrespect,' he said. 'There's people who have lose hundreds of millions in investment, the same as what a pharmacist would or a hotel owner would if the government decided to turn a blind eye to policing their industry, it's terribly unfair. 'Let the review take its course, we can accept the umpire's decision there but you can't go around running an illegal activity before then just because you know you've got deep enough pockets to challenge the government.' Cadbury is to abandon the twist-off foil wrappers from its boxes of Roses chocolates in Britain, ending a tradition dating from 1938. The US owners of the historic British brand are switching to modern tear-off wrappers. The company is also changing the shape of two of the chocolates, the hazel in caramel and the coffee escape. Cadbury is to abandon the twist-off foil wrappers from its boxes of Roses chocolates and will be switching to modern tear-off wrappers Favourite: The crescent-shaped hazel in caramel in its famous purple wrapper is a Roses favourite The crescent-shaped hazel in caramel in its famous purple wrapper is a Roses favourite. But the new shapes have standardised smooth contours, which the company claims are a better fit for the mouth. It said this means they melt in the mouth easily and result in a longer moment of joy. Cynics may suggest the changes are about standardising production methods in order to save money. Cadbury said the changes are necessary to improve flavour and experience. It said the old wrappers tended to come undone, leaving the chocolate to become stale or to transfer the flavour to others in the box. From now on all Roses chocolates will have flow wrappers. These are sealed around the chocolate and are removed by tearing a jagged edge. The new design will arrive on shelves later in the year, while the new chocolate shapes will appear in boxes from the end of this month. The name of the selection box came from the Lincolnshire packaging company Rose Brothers, which made the machines that wrapped the chocolates. The equipment was such an innovation in the 1930s that managers at Cadbury decided to use the manufacturers name for what was a flagship product. Cadbury marketing manager Claire Low said: The number one complaint about Cadbury Roses in 2014 was around the issue of poorly wrapped chocolates tainting the flavours of other chocolates in the tub. We wanted to take steps to ensure quality is of the highest standard in every pack. Although we appreciate there may be some traditionalists who still love the old twist wrap, it is important to us to ensure that we listen to the majority of our customers and address their issues by delivering Cadbury Roses in the highest quality. Head of innovation at Cadbury, Dave Shepherd, explained the new shapes saying: Holding the chocolate in your mouth and letting it melt slightly before you bite will allow for maximum flavour and the moment of enjoyment will last even longer. Thats why weve opted for this new design, as the more rounded and smoother shape fits better to the contours of your mouth, creating a better melt in the mouth experience. From now on all Roses chocolates will have flow wrappers. These are sealed around the chocolate and are removed by tearing a jagged edge Any change to a Cadburys product is normally met with howls of protest. The company suffered a backlash when the chocolate was changed for the shells of its popular creme eggs last year. It has also been criticised for shrinking many of its chocolate boxes and bars while keeping prices the same. The once British brand was controversially taken over by American firm Kraft in 2010 in a deal worth 11.5billion. The firms American bosses have never been forgiven for reneging on a promise to keep open a Cadbury factory at Keynsham, near Bristol, when it took over the company. The car industry has been rocked by another scandal last night after Japanese carmaker Mitsubishi admitted falsifying mileage figures by up to 10 per cent on 600,000 vehicles. Company president, Tetsuro Aikawa bowed deeply over the disgrace and told a news conference in Tokyo he feels horrible about the deception. The cheating came to light after Nissan became suspicious of performance figures on 470,000 of the vehicles made by Mitsubishi on its behalf. Mitsubishi, an industrial giant used over-inflated tyres to enhance mileage performance in tests. The revelation is a further blow to the reputation of the auto industry after Volkswagen last year was discovered to have used trickery in its cars to fake pollution tests on its diesel cars. Mitsubishi was founded in 1870 and became famous for making the Zero fighter planes used by Kamikaze pilots in World War II. Its name means three diamonds and this is reflected in its logo. Company president, Tetsuro Aikawa (pictured) bowed deeply over the disgrace and told a news conference in Tokyo he feels horrible about the deception The affected models included Mitsubishis ek Wagon and eK Space, as well as Nissans Dayz and Dayz Roox 650cc minicars that are popular in Japan but which sell little elsewhere. Fuel economy was falsely boosted by about 5 percent or 10 percent on the models, which were billed as getting 30.4 kilometers per liter (71.5 miles per gallon), according to the company. Mr Aikawa accepted that employees of his company had intentionally carried out the deception. The wrongdoing was intentional. It is clear the falsification was done to make the mileage look better. But why they would resort to fraud to do this is still unclear, he said. He had not been aware of the irregularities, but said: I feel responsible. Mitsubishi was attempting to rebuild trust with consumers after a scandal a decade ago which involved the company covering up faults in clutches and brakes as well as fuel tanks that fell off vehicles which involved vehicles being recalled. Aikawa was asked if the latest fiasco showed the company had still not put its house in order itself after the recall scandal, although it had promised repeatedly to come clean. I realize that view exists, he said, his voice shaking slightly. I see how difficult it can be to have compliance consciousness spread among all our employees. Mr Aikawa said he will set up a panel of outsiders to review the issue and added: We will inform our customers. I feel horrible they were given the wrong numbers. Shares in the Japanese automaker slumped by 15 per cent after the revelation. Lance Bradley, UK managing director of Mitsubishi Motors, said there was no evidence that any models sold in the UK or Europe were affected. The company is Japans sixth-largest car maker and sold more than one million vehicles last year, but has less than 1 per cent of the UK market. The issue was reported to Japans transportation ministry and Nissan told dealers to stop selling the affected vehicles. It was considering ways to help owners of the affected cars. While this is the first time a Japanese car maker has admitted falsifying fuel economy tests, South Korean car maker Hyundai paid $350million in penalties for overstating car mileage figures. Our national Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy has announced her intention to write a new poem. Not, as one might expect, about the Queens 90th this week but about gas meters Our national Poet Laureate has announced her intention to write a new poem. Not, as one might expect, about the Queens 90th this week but about gas meters. Specifically the passing of the old, whirring, coin-in-the-slot gas meters and their replacement with soulless smart meters by 2020. It must be said, previous Poets Laureate have tended to address larger, nobler and more stirring issues. Wordsworth gave us his magnificent evocations of English nature and unbridled passion for his country: Nor, England! did I know till then/ What love I bore to thee... John Masefield in the last century wrote unforgettable sea poems in which you could feel the spray in your face and the wind like a whetted knife as well as the irresistible lure of the ocean: I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky... Alfred, Lord Tennyson left us his Charge Of The Light Brigade, about the mad but magnificent dash for the Russian guns cannon that volleyed and thundered about them as our light cavalrymen galloped headlong into the jaws of Death, into the mouth of Hell during the Crimean War. Now we are reduced to Carol Ann Duffy writing about small, soon-to-be-obsolete domestic appliances. No wonder people have so little time for poetry any more. As for the idea of a classroom of unruly schoolboys being stilled and thrilled to hear such stuff read aloud as they must have once been by Tennyson forget it. Poets dont write for schoolboys any more. They seem to write mainly for each other. The Poet Laureate is an honorary appointment by the monarch on the advice of the Prime Minister. For her labours, Carol Ann Duffy gets 5,750 a year plus the venerable butt of sherry in a tradition going back to the 17th century. A butt is quite a lot too: 720 bottles. You might need a few bottles if youre writing about gas meters. We cant judge her latest work on its merits yet, mind you, as it hasnt been written. Rather surprisingly, it will take her until the summer to knock her thoughts into line. This has already caused some raised eyebrows, cheeky comments and even ribald ripostes in verse, showing that actually it can be done a lot faster. Heres one fine example from an internet message-board: I removed and attached to my ass The meter that once measured gas And now Im renowned For whirring around But Im not yet a smartass, alas. It may not be Tennyson, but its at least arguable that such light-hearted doggerel gives more pleasure than the solemn, rhyme-free effusions of the poetic Establishment. Carol Ann Duffy is a perfect example of the fashionable contemporary poet: shes Left-wing, working-class, born in the Gorbals in Glasgow, shes Scottish-Irish, with not a hint of deadly English middle-classness to be held against her by way of accusation. And shes also a lesbian, having written a long poem, Vigil, about the LGBT community although if she was really up-to-date, by now shed be writing poems about the LGBTTIQ community. Thats Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Intersexual and Queer, by the way. (Keep up!) Carol Ann Duffy is a perfect example of the fashionable contemporary poet: shes Left-wing, working-class, born in the Gorbals in Glasgow, shes Scottish-Irish, with not a hint of deadly English middle-classness to be held against her by way of accusation Despite their vaunted tolerance and love of diversity, however, the comical truth is that the liberal Left have a joyless and censorious attitude towards so many of the things we used to take for granted. Todays poets are increasingly stuck for subject matter. You cant do heroes because were all heroes now, arent we? Everyone is equal. Martial glory and soldierly valour are off the menu, too, because they smack of the dreaded P-word patriotism. They may have been staples of poetry since the days of Homer and the Ancient Greeks, but the poet of today cannot write about them except in a single, narrow manner: how horrid war is! The trouble with this observation is that its so thumpingly obvious. You dont have to be a poet to see it. Even the Duke of Wellington loathed war. General Sherman, the great American Civil War leader, said War is hell. Yet sure enough, Carol Ann Duffy has done her bit and written a poem about the war in Afghanistan and how beastly it was. It was always the traditional job of the Poet Laureate to glorify Britain, to praise the heroes of our long and colourful history, to show loyalty to the monarchy and mark royal weddings and birthdays. But these things are enough to make any self-respecting, state-salaried, Leftie-luvvie poet run away screaming and hide herself under a pile of back issues of the Guardian. Previous incumbents have managed to do their job without sounding stridently jingoistic or writing about gas meters. Lord Tennyson left us his Charge Of The Light Brigade, about the mad but magnificent dash for the Russian guns. Now we are reduced to Carol Ann Duffy writing about small, soon-to-be-obsolete domestic appliances John Betjeman, the last Poet Laureate to hold any place in the nations affections, was no crude patriotic cheerleader, preferring to bumble about in old churches and rhapsodise about steam trains. Still, his deep and genuine love for England, as well as his very English sense of mischief and irreverence, made him perfect for the job. He was followed by Ted Hughes, a dour Yorkshireman who, although a devoted monarchist, seemed to struggle to evoke anything much in his poetry beyond dead or dying animals, rain-sodden moors and the general cruelties of nature. Then there was mild-mannered Andrew Motion, who fitted in well enough, writing sensitive poems about his queasiness over war, and another in support of the TUC (though, to be fair, Motion did write a poem to mark the marriage of Charles and Camilla, and some rap verse for Williams 21st birthday). Like him, Carol Ann Duffy has come to her position by being a thoroughly safe pair of hands and holding all the correct opinions. One poem of hers, a kind of parody of The Twelve Days Of Christmas, has these lines: The first gold ring was gold indeed bankers profits fired in greed. The second ring outshone the sun, fuelled by carbon, doused by none Ring three was black gold, O for oil a serpent swallowing its tail. The fourth ring was Celebrity; Fools Gold, winking on TV. Ring five, religions halo, slipped a blind for eyes or gag for lips. This almost invites the reader to play a game: how many worthy liberal anxieties can our poet cram into ten lines? It looks like five: capitalism, oil, global warming, celebrity culture and the poison of religion or at least Christianity (Duffy was raised a Catholic). Its a tick-list of righteous issues to prove she is a virtuous and orthodox person for our times. But is it poetry? Will it still be reverently quoted a century or two hence? Or is it just yesterdays news versified? Still, for producing such sentiments she has been garlanded with honours, honorary doctorates, fellowships, professorships and been made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire not that any right-thinking person today holds the British Empire in anything but abhorrence. But DBE still sounds nice after your name, does it not? The truth is our pinko Poets Laureate (as they are pedantically called) are in an impossible situation. How can they fulfil their role as national poets? In the fractured, polyglot, multicultural country we inhabit today, they have no idea what it means to be British. And perish the thought if anything about the role has to do with customs and traditions, history and a shared ancestral identity. So poor old Carol Ann Duffy is reduced in the end to writing tired, safe political agit-prop, and finally about gas meters. Perhaps Duffy will yet surprise us. Perhaps she will bring herself to celebrate the 90th birthday of the Queen in verse. Yet there are problems even here for a delicate Left-wing conscience. After all, how can our Royal Family possibly represent their view of a diverse modern Britain any more? Hillary Clinton has a new incentive to win the presidency, as Donald Trump said Wednesday night that his administration might re-open a probe into her classified email scandal, even if the Obama administration doesn't prosecute her. Trump raised the issue during a boisterous rally in Berlin Maryland, after ripping 'crooked Hillary,' saying he would probe her 'for a second time.' In a phone interview after the campaign stop, he told DailyMail.com exclusively that he's deadly serious. 'You have to do it. You have to take a second look,' he said, saying he would insist on 'a fair look.' 'It would have to be very, very fair and very, very above board.' Scroll down for video DOUBLE-DIPPING DON: 'You have to do it. You have to take a second look,' Donald Trump said Wednesday of his plan to reopen a criminal inquiry into Hillary Clinton's email scandal if he wins the White House WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE? Even if Clinton is cleared by the Obama administration, a Trump Justice Department could open a second criminal probe But Trump insisted that he wouldn't drive an investigation from the Oval Office because it ould be ethically fraught. 'I wouldn't do that,' he pledged. 'I think that would be very inappropriate.' 'It would be up to the new attorney general, Trump said, 'but I would imagine the new attorney general would want to take a look at that.' 'You have the statute of limitations,' he acknowledged, 'but I would imagine that any attorney general would have to be serious about looking at it.' Trump contrasted his outlook with that of the Obama administration, which he said during the rally was standing in the way of the investigative process. 'It looks to me like she's being protected,' he charged. But he projected that 'we are going to beat her so badly. And then we'll take a look for a second time at what she did.' 'It's called statute of limitations, right? We'll take a look,' he vowed. EAGER TO TALK: Trump raised the issue of a second Clinton investigation only briefly during his speech Wednesday night but expanded on the concept in a phone interview with DailyMail.com Clinton faces a broad FBI criminal inquiry which she calls a 'security review' related to her exclusive use of a home-brew private email server for government business while she was secretary of state. More than 2,000 classified documents have been identified among emails she stored there, drawing howls from Republicans but shoulder shrugs from Clintonworld. A few of those records were classified at the Top Secret level or above. Allowing classified material to migrate from its proper place to an unsecure location is a violation of the federal Espionage Act. The law provides criminal penalties including prison sentences, even for people who don't intend to put state secrets at risk but do so through negligent care of official documents. The investigation has reportedly expanded this year to include public corruption allegations. Clinton is suspected of using her office to grant favors to foreign governments and companies that donated to her family foundation and provided her husband, former President Bill Clinton, with lucrative speaking engagements. Clinton, who is the prohibitive favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination, has denied any wrongdoing. The FBI, whose director James Comey is personally overseeing the probe, could make a criminal referral to the Justice Department at any time. NO RUSH: FBI Director James Comey has a 10-year term, so his G-men technically could pursue Clinton even into a Trump administration HOT SEAT: Attorney General Loretta Lynch could choose to act on a hypothetical FBI criminal referral or to let it wither on the vine, but the next president will install a new top federal law enforcement officer EXPANDED SCOPE: The FBI has reportedly moved beyond its original classified email probe to include public corruption questions about whether Hillary Clinton used the State Department to drum up donations to her family foundation and speaking engagements for former President Bill Clinton It's unknown whether the Obama administration would choose to indict and prosecute her, but even the recommendation of criminal charges could spell a quick nose-dive for Clinton's campaign and throw the Democrats into disarray. President Obama has insisted that he has not exerted any political influence on the process. But Loretta Lynch, his hand-picked attorney general, would make the final decision. Comey, too, was appointed by Obama, in 2013. But unlike Lynch, his term extends for a mandatory 10 years outlasting the man who gave him the job. Since 1972 only one FBI director has been removed from his post by a sitting president. Speculation has run rampant in Washington that Comey himself could step down in protest if the DOJ chooses not to act on a criminal referral, which functions as a formal request for prosecution. Although the contents of such an FBI referral would not be made public, it's also likely that a reluctant Lynch would find herself contending with leaks from inside the agency. WILD NIGHT IN DELMARVA: Wednesday's rally in Berlin, Maryland came within spitting distance of Delaware and both states will hold primary elections on April 26 THOUSANDS: Officials let massive crowds into a Maryland high school and reportedly left 8,000 more on the outside looking in Trump made his comments a day after victories in New York boosted both his and Clinton's presidential campaigns. After spending much of an earlier rally in Indiana going after 'Lyin' Ted Cruz' and a 'rigged' political system, on Wednesday night, he kicked off his event in Maryland by going hard after Clinton. 'You know, we are going to beat Crooked Hillary so badly,' Trump vowed. 'It's going to be something that you're going to watch and you're going to enjoy watching,' he told a packed high school auditorium with about 1,500 people. Maryland votes on April 26th. 'Crooked Hillary Clinton will not have a chance. She's not bringing jobs back. She doesn't know about the economy. She makes bad decisions,' the business mogul continued. 'You know what Bernie Sanders said about her twice, you know that. Number one, he said she wasn't qualified. That's tough. That's tough. But he said "bad judgment," she's got bad judgment.' Social media has shown little sympathy for Tara Brown and the 60 Minutes crew, branding them 'idiots' with big egos, while former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett described the Lebanon kidnap as 'an intolerable criminal act'. The response came as 60 Minutes posted a picture of the crew smiling and relaxing with beer and drinks in what appeared to be the airport lounge before their flight back to Australia. On Twitter, the reaction was critical of the Nine network and Tara Brown's crew for their actions in the April 6 abduction of Sally Faulkner's childen in Beirut Robbie @thrunthru wrote 'Real Journos do not pay kidnappers for ratings. Sheeple'. Sarah Yahya wrote 'From breaking the law and endangering lives, they got off easy. #60Mins still has a story while the mother just lost her parental rights'. Natasha @tashwil06 wrote 'I hope the #60Mins journos have learned a valuable lesson about allowing their egos to cross the line without their brains in check'. Also on Twitter, @alan555 wrote '#60Mins so the upshot from cheque book journalism garbage is a father with a further strengthened position & more wealth - bravo idiots'. Scroll down for video Social media has shown little sympathy for Tara Brown and the 60 Minutes crew, branding them 'idiots' with big egos and saying (above) that 'real journos do not pay kidnappers for ratings' Tara Brown and her crew, pictured having drinks in the flight lounge after their release from prison with Nine news boss Darren Wick (second from right) 'could have been shot or maimed', Jeff Kennett claimed The Twitter response which was highly critical (above) of 'cheque book journalism garbage' came The response came as 60 Minutes posted a picture of the crew smiling and relaxing with beer and drinks Earlier on Radio 2UE on Thursday morning as the 60 Minutes crew were on a flight back to Australia after their release from Beirut prisons, Mr Kennett said the child abduction staged and filmed by the crew on April 6 was 'a bloody high jacking event'. Blasting Nine management for endangering the lives of Tara Brown and her crew to commit an illegal act in the pursuit of ratings, Mr Kennett said someone at the network was yet to take responsibility. 'That crew could have been shot at, could have been maimed, could have spent a long time in prison,' he told 2UE's breakfast programme. AS the 60 Minutes crew flew back to Australia there was rising anger about their child kidnap including this tweet about 'hack paycheck journalists' Now that Tara Brown and her crew are free from jail people felt it was alright to express their anger on Twitter about the Nine Network's actions in sending them on the story Former Victorian premier and rival Seven Network board member Jeff Kennett (above) has made a scathing criticism of the the 60 Minutes Lebanon kidnap fiasco as 'an intolerable criminal act by Channel Nine' On Twitter @hankrango posted this tweet saying that 60 Minutes would 'kidnap your kids if they thought there was a ratings point in it', reflecting the negative outpouring on Twitter following Tara Brown and the crew's release Twitter users had been largely quiet as Tara Brown and her crew were held in custody in Lebanon, but as soon as they were safely released and photographed laughing over drinks, people turned on them Management at the Nine Network were blasted by Kennett, whose interest as a rival Seven Network board member was declared, for not protecting health and safety of 60 Minutes crew and committing 'illegal' act 'In a country as violent as Lebanon, they were extremely lucky. How can you put the lives of your staff at risk for a few ratings points? 'It's criminal ... and unacceptable that no-one is being held responsible or held to account. 'They condoned and funded an exercise that was illegal and put their lives at risk. They could have been physically hurt. 'It's intolerable. It's a criminal act by Channel Nine and somewhere, someone has to be held responsible.' 2UE show host John Stanley declared Mr Kennett's membership of the Seven West media board before the on air blast of the Nine Network. Relief: The released 60 Minutes crew with Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner (centre), from left sound recordist David Ballment, reporter Tara Brown, producer Stephen Rice and cameraman Ben Williamson Jeff Kennett (pictured with Seven Network boss Kerry Stokes) said Nine They condoned and funded an exercise that was illegal and put the 60 Minutes crew's lives at risk. They could have been physically hurt' Jeff Kennett said that Channel Nine had put its staff at risk of a lengthy imprisonment (pictured, Baabda Women's Prison where Tara Brown was held) and harming their health and safety in a 'violent country' Mr Kennett, who is also the chairman of the Beyond Blue mental health foundation which deals with issues such as workplace depression, said Nine had neglected its duty of care to the 60 Minutes crew. 'It's a workplace health and safety issue,' he said. Tara Brown, producer Stephen Rice, cameraman Ben Williamson and sound recordist David Ballment were arrested two weeks ago after the team filmed the abduction of Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner's children from their grandmother at a Beirut Bus stop. Ms Faulkner was involved in a custody battle with her ex-husband Ali Elamine over their children Laleh, 5, and Noah Elamine, 3. The three Channel Nine male crew and the Child Abduction Recover International (CARI) agents Adam Whittington and Craig Michael were held in police cells below the Baabda Court complex in south-eastern Beirut. Tara Brown and Ms Faulkner were taken to the Baabda Women's Prison. All but the CARI agents were released on Wednesday after a financial arrangement was made with Ali Elamine. The future of Whittington and Michael is uncertain, although they face criminal child abduction charges for carrying out the operation and an assault charge on Mr Elamine's mother, Ibtissam Berri. Brown and her crew made a hasty departure from Beirut to the airport and were flying home on Thursday. Four boys were rescued from a nearly submerged boat after a dangerous 11-mile ride through a flooded creek near Houston. The juveniles were found 'scared but safe' after they were reported missing on Caney Creek, near New Caney, according to the Montgomery County Constable's Office. Passers-by in an airboat found the boys under a bridge without life jackets and in a boat with no motor just before 8.30 pm Wednesday, KHOU reported. It appeared as though the boys had found a boat and decided to go for ride, even though it wasn't equipped with a working motor, paddles or life jackets, said authorities. Four boys were rescued from a nearly submerged boat after a dangerous 11-mile ride through a flooded creek near Houston Some passers-by an airboat found the boys under a bridge without life jackets and in a boat with no motor just before 8.30 pm Wednesday They boarded the boat about 90 minute before sunset and were rescued several hours later in a nearly submerged boat. The deadly Houston floods claimed another victim Wednesday bringing the death toll to eight for one of the worst flooding disasters to hit the area in recent years. The devastating floods have forced more than a thousand from their homes while hundreds were rescued after becoming trapped in their vehicles or houses. And there could be more misery to come as The Weather Channel predicts more heavy rain today. Thunderstorms hit central and southeast Texas Wednesday morning, bringing more rainfall to the saturated region. Further storms are expected in the region this afternoon and evening, including the Houston metro area, which has been devastated by flooding. The devastating floods also forced more than a thousand from their homes while hundreds were rescued after becoming trapped in their vehicles or houses Hundreds of residents had to be rescued yesterday and today after becoming trapped in their vehicles or homes Families used whatever means necessary to get to safety through the rising waters in Houston, Texas While not as heavy as Monday' downpour, forecasters are warning of more flash flooding in southeast Texas where many rivers, creeks and bayous have already burst their banks after 10 to 20 inches of rain inundated the north side of the metro area on April 18. A flash flooding warning remains in place today. Storms will keep battering the flooded Houston areas through Thursday although the will begin to sweep south east towards the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast. Friday will herald bring a much-needed dry spell behind a cold front, The Weather Channel forecasts. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declared a state of emergency in nine counties after the deadly floods left residents trapped in their own homes and vehicles. Police have arrested a female Australian Defence Force member following an armed robbery at a credit union at one of the nation's biggest air force bases. The 21-year-old soldier was arrested in full uniform at Richmond Air Force Base on Thursday morning and taken to Windsor Police Station, where she is expected to be charged with a string of offences. It will be alleged a woman was armed with a gun and wearing a balaclava when she entered the building and held-up a female staff member before fleeing with cash on 7 February, 2014. A 21-year-old is arrested in full uniform at the RAAF Base Richmond Air Force base on Thursday morning She is one of two women believed to have been involved in the hold-up at RAAF Base Richmond's (pictured) credit union in 2014 The Robbery and Serious Crime Squad established Strike Force Potto to investigate the case and also worked with the ADF Investigative Service to carry out the arrest. They conducted extensive inquiries into the robbery as well as forensic examinations of the financial institution. 'It will be alleged a woman armed with a gun entered the building and threatened a female staff member before fleeing with cash,' police said. With the assistance of military police on the base, they arrested the 21-year-old woman today and have also been searching her home in Sydney's west. Police say she is expected to be charged with armed robbery, conspiracy to commit armed robbery and firearms offences. They will also allege a second woman was involved in the robbery. 'Detectives are now asking for any person with information about the incident, particularly the involvement of a second woman, to come forward,' police said. The Richmond base is a hub for the Air Force's logistical operations and is so big it has its own military credit union, public transport network and post office. It will be alleged a woman was armed with a gun and wearing a balaclava when she entered the building and held-up a female staff member before fleeing with cash on 7 February, 2014 The woman was taken to Windsor Police Station (pictured) where she is expected to be charged with a string of offences It is the headquarters of a number of groups including the No. 37 airlift squadron operating C-130 Hercules aircraft and the No. 35 transport squadron. Robbery and Serious Crime Squad acting commander Superintendent Brad Monk is expected to address the media later on Thursday. A 79-year-old woman is fighting for her life in hospital after being knocked to the ground and run over by a thief who stole her car in a horrific carjacking. The pensioner was seriously injured when the man drove over her as she lay in the vehicle's path at a car park in Oldham, Greater Manchester. Police said it is one of the 'worst incidents' ever seen. Witnesses said the woman had got out of her white Hyundai i10 after being approached by the man, shortly before 2pm yesterday, who told her there was a problem with her vehicle. As she checked to see what was wrong, the man jumped into the car, reversed at high speed - knocking her over - and then drove over her body as she lay helpless on the ground. The pensioner was seriously injured when the man drove over her as she lay in the vehicle's path at a car park in Oldham, Greater Manchester. Police said it is one of the 'worst incidents' ever seen Police said they are now desperately trying to trace the man behind the 'horrible crime', which has left the victim seriously injured in hospital. It is understood the woman's family are by her bedside. The incident occurred at a car park off Sandy Lane in Royton, Oldham, and the car was later recovered some three miles away in the Turf Hill area of Rochdale. The suspect is described as white, in his mid-40s, of stocky build and he was wearing a light long-sleeved top and dark trousers. Detective Inspector Ian Harratt, from Greater Manchester Police's Oldham division, said: 'This is one of the worst incidents I have had to investigate in a very long time. 'My thoughts are with the lady and her family. We are doing all that we can to support them and find the man responsible for this horrible crime. 'We are appealing for anyone who may have seen the incident or the car in the Royton and Rochdale areas or may know the man responsible to come and talk to police. 'Any information, no matter how small, could be vital in our investigation. 'I am determined to bring this man to justice. 'How someone can do this to anyone, never mind a 79-year-old lady, I will never know.' Anyone with information is asked to call police on 0161 856 8906 or Crimestoppers, anonymously, on 0800 555 111. The pregnant mother whose car was struck by a train with her children in the back was talking about how 'happy' she was about her life just half an hour before the crash. Vanessa Anne Carlson, 30, and her three children Shayla, seven, Breeana, six, and Maddison, two, had just left a motel in Coopernook to visit family in Moorland when their Commodore station wagon was hit by a freight train near Taree. Both Shayla and Maddison have been placed in an induced comas at John Hunter Hospital. 'She was so happy, talking about her life and how things were going well, then this happened 20 minutes later,' a staff member at the motel told The Daily Telegraph. Scroll down for video The pregnant mother (pictured with her children Shayla, seven, and Maddison, two) whose car was struck by a train with her children in the back was talking about how 'happy' she was about her life just half an hour before the crash Ms Carlson and her children had just left a motel in Coopernook to visit family in Moorland when their Commodore station wagon was hit by a freight train near Taree Both Breeana and Ms Carlson escaped serious injury. Ms Carlson left her three-year-old son behind at the hotel with immediate family before setting off to Moorland. It's understood she attempted to cross the tracks when they were involved in the major collision. Ms Carlson (pictured with Shayla) left her three-year-old son behind at the hotel with immediate family before setting off to Moorland It's understood she attempted to cross the tracks when they were involved in the major collision The freight train was carrying thousands of tonnes of steel when it powered through the crossing. The crossing had a stop sign but no warning lights or boom gates, according to Nine News. The driver and co-driver of the train were treated for shock and were taken to Manning Hospital for mandatory blood and urine testing. Police have established a crime scene and are currently investigating the incident. 'She was so happy, talking about her life and how things were going well, then this happened 20 minutes later,' a staff member at the motel said Police have established a crime scene and are currently investigating the incident on Coralville Road The driver of the train was treated for shock and will be taken to hospital for mandatory blood and urine testing Emergency services were called to the scene following a horrific collision on the Mid North Coast in NSW She has now turned her attention to the family's beauty bar business Now old pictures have emerged of Kat Mehajer when she graduated Older brother Salim Mehajer caused a sensation with his nuptials last year Khadijeh 'Kat' Mehajer is planning her own 'big wedding' to her fiance In the lead-up to her own 'big wedding', Salim Mehajer's little sister 'Kat' has turned over a glamourous new leaf. Old pictures have emerged of Khadijeh Mehajer, the latest member of the controversial Sydney clan to capture the publics attention. In photos obtained by Daily Mail Australia, Ms Mehajer is seen upon her graduation from university a few years ago, posing for the camera hand on hip. Friends said she was celebrating completing a Bachelor of Criminology. In recent times, she's devoted her energies to the beauty industry, promoting the 'Mehajer Beauty Bar'. The pictures speak to her remarkable physical similarities with members of the wealthy family - sister Aiisha, and sister-in-law, Aysha. Scroll down for video Khadijeh 'Kat' Mehajer is pictured several years ago upon her graduation with a Bachelor of Criminology The date of Khadijeh's wedding to Ibraham Sakalaki remains secret, but the bride-to-be isn't afraid of sharing pictures with the world of the two of them together - at her graduation, left, and recently, right Ms Mehajer pictured) is helping launch a new family beauty business on her Instagram Known as Kat to her friends, Ms Mehajer began uploading the images a few months ago using hashtags like #myweaveonfleek and #gotmybluewigon Khadijeh (left) is pictured with look-a-like sister Aiisha (right), a glamorous model with an Instagram following of more than 16,000 Khadijeh (left) with fiance Ibraham Sakalaki (right). Salim's sister is promoting Mehajer Beauty Bar by sharing images of herself to Instagram wearing colourful wigs Salim (second from left) and his younger sister Khadijeh (far right) pose with his wife Aysha (far left) and the sister's fiance Ibraham Sakalaki (second from right) Some media outlets even confused Khadijeh for Aysha or Aiisha as she arrived at Salim's Lidcombe home for a party this month. News she is planning Sydneys next biggest wedding also saw commentators ramp up expectations of glitz and glamour. Despite the newfound attention, Ms Mehajer has remained silent, working hard to promote her familys new Beauty Bar business on Instagram. Known as Kat to her friends, Ms Mehajer is pumping out pictures of her in wigs with hashtags such as #myweaveonfleek and #gotmybluewigon. The business is thought to be planning to sell wigs made from real human hair, but details are vague as they are for her forthcoming wedding. The Daily Telegraph reported her bridal party is thought to include sister-in-law Aysha, three of her five sisters (Sanna, Mary and Aiisha) and two friends. Khadijeh and her beau appear to have got matching crowns tattooed on their hands, posting a picture with the caption: Love is when we crown each other. Other than Salim, only his other sister Aiisha has attracted similar attention due to her online self-promotion. Salim Mehajer's wife Aysha (left) with Khadijeh (right) in a blonde wig to promote the new family beauty business Khadijeh (right) poses with fiance Ibraham Sakalaki (left). Friends are reportedly calling their upcoming nuptials 'Sydney's next biggest wedding' Khadijeh wearing a blue wig with her beau Ibraham Sakalaki. The date of their wedding has been kept tight lipped Aiisha was crowned Miss Personality in last year's Miss Lebanon Australia competition and also shares a resemblance to Aysha. Mr Mehajer has courted the spotlight since his extravagant wedding, but it has brought an unprecedented level of scrutiny to his business and council affairs. The wedding - which he hired helicopters and Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Harley Davidsons for - also left Mr Mehajer with a $220 City Council fine for closing Frances Street in Lidcombe. Stark pictures also emerged of Salim Mehajer's wife, Aysha, in her youth before she met Mr Mehajer and changed her name by deed poll from April Amelia Learmonth. Salim Mehajer married Aysha in what he called the 'wedding of the century' last year, and has faced the unforgiving glare of the public spotlight ever since Aysha Mehajer is pictured left, in recent years, and right, in a yearbook photo first obtained by Daily Mail Australia last year Speculation has ratcheted up about Mr Mehajer's relationship with Aysha in recent days, with her emailing A Current Affair a statement under her previous name, April Learmonth She graduated from hospital Wednesday and is excited to see her pet pig The 14-year-old is now walking, talking, eating and 'almost running' She has been at Mary Free Bed Hospital for six weeks getting rehabilitated A 14-year-old girl shot in the head during a deadly shooting rampage in southwestern Michigan has left her rehabilitation center. Mary Free Bed Hospital spokeswoman Betsy Musolf says Abigail Kopf was released Wednesday. Kopf spent six weeks at the Grand Rapids facility and a couple of weeks in another hospital following the Febuary 20 rampage that killed six people and injured another woman. Scroll down for video Abigail Kopf, 14, who was shot in the head during a deadly shooting rampage in southwestern Michigan has now left her rehabilitation center. Pictured, Kopf practices exercises with therapist Physical therapist Joe Winegar (left with Abigail) said in the YouTube video : 'We're trying to get her so she can go to school and can help mom and dad in the house. While mother Vickie Kopf (right) applauded her daughter's perseverance in the face of near-death. Kopf said in a video produced by the rehabilitation facility that she's excited to see friends and pets, including her pig, Hamlet. Physical therapist Joe Winegar said in the YouTube video: 'We're trying to get her so she can go to school and can help mom and dad in the house. While mother Vickie Kopf applauded her daughter's perseverance in the face of near-death. She said: 'She's an amazing kid especially when you're told that she might be brain dead or she might not make it. 'To see her walking and talking and doing therapy the way she is it's amazing.' She added: 'She was shot almost two months ago and she's eating, walking and talking and almost running down the hallways now. The nursing staff have been tremendously wonderful. Uber driver Jason Dalton is charged with murder and attempted murder in the apparently random attacks. Dalton is due in court Friday for a competency hearing. Defense attorney Eusebio Solis is challenging whether statements Dalton made to police will be admissible at trial. Father Gene Kopf (right with mother Vickie) spoke out about America's 'gun violence epidemic' and said that something 'must be done' about a problem that 'no other developed country has. The 'miracle' Michigan teenager was mistakenly declared dead after she was shot in the head by Dalton. Ms. Greater Kalamazoo (left) visits Kopf in hospital while she was still recovering Authorities initially said the girl had been killed along with six other people. She was in the front passenger seat of a vehicle parked outside a Kalamazoo-area restaurant when she was struck once in the head by a bullet. Hospital staff began discussing the prospect of harvesting her organs for donation when she squeezed her mother's hand. Mother Vicki Kopf described that moment as 'breathtaking' and 'a miracle on its own,' reported the station WWMT. Speaking on the YouTube video, father Gene Kopf said: 'It was bad luck that it happened, but it was good luck that it happened near a trauma center, it was good luck that it was cold that night, it was good luck that she was found quickly and that the bullet took the path that it did. Some of it is sheer dumb luck but a lot of it is skill on the medical field. He also spoke out about America's 'gun violence epidemic' and said that something 'must be done' about a problem that 'no other developed country has. 'She is just one of many victims that suffer every day..where does it stop?' Uber driver Jason Dalton (right) is charged with murder and attempted murder in the apparently random attacks. Left, people gathered in Bronson Park in Kalamazoo back in February for a candlelight vigil for the victims Mr Schmidt has been charged with murder and attempted murder Kehau was taken to hospital from the scene at 6pm on Tuesday, later died Charged: Stephen Schmidt, 45, (pictured) has been charged with murder after stabbing his ex-wife and two men in the aisle of a supermarket in Maui, Hawaii A man has been charged with murder after stabbing his ex-wife and two men in the aisle of a supermarket in Maui, Hawaii. Stephen Schmidt, 45, allegedly started an argument with his estranged wife Kehau Farias Schmidt, 24, and the man accompanying her inside a Foodland store at 6pm on Tuesday. As the dispute escalated, Schmidt produced a knife, and drove it into Kehau, KHON reported. He then allegedly stabbed two other men that tried to intervene. All three victims were taken to Maui Memorial Hospital for treatment, where Kehau later died, police said. Wailuku resident Alan Sevilla told the Maui News the three victims were lying in a pool of blood on the ground between the cash registers. 'There was a lot of blood ... a lot of blood,' Sevilla told the Maui News. The men are currently being treated for their injuries and in stable condition, police said. Stephen and Kehau Schmidt were separated at the time of the attack. The Maui Police Department said Schmidt was taken into custody after he fled from police. Schmidt's bail is set at $3 million. The investigation is continuing. Foodland issued said in a statement Wednesday that the company is shocked and saddened by what happened at the Kehalani Foodland. The company said it is providing support for employees who were at the store when the stabbing occurred. The statement read: 'All of us at Foodland are shocked and saddened by the tragic incident that took place at Foodland Kehalani yesterday. 'Our hearts and prayers go out to the victims and their families and friends. Knifing: Schmidt allegedly started an argument with his estranged wife Kehau Farias Schmidt, 24, and the man accompanying her inside a Foodland store (pictured) at 6pm on Tuesday 'Bloodbath': Witnesses said the victims were lying in a pool of blood on the ground between the cash registers 'We dont yet know all the details of what occurred, but are cooperating fully with Maui police and investigators. We are also providing support to our employees who were at the store at the time of the incident. 'Our store will remain closed today, and will reopen tomorrow after a meeting and blessing with our employees. Donald Trump and his former Republican presidential rival Ben Carson have both questioned plans to put abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. Mr Trump, fresh off a thumping primary win in New York, said the move was 'pure political correctness', while Mr Carson, who is now a campaign surrogate for the billionaire echoed his sentiment. 'I think Harriet Tubman is fantastic,' Mr Trump said during a town hall event broadcast live on NBC's 'Today' show, but 'I would love to leave Andrew Jackson and see if we can maybe come up with another denomination. Scroll down for video New face: Donald Trump and Ben Carson have both questioned plans to put abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill (pictured) Not worthy? Carson said Andrew Jackson, who is currently on the bill (above), should not be moved due to a redesign as he was 'a tremendous president' Lesser spotted: Thomas Jefferson features on the $2 bill, which is rarely seen in circulation 'Maybe we do the $2 bill or we do another bill.' 'I don't like seeing it,' he added. 'Yes, I think it's pure political correctness.' Trump defended Andrew Jackson, the former US president and father of the Democratic Party, despite his history as a slave-owner. 'Pure political correctness': Mr Trump, pictured at an NBC Town Hall at the Today Show this morning, suggested Tubman might be better on the $2 bill Jackson is also reviled by descendants of American Indians as the architect of an Indian removal policy in 1838 and 1839 that required the migration of native tribes in a forced march that killed than 10,000 an event known as the Trail of Tears. The seventh U.S. president also, however, was the only American leader to be held as a prisoner of war, the only one to retire the entire national debt, and the first to be targeted for assassination. 'Andrew Jackson had a great history,' Trump argued on Thursday, 'and I think it's very rough when you take somebody off the bill. Andrew Jackson had a record of tremendous success for the country ... and really represented somebody that really was very important to this country.' Mr Carson meanwhile told Fox Business: 'I love Harriet Tubman. I love what she did, but we can find another way to honor her. Maybe a $2 bill. 'Andrew Jackson... was a tremendous president. I mean, Andrew Jackson was the last president who actually balanced the federal budget, where we had no national debt.' Republican Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, has also voiced his unhappiness at President Jackson being displaced. 'United States history is not Andrew Jackson versus Harriet Tubman,' he said in a statement. 'It is Andrew Jackson and Harriet Tubman, both heroes of a nation's work in progress towards great goals. 'It is unnecessary to diminish Jackson in order to honor Tubman. Jackson was the first common man to be elected president. He fought to save the Union. He defined an American era. He helped found the Democratic Party. And he was a great Tennessean.' Ted Cruz, Mr Trump's closest rival for the Republican nomination, has yet to comment on Tubman but came close to predicting it as far back as September. When asked which woman he'd like to see on the $10 bill, he suggested keeping Alexander Hamilton and bumping Jackson for civil rights figure Rosa Parks. The redesign of the $20 note, announced by Jack Lew, the Treasury Secretary, on Wednesday, signals the first time an African-American has featured on a US paper note. It will see Mr Jackson moved to the back of the bill, with Miss Tubman on the front. Thomas Jefferson is currently on the lesser spotted $2 bill. Mr Carson (left) added that Miss Tubman (right), an African-American who helped rescue slaves, should instead be put on a $2 note Miss Tubman was born into slavery in the early part of the 19th century but managed to escape. She then used the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad to transport other slaves to freedom. THE HISTORY OF WOMEN ON U.S. BILLS The last woman featured on U.S. paper money was Martha Washington, who was on a dollar silver certificate from 1891 to 1896. The only other woman ever featured on U.S. paper money was Pocahontas, from 1865 to 1869. Susan Anthony and Sacagawea are on dollar coins. Advertisement After the Civil War, Miss Tubman, who died in 1913, became active in the campaign for women's suffrage. The change comes after the treasury announced plans to replace Alexander Hamilton, the nation's first secretary of the treasury, on the $10 bill with a woman. They decided to keep Mr Hamilton after both supporters and women's groups championed for the $20 bill to be changed to incorporate a woman instead. A group called Women on 20s then organized a survey to select an appropriate figure. Over the course of 10 weeks, the group collected 600,000 votes and Miss Tubman came out on top. Civil rights hero Rosa Parks, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Wilma Mankiller - the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation - were among some of the other popular figures in the vote. The $5 bill will also undergo change. The illustration of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the will be redesigned to feature civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., who gave his famous 'I have a dream' speech on the steps of the memorial in 1963. It will also include Marian Anderson and Eleanor Roosevelt. Anderson, an African-American opera singer, gave a concert at the memorial in 1939 after she had been blocked from singing at the then-segregated Constitution Hall. The Lincoln Memorial concert was arranged by Mrs. Roosevelt. The $10 bill is the next note on Treasury's redesign calendar, and it aims introduce updated protections against counterfeiting. That redesign was scheduled to be unveiled in 2020, which marks the 100th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote. Lew had often cited that connection as a reason to put a woman on the $10 bill. Tubman's presence on the bill may be down to the efforts of Sofia, an 11-year-old girl from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sofia wrote to Barack Obama in 2014 after a school project on historic American heroes. 'I realized no women had their face on our currency, so I went home and wrote the letter,' she told WCVB. The schoolgirl demanded to know why there were no women on US bills, as 'if there were no women, there wouldn't be men'. She added that there were 'many women could be on dollars/ coins for the United States because of the important things they have done', and even provided a list of suggestions which included Emily Dickinson, Abigail Adams, Michelle Obama and Harriet Tubman. A man charged with attempting to record a seven-year-old girl while she was using a public toilet has avoided jail. Benjamin Douglas Faulkner, 30, was confronted by the girl's mother in the unisex toilet after the girl noticed a 'big hairy hand' directing a mobile phone at her toilet cubicle. However, the man denied he was trying to film the girl, the court heard. However, when the mother noticed Faulkner at the same toilet six months later and called police,The Courier Mail reported. Faulkner pleaded guilty to one charge of attempting to record a seven-year-old girl in breach of privacy and six charges of recording people in 2014. A seven-year-old girl noticed a 'hand' holding a mobile phone in her cubicle at a public toilet (stock image) Faulkner was handed a sentence of two years probation in the Brisbane District Court after judge Brendan Butler found the invasion of his victims' privacy had been 'significant' but that his motive was unclear. The court heard that police discovered multiple videos of six people in toilets on Faulkner's mobile phone. Judge Butler told Faulkner the confrontation with the girl's mother should have been enough to deter him from committing the offence again - but he went on to record six other people. Benjamin Douglas Faulkner, now 30, pleaded guilty to recording six other people in the toilets (stock image) Faulkner - who appeared in the Brisbane District Court on Wednesday - has avoided serving time behind bars The judge said the man's motive was still unclear as the camera only captured the victims' legs (stock image) Judge Butler said the motive behind the recording was still unclear because Faulkner's camera only captured his victims' legs from below the thigh. 'It's not possible to draw an inference that it was sexual because the vision that you took, from what I've been told, does not show sexual organs of these people,' he said. 'It may have been that you simply had a curiosity for some reason about the acts and activities of people going to the toilet.' A 'career criminal' has been charged in connection with the murder of a beloved Florida priest who spent his life trying to help prisoners rebuild their lives. Steve James Murray, 28, of Jacksonville, Florida, was arrested on Wednesday after he was spotted driving a Toyota Corolla that belonged to the missing Rev Rene Wayne Robert. He has been charged with firearms possession in Florida as he awaits extradition to Georgia, where 71-year-old Roberts' body was found. There, he will likely be charged with murder. Rev Robert, who has spent years counseling ex-cons and also teaches blind children, was reported missing on April 12 after not showing up for an appointment in his home of St Augustine, Florida. His body was found 260 miles away in woodland near Waynesboro, Georgia, on Monday night. Steve Murray, 28, (left) of Jacksonville, Florida, was arrested on Wednesday after he was spotted driving a Toyota Corolla that belonged to the missing Rev Rene Wayne Robert, (right) who was found dead on Monday It is believed Robert, a Roman Catholic priest for the Diocese of St Augustine, was trying to help Murray, who was recently arrested for fleeing law enforcement. Police apprehended Murray on Monday night in South Carolina after he was spotted driving the priest's Toyota Corolla. Murray allegedly sped up his car, engaging in a chase, then abandoned the vehicle and fled on foot. Inside the car, police found stacks of firearms and several BB guns, as well as jewelry, cash, medication and merchandise that had been reported stolen. Soon after, they received a call from a family nearby who said the suspect pictured in TV reports was knocking on their door asking to come in. Police raced to the home and soon found Murray nearby. After his arrest, Murray was interviewed then led police to the woodland, where they found Robert's body. Authorities believe the suspect kidnapped the priest, took him to Georgia in his own car and killed him there, but the motive for the slaying remains unclear. Robert's body was found 260 miles away in woodland (pictured) near Waynesboro, Georgia, on Monday night Members of the congregation that Rev Robert was part of pray at a vigil before he was found dead Community members paid tribute to Rev Robert and his tendency to help anyone who came his way It's believed that Robert was introduced to Murray by a young woman the priest had been counseling. St. Johns County Sheriff David Shoar in Florida called Murray a 'career criminal.' He was released from the Duval County Jail in Jacksonville on April 6 following a March 22 arrest for operating a vehicle with a suspended license. Shoar said Murray also broke into homes in South Carolina before his arrest, and was found with multiple guns including a rifle with a scope. Before Robert was found dead, his sister told News4Jax that she feared his tendency to help people had got him into trouble. 'No matter who you are, he would help you,' she told the network. 'And I think that's how it's gotten him into trouble a little bit.' As Britain celebrates Her Majesty The Queen's 90th birthday, it has emerged that the royal throne could have looked rather different today had a Machiavellian 1930s Cabinet plot been approved. According to a never-seen-before Cabinet document, there had been proposals for King Edward VIII's mother to become regent instead of his younger brother, George VI, taking to the throne. The handwritten document proposed that Queen Mary would rule without becoming the sovereign, with the now Queen Elizabeth's glamorous uncle Prince George, Duke of Kent, later becoming king. If the plan had gone ahead, it would have meant that today The Queen would be languishing on the sidelines of the royal family, probably known as the Duchess of Edinburgh. Meanwhile, her children - Charles, Anne, Andrew and Edward - would also be on the fringes. According to a never-seen-before Cabinet document, there had been proposals for King Edward VIII's mother to become regent instead of his younger brother, George VI, before Edward's other brother Prince George, Duke of Kent, took to the throne. If it had gone ahead, it would have meant the Queen would be on the sidelines The document proposed that Queen Mary (pictured with King George V) would rule without becoming the sovereign, with the now Queen Elizabeth's glamorous uncle Prince George, Duke of Kent, later becoming king Sir Maurice Gwyer, the first parliamentary counsel, and Sir Horace Wilson planned for Queen Mary to become regent in an attempt to get Prince George, Duke of Kent (pictured with wife Marina) on the throne eventually Her Majesty's grandchildren, William and Harry, would not be princes and would likely be commoners with day jobs, while the Duke of Cambridge's wife, Kate, and their two young children, George and Charlotte, would be relative unknowns. The two-page Cabinet document, revealed in an article by Christopher Wilson published in The Times, which sought to change the royal landscape after King Edward VIII fled the country in pursuit of love, was written by a civil servant. Sir Maurice Gwyer, the first parliamentary counsel, penned the letter to Sir Horace Wilson who advised the then prime minister Stanley Baldwin in 1936 just before King Edward VIII's abdication. In the note, he offered 'a suggestion so interesting and hopeful I pass it on to you at once. It is that Queen Mary should be invited to be Queen Regent'. He went on: 'The difficulty about the immediate 'succession' of the Duke of York is that a substantial part of the country might still favour the present King and see his brother as a sort of interloper. 'Queen Mary as Regent would re-establish the reputation of the monarchy. The Duke of York could scarcely object and all the King's subjects would only rejoice to see Queen Mary carrying on again.' He was among several within the Cabinet and close to the throne who did not believe the former King's younger brother, nicknamed Bertie, was monarch material and up to the demands of kingship. George V's doctor, Sir Stanley Hewett, said: 'The Duke of York is the worst of the four sons and has a mean character. Steady and reliable, but dull.' MP Sir Henry 'Chips' Channon also dismissed him as dull. Other senior courtiers thought of him as 'not naturally a likeable man'. If the plan had gone ahead, it would have meant that today The Queen (left yesterday, and right at her Coronation) would be languishing on the sidelines of the royal family, likely known as the Duchess of Edinburgh Her Majesty's grandchildren, William and Harry, would not be princes and would likely be commoners with day jobs, while the Duke of Cambridge's wife, Kate (pictured), and their children would also be relative unknowns How it might have looked: This diagram shows how the line of succession may have differed if the plan had been approved. As it was, George VI became King when Edward VIII abdicated and Elizabeth II later Queen Instead, they believed that Queen Mary aged 69 at the time would be the best-placed to take on the role. The former Princess Mary of Teck, known as May, had been an important part of George V's hugely successful 25-year reign and they believed she would step up to the position if asked. However, her becoming regent would only have been a 'holding position' under the proposals, with plans for King Edward VIII'S other brother, Prince George, Duke of Kent, the most popular candidate. He was married with a son and heir and while no record of the plan to put him on the throne exists, there has been a nod to the suggestion in a historic book by royal speechwriter Dermot Morrah. In The Work of The Queen, the academic wrote: 'It was certainly considered at this time whether, by agreement among the Royal Family, the crown might be settled on the Duke of Kent the only one of the abdicating King's brothers who had a son to become Prince of Wales, and so avoid laying so heavy a future burden upon the shoulders of any woman. 'The possibility of such a course was debated by some men of state who believed that it would accord with the wishes of the royal concerned.' It is thought Gwyer and Wilson are among 'some of the men' she referred to, as well as the then Cancellor, Neville Chamberlain, and Home Secretary Sir John Simon. Sir Maurice Gwyer (pictured right), the first parliamentary counsel, penned the letter to Sir Horace Wilson (left) who advised the then prime minister Stanley Baldwin in 1936 just before King Edward VIII's abdication As it was the plan never went ahead and George VI became King in 1936 when his brother abdicated to marry his love, Wallis Simpson. Elizabeth II later took on the role of Queen in 1952 when her father passed away, aged 56. She had just departed Britain for a tour of Australia via Kenya and was in the East African country when she learned of the news. She immediately flew back to the UK as Queen Elizabeth II and her coronation took place in Westminster Abbey on 2 June 1953, when she was just 25 years old. While news of the previous plot by senior politicians and Cabinet members to appoint Queen Mary to the throne is somewhat surprising, it is not the first time plans have been drawn up to alter the succession of the monarchy. In 2014 it emerged that Queen Elizabeth II personally intervened to ensure that Prince Philip rather than Princess Margaret would have acted as regent if she had died in the early years of her reign. In July 1953, just a month after her Coronation, the Queen lobbied for a change in the law to prevent her sister ever becoming regent, Government papers show. Under the terms of the Regency Act 1937, had the Queen died or become incapacitated, Prince Charles would have succeeded her. But as he was just four years old in 1953, Princess Margaret would have taken over as regent until he was 18. Files obtained under Freedom of Information laws show that the Queen's suggested change caused considerable discussion in the then Government, and that the Queen wished to see the change to the law brought in as soon as possible. If Prince George, Duke of Kent, had taken to the throne - as proposed in Gwyer and Wilson's Cabinet document - he would have been succeeded by the Duke of Kent (pictured in uniform) and the Earl of St Andrews (left) Queen Elizabeth II (left) lobbied to change the law in 1953, so Prince Philip (rear) would take over as regent instead of her sister Princess Margaret (centre) in the event of her death until Prince Charles was older Some Ministers were worried the public might regard any changes as an affront to the Queen's younger sister. They were also worried about the timing of any new legislation, given continued speculation about Princess Margaret's private life. At the time she was involved in a romance with RAF Group Captain Peter Townsend, who was considered an unsuitable husband for her because he was divorced and a commoner. One document that details a Cabinet discussion of July 6, 1953, expressed the fear that 'if the Bill were introduced at this juncture, it might give rise to controversy owing to the publicity given by certain newspapers to reports linking the name of Princess Margaret with that of a commoner recently divorced'. The Government's preferred option was to delay the new legislation until the autumn, during the Queen's planned tour of the Commonwealth. Ministers hoped that speculation about Princess Margaret's private life would have died down by then. But the documents show that the Queen did not want to wait. At a Cabinet discussion on July 8, it was reported that 'the Home Secretary [Sir David Maxwell Fyfe] said the Queen's Private Secretary had also spoken emphatically to him in favour of immediate legislation'. Significantly, the files stress that the Queen's position had the full support of Princess Margaret. A briefing note for a Commonwealth Heads of Government summit held in London on June 5, 1953, stated: 'The Queen's wish in this matter was shared by other members of the Royal Family, and in particular, by Princess Margaret.' Prime Minister Winston Churchill backed the Palace's view that the change in the law should not be delayed, although his ability to influence matters was limited because a month earlier he had suffered a stroke. In a memo dated July 8, 1953, Churchill was dismissive of the concern over press coverage, writing: 'The world does not come to an end because there is a caterwaul for two or three days... I am for going ahead and am only sorry I cannot take an active part in the dispute.' A farmer has pleaded not guilty to the murder of an environmental officer who was shot in the neck, chased for nearly an hour and then killed with a single shot. Mr Turner was shot on a public road at Croppa Creek, near Moree in northern NSW on July 29, 2014. Ian Turnbull, 81, denied the offence at his NSW Supreme Court trial in Sydney on Thursday. He pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Mr Turner but that plea has been rejected by the Crown, according to The Daily Telegraph. Ian Turnball, 81, (pictured) pleaded not guilty to the murder of Glen Turner. However, he did plead guilty to manslaughter Glen Turner, 51, (pictured) died after being shot and then chased around his vehicle for 40 minutes before being shot again Mr Turner was shot on a public road at Croppa Creek, near Moree in northern NSW on July 29, 2014 Thursday marks the first day of Turnbull's NSW Supreme Court trial. Crown prosecutor Pat Barrett told jurors they would hear evidence that Turnbull began shooting Mr Turner without warning. On the night of the shooting, Mr Turner and another environmental officer, Robert Strange, were in the area investigating land clearing on other properties near to Mr Turnbull's own land. Crown Prosecutor Barrett told the jury pool that Mr Turner was hit first in the neck with a shot that nicked his artery, and as his colleague pleaded with Mr Turnbull to allow him to get medical help the farmer replied: 'The only way he's going is in a body bag.' A jury is to be empaneled according to The Daily Telegraph. On the night of the shooting, Mr Turner (pictured) and another environmental officer, Robert Strange, were in the area investigating land clearing Advertisement An old petrol station where former Prime Minister John Howard once earned his pocket-money working alongside his father Lyall is expected to sell for more than $4 million. The Dulwich HIll premises, on the corner of Ewart Street and Wardell Road, was first owned by Mr Howard's grandfather Walter in the 1930s before the business was taken over by his father. It was in fact one of two petrol stations owned and run by the Howard family in Sydney's inner west, not far from young John's schools - Earlwood Primary and Canterbury High. Now: The old Howard petrol station is now a workshop and is being sold with expectations of a $3.8-$4.2million price tag All four of the Howard boys were expected to work at the family business outside of their school commitments. Apart from the site of the old petrol station, which is now used as a workshop, there is an adjoining shop (269 Wardell) which is also up for sale. The teenage Mr Howard worked there on most weekends. In the 2007 biography, he was quoted as saying how much he looked forward to spending his Saturday and Sundays at the Dulwich Hill garage alongside his father and siblings. 'I thoroughly enjoyed working in that garage. I liked selling things, I liked serving petrol,' he recalled. Then: The corner premises as it was several years ago - it was sold in 1985 for $100,000 and then $2.3m almost 30 years later Former Prime Minister John Howard worked at the family petrol station as a young boy in the late 1940s and 1950s - he's pictured right with Queen Elizabeth II during a visit to Australia in 1992 Raine & Horne Marrickville agent Luke Smith told the Commercial Real Estate website that the location should attract plenty of buyer interest. 'Its not out of the question that a buyer or investor with an interest in owning a slice of Australian political history may line up on auction day, Mr Smith said. Sale records show it was bought in 2014 for $2.3 million, and was worth $100,000 in 1985. It is described in the listing as 'a great location to work and live with the eclectic inner west offering a choice of cool cafes, a wide variety of eateries and boutique shopping.' The site is just 100 metres from Dulwich Hill Train Station and the local light rail and 20 minutes from the Sydney CBD. A massive explosion has rocked a petrochemical plant in Mexico, killing 24 workers, injuring 136 and sending a cloud of toxic fumes into the sky. State Oil Company Pemex raised the toll late on Thursday from the 13 fatalities previously known and said eight workers remained missing. It also said 19 people remained hospitalized, with 13 of them in serious condition. In a statement, the company said 12 of the bodies had been identified and eight of them delivered to family members. The plant, on the Gulf of Mexico coast, produces vinyl chloride, a hazardous chemical used in the manufacture of PVC pipes. The blast on Wednesday afternoon, caused by an unknown leak, could be heard and felt six miles away and sent a huge toxin-filled cloud into the air. Local people watch toxic clouds billowing into the sky after the explosion at the Pemex petrochemical plant in Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz state. Around 2,000 people had to be evacuated The explosion occurred at 3.30pm local plant and authorities issued an alert to local people telling them to stay indoors because of the danger of chemicals in the air that could cause skin burns Medical orderlies from the Mexican Army take care of the first injured workers after an explosion at the Pemex petrochemical plant in Coatzacoalcos. Most of the injured were treated for minor burns Earlier on Thursday, President Enrique Pena Nieto toured the facility in the industrial port city of Coatzacoalcos and met with relatives desperate for word on the fate of loved ones still unaccounted for. 'I understand the anxiety, the worry, the anguish you are going through,' Pena Nieto said, assuring them that both Pemex and the Mexichem company, which co-operated the plant, would fulfill their responsibilities and compensate those hurt by the accident. Pemex said on Thursday night that it was prioritizing the safety of those inspecting the plant and teams were still gradually gaining access to more parts of the site. Jose Antonio Gonzalez Anaya, Pemex's director, told Radio Formula that the explosion was caused by a leak of an as-yet unknown origin. The governor of Veracruz state, Javier Duarte, said around 2,000 people had been evacuated from the area as a precaution. The Veracruz state health department said two patients were in a grave condition from burns to their air passages from toxic gases. Most of the other injured were being treated for minor burns and broken bones. Pemex, which has a poor record in safety, said the fire was under control by early evening. It said on its Twitter account: 'The cloud that emanated from the PMV plant in Coatzacoalcos is dissipating rapidly, which means it is losing its toxic effects.' A plume of smoke rises over the plant in Coatzacoalcos. Firefighters said they had the fire under control by early evening Relatives check the list of injured people at the Mexican Institute of Social Security hospital, following an explosion at the Pemex petrochemical plant in Coatzacoalcos Authorities issued an alert to the general population of Coatzacoalcos to refrain from leaving their homes due to the presence in the air of chemicals that could cause skin burns On Thursday about 30 families gathered at a plant entrance road, wearing facemasks to ward off the pungent odor. Shoving broke out as people unsuccessfully tried to force their way into the installation and shouted at marines and soldiers who were called in to guard the facility, and they threw rocks at a white government SUV when it arrived at the scene. Rosa Villalobos was scouring Coatzacoalcos hospitals for her son, Luis Alfonso Ruiz Villalobos, a 25-year-old worker at the plant. When she couldn't find him she showed up at the plant entrance. 'What I want is for justice to be done in my son's case, for there to be no impunity,' Villalobos said. 'I'm going to stay here. Even though I have no money, even though I have nothing to eat, I'm staying put.' Some volunteers brought food and drink to the families. After a while authorities began taking people inside in small groups to see a list of those confirmed dead - some were left crying after seeing their loved ones' names. A security guard protects a convenience store that was damaged by the shock waves of the explosion at the Pemex petrochemical plant in Coatzacoalcos Smoke billows from the Pajaritos petrochemical plant in Veracruz state. A government minister and the boss of Pemex visited the site in the wake of the accident Relatives wait outside the Mexican Institute of Social Security hospital, following the explosion at the plant in Coatzacoalcos. Pemex has suffered a series of accidents in recent years There have been a number of accidents in recent years at facilities owned by Pemex. In February a fire killed a worker at the same facility in Coatzacoalcos. Two people were killed and eight injured in a fire at an offshore Pemex platform in the Gulf of Mexico in February. Back in 2012 an explosion at a Pemex gas plant in Tamaulipas state killed 26 people and in 2013 an explosion at the company's head office in Mexico City killed 37 people. Antonio Mariche, who accompanied the Villalobos family in search of Luis Alfonso, vowed that the families would demand a full account of what happened. 'To the president, to the state governor, to the head of Pemex, we will not allow any more cover-ups like have happened with previous accidents,' Mariche said. 'They have covered up the numbers (in the past); there have been people who disappeared and regrettably never appeared... We will go to the last consequences to make sure this doesn't keep happening.' Workers with special breathing gear are pictured evacuating the area. Mexico has a large oil and gas industry and produces significant amounts of petrochemicals, much of which is exported to the U.S. Emergency team members work at the petrochemical complex, which produces vinyl chloride, a hazardous chemical which is used in the manufacture of PVC pipes Hundreds of residents were evacuated from the area around the plant after the explosion. Pemex later claimed the fire was under control and the toxic fumes had dissipated At least 11 people were charged with drug offences and more are expected It is alleged two men drove the estimated $2.5 million of the drug interstate Further raids in Brisbane and Sunshine Coast uncovered another 210 kgs Gold Coast Police intercepted a car containing 90kgs of ice on Wednesday Police have uncovered an estimated $2.5 million in cannabis in a number of coordinated drug raids overnight. Officers on Queensland's Gold Coast intercepted a car on Wednesday night containing 90 kilograms of the drug, prompting coordinated raids in Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast which seized a further 210 kilograms of cannabis and a small quantity of ice. It is alleged the two men in the vehicle drove over the border with the intention of selling what police estimate to be $2.5 million worth of cannabis in Queensland. Police have uncovered an estimated $2.5 million in cannabis in a number of coordinated drug raids overnight A total of 11 people have been charged with drug offences following the raids, with possibly more to come. Detective Inspector Stephen Blanchfield said the two men found with the 90-kilogram haul were believed to be 'significant players' in the Gold Coast cannabis market. 'We think we have certainly made a significant impact on an organised criminal association,' he said. 'We see this as a particularly big win.' The syndicate is not believed to be affiliated with outlaw motorcycle gangs. Det Insp Blanchfield said police would consider charging the group under the controversial VLAD laws, even though they were under review following recommendations from retired Supreme Court justice Alan Wilson this month. 'That legislation is still current and we will use it if it's available to us,' he said. If convicted, each offender could face an additional 15 years behind bars. The arrests were part of Operation Goldensilk, a 12-month investigation by the major and organised crime squad. Officers on Queensland's Gold Coast intercepted a car on Wednesday night containing 90 kilograms of the drug Coordinated raids in Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast which seized a further 210 kilograms of cannabis and a small quantity of ice Advertisement The violence of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake left countless towns and villages across central Nepal in a shambles. Almost one year later, a shambles they remain. The country has made almost no progress in rebuilding hundreds of thousands of homes, schools and government buildings, as well as some 600 historical structures, including ancient Hindu and Buddhist temples, monuments and palaces. Nearly a million children still have no school to attend. Millions of villagers were forced to winter in flimsy pop-up tents and corrugated tin shacks, erected haphazardly at high altitudes and across the rolling plains. Then: People look at the debris of one of the oldest temples in Kathmandu, Nepal one day after the devastating earthquake in April, 2015 Now: A person looks at the same place in March this year, where the debris has simply been piled up and only some of it removed The government's reconstruction agency has so far approved zero projects. Some citizens have started rebuilding on their own, but most are still waiting either because they are afraid of running afoul of new, promised building regulations, or because they still hope to receive government grants. Many of them are still living in rows of temporary shelters made from salvaged wood covered with corrugated metal sheets that are likely to be their only protection when rainy reason returns in two months. 'This has been home for all of us for the past year and it looks like we are going to be here for a long time. All we hear is the government is going to give us money to rebuild our homes, but when is that going to happen? Our kids are getting sick and we have no money, job or a government that is going to come to our rescue,' said Keshar Narayan, a farmer living with eight family members in a tin shed on the outskirts of Kathmandu. The government was quick to promise help after the April 25, 2015, earthquake, which killed nearly 9,000 people, but a year later only a few families in Dolkha district have begun to get the money. They have each received 50,000 rupees (325), the first installment of the 200,000 rupees promised by the government to each family who lost their home. Dolkha was among the hardest-hit districts and the epicenter of another major quake that struck May 12. Lives destroyed: A woman is pictured having salvaged some of her belongings from a damaged house in Khokana, Lalitpur, shortly after the quake, which destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes, schools and government buildings Little effort: The government has made almost no progress in rebuilding the country, with its 'reconstruction agency' failing to approve even one building project Trashed: Kathmandu's 10th-century Durbar Square palace is pictured just hours after the earthquake on April 25 last year Work in progress: Bricks, stones and splintered wood collected from the rubble in Durbar Square palace remain in storage until architectural experts can sort through them and put them back in place A man walks through destruction in Bhaktapur, on the eastern outskirts of Kathmandu two days after the earthquake The same road is seen a year later, cleared of debris, however, a famous palace in the town still remains in ruins As they wait for help, even prayer can be dangerous. Many in the deeply spiritual Himalayan nation seek comfort in now-ramshackle stone temples left standing askew, sometimes held up just by wooden beams. 'Every time I come to pray in the temples, I am not sure if I will even leave in one piece. We have to risk our lives just so we can pray,' housewife Shanti Shrestha said in Kathmandu while holding her temple offering of a stick of burning incense and a marigold flower. 'We all are very angry ... for a year nothing has been done.' The lack of progress isn't for want of money. Nepal, facing an estimated $6.6 billion reconstruction bill, has received $4.1 billion in pledged donations so far. The problem, officials and aid workers say, is tangled bureaucracy and government malaise. Some frustrated donors have simply given up. 'We just lost a donor who wanted to give $400,000,' said UNESCO's representative to Nepal, Christian Manhart. 'Everything seems to be blocked because there are very lengthy government procedures.' The UNESCO office alone has about $1.8 million budgeted for Nepal, still waiting to be spent. The government has been embroiled in political infighting while facing months of ethnic protests in which more than 50 people were killed. Since the earthquake, there has been a change of government and a new constitution that took seven years to craft. It took nearly nine months for Nepal just to set up a department to deal with quake reconstruction. But there are still no guidelines for how to approach the task. It also isn't clear which buildings are even being considered for reconstruction funds. A Buddhist monk salvages a statue of a Buddhist deity from a monastery around the famous Swayambhunath Stupa after the earthquake Many of the small Buddhist temples, stupas and monasteries surrounding the Swayambhunath shrine lie in ruins. One of its damaged dome-shaped stupas, Tashi Golma, remains covered in wire mesh and corrugated tin to protect it from deteriorating further and from theft Damage done: A square in Katrhmandu is seen a week after the earthquake, with one sole surviving Buddha statue in the foreground A man lights butter lamp in front of the Buddha Statues at the same place seen in February this year as it is reported that millions of Nepalese have been forced winter in flimsy pop-up tents and corrugated tin shacks and still have no hope of getting a new home A Nepalese law requiring that government contracts go to the lowest bidder is also a problem, said Suresh Suras Shrestha, head of the world conservation section at the government's Department of Archaeology, which is charge of monuments and heritage sites. The lowest bidder may not have the skills or knowledge to take on structures dating back to the 5th or 6th century. 'The donors who want to rebuild our monuments need to follow our rules and procedures,' Suresh Suras Shrestha said. They will also have to keep waiting to find out what those rules and procedures are. The Department of Archaeology has defended its efforts, noting that its workers have reinforced some buildings that weren't heavily damaged. It has also opened the public bidding process for 39 projects, and expects about $20 million in funding to be released for the first phase of work once the contracts are finalized. There is no clear indication of when that might happen. Restoring all monuments is expected to cost about $200 million. 'The politicians just don't care about our temples. If the king was still ruling these temples and palaces would have already been built,' Hindu priest Ram Singh said, referring to the monarchs who acted as guardians of Nepal's monuments until the monarchy was abolished in 2008. Piles of crumbling red brick are all that remain of the four-story Kastamandap, the 10th-century temple from which the capital of Kathmandu got its name. Just to the east of that, hundreds of devotees still visit the temple palace of the Kumari, a girl revered by both Hindus and Buddhists as a living goddess, though its brick walls are precariously propped up by dozens of wooden beams. The Kumari, who continues to live in the temple palace, is among dozens of girls who have held the honor for the past four centuries; each steps aside once she reaches puberty. Some 600 historical structures, including ancient Hindu and Buddhist temples, monuments and palaces, including Bhaktapur Durbar Square in Kathmandu were destroyed in the quake A Buddhist monk stands at the same place, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, after the rubbles were removed in March this year Lost Heritage: Residents in Bhaktapur, pictured after the quake, are already rebuilding a 17th-century temple to the Hindu god Vishnu, relying on volunteer labor and funds What is holding them back? The UNESCO office alone has about $1.8 million budgeted for Nepal, still waiting to be spent Bricks, stones and splintered wood collected from the rubble left by the collapse of Kathmandu's 10th-century Durbar Square palace remain in storage until architectural experts can sort through them and put them back in place. Nothing has been done to fix the damaged palace in the medieval town of Bhaktapur, east of the capital. Many of the small Buddhist temples, stupas and monasteries surrounding the 5th-century hilltop shrine of Swayambhunath lie in ruins. It is also called the 'monkey shrine' for the thousands of monkeys that congregate on the spot at the northwest edge of Kathmandu. One of its damaged dome-shaped stupas, Tashi Golma, remains covered in wire mesh and corrugated tin to protect it from deteriorating further and from theft. In Nepal, where majority of the people are Hindu, these monuments and temples are important for cultural, religious and historical reasons. People visit temples regularly and go there for festivals, weddings and coming-of-age ceremonies. Tired of waiting for government help, some local officials and communities are doing what they can on their own. Residents of Bhaktapur are already rebuilding a 17th-century temple to the Hindu god Vishnu, relying on volunteer labor and funds. It's unclear how much it will cost, said local heritage department official Ram Govind Shrestha, but local officials plan to solicit donations and start charging tourists for visiting. He had no children and was divorced so was not eligible for benefits Doherty was killed in the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Libya The CIA is expanding survivor benefits for agency employees and contractors killed in the line of duty overseas in acts of terrorism. The change is retroactive to 1983 and was applauded Wednesday by Barbara Doherty, the mother of Glen Doherty, a CIA operative killed in the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Libya. The CIA has agreed to pay a death benefit even though the family was not entitled under a standard federal insurance policy Glen Doherty held that pays a survivor benefit only to spouses and dependents. Scroll down for video The CIA is expanding survivor benefits for agency employees and contractors killed in the line of duty overseas in acts of terrorism. One such victim was Glen Doherty (pictured) The change was applauded by Barbara Doherty (right), mother of Glen. While sister Kate Quigley (left) said she had been waiting for this day to come Doherty was killed in the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Libya (pictured) The family will receive $400, 000 from the spy agency under the newly-revealed program. They have been pressuring the government to expand Doherty's benefits, which has gained support from members Congress. Barbara Doherty issued a family statement calling the expanded benefit 'symbolic justice.' Her son was killed, along with three other Americans, in the attack on the facility in Benghazi. He was divorced and had no children. The CIA said in a statement that the expanded benefit reflects a statutory change enacted last December and applies to survivors of all federal employees, including contractors, killed overseas in the line of duty and as a result of terrorism. It is retroactive to April 18, 1983, the date a suicide attacker crashed a truck into the front of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans, some of whom were CIA officers. Tyrone Woods, a fellow CIA contractor and former SEAL who was killed alongside Doherty in Benghazi, had a wife and child. CIA Director John Brennan (right) was urged by sister Quigley to 'try and figure out a way to make this work' U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens (right) and State Department computer specialist Sean Smith (left) were also killed in the Benghazi attack. They would have been eligible for death benefits, but the new program will provide additional financial assistance, according to ABC. U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and State Department computer specialist Sean Smith were also killed in the Benghazi attack. Kate Quigley, Doherty's sister, told ABC the family was 'thrilled' when they got the call from the CIA on Monday and that they had been waiting for this day for a long time. She added that they were happy not just because of what ti means for their family but for all the other families who will be helped as a direct result. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said in a written statement: 'We will never forget the sacrifice Glen Doherty made defending our nation, and this benefit for the Doherty family honors that courage and service. 'It is only right that the Doherty family and all the families who've lost loved ones oversees are fully compensated and honored for their heroism... I thank the CIA for honoring Glen Doherty, who served our nation so bravely, with the benefits that his family deserves.' A mother has described the horrifying moment a hoverboard exploded and caught fire in her children's bedroom. Shefa Kabah called for the product to be banned after one burst into flames while being charged in her home in Bankstown, south-west of Sydney. 'The board was throwing metal parts around the room. The bed, everything else was catching on fire,' Ms Kabah said, the ABC reports. Scroll down for video A mother has described the horrifying moment a hoverboard (pictured) exploded and caught fire in her children's bedroom 'The smoke went through all my lungs and it was a horrible thing.' Ms Kabah added she does not think that model of hoverboard should be allowed to be sold in Australia, saying she 'can't believe' it is on shelves. Fire and Rescue New South Wales Superintendent Jeremy Fewtrell said it was the fifth fire linked to a dodgy hoverboard in New South Wales this year, and that it was 'very lucky' Ms Kabah was awake when the fire started and able to tackle it. It comes after a family home in Melbourne was almost burnt to the ground in a fire started by a hoverboard earlier this year. This hoverboard was being charged in a children's bedroom in Sydney's west when it exploded, Fire and Rescue NSW said Shefa Kabah (pictured) called for the hoverboard to be banned after it burst into flames while being charged in her home in Bankstown 'The board (pictured) was throwing metal parts around the room. The bed, everything else was catching on fire,' Ms Kabah said The fire in January sparked a state-wide investigation into businesses selling 'dodgy', unsafe, recalled models of the toy, with authorities inspecting all business that sell hoverboards, including online stores. Victoria's Consumer Affairs Minister Jane Garrett reminded toy retailers and peak industry bodies of their responsibilities. 'These toys are very popular but they are also dangerous and could have devastating consequences if they are dodgy or aren't used properly,' Ms Garrett said. 'I have instructed Consumer Affairs Victoria to conduct an immediate blitz across the state to make sure we don't have a tragedy.' A family home in Melbourne was almost burnt to the ground in a fire started by a hoverboard in January Plastic surgeons across the nation have joined a growing trend of using the social media app Snapchat to broadcast their procedures to a wider audience. In what appears to be a unique way of utilizing social media, doctors are finding internet fame after posting photos of their graphic procedures, as well as before-and-after photos on the app and later sharing them on Instagram. The doctors all ask permission from patients before they take photos and videos during the surgeries. Doctors, including New York plastic surgeon Dr Matthew Schulman, are using Snapchat to photos of their graphic procedures, as well as before-and-after photos Dr Michael Salzhauer (right), who goes by the moniker Dr Miami and has attracted over a quarter of a million fans with his Snapchat posts Dr Schulman says he uses other forms of social media like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook as educational tools and a marketing platform Perhaps the most famous of the plastic surgeons is Dr Michael Salzhauer, who goes by the moniker Dr Miami and has attracted over a quarter of a million fans with his candid snaps of nose jobs, thigh lifts and bum boosts. Speaking to Vice last year, Dr Miami, who has worked in the profession for over two decades, said the online portfolio has helped boost his business. 'This wouldn't work for me if I was just opening up my practice. It just wouldn't. But, of course it's had an effect on the business,' the 43-year-old said. 'I was pretty busy anyway, but now I'm crazy busy. I'm booked until the end of next May. Every single day. It's like, a thousand people, paid and signed up for surgery for the foreseeable future'. Giving an honest account of cosmetic surgery procedures, blood, bruising and scarring is clear to see in the images. Another who has found internet fame is New York plastic surgeon Dr Matthew Schulman. Lexington Plastic Surgeons is among the famed offices using Snapchat and Instagram to explain procedures and show before-and-after photos Dr Schulman said he has every patient sign a consent form allowing him to use photos and videos of their procedures and before-and-after photos Lexington Plastic Surgeons, which has been featured on Dr Oz, features several before-and-after photos on their Instagram page 'I was always looking for a way to broadcast my surgeries and get it out there, and interact with patients and future patients,' Schulman, 42, told FoxNews.com. 'I started [using Snapchat] about a year ago.' Though Snapchat first found fame by allowing users to share video clips and photos for ten seconds or less before they disappear, in 2013 the story feature was introduced. Photos and videos - still in increments of ten seconds or less - can be shared for 24 hours on the app before they vanish. 'I think that's what revolutionized things for me as a plastic surgeon,' Schulman, who has been practicing plastic surgery for ten years, told Fox News. Schulman said that about 90 percent of his 35 to 40 surgery patients per month allow him to broadcast their procedures on Snapchat. He said he has 'several hundred thousand' followers and sees about 450,000 views daily. 'Any surgeries that I do I will broadcast,' said Schulman, whose Snapchat handle is nycplasticsurg. 'I traditionally do breast and body surgeries. We also broadcast non-surgical procedures like Botox fillers, facials and chemical peels.' Snapchat photos from Dr Schulman's office, which goes under the name nycplasticsurg, is used as an informative tool for current and potential future patients Some videos and photos, like the one above from Lexington Plastic Surgeons, show doctors in real-time operating on patients He said he uses other forms of social media like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook as educational tools and a marketing platform. 'I'd say about 80 to 85 percent of the people who come in for a consultation are active followers on Snapchat,' he said. Schulman has patients sign a consent form prior to their surgery in which they detail where and how he can use the footage from his procedure and if he can share before and after photos online. Most patients ask him to conceal identifying features so they can remain anonymous. Schulman said that the idea of plastic surgeons using Snapchat is gaining momentum and will be even more popular in the future. 'I think plastic surgeons are recognizing it's an important social media platform, but I don't think every plastic surgeon has the patience or the desire to do this because it does take some effort,' he said. Other plastic surgeons who have found internet fame include Dr Motykie, of Hollywood, and Lexington Plastic Surgeons, founded by Dr Michael Jones, as seen on Dr Oz. Many of the doctors who use social media as a platform believe the trend will continue to rise. Pictured above, a doctor from Lexington Plastic Surgeons interacts with a patient It was four kilometres below the surface of the southern Indian Ocean The 'towfish' was recovered nearly a month after it went missing An underwater sonar device lost while scouring the southern Indian Ocean floor for missing flight MH370 has been recovered almost a month after it went missing. The 'Towfish,' a yellow torpedo-shaped device, which scans the seabed for debris was the second sonar device to be lost in three months, reported NBC News. The tool collected on Monday, almost four kilometres below the sea surface, was found to be in good condition and floating above the seafloor. A remotely-operated underwater vehicle looking in water depths of 3700 metres located and recovered the missing equipment The SL Hydrospheric SLH-ProSAS-60, which was attached to an 1,800-pound weight to prevent it from floating, was lost when a connector on the to towing cable attached to a search ship failed. The depressor weight was found to be nose-down and partly buried in sediment. 'The equipment will be examined and tested, and then the vessel will return to the search area,' federal transport minister Darren Chester said on Wednesday. A remotely-operated underwater vehicle was used to locate and recover the missing equipment in water depths of 3700 metres. An underwater Sonar device, known as the 'Towfish' was recovered from the sea bed of the Southern Indian Ocean The Australian Transport Safety Bureau also confirmed two objects that could be from the Malaysia Airlines flight, found in South Africa and east of Mauritius on Rodrigues Island, arrived in Australia last week. The South African find has part of a Rolls Royce logo on it while the Rodrigues Island discovery could be the first piece of interior debris from the Boeing 777. Authorities recently confirmed two pieces of debris found in Mozambique were 'almost certainly' from MH370, given unique stencilling on both fragments. The search has now covered more than 100,000sq km of seafloor, with only 20,000sq km left to be scoured. The Australian, Malaysian and Chinese governments have agreed the search area will not be expanded if no new credible information is uncovered between now and when the search ends in mid 2016. A Muslim woman who once idolised Osama Bin Laden and dreamed of being one of his wives has told of how she could have potentially become a terrorist under certain circumstances, but was able to walk away from radical Islam. Aisha Novakovich, who had a poster of Bin Laden on her bedroom wall as a teenager in country South Australia, decided to start wearing a niqab - or full face veil - with gloves when she was 14 for spiritual reasons. Ms Novakovich, now 32, said her mother, who is Indonesian and a Muslim, was aghast with her decision but she persisted with wearing a niqab for seven years. Scroll down for video Aisha Novakovich, who had a poster of Osama Bin Laden on her bedroom wall in Perth as a teenager, has told of how she could have become a terrorist but was able to walk away from radical Islam 'My mother hated it and said I was becoming a fanatic. It also made my sisters uncomfortable in public,' she said. 'But I donned it for spiritual reasons. Later, it became a marker of difference in the face of discrimination, and I wore it proudly at university. 'People experimented with sex, drugs and alcohol - I put the niqab on, that was my form of rebelling.' Ms Novakovich said as she went through her teenage years and university, she was determined to learn the political systems of the West so she could challenge them from within. 'I believed the argument that the only way Muslims could gain any respect in global politics was to set up a caliphate,' she said. 'Eventually, I started to flirt with ways I could leave Australia to join the fight against foreign oppressors and work towards establishing a just caliphate. 'Given different circumstances and times, I might have joined a terrorist organisation when I was younger.' Aisha, pictured with her newborn son and a friend's daughter in 2003, decided to start wearing a niqab - or full face veil - with gloves when she was 14 for spiritual reasons Aisha, who has lived in Australia since she was six weeks old, was born to a Yugoslav Greek Orthodox father and an Indonesian Muslim mother Ms Novakovich, now 32, said her mother, who is Indonesian and a Muslim, was aghast with her decision but she persisted with wearing a niqab for seven years because she was stubborn Ms Novakovich said she had Bin Laden's photo pinned to her wall up until she was 19 years old. 'My sisters had posters of Hansen and other bands and I had a picture of Osama bin Laden,' she said. 'He was charismatic and I really thought he had beautiful brown eyes.' She said she came across the al-Qaeda leader prior to the September 11 attacks in 2001 - when no one in Australia knew who he was - and she saw him as a freedom fighter in the Middle East. 'One day, my friend came over to my house and in my bedroom she saw a laminated picture of Osama Bin Laden on my pinup board,' she said. 'She was a conservative Iraqi and yelled at me, demanding to know why his picture was there. I said I thought of him as a hero and would not mind being one of his wives. The media was simply manipulating his image, because he was challenging US hegemony.' 'I cannot pinpoint the exact moment when I switched from seeing Islam as a source of great peace, to then obligating me to fight for political Islam. I think the process was gradual and insidious.' Ms Novakovich, who has lived in Australia since she was six weeks old, was born to a Yugoslav Greek Orthodox father and an Indonesian Muslim mother. She said when her father died when she was a child, her uncle influenced her mother to implement a more Islamic lifestyle. Ms Novakovich said as she went through her teenage years and university, she was determined to learn the political systems of the West so she could challenge them from within Aisha, pictured receiving the inaugural Minister's Multicultural Ambassadors Youth Award in Western Australia in 2002, was determined to learn political systems of the West so she could challenge them She said she started to flirt with ways to leave Australia to join the fight against foreign oppressors and work towards establishing a just caliphate 'Our names were changed to sound more 'Muslim'. I was Nancy one day, Aisha the next,' she said. 'We started going to Sunday school at the local mosque and learned how to pray and read the Koran. I mixed with Muslim kids from different racial and cultural backgrounds who I found different to the kids at my public school. 'I had always thought of myself as an Aussie girl with Aussie friends at an Aussie school.' She said she was bitterly disappointed when she was sent to an Islamic high school where she came across some 'strange ideas' like marrying young for a girl was desirable and being an obedient wife was noble. Ms Novakovich said she is not sure when the process for de-radicalisation started, but her concept of a Muslim family model was shattered when her first husband started beating her. 'Briefly, at 19 years old, I got married to my high school sweetheart. I was under the illusion that he was a 'religious' man since he prayed five times a day; went to the mosque every Friday; and grew a beard. 'Now I have learned that those indicators can be pretentious - good character and religiosity are not necessarily the same thing. Aisha, pictured with former PM Bob Hawke at an event at Old Parliament House in Canberra in 2007, is now a law student, works at the University of WA and is a community advocate 'Within the first six months of marriage, he perpetrated violence against me when I was pregnant. For the next four years, I experienced the full cycle of violence many more times.' Ms Novakovich said her husband left her when she was seven months pregnant with their second son. He sought permission from a sheikh to divorce her on flimsy grounds. 'The five year marriage had worn away my political ideologies and I had been literally beaten to a pulp. During those dark days, I seriously considered leaving Islam. I wondered if this was a religion that favoured men over women. 'The arrival of my children provided a reality check... Those dreams of going overseas to fight for justice now seemed rather childish and fanciful. 'The real saving grace for me was my support network of family and friends who noticed when my behaviour changed; who loved me unconditionally; who challenged me when I became overbearing and obnoxious in my religious judgement.' She is outspoken in her belief that Australia's leaders just don't get why so many young Muslims are becoming radicalised and choosing to fight with ISIS. 'Connection to community and a sense of belonging are critical for young Muslims,' she said. 'These young people are looking for answers, so it's important not to shut them down. We have to talk about it. Young people are curious, and I was no different. Police say that a fight broke out on Tuesday after protesters came to a Los Angeles high school to criticize their recent decision to install the first ever gender neutral bathroom on campus. The fight began after a student engaged adults holding signs and yelling through megaphones outside of Santee Education Complex, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. Santee Education Complex is part of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools. Cell phone video of the chaos shows an adult protester across the street holding a sign reading: 'Homo sex is sin.' Scroll down for videos Footage: Police say that a fight broke out on Tuesday after protesters came to a Los Angeles high school to criticize their recent decision to install the first ever gender neutral bathroom on campus Protester: Cell phone video of the chaos shows an adult protester across the street holding a sign reading: 'Homo sex is sin' History: The first gender-neutral restroom in the Los Angeles school district is seen at Santee Education Complex high school in Los Angeles, California Dozens of students can be seen brawling across the street with the protesters before the fight is broken up by law enforcement. When police arrived to keep the peace, the protesters left the area, according to ABC. The school's principal made a statement on Wednesday following the incident. 'Yesterday, a small group of adults unsuccessfully attempted to discredit the brave actions of our students by protesting against the school's recently approved gender-neutral restrooms,' Gomez said. Pro-change: Students rally outside Santee Education Complex in South Los Angeles on Wednesday after protesters showed up at their school the day before Positive rally: The principal of the Los Angeles high school where a scuffle broke out with adult protesters over a new gender-neutral bathroom praised his students Wednesday as 'trailblazers.' 'Above all, we want to ensure the safety of our students despite outside factors and influencers who want to disrupt instruction and the well-being of our students.' Also on Wednesday, a rally was held by a political group called Union del Barrio in support of the students and their right to have a gender neutral bathroom, according to KTLA A speaker from the advocacy group declared the school a 'no-hate zone.' 'We're saying no to hate, we're saying no to bigotry, and we're saying yes to community,' said the man, who wielded a megaphone. 'This community fought hard to make sure we have an inclusive community.' Several students spoke out on Wednesday and said they were hurt when protesters showed up to their school. 'There was a riot here because of the gender-neutral bathroom that we have,' student Sasha Phillips told KTLA. 'Its just a bathroom. I mean, people pee.' A Minnesota woman who has dubbed herself 'the world's meanest mom' is selling her 15-year-old daughter's monster truck on Craigslist 'to teach her a lesson'. Amy Adams put the post up Tuesday advertising 'every teenage kid's dream vehicle' after she claims her daughter 'decided her grades don't matter, that she can disrespect myself and her siblings on a daily basis, and that she has the right to skip school and run away from home'. The determined mother said her daughter was on her 'last chance', which she blew after she skipped school Monday. A Minnesota woman who has dubbed herself 'the world's meanest mom' is selling her 15-year-old daughter's monster truck on Craiglist 'to teach her a lesson'. Advert pictured The 1998 Dodge Ram was advertised for $2,750 and Adams says she has already received over 400 responses from to the post. Adams told WFMY News: 'Over half of them were other parents saying, hey, high five.' But her daughter's friends apparently flagged her Craigslist ad, forcing it to be removed after which she posted it again, only to have it flagged and removed a second time. And while some think she went too far, Adams says that she remembers how it feels to be a 'snippy 15-year-old' but hopes that her daughter will one day appreciate her tough parenting. She told the station: 'I hope she realizes that it's okay to discipline your kids. 'And its okay to have expectations. And it's okay for them to have consequences'. The young pair were found in Hyde Park, North Perth, an hour after missing The children - aged four and five - were lured from a holiday care program A man has been charged following the alleged abduction and sexual assault of two children after they were lured away from a school holiday program facility this week. The 52-year-old man has been charged with three counts of sexual penetration of a child under 13 and two counts of deprivation of liberty, according to Perth Now. Police allege a four-year-old girl and a five-year-old boy were sexually assaulted by the man, who had reportedly been in custody since Wednesday on 'unrelated' matters. The children were allegedly sexually assaulted before being left alone in Hyde Park about 12.15pm - an hour after they went missing from a community hall where they were attending a school holiday program. The charges were laid after police conducted a search of a North Perth property and backyard on Thursday. Scroll down for video A man has been taken into custody for questioning as police search a North Perth property (pictured) after two young children were lured away from a holiday school care program and sexually assaulted CCTV footage was released showing the two children following behind a middle-aged man in an oversized coat down a footpath. The alleged assault came to light after a woman found the children alone in the playground as it's understood supervisors at the program did not notice the children were missing at the time. Child Abuse detectives are investigating that the man sexually assaulted the children at a nearby unknown location before leaving them in Hyde Park. Western Australia State Crime division Commander Kylie Whitely told Perth Now that the school holiday facility were not aware the children were missing until after they were found. 'Obviously the parents are very distressed and no doubt the children are obviously very upset and there's a fair amount of work for them to have to navigate while we continue with the investigation,' told the news website. The children left the Fitzgerald Street premises with the man shortly after 11.15am and were later found in the playground of nearby Hyde Park at 12.15pm by a female member of the public 'It's an absolute priority for us as an agency, we understand how the community are going to be feeling so we have every available resource working on it.' Commander Whitely told 9 News that the children would have been 'enticed' by something to follow him. 'It's every parent's worst nightmare,' she said. 'They were enticed, offered something to leave the centre.' Police would like to speak to anyone who was in the vicinity of View Street and Fitzgerald Street near the North Perth shopping precinct and Hyde Park between 11am and 1pm, who saw a man accompanied by a young boy and girl. Anyone with any information is asked to call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or make a report online at www.crimestopperswa.com.au Under attack: Nine News chief of staff Kate McGrath allegedly sent texts badmouthing competitor Paul Dowsley A TV reporter has labelled a journalist from a rival station 'desperate and nasty' after she tried to persuade a source to talk to her team instead. Seven Network reporter Paul Dowsley was covering the story of Chris Wood, 36, who man who was allegedly shoved in front of an oncoming train in Melbourne. Reporters from Channel Nine were chasing an interview with the same man. In a bid to get the man on camera, chief of staff Kate McGrath allegedly sent the victim texts badmouthing Mr Dowsley. 'Hey Chris. Call me. I'll set you straight about Paul Dowsley,' one message said. 'He is the worst journalist in Melbourne'. When the victim replied, 'Iv done the interview already (sic)', Ms McGrath appeared to keep at him. 'Hi Chris,' she said. 'I'm not surprised. Paul is sneaky and dodgy'. A furious Mr Dowsley published both texts on Twitter on Wednesday evening. Scroll down for video Outraged: Channel Seven reporter Paul Dowsley was furious, describing the incident as a 'shameful insight into how a desperate and nasty competitor tries to convince people to talk to them instead of me' 'A shameful insight into how a desperate and nasty competitor tries to convince people to talk to them instead of me,' he tweeted. A Channel Nine spokeswoman told Daily Mail Australia neither the network or Ms McGrath had any comment. The incident was first reported by industry website Mumbrella. The journalists wanted to interview Chris Wood, 36, who suffered a broken leg after allegedly being punched repeatedly and thrown on to the tracks at Yarraman train station, south east of Melbourne Nine has suffered a torrent of bad publicity in recent weeks over the 60 Minutes child abduction fiasco in Lebanon. Four staffers including reporter Tara Brown were jailed for nearly a fortnight after a bungled attempt to snatch Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner's two children from a Beirut street. They were released to the relief of the network and the employees' families and friends on Wednesday evening Australian time. The leader of France's far-right party Marine Le Pen is set to join the campaign to leave the EU on a visit to Britain. Aides said the National Front (FN) chief was 'bound' to come to the UK ahead of the crucial referendum on June 23. The planned intervention has infuriated senior figures in the Brexit campaign, who worry that links to politicians seen as extreme could scare voters. A spokesman for the official Vote Leave campaign said: 'We will not be welcoming Marine Le Pen to the UK.' Ukip leader Nigel Farage previously refused to ally with Ms Le Pen's Europe of Nations and Freedom Group in the European Parliament. An aide to Marine Le Pen, leader of France's National Front, said she was 'bound' to come to the UK to campaign ahead of the crucial EU referendum on June 23 The party said it had no interest in the offer, partly because of prejudice and anti-Semitism in the FN. Ms Le Pen has described the UK ballot as a 'key moment in European history', and declared that she wants to organise an equivalent referendum in France if she comes to power. 'It's a key moment in European history,' she said this week. "Every nation in Europe has the right to be asked that question do you want to stay in this structure or not. The first step was organised by Mr Cameron.' Opinion polls show the 47-year-old topping the first round of presidential elections next year unless the center-right Les Republicains party nominates former prime minister Alain Juppe. However, the forecasts says she would lose the decisive second round. The National Front leader, who is said to speak little English, has adopted the anti-EU position of her father, Jean-Marie, the party's founder whom she succeeded in 2011. Campaigning before the last European parliament elections, she reportedly said she wanted the EU to 'collapse'. 'I expect one thing only from the European system and that's for it to blow up," she said. Talking about the prospects of a visit to Britain yesterday, FN spokesman Alain Vizier said: 'Marine Le Pen is bound to go. The date has not been set, it would be at the end of May or early June. 'She would go for a day or half a day.' He said no details had been set yet except that 'she will campaign for Brexit'. One possibility would be for Ms Le Pen to campaign with former Ukip MEP Janice Atkinson, a who is now part of her group in the European Parliament. Said ISIS has lost 30 to 40 per cent of territory and is retreating Jean-Yves Le Drian said conditions to defeat ISIS are 'coming together' ISIS could be 'eradicated' before the end of the year, French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian had said. Speaking to French radio on Thursday morning, Le Drian said that the conditions needed to defeat ISIS are slowly coming together. He said that ISIS has lost 30-40 percent of its territory in Syria and Iraq and the terrorist extremist organization is on retreat. Hope: Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, pictured yesterday with President Francois Hollande, has said he believed ISIS can be defeated before the end of the year Le Drian says the goals of the U.S.-led coalition are that Mosul, in Iraq, and Raqqa, the de-facto capital of ISIS's so-called caliphate in Syria, will 'fall before the end of the year.' The conditions necessary to defeat the jihadists are 'in the process of coming together to eradicate Daesh', Le Drian told France Info radio on Thursday, referring to the group by its Arabic acronym. 'I note that Daesh [ISIS] is retreating and that Daesh is retreating significantly 'Since Daesh's occupation of Syria and Iraq, since the attempt to attack Baghdad in June 2014, I think Daesh has lost between 30 and 40 percent of its territory.' According to Le Drian, ISIS has lost 30-40 percent of its territory in Syria and Iraq and the terrorist extremist organization is on retreat An international coalition is providing air support to Kurdish and Iraqi forces, which intend to liberate Mosul, in Iraq, and Raqqa, in Syria, by the end of the year, the minister added. 'We will need... a lot of determination, but I think the conditions are in the process of coming together for eradicating Daesh,' he said. 'For the first time, I have this slightly optimistic message.' Raqqa was seized by the jihadists in early 2014, and Mosul was overrun during an IS offensive in June that year. Iran has test-fired a new space rocket, built with North Korean technology, which could be used to deliver nuclear warheads. The Simorgh space rocket was fired on Tuesday from a secret Iranian missile base. According to reports, the rocket did not put any satellite into orbit and the launch may not have been a success. Scroll down for video Iran is believed to have test-fired its Simorgh (Phoenix) rocket, pictured, on Tuesday according to reports The missile is believed to have been manufactured using North Korean technology exported to Iran Iran has recently imported the S-300 Grumble air defence system from Russia and paraded sections of the system were paraded in front of the public at a military show in Tehran earlier this month US State Department official John Kirby told the Washington Beacon he was unable to confirm a missile launch from Iran. 'Obviously were watching this as best we can. Certainly if its true and were talking about a ballistic missile launch or the testing of ballistic missile technologies, thats obviously of concern to us. Its not consistent, as we said before, with the Security Council resolution.' The rocket is believed to be based on North Korean technology and it is feared it is capable of delivering a nuclear warhead. Earlier this month, the Iranian regime released pictures of its newly purchased S-300 air defence system. The weapon, known as the Grumble, was sold to Tehran by Russia. The Iranian regime also wants to buy the Sukhoi SU-30 fighter from Moscow. Speaking at a military parade, President Hassan Rouhani said: 'Our military, political and economic power is not directed against neighbouring countries and the countries of the Islamic world. 'When Baghdad was threatened by terrorists, the Islamic Republic of Iran responded to the call of the people, the army and the Iraqi government to defend Baghdad and the holy places.' Republican Senator Tom Cotton from Arkansas said: 'An Iranian Simorgh space launch vehicle test would be a provocation of the highest order and shows Irans true intentions. The intelligence community has said publicly that this [space launch vehicle] technology would aid an Iranian [intercontinental ballistic missile] program. And the only reason one develops ICBMs is the delivery of nuclear weapons.' President Barack Obama is travelling to the Middle East today to meet officials from six Arab nations to discuss regional security issues and the threat posed by ISIS. The meetings in Riyadh on Thursday are meant to build on a similar summit convened last year at Camp David, the American president's Maryland retreat. They reflect an effort by the White House to reassure and coordinate with important but wary Mideast allies that oppose Obama's outreach to Iran and U.S. policy toward the grinding civil war in Syria. The summit with the U.S.-allied countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council follows bilateral talks that Obama held with Saudi King Salman on Wednesday shortly after arriving in the kingdom. Besides Saudi Arabia, the GCC includes the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain. The White House said the summit meeting will include three sessions. One is aimed at fostering regional stability and another at counterterrorism efforts including efforts to defeat al-Qaida and ISIS. A third session will focus on Iran, which Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states see as a destabilizing rival in the region. Britain is under threat from 70 jihadists who have returned from fighting for ISIS in Syria and Iraq and are currently plotting attacks here, a senior government official has warned. In a chilling warning about the danger posed by the terrorist group, the national counter terrorism co-ordinator Scott Wilson warned that ISIS could not be destroyed soon and would pose a threat to national security for a 'long, long time'. He said a fifth of the 350 British jihadists who have returned to the UK are 'high threat' extremists, who are suspected of plotting or wanting to carry out attacks or spreading radical propaganda. Britain is under threat from about 70 jihadists who have returned from fighting for ISIS in Syria and Iraq and are currently plotting attacks here, senior government officials said yesterday They are also suspected of seeking new recruits for ISIS as they plan further attacks on European soil. More than 800 British extremists are estimated to have travelled to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS. Those who return are monitored by security services and police or are referred to Prevent, the counter-extremism programme. Mr Wilson told the Security and Counter Terror Expo in London yesterday that ISIS had grown a support network that al-Qaeda could only dream of, The Times reported. Warning: Senior anti-terrorism officials at NATO and the EU told the Security and Counter Terror Expo in London that ISIS terrorists are planning nuclear and chemical attacks on Britain and Europe (file photo) Both Nato and the EU say there are 'justified concerns' that ISIS jihadists are working on obtaining chemical, biological, radioactive and nuclear materials He warned: 'I cannot answer where it is going to go.'It [the terrorism threat] is going to be with us for a long, long time.' ISIS claimed responsibility for the deadly attacks in Paris last November, which killed 130 people, and also the Brussels attacks last month, which killed 32. The group has been targeting Britain for months and international security chiefs warned earlier this week that ISIS terrorists are planning nuclear and chemical attacks here. THE 23 QUESTIONS EVERY ISIS FIGHTER IS ASKED BY THE GROUP Some 800 British Muslims have travelled to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS and around half have returned to the UK, according to British spies 1. Name 2. Nom de guerre (fighter's name) 3. Mother's maiden name 4. Blood type 5. Date of birth and nationality 6. Marital status 7. Address and city/town/village of residence 8. Level of education 9. Level of Sharia understanding 10. Previous job title 11. Countries travelled through to Syria/Iraq 12. Area entered from 13. Whic ISIS member recommended them 14. Date of entry 15. Have they fought before and where 16. What role will they take in ISIS 17. Special skills 18. Place of work 19. Security deposit 20. Considered level of obedience 21. Contact telephone numbers 22. Date and place of death 23. Notes Advertisement Among those involved in the Paris and Brussels attacks were EU citizens who had travelled to Syria. At least one of them posed as a refugee as part of the migrant crisis last year, which saw more than a million people fleeing to Europe. British security experts have warned that despite Britain not being part of the border free Schengen zone, its border security is not secure enough. Former Metropolitan Police commissioners, an independent reviewer of terror laws, an ex-border chief and police boss said controls on EU migrants are inadequate and should be stepped up considerably. They said the deadly terror attacks on Brussels and Paris must act as a 'wake up call' for the Government, demanding they tighten border procedures to 'make Britons safer'. The security chiefs called on the Government to 'review security at our borders' - irrespective of the outcome in June's EU referendum. Speaking at the counter-terrorism expo earlier this week, both Nato and the EU said there are 'justified concerns' that ISIS jihadists are working on obtaining chemical, biological, radioactive and nuclear materials to carry out attacks on the EU. 'With CBRN [chemical, biological, radioactive and nuclear materials], there is a justified concern.' Jorge Berto Silva, deputy head of counter terrorism for the European Commission said. Dr Jamie Shea, deputy assistant secretary general for emerging security threats at Nato, told the annual Security and Counter Terror Expo: 'We know terrorists are trying to acquire these substances.' The conference also heard that ISIS is working on trying to implant bombs in human bodies and hack driverless cars. This follows warnings earlier today that ISIS is planning on targeting holidaying tourists by posing as ice cream and T-shirt sellers at European beach resorts. German media reports that ISIS is sending jihadists to pretend to sell refreshments before detonating suicide vests and bombs buried under sun loungers at Spanish, French and Italian resorts. The BND - Germany's equivalent of MI6 - learned from its Italian counterpart of the ISIS plots to bring bloodshed to holiday resorts, popular daily newspaper BILD said on Tuesday. BILD said the plans involve the use of automatic weapons on crowded waterfronts, suicide bombings and explosive devices buried in sand beneath sun loungers. The distraught mother of a woman who was stabbed to death by her ex-partner in a murder-suicide has said she was killed because police failed to take her domestic violence complaints seriously. Wendy Thompson said her daughter Kelly's death was 'preventable' in an emotional video appeal calling for more to be done to tackle violence against women. She made the comments after a Coroner found that police made critical errors in the leadup to Ms Thompson's death at her Point Cook home, north-west of Melbourne, in February 2014. Ms Thompson, 43, called Victoria Police 34 times in the weeks before she was murdered by her estranged partner Wayne Wood. Kelly Thompson, 43, (pictured) called Victoria Police 34 times in the weeks before she was murdered by her estranged partner Wayne Wood Her mother, Wendy Thompson, said Kelly's death was 'preventable' in an emotional video appeal calling for more to be done to tackle violence against women 'Kelly's death was preventable. She should be here with us,' her mother said in the video, which was posted on the ABC. 'Kelly was failed by Victoria Police because they failed to take the violence against her seriously. It's a culture of lethal indifference and inaction in the face of violence against women.' She called for a change, saying that police need to be 'held accountable at every level' for their failures with her daughter and other women. Ms Thompson reported her ex-partner to police numerous times before her death, even saying he had tried to run her over, attempted to strangle her, and stalked her relentlessly. Ms Thompson reported her ex-partner to police numerous times before her death, even saying he had tried to run her over, attempted to strangle her, and stalked her relentlessly Ms Thompson, 43, was sleeping when Mr Wood stabbed her to death with a hunting knife But even on the day he stabbed her to death, a call by a concerned neighbour failed to prompt the sending of a patrol car to her Point Cook home. Ms Thompson, 43, was sleeping when Mr Wood stabbed her to death with a hunting knife. Her mother said: 'She fled her home, sought multiple intervention orders and had extensive contact with police. 'She did all the things our society demands of women that endure family violence and still she was killed becasse he was never held accountable for his violence.' She said she hoped her daughter's death, and the failures that led to it, would at least help draw further attention to the plague of family violence. In the inquest, Coroner Ian Gray found that the decision not to respond to the neighbour's call was wrong. He also said that the failure to note that Wood had tried to strangle Ms Thompson a month before her murder was a 'critical error'. Victoria Police said in a statement that Ms Thompson's death was a 'tragedy' and that it had apologised to the Thompson family for the failings of police officers in the lead-up to the murder. Judge Gray made six recommendations, noting he would not double up on those sufficiently covered by the recent Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence. Andrea Lehane was hit by a illegal motorbike while shopping in September The Magistrate gave Jakobsson a second chance and released him on bail 19-year-old has allegedly breached his bail eight times and fled from police The teenager accused of running down a mother while riding an illegal motorbike allegedly breached his bail and fled from police. Caleb Jakobsson is charged with culpable driving causing the death of Andrea Lehane, 34, who was struck on a zebra crossing in the car park at Carrum Downs Regional Shopping Centre, Melbourne in September. The 19-year-old was granted bail last year with conditions that included a curfew between 10pm and 9am, but prosecutors at the Melbourne Magistrate's Court on Thursday applied to have his bail revoked, alleging he had breached his curfew eight times. The Magistrate gave Jakobsson a second chance and released him on bail with added conditions. Scroll down for video Caleb Jakobsson - the teenager accused of running down a mother while riding an illegal motorbike - allegedly breached his bail and fled from police The teenager was seen leaving the court holding a cigarette and plastic bag filled with his belongings on Thursday The teenager was seen leaving the court holding a cigarette and plastic bag filled with his belongings. A relative, whom Jakobsson was bailed to live with, reported the alleged breaches to police after the pair had an argument, the court heard. 'That was the straw that broke the camel's back,' Detective Sergeant Mark Patrick said. He said police tried to arrest Jakobsson as he was getting off a bus. 'He got off the bus and ran from police and was located hiding in some bushes,' Det Sgt Patrick told the court. The court heard Jakobsson's relative was happy for him to return to the house. Magistrate Charlie Rozencwajg wanted the relative, who cannot be named, to attend court to give evidence about their relationship, but that person couldn't be reached on Thursday. The magistrate decided the teenager could stay on bail, but didn't dismiss the prosecution's application completely. The Magistrate gave Jakobsoon a second chance and released him on bail with added conditions The 19-year-old was granted bail last year with conditions that included a curfew between 10pm and 9am, but prosecutors at the Melbourne Magistrate's Court alleged he had breached his curfew eight times Andrea Lehane, pictured with husband James, was hit on a pedestrian crossing at the Carrum Downs Regional Shopping Centre in September and died at The Alfred hospital two days later Ms Lehane tragically left behind a son and daughter, aged three and four, and heartbroken husband James There were four motorbikes being ridden in the area and Ms Lehane was hit by the second bike (pictured) Instead, Mr Rozencwajg added more conditions to Jakobsson's bail that would require him to follow the directions of his relative and attend court for bail reviews, the first starting in May. Mr Rozencwajg will decide after that whether Jakobsson can remain on bail. 'It is remarkable you should not be complying to the letter with all your bail conditions,' he told Jakobsson. Jakobsson is accused of striking Mrs Lehane with his mini-motorbike as she crossed a pedestrian crossing, then speeding away. The nurse and mother of two died on September 25 last year when her family turned off her life support after being told she would not survive her brain injuries. Jakobsson is due to face a committal hearing in July. Jakobsson is accused of striking Mrs Lehane with his mini-motorbike as she crossed a pedestrian crossing, then speeding away ISIS have beheaded two sawmill workers who were accused of spying against the terror group in the Philippines. Chilling images show the two men, dressed in orange gowns and blindfolded, cowering in front of a line of masked militants near a patch of earth. The jihadists identified the men as Makol Hanobas and Tado Hanobas in other pictures which show them sitting at a table in their jumpsuits. Two kidnapped sawmill workers accused of spying against ISIS are pictured moments before being beheaded The jihadists identified the men as Tado Hanobas and Makol Hanobas in other pictures (above) which show them sitting at a table in their jumpsuits, apparently while being forced to confess to their alleged crimes In previous execution videos, ISIS often force their captives to confess to their alleged crimes from behind a desk. The two men were among six sawmill workers who were abducted by gunmen in a village in Butig town, Lanao del Sur province, on April 5. Four other captives were freed days later after their employer negotiated with their captors. A series of kidnappings and beheadings in the Philippines have been blamed on the relatively unknown Maute group of militants who use black clothing with the ISIS symbol. The militants staged a brazen attack on an army outpost in Butig town in February, sparking a major military offensive and fighting that killed 24 militants and six soldiers, one of whom was beheaded. A number of small Muslim militant factions in the south, home of minority Muslims in the largely Roman Catholic Philippines, have expressed support to ISIS in online videos. A small group of recruits, each wearing similar black clothing and masks, are shown climbing up rope ladders, crawling under barbed wire and practicing with weapons in the Philippines in a video released last December ISIS targeted the Philippines as territory for expansion late last year. The Filipino government has long said that support for ISIS in the Philippines was limited to local bandits claiming allegiance to the group But the military says there has been no evidence of any direct and active collaborations. ISIS targeted the Philippines as territory for expansion last year after releasing its first propaganda video of a terror training camp in the Filipino jungle in December. Several jihadi commanders were shown urging Filipinos to travel to Syria to join ISIS before revealing the group have already started their own terror camp there. The footage shows the 'soldiers of the Caliphate in the Philippines' working on their fitness and agility by completing a series of assault course drills. A small group of recruits, each wearing similar black clothing and masks, are shown climbing up rope ladders, crawling under barbed wire and practicing with weapons. The mother at the centre of the 60 Minutes botched child abduction has issued a heartbreaking message to her two children, saying: 'Mummy's sorry, I tried'. Sally Faulkner was due to see her children at a court hearing on Thursday for the first time since she was jailed over the plot to snatch them both from her estranged husband's family in Beirut. But her ex-husband Ali Elamine, 32, failed to bring Noah, three, and Lahela, five, to the Baabda Palace of Justice for the hearing. Ms Faulkner told reporters that she loved her children very much and would not be leaving Beirut until she did see them, according to the ABC. Sally Faulkner apologised after walking free from a Lebanese jail on Wednesday - 14 days after she was arrested over the plot to snatch back her two children from her estranged husband's family 60 Minutes presenter Tara Brown and Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner (front) were pictured walking free from jail in Beirut on Wednesday The 60 Minutes crew including Ms Brown were pictured inside the car with Brisbane mother Ms Faulkner The veteran reporter was pictured walking free from jail two weeks after the botched abduction attempt Ms Brown (left) flashed a quick smile as she was released from Baabda Central Women's Prison on Wednesday She walked free from jail on Wednesday along with reporter Tara Brown and her 60 Minutes crew after agreeing a deal with her ex-husband in which she gave up full custody. 'I love them and mummy's sorry that it all worked out this way, I tried,' Ms Faulkner told Nine News after leaving Baabda Central Women's Prison with Ms Brown. With tears in her eyes, the Brisbane mother said: 'I hope I can see them again in Australia one day.' Her ex-husband agreed to drop the charges against the Australians in a Beirut court after Ms Faulkner gave up custody of the children. The children will now live in Lebanon with their father, but Mr Elamine insisted that Ms Faulkner would be able to visit. Judge Abdullah said Mr Elamine would bring the children to his chambers on Thursday to see their mother for the first time since she was thrown in jail along with the TV crew two weeks ago. Ms Faulkner was released on bail on Wednesday along with Ms Brown and her crew, producer Stephen Rice, cameraman Ben Williamson, sound recordist David Ballment. They were seen laughing, hugging and smiling together in a car after they were all freed from jail. Ms Brown said: 'I'm so relieved to be going home. I'm exhausted and ecstatic. Ms Faulkner's ex-husband Ali Elamine, 32, agreed to drop the charges against the Australians in a court hearing after reaching a deal in which he was awarded full custody They have been behind bars for the past two weeks after being involved in a plot to kidnap Ms Faulkner's two children from her estranged Lebanese husband's family on a street in Beirut The freed 60 Minutes team were seen hugging Ms Brown and Ms Faulkner when they climbed into the car Australian sound recordist David Ballment and cameraman Ben Williamson after their release from jail A detail of the legal sentence for the case involving the 60 Minutes crew and Faulkner 'I had a chance to say 'hi' to [husband] John. I was ordered to call home straight away. But [I have] not [talked to] the kids yet. 'I can't wait to speak to them obviously though they have no idea about any of this. It's great to talk to home. It's great to be going home.' When asked what he planned to do first after his release, Mr Williamson said: 'I'm going to call my wife and tell my family that I love them.' The TV crew are expected to arrive back in Australia at around 10pm (local time). At a court hearing on Wednesday, Nine secured the release of Ms Faulkner and the TV crew by paying an undisclosed settlement. The Australian reported that Mr Elamine is thought to have received a payout in the 'low single-digit millions'. Brown and her 60 Minutes crew at a Lebanon airport after their release waiting for their flight home Mr Elamine speaks to journalists outside Beirut court after the Australians' release The breakthrough came after Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner (pictured) and her estranged husband Ali Elamine reached an agreement which gave him full custody in return for her release Tara Brown (pictured) has been detained on kidnapping charges with a 60 Minutes crew that filmed the 'child abduction' of Sally Faulkner's two children in Lebanon on April 7 The TV crew were released on bail after charges were dropped over the botched child abduction attempt in Beirut - but they were warned they could be ordered back to the country Wearing a blue and white striped top, Ms Brown looked calm as she was photographed leaving prison to join her three freed colleagues in a waiting car Ms Brown could be seen laughing and smiling in the car before the group made their way to the airport The TV crew are expected to fly home on Wednesday night (Beirut time) and arrive in Australia on Thursday A member of the 60 minutes television crew was seen embracing Ms Faulkner in the car WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE LEBANON KIDNAP CASE THE MUM, THE TV CREW AND THE KIDNAPPING CASE Brisbane mum Sally Faulkner and a Channel Nine TV crew made up of reporter Tara Brown, producer Stephen Rice, cameraman Ben Williamson and sound recordist David Ballment have walked free from a Beirut jail after the child kidnapping and assault charges against them were dropped. FREED, BUT COULD STILL FACE CHARGES The 60 Minutes crew have already left Lebanon while Faulkner is still in the country for another day to bid farewell to her children. While the Australians are free to leave, they could still be ordered back to the country to face public prosecution charges of kidnapping and being members of a criminal gang if the state decides. A deal was struck in court on Wednesday in which Faulkner gives up custody to gain release but her estranged husband Ali Elamine says she can see the children. Elamine played down reports the Nine Network paid him compensation to drop the charges. WHAT HAPPENED? The Australians spent a fortnight in a Beirut jail after being arrested for a child abduction on April 7. The 60 Minutes crew was filming Faulkner's attempt to recover her children Noah, three, and Lahela, five, from Elamine. Faulkner has spent nine months trying to regain custody of her children, who were taken to Lebanon for a three-week holiday and not returned, she says. Professional agency Child Abduction Recovery International (CARI) was hired to snatch the children. Two of its members, Adam Whittington and Craig Michael, are still facing charges. THE ABDUCTION Security camera footage shows masked men jumping out of a car and snatching the kids from their grandmother and another woman on a Beirut street. The grandmother claims she was hit on the head with a pistol and suffered internal bleeding. THE CHARGES Faulkner faced kidnapping charges. The 60 Minutes crew was accused of hiding information, forming an association with two or more people to commit a crime against a person, kidnapping or holding a minor even with their approval and physical assault. The offences carry penalties of three to 10 years in jail Advertisement But Mr Elamine insisted that he 'did not sign anything, did not get anything'. Judge Rami Abdullah then told the Baabda Palace of Justice that the TV crew were 'free to leave Lebanon'. He said they are still facing public prosecution charges of kidnapping and being members of a criminal gang and may be required to return if the prosecution goes ahead. They could be tried in 'absentia' if they do not return and face being banned from the country. Nine reported that the crew were 'elated' at the decision and said there were 'tears, hugs and a sense of enormous relief' from their families. 'Everybody is happy,' Nine Network lawyer Kamal Aboudaher said outside court on Wednesday. The breakthrough came after Mr Elamine agreed a deal with his ex-wife after she conceded to give him full custody of the two children in exchange for her release. Speaking outside the court, Elamine said his estranged wife can have access to the children. 'I am glad it's over. She is their mother and I don't want them growing up and thinking 'Daddy had the option of letting Mummy off easily and he didn't,' he said. 'It sucks, the whole thing sucks. No one wins here ... I told Sally she can come and go as she wants. She is the mother. The only thing we can do is cooperate to give them a better future. 'They don't know what has been happening these last two weeks ... I couldn't tell them anything.' Mr Elamine is still pressing charges against Briton Adam Whittington, who was allegedly in charge of the operation, as well as Craig Michael and two Lebanese people involved. They must remain in the country to face the charges. He played down reports that the Nine Network paid him compensation to drop the charges. 'I didn't get paid anything, I didn't sign anything, the whole procedure isn't over, the case is still ongoing. We'll find out,' he said. Mr Elamine also expressed some sympathy for the crew as many of them have children of their own. 'The judge was saying the crew weren't part of the kidnapping on the ground, it still isn't confirmed that they funded it ... And they have families too, they have children,' he said. 'Being a parent away from your children sucks, and that is another reason I want Sally to be out (of jail) because she has a three-month-old baby in Australia she needs to care for ... I don't want to come between them.' Channel Nine has announced a review into the botched operation to be led by former 60 Minutes boss Gerald Stone. Nine CEO Hugh Marks sent an email to staff on Thursday outlining the plan. 'Nine will conduct a full review that will be headed by Gerald Stone, with David Hurley and General Counsel Rachel Launders, to ascertain what went wrong and why our systems, designed to protect staff, failed to do so in this case,' said Mr Marks. Ms Brown was pictured being shoved into a police car on Monday after a court hearing was postponed Ms Brown was caught in the middle of a frenzy outside a Beirut court earlier this week, but she said it looked worse than it was Ms Faulkner's estranged husband, Ali Elamine, pictured leaving court on Monday, previously told reporters that he would press charges against everyone 'involved' in the failed abduction attempt A sealed truck, believed to be transporting Ms Faulkner and Ms Brown, was seen driving towards Baabda Prison For Women on Wednesday A car carrying the 60 Minutes crew from the jail was surrounded by reporters from other news outlets The three-man 60 Minutes crew were freed from jail and left waiting in this car for Ms Brown and Ms Faulkner to emerge 'We will task the review with recommending the necessary actions to ensure that none of our colleagues are put in a similar position in the future.' 'It is important to reiterate that at no stage did anyone from Nine or 60 Minutes intend to act in any way that made them susceptible to charges that they breached the law or to become part of the story that is Sally's story. 'But we did become part of the story and we shouldn't have.' A spokeswoman for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said it was too soon to comment on any conditions attached to the group's release. 'We are please to hear of the news of the release of Ms Faulkner and the four 60 Minutes crew members on bail,' the spokeswoman said in a statement. 'It is premature to comment on how soon the released Australians will be able to depart Lebanon or any conditions attached to their release.' Mr Elamine and Ms Faulkner are set to meet the judge in his Chambers at 11am (local time) on Thursday. Ms Brown looked as though she was being manhandled when she was led out of Baabda Palace of Justice on Monday Tara Brown (right) and Sally Faulkner were pictured being led away in handcuffs from the Beirut court after the hearing was postponed on Monday Sally Faulkner (pictured) travelled to Lebanon to retrieve her children, Noah, three, and Lahela, six Ali Elamine, said he would not drop the charges against Sally Faulkner because that would mean everyone else would 'get off' The father's lawyer Hussein Berjawi said the Mr Elamine dropped the charges against his ex-wife at the request of their two children. 'It's because she is the mum of his kids,' Mr Berjawi said. 'It's based on the request of the children he will ask for her release.' On Monday, Mr Elamine admitted that the young children 'want their mum'. The father also told the judge that he decided to drop the charges against the TV crew because they were 'just doing their job'. Ms Faulkner and the TV crew were arrested two weeks ago after a child recovery team seized her children from Mr Elamine's family on a Beirut Street. They have spent the past two weeks behind bars and were facing charges of kidnapping and being members of a criminal gang, which can attract maximum sentences of up to 10 years. Police push Tara Brown's head down as she is put into a car outside Baabda Court in Beirut A policeman holds the back of Tara Brown's hair as he puts her into the car on Monday Lebanese authorities sought to shield Sally Faulkner and Tara Brown, ordering reporters into a stairway before leading them down a hallway out of sight Tara Brown was pictured being forced into a police car before she was taken back to prison These charges against the TV crew have been dropped, but members of the child recovery agency hired for the operation are believed to still be facing charges. This means the future is uncertain for Craig Michael and Adam Whittington, who are both part of a child recovery agency. Ms Faulkner's lawyer Ghassan Moghabghab told AAP that the warring couple negotiated an agreement which could mean Mr Elamine gets full custody. When Mr Moghabghab was asked whether the deal involved a payment to Mr Elamine, he replied: 'For my part it does not involve money, I don't know about the other party (the Nine Network).' Speaking earlier on Wednesday, Mr Moghabghab claimed Mr Elamine was holding out for money as part of a deal to ensure Ms Faulkner isn't formally charged with kidnapping 'He is waiting for money. Everything Ali is doing leads to one conclusion, that he is aiming for money,' Moghabghab told News Corp. Tara Brown was pictured being escorted by police officers from the court in Beirut Mr Elamine has previously denied claims that he wants compensation, telling reporters that 'money is not an issue'. Ms Brown and Ms Faulkner made a brief appearance before a judge at the Baabda Palace of Justice on Monday before the hearing was postponed. Judge Abdullah adjourned the matter so lawyers for Ms Faulkner and Mr Elamine could continue talks. The lawyers have been discussing custody arrangements for the two young children who were allegedly taken on holiday to Lebanon by their father but not returned to Ms Faulkner as agreed. Ms Faulkner's lawyer had previously indicated she could drop her claim to custody in exchange for kidnapping charges being dropped. Mr Elamine said on Monday he was reluctant to drop charges against his former partner if it made it more likely that the 60 Minutes crew, and others involved in the operation, would be freed too. Ms Faulkner then said she wanted to talk directly with Mr Elamine to help strike a deal. 'I just want to go home and take my kids,' she told News Corp from her jail cell at the Baabda women's prison. 'I am not taking them away from their dad, I don't want to do what he did, and I want him to be part of the kids' lives.' Ms Brown also insisted that the dramatic pictures of her leaving court in handcuffs on Monday and being shoved into a police car 'looked much worse than it was'. 'It looked much worse than it was,' Ms Brown told News Corp as both women spoke from inside the Baabda women's prison. Mr Elamine admitted his children 'probably' wanted to be with their mother but hardened his stance against 60 Minutes Adam Whittington, (pictured) the chief planner of the 60 Minutes botched 'child abduction' in Lebanon, said on Sunday that he can prove Channel Nine paid him more than $115,000 for the snatch 'They were trying to protect me from the cameras, it might have been easier for me to turn my head.' Ms Faulkner added: 'We were laughing in the car, all we wanted to do was not get her photo taken.' It was the first time Ms Brown was pictured since her arrest on April 7 over the attempt to snatch back Ms Faulkner's children, Lahela, 5, and Noah, 3, from their father's family on a Beirut street. She laughed off claims that she had a blow dry before her brief court appearance, saying: 'I don't even have my hairbrush in here.' But the 60 Minutes reporter insisted that she was being treated 'extremely well' and that all the women in the prison are generous and kind. Ms Brown was careful not to divulge any information about court proceedings because she did not want to 'jeopardise' the situation. Ms Faulkner issued an emotional appeal to her ex-husband after becoming distressed when she heard that he said their children wanted to see her. She said that she did not want to take the children away from their father and that she wants him to be part of their lives. A prison van believed to be carrying those accused of the botched kidnapping attempt in Lebanon arrived at Beirut's Baabda court on Monday Ms Faulkner's claims her children Noah and Lahela were taken to Lebanon by her estranged husband Ali Elamine (pictured with Noah and Lahela) in 2015 and he refused to bring them back Ghassan Mughaghab (pictured), the lawyer for Brisbane woman Sally Faulkner, said negotiations between Mr Elamine and Ms Faulkner had broken down 'I am not spiteful, I acted out of desperation,' the Brisbane mother told News Corp. 'They have had the best of us, now they have the worst of us.' She said she was concerned that Mr Elamine may be getting influenced by his family. Ms Faulkner's lawyer said she has been fighting to get access to her children for nine months. The lawyer said that Mr Elamine took the two children on a three-week holiday to Lebanon and did not return them as agreed. But an attempt to snatch them from a suburban Beirut street by a 'child recovery team', caught on CCTV, was ultimately unsuccessful. The children were returned to their father and the 60 Minutes team were arrested. Craig Michael and Adam Whittington, believed to be members of the child recovery agency hired for the operation, were also arrested. Whittington claims he has receipts showing that Nine made online payments totalling $115,000 to him for the planning of the operation and recovery of the children. 'It was direct from Channel Nine, it was from their accounts department and they paid it in two instalments,' he told The Australian. Nine has refused to comment. For the past two weeks, Ms Brown and Ms Faulkner have been held at Baabda Central Women's Prison (pictured) The prison is a grim, overcrowded block housing mostly murderers and drug dealers with up to 20 women per cell 'It will help everybody, I think. It will help everybody': Ms Faulkner's lawyer says that if Mr Elamine drops the personal kidnapping charges against her, it will have a favourable flow-on effect for the whole team Sally Faulkner's lawyer has reportedly said she was paid for by the Nine Network and had used money given to her by 60 Minutes to the child recovery agency, Child Abduction Recovery International Veteran journalist Stephen Rice (left), David Ballment (centre) and Benjamin Williamson (right) are also in custody in Lebanon Ms Faulkner told The Australian on Friday she was doing well behind bars. 'Please tell my mum and dad how well I am and also [husband] Brendan and my in-laws,' she said. Ms Brown is also behind bars at the prison. 'I am fine but my loved ones need to know that.' Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has told The Project that she is in 'constant contact' with Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil regarding the case. CCTV footage supplied by Lebanese authorities appeared to show the bungled kidnapping earlier this week The breakthrough came after Mr Elamine agreed a deal with his ex-wife after she conceded to give him full custody of the two children in exchange for her release. Speaking outside the court, Elamine said his estranged wife can have access to the children. 'I am glad it's over. She is their mother and I don't want them growing up and thinking 'Daddy had the option of letting Mummy off easily and he didn't,' he said. 'It sucks, the whole thing sucks. No one wins here ... I told Sally she can come and go as she wants. She is the mother. The only thing we can do is cooperate to give them a better future. 'They don't know what has been happening these last two weeks ... I couldn't tell them anything.' Mr Elamine is still pressing charges against Briton Adam Whittington, who was allegedly in charge of the operation, as well as Craig Michael and two Lebanese people involved. A magistrate has denied a transgender sex worker bail as she refuses to accept that she has HIV, despite facing charges over infecting a former client. Clayton James Palmer, who identifies as a woman, was refused bail in Perth Magistrates Court on Thursday and will remain in Casurina male prison until she faces a grievous bodily harm charge. The 39-year-old was extradited from New South Wales in February after a man came forward to West Australian police alleging that he had contracted HIV from the sex worker, known as 'Sienna Fox', following a number of unprotected sexual encounters in 2015. Scroll down for video Clayton Palmer, who goes by the name Sienna Fox (pictured), allegedly had unprotected sex with a male client knowing she could infect him with HIV Magistrate Andrew Maughan denied Ms Fox's bail application as he was concerned she could continue to infect members of the community given she does not accept that she has HIV, despite being diagnosed and counselled about her obligations in August 2014, the ABC reported. 'The risk that she poses of endangering the safety of other people is not a matter that can be overcome by any bail conditions,' Mr Maughan said. Police prosecutor Senior Constable Jarred Gerace objected to the application as he claims Ms Fox told her alleged victim, who she met on an adult website advertising transgender escorts, that she had a clean bill of health and continued to advertise her sexual services after her diagnosis. Ms Fox's lawyer, Simon Freitag, submitted a report on transgender issues to the court and argued that the prison his client was being detained in had the potential to become a 'very harmful place for her'. The 39-year-old (pictured) will be extradited to Western Australia to face charges of grievous bodily harm after the client was diagnosed with HIV in September Ms Fox's lawyer, Simon Freitag, submitted a report on transgender issues to the court and argued that the Casuarina Prison (pictured) had the potential to become a 'very harmful place' for his client He told the court she was not being kept in general population and placed in a crisis care unit where her social interaction was restricted, according to the ABC Mr Freitag said her mental health at risk and recommend she be transferred to Bandyup women's prison while she awaits trial. The magistrate said Ms Fox's circumstances were 'unfortunate' and suggested that the report on transgender issues be passed on to authorities with the power to transfer her before her court date in July. Ms Fox reportedly fled Perth after she was confronted by her former client following his diagnosis. Police allege she continued to work as a prostitute in Sydney after moving and was arrested at Surry Hills hotel in central Sydney as she waited for a client. She was extradited from New South Wales in late February and sent back to Western Australia where she was immediately charged with grievous bodily harm. A mother was 'disgusted' after her son was put in isolation at school because of an 'extreme hairstyle' - despite having had the same cut for the last three years. Jenni London was shocked when her son Kieran, 14, was suddenly segregated from other students last week, and claims it deprives him of basic human rights. Kieran has only had two days off school since 2013, but his mother kept him at home on Monday and Tuesday because she was so appalled at the way he was treated. Jenni London was shocked when her son Kieran (pictured together), 14, was suddenly segregated from other students last week, and claims it deprives him of basic human rights His haircut hasn't changed for the last three years, his mother says, but Raynes Park High School said that any haircut where 'scalp is visible' breaks uniform rules The school in Raynes Park (pictured), south-west London, defended its actions explaining that pupils are placed in an Achievement Improvement Centre rather than being sent home She said: 'He's always had the same haircut but now they have just suddenly decided it's too short and they have put him in isolation, in a little booth on his own. 'I'm absolutely disgusted. He goes to school to learn. 'That's why I send him there, but he's just been sat there doing a worksheet for two days. 'He even has to be in there at break and lunch.' The school in Raynes Park, south-west London, claims pupils are actually placed in an 'Achievement Improvement Centre', rather than being sent home for breaching uniform policy. Kieran, has only had two days off school since 2013 but his mother kept him at home on Monday and Tuesday because she was so appalled by isolation Headteacher Kirsten Heard from Raynes Park High School said: 'We consider that a severe haircut, where the scalp is visible, is not in line with our Uniform Policy and we have kindly requested that our students have a longer version of this current style.' Miss London, from Morden, south-west London, added: 'It's depriving him of his basic human rights. He goes to school for an education, which I would say means being taught by a teacher, not sitting alone with a worksheet.' The headteacher said: 'Our commitment to academic excellence and personal well-being is at the core of everything we do. 'The school's high expectations are stated clearly to parents, carers and students via post, email, the website and assemblies. 'We do not operate a 'send-home' policy on uniform breaches and students are provided with work in our Achievement Improvement Centre. 'We see the students as ambassadors of our school and they are expected to dress and behave in a way that reflects the high standards we seek to achieve. 'In choosing Raynes Park High School, we trust parents and carers will help us uphold these standards and their continued support is very much appreciated.' Advertisement These vultures were willing to put their (long) necks on the line, fighting one another over a dead animal carcass. The flapping and scrapping was captured by renowned wildlife photographer Roie Galitz, who photographed the violent scenes in the eastern part of the Serengeti, Tanzania, last month. Roie, from Tel Aviv, Israel, shot the birds pecking and clawing at each other. This incredible set of photos shows the scene as a group of vultures fought each other to get at the carcass of another animal The vultures attempt to overpower one another in flight and on the ground, in a graphic demonstration of the fight for survival in the wild The birds are seen attacking each other in mid-air, and pulling each other to the ground, where they peck and claw at one another The pictures were taken by Roie Galitz, a renowned wildlife photographer from Tel Aviv, Israel, who snapped the birds from nearby The images were taken in the eastern part of the Serengeti in Tanzania, where five different species of vultures can be found In total, between 20 and 30 scavenging vultures tried to get in on the action. The birds hover on thermal air columns in the area that can measure hundreds of kilometres. On these currents, they patiently wait for their next food source. Roie said: 'It is such an intense scene - noisy and quite violent. 'But after sitting back and watching for some time, you see the order of things - a challenging vulture fights a senior vulture, and the senior must fight it off. 'In the meantime another one uses the opportunity to eat until the senior vulture chases it away as well. 'So there is some order in the violence.' One of the vultures is seen swooping down from on high, wings spread wide, to take part in the battle for food The incredibly close up photos show the majestic birds in all their glory, determined to get their claws into the carcass on the ground The photographer estimates that between twenty and thirty vultures became embroiled in the battle, which was savage and vicious Vultures are often found in large, squabbling groups such as this, around carcasses, which they seek out and feed upon There are five different types of vultures to be found in the Serengeti region, which spans approximately 30,000 km2, and is known for its diverse habitats and vast range of species. The kind of fight portrayed in Galitz's photographs are typical of the large, squabbling groups of vultures that can often be found around carcasses after an animal has died. Air strikes by President Assad and Russia have now killed more than 10,000 civilians in Syria but only 6,000 ISIS fighters, a new study has found. Some 8,047 civilians including 1,144 women, and 1,704 children have died in blitzes by the Syrian government since October 2014, the report said. In that time, regime helicopters dropped 29,236 barrel bombs while warplanes conducted at least 23,781 raids on 13 provinces, analysis by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights found. Around 42,000 civilians were wounded and tens of thousands displaced as buildings and homes were destroyed. Syrians look at the damage after an air strike on a vegetable market in Maaret al-Numan in the northern province of Idlib on Tuesday. At least 12 civilians including two children were killed and dozens wounded in air strikes that hit food markets in two northwestern Syrian towns, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said But the SOHR says the air strikes only resulted in the death of 4,406 fighters from ISIS, Jabhat al- Nusra and other Islamist rebel groups. Meanwhile, bombing runs by the Russian air force killed 1,963 civilians including 465 children and 296 women but only 1,984 ISIS fighters. The report said the air strikes had been carried out 'without distinguishing' between the civilian and military targets. It added: 'The SOHR holds the international community the moral responsibility towards the daily killing committed against the Syrian people.' The SOHR called on the UN Security Council 'to issue a binding resolution to stop the military operations in Syria and to refer the file of war crimes and crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court'. It comes as hundreds of sick or wounded Syrians and their families were being evacuated from besieged rebel- and regime-held towns for treatment today as peace talks faltered A Syrian man stands amid debris following an air strike on a vegetable market in Maaret al-Numan in Idlib The evacuees, who were 'in urgent need of life-saving medical attention' according to the United Nations, were bussed out of their enclaves late on Wednesday in a joint operation with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent. In a carefully synchronised operation, they were all brought to a staging area in a rebel-held part of central Syria at dawn today before being transported on for treatment, the SOHR said. Exactly 250 of the evacuees were brought out of the besieged rebel-held towns of Madaya and Zabadani, northwest of Damascus. The same number were evacuated from the besieged government-held towns of Fuaa and Kafraya, southwest of Aleppo. The Observatory said some of the pro-government evacuees were already beginning to arrive in the regime heartland province of Latakia on the Mediterranean coast. The evacuees from Madaya and Zabadani were being taken for treatment in the rebel-held province of Idlib on the Turkish border. The staging area at Qalaat al-Madiq, a medieval castle in central Hama province, has been used in similar evacuation operations in the past. Syrian soldiers walk through a devastated part of the town of Palmyra as families load their belongings onto a bus in the central Homs province In December, rebels who quit the last opposition-held district of the central city of Homes were bussed out to Idlib province via Qalaat al-Madiq. Aid deliveries to Fuaa, Kafraya, Madaya, and Zabadani always occur simultaneously and in equal amounts, and a similar stipulation applied for those being evacuated. More than four million in Syria live in besieged or hard-to-reach areas, with limited or no access to food or medical supplies. The UN has long pressed Damascus to grant unrestricted access to these areas, and has asked all sides to end sieges. The dire humanitarian situation has been a major obstacle to progress in fragile peace talks in Geneva between the government and the opposition High Negotiations Committee. Earlier this week, the HNC walked out of the talks, saying it could not remain in Switzerland while Syrians were dying on a daily basis. ISIS is backing Brexit because it 'suits their agenda,' according to Tony Blair's former spin doctor Alastair Campbell. He said the Islamic terror group is one of very few overseas players who want Britain to leave the EU, joined only by US presidential hopeful Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin. Mr Campbell, who served as Mr Blair's director of communications in Downing Street, is in Dublin today pleading the Irish to help persuade their friends in Britain to vote to remain in the Brussels club in June's referendum. Scroll down for video Warning: Senior anti-terrorism officials at NATO and the EU told the Security and Counter Terror Expo in London that ISIS terrorists are planning nuclear and chemical attacks on Britain and Europe (file photo) He claims that no 'serious overseas player thinks we should leave,' but his controversial remarks are certain to fuel more claims of scaremongering. He told the Business and Employers Confederation today: 'No serious overseas player thinks we should leave, unless it suits their agenda. 'Putin probably. Isis definitely. And, depending what mood he is in, Donald Trump. That's about it on the international scene.' In campaigners have argued that leaving the EU would play into the hands of ISIS as it would show their aim of dividing the West was working, but Brexit campaigners dismiss this argument and claim Britain would be safer if it was no longer part of freedom of movement rules. Donald Trump (pictured yesterday in Indianapolis) has spoken in favour of Britain leaving the EU. Last month he said 'it's time' for Britain to leave the EU due to the 'craziness that's going on with migration'. At least one of the terrorists involved in the Brussels attacks travelled to Britain last year, while most of those responsible for the Paris attacks last November were EU nationals, meaning they were free to move freely between EU member states. Mr Trump has spoken in favour of Britain leaving the EU. Last month he said 'it's time' for Britain to leave the EU due to the 'craziness that's going on with migration'. Mr Campbell, who served as Mr Blair's director of communications in Downing Street, is in Dublin today pleading the Irish to help persuade their friends in Britain to vote to remain in the Brussels club in June's referendum About 1.5 million Irish people in Britain are eligible to vote in the June 23 referendum on Britain's membership of the EU. Mr Campbell will say the EU referendum is more significant than any of the elections he was involved in as Mr Blair's spin doctor. 'The historic significance, if we leave, is greater than any of the elections I was involved in,' he will say. 'The consequences for jobs, living standards, culture, national security and our standing in the world are greater.' Urging Irish citizens to 'get stuck in' to the EU debate dominating British politics, Mr Campbell said: 'Yes, only the British people will decide. But you can be influencers, and you must be. It is a legitimate and necessary thing to do. Please do it. My country needs you.' David Cameron has been heavily criticised for urging world leaders to speak in favour of Britain staying in the EU. Brexit campaigners argue that foreign leaders should not intervene in referendum as it is a matter for the British people to decide. Tomorrow US President Barack Obama will arrive in London and is expected to back the Prime Minister's case for remaining in the EU. White House advisors have said he will offer his opinion 'if he is asked'. But Justice Secretary Michael Gove, London Mayor Boris Johnson and a string of other Tory Eurosceptics have accused the US President of hypocrisy. Mr Johnson said last week: 'It is plainly hypocritical for America to urge us to sacrifice control of our laws, our sovereignty, our money and our democracy when they would not dream of ever doing the same.' And Iain Duncan Smith told a US audience in Washington earlier this week: 'It's inconceivable that the president of the United States would be asking to do exactly the same for the USA as now appears to be the case, or might be the case, for him to advise the UK to do with regard the EU. 'On June 23, I think the British people will be advised to vote to get Britain to look a little bit more like the US and a lot less like it does at the moment with regard to the power of the EU.' He added: 'I don't quite understand why any American president would want Britain to be any other way - unless of course they want the US to join the EU too. 'Maybe that is the subtext of the speech or comments about to be made.' But Brexit campaigners themselves have come under fire over a foreign politician planning to intervene in the EU debate. Marine Le Pen, the leader of France's far right party National Front is expected to come to the UK to campaign for Brexit. But Britain's leading Brexit politicians - including Nigel Farage - are expected to shun the controversial right-wing French politician. Marine Le Pen to be shunned by politicians as she comes to Britain to join campaign for leaving the EU The leader of France's far-right party Marine Le Pen is set to join the campaign to leave the EU on a visit to Britain. Aides said the National Front (FN) chief was 'bound' to come to the UK ahead of the crucial referendum on June 23. The planned intervention has infuriated senior figures in the Brexit campaign, who worry that links to politicians seen as extreme could scare voters. A spokesman for the official Vote Leave campaign said: 'We will not be welcoming Marine Le Pen to the UK.' Ukip leader Nigel Farage previously refused to ally with Ms Le Pen's Europe of Nations and Freedom Group in the European Parliament. An aide to Marine Le Pen, leader of France's National Front, said she was 'bound' to come to the UK to campaign ahead of the crucial EU referendum on June 23 The party said it had no interest in the offer, partly because of 'prejudice and anti-Semitism' in the FN. Ms Le Pen has described the UK ballot as a 'key moment in European history', and declared that she wants to organise an equivalent referendum in France if she comes to power. 'It's a key moment in European history,' she said this week. 'Every nation in Europe has the right to be asked that question do you want to stay in this structure or not. The first step was organised by Mr Cameron.' Opinion polls show the 47-year-old topping the first round of presidential elections next year unless the center-right Les Republicains party nominates former prime minister Alain Juppe. However, the forecasts says she would lose the decisive second round. Ukip leader Nigel Farage, left, and the party's only MP Douglas Carswell The National Front leader, who is said to speak little English, has adopted the anti-EU position of her father, Jean-Marie, the party's founder whom she succeeded in 2011. Campaigning before the last European parliament elections, she reportedly said she wanted the EU to 'collapse'. 'I expect one thing only from the European system and that's for it to blow up,' she said. Talking about the prospects of a visit to Britain yesterday, FN spokesman Alain Vizier said: 'Marine Le Pen is bound to go. The date has not been set, it would be at the end of May or early June. 'She would go for a day or half a day.' He said no details had been set yet except that 'she will campaign for Brexit'. A baby boy has been delivered almost two months after his mother died, in the western Polish city of Wroclaw. Baby Wojtus's mother died from a brain tumour in her 17th week of pregnancy, but as her unborn child was still alive, her vital functions were sustained until the boy could be delivered. Wojtus was born 55 days after his mother died - weighing just 2.2lbs, and has now been allowed to leave the hospital with his father. Saved: Baby Wojtus's mother died when 17 weeks pregnant, but as the foetus was still alive, her vital functions were sustained until he could be delivered at a hospital in Wroclaw, Poland The deceased woman, whose name has not been released, had known about the existence of her brain tumour for the last ten years. However, she had refused to undergo the risky surgery to have the tumour removed and opted instead to live out the rest of her life with the tumour. Polish media reported that she had been able to live a normal life for many years before suddenly losing consciousness and collapsing. The woman, who was in her 17th week of pregnancy, passed away on the way to Wroclaw University Hospital, but medical staff were able to stabilize her vital organs before the foetus died. The medical team proposed to keep her 'alive' until 28th or 30th week of pregnancy. Staying alive: Baby Wojtus was delivered 55 days after his mother 'died', weighing just 2.2lbs, but has now been allowed to leave the hospital with his father Andrzej Kubler , head doctor of the Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive Therapy, and his team kept the mother's vital organs alive for 55 days so the baby could be delivered Head doctor of the Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive Therapy, Andrzej Kubler said: 'We had no experience with such a long-term maintenance of vital functions of a patient with irreversible brain damage.' The patient was connected to a respirator, fed through a tube and intravenously given medication to fight off infections and falling blood pressure. Finally, on January 9, at 27 weeks of pregnancy, the decision was made that they could not wait any longer - after 55 days in his dead mother's womb, Wojtus was born by Cesarean section. He weighed only 2.2 lbs and he was immediately put under the care of neonatologists. According to local media, Wojtus's father had been living in the hospital since his wife's body was admitted, with the nurses saying that the father was very involved in his son's rehabilitation. Wojtus has been making rapid progress, has tripled in weight to 6.6 lbs, and was recently discharged from the hospital. The operation has reportedly been hailed as a miracle by the Polish medical profession who commended the team of Polish doctors' work. Police have been mocked after releasing a bizarre e-fit of a suspect who tried to break down an elderly womans door - whose huge grin has been compared to Wallace from Wallace & Gromit. Officers from Northamptonshire Police released the unusual e-fit yesterday of the mystery grinning man after he targeted the 95-year-old woman in her home in the village of Rothersthorpe. After trying to force her front door, she opened it and he allegedly distracted her by talking about the roof, while his accomplice forced the side door and entered the house and stole her handbag. Comparison to Wallace: Officers from Northamptonshire Police released the unusual e-fit (left) yesterday of the mystery grinning man after he targeted the 95-year-old woman in her home in the village of Rothersthorpe Responses: Police issued an e-fit of the suspect on Facebook, which led to commenters noting his similarities The 5ft-tall man, who has been described as having a chubby face and a very wide open mouthed grin showing teeth fled with his accomplice when the woman realised what was happening. Police then issued an e-fit of the suspect on Facebook yesterday, which led to commenters noting his similarities to Wallace, The Joker from Batman and even Benny Hawkins from Crossroads. Catherine Harker from London noted his similarity to Wallace from the clay animation comedy series by Nick Park, referencing one of his catchphrases by writing: More cheese, Gromit? Others suggested that The Joker was on the loose, with Warren Joseph from Manchester saying: Has anyone contacted Gotham Police Department? Im pretty sure they have a big file on this guy. Likeness: The man has been compared to The Joker from Batman (left) and Benny from Crossroads (right) And Kev Hall from Leicester thought the e-fit looked like handyman Benny played by Paul Henry in Crossroads, saying: Looks like Benny from Crossroads Motel. Showing my age with that one. After the post was shared almost 400 times, a police spokesman said this morning: We're glad this post is grabbing people's attention. This was a despicable crime against a vulnerable, elderly lady and if the e-fit helps jog somebody's memory and this goes on to help catch the offender then it's done its job. A bank statement has emerged which allegedly shows that the Nine Network directly paid at least $69,000 for the failed kidnapping of two young children in Lebanon. The documents, which were presented to a Beirut court, show that a payment was sent to Child Abduction Recovery International (CARI) with the reference 'Investigation Into My Missing Child'. CARI founder Adam Whittington, who is still behind bars, claimed this is proof that Nine paid for the failed abduction that landed Tara Brown, her 60 Minutes crew and a Brisbane mother in jail. His lawyer said that Nine paid Whittington a total of $115,000 to snatch Sally Faulkner's two children from her estranged husband's family on a Beirut street on April 6. A bank statement has emerged which allegedly shows that the Nine Network directly paid at least $69,000 for the failed kidnapping of two children in Lebanon Adam Whittington, the founder of the firm - who is still behind bars - claimed this is proof that Nine paid for the failed abduction that landed Tara Brown, her 60 Minutes crew and a mother in jail 60 Minutes presenter Tara Brown and Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner (front) were pictured walking free from jail in Beirut on Wednesday Adam Whittington (left) and Craig Michael (pictured right after the recovery of his daughter in Poland in 2014) remain in a Beirut jail facing kidnapping charges after allegedly leading the failed child recovery operation It comes after Brown and her three-man crew were released on bail on Wednesday along with Ms Faulkner after her ex-husband, Ali Elamine, 32, dropped the charges. A judge told them they were all 'free to leave Lebanon' after Nine paid a multi-million dollar settlement. But Mr Elamine is still pressing charges against Mr Whittington, who was allegedly in charge of the operation, as well as Craig Michael and two Lebanese people involved. They must remain in the country to face the charges. Mr Whittington's lawyer Joe Karam slammed the 'unethical' decision to leave the men in jail, saying that Nine had run away from any responsibility. Speaking outside the Baabda Palace of Justice in Beirut, Mr Karam said: 'Ethically it wasn't appropriate for Channel Nine to arrange for a deal and not include the man they asked to execute for them something. 'They were all a team they came all together and I think they should leave altogether,' he said. CCTV footage supplied by Lebanese authorities appeared to show the bungled kidnapping earlier this week Adam Whittington (left) and Craig Michael (right) remain in custody in Beirut after a failed attempt to recover Sally Faulkner's two children on April 7. The CARI group insists a rival revealed their plan Ms Faulkner's estranged husband, Ali Elamine, pictured leaving court on Monday, previously told reporters that he would press charges against everyone 'involved' in the failed abduction attempt He released the documents which allegedly show that $69,000 was paid into an account called IPCA Limited on January 22 this year. The payment was made from TCN Channel Nine's ANZ bank account. 'This is the first instalment of two payments that were given to my client by Channel 9,' Mr Karam told AAP. 'That shows that they did ask him to provide an investigation in a missing child which is not buying a story, they asked for what happened.' Mr Karam said he would continue to fight for Whittington and Michael's release from jail. A spokesman for Nine told Daily Mail Australia they 'can't make any comment on these matters' as they are part of an internal review. Channel Nine has announced a review into the botched operation to be led by former 60 Minutes boss Gerald Stone. Nine CEO Hugh Marks emailed staff on Thursday morning promising a comprehensive investigation into how the crew became embroiled in the kidnapping plot. Ms Brown was pictured being shoved into a police car on Monday after a court hearing was postponed Ms Brown was caught in the middle of a frenzy outside a Beirut court earlier this week, but she said it looked worse than it was Faulkner in the mini van as she leaves the Beirut jail after her release with the 60 Minutes crew The veteran reporter was pictured walking free from jail two weeks after the botched abduction attempt 'It is important to reiterate that at no stage did anyone from Nine or 60 Minutes intend to act in any way that made them susceptible to charges that they breached the law or to become part of the story that is Sally's story. But we did become part of the story and we shouldn't have,' he said. 'Nine will conduct a full review that will be headed by Gerald Stone, with David Hurley and General Counsel Rachel Launders, to ascertain what went wrong and why our systems, designed to protect staff, failed to do so in this case.' 'We will task the review with recommending the necessary actions to ensure that none of our colleagues are put in a similar position in the future.' Ms Faulkner was released on bail on Wednesday along with Ms Brown and her crew, producer Stephen Rice, cameraman Ben Williamson, sound recordist David Ballment. They are still facing public prosecution charges of kidnapping and being members of a criminal gang and may be required to return if the prosecution goes ahead. The crew could be tried in 'absentia' if they do not return and face being banned from the country. They were seen laughing, hugging and smiling together in a car after they were all freed from jail. The TV crew are expected to arrive back in Sydney at around 10pm (local time). Tara Brown (pictured) was detained on kidnapping charges with a 60 Minutes crew that filmed the 'child abduction' of Sally Faulkner's two children in Lebanon on April 7 Mr Whittington's lawyer claimed his client was paid a total of $115,000 to snatch Sally Faulkner's (pictured) two children from her estranged husband's family on a Beirut street on April 6 The two children will now live with their father, Mr Elamine (pictured) in Lebanon after he was granted full custody The breakthrough came after Ms Faulkner secured a deal with her estranged partner in which she gave Mr Elamine full custody of the children in return for her release. The Australian reported that Mr Elamine is thought to have received a payout in the 'low single-digit millions'. But Mr Elamine insisted that he 'did not sign anything, did not get anything'. When asked whether Channel Nine paid anyone surrounding him or connected to him, Mr Elamine replied, 'I can't comment on that'. 'So someone around you may have received this money from Channel Nine?' The Project's Carrie Bickmore asked. 'Again, I have no idea. My lawyer and myself never communicated anything in regards to that,' Mr Elamine replied. Ms Faulkner's lawyer previously said she has been fighting to get access to her children for nine months. The lawyer said that Mr Elamine took the two children on a three-week holiday to Lebanon and did not return them as agreed. But an attempt to snatch them from a suburban Beirut street by a 'child recovery team', caught on CCTV, was ultimately unsuccessful. A man who was brought into schools in Poland to teach about Judaism has been unearthed as a fraud, who is neither a rabbi, nor Jewish. The man, who presented himself as Jacoob Ben Nistell from Haifa in Israel, sported sidelocks and a wide-brimmed hat as he operated in the town of Poznan. He took part in many official ceremonies, both religious and civil, in Poznan, as well as nearby Koscian and Wronki. He gave talks in schools and even hosted his own Facebook page, where he offered his services. Jacek Niszczota posed as a rabbi and officiated at prayer in the Polish town of Poznan for years, but it has now been revealed that he wasn't even Jewish, and barely knew Hebrew Now, the locals have learned that he was actually Jacek Niszczota, a cook from another part of Poland, who was not a Jew, but a Catholic. He was recognised by someone from his home town of Ciechanow, and he has now fled, deleting his Facebook page. Local newspaper Glos Wielkopolski uncovered that the man was not who he said he was, and confronted him over the phone. They relay the conversation in which he attempted to fob them off by pretending to be a Russian speaker. He has not been seen since. Alicja Kobus, head of the EBF and also the Vice-President of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities told the newspaper: 'I'm surprised. I never checked identity documents of the gentleman who introduced himself as Ben Nistell. 'He said he came from Haifa, his mother still lives there, and he has an Israeli passport and a son in the army. 'I believed that he was who he said he was because of how he looked and how he was able to pray in Hebrew and knew the customs of the Jewish.' She also pointed out that Nistella was a volunteer, and not a member of the Poznan municipality, meaning he never received any payment. She added that he had learned Hebrew, and seemed to have good intentions, and as a result, the people in the town bear no ill will towards him. But it appears there may have been signs that Nistell was not a rabbi. There are reports that during a meeting with school students in Swarzedz, he touched the Torah scrolls with bare hands, which is unacceptable. Other Jewish discussion groups claim he didn't know Hebrew, and could not pray. Britain is to take in another 3,000 refugees fleeing war in Syria after the Government faced repeated demands the UK us not doing enough. Most of the new group will be children identified as vulnerable by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The 3,000 refugees will be brought to Britain over the next four years. Some of the group will be adults in family groups with the children but No 10 said today most would be under 18. The Government has been under fire for the 'indefensible' decision not to relocate any unaccompanied children from Greece who have made the dangerous journey to Europe already. Britain will take 3,000 more refugees, mostly children, from refugee camps in the Middle East as the Government steps up its response to war in Syria. Pictured: Children at the temporary camp in the Lebanese village of Tal Zaffar The new group is being taken in on top of the 20,000 refugees Britain has already taken in from refugees camps around Syria. No 10 today said it was the 'largest resettlement programme in the world for children from the Middle East and North Africa'. Last week a coalition of 13 aid organisations issued a demand for Britain to take in more refugees while a string of celebrities and public figures have also called for action. David Cameron's official spokeswoman said today: 'It has followed discussions we have had with the UNHCR, NGOs and others on what is the most appropriate means we can help with on the basis, as we have already said, our aim here is to help protect vulnerable people.' The spokeswoman said the Government remained anxious about fuelling further danger to children by taking them from Europe as it could encourage more to make the perilous journey. She added: '3,000 people will be relocated through the scheme. We would expect the majority to be children but what we have decided to do following the discussions with UNHCR is to also include cases where, for example, you might have a child carer or this might be children at risk of being put into forced early marriage. 'Therefore, you might resettle a child with family members. It's now 20,000 plus 3,000 but within that 3,000 there may be some adults.' Immigration Minister James Brokenshire said: 'We have always been clear that the vast majority of vulnerable children are better off remaining in host countries in the region so they can be reunited with surviving family members. 'However, there are exceptional circumstances in which it is in a child's best interests to be resettled in the UK. 'We have engaged with a number of NGOs, including the UNHCR on the best way to provide protection to refugee children and ensure their welfare and safety remain at the heart of every decision made.' Migrants already in Europe, included those pictured in Greece on Saturday, will not be considered under the scheme as the Government does not want to encourage people to leave the Middle East region Refugee Council Chief Executive Maurice Wren said today: 'This announcement is life changing, if not life saving news for the small group of children and their families who will benefit. 'However, it's also grim news for the majority of other refugees who are desperately trying to escape conflict and persecution who the Government is try to contain in Turkey and other, poorer countries. Immigration Minister James Brokenshire has outlined plans to disperse the new refugees around Britain 'It's not good enough to offer a lifeline to one group of refugees while colluding to close off the escape routes of everyone else. All refugees need to be able to reach a place of safety. Until we see a coordinated, comprehensive response to this crisis; men, women and children will continue to be forced to take desperate measures to reach safety.' Cllr David Simmonds, Chairman of the Local Government Association's Asylum, Refugee and Migration Task Group, said: 'Councils have a strong track record of supporting refugees, including children at risk, travelling alone or those in extended family groups. 'It is right that the increased resettlement programme is phased in over time and is subject to review, given the vulnerability of the children councils will be welcoming into their communities. 'These new measures must be planned in full partnership with councils and be effectively funded to ensure that services are able to cope with any additional demand and meet children's needs. 'Any new scheme also needs to be clearly aligned with existing schemes for unaccompanied asylum seeking children, refugees and asylum seeking families to ensure there is sufficient capacity and resources to support these vulnerable people.' Mr Brokenshire said: 'The Government is committed to making a full contribution to the global refugee crisis, in particular by helping children at risk. 'We firmly believe that we can make the biggest difference and add most value by supporting children and their families in the conflict region whilst providing a route to the UK for the minority of vulnerable or at risk cases where resettlement is judged by the UNHCR to be in the child's best interests.' Millions of refugees have been displaced by the five year war in Syria, pouring across borders into refugee camps in the region, including in Lebanon, pictured In a statement to MPs today, Mr Brokenshire added: 'We will do all we can to ensure that children in Europe with a right to be reunited with their family in the UK are supported to do so. 'However, the government remains of the view that relocation schemes within Europe risk creating unintended consequences or perverse incentives for people to put their lives into the hands of traffickers.' Tim Farron has slammed the Government for refusing to relocate unaccompanied children who have already reached Europe The new arrivals will be dispersed across the country as ministers bid to make sure no one local authority is overburdened. Kent County Council has expressed concern after receiving a surge of around 500 foreign children entering its care system over the past year. The Government has faced persistent demands to do more to help tackle the migrant crisis as more than a million entered Europe last year and similar numbers are expected in 2016. Mr Cameron has repeatedly insisted Britain will only take people from the region - warning signing up to an EU system to relocate people within Europe would only encourage more migrants to try and reach Europe. Ahead of the official announcement, Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat leader, told The Guardian: 'Disgracefully these plans do nothing for the young, vulnerable children I have met in Lesbos and northern Greece. 'The government's continuing refusal to offer safe haven to 3,000 unaccompanied child refugees in Europe is indefensible. 'We know tens of thousands of children have arrived in Europe alone, and thousands of them have simply vanished. They are at risk of human trafficking and horrific abuse and exploitation. 'MPs and peers across parties will not be fooled ahead of next week's vote by the government's plans which do absolutely nothing for these children. There is strong support across parties for Britain to act.' Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch led celebrity outrage at the Government's refusal to relocate children already in Europe when he told his audience at a Hamlet performance 'No one puts children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land'. William Harrison, 21, pictured outside court where he was accused of assaulting two women A new student at the UK's oldest catholic university sexually assaulted two young women minutes apart during drunken freshers week introductions, a court heard today. William Harrison, 21, had only been at St. Mary's University, Twickenham a week when he allegedly followed a 19 year-old into her room and forced himself on her after a night out. When Harrison started undoing his trousers, she unlocked the door and fled the room, and when he came back later to collect his coat he 'started trying to kiss' another female student, the jury heard. The 19-year-old woman told Kingston-upon-Thames Crown Court: 'He said: "Don't be boring" and kept saying: "You love it" again and again.' She said she did not want to go any further than kissing Harrison: 'He was alright, a decent-looking lad, but he was forcing his tongue into my mouth and I closed my eyes and was shaking my head.' 'He got on top of me and that's when I started to worry. He was kissing me down my neck and it was becoming forceful and he bit me and I flinched. 'He started undoing his trousers and I unlocked the door and went out.' The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, admitted drinking five vodkas, five Jagerbomb shots and two alcopops that evening before ending up at the halls of residence in Waldegrave Road at 2.30am. She was also new to St, Mary's and had spent her first week getting to know her fellow-students and was part of group that had invited Harrison to join them. Prosecutor Mr. James Dawson told the court: 'All the parties in this case had been drinking quite heavily and the first complainant had pre-drinks before going to the Student Union.' When she fled her room she told other students on the landing: 'You've got to get rid of him.' 'It was plain she was very upset and very tearful,' added the prosecutor. Traditional: A student at the UK's oldest catholic university sexually assaulted two young women minutes apart during drunken freshers week introductions, a court heard today Harrison returned to collect his coat and another female student, 20, went into the room to get it. 'He followed her in and put his hand over her mouth and started trying to kiss her and she resisted and said: "What are you doing?"' said Mr Dawson. 'She pushed her way out of the room and now there were two very upset girls,' he added. The police were called and officers arrested Harrison in his room. When questioned he did not deny there was physical contact, insisting both young women were consensual. Harrison, from Ely, Cambridgeshire has pleaded not guilty to one count of assault by penetration and one count of sexual assault on September 27, 2014. The trial continues. Harrison had only been at St. Mary's University, Twickenham a week when he followed a 19 year-old into her room and forced himself on her, the jury heard The man, 58, was arrested and taken to a police station for questioning Police say funds were made from a 'global network' of organised crime He was in possession of 30million worth of banker's drafts at his home Police arrest a man near Bridgend on suspicion of money laundering Police have today made their biggest ever UK money seizure after officers arrested a 58-year-old man who was in possession of three banker's drafts worth 30million. The enormous funds are suspected to have been generated by a 'global network of organised crime operators' who used the arrested man's business accounts to launder the cash. Officers from the City of London Police arrested the man at his home near Bridgend, south Wales, this morning on suspicion of money laundering. City of London Police officers today made the biggest ever UK money seizure after arresting a 58-year-old man who was caught in possession of three banker's drafts worth 30million They caught the man in possession of three banker's drafts, one worth $8.8million (6.1million), a second worth 315,000 and a third worth an eye-watering 30.7million euros (24.1million). He has been taken to a local police station for questioning. City of London Police believe the funds were made from overseas crime, including Ponzi schemes - which are fraudulent investing scams promising high rates of return with little risk to investors. Officers also believe the funds were generated on the foreign exchange markets, and then laundered through the 58 year old's company bank account. The man, 58, was arrested on suspicion of money laundering at his home near Bridgend (pictured) in south Wales The City of London Police investigation was launched in March 2016 after receiving intelligence that a UK bank account was suspected of being used for organised and international money laundering. Their enquiries focused on a business that was listed as being involved in test drilling into earth, known as boring, which had an annual turnover of 250,000. However, in November 2015 $19million - or 13.2million - was transferred into the company account and converted into Euros via an intermediary foreign exchange company, with the majority then being sent on to Georgia. In February 2016, a further 37 million euros - or 29.1million - was transferred into the same account. On this occasion, the suspect claimed the funds were for the purchase of a Sri Lankan tea company. Detective Inspector Craig Mullish, from the City of London Police's Money Laundering Unit, said: 'We believe this man's business account was being used by a global network of organised crime operators to launder tens of millions of pounds of stolen funds through the UK and then out into bank accounts around the world. 'His arrest and the massive money seizure is further evidence of how banks and law enforcement are working very closely together to take criminal proceeds out of the UK economy.' POLICE CAUGHT THE MAN WITH THREE BANKER'S DRAFTS One worth $8.8million (6.1m) A second worth 315,000 A third worth 30.7million euros (24.1m) Total = 30,515,000 Advertisement A bankers draft, also known as a bankers cheque, is prepaid and issued by a bank - unlike a standard cheque which is not prepaid. Banker's drafts are often used for larger amounts of money and when people or organisations won't accept a personal cheque. The City of London Police Fraud Squad takes on many of the UK's most complex and significant fraud investigations. It includes units dedicated to combating money laundering and recovering the proceeds of crime. The City of London Police is also home to Action Fraud (National Fraud Reporting Centre) and the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, which together records and analyses thousands of reports of fraud each week. An ISIS terrorist who blew himself up at Brussels airport had worked at the terminal for five years before the attack, it has been claimed. Najim Laachraoui, one of two suicide bombers who targeted the airport on March 22, was already known to have worked at the European Parliament in the city several years ago. It has now been claimed that the jihadist was working at the terminal through a temp agency for five years until 2012. A report also claims that a hidden prayer room was found at Brussels Airport shortly before the atrocity, 'where radicalised staff would meet to pray in secret'. For five years until 2012, Najim Laachraoui 'worked... at Brussels airport', according to Belgian media, which added that he had been recruited by a temp agency Najim Laachraoui was one of two suicide bombers at Brussels airport in coordinated attacks that also struck a metro station in the city, killing 32 people overall. He is pictured left next to Ibrahim El Bakraoui (centre) who also blew himself up and Mohamed Abrini (right), the so-called 'man in the hat' who has been arrested Laachraoui, thought to have been the bomb-maker for the terror attacks in Paris last November, launched a suicide attack at Brussels airport on March 22 in coordinated attacks that also struck a metro station in the city, killing 32 people overall. For five years until 2012, Laachraoui 'worked... at Brussels airport', according to Belgium's VTM reported, adding that he had been recruited by a temp agency. It did not provide details about the kind of work Laachraoui was to have carried out there, but said that airport staff are usually subject to a security check before being given access badges. There has been no official confirmation of the report. The report also said a hidden prayer room had been discovered at the terminal shortly before the attacks, 'where radicalised staff would meet to pray in secret'. The airport shut the prayer room down at the request of police, VTM reported, adding that investigators have since drawn up a list of 'at least 50 radicalised airport employees'. Traces of Laachraoui's DNA have been found at a Brussels apartment where the suicide belts for the Brussels attacks were made. The 24-year-old one-time electrical engineering student is also suspected of being the bomb-maker for last November's Paris attacks that left 130 people dead. Both attacks have been claimed by ISIS. It had already emerged earlier that Najim Laachraoui also briefly worked as a cleaner at the European Parliament several years ago. Passengers are evacuated from Brussels Airport after the terrorist attack On April 6, the European Parliament said one of the bombers had held a summer cleaning job at its Brussels headquarters in 2009 and 2010. Speaking to AFP, a source close to the inquiry named that person as Laachraoui. Belgian prosecutors believe Laachraoui went to Syria in February 2013 where he joined IS. He resurfaced last September, two months before the Paris carnage, when he was stopped by police on the Austria-Hungary border. He was using the false identity of Soufiane Kayal and was travelling with Salah Abdeslam, the sole surviving Paris attacks suspect. A woman who was kidnapped by a man with a shotgun called 911 from the trunk of his car and was rescued by a policeman who shot dead the suspect. The man bundled the woman into the trunk of his car in Homestead, near Miami, Florida, around 6pm on Wednesday night and drove off. But she still had her cellphone on her and managed to make a call to 911 as he drove through the city. The incident happened in south west Miami on Wednesday evening. The woman is said to be safe and well Police responded and found the car abandoned in a wooded area in south west Miami. A police dog was brought in to search the area for the suspect, who then confronted cops and pointed a shotgun at them. He was shot dead by the police officer and the woman was found in the woods shortly afterwards. Detective Jennifer Capote of the Miami-Dade Police Department said the woman was the dead man's estranged partner. 'She was visibly shaken up, but OK,' she added. The Government today outlined an offer to buy up to 25 per cent of the Port Talbot steel works while offering hundreds of millions of pounds of additional support to a commercial buyer. Ministers have scrambled to respond to a crisis in the steel industry since Indian firm Tata announced it would sell all of its UK plants in the face of losses running to a 1million a day. The South Wales plant supports up to 40,000 jobs in the local economy and the Government has faced demands to nationalise the steel works if necessary to keep it running. The Prime Minister's spokeswoman today rejected talk of 'nationalisation' and warned ministers did not want a 'controlling' interest in the plant. But a joint announcement by ministers in London and Cardiff made clear the Government was ready to spend taxpayers' money buying a minority stake in the British steel industry. The Government today outlined hundreds of millions in potential support for a buyer of the Port Talbot steel works, pictured, which have been threatened with closure since Tata announced a sale A possible management buy out of the steel works emerged this week after Tata triggered the official sale process. The firm concluded a sale of its Scunthorpe steel works earlier this month, selling it to financiers Greybull Capital. Union members at the site agreed three per cent pay cuts this week as part of the deal. Business Secretary Sajid Javid said: 'This Government is committed to supporting the steel industry to secure a long-term viable future and we are working closely with Tata Steel UK on its process to find a credible buyer. 'The detail of our commercial funding offer is clear evidence of the extent of that commitment. 'Ministers have visited Tata Steel sites across the country and the pride and dedication of the highly-skilled men and women working there is obvious to see. 'We have already delivered on energy compensation, on tackling unfair trading practices and on procurement of British steel, and we will keep on going further to support this vital industry.' Mr Javid said he had a second meeting in Mumbai with Tata Global Chairman Cyrus Mistry this week. The managing director of Tata's Strip Products Stuart Wilkie, pictured, is said to be considering a management buy-out of the Port Talbot plant First Minister of Wales Carwyn Jones said: 'We're committed to supporting any credible bid to secure steel making in Wales. 'We have worked with the UK Government to put in place this significant package of support and we believe that this will help secure a successful sale of Tata Steel's operations in Wales and the rest of the UK.' Shadow business secretary Angela Eagle said the move was a 'long over due recognition' of the steel crisis. She said: 'But this alone will not be enough to save the steel industry. The Government must ensure Tata allow enough time for a suitable buyer to be found and they must reassure the customer base and supply chain. 'Crucially, they need to address the underlying challenges facing the industry; energy costs, business rates, procurement, and most of all, the illegal dumping of Chinese steel. 'Steel is a foundation industry which is vital for our manufacturing base and our economy. It has a bright future if the Government takes action now. We'll continue to hold their feet to the fire and to stand up for our steel industry.' Mr Cameron's spokeswoman today said: 'Hundreds of millions of pounds will be made available to potential buyers. 'It would be through provisions of debt financing. It would be supporting a potential buyer in order to keep the operations going.' Asked if the Government was prepared to part-nationalise the giant South Wales site, Mr Cameron's spokeswoman said: 'If we were to take an equity stake it would be a minority one with the aim of supporting the purchaser with the aim of delivering a long term future. 'We are certainly not seeking to be controlling the company.' Mr Javid met Port Talbot steel workers following Tata's announcement of a sale amid criticism he was not in Mumbai during the crucial talks which threatened the plant She added: 'We would not see this as nationalisation and we would not be seeking to acquire control over the business.' The Government has repeatedly said it is keen to support a 'viable sale' and Mr Javid flew to Mumbai for talks with Tata after the sale was announced. Mr Javid faced severe criticism for not being in India when the steel giant held the crucial board meeting which led to the sale decision. It emerged yesterday that Stuart Wilkie, managing director of Tata's Strip Products, is believed to have expressed an interest in a potential buyout of the South Wales steelworks and is canvassing workers about joining a bid. The wider steel industry, including the Shotton steel works at Flint, pictured, were also threatened by the decision of Tata to sell its UK business The investment he is seeking from employees could be as much as 10,000 each, according to sources. Private investors and government support would also be needed to reach the 100million target. Tata would not confirm the names of anyone who has expressed an interest in buying its loss making UK business, but the latest proposal is based on a 'turnaround plan' earlier rejected by the board. The Indian conglomerate announced three weeks ago that it was selling its UK assets, leaving thousands of jobs in the balance at plants across the country and at firms supplying the business. Mr Wilkie was one of those behind a survival plan for Tata's UK steel business which was rejected by the board in India. The right decision ... and about time too! Commentary by Alex Brummer, City Editor for the Daily Mail Alex Brummer, City Editor for the Daily Mail Finally, after weeks of dithering, the Government has recognised that saving Britains steel industry is a matter of strategic importance. But its sclerotic response to a crisis that has been in the making for months (if not years) has damaged the Tories reputation as competent economic managers. The rescue package, unveiled by Business Secretary Sajid Javid, has come far too late to salvage the reputation of a minister who was once regarded as one of the brightest sparks in the Government. It demonstrates the inability of a bone-dry, Thatcherite, former investment banker to understand the importance of preserving steel production in the UK as part of the nations economic security. At a time when the Tories have pledged to rebuild the nations crumbling infrastructure, and continue to commit 2 per cent of the nations total output to defence, to allow the steel industry to fade away would have been an act of industrial vandalism. In the end, the Government has come up with a menu of options designed to support a private-sector rescue of Tata Steel. The choices it is offering are debt financing (something it can easily do by offering guarantees), complex debt, which could later convert into shares in the enterprise, or most radically taking a Government stake of up to 25 per cent. In the post-Thatcher era, successive governments have been reluctant to sanction intervention to save failing industries and have shied away from nationalisation. History shows that when it comes to strategic industries, there is no shame in governments relaxing their approach. In 1970, the government of Ted Heath saved aerospace engine maker Rolls-Royce from bankruptcy. It subsequently became the worlds largest supplier of engines. In 2002, the Labour government stepped in to save British Energy, owner of a Britains nuclear plants, after a catastrophic fall in electricity prices. It was subsequently sold to private investors at a large profit. More recently in 2008, Gordon Browns government launched a near 1trillion rescue for Britains banks in an intervention that arguably paved the way for the robust recovery of the British economy. The vulnerability of Britains steel industry to cheap foreign imports has been evident since the closure of Thai-owned Redcar production in 2015, and the more recent struggle to save jobs in Scunthorpe. The combined negative impact of carbon taxes imposed by Labour, high business rates and cheap Chinese imports were an obvious disaster in the making. Yet Mr Javid initially said there was little to be done. The Governments reluctance was partly down to its concern not to alienate the Indian owners, who have invested in Jaguar Land Rover, or China which it is counting on to invest in the nuclear plant at Hinkley Point. A call to action from Labour, the anxiety of the Welsh government and the determination of unions to keep Port Talbot open all contributed to Javids U-turn. But the Government must proceed with prudence. Looming in the background is the searing memory of MG Rover, when the remnants of British mass car production fell into the hands of unscrupulous businessmen who milked it dry before closing it. A hero marine who hunts down Mexican drug bosses humiliates the narcos he catches by dressing them in women's underwear and forcing them to kiss one another. During a raid by Erick Morales Guevara - nicknamed 'Senor Thor' - a masked operative posed next to an alleged cartel gunman wearing lingerie. In another image in a separate raid, a man was pictured holding a hammer to his chin while a marine holds a gun to his head. Scroll down for video A photograph taken by Mexican marines shows a masked operative posing with an alleged cartel gunman after he was arrested and humiliated by his captors by being forced to wear women's clothes Another photograph taken by 'Senor Thor' shows a bloodied prisoner holding a mallet to his face while an officer points a gun at the back of his head. The mallet, or hammer, is a symbol of the Norse god Thor This image, of a portrait of crime boss El Chive's father, was taken by the operative's team during a raid. The team defaced it then signed it 'Sr. Thor' as a provocation to the drug lord And another photo, leaked to Breitbart Texas, shows a portrait of a drug lord's father after it was defaced by the now-legendary Senor Thor during a raid on the cartel boss's home. After storming the property of Silvestre 'El Chive' Haro Rodriguez, Senor Thor had found the house empty - but decided to send him a message. Not only did he steal a vase containing the ashes of the drug lord's beloved father, but he also defaced a portrait of the elderly man by scribbling 'Sr. Thor' across his face. His provocation had its desired effect - sparking a personal cat-and-mouse feud between the two. El Chive responded to the theft of his fathers ashes by hanging a banner in public accusing Senor Thor of taking bribes. The lengthy statement, left dangling from a pedestrian overpath in the city of Tampico last year, accused the marine of stealing 330,000 during a raid. Silvestre 'El Chive' Haro Rodriguez (pictured) was arrested last year while visiting one of his key lieutenants in hospital It read: 'This is for you, Erick Morales,' it began. 'Dog, [I] know where you live but I want you, not your family. I'm not a pig like you.' 'Why do not you tell the government how much you stole from Altamira?' it added. The banner - which was signed by the Gulf Cartel's Tampico branch - went on to claim its 'soldiers' would turn the city of Tampico into a 'battlefield' if authorities continued to pester it. Unfortunately, Senor Thor never managed to capture his nemesis. El Chive was arrested by state police in August last year after Senor Thor had been transferred to a province in the south. El Chive was caught while visiting his key lieutenant in a hospital in the city after the man had damaged one of his hands in an accident with explosives. According to El Universal, he attempted to bribe the arresting officers by offering them three vehicles. However, the move was unsuccessful and he was arrested and transferred to Mexico City. El Chive was thought to be a leading boss of the Gulf Cartel and in charge of the cities of Tampico, Madero and Altamira, in the state of Tamaulipas. The gang has controlled the region for decades after it made a fortune smuggling alcohol during the prohibition era before switching to cocaine in the 1980s. The group is notoriously violent and is feared among the population it presides over for its assassinations, kidnappings, extortion rackets and murders. However, in recent years it has lost much of the power it once held, due in part to the strength of its offshoot Los Zetas. The Gulf Cartel was founded in its modern form by Juan Garcia Abrego, who expanded operations to begin importing cocaine from Colombia's Cali Cartel and distribute it across the border to various locations within the U.S. in the 1980s. Gulf Cartel, to which El Chive is linked, operates in Tamaulipas on the country's east coast (illustrated) This is the sign El Chive hung from a busy pedstrian bridge in Tampico in which the crime boss accused 'Senor Thor' of taking eight million pesos during a drug raid Pictured is a haul of weapons seized by authorities during a raid in the city of Altamira in April last year. Among the haul, which bears the logo of the Gulf Cartel, are mines, grenade launchers, grenades and assault rifles By 1995, he was so successful he found himself on the FBI's Top Ten Most Wanted and the following year, he was arrested and extradited to the U.S. He is currently serving 11 life terms in a Colorado prison after being found guilty of money laundering, and drug possession and trafficking. However, his biggest legacy was the creation of Los Zetas. It was made up of hand picked members of the Mexican Special Forces - who were persuaded to join as his personal protection team after being offered salaries vastly exceeding that of the army. By the early 2000s, the group had grown in size and power to such an extent it began operating its own extortion rackets and traffic routes. It says four Filipino workers were underpaid by $260,000 in three years A woman who was working up to 18 hours a day for as little as $3 was fired over email after she went on a holiday to the Philippines. Filipina Maricar Virata, who was working at a motel in the Grampians in Victoria, came to Australia in 2013 and took up a job for $55,000 a year plus superannuation to be split between her and her partner. In the first two weeks, she found herself routinely working 13 hours days and after her shift ended, would remain on call with the reception phone diverted to her room, The Age reported. The Fair Work Ombudsman launched a court action to prosecute her former employer, ordering them to pay her damages of $27,500 after she was sacked via email. A woman who was working up to 18 hours a day for as little as $3 was fired over email after she went on a holiday to the Philippines (stock image) Fair Work found the couple, who own three motels, have underpaid four Filipino workers by more than $260,000 in three years. The owners said the allegations are 'lies' and would dispute the claims in Federal Court in May. They said they had grounds to fire Ms Virata as she frequently argued with them. Last year, the commission found Ms Virata's working conditions at the motel were 'unusual' and 'exploitative'. Ms Virata told Fairfax media she was initially pleased with her $55,000 annual wage and decided to split it evenly between herself and her partner. 'At the beginning, yes, we were happy about it,' she said. 'Definitely it was way more than we were getting in the Philippines.' But not long after her employment began, she began working 7am to 1am the next morning. The issue has been listed in the Federal Court Circuit Court for May 12. Indianapolis police say a two-year-old boy shot and killed himself after taking a gun from his mother's purse on the kitchen counter when she wasn't watching. The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department say officers found the child with a single gunshot wound to the chest when they arrived at the home around 9pm Wednesday. The little boy was rushed to Riley Hospital for Children at IU Health where he was later pronounced dead by medical staff, Fox 59 reported. Scroll down for video Heartbreaking: Police say a 2-year-old boy shot and killed himself after taking a gun from his mother's purse on the kitchen counter when she wasn't watching The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department say officers found the child with a single gunshot wound when they arrived at the home around 9pm Wednesday Police said in a news release Thursday that the mother is cooperating with detectives who questioned her before she was released. At the time of the shooting, the mother and child were the only people at home. Police have not released the identities of the mother and child. 'We believe it was accidental, but we're talking a very preliminary investigation,' Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department Capt. Don Weilhamer told WTHR. 'If this is actually self-inflicted, it's important for people to realize you need to keep your guns up. The little boy was rushed to Riley Hospital for Children at IU Health where he was later pronounced dead by medical staff 'But, like I said, it's too early at this point in time to say exactly what happened.' According to WTHR, one neighbor said that the the mother and child had returned home a short time before the tragic shooting. 'They're real nice. I knew the grandmother real well,' neighbor Louise Jones told WTHR. The father of the two young children who were snatched off the street in the 60 Minutes botched abduction has revealed that they were confused and asked why the men were 'so rough'. Ali Elamine, 32, the estranged husband of Sally Faulkner, said his children still do not know anything about the kidnap plot or their mother's imprisonment. He also said that the Nine Network will not be able to use footage from the kidnapping attempt under the deal that secured the release of its 60 Minutes crew and Ms Faulkner. During an interview with The Project, Mr Elamine said his children Noah, three, and Lahela, five, did not understand what was happening when they were grabbed on a Beirut street. The father at the centre of 60 Minutes child abduction case, Ali Elamine (pictured), has revealed the reason why he thought his two children were better off with him Presenter Tara Brown and Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner (front) were pictured walking free from jail in Beirut on Wednesday 'Their first thing (after the kidnap attempt) when they saw me was like, 'why are mummy's friends so tough and rough?',' he said. 'And I said, oh ... they just work out, they're big guys and they work out and they didn't mean to hurt you, they're just trying to surprise you.' He also elaborated on the details of the agreement struck in a judge's office at the Baabda Palace of Justice in Beirut. 'My initial thing from Sal and Channel Nine was, Sal drops the custody charges in Australia, and Channel Nine, just they don't use that footage that they filmed in the process and don't bring up the kid's names,' Mr Elamine said. 'That was the agreement that was done yesterday in front of the judge.' Mr Elamine repeatedly denied that he received any financial compensation in exchange for the release of Ms Faulkner and the 60 Minutes team. Ms Faulkner and Brown in the back of a minivan as they leave Beirut prison after their release Ali Elamine, 32, said he had a problem with Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner's parenting and relationship decisions But it has since emerged that Channel Nine paid him US$500,000 in the official settlement after he rejected an earlier offer of $350,000, according to News Corp. An undisclosed amount was also paid directly to Mr Elamine's family to encourage him to drop charges against the 60 Minutes crew, sources have claimed. Mr Elamine has previously spoken about why he thought his two children were better off with him than their Australian mother. '[My daughter] Lahela kept on telling me 'Mummy's friend' would sleep in the same bed as us... and stuff like that. I just wasn't okay with all of that,' Mr Elamine told KIISFM's Kyle Jackie O. The father of Lahela, 5, and Noah, 3, and Ms Faulkner are still married but have been separated for about a year. Ms Faulkner embraces producer Stephen Rice after their release from jail following a two-week ordeal The 60 Minutes crew including Brown were pictured inside the car with Brisbane mother Ms Faulkner After Brown, Ms Faulkner and the 60 Minutes crew were released, Mr Elamine said Lahela, 5 and Noah, 3, (pictured with their mother) would be living with him in Lebanon. He insisted that his ex-wife would have access Mr Elamine agreed to a deal for the immediate release of Ms Faulkner (right with Brown) from a Lebanese prison in exchange for full custody of their two children Australian sound recordist David Ballment (left) and cameraman Ben Williamson (right) inside the minivan Mr Elamine also claims he had been deceived into leaving his children in his mother's care so the abduction could take place. 'I own a surf school in Lebanon, it's called Surf Lebanon,' he said. 'The night before [the abduction] I got a Facebook message asking me if I could be down there at 7 o'clock in the morning to give a lesson. 'I said: 'Listen I have to drop my kids off, I could do it 8.' [But] they kept on insisting. 'I usually do that [drop off the kids] in the morning [but] my mum from time-to-time, if I'm busy at work, she drops them off.' Mr Elamine said it was his mother who had been attacked during the child abduction, and she had 'a concussion' and 'internal bleeding in the head from three different hits'. On Monday, 60 Minutes reporter Brown was pictured being forced into a police car in handcuffs as she was taken back to a Lebanese jail. She was expected to appear in court but the case was adjourned Judge Rami Abdullah told reporters the group were facing very serious charges Brown (right) and Ms Faulkner were pictured being led away in handcuffs from the Beirut court after the Monday hearing was postponed Brown (pictured) was detained on kidnapping charges with a 60 Minutes crew that filmed the 'child abduction' of Ms Faulkner's two children in Lebanon on April 7 'She's a 70-year-old lady who got chucked around like she's in a bag of chips.' Presenter Tara Brown and her 60 Minutes crew arrived back in Australia on Thursday night following a two-week stint in jail. The reporter was pictured smiling as she made her way through Sydney Airport on Thursday with producer Stephen Rice, sound recordist David Ballment and cameraman Ben Williamson. When asked home in felt to be back on home soil, she said 'very good' before being whisked to a black van with the rest of the crew so they could be taken back to their families and friends. The team walked free from a Lebanese prison on Wednesday along with Ms Faulkner after Mr Elamine, agreed to drop the charges. They had spent two weeks behind bars over the plot to snatch Ms Faulkner's two children from her ex-husband's family on a street in Beirut. Ms Faulkner's claims her children Noah and Lahela were taken to Lebanon by her estranged husband Ali Elamine (pictured with Noah and Lahela) in 2015 and he refused to bring them back For the past two weeks, Brown and Ms Faulkner have been held at Baabda Central Women's Prison (pictured) Sally Faulkner's lawyer has reportedly said she was paid for by the Nine Network and had used money given to her by 60 Minutes to the child recovery agency, Child Abduction Recovery International have been worth $70 million but it was abandoned before it was completed Advertisement The Indian glamour couple who fled Australia after leaving an eyesore mansion dubbed the 'Taj Mahal on the Swan' have returned to fight an alleged unpaid bill of $186 million. Pankaj and Radhika Oswal's Burrup Fertilisers empire collapsed in 2010 and the couple left Perth and moved to Dubai a year later. They refused to return in February to give evidence in a case of fraud brought against them. The couple were issued a Departure Prohibition Order from the Australian Taxation Office this week and Ms Oswal said he has timed his return to Australia with several pending legal cases as the couple need the 'winnings' to pay the ATO bill, The Australian reported. Scroll down for video Pankaj and Radhika Oswal (pictured) - the Indian glamour couple who fled Australia after leaving an eyesore mansion dubbed the 'Taj Mahal on the Swan' - have returned to fight an alleged unpaid bill of $186 million After leaving in 2011, the couple left their Peppermint Grove property. It was expected to be worth up to $70 million when complete, but was covered in graffiti since being abandoned 'When I landed in Australia, I told my wife Radhika that ... we might be here for six months, or we might be here for a month, or we might be here for six years,' Mr Oswal said. The order means the couple will not be able to leave Australia for a period of time. Mr Oswal's wealthy industrialist father passed away in March and he reportedly entered a dispute with his mother over the family inheritance. 'My father passed away without a will and as my father's eldest son I have a right to a law-defined inheritance of his personal estate,' he told Press Trust of India. After leaving in 2011, the couple left their Peppermint Grove property. It was expected to be worth up to $70 million when complete, but was covered in graffiti since being abandoned. The local council has long wanted it gone and was delighted in October of last year when a breakthrough was reached The 6800-square-metre Peppermint Grove property the couple abandoned in 2011 Peppermint Grove shire president Rachel Thomas said police were regularly called to the unfinished property The local council has long wanted it gone and was delighted in October of last year when a breakthrough was reached. Peppermint Grove shire president Rachel Thomas said an application filed by Ms Oswal with the State Administrative Tribunal to prevent the demolition was withdrawn. 'We believed we had a pretty good case and they've obviously decided that perhaps we did have a good case,' she said at the time. Ms Thomas said police were regularly called to the unfinished property. 'It was a real nuisance for the immediate neighbours in particular because of the antisocial behaviour. And with the graffiti, it was a real blot on the landscape,' she said. 'We've had people smoking dope in there ... noisy parties ... it [was] a real problem.' Presenter Tara Brown and her 60 Minutes crew have arrived back in Australia after a US$500,000 deal was reached with the father in the botched child abduction case. The reporter was pictured smiling as she made her way through Sydney Airport on Thursday with producer Stephen Rice, sound recordist David Ballment and cameraman Ben Williamson. When asked how it felt to be back on home soil, she said 'very good' before being whisked to a black van with the rest of the crew so they could be taken back to their families and friends. The team walked free from a Lebanese prison on Wednesday along with Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner after her estranged husband, Ali Elamine, agreed to drop the charges. They had spent two weeks behind bars over the plot to snatch Ms Faulkner's two children from her ex-husband's family on a street in Beirut. Scroll down for video 60 Minutes reporter Tara Brown and producer Stephen Rice are pictured here landing in Sydney on Thursday Presenter Tara Brown and her 60 Minutes crew have arrived back in Australia after a US$500,000 deal was reached with the father in the botched child abduction case The reporter was pictured smiling as she made her way through Sydney Airport on Thursday with producer Stephen Rice Wearing a black top, Brown looked happy and relaxed as she made her way through Sydney Airport The TV crew had spent two weeks behind bars over the plot to snatch Ms Faulkner's two children from her ex-husband's family on a street in Beirut They walked free from a Lebanese prison on Wednesday along with Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner after her estranged husband, Ali Elamine, agreed to drop the charges Brown and her 60 Minutes crew at a Lebanon airport after their release waiting for their flight home The 60 Minutes crew sparked outrage on social media after posting a picture of them celebrating their release with drinks in an airport lounge before flying back business class to Australia via Dubai. They went straight to Beirut airport after an investigative judge dropped charges against them over their botched child recovery mission. But they were warned that they might be ordered back to Lebanon if prosecutors decide to proceed with criminal charges. Ms Faulkner has remained behind in Lebanon so she could spend time with her children before flying home to Brisbane. Channel Nine reportedly paid Mr Elamine US$500,000 in the official settlement after he rejected an earlier offer of $350,000, according to News Corp. Mr Elamine has previously denied claims that he wants compensation, telling reporters that 'money is not an issue'. An undisclosed amount was also paid directly to Mr Elamine's family to encourage him to drop charges against the 60 Minutes crew, sources have claimed. He is still pressing ahead with charges against Adam Whittington and Craig Michael from Child Abduction Recovery International (CARI), who allegedly helped plan and carry out the abduction. They were not freed as part of the deal and remain behind bars. 60 Minutes presenter Tara Brown and Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner (front) were pictured walking free from jail in Beirut on Wednesday The 60 Minutes crew including Ms Brown were pictured inside the car with Brisbane mother Ms Faulkner The veteran reporter was pictured walking free from jail two weeks after the botched abduction attempt Ms Brown (left) flashed a quick smile as she was released from Baabda Central Women's Prison on Wednesday Mr Whittington's lawyer Joe Karam has released a bank statement which allegedly shows that Nine directly paid at least $69,000 to CARI for the failed kidnapping. He said that this was just the first instalment and that Nine paid a total of $115,000 for the failed operation. Brown looked exhausted, but relieved when she left Baabda Women's Prison on Wednesday with Ms Faulkner. They were pictured smiling and hugging after being reunited with the three-man 60 Minutes crew in a waiting car. After leaving prison, Brown told 9News she was glad to be going home. 'I had a chance to say 'hi' to [husband] John. I was ordered to call home straight away. But [I have] not [talked to] the kids yet,' the 60 Minutes presenter said. 'I can't wait to speak to them obviously though they have no idea about any of this. It's great to talk to home. It's great to be going home.' Faulkner in the mini van as she leaves the Beirut jail after her release with the 60 Minutes crew Ms Faulkner's ex-husband Ali Elamine, 32, agreed to drop the charges against the Australians in a court hearing after reaching a deal in which he was awarded full custody They have been behind bars for the past two weeks after being involved in a plot to kidnap Ms Faulkner's two children from her estranged Lebanese husband's family on a street in Beirut The freed 60 Minutes team were seen hugging Ms Brown and Ms Faulkner when they climbed into the car Australian sound recordist David Ballment and cameraman Ben Williamson after their release from jail A detail of the legal sentence for the case involving the 60 Minutes crew and Faulkner Mr Elamine speaks to journalists outside Beirut court after the Australians' release The breakthrough came after Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner (pictured) and her estranged husband Ali Elamine reached an agreement which gave him full custody in return for her release Tara Brown (pictured) has been detained on kidnapping charges with a 60 Minutes crew that filmed the 'child abduction' of Sally Faulkner's two children in Lebanon on April 7 The TV crew were released on bail after charges were dropped over the botched child abduction attempt in Beirut - but they were warned they could be ordered back to the country Wearing a blue and white striped top, Ms Brown looked calm as she was photographed leaving prison to join her three freed colleagues in a waiting car Ms Brown could be seen laughing and smiling in the car before the group made their way to the airport The TV crew are expected to fly home on Wednesday night (Beirut time) and arrive in Australia on Thursday A member of the 60 minutes television crew was seen embracing Ms Faulkner in the car Ms Faulkner also issued an emotional message to her children after being released from jail. 'I love them and mummy is sorry that it all worked out this way. I tried. I hope I can see them again one day in Australia, I really do,' Ms Faulkner told Nine News. Sound recordist David Ballment said the group were all 'hoping for the best but prepared for the worst' before their sudden release. Cameraman Ben Williamson simply said he couldn't wait to 'hug my wife and my kids and tell them I love them'. The breakthrough came after Mr Elamine agreed a deal with his ex-wife after she conceded to give him full custody of the two children in exchange for her release. Ms Faulkner's lawyer previously said she has been fighting to get access to her children for nine months. The lawyer said that Mr Elamine took the two children on a three-week holiday to Lebanon and did not return them as agreed. But an attempt to snatch them from a suburban Beirut street by a 'child recovery team', caught on CCTV, was ultimately unsuccessful. The children were returned to their father and the 60 Minutes team were arrested. Ms Brown was pictured being shoved into a police car on Monday after a court hearing was postponed Ms Brown was caught in the middle of a frenzy outside a Beirut court earlier this week, but she said it looked worse than it was Ms Faulkner's estranged husband, Ali Elamine, pictured leaving court on Monday, previously told reporters that he would press charges against everyone 'involved' in the failed abduction attempt Speaking outside the court, Mr Elamine said his estranged wife can have access to the children. 'I am glad it's over. She is their mother and I don't want them growing up and thinking 'Daddy had the option of letting Mummy off easily and he didn't,' he said. 'It sucks, the whole thing sucks. No one wins here ... I told Sally she can come and go as she wants. She is the mother. The only thing we can do is cooperate to give them a better future. 'They don't know what has been happening these last two weeks ... I couldn't tell them anything.' Mr Elamine also expressed some sympathy for the crew as many of them have children of their own. 'The judge was saying the crew weren't part of the kidnapping on the ground, it still isn't confirmed that they funded it ... And they have families too, they have children,' he said. 'Being a parent away from your children sucks, and that is another reason I want Sally to be out (of jail) because she has a three-month-old baby in Australia she needs to care for ... I don't want to come between them.' Ms Brown looked as though she was being manhandled when she was led out of Baabda Palace of Justice on Monday Tara Brown (right) and Sally Faulkner were pictured being led away in handcuffs from the Beirut court after the hearing was postponed on Monday Sally Faulkner (pictured) travelled to Lebanon to retrieve her children, Noah, three, and Lahela, six Ali Elamine, said he would not drop the charges against Sally Faulkner because that would mean everyone else would 'get off' Police push Tara Brown's head down as she is put into a car outside Baabda Court in Beirut Channel Nine has announced a review into the botched operation to be led by former 60 Minutes boss Gerald Stone. Nine CEO Hugh Marks sent an email to staff on Thursday outlining the plan. 'Nine will conduct a full review that will be headed by Gerald Stone, with David Hurley and General Counsel Rachel Launders, to ascertain what went wrong and why our systems, designed to protect staff, failed to do so in this case,' said Mr Marks. 'We will task the review with recommending the necessary actions to ensure that none of our colleagues are put in a similar position in the future.' 'It is important to reiterate that at no stage did anyone from Nine or 60 Minutes intend to act in any way that made them susceptible to charges that they breached the law or to become part of the story that is Sally's story. 'But we did become part of the story and we shouldn't have.' A policeman holds the back of Tara Brown's hair as he puts her into the car on Monday Tara Brown was pictured being escorted by police officers from the court in Beirut Mr Elamine admitted his children 'probably' wanted to be with their mother but hardened his stance against 60 Minutes Adam Whittington, (pictured) the chief planner of the 60 Minutes botched 'child abduction' in Lebanon, said on Sunday that he can prove Channel Nine paid him more than $115,000 for the snatch Ms Faulkner's claims her children Noah and Lahela were taken to Lebanon by her estranged husband Ali Elamine (pictured with Noah and Lahela) in 2015 and he refused to bring them back Sally Faulkner's lawyer has reportedly said she was paid for by the Nine Network and had used money given to her by 60 Minutes to the child recovery agency, Child Abduction Recovery International The Victorian high school student aspires to enter the House of Lords Australia's youngest Donald Trump supporter and businessman has spoken about the harsh backlash he received following his rise to the public eye, in an interview with SBS. The incredibly articulate Edward Bourke, 15, said he had been subject to scathing backlash ever since he gained notoriety as a young conservative but appeared determined to push on with his aspirations. 'It can be very difficult being a young conservative person because you can receive a lot of backlash,' the Victorian high school student said on SBS program The Feed. Scroll down for video Australia's youngest Donald Trump supporter and businessman has spoken about the harsh backlash he received following his rise to the public eye The incredibly articulate Edward Bourke, 15, said he had been subject to scathing backlash 'It can be very difficult being a young conservative person' - the Victorian high school student has spoken about the challenges he has faced since emerging in the public spotlight 'Certainly online I get hate mail, at one point every minute. Every minute my phone would go off and there'd be some new hate mail.' One message Mr Bourke recalled read: 'Get f**ked Edward, you are supporting a xenophobic backwards minded w**ker who appeals to people with stupidity just as yourself.' '(It's) Because I'm an unusual vessel for this kind of opinion. A 15 year-old often doesn't carry such strong opinions, let alone conservative opinions. 'I like Donald Trump because he has some great economic, and even to some extent foreign policy, that I believe will aid the entire world including Australia, not just America.' 'Get f**ked Edward, you are supporting a xenophobic backwards minded w**ker' - Edward has received harsh criticism since starting his campaign for Trump Edward's father (pictured left) said in the video he was at a loss to explain where his son's drive and determination to campaign for Donald Trump stems from and noted that he himself wouldn't give Trump 'fresh air'. In the video, Edward spoke of his ambitions to join the House of Lords in England after attending Cambridge or Oxford universities The 15-year-old boasts being the owner of his own investment company and says Margaret Thatcher is one of his main idols In the video, Mr Bourke spoke of his ambitions to join the House of Lords in England after attending Cambridge or Oxford universities. The 15-year-old boasts being the owner of his own investment company and says Margaret Thatcher is one of his main idols. His father said in the video he was at a loss to explain where his son's drive and determination to campaign for Donald Trump stems from and noted that he himself wouldn't give Trump 'fresh air'. Last month, Mr Bourke appeared on Channel 7's Sunrise where host David Koch took a swipe at the boy's future potential as a politician. 'Politician in the making. Hes got everything, the BS (bulls***) factor, the whole lot,' Kochie quipped, in an apparent back-handed compliment. Despite criticisms, the Victorian high school student is determined to continue campaigning for Donald Trump. Despite criticisms, the Victorian high school student is determined to continue campaigning for Donald Trump He spoke top Sunrise on last month about his business aspirations Hosts Sam and Kochie giggle through the interview with the high school student 'The thing is the most admirable about him is he's not frightened to stick his neck out for what he believes in,' the teenager told Daily Mail Australia last month. 'He has some really good policies that are backed by some very high-profile businessmen in America.' When asked what he would do if he was to one day Meet Trump, Mr Bourke said he would first 'thank him for all he's doing'. 'He's not frightened to stick his neck out for what he believes in' Mr Bourke said of Donald Trump Mr Bourke also address the claims that Trump made after the Brussels attack that he could be the one to 'stop ISIS' 'I'd love to further discuss what messages he'd like me to put out there.' Mr Bourke also address the claims that Trump made after the Brussels attack that he could be the one to 'stop ISIS'. 'I think America certainly as we all known plays an enormous role in the fight against ISIS, and i think as far as a leader goes he would be very, very good in stopping terror in an effective manner,' he told Daily Mail Australia. Police are searching for a man who allegedly forced his ex-partner into a car, violently beat her and then dumped her, bloody and bruised, at a nearby park. Officers were called to a home in Broadbeach Waters, the Gold Coast, at around 8am on Thursday after neighbours heard gunshots and allegedly witnessed a woman being assaulted on Ensenada Court. The 25-year-old woman, who has not been identified, was missing when police arrived but was found an hour later at nearby Alfred Park by a concerned garbage man who brought her home. Scroll down for video Police are searching for a man (left) who allegedly forced his ex-partner (right) into a car, violently beat her and then dumped her, bloody and bruised, at a nearby park Officers were called to a home in Broadbeach Waters, the Gold Coast, at around 8am on Thursday after neighbours heard gunshots and allegedly witnessed a woman being assaulted 'She just approached me, she'd been kicked out of a car and she was trying to find her way home,' Craig Wilkie told Nine News. 'She looked like she was in a bad way and I thought to get her off the street, help her out,' he added. CCTV footage from a nearby house shows a man in a grey hooded jumper erratically driving a red Holden hatchback shortly before the incident. According to Nine News, the man drove to his ex-girlfriend's house which is when neighbours said they heard yelling, three distinct gunshots and what sounded like a woman being hit. The 25-year-old woman, who has not been identified, was missing when police arrived but was found an hour later at nearby Alfred Park by a concerned garbage man who brought her home 'She looked like she was in a bad way and I thought to get her off the street, help her out,' garbage truck driver Craig Wilkie (left) said CCTV footage from a nearby house shows a man in a grey hooded jumper erratically driving a red Holden hatchback shortly before the incident But police said there has been no evidence to suggest a gun was involved, with the victim claiming she did not sight a firearm. Shortly later the car was pictured on security cameras fleeing the scene, unexpectedly stopping in the middle of the road before leaving the shot. The woman reportedly cried hysterically and hit behind a large broad brimmed hat as she told police about the morning's events. The woman reportedly cried hysterically and hit behind a large broad brimmed hat as she told police about the morning's events. She was treated by paramedics at the scene and is now helping police with their enquiries She was treated by paramedics at the scene and is now helping police with their enquiries. A police spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia that they are searching for the man involved, who they believe is known to the victim. Advertisement Paris attacker Salah Abdeslam, 26, has been charged over a deadly shootout with Belgian police a week before the Brussels bombings Key Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam has been charged over a deadly shootout with police in Brussels a week before the suicide bombings in the Belgian capital, his lawyer said Thursday. 'He has been charged with attempted murder either alone or jointly' over the gunbattle at an apartment in the Forest district of Brussels on March 15, lawyer Sven Mary said on Thursday. An Algerian Islamist suspect was killed and four police officers were wounded in the shooutout, which led to Abdeslam's arrest three days later in Forest, Molenbeek, after a four-month European manhunt. Officers killed the AK-47 wielding gunman during a siege on the safe house in the Forest district of the Belgian capital,after the men hiding inside opened fire with assault rifles. 'As soon as the agents rang the doorbell, gunfire was directed at them from inside. A number of officers were wounded,' said Eric Van Der Sypt spokesman for the Belgian federal police, said at the time. It later emerged that four policemen were injured - three during an initial search of a property and the fourth as police mobilised outside. They locked down the area, ordered residents to stay indoors and shut down a local primary school. A spokeswoman for the police, who were acting on a tip off about the terror attacks, said two officers were lightly wounded in an initial incident and a third was also slightly hurt later. Pictures showed a victim being loaded into an ambulance on a stretcher but it was not clear whether it was a policeman or a suspect. A spokesman for Belgium's federal prosecutor said: 'This operation is connected to the Paris attacks.' The house that was raided is located near the main north-south railway linking Paris and Amsterdam and an Audi car factory. French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said French police units were also involved in the siege. Investigators believe much of the planning and preparation for the Paris attacks were carried out by young French and Belgians, some of whom fought in Syria. Local media reported the raid took place in the Forest neighbourhood which is close to Molenbeek, where several jihadis behind the Paris attacks lived. Abdeslam, 26, is due to be extradited to France in coming days over the November Paris attacks, in which he is believed to be the last surviving member of the terror squad that killed 130 people. But Belgian police have also tried to question him over his links to the three suicide bombers who struck Brussels airport and metro on March 22, killing 32 people and injuring hundreds. Officers were preparing to storm a suspected jihadi safe house in Brussels when they drew fire from two men (pictured, a sniper taking his position on the roof) A victim is removed from the scene where shots were fired during a police anti-terror raid in Brussels linked to the Paris massacre suspects Police officers take positions on a roof as they surrounded the building where other suspects are believed to holed up A masked police officer takes up position on top of a roof during a police operation linked to the Paris massacres The Islamic State group has claimed both attacks. Asked if Abdeslam admitted being present at the Forest shootout, Mary said: 'We won't discuss that, I won't comment.' Abdeslam will appear before a Belgian court again on April 28 and his extradition to France will come 'perhaps two days after his court appearance,' Mary added. Abdeslam and alleged Paris accomplice Mohamed Abrini, who has also charged over the Brussels attacks, were moved to different jails in Belgium last week. Abrini, 31, has confessed to being 'the man in the hat' caught on video with suicide bombers at Brussels airport. Abrini was also linked to the November 13 Paris massacre after being caught on video at a motorway gas station with Abdeslam. Police secure an area after an apartment raid in Brussels which was linked to suspects involved in the Paris terror attacks Police commandos were deployed while snipers climbed onto rooftops to surround the building where other suspects are holed up The house that was raided is located near the main north-south railway linking Paris and Amsterdam and an Audi car factory A sniper taking his position near the besieged property during the March shootout in Forest, Molenbeek A helicopter flew overhead as police commandos and snipers surrounded the building where the Paris attack suspects were thought to be hiding The Malayan tiger that mauled a Florida zookeeper to death has received death threats from members of the public, it has emerged. Stacey Konwiser was killed by the endangered big cat earlier this month while she was working near it. However staff at the zoo shot the tiger, one of only 250 known to exist with a tranquilizer dart instead of a rifle bullet. Scroll down for video Stacey Konwiser, left, was killed by a 13-year-old male Malayan Tiger called Hati, right, on April 15 in Florida Stacey's husband Jeremy, right, urged people to stand by the Palm Beach Zoo where his wife, left, was killed Federal and state authorities are investigating the cause behind last week's tragedy at the zoo, pictured. Police are now investigating a threat against the tiger made by a member of the public. A police report states that a man phoned up asking if the beast had been euthanized. When the receptionist told the man she wasn't comfortable speaking about it, he allegedly replied: 'You better watch your zoo. We will handle it ourselves.' In a statement read to WPTV.com, Zoo spokeswoman Naki Carter said: 'This is an ongoing investigation. I've received a lot of requests about the Malayan Tiger that received the threat. 'Safety remains the top priority for Palm Beach Zoo. Our family remains a top priority moving forward in Stacey's honor remains a top priority and protecting the integrity of the investigation remains a top priority.' The tiger, who has not been officially named by the zoo, is thought to be 13-year-old Hati. In a statement, the zoo said: 'Identifying the animal only serves to stigmatize and potentially places the tiger in harms way. 'The Zoo continues to cooperate with multiple agencies involving the tragedy. The Zoo is an organization deeply committed to species survival. The Zoo has no interest in assisting, allowing or encouraging blame on one of only 250 Malayan tigers remaining in existence. 'The male Malayan tiger involved in the April 15 incident has never been blamed or identified. His future has never been in jeopardy. His age has never been divulged. He has never been involved in any other incident at Palm Beach Zoo. The Zoo has never had any other animal-related human deaths in its 60-year history.' The threat to the tiger emerged as Konwiser's husband Jeremy called on members of the public to stand by the Palm Beach facility. 'Stacey would want me to ask everyone to stand with the Palm Beach Zoo,' he said in a statement. Jeremy Konwiser, left, worked alongside his wife Stacey, right at the Palm Beach Zoo in Florida The zoo, which has four similar tigers, serves as a 'breeding ground to make sure they don't become extinct'. The investigation into the keeper's death is being carried out by West Palm Beach police, Florida Fish and Wildlife officials and by federal authorities with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The Animal Legal Defense Fund says the zoo keeper's death was preventable and urged federal authorities to impose penalties against the zoo. 'As long as employees are allowed to work in dangerously close proximity to tigers, elephants, and other dangerous animals, a significant risk of serious injury or death persists,' said the California-based group said in a statement. Donald Trump courted a new round of controversy on Thursday morning, describing as 'pure political correctness' a Treasury Department decision to make the black anti-slavery activist Harriet Tubman the new face of America's $20 bill. 'I think Harriet Tubman is fantastic,' he said during a town hall event broadcast live on NBC's 'Today' show, but 'I would love to leave Andrew Jackson and see if we can maybe come up with another denomination.' 'Maybe we do the $2 bill or we do another bill.' 'I don't like seeing it,' the billionaire Republican front-runner said. 'Yes, I think it's pure political correctness.' 'PURE POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Thursday that Harriet Tubman should not replace President Andrew Jackson on America's $20 currency COMING SOON: This artist's rendering shows what abolitionist Harriet Tubman might look like on the U.S. twenty dollar bill. She will replace President Andrew Jackson on the $20 banknote, the first time an African-American has been featured on US money Trump openly defended Andrew Jackson, the former U.S. president and father of the Democratic Party currently depicted on the often-used $20 paper money, despite his history as a slave-owner. Jackson is also reviled by descendants of American Indians as the architect of an Indian removal policy in 1838 and 1839 that required the migration of native tribes in a forced march that killed than 10,000 an event known as the Trail of Tears. The seventh U.S. president also, however, was the only American leader to be held as a prisoner of war, the only one to retire the entire national debt, and the first to be targeted for assassination. And, like Trump, he was seen as a populist counterweight to politically powerful special interests including industrial and manufacturing giants, dismantling the nation's central bank because he believed it didn't loan enough money for small projects on the western American frontier. 'Andrew Jackson had a great history,' Trump argued on Thursday, 'and I think it's very rough when you take somebody off the bill. Andrew Jackson had a record of tremendous success for the country ... and really represented somebody that really was very important to this country.' 'I would love to see another denomination, and that could take place. I think [it] would be more appropriate.' SLAVE OWNER V. SLAVE: Harriet Tubman (right) escaped slavery but then returned to the South to lead other slaves to freedom and President Andrew Jackson (left) owned human chattel like her Dr. Ben Carson, a Trump endorser who mounted his own campaign for the White House before pulling out of the race in March, made a similar suggestion Wednesday after the Treasury Department announced its intentions. Carson also mentioned the $2 bill as a possible vehicle for honoring Tubman, drawing eye-rolls from Fox News Channel host Megyn Kelly. 'The two? The two is like the nobody [uses] the two? What?' she asked. Carson responded that 'we have lots of options here. We can have a $200 bill.' Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced Wednesday that Tubman will replace Jackson on new $20 bills printed as soon as the year 2020, following the typical review period and the implementation of new anti-counterfeiting measures. Whichever face graces the banknote, Trump said Thursday that people with millions in the bank should prepare to part with more $20s and $50s and $100s if he's president. Asked if he believes in raising taxes on the wealthy, Trump responded: 'I do. I do. Including myself.' Born into slavery in the early part of the 19th century, Tubman escaped from Maryland to Pennsylvania and then used the network of activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad to transport other slaves to freedom. After the Civil War, Tubman became active in the campaign for women's suffrage. She died in 1913. Last year, the treasury announced plans to replace Alexander Hamilton, the nation's first secretary of the treasury, with a woman on the $10 bill. But both Hamilton supporters and women's groups argued that the $20 bill should be reworked to incorporate a woman instead. Hamilton has seen a revival in popularity during the past year with the success of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Pulitzer-prize winning Broadway musical named after the founding father. Jackson, meanwhile, is a more complicated figure. When it was announced last year that the treasury would be printing a woman on U.S. currency for the first time in more than a century, a group called Women on 20s organized a survey to select an appropriate figure. The treasury originally planned to replace Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill with a woman. But now they are replacing Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with Tubman, and keeping Hamilton as is Over the course of 10 weeks, the group collected 600,000 votes and Tubman came out on top. Civil rights hero Rosa Parks, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Wilma Mankiller the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation were among some of the other popular figures in the vote. The $5 bill will also undergo change. The illustration of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the will be redesigned to honor 'events at the Lincoln Memorial that helped to shape our history and our democracy.' The new image will include civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt and Marian Anderson. The $10 bill is the next note on Treasury's redesign calendar. That reboot was scheduled to be unveiled in 2020, which marks the 100th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote. Lew had often cited that connection as a reason to put a woman on the $10 bill. The last woman featured on U.S. paper money was Martha Washington, who was on a $1 silver certificate from 1891 to 1896. The only other woman ever featured on U.S. paper money was Pocahontas, from 1865 to 1869. The mother of a toddler who wandered off and drowned in a small pond in North Carolina is in jail on charges of involuntary manslaughter and child neglect. Local news outlets report that 30-year-old Samantha Nacole Bryant of Carthage was arrested Wednesday after she was indicted in the April 14 death. It was not immediately known if she had an attorney. Samantha Nacole Bryant, 30 (left), was arrested on Wednesday and charged with involuntary manslaughter and child neglect in the death of her son Rylan Ott, age 2 (right) Authorities say Bryant's 23-month-old Rylan Ott was reported missing on the afternoon of April 14. Deputies found him unresponsive about two hours later in a small pond. The child was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead. Neighbors told WRAL that the mother often let her child wander alone outside, and that they've found the boy walking in their yards. One of her neighbors, Stephanie Calcutt told WNCN that she helped Bryant look for her child the afternoon he went missing. 'People make mistakes. Things happen. But when you know your son likes to wander, you need to keep a close eye out on him,' Calcutt said. Bryant's is being held on $200,000 bail. Her first court appearance is scheduled for May 31, 2016. Court documents show that she also has a history of child abuse allegations. In October 2015, Bryant was arrested and charged with misdemeanor child abuse after she allegedly 'consumed alcohol excessively' and fought with firearms in front of three children. Her prosecution was later deferred on the condition that she cooperate with DSS and a probation officer. She has been joined by her daughters as she receives blood The 73-year-old has reportedly been diagnosed with acute kidney failure A vibrant Australian socialite who has bravely raised awareness for ovarian cancer during her own private battle has been hospitalised and diagnosed with kidney failure. Lady Susan Renouf has been receiving blood transfusions at Cabrini Hospital, in Melbourne's south-east, since palliative care doctors diagnosed her with acute kidney failure, the Herald Sun reported. The 73-year-old socialite, who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2013, has been joined by her daughters Ann Peacock, Caroline Cordeaux and Jane Chapple-Hyam, who travelled from the UK. Lady Susan Renouf has been receiving blood transfusions at Cabrini Hospital, in Melbourne's south-east, since palliative care doctors diagnosed her with acute kidney failure Ms Peacock said she is receiving first rate care but is hoping hoping to take her mother home 'in the next day or so'. 'Mum is so grateful for the wonderful care and attention she has been receiving,' she told the Herald Sun. Ms Renouf, who has been raising awareness about ovarian cancer since her diagnosis, acquired her title during her third marriage to Sir Frank Renouf in 1985. Ann Peacock (left) said she is receiving wonderful care but is hoping hoping to take her mother (right) home 'in the next day or so' She rose to fame alongside her first husband Australian politician Andrew Peacock, who she had three daughters with The New Zealand financier broke records for the highest-price paid for a Sydney property in 1988 when he purchased 'Paradis sur Mer' at Point Piper, an affluent harbour side suburb in the city's east, from Ms Renouf's second husband, British gambling tycoon Robert Sangster. A drone flying at an altitude of 2,000 metres came close to an Aer Lingus plane as it approached Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, sources said today. The incident comes after a British Airways plane nearing London's Heathrow Airport was hit by a drone on Sunday. In the incident yesterday, the Aer Lingus pilot saw the drone pass about 150 metres (500ft) from the right wing of the Airbus A320 plane, one of the airport sources said. Near miss: An Aer Lingus passenger plane came within 150 metres of a drone flying at 2,000m as the Airbus A320 approached Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris (file picture) The Aer Lingus pilot saw the drone pass about 500ft from the right wing of the Airbus A320 plane (file picture) After landing, the pilot informed air traffic police about the near miss, which happened as the plane was flying at 2,300 metres and around 31 miles from the airport on its journey from Dublin. It is not known how many passengers were on the plane. In February, the pilot of an Air France Airbus A320 was forced to make an emergency manoeuvre to avoid a drone. The drone passed five metres under the plane's left wing as it was at 1,600 metres altitude on its approach to Charles de Gaulle. The incident in France comes just days after an unmanned aircraft is thought to have crashed into the front of the British Airways G-EUYP flight (pictured) as it approached Heathrow on Sunday Drones are banned from large parts of London and Windsor during Barack Obama's visit to Britain this week Shop-bought micro-drones are not allowed to fly above 150 metres altitude in France, although some can reach several thousand metres high. The biggest risk to a plane would be if a drone hit a jet engine, or was sucked into one, because the batteries of drones contain highly flammable lithium. The French civil aviation authority (DGAC) estimated at the end of last year that there were as many as 200,000 shop-bought drones in France. Ninety-eight percent of the drones were micro-drones weighing less than 2kg (4lbs 7oz). Drones have been banned from large parts of London and Windsor during Barack Obama's visit to Britain this week. struck as she tried to answer a phone call An 11-year-old girl was killed when lightning struck her mobile phone as she tried to answer a call from her father, Russian police say. The victim, only known by her first name Arina, had been caught in a storm near her grandparents' home in the Chernoyarsk district of south-western Russia's Astrakhan Oblast region. Arina suffered 90 per cent burns after being struck by a lighting bolt while helping her elderly grandparents drive the family sheep. Arina, 11, had been caught in a storm near her grandparents' home in the Chernoyarsk district of south-western Russia's Astrakhan Oblast region when she was hit by lightning The grandparents became worried when the young girl failed to come home, in the wake of the storm. Her grandfather went out into the storm to look for her and was devastated to find her lifeless body lying on the ground. He called for an ambulance to take her to a nearby hospital but doctors were unable to save the little girl's life. Arina and her sister had been staying with their grandparents as their parents were living and working in a the city. Police say they found evidence that the girl's phone had received a call at the same time as the lightning struck, and the family revealed it was from her father The 11-year-old was discovered by her grandfather, whose sheep she had been out herding in a field Police reportedly found evidence that Arina had tried to answer a call to her mobile phone from her just before she died. They later found that the call had come from her father. Arina's sister Milana said: 'When the storm began, our father called her mobile phone, she replied and lighting struck right on the phone. It just melted in her hands.' She said police had matched the time the lightning struck with the time of the phone call. Local media report that Arina suffered 90 per cent burns and that doctors would have had no chance of saving her. Campaigner: Dr Avril Henry, 82, an advocate of assisted suicide, has been found dead days after a police raid sparked by an Interpol alert that she had imported euthanasia drugs from Mexico An 82-year-old professor has died days after police kicked down her door when Interpol traced assisted suicide drugs to her Devon cottage from Mexico. Retired academic Dr Avril Henry, 82, appears to have conned officers into believing they had confiscated all her killer drugs on Saturday and was found dead yesterday. Dr Henry was professor of English Medieval Culture at the University of Exeter until 2000 and also a member of Exit International, which advocates the legalisation of assisted dying. It is run by campaigner 'Dr Death' Philip Nitschke, once banned from medicine and known for selling home euthanasia kits, who today said the authorities tried to 'make her last days on this earth a misery'. He has also published her suicide note and a medical report claiming it proves she was 'rational' when she died. She was not terminally ill but had a number of health problems, he said. The note says she had planned it for a year and left instructions on how to deal with her body and where she wants to be buried. Dr Nitschke said: 'On Tuesday afternoon, she took the remainder of her imported [drugs] that the police had not discovered, and died peacefully.' In a letter to Dr Nitschke, sent shortly before her death, she talked of her anxiety that there would be further police raids, and that she might lose her remaining drug. Dr Nitschke said: 'Police need to realise that in the UK, suicide is not a crime, and mental health authorities need to recognise that not everyone who seeks to end their life is in need of psychiatric intervention. 'Her death was a clear case of "rational suicide" and her decision to die at her own time and in her own place should have been respected. 'As it is the authorities did everything they could to make her last days on this earth a misery.' Dr Nitschke said that in light of events in Exeter, Exit International would be contacting its 1,000-plus UK members warning them of Interpol's growing interest in stemming the flow of the euthanasia drug into the UK, and offering advice on how to avoid the risk of interception. Death: Avril Henry, 82, pictured, with Dr Philip Nitschke - known as Dr Death because of his support of assisted dying, appears to have killed herself after importing killer drugs from Mexico Suicide note: Dr Henry said in a note written before she died said she had planned it for a year and had the support of her family and friends Her purchase was flagged on Saturday night by an Interpol official in Manchester and police in Exeter in Devon were sent to her rural home to check on her well-being. Dr Nitschke said Dr Henry had a series of illnesses and conditions over the years which had made her life a 'complete misery'. Aftermath: This is Dr Henry's door after police smashed through in Saturday's raid They included chronic ear infections and tinnitus, high blood pressure that led to cardiac and renal problems, swelling feet, incontinence and urinary infections. He said: 'She had a formidable reputation as an academic of many years standing, but her health had drastically deteriorated recently. 'She had no one terminal illness but had a myriad of problems. 'I had a couple of visits to see her and it did not surprise me when she approached me about travelling to Switzerland. 'Even though she had no terminal illness, the Swiss clinic saw her medical records and had no problem accepting her.' Dr Nitschke said she also needed to wear special clothes and bedding and her mobility was impaired and deteriorating to such an extent she was almost in a wheelchair. She also had respiratory problems and needed a specialist mask to sleep. He added: 'She described her life as becoming a complete misery. She showed me she could not lift anything and was living an impossible existence. 'It got to the point she did not have a life she wanted to live. She was living on her own and there is no known family. But she did have a lot of friends. 'They all knew her in the village so she was not isolated.' Dr Nitschke has also published her suicide note, which was found by police on Saturday when they believed they had her drugs. It said that police should know that her assisted suicide was 'laboriously planned' for 12 months and said there was no need for a post-mortem examination because 'no murder has been committed'. She added that she would kill herself in the bath and would leave antiseptic liquid for anyone who found her to clear up. Dr Nitschke said Dr Henry had a series of illnesses and conditions over the years which had made her life a 'complete misery'. Note: Dr Philip Nitschke has posted this incident report claiming to show how the authorities intervened after an Interpol alert Neighbours said that Dr Henry often spoke about assisted suicide, saying that 'age is not a good thing' despite having a relatively active lifestyle. Retired dentist Geoffrey Langley, 77, said: She was a woman of strong views. She was on the parish council for many years and could be quite controversial. 'But she was very intellectual and was ultra conservative, with a small C. She was keen on walking, was good to talk to and very personable. THE LAW ON ASSISTED SUICIDE Suicide is not illegal in Britain, but both euthanasia - killing someone to end their suffering - and assisted suicide - helping someone end their live themselves - are against the law. Doctors, relatives or friends who deliberately kill a patient, even if they are terminally ill, risk being accused of murder or manslaughter and could face life in prison. Assisted suicide can include obtaining drugs for a relative who intends to take an overdose, even if the patient does not need help to take the medication. A large number of Britons have chosen to clinics abroad such as Dignitas in Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal under some circumstances. However, loved ones of Dignitas patients have expressed concern that they could face prosecution if they help them get to the clinic to kill themselves. Euthanasia campaigners have launched a series of court bids as well as political campaigns to change the law on assisted suicide, but have so far been unsuccessful. Some argue that allowing euthanasia under tightly controlled circumstances will eliminate unnecessary suffering among the terminally ill. But others warn that it could increase pressure on the elderly to end their lives prematurely if they feel they are a burden on their families. Advertisement 'Sadly, she had not been in good physical health for a long while but she was brave and determined to keep mobile. She would say in her later years that "age is not a good thing".' Another friend, who did not want to be named, said: 'She loved swimming and would always talk about Dignitas. She was a really lovely lady. The whole village had been praying for her.' Devon and Cornwall Police say her death was not being treated as suspicious. A spokesman said: 'Devon and Cornwall Police attended an address in Brampford Speke on the 15th April following concerns for the welfare of a person within the property, and therefore entrance was forced. 'No criminal issues were highlighted during this incident and the matter was left in the hands of medical and mental health professionals. 'Police were called to the same address in Brampford Speke on the 20th April following reports of a body of a woman in her 80's being discovered. 'This death isn't currently being treated as suspicious and a file is being prepared for the coroner.' Officers refused to comment on Dr Nitschke's claim that police had removed drugs from her home, saying only that the visit last week was a 'welfare check'. Ambulance crews visited Dr Henry on Saturday night after they were alerted by police to her purchase of euthanasia drugs, and they also found a suicide note at her home. A call incident report of the encounter that began at 10pm and continued for several hours hours, says they found a 'very difficult situation' and were reluctant to leave the pensioner on her own. The report said: 'Very difficult situation. This lady has ordered an online suicide medication. The police have tracked the package to her house. This medication is in the house but can't be found. 'Complicated past medical history. Suicide note in the house. Carers aware of intent/suicidal thoughts. 'Crew feel she has full capacity so can't be moved to a place of safety. Has declined crisis team. 'Crew don't feel happy leaving this lady on her own.' For confidential support call the Samaritans on 116123 or visit a local Samaritans branch, see www.samaritans.org for details. The controversial pro-euthanasia doctor who has repeatedly been in trouble with the law Controversial: Philip Nitschke was once banned from practising medicine Philip Nitschke is a well-known euthanasia activist whose enthusiasm for relaxing the law on assisted suicide has brought him the nickname 'Dr Death'. The Australian doctor, 68, thinks that all elderly people should have legal access to a pill they could take to kill themselves if they cannot bear old age or illness. He claims to be the world's first doctor to have administered a lethal injection to a patient who wanted to die, killing a total of four people while the practice was briefly legal in Australia's Northern Territory. However, he has in the past been suspended from practising medicine, after his licence was revoked in 2014. He was also arrested at Heathrow when he tried to enter Britain in 2009 for a lecture tour where he held 'workshops' on euthanasia which some worried would promote illegal killings. Last year he launched a show at the Edinburgh Fringe where he showed off his 'euthanasia machine' which kills people by allowing to inhale deadly gasses. Dr Nitschke was interviewed under caution by the Metropolitan Police, but refused to scrap the show, where he allowed audiences to try out the machine while it was fitted with a harmless gas. Former Kings Cross identity Bill Bayeh has been given a 12-month bond for making threats involving a dildo to Geoffrey Edelsten's ex-wife. The lanky 57-year-old walked from Downing Centre Local Court after being given the sentence on Thursday, telling reporters Leanne Nesbitt should not have told him 'never speak to me on the street. You need to be in jail'. Bayeh, the court heard, had moments earlier greeted the intensive care nurse as she passed him while on her way to work at St Vincent's Hospital in February 2015. Scroll down for video Former Kings Cross identity Bill Bayeh (pictured) has been given a 12-month bond for making threats involving a dildo to Geoffrey Edelsten's ex-wife Bayeh, the court heard greeted the intensive care nurse as she passed him while on her way to work at St Vincent's Hospital in February 2015 Initially she continued walking and ignored him, but after a few steps turned to confront him about comments he'd made some weeks earlier, sparking an argument that was recorded on her phone. 'They should never have let you out, you're a criminal,' she said. Bayeh responded with what Magistrate Graeme Curran on Thursday described as 'an indelicate comment' about an apparatus and her anatomy. 'You need a vibrator up your arse,' Bayeh told Ms Nesbitt. Bayeh then jumped up from his seat at an outdoor table at the Five Boroughs coffee shop on Darlinghurst Rd and made another vivid threat. 'I'm going to shove a dildo up your arse,' he said. Bayeh in March pleaded guilty to one count of common assault over the February 2015 incident. Initially she continued walking and ignored him, but after a few steps turned to confront him about comments he'd made some weeks earlier, sparking an argument that was recorded on her phone Bayeh responded with what Magistrate Graeme Curran on Thursday described as 'an indelicate comment' about an apparatus and her anatomy Bayeh in March pleaded guilty to one count of common assault over the February 2015 incident Ms Nesbitt was married to Mr Edelsten for four years during the 1980s when the colourful businessman owned the Sydney Swans He was on Thursday given a 12-month bond, under which he must continue psychiatric treatment. Bayeh was also fined $400, having pleaded guilty to hindering police over an incident three days before making vulgar suggestions to Ms Nesbitt. While sitting outside the same Darlinghurst cafe he was asked to step out onto the side of the road and empty his pockets by police. He produced a piece of paper but held it behind his back and tore it to pieces. Police had initially suggested it was some sort of drug code however during Thursday's sentencing the court heard there was no evidence to support that inference. Bayeh is also illiterate, defence lawyer John Hajjee said. Following Thursday's brief hearing he walked from court, saying he was eager to return to his business. Ms Nesbitt was married to Mr Edelsten for four years during the 1980s when the colourful businessman owned the Sydney Swans. Police in Peru, who were parading in full riot gear as part of a carnival procession, stunned crowds when they suddenly broke into a well rehearsed dance routine. The performance was all the more impressive because of the frightening protective gear the cops were wearing, as they paraded through the city of Chiclayo. Seven representatives of the Tactical Actions Subunit (SUAT), all wearing full intervention equipment, were involved in the choreographed dance moment. Riot police were taking part in a parade in Peru when they suddenly broke into a synchronised dance routine The seven officers channeled Michael Jackson, with robotic dance moves and sound effects They danced to C&C Music Factory's 1990 song 'Everybody Dance Now' while confetti rained down on them The officers broke into a synchronised routine that paid tribute to Michael Jackson, with robotic body popping and sound effects. The music then switched to C&C Music Factory's 1990 song 'Everybody Dance Now' which garnered applause from the surrounding crowd. The officers also danced in front of a tank and were showered in confetti, as they performed Robocop dance moves. As the procession continued, the men also performed in formation in front of a police tank The celebrations were to mark the 181st anniversary of the city of Chiclayo in the north west of Peru The audience was clearly delighted by the performance, which came during a parade celebrating the town of Chiclayo's 181st birthday. The Prime Minister's mother-in-law was accused of 'lacking patriotism' after angering residents by replacing a Union Jack with a flag for her upmarket furniture store. The Viscountess Annabel Lucy Veronica Astor, the Samantha Cameron's mother-in-law, is part-owner of OKA, which will open a new branch in the former Conservative Club in Knutsford on May 2. But locals reacted angrily when they saw the OKA Direct store flag flying above the store in place of the Union Jack, which had previously flown there at half mast to mark the death of dignitaries. The Prime Minister's mother-in-law has angered residents of a leafy town in Cheshire by replacing the Union Jack with a flag for her furniture store, OKA, in Knutsford The Viscountess Annabel Lucy Veronica Astor (left), the mother of Samantha Cameron (pictured with the Prime Minister, right), is part-owner of the company One local branded it 'a disgrace', while another joked that it was a lesson in how not to endear yourselves to your potential customers in a new town. Local resident Trevor Jones of Princess Street, Knutsford, stormed: 'Why has our patriotic Union Jack flag that flies over the conservative office been taken down for a black OKA flag, disgraceful.' The row erupted on Facebook page Remembering Knutsford after one resident asked for people's views on the OKA flag, but the post has since been deleted. Flags were described as 'a divisive issue' by one resident, and while some were infuriated, others seemed to think that erecting the new flag was perfectly reasonable. Councillor Stewart Gardiner, Cheshire East Council and Knutsford ward representative, said that OKA had not legally done anything wrong in terms of planning permission. 'Originally when we got the application, the flag was part of it. In terms of flying a flag on a pole, the actual flag does not require permission, just the pole which was already there. The OKA flag came down (left) and residents were glad to see the Union Jack return to celebrate the Queen's birthday today (right) The flag is on the former Conservative Club (pictured) in Knutsford, Cheshire, which was vacated by the local party in 2012, and a flag hasn't flown above it for some time Councillor Stewart Gardiner said the flag was 'moth-eaten' but one angry resident said that its replacement with a brand flag was 'a disgrace' (pictured) 'It's their flagpole and they can fly whatever they want on it. 'There were a number of objections suggestions that we had within the application but the flag itself, there's nothing we can do about it. 'When it was the Conservative Club the flag was all moth-eaten and old. If it was flying half-mast to honour my demise I wouldn't have been too happy.' But resident Michael Harrison said on Facebook: 'Me and my dad always made sure the flag was up and always in good condition it's a disgrace that it's been taken down.' Conservative Councillor Hayley Wells-Bradshaw said one resident had brought the issue to her attention but branded the argument is a 'storm in a teacup'. She also said that the Union Jack was removed some time ago because of controversy over the flag flying at half mast after the deaths of members of the Conservative Club, leaving residents confused. She said: 'People would ring up the council and ask who had died, then they were told that it was no-one they had ever heard of. It was only a small issue but eventually they decided to remove it. But the company did get praise today for flying the Union again today to celebrate the Queen's birthday 'Because it is a historic building, I think the public feel some ownership of it, but it is not a public flagpole and it belongs to whoever owns the building.' However, today, the Union Jack was flying again to celebrate the Queen's 90th birthday, and the company said it will try to raise it for other significant events. One resident said on Facebook: 'I see the union is flying high this morning. Well done OKA' OKA Direct responded to the complaints, saying that the proper procedures had been followed before the flag was raised. 'OKA raised a branded flag over our new store in Knutsford today to herald its imminent opening,' said a spokesperson for the furniture company. They added: 'We have been given permission to do so by all the necessary local authorities. 'We apologise for an upset that might have been caused to local residents and will look to mark important events and special occasions in the future by raising the Union Flag.' A McDonalds customer has been charged with robbery after he emptied a cup of water and filled it up with soda from a machine in a restaurant in Arkansas. Cody Morris, 18, and two pals went to a drive-thru in Springdale and and asked for large cups of water. But they then parked their car and dumped their cups before filling them up with soda. Cody Morris (pictured) allegedly struck the restaurant manager with his car as he tried to drive off. He has been charged with felony robbery The restaurant manager confronted the trio and told them to return the soda. While his friends complied, Morris refused and walked out to his car. The manager then tried to prevent him leaving and tried to get the keys out of the ignition. It is understood the trio were given free water but switched it for soda. The incident is being treated as a felony robbery. McDonald's has previously been criticised for the high sugar levels in its soda (pictured) But Morris reversed his car and drove off, allegedly hitting the manager as he made his getaway. Police arrested Morris at a nearby bowling alley. It is unclear if he will face any charges apart from felony robbery. Jason Dors-Lake, 46, (pictured last year) stole bottles of wine from Waitrose after an argument with the former fiancee he met when she falsely claimed his parents abused her as a child Diana Dors's youngest son stole bottles of wine from Waitrose after an argument with the former fiancee he met when she falsely claimed his parents abused her as a child. Jason Dors-Lake, 46, stole two bottles worth 19.81 from the supermarket's branch in Notting Hill Gate following a row with Chloe Black. Hammersmith Magistrates Court heard Dors-Lake, had previously struggled with alcohol, and stole the wine because the acrimonious split with Ms Black had driven him to back to the bottle. Dors-Lake, the youngest son of the British actress and her third husband Alan Lake, admitted theft when he appeared at the court today, and was ordered to pay 145 in fines and court costs. His relationship with Ms Black started in bizarre circumstances two years ago when she sought him out and made unfounded allegations that she had been sexually abused by the actress and Mr Lake. Ms Dors, who was known as 'the English Marilyn Monroe', died of cancer in May 1984 and five months later Mr Lake, who was also an actor, died five months later after he shot himself in the head in Dors-Lake's bedroom. Dors-Lake, who lives in Notting Hill, wore a smart grey suit with a white shirt as he pleaded guilty to one count of theft at Hammersmith Magistrates Court. Tom Gill, prosecuting, said: 'On 30 March police were called to Waitrose in Notting Hill Gate. 'The defendant had been detained, he had walked out of the store with a bottle of wine, only valued at 9.' Officers found a second bottle of wine on Dors-Lake and he made full admissions when he was interviewed. The court heard that Dors-Lake, who has struggled with substance abuse since a 'very young' age, has since stopped drinking and moved on from the relationship. Dors-Lake is the youngest son of the British actress (left) and her third husband Alan Lake (with Dors, right) Dors-Lake, 46, stole two bottles worth 19.81 from the supermarket's branch in Notting Hill Gate (pictured) following a row with Chloe Black Jason Ashley, mitigating, said: 'He's trying to help himself, the whole incident was brought about by an argument with his fiancee. 'That relationship has now ended. He was so upset he felt suicidal and his first reaction was to go and find drink which took him to Waitrose.' Ms Black previously accused Dors-Lake of assault but a judge at Highbury Magistrates' Court dismissed the case after she gave apparently contradictory accounts of the incident. Magistrate Sandie Blandford praised Dors-Lake him for getting sober and seeking help with alcohol treatment courses. She said: 'We note that there was no planning at all, it was just a spur of the moment thing.' Diana Dors with Dors-Lake when he was just three days old. She died of cancer when he was a teenager Dors-Lake replied: 'Hopefully I won't be breaking up with anyone in the future and I won't be that upset.' Mrs Blandford said: 'You have moved on considerably, we give you great credit for that. 'We are going to deal with this in a compassionate way.' Dors-Lake was fined 40 and must pay 85 prosecution costs and a 20 victim surcharge. Dors-Lake with his parents outside their home near Ascot in the 1970s The court heard that he is now in receipt of incapacity benefits after suffering mental health issues since the death of his parents. Dors succumbed to ovarian cancer on 4 May 1984, aged 52, when her son was just 14 years old. Five months later Mr Lake, then 43, walked into their son's bedroom and shot himself. Speaking outside court, Dors-Lake said: 'There's nothing more goth than scraping your dad's brains off your Depeche Mode box set.' He continued: 'I was exposed to drink and drugs from a very young age. 'I was smoking pot when I was nine.' He added: 'If alcohol was invented last week it'd be a Class A drug. 'It causes more violence, street problems and anti-social disorder than any other drug.' The actor and musician co-penned a tell-all book about growing up the son of blonde bombshell Ms Dors, revealing details of wild parties at their Berkshire mansion, Orchard Manor. His mother, who once described herself as 'the only sex symbol Britain has produced since Lady Godiva', became legendary for hosting sex and drug-fuelled orgies. Orchard Manor along with the bulk of the house's contents were sold off to pay taxes and solicitors' bills, leaving little for Dors-Lake, who went to live with his half-brother Gary Dawson in Los Angeles. Ms Dors claimed to have stashed a 2 million inheritance, which could only be located by cracking a code handed to her other son, Mark Dawson. The United Nations has gathered for a landmark meeting to rethink the global strategy against narcotics, opening itself up to suggestions it may be about to surrender in the war on drugs. The General Assembly gathering, the first for two decades, comes as activists, UN officials and world leaders cited an international trend towards more liberal drug laws. Despite broad agreement on the need to deal with the global drug problem, there are deep divisions among the 193 UN member states, with some favouring a shift towards decriminalisation and a greater focus on reducing the harm caused both by narcotics abuse and the war on drugs. A number of Latin American leaders say the aggressive war on drugs has failed, having killed or destroyed thousands of lives worldwide. Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos addresses a United Nations General Assembly special session on the world drug problem at UN headquarters in New York. UN officials and world leaders cited an international trend towards more liberal laws, opening the possibility the UN may be about to surrender in the war on drugs They say there is an irreversible trend towards legalizing 'soft drugs' such as marijuana. Emphasising that point, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto told the gathering his country would soon increase the amount of marijuana Mexicans are allowed for personal use and legalise marijuana for medical purposes. He said: 'We should be flexible to change that which has not yielded results, the paradigm based essentially in prohibitionism, the so-called 'War on Drugs'... (which) has not been able to limit production, trafficking nor the global consumption of drugs.' This week's special UN session was called by Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia. But some major powers like Russia, delegates say, remain wary of the trend towards legalization and frown upon moves by U.S. states to regulate access to marijuana. Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales said 'one of the most important changes that the current drug policy needs is that we give priority to demand reduction rather than focusing solely on supply reduction.' epa05270614 Peruvian President Ollanta Humala (left) talks to delegates before addressing a United Nations General Assembly special session on the world drug problem at United Nations headquarters in New York No major decisions are expected this week. But European and Latin American delegations and activists hope this week's special UN session taking stock of what many describe as the failed war on drugs can contribute to pushing the world a few steps closer towards a more liberal drug strategy that puts human rights and public health, not repression, at the center. 'Evidence shows that prohibitionist approaches have not worked: from 1998 to 2008 the number of people using illicit drugs did not change significantly and neither did the area used for opium poppy cultivation,' UN Assistant Secretary-General Magdy Martinez-Soliman wrote in the Guardian newspaper. 'Conventional policies have failed in reducing addiction and production,' he said. Bolivia's President Evo Morales speaks at a news conference after addressing a United Nations General Assembly special session on the world drug problem at UN headquarters in New York The General Assembly adopted a declaration on Tuesday that activists supporting more liberal drug laws found disappointing. They said it focused on the traditional approach of cutting off supply, not reducing the harm caused by narcotics and protecting human rights. The Global Commission on Drug Policy, a non-governmental group that includes prominent personalities like billionaire philanthropist Richard Branson and former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, criticized the U.N. declaration as 'long on rhetoric but short on substance.' Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, also writing in the Guardian, said 'the time has come for the world to transit into a different approach in its drug policy.' 'This is not a call for legalisation of drugs,' said Santos, one of the most vocal critics of the criminalization of drug use and the heavy-handed tactics of the war on drugs. 'It is a call for recognition that between total war and legalization there exists a broad range of options worth exploring.' He called for ending the death penalty for drug offenses, and non-prison rehabilitation for drug abusers. A report by the medical journal the Lancet and Johns Hopkins University said last month that the examples of Portugal and the Czech Republic had shown that decriminalizing non-violent offenses produced compelling health benefits. Five Egyptian men linked to the death of a Cambridge PhD student may have been killed by police to quash rumours that he was murdered by the secret service. Italian investigators have rubbished claims that the Egyptian criminals - killed in a shootout with police seven weeks after the body of Giulio Regeni was found in Cairo - had been responsible for his kidnapping, torture and death. Egyptian police claim the passport of the 28-year-old Italian was found in the home of a relative of the criminals, but family members say they had nothing to do with the murder of the student. Evidence: The passport of Cambridge PhD student Giulio Regeni, 28, was found in a home of a relative of some of the criminals killed by Egyptian police in the shootout - but not until after their deaths Mr Regeni had been in Egypt researching labour unions for his thesis work at Girton College, Cambridge, when he disappeared on January 25 from central Cairo. His badly mutilated body was found more than a week later by the side of a road on the outskirts of the Egyptian capital. An autopsy showed he was tortured over several days before dying, something which human rights groups have said indicated he died at the hands of the security forces. Salah Ali, Saad Tarek, Tarek Abdel Fattah and Mostafa Bakr and their driver, Ibrahim Farouk, were shot and killed by police seven weeks after Regeni was found dead, CNN reports. The men were allegedly killed after firing at police at a checkpoint in El-Tagamou El-Khames, an eastern suburb of Cairo. Killed: Both the family of the criminals killed by police and Italian investigators have rubbish their links to the murder of Regeni All five men had criminal records, and authorities claim they would target foreigners dressed as police officers before mugging them. Egyptian police say their evidence of the five men's involvement in Regeni's kidnapping and killing is that his passport was found in an apartment belonging to a female relative of theirs. Rasha Tarek - wife of Salah Ali, daughter of Tarek Abdel Fattah and sister of Saad Tarek - say the men had nothing to do with the death of Regeni, and claims police planted his passport in the flat. Ms Tarek said her family members' criminal pasts made them easy targets for police looking for a scapegoat for the Regeni murder. A few days after the killings of the five men, the Interior Ministry admitted that there was little evidence to tie them to the deaths of Regeni. 'There is nothing in our statements that tie the five to the murder of the Italian man. We only found a new variable in our investigations,' Interior Ministry spokesman Abu Bakr Abdel-Karim said after Regeni's belongings were found at the home of Rasha Tarek's aunt, CNN reports. Italian investigators have rubbished claims that he Regeni was murdered by small-time criminals kidnapping a foreigner for valuables or a ransom. They say his injuries and the torture for several days are not 'consistent with criminals looking for a ransom'. 'It is not credible that an entire gang of alleged kidnappers was killed by police, thereby preventing any possibility of getting corroborating statements from any of them,' investigators told Italian news agency ANSA. Protesters hold an Italian flag with photos of Giulio Regeni, during a demonstration in front of the Egyptian embassy in Rome Italian officials have greeted Egypt's explanations concerning Regeni's murder with outright scepticism. They suspect he was killed by elements in the Egyptian security services, an accusation which Cairo has steadfastly denied. Regeni's murder has troubled Cairo-Rome diplomatic ties given that Prime Minister Matteo Renzi shares a close relationship with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sis, helping in turn to generate hugely valuable business contracts for Italian companies in Egypt. In terms of action, Italy's options are limited. Moves under consideration include a warning to its citizens against travel to Egypt, but the Regeni case has already caused a slump in visitor numbers from Italy. Rome is also considering asking for support from its European Union partners to try to put pressure on the Egyptian government over the case. Media coverage of the Regeni case has served as a focus for other disappearances and rights abuses in Egypt. Since ousting his Islamist predecessor Mohamed Morsi in 2013, Sisi has overseen a blistering crackdown targeting all forms of dissent. New Yorkers gazed into the blue sky with bemusement as a skywriting plane carefully scribbled the phrase 'How happy Is the one who says, I am a Turk' in Turkish over Manhattan. The phrase was coined by the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, in 1933 and was until recently an oath which every Turkish child was obliged to repeat twice a week at school. But the plane then went on to scrawl more controversial slogans in the sky, including several which denied the Armenian genocide in 1915. A plane skywrites the phrase 'How happy Is the one who says, I am a Turk' over Manhattan. It may sound like an innocuous phrase but it is perceived as having sinister connotations for Kurdish and other minorities in Turkey The plane wrote the URL of a pro-Turkish website which denies the Armenian genocide. Both sides admit that more than a million people died but the Turkish state has always denied the majority were killed deliberately and claims many died of starvation as a result of World War I A young American dance group, wearing t-shirts embossed with the Turkish flag on them, were hired by the US-based Turkish Institute for Progress to entertain people at a Turkish festival in Brooklyn These included '101 years of geno-lie' and 'Truth=Peace' and the URL of a website which is designed to 'counter Armenian misinformation' about the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians during and just after World War I. Luke O'Brien tweeted: 'Nothing screams 'we have nothing to hide' than a denial over Manhattan. Last year Kim Kardashian launched an outspoken attack on President Obama for refusing to use the word 'genocide' as he marked the 100th anniversary of the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians. The reality star, whose father was of Armenian origin, has used her celebrity since 2011 to bring awareness to the genocide. In 1986 a similar stunt set off panic in New York, when a skywriting display above a Turkish-American parade was mistaken for a warning of an imminent attack by Colonel Gaddafi's Libya. Earlier this year supporters of Republican presidential hopeful Marco Rubio paid for skywriters to scrawl: 'America is great! Trump is disgusting' above the Rose Parade in Pasadena, California. Some Armenian-Americans responded angrily to the skywriting on Twitter. France, Russia, Canada, Argentina, Belgium and Italy have formally recognised the genocide but Britain, the US and Israel have resisted using the phrase genocide One of the slogans simply referred to Russia and Armenia, who are traditional allies. During World War I the Christian Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire were seen by many Turks as a fifth column, who supported their fellow Christians, Russia, who were at war with Turkey The words 'Turkey:Truth' were left above Manhattan by the skywriting plane. The question of where the truth lies in the arguments about the Armenian genocide have been exercising historians for decades This slogan simply says 'Let history decide'. Whereas the Holocaust is universally accepted, there remains less clarity over the Armenian genocide The skywriter also bafflingly spelt out the names of the Kurdish organisations PYD and PKK as well as the defunct Armenian ASALA terror organisation and appeared to link them to Daesh. A young dance group wearing Turkish flag t-shirts perform 'peace choreography' in New York. The controversy over the Armenian genocide has embroiled none other than reality star Kim Kardashian, whose family are of Armenian origin Prolific: Mark Deitch downloaded more than 150 indecent images of children onto a hard drive which included folders named teens and candids A former BBC executive has admitted downloading more than 150 indecent images of children in folders named teens and candids onto a hard drive. Mark Deitch, 57, of Willden, Bedfordshire, would spend hours of time at work at a talent agency scouring anonymous online forum 4chan for things to download as he procrastinated - and it was enough to crash the internet connection. He admitted downloading the child images but said they were part of a wider haul from 4chan, Londons Southwark Crown Court heard today. The prolific downloader claims to have been unaware of a folder named pizza which contained only indecent images of children. He was set to face trial but has now pleaded guilty to two charges of making indecent images of children. Deitch has been undergoing a Newton hearing with a judge to determine if he was aware of the indecent images and whether or not he had intentionally downloaded them. At the time of the offences Deitch, who worked for the BBC for 12 years and was responsible for purchasing programmes on behalf of other broadcasters, was working for talent agency Benjamin Management. He used a work computer to download the images before transferring them to an external hard drive. His computer only came under scrutiny after technicians tried to fix it. Prosecutor Adrian Fleming said the original computer had been wiped so that it could be used by someone else. This meant investigators could only examine the hard drive and that certain factors - such as a browser search history - were unavailable. They did find a folder called 'MDX' which Deitch admitted he may have created because it was his initials and an 'X' which could stand for X-rated content. Mr Fleming said: Within that we [found] a number of sub files including one entitled pizza. Guilty plea: Londons Southwark Crown Court (pictured) heard Deitch admitted downloading the images but said that they were part of a wider haul from anonymous online forum 4chan 'Technicians did not appear to have very much difficulty in finding that folder - when they went in they were simply trying to fix a problem. This file pizza, in which approximately half of the images were found, was - in the Crowns submission - a fairly obvious place within the MDX folder. The file contained 80 indecent images of children and no other content. These images were part of about 33,000 files stored on the external device, almost all of which are thought to be pornographic. Mr Fleming noted that the creation date on the files ranged for vast periods of 2013 and 2014 and suggested that this may mean that Deitch added files to the device on a number of occasions. All the downloads of the files were from a computer called Mark PC, the prosecutor confirmed. He went through folder names such as candids and teen as he explained how some images were in folders only containing unlawful images while other were mixed with legal, adult pornography. In total six images of the most serious category were found on the device plus 43 of the second grouping and 115 of the third. There was also a video file that was in the third band of seriousness. During an interview when presented with the file name stills Deitch said that it rings a bell a bit, though this folder also contained hundreds of other legal images. Deitch has admitted downloading, and therefore making, the images but has denied knowing that they were present in part of a bulk download. Career: Deitch worked for the corporation (whose Broadcasting House in Central London is pictured) for 12 years and was responsible for purchasing programmes on behalf of other broadcasters Deitch told the court that for him the downloading was not a thrill because of the pornography but that the process was what interested him. He said: 'I found that the searching soothes me - it is the downloading that interests me.' The former BBC executive said that he would spend hours of time at work scouring 4chan for things to download as he procrastinated. He admitted that he had stumbled across child pornography on the site 'once or twice' but claimed to have immediately alerted moderators. 'Whilst I was at work I would go into 4chan and then there would be a post. - a new post would come up every couple of seconds, it could be anything. DEITCH'S ARTS CAREER IN PROFILE Deitch spent 12 years at the BBC, rising to become head of acquired output. He has also run the channel Bravo, and a number of other networks, and is now a senior figure at the International School of Screen Acting. His profile on the schools website describes him as an Agent and Casting Director. The profile adds that he has consulted for every major UK TV station and many international broadcasters and producers. He has also worked with a several drama schools as a tutor and casting agent. Advertisement 'It meant doing something other than the thing you are doing as a displacement exercise - it was distraction. I was not functioning with a full deck at that point to be honest. 'More often than not I would unzip it to the PC and then copy it over in bulk in the evening. 'It was a ridiculous amount - so much so in fact that I got an email from the building maintenance people saying somebody in your office is really slowing down the building, will you stop it please. It was enough to crash the internet connection.' Deitch admitted he had a particular fondness for 'amateur' couples and 'casting auditions' when it came to looking for what he described as 'legal porn'. He maintained that he had not actively sought out indecent images of children but this his knowledge of the online forum should have alerted him that there could be a risk. 'I suppose certainly looking back on it now there were people there who were into all sorts of weird stuff. It would not be beyond the realm of possibilities that something untoward would be placed there.' He was also questioned about the file named 'pizza' but claimed it was unlikely he chose the name. 'It is a strange word for me because I do not like pizza and I am allergic to cheese.' Marc Brown, defending, said: What the defendant would be saying is that he accepts responsibility for making the images on the exhibit. He was a prolific downloader of legal adult pornography. Mr Brown explained that of the roughly 33,000 images only around 0.5 per cent were illegal. He would download material from the online forum 4chan in a zip format. He would download zip files containing various folders which contained pornographic material in bulk. He did not deliberately seek out the material referred to in the indictment. The test is whether the defendant knew that the material he was downloading contained indecent material or was likely to contain indecent material. Judge Nicholas Loraine-Smith adjourned sentencing for Deitch as he was not completely convinced by his defence. The judge said: 'I am going to order a pre-sentence report. There is no evidence of the search terms that the defendant used. 'Child pornography forms a minute proportion of the materials saved by him and I am not satisfied that he deliberately sought it out. However I did not find his evidence very satisfactory.' Judge Loraine-Smith mentioned that there was an element of denial in what Deitch had told him. He warned Deitch that if he did not co-operate with the probation service and that if a report was not ready by his sentencing date that he would be committing a further offence. 'I suggest that you are as full and frank as you can be with the probation service,' the judge concluded. A biting new campaign ad by Republican Ted Cruz depicts Hillary Clinton as a virtual pawn inside her own campaign 'War Room' with longtime aide Huma Abedin acting as the real player behind the throne. The web ad casts an elaborate -- and completely imaginary -- Hollywood-style seen of Clinton's kitchen cabinet meeting inside darkly lit Clinton Campaign headquarters. But the candidate herself never utters a word. 'What do you have for me?' says the 'Huma' character in the first line of the script, kicking of the strategy session. An aide accidentally starts addressing Huma as if she's the real boss -- while an actress who is a dead-ringer for the real Hillary Clinton looks perturbed. Scroll down for video Sidelined: The ad portrays Clinton pouting while her team lick their chops about facing a supposedly weak Donald Trump in November No more makin' copies: It's Huma, not Hillary who heads up the meeting in a Ted Cruz TV spot 'Madam Secretary' the plan is coming together. Donald Trump is paving the way for you to win the White House,' replies a young aide. An actress who is a dead ringer for Clinton looks on in silence. 'Our oppo-file on Trump is ready to go. When our friends in the media release this stuff, he's toast,' crows another aide as the imagined plotting continues. Another aide delights in taking on an opponent like trump with high unfavorability ratings. 'Who has the highest?' Huma asks as all eyes turn to Clinton. 'If Trump becomes the Republican nominee, the White House is yours,' says an aide. But Huma frets: 'How do we stop Ted Cruz? How do we stop Ted Cruz?' A CBS poll last week had Clinton leading Trump by 50 to 40 percent, but still beating Cruz 45 to 42 percent. Only Ohio Gov. John Kasich led Clinton, by 41 to 47. Dynamic duo: In real life Abedin is a constant presence at her boss's side on the campaign trail A real-life war room, as President Obama's cabinet looks on from the Situation Room in the White House during the killing of Osama Bin Laden The ad provides yet more exposure to the glamorous Abedin, who has been by Clinton's side going back to her time as First Lady through her Senate career and failed 2008 presidential campaign, and who has accompanied Clinton on trips around the globe. Abedin rose to become Clinton's chief of staff at the State Department as well as a senior figure in the campaign but she also serves the role of 'body woman,' keeping tabs on Clinton's schedule and her array of connections. A series of emails released by the State Department as part of the ongoing Clinton email scandal reveal that much of Abedin's role is considerably more mundane than the high-stakes strategy session the TV ad. Among Clinton's most frequent emails to Abedin are those saying simply, 'Pls print' emails Clinton read on her blackberry. Although a major asset to the candidate, Abedin has also caused headaches for her boss. Her part time work as a 'special government employee' during her time at the State Department while also doing outside work has scrutiny from Sen. Charles Grassley. A woman who was allegedly the victim of a 'three-hour gang sex assault in a van' in the car park of a shopping centre is believed to have known her attackers. The alleged victim, aged in her 20s, said she was attacked by seven men while she was waiting for the bus home on Mother's Day outside Bluewater Shopping Centre near Dartford, Kent. She works at the shopping centre and had been approaching the bus station at the south east corner of the complex when the attack allegedly took place. Eleven people have been arrested by Kent Police in connection with the incident, all aged between 16 and 22, with 10 currently on bail as officers continue to investigate the incident on March 6. The other was released without charge. The assault, said to have lasted three hours, took place in the car park, pictured, near the bus station It comes as police confirmed none of the 11 arrested were Muslim following a controversial accusation made online by a candidate in the upcoming Kent Police and Crime Commissioner election. Steve Uncles, alleged Muslims were responsible on his English Democrats campaign website. But a spokesman for Kent Police said: 'Due to the widespread attention this incident has received, investigating officers can confirm that all the 11 men who were arrested are from Kent and not Muslim, as has been suggested.' Catherine Heseltine, of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, condemned the 'outrageous' comment. She said: 'To somehow to imply you're more likely to be a rapist because you're Muslim or Asian is simply outrageous. 'The only story here is that racists are trying to use crime to stir up racial and religious hatred. 'The fact that he is using it to further his political campaign is scary and alarming.' A woman who was the victim of a gang sex assault at Bluewater Shopping Centre in Kent is believed to have known some of her attackers Meanwhile Kent Police have moved to reassure staff and customers at the centre, stating it was an 'isolated incident' and that officers are not looking for any other suspects. A worker at laser hair removal firm Centros Unico said the news had 'come out of nowhere' and that many in the shopping centre had been totally unaware of the crime. 'We didn't have a clue about it here. I can't remember ever seeing loads of police cars around or anything, and I've only heard about it since yesterday. 'It's worrying for anyone who gets the bus because if that can happen when you have a lot of security around usually then it is very scary.' Another employee at beauty product shop Aveda said there was a high security presence around the shopping centre. 'The car parks are usually very well lit and it's quite safe because there is a police station nearby. 'I didn't even know there had been an attack until I heard about it on the news. I've never seen anything suspicious before late at night. 'It's generally pretty safe round here and you always see security and police around so that is reassuring. A spokesman for Kent Police said: 'Officers from the Kent and Essex Serious Crime Directorate are investigating a report that a woman in her 20s was sexually assaulted in a car park at Bluewater shopping centre in Kent on 6 March, between 7pm and 8.30pm. 'Officers promptly identified the suspects and 11 arrests were made. All those arrested were men, aged between 16 and 22 and from Kent. They were all released on bail with conditions while enquiries continued. One of those men has since been released without charge. 'Officers are working to establish the circumstances of the incident, and no charges have so far been made. 'We appreciate the public concern in relation to this incident but would like to reassure members of the public that we have made arrests and at this stage we are not looking for anyone else in connection with the case. Police have arrested 11 people in connection with the alleged attack at the centre, pictured, and all but one have been released on bail 'A full investigation is underway and work to gather evidence continues, but if anyone has any information that they have not brought to our attention we would encourage them to do so. 'This is being treated as an isolated incident, and there are no other incidents that are being linked to this offence.' The woman was bundled into a van and subjected to a three-hour sexual assault, according to Kent Online. As previously reported local councillor Keith Kelly said: 'I'm absolutely horrified. If it is proven to be accurate then it is a horrifying incident in a very public place. A 16-year-old girl has died after getting into a fight with another girl over a boy in a school bathroom. Officials say the fight broke out Thursday morning before classes at Howard High School of Technology, a vocational school in Wilmington, Delaware. Students who witnessed the deadly scuffle say that two girls started fighting in one of the women's bathrooms over a boy, when a gang of other girls jumped the victim. At one point, someone banged the girl's head on a sink, according to witnesses who spoke with 6ABC. Scroll down for video A 16-year-old girl has died after being attacked by a group in the women's bathroom at Howard High School of Technology in Wilmington, Delaware Thursday morning. Above, paramedics wheeling the student out of the school on Thursday The girl - who has not been identified - was flown by helicopter to A.I. DuPont Children's Hospital in critical condition. She as later pronounced dead at the hospital Kaya Wilson was in a stall when the fight broke out and spoke with the local news station after leaving school. 'She was fighting a girl, and then that's when all these other girls started banking her -like jumping her - and she hit her head on the sink,' Wilson said. The victim - who has not been identified - was flown to A.I. DuPont Children's Hospital in critical condition, where she was later pronounced dead.The cause of death has not been confirmed News media outlets quoted Police Chief Bobby Cummings as saying that two female students were taken to police headquarters for questioning. 'My heart bleeds for the family,' Mayor Dennis Williams told a news conference. Two female students are being interviewed by police, a spokesman for Wilmington's mayor confirmed The cause of the death for the as-yet-unnamed female is student is still not know. Above, a crime scene vehicle at the school on Thursday Mayor Dennis William was emotional as he announced the female student's death on Thursday Classes were cancelled at the vocational school on Thursday after the deadly attack. It's still unclear whether school will reopen on Friday A student cries in front of Howard High School of Technology on Thursday, April 21, 2016 in Wilmington, Del. A city official said a student has died after a confrontation inside the school Sherry Dorsey Walker, a Wilmington city councilwoman, says she has known the victim and her family for quite some time and had been asked by the family to speak on their behalf. Dorsey Walker says the family is asking for spiritual healing in the community and no retaliation. She says they're also 'asking people to just be calm and pray for them.' The councilwoman described the victim as 'a wonderful human being,' adding that 'her loss is a big void, not just in the family.' Dorsey Walker would not confirm the victim's name. Nathaniel Kenyatta, a freshman at the school, was friends with the victim and spoke to Delaware Online on Thursday. He says he met her in a HVAC class and that she was an easy person to talk to. 'She was very open,' he said. 'I feel bad for the people who have known her for years.' Howard isn't known as a violent school and Cummings said he did not know of any other problems in recent days. Meanwhile, school has been cancelled for the day and it's unclear whether it will reopen tomorrow. An alleged ISIS recruiter has been remanded in jail after appearing in court as it emerged he described the Paris terrorist massacre last November as an 'excellent day' and backed the sadists who beheaded British aid worker David Haines. The judge who sent him to prison also said investigators had uncovered evidence showing Mohamed Harrak, 26, had participated in the preparation of a terrorist attack in Spain. Carmen Lamela, a judge at Spain's national criminal court the Audiencia Nacional, said the attack wasn't completed for 'reasons alien to Harrack's wishes.' Scroll down for video Alleged ISIS recruiter Mohamed Harrak, pictured (left) today and (right) in a 'military' uniform, has been remanded in jail after appearing in court as it emerged he described the Paris terrorist massacre last November as an 'excellent day' and backed the sadists who beheaded British aid worker David Haines He was asked to testify via video link from a court building in the Majorcan capital Palma where he was taken this morning amid tight security. Revealing in a 13-page written prison order why she was remanding him in jail pending an ongoing probe, Judge Lamela said: 'Through social media and telephone conversations he said things like his aim was to travel to Syria for fight for his community alongside the mujahideen of the caliphate. 'After the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13 last year, Mohamed Harrak said it was an excellent day because his people had make Europe tremble.' The prison order also described how he published a sick ISIS propaganda video showing the September 13, 2014 execution of East Yorkshire-born David Haines following his abduction in a Syrian refugee camp. Harrak commented alongside the video on a fake Facebook profile: 'If the yankees had stayed where they were and stopped shovelling their s**t everywhere this wouldn't happen. 'Even though it might seem bad to some of you, I support them. The judge who sent him to prison also said investigators had uncovered evidence showing the 26-year-old, pictured today, had participated in the preparation of a terrorist attack in Spain Harrack, pictured wearing military fatigues, was asked to testify via video link from a court building in the Majorcan capital Palma where he was taken this morning amid tight security The prison order also described how Harrack published a sick ISIS propaganda video showing the September 13, 2014 execution of East Yorkshire-born David Haines following his abduction in a Syrian refugee camp 'I might disagree with some actions like decapitating innocent people but as far as everything else goes, I'm in favour of their cause.' No details were given in the ruling of the uncompleted terrorist act. As well as publishing pro-ISIS comments and propaganda on fake social media profiles where he deliberately tried to hide his true identity, the prison order said he had also worked recruiting people to join the terror's groups ranks in Syria. The judge highlighted how the investigation into Harrak had revealed that in January he had used a mobile phone to access a website containing an ISIS document titled: 'Security advice for lone wolves and autonomous cells.' He told disciples last November he had allegedly persuaded to travel with him to Syria to wear western clothes and erase images and archives on their phones and computers that could arouse suspicion before their trip to an ISIS-controlled area starting in Barcelona and passing through Azerbaijan. Harrak was a fanatic of airsoft, a paintball-style game in which participants eliminate opponents by hitting each other with pellets from replica firearms Video footage had emerged of a man - thought to be Harrak - being snatched by masked security officers and led away in broad daylight with his face covered with a grey top earlier this month Investigators say he had been making plans to join the French Foreign Legion in a bid to improve his military skills after being turned down for the Spanish Army. He is said to have used three Facebook profiles in addition to one in a fake name in which he showed off his love of guns and his obsession for airsoft, a war game he practiced using a replica of a Heckler & Koch G36 assault rife. The prison order confirmed 22 grams of cocaine were found at his home he shared with his family in a rundown neighbourhood of Palma during a police raid on Tuesday. Scales he is thought to have used to weigh out the drug he peddled to make money were discovered inside his locker at a tourist hotel in Santa Ponsa where he worked. The hotel, the four-star Viva Rey Don Jaime Hotel which is a British favourite, has declined to comment. The judge indicated in her ruling she was remanding Harrak in jail because he posed a flight risk and his bail could lead to the destruction or alteration of evidence. Two Tory MPs tonight denied personally profiting from the Grassroots Out Brexit campaign after declaring about 20,000 each in pay from the group. Peter Bone and Tom Pursglove set up the campaign organisation and both carried out work for it since December. But after Aaron Banks, a major eurosceptic donor, slammed the pair for taking a total of 41,000 in payments for work completed the MPs issued a statement insisting they had made donations back to the campaign worth more than the money received. Mr Banks insisted all money donated to the Brexit cause - of which he has contributed 5million - should be spent on front line campaigning. Grassroots Out had earlier defended the payments as justified given the work carried out by the two MPs. Peter Bone, left, and Tom Pursglove, right, have declared payments of around 20,000 each from the Grassroots Out campaign for Brexit Grassroots Out tonight insisted they were a 'low cost' campaign and the payments made to Mr Bone and Mr Pursglove were intended to streamline the campaign as much as possible. In a joint statement, the MPs said: 'We are disappointed that some individuals have jumped to conclusions without being in full possession of the facts. 'Of all the major EU referendum campaigns, we have the cheapest and most efficient structure in place and our administrative and running costs are by far the lowest. The Board of Grassroots Out Ltd took the decision to appoint Tom Pursglove as its Chief Executive and Peter Bone's accountancy firm, PWB Accountants, to carry out accountancy work on behalf of the company. 'This decision was taken to ensure that Grassroots Out kept costs to a minimum, allowing us to spend the maximum amount on campaigning.' The statement said both MPs had properly recorded the payments received on the House of Commons register of interests as they are required to do. It added: 'It must also be clarified that both Peter Bone MP and Tom Pursglove MP have made donations to Grassroots Out Ltd that exceed the level of the payments received. Donor Aaron Banks, who has spent 5million on Brexit campaigns, condemned the Tory MPs 'These donations will be listed in the official return made to the Electoral Commission. Neither Peter Bone MP, or Tom Pursglove MP, have made any financial gain from this arrangement.' Earlier, Mr Banks said: 'We are extremely shocked and disappointed to discover two elected individuals have treated the Go Brexit campaign as a business not a cause and would urge them to do the honourable thing and donate the sum directly to a smaller Brexit group.' Mr Bone, a prominent spokesman for Grassroots Out, declared 17,500 for 414 hours of 'accountancy services' provided between December 16, 2015, and March 31 this year. The Wellingborough MP was paid another 2,500 for 59 hours of accountancy work in the first two weeks of April and another 1,750 for 'directors fees' for 18 hours work between December and March. Mr Pursglove, the Corby MP, declared payments of 17,500 for employment as chief executive of Grassroots Out. He recorded 450 hours of work and said the payment was for work done between December 16, 2015, and March 31 this year. Mr Pursglove declared an additional 1,750 for 'director's fees'. Together, the two MPs declared 41,000 in payments from Grassroots Out. All the payments were received before the regulated referendum period and strict spending limits kicked in ahead of the June 23 referendum. Mr Bone's declaration of interest, highlighted yellow to mark the new entries, revealed payments to his accountancy firm and 'director's fees' Mr Pursglove's declaration of interest included Grassroots Out under 'employment and earnings' and said he had done 450 hours of work A Grassroots Out spokesman told Buzzfeed the payments had been justified. The spokesman said: 'Grassroots Out Ltd is the lowest cost referendum campaign in the country. 'Tom Pursglove is chief executive of Grassroots Out Ltd and the company's only direct employee. 'Running a nationwide referendum campaign requires an extraordinary amount of work and for this Mr Pursglove has been remunerated.' 'Mr Pursglove is paid for doing a similar job as the chief executive of Vote Leave or the executive director of Britain Stronger in Europe. 'Peter Bone's company, PWB Accountants, provides Grassroots Out Ltd with accountancy services. 'This is the most cost effective and efficient way of administering the accounts for Grassroots Out Ltd. 'Payments to both Mr Pursglove and Mr Bone have been declared in the proper way.' Ukip leader Nigel Farage is a leading supporter of the Grassroots Out campaign, which draws support from several of the main political parties Last week, Grassroots Out failed in its bid to become the 'designated' campaign for the Brexit side of the referendum. The decision means it is much more restricted in how much money it can spend in the final 10 weeks of the referendum campaign. This is the moment a police officer rescued a raft of ducklings from a storm sewer in Eagle, Idaho. Officer Zach Helbach was responding to a call from a concerned resident on South Kestrel Place that a mother duck was 'squawking at a sewer'. The caller told police the ducklings were trapped behind the metal grate having fallen into the sewer while walking along the street. Officer Zach Helbach attended the scene of reports of a loudly quacking duck, pictured, beside a sewer The officer saw the ducklings trapped in the sewer and retrieved a plastic container from his patrol car Officer Helbach used the plastic container to scoop the trapped ducklings out of the sewer Officer Helbach arrived at the scene and used a plastic container and fished out seven of the ducklings. However, three of the birds had begun to swim downstream and out of Officer Helbach's reach. Luckily, the quick-thinking police man raced down the street to the next sewer opening and managed save the remaining ducklings. Officer Helbach left the ducklings on the sidewalk where they were rounded up safely by their mother. The heartwarming footage was released by Ada County Sheriff's Office who described their officer as a 'duckling liberator'. Speaking about his exploits, Officer Helbach said: 'Once I got them all out, Mom got em all together and they just walked over to a nearby irrigation canal.' He returned the young ducklings to their mother on the sidewalk who took them to a nearby irrigation canal Japan has gone to great lengths to sell its case for the lucrative $50 billion contract to build Australia's new fleet of submarines, making a direct phone call to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called Mr Turnbull who is expected to make an announcement in the next week of who the contract to build 12 submarines will be awarded, according to the ABC. The contract recipient is in the final stages of being decided by the National Security Committee of Cabinet following a 14 month assessment of Japanese, French and German submarine builders. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (pictured) called Mr Turnbull who is expected to make an announcement in the next week of who the contract to build 12 submarines will be awarded The contract recipient is in the final stages of being decided by the National Security Committee of Cabinet following a 14 month assessment of Japanese, French and German submarine builders The news report suggests rumours point toward the contract being awarded to a European submarine builder, which caused the Japanese prime minister to make a last ditch effort to have the contract awarded to manufacturer Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The company reportedly proposed a modified version of the four-tonne displacement Soryu class boat. It is understood the French DCNS shipbuilder and German Thyssenkrupp Marine have significant experience in building submarines for export, while the contract would be Japan's first export of a major defence platform if awarded. Mr Turnbull reportedly stated this week that a decision 'will be made in due course, it will be made shortly'. Russian attack submarines are increasingly patrolling the coasts of Scandinavia and Scotland, the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic, a US Navy chief has said. Vladimir Putin's recent boost to the submarine fleet means Russia now has the most underwater attack vessels in the area in two decades. Adm Mark Ferguson, the US Navy's top commander in Europe, said that patrols had increased by almost 50 per cent in the past year, citing a Russian Navy official. Vladimir Putin has increased Russian attack submarine patrols in Scandinavia, Scotland and the North Atlantic by almost 50 per cent in the past year, a US Navy's top commander said 'For the period from January 2014 to March 2015 the intensity of patrols by submarines has risen by almost 50 percent as compared to 2013,' says Navy Commander Admiral Viktor Chirkov said in April last year. Analysts told the New York Times that the tempo 'has not changed' in the past year, and Russia now has the most attack submarines in the area in 20 years. 'We are not quite back in a Cold War, but I sure can see one from where we are standing,' retired admiral and former supreme allied commander of NATO James G. Stavridis, told the Times. Russia's chief concern is NATO's biggest modernization since the Cold War, which is likely to include a military build-up in eastern Europe with a rotating, multinational force in Poland and the Baltics. Russia accused the United States on Wednesday of intimidation by sailing a US naval destroyer close to Russia's border in the Baltics. Above two Russian planes fly over USS Donald Cook April 12 in the Baltic Sea The United States has said the guided missile destroyer USS Cook was on routine business near Poland when it was harassed by Russian jets. Above a Russian helicopter flies low near USS Cook in the Baltic Sea April 12 NATO says the plans are a proportionate response to Russian aggression following Moscow's annexation of Crimea, and the alliance had no forces in eastern Europe before the Ukraine crisis. Poland and other NATO members in the Baltics worry about an increase in the Russian military presence in its Kaliningrad enclave, where Russia is positioning longer-range surface-to-air missiles. Meanwhile, Russia accused the United States on Wednesday of intimidation by sailing a US naval destroyer close to Russia's border in the Baltics and warned that the Russian military would respond with 'all necessary measures' to any future incidents. The USS Cook was 70 miles (marked by dotted line) from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. Its exact location has not been released Speaking after a meeting between NATO envoys and Russia, their first in almost two years, Moscow's ambassador to NATO said the April 11 maritime incident showed there could be no improvement in ties until the US-led alliance withdrew from Russia's borders. 'This is about attempts to exercise military pressure on Russia,' the envoy, Alexander Grushko, said. 'We will take all necessary measures, precautions, to compensate for these attempts to use military force.' US Ambassador to NATO Douglas Lute pressed Russia about the incident, warning it had been dangerous. The United States has said the guided missile destroyer USS Cook was on routine business near Poland when it was harassed by Russian jets. Former residents at a Queensland orphanage would have urine soaked towels placed on their heads and be publicly flogged, a royal commission has found. Last year, the child sex abuse royal commission investigated the 'cruel and excessive' treatment of 13 residents at St Joseph's Orphanage at Neerkol, near Rockhampton between 1940 and 1975. The women and men said they were often flogged, walked on with high heels and had their genitals beaten by the Sisters of Mercy nuns, The Brisbane Times reported. Former residents at a Queensland orphanage (pictured) would have urine soaked towels placed on their heads and be publicly flogged, a royal commission has found Last year, the child sex abuse royal commission investigated the 'cruel and excessive' treatment of 13 residents at St Joseph's Orphanage at Neerkol, near Rockhampton between 1940 and 1975 The commissioners found some of the punishments were 'cruel and excessive' and were 'against regulations' at the orphanage. The victims - who are now aged in their 50s to 80s - told the commission they did not report the abuse earlier as they had 'little opportunity' to speak with authorities. Allegations of the first resident abuse was reported in the 1990s. In a report released on Thursday, commissioners Justice Jennifer Coate, Professor Helen Milroy and Andrew Murray found Bishop Heenan failed to provide an adequate response to a complaint of sexual abuse at the hands of the disgraced former member of his clergy, Reginald Durham, in 1996. 'In failing to do so, he placed other children at risk of sexual abuse by Father Durham,' the report said. The women and men said they were often flogged and walked on with high heels by the Sisters of Mercy nuns The commissioners found some of the punishments were 'cruel and excessive' and were 'against regulations' at the orphanage Bishop Heenan told the priest not to approach young children or schools, but there was no supervision of the restriction. The bishop failed to follow church protocols because the priest, who is now dead, was not suspended until he was charged by police in February 1998, the commission found. But the report also noted the capacity of both the Bishop and Sister Berneice Loch, who became the Congregational Leader of the Sisters of Mercy in 1991, to respond to complaints was undermined by a lack of training in detecting abuse. The Queensland government also failed to adequately supervise and protect the children because scrutiny over the living circumstances was lacking. The teen got a suspended sentence as he has tried to live a 'drug free life' The court heard that he started selling drugs to support his own habit A 'privileged' private school student who sold drugs to his classmates has escaped a prison sentence, despite trafficking dangerous illicit substances at two different schools. Ciaran Oates, 19, was handed a suspended jail sentence after he pleaded guilty to two counts of trafficking a controlled drug and one of possession with intent to sell in Adelaide District Court on Thursday. The court heard Oates, a 'privileged' private school student, started using cannabis and ecstasy in his final year at Pembroke School, in Adelaide's eastern suburbs, and soon moved on to selling drugs to his classmates and students from nearby Marryatville High to support his own habit. Ciaran Oates, 19, was handed a suspended jail sentence after he pleaded guilty to three drug offences Oates started using cannabis (L) and ecstasy (R) in his final year at Pembroke School but soon moved on to selling drugs to his classmates to support his own habit 'You obtained the drugs from a school mate. Your use of these drugs led you to selling cannabis and ethylene to finance your use of those substances,' Judge Steven Millsteed said of the 2015 offence. Judge Millsteed told the court that when the teen was arrested police found 22 ecstasy tablets, 17 blue ethylene tablets, almost $3,000 in cash and two electronic scales in his car, the Adelaide Advertiser reported. His phone also reportedly contained images of 1,000 ethylene tablets and cash taken by his supplier. Judge Millsteed said his parents had made 'substantial sacrifices' to allow him to get a quality education that would allow him to lead a 'privileged life', but did not send him to jail for his offences as he had since endeavoured to live a drug free life. Oates trafficked drugs in both Pembroke School (L) and nearby Marryatville High (R) in March 2015 Judge Steven Millsteed sentenced Oates to three years and two months in jail at the Adelaide District Court (pictured) but decided to suspend the sentence and give him a good behaviour bond He sentenced Oates to three years and two months in jail, with a non-parole period of one year and eight months, however suspended the sentence as the teen entered a $1,000, three-year good behaviour bond, according to the Adelaide Advertiser. 'You have come very close to going to jail for a substantial period,' Judge Millsteed warned. Nyomi forced boy's hand into Liam's mouth to 'show him what he'd done' A lesbian accused of murdering two-year-old Liam Fee with her civil partner forced another young boy to put his hand into the toddler's mouth after he had died and said: 'You've killed him.' The boy, who cannot be named, told police he slept naked inside a cage made of a fireguard and bars with his hands bound with cable ties, a court heard. He also said how his hands would swell up and was called 'pudding hands' by one of the accused, jurors were told. Dead in 2014: Liam Fee allegedly suffered blunt force trauma to his head and body near Glenrothes in Fife The child described how he would sometimes be naked in the cage, had his hands tied behind his back on occasion and would have objects placed on him to make sure he did not move. Liam's mother Rachel Fee, 31, and her civil partner Nyomi Fee, 28, are on trial for a second week at the High Court in Livingston, Scotland, where they deny murdering two-year-old Liam Fee and falsely blaming his death on another young boy. They also plead not guilty to a catalogue of allegations of wilfully ill-treating and neglecting two young boys over a period of more than two years. The jury has been shown various pre-recorded interviews with the boy the women blame for the death which were held in the weeks after Liam died at a house in Fife on Saturday March 22 2014. On day eight of the trial, the jury heard the child, who was seven at the time, tell a police officer and social worker about a 'cage' in the living room. He described being locked in the makeshift construction, which was tied together with cable ties. He said he would be 'sitting up, sometimes lying down, tied there' and showed his arms being stretched out and up. 'It was made of a fireguard and there was some bars,' he said, adding the bars came from the under the mattress on a bed. The child said it happened 'after Christmas' and described how the cage would stay in the living room but would get moved into another room when a nurse came round to look at his sore feet. Trial: Nyomi Fee, 28, and her civil partner Rachel Fee, 31 - who can be identified by name but not pictured for legal reasons - are also facing a catalogue of assault, cruelty and neglect charges involving three children 'Why did you have to go in there (the cage)?' he was asked. 'I don't know,' the child replied. 'What did you get tied with?' the interviewers asked. 'Cable ties,' he replied, adding that both his arms would be bound, and feet. 'How long would you be tied to that cage for?' he was asked. 'All night,' the boy said, later adding that it happened once in the daytime. He said Nyomi would do it to him but that Rachel would also do it when Nyomi was away. The child also described how the accused would throw jackets over the cage when they were watching DVDs so that he could not see. 'Did you have any clothes on?' he was asked. 'No clothes on,' the boy replied. He agreed that he had slept in the cage in the living room. Jurors heard him describe how his tied hands would become red and swollen, and that Nyomi had called him 'pudding hands'. He described how, on other occasions, he would be tied to a cot with a dressing-gown cord and coat belts. The two women are also charged with attempting to defeat the ends of justice in the wake of Liam's death Talking about the night Liam died, the boy said that Nyomi 'told me Liam's dead'. He went on: 'She said "do you want to see want you've done to Liam?" The interviewer asked: 'Who said that to you?' The boy replied: 'Ny (Nyomi) but I didn't do anything.' He said he did not know what she had meant by that. The child described how he was told to get dressed and then stood in a corridor. He said he could see that Liam was 'on the floor' in his bedroom and his colour had changed to light grey. Referring to Nyomi, the boy went on: 'She wiped my hand and got me into Liam's room and then she got my hand and put it in his mouth.' Liam was in his pyjamas and his mouth was open at the time, he said. The boy agreed that Nyomi kept pushing his hand in but said she did not say anything to him as it happened. The child later described how Nyomi told him: 'You've killed Liam.' Both women are charged with assaulting Liam Fee by repeatedly inflicting blunt force trauma to his head and body between January 2012 and March 2014. They are accused of murdering him by inflicting similar blunt force injuries in March 2014, injuring him so severely that he died. They are also charged with wilfully ill-treating, neglecting and abandoning Liam in a manner likely to cause him unnecessary suffering or injury to health between January and March 2014, leaving him in a darkened room without physical or mental stimulation, giving him Calpol to make him sleep and failing to provide and seek appropriate, timely and adequate medical aid for him when he was injured. They are also charged with attempting to defeat the ends of justice following Liam's death by delaying contacting the emergency services and falsely claiming during a 999 call - and later to police, friends and family - that one of the seven-year-olds was responsible for his death. Prosecutors also allege that prior to the arrival of police and paramedics on March 22, 2014, the couple grabbed the hand of the seven year-old they blamed and forced it into the dead toddler's mouth. The cruelty and neglect charges include allegations that they deprived all three boys of food, refused to let them go to the toilet at night and forced them to stand naked and shivering under a cold shower if they wet the bed. They argue we could strike a new deal to maintain EU protected status the warnings and say Britain would 'take back control' of product regulation if we leave Brussels club Britain's sausages, cheese and cider would be under threat if we voted to leave the EU, David Cameron claimed today in the latest warning about the consequences of Brexit. The Prime Minister said EU protected status rules - which means only products made in a specific geographical area can use the name associated with it - would no longer apply to British products and other EU manufacturers could copy their recipes and sell products under the same names. These rules mean whisky can only be sold as 'Scotch' if it has been made in Scotland and made using traditional methods. David Cameron (pictured visiting a cider farm with George Osborne) warned that the UK would lose out due to Today Mr Cameron wrote an article in the Gloucester Citizen newspaper claiming that the county's famous cider, its single Gloucester cheese and traditionally-farmed old spot pork will lose their protected status it enjoys across the European market. But Brexit supporters dismissed his claims, arguing that Britain would 'take back control' of product regulation if it left the EU and said the Government could ensure our products remain protected in European markets by striking a new deal with Brussels. Mr Cameron also warned that farmers could face tariffs of up to 40 per cent and 'huge additional costs' if Britain quit the EU and our farmers were forced to operate under World Trade Organisation rules. It is the latest claim made by the Prime Minister of how the farming and food industry would be hit if voters back Brexit in June's referendum. Today Mr Cameron wrote an article in the Gloucester Citizen newspaper claiming that the county's famous cider, its single Gloucester cheese and traditionally-farmed old spot pork will lose their protected status that it enjoys across the European market Earlier this week the National Farmers' Union, which represents 55,000 farmers and farm workers across the UK, came out in favour of remaining a member of the EU, but said it would not be actively campaigning in the referendum and would not tell its members which way to vote. In campaigners argue that British farmers will be worse off outside the EU because they will no longer be able to claim subsidies paid through the EU's common agriucultural policy (CAP), which are worth about 2.4billion a year. But Brexit supporters argue that UK farmers would be better off out of the EU as the Government would have 100 per cent control over how farming subsidies are spent and which sectors to prioritise. Urging Gloucester residents to vote to remain in the EU, Mr Cameron wrote today: 'Protected status enjoyed across Europe by our unique products, such as Gloucestershire cider, Single Gloucester cheese and traditionally-farmed Gloucester old spot pork, will be lost.' Competitors chase a Double Gloucester cheese down a steep slope, for the ancient daredevil sport of cheese rolling at Cooper's Hill in Brockworth, Gloucestershire Mr Cameron's comments came as Tony Blair's former spin doctor Alastair Campbell claimed that ISIS is backing Brexit because it 'suits their agenda'. He said the Islamic terror group is one of very few overseas players who want Britain to leave the EU, joined only by US presidential hopeful Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin. Mr Campbell, who served as Mr Blair's director of communications in Downing Street, was in Dublin today pleading the Irish to help persuade their friends in Britain to vote to remain in the Brussels club in June's referendum. He claimed that no 'serious overseas player thinks we should leave,' but his controversial remarks are certain to fuel more claims of scaremongering. He told the Business and Employers Confederation today: 'No serious overseas player thinks we should leave, unless it suits their agenda. 'Putin probably. Isis definitely. And, depending what mood he is in, Donald Trump. That's about it on the international scene.' In campaigners have argued that leaving the EU would play into the hands of ISIS as it would show their aim of dividing the West was working, but Brexit campaigners dismiss this argument and claim Britain would be safer if it was no longer part of freedom of movement rules. ISIS, Putin and Trump back Brexit because it 'suits their agenda', says Tony Blair's former spin doctor Alastair Campbell ISIS is backing Brexit because it 'suits their agenda,' according to Tony Blair's former spin doctor Alastair Campbell. He said the Islamic terror group is one of very few overseas players who want Britain to leave the EU, joined only by US presidential hopeful Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin. Mr Campbell, who served as Mr Blair's director of communications in Downing Street, is in Dublin today pleading the Irish to help persuade their friends in Britain to vote to remain in the Brussels club in June's referendum. Scroll down for video Warning: Senior anti-terrorism officials at NATO and the EU told the Security and Counter Terror Expo in London that ISIS terrorists are planning nuclear and chemical attacks on Britain and Europe (file photo) He claims that no 'serious overseas player thinks we should leave,' but his controversial remarks are certain to fuel more claims of scaremongering. He told the Business and Employers Confederation today: 'No serious overseas player thinks we should leave, unless it suits their agenda. 'Putin probably. Isis definitely. And, depending what mood he is in, Donald Trump. That's about it on the international scene.' In campaigners have argued that leaving the EU would play into the hands of ISIS as it would show their aim of dividing the West was working, but Brexit campaigners dismiss this argument and claim Britain would be safer if it was no longer part of freedom of movement rules. Donald Trump (pictured yesterday in Indianapolis) has spoken in favour of Britain leaving the EU. Last month he said 'it's time' for Britain to leave the EU due to the 'craziness that's going on with migration'. At least one of the terrorists involved in the Brussels attacks travelled to Britain last year, while most of those responsible for the Paris attacks last November were EU nationals, meaning they were free to move freely between EU member states. Mr Trump has spoken in favour of Britain leaving the EU. Last month he said 'it's time' for Britain to leave the EU due to the 'craziness that's going on with migration'. Mr Campbell, who served as Mr Blair's director of communications in Downing Street, is in Dublin today pleading the Irish to help persuade their friends in Britain to vote to remain in the Brussels club in June's referendum About 1.5 million Irish people in Britain are eligible to vote in the June 23 referendum on Britain's membership of the EU. Mr Campbell will say the EU referendum is more significant than any of the elections he was involved in as Mr Blair's spin doctor. 'The historic significance, if we leave, is greater than any of the elections I was involved in,' he will say. 'The consequences for jobs, living standards, culture, national security and our standing in the world are greater.' Urging Irish citizens to 'get stuck in' to the EU debate dominating British politics, Mr Campbell said: 'Yes, only the British people will decide. But you can be influencers, and you must be. It is a legitimate and necessary thing to do. Please do it. My country needs you.' David Cameron has been heavily criticised for urging world leaders to speak in favour of Britain staying in the EU. Brexit campaigners argue that foreign leaders should not intervene in referendum as it is a matter for the British people to decide. Tomorrow US President Barack Obama will arrive in London and is expected to back the Prime Minister's case for remaining in the EU. White House advisors have said he will offer his opinion 'if he is asked'. But Justice Secretary Michael Gove, London Mayor Boris Johnson and a string of other Tory Eurosceptics have accused the US President of hypocrisy. Mr Johnson said last week: 'It is plainly hypocritical for America to urge us to sacrifice control of our laws, our sovereignty, our money and our democracy when they would not dream of ever doing the same.' And Iain Duncan Smith told a US audience in Washington earlier this week: 'It's inconceivable that the president of the United States would be asking to do exactly the same for the USA as now appears to be the case, or might be the case, for him to advise the UK to do with regard the EU. 'On June 23, I think the British people will be advised to vote to get Britain to look a little bit more like the US and a lot less like it does at the moment with regard to the power of the EU.' He added: 'I don't quite understand why any American president would want Britain to be any other way - unless of course they want the US to join the EU too. 'Maybe that is the subtext of the speech or comments about to be made.' But Brexit campaigners themselves have come under fire over a foreign politician planning to intervene in the EU debate. Marine Le Pen, the leader of France's far right party National Front is expected to come to the UK to campaign for Brexit. But Britain's leading Brexit politicians - including Nigel Farage - are expected to shun the controversial right-wing French politician. Marine Le Pen to be shunned by politicians as she comes to Britain to join campaign for leaving the EU The leader of France's far-right party Marine Le Pen is set to join the campaign to leave the EU on a visit to Britain. Aides said the National Front (FN) chief was 'bound' to come to the UK ahead of the crucial referendum on June 23. The planned intervention has infuriated senior figures in the Brexit campaign, who worry that links to politicians seen as extreme could scare voters. A spokesman for the official Vote Leave campaign said: 'We will not be welcoming Marine Le Pen to the UK.' Ukip leader Nigel Farage previously refused to ally with Ms Le Pen's Europe of Nations and Freedom Group in the European Parliament. An aide to Marine Le Pen, leader of France's National Front, said she was 'bound' to come to the UK to campaign ahead of the crucial EU referendum on June 23 The party said it had no interest in the offer, partly because of 'prejudice and anti-Semitism' in the FN. Ms Le Pen has described the UK ballot as a 'key moment in European history', and declared that she wants to organise an equivalent referendum in France if she comes to power. 'It's a key moment in European history,' she said this week. 'Every nation in Europe has the right to be asked that question do you want to stay in this structure or not. The first step was organised by Mr Cameron.' Opinion polls show the 47-year-old topping the first round of presidential elections next year unless the center-right Les Republicains party nominates former prime minister Alain Juppe. However, the forecasts says she would lose the decisive second round. Ukip leader Nigel Farage, left, and the party's only MP Douglas Carswell The National Front leader, who is said to speak little English, has adopted the anti-EU position of her father, Jean-Marie, the party's founder whom she succeeded in 2011. Campaigning before the last European parliament elections, she reportedly said she wanted the EU to 'collapse'. 'I expect one thing only from the European system and that's for it to blow up,' she said. Talking about the prospects of a visit to Britain yesterday, FN spokesman Alain Vizier said: 'Marine Le Pen is bound to go. The date has not been set, it would be at the end of May or early June. 'She would go for a day or half a day.' He said no details had been set yet except that 'she will campaign for Brexit'. One possibility would be for Ms Le Pen to campaign with former Ukip MEP Janice Atkinson, a who is now part of her group in the European Parliament. A man has pleaded guilty to sexually abusing his twin daughters for seven months after he spent $44,000 to have the babies conceived overseas by a surrogate. According to the Australian Federal Police, the 49-year-old from regional Victoria possessed exploitation material and was also abusing his young nieces from New South Wales. On Thursday, he pleaded guilty to 37 charges, including creating almost 17,000 videos and images of child abuse and filming up women's skirts on regional trains, The Age reported. A man has pleaded guilty to sexually abusing his twin daughters for seven months and possessing exploitation material The twin girls were born in Asia in March, 2014 with a donor egg from Ukraine after the man's wife suggested surrogacy in 2012. The court heard the man's wife fell pregnant in the 1990s and he asked her to have an abortion. But Federal prosecutor Krista Breckweg said after starting to sexually abuse his nieces in 2009, the man became keen to have children of his own. The 49-year-old was part of many internet forums and went under the alias 'Candy'. The court heard he boasted on the forums and shared information on how he drugged his daughters and abused them while feeding and changing them. The man produced video and pictures showing writing on the babies' heads, which allegedly allowed him to enter certain online forums. The little girls are now in the care of the Department of Health and Human Services. Britain's most popular diesel cars pump out levels of a harmful pollutant up to almost 14 times the legal limit, it emerged yesterday. Official tests found nitrogen oxide emissions were on average six times higher than the legal limit when the vehicles were tested in real world conditions instead of in the laboratory. The investigation ordered after the Volkswagen emissions scandal covered the most popular makes of diesel cars bought in the UK in the last five years, including the Nissan Qashqai, Renault Megane, Ford Mondeo and Hyundai i30. The Vauxhall Insignia tested in the inquiry was found to emit 10 times more than the laboratory limits when on the road The study looked at the 'real driving NOx emissions' of cars in the 'Euro 5' class of vehicles and found on the road they all exceeded the laboratory test limit - with the Vauxhall Insignia coming out worst In tests on vehicles sold from September 1 last year, the Peugeot 3008 was nearly 14 times the limit. Luxury cars were also involved with the Jaguar XE eight times the limit. The Vauxhall Insignia was the worst performer in tests carried out on vehicles sold before then, emitting ten times the legal limit. But the limit was higher then. Even the best performer in the tests on vehicles sold before September 1, the Citroen C4, was found to emit nearly three times the permitted amount. But a loophole in the testing regime means none of the car firms have broken any laws. Under European rules cars are checked only on their performance in the lab and not when out on the open road. Transport Minister Robert Goodwill said the tests would change to stop gaming of the system. Levels of non-compliance have been disappointing, he added. The results of the Government inquiry revealed all cars tested broke laboratory emissions standards when tested to a 'real world' standard. The Government report included graphs, pictured, laying bare the difference between emissions in a lab setting, left, and on a track, right, when car engines were run hot VOLKSWAGEN SPARKED THE SCANDAL BY ADMITTING IT USED 'DEFEAT DEVICES' IN ITS CARS The Volkswagen emissions scandal first broke on September 18 last year, after it the German car giant admitted that regulation-cheating software had been used in 11million 2009-2015 vehicles worldwide. The revelations rocked Volkswagen and could cost it tens of billions of pounds in fines and compensation to owners. 'Defeat device' software was able to detect when an emissions test was ongoing, and adapt the engine to make it run according to U.S. standards. Immediately after testing is finished, the software switches into standard drive mode in which poisonous nitrogen oxide emissions rise to up to nine times the EPA's standard, the agency said. Advertisement The motoring industry blamed the results on the tests being carried out at too low a temperature. Emission control systems inside cars switch off at lower temperatures to protect the engine from damage and therefore do not work as efficiently. But the tests will inevitably raise further concerns about emissions from diesel cars and the effectiveness of the testing regime. Exposure to nitrogen oxide causes breathing problems, makes asthma worse and can raise the risk of strokes and heart attacks. Richard Lloyd, executive director of Which? magazine, said: Drivers will be shocked by these findings as emissions and fuel claims are important factors when buying a new car. We are pleased that the Government has finally acknowledged that emissions are much higher in real world testing than they are in the lab. The current tests are not fit for purpose. The 1million report was ordered by ministers after the scandal of Volkswagen cars found to be using defeat devices to rig emission results. Last year VW admitted that nearly half a million vehicles in the US were fitted with software to switch engines to a cleaner mode when they detected that they were being tested. The scandal affected 11million cars around the world. Department for Transport officials drew up a list of the 100 top-selling diesel cars over the past five years and tested more than 30 of the most popular. They account for more than half of all diesel cars on the roads. Scientists from Imperial College London carried out tests in the laboratory, on testing tracks and in real world conditions. They found no evidence other manufacturers were using VW-style banned devices to beat the tests. The Range Rover Sport also performed badly in real world conditions during the Department for Transport inquiry into car emissions But they found emission levels were startlingly higher in the real world compared with the lab. In the group of older vehicles, sold before September 1 last year, the average result was nitrogen oxide emissions of 1,135mg/km six times higher than the lab test limit of 180mg/km. Real world driving emissions tests will be introduced next year, although diesel cars will initially be allowed to pollute more than double the current legal level because of the difficulty in cutting emissions. Last night the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders sought to downplay the results, saying the difference between lab and real world tests were well known. It said the new testing regime would provide more confidence the industry was delivering on air quality. Kandyce Downer, 35, from Birmingham, (pictured) who is accused of killing her adopted daughter, has told a murder jury that her eldest son may have been the culprit A mother-of-four accused of killing her adopted daughter has told a murder jury that her eldest son may have been the culprit. Kandyce Downer, 35, from Weoley Castle, Birmingham, said the then 17-year-old was responsible, along with her three other children, for much of the 'day-to-day care' of little Keegan Downer because she was tired with a pregnancy and medication for high blood pressure. Asked by prosecutor Nigel Power QC: 'Who's the prime candidate amongst them? A tearful Downer replied: 'My eldest.' A Birmingham Crown Court jury also heard on Thursday that on finding her 18-month-old 'unwell' in her cot, she delayed calling 999 and instead got in her car to dump the child's old blood-spotted mattress near a skip, on September 5 last year. Downer, who was a full-time business student with four other children of her own, further admitted leaving Keegan alone in the youngster's bedroom to take her natural daughter out on the day of the toddler's death. Downer, giving evidence in her defence, told jurors that when on the way to hospital in an ambulance one of the paramedics shouted at her saying: 'You left your daughter alone?' She became the child's legal guardian in January 2015 with the blessing of social services, following a formal court hearing. A post-mortem examination revealed the child had suffered a catalogue of more than 120 separate injuries, both old and new, across her body. Keegan also had an untreated spiral leg fracture, leaving the youngster with one leg shorter than the other, and had suffered a traumatic head or spine injury, which was at least several days old. Mr Power, cross-examining Downer, asked her who had inflicted the 'terrible injuries' which were responsible for the death of the little girl. She replied: 'I don't know. Really.' Earlier, Downer denied ever mistreating or striking the toddler when asked by her barrister Christopher Millington QC. Asked what she would have done if she had ever seen her child in distress, she replied: 'I would have taken her to the hospital or the doctors for some treatment.' When he then asked why she had dumped the mattress, Downer said: 'Because it had Keegan's blood on it and I was worried someone would think that she - either myself or my son had hurt her.' She had earlier claimed blood spots on that cot mattress were from when Keegan suffered with a sore mouth which she would pick at in her cot, causing bleeding. A Birmingham Crown Court jury also heard on Thursday that on finding her 18-month-old Keegan Downer (pictured) 'unwell' in her cot, she delayed calling 999 and instead got in her car to dump the child's old blood-spotted mattress near a skip, on September 5 last year But under cross-examination, Mr Power asked why when she found her little girl lying 'unwell' in her cot she failed to dial 999 immediately and instead chose to dump two black bin bags, containing the child's old mattress and her and her other children's pyjamas. He said: 'Did you think she was so unwell, that she might die? Downer replied: 'Yes.' The Crown's QC then asked: 'But it was more important to you was it, to get rid of the mattress than to try to do something to avoid her dying? Again, Downer replied: 'Yes,' before adding 'I loved her.' Mr Power asked: 'Did you love her as you left her at risk of dying to go and get rid of the mattress.' An emotional Downer replied: 'I was panicking and I wasn't thinking straight.' Asked why she had subsequently failed to tell police in an interview why she had left Keegan alone in her cot that morning to take her other daughter out, she said she had been 'covering up' what had happened. She told the jury: 'Because I was covering up my actions on that day - that I had left Keegan alone.' Even the President of the United States has bad habits that get on his spouse's nerves and Hillary Clinton shared one of Bill's today. The former first lady said husband Bill regularly forgets to shut off his bedside lamp leaving you-know-who to do it for him. 'No matter how tired he is, he always feels like he has to read before he falls sleep,' Hillary Clinton said today during a town hall promoting her own candidacy for the Oval Office on Good Morning America. Even the President of the United States has bad habits that get on his spouse's nerves and Hillary Clinton shared one of Bill's today A town hall participant had asked Hillary Clinton what Bill's 'most annoying' habit is. 'Oh my gosh where do you start. How long do we have? ' she teased. Pausing, Clinton appeared to ponder the question and said, 'Let's see...OK if you don't tell anybody...' The Democratic presidential candidate was delving into Bill's nighttime reading routine when host George Stephanopolous told her she'd been 'saved by the bell' and the show was over. Clinton hurriedly added, 'That means I have to get up and go around and turn the light off on the other side of the bed!' While much of the town hall was spent discussing serious issues confronting Clinton and her campaign, GMA set aside time at the end to take Clinton down memory lane. It aired a montage of Clinton impersonations on Saturday Night Live over the years that the formr public official admitted were somewhat accurate. 'I've probably laughed as much as anybody because there's always a little truth in it, I hate to confess,' she said to laughter from the in-studio audience. 'And it is kind of like watching an archaeological dig to see my different hairstyles.' The reel began with a clip from a recent skit in which SNL mocked Clinton for having to swipe her MetroCard five times before she was able to pass through the turnstile. Clinton said voters frequently brought up the incident as she campaigned in New York City, and they told her, 'My MetroCard didn't work either!...I can't believe it. You had one that didn't work, either.' 'I think I got more votes from people who were frustrated with their MetroCard, and that I was connected to them somehow,' she said. Scroll down for video 'No matter how tired he is, he always feels like he has to read before he falls sleep,' Hillary Clinton said today during a town hall promoting her own candidacy for the Oval Office on Good Morning America GMA also dug up a clip of her first appearance on the show for the occasion in honor of Throwback Thursday. 'See what I mean about hair styles, say nothing of hair color!' Clinton shouted out GMA also dug up a clip of her first appearance on the show for the occasion in honor of Throwback Thursday. In the 1988 clip a 40-year-old Clinton discusses the equitable treatment of women as a representative of the American Bar Association. Bill was the governor of Arkansas at the time and would not be elected president until four years later, in 1992. 'See what I mean about hair styles, say nothing of hair color!' Clinton shouted out. Clinton's affinity for hot sauce also came up during the show. It became the subject of chatter this week after the candidate claimed she carries it on her at all times and has used it on her food in copious amounts since she read an article touting its benefits in 1992. A town hall participant asked her whether she prefers Sriracha, Tabasco, Tapatio, or something else. Clinton told him, 'I have a collection that includes all of those, and many more.' 'I've always liked hot sauce, hot foods,' she said, repeating her story. She said she's used it 'on nearly everything' since she read that it would help her stay healthy. A 27-year-old woman has been charged after leading police on a 20-minute car chase and then hitting one of the officers on the nose when she tried to run away, police said. Police were called after a ute was spotted driving dangerously and performing U-turns across both directions of the Gateway Motorway at Kuraby in southeast Brisbane at 2.10pm on Wednesday. During the chase through Logan, the car reversed into two marked police vehicles, denting their front bumpers. An attempt to stop the car using a tyre deflation device failed but police were able to track down the car shortly after when it crashed into a gutter and the driver was arrested. A 27-year-old woman has been charged after leading police on a 20-minute car chase and then hitting one of the officers on the nose when she tried to run away, police said Police said that the woman assaulted an officer when attempting to run away. The 40-year-old male sergeant sustained a minor graze to his nose and did not require medical treatment. Police say they found some methamphetamine on the woman, who was taken to the Princess Alexandria Hospital for blood analysis and assessment. A 27-year-old woman from Maryborough has been charged with assaulting a police officer and assaulting or obstructing police while adversely affected by intoxicating substance. She was also charged with dangerous operation of a motor vehicle, drink driving, failure to provide a specimen of breath and possession of dangerous drugs. This is the shocking moment a botched U.S. Army airdrop ended with three Humvees falling several hundred feet and crashing into the ground. The armored vehicles, which can cost as much as $220,000, were being flown into the Hohenfels military base in Germany when they were dropped out the back of C-130 Hercules transport planes. But their parachutes failed as they fell, sending the expensive equipment tumbling to the earth before smashing into the ground, destroying them. So far so good: The video starts with a fly-past, where the planes slow down to speeds of approximately 160mph to drop the heavy cargo Operation Dumbo Drop: The soldiers from the 173rd Airborne soon realize however that there is something wrong with the deployment, much to their hilarity Smithereens: The Humvee is a total wreck on the ground after coming loose - a feat that remarkably happens three times in less than two minutes The short clip, which appears to have been filmed by American military personnel on the ground, shows C-130 Hercules tactical airlifters dropping off HMMWV (Humvee) military off-roaders The video, shot by men believed to be soldiers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade on the mission, shows the Hercules aircraft flying overhead as various vehicles and gear are dropped gently down to solid ground. The men are soon heard whooping, laughing hysterically and shouting 'Yeeessss' as the first Humvee comes loose and crashes to the ground and breaking apart. They laugh even louder as the second Humvee plummets to the earth from another plane just moments later. One soldier can hardly contain his laughter and lets off a string of expletives. And seconds later, another plunges after its parachute fails, with the men remarking that it appeared to catch fire after the bumpy landing. Tactical Air Network said: 'To airdrop a Humvee, the vehicles are loaded onto metal pallets, sometimes with the use of a crane. 'Three G-11B parachutes (with a diameter of 100ft (30.5 meters) apiece, and a weight of 275 lbs (125kg altogether) are strapped to the Humvees, while honeycombed pads and pieces of lightweight wood are stacked underneath the vehicles to absorb the shock of a normal landing. 'When in the air, the loadmaster will open the C-130s rear cargo door when pilots slow down the aircraft to approximately 160mph (257km/h), releasing a smaller drogue chute attached to the vehicle pallet. 'The drag of the drogue chute yanks the Humvee out of the aircraft and into the sky, its G-11Bs deploying soon afterwards for a presumably comfortable float down to Earth.' It was during this 'comfortable drop' than things went awry for the three vehicles. Maj Juan Martinez, an Army spokesman, told the Army Times that an investigation of the 'highest priority' was now taking place. 'The specific malfunctions that occurred on this day are under investigation,' he said. 'There were multiple rehearsals and inspections of the equipment prior to mission execution. We cannot speculate on what went wrong until the investigation is complete.' Maj Martinez added that he does not know who shot the video nor their role in the exercise or whether disciplinary proceedings would take place. End result: The mangled remains of the Humvee on the ground in Germany after crashing from hundreds of feet in the air Advertisement Prince was treated for an overdose just six days before he was found dead in his Minnesota estate on Thursday, a report has claimed. News of the alleged overdose came as photos emerged of Prince walking out of a Walgreens pharmacy just 15 hours before he was pronounced dead. Prince's private plane made an emergency landing in Moline, Illinois, on Friday after he performed in Atlanta so he could be rushed to hospital. Though his representatives said he was battling the flu, multiple sources told TMZ that doctors gave him a 'save shot', which is usually given in dire circumstances to drug overdose victims. The sources said that doctors advised Prince to stay at the hospital for 24 hours, but when he wasn't given a private room, he and his representatives decided to leave. When he left the hospital, Prince 'was not doing well', the sources added. He was released three hours later and made an appearance at a party in Minnesota the next day, telling fans to 'wait a few days before you waste any prayers'. The 57-year-old music icon was then seen at about 7pm on Wednesday at a Walgreens pharmacy looking 'frail and nervous' with a group of employees or friends. It was his fourth visit to the pharmacy this week. It is unknown why he went to the store himself or if he picked up a prescription, though per Walgreens protocol, anyone with Prince's phone number and address could have retrieved medication for him. Prince was then found unresponsive in the elevator at his suburban Paisley Park estate in Minnesota at 9.43am EST on Thursday and was pronounced dead less than 30 minutes later. His cause of death is not known, but in a call to paramedics on the way to Prince's home, a 911 dispatcher said: 'Male down, not breathing.' In the midst of the phone call, the dispatcher asks, 'Are you with the person who's' and the unidentified male responds, 'Yes, it's Prince'. Prince was seen walking out of a Walgreens pharmacy near his Minnesota estate just 15 hours before he was pronounced dead on Thursday Prince (pictured in 1985) has died aged 57 at his estate in Minnesota, just days after he was rushed to hospital from his private plane with severe flu A rainbow appears over Paisley Park near a memorial for Prince, where fans brought flowers and cards for the late pop icon Fans of Prince were overcome with emotion as they laid flowers outside his home in Minnesota today, where dozens of people gathered Sheila Clayton (left) of St Paul, Minnesota, hugs an unidentified friend outside of Paisley Park on Thursday after hearing news of Prince's death A fan grieves outside First Avenue, a dance venue in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Thursday where Prince is one of many music legends featured in a silver star outside the nightclub Paramedics were called to his Paisley Park studio (pictured) at 9.43 this morning and the music icon's death has now been confirmed Prince made a surprise appearance at a dance party in Minnesota on Saturday, in what is believed to have been his final public appearance Riding on: Prince was seen riding a bicycle outside his estate in this picture posted on Instagram on Sunday The superstar musician combined rock, R&B, soul and hip-hop to create a unique sound that led to him selling more than 100million records during his 40-year career COUNTDOWN TO PRINCE'S DEATH Thursday, April 14: Prince performs in Atlanta and appears to be fine. Friday, April 15: Prince's private plane makes an emergency landing at Moline, Illinois, and he is taken to hospital for 'flu symptoms'. He is released after three hours of treatment. Saturday, April 16: Prince goes to a party in Minnesota to give 'proof' he is still alive. 'Wait a few days before you waste any prayers,' he tells fans. Sunday, April 17: Prince is seen riding a bicycle outside his apartment. Wednesday, April 20: Prince is seen looking 'frail and nervous' at a Walgreen's store near his estate at around 7pm. It is his fourth visit to the pharmacy this week. Thursday, April 21: Prince is found unresponsive in an elevator inside his compound at 9.43am. He is pronounced dead at 10.07am. Advertisement The caller struggles to find the address of the home and has to ask several people for numbers and streets. He struggles to decipher Minneapolis from the suburban Chanhassen, and tells the dispatcher they're in Minneapolis before finally telling the dispatcher that they are at Paisley Park. The dispatcher finally gets the address sorted out - after realizing that it is Prince that is unresponsive - and sends an ambulance toward the estate in Chanhassen. An autopsy will be performed on Friday to determine the exact cause of the star's death. TMZ reported that the seven-time Grammy award winning singer's plane diverted to Quad City International Airport in Moline, Illinois, last Friday to make the emergency landing. It is unclear which hospital Prince was taken to in Moline following the emergency landing. The closest hospital to the airport is Trinity Regional Health System. The city is also home to the Genesis Health Plex. Prince had previously revealed that he was epileptic and had suffered seizures as a child. He was bullied at school over his condition which he said he dealt with by developing his iconic larger-than-life personality. The singer, a devout Jehovah's Witness, later told his mother he had been cured by an angel. While Prince never made clear if he was still struggling to live with epilepsy, his song The Sacrifice of Victor tells the story of a boy who was 'epileptic 'til the age of seven'. Meanwhile, Aretha Franklin made the bizarre suggestion that Prince may have contracted the Zika virus. FULL TRANSCRIPT OF HARROWING 911 CALL MADE FROM PRINCE'S ESTATE BEFORE HE WAS PRONOUNCED DEAD Dispatcher: 911, where is your emergency? Unidentified male: Hi there, um, what's the address here? Yeah we need an ambulance right now. D: Okay. UM: We have someone who is unconscious. D: Okay, what's the address? UM: Um, we're at Prince's house. D: Okay, does anybody know the address? Is there any mail around that you could look at? UM: Yeah, yeah, okay, hold on. D: Okay, your cell phone's not going to tell me where you're at, so I need you to find me an address. UM: Yeah, we have um, yeah, we have um, so yeah, um, the person is dead here. D: Okay, get me the address please. UM: Okay, okay, I'm working on it. D: Concentrate on that. UM: And the people are just distraught. D: I understand that they are distraught, but UM: I'm working on it, I'm working on it. D: Okay, do we know how the person died? UM: I don't know, I don't know. D: Okay. UM: Um, so we're, we're in Minneapolis, Minnesota and we are at the home of Prince. D: You're in Minneapolis? UM: Yeah, Minneapolis, Minnesota. D: You're sure you are in Minneapolis? UM: That's correct. D: Okay, have you found an address yet? UM: Yeah, um, I'm so sorry I need, I need the address here? Unidentified female: 7801 UM: 7801 D: 7801 what? UM: Paisley Park, we are at Paisley Park. D: You're at Paisley Park, okay, that's in Chanhassen. Are you with the person who's UM: Yes, it's Prince. D: Okay. UM: The person. D: Okay, stay on the line with me. UM: Okay. (Phone ringing) Ambulance dispatcher: Ambulance, Shirley. D: Carver with the transfer for Paisley Park Studios, 78. AD: Paisley Park Studios, okay. D: 7801 Audubon Road. AD: Okay. D: We have a person down, not breathing. AD: Down, not breathing. D: Yup. UM: He's, he's D: We're going to get everybody, go ahead with the transmittal. Advertisement The Purple Rain hitmaker had performed at The Fox Theatre in Atlanta on last Thursday night - the second of two back to back sold out shows - and had seemed fine during the concert. Prince made what is believed to have been his final public appearance on Saturday at a dance party in Minnesota. He was keen for people to have 'living proof' that he was still alive, and he arrived at the bash to show off his new guitar and piano. He didn't sing, but he did tell the crowd: 'Wait a few days before you waste any prayers.' A picture posted by a fan on Instagram appeared to show Prince riding a bicycle outside his estate on Sunday. Prince's $10million Paisley Park compound sits just more than half an hour outside Minneapolis, and the musician would host parties and record music at the estate, according to CBS Minnesota. Construction began on the estate, which was designed and owned by Prince, in 1985 and it officially opened on September 11, 1987. It featured a 12,000 square-foot soundstage, guitar room, game room, and 'The Vault', where he stored unreleased material. He allowed fans to buy passes to tour the estate in 2000, but no one was allowed in The Vault. Prince was known for his sexually charged lyrics and was romantically linked to a number of male and female stars, including Madonna, Sinead O'Connor, Kim Basinger, Kylie Minogue, Carmen Electra and Boy George, among a number of other people. Prince (pictured in 2004 with his second wife Manuela Testolini) married twice and was romantically linked to a number stars Prince married backup dance Mayte Garcia (pictured together in 1999) on Valentine's Day in 1996. He dedicated the song the Most Beautiful Girl in the World to her two years earlier Grieving: Garcia looked exhausted and emotional today as she made a phone call at her home in Los Angeles, just hours after learning of her ex-husband's death Prince also slept with close friend and collaborating artist Sheila E (pictured singing together) while he was in a relationship with Susannah Melvoin, the twin sister of Wendy Melvoin who was in his band, The Revolution Prince then dated Bria Valente (pictured together at a Los Angeles Lakers basketball game in 2008) until around 2010, after which time they were still recording music together. The Purple Rain hitmaker had performed at The Fox Theatre in Atlanta on last Thursday night - the second of two back to back sold out shows - and had seemed fine during the concert A 12-inch single, Scandalous Sex Suite, included vocals from Kim Basinger and moans heard on the track were rumored to be recordings of the pair having sex. Last year Boy George claimed he had slept with Prince. During filming of The Voice in the UK, he made light of Paloma Faith saying she had performed live with Prince. 'Forget that, darling, I've slept with Prince,' he replied. Prince also slept with close friend and collaborating artist Sheila E while he was in a relationship with Susannah Melvoin, the twin sister of Wendy Melvoin - who was in his band, The Revolution. Prince married backup dance Mayte Garcia on Valentine's Day in 1996. He dedicated the song The Most Beautiful Girl in the World to her two years earlier. They had a son together, called Boy Gregory, in October 1996, but he was born with Pfeiffer Syndrome and died a week later. The baby was tragically born with Pfeiffer syndrome, a rare disorder that does not allow the head to grow properly due to the premature fusion of certain bones of the skull, and died just a week after his birth. Garcia, who split with Prince in 2000, looked exhausted and emotional today as she made a phone call at her home in Los Angeles, just hours after learning of her ex-husband's death. Garcia spoke to People about her ex-husband's tragic death, saying; 'I can't even think of the words of what I'm feeling. This man was my everything, we had a family. I am beyond deeply saddened and devastated.' She then added; 'I loved him then, I love him now and will love him eternally. He's with our son now.' In 2001, Prince went on to marry Manuela Testolini, but they divorced in 2006. He then dated Bria Valente until around 2008, after which time they split but were still recording music together. Fans and mourners place flowers on a fence outside of Paisley Park, the home and studio of Prince, in Chanhassen, Minnesota Prince fans embrace by a makeshift memorial outside Paisley Park, the home of singer Prince Unidentified employees pause for a moment as they monitor fans outside of Paisley Park on Thursday Prince's sister, Tyka Nelson holds a rose as she thanks supporters for making a memorial in her brother's honor Terrance May, a musician who goes by the name May Millions, appears at a makeshift memorial for singer Prince outside the dance venue First Avenue in Minneapolis Prince family members Loretta Thomas (left) and Deshone cry during a candlelight vigil to commemorate Prince in Los Angeles on Thursday Julya Baer, 30, (right) and other fans sing Purple Rain at a vigil to celebrate the life and music of deceased musician Prince People dance outside Warner Theatre in Washington, DC, on Thursday to commemorate Prince's life Mourners gather in front of director Spike Lee's production company headquarters for 'PRINCE We Love You Shockadelica Joint- A Celebration of His Life' on Thursday Director Spike Lee dances at the street party, which he held in the Brooklyn borough of New York on Thursday People gather at a makeshift memorial outside of the Apollo Theater dedicated to the musician Prince on Thursday in the Manhattan borough of New York People paid their respects at a makeshift memorial dedicated to musician Prince at Amoeba Records in Hollywood The superstar musician combined rock, R&B, soul, disco and hip-hop to create a unique sound that led to him selling more than 100million records during his 40-year career. Prince was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1958 and started making music at the age of seven. He first found fame in the late 1970s and over the next three decades became known as one of the most inventive and eccentric forces in American pop music. He became even more famous with the release of the film Purple Rain in 1984, a seemingly autobiographical movie set in the club scene in Minneapolis. The film was a huge success and the soundtrack album spent 24 weeks at the top of the charts and sold more than 13million copies. He is also the only solo artist to have the number 1 movie, album and single in the United States at the same time. The Beatles are the only the group. The legendary singer and songwriter is best known for hit songs such as Raspberry Beret and Little Red Corvette. He was fiercely protective of his independence, battling his record company over control of his material and even his name. In 1993, Prince legally changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol - also known as the Love Symbol. During that phase, he was referred to as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. After changing his name back to Prince, he was sometimes called The Artist Formerly Known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. Prince once wrote 'slave' on his face in protest at not owning his work and famously battled and then departed his label, Warner Bros, before returning a few years ago. Police officers gather outside of Paisley Park in Chanhassen, Minnesota, on Thursday following Prince's death Friends and employees gather outside of Prince's estate and recording studio, Paisley Park, on Thursday An aerial shot of Prince's $10million mansion Paisley Park, where many of his friends and family gathered as news of his death emerged Prince's Jet, which is the same model as the one pictured above, made an emergency landing on Friday in Illinois on the way to Minnesota from Atlanta Prince, an intensely private person, sold more than 100 million records during his career, won seven Grammy awards and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004 Prince was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1958 and started making music at the age of seven, launching his career in proper 10 years later Prince, an intensely private person, sold more than 100 million records during his career, won seven Grammy awards and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. In 2007, he played the Super Bowl in one of the most celebrated half-time show performances in history. Prince's most recent album, HITnRUN: Phase Two was released in December 2015 and he was in the process of writing an untitled autobiography, which was due to be published in 2017. He is believed to have written around 50 pages of his memoirs and had recorded a number of songs that had not been released. It is not clear what will happen to his unpublished work. 'What's happening now is the position that I've always wanted to be in,' he said in 2014. 'I was just trying to get here.' Fans gathered across the country on Thursday to mourn the loss of the legendary musician and celebrate his life and music. Mourners were seen outside the 57-year-old music icon's Minnesota estate, Paisley Park, in Chanhassen, Minnesota, dropping off flowers and consoling one another. A rainbow emerged as hundreds stood outside the home. Prince's sister, Tyka Nelson, thanked fans and dropped a rose off in her brother's honor. In Minneapolis, fans gathered outside First Ave, a dance venue, where a silver star features Prince's name. The Minnesota Twins lit up their stadium with purple screens to honor the legendary musician. In Brooklyn, filmmaker Spike Lee decided to host an all-Prince street party to celebrate the star's life and music. He urged attendees of the open event to wear purple in his honor. New York City's Apollo Theater and Hard Rock Cafe also paid tribute to the music icon. People danced during a candlelight vigil in remembrance to Prince outside the Warner Theatre in Washington, DC. In Los Angeles, people gathered for a candlelight vigil in Leimert Park. Tributes started pouring in almost immediately, with dozens of stars expressing their grief following the death of the music icon. 'What a loss': Madonna shared a throwback photo of herself with Prince, both wearing yellow, and said she is 'devastated' at his death 'I LOVED him': Chaka Khan, who had a hit with Prince's song I Feel For You in 1984, expressed her huge affection for the diminutive star Tributes started pouring in almost immediately, with dozens of stars expressing their grief following the death of the music icon Mariah Carey, who joined Prince on stage at the Apollo Theatre to pay tribute to Patti LaBelle in June 2009, said she would 'never get over' his death Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood said Prince was 'a good friend who was so talented.' He shared a photo of the two of them rocking on stage together and added: 'Sleep well Prince' Legendary music producer Quincy Jones joined in the chorus of 'gone too soon' that many were feeling President Obama said: 'Today, the world lost a creative icon. Michelle and I join millions of fans from around the world in mourning the sudden death of Prince. 'Few artists have influenced the sound and trajectory of popular music more distinctly, or touched quite so many people with their talent. 'As one of the most gifted and prolific musicians of our time, Prince did it all. Funk. R&B. Rock and roll. He was a virtuoso instrumentalist, a brilliant bandleader, and an electrifying performer. ''A strong spirit transcends rules,' Prince once said - and nobody's spirit was stronger, bolder, or more creative. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, his band, and all who loved him.' Boy George tweeted: 'Today is the worst day ever. Prince R.I.P I am crying!' Joan Collins said: 'Shocked that @prince has died at only 57. Such a talent to have died so young.' 'Omg..... RIP Prince,' Demi Lovato tweeted. 'And just like that....the world lost a lot of magic,' tweeted Katy Perry. Director Spike Lee said: 'I Miss My Brother. Prince Was A Funny Cat. Great Sense Of Humor.' Retired basketball star Shaquille O'Neal wrote: 'R.I.P PRINCE, another icon gone too soon.' Oscar-winning actor Russell Crowe called Prince a 'genius' and 'poet', adding he was 'the greatest live act I ever saw'. Lord Of the Rings star Elijah Wood thanked Prince 'for everything;. Can't even process this. There will never be another,' he added. Fox Business anchor John Stossel has revealed he is battling lung cancer in an article written from his hospital bed. Stossel told readers on Thursday that he is recovering at New York Presbyterian hospital following surgery to remove a fifth of one of his lungs that was covered with a cancerous growth. The former ABC journalist said doctors caught the growth early and say he will be fine after learning to adjust to missing a portion of his lung. Scroll down for video John Stossel revealed he is recovering in hospital on Wednesday following surgery to remove a fifth of his lung after doctors discovered a cancerous growth (pictured in 2011) Stossel, who is known for his consumer affairs journalism and passionate advocacy of free market economics, then went on to blast the poor customer service in hospital because of their 'socialist' structure In his typical journalistic style, Stossel praised the hospital's excellent care but went on to attack its 'terrible customer service' which he blamed on its 'socialist' structure. He wrote: 'Doctors keep me waiting for hours, and no one bothers to call or email to say, "I'm running late." Few doctors give out their email address. 'Customer service is sclerotic because hospitals are largely socialist bureaucracies. 'Instead of answering to consumers, which forces businesses to be nimble, hospitals report to government, lawyers and insurance companies.' Stossel, a libertarian, made a name for himself as a strong proponent of free market economics during his time as a reporter and in three books he has published. A graduate of Princeton, Stossel hoped to start his career at Seattle Magazine but it had closed by the time he finished university. Stossel took issue with the New York Presbyterian Hospital for having no way to communicate with doctors using modern technology, and of being ignored by nurses Instead he became a researcher and eventually a writer for KGW-TV in Portland, before being put on the air, an experience he said terrified him because of his natural stutter. He then transferred to WCBS-TV in New York, before moving to ABC in 1981 as a correspondent on 20/20. From there he climbed the ranks, becoming a consumer editor and landing a spot on Good Morning America, eventually going on to co-anchor 20/20. Kelly Ripa is not only skipping out on work this week, but also a tropical getaway she had planned to celebrate her 20th wedding anniversary to husband Mark Consuelos. The Live With Kelly and Michael host had been set to fly off to Turks and Caicos for a long weekend but has scrapped those plans after learning earlier this week that her co-host Michael Strahan was quitting their show come September and moving over to Good Morning America. Sources close to Ripa tell DailyMail.com that news of Strahan's departure was difficult enough for Ripa to deal with and she cannot believe the decision was made to tell her about the move just days before her much anticipated vacation. 'The reason Kelly is upset is that ABC knew of her long standing vacation plans for the end of this week, and this is the week they chose to stick the knife in her back,' said one source. 'She had advised them that she was taking a vacation with Mark to Turks and Caicos to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary, yet they chose to dump the news on her after they had made their decision and just a few days out from her scheduled trip. 'Shes very hurt as she feels they have destroyed what was a significant milestone in her life and late last night they cancelled their initial plans.' The source later added; 'What should be a really happy time for her and Mark has now been destroyed as rather than focusing on her family she and her team face an uncertain future with a network that she doesnt believe supports her. 'It really is a David and Goliath battle for her.' Scroll down for video Getaway: Kelly Ripa and husband Mark Consuelos (above on Thursday) had been planning a vacation to Turks and Caicos this weekend to celebrate their anniversary No more getaway: Ripa cancelled the vacation however in the wake of Michael Strahan's announcement that he was quitting Live With Kelly and Michael (Ripa and Consuelos above on Thursday) The beginning: It will be 20 years since the two made the decision to elope and marry in a low-key Las Vegas ceremony on May 1, 1996 (above) one year after they meet The network's decision to move Strahan to Good Morning America comes after her spent two years on the show in a limited capacity, appearing two days a week and leaving early so he could head off to tape Live. That job however was only offered to him after his co-host turned it down according to sources close to Ripa and with knowledge of the situation. 'Two years ago Kelly was offered Michaels current role of contributor to Good Morning America. She turned this down as she was committed to Live and didnt want to give less to the show that she had been focused on for well over ten years and then kept a ratings winner after Regis left,' said one source. 'Michael then scooped up the role and started saying yes to everything ABC and Disney had to offer. 'Kelly felt that her and Michael Gelman, Lives Executive Producer, were left to be the only two people solely focused on the show. The source went on to say; 'This began creating tensions internally as Kelly and Michael Gelman were having to work to Michaels schedule as Live become less of a priority for him. 'Kelly isnt shocked that he did this as shes watched him advance his career off Lives success for years now, she is just disgusted and angry that he did this behind her back with her bosses.' Meanwhile, conflicting reports are emerging about how the staff at Live With Kelly and Michael are dealing with their boss' absence this week, with one source close to Ripa telling DailyMail.com; 'Live staffers are upset. Kelly has been inundated with calls and messages from the team. 'They blame Disney management and want her to come back to work as they see her as the star of the show who also has their back.' Multiple sources close to the show tell a different story however, saying that it is Strahan the staff is supporting while his co-host skips work. 'They feel like Michaels taking the high road but Kellys the one who blindsided them by not showing up for work,' said one source. 'The feeling is that how shes acting is deeply selfish.' The source went on to say; 'Staff are upset that shes not there. They are pulling a double shift today while shes left them in the lurch after her tantrum.' Ripa and Consuelos were seen leaving their $27million townhouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side Thursday morning, but neither carried any luggage as they dashed into a waiting car. Anger: Source close to Ripa say the talk show host was 'furious' that the news of Strahan's departure was told to her before her much anticipated vacation (Strahan and Ripa above last October) So in love: 'Shes very hurt as she feels they have destroyed what was a significant milestone in her life,' said a source It will be 20 years since the two made the decision in 1996 to elope and marry in a low-key Las Vegas ceremony on May 1, one year after they meet on the set of the soap opera All My Children. The two were never engaged and Ripa has said in the past they made the decision after learning they both had two days off from work. Since that time they have welcomed three children; 18-year-old Michael, 14-year-old Lola and 13-year-old Joaquin. They have also watched as their public profiles and fortune grew, thanks in large part to Ripa landing the job of a lifetime when she was selected from a long list of possible candidates to take over for Kathie Lee Gifford on Live With Regis and Kathie Lee. She then got another promotion in 2011 with the news that her co-host Regis Philbin was leaving the show, and a year later Strahan was brought on as a replacement for Philbin. Ripa was less than thrilled with the decision made by Philbin and the network back then as well, with her co-host telling her the news of his departure as they walked on to set just minutes before announcing it to the world on live television. Her salary on the show has never been confirmed, but has been reported to be somewhere in the region of $15 to $20million a year. In addition to her multimillion dollar townhouse she and her husband also own a home in Southampton and recently sold their previous pad - a two-floor penthouse apartment in Manhattan's trendy Soho district - for a reported $20million. Ripa and Consuelos also enjoy vacationing with friends, and frequently post photos of their tropical getaways with pals like Anderson Cooper, Andy Cohen, Bryan Lourd and Bruce Bozzi, and Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg. The talk show host revealed to Oprah Winfrey in a interview a few years ago that one of her favorite places to go is the Amanyara Resort in Turks and Caicos. Defence Secretary Michael Fallon today said he did not think Britain would ever go to war alone again Britain will never go to war alone again after establishing greater ties with Europe, the Defence Secretary said today. Michael Fallon said it was 'hard to see the circumstances' in which the UK would go into conflict on its own. Since the Falklands War, he said: 'You've seen European armies and navies working alongside each other defending the values we have in common and cooperating.' He said Britain's defence relationship with European countries was a 'growing partnership', after missions under the European Union framework in the Mediterranean and off the horn of Africa. Speaking at the largest ever military exercise of British and French troops today, he said: 'I think we are going to see greater interoperability amongst our European armies and navies.' During the exercise on Salisbury plain, Wiltshire, 3,500 British troops and 1,500 French troops partnered together to practice taking on the same enemy. Asked about the pooling of resources between European nations, French defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said: 'We have to start here, make sure that is does work, prove that is does work. 'At first nobody really believed in it, today you have witnessed it, now we are open.' Making the case for staying in the European Union, Mr Fallon said Britain's cooperation with France rests on the UK's membership of the EU and Nato. He said only Islamic State and Vladimir Putin would 'welcome' Brexit. He said whilst Nato was a 'slower moving organisation that requires more elongated political decisions', the partnership 'inside Europe' was able to deploy at 'very short notice'. Mr Fallon said the exercise showed that together the nations could 'pack a more powerful punch' and by 'pooling elite resources' they could create a fast force 'without waiting for the bureaucratic wheels to turn'. Asked if Britain would ever go to war alone again, he said: 'Its very hard to see the circumstances in which Britain would go into conflict again. The Falklands, I think, were very much an exception. 'All the operations since then, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Africa, in the Mediterranean, you've seen European armies and navies working alongside each other defending the values we have in common and cooperating and indeed cooperating on future equipment.' French troops and British soldiers trained alongside each other at today's exercise on Salisbury Plain, pictured He said an example of this was the Typhoon warplane, which is a 'European aircraft', he said. The last time Britain fought a solo conflict was in the Falklands in 1982. Cuts to manpower and equipment have raised questions by former top brass on whether the UK could defend the islands if tensions with Argentina worsened. Following cuts to troop numbers in 2010, the regular Army now stands at 82,000. European countries are currently working together to tackle the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean under an EU umbrella. Mr Fallon dismissed the idea of an EU army but said: 'We have British and French ships sailing together on a European mission, not a Nato mission, we work closely together in Africa, we work on piracy off the coast of Somalia. 'These are European missions in which we cooperate extremely closely. 'This cooperation does rest on membership of the European Union and neither France nor the United States want us to leave.' British troops trained alongside a French armoured vehicle during today's training exercise on Salisbury Plain Mr Fallon said it would be 'difficult' to do those missions if Britain was not part of the EU. He said: 'Not only would that cooperation be lost, but we would be less secure if the European Union was fragmented by Britain leaving. He said leaving the EU would 'only bring comfort to our adversaries, whether they are in Raqqa or in Moscow.' Mr Le Drian added: 'I know the effect of Britain within the European Union, partnership is absolutely essential and the fact that Britain is in the European Union makes us all stronger. A New York college student who identifies as androgynous was 'forced' by cops to put on a shirt while sunbathing at a university park. Cedar Brock, 22, had been topless at Sage Park in Troy for more than an hour on Sunday when a school public safety officer and cops said it was illegal for women to go topless in public, The Times-Union reported. The junior at Russell Sage College, who was born a female but does not identify as male or female, said officers asked about the their gender before saying to cover up. Scroll down for video New York college student Cedar Brock, 22, (pictured during a topless protest on Wednesday) who identifies as androgynous was allegedly 'forced' by cops to put on a shirt while sunbathing at a campus park The junior at Russell Sage College, who was born a female but does not identify as male or female, said officers asked about gender before saying to cover up. Above a Facebook post recalling the ordeal The student identifies as androgynous meaning someone with physical characteristics of both men and women. When Brock was initially approached by the campus security guard he asked, 'Are you a boy or a girl?' to which Brock replied, 'I'm neither. I'm androgynous.' The campus security officer repeatedly told the student to put a shirt on or threatened he would call police, according to Brock. However, Susan Scrimshaw, president of The Sage Colleges, said the officer did not notify Troy police and that they instead responded from complaints from the public, The Times-Union reported. Brock usually wears a binder, which the student said 'crushes my chest down because I'm not comfortable that I have breasts,' according to WRGB. However while sunbathing on Sunday, Brock thought 'it's hot, I'm uncomfortable,' and took the binder off. Brock and other students who witnessed the incident said a standoff quickly ensued involving Troy police, who arrived 10 minutes later, and insisted the student cover up. Officers at the scene stated a city law that forbids women from going topless in public. State law allows anyone to go topless, regardless of gender, but women are allowed to as long as it is not for commercial purposes. Following the incident, angry students at the college held a topless protest to show support for Brock and to stand against what they claim was discriminatory police treatment Around 120 students were seen during the protest bearing their breasts and painted their chests with slogans as they gathered in a public park that fronts the school's campus and listened to music Kelly Shanahan, a friend of Brock's who and one of the rally's organizers was 'absolutely appalled' by the public safety and police officers' actions 'They told me, "You're in public." They said, "This isn't what normal people do,"' Brock told the Times-Union on Tuesday. Initially the student refused to put on a shirt but eventually complied after a back and forth with the officers. 'I felt forced to put a shirt back on,' Brock told The Times-Union. 'I was scared.' Following the incident, angry students at the college held a topless protest to show support for Brock and to stand against what they claim was discriminatory police treatment, WRGB reported. Around 120 students were seen during the protest bearing their breasts and painted their chests with slogans as they gathered in a public park that fronts the school's campus and listened to music, according to the New York Daily News. Kelly Shanahan, a friend of Brock's who and one of the rally's organizers was 'absolutely appalled' by the public safety and police officers' actions, SF Gate reported. 'I thought there had to be more diplomacy in that situation,' Shanahan said. 'But I think most people who are in law enforcement, or even members of the community, don't really know how to speak to the trans community. That's something that we'll have to learn.' When Brock (pictured left and right) was initially approached by the campus security guard he asked, 'Are you a boy or a girl?' to which Brock replied, 'I'm neither. I'm androgynous' On Facebook, Brock wrote that Sunday's incident was a trespass on students' rights During the protest, Brock and other students referenced a landmark case, People v Santorelli, which suggests that it is legal for women and men to be shirtless in places such as public parks, according to WRGB. Meanwhile, Russell Sage College is working on a transgender policy and sensitive training, according to the school's Dean Deborah Lawrence. On Facebook, student Samantha Tirrell who witnessed the incident recounted it on Facebook and said the campus security officer at one point told police 'we have a transgender on our hands.' Tirrell also said the situation was 'handled poorly by the public safety officer.' In the comments of the student's post, Brock, who is studying theater arts, told everyone that problems like this cannot be solved unless they are discussed. 'I just wanted to say that though this happened to me specifically, this is a trespass on all of our rights,' Brock wrote. 'I'm going to do everything I can to fight this discrimination, and make sure it doesn't happen again. 'Get the word out, because problems like this will not be solved unless we talk about it. Thanks and hugs to you all.' The school is investigating the incident with Scrimshaw noting, it was inappropriate for the officer to ask for Brock's gender adding 'we have a little work to do with training.' The wife of an emergency room doctor who pleaded guilty to sexually abusing four preteen girls for years in Alaska admitted to investigators that she helped him drug the victims. Clifford Merchant, 69, pleaded guilty in court on Friday to sexually abusing four young girls and also admitted that he violated the conditions of his release while attempting to hire someone to kill two of the girls, KTUU reported. He was indicted in 2014 on 17 charges of sexual abuse of a minor and 16 charges of possession of child pornography. Those charges were related to his repeated abuse between 2000 and 2005 of girls under the age of 13. Linda Merchant cooperated with authorities from the beginning of the investigation into her husband, Palmer assistant district attorney Brittany Dunlop told the Alaska Dispatch News. As part of his plea deal, Clifford Merchant (above) admitted that he abused four preteen girls for years. He faces a minimum of nine and a maximum of 99 years in prison His wife, Linda Merchant (above), admitted to investigators that she helped him drug the victims so that he could abuse them. However, prosecutors say she won't face any charges However, prosecutors say that her confession about supplying drugs to her husband is not enough to prosecute her. 'She provided more value to the case as a cooperating witness,' Dunlop told the newspaper. 'Unfortunately, sometimes that has to be done to secure a conviction' of another defendant. The longtime Anchorage doctor who worked at Providence Alaska Medical Center pleaded guilty Friday to one consolidated charge of sexual abuse of a minor in the first degree, one consolidated charge of possession of child pornography and a charge of violation of conditions of release, KTUU reported. As part of his plea deal, the doctor admitted that he abused four preteen girls for years at his home in South Anchorage and his cabin at Shell Lake. After the abuse of three girls was discovered, he was arrested in October 2014 and more charges were filed against him when a fourth victim came forward. According to KTUU, one of the victims was a family member and two others were placed in his care. Documents filed in court state the youngest victim was five years old and say his wife gave the victims the drugs so he could abuse them. The doctors abuse of the girls was usually accomplished by 'pacifying them with drugs like Valium and Ambien,' according to his plea deal the newspaper reported. 'Linda Merchant would supply (the victim) with narcotic medication or sleeping pills to secure her compliance,' his agreement states. Dunlop said that based solely on his wife's admission of her role in the abuse that it would be hard to bring a new case forward. As part of his plea deal, the doctor admitted that he abused four preteen girls for years at his home in South Anchorage and his cabin at Shell Lake. Above he is pictured in court earlier this year The longtime Anchorage doctor worked at Providence Alaska Medical Center (above) in their emergency room 'If there is new evidence that turned up, there is a chance she could be prosecuted, but right now I don't anticipate that,' Dunlop told the Alaska Dispatch News. In addition, authorities found thousands of images and literature that depicted child pornography on two of his computers, even though he tried to wipe the electronic devices clean. The doctor was released on $75,000 bail with the condition that he remain within sight of a third party custodian and he was not allowed to have any contact with the victims. However, Merchant was caught by the FBI in 2015 attempting to hire a hit-man to kill two of the girls in order to stop them from testifying against him in court. He was secretly recorded discussing what he would pay to have them killed, but then weeks later backed out of it. Prosecutors say Merchant usually accomplished the abuse of the girls by 'pacifying them with drugs' KTUU reported during that time period he was in contact with one of the victims and he was charged with violating the conditions of release. According to the plea deal, the four victims will each get $25,000 as restitution and his previously paid $75,000 bail will be used to pay part of that, KTUU reported. He could face a minimum of nine and a maximum of 99 years in prison and will be sentenced August 19. The doctor and is wife are also facing a lawsuit in civil court. Jon-Marc Petersen, the victims' attorney, told the newspaper that the claims within their complaint rely upon the criminal investigation into the couple. He added that the state was 'conservative' in the approach of how much blame to place on Linda Merchant or her husband. 'Obviously, her involvement in the abuse was significant,' he told the Alaska Dispatch News. 'She's just as culpable.' A group of motorbike riders are lucky to be alive in Wisconsin, after a dog ran across the road and caused an incredibly dangerous chain reaction crash. The incident occurred on Highway 21 in Omro at the weekend and was captured by the helmet cam of a rider that was part of the group. In the footage, the dog runs across the road and is struck by a biker riding alongside the person filming. Suddenly, another biker riding close to the one that hit the dog goes down as well, while attempting to avoid the crash, Live 5 News reported. Incoming: This is the harrowing moment a dog runs across Highway 21 in Omro, Wisconsin, on Saturday, causing a crash that two motorbike riders were lucky to survive Shocking: This is the moment the first rider hits the dog, killing it on impact, before he falls to the ground The impact of hitting the dog causes the bike to crash to the road and the rider to go tumbling down with it After witnessing the crash, the second rider falls to the ground also, in an attempt to not hit his friend In a scary part of the video, one of the bikers just manages to jump out of the way of an incoming truck The rider in the front was the person most badly injured in the crash. He can be heard crying out in pain while his friends dial 911 for help. It's unclear from the video how badly the dog was hurt. However a YouTube user named R6down Ullrich commented Monday on the video saying the dog was killed. He wrote: 'I am the rider that hit the dog. I'm sure it was dead on impact. I couldn't have missed the dog by much so it was hit it or force the guy next to me in the ditch and it happened so fast. Not blaming the dog by any means but a few people say that dog runs around all the time there.' In footage taken on a second camera, the men can be seen falling down in an angle from behind Injured: The incident occurred on Highway 21 in Omro at the weekend and was captured by the helmet cam of a rider that was part of the group Both of the riders walked away mostly unscathed, but in shock at what had happened in a few short seconds The two riders were both properly suited up and survived with minimal injuries, incredibly. The group are all in shock in the aftermath of the crash. The rider who took the video, Travis Meyer, can he heard saying: 'I thought you were dead.' A mother was in tears as she admitted stabbing her daughters to death. Samira Lupidi, 24, admitted killing Evelyn, three, and Jasmine Weaver, in Bradford, West Yorkshire last November. The Italian woman appeared at Bradford Crown Court today and cried as she entered her plea to the charges against her. Samira Lupidi appeared at Bradford Crown Court today and cried as she entered her plea to the charges against her Samira Lupidi, 24, admitted killing Evelyn (left), three, and Jasmine Weaver (right), in Bradford, West Yorkshire last November Samira Lupidi, aged 24, with one-year-old Jasmine Weaver (left) and three-year-old Evelyn Lupidi (right) In broken English, she said: 'Not guilty to murder but guilty to manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility.' Prosecutor Stephen Wood said the Crown would not accept Lupidi's pleas. Lupidi, dressed in a white blouse and blue jeans, appeared distressed in the dock. Family members of Jasmine and Evelyn watched on from the public gallery during the short hearing. Remanding her in custody, Judge Roger Thomas QC said: 'You will be back here for trial in a couple of weeks and will be remanded in custody until then.' She will now stand trial for murder on May 9. Pictured isSamira Lupidi who has today appeared at Bradford Crown Court today In broken English, she said: 'Not guilty to murder but guilty to manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility' Police found the two girls were found with stab wounds at a shared home in Bradford. Three police vans attended the scene of the deaths, and the area was cordoned off for several hours as forensic officers searched for evidence. They said he told them they were going to another restaurant in Asia Women worked at restaurant in China run by the North Korean state Seven waitresses, all in their 20s, said their manager had 'tricked' them North Korean waitresses have claimed their colleagues were 'tricked' into defecting to South Korea. Twelve women who worked in a state-owned restaurant in Ningbo, China, reportedly left for the country with their manager after seeing what life was like there on television and in films. But seven waitresses, all in their 20s, who did not go said their manager had lied and told them they were going to another restaurant run by the North Korean state in south-east Asia. Scroll down for video The North Korean waitresses claimed their colleagues were 'tricked' into defecting to South Korea The women, who worked in a state-owned restaurant in China, said they would 'never leave' Kim Jong-un The women, who have since been returned to Pyongyang following the defection on April 6, sobbed as they pleaded their innocence. 'We would never leave our parents, country, and leader Kim Jong-un. None of us would ever do that,' waitress Han Yun Hui told CNN. 'I think about our colleagues being deceived and dragged to South Korea and facing extreme hardship there. It tears our hearts.' Head waitress Choe Hye Yong added that she only had time to warn a few of her colleagues when she found out about the planned defection. Overseas labour is a large source of foreign currency for North Korea, which earns between $200 million and $300 million from approximately 50,000 workers per year - mostly in China and Russia. It is estimated Pyongyang rakes in about $10million every year from some 130 restaurants it operates - with mostly North Korean staff - in 12 different countries. The country claimed earlier this month that it has a new intercontinental ballistic rocket engine The defections have come at a time of elevated military tensions, with the country claiming that it has a new intercontinental ballistic rocket engine that will let it strike the US. The Unification Ministry's website says more than 29,000 North Koreans have defected to South Korea as of March. See more of the latest on Hillary Clinton at www.dailymail.co.uk/hillary Pennsylvania has become more fertile ground in recent days; she held a similar forum there yesterday at a church in Philadelphia Connecticut, along with Pennsylvania and three other states, votes this Tuesday, April 26; polls show Clinton with a single-digit lead in the former She was accompanied by Erica Smegielski, daughter of Sandy Hook School principle Dawn Hochsprung Bernie Sanders as as friend of the National Rifle Association over a vote that gave gun-makers legal immunity Hillary Clinton took her gun violence prevention message to Connecticut today, holding a panel with families who tragically lost loved ones in the Sandy Hook shooting at an event 50 miles upstate. Clinton said it would take a 'national movement' to force Congress to change federal firearms laws, and that's no easy task because of all 'nobody is more powerful than the gun lobby.' 'I am not here to make promises I can't keep,' she told attendees of the Hartford, Connecticut, event, attempting to slight Democratic rival Bernie Sanders, whom she's been characterizing as as friend of the National Rifle Association. She said, 'I am here to tell you I will use every single minute of every day, if I am so fortunate to be your president, looking for ways that we can save lives, that we can change the gun culture.' SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO Hillary Clinton took her gun violence prevention message to Connecticut today, holding a panel with families who tragically lost loved ones in the Sandy Hook shooting at an event 50 miles upstate. She was accompanied by Erica Smegielski, daughter of Sandy Hook School principle Dawn Hochsprung. Family members of the victims embrace after the Clinton-led discussion on gun violence prevention at the Wilson-Gray YMCA in Hartford, Connecticut From L to R: Erica Smegielski, Clinton, Kim Washington, Deborah Davis and Nelba Marquez-Greene share a laugh during a lighter moment. Clinton said today that it would take a 'national movement' to force Congress to change federal firearms laws Clinton has sought throughout the Democratic presidential race to undercut Sanders by emphasizing her support for laws that would restrict gun ownership and his reticence to back legislation that would open up gun manufacturers to costly lawsuits. Both candidates want to see background checks expanded to include purchases made online and at gun shows, and Sanders has said that weapons dealers should be held responsible for crimes committed with their product when the purchaser's intent is clearly nefarious. His vote in the Senate for a bill that Clinton and President Barack Obama were against that gave gun manufacturers an exemption from liability lawsuits has become a wedge issue in the race, and Clinton is making sure it stays put. African-American mothers whose children were victims in firearms fatalities traveled with her across the south with Clinton and joined her again in New York last week. Yesterday, the mothers of Sean Bell, Brandon Tate-Brown and others appeared at a town hall with her in a Philadelphia church. Today she was accompanied in Hartford by Erica Smegielski, daughter of Sandy Hook School principle Dawn Hochsprung. Hochsprung died in the December 2012 Newtown, Connecticut, massacre protecting her students. Smegielski was with Clinton when the former U.S. senator won New York on Tuesday night and is the star of her latest campaign ad. 'No one is fighting harder to reform our gun laws than Hillary Clinton,' Smegielski says in the ad that is airing in 30 and 60 second cuts in media markets in and around Connecticut. 'She is the only candidate who has what it takes to take on the gun lobby. She reminds me of my mother: she isnt scared of anything.' Local resident Deborah Davis wipes a tear as family members of victims of gun violence share their stories. Davis lost her 20-year-old son Phillip in 2010 Connecticut, along with Pennsylvania and three other states, votes this Tuesday, April 26. Polls show Clinton with a single-digit lead in the former, despite of her pro-gun control message and the credibility of the women helping her push it. Pennsylvania has become more fertile ground in recent days, and she now has 16 points to spare before she'd fall behind Sanders. In Connecticut of all places, Clinton's emotions-based appeal to women whose children could one day become the victims of gun violence should be well-received. The state banned the sale of high-capacity ammunition magazines in 2013, and authorities now keep track of sales of magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds. It further requires background checks at all levels and has a strict assault weapons ban on the books. Clinton told them today that she understands how much political capital it took to pass that legislation after Sandy Hook. 'We need a national movement. The gun lobby is the most powerful lobby in Washington,' she declared. In another subtle jab at Sanders she said, 'You can talk about Wall Street, drug companies, insurance companies, big oil, they're all powerful. 'Don't get me wrong: nobody is more powerful than the gun lobby because they have figured out how to intimidate elected officials at all levels.' Clinton said lawmakers have 'basically just stopped thinking about this problem because they're too scared to stand up to the NRA.' 'And that's why what happened her in Connecticut really needs to be a model, to stand up and then fight for what you have done politically, and convince a majority of people to stay with you,' she said. 'We have to turn this into a voting issue.' EMOTIONAL: Smegielski was with Clinton when the former U.S. senator won New York on Tuesday night, as well, and is the star of her latest campaign ad In her opening remarks, Clinton said that firearms purchasing laws can withstand reforms that are 'consistent with the Second Amendment.' And they can be passed with the support of 'responsible gun owners.' 'That is exactly what we will do,' she said, contending as part of her statement that 'it is just too easy for people to reach for a gun to solve their problems. It make no sense.' Back in Washington, Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal spoke on MSNBC about the importance of gun reforms, especially when it comes to residents of his state. 'Hillary Clinton has been a strong and most-effective advocate,' he said, and that's one of the reasons he endorsed her. Clinton stressed the issue yesterday in Pennsylvania, as well, telling a mostly-black audience in Philadelphia yesterday afternoon, 'There's been a lot of talk in this campaign and the primary campaign about the power of certain interests in our country. 'And we do have a bunch of powerful interests...but there is no more powerful lobby than the gun lobby,' she said. 'None.' In Pennsylvania she said, the NRA pressured officials into passing a law that 'basically stripped local communities from power' to pass common sense gun laws. 'That wasn't enough for them,' she stated. The NRA came back and said, 'We're gonna give special protection to gun makers and dealers. 'And we're gonna make it really painful for people who want to stand up and have their day in court because were gonna make them pay the legal fees of the NRA lawyers.' Clinton said, 'That's exactly what happened in Congress. It's one of the big differences between me and my opponent Sen. Sanders.' 'I am not here to make promises I can't keep,' Clinton told attendees of the Hartford, Connecticut, event, attempting to slight Democratic rival Bernie Sanders, whom she's been characterizing as as friend of the National Rifle Association. She took another dig at him later and hit him yesterday on the topic, too 'We were all in the Senate at the same time,' she said, referring to Sanders, herself and Obama. She and Obama voted against legislation to remove those exemptions and Senator Sanders voted for it, she reminded them. 'So I know how hard this is. I'm not sitting here spinning a tale of the kind of conversion experience that we would hope would come from the gun lobby,' she said. 'It will only happen if we organize, and if we make it a voting issue,' Clinton said. Clinton insisted then as she did today that she's not seeking to infringe on Americans' Second Amendment rights. 'But we have got to do more, and it cuts across every community.' she said. 'We have got to do more to save more lives.' Administrators, faculty and a Jewish group at Harvard Law School have come out to condemn a student who called a visiting Israeli official 'so smelly' during a panel discussion last week. Former Israeli minister Tzipi Livni was invited to speak to a small group of about 150 people at the Ivy League law school on April 14, in a discussion on the fraught Israeli-Palestinian relations. Livni is a member of the Knesset, Israel's legislative body, previously served as acting prime minister, minister of foreign affairs and minister of justice. During the question-and-answer portion of the event, one student got up and asked Livni 'how is that you are so smelly?' A Harvard Law School student called Israeli official Tzipi Livni (pictured in 2015) 'smelly' when she spoke at the school last week A wave of silence went over the room, so the student spoke up again, saying: 'It's regarding your odor - about the odor of Tzipi Livni, very smelly.' The student who asked the question has not been identified by name. However, he is described as a third-year male law student who is the president of the campus' Justice for Palestine chapter. The comment was offensive and it violated the trust and respect we expect in our community. Martha Minow, Dean of Harvard Law School Many interpreted the student's comments as an anti-Semitic stereotype that Jewish people 'smell' and the condemnation of the remarks was swift. Four days later, the co-president of the Jewish Law Students Association (JLSA), as well as one of the group's former presidents, wrote a public letter calling the question 'blatantly anti-Semitic rhetoric'. Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow also addressed the comments in a strongly worded email to the entire college, titled 'A Disturbing Event'. 'The comment was offensive and it violated the trust and respect we expect in our community. Many perceive it as anti-Semitic, and no one would see it as appropriate. It was an embarrassment to this institution and an assault upon the values we seek to uphold,' she wrote. The unnamed third-year male student has since apologized for the comment and said he did not know he referenced an anti-Semitic stereotype The student in question has since apologized for the comment, in a statement to the HLS Record, the school's independent student newspaper, claiming he did not know that his comments were playing into a hateful stereotype. 'I am writing to apologize, as sincerely as I can via this limited form of communication, to anyone who may have felt offended by the comments I made last week. 'To be very clear, as there seems to be some confusion, I would never, ever, ever call anyone, under any circumstances, a smelly Jew. Such a comment is utterly repugnant, and I am absolutely horrified that some readers have been led to believe that I would ever say such a thing, ' the student wrote. He went on to say he was 'entirely unaware of' of the anti-Semitic stereotype and that is was 'never my intention' to invoke the hate speech. 'But I recognize now that, regardless of my intention, words have power, and it troubles me deeply to know that I have caused some members of the Jewish community such pain with my words,' he added. He finished his statement by saying that he has spoken to several Jewish people who didn't interpret his words as anti-Semitic, since 'they know me well enough to know that that is not at all consistent with who I am as a person'. Jack Susianta (pictured), 17, of Hackney, east London, died in a canal at Walthamstow Marshes in July 2015 An inspector in charge of police who were unable to help a drowning teenager insisted he was right not to ask the officers to dive in to save the boy, an inquest heard. Jack Susianta, 17, of Hackney, east London, died in a canal at Walthamstow Marshes in July 2015. Acting Inspector James Reynolds, speaking at St Pancras Coroner's Court, said he was 'satisfied' officers at the scene did 'all they could do' to help the teen. 'The Metropolitan Police does not expect people to jump in the water but it does expect them to do a dynamic assessment,' he said. This would take into account various factors such as the conditions of the water including potential obstacles, and the officers' ability to swim - but they must communicate a rescue plan, he explained. He said the officers 'appreciated the urgency' and were communicating in a 'calm manner' to Jack, who had suffered a psychotic episode, smashed through a window at his family home and fled in just a T-shirt, boxer shorts and socks. The teenager's mental state also meant he feared the police were not the real police, the jury has heard. By the time Mr Reynolds had made the journey by car from Jack's home to the scene, the police helicopter, marine support and ambulance were on the way. Mr Reynolds said members of the Territorial Support Group, who could help with the search, seemed 'distraught' and there were quite a few members of the public watching. Saying the police are not a rescue service, he added: 'Once they (the officers) make a dynamic risk assessment, if they choose to go into the water they will not be in trouble.' Knowing that Jack had previously been sectioned and taken to hospital, Mr Reynolds, who was in charge at the scene, had declared him a high-risk missing person. An inspector in charge of police who were unable to help a drowning teenager insisted he was right not to ask the officers to dive in to save the boy. Pictured are rescue workers searching for his body Acting Inspector James Reynolds, speaking at St Pancras Coroner's Court, said he was 'satisfied' officers at the scene did 'all they could do' This meant there were substantial grounds to fear he could come to harm. Mr Reynolds declared it a critical incident after no-one in a nearby park had spotted Jack. Then he heard that the teenager was in the water. Officers were throwing 82ft (25m) life ropes to Jack as he became submerged but the teenager did not grab them. One of the bright orange life ropes, similar to that used, was unfurled inside the court so the jurors could see it. The rope crossed the diagonal of the court room 3.5 times. Coroner Mary Hassell said she was posing some of her questions in case lessons could be learned to manage future incidents. She asked Mr Reynolds if he felt he made the right decision in not asking while he was in the car en route to the scene whether anyone was a strong swimmer. He said: 'Yes, the rationale for me is that it felt like there was an effective rescue plan in place and they were carrying out a dynamic risk assessment.' Jack (pictured) had suffered a psychotic episode, smashed through a window at his home and fled in just a T-shirt, boxer shorts and socks. The teenager's mental state meant he feared the police were not the real police He described the water as 'dismal' and 'really oily, dark and you could not see below the surface'. Within minutes of arriving at the scene a police officer had asked to go into the water. Mr Reynolds said that during this 'quite frantic' stage he had not stopped anyone from going into the water. The coroner told Mr Reynolds that members of the public had volunteered to go in. He said he did not see or hear that, but that he would have given them a 'health warning'. He said he would have told them 'if they want to go in there they could be a casualty as well and it is very important to know that they did not know what was below the surface'. Regarding the police officer's request to go into the canal, Mr Reynolds said: 'I could not give that authorisation - it is for you to make a risk assessment.' The coroner said one interpretation of that comment is that he was not taking responsibility and was stepping back from the situation. Floral tributes were left to the teenager close to where he died in Walthamstow marshes last year Mr Reynolds replied: 'I think I answered that in the best way that I can. I answered in a way that people (police officers) could understand.' Pc Richard Wilson waded into the water but had to go to hospital afterwards because he felt 'a bit poorly after ingesting water', the court was told. Mr Reynolds said the officer seemed to be a little confused at the time and his teeth were chattering. The inspector spoke to members of the public about what was going on and the fire brigade had also arrived. Asked if in retrospect he would have done anything different, Mr Reynolds said: 'I did have sleepless nights. I brood about it a lot - it is nothing compared to what Jack's mum has suffered though - but looking back at it, no, I believe not.' Mr Reynolds told the inquest he was confident of his ability to do a good job, saying he was well trained and had been in frontline policing throughout his career. Ailish Tynan, a cyclist who saw the teenager drown, had earlier told the inquest she thought he must have been dangerous because police officers were not going into the water to save him. She said did not see Jack go into the canal, but another onlooker told her 'the police have chased that fella into the water'. 'There did not seem to be any sense of urgency, which made me think "Gosh, maybe he has got a knife" and "Why is nobody doing anything?",' Ms Tynan said. The Metropolitan Police have denied claims that they refused to go in to save the teenager. The Canadian health minister has pledged to overhaul Canada's drug laws in order to legalize the sale and recreational use of marijuana by spring next year during a speech at the UN. Jane Philpott told a cheering audience that Canada's liberal government will develop legislation to 'keep marijuana out of the hands of children and profits out of the hands of criminals.' Philpott made the announcement yesterday on 4/20, the unofficial holiday celebrating marijuana and stoner culture, though she insisted the timing was a 'coincidence'. Jane Philpott, Canada's health minister, pledged to legalize the production, sale and recreational use of cannabis by spring next year during a speech to the UN yesterday The announcement was well received by hundreds of people who had gathered on Parliament Hill in Ottawa to celebrate 4/20, the unofficial yearly celebration of cannabis culture The news was welcomed by hundreds of pro-cannabis demonstrators who had already gathered to smoke on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. If the proposal does become law then Canada will be only the second nation to have legislated for the sale and recreational use of the drug after Uruguay. Other countries such as Jamaica, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain all have relaxed laws when it comes to the possession of cannabis, but the growing and selling of it remains technically illegal. Meanwhile four U.S. states - Colorado, Alaska, Oregon and Washington, along with Washington D.C. - allow the growing and sale of cannabis for recreational use, though federal law still prohibits it. Around a dozen other states allow medicinal cannabis use, which is already legal in Canada. Philpott announced a taskforce will be set up in the next few weeks in order to examine the best way to write the legislation, and how to organize the sale of cannabis. The health minister told CBC: 'We will task them with a very specific set of questions around how it will be produced, where it will be accessed and sold and around questions of taxation.' If the legislation goes ahead, Canada will be the second country to completely decriminalize cannabis use after Uruguay, which passed similar legislation in 2013 (pictured, people celebrate 4/20 in Ottawa) Justin Trudeau, who promised a review of cannabis laws as part of his election drive, has named Bill Blair, a former Toronto police chief, as his lead on the issue. Blair has advocated applying a system similar to the way alcohol is sold to cannabis. He said: 'We control who it's sold to, when it's sold and how it's used, and organised crime doesn't have the opportunity to profit from it.' However, Blair reminded cannabis users that the drug will remain illegal until the legislation is drafted and passed, and said police will still be expected to enforce the law. Trudeau has said legalizing marijuana would fix a 'failed system' and help remove the 'criminal element' linked to the drug. He also has said Canadians would benefit from analyzing the experiences of Colorado and Washington state. Gerard Deltell, a Conservative politician, said the country's proposed legislation would harm people's health and lead to life-long problems among users. The rockers are believed to have a maximum range of around 8,700 miles China has tested a weapon which could be used to strike London and the United States with nuclear warheads. The Dongfeng-41 missile, which has the longest range of any ballistic rocket in the world, can carry up to ten nuclear warheads. US Pentagon officials are said to have slammed China for testing the 'intercontinental weapons', which have a maximum range of around 8,700 miles. US Pentagon officials are said to have slammed China for testing missiles which have a maximum range of around 8,700 miles (file photo of Chinese submarine) China hit back at its critics today, saying it was perfectly 'normal' to carry out ballistic missile launches. US media site Washington Free Beacon, citing unnamed Pentagon officials, reported that China had carried out a test of its DF-41 long-range missile on April 12. The report linked the tests to tensions between Washington and Beijing over the South China Sea, noting it came three days before a visit by US Secretary of Defence Ashton Carter. In a brief response, China's defence ministry did not deny a test had been carried out, but dismissed media reports of a specific location as 'pure speculation'. A statement on the ministry's website said: 'It is normal for us to carry out scientific research tests in our own territory, according to our plans, and they are not aimed at any specific nations or targets.' China claims nearly all of the South China Sea, which is home to some of the world's most important shipping lanes and is believed to contain vast oil reserves. The Dongfeng-41 missile, which has the longest range of any ballistic rocket in the world, can carry up to ten nuclear warheads (pictured, Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2011) But many of its Southeast Asian neighbours have overlapping claims, and tensions have risen over China's construction of artificial reefs in the disputed waters. On Monday, China's defence ministry gave its first confirmation that Beijing had landed a military flight on the Fiery Cross reef in the Spratlys archipelago, also claimed by the Philippines. A farmer has been left devastated after discovering that 40 of her lambs had been slaughtered in one night by dogs. Isobel Bowden said the livestock were killed in a savage attack on her family farm in the village of Hambleden, near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. She posted graphic photographs of the slaughtered and injured lambs on Facebook, appealing for owners to make sure their dogs are kept indoors overnight. Farmer Isobel Bowden has been left devastated after discovering that 40 of her lambs had been slaughtered in one night by dogs on her family farm in Buckinghamshire 'I have debated with myself whether to post this but I think it's necessary to make people realise the damage dogs out of control can do,' she wrote. 'These dogs were left outside a property loose at night and this is some of the heartbreaking images of the damage they have left behind. 'It is not the dogs' fault - they are animals with instinct and it is your responsibility as owners to keep them away from livestock for their sakes as well as the poor defenceless animals that will be their prey.' Ms Bowden said the incident had left her heartbroken after working endlessly for weeks to deliver the lambs. 'Keep dogs shut in at night and on a lead around livestock!!,' she said. 'For the lambs that we have worked endlessly to deliver and care to be wiped out in one field overnight is truly heartbreaking, as it would be for any farmer.' She posted graphic photographs of the lambs, including those that had been badly injured, on Facebook Ms Bowden appealed for dog owners to keep their pets shut in at night or to secure their property It comes after more than 100 sheep were 'worried to death' after being spooked into the corner of a field by a dog. The flock, which included dozens of pregnant ewes, were either crushed or died from shock at a farm in West Sussex. Police said there had been a rise in sheep-worrying and urged dog owners to keep their pets on leads in rural areas. A farmer can legally shoot a dog chasing their livestock and seek compensation from the pet's owner. A 45-year-old man has been arrested after grandmother Dorothy Cooper, 76, (pictured) was left fighting for her life after being run over by her own car during a horrific carjacking A 45-year-old man has been arrested after a grandmother, 76, was left fighting for her life after being run over by her own car during a horrific carjacking. Grandmother Dorothy Cooper was attacked in Oldham, Greater Manchester, on Wednesday afternoon after being approached by a man who told her there was a problem with her Hyundai i10. As she checked to see what was wrong, the man jumped into the car, reversed at high speed - knocking her over - and then drove over her body as she lay helpless on the ground. The pensioner was seriously injured as she lay in the vehicle's path in a car park. Police said it is one of the 'worst incidents' ever seen and she remains in a serious condition in hospital. The family of the Mrs Cooper have thanked passers-by who came to her aid. Appealing for more information, Mrs Cooper's grandson Matthew said: 'First and foremost I would like to thank the police, the public and family and friends for all of their help and support. 'In particular we would like to thank the people who helped my Grandma when this first happened. 'One lady gave her a blanket and calmed her down and made sure all of her belongings were with her when she got in the ambulance, thank you so much, your help means so much. 'My Grandma is a very strong lady. She has gone through a very difficult couple of years, losing her son and her husband and just when she was back on her feet, someone has quite literally knocked her down. 'She is in a very serious condition and has a long road to recovery, the injuries she's sustained would be difficult for a young and healthy person to overcome. 'All we want now is for my Grandma to get better and for anyone who has any information or saw anything, no matter how small, to please get in touch with the police.' Detective Inspector Ian Harratt said he was keen to speak to a man and a woman who possibly spoke to the car thief beforehand in the car park off Sandy Lane, Royton, The offender drove off towards Rochdale Road in the direction of Rochdale and police recovered the Hyundai in Buersil Avenue near the Turf Hill area. The pensioner was seriously injured when the man drove over her as she lay in the vehicle's path at a car park in Oldham, Greater Manchester. Police said it is one of the 'worst incidents' ever seen Detective Inspector Ian Harratt, from Greater Manchester Police's Oldham division, said: 'This is one of the worst incidents I have had to investigate in a very long time. 'My thoughts are with the lady and her family. 'We are appealing for anyone who may have seen the incident or the car in the Royton and Rochdale areas or may know the man responsible to come and talk to police. 'Any information, no matter how small, could be vital in our investigation. 'I am determined to bring this man to justice. 'How someone can do this to anyone, never mind a 79-year-old lady, I will never know.' Anyone with information is asked to call police on 0161 856 8906 or Crimestoppers, anonymously, on 0800 555 111. The FBI has assumed full control of the investigation A 42-year-old woman has been jailed on unspecified charges Her body was found a day later just several blocks from her home The body of 1-year-old Kenzley Olson was found just a day after she was reported missing from her home at Montana's Fort Peck Indiana Reservation The body of a 1-year-old girl who was reported to have been kidnapped from a Montana Indian reservation earlier this week was discovered several blocks from her home. A 42-year-old woman has been arrested in connection with the disappearance and death of Kenzley Olson. The woman, whose name has not been released, is jailed on unspecified charges on Montana's Fort Peck Indian Reservation, said FBI spokeswoman Sandra Yi Barker. Authorities initially believed Kenzley was abducted from her home on Tuesday, but Barker could not confirm that was still believed to be the case. An Amber Alert was issued early Wednesday. Police said Kenzley was abducted from her home at 9am but that her family did not report her missing until three hours later, according to KTVH. Kenzley's body was discovered in Poplar at the Fort Peck Indian Reservation on Wednesday. Her cause of death has not been released. The FBI has assumed full control of the investigation into Kenzley's death. The woman is expected in tribal court on Thursday. Barker says federal charges are also anticipated. A Roosevelt County spokesman has said investigators were searching for additional people for questioning. Authorities initially believed Kenzley was abducted by a man and woman from North Dakota but later determined neither was involved. Melinda Tweet, 51, and Timothy Duane Dornheim, 55, were both named suspects shortly after an Amber Alert was issued, according to the Grand Forks Herald. Both Tweet and Dornheim were ruled out as suspects after they were located, but Tweet and her son Tyler Moulton, 25, were arrested on firearm and drug charges after police made contact. Authorities said Tweet and her son were acquaintances of Kenzley's mother. Tweet was charged with felon in possession of a firearm and methamphetamine, as well as possession of drug paraphernalia and ingestion of meth. Moulton was charged with possession of meth and drug paraphernalia. The Fort Peck Reservation is home to the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes and has a population of about 10,000 people. Poplar is on the edge of the reservation and home to 850 people. Kenzley's death followed the February abduction of a 4-year-old girl from a public park in Wolf Point, a town on the reservation about 20 miles west of Poplar. The victim was found alive several days later about six miles from a park. Authorities said her abductor had tried to kill her. A mother who allowed her newborn baby to drown after giving birth in a WalMart toilet before hiding his partially burned corpse in a cave is facing 15 years in jail as part of a plea deal. Latasha Wilson, 21, from Missouri, pleaded guilty Thursday to first-degree involuntary manslaughter, child endangerment and abandoning a corpse. She had initially been facing 10 years to life after being accused of second-degree murder, but prosecutors agreed to amend the charges. Latasha Wilson, 21 (left, pictured right aged 19 at the time of her arrest), is due to be sentenced to 15 years in jail after pleading guilty to first-degree manslaughter and other charges over the death of her newborn son Wilson will be sentenced tomorrow, and her lawyers have agreed she will serve seven years for manslaughter, and four years each for endangerment and abandonment, to run consecutively. Wilson was just 19 when she gave birth in January 2014 in the bathroom of a WalMart where she worked in the town of Warrensburg. Shortly after birth the baby drowned, and police accused Wilson of leaving him in the bowl for up to three hours. She then wrapped the boy's body in paper towels and stashed the remains in her work locker, before taking the bundle home and hiding it in a closet. Ten days later she enlisted the help of accomplice Zakary Carter, 20, to dispose of the body away from her home. Wilson admitted allowing the boy to drown after giving birth in a toilet at the WalMart where she worked, of taking his body to this cave and then trying to burn it The pair dumped the boy's remains in a cave in the Pertle Springs recreation area, around a 15 minute drive south of the WalMart. Wilson is believed to have returned to the cave several times before eventually trying to burn the remains in order to dispose of them. The boy's badly rotted and partially decomposed body was eventually discovered by University of Central Missouri researchers using the cave for a project. A man facing a murder charge in the disappearance of a Florida priest said he 'lost control' and asked for forgiveness as he was led from a courthouse in east Georgia. In video aired by local TV stations, 28-year-old Steve James Murray said on Wednesday that he is 'very sorry' and that if people love the Rev. Rene Wayne Robert, they will forgive him. Asked by a reporter what happened, Murray replied that he has mental problems and 'I lost control of myself.' Steve James Murray, 28, who is facing a murder charge in the disappearance of Florida priest Rev. Rene Wayne Robert said he 'lost control' and asked for forgiveness as he was led from a Georgia courthouse on Wednesday (pictured) Murray (left) of Jacksonville, Florida, was arrested on Wednesday after he was spotted driving a Toyota Corolla that belonged to the missing Rev Rene Wayne Robert, (right) who was found dead on Monday 'If anybody really loves Father Rene, they'll forgive me because he was a man of God and forgiveness is forgiveness,' he said. 'I have mental problems, and I lost control of myself and I apologize.' In the video, another reporter asks Murray specifically what he did, and Murray does not respond as authorities place him inside a waiting car outside the courthouse. Authorities said the 71-year-old priest worked with prisoners, a calling police say put him in contact with his killer. Robert may have been trying to help Murray, who was recently released from jail, authorities have said. 'There are more details through interviews that will hopefully clarify some of those issues,' Georgia Bureau of Investigation spokesman Scott Dutton said. In video aired by local TV stations, Murray said on Wednesday that he is 'very sorry' and that if people love the Rev. Rene Wayne Robert, they will forgive him Georgia authorities filed a murder charge against Murray who led authorities to a body believed to be that of the missing priest. Dutton said on Thursday that an autopsy found that the victim was shot multiple times. On Thursday, dental records were used to confirm that the body found in Georgia is that of the missing priest, the GBI said in a statement. Dutton said the body was found in a heavily wooded area of Burke County, in east Georgia, where Murray is being held without bond. Police said Murray, who also faces charges in Florida, knew Robert and led authorities to the body in woods near Waynesboro, Georgia. Murray was arrested on Wednesday after he was spotted driving a Toyota Corolla that belonged to Rev Robert. Murray allegedly sped up his car, engaging in a chase, then abandoned the vehicle and fled on foot. Robert's body was found 260 miles away in woodland (pictured) near Waynesboro, Georgia, on Monday night Inside the car, police found stacks of firearms and several BB guns, as well as jewelry, cash, medication and merchandise that had been reported stolen. Soon after, they received a call from a family nearby who said the suspect pictured in TV reports was knocking on their door asking to come in. Police raced to the home and soon found Murray nearby. Rev Robert, who has spent years counseling ex-cons and also teaches blind children, was reported missing on April 12 after not showing up for an appointment in his home of St Augustine, Florida. Investigators believe Robert was killed the evening of April 10. His body was found 260 miles away in woodland near Waynesboro, Georgia, on Monday night. After his arrest, Murray was interviewed then led police to the woodland, where they found Robert's body. Authorities believe the suspect kidnapped the priest, took him to Georgia in his own car and killed him there, but the motive for the slaying remains unclear. Members of the congregation that Rev Robert was part of pray at a vigil before he was found dead Community members paid tribute to Rev Robert and his tendency to help anyone who came his way It's believed that Robert was introduced to Murray by a young woman the priest had been counseling. St. Johns County Sheriff David Shoar in Florida called Murray a 'career criminal.' He was released from the Duval County Jail in Jacksonville on April 6 following a March 22 arrest for operating a vehicle with a suspended license. Shoar said Murray also broke into homes in South Carolina before his arrest, and was found with multiple guns including a rifle with a scope. Before Robert was found dead, his sister told News4Jax that she feared his tendency to help people had got him into trouble. 'No matter who you are, he would help you,' she told the network. 'And I think that's how it's gotten him into trouble a little bit.' Embryos usually comprise just a few cells when transferred to a host T he couple say that adoption is 'the logical outcome of being pro-life' They already adopted two black kids, as most adoptive parents want white children A white evangelical couple told the amazing story of how - and why - they chose to adopt five black children, three as embryos, Thursday. Presbyterian missionaries Aaron and Rachel Halbert had agreed while dating that they wanted to adopt because, as Aaron told The Washington Post, it was 'the logical outcome of being pro-life.' And they agreed not to adopt white children, knowing that white kids are more likely to be chosen by prospective parents. It was a decision that was to transform their lives in the most heartwarming way imaginable. Presbyterian missionaries Aaron (pictured) and Rachel Halbert give birth to black triplets (pictured) after 'adopting' African-American embryos left over from another couple's IVF treatment Having difficulty conceiving naturally, the couple (pictured) went to an adoption agency in Mississippi, and told workers there they only wanted to adopt 'non-Caucasian' children Aaron grew up with his missionary parents in Honduras, where he says he was a 'blue-eyed, cotton-topped white kid who stuck out like a sore thumb.' But that helped him feel comfortable around people of other races, he says - something Rachel, who grew up in the Mississippi delta, took a few years to pick up. Having difficulty conceiving naturally, they eventually went to an adoption agency in Mississippi, and told workers there they only wanted to adopt 'non-Caucasian' children. 'We did this with the deeply held conviction that if the Lord wanted us to have a fully Caucasian child my wife would conceive naturally,' Aaron explained. The pair adopted two African-American kids, and found their lives changing in a magical way. 'There is something beautiful and enriching being the only white face sitting and chatting with some of my African-American friends as my son gets his hair cut on a Saturday morning,' Aaron told the Washington Post. 'There is also something wonderful in the relationship that is built as my wife asks a black friend on Facebook how to care for our little biracial daughters hair. 'The beauty of a multi-ethnic family is found there, in the fact that the differences are the very thing that make ours richer and fuller. It forces you to think in a new way about the way you think, speak, act and live.' The pair also adopted two African-American children (pictured) and found their lives changing in a magical way. The Halberts (pictured) hadn't intended to have any more children, until they heard about the National Embryo Donation Center The Halberts hadn't intended to have any more children, but then they heard about the National Embryo Donation Center, a Christian embryo bank that 'saves' the excess frozen embryos that are created during a couple's IVF treatment. Usually those embryos - which comprise just a few cells - are destroyed or given to science once their biological donors successfully implant one. But Christian centers accept 'donations' that can then be 'adopted' by couples having trouble conceiving. 'Deeply moved' by the thought of having more kids - and wanting their new arrives to fit in with their siblings - the couple had two African-American embryos implanted. Little did they know that one of those embryos would divide again, leaving them with triplets and not the twins they had expected. And on Sunday Rachel gave birth to the three tiny bundles of joy. The couple are currently serving as missionaries in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, but Aaron knows from experience the strange looks they will get when they take their three new kids out and about in the American South. He recalled the times that an elderly white women looked at his family with disgust, and a black mother 'looked at us and just shook her head.' 'However, there was also the young black girl who wept when we told her this little boy with her skin color was our son,' he said, 'and the older white doctor who lovingly prayed over him and held him so tenderly. Sally Faulkner has seen her two young children for the last time before returning to Australia following a botched child abduction. On Thursday night Tara Brown and the 60 Minutes crew returned home from Beirut after two weeks in a Lebanese jail. Ms Faulkner also walked free on the condition she gave up custody of her children. Ms Faulkner's estranged husband Ali Elamine described the meeting - where the woman and her children enjoyed a 'happy' few hours eating ice-cream. Scroll down for video Sally Faulkner had a last meeting with her two young children in Lebanon where she shared ice-cream with them On Thursday night Tara Brown and the 60 Minutes crew returned home from Beirut Ms Faulkner also walked free on the condition she gave up custody of her children 'The visit was good, Sal had fun, the kids had fun,' Mr Elamine told Nine News. 'She's their mother obviously they're going to enjoy time with her. 'We were just at a play centre, had ice-cream, and yeah just enjoyed it,' he said. Earlier the mother at the centre of the 60 Minutes botched child abduction issued a heartbreaking message to her two children, saying: 'Mummy's sorry, I tried'. Sally Faulkner was due to see her children at a court hearing on Thursday for the first time since she was jailed over the plot to snatch them both from her estranged husband's family in Beirut. But her ex-husband Ali Elamine, 32, failed to bring Noah, three, and Lahela, five, to the Baabda Palace of Justice for the hearing, which he later said was so avoid the media circus. Ms Faulkner told reporters that she loved her children very much and would not be leaving Beirut until she did see them, according to the ABC. 60 Minutes presenter Tara Brown and Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner (front) were pictured walking free from jail in Beirut on Wednesday The 60 Minutes crew including Ms Brown were pictured inside the car with Brisbane mother Ms Faulkner The veteran reporter was pictured walking free from jail two weeks after the botched abduction attempt She walked free from jail on Wednesday along with reporter Tara Brown and her 60 Minutes crew after agreeing a deal with her ex-husband in which she gave up full custody. 'I love them and mummy's sorry that it all worked out this way, I tried,' Ms Faulkner told Nine News after leaving Baabda Central Women's Prison with Ms Brown. With tears in her eyes, the Brisbane mother said: 'I hope I can see them again in Australia one day.' Her ex-husband agreed to drop the charges against the Australians in a Beirut court after Ms Faulkner gave up custody of the children. The children will now live in Lebanon with their father, but Mr Elamine insisted that Ms Faulkner would be able to visit. Judge Abdullah said Mr Elamine would bring the children to his chambers on Thursday to see their mother for the first time since she was thrown in jail along with the TV crew two weeks ago. Ms Faulkner was released on bail on Wednesday along with Ms Brown and her crew, producer Stephen Rice, cameraman Ben Williamson, sound recordist David Ballment. They were seen laughing, hugging and smiling together in a car after they were all freed from jail. Ms Brown said: 'I'm so relieved to be going home. I'm exhausted and ecstatic. Ms Brown (left) flashed a quick smile as she was released from Baabda Central Women's Prison on Wednesday Ms Faulkner's ex-husband Ali Elamine, 32, agreed to drop the charges against the Australians in a court hearing after reaching a deal in which he was awarded full custody They have been behind bars for the past two weeks after being involved in a plot to kidnap Ms Faulkner's two children from her estranged Lebanese husband's family on a street in Beirut The freed 60 Minutes team were seen hugging Ms Brown and Ms Faulkner when they climbed into the car Australian sound recordist David Ballment and cameraman Ben Williamson after their release from jail A detail of the legal sentence for the case involving the 60 Minutes crew and Faulkner 'I had a chance to say 'hi' to [husband] John. I was ordered to call home straight away. But [I have] not [talked to] the kids yet. 'I can't wait to speak to them obviously though they have no idea about any of this. It's great to talk to home. It's great to be going home.' When asked what he planned to do first after his release, Mr Williamson said: 'I'm going to call my wife and tell my family that I love them.' The TV crew are expected to arrive back in Australia at around 10pm (local time). At a court hearing on Wednesday, Nine secured the release of Ms Faulkner and the TV crew by paying an undisclosed settlement. The Australian reported that Mr Elamine is thought to have received a payout in the 'low single-digit millions'. Brown and her 60 Minutes crew at a Lebanon airport after their release waiting for their flight home Mr Elamine speaks to journalists outside Beirut court after the Australians' release The breakthrough came after Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner (pictured) and her estranged husband Ali Elamine reached an agreement which gave him full custody in return for her release Tara Brown (pictured) has been detained on kidnapping charges with a 60 Minutes crew that filmed the 'child abduction' of Sally Faulkner's two children in Lebanon on April 7 The TV crew were released on bail after charges were dropped over the botched child abduction attempt in Beirut - but they were warned they could be ordered back to the country Wearing a blue and white striped top, Ms Brown looked calm as she was photographed leaving prison to join her three freed colleagues in a waiting car Ms Brown could be seen laughing and smiling in the car before the group made their way to the airport The TV crew are expected to fly home on Wednesday night (Beirut time) and arrive in Australia on Thursday A member of the 60 minutes television crew was seen embracing Ms Faulkner in the car WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE LEBANON KIDNAP CASE THE MUM, THE TV CREW AND THE KIDNAPPING CASE Brisbane mum Sally Faulkner and a Channel Nine TV crew made up of reporter Tara Brown, producer Stephen Rice, cameraman Ben Williamson and sound recordist David Ballment have walked free from a Beirut jail after the child kidnapping and assault charges against them were dropped. FREED, BUT COULD STILL FACE CHARGES The 60 Minutes crew have already left Lebanon while Faulkner is still in the country for another day to bid farewell to her children. While the Australians are free to leave, they could still be ordered back to the country to face public prosecution charges of kidnapping and being members of a criminal gang if the state decides. A deal was struck in court on Wednesday in which Faulkner gives up custody to gain release but her estranged husband Ali Elamine says she can see the children. Elamine played down reports the Nine Network paid him compensation to drop the charges. WHAT HAPPENED? The Australians spent a fortnight in a Beirut jail after being arrested for a child abduction on April 7. The 60 Minutes crew was filming Faulkner's attempt to recover her children Noah, three, and Lahela, five, from Elamine. Faulkner has spent nine months trying to regain custody of her children, who were taken to Lebanon for a three-week holiday and not returned, she says. Professional agency Child Abduction Recovery International (CARI) was hired to snatch the children. Two of its members, Adam Whittington and Craig Michael, are still facing charges. THE ABDUCTION Security camera footage shows masked men jumping out of a car and snatching the kids from their grandmother and another woman on a Beirut street. The grandmother claims she was hit on the head with a pistol and suffered internal bleeding. THE CHARGES Faulkner faced kidnapping charges. The 60 Minutes crew was accused of hiding information, forming an association with two or more people to commit a crime against a person, kidnapping or holding a minor even with their approval and physical assault. The offences carry penalties of three to 10 years in jail Advertisement But Mr Elamine insisted that he 'did not sign anything, did not get anything'. Judge Rami Abdullah then told the Baabda Palace of Justice that the TV crew were 'free to leave Lebanon'. He said they are still facing public prosecution charges of kidnapping and being members of a criminal gang and may be required to return if the prosecution goes ahead. They could be tried in 'absentia' if they do not return and face being banned from the country. Nine reported that the crew were 'elated' at the decision and said there were 'tears, hugs and a sense of enormous relief' from their families. 'Everybody is happy,' Nine Network lawyer Kamal Aboudaher said outside court on Wednesday. The breakthrough came after Mr Elamine agreed a deal with his ex-wife after she conceded to give him full custody of the two children in exchange for her release. Speaking outside the court, Elamine said his estranged wife can have access to the children. 'I am glad it's over. She is their mother and I don't want them growing up and thinking 'Daddy had the option of letting Mummy off easily and he didn't,' he said. 'It sucks, the whole thing sucks. No one wins here ... I told Sally she can come and go as she wants. She is the mother. The only thing we can do is cooperate to give them a better future. 'They don't know what has been happening these last two weeks ... I couldn't tell them anything.' Mr Elamine is still pressing charges against Briton Adam Whittington, who was allegedly in charge of the operation, as well as Craig Michael and two Lebanese people involved. They must remain in the country to face the charges. He played down reports that the Nine Network paid him compensation to drop the charges. 'I didn't get paid anything, I didn't sign anything, the whole procedure isn't over, the case is still ongoing. We'll find out,' he said. Mr Elamine also expressed some sympathy for the crew as many of them have children of their own. 'The judge was saying the crew weren't part of the kidnapping on the ground, it still isn't confirmed that they funded it ... And they have families too, they have children,' he said. 'Being a parent away from your children sucks, and that is another reason I want Sally to be out (of jail) because she has a three-month-old baby in Australia she needs to care for ... I don't want to come between them.' Channel Nine has announced a review into the botched operation to be led by former 60 Minutes boss Gerald Stone. Nine CEO Hugh Marks sent an email to staff on Thursday outlining the plan. 'Nine will conduct a full review that will be headed by Gerald Stone, with David Hurley and General Counsel Rachel Launders, to ascertain what went wrong and why our systems, designed to protect staff, failed to do so in this case,' said Mr Marks. Ms Brown was pictured being shoved into a police car on Monday after a court hearing was postponed Ms Brown was caught in the middle of a frenzy outside a Beirut court earlier this week, but she said it looked worse than it was Ms Faulkner's estranged husband, Ali Elamine, pictured leaving court on Monday, previously told reporters that he would press charges against everyone 'involved' in the failed abduction attempt A sealed truck, believed to be transporting Ms Faulkner and Ms Brown, was seen driving towards Baabda Prison For Women on Wednesday A car carrying the 60 Minutes crew from the jail was surrounded by reporters from other news outlets The three-man 60 Minutes crew were freed from jail and left waiting in this car for Ms Brown and Ms Faulkner to emerge 'We will task the review with recommending the necessary actions to ensure that none of our colleagues are put in a similar position in the future.' 'It is important to reiterate that at no stage did anyone from Nine or 60 Minutes intend to act in any way that made them susceptible to charges that they breached the law or to become part of the story that is Sally's story. 'But we did become part of the story and we shouldn't have.' A spokeswoman for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said it was too soon to comment on any conditions attached to the group's release. 'We are please to hear of the news of the release of Ms Faulkner and the four 60 Minutes crew members on bail,' the spokeswoman said in a statement. 'It is premature to comment on how soon the released Australians will be able to depart Lebanon or any conditions attached to their release.' Mr Elamine and Ms Faulkner are set to meet the judge in his Chambers at 11am (local time) on Thursday. Ms Brown looked as though she was being manhandled when she was led out of Baabda Palace of Justice on Monday Tara Brown (right) and Sally Faulkner were pictured being led away in handcuffs from the Beirut court after the hearing was postponed on Monday Sally Faulkner (pictured) travelled to Lebanon to retrieve her children, Noah, three, and Lahela, six Ali Elamine, said he would not drop the charges against Sally Faulkner because that would mean everyone else would 'get off' The father's lawyer Hussein Berjawi said the Mr Elamine dropped the charges against his ex-wife at the request of their two children. 'It's because she is the mum of his kids,' Mr Berjawi said. 'It's based on the request of the children he will ask for her release.' On Monday, Mr Elamine admitted that the young children 'want their mum'. The father also told the judge that he decided to drop the charges against the TV crew because they were 'just doing their job'. Ms Faulkner and the TV crew were arrested two weeks ago after a child recovery team seized her children from Mr Elamine's family on a Beirut Street. They have spent the past two weeks behind bars and were facing charges of kidnapping and being members of a criminal gang, which can attract maximum sentences of up to 10 years. Police push Tara Brown's head down as she is put into a car outside Baabda Court in Beirut A policeman holds the back of Tara Brown's hair as he puts her into the car on Monday Lebanese authorities sought to shield Sally Faulkner and Tara Brown, ordering reporters into a stairway before leading them down a hallway out of sight Tara Brown was pictured being forced into a police car before she was taken back to prison These charges against the TV crew have been dropped, but members of the child recovery agency hired for the operation are believed to still be facing charges. This means the future is uncertain for Craig Michael and Adam Whittington, who are both part of a child recovery agency. Ms Faulkner's lawyer Ghassan Moghabghab told AAP that the warring couple negotiated an agreement which could mean Mr Elamine gets full custody. When Mr Moghabghab was asked whether the deal involved a payment to Mr Elamine, he replied: 'For my part it does not involve money, I don't know about the other party (the Nine Network).' Speaking earlier on Wednesday, Mr Moghabghab claimed Mr Elamine was holding out for money as part of a deal to ensure Ms Faulkner isn't formally charged with kidnapping 'He is waiting for money. Everything Ali is doing leads to one conclusion, that he is aiming for money,' Moghabghab told News Corp. Tara Brown was pictured being escorted by police officers from the court in Beirut Mr Elamine has previously denied claims that he wants compensation, telling reporters that 'money is not an issue'. Ms Brown and Ms Faulkner made a brief appearance before a judge at the Baabda Palace of Justice on Monday before the hearing was postponed. Judge Abdullah adjourned the matter so lawyers for Ms Faulkner and Mr Elamine could continue talks. The lawyers have been discussing custody arrangements for the two young children who were allegedly taken on holiday to Lebanon by their father but not returned to Ms Faulkner as agreed. Ms Faulkner's lawyer had previously indicated she could drop her claim to custody in exchange for kidnapping charges being dropped. Mr Elamine said on Monday he was reluctant to drop charges against his former partner if it made it more likely that the 60 Minutes crew, and others involved in the operation, would be freed too. Ms Faulkner then said she wanted to talk directly with Mr Elamine to help strike a deal. 'I just want to go home and take my kids,' she told News Corp from her jail cell at the Baabda women's prison. 'I am not taking them away from their dad, I don't want to do what he did, and I want him to be part of the kids' lives.' Ms Brown also insisted that the dramatic pictures of her leaving court in handcuffs on Monday and being shoved into a police car 'looked much worse than it was'. 'It looked much worse than it was,' Ms Brown told News Corp as both women spoke from inside the Baabda women's prison. Mr Elamine admitted his children 'probably' wanted to be with their mother but hardened his stance against 60 Minutes Adam Whittington, (pictured) the chief planner of the 60 Minutes botched 'child abduction' in Lebanon, said on Sunday that he can prove Channel Nine paid him more than $115,000 for the snatch 'They were trying to protect me from the cameras, it might have been easier for me to turn my head.' Ms Faulkner added: 'We were laughing in the car, all we wanted to do was not get her photo taken.' It was the first time Ms Brown was pictured since her arrest on April 7 over the attempt to snatch back Ms Faulkner's children, Lahela, 5, and Noah, 3, from their father's family on a Beirut street. She laughed off claims that she had a blow dry before her brief court appearance, saying: 'I don't even have my hairbrush in here.' But the 60 Minutes reporter insisted that she was being treated 'extremely well' and that all the women in the prison are generous and kind. Ms Brown was careful not to divulge any information about court proceedings because she did not want to 'jeopardise' the situation. Ms Faulkner issued an emotional appeal to her ex-husband after becoming distressed when she heard that he said their children wanted to see her. She said that she did not want to take the children away from their father and that she wants him to be part of their lives. A prison van believed to be carrying those accused of the botched kidnapping attempt in Lebanon arrived at Beirut's Baabda court on Monday Ms Faulkner's claims her children Noah and Lahela were taken to Lebanon by her estranged husband Ali Elamine (pictured with Noah and Lahela) in 2015 and he refused to bring them back Ghassan Mughaghab (pictured), the lawyer for Brisbane woman Sally Faulkner, said negotiations between Mr Elamine and Ms Faulkner had broken down 'I am not spiteful, I acted out of desperation,' the Brisbane mother told News Corp. 'They have had the best of us, now they have the worst of us.' She said she was concerned that Mr Elamine may be getting influenced by his family. Ms Faulkner's lawyer said she has been fighting to get access to her children for nine months. The lawyer said that Mr Elamine took the two children on a three-week holiday to Lebanon and did not return them as agreed. But an attempt to snatch them from a suburban Beirut street by a 'child recovery team', caught on CCTV, was ultimately unsuccessful. The children were returned to their father and the 60 Minutes team were arrested. Craig Michael and Adam Whittington, believed to be members of the child recovery agency hired for the operation, were also arrested. Whittington claims he has receipts showing that Nine made online payments totalling $115,000 to him for the planning of the operation and recovery of the children. 'It was direct from Channel Nine, it was from their accounts department and they paid it in two instalments,' he told The Australian. Nine has refused to comment. For the past two weeks, Ms Brown and Ms Faulkner have been held at Baabda Central Women's Prison (pictured) The prison is a grim, overcrowded block housing mostly murderers and drug dealers with up to 20 women per cell 'It will help everybody, I think. It will help everybody': Ms Faulkner's lawyer says that if Mr Elamine drops the personal kidnapping charges against her, it will have a favourable flow-on effect for the whole team Sally Faulkner's lawyer has reportedly said she was paid for by the Nine Network and had used money given to her by 60 Minutes to the child recovery agency, Child Abduction Recovery International Veteran journalist Stephen Rice (left), David Ballment (centre) and Benjamin Williamson (right) are also in custody in Lebanon Ms Faulkner told The Australian on Friday she was doing well behind bars. 'Please tell my mum and dad how well I am and also [husband] Brendan and my in-laws,' she said. Ms Brown is also behind bars at the prison. 'I am fine but my loved ones need to know that.' Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has told The Project that she is in 'constant contact' with Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil regarding the case. CCTV footage supplied by Lebanese authorities appeared to show the bungled kidnapping earlier this week The breakthrough came after Mr Elamine agreed a deal with his ex-wife after she conceded to give him full custody of the two children in exchange for her release. Speaking outside the court, Elamine said his estranged wife can have access to the children. 'I am glad it's over. She is their mother and I don't want them growing up and thinking 'Daddy had the option of letting Mummy off easily and he didn't,' he said. 'It sucks, the whole thing sucks. No one wins here ... I told Sally she can come and go as she wants. She is the mother. The only thing we can do is cooperate to give them a better future. 'They don't know what has been happening these last two weeks ... I couldn't tell them anything.' Mr Elamine is still pressing charges against Briton Adam Whittington, who was allegedly in charge of the operation, as well as Craig Michael and two Lebanese people involved. These are the faces of three young men police are searching for after a violent gang-related riot in Melbourne shut down parts of the city and terrorised the public. Police have so far charged 24 people, some as young as 14, who were involved in the riot at Melbourne's Moomba festival on March 12. But investigators are yet to identify these three men and are now appealing for public assistance to help identify them. Scroll down for video Police have so far charged 24 people who were involved in the riot at Melbourne's Moomba festival on March 12 but are yet to identify three men (pictured) who are suspected of being involved Two of the men are believed to have been involved in a 10-person fight on Swanston Street between Flinders Street and Flinders Lane at about 10.30pm, just prior to a larger brawl at City Square. The other young man is alleged to have stolen a woman's phone while she was waiting at Melbourne Central train station at about 12.10am. A number of the teenagers already arrested over the brawls have claimed to be part of the notorious Sudanese Apex gang, but police said earlier this month many are normal young people who haven't ever had run ins with the authorities. This young man, believed to be are believed to be 17 to 20-years-old, is suspected of being involved in a 10 person fight on Swanston Street at about 10.30pm Police also want to speak to this man, believed to be between 15 to 20-years-old, after coming through CCTV and still images taken on the night This man, who police believe is about 15, is alleged to have stolen a woman's phone while she was waiting at Melbourne Central train station at about 12.10am The majority of those charged so far have been under the age of 18. They have been accused of a range of offences including affray, riotous behaviour, robbery and theft. Police have released descriptions and photos of the three men they wish to speak to after coming through CCTV and still images taken on the night. The first man is of Caucasian appearance and is described as 15 to 20-years-old, 172cms with a slim build. He had stubble on his chin and short black hair on both sides of his head with wavy bleached hair on top. He was wearing a black t-shirt with red and black chequered sleeves. Police have identified more than 40 people, some as young as 14 years old, who were involved in a violent gang-related riot at Melbourne's Moomba festival on March 12 At least 24 young people, some who claim to be part of the Sudanese Apex gang, have been charged following a violent gang-related riot in Melbourne that shut down parts of the city and terrorised the public The second male is of African appearance, 17 to 20-years-old, over 182cms with a slim build. He had cropped black hair and was wearing a red 'Red Wings' jumper with white bands on the shoulders, neck and waist, black tracksuit pants with three white stripes down the side and black canvass shoes. The third man, who was allegedly involved in the robbery, is of African appearance and aged about 15. He is about 172cm tall with a slim build. He was wearing a black hooded jumper with grey shoulders and a grey hood, black Adidas tracksuit pants with three white stripes down the side and black canvas shoes with black laces. Anyone with any information is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or submit a confidential crime report to www.crimestoppersvic.com.au. Colorado Republican Chairman Steve House said he hopes a sheriff from his state will accompany the delegation to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this summer. His delegates have been getting threatening email messages and telephone calls from GOP frontrunner Donald Trump's supporters after the state didn't hold a primary or caucus and instead selected delegates through a series of nominating conventions. Trump's biggest rival, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, had a superior ground game in the state and his supporters ended up filling up practically all of the state's delegate slots. Scroll down for video Colorado Republican Chairman Steve House told a closed meeting of state GOP chairmen that he wanted protection for his delegation at the Republican National Convention because of threats from Trump supporters Sen. Ted Cruz (left) is putting all of his eggs in a contested convention basket, while frontrunner Donald Trump (right) says he will have the nomination locked up before the RNC House raised his concerns during a closed meeting of state GOP chairmen gathered in Holiday Beach, Florida, for the Republican National Committee meeting going on this week. House later relayed to The Associated Press just one of the messages he received by phone after Ted Cruz swept Colorado's delegate selection conventions this month. House said a caller told him to 'put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger.' And if he didn't? 'I'll send someone over to help you.' Trump did not compete aggressively for the Colorado delegates, and received none of the state's 34 pledged delegates. House is among three unpledged delegates from the state, and is publicly neutral. With Trump's convincing win in New York this week, Cruz has been mathematically eliminated from being able to earn the requisite 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination. Now Trump is the only Republican candidate who can achieve such a feat, which he still can, but would have to win 63 percent of the remaining bound delegates on the table. That means the Texas senator has to put all of his eggs in the contested convention basket, with the hopes that the convention will go to a second ballot. At that point many of Trump's bound delegates will be able to vote for the candidate of their choice. Cruz's team is going state by state to make sure if it comes to that, the delegates headed to the convention would choose the Texan in that scenario. Colorado's situation was a bit unique because the delegates never have to vote with the will of the voters because voters in the state never went to the polls, as Republicans never scheduled a caucus nor a primary. While Cruz is maneuvering behind the scenes, Trump's team is trying to put forward that the billionaire's nomination is inevitable. In a campaign memo leaked to the Washington Post, surrogates for the Trump campaign were confidently supposed to say that The Donald expected to grab up 1,400 delegates before the convention. He would do this by dominating the remaining primary contests and convincing unbound delegates, of which there are, give or take, 200, to board the Trump train. 'The Cruz spin machine produces more lies than anybody else,' surrogates are supposed to say. British gangsters drove across Europe to smuggle an arsenal of guns and ammunition with four times the firepower used in the Paris attacks last November. The haul, bought in Slovakia from a supplier linked to the Charlie Hebdo shootings, was driven through open borders with no customs or passport checks. Assault rifles and machine guns capable of firing 800 rounds a minute, bought for as little as 40, were then smuggled on a motor boat into a quiet Kent marina where police were waiting. Last night, after the trial of two of the gangsters, police warned similar contraband weapons could end up in the hands of Islamic fanatics bent on bringing jihad to Britain. The Kent-based gang transported 22 assault rifles, nine machine guns and 1,500 rounds of ammunition on a motor boat into a quiet Kent marina where police were waiting Assault rifles and machine guns capable of firing 800 rounds a minute, bought for as little as 40, were then smuggled on a motor boat into a quiet Kent marina The Kent-based gang transported 22 assault rifles, nine machine guns and 1,500 rounds of ammunition into the country the largest haul ever seized in mainland Britain. They face lengthy jail sentences after two of them were found guilty at the Old Bailey yesterday of smuggling firearms worth up to 250,000 on the black market. Three others had pleaded guilty at an earlier date. The National Crime Agency's Paul Morris said such weapons being on the criminal market brought 'concerns for all of us' as no one can control who they are sold to. Following the trial, it can be revealed that: The guns came from a weapons store called AFG in Slovakia which supplied the fanatics who slaughtered 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris in January last year; An assault rifle used in an attack on a French train in August came from the same shop; Such weapons capable of 'carnage on a terrifying scale' can be sold for 8,000 each in Britain; Armed officers were deployed inside the Old Bailey for the first time in eight years and the jury was kept in isolation for security. The gang bought 22 Czech VZ58 assault rifles, similar to the Russian AK-47, nine Skorpion sub-machine guns, 1,500 rounds of ammunition, 58 magazines and two silencers. Harry Shilling, 26, ran the seven-strong gang which imported the largest haul of weapons ever seized on mainland Britain The weapons were shipped in from Boulogne, in northern France, on board the Albernina to the river Medway and unloaded at Cuxton Marina, near Rochester The weapons were initially purchased by a middleman from AFG last year. The guns were being legally sold in a deactivated condition. But they were reactivated by a criminal who simply hammered out a metal pin placed in the barrel. A police source said: 'We have seen weapons from Slovakia which are very easy to reactivate and are fully functional. 'They can be bought legally and are often stashed at safe houses across Europe. Some are passed to Islamic extremists to wage terror and others are for the criminal underworld.' The sale of the 'live' weapons was negotiated by Michael Defraine, 30, the gang's 'man on the Continent'. The arsenal was then driven from Slovakia to Boulogne in northern France, through at least five countries without having to show passports. Weapons and ammunition were hidden in an adapted leisure cruiser called the Albernina before David Payne, 43, sailed them across the Channel and up the River Medway in Kent in August. When the boat arrived at Cuxton Marina, near Rochester, Harry Shilling, 26, emailed Defraine saying: 'We [are] now officially gangsters.' Defraine responded: 'F****** nice one.' Shilling replied: 'Hahahaha, defo [definitely] that's sick. Duck and run for cover b******. We are a firm ain't we.' Defraine answered: 'Proper heavy and armed to the teeth.' The gang were found with 22 VZ-58 assault rifles, nine Skorpion sub-machine guns, two silencers and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition Bought for as little as 40 each, the gang hoped to make up to 250,000 selling the weapons to criminals but the military-grade weapons could have easily fallen into terrorists' hands The guns were bought in the Balkans and Eastern Europe - believed to be the source of at least some of the weapons used in the Charlie Hebdo shootings Shilling also exchanged messages with a contact known as 'B' to arrange onward supply of the guns. He wrote: 'Next month I have 30 glocks I will sell.' B asked whether he would 'give sweets with them', and Shilling replied: 'Yea there's 2 clips with each one.' The terms 'sweets' and 'clips' are references to ammunition. However, the NCA had been monitoring the gang since March after Kent Police discovered intelligence suggesting the men were planning to smuggle weapons into Britain. Armed police made the arrests on August 11, soon after the weapons were transferred to a van. They arrested Payne on a dirt track near the marina. Asked what was in the van, he said: 'Guns.' The NCA admitted there is a weakness in customs controls around small ports, describing them as 'generally an unpoliced area'. But its officers thwarted the plot after breaching encryption software installed on BlackBerry phones. Rob Lewin of the NCA said: 'This seizure of automatic weapons was the largest ever made by the NCA These are hugely powerful firearms, and have a truly devastating capability. 'We cannot say for certain what the organised crime group would have done But the evidence pointed to them not being afraid to use guns themselves to expand their influence We can only speculate that some of these weapons would have been sold to whoever had the means to pay the asking price.' Richard Rye, 24, (left) and David Payne, 43, (right). Rye and Payne pleaded guilty to conspiring to import the firearms and also admitted conspiracy to possess firearms with intent to endanger life Armed officers arrested Michael Defraine, 30, (left) outside a Homebase in Kent in August 2015. He has now been found guilty of attempting to smuggle weapons into Britain. Christopher Owen, 30, (right) pleaded guilty to being knowingly concerned in the evasion of a prohibition on importation of the firearms He added: 'These were very similar weapons to those used in the Charlie Hebdo attacks the same supply route and same methodology of deactivating and reactivating.' Shilling and Defraine were convicted of conspiring to import firearms and possessing firearms with intent to endanger life. Payne, Richard Rye, 24, and Christopher Owen, 30, had already pleaded guilty to conspiring to import firearms. Rye and Payne also admitted conspiracy to possess firearms with intent to endanger life. Police say they likely found the body of missing firefighter Nicole Mittendorff Female remains found on Thursday in Virginia's Shenandoah National Park are likely those of a paramedic-firefighter who disappeared a week ago, Virginia State Police said. Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said in an email late on Thursday that troopers have preliminarily identified the body found as Nicole Mittendorff of Woodbridge, Virginia. The Virginia medical examiner will have to confirm the identity through an autopsy and the body was taken to the chief medical examiner's office in Manassas, Geller said. The evidence collected during the investigation, including a 'suicide note' found in Mittendorff's car, leads troopers to believe no foul play was involved in her death, she said. The contents of the note have not been publicly revealed. Mittendorff's sister, Jennifer Clardy Chalmers, released a statement saying, 'We believe that Nicole has been found and is finally coming home, however not in the way we anticipated. This is not the positive outcome that we continued to hope and pray for over the past week. ... We thank everyone for their time, dedication and support in our search to find Nicole and ask that you keep our family in your prayers in the challenging days ahead.' Mittendorff went missing a week ago after phoning in to work sick and leaving the home she shared with her husband. Her abandoned car was later found in the Virginia National Park. A park spokesman said: 'At approximately 2:00 p.m. a ground team of National Park Service and Virginia State Police personnel discovered a body in a remote location more than a mile from the Whiteoak Canyon parking area and about 330 yards from the trail in treacherous rocky terrain. National Park Service and Virginia State Police are currently still processing the scene,' said a statement from Shenandoah National Park. Earlier on Thursday, the Facebook page Find Nicole said: 'Our hearts are broken. We thank you for your support and ask that you keep our family in your prayers in the challenging days ahead.' Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said in an email late on Thursday that troopers have preliminarily identified the body found as Nicole Mittendorff. Pictured here is teh search team on site The body was found at 2:00 p.m. on about 330 yards from a trail in the park in treacherous rocky terrain. The search and rescue team is pictured on Thursday evening The Find Nicole Facebook page shared the police's tragic finding which may indicate that the body does belong to Nicole Mittendorf Earlier on Thursday, the Facebook page Find Nicole said: 'Our hearts are broken. We thank you for your support and ask that you keep our family in your prayers in the challenging days ahead' Tragedy: Mittendorff is also an athlete, runs avidly and frequently explores trails to train for triathlons and other events, her family said Those close to Mittendorf previously said she is 'extremely dedicated to her job'. Her family also wrote on Facebook that Nicole downloaded documents onto her cellphone before she went missing and that her wireless provider is now cooperating with the investigation. Just what the documents include has not yet been revealed. A vigil was held at 7:30pm Wednesday night at Fire Station 32. At a Tuesday press conference, Nicole's husband Steve Mittendorff broke down in tears as he read a statement directed at his wife. 'Sweetheart, I love you. I am praying for you. Im not sure where you are but know that we are all looking for you. And I look forward to your safe return,' he said. Family say the last time they heard from her was on Wednesday, April 13, by text. Mittendorff is also an athlete, runs avidly and frequently explores trails to train for triathlons and other events, her family said. For confidential support in the U.S., call the National Suicide Prevention Line on 1-800-273-8255. For confidential support in the UK call the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90, visit a local Samaritans branch or see www.samaritans.org. On the lookout: The Virginia State Police recovery team helped search for Nicole in Shenandoah National Park Mittendorf went missing a week ago after phoning in to work sick and leaving the home she shared with her husband. Pictured here are people aiding in a search Last heard from: Family say the last time they heard from her was on Wednesday, April 13, by text Married: Mittendorff's husband Steven has expressed gratitude at the support people have sent since his wife's disappearance Found: Her abandoned car was later found in the Virginia National Park. Police say that inside of the car was a suicide note Mittendorff is a firefighter and a paramedic in Fairfax County, Virginia. Friends and family knew something was wrong when she didn't show up to her job on Friday Clothes maketh the man, and this could not be more true when it comes to crushing rebel scum. As one of the most iconic baddies in Hollywood history, Darth Vader is a menacing presence but without his glossy black space suit, it is unlikely he would have instilled the same level of fear. For those in the market for the Sith Lord's garb - it now has a real-life price tag - $18.3 million (12.9 million) Darth Vader's suit is one of the most iconic outfits in Hollywood history, and it has a real-world price tag. Bury-based Shade Station calculated the price for the infamous Sith Lord's suit, based on current pricing of components, putting the grand total at a staggering $18.3million (12.7million). From the specialist breathing apparatus, to the prosthetic limbs, the meeting of space age tech sartorial style does not come cheap. Bury-based Shade Station calculated the price for the infamous movie villain's suit, based on current pricing of components. When considering the design, they had to take function into account and the resulting suit would have kept a young Anakin Skywalker pod-racing into his teens to earn enough credits top afford it. At the heart of his Imperial style, and pushing up the price a cool $12million, is a Nasa space suit, as used by astronauts aboard the station. Pictured is Vader after his Imperial Storm Troopers have taken out the Rebels MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU (AND ALSO YOUR WALLET) Bury-based Shade Station has worked up the price for the infamous villian's suit, based on current pricing of components. It includes prosthetic limbs, augmented reality helmet, respirator and voice box as well as a pressurised space suit. In total, based on real world components, Lord Vader's suit is estimated to be worth $18.3million (12.9million). Advertisement At the heart of his Imperial outfit is one of Nasa's space suits, as used by astronauts aboard the International Space Station for space walks. The report figures Vader would need a pressurised suit to protect him from the vacuum of space when chasing down X-Wings in his Advanced TIE Fighter, so this kicks things off at an impressive $12m (8.4m). Fans of the second trilogy, will know Vader's limbs were destroyed by lava in an epic battle with Obi Wan Kenobi. In order for him to be able to wield a lightsaber and choke incompetent staff aboard the Death Star, they needed replacing. Advanced prosthetics can help the Sith Lord on his way to the dark side, at a cost of $70k (49k) a leg, and $40k (14k) for his left arm - racking up a total of $180,000 (126,000). By the time he fought Luke Sywalker in the Empire Strikes Back (pictured), Darth Vader had already lost both legs and an arm. These would have been replaced by top-end prosthetics The high-end prosthetic arm (illustrated) and legs, combined with life-long maintenance and care in the real world, would rack up a hefty $5.4million (3.8million) for all three limbs In order to keep his prosthetics in working order, Shade Station factored in health insurance and maintenance costs, which for top end prosthetics, could run as high as $1.8million (1.3million) over the course of a lifetime. This boosts the price to $5.4million (3.8million) for all three limbs. Elsewhere, the firm believes the helmet would incorporate augmented reality, including night vision, navigation and targeting. The closest thing available on Earth would be the mounted display of an F-35 fighter jet, which would roll up the cost by a further $600,000 (418,000). It was assumed that Darth Vader would require a Nasa space suit (illustrated), as used by astronauts aboard the space station, in order to keep him alive in the unpressurised cabin of his TIE-Fighter The firm believes Darth Vader's helmet would most likely incorporate augmented reality technology, including night vision, navigation and a targeting system for chasing down X-Wings The closest thing to Lord Vader's helmet available on Earth today would likely be the mounted display of an F-35 fighter jet, which would roll up the cost by a further $600,000 (418,000) MILLENNIUM FALCON WOULD COST 2MILLION A YEAR TO RUN The Millennium Falcon would cost 2,044,000 ($3,064,415) a year in repairs, according to engineers. Researchers estimated it would require more than 350,000 ($529,817) in labour costs alone. Derby-based engineering firm SGS estimated that the annual maintenance bills of the Millennium Falcon alone would top seven figures. With a reputation for being unreliable, replacements parts would see captain Han Solo paying out around 500,000 ($749,612). The firm used official data of annual maintenance costs of commercial jets, fighter jets and standard mechanical labour rates as the basis for its calculations. Advertisement Vader would not be Vader without the laboured mechanical breathing of his suit. In order to keep his heart and lungs running efficiently, a suitable ventilator would need to be built into the suit. As an Imperial leader, it is unlikely Vader would want to be seen associating with the smuggler rabble in one of Mos Eiley's cantinas, so would likely pay in the realms of $45,000 (32,000) for it new. Last and by no means least, is Darth Vader's iconic voice. Such well-spoken received pronunciation would require a decent voice synthesiser to be incorporated into the suit, with a high end unit expected to cost $1,000 (700). Shade Station told MailOnline it designed the infographic to coincide with the DVD release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, released in the UK this week. 'We thought it was a really interesting topic, and helped not only to celebrate the film, but to highlight some of the amazing technology currently available in the real world.' The firm added that it hopes to boost awareness of looking after their eyesight. Thousands of years after his death, Otzi 'the iceman' has been resurrected as a life-sized model. Scientists today presented a 3D printed copy of the mummified 5,000-year-old body found in the Alps 25 years ago. Pre-existing CT scans were used to make the resin replica which was then sculpted and hand-painted by US artist Gary Staab over many months. Scroll down for video The scanned images were first transformed into a virtual 3D model that was printed and post-processed with Staab's unique prodigious artistry. The first replica is housed in South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, but will soon make its way to the United States for a travelling exhibit HOW WERE THE REPLICAS MADE? Pre-existing CT scans were used to make the 5,000 mummy replica, which was then sculpted and hand-painted before finding a new home at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Italy. Using 3D images of the corpse and forensic technology, two Dutch artists Alfons and Adrie Kennis - painstakingly created a new Otzi model and US artist Gary Staab spent months painting and sculpting the replica. The scanned images were first transformed into a virtual 3D model that was printed and post-processed with Staab's unique prodigious artistry. Advertisement 'The reconstruction of the hands was a challenge, since they could not be captured on CT scans,' the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology, where Otzi is housed in Bolzano, northern Italy said. Three replicas were made, one of which will be part of a travelling exhibition that will tour North America, starting in the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science in Raleigh in October 2017. The second and the third replicas will be used for teaching purposes at the Cold Spring Harbor DNA Learning Center in New York (DNALC). In what became an archaeological sensation, Otzi's mummified remains were found high in the Otztal Alps of southern Austria by hikers in September 1991 after being preserved in the ice since the Stone Age. Clothing and equipment including an axe and a backpack found at the site, as well as the contents of Otzi's stomach, his DNA and his 61 tattoos gave scientists highly valuable insights into human life at the time. He died a violent death, killed by an arrow, around the age of 45. He was 1.6 metres (five foot, three inches) tall, weighed 50 kilos (110 pounds), had brown eyes and was lactose intolerant. Pre-existing CT scans were used to make the 5,000 mummy replica, which was then sculpted and hand-painted before finding a new home at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Italy. Three models have been made from the scans and starting next year, Otzi will tour North America for a travelling exhibit Artists created a 55-tall printed copy of the Iceman, over which skin textures were laid and painted Using 3D images of the corpse and forensic technology, two Dutch artists Alfons (right) and Adrie Kennis (left) - painstakingly created a new Otzi model. The are pictured here with an old Otzi model created in 2011 WHO WAS OTZI? MUMMIFIED MAN GIVES GLIMPSE OF EARLY HUMAN HISTORY Researchers discovered an arrow took Otzi's life at the age of 45. The ice man stood at 5 foot 3 inches tall, weighed 110 pounds and was lactose intolerant Since his discovery on 19 December 1991 by German hikers, tzi has provided window into early human history. His mummified remains were uncovered in melting glacier in the mountainous border between Austria and Italy. Analysis of the body has told us that he was alive during the Copper Age and died a grisly death. Otzi, who was 46 at the time of his death, had brown eyes, relatives in Sardinia, and was lactose intolerant. He was also predisposed to heart disease. Recent research focused on the DNA in the nuclei of Otzi's cells, and it could yield further insights into the famous ice mummy's life. Otzi was unearthed in September 1991 by German tourists trekking through the Oetz Valley, after which he was named. Researchers examining the contents of his stomach worked out that his final meal consisted of venison and ibex meat. Archaeologists believe Otzi, who was carrying a bow, a quiver of arrows and a copper axe, may have been a hunter or warrior killed in a skirmish with a rival tribe. Researchers say he was about 5ft 2.5 inches (159cm) tall, 46 years old, arthritic and infested with whipworm - an intestinal parasite. His perfectly preserved body is stored in his own specially designed cold storage chamber at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Italy at a constant temperature of -6C (21F). Visitors can view the mummy through a small window. Alongside his remains is a new Otzi model created using 3D images of the corpse and forensic technology by two Dutch artists - Alfons and Adrie Kennis. Advertisement The 3D version of Otzi does have some parts missing from its body, such as a few ribs, and the team noted the hands were challenging to construct, as they wouldn't show up in the scan. The scanned images were first transformed into a virtual 3D model that was printed and post-processed with Staab's unique prodigious artistry, reports Materialise. 'Materialise process-segmented all of the scan data, made a fantastic accurate print, and I was able to add the details over the top of the print,' he said. But there were also issues that followed the printing. 'When I tried putting him back together from the scanned slices, the pieces didn't seem to match,' said Eric Renteria, one of the engineers for the project. 'So I did some research and found his total height and compared that to the total height of all the pieces I had reconstructed. 'Once I saw that there was a mismatch, I moved his head piece into the correct spatial location, which revealed that there was a gap missing.' The scanned images were first transformed into a virtual 3D model that was printed and post-processed Since his discovery in December 1991 by German hikers, tzi has provided window into early human history In what became an archaeological sensation, Otzi's mummified remains were found high in the Otztal Alps - hence the name- by hikers in September 1991 after being preserved in the ice since the Stone Age The 3D version of Otzi does have some parts missing from its body, such as a few ribs, and the team noted the hands were challenging to construct, as they wouldn't show up in the scan The first will go on display at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science in Raleigh in October 2017 and the second and third will be used as educational instruments at the Cold Spring Harbor DNA Learning Center in New York Google has been accused by the European Commission of 'stifling competition' by abusing the dominant position of its Android operating system. The EU Anti-Trust Commission has alleged the technology giant breached competition rules by preventing consumers from 'having as wide a choice as possible'. The commission claims Google was making manufacturers pre-install Google Search and the Chrome browser. The European Union opened a new anti-trust battle with Google, charging the US tech giant with abusing the dominance of its Android mobile phone operating system A TIMELINE OF EVENTS 2007 - US Federal Trade Commission investigates Google's acquisition of online advertising firm DoubleClick and rules it can go ahead. 2008 - US Justice Department blocks a deal to allow Yahoo to run Google search ads on Yahoo sites. 2009 - Rivals file complaints against Google to national regulators in Europe, citing competition concerns. 2010 - European Commission launches formal antitrust probe of Google's search business. This is still ongoing. 2013 - FTC drops its two-year investigation of Google, concluding it had not manipulated search results to damage rivals. 2014 - European politicians pass a non-binding resolution calling for the break-up of Google's search engine business from the rest of the company. 2015 - New EU antitrust commissioner Ms Vestager charges Google with distorting search results to favour its own shopping services over rivals and reveals that she is also investigating Google's Android business. Advertisement In a statement of objections to the US tech firm, the Commission told Google it had breached EU competition law. It said that if found guilty the company faces a heavy fine and would be forced to clean up its act. Google is already facing charges over the promotion of its shopping service in internet searches at the expense of rival services in a case that has been on since late 2010. In the latest charge, Google has allegedly given financial incentives to manufacturers and mobile network operators if they exclusively pre-installed Google Search on their devices. It has also blocked some manufacturers from selling smartphones which ran on 'competing operating systems based on the Android open source code'. The Commission believes these moves have stopped other mobile browsers from being able to compete with Google in the rapidly growing smartphone and Android markets. Speaking at a press conference in Brussels, the European competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, told journalists she had reached a preliminary view that Google was in breach of EU law. The California based firm now has 12 weeks to respond to the charges. Vestager went onto detail specific problems in the Android market. Android was first unveiled by Google in 2007 and allows users to swipe, tap and pinch objects on their phones and tablets. It is what is known as an 'open-source software' platform, meaning competing operating systems can be built using its source code. Speaking at a press conference in Brussels, the European competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, told journalists she had reached a preliminary view that Google was in breach of EU law But today the Commissioner alleged Google had barred manufacturers from selling devices using these operating systems. She said: 'Based on our investigation thus far, we believe that Google's behaviour denies consumers a wider choice of mobile apps and services and stands in the way of innovation by other players, in breach of EU anti-trust rules.' Pictured is the global market for smartphone operating systems, showing just how dominant Android has become She added that a 'competitive mobile internet sector' was becoming more important for consumers and businesses in Europe. Kent Walker, Google's senior vice president and general counsel, responded: 'Android has helped foster a remarkable - and, importantly, sustainable - ecosystem, based on open-source software and open innovation. 'We look forward to working with the European Commission to demonstrate that Android is good for competition and good for consumers.' According to the EU Commission, Google is a dominant force, holding more than 90 per cent of the market for general internet search, licensable smart mobile operating systems and app stores for the Android mobile operating system. It added that about 80 per cent of smartphones across the world run on the Android operating systems developed by Google. The rebuke from the commission comes after Google faced criticism earlier this year for the amount of tax it pays in the UK. The company has agreed to pay the Treasury 130million in back taxes and interest dating back to the previous decade, but has been criticised over the amount. Last week the European Union's digital chief warned that he wanted search engines - such as Google's and Microsoft's Bing - to be more transparent about advertising in web search results. European Commission vice-president Andrus Ansip, said he was worried about how transparent some search engines are when displaying ads in search results. The Commission is also looking into the transparency of paid-for reviews as well as the conditions of use of services such as Google Maps and Apple's IoS mobile operating system. Although the idea of living forever seems to be rooted firmly in the realms of science fiction, it may not be the futuristic pipe dream once thought. Ray Kurzweil, an author who describes himself as a futurist and works on Google's machine learning project, predicts that by 2029, humans will be extending their lives considerably or even indefinitely. He also believes the human brain could be enhanced by tiny robotic implants that connect to cloud-based computer networks to give us 'God-like' abilities. Scroll down for video Ray Kurzweil (pictured), who describes himself as a futurist and works on Google's machine learning project, predicts that by 2029, humans will be extending their lives considerably or even indefinitely. He also believes the brain could be enhanced by implants that connect to cloud-based networks to give us 'God-like' abilities However, he admitted computers won't take over us until they learn to love and laugh. Mr Kurzweil's views about living forever have been expressed on a number of occassions, but more recently in an interview with Playboy. The comments build on those he made previously during a discussion in New York with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. 'When I talk about computers reaching human levels of intelligence, I'm not talking about logical intelligence,' Kurzweil said. 'It is being funny, and expressing a loving sentiment...That is the cutting edge of human intelligence.' CREATING LIVING ROBOTS DNA already has the potential to transform the computing world by recreating living cells into data storage devices. Now scientists have gone one step further and used DNA 'nanobots' inside living cockroaches that open up to deliver drugs. The nanorobots, which can function like living computers, were created using DNA strands that fold and unfold like origami. Bioengineers hope DNA nanobots could carry out complex programs that could one day be used to diagnose or treat diseases. Daniel Levner, a bioengineer at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University and his colleagues at Bar Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel, made the nanobots by exploiting the binding properties of DNA. When DNA comes across a certain kind of protein, it unravels into two different strands, according to a report by Sarah Spickernell at New Scientist. Advertisement The implants would allow people to send emails and photos directly to each other's brains while also backing up our thoughts and memories. Mr Kurzweil said they could also expand our capacity for emotions and creativity, and this ability to expand our brains with the information held in the cloud will combine with the power of artificial intelligence to make humans more 'God-like'. 'There is beauty, love and creativity and intelligence in the world, and it all comes from the neocortex,' he explained. 'We are going to be able to expand the neocortex and so we are going to become more God-like. 'We are going to add additional levels of abstraction and create more profound means of expression so we are going to be more musical, we are going to be funnier, we are going to be sexier and be better at expression more loving sentiments.' He added that it may be possible in the future to use the extra brain power provided by the cloud to multiply human intelligence. By the 2030s if he met Google co-founder Larry Page, for example, in the street, the technology could provide some assistance. He said: 'So I'm walking along, and I see Larry Page coming, and I think, "I better think of something clever to say." 'But my 300 million modules in my neocortex isn't going to cut it. I need a billion in two seconds. 'I'll be able to access that in the cloud - just like I can multiply intelligence with my smartphone thousands fold today.' Tiny robots (illustrated above) that have the capacity to connect our brains directly to the internet could help to give humans God-like abilities, expanding our capacity for emotions and creativity Scientists developing nano-machines have created capsules of DNA that can change their shape in response to certain conditions in the body and a molecular 'car' that uses balls of carbon as wheels (illustrated) The concept of nanomachines being inserted into the human body has been around in science fiction for decades. In the TV series Star Trek tiny molecular robots called nanites were used to help repair damaged cells in the body. Mr Kurzweil said similar robots could be built out of DNA and injected into the brain. Last year researchers injected packages of DNA that would unfurl under certain conditions into the bodies of cockroaches. They DNA origami were described as being the first step towards building basic robots that perform logical operations when it encounters a specific protein much like a 1 or a 0 from a silicon microchip. The more DNA robots injected into an animal, the greater the complexity can be achieved, and the researchers from the Bar Ilan University are now working to scale up the 'computing power' so that it rivals old 8-bit computers from the 1980s like a Commodore 64 or an Atari 800. Scientists at Rice University recently demonstrated a single-molecule 'car', which had buckyballs of carbon for wheels and could be controlled by changes in temperature. Computer scientist and author Ray Kurzweil claims nanobots could lead humans along an entirely new path of evolution that will give our species new powers of intelligence and emotional capabilities However, some scientists have warned the effectiveness of such devices will be limited. Most nano-machines are likely to find more use as ways of delivering drugs to specific cells in the body. Professor James Friend, a mechanical engineer at the University of California San diego told TheWorldPost that getting approval to inject these into humans may be difficult. He said would be a great deal of concern about injecting 'swimming mysterious things in your head and leaving them there'. Other leading scientists and technology experts have expressed fears at the growing use of Artificial Intelligence and called for tighter controls to be placed on its development. But Mr Kurzweil said nanobots could also help people create realistic avatars with the aid of artificial intelligence. He said: In the 2030s, we will be able to send nanobots into living people's brains and extract memories of people who have passed away. Then you can really make them very realistic.' Whether it's from your work computer, or on your phone, the layout of the letters on the keyboards you use every day may be having more of an effect on you than you realise. A study has found that words containing letters predominantly from the right of the keyboard are viewed more positively than those with letters from the left. This increasing use of keyboards might also be influencing our attitudes towards certain brands with names that contain more right-hand letters - such as Apple. The Qwerty effect is the idea the layout of computer keyboards influences word meanings by linking positivity to the use of the right hand and negativity to the use of the left hand. Researchers have studied whether it impacts our use of words across the web and found evidence to support its existence The Qwerty effect is the idea that the layout of computer keyboards influences word meanings by linking positivity to the use of the right hand and negativity to the use of the left hand. Dr David Garcia from ETH Zurich and Professor Markus Strohmaier from the University of Koblenz-Landau wanted to see if the effect had any impact on the way we use words across the web. They examined whether the effect was exhibited on the internet by studying the text of online reviews and how many stars people gave certain titles. THE QWERTY EFFECT The Qwerty effect is the idea that the layout of computer keyboards influences word meanings by linking positivity to the use of the right hand and negativity to the use of the left hand. Researchers have previously tested the idea by asking English, Dutch and Spanish speakers to rate their positive association with different words. One study in 2014 by researchers in found baby names with a higher proportion of right-side letters became more popular after Qwerty keyboards became widespread in the 1960s. The Qwerty effect can be studied by measuring the 'right side ratio' or RSR. This is the amount of right side letters divided by the sum of right and left side letters in a text. Book titles with a higher RSR have increased since the introduction of the internet Advertisement 'Our initial scepticism about the hypothesis of the effect raised our curiosity, it could be a good example of how human-computer interaction can have an fundamental effect on human communication,' Dr Garcia told MailOnline. 'We thought data from the web was a good opportunity to test the effect, and to our surprise we found evidence supporting its existence and illustrating some of its limitations.' The pair looked at millions of English-language product names and titles of books, films and video clips that appeared on 11 websites. The websites included Amazon, YouTube and Rotten Tomatoes. Dr David Garcia and Professor Markus Strohmaier wanted to see if the effect had any impact on the way we use words across the web. They examined whether the effect was exhibited on the internet by studying the text of online reviews and how many stars people gave certain titles This graph compares the estimate of the effect in the data (red) versus the same measure of the effect when the names were reshuffled (blue). For 9 out of 11 datasets, the red mass is clearly higher than the blue one, showing the relationship between the ratio of right side letters in the name is not by chance On nine of the sites, items with names with a higher ratio of letters from the right-hand side of the keyboard tended to be rated more highly On nine of those sites, items with names that had a higher ratio of letters from the right-hand side of the keyboard tended to be rated more highly by reviewers. The correlation with positive emotions is fascinating, Naomi Baron at American University in Washington DC, who is author of Words Onscreen told New Scientist: 'If you look at the origin of the QWERTY keyboard, it had nothing to do with emotions,' she says. 'It had to do with not getting the keys entangled with one another.' But the researchers still do not know what causes the effect. The effect was first put forward in 2012 by Kyle Jasmin and Daniel Casasanto, who looked into whether the reverse happened for left-handed people. 'We did not study the effect of handedness, but Jasmin and Casasanto did in their two papers on the topic,' Dr Garcia told MailOnline. 'They found that left-handers did not have the reverse effect and that the evidence pointed to the possibility that they also had the same association as the right-handers, but the data was too small to be significant.' The meaning of words is normative, we all agree lo a large extent on what they mean, and since the vast majority of the population is right-handed, they might push the meanings towards the association of the right with positivity and make it appear in left-handers too. WHY DO WE USE QWERTY KEYBOARDS? The arrangement of characters on a QWERTY keyboard was designed in 1868 by Christopher Sholes, the inventor of the typewriter. The early typewriter used a mechanism with characters on the end of a bar. When a key was struck, a linkage would swing the bar into a tape coated with ink. When the character struck the tape, the impression of the character was transferred onto the paper, which was positioned behind the tape. According to popular myth, Sholes arranged the keys in their odd fashion to prevent jamming on mechanical typewriters by separating commonly used letter combinations. The arrangement of characters on a QWERTY keyboard was designed in 1868 by Christopher Sholes, the inventor of the typewriter.The early typewriter used a mechanism with characters on the end of a bar. When a key was struck, a linkage would swing the bar into a tape coated with ink Advertisement Sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean is already 'extraordinarily thin', and could shrink to the record low of 2012 as the summer approaches. Scientists analysed current satellite data about the thickness of the ice cover and compared this thickness to previous readings. The thin ice cover from summer 2015 combined with the fact that little new ice formed over the winter has led to the dire estimates. Sea ice cover (pictured) in the Arctic Ocean is already 'extraordinarily thin', and could shrink to the record low of 2012 as the summer approaches. The thin ice cover from summer 2015 combined with the fact that little new ice formed over the winter has led to the dire estimates Dr Marcel Nicolaus, expert on sea ice, has presented these findings at a press conference during the annual General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna. Predicting the summer extent of the arctic sea ice several months in advance is one of the great challenges facing contemporary polar research. Until the end of the melting season, the fate of the ice is ultimately determined by the wind conditions and air and water temperatures during the summer months. Foundations are laid during the preceding winter, but this spring the levels were on par with the negative record year of 2012. Back then, the sea ice surface of the Arctic shrunk to 3.4 million square kilometres. 'In many regions of the Arctic, new ice only formed very slowly due to the particularly warm winter,' Dr Marcel Nicolaus, sea ice physicist at AWI, said. STUDYING SEA ICE COVER Scientists analysed current satellite data about the thickness of the ice cover and compared this thickness to previous readings. A comparison of their temperature data with the long-term measurements taken on Spitsbergen has shown the temperature in the central Arctic in February 2016 exceeded average temperatures by up to 8C (46.4F). During the past winter, the growth of the arctic sea ice was significantly slower than the scientists had expected. In previously ice-rich areas such as the Beaufort Gyre off the Alaskan coast or the region south of Spitsbergen, the sea ice is considerably thinner now than it normally is during the spring. According to the scientists, the extent of the ice loss will be great enough to undo all growth recorded over the relatively cold winters of 2013 and 2014. Advertisement 'If we compare the ice thickness map of the previous winter with that of 2012, we can see that the current ice conditions are similar to those of the spring of 2012 - in some places, the ice is even thinner,' Together with his AWI colleague Dr Stefan Hendricks, they evaluated the sea ice thickness measurements taken over the past five winters by the CyroSat-2 satellite for their sea ice projection. Seven autonomous snow buoys, which the AWI researchers had placed on floes last autumn, supplied additional important clues. In addition to the thickness of the snow cover on top of the sea ice, the buoys also measure the air temperature and air pressure. A comparison of their temperature data with the AWI long-term measurements taken on Spitsbergen has shown that the temperature in the central Arctic in February 2016 exceeded average temperatures by up to 8C (46.4F). Contrary to a report published by US researchers, this warmth did not result in the thinning of the sea ice cover in some regions over the course of the winter. 'According to our buoy data from the spring, the warm winter air was not sufficient to melt the layer of snow covering the sea ice, let alone the ice itself,' Dr Nicolaus explained. During the past winter, the growth of the arctic sea ice was significantly slower than the scientists had expected. In previously ice-rich areas such as the Beaufort Gyre off the Alaskan coast or the region south of Spitsbergen, the sea ice is considerably thinner now than it normally is during the spring. 'While the landfast ice north of Alaska usually has a thickness of 1.5 metres [5ft], our US colleagues are currently reporting measurements of less than one metre,' Dr Hendricks added. A total of seven autonomous snow buoys (locations marked), which the researchers had placed on floes last autumn, supplied additional important clues. In addition to the thickness of the snow cover on top of the sea ice, the buoys also measure the air temperature and air pressure During winter the growth of the arctic sea ice was significantly slower than scientists had expected. According to scientists, the extent of the ice loss will be great enough to undo all growth recorded over the relatively cold winters of 2013 and 2014. The sea ice readings for 2016 and previous years are shown 'Such thin ice will not survive the summer sun for long.' Examining the CyroSat-2 sea ice thickness map for this spring, Dr Hendricks further explained: 'The Transpolar Drift Stream, a well-known current in the Arctic Ocean, will be carrying the majority of the thick, perennial ice currently located off the northern coasts of Greenland and Canada through the Fram Strait to the North Atlantic. 'These thick floes will then be followed by thin ice, which melts faster in the summer. 'Everything suggests the overall volume of the arctic sea ice will be decreasing considerably over the course of the coming summer. 'If the weather conditions turn out to be unfavourable, we might even be facing a new record low,' Stefan Hendricks continued. According to the AWI scientists, the extent of the ice loss will be great enough to undo all growth recorded over the relatively cold winters of 2013 and 2014. AWI researchers observed a considerable decrease in the thickness of the sea ice as early as the late summer of 2015, even though the overall ice covered area of the September minimum ultimately exceeded the record low of 2012 by approximately one million square kilometres. The unusually warm winter has thus contributed to the likely continuation of the dramatic decline of the Arctic sea ice throughout 2016. Anyone who has watched late-night television will have witnessed the scene play out a hundred times on US cop shows. A police officer pulls over a vehicle, walks up to the driver-side window only for the car to screech off and a high-speed pursuit entails, often ending in a crash. But one police force in the American mid-west is using GPS bullets to deploy tracking technology in an effort to reduce the dangers of high-speed car chases. Scroll down for video Milwaukee Police Department is deploying GPS tracking bullets in order to track drivers who make a break for it (pictured), without endangering other road users with high speed pursuits Milwaukee Police Department is deploying the James Bond-style tech in order to track rogue drivers without endangering other road users. The aim is that by using GPS bullets which are fired from police cruisers and stick to the target car, the vehicle can be followed, and even if the drivers get away the police still have the evidence left behind. According to the Journal Sentinel, a pilot programme of the 'StarChase' technology has seen the trackers successfully deployed half of the time, sticking to the vehicle as it tears off. WPD expects the success rate to improve as officers become more accustomed to using the technology. The aim is that by using GPS bullets, fired from police cruisers and stick to the target car, the vehicle can be followed. Even if drivers get away, the police still have the evidence left behind. Stock image GPS TRACKING BULLETS Milwaukee Police Department is deploying hi-tech GPS 'bullets' in order to track rogue drivers without endangering other road users The dual barrel launchers contain two tracking and can be launched with a button on a key fob, carried by the officer. It uses laser-guided tracking technology to launch the bullets, which are 4.5 inches (11.4 cm) long and 2 inches (5 cm) in diameter. As for the tracking, it uses Google Street View maps over a secure web portal, so criminals can't hack into the system, to track the driver in real time. Advertisement The launcher is attached to the front of the police cruiser and uses compressed air to fire a GPS 'bullet'. This bullet contains a tracking device and adhesive to stick to the body of the car. As a police officer leaves their squad car, they take a remote control with them. If the car attempts to flee, they simply press a button on the remote and the system launches the tracker at the car in front. Once the tracker is attached to the car, the police can back off to a safe distance, monitoring the car's location in real-time thanks to GPS signal relayed by the tracking device. According to the system's manufacturers, the driver can be apprehended at a safer location, if they drive home, for example. The Journal Sentinel reports that in a demonstration of the technology for the press this week, less than ideal weather conditions meant that the tracker bounced off the target car on two occasions. Kim Lastrilla, an officer with WPD, told the news outlet: 'It helps us locate the vehicle and even if we don't have the suspects in custody, we still have evidence.' A training video released by the WPD (still pictured) shows the system in action. Police are able to catch up with a car on a street corner, where the system can be activated to launch a GPS tracker at the vehicle Once the 'bullet' is in place (pictured stuck to the body of the car close to the brake light) the police cruiser can drop back to a safe distance to track the vehicle in real time via secure maps, reducing the chances of a crash The dual barrel launcher system reportedly costs in the region of $5,000 (3,480) can carry two tracking devices and can be launched with a button on a key fob, carried by the officer. It uses laser-guided tracking technology to launch the bullets, which are 4.5 inches (11.4 cm) long and 2 inches (5 cm)in diameter. As for the tracking, it uses Google Street View maps over a secure web portal, so criminals can't hack into the system, to track the driver in real time. The WPD states that the trackers can only be used in instances when there is a valid reason to pull over the car, in emergency situations, and when officers do not have the opportunity to get a warrant. According to Starchase, the American Civil Liberties Union said the technology 'has the potential to obviate the need for high-speed pursuits by police cars through cities and towns, which are dangerous and kill hundreds each year, with a third or more of those fatalities being innocent bystanders.' A map of down town Milwaukee: Once the tracker is deployed police can follow the car's location in real-time using Google Street View maps over a secure portal Lightly sketched in the margin, it looks much like any doodle drawn during an idle moment in a boring meeting. But this caricature is believed to have been drawn by a bored medieval scribe as he studied the rare plainsong discovered on the parchment it was doodled on. The exquisitely preserved document was discovered hidden inside the binding of a religious book where it had lain forgotten for centuries following the Reformation. In the margin, next to a carefully drawn letter R, a caricature of a monk has been doodled (pictured) on a newly discovered piece of medieval parchment. The document contains the Latin words to a monastic chant that was found hidden within a religious book in a collection at Norwich Cathedral's parish library It was only found when conservators assessing a collection at Norwich Cathedral's parish library picked up the book and it fell open to reveal the leaf of parchment. Written in Latin script is a monastic chant called the Feast of Epiphany, which commemorates the visit of the wise men to see Jesus in Bethlehem, alongside musical annotations. The plainsong, as these chants were called, would have been sung by the monks around Christmas, experts believe. MEDIEVAL MONK'S DOODLES Stick men, scribbles and smiley faces might be what you would expect to see inside the notebooks of bored students. But some of the world's oldest manuscripts are adorned with the doodles of medieval scribes. Dr Erik Kwakkel, a book historian from Leiden University, Netherlands, revealed that there are two types of medieval doodle. He highlighted the idle shapes we all produce and also said the monastic scribes would perform 'pen trials' to get the nibs of the quills flowing after regular cutting. The least imaginative doodlers would write, repeatedly, 'probatio pennae' ('I test my pen'). In other cases the doodles include funny faces with long beards, big hats or noses, as well as animals, unidentifiable creatures and even caricatures of teachers and colleagues. In most cases, the doodles were never intended to be seen as they were drawn on the pages that were later glued face down to wooden covers. Advertisement By itself the medieval parchment and its plainsong contents are a rare discovery, but the unusual doodle in the margin beside a carefully drawn letter R provides a unique insight into who created it. Lorainne Finch, a freelance conservator based in Great Yarmouth who discovered the parchment, told MailOnline: 'We are not exactly sure who it is. 'It looks like a monk - perhaps who originally sang the chant. 'It could also be a drawing of whoever was sitting beside the scribe. 'It really looks like a doodle they would have created while a bit bored. 'The face is drawn onto the side of the letter R, so we could guess that the drawing is of a Brother Richard or Brother Roger. 'Either way he has a bit of a flat nose, like a boxer. 'It is not very flattering. I've certainly never seen anything like this.' The parchment, made from cow or sheep skin, was found inside a book called Erasmus, dating from 1548. Miss Finch, who specialises in the conservation of archives and photographs, had been assessing the state of the Parish Library collection. Now kept at Norwich Cathedral, the collection is made up of books owned by several different parishes in the region, some of which have been damaged by water and insects over the years. The A4-sized piece of parchment (pictured) contains the words to a monastic plainsong about the visit of the wise men to Jesus has been discovered hidden within the binding of another religious book from 1548. It is thought to have been written sometime in the 1400s before the disollution of the monasteries Conservation expert Lorraine Finch discovered the manuscript (pictured) inside the broken binding of a 1548 book about Erasmus while inspecting the collection at Norwich Cathedral library. It is thought the parchment had been recycled as part of the binding and has remained hidden for centuries Miss Finch believes the drawing in the margin (ringed in the picture) may be a caraciture of the monk who sang the chant made by a bored scribe. The parchment could reveal new details about monastic life in the years running up to the reformation when it is analysed further The collection has around 304 books, many of which are in need of conservation. When Miss Finch picked up the book Erasmus, she found the binding had become broken so the front board was no longer attached. The book the parchment was found in is thought to have been written about the Dutch humanist Desiderisu Eramus (pictured) who died in 1536 This caused the book to fall open to reveal the parchment, which had originally been pasted down to the front board and covered with paper. Miss Finch said: 'It would not have been visible at all had the binding not been broken. 'Parchment was an expensive and time-consuming material to make, so when the monasteries were dissolved in 1536, much of this parchment was passed to book binders. 'At the time people would buy a book as a block that was tied together and they would then take it to a binder to have it properly bound. 'The binders tended to use old bits of parchment in the bindings and recycled some of those from the monasteries as they had essentially become irrelevant by that stage. 'But during my 24 years as a conservator, I have never seen such a complete piece of parchment being used.' The book originally belonged to the parish of Shipdham, near Dereham and may refer to the Dutch Renaissance humanist Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, who died in 1536. The plainsong is written on an A4 piece of parchment on both sides and would have probably constituted four pages of a book. Sadly part of the parchment has been lost, meaning the chant appears to be incomplete. 'There may also have been other pages that have been lost,' said Miss Finch. 'But it is a really significant discovery. The book it was found in was made in 1548, which means the parchment is earlier than that. We think it may date to some-time in the 1400s.' Part of the parchment has been damaged (pictured), so the full chant may have been lost. It is also unclear whether it was part of a larger collection of pages before it was recycled in a medieval book binding The parchment has writing on both sides, but part of the chant has been lost. Regardless, it is hoped it can be brought back to life and sung for the first time since the parchment was hidden away The plainsong was written on the parchment using black ink - possibly iron gall or black carbon and red vermilion, made from the poisonous mercuric sulphide. Miss Finch continued that it was likely the ingredients used to make the inks were sourced from as far away as the Mediterranean and even Africa. She said they hoped the parchment, which she found at the end of March, could now be analysed to see what else could be learned about it. It is also hoped the chant itself could be brought back to life as a local reverend and her monk friend may try to sing it. Miss Finch added: 'There are a few people who are eager to try to sing it. It will be really wonderful to hear what it sounded like.' Gudrun Warren, librarian and curator at Norwich Cathedral, said the plainsong would have been chanted by Catholic monks during a service. Experts say the marine mammals were 'talking' to solve the problem Two managed to open it by cooperating and their sounds were recorded Dolphins are known to work together to catch fish, save sick friends and play. Now researchers have recorded the clever cetaceans 'talking' to each other in order to solve a complex puzzle. The discovery suggests dolphins may use a language dedicated to problem solving. Researchers have recorded dolphins 'talking' to each other in order to solve a complex puzzle. This image shows two dolphins not involved in the study opening a similar puzzle or capsule together Analysing the communication between partners is necessary to decide whether actions really are cooperative, or are the result of trial and error or even just luck. In an experiment, six male bottlenose dolphins were given a locked capsule filled with food, resembling a large pill. It could only be opened when ropes at both ends were pulled simultaneously, encouraging the captive animals to work together. In an experiment, six male bottlenose dolphins were given a locked capsule filled with food, resembling a large pill. It could only be opened when ropes at both ends were pulled simultaneously, encouraging the captive animals to work together. A stock image of two bottlenose dolphins swimming together is shown DOLPHINS HAVE ACCENTS TOO Dolphins that live in pods in certain areas off the coast of the UK have been spotted communicating with unique sounds - regional accents - off the coat of Wales. And now a group of marine biologists is studying dolphins in the water around Jersey to determine if these 'accents' are widespread. Researchers from the Marine Biology Section of Societe Jersiaise in the Channel Islands will compare the noises made by dolphins off the Channel Islands with those from elsewhere. To do this, hydrophones - microphones designed to be used underwater - will be placed in the waters around Jersey, which is home to the UK's largest resident dolphin population. They will be fitted with SD cards to record noises, which scientists say will help them identify 'numbers, species and movements' of the mammals. Advertisement Holli Eskelinen, assistant director of research at Dolphins Plus in Florida and a team from the University of Southern Mississippi, put the dolphins through the test 24 times. Just two dolphins managed to solve the puzzle and access the fishy treat hidden inside the capsule, New Scientist reported. But incredibly, these two animals completed the taxing task in 20 of the trials, working together to pull the capsule apart in just 30 seconds. In the other four, one of the dolphins managed to crack open the capsule on its own, although it took longer to access the food. While the feat is impressive, the researchers were more interested in the noises the pair of dolphins made while opening the canister. The team found the animals 'talked' more while opening the canister while attempting the task on their own, or when the puzzle was removed from the pool. 'Sound production rates were significantly higher during cooperative successes than solo successes, suggesting that the coordination of efforts rather than the apparatus itself was responsible for the phonation increase,' the researchers wrote in their paper. They were able to show the increase in vocalisations, or 'burst pulses' which sound like squarks to humans, was linked to the task, as opposed to usual chatter between dolphins. Dr Eskelinen said: 'This is the first time that we can say conclusively that dolphin vocalisations were used to solve a cooperative task.' Researchers already know dolphins use burst pulses in echo location as well as in social interaction. The team found the animals 'talked' more while opening the canister while attempting their task on their own, or when the puzzle was removed from the pool. A pair of dolphins are shown in this stock image Commenting on the study, published in the journal Animal Cognition, marine ecologist Leigh Torres, of Oregon State University, told Robin Wylie: 'The results point toward the possibility of a dolphin language that enables team problem solving.' This experiment builds on a study also published by Animal Cognition, led by Dr Eskelinen, which was published last year. To test dolphins' cognitive abilities, her team used the capsules to find two male adult bottlenose dolphins were most likely to cooperate. The pair even shared the fish they managed to release from the capsule. They even synchronously surfaced and dove together while carrying the device, which researchers view as a sign of close relationships. Despite countless reports money can't buy happiness, many of us wouldn't object to having a little bit more. Now new research has found the amount of cash in people's bank accounts can predict how satisfied they are with their lives. But this only works up to a point - and the first 1,000 (1,438) is much more important to people's happiness than the next 9,000 ($12,941). New research has found the amount of cash in people's bank accounts can predict how satisfied they are with their lives. But this only works up to a point - with the first 1,000 (1,438) being more important to people's happiness than the next 9,000 ($12,941). Stock image The researchers from the University of California, Riverside and Cambridge University looked at data from 585 customers at a UK bank. The information they used included things such as how stressed they were about their finances and how satisfied they were with their lives, along with the balances of their checking and savings accounts. 'Liquid money - having money actually available for use - confers a sense of financial security, which in turn is associated with greater life satisfaction,' Joe Gladstone, co-author of the study told MailOnline. HOW THE STUDY WORKED The researchers from the University of California, Riverside and Cambridge University looked at data from 585 UK bank customers. Customers were recruited by email in late 2014 to complete a survey about their financial attitudes and behaviours, as well as their life satisfaction. The survey was randomly sent to approximately 150,000 customers in the UK. Life satisfaction was assessed with the 5-item Satisfaction with Life Scale, a widely used measure of global life evaluation Advertisement The researchers then looked at how life satisfaction changed with the amount of money in the accounts, and they saw the link tapers off after balances climb to a couple of thousand pounds. They measured life satisfaction using a five-part scale. The first 1,000 (1,438) was more important than the next 9,000 ($12,941), the study found. 'We found that going from having 1 ($1.44) to having 1,000 (1,438) in ones bank accounts each month is associated with an average gain of 2 points (10 per cent of a 20-point scale) in life satisfaction by virtue of feeling more secure about ones finances,' Gladstone said. 'However, because liquid wealth was log transformed, further increasing liquid assets from 1,000 (1,438) to 10,000 (14,379) was associated with an expected increase of just 0.7 further points on the same scale.' 'The hedonic benefits to your happiness will be experienced once you save enough to feel comfortable with your finances, but saving above that point buys you relatively little in terms of wellbeing.' 'What is particularly interesting about the finding is that this effect holds regardless of a person's income, total spending or indebtedness,' he said. 'So even people we would traditionally consider to be "rich" would benefit from keeping more cash in their bank accounts. Indeed, no matter how much the customers had or earned, no matter how much debt they had, having a buffer of easily accessible cash was associated with greater happiness.' The researchers looked at how life satisfaction changed with the amount of money in people's accounts. They saw the link tapers off after balances climb to a couple of thousand pounds. The first 1,000 (1,438) was more important than the next 9,000 ($12,941) This is not the first study into whether money can buy happiness. Earlier this month, experts found the happiness caused by having more spare cash actually depends on what people spend it on, and if those items match people's personalities. Researchers from Cambridge Judge Business School and the Psychology Department of Cambridge University analysed 77,000 UK bank spending transactions. Customers were also asked to complete a personality and happiness questionnaire, and to consent to their responses being matched anonymously for research purposes with their bank data. The final study was based on 76,863 transactions of 625 participants and whittled down 112 spending categories automatically grouped by the bank into 59 categories that had at least 500 transactions over a six-month period. Spending categories were compared to the widely recognised 'Big Five' personality traits - openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. For example, 'eating out in pubs' was rated as an extroverted and low conscientiousness spending category, whereas 'charities' and 'pets' were rated as agreeable spending categories. A separate study compared participants' actual purchases to their personalities, and found that people generally spent more money on products that match their personality. For example, a highly extroverted person spent approximately 52 ($73) more each year on 'pub nights' than an introverted person SPENDING AND PERSONALITY The Big 5 Personality Trait Openness Conscientiousness Extraversion Agreeableness Neuroticism Low correlation Traffic fines, mortgages Gambling, toys and hobbies Insurance, accountant fees Traffic fines, gambling Stationery, hotels High correlation Entertainment, hair and beauty Insurance, health, fitness Entertainment, travel Charities, pets Traffic fines, gambling Advertisement Home insurance, health and fitness were rated as popular spending categories for conscientious people, while neurotic people were less likely to be happy if they spent money on stationery. The researchers compared the participants' actual purchases to their personalities using this scale, and found that people generally spent more money on products that match their personality. For example, a highly extroverted person spent approximately 52 ($73) more each year on 'pub nights' than an introverted person. Similarly, a highly conscientiousness person spent 124 ($175) more annually on 'health and fitness' than a person low in conscientiousness. It was a period that saw one of the greatest civilisations in the world enter a 'Dark Age' from which it never fully recovered. Now scientists believe the chaos that caused a hiatus in the growth of the Mayan during the 6th century may have been caused by the eruption of a massive volcano in Mexico. They believe volcanic deposits found in Mexico suggest the El Chichon volcano erupted in 540AD bringing widespread devastation and impacting the climate. The Mayan civilisation (Maya palace in Palenque, Mexico pictured) lasted for hundreds of years in Mesoamerica, but suffered a major 'Dark Age' in the 6th century from which it never really recovered. Two new studies suggest massive volcanic eruptions may have triggered dramatic changes in climate at the time The Mayan 'hiatus' is thought to have occurred during a pronounced dry period that brought drought to the region. But other research is also suggesting the Maya may have been hit by not one, but two devastating volcanic eruptions. THE DOWNFALL OF THE MAYAN For hundreds of years the Mayans dominated large parts of the Americas until, mysteriously in the 8th and 9th century AD, a large chunk of the Mayan civilisation collapsed. The reason for this collapse has been hotly debated, but recent research has suggested the civilisation was hit by an intense drought that lasted a century. Although the theory that a drought led to a decline of the Mayan Classic Period is not entirely new, studies of sediments in the Great Blue Hole in Belize suggest a lack of rains caused the disintegration of the Mayan civilisation, and a second dry spell forced them to relocate elsewhere. The Classic Period refers to the time from 300 to 900 AD in Mesoamerica - a region that extends from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala and northern Costa Rica. During this time the Mayans built a number of monuments, on which they recorded dates. In 514 they were building around ten per year, rising to about 40 per year in 750. But following this, the numbers began to decline quickly; by 900, no monuments were being built. Advertisement A separate group of researchers discovered evidence of two huge spikes in sulphur levels in ice cores taken from the poles. This, they say, indicate there was an earlier eruption in 536AD that brought widespread changes to the climate around the world. Together the two eruptions may have dramatically cooled the global climate and been the trigger for a series of events that marred the beginning of the Middle Ages. Historical records from the time describe the skies over Europe darkening unnaturally while 25 million people were wiped out as the Plague of Justinian spread through the Eastern Roman Empire. Dr Matthew Toohey, a climate scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, said: 'One of the eruptions would have led to a significant cooling of the Earth's surface. 'Two of them, so close in time, caused what is probably the coldest decade of the past 2,000 years.' The vast amount of ash and volcanic gases thrown up into the atmosphere would have caused widespread dimming of the sunlight reaching the surface. Other eruptions in the past, such as the 1815 Tambora volcano in Indonesia, hurled so much ash and sulphur into the atmosphere that Europe and North America suffered crop failures and famine. Dr Toohey and his colelagues examined ice core samples taken from Greenland and Antarctica for sulphur levels trapped inside the ice. Although they said they have yet to identify exactly which volcanoes were responsible for the eruptions, there were several candidates in Central America and North America. But their research, which is published in the journal Climate Change, ties in with separate work conducted by Dr Kees Nooren, a palaeoclimatologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Researchers say the volcanic eruptions triggered widespread climate change around the world between 536AD and 545AD (reconstructions of summer temperature anomalies pictured left and winter anomalies pictured right) and this may have caused upheaval in many areas of the globe Scientists believe the Mexican El Chichon volcano (pictured) may have been responsible for the later of the two massive eruptions. Volcanic glass and ash from El Chichon have been found spread across Mexico dating to around 540AD Speaking at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, Austria, he explained how analysis of volcanic ash and glass at lake Tuspan in Guatamala and on the Usumacinta-Grijalva delta in Mexico suggests the 540AD volcanic eruption was caused by El Chichon in Mexico. This 3,937ft-high (1,200 metres) volcano last exploded spectacularly in 1982, killing more than 2,000 people and destroying local communities. It spewed vast quantities of sulphur dioxide and ash into the atmosphere. But according to the BBC, Dr Nooren believes the eruption in 540AD was even larger. Volcanic glass and ash from El Chichon dating to 540AD has been found at Lake Tuspan in Guatemala and the Usumacinta-Grijalva Delta in Mexico (shown on the map) The Mayan Hiatus was a period of dramatic cultural downturn, political instability and the abandonment of many sites in the Central Maya Lowlands (ruins of Altun Ha in Belize pictured) Speaking at the EGU meeting, he said his team is now evaluating pollen records from the time to examine the impact this had on the Mayan civilisation. He added: 'Maya societies in Southern Mexico, Guatemala and Belize experienced a 'dark age' during the second half of the 6th century. After battery problems and bad weather hampered the last leg of its mission, the world's first solar-powered plane has taken to the skies once again. Following a successful take off earlier today, Solar Impulse 2 will make the flight from Hawaii to Mountain View in California after having been grounded for nine months. The plane took off just after 4PM UCT (5PM BST/12PM ET) and is expected to land in Mountain View, California - home of Google - as early as Saturday. Solar Impulse 2 has successfully taken to the skies again following nine months on the ground in Hawaii (pictured). The solar powered plane took-off from Hawaii today destined for Mountain View in California, where it could arrive as early as Saturday It was due to take off at 3PM UTC but earlier this morning weather conditions exceeded the safety limits with gusting winds leading the team to store the craft in a hanger just before sunrise. However, winds dropped sufficiently for the team to send the solar-powered craft on its way towards the US mainland. Piloted alternately by Swiss adventurers Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg, the crew set off on the voyage in March 2015, with aspirations of flying around the world in a matter of months. Speaking to press and spectators gathered on the air strip in Hawaii this morning during the pre-flight checks, Piccard said: 'Thank you, goodbye, and see you in San Francisco in three days, I hope.' Michele Piccard, Head of Corporaty identity, sending a kiss to her husband, as Solar Impulse2, a solar-powered plane piloted by Piccard, successfully took off from Kalaeloa Airport, O'ahu, Hawaii, 21 April 2016 The solar-powered plane is piloted by Swiss adventurers Andre Borschberg and Bertrand Piccard (pictured left and right). The next leg of the journey, from Hawaii to California, will be flown by by Piccard While co-pilot Andre Borschberg, who waved off his team mate from the airstrip, told reporters: 'You train [to be patient] and your plan sometimes has to be modified, and that's not always easy.' He added: 'You always have to put yourself in the right mindset when you have a tough decision to makewe try to stay Zen and calm.' The solar-powered aircraft was left stranded on the ground in Hawaii last summer after suffering battery problems in the previous leg of its journey. Team members working on the plane shortly before Solar Impulse2, a solar-powered plane piloted by Piccard, successfully took off from Kalaeloa. Andre Borschberg (pictured) waved off his team member and fellow pilot Bertrand Piccard, who is now flying the solar-powered plane across the stretch of the Pacific Ocean to California The team had been carrying out pre-flight checks on the airstrip in Hawaii earlier this morning (pictured). But weather conditions exceeded safety limits and gusting winds led the team to move the craft back into the hanger just before sunrise, in order to complete checks Rolling #Si2 back into the hangar to protect it from strong gusts, we are following the wind forecast closely pic.twitter.com/HjkppQA03x SOLAR IMPULSE (@solarimpulse) April 21, 2016 Taking a nap in #Si2's cockpit while we wait for the wind to die down. I must recharge my own batteries too pic.twitter.com/jVmw4S7yDM Bertrand PICCARD (@bertrandpiccard) April 21, 2016 The team was forced to take the craft back to the hanger to complete checks, owing to strong winds earlier this morning. But pilot Bertrand Piccard has now resumed the round-the-world flight The flight was halted around 12,400 miles (1,955km) into the epic 21,747-mile (34,998km) journey. But with spring bringing longer hours of sunlight in the northern Hemisphere, the team aims to take off from close to Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu to head towards California later today. It was due to take off at 3PM UTC but earlier this morning weather conditions exceeded the safety limits with gusting winds leading the team to store the craft in a hanger just before sunrise. Three test flights from Oahu's Kalaeloa Airport on 14 March showed the aircraft was ready to make the journey. Swiss aviator Bertrant Piccard conducted a series of low-altitude training procedures following several months of repairs and maintenance. Solar Impulse 2 (pictured coming into land in Hawaii) is due to restart its round-the-world flight today following a series of tests after it was grounded for repairs. Problems with the batteries overheating while in the air had forced the team to delay their journey over the winter Swiss pilot Bertrant Piccard (pictured preparing for a test flight in Hawaii) conducted three low altitude flights aimed at testing the aircraft following its months on the ground and allowing the pilots to re-familiarise themselves with the controls According to the Solar Impulse blog, the three test flights were aimed at allowing Mr Piccard to re-familiarise himself with the aircraft's systems and handling. HOW DOES SOLAR IMPULSE WORK? Solar Impulse 2 is powered by 17,000 solar cells and on-board rechargeable lithium batteries, allowing it to fly through the night. Its wingspan is longer than a jumbo jet but its light construction keeps its weight to about as much as a car. Solar Impulse 2 relies on getting enough solar power during the day to survive the night. It is also extremely light - about the weight of a car - and as wide as a passenger jet. Both of these combined means it is extremely susceptible to the weather. In high winds or turbulent it can struggle to stay aloft at the altitudes necessary to gather sunlight. Its maximum altitude is 27,900ft (8,500m), before dropping to 3,280ft (1,000m), when the pilot is able to take short 20-minute catnaps. Advertisement His last flight was the sixth leg from Chogquing to Nanjing in China. However, both he and his co-pilot Andre Borschberg have continued training over the past months using a simulator. At the time, Mr Piccard said: 'I was very happy with this flight day, all the tests that had to be performed with Solar Impulse Two were done. 'I loved the approach coming from 6,000ft straight in, as I had the airplane on the glide all the time.' The Solar Impulse team said the aircraft had handled well during the flights, during which they tested the airbrakes and emergency procedures. They also practiced flying at slower speeds while the aircraft reached a maximum altitude of 7,800ft and an average speed of 30mph (25 knots). The team was also able to trail new 360-degree cameras that have been installed on the aircraft during the repairs. A spokesman said further training flights were conducted to simulate the night and day conditions the team will experience as they cross the Pacific to the west coast of the US. Solar Impulse 2 has now left Hawaii (shown on the map) after flying more than 12,000 miles since it set off from Abu Dhabi in March 2015. It took a five-day flight to cross the Pacific Ocean from Japan to Hawaii and it will make the journey to the west coast of the US and a series of further US stops before the Atlantic The Solar Impulse 2 team conducted test flights following the repairs before they embark on the rest of their round-the-world mission later today Solar Impulse 2 was grounded in July last year after 'irreversible damage to certain parts of the batteries'. Following its record-breaking, five-day flight across the Pacific last month, battery temperatures surged. In particular, there was too much insulation which caused the plane's battery temperature to spike on the first day of the flight across the Pacific. The crew struggled to find ways of cooling the batteries once the aircraft was in the air. BREAKING NEWS: irreversible damage to overheated batteries in #Si2 pushes the second half of the #RTW to April 2016 pic.twitter.com/VuInioo9fG SOLAR IMPULSE (@solarimpulse) July 15, 2015 We will get back on track and continue @solarimpulse's Round-The-World next year. The adventure continues pic.twitter.com/IPvvMTfSUl Bertrand PICCARD (@bertrandpiccard) July 15, 2015 The solar impulse team announced they would be grounding their aircraft last July after suffering problems with the batteries overheating. Pilot Bertran Piccard tweeted: 'The adventure continues' (pictured) Upon arriving in Hawaii the team decided to delay the rest of the trip until spring this year when the weather would likely be more favourable. Solar Impulse 2 and its pilots Mr Borschberg and Mr Piccard set off from Abu Dhabi in March with the hope of returning within five or six months. It was forced to make an unscheduled stop in Nagoya in Japan after bad weather stopped it taking off on its Pacific leg, but it successfully touched down in Hawaii on 3 July. Mr Borschberg's 118-hour journey across the Pacific at the end of June and into July smashed the previous record of 76 hours and 45 minutes set by US adventurer Steve Fossett in 2006 when he circumnavigated the world in a jet, travelling 26,389 miles (42,468km). Solar Impulse 2 is powered by 17,000 solar cells and on-board rechargeable lithium batteries, allowing it to fly through the night. The solar-powered plane was grounded at Kalaeloa airport (pictured) while maintenance work was carried out. The pilots are conducting a series of test flights before taking off for the West coast of America Its wingspan is longer than a jumbo jet but its light construction keeps its weight to about as much as a car. This slow speed and light weight means it can only travel in certain weather conditions. For example, in high winds or turbulence it can struggle to stay aloft at the altitudes necessary to gather sunlight. Too much insulation caused the plane's battery temperature to spike on the first day of the flight. The pilots said the problem was a failure to fully anticipate the quick rate at which battery temperatures can rise in tropical climates. Swiss pilot Andre Borschberg is shown in the cramped cockpit of the plane The battery damage was the latest in a series of hitches. Mr Borschberg experienced a problem with one of his eyes, which forced him to cut short his flight over Asia and return to Switzerland for several days. After the unscheduled stop in Japan, Solar Impulse 2 was stranded for nearly a month with the crew scouring long-range forecasts for a favourable weather window. Solar Impulse 2 is powered by 17,000 solar cells and on-board rechargeable lithium batteries, allowing it to fly through the night. The plane is shown approaching Kalaeloa Airport near Honolulu after a 118-hour voyage from Nagoya, Japan at the end of June LIFE ON BOARD SOLAR IMPULSE The two pilots have to contend with some testing conditions aboard the plane as they fly alone for up to five days at a time. 'It's a flying home in some ways,' Mr Borschberg told MailOnline previously. The cockpit has no heating, and the pilots are not able to stand up or walk around. Instead, they can only recline in their seats to get a bit of exercise, such as yoga, or rest. A 'visit' to the toilet is pretty uncomfortable too - they simply use a hole in their seat. The pilots trained hard for the mission, during which they have faced temperatures dropping to -40C (-40F) in their cramped cockpit and have had to breathe oxygen from a tank to cope with the extreme altitudes. Advertisement The plane's maximum altitude is 27,900ft (8,500m) but this drops to 3,280ft (1,000m), when the pilot is able to take short 20-minute catnaps. The goal of the project is to show the possibilities of renewable energy such as solar power. To help break up the long periods in the cramped cockpit, the pilots planned to land Solar Impulse 2 in 12 locations around the world. After taking off in Abu Dhabi on 9 March 2015, it stopped in Muscat in Oman before heading to Ahmedabad in India on 10 March and Varanasi, also in India, on 18 March. On the same day it flew to Mandalay, Burma, before making a pit stop in Chongqing, China on 29 March - for three weeks, rather than the one planned. After Nanjing in China, the next was a five-day flight to Honolulu in Hawaii, before its unscheduled stop in Japan. Solar Impulse 2 suffered 'irreversible' battery damage on its flight from Japan to Hawaii and was grounded. Its Swiss pilots, Bertrand Piccard (left) and Andre Borschberg (right) have continued training on simulators over the winter ahead of restarting their round-the-world attempt The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has been hailed as the 'most expensive weapon in history.' But despite a price tag of $400 billion for 2,457 planes, the fifth-generation fighter has been plagued with issues. Now, a new report says problems with its logistics software system could ground the entire fleet. Scroll down for video The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has been hailed as the 'most expensive weapon in history.' But despite a price tag of $400 billion for 2,457 planes, the fifth-generation fighter has been plagued with issues. Pictured is a F-35B aircraft prepares for a landing at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Arizona ALIS: THE 'BRAINS' OF THE F35 The problem is with what the Department of Defense officials call the 'brains' of plane, also known as the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS). It is designed to support operations, mission planning and to spot any maintenance issues with the vehicle. It also allows pilots to plan missions and look back at their their performance. ALIS receives Health Reporting Codes via a radio frequency downlink while the F-35 is still in flight; this enables the pre-positioning of parts and qualified maintainers so that when the aircraft lands, downtime is minimised. Advertisement The issue is with what the Department of Defense officials call the 'brains' of plane, also known as the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS). A Government Accountability Office report says a failure 'could take the entire fleet offline' because there is no backup system. The report also says a lack of testing done of the software will mean it's not ready for its deployment by the Air Force in August and the Navy in 2018. The 'brains' of the F35 are one of three major components, with the other two being the engine and airframe. CNN points out that the software runs on ground computers rather than operating on the plane itself. It is designed to support operations, mission planning and to spot any maintenance issues with the vehicle. 'Program officials said that if ALIS is not fully functional, the F-35 could not be operated as frequently as intended,' the report said. 'But a DoD commissioned plan found that schedule slippage and functionality problems with ALIS could lead to $20-100 billion in additional costs.' So far, the software has been so flawed that maintenance crews have had to resort labour-intensive alternatives. According to National Interest, in one instance maintainers had to manually burn data onto CDs and to send the massive files across a civilian WiFi network. One major problem, the report said, is that the F-35 data produced goes through a single main operating unit which has no back up. a new report says problems with its logistics software system could ground the entire fleet. The problem is with what the Department of Defense officials call the 'brains' of plane, also known as the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) 'The F-35 is still in development, and this is the time when technical challenges are expected,' Lt. Genernal Chris Bogdon told CNN. 'However, we believe the combined government and industry team will resolve current issues and future discoveries,' he said. Lead defense contractor for the plane, Lockheed Martin, insists development of the logistics software is on schedule. 'As ALIS development continues, our focus is on the warfighter and delivering the most effective, efficient fleet management system to sustain the F-35 over the next five decades of operations,' said Sharon Parsley, a spokeswoman for Lockheed Martin. 'The recommendations by the GAO are in line with the actions already underway in preparation for full-rate production and worldwide sustainment.' As well as this month's report, a recent Pentagon report has revealed a massive list of potentially lethal bugs still facing the jet. Pictured is the F-35A, which recently completed its first aerial gun test HOW DOES IT COMPARE WITH ITS 1970S PREDECESSOR, THE F-16 JET? F-35 Role: Stealth multirole fighter First flight: December 15, 2006 Unit cost (not including engine): F-35A - $98million F-35B - $104million F-35C - $116million Number built: 115 (as of November 2014) Length: 15.67m Wingspan: 10.7m Height: 4.33m Max speed (F-35A): 1,930kph Armament: One of the most highly-anticipated features of the F-35 armament is the Small Diameter Bomb II (SBD II).The bomb is able to guide towards its target using laser, imaging infrared or radar homing. It can hit moving or stationary targets in any weather, or at night, with unprecedented reliability and accuracy. The 'super weapon' is predicted to be the most versatile air-to-ground munition in the Pentagon's air combat inventory. The cost per SDB II is said to be around $250,000 and the US military plans on buying as many as 17,000 of them. F-16 Role: Multirole fighter First flight: January 20, 1974 Unit cost: F-16A/B - $14.6million F-16C/D - $18.8million Number built: 4,540+ Length: 15.06m Wingspan: 9.96m Height: 4.88m Max speed (F-16C): 2,120kph Combat history: The F-16 has served in the Air Forces of 26 nations, including the U.S., Israel, Egypt, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway. During Operation Desert Storm, the 1991 assault on Iraq, F-16s flew over 13,000 operations, more than any other Coalition aircraft. The U.S. has employed the F-16 in operations over the Balkans, Afghanistan and Libya. At its production peak in 1987, the F-16 team in Fort Worth was also making history, by producing 30 F-16s in just 30 days. Thanks to frequent upgrades improving and incorporating new technologies into the cockpit, avionics, sensors and weapons, the aircraft has become more reliable over its 40 years. Advertisement This isn't the only problem to plague the program. Last month, it has emerged the jets complex radar system has a problem - it keeps crashing. The software glitch that interferes with the ability of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter's AN/APG-81 AESA radar working in flight. This poses the greatest threat to delaying US Air Force (USAF) plans to declare its jets operationally deployable, a top service official told Janes. Major General Jeffrey Harrigian, director of the air force's F-35 integration office at the Pentagon, described the problem as 'radar stability - the radar's ability to stay up and running'. 'What would happen is they'd get a signal that says either a radar degrade or a radar fail -something that would force us to restart the radar,' Maj Gen Harrigian said Another Pentagon report revealed a massive list of potentially lethal bugs still facing the jet. It also found problems with the computer software, including 'in fusion, electronic warfare, and weapons employment result[ing] in ambiguous threat displays, limited ability to respond to threats, and a requirement for off-board sources to provide accurate coordinates for precision attack.' Last year researchers revealed the hugely delayed and over budget project has finally fired its first shots in the air. The F-35A Lightning II completed the first three airborne gunfire bursts from its internal Gun Airborne Unit (GAU)-22/A 25mm Gatling gun system during a California test flight on October 30th. The F-35 also has a smart parts system to ensure everything is working within its limits, and can warn when parts need to be replaced. However, the computerized maintenance management System, or CMMS, 'incorrectly authorizes older/inappropriate replacement parts.' the report said. THE EJECTOR SEAT THAT COULD KILL Pilots under 136 pounds aren't allowed to fly any F-35 variant. Pilots under 165 pounds have a 1-in-4 chance of death and 100 percent chance of serious neck injury upon ejecting, according to the testing office. 'The testing showed that the ejection seat rotates backwards after ejection. This results in the pilot's neck becoming extended, as the head moves behind the shoulders in a 'chin up' position. When the parachute inflates and begins to extract the pilot from the seat (with great force), a 'whiplash' action occurs. The rotation of the seat and resulting extension of the neck are greater for lighter weight pilots,' the report states. Sophisticated: Footage from ground testing of the F-35A stealth jet at Edwards Air Force Base in California, shows the awesome firepower of the four-barrel Gatling gun embedded in the left wing Advertisement It also fails to detect if it's been flying too fast and 'randomly prevented user logins' into its computerised control system. In the first live firing test, three bursts of one 30 rounds and two 60 rounds each were fired from the aircraft's four-barrel, 25-millimeter Gatling gun. In integrating the weapon into the stealthy F 35A airframe, the gun must be kept hidden behind closed doors to reduce its radar cross section until the trigger is pulled. 'The successful aerial gun test sortie was a culmination of several years' planning, which intensified in the first half of 2015 at the Edwards F-35 Integrated Test Force (ITF) Flight Test Squadron with a team of Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Pratt & Whitney, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman personnel,' said Mike Glass, Edwards ITF flight test director. 'The results of this testing will be used in future blocks of testing, where the accuracy and mission effectiveness capabilities will be evaluated.' The 25mm gun is embedded in the F-35A's left wing and is designed to be integrated in a way to maintain the F-35's very low observable criteria. It will provide pilots with the ability to engage air-to-ground and air-to-air targets. 'At the end of the program's system development and demonstration phase in 2017, the F-35 will have an operational gun. US military leaders have extolled the virtues of the F-35 jets, which are intended to 'combine advanced stealth capabilities with fighter aircraft speed and agility' The first phase of F-35 gun testing started in June, when initial shots were fired from the ground at the Edwards Air Force Flight Test Center's gun harmonizing range. The gun system will be further tested with a production F-35A next year for integration with the jet's full mission systems capabilities. The test team will demonstrate the gun's effectiveness in both air-to-air and air-to-ground employment when integrated with the next generation fighter's sensor fusion software, which will provide targeting information to the pilot through the helmet mounted display. At the end of the program's system development and demonstration phase in 2017, the F-35 will have an operational gun. The first phase of the gun testing began on June 9, and the amount of munitions fired has been gradually increased, until the 181 rounds were fired on August 17. The ground tests were designed using software to replicate being in flight, using a production version of the GAU-22/A gun. The tests, using the target practice PGU-23/U which does not explode on impact, showed the gun's ability to spin up and down correctly. Further testing will be carried out next year, to integrate the GAU-22/A system with the jet's full avionics and mission systems capabilities. The following stage will be to observe the qualitative effects, including muzzle flash the visible light emitted by the blast of a firearm the human factors, and the flying qualities. But for the first time a Bell correlation has been seen in a large system Bell correlation, a specific kind of entanglement, has been seen before The world of quantum mechanics is completely unlike anything we experience in our everyday lives. The laws that govern the behaviour of the very smallest particles are completely different to classical physics, which makes them incredibly different to understand and even more difficult to study. By developing a new method to measure the quantum states of hundreds of atoms at once, physicists have been able to see a particular effect of quantum mechanics, called a Bell correlation, for the first time in a large system. In a sense, the atoms in a Bell state have no properties because they can't be thought as having properties until a measurement is made. By developing a new method to measure the quantum states of hundreds of atoms at once, physicists have been able to see a particular effect of quantum mechanics, called a Bell correlation, for the first time in a large system, proving the effect works on a large scale One example of the strange features of quantum physics, or the rules that govern the smallest particles, is quantum superposition. This is the property that allows an object to be in two states at the same time, which can be described by the famous Schrodinger's cat thought experiment. Properties like the location, speed or magnetic moment of an atom can exist in two different states at once, until the moment a measurement takes place. At this moment, it is as if the atom 'chooses' one possible state. HOW THE STUDY WORKED The property of the atoms the researchers used to see the correlation was their 'magnetic moment'. This can be thought of as the direction of the atoms' own magnetic field, generated by the electrons orbiting the nucleus. The researchers made small clouds of ultracold atoms cooled with laser light down to a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero. The atoms in the cloud constantly collide, which causes their magnetic moments to become slowly entangled. When this entanglement reaches a certain magnitude, Bell correlations can be detected. Advertisement And it gets more complicated with the introduction of another quantum mechanical property called entanglement. When atoms are 'entangled' the measurement of one of the atoms will not only cause it to 'pick' one state, but it will also instantaneously cause the atoms it is entangled with to do the same, even if that atom has not been measured itself. This means we automatically know information about all the atoms that are entangled at once, just by measuring one, and it does not matter how far apart in space the two entangled atoms are. This strange concept is at the heart of quantum computing and the source of the potential speed up of a quantum computer compared to a classical computer for certain algorithms. One particular form of entanglement is a state known as a Bell correlation. 'The Bell inequalities are essentially tests proposed by the physicist John Bell to reveal the presence of entanglement in a quantum system in an unambiguous way,' Professor Simon Cornish, a professor in Atomic and Molecular Physics from Durham University, who was not involved in the study, told MailOnline. 'They have essentially become the benchmark tests that are used by researchers in the field. In this sense they relate to quantum computing because they reveal the entanglement needed for computing.' A group of physicists at the University of Basel managed to observe a Bell correlation in a group of hundreds of atoms for the first time. Until now, the correlation had only been seen in groups of four light particles or 14 atoms, but the new study shows it in a group of 480 atoms. 'What is interesting about the current work is that they are using larger numbers of atoms,' Professor Cornish said. 'This relates to the idea that we know truly large objects, like the moon, behave classically, even though at the atomic level they are still governed by quantum mechanics. 'But at what stage in terms of sample size does the quantum nature disappear?' he said. 'Revealing entanglement through the Bell correlation measurements shows that quantum mechanics still governs the system investigated in Basel. 'This is again relevant to quantum computation where one of the issues is scalability, producing big quantum systems to perform more powerful computations.' One of the potential applications for Bell correlations, the researchers say, is in quantum computers (illustrated) that are far faster than conventional PCs and are able to perform calculations that could not be done otherwise SCHRODINGER'S CAT Schrodinger's cat is a thought experiment created by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger in 1935. In the hypothetical experiment a cat is placed in a sealed box next to a radioactive sample, a Geiger counter and a bottle of poison. If the Geiger counter detects the radioactive material has decayed, it will trigger the smashing of the bottle of poison and the cat will be killed. The observer cannot know whether or not an atom of the substance has decayed, and consequently, cannot know whether the vial has been broken until the box is opened. This means the cat is both dead and alive inside the box, a mixture of both states, until the box is opened to reveal the cat as either dead or alive. In a similar way, quantum superposition means particles are in two states at once, until a measurement takes place. We know superposition actually occurs at the subatomic level because there are observable effects of interference, in which a single particle is demonstrated to be in multiple locations simultaneously. Advertisement The researchers made small clouds of ultracold atoms cooled with laser light down to a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero, and slowly become entangled. When this entanglement reaches a certain magnitude, Bell correlations can be detected. Co-author, Dr Roman Schmied said 'one would expect that random collisions simply cause disorder. Instead, the quantum-mechanical properties become entangled so strongly that they violate classical statistics.' Each atom starts in a superposition of two states. After the atoms have become entangled through collisions, the researchers then measured the magnetic moment of all the atoms at once. If more of the atoms have the same magnetic moment than could be explained by chance, this shows the atoms had become entangled and 'agreed' on the same magnetic moment. One of the potential applications for Bell correlations, the researchers said, is for generating random numbers or for quantum-secure data transmission. This research has also opened up new prospects for further research. 'Bell correlations in many-particle systems are a largely unexplored field with many open questions - we are entering uncharted territory with our experiments,' said Professor Phillipp Treutlein, lead author of the study. Schrodinger's cat is a thought experiment created by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger in 1935. In the hypothetical experiment a cat is placed in a sealed box next to a radioactive sample, a Geiger counter and a bottle of poison (diagram pictured) and is both dead and alive until the box is opened What is the point of a beard, evolutionarily speaking? Children, women, and a whole bunch of men manage just fine without one. But take a walk down some streets these days and youll be confronted with all sizes and shapes of groomed (and less groomed) facial hair from designer stubble to waxed moustaches and hipster beards. Take a walk down some streets these days and youll be confronted with all sizes and shapes of groomed (and less groomed) facial hair from designer stubble to waxed moustaches and hipster beards. Jonathan Goldsmith is known as the most interesting man in the world, and always has a trimmed beard REASONS WHY MEN GROW BEARDS Researcher shows that beards probably evolved at least partly to help men boost their standing among other men. A mans ability to grow a fulsome beard isnt actually neatly linked to his testosterone levels. Despite this, a number of studies have suggested that both men and women perceive men with beards as older, stronger and more aggressive than others. And dominant men can get more mating opportunities by intimidating rivals to stand aside Advertisement When we see men paying attention to their appearance, its easy to assume that theyre just angling for partners. But our research on beards and voices shows that beards probably evolved at least partly to help men boost their standing among other men. Compared to males and females of many other primates, men and women on average look very different from each other partly thanks to mens facial hair. And when we see differences between males and females A study by the appropriately-named Nigel Barber linked British facial hair fashions between 1842 and 1971 to the ratio of men to women in the marriage market. It found that in times with a greater proportion of single men competing for fewer women, beards and moustaches became more fashionable. Beards arent the only feature that can convey dominance voices do too. People tend to vote for leaders with lower-pitched voices, and during competitive tasks men lower the pitch of their voice if they think they are more dominant than their opponent. When we see men paying attention to their appearance, its easy to assume that theyre just angling for partners. But our research on beards and voices shows that beards probably evolved at least partly to help men boost their standing among other men. Lenny Kravitz rocks out with his beard, but doesn't grow it too long Like facial hair, voice pitch also easily distinguishes men and women. To help trace the evolutionary origin of beards and voices, we tested whether they were seen as attractive, dominant or both. We asked 20 men and 20 women to rate the dominance and attractiveness of six men who were video-taped on four occasions as they let their facial hair grow. We then used computer software to create four versions of each video where the mens voices had been changed to sound higher and lower-pitched. We found that male voices that sounded deeper than average were rated as the most attractive. Really deep or high pitches werent as popular. In contrast, mens voices were perceived as increasingly dominant the lower they were. Beards didnt affect a mans attractiveness rating consistently, but those who let their facial hair grow were perceived as more dominant than others in line with previous research. The tension between attracting a mate and competing with others doesnt just apply to beards and voices. Men on average also think their body should be more muscular than women report that they want, while women on average believe they need to be thinner and wear more make-up than men report that they want. THE BEARDED STUDY A study by the appropriately-named Nigel Barber linked British facial hair fashions between 1842 and 1971 to the ratio of men to women in the marriage market. It found that in times with a greater proportion of single men competing for fewer women, beards and moustaches became more fashionable. Beards arent the only feature that can convey dominance voices do too. People tend to vote for leaders with lower-pitched voices, and during competitive tasks men lower the pitch of their voice if they think they are more dominant than their opponent. Like facial hair, voice pitch also easily distinguishes men and women. To help trace the evolutionary origin of beards and voices, we tested whether they were seen as attractive, dominant or both. We asked 20 men and 20 women to rate the dominance and attractiveness of six men who were video-taped on four occasions as they let their facial hair grow. We then used computer software to create four versions of each video where the mens voices had been changed to sound higher and lower-pitched. A study linked British facial hair fashions between 1842 and 1971 to the ratio of men to women in the marriage market. It found that in times with a greater proportion of single men competing for fewer women, beards and moustaches became more fashionable. Christian Bale goes back and forth between cleanshaven and a beard We found that male voices that sounded deeper than average were rated as the most attractive. Really deep or high pitches werent as popular. In contrast, mens voices were perceived as increasingly dominant the lower they were. Beards didnt affect a mans attractiveness rating consistently, but those who let their facial hair grow were perceived as more dominant than others in line with previous research. The tension between attracting a mate and competing with others doesnt just apply to beards and voices. Men on average also think their body should be more muscular than women report that they want, while women on average believe they need to be thinner and wear more make-up than men report that they want. Advertisement The explanation often boils down to evolution through sexual selection the process that favours traits that boost mating opportunities. But interestingly, women dont seem that interested in beards. While some studies have found that women like a bit or even a lot of facial hair on men, other studies have reported that they prefer the clean-shaven look. The lack of consistent evidence means we cant conclude that beards evolved because women were attracted to them. Despite this, a number of studies have suggested that both men and women perceive men with beards as older, stronger and more aggressive than others. And dominant men can get more mating opportunities by intimidating rivals to stand aside. Some prefer actor Jake Gyllenhaal with a beard than without Researchers have therefore suggested that a second type of sexual selection may hold the answer. To reproduce, its often not enough to simply be attractive. You also have to compete with the same sex for mating opportunities. The funny, shy guy at the back of the bar isnt going to stand a chance when competing with his bolshier brothers otherwise. And theres evidence that beards evolved to help men do just that. A mans ability to grow a fulsome beard isnt actually neatly linked to his testosterone levels. Despite this, a number of studies have suggested that both men and women perceive men with beards as older, stronger and more aggressive than others. And dominant men can get more mating opportunities by intimidating rivals to stand aside. This is something that holds true both in modern times and throughout human history. Dominance can provide a staggering short-cut to mating opportunities: genetic evidence indicates that about 8% of the male population of Asia today is a descendent of Genghis Khan and his family. A study by the appropriately-named Nigel Barber linked British facial hair fashions between 1842 and 1971 to the ratio of men to women in the marriage market. It found that in times with a greater proportion of single men competing for fewer women, beards and moustaches became more fashionable. Beards arent the only feature that can convey dominance voices do too. People tend to vote for leaders with lower-pitched voices, and during competitive tasks men lower the pitch of their voice if they think they are more dominant than their opponent. Like facial hair, voice pitch also easily distinguishes men and women. FACIAL HAIR IS RIDDLED WITH BACTERIA WHICH MAY SPREAD GERMS AND TRIGGER INFECTIONS, EXPERTS CLAIM Beards can harbour more germs than a toilet +6 Beards can harbour more germs than a toilet Experts have warned that beards are nothing more than a 'bacterial sponge', riddled with thousands of bacteria - and a perfect way to pass on germs. Carol Walker, a consultant trichologist from the Birmingham Trichology Centre, said having facial hair can lead to more frequent skin infections and to germs being passed on to others. Beards harbour more germs because facial hair is courser than other hair, so traps dirt and germs more easily, she explained. She told MailOnline: 'Beard hair; its courser. It has the shape of a bayonet, a round, convexed bottom and then comes up the side to a point. It becomes curly and smooth, it tends to have more bends and kinks which trap dirt. The cuticles on the hair which are like layers of tiles on a roof - trap the germs and grease. Hair around nostrils and mouth is well-placed to harbour bacteria. A participant poses for photographers during the "World Beard Championship" in Leogang, in the Austrian province of Salzburg. She added that people have a habit of over-handling their beards, meaning they can spread bacteria to their mouths. She said: If their hands are dirty, they transfer dirt from their hands on to their face and mouths. If someone eating dairy products it can get stuck in their beard and become a bit rancid. There can be a lot of Stepholococci [a group of bacteria that can cause illness] if someones got a cold. She has noticed people developing skin conditions due to their facial hair. She said: Some people get skin infections, caused if they have a lot of scale build up or eczema from the bacteria in their beard. If someone has a cold, a runny nose it can trickle down and be trapped in the nose, beards. Food drink can dribble down too.' Advertisement To help trace the evolutionary origin of beards and voices, we tested whether they were seen as attractive, dominant or both. We asked 20 men and 20 women to rate the dominance and attractiveness of six men who were video-taped on four occasions as they let their facial hair grow. We then used computer software to create four versions of each video where the mens voices had been changed to sound higher and lower-pitched. We found that male voices that sounded deeper than average were rated as the most attractive. Really deep or high pitches werent as popular. In contrast, mens voices were perceived as increasingly dominant the lower they were. Beards didnt affect a mans attractiveness rating consistently, but those who let their facial hair grow were perceived as more dominant than others in line with previous research. The tension between attracting a mate and competing with others doesnt just apply to beards and voices. Men on average also think their body should be more muscular than women report that they want, while women on average believe they need to be thinner and wear more make-up than men report that they want. Were not always that great at judging what the other sex finds appealing, but maybe thats in part because our instincts are to out-compete our peers as well as attract a partner. Of course, most of this research has been carried out within western populations. Make-up use, average body composition, and even the very ability to grow facial hair all differ enormously across the world meaning we could get different results elsewhere. But the point is that, whether its facial hair or something else, we often see this pattern of competing requirements leading to differences in appearances. The US Army and Marine Corps are set to test tanks with a new version of the iron dome' system developed by the Israeli government. The Trophy Active Protection System (APS) uses sensors to detect an anti tank missile is coming. It then fires small rounds to deflect them, and can also use jammers to mislead the enemy. Scroll down for video The system is designed to create a protective field around tanks, shooting down incoming missiles before they detonate. HOW IT WORKS The Trophy Active Protection System (APS) uses sensors to detect an anti tank missile is coming. It then fires small rounds to deflect them, and can also use jammers to mislead the enemy. Advertisement Military bosses believe the system could helop protect M1 tanks. Lt. Gen. Robert Walsh says they are seeing 'much more sophisticated threat(s) on the ground,' and adding more armor to the vehicles will just slow them down. The Corps is already tweaking some M1 Abrams tanks, one of the heaviest in the world, to be able accommodate a Trophy system, according to USNI. Walsh says they're also investing in drones designed to spot enemies before they can launch anti-tank missiles. He told a Senate Armed Services seapower subcommittee hearing on Wednesday that as technology proliferates, the anti-tank threat is rapidly evolving. 'When we start getting threats on our aircraft, our helicopters, our fixed wing aircraft, [from] infrared missiles, we quickly put out a capability to defeat those types of missiles,' he said. TPS fires small rounds to deflect them, and can also use jammers to mislead the enemy. 'Now we're seeing the threat on the ground changing, becoming a much more sophisticated threat on the ground. 'What we've continued to do is up-armor our capabilities on the ground, put armor on them. IRON DOME: THE FACTS Iron Dome is a mobile air defense system designed to intercept and destroy short-range rockets and artillery shells with interceptor missiles. It was created as a defensive countermeasure to the rocket threat against Israel's civilian population with help from America. Iron Dome was declared operational and initially deployed in March 2011 and the next month Iron Dome successfully intercepted a Grad rocket launched from Gaza for the first time. The tracking technology can follow the trajectory of incoming ordnance and assess whether it will hit a civilian centre or land harmlessly in open ground or the sea. There are four launchers and three are currently in operation. They cost an estimated 1.3m each and the missiles are 25,000 each. Advertisement 'We've got to start thinking more with a higher technology capability, with vehicle protective systems, active protective systems that can defeat anti-tank guided munitions, RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) along with soft capability, which is the technology our aircraft have.' Developed by the state-owned company Rafael, Trophy was initially planned for Merkava Mk4 tanks. A less expensive system developed by state-owned Israel Military Industries (IMI), known in Tel Aviv as Iron Fist, was initially developed to protect infantry deployed on Namer carriers and other armored vehicles. The Army is leasing four systems and will experiment with their Stryker combat vehicle and M1A2 tanks. The Marine Corps is currently modifying some of its M1A1 tanks to install mounts for the Trophy system When sensors detect an incoming threat, the active system fires small rounds to deflect the threat, Walsh said, noting that 'when they're going that fast, it doesn't take much to deflect them away.' The system incorporates both soft- and hard-kill missile countermeasures. Soft-kill systems either disguise a vehicle from an incoming threat or spoof or damage its homing ability by electronic means, using a jammer. The Army is leasing four systems and will experiment with their Stryker combat vehicle and M1A2 tanks. The US is also investing in drones designed to spot enemies before they can launch anti-tank missiles. Hard-kill systems physically destroy incoming projectiles before they reach the vehicle and ideally before detonation. Trophy is the only APS that has been proven in combat. Israeli Merkava tanks were outfitted with the system during the 2014 Gaza conflict where they successfully destroyed incoming missile threats , Mike OLeary, director of advanced concepts at DRS, told Defense Daily in a recent interview. Trophy also automatically identifies the direction from which a missile was fired and directs offensive systems toward the threat, OLeary said. Advertisement These stunning pictures reveal the undisturbed wrecks that lie deep under the sea. Shipwreck hunter and underwater photographer Tobias Friedrich snapped the remains of ships, planes and aircraft carriers while visiting countries including Papua New Guinea, Malta, Corsica, Egypt, Jordan and Barbados. The 35-year-old from Wiesbaden, Germany, explained that he got a thrill from exploring the wrecks. The Cedar Pride wreck is one of Jordans most popular and celebrated dives. A former Lebanese freighter, the ship sustained extensive damage during a fire in 1982. Following a request from King Abdullah, the ill-fated vessel was deliberately sunk approximately 650ft offshore as an artificial reef for divers A diver is surrounded by fish as he explores this rusted tank that sits buried in the sand below the surface in Aqaba, Jordan Friedrich meticulously plans each dive to ensure he captures the wrecks, using a wide-angle lens, at their most striking. Pictured: A P-47 Thunderbolt in Corsica Tobias said: 'Diving into a wreck is like diving into a cave. There is usually no direct way out to the surface so you need to be sure that your dive equipment is working and that you have enough air in your tank before you enter. 'It can be very difficult and dangerous - if there is no visibility inside a wreck if you need to get out diving with at least one buddy is really important inside.' Friedrich meticulously plans each dive to ensure he captures the wrecks, using a wide-angle lens, at their most striking. A diver floats beside the underneath of the Satile in Eilat, Israel (left), and a staircase still stands inside the Kawela (right) in Gozo, Malta Tobias Friedrich snapped the remains of ships, planes and aircraft carriers while visiting countries including Papua New Guinea, Malta, Corsica, Egypt (pictured), Jordan and Barbados Stern of the wreck of the Brinna H with a diver in the background holding a lamp. The wreck was a former cargo freighter that sunk on its anchor in August 2014 near Bridgetown in Barbados He said: 'I always like to explore new wrecks, so one time in my life I want to dive the wrecks of the Chuuk Lagoon in Micronesia and the Bikini Atoll because it's been said that these are the best wreck dives in the world.' Tobias has been taking underwater photography since 2007 and admitted that his favourite shots include planes. He said: 'I think the shots of the planes are pretty special because they don't belong to the sea at all despite being shipwrecks.' The bow of the wreck of the Berwyn (left), which sits 10ft below the water's surface, depending on the level of the tide at the time. This tug boat was sunk in 1919 by its own crew in Barbados. The ferry Karwela (right) in Gozo, Malta, was sunk as an artificial reef for scuba divers on August 12 2006 The middle seat on an aircraft is the least popular and airlines have realised they can make money from this, with more and more of them charging extra for the luxury of avoiding it. To increase profit, some carriers have started charging higher fees when economy class travellers choose their preferred seat in advance, usually to avoid the middle seat. That means passengers will need more than luck to nab a window or aisle seat, and those who dont pay may find themselves in one of the worst seats on a plane. To boost profit, airlines have starting charging new or higher fees to secure a window or aisle seat In the US, no-frills carrier Southwest Airlines has increased the price of its early boarding pass from $12.50 (8.75) to $15 (10.50) each way an increase of 20 per cent. The Dallas-based airline doesnt assign seats, meaning passengers have to take whatever seat is available when they board. Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines cheapest option, basic economy, doesnt allow passengers to choose their seats until 24 hours before departure. By then, the favoured window and aisle seats may already be taken, leaving travellers with little choice. Scott Mayerowitz, an airline, travel and business reporter with Associated Press, told ABC News that other carriers are following suit, treating the window or aisle seat as a luxury. Travellers who don't pay a selection fee in advance may find themselves in one of the worst seats He added: American Airlines and United are following Deltas lead on this and will be launching their own basic economy fares in coming months, although they havent yet released the details of those plans. Airlines also reserve seats at the front of economy class for elite members or those willing to pay extra, he said. Mayerowitz said passengers who arent willing to pay more for a window or aisle seat should keep checking the website of the airline they booked with to see if any seats have opened up, especially 24 hours before departure. These profit-boosting measures are already used by many airlines around the world and fees are usually charged for seats that have more legroom or are closer to the front of the plane. In the UK, for example, passengers with British Airlines must pay a 7 fee to select their seat when they book a basic economy ticket or wait until 24 hours before travelling to choose one for free. Higher fare categories, including flexible economy tickets, include seat selection at the time of booking. Monarch Airlines allows passengers to pre-reserve their seats in advance at a cost of 3.99 per seat, while easyJets fees range from 1.99 to 16.99, with higher rates for seats with more legroom. For advance selection, Ryanair, the largest low-cost carrier in Europe, charges 15 for a front row seat, 10.99 for a premium seat with more legroom, and 5.99 for a regular seat. Frank Brehany is the Consumer Director of HolidayTravelWatch, told MailOnline Travel: In an age when airlines are looking at every pound or euro they earn and new sources of income, it is not too far a stretch to imagine that airlines may be tempted to make charges for seats that are considered to be more premium, such as window or aisle seats, the logic being that the middle seat is the most uncomfortable, particularly if you are not travelling with friends or family. If EU airlines are tempted to engage in such a charging structure then they need to make sure that they are completely clear about the overall pricing or average cost of a ticket with all the extras and not just simply to present the headline figure. Kwon Woo Sung was travelling from Seoul, South Korea, to Guam island, a US territory, when he allegedly started a brawl on board the flight An unruly passenger allegedly started a fight with a flight attendant on Sunday because he was refused more alcohol. The man, who has been identified as Kwon Woo Sung, had reportedly already consumed five beers and had been smoking in the toilets of the plane before the altercation. His actions led him to be restrained for the rest of his journey aboard Korean Airlines flight 2115 from Seoul, South Korea, to Guam, a US island territory in the western Pacific. Pacific Daily News reported that the suspect was charged with 'interference with flight attendants' according to a complaint filed with US District Court of Guam. The court documents reveal the incident took place about four hours into the flight. Kwon Woo Sung, by this point, had drunk about five beers according to the court document and admitted to smoking in the toilets of the plane. The passenger then allegedly tried to order two more beers according to the document and when his request was denied, he reportedly began attacking the attendant and the supervising attendant who came to help. The court documents also revealed that the man had to be restrained with the help of four to five other passengers before he could be tied up for the remainder of the journey. Both his hands and feet had to be tied up and he had to be held down for the rest of the flight according to the court document. As a result of the alleged attack, the flight attendant, who has not been identified, received a cut on his hand, bruises on his chest and back as well as a puncture wound on his chest, stated the court document. The FBI were involved in the incident according to the report. Under US Federal Law, the suspect could face up to 20 years imprisonment. MailOnline Travel has reached out to Korean Airlines and District Court of Guam for comment. A male passenger has been arrested after opening the plane door for some 'fresh air' as the aircraft was getting ready for take off. The businessman, who has only been identified by his surname, Hu, was travelling on Hainan Airlines flight HU7729 from Hangzhou to Shenyang on April 18 when the incident took place. He was reportedly experiencing travel sickness and confused a wing emergency door with a window. He had never flown before and thought that no one would notice if he opened it as the plane waited to take off. A male passenger identified by his surname, Hu (pictured), was arrested and detained after he opened the emergency door of a plane while it was on the tarmac All the passengers on board the flight from Hangzhou to Shenyang were delayed for 45 minutes as the police came to arrest him An air hostess (pictured) reportedly told Hu twice not to touch the handle of the emergency door having gone through the safety procedures with him Hu, from Jinhua, had already traded places with a fellow passenger as he was feeling unwell according to a 1818 Golden Eye report. An air hostess, who was also interviewed in the report, said that she had gone through the safety procedures with Hu after noticing that he had switched seats. The air hostess claims to have informed him twice about not touching the handles of the door. Hu, who said he wanted 'a breath of fresh air', reportedly thought no one would notice if he secretly opened a 'window' according to QQ. However, once he turned the handle, the whole door came away from the body of the plane. Hangzhou Airport Terminal Police were immediately informed. They boarded the plane at the terminal and arrested Hu. A police officer involved in Hu's arrest said that the confused passenger might have fallen out of the plane if he hadn't had his seat belt on A police officer involved in the arrest told 1818 Golden Eye that if Hu hadn't had his seat belt on, he might have fallen out of the plane. Due to Hu's mistake, the flight was delayed for 45 minutes. In accordance with the People's Republic of China Public Security Administration Punishment Law, Hangzhou Airport police detained Hu for seven days and fined him 500 Yuan (50). MailOnline Travel has reached out to Hainan Airlines for comment. Earlier this year, MailOnline reported that another passenger had opened the door of a plane in China after deciding he needed a breath of fresh air. The man, who was not identified, was travelling from Chengdu to Urumqi when he decided to open the emergency door, causing an hour's delay to the journey. Jet Airways passengers were delayed for two hours after a cleaner found a note with the word bomb written on it. The worker made the alarming discovery under a seat as the Boeing 737-700 was being prepared for a domestic flight from Ahmedabad to Mumbai, in India. It turned out to be a hoax, however, as authorities did not find any explosives when they did a sweep of the plane. A cleaner found a note with the word 'bomb' written on it under a passenger's seat (file photo) Investigators believe the note was left on the plane when passengers arrived in Ahmedabad on a 45-minute flight from Mumbai yesterday. It wasnt discovered until all passengers had disembarked and the cleaning crew boarded to prepare the plane for the return flight, NDTV reported. One of the workers found a chit with bomb scribbled on it and police were notified. Not knowing whether it was a legitimate threat or a hoax, authorities had the plane taken to an isolation bay, where it was searched by a bomb disposal unit, including a police dog. The note was discovered while a Jet Airways plane was being prepared for a return flight (file photo) Nothing suspicious was found and the plane was cleared to carry on with flight S2 4738. The search delayed the return flight, which eventually carried 125 passengers and six crew members, by about two hours. Investigators detained and questioned the passenger who was in the seat where the note was found. Police assistant commissioner JN Parmar told NDTV: The word bomb was written on the chit. As passengers had already alighted, it was difficult for us to trace as to who left it. Hence, we have detained one passenger for questioning under whose seat the chit was found. MailOnline Travel has contacted Jet Airways for comment. Bomb hoaxes have become an increasing problem for airlines, especially in India, in the wake of recent terror attacks. Last month, hoax calls affected at least 20 flights at New Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport over the course of a week. In one incident, a hotel received a call from someone who claimed bombs were hidden on about six flights. Advertisement These stunning snaps of frozen landscapes, ferocious animals and candid moments are among those in the running for National Geographic Travels coveted photographer of the year contest. The annual competition celebrates the best in travel photography with entrants submitting snaps from their time in destinations such as China, India and the US. Based on these spectacular shots, competition will be stiff this year. National Geographic Traveler has revealed some of the entrants so far and they are nothing short of breathtaking. Photographer Michele Palazzo captured this shot of New York's Flatiron Building as the city was walloped by Winter Storm Jonas Photographer Karen Morris-Lanz was invited to have lunch with a husband and wife during her travels through Longsheng, China This mind-bending road cuts through the Gorges du Dades between walls of rock near to Boumalne, Souss-Massa-Draa, Morocco Among the astonishing snaps is Angiolo Manetti's mesmerising photo of a winding road in the Gorges du Dades near Boumalne, Morocco. Drivers must carefully navigate the narrow road, frequently named one of the world's most dangerous, which takes many twists and turns between walls of rock. One of the most eye-catching images is from Aashit Desai, who photographed devotees as they carry the palki, or sedan chair, of the god Shiva on the day of Somvati Amavasya, the no moon day, in Jejuri, India. The main ritual is the offering of turmeric powder, but so much is used that all the devotees are covered in it from head to toe. Photographers have until May 27 to enter the competition. The grand prize winner will receive a seven-day polar bear photo safari for two in Churchill, Manitoba, in Canadas Arctic the self-proclaimed polar bear capital of the world and a popular destination for nature photographers. During a snowstorm in Bryce Canyon, Utah, a tree cuts a lonely figure against the frozen landscape, where visibility was almost zero Devotees covered in turmeric carry the sedan chair of Shiva at the Khandoba temple in Jejuri, India, on Somvati Amavasya, a no moon day Ari Ross came face to face with this scarred polar bear on Wahlenbergfjorden, off of Svalbard, Norway, while in the safety of a boat A Japanese larch's twig looked like hands and feet of a ballet dancer when exposed to illumination (location: Biei, Hokkaido, Japan) Manish Mamtani and his companion laid down on a snow-covered bridge and snapped this image from a drone (Mittersill, New Hampshire) This is a general view of Eid ul Fitr Prayer at Alamgir Mosque in Varanasi, Uttarpradesh, India. Eid prayers, also known as Salat al-Eid and Salat al-Eidain , is the special prayer offered to commemorate two Islamic festivals.This image depicts the HinduMuslim brotherhood exploring the dynamics of communal relations in Varanasi-a holy city of the Hindus. Location: Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India She recently told of her plans to launch a blog about hair styling. And former Bachelor star Lana Jeavons-Fellows seemed eager to test run one particular look on Wednesday. The 28-year-old raised eyebrows at the Glue Store Denim Party in Sydney where she arrived with her brunette locks partially plaited down the middle. Scroll down for video Serious business: Lana Jeavons-Fellows showed off a bizarre new hairstyle as she attended The Glue Store Denim Party in Sydney on Wednesday Leaving the rest of her tresses to fall freely in loose waves, Lana opted for a natural make-up look to accompany her hairstyle. Dressing for the occasion, she slipped in to a pinstriped denim playsuit which revealed a glimpse of her toned legs. Wearing a black t-shirt beneath it and sporting a thick black joker, she was on trend at the jean-inspired event. Style: The 28-year-old former Bachelor contestant showed off her legs in a thigh-skimming denim playsuit Winning smile: The brunette opted for a natural make-up look with a slick of black eyeliner and mascara Project: Lana recently revealed hopes to launch a hair blog to give fans tips and advice on styling Excited: Lana took to Instagram to share this selfie for the event on Wednesday night She finished her look with some black ankle boots and added a stylish black clutch bag. Her outing comes after she teased fans over speculation she might soon appear on screens as The Bachelorette, telling Daily Mail Australia when asked: 'You never know!'. Lana found fame on the last series of The Bachelor starring Sam Wood, coming second place to Snezana Markoski. She has since maintained a visible presence in Sydney's social scene, regularly attending glittering events. Model behaviour: Georgia Gibbs showed off her model credentials in some black skinny jeans and a denim shirt On brief: DJ Tigerlily stuck with the denim theme in a shirt and some trousers of the same material At the YSL Beauty Night Out last week she revealed hopes to launch a blog to offer fans hair and beauty tips after receiving compliments on her look throughout the show. She was joined at The Glue Store party on Wednesday by former X Factor Australia star Jacinta Gulisano who opted for denim overalls. Young Talent Time star and Disney presenter Georgia May Davis was elegant in a black camisole and skinny jeans while model Georgia Gibbs was casual in a denim shirt and black trousers. DJ Tigerlily showed off her green hair in some slouchy trousers with a matching shirt while blogger Melissa Whitelaw was daring in a busty crop-top and jeans. Daring to bare: Blogger Melissa Whitelaw opted for a more risque ensemble of a transparent body and jeans Manu Feildel has cancelled his live cooking show, An Evening With Manu, giving no reason for the U-turn to disgruntled ticket holders. The Frenchman was due to tour the country to put on a string of shows for audiences in Perth, Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne in May but has dropped out. In a statement released by promoters Lateral Events, the company cited 'circumstances beyond' both theirs and Manu's control for the sudden cancellation. Scroll down for video Cancelled: Manu Feildel's live show, An Evening with Manu, has been axed, promoters revealed onThursday 'It is great regret that we inform you that An Evening with Manu has been cancelled, this is due to circumstances beyond our control. 'Manu and Lateral Events are very disappointed and both extend their sincere apologies for this cancellation,' it said. Daily Mail Australia has contacted representatives for the star for further information. 'Disappointed': In a statement, organisers Lateral Events said the celebrity chef and they too regretted the move Fans with tickets, some of which sold for up to $160, have seven days to claim a full refund. It comes as My Kitchen Rules, the Seven Network show in which he appears, nears its end with just four teams remaining in the competition. Manu recently revealed plans for his forthcoming wedding to his long-term partner Clarissa Weerasena. Busy schedule: Manu and his co-star 'Paleo' Pete Evans have appeared in My Kitchen Rules for weeks Speaking to TV week, he said the pair were planning a destination ceremony in a tropical paradise. Dismissing the notion of marrying in his native France, he said: 'We're thinking of having the wedding on an island somewhere, with turquoise blue seas. 'The Maldives, maybe - that's one we're discussing.' The pair have been engaged since 2013 and share a son, Jonti. Manu has another child from a previous relationship. She was the much-loved presenter of Four Rooms for nearly five years. But Anita Rani has bid a sad farewell to the Channel 4 series as Property Ladder presenter Sarah Benny prepares to replace her. The 38-year-old Strictly Come Dancing star is stepping down from the show - where sellers pitch their treasures to Britain's top dealers - as the series is recommissioned with 20-hour long episodes. Scroll down for video Departure: Anita Rani is stepping down from Channel 4's Four Rooms after nearly five years as host The news may come as a shock to fans of Four Rooms, especially as Anita, who hosted the show from May 2011 onwards, is yet to make any mention of her departure on social media. However her successor Sarah, 44, - who was confirmed as the new host by Channel 4 - has a string of successful programmes under her belt including Property Ladder, Double Your House for Half the Money, Help! My House is Falling Down and Restoration Nightmare. In Four Rooms, sellers pitch their unique and cherished treasure to some of Britain's top dealers in the world of art, antiques and collectibles. The rules remain the same: if the seller says no to a dealer's offer, the deal is dead forever. New beginnings: The 38-year-old presenter is being replaced by queen of property shows, Sarah Beeny, 44 (pictured) 'I'm delighted that Four Rooms is returning and am thrilled to welcome Sarah Beeny as our new presenter,' said Hannah Wyatt, an executive at production company Boundless. 'Her energy and enthusiasm will dovetail that of our fantastic dealers, including our new dealer Pearl Lowe. I'm looking forward to seeing what treasures this series will unearth.' Meanwhile Anita still has plenty to keep her busy as she co-presents the BBC nature show Countryfile - and has previously presented Watchdog, The One Show and Escape To The Continent. Sizzling samba! Anita won over the nation when she appeared on Strictly Come Dancing last year and made it to the semi-final with hunky dancing partner Gleb Savchenko Ready for her close-up: The Bradford-born star shared a selfie with a glamorous pal before a V&A party for the Undressed exhibition She also appeared on last year's Strictly Come Dancing with her hunky dancing partner Gleb Savchenko. The duo won over the nation with their chemistry and quick-footed skills, and made it to the semi-final of the hit competition. And despite keeping quiet on social media about being replaced on Four Rooms, Anita has certainly been keeping entertained. The Bradford-born star stunned in a paisley maxi dress at the V&A's Undressed party last week, posting a selfie with her pal. And earlier that week the presenter flaunted her impeccable style in some statement culottes in a green graphic print which she teamed with a denim short-sleeved shirt. They've been dating since early 2014, and there's no doubt Margot Robbie and Tom Ackerley are as loved up as ever. Appearing on the latest cover of Australia's Who magazine, The Wolf Of Wall Street star Margot and Tom are seen putting on quite the public display of affection. Splashing about during a romantic getaway in St Barts earlier this month, 25-year-old Margot is seen kissing her beau and also flashing the flesh in a white bikini. Scroll down for video Loved up: Appearing on the latest cover of Australia's Who magazine , The Wolf Of Wall Street star Margot Robbie and boyfriend Tom Ackerley are seen putting on quite the public display of affection. Her crochet, triangle-cut bikini top reveals a glimpse of cleavage and is teamed with a pair of matching stringed bottoms allowing her toned stomach to be on show. When enjoying the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea, Margot and her man are seen wrapping their arms around each other while staying afloat. Making the most of their intimate time together, they are seen sharing a sweet smooch, and there's no doubt the pair can't keep their eyes off each other. A source told Who magazine: 'They looked very relaxed and stayed close to each other'. Very cute: News of Margot's budding romance with Tom, who attended Godalming College, surfaced in 2014 after the pair met while working together on Suite Francaise, which also stars Michelle Williams 'They were happy just mixing in with other holidaymakers.' News of Margot's budding romance with Tom, who attended Godalming College, surfaced in 2014 after the pair met while working together on Suite Francaise, which also stars Michelle Williams. His impressive directing film credits include Pride, Rush and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy amongst others. Last year Margot revealed to Sunday Style that it's hard maintaining a relationship when she is required to travel so much, saying: 'I don't know how anyone makes a relationship work [like this] to be honest.' But even though the couple are forced to spend a lot of time apart due to their conflicting work schedules, they appear to be making the relationship work. The final four teams on My Kitchen Rules have been announced with the highly anticipated semi finals set to begin. And with a whopping $250,000 prize money on the line, things are heating up between the contestants. On Thursday evening, 'legal eagles' Zana Pali and Gianni Romano are set to go head-to-head with sisters Tasia and Gracia, before mother and son duo Anna and Jordan battle married couple Carmine and Lauren for a spot in the grand final. Daily Mail Australia takes a look at the final teams to see if they have what it takes to win. Scroll down for video ZANA PALI AND GIANNI ROMANO Will they win? On Thursday evening, 'legal eagles' Zana Pali and Gianni Romano are set to go head-to-head with sisters Tasia and Gracia in the first semi final round Married lawyers Zana, 25, and Gianni, 28, are the high-powered Victoria-based couple who have made a bid to win the competition. Zana, known for her love of the finer things in life, is no stranger to causing a stir with her opinions and feisty attitude. Over the course of the show, she's slammed another team for finding hair in her food, worried about breaking her high heels while walking towards an outdoor instant restaurant, critiqued the cooking methods of other teams and has been open about her fear of germs. At one point on the show, she and Gianni declared that the 'don't like' eating at places other than their mansion because they get worried they would fall ill. See MKR news as semi-final teams revealed as Zana and Gianni and Tasia and Gracia prep Not happy! Over the course of the show, Zana's slammed another team for finding hair in her food Interesting: Earlier this year, Daily Mail Australia uncovered exclusive footage of Gianni simulating sex with a teddy bear in his underwear before marrying Zana Germaphobes? At one point on the show, she and Gianni declared that the 'don't like' eating at places other than their mansion because they get worried they would fall ill She once freaked out about the possibility of having bacteria in her stew, saying to camera: 'The stew is the most ugliest dish you will ever see. Normally the village people would just grab a spoon full and eat from the big bowl but diseases and bacteria are not for me!' Zana also become known for bossing around her husband Gianni in the kitchen, but he also has courted controversy during their time on the show. Earlier this year, Daily Mail Australia uncovered exclusive footage of Gianni simulating sex with a teddy bear in his underwear before marrying Zana. TASIA AND GRACIA SEGER Top contenders: Tasia (L) and Gracia (R) Seger are sisters from Victoria who are known for their good food The sisters from Victoria have proved themselves in the competition and are the current leaders on the scoreboard between the four teams, at 85 points. The pair have shown they are fine cooks with their Indonesian-inspired dishes. Indeed last week, Zana said they were a 'team to be worried about' as she was left impressed by their ultimate instant restaurant. She had previously said that she was 'definitely not a fan' of Asian cuisine but was won over by their cooking. The girls also gained the highest total score ever for the ultimate instant round. On top! The girls also gained the highest total score ever for the ultimate instant round Coming to blows! However, the siblings have also become known on the show for their constant bickering in the kitchen However, the siblings have become known on the show for their constant bickering in the kitchen. During their ultimate instant restaurant, Jordan made the other teams laugh when they all heard the girls screaming in the kitchen and he remarked: 'Do you think they get noise complaints from the neighbours?' Gracia has meanwhile said: 'Actually, we're not fighting, we're having a conversation and that's just how we communicate in the kitchen.' CARMINE AND LAUREN FINELLI Underrated: Carmine and Lauren Finelli are a married couple, who hail from South Australia Carmine and Lauren are a married couple, who hail from South Australia. They have previously talked about how much they want to win the competition, as they want 'career changes' and have delayed starting a family to tackle the show. Last week, the pair spoke to AAP about the sacrifices they made to appear on the show. 'We put off having children to be on this show,' Lauren said. 'We wanted career changes, so we were going to fight for it. We weren't going to give up'. The pair have rather been seen as underdogs in the competition, with Zana noting after their ultimate instant restaurant that they are now a 'threat.' They have cooked in a whopping three sudden deaths and have scraped through to the semi finals. ANNA AND JORDAN BRUNO Will they be victors? Anna and Jordan Bruno are a Maltese mother and son team from Western Australia Anna and Jordan Bruno are a Maltese mother and son team from Western Australia. The pair have had a solid performance throughout the competition and often chose to perform intricate dishes on the show. Jordan often shows his sensitive side and breaks down in tears, sometimes thanks to the pressure. During their ultimate instant restaurant this week, he copped a grilling from judge Manu Feildel for bickering with his mother, before Anna stood up for her son and said all was well between them. During the evening, Jordan cried with the pressure of it all, saying how much he wants to win the competition. Meanwhile, he also recently cried during Tasia and Gracia's ultimate instant restaurant, because his mother gave 'a really good speech about love.' Emotional: During the evening, Jordan cried with the pressure of it all, saying how much he wants to win the competition Breaking down: Meanwhile, he also recently cried during Tasia and Gracia's ultimate instant restaurant, because his mother gave 'a really good speech about love.' He came to prominence as a lifeguard, patrolling Australia's most famous beach. And now, Bondi Rescue star Trent Maxwell has revealed his delight after making his life-long ambition come true by becoming a firefighter. Speaking to Confidential this week, the 24-year-old - who completed his training at the Alexandria College - described his new career as every kids dream. Scroll down for video 'It's every kids' dream': Former Bondi Rescue star Trent Maxwell has revealed his delight after making his life-long ambition come true by becoming a firefighter I applied six times, the TV personality confessed, before adding: I left school to become a lifeguard, but I never lost sight of becoming a firefighter. Saving lives is clearly in Maxwells blood as various members of his family are in the emergency services, working as paramedics and firefighters. Its kind of sticking with the family, he continued. From water to fire: Speaking to Confidential this week, the 24-year-old - who completed his training at the Alexandria Colleg - described his new career as every kids dream In a previous interview with The Daily Telegraph, Maxwell opened up about his very first day as a lifeguard, which involved trying to save a man who had made a suicide attempt. The former lifeguard was just 16 when the incident happened when he worked across Bronte beach. Recalling the tragic event, he explained: He was still alive when I got to him but in a really bad way. I brought him in but he died.' Runs in the family: Saving lives is clearly in Maxwells blood as various members of his family are in the emergency services, working as paramedics and firefighters Bondi Rescue is a reality television show which documents lifeguards patrolling the world's busiest beach during the summer period. Meanwhile, earlier this year, Bondi Rescue boss Bruce Hopkins was caught by police driving more than three times the legal limit. Chief lifeguard 'Hoppo' was unable to control his vehicle swerving on to the wrong side of the road luckily missing pedestrians and oncoming traffic along the beachfront of Sydney's Bondi beach, on January 4, according to reports. He's the Hollywood star known to enjoy surfing near his home in Byron Bay. And actor Chris Hemsworth is hitting the waves again as he embarks on a mates' holiday in Fiji with pro surfer Kelly Slater. The Melbourne-born hunk, 32, was seen arriving at Nadi International Airport this week with the 11-time World Champion, The Courier Mail reported. See Chris Hemsworth updates as he enjoys Fiji surfing holiday with friend Kelly Slater Surfing buddies: Australian actor Chris Hemsworth (left) and professional surfer Kelly Slater (right) - pictured here at an event in California last year with Kelly's daughter (centre) - were recently spotted by Brisbane local Matt Thomas at a Fiji airport before reportedly embarking on a mates' surfing holiday, reports The Courier Mail The A-list pals were spotted at the arrivals hall by Brisbane local Matt Thomas, who was in the island country for his honeymoon. And on Wednesday, Kelly shared an Instagram photo taken by Josh Bystrom at the Tavarua island resort which 'tagged' Thor star Chris and his actress wife Elsa Pataky. This social media snap - which featured Kelly riding through a tube-shaped wave - would suggest the Hollywood couple had joined him for the surfing safari. G'day mates! Melbourne-born Chris (left) is good friends with 11-time World Champion Kelly (right) In good company: On Wednesday, Kelly shared an Instagram photo of himself riding riding through a tube-shaped wave taken by Josh Bystrom at the Tavarua island resort, which 'tagged' Thor star Chris and his actress wife Elsa Pataky - suggesting the Hollywood couple had joined him for the surfing safari Chris' passion for surfing is well-documented, and he is often seeing catching waves near his coastal New South Wales home. The star's friendship with Kelly, 44, goes back several years - with Chris previously telling Vanity Fair he grew up idolising the Florida athlete. He even recalled a story when he 'started crying' after discovering his father Craig Hemsworth went surfing with Kelly, but Chris missed out because of theatre class. Making waves! Chris' friendship with Kelly - pictured here during the Quiksilver Pro competition last year - goes back several years, and the Thor star previously admitted he grew up idolising the pro surfer Fortunately, the pair become close friends after Chris' rise to fame as a Hollywood star in blockbuster films Thor and The Avengers. Meanwhile, this follows rumours Kelly proposed to his long-time girlfriend Kalani Miller during a recent trip Down Under. Fashion designer Kalani was spotted at a David Jones event in Sydney earlier this month supposedly flashing a diamond 'engagement ring'. After Michelle Bridges said 'morbidly obese people can't be happy' in a controversial interview with Australian Story, Ajay Rochester took to Instagram to share her literal rebuttal. The former Biggest Loser host told the show's personal trainer to 'kiss [her] fat happy a**!' by posting a photo of a smiley face that had been drawn on her bare bottom. And on Thursday, the 47-year-old spoke with 2DayFM Hit 104.1's Rove McManus and Sam Frost with claims Michelle had 'bullied' her while on the show. Scroll down for video 'She's a bad, nasty piece of crap': Former Biggest Loser host Ajay Rochester claimed on Thursday that she was 'bullied' by Michelle Bridges while hosting the weight loss show 'Working with her was horrible, it was like being at high school and being bullied every single day,' she said, having worked with Michelle on the weight loss show from 2006 to 2009. 'She was one of those mean girls.' One such incident, claims Ajay, was when she walked past Michelle who laughed and apparently called out 'cankles'. Controversial: Michelle Bridges said 'morbidly obese people can't be happy' in an interview with Australian Story on Monday night 'Working with her was horrible': The 47-year-old claims she was 'bullied' by Michelle on a regular basis 'She's a bad, nasty piece of crap,' she finished. Michelle's management informed Daily Mail Australia she was on holiday and was unavailable to comment. The photo shared to Ajay's Instagram on Tuesday showing her flashing her rear end she said was taken by her 'drunk neighbour' who was also responsible for drawing the face as well. 'Michelle Bridges can kiss my fat happy a***!' she wrote alongside the image as she added the hashtags: 'Drop the plus' and 'Happy at any size.' 'She can kiss my fat happy a***!' Ajay shared a snap on Tuesday of her bare bottom as a literal rebuttal to Michelle's controversial statements But the snap was removed from her social media, with the media personality saying 'some people found my rather large buttocks offensive'. Fans of Ajay commented on the daring photo as they commended the star for courageously taking a stand. 'Cheers Ajay!! LA looks GOOD on you!!!! That's way more beautiful than my skinny bone puking neighbour!!!' one fan wrote. Earlier this week, former Bachelor star Laurina Fleure slammed Blake Garvey and Louise Pillidge for 'exploiting themselves' and 'milking the last drop of publicity' after they called time on their 18-month romance. And as expected, Blake has hit back at the 31-year-old reality star who appeared on his season of the reality show in 2014, calling her comments 'hypocritical'. 'It seems a bit pot-calling-kettle-black when she's talking about milking publicity,' he told KIIS FM's Kyle And Jackie O. 'Didn't she go on that show in the jungle?' Scroll down for video 'It seems a bit pot-calling-kettle-black': Blake Garvey slams Laurina Fleure as hypocritical after she criticised him and ex Louise Pillidge for 'milking the last drop of publicity' 'Didn't she go on that show in the jungle?': In his vitriol, Blake slammed Laurina for trying to gain publicity for appearing on I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! The catty comment was a reference to Laurina's six-week stint in the South African jungle for the recent series of I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! during which she competed for her chosen charity Living Positive Victoria. The vitriol from the 33-year-old auctioneer is rather hypocritical, considering after his tenure on The Bachelor he continued his foray into reality television with an appearance of The Celebrity Apprentice last year. Daily Mail Australia has contacted Laurina in regards to the comments. Hypocritical? After his tenure on The Bachelor, the 33-year-old auctioneer continued his foray into reality television with an appearance of The Celebrity Apprentice last year Weighing in: Former The Bachelor Australia star Laurina Fleure responded to Blake's split with Louise Pillidge saying the pair were 'exploiting themselves' and 'milking the last drop of publicity' It comes after Laurina told Daily Mail Australia on Monday she was opposed to the way the pair were dealing with their breakup so publicly. 'I think that Blake and Louise posing for a photo and tell-all about their break-up is exploiting of themselves,' she said. 'Not very tasteful milking the last drop of publicity, but probably indicative of the type of relationship they were in,' she added. The brunette beauty also said she believed it was always going to be 'hard' for the couple, given Blake first proposed to Sam Frost, before dumping her and picking runner-up Louise. Doomed to fail? Speaking to Daily Mail Australia, Laurina said she believed things were always going to be tough given Blake had first proposed to Sam Frost, before dumping her and picking second runner-up Louise 'She is the cookie-cutter ideal of what a woman and a wife should be': Laurina previously told NW Magazine that she thought Blake and Louise were the perfect match 'The start to their relationship wasn't ideal so maybe that hindered their foundation and may have made it hard for them to move forward,' she added. However, the Pialia fashion boutique owner was quick to add: 'I have no idea why Blake and Louise split. I didn't know either of them very well'. Laurina had previously toldNW Magazine that she thought Blake and Louise were the perfect match. 'Ending up with Blake would have been soul destroying,' she said. 'He had lots of ideas as to what a woman should be, and it's perfect that he ended up with Louise, because she is the cookie-cutter ideal of what a woman and a wife should be,' she went on to add. Way back when: Laurina appeared on the 2014 season of The Bachelor Australia starring Blake himself 'Ending up with Blake would have been soul destroying': Following the appearance Laurina publicly slammed the Lothario, saying, 'He had lots of ideas as to what a woman should be' Blake and Louise, who are still living together in Perth, have copped serious backlash over ending their relationship in such a public manner, however Blake told Kyle and Jackie O that he believes he had no choice. 'Can you imagine if we didn't?' he said. 'When just do something quietly they're like "What are you hiding? Why aren't you speaking out?"' He said he learned that lesson the hard way during the beginning of their relationship, when a media blackout had reporters camped outside his mother's house. 'That was ridiculous,' he recalled. 'I'm not going through that again.' 'Can you imagine if we didn't?': Blake and Louise, who are still living together in Perth, have copped serious backlash over ending their relationship in such a public manner, but say they had no choice During the interview, lifestyle blogger Louise also opened up on the pressure of dealing with their break-up being played out in such a public manner. 'We've still got this amazing friendship, which has so been great for both of us to get through this,' said Louise. 'Because, obviously, it hasn't been easy.' According to Louise, the immense public scrutiny was the underlying cause of their relationship break down. 'Not being able to celebrate our love was one of the hardest things for me,' she told the radio hosts. 'When you're trying to move forward, it's hard to always be reminded of what's happened.' 'It's hard to always be reminded of what's happened': According to Louise, the immense public scrutiny was the underlying cause of their relationship break down She also said the negative attention, including fans labeling Blake a 'love rat' for then expressing his love for his third choice Louise was 'hard to move forward' from. In Monday's issue of New Idea magazine, Blake revealed the romance between him and Louise has crashed despite them undergoing three months of counselling in a bid to mend the cracks. 'We were walking on eggshells around each other, always trying to say the right thing... It was suffocating' he told the publication, before adding: 'It feels surreal and since then I have gone through so many emotions. Ive been crying, numb and angry'. 'It was suffocating,' he told the magazine in a teary interview. What could have been: In October 2014 the finale of The Bachelor Australia's second season aired in which Blake proposed to Sam Frost She shot to fame after launching a modelling career in her teen years before landing an acting role on Home And Away. And Jodi Anasta says she's certainly not against her two-year-old daughter Aleeia following in her footsteps when it comes to a career in fashion or showbusiness. Appearing on Channel Nine's Today Extra program on Thursday morning, the 31-year-old said she would support her little girl's aspirations, just like her own mother did for her when she travelled overseas to model aged 13. Scroll down for video Like mother, like daughter: Jodi Anasta says she'll support two-year-old daughter Aleeia is she follows in her footsteps when it comes to a career in fashion or showbusiness Doting: Jodi pictured with Aleeia at the Mon Purse collection launch in Sydney on Tuesday 'It is interesting. I remember travelling to Japan with my mum when I was 13 and so I had the support from my mum,' Jodi began telling show hosts David Campbell and Sonia Kruger. 'I would say that to any young girls, have family support, clear direction, know what you are doing and a good support team... that's what it is all about. 'If you have those people in place, you are quite well protected. If you are on your own, that's the problem,' she said. Open to it: Appearing on Channel Nine's Today Extra programme on Thursday morning, the 31-year-old Australian beauty said she would support her little girl's aspirations Back in the day: Jodi launched her international modelling career at the age of 13, before landing an acting role on Home And Away at the age of 19 - pictured in 2006 at the age of 21 While Jodi says her mother 'was learning as I was learning' about the modelling industry, Aleeia will have an advantage if she chooses the same career path as Jodi has been through it all before. But keen to let her little girl, whom she shares with Braith Anasta, make up her mind, she jokingly added: 'She'll be studying and playing sport, that's it'. Back in December Jodi and former NRL star Braith called time on their marriage. Speaking to Daily Mail Australia at the launch of her Mon Purse collection in Sydney on Tuesday, Jodi said she hoped her daughter would see the hard work she puts in as a single mother. Role model: The actress says her daughter understands her work and recognises her in magazines. Pictured with bag and purse designer Lana Hopkins 'She understands what my job is, she'll pick up a magazine or if it's on TV and (she'll) go "mummy mummy!" 'I just like to think that she sees me as a hard working mother doing the best I can in a world where it's not always easy to work.' Jodi added that she and Braith were supportive of one another and eager to succeed as co-parents. Hard at it: Jodi launched her collection for Mon Purse in Sydney on Tuesday night Working it: She poses with make up artist Max May and Lana Asked how the pair were coping with parenting whilst no longer together, she said: 'It's amazing. 'I make sure the days Im not working we have really good quality time together and she has a great time with me and a great time with Braith and I think together you only have to look at the little girl that she is (to see) that shes thriving, shes in her element, shes intelligent, shes funny and very entertaining.' Jodi welcomed their daughter in 2014. Following news of her split from Braith, the 34-year-old former NRL player said he felt she had put her career on hold to have children. Revealing that she is eager to return to acting, Jodi said on Tuesday that she had been auditioning for roles and was excited about the future. Proud: The actress has gushed over her daughter, describing her as 'intelligent and entertaining' Joint effort: Jodi says she and former husband Braith were working together to raise Aleeia 'I love it, and Ive got some really exciting things coming up. Im looking forward to acting again very soon.' Jodi stunned at the launch party held at the Roslyn Packer Theatre on Tuesday, showing off her model figure in a slinky cream dress. She brought Aleeia along for the special occasion, putting on a doting display as they posed on the red carpet before entering the party. Fifi Box has long been the subject of speculative magazine covers. And after confirming Grant Kenny as the father of her daughter Beatrix 'Trixie' Belle Box last Monday, the front cover of New Idea magazine has suggested a wedding is now on the cards. Appearing on The Project on Tuesday, the popular guest host made light of the rumours with her fellow panellist with Carrie Bickmore stating: 'We should start by saying "Congratulations" - cause am I right in reading, there's a beach wedding on the cards?' Scroll down for video 'I was as surprised as you were': Fifi Box made light of the rumours she is set to marry ex partner Grant Kenny joking with her fellow panellist Peter Helliar, Waleed Aly and Carrie Bickmore while on The Project on Tuesday 'I was as surprised as you were when I read a headline that I was having a beach wedding,' Fifi admitted. 'Then I thought the most recent beach I've been to was with you,' the 39-year-old told Carrie, adding: 'And I'm thinking "did we get married"?' 'Well, that would make front cover news!' Carrie laughed. 'Was this beach in New Zealand or the UK, where was this beach?' panellist Waleed Aly chided, given same-sex marriage is still not legal in Australia. 'Absolutely not, no': The popular radio personality then denied the New Idea cover story 'That would make front cover news!' Fifi made light of the magazine cover, talking about Fifi and Grant's wedding plans, by talking of marrying Carrie instead 'It all adds up,' Pete began, before explaining: 'Cause there's a hen's night in the audience - is this your hen's night?' 'Have you organised your hen's night for the night you're doing The Project?' he grilled. 'So no wedding and no beach wedding?' Carrie clarified, with Fifi responding without a moment's hesitation, saying: 'Absolutely not, no'. 'Unless you're interested and we can talk about that after the show,' she added to Carrie. The magazine article was published a week after the bubbly blonde breakfast radio presenter took to Instagram following Trixie's third birthday party, sharing photos of the fun festivities with fans. 'Bouncing castle daddy cuddles': Fifi confirmed in an Instagram post last Monday that Grant Kenny was the father of her three-year-old daughter Beatrix 'Trixie' Belle Box Among the images, one stood out, when Fifi captioned a shot of Grant and Trixie: 'Bouncing castle daddy cuddles'. A second shot uploaded showed the trio together for the first time and simply stated: 'Hide-and-seek in the bouncing castle...boo!' The fiercely private radio and TV personality has long evaded questions of her daughter's father, with the starlet announcing her pregnancy in 2012, shortly after the pair reportedly broke up. Australian actress Rose Byrne barely puts a foot wrong with her fashion choices whether on the red carpet or during her downtime. And on Wednesday, the 36-year-old looked positively radiant as she cut a stylish figure in New York. Appearing in high spirits, the new mother showed off her trim post-baby body in a bright red coat and a chic pink and black floral dress. Scroll down for video Looking chic! Australian actress Rose Byrne was spotted cutting a stylish figure in New York on Wednesday Teaming her look with a black leather belt clenched in her waist, she also wore a pair of high-heeled black boots to give her extra height. She appeared to carry a black quilted leather Chanel bag on her shoulder. Her make-up included dewy foundation, a smokey eye with shimmering eye shadow and a pink lip. The Bridesmaids star also wore bronzer which accentuated her cheekbones. Dressed up: Appearing in high spirits, the new mother showed off her trim post-baby body in a bright red coat and a pink and black floral dress Glowing: Her make-up included dewy foundation, a smokey eye with shimmering eye shadow and a pink lip Rose meanwhile had her honey-tipped brunette locks out in loose tousled curls. She appeared to be riding solo for the outing, with her partner Bobby Cannavale no where in sight. The duo welcomed their first child together, son Rocco Robin Cannavale, on February one. Bobby recently shared a sweet snap of their boy to Instagram while they were holidaying in Florida, when he was just seven weeks old. Bouncing along! Rose meanwhile had her honey-tipped brunette locks out in loose tousled curls Busy woman! She is also set to appear in the upcoming film Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising and X:Men Apocalypse, that will be released later this year They have kept him relatively under wraps online and have been dating since 2012. Bobby also has a 20-year-old son, Jake, from a previous relationship. Elsewhere, Hollywood beauty Rose has been busy promoting her new film, The Meddler. In the comedy and drama film, she stars alongside the likes of Susan Sarandon. She is also set to appear in the upcoming film Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising and X:Men Apocalypse, that will be released later this year. Girls day? She appeared to be riding solo for the outing, with her partner Bobby Cannavale no where in sight (seen at an event earlier this year) The late, great Whitney Houston once sang 'I believe the children are the future,' and it sounds like it's going to be a pretty sweet future if primary school students have anything to do with it. With the news of an impending Double Dissolution, 2DayFM Hit 104.1's breakfast hosts Rove McManus and Sam Frost went to discuss politics with some youngsters. Sharing a video to the show's Facebook page on Tuesday, one student said he'd have 'everyone eat ice cream every day' if he were Prime Minister prompting Rove to reply: 'You'd get my vote.' 'Everyone eats ice cream every day': Rove McManus and Sam Frost asked primary school students what they would do if they were Prime Minister 'The video began with the radio hosts asking the children what they thought 'double dissolution' meant, which none of them could answer. Fans were sympathetic, however, with one comment on the post reading: 'I'm not even kidding I have no idea what it means!' 'You'd get my vote': Rove, 42, was encouraging of one young boy At the end of the clip, Rove noticed two of the boys fidgeting, to which he asked: 'Do you want to do a lap of the room?' before leaping off his chair. The segment ends with Rove and the kids running around in a circle around the classroom chanting 'double dissolution' while clapping. The video comes after Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced he would call a double dissolution election as early as July 2. 'Double dissolution': The segment ends with Rove and the kids running around in a circle around the classroom chanting and clapping Big news: The video comes after Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced he would call a double dissolution election as early as July 2 But Mr Turnbull said he will wait until the budget is delivered on May 3 before making the final call to send Australians to the polls. 'My intention is after the budget, at an appropriate time after the budget has been delivered, I will be asking the Governor-General to dissolve both houses of the Parliament for an election which I expect to be held on the 2nd of July', the Prime Minister said on Tuesday. A double dissolution means all 226 seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate will be up for grabs - something that will favor the Liberal-National coalition and the Labor party over minor parties because it means the quota of votes needed to win a senate seat is greater. The biggest music and arts festival in Australia, Splendour In The Grass 2016, has sold out. 32,500 tickets were sold in just over an hour on Thursday morning when online vendor Moshtix opened the floodgates at 9am. Hopefuls queued on line over an hour to secure tickets for the festival which this year features Flume, The Cure and James Blake, with the organisers telling people to 'Hang in there, stay cool'. Scroll down for video Byron Bay's Splendour In The Grass 2016 sells out in just over an hour leaving some fans fuming at wait times online Just after 10.45am, Moshtix took to Twitter and Facebook to tease those who had missed out: 'Its happened! Dont say we didnt warn you.' Many frustrated fans took to social media begging for more information about the long wait for tickets. One user wrote: 'I feel like I've suddenly developed anxiety being in the greenroom for so long,' referencing the page users are redirected to to wait in line for tickets. 'Stay cool': 32,500 tickets were sold in just over an hour on Thursday morning when online vendor Moshtix opened the floodgates at 9am Massive: The lineup, that includes The Cure and The 1975, was announced last week Another wrote: 'This is RIDICULOUS!!!! 1hr and still in the green room!!! Get your act together - you knew there would be a lot of people trying!' To which Splendour's official Twitter wrote their generic response: 'There is a lot of ppl attempting to access #SITG2016 tix at the same time. Hang in there, stay cool and follow the instructions [sic]'. Some users also appeared to experience problems with the vendor, claiming their credit card had been charged but they had not been issued tickets. Fuming: Fans were waiting in online queues for a long time and took to social media to express their frustration Massive: The Cure fronted by Robert Smith lead a huge amount of international headliners Local boy: Flume leads the plethora of local acts Daily Mail Australia has contacted Moshtix for comment. Revellers hoping to still attend the festival have been given the option to go on a waitlist for tickets via Splendour's resale facility. Resale tickets will become available from 9am AEST Monday 30 May 2016. Legendary alternative English outfit The Cure will be among the exclusive international headliners gracing the stage at this year's Splendour In The Grass 2016 music festival in Byron Bay. Getting the big names: The 1975 will be making an exclusive appearance as well Hosts Matt Okine and Alex Dyson made the anticipated announcement on triple j, with British alt-rockers The 1975 also making an appearance at the festival. Organisers also secured exclusive performances from US rockers The Strokes and Melbourne's elusive Avalanches, who have been teasing their second album for the past 16 years. Splendour In The Grass takes place at the North Byron Parklands in Byron Bay over Friday July 22, Saturday July 23 and Sunday July 24 2016. My Kitchen Rules is nearly coming to an end. And battling it out on Thursday night's semi-finals are teams Zana Pali and husband Gianni Romano and sisters Tasia and Gracia Seger. In a new teaser from the show, judge Pete Evans is left utterly impressed by the food served by the remaining teams. Scroll down for video He's a fan! My Kitchen Rules judge Pete Evans (R) was left utterly impressed by the food served in a new preview for Thursday night's first semi final round. He is seen here with fellow judge Manu Feildel (L) 'It's the strongest three course menu I've ever had in this competition,' Pete said to fellow judge Manu Feildel. After his remark, Victorian siblings Tasia and Gracia could be seen cheering and jump up and down for joy as they stand in the kitchen, while Zana and Gianni high-ten. Pete then added: 'What a semi final.' Two fancy dishes are also seen in the clip. It went well? After his remark, Victorian siblings Tasia (R) and Gracia (L) cheer and jump up and down for joy as they stand in the kitchen, while Zana and Gianni high-ten Relieved? Zana and Gianni are seen clapping their hands together in the preview He's happy! Pete then adds: 'What a semi final' On Thursday night's episode, one of the teams will be eliminated and the other will gain a spot in the grand final, that is set to air next week. Remaining teams, mother and son duo Anna and Jordan and married couple Lauren and Carmine will then compete on Monday in their semi final round to see who will go to the grand final. Gianni and Zana made their way to the semi finals after scoring 71 in their ultimate instant restaurant on Wednesday night and sending home brother and sister team Laura and Mitch, who were on 60 points. Sisters: Tasia (L) and Gracia (R) are seen here Can they do it? Zana and Gianni are pictured earlier this year A taste of what's to come: A dish that looks like homemade pasta is seen in the preview Tasty: A dish that looks like seafood can be seen in the clip Zana told The Daily Telegraph about her upcoming battle against Tasia and Gracia in the semi finals, saying: 'Gianni and I knew they were the strongest team in the competition and that wed have to step it up.' She added: 'The fact they converted me into loving Asian food says a lot. Its a very big deal. I said to them, "Your food so far is the best Ive tasted in the competition".' Booted: Gianni and Zana made their way to the semi finals after scoring X in their ultimate instant restaurant on Wednesday night and sending home brother and sister team Laura and Mitch Max Ehrich and Veronica Dunne looked very much in love while on vacation in Hawaii. The actors kissed and cuddled during a day at the beach as they enjoyed a romantic getaway in Hawaii on Tuesday. K.C. Undercover star Veronica showed off her figure in a purple bikini while in Kapalua, Maui. Scroll down for video Sweet: Actor Max Ehrich plants a kiss on actor girlfriend Veronica Dunne in Maui on Tuesday The couple, who have been dating for almost two years, packed on the PDA on the beach before heading into the waves. The Young And The Restless star Max, 24, who also appears on Hulu's new show The Path, planted a kiss on his 21-year-old girlfriend's cheek. The pair laughed as he gave Veronica, 21, a piggy back ride and then carried her in his arms across the sand. Fun in the sun: The couple laughed as Max gave Veronica a piggy back ride Swept up: The K.C. Undercover star showed off her figure in a pink bikini Veronica appeared to be having a blast, beaming and laughing as she was carried across the sand. The Disney Channel star showed off her toned figure in a white bikini top with pink floral pattern, which she paired with purple bottoms. She wore her long blonde hair down, and added a slim necklace, bracelet and light blue manicure. Relaxed: The 21-year-old Disney Channel star wore a white floral bikini as she strolled on the beach Romantic trip: Max posted a photo of the loved-up couple to Instagram on Tuesday The Under The Dome actor Max wore black Adidas sweatpants and went shirtless as he showed off his toned physique. He shared a sweet photo of the lovebirds on Instagram, writing 'You light up my life' on Tuesday. In addition to his years on The Young And The Restless, Max has previously appeared on Under The Dome and High School Musical 3. Cute couple: Young And The Restless star Max wore black Adidas sweats Nice view: The 24-year-old shot an admiring glance at his girlfriend as they headed into the waves Currently starring opposite Zendaya on Disney Channel show K.C. Undercover, Veronica has also had roles on Kickin' It and Austin & Ally. Max also shared a naked shot of his backside as he admired the view in Hawaii on Tuesday. The 24-year-old posed nude as he gazed out over the balcony from their room at the Ritz-Carlton, and captioned it '#FreeTheBunz.' He wrote: 'The Naked Truth: We are one. Much love & peace. Always,' and added hashtags '#Rebel, #Hawaii and #Beach.' Jerry Seinfeld and Michael Richards enjoyed a mini Seinfeld reunion on Wednesday during a benefit in Beverly Hills, California. The 61-year-old comedian was hosting the Los Angeles Fatherhood Lunch and welcomed his former co-star Richards, 66, to the event. Jerry looked dapper in a dark coat, light blue dress shirt, jeans and mint green tie. Together again: Jerry Seinfeld and Michael Richards reunited on Wednesday during a charity benefit in Beverly Hills, California Richards wore a brown coat over an untucked grey shirt and grey trousers. Seinfeld was seen cracking up while talking to Richards at the benefit held at The Palm Restaurant. Richards and Seinfeld starred in the NBC comedy Seinfeld for nine seasons along with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander. The second annual fundraiser was inspired by Seinfeld's wife Jessica, 44, who founded Baby Buggy in 2001 to help provide good and services for poor families. Sitcom stars: Richards and Seinfeld starred on Seinfeld together for nine seasons Good times: Seinfeld laughed while catching up with his old pal Hit show: Richards played Cosmo Kramer while Seinfeld had the title role in the sitcom Final season:Seinfeld and Richards are shown in a 1998 still from Seinfeld Seinfeld and his wife both spoke during the fundraiser that also drew comedian Bob Saget, actress Sarah Michelle Gellar and director Judd Apatow. The Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee host will moderate an upcoming reunion among Margaret Cho and her recent audience at the Stress Factory in New Brunswick, New Jersey, according to an article on Wednesday by Vulture. Cho, 47, had a bizarre onstage meltdown last month at the comedy club with audience members saying she could barely stand and repeated jokes about rape. Speaking role: The sitcom star spoke during the fundraiser Lunch guest: Richards was among the celebrities at the Fatherhood Lunch Funny men: Bog Saget and Richards sat next to each other at the fundraiser Good cause: Sarah Michelle Gellera and Jessica Seinfeld are shown with Jerry Seinfeld at the fundraiser Most of the audience walked out and received refunds, but Cho and Seinfeld have invited them back for a moderated discussion. Seinfeld in a note emailed to the audience wrote: 'When a stand-up show doesn't go well, the audience and the comedian both go home unhappy, sometimes not really sure what went wrong. Every comedian has experienced this sense of unresolved resentment and anxiety. Wouldn't it be something if we could go back to New Jersey, back to that club with the same audience and try to make things right? Have a discussion where both sides comedian and audience could talk about what happened?' Hollywood director: Judd Apatow also caught up with Jessica and Jerry On Wednesday, Blake Garvey lablled Laurina Fleure as 'hypocritical' after she slammed the former Bachelor for 'milking' his breakup to Louise Pillidge. And true to form, the outspoken reality star - who appeared on Blake's season of The Bachelor in 2014 - has hit back at the 'love rat' once more. Speaking to Daily Mail Australia on Thursday, the 31-year-old beauty criticised the couple for selling their breakup, saying: 'They might need to cash in on as many paid opportunities as possible to help with the transition.' Scroll down for video 'They probably need to cash in on as many paid opportunities as possible': On Thursday, Laurina Fleure critcised Blake Garvey and Louise Pillidge for selling their breakup Laurina stated that she thought that it was unusual for the pair to be so public with their breakup. She admitted: 'It's just unusual for people to publicise a break up, but hey, break ups are hard times.' Before adding: 'Good luck to them both.' On Tuesday, Blake responded to Laurina's comments that she thought Blake and Louise were 'exploiting themselves' and 'milking the last drop of publicity' after they called time on their 18-month romance. 'Good luck to them both': Laurina stated that she thought that it was unusual for the pair to be so public with their breakup 'It seems a bit pot-calling-kettle-black': Blake called Laurina hypocritical after she criticised him and ex Louise Pillidge for 'milking the last drop of publicity' 'It seems a bit pot-calling-kettle-black when she's talking about milking publicity,' he told KIIS FM's Kyle And Jackie O. 'Didn't she go on that show in the jungle?' The catty comment was a reference to Laurina's six-week stint in the South African jungle for the recent series of I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! during which she competed for her chosen charity Living Positive Victoria. The vitriol from the 33-year-old auctioneer is rather hypocritical, considering after his tenure on The Bachelor he continued his foray into reality television with an appearance of The Celebrity Apprentice last year. 'Didn't she go on that show in the jungle?': In his vitriol, Blake slammed Laurina for trying to gain publicity for appearing on I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! Hypocritical? After his tenure on The Bachelor, the 33-year-old auctioneer continued his foray into reality television with an appearance of The Celebrity Apprentice last year Weighing in: Former The Bachelor Australia star Laurina Fleure responded to Blake's split with Louise Pillidge saying the pair were 'exploiting themselves' and 'milking the last drop of publicity' It comes after Laurina told Daily Mail Australia on Monday she was opposed to the way the pair were dealing with their breakup so publicly. 'I think that Blake and Louise posing for a photo and tell-all about their break-up is exploiting of themselves,' she said. 'Not very tasteful milking the last drop of publicity, but probably indicative of the type of relationship they were in,' she added. The brunette beauty also said she believed it was always going to be 'hard' for the couple, given Blake first proposed to Sam Frost, before dumping her and picking runner-up Louise. Doomed to fail? Speaking to Daily Mail Australia, Laurina said she believed things were always going to be tough given Blake had first proposed to Sam Frost, before dumping her and picking second runner-up Louise 'She is the cookie-cutter ideal of what a woman and a wife should be': Laurina previously told NW Magazine that she thought Blake and Louise were the perfect match 'The start to their relationship wasn't ideal so maybe that hindered their foundation and may have made it hard for them to move forward,' she added. However, the Pialia fashion boutique owner was quick to add: 'I have no idea why Blake and Louise split. I didn't know either of them very well'. Laurina had previously told NW Magazine that she thought Blake and Louise were the perfect match. 'Ending up with Blake would have been soul destroying,' she said. 'He had lots of ideas as to what a woman should be, and it's perfect that he ended up with Louise, because she is the cookie-cutter ideal of what a woman and a wife should be,' she went on to add. Way back when: Laurina appeared on the 2014 season of The Bachelor Australia starring Blake himself 'Ending up with Blake would have been soul destroying': Following the appearance, Laurina publicly slammed the Lothario, saying, 'He had lots of ideas as to what a woman should be' Blake and Louise, who are still living together in Perth, have copped serious backlash over ending their relationship in such a public manner, however Blake told Kyle and Jackie O that he believes he had no choice. 'Can you imagine if we didn't?' he said. 'When just do something quietly they're like "What are you hiding? Why aren't you speaking out?"' He said he learned that lesson the hard way during the beginning of their relationship, when a media blackout had reporters camped outside his mother's house. 'That was ridiculous,' he recalled. 'I'm not going through that again.' 'Can you imagine if we didn't?': Blake and Louise, who are still living together in Perth, have copped serious backlash over ending their relationship in such a public manner, but say they had no choice During the interview, lifestyle blogger Louise also opened up on the pressure of dealing with their break-up being played out in such a public manner. 'We've still got this amazing friendship, which has so been great for both of us to get through this,' said Louise. 'Because, obviously, it hasn't been easy.' According to Louise, the immense public scrutiny was the underlying cause of their relationship break down. 'Not being able to celebrate our love was one of the hardest things for me,' she told the radio hosts. 'When you're trying to move forward, it's hard to always be reminded of what's happened.' 'It's hard to always be reminded of what's happened': According to Louise, the immense public scrutiny was the underlying cause of their relationship break down She also said the negative attention, including fans labeling Blake a 'love rat' for then expressing his love for his third choice Louise was 'hard to move forward' from. In Monday's issue of New Idea magazine, Blake revealed the romance between him and Louise has crashed despite them undergoing three months of counselling in a bid to mend the cracks. 'We were walking on eggshells around each other, always trying to say the right thing... It was suffocating' he told the publication, before adding: 'It feels surreal and since then I have gone through so many emotions. Ive been crying, numb and angry'. 'It was suffocating,' he told the magazine in a teary interview. What could have been: In October 2014, the finale of The Bachelor Australia's second season aired in which Blake proposed to Sam Frost They're the flashy lawyers viewers love to hate for their expensive taste and glamorous life. So it's natural MKR's Gianni Romano spared no expense when it came to spoiling his stunning wife Zana Pali on her 25th birthday. A champagne dinner, designer clothes and a bouquet of roses were among the treats Zana received from her beau to celebrate their special day, Daily Mail Australia can reveal. The real treat, she revealed, was a trip to Europe for later in the year. Scroll down for video Birthday girl! MKR's Zana Pali and Gianni Romano enjoyed a lavish dinner date in Brisbane on Wednesday complete with designer dress, killer heels, champagne and roses Eager to mark the occasion in style, Gianni arranged a romantic dinner at Brisbane restaurant Bacchus to kick off the celebrations. The plush setting, inside the Rydges hotel on the Southbank, was matched with the birthday girl's designer clad ensemble. To mark the special occasion, the brunette donned a High Neck Panelled Dress by Self Portrait in black, which retails anywhere from $470 - $670 and is the same style (but different colour) to the one the reality TV starlet wore on a date night with Gianni earlier this month. She paired it with some leather studded Valentino sling-back pumps - a new purchase worth more than $1,200. Sealed with a kiss: Zana later thanked her husband for spoiling her with a trip to Europe as a present Cheers! Gianni appeared to pull out all the stops as the couple celebrated the brunette's 25th birthday in style Showered with gifts: On her milestone birthday, Zana received an exquisite bouquet of flowers with red roses Thrilled: The loved up pair looked thrilled with their evening out, as on-screen they made it through to the semi-finals of the cooking competition, after serving up a three-course meal in their ultimate instant restaurant Completing the outfit was a Viktoria Novak floral headpiece, similar to the one the reality TV personality wore to the races at Flemington in Melbourne last month. During dinner Zana was presented with a large bouquet of red roses by her adoring husband, beaming as she placed the blooms between them for the remainder of their meal. Taking to Instagram afterwards, Zana, who is known for her harsh critiques on the show, noted how impressed she was with the spread. 'Delicious dinner...So impressed with the high standard of cooking! We will be coming back for sure,' she wrote in a caption on Instagram. Looks familiar! The fashionista wore a black Self Portrait dress, the same style she sported on the couple's date night last month and a Viktoria Novak headpiece Designer wardrobe: The birthday girl's dress retails for anywhere between $470 and $670 along with Valentino sling-back heels, costing over $1,200 The woman of the evening also thanked her husband for her present, telling their fans excitedly: 'I've been incredibly spoilt by my man. We are going to Europe in June!'. Gianni was dapper for the evening in some chinos, brown leather loafers and a blue shirt. Earlier on Wednesday, Gianni 'hacked' Zana's Instagram account to pay tribute to his wife on her milestone birthday in a gushing caption alongside a photo from his marriage proposal. What to order? The couple celebrated the reality TV starlet's birthday in style at Bacchus in Brisbane 'So impressed with the high standard of cooking!' The night appeared to only get better, with the brunette praising the restaurant, despite normally being known for harsh critiques on the show The 27-year-old began his emotional message by notifying their 16,000 fans who was at the keyboard, before writing: 'I just want to wish my amazingly talented and gorgeous wife a massive HAPPY 25th BIRTHDAY today!' 'You are the most loving, passionate, loyal and honest person I know; and by far the most beautiful! 'Thank you for being you; the love of my life, my best friend and one hell of a cook! I am so proud of everything that you are and that I can call you my wife. 'I am so proud of everything that you are': Gianni took over his wife's Instagram account earlier on Wednesday to wish her a happy 25th birthday in an emotional tribute 'Instahack': The 27-year-old made sure their 16,000 Instagram followers knew who was behind the keyboard as soon as he started 'I can't wait to grow old with you and look back at everything we have achieved together. You light up my world and I will love you indefinitely,' he concluded. The couple have earned themselves a villainous reputation on the series for their frank comments about the other contestants. When it comes to complimenting one another, however, it seems the pair can't quite hold back. 'My best friend and one hell of a cook!' The newlywed team from this season of My Kitchen Rules appear as loved up as ever Before the show kicked off, the couple spoke about what they loved about each other, with Gianni noting it's Zana's honesty that impresses him. 'I love that Zana is so grounded, so honest,' he told the show's official website. 'When people first meet her they might be a bit taken aback at first, but then they just fall in love with her too because what you see is what you get. I love that about her,' he added. As the daughter of late 'Crocodile Hunter' Steve Irwin, she's known for her clean cut and media-friendly public image. But Bindi Irwin appears to have taken her wholesome lifestyle to unusual lengths as she revealed on The Kyle and Jackie O Show on Thursday that she's never even drank Coca-Cola. The Dancing With The Stars winner, 17, admitted she hasn't tried the popular fizzy drink or any alcohol - and admits she's unlikely to be sampling either on her upcoming birthday. Scroll down for video Feeling fizzy? Bindi Irwin, the daughter of the late Australian TV personality Steve Irwin, revealed on The Kyle and Jackie O Show on Thursday that she's 'so wild' she hasn't even tried Coca-Cola Ahead of her 18th birthday party in July, co-host Jackie 'O' Henderson noted that Bindi had previously said she wouldn't be having any booze. But when asked if she had ever drank alcohol before, Bindi replied: 'I haven't. You know, I am so wild that I haven't even had Coco Cola before, can you believe that? 'I wanted to see how long i could go without it, honestly. And it's really interesting because people will say, "Gosh what are you going to do?" 'I'm like, "Well I'm going to have a cup of tea. I might have some Coca Cola on my 18th but I'm going to see. I'm going to see if I'm that crazy.' No alcohol! The teetotal teen, who was crowned champion of the U.S. version of Dancing With The Stars last year, won't be drinking any booze at her 18th birthday in July and admits she's never drank alcohol at all Jackie and co-host Kyle Sandilands then speculated whether Bindi was going 'go crazy' later in life because she's leading such a rebellion-free youth. 'She's going to go mental, going to be on the weed,' quipped Kyle. 'She's going to be doing lines of coke. She's going to have nude parties.' 'You're going to have this massive thing at 40 where you make up for lost time!' said Jackie. Clearly taking the DJ's remarks in good humour, Bindi responded that even her own mother, Terri, thinks her behaviour is too conservative. Young love: Bindi is currently in a relationship with American boyfriend Chandler Powell (right), pictured here at the Country Music Channel Awards 2016 in Queensland last month 'It's so funny, my mum always says, "I look at you and it's like I trapped this 86-year-old inside a 17-year-old's body". I'm not sure what to do about that!' Back in 2014, Bindi admitted she called Terri to say she'd 'screwed up' after drinking a mocha at a music festival. She told WHO magazine: 'Mum always said try to avoid too much caffeine. 'I called mum up and I go, "I'm so sorry".' Meanwhile, Bindi also laughed off recent reports that Terri, 51, has found love with a 'mystery man' and plans to move the Irwin family out of the spotlight. 'That's really funny,' she told Kyle and Jackie O. 'Mum read that article and went, "Wow, he's so mysterious that I didn't even know about it". 'And I'm reading it going, "Good for you mum, that's great!"She's like, "Yeah, I had no idea, but good for me!" 'It's amazing because my mum is still absolutely married to dad. I really believe that each and every one of us have that one person in our life. 'My mum is still absolutely married to dad': Terri also took the opportunity to shut down rumours that her mother Terri (right, behind Steve) had found love with a 'mystery man' Daddy's girl! Terri also claimed that her mother didn't plan on getting married until she met Steve (right) 'And some of us find it early on life and some of us find that love later on in life but mum found her one and she's just still married to dad. It's beautiful.' Bindi was also asked about the prospect of her mother beginning a new relationship after Steve's death from a stingray barb at Batt Reef, Queensland in 2007. 'I really want mum to be happy and whatever makes her happiest, I think that I'll be grateful for. She always said that if she never found dad she wouldn't have gotten married. When she was living in Oregon she finally said, "I'm good, I'm not going to date anymore, I'm happy." And then she met dad and her world changed.' She also revealed she's still happily in a relationship with her boyfriend Chandler Powell, calling herself 'lucky' to have found him. She may be expecting her first child. But Ellie Kemper isn't too keen on the extra attention her belly has been receiving. The 35-year-old actress made an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show airing on Thursday as she opened up about the early stages of her pregnancy. Unbreakable: Ellie Kemper made an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in an episode airing Thursday As it was recently revealed that she and screenwriter husband Michael Koman were expecting their first child, Ellie said: 'Im very excited. I feel not nauseous. I feel good. Both my husband and I are very excited.' The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt actress said that there is one odd thing she has noticed about the way people have reacted to her growing baby bump. She explained: 'I would notice people looking at my stomach then looking at me kind of like "I know your secret" and I started getting slightly annoyed. 'Because when a woman's stomach starts to bulge it's like "Oh you must be pregnant." Feeling good: She said that she and her husband are excited about the child but has been getting 'slightly annoyed' of people looking at her stomach 'I was taking a look at guys and men have "baby bumps" all of the time. And I'm like I know you're secret man, like you ate too many Cheetos. Not fair.' On the programme, Ellie looked adorable in a powder blue sleeveless midi dress with black heels and the 58-year-old chat show host asked if it was a maternity dress. The actress said that it was actually a normal dress as she explained: 'It works both ways. I thought it was a pretty blue. But its forgiving in case youve had a big lunch or are in the early stages of pregnancy like me.' Multi-faceted: The pretty auburn-haired actress showed off her singing talent by serenading Ellen with a song about her two dogs: Augie and Wolf Ellie also revealed that she is due sometime this summer. As if that wasn't enough fun, the pretty auburn-haired actress showed off her singing talent by serenading Ellen with a song about her two dogs: Augie and Wolf. Meanwhile, after a successful first season 13 new episodes continue the tale of Kimmy, a plucky, wide-eyed believer who has taken up residence in New York City after her rescue, back at the series' start, from 15 years of imprisonment by an Indiana doomsday prophet. Just the two of us: She is expecting her first child with screenwriter Michael Koman, as they are pictured in New York in April 2015 Kimmy continues her adventures with her flat-mate, a flamboyant musical-star wannabe (played by Tituss Burgess), a dotty landlady (Carol Kane) and a fallen socialite (Jane Krakowski), who, having been discarded by her wealthy husband, is comically struggling to keep up plush appearances. In the hands of 30 Rock creators Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, Kimmy Schmidt carries on the daffy ethos of their smashing first success, but with a welcome added element: its cockeyed optimism. The second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is currently on Netflix. Ellie's appearance on The Ellen Degeneres Show will air on Thursday. She announced on Thursday that she was separating from her husband after just a year of marriage in what has been a tumultuous history in recent years to say the very least. When Mel Greig broke the news to Studio 10 that she and husband Steve Pollock had split, it cast the headline-making broadcaster back into the spotlight once more. Daily Mail Australia looks back at Mel's highs and lows; a history of international controversy, multiple stints on reality television and a short-lived romance which crumbled under the pressure of failed gruelling IVF treatments. Scroll down for video Battling on: Broadcaster Mel Greig has endured a history of international controversy, multiple stints on reality TV and a short-lived romance which crumbled under the pressure of failed gruelling IVF treatments The way it was: Mel was married to Steve Pollock and revealed on Thursday they had split as he needed time to 'find himself' Mel began her career in the media as a contestant on the reality series The Amazing Race at the age of 28 with her younger sister Alana. Describing herself as a rebel on the shows first series which aired in 2011, the bubbly blonde and Alana raced to seven countries before they were eliminated. Leaving her announcing job at Adelaides Mix 102.3fm, it was revealed in March 2012 that she was to replace Maude Garrett as the national presenter of the Today Networks Hot30 Countdown in Sydney. Brave face: The bubbly blonde was seen in Sydney on Thursday wearing a figure hugging ensemble after announcing marriage split She became known for her pranks and playful nature on air with her host Michael Christian but everything went awry later that year. In December 2012, Mel was working on 2DayFM when she and her co-host Michael posed as Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles and made a prank call to the UK. The duo called a London hospital where the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, was staying as she suffered morning sickness while pregnant with Prince George. Weight battles: In around April 2015, Mel revealed to her Instagram followers she was undergoing IVF treatment - a personal battle with played havoc with her weight. Pictured right last year on Celebrity Apprentice Weight battles: She took to the gym to shed weight and detailed her progress daily on social media Determined: The broadcaster was determined to return to her ideal 68kg weight The call resulted in nurse and mother Jacintha Saldana taking her own life three days later, and she left a note mentioning the hosts' names. 'My name was in someone's suicide note,' the DJ told Woman's Day at the time. 'Nothing will change the fact that Jacintha thought of me before she took her own life and that is something that is really hard to come to terms with.' The next few years, Mel struggled to land a job despite her co-host Michael returning to Melbourne in February 2013 for a job at FoxFM. Her rock: The broadcaster has revealed Steve, whom she met more than five years ago, needs time for himself In an interview with Adelaide Now, the media personality spoke of her struggle to find her feet after the devastating incident in December 2012. Mel went to work for an advertising agency when she found it hard to secure a permanent on-air role. The hate mail, including death threats, went for many months and the DJ admitted she even contemplated suicide before she decided to seek help from a medical professional and was put on a high-dose of antidepressants. Long-term relationship: The couple had met each other before they tied the knot in November 2014 and regularly enjoyed date nights 'I've made a noose Mel, and it belongs around your neck,' one tweet read. 'I can't wait to take your last breath.' 'You've killed a mother so it's only fair we kill yours,' another said. 'You'll never sleep again. I'm coming for you and your mum.' She was later referred to a psychiatrist, who she saw once a week, because she was struggling to eat and sleep. Sad news: She revealed on Studio 10 on Thursday that she and her husband had parted ways amicably Mel met husband Steve Pollock at a charity event for the Queensland floods more than five years ago - Mel was hosting and Steven was a topless waiter and they became engaged in 2013. She has constantly referred to him as 'my rock' as cooed about their regular date nights on Instagram. After a two-year hiatus and over 100 knock-backs from various outlets, she was awarded the role of marketing manager for The Kingdom, an Adelaide advertising company in June 2015. The former breakfast show host, who had worked in the industry for 16 years, said at the time she'd given up her former profession but still hoped to utilise her talents via creating podcasts and driving social media of her new company. Looking svelte: She showed off her smaller frame whilst celebrating the Maxim annual HOT 100 party at the Cruise Bar in Sydney last year In around April 2015, Mel revealed to her Instagram followers she was undergoing IVF treatment after being diagnosed with endometriosis - a battle which played havoc with her weight. She has lost 14kg in recent months, detailing her weight loss journey on social media. 'Those 14kg were weighing me down on so many levels, each kilo represented a dark time in my life and I wanted to shed the power they had over me and each time the scale went down I felt my sense of control coming back,' she wrote on her blog during a moment of darkness in 2014. In December 2015, Mel announced she would be returning to the airwaves on Wollongong local station 96.5 Wave FM the following year after a three-year break from broadcasting. 'After three years, a long and hard battle, I am finally back in radio,' she told Daily Mail Australia at the time. 'I'm moving to Woolongong next, Wave FM and it's going to be great to be back on air!' she gushed. They were seen putting on a loving display at Coachella Music and Arts Festival over the weekend. And while Bella Hadids superstar boyfriend, The Weeknd, did not join her for her fun night out on Wednesday evening, he was on hand to drive her home. The 26-year-old crooner - real name Abel Tesfaye was pictured waiting outside popular celebrity hangout, The Nice Guy, as Bella made left the nightclub. Scroll down for video Zip it: Bella Hadid was seen letting her hair down after working on a string of fashion shoots during a fun night out in West Hollywood on Wednesday night In the night: While Bellas superstar boyfriend, The Weeknd, did not join her for her fun night out, he was on hand to drive her home The 19-year-old beauty was pictured making her way out of celebrity favourite showing off her model figure in a sexy mini dress. The rising supermodel drew attention to her toned legs in zip-up denim dress which she teamed with black boots and socks. Accessorising with a black handbag and an on-trend choker, the brunette beauty styled her locks up and away from her face. Bella, sister of supermodel Gigi Hadid, had started her night at the Jesse Jo Stark Show at Roxy Theatre. Girls' night out: The 19-year-old beauty was pictured making her way out of celebrity favourite, The Nice Guy, as she showed off her model figure in a sexy mini dress Model legs: The rising supermodel drew attention to her toned legs in zip-up denim dress which she teamed with black boots and socks Taking to Instagram before the show she shared a snap captioned, How long til this chick is ready?..!!@jessejostark by @thecobrasnake. She then posted another snap which saw her helping her pal sort out her outfit as she joked: best friend/seamstress @jessejostark. Bella recently proved she knows how to command attention, as she flaunted her enviable figure for multiple covers for the May 2016 issue of W Magazine Korea. The famous model donned a fringed, two-toned mini dress and revealing lingerie in the two covers, which put her toned figure on display. Keeping close: Accessorising with a black handbag and an on-trend choker, the brunette beauty styled her locks up and away from her face Heading in: Bella, sister of supermodel Gigi Hadid, had started her night at the Jesse Jo Stark Show at Roxy Theatre Picture perfect: Taking to Instagram before the show she shared a snap captioned, How long til this chick is ready?..!!@jessejostark by @thecobrasnake Fashion fans: She then posted another snap which saw her helping her pal sort out her outfit as she joked, best friend/seamstress @jessejostark The raven-haired beauty - who is currently dating Grammy winner The Weeknd - also gushed about her experience, thanking the publication. 'New @wmag Korea cover!By the legend @terryrichardson and amazing @katie_mossman thank you so much to everyone at W,' she wrote. The daughter of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Yolanda Hadid revealed last year that she is battling Lyme disease but she hasn't let the debilitating illness get in the way of her dreams. Rising star: The daughter of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Yolanda Hadid revealed last year that she is battling Lyme disease but she hasn't let the debilitating illness get in the way of her dreams Hop in: The Weeknd - real name Abel Tesfaye was pictured waiting outside popular celebrity hangout, The Nice Guy, as Bella made left the nightclub She's one of the hottest female DJs in Australia - in more ways than one. And DJ Tigerlily certainly got the party started this weekend as she performed a headline set at Sydney's trendy Marquee nightclub. The 23-year-old, real name Dara Kristen Hayes, flaunted plenty of cleavage in a plunging Nicce London top before performing for the packed-out crowd on Saturday. Scroll down for video Queen of spin! DJ Tigerlily got the party started this weekend as she performed a headline set at Marquee Sydney in a longsleeve Nicce top featuring a plunging neckline Tigerlily turned heads with her trademark bright blue dyed hair, which stood out like a beacon in the busy nightclub. She opted for figure-hugging club wear as she took to the decks, and highlighted her striking features with a slick of purple lipstick and smoky eye make-up. The Paradise hitmaker showed off her ample assets in a very low-cut black long sleeve, which she tucked into skimpy black denim shorts. Party vibes: DJ Tigerlily posed for a snap next to YouTube star and DJ James Yammouni, who was also in attendance for the event She put on a very leggy display in a pair of dominatrix-inspired thigh high, peep toe leather boots. Elsewhere, Tigerlily posed for photographs astride an impressive throne-like chair surrounded by sea shell props, treasure chests and a gold trident. She also posed for a snap next to YouTube star and DJ James Yammouni, who was in attendance for the event. Getting the crowd going: The 23-year-old, real name Dara Kristen Hayes, performed for the packed-out crowd on Saturday night Headline act: Tigerlily turned heads with her trademark bright blue dyed hair, which stood out like a beacon in the busy nightclub Other acts scheduled to follow in Marquees autumn line-up include Gold Coast DJs the Stafford Brothers and Melbourne producer Will Sparks. Meanwhile, earlier this week, Tigerlily made an appearance at the The Glue Store Denim party in Sydney dressed - rather appropriately - in double denim. Sporting lashings of mascara and a healthy glow, she appeared in high spirits as she posed on the red carpet for photographs. Busy Philipps showed off her modern style in a geometric-print dress. The actress wore a black-and-white dress as she attended the Norma Jean Gala at the Taglyan Cultural Complex in Hollywood on Wednesday. The 36-year-old was all smiles as she attended the event, named after Marilyn Monroe, which benefits children's non-profit Hollygrove. Red carpet: Actress Busy Philipps looked stylish in a geometric-print dress at the Norma Jean Gala in Hollywood on Wednesday The actress struck a confident pose with hands on hips as she arrived at the gala. Her sleeveless dress featured a modern print with an asymmetrical hem. Busy wore her blonde hair in a chic bun, and cinched in her waist with a bright red belt. The former Cougar Town star added white heels and a matching white manicure. Bold look: The former Cougar Town star wore a bright red belt and lipstick Also attending the gala was actor Ian Ziering and wife Erin Kristine Ludwig. The former 90210 star, 52, looked sharp in a black suit while Erin wore a long black dress with ruffled sleeves. She wore her dark brunette hair down in waves, and added a gold necklace. Getting close: Actor Ian Ziering and wife Erin Kristine Ludwig were all smiles as they arrived at the gala Gala event: Erin donned a floor-length black gown with ruffled sleeves Actor Colin Hanks and wife Samantha Bryant also attended the Hollywood gala. The Life in Pieces star, 38, wore a grey patterned suit, while Samantha wore a pretty dress with sheer waist and light floral pattern. Actor Tom Arnold, 57, also showed his support for the children's charity, attending with wife Ashley Groussman. Looking good: Actor Colin Hanks and wife Samantha Bryant also showed their support for the children's non-profit Casual look: Actor Tom Arnold wore a denim shirt as he attended with wife Ashley Groussman Bindi Irwin has denied claims that her mother Terri Irwin has found love again. The wildlife warrior told KIIS FM's Kyle and Jackie O Show on Thursday that she believes her mother is still in love with her late father. 'My mum is still absolutely married to dad, and I really believe that each and every one of us has that one person in our life,' the 17-year-old said. Scroll down for video 'I really want mum to be happy': Bindi Irwin has denied claims that her mother Terri Irwin has found love again New Idea reported earlier this month that the family were set to move to the U.S. where Terri had reportedly found love with a 'controversial' man. Slapping down its claims, Bindi said on Thursday: 'No, no. Mum read that article and went, "Wow! He's so mysterious that I don't even know about it!'' At the time a spokesman for Australia Zoo told Daily Mail Australia the report was unfounded. Flashback: Terri's husband and father to Bindi and Bob, Steve Irwin, was internationally known and referred to as The Crocodile Hunter 'This seems to have literally come out of thin air. There is absolutely no truth to that claim,' they said. Steve Irwin died in 2006 after being stung in the heart by a sting ray. At the time Bindi, now 17, was just six years old. During the emotional chat with the radio hosts Bindi said she saw no need in trying to reconnect with his spirit through a medium because she felt he was 'always with us'. 'They are not planning to move anywhere': Australia Zoo confirm there's no truth to reports the Irwin family were relocating to the US (pictured Terri, 51, Robert, 12, and Bindi, 17) 'It'll be like the Universal Studios of zoos': The family were reportedly set to expand the Irwin brand in a big way, carrying on Steve's legacy by opening a massive Australian zoo and resort in Las Vegas Bindi added that she and her extended Australia-Zoo family is currently preparing for the first Steve Irwin Gala Dinner, to be held in Los Angeles in the coming weeks, where they will honour her late father's legacy. Despite the event the family insists they have no plans to move to America where Bindi recently triumphed in Dancing With The Stars. A Woman's Day article alleged they were set to expand the Irwin brand in a big way, carrying on the late Steve's legacy by opening a site in Las Vegas. 'There is absolutely no truth to that claim': The Australia Zoo spokesperson said there was no truth to the rumour that Terri planned to relocate to the US to be closer to her 'controversial mystery man' The dismissed the report, explaining that they remained living at Australia Zoo. Earlier this year the family fought off a civil lawsuit launched by their Melbourne based company Zoo Sky Media who claimed they had breached contract by wanting to take a break from commercial commitments. The company sought damages after allegedly being told by the mother-of-two that the trio were 'reassessing' their lives, news.com.au reported. She recently jetted home from a sun-soaked holiday in the States. And Tamara Beckwith flaunted her Florida tan as she headed out on Wednesday night. Back home in London, the TV star and gallery owner hit one of the city's best-known haunts - the Chiltern Firehouse. Sun kissed: Tamara Beckwith flaunted her Florida tan as she headed out on Wednesday night following a recent family getaway to the US Tamara chose a chic black ensemble for her night on the town with her girlfriends. She layered a sparkly top under a fitted jacket and added smart cropped trousers with a front pleat. The stylish star added a pop of colour with her choice of accessories though, matching her metallic heels in a bright electric blue to her shoulder bag. Out on the town: Back home in London, the TV star and gallery owner hit one of the city's best-known haunts - the Chiltern Firehouse A silver pendant and earrings were the finishing touches, while she swept her blonde locks back off her face to highlight her holiday tan. Tamara enjoyed a vacation with her husband of eight years Giorgio Veroni and their two children this month, hitting the sights of LA before heading to Miami. The socialite wed her Italian husband in Venice in August 2007. Their daughter Violet Angiolina Rose was born two years later and the couple's first son, Vero, was born in 2014. Check out the shoes! Tamara layered a sparkly top under a fitted jacket and added smart cropped trousers with a front pleat, with her electric blue heels providing a bright pop of colour Party time! Tamara looked a little unsteady on her heels as she made her way out of the celeb-favourite nightspot with a girlfriend Tamara also has a 27-year-old daughter, Anouska, from a previous relationship with her ex, William Gerhauser. Speaking to Hello! Magazine ahead of the birth of Vero, Tamara explained her shock at becoming a mum again in her mid-forties after having two miscarriages: 'When youve been lucky to have two gorgeous girls, I think you should just be grateful. I am quite matter-of-fact about those things; what will be, will be,' she said. She has lost an astonishing amount of weight and is looking better than ever. And showcasing her newly-trim frame, Brynne Edelsten cut a relaxed and content figure as she soaked up the balmy climes and chatted away with her male companion, Dominic Bond, in the Sydney suburb of Surry Hills on Wednesday. The 33-year-old looked in fantastic shape, dressed down in an off-the-shoulder midriff top revealing her washboard abs and ample assets. Scroll down for video Boho chic! Brynne Edelsten flaunts her ample assets and incredible slimmed-down figure in a midriff top and skirt with a thigh-high split She teamed the crocheted shirt with a red skirt which included a daring thigh-high split and showed off her muscular legs thanks to a vigorous gym schedule. It appeared the former wife of Sydney Swans owner Geoffrey Edelsten went without a bra as she opted to stick to her boho chic theme - from head to toe. Brynne styled her blonde tresses out and in loose waves which framed her face perfectly. Sans bra: It appeared the former wife of Sydney Swans owner Geoffrey Edelsten went without a bra as she opted for a boho chic ensemble Catch up: Showcasing her newly-trim frame, Brynne cut a relaxed and content figure as she soaked up the balmy climes and chatted away with her male companion, Dominic Bond, in the Sydney suburb of Surry Hills Laughs: It appeared the blonde beauty was in a good mood as she giggled with her male companion Nothing but the best: Once the conversation had ended, the blonde beauty was seen pushing her Louis Vuitton luggage towards a taxi which waited nearby The reality starlet, who competed on Celebrity Splash in 2013, drew further attention to her pretty complexion with a touch of blusher, a light pink lip and well-defined eyes. She accessorised simply, opting for beaded bracelets and sky high heels which included straps across her arches. Trying to keep a low-profile, Brynne covered her well known facial features with a pair of large shades as she chatted away with her male friend. Once the conversation had ended, the blonde beauty was seen pushing her Louis Vuitton luggage towards a taxi which waited nearby. Great hair: Brynne styled her blonde tresses out and in loose waves which frame her face perfectly Sky high: She teamed her daring out fit with a pair of tower stilettos which featured straps across the arch New me: Since officially splitting from her businessman husband of four years at the end of 2013, Brynne has quietly been reinventing her look On point: The reality starlet, who competed on Celebrity Splash, drew further attention to her pretty complexion with a touch of blusher, a light pink lip and well-defined eyes But the luggage was a bit much and she needed help from a woman dressed in all black - a button-up shirt and matching pants. Before hopping into the car with her male friend, the fashion entrepreneur was seen flaunting her newly found figure before sticking her tongue out at passers-by. Since officially splitting from her businessman husband of four years at the end of 2013, Brynne has quietly been reinventing her look. She has also become a shadow of herself after a jaw-dropping 15-kilo weight loss that has seen her go from a curvy size 12 to a more petite size six. Chatting away: The reality star kept busy on the phone as she waited for her car to arrive Flaunting it: The blonde's shrinking frame has also affected her famous chest, which has dropped from a 12G to a smaller 8E - leaving her with 'nothing but implants' now that her natural body fat has vanished New body: Brynne said she had been striving for 'years' to slim down but thanks to a healthier lifestyle, she has managed to lose weight Just checking: The blonde beauty was seen taking belongs out of her designer backpack The blonde's shrinking frame has also affected her famous chest, which has dropped from a 12G to a smaller 8E - leaving her with 'nothing but implants' now that her natural body fat has vanished. Speaking about her new shape on Sunrise Brynne explained she had been striving for 'years' to slim down. 'I've spent the last three and a half years at the gym and just trying to be healthy. It's taken time but it's finally paying off,' she said bashfully. Claiming to now visit the gym 'three days a week', the My Bedazzled Diary star said cutting out 'sugary drinks' had also helped her new regime. Help: The luggage was a bit much and the 33-year-old needed help from a woman dressed in all black - a button-up shirt and matching pants Frankie Essex showed her body confidence when she paraded her curves in a form-fitting white mini dress while out on the town on Wednesday night. Fresh from a recent holiday in Cyprus, the former TOWIE star showed off her shape in her local Essex as she joined the girls for a night of fun. The 27-year-old showed off plenty of leg in the super short party number, which she teamed with some eye-catching ruby red heels. Scroll down for video Confident: Frankie Essex, 27, flaunted her curves in a very short form-fitting mini dress when she went out in Essex on Wednesday night Keeping things co-ordinated, she clasped a matching clutch and wore a slick of glossy red lipstick, while her nails were decorated with a shocking pink manicure. The reality star tied her blonde hair up in a stylish updo resembling the women of Hollywood's golden era. On her way into town she stopped off at a cash machine and a local shop to pick up some last minute essentials. See TOWIE updates as Frankie Essex parades her curves in form-fitting white mini dress A white good time: Keeping things co-ordinated, she clasped a matching clutch and wore a slick of glossy red lipstick, while her nails were decorated with a shocking pink manicure Strutting her stuff: Frankie showed off plenty of leg in the super short mini dress which she teamed with some eye-catching ruby red heels Oops: As she climbed out of a male pal's car she suffered a slight wardrobe malfunction As she climbed out of a male pal's car she suffered a slight wardrobe malfunction. However, she took the unfortunate fashion faux pas in her stride and returned to the passenger seat ready to be whisked to a livelier environment. The sister of reality show fan favourite Joey Essex looked to be relishing a glamorous night out, walking with a wide pearly-white smile on her face. Easy does it: She wore a big smile on her face as she attempting to get into the car without revealing too much Stepping out: The reality star tied her blonde hair up in a stylish updo in the style of the women of Hollywood's golden era She hasn't always felt as positive about her appearance thought. Frankie once told Closer magazine: Im a confident person, but Im not happy with my body and I want to start training again.' Frankie - who fluctuates between a size 10 and 14 - revealed to MailOnline last summer that she had achieved the waist of her teenage self when she slimmed it to 29 inches. She lost an impressive 21lbs during her body blitz mission and achieved a comfortable goal weight of 10st. 'Previously when I have put on weight, it would all go on around my hips and bypass my boobs and upper body, she revealed to MailOnline. 'Well, I'm proud to say that I've lost my love handles and my bum is lovely and firm. I feel in incredible shape and have never felt sexier.' No harm done: She took the unfortunate faux pas in her stride and returned to the passenger seat of her male companion's car ready to be whisked to a livelier environment surrounding his death are yet to be revealed James Bond director Guy Hamilton has died aged 93. The filmmaker - who was the mastermind behind four 007 blockbusters - passed away at his home in Majorca, Spain on Wednesday morning. Details surrounding his death are yet to be revealed. Sad: James Bond director Guy Hamilton (right) has passed away at his home in Majorca aged 93 Sir Roger Moore, who worked with the veteran director on Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun, broke the news to fans on Thursday via his Twitter account. He wrote: 'Incredibly, incredibly saddened to hear the wonderful director Guy Hamilton has gone to the great cutting room in the sky. 2016 is horrid. (sic)' Hamilton, who was born in Paris, worked behind the camera on a total of 22 films over the span of his career but was best known for directing 1964's Goldfinger with Sir Sean Connery as 007. Iconic: Sir Roger Moore as James Bond in Guy's Man With The Golden Gun alongside Maud Adams and Britt Ekland Sad news:The actor, who worked with the veteran director on Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun, broke the news to fans on Thursday via his Twitter account He returned to the franchise with Diamonds Are Forever - with the same actor in the lead - in 1971. Two years later, he directed Live And Let Die before working on The Man With The Golden Gun in 1974 alongside Moore and the late Sir Christopher Lee. Hamilton also teamed up with Sir Michael Caine on two movies - Funeral In Berlin and Battle Of Britain - as well as directing Harrison Ford in 1974's Force 10 From Navaron. Rest in peace: Details surrounding his death are yet to be revealed Great work: Hamilton, who was born in Paris, worked behind the camera on a total of 22 films over the span of his career but was best known for directing 1964's Goldfinger with Sir Sean Connery as 007 His latest work included two Agatha Christie adaptations, The Mirror Crack'd and Evil Under The Sun. He also worked on Try This One For Size in 1989, with Michael Brandon and David Carradine. Guy was married to actress Naomi Chance - she passed away in 2003. They were dubbed the 'villains' after a series of snarky comments were made to their fellow competitors on My Kitchen Rules (MKR). But it seems the sassy commentary is no more for high flying lawyers Gianni Romano and his wife Zana Pali who were eliminated from the reality cooking series on Thursday night's semi-finals episode. The Brisbane based couple failed to impress judges with their Balkan inspired dishes and missed out on a spot in Tuesday night's grand final decider. Scroll down for video 'It's the best experience of our lives': Zana Pali breaks down in tears upon hearing she and her husband Gianni Romano have been eliminated from My Kitchen Rules Upon hearing the news that they were going home, Zana, 25, broke down in tears, saying: 'We've loved working hard and we've learnt so much. MKR has all been about our family, our true traditional recipes.' She added: 'You cannot put money on what we have learnt and how we've improved. It's priceless. It's the best experience of our lives.' Despite hearing the sad news about their poorly put together dishes, the pair did received praise for their flavoursome beetroot ravioli with goat cheese and pistachios entree. Learnt so much: Zana added the show was a great experience, saying: 'You cannot put money on what we have learnt and how we've improved. It's priceless. It's the best experience of our lives' Still smiling: Zana said she was grateful for her time on the show saying, 'You cannot put money on what we have learnt and how we've improved. It's priceless. It's the best experience of our lives' Praise was received: Despite hearing the sad news about their poorly put together dishes, the pair did receive praise for their flavoursome beetroot ravioli with goat cheese and pistachios entree Like art: Celebrity judge Liz Egan complemented the dish saying: 'One Perfectly rolled pasta. It's got that lovely beetroot in there that makes it really pretty to look at Celebrity judge Liz Egan complemented the dish saying: 'One Perfectly rolled pasta. It's got that lovely beetroot in there that makes it really pretty to look at. The zing from the goats' cheese breaks through that butter and sage, which is just an outstanding accompaniment.' Colin Fassnidge added: 'This is a competition-winning dish.' While Pete Evans simply said: 'Sensational.' Too slow: But the episode wasn't without it quips from the brunette beauty who hounded her husband on a number of occasions to speed up Come on: Zana hounded her husband to hurry up as he attempt to plate the meals, saying: 'Move.You're going really slow right now' But the episode wasn't without it quips from the brunette beauty who hounded her husband on a number of occasions to speed up. 'Move.You're going really slow right now,' Zana snapped at a very patient Gianni. The Brisbane based attorneys rushed as they then attempted to put together their homemade beef goulash which had been left to simmer in a pot ahead of plating their entree. Zana and Gianni had left the hearty dish on the stove for too long eventually causing the main dish to burn. Trying to fix the rustic meal, the husband and wife duo added various spices to subside the burnt flavouring. Fail: Zana and Gianni had left the hearty dish on the stove for too long eventually causing the main dish to burn No fooling: But the bad taste couldn't be masked and the judges failed to award the couple highly But the bad taste couldn't be masked and the judges failed to award the couple highly. 'Your main course, the goulash. I think your plating let you down. The meat was cooked well. It had flavour. Was it as good as your entree? No. Interesting choice for a semifinal,' Guy Grossi said. Karen added: 'There was a considerable amount of paprika in there, that I could taste. But I think there was an added smokiness there catching the goulash in the pot.' Again their dessert was given low marks. Judge and host of the host show Manu Feildel told the couple: 'The poached figs didn't look great.' Terrible: Judge and host of the host show Manu Feildel told the couple he wasn't impressed by their dessert, saying: 'The poached figs didn't look great' Just plain: While Liz Egan called the sweat treat 'very simple and quite pleasant' High five: Tasia and Gracia Seger jumped for joy as they were announced they were moving through to the grand final after receiving near perfect scores for their Asian inspired three-course meal Liz stated the sweat treat was 'very simple and quite pleasant'. Meanwhile, Tasia and Gracia Seger jumped for joy as they were announced they were moving through to the grand final after receiving near perfect scores for their Asian inspired three-course meal. 'I'm happy. I can't believe it. Whew,' a beaming Tasia screamed and bounced around. Gracia screamed in disbelief: 'I'm so proud of you. Oh, my God! I can't believe it.' In Sunday night's episode South Australian husband and wife duo Carmine and Lauren Finelli will fight it out against Maltese mother-and-son team Jordan and Anna Bruno for a place in Tuesday night's grand final decider. A whopping $250,000 will be awarded to the series winner. They have been 'talking the talk' since debuting on My Kitchen Rules. And during Thursday night's semi-finals episode Tasia and Gracia Seger were forced to prove they could 'walk the walk' during the elimination round. But the pressure to perform to the best of their ability didn't affect the Victorian sisters who received near perfect scores for their three-course Asian inspired meal. Scroll down for video Happy times: My Kitchen Rules' Tasia and Gracia Seger receive near perfect scores for their spicy dishes The intense night kicked off to a brilliant start for the siblings after they received rave reviews from the judges for their lobster tails with curry sauce. Colin Fassnidge was so impressed by the Victorian team, he said the sisters could successfully launch a career in the sauce industry. 'Tasia and Gracia, your entree, I see lobster, and I go, "Here we go. Trying to win us over". When I tasted your sauce...you could have given me a chicken wing with that sauce,' he said. Break down: The sisters cried upon hearing they had moved onto the grand finals Right from the start: The intense night kicked off to a brilliant start for the siblings after they received rave reviews from the judges for their lobster tails with curry sauce New career? Colin Fassnidge was so impressed by the Victorian team, he said the sisters could successfully launch a career in the sauce industry Adding: 'That dish, you knocked it out of the park. The sauce...in a few years' time, into a supermarket and I'll see your little faces on a bottle, 'cause you can sell that. I'm just glad I don't have to listen to all that arguing when I look at it.' The praises continued with their main course - crispy fried barramundi with tamarind dressing and salad. Liz Egan confessed after wiping the plate clean: 'Your main course - so impressive. The salad was just wow. It made each other look good. It was just one of those beautiful main courses.' Another round of applause: The praises continued with their main course - crispy fried barramundi with tamarind dressing and salad Yum: Liz Egan told the sisters their 'main course - so impressive' Their dessert couldn't be faulted by the dazzled judges. 'How many people get panna cotta wrong? You didn't tonight. It was really silky and just hanging together. I have to admit that that's probably the most perfect panna cotta I've ever eaten. I can't remember a better one,' Guy Grossi told the beaming sisters. Manu Feildel echoed his co-stars sentiments, saying: 'I've got to agree. That panna cotta was probably the most perfect we could expect. As soon as you put your spoon through it, it was just trying to hold together.' Perfect dish: Manu Feildel said the 'panna cotta was probably the most perfect we could expect' Top praise: Guy Grossi told the Victorian siblings: 'I have to admit that that's probably the most perfect panna cotta I've ever eaten. I can't remember a better one' But the compliments didn't stop there. The sisters were then awarded a perfect 10 out of 10 for their semi-finals three course meal by celebrity judge Pete Evans. 'Tasia and Gracia, the strongest three-course menu I've ever had in this competition. I score you... ..a 10,' he said as he held up the sign towards the overjoyed women. The sisters, who plan to open an Indonesian restaurant if they take out the top spot in next week's grand final, couldn't contain their excitement upon hearing the perfect score and were seen hugging and crying. Perfect: The sisters were then awarded a perfect 10 out of 10 for their semi-finals three course meal by celebrity judge Pete Evans Hugs: The sisters shouted upon hearing they had received a perfect 10 out of 10 for their meal 'Oh, my God.' the sisters screamed together. 'We got a 10 from Pete! That's a perfect score,' Tasia added. Meanwhile, the other three judges awarded the siblings scores of nine out of 10 for their meal. In Sunday night's episode South Australian husband and wife duo Carmine and Lauren Finelli will fight it out against Maltese mother-and-son team Jordan and Anna Bruno for a place in Tuesday night's grand final decider. A whopping $250,000 will be awarded to the series winner. Rich Kids of Beverly Hills star Morgan Stewart is making sure that everyone knows her wedding means her rules. In a sneak peek of the show's fourth season premiere which was released on Thursday, the 27-year-old exclaimed, 'He doesnt understand that I am the bride! This is my wedding!' The bride-to-be appeared visibly annoyed and snippy with her fiance Brendan Fitzpatrick, 26, during a meeting with their wedding planner. Scroll down for video Bridezilla: Morgan Stewart ranted, 'He doesnt understand that I am the bride! This is my wedding!' Seen in an exclusive sneak peek of the new season of Rich Kids of Beverly Hills In the two minute video Morgan and Brendan get into a heated discussion as they struggle to plan their big day. One of the many areas of contention: the menu. In the clip the engaged couple argue over beets and carrots and whether or not they should be served at their nuptials. The blonde beauty was quick to dismiss any input Brendan had about the vegetables. Snippy: The bride-to-be, 27, appeared visibly annoyed as she and her fiance Brendan Fitzpatrick, 26, met with their wedding planner and struggled to plan their big day Clashing opinions: In the clip the engaged couple argue over beets and carrots and whether or not they should be served at their nuptials. The blonde beauty was quick to dismiss Brendan's input about the vegetables Toward the end of the clip the groom-to-be fought back saying, 'Im tired of my opinions being walked all over.' But the bridezilla made it clear that this is 'her' wedding, and multiple times she can be seen referring to the occasion as 'my wedding' and not 'our' wedding. As the pair left the meeting tension between them was heightened, and Brendan exited with his arms crossed in front of his chest while she chased after him many steps behind. Fighting words: Toward the end of the preview the groom-to-be fought back saying, 'Im tired of my opinions being walked all over' Bride wins: Multiple times Morgan referred to the occasion as 'my wedding' and not 'our' wedding. During the video tension between the E! stars heightened Wait up! Brendan left the wedding prep with his arms crossed in front of his chest leaving his bride-to-be many steps behind him What's wrong? In the parking lot Brendan yelled 'I dont need to come to all this wedding planning if youre going to treat me like sh*t in front of strangers' The cliffhanger ends with Brendan yelling at her in the parking lot, shouting: 'I dont need to come to all this wedding planning if youre going to treat me like s*** in front of strangers.' The Rich Kids Of Beverly Hills star and her real estate agent fiance got engaged in Montecito, California in March 2015. Fans will get to see if these two make it down the aisle on the new season of The Rich Kids Of Beverly Hills, which premieres on E! on Sunday, May 1. Happier times: The RKoBH star and her real estate agent fiance got engaged in Montecito, California in March 2015. The new season of The Rich Kids of Beverly Hills premieres on E! Sunday May 1 Tila Tequila has been on a 24-hour Twitter tirade that began with wishing Adolf Hitler a happy birthday on Wednesday. In a bizarre rant, the 34-year-old glamour model and reality star called the Nazi leader her 'boo,' claimed to be the reincarnation of the dictator and posted a photo of herself wearing a Nazi cap, Hitler mustache and Swastika armband. 'On this great day of 420 I will HONOR our TRUE KING! They tried to destroy your legacy, but I will fight for you!' she tweeted along with a black and white photo of Hitler. Her hero: Tila Tequila took to Twitter to wish Adolf Hitler a happy birthday on Wednesday. The Nazi leader was born on April 20 1889 in Austria Claimed magic powers: The glamour model and reality star described the dictator as 'my boo Hitler' in this tweet in which she also referenced the killings at concentration camps during World War Two Cosmic connection: Tequila, 34, used this picture to claim she is linked to Hitler, whom she calls 'mein Furhor' and calls herself 'Hitila' In another tweet, she wrote: 'And happy birthday to my past life historical figure, most epic legend of all time, Mein Furhor (sic), Adolf Hitila! The MOST HIGH!' 'We all knew this day was coming! The 2nd coming of Christ in the end times prophecy has been fulfilled! #HeilHitila.' Tequila's diatribe, which continued Thursday morning, also included remarks about Jews, black people and gays and was filled with gay and racial epithets and slurs. Apocalyptic: She shared this doctored photo of herself in Nazi cap, Hitler mustache and Swastika armband as she predicted the end of the world is nigh 'Strong ties': Tequila also claimed to be the reincarnation of the Nazi dictator Seeing the future: She claimed that a cataclysmic event will strike the Earth before the end of 2016 The offensive ramblings went on and on, explaining how the Singapore born former Playboy pinup is of 'Angelic descent,' how the Rapture will take place this year and promising to post a video of how to move between two parallel universes like she does. Twitter users who took her to task for her comments were 'rewarded' with insults and name-calling. It's not the first time Tequila has drawn attention for her pro-Nazi stance. In August of last year, she was kicked off the British version of Celebrity Big Brother after after it emerged that she posed in front of Auschwitz in Nazi gear and claimed to be 'Hitila,' or 'Hitler reborn'. Offensive: Tequila was kicked off Britain's Celebrity Big Brother last August following hundreds of complaints about her inclusion in the reality show after it emerged she'd posed as Hitler in front of Auschwitz in a photoshopped image she posted on social media in 2013 The social media postings made in December 2013 prompted complaints from hundreds of viewers and the Campaign against Anti-Semitism, and she was removed from the reality show one day after entering the Big Brother house. A spokesman for Britain's Channel 5, that airs the program, said at the time: 'Unfortunately, Channel 5 and Endemol did not know about the views and attitudes Tila had expressed in social media postings prior to her involvement in Celebrity Big Brother.' 'The views Tila had expressed, and permitted to remain uncorrected, are totally unacceptable and, accordingly, her continued involvement in the program was untenable.' Tequila, who was born in Singapore, went on a Twitter rant for 24 hours and her remarks included an array of racial and gay epithets and denial of the Holocaust. She's pictured in England in August 2015 Tequila, who first gained fame on her bisexual-themed dating show, has strongly denied that she is anti-Semitic. But in a series of online postings, including a blog entitled 'Why I sympathize with Hitler Part 1', she described the Nazi leader as a 'good man' who deserved forgiveness. She has since referred to the killing of six million Jews by the Nazi regime as the 'Holohoax.' In January, she tweeted that she believes the earth is flat. With mom-to-be Chrissy Teigen as one of the guests, the subject of pregnancy was bound to come up on Kocktails with Khloe. On the finale episode on Wednesday, Kim Kardashian, who is mother to two-year-old North and four-month-old Saint, admitted that she is considering more children - thanks to her very broody husband Kanye West. 'Do you want more kids?' Host Khloe, 31, asked the star. Kim replied: 'I said no way. I was so set on my two kids and how happy I was with my life the way that it is, but Kanye has been mentioning it every single day lately for the past 10 days,' Scroll down for video 'I said no way': Kim Kardashian revealed on Kocktails with Khloe that she didn't want more kids but that husband Kanye West has been begging her for more 'Im like why is he doing this to me?!' the reality star sighed as she revealed the rapper has mentioned having more kids every day for 10 days 'Youve been counting the days?' Khloe asked. 'Yeah,' an exasperated Kim said 'Im like why is he doing this to me?!' 'It would be a really dangerous environment for me if I were to get pregnant again,' Kim continued, referring to the health problems she suffered during her two pregnancies. Khloe then asked if she would have to have a surrogate and the mother-of-two replied with a laugh: 'I dont know. Why, are you offering?' See Kim Kardashian updates as she considers surrogate as Kanye begs for more kids 'It would be a really dangerous environment for me if I were to get pregnant again,' The 35-year-old star talked about her concerns if she did fall pregnant again Other options: The KUWTK star revealed she would consider using a surrogate for another child and revealed that Khloe, Kourtney and even Chrissy had previously offered to help Kim also revealed that Khloe, Kourtney and even Chrissy had offered to be her surrogate in the past, much to the surprise of Chrissy's husband John Legend. 'Chrissy, I have it in an email!' she insisted. Meanwhile, another hot topic of conversation was Kanye's fondness of watching porn on silent and screened in his mother-in-law's house. The 38-year-old rapper admitted to watching pornography in Kris Jenner's home with 'the kids next door' as long as the sound was off. Round table: Khloe and her guests chatted around a table for the finale episode which aired on Wednesday 'I've never watched porn with the sound on,' said the rapper, who lived with his wife Kim Kardashian in her mother's home for several months while she was pregnant and nursing. 'Why don't you want to hear it?' asked John Legend, who also appeared on the show with his model wife Chrissy Teigen. 'WellI lived with my mom in high school then I lived in my mother-in-law's housethere's kids next door and stuff,' laughed Kanye as explanation. Adding: 'I am all about the storyline'. Last guest: Kanye West talked about his porn preferences in the series finale Couples night: John Legend and pregnant Chrissy Teigen also were guests on the show which is why the subject of children came up in conversation several times Kim, who starred in her own sex tape, wasn't fazed, noting that her husband 'probably watches Japanese anime porn'. While usually absent from the Kardashians' reality show, Kanye was very vocal during the hour-long programme. In the past the hip-hop artist has compared himself to Steve Jobs, Michelangelo and Jesus Christ. Very vocal: Kanye has mostly shunned Keeping Up With The Kardashians but wasn't shy on Kocktails With Khloe 'Everyone is like Jesus though,' he shrugged. He fielded several questions from Khloe including one about where he gets his confidence. Kanye said his abundant confidence came from his family and 'not having a slave mentality.' Kanye talked of meeting Kim in 2004, when he and his friends noticed that she had: 'All three, face, tits and ass'. Kim talked of breastfeeding her new baby Saint, and her elder child North's jealousy. 'She would cry so much and try to pull him off of me,' she confessed. In parenthood Kim said she's the disciplinarian while Kanye is 'the fun dad'. 'No is my favorite word,' she giggled. 'North has Kanye wrapped around his little finger,' agreed Khloe. Drink up: The host enjoyed a cocktail during the show Meanwhile Chrissy said that pregnancy was starting to 'hurt' her. 'I get these weird butt pains now,' said the 30-year-old co-host of Lip Sync Battle. John and pregnant Chrissy filmed their appearance on the talk show before they welcomed daughter Luna earlier this month. Kim warned Chrissy about 'mommy shamers' online. 'They will literally attack you,' she said of critics who challenge parenting skills. FYI network announced earlier this month that it was cancelling Kocktails With Khloe after just one season. Caitlyn Jenner has been named one of TIME magazine's most influential people of 2016. The I Am Cait star - who was known as Bruce Jenner prior to her gender transition surgery last year - has been recognised as one of the world's most powerful people on the magazine's annual list. The 66-year-old former decathlete - who has six children from three different relationships - was recognised by the magazine for her bravery after she revealed just under 12 months ago that she wants to live her life as a woman. Scroll down for video Making the list: Caitlyn Jenner -formerly known as Bruce- has been named one of TIME magazine's most influential people of 2016. The 66-year-old is pictured on April 2 in Beverly HIlls In the special issue of the magazine, Caitlyn is honoured by Wayne Maines, an activist whose daughter Nicole is transgender. Maines wrote in Caitlyn's entry: 'No matter where you come from, how famous you might be or how much money you have, letting America see you in such a vulnerable way is daring and admirablenot self-serving. 'I have the greatest respect for her courage and commitment to truth. The courage that she displays is helping challenge society to change. I am so pleased that she has fulfilled her dreams and that she is now helping our children do the same.' The Olympic medallist made the list alongside the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Idris Elba, Melissa McCarthy and Adele. See Caitlyn Jenner updates as she is named one of TIME's most influential people of 2016 Notable others: The Olympic medallist, pictured in March 2015, made the list alongside the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Idris Elba, Melissa McCarthy and Adele Supermodel Karlie Kloss, Ariana Grande and Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson also managed to claim a spot. Noticeably absent were Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, both of whom were among last year's honourees. In fact, none of the Kardashians made this year's selection of 100 influential people. Remember when: The I Am Cait star is pictured with sons Brandon, 34, and Brody Jenner, 32, Kim Kardashian, 35, and Brandon's wife Leah Jenner in 2013 Power couple: Mark Zuckerberg, 31, is pictured with wife Priscilla Chan, 31, on the cover of TIME magazine The list - which features 40 women and 60 men - was derived by the magazine based on people who have inspired others either positively or negatively over the last 12 months. Other people to make the annual list include US President Barack Obama, who claimed a spot for the 11th time in 13 years and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The youngest person to make the list is Olympic gold medallist Katie Ledecky, a swimmer expected to play a major part of this summer's Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. She sat at the epicenter of a frenzied attack by fellow cast member Lisa Rinna, and that was only the first episode of a three part RHOBH reunion. So Lisa Vanderpump's next course of action was to jet out of town the next day as she was spotted at LAX airport on Wednesday. And the 55-year-old Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star looked fashionable as always in a chic lace-up blazer suit. Scroll down for video Jetting out of town: Lisa Vanderpump, 55, was spotted departing from LAX airport on Wednesday She wore a stylish black two-piece ensemble with matching trousers teamed with a form-fitting white shirt and strappy heels. Adding a pop of colour to her achromatic wardrobe, she carried a large designer Chanel handbag in her signature hue of pink. Her silky brunette tresses cascaded effortlessly in loose tendrils past her shoulders and she kept concealed behind mirrored aviator shades. Heading for the hills! The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star jetted out of town the day after she was confronted during an explosive reunion show Walking close alongside the restaurateur was her longtime husband Ken Todd, 70, who looked handsome in a royal blue suit with brown leather brogues. The couple - who tied the knot in 1982 - headed to Las Vegas where she tweeted a snapshot of a gorgeous bright pink floral bouquet in her hotel room. 'Ooh just arrived in Vegas #work but Nobu knows how to welcome you,' the mother of two captioned the image. Traveling in style! The reality star looked chic in a fitted lace-up blazer two-piece suit Pop of colour! Vanderpump carried a large designer Chanel handbag in her signature hue of pink Vanderpump was spotted the afternoon after an explosive episode on her hit Bravo reality show. On Tuesday night Yolanda Hadid stormed out of the RHOBH reunion after Lisa Rinna, 52, screamed about the Munchausen scandal. Lisa Rinna has been widely vilified for accusing Yolanda of faking her Lyme disease via a psychiatric disorder called Munchausen syndrome. Under pressure from Yolanda, Rinna attempted to blame Vanderpump for the whole debacle, shouting and squawking until Yolanda left the room in tears. Stylish spouses! Walking close alongside the restaurateur was her longtime husband Ken Todd, 70 'Lisa [Rinna] you have no place to come out and have such strong opinions about the integrity and honesty of me as a human being,' said Yolanda, 52. 'What was your basis for being so outspoken, so judgmental?' she asked. Adding with irritation: 'How do you fake medical records? Blood tests?' Rinna then attempted to blame Vanderpump, saying that she'd coerced her into suggesting Munchausen syndrome for the sake of the show's storyline. Reunion show: Lisa Vanderpump was accused by Lisa Rinna of coercing her into suggesting that Yolanda Hadid's battle with chronic Lyme disease was actually a case of Munchausen syndrome Too much: The reality star was overcome with emotion as Rinna made her remarks The soap opera star delivered a high volume story about how during her birthday party her husband Harry Hamlin said everyone should support Yolanda whether she was sick or not. 'You said ''There goes our f***ing storyline'',' Rinna screamed at Vanderpump. 'You encouraged me to say Munchausen and guess what? I did it, I did it and I'm sorry,' she shouted. Not backing down: The soap opera star ignored Vanderpump's protest and blamed the Munchausen scandal on her 'Are you kidding me?': Lisa Vanderpump, who was dressed in shimmering copper Tom Ford, protested Rinna's claims Lisa Vanderpump, who was dressed in shimmering copper Tom Ford, protested saying, 'No. Are you kidding me?'. Rinna then produced phone records to bolster her claim that Vanderpump called her urging to say 'Munchausen.' 'Ten f***ing phone calls! You encouraged me to say this!,' Rinna shouted at Vanderpump as Yolanda stormed off. While the British beauty kept silent on social media, she did retweet one post from a fan who wrote: 'Rinna's a liar & we saw the evidence with our own eyes.' 'Rinna's a liar': Vanderpump remained silent on social media but retweeted a single post from a follower which clearly revealed her thoughts on the matter Vanderpump's follower continued: 'We watched [Rinna] pull out her cell and share the Munchausen speculation. We also saw Lisa V and Kyle express their wish not to talk about it and their discomfort to bring it out in front of cameras.' Adding: 'Also as to the "there goes our storyline" claim, I can see Lisa V saying it as a joke, but never seriously. Why would Lisa V want the storyline to be about Yolanda when that pushed out more time spent on informing people... about the new restaurant... The women all want their activities featured, not someone else's. Part two of the three part reunion continues next week on Bravo. He's best known for playing Henry Talbot in popular period drama Downton Abbey. And Matthew Goode was hoping to fill the shoes of Daniel Craig in his role of James Bond but he appears to have scuppered his chances. The actor took a swipe at the 007 film franchise after revealing he had auditioned for the titular job but hadn't been invited back for a second during a appearance on This Morning on Thursday. Matthew, 38, told Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby: 'I went in for it last time and Barbara [Broccoli, James Bond producer] who is completely lovely but she hasn't brought me in this time.' He continued: 'I think they should half the budget. Reboot it. I dont think modern Bond is working as well [as old Bond].' Phillip, 54, didn't beat around the bush and told him: 'Well, you've blown your chances now,' to which he replied: 'Well, I have now.' 'I don't think modern Bond is working': Matthew Goode took a swipe at the 007 film franchise as he revealed he hasn't been invited back for a second audition during an appearance on This Morning on Thursday He continued: 'I think they should half the budget. Reboot it. I dont think modern Bond is working as well [as old Bond]' Matthew swiftly changed the subject to who he would like to see replace Craig. 'I think either [Tom] Hardy or Hiddleston - he was so great in The Night Manager. Or Idris [Elba] so let's have some diversity if we're going to talk about it. He would be killer as a modern Bond,' he explained. Matthew, Holly and Phillip shared a toast to The Queen's 90th birthday with a glass of red wine ahead of his interview. Phillip Schofield didn't beat around the bush and told him: 'Well, you've blown your chances now,' to which he replied, 'well, I have now.' Out with the old: The Downton Abbey actor said he hoped Tom Hiddleston, Tom Hardy or Idris Elba would replace Daniel Craig in the titular role Raising a glass: Phillip, Holly and Matthew toasted The Queen's 90th birthday with a glass of red ahead of his tell-all interview The Imitation Game actor also shared he 'hadn't worked in a while' but has something exciting in the pipeline. 'I'm dipping my feet back in with Brad Pitt,' he said. Robert Downey Jr. is adding his star-power to the new Spider-Man movie. The 51-year-old actor will reprise his role as billionaire businessman Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, in the upcoming reboot Spider-Man: Homecoming. Sony and Marvel were keen to include Robert after seeing his great chemistry with 19-year-old British actor Tom Holland - who plays Spider-Man - in Captain America: Civil War,Variety reported on Thursday. Scroll down for video Iron Man on the red carpet: Robert Downey Jr. waved to fans at the premiere of Captain America: Civil War in Berlin on Thursday. He's now set to join Marvel's Spider-Man: Homecoming Sources told Variety on that the size Robert's role is unknown at this point, and plot details are being kept under wraps. But Spider-Man: Homecoming reportedly focuses on a teenage Peter Parker during his high school days, leading up to his debut as the web-slinger. Jon Watts is directing the Spidey reboot from a script by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein. British actor Tom will be introduced as Spider-Man in Captain America: Civil War, before going on to star in the reboot. Strike a pose: Robert with Captain America: Civil War costars, Paul Bettany, left, Emily VanCamp and Daniel Bruhl, far right Fan favorite: Robert laughed as he signed autographs at the Berlin premiere on Thursday Production on Spider-Man: Homecoming is expected to start this summer. The pic opens on July 7, 2017, with Marisa Tomei as Peter's Aunt May. Zendaya, Tony Revolori and Laura Harrier are also on board. In the spotlight: Nineteen-year-old Brit Tom Holland, who plays Peter Parker, aka Spider- Man, suited up for the Hollywood premiere of Captain America: Civil War on April 12 Having a bad day? Iron Man, aka billionaire businessman Tony Stark, in Captain America: Civil War. Marvel added him to the reboot because of his great chemistry with new Spidey star Tom Holland Michael Keaton, who already has superhero creds starring as Batman in 1989, had been set to play the villain in the new movie, according to Variety. But sources revealed that his deal may not work, meaning the search may be on yet again for a baddie. Sony and Marvel had no comment. Captain America: Civil war is set for release in the US on May 6, on April 28 in Australia and April 29 in the UK. In addition, Downey told Shortlist that a Sherlock 3 is in the works and he has already agreed to preliminary shooting dates. Her style only improves with age and Sienna Miller looked typically chic in a spectrum of blue as she was pictured out and about in New York City on Thursday. The British actress rocked a simple but effective ensemble as she sauntered around SoHo in the afternoon sun on her own. Sienna, 34, sported a pair of very wide leg culottes, which were royal blue in colour, teaming them with a pair of paler blue suede heeled mules. Scroll down for video Fifty Shades of Blue: Sienna Miller looked typically chic in a spectrum of blue as she was pictured out and about in SoHo, New York City, on Thursday The Burnt actress kept her upper half equally understated, pulling on a long-sleeved grey jersey top which she tucked into her waistband. Sienna carried a more colourful leather jacket over one arm after having underestimated the temperature while she carried a navy tote bag in her other hand. She afforded herself an element of coverage with a pair of cat-eye sunglasses and kept her head down as she went about her day. Simple but effective: Sienna, 34, favoured an effortlessly fashion-forward ensemble for her solo stroll in the sun Don't you step on my blue suede mules: The Burnt actress rocked a pair of open-toe heels with which she paired some royal blue culottes Wardrobe staple: The British-born fashionista kept her upper half equally understated, pulling on a long-sleeved grey jersey top which she tucked into her waistband Sienna has been in the Big Apple for the past week promoting her latest film High-Rise - which was released in the UK last month - with co-stars Tom Hiddleston and Luke Evans. Her latest engagement saw her discuss the science fiction thriller at the AOL Build Speaker Series during a Q&A session on Wednesday. In the film, based around the residents of a tower block in the 1970s, the actress takes on the role of Charlotte Melville. No rest for the wicked: Sienna has been in the Big Apple for the past week promoting her latest film High-Rise - which was released in the UK last month - with co-stars Tom Hiddleston and Luke Evans She is accompanied on screen by co-stars Elisabeth Moss and Sienna Guillory, who help to retell J.G. Ballard's classic novel. Meanwhile, The Night Manager leading actor Tom tackles the role of Dr. Robert Laing, a resident of the twenty-fifth floor who strikes up a relationship with Sienna's character. Later in the evening, Sienna looked ravishing in red as she took to the red carpet at the premiere in a slashed Christopher Kane dress from his unreleased Autumn/Winter '16 collection. She portrayed a post-apocalyptic freedom fighter. But it sounds like Emilia Clarke will not be participating in any future installments of the legendary Terminator film series. The 29-year-old actress, who also plays Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones, opened up to Comingsoon.net about her possible involvement in any future Terminator movies. Scroll down for video She's terminated! It sounds like Emilia Clarke will not be participating in any future installments of the legendary Terminator film series Emilia did not mince words when asked if she would possibly reprise her role as Sarah Connor. 'No. Can I say that? It's okay. No. Uh-uh. But I have some very different roles coming up.' While she's obviously most famous for her portrayal of the dragon queen in HBO's hit Game of Thrones, it was recently revealed by producers that the series would probably end after season eight. Luckily it seems the talented star has lots of other projects lined up for her fans. Gunslinger: She portrayed a post-apocalyptic freedom fighter named Sarah Connor in the film series She told the website that she was particularly excited about her role in the upcoming drama Me Before You. 'I read the book and it was just the most beautiful thing I had ever read,' she said, before recounting a somewhat humorous anecdote about her discovery of the tome. 'I was shooting Terminator at the time and had a rocket launcher in my hand while crying like a little girl. I felt like the author, Jojo Moyes, had found a part of me and just wrote it down. I knew that I just had to play the role.' Bright future: She's particularly excited about her role in the upcoming drama Me Before You The book details the relationship between a woman and a young paralyzed man she's been hired to care for. Emilia went on to point out how much the role differs from her icy Game of Thrones character. 'Khaleesi doesnt laugh. She doesnt smile. Shes really serious. She takes her work very seriously. This role is the complete opposite. Its affecting, but its a comedy as well. Theres some very funny moments in it Its a simple love story that talks about peoples rights.' He's rumoured to have quit his role as secret agent James Bond. And Daniel Craig has never looked happier, flashing a big grin as he touched down at New York's JFK airport on Thursday. The 48-year-old actor was in great spirits as he made his way through the terminal, travelling light and carrying just a leather holdall and a brown satchel. Scroll down for video Travelling in style: Bond star Daniel Craig was dressed to impress as he made an appearance at New York's JFK airport on Thursday Daniel looked every inch the English gentleman, sporting a flat cap and a matching grey zip-up jacket. The Spectre star dressed his jet-setting attire down with jeans, a white shirt and a black cardigan. The actor is rumoured to have turned down the opportunity to play 007 one more time as a new US television series has meant he will be too busy to reprise the role. On his way to filming? The actor is rumoured to have turned down the opportunity to play 007 one more time as a new US television series has meant he will be too busy to reprise the role According to The Sun, the 47-year-old will star in Purity, which will run for several series of 20 episodes apiece. No doubt the decision will come as little surprise to Bond fans as Daniel claimed he'd rather slash his wrists than play James Bond again, after playing the secret agent for a decade. He will also be appearing in a Broadway production of Shakespearean tragedy Othello alongside David Oyelowo this autumn. Daniel's outing comes as Downton Abbey star Matthew Goode took a swipe at the 007 film franchise during an appearance on ITV's This Morning, revealing he had auditioned for the titular job but hadn't been invited back for a second round. Busy schedule: Daniel will also be appearing in a Broadway production of Shakespearean tragedy Othello alongside David Oyelowo this autumn Matthew, 38, told Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby: 'I went in for it last time and Barbara [Broccoli, James Bond producer] who is completely lovely but she hasn't brought me in this time.' He continued: 'I think they should half the budget. Reboot it. I dont think modern Bond is working as well [as old Bond].' Phillip, 54, didn't beat around the bush and told him: 'Well, you've blown your chances now,' to which he replied: 'Well, I have now.' Tom Hiddleston, Idris Elba and Tom Hardy have all been hotly tipped to replace Craig. The Night Manager star Tom recently admitted he hasn't been approached by filmmakers and that the hype from his fans was 'becoming a weird thing to deal with.' He explained: 'It's just an idea in people's minds so it's quite hard to engage with because it hasn't come from me if that makes sense. It's odd because it's becoming overwhelming - not the thing of it, but the number of people per day who bring it up, it's actually becoming a weird thing to deal with.' American tech giants under EU cosh US technology giants Google, Amazon, Apple, Intel and Microsoft have all come under the often costly scrutiny of European Union (EU) authorities in Brussels: - GOOGLE - A European Commission anti-trust probe was opened in April 2015 into whether Google gives unfair prominence to its own Android apps such as maps or music streaming in deals with mobile manufacturers such as Samsung or Huawei. A European Commission anti-trust probe was opened in April 2015 into whether Google gives unfair prominence to its own Android apps with mobile manufacturers Justin Sullivan (Getty/AFP/File) The Android operating system captures over 80 percent of the world market for mobile phones, far ahead of its closest rival Apple. The EU a year ago formally charged Google with abusing its dominance in Europe and a decision could come later this year. In both cases, Google risks a fine of 10 percent of worldwide global sales for one year. - AMAZON - In June 2015 the EU's anti-trust watchdog opened a formal investigation into the Seattle-based online retail titan's e-book distribution. The European Commission is probing clauses Amazon has with publishers which may shield the company from competitors, including an obligation to be informed of more favourable terms being offered by rivals. Brussels is already conducting a separate investigation into Amazon's tax arrangements over its tax deals in Luxembourg, one of a series of such probes targeting major global firms, including Apple, Starbucks and Fiat. - MICROSOFT - In a historic case in March 2013, the European Commission fined US giant Microsoft 561 million euros ($638 million) for failing to provide clients with a choice of Internet browser for Windows 7, as it had promised to do. In 2009, the Commission required Microsoft to offer clients a choice of web browser through to 2014 after complaints that it was restricting them to its own product, Internet Explorer. The EU has had several disputes with Microsoft, fining the company 899 million euros in 2008, subsequently reduced to 860 million euros, for failing to comply with an order to share product information with rivals so that their software could work with Windows. That came on top of a then-record fine of 497 million euros in 2004 for violating EU competition rules. - APPLE - In September 2014, the European Union said that Apple's sweetheart tax deals with Ireland breached rules on receiving state aid, in a case which could cost the US tech giant billions if it is found to be at fault. - INTEL - INTEL, the world's biggest chipmaker, was in May 2009 fined a record 1.06 billion euros. The EU says it abused its stranglehold on the semiconductor market to crush its main rival, AMD. The European Commission accused Intel of using illegal loyalty rebates to squeeze rivals out of the market for central processing units (CPUs) -- the brains inside personal computers. Brazil's leader heads to US amid impeachment fight Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff will travel to New York on Thursday to sign a global climate change pact -- while she confronts a bruising impeachment fight back home. Rousseff's trip will mean that Vice President Michel Temer, whom she accuses of conspiring to oust her, will be in charge of the country until her return. An aide in her office told AFP that the 68-year-old leftist leader would be back in Brasilia late Friday or early Saturday. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff (pictured) has accused her vice president, Michel Temer, and the house speaker of "treachery" and coup-plotting Evaristo Sa (AFP) More than 160 nations will gather at the headquarters of the United Nations on Friday to sight the climate pact that was agreed in Paris in December. Rousseff could use the international stage to denounce her possible impeachment, which she has decried as a "coup" bid by Temer and other members of the centrist PMDB party, her former coalition partner. The lower house of Congress overwhelmingly voted on Sunday to send impeachment proceedings to the Senate, which is expected to vote in mid-May on whether to put Rousseff on trial. If a simple majority approves the trial, Rousseff would be suspended for up to 180 days and Temer would replace her during that time. Egypt cuts TV host's jail term over 'women are adulterous' slur A Cairo court on Wednesday reduced to three months a three-year sentence for a man imprisoned for saying many women in Egypt are adulterous, a judicial official said. The court decision came a month after Taimour Subki was sent to jail for making the claim in a television interview. A misdemeanour court had convicted him of spreading "false news that disturbs the public peace." An Egyptian couple sit on a bridge overlooking the Nile in Cairo Filippo Monteforte (AFP/File) Subki, who runs a Facebook page titled "The Diary of a Crushed Husband," made the claim in a television interview in December, sparking an uproar. A backlash on social media had already led to the cancellation of the talk show, aired on private satellite station CBC, that hosted Subki. "Many women cheat on their husbands... I can say that 30 percent of women are ready to be deviant," Subki said, pointing to the southern cities of "Asyut, Minya, Sohag, Qena, Luxor and Aswan." Israel arrests settlers who attacked Palestinians: police Israel has arrested six Jewish settlers who allegedly carried out attacks against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, police said on Wednesday. Two teenagers and a soldier are among the six-member "extremist and violent" cell suspected of attacking Palestinian homes in the northern West Bank with Molotov cocktails and tear gas, a statement said. The attacks took place in the second half of 2015 and also included the torching of Palestinian vehicles and throwing stones at them, it said. Israeli soldiers clash with Palestinian demonstrators during a demonstration against Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, near Ramallah, in September 2015 Abbas Momani (AFP/File) Police described the suspects as members of an "extremist and violent organisation that systematically attacked Palestinians and their property in full awareness that this could endanger their lives." The statement said the suspects admitted carrying out the attacks during questioning by the Shin Bet internal security agency and the police department dedicated to nationalist crimes. Details of the case were released after authorities lifted a gag order that was imposed earlier this month following the arrests of the cell members, most of whom come from the Nahliel settlement northwest of the West Bank city of Ramallah. The six, who are to be charged in the coming days, allegedly threw Molotov cocktails at a Palestinian home in the village of Mazraa al-Qibliya last November while family members slept. "A disaster was avoided by a miracle" when one Molotov cocktail rebounded off a window, the police statement said. And in December the suspects threw a tear gas grenade at another Palestinian home overnight in the village of Beitillou. "The father was awakened by the noise, felt difficulty breathing... and immediately took his wife and baby out the house," the police statement said. In both cases anti-Arab slogans were scrawled on the walls of the houses. There were no reports of casualties in the Beitillou and Mazraa al-Qibliya attacks. But they are a stark reminder of the July 2015 arson attack in the West Bank village of Duma where an 18-month old baby was killed when his family home was firebombed by Jewish extremists. Two Israelis were charged in January over those attacks. Trump, Clinton re-energized after big New York wins Fresh from resounding wins in New York's primaries, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump declared they were on the way to locking up their parties' nominations, and turned Wednesday to the next critical round of presidential campaign contests. Tuesday's election routs on their home turf re-set the presidential race, as Clinton halted rival Bernie Sanders' multi-state winning streak. Trump also righted his ship, after a series of losses to Ted Cruz that have raised the specter of a bruising nomination endgame playing out at the Republican convention in July. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton widened her already substantial delegate lead by securing 57.9 percent of the vote in New York Timothy A. Clary (AFP) "The race for the Democratic nomination is in the home stretch, and victory is in sight," Clinton told jubilant supporters late Tuesday in Manhattan. The former secretary of state, first lady and senator from New York, who campaigned in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, widened her already substantial delegate lead by securing 57.9 percent of the vote. Vermont Senator Sanders received 42.1 percent -- clearly a letdown for a campaign which had predicted a strong showing. In her victory speech, the 68-year-old Clinton shifted her focus to the general election match-up with Republicans, extending an olive branch to Sanders supporters after a tense New York primary. "To all the people that supported Senator Sanders, I believe there's much more that unites us than divides us," said Clinton. Sanders, for his part, insisted that he would rebound in the upcoming primaries. "We think we have a path to victory," the 74-year old Sanders told reporters. The self-declared democratic socialist planned to return to campaign trail Thursday, with stops in Pennsylvania, which plans to hold its vote on April 26 -- the same date as elections in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland and Rhode Island. - US 'going to hell' - Trump scored a blowout victory Tuesday with 60.5 percent of the vote -- more than the combined vote percentages of Ohio Governor John Kasich and Cruz, an arch-conservative senator from Texas who was thumped by voters after daring to criticize "New York values." "Senator Cruz is just about mathematically eliminated" from the nominations race, a confident Trump said, noting his own campaign is nearly 300 delegates ahead after securing at least 89 of the 95 New York delegates at stake. Trump's provocative candidacy has appalled establishment Republicans, many of whom have joined an effort to block him from winning the nomination. While Trump, 69, had toned down his divisive rhetoric in recent days, he returned to his fiery bravado and harsh name-calling Wednesday at a rowdy rally in Indiana, which votes early next month. "I'm millions of votes ahead of lyin' Ted Cruz," he boomed, before taking aim at "crooked Hillary." And the political outsider doubled down on his claim that the system for picking delegates who ultimately will choose the Republican nominee is fixed. "It's a rigged, crooked system that's designed so that the bosses can pick whoever they want," he said. Trump also attacked the country's "stupid" leaders, and their inability to secure strong trade deals, negotiate successfully with China, or defeat what he described as radical Islamic terrorism. "Our country is going to hell," Trump said. The rally was interrupted several times by protesters, with Trump repeatedly yelling: "Get 'em outta here!" Even with his New York victory, Trump is hardly assured of reaching the 1,237 delegates needed to win the Republican nomination outright before the convention in Cleveland. He has now won 846 delegates, according to CNN's tally, with some 670 delegates at stake in the remaining 15 Republican primaries. Cruz so far has 563, while Kasich has 147. - 'Nobody' getting to 1,237 - Even though he trails Trump, Cruz's campaign has shown more savvy in working the complex delegate system. Cruz, angling for a contested convention, downplayed Trump's New York performance and insisted that no one has a path to outright victory. "Nobody is getting to 1,237," Cruz told reporters in Hershey, Pennsylvania, adding that the race is "headed to a contested convention." But Trump's campaign sees it differently, according to an internal memo distributed late Tuesday of talking points for Trump surrogates to use in media appearances. "Our projections call for us to accumulate over 1,400 delegates and thus a first ballot nomination win in Cleveland," read the memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. Leading contenders for the US presidency John Saeki, Adrian Leung (AFP) US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks following victory in the New York state primary on April 19, 2016 Jewel Samad (AFP) Republican presidential candidate John Kasich holds a town hall meeting on April 19, 2016 in Annapolis, Maryland Chip Somodevilla (Getty/AFP) Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks at Penn State University on April 19, 2016 Jeff Swensen (Getty/AFP) MPs urge British government to recognise IS 'genocide' British lawmakers voted Wednesday to urge the government to recognise the Islamic State jihadist group's attacks on minorities in Iraq and Syria as genocide. Members of parliament unanimously approved the motion -- which is not binding on the government -- by 278 votes to zero. The vote in the 650-seat lower House of Commons calls on ministers to accept formally that IS actions against Christian, Yazidi and other religious and ethnic minorities in Syria and Iraq constitute genocide. A vote in Britain's House of Commons called on ministers to accept formally that IS actions against Christian, Yazidi and other religious and ethnic minorities in Syria and Iraq constitute genocide But Foreign Office junior minister Tobias Ellwood, who has specific responsibility for the Middle East, said it was up to the courts rather than the government to make such a judgement. "I believe genocide has taken place, but as the prime minister (David Cameron) has said, genocide is a matter of legal rather than political opinion," Ellwood said. MPs from all parties urged Britain to use its position as one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council to get the situation referred to the International Criminal Court. Ellwood said any referral to the ICC by the UNSC "will only be possible with a united council and ideally with the cooperation of countries in which alleged crimes have been committed. "But I draw the house's attention when efforts were made to refer the situation in Syria to the ICC in 2014 it was vetoed by Russia and China and we expect any Security Council resolution seeking to refer the situations in Iraq or Syria to the ICC against these countries could very well be blocked again. "But further discussions are taking place. We are now in a different place than in 2014." He added: "It is not for governments to be the prosecutor, the judge or indeed the jury." The United States declared last month that Islamic State's slaughter of Christians, Yazidis and Shiites in Iraq and Syria amounts to a genocide and vowed to halt it. Secretary of State John Kerry's "moral statement" did not place the United States under any new legal obligations, but the White House said it could back an international investigation by the ICC -- which the United States is not party to -- into alleged genocide. Australian TV crew arrive home after Beirut kidnap deal An Australian television crew accused of aiding a mother in the botched kidnapping of her two children in Lebanon arrived home Thursday, amid reports of a multi-million dollar deal struck with the father to drop abduction charges. Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner and the Channel Nine team were arrested and charged last week after Faulkner's son and daughter were snatched in broad daylight on a Beirut street. But they were released on bail Wednesday after the father, Ali al-Amin, decided not to pursue the charges in court. Australian TV presenter Tara Brown (back) and Sally Faulkner, a woman accused of abducting her children, are released from prison in Baabda, Lebanon, on April 20, 2016 Anwar Amro (AFP) Bailed star reporter Tara Brown led her producer Stephen Rice, cameraman Ben Williamson and sound recordist David Ballment on to the earliest flight out of Beirut after their release from custody. The Nine team arrived in Sydney Thursday, touching down about 10 pm (1200 GMT) on an Emirates flight from Dubai. They were mobbed by a large media scrum as they left the airport via a private exit, and were whisked off in waiting black vans. "I'm just so glad to be home," Brown said as she was escorted by Rice to a van. Ballment added that he was looking forward to "a shower and seeing my wife". Faulkner, however, remains in Beirut for a custody hearing with her estranged husband. It was a disastrous end to the news story the crew had planned. - Deal struck - Faulkner's lawyer Ghassan Mughabghab earlier said a deal had been struck granting Amin full custody of the children in line with Lebanese law. The commercial Nine network did not mention any deal they were reportedly behind, but announced a full inquiry into the bizarre episode. The Australian newspaper said "a multi-million dollar deal was struck to drop abduction charges". "Nine pays dad to win freedom for crew and mum," Sydney's Daily Telegraph headlined, adding that "a massive sum of cash" had been paid in compensation. The Sydney Morning Herald said it had cost several hundred thousand dollars, but that an exact figure could not be confirmed. The crew and Faulkner still face potential charges by Lebanon's public prosecutor, but they can be sentenced in absentia. Amin's lawyer Hussein Berjawi told AFP he had not dropped charges against two Britons and two Lebanese allegedly involved in the abduction through a child recovery agency. "They intended to get away in a boat captained by a member of a private child recovery agency," a Lebanese security source said. - 'Public interest' - The crew were arrested April 7, a day after the two children were grabbed. Video footage shows them walking with an elderly person said to be their grandmother before several figures jump out of a car, shove the adult aside and carry the children off in the vehicle. Police later found Faulkner with the children, reportedly a six-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy, at a home in Beirut. They were handed back to their father through the courts. Faulkner accused him of taking them for a holiday to Beirut and then refusing to return them to Australia. The channel's handling of the coverage has proved controversial in Australia and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull issued a warning. "We are very pleased they (the television crew) are on their way home," he said, "and we want to thank the Lebanese authorities for their cooperation". But he added: "All Australians, regardless of what they do or who they work for, should recognise that when they are outside of Australia, they must obey the laws of the country in which they are visiting." Nine Network chief executive Hugh Marks pledged to "ascertain what went wrong and why our systems, designed to protect staff, failed to do so in this case". "What has happened to Sally happens all too often and affects thousands of Australian families," he said. "It is a story that not only is profoundly in the public interest but also one the public is interested in." Ali al-Amin, whose ex-wife tried to abduct their children, talks to the press as he leaves the court in Baabda, northeast of Lebanon's capital Beirut on April 20, 2016 Anwar Amro (AFP) Will US secrecy laws boost the death penalty? America stands alone among Western nations for its use of the death penalty, but the number of prisoners it executes has slowed to a trickle in recent years -- partly due to a lack of drugs. Death sentences carried out by lethal injection have fallen dramatically since a European export ban stopped pharmaceutical companies that produce the drugs from sending them to US prisons. Now some states facing shortages of such substances believe they have found a solution: guaranteeing anonymity to pharmaceutical companies that manufacture them. Already slowing for several years, the number of US executions dropped to 28 in 2015, partly due to flagging public support for capital punishment Scott Eisen (Getty Images/AFP/File) But experts say that strategy comes with risks. Already slowing for several years, the number of US executions dropped to 28 in 2015, the lowest since 1991. The drug shortage is one reason for that -- alongside falling crime rates, flagging public support for capital punishment, and its high cost. Last week, Virginia became the latest state to look to secrecy as a way of reviving the pace of executions after Governor Terry McAuliffe suggested amending legislation currently under debate. He recommended officials be allowed to obtain lethal drugs for executions on an emergency basis, keeping the identities of companies providing the drugs secret. Arkansas, Missouri and Ohio have already adopted similar measures with mixed initial results. McAuliffe, a Democrat, presented his idea as a "reasonable compromise" that would help kill a measure to make the electric chair mandatory when drugs for lethal injections are unavailable -- a proposal backed by the Republicans who control the state legislature. But anti-death penalty activists criticized the debate for offering a flawed choice between two means of meting out death. "The governor's proposal would replace a barbaric practice (the electric chair) with a constitutionally suspect one (a veil of secrecy over executions)," a Washington Post editorial said. - Secret sources - A number of Republican politicians have welcomed McAuliffe's amendment, however, seeing it as an acceptable way out of the current impasse. It has essentially fallen to the states -- which can choose whether or not to institute the death penalty -- to run the obstacle courses now necessary for obtaining the three drugs. The shortages have prompted some of them to quietly turn to companies not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, or to violate US federal law by finding secret sources abroad. Just this week the state of Texas -- which carries out a majority of all US executions -- was blocked by the agency for the second time in a year from importing the unapproved drug sodium thiopental. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice said it was "reviewing the tentative decision by the Food and Drug Administration and exploring its options moving forward regarding the lawful importation of drugs used in the lethal injection process." Prisons generally use a cocktail of three drugs to execute the condemned, including one that knocks them unconscious, another that paralyzes muscles and a third that stops the heart. Some of the lethal-injection executions carried out since 2014 have been widely criticized after they made prisoners die slowly in agony, gasping, groaning and wracked by convulsions. The Constitution's Eighth Amendment bans "cruel and unusual punishment" and defense lawyers have not hesitated to launch last-minute appeals questioning the effectiveness of various drugs, often successfully. Experts say the moves toward secrecy will provide more grounds for challenging scheduled executions, while news media will probably demand to know drug manufacturers' identities, relying on the First Amendment right to freedom of the press. "State execution secrecy laws also raise questions about obstructing enforcement of federal drug laws against illegal compounding activities," says Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Information Center. - Multiplying appeals - Legal action against the murkiness surrounding pharmaceutical companies providing drugs for lethal injections has been quick to start. In Arkansas, where the authorities want to resume putting prisoners to death after a decade's hiatus, a judge in October halted the executions of eight death-row inmates who demanded to know what products would be injected into them. Last week, the state's Supreme Court said it would take up the case. In Ohio and Missouri, death row also appears to lead to courtrooms more frequently than execution chambers. The future for secrecy laws is far from clear. "It is hard to predict how the different state courts will rule," says Dale Baich, a lawyer who specializes in the death penalty. "Some have ordered the information to be released and others have upheld secrecy." Since secrecy statutes are state laws, the Supreme Court is unlikely to weigh in, he adds, meaning each state will continue grappling with a punishment that's increasingly coming under fire. US executions and methods since 1977 Virginia became the latest state to look to secrecy as a way of reviving the pace of executions after Governor Terry McAuliffe suggested amending legislation currently under debate Yamil Lage (AFP/File) A fight over prayer at an ancient wall tests Israeli politics Tourists and worshippers streaming toward the ancient Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City encounter a rigid directive: men to the left, women to the right and no mixing allowed. There has long been a push to change it, and the rule rooted in a strict interpretation of Jewish law is now at the heart of a political battle testing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government. "For Israelis, this is like the tip of the trunk of the elephant," said Batya Kallus, a 59-year-old activist with the Women of the Wall group, which has long fought for equal prayer rights at the historic site. Ultra-Orthodox Jewsih men (L) and women (R) pray in two different sections at the Western Wall, the most holy site where Jews can pray, in Jerusalem's Old City Thomas Coex (AFP/File) "It's symbolic. It speaks about exclusion in some ways where other forms of exclusion are less visible and obvious," she said on a recent day at the plaza leading to the wall, where rabbis bow in reverence and visitors stuff bits of paper with prayers on them between its stone blocks. The controversy has highlighted a sensitive debate among Israelis over the often blurry line between state and religion in a country founded as the nation of the Jewish people. The Western Wall, in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, is the holiest site in which Jews are currently permitted to pray, giving the rules surrounding it heavy symbolic importance. On the surface, the issue is simple -- and it had seemingly been resolved in January. Activists and reformers want to create a space where women and men are allowed to pray together at the wall, considered among the last remnants of the second Jewish temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. It is contentious because the ultra-Orthodox Jewish establishment, which wields legal power over a range of issues in Israel and has often played a kingmaker role in its politics, views such change as sacrilegious. Under its reading of Jewish law, mixed prayer is not allowed. Women are also not permitted to lead prayers, though Kallus's group regularly does so at the women's section of the wall to the anger of ultra-Orthodox rabbis. - 'Will not compromise' - After years of political and legal disputes, not to mention harassment of women seen as breaking tradition at the wall, a compromise was at last reached in January. The agreement, approved by Israel's cabinet and labelled historic, laid out a plan to create an egalitarian prayer space away from the men's and women's sections controlled by the ultra-Orthodox. It was said to have been the result of careful negotiations begun in 2013 involving the government, Women of the Wall and the Western Wall rabbi, among others. But as word spread that the ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties that form part of Netanyahu's coalition had not prevented the deal, pressure built. Members of the ultra-Orthodox community, which amounts to between seven and 10 percent of Israel's population, expressed outrage. Demanding the deal and other related issues be scrapped, ultra-Orthodox politicians have signalled they could pull out of Netanyahu's coalition, which holds only a one-seat majority in parliament. "There is a status quo that remained over the years and we wish to preserve it," Health Minister Yaakov Litzman, of the United Torah Judaism alliance of ultra-Orthodox parties, said by email. "We will not compromise." That is partly because the issue encompasses much more than prayer at the site. The ultra-Orthodox are opposed to granting religious authority to Reform and Conservative Jews, whose numbers are limited in Israel but who are numerous in the United States. Those more liberal streams of Judaism have pushed for an easing of restrictions on matters including conversions, marriage and divorce, which are under ultra-Orthodox control in Israel. The Conservative and Reform movements joined Women of the Wall in its campaign to create the egalitarian prayer space. "It gives them a formal position in the most holy place for the Jewish people, and that makes many (ultra-Orthodox) leaders outside politics, those that were not involved in striking the compromise, object to it," said Shuki Friedman, head of the Centre for Religion, Nation and State at the Israel Democracy Institute. - Back to the negotiating table? - Efforts are now underway to reach yet another compromise. Netanyahu in late March gave the head of his office, David Sharan, 60 days to come up with possible solutions. Friedman said that, despite their firmness in public, the ultra-Orthodox parties have an interest in finding an agreement to avoid another court battle, with previous decisions having gone against them. They would also not likely relinquish the power they wield and the benefits they receive under one of the most right-wing governments in Israel's history by causing it to collapse, he said. As for Women of the Wall, they say they are not willing to renegotiate an agreement reached in good faith. They are planning another challenge to ultra-Orthodox control on April 24 with a first-ever "women's priestly blessing" at the wall -- a tradition always overseen by men. "The Western Wall is a deeply symbolic place for Israelis and for Jews," Kallus said. "And it's a place which has utterly excluded women from any kind of active engagement with Judaism." A member of the liberal Jewish religious group Women of the Wall wears phylacteries and "Tallit", a traditional Jewish prayer shawl for men, as she dances with a Tora scroll at the Western Wall in Jerusalems Old City Gali Tibbon (AFP) Ultra Orthodox Jewish men protest against members of the liberal Jewish religious group Women of the Wall at the Western Wall in Jerusalem Gali Tibbon (AFP/File) An Israeli police woman stands guard near members of the liberal Jewish religious group Women of the Wall wearing traditional Jewish prayer apparel for men, as they pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem Gali Tibbon (AFP/File) Despite tensions, Obama says US and Gulf united against IS President Barack Obama said Thursday the United States is united with Gulf Arab nations in fighting the Islamic State group and sought to reassure them about US overtures to regional rival Iran. In Riyadh for talks hosted by Iran's arch-foe Saudi Arabia, Obama said Washington still had "serious concerns" about Tehran, but insisted no country had an interest in conflict with the Shiite power. Obama, on likely his final presidential visit to America's historic Gulf allies, was in Riyadh seeking to reduce tensions with the Sunni Arab states. US President Barack Obama (R) speaks with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan (L), Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, during the US-Gulf Cooperation Council Summit in Riyadh, on April 21, 2016 Jim Watson (AFP) With the IS jihadists suffering a series of recent setbacks in Syria and Iraq, Washington is seeking more help from the oil-rich Gulf monarchies to keep up the pressure. Speaking at the close of the summit of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, Obama played down any divisions and vowed continued cooperation in the battle against the extremists. "We remain united in our fight to destroy (IS)," he said, adding the US "will continue to increase our security cooperation with our GCC partners". Saudi King Salman also spoke positively, stressing the GCC's commitment to developing ties with the US "in order to serve common interests and security and peace". - 'Destabilising activities' - Seated beside Salman inside a Riyadh royal palace, Obama said concerns remained about Iran's "destabilising activities" despite its landmark nuclear agreement with world powers and the lifting of sanctions. "Even with the nuclear deal we recognise collectively that we continue to have serious concerns about Iranian behaviour," Obama said. He warned, however, of the risk of confrontation with Tehran. "None of our nations have an interest in conflict with Iran," Obama said. Iran's emergence from international isolation following the nuclear deal has worried the Gulf monarchies, which fear Tehran will be emboldened to seek a still bigger regional role. Gulf Arab states and Iran back opposing sides in a range of Middle East conflicts, including in Syria and Yemen. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states belong to the US-led coalition that has been carrying out air strikes against IS in Syria and Iraq since mid-2014. But US officials have urged them do to more, especially to support Baghdad, which is battling political chaos and an economic crisis as well as the extremists. Ben Rhodes, a close adviser to Obama, said there were "political steps that can be taken," as Iraq would need assistance to hold on to and rebuild areas reclaimed from IS. Obama said a cessation of hostilities in Syria is "obviously under tremendous strain" as fighting has intensified in some areas despite efforts to hold peace talks in Geneva. Washington hopes that in both Syria and Yemen -- where a Saudi-led coalition launched air strikes against Iran-backed rebels in March last year -- an end to broader fighting can lead to a greater focus on the battle against IS and other jihadists. UN-backed peace negotiations between Yemen's warring sides started in Kuwait on Thursday, and Obama "urged all parties" to abide by a ceasefire that began on April 11. Jihadists -- including the powerful local branch of Al-Qaeda -- have exploited the Yemen conflict to strengthen their presence in the country's south. Both Defence Secretary Ashton Carter and US Secretary of State John Kerry joined Obama in Riyadh, holding meetings with top officials. - Strains 'overblown' - The diplomatic offensive followed months of rising tensions between the United States and the Gulf monarchies, which have for decades enjoyed strong security ties. Prince Turki al-Faisal, the kingdom's former intelligence chief, told CNN that Obama's conduct and declarations has made Saudi Arabia realise the relationship has changed. "My personal view is that America has changed," he said. The senior royal said the kingdom would have to "recalibrate" things such as "How far we can go with our dependence on America? How much can we rely on steadfastness from American leadership?" In highly unusual moves, Saudi state news channel Al-Ekhbaria did not broadcast either the start or the summit meeting or Obama's airport arrival on Wednesday. At a news conference after the summit, Obama said talk of strains "was always overblown", saying there were "tactical" differences on how to deal with Iran. Obama also told the summit that Washington and Gulf states would work together to lessen the impact of the dramatic fall in oil prices since early 2014. The United States and GCC "will launch a new high-level economic dialogue with a focus on adjusting to lower oil prices, increasing our economic ties and supporting GCC reforms", Obama said. Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, and its petroleum-rich neighbours have been forced to cut subsidies and adopt other measures to deal with deficits caused by plunging oil prices, which make up the bulk of their revenues. Islamic States group in Syria and Iraq Jean Michel CORNU, Jonathan JACOBSEN (AFP) US President Barack Obama (C) speaks with King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud of Saudi Arabia (R) at Erga Palace in Riyadh Jim Watson (AFP) In a bid to accelerate gains against the jihadists, US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter said the US will send more troops and Apache attack helicopters to Iraq Senior Master Sgt. Adrian Cadiz (US DoD/AFP) Sudan's top girl band eyes world tour 45 years on Stepping onto a Khartoum stage and launching into their first song, The Nightingales -- Sudan's best-loved girl band -- still raise whoops and cheers from adoring fans, 45 years after their debut. Sisters Amal, Hadia and Hayat Talsam were known in their 1970s heyday as the "Sudanese Supremes" for their stylish bobs, matching dresses and their soulful ballads, changing the image of female artists in Sudan forever. Their outfits may have changed a little -- at the January concert in Khartoum, the sisters appeared in long robes and loose headscarves -- but the audience's adoration has only increased, with fans dancing and singing in front of the stage. The Nightingales -- Sudan's best-loved girl band -- perform at a concert in Khartoum Ashraf Shazly (AFP) Their vintage brand of Sudanese pop, songs of longing and youth blending elements of folk music with their driving vocals aim to show the world another side to Sudan. "We want to travel the globe and offer our art to all the peoples of the world," Amal said after the concert at the family home, sitting beside her sisters. "We could show a beautiful side of Sudan to the outside world" said Hadia, the oldest of the sisters, grinning. Although they haven't got round to planning their tour, they do have some prior experience. - 'Vibrant period' - The Nightingales were formed in 1971, when a family friend came to their home in Omdurman, Khartoum's twin city, to ask their father if he could pick three of his seven daughters to perform a song he wrote. The trio performed so well that they made the arrangement permanent and they were picked to tour Sudan with president Jafer al-Nimeiri, a socialist-leaning army officer who seized power in 1969. "It was a very, very vibrant period for culture and art," said Hayat, the quietest of the sisters. Amal said she was 15, Hadia 17 and Hayat just 13 years old when they started touring, building a region-wide fan base. But in socially conservative 1970s Sudan, not everyone was pleased at the three young women travelling unaccompanied and singing and dancing in front of crowds. But the sisters won acceptance by force of character and with support from their family. "The Nightingales changed the way people looked at female artists in Sudan," said Hadia. The group did nothing to change their looks and even appeared on the state broadcaster performing their songs. Other female artists had preceded them but their music had been more traditional. Neighbours, friends and even some relatives criticised their father for their on-stage and television appearances as their fame grew. "Our father wasn't interested in any of that and he used to encourage us a lot," Hadia said proudly. "We were able to stand firm and fight back against people who were against us and our progress and our presence on stage proved that there was nothing wrong with it," Amal added. By the 1980s, the group had cemented their reputation as one of the country's best loved groups ... but Sudan itself was changing. Nimeiri grew increasingly paranoid and repressive toward the end of his 16-year reign, declaring sharia Islamic law in 1983 and igniting another civil war with southern rebels. - 'Better than the Supremes' - The Nightingales kept playing but in 1988, with all three married and other commitments, they played their final concert in Khartoum. Amal and Hadia left for the Gulf with their families, before moving to the US, while Hayat stayed in Khartoum. The next year, now-president Omar al-Bashir seized power in an Islamist-backed coup and his military authorities imposed a curfew that lasted for years, putting limits on musical performances. But in 2007, Hadia and Amal performed in New York's Central Park at a festival of Sudanese music and people urged them to return to Sudan for a full reunion. Apprehensively, Hadia and Amal returned the next year and organised a concert with Hayat at the officers' club in central Khartoum, unsure whether their fans would remember them after 20 years. When they arrived, the streets were jammed with expectant fans. "The only thing that changed was they liked it much more and it was a huge success," Amal said. Now, the Nightingales tour Sudan when they are all in the country together, drawing hundreds of spectators of all ages to their shows across Khartoum. They have lost none of their glamour, singing in matching outfits, with performances punctuated by mid-set costume changes -- and a quick cigarette break. Amal, Hadia and Hayat are confident they can win more fans abroad and are keen to arrange their tour. And would the comparison with the Supremes help draw foreign crowds in? "Honey, we're better than the Supremes," Amal shot back in American-accented English. "We came to their country, but they never came here". Sisters Amal, Hadia and Hayat Talsam were known in their 1970s heydey as the "Sudanese Supremes" Ashraf Shazly (AFP) The Nightingales' vintage brand of Sudanese pop, songs of longing and youth blending elements of folk music aim to show the world another side to Sudan Ashraf Shazly (AFP) Fans watch The Nightingales perform at a concert in Khartoum Ashraf Shazly (AFP) Hunger and fear of Boko Haram stalk Lake Chad refugees Sitting on a mat in the shade cradling a six-month baby, Falmata Marara touches her mouth, her stomach, and then her mouth and stomach again. The message couldn't be clearer, she's hungry. A gold ring in her nose and wearing a vibrantly coloured scarf and dress, Marara, a member of the Bodoma people, five months ago fled her Lake Chad island home after an attack by Nigeria's feared Boko Haram Islamists. Fougo, her home island, is one of 85 scattered across Lake Chad that have been emptied of people since Boko Haram's six-year campaign of terror began, said UN humanitarian affairs officer Florent Mehaule. Some 110,000 people displaced by the violence live in makeshift camps around Lake Chad straddling Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria Philippe Desmazes (AFP/File) Some 110,000 people displaced by the violence live in makeshift camps around the immense waterway straddling Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria that supplies millions of people with water, Mehaule added. But if safe for now, all live in fear of fresh Boko Haram terror -- and most suffer from hunger. "I've run out of sorghum" or cereal, mumbles mother of six Marara, whose baby is feverish after a bout of diarrhoea and who had walked that day to Baga Sola from her reed hut refuge to a mobile clinic run by Doctors Without Borders (MSF). - Body searches - Set up not far from the invisible underwater border separating the four Lake Chad nations, the clinic deals daily with a stream of people with malaria or respiratory problems, but also reports a spike in cases linked to malnutrition. Fear of Boko Haram runs high in Baga Sola where a triple suicide attack in October killed 41 people. MSF is taking no risks. Because the extremists are increasingly resorting to female suicide bombers, women seeking medical help first are body-searched in an area well away from the mobile MSF centre. They're then submitted five by five to a second search before being allowed into the waiting room -- a carpet thrown on the ground. Some 10 kilometres (six miles) away across parched and sandy terrain, MSF runs a tiny mental health centre to help those displaced overcome the trauma of rape, violence and flight. - 'Acute paranoia' - "Some people become anorexic and no longer eat, others just close up on themselves," said Charlot Serferbe Dabo, a clinical psychologist. "Depression can be immediate or surface months later," he added. One patient suffered from acute paranoia, convinced he was being hunted night and day by Boko Haram fighters. The doctor said he believed he was also taking a powerful painkiller called Tramadol which is widely sold to addicts on the black market. Nigeria-based Boko Haram has left thousands dead and 2.6 million homeless in that country alone since 2009. Moving back and forth across Lake Chad it has brought its war to set up an Islamic state across the borders as well. Now the four border nations as well as neighbouring Benin have banded together to rout the Islamists and cut supply lines. Among the refugees around the lake are fishermen deprived of food and income after the authorities banned fishing in a bid to flush out and starve the Islamists. - 'Throats slit' - "Many have returned home to their islands, despite the threat of Boko Haram attacks," said an MSF doctor. "They say they'd rather risk being killed on a full stomach than dying of hunger bit by bit. But recently, three of them had their throats slit on their return." Around Baga Sola, local civilian vigilante groups keep a watchful eye on comings and goings, specially on market day. Crowded mosques and markets are favoured targets for Boko Haram, though nowadays, with traffic stopped across Lake Chad, there's little for sale at the stalls. There are no fresh fish, no Chad beef in Nigeria and no dried Nigerian fish in Chad. "The security situation is a little better," said Ocha's Mehaule. "But people are still not going home which indicates there is still a risk." Chadian soldiers parade in the capital N'djamena during their homecoming from neighbouring Niger where they were fighting against Boko Haram Brahim Adji (AFP/File) Fear of Boko Haram runs high in Baga Sola where a triple suicide attack in October killed 41 people Philippe Desmazes (AFP/File) Australia admits government hack attacks, boosts cyber security Australia unveiled a multi-million-dollar cyber scheme to combat hacking on Thursday, as Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull acknowledged an attack on the country's weather bureau but stopped short of blaming it on China. The Australian leader added that it was safe to assume "efforts are made by foreign actors, both governmental and non-governmental, to penetrate" local agencies. "I can confirm reports that the Bureau of Meteorology suffered a significant cyber intrusion which was first discovered early last year, and the department of parliamentary services suffered a similar intrusion in recent years," Turnbull said in Sydney as he announced Aus$230 million (US$180 million) in new government funding. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has acknowledged cyber attacks on Australia's government agencies but stopped short of blaming it on China Atsushi Tomura (POOL/AFP/File) "I don't have anything further to add than what I've said today," he replied when asked at a press conference if the weather bureau attack came from China. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation in December cited an unnamed official blaming Beijing for the major cyber attack, where hackers got inside computer systems at the bureau, which owns one of the nation's largest supercomputers and has links to the defence department. Turnbull said the new funding, which comes on top of an allocation of Aus$400 million over the next decade to strengthen cyber security, would include support for regular meetings between government, businesses and researchers on tackling emerging concerns. The additional money would also help to boost international efforts, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region, to take down cyber criminals. "The Australian Crime Commission estimates the annual cost of cyber crime to Australia is over Aus$1 billion in direct costs," the prime minister added. "But some estimates put the real costs to be as high as one percent of GDP (gross domestic product) a year, or about Aus$17 billion." Turnbull said the government was focusing not just on defensive measures but also offence, stressing that the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) -- like allies the United States and Britain -- had "very considerable capabilities", without elaborating. Regional superpower China, Australia's largest trading partner, has been accused of organised hacking against the US government and private firms, as well as other countries. In 2013, Chinese hackers were accused of stealing the top-secret blueprints of Australia's new intelligence agency headquarters. China exported military drones to 10 nations: report China has exported military drones to more than 10 countries in deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and plans to sell unmanned craft capable of launching laser-guided bombs, state-run media said Thursday. Chinese drones "have bigger payloads, which means they can carry more weapons" than their competitors, Shi Wen, chief drone designer at the China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics, told the China Daily newspaper. Chinese companies dominate the global market for commercial drones, but the rare interview is a sign Beijing is seeking to promote itself as a manufacturer of unmanned military surveillance and killing machines. Visitors walk around a museum in Beijing displaying various types of military hardware used by China's PLA Peter Parks (AFP/File) Shi did not specify the countries involved, the numbers sold or the total value of the deals, but said the academy's most valuable sale was worth "hundreds of millions of US dollars". The drones are named Cai Hong, or Rainbow, with the bestselling CH-3 capable of firing missiles 10 kilometres (six miles) from a target and staying in the air for more than 10 hours, the report said. "One of our clients in Africa uses each of its CH-3s about 100 hours on average each month," Shi told the newspaper, which is published by the government. The academy is seeking an export licence for a new CH-5 model capable of launching air-to-surface missiles and laser-guided bombs, Shi added. The drone made its first test flight in August, the newspaper said. China has also exported smaller unarmed search aircraft, it said, citing a report last year that the academy would export about 200 drones. China has leapfrogged both France and Germany to become the third-largest source of major arms globally, with its exports up 88 percent in the 2011-15 period compared to the previous five years, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Philippine president candidate ready to cut US ties over rape row Trash-talking Philippine presidential favourite Rodrigo Duterte has warned he is prepared to cut diplomatic ties with the United States and Australia after their envoys criticised his comments about the jailhouse rape of a missionary. Duterte also told the ambassadors to "shut their mouths", as controversy raged over his comments last week in which he said he wanted to have been the first to rape the Australian woman who was brutalised and murdered in a 1989 prison riot. "If I become president, go ahead and sever (diplomatic ties)," Duterte, 71, said on the campaign trail on Wednesday night, referring to the relationships with the United States and Australia, two of the Philippines' closest allies. Philippine presidential favourite Rodrigo Duterte warns he is prepared to cut diplomatic ties with US and Australia after their ambassadors criticised his joke about the jailhouse rape of a missionary Duterte, who while campaigning has called the pope a "son of a bitch" and promised to kill tens of thousands of criminals, recounted at a recent rally the attack on the Christian missionary as part of his tough-on-crime pitch to voters. "I was mad she (the missionary) was raped but she was so beautiful. I thought, the mayor should have been first," she told the crowd. Duterte was at the time mayor of Davao, a major city in the southern Philippines where he is accused of running vigilante death squads that have allegedly killed more than 1,000 people. The front runner has at times on the campaign boasted about running the death squads, claiming they killed 1,700 people, but also denied any links to them. Duterte has similarly offered varying responses to the rape comments, with his media team releasing a statement in which he apologised. But on the campaign trail, he has repeatedly told reporters he would not say sorry. Australian ambassador Amanda Gorely criticised his remarks this week, saying on Twitter: "Rape and murder should never be joked about or trivialised. Violence against women and girls is unacceptable anytime, anywhere". US ambassador Philip Goldberg later agreed with her. "Statements by anyone, anywhere that either degrade women or trivialise issues so serious as rape or murder are not ones that we condone," Goldberg said in an interview with CNN Philippines television. - 'Shut your mouths' - Duterte has repeatedly expressed anger at what he regards as their intervention in domestic politics. "It would do well with the American ambassador and the Australian ambassador to shut their mouths," Duterte told reporters on Wednesday. A US embassy spokesman told AFP Thursday there was no immediate response to Duterte's remarks about the ambassadors. An Australian embassy spokeswoman said there would be no comment. Incumbent President Benigno Aquino on Thursday also criticised Duterte's remarks, while warning the policies of certain candidates could reverse the high rates of economic growth the country had seen during his six-year rule. "What do we gain by this? America is a very big trading partner, Australia has been helping us... so what is the value (of such actions?) If there is no value, why will you do it?" he told reporters. "I do have to thank them (certain candidates) for showing how different their styles are from ours," Aquino said. "These (economic growth) results were a direct outcome of our governance. If governance (were reversed) surely it is not reasonable to expect that progress would continue," Aquino added. Meanwhile in another warning to the country's traditional allies, Duterte's camp signalled it was prepared to start direct talks with China over a long-running territorial dispute. Aquino has been improving defence ties with the United States and Australia to bolster the Philippines in its dispute with China over the South China Sea. China claims most of the sea, even up to the coasts of its neighbours like the Philippines which has accused China of "bullying" other claimants. However Duterte spokesman Peter Lavina told ABS-CBN television on Thursday that the presidential hopeful would be prepared to talk directly with China if elected. Aquino has refused to hold direct talks with China over the dispute, preferring multilateral discussions and filing a legal challenge with a United Nations-backed tribunal. Factfile on the Philippines, which will hold general elections on May 9 Gal Roma (AFP) Davao City Mayor and presidential candidate Rodrigo Duterte is accused of running vigilante death squads that have allegedly killed more than 1,000 people Noel Celis (AFP/File) Malnutrition still major health concern in N. Korea: UN Malnutrition remains a significant health issue in North Korea, with a drought last year slashing crop output and undermining the push for agricultural self-sufficiency, according to a new UN report. More than three quarters of North Korea's population of 25 million remain "food insecure and highly vulnerable to shocks," said the report compiled by UN agencies in Pyongyang and published Wednesday. "An estimated 18 million people are in need of some form of humanitarian assistance," it added. An estimated 18 million people are in need of some form of humanitarian assistance and malnutrition rates continue to be a public health concern in North Korea, says a new UN report Malnutrition rates continue to be a public health concern, with significant gaps remaining in nutritional intake, particularly affecting women and children under-five. Undernutrition is a major underlying cause of "maternal and child mortality and morbidity," said the report. According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO)'s 2015 State of Food Insecurity report, the proportion of people undernourished in the total population was 41.6 per cent in 2014-16, up from 35.5 per cent in 2005-07. By the end of 2015, the impact of two consecutive drought seasons had "severely affected" crop performance, with production down 11 percent from the previous year. "The country continues to suffer from food insecurity as well as limited access to health and water, sanitation and hygiene, resulting in chronic malnutrition and poor health outcomes," the report said. Production is constrained by insufficient arable land, land degradation due to intensive cultivation, as well as a scarcity of quality seeds, fertilisers and pesticides, the report said. North Korea has suffered regular food shortages and hundreds of thousands are believed to have died during a famine in the mid-to-late 1990s. International food aid, especially from South Korea and the United States, has been drastically cut amid tensions over Pyongyang's nuclear and ballistic missile programmes. "The protracted humanitarian situation (in North Korea) is largely forgotten on the global agenda," the UN report said. Fuel-cheating scandal wipes $2.5 bn off Mitsubishi stock Mitsubishi Motors shares nosedived again Thursday as panic selling wiped about $2.5 billion off the automaker's market value in response to its shock admission that it cheated on fuel-efficiency tests. The embarrassing revelation is the latest in a string of recent scandals to hit Japanese firms, while German giant Volkswagen struggles to restore its badly dented reputation after a massive emissions scandal. Japanese transport ministry officials raided a company research and development centre Thursday following the admission, as the government slammed the maker of Outlander sport utility vehicles and Lancer cars. Japanese automaker Mitsubishi has admitted it manipulated pollution data in more than 600,000 vehicles Toshifumi Kitamura (AFP) The embattled stock plunged to 583 yen ($5.31) in Tokyo, down 20 percent, after diving 15 percent on Wednesday when news of the fuel-cheating first broke. The scandal has also raised questions about Mitsubishi's future as it faces the prospect of huge lawsuits and fines. "This has critically damaged consumers' trust and it won't be tolerated," top government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said Thursday. "It's an extremely serious issue." Mitsubishi admitted Wednesday that unnamed employees rigged tests to make some of its cars seem more fuel-efficient than they were in reality. The company said it would halt production and sales of the affected vehicle models -- mini-cars sold in Japan including some made for rival Nissan -- and warned that the number of cars involved in the scandal would likely rise. Mitsubishi's top executive conceded Wednesday that the crisis would take a bite out of its bottom line, as the firm widens an internal probe to cars sold overseas. "This is not a simple problem and we need time" to assess the impact, president Tetsuro Aikawa told a news briefing. "But I'm sure there will be an impact. The damage will be big." - Company loyalty - The collapse of Mitsubishi's stock on Wednesday was its biggest one-day plunge since 2004. At that time, Mitsubishi was struggling to launch a turnaround as it teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, hit by a lack of cash and a series of huge recalls linked to deadly defects. Bailouts by the Mitsubishi group companies saved the automaker, which had covered up defects linked to flawed axles that could lead to wheels coming off the car. Regulators must now deal harshly with Mitsubishi to ensure it overhauls a corporate culture that prizes unwavering loyalty to the company even more than many Japanese firms, likely a key driver in the latest cover-up, one expert said. "Just as Volkswagen got slapped with very severe sanctions...Mitsubishi also needs to face tough measures so it's guaranteed that the company will change," said Hideyuki Kobayashi, a business professor at Hitotsubashi University, who authored a book about the company's struggles a decade ago. The falsified figures were discovered after Nissan found inconsistencies in fuel-economy data. Japan's number-two automaker said it would halt sales of the affected mini-cars, but added that it had no immediate plans to change its business relationship with Mitsubishi. Mini-cars, or kei-cars, are small vehicles with 660cc gasoline engines that are hugely popular in the Japanese market, although they have found little success abroad. Mitsubishi sold more than a million vehicles at home and overseas in its latest fiscal year. The incident is another black eye for Japan Inc. after auto parts giant Takata plunged into crisis after an exploding air bag defect was linked to at least 11 deaths. Vast conglomerate Toshiba is trying to recover from a huge accounting scandal. Volkswagen, meanwhile, has been hammered by the global scandal that erupted when it emerged that it had installed emissions-cheating software in 11 million diesel engines worldwide. South Korean automakers Hyundai and Kia in 2014 agreed to pay $100 million to settle a US government investigation into exaggerated fuel efficiency on 2012 and 2013 car models sold in the United States. Mitsubishi Motors president and COO Tetsuo Aikawa (front R) bow at a press conference in Tokyo on April 20, 2016 The 2016 Mitsubishi Outlander is unveiled at the New York International Auto Show on April 2, 2015 Andrew Burton (Getty/AFP/File) Yemen rebels arrive in Kuwait for delayed peace talks UN-brokered peace talks on Yemen's war were set to finally set to kick off Thursday as a rebel delegation arrived at the crucial negotiations in Kuwait after three days of delay. The United Nations has been pushing the talks that it hopes will end a conflict that has been exploited by jihadists and sent tensions between Iran and its Gulf rivals soaring. More than 6,400 people have been killed and almost 2.8 million displaced since a Saudi-led coalition began operations in March 2015 against Iran-backed rebels who have seized swathes of territory, including the capital Sanaa. Supporters of the southern separatist movement rally in Yemen's second city of Aden on April 18, 2016 Saleh Al-Obeidi (AFP) The talks were originally supposed to start on Monday but were delayed after the rebels failed to show up in protest against what they described as Saudi violations of a ceasefire, in effect since April 11. "They (the rebel delegation) have arrived in Kuwait just a few minutes ago," Charbel Raji, spokesman for UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, told AFP. Insurgents have sent representatives from the Shiite Huthi group and members of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh's General People's Congress party. A member of the Yemeni government delegation confirmed that the talks were to open at 1600 GMT. President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi had sent a message to UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed demanding the "negotiations open on Thursday evening" and rejecting "rebel conditions to modify the agenda agreed on," according to a member of the government delegation. Hadi's people arrived in Kuwait at the weekend and threatened to pull out if meetings did not begin on Thursday. Mahdi al-Mashat, a representative of rebel leader Abdulmalik al-Huthi, said Wednesday that the rebels had been assured that the agenda for the talks would be "clear and tackle issues that could help achieve peaceful solutions". Writing on Facebook, Mashat warned however that "we will have the right to suspend our participation" if the assurances are not met. Diplomats say that rebels are demanding an end of the Arab coalition operations and a naval blockade on Yemen that began more than 13 months ago. They also want UN sanctions against some of their leaders, including Saleh, to be lifted. Saudi ally Turkey said on Thursday that it has frozen assets belonging to Saleh and his son, in line with the sanctions. Saleh amassed billions of dollars through corruption and stashed assets in at least 20 countries during his 33 years in power, according to a UN report released last year. - Talks 'allow Qaeda focus' - US President Barack Obama is visiting Saudi Arabia, where he is expected to discuss the wars in Yemen and Syria with Gulf leaders. Ben Rhodes, one of Obama's closest foreign policy advisers, urged all Yemeni counterparts on Thursday to participate "constructively" in the Kuwait talks. A political resolution to the country's conflict would "allow for a focus on (Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) AQAP in Yemen," he said. Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group have gained ground in the government-held south, carrying out attacks against officials. Yemen's rebels seized control of Sanaa in 2014 before expanding, forcing Hadi's government to declare main southern city Aden as the temporary capital. And while the loyalists managed since July to reclaim large areas, they have been unable to dislodge the rebels from Sanaa and other key areas. Fighting has continued on several fronts, military sources said, as each side blamed the other for truce breaches. The rebels fired a Katyusha rocket late Wednesday on the loyalist-held city of Marib, east of the capital, according to an AFP journalist there. Pro-government military sources reported heavy fighting in Nahm, northeast of Sanaa, and sporadic clashes elsewhere. The rebels claimed on their sabanews.net website that coalition warplanes carried out two air strikes on Nahm and flew sorties over other areas, including Sanaa. Shiite Huthi supporters rally in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on April 17, 2016 Mohammed Huwais (AFP) A Yemeni family stands outside their house which was damaged in an air-strike by the Saudi-led coalition at a slum in the capital Sanaa, in March 2016 Mohammed Huwais (AFP) Starbucks opens first cafe in sub-Saharan Africa Hundreds of coffee lovers queued early Thursday in an upmarket Johannesburg shopping centre as international chain Starbucks opened its first cafe in sub-Saharan Africa. The US-based global brand plans to open 12 to 15 more stores in South Africa over the next two years, with a long term plan of up to 150 outlets. The cafe's first customers formed a long line at Starbucks' doors in the Rosebank district of the city before the opening at 7:30 am. People queue during the official opening of South Africa's first Starbucks store in Johannesburg on April 21, 2016 Gianluigi Guercia (AFP) "We've been queueing for twelve hours, since 7:30 last night and we wanted to be the first customers at Starbucks, and we were," said 19-year-old student Mohamed Mala. Another customer, Norma Cooper, described the arrival of the cafe as "long overdue". "Starbucks has been one of the things missing from the South African scene," said the bank employee. A second branch will open later this month at another shopping mall in the financial capital Johannesburg, but there are no plans to expand to other countries in the region. Starbucks, which operates more than 22,000 cafes worldwide, has a presence in only two other African countries -- Egypt and Morocco. A caffe latte in the stylishly-designed shop costs between 27 and 33 rand ($1.89- $2.30). In terms of wages, a junior bank teller's hourly rate in South Africa starts from 19.28 rand while an administrative clerk starts from 17.94 rand, according to Payscale, a private salary survey firm. Starbucks will compete with a host of well-established locally-owned brands and independent coffee shops. "The timing is right. We are going to offer coffee lovers a special experience," said Carlo Gonzaga, chief executive of Taste Holdings, the local partner of Starbucks Coffee Company. Gonzaga told journalists the prices were set for the South African market and not linked to the exchange rate, which has seen the South African currency fall against the US dollar. "We also carefully considered South African customer tastes when we developed our menu, and customers can expect local products like Rooibos tea," he said. Some of the coffee beans are sourced from nine African countries, including Kenya and Burundi. South Africa has the most developed economy on the continent, and several American food chains have opened doors here recently, including Burger King and Krispy Kreme Doughnut. Starbucks opens its first branch in Sub-Saharan Africa, in Johannesburg on April 21, 2016 Gianluigi Guercia (AFP) Hundreds of people queue for the official opening of South Africa's first Starbucks store, in Johannesburg on April 21, 2016 Gianluigi Guercia (AFP) Israel says Hamas suicide bomber attacked Jerusalem bus Israeli police said Thursday a Hamas militant carried out a "suicide" bus bombing in Jerusalem that wounded 20 people, in the first such attack since a wave of violence erupted in October. The attacker, a 19-year-old from Beit Jala near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, died from his wounds on Wednesday, two days after the bombing. Hamas had previously said he was a member of the militant group and that he had carried out the attack, while his mother told AFP he had idolised an assassinated bombmaker from the Islamist movement. Israeli forensics search at the scene of an explosion on a bus in Jerusalem on April 18, 2016 Thomas Coex (AFP/File) Israeli police lifted a gag order on elements of the case on Thursday, confirming Abdel Hamid Abu Sorur as the assailant and specifically calling it a "suicide attack". The police also said they made several arrests of Hamas militants suspected of helping to plan the bombing. Monday's bus attack is the first suicide bombing in a nearly seven-month wave of violence. Most of the attacks have been stabbings, while car-rammings and shootings have also occurred. While Hamas praised his actions and hailed him as a martyr, the Islamist movement that runs the Gaza Strip did not formally claim the attack. It said his death "will continue to fuel the uprising". Hamas officials in Gaza declined to comment on Thursday, only welcoming the attack. His mother, Azhar Abu Sorur, told AFP in an interview that she did not know he was a Hamas member. On Monday before the bombing, she said "he was normal and we ate lunch together and he was laughing. Then he told me he was going out to buy something and will come back." "Everyone was with the resistance and supporting the resistance," she said. "But for him, his role model was Yahya Ayash." She said her son used an image of Ayash, the Hamas bombmaker known as "The Engineer" who was assassinated by Israeli agents in 1996, as his social media profile picture. "I would have chosen a different path of resistance than my son's path, but this is what happened and I respect that," she said. "He is free and this is what he wanted." - Concerns ahead of Passover - The family said Israeli authorities had ordered his father to take a DNA test. The Hamas-affiliated Palestinian Information Center website cited the father as saying he had been asked to identify his son's badly burned body. The bomb on Monday exploded aboard a bus in a relatively isolated area of Jerusalem, sparking a fire that spread to another empty bus and a car. It occurred with tensions high following the wave of knife, gun or car-ramming attacks that has left 201 Palestinians and 28 Israelis dead since last October. The level of violence had decreased in the weeks before the bombing, though there have been concerns the Jewish Passover holiday beginning Friday evening could lead to a new surge. Israeli authorities say they are increasing security for the eight-day holiday. Bus bombings were common during the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in the early 2000s, but Monday's attack was the first bomb targeting a bus in Jerusalem since 2011, when a British tourist was killed. In Tel Aviv, a bomb exploded on an empty bus in 2013 in what Israeli authorities called a "terrorist" attack. Many analysts say Palestinian frustration with Israeli occupation and settlement building in the West Bank, the complete lack of progress in peace efforts and their own fractured leadership have fed the recent unrest. Israel blames incitement by Palestinian leaders and media as a main cause of the violence. Palestinian youth stand next to a poster depicting Abdel Hamid Abu Sorur (L), who Israeli police said carried out a "suicide" bus bombing in Jerusalem that wounded 20 people Thomas Coex (AFP) Boko Haram gunmen kill 11 in NE Nigeria: vigilantes Suspected Boko Haram gunmen on horseback killed at least 11 people in northeast Nigeria this week, two civilian vigilantes assisting the military told AFP on Thursday. The attack on Zango village, in the Gulani district some 150 kilometres (94 miles) south of the Yobo state capital, Damaturu, happened overnight on Tuesday to Wednesday, said Aisami Mamman. It came two weeks after a similar attack on two nearby villages left at least 20 dead, he added. Boko Haram fighters have conducted a number of attacks on remote villages in Nigeria after arriving on horseback and even bicycles because of a shortage of fuel for vehicles or motorbikes Pius Utomi Ekpei (AFP/File) "They (Boko Haram) came around midnight (2300 GMT Tuesday) and started firing gunshots in the village. This prompted residents to flee into the bush," said Mamman. "They pursued them, shooting at them while others set fire to the whole village. The whole village was burnt. Eleven people were killed and several others were injured, six of them critically. "They were brought here to Damaturu where they are receiving treatment for gunshot wounds." The motive for the attack was not immediately clear but previous strikes have seen Boko Haram steal cattle or foodstuffs. The hit-and-run attack has been a trademark of the Islamic State group affiliate but such incidents have become rarer because of a concerted military counter-offensive in the northeast. Troops have over the last year wrested back territory lost to the militants in 2014, scattering fighters and cutting off their supply lines. Boko Haram fighters have conducted a number of attacks on remote villages after arriving on horseback and even bicycles because of a shortage of fuel for vehicles or motorbikes. Mamman suggested the attackers in Zango came from the Sambisa Forest area of neighbouring Borno, where Boko Haram has long had camps. "Exactly two weeks ago there was a similar attack on two villages nearby. They attacked Gurum and Dokshi villages," he said in an account of both incidents supported by another militia member. "They burnt them completely and killed more than 20 residents." Boko Haram has killed nearly 1,900 people since President Muhammadu Buhari took office in May last year, according to AFP reporting. Vietnam investigates mass fish deaths Vietnam Thursday said it was investigating whether pollution is to blame for a spate of mysterious mass fish deaths along the country's central coast after huge amounts of marine life washed ashore in recent days. Tonnes of fish, including rare species which live far offshore and in the deep, have been discovered on beaches along the country's central coastal provinces of Ha Tinh, Quang Tri, Quang Binh and Hue. "We have never seen anything like it," aquaculture official Nhu Van Can told AFP Thursday. A Vietnamese villager shows dead sea fish he collected on a beach in Thua Thien Hue province on April 21, 2016 The strange situation first came to light when farmed fish in the area began dying in great numbers, he said, with locals later discovering huge numbers of dead fish on beaches. Local fishermen told state-run media that they are burying hundreds of kilograms of fish everyday. "If you sail just three miles offshore, you can see dead fish all over the ocean floor," the state-run Tuoi Tre quoted local fishermen as saying. Signs point to the fish having been poisoned by "unidentified substances," Tran Dinh Du, deputy director of agriculture in Quang Binh province, said, according to the report. "We have asked people not to eat the fish and not use the fish as food for their livestock," Du added. State news outlet Thanh Nien quoted worried locals saying they dared not eat any of the washed up fish, adding in their report that "all signs (are) pointing to an environmental disaster." Central Ha Tinh province is home to a sprawling economic zone which houses numerous industrial plants, including a multi-billion dollar steel plant run by Taiwanese conglomerate Formosa. Hanoi has dispatched teams of environmental experts and officials to investigate the phenomenon, the Ministry of Environment said in a statement posted online. "We must quickly establish whether the fish have died because of environmental pollution," Environment Minister Tran Hong Ha said in the report. Vietnam has a long coastline and much of the country's export income depends on seafood, including farmed shrimp, catfish and wild-caught tuna. Last year, the country earned 6.6 billion dollars from seafood exports. Critics dismiss S. Africa corruption probe clearing arms deal A South African judicial inquiry clearing all government officials of corruption over a multi-billion dollar arms deal was greeted with scorn on Thursday by critics of President Jacob Zuma. "It's a whitewash," leading anti-arms-deal campaigner Terry Crawford-Browne told AFP. "It is very much as expected." The opposition Democratic Alliance party called the commission's report "a massive disappointment because those who were implicated in arms deal corruption have effectively been let off the hook". South African President Jacob Zuma was a central suspect in the corruption scandal Michael Sheehan (AFP/File) The four-year inquiry into the scandal, in which Zuma was a suspect, found that there was no evidence to support widespread allegations of bribery, fraud and corruption, the president said Thursday. Zuma summarised the findings of the commission in a statement in which he said he had received the three-volume report at the end of last year and was now making it public. Critics have long charged that the government-appointed inquiry was toothless and was being used in an attempt to put the issue to rest. Paul Hoffman, a lawyer representing anti-arms-deal activists, likened the inquiry to "a farce". The commission suffered a series of resignations of officials involved, including the departure of one of the three original judges. - Scandal-hit president - "The commission states that the widespread allegations of bribery, corruption and fraud in the arms procurement process... have found no support or corroboration in the evidence," Zuma's statement said. "Any findings pointing to wrongdoing should be given to law enforcement agencies for further action. There are no such findings and the commission does not make any recommendations." The $4.8 billion arms deal saw the government acquire a vast range of military equipment, including fighter jets, helicopters, warships and submarines from countries including Britain, France and Sweden. The commission's report comes as a High Court challenge is under way to reinstate more than 700 charges of corruption against Zuma which were dropped in 2009, shortly before he became president. The charges, which relate to the arms deal signed in 1999 when Zuma was deputy president, were dropped allegedly because of interference in the prosecution case by his political opponents. Zuma was accused of having accepted bribes from international arms manufacturers. Zuma's advisor, Schabir Shaik, was jailed for 15 years on related charges in 2005, with the judge saying there was "overwhelming" evidence of a corrupt relationship between the two. Shaik was released on medical parole in 2009, the year Zuma was elected president. Zuma set up the commission, headed by Judge Willie Seriti, after Crawford-Browne launched a case for an inquiry in the Constitutional Court. The president unveiled its conclusions after months of separate corruption controversies that have weakened his position within the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party. A court ruled last month that Zuma had violated the constitution over spending on his private residence, and he has been beset by allegations that a wealthy family had such influence over him that it could decide ministerial appointments. Former president Thabo Mbeki, who was in power when the arms deal was signed, was among witnesses who testified at the commission. Mbeki defended the decision to spend billions on arms despite dire poverty in a country emerging from the apartheid era. He said the government wanted to reclaim the defence force from the white-minority regime ousted by Nelson Mandela and the ANC in 1994. The commission found that the purchase of the weapons was "necessary". The Minister in the Presidency, Jeff Radebe, denied the commission was a whitewash, saying: "We trust these findings will bring final closure to this long drawn-out process." Crawford-Browne said activists would consider taking the case back to the Constitutional Court. Relief groups launch largest Syria aid delivery yet: Red Cross Relief groups launched their largest aid delivery yet in Syria on Thursday, sending 65 trucks carrying food and medicines to a besieged rebel-held town in the country's centre, the Red Cross said. The Red Crescent and International Committee of the Red Cross will deliver the aid to some 120,000 civilians in and around the Homs province town of Rastan, ICRC spokesman Pawel Krzysiek told AFP. The last time residents received aid from the ICRC was in 2012, the same year rebels seized the town. A convoy of aid from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) waits on the outskirts of the besieged rebel-held Syrian town of Madaya, on January 11, 2016 Louai Beshara (AFP/File) Krzysiek said Thursday's convoy included food parcels, wheat flour and other nutritional items, as well as medicines and equipment to improve water supply in the city. "This is the largest joint humanitarian convoy we have done in Syria so far," he told AFP. Once they reach Rastan, ICRC and Syrian Arab Red Crescent teams will assess the water and waste infrastructure, as well as the nutritional and other needs of residents. Many of the 120,000 people living in and around the town had fled fighting in neighbouring Hama province. UK to take in up to 3,000 refugee children Britain announced plans Thursday to take in up to 3,000 of the most vulnerable children and their families from conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa by 2020. The scheme, drawn up in coordination with the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), is aimed at children deemed at risk of child labour, forced marriage and other forms of abuse or exploitation. It will affect children on their own and those accompanied by relatives or carers, and will see several hundred people resettled in the coming year, the Home Office interior ministry announced. The British government plans to resettle up to 3,000 children from conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa by 2020 Christof Stache (AFP/File) The commitment is in addition to Britain's pledge to resettle 20,000 of the most vulnerable refugees from camps on Syria's borders by 2020. So far, more than a thousand -- half of them children -- have arrived. Britain has committed 2.3 billion (2.9 billion euros/$3.3 billion) to helping refugees in Syria and the region, but has opted out of European Union quotas for taking migrants and dispersing them around the 28-nation bloc. "We have always been clear that the vast majority of vulnerable children are better off remaining in host countries in the region so they can be reunited with surviving family members," said Home Office minister James Brokenshire. "However, there are exceptional circumstances in which it is in a child's best interests to be resettled in the UK." The UNHCR's representative to Britain, Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, said the new scheme was an "important contribution" to the agency's efforts to address the needs of refugee children. "We welcome the scheme's focus on children at risk, including unaccompanied and separated children, and the UK's commitment to upholding the principles of child protection and the child's best interest, in implementing the programme," he said. No country has an interest in 'conflict' with Iran: Obama US President Barack Obama said Thursday that neither the United States nor Arab Gulf nations had an interest in conflict with Iran. "Even with the nuclear deal we recognise collectively that we continue to have serious concerns about Iranian behaviour", Obama said at the close of a summit in the Saudi capital with the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council. He referred to Iran's "destabilising activities" in the region but said: "None of our nations have an interest in conflict with Iran." US President Barack Obama delivers a speech following a US-Gulf Cooperation Council Summit in Riyadh on April 21, 2016 Jim Watson (AFP) Differences over relations with Iran are at the heart of tensions between Sunni Gulf nations and Washington. Gulf states are concerned about what they see as Obama's moves towards closer ties with their Shiite arch-rival, fearing that Tehran will be emboldened to seek a bigger regional role after the lifting of sanctions under its landmark nuclear deal with major powers led by the United States. 50 regime forces surrender to Kurds in northeast Syria Fifty Syrian pro-government fighters surrendered Thursday to Kurdish forces in the northeastern city of Qamishli, a Kurdish security source said as fighting raged for the second consecutive day. "A group of fighters loyal to the regime were taking cover in a prison in Qamishli, and Kurdish forces gave them until noon to hand themselves in," a Kurdish security source told AFP. "When they didn't, the Kurdish forces stormed the prison, and the 50 regime fighters surrendered," he said. Kurdish fighters take position during clashes with Syrian pro-government forces in the northwestern Syrian town of Qamishli on April 20, 2016 Delil Souleiman (AFP) He said other regime fighters from around the city were firing rockets at the prison. Fighting between the Kurdish police force, known as the Asayish, and fighters from the pro-regime National Defence Forces erupted on Wednesday after a scuffle at a checkpoint in the city. It resumed at around midday on Thursday, an AFP reporter said, adding that loud blasts from heavy weapons were heard across the city. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that since Wednesday 10 NDF fighters, four Kurdish forces and two civilians have been killed. Meanwhile, the Islamic State group claimed in a statement that it carried out a suicide bombing in Qamishli on Thursday afternoon that caused several casualties. The claim could not be independently confirmed. In August, IS claimed responsibility for a suicide attack that killed 16 people in the city. Qamishli is under the shared control of the Syrian regime and Kurdish authorities, who have declared zones of "autonomous administration" across parts of north and northeast Syria. Syrian troops and seasoned Kurdish fighters have coordinated on security in Hasakeh province where IS jihadists have tried to advance, but tensions have built up between the sometimes-rival authorities. More than 270,000 people have been killed and millions more hav been displaced since Syria's conflict erupted in March 2011. France to hold May meeting on Israel-Palestinian peace process France will host a meeting of ministers from 20 countries on May 30 to try and relaunch the Israel-Palestinian peace process, Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault announced on Thursday. But in an interview with four newspapers, including Israel's Haaretz and pan-Arab daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi, the minister said Israel and the Palestinians would not be invited to the Paris meeting. Ayrault said the aim was to prepare an international summit in the second half of 2016, which would include the Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Palestinian youths clash with Israeli security forces in Qabatiya, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Jaafar Ashtiyeh (AFP/File) "The two sides are further apart than ever," he admitted. But he said: "There is no other solution to the conflict than establishing two states, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, living side by side in peace and safety with Jerusalem as a shared capital. "We cannot do nothing," Ayrault told the newspapers, which also included France's Liberation and the Wall Street Journal. "We have to act before it's too late." He said the discussions would be based on the 2002 Saudi peace initiative, which was largely ignored by Israel. Drawn by oil kingpin Saudi Arabia, the Arab Peace Initiative called on Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territory occupied in 1967, including east Jerusalem, in exchange for a normalisation of ties with Arab countries. It also outlined the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and envisaged a "just solution" of the refugee issue. "In Israel, the government is more and more ambiguous on the issue of a two-state solution and the Palestinians are more and more divided," he said. "We have to explain to the Israelis that settlement activity is a dangerous process and that it puts their own security in danger." The initiative was announced in February by Ayrault's predecessor Laurent Fabius. "I am not naive, I am perfectly sincere," he said. "There is no alternative -- the other option is fatalism and I reject that." A former French ambassador to Washington, Pierre Vimont, has been given the job of preparing the meetings. US Secretary of State John Kerry gave the French proposal a guarded welcome when he visited Paris in March. Kerry brokered a previous round of Israel-Palestinian peace talks that collapsed in April 2014. US Supreme Court ruling on assets amounts to theft: Iran Iran said Thursday that the US Supreme Court's decision to deduct $2 billion from Tehran's frozen assets to compensate American victims of terror attacks amounted to theft. "The ruling is considered stealing the Islamic Republic of Iran's properties and naturally the onus of compensation of damages to Iran... falls on the US administration," foreign ministry spokesman Hossein Jaber Ansari said. The spokesman said the decision went "against international law". US Marines search for victims on October 31, 1983 after a bomb attack on the headquarters of a US barracks in Beirut Philippe Bouchon (AFP/File) The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that Iran must hand over nearly $2 billion in frozen assets to survivors and relatives of those killed in attacks blamed on the Islamic republic. The attacks included the 1983 bombing of US Marine barracks in Beirut and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia. The decision affects more than 1,000 Americans. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the court's opinion rejecting the Iranian central bank's efforts to block payments to victims and relatives. Yemen peace talks resume in Kuwait Delayed peace talks aimed at ending 13 months of conflict in Yemen resumed on Friday, a day after UN mediators finally managed to get warring sides to the table. The United Nations hopes negotiations -- which were originally due to begin on Monday -- will put a stop to fighting across Yemen that has killed more than 6,800 people and driven 2.8 million from their homes since March last year. The talks resumed on Friday afternoon, Charbel Raji, spokesman for UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed told AFP. A Yemeni man waves his national flag during a protest against the ongoing conflict, on the eve of UN-brokered peace talks in Kuwait on April 17, 2016 Ahmad al-Basha (AFP/File) Two delegations, each of seven members, representing the government, and the rebels and their allies, joined Ould Cheikh Ahmed at the meeting, a delegate said. The envoy appealed to both government and rebel delegations to seize the opportunity of the talks in Kuwait, saying Yemen was "closer to peace than any time before". The rebel delegation -- consisting of representatives of the Shiite Huthi militia and allied forces loyal to ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh -- arrived in Kuwait late on Thursday after receiving assurances from the UN that a ceasefire -- in place since April 11 -- would be respected. Delegates representing the government of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi had threatened to pull out of talks altogether if the rebels were not around the table by Thursday evening. A first session was eventually held and lasted less than two hours, a delegate told AFP. Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheikh Sabah al-Khaled Al-Sabah hailed the talks as "a historic opportunity" to end the bloodshed. "War will only lead to more devastation, losses and displacement of people," he said. Yemen has been riven by fighting since a Saudi-led coalition launched a military intervention last year against Iran-backed Huthi rebels, who had seized the capital and much of the rest of the country. The violence has allowed Al-Qaeda and its jihadist rival the Islamic State group to make headway, overrunning swathes of southern Yemen and establishing a toehold around second city Aden -- where the Saudi-backed government is based. The conflict has stoked tensions between Sunni heavyweight Saudi Arabia and its Shiite rival Iran, which has been accused of smuggling weapons to the rebels. Previous UN-sponsored peace efforts failed to make any headway, and the last ceasefire in December was repeatedly violated and eventually abandoned by the Arab coalition on January 2. - Honourable life or ruin - But the UN envoy said the latest truce and negotiations offered a unique chance to end the violence. "Today, you have one of two options -- a secure nation that guarantees an honourable life or the ruins of a nation," he told delegates. The rebel delegation met Ould Cheikh Ahmed after the opening session, their news agency reported late Thursday, and stressed the "need to secure the ceasefire." The delegation said the "key to reaching a solution is agreeing on a transitional authority," Sabanews.net reported. Diplomats say the rebels are demanding an end to the coalition's air campaign and naval blockade, as well as its ground operations. They also want UN sanctions against some of their leaders, including Saleh, to be lifted. UN Security Council Resolution 2216, which is seen as a basis for any peace plan, states that the rebels must withdraw from seized territories and disarm before talks can progress. But diplomatic sources have said the rebels are demanding a change to the UN initiative, preferring to first agree on a political leadership for Yemen before making military concessions on the ground. At the opening session Thursday, Ould Cheikh Ahmed said the UN process "will not necessarily follow a particular sequence." "Instead, discussions will happen in parallel through working committees that will look into implementation mechanisms of each element, for the sake of reaching one comprehensive agreement that paves the way for a peaceful and orderly transition." The Huthis, who had waged an on-off rebellion for a decade, swept from their stronghold in the northern mountains to take Sanaa unopposed in September 2014, before storming south and forcing Hadi into exile in March last year. With the support of coalition troops and air power, Hadi's loyalists have managed to oust the rebels from Aden and neighbouring southern provinces as well as some districts on the Saudi border. But the rebels and their allies remain in control of the capital and much of the northern and central highlands, as well as the Red Sea coast. Despite the nominal ceasefire, fighting has continued, particularly around the battleground third city of Taez, where loyalist forces have been under rebel siege for months, and in Jawf province on the Saudi border, military sources said. A handout picture released by the official Kuwait News Agency (KUNA) on April 21, 2016, shows various delegations taking part in the Yemen peace talks, in Kuwait City A Yemeni man walks past flames rising from the ruins of buildings destroyed in an air-strike by the Saudi-led coalition in the capital Sanaa, on February 10, 2016 Mohammed Huwais (AFP/File) Trump: Don't put abolitionist Tubman on $20 bill Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump said Thursday he opposes placing an image of one-time slave Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, saying she should grace the rarely used $2 note instead. "Andrew Jackson had a great history, and I think it's very rough when you take someone off the bill," Trump told NBC's "Today" show when asked about the US Treasury's plan to remove the 19th century president and make Tubman the first African-American to be featured on American currency. Citing Jackson's "history of tremendous success for the country," Trump said it would be nothing but "pure political correctness" to displace him from the widely used note. US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks following victory in the New York state primary on April 19, 2016 in New York City Jewel Samad (AFP/File) "Maybe we do the $2 bill" for Tubman, Trump added. "I would love to see another denomination, and that could take place. I think it would be more appropriate." Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew on Wednesday announced a sweeping redesign of the US bills to be unveiled in four years. They will also protect Alexander Hamilton's central place on the $10 note, once thought threatened until Broadway's hit hip-hop musical "Hamilton" made the 18th century US finance chief a modern-day star. Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both gave their full-throated support of the Tubman plan, but few Republican lawmakers showed the same enthusiasm. Ben Carson a Republican presidential candidate until dropping out in early March, also opposed dropping Jackson. "I love Harriet Tubman. I love what she did, but we can find another way to honor her," Carson, who is black, told Fox Business. "Maybe a $2 bill." Republican US Senator Lamar Alexander, from Jackson's home state of Tennessee, took issue with the one-or-the-other nature of the Treasury decision. "It is unnecessary to diminish Jackson in order to honor Tubman," Alexander said in a statement. "Jackson was the first common man to be elected president. He fought to save the Union." Snowden sues Norway to prevent extradition during award visit Fugitive US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden has filed a lawsuit against the Norwegian government seeking a guarantee he will not be extradited if he visits to accept an award, a literary rights group said Thursday. The Norwegian branch of the PEN Club has invited Snowden, who has been living in exile in Russia since 2013 after revealing widespread US foreign surveillance, to collect the Ossietzky prize for freedom of expression in November. PEN said a law firm had filed a petition with Oslo City Court "in order to allow Snowden to travel to Norway without fear of extradition to the US, where he faces decades of imprisonment under the Espionage Act". Edward Snowden is seen via live video link from Russia on a computer screen during a parliamentary hearing on June 23, 2015, at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg Frederick Florin (AFP/File) "We will do our utmost to ensure that Snowden may receive the prize in person," it said in a statement. The 32-year-old American was charged by US authorities with espionage and the theft of state secrets after revealing the extent of surveillance programmes run by the National Security Agency. Norway's justice ministry said it had not yet received the lawsuit. "We never comment on individual extradition cases, let alone when they have not been examined in court," said ministry spokesman Gunnar Johansen. Considered a whistleblower by some and a traitor by others, Snowden won a similar Norwegian award last year. He was unable to collect it in person after he failed to receive assurances that he would not be arrested and extradited to the United States. Burundi gunmen murder military officer: witness, army Gunmen in Burundi shot dead a high-ranking military officer seen as a critic of the regime, a witness and an army spokesman told AFP on Thursday. Lieutenant-Colonel Emmanuel Buzubona died on his way home on Wednesday along with his driver when he was attacked by three men armed with rifles and grenades, the witness told AFP on condition of anonymity. The killing comes amid turmoil in the country since President Pierre Nkurunziza decided to run for a third term, which he went on to win in July 2015, with violence leaving hundreds dead. A military vehicle drives through the Musaga neighbourhood of the city of Bujumbura on December 11, 2015 Suspected of forging an alliance with insurgents opposed to Nkurunziza's bid for a third term, Buzubona was arrested in December 2015 by the national intelligence service, which operates on the direct orders of the president. He was released six days later, a security source told AFP. Army spokesman Colonel Gaspard Baratuza confirmed what the witness saw, adding that the attackers first shot Buzubona and then hurled a grenade at him. "A police inquiry is under way to try to find the assassins," he said. Buzubona, Burundi's former deputy military intelligence chief, had been on leave since his return from a mission in Tanzania six months ago, another high-ranking military officer told AFP on condition of anonymity. There has been no claim of responsibility for the latest killing, but supporters and opponents of Nkurunziza traded accusations on social media networks. Supporters of the regime accuse soldiers of the former Tutsi army of shooting dead the Hutu officer. Opponents however say the officer was killed because he was hostile to the government. - Deadly shootout - In a separate incident in southern Burundi, two civilians were killed and two others wounded in the crossfire during a shootout on Wednesday between troops and "armed criminals", a police spokesman said Thursday, using a term often used by the government to refer to rebels. "A military patrol was sent to Kivumu hill where people had reported the presence of armed criminals in a bar. There was an exchange of fire and four residents present at the scene were injured, two of who died from their wounds," deputy police spokesman Moise Nkurunziza said. Witnesses say police had initially arrested all the men at the bar. "They let us go, warning us against helping the rebels who had been reported to be in the area, but they took with them eight young men," a resident of Mugumba told AFP on condition of anonymity. Located some 90 kilometres (60 miles) south of the capital Bujumbura, Mugumba has seen some of Burundi's most frequent clashes between government forces and armed rebels. Four ruling party militants were killed in two incidents on Saturday, police says. Violence over the past year has left more than 400 people dead and forced more than 250,000 people to flee Burundi, and watchdogs have repeatedly sounded the alarm. 45 Taiwanese fraud suspects to be tried in China: state media Dozens of Taiwanese deported from Kenya over allegations of fraud have admitted their guilt and will stand trial in China, state media reported on Friday. Kenyan police expelled 45 Taiwanese citizens to China this month over charges they were part of a vast telephone fraud network, according to China's Xinhua state news agency. Taiwan reacted furiously, accusing China of "abducting" its citizens, and dispatched a delegation of government officials to Beijing for talks with police. Johnny Chiang, a legislator from the Kuomintang (KMT) party, displays a video clip showing Taiwanese detented at a police station in Kenya, during a press conference at Parliament in Taipei on April 12, 2016 Sam Yeh (AFP/File) Chinese state media last week showed the deportees apparently admitting to crimes under police interrogation, in what has become a common sight in such cases. Chen Shiqu, an investigator with China's ministry of public security, said all 45 suspects have already "admitted their guilt". "The suspects specifically targeted people on the Chinese mainland and their victims are from the mainland," Xinhua quoted him as saying. "Many of the suspects are themselves from the mainland. They will thus be investigated, prosecuted and tried in accordance with mainland law," he said. Last week, China's minister of public security said the mainland had legal jurisdiction over the case. China considers Taiwan to be one of its provinces awaiting reunification, by force if necessary, even though the island has ruled itself since 1949 following a civil war split. Syria Kurds train new army to protect 'federal region' In a leafy field in Syria, fighters in beige fatigues negotiate an obstacle course as they are trained to defend a Kurdish federal region across the country's north. Clutching rifles under a bright spring sun, the men are among thousands undergoing obligatory nine-month training to join the Autonomous Protection Forces. The APF, its commander-in-chief Renas Roza says, will be responsible for defending the federal region declared last month at a Kurdish-led conference. Fighters take part in an obligatory nine month training to join the Autonomous Protection Forces at a training camp in the northern Syrian town of Rmeilane on March 24, 2016 Delil Soueliman (AFP/File) "This is the nucleus of a new army that will take up the defence of the federal region in northern Syria," Roza tells AFP in his headquarters at Amuda near the border with Turkey. The clean-shaven commander sits under a large poster bearing the APF logo -- a long, curved sword crossed over a rifle below a red five-point star. Roza says thousands of Kurdish, Arab and Syriac Christian men between the ages of 18 and 30 have completed the compulsory training. For the first two months, conscripts are taught military structure and tactics, and then have lessons on human rights and interaction with civilians. Three stages of training are led by the powerful People's Protection Units (YPG), the military arm of the leading Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD). Fadi Abdo Lahdo, a Syriac fighter training in the Bawr camp near Rmeilan, says his trainers are from the YPG's commando force. - Dealing with civilians - "We're learning how to cross over both cement barriers and natural barriers," says the fair-haired fighter, squinting in the sunlight. Other training sessions are administered by civic institutions. "I served five months and I still have four months before I finish my service," says Rinas Ahmad, an 18-year-old conscript with gelled hair. "We were trained on military life and on how to deal with civilians so we don't become like the Syrian (government) army," Ahmad says. Syria's Kurds have both exploited and benefited from the chaos of the five-year-war to expand their control across northern parts of the country. When the regime's armed forces withdrew from Kurdish-majority areas in 2012, Kurds filled the void with a system of three "autonomous administrations". The three cantons, known from west to east as Afrin, Kobane and Jazire, already feature their own independent police forces, driving licences and schools. In March, a Kurdish-led summit in Rmeilan announced that it would establish a "federal region" uniting the cantons. It elected a 31-member assembly tasked with laying the groundwork for the federal region by September. The announcement was swiftly shot down by both the mainstream opposition and the regime, which categorically reject a federal system for Syria. - Rounding up recruits - In anti-government demonstrations across the country, some protesters burned the Kurdish flag to show their opposition to federalism. Syria's Kurds have continued their preparations nevertheless. Training camps currently operate in the Afrin and Jazire cantons and will open soon in Kobane, Roza says. The APF is also rounding up anyone who has yet to complete his nine-month service. "We check people's papers as they pass through checkpoints. If they have not done the training, we take them there," an APF spokesman says. An Arab APF trainee, who spoke on condition of anonymity, says he was detained at a Kurdish-run checkpoint as he drove to work. Non-Kurdish residents living under the PYD-run cantons were already complaining about a six-month period of compulsory military service run by the YPG, but the new training period is three months longer. As the federal region's future army, APF units have begun deploying to areas recently captured from the Islamic State jihadist group. Although they are not yet involved in front-line fighting, they are increasingly cooperating with the YPG and the Kurdish-Arab Syrian Democratic Forces. The APF moves in to secure towns that the YPG or the SDF have seized from IS -- such as Shadadi in Hasakeh province, which the SDF captured in February. Kurdish forces have led the fight against IS since the jihadist group emerged in Syria in 2013, scoring several major victories in the recapture of key border towns, like Kobane, last year. Renas Roza, the commander-in-chief of the Autonomous Protection Forces speaks during an interview with AFP in the northern Syrian town of Amude on April 10, 2016 Delil Souleiman (AFP/File) In Moscow, Israel PM pushes Putin on Syria, Iran concerns Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow Thursday over fears the Kremlin's involvement in Syria and weapons deliveries to Iran could bolster the Jewish state's fiercest opponents. "Israel has obvious and evident red lines connected to our security," Netanyahu told Putin at the start of the meeting. "Firstly, we are doing everything that depends on us to stop the most hi-tech weaponry from Syria and Iran from falling into the hands of Hezbollah," he said, referring to Lebanon's powerful Shiite militia. Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during their meeting to discuss the government's involvment in Syria in Moscow on April 21, 2016 Alexander Nemenov (Pool/AFP/File) "Secondly, we are doing everything in order to prevent an additional terrorist front opening up against us in the Golan Heights." Russia is currently flying a bombing campaign in support of forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Iran and allied Shiite militia Hezbollah are also battling on the side of the regime in Damascus -- making the trio de facto allies on the ground. Israel fears that the chaos in Syria could help strengthen its arch-enemy Hezbollah and Netanyahu admitted for the first time this month that Israel had attacked dozens of convoys there which were transporting weapons to the group. It was the first clear public acknowledgement that Israel had carried out attacks in neighbouring Syria with which it is still officially at war. Russia has also stirred Israeli ire by pushing ahead with the long-awaited delivery of the S-300 air defence system to Tehran. Iran used its annual Army Day parade last week to showcase parts of the systems -- ordered from Moscow in 2007 but not delivered until now due to UN Security Council resolutions relating to Tehran's nuclear programme. HRW accuses Egypt police of torturing detained children Human Rights Watch accused Egyptian police on Thursday of detaining and torturing 20 people, including eight children, saying there was a pattern of abuse in the North African country. The New York-based group said in a report that six people arrested in the coastal city of Alexandria in February had reported to relatives that they were tortured with electric shocks and beatings. They had been accused of protesting without a permit, vandalism and arson, and joining an illegal group. In a report, Human Rights Watch said there is a pattern of abuse by police in Egypt Mahmoud Khaled (AFP/File) A police official told AFP that the allegation in the report "was illogical and clearly fabricated." HRW said that police had initially refused to admit they were holding the detainees for more than a week. When the detainees appeared in court a week later, police said in a report to the prosecutor they had just been arrested. "Some Egyptian officials have disappeared children and apparently tortured them, then faked arrest records to cover it up," the report quoted HRW's children's rights director Zama Coursen-Neff as saying. "The authorities have turned a blind eye to the reports of abuse and refused to investigate." It said six of the detainees told relatives they were suspended by their arms, electrocuted in the genitals and punched. They had been arrested after an alleged arson attack on a police vehicle and a garage. "The arrests fit a wider pattern of abuse and violations by officers of the Interior Ministrys National Security Agency," the report said. "Since 2014, Human Rights Watch has documented National Security officers frequent use of enforced disappearance and torture, as well as a failure by prosecutors and judges to investigate these violations when defence lawyers raise them." Rights groups say Egyptian security services have carried out abuses against protesters and dissidents that spiked after the military overthrew Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013. His overthrow unleashed a deadly police crackdown on his supporters which left more than 1,000 protesters dead and thousands in prison. Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood movement has been blacklisted as a terrorist group, and protests without a police permit are banned. Meanwhile Islamist militants in the Sinai Peninsula have launched an insurgency that has killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers. The Islamic State group's Egypt affiliate has also claimed responsibility for bombing a Russian airliner in October over Sinai, killing all 224 people on board. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the former army chief who toppled Morsi, has shown little patience with dissidents but has also pledged to crack down on police abuses. 450 million Africans threatened by spinal meningitis Spinal meningitis, which can kill in 24 hours, poses a threat to 450 million Africans this year, according to medical experts from eight of the continent's countries. Meningococcal meningitis is a global burden that affects 1.2 million people every year and causes the death of 135,000 of them, said the doctors from west and central Africa. Twenty-six countries that make up the so-called "African meningitis belt that stretches from Senegal to Ethiopia -- an area home to 450 million people -- may be heavily affected by epidemic outbreaks," said the doctors at a press conference. Children are vaccinated against meningitis on March 17, 2006 in Tchadoua near Maradi in Niger Issouf Sanogo (AFP/File) "Meningitis is still a problem, we must react to avoid tragedy," said Dr Elia Gilbernair, a medic at pharmaceutical giant Sanofi which organised the conference. Dr Gilbernair added that countries don't make calls for stockpiles of meningitis vaccines until the last moment, when an epidemic is declared. Mali's Professor Mamadou Keita Marouf called for a mass vaccination programme to help prevent the disease responsible for "practically decimating a generation". Professor Ye Ouattara Diarra, from Burkina Faso, described meningitis as a public health problem and called for increased monitoring to help detect cases early. The World Health Organization (WHO) warned in December of a risk of fresh meningitis outbreaks this year in Africa, particularly Niger and Nigeria which were both badly hit in 2015. Meningitis is an acute inflammation of the protective membranes covering the brain and spinal cord and can be life-threatening. Seven killed in NE Nigeria suicide bombing: army At least seven people were killed in a suicide bomb attack near a camp for those displaced by the Boko Haram conflict in northeast Nigeria, the army said on Thursday. The attack happened early Wednesday in Banki, a town on the border with Cameroon some 130 kilometres (80 miles) southeast of the Borno state capital, Maiduguri. "Seven people lost their lives. There were two suicide bombers," both women, army spokesman Colonel Sani Usman told AFP. Women sit in a camp in Maiduguri, northeast Nigeria on February 4, 2016 Pius Utomi Ekpei (AFP/File) News of the attack was slow to emerge because of the poor to non-existent telecommunications in the remote area. Usman said one of the women failed to detonate her explosives and was arrested, despite being injured but a civilian vigilante said the second bomber died of her wounds on her way to hospital. "Two female suicide bombers came by a checkpoint manned by CJTF (civilian joint task force) and the military at about 6:30 am (0530 GMT) yesterday (Wednesday)," the vigilante said. "They successively detonated their explosives. One of them died instantly while the second one was badly injured. "She died on the way to Maiduguri because she was evacuated along with the wounded. Seven people were killed including two women and their infants. "A vigilante and two residents were also killed. Nine people were injured and we brought them to Maiduguri for medical attention." Boko Haram has carried out suicide bombings often using women and girls as part of its armed campaign to establish an Islamic state in northern Nigeria. Mosques, crowded markets, bus stations and military checkpoints have been frequent targets. But in February, two female suicide bombers killed at least 58 at camp for those made homeless by the insurgency in Dikwa, some 90 kilometres from Maiduguri. That attack raised security fears about the safety of internally displaced people (IDPs), whom the government is encouraging to return home. Palestinians to hold off on UN move against Israeli settlements The Palestinian foreign minister said Thursday that a push for a UN resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlement expansion will be put on hold to focus instead on a French proposal for a peace conference. The draft resolution was circulated to Arab countries and to some members of the Security Council earlier this month as part of a drive for UN action in support of the two-state solution. Palestinian foreign minister Riyad al-Maliki said the draft would be shelved to focus instead on the French initiative, which provides for a first ministerial meeting in Paris on May 30. Palestinian Foreign Affairs minister Riyad Al-Malki looks on during a meeting with his French counterpart at the Quai d'Orsay in Paris on August 18, 2015 Miguel Medina (AFP/File) "We have agreed that our move at the Security Council should not jeopardize in any way the French initiative," Maliki told reporters in New York following talks between president Mahmud Abbas and Chinese Ambassador Liu Jieyi, who chairs the council this month. "We should really sail smoothly in a way that the French initiative will continue," he said, adding that the Palestinians would decide on formally presenting the draft text at a later time. Diplomats said that France, Egypt and Saudi Arabia had discouraged the Palestinians from moving ahead with the proposed measure that would have put pressure on the United States to resort to a veto. The Security Council failed in 2011 to adopt a draft resolution condemning Israeli settlements after the United States vetoed it. Earlier this month, Abbas said there was an "urgent" need for a UN resolution on Israeli settlements to salvage the two-state solution in which Israel and Palestine would be both recognized. French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said in Paris that the May meeting will prepare an international summit to be held in the second half of 2016, which would include the Israeli and Palestinian leaders. South Sudan deadline for rebel chief's return International powers gave South Sudan's rival leaders a Saturday deadline to strike a deal and ensure rebel chief Riek Machar returns to the capital, peace monitors said. If they fail to agree, the peace deal to end over two years of intense civil war would collapse, warned Festus Mogae, head of the internationally-backed Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission (JMEC). In a country awash with weapons, the deal now stands or falls on how many machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades the rebel troops protecting Machar should be allowed to bring with them. A man watches the news headlines about Rebel Leader Riek Machar's return to Juba, South Sudan on April 20, 2016 Carl de Souza (AFP/File) "If we are not able to reach an agreement, then it is a total breakdown," Mogae told reporters Thursday, after no breakthrough was made in an all-day JMEC meeting in the capital Juba. Tens of thousands have been killed and more than two million have been driven from their homes since war broke out in December 2013, a conflict characterised by extreme brutality and human rights violations. The April 23 deadline was proposed by the non-South Sudanese members of JMEC, which include the African Union and European Union, as well as China, Britain, Norway and the United States, diplomats said. Rebel officials said Machar would return on a one-hour flight from neighbouring Ethiopia as soon possible after a deal was agreed, and then take up the post of vice-president. If they fail, the rivals will be reported to the UN Security Council. His return to forge a unity government with arch-rival President Salva Kiir is seen as fundamental to ensure the repeatedly delayed and broken peace deal sticks. But his arrival on Monday was delayed by wrangling over how many soldiers and weapons he could bring with him, with the government saying his large armed entourage would contravene the peace deal. The international proposal -- accepted by rebels -- is that Machar's guards can bring 20 machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, while the government says the limit should be just seven. "If there is no agreement until that day, then I am required to report to the IGAD heads of state, to the Security Council of the African Union and to the Security Council of the United Nations," Mogae said, when asked what will happen if the April 23 deadline is missed. Minister of Information Michael Makuei told reporters that both sides were "advised to go and sleep on this and think how best we can come out with an amicable solution." Rebel negotiator Taban Deng Gai said they accepted the international proposal. "Once we have this approval by the government... we shall have the first vice-president to Juba as early as possible," Gai said. The peace deal is already months behind schedule, with multiple militia forces paying little heed to paper agreements. A 1,370-strong armed rebel force has finished arriving in the city as part of the peace deal, while government forces say they have pulled out all but 3,420 of their troops, according to the agreement. All other soldiers have to remain at least 25 kilometres (15 miles) outside the capital. Chadian President Deby wins fifth term, opposition cry foul Chad's veteran leader Idriss Deby has won a fifth term in office, the national electoral commission announced, extending his 26 years in power, as the opposition alleged widespread fraud. Taking more than 60 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential polls, Deby came far ahead of main opposition leader Saleh Kebzabo, who won just over 12 percent but said the vote was rigged. We "don't recognise the outcome of this electoral stick-up", a group of opposition politicians including Kebzabo said, alleging ballot-stuffing and the buying-up of voter cards. Chad's incumbent president Idriss Deby Itno arrives to cast his ballot at a polling station in N'djamena on April 10, 2016 Issouf Sanogo (AFP/File) "Hundreds of ballot boxes have disappeared," the group said, adding that soldiers who had intended to vote against Deby had also "disappeared", alleging they had likely been "arrested and imprisoned". African Union observers last week declared the elections free and fair. The organisation's rotating presidency is currently held by Deby. On Thursday, supporters from Deby's Patriotic Salvation Movement (MPS) party celebrated by firing guns and automatic rifles into the air in the capital's vast Nation square. During the day, ahead of the results announcement, there was a strong military presence on the streets of the capital. More than six million people had been asked to choose between 13 presidential hopefuls in the vote, with turnout pegged at more than 71 percent. During the polls there was an online blackout with the Internet cut and mobile phones unable to send messages. A camera crew for French-language broadcaster TV5 that had been covering scuffles between soldiers and young opposition activists over alleged ballot box stuffing had their camera roughly taken away by security forces and the footage erased. Earlier this month, four civil society leaders were handed four-month suspended sentences for urging anti-government protests ahead of the vote. The government had banned demonstrations after protests erupted in February over the gang rape of a teenage girl blamed on the sons of top figures in Deby's regime. Four days after the ban, a student was killed and five wounded when police opened fire to break up a protest at Faya Largeau in the north. Deby's election also came as staff at several hospitals, schools and universities were on strike over weeks of wage arrears. Under Deby -- who took power in a military coup -- once unstable Chad has become both an oil producer and a key player in the fight against jihadist groups on the rampage in west Africa. But despite a wealth of new oil resources since 2003, half of the population of 13 million lives below the poverty line and seven out of 10 people cannot read or write. S. Korea covered up mass abuse, killings of 'vagrants' BUSAN, South Korea (AP) The 14-year-old boy in the black school jacket stared at his sneakers, his heart pounding, as the policeman accused him of stealing a piece of bread. Even now, more than 30 years later, Choi Seung-woo weeps when he describes all that happened next. The policeman yanked down the boy's pants and sparked a cigarette lighter near Choi's genitals until he confessed to a crime he didn't commit. Then two men with clubs came and dragged Choi off to the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place. A guard in Choi's dormitory raped him that night in 1982 and the next, and the next. So began five hellish years of slave labor and near-daily assaults, years in which Choi saw men and women beaten to death, their bodies carted away like garbage. ADVANCE FOR THE STORY SLUGGED: SOUTH KOREA TORTURED CHILDREN - In this Jan. 28, 2016, photo, Choi Seung-woo, second right, and Lee Chae-sik talk as they walk up a hill behind a row of apartments that was once the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place, in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon) Choi was one of thousands the homeless, the drunk, but mostly children and the disabled rounded up off the streets ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which the ruling dictators saw as international validation of South Korea's arrival as a modern country. An Associated Press investigation shows that the abuse of these so-called vagrants at Brothers, the largest of dozens of such facilities, was much more vicious and widespread than previously known, based on hundreds of exclusive documents and dozens of interviews with officials and former inmates. Yet nobody has been held accountable to date for the rapes and killings at the Brothers compound because of a cover-up orchestrated at the highest levels of government, the AP found. Two early attempts to investigate were suppressed by senior officials who went on to thrive in high-profile jobs; one remains a senior adviser to the current ruling party. Products made using slave labor at Brothers were sent to Europe, Japan and possibly beyond, and the family that owned the institution continued to run welfare facilities and schools until just two years ago. Even as South Korea prepares for its second Olympics, in 2018, thousands of traumatized former inmates have still received no compensation, let alone public recognition or an apology. The few who now speak out want a new investigation. The current government, however, refuses to revisit the case, and is blocking a push by an opposition lawmaker to do so on the grounds that the evidence is too old. Ahn Jeong-tae, an official from Seoul's Ministry of the Interior, said focusing on just one human rights incident would financially burden the government and set a bad precedent. The Brothers' victims, he said, should have submitted their case to a temporary truth-finding commission established in the mid-2000s to investigate past atrocities. "We can't make separate laws for every incident and there have been so many incidents since the Korean War," Ahn said. Former inmates, however, cannot forget. One spent months standing quietly in front of the National Assembly with a signboard demanding justice. Choi has attempted suicide several times and now attends weekly therapy sessions. "The government has consistently tried to bury what happened. How do you fight that? If we spoke up, who would have heard us?" he asked. "I am wailing, desperate to tell our story. Please listen to us." ___ "HELL WITHIN A HELL" Once an orphanage, Brothers Home at its peak had more than 20 factories churning out woodwork, metalwork, clothing, shoes and other goods made by mostly unpaid inmates. The sprawling compound of concrete buildings rose above the southern port city of Busan, its inmates hidden from view by tall walls and kept there by guards who carried bats and patrolled with dogs. The horrors that happened behind those walls are inextricably linked to South Korea's modern history. The country at the time was still recovering from the near-total devastation of the 1950-53 Korean War, which followed nearly four decades of brutal Japanese colonization. From the 1960s until the '80s, before democracy, it was ruled by military dictators who focused overwhelmingly on improving the economy. In 1975, dictator President Park Chung-hee, father of current President Park Geun-hye, issued a directive to police and local officials to "purify" city streets of vagrants. Police officers, assisted by shop owners, rounded up panhandlers, small-time street merchants selling gum and trinkets, the disabled, lost or unattended children, and dissidents, including a college student who'd been holding anti-government leaflets. They ended up as prisoners at 36 nationwide facilities. By 1986, the number of inmates had jumped over five years from 8,600 to more than 16,000, according to government documents obtained by AP. Nearly 4,000 were at Brothers. But about 90 percent of them didn't even meet the government's definition of "vagrant" and therefore shouldn't have been confined there, former prosecutor Kim Yong Won told the AP, based on Brothers' records and interviews compiled before government officials ended his investigation. The inner workings of Brothers are laid bare by former inmate Lee Chae-sik, who had extraordinary access as personal assistant to the man in charge of enforcing the rules. The AP independently verified many of the details provided by Lee, now 46, through government documents. Lee was sent to Brothers at 13 after trouble at school. His first job was in a medical ward. Twice a day, Lee and four others, none of whom had medical training, would try to care for patients, often dousing their open wounds with disinfectant or removing maggots with tweezers. "People screamed in pain, but we couldn't do much," Lee said. "It was a hell within a hell. The patients had been left there to die." Stronger inmates raped and beat the weak and stole their food, he said. Lee attempted suicide after a guard at the medical ward raped him. A year later, he was made personal assistant to chief enforcer Kim Kwang-seok, who like other guards at Brothers was an inmate raised to power by the owner because of his loyalty. Many former inmates remember Kim as the facility's most feared man. The AP tried repeatedly to track Kim down but could not find him. Lee said he was present when Kim, a short, stocky man with sunburned skin, led near-daily, often fatal beatings at the compound's "corrections room." Lee accompanied Kim as he compiled a twice-a-day tally of the sick and dead for the owner; four or five daily deaths were often on the list. A scene recounted by Lee provides a firsthand account of the efficient, almost casually evil way the facility worked. One morning, Kim approached owner Park In-keun on his daily jog to report that yet another inmate had been beaten to death the night before. The boy heard Park order Kim to bury the body in the hills behind the compound's walls. ___ MONEY FROM SLAVES The violence at Brothers happened in the shadow of a massive money-making operation partly based on slave labor. The factories were ostensibly meant to train inmates for future jobs. But by the end of 1986, Brothers saw a profit from 11 of them, according to Busan city government documents obtained exclusively by the AP. The documents show that Brothers should have paid the current equivalent of $1.7 million to more than 1,000 inmates for their dawn-to-dusk work over an unspecified period. However, facility records and interviews with inmates at the time suggest that, instead, most of the nearly 4,000 people at Brothers were subject to forced labor without pay, according to prosecutor Kim. Another probe at the time, quickly scrapped by the government, showed that "nearly none" of about 100 inmates interviewed received payment. None of 20 former inmates interviewed by the AP received money while at Brothers either, though three got small payments later. Adults worked on construction jobs, both at Brothers and off-site. Children sometimes hauled dirt and built walls, but mostly they assembled ballpoint pens and fishing hooks. Some products were tied to other countries. For example, dress shirts made at Brothers' sewing factory were sent to Europe, and inmates were trained by employees at Daewoo, a major clothing exporter during the 1980s to the United States and other markets, according to the owner's autobiography. Park, the owner, said officials from Daewoo had toured the facility before offering a partnership. Daewoo International spokesman Kim Jin-ho said it was impossible to confirm such details because of a lack of records from the time. Inmates during the 1970s recounted spending long hours tying fishing lines to hooks for packages with Japanese writing on them, for export to Japan. Kim Hee-gon, an inmate at Brothers for eight years, said he and his colleagues were beaten severely in the early 1970s after thousands of such packages shipped to Japan were returned because they were faulty or missing hooks. Park Gyeong-bo, who was confined at Brothers from 1975 to 1980, remembered sneaker bottoms produced with the logo of Kukje Sangsa, a now-defunct company that manufactured shoes for the United States and Europe in the 1970s and 80s. The operation thrived because everybody benefited, except the inmates. Local officials needed somewhere to put the vagrants they were charged with corralling, so each year they renewed a contract with Brothers that required an inspection of how the inmates were treated and of how the facility was financially managed. Brothers got government subsidies based on its number of inmates, so it pushed police to round up more vagrants, the early probe found. And police officers were often promoted depending on how many vagrants they picked up. Two Busan city officials would say only that the facts are difficult to confirm now because the facility closed three decades ago. Heo Gwi-yong, a spokesman for the Busan Metropolitan Police Agency, said he couldn't confirm any details for the same reason. The owner of Brothers, Park, received two state medals for social welfare achievements and sat on a government advisory panel. His version of his story even inspired a 1985 television drama about a man's heroic devotion to caring for what were called "bottom-life people." Park eventually served a short prison stint for embezzlement and other relatively minor charges, but not for the abuse at Brothers. When the facility was at last raided in 1987, investigators found a vault in Park's office filled with the current equivalent of about $5 million in U.S. and Japanese currencies and certificates of deposit. In his autobiography, in court hearings and in talks with close associates, Park has denied wrongdoing and maintained that he simply followed government orders. Repeated attempts to contact him through family, friends and activists were unsuccessful. The AP, however, tracked down the former second-highest management official at Brothers, Lim Young-soon, who bristled in a telephone interview at descriptions of corruption, violence and slavery at the facility. Lim, a Protestant pastor now in Australia who is the brother of Park's wife, said Park was a "devoted" social worker who made Busan better by cleaning its streets of troublemakers. He said Brothers' closure "damaged national interests." Lim acknowledged beating deaths at Brothers, but said they were caused by clashes between inmates. He attributed the facility's high death toll to the many inmates he said arrived there in poor physical and mental health. "These were people who would have died in the streets anyway," Lim said. ___ "I DIDN'T LIVE AS A HUMAN" While Park raked in the money, the death toll mounted and the inmates struggled to survive. On his second day at Brothers, still dazed from his brutal rape the night before, Choi waited with other children to be stripped and washed. He said he watched a guard drag a woman by her hair and then beat her with a club until blood flowed from her head. "I just stood there, trembling like a leaf," Choi, 46, said. "I couldn't even scream when the platoon leader later raped me again." Another time, Choi recalled, he saw seven guards knock down a screaming man, cover him with a blue blanket and stomp and beat him. Blood seeped through the blanket. When it fell away, the dead man's eyes had rolled back into his head. Death tallies compiled by the facility claimed 513 people died between 1975 and 1986; the real toll was almost certainly higher. Prosecutor Kim interviewed multiple inmates who said facility officials refused to send people to hospitals until they were nearly dead for fear of escape. "The facility was Park's kingdom, and violence was how he ruled," Kim said of the owner. "When you are confined to a place where people are getting beaten to death every day, you aren't likely to complain too much about forced labor, abuse or getting raped." Most of the new arrivals at Brothers were in relatively good health, government documents show. Yet at least 15 inmates were dead within just a month of arrival in 1985, and 22 in 1986. Of the more than 180 documented deaths at Brothers in 1985 and 1986, 55 of the death certificates were issued by a single doctor, Chung Myung-kuk, according to internal facility documents, interviews and records compiled by Kim. Chung, now dead, mostly listed the cause of death as "heart failure" and "general weakness." Life at Brothers began before dawn, as inmates washed and got ready for mandatory 5:30 a.m. prayers, transmitted by loudspeaker from the facility's Presbyterian church. After a morning run, they ate breakfast and then headed to factories or construction sites. When city officials, foreign missionaries or aid workers visited, a select group of healthy inmates worked for hours to prepare a sanitized version of Brothers for the guests. Guards locked everyone else in their dormitories. Choi said inmates watched hopelessly as these clueless do-gooders trooped through. "We were trapped in a prison. But who could help us? No one," Choi said. Once the doors were locked at 6 p.m., Choi said, the guards unleashed "uncontrolled violence" upon the 60 to 100 kids in his dormitory, including frequent rapes. A principal at a Busan school who once taught at Brothers acknowledged that inmates were held against their will, and even called the facility a massive concentration camp. However, the principal, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was worried about his reputation, staunchly defended its practices. He said severe violence and military-style discipline were the only ways to run a place filled with thousands of unruly people who didn't want to be there. Park Sun-yi, who had been snatched by police at age 9 from a Busan train station in 1980, was one of the few to escape. She had watched as the guards reserved their most ruthless beatings, the kind where inmates sometimes didn't recover, for those who tried to run. But after five years, she said, she became "consumed with the thought that my life might be like this forever and that I might die here." She and five other girls used a broken saw from the ironwork factory to file away bars on a second-floor window at night, little by little, reattaching them with gum each morning. At last, they squeezed themselves out, scaled a wall embedded with broken glass and fled into the hills. When she finally walked through the door of her family home in Munsan, she said, her father fainted. ___ "JUST WAITING TO DIE" The unraveling of Brothers began by accident. While pheasant hunting, Kim, then a newly appointed prosecutor in the city of Ulsan, heard from his guide about men with wooden bats and large dogs guarding bedraggled prisoners on a nearby mountain. When they drove there, the men said they were building a ranch for the owner of the Brothers Home in nearby Busan. Kim knew immediately, he said, that he'd stumbled onto "a very serious crime." On a frigid January evening in 1987, Kim led 10 policemen in a surprise raid past the facility's high walls, imposing steel gates and gape-mouthed guards. Inside, he found battered and malnourished inmates locked in overcrowded dormitories. The inmates gave the unexpected visitors crisp, military-style salutes. "I remember thinking, 'This isn't a welfare facility; it's a concentration camp,'" Kim, now 61 and a managing partner at a Seoul law firm, said. People lay coughing and moaning in a squalid sick ward, "just waiting to die." After the owner was arrested, he demanded a meeting with Kim's boss, the chief Busan prosecutor, who then supervised Ulsan. A day later, Busan Mayor Kim Joo-ho, who died in 2014, called Kim to plead for Park's release. Kim said he politely declined and hung up. At every turn, Kim said, high-ranking officials blocked his investigation, in part out of fear of an embarrassing international incident on the eve of the Olympics. President Chun Doo-hwan, who took power in a coup after Park Chung-hee was assassinated, didn't need another scandal as he tried to fend off huge pro-democracy protests. Internal prosecution records reveal several instances where Kim noted intense pressure from Chun's office to curb his probe and push for lighter punishment for the owner. Kim had to reassure presidential officials directly and regularly that his investigation wouldn't expand. Park Hee-tae, then Busan's head prosecutor and later the nation's justice minister, relentlessly pushed to reduce the scope of the investigation, Kim said, including forcing him to stop his efforts to interview every inmate at Brothers. Park, a senior adviser to the current ruling party, has repeatedly denied AP interview requests. His personal secretary said Park can't remember details about the investigation. Despite interference, Kim eventually collected bank records and financial transactions indicating that, in 1985 and 1986 alone, the owner of Brothers embezzled what would be the current equivalent of more than $3 million. That came from about $10 million of government subsidies meant to feed and clothe the inmates and maintain the facilities. However, Kim said, the chief Busan prosecutor forced Kim to list the embezzlement as nearly half the amount he had actually found so that a life sentence couldn't be pursued under the law at the time. Kim said his bosses also prevented him from charging the owner, Park, or anyone else for the suspected widespread abuse at the Brothers compound, and limited the prosecutor to pursuing much narrower abuse linked to the construction site Kim found while hunting. Kim demanded a 15-year prison term for Park. After a lengthy battle, the Supreme Court in 1989 gave Park 2 years in prison for embezzlement and violations of construction, grassland management and foreign currency laws. He was acquitted of charges linked to off-site abuse. Only two guards received prison terms, one for 1 years and another for eight months. After prison, Park continued to earn money from welfare facilities and land sales. The Brothers site was purchased in 2001 by a construction company for what would now be about $27 million, according to a copy of the land sale shown to the AP. One of Park's daughters operated a school for troubled kids that closed in 2013. His family in 2014 sold a home for the severely disabled. ___ UNFORGETTABLE PAIN The legacy of Brothers lingers. It finally closed its gates in 1988. In the 1990s, construction laborers dug up about 100 human bones on the patch of mountain just outside where it stood, according to one of the workers who found the bones, Lee Jin-seob. Blankets covering the bones and the lack of burial mounds made Lee think they'd been buried informally and quickly. It's unclear what happened to the remains. On a recent trip to the site, which is now covered with tall apartment buildings, ex-inmates Choi and Lee Chae-sik stood on a concrete-covered former water reservoir that they think is the only remaining physical trace of Brothers. Both recalled the sight of guards carrying corpses into the woods. "There could be hundreds of bodies still out there," Lee said, pointing toward the steep slopes. Inmates released from the facility ended up homeless and in shelters and mental institutions; many struggle with alcoholism, depression, rage, shame and poverty. Choi, whose back is covered by a large tattoo from his time in a gang after he left Brothers, was imprisoned for assaulting a policeman. The few former inmates who have begun speaking out want justice: an apology and an admission that officials encouraged police to kidnap and lock away people who shouldn't have been confined. "How can we ever forget the pain from the beatings, the dead bodies, the backbreaking labor, the fear ... all the bad memories," Lee, who now manages a lakeside motel, said. "It will haunt us until we die." ___ Follow Foster Klug, the AP's Seoul bureau chief, at www.twitter.com/apklug . Follow reporter Kim Tong-hyung at www.twitter.com/kimtonghyung ADVANCE FOR THE STORY SLUGGED: SOUTH KOREA TORTURED CHILDREN - In this Jan. 28, 2016, photo, Choi Seung-woo, left, and Lee Chae-sik talk as they stand on what they say was a water tank used for the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place, in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon) ADVANCE FOR THE STORY SLUGGED: SOUTH KOREA TORTURED CHILDREN - In this Jan. 28, 2016, photo, Choi Seung-woo shows an old photo of the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place, in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon) ADVANCE FOR THE STORY SLUGGED: SOUTH KOREA TORTURED CHILDREN - In this Jan. 28, 2016, photo, Choi Seung-woo, left, and Lee Chae-sik talk as they examine what they say was a water tank left from the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place, in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon) ADVANCE FOR THE STORY SLUGGED: SOUTH KOREA TORTURED CHILDREN - In this Jan. 28, 2016, photo, Choi Seung-woo examines a lock on what he says was a water tank left from the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place, in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon) ADVANCE FOR THE STORY SLUGGED: SOUTH KOREA TORTURED CHILDREN - In this Jan. 28, 2016, photo, Choi Seung-woo, left, and Lee Chae-sik talk as they stand in front of an apartment complex at the former location of the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place, in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon) ADVANCE FOR THE STORY SLUGGED: SOUTH KOREA TORTURED CHILDREN - In this Jan. 28, 2016, photo, Lee Chae-sik talks as he walks up a hill behind a row of apartments at the former location of the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place, in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon) ADVANCE FOR THE STORY SLUGGED: SOUTH KOREA TORTURED CHILDREN - In this Jan. 28, 2016, photo, residents exercise as at a school near an apartment complex at the former location of the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place, in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon) ADVANCE FOR THE STORY SLUGGED: SOUTH KOREA TORTURED CHILDREN - In this Dec. 22, 2014, photo, Kim Yong Won, the former prosecutor who was in charge of the Brothers Home case, speaks during an interview at his office in Seoul, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon) ADVANCE FOR THE STORY SLUGGED: SOUTH KOREA TORTURED CHILDREN - In this December 1986, photo provided by the Ulsan District Prosector's Office, Brothers Home inmates work at a construction site in Ulsan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. (Ulsan District Prosecutors' Office via AP) ADVANCE FOR THE STORY SLUGGED: SOUTH KOREA TORTURED CHILDREN - In this undated image provided by the Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons, a civic group representing the former inmates, guards from the Brothers Home unload children from a truck in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation shows that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. It also reveals that the secrecy around Brothers has persisted for decades because of a cover-up orchestrated at the highest levels of government.(Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT, NO SALES, NO ARCHIVE ADVANCE FOR THE STORY SLUGGED: SOUTH KOREA TORTURED CHILDREN - In this undated image provided by the Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons, a civic group representing the former inmates, Brothers Home owner Park In-keun, right, shakes hands with former South Korean dictator Chun Doo-hwan. An Associated Press investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. It also reveals that the secrecy around Brothers has persisted for decades because of a cover-up orchestrated at the highest levels of government.(Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT, NO SALES, NO ARCHIVE ADVANCE FOR THE STORY SLUGGED: SOUTH KOREA TORTURED CHILDREN - In this undated image provided by the Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons, a civic group representing the former inmates, child inmates line up for morning assembly at the Brothers Home in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation shows that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. It also reveals that the secrecy around Brothers has persisted for decades because of a cover-up orchestrated at the highest levels of government.(Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT, NO SALES, NO ARCHIVE Islamic group condemns Israeli premier's remarks on Golan RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) The Organization of Islamic Cooperation has condemned comments by Israel's prime minister that the Golan Heights "will forever remain in Israeli hands." The 57-member organization based in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, said Wednesday the comments are a violation of international law. It said it would convene a meeting on the remarks as well. The OIC is the world's largest body of Islamic nations. Israel captured the strategic plateau from Syria in the 1967 Mideast war and annexed it in 1981. An Israeli withdrawal was long seen as a key to any Israel-Syria peace agreement. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the comments on Sunday, saying he doubted Syria would ever return to what it was after the violence of its civil war. Reformers to lead 2 key Ukrainian state companies MOSCOW (AP) The Ukrainian government has appointed two Western-educated executives to lead the country's two key state-owned companies. Wojciech Balczun, former chief executive of Poland's largest railway freight carrier, will head Ukrainian Railways while Ihor Smilyansky, who has worked for global consulting companies, will lead the Ukrposhta postal service. Their appointment was seen as a test of reform commitment for Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, who was named the country's new prime minister last week at the end of a protracted political crisis. Critics were initially alarmed that Poroshenko nominated his ally Groysman for the job and not the U.S.-born finance minister, saying that Groysman was likely to bow to pressure from Ukraine's influential tycoons. High court sides with Mexican man in sentencing case WASHINGTON (AP) A unanimous Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a Mexican man who said he received an unfairly long prison sentence for re-entering the United States after being deported. The justices ruled Wednesday that Saul Molina-Martinez's rights were violated when a federal judge used the wrong sentencing guideline range to give him a 77-month prison sentence. Molina-Martinez should have been subject to a guideline range of 70 months to 87 months. But the judge mistakenly placed Molina-Martinez in a higher category that called for a range of 77 months to 96 months. A federal appeals court ruled that the error didn't violate Molina-Martinez's rights because the judge's sentence was within both the correct and incorrect ranges. The Latest:Ex-prosecutor pleads guilty to obstruction charge NEW ORLEANS (AP) The Latest on case of Louisiana district attorney (all times local): 9:20 a.m. A former Louisiana district attorney has pleaded guilty to a charge that he harassed a witness and tried to get rid of evidence for a federal grand jury investigation that targeted the veteran prosecutor. Harry Morel, who served as St. Charles Parish's elected district attorney for 33 years, was charged last month with obstruction of justice. Morel's attorney, Ralph Capitelli, said earlier that the 73-year-old intended to plead guilty to the federal charge Wednesday. In a March 31 court filing, U.S. Attorney Kenneth Polite's office said Morel and a grand jury witness had "inappropriate" meetings concerning criminal charges against the witness and others. The court filing says Morel instructed the witness to destroy photographic evidence of the meetings, knowing federal authorities wanted it. ___ 3:40 a.m. A former Louisiana district attorney is expected to plead guilty to a charge that he harassed a witness and tried to get rid of evidence for a federal grand jury investigation that targeted the veteran prosecutor. Harry Morel, who served as St. Charles Parish's elected district attorney for 33 years, was charged last month with obstruction of justice. Morel's attorney, Ralph Capitelli, says the 73-year-old intends to plead guilty to the federal charge Wednesday. In a March 31 court filing, U.S. Attorney Kenneth Polite's office said Morel and a grand jury witness had "inappropriate" meetings concerning criminal charges against the witness and others. 'Sexual predator' ex-prosecutor admits guilt in federal case NEW ORLEANS (AP) A former Louisiana district attorney solicited sex from at least 20 women in exchange for offering favorable treatment from his office, authorities said Wednesday after the veteran prosecutor pleaded guilty to obstructing their long-running investigation of him. They described him as a sexual predator after he pleaded guilty to a narrowly tailored charge of harassing a witness and trying to get rid of evidence in a federal grand jury investigation that targeted him. Harry Morel, who served as St. Charles Parish's elected district attorney for 33 years, demanded sex acts in exchange for help with their cases or relatives' cases, prosecutors and investigators said at a news conference after the hearing. Harry Morel, a former district attorney for St. Charles Parish, La., arrives at Federal Court in New Orleans, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. Morel Jr. is charged with obstructing a federal investigation. A bill of information filed by prosecutors said he harassed an unidentified witness in a federal grand jury investigation. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) "By title, he was the embodiment of justice," U.S. Attorney Kenneth Polite said. "However, in the darkness of his heart, he was something else entirely a man who perverted his position of power to take sexual advantage of desperate women who needed help. And he did this over and over and over again." St. Charles Parish Sheriff Greg Champagne said Morel "knew who to target and was good at it." "Despicably, at least 20 women seeking ... help during the last two decades on St. Charles Parish discovered that a sexual predator was sitting in the chair of the district attorney," the sheriff said. Morel faces a maximum sentence of three years in prison after his guilty plea to obstruction of justice. His sentencing is set for Aug. 17. His attorney, Ralph Capitelli, said there was no agreed-upon sentence. Polite said his predecessor had decided against prosecuting Morel because of a number of legal problems, including whether they could prove explicit demands for sex in exchange for help from his office. But he said he decided the case "called for justice" once he heard the facts. In the end, prosecutors did not charge Morel with any sexual crimes. Polite, speaking after the court hearing, said justice is a slow and "often imperfect process" and cited the statute of limitations as one reason prosecutors did not pursue the more serious sexual offenses. Morel, 73, declined to comment after the hearing, but his attorney said officials' comments describing Morel as a sexual predator were a smear tactic to influence sentencing. Polite said FBI agents and St. Charles Parish sheriff's deputies found other witnesses to support statements by a key witness, now deceased, who put herself and her family at risk and "was unfairly maligned." A court filing Wednesday refers to that witness only as "Individual A," but Polite and the woman's mother identified her as Danelle Keim, who died of a drug overdose at age 27 on Feb. 9, 2013. The filing says Morel engaged in "inappropriate behavior" with the woman at her home after her arrest in St. Charles Parish on a drunken driving charge in March 2010. The filing doesn't elaborate on the nature of Morel's behavior but says he discussed the possibility of dropping the charge against her. The woman called 911 after Morel left her home, the document adds. Wednesday's court filing says Keim agreed to record conversations with Morel for the FBI after he agreed to assist her with new theft and drunken driving charges. Keim's mother, Tammy Glover, said her daughter cooperated with the FBI for more than a year. "She went undercover with the FBI and exposed him," Glover said in a telephone interview. "If it would not have been for my daughter, who is my hero, (Morel) would have never been exposed. I am amazed at what she did and so very proud of her. She will never be forgotten for her bravery in bringing down Mr. Morel." Jeff Sallet, special agent in charge of the FBI office in New Orleans, said Keim "should be singled out for her tremendous bravery and resolve during the course of this investigation." The FBI also videotaped a July 2012 meeting between Morel and Keim at her home. Morel brought two bottles of wine and again attempted to engage in "inappropriate behavior," the filing said. In 2011, a boyfriend of Keim took photographs of meetings between her and Morel in a courthouse parking lot and at a satellite office for the district attorney's office. Morel instructed Keim to destroy photographic evidence of the meetings, knowing that federal authorities wanted it, Wednesday's court filing says. "You shoulda got rid of it a long time ago," Morel told her during a 2012 meeting, according to the filing. The filing says Morel solicited sex from other defendants or relatives of defendants between 2007 and 2009, offering them favorable treatment from his office. But the document doesn't provide any details of those allegations. Morel, who is free on $50,000 bond pending sentencing, served as district attorney from 1979 to 2012. After opting not to seek re-election, Morel served as an assistant prosecutor under his successor for several months before retiring amid the FBI investigation. The Mississippi River bisects St. Charles Parish, which is about 20 miles west of New Orleans and has roughly 50,000 residents. ___ Associated Press writer Kevin McGill contributed to this story. Harry Morel, a former district attorney for St. Charles Parish, La., arrives with his attorney Ralph Capitelli, right, at Federal Court in New Orleans, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. Morel is charged with obstructing a federal investigation. A bill of information filed by prosecutors said he harassed an unidentified witness in a federal grand jury investigation. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) Harry Morel, a former district attorney for St. Charles Parish, La., arrives with his attorney Ralph Capitelli, right, at Federal Court in New Orleans, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. Morel is charged with obstructing a federal investigation. A bill of information filed by prosecutors said he harassed an unidentified witness in a federal grand jury investigation. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) A timeline of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan FLINT, Mich. (AP) A look at some of the key events in the development of the Flint water crisis: ___ APRIL 2014: In an effort to save money, Flint begins drawing its water from the Flint River instead of relying on water from Detroit. The move is considered temporary while the city waits to connect to a new regional water system. Residents immediately complain about the smell, taste and appearance of the water, and raise health concerns, reporting rashes, hair loss and other problems. In this April 16, 2016 photo, Mona Stonefish stands by the Flint River before a Native American water ceremony and unity gathering on the University of Michigan- Flint campus in Flint, Mich. The event was organized by multiple tribes, organizations and people from Michigan and Canada. (Conor Ralph/The Flint Journal-MLive.com via AP) LOCAL TELEVISION OUT; LOCAL INTERNET OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT OCTOBER 2014: A General Motors engine plant stops using Flint water, saying it rusts parts. JANUARY 2015: Detroit offers to reconnect Flint to its water system, but Flint leaders insist the water is safe. MARCH: Flint promises to spend $2.24 million on immediate improvements to its water supply. Later in the month, city officials say water quality has improved and meets all state and federal standards for safety. SEPT. 24: A group of doctors urges Flint to stop using the Flint River for water after finding high levels of lead in the blood of children. State regulators insist the water is safe. SEPT. 29: Gov. Rick Snyder pledges to take action in response to the lead levels the first acknowledgment by the state that lead is a problem. OCTOBER: Snyder announces that the state will spend $1 million to buy water filters and test water in Flint public schools, and days later calls for Flint to go back to using water from Detroit's system. OCT. 15: The Michigan Legislature and Snyder approve nearly $9.4 million in aid to Flint, including $6 million to help switch its drinking water back to Detroit. NOV. 3: Voters elect newcomer Karen Weaver over the incumbent. DEC. 29: Snyder accepts the resignation of Department of Environmental Quality Director Dan Wyant and apologizes for what occurred in Flint. JAN. 5, 2016: Snyder declares a state of emergency in Flint, the same day federal officials confirm that they are investigating. A week later, the Michigan National Guard begins helping distribute bottled water and filters, while Snyder asks the federal government for help. JAN. 13: Michigan health officials report an increase in Legionnaires' disease cases some fatal over the past two years in the county that includes Flint. JAN. 14: Snyder asks the Obama administration for major disaster declaration and more federal aid. The White House provides federal aid and an emergency declaration on Jan. 16, but not the disaster declaration. JAN. 15: Michigan attorney general Bill Schuette begins an "independent review" into the Flint crisis. JAN. 20: Snyder releases more than 270 pages of emails about the Flint water crisis that show debate over who is to blame and offer insight into the state's response the first batch of several that are rolled out in the coming months. FEBRUARY: Several lawsuits are filed over the lead-tainted water crisis, including some that name Gov. Rick Snyder and public employees. MID-MARCH: Snyder, the state-appointed emergency manager who oversaw Flint when the water source was switched to the river and other state officials testify in front of Congress. MARCH 23: A governor-appointed panel concludes that the state of Michigan is "fundamentally accountable" for the crisis because of decisions made by environmental regulators. APRIL 20: Two state officials and a local official are charged with evidence tampering and other crimes in the Michigan attorney general's investigation the first to be levied in a probe expected to expand. ___ This story has been corrected to show that two state officials and local official, not three state officials, were charged April 20. United flight delayed in NY when passenger utters 'bomb' ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) A United Airlines flight has been delayed at a New York airport after a male passenger uttered the word "bomb." Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple says another passenger alerted the flight crew at Albany International Airport, and the man was taken into custody Wednesday morning. The pilot requested a search of the aircraft, which was bound for Newark, New Jersey. All passengers were evacuated and everything was unloaded from the plane while K-9 units searched it. No bomb was found. The flight was allowed to take off after the delay. Funeral being held for firefighter fatally shot in Maryland HOLLYWOOD, Md. (AP) A funeral is being held for a firefighter who was fatally shot while responding to a call for help at a home in a Maryland suburb of Washington. The funeral for firefighter John Ulmschneider is being held Wednesday at St. John's Catholic Parish in Hollywood, Maryland. A private family burial will follow. Ulmschneider was killed Friday when firefighters went to a Temple Hills home after the brother of the man who lived there told authorities he was concerned about the man. When the firefighters arrived, the person inside was unresponsive, so they decided to force entry. As that was happening, the person inside fired several rounds. Another firefighter, Kevin Swain, and the resident of the home's brother were injured in the shooting. Timeline of EU's legal battle with Google BRUSSELS (AP) As the European Union charges Google with rigging the global market for mobile apps, here is a look at the key dates in its legal tussle with the technology company. ___ November 2010 - The EU opens formal inquiry into whether Google manipulates search results in a way that favors its own business. The probe includes whether the search results favor Google's services, such as its price comparison business, how it displays the contents of rivals, and how it manages ads. April 2013 - Google offers change to its practice in the hope of ending the investigation. July-December 2013 - After feedback from complainants, the EU twice rejects Google's offer to change its search results as not good enough. Feb 2014 - The EU and Google reach a tentative agreement on how to fix the search results. This keeps Google from paying a fine. May 2014 - In a separate case, the European Court of Justice rules that Google must consider EU citizens' requests to remove irrelevant or embarrassing personal information that pops up on a search of their names. Sept 2014 - After receiving complaints from Google's competitors, the EU appears to make a U-turn on its settlement with Google on search results, declaring it insufficient. April 2015 - After five years of investigations and talks, EU formally charges Google with abusing its dominant position in search results, a step up in the legal battle. It also opens a preliminary investigation into whether Google uses its Android mobile operating system to rig the market for apps. Romania moves to end opera turmoil with new manager BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) Romania's culture minister said Wednesday he would appoint a manager of "international standing" at the Romanian Opera, which has been torn apart by a bitter dispute involving international ballerina Alina Cojocaru. Culture Minister Vlad Alexandrescu says the opera house has been riddled by "imbalances and structural dysfunctionality," and that an interim manager would implement a three-month plan before the new appointment. Alexandrescu announced Cojocaru, a principal dancer at the English National Ballet, would be reinstated after refusing to dance the lead in "Manon." FILE - In this file photo dated Sunday Sept. 23, 2007, Ballet dancers Julio Bocca, right, and Alina Cojocaru perform Swan Lake in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Sunday Sept. 23, 2007. Romania Opera house artistic director Johan Kobborg, of Denmark, has resigned, and it is announced Thursday April 14, 2016, that Romania's Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos intends to help find a solution to a bitter dispute raging at the Romanian Opera. Ciolos decided to step in to the dispute after his meeting with internationally renowned ballerina Alina Cojocaru who says she won't dance Manon this weekend and claims there is an atmosphere of "fear and intimidation." (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko, FILE) Cojocaru had claimed there was an atmosphere of "fear and intimidation." Danish ballet dancer and choreographer Johan Kobborg, who recently resigned citing pressure from managers, would also be reinstated, Alexandresc said. Under the previous management, a dispute erupted with some employees shouting "Out with foreigners!" claiming Kobborg was overpaid. After Alexandrescu's announcement Wednesday, fresh protests broke out at the opera. Artists said they would no longer go on stage and demanded the minister's resignation. Wildfires burning thousands of acres in North Carolina WILMINGTON, N.C. (AP) Firefighters are working to contain wildfires that have burned nearly 12,000 acres across North Carolina. There were no reports of injuries or buildings damaged. A shelter for people in the fire area was opened. The biggest fire has burned about 9,600 acres in the Alligator River Wildlife National Refuge in northeastern North Carolina. It started Monday as about a 60-acre fire in Hyde County that closed a section of U.S. 264 and spread into Dare County. Media outlets report about 1,400 acres of woods in Brunswick County near Wilmington have burned. New vistas open up at small businesses that use drones NEW YORK (AP) That drone flying around a suburban house might not belong to a wannabe pilot it may be a tool that's become indispensable for a small business. Many small companies have either built their business around drones or use them to do tasks they previously accomplished by regular planes and helicopters. The unmanned aircraft also take the place of humans who might use scaffolding or navigate difficult terrain to get a close look at a structure or damage from a disaster. Drones, whose prices range from under $100 into the thousands of dollars, can be cheaper, faster and safer ways to make inspections and take photos and videos. Mark Stoner's chimney repair company uses them to assess the work a potential customer needs without rigging a scaffold or having a worker climb onto a sharply-angled roof. In this Thursday, April 14, 2016, photo, DroneLinx CEO Steve Metzman operates a drone to make videos and still images of an apartment building, in Philadelphia. DroneLinx, a service based in New York, takes shots of cellphone towers, bridges, oil rigs and utility lines that are difficult to get careful inspections of, Metzman says. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) "We started using them in dangerous or difficult situations where you can't get a person very easily," says Stoner, co-founder of SirVent in Nashville, Tennessee. Cameras on the company's three drones can show cracks or other damage and peer inside a chimney. The drones are controlled by a smartphone or a tablet computer. "It's just like playing a video game. They're very easy to fly around," Stoner says. TRENDING NOW The Federal Aviation Administration has issued more than 5,000 exemptions, or permits, for commercial drone use since it began regulating non-recreational use of drones in September 2014. Companies must file petitions with the FAA to be allowed to use drones, or as the agency calls them, unmanned aircraft systems. Large companies also use drones in the course of their work Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos has said he hopes to deliver packages using drones. But because drones have only started getting notice the past few years, they're still something of a novelty. Companies can tout their ability to use drones in advertising or when bidding on projects. Meares Auction Group, which auctions real estate and other property, has posted videos of properties shot by drones on its website, including one that had sweeping vistas of a house and its grounds and gave viewers a sense of what it would be like to go up the property's long driveway. "Drones are the flavor of the month now," says Darron Meares, CEO of the Pelzer, South Carolina-based company. Companies attracted to drones' versatility and in many cases their ability to help cut costs are getting creative about how to use them, says Regenia Sanders, a management consultant with SSA & Co. in New York. For example, using drones in a warehouse to check on inventory may allow a company to cut its labor costs. But many companies also may not know yet if a drone makes economic sense, she says. "People are just trying to look at possibilities for how drones can be used, and then think about the cost part," she says. GOING WHERE PEOPLE CAN'T For some companies, just being able to do their work more easily is reason enough to use drones. For example, they come in handy when toxic spills from rail cars or pipelines occur in hard-to-reach areas and thousands of gallons of leaked chemicals or fuel prevent crews from assessing the damage and starting a cleanup. "We've had several of those where they don't allow anyone in because of health and safety issues," says Bryan Martin, emergency response director at Superior Environmental Solutions, a Cincinnati-based company with offices in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Michigan that cleans up spills. Superior began using a drone three years ago, equipping it with high-definition cameras that show the extent of the spills and equipment that measures air quality. The drones send that data wirelessly to Martin's teams so they can determine whether it's safe to start approaching a site. "Usually they have to go by vehicle and find access points or get a helicopter, but we can just send a drone," he says. The drone also helps officials determine whether the area around a spill must be evacuated, he says. A company that owns a drone is more nimble because it doesn't have to rely on private plane or helicopter services, says Brian Webster, executive vice president with KWA Construction in Addison, Texas. "You have to work with their schedule," Webster says. With its own drone, his company can take as many pictures of its projects as it wants and whenever it wants. BETTER AND CHEAPER PHOTOS AND VIDEO. C.L. Burks Commercial Roofing uses a drone for progress reports to owners and managers of the buildings it works on, including high-rises and shopping centers. "In the past, we used a company with a plane and a camera, and that gets pretty expensive," says Jut Carnes, a vice president of the Alpharetta, Georgia-based company. Burks was working on nine projects throughout the Southeast and Puerto Rico, and it would have been too costly to shoot video to all its clients at once without a drone. It costs $500 to shoot photos of one building from a plane. Cameras on drones take more than photos or video. Rotor Air Cam, a Plainview, New York, based drone operator, uses equipment that help create topographical maps and 3D models of terrain, co-owner David Sanders says. The company, whose clients include oil and gas producers and other industrial companies, is also exploring the use of equipment that can detect gas leaks around oil wells. Some companies have been launched purely to fly drones for a variety of customers who want aerial photos or videos but don't want or need their own aircraft. DroneLinx, a service based in New York, takes shots of cellphone towers, bridges, oil rigs and utility lines that are difficult to get careful inspections of, CEO Steve Metzman says. His company's surveying services start at $2,500. Metzman, a commercial helicopter pilot as well as a registered drone operator, also has local law enforcement agencies for clients. "They're using drones to get immediate aerial views on crime scenes," he says. But some companies find drones don't do better than full-size aircraft. Hahn Estate, a vineyard in Soledad, California, has experimented with using drones to check on the progress of the grape crops rather than the planes it has used for years. With 1,100 acres to cover, it looks like a drone is too small and takes too long to survey all the vines. "A regular plane can cover so much more ground and do it more efficiently," says Andy Mitchell, a winemaker with Hahn. _____ Online: www.faa.gov _____ Follow Joyce Rosenberg at www.twitter.com/JoyceMRosenberg . Her work can be found here: http://bigstory.ap.org/content/joyce-m-rosenberg 23 dogs rescued at border will be offered for adoption SAN DIEGO (AP) Authorities say a smuggling suspect was arrested after 23 dogs including 20 puppies packed in a nearly airless crate were seized from an SUV at the U.S.-Mexico border. The San Diego Union-Tribune reports (http://lat.ms/20Xfbbu ) the driver told officials at the San Ysidro border crossing on Saturday that he had picked up the dogs in Tijuana and was bound for Los Angeles. He said he had not given them water for more than five hours. All the animals are expected to recover. The dogs including Labradors, shepherds, hounds, terriers and Chihuahuas will be offered for adoption. The suspect, who was not named, could face multiple counts of animal cruelty. ___ The Latest: 2 of 3 people plead not guilty in Flint crisis FLINT, Mich. (AP) The Latest on the lead-tainted water crisis in Flint, Michigan (all times local): 5:25 p.m. Two state employees charged with crimes in the Flint water debacle have pleaded not guilty. Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette addresses the media, Wednesday, April 20, 2016, in Flint, Mich. Months after officials conceded that a series of bad decisions had caused a disaster, charges were filed against a pair of state Department of Environmental Quality employees and a local water treatment supervisor and stem from an investigation by the office of the attorney general. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio) Stephen Busch and Michael Prysby appeared in court Wednesday on several charges, including conspiracy and misconduct in office. They've been suspended without pay at the Department of Environmental Quality. Lawyers for the pair didn't immediately return phone messages seeking comment. Busch and Prysby were released on bond. Flint utilities administrator Michael Glasgow is also charged and has been placed on leave. The three are accused of failing to do their duty to provide safe drinking water. Flint used the Flint River for 18 months but didn't treat the water to reduce corrosion. As a result, lead leached from old plumbing as water moved through the system. ___ 4 p.m. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder says two state employees facing criminal charges in connection with Flint's lead-tainted water crisis have been suspended without pay. The governor says Wednesday that the suspensions were triggered once Stephen Busch and Michael Prysby were charged. Busch had been on paid leave under civil service rules. Snyder says his administration will review whether the state should pay for the defendants' representation in the criminal case and civil lawsuits once a state police investigation is complete. State Attorney General Bill Schuette (SHOOT'-ee) charged Busch and Prysby, who both work at the state Department of Environmental Quality, with several things, including misdemeanor violations of Michigan's safe drinking water law. Flint utilities administrator Michael Glasgow is charged with tampering with evidence for changing lead water-testing results and willful neglect of duty as a public servant. Glasgow is on administrative leave, according to Flint's mayor, but it wasn't clear whether it was paid or unpaid. ___ 3:40 p.m. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder says charges against two state employees and a Flint utility worker in connection with the city's lead-tainted water crisis are "deeply troubling." Snyder says Wednesday that if the accusations are true it would take the issue "to a whole new level." State Attorney General Bill Schuette (SHOOT'-ee) charged Stephen Busch and Michael Prysby, who both work at the state Department of Environmental Quality, with several things, including misdemeanor violations of Michigan's safe drinking water law. Flint utilities administrator Michael Glasgow is charged with tampering with evidence for changing lead water-testing results and willful neglect of duty as a public servant. Flint used water from the Flint River for 18 months but it wasn't treated to reduce corrosion. As a result, lead leached from old plumbing. ___ 3:20 p.m. Michigan lawmakers have taken a step toward directing another $144 million to Flint's water crisis, including $25 million to replace thousands of underground lead pipes. The Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday approved the fourth round of emergency spending requested by Gov. Rick Snyder. More than $67 million has been authorized already. The additional money would help the beleaguered city stay on Detroit's water system until switching to a regional pipeline and cover costs like intervention services for children with developmental delays associated with lead exposure. Flint remains under a state of emergency. Residents are using filters and bottled water until pipes are effectively recoated with a protective layer formed by anti-corrosion chemicals. The budget measure next will be considered by the full Senate and, if it wins approval, then the House. This item has been corrected to show that a committee approved $144 million for Flint, not $126 million. ___ 2:40 p.m. Michigan Attorney Bill Schuette (SHOOT'-ee) says "no one is off the table" in his investigation of the Flint water crisis. Schuette was asked more than once whether Gov. Rick Snyder, a fellow Republican, was being investigated. He said there is "no target and no one is off the table." Schuette held a news conference Wednesday after charging two state employees and a Flint utility worker with felonies and misdemeanors. Snyder says he'll comment later Wednesday. Flint used water from the Flint River for 18 months but it wasn't treated to reduce corrosion. As a result, lead leached from old plumbing, contaminating the water. Snyder has said his environmental regulators failed miserably. He insists he didn't know about dire lead problems until last fall. ___ 1:20 p.m. Michigan's attorney general says two state employees and a Flint utility worker charged in the Flint lead-tainted water crisis "failed Michigan families." An investigation led by the office of Bill Schuette (SHOOT'-ee) began in January. Two state employees and a Flint utility worker were charged Wednesday with several crimes. Schuette also said at a news conference Wednesday that he'd "guarantee" there will be more charges. For nearly 18 months after Flint's water source was switched while the city was under state financial management, residents drank and bathed with improperly treated water that coursed through aging pipes and fixtures, releasing toxic lead. Blood tests have revealed high lead levels in children. ___ 11:55 a.m. Two state employees facing charges related to the Flint water crisis are accused of refusing to order chemical treatment that could have prevented the release of lead in old plumbing. The charges filed Wednesday against Stephen Busch and Michael Prysby, who work at the state Department of Environmental Quality, include misdemeanor violations of Michigan's safe drinking water law. Corrosion control wasn't added to water from the Flint River while the city used it for 18 months. That lack of treatment caused lead to leach from pipes as water flowed into homes and businesses. Busch and Prysby also face felony charges. While under state management, Flint switched water sources to save money while it awaited construction of a new pipeline to Lake Huron. Blood tests have revealed high lead levels in children. ___ 11:05 a.m. Two state regulators and a Flint employee are charged with evidence tampering and several other felony and misdemeanor counts related to the Michigan city's lead-tainted water crisis. The charges, filed Wednesday in a state court, stem from an investigation by the Michigan attorney general's office. Michael Prysby, a district engineer for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, and Stephen Busch, who is a supervisor with the DEQ's Office of Drinking Water, are both charged with misconduct in office, conspiracy to tamper with evidence, tampering with evidence and violations of water treatment and monitoring laws. Flint utilities administrator Michael Glasgow is charged with tampering with evidence for changing lead water-testing results and willful neglect of duty as a public servant. For nearly 18 months after Flint's water source was switched while the city was under state financial management, residents drank and bathed with improperly treated water that coursed through aging pipes and fixtures, releasing toxic lead. ___ 2:30 a.m. Michigan's attorney general is set to announce criminal charges against two state regulators and a Flint employee, alleging wrongdoing related to the city's lead-tainted water crisis, according to two government officials familiar with the investigation. The charges will be filed Wednesday against a pair of state Department of Environmental Quality officials and a local water treatment plant supervisor, the officials told The Associated Press late Tuesday. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the investigation publicly. The charges would be the first levied in a probe that's expected to broaden. A spokesman for Attorney General Bill Schuette's office declined comment Tuesday night. Schuette and other investigators have scheduled a news conference Wednesday afternoon to make a "significant" announcement in the investigation. Polish baby born from mother on life support is doing fine WARSAW, Poland (AP) Hospital authorities in southwestern Poland said Wednesday that a baby born two months after his mother was put on life support is home and doing fine. In a rare case, doctors at Wroclaw's University Clinic kept a pregnant woman on life support for 55 days to allow her 17-week fetus to grow until it could be born. Professor Andrzej Kuebler, an anesthesiologist, said it was the youngest pregnancy ever that he is aware of that has been saved in a brain-dead mother. The 41-year-old woman had a brain tumor that she did not want to have removed due to the risks attached, and that eventually caused terminal brain damage. She was brought to the clinic in November, unconscious, with no brain activity and was put on life support because of the pregnancy. She was pronounced dead when life support was turned off after the birth. The boy, born in the 26th week by Caesarean section, weighed 1 kilogram, or 2 pounds, 2 ounces. He was put under intensive care and spent three months in an incubator. Turkey faces uphill battle to meet EU visa conditions BRUSSELS (AP) Turkey faces an uphill battle to secure visa-free travel in Europe for its citizens before July, with just two weeks to go to meet a number of conditions set by the European Union. Ankara must reduce a backlog of asylum applications, grant all refugees access to its labor market, upgrade its visa regime to make it harder for people from countries with "a high migratory risk" to enter, and bring its data protection laws into line with EU standards, among other requirements, all by May 4. The visa-waiver is part of a package of incentives the EU is offering Turkey to stop migrants piling into boats and making the dangerous voyage to Europe in search of sanctuary or jobs. The EU would also provide up to 6 billion euros ($6.8 billion) for Syrian refugees in Turkey and fast-track Ankara's EU membership talks. European Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship Dimitris Avramopoulos, left, talks with European Commissioner for Environment, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Karmenu Vella during the weekly meeting of commissioners at EU Commission headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday April 20, 2016. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert) Turkey's leaders are warning that the whole migrant deal will collapse if the EU fails to allow Turkish citizens visa-free short stays for travel or business purposes. "If the European Union does not take the steps it needs to take, if it does not fulfill its pledges, then Turkey won't implement this agreement," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said earlier this month. But the bloc's executive European Commission insists the ball is in Ankara's court, even though Europe is desperate for Turkey to help stem the flow of migrants. EU migration commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos said Wednesday that there could be "no visa liberalization if not all benchmarks are met." He said Turkey has been making good progress, but suggested that even this pace might not be quick enough. "If we continue working like this most of the benchmarks will be met," Avramopoulos said. "Every minute counts," he said. "We do not have much time in front of us." Police ID 2 killed in Maryland small plane crash STEVENSVILLE, Md. (AP) Police are identifying two people killed when a small plane crashed on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Maryland State Police said in a news release Wednesday that two Ellicott City residents, 63-year-old Richard Hess and his friend, 56-year-old Janet Metz, were killed in the crash near Bay Bridge Airport on Tuesday afternoon. Police say Hess was piloting the Van's Aircraft RV-12 when it crashed in an open field in Stevensville and burst into flames. According to the company's website, the plane is a two-seater that can be built from a kit or in a factory. 3rd sewage line breaks in Memphis, spills waste into river MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) Workers are making emergency repairs to a broken sewer line that's spewing about 1 million gallons of wastewater per day into a Mississippi River tributary in Memphis, an official said Wednesday. This is the third sewage spill in Memphis in the past three weeks. The break in the 42-inch sewer line was discovered Sunday by a resident who was at the Loosahatchie River and confirmed Monday by a city inspector, Public Works Division Director Robert Knecht told reporters at a news conference. Knecht says the pipe ruptured when nearby soil eroded and gave way due to heavy rains. Public drinking water is not affected, Knecht said. Officials are warning residents to avoid contact with the Loosahatchie, which flows into the Mississippi River. Crews are hoping to stop the leak within two days, Knecht said. Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation officials were headed to the leak site Wednesday to take samples of the river for water quality testing, department spokeswoman Kelly Brockman said. A 96-inch pipe collapsed March 31, sending 50 million gallons of sewage per day into Cypress Creek and adjoining McKellar Lake, which also flows into the Mississippi River. The spill caused a major fish kill and led to high levels of E.coli in both bodies of water. Knecht said record rainfall amounts in March caused the soil to erode and an embankment to fail, similar to the most recent leak. The March 31 leak was stopped a week after it was reported. A second, much smaller leak was discovered while crews were working to fix that leak. The pipe that is spilling water into the Loosahatchie was inspected in November, and no problems were found, Knecht said. The city inspects sewer lines twice a year, Knecht said, but he added that that his department is working on a "serious inspection regimen" to determine the condition of main sewer lines in vulnerable areas in the next 30 days. "We have to do a detailed and dedicated assessment and look to identify any other issues that are occurring so that we can address them immediately," Knecht said, adding that the city has 3,200 miles of underground sewer pipes. In 2012, the Department of Justice, the Environmental Protection Agency, TDEC and the state attorney general reached a settlement with Memphis over a complaint filed together with the Tennessee Clean Water Network against the city for alleged violations of the federal Clean Water Act and the Tennessee Water Quality Control Act. The city agreed to make improvements to its sewer systems to eliminate unauthorized overflows of untreated raw sewage, work estimated to cost approximately $250 million. Knecht said the city could face fines due to the spills and the environmental damage they have caused. Scott Banbury, conservation program coordinator for the Sierra Club's Tennessee chapter, said he believes the city is doing a decent job of fixing the problems under the settlement, but the leaks may be a result of years of neglect. Medicare aims to foster critical care talks with doctors Medicare wants more doctors and patients to talk about the tough care decisions that must be made if a person becomes seriously ill or incapacitated. The federal entity, which covers health care for people over age 65, has started reimbursing doctors for having face-to-face, advance care planning discussions about a patient's treatment preferences should they become unable to speak for themselves. Only 17 percent of adults say they have had these discussions with a health care provider, according to the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation. Here's what you need to know. WILL EVERYONE HAVE COVERAGE NOW? That can still depend on the insurer. If you don't have Medicare, check before scheduling an appointment specifically for one of these discussions. If there is no coverage, doctors may cut you a discount to have the talk. A half an hour of a doctor's time could cost you $125 or more, depending on where you live. But don't think a lack of coverage means you can't talk to your doctor. Doctors have been reimbursed for years for discussing treatment options with patients during the course of care or an office visit. Some have done it without reimbursement. By offering reimbursement specifically for this discussion, the government aims to encourage more of these conversations to take place. This might make it easier for more people to have the conversation with their doctors if they are not facing a terminal illness. WHO SHOULD HAVE THIS TALK? The range of patients isn't limited to the elderly or people with a serious condition. These voluntary discussions can be crucial if someone later winds up critically injured from a car accident and unable to communicate. Even healthy younger adults should think about an advance care plan, according to said Dr. Peter Hollmann, chief medical officer of University Medicine in Rhode Island. "The odds of you needing it tomorrow are very, very small, but they're not zero," he said. These discussions can last a half an hour or more and may require another visit. WHAT WILL THESE DISCUSSIONS INVOLVE? There's no set format for how they unfold. Hollmann says they should largely be directed by the patient. The conversation may involve how you would want to be treated if you have a terminal illness. That could include exploring whether you would want a ventilator or CPR performed in certain situations. It also could include talking about nutrition and whether you want treatment that's focused on comfort or prolonging your life. Your doctor will probably want to discuss who you have chosen to act as your health care representative in case you become incapacitated and need someone to make decisions based on your wishes. Think carefully about the spouse, family member or close friend you select for this role and make sure they know your wishes. ARE THESE THE DISCUSSIONS THAT STIRRED CONERN THAT THEY WOULD LEAD TO FEDERAL 'DEATH PANELS'? Yes. More than six years ago, a provision for Medicare to cover this sort of counseling, which includes discussing end-of-life care, touched off an uproar that threatened President Obama's still-developing health care overhaul. Former Alaska Republican Gov. Sarah Palin's accusation that voluntary counseling could lead to government-sponsored "death panels" dictating the fate of frail elders was widely discredited. But the counseling still stirs concern among some right-to-life advocates that it could be used to nudge patients into forgoing life-saving treatment and cannot be adequately monitored for bias. WHAT SHOULD I DO AFTER TALKING TO MY PHYSICIAN? Write an advance directive. This documents in your own words instructions about future medical care. That means you won't have to depend on your doctor being present in an emergency and having notes from your discussion. Advance directives don't expire, so patients don't have to worry about writing one too soon. But people should periodically review them to make sure they still reflect their wishes, said John Mastrojohn III, executive vice president with the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization. "They basically remain in effect until you change it," he said. These are legal documents, and their form can vary by state. You won't need a lawyer to complete one, but you may need a witness or notary to sign it. Home sweet home? Trump's lone defeat in NY was in Manhattan NEW YORK (AP) Donald Trump celebrated his overwhelming home-state primary victory in the glitzy Manhattan skyscraper that bears his name, he strode onstage to tune of "New York, New York," and the Empire State Building even marked the moment by lighting its spire in shimmering Republican red. All of which masked an undeniably embarrassing fact for the GOP front-runner: The one county he lost in the state was his home borough of Manhattan. Trump's 45 percent to 42 percent loss to John Kasich on the island stood in contrast to his dominance across the rest of the state, where he won 61 of 62 counties and regained momentum in the Republican race after a stinging loss in Wisconsin earlier this month. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures as he arrives to speak at a New York primary night campaign event, Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in New York. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson) The celebrity businessman didn't mention the Manhattan setback in his speech Tuesday night at Trump Tower, saying it was rewarding to be given such a massive victory by "the people who know me best." "We've been all over New York state," he said. "The people of this state truly are great and amazing people." Trump, who made defending "New York values" the centerpiece of his campaign, racked up massive margins in the city's other four boroughs, including posting more than 80 percent of the vote on the GOP stronghold of Staten Island. But the loss in Manhattan highlighted a weakness Trump has shown among the more moderate, business-class "Rockefeller Republicans" who often populate big cities and their suburbs. He lost to Marco Rubio in Washington, D.C., while Kasich recorded wins in the affluent areas around Chicago. A Trump campaign spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday. The Manhattan results also highlighted the massive disparity between Republican and Democratic voters in the state and city. Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1 in the state and 10-to-1 in Manhattan. Kasich's victory in the borough came out of a total of 24,887 Republican votes cast, compared to 267,723 total Democratic votes in the borough. The night's other winner, Hillary Clinton, did not suffer a similar hometown defeat. Clinton, who cruised to victory in the Democratic primary, represented New York for eight years in the Senate and keeps a home in Westchester County, just north of New York City. She defeated rival Bernie Sanders 67 percent to 33 percent in Westchester, according to unofficial and incomplete rivals. She also triumphed in Brooklyn, where both Democrats have ties: Sanders was born in the borough, while Clinton headquartered her national campaign there. ___ Contact Jonathan Lemire on Twitter at http://twitter.com/@JonLemire Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a New York primary night campaign event Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in New York. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson) The Latest: Man accused in $200M fraud wants assets unfrozen NEWPORT, Vt. (AP) The Latest in the fraud claims against two developers in Vermont (all times local): 11:30 a.m. A Miami businessmen accused in what the Securities and Exchange Commission calls a "massive eight-year fraud scheme" involving developments in an economically-depressed area of northern Vermont is seeking to have his assets unfrozen. This April 18, 2006 photo shows a razed block in downtown Newport, Vt. Sweeping plans for development in an economically depressed area of northern Vermont brought the promise of jobs to a region that has some of the highest unemployment rates in the state. But new allegations that Bill Stenger, president of Jay Peak ski resort, and his partner Ariel Quiros, owner of Jay Peak, misused more than $200 million in foreign investors' money in Ponzi-like fashion has brought some of the development to a halt. (AP Photo/Lisa Rathke) Lawyers for Ariel Quiros filed a motion in federal court in Florida on Tuesday saying the SEC's order to freeze his assets is overbearing and deprives him of any ability to feed his family or defend himself legally. Quiros' lawyers also said the SEC's case is premised on an incorrect argument that Quiros and his affiliates were only entitled to receive a limited amount of investor funds from each of the limited partnerships. Quiros, the owner of Jay Peak ski resort, and Bill Stenger, president of the resort, are accused of misusing more than $200 million and "systematically looting" more than $50 million raised from hundreds of foreign investors through a special visa program. ____ 2:30 a.m. Sweeping development plans for a remote area of northern Vermont brought the promise of jobs to a region that has some of the highest unemployment rates in the state. But new allegations that two prominent businessmen behind the plans misused more than $200 million raised from foreign investors have brought some of the development to a halt. They've also left state officials feeling betrayed after enthusiastically promoting the projects. The plans were to include a biomedical research plant, a hotel and conference center, an airport runway extension, and big upgrades at two ski areas. Some of the work is completed, but Gov. Peter Shumlin has acknowledged that the bioresearch plant and a downtown redevelopment probably won't happen. The bio-tech plant was to create 450 jobs. This April 18, 2016 photo shows Jay Peak Resort. Sweeping plans for development in an economically depressed area of northern Vermont brought the promise of jobs to a region that has some of the highest unemployment rates in the state. But new allegations that Bill Stenger, president of Jay Peak ski resort, and his partner Ariel Quiros, owner of Jay Peak, misused more than $200 million in foreign investors' money in Ponzi-like fashion has brought some of the development to a halt and left state officials saying theyve been betrayed. (AP Photo/Lisa Rathke) BYU students investigated by school after reporting rape PROVO, Utah (AP) Madeline MacDonald says she was an 18-year-old freshman at Brigham Young University when she was sexually assaulted by a man she met on an online dating site. She reported the crime to the school's Title IX office. That same day, she says, BYU's honor code office received a copy of the report, triggering an investigation into whether MacDonald had violated the Mormon school's strict code of behavior, which bans premarital sex and drinking, among other things. Now MacDonald is among many students and others, including a Utah prosecutor, who are questioning BYU's practice of investigating accusers, saying it could discourage women from reporting sexual violence and hinder criminal cases. Protesters stand in solidarity with rape victims on the campus of Brigham Young University during a sexual assault awareness demonstration Wednesday, April 20, 2016, in Provo, Utah. BYU students who say they were sexually assaulted are finding themselves under investigation for possible violations of the Mormon school's honor code against sex and drinking. BYU says it will re-evaluate the practice. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer) Some have started an online petition drive calling on the university to give victims immunity from honor code violations committed in the lead-up to a sexual assault. This week, BYU announced that in light of such concerns, the school will re-evaluate the practice and consider changes. "I hope we have a system that people feel they can trust, particularly again the victims of sexual assault," BYU President Kevin Worthen said in a video released Wednesday. "And that we have one that creates an environment in which we minimize the number of sexual assaults on campus." BYU would not say how many students who complained of sexual violence have been investigated by the honor code office or whether any of them have been punished. In MacDonald's case, she said BYU eventually called to tell her she hadn't violated the code. But she said she was made to feel guilty by the university. "For those two weeks, I wasn't sure if they were going to decide to kick me out or what they were going to do," she said. Two years later, no arrest has have been made in the assault case. All BYU students must agree to abide by the honor code. Created by students in 1949, it prohibits such things as "sexual misconduct," ''obscene or indecent conduct or expressions" and "involvement with pornographic, erotic, indecent or offensive material." Violators can be expelled or otherwise punished. Mary Koss, a public health professor at the University of Arizona who is an expert on sexual assault, questioned whether BYU is fulfilling its legal duty under federal Title IX to support victims of sexual violence. "The students agreed to be governed by that honor code when they came there," she said. "But they cannot put things in their contract to students that are in violation of federal guidelines on civil rights." Alana Kindness, executive director of the Utah Coalition Against Sexual Assault, warned: "The impact of that practice is that students at BYU who are sexually assaulted will not report that assault." U.S. Education Department spokeswoman Dorie Nolt would not comment directly on BYU. But she said in an email that "schools should consider whether their disciplinary policies have a chilling effect on victims' or other students' reporting of sexual violence offenses." Some U.S. colleges with codes of conduct have an immunity clause under which they investigate and punish only the perpetrator of the more severe offense. On Wednesday, dozens of BYU students, alumni and others gathered at the campus entrance to present petition signatures to BYU's president. Many wore teal bands on their arms and mouths to signify sexual assault awareness and held signs that read "BYU: Protect victims, don't shame them." "There is no honor in this archaic code," said protester Brooke Swallow-Fenton, who added that investigations of accusers have been going on for years at BYU. The petition drive was started last week by Madi Barney, a 20-year-old BYU student who says that she, too, was sexually assaulted and now faces an honor code investigation. Barney said that she was raped in her apartment last September by a man she met at a gym. A suspect was arrested and is awaiting trial. Barney said she has been informed by the university that until the honor code investigation has been completed, she cannot sign up for any more classes after this semester. She has filed a Title IX sex-discrimination complaint against BYU with the Education Department's Office of Civil Rights. The university would not comment on the case, citing federal privacy law. The Associated Press doesn't normally identify possible victims of sex crimes, but Barney said she wants her name to be used so she can help change the policy. Craig Johnson, the Utah County prosecutor assigned to the case, said the criminal investigation is being hindered by BYU's insistence on determining if Barney broke school rules. He said his focus has been pulled away from the case because of worries Barney will move home to California and refuse to take part in hearings and interviews. "How excited is she really going to be to come back to Utah where she was raped and her school kicked her out?" Johnson said. However, Johnson's bosses in the Utah County Attorney's Office said in a statement that BYU has not harmed the case. ___ Follow Hallie Golden at https://twitter.com/HallieGolden4 Protesters stand in solidarity with rape victims on the campus of Brigham Young University during a sexual assault awareness demonstration Wednesday, April 20, 2016, in Provo, Utah. BYU students who say they were sexually assaulted are finding themselves under investigation for possible violations of the Mormon school's honor code against sex and drinking. BYU says it will re-evaluate the practice. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer) A protester stands in solidarity with rape victims on the campus of Brigham Young University during a sexual assault awareness demonstration Wednesday, April 20, 2016, in Provo, Utah. BYU students who say they were sexually assaulted are finding themselves under investigation for possible violations of the Mormon school's honor code against sex and drinking. BYU says it will re-evaluate the practice. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer) Brent Webb Brigham Young University Academic Vice President speaks with protesters who stand in solidarity with rape victims on the campus of Brigham Young University during a sexual assault awareness demonstration Wednesday, April 20, 2016, in Provo, Utah. BYU students who say they were sexually assaulted are finding themselves under investigation for possible violations of the Mormon school's honor code against sex and drinking. BYU says it will re-evaluate the practice. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer) Katie Townsley stands in solidarity with rape victims on the campus of Brigham Young University during a sexual assault awareness demonstration Wednesday, April 20, 2016, in Provo, Utah. BYU students who say they were sexually assaulted are finding themselves under investigation for possible violations of the Mormon school's honor code against sex and drinking. BYU says it will re-evaluate the practice. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer) In this April 19, 2016 photo, Madeline MacDonald poses for a photograph, in Provo, Utah. MacDonald said she reported being sexually assaulted during her freshman year at Brigham Young University. She is among other students who say they have been sexually assaulted and find themselves under investigation for possible violations of the Mormon school's code against sex and drinking. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer) Sister asks for leniency for Boston gangster's girlfriend BOSTON (AP) The twin of a woman who went on the run with gangster James "Whitey" Bulger has asked a judge to be lenient while sentencing her sister on a criminal contempt charge. Catherine Greig (grehg) is already serving an eight-year sentence for helping Bulger avoid capture during his 16 years as a fugitive. Bulger and Greig were captured in California in 2011. Greig pleaded guilty in February to a contempt charge for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating whether others helped Bulger, too. Her twin, Margaret McCusker, wrote to the judge who will sentence Greig on April 28. She says Greig has no prior criminal record, has "not a violent bone in her body" and has already received an "unprecedented" sentence. Woman who saw sister killed by white mob in 1969 has died YORK, Pa. (AP) A black woman who watched a white mob kill her sister during race riots nearly a half-century ago in Pennsylvania and had to wait over 30 years for justice has died. Hattie Dickson died of natural causes Monday at York Hospital, said Lucy Gladfelter, of Gladfelter Funeral Home. She was 70. Long-simmering racial tensions in York erupted in violence in the summer of 1969. FILE - In this Dec. 6, 2005 file photo, family attorney Harold Goodman leaves the York City Hall with Hattie Dickson, center, sister of murder victim Lillie Belle Allen, and Allen's daughter, Debra Grier, after a news conference in York, Pa. Dickson, who watched a white mob kill her sister during race riots nearly a half-century ago in Pennsylvania has died. A funeral home says she died Monday, April 18, 2016 at York Hospital. She was 70. (Bill Kalina/York Dispatch via AP) YORK DAILY RECORD OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT On July 18, 1969, white police officer Henry Schaad was shot and killed. Four days later, Dickson was behind the wheel when a mob of armed white youths confronted her family after their car got stuck at a railroad crossing. Her 27-year-old sister, Lillie Belle Allen, got out of the car to take the wheel from a frightened Dickson, and was gunned down by the mob. Allen was a 27-year-old mother of two from Aiken, South Carolina, and was in York visiting her sister. Her killing went unpunished until prosecutors reopened the case in 1999. Eventually, 10 white men were charged, including York's mayor at the time of prosecution. Two were convicted of second-degree murder, seven others pleaded no contest or guilty to lesser charges, and former York Mayor Charlie Robertson was acquitted. Dickson, her surviving sister and Allen's two children were awarded a $2 million settlement from the city in 2005. It settled the lawsuit Allen's family filed against York and five former police officers. "I thank God we've finally come to closure," Dickson said at the time. Canadian Pacific says railroads will need mergers in future OMAHA, Neb. (AP) The CEO of Canadian Pacific still thinks railroad mergers are needed if the industry is to handle more freight, even after the company's bid for Norfolk Southern crumbled under stiff resistance. Hunter Harrison said he thinks major railroad mergers will happen eventually and that they'll be successful. He says worsening congestion in Chicago, where the major railroads all meet, will force a change. Earlier this month, Canadian Pacific dropped its roughly $30 billion offer to acquire Norfolk Southern Corp. because the deal was opposed by Norfolk Southern executives, politicians and rail customers along the route and other railroads. Harrison said some of the rail customers that opposed Canadian Pacific's attempted buyout told him they didn't oppose mergers but worried about the service problems that followed past railroad deals. That made it hard for Canadian Pacific to argue that it could do better because the proposed merger was being judged on what other railroads had done in the past. The service problems and economic damage that followed railroad mergers in the 1990s are part of why regulators adopted tough rules for major railroad mergers in 2001. Any merger involving a major railroad must enhance competition and serve the public interest. "There's only so much we can do," Harrison said. "It's going to happen. We just have to develop a little patience." Canadian Pacific also said Wednesday that it will increase its dividend to 50 cents, from 35 cents. And it plans to repurchase up to 5 percent of its stock, or about 6.9 million shares. Keith Creel, president and chief operating officer, said the Calgary, Alberta, based railroad is preparing for Harrison's retirement next year. Creel said the railroad plans to consolidate its three operating regions into two as part of its planning for the transition, but he didn't expect significant savings from that. Former auto parts executive pleads guilty to price fixing COVINGTON, Ky. (AP) A former automotive parts executive has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for conspiring to fix prices and rig bids for the sale of sealing products to automakers. Keiji Kyomoto pleaded guilty Wednesday in a federal court in Kentucky to a single-count indictment charging him with bid rigging and price fixing. Kyomoto was indicted last October in the conspiracy involving body sealing products sold to Honda Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. The Justice Department says the products included body-side opening seals, door-side weather stripping and trunk lids. Kyomoto is a former executive of an automotive body sealing products supplier based in Hiroshima, Japan, and former president of its U.S. joint venture. GOP Graham says next year for filling Supreme Court vacancy WASHINGTON (AP) Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee is honest and capable, but the next president should fill the vacancy. The South Carolina senator met Judge Merrick Garland on Wednesday and issued a video statement following the session. Graham said Garland's reputation is "beyond reproach." Graham said he told Garland that the vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February should be filled by the next president because the country is well into the presidential nominating process. The senator said the voters should have a say about who should be next justice. Former US Rep. Mel Reynolds taken into custody in Chicago CHICAGO (AP) A federal judge in Chicago ordered former U.S. Rep. Mel Reynolds taken into custody at a hearing on Wednesday after finding Reynolds' proposed place of residence while on bail in a tax case to be unacceptable. U.S. District Judge John Darrah ordered Reynolds taken into custody after determining that the proposed residence would be too close to a school or playground for Reynolds to stay there while on bail with electronic monitoring. The former Illinois congressman will remain in custody until his June 20 trial or until he can make suitable living arrangements, said Joseph Fitzpatrick, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago. Reynolds has pleaded not guilty to four misdemeanor counts of failing to file a tax return. He has residency restrictions due to a 1995 conviction for having had sex with an underage campaign worker. FILE - In this July 30, 2015 file photo, former Illinois U.S. Rep. Mel Reynolds talks on his cell phone as he leaves federal court in Chicago after pleading not guilty to federal tax charges. On Wednesday, April 20, 2016, a judge in Chicago ordered Reynolds to be taken into custody after finding his proposed place of residence while on bail in a tax case to be unacceptable. Reynolds faces misdemeanor tax evasion charges and has residency restrictions due to a 1995 conviction for having had sex with an underage campaign worker. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green, File) Darrah ordered Reynolds' arrest last month after he failed to show up for a hearing in the tax case. Reynolds was in South Africa, where he said he was caring for his 23-year-old daughter, Marisol, who he said may need surgery for scoliosis and may have cervical cancer. Prosecutors expressed doubt about Reynolds' story, citing his daughter's social media updates from Berlin in February, when he was supposed to be caring for her in Africa. On Wednesday, Reynolds admitted that she was in Germany, but he said she was there seeking alternative medicine, Fitzpatrick said. He said the judge said he thought she was there on vacation. Also during Wednesday's hearing, Reynolds told Darrah that his attorney, Richard Kling, was no longer representing him and that he would represent himself. A Harvard graduate and a Rhodes Scholar, Reynolds resigned from his 2nd Congressional District seat in 1995 after being convicted of statutory rape for having sex with a 16-year-old campaign worker. He served 2 years in prison. Later, he was convicted in federal court of concealing debts to obtain bank loans and diverting money intended for voter registration drives into his election campaign. He was sentenced to 6 years in federal prison and had two years left when then-President Bill Clinton commuted the sentence in 2001. ___ The Salt Lake Tribune sold to wealthy industrialist family SALT LAKE CITY (AP) A son of wealthy industrialist Jon Huntsman Sr. has agreed to buy The Salt Lake Tribune, ending uncertainty about the future of Utah's largest newspaper that has long been an independent watchdog in a state where the Mormon church wields significant power. Digital First Media, which runs major publications in Colorado and California, reached an agreement to sell the newspaper to Paul Huntsman, the company said Wednesday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The Huntsmans, who run a major cancer research center and whose name adorns university arenas and college programs, are one of the most influential families in Utah. The Salt Lake Tribune editor and publisher Terry Orme speaks during a interview in his office at the Salt Lake Tribune Wednesday, April 20, 2016, in Salt Lake City. A son of wealthy industrialist Jon Huntsman Sr. has agreed to buy The Salt Lake Tribune, ending uncertainty about the future of Utah's largest independent newspaper. Digital First Media announced in a news release Wednesday that the company reached an agreement to sell the newspaper to Paul Huntsman. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer) They are Mormon, but Paul Huntsman said the Tribune's role in the community won't change. His father made similar comments two years ago when he disclosed that the family was interested in buying the Tribune to preserve a crucial independent news voice. "It is important that The Salt Lake Tribune continues in its indispensable role for our community and to be locally owned," Paul Huntsman said in a statement. "We hope to ensure the Tribune's independent voice for future generations." The sale still has raised some concerns, with another Salt Lake City newspaper, the Deseret News, owned by the Mormon church. Democratic state Sen. Jim Dabakis, who was part of a group also interested in buying The Tribune, said it is important to preserve the paper's independence and progressive editorial voice. "We want to make sure there's not some kind of deal or backroom understanding between Deseret News Publishing and the Huntsman family," Dabakis said. The purchase fits an emerging ownership trend in the newspaper industry of wealthy business figures buying publications because they value their civic importance, media analyst Ken Doctor said. In recent years, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has bought the Washington Post; Boston Red Sox owner John Henry has purchased the Boston Globe; and Minnesota Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor has bought the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson secretly bought The Las Vegas Review-Journal last fall, but that sale has been heavily scrutinized over concerns about transparency. Salt Lake Tribune Publisher and Editor Terry Orme, who has been advocating for local ownership of the paper, called the sale good news. But he cautioned that the deal has not closed and that he has yet to talk with Paul Huntsman about the vision for the newspaper and who will manage it. "We have a long ways to go before we know how the future is going to look," Orme said. "However, I welcome this news very much. I am very pleased that it appears the Tribune will once again be owned by a Utahn." Jon Huntsman Sr. founded a roughly $13 billion company that refines raw materials that go into thousands of products. Paul Huntsman is CEO of Huntsman Family Investments, a private investment arm. Another son, Jon Huntsman Jr., is a former Utah governor and ambassador to China who ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2012. The sale comes after major changes to a longstanding joint operating agreement with the Deseret News in 2013 cut the Tribune's profits nearly in half. The church-owned paper got 70 percent of the profits in exchange for an undisclosed, one-time lump sum to Digital First Media. In the previous agreement, the Tribune had 58 percent of the profits. The deal triggered a lawsuit by a group of former staffers who allege the terms violated antitrust laws and would lead to the Tribune's demise. The group's attorney, Karra Porter, said she and lawyers for the newspaper's owners plan to meet Monday to discuss the sale and a possible resolution of the legal challenge. It was not known if the profit split was renegotiated in the sale. Digital First Media declined to answer additional questions. Orme, the longtime newsroom leader, said the uncertainty about the future of the newspaper has made it hard for him to retain top journalists and plan for the future. The Huntsman purchase is the best-case scenario for the Tribune, said Doctor, the analyst. "You have a local owner with deep pockets and a civic commitment who wants to see a long-term survival of a strong newspaper," Doctor said. "That stands in distinction to many of the shorter-term players, like Digital First Media." The Salt Lake Tribune editor and publisher Terry Orme speaks during a interview in his office at the Salt Lake Tribune Wednesday, April 20, 2016, in Salt Lake City. A son of wealthy industrialist Jon Huntsman Sr. has agreed to buy The Salt Lake Tribune, ending uncertainty about the future of Utah's largest independent newspaper. Digital First Media announced in a news release Wednesday that the company reached an agreement to sell the newspaper to Paul Huntsman. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer) The Salt Lake Tribune is shown Wednesday, April 20, 2016, in Salt Lake City. A son of wealthy industrialist Jon Huntsman Sr. has agreed to buy The Salt Lake Tribune, ending uncertainty about the future of Utah's largest independent newspaper. Digital First Media announced in a news release Wednesday that the company reached an agreement to sell the newspaper to Paul Huntsman. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer) Police: Man arrested after driving drunk to report crash CORTE MADERA, Calif. (AP) Authorities say a Northern California man was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence after he drove to the California Highway Patrol office to report a crash he had been involved in over the weekend. The Santa Rosa Press Democrat newspaper reports (http://bit.ly/20VNKi4 ) an officer who spoke to Donald Gendron in the station's lobby said he smelled strongly of alcohol. The CHP says in a statement Gendron's eyes were red and watery. Documentary turns Disney-loving autistic man into a star NEW YORK (AP) Owen Suskind had largely retreated into silence in the years after his autism began to manifest, around age 3. Three painfully mute years later, and after countless rapt hours spent watching Disney animated movies, a word broke through. "Juicervose!" His parents, Ron (a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist) and Cornelia, initially thought he was asking for juice. But he wasn't. He was repeating back a line from "The Little Mermaid," a scene he often rewound to watch again, where Ursula the sea witch sings "Poor Unfortunate Souls." She sings, "It won't cost you much, just your voice!" ("juicervose") This image released by the Tribeca Film Festival shows Owen Suskind in a scene from the documentary, "Life, Animated," being shown at the Tribeca Film Festival. (Tribeca Film Festival via AP) It was just the first phrase from a Disney film that Owen would go on to mimic, but it was the first hint of his rediscovery of language. For the Suskinds, it was a life line back to their son. A few weeks later, Ron picked up a puppet of Iago, the parrot from "Aladdin," and had his first conversation with his son in years albeit one doing his best Gilbert Gottfried impression. Roger Ross Williams' documentary "Life Animated," playing this week at the Tribeca Film Festival, chronicles Owen's remarkable growth, aided by the colorful, underdog sidekicks of Disney movies. The film, inspired by Ron Suskind's book "Life Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes and Autism," is both about Owen's impressive maturity and the power of movies, of stories, to connect. The film, which will open in theaters July 8, has been a hit on the festival circuit where 25-year-old Owen has bounded down theater aisles, high-fiving cheering crowds. Williams won the directing award at the Sundance Film Festival, and the film picked up the audience award at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Owen, the most ardent of movie lovers, is now a star himself. "I've never experienced anything like I'm experiencing with this film," says Williams. "What I hope is that it not only gives parents hope, but it inspires everyone to realize the potential of people living with autism. There are all these gifts they have to offer to the world." Speaking by phone from Los Angeles, Owen cheerfully greeted this reporter. (In Los Angeles, Owen visited the Disney Animation studios and met animators whose credits he knows thoroughly.) "Hi Jake," said Owen. "That's also the name of the hilarious, awesome, cool, wise-cracking kangaroo rat from Disney's 'The Rescuers Down Under.'" Owen had what's called "regressive autism," which only reveals itself once a child is a toddler. "Life Animated" captures Owen at a universal crossroads: He's graduating from school, moving out of his parent's house, finding (and losing) a girlfriend and getting a job at (where else?) a movie theater. He speaks knowingly about why Disney films so resonate for him. "I live in these characters and they live in me," he says. "It speaks to me. It helps me with my own life, to find my place in the world, to touch a lot of people." At Tribeca, "Life Animated" has particular meaning. This year's festival has been partly defined by the backlash provoked by its programming of an anti-vaccination documentary, "Vaxxed," by a discredited British doctor who maintains that vaccinations can cause autism. (Among others, the Centers for Disease Control emphatically state that there's no link between the two.) "Life Animated" is a joyful antidote to that episode, which culminated in Tribeca pulling "Vaxxed." "It says something about the power of story for all of us, that we all need story for us to survive," says Williams. "It's kind of the lifeblood of human interaction. These Disney films are basically classic fables and Owen was raised on these fables." Owen is a fan of recent Disney films like "Zootopia" Pixar's "Inside Out." But as Williams notes, "Owen likes the classics." Unquestionably, his favorite is "Aladdin." "It's fun, magical, colorful, musical, kid-friendly, wacky, hilarious, show-stopping and entertaining," says Owen. "Mostly, it's about accepting who you are and being OK with that, show them that you are an unpolished gem and a diamond in the rough." In "Aladdin," the title character a young vagabond learns that he doesn't need to be a prince to reach his dreams. "I'm not one either," adds Owen. Researchers have begun studying the usefulness of affinity therapy to coax others out from their shell by tapping into their interests. Owen's passion has affected others, too. Gottfried and Jonathan Freeman (voice of Jafar in "Aladdin") are among the Disney voice actors he's met. Freeman cried. "He didn't see the meaning in the film that Owen saw," says Williams. "He said Owen opened his eyes to the beauty of the film. It's just amazing how the actual people who work on these films are transformed and enlightened after meeting Owen." "Life Animated" has earned Owen's endorsement, too. "It was a little different in my head," he says. "But it was beautiful on the screen." ___ Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP ___ Federal lawyer gets 30 days for forging document SEATTLE (AP) A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney was sentenced to 30 days in jail Wednesday for forging a document to make it look like a Mexican man who wanted to stay in the United States was not eligible to do so. Jonathan M. Love was also sentenced to 100 hours of community service, must resign his law license and must pay Ignacio Lanuza $12,000 in restitution, Seattlepi.com reported (http://goo.gl/RAHFGW). Love, 58, previously pleaded guilty to a federal deprivation of rights misdemeanor charge, acknowledging he used his position to deprive Lanuza of due process. The U.S. Attorney's Office says Lanuza was stopped by an ICE officer in 2008, and ICE started removal proceedings. Love was assigned the case in 2009 and submitted a document to the Immigration Court that he said was signed by Lanuza in 2000. Prosecutors say Love doctored the date to make Lanuza ineligible to have his removal cancelled. Lanuza should have been eligible to contest his deportation because he had been living in the United States for over 10 years, showed good moral character and had a family made up of U.S. citizens. Love's forgery was meant to make it appear as though Lanuza hadn't been in the United States for 10 years and was therefore ineligible for deportation relief. The motive for Love's actions remains unclear. He said in court Wednesday he didn't know why he did it. "It was stupid and unnecessary, and the consequences of my actions have tarnished my hard work and dedication to public service for the last 30 years," Love said. Love was charged after Lanuza filed a civil case against him and the federal government seeking damages for legal costs Lanuza incurred because of the incident. The civil case against Love was dismissed and appealed. The case against the government continues. "Mr. Lanuza and his family suffered greatly as a result of these egregious actions," the Washington man's attorneys with the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project attorneys said in court papers. Lanuza became a lawful permanent resident in 2014. ___ Panama inks $2.6B financing deal with Japan for metro line PANAMA CITY (AP) Panama has signed a deal with Japan to secure $2.6 billion in financing for the construction of a third metro line in the Central American nation's capital. The line will run from central Panama City west across the Panama Canal to link the capital with western suburbs. Construction is expected to begin next year with a late 2021 target date to begin operations. The first phase envisions nearly 17 miles (27 kilometers) of track and 14 stations. The financing deal was signed Wednesday during a trip by President Juan Carlos Varela to Japan. Varela called the agreement "a recognition of Panama's solidity and credibility." A 16-year-old boy and his disabled younger brother finished a 111-mile walk Monday, reaching the steps of the Michigan Capitol after the teen carried his sibling on his back for all but the last half-mile. It was the third and longest journey for Hunter Gandee and his nine-year-old brother Braden, who has cerebral palsy. They set out from their home town of Temperance last Wednesday to inspire people to embrace anyone with a disability. 'Not just cerebral palsy all disabilities,' Hunter told The Associated Press. Hard work: Hunter Gandee, 16, walked 111 miles with his brother Braden, nine, strapped to his back Loving family: The Michigan brothers pictured with sister Kerragan, 15 (left), and brother Kellen, eight (right) started the walk last Wednesday and completed it on Monday Long distance: They walked from their hometown to the steps of the Michigan Capitol Good message: The brothers call the walk the Cerebral Palsy Swagger and hope it will promote inclusion of people with disabilities They call the walk the Cerebral Palsy Swagger, and it challenges people worldwide to take steps toward inclusion. When they started their journey last week, the plan was to stop at several Michigan schools along the way to spread their message. 'He's pretty excited right now,' Hunter said before setting out. 'We've had a great time, so far.' Then on Monday, surrounded by family, Braden walked the last half-mile to the Capitol with a walker. Lieutenant governor Brian Calley and others greeted them. 'It's hard to take just one moment,' Hunter said when asked to describe a highlight. 'A lot of memories were created. To see Braden get to the steps of the Capitol building was just amazing.' It wasn't their first trek. Hunter was 14 in 2014 when he carried Braden for 40 miles. Last year, they made a 57-mile walk. A crowd: Others joined them on the long walk, which saw them stopping at schools along the way Finale: Braden weighs 70lbs, and Hunter noted that he's getting bigger so this will be their last walk Good kid: Hunter is starting his senior year of high school in the fall However, the dedicated big brother expects that this will be his last such walk because he will be starting his senior year of high school in the fall and will be preparing for college. 'And Braden is getting bigger,' Hunter added. The nine-year-old now weighs 70lbs, but weighed just 50lbs on their first walk. 'I'm extremely thankful for our support and that has inspired me to keep going; Hunter said. That support has been there since the beginning. On their first walk, two years ago, Hunter thought seriously about giving up. 'Honestly, yes, there was a point that we did consider stopping,' Hunter said. 'Braden's legs the chafing was getting pretty bad. We did have to consider stopping. It was at about the 30-mile point.' A phone call changed all that. Starting the tradition: The pair's first Cerebral Palsy Swagger was a 40-miled journey in 2014, when Braden weighed 50lbs Walk through the pain: During the first walk, Hunter considered stopping, but soldiered on Getting longer: They completed a second walk, this one 57 miles, in 2015 Going far: The walks have grown steadily longer, with 111 miles being the lengthiest trek yet Hunter reached out to a friend, who said a prayer for the brothers. That, combined with some rest and a change in how Braden was positioned on his brother's back, helped the boys make it the final 10 miles. A year later, they took the Cerebral Palsy Swagger to the University of Michigan's Pediatric Rehabilitation Center in Ann Arbor. The brothers set out from Lambertville, located on the border with Ohio on the state's eastern edge, with Braden secured in a harness. 'It went great we walked into a big crowd of people,' Hunter said about the finish. US congressman: Ohio fugitive arrested in her native Brazil WASHINGTON (AP) A U.S. congressman says a woman suspected of killing her husband in Ohio and fleeing to Brazil has been arrested by authorities there. Ohio Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan says the U.S. ambassador to Brazil notified him Wednesday about Claudia Hoerig's arrest. He says Brazil's Supreme Court justices this week upheld a decision revoking Hoerig's citizenship in Brazil, allowing extradition efforts to proceed. Officials previously said she had U.S. citizenship but couldn't be extradited because she was born in Brazil. Prosecutors allege Hoerig fatally shot 44-year-old Karl Hoerig in 2007 at their Newton Falls home. A federal warrant charged her with fleeing to avoid prosecution. The Latest: Students airlifted amid fears of bear's return JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) The Latest on the mauling of a university professor in Alaska (all times local): 5 p.m. University officials decided to evacuate students off a mountain after a brown bear attacked their teacher and amid fears the animal had returned. University of Alaska Southeast Chancellor Rick Caulfield talks to a group of students who safely returned to Juneau from a remote mountaineering class on Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Juneau, Alaska. One of their professors, Forest Wagner, was badly mauled by a brown bear and the class was cut short after they were evacuated from a mountain near Haines, Alaska. (AP Photo/Rashah McChesney) Officials say students reported hearing a bear within 200 yards of the helicopter that was taking their badly injured assistant professor, Forest Wagner, off the mountain. Officials haven't been able to confirm a bear was in the area, but a state trooper hiked in to provide security as the group was taken off the mountain. The details are among few to emerge since Wagner was mauled as he led the mountaineering class outing in the wilderness near Haines, a remote town about 90 miles north of Juneau. Wagner is a 35-year-old University of Alaska Southeast assistant professor. He is recovering at an Anchorage hospital and has declined interview requests. This April 2, 2016, photo provided by Gemini Waltz Media shows Forest Wagner at a Eaglecrest Ski Area in Douglas, Alaska. Wagner, an assistant professor at the University of Alaska Southeast, was mauled by a bear while leading a mountaineering class near Haines, Alaska, on Monday, April 18, 2016. (Photo courtesy of Ryan Cortes Perez, Gemini Waltz Media via AP) Students feared bear that attacked teacher had come back JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) University officials decided to evacuate students off a mountain after a brown bear attacked their teacher and they feared the animal had returned. Students reported hearing a bear within 200 yards of the helicopter that was taking their badly injured assistant professor, Forest Wagner, off the mountain, officials said. Officials haven't been able to confirm a bear was in the area, but a state trooper hiked in to provide security as the group was flown off the mountain. This April 2, 2016, photo provided by Gemini Waltz Media shows Forest Wagner at a Eaglecrest Ski Area in Douglas, Alaska. Wagner, an assistant professor at the University of Alaska Southeast, was mauled by a bear while leading a mountaineering class near Haines, Alaska, on Monday, April 18, 2016. (Photo courtesy of Ryan Cortes Perez, Gemini Waltz Media via AP) The details were among few to emerge since Wagner, a University of Alaska Southeast assistant professor, was mauled Monday as he led the mountaineering class outing in the wilderness near Haines, a remote town about 90 miles north of Juneau. Wagner, 35, is recovering at an Anchorage hospital and has declined interview requests. The nine students and two teaching assistants who were with him on the outing returned to Juneau on Tuesday but said they were tired and not yet ready to talk about what happened. It's unclear if any of them witnessed Wagner's tangle with the bear sow, officials said. The animal had at least one cub with her, according to a university statement. "It sounds like (Wagner) was kind of hiking ahead, trying to find the best way down," Fish and Game biologist Stephanie Sell told The Associated Press on Wednesday Alaska State Troopers spokeswoman Megan Peters had no details on the extent of Wagner's injuries. But an internal troopers report obtained by the AP indicated Wagner had extensive leg injuries. The Washington Post first reported details from the internal report. The group was at roughly 2,000 feet in elevation when the attack occurred, Sell said. Brown bear dens are common at higher elevations. Fish and Game employees see them in the 2,000- to 3,500-foot range during their bear surveys of the Haines area, Sell said. "It's a very remote location in great denning habitat," she said. A student hiked into cellphone range to report the attack, but it took several hours to get Wagner from the mountain to the hospital. He was transferred between two helicopters before he was taken to Anchorage, roughly 500 miles away. University Chancellor Rick Caulfield was waiting at the Juneau ferry terminal when the students arrived Tuesday night. Caulfield arranged to evacuate the students from the mountain after a bear was spotted in the area where a helicopter was attempting to airlift Wagner from the mountain, according to the internal trooper report. A trooper provided security until the group left. Caulfield said administrators will make sure the students get counseling if they need it. He said one of the concerns is that the trauma could interfere with their end-of-semester finals, scheduled to begin next week. University of Alaska Southeast Chancellor Rick Caulfield smiles after greeting a group of students who safely returned to Juneau from a remote mountaineering class on Tuesday, April 19, 2016, in Juneau, Alaska. One of their professors, Forest Wagner, was badly mauled by a brown bear and the class was cut short after they were evacuated from a mountain near Haines, Alaska. (AP Photo/Rashah McChesney) China's Xi moves to take more direct command over military BEIJING (AP) Chinese President Xi Jinping has assumed a more direct role over the country's powerful armed forces as head of its increasingly important joint operations, displaying both his strong personal authority and China's determination to defend its interests. The move to make Xi commander in chief of the military's Joint Operations Command Center bolsters his status as China's most powerful leader in decades and comes at a time when Beijing is becoming increasingly bold in its territorial assertions, despite a growing pushback from Washington and others. Xi already enjoys special influence with the armed forces, largely because his muscular foreign policy is popular among Chinese nationalists and the defense establishment. In this Thursday, April 21, 2016 image taken from a video footage run by China's CCTV via AP Video, Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, in military uniform gestures as he tours to the Chinese armys Joint Operation Command Center in Beijing. Xi is assuming a more direct role as commander of the country's powerful armed forces with the new title of commander in chief of its Joint Operations Command Center. Xi's new position was revealed in news reports run on Wednesday and Thursday in which he appeared publicly for the first time in camouflage battle dress wearing the center's insignia. (CCTV via AP Video) CHINA OUT, TV OUT, NO SALES, EDITORIAL USE ONLY That's especially true in the disputed South China Sea, which China claims virtually in its entirety and where it has constructed airfields on former coral reefs and sought to limit the U.S. Navy's ability to operate in the area. Xi has remained resolute in that approach, although it has been blamed for raising tensions with China's Southeast Asian neighbors and has prompted the U.S. to devote more resources to Asia and strengthen its cooperation with traditional allies and even former foe Vietnam. Xi visited the Joint Operations Command Center reportedly located underground in the western outskirts of Beijing on Wednesday and said officers need to prepare for conflicts and effectively handle "all sorts of emergencies," state media reported Thursday. Xi was shown publicly for the first time in camouflage battle dress with the joint center's insignia, rather than the featureless olive drab attire he usually wears when acting in his capacity as chairman of the Communist Party commission that oversees the 2.3 million-member People's Liberation Army , the world's largest standing armed forces. Xi's choice of apparel "indicates that he not only controls the military, but also does it in an absolute manner, and that in wartime, he is ready to command personally," said Ni Lexiong, a military affairs expert at Shanghai's University of Political Science and Law. "The most important message he meant to send to the world is that he will not make a concession on the issue of territory even at the cost of a war," Ni said. The joint center is under the direct supervision of the Central Military Commission, whose two vice chairmen, Gen. Fan Changlong and Gen. Xu Qiliang, accompanied Xi on his visit. Xi's new title and appearance in battle dress may also be a deliberate message to China's chief rivals, including the U.S., Japan, the Philippines and the self-governing island of Taiwan that China has vowed to conquer by force if necessary. "The combat uniform is not only to show he is in charge of the military, but also shows that China is ready for a fight amid a tense external situation. It is a bit like telling China's opponents that he is ready for combat," Ni said. Three years since taking on the presidency, Xi is widely seen as having accumulated more power and authority than any Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping in the late 1980s. A cult of personality has also sprung up around him rivaling that of the founder of the Communist state, Mao Zedong, with Xi's slogans, sayings and signature political themes widely disseminated in the media. Xi's cachet with the armed forces is enhanced further by the reputation of his late father, who was a military commander during China's revolution, as well as by Xi's own brief service as an aide to a former defense minister. Among his other titles, Xi is also leader of the ruling Communist Party and chairman of a recently created National Security Council, which gives him greater control over the domestic security services. As head of the military, Xi has overseen a reorganization of the PLA's command structure into five theater commands aimed at better integrating the different services. He has ordered a 300,000-person reduction in forces that will see the elimination of many outdated and non-combat units, and shift the emphasis further from ground forces to the navy, air force and missile corps. Xi has highlighted the PLA's importance with frequent, highly publicized visits to military bases and a massive parade last September in which the army's latest equipment was wheeled through the center of Beijing while warplanes and helicopters roared overhead. Yet his reputation has also been called into question by anonymous letters, allegedly from Communist Party members, calling for his resignation. Revelations in the international media about vast wealth accumulated by members of his extended family have flown in the face of his relentless campaign against corruption in the party, military and state industries. Xi's new title is "more political than military" in significance and doesn't imply he will take charge of the day-to-day running of the PLA, said Andrei Chang, Hong Kong-based editor of the magazine Kanwa Asian Defense and a close observer of Chinese military affairs. "Throughout Chinese history, political power has always been founded on control of the military," Chang said. "This was a visit to show off his muscle to his potential enemies and show that he is tough and in charge." FILE - In this Thursday, Sept. 3, 2015 file photo, Chinese President Xi Jinping is displayed on a screen as Type 99A2 Chinese battle tanks take part in a parade commemorating the 70th anniversary of Japan's surrender during World War II held in front of Tiananmen Gate in Beijing. Chinese President Xi Jinping is assuming a more direct role as commander of the country's powerful armed forces with the new title of commander in chief of its Joint Operations Command Center, as revealed in news reports run on Wednesday, April 20, and Thursday, April 21, 2016, in which he appeared publicly for the first time in camouflage battle dress wearing the center's insignia.(AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File) In this Thursday, April 21, 2016 image taken from a video footage run by China's CCTV via AP Video, Chinese President Xi Jinping, center, in military uniform poses for a group photo with military staff members at the Chinese armys Joint Operation Command Center in Beijing. Xi is assuming a more direct role as commander of the country's powerful armed forces with the new title of commander in chief of its Joint Operations Command Center. Xi's new position was revealed in news reports run on Wednesday and Thursday in which he appeared publicly for the first time in camouflage battle dress wearing the center's insignia. (CCTV via AP Video) CHINA OUT, TV OUT, NO SALES, EDITORIAL USE ONLY In this Thursday, April 21, 2016 image taken from a video footage run by China's CCTV via AP Video, Chinese President Xi Jinping in military uniform shakes hands with a military staff member in Beijing. Xi is assuming a more direct role as commander of the country's powerful armed forces with the new title of commander in chief of its Joint Operations Command Center. Xi's new position was revealed in news reports run on Wednesday and Thursday in which he appeared publicly for the first time in camouflage battle dress wearing the center's insignia. (CCTV via AP Video) CHINA OUT, TV OUT, NO SALES, EDITORIAL USE ONLY Eagles' Joe Walsh: I'm dropping out of GOP convention show CLEVELAND (AP) Eagles keyboardist and guitarist Joe Walsh says he's pulling out of a Cleveland summer concert he thought would be a nonpartisan event for veterans' families because it's actually a launch for the Republican National Convention. Walsh says in an emailed statement he's "very concerned about the rampant vitriol, fear-mongering and bullying coming from the current Republican campaigns." He says he "cannot in good conscience endorse the Republican party in any way." The concert is scheduled for July 18. The Republican National Convention is scheduled for July 18-21 at Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena. FILE - In this Oct. 12, 2015 file photo, Joe Walsh of the band The Eagles performs in a solo concert at The Fillmore in Philadelphia. Eagles keyboardist and guitarist Walsh says hes pulling out of a Cleveland summer concert he thought would be a nonpartisan event for veterans families because its actually a launch for the Republican National Convention. The concert is scheduled for July 18, 2016. (Photo by Owen Sweeney/Invision/AP, File) Walsh said Wednesday he's sorry for any fans or veterans and their families he might disappoint. He promises to look at doing a veterans-related benefit concert later this year. Future of Palestinian town bleak after Israel shuts quarries BEIT FAJAR, West Bank (AP) The future of the Palestinian town of Beit Fajar looks bleak after Israel's military forced the shutdown of some three dozen quarries in the area, endangering 3,500 jobs and paralyzing the dominant local industry. Palestinian quarry owners and their lawyer say March 21 raids of the quarries by hundreds of Israeli soldiers and the confiscation of millions of dollars in equipment amount to collective punishment. The raids came four days after two Beit Fajar residents stabbed and wounded an Israeli soldier. The fate of the quarries also highlights Israel's policy of favoring Jewish settlement businesses in the occupied West Bank over those of local Palestinians, the New York-based group Human Rights Watch said Thursday. Israel has not issued new licenses for Palestinian-run quarries in the West Bank since 1994, while giving operating permits to 11 Israeli-run quarries in the area, the group said. In this Tuesday, April 19, 2016 photo, 25 year-old, Alaa Al-Tawil, walks through a Palestinian quarry in the West Bank village of Beit Fajar, Bethlehem. The economic future of the Palestinian town of Beit Fajar looks bleak after Israel's military shut some three dozen quarries and put 3,500 jobs at risk, paralyzing the dominant local industry. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser) The Israeli-administered quarries produce 25 percent of the quarrying materials for the Israeli and settlement economies, amounting to Israeli exploitation of natural resources in occupied territories in violation of Israel's obligations as an occupying power, HRW said. "I think Israel wants to strike at the Palestinian economy," said Subhi Thawabteh, head of the Union of Stone and Marble in Palestine. "This is part of the Israeli pressure on the Palestinians. They want us to desert our land and fill it with Israeli settlers." COGAT, the Israeli military body that deals with Palestinian civilian affairs, denied the accusations in the report. In a statement, it noted that it had approved the planning of four Palestinian quarries seeking temporary licenses elsewhere in the West Bank. It said the Beit Fajar quarries have operated illegally for many years and pose a safety and environmental hazard. It also said that "unfortunately" their owners have not taken proper steps to legalize the quarries. Roni Salman, a lawyer representing the Palestinian quarry owners, said he believes the raids amounted to "collective punishment of the people of Beit Fajar" for the attack carried out by the two village residents. Human Rights Watch also noted that a previous raid of quarries by the military came three days after a Beit Fajar resident killed an Israeli woman in a West Bank attack in November. Asked about the timing, COGAT wrote to HRW that the raids were carried out once resources were available and "as per priority." Quarry owners said troops confiscated equipment in the past, but that the heavy machinery was usually returned after payment of heavy fines. This time, Israel had stiffer demands. In a letter to HRW, it said that quarry owners will have to pledge to "cease illegal operations." They would also have to reimburse the military for the cost of confiscating equipment and pay retroactive royalties for extracting stones. Salman, the lawyer, said he is trying to persuade quarry owners to appeal to Israel's Supreme Court to try to challenge Israel's overall policy. Underlying the dispute is a complex division of the West Bank into jurisdictions a legacy of failed negotiations on Palestinian statehood on lands Israel captured in 1967, including the West Bank. Israel retains full control over more than 60 percent of the West Bank, known as "Area C" and home to dozens of Israeli settlements with some 370,000 residents. The rest of the territory, where most Palestinians live, is under varying degrees of Palestinian self-rule. Beit Fajar, near biblical Bethlehem, is located in autonomous territory, but the quarries are in Area C. Israel argues that the quarries are on state land, a designation critics say has routinely been used to take lands from Palestinians. Human Rights Watch quoted three Palestinian quarry owners as saying they have repeatedly tried to prove ownership of the land, but been rejected. Quarry owners also said they repeatedly asked for licenses, but were ignored or turned down. "This is our land, it's in our village, not in Israel," quarry owner Abdel Moin al-Taweel said this week, after seeing two bulldozers and other heavy equipment confiscated. Quarries and stone factories are the economic bedrock of Beit Fajar, employing some 3,500 people and producing an estimated $25 million a year. Sari Bashi, the Israel and Palestine director at HRW, said the latest measures counter recent assurances by the military to facilitate Palestinian economic development. "Instead, it is choking a Palestinian-run industry in the West Bank, while promoting the same industry in Israeli settlements," she said. In this Tuesday, April 19, 2016 photo, 25-year-old, Alaa Al-Tawil, walks through a Palestinian quarry in the West Bank village of Beit Fajar, Bethlehem. The economic future of the Palestinian town of Beit Fajar looks bleak after Israel's military shut some three dozen quarries and put 3,500 jobs at risk, paralyzing the dominant local industry. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser) In this Tuesday, April 19, 2016 photo, a Palestinian quarry is seen in the West Bank village of Beit Fajar, Bethlehem. The economic future of the Palestinian town of Beit Fajar looks bleak after Israel's military shut some three dozen quarries and put 3,500 jobs at risk, paralyzing the dominant local industry. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser) In this Tuesday, April 19, 2016 photo, a Palestinian quarry is seen in the West Bank village of Beit Fajar, Bethlehem. The economic future of the Palestinian town of Beit Fajar looks bleak after Israel's military shut some three dozen quarries and put 3,500 jobs at risk, paralyzing the dominant local industry. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser) In this Tuesday, April 19, 2016 photo, a Palestinian quarry is seen in the West Bank village of Beit Fajar, Bethlehem. The economic future of the Palestinian town of Beit Fajar looks bleak after Israel's military shut some three dozen quarries and put 3,500 jobs at risk, paralyzing the dominant local industry. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser) UN hears major differences on global approach to drug use UNITED NATIONS (AP) Jamaica defended its decriminalization of possession of small amounts of marijuana. Iran said it seized 620 tons of different types of drugs last year and is helping protect the world from "the evils of addiction." Cuba opposed the legalization of drugs or declaring them harmless. The first U.N. General Assembly special session to address global drug policy in nearly 20 years heard major differences on the approach to drug use on its second day on Wednesday. On the liberalization side, Canada's Health Minister Jane Philpott announced that the government will introduce legislation to legalize marijuana next spring. She said Canada will ensure that marijuana is kept out children's hands, and will address the devastating consequences of drugs and drug-related crimes. Jamaica's Minister for Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade Kamina Johnson Smith addresses the United Nations special session on global drug policy, Wednesday April 20, 2016 at U.N. headquarters. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews) Jamaica's Foreign Minister Kamina Johnson Smith told delegates that the government amended the Dangerous Drugs Act last year to give tickets for possession of less than two ounces of cannabis instead of making it a felony offense, and to legalize the sacramental use of marijuana by Rastafarians. It also established provisions for the medical, scientific and therapeutic uses of the plant, she said. Smith said Jamaica is finalizing a five-year national drug plan including programs to reduce demand for drugs, provide for early intervention and treatment of drug users, and promote rehabilitation and social reintegration. Michael Botticelli, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, stressed that "law enforcement efforts should focus on criminal organizations not on people with substance use disorders who need treatment and recovery support services." He called for drug policies in every country to address the needs of underserved groups including women and children, indigenous people, prisoners, and lesbians, gays, bisexual and transgender people. On the tough enforcement side, Indonesia's Ambassador Rachmat Budiman said "a zero-tolerance approach" is needed to suppress and eliminate the scourge of drugs. He said drug trafficking rings are using new "psychoactive substances" and the Internet to penetrate all levels of society, including the young generation, and pose "a serious threat which requires extraordinary efforts." Like Indonesia, Iran imposes the death penalty on drug traffickers. Iran's Justice Minister Abdulreza Rahmani Fazli told the high-level meeting that the Islamic Republic has spent billions of dollars in its campaign against armed drug traffickers. He said Iran is ready to host an international conference on countering drugs and drug-related crimes along the Balkan route, one of the two main heroin trafficking corridors linking opium-producing Afghanistan to the huge markets of Russia and Western Europe. It usually goes through Pakistan to Iran, Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria across southeastern Europe to the Western European market, and has an annual market value of some $28 billion, according to the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime known as UNODC. Fazli said the conference, in collaboration with the UNODC and countries on the route, would tackle ways to combat drug-related money laundering and detect drug trafficking ringleaders. Cuba's Justice Minister Maria Esther Reus Gonzalez asked how the world couldn't be worried when the world drug problem has become "deeper and more intensified" with 246 million people using illicit drugs, according to UNODC. "It will be really difficult to solve the problems of mass production of and trafficking in drugs from the South, if the majority demand from the North is not eliminated," she warned. Reus Gonzalez also warned that legalizing drugs won't solve the problem either and will only open "more dangerous gaps for the stability of our nations." She reiterated "Cuba's absolutely commitment to achieving societies free of illicit drugs." Netherlands Minister for Health, Welfare and Sport Martin van Rijn addresses the United Nations special session on global drug policy, Wednesday April 20, 2016 at U.N. headquarters. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews) Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Michael Botticelli, addresses the United Nations special session on global drug policy Wednesday, April 20, 2016, at the U.N. headquarters. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II) Colombia's capital investigates simultaneous explosions BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) Police are on maximum alert in Colombia's capital after two homemade bombs exploded almost simultaneously in different parts of the city Wednesday night, shattering windows and rattling residents but causing no injuries. The first explosion took place in a wealthy district of northern Bogota around 9 p.m. outside the office of a health care insurer. Shortly after that, another blast occurred closer to downtown in an area of office buildings. Mayor Enrique Penalosa said there were no injuries and nobody claimed responsibility. He said it appeared the two blasts were targeting a health care company whose affiliate was recently liquidated. The same company was the target of a previous attack in December. Police officers inspect the office of a health care insurer damaged by an explosion in Bogota, Colombia, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. No injuries were reported after at least two small bombs detonated almost simultaneously in the city. (AP Photo/Ricardo Mazalan) "It's always easy to put some homemade bombs in an act of terrorism but that doesn't mean that the city in any way isn't under control," said Penalosa after visiting one of the blast scenes. The Paris climate deal at a glance NEW YORK (AP) Four months after negotiating a global climate agreement in Paris, government officials are coming to New York on Friday to sign the pact in a ceremony at the United Nations. Here are some of the key elements of the Paris deal, which is the first agreement requiring all countries to join the fight against global warming. TEMPERATURE GOAL: The objective of the agreement is to keep the global temperature rise "well below" 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with pre-industrial times. At that level, scientists believe the worst effects of climate change can be avoided. The agreement also includes an aspirational goal of limiting the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F). Temperatures have already risen by almost 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F) since the industrial revolution. FILE - In this Saturday, Dec. 12, 2015 file photo, US President Barack Obama speaks about the Paris climate agreement from the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington. About 160 countries are expected to sign the Paris Agreement on climate change Friday, April 22, 2016, in a symbolic triumph for a landmark deal that once seemed unlikely but now appears on track to enter into force years ahead of schedule. The U.S. and China, which together account for nearly 40 percent of global emissions, have said they intend to formally join the agreement this year. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File) INDIVIDUAL TARGETS: Countries are required to set national targets for reducing or reining in their greenhouse gas emissions. Those targets aren't legally binding, but countries must report on their progress and update their targets every five years. The first cycle begins in 2020. Only developed countries are expected to slash their emissions in absolute terms. Developing nations are "encouraged" to do so as their capabilities evolve over time. TRANSPARENCY: There is no penalty if countries miss their emissions targets. Instead, the agreement relies on transparency rules to motivate countries to fulfill their pledges. All countries must report on their efforts to reduce their emissions. But some "flexibility" is allowed for developing countries that need it, which was a key demand from China. MONEY: The agreement says wealthy countries should continue to offer financial support to help poor countries reduce their emissions and adapt to climate change. It also encourages other countries to pitch in on a voluntary basis. That paves the way for emerging economies such as China to contribute, even though it doesn't require them to do so. Actual dollar amounts were kept out of the agreement itself, but wealthy nations had previously pledged to provide $100 billion annually in climate finance by 2020. LOSS AND DAMAGE: In a victory for small island nations threatened by rising seas, the agreement includes a section recognizing "loss and damage" associated with climate-related disasters. The U.S. long objected to addressing the issue in the agreement, worried that it would lead to claims of compensation for damage caused by extreme weather events. In the end, the issue was included, but a footnote specifically stated that loss and damage does not involve liability or compensation. WITHDRAWAL: The agreement will enter into force 30 days after 55 countries accounting for at least 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions have completed the ratification process. It's possible to withdraw from the treaty, but not in the first three years after it enters into force. There's also a one-year notice period, so the earliest a country could drop out is four years after the agreement has come into effect. Paris climate agreement on track for early start UNITED NATIONS (AP) As many as 170 countries are expected to sign the Paris Agreement on climate change Friday in a symbolic triumph for a landmark deal that once seemed unlikely but now appears on track to enter into force years ahead of schedule. U.N. officials say the signing ceremony Friday will set a record for international diplomacy: Never before have so many countries inked an agreement on the first day of the signing period. That could help pave the way for the pact to become effective long before the original 2020 deadline possibly this year though countries must first formally approve it through their domestic procedures. FILE - In this Dec. 12, 2015, file photo, French President Francois Hollande, right, French Foreign Minister and president of the COP21 Laurent Fabius, second right, United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres, left, and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon hold their hands up in celebration after the final conference at the COP21, the United Nations conference on climate change, in Le Bourget, north of Paris. About 160 countries are expected to sign the Paris Agreement on climate change Friday, April 22, 2016, in a symbolic triumph for a landmark deal that once seemed unlikely but now appears on track to enter into force years ahead of schedule. The agreement, the worlds response to hotter temperatures, rising seas and other impacts of climate change, was hammered out in December outside Paris. (AP Photo/Francois Mori, File) "We are within striking distance of having the agreement start years earlier than anyone anticipated," Brian Deese, an adviser to President Barack Obama, said in a speech last week at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. The U.S. and China, which together account for nearly 40 percent of global emissions, have said they intend to formally join the agreement this year. It will enter into force once 55 countries representing at least 55 percent of global emissions have done so. "There's incredible momentum," former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, who heads the U.N. Development Program, told The Associated Press. "We're moving as quickly as possible to action." She said her agency is working with more than 140 countries on climate change-related issues, and that financing to make the Paris Agreement a reality is "critical, and let's hope everyone lives up to commitments made." The agreement, the world's response to hotter temperatures, rising seas and other impacts of climate change, was hammered out in December outside Paris. The pact was a major breakthrough in U.N. climate negotiations, which for years were bogged down with disputes between rich and poor countries over who should do what to fight global warming. The mood was so pessimistic after a failed 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, that U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres said she thought a global deal wouldn't happen in her lifetime. Now she expects the Paris Agreement to take effect by 2018. Under the agreement, countries set their own targets for reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The targets are not legally binding but countries must update them every five years. That's because scientific analyses show the initial set of targets that countries pledged before Paris don't match the long-term goal of the agreement to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), compared with pre-industrial times. Global average temperatures have already climbed by almost 1 degree C. Last year was the hottest on record. "Even if the Paris pledges are implemented in full, they are not enough to get us even close to a 2-degree pathway," said John Sterman, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "I don't think people understand how urgent it is." The latest analysis by Sterman and colleagues at the Climate Interactive research group shows the Paris pledges put the world on track for 3.5 degrees C of warming. A separate analysis by Climate Action Tracker, a European group, projected warming of 2.7 degrees C. Either way, scientists say the consequences could be catastrophic in some places, wiping out crops, flooding coastal areas and melting glaciers and Artic sea ice. Small island nations and other vulnerable countries managed in Paris to get others to agree to an aspirational goal of keeping the temperature rise below 1.5 degrees C, which many analysts say won't be possible without removing vast amounts of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. "In Paris they reached what was possible diplomatically and maybe went a little bit beyond it," Sterman said. "I think we should celebrate it. But the physics of the climate are relentless." There is some good news. Global energy emissions, the biggest source of man-made greenhouse gases, were flat last year even though the global economy grew, according to the International Energy Agency. Some say that shows countries are finally driving their economies forward without burning massive amounts of oil, coal and gas. Still, those fossil fuels are used much more widely than renewable sources like wind and solar power. After signing the agreement, countries need to formally ratify it. Procedures for doing that vary among countries. The U.N. says 13 countries, most of them small island developing states, are expected to deposit their instruments of ratification on Friday and that the world body will have a better idea by the end of the day which other countries intend to ratify the agreement this year. "We can't stagnate," French Environment Minister Segolene Royal, who is in charge of global climate negotiations, said Thursday. "We need to keep the pressure on" for countries' ratifications. The Obama administration says the deal is consistent with existing U.S. law and doesn't require the approval of the Republican-controlled Senate, where it would likely face stiff resistance. The administration is expected to treat the deal as an executive agreement, which needs only the president's approval. Analysts say that if the Paris Agreement enters into force before Obama leaves office in January, it would be more complicated for his successor to withdraw from the deal, because it would take four years to do so under the rules of the agreement. Also, there would be "a strong negative reaction globally that any administration would have to take into account," said David Waskow of the World Resources Institute in Washington. The 28-nation European Union is another source of concern. "In Europe, things are more complex," Royal said, pointing out that coal-producing countries find it much harder to quickly change to other energy sources. She said France is pressing other EU members to ratify as soon as possible. U.N. officials say most countries attending Friday's signing ceremony in New York will be represented by their head of state or government. Secretary of State John Kerry will represent the United States. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is encouraging countries to use the signing to announce timelines for implementing the agreement, U.N. officials say. Those who don't sign the agreement Friday have a year to do so. The U.N. says the previous record for opening-day signatures for an international agreement stands at 119. That record is from the signing of the Law of the Sea Treaty in 1994. ___ Ritter reported from Stockholm. A list of some effects from Nepal's earthquake 1 year ago KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) Nearly one year ago, Nepal rumbled with a massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake that shattered daily life across the poor Himalayan nation. A series of powerful aftershocks that lasted for weeks compounded the damage and terrified the country's 26.5 million citizens. Here are some statistics behind the disaster. Sources include the Nepalese government, Asia Development Bank, UNICEF and the Red Cross-led partnership Shelter Cluster: ___ FILE- In this April 26, 2015 file photo, Nepalese people look at a cracked road after an earthquake in Kathmandu, Nepal. Nearly one year ago, Nepal rumbled with a massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake that shattered daily life across the poor Himalayan nation. A series of powerful aftershocks that lasted for weeks compounded the damage and terrified the countrys 26.5 million citizens. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha, File) 8,856: Number of deaths 22,309: Number of injuries 602,257: Number of houses destroyed 185,099: Number of houses damaged 6,430: Number of government buildings damaged 35,000: Number of classrooms destroyed Nearly 1 million: Number of children left with no school 9.1 million: Total number of school-age children in Nepal 956: Number of hospitals and clinics damaged 700,000: Number of people pushed into poverty by the quake 3.7 million: Number of people receiving humanitarian aid 200,000: Number of families who lived in high-altitude temporary shelters through winter Less than 5 percent: Percentage of homes rebuilt so far $6.6 billion: total estimated cost for reconstruction $4.1 billion: amount pledged so far in donations $308,880: total funding Nepal has offered for reconstructing homes 661: number of Nepalese families who have received reconstruction funding FILE- In this April 26, 2015 file photo, a dead body of a woman is seen after rescue workers recovered it from debris following earthquake in Bhaktapur near Kathmandu, Nepal. Nearly one year ago, Nepal rumbled with a massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake that shattered daily life across the poor Himalayan nation. A series of powerful aftershocks that lasted for weeks compounded the damage and terrified the countrys 26.5 million citizens. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha, File) FILE- In this April 29, 2015 file photo, destroyed villages sit on mountain tops near the epicenter of the April 25 massive earthquake, in the Gorkha District of Nepal. Nearly one year ago, Nepal rumbled with a massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake that shattered daily life across the poor Himalayan nation. A series of powerful aftershocks that lasted for weeks compounded the damage and terrified the countrys 26.5 million citizens.(AP Photo/Wally Santana, file) FILE- In this April 29, 2015 file photo, villagers wait in the rain as an aid relief helicopter lands at their remote mountain village of Gumda, near the epicenter of the April 25 massive earthquake in the Gorkha District of Nepal. Nearly one year ago, Nepal rumbled with a massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake that shattered daily life across the poor Himalayan nation. A series of powerful aftershocks that lasted for weeks compounded the damage and terrified the countrys 26.5 million citizens.(AP Photo/Wally Santana, file) FILE- In this May 3, 2015 file photo, Nepalese woman remove debris searching their belongings from their house that was destroyed a week ago during the earthquake in Bhaktapur, Nepal. Nearly one year ago, Nepal rumbled with a massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake that shattered daily life across the poor Himalayan nation. A series of powerful aftershocks that lasted for weeks compounded the damage and terrified the countrys 26.5 million citizens. (AP Photo/Bernat Amangue, file) Beijing auto show showcases China's SUV love affair BEIJING (AP) China's love affair with SUVs is helping to cushion the blow of an unexpectedly painful slump in the rest of its crowded auto market. Sales of SUVs, seen as the safest option on China's rough, chaotic roads, soared 52 percent last year. That helped the overall market grow 7.3 percent a sliver of its 45 percent peak in 2009 even though car and minivan sales sagged. "Ten years ago, no one wanted an SUV because it was considered to be a bulky truck for peasants," said Michael Dunne, a consultant on Chinese auto market strategy. "Now the cool factor has kicked in and SUVs are super-hot in the China market." Female workers walk past an ad for an SUV at the site of the upcoming Auto Show in Beijing, China, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. China's love affair with SUVs is helping to cushion the blow of an unexpectedly painful slump in the rest of its crowded auto market. Scrambling for a piece of that action, automakers from General Motors Co. and Volkswagen AG to local players Great Wall and BYD are making SUVs the star of this months Beijing auto show, the biggest of the year in the biggest auto market.(AP Photo/Ng Han Guan) Scrambling for a piece of that action, automakers from General Motors Co. and Volkswagen AG to local players Great Wall and BYD are making SUVs the star of this month's Beijing auto show, the biggest of the year in the biggest auto market. The show "will highlight the growing tension between international and local brands as they fight to outshine each other with new products," said Namrita Chow of IHS Automotive in a report. Overall sales growth is likely to fall further this year to 6 percent after economic growth fell last year to a 25-year low, though total volume might reach 25 million vehicles, according to Chow. An industry group for Chinese auto dealers has warned against stocking up on inventory that might not sell. A few years ago customers waited months for delivery of popular models. The speed of the decline surprised U.S., European and Asian automakers that are counting on China to drive revenue growth. They have poured billions of dollars into new factories and models designed for Chinese tastes. "Nobody foresaw how quickly demand would slow," said Dunne. "Prices will fall. Profitability will suffer." Communist leaders have encouraged auto manufacturing as an economic development tool, though creating globally competitive Chinese brands turned out to be harder than they hoped. Foreign automakers that want to produce cars in China have been required since the 1980s to work through state-owned partners that Beijing hoped would learn enough to launch their own brands. When that failed to work fast enough, communist leaders extended support to independents such as BYD Auto, an electric vehicle maker, and Geely Holding Group, which bought Sweden's Volvo Cars in 2010 with support from state banks. Global automakers were required to help state-owned partners create Chinese brands such as GM's Baojun and Nissan's Venucia in exchange for being allowed to expand their own production. Meanwhile, major cities pay a price in throat-searing smog so severe that half of Beijing's cars were ordered off the road in December. The SUV boom has helped to rescue domestic Chinese automakers that had steadily lost market share to bigger, richer foreign brands. Total profit for Chinese brands fell last year despite 10 percent sales growth, according to Robin Zhu of Bernstein Research. Zhu said that squeeze will worsen as more SUVs flood the market. Chinese brands account for 65 percent of SUVs sold, dominating the market's lowest tiers, where profits are slim. Most Chinese automakers have left behind the days of quirky and bargain-priced but poor-quality vehicles. They have invested heavily in technology and brought in Western designers to create sleek models that could be mistaken for Japanese or Korean brands. "The foreign car makers are going to face more challenges," said analyst John Zeng of LMC Automotive. "The quality and competitiveness of local car makers are getting stronger and stronger." This month, BYD Auto unveiled the Yuan compact SUV, starting at 59,000 yuan ($9,100) for the gasoline version and 209,900 yuan ($33,000) for a gas-electric hybrid. Also ahead of the Beijing show, Geely debuted the Boyue SUV, starting at 98,800 yuan ($15,200). At the show, automakers plan an avalanche of new SUVs ranging from 45,000 yuan ($6,900) compacts to luxurious land yachts with heated seats and video players. The original off-road brand, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles' Jeep, is due to debut its China-manufactured Renegade. Honda Motor Co. plans to unveil two SUVs designed for China. Local brands Great Wall Motor Co., China's best-selling SUV brand, and Chery Automobile Co. plan to show at least one new model. Also this year, state-owned automakers Shanghai Automotive Industries Corp., Guangzhou Auto Co. and Dongfeng Motor Co. are expected to launch as many as three new SUVs. That should raise annual SUV production in China above 7.2 million units, with possible sales reaching 7.7 million, Chow says. Automakers also are working on futuristic technologies including electric and self-driving cars, shared vehicles summoned by smartphone and Internet-linked onboard services. GM plans to launch at least 10 electric or hybrid vehicles in China over the next five years, according to Matt Tsien, the Detroit automaker's president for China. That is part of 60 new or refreshed GM vehicles planned over the next five years. Joining the fray, technology companies including search engine Baidu Inc. and e-commerce giant Alibaba Group have announced plans to develop self-driving cars, navigation and other advances. On Wednesday, a Chinese company, LeEco, which started out as video website LeTV, unveiled what it said is a self-driving all-electric car. The company said it would announce details at the Beijing auto show. Automakers are encouraged by the fact that China's overall vehicle ownership rates still are low compared with developed countries. China has 172 million cars and 280 million licensed drivers, according to government data. That is the equivalent of 13 cars for every 100 people, well below the U.S. level of 80 per 100 people. But efforts by Beijing and other big cities to curb smog by limiting new car registrations are forcing automakers to look for buyers in smaller towns, where profits are thinner. SUV sales are so strong that some Chinese brands are gambling their futures on the boom by putting all their resources into that segment, said Zeng. "That strategy is effective in the short-term but in the longer term quite risky," he said. Workers setup for the upcoming Auto Show in Beijing, China, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. China's love affair with SUVs is helping to cushion the blow of an unexpectedly painful slump in the rest of its crowded auto market. Sales of SUVs, seen as the safest option on Chinas rough, chaotic roads, soared 52 percent last year. That helped the overall market grow 7.3 percent - a sliver of its 45 percent peak in 2009 - even though car and minivan sales fell. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan) A worker rests in a van near the site of the upcoming Auto Show in Beijing, China, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. China's love affair with SUVs is helping to cushion the blow of an unexpectedly painful slump in the rest of its crowded auto market. Scrambling for a piece of that action, automakers from General Motors Co. and Volkswagen AG to local players Great Wall and BYD are making SUVs the star of this months Beijing auto show, the biggest of the year in the biggest auto market.(AP Photo/Ng Han Guan) Renowned Cuban pro-reform economist fired as chill HAVANA (AP) One of Cuba's most renowned advocates of economic reform has been fired from his University of Havana think tank for sharing information with Americans without authorization, among other alleged violations. The dismissal of Omar Everleny Perez adds to a chillier mood that has settled over much of Cuba as the country's leaders try to quash the jubilation that greeted President Barack Obama's historic trip to the island last month. The Cuban Communist Party's twice-a-decade Congress ended Tuesday after four days of officials issuing tough warnings about the need to maintain a defensive stance against what they called the United States' continuing imperialist aspirations. Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez described Obama's visit as an "attack on the foundation of our political ideas, our history, our culture and our symbols." President Raul Castro described the U.S. as an "enemy" seeking to seduce vulnerable sectors of society, including intellectuals and members of Cuba's new private sector. Economists Everleny Perez poses for a photo in Havana, Cuba, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. Perez, one of Cubas most renowned advocates of economic reform has been fired from his University of Havana think tank for sharing information with Americans without authorization, among other alleged violations. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa) While that was going on, Cuban academics began sharing the news that Perez had been dismissed from his post at the Center for Studies of the Cuban Economy on April 8, less than three weeks after Obama's visit. Perez is one of the country's best-known academics, an expert in developing economies who served as a consultant for Castro's government when it launched a series of market-oriented economic reforms after he took over from his brother Fidel in 2008. Perez made dozens of trips to universities and conferences in the U.S. with university approval and frequently received foreign visitors researching the Cuban economy. Reached by The Associated Press on Wednesday, Perez confirmed his dismissal by center director Humberto Blanco for having unauthorized conversations with foreign institutions and informing "North American representatives" about the internal procedures of the university. The dismissal letter described Perez, 56, as "irresponsible" and "negligent" for continuing to engage in unauthorized activity after warnings from his superiors. It also accused him of receiving unauthorized payments for a study of the South Korean economy and said he was barred from returning to work for at least four years. Perez said he had appealed his dismissal, and believes Cuban authorities were seeking to make an example of him not because of the allegations in the letter, but because of his critical writings about the slow pace of economic reforms. "Sometimes they don't like what you write or think," he told the AP. Cuban government representatives did not respond to request for comment on Perez's dismissal. Perez was one of the first state economists to begin publishing in non-government publications, including several run by the Catholic Church. In 2010, he became a key consultant in reforms implemented by Raul Castro that include the legalization of hundreds of new types of private businesses, a loosening of restrictions on foreign investment, the opening of a real estate market and the handing of unused agricultural land to small farmers. "I'm still a revolutionary and a nationalist and I believe in many of the reforms that Raul Castro is undertaking," he said. Cuba's system is based on the communist government's total oversight of virtually all elements of society, including the press, arts and academia. While room for debate has grown somewhat under Raul Castro, and Cubans openly criticize the government in private conversations, intellectuals who publicly offend official sensibilities have found themselves losing their state jobs and other privileges. "His call to speed up the reforms and make them coherent may have served to frighten some of the forces of immobility in the bureaucracy," said Armando Chaguaceda, a Cuban political scientist based at the University of Guanajuato in Mexico. "It's a terrible message to economists that will affect the government's own capacity to hear feedback about its reforms." Political scientist Esteban Morales was expelled from the Communist Party in 2010 for two years for denouncing corruption. Sociologist Roberto Zurbano lost his job at a state cultural center after discussing racism in Cuba in an editorial published in The New York Times. In 2013, musician Roberto Carcasses was temporarily barred from cultural institutions after criticizing the government during a concert, and director Juan Carlos Cremata was prevented last year from putting on a production of Eugene Ionesco's "Exit the King," a play about a once-powerful dying leader. Pavel Vidal, a former colleague of Perez now working in Colombia, said the University of Havana was taking limits on academic work to an extreme. "The public work of academics has been coming under increasingly greater control," he said, even as Castro's reforms make it more urgent for the country to have "new ideas and an open and honest debate about the future of the country." ___ Associated Press writer Michael Weissenstein contributed to this report. ___ Andrea Rodriguez on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ARrodriguezAP Michael Weissenstein on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mweissenstein FILE - In this Monday, March 21, 2016, file photo, Cuban President Raul Castro, right, lifts up the arm of President Barack Obama at the conclusion of their joint news conference at the Palace of the Revolution in Havana, Cuba. One of Cubas most renowned advocates of economic reform has been fired from his University of Havana think tank, on Wednesday, April 20, for sharing information with Americans without authorization, among other alleged violations.(AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa, File) Ukraine's president bans Russian movies MOSCOW (AP) Ukraine has banned all movies filmed in Russia after 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula. President Petro Poroshenko signed the bill on Wednesday which also bans all movies produced by Russian companies and Russian citizens after 1991 if they "glorify the work of government bodies" of Russia. Russian films and television series have long dominated the Ukrainian market where an overwhelming majority of the population is bilingual. Ukrainian and Russia television channels have also been engaged in a decades-long partnership to co-produce movies and TV series. The ban means that no Russian movie produced after Jan. 1, 2014, will be able to receive a national distribution license required for any film to hit the screens in Ukraine Before the ban was imposed, Ukraine had barred dozens of Russian movies and TV series by refusing to give them a license. The Ukrainian Cinema Agency's 2015 black list had over 160 titles including a popular series about a physical education teacher and an animated series for children about trains. Because of the shared Soviet past millions of Ukrainians have the same adoration of Soviet-era comedies and dramas as Russians or Belarusians. Concerns swirled before Wednesday's ban that Kiev might move to blacklist some much-loved Soviet movies which featured, for example, intelligence agents and police detectives. Indiana lawmaker defends taking family on California trip INDIANAPOLIS (AP) U.S. Rep. Marlin Stutzman on Thursday defended his decision to have his Senate campaign pay more than $2,000 for a six-day trip to California last summer that his wife described on social media as a family vacation. But an itinerary of the trip released by his campaign as well as a radio interview Stutzman gave Thursday left a number of questions unanswered and raised new ones about the West Coast visit and wider spending on travel by the tea party favorite. Federal Election Commission guidelines forbid using campaign funds for personal expenses. Stutzman reimbursed the campaign for his family's portion of the trip last week after The Associated Press began questioning him about it, his campaign director says. FILE - In this April 18, 2016, file photo, Indiana Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Marlin Stutzman speaks during a debate with opponent Todd Young in Indianapolis. Stutzman billed his campaign more than $2,000 in airfare for his family's trip to the Ronald Reagan library in California, an apparent violation of federal election laws. The expense is part of hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel expenses, meals and vehicle payments Stutzman has charged to his campaign fund since 2010. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy, File) The California visit represents just a small part of over $300,000 in flights, vehicle charges, meals and hotel stays Stutzman's campaign fund has spent since the tea party-backed Republican went to Washington in 2010 on a pledge to oppose special interests, an AP review found. That's roughly three times more than Rep. Todd Young, his GOP rival in the May 3 primary, who joined the House about the same time. Stutzman is locked in a primary battle with Young for the Republican nomination to fill an open U.S. Senate seat that could be important in the November elections, when Democrats hope to win a Senate majority. On Thursday, Stutzman's campaign pointed out that the FEC once fined Young for campaign finance violations. The FEC found in 2012 that Young received more than $100,000 in contributions from "prohibited" donors, exceeded campaign finance limits or were not reported properly. Young was fined $8,670. His campaign declined comment Thursday on the FEC's finding against them. "He's the only one who's been found guilty of wrongdoing by the FEC," Stutzman campaign manager Josh Kelley said. Stutzman's campaign has repeatedly said the California trip was for political purposes and that his family joined Stutzman at campaign-related events. The itinerary released Thursday deletes the names of those he met with and locations of many events. It does not explain their political purpose, and shows his wife and children attending only one of the events listed. Stutzman told WOWO radio in Fort Wayne on Thursday that personal considerations were involved in his decision to bring family with him. "I want to keep my family with me as much as possible," he told the station. "That's part of the reason why we decided to do the personal trip for Christy and the boys and me on the campaign. It was during the summer break for the boys and we decided, hey, if there is a way to stay together and do this trip that way I'm not away from my family." Stutzman's campaign did not respond to the AP's request to interview the congressman. Over the course of a week, the AP repeatedly asked the campaign to explain the California trip and Stutzman's other spending, including his use of congressional and campaign funds to reimburse himself for mileage driven on a personal vehicle. The campaign never answered directly and never announced that it had belatedly reimbursed the campaign fund for the costs of the family's trip until after the AP published a review of Stutzman's campaign fund usage on Wednesday. A Facebook page at the time of the California trip belonging to Stutzman's wife called the trip a "family vacation" and touted a visit to the Ronald Reagan presidential library in Simi Valley, California. The Facebook pictures were removed from public view several days after the AP first asked about the trip. Michael Toner, who was chairman of the FEC under President George W. Bush, told the AP that family vacations can't be charged to a campaign account and that the candidate must pay for personal expenses, even if the trip includes political activities. He said reimbursing the campaign "doesn't completely resolve the situation." Stutzman released a statement to the media Thursday saying he has always been "fully transparent with Hoosiers." He said all "personal family time" on the California trip was paid for out of his own pocket. The 3 -page itinerary detailed the congressman's events on four of the six days of the trip, not including a weekend in the middle. It detailed the family's drive from their hometown of Howe in northeast Indiana to the Detroit airport and then flying to Los Angeles. It listed several hotels and restaurants visited for meetings and meals, but deleted all names of people the congressman met with. "We just didn't want to put that information on there," Kelley said, citing "privacy concerns." Kelley said the Hilton expense was incurred in Indianapolis the night before the California trip. But did not explain who used the room. In the Thursday interview, Stutzman told WOWO radio that the campaign had consulted with the FEC on the trip spending, and that the FEC had "cleared everything." His campaign could not say when Stutzman consulted the FEC or whom he spoke with. The FEC shows no record of Stutzman seeking a formal opinion. Often when a campaign wants FEC approval on the use of campaign funds, a written opinion is requested. Among other AP questions Stutzman's campaign has declined to answer is whether the mileage he charged his congressional and campaign accounts was largely for in-state trips or travel to and from Washington and the details of his purchasing a car with campaign funds. Jewish family makes claims to prized Passover manuscript JERUSALEM (AP) The grandchildren of one of the earliest Jewish victims of the Nazis are laying claim to a jewel of Israel's top museum: the world's oldest illustrated Passover manuscript. The descendants of a German Jewish lawmaker say the famed Birds' Head Haggadah, a medieval copy of the text read around Jewish dinner tables on Passover, was stolen from their family during the Nazi era and sold without the family's consent 70 years ago to the predecessor of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem an act the family calls a "long-standing illegal and moral injustice." The medieval manuscript, which tells the biblical tale of the Israelite exodus from Egypt, has long vexed scholars with its peculiar drawings of Jewish figures with bird-like heads. Now, a new page in the manuscript's history is being written, as a high-profile American attorney who restored looted masterpieces by artist Gustav Klimt to their Jewish heir a courtroom drama made famous in the recent Hollywood film "Woman in Gold" is taking on the case. CLARIFIES FAMILY MEMBERS INVOLVED - In this photo taken Wednesday, April 13, 2016, Eli Barzilai holds a copy of the Birds' Head Haggadah in his house in Jerusalem. Barzilai and his cousins, the grandchildren of one of the earliest Jewish victims of the Nazis, are laying claim to a jewel of Israel's leading museum: the world's oldest surviving illustrated Passover manuscript. The descendants of a German Jewish lawmaker say the famed Birds' Head Haggadah, a medieval copy of the text read around Jewish dinner tables on Passover, was stolen from their family during the Nazi era and sold without their consent to the predecessor of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem 70 years ago. (AP Photo/Dan Balilty) The manuscript is currently displayed behind glass in a darkened room at the special exhibit at the Israel Museum ahead of the weeklong Passover holiday, which begins Friday. The family wants the manuscript to remain at the museum, but it demands the museum pay compensation and rename the manuscript after the family, or face a lawsuit. "We want a compromise," said Eli Barzilai, 75, who lives in Jerusalem. He is leading the restitution demand in Jerusalem on behalf of his cousins in the United States and Berlin. He said the manuscript is so rare, its value is priceless. The Art Newspaper, which first reported the ownership claim, said the family is seeking "less than" $10 million, but neither Barzilai nor the family's lawyer would cite a figure to The Associated Press. "If we go to court," he said, "there's no turning back." Barzilai, who is spending Passover on a tour of China with his wife, said his lawyer and the Israel Museum had exchanged documentation regarding the Haggadah, and that Barzilai would meet museum staff for the first time in May. The museum said in a statement that it "looks forward to meeting with Mr. Barzilai, following its several suggestions that he do so, and to learning about whatever new information and documentation he has and to sharing what the Museum knows with him." In an email exchange provided by Barzilai's lawyer, the museum's lawyer acknowledged the Marum family's ownership of the Haggadah "for a period of time up until 1933." Written in southern Germany around 1300 by a scribe identified only as Menahem, the Bird's Head Haggadah has long been a riddle. Marc Michael Epstein, Vassar College professor and author of the book The Medieval Haggadah, called it "as mysterious as the Pyramids of Giza, the monoliths of Easter Island, or Mona Lisa's smile." Much of the enigma surrounds its strange illustrations of Jewish figures. Epstein believes the heads on the figures are those of griffins, a beloved mythical creature, and the drawings were meant to offer a positive representation of Jews while skirting a biblical prohibition against depicting human likenesses. Barzilai says the 14th-century Haggadah was a wedding gift from his grandmother's family to his grandfather, Ludwig Marum, a lawyer from the German town of Karlsruhe who served in Germany's parliament and opposed Hitler. The Nazis paraded Marum and other opponents across town before taking them away. Marum was later killed at the Kislau concentration camp. A Jewish lawyer named Shimon Jeselsohn who worked with Marum managed to flee and eventually moved to Israel after World War II. One day, he read in the newspaper about a special Haggadah purchased by the Bezalel National Museum, the forerunner to the Israel Museum. Jeselsohn recognized it as the Birds' Head Haggadah. Marum had kept it in his law office, Jeselsohn said in his memoirs. Curious as to how the manuscript ended up in Jerusalem, Jeselsohn began making inquiries. The museum director told him a Jewish immigrant from Karlsruhe brought it after the war. When Jeselsohn asked the immigrant where he got it, he said a Jewish doctor had given it to him. But when the doctor denied it, the immigrant offered no further explanation, and Jeselsohn grew suspicious. He wrote to Barzilai's aunt, Elisabeth, who had survived World War II and moved to New York, to update her about the Haggadah's journey. After a visit to Israel in 1984 to see the Haggadah at the Israel Museum with Barzilai, Elisabeth wrote to the museum that she believed the immigrant who had brought it to Jerusalem "had no right to sell it," but that the Marum family wanted it to remain at the museum "for the benefit of the public." For years, the family did not act. Dominique Avery, Elisabeth's daughter, says her late mother thought she had no recourse to retrieve the manuscript and she deferred to Barzilai. After Barzilai heard a speech last year at the Israel Museum by E. Randol Schoenberg, the lawyer who retrieved the Klimt paintings, Barzilai enlisted the lawyer's help. The family's demands are delicate, because they are leveled at the leading museum of a country that gave refuge to Holocaust survivors and that has long seen itself as a caretaker of the cultural artifacts of Holocaust victims. "The Israel Museum should be even more sensitive to the claimant's side," said Schoenberg. The museum said it has in recent years restituted 18 works looted during World War II, and is in the process of restituting three more works. There are two researchers dedicated to combing through the museum's collection for looted objects, the museum said. Why Barzilai waited until his 70s to pursue the manuscript is another question mark in the story. Barzilai spent his childhood with an adopted family, and only learned as a teenager that he had been adopted and that his biological parents had perished in the Holocaust. It was too painful a truth to bear, he said, and he wanted to forget his connection to the Marum family. "We were two separate identities," he said. Even when he accompanied his aunt Elisabeth to see the Haggadah, he said he took no special interest in the manuscript. Through his quest to reclaim the Haggadah at this stage in his life, Barzilai says he has reclaimed a part of himself. "The Haggadah," Barzilai said, "was a trigger." ___ Follow Daniel Estrin: www.twitter.com/danielestrin In this photo taken Wednesday, April 13, 2016, Eli and Shuli Barzilai holds a copy of the Birds' Head Haggadah in his house in Jerusalem. Barzilai and his cousins, family grandchildren of one of the earliest Jewish victims of the Nazis are laying claim to a jewel of Israel's leading museum: the world's oldest surviving illustrated Passover manuscript. The descendants of a German Jewish lawmaker say the famed Birds' Head Haggadah, a medieval copy of the text read around Jewish dinner tables on Passover, was stolen from their family during the Nazi era and sold without their consent to the predecessor of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem 70 years ago. (AP Photo/Dan Balilty) In this photo taken Wednesday, April 20, 2016, the famed Birds' Head Haggadah, a medieval copy of a text read around the Passover holiday table, is seen on display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The grandchildren of one of the earliest Jewish victims of the Nazis are laying claim to a jewel of Israel's top museum: the world's oldest surviving illustrated Passover manuscript. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner) In this photo taken Wednesday, April 20, 2016, the famed Birds' Head Haggadah, a medieval copy of a text read around the Passover holiday table, is seen on display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The grandchildren of one of the earliest Jewish victims of the Nazis are laying claim to a jewel of Israel's top museum: the world's oldest surviving illustrated Passover manuscript. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner) In this photo taken Wednesday, April 20, 2016, the famed Birds' Head Haggadah, a medieval copy of a text read around the Passover holiday table, is seen on display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The grandchildren of one of the earliest Jewish victims of the Nazis are laying claim to a jewel of Israel's top museum: the world's oldest surviving illustrated Passover manuscript. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner) In this photo taken Wednesday, April 20, 2016, visitors look at the famed Birds' Head Haggadah, a medieval copy of a text read around the Passover holiday table, on display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The grandchildren of one of the earliest Jewish victims of the Nazis are laying claim to a jewel of Israel's top museum: the world's oldest surviving illustrated Passover manuscript. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner) In this photo taken Wednesday, April 20, 2016, the famed Birds' Head Haggadah, a medieval copy of a text read around the Passover holiday table, is seen on display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The grandchildren of one of the earliest Jewish victims of the Nazis are laying claim to a jewel of Israel's top museum: the world's oldest surviving illustrated Passover manuscript. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner) VA study on whether dogs can heal vets with PTSD has critics FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. (AP) Army veteran Joe Aguirre opens a restaurant door, then steps aside to let his golden retriever take point. "Clear," Aguirre commands, and 3-year-old Munger pivots right, left, then right again, sweeping the room for potential threats. "He's basically looking for ... anything that would be out of the ordinary. A bag. A particular weapon. People acting erratic," says Aguirre, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder after three tours of duty in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. At the cash register, Aguirre says "Block," and the dog places himself perpendicular to his master, creating a buffer to anyone who might approach. Before Munger, a simple outing like this would have been terrifying if not impossible. "He's put faith back into my way of looking at society," Aguirre says. In this Thursday, March 24, 2016 photo, Army veteran Joe Aguirre drapes a tattooed arm across the back of his service dog, Munger, in Fayetteville, N.C. The Department of Veterans Affairs is in the middle of a multi-year study to determine whether it should pay for such psychiatric service dogs. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed) But do the comfort and security this lovable dog provides come at the expense of true healing from PTSD? Is Munger merely preventing Aguirre from confronting his demons? Since 2002, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has paid veterinary bills to veterans with guide or service dogs for physical disabilities. Now, the agency is in the midst of a $12 million study to gauge the efficacy and costs of using dogs to help those who suffer from post-traumatic stress. Four years in, that research has been plagued by problems. Only about 50 dogs have been placed with veterans, and critics question whether the protocol itself is flawed with the dogs being trained to do things that could reinforce fears. Others worry the animals could become a substitute for the hard work that comes with therapy. "You will have the veterans go to more places with the dogs and do more things than they would otherwise do. But they are reliant on the dog, not on their knowledge of ... whether really they are afraid of a ghost," said Dr. Edna Foa, director of the Center for Treatment and Study of Anxiety at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. More than 350,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have sought help from the VA for PTSD. Yet the agency is authorized to pay only for "evidence-based" therapies such as cognitive processing and prolonged exposure, which involve having veterans confront and analyze traumatic events. In 2010, Congress permitted the VA to study alternative treatments for PTSD, including the therapeutic use of animals. The study began in late 2011 in Tampa, Florida, with three nonprofits contracted to provide up to 200 service dogs for veterans, who would be compared against a control group that did not receive dogs. The effort soon ran into trouble. The VA cut off two of the three dog vendors following biting incidents involving participants' children. The final contract was terminated in August 2012 amid allegations of lax veterinary care and placement of dogs "with known aggressive behavior," according to VA records. By then, only 17 dogs had been placed. During the next year and a half, the study protocol was revamped to exclude veterans with children under age 10. It also dropped the no-dog control in favor of a group that would receive less-specialized "emotional support dogs" whose "sole function is to provide comfort." Critics of the study object most strongly to the tasks the VA is requiring of the dogs sweeping the perimeter of a room before a veteran enters, for example, or protecting the veteran by "blocking." "Isn't that saying that al-Qaida could be behind the shower curtain? That's supporting paranoid, pathological thinking," said Meg Daley Olmert, author of a book on how contact with a dog can create a sense of well-being. Olmert is chief research adviser for Warrior Canine Connection, a Maryland-based nonprofit that uses veterans to train service dogs for their fellows. The group's leaders say dogs should be trained to pick up on cues from PTSD sufferers and then provide the appropriate support, such as learning to wake someone up during a nightmare or detecting when a veteran is anxious, and interacting in a way that helps calm him. The VA's training protocol "reinforces the cognitive distortions that accompany PTSD," said Robert Koffman, a retired Navy psychiatrist and chief medical officer for Warrior Canine Connection. Rick Yount, executive director of the nonprofit, questioned whether the study had perhaps even been set up to fail so that the VA wouldn't have to pick up the tab for veterinary bills for psychiatric service dogs. Already the VA is on the hook for upward of $1.4 million a year to cover bills for service dogs for physical disabilities. Michael Fallon, the VA's chief veterinary medical officer, said the insinuation that money is the researchers' chief concern is "ludicrous." As for the training guidelines, he said the list of commands was developed during more than a year of consultation with mental-health experts, service dog providers and veterans. They help get veterans "out into the community and integrated more into the public life," he said. One dog trainer agreed, in part. David Cantara heads North Carolina-based Patriot Rovers, which trained Aguirre's dog and is not connected to the VA's study. While Cantara is opposed to using dogs to sweep rooms, he said the blocking command is one of the most vital to his veterans. "They startle very quickly. And knowing that they have that dog there, guarding their six as it were ... they're not in this constant hyper vigilant state," he said. The debate has highlighted an overall lack of standards in the service dog industry. Currently, the VA will only pay benefits for service dogs trained by an organization accredited by Assistance Dogs International, and that group is only now developing its own guidelines for the use of dogs for veterans with combat-related PTSD. Only one of the vendors supplying dogs for the VA study is ADI-accredited, and none has prior experience training animals for veterans with PTSD. Sheila O'Brien, chair of the steering committee drafting ADI's guidelines, said the group is studying other tasks in lieu of blocking and sweeping. Despite all the criticism, the VA's study, set to conclude in 2018, is chugging along with more than 100 of an eventual 220 veterans enrolled, about half paired with dogs. Fallon said the only recent glitch was a vendor error that shipped out service dog vests for some support dogs, which don't have the same public access rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act. In November, the Kaiser Permanente Northwest Center for Health Research released the results of a study involving 78 veterans with PTSD. It found that those with animals had better overall mental health, less substance abuse and higher ratings on their interpersonal relationships. Researchers said, however, that "differences cannot be directly attributed to service dogs" and that more study is needed. U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis recently introduced a bill that would take $10 million from the VA's budget to immediately begin pairing service dogs with post-9/11 veterans for whom traditional PTSD treatments hadn't worked. During a subcommittee hearing last week, Rory Diamond, executive director of the group K9s for Warriors, said the VA had "fumbled" its study, and that veterans can't afford to wait. As far as Joe Aguirre is concerned, the question of whether these dogs help has been answered. "I honestly feel without Munger in my life right now, I probably wouldn't be alive," he said of the dog named in honor of Spc. Joshua Munger of Maysville, Missouri, killed by an improvised explosive device near Baghdad in 2005. Patriot Rovers names all its support dogs after fallen service members. "It makes me feel like I've got a bond, knowing that he, like any other soldier that you have a bond with, would take a bullet for you. Would watch your back and your front." Whatever the potential costs of providing these animals, Aguirre added, it's "nickels and dimes compared to the service we provided to our country." ___ Allen G. Breed is a national writer, based in Raleigh, North Carolina. He can be reached at features@ap.org. Follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/AllenGBreed . In this Thursday, March 24, 2016 photo, Army veteran Joe Aguirre and his service dog, Munger, walk back to their truck after lunch in Fayetteville, N.C. The Department of Veterans Affairs is in the middle of a multi-year study to determine whether the agency should provide psychiatric service animals for vets with post-traumatic stress disorder. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed) In this Thursday, April 14, 2016 photo, military veteran Cole Lyle, who suffers with PTSD, walks with his dog Kaya in the hallways of Rayburn House Office building on Capitol Hill in Washington, prior to testifying before the House National Security subcommittee hearing on "Connecting Veterans with PTSD with Service Dogs." (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) In this Thursday, April 14, 2016 photo, military veteran Cole Lyle, who suffers with PTSD, and his dog Kaya, wait in the hallway of the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, prior to testifying before the House National Security subcommittee hearing on "Connecting Veterans with PTSD with Service Dogs." (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) In this Tuesday, March 8, 2016 photo, David Cantara watches as his newest litter of would-be service dogs eat from their food dish at Patriot Rovers in High Point, N.C. Cantara has been training dogs to help fellow veterans for about 30 years. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed) In this Thursday, March 24, 2016 photo, Munger, a psychiatric service dog, naps under the table while Joe and Angela Aguirre eat lunch in Fayetteville, N.C. The 3-year-old Golden Retriever helps the Army veteran cope with his post-traumatic stress disorder. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed) In this Tuesday, March 8, 2016 photo, service dog Geoffrey raises a paw to shake with Patriot Rovers founder David Cantara in High Point, N.C. Like all the dogs Cantara trains, Geoffrey is named for a fallen service member. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed) In this Thursday, March 24, 2016 photo, Munger, a psychiatric service dog, "clears" the area as Joe Aguirre enters a restaurant in Fayetteville, N.C. The 3-year-old Golden Retriever helps the Army veteran cope with his post-traumatic stress disorder. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed) In this Thursday, April 14, 2016 photo, Veterans Affairs Department Office of Research and Development Chief Veterinary Medical Officer Dr. Michael Fallon testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, before the House National Security subcommittee hearing on "Connecting Veterans with PTSD with Service Dogs." (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) Novartis profits dip as generic rival challenges cancer drug GENEVA (AP) Swiss pharmaceuticals maker Novartis says net income from continued operations fell 13 percent in the first quarter as generic competition cut into sales of Gleevec, one of the first very effective cancer medicines. The Basel-based company said Thursday that net income from continuing operations declined to $2.01 billion from $2.31 billion a year earlier. Sales dipped 3 percent to $11.6 billion. Novartis noted the start of sales of a U.S. generic version of Gleevec which had cost around $10,000 per month in February. The company said its core operating margin fell because of the generic competition as well as investments in new product launches and a growth plan for its Alcon eye-care business. Shares of Novartis were down 0.7 percent at 74.55 Swiss francs in mid-morning trading on the Six Swiss stock exchange. The company reported net income fell 85 percent from $13 billion last year, which included the impact of a shake-up in its business with an acquisition of oncology and consumer health-care assets from GSK and the divestment of its vaccines and animal health businesses. The company predicted revenues and core operating income this year would be "broadly in line" with those of 2015, and expects a rise in generic drugs to weigh on its sales by up to $3.2 billion this year, $1 billion more than in the previous year. In Saudi visit, Obama works to calm Gulf tensions with US RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) President Barack Obama strained to ease tensions with Persian Gulf allies Thursday, pledging U.S. help in confronting Iran and other security threats. Yet he failed to win the commitments he sought to boost economic aid to Iraq. Obama's trip to Saudi Arabia the fourth and probably last of his presidency did not result in any major breakthroughs. Obama said Gulf leaders attending the regional summit had agreed to step up the campaign against the Islamic State group, but did not lay out specifics. He described the talks as a chance to clear up misperceptions among allies, insisting the U.S. and Gulf partners had "tactical differences" but similar goals. "A lot of the strain was always overblown," Obama said as he closed a two-day trip here. President Barack Obama, with Saudi Arabia's King Salman, right, speaks after a Gulf Cooperation Council session at the Diriyah Palace during the Gulf Cooperation Council Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Thursday, April 21, 2016. The president is on a six day trip to strategize with his counterparts in Saudi Arabia, England and Germany on a broad range of issues with efforts to rein in the Islamic State group being the common denominator in all three stops. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) Saudi Arabia, like other Sunni-led countries in the region, has been wary of Obama's nuclear deal with Iran and skeptical of his approach in Syria. Obama came to the Gulf Cooperation Council meeting not only to urge its members to do more to tackle thorny security challenges but also to offer his own reassurance. His brief visit, though, illustrated the limits of what can be achieved when Gulf budgets are stretched by a slump in oil prices and the region is eagerly looking beyond Obama to his successor. Obama leaves office in January after eight years that Saudi leaders saw as heralding a shift in traditional U.S. loyalties away from Saudi Arabia and toward Iran. Obama, in meetings with Saudi King Salman, the ruling emirs of Qatar and Kuwait and others, appealed for more financial and political support to help Iraq. Yet the leaders appeared reluctant to invest until Iraq's government overcomes a political crisis and better integrates Sunnis into the process. In a shift in tone from just a day earlier, Obama said the U.S. and its Gulf partners should wait to see whether Iraq can resolve the crisis before committing more aid. He warned that the paralysis is impeding U.S.-led efforts to defeat the Islamic State group and reconstruct war-damaged Iraq. "Right now in Baghdad, there's some big challenges," Obama said. "Until that's settled, I think it's important for us to make sure that any additional stabilization dollars that we put in are going to be effectively spent." Obama praised Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi as a "good partner" for the U.S. but and said he was concerned about his grip on power. Increasing pressure on Iraqi leaders, Obama said it was vital for the country to finalize a Cabinet so the nation can focus on profound long-term problems. "They've got a lot on their plate," Obama said. "Now is not the time for government gridlock or bickering." Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser, said there was no discussion of calls in the U.S. for the release of 28 pages of a report on the Sept. 11 attacks believed to shed light on possible Saudi connections. The controversy has led some in Congress to push legislation allowing families of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi government for compensation. The White House opposes the legislation, arguing it could expose Americans overseas to legal risks. The Gulf states remain concerned about Obama's willingness to negotiate with Shiite powerhouse Iran, amid fears that the deal to curb Iranian moves toward nuclear weapons will lead to a rebalancing of regional stances at their expense. Obama said the U.S. would live up to its commitments under the deal to grant sanctions relief to Tehran while remaining vigilant about destabilizing activities including arms shipments to Houthi rebels in Yemen that the U.S. has helped intercept. "None of our nations have an interest in conflict with Iran," Obama said before flying to London, the next stop on his three-country trip. The president's hopes of winding down U.S. military engagement in the Mideast have repeatedly been confounded by conflicts that have flared in countries struggling to contain extremists. Obama said the U.S. would boost security cooperation to address threats in Libya and support a fledgling U.N.-brokered unity government there. He urged all parties to abide by a nascent cease-fire in Yemen, where a Saudi-led coalition is fighting on the side of an internationally recognized government against Shiite rebels and their allies. Though many of the Mideast allies are participating in the U.S.-led coalition against IS, they harbor serious doubts about Obama's approach to resolving Syria's long-running civil war, which has left President Bashar Assad in power to the dismay of Sunni leaders elsewhere in the Middle East. Obama warned that a cease-fire in Syria that the U.S. and Russia brokered was under "tremendous strain," blaming Assad's forces in part for what he said were repeated violations. "It may be breaking down," Obama said. ___ Schreck reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writers Josh Lederman and Kevin Freking in Washington contributed to this report. ___ Follow Kathleen Hennessey on Twitter at http://twitter.com/khennessey and Adam Schreck at http://www.twitter.com/adamschreck . President Barack Obama and Saudi Arabia's King Salman walk together to a meeting at Erga Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. The president begins a six day trip to strategize with his counterparts in Saudi Arabia, England and Germany on a broad range of issues with efforts to rein in the Islamic State group being the common denominator in all three stops. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) President Barack Obama, seated right, speaks with Abu Dhabias Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, during a Gulf Cooperation Council session during the Gulf Cooperation Council Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Thursday, April 21, 2016. The president is on a weeklong trip to strategize with his counterparts in Saudi Arabia, England and Germany on a broad range of issues with efforts to rein in the Islamic State group being the common denominator in all three stops. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) He also came out against the plan to replace President Andrew Jackson with the civil-rights figure Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill Trump raised fresh concern among some conservatives by speaking against North Carolina's 'bathroom law' Trump's team said the GOP frontrunner is 'evolving' in a way that will improve his standing among general election voters Donald Trump's chief lieutenants told skeptical Republican leaders on Thursday that the GOP front-runner has been 'projecting an image' so far in the 2016 primary season and 'the part that he's been playing is now evolving' in a way that will improve his standing among general election voters. The message, delivered behind closed doors in a private briefing, is part of the campaign's intensifying effort to convince party leaders that Trump will moderate his tone in the coming months to help deliver big electoral gains this fall, despite his contentious ways. Even as his team pressed Trump's case, he raised fresh concern among some conservatives by speaking against North Carolina's 'bathroom law', which directs transgender people to use the bathroom that matches the sex on their birth certificates. Trump also came out against the federal government's plan to replace President Andrew Jackson with the civil-rights figure Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. Scroll down for video Donald Trump's chief lieutenants told skeptical Republican leaders on Thursday that the GOP frontrunner will moderate his tone in the coming months. Pictured above, Trump speaks during a campaign event at Stephen Decatur High School on Wednesday in Berlin, Maryland The developments came as the GOP's messy fight for the White House spilled into a seaside resort in south Florida. While candidates in both parties fanned out across the country before important primary contests in the Northeast, Hollywood's Diplomat Resort & Spa was transformed into a palm-treed political battleground. Trump's newly hired senior aide, Paul Manafort, made the case to Republican National Committee members that Trump has two personalities: one in private and one onstage. 'When he's out on the stage, when he's talking about the kinds of things he's talking about on the stump, he's projecting an image that's for that purpose,' Manafort said in a private briefing. 'You'll start to see more depth of the person, the real person. You'll see a real different guy,' he said. The Associated Press obtained a recording of the closed-door exchange. 'He gets it,' Manafort said of Trump's need to moderate his personality. 'The part that he's been playing is evolving into the part that now you've been expecting, but he wasn't ready for, because he had first to complete the first phase. The negatives will come down. The image is going to change.' The message was welcomed by some party officials but criticized by others who suggested it raised doubts about his authenticity. 'He's trying to moderate. He's getting better,' said Ben Carson, a Trump ally who was part of the GOP's front-runner's RNC outreach team. While Trump's top advisers were promising Republican leaders that the GOP front-runner would moderate his message, the candidate was telling voters he wasn't ready to act presidential. Trump raised fresh concern among some conservatives by speaking against North Carolina's 'bathroom law' Donald Trump strategist Paul J Manafort, left, chats with former presidential candidate Ben Carson as they head to a Trump for president reception at the Republican National Committee Spring Meeting on Thursday 'I just don't know if I want to do it yet,' Trump said during a raucous rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Thursday that was frequently interrupted by protesters. 'At some point, I'm going to be so presidential that you people will be so bored,' he said, predicting that the size of his crowds would dwindle if he dialed back his rhetoric. There was evidence of drama on the Democratic side as well. Prominent Southern Democrats urged Bernie Sanders to stop dismissing Hillary Clinton's landslide primary wins across the South, where the front-runner's popularity among non-whites has helped fuel her success. Sanders said the results in the South 'distort reality' because they came from the country's 'most conservative region'. Don Fowler of South Carolina, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and other Clinton supporters told Sanders in a letter that 'our national Democratic leaders' should 'invest in our races and causes - to amplify our voices, not diminish them'. Yet as Clinton's grasp on the Democratic nomination tightens, Trump's overwhelming Republican delegate lead has done little to calm concerns from GOP leaders, gathered at the resort for the party's meeting. As Trump continues to rail against 'a rigged' nomination process, he sent Manafort and his newly hired political director, Rick Wiley, to help improve relationships with party officials at the meeting. 'He might not win some of these blue states, but you can make the Democrats spend money and time,' Wiley said. Trump's team also signaled to RNC members a fresh willingness to dip into the New York real estate mogul's personal fortune to fund his presidential bid, in addition to helping the national committee raise money, a promise that comes just as Trump launches his first big television advertising campaign in a month. Republican presidential candidate Sen Ted Cruz, R-Texas, gestures as he speaks during a news conference on Wednesday at the Republican National Committee Spring Meeting in Hollywood, Florida His campaign reserved about $2million worth of air time in soon-to-vote Pennsylvania and Indiana, advertising tracker Kantar Media's CMAG shows. 'He's willing to spend what is necessary to finish this out. That's a big statement from him,' Manafort said in the briefing. Trump is increasingly optimistic about his chances in five states holding primary contests on Tuesday: Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. He is now the only Republican candidate who can possibly collect the 1,237-delegate majority needed to claim the nomination before the party's July convention. Chief rival Ted Cruz hopes Trump will fall short of a nomination-clinching delegate majority so that he can turn enough delegates to his side at the convention to give him the prize. The political posturing came as Trump sparked new criticism by addressing the debate over which bathrooms transgender people should use. Speaking at a town-hall event on NBC's Today show on Thursday, Trump said North Carolina's bathroom law has caused unnecessary strife and transgender people should be able to choose which bathroom to use. 'There have been very few complaints the way it is,' Trump said. 'People go, they use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate.' Cruz lashed out at Trump's 'support of grown men using women's restrooms'. The Texas senator called Trump's position 'a reckless policy that will endanger our loved ones.' 911 call helps convict former Louisiana district attorney NEW ORLEANS (AP) In 2010, a woman made a desperate 911 call to report that a powerful prosecutor sexually assaulted her at her home. Six years later that prosecutor has been called a sexual predator by authorities and faces a possible prison sentence. Records released Thursday reveal that sheriff's deputies summoned an FBI agent after Danelle Keim called for help and reported the allegations about Harry Morel, who served as St. Charles Parish's elected district attorney for more than three decades. Keim became the key witness for the FBI in its long-running investigation of Morel, who pleaded guilty Wednesday to obstructing a federal investigation of the sex abuse allegations. Authorities say Morel repeatedly abused his power to prey on vulnerable women, offering them or their relatives leniency from his office in exchange for sex. Harry Morel, a former district attorney for St. Charles Parish, La., arrives with his attorney Ralph Capitelli, right, at Federal Court in New Orleans, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. Morel is charged with obstructing a federal investigation. A bill of information filed by prosecutors said he harassed an unidentified witness in a federal grand jury investigation. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) Investigators accused Morel of soliciting sex from at least 20 women during his 33-year tenure in office. "Harry Morel could make things go away, but he wanted sexual acts in exchange," said U.S. Attorney Kenneth Polite. "We suspect that this pattern of conduct has been ongoing for many decades. In fact, we will never know the full extent of it." In the end, prosecutors facing a statute of limitations on the crimes, significant problems with evidence and victims who could prove to be difficult witnesses chose not to charge Morel with any sexual crimes, Polite said. Morel pleaded guilty to a narrowly tailored charge of obstruction of justice for harassing Keim and pressuring her to get rid of evidence in the federal grand jury investigation that targeted him. Keim died of a drug overdose in 2013 when she was 27. Investigators said her cooperation with the FBI was instrumental in securing a guilty plea from Morel, who faces a maximum sentence of three years in prison. A court filing Wednesday says Morel, 73, engaged in "inappropriate behavior" with Keim at her home after her arrest in St. Charles Parish on a drunken driving charge in March 2010. On Thursday, St. Charles Parish Sheriff's office released the tape of Keim's 911 call after Morel left her apartment. She accused him of sexually assaulting her. "He grabbed me, he kissed me and he touched me in my private areas," she told a dispatcher in a trembling voice. "He wanted me to take off my clothes. He wanted me to take my pants off so he can please me." Keim later told investigators that Morel left after she pulled away from his kiss, according to a taped interview released Thursday. "He touched me, and I didn't want to be touched. Nobody touches me if I don't want to be touched," she said. Keim told a deputy that she worried it would be "my word against his." Keim later recorded conversations with Morel for the FBI after he agreed to assist her with new theft and drunken driving charges, according to Wednesday's court filing. The FBI also videotaped a July 2012 meeting between Morel and Keim at her home. Morel brought two bottles of wine and again attempted to engage in "inappropriate behavior," the filing said. Jeff Sallet, special agent in charge of the FBI office in New Orleans, said Keim "should be singled out for her tremendous bravery and resolve." "Harry Morel is nothing short of a sexual predator," Sallet said. "His days of victimizing the most defenseless among us are over." Morel's attorney, Ralph Capitelli, rejected Keim's allegations and said authorities never confronted Morel about the 911 call during his tenure as a prosecutor. Capitelli said law-enforcement officials have engaged in "character assassination" for releasing the 911 call and accusing Morel of conduct for which he hasn't been charged. "The release of a 911 call six years after it took place demonstrates clearly the continuing smear campaign that both the federal government and the St. Charles Parish Sheriff's Office are conducting against my client," he said. Keim wasn't the first women to call authorities about Morel. Sheriff Greg Champagne said Wednesday that a woman whose husband had been arrested on traffic charges including drunk driving had called him in June 2009, a few months before Keim's call. That woman, whom he did not identify, said Morel told her "that the charges could be 'taken care of' if she would agree to meet him at his camp in Mississippi to 'play' while her husband sat in jail." He said he referred the report to the FBI, which began investigating. Keim's mother, Tammy Glover, said her daughter cooperated with the FBI for more than a year. "She went undercover with the FBI and exposed him," Glover said in a telephone interview. "If it would not have been for my daughter, who is my hero, (Morel) would have never been exposed. I am amazed at what she did and so very proud of her. She will never be forgotten for her bravery in bringing down Mr. Morel." Wednesday's court filing says Morel solicited sex from other defendants or relatives of defendants between 2007 and 2009, offering them favorable treatment from his office. But the document doesn't provide any details of those allegations. In 2011, a boyfriend of Keim took photographs of meetings between her and Morel in a courthouse parking lot and at a satellite office for the district attorney's office. Morel instructed Keim to destroy photographic evidence of the meetings, knowing federal authorities wanted it, the court filing says. "You shoulda got rid of it a long time ago," Morel told her during a 2012 meeting, according to the filing. Morel's sentencing is set for Aug. 17. His attorney said there was no agreed-upon sentence. Morel, who is free on $50,000 bond pending sentencing, served as district attorney from 1979 to 2012. After opting not to seek re-election, Morel served as an assistant prosecutor under his successor for several months before retiring amid the FBI investigation. The Mississippi River bisects St. Charles Parish, which is about 20 miles west of New Orleans and has roughly 50,000 residents. ___ Associated Press writer Kevin McGill contributed to this report. Harry Morel, a former district attorney for St. Charles Parish, La., arrives at Federal Court in New Orleans, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. Morel Jr. is charged with obstructing a federal investigation. A bill of information filed by prosecutors said he harassed an unidentified witness in a federal grand jury investigation. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) Harry Morel, a former district attorney for St. Charles Parish, La., arrives with his attorney Ralph Capitelli, right, at Federal Court in New Orleans, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. Morel is charged with obstructing a federal investigation. A bill of information filed by prosecutors said he harassed an unidentified witness in a federal grand jury investigation. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) Harry Morel, a former district attorney for St. Charles Parish, La., arrives with his attorney Ralph Capitelli, right, at Federal Court in New Orleans, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. Morel is charged with obstructing a federal investigation. A bill of information filed by prosecutors said he harassed an unidentified witness in a federal grand jury investigation. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) This is a 2007 photo provided by Tanya Glover shows her daughter Danelle Keim in Destrehan, La. Records released Thursday, April 21, 2016, reveal that sheriff's deputies summoned an FBI agent after Keim called for help and accused Harry Morel, who served as St. Charles Parish's elected district attorney for more than three decades, of sexually assaulting her at her home. (Tanya Glover via AP) Pennsylvania GOP presidential delegate chase adds to mystery HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) Pennsylvania, long an afterthought in presidential primary stakes, may emerge as a key player in crowning this year's Republican presidential nominee. Pennsylvania will send a whopping number of delegates to July's unsettled Republican National Convention who, under a state party rule, can vote for whichever candidate they choose. As a result, Pennsylvania's April 26 statewide primary election is relatively meaningless a beauty pageant. What is meaningful, however, is whom primary voters will select to send to Cleveland as the 54 uncommitted delegates. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump greets supporters after speaking at a campaign event at Stephen Decatur High School, Wednesday, April 20, 2016 in Berlin, Md. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon) "And then the drama begins," said Michael McMonagle, a delegate candidate from Montgomery County who supports Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. "Who can persuade who?" Polls show New York businessman Donald Trump leading both Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich in Pennsylvania, where primary contests are usually so late that the eventual presidential nominee is no longer in doubt. This year, there's a real campaign in Pennsylvania, and it's about the delegates. On Pennsylvania's primary ballot are 162 people who are running to be a GOP convention delegate. They are elected by congressional district, three for each of Pennsylvania's 18 districts for a total of 54. Seventeen other delegates the state party chairman, Rob Gleason, Pennsylvania's two national GOP committee members and 14 picked in May by party leaders must vote for the winner of Pennsylvania's statewide primary election, but only on the first convention ballot. Beginning with the second ballot, they are as uncommitted as the 54 elected delegates. For now, campaigns are trying to win pledges of allegiance from delegate candidates and, later, they expect to jockey to get party leaders to pick the campaigns' supporters as the 14 delegates. Many delegate candidates are relatively anonymous, and some are better-known officeholders. But the delegate candidates' names appear on the ballot without any affiliation to a presidential candidate, meaning voters won't necessarily know who they are really supporting. "You can go in there and vote for Trump and vote for three delegates that are three votes against Trump," said Rep. Lou Barletta, R-Pa., a state co-chairman of Trump's campaign. For the Democrats, the process is less mysterious: Primary voters select 127 delegates who are affiliated on the ballot with either former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. The rest of the 210 Democratic convention delegates are picked by the party and most must support the winner of the state's presidential primary vote. Republican Party officials and political operatives say they expect an onslaught of delegate persuasion to begin in earnest after the election. A below-the-radar persuasion effort began last week, with Trump and Cruz loyalists telephoning delegate candidates to try to secure pledges of support. The Trump and Cruz campaigns have released a list of supportive delegates and are preparing campaigns to get them elected. Some delegate candidates say they feel bound, at least on the first convention ballot, to vote for whichever presidential candidate wins their congressional district. Many are remaining noncommittal, at least publicly. "I think that is my responsibility to hear everybody out and make a judgment at some point," said Calvin Tucker, a delegate candidate from Philadelphia. "I think that is the purpose of being uncommitted." There is some high-level support for Kasich in the Pennsylvania GOP including former Gov. Tom Ridge and national GOP committeeman Bob Asher and that creates the potential that a bloc of delegate votes will favor Kasich. The last time a Republican convention was so unsettled, in 1976, candidate Ronald Reagan picked one of Pennsylvania's senators, Richard Schweiker, as his running mate in an effort to pick up support from the state's delegates. Asher is cautioning delegates against taking a hard stance for or against a particular candidate. "We really have to consider who we think has the best chance of beating Hillary Clinton," Asher said, "and when we get to Cleveland, we need to put our prejudices aside." ___ Follow Marc Levy on Twitter at twitter.com/timelywriter. Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, gestures as he speaks during a news conference, Wednesday, April 20, 2016, at the Republican National Committee Spring Meeting in Hollywood, Fla. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee) Rape conviction overturned for former Premier League player LONDON (AP) A British court overturned the rape conviction of former Premier League player Ched Evans on Thursday and ordered a new trial. Evans, a former Sheffield United and Wales striker, was in the packed London courtroom with his girlfriend when the verdict was read out by the Court of Appeal. Evans was convicted in April 2012 of raping a 19-year-old woman at a hotel in Rhyl, north Wales. He was released from prison last year after serving half of his five-year sentence. FILE - This is a March 23, 2016 file photo of soccer player Ched Evans, left, and his partner Natasha Massey, in London. A British court has overturned the rape conviction of former Premier League player Ched Evans and ordered a new trial. The decision was announced Thursday April 21, 2016 by the Court of Appeal in London. (Chris Radburn/PA via AP) UNITED KINGDOM OUT The 27-year-old Evans had always maintained his innocence and took his case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission. Justice Heather Hallett said the judges heard "fresh evidence" during a two-day appeal hearing last month. "In summary, we have concluded that we must allow the appeal and that it is in the interests of justice to order a retrial," she said. The judge said a fresh indictment "must be served" and Evans "must be re-arraigned on that fresh indictment within two months." He was placed on unconditional bail. After the ruling, Evans left the Royal Courts of Justice hand-in-hand with his girlfriend to catch a taxi. China asks Indonesia to extradite Uighur prisoners JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) China has asked Indonesia to extradite four Uighur men in exchange for returning a graft fugitive recently arrested in Shanghai, the top Indonesian security minister said Thursday. Coordinating Minister for Politics, Legal and Security Affairs Luhut Pandjaitan said Indonesia will allow China to question the men, who are serving prison sentences for collaborating with Indonesia's most wanted militant, Abu Wardah Santoso. He said China's request was made during negotiations for the deportation from China of corruption fugitive Samadikun Hartono. Pandjaitan said Indonesia would talk with China separately about the four members of China's Muslim Uighur minority "because it is a different case." They were arrested in September 2014 in Central Sulawesi. Hartono fled from Indonesia in 2003 after the Supreme Court sentenced him to four years in prison for misappropriating government bailout funds during the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis. Indonesia expects he will be deported from China on Thursday. Starting in around 2009, groups of Uighurs have traveled across Southeast Asia from their homeland of Xinjiang, a region in northwestern China, hoping to reach Turkey to claim asylum from what they say is persecution by Chinese authorities. China has alleged that members of the Uighur minority in the past have joined the Islamic State group and returned home to carry out extremist plots. Indonesian authorities believe a small number entered Indonesia to join forces with local militants at the urging of Santoso. University not releasing footage of black man's beating GREENVILLE, N.C. (AP) The chancellor of a North Carolina university says the school hasn't released surveillance video of an on-campus beating of a black man by four white people last month because of an ongoing criminal investigation. East Carolina University Chancellor Steve Ballard said Wednesday that Pitt County District Attorney Kimberly Robb has subpoenaed all copies of the tape of the beating of 26-year-old Patrick Myrick, according to news outlets. "The Pitt County district attorney has instructed East Carolina that the video is not to be released because it is part of a criminal investigation," Ballard added in a statement to the outlets. Greenville police said Myrick was attacked March 17 after he hit a woman in the face and she fell to the ground. Several people ran to Myrick and began beating him, then chased him and beat him again, according to authorities. Myrick suffered serious injuries and had to be taken to the hospital, police said. Police said earlier this week that the FBI is reviewing the case due to racial overtones. Ericsson's profits rise 49 percent, but sales down STOCKHOLM (AP) Networks maker Ericsson's profits jumped 49 percent in the first quarter but the results were lower than expected and the company announced a shakeup of its leadership structure to drive growth. The Stockholm-based company on Thursday reported a net profit of 1.97 billion kronor ($244 million), up from 1.4 billion kroner, mainly due to cost cuts. Sales dropped 2 percent to 52.2 billion kronor amid weak results in Europe and some emerging markets. Swedish telecom company Ericsson's President & CEO Hans Vestberg gestures at a presentation of the interim financial report on Thursday April 21, 2016. Networks maker Ericsson's profits jumped 49 percent in the first quarter but the results were lower than expected and the company announced a shakeup of its leadership structure to drive growth. The Stockholm-based company on Thursday reported a net profit of 1.97 billion kronor ($244 million), up from 1.4 billion kroner, mainly due to cost cuts. (Christine Olsson / TT via AP) SWEDEN OUT The earnings were below expectations and Ericsson shares fell 10 percent to 70.70 kronor in Stockholm after the report. Obama's UK visit overshadowed by debate about leaving EU LONDON (AP) It's springtime in London, but President Barack Obama might sense a chill in the air. The U.S. leader is being welcomed by British Prime Minister David Cameron and wined and dined by the royal family on a three-day visit to the U.K. that began late Thursday. But Britain's looming June 23 referendum about whether to stay in the 28-nation European Union has strained the "special relationship," with several senior U.K. politicians bluntly telling the president to butt out of Britain's debate. They have branded Obama "anti-British" and "unsuccessful" and accused him of meddling for suggesting that the U.S. would be happier if Britain stayed in the bloc. President Barack Obama arrives on Air Force One at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. The president begins a six day trip to strategize with his counterparts in Saudi Arabia, England and Germany on a broad range of issues with efforts to rein in the Islamic State group being the common denominator in all three stops. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) The White House says Obama is willing to speak out on the subject. "If he's asked his view as a friend, he will offer it," U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said, adding that the American stance was clear. "As the president has said, we support a strong United Kingdom in the European Union." In an op-ed published in the Telegraph newspaper, Obama wrote that Great Britain's presence in the EU "magnifies" Britain's influence and helps spread "British values." In the piece published Thursday evening as he arrived in London, Obama writes that he's offering his view "with the candour of a friend" and notes the decision will affect U.S. interests. Obama's agenda before he leaves for Germany on Sunday includes talks with Cameron on the global economy, on countering an increasingly assertive Russia and on the fight against the Islamic State group. Peter Wittig, Germany's ambassador to the U.S., told reporters Thursday he hopes Obama will use his influence with British politicians and society to try to persuade them to remain in the EU. "I think that people will listen to him in the UK and I am sure he will find the right words for that," he said. "The UK looks to the U.S. It is a relationship with a long tradition and depth." The president's British stopover one of a series of international visits during his last year in office will also include a lunch with Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle on Friday a day after her 90th birthday and a dinner hosted by Prince William, his wife Kate and Prince Harry at the younger royals' Kensington Palace home. But for the British media, the visit will be dominated by the debate over a possible EU exit, dubbed "Brexit." Cameron, who is meeting Obama for talks Friday at 10 Downing St., is eager for the president's intervention. Cameron is leading the campaign to stay in the EU, but faces opposition from within his own Conservative government and widespread skepticism among voters about the benefits of membership in the bureaucratic Brussels-based behemoth that is the EU. Obama's former campaign manager, Jim Messina, is advising Cameron's Remain campaign, another sore point for backers of the Leave side, who have lined up to accuse Obama of interfering. Conservative lawmaker Jacob Rees-Mogg said Britons would not "want to be told what to do by a rather unsuccessful American president who has had one of the least successful foreign policies in modern history." Nigel Farage, leader of the anti-immigrant U.K. Independence Party, called Obama "the most anti-British American president there has ever been." Even London's Conservative mayor, Boris Johnson born in New York and resolutely pro-American has accused Obama of hypocrisy for urging Britain to give up some of its sovereignty to a powerful multinational body. "I just think it's paradoxical that the United States, which wouldn't dream of allowing the slightest infringement of its own sovereignty, should be lecturing other countries about the need to enmesh themselves ever deeper in a federal superstate," Johnson said Tuesday. Cameron said Wednesday that British voters will make the final decision about the country's future but "listening to what our friends say in the world is not a bad idea." "I struggle to find the leader of any friendly country that thinks we should leave," he said. Tim Oliver, an expert in trans-Atlantic relations at the London School of Economics, says Obama is in a no-win situation. "He would be criticized if he didn't say something, and he is criticized for saying something," Oliver said. Obama is not the only American offering his opinion. Eight former U.S. Treasury chiefs said Wednesday in a letter to the Times of London that Brexit could diminish Britain's influence and threaten London's "global primacy" as a financial center. Oliver said many American politicians, policymakers and diplomats regarded the EU referendum as "a bit of an unwanted headache" and believed a Brexit would weaken Britain on the world stage. "From the U.S. perspective, this doesn't serve anyone's interest," he said. "It doesn't make sense for the U.S. It doesn't make sense for NATO. It doesn't make sense for the European Union. It doesn't even make sense for the U.K. So who does this benefit?" ___ Associated Press writers Maria Danilova and Kathleen Hennessey in Washington contributed to this report. ___ Follow Jill Lawless on Twitter at http://Twitter.com/JillLawless U.S. President Barack Obama speaks during a press conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Thursday, April 21, 2016. Obama met with Saudi King Salman and attended a meeting of Gulf Arab heads of state of the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries during his two-day visit to the kingdom. (AP Photo/Hasan Jamali) Turkish court overturns 275 verdicts in 'coup plot' trial ANKARA, Turkey (AP) Turkey's supreme court of appeals on Thursday overturned the convictions of 275 people, including a former military chief, who allegedly plotted to overthrow the country's Islamist-leaning government. The decision opens the way for a re-trial and their possible acquittal. The high court on Thursday cited several flaws in the trial of ex-military chief Ilker Basbug, other military officers and lawyers, academics and journalists. They were accused of membership in an organization dubbed Ergenekon that allegedly plotted in 2003-2004 to topple Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then prime minister and now Turkey's president. The lengthy trial contributed to the gradual erosion of the powers of the army, historically viewed as a guarantor of Turkey's founding principle of secularism. The appeals court said the lower court had, among other flaws, failed to prove Ergenekon's existence and ruled that the defendants were denied a fair trial. It also ruled that Basbug, the former military chief, should have been tried by a high court in line with regulations on the prosecution of senior officials. The trial, which began in 2008, grew out of an investigation into the seizure of 27 hand grenades at the home of a noncommissioned officer in Istanbul in 2007. The defendants were accused of plotting high-profile attacks that prosecutors said were aimed at sowing chaos in Turkey to prepare the way for a military coup. The lower court sentenced Basbug and 18 of the defendants to life in prison in 2013. The Ergenekon case had polarized the country. Some saw it as an opportunity to unravel a shadowy ultranationalist and pro-secular network that allegedly acted behind the scenes with impunity, while others believed the trial was a government attempt to muzzle Erdogan's secular-minded foes and undermine Turkey's secular legacy. Aid reaches besieged Syria town amid concerns for truce BEIRUT (AP) The U.N. special envoy for Syria said there was "real but modest" progress in the country's humanitarian situation despite a stumbling cease-fire, as one of the largest international aid convoys made it into a government-besieged opposition stronghold. NATO said an increasingly fragile cease-fire remains the best hope for ending Syria's five-year war, and the main Syrian opposition group said it would keep "experts" in Geneva next week to discuss issues like humanitarian aid even though it has pulled back from indirect peace talks with President Bashar Assad's government. Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. envoy, said he would address the "next steps" in the U.N.-brokered peace talks on Friday after the Western-backed opposition walked out, accusing President Bashar Assad's government of trying to wreck the negotiations with new fighting. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg speaks to the media during a joint news conference with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in Ankara, Turkey, Thursday, April 21, 2016. Stoltenberg will be on media tour of NATO flagship Bonn on the Aegean Sea , which is part of the flotilla patrolling the Aegean in an effort to curb migrant activity. Stoltenberg says efforts to stem the tide of migrants seeking the shores of Europe are working.(AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici) De Mistura called for improved aid access to besieged areas, which he said would boost chances for salvaging the teetering cease-fire. "Bottom line: If humanitarian aid increases as they should be and the cessation of hostilities goes back into what we would consider a hopeful mood that would certainly help the political discussions," he told reporters in Geneva on Thursday, the locale of on-and-off intra-Syrian peace talks under U.N. mediation in recent months. The opposition's High Negotiations Committee, an umbrella group of Assad opponents, said it will keep "technical experts" in Geneva next week to focus on the truce, humanitarian aid, and a new, accelerated push it has sought from the U.N. to win the release of thousands of detainees held by the Syrian government. The U.S.-Russia-engineered cease-fire between Assad's government and rebel fighters, which went into effect in late February, has excluded the Islamic State group and al-Qaida's branch in Syria designated as terrorist organizations by the United Nations. The truce has sharply reduced violence in Syria but has all but collapsed in the country's north. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned that the suspended participation of the Syrian opposition in the Geneva talks could lead to "a return of total armed conflict." "We have a situation where terrorists are desperately trying to disrupt the political process," referring to the Syrian opposition's High Negotiations Committee, which said Monday it was halting its involvement in talks, she said. Zakharova told reporters in Moscow that the armed standoff in Syria is growing, especially to the north and south of Aleppo. While the Russian official blamed Turkey for continuing to destabilize Syria by colluding with extremist groups, U.S. deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes expressed Washington's concern about a reported Russian buildup in Syria. He addressed reports that Russia was moving military personnel and equipment back into Syria weeks after Moscow said that it would scale back its presence. A Russian air campaign aiding the Syrian government launched in September has significantly reversed the tide of the war in recent months, enabling government advances. "It would be negative for Russia to move additional military equipment or personnel in to Syria," Rhodes told reporters Thursday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where President Barack Obama and Gulf leaders were meeting to discuss Syria and other regional conflicts. "We believe that our efforts are best focused on supporting the diplomatic process." NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg echoed that stance, saying that Russia has maintained a "considerable military presence" in support of the Syrian government despite announcing a partial withdrawal. Speaking in the Turkish capital, Ankara, Stoltenberg said the cease-fire was "under strain" but remains the "best basis for a negotiated, peaceful solution to the crisis." Despite the dire straits in the political talks, de Mistura said there has been modest progress in the humanitarian situation in Syria where aid convoys have reached 560,000 people in hard-to-reach and besieged areas. He also said six areas remain off limits to the aid convoys. De Mistura told reporters that 515 people were medically evacuated Wednesday from four communities, Zabadani, Madaya, Kfarya and Foua, besieged by government and rebel groups. He said it was one of the largest evacuations of residents from besieged areas. The Syrian Arab Red Crescent Society said its convoy came under fire during the evacuation from Madaya and Zabadani, besieged by the government forces in rural Damascus. In a statement, SARC said one of its vehicles, clearly marked, was hit but that the team carried on with its mission. A photograph posted on SARC's website shows the rear window of the vehicle damaged from what appears to be a bullet that hit right next to the large white and red SARC logo. De Mistura also said there were eight airdrops of aid in Deir el-Zour, a stronghold of the Islamic State which is locked in a fight over control of the province with the government. A vaccination program is expected to begin later this month to reach more than 2 million children, he said. Still, de Mistura said some medical supplies and medicines are still denied by the Syrian health ministry into besieged areas. "This is not only worrisome but unacceptable according to international law." Dialysis equipment has been allowed in, he said. The International Committee of the Red Cross said that together with the U.N., it is delivering its largest humanitarian aid convoy, destined for Rastan, an opposition-held town under siege in the central Homs. ICRC spokesman Pawel Krzysiek said Thursday's aid convoy is the first to reach the town of Rastan in over a year. Krzysiek said about 120,000 people live in the area. Rastan has seen its population double because of the influx of people fleeing nearby fighting. The convoy was made up of 65 trucks containing food, medicine and medical equipment, electricity generators and water treatment materials. ___ Associated Press Writers Zeina Karam in Beirut, Jamey Keaten in Geneva and Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey contributed to this report. ___ This story has been corrected to show that the ICRC is the International Committee of the Red Cross, not the International Commission for the Red Cross. Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad answers questions to media during a press conference in Prague, Czech Republic, Thursday, April 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek) Staffan de Mistura, UN Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Syria, speaks after the Update on Task Force for Humanitarian Access in Syria at the European headquarters of the United Nations, in Geneva, Switzerland, Thursday, April 21, 2016. (Martial Trezzini/Keystone via AP) Southwest Airlines 1st quarter helped by lower fuel prices DALLAS (AP) Southwest Airlines packed even more people on its planes, notched a record first-quarter profit of $511 million, and said solid bookings have continued into April. The Dallas carrier topped Wall Street expectations, and Southwest shares rose on Thursday while every other major U.S. airline stock fell. Southwest has been adding flights and bigger planes, contributing to investor concern about fast growth leading to lower prices. Indeed, Southwest's average fare dipped 3 percent to $153.75 each way. FILE- In this April 23, 2015, file photo, a Southwest Airlines jet takes off from a runway at Love Field in Dallas. Southwest Airlines reports financial results Thursday, April 21, 2016. (AP Photo/LM Otero, File) Passenger traffic grew faster than Southwest added seats, however, and 80.5 percent of seats were filled on the average flight, a Southwest record for the first quarter in what is typically a weak time of year for travel. CEO Gary Kelly said that the solid bookings and revenue trends continued in April. For the second quarter, he predicted modest growth in revenue for every mile passengers fly American, Delta and United all saw that number shrink from last year. Southwest's $511 million profit compared with $453 million a year earlier. Excluding one-time gains and charges, the company said it earned 88 cents per share, which was 4 cents better than analysts had expected, according to polls by Zacks Investment Research and FactSet. Revenue rose 9 percent to $4.83 billion. Kelly called it the best start that Southwest has had to a year in more than two decades. Southwest spent $852 million on fuel in the quarter and continued to get a break from lower oil prices. However, its fuel savings of 3 percent were slimmer than at other airlines because of hedging contracts, which act like insurance against an oil price spike. Southwest reported $275 million in hedging losses, enough to boost its all-in cost of fuel from $1.22 to $1.78 a gallon. Labor is now easily Southwest's biggest expense, and that grew nearly 9 percent in the quarter, to $1.54 billion. Southwest also announced that it will speed up the retirement of its oldest Boeing 737 models by one year, to 2017. That way the old 737-300s will be gone before Southwest begins receiving the newest version of the plane, called the 737 Max, from Boeing. Kelly said that would reduce planned growth in 2017. Shares of Southwest Airlines Co., the nation's fourth-biggest airline, gained 68 cents to close at $47.73. Compared with the 1990s when it was a stock market favorite, Southwest today faces tougher competition on all sides. A new breed of ultra-low-cost carriers like Spirit can undercut it on fares. Other rivals are perceived to have better amenities, like JetBlue Airways, or better operations, like Alaska Airlines. The big three of American, Delta and United have cut their costs and can compete better with Southwest for leisure travelers while retaining an advantage in corporate accounts. Southwest is in drawn-out negotiations with unions that could lead to higher labor expenses. But the airline retains a loyal customer base and claims to be gaining passengers by not charging fees for checked bags and ticket changes. Barclays analyst David E. Fintzen, who recently upgraded the carrier to "neutral," estimates that Southwest has taken about $1.6 billion in revenue away from other U.S. airlines since the peak of the industry's last cycle. Fintzen and Credit Suisse's Julie Yates say the Dallas carrier could do better in a recession than airlines that depend more on high-end business travel. ___ Ukraine president: Sanctions against Russia must remain BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) Ukraine's president says sanctions against Russia must stay in place as long as hostilities in eastern Ukraine still continue. President Petro Poroshenko said he and Romanian President Klaus Iohannis agreed that "discussions related to cancelling sanctions imposed on Russia cannot take place until the aggression stops." Security was the main focus of talks during Poroshenko's one-day visit Thursday to neighboring Romania. Fighting in eastern Ukraine between Russia-backed separatists and government troops has left 9,100 dead since 2014. Poroshenko says "an end to sanctions will be an unmitigated danger for resolving the situation in Donbass. Russia will continue its aggressive actions." Charges filed after 2-year-old accidentally left in car dies ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) An Annandale man has been charged with child neglect and involuntary manslaughter after police say he accidentally left a 2-year-old child strapped in a car. Police on Thursday arrested 32-year-old Daiquan Fields, an acquaintance of the child's mother. Arlington Police say Fields was supposed to drop three children off at two locations Wednesday morning. Police say he dropped the two older children off, but didn't realize the toddler was still in the car when he returned to a home in Fairfax County. The man got back in the car sometime later to pick up the children's mother. When he arrived at her location in Arlington, police say he saw the girl, unresponsive in the back seat, and called 911. German diplomat who was EU administrator of Mostar, dies BERLIN (AP) Hans Koschnick, who served as the European Union's administrator of the bitterly divided Bosnian city of Mostar, has died. He was 87. Koschnick, a Social Democrat who governed the German city-state of Bremen from 1967 to 1985, died early Thursday according to his party. Internationally, Koschnick is probably best known for his tumultuous 20-month administration of Mostar, starting in July 1994 after months of brutal fighting. He was often caught between the divided city's feuding Muslim Bosniacs and Catholic Croats, between whom tensions remain today. In 1996, hundreds of Bosnian Croats attacked Koschnick's armored car, firing 10 bullets into it, after his proposal to unify the city. He resigned a short time later. Taiwan officials: Fraud suspects deported to China seem well BEIJING (AP) The Taiwanese wire fraud suspects who were deported from Kenya to China are adjusting to conditions in a Beijing detention center, said an official from the island who visited the facility Thursday. Chen Wen-chi, who leads the Justice Ministry's department of international and cross-strait legal affairs, was given a tour of medical facilities and interview rooms in the Haidian district detention center, but she was only able to observe the suspects on security cameras. "I saw those Taiwanese detainees today. They are in good physical condition. Please rest assured that they are all adjusting well at the detention center," Chen told a small group of reporters accompanying the delegation. Chinese police are investigating the 45 Taiwanese over their suspected involvement in telephone scams that cheated Chinese victims out of large sums. Several have been shown on Chinese state television describing how the scammers pretended to be government officials and other authority figures to convince victims to transfer funds to them or provide personal financial details that could be used to steal money. Taiwan's government protested the deportations out of concern that China was using the case to assert its claim to Taiwan. China said it had jurisdiction because its citizens were victimized and argued that Taiwan had not sufficiently punished past perpetrators. Along with looking into the condition of the detainees, Chen's delegation is discussing with Chinese officials how they might cooperate in future cases. While some on Taiwan hope the 45 can return home to stand trial or serve their sentences, China appears to be determined to deal with them on its own. Taiwan managed to convince Malaysia to send another group of suspected scammers to Taiwan rather than the mainland, but then released them on arrival for lack of evidence sparking anger from China. On Thursday, 18 of the 20 were taken into custody after prosecutors reviewed evidence dockets forwarded by Chinese investigators. They argued there was strong evidence of their culpability and concerns they would collude on their stories and pervert the course of justice. The two not taken into custody were ordered to stay in Taiwan. ___ Talks stalled, Syrian opposition to stay in Geneva next week BEIRUT (AP) The Latest on Syria's civil war and peace talks in Geneva (all times local): ___ 1:55 a.m. Staffan de Mistura, UN Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Syria, speaks after the Update on Task Force for Humanitarian Access in Syria at the European headquarters of the United Nations, in Geneva, Switzerland, Thursday, April 21, 2016. (Martial Trezzini/Keystone via AP) The main Syrian opposition group says it's keeping "technical experts" in Geneva next week to focus on humanitarian aid for the war-ravaged country, a wobbly cease-fire and a stepped-up push to win the release of detainees. The statement by the High Negotiations Committee comes days after it pulled back from, but didn't formally leave, the main U.N. sponsored effort on Syria: Indirect peace talks between the HNC and President Bashar Assad's government. The HNC walked off largely to protest alleged government violations of a U.S. and Russia-engineered truce. U.N. Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura plans Friday to detail a "review" of the talks' status. He told Swiss television Thursday that talks will continue because "we must never give up when there's a possibility to stop such a horrible war like Syria's." ___ 6:30 p.m. The leaders of Russia and Israel have met in Moscow to discuss coordination between their militaries in Syria. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday that he wants to "strengthen the security coordination between us so as to avoid mishaps, misunderstandings and unnecessary confrontations." Israel and Russia established a mechanism meant to coordinate between their air forces in Syria after Russia began carrying out airstrikes to help Syrian President Bashar Assad who has said his forces are battling Islamic militants and other "terrorists." Assad's government often refers to all opposition fighters as terrorists. Israel is widely thought to have carried out a number of airstrikes that have targeted advanced weapons systems believed to be destined for the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah militant group. Israel has also responded to fire into its territory emanating from Syria. ___ 6 p.m. A Syrian Kurdish media outlet says 67 Syrian government fighters have surrendered to Kurdish forces in the northeastern city of Qamishli. Hawar news reported on Thursday that Kurdish forces, which have carved out a zone of semi-autonomy in Syria's north over the course of the country's violent and ongoing conflict, managed to seize the Alaya prison, inside the city, after the government fighters inside it gave themselves up. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says Kurdish forces have encircled the government's "security" quarter in the city, amid fierce fighting. The Observatory says 25 pro-government militiamen were arrested or killed Wednesday by Kurdish forces in the city, which had been generally peaceful despite sporadic outbreaks of violence. ___ 4:40 p.m. Syria's deputy foreign minister says the Syrian government is ready to "respect the cessation of hostilities requested by the United Nations" and allow to the humanitarian aids to reach those who need it. Faisal Mekdad spoke on Thursday in Prague after talks at the Czech Foreign Ministry. The Czech Republic is the only EU country that keeps an ambassador to Damascus. He said the indirect peace talks between Syria's warring parties that has resumed in Geneva should continue "until we reach a solution." With the Czechs, Mekdad discussed the distribution of the latest humanitarian aid from the Czech Republic. He said: "We assure you that this humanitarian assistance will go to the people who deserve it." Mekdad also met the ministers of finance as well industry and trade, saying the reconstruction of Syria will start soon after the end of the crisis, and that "we have to prepare ourselves." ___ 4:00 p.m. The U.N. envoy for Syria is pointing to "real but modest progress" in the country's humanitarian situation, even as doubts linger about the future of peace talks in Geneva. Staffan de Mistura told reporters Thursday that 515 people were medically evacuated a day earlier from four Syrian municipalities: Zabadani, Madaya, Kfarya and Foua. He also announced a "fact-finding" mission is seeking to arrange deliveries of humanitarian aid to the besieged Damascus suburb of Daraya, something President Barack Obama has publicly called for. De Mistura credits Russia for "arguing in favor" of the convoy. Staffan de Mistura reiterates that he will speak on Friday about the future of the U.N.-brokered peace talks after the Western-backed opposition postponed its participation, in protest at the Syrian government's cease-fire violations. De Mistura says he plans to nominate an unspecified "very effective person" to focus on the critical question of the thousands of detainees held Syria a major issue for the opposition. ___ 3:45 p.m. A top American official says the U.S. is concerned about reports that Russia is moving military personnel and equipment back into Syria. "It would be negative for Russia to move additional military equipment or personnel in to Syria," Ben Rhodes, the U.S. deputy national security adviser, told reporters Thursday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where Obama and Gulf leaders were meeting to discuss Syria and other regional conflicts. "We believe that our efforts are best focused on supporting the diplomatic process." President Barack Obama told Russian President Vladimir Putin in a telephone call earlier this week that Russia should focus on maintaining the cease-fire and pursuing a diplomatic solution to the conflict. Rhodes says the cease-fire has restored "some degree of calm" to several areas of Syria over the past several weeks and allowed much-needed humanitarian aid to be delivered. But he says the U.S. has been concerned by "an uptick" in violations of the truce agreement. He called on Russia to use its influence to ensure the Syrian government abides by the cease-fire terms. ___ 3:30 p.m. The International Committee of the Red Cross says that together with the U.N. it is delivering its largest ever humanitarian aid convoy, destined for an opposition-held town under siege in central Syria. ICRC spokesman Pawel Krzysiek says Thursday's aid convoy is the first to reach the town of Rastan in over a year. Krzysiek says the population of Rastan, which is in Homs province, has doubled because of the influx of people fleeing nearby fighting. He says the convoy is made up of 65 trucks containing food, medicine and medical equipment, electricity generators and water treatment materials. The two-month-old cease-fire, now in jeopardy, was intended in part to improve access to besieged areas of Syria. The U.N.'s humanitarian office said earlier this month that 21 percent of the nearly half million people in besieged areas of Syria were reached in March, down from 25 percent in February. ___ 3:00 p.m. Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova says the suspended participation of the Syrian opposition in the Geneva talks could lead to "a return of total armed conflict" Zakharova said on Thursday that "we have a situation where terrorists are desperately trying to disrupt the political process," referring to the Syrian opposition's High Negotiations Committee, which said Monday it was halting its involvement in talks. Speaking at a press briefing in Moscow, Zakharova said the armed standoff in Syria is growing, especially to the north and south of Aleppo, though the U.S.- Russia brokered cease-fire agreement is generally holding in most parts of the country. The spokeswoman blames Turkey for continuing to destabilize Syria by colluding with extremist groups ___ 1:30 p.m. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says Syria's fragile cease-fire remains best the hope for ending the conflict. Speaking in the Turkish capital, Ankara, he said the cease-fire was "under strain" but remains the "best basis for a negotiated, peaceful solution to the crisis." Stoltenberg noted that Russia has maintained a "considerable military presence" in support of the Syrian government despite announcing a partial withdrawal. A February cease-fire agreement between President Bashar Assad's government and rebel fighters, which excluded extremist factions like the Islamic State group, greatly reduced violence in Syria but has all but collapsed in the north of the country amid faltering peace talks in Geneva. ___ This story has been corrected to show that the ICRC stands for the International Committee of the Red Cross, and not the International Commission of the Red Cross. Hamas deploys forces on Egypt-Gaza border over IS concerns GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) The militant Hamas group deployed forces on Thursday along the Egypt-Gaza border to counter Cairo's concerns that it is aiding Islamic State extremists in Egypt's lawless Sinai Peninsula. Egypt accuses Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, of providing a safe haven for the IS affiliate in Sinai through a network of smuggling tunnels. Hamas denies the charge. Hamas and a high-ranking Egyptian security official said the deployment is part of an agreement reached with Egyptian officials last month. Palestinian Hamas security forces deploy on the Palestinian side of the border with Egypt in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, April 21, 2016. Hamas has deployed forces along the Egyptian-Gaza border to counter Cairo's concerns it is aiding militants from the Islamic State group in Egypt's lawless Sinai Peninsula. (AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra) "This emphasizes the Palestinian stand to tighten security on the border and nothing that harms Egypt will come out of Gaza," said Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri. The Egyptian security official said the deployment is part of the new deal with Egypt that sees Hamas halt tunnel construction in return for opening the Rafah border crossing, Gaza's main gateway to the outside world. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak to the media. On Thursday, armed Hamas men took up positions along the 13-kilometer (8-mile) border, with fighters in pick-up trucks patrolling back and forth. Relations between Hamas and Egypt soured after the 2013 military ouster of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi. Hamas is an offshoot of Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood movement. Egypt has been battling IS militants and in 2014 launched a fierce campaign on the underground tunnels with Gaza, destroying many of them. It has also kept the Rafah crossing largely sealed. Abu Zuhri said he hopes that the deal will lead to the crossing's reopening. ___ Associated Press Writer Maggie Michael contributed to this report from Cairo. Egyptian soldiers watch Palestinian Hamas security forces deployed on the Palestinian side of the border with Egypt in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, April 21, 2016. Hamas has deployed forces along the Egyptian-Gaza border to counter Cairo's concerns it is aiding militants from the Islamic State group in Egypt's lawless Sinai Peninsula.(AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra) Palestinian Hamas security forces stand in formation on the Palestinian side of the border with Egypt in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, April 21, 2016. Hamas has deployed forces along the Egyptian-Gaza border to counter Cairo's concerns it is aiding militants from the Islamic State group in Egypt's lawless Sinai Peninsula. (AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra) Palestinian Hamas security forces deploy on the Palestinian side of the border with Egypt in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, April 21, 2016. Hamas has deployed forces along the Egyptian-Gaza border to counter Cairo's concerns it is aiding militants from the Islamic State group in Egypt's lawless Sinai Peninsula. (AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra) Ethiopian troops enter South Sudan to rescue 125 children JUBA, South Sudan (AP) Ethiopian troops were operating in South Sudan on Thursday after crossing the border to rescue about 125 Ethiopian children who were kidnapped during a bloody cattle raid, and top officials from both countries sought to coordinate their efforts. Peter Bashir Gbandi, acting South Sudanese foreign affairs minister, said South Sudan Chief of Staff Paul Malong would go to Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, as soon as Friday to coordinate. Bashir told The Associated Press that South Sudan doesn't want Ethiopian troops to go deeper into South Sudan. He said the South Sudanese army has no forces in the area but has put troops on standby. He wouldn't answer directly if South Sudan gave permission to Ethiopia to enter but insisted, "we are in touch." He said he knew who was responsible for the attack in Ethiopia and added that the area "is full of jungle. These are criminals." Officials in both countries said there was no tension between the neighboring states. South Sudanese local leaders, meanwhile, traded accusations over who was responsible. Ethiopia's government said the April 15 raid in its Gambela region resulted in 208 deaths. Ethiopia announced Wednesday its military entered South Sudan and surrounded the attackers, believed to be Murle tribesmen who abducted 125 children. Local media in Ethiopia reported the Murle wanted the children to raise the 2,000 head of cattle the tribal members stole. South Sudan's Ambassador to Ethiopia, Akuei Bona Malwal, told the AP that Ethiopia and South Sudan are coordinating their actions to solve the crisis, but declined to give details about "joint tasks" which he said the two countries are carrying out. Baba Medan, the governor of South Sudan's Boma state, where Murle and other groups live, said dissident members of the Cobra faction were responsible. The Cobra was a rebel militia comprising Murle and Anyuak tribes which signed a peace deal with South Sudan's government in 2013 and has been integrated into the national army. David Yau Yau, who led the Cobra rebellion, denied any involvement of his former troops and accused the governor, a Murle who was allied with the government against Yau Yau during the rebellion, of arming the groups that carried out the attack in Ethiopia. South Sudan President Salva Kiir called Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn on Wednesday to express condolences, according to Bashir. The U.N. children's agency, the EU and the U.S. have condemned the attack and the abductions. Residents of Gambella held a rally Thursday to demand the children's release. It was unclear how many Ethiopian soldiers entered South Sudan or what kind of weapons they brought. The Murle, like many groups in South Sudan, are usually armed with light weapons like AK-47 assault rifles. The conflict area is a lowland with thick bush which turns swampy in the rains. It is currently the dry season, making mobility easier. The Murle are viewed with suspicion by Dinka and Nuer, the other two dominant tribes in that area of South Sudan, and are often blamed for cattle raids and abductions of children. ___ Elias Meseret reported from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. ___ The Latest: Sanders celebrates praise from Joe Biden WASHINGTON (AP) The Latest on the 2016 presidential campaign (all times Eastern Daylight Time): 8:30 p.m. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is citing favorable comments from Vice President Joe Biden that stopped short of an endorsement of his campaign. Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, speaks during the Indiana Republican Party Spring Dinner Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Indianapolis. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings) Biden told The New York Times he prefers Sanders' "aspirational approach" to rival Hillary Clinton's "caution." Sanders on Thursday told a crowd at the Philadelphia Expo Center in Oaks, Pennsylvania, that he thinks "the Vice President is exactly right." Sanders says he thinks being aspirational means "having the courage to envision a nation that allows us to fulfill the potential we know we have as a people." The Vermont senator acknowledges he's thinking big, but denies that proposals like free public college, campaign finance reform and universal health care are radical ideas. Biden was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and is hugely popular in the state. __ 8:20 p.m. Sen. Ted Cruz is quoting the basketball movie "Hoosiers" as he campaigns in Indiana, comparing the federal government to "the guy who will get naked and bark at the moon in your living room." The Republican presidential contender told the crowd at the state's annual GOP spring dinner that the 1986 movie about a small-town Indiana basketball team. Indiana's presidential primary is on May 3, with 57 national delegates up for grabs. In "Hoosiers," a coach says there are "two kinds" of dumb: "a guy that gets naked and runs out in the snow and barks at the moon, and a guy who does the same thing in my living room. First one don't matter, the second one you're kinda forced to deal with." __ 8:05 p.m. Sen. Ted Cruz is vowing to aggressively campaign across Indiana in the coming weeks, saying all eyes will be on the state ahead its May 3 primary. The Republican presidential candidate spoke Thursday during the state GOP's annual spring dinner. He says the people of Indiana want to get behind an optimistic conservative campaign. Cruz's swing through the state follows a Wednesday rally held by businessman Donald Trump, which drew several thousand people. Indiana offers 57 Republican delegates and could play a crucial role as Trump seeks to gain enough delegates to avoid a contested national convention. __ 7:25 p.m. A top aide to Donald Trump is telling GOP officials that the billionaire businessman is prepared to raise money for the Republican National Committee. Trump's convention manager Paul Manafort delivered the message behind closed doors in a private meeting with RNC officials in Florida Thursday. He said Trump is prepared to work with the RNC "to raise the money necessary so that we will be well-funded" and is "prepared to do his part in his campaign as well." Manafort, who was brought in to professionalize Trump's campaign, also assured potentially nervous members that Trump is "preparing a campaign operation that will be what you all are historically used to." The Associated Press obtained a recording of the closed-door exchange. __ 7:15 p.m. Donald Trump's chief lieutenants are telling skeptical Republican leaders the GOP front-runner has been "projecting an image" so far in the 2016 primary season and "the part that he's been playing is now evolving" in a way that will improve his standing among general election voters. The message, delivered behind closed doors in a private briefing, is part of the campaign's intensifying effort to convince party leaders that Trump will moderate his tone in the coming months to help deliver big electoral gains this fall. Trump's newly hired senior aide, Paul Manafort, told party leaders in Florida that "the part that he's been playing is evolving." Manafort says, "The image is going to change." The Associated Press obtained a recording of the closed-door exchange. __ 6:30 p.m. Republican Donald Trump is calling on his remaining rivals to drop their presidential bids, saying neither Ted Cruz nor John Kasich has a path to the nomination. "They should both drop out of the race so that the Republican Party can unify!" Trump tweeted Thursday evening. While Trump has previously called on Kasich to quit, he is ramping up his rhetoric against Cruz following a commanding win in New York, which left him the only candidate with a realistic, if narrow, path to clinching the nomination ahead of this summer's GOP convention. "Cruz said Kasich should leave because he couldn't get to 1237. Now he can't get to 1237," Trump added. "Drop out LYIN' Ted." __ 6:25 p.m. Donald Trump is running two new television spots in Pennsylvania and Indiana, part of a robust new advertising buy from the Republican front-runner. The 30-second ad running in the Pittsburgh area features Trump speaking directly to the camera about his policy proposals. The message is similar to radio ads he's run in other states. The second spot features Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., speaking warmly about the businessman as a father and includes images of Trump with his young grandchildren. That ad is going on air in the Evansville, Indiana, area, according to advertising tracker Kantar Media's CMAG. CMAG shows Trump has reserved about $2 million worth of airtime in Pennsylvania and Indiana. __ 6 p.m. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz drew more than 100 people to his first campaign event in Indiana. The Republican presidential candidate met voters at Shapiro's Delicatessen in Indianapolis. Dave Frye of Indianapolis says he has supported Cruz since he announced his candidacy more than a year ago. The 44-year-old insurance broker praises Cruz as a staunch constitutionalist and says GOP front-runner Donald Trump has distorted the national conversation. Twenty-five-year-old Katie Conley of Indianapolis says she supports Cruz because of his focus on family and his anti-abortion stance. Cruz's visit comes nearly two weeks before Indiana voters cast their ballots in the state primaries. Indiana is expected to be pivotal in this year's presidential race despite being late in the election season. __ 5:17 p.m. Bernie Sanders is showing few signs of backing down in his Democratic primary fight against Hillary Clinton, reminding voters in Pennsylvania about Clinton's high-priced private speeches to Wall Street. Sanders notes at a rally in Reading, Pennsylvania, that Clinton delivered speeches to Wall Street after she left the State Department for $225,000 per speech. The Vermont senator has pressured Clinton to release the transcripts of her speeches, saying it should be "shared with the American people." Sanders was traveling across Pennsylvania on Thursday ahead of the state's April 26 primary. It was his first day of campaigning since Clinton defeated Sanders decisively in New York's primary. Sanders also notes his differences with Clinton over trade, fracking and super PACs. ___ 4:30 p.m. Colorado Republican Chairman Steve House said he hopes a sheriff from his state will accompany the delegation to the GOP nominating convention in Cleveland, after his delegates reported getting threatening email messages and telephone calls from Trump supporters. House raised the concerns during a closed meeting of state GOP chairmen gathered in Holiday Beach, Florida, for the Republican National Committee meeting going on this week.. House later relayed to The Associated Press just one of the messages he received by phone after Ted Cruz swept Colorado's delegate selection conventions this month. House said a caller told him to "put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger." And if he didn't? "I'll send someone over to help you." Trump did not compete aggressively for the Colorado delegates, and received none of the state's 34 pledged delegates. House is among three unpledged delegates from the state, and is publicly neutral. ____ 1:52 p.m. Bernie Sanders is urging his supporters to pressure the nation to tackle problems like wealth inequality and the influence of Wall Street but offering a more subdued speech after his defeat in New York's primary. The Vermont senator is back on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania after losing to Hillary Clinton in Tuesday's presidential primary in New York. He is only mentioning Clinton in passing, pointing to their differences over trade, fracking and Social Security. When he brings up New York's primary, some supporters boo. Sanders jokes, "I share those sentiments." He points out that 3 million voters in New York were registered as independents but "did not have the right to participate." He says, "that really is not democracy." ___ 11:35 a.m. Ted Cruz is criticizing Donald Trump for opposing North Carolina's new bathroom law, saying his rival is giving in to "political correctness." Trump said earlier Thursday that North Carolina should not have passed the law directing transgender people to use the bathroom that matches the gender on their birth certificate. Cruz supports the North Carolina measure and says, "Grown adult men, strangers, should not be alone in a bathroom with little girls." He says his view is "basic common sense." Cruz is campaigning in Frederick, Maryland, where voters will cast their ballots Tuesday. ___ 11:30 a.m. Some prominent Southern Democrats supporting Hillary Clinton want Bernie Sanders to stop dismissing his rival's landslide Democratic primary wins across the GOP-dominated region. Southern primaries account for a considerable portion of Clinton's national lead in pledged delegates and the popular vote. Sanders in recent weeks said the results "distort reality," and he's suggested the results aren't indicative of the Democratic Party because they came from the country's "most conservative region." Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Don Fowler of South Carolina, among others, penned a letter this week to the Vermont senator noting the region's racial diversity accurately reflects the national Democratic coalition. Clinton has won non-white voters by large margins. They noted President Barack Obama leaned on a similar coalition of voters in the 2008 primary and both his general election victories. Citing the Republican power in the region, Fowler and his colleagues argued that "our national Democratic leaders" should "invest in our races and causes_to amplify our voices, not diminish them." ___ 10:40 a.m. Donald Trump says he will deliver a foreign affairs address on Wednesday, the first in a series of policy speeches for the Republican front-runner. In an interview with The Associated Press, Trump says he is also planning a speech outlining more details on his immigration policy, and a separate speech on the military. He says people may be surprised by "how well I'll handle matters relative to the military." Trump says he "may or may not" use teleprompters for his speeches depending on the "level of detail" in policy speeches. Trump almost never relies on a teleprompter, preferring instead to speak in his free-wheeling style at large rallies. Trump's advisers have cast the policy speeches as part of a campaign evolution that has included hiring staff with more experience in presidential politics. ___ 9:25 a.m. Donald Trump says he opposes replacing President Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. The Republican presidential front-runner calls it an act of "pure political correctness." Trump during a town hall Thursday on NBC's "Today Show" said he'd prefer to leave Jackson on the bill and place Tubman's image on another denomination instead. As he puts it: "Maybe we do the $2 bill or we do another bill." He says Tubman is "fantastic," but that Jackson has "been on the bill for many, many years" and "really represented somebody that really was very important to this country." ___ 8:15 a.m. Donald Trump says he believes transgender people should be able to use whichever bathroom they choose. Speaking at a town hall event on NBC's "Today" Thursday, Trump said North Carolina's so-called "bathroom law," which directs transgender people to use the bathroom that matches the gender on their birth certificates, has caused unnecessary strife. "There have been very few complaints the way it is. People go, they use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate. There has been so little trouble," he says. Still, he says he's opposed to the move to create new, non-gendered bathrooms open to anyone, calling that push "discriminatory in a certain way" and "unbelievably expensive for businesses and the country." He says if Caitlyn Jenner, formerly former Olympic gold medal winner Bruce Jenner, were to walk into Trump Tower, she could use whichever bathroom she wanted. ___ 7:45 a.m. Melania Trump says there's one habit she wishes her husband, Donald Trump, would give up: "Retweeting." The wife of the Republican presidential front-runner offered the response while speaking on NBC's "Today" ahead of a town hall event taking place in midtown Manhattan. Melania Trump has long taken issue with her husband's Twitter use. She told CNN's Anderson Cooper recently that she's tried to rein it in, with little success. "Anderson, if he would only listen. I do say it many times," she said then. Trump has long described his social media following as an asset that gives him the power to broadcast his own message. But it's also gotten him in trouble. He does appear to have toned down his Twitter use since re-shuffling of his campaign and bringing in more experienced operatives in recent weeks. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a rally, Thursday, April 21, 2016, at the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex and Expo Center in Harrisburg, Pa. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez) Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks at a campaign stop, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Scranton, Pa.(Christopher Dolan/The Times & Tribune via AP) WILKES BARRE TIMES-LEADER OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a rally, Thursday, April 21, 2016, at the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex and Expo Center in Harrisburg, Pa. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez) Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks at a campaign stop, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Scranton, Pa. (Jake Danna Stevens/The Times & Tribune via AP) WILKES BARRE TIMES-LEADER OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks at a campaign stop, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Scranton, Pa. (Jake Danna Stevens/The Times & Tribune via AP) WILKES BARRE TIMES-LEADER OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT Czech police accused of excessive force against protesters PRAGUE (AP) Czech center-right opposition parties have condemned what they call an excessive use of police force against citizens protesting China's human rights record during a recent visit of the Chinese president. For three days of President Xi Jinping's March visit, police dealt with numerous skirmishes between Czech protesters and what appeared to be well-organized groups of Chinese people supporting their leader. Police say 23 people were detained in total from both camps. The opposition Civic Democratic Party and TOP 09 claim police sided with the Chinese and want to know if officers were instructed to do so. They say Czechs were denied their protest rights, demanding an extra parliamentary session on the issue. Interior Minister Milan Chovanec denies wrongdoing, acknowledging only one mistake. Union Pacific's 1Q profit falls 15 percent as volume slows OMAHA, Neb. (AP) Union Pacific's first-quarter profit fell 15 percent, hit by a steep decline in the amount of freight hauled due to weak energy and commodity prices. The railroad based in Omaha, Nebraska, said Thursday that it earned $979 million, or $1.16 per share. That's down from last year's $1.15 billion, or $1.30 per share. Per-share earnings topped the $1.10 that analysts had expected, according to a survey by FactSet. FILE - In this June 6, 2014, file photo, a train operator, left, dismounts a Union Pacific locomotive, while another operator climbs up, at a rail yard in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Union Pacific reports financial results Thursday, April 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik, File) Revenue slumped 14 percent to $4.83 billion, missing expectations. Analysts expected $4.9 billion. Weak coal demand continues to be a challenge for all the major railroads as utilities switch to natural gas because of low costs and environmental regulations. Union Pacific Corp. said coal shipments fell 34 percent in the quarter, but there were also declines in shipments of industrial products, agricultural crops and intermodal containers. The railroad cut its expenses by 14 percent to $3.14 billion in response. "We did a very good job of adjusting our cost structure," Lance Fritz, Union Pacific's chairman, president and CEO, said in an interview. The overall economy continues to grow but that's obscured in the railroad results by the weak demand for coal, shipments related to shale mining and exports. "It could be better, but there is broad, slow, steady recovery going on," Fritz said. The railroad responded well to the slower demand by reducing expenses and improving productivity, Edward Jones analyst Logan Purk said. For instance, average train speed increased 11 percent to 27.3 miles per hour, and the amount of time trains spent sitting in terminals fell 7 percent to 28.6 hours. "UP is doing a phenomenal job of controlling what they can," Purk said. "I think they're setting themselves up nicely for when volumes come back." Union Pacific said it also reduced its capital spending plans for 2016 by $75 million to $3.68 billion because of the slower volume. Union Pacific operates 32,400 miles of track in 23 states from the Midwest to the West and Gulf coasts. German man charged with Islamic State group membership BERLIN (AP) Federal prosecutors say they've charged a 32-year-old German man with membership in a terrorist organization over allegations he joined the Islamic State group in Syria. Prosecutors say that Ali R., whose last name wasn't disclosed in line with privacy laws, traveled to Syria in December 2014 to try to get his three children back from an Islamic State group-controlled area, a month after his wife took them there without his knowledge. Once there, they said the suspect joined the group himself, serving in an administrative capacity dealing with new recruits and helping produce booby traps. He was returning home with his children when he was arrested at Munich Airport in November 2015. The Latest: White House touts security agreements in Gulf RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) The Latest on President Barack Obama's meeting with top officials from six Arab nations in Saudi Arabia. (all times local): 5:40 p.m. The White House says the U.S and Gulf Arab allies have agreed to various security initiatives designed to defeat the Islamic State group as well as to counter Iran's actions in the region. President Barack Obama speaks to the media after meetings at the Gulf Cooperation Council Summit at the Diriyah Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Thursday, April 21, 2016. The president is on a six day trip to strategize with his counterparts in Saudi Arabia, England and Germany on a broad range of issues with efforts to rein in the Islamic State group being the common denominator in all three stops. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) The leaders have committed to accelerating efforts to field an early warning system for ballistic missiles. They have also finalized plans to undertake a U.S.-Gulf Cooperation Council military exercise in March 2017. Other security initiatives resulting from the Riyadh summit include the pairing of elite special operations forces from each of the Gulf partners to work with U.S. trainers and an agreement to conduct joint maritime patrols. The president has left Riyadh and is now flying to London. ___ 5:00 p.m. President Barack Obama says he's concerned about Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's grip on power but calls him a good partner. Ultimately, Obama says, it's up to the Iraqi people to make decisions about who leads their government, not the United States or Iran. Obama says the U.S. is in contact with various factions inside Iraq and is encouraging them to finalize the makeup of a governing cabinet. He notes that the Iraqi government has a lot on its plate, with low oil prices and work needed to save the Mosul Dam and battle the Islamic State. He says now isn't the time for gridlock. On Syria, Obama says the leaders agree no option for ending civil war is good and that it's hard to see President Bashar Assad as a head of a government that would end the fighting. ___ 4:55 p.m. President Barack Obama says there's a need for better communication with America's Gulf Arab allies, and that summits like Thursday's in Saudi Arabia are a step in that direction. Obama's comments come after meetings in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, with leaders from the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council. The president says the formation of a new government in Libya and peace talks to end fighting in Yemen along with last year's nuclear deal with Iran wouldn't have been possible without support from the Gulf states. Obama say there's a need for "consistent, institutionalized communication" with countries in the region because "the possibilities of misunderstanding increase when there's so much activity taking place." ___ 4 p.m. President Barack Obama says the United States and Arab allies remain united in their efforts to destroy the Islamic State group and will continue to increase their contributions to the fight. Obama is speaking after meeting with U.S.-allied countries in Saudi Arabia. The president says the leaders have agreed to enhance humanitarian efforts in Iraq and Syria. He says they also continue to see violations of a fragile cease-fire agreement in Syria and that they agree the road ahead there must have a transitional government, a new constitution with free elections and a move away from President Bashar Assad. Obama says that the leaders also continue to have serious concerns about the behavior of the Iranian government. President Barack Obama walks from Marine One to boards Air Force One at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Thursday, April 21, 2016, en route to London after participating in the Gulf Cooperation Council Summit. The president is on a weeklong trip to strategize with his counterparts in Saudi Arabia, England and Germany on a broad range of issues with efforts to rein in the Islamic State group being the common denominator in all three stops. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) President Barack Obama looks to Saudi Arabia's King Salman as he speaks during the Gulf Cooperation Council Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Thursday, April 21, 2016. The president is on a six day trip to strategize with his counterparts in Saudi Arabia, England and Germany on a broad range of issues with efforts to rein in the Islamic State group being the common denominator in all three stops. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) President Barack Obama arrives to speak to the media after meetings at the Gulf Cooperation Council Summit at the Diriyah Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Thursday, April 21, 2016. The president is on a six day trip to strategize with his counterparts in Saudi Arabia, England and Germany on a broad range of issues with efforts to rein in the Islamic State group being the common denominator in all three stops. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) Belgium wants EU deal with Turkey to halt foreign fighters BRUSSELS (AP) Belgium wants a European Union agreement with Turkey to monitor the movement of foreign fighters after an airport suicide bomber slipped through the security net. Interior Minister Jan Jambon said Thursday that the EU's executive Commission has agreed to "come up with an arrangement or a convention with the Turks to resolve all this." Turkish authorities allowed Brussels bomber Ibrahim El Bakraoui to board a flight in Istanbul last summer without an escort and fly to the Netherlands, where he disappeared. Belgium's Interior Minister Jan Jambon, left, prepares to light a candle with other leaders of various faiths during a remembrance service for victims of the Brussels attacks at the Jewish Center of Brussels on Tuesday, April 19, 2016. Leaders of various faiths and a school group from the Molenbeek district of Brussels attended the service to remember victims who died or where injured during attacks at the Brussels airport and metro station on March 22, 2016. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo) Belgium was informed after Bakraoui was caught near the Syrian border but Ankara only warned it was sending him half an hour before his flight left. Looking back: 30 years of photographing Chernobyl KIEV, Ukraine (AP) Efrem Lukatsky, a Kiev-based photographer for The Associated Press, recalls the confusion and anxiety of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion, the world's worst nuclear accident. ___ The Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion was only about 100 kilometers (65 miles) from my home in Kiev, but I didn't learn about it until the next morning from neighbor Natalia Finkel, a policeman's wife. In this photo taken in 1996, shows photographer Efrem Lukatsky, wearing protective clothes to reduce the radiation impact, standing in front of the sarcophagus that covers destroyed reactor No.4 in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, in Chernobyl, Ukraine. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion was only about 60 miles from photographer Efrem Lukatsky's home, but he didnt learn about it until the next morning from a neighbor. Only a few photographers were allowed to cover the destroyed reactor and desperate cleanup efforts, and all of them paid for it with their health. I went a few months later, and have returned dozens of times. (AP Photo) There's radioactive dust, she said; close all the windows and plug all the cracks. Later, my anxiety grew when I saw her husband Andrei taking off his clothes and putting them in a plastic bag before entering his apartment. It was two full days after the April 26, 1986, explosion when the Soviet Union's tightly controlled news media acknowledged that anything had happened and the reports' dishonesty was as bad as no news at all. The Tass news agency called it an "unlucky accident" and said there was nothing to worry about. Nobody canceled a May Day parade in Kiev that saw thousands of people walking in columns along the streets, with songs, flowers and Soviet leaders' portraits, covered with invisible clouds of fatal radiation. A thick cloud of smoke was carrying radioactive poisons over much of Europe. The only reliable source of information was the Voice of America, but the KGB was jamming the signal. If the signal got through, we heard doctors advising us to take a daily drop of iodine to protect our thyroids from radiation. A friend, an Institute of Nuclear Physics engineer named Viktor Ivashchenko, called me a few days after the blast and urged more me to flee Kiev and never come back. But I stayed, and went on to develop a photographic relationship with the ruined plant that lasts to this day. Soviet authorities finally unveiled what had really happened, and let in a few photographers to cover the destroyed reactor and the desperate cleanup efforts. Initially, only three Tass photographers were allowed in: Vladimir Repik, Igor Kostin and Valery Zufarov. Repik and Zufarov later died of radiation-related illnesses and Kostin suffered from the effects for decades before dying in a car accident last year. They were not allowed to develop the film they shot. Instead, the rolls were sent to Moscow, where the photos were edited and top-level discussions took place on which could be made public. Kostin was with a group of "liquidators," soldiers who had been pressed into service to battle the disaster. He climbed to the roof of the building next to the exploded reactor, firing off frames to record the soldiers who were frantically shoveling debris off the ruined structure's roof. He had to shoot fast. "They counted the seconds for me: one, two, three ... As they said '20' I had to run down from the roof. It was the most contaminated place," he told The Associated Press in 2011. "Fear came later." "If that explosion had occurred now and I had been told to go to Chernobyl, I would have never gone," Repik told me a few weeks before he died. I went myself a few months later, the first of dozens of trips, as a stringer for Ogonyok magazine. I saw crews of soldiers and firemen hastily laboring to cover the destroyed reactor with a concrete and steel sarcophagus. They had no protection from the radioactive smoke and dust except for face masks that they tore off because of heat. I had no protection other than a gauze mask and a white medical-style coat and head covering, all provided by the plant, which also gave us a shower afterwards. In all, some 600,000 people took part in the cleanup operations in the first five months of the work; in subsequent years, that group has registered a markedly higher rate of cancer than in the general population. In 2000, after I had been hired by AP, I went to mark the closing of Chernobyl's last operating reactor and got a look into the sarcophagus over the destroyed unit. I put on two layers of thick white cotton clothes, rubber boots, a special hat and a helmet, padded jackets, gloves and a face mask. My guide's flashlight picked up the sparkle of dust slowly whirling around us. We tried not to take any deep breaths as we wove our way through dark, wreckage-strewn passages. We reached the old control room, long and poorly lighted, with its damaged machinery. This was the place where the Soviet engineers threw a power switch for a routine test on that doomed night, and two explosions followed. We bent our heads to get through the dark, narrow labyrinth leading to the center of the sarcophagus. The walls were covered with lead plates intended to decrease radiation levels. There were piles of lead and boron powder dropped by helicopters to suppress the nuclear reaction. My Geiger counter registered about 80,000 microroentgens an hour; normal background radiation is about 23 microroentgens an hour. It was time to leave. The half-life of cesium-137, one of the most dangerous of the particles emitted by the explosion, is 30 years as long as it has been since the blast. At least three more of those half-lives will have to pass before the soil might be considered uncontaminated. The catastrophe's effects will outlive all of us who endured it. In this photo taken on Wednesday, March 23, 2016, a crucifix and a radiation sign at the entrance to the out-of-bounds town Pripyat close to the Chernobyl nuclear power station are seen through a bus window. Ukraine marks the 30th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear disaster that happened in Chernobyl on April 26. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion was only about 60 miles from photographer Efrem Lukatsky's home, but he didnt learn about it until the next morning from a neighbor. Only a few photographers were allowed to cover the destroyed reactor and desperate cleanup efforts, and all of them paid for it with their health. I went a few months later, and have returned dozens of times. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) In this photo taken on Wednesday, March 23, 2016, a worker checks radiation levels after he leaves the nuclear waste storage at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine. The half-life of cesium-137, one of the most dangerous of the particles emitted by the explosion, is 30 years -- as long as its been since the blast. At least three more of those half-lives will have to pass before the soil might be considered uncontaminated. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion was only about 60 miles from photographer Efrem Lukatsky's home, but he didnt learn about it until the next morning from a neighbor. Only a few photographers were allowed to cover the destroyed reactor and desperate cleanup efforts, and all of them paid for it with their health. I went a few months later, and have returned dozens of times. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) In this photo taken on Wednesday, March 23, 2016, A chimney over the destroyed reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, background left, and a gigantic steel-arch under construction to cover the remnants of the exploded reactor, in the town of Prypyat close to Chernobyl, Ukraine. Abandoned houses in the foreground have been left by Chernobyl plant workers a few days after the explosion, and since then Prypyat had become the ghost town. Ukraine marks the 30th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear disaster on April 26. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) This photo taken Wednesday, March 23, 2016 shows abandoned apartment buildings in the town of Pripyat near Chernobyl, Ukraine, with a chimney, left, at the destroyed reactor and a gigantic arch-shape confinement to cover the remnants of the exploded reactor, in the back, at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Thirty years after the worlds worst nuclear accident, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is surrounded by both a hushed desolation and clangorous activity, the sense of a ruined past and a difficult future. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion was only about 60 miles from photographer Efrem Lukatsky's home, but he didnt learn about it until the next morning from a neighbor. Only a few photographers were allowed to cover the destroyed reactor and desperate cleanup efforts, and all of them paid for it with their health. I went a few months later, and have returned dozens of times. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) FILE - In this Dec. 3, 1999 file photo, engineer operators of Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the site of the 1986 world's worst nuclear accident, carry out their routine work inside the only operating third reactor, Ukraine. Shortly before Chernobyl's last operating reactor was closed in 2000. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion was only about 60 miles from photographer Efrem Lukatsky's home, but he didnt learn about it until the next morning from a neighbor. Only a few photographers were allowed to cover the destroyed reactor and desperate cleanup efforts, and all of them paid for it with their health. I went a few months later, and have returned dozens of times. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File) FILE In this file photo taken on Wednesday, March 19, 1996, five-year-old Alek Zhloba, who suffers from leukaemia, is held by his doctor in the children's cancer ward of the Gomel Regional Hospital, in Gomel, Belarus. There are tracks from medical procedures on his head. Much of the nuclear fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster fell on Belarus. Thirty years ago, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded in Ukraine, spreading radioactive material across much of the Northern Hemisphere. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion was only about 60 miles from photographer Efrem Lukatsky's home, but he didnt learn about it until the next morning from a neighbor. Only a few photographers were allowed to cover the destroyed reactor and desperate cleanup efforts, and all of them paid for it with their health. I went a few months later, and have returned dozens of times. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky File) In this photo taken Wednesday, March 23, 2016, portraits of Soviet leaders are covered by radioactive dust in a club in the dead town of Pripyat, near Chernobyl in Ukraine. The portraits were prepared for a May Day rally in Pripyat - the town that housed the Chernobyl nuclear power plant workers - but the residents were evacuated within hours after the radioactive explosion in the fourth reactor on April 26, 1986. Thirty years after the worlds worst nuclear accident, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is surrounded by both a hushed desolation and clangorous activity, the sense of a ruined past and a difficult future. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) FILE - In this Nov.10, 2000 file photo radioactive contaminated vehicles lay dormant near the Chernobyl nuclear power plan. Some 1,350 Soviet military helicopters, buses, bulldozers, tankers, transporters, fire engines and ambulances were used while fighting against the April 26, 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl. All were irradiated during the clean-up operation. Thirty years ago, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded in Ukraine, spreading radioactive material across much of the Northern Hemisphere. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion was only about 60 miles from photographer Efrem Lukatsky's home, but he didnt learn about it until the next morning from a neighbor. Only a few photographers were allowed to cover the destroyed reactor and desperate cleanup efforts, and all of them paid for it with their health. I went a few months later, and have returned dozens of times. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) FILE - In this Nov.10, 2000 file photo, an investigator points at the place of the April 26, 1986 explosion in reactor No 4 in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Ukraine. We reached the old control room, long and poorly lighted, with its damaged machinery, the place where the Soviet engineers threw a power switch for a routine test on that doomed night, and two explosions followed. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion was only about 60 miles from photographer Efrem Lukatsky's home, but he didnt learn about it until the next morning from a neighbor. Only a few photographers were allowed to cover the destroyed reactor and desperate cleanup efforts, and all of them paid for it with their health. I went a few months later, and have returned dozens of times. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File) FILE - in this Nov. 10, 2000, file photo the shattered remains of the control room for Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Ukraine. We reached the old control room, long and poorly lighted, with its damaged machinery, the place where the Soviet engineers threw a power switch for a routine test on that doomed night, and two explosions followed. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion was only about 60 miles from photographer Efrem Lukatsky's home, but he didnt learn about it until the next morning from a neighbor. Only a few photographers were allowed to cover the destroyed reactor and desperate cleanup efforts, and all of them paid for it with their health. I went a few months later, and have returned dozens of times. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File) FILE - This Friday, Oct. 13, 1991 file picture shows part of the collapsed roof at the Chernobyl, Ukraine nuclear power plant during a media tour of the facility, Ukraine. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion was only about 100 kilometers (65 miles) from my home in Kiev. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion was only about 60 miles from photographer Efrem Lukatsky's home, but he didnt learn about it until the next morning from a neighbor. Only a few photographers were allowed to cover the destroyed reactor and desperate cleanup efforts, and all of them paid for it with their health. I went a few months later, and have returned dozens of times. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File) FILE In this 1986 photo, a Chernobyl nuclear power plant worker holding a dosimeter to measure radiation level is seen against the background of a sarcophagus under construction over the 4th destroyed reactor, Ukraine. On May 12, 1986, more than two weeks after the explosion, the leading Soviet daily newspaper Pravda published its first photograph from the site for the first time, shot three days earlier from a helicopter. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion was only about 60 miles from photographer Efrem Lukatsky's home, but he didnt learn about it until the next morning from a neighbor. Only a few photographers were allowed to cover the destroyed reactor and desperate cleanup efforts, and all of them paid for it with their health. I went a few months later, and have returned dozens of times. (AP Photo/Volodymyr Repik) FILE - In this photo taken May 1, 1986 in Ukraine's capital Kiev, people rally to celebrate the May Day a few days after the deadly explosion on the 4th unit in Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Nobody cancelled a May Day parade in Kiev when thousands of people walked in columns along the streets, with songs, flowers and Soviet leaders portraits, covered with invisible clouds of fatal radiation. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion was only about 60 miles from photographer Efrem Lukatsky's home, but he didnt learn about it until the next morning from a neighbor. Only a few photographers were allowed to cover the destroyed reactor and desperate cleanup efforts, and all of them paid for it with their health. I went a few months later, and have returned dozens of times. (AP Photo) The Latest: Austrian bishop refuses border fence on his land ANKARA, Turkey (AP) The Latest on Europe's migration crisis (all times local): 8:25 p.m. An Austrian Roman Catholic bishop says a planned fence along a stretch of Austria's border with Hungary is going to have at least two gaps on property owned by his church. Children play in a makeshift camp at the northern Greek border point of Idomeni, Greece, Thursday, April 21, 2016. Many thousands of migrants remain at the Greek border with Macedonia, hoping that the border crossing will reopen, allowing them to move north into central Europe. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) The 9-kilometer (5.4-mile) barrier in Austria's eastern Burgenland province is planned by the government to tighten its border against migrants trying to avoid controls at authorized crossings. But owners of property along the fence must agree to allow it on their land. Diocesan Bishop Aegidius Zsifkovics, who has church authority in the region, said Thursday that erecting a fence on the property to keep out those seeking help is contrary to the spirit of the Gospel. In a statement published by the Austria Press Agency, he says fences do not solve Europe's refugee problem. ___ 8:20 p.m. Britain says it will resettle up to 3,000 child refugees from Syria by 2020. Immigration Minister James Brokenshire says the British government "is committed to providing life-saving support and assistance to the vulnerable children who have been unjustly impacted by this ongoing humanitarian crisis." But opposition politicians say the government must do more and accept unaccompanied refugee children who are already in Europe. Labour immigration spokeswoman Yvette Cooper said Thursday that Britain "cannot turn our backs on the thousands of children who are going missing in Europe because children's homes in Italy and Greece are full, and other countries can't cope with this crisis alone." Britain has already committed to accept 20,000 Syrians from refugee camps in the region by 2020, but the government is under pressure to do more. ___ 3:55 p.m. Spain's interior minister has said his country will take in 182 asylum seekers from Greece and Italy in the coming weeks. Speaking to reporters in Luxembourg Thursday, Jorge Fernandez Diaz said Spain would accept 150 asylum seekers from Greece and 32 from Italy once they had been security vetted. He said they would arrive between the end of this month and the beginning of May. Spain, Fernandez Diaz said, will also take in 385 Syrian refugees returned to Turkey. He gave no details as to when. The minister said Spanish authorities were doing all they could to speed up taking in refugees after the country came in for criticism on the issue. ___ 2 p.m. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said efforts to stem the tide of migrants seeking the shores of Europe are working. Speaking at a news conference Thursday with Turkish Foreign Affairs Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in Ankara, the Turkish capital, Stoltenberg said the collective effort is "making a difference" and that the number of migrants crossing the Aegean Sea is "going significantly down." Under an EU-Turkey deal signed last month, migrants arriving on Greek islands from the Turkish coast from March 20 onwards face deportation to Turkey unless they successfully apply for asylum in Greece. The International Organization for Migration says Greece has seen fewer than 70 arrivals per day in the past 10 days, down from nearly 1,500 of arrivals per day before the deal was struck. Stoltenberg also said Turkey, based on information that NATO provides, is "taking action to help break the business model of traffickers." Children play in a makeshift camp at the northern Greek border point of Idomeni, Greece, Thursday, April 21, 2016. Many thousands of migrants remain at the Greek border with Macedonia, hoping that the border crossing will reopen, allowing them to move north into central Europe. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) Migrants and refugees gather at their makeshift camp at the northern Greek border point of Idomeni, Greece, Thursday, April 21, 2016. Many thousands of migrants remain at the Greek border with Macedonia, hoping that the border crossing will reopen, allowing them to move north into central Europe.(AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, left, and Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu shake hands after a joint news conference in Ankara, Turkey, Thursday, April 21, 2016. Stoltenberg says efforts to stem the tide of migrants seeking the shores of Europe are working.(AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici) The Latest: Lawmaker defends taking family on campaign trip INDIANAPOLIS (AP) The Latest on Indiana Senate candidate Marlin Stutzman's travel expenses (all times local): 9:35 a.m. U.S. Rep. Marlin Stutzman is defending his decision to have his campaign pay for his family to visit California last summer, saying political business was conducted during the six-day trip. Indiana Republican candidates for U.S. Senate Marlin Stutzman, right, shakes hands with opponent Todd Young following their debate in Indianapolis, Monday, April 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy) Stutzman's wife described the event online as a family vacation. Federal Election Commission guidelines forbid using campaign funds for personal expenses. Over the course of a week, The Associated Press repeatedly asked the campaign to explain the travel. The campaign never answered and only refunded the campaign for trip costs after the AP inquired. In a statement Thursday, Stutzman said he's always been transparent with voters. Also Thursday, the campaign released an itinerary for the trip, but deleted the names of people Stutzman met and didn't spell out the political purpose of the events. A spokesman said Wednesday that a number of the meals and meetings were political. ___ 1:40 a.m. A Republican congressman running for Senate in Indiana billed his campaign more than $2,000 in airfare for his family's trip to the Ronald Reagan library in California, an apparent violation of federal election laws. The expense is part of hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel expenses, meals and vehicle payments U.S. Rep. Marlin Stutzman has charged to his campaign fund since 2010. Federal Election Commission guidelines forbid the use of an official campaign fund for personal expenses. Stutzman was first elected to Congress amid a wave of tea party insurgency in 2010. He has regularly found himself at odds with members of the GOP establishment and says he was sent to Congress to rein in spending. FILE - In this April 18, 2016, file photo, Indiana Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Marlin Stutzman speaks during a debate with opponent Todd Young in Indianapolis. Stutzman billed his campaign more than $2,000 in airfare for his family's trip to the Ronald Reagan library in California, an apparent violation of federal election laws. The expense is part of hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel expenses, meals and vehicle payments Stutzman has charged to his campaign fund since 2010. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy, File) Indiana Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Todd Young speaks during a debate with opponent Marlin Stutzman watches as in Indianapolis, Monday, April 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy) 'Shades' of meaning as W. Kamau Bell probes cultural divides NEW YORK (AP) "America's Best Bigots" is NOT the name of W. Kamau Bell's new CNN series "although that would be a great name for a show," says the popular black comedian who hosts it. Bell's series, premiering Sunday at 10 p.m. EDT, is instead titled "United Shades of America," and, while it will routinely place him in a culture clash with the week's chosen groups or subcultures, the point is not to spotlight prejudice. Bell's mission is to build a bridge even if only a shaky footbridge of understanding between him and a racially, ethnically or otherwise divergent sample of his fellow habitants in these United States. In this March 31, 2016 file photo, W. Kamau Bell poses for a portrait to promote the series, "United Shades of America" in New York. Bell's series, premiers Sunday at 10 p.m. EDT on CNN. (Photo by Scott Gries/Invision/AP) Future episodes of the eight-episode season will feature inmates at San Quentin State Prison; happily disconnected folks who in a Snapchat Age opt for living "off the grid"; retirees and spring-break college kids who annually collide in Daytona Beach, Florida; and a few of the hipsters gravitating to Portland, Oregon, along with longtime residents who weather this assault. To kick off the series, Bell takes a big swing: He consorts with members of the Ku Klux Klan. "As a black person, it's good to know who hates you," he proposes. And while one might argue that it would have been smarter to film this episode last, not to start with, "I figured if it really goes badly, we only shoot that one episode and I become a legend." He's joking about that, but he makes a chilling point: "In history, most black guys that get this close to the Klan don't end up leaving." Bell does, of course, "and when I left, at least one or two of those Klansmen were like, 'Uh-oh, I think I kinda like a black man now.' They won't be joining the NAACP, but maybe they'll see a little crack in their flawed logic." For Bell, a towering chap with a Teddy Bear build, the secret is his disarming manner. It's the same cheery style that has helped establish him as a standup comic who can defuse uncomfortable truths with insight and a smile. "You're always using jokes to explain the world to yourself, and then to the audience," says Bell (whose onstage act will be on display in his first solo standup special, "W. Kamau Bell: Semi-Prominent Negro," premiering April 29th on Showtime). Humor is a big part of the formula on "United Shades of America." "But I tried to be very clear, in each case, that we're here to make fun out of this situation, not to make fun OF this situation," he says. That's true even with the Klanners, one of whom is asked about the infamous robes he's wearing: "We were in Kentucky in the middle of August, so I said, 'It's got to be hot under there.'" "Oh, it's horrible!" this Imperial Wizard replies from behind his hood. "It opened up a great human moment," says Bell, noting that certain Klansmen seemed game to even make fun of themselves. "When one guy says he separates his Skittles based on color, all I have to say is, 'Did we get that on film?'" They did, and it's a funny exchange. The episode (which includes a cross-burning, complete with fun facts including the correct terminology: "cross lighting") doesn't laugh off the Klan's hateful principles. Yet even in this netherworld, Bell is able to uncover a bit of common ground. "I believe in the power of the awkward conversation to initiate social change," he says. Bell grew up in Chicago, where he first put his sense of humor to work at a local club's open-mic night. He found a local beachhead for his comedy after moving to San Francisco, then gained a national following on tour and on "Totally Biased," a series he hosted on FX. He has no problem being called "a black comic" an insufficient if literally true label any more than he objects to being called a black man. "I'm not trying to be post-racial, I'm not trying to be colorblind," he says. "I think we should all be able to embrace the parts of our identity we want. Like many people of color, you either have to embrace it or fight it your whole life." But there's more to the picture: His wife, Melissa Hudson Bell, with whom he has two young daughters, is white. She is also a multi-degreed academic, Bell says with obvious pride, "and a lot of the work that I do has been affected by our conversations. We have a racism-feminism think tank at home." That news doesn't please a certain Imperial Wizard in Arkansas, who advises Bell that the Bible condemns interracial marriage as "an abomination." "So, it's worse than murder?" Bell inquires. "Yeah," insists the Klansman who, a moment later, vows "the Klan will go on forever and evolve." "One way I hope it evolves," Bell offers, is for the Klan's hoods to add mouth-holes, "cause sometimes it's hard to understand you." He really does want to understand. _____ EDITOR'S NOTE Frazier Moore is a national television columnist for The Associated Press. He can be reached at fmoore@ap.org and at http://www.twitter.com/tvfrazier. Past stories are available at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/frazier-moore _____ Online: www.cnn.com In this March 31, 2016 file photo, W. Kamau Bell poses for a portrait to promote the series, "United Shades of America" in New York. Bell's series, premiers Sunday at 10 p.m. EDT on CNN. (Photo by Scott Gries/Invision/AP) In this March 31, 2016 file photo, W. Kamau Bell poses for a portrait to promote the series, "United Shades of America" in New York. Bell's series, premiers Sunday at 10 p.m. EDT on CNN. (Photo by Scott Gries/Invision/AP) The Latest: Solar-powered plane heading toward California KAPOLEI, Hawaii (AP) The Latest on a solar plane flying from Hawaii to California (all times local): 6:45 p.m. The pilot of a solar plane trying to circumnavigate the globe says he has passed the point of no return after departing Hawaii and is forging forward over the Pacific Ocean toward California. The Solar Impulse 2 solar plane flies out of the Kalaeloa Airport, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Kapolei, Hawaii. The solar plane will fly a two-and-a-half day journey to Northern California. (AP Photo/Marco Garcia) Pilot Bertrand Piccard posted a picture on the voyage's website of chunks of ice in the northern Pacific as he pulls farther away from Hawaii, where he took off Thursday. The Swiss-made Solar Impulse 2 is expected to reach Mountain View, California sometime this weekend. The plane is cruising at about 20,000 feet and its batteries are almost fully charged. The crew says it was at one point passed by a Hawaiian Air plane whose passengers caught a glimpse of the Solar Impulse 2 before the powerful airliner left the slow-moving aircraft behind. ___ 2:30 p.m. The Swiss-made Solar Impulse 2 airplane is leaving Hawaii in its wake and is still ascending over the Pacific hours after takeoff as it heads to California for the next step in its journey around the world. In its latest online update, the crew announced that it was approaching 23,000 feet and attempting to reach a high altitude before night sets in. Meanwhile, the crew that helped it takeoff earlier Thursday is clearing out of its Hawaiian hangar and heading to Mountain View, California, where the plane is set to arrive sometime this weekend. The aircraft is attempting to circumnavigate the globe using only energy from the sun. The plane took off in March 2015 from Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. ___ 6:20 a.m. After some uncertainty about the weather, the Swiss-made Solar Impulse 2 airplane has taken off from Hawaii as it continues its journey around the world. The aircraft is heading to California as part of its circumnavigation of the globe using only energy from the sun. Its departure was delayed briefly Thursday by the wind. The plane took off in March 2015 from Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. The crew landed on Oahu last July but was forced to stay in the islands after the plane's battery system sustained heat damage on its trip from Japan. ___ 5:30 a.m. The Swiss-made Solar Impulse 2 airplane has left the hangar and is taxiing to the runway as it prepares for its journey from Hawaii to California. The aircraft is heading across the Pacific as part of its circumnavigation of the globe using only energy from the sun. The aircraft took off in March 2015 from Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. The team has until 6:30 a.m. Thursday for the wind conditions to meet their standards for takeoff. The winds need to be less than 10 knots for the light, solar-power airplane to leave Hawaii. ___ 4:50 a.m. The Solar Impulse team is delaying their solar-powered plane's departure from Hawaii while they wait for the wind to subside. The Swiss-made Solar Impulse 2 is heading for California as part of its circumnavigation of the globe using only energy from the sun. The aircraft took off in March 2015 from Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. The team has until 6:30 a.m. to leave the hangar and still be able to take advantage of a full day's sun. The National Weather Service in Honolulu says winds at the airport are variable, which is about as light as they will get. They expect the winds to pick up slightly in the coming hours as the sun comes up. ___ 4:40 a.m. Swiss pilot Bertrand Piccard has suited up for his three-day voyage from Hawaii to California in a solar plane. The Swiss-made Solar Impulse 2 is preparing to leave Hawaii on Thursday to continue its circumnavigation of the globe using only energy from the sun. Piccard's co-pilot Andre Borschberg, who flew the leg from Japan to Hawaii, told Piccard he greatly admires his dedication and strength. He said the plane "represents what we could do on the ground in our communities, in our cities." Piccard said the idea of crossing the ocean in a solar powered plane a few years ago stressed him out, but this morning he was confident things would go according to plan. Piccard also said the flight's destination, in the heart of Silicon Valley, is fitting. He said on his way to the airfield that when the plane lands there, it will land "in the middle of the pioneering spirit." ___ 4 a.m. A pilot is preparing to take off for a flight from Hawaii to California with no jet fuel aboard his plane. The Swiss-made Solar Impulse 2 is preparing to leave Hawaii on Thursday to continue its circumnavigation of the globe using only energy from the sun. The crew landed on Oahu last July but was forced to stay in the islands after the plane's battery system sustained heat damage on its trip from Japan. The plane, now preparing for the ninth leg of its journey, plans to finish its trip across the Pacific and land in Mountain View, California, in about three days. ___ This story has been corrected to note the plane originally left Abu Dhabi in March, 2015, not 2016. Ground crew prepare for the departure of the Solar Impulse 2 solar plane from the Kalaeloa Airport, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Kapolei, Hawaii. The Solar Impulse team landed in the islands in July after a record-breaking flight from Japan. (AP Photo/Marco Garcia) Solar Impulse 2 pilots Bertrand Piccard, left, and Andre Borschberg speak to the media in front of the solar plane from the Kalaeloa Airport, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Kapolei, Hawaii. The Solar Impulse team landed in the islands in July after a record-breaking flight from Japan. (AP Photo/Marco Garcia) The Solar Impulse 2 solar plane is moved out of the hangar to prepare for a dawn lift off at the Kalaeloa Airport, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Kapolei, Hawaii. The solar-powered plane that has been grounded in Hawaii since July plans to resume its round-the-world voyage on Thursday. (AP Photo/Marco Garcia) The Latest: Body of missing priest is positively identified ATLANTA (AP) The Latest on charges related to a missing Florida priest whose body was found in Georgia (all times local): ___ 1:15 p.m. This photo provided by St. Johns County Sheriffs Office shows Father Rene Wayne Robert, a Roman Catholic priest in Florida whose body was found in rural east Georgia, who dedicated his life to working with prisoners and society's downtrodden. He was reported missing April 12 after church officials became concerned when he missed an appointment. (FHSMV/St. Johns County Sheriffs Office via AP) Investigators say they've positively identified a body found in a wooded part of east Georgia as a Florida priest who has been missing since April 10. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said Thursday afternoon that dental records confirm the body is that of the Rev. Rene Wayne Robert. Authorities say 28-year-old Steve James Murray of Jacksonville, Florida, faces a murder charge in Georgia in connection with the priest's death. An autopsy found that Robert was shot multiple times. At a Wednesday court appearance, Murray said that he's "very sorry." He's being held without bond in the Burke County Jail in Georgia. ___ 10:40 a.m. ATLANTA A man facing a murder charge in the disappearance of a Florida priest said he has "mental problems" and asked for forgiveness as he was led from a courthouse in east Georgia. In video aired by local TV stations (bit.ly/244d0EU) 28-year-old Steve James Murray said Wednesday that he's "very sorry" and that if people love the Rev. Rene Wayne Robert, they will forgive him. Asked by a reporter what happened, Murray replied that he has mental problems and "I lost control of myself." Another reporter asks Murray specifically what he did, and Murray doesn't respond as authorities place him inside a waiting car outside the courthouse. Authorities say the priest worked with prisoners, a calling police say put him in contact with his killer. ___ 8:30 a.m. ATLANTA Georgia authorities say they've filed a murder charge against a man described as a "career criminal" who led authorities to a body believed to be that of a missing Florida priest. Georgia Bureau of Investigation spokesman Scott Dutton on Thursday told The Associated Press that 28-year-old Steve James Murray of Jacksonville, Florida, has been charged with murder in Georgia. Dutton says an autopsy found that the victim believed to be the Rev. Rene Wayne Robert of St. Augustine, Florida was shot multiple times. Dutton says the body was found in a heavily wooded area of Burke County, in east Georgia, where Murray is being held without bond. Police say Murray knew Robert and led authorities to the body in woods near Waynesboro, Georgia. Murray was arrested in South Carolina while driving the priest's Toyota Corolla. Bank of North Dakota reports record $130.7 million profit BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) The Bank of North Dakota, the nation's only state-owned bank, set an earnings record for the 12th straight year in 2015, the bank's president said Thursday. Bank President Eric Hardmeyer told the state Industrial Commission that the bank's net income last year was $130.7 million, up from $111 million in profits in 2014. Hardmeyer told the commission that 2016 already is off to a strong start, the Bismarck Tribune reported (http://bit.ly/1r1GLb3 ), with net income for the first quarter of 2016 at $37.5 million, up from $34.5 million for the first quarter of 2015. The bank's assets increased to a record $7.4 billion and have more than tripled since 2006. The streak of record profits began in 2004, when profits for that entire year were $34.2 million. Hardmeyer has said the increased profits are due to state's strong economy, growing tax collections and loan growth. The bank, which is based in Bismarck, acts as an economic development agency, offering low-interest loans to businesses, farmers and students. It also helps private banks finance larger projects. Loans set a record in 2015 at $4.34 billion, up from nearly $3.9 billion the previous year. The biggest part of the increase came from student and business loans, Hardmeyer said. The bank was established in 1919 and historically funneled the bulk of its profits to North Dakota's general treasury for the lawmakers to spend. But the Legislature curbed the practice in recent years to allow the bank to build up its capital reserves. The commission, which oversees the bank, is made up of Gov. Jack Dalrymple, Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem and state Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring. ___ ACLU defends New Jersey man ticketed for Donald Trump flags WEST LONG BRANCH, N.J. (AP) New Jersey's American Civil Liberties Union is joining the defense team for a man facing a fine for flying flags supporting Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Joseph Hornick was ticketed for violating a West Long Branch ordinance that restricts the display of political signs until 30 days before an election. The town considers the "Trump-Make America Great Again" flags equivalent to a political sign. Chapter deputy legal director Jeanne LoCicero says it doesn't matter whether it's a lawn sign or a flag. She says people have the right to express their political beliefs every day. The chapter plans to defend Hornick in court along with Eric Sherman with the New York-based firm Pryor Cashman. New Jersey's primary is June 7. Jessica Lange revisits an 'extraordinary' play on Broadway NEW YORK (AP) For her one day off this week playing a drug-addled mother in the Broadway revival of the monumental "Long Day's Journey Into Night," Jessica Lange had a plan. She wanted to walk in the spring sunshine. "What a gorgeous day, huh?" she asked Monday over lemon-ginger tea at a downtown cafe. "I was thinking about this morning when I woke up: I long to hear birds. I long for the silence and the birds." That's understandable, seeing as Lange has thrown herself into portraying Eugene O'Neill's demented heroine, Mary Tyrone, a morphine addict with gnarled hands who is caught in a dreamlike web of the past. FILE - In this March 15, 2015 file photo, Jessica Lange arrives at the 32nd Annual Paleyfest : "American Horror Story: Freak Show" in Los Angeles. Lange will play a drug-addled mother in the gloomy Broadway revival of "Long Day's Journey Into Night," opening on April 27 at the American Airlines Theatre in New York. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File) "I think it's the most extraordinary American play ever written," she said. "I'm so exhausted from this. I don't know if it's age or what it is. But I feel like I have never worked as hard in my entire life." Lange has only herself to blame. After all, she played the same part in London 16 years ago. "I have no excuse," she acknowledged. "But it's like pregnancy: You forget from one to another." The actress, who turned 67 this week, on this sun-splashed day is gorgeous and chic in black tuxedo pants and jacket, sunglasses and flats. Her straight blond hair frames her fair face and she wears a minimum of makeup. Lange, who in the movies has played an array of fascinating women, from Patsy Cline to Frances Farmer to the object of King Kong's affection, has been stingy with her stage work. But when she does it, attention must be paid. She's played Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire" and Amanda Wingfield, the domineering mother who propels "The Glass Menagerie." "If I had to say what characters just took me to the limit, Blanche obviously would be one. But at this point in my life, Mary is so much more complete," she said. Jonathan Kent, her director, agreed: "Jessica now is absolutely at the moment where she should be playing this part. She understands it on such a visceral level." Lange is a two-time Academy Award winner and three-time Emmy winner who has lately connected with millennials, thanks to four seasons aboard "American Horror Story," playing a washed-up Southern belle, a freak show ringmaster, a nun and a witch. "They were big, baroque characters. I'd never worked that way before: Never knowing where you were going with the character. You were really out there on a wing and a prayer," she said. "I never had to worry, 'Am I over-the-top?' 'Am I doing too much?'" Lange can thank that show's mastermind, Ryan Murphy, for her new gig. They had been talking about how much she wanted to do "Long Day's Journey" again and he helped get the rights. She thinks the passing of 16 years make her Mary more poignant. "At this point in my life, there's much more loss. There's much more things falling away. So coming back to it, it feels richer and deeper. And also at this point in my life I have fewer distractions. I mean, I don't have children at home any more. I don't have a partner," she says. Joining Lange at the American Airlines Theatre on Broadway is Gabriel Byrne playing her husband, and both Michael Shannon and John Gallagher Jr. as her unravelling sons. But it is work that takes its toll on her. "I said to somebody the other day: 'I go to the theater. I play this incredibly lonely woman and I come back to my apartment and I am this incredibly lonely woman. It's kind of poetic justice," she says, laughing. And with that, it's back out into the warmth and sunshine. "I'm going to walk, get outside. You begin to feel a little bit like a mole," she says, heading for the door. ___ Online: https://www.roundabouttheatre.org/ ___ Walgreens to settle NY attorney general probe for $500,000 Walgreens will pay $500,000 to settle the latest case of a company accused of duping New York consumers over prices. The New York attorney general's office said Thursday that an undercover investigation found instances cases where Walgreens used misleading advertising in its stores. It also accused the nation's largest drugstore chain of overcharging customers. The state regulator said Walgreens charged different prices at the register for some products compared to figures that appeared in print ads or on store shelf tags. That included tags that remained up after the advertised price had expired. FILE - In this Tuesday, April 5, 2016, file photo, a customer enters a Walgreens, in New York. Walgreens will pay $500,000 to settle the latest case of a company accused of duping New York consumers over prices. The New York attorney general's office said Thursday, April 21, 2016, that an undercover investigation found instances where Walgreens used misleading advertising in its stores. It also accused the nation's largest drugstore chain of overcharging customers. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File) Walgreens said it has been working with the attorney general's office for several months and receiving feedback from customers, and that has helped it make improvements in how it communicates in its stores and with advertising. Deerfield, Illinois-based Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. runs about 251 Walgreens and 214 Duane Reade stores across the state. The attorney general's office said that, in addition to the fine, the drugstore chain agreed to remove expired shelf tags within 36 hours and conduct price checks in its stores, among other things. Late last year, the grocer Whole Foods said it would pay New York City $500,000 to settle allegations that it overcharged customers for prepackaged foods. The city had said last June that an investigation tested 80 different types of prepackaged food at Whole Foods and found mislabeled weights on every one. Walgreens shares fell 10 cents to $81.03 in midday trading while the Nasdaq exchange rose slightly. The Latest: In 911 call, prosecutor accused of sex assault HAHNVILLE, La. (AP) The Latest on the case of a former Louisiana district attorney who pleaded guilty Wednesday to obstructing a federal investigation of allegations that he solicited sex from at least 20 women in exchange for leniency from his office (all times local): 10:00 a.m. Authorities have released tapes of a 911 call and other recorded statements by a woman who accused a former Louisiana district attorney of sexually assaulting her in 2010. Harry Morel, a former district attorney for St. Charles Parish, La., arrives with his attorney Ralph Capitelli, right, at Federal Court in New Orleans, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. Morel is charged with obstructing a federal investigation. A bill of information filed by prosecutors said he harassed an unidentified witness in a federal grand jury investigation. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) On the tapes, Danelle Keim told investigators that veteran prosecutor Harry Morel grabbed her, kissed her and touched her inappropriately after he stopped by her home to discuss a drunken driving charge that she faced. Keim ultimately cooperated with an FBI investigation of Morel, who pleaded guilty Wednesday to obstruction of justice. Morel, 73, served as St. Charles Parish's district attorney from 1979 to 2012. Keim died of a drug overdose in 2013 at age 27. Authorities said Morel preyed on at least 20 women, offering them leniency from his office in exchange for sex. ___ 2:45 a.m. A former south Louisiana district attorney whom authorities called a sexual predator pleaded guilty to harassing a witness and trying to get rid of evidence in a federal grand jury investigation that targeted him. Harry Morel, who served as St. Charles Parish's elected district attorney for 33 years, was a predator who demanded sexual favors from at least 20 women who asked for help with their cases or relatives' cases, prosecutors and investigators said at a news conference after Wednesday's hearing. Morel declined to comment after the hearing, but his attorney, Ralph Capitelli, said officials' comments describing Morel as a sexual predator were a smear tactic to influence sentencing. Harry Morel, a former district attorney for St. Charles Parish, La., arrives at Federal Court in New Orleans, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. Morel Jr. is charged with obstructing a federal investigation. A bill of information filed by prosecutors said he harassed an unidentified witness in a federal grand jury investigation. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) Harry Morel, a former district attorney for St. Charles Parish, La., arrives with his attorney Ralph Capitelli, right, at Federal Court in New Orleans, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. Morel is charged with obstructing a federal investigation. A bill of information filed by prosecutors said he harassed an unidentified witness in a federal grand jury investigation. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) Trump voices opposition to transgender bathroom law JERSEY CITY, N.J. (AP) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Thursday that transgender people should be able to use whichever bathroom they choose, wading into one of the most contentious issues in politics and opposing many in his party. Speaking at a town hall event on NBC's "Today" Thursday, Trump was asked about North Carolina's so-called "bathroom law," which, among other things, requires transgender people to use bathrooms corresponding to the gender on their birth certificate in state government buildings as well as public schools and universities. Trump said the law had caused unnecessary strife for the state, which he said had paid "a big price" economically. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump signs a copy of one of his books for an audience member at the NBC "Today" television program, in New York, Thursday, April 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Richard Drew) "There have been very few complaints the way it is. People go, they use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate," said Trump. "There has been so little trouble." After the law was signed in late March, Deutsche Bank halted plans to add 250 North Carolina jobs, while PayPal reversed a decision to open a 400-employee operation center in Charlotte. Local tourism boards have also said they've lost millions of dollars thanks to cancelled conventions and business meetings. Trump's main rival, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, immediately fired back, saying that Trump is giving in to "political correctness." "Grown adult men, strangers, should not be alone in a bathroom with little girls," Cruz said, calling his view "basic common sense." His campaign also released a statement declaring Trump "no different from politically correct leftist elites." "He has succumbed to the left's agenda, which is to force Americans to leave God out of public life while paying lip service to false tolerance," it read. The comments came as Trump drew closer to clinching the Republican nomination with a big win in his home state of New York earlier this week. If he becomes his party's nominee, Trump is likely to face pressure to moderate some of his stances to appeal to independents and women in the general election. Yet in doing so, he risks alienating some of his party's more conservative supporters, and falling vulnerable to those like Cruz and others who insist that Trump is not a true Republican. Trump said at the town hall that he didn't know if any transgender people work for his organization, but said that some "probably" did. Asked about Caitlyn Jenner, an Olympic gold medal winner then-known as Bruce Jenner, walking into Trump Tower using the bathroom, he said would be fine with her using any bathroom she chooses. Still, Trump said he's opposed to efforts to create new, transgender bathrooms alongside single gendered ones, calling that push "discriminatory in a certain way" and "unbelievably expensive for businesses and the country." Meanwhile, the state's Republican Gov. Pat McCrory defended the law in a statement from his re-election campaign, blaming the Charlotte city council for passing an "unneeded and overreaching ordinance." "Where the governor disagrees with Mr. Trump is that bathroom and shower facilities in our schools should be kept separate and special accommodations made when needed. It's just common sense," said the statement from campaign spokesman Ricky Diaz. In Washington, U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan punted on questions about the legislation, saying that it wasn't his place to get involved in what each state was doing. ___ Associated Press writers Julie Pace in Frederick, Maryland and Erica Werner in Washington contributed to this report. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, right, appears with family members on the NBC "Today" television program, in New York, Thursday, April 21, 2016. His family, from left are: daughter Tiffany Trump, son Eric Trump, daughter Ivanka Trump, son Donald Trump Jr., and Donald Trump's wife Melania Trump. (AP Photo/Richard Drew) FILE- In this Oct. 20, 2014 file photo, CEO of Vanguard Furniture John Bray, left, leads North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory on a tour of the Vanguard showroom in High Point, NC. Gov. McCrory said it's up to individual companies to decide how to deal with a new law that requires transgender people to use bathrooms that conform to the sex listed on their birth certificates. The governor made the comments Tuesday, April 5, 2016, at a high school in Jamestown, just hours after PayPal said it was withdrawing its commitment to Charlotte. PayPal had planned to expand and create 400 jobs there. (Laura Greene/ The Enterprise via AP, File) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, and his wife Melania Trump, are interviewed by co-host Matt Lauer, third left, and Savannah Guthrie, right, on the NBC "Today" television program, in New York, Thursday, April 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Richard Drew) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump reacts as his wife Melania Trump, answers a question during an interview on the NBC "Today" television program, in New York, Thursday, April 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Richard Drew) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, fourth from left, poses for a photo with family members on the NBC "Today" television program, in New York, Thursday, April 21, 2016. From left are: daughter Tiffany Trump, son Donald Trump Jr., his wife Melania Trump, daughter Ivanka Trump, and son Eric Trump. (AP Photo/Richard Drew) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump reacts to the audience on the NBC "Today" television program in New York, Thursday, April 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Richard Drew) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, left, is interviewed by co-hosts Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie on the NBC "Today" television program, in New York, Thursday, April 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Richard Drew) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump answers a question during a town hall interview on the NBC "Today" television program, in New York, Thursday, April 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Richard Drew) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump appears on the NBC "Today" television program in New York, Thursday, April 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Richard Drew) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, third from right, appears with family members and co-hosts Matt Lauer, second from right, and Savannah Guthrie, right, on the NBC "Today" television program, in New York, Thursday, April 21, 2016. His family, from left are: daughter Tiffany Trump, son Eric Trump, daughter Ivanka Trump, son Donald Trump Jr., and Donald Trump's wife Melania Trump. (AP Photo/Richard Drew) Maker of Gucci, Puma sees sales rise despite market jitters PARIS (AP) French luxury goods and sportswear maker Kering says its sales rose 2.7 percent in the first quarter of 2016 thanks to good demand in Western Europe, Japan and emerging economies. The company, whose brands include Gucci and Puma, said when stripping out factors like currency shifts, sales were up an even stronger 4 percent in the first three months of the year compared to the same time period last year. Chairman and CEO Francois-Henri Pinault said "we are confident that we can extend our growth trajectory over the full year." He said the sales growth was achieved despite a challenging market environment. 3 sentenced in $9M Maine marijuana-growing operation TOWNSHIP 37, Maine (AP) Six years ago, there was more than logging going on in the wilderness in eastern Maine. Hidden from view and protected by gates, a sophisticated marijuana-growing operation featured a warehouse, bunkhouses, migrant workers and $9 million worth of marijuana. It was camouflaged so well that a game warden rode right past it the day before law enforcement officials finally spotted it using aircraft on Sept. 22, 2009. Three men convicted in the enterprise that produced one of the biggest marijuana seizures in Maine history were sentenced Thursday in U.S. District Court in Bangor. In this Sept. 23, 2009 photo released by the U.S. Attorney's Office, a fire set by fleeing workers burns in a forest where authorities seized $9 million worth of marijuana in Township 37, Maine. Three men convicted in the enterprise that produced one of the biggest marijuana seizures in state history were sentenced ranging from 5-14 years Thursday, April 21, 2016, in U.S. District Court in Bangor, Maine. (U.S. Attorney's Office via AP) A judge imposed sentences of more than 14 years for Malcolm French, 54, of Enfield, and more than 12 years for Rodney Russell, 52, of South Thomaston, for charges including manufacturing drugs and harboring workers who were in the country illegally. A third man, Kendall Chase, 59, of Bradford, was sentenced to five years in prison for conspiracy. "This was a truly remarkable operation," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Joel Casey, who described it as the largest marijuana-growing operation to be successfully prosecuted in Maine. The three men were convicted by a federal jury in January 2014. The marijuana operation was concealed in the woods and bogs in rural Washington County at the nation's eastern tip. Drug agents found nearly 3,000 plants, some as tall as 8 feet, along with 40 pounds of processed marijuana, all valued at $9 million. Special Agent Jonathan Richards of the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency said he'd seen nothing like it in his 37-year career in law enforcement. There were two bunkhouses for workers and a building equipped with a kitchen and a shower with hot water, all powered by propane, Richards said. A swampy area provided a clearing for sunshine and an abundant supply of water for the plants, which grew in peat moss plots surrounded by wire, he said. There were seven connected buildings with propane heaters for storing and drying the plants, he said. The site couldn't be reached by rough logging roads cut through the woods of Township 37, and locked gates required a 2-mile trek to reach the secluded operation. "When they put this together, there was clearly a great deal of planning that went into it. They didn't all of a sudden start growing marijuana. They thought it out, planned the structures and used natural cover to keep it hidden," Richards said. Some of the structures were set afire by workers before they fled after being spotted by a law enforcement aircraft. The legal case had dragged on for years. A Mexican man accused of overseeing the operation pleaded guilty in 2013, and another man also pleaded guilty a year later. Faced with testifying before a grand jury, another man implicated in the operation killed himself in 2011. In February, the judge accepted a forfeiture agreement in which Haynes Timber, which was owned by French and his wife, was fined $100,000. French's wife paid $1.5 million under the agreement in which she retained 22,000 acres comprising Township 37. Thomas Hallett, lawyer for French, said the sentence was far less than what was originally sought by prosecutors but said it was still substantial, especially given society's changing attitudes about marijuana. "Everybody is cognizant that marijuana has moved a significant step toward legalization in the last five years," he said afterward. Casey said societal attitudes may be changing but the law hasn't. "People need to understand this is not the court of public opinion. This is a court of law. If people want to change the law, then there are ways in the representative form of government to do that," he said. Richards, for his part, said he was happy to put the matter to a rest. "This has been my life for six years," he said. "It's good to have it closed. It's good for everybody." ___ UK government willing to take 25 pct stake in Tata rescue LONDON (AP) Britain's government says it is willing to take a stake of up to 25 percent in Tata Steel's U.K. operations as part of any deal to rescue the plants. The offer announced Thursday is part of a package worth hundreds of millions of pounds that will be made available "on commercial terms to potential buyers." Business Secretary Sajid Javid says "this government is committed to supporting the steel industry to secure a long-term viable future and we are working closely with Tata Steel U.K. on its process to find a credible buyer." Spain: No bail for Moroccan IS links suspect from Mallorca MADRID (AP) A Spanish judge has ordered a Moroccan man who lived on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca to be held without bail after concluding he was prepared to launch a terror attack. Judge Carmen Lamela Diaz says in court documents that Mohamed Harrak's plans for an attack on an unspecified target in Spain were not carried out for reasons beyond his control. She did not provide more details. The 35-year-old worked as a restaurant cook in the popular tourist destination of Palma de Mallorca. He was arrested Tuesday. The court documents say he tried to recruit Islamic State combatants and was in contact with leaders of the extremist group in Syria. Police reported finding cocaine and scales in his apartment. Top Pennsylvania official uses private email against policy PHILADELPHIA (AP) Pennsylvania's embattled attorney general has routinely used personal email accounts to conduct official business, transmitting confidential information and the identities of undercover agents, despite an office ban that says doing so risks security. Kathleen Kane sent or received nearly 4,000 work-related emails through AOL and Yahoo accounts from the time she took office in January 2013 through August 2015, according to records obtained by The Associated Press. The attorney general's office released copies of two-thirds of those emails under the state's open records law, but it deemed almost one-third exempt from disclosure, mostly on the grounds they contained sensitive or confidential material. Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane arrives for a pretrial hearing in her grand jury leak case, Wednesday, April 20, 2016, at the Montgomery County courthouse in Norristown, Pa. Kane is accused of leaking secret grand jury information to the press, lying under oath and ordering aides to illegally snoop through computer files to keep tabs on an investigation into the leak. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) Among the subjects covered in the 1,144 unreleased emails, Kane's office said: personal medical and mental health; workplace discrimination, sexual harassment and employee discipline; secret grand jury and attorney-client communications; and information that could identify agents "performing an undercover or covert law enforcement activity." A previous attorney general established a policy in 2009 that deemed using private email for office work a fireable offense. Kane is responsible for setting office policy and had the authority to exempt herself from those rules, spokesman Chuck Ardo said. Kane said last week that she didn't know her office had such a policy until the AP asked about it, though she at least once told senior staffers they shouldn't use personal email. Kane's spokesman said the attorney general is always on call and sometimes uses the personal accounts "to expedite matters." The practice continues, Ardo said. "Given her authority to choose to use her private email account, no one has attempted to dissuade her from doing so," he said. The 2009 policy barring use of personal email is 18 pages long, states that it is critical to transmit confidential information over a secure network and warns that access to such information could cause "severe damage" to the attorney general's office. The policy specifically mentions AOL and Yahoo as examples of "external resources" that should not be used so that "official business is never confused with personal business." Violations can result in an employee's firing. "That policy was set by a previous AG," Kane wrote. "I had no knowledge of its existence nor did anyone indicate that this policy was in effect. We are not the Department of Justice." Kane, a Democrat and the first woman elected to the post, has had a tumultuous first term. She is facing trial on criminal charges that she unlawfully leaked information from a grand jury investigation to a reporter and then lied about her actions. She is not seeking re-election, and her term ends in January. She also exposed the exchange of raunchy, homophobic, sometimes pornographic emails among former members of the attorney general's office and others in the criminal justice system. Those disclosures have led to many disciplinary actions and the resignations of two Supreme Court justices. The use of personal email accounts has been problematic for other public officials in the U.S. In October, CIA director John Brennan's AOL account was hacked and his private conversations splashed online. Heidi Shey, a senior analyst at the technology research firm Forrester, said using personal email "creates a totally unnecessary level of risk." She called the practice "awful" and added: "Those policies are there for a reason." Routing official email through nongovernment accounts can also cause gaps in official archives and trouble complying with subpoenas and records requests. In Kane's case, the practice hindered the investigation that led to charges against her in August. After sweeping the state's servers, detectives discovered chunks of emails were missing. They were in Kane's personal accounts. Though Kane uses her personal email accounts, she admonished her staff not to. Among the documents obtained by the AP was an August 2014 email in which she asked an aide to remind senior staff members that her personal email "is not secure and should not be used." The AP began looking into Kane's email practices when search warrant documents unsealed after her arrest showed she used personal accounts to communicate with senior staff about news coverage. At the time, her office denied that it had a policy barring employees from using personal email for work. However, Ardo later acknowledged the 2009 policy. No one in the attorney general's office has ever been punished for using personal email, Ardo said. ____ Follow Mike Sisak at twitter.com/mikesisak. His work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/journalist/michael-r-sisak and at twitter.com/APEastRegion Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane, center, departs after a pretrial hearing in her grand jury leak case, Wednesday, April 20, 2016, at the Montgomery County courthouse in Norristown, Pa. Kane is accused of leaking secret grand jury information to the press, lying under oath and ordering aides to illegally snoop through computer files to keep tabs on an investigation into the leak. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) Sheriff: Prince found unresponsive in elevator, CPR failed MINNEAPOLIS (AP) Prince was unresponsive in an elevator when the musician was found by sheriff's deputies who had been called to his suburban Minneapolis compound, a Minnesota sheriff said Thursday. Carver County Sheriff Jim Olson said deputies responded to a medical call about 9:43 a.m. Medical personnel tried CPR, but couldn't revive the 57-year-old Prince, who was pronounced dead at 10:07 a.m. A cause of death wasn't immediately determined. An autopsy was scheduled for Friday. FILE - In this Nov. 22, 2015 file photo, Prince presents the award for favorite album - soul/R&B at the American Music Awards in Los Angeles. Prince, widely acclaimed as one of the most inventive and influential musicians of his era with hits including "Little Red Corvette," ''Let's Go Crazy" and "When Doves Cry," was found dead at his home on Thursday, April 21, 2016, in suburban Minneapolis, according to his publicist. He was 57. (Photo by Matt Sayles/Invision/AP, File) The singer's death came two weeks after he canceled concerts in Atlanta because he wasn't feeling well. He performed April 14 in Atlanta, apologizing to the crowd shortly after coming on stage. Later on, while talking to the crowd between songs, he joked about having been "under the weather," giving a slight smile. His voice seemed a bit weak at times when he spoke, but he sounded fine when singing during his 80-minute show, which included everything from songs made famous by others ("Nothing Compares 2 U") to his finale to the first show of the evening, "Baby, I'm A Star." He sat at his piano most of the show, but stood up at times to pound the keys and walked around the piano a couple of times, soaking up cheers. Following news reports that he had fallen ill while returning from Atlanta to Minneapolis, Prince hosted a dance party on April 16 at his Paisley Park compound in Minnesota. Jeremiah Freed, who runs the website drfunkenberry.com and has gotten to know Prince after writing about his events over the years, said he last saw Prince at the dance party. Freed said he believed Prince held the party to show everyone he was fine. Freed didn't have one-on-one time with Prince that night, but Prince made a brief appearance. Freed said the artist showed off a new purple piano he received as a gift, as well as a purple guitar, but seemed upset about the reports of an illness. "When he had to talk about the stories going on, he didn't seem too pleased. It was kind of like, 'I'm here. I'm good,'" Freed said, adding that Prince told the crowd: "Just wait a few days before saying your prayers." Lars Larson, a 37-year-old Minneapolis man who had worked security for Prince and at Paisley Park events for about six years on and off, said he was at the same dance party. Larson said the singer was on stage briefly and spoke to the crowd before standing by the sound board for 20 minutes and then disappearing for the night. "He seemed great. He looked like Prince," he said. "The whole point of the show on Saturday was to show he was doing all right." ___ Associated Press writers Paul Newberry in Atlanta and Kevin Burbach in Minneapolis contributed to this report, along with researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York. ___ Yemen peace talks begin in Kuwait after Shiite rebels arrive KUWAIT CITY (AP) U.N.-backed peace talks between Yemen's warring sides began in Kuwait on Thursday evening in an effort to end the impoverished country's year-long conflict that has killed nearly 9,000 people a third of them civilians, according to the United Nations. The talks were originally slated to begin Monday but were delayed because of an earlier boycott by the Yemeni Shiite rebels known as Houthis and their allies. There have been previous attempts at peace talks. This round in Kuwait is aimed at finding ways to resolve the conflict between Yemen's internationally recognized government, which is backed by a Saudi-led military coalition, and the Houthis and their allies, which include forces loyal to former longtime Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. A member of the Houthis and allies team to Yemen peace talks in Kuwait, Faiqah al-Sayed, arrives at Sanaa airport before the team leaves in Sanaa, Yemen, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. Yemen's Shiite rebels have reversed an earlier decision to boycott U.N.-sponsored peace talks designed to find a way to end the war in the impoverished Arab nation and their delegation was on its way Wednesday, heading to the negotiations, due to take place in Kuwait. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed) Just a day before the talks kicked off, the Houthis warned they could suspend their participation if there are continued violations of a cease-fire in place since April 10. Both sides of the fighting have violated the fragile cease-fire. The war has devastated Yemen, with civilians unable to access hospitals, schools or electricity. More than 14 million Yemenis lack access to sufficient food and some 2.4 million people have been displaced by the war. A total of 14 delegates from each side are reportedly taking part in the negotiations, which are being mediated by U.N. envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed. The envoy opened the talks in Kuwait, urging both sides to have "good intentions" and "make concessions". He told the delegates, seated at a large round table, that only they can bring stability back to Yemen and that they needed to "turn the page" for the country's future. The talks should "provide a strong foundation for a new political consensus, to help Yemen achieve the stability and security that its people deserve and its future requires," Cheikh Ahmed said. "The path to peace may be difficult but I believe that it is clearly in reach if all parties engage in good faith." "Peace is a choice, make it your choice," he said, addressing the delegates. The Saudi-led coalition of mostly Arab countries including Kuwait, which is hosting the talks has been bombing the Houthis since late March 2015 to try and roll back their takeover of the capital, Sanaa, which forced the Saudi and U.S.-backed interim Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi into exile. Washington has assisted the Saudi-led coalition with logistical and intelligence support, including aerial refueling. However, the United States is concerned by the chaos fueled by the war. Al-Qaida's branch in Yemen has seized several cities along the coastline and the Islamic State group, gaining ground amid Yemen's civil war. It has claimed responsibility for an attack on two mosques in Sanaa that killed more than 130 people last year. Speaking in Saudi Arabia on Thursday after a summit with Gulf Arab leaders, President Barack Obama told reporters that Yemen's ceasefire "allows us to build a peace process that can relieve the suffering of the people" of Yemen. The Saudis accuse regional rival Iran of arming and training the Houthis, whose stronghold is just south of the kingdom's border. Iran says it has only provided the rebels with political support. Despite a year of fighting, the Houthis still retain control in much of the country's northern regions, including Sanaa. The conflict has also fueled secessionist aspirations among Yemen's Southerners for independence. ___ Batrawy reported from Dubai. Associated Press writers Ahmed al-Haj in Sanna, Yemen, Cara Anna at the United Nations and Maggie Michael in Cairo contributed to this report. A head of the Houthis and allies team to Yemen peace talks in Kuwait, Arif Al-Zoka, right, arrives at Sanaa airport before the team leaves in Sanaa, Yemen, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. Yemen's Shiite rebels have reversed an earlier decision to boycott U.N.-sponsored peace talks designed to find a way to end the war in the impoverished Arab nation and their delegation was on its way Wednesday, heading to the negotiations, due to take place in Kuwait. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed) A member of the Houthis and allies team to Yemen peace talks in Kuwait, Yahya Douaid, talks to media at Sanaa airport before the team leaves in Sanaa, Yemen, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. Yemen's Shiite rebels have reversed an earlier decision to boycott U.N.-sponsored peace talks designed to find a way to end the war in the impoverished Arab nation and their delegation was on its way Wednesday, heading to the negotiations, due to take place in Kuwait. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed) EU official urges US to accept more refugees from Syrian war WASHINGTON (AP) A top European Union official urged the United States on Thursday to accept more refugees fleeing the civil war in Syria, saying that asylum seekers should not be equated with violent extremists. Stavros Lambrinidis, the EU's special representative for human rights, said that taking in more refugees would help ease the pressure on Europe, which is facing a massive refugee crisis. "To the extent that we can all understand this global issue and share the responsibility, this will clearly alleviate the pressure on Europe right now and Greece in particular," Lambrinidis said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "To our knowledge, there is absolutely no evidence in the case of the US, that giving asylum to people is opening the door to terrorists." The U.S. annually accepts 70,000 refugees from around the world. This group includes people fleeing violence, religious persecution and war. The Obama administration announced last year that the number of people invited to move to the U.S. as refugees would be increased to 85,000 in 2016, including about 10,000 Syrians. Lambrinidis said that while it was important for authorities to be vigilant in screening migrants, the anti-refugee rhetoric that is on the rise in the U.S. and the EU is alarming and undermines the countries' international obligations. Europe has seen a rise of far-right parties fueled by the refugee crisis and terrorist attacks in European capitals. In the U.S., Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has called for temporarily barring Muslims from entering the country and refusing entry to Syrian refugees. Capitol Hill Buzz: House Republicans solve flag fight_coins WASHINGTON (AP) House Republicans sidestepped the divisive fight over displays of the Confederate battle flag at the U.S. Capitol with plans to put up state coins instead. Rep. Candice Miller, R-Mich., who heads the House Administration Committee, announced Thursday that reproductions of commemorative quarters depicting the 50 states, District of Columbia and the territories will line the wall between the Capitol and the Rayburn House Office Building. "A print of each state's commemorative coin will be tastefully displayed for this highly trafficked area, as each quarter serves as a reminder of the ideals, landmarks and people from each state, as well as this nation's great motto, 'out of many, one,'" Miller said in a statement. In this photo taken Sept. 19, 2015, Rep. Candace Miller, R-Mich. speaks in Mackinac Island, Mich. Miller, who heads the House Administration Committee, announced Thursday, April 21, 2016, that reproductions of commemorative quarters depicting the 50 states, District of Columbia and the territories will line the wall between the Capitol and the Rayburn office building. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File) The walls previously displayed state flags, and Mississippi's includes an image of the Confederate battle flag. Democrats complained last year that the flag celebrates a murderous, racist past in the nation's history. The Republican-controlled House was forced to scrap a vote on permitting the Confederate flag at Park Service-run cemeteries in a fierce fight over the issue. Last July, South Carolina removed the confederate flag from statehouse grounds after 54 years, a move that came weeks after nine people at an historic black church in Charleston had been shot and killed. The Confederate battle emblem has been on the Mississippi flag since 1894, and voters chose to keep the design in 2001. Since the Charleston slayings, several Mississippi cities, counties and colleges have stopped flying the banner. Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., welcomed the decision, saying the "symbols of hatred and bigotry" will no longer be displayed in the esteemed halls of the U.S. House. "I can only hope that this understanding will somehow reach the hearts and minds of the elected officials in the state of Mississippi, and they will follow suit and rid our state of this ultimate vestige of slavery and bigotry," Thompson said. Miller said that given the "controversy surrounding confederate imagery, I decided to install a new display." The chairwoman said lawmakers could display their state flag alongside the American flag outside individual offices. ___ Democratic Rep. Mike Honda is lashing out at former Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling for his comments on Facebook about transgender people. ESPN on Wednesday fired Schilling, a baseball analyst on the network, for his comments, saying his conduct was unacceptable. Honda said in a statement Thursday that Schilling's social media posting was personal and directed at the California lawmaker and his transgender grandchild. "Apparently, posting hateful and derisive memes was not enough for Mr. Schilling, who through his Twitter account went on to call me 'a coward' for standing with my grandchild and the transgender community," Honda said. Honda spent time as a young child in a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II and alluded to this in his statement. "Mr. Schilling, having a bloody sock is nothing compared to being put in a prison camp for three years by my own country just because of my ancestry," Honda said. "... I've dedicated my life to fighting for the expansion of civil rights for all and protecting the diversity that makes our country so rich, while you got rich playing a sports game." Honda was referring to Game Six of the 2004 American League championship when Schilling pitched against the Yankees despite an ankle injury, evident by blood on his sock. Top Senate Republican: Zika funding to get floor vote WASHINGTON (AP) A bipartisan measure to partially fund President Barack Obama's $1.9 billion request to combat the Zika virus will soon get a vote, a senior Senate Republican said on Thursday. Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Thad Cochran, R-Miss., said the proposal, still a work in progress, is likely to be attached to an unnamed spending bill on a Senate floor vote. "This proposal will provide new resources to supplement other funding," Cochran said. "It's my expectation that this proposal will be offered to an appropriations measure on the Senate floor in the near future." Both Republicans and Democrats on the powerful committee said significant progress has been made toward a compromise to fund research on a vaccine against Zika and efforts to battle its spread. Obama requested $1.9 billion in February. Republicans controlling Congress responded by pressuring the administration to transfer unspent funding provided in 2014 to battle Ebola. The administration reluctantly transferred almost $600 million in previously appropriated funds to take on Zika, but says more money is still needed. The Zika virus can cause microcephaly, a severe birth defect in which babies are born with abnormally small heads. It is spread by mosquitos and sexual contact and is likely to spread more aggressively as mosquito season looms. The Senate is taking the lead in developing the Zika funding measure. "We're all going to be working jointly to find a way ... to get it on a bill that gets to the president's desk," said Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo. Sen. Patty Murray. D-Wash., said negotiators are working "to get this done in the most expeditious way as possible." But the White House may not be satisfied. The Latest: LGBT law's backers seek attorney general records RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) The Latest on reaction to a North Carolina law that requires transgender people to use public bathrooms conforming to the sex on their birth certificates and restricts protections for LGBT people. (all times local): 1:10 p.m. Conservative supporters of a North Carolina law that limits protections to LGBT people say they want to know how much communication there was between gay rights groups and Attorney General Roy Cooper. Cooper refuses to defend the law in court. The North Carolina Values Coalition said Thursday it filed public records requests because it had questions about whether the Democrat's decision was motivated by his campaign against incumbent Republican Gov. Pat McCrory. The public records requests came a week after the Human Rights Campaign filed similar demands for documents from McCrory, state House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate leader Phil Berger. Those requests seek any correspondence between the elected leaders, the Values Coalition and the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom. ___ 10:50 a.m. Attorneys are adding a transgender high school student to a lawsuit challenging a new North Carolina law just days after a federal appeals court sided with a transgender student in a Virginia case. The federal lawsuit updated Thursday challenges a North Carolina law limiting some protections for transgender people. The plaintiffs now include 17-year-old Hunter Schafer, a junior at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts High School in Winston-Salem. She uses the restroom and lives in dorms with girls, but the North Carolina law would require that she use boys' facilities. Only US grizzly recovery coordinator retiring after 35 years The nation's first and only grizzly bear recovery coordinator is stepping down after 35 years, saying the threatened species has recovered enough for him to retire. Chris Servheen of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is retiring at the end of April. Wayne Kasworm will become acting recovery coordinator. Servheen, 65, said he considers bear populations in Yellowstone National Park and the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem to be recovered. In this April 14, 2016 photo, Chris Servheen in West Yellowstone, Mont. The nations first and only grizzly bear recovery coordinator is stepping down after 35 years, saying the threatened species has recovered enough for him to retire. (Michael Wright/Bozeman Daily Chronicle via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT But when he began his work in 1981 right after getting his doctorate at the University of Montana the challenges seemed insurmountable. "I didn't think at all that we would get to recovery," Servheen told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. "In fact, I really wondered if we would even have grizzly bears around." At the time, garbage dumps, livestock herds and backcountry hunting camps were creating conflicts and bear numbers were low. He brought together state, federal and local governments as well as conservation groups to recover grizzly bear populations in six areas throughout the Northwest: the Cabinet-Yaak area in northwest Montana; the Selkirk area in parts of Idaho, Washington and British Columbia; the Bitterroot in western Montana; the Northern Continental Divide, including Glacier National Park and nearby wilderness areas at the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. "It was a great challenge and a great honor," Servheen said. Early on, one of the biggest challenges was getting people living in and visiting grizzly habitat to change their behaviors from how they disposed of their trash to cleaning up backcountry camps. "All the things that people do, they're all different now because everything has grizzly bears in the background," Servheen said. Now, the USFWS is proposing removing Endangered Species Act protections for around 700 bears in the Yellowstone area. Servheen wrote the proposed rule. Some think it's too soon, while others think it should have been done long ago. As Servheen winds down his career, he's hearing from people he's worked with, and sometimes against, in trying to improve grizzly bear habitat and their populations. In West Yellowstone last week, members of the Yellowstone Ecosystem Subcommittee of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee thanked him for his years of service, as did Scott Christensen, the executive director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. "We have at times been at odds and at opposite sides of the courtroom," Christensen said. "But we respect your contribution to grizzly bear conservation." There are up to 1,700 grizzly bears in the West, with most in Montana and Wyoming about three times as many as when Servheen began his work. Servheen told the Great Falls Tribune he plans to spend more time in the backcountry with his children with a chance to see a grizzly bear, rather than sit in meetings talking about them. He'll also continue as an adjunct professor at the University of Montana, where he has taught a course in international wildlife management for the past 18 years. "Summer's coming. The backcountry is opening up and it's calling to me, and that's where I want to be." ___ UN Libya envoy says it's time for unity government to work CAIRO (AP) The U.N. envoy to Libya says it's time for the newly-formed unity government to work after the arrival of its chief in the capital, Tripoli. Yet the unity government is still awaiting a crucial vote of confidence by the country's elected parliament, which is based in eastern Libya. Martin Kobler told reporters in Cairo on Thursday that "it's one thing to have an agreement with words and another thing is to implement the agreement." He was referring to the U.N.-brokered political agreement between the country's rival factions struck in Morocco last December. Burundi official: 4 killed in violence in Burundi BUJUMBURA, Burundi (AP) A Burundian official says a military officer was among four people killed in violence associated with the extended tenure of President Pierre Nkurunziza. Deputy police spokesman Moise Nkurunziza, who is not related to the president, said Thursday that unknown gunmen ambushed Col. Emmanuel Buzubona as he arrived home on a motorcycle in Bujumbura Wednesday evening Nkurunziza said the men shot at and threw a grenade at Buzubona, also killing the motorcycle's driver. He said Buzubona was based in Tanzania and had come home for his annual vacation. Two armed men were shot and killed by the military in the Mugamba commune in the country's south, he added. Driver deaths on flooded Houston-area roads prompt review HOUSTON (AP) The deaths of eight drivers whose bodies were pulled from vehicles inundated by this week's torrential rains in the Houston area have prompted local leaders to push for improvements in how they warn people about the dangers of flooded roads. Houston and nearby counties have been hit with more than a foot of rain since Sunday night. Six of the driver deaths occurred in the city or suburbs of Houston, while two happened in surrounding counties. Three of the deaths were at the same Houston underpass. The flooding also has forced thousands of people from their homes as creeks and bayous became overwhelmed. U.S. Highway 380 is closed because of water over the bridge as Lake Bridgeport continues to rise with runoff from recent rains, in Bridgeport, Texas, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. The death toll has reached several in Southeast Texas flooding after storms dumped more than a foot of rain. (Rodger Mallison/Star-Telegram via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT "There's no question that not enough has been done" to warn drivers, Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said Thursday. Emmett is leading an effort to ensure drivers are properly notified about flooded roads during heavy storms. The deaths at the Houston underpass prompted Emmett to take action. While one woman drove around a barricade at one side of the underpass, Emmett said no barricades were placed on a different part of the underpass and two drivers unknowingly sent their vehicles into dark floodwaters. "If it's somebody who drives around a barricade and goes into the water, that's problematic. I don't know if any system can stop somebody like that," he said. "But the other two deaths were completely preventable." Others have drowned in the same location, he said, most recently last May when heavy rains also flooded Houston. He said in the short term, he will speak with the Harris County Sheriff's Office and the offices of local constables to make sure deputies and other officers are stationed at underpasses and other flooded locations. In the long term, Emmett said he'll work with officials from the city and state to determine what other solutions possibly some type of barrier are needed at the underpass where the deaths occurred and other places prone to flooding. Texas Department of Transportation spokeswoman Raquelle Lewis said her agency is committed to working with city and county officials to find solutions to the problem. "There is always going to be the potential that people will make decisions that are not necessarily in their best interests or life-preserving," Lewis said. "What we will do is to look at what can we feasibly do to minimize the potential for those instances." Before this week's flooding, the city of Houston had already begun installing an early warning system at 27 locations where high water sensors and flashing lights are used to let drivers know that a road in front of them is flooded. The city has put the sensors and lights in place at 19 locations so far. The system had also included wooden gates, similar to those at railroad crossings, that would have dropped down to block flooded roads. But the city decided not to install the gates after drivers drove around and crashed into the first one that had been set up. Gary Norman, executive staff analyst with the Houston Public Works and Engineering Department, said in an email that "we are constantly evaluating how best to protect and inform the public." Skies were bright Thursday afternoon after a heavy rainstorm earlier in the day. But residents living in a subdivision near the Addicks Reservoir, one of two aging reservoirs in west Houston that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers considered "extremely high risk," were warned of possible flooding. The Harris County Flood Control District said the streets near the reservoir may be impassable over the next few days and reservoir water levels may remain high for days or weeks. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began releasing water Thursday evening from the Addicks and Barker reservoirs into Buffalo Bayou at the rate of about 2,000 cubic feet per second, enough to lower the water level by an inch per hour, Corps spokeswoman Sandra Arnold said. The amount of water to be released will increase over the next two to three days, weather permitting, and gradually ease the surrounding street flooding, Arnold said. Meanwhile, officials in Wharton, a community of about 8,700 residents about 50 miles southwest of Houston, ordered residents to leave their homes in some low-lying neighborhoods along the rain-swollen Colorado River. The river's flood stage is 39 feet but the river level there exceeded 47 feet Thursday and some streets were underwater. Mayor Domingo Montalvo Jr. expanded his order later Thursday to include about a square mile of town, affecting some 350 homes. Police Chief Terry Lynch said most residents had complied and about 30 were rescued, but a handful refused to leave their property. Flood warnings remained in effect for several southeastern Texas counties. Forecasts showed the conditions were expected to improve starting Friday. ___ Associated Press writers Diana Heidgerd and Terry Wallace contributed to this story from Dallas. ___ Follow Juan A. Lozano on Twitter at www.twitter.com/juanlozano70 Trucks at a repair shop in Texas Highway 114 are flooded as Lake Bridgeport continues to rise with runoff from recent rains, in Bridgeport, Texas, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. The death toll has reached several in Southeast Texas flooding after storms dumped more than a foot of rain. (Rodger Mallison/Star-Telegram via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT Judy and Kent Hamilton, of Boyd, Texas, watch water being released from the flood gates as Lake Bridgeport continues to rise with runoff from recent rains, in Bridgeport, Texas, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. The death toll has reached several in Southeast Texas flooding after storms dumped more than a foot of rain. (Rodger Mallison/Star-Telegram via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT Cattle egrets roost in a tree at Lake Daniel Wednesday April 20, 2016. The lake is south of Breckenridge and supplies water to the city. (Ronald W. Erdrich/The Abilene Reporter-News via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT The U.S. 180 bridge crossing Hubbard Creek Reservoir west of Breckenridge Wednesday April 20, 2016. The lake is 57-percent full, a year ago it was at 12 percent. (Ronald W. Erdrich/The Abilene Reporter-News via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT Venezuela prosecutors arrest 2 named in 'Panama Papers' leak CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) Venezuelan prosecutors have charged two relatives of a former presidential security guard whose name appeared in documents about offshore investments leaked from a Panama law firm. Officials arrested businessman Josmel Velasquez and his mother on charges of money laundering and criminal association. Officials later allowed his mother to return home for health reasons. Velasquez's brother Adrian was named in the "Panama Papers" leak. He worked at the presidential palace during the administration of late President Hugo Chavez. The documents indicate he opened a shell company with help from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. Mexico proposes raising limit on decriminalized pot to 1 oz MEXICO CITY (AP) President Enrique Pena Nieto said Thursday that he will ask Mexico's Congress to raise the limit on decriminalized marijuana for personal use to 28 grams, or about one ounce. Currently, only possession of five grams, or less than a fifth of an ounce, is exempt from prosecution. "This means that consumption would no longer be criminalized," Pena Nieto said. Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto holds up a signed document during an announcement on proposed marijuana policy, in Mexico City, Thursday April 21, 2016. Pena Nieto said Thursday he will ask Congress to raise the limit on decriminalized marijuana for personal use to 28 grams, or about one ounce. Mexico had previously exempted from prosecution only five grams, or less than a fifth of an ounce. The bill presented would free people who are on trial or serving time for possession of up to an ounce of marijuana. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo) Possession of larger amounts would still be punishable under drug trafficking laws. "We Mexicans know all too well the range and the defects of prohibitionist and punitive policies, and of the so-called war on drugs that has prevailed for 40 years," Pena Nieto said. "Our country has suffered, as few have, the ill effects of organized crime tied to drug trafficking." "Fortunately, a new consensus is gradually emerging worldwide in favor of reforming drug policies," he said. "A growing number of countries are strenuously combating criminals, but instead of criminalizing consumers, they offer them alternatives and opportunities." Pena Nieto's proposal also would allow the use and importation of cannabis-based medications and it would free people who are on trial or serving time for possession of up to an ounce of marijuana. The move comes after Mexico's Supreme Court approved an appeal by four people to allow them to grow and possess marijuana for personal use. That helped launch a national debate on marijuana policy. However, it appeared to bear no relation to the legal measure announced Thursday. An ounce is equivalent to about 20 to 25 marijuana cigarettes. The plan would put Mexico in the middle range of marijuana regulation policies in Latin America. In Cuba and Venezuela, possession of any quantity of marijuana is a criminal offense. On the other extreme, Uruguay passed a law in 2013 that not only legalized limited pot consumption and production, but also set up a regulated market of producers who can sell through a network of pharmacies. Colombia and Ecuador have decriminalized amounts up to 20 grams, and Paraguay considers up to 10 grams as possession for personal use. While legalization advocates are vocal in Mexico, recent polls suggest a majority of Mexicans oppose legalizing marijuana. Pena Nieto had earlier said he opposed legalization. Neither side got all it wanted. "Without doubt, we set aside the 'all or nothing' approach, in favor of one that put the public health aspect first," said Jose Narro Robles, rector of Mexico's National University. "It is a process we can all feel satisfied with." Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the U.S. Drug Policy Alliance, called the measure "a modest but important step in the right direction. ... The problem, of course, is that this falls so far short of what other countries are already doing successfully in Europe and the Americas, and so far short of what's needed in Mexico. " Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto attends an announcement about the use of marijuana, in Mexico City, Thursday April 21, 2016. Pena Nieto said Thursday he will ask Congress to raise the limit on decriminalized marijuana for personal use to 28 grams, or about one ounce. Mexico had previously exempted from prosecution only five grams, or less than a fifth of an ounce. The bill presented would free people who are on trial or serving time for possession of up to an ounce of marijuana. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo) Iran calls US Supreme Court ruling on Beirut blast a 'theft' TEHRAN, Iran (AP) Iran rejected on Thursday a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court the day before that clears the way for families of victims of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut and other attacks linked to Iran to collect nearly $2 billion in frozen Iranian funds. The state IRNA news agency quoted the spokesman of Iran's foreign ministry, Hossein Jaberi Ansari, as saying that "such a verdict is a theft of the assets and properties of the Islamic Republic of Iran." From the United Nations, Ansari spoke to IRNA and said the ruling is "tantamount to ridiculing justice and law and it does not create any right for the US nationals." He added that Iran considers the U.S. government responsible for compensating any damages that Iran might incur from the verdict. The U.S. court's ruling directly affects more than 1,300 relatives of victims, some who have been seeking compensation for more than 30 years. They include families of the 241 U.S. service members who died in the Beirut bombing. Iran denies any links to the attacks and has said it had no role in the deadly events in the Lebanese capital. Ansari said the verdict also shows Washington is still under the influence of Israel and that such hostile action against Tehran "only adds to the growing and intense mistrust of U.S. policies by the Iranian government and nation." The Supreme Court case involved $1.75 billion in bonds, plus accumulating interest, owned by Iran's central bank, or Bank Markazi, held by Citibank in New York. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit included relatives of the victims of the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. service members, and other attacks that were carried out by groups with links to Iran. The lead plaintiff is Deborah Peterson, whose brother, Lance Cpl. James C. Knipple, was killed in Beirut. Iran's Bank Markazi complained that Congress was intruding into the business of federal courts when it passed a 2012 law that specifically directs that the banks' assets in the United States be turned over to the families of the victims. Renault revenue rises in first quarter as Europe recovers PARIS (AP) French carmaker Renault says its revenue rose 11.7 percent in the first quarter of the year, mainly thanks to the recovery of the European market. The company said Thursday that revenue hit 10.49 billion euros ($11.91 billion). Registrations reached 692,453 globally, a rise of 7.3 percent, which Renault said beat the world market growth of 1.5 percent. New models including the Espace, Kadjar and Talisman helped its business in Europe, which offset declines in struggling economies like Russia and Brazil. UN envoy: America won't give up trying to find Chibok girls ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) The United States will never give up trying to bring the Chibok girls home, U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power said Thursday as she met with protesters who have been holding vigil each day in Nigeria's capital. Two years after Boko Haram abducted the girls from their school, 219 remain missing. Power said she couldn't imagine the frustration of loved ones. "I come here as an act of solidarity with each of you who are here every day, and for all of those days on behalf of the missing girls," she told the gathering, who chanted "Bring Back Our Girls Now and Alive," the motto of their now globally famous movement. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, second from right, stands next to Bring Back Our Girls co-founder Obiageli Ezekwesili, center and Aisha Yesufu, left, as she attends a Bring Back Our Girls vigil in Abuja, Nigeria, Thursday, April 21, 2016, which, two years after Boko Haram abducted the girls from their school, is still held daily. A total of 219 girls remain missing, and Power said she couldn't imagine the frustration of the families. Power is traveling to Cameroon, Chad, and Nigeria to highlight the growing threat Boko Haram poses to the Lake Chad Basin region. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) Power, who met in Abuja with President Muhammadu Buhari and other top officials, said Washington is working with Nigeria and neighboring countries to defeat Boko Haram and safely recover thousands more kidnapped by the extremists. "You think, 'We're the superpower; if we really wanted this, we could just snap our fingers,'" Power said. "I wish that were so." Power stressed that the U.S. is learning more about Boko Haram but that the effort against the group was complicated. It takes military force from able partners on the ground, protection of civilians and economic development so people in northern Nigeria have more opportunities, she said. "We will never give up, just as you will never give up," she said. Power visits eastern Nigeria on Friday. ___ This story has been corrected to reflect that Power is visiting eastern Nigeria, not northern Nigeria, on Friday. Children listen as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power attends a Bring Back Our Girls vigil in Abuja, Nigeria, Thursday, April 21, 2016, which, two years after Boko Haram abducted the girls from their school, is still held daily. A total of 219 girls remain missing, and Power said she couldn't imagine the frustration of the families. Power is traveling to Cameroon, Chad, and Nigeria to highlight the growing threat Boko Haram poses to the Lake Chad Basin region. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, center left, shakes hands with Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari, center right, after meeting at the Presidential Villa in Abuja, Nigeria, Thursday, April 21, 2016. Power is traveling to Cameroon, Chad, and Nigeria to highlight the growing threat Boko Haram poses to the Lake Chad Basin region. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) The Latest: Student says she saw deadly restroom fight WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) The Latest on a 16-year-old girl who died after a fight broke out in a high school restroom in Delaware (all times local): ___ 4 p.m. A student at Howard High School of Technology says she was in a stall in the girl's restroom when a fight broke out that left a 16-year-old girl dead. Kayla Wilson told Philadelphia TV station WPVI that the victim "was fighting a girl, and then that's when all these other girls started banking her like jumping her and she hit her head on the sink." Alexandra Coppadge is a spokeswoman for Mayor Dennis Williams. She says two female suspects are being questioned at the Wilmington police station. ___ 3:30 p.m. A Wilmington city councilwoman who says she knows the 16-year-old girl who died after a fight broke out in a high school restroom says her family is asking for calm. Sherry Dorsey Walker says she has known the victim and her family for quite some time and had been asked by the family to speak on their behalf. Dorsey Walker says the family is asking for spiritual healing in the community and no retaliation. She says they're also "asking people to just be calm and pray for them." The councilwoman described the victim as "a wonderful human being," adding that "her loss is a big void, not just in the family." Dorsey Walker would not confirm the victim's name. ___ 2 p.m. A spokeswoman for Wilmington's mayor says two female suspects are being questioned by police after a 16-year-old girl died following a fight in a high school restroom. Alexandra Coppadge is a spokeswoman for Mayor Dennis Williams. She says the young women are being questioned at the Wilmington police station. Police say that the assault took place at Howard High School of Technology about the time students were arriving for the day. Wilmington Police spokeswoman Sgt. Andrea Janvier says the girl was flown to A.I. DuPont Children's Hospital in critical condition. A woman who answered a knock on the locked doors of the high school told an Associated Press reporter that he would not be allowed in. The same woman told a parent the school had been dismissed for the day. A public forum for mayoral candidates to discuss public safety had been scheduled at the school Thursday evening. Debate host WHYY said on its website that the event had been canceled. ___ 1:30 p.m. A city official says a 16-year-old girl is dead after a fight broke out in a high school restroom in Delaware. Alexandra Coppadge is a spokeswoman for Wilmington Mayor Dennis Williams. She confirmed on Thursday that the student had died. Coppadge says there was a confrontation involving multiple people in the women's restroom at Howard High School of Technology. Wilmington Police spokeswoman Sgt. Andrea Janvier said by telephone that the assault took place around the time when students arrive at the school for the day. She said the girl was flown to A.I. DuPont Children's Hospital in critical condition. Janvier says the girl was 16. Janvier says police are conducting several interviews and will be at the school for several hours. She referred further questions to Coppadge. ___ Clinton, relatives of Newtown victims talk gun violence HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) Hillary Clinton, sitting with relatives of victims of the Newtown school massacre, vowed Thursday to make sure gun violence is not ignored, saying Connecticut's bipartisan gun control legislation was a model for the nation. "I'm really proud that your leaders here in Connecticut have shown the way," the Democratic presidential candidate told a crowd of about 600 supporters at a YMCA gymnasium in Hartford's north end, a section of the capital city where families have first-hand experience with gun violence. "That's why what happened here in Connecticut really needs to be a model." The state passed a sweeping package of gun law changes following the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which left 20 first-graders and six educators dead. The new law expanded the state's assault weapons ban, barred large-capacity magazines and boosted background check requirements, among other changes. Clinton has proposed comprehensive federal background check requirements, including for gun show and Internet sales, and repealing certain immunity protections for the gun industry, among other provisions. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, center, speaks during a campaign event, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Hartford, Conn. Clinton stopped in Hartford for a discussion on gun violence prevention with family members of gun violence victims. From left are, Iran Nazario, Erica Smegielski, Clinton, Kim Washington, Deborah Davis and Nelba Marquez-Greene. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill) "I know how hard it was to do what Connecticut's governor and legislature did after Sandy Hook. So I am not here to make promises I can't keep," she said. "I am here to tell you I will use every single minute of every day, if I'm so fortunate to be your president, looking for ways to save lives so we can change the gun culture." Ahead of Tuesday's primary election, Clinton appeared at a roundtable discussion with some family members of gun violence victims, including those from the Newtown shooting. Clinton's campaign has focused heavily on the gun issue in Connecticut. This week, it began running a television ad featuring the daughter of slain Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung. "No one is fighting harder to reform our gun laws than Hillary Clinton," Erica Smegielski said in the ad. "She is the only candidate that has what it takes to take on the gun lobby. She reminds me of my mother: She isn't scared of anything." Nelba Marquez-Greene, whose six-year-old daughter was killed at Sandy Hook, said she and other Sandy Hook families have heard the accusations that their tragedies are being used by people like Clinton for political purposes. Clinton mentioned how families of gun violence victims who speak out have been subjected to "vile harassment" on the Internet, saying there's "an organized effort to intimidate." "My husband can tell you, nobody can make me do much unless I want to," Marquez-Green said. Smegielski, who introduced Clinton at Thursday's event, has criticized Clinton's primary opponent, Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, for supporting legal liability protections for the gun industry. She has demanded Sanders apologize to relatives of the Newtown victims. Sanders said at a debate last week that he didn't think he owed them an apology, adding, "They are in court today, and actually they won a preliminary decision today. They have the right to sue, and I support them and anyone else who wants the right to sue." The families of nine people killed at the school and a surviving teacher are suing Remington Arms, the parent company of Bushmaster Firearms. Despite the Clinton campaign's efforts to appeal to gun control advocates in Connecticut, a new Quinnipiac University Poll shows the gun issue is very low on voters' priority lists, both nationally and in Connecticut. The survey released Wednesday showed only 3 percent of likely Democratic primary voters in the state identified gun policy as the most important issue to them. The percentage was the same among likely Republican primary voters in Connecticut. "We've haven't seen the gun issue in any of our states get a large number of voters," said poll director Doug Schwartz. The economy and jobs topped the list in Connecticut, with 31 percent of likely Democratic primary voters saying that was their most important issue. The poll showed Clinton leading Sanders 51 to 42 percent, with 6 percent undecided, ahead of the primary. The survey of 1,037 likely Democratic primary voters had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton laughs during a campaign event, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Hartford, Conn. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill) Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, right, accompanied by Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, speaks with an attendees during a campaign event, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Hartford, Conn. Clinton stopped in Hartford for a discussion on gun violence prevention with family members of gun violence victims. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill) Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton listens as Kim Washington speaks during a campaign event, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Hartford, Conn. Clinton stopped in Hartford for a discussion on gun violence prevention with family members of gun violence victims. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill) Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks to Kim Washington during a campaign event, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Hartford, Conn. Clinton stopped in Hartford for a discussion on gun violence prevention with family members of gun violence victims. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill) NATO: Efforts to stem migrant flows making a difference ABOARD THE FGS BONN (AP) Efforts to stem the tide of migrants seeking the shores of Europe are working, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday. Speaking at a news conference with Turkish Foreign Affairs Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in Ankara, the Turkish capital, Stoltenberg said the collective effort is "making a difference" and that the number of migrants crossing the Aegean Sea is "going significantly down." Under an EU-Turkey deal signed last month, migrants arriving on Greek islands from the Turkish coast from March 20 onwardface deportation to Turkey unless they successfully apply for asylum in Greece. German Navy officers, preparing for an approach by a helicopter, secure the deck of the NATO German warship FGS Bonn, on patrol on the Aegean Sea, off the Turkish coast, Thursday, April 21, 2016. The Bonn is part of the NATO flotilla patrolling the Aegean in an effort to curb migrant activity between Turkey and Greece. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) The International Organization for Migration says Greece has seen fewer than 70 arrivals per day in the past 10 days, down from nearly 1,500 of arrivals per day before the deal was struck. Stoltenberg also visited NATO's flagship Bonn, which is part of a flotilla that began patrolling the Aegean Sea in February, and met Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Stoltenberg said Turkey, based on information that NATO provides, is "taking action to help break the business model of traffickers." But, he warned, the fight against trafficking requires "flexibility" as smugglers can "shift their routes rapidly." He told the AP that the larger goal of efforts to stem the flow of illegal migrants is "to make something that has been illegal and disorderly and dangerous into something which is orderly and legal and safe." ___ Fraser reported from Ankara, Turkey. German Admiral Joerg Klein talks next to a map of the Aegean Sea on the bridge of the NATO German warship FGS Bonn, on patrol in the Aegean Sea, off the Turkish coast, Thursday, April 21, 2016. The Bonn is part of the NATO flotilla patrolling the Aegean in an effort to curb migrant activity between Turkey and Greece. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg points as he is briefed aboard the NATO German warship FGS Bonn, on patrol in the Aegean Sea, off the Turkish coast, during a visit, Thursday, April 21, 2016. The FGS Bonn is part of the NATO flotilla patrolling the Aegean Sea in an effort to curb migrant activity between Turkey and Greece. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, left, is briefed by German Admiral Joerg Klein onboard the NATO German warship FGS Bonn, on patrol in the Aegean Sea, off the Turkish coast, Thursday, April 21, 2016. The Bonn is part of the NATO flotilla patrolling the Aegean in an effort to curb migrant activity between Turkey and Greece. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, left, is briefed by German Admiral Joerg Klein onboard the NATO German warship FGS Bonn, on patrol in the Aegean Sea, off the Turkish coast, Thursday, April 21, 2016. The FGS Bonn is part of the NATO flotilla patrolling the Aegean Sea in an effort to curb migrant activity between Turkey and Greece. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg looks out, over the Aegean Sea as he is briefed aboard the NATO German warship FGS Bonn, on patrol, off the Turkish coast, during a visit, Thursday, April 21, 2016. The FGS Bonn is part of the NATO flotilla patrolling the Aegean Sea in an effort to curb migrant activity between Turkey and Greece. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) German Navy officers work on the bridge of the NATO German warship FGS Bonn, on patrol in the Aegean Sea, off the Turkish coast, Thursday, April 21, 2016. The Bonn is part of the NATO flotilla patrolling the Aegean in an effort to curb migrant activity between Turkey and Greece. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, left, is briefed by German Admiral Joerg Klein onboard the NATO German warship FGS Bonn, on patrol in the Aegean Sea, off the Turkish coast, Thursday, April 21, 2016. The Bonn is part of the NATO flotilla patrolling the Aegean in an effort to curb migrant activity between Turkey and Greece. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) German Navy officers use binoculars to scan the Aegean Sea on the deck of the NATO German warship FGS Bonn, on patrol off the Turkish coast, Thursday, April 21, 2016. The Bonn is part of the NATO flotilla patrolling the Aegean in an effort to curb migrant activity between Turkey and Greece. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) A German Navy officer looks over the Aegean Sea from the deck of the NATO German warship FGS Bonn, on patrol in the Aegean Sea, off the Turkish coast, Thursday, April 21, 2016. The Bonn is part of the NATO flotilla patrolling the Aegean in an effort to curb migrant activity between Turkey and Greece. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) A Turkish Coast Guard vessel patrols the Aegean Sea, off the Turkish coast, Thursday, April 21, 2016, as seen from the NATO German warship FGS Bonn, also on patrol in the Aegean Sea. The Bonn is part of the NATO flotilla patrolling the Aegean in an effort to curb migrant activity between Turkey and Greece. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) A Turkish Coast Guard vessel, foreground, patrols the Aegean Sea, off the Turkish coast, Thursday, April 21, 2016, as seen from the NATO German warship FGS Bonn, also on patrol in the Aegean Sea. The Bonn is part of the NATO flotilla patrolling the Aegean in an effort to curb migrant activity between Turkey and Greece. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg speaks to the media during a joint news conference with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in Ankara, Turkey, Thursday, April 21, 2016. Stoltenberg will be on media tour of NATO flagship Bonn on the Aegean Sea , which is part of the flotilla patrolling the Aegean in an effort to curb migrant activity. Stoltenberg says efforts to stem the tide of migrants seeking the shores of Europe are working.(AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici) School board chairman accused of cheating to get his GED BARBOURVILLE, Ky. (AP) The chairman of a Kentucky school board, who dropped out of high school at 17, hoped to settle the controversy raging around whether a diploma he bought online was real. So Dexter Smith signed up to take the GED exam. Now he's accused of cheating on the test. The Kentucky State Police allege Smith, chairman of the Knox County School Board, had another person take it for him. The issue erupted last month, when the Mountain Advocate, the newspaper in Barbourville, Kentucky, reported that Nation High School, the online school listed on Smith's diploma, is a "diploma mill," unaccredited and described by the Better Business Bureau as a scam. The Federal Trade Commission and the state's Council on Postsecondary Education have also warned consumers away from online high school scams. Nation High School boasted in its advertisements that for $289 a person could apply for a diploma based on their "prior life experience." A toll-free number listed for the alumni center now routes to a recording promising callers a free Caribbean cruise. The Kentucky Department of Education requires that school board members, who receive a per diem of $75 and expenses for each meeting, have a high school diploma or a GED. Kentucky State Police Trooper Shane Jacobs said Smith signed a statement declaring he met the requirements when he ran for office three years ago. Jacobs said the state police submitted its perjury investigation to prosecutors, who will decide whether to pursue charges. The questions over Smith's qualifications arose amid other turmoil in the rural Kentucky school system. The Kentucky Office of Education Accountability found that Smith, another board member and the superintendent violated the law by meddling in the day-to-day operation of schools. Smith told the media he only did so to ensure students were getting the best possible education. Kentucky Department of Education spokeswoman Nancy Rodriguez said the department "has an open investigation into numerous allegations regarding the Knox County Schools," and declined to comment on their status. Terry Sebastian, spokesman for the attorney general, confirmed his office is also investigating the matter. Then the board, including Smith, voted last month to oust the superintendent. The Mountain Advocate reported that citizens incensed by the votes against the superintendent questioned Smith over his educational qualifications last month. In response, he posted a picture of his Nation High School diploma on Facebook. Questions piled up about its validity and Smith said he would settle the issue by getting his GED. Jacobs said that on March 30, Smith went to the Jackson County Adult Education Center for the GED exam. But he didn't take it. The state police found surveillance video showing him talking with the employee, then leaving, and the employee taking the test in his name instead, Jacobs said. He did not know how the arrangement came to be, or if there is a connection between Smith and the employee, who he declined to identify. Larry Bryson, the attorney for Jackson County Schools, said the district started a separate investigation and the employee, who had been with the school system for more than 30 years, opted to retire. Jacobs was unsure whether that person could face criminal charges. Smith's lawyer, Johnny Turner, declined to comment Thursday and calls to Smith's home went unanswered. President Obama arrives in London for three-day visit LONDON (AP) President Barack Obama has arrived in London for a three-day visit that will include dining with the royal family and talks with Prime Minister David Cameron. The president is visiting Britain after talks in Saudi Arabia with Persian Gulf allies. The president will be joined in London by Michelle Obama and they will have lunch Friday with Queen Elizabeth II a day after her 90th birthday. They'll also attend a dinner hosted by Prince William, his wife, Kate, and Prince Harry at Kensington Palace. President Barack Obama boards Air Force One at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Thursday, April 21, 2016, en route to London after participating in the Gulf Cooperation Council Summit. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) Starbucks expresses confidence in rewards overhaul NEW YORK (AP) Starbucks expressed confidence Thursday that an overhaul of its rewards program will drive up sales over the long term, but warned that the transition could be bumpy. The comments came after the company reported sales growth for the first three months of the year that fell short of Wall Street expectations. The Seattle-based chain said global comparable sales rose 6 percent, including a 7 percent increase in its flagship U.S. market. While it's still early, Starbucks said spending is up across loyalty members, including those who stood to lose out from the change. FILE - In this Wednesday, March 23, 2016, file photo, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz speaks at the coffee company's annual shareholders meeting in Seattle. Starbucks reports financial results Thursday, April 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File) "We are not seeing any of the noise that has been speculated on," said Matt Ryan, Starbucks' chief strategy officer, in a call with analysts. The change in the U.S. went into effect just last week, with people earning rewards "stars" based on the amount of money they spend, rather than how often they visit. That means that people who only buy a plain $2.50 coffee would have to spend more to earn a free drink or food item. The change had prompted worries that some angry customers would take their business elsewhere. Despite the encouraging early signs, however, Starbucks executives warned that there could be "noise" in coming quarters as customers adjusted to the change. When asked about the mixed signals it seemed to be sending, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who had been quietly listening from South Africa as other executives fielded questions, chimed in. "We're building something so enduring and so unique I think it's going to be one of the most significant changes to the equity of the brand," Schultz said. Starbucks has said the change will help it give customers more ways to earn rewards stars. Later this year, for instance, it plans to introduce a Visa prepaid debit card that lets people earn stars for the program. For the first three months of the year, Starbucks said sales in the U.S. rose as it pushed more food like breakfast sandwiches and salads intended to draw people in the afternoons. Starbucks Chief Operating Officer Kevin Johnson said food surpassed more than 20 percent of sales in the U.S. for the first time. Sales rose 3 percent at established locations in Asia. Sales for the unit including Europe, the Middle East and Africa rose 1 percent. Taken together, global sales rose 6 percent in the period. Total revenue, which factors in new store openings, rose 9 percent to $4.99 billion. That was short of the $5.03 billion analysts expected, according to FactSet. Shares of Starbucks stock fell 4 percent to $58.23 in after-hours trading. Profit for the quarter rose 16 percent to $575.1 million, or 39 cents per share, in line with expectations. So Yeon Ryu shoots 63 to take Swinging Skirts lead DALY CITY, Calif. (AP) So Yeon Ryu shot a tournament-record 9-under 63 on Thursday to take the first-round lead in the Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic. Playing in the first group of the day off the 10th tee, the South Korean player had seven birdies in an eight-hole stretch on the back nine and added two more on the front nine at Lake Merced. "I was kind of lucky to tee it off really early," Ryu said. "I had a really fresh green, no wind. Also San Francisco is really cold in the morning, but this morning it was just perfect temperature. So Yeon Ryu, of South Korea, hits from the fifth tee of the Lake Merced Golf Club during the first round of the Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic golf tournament, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Daly City, Calif. Ryu shot a 9-under-par 63. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg) "I think today just everything was just great. My tee shot was great. I only missed one green today. I shot 17 greens. Putting was really good." Taiwan's Candie Kung and Japan's Haru Nomura were two strokes back at 65. Kung opened her afternoon round with bogeys on 10 and 11, then birdied the next two and made seven more in a nine-hole stretch from the 17th to the seventh. "Two three-putts, hello, what a start," Kung said. "Putting let me down the first two holes and then picked me right up on the last 16 holes. I made a lot of long putts and hit 18 greens today. This course is hard to hit fairways and greens, and I was able to keep it in play and hit all the greens." Nomura had eight birdies and a bogey. She won the Australian Women's Open in February for her first LPGA Tour title. "Winning in Australia gave me a lot of confidence," Nomura said. "I still remember how I shot and my putting when I won. So If I play same way I feel I can win again here soon." China's Xi Yu Lin and the Netherlands' Christel Boeljon shot 67, and two-time defending champion Lydia Ko was at 68 along with Catriona Matthew, Na Yeon Choi and Rachel Rohanna. Ko already has two victories in California this year, winning the Kia Classic and ANA Inspiration the first major of the year in consecutive weeks. "Course is easy, whatever course she's playing on," the top-ranked Ko joked about Ryu. "Obviously, everything was going right today. For her to shoot a score like that, that's really impressive." Ryu is winless since the 2014 Canadian Pacific Women's Open. She also won the 2011 U.S. Women Open and 2012 Jamie Farr Toledo Classic. "Every tournament, I really want to win" Ryu said. "I think it's a bit too early to discuss about the result. We still have three more days." Ko got a fashion assist from U.S. Women's Open champion In Gee Chun on the opening hole. "I had my two bracelets and my hair tie and I was planning on braiding my hair before I played," Ko said. "She was like, 'Oh, doesn't it bother you having stuff on your wrist? I said, 'No, no.' Well, the hair tie was for me to braid it. She was like, 'Do you want me to braid it for you?' I was like, 'Sure. It's going to end up way nicer than how I braid it.' She did good. I told her, 'It's hairstylist In Gee.'" Chun opened with a 71. Brooke Henderson also had a 71. The 18-year-old Canadian has seven straight top-10 finishes. She held the previous tournament record, shooting a 65 last year in the second round. Third-ranked Lexi Thompson and No. 4 Stacy Lewis each shot 72. Former Stanford student Michelle Wie shot a 73. Minjee Lee also had a 73. The 19-year-old Australian won the Lotte Championship last week. She also won the U.S. Girls' Junior four years ago at Lake Merced. DIVVOTS: Hall of Famer Juli Inkster opened with a 74 in her home event. The 55-year-old Inkster will be honored with her own bobblehead by the San Francisco Giants before their game Friday night game against the Miami. ... Ha Na Jang withdrew after 11 holes because of illness. The eight-ranked South Korean player has two victories this season. ... Suzann Pettersen withdrew before the round because of back spasms. So Yeon Ryu, of South Korea, holds up her ball after making a birdie on the sixth green of the Lake Merced Golf Club during the first round of the Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic golf tournament Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Daly City, Calif. Ryu shot a 9-under-par 63. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg) So Yeon Ryu, of South Korea, reacts after missing a birdie putt on the eighth green of the Lake Merced Golf Club during the first round of the Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic golf tournament Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Daly City, Calif. Ryu shot a 9-under-par 63. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg) Lydia Ko, of New Zealand, follows her shot from the ninth fairway of the Lake Merced Golf Club during the first round of the Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic golf tournament Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Daly City, Calif. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg) Brooke Henderson, of Canada, follows her drive from the seventh tee of the Lake Merced Golf Club during the first round of the Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic golf tournament Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Daly City, Calif. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg) Lexi Thompson follows her shot from the first fairway of the Lake Merced Golf Club during the first round of the Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic golf tournament, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Daly City, Calif. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg) In Gee Chun, of South Korea, hits out of a bunker up to the eighth green of the Lake Merced Golf Club during the first round of the Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic golf tournament Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Daly City, Calif. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg) Haru Nomura, of Japan, follows her shot from off the fairway up to the ninth green of the Lake Merced Golf Club during the first round of the Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic golf tournament Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Daly City, Calif. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg) Cristie Kerr looks over the sixth green of the Lake Merced Golf Club during the first round of the Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic golf tournament Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Daly City, Calif. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg) Lydia Ko, of New Zealand, hands off her putter while walking off the eighth green of the Lake Merced Golf Club during the first round of the Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic golf tournament Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Daly City, Calif. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg) Stacy Lewis hits from the seventh tee of the Lake Merced Golf Club during the first round of the Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic golf tournament, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Daly City, Calif. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg) Criminal charges in Flint water crisis raise stakes DETROIT (AP) Flint's water crisis has taken a dramatic turn with criminal charges being filed against two state employees and a city worker. Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette alleges the three men knew that a lack of corrosion control in drinking water was a threat to public health and intentionally tampered with lead-level reports to cover up the fiasco. It's an extraordinary step to haul mid-level public employees into court on such allegations, especially when the public's perception of corruption typically involves bribes or other favors. Gov. Rick Snyder has said his environmental regulators didn't use "common sense." Flint pulled water from the Flint River for 18 months until last fall but didn't add corrosion-control treatments that could have prevented lead from leaching out of old plumbing. The city is struggling to recover, six months after switching to another water source; it's still considered unsafe to drink unfiltered tap water. Defense attorney Mark Kriger, left, goes over charges with his client, state Department of Environmental Quality employee Stephen Busch, before an arraignment Wednesday, April 20, 2016, in Flint, Mich. Two state employees facing charges related to the Flint water crisis are accused of refusing to order chemical treatment that could have prevented the release of lead in old plumbing. (Jake May/The Flint Journal-MLive.com via AP) LOCAL TELEVISION OUT; LOCAL INTERNET OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT The following may help answer questions of whether authorities found illegal conduct or are trying to criminalize bumbling performance during a major government failure: ___ WHAT ARE THE CHARGES? It's a mix of felony and misdemeanor crimes. Stephen Busch and Michael Prysby of the state Department of Environmental Quality and Flint utilities administrator Michael Glasgow are charged with tampering with evidence. Busch and Prysby are also charged with conspiracy, misconduct in office and violations of drinking water law. Glasgow is additionally charged with willful neglect of duty while operating the water plant. Busch and Prysby have pleaded not guilty, while Glasgow hasn't appeared in court. ___ WHAT'S THE MOST SERIOUS ALLEGATION? The evidence-tampering charge refers specifically to 2015 reports on lead levels in water samples, and carries a maximum penalty of four years in prison. Glasgow's attorney, Robert Harrison, said the charges against his client "are difficult to understand." He said Glasgow was a source for investigators, freely speaking over many days without a lawyer. The charges suggest actions by the three went "above what would be the normal, perhaps imperfect, performance" of public employees, said Linda Fentiman, a professor at Pace Law School in New York. ___ WILL THIS HAVE A CHILLING EFFECT ON PUBLIC EMPLOYEES? Snyder has taken responsibility for what happened in Flint, but he's also repeatedly blamed bureaucrats in his administration for not properly treating the river water for corrosion and endangering public health. Criminal charges, the governor said, have taken the saga to a "whole new level." In 2014, eight days before Flint switched to the Flint River, Glasgow told a state official that he wasn't comfortable but felt pressured by bosses to move ahead. Snyder sent an email Wednesday to more than 40,000 state employees, saying he's proud of their work and doesn't want the charges to "hang like a cloud" over their service. But Ray Holman, a lobbyist for the United Auto Workers, which represents state workers, said there was already a culture of "fear and intimidation" before the charges. ___ WILL THERE BE MORE CHARGES? Schuette didn't waffle Wednesday: He guaranteed more charges in a $1.5 million investigation being led by former FBI agent Andy Arena and special prosecutor Todd Flood. "We'll go wherever the truth takes us in this case wherever the emails take us," Schuette said, referencing the bushels of emails by state, county and city employees who made decisions about Flint water. "High-profile conspiracy cases will get worked from the bottom up," said Kevin Collins, a former federal prosecutor in Texas, who's not involved in the Flint probe. The attorney general said no one is off limits. Arena, who built a career busting corrupt politicians, appealed to people who committed wrongdoing but want to cooperate: "Usually the first person on the train gets the best seat." State Department of Environmental Quality employee Michael Prysby stands as his defense attorney Richard Hillman, right, puts in a plea of not guilty during an arraignment related to the Flint water crisis Wednesday, April 20, 2016, in Flint, Mich. Two state employees facing charges related to the Flint water crisis are accused of refusing to order chemical treatment that could have prevented the release of lead in old plumbing. (Jake May/The Flint Journal-MLive.com via AP) LOCAL TELEVISION OUT; LOCAL INTERNET OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT Trump presses Republican leaders to embrace him HOLLYWOOD, Florida (AP) Donald Trump's chief lieutenants pushed skeptical Republican leaders Thursday to embrace him as their likely presidential nominee, declaring he can deliver big electoral gains this fall despite his contentious ways. Even as his team pressed Trump's case, the billionaire raised fresh concern among some conservatives by speaking against North Carolina's "bathroom law," which directs transgender people to use the bathroom that matches the sex on their birth certificates. Trump also came out against the government's plan to replace President Andrew Jackson with the civil-rights figure Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. The developments came as the Republicans' messy fight for the White House spilled into a seaside resort in south Florida. While candidates in both parties fanned out across the country before important primary contests in the Northeast, Hollywood's Diplomat Resort & Spa was transformed into a palm-treed political battleground. Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas meets with supporters during a campaign stop at Shapiro's Delicatessen, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Indianapolis. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings) There were new signs of frustration among members of the Republican National Committee, who are eager for the divisive primary season to end. "I want to see Mr. Trump begin to bring us together," said Henry Barbour, a committeeman from Mississippi. "And I haven't seen it. It's not good enough to do it for 30 minutes one day and then the other hours of the day try to divide." On one side in the long-running battle, Ted Cruz's team warned party elders in private briefings that only the Texas senator could expand the Republican party and heal deepening intraparty divisions. On the other, Trump's revamped inner circle quietly courted RNC members who openly questioned the front-runner's tone and party loyalty. "People have expressed concerns about that," said Paul Manafort, tapped by Trump earlier in the month to lead the remainder of his primary election strategy. "We hear them." "We're here letting people know that know we're starting to pivot toward the inevitability of the nomination," Manafort told The Associated Press. "We want to start opening doors and building relationships because we are committed to running a traditional united party." There was evidence of a rift on the Democratic side as well. Prominent Southern Democrats urged Bernie Sanders to stop dismissing Hillary Clinton's landslide primary wins across the South, where the front-runner's popularity among non-whites has helped fuel her success. Sanders said the results in the South "distort reality" because they came from the country's "most conservative region." Don Fowler of South Carolina, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and other Clinton supporters told Sanders in a letter that "our national Democratic leaders" should "invest in our races and causes to amplify our voices, not diminish them." Yet as Clinton's grasp on the Democratic nomination tightens, Trump's overwhelming Republican delegate lead has done little to calm concerns from Republican leaders, gathered at the resort for the party's meeting. As Trump continues to rail against "a rigged" nomination process, he sent Manafort and his newly hired political director, Rick Wiley, to help improve relationships with party officials at the meeting. The aides were to deliver a private briefing to RNC members Thursday evening aimed at "dispelling the notion out there right now" that Trump's current unpopularity among key general election constituencies women and minorities, for example would trigger a general election disaster, Wiley said. Trump's team planned to draw on political history to make the case. Wiley cited polls that found Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush struggling in presidential campaigns before they won. Wiley also said Trump could compete and even win in Democratic strongholds such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and even deeper-blue states such as New Jersey, Oregon and Washington. Trump is increasingly optimistic about his chances in five states holding primary contests Tuesday: Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. He is now the only Republican candidate who can possibly collect the 1,237 delegate majority needed to claim the nomination before the party's July convention. But Cruz hopes Trump will fall short of a nomination-clinching delegate majority so that he can turn enough delegates to his side at the convention to give him the prize. ___ Associated Press writers Alan Fram in Hollywood, Jill Colvin in New York and Errin Haines Whack in Philadelphia contributed to this report. Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas meets with volunteers during a campaign stop at Shapiro's Delicatessen, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Indianapolis. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings) Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas pays JoAnn Spears for his meal during a campaign stop at Shapiro's Delicatessen, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Indianapolis. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings) Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas meets with volunteers during a campaign stop at Shapiro's Delicatessen, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Indianapolis. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings) Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas poses for photos during a campaign stop at Shapiro's Delicatessen, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Indianapolis. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings) Audience members listen to Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.,at a campaign stop, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Scranton, Pa. (Jake Danna Stevens/The Times & Tribune via AP) WILKES BARRE TIMES-LEADER OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT The hand of Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., points the crowd at a campaign stop, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Scranton, Pa. (Jake Danna Stevens/The Times & Tribune via AP) WILKES BARRE TIMES-LEADER OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks at a campaign stop, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Scranton, Pa. (Jake Danna Stevens/The Times & Tribune via AP) WILKES BARRE TIMES-LEADER OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks at a campaign stop, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Scranton, Pa. (Jake Danna Stevens/The Times & Tribune via AP) WILKES BARRE TIMES-LEADER OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas meets with volunteers during a campaign stop at Shapiro's Delicatessen, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Indianapolis. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings) FILE - In this Feb. 18, 2016 file photo, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump listens to his mobile phone during a lunch stop in North Charleston, S.C. Trumps approach to Twitter has been as unorthodox as his presidential campaign. The billionaires use of the social media service has been unpredictable and unfiltered, sometimes brilliant and occasionally typographically challenged. He has celebrated the support of scores of accounts that appear almost solely dedicated to him. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File) Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks at a campaign stop, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Scranton, Pa. (Jake Danna Stevens/The Times & Tribune via AP) WILKES BARRE TIMES-LEADER OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks at a campaign stop, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Scranton, Pa. (Jake Danna Stevens/The Times & Tribune via AP) WILKES BARRE TIMES-LEADER OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks at a campaign stop, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Scranton, Pa. (Jake Danna Stevens/The Times & Tribune via AP) WILKES BARRE TIMES-LEADER OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, and his wife Melania Trump, are interviewed by co-host Matt Lauer, third left, and Savannah Guthrie, right, on the NBC "Today" television program, in New York, Thursday, April 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Richard Drew) Rabbi sues Manischewitz, saying it let kosher standards slip NEW YORK (AP) A rabbi is accusing kosher foods giant Manischewitz of pushing him out as their longtime inspector of holiday matzos after he complained that the company wasn't sticking to strict Jewish religious practices. Rabbi Yaakov Horowitz filed a lawsuit against the Newark, New Jersey, company on Wednesday, just days ahead of Passover. It seeks millions of dollars in compensation for emotional distress and damage to his reputation. Horowitz was the chief supervising rabbi at The Manischewitz Company. He worked for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, which supplies inspectors to independently ensure that kosher standards are kept at food producers. The union is also named in the lawsuit, filed in New York City. The Orthodox Union said in a statement that the suit is "entirely without merit." It said that Manischewitz meets the highest kosher standards. Manischewitz officials had no immediate comment. For 20 years on the Manischewitz production line, Horowitz' work included feeling the temperature of the sheets of unbaked matzo before they enter a massive oven. He claims the company has relaxed its strict guidelines for keeping food kosher and excluded him from properly observing production. The "Orthodox Union has violated the public trust by failing and refusing to abide by its established guidelines for certifying certain products manufactured by Manischewitz as Kosher," the suit says. In the court complaint, the rabbi says he got "the clear, but unstated, message" that to keep his job "he should do everything in his power to keep Manischewitz happy, even if this meant compromising his personal religious principles." Girl who wrote Obama excited over Harriet Tubman on $20 bill CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) In a few years when Sofia gets her first chance to spend a redesigned $20 bill featuring Harriet Tubman, the Massachusetts fifth-grader can take some extra pride in knowing the role she played in getting the first woman portrayed on U.S. paper currency in more than a century. Sofia, whose family asked that her full name not be used, wrote a letter to President Barack Obama after noticing the lack of women on U.S. currency while working on a class project. "It makes things feel fair," Sofia said Thursday. In this Wednesday, April 20, 2016, photo, Sofia, 11, stands with a U.S. $20 bill outside of her home in Cambridge, Mass. Sofia, who wrote a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to put a woman on U.S. paper currency has gotten her wish. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew announced Wednesday that African-American abolitionist Harriet Tubman will be featured on the front of the $20 bill. (Ryan Mcbride/Boston Herald via AP) BOSTON GLOBE OUT; METRO BOSTON OUT; MAGS OUT; ONLINE OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT On Wednesday her 11th birthday she received phone calls from U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and other officials informing her of the decision to put Tubman, an African-American abolitionist, on the front of the $20 bill and feature other women on other bills. "If women do important things just like men, women should be on our currency too, and once that happens it's going to be amazing," Sofia said in an interview with the Associated Press at her Cambridge home. Her letter to Obama in 2014 read in part: "I am writing to know why there aren't more women on dollars/coins for the United States. I think there should be more women on the dollars/coins of the United States because if there were no women there wouldn't be men." At the bottom of the letter, Sofia suggested a dozen names that could fit the bill, including Tubman's. Tubman was born into slavery and, after escaping, helped other slaves gain freedom through what became known as the Underground Railroad. Sofia also listed civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, poet Emily Dickinson and first ladies Eleanor Roosevelt, Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton, a former U.S. senator, secretary of state and current presidential candidate. Sofia did not hear back right away, but a few months later the family heard that Obama had referenced a letter from a "Massachusetts girl" in a speech and wondered if it was her. It turned out that it was, and in February 2015 a letter arrived from the White House from Obama thanking Sofia for writing to him "with such a good idea." The women she suggested were an impressive group, "and I must say you're pretty impressive too," the letter stated. While Tubman wasn't the only famous woman Sofia offered, she is very happy with the choice. What impressed her so much in learning about Tubman was that she not only escaped from slavery, but risked her life to help others do the same. Sofia's proud mom, Kim, said her daughter is concerned about the world, "but I think the part of the story I like the best is that she really is just an average, typical little girl who noticed something that was unfair in the world and she decided to do something about it." Sofia said she does not have plans for politics herself in the future, and instead hopes to become a scientist. For now she is enjoying a heartfelt wish that has come true. "I was really excited and to have it happen on my birthday, it was the best birthday present ever," she said. The new $20s are expected to go into circulation in 2020, with Tubman replacing the portrait of Andrew Jackson, the nation's seventh president and a slave owner, who is being pushed to the back of the bill. The last woman featured on U.S. paper money was Martha Washington, who was on a dollar silver certificate from 1891 to 1896. __ More terror charges for men accused in plot to kill blogger BOSTON (AP) Two New England men already being held on charges they conspired to help the Islamic State group are facing additional terrorism charges. Nicholas Rovinski (roh-VIN'-skee), of Warwick, Rhode Island, and David Wright, of Everett, Massachusetts, were charged Thursday with conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries. They pleaded not guilty last year to conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organization. Lawyers for them haven't returned messages seeking comment on the new charges. Prosecutors allege the two plotted with Wright's uncle Usaamah Rahim to behead a conservative blogger known for provoking Muslims. The plot was not carried out. Thursday's indictment says Islamic State recruiter Junaid Hussain communicated instructions about the plot directly to Rahim. Chad's leader, in power since 1990, secures 5th term N'DJAMENA, Chad (AP) Chad President Idriss Deby has won a fifth term in office, soundly defeating more than a dozen challengers to remain leader of a country that is central to Africa's fight against Islamic militants, the national election commission announced late Thursday. Deby earned 61.5 percent of the April 10 contest for which more than 6 million voters were registered, according to provisional results that need to be ratified by the Constitutional Council. He needed more than 50 percent to avoid a runoff. The turnout was 76 percent, the election commission said. The announcement came one day after a visit by Samantha Power, U.S. envoy to the United Nations, and top U.S. military officials that highlighted Chad's prominence in the fight against Islamic extremist groups such as Boko Haram. The country serves as headquarters for a five-nation regional force intended to wipe out the Nigeria-based group, which has launched multiple attacks on Chadian territory including suicide bombings in the capital, N'Djamena. Chad is also the base for France's military operations in Africa. Deby appeared before hundreds of supporters in the capital just after the commission's announcement, thanking them for the win while urging them to wait for the Constitutional Council's ratification. "It's your victory," he said. Earlier this week, the opposition withdrew from the electoral commission, citing doubts the vote would be credible. During her visit Wednesday, Power expressed displeasure with a "crackdown on freedom of protest" and a government decision to shut down the Internet and text messaging throughout Chad for several days around the time of the vote. In a rare appearance before foreign journalists at his presidential palace, Deby denied opposition claims that some 60 security forces who voted against him have disappeared. __ Missouri Senate, Planned Parenthood CEO reach subpoena deal JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) The Missouri Senate announced Thursday it is suspending contempt proceedings against a Planned Parenthood CEO after reaching an agreement to review some documents a legislative committee investigating the organization subpoenaed last year. The fetal tissue disposal policies of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri will be made available along with other documents, including blank patient forms and written protocols for abortions. Republican and Democratic Senate leaders will designate people to review the documents during business hours in the office of the regional organization's attorney, but they will not be allowed to copy them, according to the agreement. Some documents will be available for review as soon as noon Friday, while others will take longer to produce, the agreement said. All the documents must be provided by May 9. Senators voted last week to summon to the chamber Mary Kogut, CEO and president of the regional Planned Parenthood, to justify why she had not complied with the Senate's subpoena and explain why she should not be held in contempt, a rare move that could carry jail time. They also summoned Dr. James Miller, who owns the suburban St. Louis Pathology Services Inc. that reviews fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood. The summonses demanded Kogut and Miller appear before the entire chamber at 2 p.m. Monday. In response, Planned Parenthood's attorney said he wanted to subpoena witnesses as well, including former Senate President Pro Tem Tom Dempsey, who created the Senate panel that began investigating Planned Parenthood last summer. Senators began investigating Missouri's Planned Parenthood clinics after undercover videos alleged the nation's largest abortion provider was illegally selling fetal tissue for profit. The organization has denied the allegations in the videos, which reference its St. Louis clinic, the state's only abortion provider. Democratic Attorney General Chris Koster found no evidence of wrongdoing in Missouri. Chuck Hatfield, the attorney for the regional Planned Parenthood, characterized the documents covered under the agreement as mostly policies and protocols that would not include patient information, redacted or otherwise. Whereas the subpoena demanded all documents with any reference to two doctors who appeared in the undercover videos, the agreement limits disclosure to only those documents in which the doctors are mentioned alongside fetal tissue, staff recruitment or commercial transactions outside the group's "customary fees." And while the subpoena encompassed all documents on emergency medical dispatches to Planned Parenthood clinics, the agreement only calls for dispatch records compiled by public entities. Sen. Kurt Schaefer, chairman of the panel that investigated Planned Parenthood, said lawmakers never wanted any personal information. Emphasizing that helped resolve the issue, he said, and the deadline helped. "I think they didn't want to appear on Monday," he said. In a statement, Kogut called the agreement "a victory for Planned Parenthood patients." Planned Parenthood officials were always willing to share documents as long as they didn't violate patients' personally identifiable information, Hatfield said. Furthermore, lawmakers clearly didn't want to subpoena Dempsey, he said. Part of the agreement includes Hatfield withdrawing his request for subpoenas. Hatfield said the Senate has committed to limiting the documents to a "small number" of senators. Miller, the pathology services business owner, has invoked his constitutional right to not incriminate himself and will not appear Monday either, Schaefer said. Virginia police: Remains likely those of missing firefighter Female remains found Thursday in Virginia's Shenandoah National Park are likely those of a paramedic-firefighter who disappeared a week ago, Virginia State Police said. Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said in an email late Thursday that troopers have preliminarily identified the body found as Nicole Mittendorff of Woodbridge, Virginia. The Virginia medical examiner will have to confirm the identity through an autopsy and the body was taken to the chief medical examiner's office in Manassas, Geller said. The evidence collected during the investigation, including a note found in Mittendorff's car, leads troopers to believe no foul play was involved in her death, she said. The ground search for Mittendorff was called off about 2 p.m. after the remains were found in a remote location more than a mile from the Whiteoak Canyon parking area, the National Park Service and State Police said in a news release. Mittendorff's car was found in the parking area Saturday, a day after she was reported missing when she didn't show up for her job with Fairfax County Fire and Rescue. Law enforcement officials said the remains were found about 330 yards from the trail in treacherous, rocky terrain. Mittendorff, 31, was an avid runner and tri-athlete; her family said earlier this week that she may have been training on a trail near where her car was found. About 100 search and rescue team members from several agencies combed a steep, rocky and forested 10-square-mile section of the 300-square-mile national park, park spokeswoman Sally Hurlbert said earlier this week. Searchers have been out daily since Mittendorff was reported missing. Fairfax County Fire Chief Richard Bowers praised Mittendorff this week as the search went on. "She's dedicated, she's respected and she's well-liked among her peers and colleagues," he said. UK accepts more resettlement scheme refugees than any other EU nation The UK accepted more refugees under resettlement schemes than any other country in the EU last year, new figures reveal. A total of 1,864 people arrived in this country through the route in 2015. Data released on Wednesday by the EU's official statistics agency, Eurostat, showed this was the highest number out of all 28 member states. New figures show how many refugees have been resettled in the UK It means Britain received more than one in five (22%) of the total 8,155 resettled refugees recorded across the bloc. The number includes those who have come to the country through the Government's programme to give sanctuary to Syrians brought from the region around the war-torn country. Sweden had the next highest tally for resettled refugees, with 1,850, followed by Finland with 1,005. Eurostat defined resettled refugees as those who have been granted authorisation to reside in a member state " within the framework of a national or community resettlement scheme". In addition to those resettled, nearly 18,000 people received positive decisions on asylum applications in the UK, according to the figures. This was a rise of more than a quarter (26%) compared to the previous year, and the fifth highest total across the EU. Germany granted the highest number of people protection status, with more than 148,000 - a rise of 212% - followed by Sweden (34,500, or +4%), Italy (29,600, or +44%) and France (26,000, or +26%). Overall, countries in the EU gave refuge to a total of 333,350 people in 2015, a rise of 72% compared with the previous year. Eurostat said that since 2008, a total of nearly 1.1 million asylum seekers have been granted protection status in the EU. The largest group were Syrians, with 166,100 citizens of the war-torn country - or half of the total - given asylum in Europe. In the UK, Sudanese people accounted for the highest number of refugees designated with protection status, followed by Iran and then Syria, according to the data. Allan Hogarth, of Amnesty UK, said: "These stats have to be placed in the grim context in which they belong. "The world is in the grips of the biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War and countries across Europe, including the UK, haven't done anywhere near enough in response to that. "5 million people have fled Syria and the UK's contribution to resettlement of Syrians is a puny sum when set against that. "The UK took in some 20,000 refugees from Hungary over one winter in 1956, so surely we can do something similar in the 21st century for which we can be similarly proud." Ex-soldiers cleared of raping female colleague Two former soldiers have been acquitted of raping Corporal Anne-Marie Ellement, who was found hanged in her barracks two years later. Cpl Ellement died at Bulford Barracks in Wiltshire on October 9 2011, almost exactly two years after alleging that she was raped by two soldiers while stationed in Germany in November 2009. Thomas Fulton and Jeremy Jones, both 28, insisted Cpl Ellement had engaged in a consensual threesome after drinking with them in the corporals' mess at the camp in Sennelager. Anne-Marie Ellement allegedly that she was raped by two colleagues (Liberty) A seven-strong board of civil servants and senior military officers at Bulford Court Martial Centre found both Fulton and Jones not guilty of two charges of raping Cpl Ellement. Following the verdicts, Judge Jeff Blackett told the defendants: "Thomas Fulton and Jeremy Jones: your conduct on 20 November was disgraceful. "This is not a moral judgment and I make no comment upon sexual practices involving more than two people. "But the way you treated Anne-Marie after your encounter was extremely unpleasant. "After engaging in sex you effectively discarded her while you decided to go off to town without a thought for how she might be feeling or how she might get back to her accommodation safely. "For Mr Fulton to call her those very unpleasant names including the word 'slag' was truly dishonourable. "You may have grown up in the seven years since this incident and I hope you will never act in such an appalling way again. "When you look back on what happened you must feel very ashamed. "Having said that, you are now free to go and you are to leave the courtroom now before I clear the court." The verdicts follow a lengthy fight for justice by Cpl Ellement's family, as the case was originally dismissed in 2010. Judge Blackett said: "This case should have been heard five years ago. "The extreme delay in bringing this case to court ultimately prejudiced the defendants, Anne-Marie and justice generally." The judge added that it was "absolutely correct" for the proceedings to be reinstituted, "not withstanding the ultimate outcome". In March 2014, coroner Nicholas Rhinberg said the "lingering mental effects" of the alleged rape were a factor in Cpl Ellement's suicide. Mr Rhinberg found Cpl Ellement believed she had been raped and was strongly affected by the "deeply humiliating experience". His comments came following the second inquest into Cpl Ellement's death, which took place after her family used Article 2 of the Human Rights Act to demand a fresh hearing. The family, represented by Liberty, also fought for a fresh investigation into the rape allegations against Fulton, from Chester, and Jones, from Carmarthenshire. The case was later investigated by the RAF Police, who worked with civilian officers from Bedfordshire Police and the Crown Prosecution Service. Fulton and Jones, who left the Army in 2014 and 2013 respectively, were each charged with two counts of rape in October last year and their trial began on April 11. The eight-day trial heard Cpl Ellement was drinking in the corporals' mess in Sennelager with Fulton, Jones and two other soldiers on the evening of November 19 2009. Cpl Ellement, dressed in a brown cardigan and jeans, went to the bar at about 10pm after drinking two bottles of beer in her quarters. Fulton - the boyfriend of Cpl Ellement's friend Cpl Sarah Noteyoung - had just completed his first shift as the orderly sergeant at the Royal Military Police station. Witnesses described how Fulton, Jones and Cpl Ellement began flirting with each other and were kissing and touching as they drank together. Fulton and Jones were heard discussing a threesome, which Fulton later suggested to Cpl Ellement, then aged 28. The three colleagues went upstairs to Jones's room at about 12.30am, where both men had sex with Cpl Ellement. Judge Blackett said: "I also want to say something about the culture of the Royal Military Police in Sennelager in 2009. "We have heard much about drinking to excess, sexual relationships between colleagues, intention to go places that were out of bounds in the local town. "The RMP more than other soldiers are required to uphold the standards and values of the British Army, and to investigate those who fall below those standards. "It appears to me that 110 Provost Company fell woefully short of those standards themselves. "We all know of the dangers of excessive drinking. "The reason that casual sexual relations between colleagues in the same unit are discouraged is because of the potential adverse effect they may have on morale and on operational effectivity. "This case demonstrates that and I hope that the RMP have learned lessons from the evidence that we have heard in this trial." Cpl Ellement was found naked apart from her brown cardigan and crying in the corridor of her accommodation block at 1.37am. She immediately alleged that she had been raped and sexually assaulted. Fulton and Jones were in a taxi on their way to a nightclub in Sennelager when they received a call instructing them to return to camp as Cpl Ellement was upset. Both men were then arrested. In a police interview in 2014, Fulton said: "I am really sorry she killed herself. "I wish something had been done to help her. I wish she had got the help she needed but it wasn't my responsibility. "I was trying to get on with my own life. I'm having my life blown to pieces by this. She lied about this incident. "I wouldn't have cared if she was mistaken or too drunk but she lied about it. She said I held her down but I didn't. "I haven't done anything wrong." Ex-corporals Fulton, formerly of 174 Provost Company 3 Royal Military Police, and Jones, 28, formerly of Close Protection Unit Royal Military Police Operations Wing, left court through a military exit. Emma Norton, lawyer for Liberty which represents Cpl Ellement's family, said: "The verdict of the court is respected and accepted. "It is now more than six years since Anne-Marie reported being raped and it is more than four years since she died. "The family would like to take this opportunity to thank the police officers that worked so hard - from the RAF Police and Bedfordshire Police - and all the lawyers from the prosecuting team. "The commitment and diligence they have shown is something to which all those who report rape ought to be entitled. "Anne-Marie was entitled to have her allegations investigated while she was still alive. As the judge himself noted in very strong terms, this case should have been heard five years ago. "The family welcome the judge's comments about the extremely unpleasant and dishonourable conduct of the defendants. They share the judge's concerns about the culture within the Royal Military Police. "The history of this case, and how it took six long years for it to come to court, reveals grave deficiencies in the policies and practices of those responsible for investigating sexual offences committed against members of the armed forces. "Had it not been for the tenacity and strength of Anne-Marie's family and their willingness to challenge the extraordinary reluctance of the Ministry of Defence (MoD), the military police and the Army prosecuting authority to investigate the allegations, this case would never have come to court. "After such a long struggle the family now asks for time to reflect upon the verdict. Above all today their thoughts are with Anne-Marie." A spokesman for the Army said: " Quite rightly we take any allegation of rape or sexual assault extremely seriously and there is no place in a modern armed forces for bullying, harassment or criminal behaviour of any sort, including sexual assault. "As with any instance where the Service Prosecuting Authority or Crown Prosecution Service decides there is a case to be answered, it is right that these allegations are scrutinised in court and we fully respect the court martial's decision. Our thoughts remain with Cpl Ellement's family and friends at this time." During evidence, Fulton admitted shouting and swearing at Cpl Ellement after having sex with her. He said he woke to find Cpl Ellement had left Jones's room wearing his lightweight trousers. The soldier found Cpl Ellement walking through a nearby car park and asked for his trousers back but she refused, he claimed. "I said something along the lines of 'Give me back my f****** trousers'. She said no. I said 'Stop being a c***'," he said. "She pulled the lightweights down in front of me and she threw them to my chest. "As she walked off I said 'F*** off you slag'. I was frustrated that she had spoiled a really good night for us all. "I was 21. It is the biggest regret of my life that I never walked Anne-Marie back that night." Jones told the court martial he saw Cpl Ellement wearing his blue hooded jumper after they had sex. He said he asked her to take it off and she put on her brown cardigan instead. The two male soldiers then decided to go to a nightclub in Sennelager. White House: Barack Obama will back Remain campaign US president Barack Obama will arrive in the UK for a visit which will see him drawn into the bitter row over the UK's membership of the European Union. The White House has indicated that Mr Obama will set out his support for the UK staying in the EU, in a major boost to David Cameron and the Remain camp. Mr Obama and the Prime Minister will hold a joint press conference on Friday where he is expected to give his opinion on the June 23 referendum despite calls from Leave campaigners for him to stay out of the debate. Mr Obama will set out his support for a Remain vote if asked, the White House has said Ahead of the visit, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters that the president would set out his support for a Remain vote if he was asked. "He will make very clear that this is a decision for the people of the United Kingdom to make, it's not a decision for us to make. "But we have no closer friend in the world, and if we are asked our view as a friend, we will offer it." That would mean " being very straightforward and candid as a friend as to why the United States believes that it is good for the United Kingdom to remain in the European Union". During the visit, Mr Obama will also have lunch with the Queen and hold a "town hall" style meeting with young Londoners. Prominent Leave campaigners warned the president not to back continued UK membership of the EU ahead of his arrival. London mayor Boris Johnson said it would be "hypocritical for America to urge us to sacrifice control - of our law s, our sovereignty, our money and our democracy - when they would not dream of ever doing the same", while Commons leader Chris Grayling suggested the US president "perhaps doesn't understand" the shift in power that has taken place between the UK and Brussels. But former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg used a speech at a prestigious US university to urge Mr Obama to make the case for a Remain vote "loudly and clearly" during his visit to the UK. Speaking at Princeton University on Wednesday, Mr Clegg warned that the "special relationship" would be put at risk if the UK left the EU. Mr Clegg said the only prominent American who did not support the UK remaining in the EU was Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump. The former Liberal Democrat leader said during his time in government he was told "over and over again by US decision makers" that British influence in the EU "strengthened the West" and the co-operation between the EU and Nato. "President Obama has said that having the UK in the European Union gives the States 'much greater confidence about the strength of the transatlantic union'. It is a case I hope and expect he will make loudly and clearly when he visits London in the coming days," Mr Clegg said. "In fact, the only prominent American who has dissented from that view is Donald Trump. "So, the choice for any British voter who cares about American opinion couldn't be clearer: Trump wants Britain out of the EU; president Obama wants us to stay in. It is one of the more remarkable twists in this ongoing saga that Boris Johnson, a contender for the future leadership of Britain's most Atlanticist political party, should side with Trump rather than Obama. I know whose side I - and I suspect millions of other Brits - would rather be on." Charles wishes Mummy 'the happiest of birthdays' as Queen turns 90 The Prince of Wales has paid a touching tribute to his mother, wishing her the "most special and happiest of birthdays". Charles, at a beacon lighting ceremony at Windsor Castle to mark the Queen's 90th birthday, spoke of the "love and affection" for her throughout the country and the Commonwealth. He called the head of state "Mummy" during his short address - often his affectionate introduction for the sovereign during royal celebrations. The Queen, accompanied by the Prince of Wales, lights a beacon at Windsor Castle As dusk approached on her milestone birthday, he said: "Your Majesty, Mummy, I find it very hard to believe you've reached your 90th year and I suddenly realised the other day that I've known you since you were 22 years old. "This is, ladies and gentlemen, a very special occasion and the beacon Her Majesty is about to light will also represent, as it lights other beacons across the nation, the love and affection in which you are held throughout this country and the Commonwealth. "So, ladies and gentlemen, can we wish Her Majesty the most special and happiest of birthdays on this occasion. And long may you reign over us. "Now, ladies and gentlemen, can I ask you as well if you could raise three very special cheers for Her Majesty on this special occasion. "And if they're loud enough it might just work to light the other beacons by spontaneous combustion." The crowd then gave three cheers. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were driven to Cambridge Gate in Home Park, Windsor, for the lighting of the first in a network of more than 1,260 beacons. She was dressed in a white silk headscarf for her last public engagement of the day before a private black tie dinner hosted by Charles in the Waterloo Chamber of the castle. More than 30 royals were among more than 70 guests joining the Queen for the lavish affair. Charles handed the torch to the Queen and invited her to light the principal beacon - a large brazier on a 20ft (6m) pole at the start of the Long Walk. With the beacon towering above them Charles handed a flaming torch to the Queen who lit a fuse which set off a series of small controlled explosions which ignited the beacon. It took a while to get going and Bruno Peek, who has organised a number of national beacon lighting events to mark royal anniversaries, said Philip quipped: "It's not going up". The Royal party left for the Queen's private birthday dinner and expected among the guests were the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Prince Harry and other senior royals. The Queen's day began with the monarch acknowledging the well-wishes of the thousands who filled Windsor town centre when she went on a walkabout. And the birthday Queen declared 1926 - the year she was born - a vintage year when she met a group of fellow nonagenarians. During the public meet and greet, with the Duke of Edinburgh by her side, the Queen received armfuls of cards, bouquets and even a cake as she acknowledged the greetings of the crowds. The royal fans who lined crash barriers around the town centre broke into spontaneous renditions of Happy Birthday and applause as they caught sight of the monarch. There were a few famous faces among the crowds, from the Gogglebox stars Sandra and Sandy, to reality TV celebrity Joey Essex and television chef Mary Berry. The event was part of an unveiling ceremony at the foot of Castle Hill in Windsor that formally marked the launch of the Queen's Walkway . The walkway - a four-mile self-guided walking trail of Windsor by the Outdoor Trust - has been created in honour of the Queen becoming the country's longest reigning monarch. Historian Hugo Vickers, the Outdoor Trust's chairman, helped the Queen remove the cloth from a large temporary display board in the middle of a main road and she remarked it was a "lovely day". Mr Vickers said: "She was terribly happy with the beautiful weather and the lovely occasion. She said it was a lovely day." He added: "She loved the panel. Prince Philip said it wouldn't last long if we left it there." At one point the Queen stopped with lady-in-waiting Jennifer Gordon-Lennox to briefly chat to sisters Judy and Anne Daley, from Cardiff, who were each holding a balloon that formed the number 90. The siblings had been featured on breakfast television earlier and in the excitement the number nine balloon had floated off over Windsor, but luckily another was donated by a local shop. Anne, 55, said: "When the lady-in-waiting saw the balloons she said 'you've got the nine back'. The Queen was killing herself laughing, she must have seen it on TV, she was really lovely." Judy, 50, a civilian police worker, said: "The Queen's just remarkable, a very formidable lady, and certainly the one we all look up to. "She's remarkable for her age, and her dedication to duty, day in and day out - just a wonderful, wonderful lady.'' And when the Queen met a group of fellow nonagenarians - all born in 1926 - Rosamund Fulawaka, whose 90th birthday was on April 10, said she told them: "You were all born in a lovely vintage year." Mrs Fulawaka, from Ascot, added: "That was a lovely thing to say. "It was wonderful to meet her, I had seen her from a distance but never seen her close up so I had a really good look and thought she was just lovely." Yetta Jacobs, who celebrated her 90th birthday on February 11, was evacuated to Windsor in 1939 from London's East End. "I think she just said 'hello', she recalled after their meeting. She added: "I told her I was evacuated to Windsor and she asked if I liked it and I said yes" Gogglebox stars Sandra and Sandy had staked a spot in the crowd to get a good view of the Queen. Sandra Martin, who was wearing a pair of union flag decorated glasses, said: ''We've taken time out of filming to come here and stayed overnight in Windsor. ''We're here to celebrate the Queen's birthday and I'm the only one on the programme who is allowed to speak about the Queen - for the last 20 years I've been a loyal, devoted follower.'' Philip stopped to talk to the pair and Ms Martin said later: "He asked me what I do and where I live and I told him I'm Sandra, I live in Brixton and I appear on TV. "I told him I sit on my sofa and watch TV and you watch me watching TV and that made him laugh." Town crier Tony Appleton, 80, from Chelmsford, had been at the Lindo Wing when Prince George and Princess Charlotte was born. Prime Minister David Cameron has led the tributes to the Queen - born on April 21 1926 - who has become the country's first nonagenarian sovereign. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were married at Windsor's Guildhall and in its open air portico known as the corn market the Queen and Philip chatted to a group, mostly women, who turn 90 this year. Nadiya Hussain, winner of the BBC's The Great British Bake Off, had made the Queen an orange drizzle birthday cake over four days, and used 42 eggs to create the three tier confection that actually featured 12 cakes. She said: "My theory was if lemon drizzle was good enough for Mary Berry, we can change it up and do one for the Queen." The baker added that she froze when she first spoke to the Queen but recovered: "She asked me about what was in the cake, because she said 'does it cut?' so clearly she's had issues about cutting cake - hence why I didn't do a fruit cake." She added: "You've got to feel some pressure when it's the Queen right? Every time I tried to ignore the fact I was doing it for the Queen, my husband would very conveniently remind me - 'hey, hey you're slacking. It's for the Queen get up, you can't be lying down'." And it appears the Duke may be an avid watcher of the BBC's hit baking show, Nadiya suggested. "The Queen said 'Oh she won the baking show' and he said 'of course I know she won the baking show' - I think they were having a bit of a conversation. The Queen lights a beacon at Windsor Castle as she celebrates her 90th birthday The Queen met hundreds of well-wishers gathered for her walkabout outside Windsor Castle on her 90th birthday Well-wishers had hundreds of balloons and flowers they hoped to give the monarch She accepted dozens of posies from well-wishers, many of whom were young children The birthday girl was dressed in what was described by Buckingham Palace as a 'spring grass green' wool and silk weave coat and dress with hat to match adorned with flowers The Queen also met with other ladies in their 90s Town criers Steve Clow, Tony Appleton and Peter Baker declare the Queen's presence in Windsor Judy, left, and Anne Daley, from Wales, joined the crowds outside Windsor Castle with giant balloons spelling out the Queen's age The Duke of Edinburgh joined the Queen in an open-top Range Rover as they were driven around Windsor The streets were thronged with well-wishers, all eager to wish the Queen a happy birthday Born Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary of York on April 21 1926, she was never expected to be Queen - but she is now the longest reigning and oldest monarch in British history The Queen's famous wave was used throughout her tour of the Berkshire town The whole town came out to catch a glimpse of the Queen and Prince Philip driving past As part of the celebrations, the King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery performed a 41-gun salute in Hyde Park, central London Nadiya Hussain, winner of the Great British Bake Off, baked the Queen's birthday cake and met the monarch to present it to her The Queen cut into the three-tier cake, while a nervous-looking Nadiya looked on But it wasn't the only cake made for the occasion, royal enthusiast Margaret Tyler marked the Queen's love of corgis on her edible creation A message on the BT Tower in London wished the Queen a happy 90th The Burger King restaurant on Tottenham Court Road was rebranded for the day in honour of the Queen A beacon lit by the Queen at Windsor Castle The Prince of Wales pays tribute to the Queen during the beacon-lighting ceremony at Windsor Castle The Queen with the Duke of Edinburgh at Windsor Castle TSB calls for help from regulator after profits and customers surge Challenger bank TSB has called on regulators to use the "full force of competition" to help it break the stranglehold of the Big Five banks in the UK as it posted a surge in profits and new customers. Paul Pester, chief executive of TSB, said the lender was "doing its bit" to increase competition in high street banking, attracting more than 1,200 new customers a day in the first quarter - up 25% year-on-year. But he said the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which is nearing the end of a two-year inquiry into UK retail banking, needed to do more to promote switching and make charges clearer. TSB said it had notched up record growth in customer savings deposits He said: " We need the CMA to use the once-in-a-generation opportunity they have to help us bring the full force of competition to bear on the UK banking market." His plea came as the group - spun out from Lloyds Banking Group and then taken over by Spanish rival Banco de Sabadell last March - posted a 53.4% year-on-year hike in bottom-line profits to 52.6 million in the first three months of 2016. On an underlying basis, management pre-tax profits rose 75% to 59.9 million. TSB said it notched up record growth in customer savings deposits, up 2.1 billion year-on-year to 26.8 billion in the first quarter and a 900 million or 3.5% rise on the previous three months. Mr Pester said the results showed the group was making good strides in taking on its big rivals - Barclays, Lloyds, NatWest, HSBC and Santander - but added "we can't do this alone". He said: "We want all bank customers to know what they're paying for their banking; all customers - including overdraft users - to be able to switch easily; and all customers to be aware of their right to switch banks. "Only then will competition really start to work and the culture of UK banks finally shift to serving customers on their terms - rather than on the banks'." The CMA is due to publish its final report next month. It has so far stopped short of breaking up the big banks, instead recommending a raft of proposals to help promote switching after i t revealed last October that bank customers could save 70 on average a year by changing current account providers. TSB is one of a number of smaller players that has entered the market in recent years, alongside other challengers such as Metro Bank, which reported its first quarter figures on Wednesday. Metro Bank, which floated on the stock market in March, trimmed underlying losses by 7% to 7.9 million, although 3.2 million in costs for its stock market listing saw it post bottom-line losses of 11.1 million. It said customer savings deposits surged 15% during the first three months of 2016 to 5.9 billion and attracted a record 62,000 new customers in the quarter, while net lending more than doubled year on year to 4.1 billion. The major banking groups report their first quarter updates next week, starting with Barclays and Spanish-owned group Santander on Wednesday. Mr Pester said he did not believe the CMA proposals went far enough and called for next month's final report to get tougher on the banking sector. On the EU referendum, he said it was "up to the UK electorate to decide", but added it was an "uncertainty" for the banking sector. TSB said it saw 1 billion in net mortgage lending - loans less redemptions - in the first quarter as a 300 million reduction in mortgages from its Northern Rock and Lloyds portfolio offset 1.3 billion in growth from its own direct lending. The group also confirmed it had 4.8 million current account customers after taking a 7% share of all those opening a new account or switching in the three months to March 31. David Walliams: Stolen letters from young book fans have been returned Comedian David Walliams says stolen letters sent to him by young fans of his children's books have been returned by police. The Britain's Got Talent judge and author revealed on Twitter on Sunday that his post, including "a large box of letters from children" from publisher HarperCollins, had been taken by thieves, and he apologised to those who had not received a reply from him. On Thursday, he tweeted: "The @metpoliceuk kindly returned a number of children's letters to me that had been stolen in December & I have now replied to them all." David Walliams has written eight books for HarperCollins Walliams has written eight books for HarperCollins, with Demon Dentist, Ratburger and Gangsta Granny all becoming children's best-sellers. Billionaire Boy, The Boy In The Dress, Gangsta Granny and Mr Stink were all turned into TV adaptations that have been highlights of the Christmas TV schedule for families in recent years. According to his publisher's website, his next book is due for release in November. The Little Britain star, 44, announced last week that Scotland Yard had informed him of the crime. He tweeted: "The @metpoliceuk just told me my post was stolen, including a large box of letters from children that had been sent via @HarperCollins. "So I apologise if you sent a letter & have not received a reply as I do endeavour to reply to everyone. If in doubt please write again." Police said inquires were continuing and that no arrests had been made. A Scotland Yard spokeswoman said: " Police in Camden were called on 8 April by a member of the public who had found a numbers of discarded items of post. Farne Islands' rangers hope for successful summer for puffin colony Rangers on one of Britain's most important seabird colonies are hoping for a more successful summer after flooding wreaked havoc last year. Thousands of puffins and other birds have returned after winter to the Farne Islands, which sit just off the Northumberland coast. Last year storms and torrential rain flooded a huge number of puffin burrows, causing chick productivity to halve. Puffins on the Farne Islands for the start of the breading season But the team from the National Trust, who look after the islands - which are also home to many other animals such as seals, Arctic terns, guillemots, shags and kittiwakes - are hoping for better luck this year. Ranger Lana Blakely said: "At this time of year we'll see the puffins coming back, it'll gradually build up until we have thousands on the islands like we do now. "They'll come on, clean out burrows, reaffirm their bonds and you'll see a lot of bill clicking, and they'll also go off for days on end feeding. "And as they get closer to their laying date they'll be staying more and more on the islands, getting ready for that time. "Last year we had a lot of storms and torrential downpours and a lot of burrows flooded, which is really bad for the chicks and eggs as it means they will fail. "We had a much lower rate of chicks fledging than we did the previous year, it was nearly half, so quite a big drop. "Hopefully this year will be much better, just fingers crossed with the weather." UK to take in extra 3,000 refugees As many as 3,000 more refugees will be brought to Britain under a new resettlement scheme, the Government has announced. The majority of those arriving over the next four years will be children, with some accompanied by their families or carers. It was billed as the "largest programme in the world" for children from the Middle East and North Africa and is in addition to the commitment to resettle 20,000 Syrians by 2020. The majority of those arriving will be children, with some accompanied by their families or carers However, the move failed to ease pressure on the Government over demands for the UK to give refuge to youngsters who are stranded alone in Europe. Former Labour minister Yvette Cooper said: "This is the same announcement as the Government made back in January and includes nothing new to help the thousands of child refugees alone in Europe who are at risk of trafficking, sexual exploitation and abuse. "As we said at the time, we welcome vital support for children and families at risk in the Middle East and North Africa, but we also cannot turn our backs on the thousands of children who are going missing in Europe because children's homes in Italy and Greece are full, and other countries can't cope with this crisis alone." Lord Dubs, who called for the relocation of 3,000 unaccompanied refugee children to the UK from Europe, welcomed the proposal but vowed to continue pressing the Government for more action. He added: "You also have to wonder whether the use of the '3,000' figure is a deliberate ploy to muddy the debate." The Government described the new scheme as the largest resettlement effort aimed specifically at children at risk from the Middle East and North Africa region. Several hundreds will be resettled over the next year, with up to 3,000 being given refuge over the lifetime of the Parliament. The initiative will not only target unaccompanied children but will be extended to vulnerable children at risk - such as those threatened with child labour, marriage and other forms of abuse or exploitation. It will be open to all at-risk groups and nationalities within the region and will be reviewed after two years. Immigration Minister James Brokenshire said: "The UK Government is committed to providing life-saving support and assistance to the vulnerable children who have been unjustly impacted by this ongoing humanitarian crisis. "We have always been clear that the vast majority of vulnerable children are better off remaining in host countries in the region so they can be reunited with surviving family members. "However, there are exceptional circumstances in which it is in a child's best interests to be resettled in the UK." He said the new scheme complements "ongoing work within Europe to assist vulnerable migrant children". Anne Longfield, Children's Commissioner for England, welcomed the announcement. She added: " Other countries in Europe also need to fulfil their moral and legal responsibilities to child migrants, providing protection and immediate care for children in their countries and helping them to reunite with close family members." David Simmonds, of the Local Government Association, said: "Councils have a strong track record of supporting refugees, including children at risk, travelling alone or those in extended family groups. "It is right that the increased resettlement programme is phased in over time and is subject to review, given the vulnerability of the children councils will be welcoming into their communities. Gangsters smuggled haul of guns from same source as Charlie Hebdo terror attack Gangsters behind Britain's biggest known gun smuggling operation are facing life behind bars for shipping 100,000 of weapons from the same source used in the Charlie Hebdo terror attack Mastermind Harry Shilling bragged "we now officially gangsters" after 22 assault rifles and nine Skorpion sub-machine guns from Eastern Europe sailed up the River Medway from Boulogne in France. The 23-year-old and Michael Defraine, 30, were found guilty of gun smuggling and possessing firearms with intent to endanger life following a trial held at the Old Bailey amid almost unprecedented security. Some of the weapons smuggled into the UK by the gang (National Crime Agency/PA Wire) They will be sentenced along with the rest of the gang, skipper David Payne, 43, Richard Rye, 24, and Christopher Owen, 30, who had already pleaded guilty. John Smale, 58, and Payne's partner Jennifer Arthy, 42, were cleared of the charges they faced. Judge Michael Topolski QC said he will give "serious consideration" for life sentences as he adjourned to a later date. The National Crime Agency (NCA) hailed it as the biggest seizure of these deadly guns on British soil. Although the gang had no connection with terrorism, the source and route of the weapons was the same as those used in the Charlie Hebdo atrocity in Paris just over six months before, the NCA said. The Albernina vessel arrived with the "evil" cargo near Cuxton Marina, outside Rochester in Kent, on August 10 last year. But the NCA had the plotters under surveillance and swooped to seize the deadly cache before it could be buried and then passed into the wrong hands. Prosecutor Duncan Atkinson QC said Shilling masterminded the plan and paid for the guns, with help from his man on the Continent, Defraine, and "loyal lieutenant" and "go-between" Rye. Payne brought the guns into the country on board the Albernina. On arriving back in the UK, Shilling emailed: "We now officially gangsters," and Defraine replied "F***ing nice one". Shilling emailed back: "Hahahaha defo that's sick. Duck and run for cover bitches. We are a firm ant we', and Defraine responded: "Proper heavy and armed to the teeth no one wants beef fam." Shilling also exchanged messages with a mystery contact "B" to arrange the onward supply of the guns. On August 11, Shilling, Defraine and Rye were arrested after visiting DIY store Homebase to buy bags and tools to bury the guns until they were needed. In his defence, Shilling said his long-time friend Rye was the real "puppet master" and he only worked for him collecting and dealing in cannabis. Shilling gave his occupation as a breeder of dogs and game birds. He also had an Emu as a family pet - which had been "arrested" in the past. He denied that an encrypted BlackBerry phone with the incriminating messages on it was his. The prosecution suggested that because Shilling was the boss, the name "Kaiser" on the mobile was a reference to the film character Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects. Like the film character, they said, Shilling acted the fool but was really the mastermind. But Shilling said Kaiser was in fact the name of Rye's dog, backing up his claim that the phone was not his. He said he went to Romania to buy a Caucasian Shepherd puppy called "Misty" and the trip had nothing to do with setting up a guns deal. In turn, Defraine, nicknamed Daffy, denied being Shilling's man on the Continent. He told jurors he worked for Rye buying and selling cars and had planned to set up a new motor dealership in Belgium. On his arrest in the car park of Homebase with the so-called "burial kit", his lawyer David Taylor said he had been "left holding the baby" as Shilling had a "panic attack" and Rye had a "Mac attack" as he darted off to McDonald's. Shilling, from Swanley; Defraine, from Bexleyheath; Smale, from Rochester; and Arthy, who lived with Payne on a houseboat in Cuxton, denied the charges. Rye, Payne and Owen had pleaded guilty to their part in the smuggling conspiracy. Payne and Rye, from Swanley, also admitted conspiracy to supply firearms that would be used by others to endanger life. Following the convictions, Rob Lewin, NCA head of specialist operations, said: "This seizure of automatic weapons was the largest ever made by the NCA - and, we believe, the largest ever on the UK mainland. "These are hugely powerful firearms, and have, as the prosecution stated in court, a 'truly devastating capability'. "We cannot say for certain what the organised crime group would have done with the weapons had they not been stopped. "But the evidence pointed to them not being afraid to use guns themselves to expand their influence. They wanted to move up in the criminal world from regional to international gangsters." Tom Guest, from the Crown Prosecution Service, added: "This was a sophisticated operation involving weapons with a lethal capacity. The CPS built a strong case, working with the NCA, Kent Police and international partners, not only around the organised crime gang's plot to import the weapons - but also about the intentions for their deadly future use. "Each defendant played an important role in this operation and was well aware of the danger of these firearms, and the consequences of their use." Harry Shilling, 23, masterminded the operation and bragged about it as the weapons arrived in the UK (National Crime Agency/PA Wire) Tata Steel: UK willing to take 25% in rescue deal The Government has offered to take a 25% stake in Tata Steel's UK business as part of a package of support worth hundreds of millions of pounds. The money will be made available on commercial terms to potential buyers of the company, the UK and Welsh governments announced. The move was welcomed by industry and union leaders and was viewed as a positive development by sources close to a potential management buyout of the business. The move followed another visit to Mumbai by Business Secretary Sajid Javid Business Secretary Sajid Javid met Tata's chairman Cyrus Mistry in Mumbai on Tuesday where the minister said progress on the sales process had been made. It is expected that all, or the large majority, of the support package, will be through the provision of debt financing. Other options include providing hybrid (convertible debt) or alternative forms of financing and s upporting a purchaser's financing by taking a minority equity stake of up to 25% to support any sale. The Government said it was actively working with Tata Steel and the British Steel Pension Scheme's trustees to find a solution that will help minimise its impact on a potential purchaser, and potentially separate it from the business. Mr Javid said: "This Government is committed to supporting the steel industry to secure a long-term, viable future and we are working closely with Tata Steel UK on its process to find a credible buyer. The detail of our commercial funding offer is clear evidence of the extent of that commitment." First Minister of Wales Carwyn Jones said: "We're committed to supporting any credible bid to secure steel making in Wales. We have worked with the UK Government to put in place this significant package of support and we believe that this will help secure a successful sale of Tata Steel's operations in Wales and the rest of the UK." In addition to the support package, the UK and Welsh governments said they will also be willing to consider additional grant funding support, for example to support the development of power plant infrastructure, energy efficiency and/or environmental protection measures, R&D and training. A management buyout has emerged as a potential saviour of Tata and thousands of jobs which depend on the steel industry. Stuart Wilkie, managing director of Tata's Strip Products, based in Port Talbot in south Wales, has canvassed workers about joining a bid. The investment he is seeking from employees could be as much as 10,000 each, according to sources. Private investors and Government support would also be needed. The Prime Minister's official spokeswoman said the support would come in the form of debt financing. "It would be supporting a potential buyer in order to keep the operation safe. We would work alongside a potential buyer to make sure that the Government is doing what it could to support a viable sale. "If we were to take an extra stake it would be a minority one with the aim of supporting the purchaser in delivering a long term future for the business, we are certainly not seeking to be controlling the company." Asked if it was part-nationalisation, she replied: " I am not sure we would accept the concept of 'part' nationalisation. We will be investing on a commercial basis. We would not see this as nationalisation. We would not be seeking to acquire a control in the business. We don't think that nationalisation is the right answer." Roy Rickhuss, general secretary of the Community union, said: "Today's announcement is a positive step forward. This is a clear commitment to financially assist the UK steel industry as it seeks new ownership. "We welcome the willingness of Government to support debt financing and that they remain open to taking a 25% share in the business." Gareth Stace, director of UK Steel, said: "This is a positive first step which will provide the certainty and continuity that should enable credible investors to come forward and provide a sound future for steel making in the UK." Angela Eagle, shadow business secretary said: "Whether you call this 'co-investment' or part-nationalisation, it is a long-overdue recognition of the need for Government support for the sale process." GMB union national officer Dave Hulse said: "We welcome the announcement that the UK and Welsh Governments are prepared to take a minority equity stake of up to 25%. "This gives us confidence that all credible potential new owners will be encouraged to come forward. 'Large scale' human rights abuses in Yemen, says Foreign Office Human rights violations are taking place in Yemen on a "large scale", the Foreign Office (FCO) has said amid continuing criticism that UK arms are fuelling the country's bloody civil war. In its annual review of human rights around the world, the FCO said the conflict has had a "significant impact" on the civilian population, with the International Committee of the Red Cross warning the suffering had reached "unprecedented levels". The report comes as MPs on the Committees on Arms Export Controls are holding an inquiry into the use of UK-made weapons by the Royal Saudi Air Force which is supporting the Yemeni government in its struggle with the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. Amnesty International campaigners carrying dummy missiles to Downing Street last month to highlight the government's refusal to halt arms exports to Saudi Arabia Campaigners demanding Britain suspends arms sales to Saudi Arabia say thousands of civilians have been killed in Saudi air strikes. In its report, the FCO noted that the overall human rights situation in Yemen "significantly deteriorated" over the course of 2015. "Human rights violations and abuses in Yemen took place on a large scale, including: the use of child soldiers; attacks on journalists and human rights defenders; arbitrary detentions; destruction of civilian infrastructure; damage to Yemen's cultural heritage; and the lack of progress on improving the rights of women," it said. "Internal conflict further impeded the legitimate Yemeni authorities and undermined the protection of universal rights. "Throughout 2015, we raised the importance of respect for human rights law with the coalition, the government of Yemen, and the Houthis. The UK has emphasised repeatedly to all parties, throughout the conflict, the importance of protecting civilians." The report also noted the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia "remained of concern", with a rise in the number of executions from 90 in 2014 to 158 last year. While Britain, together with the EU, had been "vocal" in its opposition to the use of the death penalty while raising the cases of human rights activists faced with execution or flogging with the Saudi authorities. "We continue to believe that raising issues in private is the most effective way of effecting change in this context," the report said. Saudi Arabia and Yemen are among 30 "human rights priority countries" listed in the report which also includes China, which has been heavily wooed by the Government in the hope of building trade and investment. The report said Britain had consistently raised human rights concerns with Beijing "including at the highest levels" and that UK "co-operation" was assessed to have led to a reduction in the numbers of crimes subject to the death penalty as well as greater legal protection for the victims of domestic violence and rape. It added however: "Barriers to achieving our aims included China's reluctance to accept meetings to discuss sensitive issues. Requests for human rights monitoring visits to Tibet were refused." Others on the list include Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya - which have all been subject to UK military intervention - as well as Iran, which has recently signed an international agreement to limit its nuclear programme, and Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Diesel cars 'exceed lab test emissions limits when driven on roads' Diesel cars being sold in the UK emit an average of six times more nitrogen oxide (NOx) in real-world driving than the legal limit used in official tests, according to a Government report. The Department for Transport (DfT) investigation found that all of the 37 top-selling diesel cars tested exceed the legal limit required for laboratory tests when driven for 90 minutes on normal roads. But ministers insisted that no laws had been broken by the manufacturers as they are only required to meet the lab test regulations. The Government set up an inquiry to test diesel emissions The inquiry, which was launched in the wake of the Volkswagen emissions scandal, also revealed the widespread use of systems for preventing engine damage which can lead to higher NOx output in real-world driving when the temperature is lower than during lab tests. Cars meeting Euro 5 standards - which could be sold up to September last year - all had "substantially higher" emissions in real-world conditions than the 180 mg/km limit they had to be under when they passed official tests , according to the study. The Vauxhall Insignia was the worst performer, emitting 1,881 mg/km. Even the best performer, the Citroen C4, was found to emit almost three times the legal lab level. Cars that meet the current Euro 6 standards have a limit of 80 mg/km NOx in the lab, but in real-world driving the average level recorded was more than six times higher. The Peugeot 3008 was found to perform the worst at more than 13 times higher. Real-world driving emissions tests are set to be introduced in the European Union in September 2017 . Regulations are yet to be fully agreed, but it has been proposed that n ew diesel models will initially be allowed to emit up to 2.1 times more NOx than the current lab limit. This is to give manufacturers time to develop ways of cutting emissions and allow a margin for error in the testing equipment. The discrepancy will be reduced to 1.5 by January 2020. A spokesman for the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) said the industry " acknowledges the need for fundamental reform of the current official test regime, which does it no favours". The Government's 1 million investigation found no evidence of car manufacturers other than the Volkswagen Group fitting devices to cheat emissions tests. Transport Minister Robert Goodwill insisted manufacturers "have not done anything illegal" by using engine management systems which reduce emissions in the lab. But on the real-world emissions recorded, he said: "What's been disappointing is the levels of non-compliance have been higher than we'd expected." Mr Goodwill went on: "It's a bit like, you can pass your driving test on the day that you're being very careful but then in the real world it's slightly different. "That's the difficulty that we face." Jim Holder, editorial director of magazines Autocar and What Car?, claimed that even though better testing regulations are being introduced, the report paints legislators and the motor industry in "a very poor light". He said: "They have not maintained the regulations to a satisfactory standard. "For all the rhetoric about improving public health, they have allowed that to be given scant attention for 15 or 20 years. "They're coming in late. They delayed introducing these new regulations. They've introduced them now when they've been forced to. It's a shame they didn't do it before." AA president Edmund King claimed consumers will welcome more accurate data on fuel efficiency and emissions from real-world testing. But environmental group Friends of the Earth claimed the proposed new scheme is "a brazen smokescreen" that is "far weaker" than existing standards. VW admitted last September that 482,000 of its diesel vehicles in the US were fitted with defeat device software to switch engines to a cleaner mode when they were being tested for emissions. The German-based manufacturer announced that some 11 million vehicles were affected worldwide - including almost 1.2 million in the UK. Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin said: "The UK has been leading in Europe in pushing for real-world emissions tests which will address this problem. Philippine army urges no payments to free foreign captives MANILA, April 20 (Reuters) - The Philippines discouraged ransom payments on Wednesday for captives held by Islamist militants in a bid to stop a kidnap "industry" emerging after a series of rebel seizures of Indonesian and Malaysian crew. A Philippine military spokesman was responding to media reports on Tuesday that quoted an Indonesian minister as saying a Taiwan firm would pay to free 10 Indonesians held by Abu Sayyaf rebels. A combined 18 crew from Indonesia and Malaysia have been taken captive in three separate attacks on tugboats in Philippine waters close to maritime borders with the two countries. "The armed forces continues to encourage everyone to observe the government's no ransom policy," Philippine military spokesman Brigadier-General Restituto Padilla told reporters. He said the military wanted to "discourage this kind of growing 'industry'" and cut off funds that would ultimately strengthen the rebels. Indonesia's coordination minister for political, legal and security affairs, Luhut Pandjaitan, was quoted as saying a Taiwan firm was prepared to pay 50 million pesos ($1.08 million) to free a crew held since late March. The Philippines rarely publicises ransom payments and officials sometimes refer to them euphemistically as "board and lodgings". Padilla said there were ongoing military operations to rescue the captives. "The safety of the kidnap victims is our primordial concern," he added. Five other foreign nationals, including two Canadians, are also held on the remote southern island of Jolo, a stronghold of the small but violent al Qaeda-linked group, known for beheading, bombings and extortion. Neil Reeder, Canada's ambassador to the Philippines, expressed serious concern over an Abu Sayyaf threat to behead two of its citizens on April 25 if their families and government failed to pay 300 million pesos for each of them. "We are very, very concerned about the situation of our nationals," Reeder told reporters in Manila. "We are doing our best for their safety and security and we hope that they'll be safe and sound and released very soon." Ecuador to hike taxes, sell assets to fund quake rebuilding By Ana Isabel Martinez and Diego Ore PEDERNALES/QUITO, Ecuador, April 20 (Reuters) - Ecuador will temporarily increase some taxes, sell assets, and may issue new bonds on the international market to fund a multi-billion dollar reconstruction after a devastating 7.8 magnitude quake, a somber President Rafael Correa said on Wednesday. The death toll from Ecuador's weekend earthquake neared 600 and rescue missions ebbed as the traumatized Andean nation braced itself for long and costly rebuilding. "It's hard to imagine the magnitude of the tragedy. Every time we visit a place, there are more problems," Correa said, fresh from touring the disaster zone. The leftist leader estimated the disaster had inflicted $2 billion to $3 billion of damage. Lower oil revenue had already left the poor nation of 16 million people facing near-zero growth and lower investment. In addition to $600 million in credit from multilateral lenders, Correa, an economist, announced a raft of measures to help repair homes, roads, and bridges along the devastated Pacific Coast. "We're looking at the possibility of issuing bonds on the international market," he said on Wednesday afternoon, without providing details. Ecuador had been saying before the quake that current high yields would make it too expensive to issue debt. Yields on its bonds are close to 11 percentage points higher than comparable U.S. Treasury debt, according to JPMorgan data, and creditors are likely to be wary after the quake. Correa's government in 2008 defaulted on debt with a similar yield, calling the value unfair. His government has since returned to Wall Street and Ecuador currently has some $3.5 billion worth of bonds in circulation. In a nationally televised address later on Wednesday, Correa also announced the OPEC nation was poised to shed assets. "The country has many assets thanks to investment over all these years and we will seek to sell some of them to overcome these difficult moments," he said. He also unveiled several short-term tax changes, including a 2-point increase in the Valued Added Tax for a year, as well as a "one-off 3 percent additional contribution on profits," although the fine print was not immediately clear. The VAT tax is currently 12 percent. Additionally, a one-off tax of 0.9 percent will be imposed on people with wealth of over $1 million. Ecuadoreans will also be asked to contribute one day of salary, calculated on a sliding scale based on income. 'FOOD, PLEASE' Briefly pausing talk of reconstruction and hindering rescuers, another quake, of 6.2 magnitude, shook the coast before dawn on Wednesday, terrifying survivors. "You can't imagine what a fright it was. 'Not again!' I thought," said Maria Quinones in Pedernales town, which bore the brunt of Saturday's disaster. That quake, the worst in decades, killed 570 people, injured 7,000 others, damaged close to 2,000 buildings, and forced over 24,000 survivors to seek refuge in shelters, according to government tallies. Four days on, some isolated communities struggled without water, power or transport, as torn-up roads stymied deliveries. Along the coast, stadiums served as morgues and aid distribution centers. "I'm waiting for medicines, diapers for my grandson, we're lacking everything," said Ruth Quiroz, 49, as she waited in an hour-long line in front of a makeshift pharmacy set up at the Pedernales stadium. On a highway outside the town, some children sat holding placards saying: "Food, please." When a truck arrived to deliver water to the small town of San Jacinto, hungry residents surrounded the vehicle and hit it as they yelled: "We want food!" Scores of foreign aid workers and experts have arrived in the aftermath of Saturday's disaster and about 14,000 security personnel have kept order, with only sporadic looting reported. But rescuers were losing hope of finding anyone alive even as relatives of the missing begged them to keep looking. Speaking from the highland capital, Quito, Correa said the death toll would likely rise further, although at a slower rate than in previous days. "May these tears fertilize the soil of the future," he said. Surging U.S. grain futures confuse traders, delight farmers By Tom Polansek CHICAGO, April 20 (Reuters) - A burst of frenetic buying sent U.S. corn and soybean futures sharply higher on Wednesday after months of sluggishness, rewarding farmers with prices they thought were unattainable just weeks ago due to massive crop inventories. But traders said the soybean rally could be short-lived. They cited a sharp jump in the premium of near-term contracts over those for later delivery. Searching for reasons behind the surge, traders pointed to a host of factors, including an influx of money from commodity funds and exporters looking for alternatives to South American supplies that may not be available. The buying represents a "fund-money freight train," said Angie Setzer, vice president of grain for Citizens LLC. "A lot of the fundamentalists, who I still think will be right in the long run, have gotten chewed up in the short run," said David Durra, an independent grain trader and analyst with AgSpread Analytics. The July soybean contract reached the highest level for a most-active contract since last summer, in record volume at the Chicago Board of Trade and topped $10 a bushel, a price target farmers have been lusting after for months. July corn touched the highest level for a most-active contract since August, topping a sought-after target of $4 a bushel. Traders estimated commodity funds were net buyers of 17,000 to 45,000 contracts of corn and 18,000 to 30,000 contracts of soybeans, by far exceeding their activity on typical days. The markets had been range bound for months with the world awash in crops and U.S. export demand weak due to competition from shippers in South America, who gain an advantage from the dollar's strength. But unfavorable rains on Argentina's crops and political uncertainty in Brazil stemming from President Dilma Rousseff's potential impeachment have fueled expectations that some export business will shift to the United States, traders said. "Word's out on the street that South America may be caught short," said Tom Grisafi, broker for Advance Trading. "Right now they might have commitments sold that they can't meet, and that's creating a massive panic in the market." The May and July soybean contracts each surged more than 20 cents, suggesting strong demand for immediate supplies. The November contract, which reflects the autumn U.S. harvest, rose only 3-3/4 cents, indicating less concern for stockpiles later this year. The July-November soybean spread <_1SN6-X6> shot up 21-3/4 cents, for its biggest daily spike in 10 months. For farmers, the rallies have provided an unexpected opportunity to sell grain they've kept in storage for months. Three dead, dozens injured in blast at chemical plant in Mexico MEXICO CITY, April 20 (Reuters) - A massive explosion rocked a major petrochemical facility of Mexican national oil company Pemex in the Gulf state of Veracruz on Wednesday, killing at least three people, injuring dozens more, and pumping a cloud of noxious chemicals into the sky. Luis Felipe Puente, head of federal emergency services, told Reuters that three people had died in the blast. Pemex confirmed that three of its workers had died, and said another 136 were injured, of which 88 were still in the hospital. The firm said the explosion, which sent a huge, dark plume of smoke billowing upwards, occurred just after 3 p.m. (2000 GMT) at the facility's chlorinate 3 plant near the port of Coatzacoalcos, one of the company's top oil export hubs. Local emergency officials said hundreds of people had been evacuated from the site. Television footage showed an initial burst of flames followed by a tower of thick smoke. A company official said local oil exports were unaffected. What caused the blast was unclear, but Pemex initially warned local residents to keep away from the site due to what it described as a dissipating cloud of toxic fumes. TV footage showed rain clouds gathering above the plant as evening fell. "The current situation at the plant... is under control and there is no risk to the population," Pemex said later in the evening on its official Twitter account. Pemex Chief Executive Jose Antonio Gonzalez traveled to Coatzacoalcos late on Wednesday to oversee the response. Petroquimica Mexicana de Vinilo, or PMV, a vinyl petrochemical plant that is a joint venture between Pemex's petrochemical unit and Mexican plastic pipe maker Mexichem was the facility hit by the blast. Operated by Mexichem, the plant lies within Pemex's larger Pajaritos petrochemical complex. Mexichem said in a statement the explosion occurred in an ethylene unit at the plant. The company could not be immediately reached for further comment. In February, a fire killed a worker at the PMV plant, which makes vinyl chloride monomer, also known as chloroethene, an industrial chemical used to produce plastic piping. The incident occurred just weeks after three workers were killed and seven injured when a fire broke out on a Pemex oil-processing platform in the Gulf of Mexico. It also came as Pemex implements deep cost cuts to cope with the rout in oil prices, and seeks to stem a slide in output. Mexico is in the midst of a historic push to lure private investors to revive its oil industry. Pemex, which enjoyed a decades-long monopoly over Mexico's oil and gas industry until an energy reform opened up the sector in 2014, has experienced a series of high-profile accidents. In 2013, at least 37 people were killed by a blast at its Mexico City headquarters, and 26 people died in a fire at a Pemex natural gas facility in northern Mexico in September 2012. A 2015 fire at its Abkatun Permanente platform in the oil-rich Bay of Campeche affected oil output and cost the company up to $780 million. Chicago financing plan for 'Star Wars' museum draws mixed reviews CHICAGO, April 20 (Reuters) - Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's proposal to fold financing for a museum sought by "Star Wars" filmmaker George Lucas into a redo of the city's massive convention center got mixed reviews from U.S. municipal bond market on Wednesday. The proposal, which surfaced on Monday, calls for $1.5 billion of tax-exempt revenue bonds issued by the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority and the extension of existing so-called tourism taxes on hotel rooms, rental cars, restaurant meals and airport taxi rides to pay off the debt over 40 years. About $1.16 billion would be used to raze part of the McCormick Place convention center to make room for and build the museum and replace the lost exhibition space. Lucas, whose museum would showcase his collection of paintings, illustrations and digital art, would contribute $743 million to cover interest payments on the bonds, according to Richard Oldshue, the authority's chief financial officer. Illinois' fiscal and political woes, which pushed the credit ratings on $3 billion of existing McCormick Place bonds into the low-investment grade level of triple-B last year, could taint the new bonds. "The market can't trust the state to do the right thing and as such they will levy a pretty significant penalty before buying these bonds," said Nicholos Venditti, a portfolio manager at Thornburg Investment Management in Santa Fe. Illinois' fiscal 2016 budget impasse led to a technical default on McCormick Place bonds last year because there was no state appropriation to transfer tax revenue to the bond trustee for required monthly debt service deposits. Legislation appropriating the tax revenue subsequently passed, ending the default. John Miller, co-head of fixed income at Chicago-based Nuveen Asset Management, said going forward, the state has no incentive not to appropriate for McCormick Place bonds. "I don't think anybody could or should view a McCormick Place renovation and a Lucas Museum as a partisan issue. It's an opportunity," he said, adding that the taxes paying off current bonds have been growing. Still, Venditti questioned how the state could approve the museum plan instead of tackling its growing public pension costs, a structural budget deficit and the severe financial problems of the Chicago Public Schools. "If I lived in Chicago, this proposal would drive me insane," he said. Venezuela indicts businessman implicated in Panama Papers CARACAS, April 20 (Reuters) - Venezuelan prosecutors have indicted local businessman Josmel Velasquez on charges of money laundering and criminal association as part of an investigation that followed local media reports on the leaked Panama Papers. Local website Armando.info reported this month that Velasquez's brother Adrian, a former aide to late President Hugo Chavez, had opened a shell company in the Republic of the Seychelles with $50,000. The report was based on the documents leaked from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. Prosecutors detained Josmel Velasquez and his mother Amelis Figueroa on Friday at an airport outside Caracas as they were attempting to leave the country, the chief prosecutor's office said in a statement. Raids on family properties had turned up luxury cars, motorcycles and diamond certificates, the statement said. Reuters was unable to immediately obtain comment from the Velasquez family. Rice sculpture: Taiwan artist gets granular with president elect TAIPEI, April 21 (Reuters) - A Taiwan artist has refused to see the big picture and instead captured the likeness of president-elect Tsai Ing-wen, to celebrate her inauguration next month, on a single grain of rice. Chen Forng-Shean, who has also sculpted the face of China's late Chairman Mao Zedong on rice, said the staple was a fitting medium for his work because it met the basic needs of ethnic Chinese. "Rice gives nourishment to the proverbial belly of the ethnic Chinese people. I used rice (as a medium) to encourage Taiwan's leader, Tsai Ing-wen, hoping that she can take care of the common people, so they don't need to endure hunger, and improve their financial situation," he said. He outlined the facial features and accompanying Chinese characters with a needle-point pen on to the surface before carving and then dabbing black paint into the grooves. It took three months and more than 10 tries to get the sculpture to Chen's satisfaction. Visitors to his cluttered workshop near the capital Taipei can view more than 150 of his works using a magnifying glass. Chen reminded Tsai, who takes office on May 20, that she pledged in her acceptance speech in January to work for the people of Taiwan. Crude oil prices fall as major producers hint at output hike By Henning Gloystein SINGAPORE, April 21 (Reuters) - Crude prices fell early on Thursday as concerns over a global glut took centre stage after Russia and Iran said they were ready to raise oil production further, while inventories in the United States climbed slightly. The International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Thursday that oil markets would likely take until 2017 to rebalance and that even that was provided there was no major economic slowdown. International Brent crude futures were trading at $45.36 per barrel at 0048 GMT, down 44 cents from their last settlement. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were down 40 cents at $43.78 a barrel after the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said that crude stocks rose slightly, by 2.1 million barrels last week. Russia said on Wednesday it was prepared to push oil production to historic highs, just days after a global deal to freeze output levels collapsed and Saudi Arabia threatened to flood markets with more crude. Energy Minister Alexander Novak said Russia was "in theory" able to raise production to 12 million or even 13 million barrels per day (bpd) from current record levels of close to 11 million bpd. Meanwhile, Iran, determined to regain market share following the lifting of international sanctions last January, reiterated its intention to reach output of 4 million bpd as soon as possible. With major producers in the Middle East and Russia seemingly racing to raise production, much will depend on U.S. shale drillers and demand to determine how long the global glut lasts which sees between 1 million and 2 million barrels of crude pumped every day in excess of demand. "Any hope of market re-balancing from the current surplus in supply (lies) on the predicted decline in U.S. oil production," French bank BNP Paribas said. IEA chief Fatih Birol said on Thursday he expected the oil market to come back into balance from oversupply by next year, although he warned that this was provided there were no major economic shocks. Speaking in Japan, Birol said the IEA expects non-OPEC oil production to fall by about 700,000 bpd this year. Mitsubishi Motors shares dive, Japan officials raid facility By Chang-Ran Kim TOKYO, April 21 (Reuters) - Japanese officials raided a facility belonging to Mitsubishi Motors Corp on Thursday after the carmaker admitted to overstating the fuel efficiency of 625,000 cars, a revelation that has sent its shares into a tailspin. A spokeswoman for the company said the raid by members of Japan's Transport Ministry at a plant in the central Japanese city of Okazaki would continue on Friday. Earlier on Thursday, Mitsubishi shares slid for a second straight day, hitting a record low amid concerns about the potential cost of compensation and fines from the biggest scandal to hit the company since a defect cover-up a decade ago. The stock has lost a third of its market value, or $2.5 billion, in the last two days. The problem, which the government has called "extremely serious", came to light after Nissan Motor, which markets a model made by Mitsubishi, found a discrepancy in fuel efficiency test data. It affects two models - Mitsubishi's eK mini-wagon and Nissan's Dayz, with both automakers saying they will halt sales of the vehicles. JPMorgan auto analyst Akira Kishimoto estimated the cheating could cost Mitsubishi more than 50 billion yen ($450 million), including payments to consumers, the cost of replacing parts and compensation to Nissan. And while Mitsubishi said the cars were sold only in Japan, the impact could be felt further afield. "In addition to the costs of the scandal, the secondary effects on worldwide sales could be very large," Kishimoto wrote in a client note, adding the automaker has tied its brand to environmentally friendly technology with its fuel-sipping, plug-in hybrids and fully electric vehicles. The cheating follows a cover-up scandal that brought Mitsubishi close to collapse about a decade ago, when the automaker admitted to systematically concealing defects over decades. It was Japan's worst automotive recall scandal at the time. On Thursday, Mitsubishi Motors shares were untraded for the whole day as they were swamped with sell orders prompted by the bad news. Tokyo stock exchange rules do not allow trades when there is a large imbalance in buy and sell orders, but shares close at their last indicated price. The Transport Ministry has ordered the company to submit a full report on test manipulation within a week. "We want the whole picture of the misconduct clarified as soon as possible, and want a strict response and the safety of automobiles to be ensured," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, the government's top spokesman, told a news conference. The ministry has also ordered Japanese automakers to submit fuel economy test data by May 18. Mitsubishi, which has annual sales of just over 1 million cars, is the first Japanese automaker to report misconduct involving fuel economy tests since Volkswagen AG was found last year to have cheated in diesel emissions tests in the United States and elsewhere. People briefed on the matter told Reuters that Volkswagen and U.S. officials had reached a framework deal under which the automaker would offer to buy back almost 500,000 diesel cars that used sophisticated software to evade U.S. emission rules. South Korean car maker Hyundai Motor Co and affiliate Kia Motors Corp in 2014 agreed to pay $350 million in penalties to the U.S. government for overstating their vehicles' fuel economy ratings. China eyes deeper military ties with Afghanistan By Ben Blanchard BEIJING, April 21 (Reuters) - China wants to have deeper military ties with Afghanistan, including counter-terrorism intelligence cooperation and joint drills, a senior Chinese officer told a visiting Afghan envoy. China is working with Pakistan and the United States to broker peace talks to end a Taliban insurgency that has raged for 15 years in Afghanistan, but last month the militants refused to take part. The U.S.-led NATO mission ceased combat operations at the end of 2014, and has withdrawn most of its forces. China says it does not seek to fill a void left by their withdrawal. But, it has promised to play a "huge" commercial role in helping rebuild the country, where the Taliban seek to re-establish their Islamist regime. China is very nervous at the prospect Islamist militants from its restive far western region of Xinjiang getting support from the Taliban and other groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan and central Asia. Fang Fenghui, a member of the powerful Central Military Commission which controls China's armed forces, told Mohammad Hanif Atmar, the Afghan president's national security advisor that their two armed forces had always had good relations, China's Defence Ministry said late on Wednesday. China is willing to "deepen counter-terrorism intelligence, joint drills, personnel training and other areas of practical cooperation", the ministry cited Fang as saying. China wants to promote a regional counter-terrorism mechanism to "jointly protect regional peace, stability and development", he added. Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which prizes its long-time alliance with China, have been fraught with mistrust in the past. For year, Afghan leaders repeatedly accused Pakistan of harbouring Taliban militants and covertly supporting their cohorts. But, the Taliban's recent refusal to join a peace process and ongoing offensive has raised doubts over how much influence Islamabad still exerts over the militants. Atmar told Fang Afghanistan was willing to work with China to fight terrorism, and explained the Afghan role in combatting the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which Beijing blames for much of the violence in Xinjiang, the ministry said. China's official Xinhua news agency said Atmar also met China's domestic security chief Meng Jianzhu, where they discussed counter-terrorism too. China's vice president last year pledged infrastructure and security support for Afghanistan, signing several deals during a rare high-level Chinese visit to Kabul. China has become increasingly concerned about what it calls extremists and separatists Xinjiang, where violence has killed hundreds in recent years, and sees security in Afghanistan as key to stability at home. Vietnam coffee exports could drop 25 pct in 2016 -industry official By Ho Binh Minh HANOI, April 21 (Reuters) - Vietnam's coffee exports could fall 25 percent in 2016 to their lowest in a decade at 1 million tonnes (16.67 million 60-kg bags), hit by drought, lower yields from old trees and increased output from domestic roasters, a senior industry official said. Tighter supply from Vietnam, the world's largest producer of robusta beans, coupled with concerns over lower output in Brazil and Colombia, could boost global coffee prices. ICE July robustas settled up $13, or 0.8 percent, at $1,578 per tonne on Wednesday. The contract has gained around 3 percent so far this year. "Coffee processing in the country serving a higher number of coffee shops, plus more newly registered roasting businesses, will bring down the country's coffee bean exports," said Luong Van Tu, chairman of the Vietnam Coffee and Cocoa Association. He added that local consumption now accounted for 10 percent of Vietnam's output, up from 5 percent in 2006, when the Southeast Asian nation exported 981,000 tonnes of coffee. Apart from domestic roasters, foreign firms including Nestle have established processing facilities in Vietnam. Nestle alone buys up to a quarter of Vietnam's coffee. Farmers in the Central Highlands coffee belt have been hit by the widening impact of the worst drought in three decades brought on by the El Nino weather pattern. The October 2016/September 2017 coffee crop could drop 30 percent if the drought intensifies in the Central Highlands during April, Tu told Reuters. The region produces 80 percent of the country's coffee. Output from the key growing province of Daklak is expected to drop 30 percent. Tu said lower yields from old trees, which account for 35 percent of Vietnam's 650,000 hectares of coffee, will contribute to the decline in output. Dryness brought on by El Nino could also cut supply from Colombia in the second half of 2016, the International Coffee Organization said in its March report. "Drought is also affecting supply expectations in Vietnam and (the state of) Espirito Santo in Brazil, which could lend support to robusta prices in the near future," the report said. China jails man for espionage over islets disputed with Japan BEIJING, April 21 (Reuters) - China has jailed for seven years a man who gave information to an unnamed foreign power about Chinese military and other ships patrolling islets in the East China Sea disputed with Japan, state media said. The man, named as Chen Wei from the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang, was recruited while working overseas, state television said late on Wednesday, in its second report this week on people jailed for security-related crimes. Chen's recruiter, Ji Tian, whose nationality was not specified, roped him in by initially feigning an interest in Christianity and saying he also wanted to learn Chinese, the report said. Ji used their growing friendship to ask Chen to take pictures of harbours in Zhejiang - which lies close to the disputed and uninhabited islands, called the Diaoyu in China and Senkaku in Japan. Chen was caught in December 2013 after taking pictures of a military base and sentenced to seven years in jail, state television said. The report did not say when he was sentenced. China's state secrets law is notoriously broad, covering everything from industry data to the exact birth dates of state leaders. Information can also be labelled a state secret retroactively. President Xi Jinping has overseen a sweeping revamp of China's security apparatus, aimed at combating both domestic and foreign threats. Japan's Abe makes offering at shrine to war dead, prompting China rebuke TOKYO, April 21 (Reuters) - Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Thursday sent a ritual offering to a controversial Tokyo shrine for war dead, prompting China to urge it to "deeply reflect on its invasion history", as the Asian neighbours prepare for a meeting to help smooth ties. Chinese ties with Japan have long been strained by what Beijing see as Japanese leaders' reluctance to atone for the country's wartime past. China and South Korea suffered under Japan's sometimes brutal occupation and colonial rule before Tokyo's defeat in 1945. Abe's spring festival offering of a "masakaki" ceremonial tree at the Yasukuni shrine, which some see as a symbol of Japanese militarism in World War Two as it honours convicted war criminals among other war dead, comes as Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida prepares to visit Beijing. Kishida is likely to meet Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on April 30 in a bid to ease friction over issues such as sovereignty disputes over the South China Sea, Japanese media have said. "I am aware that the prime minister sent a 'masakaki' offering," chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga told a news conference. "He did it as a private person and did not use public funds." Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said the shrine consecrates war criminals. "We urge Japan to honestly and deeply reflect on its invasion history, demarcate a complete boundary on militarism, and take practical actions to win back the trust of its Asian neighbours and the international community," she told a daily news briefing. Seiichi Eto, a special advisor to Abe, visited the shrine on Thursday, Japanese media said. Other lawmakers are expected to pay their respects there on Friday. Abe's offering at Yasukuni, where 14 leaders convicted as war criminals by an Allied tribunal are honoured with war dead, treads a fine line between the demands of conservative allies that he visit the shrine in person and a desire to avoid the diplomatic furore that would result if he attended the festival. Japan hosts the Group of Seven (G7) leaders summit next month, and Abe is eager to put his best foot forward, particularly ahead of an election in July. His last visit to Yasukuni, in December 2013, angered China and South Korea and provoked rare criticism from key ally the United States. China to launch "core module" for space station around 2018 By Ben Blanchard BEIJING, April 21 (Reuters) - China will launch a "core module" for its first space station some time around 2018, a senior official told the state-run Xinhua news agency on Thursday, part of a plan to have a permanent manned space station in service around 2022. Advancing China's space programme is a priority for Beijing, with President Xi Jinping calling for the country to establish itself as a space power, and apart from its civilian ambitions Beijing has tested anti-satellite missiles. China insists its space programme is for peaceful purposes, but the U.S. Defense Department has highlighted its increasing space capabilities, saying it was pursuing activities aimed to prevent adversaries from using space-based assets in a crisis. The "core module" for the space station would be called the "Tianhe-1", the Chinese word for galaxy or Milky Way, Wang Zhongyang, spokesman for the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp, told Xinhua. "Two space labs will be launched later and dock with the core module, Tianhe-1," he said. "The construction of the space station is expected to finish in 2022." It gave no details of what the "core module" would consist. "If the International Space Station, which has extended its service, is retired by 2024, China's new space station will be the only operational one in outer space," Wang added. In a manned space mission in 2013, three Chinese astronauts spent 15 days in orbit and docked with an experimental space laboratory, the Tiangong (Heavenly Palace) 1. This year, China will launch the Tiangong 2 and Shenzhou 11 spacecraft, which will carry two astronauts and dock with Tiangong 2, Xinhua added. Next year, China's first cargo ship, Tianzhou 1, will attempt to dock with Tiangong 2, it said. China also plans a space telescope similar to the Hubble Space Telescope, which will "be on a separate space unit and share orbit alongside the space station", Wang added. Xinhua, in a separate report, said China was also working on its own reusable rocket technologies and has already built a prototype model. "The experiment has laid solid foundation for the realisation of reusable rockets in the country," an unnamed source told Xinhua. China has been moving to develop its space programme for military, commercial and scientific purposes, but is still playing catch-up to established space powers the United States and Russia. China's Jade Rabbit moon rover landed on the moon in late 2013 to great national fanfare, but soon began experiencing severe technical difficulties. Oil down 3 pct; producers hint of more output add to glut worry By Barani Krishnan and Sarah McFarlane NEW YORK/LONDON, April 21 (Reuters) - Oil prices fell 3 percent on Thursday, pausing after a two-day rally, after producers from Russia to Saudi Arabia and Iran to Libya hinted at more output amid growing U.S. crude stockpiles. Profit-taking and the dollar's steadying from a slide earlier in the week also weighed on crude futures. Oil markets rose initially when the International Energy Agency, an energy watchdog for the Western world, said non-OPEC production would fall this year by the most in a generation. IEA chief Fatih Birol said low oil prices had cut investment by about 40 percent in the past two years, with sharp falls in the United States, Canada, Latin America and Russia. But as the session progressed, Russia and major producers in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)indicated they will raise output, extending their fallout from the weekend meeting in Doha, Qatar, where they could not agree to a production freeze. The hints at higher production came on top of data from market intelligence firm Genscape that suggested a build-up of more than 840,000 barrels in U.S. crude at the Cushing, Oklahoma, delivery point in the four days to April 19. Even so, Russian Deputy Energy Minister Kirill Molodtsov said on Thursday that a new initiative for an oil output freeze was likely to emerge in a couple of weeks. OPEC's meeting in June will also focus on such cooperation, senior Saudi oil advisor Ibrahim al-Muhanna said on Thursday. That led some analysts to be cautious on calling for steeper price slides. "We see a high probability of fresh highs within the next couple of sessions given an impressive trade this week that has seen the complex shrug off some significant bearish headlines," said Jim Ritterbusch of Chicago-based oil markets consultancy Ritterbusch & Associates. Brent crude settled down $1.27, or 2.8 percent, at $44.53 a barrel. It had gained 7 percent in two previous sessions. U.S. crude's West Texas Intermediate (WTI) slid $1 to $43.18. Despite Thursday's slide, Brent and WTI are up about 70 percent from multi-year lows hit between January and February. "Should we really be at $43 on a WTI basis? Because the closer we get to $45 mark ..., the more you're going to throw a lifeline to U.S. shale producers," said Harry Tchilinguirian, global head of commodity strategy at BNP Paribas. Poland - Factors to Watch April 21 Following are news stories, press reports and events to watch that may affect Poland's financial markets on Thursday. ALL TIMES GMT (Poland: GMT + 2 hours): PKN ORLEN Poland's top refiner PKN Orlen reported on Thursday a 55-percent fall in its first quarter net profit, which came well below forecasts as analysts underestimated the negative impact of an oil price slump and the Polish zloty strengthening. CENTRAL BANK The central bank is to publish minutes from its April meeting at 1200 GMT. DEBT TENDER Poland to hold bond tender, at which it will offer to sell bonds worth 5-8 billion zlotys. COAL Poland's efforts to agree a debt-for-equity swap with creditors to rescue troubled miner Kompania Weglowa (KW) have run into opposition from private lenders involved in the discussions, three sources said on Wednesday. KOMPANIA WEGLOWA Next Tuesday will see a formal launch of a new entity called PGG, with three state-run utilities as investors, where 11 coal mines and 4 production facilities owned now by the troubled Kompania Weglowa will be transferred, Parkiet daily said. CREDIT SUISSE Credit Suisse is planning to open a new office in Warsaw with a headcount of 1,000 people, Puls Biznesu daily said quoting a statement on the lenders' website. MONETARY POLICY The monetary policy run by Poland's central bank is conservative, Puls Biznesu quoted the bank's board member Adam Glapinski, who is to become central bank governor in June, as saying. ****Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.**** Czech Republic - Factors To Watch on April 21 PRAGUE, April 21 (Reuters) - Here are news stories, press reports and events to watch which may affect Czech financial markets on Thursday. ALL TIMES GMT (Czech Republic: GMT + 2 hours) ===========================ECONOMIC DATA======================== Real-time economic data releases................... Previous stories on Czech data............ Overview of economic data and forecasts......... Updates on CEE currencies........................... ] ==========================EVENTS================================ PRAGUE - Auction of 13-week T-bill. Related news: PRAGUE - Downstream oil group Unipetrol to hold news conference on first-quarter earnings. Related news: ==========================NEWS================================== UNIPETROL: Czech downstream oil group Unipetrol will delay the re-launch of its damaged steam cracker by about a month, planning to start the unit in August at 80 percent capacity, it said on Thursday. Story: Related stories: RUSNOK: Czech central banker Jiri Rusnok reiterated the likely exit from the bank's FX policy was seen in mid-2017 Story: Related stories: SKODA WAGES: Unions at Skoda Auto, the Czech unit of Volkswagen AG VOWG.DE, approved on Wednesday an agreement with management on wage hikes for the next two years, the union chief said in a union newsletter. Story: Related stories: CEE MARKETS: Central European assets mostly retreated on Wednesday as crude prices fell, leading investors to avoid risk and take profits in the region's markets. Story: Related stories: ---------------------- MARKET SNAPSHOT ------------------------ Index/Crown Currency Latest Prev Pct change Pct change close on day in 2016 vs Euro 27.005 27.003 -0.01 -0.03 vs Dollar 23.914 23.754 -0.67 3.81 Czech Equities 916.94 916.94 0.19 -4.12 U.S. Equities 18,096.27 18,053.6 0.24 3.85 Pvs close or current levels vs prior domestic close at 1500 GMT ========================PRESS DIGEST============================ GAS: Gas pipeline operator Net4Gas reported 10 percent lower profit last year, down to 2.76 billion crowns, on 12.5 percent higher revenue. Hospodarske Noviny, page 14 Reuters has not verified the stories, nor does it vouch for their accuracy. For Instant Views of key economic data click on For summary of economic data and forecasts For diary of forthcoming Czech events For calendar of east European economic indicators TOP NEWS -- Emerging markets TOP NEWS -- Convergence watch For an economic indicator diary for the euro zone, the United States and other Group of Seven countries see For real-time stock market index quotes click in brackets: Warsaw WIG20 Budapest BUX Prague PX Prague Newsroom: +420 224 190 477 E-mail: prague.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (Reporting by Prague Newsroom) Taiwan, in flip-flop, detains suspects in China-linked telecoms scam TAIPEI, April 21 (Reuters) - Taiwan prosecutors angered China over the weekend by freeing 20 Taiwanese suspected of defrauding Chinese nationals in a telecoms scam but on Thursday changed their minds, taking most of them into custody on suspicion of committing "serious crime". The move came as island officials are in Beijing this week to negotiate the return of 45 of its citizens who were forcibly sent to China from Kenya and linked to a similar telephone fraud case abroad against Chinese nationals. Taiwan at the time accused China of kidnapping the suspects. China has since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949 regarded self-ruled Taiwan as a breakaway province, to be taken back by force if necessary should it make moves towards independence. Since Tsai Ing-wen and her independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party won Taiwan's presidential and parliamentary elections by a landslide in January, Beijing has been stepping up pressure on the self-ruled island. Taiwan authorities had said they had requested evidence from China ahead of the arrival of the 20 Taiwanese deported on Friday from Malaysia, but no information was provided. Hong Chia-juan, a chief prosecutor in the Taichung District Prosecutors Office, said Thursday's move came after visual evidence gathered from Malaysian authorities gave his team the evidence they needed to detain most of the individuals for at least two months for investigation. Two of the suspects were under effective house arrest with their movements limited, Hong said. PRESS DIGEST - Bulgaria - April 21 SOFIA, April 21 (Reuters) - These are some of the main stories in Bulgarian newspapers on Thursday. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy. -- The director of the fund for treating of ill children abroad and another seven employees were arrested on suspicions of bribe taking and corruption. The health ministry dismissed the director after the arrest. (24 Chasa, Trud, Monitor, Sega, Capital Daily, Duma, Standart) -- The head of the nationalist Attack party reached an agreement with the prosecution and was sentenced to probation for a brawl at the Varna airport in 2014. (24 Chasa, Duma, Monitor, Trud) -- The minimum monthly wage will increase to 460 levs ($265.67) as of next year, the three-year budget forecast of the finance ministry showed. (24 Chasa, Sega) -- Bulgaria dropped to 113th position in the Reporters Without Borders' list on media freedom of 180 countries and became the worst performing EU member state in terms of media freedom. (Duma, Capital Daily, Sega) -- Bulgarian truck drivers plan to block the Bulgarian-Greek border on pending east Orthodox Easter holidays to retaliate the Greek farmers who kept the border blocked for over two weeks in the winter, the head of Bulgarian truck drivers association said.(Standart, Duma, 24 Chasa, Capital Daily, Trud) Engineering firm Arcadis' Q1 core earnings hurt by Brazil recession By Toby Sterling AMSTERDAM, April 21 (Reuters) - Dutch engineering company Arcadis posted a 9 percent fall in first-quarter core earnings to 46.6 million euros ($52.6 million) and warned of continuing difficult business conditions in North America and in emerging markets. Analysts polled for Reuters had expected the company to make first-quarter earnings before interest, taxes and amortisation (EBITA) of 50.9 million euros. "The deep recession in Brazil drove revenues lower and impacted our overall results," Chief Executive Neil McArthur said in a statement. "In North America, we saw increased competition with related price pressure, especially in the Environment business." It warned in February that it expected difficult conditions in North America, which contributes almost half of its revenue. However, European markets continued to strengthen. It said its 2016 priorities are improving operating earnings and delivering a strong free cash flow, barring unforeseen circumstances. Arcadis also said an internal investigation into possible fraud at a Brazilian water management project found no evidence of any wrongdoing on its part. In December, the company said it was cooperating with Brazilian police as part of an investigation into suspected misuse of funds at a $6.4 billion water management project in northern Brazil. Arcadis' offices were raided but it has not been charged or named as a suspect. It said on Thursday it had widened its own investigation to look at how it handles several other Brazilian projects. Indonesia fears piracy surge could turn regional waters into 'new Somalia' By Kanupriya Kapoor JAKARTA, April 21 (Reuters) - Indonesia fears piracy on a busy shipping route along its maritime border with the Philippines could hit levels seen in Somalia unless security is tightened, the chief security minister said on Thursday, following a spate of kidnappings. The waters form part of major shipping arteries that carry $40 billion worth of cargo a year, analysts say, and the corridor is used by fully laden supertankers from the Indian Ocean that cannot use the crowded Malacca Strait waterway. A total of 18 Indonesians and Malaysians have been taken captive in three separate attacks on tugboats in Philippine waters along the route, by groups suspected of ties to the al-Qaeda linked Abu Sayyaf militant network in the Philippines. Abu Sayyaf, a group known for kidnappings, beheadings, bombings and extortion, has demanded 50 million pesos ($1.1 million) to free the Indonesian crew. "We don't want to see this become a new Somalia," Indonesian chief security minister Luhut Pandjaitan told reporters, referring to the southern Philippine waters of the Sulu Sea, where the abductions took place. Piracy near Somalia's coast has largely subsided in the past few years, mainly due to shipping firms hiring private security details and the presence of international warships. The foreign ministers of Malaysia and the Philippines will meet their Indonesian counterpart in Jakarta to discuss the possibility of "joint patrols in order to secure the passage from Indonesia to the Philippines," Pandjaitan said. He did not give a date for the meeting, although he added that armed forces chiefs of the three countries would also meet in Jakarta on May 3. Indonesian security and transport officials met on Thursday to discuss stepping up security in the area. The Kuala Lumpur-based Piracy Reporting Centre this week warned all vessels sailing in the Celebes Sea and northeast of the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo to stay clear of small suspicious vessels. For the first time, the rising tide of maritime attacks by suspected Islamist militants is disrupting coal trade between the southeast Asian neighbours. Indonesia, the world's largest thermal coal exporter, supplies 70 percent of the Philippines' coal import needs. But as security concerns rise, authorities at several Indonesian coal ports have blocked further departures of ships for the Philippines, threatening the shipment schedules of some of the country's top producers. "The Indonesians' move to ban coal shipments are their own domestic actions, thus it's their prerogative," said a spokeswoman for the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia (ReCAAP). The government-to-government group based in Singapore, which cooperates on anti-piracy issues, is in touch with Malaysia and the Philippines on the hijackings, she added. In a bid to stop a kidnap "industry" from emerging, the Philippines military has urged the shipping companies involved not to pay ransoms for captives held by Islamist militants. The last outbreak of Somali piracy, at the end of the previous decade, cost the world's shipping industry billions of dollars as pirates paralyzed shipping lanes, kidnapped hundreds of seafarers and seized vessels more than 1,000 miles from Somalia's coastline. Italy's struggling Vicenza bank hit by $1.9 bln legal threat By Francesca Landini and Stephen Jewkes MILAN, April 21 (Reuters) - Banca Popolare di Vicenza faces legal claims of up to 1.65 billion euros ($1.9 billion) from clients who allege they were mislead into buying its shares, potentially undermining a state-backed rescue of the loss-making bank. Italy's eighth-largest bank revealed the legal risks on Thursday in a 950-page prospectus for its initial public offering, aimed at raising money to shore up its balance sheet. The share sale has become a test of confidence in Italy's banking sector, the fourth largest in the euro zone. Italy is saddled with 360 billion euros in bad debts, a third of the euro zone's total, and there had been fears that a failure of the Vicenza IPO would trigger a sector-wide crisis. Vicenza's share sale is underwritten by Italy's new bank bailout fund, Atlante, created this month to boost confidence in the country's banks. European Central Bank President Mario Draghi said on Thursday the fund was a "small step" in the right direction. But the legal claims facing Vicenza, based in the picturesque northern Italian city of the same name, threaten to eat into the 1.76 billion euros it plans to raise in its IPO. The bank also said in the prospectus it had suffered deposit outflows in March and was heavily dependent on funding from other banks to keep its liquidity above regulatory requirements. Many of Vicenza's 119,000 shareholders are its depositors and borrowers who also bought its shares. Some allege in civil lawsuits the bank compelled them to buy shares as a condition for securing loans. Vicenza has said it is fully cooperating with authorities investigating the complaints. A bank spokeswoman said on Thursday it had already made an offer to discuss the claims with aggrieved clients. Fabrizio Bernardi, an analyst at broker Fidentiis, said the Atlante bailout fund may end up with nearly 100 percent of the bank if, as expected, the issue fails to attract investors. "We see little or no chances that this capital increase may be successful," he said. "We see large room for risks: key problems may arise from lawsuits ... We also believe Vicenza will need time to bring back its own credibility in order to regain the trust of its client base. The pain may not be over." The IPO, expected to be priced at around 10 euro cents per share, will effectively wipe out the savings of thousands of Italians, mostly from Vicenza's home region where the 150-year-old co-operative bank was a byword for tradition and security. Some of the bank's clients bought its unlisted shares for as much as 62.5 euros each two years ago. Only a year ago, the bank sold shares at 48 euros apiece. In its prospectus, Vicenza said it faced 647 million euros in claims for damages under law suits already with the courts, with another 1 billion euros in potential claims. It said it had secured around 860 million euros in financing from JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank earlier this year to help restore its liquidity coverage ratio - a measure of a bank's ability to ride out short-term cash outflows. After a 23 percent drop in deposits last year, Vicenza said direct funding had stabilised in the first two months of the year, but fell by an unspecified amount in March. UniCredit, Italy's biggest bank by assets, had agreed to underwrite the Vicenza issue, but that role has passed to the Atlante fund, set up as a safety net for Vicenza and other banks struggling to raise the capital they need. The fund, which has so far had pledges for 4 billion euros, is financed mainly by banks and insurers, but is also backed by state lender Cassa Depositi e Prestiti. Popolare di Vicenza's IPO will run from April 21-28. Twenty-five percent of the offer will be for retail investors, with the rest for institutional investors in Italy and abroad. The bank said earlier this week the pre-marketing phase was weak. ($1 = 0.8857 euros) Gulf Arabs back Morocco in Western Sahara rift with UN RIYADH, April 21 (Reuters) - Gulf Arab rulers back fellow monarchy Morocco in its row with the United Nations over the disputed region of Western Sahara, Saudi Arabia's SPA news agency reported, one of the worst diplomatic crises over the territory since a 1991 ceasefire. Morocco expelled dozens of U.N. staff from the mission in Western Sahara, known as MINURSO, after U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last month referred to the North African nation's 1975 annexation of the region from Spain as an "occupation." Rabat said its decision was irreversible, but that it was committed to military cooperation with the U.N. to guarantee the ceasefire. Ban has recommended extending MINURSO's mandate for a year, warning that the conflict there was in danger of reigniting. Saudi Arabia's King Salman, chairing a summit of rulers of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in Riyadh, issued a statement supporting his long-time North African ally as he welcomed Morocco's King Mohammed on a short visit to the kingdom. "We stress our mutual solidarity and support for all the political and security issues which concern your brotherly nation, foremost among them the Moroccan Sahara (Western Sahara) issue, and we reject completely any prejudice to the higher interests of Morocco," the statement said. The controversy over Ban's comment, made during a visit to refugee camps for Sahrawi people, is the worst between the U.N. and Morocco since 1991, when the international body brokered a ceasefire to end a war between Rabat and rebels fighting for independence in Western Sahara. MINURSO was established at that time. The Arab News newspaper quoted King Mohammed as saying: "The security and stability of the Gulf states is in Morocco's interest. We have similar views on common issues which increase the depth of the ties between our nations." The Arab News reported King Mohammed as saying that Ban had been misled by his advisers. The Sahrawi people's Polisario Front say the desert territory on Africa's northwest belongs to them. Turkey freezes assets of Yemeni ex-president Saleh ISTANBUL, April 21 (Reuters) - Turkey has frozen the assets of former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh, in line with a decision by the U.N. Security Council, the government said in its Official Gazette on Thursday. All of Saleh's assets in Turkish banks and other financial institutions were frozen, it said. It did not say how much money Saleh was believed to hold in Turkey. U.N.-appointed investigators have told the Security Council they suspect Saleh of amassing as much as $60 billion, equivalent to Yemen's annual GDP, during his long rule, and colluding in a takeover by the Houthi militia in 2014. Most of this wealth was believed to have been transferred abroad under false names or the names of others holding the assets on his behalf, the investigators have said. The assets were in the form of property, cash, shares, gold and other valuable commodities, and were believed to spread across at least 20 countries. Saleh, who is head of Yemen's largest party, the General People's Congress, enjoys the loyalty of sections of the armed forces despite having stepped down from office nearly four years ago after months of protests. He later emerged as ally of the Iran-backed Houthi Shi'ite fighters. Majority Sunni Turkey is allied with Saudi Arabia in Yemen, where forces loyal to Yemen's Saudi-backed president are fighting the Houthis. South Africa's Zuma to release findings on controversial arms deal JOHANNESBURG, April 21 (Reuters) - President Jacob Zuma will on Thursday release the findings of a probe into charges of fraud and corruption relating to a major arms deal arranged by South Africa in the late 1990s, his office said. Nigeria plans shuttle diplomacy on oil, hopes for freeze deal in June By Felix Onuah ABUJA, April 21 (Reuters) - Nigeria will hold talks with Saudi Arabia, Iran and other oil producers by May, hoping to reach a deal on an output freeze at the next OPEC meeting in June, the West African country's oil minister told Reuters. A deal to stabilise oil output by OPEC and non-OPEC producers fell apart on Sunday after Saudi Arabia demanded that Iran join in despite calls on Riyadh to save the agreement and help prop up crude prices. "I will be doing a lot of shuttle diplomacy with the (president) ... of OPEC to see how we can engage Saudi more, engage Iran more," Oil Minister Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu said in an interview late on Wednesday. "We will be doing a lot of consultations before the June (OPEC) Vienna meeting," he added. "I hope we can get there," Kachikwu said, when asked whether there was a chance of a freeze when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries holds its June meeting. He said he hoped non-OPEC member Russia would support such an agreement, after Moscow said on Wednesday it was prepared to push output to new historic highs following threats made by Saudi Arabia to flood markets with more crude. Nigeria, Africa's top oil producer, has been at the forefront of attempts to agree a production freeze as it suffers from a slump in oil revenues. Brent crude is trading at about $45 a barrel, down from levels as high as $115 hit in mid-2014. Kachikwu said a failure in Vienna would encourage more producers to flood the market. "Saudi, which produces 10.2 million (barrels per day) now, can go to 11.2 million. Russia is doing about 10.5 million and has the capacity of about 12 million so if everybody opens up ... there will be much more surplus," he said. Iran has refused to participate in any freezing of production levels as Tehran wants to ramp up output after years of Western sanctions. "Iran is pumping more and there will be more if others take a cue," he said. The focus of Nigeria's shuttle diplomacy would be to convince Saudi Arabia and its arch foe Iran to agree on a deal. "We need to get them realising that both parties can exist in this organisation happily and look at common interest," Kachikwu said. He added that Nigeria's oil production would remain below 2 million bpd due to the closure of a Shell pipeline after an attack by unknown gunmen. Repairs are expected to last until June. South Africa's Zuma says arms probe clears government of corruption By Stella Mapenzauswa and James Macharia JOHANNESBURG, April 21 (Reuters) - South African President Jacob Zuma said on Thursday that an investigation into a major government arms deal arranged in the late 1990s had found no evidence of corruption or fraud. Critics denounced the findings as a coverup and said they would continue to campaign for justice, including a possible legal challenge in the United States under U.S. anti-graft laws. The 30 billion rand ($2 billion) deal to buy European military equipment has cast a shadow over politics in Africa's most industrialised economy for years. Zuma - then deputy president - was linked to the deal through his former financial adviser, who was jailed for corruption. This almost torpedoed Zuma's bid for president but all charges against him were dropped in 2009. "No evidence was found as well through the Commission's own independent inquiries," Zuma said in a televised address on Thursday. Zuma said the three-volume report on the investigation, which heard evidence from senior politicians including Thabo Mbeki, the former president, and ex-cabinet ministers, would be made public. Former banker and anti-arms campaigner Terry Crawford-Browne, who sued the government, leading to the establishment of the commission of inquiry into the arms deal, said he would challenge the investigation's findings. "The report is a whitewash, the whole thing is a farce," Crawford-Browne said. The probe had ignored documentary evidence gathered in a separate investigation by the state, he said. Crawford-Browne said he would ask his lawyers to consider taking the case to the Constitutional Court, South Africa's top court, or to the United States to be tried under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Andrew Feinstein, a former ANC member of parliament who has long called for more investigations into the deal, said in a statement that "this was not the end of the road in the struggle for accountability of corruption in the arms deal." Zuma's former financial adviser, Schabir Shaik, was found guilty and jailed in 2005 of trying to solicit bribes worth 500,000 rand a year for Zuma from a French arms company. Then-president Mbeki sacked Zuma after his deputy was also implicated in the deal. It was alleged that Zuma had offered to protect the French firm from an investigation into the deal. Zuma later ousted Mbeki to win leadership of the ANC. In 2009, a month after prosecutors dropped an investigation into more than 700 charges of fraud, corruption and racketeering relating to the same arms deal, Zuma was elected president. Zuma said the four-year investigation he set up in 2011 had found no evidence of widespread bribery, corruption or fraud in the selection of the preferred bidder to supply the arms. Nor had it found evidence that officials were bribed in an attempt to influence the deal. The South African leader has been beset by scandal during his tenure. Earlier this month, he survived an impeachment vote after the Constitutional Court said he breached the law by ignoring an order to repay some of the $16 million in state funds spent on renovating his home. Indonesia fears piracy surge on shipping route could make it "new Somalia" By Fergus Jensen and Kanupriya Kapoor JAKARTA, April 21 (Reuters) - Indonesia fears piracy on a shipping route along its sea border with the Philippines could reach Somalian levels and has told vessels to avoid danger areas, officials said on Thursday, after a spate of kidnappings. Analysts say the route carries $40 billion worth of cargo each year. It is taken by fully laden supertankers from the Indian Ocean that cannot use the crowded Malacca Strait. Concerns over maritime attacks by suspected Islamist militants are disrupting the coal trade, with at least two Indonesian coal ports suspending shipments to the Philippines. Up to 18 Indonesians and Malaysians have been kidnapped in three attacks on tugboats in Philippine waters by groups suspected of ties to the Abu Sayyaf militant network. Abu Sayyaf, which has posted videos on social media pledging allegiance to Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, has demanded 50 million pesos ($1.1 million) to free the Indonesian crew. "We don't want to see this become a new Somalia," Indonesian chief security minister Luhut Pandjaitan told reporters, referring to the southern Philippine waters of the Sulu Sea, where the abductions took place. Piracy near Somalia's coast has subsided in the last few years, mainly due to shipping firms hiring private security details and the presence of international warships. The foreign ministers of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines will meet in Jakarta to discuss the possibility of joint patrols, Pandjaitan said. He said the armed forces chiefs of the three countries would hold talks in Jakarta on May 3. The Indonesian Navy has instructed all commercial vessels "to avoid piracy-prone waters around the southern Philippines", a spokesman for the Indonesian military said. The navy is increasing patrols around Indonesia's borders with Malaysia and the Philippines "to prevent acts of piracy and hijacking", Tatang Sulaiman told Reuters. The Kuala Lumpur-based Piracy Reporting Centre has also warned ships sailing in the Celebes Sea and northeast of the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo to stay clear of suspicious small vessels. COAL TRADE HIT Two Indonesian coal ports have blocked departures of ships for the Philippines and more suspensions are expected, said Pandu Sjahrir, chairman of the Indonesian Coal Mining Association, and a director of Jakarta-listed coal producer Toba Bara Sejahtera. Toba had suspended all shipments to the Philippines, Sjahrir said. Other companies had cancelled shipments "from both sides", he added. Indonesian state-owned coal miner Bukit Asam said it was diverting Philippine coal shipments to Hong Kong for the next three months. The company ships less than a million tonnes to the Philippines per year, Bukit Asam corporate secretary Joko Pramono told Reuters. One company with a fleet of 40 dry cargo ships saw a silver lining, however. "If Indonesia bans tugs and barges from exporting coal then it will have to travel in larger cargo ships, of 32,000 to 64,000 tonnes," said Khalid Hashim, managing director of Bangkok-listed Precious Shipping. "All this would of course be beneficial for shippers like us." Indonesia, the world's largest thermal coal exporter, supplies 70 percent of the Philippines' coal import needs, which Indonesian data shows stood at about 15 million tonnes, worth around $800 million, last year. Philippine coal importers, however, said they could import coal from other countries including Australia, South Africa and Russia and source more locally if Indonesian shipments dried up. Belarus finance minister expects IMF visit in June MINSK, April 21 (Reuters) - A mission from the International Monetary Fund will visit Minsk in June in connection with a new $3 billion loan requested by Belarus, Finance Minister Vladimir Amarin told journalists on Thursday. The former Soviet republic needs help servicing its foreign debt of $12.5 billion amid an economic downturn brought about by a protracted recession in neighbouring Russia, a major export market. The IMF said it would be willing to lend to Belarus provided efforts were made to reform its economy, which has been run along Soviet-style command lines since 1994 by the authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko. Asked if the loan would be a subject of talks in June, Amarin said: "We will discuss these issues." The recent economic crisis has brought about cautious reforms, including a higher retirement age and more flexible rules on the foreign currency market. "On pensions, we've made a first step," Lukashenko told parliament. "Special attention must be paid to cooperating with the IMF. I demand as soon as possible the removal of all obstacles in the way of cooperating with international financial organisations," he said. Belarus has also borrowed $2 billion from the Russia-controlled Eurasia fund, which it will receive in tranches over the next two years. Last week, the government presented an economic plan for the next five years, which foresaw a strengthening of trade and commercial ties with the European Union to offset economic turbulence in Russia, which has been hit by a slump in global oil prices and Western sanctions over the Ukraine conflict. Belarus's economy contracted 4 percent in the first two months of 2016 and is forecast to grow 0.3 percent in the full year as a whole. Barely guarded Afghan border puts ex-Soviet Tajikistan in peril By Nazarali Pirnazarov SHURO-OBOD, Tajikistan, April 21 (Reuters) - The three Tajik construction workers were quietly mending a road near the Panj River last month when they stumbled on a group of men with assault rifles who had crossed over from Afghanistan in broad daylight. The gunmen shot and wounded one worker and took the two others back across the river into Afghanistan. A few days later, Tajik border guard commanders negotiated the release of the kidnapped pair through elders of nearby Afghan villages, the border guards say. It's the sort of incident that has become increasingly frequent near towns like Shuro-obod on the Tajik-Afghan border, where what was once one of the heavily guarded frontiers of the Cold War has all but melted away. Tajikistan, the poorest country in the former Soviet Union, is now barely defended from armed smugglers, kidnappers and what its rulers say is a looming threat from Islamist insurgents looking for a new front in their global holy war. "Terrorist organisations are expanding their activity and the situation is further complicated by their resurgence in neighbouring Afghanistan," President Imomali Rakhmon said in his annual address this year. At a section of the border near Shuro-obod visited by Reuters there was no fence, no evidence of servicemen patrolling, and the nearest Tajik border guard post was several kilometres (miles) away. The border is a major route for narcotics from Afghanistan, the world's main producer of opium used to make heroin, to Central Asia and on to Russia and Europe. The only barrier to anyone wanting to cross is the river, which meanders through deep canyons, about 50 metres wide at this time of year. Smugglers float across using tyre inner tubes as rafts, locals say. The threat of violent Islamism spilling over into ex-Soviet central Asia has grown more acute since NATO member states pulled out most of their forces from Afghanistan, leading to a deterioration in security there. The risk was brought home by Taliban attacks on the Afghan city of Kunduz, not far from the border, first last year when attackers briefly seized the city and then again last week when the Taliban launched another offensive. The United States and Russia, major powers in the region, look to Tajikistan to act as a bulwark against the spread of Islamist violence, but it is ill-equipped. Its national security expenditure which includes border protection is just $164 million a year, and its security forces are creaking. Last year one of its most elite police commanders left the country and joined the Islamic State group. Tajik officials believe he went to fight in Syria. While the Afghan Taliban have yet to mount major cross border attacks, Tajik officials fear domestic Islamist fighters could ally with Islamic State or other groups across the frontier, using Afghanistan as a base for an insurgency. CRACKDOWN Ever poor and fragile, Tajikistan has grown even poorer in recent years. It is struggling with a collapse in the prices of its few exports and the impact of recession in Russia, which has forced thousands of Tajik migrant labourers to return home finding no job prospects. Rakhmon, a 63-year-old former Communist collective farm boss who took power in the months after the Soviet Union broke up, survived a civil war against Islamist rebels in the mid-1990s with Russian support. Last year he cracked down on political opponents, accusing an Islamist political party of being behind a failed coup attempt. The party has since been outlawed, a move which critics say may radicalise its supporters. Parliament voted this year to eliminate term limits for Rakhmon, allowing him to stay in office indefinitely. Shuro-obod locals earn their living by farming, beekeeping and cultivating pistachio orchards. The porous border provides another livelihood for some, who have become as mired in the cross-border trafficking as Afghans on the other side, residents say. Some of the recent kidnappings may have been a way of settling commercial disputes, said Hairatsho Jonkhoni, a former policeman who now works for a road construction company. "Locals themselves are to blame. If they weren't involved in crime, there wouldn't have been any kidnappings," he said. "There are cases when random innocent people are kidnapped and the culprits (among Tajiks involved in smuggling) remain unpunished." Local people say they often spot Afghans on Tajik territory. "The Tajik-Afghan border is extremely criminalised and corrupt on the Tajik side," said regional political analyst Alexander Knyazev. Large-scale incursions by Taliban or Islamic State fighters appear unlikely for now, he said. But there is a risk that corrupt border guards who now provide safe passage to smugglers for money would do the same for militants, said Knyazev. LIMITED RESOURCES Russia used to station its own border guards on the frontier until 2005, and after that kept a regiment in the Tajik city of Kulyab, 42 km (25 miles) from the Afghan border. But Moscow pulled the regiment out in December last year and moved it to the capital, Dushanbe, about 200 km further away. Tajikistan says it is doing its best to meet a huge challenge, monitoring a border that stretches for 1,345 kilometres (840 miles). The Tajik border guard service said in February it was reinforcing the frontier after intelligence reports showed there were about 5,000 gunmen in adjacent Afghan territories. It said last week border guards had killed five intruders in January-March this year, without report its own casualties. "The government of Tajikistan is taking all the possible measures to strengthen the border with Afghanistan," a spokesman for the service said. But its capability is limited. Border guard outposts are located 10-15 kilometres apart. Foreign aid helps, but is modest. Servicemen in Shuro-obod drive Toyota trucks paid for by the U.S government, which also funded refurbishment of a border guard outpost at nearby Sari Gor. According to Security Assistance Monitor, a website tracking U.S. security and defence assistance programs worldwide, Washington provided $29 million in such aid to Dushanbe in 2014. That dropped to only about $8 million in 2015 but could jump again after the Pentagon proposed in February to allocate $50 million to Central Asia over the next two years to help counter the Taliban, Islamic State and other militant groups. Syrian minister says Turkey and others still supplying terrorists - state media BEIRUT, April 21 (Reuters) - Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said on Thursday that states including Turkey continued to supply terrorists in Syria with advanced weapons, state media reported, as fighting raged across the country after peace talks halted. Russia's Rosinter Restaurants sees return to profit in 2016 By Olga Sichkar and Maria Kiselyova MOSCOW, April 21 (Reuters) - Rosinter Restaurants, Russia's biggest and only listed restaurant holding company, expects to return to profit this year after closing 50 branches and hopes a new, more affordable chain will appeal to crisis-hit Russians and boost revenues. Rostislav Ordovsky-Tanaevsky Blanco, Rosinter's chairman and biggest shareholder, told Reuters the company could close more restaurants, but there should be no more big write-offs, which resulted in net losses last year. "In 2016, I think, we will show a profit," he said in an interview in Reuters' Moscow office. "It's been very tough (in the past year and a half) ... We've saved the ship and are now renovating our fleet," the Venezuelan-born entrepreneur added. A sharp fall in global oil prices and the rouble, coupled with Russia's ban on Western food imports, has dealt a heavy blow to the eating-out industry, as customers cut back spending and suppliers struggled. Rosinter has closed around 50 outlets since the middle of 2014 and cut 300 staff as the weaker rouble raised dollar rental costs while the import ban lifted food prices. In a bid to adapt, it also launched the "Shikari" brand last September, which is to gradually replace all its sushi restaurants that rely on imported fish, nori sheets and sauces and have suffered as ingredient costs soared. "We wanted to make the new project more affordable. People's price sensitivity has spiked, we have felt that we are affected even by a 50-rouble ($0.8) change (in the price)," Ordovsky-Tanaevsky Blanco said. The number of transactions at the company's restaurants has stopped falling in 2016 and it is now seeing a "very tiny" increase in customers, he said. "During crises, people need very much to go out and you have to give them a possibility to spend less ... because it's the little they can still afford," Ordovsky-Tanaevsky Blanco said. He predicted a single-digit percentage growth in same-stores sales this year and said the relaunch of its Asian brand and refurbishment of its "Il Patio" Italian food cafes would mostly contribute to revenue growth in 2017-2018. The company is considering opportunities to raise funds for investments into its restaurants, including a new share issue, a convertible loan or project financing, he said. "There is money on the market ... looking for where to invest. It's quite possible that we will do something (to raise money) although for now this is just thinking out loud." South Africa's first Starbucks opens to long queues JOHANNESBURG, April 21 (Reuters) - Scores of Johannesburg's caffeine crowd lined up in the shopping hub of Rosebank on Thursday to buy a first cup of Starbucks coffee in sub-Saharan Africa. Not to worry, though, rooibos, the local bush tea favourite, also features on the menu. Starbucks, brought in under licence by South Africa's Taste Holdings, is the latest U.S. chain to court brand-conscious consumers in South Africa, which has Africa's most advanced economy. The same queues snaked out from Krispy Kreme when the doughnutmaker opened its first store 50 metres up the road last year. And more on-the-go snacks are coming. Grand Parade Investments, the Cape Town-based group which also runs Burger King in South Africa, said it will open the first Dunkin' Donuts by the end of June, despite economic growth forecast to be below 2 percent this year. Taste Holdings Chief Executive Carlo Gonzaga told Reuters last month that he plans to open up to 15 Starbucks outlets over the next two years. While Johannesburg has coffee shops in virtually all shopping malls and a wide choice in most well-to-do suburbs, Starbucks brings a range of syrupy lattes that are less common in South Africa. "The flavours are something we're not that used to here, and could be their selling point," said Katy Meurs, a twenty-something queueing for her latte. Taste, which is also the master franchisee of Dominos Pizza in South Africa, holds the local licence for Starbucks and has the right of first refusal in several other African markets. Zimbabwe suspends capital's mayor, opposition goes to court HARARE, April 21 (Reuters) - The Zimbabwean government has suspended the mayor of Harare accusing him of insubordination, escalating a struggle for control of the capital which has been run by the opposition since 2002. President Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF has consistently lost elections in Harare to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) since 2000, but has asserted itself by firing mayors using a disputed law that allows a cabinet minister to wield the axe on elected councillors. Local Government Minister Saviour Kasukuwere sent a suspension letter to mayor Bernard Manyenyeni on Wednesday, accusing him of appointing the city council's top executive, known as the town clerk, despite government objections. "You will be brought before a competent authority to answer the allegations above," Kasukuwere said in the letter. Control of Zimbabwe's major cities, which are all run by the MDC, would allow ZANU-PF to influence lucrative tenders and contracts for development projects, and appoint its own people to senior positions as part of the ruling party's patronage system. Mugabe, 92, is Africa's oldest leader and has been in charge for 36 years. He has indicated that he intends to stay in power for life. Manyenyeni's suspension follows that of the mayor of the third largest city Gweru last year, which the High Court later overturned. The court ruled that a government minister no longer had such powers under a new constitution passed in 2013. Manyenyeni confirmed his suspension but declined further comment. MDC shadow minister for local government Jameson Timba said a mayor could only be disciplined by an independent tribunal established by parliament. Such a tribunal is yet to be set up. "Under these circumstances, Kasukuwere has acted unlawfully. We have launched an urgent application in the High Court to have this purported decision to suspend the mayor set aside," Timba told Reuters. Attempt to bring rival Macedonian factions together in Vienna fails -EU VIENNA, April 21 (Reuters) - An attempt to bring Macedonia's main political parties to join European Union Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn for talks in Vienna on how to resolve a political crisis has failed, a Commission spokesman in Vienna said on Thursday. The long-running crisis deepened last week when President Gjorge Ivanov pardoned 56 officials in connection with a wire-tapping scandal despite protests at home and abroad. Army officer, three more killed in Burundi violence, officials say NAIROBI, April 21 (Reuters) - A senior army officer and a motorcyclist and two members of an armed group have been killed in separate incidents in Burundi, officials said on Thursday, a day after the latest flareup of violence in the country's year-long crisis. Tit-for-tat killings by supporters of President Pierre Nkurunziza and his political opponents have raised concerns that Burundi could slide back into conflict, after the country emerged from an ethnically fuelled civil war in 2005. More than 400 people have been killed since Nkurunziza said he would run for a third term last year. Opponents said he was violating the constitution and a peace deal that ended the civil war. A court ruled he could run, and he won re-election in July . In one incident on Wednesday, gunmen ambushed Colonel Emmanuel Buzubona as he travelled on the back of a motorbike to his home in Bujumbura, the capital, according to Moise Nkurunziza, deputy police spokesman. "The senior officer tried to flee but he didn't make it because the attackers finished him off by throwing a grenade," Nkurunziza told Reuters. He said the motorcyclist also died. The motive was not immediately clear. Buzubona's neighbours said he had returned in September from Tanzania, where he had been an instructor at a military college for officers from the East African Community bloc. He was awaiting a new assignment, army spokesman Gaspard Baratuza said. An ethnic Hutu, Buzubona had been a member of CNDD-FDD rebel force, which became the ruling party of the president. In the civil war, Hutu rebel groups such as CNDD-FDD fought the then-Tutsi-led army. The army has since been reformed to include both Hutus and Tutsis in all ranks. Leaders of a failed coup in May included both Hutus and Tutsis. In a separate incident on Wednesday, soldiers on patrol killed two people in a clash with an armed group in Kivumu village in Mugamba southern district, 60 km southeast of Bujumbura, said Christian Nkurunziza, regional governor of the districk where Mugamba is located. "As they were patrolling, soldiers exchanged fire with an armed group of eight men, killing two people," he said. Four members of the CNDD-FDD party were killed in the same village last week. Female suicide bombers kill eight at refugee camp in northeast Nigeria By Lanre Ola MAIDUGURI, Nigeria, April 21 (Reuters) - Two female suicide bombers have killed at least eight people at a camp for people displaced by the jihadist Boko Haram insurgency in northeast Nigeria, a community security force member and a customs official said on Thursday. The bombings happened around 8 a.m. (0700 GMT) on Wednesday in the town of Banki on the edge of Borno state, near the border with Cameroon. An attack in February on an internally displaced persons camp, also in Borno, killed 60 people. Details of Wednesday's attack were slow to emerge as Banki is remote and largely disconnected from mobile phone networks. The state of Borno is where Boko Haram began their insurgency seven years ago. The group wants to create a state adhering to strict sharia law. "Two female suicide bombers who were initially thought to be IDPs blew themselves up in the camp," said Khalid Aji, a member of a grassroots community security group based in Konduga, a Borno district nearly 100km from Banki. "The first one occurred at about 8 a.m. and the second followed few minutes later. Eight people died and 12 were wounded," he added. Aji said members of his organisation in Banki who helped to evacuate victims gave him details of the attack. There has been no claim of responsibility for the attack. A senior Nigeria Customs Service official, who asked not to be named, also said eight people were killed but put the number of wounded at 15. Banki, which is around 120 km from the state capital Maiduguri, was seized by Boko Haram in 2013 but Nigerian troops drove the militant group out of the town early last year. Boko Haram once controlled an area roughly the size of Belgium in northeast Nigeria, but in early 2014 they were pushed out by Nigerian troops aided by soldiers from neighbouring countries. Under-pressure Maldives to let jailed opposition leaders attend talks By Shihar Aneez and Ranga Sirilal April 21 (Reuters) - The Maldives government has said it would allow jailed leaders of rival parties to take part in talks on resolving the country's political crisis. Best known as an exotic tourist destination, the Indian Ocean island nation has been mired in political unrest since its first democratically elected leader, Mohamed Nasheed, was ousted in February 2012. The concession was announced on Wednesday, four days after President Abdulla Yameen's administration started talks with a U.N. delegation amid international pressure for reform. The administration has jailed opposition leaders including Nasheed and members of Yameen's party, including the vice president, on various charges. Opposition parties have demanded the release of all political detainees and allow parties to choose representatives at the talks. "Those serving sentences won't be released. Arrangements will be made so that they can actively contribute to the party talks," said government spokesman Ibrahim Hussain Shihab. He gave no date for the talks but said the government was committed to holding them. Nasheed was arrested and sentenced in March last year to 13 years in jail on terrorism charges for ordering the abduction of a judge, following a rapid trial that drew international condemnation. He is now in London for medical treatment. The Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group (CMAG), in a statement on Thursday, underscored the importance of Yameen's government facilitating the prompt release from detention of political leaders "in order to help restore confidence in the overall political environment in Maldives". A spokesman for Nasheed's Maldivian Democratic Party, Hamid Abdul Ghafoor, said the party appreciated the group's "call for clear, measurable progress and calls upon the government to release political prisoners". Attempt to hold Macedonian crisis talks in Vienna fails-EU VIENNA, April 21 (Reuters) - An attempt to bring Macedonia's main political parties together for European Union-hosted talks in Vienna on resolving a long-running political crisis has failed, a European Commission spokesman in the Austrian capital said on Thursday. The EU delegation in Macedonia had invited the Macedonian parties for talks with Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn and three members of the European Parliament, but the main opposition party declined to take part. "The conditions for the meeting were not met," the Commission spokesman in Vienna said. Macedonia's crisis deepened last week when President Gjorge Ivanov pardoned 56 officials in connection with a wire-tapping scandal despite protests at home and abroad. While several Macedonian parties were prepared to go to Vienna, the opposition Social Democrats said they would only take part in the talks if Ivanov annulled the pardons. A party spokesman said the Social Democrats also wanted June 5 elections postponed until it was possible to hold a free and fair vote. IHH Healthcare Berhad buys hospitals in Bulgaria SOFIA, April 21 (Reuters) - Malaysia-based IHH Healthcare Berhad is to buy Bulgaria's Tokuda Hospital in a deal that will help to make it the biggest private healthcare provider in the Balkan country, the company said on Thursday. The enlarged group plans to develop the medical tourism business by attracting patients from the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. IHH's Turkish subsidiary Acibadem has agreed to acquire Tokuda from Japan's Tokushukai Medical Corporation for 65 million euros ($73.6 million). It is also paying around 11 million euros to its existing operating partners to raise its stake in Bulgaria's City Clinic to 76.5 percent. "The total amount of the deal is about 250 million levs ($144.5 million), as it also includes some debt," Angel Angelov, one of Citi Clinic's shareholders, told Reuters. After the acquisition, Acibadem will become the leading private healthcare operator in Bulgaria with four hospitals, totalling 750 beds and four medical centres. "We will focus on the development of medical tourism as this business is still underdeveloped in Bulgaria. We will aim to attract customers from the former Soviet Union countries as well as the Middle East," he added. The newly created holding company will have 2,300 employees. The two transactions boost Acibadem's beds globally to more than 3,500 across 22 hospitals in three countries. ($1 = 1.7303 leva) Russia needs to quit Ukraine before sanctions talks begin, says Poroshenko BUCHAREST, April 21 (Reuters) - No talks on lifting Western sanctions against Russia should take place until Moscow completely withdraws its military presence from Ukraine, President Petro Poroshenko said on Thursday. Any sanctions relief in return for a partial fulfilment by Russia of the conditions of the Minsk peace deal "will be a direct threat to solving the situation in Donbass," the region of eastern Ukraine where pro-Russian separatists are battling Ukrainian government forces. Kiev says Russia has sent troops and heavy weapons to the region, but Moscow has repeatedly denied this. Extended at the end of last year, the Minsk deal signed by Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany aims to give Ukraine back control of its border with Russia, see all heavy weapons withdrawn, return hostages and allow an internationally monitored local election in the east. Speaking after talks with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in Bucharest, Poroshenko said he was convinced that early sanctions relief "can prompt Russia to continue its aggressive actions .... The Minsk agreements must be implemented in their entirety." NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Wednesday that the first formal meeting with Russia's envoy to the alliance in almost two years underscored the deep East-West divide over Ukraine. "It was reconfirmed that we disagree on the facts, on the narrative and the responsibilities in and around Ukraine," he said. Ukraine cbank chief says timing of IMF visit depends on FinMin KIEV, April 21 (Reuters) - Ukraine central bank chief Valeriia Gontareva said on Thursday a mission from the International Monetary Fund was ready to visit Kiev as soon as possible and the exact timing would depend on when the finance ministry was ready. "I just came back, I was at the spring meeting of the IMF. We met with the IMF mission, with Christine Lagarde, with the World Bank, and other central bankers," Gontareva said in a briefing. Syrian opposition says govt must "stop massacres" before talks can resume GENEVA, April 21 (Reuters) - Syrian opposition negotiator Mohammad Alloush, representing Jaish al Islam, a major rebel group, said on Thursday peace talks in Geneva could only resume if the government stopped massacres and released thousands of prisoners. "We say to (government negotiator Bashar) Ja'afari if he wants a real national unity government, first he must release the 10,000 women in his prisons, and the tens of thousands more there," Alloush said before leaving the Geneva talks. Indonesia hopes for EU trade deal, including Britain By Meredith McGrath BRUSSELS, April 21 (Reuters) - The European Union has agreed to start free trade talks with Indonesia, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Thursday, as the growth-hungry bloc presses for improved economic ties with Asian countries. Juncker said he and EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom made progress on Wednesday in discussions with Indonesian President Joko Widodo. "We have concluded yesterday... preparatory discussions for a comprehensive economic partnership agreement and that's good news both for Indonesia and the European Union," Juncker told a joint news conference on Thursday. The comprehensive economic partnership (CEPA), envisaged since 2011, would liberalise trade in goods and services and open up investment and procurement markets with the largest economy in the Association of South East Asia Nations (ASEAN). The EU has reached free trade deals with Singapore, Vietnam and South Korea as it seeks to sign deals with the 10-member ASEAN on a country-by-country basis, a strategy that is strongly supported by Britain. Widodo said he hoped Britain, which holds a referendum on EU membership on June 23, would remain part of the bloc. He also met British premier David Cameron this week. Just as the United States has sought to shift its focus to Asia, the EU is also trying for a trade deal with Japan and is in talks to deepen investment ties with China, potentially a precursor to a free-trade accord. Widido said a free trade deal would be in line with Indonesia's policy to make its economy more open and competitive. Indonesia mainly exports agricultural products, fuel, minerals, textiles and semi-manufactured goods to the 28-member bloc. The EU's main exports to Indonesia are high-tech machinery, transport equipment, manufacturing goods, chemicals and processed foods. Trade in goods between the parties was some 24 billion euros in 2014, compared with some 180 billion between the European Union and ASEAN as a whole. The European Union had initially sought to negotiate a free trade deal with the entire ASEAN bloc, but broke off talks in 2009, launching separate negotiations instead. Hapag-Lloyd seeks tie-up with rival UASC as shipping depression deepens By Vera Eckert and Jonathan Saul FRANKFURT/LONDON, April 21 (Reuters) - Germany's Hapag-Lloyd is in talks to merge with United Arab Shipping Company (UASC), representing the latest move in the container market to battle a faltering global economy and too many ships. Hapag-Lloyd shares hit a three-month high on Thursday as it said the talks were based on its shareholders owning 72 percent of the combined business and UASC's shareholders the rest. Global container shipping, which transports everything from iPhones to designer dresses, is suffering its worst downturn as a combination of weaker consumer demand and overcapacity have forced lines to cut costs and try to build scale. Hapag-Lloyd gave no further details of the discussions and said there is no certainty of a deal, though a successful merger would create a group with an estimated enterprise value in the region of 7 to 8 billion euros ($9 billion). Kuwait-headquartered UASC, which is owned by Gulf Arab states and in which Qatar holds a majority stake, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. "There is so much price pressure that all shipping groups are looking for mergers and this one won't be the last," a transport banking source said. "Hapag in particular had to look for a partner as it was left out of recent tie-ups and alliance regroupings. It was at risk of becoming a sub-scale player lacking the full range of destinations." However, a shipping industry source said it is unclear whether there would be sufficient benefit to UASC. "Even with market pressure, it will take some convincing, given UASC's state ownership," the source said, adding that Hapag-Lloyd is likely to gain most from a tie-up. DEAL FLURRY The talks follow a takeover by France's CMA CGM of Singapore's Neptune Orient Lines to cement its position as the market's No.3 player behind Switzerland's MSC and Denmark's Maersk, the industry leader. Other recent deals include a merger of state-controlled Chinese lines COSCO and China Shipping. Container lines have also formed alliances aimed at saving costs and pooling runs to various destinations. China COSCO Shipping and France's CMA CGM said on Wednesday that they had formed an alliance on Asia routes, making the partnership bigger in capacity than Maersk Line and MSC's rival 10-year agreement. Maersk's Chief Commercial Officer Vincent Clerc said its arrangement with MSC is unaffected by its rivals' Asia announcement, adding that his company welcomes consolidation. "The container shipping industry is fragmented and consolidation will enable carriers to create economies of scale and to optimise networks," Clerc said. Hapag-Lloyd merged with Chile's Compania Sud Americana de Vapores (CSAV) in December 2014, helping it to swing to profit last year, and another deal could sit well with shareholders. Klaus Michael Kuehne, Hapag-Lloyd's third-biggest shareholder with a 20 percent holding, recently said he believed the company was too small to thrive alone. CSAV owns 31 percent of Hapag-Lloyd, while HGV, the city of Hamburg's investment holding company, owns 21 percent. European tourism group TUI Group , which still holds a little more than 12 percent of Hapag-Lloyd, said it supported moves that would add value and is sticking to its goal of selling the stake. Eastern Libyan military's warplanes hit Islamists in Derna By Ayman al-Warfalli BENGHAZI, Libya, April 21 (Reuters) - Military forces loyal to Libya's eastern government said on Thursday they had carried out air strikes overnight against Islamist fighters in Derna after Islamic State militants retreated from positions close to the city. Derna has been the site of a three-way conflict between the forces loyal to the eastern government, an Islamist grouping known as the Derna Mujahideen Shura Council and Islamic State militants. Fighters from Islamic State had controlled the city until the Shura Council forces pushed them out last June. The military has attacked both groups. Military spokesman Abdulkarim Sabra said the overnight air strikes had targeted Shura Council fighters in Derna's Sayeda Khadija neighbourhood and at Bishr prison. He made no comment on possible casualties. Shura Council spokesman Hafed Addabaa said the prison had held Islamic State suspects and added that the strikes had not caused any casualties or damage. The military and the Shura Council both claimed credit for the withdrawal of Islamic State on Wednesday from positions in Derna's 'district 400' and al-Fatayeh to the south of the city. "We attacked Daesh (Islamic State) in al-Fatayeh to recapture the area ... The attack was from all sides except the south, which is where they fled," said Addabaa. Five Shura Council fighters and six civilians were killed by mines and booby traps after they entered al-Fatayeh, he said. Sabra, the military spokesman, said Islamic State had retreated because of a year-long blockade by the army and shelling by troops of the militants' positions. Soldiers posted videos of themselves in al-Fatayeh on Thursday, saying they had control of the area. Islamic State has gained territory in Libya as two rival governments and a range of armed factions have battled to control the country since 2014. But it has faced resistance from other local armed groups on the ground. Derna, which has a history of Islamist militancy, was an early bastion for Islamic State fighters returning from Iraq and Syria in 2014. Though they lost control of Derna last year, the group established a stronghold in the central coastal city of Sirte. Last month, a U.N.-backed Libyan unity government arrived in the capital Tripoli and is trying to establish its authority over the large oil-producing nation. But allies of eastern military commander Khalifa Haftar have prevented moves by Libya's eastern parliament towards recognising the new unity government. GRAINS-Soy and corn at nine-month highs on fund buying, Latam weather By Gus Trompiz and Naveen Thukral PARIS/SINGAPORE, April 21 (Reuters) - U.S. soybean and corn futures extended gains on Thursday to reach their highest level since last July, lifted by investment fund flows and concerns about adverse weather hurting crop yields in South America. Wheat also rallied again to a new five-month high as funds continued to unwind large positions that were betting on a fall in prices, traders said. Strength in crude oil and broad gains in financial markets also lent support to grain and oilseed markets. The most-active soybean contract on the Chicago Board of Trade was up 1.4 percent at $10.33 a bushel by 1221 GMT, after earlier hitting $10.43-3/4. Corn was up 1.5 percent at $4.05-3/4 a bushel, after an earlier high of $4.07-1/4. Wheat was up 0.6 percent at $5.15-1/4 a bushel. Soybeans have been drawing support from investment funds concerned about excessive rains in Argentina. Forecasters had been expecting Argentina to harvest a bumper crop of about 60 million tonnes of soybeans. But the government says 3.3 million tonnes have already been lost and traders are awaiting an updated forecast due later on Thursday from the Buenos Aires Grains Exchange. "The soybean rally is still about the weather problems in Argentina, plus short-covering by funds and the strength in crude oil," a European trader said. In Brazil, dry conditions were threatening to harm corn crops. The doubts over South American weather was also raising the prospect of extra demand for U.S. corn and soybeans, which could alleviate large stocks. "With concerns over crops in Brazil and Argentina, buyers are turning to the U.S. This increased demand is being magnified by fears of a drought as the likelihood of a La Nina pattern later this year increases," ANZ bank said in a research note. However, wheat traders were cautious about the rally in the cereal given plentiful world supplies and favourable growing conditions for this year's harvests. Syrian peace talks limp on to next week with opposition absent By John Davison and Stephanie Nebehay BEIRUT/GENEVA, April 22 (Reuters) - The U.N. special envoy for Syria has vowed to take fragile peace talks into next week despite a walkout by the main armed opposition, a breakdown in a truce and signs that both sides are gearing up to escalate the five-year-old civil war. The opposition declared a "pause" in the talks this week because of a surge in fighting and too little movement from the government side on freeing detainees or allowing in aid. Nearly all of its delegation left Geneva. But U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura said he had no plans to call off the negotiations, the first in five years of conflict to include some rebel factions. He said a ministerial meeting of world powers was urgently needed to get the talks back on track. "Bottom line, I plan to continue the proximity talks, but at the formal level and at the technical level until next week, probably Wednesday as originally planned," he said. A fragile ceasefire in place since February was still in effect because none of the sides had renounced it, he said, but it was "in great trouble if we don't act quickly." The talks at U.N. headquarters in Geneva aim to halt a conflict that has allowed for the rise of the Islamic State group, sucked in regional and major powers and created the world's worst refugee crisis. De Mistura now says 400,000 people have been killed in the war, far higher than the previous U.N. toll, usually given as 250,000. He said he had no proof of the higher figure but the estimate of 250,000 was two years old and no longer valid. The war was tilted in President Bashar al-Assad's favour late last year by Russia's intervention. WASHINGTON CONCERNED BY RUSSIAN MOVES The White House has expressed concern that Russia has repositioned artillery near the disputed city of Aleppo. The Russian military moves have sharpened divisions in Washington over whether President Vladimir Putin genuinely backs the U.N.-led initiative to end the war or is using the talks to mask renewed military support for Assad. President Barack Obama, on a visit to London, said the Syrian crisis cannot be solved without political negotiations and that required dealing with people he deeply disagrees with. "We are not going to solve the overall problem unless we can get this political track moving," Obama told a joint news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron. He said he had always been skeptical about Putin's actions and motives in Syria and that Russia will recognise that the Syrian problem cannot be solved by military means. Washington is leading its own campaign of air strikes against Islamic State positions in both Iraq and Syria. It acknowledged on Friday that 20 civilians were among those killed in its strikes between Sept. 10 and Feb 2. Britain's envoy to the Syria peace talks, Gareth Bayley, said on Friday: "The regime is so reliant on external support that it is inconceivable that its allies don't have the leverage to change its approach." Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday that the decision by the opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) to quit Geneva was not a loss for anyone except the HNC itself. "If they want to ensure their participation (in the peace talks) only by putting ultimatums, with which others must agree, it's their problem," Lavrov said, adding: "For God's sake, we shouldn't be running after them, we must work with those who think not about their career, not about how to please their sponsors abroad, but with those who are ready to think about the destiny of their country." Moscow and Washington sponsored the fragile cessation of hostilities that went into effect on Feb. 27 to allow talks to take place but has been left in tatters by increased fighting in the past week. A warplane crashed southeast of Damascus airport on Friday, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict with a network of sources on the ground. It said the cause of the crash and the fate of the pilot were not clear. The Islamic State group released a video claiming to have shot it down. Footage showed fighters around burning plane wreckage, part of which had a Syrian flag painted on it. Reuters could not independently verify the video. Russia's Interfax news agency quoted a Syrian military source saying it crashed due to technical malfunction. In Aleppo, government air strikes in different parts of the city killed at least 19 people and wounded dozens more on Friday, with the death toll expected to rise due to serious injuries, the Observatory said. Further southwest in Hama province, warplanes targeted rebel-held areas in the strategic Ghab plain that borders Latakia province, Assad's coastal heartland. Insurgents announced a new battle in Latakia earlier this week which they said was in response to ceasefire violations by the government side, launching fierce assaults there. Fighting raged in the area on Friday, said Observatory. ASSAD MAIN ISSUE Endorsed by the U.N. Security Council, the Geneva peace talks marked the most serious effort yet to resolve the war, but failed to make progress on political issues, with no sign of compromise over the question of Assad's future. Government negotiators say Assad's presidency is non-negotiable. Underlining confidence in Damascus, a top Assad aide reiterated its view that local truce agreements and "destroying terrorism" were the way towards a political solution. The opposition wants a political transition without Assad, and says the government has failed to make goodwill measures such as releasing detainees and allowing enough aid into opposition-held areas besieged by the military. The HNC, which is backed by Western nations and key Arab states, had this week urged more military support for rebels after declaring the truce was over and said talks would not re-start until the government stopped committing "massacres". All the main HNC members had left Geneva by Friday, leaving a handful of experts and a point of contact behind. Syria is now a patchwork of areas controlled by the government, an array of rebel groups, Islamic State, and the well-organised Kurdish YPG militia. Syrian HNC opposition to leave Geneva talks by Friday - sources By John Irish and Bushra Shakhshir GENEVA, April 21 (Reuters) - All members of the main Syrian opposition will leave peace talks in Geneva by Friday, their chief negotiator Asaad Zoubi said on Thursday, with little prospect of talks resuming unless the situation radically changes on the ground. The High Negotiations Committee (HNC), which is backed in the talks with the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by Western nations and key Arab states, paused its representation on Monday though it agreed to hold technical talks away from the United Nations building. But the group on Thursday decided to finally draw a line under the negotiations until its demands were met relating to the military on the ground in Syria. A partial truce, brokered by Washington and Moscow in February, initially reduced violence in the west, but fighting has picked up again, leaving the ceasefire in tatters. "We say to (government negotiator Bashar) Ja'afari: if he wants a real national unity government, first he must release the 10,000 women in his prisons, and the tens of thousands more there," another opposition negotiator Mohammad Alloush, representing Jaish al Islam, a major rebel group, told reporters before leaving Geneva. "And (he must) stop the massacres he is committing every day, so he can be a human with an ounce of nationalism. Then maybe the negotiations will resume." The HNC said on Monday it could not continue given the deteriorating military situation in Syria, lack of progress on humanitarian issues and complete impasse in discussing the release of thousands of prisoners. Two senior Western diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the delegation had been given instructions by chief coordinator Riad Hijab to leave the talks by Friday. "I'm saddened and believe it's a mistake," one diplomat said. "It will be very difficult to find a pretext for them to return given the situation on the ground and now the regime knows that a bombing will ensure they stay away." This diplomat said efforts were still being made to persuade officials to remain, but it appeared unlikely to happen. Russian intervention late last year swayed the conflict in Assad's favour and a U.S. official told Reuters Moscow was now repositioning artillery to northern Syria, including near the city of Aleppo. "It's understandable that the opposition felt unable to stay further given sustained regime attacks on Syrian civilians and continuation of siege and starvation tactics," a second senior Western diplomat said. "Those who back the regime need to get a leash on them." Referring to the government delegation, he added that the U.N. special envoy Staffan de Mistura may decide to continue the talks, which had been scheduled to run until the middle of next week, with those who had yet to "offer any real ideas, to press them to do so." EU warns Sierra Leone, Trinidad & Tobago and Kiribati over illegal fishing By Julia Fioretti BRUSSELS, April 21 (Reuters) - The European Union's executive warned Sierra Leone, Trinidad & Tobago and Kiribati on Thursday for failing to tackle illegal fishing adequately, exposing the countries to possible trade bans. However, the European Commission lifted its warning against Sri Lanka after it strengthened sanctions against illegal fishing, improved control of its fleets and changed its legal framework. "Sri Lanka has now a robust legal and policy framework to fight illegal fishing activities," said Karmenu Vella, EU Fisheries Commissioner. Since 2010, the EU - the world's biggest fish importer - has acted against countries that do not follow international standards to prevent over-fishing, such as policing their waters for unlicensed fishing vessels and imposing penalties. The EU also said it still had serious concerns about Thailand's efforts to address illegal fishing. "This means that further action by the Commission cannot be ruled out. A meeting with the Thai authorities in May will be a new opportunity for them to show their good will and commitment," the Commission said in a statement. Thailand, the world's third-largest seafood exporter, was given a "yellow card" a year ago for failing to certify the origin and legality of its fish exports to the EU. Sierra Leone, Kiribati and Trinidad and Tobago have six months to implement measures suggested by the Commission. Failing that, the 28-member bloc could impose an embargo on fish imports. Sierra Leone's sanctions system fails to deter illegal operators fishing internationally under its flag. Trinidad and Tobago also has a large fleet operating internationally where authorities do not control or inspect foreign vessels, the Commission said. Egyptian police detained Italian student before his murder - sources April 21 (Reuters) - An Italian student who was tortured and murdered in Egypt had been detained by police and then transferred to a compound run by Homeland Security the day he vanished, intelligence and police sources say. The claims contradict the official Egyptian account that security services had not arrested him. Giulio Regeni, a 28-year-old postgraduate student, disappeared on Jan. 25, friends say. His body was found on Feb. 3, dumped on the side of a road outside Cairo. It showed signs of torture, according to forensic and prosecution officials in Egypt. Egyptian officials have strongly denied any involvement in Regeni's death. Soon after his body was found, police suggested he was the victim of a car accident. Weeks later they said he might have been killed by a criminal gang impersonating policemen. But three Egyptian intelligence officials and three police sources independently told Reuters the police had custody of Regeni at some point before he died. Asked if Regeni had been taken to the Izbakiya police station in Cairo, as some of the sources asserted, an official in the Interior Ministry said: "We did not issue a statement on this matter." Mohamed Ibrahim, an official in the media department of Homeland Security, said: "There is no connection whatsoever between Regeni and the police or Interior Ministry or Homeland Security. He has never been held in any police station or here. The only time he came into contact with police was when the police officials stamped his passport when he landed in Egypt. "If we had any suspicions concerning his activities the solution would have been simple: Expel him." Regeni's fate has re-focused attention on broader allegations of police brutality in Egypt and created tensions between Cairo and Italy, one of Egypt's most important trading partners. A senior forensic official told Reuters that Regeni had seven broken ribs, signs of electrocution on his penis, traumatic injuries all over his body, and a brain haemorrhage. He had been killed by a sharp blow to the head. Pointing to the signs of torture, human rights groups such as the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms and Amnesty International have suggested Regeni may have been killed by Egyptian security services. Rome is demanding Egypt find Regeni's murderers. All six intelligence and police sources told Reuters that Regeni was picked up by plainclothes police near the Gamal Abdel Nasser metro station in Cairo on the evening of Jan. 25. Security had been heightened that day because it was the anniversary of the beginning of the 2011 Arab Spring uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak. An Egyptian man was picked up at the same time. Three sources gave his name but Reuters was unable to verify the man's identity. His connection to Regeni, if any, is unclear. It is also unclear why the men were picked up, though all the sources said the two had not been specifically targeted but were detained as part of a general security sweep. One of the intelligence officials said the two men were taken to the Izbakiya police station, a fortress-like compound located beneath a flyover near downtown Cairo. "They were transported in a white minibus with police licence plates," he said. The three police sources said officers on patrol in the area that night confirmed to them that Regeni had been taken to Izbakiya. "We were told that an Italian was arrested and he was taken to Izbakiya police station," said one of the police officers, who confirmed the detainee was Regeni. A senior police official in the Izbakiya station told Reuters that he recalled an Italian being brought in and said he would check the records to confirm the name. He subsequently declined to comment. "I don't know anything about it," he said. "I checked the books. Regeni's name was not there." One of the intelligence sources said that Regeni was held at Izbakiya for 30 minutes before he was transferred to Lazoughli, a state security compound run by Egyptian Homeland Security. The sources did not say what happened to the Italian after that. Reuters was unable to obtain information on the whereabouts of the Egyptian. "THIS IS OUR WORK" On March 24, Egyptian police said they had discovered Regeni's bag and passport following a shootout with a criminal gang whose members had in the past posed as policemen. Police suggested he might have been a victim of this gang. Italian officials have dismissed the story. Regeni's family have said they believe the student was not killed for criminal gain. The family declined to comment. Regeni's parents have said that if Egypt fails to uncover the truth behind their son's murder they want Rome to respond strongly. Paola Regeni, his mother, said she might release a photograph - held by the family's lawyer - to show the world what had happened to him. Italy has significant economic interests in Egypt, including the giant offshore Zohr gas field, which is being developed by Italy's state energy producer Eni. A delegation of Italian businessmen led by then-Industry Minister Federica Guidi cut short a visit to Cairo and returned home when Regeni's body was recovered in February. On April 8, Italy recalled its ambassador to Egypt for consultations because, the Italian foreign ministry said, Egyptian investigators in Rome had failed to hand over all their evidence to the Italians. Italian prosecutors said they still wanted details from Cairo mobile phone towers that had connected to Regeni's mobile phone. Egypt said this would violate Egyptian laws and the constitution. Ahmed Essam, a Vodafone official in Egypt, told Reuters that security officials had asked him about "a technical issue related to an investigation that is still ongoing about something secretive." He would not elaborate. Police sources said security officials had asked Essam for telephone recordings but added they could not elaborate. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has said Egypt deeply regretted Regeni's death and intended to continue its "full cooperation" with Italy to resolve the case and bring the culprits to justice. Regeni, who studied at Cambridge University, was researching trade unions in Egypt, focusing on street vendors. In the aftermath of the 2011 uprising, vendors were often used by police to attack protesters or acted as informers. Some vendors were also targeted by the police for blocking roads. His obituary on the Cambridge University website said Regeni "sought to understand how the labour sector was changing in the country, in the context of economic globalisation and greater international institutional linkages." A colleague at Cambridge said Regeni had not flagged any concerns about his safety. But Regeni's research had raised the suspicions of police, a security source told Reuters. The trade union movement is seen as the origin of the 2011 uprising and the last bastion of dissent under Sisi's crackdown. Egypt's interior and foreign ministers both dismissed the allegation that security forces were behind Regeni's murder. Eleven Aymara indigenous women scale Bolivia's mountains By David Mercado ILLIMANI, Bolivia, April 21 (Reuters) - For years, Lydia Huayllas, 48, has worked as a cook at base camps and mountain-climbing refuges on the steep, glacial slopes of Huayna Potosi, a 19,974-foot (6,088-meter) Andean peak outside of La Paz, Bolivia. But two years ago, she and 10 other Aymara indigenous women, ages 42 to 50, who also worked as porters and cooks for mountaineers, put on crampons - spikes fixed to a boot for climbing - under their wide traditional skirts and started to do their own climbing. These women have now scaled five peaks - Acotango, Parinacota, Pomarapi and Huayna Potosi as well as Illimani, the highest of all - in Bolivia's Cordillera Real range. All are higher than 19,500 feet (6,000 meters) above sea level. "What do you do up there, how does it feel?" Huayllas said she asked her husband, mountain guide Eulalio Gonzales, two years ago. That was when he proposed that she climb the peak to find out for herself. Pictures taken by a Reuters photographer of the Aymara women training on a glacier on Huayna Potosi can be found in a Wider Image photo essay at http://reut.rs/23AFlCk. Last weekend, the women climbed the imposing Illimani, which has a 5-mile (8 km) long series of four peaks. It is the highest mountain in the Cordillera Real with its peak at 21,122 feet (6,438 meters). It looms above the Bolivian highlands, the country's largest city La Paz and Lake Titicaca to the west, and the valleys of the Amazon to the east. Eight of the 11 managed to reach the summit, braving a snowstorm and heavy winds. The women climb in their traditional "cholita" garb, but trade in their bowler hats for helmets, and use modern equipment including ropes, harnesses, crampons and boots. One advantage the women have to outsiders who come to the Andes to climb is that highland Bolivians are already well acclimated to the thin air at high altitudes. The short-term goal for the group is to climb eight mountains higher than 19,700 feet (6,000 meters). "The first experience was the Huayna Potosi. I cried with emotion. And I'm strong, I'm going to continue and get to the top of eight mountains," said Dora Magueno, 50. Syria's ancient Palmyra has been demined - Russian military MOSCOW, April 21 (Reuters) - The Russian military said on Thursday it had completed the demining of the ancient part of the Syrian city of Palmyra, recaptured by Syrian and Russian forces in late March from militants. "Comrade commander-in-chief! As of today, the task of demining the architectural and historical part of Palmyra has been fully completed," Russian engineer troops commander Yuri Stavitski told President Vladimir Putin via video link from Palmyra. EU threatens sanctions over Macedonian crisis By Robin Emmott BRUSSELS, April 21 (Reuters) - The European Union threatened sanctions on Thursday against Macedonian politicians who it says have obstructed efforts to end a long-running crisis after a push for EU-mediated talks failed. Macedonia, a poor Balkan country on the frontline of the migrant crisis, has been in turmoil since the opposition accused then Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and his counter-intelligence chief in February 2015 of wiretapping more than 20,000 people. Under an EU-brokered agreement, Macedonian politicians agreed last year to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the scandal and to hold early elections, but the process is on the brink of collapse. The EU is willing to consider travel bans and asset freezes against politicians judged to be blocking progress, said an EU official involved in the mediation, speaking on condition of anonymity. The official said that Macedonia faced being shunned on the world stage unless its political leaders made a concerted effort to end the 14-month-old crisis, which deepened last week when President Gjorge Ivanov drew protests by pardoning 56 officials over the wire-tapping scandal. "We are extremely concerned by the short-sightedness of the current government. The EU is willing to consider sanctions on politicians blocking a resolution of the crisis. Macedonia is heading towards international isolation," the official said. EU Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn and three members of the European Parliament, who have acted as mediators, earlier admitted the failure of their efforts to bring Macedonian political leaders together for talks in Vienna on Friday. Macedonia's opposition Social Democrats said they would only take part in the Vienna talks if Ivanov annulled the pardons. They also want June 5 elections postponed until a free and fair vote can be held. They have pledged to boycott the election if it goes ahead. The EU official said Ivanov must now annul the pardons as a pre-requisite for more EU-brokered talks. "That is the number one priority. Only then can we go back and talk," he said. In a statement, Hahn and the other EU mediators said Macedonia must take urgent steps to ensure the elections were credible and could be recognised by the international community. The crisis could hinder Macedonia's attempts to join the EU and NATO, they said. "We deeply regret retrograde steps that move the country further away from its aspirations towards European Union accession. In the absence of any further progress, we are now forced to consider further actions," they said. Steps Macedonia must take to prepare credible elections include updating its voter list, the EU official said. France to convene Middle East peace conference on May 30 GENEVA, April 21 (Reuters) - France will hold an international conference in Paris on May 30 in a bid relaunch talks between Palestinians and Israelis by the end of the year, its foreign minister said in remarks published on Thursday. With U.S. efforts to broker a two-state accord in tatters since April 2014 and Washington focused on a November presidential election, Paris has lobbied countries to commit to a conference before then that would set out a framework to get Israelis and Palestinians back into negotiations. "There is no other solution to the conflict other than a two-state solution, Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in peace and security with Jerusalem a shared capital," Jean-Marc Ayrault said in a joint interview with daily newspapers Liberation, the Wall Street Journal, Al-Quds al-Arabi and Haaretz. "The two sides are more divided than ever. I'm not naive, but am acting in good faith. There is no alternative. The other option is fatalism and I refuse it," he said. France's special envoy for the Middle East peace process, Pierre Vimont, completed a report earlier this month after selling the initiative across the Arab world, Israel, the U.S. and Russia, among others. The idea is to pave the way for face-to-face talks between the two sides after the summer with the meeting on May 30 beginning on the basis of a 2002 Arab peace plan that at the time was rejected by Israel. The May conference will include the Middle East Quartet (the United States, Russia, European Union and United Nations), the Arab League, the U.N. Security Council and about 20 countries. "We welcome that and are looking forward to help," Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki told reporters at the United Nations, in response to the French announcement. While not rejecting the notion of a conference, Israel has been lukewarm to the idea, repeating its stance that it is prepared to enter direct negotiation without preconditions and without dictated terms. Last year France failed to get the United States support for a U.N. Security Council resolution to set parameters for talks between the two sides and set a deadline for a deal. U.N.-Sponsored Yemen peace talks begin in Kuwait after delays - live TV KUWAIT, April 21 (Reuters) - United Nations-sponsored peace talks to end a year of war in Yemen began in Kuwait on Thursday, live television showed, after delays over alleged truce violations and the agenda of the negotiations. Iran denounces US ruling awarding Iran money to bomb victims - TV ANKARA, April 21 (Reuters) - Iran has denounced as "theft" a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that almost $2 billion in frozen Iranian assets must be paid to American families of those killed in attacks blamed on the Islamic Republic, state television reported. The ruling was handed down on Wednesday as U.S. President Barack Obama visited Iran's regional rival Saudi Arabia, hoping to reduce Gulf states' fears over Iranian influence in the region. "This is totally rejected. It is theft ... it is like stealing Iran's money and we condemn it," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossein Jaber Ansari was quoted as saying. "The decision is incompatible with international laws." The court found that the U.S. Congress had not usurped the authority of the courts by passing a law in 2012 stating that the frozen funds should go toward satisfying a $2.65 billion judgment against Iran won by the families in a U.S. federal court in 2007. The ruling would affect, among others, the families of 241 U.S. soldiers killed in truck bomb attacks on a U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut in October 1983. A conservative Sunni Muslim monarchy, Saudi Arabia sees revolutionary Iran as the paramount threat to the Middle East's stability, because of its support for Shi'ite militias that Riyadh says have inflamed sectarian violence. Riyadh fears a nuclear deal reached with the United States and five other major powers in 2015 might embolden Tehran to tighten its grip in the Middle East and step up its efforts to dominate Arab countries such as Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. However, Iran's top authority Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has repeatedly ruled out any detente with the United States even after the lifting of economic sanctions in January under the nuclear deal in exchange for curbing Iran's nuclear work. Relations with Washington were severed after Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution and enmity to the United States has always been a rallying point for hardliners in Iran. Greece, EU/IMF lenders make progress but still no deal By Lefteris Papadimas and Renee Maltezou ATHENS, April 21 (Reuters) - Greece and its international lenders have made progress in negotiations on economic reforms, a Greek government official said on Thursday, but a final accord needed to unlock badly needed bailout loans remained elusive. Talks on pension reforms, tax hikes, privatisations and the management of bad loans resumed this week in Athens with the aim of reaching an agreement on the package before euro zone finance ministers meet in Amsterdam on Friday to assess the progress. "There was significant convergence, more than in the past days," a Greek government official said, adding that this concerned especially pension reforms and bad loans. The main sticking point in the talks, which have dragged on for months, concerns fiscal issues, as EU institutions and the International Monetary Fund differ on whether it can meet a primary surplus target equal to 3.5 percent of gross domestic product in 2018. A primary surplus excludes interest payments. The IMF considers EU assumptions too optimistic and sees Athens achieving a 1.5 percent primary surplus in 2018, unless it receives debt relief and takes additional austerity measures. To reach a compromise, the lenders have suggested that Athens adopt measures proposed by EU institutions now and agree to implement additional reforms, worth up to 2 percent of GDP, if it misses its 2018 bailout targets. But adopting contingent measures would be a tough task for the left-led government, which has a thin parliamentary majority and needs to conclude the review in order to unlock bailout funds to pay maturing debt owed to the IMF and the European Central Bank in July. Negotiations will probably resume after Friday's Eurogroup. "A good sign will be if tomorrow's Eurogroup makes an announcement that there will be a second extraordinary (Eurogroup) meeting," the government official said. DIVIDED Due to their different growth and fiscal performance assumptions, international lenders also remain divided over whether Greece needs debt relief. The IMF wants a compromise on this issue before concluding the review, while euro zone countries, and in particular Germany, want to first end the review and then start talking about possible debt relief for Athens. The European Commission said on Thursday that Greece had a primary budget surplus last year, beating the target set in its bailout programme. Greece believes the positive data can help conclude the review, signalling a better 2016 performance and cementing its position that it can achieve its 2018 fiscal targets without being forced to legislate contingent measures now. "Greece ... does not need extra measures. What Greece needs, is an essential debt relief," Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras told Euronews. But the Commission announcement on Thursday may change little. "It is irrelevant because it had been fully discounted beforehand," one senior euro zone official said. Complicating things further, Greece's court of auditors - an advisory body - said the planned pension reforms, which unify rules for public and private sector retirees and merges pension funds, were unconstitutional and not quantified. Human traffickers stopped rescue after sinking disaster -survivors By Lefteris Karagiannopoulos and Abdi Sheikh ATHENS, April 21 (Reuters) - A knife-wielding human trafficker prevented survivors of a shipwreck from pulling others to safety, leaving them to drown in the dark, one of the surviving migrants said on Thursday. Up to 500 people are believed to have died in last week's disaster, when an overcrowded boat sank in the southern Mediterranean. Just 41 people were eventually saved by a passing merchant ship and brought to Greece on April 16. Muaz Mahmud, 25, from Oromia in Ethiopia, managed to escape the packed vessel as it was sinking and clambered onto a nearby boat. However, a people smuggler prevented them from helping others still in the sea, saying they had to leave immediately. "I told him 'don't start motor please we have to save these people'. He took a knife. "I am going to kill you, we don't stand here," and then I just cried," Mahmud told reporters, speaking in broken English. He had been with his wife and 2-month-old baby, having paid $1,800 each for the passage. They are feared drowned. While the handful of survivors recounted their tales of horror, families of those still missing, many of whom were believed to be from Somalia, described how their relatives had hoped to reach Europe and escape poverty. In Somalia's bombed-out capital, the parents of Mohamed Farah, 25, are still awaiting word of his fate. His family and friends had scraped together thousands of dollars to help him to make the perilous trip over land and sea to Europe. They have been told his picture was not among those of the survivors. "Is he alive or dead? His mother has not eaten food for days," said Ali Nur, his 23-year-old cousin and friend. "The agent (trafficker) is the criminal behind the disaster. He got rich from the Somalis drowning in the sea." The stories from the survivors and grieving relatives give a clear timeframe for one of the worst such tragedies in recent years, showing not just the dangers of the journey but also the relative sophistication of the human trafficking ring. More than 150,000 migrants reached Italy by boat last year, with some 25,000 arriving so far this year. About 800 are believed to have died trying to make the crossing since January. NIGHTTIME RENDEZ-VOUS Mohamed Farah left Mogadishu in early February, travelling through Somaliland, Ethiopia and Sudan before reaching Egypt. On April 8 he called home to say he was set to leave, having paid about $3,000 for his place on the boat. "'We are going to sail, please pray for me, parents,'" Nur quoted him as saying in that final call. It is not clear when precisely he put to sea, but survivors have said one boat with up to 300 people aboard departed somewhere from Egypt, while a second, smaller boat, carrying up to 200, left from near Tobruk in eastern Libya. Many hours after putting to sea, these two vessels met up in the dead of night, probably on April 13. The smugglers transferred almost everyone onto the bigger boat, at which point it started taking in water. Survivors and officials say that between 400-500 were probably on board when it sank. "When this boat was falling, we started swimming to save our life to the other boat. Some survivors on the other boat threw something to us (to help us). We were 10 people," said Mahmud. With others still swimming towards them, the smuggler started the engine and abandoned them. "We saw the dead guys with our eyes," said Mowlid Isman, 28, from Mogadishu in Somalia. Like Mahmud, he had managed to reach the smaller boat before it left. His sister and her baby did not and are feared drowned. "Other peoples' families died too. There wasn't anything we could do because they were in the water (and) we moved away," he said, speaking through an interpreter. Survivors said the smuggler headed towards Italy but at a certain point he boarded a third boat to return to Libya. He promised to return with water and food, but never reappeared. He also left a satellite phone, with an Italian number for them to call. "I called. It was the police, I called them to help us," Mahmud said. One ship passed nearby but did not pick them up, he said. A second boat finally found them and took them to Greece. The survivors -- 37 men, three women and a three-year-old child from Somalia, Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan -- said they had drifted at sea for three days. They are now in Athens and Greek non-governmental organization Praksis said they had all been given a one-month permit to stay in the country. In Somalia, news of the disaster started to filter through on April 17. Farah's cousin said they got confirmation from a man nicknamed Magafe, which means 'he who never misses', who was the agent who had organised the doomed crossing. U.N.-sponsored Yemen peace talks begin in Kuwait By Mohammed Ghobari KUWAIT, April 21 (Reuters) - Talks aimed at ending Yemen's war opened in Kuwait on Thursday, with Kuwait's top diplomat appealing to both sides to "turn war into peace" after more than a year of conflict which has killed more than 6,200 people and caused a humanitarian crisis. Yemen's foreign minister warned against high expectations from the U.N.-sponsored talks, which brought together the Houthi group and its General People's Congress party allies with the Saudi-backed government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. The talks, originally scheduled to start on Monday, were delayed over accusations by the Houthi group of truce violations and disagreements over the agenda for the negotiations. Kuwait's foreign minister Sheikh Sabah al-Khalid al-Sabah, in an opening speech at Bayan Palace, urged Yemenis to "turn war into peace and backwardness into development". The talks are based on U.N. Security Council resolution 2216 which calls for the Houthis to withdraw from areas they seized since 2014 and hand heavy weapons back to the government, U.N. special envoy to Yemen Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed said. "The choice today is one of two options: a safe homeland that ensures security for all of its citizens... or remnants of a land whose sons die everyday," Ould Cheikh Ahmed said in an opening speech. The talks are expected to focus on creating a more inclusive government and restoring state authority over the country, which is now divided between the Houthis and Hadi's administration. The war has caused a major humanitarian crisis in Yemen, the poorest country in the Arabian Peninsula. Apart from the more than 6,200 killed, the United Nations says some 35,000 people have been wounded and more than 2.5 million people displaced. The fighting has also allowed the militant Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Isalmic State to consolidate their presence in the country next door to the world's top oil exporter. The United States and the Saudi-led coalition welcomed the start of the talks. "We urge the parties to fully engage in good faith in order to end the military conflict immediately and to return to a peaceful political process," State Department spokesman John Kirby said in Washington. The Saudi-led coalition spokesman, Brigadier-General Ahmed Asseri, speaking to Dubai-based al-Arabia Television, said: "Everybody knows that the way out in the end is political, and the issue will not end through military means, and the coalition has no desire to ... prolong the situation." FIVE POINTS Ould Cheikh Ahmed outlined five points which he said were derived from U.N. Security Council resolution 2216 as the basis for the talks, officially dubbed as "consultations". These included withdrawal from cities seized by the Houthis since the crisis began in 2014, forming a more inclusive government and handing over heavy weapons to the new government. The chief Houthi negotiator, Mohammed Abdul-Salam, registered his delegation's objections to what he said were continuing air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition and to the five-point agenda outlined by Ould Cheikh Ahmed, saying they were not clear enough. The crisis began in September 2014 when the Iran-allied Houthis seized the capital Sanaa. A Saudi-led Arab alliance intervened last year, launching a campaign of mostly air strikes against the Houthis in support of Hadi's forces. The Houthi group and the GPC had accused the Saudi-led coalition and Hadi supporters of failing to honour a truce that began on April 10, and refused to send their negotiators to Kuwait until the truce was consolidated. They agreed to join the talks following intervention by the U.N. Security Council permanent members and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Yemeni Foreign Minister Abdel-Malek al-Mekhlafi, speaking before the talks, said the government delegation would do all it could to make the talks a success. "The Houthis and Saleh's party, by refusing to arrive on the agreed time, and by putting a series of conditions and by saying they reserve the right to boycott sessions if their conditions are met -- all of these have lowered the ceiling of expectations," Mekhlafi told Reuters. Serbia protests to Croatia over minister's war crimes comment BELGRADE, April 21 (Reuters) - Serbia lodged a diplomatic protest on Thursday after Croatia's foreign minister was quoted as saying it was "an historical perversion" for Belgrade to claim the right to judge war crimes committed anywhere in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The protest marked an escalation of a row between the neighbours over Croatia's attempt to set conditions for Serbia to make progress in its talks on joining the European Union. Croatia, which fought a 1991-95 war against Belgrade-backed Serb rebels to forge its independence from Yugoslavia, wants Serbia to drop its claim - enshrined in a 2003 law - to jurisdiction over war crimes committed on the entire territory of the former Yugoslavia. The opening of a new policy area or chapter of Serbia's EU entry talks has been held up while Croatia, which joined the bloc in 2013, lobbies its EU partners to support its position. "The country in which plans for the 1990s wars were made cannot be the judge or the policeman for war crimes in all countries in former Yugoslavia, including Croatia," Croatian Foreign Minister Miro Kovac said in an interview last weekend with the country's "Jutarnji list" newspaper. "That is absurd, an historical perversion in a way, and prevents good neighbourly cooperation," Kovac said. Serbia's Foreign Ministry called in Croatia's ambassador on Thursday to deliver a protest note over Kovac's comments "in which he insults and undervalues Serbia", the ministry said. "The ministry thinks that refraining from such statements in the future would contribute to better bilateral and neighbourly relations," it said in a statement. The Croatian Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the protest, delivered a few days before Serbia's general election. Serbia approved the law claiming jurisdiction to prosecute war crimes over the whole territory of former Yugoslavia in 2003 saying it would improve cooperation with the U.N. tribunal in The Hague. Croatia reacted angrily last month when the U.N. tribunal aquitted Serbian nationalist Vojislav Seselj of war crimes. Croatia banned Seselj from entering the country and Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic called the verdict "shameful". In major shift, Mexico president proposes relaxing marijuana laws By Gabriel Stargardter MEXICO CITY, April 21 (Reuters) - Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto on Thursday proposed legalizing marijuana-based medicines, raising the amount users can carry and freeing inmates on minor weed charges, in a major shift amid regional efforts to reboot drug policy. Pena Nieto, who is grappling with deadly drug cartel violence, said he will send to Congress a proposal to permit the use and importation of marijuana-based medicines, and raise the amount that weed users can legally carry to 28 grams from 5 grams. Growing and selling marijuana is illegal in Mexico and a mainstay business of violent drug gangs. Pena Nieto did not say where consumers would be able to obtain the weed they are then allowed to carry. Pena Nieto said if his plan was approved, it would allow many people behind bars for marijuana offenses to be released. However, he gave no further details on what appeared tantamount to a retroactive pardon for such inmates. A traditional opponent of efforts to liberalize drug laws, Pena Nieto began to modify his stance in recent months, reflecting growing regional disenchantment with the so-called War On Drugs. "Our country has suffered the harmful effects of drug-linked organized crime. Thankfully, a new global consensus is gradually gathering steam in favor of a reform to the international drug regime," Pena Nieto said in Mexico City. "Instead of criminalizing consumers, it will offer alternatives and opportunities." Pena Nieto's proposals are the fruit of a national drug policy review that he called for following a landmark Supreme Court decision in November, which allowed four plaintiffs to grow and consume their own marijuana, paving the way for a liberalization of weed regulations. After the ruling, Cristina Diaz, of Pena Nieto's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, presented a bill to allow the import of medical marijuana products. In January, she told Reuters she expected the bill to be approved by May. It is unclear what will now happen to her bill. A growing number of politicians in Latin America, where hundreds of thousands of people have died in drug-related violence in recent decades, have begun to express their unease with prohibitionist drug policies. In the United States, two dozen states have approved marijuana for medical purposes, while recreational use of the drug has been legalized in Colorado, Washington state, Oregon, Alaska and the District of Columbia. The president's announcement will be good news for many of the world's top companies cashing in on legal cannabis, who have been weighing a bet on entering Mexico. U.S. prisoner in Bahrain says he has been freed via royal pardon By Yara Bayoumy WASHINGTON, April 21 (Reuters) - A U.S. citizen who had been sentenced in Bahrain to 10 years in jail in 2013 has been granted a royal pardon and was freed on Thursday after paying a fine, he and his lawyer said. Tagi al-Maidan was born in the United States to a Bahraini mother and Saudi father and his status as a U.S. national had thrown a spotlight on the complex relationship between Washington and Bahrain, a U.S. ally in the volatile Gulf region that has long provided a base for the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet. Maidan was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in jail in 2013 on charges of attempted murder during a disturbance related to Shi'ite Muslim demands for greater rights. He had told Reuters that the charges against him were false, but that he had made a false confession under torture after his detention in October 2012. (http://reut.rs/23LY29H) The government has denied any abuse in the incident, saying it has a "zero-tolerance policy" towards torture. Mohammed al-Jishi, Maidan's lawyer, said he had received an official document that referred to the royal pardon in Maidan's case. A copy of a document issued by Bahrain's Public Prosecution office dated April 21 showed the details of the case. "The accused carried out the sentence in the Reform and Rehabilitation Administration from Sept. 24, 2013 until April 20, 2016, as there was a special royal pardon and the required monetary amount was paid on April 21," the document said. Maidan was freed as President Barack Obama visited Saudi Arabia for talks with leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council, a Gulf Arab grouping that includes Bahrain. Maidan, reached by phone on Thursday, said he was on his way to Dubai. "I was released a few hours ago. They told me a royal pardon was issued and that if I paid a fine, I would be released. I told my mother and she paid it," said Maidan, who sounded composed. Bahrain, which faces criticism over human rights, has seen frequent protests by members of the Shi'ite majority since February 2011, when it quelled a Shi'ite-led uprising demanding that the Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty give up power. The persistent unrest has placed Bahrain on the front line of a struggle for regional influence between Sunni Saudi Arabia, Bahrain's close ally, and Shi'ite Iran, which denies Bahraini accusations of fomenting Shi'ite protests. Bahrain's Shi'ites have long complained of entrenched discrimination in areas such as employment and public services, allegations the Sunni-led government denies. Bangladesh Bank exposed to hackers by cheap switches, no firewall-police By Serajul Quadir DHAKA, April 21 (Reuters) - Bangladesh's central bank was vulnerable to hackers because it did not have a firewall and used second-hand, $10 switches to network computers connected to the SWIFT global payment network, an investigator into one of the world's biggest cyber heists said. The shortcomings made it easier for hackers to break into the Bangladesh Bank system earlier this year and attempt to siphon off nearly $1 billion using the bank's SWIFT credentials, said Mohammad Shah Alam, head of the Forensic Training Institute of the Bangladesh police's criminal investigation department. "It could be difficult to hack if there was a firewall," Alam said in an interview. The lack of sophisticated switches, which can cost several hundred dollars or more, also means it is difficult for investigators to figure out what the hackers did and where they might have been based, he added. Experts in bank security said that the findings described by Alam were disturbing. "You are talking about an organization that has access to billions of dollars and they are not taking even the most basic security precautions," said Jeff Wichman, a consultant with cyber firm Optiv. Tom Kellermann, a former member of the World Bank security team, said that the security shortcomings described by Alam were "egregious," and that he believed there were "a handful" of central banks in developing countries that were equally insecure. Kellermann, now chief executive of investment firm Strategic Cyber Ventures LLC, said that some banks fail to adequately protect their networks because they focus security budgets on physically defending their facilities. POLICE BLAME BANK, SWIFT Cyber criminals broke into Bangladesh Bank's system and in early February tried to make fraudulent transfers totalling $951 million from its account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Most of the payments were blocked, but $81 million was routed to accounts in the Philippines and diverted to casinos there. Most of those funds remain missing. The police believe that both the bank and SWIFT should take the blame for the oversight, Alam said in an interview. "It was their responsibility to point it out but we haven't found any evidence that they advised before the heist," he said, referring to SWIFT. A spokeswoman for Brussels-based SWIFT declined comment. SWIFT has previously said the attack was related to an internal operational issue at Bangladesh Bank and that SWIFT's core messaging services were not compromised. A spokesman for Bangladesh Bank said SWIFT officials advised the bank to upgrade the switches only when their system engineers from Malaysia visited after the heist. "There might have been a deficiency in the system in the SWIFT room," said the spokesman, Subhankar Saha, confirming that the switch was old and needed to be upgraded. "Two (SWIFT) engineers came and visited the bank after the heist and suggested to upgrade the system," Saha said. GLOBAL WHODUNIT The heist's masterminds have yet to be identified. Bangladesh police said earlier this week they had identified 20 foreigners involved in the heist but they appear to be people who received some of the payments, rather than those who initially stole the money. Bangladesh Bank has about 5,000 computers used by officials in different departments, Alam said. The SWIFT room is roughly 12 feet by 8 feet, a window-less office located on the eight floor of the bank's annex building in Dhaka. There are four servers and four monitors in the room. All transactions from the previous day are automatically printed on a printer in the room. The SWIFT facility should have been walled off from the rest of the network. That could have been done if the bank had used the more expensive, "managed" switches, which allow engineers to create separate networks, said Alam, whose institute includes a cyber-crime division. Egyptian police detained Italian student before his murder - sources April 21 (Reuters) - An Italian student who was tortured and murdered in Egypt had been detained by police and then transferred to a compound run by Homeland Security the day he vanished, intelligence and police sources say. The claims contradict the official Egyptian account that security services had not arrested him. Giulio Regeni, a 28-year-old postgraduate student, disappeared on Jan. 25, friends say. His body was found on Feb. 3, dumped on the side of a road outside Cairo. It showed signs of torture, according to forensic and prosecution officials in Egypt. Egyptian officials have strongly denied any involvement in Regeni's death. Soon after his body was found, police suggested he was the victim of a car accident. Weeks later they said he might have been killed by a criminal gang impersonating policemen. But three Egyptian intelligence officials and three police sources independently told Reuters the police had custody of Regeni at some point before he died. Mohamed Ibrahim, an official in the media department of Homeland Security, said: "There is no connection whatsoever between Regeni and the police or Interior Ministry or Homeland Security. He has never been held in any police station or here. The only time he came into contact with police was when the police officials stamped his passport when he landed in Egypt. "If we had any suspicions concerning his activities the solution would have been simple: Expel him." The Interior Ministry also denied Regeni had been detained, saying this account "had no basis in truth". Regeni's fate has re-focused attention on broader allegations of police brutality in Egypt and created tensions between Cairo and Italy, one of Egypt's most important trading partners. A senior forensic official told Reuters that Regeni had seven broken ribs, signs of electrocution on his penis, traumatic injuries all over his body, and a brain haemorrhage. He had been killed by a sharp blow to the head. Pointing to the signs of torture, human rights groups such as the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms and Amnesty International have suggested Regeni may have been killed by Egyptian security services. Rome is demanding Egypt find Regeni's murderers. All six intelligence and police sources told Reuters that Regeni was picked up by plainclothes police near the Gamal Abdel Nasser metro station in Cairo on the evening of Jan. 25. Security had been heightened that day because it was the anniversary of the beginning of the 2011 Arab Spring uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak. An Egyptian man was picked up at the same time. Three sources gave his name but Reuters was unable to verify the man's identity. His connection to Regeni, if any, is unclear. It is also unclear why the men were picked up, though all the sources said the two had not been specifically targeted but were detained as part of a general security sweep. One of the intelligence officials said the two men were taken to the Izbakiya police station, a fortress-like compound located beneath a flyover near downtown Cairo. "They were transported in a white minibus with police licence plates," he said. The three police sources said officers on patrol in the area that night confirmed to them that Regeni had been taken to Izbakiya. "We were told that an Italian was arrested and he was taken to Izbakiya police station," said one of the police officers, who confirmed the detainee was Regeni. A senior police official in the Izbakiya station told Reuters that he recalled an Italian being brought in and said he would check the records to confirm the name. He subsequently declined to comment. "I don't know anything about it," he said. "I checked the books. Regeni's name was not there." One of the intelligence sources said that Regeni was held at Izbakiya for 30 minutes before he was transferred to Lazoughli, a state security compound run by Egyptian Homeland Security. The sources did not say what happened to the Italian after that. Reuters was unable to obtain information on the whereabouts of the Egyptian. "THIS IS OUR WORK" On March 24, Egyptian police said they had discovered Regeni's bag and passport following a shootout with a criminal gang whose members had in the past posed as policemen. Police suggested he might have been a victim of this gang. Italian officials have dismissed the story. Regeni's family have said they believe the student was not killed for criminal gain. The family declined to comment. Regeni's parents have said that if Egypt fails to uncover the truth behind their son's murder they want Rome to respond strongly. Paola Regeni, his mother, said she might release a photograph - held by the family's lawyer - to show the world what had happened to him. Italy has significant economic interests in Egypt, including the giant offshore Zohr gas field, which is being developed by Italy's state energy producer Eni. A delegation of Italian businessmen led by then-Industry Minister Federica Guidi cut short a visit to Cairo and returned home when Regeni's body was recovered in February. On April 8, Italy recalled its ambassador to Egypt for consultations because, the Italian foreign ministry said, Egyptian investigators in Rome had failed to hand over all their evidence to the Italians. Italian prosecutors said they still wanted details from Cairo mobile phone towers that had connected to Regeni's mobile phone. Egypt said this would violate Egyptian laws and the constitution. Ahmed Essam, a Vodafone official in Egypt, told Reuters that security officials had asked him about "a technical issue related to an investigation that is still ongoing about something secretive." He would not elaborate. Police sources said security officials had asked Essam for telephone recordings but added they could not elaborate. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has said Egypt deeply regretted Regeni's death and intended to continue its "full cooperation" with Italy to resolve the case and bring the culprits to justice. Regeni, who studied at Cambridge University, was researching trade unions in Egypt, focusing on street vendors. In the aftermath of the 2011 uprising, vendors were often used by police to attack protesters or acted as informers. Some vendors were also targeted by the police for blocking roads. His obituary on the Cambridge University website said Regeni "sought to understand how the labour sector was changing in the country, in the context of economic globalisation and greater international institutional linkages." A colleague at Cambridge said Regeni had not flagged any concerns about his safety. But Regeni's research had raised the suspicions of police, a security source told Reuters. The trade union movement is seen as the origin of the 2011 uprising and the last bastion of dissent under Sisi's crackdown. Egypt's interior and foreign ministers both dismissed the allegation that security forces were behind Regeni's murder. UN Syria envoy to pursue peace talks next week GENEVA, April 21 (Reuters) - The U.N. Special Envoy for Syria said on Thursday peace talks would continue next week, despite the main opposition's decision to leave early, which he dismissed as "diplomatic posturing". Staffan de Mistura, in an interview with French-language Swiss television, said 400,000 people had been killed in the five-year-old war. Colombia: guerrilla peace pact would make big dent in drug trade By Christian Plumb UNITED NATIONS, April 21 (Reuters) - Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said on Thursday that successful peace deals with the country's two largest guerrilla groups would make a big dent in the drug trade, boosting the country's effort to replace illicit crops with legal ones. Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly, Santos also slammed policies purely focused on "repression" which he said had often targeted poor, small farmers in Colombia - one of the world's top cocaine producers - instead of deep-pocketed drug traffickers. "After so many lives that have been destroyed, after so much corruption and so much violence, after so many young people being marched off to jail, can we say that we have won the war (on drugs) or at least that we are winning it?" Santos asked. "Unfortunately the answer is 'no.'" Santos is the latest Latin American leader to question the aggressive war on drugs during a special U.N. session called to rethink global strategy in the war on narcotics for the first time in two decades amid an international trend toward more liberal drug laws. "How do you explain to a humble Colombian farmer that he's going to jail because he's growing marijuana when anybody in Colorado or Washington in the U.S., anybody at all, can grow marijuana, sell it and consume it freely?" Santos asked. "It simply doesn't make sense." Instead, Colombia has been going after major drug traffickers while also focusing on getting farmers to switch to legal crops, an effort Santos said would be helped greatly by a successful conclusion to continuing peace talks with the country's largest rebel group, the Marxist FARC, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Negotiations are also slated with the second-largest guerrilla group, the leftist National Liberation Army. "If we are able to do this, this will be a historical turnaround not only for Colombia but the entire world and a step in the right direction," he said. Colombia, long a hub for narcotics production and trafficking, was once home to large marijuana cultivations. Much of the crop was smuggled to the United States before drug cartels began producing more profitable cocaine. Just a day after the government of India said in the Supreme Court that the country should not try to reclaim the Koh-i-Noor as it was "neither stolen nor forcibly taken" it has made a dramatic U-turn saying it will make all efforts to bring back the diamond. The factors which could have led to this U-turn might be the thrashing that the BJP-led government received on social media, some of it even coming from its diehard supporters. The BJP's parent outfit Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) too took a contradictory stand while ally Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) went after the government on the issue. On April 19, a statement by the Central government put the blame for the Koh-i-Noor issue on the shoulders of the media, India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and all previous governments, while lauding Prime Minister Narendra Modi's efforts in bring back lost Indian heritage from distant lands. The statement read, Ever since he has taken over as PM, Narendra Modis efforts led to three significant pieces of Indias history coming back home. It said Germany returned a tenth century statue of goddess Durga, Canada returned a sculpture known as the Parrot Lady and Australia returned antique statues of Hindu deities. The Indian government had earlier said that the country should not try to reclaim the Koh-i-Noor. Blaming the media, the statement said, The government of India wishes to put on record that certain news items appearing in the press regarding the Koh-i-Noor diamond are not based on facts. But the fact is that most mainstream media reports were based verbatim on what the solicitor general of India, Ranjit Kumar, said in the apex court. Kumar narrated a brief history of the Koh-i-Noor from the time it was found in the Kollur mines till now. While indicating the futility of past efforts, the solicitor general told the Supreme Court that seeking the return of the diamond was impractical as there could be similar demands from other countries. And that it was "neither stolen nor forcibly taken". It seems perplexing which part of the media reports the government felt was not based on facts. Secondly, putting the onus on Nehru, the Modi government said that in 1956, Nehru "went on record saying that there is no ground to claim this art treasure back. He also added that efforts to get the Koh-i-Noor back would lead to difficulties. Interestingly, the solicitor general too quoted Nehru in the Supreme Court, saying that there was no ground to claim the Koh-i-Noor back. While blaming previous governments, the Modi government said that the status report on which the preliminary submission was made by the solicitor general has references to the stand taken by governments earlier that the Koh-i-Noor was a gift and cannot be categorised as an object stolen. One may wonder if the past governments so blamed also included the one headed by BJP leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee or the Janata government, in which the BJP's predecessor the Bharatiya Jana Sangh has merged. But in this entire controversy the government quite conveniently forgot to mention what it had said in the Parliament. In a written reply to the Rajya Sabha, the then minister of culture Shripad Naik said, "The cultural property taken out prior to India's independence cannot be claimed on the ground of violation of any law. The issue is not covered under the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property (1970)". Ironically, this statement came not from the Congress-lead Manmohan Singh government but from the BJP-led Modi government. This statement was made in Parliament on August 6, 2014, that is, about three months after Modi took over as the prime minister. Changing or amending one's view is not an offence. The government could have said that it had changed its stand after what the solicitor general had said in the Supreme Court. Making a U-turn is nothing new in governance, even this government has had its fair bit of the practice, the most recent being the one on taxing Employees' Provident Fund (EPF). The Uttarakhand High Court quashing President's Rule in the state, restoring the Harish Rawat government and fixing a new date for the floor test is a huge legal setback and political embarrassment for the Narendra Modi government. Since less than a month ago, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley was the most vocal defendant of the Centre's strategy, suggesting that he was the de facto scriptwriter of the drama in the hills, the high court's directive is a personal loss of face for him. It needs to be recalled that Jaitley provided an elaborate case for justifying Central rule in the state in a Facebook post titled "A State Without a Budget" in which the thrust was on the circumstances under which the imposition of President's Rule under Article 356 of the Constitution was permissible. Jaitley wrote: "There can be no better example of implementation of Article 356." The post was extremely ironical coming from a minister of a party that routinely promised to end the misuse of Article 356 in election manifestos. The sordid saga in the hill state exposes the fact that for all the fulminations of the BJP against the Congress for attacking state autonomy and all of Modi's glib talk about cooperative federalism, in practice, the BJP is no different. In fact, it remains on the prowl for the slightest opening to dismiss governments run by other parties. The high court was as scathing as it gets in Thursday's (April 21) ruling because it accused the government of trying to play with the court. It must be kept in mind that the court has reserved its verdict for later. But because the court does not trust the Centre any longer - after government counsel refused to guarantee that the Centre would not revoke President's Rule and try to get the BJP to form the government in the state before the court's final verdict - the two-judge bench decided to quash the President's Rule on Thursday itself. This is a double snub for the Centre - the high court held the President's Rule was wrongly imposed and added that it had no faith in the government. It is one matter for either political opponents or people to say that they had no faith left in the government but another matter when courts too say the same. The BJP acted in a hasty manner in Uttarakhand because the Modi government decided to take the prime minister's election promise of ushering in a Congress-mukt Bharat to extreme limits. Coming close on the heels of another cloak and dagger operation in Arunachal Pradesh, the BJP brass believed that it could dislodge one Opposition government after another. The Modi government decided to take the PM's poll promise of ushering in a Congress-mukt Bharat to extreme limits. Even before the din from the hills died down, there were murmurs within the BJP that the action brigade of the party would now look eastward - towards Manipur where a similar "operation dislodge" would be undertaken soon. This is not the first time that the Centre has ended up with a bloody nose after wrongly imposing President's Rule using Article 356. A similar embarrassment was caused by the Supreme Court's verdict in January 2006 when it declared the dissolution of the Bihar Assembly as null and void in the Buta Singh case. The only difference at that time was that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government was in power and the governor had refused to allow a National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government headed by Nitish Kumar (in coalition with the BJP) to take the oath of office after the February 2005 Assembly polls. At that time, the apex court stated that "drastic and extreme action under Article 356" cannot be justified according to the whims and fancies of the governor. In the case of Uttarkhand, it appears that the governor's report was more in the nature of secondary evidence and written much after a political decision to dislodge the Harish Rawat government had been taken. From what has happened so far, the Uttarakhand High Court had clearly endorsed the SR Bommai case judgment of the apex court which emphatically stated that the majority of a government has to be proved on the floor of the House and is not open to subjective assessment of the governor. A similar plea was made by the governor of Arunachal Pradesh and the Supreme Court is hearing that matter too. The Uttarakhand High Court has also ruled that it does not believe the assertions of the Modi government as far as cooperative federalism and constitutionalism is concerned. The restoration of the Rawat ministry, irrespective of the outcome of the floor test on April 29, will once again make the case for a thorough review of Article 356. Politically, the high court quashing the President's Rule in Uttarakhand is embarrassing for the BJP because it will strengthen forces of reason and restraint within the party and the Sangh Parivar. The decision could, in the long run, precipitate a change in the balance of power at the highest echelons of the party and government. The decision will also hearten the Opposition parties, and in the middle of the electoral season, it will strengthen those parties which have a consistent position on the review of Article 356. Rawat will now head to the floor test with greater confidence. He may also be able to secure support of those rebel Congress MLAs who were willing to cross over to the other side, but would not do so now because they were able to see through the BJP's game and realise that there was little gain for them in facilitating the fall of the Congress regime. Virginia would not run afoul of federal law or violate death row inmates constitutional rights by passing a law allowing the state to obtain lethal injection drugs from secret sources, according to an opinion released late Tuesday by Attorney General Mark R. Herring. In a 13-page document, Herring responded to a series of Republican and Democratic lawmakers questions about a pending death penalty bill that will be a major focus when the General Assembly reconvenes today to take up Gov. Terry McAuliffes vetoes and amendments. McAuliffe has recommended allowing the state to obtain execution chemicals from unidentified pharmacies and outsourcing facilities. The proposal, pitched as a solution to a widespread shortage of execution drugs, raised legal questions about whether pharmacists could compound drugs for non-medicinal purposes and whether the state could shield information about its execution methods from prisoners scheduled to die. Herrings opinion states that the governors amendments to House Bill 815 would not violate the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act or the Controlled Substances Act, federal statutes meant to control the manufacture and distribution of drugs. Herring said courts would likely find the compounding of lethal drugs falls outside the scope of both laws. The secrecy provision, which would exempt the identities of drug providers from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, is perhaps the most controversial element of the governors plan. McAuliffe has said its necessary to induce businesses to partner with the Department of Corrections. Herring said the governors amendments would allow prisoners defense teams to gather evidence pertaining to the names of the drugs and the injection protocol. The provision would not violate constitutional protections, Herring wrote, adding that its up to the General Assembly to decide whether such limitations on disclosure are in the public interest. Decisions related to the process by which the commonwealth carries out a court-imposed sentence of death deserve the greatest deliberation and consideration, as this is among the most solemn and consequential powers exercised by the state, wrote Herring, who said he was supplying an explanation of existing law to inform the policy decision being weighed by legislators. Herring and McAuliffe are Democrats. Matt Moran, a spokesman for House of Delegates Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford, called Herrings opinion a strong legal endorsement of capital punishment in Virginia. The original legislation introduced by Del. Jackson H. Miller, R-Manassas would have allowed the state to use the electric chair to execute prisoners in lieu of lethal injection. Under current law, death row inmates are given a choice between electrocution and lethal injection. McAuliffe, who personally opposes the death penalty, has said hell veto the electric chair bill if legislators reject his recommendation to give the state new powers to acquire drugs secretly. Religious leaders and others have criticized the governors proposal as a blow to government transparency for the sake of continuing a controversial practice. Miller and others have said a fix is needed to ensure that death sentences handed down for heinous crimes can be carried out. Miller asked Herring to weigh in on the legal issues last week and requested the opinion be issued before todays session. The attorney general also responded to a series of additional questions posed by Sen. Scott A. Surovell, D-Fairfax, and Del. Marcus B. Simon, D-Fairfax. Herring opined that the state can pursue alternative drugs without legislative action, but said the Department of Corrections does not have the authority to delay executions until after the 2017 legislative session to give lawmakers more time on the issue. He also said that the state would be unlikely to face civil liability for using a drug in a manner contrary to the wishes of its manufacturer. Todays legislative session is scheduled to begin at noon. Graham Moomaw reports for the Richmond Times-Dispatch NEW JERSEY - USA - Speaking at Princeton University, Former Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg claims that the UK would be 'left alone and 'powerless' if it left the EU. There has been more scaremongering from Nick Clegg this evening, the Lib Dem former leader has come out with some real choice phrases. We will be left with no empire, no union and no special relationship. We will never have been so alone. Never so isolated. Never so powerless. This like many of Nick Cleggs woeful pitiful words is pure nonsense. Britain will always keep its seat on the UN Security Council, will always be at the helm of NATO, and will always have a special military and political alliance with the United States. Britain has the fifth largest economy in the world, and opening the country up to global trade on Brexit will increase its wealth enormously. Britain also has the fifth largest defence budget in the world. Nick Clegg and his histrionics are never far from the levels of preposterous over emotional babbling, and his staunch pro-euro stance is a danger to the UKs stability. In 2002 he told Prospect magazine: If we remain outside the euro, we will simply continue to subside into a position of relative poverty and inefficiency compared to our more prosperous European neighbours. Look where we are now in 2016. The euro is sinking, Greece is bankrupt 10 times over, Italy is on the brink and with mass unemployment in some EU countries at 45% of the population as well as mass unfettered migration causing immense burdens on EU coffers, there is no way that joining the euro currency would have been good for the UK in 2002 let alone in 2016, or any time in the foreseeable future. Here is the hypocritical Nick Clegg today cosying up to the Americans with another begging speech at Princeton about how much the UK will lose out if we leave the EU, but in 2010, he told Politico magazine: We still too readily put ourselves in a position of unthinking subservience to American interests, even when theyre not necessarily in our strategic interests. Wishy washy Clegg doesnt know which way hes coming or going, one minute he says one thing, the next hes off on another tangent in the complete opposite direction. Suffice to say, people with a surefire dedication to Brexit will not be assuaged by Mr. Yellow, any time soon. Lest we forget what Clegg told the Guardian about the UKs stance towards the US in 2004: Above all, Blair confirmed the suspicion in many European capitals that, in the end, De Gaulle was right: the UK will always remain a footsoldier of US transatlantic power, incapable of committing itself to its own European hinterland. When push comes to shove, the UK will always choose America over Europe. Mr. Clegg has no leg to stand on, and his little miserable speech today at Princeton putting down Britain will go nowhere, much like his policies, his piffling little words, or his party. Not only did Nick Clegg lie about tuition fees, getting him a seat in the government but he promised a referendum before backtracking on his words. Mr. Clegg lies more than David Cameron, and thats saying something. Britain will vote for Brexit on June 23, and nothing will stop the UK gaining its sovereign freedom, not least, words from a squirming dilly dallying Clegg. The Washington Apple Commission (WAC) is an industry initiated self-governing body made up of apple growers and packers from Washington. Visakhapatnam: China, New Zealand, Chile and Italy are offering apples from Washington tough competition in India. Washingtons market share is about 25 per cent due to smaller production and a constrained crop this season, said Washington Apple Commission (WAC) president Todd Fryhover. The Washington Apple Commission (WAC) is an industry initiated self-governing body made up of apple growers and packers from Washington. We have generally held a 40 per cent market share and have had peaks of 55 per cent. We expect our share to be back to over 40 per cent during the 2016-17 season. China, New Zealand, Chile and Italy are the main competing countries in the imported apple segment, but the Indian domestic apple is the toughest competition in the country, Mr Fryhover said. The most favoured variety in India, imported from Washington, is Red Delicious. Apart from this, Granny Smith and Gala are also imported in limited quantities as also Fuji, Cripps Pink and Honeycrisp. Both the Telugu-speaking states are considered to be the steady growth markets for Washington apples. The Washington Apple Commission had recently launched a 70-city national campaign, called The Washington Apple Wagon Tour, across India, especially in Tier II and III cities. The Wagon Tour, had recently touched Vizag in AP. India is the 4th largest export market for Washington apples after Canada, Mexico and Taiwan, as per current data available till March 2016 for the September-August marketing year. India imported 1.97 lakh tonnes of apples worth Rs 1,389 crore in 2014-15 and 1.75 lakh tonnes worth Rs 1,176 crore in 2013-14, according to the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority. The Nhava Sheva Sea accounted for 51.5 per cent of imports, followed by the Chennai Sea and Cochin Sea, which account for 39.1 per cent and 4.8 per cent of imports respectively. Mumbai: It's a known fact that Bollywood's King Khan, Shah Rukh has one of the biggest fan followings in the world. So it was just normal for his fans to rejoice when the actors new film hit the theatres. While SRKs fans are down with Fan frenzy, the films makers recently released a behind the scene footage from their Croatia schedule shoot. The video takes us through the ups and downs and all the sweet memories that Maneesh Sharma and Shah Rukh Khan along with their film's team made in Croatia while shooting Fan. However, its one specific element in the video that holds our undivided attention; two German ladies and their FANtastic story. Apparently, these two German ladies are Shah Rukh Khans one of the biggest fans and have been following the actor on his abroad shoots for last 8 years. We met a set of people, these German women who come to every Shah Rukh Khan shoot that takes place abroad. They just take a flight and join SRK on his sets and now they have become acquaintances. Shah Rukh is not even surprised to see them in a hotel lobby. On spotting them, he would just go and hug them and greet them. They are very gentle, says Maneesh Sharma. Unlike other people who often surprise Shah Rukh Khan with unwanted random pictures and videos, these two ladies are just happy to see the actor do his job. They are not imposing at all. Theyre happy to see him. They even stay in the same hotel on their own cost. They would just come to the set and not bother anyone. Theyd just see him and not click him randomly. And I was told that this has been happening since last 8 years now, adds Maneesh. These two beautiful ladies have seen almost every film of the actor. I liked Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. He is such a warm and kind person, says SRKs fan. When asked about these special ladies, Shah Rukh Khan smilingly says, These ladies are like my twins. They are everywhere. It was really nice to have them in Croatia. I guess we even have them in some of the shots too. They are really sweet. They would have lunch with us. They come everywhere I go. If I am travelling in Europe, these ladies will be there for sure. They are my beautiful groupies and Ive had them for years. They plan their holidays in places where I am. Watch the video below: As it stands, the proposal would allow existing cars to stay in use, but would strive to prevent the sales of any future ones, ensuring that Dutch roads gradually electrify over the next decade or so. Dutch politicians have voted through a motion calling on the country to ban sales of new petrol and diesel cars starting in 2025. The motion has only passed through the lower house of the Netherlands parliament, and would need to pass through the Dutch senate to become legally binding. But its success in a majority vote puts the earliest date yet on just when a major country might begin phasing out polluting transportation. Initially, the motion proposed by the Labour Party (PvdA), the junior member of the Netherlands coalition government aimed to ban petrol and diesel cars entirely, but it was dialled back. As it stands, the proposal would allow existing cars to stay in use, but would strive to prevent the sales of any future ones, ensuring that Dutch roads gradually electrify over the next decade or so. Source: www.theguardian.com Hyderabad: Six children were burnt with heated spoon by ayahs of a state-run Shishu Griha as punishment for not wanting to eat dinner five days back. Three of the little children, all less than five years old, had blisters on their hands from the branding. The staff of the home concealed their barbaric act for four days. However, the incident came to light on Wednesday when a regional language newspaper carried a story based on CCTV footage leaked by one of the workers of the home. The three children whose burns were quite serious are Geeta, Rajan and Swaroopa. They were admitted to the district headquarter hospital and discharged in the evening. The other three had minor burns. Eight abandoned children are housed in the Shishu Griha. CCTV footage showed that ayah K. Padma burned the hands of the six kids as they did not want to eat dinner on April 15. Another ayah, D. Buchamma, heated the spoon on a stove and handed it to Padma while a third ayah, Sharada, remained a mute spectator to the barbaric act. Action only after CCTV images leaked Upon learning about the incident, Collector Neetu Prasad inspected Shishu Griha and expressed her anger against the staff of the home and supervising officials. She then served a show-cause notice on ICDS project director Vijayamohan Reddy for his apathy in supervising the home. The three ayaas, social activist Sri Latha and manager of the home, Babu Rao, were sacked for their role in the incident. Based on a complaint by the project director, Karimnagar II Town police registered a case against Padma and Buchamma under Section 324 of IPC (voluntarily causing hurt) and Section 75 and 85/2015 (cruelty to children) of the Juvenile Justice Act. CCTV grabs show how one of the employees heated a serving spoon, which she then used to hurt the children. But it has emerged that the inmates are paying the price for apathy of officials who are by rules required to supervise the functioning of Shishu Griha. Inmates are often subjected to corporal punishments and are starved of food and water, thanks to lack of constant monitoring by officials concerned. The branding incident has also exposed how safety of abandoned children being housed in State Homes is at stake. The authorities were simply not aware of the branding incident even after four days it happening. They did not even take action against the culprits even after being informed by employees of the Home. They responded only when the CCTV footage was leaked to the media, sparking outrage across the country. ICDS PD Vijayamohan Reddy was immediately served a show-cause notice for his negligence in dealing the issue. The three Ayaas, social activist and the manager of the home were immediately sacked from services for their role in punishing the six children. Abandoned by their parents Madam scolded us, all three children jointly said after being asked what had happened. The kids could not explain how much they were hurt when the ayaas branded with hot steel spoon on their hands. Below five years of age, Geetha, Rajan and Swaroopa were unable to express the agony they had undergone. All they could recall was they that were scolded by their madam when they did not want to eat on that day. The said they had applied ointment on the burns. Geetha joined the home after being abandoned by her mother. Swaroopas father is serving a prison term for killing his wife and Rajan meanwhile is here as his father married another woman. Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar will sign the agreement on behalf of India on April 22 at a high-level signature ceremony convened by the Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon. New Delhi: India will sign the Paris Agreement on climate change, adopted by more than 190 countries in December last, on Friday in New York. The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved the signing of the agreement, adopted during the 21st Conference of Parties held in the French capital. Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar will sign the agreement on behalf of India on April 22 at a high-level signature ceremony convened by the Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon. India had advocated a strong and durable climate agreement based on the principles and provisions of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the agreement addresses all the important concerns and expectations of India. A record number of more than 150 countries are expected to sign the historic Paris agreement in New York. A UN body had earlier said that this record number of countries would surpass the previous record of 119 signatures for an opening day signing for an international agreement, set by the Law of the Sea in Montego Bay in 1994. The signing ceremony will mark the first step toward ensuring that the Paris Agreement enters into force as early as possible. Bengaluru: Former prime minister and JD S) patriarch H.D. Deve Gowda on Wednesday threatened to stage a protest in front of Chief Minister Siddaramaiahs residence in case the state government does not heed his demand for a judicial probe into clashes between people belonging to two castes in his home district, Hassan. Accusing the police top brass and the local administration of colluding with district in-charge minister A Manju, though the latter alleged triggered a rift between caste Hindus and dalits in Sigaranahalli, Holenarasipur taluk, Mr Gowda told the media that he was humiliated in his own constituency. How can I attend parliament? I request the CM to announce a judicial probe. Otherwise, I will stage a protest in front of his residence when parliament is in session, he added. Mr Gowda alleged that the district administration had humiliated him to such an extent that he had decided not to attend the forthcoming session of parliament. He alleged that trouble started when members of a Women Self Help group wanted to share money released by a bank. Two factions in the group had a differences over the issue, but it took an inter-caste turn. The dalit group was supported by a vernacular journalist. He said a similar attempt to create problem was made six months ago, when Mr Raman Gupta was Superintendent of Police, Hassan. The officer managed the issue tactfully but was transferred from the district soon. First, the local police registered a case saying dalits were not allowed to enter a temple followed by a series of atrocity cases. I tried calling up the new SP, IGP and the DGP. However, they never responded, Mr Gowda added. Dalit CM: dharam joins the chorus KPCC president Dr G Parameshwars call for appointment of a dalit as Chief Minister was backed by former chief minister and veteran leader N Dharam Singh on Wednesday. Speaking at a function organized here to mark the release of books authored by Dr V Munivenkatappa on the dalit movement, Mr Singh remarked The cry of dalits for getting the top position has existed from the days of the late B Basavalingappa, but could not materialize. In the renewed debate on leadership of the state going to dalits , the names of Congress leader in Lok Sabha, M Mallikarjun Kharge, and Dr G Parameshwar are figuring prominently. Dalits are still denied benefits which are due to them, Mr Singh added. Dr Jnanaprakash Swamiji of Urulinga Peddi Mutt, Mysuru, underlined the need for dalit organizations spreading their tentacles on the lines of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS). Dalit Sangarsh Samitis are like seeds capped in a bottle, while the RSS is like a seed sown in soil. The seeds capped in a bottle never bear roots where as the one sown in soil grows into a huge tree, he observed. Criticising dalit writers for hankering after awards and rewards for their literary works and dalit organizations becoming professional bodies, the seer said, Ambedkar, Basavanna and Buddha have become like ATM cards and one can encash them at any time. If the same trend continues, the number of people living by mortgaging Ambedkar will increase and the number of well off among Dalits will also increase, he added. Dangerous impact on sovereignty: The nuclear security summit in Washington DC, March 31-April 1, 2016, attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was a failure in addressing two crucial issues nuclear disarmament and moving towards a nuclear weapon-free world. The threat from nuclear weapons is a threat to the entire humanity and the United States, the first country to have a stockpile of nuclear weapons, has nuclear warriors and bases in different parts of the world. We must remember that India used to have a stated position on the basis of national consensus for nuclear disarmament and a nuclear weapon-free world. The Modi government is breaking this commitment in the national consensus to please and support the US. India, in fact, entered into the India-US Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) after the nuclear security summit. This shows that the Modi government has been taking pro-US steps that are dangerous. Furthering military collaboration with the US is not in our interest. LEMOA is just another name for the Logistics Support Agreement (LSA) the US used to enter into with allies such as the Philippines, South Korea, Japan and other countries. Whatever defence minister Manohar Parrikar has been saying, that its only for refuelling and maintenance of American ships and planes, is not true. In practice this agreement will require stationing of US armed forces on our own soil Indian soil on regular basis. Earlier during the Iraq war, there was pressure on India to allow American Air Force planes refuelling at Chennai, but India resisted. Now these agreements will allow such things to take place. Further, Mr Parrikar indicated that there will be more follow-up agreements, which include Communication Interoperability and Security Memorandum Agreement (CISMOA) and Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (BECA). Actually if these agreements are signed, it will make our own armed forces a part of the command and control structure of the US armed forces. If this happens, the Bharatiya Janata Party government will be marking a significant departure from what the Government of India has been following since Independence to make India a strategic military ally of the US. It is a surrender of the Indian government to US demands and pressure. These are all very crucial strategic agreements, yet there was no adequate discussion inside Parliament. The Modi government, in fact, neither took Parliament nor people into confidence. There is no transparency in what the Modi government does as far as defence agreements and military collaborations with other countries are concerned. On one hand many countries are fighting US military presence in their regions and India has to fight against the US base in Indian Ocean. But instead of joining with other countries to stand up against the US, India has willingly become a subservient ally of the US. This is going to have a very dangerous impact on our sovereignty and strategic autonomy. D. Raja is Communist Party of Indias national secretary. Itll enhance our defence against China: India has in principle agreed to sign LSA, one of the three foundational agreements that the US has been asking India to sign. The agreement provides access to each others military facilities for berthing and refueling, and better logistic support on a reimbursable basis. LEMOA, specially written for India, essentially formalises an existing arrangement to strengthen military-to-military cooperation. The debate about India signing the LEMOA, CISMOA and BECA for geo-spatial cooperation has gone on for more than a decade. The Indian government under the UPA resisted signing these agreements because it feared domestic political criticism about losing strategic autonomy. Critics argue that these are agreements signed typically by US allies and, therefore, if New Delhi were to sign them, it could be construed as India turning into one. However, in reality, these agreements have been signed by around 100 countries, not all of whom are US allies. Another, even more absurd criticism is that signing these agreements will make New Delhi complicit in American wars and policies, especially in West Asia and East Asia. Proponents of such views do not say how, nor why the other 100 countries that have signed such agreements are not similarly considered. France has signed a similar agreement but that has not drawn it into these conflicts. The LEMOA does strengthen US-India military-to-military relationship. But this strengthening has been happening for more than a decade. We conduct more military exercises with the US than with anyone else, and our military is increasingly looking to equip itself with American-built military equipment (even though we will remain overwhelmingly dependent on Russian equipment for the foreseeable future). This is happening as a conscious strategic choice that the last three Indian governments have made, partly because Chinas increasing military strength can no longer be ignored and partly because Chinas behaviour over the last decade has become increasingly assertive. India needs to beef up its military capabilities and its It is only natural that India will look to the US because both countries share a common perception about Chinas rise. The absence of these umbrella agreements have hindered India-US military-to-military cooperation: India has been denied certain equipment with CISMOA-category communication systems, and equipment that India has acquired, such as the P-8I anti-submarine aircraft, have been stripped of some of its most useful equipment because India has not signed of the agreements. Signing these agreements will not make the US our ally, nor will it solve all our differences with Washington. But India does stand to gain by signing the LEMOA and other agreements. For example, India, which has one aircraft carrier and lacks the capacity for far-sea operations, could potentially gain access to US military bases in the Indian Ocean, such as Diego Garcia and Djibouti. This will enhance Indias reach in a big way and provide the much-needed logistics support to carry out a variety of missions in the Indian Ocean. Dr Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan heads the Nuclear and Space Policy Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. A boy cries in pain as others try to prevent him from moving too much during a mass circumcision in Marikina city, east of Manila, Philippines. (Photo: AP) Marikina city, Luzon: Around 300 pre-teen boys were forced to undergo circumcision at a mass event in a school in Philippines' Markina city, according to a report in the Daily Mail. The ritual, commonly referred to as 'tuli' in Philippines, is an age-old custom, wherein the foreskin of the penis is cut off for non-medical reasons. Circumcision is performed on those boys who are about to enter their teens. A boy tries to control himself as doctors work on him during a free circumcision surgery. (Photo: AP) Although painful and illegal, circumcision in many parts of the country is mandatory for young boys and those who do not undergo the ritual are often teased by peers. The tradition of circumcision is generally associated with Islam and Judaism as in those religions young boys are forced to undergo the custom in the name of God. A group of boys lie on a makeshift operating table as nursing aid prepares them during a free circumcision surgery in Marikina city, east of Manila, Philippines. (Photo: AP) In Philippines, around 300 boys underwent the surgery as part of their transformation from young boys to adulthood and majority of the boys are Roman Catholics. As a part of the ritual, the boys are encouraged to wear loose skirts to facilitate circumcision and the swelling that follows the ritual. A newly circumcised boy walks past a line of other boys waiting to be circumcised during a circumcision surgery event. (Photo: AP) Some boys cried in their mother's arms while some bit on to their shirts as the doctors and nurses performed the surgery. Young Filipino boys are often circumcised during their summer break holidays that last from March to May. Newly circumcised boys wait in line to receive free medicine during a circumcision surgery event. (Photo: AP) Around five years ago, the Filipino city had also tried to register for Guinness Book of World Records for the largest number of circumcisions, but their application was rejected on the grounds of hygiene and risks. "We would like to clarify that we do not, under any circumstance, monitor, endorse or recognise this type of record attempt," a spokesperson from Guinness World Records was quoted as saying. In some rural parts of the country, the surgery is often performed by non-doctors using crude methods which can at times be more painful and unhealthy. National Security Advisor, Ajit Doval being welcomed by China's State Councillor, Yang Jiechi at the 19th India-China Boundary talks in Beijing. (Photo: PTI) Beijing: India and China on Wednesday agreed to adhere to "peaceful negotiations" to settle the vexed border issue and reach a "fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution", amid negativity over Beijing's blocking of India's bid in the UN to ban Pakistan-based JeM chief Masood Azhar. The decision was taken during the annual 19th round of boundary talks here between National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi to discuss the way forward to resolve the dispute which has bedevilled the relations between the two countries. Both the leaders had an "extensive, deep and candid" discussion on the 3,488 km-long Line of Actual Control (LAC), which remains undemarcated resulting in tensions between the two sides. Both sides agreed to adhere to "peaceful negotiations to settle the boundary question". They will make efforts to reach a "fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution", according to a Chinese Foreign Ministry statement. Besides the border issue, Doval and Yang, the designated Special Representatives, also have a larger mandate to discuss all contentious bilateral, regional and international matters of mutual concern. Welcoming Doval, Yang in his opening remarks at the meeting said: "Your visit fully signifies the importance Indian side attaches to this meeting and the efforts to further promote the strategic partnership between China and India. "China-India relations carry special significance. China stands ready to use this important occasion to have a broad-ranging in-depth and candid discussion with Indian side on the bilateral relations, boundary question, regional and international issues and other issues of shared interest." Doval in his response spoke about the importance of informal talks between him and Yang, saying "not talking from the mind but also from the heart". The statement, carried by state-run Xinhua news agency, said that the two sides will properly manage differences and safeguard peace and tranquillity in the border areas so as to create favourable conditions for development of their ties. Both sides shared the view that China-India relations have broad prospects and Beijing and New Delhi have far more common interests than differences. Bilateral ties have entered a new era of comprehensive and rapid development since Chinese President Xi Jinping paid a successful visit to India in 2014 and Prime Minister Narendra Modi travelled to China in 2015, it said. Both sides should implement the important consensus between the leaders, enhance high-level interactions, tap the potential of cooperation, and promote China-India relations to a higher level, it said. The issue of China putting technical hold on India's recent bid to bring about a UN ban on Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) chief Azhar for his involvement in the Pathankot terrorist attack was also said to have figured during the talks. Terming 2015 during which Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited China as a "very positive year" in bilateral ties between the two countries, Doval said: "It started a process about which we feel very satisfied. There has been an improvement in the bilateral exchanges between the two countries in various fields." He also conveyed greetings by Modi to Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang. Barring the opening remarks, officials maintained total secrecy on the proceedings and Doval himself declined to speak to the media. Ahead of the talks, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar - who concluded his visit to China today - highlighted India's stand that there should be clarity about the LAC. It was highlighted by Modi both during Xi's visit to India in 2014 and his own trip here last year. But China was averse to accept it and for its part suggested a code of conduct. Last year, Deputy Director General of the Asian Affairs at the Chinese Foreign Ministry Huang Xilian highlighted China's reservation on the clarification of LAC, saying "whatever we do in the border area it should be constructive. That means it should be a building block for the process of negotiations, not a stumbling block." In the meeting with his Chinese counterpart on Monday, Parrikar said clarity over LAC will bring down tensions between the troops on both sides which aggressively patrol the areas to assert their control. "We are insisting it should be done in order to really ensure a very stable border as all the issues take place because of perception," he said. Marking the LAC is "one of the preconditions of smooth border operations. Without that everything goes by perceptions, which has caused problems sometimes", he told the media here. Parrikar also highlighted India's concerns over China's projects in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) especially the USD 46-billion Economic Corridor going through the disputed territory. This issue too reportedly figured in the Doval-Yang talks. On the border dispute, officials on both sides say the protracted boundary talks made progress and that they also made attempts to avert tensions along the disputed border. While China says that the boundary dispute is confined to 2,000 kms, mainly in Arunachal Pradesh in eastern sector which it claims as part of southern Tibet, India asserts that the dispute covered the whole of the LAC including the Aksai Chin occupied by China during the 1962 war. When the Special Representatives were appointed in 2003, the two sides set off a three-stage process. The two countries first reached an agreement on the guiding principles and setting political parameters for the settlement in 2005. Officials say the two sides are currently in the second stage which focuses on working out a framework of settlement to be followed by final step drawing the boundary line based on framework agreement. On the 19th round boundary talks, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said yesterday that "we have been working to resolve territorial disputes through negotiations and consultation. China completely settled territorial disputes with 12 of the 14 land neighbours". Regarding Azhar, India's UN Permanent Representative Syed Akbaruddin spoke of "hidden veto" at a meeting at an open debate in UNSC on 'Threats to International Peace and Security Caused by Terrorist Acts' in New York on April 16, while External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar called for a review of China's decision to strike a common stand against terrorism. For its part, China continued to stick to its stand, saying that its decision is based on facts and fairness. Defending China's stand, Hua said that "we oppose double standard in counter terrorism campaign. We have been dealing with the listing (of terrorists by UN) matter in accordance with the facts and relevant resolutions. "We are also in sound communication with all relevant parties including the Indian side," she said. Significantly Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in his meeting with Parrikar yesterday said disputes should be handled properly and ties with New Delhi to be boosted, state-run China Daily reported today. China will properly manage disputes while boosting bilateral cooperation with India, making contributions to Asia's economic growth, Li said. Doval is scheduled to call on Li tomorrow which makes it a rare occasion for a Chinese premier to meet two top officials in such short time. Doval and Yang are also reported to have discussed a range of issues including India's concern over USD 46 billion trade deficit with China in about USD 70 billion bilateral trade. A CPI(M) supporter was killed and ten were injured in sporadic violence during the third phase of polling for 62 Assembly seats of West Bengal which saw an estimated 79.22 per cent turnout. The Election Commission said in New Delhi that the turnout could be more as the figures were based on text messages sent by polling officials from the field till 5 pm. Heavy turnout of 81.62 per cent was recorded in 17 seats of Nadia, 79.29 per cent in 22 seats of Murshidabad and 78.26 per cent in 16 seats of Burdwan. However, the seven constituencies of northern Kolkata, registered only 57.05 per cent votes. Though polling ended at 6 PM, officials said the final turnout figure would be known tomorrow. Deputy Election Commissioner in charge of West Bengal Sandeep Saxena said in Delhi that in the 2011 assembly polls, the voter turnout stood at 84.83 per cent, while it was 81.80 per cent in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls in the constituencies which went to poll today. The body of a 35-year-old CPI(M) supporter, identified as Tahidur Mondal, was found about 500 metres away from a polling booth at Shibapara area of Domkal Assembly seat in Murshidabad district. No arrests have so far been made in connection with the incident. Asked whether the incidents of violence in the third phase were the highest in this phase, Saxena said the Commission "cannot compare" the number of incidents in each phase. Police said an FIR has been filed against 20 persons alleging that Trinamool supporters killed Mondal. In another area of Domkal constituency, four people were hurt, two of them seriously, in a clash between rival political workers for which 25 people have been detained. Three other incidents of clashes were also reported from Burdwan in which crude bombs were used. ADG (law and order) Anuj Sharma said the police made 169 arrests during the day out of which 162 were under preventive sections all over the state. Altogether 63 preventive arrests were made from Kolkata including 52 from Beleghata area where there were complaints of voter intimidation. A government official on poll duty, who was maintaining the queue at a booth in Burdwan district, died of sun-stroke. Altogether seven presiding officers were removed from duty during the day in Burdwan and Murshidabad, West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer Sunil Gupta said. Union Minister Babul Supriyo was allegedly heckled at a polling booth in Jorasanko constituency in the city when he went to cast his vote along with his mother. In Kolkata, Trinamool leader Anwar Khan was arrested following instructions from the Chief Electoral Officer after he was shown on TV channels abusing the poll panel while talking to a party worker over phone. During the day, the poll panel received over 2,700 complaints, many of which were related to booth-capturing, false voting and voter intimidation. Altogether 418 candidates, including 34 women, are in fray in this phase where over 1.37 crore voters, including 65.8 lakh females, were eligible to exercise their franchise. Key candidates whose fate was sealed today include Trinamool ministers Shashi Panja and Sadhan Pande, BJP national secretary Rahul Sinha, five-time Congress MLA Md Sohrab, CPI-M MLA Anisur Rahman and retired IPS officer Nazrul Islam. Chief Minister and Trinamool chairperson Mamata Banerjee said her party has nothing to do with the incident in Domkal. "It is a false propaganda by a media house," she said at an election rally in North 24 Parganas district. TMC lauded the Election Commission for ensuring large turnout in polling today. "The voting process has been good. EC has done a good job in ensuring that so many people could vote," TMC vice-president Mukul Roy said. CPI(M) Politburo leader Md Salim alleged the ground was slipping fast from under the ruling TMC and that was why it was resorting to widespread violence and attacking opposition party workers and supporters. CPI(M) alleged EC had failed to ensure free and fair polls in the third round of polling in Bengal and opposition Left Front demanded repolling in 15 booths in Domkal constituency. Congress state president Adhir Chowdhury demanded repolling in 11 booths in Domkal constituency and claimed Left Front-Congress alliance today took another step towards winning the Assembly polls in Bengal. There were one lakh security personnel, including 75,000 central forces, on duty for the polls. A day after BJP claimed the Rafale aircraft deal with France has been "finalised" at USD 8.8 billion (Rs 59,000 crore), Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar today said it is not complete as yet but at an "advanced stage" and the intention is to "close it quite soon". In a lighter vein, he told reporters here that the BJP tweet only indicates that journalists write stories very convincingly. BJP had yesterday tweeted a graphic, saying that the Rafale combat aircraft deal has been "finalised" and the Narendra Modi government had saved over Rs 21,000 crore in the "re-negotiation" with the French government. Defence Ministry sources had earlier said the deal was at an advanced stage and both India and France had narrowed down their differences over the pricing issue. "I can only tell you this much that while the deal is in quite an advanced stage, and we intent to close it quite soon, I still can't say that negotiations are totally cleared until we sign the deal or at least the deal is forwarded to the Cabinet for approval," Parrikar told reporters here. The deal is expected to be finalised by May end. India has been bargaining hard with France over the pricing of the 36 fighter planes, a deal that was announced first by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in April last year. The cost of the 36 Rafales, as per the earlier tender while keeping the cost escalation into account, comes to around Rs 65,000 crore. India has been bargaining for a price that is less than 8 billion Euro (Rs 59,000 crore). "The deal to buy 36 state-of-the-art Rafale aircraft from France at 12 billion dollar (Rs 80000 crore) was re-negotiated and finalised at 8.8 billion dollar (around Rs 59000 crore)," the BJP tweet had said. The government "saved" public money and the deal resulted in gain of "technological knowledge" and "strengthening the air power to defend the border", it had said. A pistol-wielding cop perched on a raised platform, a machan of sorts. This is a Delhi Police measure to tackle rising incidents of snatching and robbery on a stretch of road just after the Yamuna Bridge ends. The dangerous spot extends up to the beginning of Laxmi Nagar on Vikas Marg. Autorickshaw passengers and people on foot on this relatively lonely stretch, close to the Yamuna riverbed, have complained about motorcycle-borne men snatching handbags and necklaces. I, my wife and my brother were travelling on an auto from Kashmere Gate bus station today. As we reached the loop of the flyover, two bike-borne men who were following us from a distance, rode near us, and before we could suspect anything the pillion rider snatched the purse from my wifes hands, said Gopal, a complainant. Gopal got off from the autorickshaw and spotted the police machan a few metres away. He narrated the incident to the constable there who immediately informed a police control room van stationed nearby. The constable then took Gopal to the Shakarpur police station on his motorcycle to get the FIR registered. The basic idea is to instill confidence in the public and make the visibility of police more prominent, said Rishipal, Deputy Commissioner of Police (East). There are also complaints that accident victims on this stretch of road dont help in time. A PCR van with first aid kit is also stationed here to take care of any untoward incident, including accidents, said a senior police officer. The machans are manned from 11 am to 11 pm every day. A constable spends two hour on the raised platform before being replaced by a colleague. The machans, about three feet above ground and equipped with CCTV cameras to record any untoward incident. A day after they were allegedly manhandled while trying to enter into the sanctum sanctorum of the famous Trimbakeshwar temple in "dress code", the four women activists today took 'darshan' of the deity amid police protection. The activists, led by Vanita Gutte of Pune-based Swarajya Mahila Sanghatana, offered prayer inside the Lord Shiva temple's 'garbha griha' (sanctum sactorum) at around 6 AM today, accompanied by police personnel, Trimbakeshwar Police Station in-charge H P Kolhe said. "We are happy that we offered prayer inside the garbhagrih. We arrived in the dress code - wearing wet cotton and silk saris - and were treated well by the trustees," Gutte told reporters. A team of police personnel were deployed at the temple premises ahead of the scheduled visit today, Kolhe said. Dedicated to Lord Shiva, the Trimbakeshwar temple is one of the 12 'Jyotirlingas' situated in the country. Yesterday, as many as 200 persons, including the former municipal president of Trimbakeshwar, were booked under relevant IPC sections for allegedly manhandling with the activists in their bid to enter the temple's core area. On April 14, based on a complaint by Gutte that they were being obstructed from entering the temple, police had registered offences against nearly 250 people, including members of the temple trust, some local priests, and temple workers. Meanwhile, a bandh was observed in the city today after locals gave a call last night opposing police action against some villagers for allegedly obstructing the activists. Most of the shops, restaurants remained shut. Earlier, the Trimbakeshwar Devasthan Trust decided to allow women into the famous Lord Shiva temple's 'garbha griha' for an hour everyday, but with a rider that they must wear wet cotton or silk clothes while offering prayers in the core area. The development is significant as it comes 13 days after women were permitted entry to the Shani Shingnapur temple in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra on April 8. It came to national attention in January when hundreds of women activists attempted to storm into the Shani Shingnapur temple. After months of protests, and the Bombay high court observing that entering a temple was a fundamental right of every person, the temple trust finally decided to allow women on Arpil 8. The decision opens the doors for women to contest similar bans at other temples. The Islamic State, notorious for its brutality, has reportedly executed 250 girls in northern Iraq for refusing to become sex slaves, according to a media report. The girls had been ordered to accept temporary marriages to the terrorists and were murdered, sometimes alongside their families, for their refusal to be sex slaves in Iraq's second largest city of Mosul. ISIS began selecting women of Mosul and forced them into marrying its militants, calling it temporary marriage since it has taken control over Mosul, and the women who refused to submit to this practice would be executed, said Kurdish Democratic Party spokesman Said Mamuzini. "At least 250 girls have so far been executed by IS for refusing to accept the practice of sexual jihad, and sometimes the families of the girls were also executed for rejecting to submit to IS's request," Mamuzini told London-based Kurdish news agency 'AhlulBayt'. Another official from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) party Ghayas Surchi said that human rights were being widely violated in all IS-held territories, particularly the womens' rights as they're seen as commodities and have no choice in choosing their spouses. Surchi said that women were not allowed to go out alone in Mosul and cannot choose their spouses. The executions follows a spate of similar killings that took place last August in which 19 Mosul women were slaughtered for refusing to have sex with ISIS fighters, the report said. Up to 500 Yazidi women and girls were kidnapped and sexually abused by militants in August 2014. In October, more than 500 Yazidi women and young girls were reportedly abducted by the ISIS when they stormed the Sinjar region in northern Iraq. ISIS took control of Mosul in June 2014 after the fall of Iraqi army in the city and since then has been slaughtering its residents for various charges to spread fear. US President Barack Obama said on Monday that he expected Mosul to be retaken from the ISIS "eventually". "My expectation is that by the end of the year, we will have created the conditions whereby Mosul will eventually fall," Obama had said. Union Minister Giriraj Singh kicked up a controversy with his remark that if the country's population policy is not changed to mandate a two-child norm across religions then "our daughters" will not be "safe" and might have to be kept "under the veil" like in Pakistan. Opposition parties today slammed Singh, a senior BJP leader and a party MP, for his remark made yesterday, saying his basic puropose is to create a "divide" between the Hindus and the Muslims for "short term political gains" and virtually demanded that he be sacked from the government. "Hindus should have two sons, Muslims, too, should have two sons. Our population is coming down. Bihar has seven such districts where our population has gone down. Population rules have to be changed, only then will our daughters be safe. Otherwise, like Pakistan, we too will have to keep our daughters under the veil," he said while addressing a cultural event in Bagaha in West Champaran. "There should be such a law in the country that same number of children should be allowed for families across religions whether Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or Christian," he said, adding, "The population policy should be the same for all. And if you want our country to be a developed nation, population control is necessary." Under attack, Singh today sought to defend his remark, saying it was said in the interest of the country. "I said this in the interest of the nation like how China brought the population control law in 1979...Today Malaysia, Indonesia and Bangladesh have brought this law. There should be strong law in India also that should apply to all families across religions whether Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or Christian," he said. "I said in many districts and states the Hindu population is declining which is a matter of worry because we need to maintain social harmony. So there should be strong law like if Hindus can have two children then Muslims, Sikhs or Christians should also have two each." JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav said Singh's remark was in bad taste and that he should first ask his governmetn what it thoght about the population control issue. Another JD(U) leader Pavan Varma said Giriraj Singh's devotion to Hindutva is an "inversse proportion" to his knowledge of demography. "His basic puropose is to create a divide between the Hindus and the Muslims on the basis of cooked up facts for short term political gain," he added. RJD spokespersond Manoj Jha said Giriraj Singh does not have any understanding of the demography of the country. "If hate speech has any kind of award then it should go to Giriraj Singh," Jha said, adding the prime minister should look into why this kind of minister should be in the ministry. "This kind of people should not have any space in public life," he said. China today aired its concern over World Uyghur Congress (WUC) leader Dolkun Isa's reported visit to India, saying he is a "terrorist" on Interpol's Red Corner and it is the obligation of all countries to bring him to justice. "I am not aware of the situation," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying told PTI in a written response when asked about the reports that WUC leaders including Dolkun were given permission to meet the Dalai Lama later this month. "What I want to point out is that Dolkun is a terrorist in red notice of the Interpol and Chinese police. Bringing him to justice is due obligation of relevant countries," Hua said. India's decision to permit WUC leaders whom China regards as backers of terrorism in its volatile Muslim-dominated Xinjiang province was reported to be in response to Beijing's blocking a ban on Jaish-e-Muhammad chief Masood Azhar in the UN. Xinjiang, which has over 10 million Uyghur population of Turkik origin Muslims, was on the boil for several years over Uyghur protests against the large-scale settlements of Hans from different part of the country. China blames East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a militant Islamist group, for terrorist attacks in Xinjiang and other parts of the country. President Xi Jinping has assumed a new title of "Commander in Chief" of China's new joint forces battle command centre, in his latest move to exert greater control over the world's largest army and consolidate his status as China's most powerful leader in decades. 62-year-old Xi is already General Secretary of the ruling Communist Party and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, which manages the People's Liberation Army (PLA). Xi is now Commander in Chief of the military's Joint Operations Command Centre, state media reported, showing him visiting the centre wearing camouflage fatigues. The Xinhua news agency and the state broadcaster CCTV both carried reports referring to Xi by the description for the first time after he visited the command centre on Wednesday. "The current situation requires battle command to be highly strategic, coordinated, timely, professional and accurate," Xi said, urging staff at joint battle command centers at both CMC and theater command levels to bear in mind a sense of crisis and adapt to the strategic demands of national security. Xi told the officers to closely follow the trends of global military revolution and strive to build a joint battle command system that meets the need of fighting and winning an informationised war. "All must be done with the ultimate goal of improving battle command capacities and measured by the standards of being able to fight and win wars," Xi said, urging a focus on solving conflicts and problems limiting joint battle command. Xi also called for "extraordinary methods" to foster joint battle command talent, stressing that "a major breakthrough should be achieved as soon as possible." The command centre was set up as part of a major revamp of China's military structure, which also included the creation of a strategic rocket force to operate its missiles. China's foreign policy has become increasingly assertive in recent years, especially on its claims to disputed territories in the resource-rich and strategic South China Sea. However, analysts say his new title indicates he wants to be seen as a leader capable of commanding the military directly. During his visit to the centre on Wednesday, which was widely publicised in state media, he said the armed forces should be "absolutely loyal" and "capable of winning wars". Experts say his appearance in military fatigues may also be a display of strength aimed at China's rivals. China and several of its neighbours are locked in a territorial dispute over the South China Sea, which Beijing claims almost in its entirety. The PLA is the world's largest military force, with a strength of approximately 2,285,000 personnel. Meanwhile, the establishment of a joint battle command capacities improve military capabilities and the outcome of conflict, the PLA Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese military commented today. The commentary noted that the "possibility of turmoil and conflict on the nation's doorstep was increasing," citing factors such as inter-related traditional and non-traditional security threats, disputes over territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests, and terrorism. The article urged military authorities to heighten their sense of crisis and adapt to the strategic demands of national security. It said China's joint battle command system should support the needs of fighting and winning an informationised war and fulfil its missions and tasks efficiently.The article also asked military personnel to strengthen their theoretical study, training and command disposal drills. "If they did not grow to be experts of joint battle command, it would be difficult for the army to keep a firm grip on the future developments in conflicts," it warned. Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said the demand for setting up a government medical college at the Wenlock Hospital in the city will be considered in the next years budget. Speaking after laying foundation stone for the construction of the district office complex, a new wing of Wenlock Hospital, an international standard swimming pool at Emmekere and police quarters both in Commissionerate and SP limits here on Thursday, he said, Since 2004-05, I have sanctioned 12 government medical colleges. There were only four medical colleges in 2004-05. The demand will be considered in the next budget. He said the state government has made an honest effort to fulfill the promises it made in the election manifesto, Out of 165 promises, more than 100 promises have been fulfilled. The Congress will come back to power in 2018 Assembly election as it has implemented a number of welfare programmes. Some persons are in delusion that they will come to power in the next Assembly election and have started the portfolio distribution, he said without mentioning the Opposition parties. They will be disheartened with the victory of the Congress in the next Assembly election, he added. Siddaramaiah said, The Congress government is committed to make Karnataka a hunger-free state and has already supplied free rice to 1.13 crore families. To empower SC/ST community members, the state government has earmarked Rs 19,452 crore in the budget. Rubbishing the allegations that his government has concern for only Ahinda (Minorities, Backward Classes and Dalits), he said his governments schemes are not only aimed at the Ahinda communities, but also at the poor sections of society. Those who are against the reservation system and social justice are levelling such allegations, he charged. The chief minister said, The government will make a positive move towards the implementation of Paschima Vahini Scheme which envisages harnessing the west-flowing rivers. The demand on expansion of runway at Mangaluru International Airport, widening of road to Airport from Kavoor, ring road from Mulki-Bajpe-Gurupura-Konaje-Kotekar, facelift to Old Port will be considered in future. Earlier, MLA J R Lobo and District In-charge Minister B Ramanath Rai appealed to the chief minister to come to the rescue of rubber growers who are facing problem with steep fall in the price of rubber. Estimated cost of projects The district office complex will come up on Alape in Padil on 5.89 acre land at an estimated cost of Rs 41 crore. The international standard swimming pool at an estimated cost of Rs 5 crore will come up at Emmekere on two acres of land. The new wing at Wenlock Hospital with 176 beds will be taken up at a cost of Rs 15.16 crore. Projects in Surathkal Chief Minister Siddaramaiah also initiated shifting of old market and construction of a new market at Surathkal at an estimated cost of Rs 1.70 crore. The foundation stone was laid for construction of new building for MCC sub-office at Surathkal at an estimated cost of Rs 2.25 crore and six-lane road from Surathkal Junction to MRPL at an estimated cost of Rs 2.75 crore. Protesters in custody Earlier, Nethravathi Rakshana Samyukta Samithi activists, who tried to stage a protest against the chief minister and the Yettinahole project, were taken into custody. The Samiti had announced on Wednesday that it would hold a silent protest and wave black flags against the chief minister at Suratkal junction over the implementation of the controversial Yettinahole project. Former labour minister C Gurunath reportedly committed suicide on Thursday by jumping off the second floor window of the hospital where he was undergoing treatment. At 12.30 pm, hospital staff came running on hearing a loud noise in the corridor only to see Gurunath lying in a pool of blood. The 69-year-old fell to death from the window of special ward number 214 of Sagar Hospital in Tilaknagar. Gurunath, who was a minister in H D Deve Gowdas government in 1994, was admitted to the hospital on April 18. He underwent prostate surgery on April 19 and suffered from urinary problems, said doctors treating him. A doctor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they did not know if he suffered from depression. He was due for discharge on Thursday. A source in the hospital said Gurunath might have felt depressed since none of his immediate family members visited him. No family member visited him in the four days. That could have left him depressed, said a member of the hospital staff. DCP South Lokesh Kumar who visited the spot said that only after the forensic examination and postmortem will the cause for death be known. No suicide note was found in the room, the police officer said. His body was taken to KIMS Hospital for postmortem. There were two patients in the room. Gurunath asked his relative Dilip to fetch a doctor. The wife of the other patient Ramanujam who was sharing the ward with him, had also stepped out when the incident took place, the police said. Ramanujam is believed to have told the police that when he saw Gurunath opening the window to jump out, he questioned him. He also told him that it was an airconditioned room and he should not open the window. Gurunath, however, did not heed his words. Being heavily built, the former minister had to make a effort to squeeze himself through the window. When onlookers rushed to the spot, he was found dead. He had sustained severe injuries on the head and right shoulder. The inner circle of the hospitals corridor has a net to prevent a fall. "I had come to Bengaluru for cancer treatment. Even I was unaware that he was hospitalised. At 1.30 pm, Dilip called and informed us about the incident. I rushed to the spot soon after that," said Gurunaths brother Ramakrishna. Gurunath had three daughters, Jyothi, Jwala and Jaya and a son, Raghu. The son is in Hyderabad, said Ramakrishna. The family requested the doctors to conduct the post mortem on Thursday so that they could take his body to his birth place Shahabad in Kalaburagi district for his last rites. Dilip who was staying in Sagar Hospital throughout Gurunaths stay, appeared shocked by the incident and could hardly react to the situation. He asked me to go call the doctor immediately. He was complaining of sudden stomach ache and discomfort. I rushed out to call the doctor. Little did I know that this would happen in such a short span of time, he said. The BJP in Tamil Nadu said it would constitute Cauvery Management Board to get the required water from Karnataka, besides implementing the UDAY scheme, something the Jayalalithaa government failed. Releasing the BJP's manifesto for the Assembly polls, party's former national president and Union Minister Nitin Gadkari claimed that it was a vision document for the states development. He said the BJP would take steps to setup Cauvery Management Board as per Supreme Court order for securing 205 TMC water from Karnataka. "The UDAY scheme, rejected by the AIADMK government, will ensure uninterrupted power supply to all households in the State", Gadkari said. The manifesto, besides promising to solve the fishermen issue, also pledged to waive farmers loans in the State if voted to power. Vowing to remove all encroachments from water bodies, the manifesto also said the BJP would take up the sand business if voted to power. Fifty % subsidy to solar projects, setting up Lok Ayukta, education on par with CBSE, introducing yoga and meditation from class VI and Rs 5,000 monthly assistance to girl till their 12th standard are some of the other salient features of the BJP manifesto. The manifesto also assures gold for women living below the poverty line for marriage, 20 litres of free drinking water to each household, protection of temple lands, legislation against crime similar to MCOCA in Maharashtra and extending AYUSH scheme to all districts. DMDK chief Vijayakanth might have formed a grand alliance with the Peoples Welfare Front (PWF) in Tamil Nadu to encounter the ruling AIADMK and the Opposition DMK in the May 16 elections. But the electoral battle at Ulundurpet from where Vijayakanth is contesting, is getting harder, with the Vanniyar-dominated PMK changing its candidate and fielding party spokesman and high court advocate Balu. In addition, the DMDK chief has to face the ruling AIADMK candidate and sitting Ulundurpet MLA R Kumaraguru, who is seeking re-election at the same place. Balu is expected to provide a tough time for the actor, who would be involved in a six-cornered contest that also includes the ruling AIADMK, DMK, BJP-led NDA and Seeman-led Naam Tamizhar Katchi, which also has a good vote bank. The DMK, which gave the Ulundurpet seat to its allay Manithaneya Makkal Katchi earlier, has filed G R Vasanthavel as its candidate in this constituency. As I have filed several PILs in the high court with regard to issues affecting Udumelpet, people here know me very well, Balu told DH. He claimed that defeating Vijayakanth will not be a big problem since the voters in Ulundurpet are aware of the fact that the actor hardly attended the Assembly session to take up the grievances of the neighbouring Rishivandhiyam constituency where he won last time. On the other hand, a confident AIADMK candidate Kumaraguru said that various welfare schemes launched by Chief Minister Jayalalithaa has reached the people living here. I am confident that the people would elect me as I have implemented several welfare schemes here, he said. There are speculations as to why Vijayakanth chose this constituency. Going by the numbers, in the 2011 election, VCKs Mohammed Yusuf secured 61,286 against the total 1.91 lakh votes polled. In 2006, DMKs Thirunavukarasu emerged victorious with 65,662 votes, followed by VCKs E Vijayaraghavan who got 46,878. In both elections, the VCK secured second position. The DMDK, which allied with AIADMK in 2011, secured third position in 2006 with 20% vote share, and got 30,411 votes. Now with the VCK and DMDK stitching up an alliance, Vijayakanth camp claims that chances of winning Ulundurpet seems brighter. Vijayakanth was first elected to the Assembly in 2006 from Vridhachalam, when he was the lone candidate to win after floating the party in 2005. Filing of nomination from today Assembly polls in Tamil Nadu would enter a crucial phase on Friday with the beginning of the filing of nominations, even as the Election Commission laid down strict guidelines for the filing procedure, DHNS reports from Chennai. DMK patriarch M Karunanidhi undefeated in the hustings for the record 13 times- would file his papers from Thiruvarur, while Chief Minister and AIADMK General Secretary J Jayalalithaa would file her papers in RK Nagar. With the state witnessing six-cornered contest, more than 1,500 candidates from all major political parties would file their nomination papers between Friday and April 29. Meanwhile, the EC has said only five people including the candidate would be allowed in the chambers of the returning officer while filing the nomination papers, while the affidavit disclosing the candidates assets will be uploaded on the ECs website within 24 hours of the filing of the nomination papers. Except on Sunday, April 24, nomination papers can be filed between 11 am to 3 pm on any day up to April 29. The papers will be scrutinised on April 30 and the last date for withdrawal will be on May 2. The final list of candidates with their symbols will be released on the same day. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday slammed the ruling Trinamool Congress for failing to bring about any real change in the state. The nights in Bengal are darker now than it ever were, Modi said while addressing two election rallies. Describing Chief Minister Mamata Banerjees regime as the darkest night, Modi launched a salvo not just against the Trinamool but also the coalition of the Left and Congress. When Mamata didi came to power in 2011, everybody hoped she will usher in a new dawn, driving away 34 years of darkness under the Left Front. Instead, people of Bengal got nights that are darker than even under the Left, he said. The Prime Minister addressed rallies at Basirhat in North 24 Parganas and in Howrah. While Basirhat boasts of the sole BJP MLA in Bengal, Shamik Bhattacharya, who won the seat in a by-election in 2014, the BJP has fielded actor-turned politician Roopa Ganguly from the Howrah North seat. In both places, Modi raised the issue of corruption within the Trinamool ranks. Once upon a time, didi used to crusade against corruption but after coming to power in the name of change, she herself has changed. The Vivekananda flyover, Saradha scam and Narada tapes are all examples of how corrupt her government is but she says nothing, Modi said. The Prime Minister presented the BJP as the only real alternative and urged people to vote for his party and pointed out that both the Left and Trinamool have destroyed Bengal. Reiterating his commitment to the three-point agenda for Bengal development, speedy development and overall development he said only his vision of development can solve the problems dogging Bengal. Industries have closed and the future of Bengals youth is in dark. The only party dedicated to development is the BJP, he said. In Basirhat, he referred to Bhattacharya winning the by-poll in 2014 and said, You are the people who have identified the party that can be entrusted with the future of Bengal. Weve only one MLA and they (Trinamool, Left and Congress) keep asking what Modi has done but no one says what they have done, he said. Referring to incidents of violence during the third phase of polling, Modi claimed that such acts reveal Mamatas desperation. Didi has accepted defeat, he added. Three people were reported dead and several others injured during the third phase of the six-phase Assembly elections in West Bengal on Thursday. The poll percentage till the end of days polling at 6 pm stood at slightly over 79. Despite a security blanket of 1 lakh security personnel, including 75,000 central forces, incidents of violence were reported from different areas, including Domkal in Murshidabad, where one person died. At Ketugram in Burdwan, the police arrested four CPM cadre for slashing a Trinamool Congress workers ear, while three received serious injuries from a crude bomb explosion. At Chakdaha and Gayeshpur in Nadia, clashes between the Trinamool and CPM were reported. The day witnessed polling at seven seats in Kolkata, along with 22 constituencies in Murshidabad, 17 in Nadia, and 16 in Burdwan. Around 1.37 crore voters exercised their right to decide the fate of 418 candidates across 16,461 polling stations. The seats in Kolkata recorded the lowest percentage, a trend noticed in most elections. The state capital also witnessed some incidents of violence, particularly at Beliaghata in east Kolkata, from where police arrested 11 Trinamool workers for intimidating voters. In Jorasanko in north Kolkata, where an under-construction flyover recently collapsed, causing several deaths, BJP MP Babul Supriyo accused Trinamool workers of heckling him while trying to enter a booth with his parents. As a crowd gathered to get a glimpse of Babul, Trinamool workers claimed Babul entered the booth with a large retinue, leading to a squabble. Local Trinamool MLA Smita Bakshi, who came to the aid of her worker, said that the BJP-led Central government is trying to intimidate voters. Babul countered her claim by accusing the deployed policemen of being negligent in their duty. Whatever the Election Commission is doing, thats not enough and polling at 30-40% places is not free and fair, Babul said. Meanwhile, the poll percentage till 3 pm was recorded at 67.80, with complaints and instances of violence receding during the late afternoon, EC officials said. The percentage in first two hours since 7 am stood at 6.29 pm, Murshidabad registered the highest at 8 pm and Kolkata, the lowest at around 3 pm. By 1 pm, the percentage had gone up to slightly over 57, with Murshidabad continuing to maintain a high percentage throughout the day, although Nadia registered the highest with nearly 82 at 6 pm. The high turnout in Murshidabad is not likely to reap well for Trinamool, where most seats are held by Congress. While Trinamool is expected to face a tough time in Kolkata and Nadia, Burdwan could provide the party with some relief. Question paper leak kingpin Shivakumaraiah seems to have done a Pari Rajan, the kingpin of the single-digit lottery racket. Interrogation of the 10 suspects arrested so far and the ongoing investigation suggest such a possibility, but with a difference. During the last one decade, Shivakumaraiah developed a strong network of police officers and politicians and led a crime syndicate. The difference is that he handled politicians and top cops indirectly by using associates to be in touch with them. He knew that the cops and politicians would avoid him as there were cases against him, said sources in the CID. His associates attended functions of leaders and police officers and presented gifts to them. They often looked for newly elected MLAs and newly transferred officers. But these leaders and officers may not have been aware of Shivakumaraiahs dealings, said the police. He might have indirect links with many politicians in Bengaluru, Tumakuru, Kolar, Ballari, Shivamogga, Haveri and Hubballi-Dharwad. Details of Shivakumaraiahs links emerged during the interrogation of Manjunath, a physical education lecturer from Vijayanagar in the city. He used his indirect connections and ensured that investigations derailed in all the six cases registered against him in Tumakuru and Bengaluru, said the police. Manjunath claimed that he knew little about Shivakumaraiah and he came to know him through Kiran, a close associate of the kingpin. He said that he rarely met Shivakumaraiah. Hiding in Goa Shivakumaraiah is believed to be hiding in a star hotel in Goa and is in constant touch with a team of advocates to evade a possible arrest. The police decided to invoke the provisions of the Karnataka Control of Organised Crimes Prevention Act as they realised that otherwise, they might not be able to arrest him and take him into their custody for interrogation. He always carried over a dozen mobile phones wherever he went and all of them were switched off now, the police said.Our teams are working in various parts of the state to trace him. We have so far questioned about 300 persons, DGP (CID) H C Kishore Chandra said. There are around four layers in the whole scam and those who have already been arrested fall either in the third or fourth layers. We have credible information regarding the modus operandi of the kingpin and how the question paper was leaked. We are unable to share the information as the investigation is under progress and a clear picture will emerge once the kingpin is arrested and is thoroughly interrogated, he said. The six deputy superintendents of police and a host of students, who received papers from suspects and wrote exams, may not face action by the CID as there is no criminality on their part. They did not sell the paper for money and hence, the police may not act against them, said an investigating officer. A 14-year-old boy and his family driver were killed when the car they were sitting in fell down the car elevator shaft here on Wednesday evening. The car plunged two stories down the car elevator shaft of 22-storeyed Iqbal Heights in the Agripada area of south Mumbai. The teenager Hafiz Patel and Javed Iqbal (26) died in the accident. The Mumbai Police, which is investigating the matter, is looking at multiple CCTV footages, to ascertain what exactly happened. Patel lived in Iqbal Heights with his parents and two sisters in the building which is near Maratha Mandir cinema hall. Initial investigations revealed that it was Patel who was at the wheels. He was approaching the door of the second floor car lift shaft in reverse when it appears to have pressed the accelerator and banged on the shaft. The lift door opened due to the force of the impact, and the car fell into the elevator duct, said a police officer, adding that the two victims were stuck inside the car, a Toyota Etios, for a very long time. Siddaramaiah refused to set a deadline for completion of the Yettinahole project which entails drawing water from a stream of the same name in Hassan district and supply it through pipelines to the arid districts of Chikkaballapur, Bengaluru Rural, Kolar and Tumakuru. Exuding confidence in the project, the chief minister said the Yettinahole Corporation, as announced in the state budget, would be established soon. Stating that more than 24 tmc water is available in Yettinahole, he said only excess water would be lifted and used for potable purpose. The project will not harm the people of Dakshina Kannada, he stated. The chief minister also said the government would shortly celebrate the birth anniversary of Brahmashri Narayana Guru. The Supreme Court on Thursday directed the authorities to start air services to Shimla or the court will issue an order for it. A three-judge bench presided over by the chief justice took strong note of lack of air connectivity to the capital of Himachal Pradesh. The court asked the authorities to tell by May 4 if air services to Shimla would be launched or not. It said that its interim order, issued on December 16 last year, shall not prevent these authorities from enforcing the obligation of providing 10% of the capacity deployed on Category-I routes (trunk routes) to Category-II routes. Under the governments Route Dispersal Guidelines, Category-I routes are the busy routes connecting major metros like Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai, while Category-II are those in remote and difficult parts of the country, including Jammu and Kashmir, Northeast and the island territories. The US is keen to speed up its negotiations with India for the proposed Bilateral Investment Treaty before Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits Washignton in June. Modi is likely to visit Washington from June 7 and 8 to meet US President Barack Obama. With the officials of the two nations starting preparations for the visit, the US wants to move fast to make substantial progress in the negotiations with India on the proposed BIT in the coming weeks. Washington is understood to have conveyed to New Delhi that even if the BIT could not be signed, an announcement on the substantial progress in the negotiation by the two leaders will send out a encouraging signal to US companies seeking to invest in India. They (US companies) want to invest more in India because they know that it will be one of the 21st centurys great growth stories, Nisha Desai Biswal, US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, said here recently. And one of the best tools out there to increase US investment in India would be a high-standard BIT, she added. China on Thursday aired its concern over World Uyghur Congress (WUC) leader Dolkun Isas reported visit to India, saying he is a terrorist on Interpols Red Corner. China also said it is the obligation of all countries to bring Dolkun Isa to justice. I am not aware of the situation, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said in response to the reports that WUC leaders, including Dolkun, were given permission to meet the Dalai Lama later this month. What I want to point out is that Dolkun is a terrorist in red corner notice of the Interpol and Chinese police. Bringing him to justice is due obligation of relevant countries, Hua said. The two-day violent stir by garment sector workers has once again raised doubts over the city polices strength, abilities and their limitations in countering such violence in future. There appears to be a huge void between the reality and demands of the police. A former city police commissioner who did not wish to be named sarcastically remarked that there was human rights violation in the police department. Cops are forced to work even without weekly offs and without additional benefits. Nobody is bothered about their plight, he said. The government has never considered parameters of National Police Commission (NPC) while deciding the sanctioned strength. The NPC says total area to be covered, population, vehicular population and type of establishment should be considered before deciding the sanctioned strength. We should have sufficient boots on the ground. We are still following age-old formula framed 50 years ago. Its not just population and geographical size, but activity quotient that is most important, observed retired IGP Gopal Hosur. There are defence establishments, public and private sector undertakings, an international airport, a large number of foreigners, huge volume of trade and commerce and a number of international activities taking place in the city. This collective activity needs heavy manpower in the police department to monitor it, he said. About 30% of the total crimes taking place in the state are in Bengaluru. Considering the citys population, geography and activity quotient, it needs at least 35,000 men and an additional 15%, he added. The city police commissioner generates a proposal, seeking increase of sanctioned strength, which is forwarded to the DGP. It goes to the Home secretary, who forwards it to the Finance department (FD). The FDs approval is required for the increase of sanctioned strength. The city police had demanded sanctioned strength of 30,000 for the city some years ago. They had also requested to increase the number of Hoysala patrol vehicles to 520, but permission was given for only 220. There are 184 Hoysala vehicles at present and many of them cant be used during emergencies, the traffic police said. A Legislative Assembly committee on lake encroachment is scheduled to inspect a few lakes including the Sankey tank on Friday. The committee headed by senior Congress MLA K B Koliwad will be visiting the Sankey tank, Singanayakanahalli lake and Bellandur lake. BJP MLA from Malleswaram Dr C N Ashwath Narayan had recently complained in the Legislative Assembly that a reputed builder was trying to encroach upon the catchment area of the Sankey tank. The committee had recently released a list of encroachers of all lakes in Bengaluru Urban and Bengaluru Rural districts. Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on Thursday said that India has coveyed to the Chinese leadership that there cannot be any differentiation among the terrorists as all terrorists are the same. I have expressed very clearly to them (Chinese leaders) that there cannot be differentiation in terrorists. All terrorists are the same and they should be dealt with the same principle, including the issue they had obstructed at the UN. They should also deal with it in the same manner, he said referring to Beijings blockade of Indias bid to have Pathankot terror attack mastermind Masood Azhar designated as a terrorist by the United Nations. The defence minister returned on Tuesday after his five-day maiden visit to China where he called on the Premiere Li Keqiang, vice-chairman of Central Military Commission Gen Fan Changlong, Defence Minister Gen Chang Wanquan and Gen Zhao Zongqi, the chief of the Western Theatre Command in Chengdu. Parrikar said India did not shy away from expressing its concerns to China in a clear and firm manner. Issue was also raised and Indias concerns were presented in a clear manner. May be for the first time, it was raised clearly and firmly. Of course, they have their own justification, but we did not shy away from raising our issues, he said. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, too, had raised the same issue with her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Russia. The takeaways from the China trip, Parrikar said, include a decision on increased interaction and adopting better border management strategies to reduce chances of any unwanted and undesirable incident. While a new version of the 2006 Memorandum of Understanding is being exchanged between the two sides before finalisation, a hotline between the two director generals of military operations and establishing more border personnel meeting huts would be a reality soon. Asked about reports of Chinese army personnel crossing the border, Parrikar said, Because of different perceptions, technical transgression happens. We feel it is traversing, but they (Chinese troops) are just patrolling. They come and go. Home Minister G Parameshwara on Thursday said the government has ordered a probe to ascertain the reasons and the people behind the garment workers protest turning violent here earlier this week. The minister held a four-hour-long review meeting with top police officials, including Director General of Police Om Prakash and Bengaluru City Police Commissioner N S Megharikh, at the Vikasa Soudha. Later, speaking to the media, Parameshwara said the police will also investigate as to why the protest began from Bengaluru while the demands of the garment workers was a nationwide issue. Parameshwara said it was surprising that protesters, who had congregated in thousands, did not have a leader. Thursdays review meeting also discussed how the police should gear-up to face similar situations in future. He said the police had booked 42 cases in Bengaluru City and another 12 cases in Bengaluru Rural Division. In all, as many as 249 people have been arrested. The antecedents of those arrested are being probed. Investigations will also reveal from which factory it all began. We will also probe who instigated the protesters and whether factory owners were involved, the minister said. Initial investigations revealed that messages on the social media were doing the rounds stating that workers would lose their Provident Fund (PF) amount if it is not claimed immediately. The minister said it was evident that anti-social elements took advantage of the large scale protest by garment workers and created law and order problem. Those responsible for the violence will be booked under stringent provisions of the Indian Penal Code. The police have videographic evidence of those indulging in violence, he said. Parameshwara said there was no intelligence failure and the police had prior information about the protests. The police had shown restrain while dealing with the protesters as a majority of them were women. The agitators had even tried to torch vehicles parked inside the Hebbagodi police station. A large number of LPG cylinders were stored adjacent to the station. If not for the timely intervention of the police, there would have been a huge explosion, the minister said. However, he declined to comment on the Karnataka High Court coming down heavily on the police for failing to handle the situation. He also denied accusation by the BJP that the protests were politically motivated and sponsored by the state government to embarrass the Centre. In a major setback to the Centre, the Uttarakhand High Court on Thursday set aside the Presidents Rule imposed on the state and reinstated the Harish Rawat regime. A division bench of Chief Justice K M Joseph and Justice V K Bist delivered the verdict after the Centres counsel refused to give an undertaking to the court that the government would not revoke the Presidents Rule for a week. The bench quashed the proclamation of the Presidents Rule, saying it was contrary to the rule laid down by the Supreme Court. The material (considered for the proclamation) has been found wanting and justifies judicial review interfering with the proclamation, the court said. Dictating the order in the open court, Justice Joseph also asked Rawat to face a floor test on April 29 to prove his majority. The bench also upheld the disqualification of 9 Congress rebel MLAs, saying they have to pay the price for committing the Constitutional sin of defection. An elated Harish Rawat welcomed the High Court order. Uttarakhand has a 71-member Assembly with the Congress having 26 MLAs, BJP (27), Congress rebels (9), Progressive Democratic Front (6), BJP rebel (1), Nominated (1). The Congress enjoys the support of the PDF, the BJP rebel and the nominated MLA. With 9 Congress rebels disqualified, the strength of the Assembly stands reduced at 62 where Rawat has support of 34 MLAs. After a series of meetings with top government functionaries, Attorney General Mukul Rohtagi said the matter would be mentioned before the Supreme Court on Friday. The high court pulled up the Modi-led government for dismissing an elected-government. The soul of the matter is whether it is open to the Central government to get rid of state governments, supplant or uproot the democratically-elected government, introduce chaos, undermine confidence of the little man who stands with a white paper to cast his vote braving the snow, heat and rain, the bench observed. We are of the view that be it suspension or dissolution, the effect is toppling of a democratically-elected government. It breeds cynicism in the hearts of citizens who participate in the democratic system and also undermines democracy and foundation of federalism, the bench said. The Congress welcomed the High Court order. Those eyeing Himachal Pradesh and Manipur with greedy eyes must learn to control their greed, Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi told reporters in Delhi. The high court order came amid reports that the BJP was making efforts to install its government in Uttarakhand by revoking the Presidents Rule ahead of the Parliament Session beginning on Monday. On Thursday morning, the Centres counsel expressed inability to give an undertaking that the Presidents Rule would not be revoked. Otherwise, you can do this in every state. Impose Presidents Rule for 10-15 days and then ask someone else to take oath. More than angry, we are pained that you are behaving like this. That the highest authority the Government of India behaves like this. How can you think of playing with the court, the bench asked. The verdict HC pulls of Centres counsel for refusing to give undertaking that Presidents Rule will not be revoked. Court finds material for proclamation of Presidents Rule wanting, justifies judicial review. Orders status quo ante as on March 27. Upholds disqualification of 9 Congress rebels for constitutional sin of defection. Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal seems keen to double the team of coterminous staff that is serving him and his ministers in the Secretariat from 81 to 162, sources said. The co-terminus staff, which includes non-government workers, assist ministers in policy making and other technical issues. In their absence, the elected representatives need to rely on the existing talent among bureaucrats and government employees. Sources in the AAP government claim that the plan to double the coterminous staff is aimed at improving efficiency but the proposal appears fraught with dangers of giving yet another handle to the rival BJP and the Congress to hit out at Kejriwal who is facing flak for unconstitutionally appointing 21 legislators as parliamentary secretaries a move disapproved by Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung. The 21 parliamentary secretaries are facing the heat as the Election Commission has sought replies from them by May 10 on a petition alleging that their post comes within the purview of the office of profit. For doubling the co-terminus staff, Kejriwal has directed that a Cabinet note be prepared, said an official. The whole exercise is aimed at speedy disposal of public related work, he said. The new batch of 81 staff members would be in addition to the existing 81 coterminous staff working in the offices of Kejriwal and his ministers. An official said it has still not been decided as to how many out of the new 81 coterminous staff members would be drawn from government departments and how many of them would be private persons. At present, some of the co-terminus staff serving in the Secretariat are experts who joined the AAP before elections. According to a proposal, 21 out of the new batch of 81 staff members would be attached with the chief minister. These may include a private secretary, four joint secretaries, 12 personal secretaries and four multi-tasking staff. If the proposal goes through, it will be the first occasion when such a large number of joint secretaries and personal secretaries would be attached to a Delhi chief minister. Apart from the 21 co-terminus staff members proposed to be attached with the chief minister, the new batch of 81 co-terminus staff members would be divided among other cabinet ministers. Fires have erupted at two landfill sites in the city and the smoke emanating from these dumpyards seems to have taken the sheen off the city governments anti-pollution drive. The AAP government on Thursday blamed the BJP-ruled MCDs for deliberately sparking the fires to deteriorate the air quality during the odd-even drive. Environment Minister Imran Hussain blamed the MCD for starting these fires to spread pollution and fail the city government's odd-even scheme. The incidents of fire at Bhalswa Landfill site under the North Delhi Municipal Corporation prompted the Environment Minister to visit the dumpyard on Thursday afternoon. Leader of Opposition in the Vidhan Sabha, Vijender Gupta rubbished the allegations saying nothing can be more ridiculous than blaming the BJP for a natural phenomenon. North Corporation Mayor Ravinder Gupta strongly condemned the Kejriwal government for playing politics over the issue of fire at Bhalaswa landfill site in an attempt to hide the failures of its odd-even scheme. Transport Minister Gopal Rai said the government has formed a four-member committee to probe the incident of fires at landfill sites. The committee, headed by Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) member secretary Kulanand Joshi, will submit its report in four days, the minister said, while launching a helpline for congested roads. He admitted that there were 32 stress points on main roads. On the landfill fires, civic engineers said these are a natural phenomenon due to the inflammable methane gas rising from the dumps. The problem of landfill fire is not only being faced by India but also by developed countries like the US. In the US, around 8,300 fire incidents were reported in a year (source: US Fire Administration 2001) and in the UK around 280 to 300 incidents were reported in a year, said the North Corporation in a reply to the DPCC. In February, the DPCC had imposed a fine of Rs 5,000 per day on the North and East Corporation for burning of garbage at Bhalswa and Ghazipur landfill sites. In all, there are four landfill sites across the city at Bhalswa, Ghazipur, Okhla and Narela-Bawana. According to the Delhi government, Bhalswa, Ghazipur and Okhla landfill sites were not designed as per the Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) Rules which came into effect in 2000. The DPCC has not granted authorisation to all three landfill sites," it said quoting the DPCC. The North Corporation said that the Bhalswa landfill site was started in 1994. Republicans and Democrats will announce a plan for a Colorado presidential primary Thursday that would allow the states unaffiliated voters to participate. More than one-third of Colorado voters the largest bloc are not affiliated with a party. The legislative proposal would allow them to choose which partys primary they would wish to participate in. Thirty days after the primary the registration would expire, said Rep. Dominick Moreno, a Democrat from Commerce City, one of the authors of the bill. The measure would apply only to the presidential race. All other party caucus operations, including selecting delegates in the nomination process, would remain the same, he said. Were going to make it as easy as possible for unaffiliated voters to actually vote in the primary, Moreno said. That would include allowing the unaffiliated voter to request which ballot they want, and it would result in them being temporarily affiliated with the party for the period of the primary. At the end of the day we want as many people to participate in the primary as possible. Cost is expected to be a focus of debate. Parties pay for the caucuses, but state taxpayers would be on the hook for a primary, with estimates ranging from $2 million to $7 million. As much as two-thirds of that cost would be borne by counties, with the state picking up the rest. Republicans and Democrats in Colorado were roiled by claims that this years caucuses did not represent a majority rule. Supporters of Donald Trump, who received none of Colorados 34 delegates this year, protested at the state Capitol last Friday, demanding a vote. Republicans canceled the presidential preference poll at their March 1 caucus. And in New York this, supporters of Bernie Sanders railed against the states exclusion of unaffiliated voters. Democratic voters complained of a chaotic caucus this year, as party volunteers tried to manage a large turnout. Unaffiliated voters in Colorado this year had to register with a party almost two months in advance to participate in the caucus, then change their voter registration afterward. Allowing unaffiliated voters is a major concession from Republicans who have blocked previous attempts to do so, including a bill that was killed in the 2015 session. Ballot initiatives to restore a primary in Colorado have been floated. Weve all heard loud and clear in Colorado that folks want their voices heard in a primary, said Senate President Bill Cadman, a Republican from Colorado Springs. Id like to have my voice heard in a primary in Colorado. There are different sentiments about what that looks like. Some folks want to get rid of the caucus system, some folks want to open up the primaries (to unaffiliated voters). With some concerns with what could happen outside this building with the initiative process, Id like to be a part of providing a solution that I think is appropriate for this state. Colorado had a caucus from at least 1912 to 1992, the switched to primaries. The state reverted to a caucus system in 2002. . Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174, jbunch@denverpost.com or @joeybunch The conventional view is that the semiconductor industry is consolidating, but Wally Rhines CEO of Mentor Graphics, told the GSA Forum in Munich this morning that it is not consolidating despite the M&A frenzy of 2015. "Traditionally we're a de-consolidating industry", Rhines told the Forum. Rhines pointed out that in 1972 the company with the most market share had the same market share as Intel has today. Click here to read more ... The conventional view is that the semiconductor industry is consolidating, but Wally Rhines CEO of Mentor Graphics, told the GSA Forum in Munich this morning that it is not consolidating despite the M&A frenzy of 2015. "Traditionally we're a de-consolidating industry", Rhines told the Forum. Rhines pointed out that in 1972 the company with the most market share had the same market share as Intel has today. Click here to read more ... The Central Bank of Myanmar has released new regulations on mobile financial services allowing participation from non-banking financial institutions. This move is expected to build a more enabling regulatory framework for efficient and secure mobile financial services in a country where the majority of the population remain unbanked and as a result is causing much excitement in the mobile money industry. Recognizing this imminent development crucial to the success of mobile money operations in Myanmar, the inaugural Emerging Asia FinTech & Agent Banking Summit 2016, to be held at the Park Royal Yangon hotel on the 17th and 18th of May, is poised to dive deep into mobile money issues with agent banking topics taking centre stage. The importance of financial technologies in the ecosystem will also be keenly deliberated upon. Speakers who will share their insights and dissect critical issues pertinent to the development of mobile money operations include key representatives from Myanmar Citizens Bank, AYA Bank and Myanmar Agricultural Development Bank. Experts from the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) will also be in attendance. Leading technology providers such as ModeFinServer and True Money will showcase their expertise through informative presentations on stage as well as displays at the exhibition hall. Mobile money provider Wave Money and Myanmar FinTech start-ups such as MyPay will be sharing their expert opinions together with updated advice from the regulatory authorities. The engaging dialogue will come full circle with closing panel discussions that will allow both speakers and delegates to deepen and complete the exchange of critical views and information. Maggie Tan, CEO of the event's organizer, Magenta Global, said: One key objective of this summit is to emphasize the importance of the distribution network which is crucial in a successful mobile money operation. The agent banking model reflects well on the importance of distribution, and together with effective and secure financial technologies, provides a proven recipe that will work best with thorough end user education, adoption and a supportive regulatory environment. There will be many interesting issues to be dissected - especially in the Myanmar context - and we look forward to another meaningful summit for everyone. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site. by Kathleen Gilbert BEIJING, September 7, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) Escaped Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng is leading international opponents of forced abortion in calling upon the worlds largest company to end compliance with the Chinas one-child policy. Family planning police have targeted employees (569) Sign up below to have the hottest Catholic news delivered to your email daily! Close Sign up below to have the hottest Catholic news delivered to your email daily! Church Militant, we need to band together to protect our religious liberties and win the culture war! Researchers are investigating how blocking the hormone glucagon could improve control of type 1 diabetes. In type 1 diabetes, glucagon works with insulin to regulate blood glucose levels. Glucagon raises blood sugar and insulin lowers it. This new study, published in eLife, reports that using insulin therapy and blocking glucagon as a combined treatment could provide a more effective and safer way for some people to maintain good blood glucose levels. The researchers noted that in previous studies, mice that lacked glucagon did not develop diabetes following the surgical removal of insulin-producing beta cells. Lead author Pedro Herrera, from the University of Geneva, explained: Inhibiting the hormone glucagon has recently been explored as an alternative or supplement to insulin injectio, but it has limitations. Our research reveals why: the body needs to have some residual insulin production in order for a treatment blocking glucagon to work. In this new study, the scientists used mice that were chemically induced to develop a form of type 1 diabetes. They were also modified to lack glucagon receptors. This meant that the mice could produce glucagon, but because they lacked the receptors, the glucagon would not have any effect. The researchers found that blocking the effect of glucagon had success, but only when the mice were able to still produce a small amount of insulin. Collectively, these results indicate that glucagon antagonism could i) be a useful adjuvant therapy in diabetes only when residual insulin action persists, and ii) help devising future beta-cell regeneration therapies relying upon alpha cell reprogramming, the researchers concluded. An American trial finds a high percentage of vitamin D deficiency in a large population of children with type 1 diabetes. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing looked to examine the association of 25-hydroxyvitamin D and blood glucose levels among children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes. They recruited 197 children and adolescents and collected non-fasting blood samples to measure 25-hydroxyvitamin D and blood glucose levels. 23 per cent of the children were overweight; 13 per cent were obese. The Department of Health defines low vitamin D status as a plasma concentration of 25-hydroxyvitamin D below 25 nmol/l. The study results did not list a category as low as this but did find that 41 per cent of the participants had levels below 50 nmol/L. The researchers noted that a high prevalence of 25-hydroxyvitamin D deficiency was observed in the cohort, specifically among healthy weight and Caucasian children who had previously been considered at no or low risk of having low levels of vitamin D. However, it should be noted that the level at which they defined a deficiency was at a higher level than the definition from the Department of Health. The study team highlighted the importance of vitamin D screening for all children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes. However, the relationship between low vitamin D levels and HbA1c levels did not reach statistical significance. Senior author Terri Lipma, PhD, said: To our knowledge this is the first study that has been adequately-powered to examine the association between 25-hydroxyvitamin D and HbA1c (a measure of diabetes control) in children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes. These data suggest the need for monitoring of vitamin D in all youth with this disorder. The findings appear in Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice. UBS has downgraded Standard Chartered to 'sell' from 'neutral' after the emerging markets-focused bank recovered more than 40% from its February lows and stands at a hefty premium to many peers. "With many funds short or underweight at the start of the year, commodity prices regaining some poise, EM equities rallying and EM funds seeing a return to inflows, a rally is directionally easy to rationalise." However, UBS pointed out that the rally had happened against a background of a 60% fall in consensus profit forecasts for this year and 30% decline for the next. UBS has kepts it forecasts unchanged and still sees "a great businesses within StanChart", namely transaction banking, financial markets and bits of retail. But the Swiss bank forecasts a loss for this year as "the headwinds of de-risking, deleveraging, and flat and low yield curves will combine with elevated loan losses to make life particularly difficult near term [...and...] leaving the 8% ROE target for 2018 out of reach". While the shares may be cheap on the long-term view due to their 35% discount to triple net asset value, with capital levels sufficient to weather headwinds, analysts said they preferred to value businesses "based on the profits we expect, a basis upon which StanChart looks distinctly over-extended in our view". Moreover, at 14.4 times 2017 forecast earnings per share, the FTSE 100 bank trades at a material premium to scale banks it competes with, ranging from a 26% premium to Hong Kong banks, 34% to Singapore's, 56% to the Europeans, and 200% to the Chinese. "Considering the fears investors harboured about EM in general and China in particular only a short while ago, we think this is too optimistic." Hedge funds have suffered their worst quarter in seven years after more than $15bn was pulled out by investors starting to fight back against the high fees being charged across the industry. The total amount invested in hedge funds fell to $2.86tn in the first three months of the year, marking the first time since 2009 that the sector has faced two consecutive quarters of net outflows, according to data from Hedge Fund Research. Financial Times Anglo American is braced for a revolt over rewards for top executives, with indications that more than a third of investors will fail to back the miners pay policies. A trio of investor advisory groups have urged shareholders to vote against Anglos pay report ahead of its annual shareholder meeting on Thursday. Mark Cutifani, the miners chief executive, was awarded a 3.4m pay package last year, when Anglos shares were the UKs worst-performing blue-chip stock. Financial Times From Atoms Apple app-only offering which counts out all those who do not own an iPhone or an iPad or do not want to use one for banking to Metros weird obsession with offering free water for dogs, each has their own quirk. Between them they make a significant noise about what they offer and how they do things differently. Telegraph Greece could crash out of the eurozone as early as this summer if Britons vote to leave the European Union in the upcoming referendum, economists have predicted. The uncertainty following a 'yes' vote to Britain leaving the EU would put unsustainable pressure on Greeces cash-strapped economy at a time when it is also struggling to cope with an influx of migrants escaping turmoil in the Middle East and Africa, according to a report from the Economist Intelligence Unit. Telegraph Sir Terry Matthews, the first Welsh billionaire, is backing a proposed management buyout of Tata Steel UK, boosting hopes of a rescue deal for the Port Talbot steelworks and thousands of employees. Matthews is helping to put together a consortium of public and private sector figures from south Wales who can support the buyout. Other figures in the consortium include Simon Gibson, the chief executive of Matthewss investment vehicle Wesley Clover, and Steve Phillips, the chief executive of the Neath Port Talbot county borough council. - Guardian Older homeowners unlocked a record amount of value from their properties in the first three months of 2016, cashing in to the tune of 393m. The figures show housing wealth is centre stage in financial planning for later life, said the Equity Release Council, which reported the biggest quarter for lending in its 25-year history. Guardian Volkswagen is believed to have reached a deal with the American authorities to settle the case over its cheating of diesel emissions tests that would involve it offering to buy back the affected vehicles or fix them and pay compensation of as much as $5,000. Shares in the carmaker rose to a six-week high after the German newspaper Die Welt reported that the company was expected to set out a solution today to Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco to avoid a damages trial in the US over its emissions fraud. The Times Save my User ID and Password Some subscribers prefer to save their log-in information so they do not have to enter their User ID and Password each time they visit the site. To activate this function, check the 'Save my User ID and Password' box in the log-in section. This will save the password on the computer you're using to access the site. Note: If you choose to use the log-out feature, you will lose your saved information. This means you will be required to log-in the next time you visit our site. No power, no hot water, bedbugs at apartment towers near Downtown Residents at the Latitude Five25 apartment towers on the Near East Side said they've had no hot water, no power at times. The city is going to court. Subscriber content preview SEATTLE (AP) Since September, about 14,000 college savers have pulled their money out of Washington's prepaid tuition program. Those refunds from the Guaranteed Education Tuition program have totaled more than $285 million, but the program still has more than $2 billion invested in more than 120,000 accounts. . . . Court convicts Vijay Mallya of cheque fraud UB Group chairman Vijay Mallya was on Wednesday convicted by a local court in Hyderabad in a cheque-bouncing case against his grounded Kingfisher Airlines Ltd. A fresh non-bailable warrant has been issued against the former liquor baron. The local court is expected to pronounce the quantum of sentence on 5 May, according to a report by Asian News International. The Press Trust of India has also reported that Mallya was convicted by a Hyderabad court in connection with alleged dishonour of cheques amounting to Rs50 lakh to GMR Hyderabad International Airport Ltd (GHIAL), which is run by the GMR Group. This is the second non-bailable warrant against Mallya in the last three days. A special court on Monday issued a non-bailable warrant against Mallya, as investigators and creditors strive for the return of the embattled businessman from abroad. The PMLA (Prevention of Money Laundering Act) court issued the warrant in response to a petition filed by the Enforcement Directorate (ED), alleging Mallya had siphoned Rs430 crore from an IDBI Bank Ltd loan to his Kingfisher Airlines to purchase properties overseas (See: Court tells ED to execute warrant against Mallya) The UB Group has denied the allegation by ED. Last week, the government suspended his passport on a request by the ED. The foreign ministry said on 15 April that Mallya had a week to explain why his passport shouldn't be impounded or revoked, after suspending it for a month. Mallya, 60, flew out of India days before creditors moved the apex court to restrain him from leaving India and sought an arrest warrant against the businessman. Earlier this month, a lenders' consortium spurned Mallya's offer to repay Rs4,000 crore to settle the Rs9,091 crore debt of Kingfisher Airlines. He had also offered to pay an additional Rs2,000 crore if he wins a pending lawsuit against an aircraft engine maker. Halloween creatures owls, crows and bats all live at Crossroads, and that makes us very happy, for these scary animals make a positive contribution to the habitats of the preserve. We don't even mind black cats, IF they are kept indoors. Feral and outdoor cats are exceedingly harmful to wildlife ... and that's not a superstition! But to tamp down superstitions, we at Crossroads will spend the week demystifying Halloween creatures. On October 28, 2022, at 6 p.m. will be our Evening with Owls. The Open Door Bird Sanctuary will be at Crossroads, offering a one-hour presentation followed by the opportunity to meet and greet live birds. Learn all about owls and the other incredible birds in the care of the Sanctuary! Down through the centuries, in many cultures throughout the world, owls have been associated with evil and death. Truth is, owls probably are not smart enough to be evil. But researchers agree that owls are about as dim as the nighttime forests in which they hunt. Owls don't need to be smart. They have everything else going for them. They are muscular. They fly silently. Their huge eyes enable them to see in the dark. Their beaks and talons are strong and wickedly sharp. But their sensitive ears are what make owls extraordinary hunters. Most people assume that the plumicorns (a.k.a. "horns) of an owl are its ears. Not so. The actual ears lie under feathers on the sides of the head, and they aren't symmetrical. Because one ear is higher than the other and the ears are unequal in size, sound is different from different directions, helping owls locate prey, which they do almost unfailingly, even in total darkness. Owls do not smell their prey. As with most birds, the sense of smell is insignificant, if it exists are all. Great Horned Owls frequently prey on skunks. Enough said. But well-developed intelligence? Researchers have observed owls beating their wings on bushes to try to flush out little birds. Is this learned behavior? Is it problem-solving? Maybe. For the most part, owls do not have a lot of problems to solve. They appropriate abandoned nests of other birds, so they don't need building skills. They are stealthy by nature, and they pounce on and usually catch anything they hear, so they don't need hunting techniques. In spite of ghost stories, legends of American First People, and superstitions from Europe and India, hooting owls do not foretell impending death, although their nocturnal calls are spooky. We hear them now and then this time of year, but we will regularly hear those eerie calls at Crossroads in January or February. In contrast to owls, crows are noisy all year round and they are amazingly intelligent. They can learn. They can remember. They can solve problems. They can even identify individual humans. And they detest owls, though whether this is innate or learned behavior is not clear. Those curious about crows will want to attend the Crossroads Book Club on Wednesday, October 26, at 10:00 a.m. This month, the book Crow Planet, Essential Wisdom for the Urban Wilderness by Lyanda Lynn Haupt will explore the fascinating world of these remarkable birds. The program is free and open to all, whether or not they have read the book. So bring the family to our program on owls, learn about crows at the Crossroads Book Club, or learn about bats at our pre-school Junior Nature Club on Wednesday at 10:00 a.m. or our Family Science Saturday program at 2:00 p.m. Costumes are encouraged but not required at Junior Nature Club and Science Saturday, and adult visitors are welcome. Author and Geneva-native Kay Chandler will be at Dove Christian Supply in Enterprise on April 27 to sign copies of her latest book, Mercy. Chandler will be at the Enterprise store, located at 607 Boll Weevil Circle, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. The writer uses her romantic Christian novels to unravel the tightly-woven secrets of the South. Mercy is the newest book in Chandlers Switched series. Mercy will be available at the book signing while supplies last. Sign up for the event on the Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/events/862298763879901/ and receive a special gift upon arrival. Historian Dale Cox will release the first volume in his new four-book series on 19th century military sites in Southwest Georgia and North Florida. Fort Scott, Fort Hughes & Camp Recovery: Three 19th Century Military Sites in Southwest Georgia will be released on May 9 at 6 p.m. EST in a special presentation to the Decatur County Historical Society in Bainbridge, Georgia. The event will take place at the Kirbo Center on the campus of Bainbridge College. Three other volumes will be released throughout the year in the following order: The Fort on the Apalachicola: A History of Prospect Bluff in the Apalachicola National Forest of Florida; San Marcos de Apalache: The Forts of St. Marks, Florida; and Fort Gaines: The Military History of Fort Gaines, Georgia. Known professionally as Lil Jimmy Reed, Leon Atkins has been a fixture at the Wiregrass Blues Fest, performing every year since it started in 2011. When he takes the stage this year with his guitar in hand and a harmonica around his neck, Atkins will do so as the blues fests 2016 Living Legend honoree. The Wiregrass Blues Fest and Blue Moon Cafe Gumbo Cook-off will be held April 30 on the grounds of the Wiregrass Museum of Art in downtown Dothan. Atkins, or Lil Jimmy Reed as hes better known, will perform at 5 p.m. Each year, the music festival has honored a blues musician with ties to the Wiregrass. This years blues fest, a fundraiser for the Wiregrass Blues Society and the ALS Association, will feature Brandon Santini, the Betty Fox Band, Debbie Bond and Blues Women, Sol Tree and Oddly Enough. Gates open at 3:30 p.m. and music starts at 4 p.m. Atkins, a Louisiana native who lives in Enterprise, began performing and playing guitar at an early age. He got his big break as a college student in Arkansas while hanging out at an upscale blues club where the famous bluesman Jimmy Reed was to perform. Atkins was a fan and knew Reeds music well. But Jimmy Reed never played that night. They snuck him out back and came and got me, Atkins recalled in a written biography provided by blues fest organizers. Mr. Reed was just too drunk to play. Instead, Leon Atkins performed a set of Reeds music and was dubbed Lil Jimmy Reed, forever tying him to the famous musician. Atkins served 20 years in the Army before retiring and pursuing his blues career full time. As Lil Jimmy Reed, Atkins has played with the Bobby Blue Bland, Ike Turner, Clarence Carter and Tabby Thomas. And when hes not playing locally he most recently performed at the Crawdad Festival in Ozark Lil Jimmy Reed has made quite an impact abroad. Earlier this year he performed in Israel in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and in Hamburg, Germany. This years Legacy Honoree is Buddy Buie, who died in July 2015 and made a career as a music producer and songwriter. Buie was best known for work he did with the Atlanta Rhythm Section, the Classics IV and Roy Orbison. In the 1960s, he wrote the song Georgia Pines and co-wrote hits like Spooky, Stormy and Traces. In the 1970s, he produced music by the Atlanta Rhythm Section. Born in Marianna, Florida, and raised in Dothan, Buie spent the last 13 years of his life in retirement on Lake Eufaula. Buie was inducted into both the Georgia Music Hall of Fame and the Alabama Music Hall of Fame. As in the past, there are activities leading up to the actual Wiregrass Blues Fest on April 30. Troy University and the Wiregrass Blues Society will have a free educational presentation and concert on April 28 at The Studio in Troy with performances by Debbie Bond, co-founder of the Alabama Blues Project, and Lil Jimmy Reed. The Wiregrass Museum of Art is also featuring an exhibit of photography of blues culture by Bill Steber and a reception for advance ticket-holders will be held at the museum on Friday, April 29, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. There will also be an exhibit of Mike McCarty's album covers in the museums Great Hall and many of the musicians performing on Saturday will be on hand. On April 30, a Blues and Bikes Poker Run will depart from the Dothan Civic Center at 10 a.m. A free harmonica workshop will be held inside the museum at 10:30 a.m., and a free Chord Buddy guitar class with company founder Travis Perry will begin at 12:30 p.m. (You must bring your own guitar.) While gumbo tasting gets underway, music will begin with Oddly Enough at 4 p.m.; Sol Tree at 4:30 p.m.; Lil Jimmy Reed at 5 p.m.; Debbie Bond and Blues Women at 6 p.m.; Betty Fox Band at 7 p.m. and Brandon Santini at 8:30 p.m. A teenager hopes to get out of jail after a bail reduction hearing Thursday for the armed robbery charge he faces involving the Inland service station robbery on Cottonwood Road last month. Attorney Adam Parker asked the court to reduce the bail for his client, 18-year-old Michael Wayne Coker II, who has been charged with felony first-degree robbery. Parker asked for his clients bail to be reduced from $250,000 to within the guidelines for an armed robbery. He did not have a weapon, Parker said. Someone else had the weapon. Coker was one of three suspects arrested by the Dothan police investigators and charged with the robbery of the Inland convenience store on March 28. Jared Jamal Roberson, 20, of Houston, and Latavion Tiller-McCall, 17, of Dothan, both also have pending armed robbery charges against them. District Court Judge Benjamin Lewis said he would consider the request and issue a ruling later. Assistant Houston County District Attorney Seth Brooks called Coker a flight risk because he gave police a South Caroline address, and has a history of not showing up for court. This was a violent crime, and its on video, Brooks said. Dothan Police Investigator Bryan Tate testified during the bail hearing how another judge set the bail at $250,000 because the court then considered Coker a potential flight risk. Tate said the suspect gave police a South Carolina address when arrested, which meant he has no ties to the Dothan area. Tate also testified Coker had been the victim of a shooting, and failed to show up for court to testify in his assailants case. Cokers mother, Lynette Norman, testified during the bail hearing how her son had moved to South Carolina with her while she stationed there while serving in the Army, and thats why he had a South Carolina address. But she said he now lives in Dothan because shes been reassigned to Fort Rucker. Norman also testified how her son could not attend the previous court dates because hed moved to South Carolina and because the shooting left him afraid to come to court. Dothan Police Lt. Will Glover said police charged all three suspects with the robbery of the Inland convenience store located on Cottonwood Road near Mimosa Drive. Coker and Roberson were each booked into the Houston County Jail and held on $250,000 bail. Tiller-McCall was released after he posted $10,000 bail. Geneva County Sheriffs deputies arrested a Dothan man who was recently paroled from prison and charged him with burglarizing a local residence. Geneva County Sheriff Tony Helms said sheriffs deputies arrested Melton Leon Rivers, 27, of Dothan, on Tuesday and charged him with felony third-degree burglary and felony first-degree theft of property. Helms said investigators have charged Rivers with burglarizing a home on Geneva County Road 9 on Monday. Helms said Rivers was taken to the Geneva County Jail and held on bail totaling $150,000. Court records show Rivers was also out on bail for a pending felony drug possession charge filed by Dothan police last month. Helms said Rivers had just been paroled from prison earlier last month. Authorities have arrested the 22-year-old man wanted in connection with a weekend shooting in Enterprise. According to a statement from Enterprise Police Sgt. Billy Haglund, police arrested Devonquez Kelon Blackmon, who was wanted on a felony second-degree assault charge. The police statement said Blackmon was taken into custody in Geneva County with assistance from the Geneva County Sheriffs Office, Alabama state troopers, and Alabama game wardens. Blackmon was served with the warrant for his arrest around 12:30 a.m. Thursday. Police charged Blackmon in connection with the shooting on Baxter Street Saturday. According to police, the charge stemmed from police responding to Baxter Street around 1:45 a.m. where they found dozens of people in the street who had been attending a house party, including four of whom had been shot. Blackmon was booked into the Coffee County Jail. The shooting remains part of an ongoing investigation. Attorneys for indicted Alabama Speaker of the House Mike Hubbard asked Wednesday that a Lee County judge delay the Auburn Republicans trial until sometime in August. Hubbards case, which encompasses 23 felony ethics charges of the speaker using his political position for personal gain, is currently slated to begin in mid-May. Defense attorneys Bill Baxley and Lance Bell at a pretrial hearing Wednesday told Lee County Circuit Court Judge Jacob A. Walker III that theres no way Hubbards counsel will be prepared for trial next month. Baxley made an oral motion to delay the trial and set a certain date in August. We just cannot be ready for this May 9th day, Baxley said. Bell told Walker he has only gotten through 60-70 percent of discovery and that the defense still has new discovery coming in the case, which involves about two million documents. Theres no way if it goes to trial in May that we can effectively represent Speaker Hubbard, Bell said. Prosecutors opposed a delay in the trial, but asked that opening arguments not begin prior to May 16 due to the states subpoena of several out-of-state witnesses. Walker did not issue a ruling on the request or any other motions at the hearing. Later Wednesday afternoon, Walker ordered Hubbard's attorneys to file a written motion to continue by Friday, April 22 at 12 p.m. The state must file a response to the defense's motion by Tuesday, April 26, Walker wrote. Attorneys also discussed the states April 8 404(b) motion to introduce other crimes, wrongs or acts into evidence when the case goes to trial. The filing lists descriptions of 11 alleged offenses, which reflect the 23 ethics charges Hubbard currently faces. Baxley took issue that the state didnt file the motion under seal, calling it frivolous and claiming that the document is aimed only at tarnishing the jury pool and slandering Hubbard, as attorneys are under a gag order and cannot address allegations in the media. Walker said he didnt see how the document could be filed under seal. I dont really see how to possibly rule on it, he said of the motion, explaining that implications of the filing as written would be confusing to jurors for various reasons and that it is too vague. Walker said the prosecution could re-file the motion with more specific information. You can always file the names under seal, he said. A series of motions in limine filed by the state last Wednesday seeking to limit arguments Hubbards defense can make at trial were also a topic of discussion at the pretrial conference. Walker said the states motion to exclude improper sentencing evidence or argument was standard. However, the rest of the arguments, he said, which include motions to exclude evidence or argument regarding: other candidates use of Craftmaster printing company or Auburn Network, post-indictment election results, prosecutorial misconduct, selective prosecution, grand jury abuse, or a "political witch hunt," alleged "customs" or "habits" of other public officials, improper argument about the ethics laws and specific acts of Hubbard's good conduct or specific acts of bad conduct by the state's witnesses, I dont know. Walker asked prosecutors why the rest of the motions, which appeared to him to be filed based on anticipation, couldnt be handled as evidentiary matters during trial. The prosecution responded that certain matters, particularly those relating to alleged prosecutorial misconduct, should not be brought up during trial because Walker already rejected the defenses motion to dismiss based on prosecutorial misconduct last month and further debate would deter jurors attention from addressing Hubbards guilt or innocence. Hart said he does not want jurors to be informed of the defenses allegations about prosecutorial misconduct. We dont want to invite notification, Hart said. "We don't want to have to convince this jury we're not criminals." Bell told Walker that Hart is on the defenses witness list and he intends to call him. I am hesitant to grant a motion in limine that might cut off a potential defense, said Walker. A motion hearing is scheduled for Friday, April 29 at 9 a.m. Hubbard has maintained his innocence and has continued to serve as Speaker of the House during the 2016 Alabama legislative session. ASHFORD - Candace Carnahan found a purpose after losing a leg in an industrial mishap in 1999. Something that could have been negative turned out to be a life changing situation thats given me the opportunity to come in contact with lots of different people and different places, she said. That said, its a situation that shed rather not have others experience. Thats why for almost 16 years, Carnahan has traveled the world talking to workers and students about workplace safety and how they can avoid similar incidents. On Wednesday, Carnahan visited the Houston County Career and Technical Center in Ashford to tell her story to students. Carnahan was a 21-year-old university student in Canada working a summer job at a paper mill when she lost her leg. Carnahan was using a shortcut over a conveyor system frequently used by employees when her foot became caught in the conveyor belt. The device had no emergency stop system, but another employee was nearby and stopped the conveyor, saving Carnahans life. Carnahan suffered severe injuries to her left leg as a result of the incident, and the leg was amputated below the knee. Carnahan told students about her recovery and her life with a prosthetic leg. She said she largely avoided the feelings of frustration and self-pity that can often come with circumstances like hers, but did break down after a disastrous trip to Mexico a few months after the amputation. Carnahan was on a hiking trip and was having difficulty with her prosthetic leg. She reached a vending stand hoping for a drink, but it appeared no one was there. Carnahan had a meltdown, but quickly snapped back after finally seeing the owner of the stand, a man who had no legs who used a skateboard to get around. Here was this guy who didnt have any legs and used a skateboard to get to work so he could support his family, she said. What did I have to complain about with my $20,000 prosthetic leg? Carnahans speech often addressed issues of personal safety. She told students that being aware of workplace safety issues is important as they transition from school to careers. You have a role to play in your own health and safety, Carnahan said. Carnahan said students need to practice situational awareness in their daily lives and ensure that they always know where and what theyre doing. She also advised students to decline to perform tasks that they feel are unsafe. Im really happy to be alive to tell you my story, she said. A lot of people are not so lucky. Gabe Chavis, 18, said Carnahans story made lessons hes learning in a pre-engineering class more relevant. We designed conveyor systems and had to build emergency stops and now I have a better understanding of why, he said. Keyshauna McCree, 18, said Carnahans story was inspiring. I wouldnt have had her confidence, she said. Neecie Tarrant, a spokesperson for Farley Nuclear Plant, said the plants corporate parent, Southern Nuclear Company, sponsored Carnahans visit to local schools to help foster a greater culture of workplace safety. Safety is a top priority at Southern Nuclear and Plant Farley, so were excited that she could come in and deliver such a dynamic message, she said. 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. Just look at them. Already one of the most elegant cars on sale, the Jaguar F-Type convertible has transformed into a Le Mans-inspired road racer with the performance to back up its racy looks. Meet the F-Type Project 7, the fastest and most expensive Jaguar to go on sale in Australia. It represents a special series of cars to celebrate Jaguar's seven victories in the 24 hours of Le Mans. Just 250 will be built, and 10 have arrived in Australia. Unfortunately for would-be customers, all 10 are sold Jaguar hasn't even hung onto one for publicity purposes. The lucky buyers met their $340,000 motors during an exclusive function in Sydney this week before taking delivery of the cars. We had a sneak peek at the new machines, which feature stunning details from Jaguar's Special Operations division. The most obvious touch is an offset aerodynamic cowling behind the driver's seat that takes its form from the Jaguar D-Type roadster that took victory at Le Mans in 1955, 1956 and 1957, lending a more purposeful profile to the supercharged roadster. The looks are helped by a lower windscreen than the regular model that contributes to the sleek theme. Far more than a styling exercise, the bodywork also features a new front splitter and rear spoiler that produce genuine downforce, as well as a new floor and diffuser to control underbody airflow. Engineers replaced regular cast metal suspension parts with billet aluminium elements with more aggressive geometry, and its 20-inch wheels feature track-ready rubber and oversized carbon-ceramic brakes. Based on the 5.0-litre V8-powered F-Type R convertible, the Project 7 benefits from a more powerful engine tune that pumps 423kW and 700Nm to the rear wheels through an eight-speed automatic transmission. Jaguar will use that engine in the upcoming F-Type SVR, though that model will only be available with all-wheel-drive. The decision to limit Project 7 to two-wheel-drive results in a rawer driving experience than the upcoming SVR, along with a 0-100km/h acceleration time of just 3.9 seconds. A weight-reduction program helped Jaguar shed around 80 kilograms from the F-Type's mass, helped in part by the decision to do away with that car's electrically folding convertible roof. The Project 7 features a special roof of its own, a complicated canvas arrangement that lives in the boot, requiring customers to extract three bags of equipment and erect a fiddly structure in order to be protected from the elements. It's an emergency-use item that reduces the car's top speed to less than 200km/h (down from an electronically limited v-max of 300km/h), one that took two of jaguar's technical staff four minutes to assemble during the car's press demonstration. Jaguar Land Rover's local chief Matthew Wiesner rightly jokes the company will confiscate any cars caught with the roof in place. It's just not that sort of machine. Wiesner says the Project 7 is an important way to "drive new interest in the brand", a way to build awareness and attract customers that may not have considered a Jaguar in the past. "They're not all existing Jaguar customers... not just those that have been welded on forever. We can't survive on that," he says. "There's plenty of opportunity in the $300,000-plus space to grow Range Rover and Jaguar. "It gives us a great opportunity to focus on the key attributes of what Jaguar wants to be." Jaguar F-Type Project 7 pricing and specifications Price: $339,610 plus on-road costs. On sale: Sold out Engine: Supercharged 5.0-litre V8 Power: 423kW at 6500rpm Torque: 700Nm at 2500-5500rom Transmission: Eight-speed automatic, all-wheel-drive Fuel use: Approx. 11L/100km An increasingly favourable Indonesian investment climate offers growth opportunities for Australian exporters, according to new analysis from Efic. Jokowis reform drive buoys Indonesias investment climate Indonesias investment climate has benefited from 11 wide-ranging reform packages introduced by the government since September 2015. This renewed reformist zeal has boosted market sentiment and will aid new efforts to increase underdeveloped trade and investment ties between Australia and our close neighbour. Progress on reforms has helped reignite the possibility of an FTA with Australia, says Efic Senior Economist, Cassandra Winzenried. President Jokowis reforms have focused on deregulation, domestic industry revitalisation, eased trade restrictions, improved logistics and attracting foreign investment. This has improved the business environment, with a shortened approval process for building and land permits, and reduced processing times at ports. And the Negative Investment List has been reduced to allow foreign ownership in growth sectors like communications, health, manufacturing and tourism. So far the signs are promising, with the stock market up 18 per cent from the 52-week low at the end of September 2015. In comparison, the MSCI ex-Japan rose just 7 per cent over the same period, says Winzenried. Chinas ailing corporate profits are a bad omen Chinese corporate profits fell 1.4 per cent in 2015, the first annual decline since at least 2000. Profit data in the opening two months of 2016 showed some improvement, but the overall trend remains gloomy. Falling mining profits were behind the disappointing profit numbers, as overcapacity in the resource sector and lacklustre real estate investment has reduced the demand for commodities. Chinas commitment to rebalance the economy away from investment towards consumption suggests mining profits will remain stagnant through 2016. According to Winzenried, History in the US and Japan shows us that a sustained downturn in corporate profits often foreshadows an economic downturn, as business responds by cutting hiring and investment. However, the 2015 profit numbers do have some positives. Consumer-oriented industries, including processed foods and drinks, medicines and clothing outperformed relative to the commodities sectors, which is consistent with Chinas rebalancing narrative. Other developments Efics April World Risk Developments also details trends including: Dairy prices being expected to remain low during 2016 because of the continuing global supply glut The risk of a new political impasse in Greece, following the stalling of negotiations aimed at unlocking additional rescue loans Argentinas improving economic prospects following economic liberalisation reforms by newly-elected President Macri Falling oil prices having curbed public spending on infrastructure in the Persian Gulf, which will weigh on demand for migrant workers and remittances to Asia. To read full report visit: World Risk Developments About Efic Efic is a specialist financier that delivers simple and creative solutions for Australian companies to enable them to win business, grow internationally and achieve export success. Through its loans, guarantees, bonds and insurance products, Efic has helped many Australian exporters and subcontractors take advantage of new contract opportunities that may otherwise have been out of reach. Oscar Vizcarra and Erik Gustafson pose with the official declaration of April as "Wine Month" following the Tuesday meeting of the Niagara County Legislature. (CONTRIBUTED PHOTO) Check out East Niagara Post videos on YouTube, Vine and Periscope. April is officially something to "wine" about -- as the Niagara County Legislature declared April to be "Wine Month" at its Tuesday meeting.Legislator John Syracuse spoke on the importance of the wineries to the county. In acceptingthe proclamation, Niagara Wine Trail President Oscar Vizcarra thanked the elected officials for their support.Wine Trail Vice President Erik Gustafson explained why we have a burgeoning wine industry in Niagara County. Explaining the importance of both the escarpment and Lake Ontario, he describe the ideal conditions here. He buttressed his discussion by mentioned the various gold medals and otherawards our wineries have received. He concluded by sharing his journey to owning a winery in New York. After attending Purdue University, he and his wife Shane explored various areas. After looking at California and other locales, they decided that the opportunities in Western New York outweighedall others.Proposing a toast to the industry, Event Committee Chair Margo Sue Bittner recognized the farmers and the organizations that support the wineries. She encouraged everyone to buy local, including using the Uncork NY restaurant cards when dining out. Thanking the legislators for their support, she asked that they sign a pledge to serve only New York State wines at any of their functions, as state Sen. Rob Ortt and Assembly members Jane Corwin and John Ceretto have. In concluding her toast, she reminded everyone to find local wines at the wineries, in liquor stores and at local farmers markets.Syracuse concluded the presentation by presenting the proclamation to Vizcarra and Gustafson. For more information about the wineries, to get copies of the UnCork NY wine card or wine pledge or learn about the wine trail events, go to www.NiagaraWineTrail.org or email Contact@NiagaraWineTrail.org. Apple has hired Chris Porritt, Tesla Motors former vice president of vehicle engineering, to work on special projects, according to news reports published Tuesday. Porritt, who left Tesla last year, will take charge of Apples electric car initiative, Project Titan, according to Electrek, which first reported the hire. He reportedly was given the purposefully vague title of special projects group PD administrator. Apple is said to have a group of about 20 engineers, designers and other specialists working on Project Titan, its top-secret car program in Germany. Engineering Prowess Porritts hire wouldnt mark the first time Apple attracted someone from Tesla. The company last year recruited Jamie Carlson, a senior engineer on Teslas Autopilot self-driving program. The autopilot program, currently offered as an upgrade for Tesla drivers, allows the car to change lanes, manage speed and parallel park without human intervention. Apple is a Tesla graveyard, where former employees wind up when they are no longer needed or wanted by Tesla, CEO Elon Musk famously quipped last year. Before joining Tesla in 2013, Porritt worked as chief engineer at Aston Martin, which he joined in 1997. At Aston Martin, his group was responsible for the architecture of the VH Platform vehicles, including the DB9 and he V12 Vantage. Porritt is credited with establishing Aston Martins vehicle engineering team. He was chief engineer of its One-77 supercar, which at one point was considered the fastest car in the world. In his first job, at Land Rover, Porritt rose from college intern to principal engineer in the vehicle dynamics unit. Shifting Into High Gear Hiring a senior person away from Tesla, which has been the center of the universe for new vehicle technology as of late, is a major achievement and demonstrates how serious Apple is about competing in this segment, said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research. However, we are in the early days of the electric vehicle and likely two or more decades away from autonomous vehicles for consumers, he told the E-Commerce Times, even though many, like Elon Musk, have much more aggressive predictions for autonomous vehicles. There are a couple of ways to understand Apple move, noted Praveen Chandrasekar, mobility service manager at Frost & Sullivan. It could be a move to replace Steve Zadesky, who was apparently in a big role at the rumored Project Titan and left recently, he told the E-Commerce Times. Zadesky, a 16-year Apple employee, reportedly left the company for personal reasons. The second could be that Apple needs the expertise of someone like Chris, who comes from Aston Martin and worked on the Model S and X at Tesla, to finalize a body style and segment for its EV, Chandrasekar suggested. Porritts Aston Martin background could mean Apple is taking a premium route with its rumored electric vehicle, speculated. The hire, while significant, will not cause an immediate shakeup in the electric car space because the next big move in the industry will be the rollout of the upcoming Chevrolet Bolt and Tesla Model 3 vehicles, he said. These two products, we believe, will lay the groundwork for mass-market stylish and technology-heavy EVs, said Chandrasekar. Apple might join this group and make an affordable product or take the usual Apple route and enter the market with a high-end product and then look at commodity. Electric Isnt All That Apple is not likely to confine its ambitions to the electric vehicle space, however, maintained Tirias McGregor. Electric vehicles arent the ultimate vehicle technology, he explained. Electric vehicles still require the generation of electricity and require batteries that use rare materials and are not very recyclable. I think the Toyota CEO was correct when he said that hybrid vehicles will be the best solution for the near future, but Im still hoping for hydrogen or some other technology that is greener. In any case, the end goal is not an electric vehicle, McGregor said. The end goal is an autonomous vehicle, which the entire auto industry and major tech companies like Google and Apple are striving to achieve. Apples top legal official on Tuesday appeared before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee and reiterated the companys willingness to help law enforcement on active cases and cooperate on long-term solutions, despite its contentious legal battle with the FBI over the encrypted iPhone used in the San Bernardino terrorist attack. Apple works daily on an operational level with law enforcement on a number of cases, General Counsel Bruce Sewell told legislators. Among past collaborations were one that involved child abduction and a case in which lives were saved. The company is willing to work with law enforcement when they cannot crack the code on encrypted data, he said in response to questioning. Despite its cooperative stance, Apple would not be able to establish some sort of lockbox to provide law enforcement with a key to access encrypted data without risking the security of its data platform, Sewell said. We havent figured out a way that we can create an access point and then create a set of locks to protect access through that access point, he said in response to questioning. The problem is the key to that lock will ultimately be available somewhere. Sewell was one of several encryption and cybersecurity experts who testified at the hearing. His testimony followed remarks by a top FBI official and two local law enforcement experts. His concerns about the vulnerabilities of a backdoor were echoed by Matthew Blaze, an associate professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania, who testified that he discovered the same kind of vulnerabilities in the backdoor Clipper Chip encryption device, which the National Security Agency introduced in the 1990s. Sewell pushed back hard against suggestions in the local law enforcement officials testimony that Apple had provided source code to the Chinese government and that Apple had a created a key to access encrypted data 19 months ago but threw it away. He also balked at suggestions that Apple had decided to provide passcode encryption with its next generation of iCloud, saying nothing has been announced. Prefer to Stay In-House In earlier testimony, Amy Hess, executive assistant director for science and technology at the FBI, conceded that the bureau should not rely on gray hats to help it access encrypted data going forward. However, the FBI is not equipped to handle encrypted data investigations on its own, she added. These types of solutions that we do employ and we can employ require a lot of highly skilled, specialized resources that we may not have readily available to us, Hess said in response to questioning. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has expressed the hope that when the FBI calls on outside parties for help, it will then share with Apple or other technology firms any information gained about vulnerabilities exploited to access data, said Parker Higgins, a spokesperson for the organization. However, that issue was not addressed at the hearing, he told the E-Commerce Times. Police Stymied The growing use of encryption in messaging apps and mobile phones has led to real consequences for police investigations on the local level. During a six-month period ending in March of this year, the New York Police Department was locked out of 67 Apple devices connected with 23 felonies, 10 homicides, two rapes and one case in which two officers were shot in the line of duty, said NYPD Chief of Intelligence Thomas Galati in testimony before the committee. In every case we have the file cabinet, as it were, and the legal authority to open it, but we lack the technical ability to do so because encryption protects the contents of those 67 Apple devices, he testified. The Indiana State Police examined 1,000 mobile phones related to crimes, testified Captain Charles Cohen, commander, intelligence and investigative technologies. An estimated 40 percent of the phones involved in Internet crimes against children contain encryption that prevents forensic examination. Apple and other tech companies should censor the apps that are allowed in their libraries, rejecting those that contain encryption capabilities that might thwart future investigations, according to several officials. That suggestion raised the ire of a number of privacy and technology advocates. The suggestion that app stores could be used to censor encryption apps is beyond the pale, said Ross Schulman, Co-Director of New Americas Cybersecurity Initiative. The only way to truly keep encryption apps out of the United States would be to recreate the Great Firewall of China, he told the E-Commerce Times. The suggestion would be wholly destructive to commerce within the United States and anathema to the First Amendment. Verizon reportedly is planning to make a formal first-round bid for the core assets of Yahoo when the company begins fielding offers on Monday. Verizon, whose CEO last month confirmed his companys interest, reportedly is working with executives of its AOL subsidiary and three financial advisors to put together a bid by the April 11 deadline. The package will include an offer to buy the core Web business along with Yahoo Japan, according to the Bloomberg report, which puts a value on the business of less than US$8 billion. Verizon is expected to have at least one major competitor. Google executives are considering a bid for Yahoo, and Time also may be a suitor, according to the Bloomberg report. Yahoo declined to comment on the report, spokesperson Rebecca Neufeld told the E-Commerce Times. The company did not plan to provide any updates until the Strategic Review Committee either reached an agreement with a prospective buyer or decided not to pursue an offer, she confirmed earlier this week. Google also declined to comment for this story. Verizon Plays Catch-Up The agreement could help Verizon build upon its legacy base of loyal AOL subscribers, who trend toward the more seasoned Web users MSN and Yahoo competed for a generation ago. The deal makes sense in that Yahoo needs a suitor and by acquiring it, Verizon could consolidate what you would call the Webs most established or traditional users, observed Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT. Its not as potentially profitable as some of the younger groups, but its more steady and loyal, he told the E-Commerce Times. Yahoo would give Verizon an immediate boost in its Web traffic numbers, with more than 1 billion monthly visits to Yahoo sites monthly, noted Kevin Krewell, principal analyst at Tirias Research. Communication companies like Comcast and Verizon are trying to monetize the bit delivery service with media that can deliver more margins or thats the theory, he told the E-Commerce Times. This is Verizons attempt to catch up and possibly surpass some of its main rivals in the Internet of Things space, after having failed to capitalize on the explosions of smartphones and app and content distribution, suggested Paul Teich, principal analyst at Tirias Research. Also, like the rest of the telcos, Verizon is deploying network function virtualization and software-defined networking to modernize their service delivery infrastructure, he told the E-Commerce Times. Despite Yahoos missing out on offering cloud services to compete with rivals Amazon, Google and Microsoft, the company has had a good deal of experience operating its own cloud services at scale, noted Teich. The firm also is doing a good deal of research in big data analytics, as well as machine learning and deep learning, he pointed out. Remember that data collected from IoT endpoints feeds into cloud-based big data analytics engines and machine learning is starting to be aimed at gleaning deeper insight from large amounts of IoT data, Teich said. Yahoos Best Chance Yahoos downward spiral appears to have accelerated under CEO Marissa Meyer, who was brought in to turn around the struggling company. Yahoo has failed to develop any major new technology products in recent years, drawing heavy criticism from its own investors for what they see as a top-heavy, overpaid management team and bloated workforce. That sentiment led to its actively considering strategic alternatives. A review of Yahoos deal book revealed a financially distressed firm whose revenues were expected to drop 15 percent to $3.5 billion in 2016, on profit of only $750 million, representing a 20 percent decline, according to a Re/code report. If its bid should be accepted, Verizon would replace Mayer with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong. Verizon EVP Marni Walden would oversee a combined Yahoo and AOL. (twitter.com/popcorntimetv)Popcorn Time Groups that have been backing Popcorn Time have been active lately supporting the website in courts. In the latest salvo against the Norwegian government, the seizure of a domain name was challenged in courts, but it is not known right now if there will be any ruling in favor of the website that deals with Torrent files. Reporting on the latest legal battle surrounding Popcorn Time, TorrentFreak states that two digital rights groups have supported it and even gone so far as to state that it did nothing illegal. Importantly, the groups stressed that the seizure of the domain name associated with Popcorn Time was disproportionate to the alleged wrongdoing. In this particular case, Popcorn Time, which streams torrent files of several popular TV series and films on websites that bear a remarkable resemblance to Netflix, was reported to the authorities in Norway. The website, which was reported, has a domain named Popcorn-Time.no. When the complaint against the website was received, the Norwegian authorities took action and promptly seized the domain name. However, the groups supporting Popcorn Time have since pointed out that the seized domain only offered links to applications that are used for streaming shows. In addition to the links to the Popcorn Time application, the domain in question also had a number of news articles and this meant that it did not violate any rules. The lawsuit filed in Norway has the backing of two groups, Electronic Frontier Norway (EFN) and the Norwegian Unix User Group (NUUG). They have petitioned the courts to look into the situation surrounding the seizure of the domain name and their action has been supported by others in the country. Popcorn Time was shut down last year, but The Next Web states that the original app that was used for the service has started functioning again. This indicates that the website is on its way to becoming fully operational again, even though the team that built the app originally stated that they were not involved in its revival. (www.facebook.com/starwarsrebels)Poster for "Star Wars Rebels" "Star Wars Rebel" season 2 ended on a high note and so a lot of fans are dying to learn what's in store for the third installment. Although Disney XD has not revealed the exact premiere date of the 3D CGI-animated series, there are reports that suggest a fall release. The second season ended with the characters being whitewashed by the dark forces. Ahsoka disappeared and Kana became blind. Ezra, on the other hand, fell into the trap of joining the dark side, while Anakin transitioned into Darth Vader. The creators of the animated series promise the third installment to be filled with "adventure, hope, and the battle between good and evil." It will feature a much heavier story arc without eliminating the same elements that give the series its own identity. Disney XD senior vice president and general manager of Programming Marc Buhaj said in a statement on the "Star Wars" blog: "We are proud to bring our audience a third season of Star Wars Rebels, a series that has resonated across generations. The creative team behind the series continues to do a brilliant job in delivering on the key tenets that fans have come to expect from a 'Star Wars' property." Meanwhile, Lucasfilm SVP of Development Kiri Hart revealed that season 3 will be a tale of the rebel heroes facing new challenges and finding new allies as part of their battle against the Empire. The upcoming third chapter of the series also promises to feature Grand Admiral Thrawn of "Thrawn Trilogy." His rumored appearance as an Imperial officer could be the largest cameo role of the series. In an interview with IGN, executive producer Dave Filoni also shared that "there are probably more stories to tell with Ahsoka Tano." However, he believes it is not necessary to happen on "Star War Rebels." In May last year, The Grange P-12 College, located in the Melbourne suburb of Hoppers Crossing, hired Australias first in-house school lawyer, Vincent Shin , to educate students about legal issues they might come into contact with.The school, whose students come from 60 different ethnic backgrounds, also has a large number of students from disadvantaged families. From time to time, such students face issues such as domestic violence and abuse.However, very few come forward to talk about it and thats where Vincent Shins presence at the school is so important.PLGRM Media has released a documentary about Shins personal experience with family violence and the School Lawyer Project entitled The High School Lawyer.The video detals how through opening up about his own experiences with domestic violence, Shin has been able to connect on a personal level with students from broken homes.I assist victims who are currently suffering in silence, give them a bit of encouragement to speak out about it, he told The Educator.Speaking out about this will hopefully keep the conversation going for this disgusting social issue to just disappear.Shin said he has been in talks with Victorian Legal Aid, which is looking to expand the school lawyer concept, however he added this process remains in the early stages.Despite the issue of domestic violence being a very personal one to him, he said this hasnt been an obstacle to his important role at the school.Its the first time Im publically sharing what is quite an intimate part of my life so Im very much unsure how to deal with it all but quite happy to share, he said.Im just going to sit back and see what happens.Shin said that he hoped the documentary would be a good step forward in terms of tackling family violence and encourage those who are experiencing it to share their own stories.The issue of family violence is very much on the table for discussion across Australia and Victoria, he said.The Royal Commission into Family Violence just finished up, the recommendations are out, the conversation is still continuing and there are several prominent people who have spoken out about their experiences.I feel like having my story out there for some of the kids to see. If they do in fact find this clip, which I have no doubt they will come across, I hope that I can inspire some of the kids at my school to really be tenacious with life.Shin cautioned that while domestic violence was a very difficult situation for many children, there was a light at the end of the tunnel.Hopefully my story can really demonstrate to some of the young people who find themselves in a similar situation that I did, to really chase their dreams and just go for it, regardless of their background and where they come from. Ely, Cambridgeshire is best known for its majestic cathedral dubbed the 'Ship of the Fens' because it dominates the flat landscape. The city, which is the second smallest in England, is about 14 miles north-northeast of Cambridge and about 80 miles by road from London. 08:11, 22 OCT 2022 'Count yourself in' to Island census Manx residents are British - so they'll be expected to declare it on their census forms. That's according to government's census project manager - it's because the Isle of Man is recognised as 'British' in international law. All Manx households are asked to submit the information on April 24th to help sculpt public sector services. Adam Smith is encouraging anyone who can to fill out their details online: Media Adam Smith Sacked chairman says Post Office plans are 'dead' The fired Post Office chairman says he believes corporatisation plans are "dead" until the next administration. Graham Cregeen says he now feels "vindicated" after Tynwald threw out the idea - despite Members agreeing in principle that the statutory board should become a government owned company. The Council of Ministers backed the plans and a decision to sack the Malew and Santon MHK after he disagreed with them. He's now accused CoMIN of presenting policies in "a rush" and says he believes the office can now continue without issue: Media Graham Cregeen MHK A new bench mark has been set for property sales north of Umhlanga. Ocean Dune-Sibaya has officially sold out in record time since launching to the public a mere four months ago. Residential sales to date total over R900 million and with the further R100 million Retail segment in the pipeline, the estimated investment will be in the region of R1 bn. The Retail element will comprise a large food wholesaler, bottle store and upmarket restaurant. We aim to break ground as planned around July 2016, says Charles Thompson of Ocean Dune Developments. We are extremely excited about Ocean Dune Sibaya as it offers investors a unique opportunity to benefit from the projected capital appreciation that comes from investing in Sibayas first off-plan development. It is ideal for savvy buyers who are looking to balance capital growth with investment yield. They not only benefit from an off-plan purchase, they also have the flexibility to rent it out at a rate that will exceed the interest gained on stagnant money sitting in the bank he said. Privacy and sea frontage are two key elements in this development. The tiered apartment blocks, situated at the southernmost tip of the node, feature unobstructed ocean and coastline views, safeguarded in perpetuity by the surrounding indigenous Hawaan Forest Reserve. Investors had a selection of 260 one to four-bedroom apartments and penthouses to choose from. Prices ranged from R995 000 up to R17.5 million and sales to date have exceeded all expectations. First to sell were the end units priced between R7 million and R14 million. Of the four Penthouses, three were sold to local Durban buyers for between R9.5 million and R17.5 million the largest being 630m2 said Thompson Ocean Dune Sibaya, situated between uMdloti and uMhlanga, is underwritten by Tongaat Hulett Developments and consists of luxury seafront apartment blocks located within the new Sibaya Precinct. Tongaat Hulett Marketing Director, Trenley Tilbrook, said the style and feel of the development is completely in sync with their vision for the Sibaya Precinct. This development will follow environmentally-conscious development principles by integrating urban development with our natural environment, he said. This is the year that helped cement Redefine Properties place at the very top. Cognisant of the upside diversifying and accessing hitherto untapped long-term income streams investors have buoyed the stock. The top brass reasons for highlighting 2014 include Redefines completion of the Matlosana Mall, a R1-billion, 652 000m super-regional shopping centre, and the pristine-looking premium-grade office development on Sandtons 90 Grayson Drive. This year is set to become yet another seminal one as Wembley Square landlord, which completed its maiden direct offshore property acquisition via Australia in 2014, enters Poland. As things stand, office space accounts for 41%. Retail properties including Tshwanes Centurion Mall and Blue mall in the Western Cape claim a third with industrial and specialised assets accounting for the remainder. For the year to end-August, profit attributable to shareholders skyrocketed almost 60% to hit R5.4 billion. Tidy dividends are the norm. This years distribution came in 80c per unit (a total of R3.2 billion) or 7.3% higher. Further, market cap has more grown more than centupled since 2000, lifted by factors such as acquisitive and organic growth, to flirt with R60 billion now. Among the many landmark deals since listing, the Johannesburg outfit managed to take ApexHi and Madison Property Fund Managers but failed to lay its hands on Hyprop. Now at R12 apiece (translating into a price:earnings ratio of 14), Redefine is the second-most traded Reit on the JSE by value, figures from Catalyst Fund Managers show. That is despite a premium of about 12% and gearing in the region of 38%. In February, the average monthly traded or number of shares multiplied by share price worked out to R2.9 billion, behind only to premier Reit Growthpoints R3.9 billion. Depending on how you look at it, the premium could be viewed as the investment communitys vote of confidence in Redefine under the baton of CEO Andrew Konig (48), who was promoted to the hot seat in 2014 after previously serving, for three years, as group financial director a post now held by the 44-year-old Leon Kok. The rest of the overwhelmingly pale male board is a mix of old and new. The 71-year-old Bernie Nackan, a property industry all-rounder and erstwhile journalist, assumed lead independent non-executive directors post in 2009 while Harish Mehta (65), now-chairman at Times Media Group, became Redefines nonexecutive. David Rice, former ApexHi MD, took over as the enlarged groups chief operating officer in 2011. Recent appointments include director of companies Ntombi Langa-Reynolds and Afropulses Phumzile Langeni. The only women in the major landlords 13-member boardroom were named independent non-executive last year. Marius Barkhuysen joined the board last year following David Nathan and Michael Watters who were appointed in 2014. With an obvious penchant for shopping (and developing projects) to enhance value, Konigs team is now actively pursuing opportunities abroad. For instance, the group announced this month that its Polish foray would significantly broaden its offshore presence via an initial 75% investment into a 1.2-billion high-yielding commercial platform comprising 18 properties. This is said to be the largest deal in Polands real estate investment. Redefine executive chairman Marc Wainer, a 67-year-old property doyen, aptly describes it as a game changer. The industry grandee and long-time CEO, known for his short temper and sharp nose for deals, has seen his stake breaching the R300 million mark. The Polish deal follows that of Marc Edwards-led Tower Property Fund which set up in Croatia, in the same region, in December after buying a 66-million asset. New Europe Property Investment (NEPI) has, since opening shop a decade ago, earned its investors a fortune from Romania, Serbia and Slovakia. Its fair to note that locals are drawn to Poland, and this part of Europe, by what is viewed as exciting prospects. Private hospital owner Life Healthcare, which arrived in Poland in 2014, has spent billions over time to bolster its asset base. Redefines deal in Poland, a country of almost 40 million, will, according to management, be financed via debt and equity at a proposed 60% gearing at the property level. It significantly advances our international strategy it has the scale, the right partners and the ability for growth to take a major part of our business to the next level, says Wainer of the mega transaction, putting the portfolios average portfolio occupancy rate at a solid 95%. The 18 properties tick all the boxes from an investment perspective and allow us to take advantage of what will be positive yield carry. At home, the titan remains in top form. The green development named Rosebank Towers (previously Bierman Business Park) is well-positioned and has the makings of a money maker. Its still early days but things are looking up at the development, a joint venture with Abland, Rosebanks tallest, that has 22 000 m in lettable space. For one, the nine-storey office development that Redefine also calls home is already 70% let. In a market like this, that is commendable. On the other hand, the cool yet functional office development in Sandton, constructed by WBHO (following the demolition of the previous one in the same address), pushes the bar higher. Redefines development team can pat itself on the back for what executive director for development Mike Ruttel excitedly describes as Sandton's newest landmark (that) features sleek lines and eye-catching architecture. The said newest landmark, a skyscraper of 16 storeys, is home to blue-chip tenants hi-tech firm IBM and legal titan Webber Wentzel. Purely from a share performance angle, 2015 was terrible for the landlord. The stock slid 2.51%. That booked Redefine a place in the duckling league. To see how, juxtapose Redefines underperformance with an 8% rise in the South African Property Index, as per Catalyst records. Whats more, NEPI surged a determined 62%, Resilient raced 43%, and Hyprop managed 11%. That is at odds with the fact that just a year earlier, Redefine clinched a headline-grabbing R2.7-billion deal that netted it a portfolio of 28 industrial properties from media-shy mogul Eric Samsons Macsteel, an unlisted steel titan. The Macsteel transaction will transform Redefine's industrial portfolio and is in line with our strategy to grow and diversify our portfolio, said Konig at the time, while also announcing the property behemoths rights issue. Added to that mega deal, viewed as Samsons lane to realise his long-term investments, the Reit spent billions more to acquire Annuity Properties and a minority stake in Emira Property Fund in 2014. Having gone shopping in that period, the groups Rosebank headquarters spotted a for sale sign last year. That said, it offloaded 35 properties with a gross lettable area of 339 000m which no longer met Redefines investment criteria to different entities for an aggregate R2.2 billion at an average yield of 9.3%. Further agreements, to shed more properties, were entered into. Notably, Redefines market cap has shot up a significant R25 billion, partly helped along by equity issues and a series of acquisitions, since then with the stock also bouncing from a losing streak to firmer footing as investors nod the property companys prospects. When distinguished businessperson and critical thinker Dr Reuel Khoza, asked whereto South Africa? at the recent SA REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) Association Conference 2016, leaders from the countrys property, financial and investment sectors welcomed his straight-talking vision to move beyond todays tempestuous political and economic environment with good governance for both state and corporate South Africa. Articulating many of the pressing concerns for the business community Khoza stressed that, as a country, South Africa is at a painfully significant crossroads. He cautioned delegates that at this junction, South Africa faces a lack of clear vision, poor governance, a background of inappropriate problem solutions, the stifling of enterprise and innovation, and the scoring of own goals and state capture. This is just the tip of the iceberg of national concerns, fears and outright anger characteristic of contemporary South Africa, reported Khoza. He believes the crossroads at which the country stands requires the ability to lead with complexity and make urgent resolutions. Khoza urged SA REIT Conference delegates, and the entire South Africa to unite, pause, reflect and think where the country is headed and, more importantly, where it should be headed. As a major contributor to the countrys economic landscape, South Africas listed REIT (real estate investment trust) sector represents more than R330 billion worth of property assets. The quality of these SA REITs influence our economy and the quality of South Africans lives. Laurence Rapp, Chairman of SA REIT Association, which hosted the event, said: As an organisation, SA REIT exists to lobby for and represent the collective interests of all the listed funds in the sector to the extent that, if there is a broader role we need to play in our broader environment, we should take up that challenge. Khoza joined the powerhouse of business leaders, local and global, at the SA REIT Conference 2016 in Sandton Central. Khoza is President of the Institute of Directors in Southern African (IoDSA), Chairman of Aka Capital, a former Chairman of Nedbank Group Limited and a director of several companies. He offered his unique perspective as an Africanist who has been at the forefront of transformation in the South African political economy. Khoza is a seasoned voice on business leadership and corporate governance. He was involved in formulating the King Codes on Corporate Governance - both King II and King III. My sense of a desirable South Africa would be a country with a clearly articulated and compelling vision memorable and motivated, and perhaps crystallised from the National Development Plan, said Khoza. The country should be anchored on a sound and wholesome value system, encompassing such values as integrity, humanity and compassion, as well as probity behaving in a manner that is, and is seen to be, beyond reproach. Above all, Khoza believes that ethical, humane leaders who govern with these values are important for the countrys future ability to grow and prosper. Good governance - economic, political or corporate - is a simple norm for stability and prosperity in any political economy and should be viewed as sacrosanct, says Khoza. He also believes that leaders and administrative officials should be selected and elected on merit, rather than deployed on the basis of political affiliations. At all times, meritocracy should trump political cronyism. Khoza points out the global economy may be in dire straits, and as a part of that South Africa will suffer. However, as we endeavour to feather our own nest in this difficult environment we should avoid scoring own goals like the plague, he stresses. Worldwide, small business enterprises are accepted as a key job creator. In nurturing small business in South Africa, Khoza implored that undue bureaucracy be kept out of the way. He also stressed that creeping state capture should be stopped dead in its tracks. It does not belong in a desirable South Africa. The same should happen to things unsavoury, such as bribery and corruption. Unless we actually we do something about them, the creeping stratocracy that we see will soon engulf us. He emphasised to the 300-plus executives attending the SA REIT Conference that leadership will play a key role in the direction of South Africas future. The leadership that will take SA out of the current morass and into a prosperous future must demonstrate competence - not popularism - tenacity and a sense of efficacy, standing for truth and affirmation, embracing the intelligent and wise among its citizenry and not dismissing them as clever blacks, says Khoza. He says this desirable leadership must practice introspection and self-renewal, leading by the talent of consultation and moral suasion. They will understand that the success of others does not diminish their own success but adds to the common life, thus generating trust, goodwill and confidence. They will strive to breach the schisms and differences brought on by the religious, tribal, social and politically diverse character of South Africa. Above all, this leadership should be visionary, behaviourally personify its wholesome vision and strive to align the nation in pursuit of what is in the national interest. While Ballito has always been a popular seaside destination for Durban locals, it was the opening of the King Shaka International Airport in May 2010 that really put this coastal gem on the map. Since then, the once-quiet town has become one of the biggest growth areas in KwaZulu-Natal, garnering significant interest from property investors looking for positive, income-generating assets. Ballito has become highly sought-after as a holiday destination, says Denise Hattingh of the Rawson Property Group's Ballito franchise. It has everything you could need all the infrastructure and amenities, along with perfect weather, wonderful wildlife and pristine beaches and with the convenience of King Shaka Airport just 10 minutes away, its now easily accessible from almost anywhere in the world. Thanks to this convenience, accessibility, and enviable lifestyle, the demand for holiday rental accommodation in Ballito is strong. This has created a great opportunity for buy-to-let investors looking to capitalise on the continued property growth in the area, while using rental income to offset investment expenses. There has definitely been an increase in buy-to-let investment in Ballito, says Hattingh. We have both local and international buyers, but a significant proportion of investors at the moment are young, professional South Africans who are currently living and working abroad. They are taking advantage of the favourable buying conditions to put their strong foreign currency to good use, here at home. With capital growth in Ballito sitting at around 10%, and return on rentals as high as 20%, it does seem like a good option for a budding investment property portfolio. In spite of the positive numbers, however, Hattingh cautions buyers not to jump in without doing their research, as certain properties will always do significantly better than others. Id definitely recommend getting in touch with an experienced real estate agent in the area before you buy, she says, especially if youre not based in the country or you arent familiar with Ballito and its various neighbourhoods. In general, though, anything in close proximity to the beach can be a sound investment, but properties with ocean views are definitely first prize. They maintain their value while giving the highest rental returns but they are also very popular and can be difficult to come across at times. Wherever you buy, she continues, think security, low-maintenance, and modern finishes holiday-makers want a fuss-free, home-away-from-home. Apartments tend to be popular especially those with pools in the complex but make sure your unit is either newly built, well maintained, or easy enough to renovate to modern standards. A sectional title beachfront property in Ballito could list for anything from R1.3 million to R8.5 million, and can bring in between R2000 and R4500 per day in rental, in high season. With the right property, rentals can cover a big part of your investment expenses, says Hattingh, but you do need to take things like occupancy rates and seasonal fluctuations into account when estimating potential income. No holiday property will have 100% occupancy, but a well-maintained and well-positioned apartment in Ballito could definitely achieve around 70%. For those interested in getting a foot in the door of the buy-to-let market in Ballito, Hattingh recommends moving quickly, as continued demand and limited supply will inevitably impact affordability. Timing is always important in property investment, and the conditions may not be as favourable for buyers as they are now, for very much longer, she says. If youre considering investing, dont hesitate too long or the opportunity will pass you by. The low-cost Aakash tablet and its previous iterations in India have gone through several phases of technological changes and ideological experiments. Did the government prioritise familiarity and literacy about personal technological devices over the promise of quality mass education generated by low-cost devices? Introduction The Aakash tablet, hailed as the vanguard of India's tablet revolution, was unveiled at the United Nations. It was to showcase India's technological prowess but was quickly lamented as a failed dream, and as India's object lesson in how not to do technological innovation. The so-called failure of the device became a metonym for the government that backed it, and for the technology establishment of the country. While our longer paper (Phalkey and Sumandro 2016) questions this notion of failure, in this article we wish to highlight the role played by the discourse and experiments in technologies of mass education in creating the practical context and the market conditions for low-cost tablets in India. A 2011 report by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) claimed that although the initiation of the Aakash tablet project met with skepticism and scorn, over time it not only developed an affordable device aimed at students in India, but has produced an entirely new market niche of sub-US$100 tablets. This ambitious statement appears to be vindicated by a recent report by the International Data Corporation (IDC), an economic intelligence company, on the tablet market in India. The report notes that the market has grown in the previous year at an annual rate of 8.2%. More importantly, the two companies leading in market share are DataWind (20.7%) and Samsung (15.8%). Incidentally, after the first quarter of 2014, Samsung had the largest (22.5%) and DataWind the 4th largest (6.8%) share. What is noteworthy here is not the rise of DataWind as the leading seller of tablets alone, but that it is the MHRD that heralded this creation of a market niche in India for affordable tablets. From Satellite to Internet in Education On 30 May, 1974, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched an ATS-6 satellite that formed the central infrastructural component of the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE), one of the early initiatives to harness communication technology for primary and adult education. The SITE project involved broadcasting educational and informational audiovisual content, produced by the All India Radio (AIR), across 2400 selected villages located in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha (erstwhile Orissa), and Rajasthan. Operating from 1 August 1975 to 31 July 31 1976, the experiment was led by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), and was supported by UNESCO, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Negro College Fund (UNCF), and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The objective of the SITE project was inspired directly by the importance given to skill-development oriented higher education and adult education in the report of the first Education Commission (19641966). However, Asif Siddiqi (2015) notes that the project performed a crucial task of establishing the Indian space research programme through a direct alliance with NASA, which held special geopolitical significance given the Chinese nuclear tests of 1964. This experiment paved the way for the development of the Indian National Satellite System (INSAT,) the first Indian satellite. The entanglement of the Indian space programme with the idea of national-level technological infrastructure for education has continued since. The EDUSAT, launched in 2004, was a collaborative project between ISRO and MHRD to drive satellite-based education across disadvantaged and remote regions of the country. In an audit report in 2013, however, the Department of Space declared that the project has failed, and highlighted three lacks in particular network connectivity, content generation, and management structure (Union Government 2013). The earliest initiatives in India to put computers in schools, supplementing and supplanting television screens, began in the 1980s. These efforts pre-dated extensive terrestrial communication fibre networks and relied almost completely upon the success of the Indian space programme. The University Grants Commission (UGC) Countrywide Classroom, Computer Literacy and Studies in Schools, and Computer Literacy and Awareness Programme are the key examples from this time. The revised Programme of Action of the National Policy on Education (1986) reiterated the need for increased attention to upgrading education technology infrastructure, as well as the development of electronic content for the same. This led to the initiation of the ICT@Schools scheme beginning with the 8th Five Year Plan (19931998). Even after 20 years of the introduction of computers in schools across India, a 2006 report on education technology by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) noted that computer-based teaching and learning in an actual classroom setting remains more of a spectator sport. With the advent of the internet, the MHRD started experimenting with internet-based delivery of distance education from 2003, beginning with the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL). It did so alongside satellite-based distribution of educational content. NPTEL involved five Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) (Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, and Madras) developing openly available course materials for more than 100 undergraduate courses in five engineering subjects, as well as courses in basic science. These course materials were later made part of the online learning portal called Sakshat, which eventually became one of the pillars of the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technologies (NMEICT), initiated during the 11th Five Year Plan (20072012). This portal marked the completion of a conceptual and technological shift from the satellite-based models of delivery of educational content, to an internet-based one. Making and Unmaking of the Aakash Tablet With NMEICT, large-scale education technology initiatives of the Indian state moved away from the earlier emphasis on primary education and school-oriented computer literacy, to that on higher education and aids for self-learning. The plan for an affordable tablet computer was announced in mid-2010 as part of this mission. This low-cost access-cum-computing device was aimed at bypassing the institutional, bureaucratic, and infrastructural barriers to access to quality higher education. Its main audience were students in disadvantaged regions and non-elite institutions, as well as self-learners. The actualisation of the device, however, was continuously delayed and blocked by conflicts between the governmental and non-governmental actors, strong skepticism from the media, and several changes in the state's approach to the project. The first approach to the project was an international company that approached the MHRD in 2006, with a proposal to sell educational laptops for school students at 100 US$ each. NK Sinha, then mission director of NMEICT, argued against the purchase. The MHRD saw this as an opportunity for developing an indigenous low-cost computer, and initiated a competition among the IITs to come up with a prototype for this device, which was won by the IIT Kanpur team led by Prem Kumar Kalra, then professor and head of the department of Electrical Engineering. The first publicly exhibited (2010) prototype of the device was the one developed in IIT Kanpur, which was priced initially at 35 US$. The MHRD, however, soon decided to buy the device from a commercial manufacturer. The responsibility of procurement and testing went to IIT Rajasthan, under the leadership of Kalra who joined the newly established institution as its first director. After the contract with HCL Infosystems was called off in January 2011, DataWind, a Canada and UK based company specialising in internet-access devices, won the new tender to produce the first version of the device. On 5 October 2011, the first version of tablet was launched, priced at Rs 2,500, and co-branded as Aakash and Ubislaterespectively for those bought and redistributed at a subsidised rate by MHRD, and those sold commercially by DataWind. An early controversy about the tablet, apart from its technical capabilities, was around the claim that they were produced and assembled in China. DataWind rejected the allegations and claimed that all the devices were assembled by Quad Electronics in its factory in Secunderabad, Telangana (then Andhra Pradesh). Within a year, however, DataWind got involved in serious conflict with IIT Rajasthan on one hand, and Quad Electronics on the other. The MHRD intervened again to change the approach by bringing in IIT Bombay (March 2012) as the new procuring and testing agency, thus removing IIT Rajasthan from the project. DataWind also found a new partner in VMC Systems, who started assembling the kits imported from China in its establishments in Amritsar and Delhi. With M M Pallam Raju becoming the Minister of Human Resource Development in late 2012 by succeeding Kapil Sibal, one might say, the Aakash project gradually moved to what we know as its final form. At first, it was suggested that the state should entirely move out of the business of providing low-cost tablets as there is already a vibrant market. Later on, and with thought leadership from Rajat Moona, director general of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), and others, it was decided that Aakash would become a brand name available for commercial manufacturers of affordable tablets that satisfy a minimum set of technical specifications. The first draft of the specifications list was published in June 2013. The tendering process, however, got delayed, and eventually came to a near-permanent pause with the general elections in 2014. As of November 2015, the MHRD has again shown interest in the idea of a state-subsidised tablet computer for education. The tablet was now called Udaan, and aimed at girl students at the higher secondary level, priced at Rs 10,000 (against Rs 2,500 of Aakash), and distributed only to 1,000 students. Creating Device Desire In an interview in late 2013, Kapil Sibal (then Union Minister of Communication and Information Technology, former Union Minister of Human Resource Development) shared that [the] Aakash tablet was [his] dream but it was not fulfilled. Sibal, undoubtedly the key political driver of the project, in his admission to failure, raises deep concerns about the present state and the future of the technological infrastructureand the imaginationfor mass education in the country. Tracing the transition of these technologies from SITE to Aakash, we continuously find it difficult to delineate the states transforming and transformative agenda of mass education from that of building technological capability. At times, though, we wondered if the agenda for mass education did not become one that served the purpose of generating, for lack of a better phrase, a certain familiarity and literacy about personal technological devices among the population. The motivations and goals that informed these mammoth projects become more and more difficult to decipher when we look at the relatively poor attention given to the production of content. Careful monitoring and documentation of how such content is being received and utilised by the actual learners and their educators was not prioritised; and whenever undertaken, such exercises revealed the deep lack of pedagogic concerns at the heart of these education technology programmes. Alongside the overwhelming narrative of failure, however, we cannot ignore the remarkable, but quiet, success of the project in normalising and framing the tablet computer as familiar, and almost essential, object for personal learning and development. Apart from presenting the tablet computer as an everyday media object, almost similar to the way television entered the households, the NMEICT and the Aakash project played a crucial role in normalising the notion of online self-learning, and thus that of the online, in the Indian public imagination. In an insightful comment, Suneet Singh Tuli, the CEO of DataWind, remarked that the Aakash tablet was not an iPad for the poor, it was the the computer and Internet of the massesit was not selling a demo version of the real thing, it was shaping the very imagination (Kurup 2011). These stories, together, conspire to make us wonder if all this eventually amounts to create desires for devices; and if the educational and developmental rhetoric helped frame electronic devices as everyday and household objects. The consequences, as we see, cannot exactly be called unintended. References [All URLs accessed on 21 April 2016] Government of India (2011): The Newsletter on Higher Education, Issue 6, Department of Higher Education, http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/document-reports/Newsletter-062011.pdf. Kurup, Saira (2011): 'We Want to Target the Billion Indians Who are Cut Off', Times of India, 9 October, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/deep-focus/We-want-to-target-the-billion-Indians-who-are-cut-off/articleshow/10284832.cms. Phalkey, Jahnavi and Sumandro Chattapadhyay (2016): The Aakash Tablet and Technological Imaginaries of Mass Education in Contemporary India, History and Technology, Vol 31, No 4, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07341512.2015.1136142?journalCode=ghat20. Siddiqi, Asif (2015): Making Space for the Nation: Satellite Television, Indian Scientific Elites, and the Cold War, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol 35, No 1, pp 3549, http://cssaame.dukejournals.org/content/35/1/35.abstract. Union Government (2013): Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India for the year ended March 2012, Scientific and Environmental Ministries/Departments, Report No. 22 of 2013 (Compliance Audit), http://www.cag.gov.in/sites/default/files/audit_report_files/Union_Compliance_Scientific_Department_Audit_22_2013.pdf. On 21st April 2016, the ESRF welcomed the winners of the 2nd prize in the French national physics Olympiads competition. They are a team of six high school students from the Lycee Viette in Montbeliard (north-east from Grenoble), who won the prize for their work entitled When the Atmosphere plays with Light. The students are Heidi Macherel,Caroline Marion, Valentine Marion, Guillaume Demet, Enzo Sacchi, Bertrand Turck. The visit to the ESRF, together with a cash prize, was the prize of the competition. They visited the ESRF control room from where the particle accelerators are operated before getting some hands-on experience by fishing for crystals and preparing samples in the molecular biology laboratory. They pursued the visit with a tour of several beamlines, notably ID24, which studies high pressure and extreme conditions. The group then got the chance to discuss life as a researcher with the Palaeontology team headed by Paul Tafforeau. At the end of the visit, the students explained that the experience had helped them to be even more convinced of following a career in science. Winning stratospheric balloon The aspiring physicists won their trip to the ESRF thanks to their successful project with the schools science club. They designed, built and equipped a stratospheric balloon to observe the sunrise from 26 km above the Earth. The data collected from the detectors placed on the balloon were then analysed around two main themes: the role of the Earths atmosphere in the magical colours of the sky, and the atmosphere: a shield for Earth? The French National Olympiads is an annual competition organised since 1992 by the Union of Physics and Chemistry Teachers and the French Physics Society. Sorry... ..An error has occured: If you have any queries about this error, try emailing feedback@mirror.co.uk and we'll do what we can to help you. ZID:308457493 Alexandria, VA - The American Geosciences Institute is pleased to announce the first seven recipients of the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) Diversity Grants. We would like to congratulate Elizabeth Padilla (University of Tennessee Knoxville), Celina Suarez (University of Arkansas), Marina Suarez (University of Texas San Antonio), Jeremy Williams (Kent State University), Yadira Ibarra (Stanford University), John Paul Balmonte (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) and Matthew Medina (University of Michigan). These grants support geoscience researchers with travel funds to national and international conferences to present DCO-affiliated research, travel funds to attend DCO-related workshops, conferences and events, funds for supporting lab or fieldwork that advances DCO-aligned research, or instrumentation time at DCO-affiliated facilities. For more information about their research, please visit: http://www.americangeosciences.org/workforce/dco-diversity-grant-recipients. The Deep Carbon Observatory Diversity Grants program is made possible through support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and is designed to bolster participation of traditionally underrepresented geoscientists in the United States within the Deep Carbon Observatory community. The Deep Carbon Observatory is a global research program to transform our understanding of carbon in Earth. DCO is a community of scientists, from biologists to physicists, geoscientists to chemists, and others whose work crosses these disciplinary lines, forging a new, integrative field of deep carbon science. A final solicitation for proposals is currently open, with a 6 June 2016 deadline. AGI has four $5,000 grants available for eligible applicants. For more information, please visit: http://www.americangeosciences.org/workforce/dco-diversity-grants. Geoscientists whose research aligns with the Deep Carbon Observatory's mission and decadal goals are eligible to apply if they: 1. Identify as one or more of the following: African American, Native American, Native Alaskan, Hispanic, Latino, Latina, Native Hawaiian, Native Pacific Islander, Filipino, or of mixed racial/ethnic backgrounds from these diverse groups. AND 2. Are pursuing doctoral degrees, who are employed as post-doctoral researchers or are early-career, assistant professors. ### For questions regarding this opportunity, please contact Workforce Development Specialist Heather Houlton at hrh@americangeosciences.org. The American Geosciences Institute is a nonprofit federation of geoscientific and professional associations that represents more than 250,000 geologists, geophysicists and other earth scientists. Founded in 1948, AGI provides information services to geoscientists, serves as a voice of shared interests in the profession, plays a major role in strengthening geoscience education, and strives to increase public awareness of the vital role the geosciences play in society's use of resources, resiliency to natural hazards, and interaction with the environment. Dr. William "Barney" Balch's team at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences has been sampling the waters of the Gulf of Maine regularly over the same transect for the last 18 years as part of a NASA-funded study. Working with scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, Dr. Thomas Huntington and Dr. George Aiken, Balch reported in a recent paper an overall reduction in productivity in the Gulf of Maine. The researchers found that the amount of dissolved organic carbon from rivers emptying into the Gulf of Maine has increased over the last 80 years, a trend they predict will continue through 2100 if annual precipitation continues to increase. The adjacent Gulf of St. Lawrence also was found to supply a significant amount of organic material into the Gulf of Maine via the Scotia Shelf Current. Collectively, these conditions appear to be contributing to the decline in the Gulf's primary productivity, as reported in the American Geophysical Union's journal, Global Biogeochemical Cycles, Volume 30, Issue 2, February 2016, pages 268-292. Balch explained the significance of this finding: "As increasing amounts of dissolved organic matter leaches from the soil into rivers after rains, these materials ultimately flow directly into the Gulf of Maine or indirectly from the Gulf of St. Lawrence via the Scotian Shelf Current. This organic matter is rich in colored humic materials that impart a brown color to the rivers in Maine--think of a dark "tea" steeped from dead leaves and soil. This input actually changes the color of the seawater and appears to be reducing the light available to phytoplankton for photosynthesis and growth, causing a decline in overall productivity." "Ocean color serves as a useful proxy for understanding some of the changes in fundamental processes that are happening in the sea as the climate changes. Normally the ocean is blue with little light absorption. When there is a lot of chlorophyll-containing phytoplankton (microscopic plants) in the water, the water has a greenish color, just like plants do on land. However, the dissolved organic matter delivered to the Gulf of Maine by rivers, has a yellowish-brown "tea" color which gives the normally blue ocean a yellow tint. This organic matter also absorbs light necessary for photosynthetic organisms, and can thereby influence the ecology of the Gulf of Maine. Our data suggest that increases in precipitation and runoff during the last 80 years result in more of this organic, dark-colored "tea" being delivered to the Gulf of Maine which could be affecting how marine plants are able to photosynthesize and grow." added Aiken. Because ocean color is one of the best indicators of what is happening in ocean waters, Balch and his team compared their color measurements of the Gulf of Maine with 1912-1913 color data recorded by Henry Bryant Bigelow, considered the founder of modern oceanography and for whom Bigelow Laboratory was named. In 1912, Henry Bigelow had the foresight to make manual ocean color measurements as he plied the Gulf of Maine aboard his schooner, Grampus. Bigelow used a simple technique published in 1890 by Francois-Alphonse Forel, a Swiss lake scientist. Balch's team compared Bigelow's original color data with current water color measurements to document color change over a century time scale. The conclusion is that the Gulf has yellowed over the last century, particularly in coastal Maine waters. Climate and hydrologic models predict increasing precipitation and runoff in the Gulf of Maine watershed in the 21st century. Based on these projections, Balch, Huntington, and Aiken predict that river discharge of soil-derived dissolved organic carbon into the Gulf of Maine could increase close to 30% over the next 80 years, potentially contributing to a continued decline in the productivity of this coastal marine food web. Today scientists use NASA's Earth-observing satellites and sophisticated shipboard optical measurements to document ocean color. The Bigelow Laboratory-USGS research team also showed a direct link for the first time between satellite-derived measurements of dissolved organic carbon across the Gulf of Maine with dissolved organic carbon discharged in rivers as estimated by the USGS, which go far to validate the satellite-derived measurements as an important predictive tool. With this solid foundation of data and collaboration, the research team expects to continue to mine the data to advance understanding of ongoing changes in the Gulf of Maine. ### Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, an independent not-for-profit research institution on the coast of Maine, conducts research ranging from microbial oceanography to large-scale ocean processes that affect the global environment. Recognized as a leader in Maine's emerging innovation economy, the Laboratory's research, education, and technology transfer programs are spurring significant economic growth in the state. For more information, http://www.bigelow.org or @BigelowLab or social. The U.S. Geological Survey provides science for a changing world. Visit USGS.gov, and follow us on Twitter @USGS and our other social media channels. Subscribe to our news releases via e-mail, RSS or Twitter. LOS ALAMOS, N.M., April 21, 2016-- Innovative multidisciplinary research in nuclear and particle physics and cosmology has led to the development of a new, more accurate computer code to study the early universe. The code simulates conditions during the first few minutes of cosmological evolution to model the role of neutrinos, nuclei and other particles in shaping the early universe. Anticipating precision cosmological data from the next generation of "Extremely Large" telescopes, the BURST code developed by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in collaboration with colleagues at University of California San Diego, "promises to open up new avenues for investigating existing puzzles of cosmology," says Los Alamos physicist Mark Paris of the Nuclear and Particle, Astrophysics and Cosmology group. "These include the nature and origin of visible matter and the properties of the more mysterious 'dark matter' and 'dark radiation.' " "The BURST computer code allows physicists to exploit the early universe as a laboratory to study the effect of fundamental particles present in the early universe," Paris explains. "Our new work in neutrino cosmology allows the study of the microscopic, quantum nature of fundamental particles--the basic, subatomic building blocks of nature--by simulating the universe at its largest, cosmological scale," said Paris. "The frontiers of fundamental physics have traditionally been studied with particle colliders, such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, by smashing together subatomic particles at great energies," says UCSD physicist George Fuller, who collaborated with Paris and other staff scientists at Los Alamos to develop the novel theoretical model. BURST brings a new dimension in simulations. "Our 'self-consistent' approach, achieved for the first time by simultaneously describing all the particles involved, increases the precision of our calculations. This allows us to investigate exotic fundamental particles that are currently the subject of intense theoretical speculation." The new theoretical work has been recognized by Physical Review D editors as an Editors' Suggestion, a category reserved for "a small fraction of papers, which we judge to be particularly important, interesting, and well written." It will appear in the late April 2016 issue. The research is driven by several mission goals of Los Alamos's Nuclear and Particle Futures research pillar in basic and applied nuclear science. According to Paris, "The early universe is becoming such a tightly constrained environment with increasingly good measurements that we can test our descriptions of microscopic quantum physics, such as nuclear cross sections, to high accuracy." These cross sections are important for Los Alamos' nuclear data needs that feed into applications in nuclear energy, safety and security. A few seconds after the Big Bang, the universe was composed of a thick, 10-billion degree "cosmic soup" of subatomic particles. As the hot universe expanded, these particles' mutual interactions caused the universe to behave as a cooling thermonuclear reactor. This reactor produced light nuclei, such as hydrogen, helium, and lithium, found in the universe today. And the amounts of the light nuclei created depend on what other particles--such as neutrinos and perhaps their exotic cousins, "sterile" neutrinos--comprise the "soup'" and how they interact with each other. "Neutrinos are very interesting--they're the second most abundant particle in the universe after photons yet we still have much to learn about them," commented Evan Grohs, who earned his Ph.D. through UCSD for the work, while working on the project in the Center for Space and Earth Sciences at Los Alamos. "By comparing our calculations with cosmological observables, such as the deuterium abundance," says Grohs, "we can use our BURST computer code to test theories regarding neutrinos, along with other--even less understood--particles. It can be difficult to test these theories in terrestrial labs, so our work provides a window into an otherwise inaccessible area of physics." This research has become possible only recently with the advent of astronomers' precision measurements of the amounts of nuclei present in the early universe. These measurements were made with "Very Large" telescopes, which are about 10-meters wide. The next generation of "Extremely Large" telescopes, 30-meters across, are currently under construction. "With coming improvements in cosmological observations, we expect our BURST computer code to be useful for many years to come," said Paris. Improvements in BURST are planned that will exploit the precision cosmological observations to reveal even more exotic physics such as the nature of dark matter and dark radiation. A complete understanding of dark matter, which comprises about a quarter of the mass in the universe, is currently lacking, Paris noted. ### Ongoing support for the project is provided by the National Science Foundation at UCSD and the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program through the Center for Space and Earth Sciences (formerly the Institute for Geophysics, Planetary Physics and Signatures) at Los Alamos. Supercomputing resources on the TriLab Linux Capacity Cluster systems at Los Alamos National Laboratory were provided through a Los Alamos Institutional Computing grant. Publication: Physical Review D, "Neutrino energy transport in weak decoupling and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis," by E. Grohs, G.M. Fuller, C.T. Kishimoto, M.W. Paris, A. Vlasenko Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, BWXT Government Group, and URS, an AECOM company, for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. HANOVER, N.H. - New funding is not enough to guarantee success against emerging infectious diseases around the world. Rather, good governance, a long-term technology investment strategy and strong product management skills are essential, say a Dartmouth College researcher and her co-author. Their article appears in the journal Nature Biotechnology. A PDF is available on request. Kendall Hoyt, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and an expert in biosecurity, and Richard Hatchett, M.D., the acting director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, propose a new way to develop countermeasures for Ebola, Zika and other emerging infectious diseases. As momentum builds for an international effort to develop drugs and vaccines for emerging infectious diseases, the duo examined U.S. biodefense programs to understand approaches that might work and developed a global strategy for countermeasure development. "As infectious outbreaks such as SARS, MERS, Ebola and Zika become the new norm, there is growing recognition that governments and philanthropic organizations need to pool funds to develop countermeasures for these diseases," Hoyt says. "Money is not enough, however. Without strong governance, a clear technology strategy and good product management, precious public funds will be wasted and we will continue to battle public health emergencies of international concern without the aid of medical countermeasures." In February, the World Health Organization declared the Zika virus a public health emergency, setting a now familiar scenario into motion. As with previous infectious disease outbreaks -- HIV/AIDS, severe acute respiratory stress (SARS) disorder, pandemic flu and most recently Ebola -- Zika will spark an international race to develop new vaccines. "The problem is that vaccines can take over a decade to develop," Hoyt says. "The development of new biomedical countermeasures -- vaccines, therapies and diagnostic -- requires the coordination of a wide number of institutional and industry actors to succeed. We argue that international efforts to develop countermeasures for emerging infectious diseases should build on lessons learned from U.S. programs to develop closely related biodefense products." ### Assistant Professor Kendall Hoyt is available to comment at Kendall.L.Hoyt@dartmouth.edu. Broadcast studios: Dartmouth has TV and radio studios available for interviews. For more information, visit: http://communications.dartmouth.edu/media/broadcast-studios The oceans hold more than four billion tons of uranium--enough to meet global energy needs for the next 10,000 years if only we could capture the element from seawater to fuel nuclear power plants. Major advances in this area have been published by the American Chemical Society's (ACS) journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research. For half a century, researchers worldwide have tried to mine uranium from the oceans with limited success. In the 1990s, Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) scientists pioneered materials that hold uranium as it is stuck or adsorbed onto surfaces of the material submerged in seawater. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) initiated a program involving a multidisciplinary team from U.S. national laboratories, universities and research institutes to address the fundamental challenges of economically extracting uranium from seawater. Within five years this team has developed new adsorbents that reduce the cost of extracting uranium from seawater by three to four times. To chronicle this and other successes, the special issue focused on "Uranium in Seawater" amasses research presented by international scientists at ACS's spring 2015 meeting in Denver. Major contributions came from researchers supported by the Fuel Resources Program of DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy who coordinate an international effort involving researchers in China and Japan under agreements with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and JAEA. The DOE program is laying the technological foundation to determine the economic feasibility of uranium recovery from seawater. It supports researchers at national laboratories, universities and research institutes focused on developing and testing the next generation of adsorbents that will exhibit higher adsorbent capacity, faster binding and lower degradation over multiple use cycles in seawater. "For nuclear power to remain a sustainable energy source, an economically viable and secure source of nuclear fuel must be available," said Phillip Britt, who provides technical and outreach leadership for the DOE program. "This special journal issue captures the dramatic successes that have been made by researchers across the world to make the oceans live up to their vast promise for a secure energy future." Scientists from two DOE labs, Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington, led more than half of the 30 papers in the special issue. ORNL contributions concentrated on synthesizing and characterizing uranium adsorbents, whereas PNNL papers focused on marine testing of adsorbents synthesized at national labs and universities. "Synthesizing a material that's superior at adsorbing uranium from seawater required a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional team including chemists, computational scientists, chemical engineers, marine scientists and economists," said Sheng Dai, who has technical oversight of the ORNL uranium from seawater program. "Computational studies provided insight into chemical groups that selectively bind uranium. Thermodynamic studies provided insight into the chemistry of uranium and relevant chemical species in seawater. Kinetic studies uncovered factors that control how fast uranium in seawater binds to the adsorbent. Understanding adsorbent properties in the laboratory is key for us to develop more economical adsorbents and prepare them to grab as much uranium as possible." That teamwork culminated in the creation of braids of polyethylene fibers containing a chemical species called amidoxime that attracts uranium. So far, testing has been conducted in the laboratory with real seawater; but the braids are deployable in oceans, where nature would do the mixing, avoiding the expense of pumping large quantities of seawater through the fibers. After several weeks, uranium oxide-laden fibers are collected and subjected to an acidic treatment that releases, or desorbs, uranyl ions, regenerating the adsorbent for reuse. Further processing and enriching of the uranium produces a material to fuel nuclear power plants. PNNL researchers tested the adsorbents developed at ORNL and other laboratories, including universities participating in the Nuclear Energy University Program, using natural filtered and unfiltered seawater from Sequim Bay in Washington under controlled temperature and flow-rate conditions. Gary Gill, deputy director of PNNL's Coastal Sciences Division, coordinated three marine testing sites--at PNNL's Marine Sciences Laboratory in Sequim, Wash., Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and the University of Miami in Florida. "Understanding how the adsorbents perform under natural seawater conditions is critical to reliably assessing how well the uranium adsorbent materials work," Gill said. "In addition to marine testing, we assessed how well the adsorbent attracted uranium versus other elements, adsorbent durability, whether buildup of marine organisms might impact adsorbent capacity, and we demonstrated that most of the adsorbent materials are not toxic. PNNL also performed experiments to optimize release of uranium from the adsorbents and adsorbent re-use using acid and bicarbonate solutions." Marine testing at PNNL showed an ORNL adsorbent material had the capacity to hold 5.2 grams of uranium per kilogram of adsorbent in 49 days of natural seawater exposure--the crowning result presented in the special issue. The Uranium from Seawater program continues to make significant advancements, producing adsorbents with even higher capacities for grabbing uranium. Recent testing exceeded 6 grams of uranium per kilogram of adsorbent after 56 days in natural seawater - an adsorbent capacity that is 15 percent higher than the results highlighted in the special edition. The special issue captures a wide range of enterprises, including Uranium coordination and computer-aided ligand design (ORNL) Thermodynamic, kinetic and structural characterization of the adsorbent (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, ORNL, PNNL) Adsorbent synthesis using radiation to graft more polymer onto the polyethylene (ORNL, Brookhaven National Laboratory, University of Maryland) Adsorbent synthesis using a chemical method (ORNL, University of Tennessee) Adsorbent nanosynthesis (ORNL, PNNL, Hunter College, University of Chicago, University of South Florida, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, University of California-Berkeley) Laboratory testing and modeling of adsorbent performance (ORNL, Georgia Tech) Marine testing and performance assessment of the adsorbent (PNNL, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, University of Miami) Adsorbent durability and reusability (PNNL, University of Idaho) Adsorbent characterization, toxicity and biofouling studies (ORNL, PNNL, UI) Technology cost analyses and modeling (University of Texas-Austin) Green chemistry: Adsorbents prepared using marine shellfish waste (University of Alabama) Adsorbent deployment (PNNL, ORNL, MIT) Uranium from terrestrial sources can last for approximately 100 years, according to Erich Schneider of the University of Texas-Austin. As terrestrial uranium becomes depleted, prices are likely to rise. "If we have technology to capture uranium from seawater, we can ensure that an essentially unlimited supply of the element becomes available if uranium prices go up in the future," Schneider said. In July, experts in uranium extraction from seawater will convene at University of Maryland-College Park for the International Conference on Seawater Uranium Recovery. They will further explore the potential of uranium from seawater to keep the world's lights on. UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE's Office of Science. ORNL conducts basic and applied research to deliver transformative solutions to compelling problems in energy and security. Battelle manages PNNL for DOE's Office of Science. Interdisciplinary teams at PNNL address many of America's most pressing issues in energy, the environment and national security through advances in basic and applied science. The single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, the Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. ### Media contacts: Dawn Levy, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, levyd@ornl.gov, 865-576-6448 Susan Bauer, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, susan.bauer@pnnl.gov, 509-372-6083 CAPTION/CREDIT: Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers developed a fiber to adsorb uranium from seawater. Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory exposed the fibers to Pseudomonas fluorescens and used the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory to create a 3-D X-ray microtomograph to determine that the fiber structure was not damaged by the organism. Image credit: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy DURHAM, N.C. -- Researchers believe that genetically modified bacteria can help explain how a developing animal keeps all of its parts and organs in the same general proportions as every other member of its species. In 1952, Alan Turing mathematically demonstrated how the nearly endless variety of patterns seen in nature -- spots on cheetahs or the distinctive coats of leopards, for example -- could be explained by chemicals spreading and interacting by simple rules. Many scientists, however, remained unconvinced, and believed there must be more to the story. Now, Duke University researchers have discovered another way that patterns can form -- through the use of a ticking clock. By combining two chemical signals with a few variables, timing cues emerge. And these timing cues can not only create patterns -- they can also make sure these patterns have roughly the same proportions from one colony to the next. In a study published on April 21 in the journal Cell, Lingchong You, the Paul Ruffin Scarborough Associate Professor of Engineering at Duke University, introduced a new genetic circuit into a population of bacteria. You programmed bacteria to produce a protein called T7RNAP (tagged fluorescent blue), which activates its own expression in a positive feedback loop. As the bacterial colony grows and produces more T7RNAP, it also produces a chemical that triggers the production of a protein called T7 lysozyme (tagged fluorescent red), which inhibits the production of T7RNAP. Wherever the two molecules interact, purple patterns appear in the colony. Because bacteria toward the outer edge of the colony are more active than those in the interior, this system causes a purple ring to appear like a bullseye. You and his colleagues discovered that they could control its thickness and how long it took for the bullseye to appear by varying the size of the growing environment and amount of nutrients provided. These variables act as a time cue for the pattern's development. A bigger growth environment or more nutrients causes a delay in the formation of the ring. You speculates that similar timing circuits can operate in other organisms, including animals. "In our experiment, we get a spatial cue from an unsuspected source. We sort of get it for free from the timing of the genetic circuit," said You. "These two diffusible molecules aren't dictating at what positions cells are going to stop or start producing proteins. Instead, they're telling the cells when to start or stop producing proteins. That's enough to both produce a pattern and to control its scaling, and it's a fundamentally new mechanism." ### This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research (N00014-12-1-0631), the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office (W911NF-14-1-0490), the National Institutes of Health (1R01-GM098642, R01-GM096190), the Swiss National Science Foundation (P300P2_154583), the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security. "Collective Space-Sensing Coordinates: Pattern Scaling in Engineered Bacteria." Yangxiaolu Cao, Marc D. Ryser, Stephen Payne, Bochong Li, Christopher V. Rao, and Lingchong You. Cell, 2016. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2016.03.006 AMES, Iowa - It was late in the year, but Panama was still muggy and rain clouds were closing in. A field crew of student-paleontologists wasn't having much luck, but Aaron Wood kept chipping away at the exposed rock with a flathead screwdriver. And then he found a tiny, black-colored fossil tooth. "It's a good day if you find a complete fossil tooth - even if you already have 100 of them from the same species back at the museum," Wood said of the student field work he was supervising near the Panama Canal as a postdoctoral research associate for the Florida Museum of Natural History back in 2012. "It's an amazing day, though, when you find an entirely new species." Wood, who has directed Iowa State's Carl F. Vondra Geology Field Station since 2015, said workers expanding the canal cut back forest and exposed rock to researchers. In that part of the world, vegetation quickly covers any exposed rock and evidence of Panama's ancient past. And so it was a once-in-a-century opportunity for a project led by Bruce MacFadden, distinguished professor and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum on the campus of the University of Florida. When Wood uncovered that first tooth, he knew it was something unusual. But what? His initial thoughts went to the usual suspects: fossil mammals from North America. The 21-million-year-old rocks of the dig site formed when Panama was the southern tip of North America, separated from South America by a narrow sea. All of the fossil mammals previously found in the rocks were similar to those found in Texas, Florida and Mexico. Jonathan Bloch, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum and lead author of the paper describing the fossil discovery in the journal Nature, was the first to suspect otherwise. "After a week or so of trying to identify these teeth, Jon made what seemed at the time a somewhat crazy and exciting suggestion," Wood said. "Could this tooth be from an extinct South American monkey?" Turns out it was the latter: The first North American fossil monkey and the oldest fossil evidence of mammals traveling from South America to North America. Prior to the discovery, the oldest evidence of mammals making the trip north was the movement of certain sloths about 9 million years ago. The Isthmus of Panama formed about 3.5 million years ago, creating a land bridge for animals to freely move north and south. The National Science Foundation, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Florida Museum of Natural History supported the research project that produced the fossil discovery. In all, Wood and the student crews collected seven of the monkey teeth from the ancient rocks of the Panama Canal. Researchers say the fossils are most similar to the squirrel monkeys found across Central and South America today. Researchers named the animal Panamacebus transitus, denoting the discovery in Panama and a family of Western Hemisphere monkeys that includes squirrel monkeys. The name also highlights the 100-mile ocean crossing the monkeys made from South America to North America. Once the monkeys arrived in present-day Panama, probably floating on rafts of vegetation, there's no evidence they moved much farther north. "What this tells us is that physical barriers, like oceans, can be overcome when talking about animals crossing from one continent to another," Wood said. "But these monkeys didn't go very far north once they arrived in Panama. Something else must have acted as a barrier." The fossil record of plants indicates ancient Panama was covered by forests similar to those in South America, Wood said. The forests could provide the monkeys the tropical fruit and habitats they preferred. Farther north, the forests featured North American vegetation and different foods for the monkeys. "These monkeys were adapted to the South American forest," Wood said. "And so they stopped where the South American forest stopped." So yes, Wood said, it was a big find - not only for science, but for the field crew. "It boosts everybody's morale when we find something at a dig site," he said. "On that particular day, other people weren't having much luck. But then we found something unusual - we just didn't know how unusual it was." ### The Board of Research at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, has appointed three new honorary doctors - Sir Richard Peto, Bob Langer and Alimuddin Zumla - who will have their doctorates formally conferred at a ceremony in the Stockholm City Hall on 13 May 2016. Every year, Karolinska Institutet (KI) confers honorary doctorates to individuals for their vital scientific achievements or significant contributions to the university or humanity at large. The title of Honorary Doctor of Medicine (MDhc) has been awarded to Sir Richard Peto, Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Sir Richard Peto is an epidemiologist who studies the major causes of adult mortality; he is also a clinical trialist who evaluates widely practicable treatments. Throughout the past 40 years he has helped document the massive hazards of smoking, first in developed countries and then in the much greater populations elsewhere, generating big nationwide studies in China to monitor their evolving epidemic of tobacco deaths. In the 1990s he showed that, if worldwide smoking patterns continued, tobacco would cause one billion deaths during the present century, and his predictions helped get the World Health Organisation and World Bank seriously committed to tobacco control. On disease treatment, he initiated many of the biggest trials in the world in heart disease, stroke, and cancer, and helped originate the science of meta-analyses, which bring together the findings from many different studies. He has created a worldwide collaboration between the breast cancer trialists in many different countries, showing that widely practicable chemo-endocrine treatments reduce by more than half the risk of death from the commonest type of breast cancer. For his achievements in human medicine Sir Richard Peto has gained many international honours, and he continues to collaborate closely with breast cancer researchers from KI. The title of Honorary Doctor of Medicine (MDhc) has been awarded to Robert S. Langer, Institute Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA Bob Langer works at the interface between biotechnology and material sciences. He pioneered the development and synthesis of polymers for controlled delivery of drugs. These delivery systems include microspheres, nanospheres, and implants for treating cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and mental health disorders such as schizophrenia, narcotic addiction and alcoholism. Hundreds of millions of individuals every year use controlled drug delivery systems. He has been cited approximately 200,000 times (h-index 222) by other scientists, and has trained a large group of leaders in biotechnology research and in the biotech industry. The research and inventions of Bob Langer have transformed the pharmaceutical industry across the world and improved the life of many patients with chronic diseases. Bob Langer has received more than 220 major awards for his achievements in human medicine and bioengineering. He is one of only four living individuals to have received both the United States National Medal of Science and United States National Medal of Technology and Innovation. He has over the years maintained a close contact with KI, where he has been an inspiring lecturer and teacher at graduate and post-graduate courses. The title of Honorary Doctor of Medicine (MDhc) has been awarded to Alimuddin Zumla, Professor in Infectious Diseases and International Health at University College London, London, United Kingdom. Alimuddin Zumla is distinguished for being one of the few individuals who has combined research excellence with creativity for establishing equitable research partnerships between Europe, USA, Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, and for effectively aligning them to capacity development and training activities. He has made seminal contributions to the understanding and advancement of knowledge of the epidemiology, transmission, pathogenesis, rapid diagnosis and treatment of respiratory tract infections, particularly tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, two diseases declared global emergencies by the World Health Organization in 1992. These data have been used for developing new global diagnostic, prevention and treatment guidelines. Alimuddin Zumla has been awarded numerous honors, medals and prizes not only for his scientific excellence, but also for his contributions to international policy development and advancement of public health agenda on infectious diseases with epidemic potential. He has also been a major driving force for training of young developing country physicians, scientists and laboratory personnel. Alimuddin Zumla works closely with KI researchers, co-authoring numerous high impact publications, and jointly with colleagues at KI has established the Host-Directed Therapies network consortium of 64 international partners. ### More reading - KI Honorary Doctors from previous years: http://ki.se/en/about/honorary-doctors-at-karolinska-institutet Karolinska Institutet - a medical university: http://ki.se/english BALTIMORE, MD - (April 21, 2016) - Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, MD today helped launch SPARK, an online research initiative designed to become the largest autism study ever undertaken in the United States. Sponsored by the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI), SPARK will collect information and DNA for genetic analysis from 50,000 individuals with autism -- and their families -- to advance our understanding of the causes of this condition and to hasten the discovery of supports and treatments. Kennedy Krieger Institute is one of a select group of 21 leading national research institutions chosen by SFARI to assist with recruitment. The SPARK effort is being led locally by Dr. Ericka Wodka and her team at Kennedy Krieger Institute Center for Autism and Related Disorders. "The Kennedy Krieger Institute is known for our research in autism, so we are incredibly excited to be a part of SPARK, the largest genetic autism study now underway in the U.S." says Dr. Wodka. Autism is known to have a strong genetic component. To date, approximately 50 genes have been identified that almost certainly play a role in autism, and scientists estimate that an additional 300 or more are involved. By studying these genes, associated biological mechanisms and how genetics interact with environmental factors, researchers can better understand the condition's causes, and link them to the spectrum of symptoms, skills and challenges of those affected. SPARK aims to speed up autism research by inviting participation from this large, diverse autism community, with the goal of including individuals with a professional diagnosis of autism of both sexes and all ages, backgrounds, races, geographic locations and socioeconomic situations. SPARK will connect participants to researchers, offering them the unique opportunity to impact the future of autism research by joining any of the multiple studies offered through SPARK. The initiative will catalyze research by creating large-scale access to study participants whose DNA may be selectively analyzed for a specific scientific question of interest. SPARK will also elicit feedback from individuals and parents of children with autism to develop a robust research agenda that is meaningful for them. ### Anyone interested in learning more about SPARK or in participating can visit http://www.SPARKforAutism.org/KKI, or call us at 443-923-7598. About Kennedy Krieger Institute Internationally recognized for improving the lives of children and young adults with disorders and injuries of the brain, spinal cord and musculoskeletal system, the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, MD, serves more than 20,000 individuals each year through inpatient and outpatient clinics, home and community services and school-based programs. Kennedy Krieger provides a wide range of services for children with developmental concerns mild to severe, and is home to a team of investigators who are contributing to the understanding of how disorders develop while pioneering new interventions and earlier diagnosis. For more information on the Kennedy Krieger Institute, visit http://www.kennedykrieger.org. About SPARK SPARK (Simons Foundation Powering Autism Research for Knowledge) is a national autism research initiative that will connect individuals with a professional diagnosis of autism and their biological family members to research opportunities to advance our understanding of autism. SPARK's goal in doing so is not only to better understand autism, but to accelerate the development of new treatments and supports. SPARK was designed to be easily accessible to the entire autism community and was fashioned with input from adults with autism, parents, researchers, clinicians, service providers and advocates. Registering for this first-of-its-kind initiative can be done entirely online in the convenience of one's home and at no cost. DNA will be collected via saliva kits shipped directly to participants. Once the SPARK participant's family has returned their saliva samples and provided some medical and family history information, the SPARK participant will receive a $50 gift card. SPARK will provide access to online resources and the latest research in autism, which may provide participants and families with valuable information to help address daily challenges. For researchers, SPARK provides a large, well-characterized cohort of genetic, medical and behavioral data, and will result in cost-savings for researchers by reducing start-up costs for individual studies. SPARK is entirely funded by the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI). Research scientists from A.N. Belozersky Institute of Physico-Chemical Biology, the Lomonosov Moscow State University demonstrated how it is possible to suppress the resistance of fungi to antifungal drugs. The results of the work which can serve as a basis for the development of effective antifungal pharmaceuticals have been published in the journal FEMS Yeast Research. Increasingly often scientists are finding strains of pathogenic fungi resistant to known antimycotics (antifungal drugs). 'There is quite a lot of different antifungals. The most common targets for them are ergosterol biosynthesis pathways. Ergosterol is localized in fungal plasma membrane and is similar to and performs the same functions as cholesterol in animal cells. Antifungals disrupt the biosynthesis of ergosterol, thereby suppressing the vital functions of the fungal cells while causing no significant harm to animal cells,' says Dmitry Knorre, a senior researcher at the Department of Molecular Energy of microorganisms, A.N. Belozersky Institute of Physico-Chemical Biology, the Lomonosov Moscow State, and the first author of the study. In addition, Dmitry Knorre is the author of a popular board game "Evolution". Mutations leading to drug resistance allow pathogenic fungi to survive the action of antimycotics. Therefore fungal strain with such mutations are actively spreading, displacing less 'lucky' ones. Some mutations provide resistance just to a particular antifungal compound, whereas others protect from a whole range of the antimycotics. This effect is called "multidrug resistance". Usually, it is associated with excessive activation of the so-called ABC-transporters (ATP binding cassette). ABC-transporters are membrane enzymes pumping unwanted substances from the cells. Typically, the cellular transporters are working with a limited set of molecules, but some of them may protect the cells from large numbers of the compounds. The work describes an approach that allows to make the work of such ABC-transporters ineffective, to prevent their interference with the delivery of the antifungal agents into the cells. The experiments were conducted on the cells of baker's yeast, a common fungal model object. Fluorescent dyes were added to the cells, along with fungi-toxic compounds (e.g., well known Clotrimazole). The dyes were alkyl-rhodamines, which can be easily tracked inside or outside the cells by measuring their fluorescence. This information is important as poorly soluble in water (hydrophobic) alkyl-rhodamine molecules are absorbed effectively by a cell membrane. At the same time, the absorbtion is opposed by ABC-transporters activity, which acts to extrude the xenobiotics from the cells. Pdr5p protein is one of such transporters, it has been shown by the scientists to play a key role in pumping out alkyl rhodamines from yeast cells. Scientists have tried to trace how the distribution of the dyes correlates with their ability to 'help' the drug to kill the fungus. 'Cell viability is determined as follows: if the cell suspension is supplemented with antimycotic, and then transferred to a solid media, then after a while the surviving cells form colonies that can be counted. As a result one can estimate the efficiency of used drug composition', says Dmitry Knorre. The research team found that octyl-rhodamine was the most effective among the tested dyes - it outperformed all others in increasing the effects of the conventional antifungals. The scientists also explained how this happens. Alkyl rhodamines are actively ejected by the ABC-transporters from the cells, but, as these compounds are extremely hydrophobic, they are immediately captured again. As a result, ABC-transporters are deceived: they are fully engaged in pumping out alkylated rhodamines, so they have no capacity to pump such detrimental drugs as clotrimazole. 'In future, it will probably be possible to find a similar colorless compound for pharmacological purposes -- another alkylated penetrating cation,' says Dmitry Knorre. Thus, in the course of work it was found how to force the fungi to "forget" about the medication and fight with "windmills" such as alkylated rhodamines instead. Further research in this area will certainly help to improve antifungal drug composition. ### (New York, NY and Haifa, Israel, April 21, 2016) - Drug- carrying "nanoghosts" that battle melanoma and new treatments for malignant mesothelioma will be the focus of the first joint research projects led by NYU Langone Medical Center and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology under a groundbreaking research initiative supported by noted philanthropists and NYU Langone Trustees Laura and Isaac Perlmutter. NYU Langone and its Perlmutter Cancer Center - which the Perlmutters named in 2014 with a separate gift of more than $50 million - and the Technion established the new partnership last year to advance global collaboration in cancer research and therapeutics. The joint program is positioned to attract additional, world-class support from institutions and individuals dedicated to eradicating cancer through focused and efficient research. The first $3 million of the Perlmutters' $9 million donation to the two institutions is earmarked to finance six joint research projects. Co-investigators on each project will receive a two-year, $500,000 grant--$250,000 for each site. The remaining $6 million is designated to establish a state-of-the-art research facility on the Technion campus in Israel to support these and other research projects, primarily in the emerging field of cancer metabolomics, the systematic study of the unique chemical fingerprints that cellular processes leave behind. These processes are both affected by, and can influence, a variety of human diseases, including cancer. Examining a Novel Approach to Treat Metastatic Melanoma In the first joint collaboration, NYU Langone and Technion researchers will test the ability of a nanotechnology based on stem cell "nanoghosts" to deliver to the brain a promising treatment for metastatic melanoma, skin cancer that has spread or metastasized, and is often incurable. In earlier studies, researchers at the Technion took a stem cell, removed its contents, and then shaped a piece of the cell's outer membrane into a vehicle to deliver treatments into the brain. The idea was to borrow the stem cell's outer membrane ability to home in on cancer cells. As a fragment of the former stem cell's membrane, the nanoghost encompasses particular mechanisms that slow it enough to traverse the barrier that filters blood flowing into the brain, and which keeps most drugs from entering. The nanoghost's cargo is a microRNA (miR), a stretch of genetic material that fine-tunes genetic messages by blocking the conversion of genes into proteins. First applied by NYU researchers to metastatic melanoma, miR-124a, in particular, blocks the expression of cancer-promoting genes. The joint team's experiments will seek to determine the feasibility of encapsulating miR-124a in the nanoghost, and study how the vehicle reaches its target in mouse models of the disease. "Our studies should provide important information on nanoghosts' general value as drug and gene carriers to the brain, and create potential for new treatment approaches against brain tumors and metastases," said Professor Marcelle Machluf, PhD, head of the Laboratory for Cancer Drug Delivery & Cell Based Technologies at the Technion, and inventor of the nanoghost with her colleagues there. "The difficulty of delivering agents to the brain represents a major impediment to improving outcomes in patients suffering from brain tumors. Our state-of-the-art nanovehicle promises safer, simpler and more clinically relevant treatments than existing vehicles, which are comprised of polymers or synthetic vesicles which largely lack the ability to enter the brain and to target evolving and changing pathologies." "It is much harder to secure funding for this type of high risk, high reward research," said Eva Hernando-Monge, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Pathology at NYU Langone, a member of the Perlmutter Cancer Center, and leader of the NYU team that first identified miR-124 as a suppressor of the growth of brain metastases. "The Perlmutters' generous gift gives us the ability to be bold." Like the stem cells they are based on, nanoghosts are invisible to the immune system, which means they could potentially be made from donated stem cells, expanded to large numbers in the lab, and not just from the patient's own supply. In the future, this could enable the stockpiling of nanoghost treatments used off the shelf without fear of immune reactions to treatments based on "foreign" cells. New Approach to Mesothelioma The second joint project will investigate whether an enzyme called heparanase can be used to diagnose and treat mesothelioma, a rare cancer that develops in the mesothelium, the protective lining of the lungs and other internal organs of the body. Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM), the most common form of the disease, often occurs after exposure to asbestos and is resistant to most therapies. Heparanase was first identified as a treatment target in 2004 by a team led by Israel Vlodavsky, PhD, one of the project's co-investigators and professor at the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine. Past studies found that patients with high levels of this enzyme in their tumors have lower survival rates after surgery, and that related tumors in mice respond to treatment with heparanase-inhibiting compounds. The enzyme breaks up molecular chains of heparan sulfate, a building block of the scaffolds that give organs shape and support. Cancer cells use the enzyme to break down tissue barriers around a growing tumor, providing new pathways for the cancer to spread and for the building of blood vessels that supply tumors. In addition, breaking up extracellular matrices releases pro-growth proteins stored there to further drive disease. Furthermore, the joint team has developed the novel theory that heparanase secreted by tumor cells primes local microenvironments in a "vicious" cycle where inflammation and tumor growth drive each other. The co-investigators at NYU Langone -- led by Harvey I. Pass, MD, the Stephen E. Banner Professor of Thoracic Surgery and vice chair for research, Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, at NYU Langone, also a member of its Perlmutter Cancer Center -- will use tissue samples from its Thoracic Oncology Archives to validate Dr. Vlodavsky's findings in hopes of eventually evaluating the treatment potential of heparanase-inhibiting compounds in mesothelioma clinical trials. Dr. Pass has been collecting tissue samples from his surgical patients since 1989, when he was head of thoracic oncology at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The collection now houses frozen specimens from more than 350 mesothelioma patients. "This project, supported through the generosity of the Perlmutters, enables us to collaborate with one of the world's leading experts on the role of heparanase in cancer, and is crucial in developing new strategies," Dr. Pass says. "We hope that these experiments can be translated into applications for ongoing funding from the NCI, and enable Phase I trials with new therapeutics that influence heparanase pathways." "Our collaboration represents the first attempt to focus on heparanase as a major risk factor in mesothelioma and a valid target for the development of heparanase-inhibiting drugs," Dr. Vlodavsky says. "In fact, applying a potent inhibitor of the heparanase enzyme we have already demonstrated a most prominent inhibition of tumor progression in mouse models of human mesothelioma, resulting in a pronounced extension of mouse survival. This joint effort provides an opportunity to make important strides in both our fundamental understanding of mesothelioma and in translating this knowledge into therapeutics." About The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is a major source of the innovation and brainpower that drives the Israeli economy, and a key to Israel's renowned as the world's "Start-Up Nation." Its three Nobel Prize winners exemplify academic excellence. Technion people, ideas and inventions make immeasurable contributions to the world including life-saving medicine, sustainable energy, computer science, water conservation and nanotechnology. The Joan and Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute is a vital component of Cornell Tech, and a model for graduate applied science education that is expected to transform New York City's economy. American Technion Society (ATS) donors provide critical support for the Technion--more than $2 billion since its inception in 1940. Based in New York City, the ATS and its network of chapters across the U.S. provide funds for scholarships, fellowships, faculty recruitment and chairs, research, buildings, laboratories, classrooms and dormitories, and more. ### About NYU Langone Medical Center NYU Langone Medical Center, a world-class, patient-centered, integrated academic medical center, is one of the nation's premier centers for excellence in clinical care, biomedical research, and medical education. Located in the heart of Manhattan, NYU Langone is composed of five hospitals--Tisch Hospital, its flagship acute care facility; Rusk Rehabilitation; the Hospital for Joint Diseases, the Medical Center's dedicated inpatient orthopaedic hospital; NYU Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn; and Hassenfeld Children's Hospital, a comprehensive pediatric hospital supporting a full array of children's health services across the Medical Center--plus the NYU School of Medicine, which since 1841 has trained thousands of physicians and scientists who have helped to shape the course of medical history. The Medical Center's tri-fold mission to serve, teach, and discover is achieved 365 days a year through the seamless integration of a culture devoted to excellence in patient care, education, and research. For more information, go to http://www.NYULMC.org, and interact with us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Media Inquiries: Jim Mandler (212) 404-3525 Jim.mandler@nyumc.org The current effort by the United States and its coalition partners is insufficient to achieve the lasting defeat of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Iraq and Syria, according to a new RAND report. Successful conclusion of the campaign will require significantly increased effort by the United States across two fronts, said Linda Robinson, author of the study and a senior international policy analyst at RAND, a non-profit research organization. First, more-comprehensive training, advising and assisting will be required to create more-capable, coordinated indigenous forces of appropriate composition in order to enable them to regain and hold territory. Second, political agreements must be forged to resolve key drivers of conflict among Iraqis and Syrians. Without these elements, resurgent extremist violence is likely. The report assesses the military and political aspects of the campaign against the Islamic State, including the capabilities and motivations of the various counter-ISIL forces on the battlefield and the U.S.-led efforts to provide training, equipment, advice and assistance, including air support. "The U.S. strategy to degrade and defeat ISIL relies heavily on effective partner forces to combat the group, and clear and hold the extensive territory it has seized in Iraq and Syria," Robinson said. "The partner forces are not yet able to hold territory, which is essential to lasting defeat." While the campaign has degraded ISIL by targeting leadership and retaking a portion of territory, achieving lasting defeat of ISIL will be elusive without local forces capable of holding territory. The key findings show that anti-ISIL forces suffer from capability gaps and a lack of coordination among disparate forces. Iraq's Counter Terrorism Service has carried the brunt of the fighting, suffering extensive casualties and materiel losses. Lack of advisers at the operational level in Iraq and lack of support to Syrian opposition fighters limit effectiveness of indigenous forces, according to the report. The training effort also was limited, as some 20,000 Iraqi army and Peshmerga forces were trained in 18 months, including 2,000 Iraqi special operations personnel. Efforts to arm and train Sunni tribes were halting. In Syria, most territory was retaken by the Syrian Kurdish militia, and other efforts such as those by the New Syrian Forces were inadequate in numbers and capability. Coordination also was lacking among Syrian forces. "In Syria, the only exit from the current zero-sum stalemate is for the United States to embrace a simultaneous campaign to defeat ISIL and put sufficient military pressure on the regime to negotiate Assad's departure," Robinson said. "That path would mean acknowledging the reality of a two-front war in Syria. The United States can support others in the anti-Assad fight while retaining its leading role in the anti-ISIL fight." The government in Iraq, led by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, has pledged decentralization efforts to address Sunni concerns, but lacks sufficient Shia support to enact them. Robinson recommends prioritization of the political line of effort, and achieving synergy between the military and political efforts. ### The research described in the report was sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The report, "Assessment of the Politico-Military Campaign to Counter ISIL and Options for Adaptation," can be found at http://www.rand.org. The research was conducted within the RAND National Defense Research Institute, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the defense Intelligence Community. Seven tiny teeth tell the story of an ancient monkey that made a 100-mile ocean crossing between North and South America into modern-day Panama - the first fossil evidence for the existence of monkeys in North America. The find provides the oldest fossil evidence for the interchange of mammals between South and North America and challenges long-held views of South America as an island continent that evolved in isolation before the Isthmus of Panama was formed and animals began crossing between the continents about 3.5 million years ago, said Jonathan Bloch, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the University of Florida campus. Study findings are detailed online today in the journal Nature. Scientists uncovered the teeth belonging to the 21-million-year-old forest-dwelling primate during recent excavations related to the expansion of the Panama Canal. The new genus and species, dubbed Panamacebus transitus, received its name from the Latin word transit, meaning crossing. It is somewhat of a mystery how P. transitus traveled across the sea dividing North and South America during the early Miocene. It may have swum across, but this would have required covering a distance of more than 100 miles, a difficult feat for even the most talented long-distance swimmers. It's more likely P. transitus unintentionally rafted across on mats of vegetation, much like their ancestors who probably made their way from Africa to the New World in a similar fashion, Bloch said. The unearthing of P. transitus - which probably looked a lot like a capuchin or "organ grinder" monkey - adds a new chapter to the "utterly bizarre" history of New World monkeys, Bloch said. "Somehow they made a transoceanic journey from Africa, then they dispersed throughout South America," Bloch said. "Now we see that they, as far as we know, are the only mammal that successfully crossed the early Miocene Central American Seaway into present day Panama. So how were monkeys able to do this? Hopefully future fossil discoveries will help us better understand this extraordinary history." The ocean-faring monkey suggests the modern diversification of New World monkeys happened in the ancient tropics. The surprising discovery of the first fossil monkey from North America extends the record for the beginning of the modern diversification of New World monkeys by more than 5 million years, Bloch said. "Uncovering a monkey this old in Central America, at the southern-most point of the North American landmass, is similar in some ways to finding Homo erectus, an extinct human ancestor known only from Africa and Asia, in Australia," Bloch said. It also provides fossil evidence for a pattern previously documented by molecular scientists who have suggested for some time that a variety of animals, including amphibians, reptiles, freshwater fishes and insects made ocean crossings between North and South America during the early Miocene. New World monkeys today are restricted to tropical forests from Brazil to southern Mexico, but during the early Miocene they were found throughout South America, including some of the continent's highest latitudes. The new primate raises the question of why these monkeys are not found farther north once they crossed the seaway into Panama, said study co-author Aaron Wood, who discovered the first teeth belonging to P. transitus as a Florida Museum postdoctoral researcher in 2012. "While the fossil mammals found with P. transitus include horses, camels and squirrels that look like what paleontologists have found in the early Miocene of Mexico, Texas and Florida, the new monkey was limited to the southernmost point of the continent," said Wood, now a paleontologist with Iowa State University. "The ancient South American-derived forests found in Panama were absent in northern Central America at the time, preventing monkeys from moving north, even though climate and geographic barriers like oceans did not wholly restrict their northward movements." Bloch said maybe acorns in the northern forests just weren't particularly tasty to a South American monkey used to eating tropical fruit. But the same dense jungles that provide monkeys with the fruits and habitats they enjoy today also make it difficult to find fossils in the tropics, Bloch said. "We hope to find more monkey fossils, but time is definitely a factor," Bloch said. "We're fighting against the forest that wants to grow over the rocks again. The expansion of the Panama Canal provides a once-in-a-century opportunity for these kinds of exciting discoveries. But we can't assume we'll always be able access these rock exposures." ### Study co-authors include Douglas Jones, Nathan Jud, Bruce MacFadden, Aldo Rincon and Emily Woodruff with the Florida Museum; David Foster with UF's Department Geological Sciences; Arianna Harrington, Duke University; Carlos Jaramillo, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama; Camilo Montes, Universidad de los Andes in Colombia; Gary Morgan, the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science; Aaron R. Wood, Iowa State University, Ames. Researchers from the University of Leicester will be travelling to Kenya from 25 - 29 April to kick off a new satellite project that aims to monitor the world's forests in near real-time. The researchers hope that it will help forest land owners and national agencies to protect biodiversity and reduce climate change through the rapid detection of forest cover changes arising from unsustainable utilisation practices. The project is supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). The University of Leicester is internationally renowned for its Space and Earth Observation research. The team travelling to Kenya includes Professor Heiko Balzter, Director of the Centre for Landscape and Climate Research at the University of Leicester, together with Dr Pedro Rodriguez Veiga and Dr Ciaran Robb from the University's Department of Geography and Dr Maggy Heintz from the Research and Enterprise Division. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change includes an international initiative on 'Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation' (REDD+) whose aim include protection of carbon stocks and biodiversity in threatened ecosystems around the world. This way, carbon stays in the forest and is not released to the air, where it could lead to further global warming. One of the main constraints for the successful implementation of REDD+ that has been identified by policy makers, investors, financiers and scientists is the need for robust and objective Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) systems. It has been recognised that satellite technology is the most feasible way to regularly monitor the world's forests in a timely fashion. Kenya has recently set out an ambitious climate change action plan and within the context of REDD+. The University of Leicester is working with the Ministry for Environment, Natural Resources and Regional Development Authorities, Kenya Forest Service and a Kenyan company Ukall Ltd to develop a prototype for a near-real-time forest cover change, monitoring service from Sentinel-1 and 2 satellite data. The service will use national forest definitions and is delivered directly in an easily accessible reporting format via a smartphone app to community forestry associations and the Kenya Forest Service. This will help Kenya in its REDD+ readiness efforts and demonstrate the value of satellite enabled forest monitoring and its application via mobile phone app development. Professor Balzter said: "After the greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, tropical deforestation is the second largest contributor to global climate change. We will focus the initial prototype of our monitoring system at the scale of a national forest reserve in Kenya and make sure that community forestry associations and local communities also have access to the information. "Our aspiration is to support participatory forest management strategies to enable Kenya to manage its forests more sustainably and achieve its national forest cover target of minimum 10% by 2030. Our research has a huge potential impact if it contributes to Kenya's efforts to take up more carbon from the air and store it in the form of forest biomass. "The prototype will allow the Kenya Forest Service and the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources to have timely information on deforestation and forest degradation and have the means to establish a robust and objective Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) system based on cutting-edge technology." During the visit the University of Leicester, together with the Kenya Forest Service (KFS), will organise a workshop to be hosted by KFS in Nairobi. Also participating will be our Kenyan based Partner, UKALL Limited, a leading mobile app design and development company, to be represented by their lead developer and CEO Catherine Kiguru and their Executive Chairman, Paul Rees. The objectives of the workshop are to engage interested parties in a dialogue and discuss forest monitoring user requirements, satellite forest monitoring service development, data availability, reporting format and agree on a forest test site to test the prototype. Apart from the workshop, a series of meetings with a variety of stakeholders including the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis and the Kenya Wildlife Service is planned while in Nairobi. This visit is a follow-up from an initial stakeholders engagement conducted by Professor Balzter and William Wells (Research and Enterprise Division at the University of Leicester) in October 2015, enabled by a NERC pathfinder grant aimed at conducting a market assessment for a global near-real-time deforestation warning service from satellite data, based on the research results from a previous NERC CORSAR grant. ### A photograph of Professor Heiko Balzter at a tour of Karura Forest Reserve in Nairobi with the Kenya Forest Service is available here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/43u1uv4r3a2dosm/AABxoRZxeP6ZAEUp8Sp27RyDa?dl=0 Researchers from the University of Miami - Nova Southeastern University Center for Autism and Related Disabilities (UM-NSU CARD) within the University of Miami (UM) Department of Psychology in Coral Gables, FL, today helped launch SPARK, an online research initiative designed to become the largest autism study ever undertaken in the United States. Sponsored by the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI), SPARK will collect information and DNA for genetic analysis from 50,000 individuals with autism -- and their families -- to advance our understanding of the causes of this condition and to hasten the discovery of supports and treatments. UM-NSU CARD is one of a select group of 21 leading national research institutions chosen by SFARI to assist with recruitment. Dr. Melissa Hale, clinical assistant professor and her colleagues, Dr. Anibal Gutierrez, and Executive Director of UM-NSU CARD Dr. Michael Alessandri, are leading the SPARK effort locally. Housed in the UM College of Arts & Sciences Department of Psychology, UM-NSU CARD is a state-funded resource and support program dedicated to improving the lives of individuals with autism and related disabilities including deaf-blindness and pervasive developmental disorders. "SPARK empowers researchers to make new discoveries that will ultimately lead to the development of new supports and treatments to improve lives, which makes it one of the most insightful research endeavors to date, in addition to being the largest genetic research initiative in the U.S.," says Dr. Hale. Autism is known to have a strong genetic component. To date, approximately 50 genes have been identified that almost certainly play a role in autism, and scientists estimate that an additional 300 or more are involved. By studying these genes, associated biological mechanisms and how genetics interact with environmental factors, researchers can better understand the condition's causes, and link them to the spectrum of symptoms, skills and challenges of those affected. SPARK aims to speed up autism research by inviting participation from this large, diverse autism community, with the goal of including individuals with a professional diagnosis of autism of both sexes and all ages, backgrounds, races, geographic locations and socioeconomic situations. SPARK will connect participants to researchers, offering them the unique opportunity to impact the future of autism research by joining any of the multiple studies offered through SPARK. The initiative will catalyze research by creating large-scale access to study participants whose DNA may be selectively analyzed for a specific scientific question of interest. SPARK will also elicit feedback from individuals and parents of children with autism to develop a robust research agenda that is meaningful for them. Anyone interested in learning more about SPARK or in participating can visit http://www.SPARKforAutism.org/card, or e-mail SPARK@psy.miami.edu. ### About SPARK SPARK (Simons Foundation Powering Autism Research for Knowledge) is a national autism research initiative that will connect individuals with a professional diagnosis of autism and their biological family members to research opportunities to advance our understanding of autism. SPARK's goal in doing so is not only to better understand autism, but to accelerate the development of new treatments and supports. SPARK was designed to be easily accessible to the entire autism community and was fashioned with input from adults with autism, parents, researchers, clinicians, service providers and advocates. Registering for this first-of-its-kind initiative can be done entirely online in the convenience of one's home and at no cost. DNA will be collected via saliva kits shipped directly to participants. Once the SPARK participant's family has returned their saliva samples and provided some medical and family history information, the SPARK participant will receive a $50 gift card. SPARK will provide access to online resources and the latest research in autism, which may provide participants and families with valuable information to help address daily challenges. For researchers, SPARK provides a large, well-characterized cohort of genetic, medical and behavioral data, and will result in cost-savings for researchers by reducing start-up costs for individual studies. SPARK is entirely funded by the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI). About UM-NSU's Center for Autism and Related Disabilities (UM-NSU CARD) UM-NSU CARD is one of seven state-funded, university-based outreach and support centers in Florida dedicated to optimizing the potential of people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), dual sensory impairment, sensory impairments with other disabling conditions, and related disabilities. About Autism Autism is a general term used to describe a group of complex developmental disorders - autism spectrum disorders - caused by a combination of genes and perhaps environmental influences. These disorders are characterized by deficits in social communication (both verbal and non-verbal) and the presence of repetitive behaviors or restrictive interests. An estimated one in 68 children in the U.S. is on the autism spectrum. The wide range of autism manifestations makes it challenging to study potential causes or treatments, and thus a large cohort, which can be segmented, can substantially advance such efforts. The school a girl attends can affect her chance of being diagnosed with an eating disorder. That's the conclusion of research carried out by a joint UK-Swedish team. The results were published today in the International Journal of Epidemiology. Researchers from Oxford University, UCL, the University of Bristol, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm used routinely collected data from Sweden to take account of individual factors that would make someone more likely to develop an eating disorder. Even after accounting for these factors, there were still differences in the rates of eating disorder according to the school attended. Girls attending schools with higher proportions of female students, and high proportions of university- educated parents were more likely to be diagnosed with an eating disorder than girls at schools with lower proportions of female students and fewer university-educated parents. Eating disorders, including anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, and other eating disorders which don't fit so neatly into the classification system, affect 5.7% of adolescent girls. That's almost 2 in a class of 30. They are serious illnesses: someone with bulimia nervosa is around twice as likely to die young as someone without it, while someone with anorexia nervosa is about 6 times more likely to die young. Dr Helen Bould, Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist at the University of Oxford, Department of Psychiatry, led the research. She said: 'Eating disorders have an enormous effect on the lives of young people who suffer from them - it is important to understand the risk factors so that we can address them. 'For a long time clinicians in the field have noted that they seem to see more young people with eating disorders from some schools than others, but this is the first empirical evidence that this is the case.' The research team accounted for factors as diverse as parental income, whether parents had a history of mental ill health, parental education, the number of siblings and birth weight among others. Even allowing for all these characteristics, there were still variations between schools. Dr Bould said: 'Unfortunately, this study can't tell us what it is about schools that affects the rates of eating disorders: it might be an unintentional effect of the aspirational culture of some schools that makes eating disorders more likely; it might be that eating disorders are contagious and can spread within a school. On the other hand, it could be that some schools are better than others at identifying eating disorders in their students and ensuring they get diagnosed and treated.' Sweden does not have any single sex schools, due to its strict laws on gender equality. It is difficult to extrapolate these findings to the different educational system in the UK, where there are selective all-girls schools that are likely to have a high proportion of highly educated parents. However, given the results in Sweden it is possible that such schools would have higher rates of eating disorders. ### During this study, Dr Bould was supported by the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute for Health Research at the University of Bristol, and subsequently by a Wellcome Doctoral Training Fellowship at the University of Oxford. Those who have an eating disorder, or who are worried about someone with an eating disorder, should seek help from their GP. Other resources which may be helpful include the charities Beat (http://www.b-eat.co.uk) and Anorexia and Bulimia Care (http://www.anorexiabulimiacare.org.uk). Doctors and scientists at the University of Southampton have used advanced 3D X-ray imaging technology to give new insight into the way an aggressive form of lung disease develops in the body. Originally designed for the analysis of substantial engineering parts, such as jet turbine blades, the powerful scanning equipment at Southampton's -VIS Centre for Computed Tomography, has been used to image Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) lung tissue samples for the first time. IPF is usually diagnosed via a hospital CT scan or by using a microscope to view a lung biopsy sample however Southampton researchers have now successfully applied Microfocus CT to image biopsy samples. This allowed them to view each lung sample with a level of detail similar to an optical microscope but now in 3D. It had been thought that active scarring in IPF progressed like a large 'wave' from the outside to the inside of the lung. Instead, the study, published in JCI Insight, found that there are large numbers of individual sites of active disease scarring. The research team, from the National Institute for Health Research Southampton Respiratory Biomedical Research Unit, believes this finding will help to ensure doctors develop targeted therapies focussing on these areas. Each year over 5,000 new cases of IPF are diagnosed in the UK, and the number of cases is increasing by around 5 per cent every year. The condition, one of a group of disorders known collectively as interstitial lung diseases, causes inflammation and scarring of the lung tissue. This makes it increasingly difficult to breathe, and it leaves sufferers with a life expectancy of only three to five years. The study's lead author Dr Mark Jones, a Wellcome Trust fellow from the University of Southampton and University Hospital Southampton, comments: "Whilst accurate diagnosis of IPF is essential to start the correct treatment, in certain cases this can be extremely challenging to do using the tools currently available. This technology advance is very exciting as for the first time it gives us the chance to view lung biopsy samples in 3D. We think that the new information gained from seeing the lung in 3D has the potential to transform how diseases such as IPF are diagnosed. It will also help to increase our understanding of how these scarring lung diseases develop which we hope will ultimately mean better targeted treatments are developed for every patient." The study was funded by the Wellcome Trust and also involved researchers at the Royal Brompton Hospital, National Jewish Health in Colorado, and University College Dublin. The -VIS Centre received launch funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (grant EP-H01506X) and the University of Southampton, along with ongoing imaging collaboration with Nikon Metrology. Microfocus CT can scan inside objects in great detail - rotating 360 degrees whilst taking thousands of 2D images, which are then used to build detailed 3D images. Professor Ian Sinclair, Director of the -VIS Centre for Computed Tomography, says: "Our centre examines a wide variety of objects from the layup of individual carbon fibres in aircraft wing components, to the delicate roots of growing plants, and now parts of the body. By being a multidisciplinary centre we have a wealth of expertise that have allowed us to apply this technology in a way that has not been done before. This work is of great significance to us, with the long-term potential to translate our research from the bench to the bedside of patients." The Southampton team are now studying how this technique can help doctors improve the way we diagnose such diseases more accurately, to ensure every patient will receive the correct treatment. ### Cambridge, UK and Gland, Switzerland. To prevent a new mass extinction of the world's animal and plant life, we need to understand the threats to biodiversity, where they occur and how quickly change is happening. For this to happen, we need reliable and accessible data. A new study published in Science today reveals those data are largely missing. We are lacking key information on important threats to biodiversity such as invasive species, logging, bush meat harvesting, and illegal wildlife trade. Over the past two years a consortium of 18 organizations, including UNEP-WCMC, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the Luc Hoffmann Institute, a research hub at WWF International, and BirdLife International, compiled available global data on biodiversity threats. They reviewed almost 300 data sets and marked them on five attributes required for conservation assessments. Datasets should be freely available, up to date, repeated, at appropriate spatial resolution, and validated for accuracy. Only 5% of the datasets satisfied all attributes. "We were surprised that so few datasets met all of the five attributes we believe are required for 'gold standard' of data," says Lucas Joppa who leads environmental research at Microsoft and was lead author on the study. "We live in the age of Big Data, but are effectively flying blind when it comes to understanding what is threatening biodiversity around the world." "This analysis can help pioneer a new approach to mapping and measuring the threats facing endangered species and ecosystems," says Jon Hutton, Director of the Luc Hoffmann Institute. "This is critical if we are to understand why some populations of, for example, tigers or elephants are doing better than others." In some cases, the data needed for effective conservation policy already exists but are not accessible due to associated costs, commercial considerations or intellectual property arrangements. "Agreements between conservation organizations and private companies can help address this," says Brian O'Connor, Programme Officer for UNEP-WCMC's Science Programme. "For example, an agreement between UNEP-WCMC and IHS Company provides detailed and comprehensive data on oil and gas activity worldwide for use in biodiversity assessments." Governments are another valuable future source of information. "Open Government Initiatives such as those in the UK and US have made more than 200,000 datasets freely available, including several that are relevant to environmental conservation," says Piero Visconti, Postdoctoral Scientist at UNEP-WCMC. "We encourage more initiatives of this kind." This work has already started to have an impact on conservation. "We are working with TRAFFIC and UNEP to analyse legal and illegal wildlife trade to address one of the critical knowledge gaps we identified in this study," concludes Neil Burgess, Head of Science at UNEP-WCMC. The authors of the study stress that filling these data gaps need not start from scratch. Several existing datasets, such as those dealing with invasive species on islands around the world, can be scaled up if appropriately resourced. ### Notes to Editors: Joppa, L, O'Connor, B, Visconti, P, et al. (2016) Filling data gaps for threats to biodiversity was published in Science on 22 April 2016. More information, including a copy of the paper, can be found online at the Science press package at http://www.eurekalert.org/jrnls/sci. You will need your user ID and password to access this information. For further information contact: Lucas Joppa Lead Author Nature & Computing Group, Microsoft Research lujoppa@microsoft.com Tel: +1 425 326 8376 Camellia Williams Communications Officer UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre camellia.williams@unep-wcmc.org Tel: +44 (0)1223 814656 Tanya Petersen Communications Luc Hoffmann Institute tpetersen@wwfint.org Tel: +41 79 912 2447 Written by ACM *Strasbourg/CoE/Angelo Marcopolo/- Speaking to "Eurofora" after Adressing PanEuropean CoE's Assembly just before it starts debating and Voting about the controversial EU-Ankara Deal on Mass Asylulm Seekers/Migrants' influx through Turkey, via EU (and Shenghen) Member Greece, Spanish Foreign Minister, Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo, confirmed that a Differend and pre-existing Spain-Morocco Deal on EU's External Borders to Africa, continues to function Properly, but also as a part of an overall set of Agreements : - "Eurofora" asked the Spanish Minister how he feels Now about that Agreement with Morocco about Migrants, reminding that it had been recently Praised by an Important hristianDemocrat/EPP Summit of Heads of State/Government, (which included German Chancelor Angie Merkel, and other EU Leaders), organized Last Year in Madrid, (See Infra). - Garcia - Margallo, after reminding, with a smile, that he has already spend more than 17 Years in Strasbourg, particularly at the nearby EU Parliament, as a mainstream MEP, where we had met for the 1st time a few years ago, as well as shortly after he had been appointed as Minister for Foreign Affairs, went on to Add that Spain's and Morocco's relatiop were placed in a Wider Context : => - "With Morocco, we (External EU Borderline Member Country Spain) have a Close Relationship", he stressed from the outset, in Reply to our Question. - It extends "both on Political, Cultural, Economic, and Migration issues", the experienced Spanish Minister added. - And it's, indeed, still Working quite Well, Garcia-Margallo agreed with "Eurofora", in Conclusion, as far as it concerns, specificaly, the currently Topical matter of Asylum Seekers/irregular Migrants. Regarding which, as it's well known, only a Few People risked to be drown in the Sea, instead of many Hundreds of Dead at the Turkish Borders in the Aegean, without any "Tsunami" of Mass Asylum Seekers/irregular Migrants ever rushing towards Madrid and Paris, etc., Contrary to what happened recently with More than 1 Million of People suddenly rushing through Turkey to cross EU's Borders via Greece towards FYROM, Serbia, Hungary, Austria, Germany and other EU Countries. Moreover, this, without Morocco, (behind which stands the Huge African Continent, currently plenty of various Conflicts, even Terrorism, including ISIS-related, Poverty, etc., despite the existene, also, of several Natural Resources, almost like the Middle East area), ever Asking, during all these Recent Years, to boost any "Accesion" process in order to Enter into the EU, Neither to Pay it 6 Billions , Nor to give (already from June 2016) a "Visa-Free" status for almost 80 Millions of Population, (as that of Turkey's, according to the Latest Statistical Data of 2016), due to become able to Enter inside the EU at any moment after that, (etc). Contrary to what Ankara notoriously Requested from the EU in order to accept to take Back just a Small Number of the Mass Irregular Migrants that mainly Turkish Smugglers had brought at the Aegean Sea's EU External Borders, provoking a Massive phenomenon of Huge Population Movements without any precedent in Modern History. ---------- - "The Western Mediterranean Model between Spain and Morocco should be used as a positive Example", stressed, a few Months ago, the Resolution on the "Emergency" for "Protecting Refugees - Securing EU's External Borders", adopted by the latest Heads of State/Government Congress of the ChristianDemocrat/EPP Parties, headed by President Joseph Daul, which was organized last October 2015 in Madrid. The move came while EU seeked to "reinforce its External Borders by stepping up border Controls ... to Prevent illegal Crossings", "both at Sea and on Land, ...in the Southern Mediterranean, the Aegean Sea and along the Balkan route, as part of the "No 1" Priority to "Guard and Protect (EU's) External Borders", acording to that October 21-22 EPP Congress' Resolution. ----------------------------- - "in Europe right now, the Migration crisis is the most Pressing, ...complex and immense Challenge which is truly Europeanit affects all of us and we need to find a common Solution that works from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, and from the Black Sea to the Atlantic"... "We must Start by finding a European solution to Securing our External EU Borders, which means finding a European approach to Border Control and strengthening our European agencies, such as Frontex". "We are and will remain committed to Helping those in Need, but we must ensure the Security of our Citizens as our first Priority", Warned President Daul with a Premonitory instict. Indeed, he had published that, already, as early as since the 15 October 2015, i.e. less than 1 Month before the Deadly Terrorist Attacks against Civilian People in Paris, by Islamist Extremists of ISIL's atrocious BeHeaders, even of innocent unarmed People, on November 13, 2015, in relation of which almost 40 ISIL's Terrorists reportedly crossed EU's External Borders through Turkey, via EU (and Shenghen) Member Greece, by Hiding among the above-mentioned Massive Asylum Seekers/irrefular Migrants "Tsunami" triggered by mainly Turkish Smugglers at the Aegean Sea, for the First Time in History, all out of a Sudden. ------------------------------------------------------------------ A Different situation exists between EU Member Spain and the Neighbouriing African Countries, the Spanish Foreign Minister explainedearlier Today, in a Wider overview : - "Spain has special relations with northern African countries. Those relations have allowed to us Control Migratory phenomena pretty Satisfactorily, without creating problems for our European associates", he pointed out. - "It is Essential to Collaborate with Countries of Origin and Transit, to have Border Controls to avoid irregular immigration, to establish a means of Regular immigration, and to Retain those immigrants in the societies in which they live, to Avoid Ghettoes, which exist in some European Countries. That policy has been very successful in the past 4 Years. We have collaborated with Morocco, Mauritania and Senegal". => Thus, "in 2015, the increase in irregular immigration was 15%". But "in Italy, the figure was more than 270%, as a fundamental consequence of events in Libya. There is also the position in the western Balkans", with that notorious, unprecedented Huge "Tsunami" of Massive Asylum Seekers/Migrants' flows through Turkey and via EU Member Greece, he reminded, in comparison... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Garcia - Margallo made it clear, earlier, that Spain considered that EU - Turkey controversial Deal only as "an Emergency" Measure, and "Not a Final Solution". Such Massive "Displacements of Populations" had Never been seen before "Since the 2nd World War", he observed. However, Spain requested, during EU Decision-making, the Respect of International Legality, the Exclusion of Collective Expulsions, and the Individual Investigation of each Asylum Seeker's case, he added, in Reply to Questions also by the Head of the Gzerman Delegation to CoE's Parliamentary Assembly, mainstream ChristianDemocrat/EPP MEP, Axel Fischer. Meanwhile, "International", UN-sponsored efforts to "Bring Together all Parties to the Conflict" in Syria and other affected areas, were recently supported by Spain, France, and other Countries through the UN HQ at New York, he pointed out. In this regard, the experienced Spanish Foreign Minister, expressed his Regret for the Fact that "Ukraine" Crisis "Prevented us (EU) from establishing a Strategic Partnership with Russia, which would have been of Tremendous Importance", (particularly on Fighting Efficiently against ISIS' Deadly Terrorism's threats, etc). (../..) ------------------------------------------------- *** ("DraftNews", as already send to "EuroFora"s Subscribers/Donors, earlier. A more accurate, full Final Version might be Published asap). *** New global rules will come into force from September, requiring the worlds biggest financial players to start posting initial and variation margin on their uncleared derivatives trades. The rules will initially impact the largest dealers, but over time will also affect smaller banks and buy-side institutions such as pension funds. Roger Cogan, Isda Regulators want to push as many derivatives trades as possible through clearing houses, in a bid to mitigate counterparty risk, but this cookie-cutter approach does not work for all derivatives, hence the new margin rules. The theory is that posting collateral against these trades, such as cash or bonds, will prevent another Lehman-style collapse, if a counterparty to a trade goes bust. The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission finalized its minimum margin requirements at the end of last year, which fall under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. European Union (EU) regulators released the final draft of their equivalent rules in March, which form part of the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR). These are expected to be finalized by mid-July. Currency mismatch haircut The EUs final draft has provided clarity on the rules and offers dealers some relief with regards to its currency mismatch rules. Variation margin that is posted in cash but is denominated in a different currency than that agreed under the master agreement will no longer face an 8% haircut. Roger Cogan, head of European public policy at the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (Isda), which represents the worlds largest derivatives dealers, welcomed the concession. We welcome the improvements made to the RTS [regulatory technical standards] in respect of the currency mismatch haircut, which make the calculation more proportionate and importantly ensure that the calculation does not itself increase counterparty credit risk. Dealers will still face an 8% haircut on initial margin cash and non-cash where there is a currency mismatch, and also on non-cash variation margin, such as bonds. EU vs US The EU and Hong Kong have adopted the same approach regarding cash variation margin; Singapores rules have yet to be finalized. Michael Beaton, DRS US rules are comparatively more restrictive, though, imposing the haircut where the variation margin collateral is denominated in a different currency to the one of settlement or is not cash-denominated in a G10 currency. In particular, this would hit Asian financial counterparties that trade with US counterparties, because their local currencies are not G10 currencies, says Michael Beaton, managing partner at specialist risk consultancy Derivatives Risk Solutions (DRS). The impact to Asian banks should be minimal, though in terms of getting access to the relevant currencies, believes John Ball, managing director of the FX division in Asia-Pacific at banking lobby forum Global Financial Markets Association. This [access] should already be happening on a daily basis through the funding of their currency assets and liabilities in the interbank market to meet settlement obligations, he says. Regulatory divergence Haircuts are part and parcel of margining, though. The bigger problem is how regulators treat FX derivatives. Non-cleared physically settled currency forwards fall outside of the scope of US rules, meaning dealers do not have to post collateral on these trades. William Winterton, Clifford Chance It remains to be seen whether US banks will seek to margin those trades anyway, either of their own volition or as a result of prudential encouragement, says William Winterton, senior associate in banking and finance at law firm Clifford Chance. EU regulators have, however, taken a radically different approach, deeming them in scope. This is the key headline difference between the EU and US margin rules on uncleared derivatives, says Winterton. However, the problem remains there is no EU-wide definition of an FX forward and, as such, consensus on whether it is even a derivative. The final draft rules provided some clarity on the issue, largely by kicking the can down the road. An EU-wide definition of an FX forward is expected under forthcoming regulation the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (Mifid II). EU banking regulators have therefore decided to defer imposing variation margin on physically settled FX forwards until Mifid II is in force or December 21, 2018, whichever date come first. If it is decided these commonly traded instruments are in fact derivatives, then this could make it is more expensive to trade them in the EU than in the US. Isdas Cogan says: Our members want the rules to be as harmonized as possible to make them practically workable. From Silicon Valley to Scandinavia, from London to Singapore, the fintech revolution gathers pace as venture capitalists throw money at what they expect will be a big growth sector, even while mainstream equity investors withdraw capital from conventional banks. At the Innovate Finance Global Summit in London in April, entrepreneurs shared with Euromoney their plans to disrupt institutional asset management, wholesale payments, SME and mortgage lending, and debt and equity capital markets. Kosta Peric, Gates Foundation However, the incumbent banks have spread their nets skilfully in the moats around these businesses to scoop up the most threatening innovations in their own accelerators and venture funds. And the so-called disruptors threatening to attack are mostly hoping to be caught in the nets and bought out. The real proving ground for fintech, the cauldron of innovation for financial services outside the established banking industry and the biggest financial opportunity might lie a world away from Silicon Valley and Silicon Roundabout. It might be in the impoverished rural communities of Bangladesh, Tanzania, Uganda, India and Nigeria. There it is becoming apparent that embracing secure, low-cost, large-scale digital financial services has clear economic benefits. A growing body of evidence suggests a correlation between the spread of mobile money, financial inclusion and GDP growth. Governments, more anxious to promote economic development first and inclined to worry about know your customer and anti-money laundering second, balance regulation accordingly. In those countries, building digital highways to transfer small amounts of money offers the best way to fold unbanked people, whose days might consist of multiple time-consuming, high-cost and insecure cash transactions, into the formal economy and at least help lift them out of poverty and cushion a collapse back into debt. Digital providers, not conventional banks, are best set to do this and the lessons from these countries might point to the future of fintech. Kosta Peric, deputy director, financial services for the poor, at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and previously chief architect of SwiftNet, Swifts global secure network connecting 10,000 financial institutions and corporates brought this message to the summit: providing services to these populations is not a philanthropic act; it is a big business opportunity. Peric points out there are two billion of these people and that many are economically quite active in fact, often having three or four sources of revenue and transacting multiple times a day. M-Pesa and bKash The obvious examples of businesses that have grown fast by serving them are M-Pesa, launched by Safaricom and Vodafone in Kenya in 2007, and bKash, an autonomous subsidiary of BRAC bank in Bangladesh. In their first three years in operation, these two companies attracted 10 million customers bKash now has 17 million and turned a profit in 2015, just four years after starting up. M-Pesa used to be how poor people paid a motorbike taxi to take them to work. Now its how middle-class families pay the school fees. Other providers are copying them. In Uganda, more people have mobile money accounts than have conventional bank accounts. Mobile phone companies are playing the lead in bringing digital financial services to these populations and taking advantage of low costs to derive profits from large volumes of low value transactions that would be far costlier to process in cash through conventional branches and ATMs. They are also learning a valuable lesson, Peric tells Euromoney, in the need to collaborate on building new, shared financial infrastructure that is secure, resilient and scalable, on which they can each then deliver their competing services. In Tanzania, providers of digital financial services led by the three leading telcos have embraced an interoperable payment architecture across which customers of different providers can transact with each other. The proportion of the adult population with a financial account grew from 12% in 2009 to 50% by 2014. In its mission to catalyze financial inclusion as a step to reducing poverty, the Gates Foundation is encouraging governments to add their hefty volumes to these payment networks by directly paying salaries, benefits and pensions to populations across them. The next step is to add merchants, so recipients can pay for goods easily with their digital cash. In the developed world, banks remain supremely confident that whatever innovations the fintech newcomers devise, most will be transacted across the established payment rails the banks built and still control. In the emerging world, development banks and philanthropic bodies such as the Gates Foundation are providing political risk cover to foster the building of new payments infrastructure. Only a few incumbent banks are taking much interest. They might be well advised to become more involved. Who knows were all this leads? We use cookies and external services on our website. Some are necessary, others enhance your user experience or help us improve this website. You can change your privacy settings any time by clicking privacy policy. Georgetown University professor John Hasnas has a fine Wall Street Journal op-ed today, The One Kind of Diversity Colleges Avoid, pleading for intellectual and philosophical diversity in faculty hiring, alongside the racial and sexual kind. Theres something missing, though. He begins: Many universities are redoubling their efforts to diversify their faculties in response to last falls wave of protests from student groups representing women and minorities. Yale, for example, has announced a $50 million, five-year initiative to enhance faculty diversity. Brown has committed $100 million to hire 60 additional faculty members from historically underrepresented groups over the next five to seven years. Americas institutions of higher education seem committed to faculty diversity. But are they really? In the more than 20 years that I have been a professor at Georgetown University, I have been involved in many faculty searches. Every one begins with a strong exhortation from the administration to recruit more women and minority professors. We are explicitly reminded that every search is a diversity search. Administrators require submission of a plan to vigorously recruit applications from women and minority candidates. Before we even begin our selection process, we must receive approval from the provost that our outreach efforts have been vigorous enough. The deans and deputy deans of each school reinforce the message that no expense should be spared to increase the genetic diversity of our faculty. Yet, in my experience, no search committee has ever been instructed to increase political or ideological diversity. On the contrary, I have been involved in searches in which the chairman of the selection committee stated that no libertarian candidates would be considered. Or the description of the position was changed when the best resumes appeared to be coming from applicants with right-of-center viewpoints. Or in which candidates were dismissed because of their association with conservative or libertarian institutions. That is all fine, as I say, and hes of course right to push for fair consideration of right-of-center viewpoints. But I wonder where Hasnas (or for that matter the editors of the Wall Street Journal) would come down on the question of philosophical diversity when it bears on thinking about cosmic and biological origins. Because with debates on origins, the dividing line between the politically correct view (orthodox Darwinism) and the politically incorrect one (Darwin skepticism or intelligent design) is scientific only as a secondary matter. The divide begins with a difference of perspective on what kind of scientific conclusions are to be permitted in the first place. As the ultimate driver behind the story of life, may intelligence or creativity be considered or must it be ruled out before investigations even commence? Thats not a scientific question its a philosophical one. Maybe an aesthetic one. Even simply a matter of personal inclination. Honest brokers and critics looking in from outside acknowledge this. A distinguished philosopher, atheist and Darwin foe Thomas Nagel, for one, candidly admits his ungrounded intellectual preference in favor of an immanent natural explanation for biological order. You have to credit him for being totally honest with himself, a rare quality. Advocates of ID insist there is no reason to exclude mind as an ultimate explanation behind the cosmos. For that, they are branded as thought criminals. On the other hand, for those who embrace the exclusionary principle, the scientific evidence must confirm a materialist understanding. The conclusion is built into the premise. Ill regard the university faculty hiring system as healthy when even diversity on this question is regarded as a positive good. Were a long way from that now. Image credit: kasto stock.adobe.com. As part of the acquisition, Leo Burnett Sri Lanka and Arc Worldwide Sri Lanka will now be fully integrated into Publicis Communications, one of Publicis Groupes four Solutions hubs regrouping all creative communications activities. Leo Burnett Worldwide, a part of the Publicis Groupe has announced the acquisition of a majority stake in the Solutions Group, the leading communications company based in Sri Lanka. As part of the acquisition, Leo Burnett Sri Lanka and Arc Worldwide Sri Lanka will now be fully integrated into Publicis Communications, one of Publicis Groupes four Solutions hubs regrouping all creative communications activities. The Solutions Group was founded in 1999. Since its inception, the company has been headed by renowned communications leader, Ranil de Silva. Today, the company has 81 of the countrys best and brightest professionals whose work has been consistently recognised globally at leading award shows including Cannes Lions, D&AD, London International, Clio, Adfest, Spikes Asia among others. "Given the tremendous growth and creative opportunities in Sri Lanka, I am thrilled to see Leo Burnett join forces with the talent and possibility that resides within the Solutions Group, said Rich Stoddart, CEO of Leo Burnett Worldwide. Ranil de Silva, Managing Director, Leo Burnett Sri Lanka, stated, We are thrilled to strengthen our partnership and to continue our efforts to build Leo Burnetts position as a leading creative force in the country. I am confident that all the stakeholders will benefit greatly from the access to our global footprint. As part of this acquisition, the Solutions Group also acquired 100% ownership of First Media Solutions, which represented Starcom Worldwide in Sri Lanka and was the first international media independent brand to enter Sri Lanka. First Media will now be fully integrated into the Publicis Groupe. Read more news about (ad news, latest advertising news India, internet advertising, ad agencies updates, media advertising India) With market sentiment damp amid commodity price fluctuations and global stock price volatility, the Pound Sterling to Canadian Dollar (GBP/CAD) exchange rate advanced. Although oil prices were on track to close higher for the third week in a row this did not offer any particular support to the Canadian Dollar exchange rates (CAD) on Friday. With Canadas Consumer Price Index forecast to show a dip in inflationary pressure markets were inclined to move away from the Loonie, benefiting the GBP/CAD exchange rate. Crude oil prices declined significantly in the wake of the end of strikes in Kuwait. This caused the Canadian Dollar to decline versus the majority of its peers, with the GBP/CAD exchange rate advancing by around 0.4% during Thursdays European session. Crude price futures are uncertain now that US inventories data is showing signs of a steep reduction in oversupply but global demand remains comparatively weak. Other Currency Exchange News Latest Pound/Canadian Dollar Exchange Rates On Monday the Pound to British Pound exchange rate (GBP/GBP) converts at 1 FX markets see the pound vs pound exchange rate converting at 1. The live inter-bank GBP-EUR spot rate is quoted as 1.15 today. The live inter-bank GBP-USD spot rate is quoted as 1.131 today. Please note: the FX rates above, updated 24th 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. Pound Sterling (GBP) Exchange Rates Stage a Recovery After Brexit News Calms Fears The British Pound has seen a mixed performance versus its major peers today. A slight lean towards appreciation, however, was the result of easing Brexit jitters. The latest opinion polls suggest that the remain campaign is gaining traction. The latest polls, both phone and online, have shown a shift towards Remain, political blogger Matt Singh said. It would appear that the Panama Papers have had little impact, whereas the shift in the referendum debate onto the economics of Brexit is having an effect. As a result, Leave has fallen further from where it needs to be at this point. With a complete absence of British economic data to provoke changes on Friday, Pound Sterling movement will likely be dictated by market sentiment and any political developments regarding the EU referendum. Canadian Dollar (CAD) Exchange Rates Forecast to See Movement on Friday Crude oil prices have fluctuated considerably today but continue to remain well below $50 a barrel. Now that the workers strike in Kuwait has ended the Canadian Dollar is predicted to struggle as crude is likely to fall. Only a day after the strikes finished Kuwaits crude output is almost at capacity. There will be a number of influential domestic ecostats with the potential to provoke CAD exchange rate movement on Friday. Trader focus will be dominated by Marchs Consumer Prices data, but the Retail Sales reports may also be of interest. Don't know of any preferences for PHd holders, but if you are looking for a work visa you need to find an employer to sponsor you. Being a PHd holder you must be in a specific field so should not be too difficult to find companies in your particular area. Research such companies sharmoon said: In which area of Montreal I can suit better as an English speaker? And it should be reasonable also Thanks in advance. Hi All, can anybody tell me how is the availability of Software Engineering job in Montreal, Canada.In which area of Montreal I can suit better as an English speaker? And it should be reasonable alsoThanks in advance. Click to expand... If you don't have aof a Bachelor's Degree in a relevant field of study (having a Masters degree would be a huge asset), the ability to speak French somewhat fluently, and at least 3-5 years experience, then I doubt that there's much out there for you job wise... there areof Anglophone Canadian people from other parts of Canada with whom you would be competing for positions in an English speaking environment who have the same qualifications as you (if not better), none of whom would require sponsorship for a work visa and most of whom would likely also have the required work experience working in Canada.I know that you say that you have a Bachelor's degree from a university in Bangladesh, but that doesn't necessarily guarantee that it is equivalent to a Bachelor's degree in other countries (standards differ from country to country) and given your past experiences in dealing with the authorities in Australia, who have judged your degree to be equal to an associate's degree in Australia, I wouldn't be surprised if you received the same result from the Canadian authorities as well and as such, I don't know how likely potential Canadian employers would be to accept your non-Canadian degree to be equivalent to the minimum standard that they expect potential new hires to possess. You have a chance of coming in only if you have a valid, qualifying job offer from a Canadian employer or you have a PNP. Without either of those things, you will have to have a CRS rank of >450. If you cannot achieve a CRS >450, then you won't likely ever receive an ITA. Also consider that a good many of the applicants who have a valid, qualifying job offer or PNP are already present within Canada when they receive the job offer/PNP, so that part has been taken care of for them. It is more difficult to be hired from outside of Canada than it is from within Canada unless you have a specialised skill or training that isn't widely available in Canadian job applicants. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate For most food lovers, Baja California conjures images of fish tacos and cold beer. But in the world of wine, its a rapidly developing region thats getting all kinds of buzz. Accolades have been rolling in for the region of Baja California between Tijuana and Ensenada, with publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast and The Guardian of London raving about the experience and the wines. For probably the last three to four years, people have been making claims that Baja can be that next big up-and-coming wine region. I think theres a lot of curiosity, a lot of growing interest, said Tom Bracamontes, owner of La Competencia Imports, which is based in Napa, California. Whats intriguing is that nobody has really seen these wines in the United States. Occasionally, some restaurants and wine shops obtain wine from Baja Calfornia, but Although H-E-B Central Market is showcasing these wines as part of the stores Pasaporte Mexico festival, which runs through May 3. What are they like? The wines dont have a specific taste profile but can range from a clean and elegant sauvignon blanc to a funky blend of tempranillo and carignan that tastes a little like a pinot noir. More Information Everything you wanted to know about Pasaporte Mexico Where: H-E-B Central Market, 4821 Broadway When: Through May 3 What's happening: The store will showcase items from throughout Mexico. In front of the store, an outdoor mercado will offer street-style quesadillas, while the prepared food case will include moles and various regional dishes. The wine area features bottles from Baja and other wine-growing areas in Mexico. Among packaged foods, we especially liked an organic granola and a salsa of chiles de arbol packed in olive oil. And you haven't lived until you have tried the salt with ground grasshoppers. Edmund Tijerina Recipe: Chile Roja Rubbed Ahi Tuna with Seared Pineapple-Fresno Salsa Recipe: Flank Steak with Goat Cheese Potato Azteca and Mole Negro Recipe: Coconut Creme Brulee with Aji Amarillo Sugar Tuile and Pineapple Mole See More Collapse Theres no particular varietal. Baja winemakers arent trying to be California wines or Italian wines or French wines, said Heidi Holcomb-Rinehart, wine manager at Central Market. Each wine has its own individual taste and characteristic. Although Baja is only now emerging as a wine destination, the history of winemaking in Mexico goes back to the 16th century conquistadores who brought grape vines with them on their voyages. But the vines grew too well in the New World, and colonies soon didnt need to buy wine from Spain, so the Spanish crown banned the production of wines except for liturgical purposes. That ban stood in Mexico until the country won its independence in 1821. In Baja, the first commercial winery, Bodegas de Santo Tomas, opened in 1888, but the current wave of interest in Baja wines has a much more recent history, beginning in the 1990s. Mexico City native Hugo DAcosta, a winemaker who trained in France, came to work for Santo Tomas and soon opened his own winery, Casa de Piedra, which paved the way for other winemakers and launched a willingness to experiment. Winemakers and even importers banded together to promote the region, which now has a Ruta de Vino Mexico Highway 3 and prominence in Baja California tourist promotions. The region, known as the Valle de Guadalupe, sits between two small mountain ranges and offers dry, hot summers with cool, damper winters and a constant sea breeze. That breeze may give some of these wines a touch of salinity, a characteristic that reminds Holcomb-Rinehart of the up-and-coming wines from Greece. When they asked me, How are they, I said, I think theyre solid, but I dont know how to compare them, because theres nothing for me to compare them to, she said. I was thinking of foods to compare them. With moles, with the shrimp dishes, theyre fantastic. It may be the growth and development of Mexican gastronomy that propels Mexican wines in general and Baja wines specifically into greater prominence, appreciation and availability. Mexican cuisine is changing, and as it becomes more high-end, you want good wines to accompany those as well, Bracamontes said. And why not complete the experience. If you have a great fine-dining restaurant that happens to feature Mexican food, why not feature wines from Baja California? etijerina@express-news.net Despite recent improvements, San Antonio air still has unhealthy levels of ozone, according to the American Lung Association. The national health group airs its grievances with American cities air pollution in its annual State of the Air report. This years ranked the San Antonio-New Braunfels metro area as 32nd highest for ground-level ozone out of 197 metro areas. Thats a little better than last years report, when the metro area ranked 33 out of 220. The associations scoring method gave Bexar County a weighted average of 13.7 days of unhealthy ozone levels, 7.5 fewer than 20 years ago. Still, the association gave the county an F grade for ozone. Residents experience 32 days of orange air quality, deemed unhealthy for sensitive populations, such as the elderly or those with lung conditions. There were six red, or unhealthy, days in 2015. Ozone is harmful to public health and especially children, older adults and those with asthma and other lung diseases, Angie McClure, director of the American Lung Associations branch in San Antonio and Austin, said in a statement released with the report. When older adults or children with asthma breathe ozone-polluted air, too often they end up in the doctors office, the hospital or the emergency room. High levels of ozone are likely to put the city into nonattainment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agencys ozone standard, which would trigger requirements to reduce pollution, such as limits on highway construction. The EPA lowered the ozone standard to 70 parts per billion in October. The Alamo Area Council of Governments, which monitors local air quality, announced last week that rising levels of ozone pushed the average at one air monitor to 71 ppb. Efforts to reach Brenda Williams, AACOGs natural resources director, for comment late Wednesday were not successful. State and federal environmental regulators will look at data from 2014 to 2016 to determine whether the county or metro area meets or exceeds the new standard. Other Texas cities ranked far worse than San Antonio for ozone: Dallas-Fort Worth ranked 11th in the country for high ozone days, while Houston and its suburbs ranked 15th. In other measures of air quality besides ozone, the city scored well in this years report. The American Lung Association gave Bexar County an A grade for fine particle pollution over 24 hours. The metro area ranked No. 1 in the country for 24-hour particle pollution and a pass grade for annual concentration of particles. Particle pollution is made of soot or tiny particles that come from coal-fired power plants, diesel emissions, wildfires and wood-burning devices. These particles are so small that they can lodge deep in the lungs and trigger asthma attacks, heart attacks and strokes, and can even be lethal, McClure said. The metro area ranked 117 out of 171 for annual particle pollution averages. Along with 15 other cities, San Antonio had the lowest particle pollution levels on record, according to the association. bgibbons@express-news.net Twitter: @bgibbs NEW BRAUNFELS The message was clear: If San Antonio-area officials arent willing to commit millions of dollars to planning a regional passenger rail line, Austin-area officials will reconsider their financial commitment to the project. The Capital Area and Alamo Area metropolitan planning organizations met Wednesday to discuss the status of a proposed passenger rail line known as LSTAR and what role the agencies should have in it. The project, which would connect San Antonio and Georgetown, recently suffered a setback when Union Pacific pulled its tracks from a possible route. In February, UP nixed the Lone Star Rail Districts proposal to use the companys freight line tracks that parallels Interstate 35 for passenger rail service. The district, a government-funded agency that represents counties, cities and organizations in the I-35 corridor, is in the midst of an environmental study that has focused heavily on that route. The districts board met last week to discuss alternate routes which could include building new tracks parallel to I-35 or Texas 130 and voted to continue the environmental study by examining those options. But several officials at the joint MPO meeting expressed concern about the effect UPs decision could have on the cost and timeline of a project that already has been under discussion for more than a decade. The financing of it is really a big question mark, said Bexar County Commissioner Kevin Wolff, vice chairman of the Alamo Area MPO. Weve already done a lot of work (on planning). Will we be able to utilize any amount of that data in choosing a different alternative? In 2007, the Alamo Area MPO set aside $20 million for the passenger service. Those funds, reserved for final design, right-of-way acquisition and construction, have not been spent yet. In 2011, CAMPO also gave the district $20 million, nearly $12 million of which has been spent on planning the line. The board debated freezing the remainder late last month but ultimately decided to take a closer look at the project and reconsider the issue in June. Hays County commissioner Will Conley, CAMPOs chairman, said the boards final decision on the matter could depend on whether the Alamo Area MPO agrees to foot some of the costs of planning the rail service. He said that commitment would demonstrate San Antonio-area officials confidence in the direction of the project. There are a lot of us a majority of us on the CAMPO board who have lost a lot of confidence in where were currently at, he said. Are you comfortable with the status quo? If youre comfortable with the status quo, we would very much like you to make a commitment on the rest of the environmental document. Sid Martinez, director of the Alamo Area MPO, said an organizational policy doesnt allow it to pay for planning costs. In order to tap into the LSTAR funding now, he said, the board would have to vote both to suspend that policy and to change the purpose of the allocation. The board will likely vote on the matter at its meeting next month. The two MPO allocations are among the districts largest funding sources. According to CAMPO, it has spent the majority of the $7.7 million in federal funds and $8.7 million in state funds it received for planning purposes. Without funding from either MPO, the district would likely have to halt the project. It has spent just over $2 million on an $8 million environmental study, and the costs of building any of the alternative routes have yet to be determined. Marc Williams, deputy executive director of the Texas Department of Transportation, cautioned that shifting the focus of the environmental study could lead to unforeseen costs and changes further down the road. The alternative routes arent guaranteed to succeed, he said, but the federal government might request a reimbursement of its planning funds if the district scrapped the study altogether. Everyone has to have a really clear reality and understanding of where were potentially going to move forward, he said. kblunt@express-news.net Twitter: @katherineblunt This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate WASHINGTON A 10-month Senate delay in confirming a U.S. ambassador to Mexico, which is triggering sharp criticism from Mexican-American business leaders, may be nearing an end. President Barack Obamas choice of career diplomat Roberta Jacobson as ambassador sparked concerns from several senators, but the most significant obstacle is the hold that Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., slapped on moving forward with a vote last fall, when he was campaigning for the GOP presidential nomination. On Wednesday, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who has been working with the White House on the nomination, said he had spoken with Rubio over lunch and that he believed that the matter could soon be resolved. Cornyn, who supports Jacobson, said Rubio told him hed made a request to the White House on an unrelated matter and thought that he could be close to lifting his hold. Mexico is just too important a country to leave without an ambassador, Cornyn said. The post has been vacant since July, when former Ambassador Anthony Wayne stepped down. A Rubio spokesman said the senator is in discussions with the administration about what can be done going forward. In November, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee advanced Jacobsons nomination to the floor on a bipartisan 12-7 vote. Rubio, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, is believed to be pressing for a harder line toward Venezuela. His office declined to discuss the nature of the discussions. Obama had initially nominated Maria Echaveste, a former Clinton administration official and the daughter of Mexican immigrants. She withdrew after it appeared unlikely that she could win confirmation. Jacobson, 54, a New Jersey native, carries the title of assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs. She led negotiations that brought resumption of diplomatic ties with Cuba, which triggered criticism by senators of Cuban descent, among them Rubio; Ted Cruz, R-Texas; and Bob Menendez, D-N.J. Jacobson has extensive experience in Latin America. She previously was a deputy assistant secretary for Canada, Mexico and NAFTA issues and before that was the director of the Office of Mexican Affairs. She was involved in the Merida Initiative a multinational effort to combat organized crime and drug trafficking and the resolution of Mexicos water debt with the United States, according to the Hill, a newspaper that covers Congress. Leaders in the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, which claims to represent 4.1 million Latino-owned businesses, enlisted Cornyn and other senators in the fight to confirm Jacobson. The chamber is hosting a national gathering in Washington this week, and Jacobson is scheduled to speak. The Latino leaders are pointedly telling anyone who will listen that the Senate is making a mistake by blocking confirmation of the ambassador to the United States third-biggest trading partner. Javier Palomarez, president and CEO of the Hispanic Chamber, said trade and communication with Mexico have suffered in the absence of a U.S. ambassador. This woman has an unblemished record. Shes got close to 30 years of experience. Shes the right person for the job. For us to hold her up now for 10 months simply because were playing politics is irresponsible and its un-American. Its got to stop, he said. bill.lambrecht @hearstdc.com This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate SEGUIN The top executive of the state agency in charge of water planning across Texas will step down to lead the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority. The GBRAs board of directors approved Texas Water Development Board executive administrator Kevin Patteson to take over the job held by general manager W.E. Bill West Jr., on May 2. West said he will continue to work for the GBRA until September to help with the transition. Were going to work hard and were going to have fun doing it, Patteson said at Wednesdays board meeting. Patteson, 39, will soon handle the day-to-day operations of the agency that manages the Guadalupe and Blanco rivers from near their headwaters in the Hill Country to the San Antonio Bay on the Gulf of Mexico, a territory that encompasses all or parts of 10 counties. It has 150 employees and manages $250 million in assets, including six lakes along the river. Patteson must now steer the authority as it builds two water supply projects: Texass first seawater desalination plant combined with power generation on the Gulf Coast and the Mid-Basin Project that would divert and store water from the Guadalupe River in times of flood. In February, West announced the GBRA would work with the environmental group and one-time foe The Aransas Project to explore several projects on the Gulf, including some that would create habitat for the endangered whooping crane. A licensed attorney, Patteson has served in his position since October 2013. Before that, he directed the state Office of State-Federal Relations and served as counsel to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the Texas Workforce Commission and the office of former Gov. Rick Perry. If you look at his credentials and his experience both in state government and state water policy, as well as some work in Washington, D.C., he brings a tremendous amount of skills and a tremendous leadership set, GBRA board chair Thomas Mathews said. Texas Water Development Board chair Bech Bruun also praised Patteson in a Wednesday email to the agencys staff. Kevin admirably led the TWDB through the most significant transition in our agencys history, he wrote, referring to new funding programs and changes in the agencys leadership structure. Thanks in large part to his efforts, our agency is well positioned to address our states water challenges. West, 69, steps down after running the GBRA since 1994. He was in charge during years of meetings about how to manage the Edwards Aquifer after a judges historic ruling on overpumping in 1993 led to the Edwards Aquifer Authority and later to what is known as the Edwards Aquifer Habitat Conservation Plan to protect endangered species that depend on the aquifer. West said by the time he leaves in September, he will have worked 23 years at the Lower Colorado River Authority and nearly 23 years at the GBRA. I feel like 46 years of public service is enough, he said. I feel like Ive earned my keep. Its time for somebody else. He said Pattesons experience with water project financing will help the GBRA pay for its projects and deal with unexpected expenses, such as a recent damage to a dam near Gonzales. The GBRA relies on fees as its funding source. The TWDB will soon post the opening for the executive administrator position on its website, spokeswoman Merry Klonower said. Pattesons salary will be $250,000 per year. Wests is nearly $300,000. bgibbons@express-news.net Twitter: @bgibbs Angelica Jimenez has a lot going for her in the Democratic runoff for the 408th District Court. Shes bright and charismatic. She has a compelling story to tell about overcoming a challenging childhood in Eagle Pass (where she was labeled an at-risk student) and emerging as a successful San Antonio attorney. She has City Councilwoman Shirley Gonzales as her campaign treasurer and endorsements from the police and fire unions, as well as the AFL-CIO Labor Council. Jimenez, 41, has also demonstrated an admirable social conscience, establishing an organization during her college years that provided tutoring and mentorship to high-school students from low-income families. The one major hurdle for Jimenez as she approaches the May 24 runoff is the experience issue. She began her family law practice a little more than five years ago, just barely meeting the Texas Constitution requirement that a district-court judge be licensed to practice law for at least four years. And while she has handled more than 200 cases during her short legal career, there are no jury trials on that list. Jimenezs experience came up during a recent appearance with her runoff opponent, Gabe Quintanilla, before the Northwest Democrats. The question was asked, but she walked all around it, said Joyce Dorrycott, the former chair of the organization. She seems to be a very nice young woman. I think that if she would give herself a few years, she could probably make a really good judge. In the March 1 primary, Jimenez easily outpaced the rest of the five-candidate Democratic field, finishing with 38.2 percent, while Quintanilla came in second with 25.6 percent. The 408th District Court race serves as a reminder that whenever we vote on trial court judges, were always working with a limited palette. Unlike most elections, judicial contests arent tests of ideology, and they dont lend themselves to big political promises. All we have to go by is our sense of the candidates judgment, temperament and experience. I remember my first five years out of law school, Quintanilla said. The first few years when youre a professional, you are literally just learning the rudimentary elements. Quintanilla, 58, currently works as a juvenile case manager attorney for the San Antonio Municipal Court, and his 32-year legal career also includes stints in the Texas Attorney Generals Office and the Bexar County District Attorneys Office. The district court trial judge is the highest trial judge in Texas law, Quintanilla added. The district court trial judge is responsible for verdicts that can range into the multi-millions and even billions of dollars. My only argument on this is that when you have judges who bring so few years of legal experience to the bench, I believe the judicial system as a whole suffers. Jimenez counters that experience cant be defined simply by the number of years someone has been practicing law. I have handled over 200 cases relevant to this court and Gabe has handled a little over 300 in his vast experience, Jimenez said. From 2011 to 2016, he hasnt handled a single case in this court and Ive handled 198. So the experience is there. Jimenez added that while she has never handled a jury trial on her own, she has considerable experience with bench trials which go directly to the judges and has assisted her husband on jury trials. The law is the same, the rules are the same, whether youre handling a bench trial or dealing with a jury, she said. The only difference with a jury is just that youre having to take into consideration how things are coming across to a panel of 12 jurors, instead of the one judge. To be sure, both candidates have demonstrated a degree of compassion thats rare for any political candidate. While Jimenez has devoted herself to helping low-income students, Quintanilla has championed public education on a little-known court decision stipulating that Medicare coverage cant be denied to a patient simply because a doctor has determined that the patient is not showing improvement. Its a deeply personal cause for him, because it came into play when his mother suffered a stroke in 2013. There is every reason to believe that both candidates would bring a sense of fairness to the 408th District Court. The challenge for Jimenez will be to convince voters that she has the knowledge to accompany that fairness. ggarcia@express-news.net Twitter: @gilgamesh470 FLINT, Mich. The first criminal charges stemming from the Flint, Michigan, water crisis were filed Wednesday, as two state officials and a city employee were accused of offenses including covering up evidence of lead contamination. Michael Prysby, a district engineer with the state Department of Environmental Quality; Stephen Busch, a district supervisor in the same department; and Michael Glasgow, the citys utilities manager, face a mix of felony and misdemeanor charges. The charges are linked both to the handling of a change in the citys water supply in 2014 and to months of official denials that the change had led to a dangerous level of lead flowing into residents homes. The charges were brought by the state attorney general, Bill Schuette, and authorized by Judge Tracy Collier-Nix of Genesee District Court. They were announced Wednesday at a news conference in Flint. The justice system in Michigan is not rigged, Schuette said in a statement before the news conference. Anyone who says that Michigan has a wink-and-nod justice system is wrong. It doesnt matter who you are, what you do. If you break the law there will be consequences. He also said that the charges announced Wednesday did not preclude additional charges later, and that the investigation was continuing. The contamination of the water in Flint, a poor, majority-black city, has become not only a public health crisis but also a political crisis for Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, prompting an effort to recall him. Last month, a panel appointed by the governor assigned most of the blame to state officials, citing government failure, intransigence, unpreparedness, delay, inaction and environmental injustice. In a bid to save money, Flint, which was then under the control of an emergency financial manager appointed by the governor, switched in April 2014 from buying its water from the city of Detroit to taking it from the Flint River. The river water was much more corrosive, causing lead to leach from old pipes, and the city failed to add chemicals that would have prevented that contamination. Residents complained after the switch that the water was discolored, and that it smelled and tasted foul. State and city officials insisted until last fall that the problems were merely cosmetic. Altogether, 13 felony and five misdemeanors were lodged against the three men. Busch and Prysby, the state officials, were charged with misconduct in office, a felony, for willfully and knowingly misleading both the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Genesee County Health Department about dangers posed by the water. Prysby was also charged with misconduct in office for authorizing use of the Flint plant, knowing that the Flint Water Treatment Plant was deficient in its ability to provide clean and safe drinking water. Each of the misconduct in office charges carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. All three defendants were charged with tampering with evidence contained in reports on lead levels in city water, and the two state officials were also charged with conspiracy to tamper with evidence. Each of the tampering charges is a felony punishable by up to four years and $10,000. Prysby and Busch each face two misdemeanor charges of violating the states Safe Drinking Water Act by failing to order anti-corrosion treatment of the water, and for telling residents to run, or pre-flush, their taps before samples were taken for lead testing, creating misleadingly low readings. Each count carries a penalty of up to a year in prison, and a fine of up to $5,000 for each day of violation. Glasgow faces a misdemeanor charge of willful neglect of duty, with a maximum sentence of a year and a $1,000 fine. State officials began to acknowledge Flints lead problem in September, and advised residents to use filters on their tap water or drink bottled water instead. The next month, the city returned to using water supplied by Detroit, but officials warned that the switch back did not immediately solve the leaching problem. Residents are still advised to avoid the tap water, though recent tests show some lessening of contamination. Residents have been lugging jugs into their homes, and finding alternative ways to cook, clean and shower for all these months. Snyder has been accused of being slow to react; it was not until January that he declared a state of emergency and requested federal assistance. He has apologized to Flint residents numerous times, but said blame for the problem should be shared by all levels of government, not just the state. He said he will respond to the announcement of the charges against the three officials at a news conference Wednesday. On Monday, the governor said he would drink Flint water for the next month, to demonstrate to residents, who are now skeptical of government assurances, that the water is indeed safe. SAN FRANCISCO Thousands of people descended on San Franciscos Golden Gate Park to smoke pot for the annual 4/20 celebration, in what may be the last year marijuana is illegal in California. Fans of the drug have long marked April 20 as a day to roll weed or munch on pot-laced brownies especially at 4:20 p.m. and call for increased legal access to it. Crowds gather in states with legal recreational pot and those where voters and lawmakers are considering it. In California, this years unofficial pot holiday could be the last that users have to call for legalization, with an initiative expected on the November ballot. The drugs use for medical purposes was approved in 1996. Voters in Nevada, Arizona and Massachusetts also are expected to consider marijuana legalization measures. And the Vermont Legislature is discussing a proposal to legalize the possession of up to 1 ounce. Recreational use already is legal in Colorado, Washington, Oregon and Alaska. The 4/20 pot holiday, which some say has its roots in the San Francisco Bay Area, will bring more police, park rangers and other officials this year to make sure its safe for the 15,000 revelers expected to flood the parks Hippie Hill, Board of Supervisors President London Breed said. Because we, as a city, welcome folks from all over the world, we are doing everything we can within our capacity to keep the community as safe and as clean as possible, Breed told the San Francisco Examiner. The unsanctioned event costs the city between $80,000 and $100,000 per year because agencies are called in to help ensure safety, control heavy traffic and collect trash. Crews have cleaned up more than 5 tons of trash in previous years, Breed said. The origins of the number 420 as a code for marijuana are murky. Some say 420 was once used by Southern California police to denote marijuana use. But others say the number became a code in the 1970s among high school students in San Rafael, north of San Francisco, who used it as a meeting time to gather to smoke marijuana after school. JOHNSTON, Iowa DuPont Pioneer recently unveiled waxy corn hybrids as its first commercial agricultural product developed through the application of CRISPR-Cas enabled advanced breeding technology. This next generation of waxy corn hybrids is expected to be available to U.S. growers within five years, pending field trails and regulatory reviews. Starting with an identity-preserved product as our initial CRISPR-Cas offering allows us to lay a solid foundation for success of future larger volume products from this plant breeding innovation, said Neal Gutterson, vice president, research and development for DuPont Pioneer. Waxy corn In the United States, about a half-million acres of waxy corn are grown each year, however, they traditionally yield less than non-waxy corn hybrids. Waxy corn produces a high amylopectin starch content, which is milled for a number of everyday consumer food and non-food uses including processed foods, adhesives and high-gloss paper. Waxy corn is typically grown on contract through a closed-loop production system commonly referred to as identity preserved. The next generation of waxy hybrids developed with CRISPR-Cas will represent a step-change in how efficiently we bring elite genetic platforms of high-yielding waxy corn to our customers, Gutterson said. USDA green light The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently stated (link opens .pdf of USDA letter) that it does not consider next-generation waxy corn developed with CRISPR-Cas enabled advanced breeding technology as regulated by USDA Biotechnology Regulatory Services. Gutterson said the company will continue to consult with global regulatory bodies and government agencies in order to understand the potential regulations around the world. Potential Pioneer is establishing a CRISPR-Cas enabled advanced breeding platform to develop seed products for greater environmental resiliency with characteristics like disease resistance and drought tolerance. Gutterson said the technology has applicability for all Pioneer crops of interest. This is just the beginning. Pioneer previously announced strategic agreements for research collaborations and intellectual property (IP) licenses with Vilnius University and with Caribou Biosciences to advance CRISPR-Cas. The Arla Foods amba on-account price will reduce, with effect from 1 May 2016, by one eurocent per kg. When applied to the UK standard litre it equates to a reduction of 0.75 pence per litre, taking the UK standard litre to 20.12 pence. The imbalance between global supply and demand continues to significantly impact the market. In addition, cheese stocks remain high. These, coupled with the very competitive market environment, have generated a further downward pressure on prices. Arla Foods amba Farmer Board Director, Johnnie Russell, commented: "The continuing decline of milk prices is of deep concern to all involved in the dairy industry and the entire world market is at an unsustainably low level right now. "Arla is doing all it can to mitigate the downturn of the markets and is working hard to move the extra milk volume from our farmer owners into branded sales and foodservice. "However, even those areas are also now being affected by the global imbalance between supply and demand." Arla is also informing its farmers supplying milk on a direct contract of a 0.9ppl reduction in the milk price taking it to 15.1ppl from 1 June 2016. A critical cocktail of low consumer purchasing power, punitive exchange rates, cheap imports and supply surfeits forced UK lamb exports to dip by nearly a quarter in the last twelve months. Reports Hybu Cig Cymru-Meat Promotion Wales (HCC) latest edition of Market Bulletin shows sheepmeat exports during 2015 were significantly impeded by the strength of Sterling against the Euro, as well as cheaper imports from other countries and subdued consumer demand for lamb. This sent UK sheepmeat exports falling to 79,400 tonnes, a decline of 22 per cent, some 22,500 tonnes less in twelve months. The Eurozone accounts for nineteen in every twenty sheepmeat export sales and, with shoppers in general feeling the pinch, most European countries recorded reduced shipments. France, which accounts for 54 per cent of the market, witnessed a 16 per cent decline and exports to Germany, Ireland and Belgium fell two per cent, ten per cent and 11 per cent respectively. Imports of sheepmeat to the UK during 2015 rose by 0.3 per cent to 92,800 tonnes, attributed to an increase in shipments received from New Zealand of six per cent to 68,800 tonnes, amounting to nearly three-quarters of all imports. Although New Zealand sheepmeat production fell during 2015, imports to the UK increased as other key markets, in particular China, took smaller quantities due to reduced demand. Other imports to the UK declined, with Australia, Ireland, Spain and France witnessing volume declines of three per cent, 19 per cent, 14 per cent and 23 per cent respectively. The timing of these imports took its toll on the UK market and was a major contributory factor to the increase during the year. In 2015, the UK imported more beef than it exported - 268,400 tonnes of beef, five per cent up on 2014, as UK exports fell by ten per cent to 100,500 tonnes. The dominance of Ireland as the main importer of beef to the UK has grown in recent years accounting for 182,400 tonnes, 68 per cent of the total volume of beef imported. The second largest beef importer to the UK is the Netherlands, some way behind Ireland with eight per cent of all volume at 20,400 tonnes, a rise of 21 per cent on 2014 and underlining how the strength of Sterling against the Euro underpinned all European imports. UK beef export shipments to other member states during 2015 varied with exports to the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium and Germany declining whilst those to France increased three per cent to 10,100 tonnes. Looking forward, HCC expects exports of red meat market from the UK for the coming year to continue to be influenced strongly by the Sterlings exchange rate with the Euro. If the estimated reductions in volumes of lamb from New Zealand transpire, it could be beneficial to the domestic market, but any optimism is guarded with the global marketplace demonstrating considerable volatility, making the future import and export performance of both species notoriously difficult to predict. A farmer has started an online petition to urge the public to keep dogs on leads when near livestock to try prevent attacks. Kelly Garratt and partner Harley Baxter, from Riddlesden in West Yorkshire, had more than eleven livestock killed by roaming dogs both this year and last. Now Miss Garratt has called for a change in the way dogs are kept under control when near farms. In February, dog owners were urged to remember to be vigilant with their pets when walking near cows in the countryside, following a new review into cattle attacks by the University of Liverpool. A total of 54 cattle attacks were reported in the UK media between 1993 and 2013 and, of these, approximately one in four were fatal and two-thirds involved dogs. "Things really need to change. This is a national problem, there are just too many attacks on livestock taking place," Garratt told Keighley News. "The law must change and there must be tougher fines and penalties." Dr Carri Westgarth, a dog behaviour expert at the University's Institute of Infection and Global Health, said: "We found that walking with dogs among cows, particularly with calves present, was a common factor for an attack. "One theory for this is that the cows may feel particularly threatened by dogs, especially if they have young to protect. People then try to protect their dogs, which can lead to a tragic incident occurring." The review of published literature, newspaper articles and web pages also highlighted that injuries from cattle are a significant and under-reported public health risk. Dr Marie McIntyre, who co-authored the review, said: "There is currently no official system in place for reporting attacks, so it is highly likely that there have been far more incidents than we know about. Further work is needed to fully assess the public health impact of this issue." There are approximately 300 000 farms and 9.7 million cattle in the UK. Many public rights of way cross farmland, so while walking people come into contact with livestock, particularly cattle. Within the various guidelines reviewed, advice of how to behave around cattle and avoid injury were found to vary, in particular concerning control of dogs. Dr Westgarth added: "The countryside is a great place to exercise dogs, but it's every owner's duty to make sure that their dog is not a danger or nuisance to farm animals, wildlife or other people. Considering our findings, the best advice, if cattle approach, would be to let your dog off the lead, as then it can escape, and the cows are also likely to remove their focus from you." The fast-growing grazing turnip Appin is an ideal catch crop to boost summer forage production and provide a break for pest control ahead of autumn grassland reseeding, according to Germinal. Sown before the end of May in most parts of the UK, either following early grazing or first cut silage, this brassica forage crop will establish quickly and yield 46 tonnes of dry matter per hectare in 810 weeks. "Unlike many other brassica forage crops, Appin can be direct drilled into spayed-off grassland," explains Germinal GB national agricultural sales manager Ben Wixey. "As it establishes and grows so quickly, there is time to use it as a catch crop over the summer months ahead of autumn reseeding. "This crop has a high leaf-to-bulb ratio, so provides high quality grazing for sheep or cattle. "It has good resistance to club root, alternaria and mildew and is very drought tolerant, so offers a lot as a summer forage crop. "With the recent withdrawal of pesticides used to control common pests of new grassland such as leatherjackets and frit fly, a short term break crop could be particularly advantageous in reducing risks." Appin is recommended for sowing at a seed rate of 5kg/ha and is available through Germinal GB distributors. Cumbria's Vote Leave camp said they were 'disappointed but not surprised' about the NFU's support for the UK to remain a member of the EU, as they launched their campaign at Cartmel Racecourse. At the launch were four speakers, Lord Cavendish, chairman of the event; Paul White, the regional director of the Vote Leave campaign; David Campbell Bannerman, the Conservative MEP for the East of England and John Stanyer, the Ukip chairman for the North West. The NFUs ruling body backed a resolution concluding farmers interests are best served remaining in the EU, after a gruelling four hour debate. Peter Kendall, former President of the NFU, said "Britain's membership of the EU is essential for the farming and food industry so it is hugely significant that the NFU has today confirmed that it believes UK agriculture will have a more secure future within the EU." But North West Chairman for UKIP, John Stanyer said farmer had suffered greatly from EU regulations. "I am disappointed but not surprised with the stance the NFU have taken. They have given the least possible endorsement they could and confirmed they will not be actively involved with the campaign to stay in the EU, but I think that they should have remained neutral and not come down on either side. "When I attended the Cumbrian farmers meeting on the topic last week we had about 40% of farmers who wanted to remain in the EU, 40% who wanted to leave and about 20% who are still undecided. However, what we have noticed is that as each day goes on more of the farmers who are wavering are siding with the Vote Leave Campaign. "People seem to think it's the older farmers who want to leave but it's the other way round, it's the younger farmers looking ahead to the future who are worried about remaining in the EU. "Since the decision was announced last night I have had hundreds of farmers contact me today complaining about the result of the vote. At the end of the day the decision to remain in the EU has been made by a small representative panel and doesn't fairly reflect the real feelings of farmers across the county. "We recently learnt in a poll that Cumbria is one of the most Eurosceptic counties in Britain and I believe that this is because the needs of Cumbria seem to be constantly disregarded. We need more autonomy over our own regulations." The NFU said it will not be actively campaigning in the referendum; it will not be joining with any campaign groups and 'it will not, in any circumstances, advise its members how to vote'. Defra minister George Eustice said the UK government will give more to farmers than they do now as he outlined his vision for UK agriculture outside the European Union. Eustice drew attention to non-EU nations like Switzerland and Norway and how their governments gave more to farmers than the UK does. "Where power has been ceded to the EU, we see inertia, inconsistency and indecision," the Farm minister said. "The achievements we cherish most of all are those where we have secured opt-outs from EU initiatives." Eustice said the UK gives money to the EU, which they convert into foreign currency creating unnecessary exchange rate risks. "The system has been through various changes over the years but remains a centralised and bureaucratic policy. In its current form, it attempts to codify and regulate almost every conceivable feature of our landscape and almost every conceivable thing a farmer might want to do with their land." He said some 80% of legislation affecting DEFRA comes directly from the EU. But Kendall said: "Being part of the single market - our home market of 500 million consumers - is crucial to the long term prosperity of farming in this country. "We saw from the NFU's own report earlier this month that leaving the EU could hit our industry hard and their support today demonstrates that walking away puts too much at risk. "Leaving the EU would make trading farm products significantly harder, financial support uncertain and leave farmers facing years of uncertainty. "That is too much of a gamble and one our industry cannot afford to take. "That is why I fully welcome the decision from the NFU who have made it clear that Britain's farmers are stronger, safer and better off in the EU." A new partnership between Tesco and Kenyan produce growers will save 135 tonnes of edible fine bean crop from going to waste each year. Until recently, growers were required to deliver fine beans within a specific size range and to trim them before being packed and shipped to the UK. This move was originally made as a convenience measure to help customers, but after listening to them Tesco found customers prefer the beans uncut. As part of an ongoing review of its food sourcing policy, Tesco has widened the length specifications and stopped the trimming procedure, resulting in the huge waste saving. The new length specifications will also mean customers will be able to benefit from a fresher, uncut product, meaning less food waste in the home. Use as much of the crop as possible Tesco Commercial Director for Fresh Food Matt Simister said: "We have listened to our customers who have told us that they want great tasting, quality fresh produce over uniformed sizing. "This new partnership with our growers in Kenya is a great example of how we are delivering on that promise to customers while also ensuring we prevent food that could be eaten, going to waste. "Our overall aim is to use as much of the edible crop as possible. In some cases, we believe that our specifications - such as with the fine beans - can be widened to accommodate more of the crop. "If there is a surplus, we will work with suppliers to find an outlet for example, by connecting our growers with our fresh and frozen suppliers for it to be used in foods such as ready meals." The opportunity to provide customers with a fresher, uncut product was identified by Tescos Agricultural Hubs and the supermarkets suppliers, Flamingo Produce. The Agricultural Hubs, have been set up by Tesco in different parts of the world including Spain, France, Chile, Peru, Costa Rica and South Africa. They are staffed by trained agronomists and act as Tescos eyes and ears on the ground, providing insight on levels and causes of farm waste. As a result of the new measures being adopted, 15 per cent of the bean will no longer go to waste. Growing and harvesting what is required Matt Simister added: "Weve also improved how we forecast and order to help producers cut down on waste by only growing and harvesting what is required. "In the case of Kenyan fine bean growers we have overhauled the ordering process. This means the beans can be sent straight to our distribution centres, cutting time out of the supply chain and providing customers with a fresher product." Last month Tesco also launched its Perfectly Imperfect range. The range sees the supermarket now selling produce which traditionally fell outside its size specifications. The first products introduced are parsnips, potatoes, strawberries and apples and Tesco aims to extend the range to between 15 and 20 seasonal lines throughout the year, taking into account crop flushes. British beef and lamb farmers are a step closer to a 60 million a year export boost. Following further talks between the UK and the USA to negotiate a deal to access the lucrative American market, Environment Secretary Elizabeth Truss said today. Visiting the US as part of a worldwide Food is a government campaign with the sole purpose to champion British food and drink. The Environment Secretary met with her American counterpart, United States Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, in Washington to discuss next steps in securing access to the US market. The UK submitted a 1,000 page dossier last week to the US Department of Agriculture, detailing the safety and quality of British beef and lamb. Secretary Vilsack committed to study the paperwork rapidly ahead of agreeing a timetable for inspections of UK beef and lamb plants. The approval of British plants would be a major breakthrough in recognising the quality and safety of European meat, allowing farmers to start exporting British beef to the United States 300 million consumers for the first time since restrictions on beef imports from the EU were lifted in 2014. The restrictions on lamb are expected to be lifted in early 2017. 'British produce on American tables' Speaking after her meeting today, Environment Secretary Elizabeth Truss said: "I want to see British burgers, steaks and lamb chops on American tables. "Todays positive talks mean our farmers are a step closer to providing their world class beef and lamb to 300 million Americans. "We already export nearly 2 billion of food and drink to the USA every year, but we want to grow our exports even further and give our businesses more opportunities. "These negotiations take a long time to conclude and require a great deal of effort and paperwork, which is why it is dangerous to take for granted the access we already have to the European market of 500 million people. "Our EU membership gives our beef and lamb farmers easy and tariff-free trade that was worth 600million last year. "With 40 per cent of all the lamb we produce going to Europe, losing our full access to the single market would have severe consequences for British farmers." Currently the EU is by far the biggest market for British beef and lamb, with exports of beef to the EU worth 316m and lamb and mutton worth 291m in 2015. The French bought nearly 160m of British lamb and mutton last year, and we sold 109m of British beef to Ireland. All other non-EU countries currently buy just 33m of beef and lamb between them so a new deal with the US could triple this figure to more than 90m. The US is the UK's most lucrative export market outside the EUfood and drink exports there were worth nearly 2bn last year with big hitters including whisky, salmon, cheese and biscuits. The free trade transatlantic partnership (TTIP) deal is currently being negotiated with the US and will help remove trade barriers for thousands of UK food and drink companies, potentially boosting US exports by an extra 500 million. USA 'massive opportunity' for British exporters Elizabeth Truss added: "The USA is a massive opportunity for British exporters, but we only stand to benefit from these trade negotiations as part of a reformed European Union. "If we choose to leave, we will back to square one and face years of further negotiations instead of enjoying a major trade boost for UK food and farming. "It is clear that our farmers are safer, stronger and better off in a reformed European Union." The meeting was one of several during the Environment Secretarys visit to promote British food and drink in the US through the Great British Food Unit. Launched last year, the unit will turbo charge our exports, support inward investment and champion the excellence of British food and drink at home and abroad. Legal ruling set to have implications for farm inheritance rows For many decades Landmark, now owned by Canadian-based Agrium Incorporated but once also owned by Wesfarmers, had a similar agreement with CSBP where Landmark agents arranged fertiliser deliveries, and the finance to pay for them, for clients. "This is an opportunity for all pastoral members to not only listen to independent legal and industry advice on how the proposed Rangelands reforms will affect your lease, but to also provide any insight or concerns you and other members may have with these changes." On behalf of the PGA and its members I would like to thank Leanne and her family for her service and dedication to the industry at what appears to be the onset of a volatile time in industry/government relations, he said. Is Wawa coming to Fayetteville? Heres what we know. Wawa, a Pennsylvania-based convenience store chain that residents have long clamored for, could be coming to the area. One of the worlds biggest gold miners said in a securities filing Wednesday it is investigating some business activities in countries outside the United States. Colorado-based Newmont Mining said the investigation includes a review of compliance with the requirements of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. It involves the company and its affiliates and contractors. In March, Newmont entered into a one-year agreement with the SEC to toll statute of limitations relating to the investigation. The company said it more recently entered into a similar tolling agreement with the DOJ. Tolling agreements extend the time in which prosecutors and regulators can bring enforcement actions. The statute of limitations for the FCPA is five years. It can be extended at the request of the DOJ for three more years to give the government time to gather foreign evidence. Under the federal conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. 371, the statute of limitations can reach back to criminal behavior more than five years old if the conspiracy continued at any time during the past five years. Newmont said it cant predict the outcome of the investigation. The company hasnt yet made any provision for it in its financial statements, it said. Newmont has about 28,000 employees and contractors. It operates in the United States and in Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Indonesia, and Ghana. Newmont Mining Corporation trades on the NYSE under the symbol NEM. * * * Heres the FCPA disclosure from Newmonts Form 10-Q (Quarterly Report) filed with the SEC on April 20, 2016: We occasionally identify or are apprised of information or allegations that certain employees, affiliates, agents or associated persons may have engaged in unlawful conduct for which we might be held responsible. We are conducting an investigation, with the assistance of outside counsel, relating to certain business activities of the Company and its affiliates and contractors in countries outside the United States. The investigation includes a review of compliance with the requirements of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and other applicable laws and regulations. The Company is working with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice with respect to the investigation. In March 2016, the Company entered into a one-year agreement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission tolling the statute of limitations relating to the investigation, and recently entered into a similar agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice. As of the filing of these financial statements, we cannot predict the outcome of these matters. Accordingly, no provision with respect to these matters has been made in our consolidated financial statements. ____ Richard L. Cassin is the publisher and editor of the FCPA Blog. He can be contacted here. The former owner and president of a Pennsylvania consulting business pleaded guilty Wednesday to violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices by bribing an official at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Dmitrij Harder, 42, a Russian national living in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, pleaded guilty to two counts of violating the FCPA. Harder owned Chestnut Consulting Group Inc. Hes a U.S. legal permanent resident. He appeared before Judge Paul Diamond in federal court in Philadelphia. Sentencing is set for July 21. Harder faces up to ten years in prison. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development or EBRD is headquartered in London. It started operating in in 1991. Its owned by 65 countries and helps fund projects in Eastern Europe, Turkey, Greece, and North Africa, among others. Between 2007 and 2009, Harder paid about $3.5 million in bribes to an EBRD official. The EBRD then approved applications for financing from two of Chestnuts corporate clients. The first resulted in the EBRD providing an $85 million investment and a 90 million ($101.7 million) loan. The second EBRD award led to a $40 million investment and a $60 million convertible loan. The Chestnut Group earned about $8 million in success fees from the EBRDs approval of the two applications. A federal grand jury in Philadelphia indicted Harder in January 2015. He was charged with one count of conspiracy to violate the FCPA and Travel Act, five counts of violating the FCPA, five counts of violating the Travel Act, one count of conspiracy to commit international money laundering, and two counts of money laundering. In the FCPA, the term foreign official means any officer or employee of a foreign government or any department, agency, or instrumentality thereof, or of a public international organization . . . (15 U.S.C. 78dd-2(h)(2)(A)) The DOJ said the EBRD was a public international organization. Harder argued the point in court but lost a motion to dismiss. In 2012, the UK Crown Prosecution Service charged the EBRD official, Andrey Ryjenko, and his sister, Tatjana Sanderson. A status conference in the UK case is set for June 8. The DOJ said Wednesday it had help in the case from the City of London Police and from authorities in Germany, Jersey, and Guernsey. _____ Richard L. Cassin is the publisher and editor of the FCPA Blog. He can be contacted here. What can readers expect from Born Bad? Born Bad is a history of original sin! The book explores how that the idea that we were born both bad and guilty has become deeply ingrained in Western people not only in the past, when religion was powerful, but through to the present day. I see original sin as our culture's creation story. It comes from a distinctively Western take on the story of Adam and Eve that was first formulated about fifteen hundred years ago. This taught that every baby was born a sinner because they had inherited the sin of the first humans. In turn this meant that we were condemned by God however innocent we were or however good we tried to be. Every single one of us, whether one day old or one hundred years old, needed to be saved by Christ. Of course this religious idea, even among Christians, is not doing too well these days when almost everyone believes in the innocence of new borns. But that does not mean that the essence of our creation story, that there is something bad in our innate nature that we require some form of external salvation to be redeemed from, has not continued to prosper. More than half of my book explores influential thinkers in the modern world to show how much continuity there is (I even suggest that the thought of the famous atheist, Richard Dawkins, has remarkable resonances with original sin!). Most books on original sin set out to either damn or defend the doctrine. I wanted to do neither and have set out to explore the extent to which these ideas have become deeply ingrained in Western people, for good and for bad. Born Bad What did it mean to you to win the Tasmanian Book Prize and other prizes for both your previous books, Van Diemen's Land and 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia? I am extremely honoured to have won Tasmania's highest book prize for both my earlier books because even my fellow Tasmanian and famous writing friend, Richard Flanagan, has only won it once! Winning any prize, as Richard famously said when receiving the Man Booker in 2014, is a bit liking winning a 'chook raffle' (an Australian phrase meaning you got lucky, your number came up and you get to go home with the hen!). But I must admit that what was most important to me about winning this prize and the others that I won or got shortlisted in, was the money that came with it. I am a full time writer and it is not easy to make a living from writing history. I have a family, and when I began writing full time my children were still quite young, so I actually could not have carried on as a writer without the practical help that the prizes provided! When did your passion for history begin? I was recently on a three day bushwalk with my friend and publisher, Chris Feik, when we were discussing this very question. For Chris, it was when a primary school teacher asked him to imagine being one of the first settlers to come to Australia and what he would need to bring with him on the ship. Instead of just being told a list of what settlers actually brought, Chris was being asked to think for himself. Something like this happened to me at the end of high school. We had a very special teacher for just a few months, whose name (much to my annoyance) I can no longer recall. This man conveyed to me that history is not an endless collection of facts but something created by historians who immerses themselves in the context of the time. The task I was set by this teacher was to write a history of the policy of appeasement pursued by the British Government to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. I can still feel my growing excitement as I realised that there was not one answer to the question that he had set. As I read and explored the different interpretations and tried to understand the times, I realised with astonishment that if I did enough work, I could have a view of my own! I didn't put it like this at the time, but what I was discovering, under the guidance of my mentor, was that writing history was a creative process. It had important rules and disciplines, but it allowed me to interact with the extraordinary richness of the past and then form a story of what occurred and why. I found this very exciting and some part of my temperament responded to the task which all cultures have, of making sense of our past so that it can speak to the present and the future. At what point did you decide to write about your passion and work? Most of my life I have been a social worker (although even then my favourite ever job was working with elderly people in Norfolk - what stories of the past they could tell!). My move back to my childhood home, Tasmania in my late twenties was connected to a search for home. But I found that the histories of Tasmania that were being told did not help me understand how exiles from one island, Britain, had made home in another distant island, Van Diemen's Land (as Tasmania used to be called). The convicts, who were the large majority of emigrants to Tasmania in the first half of the nineteenth century, just seemed to be victims, and all settlers were being presented as if they did little more than reproduce a little England. I wanted to know how being in Tasmania had changed the people and my questions grew within me over the coming years, especially after I had taken a year out from social work to do my honours thesis on early Tasmania. A few years after this, when I met a gorgeous English woman on the Scottish island of Iona and started a family back in Hobart, I decided to write a book to explore all that was bubbling away within me. I must confess that the immediate spur to this was that I was far too tired and grumpy after a day of social work to be much of a husband and dad, and that the offer of a PhD scholarship to enable me to research and write, was a pretty attractive lifestyle choice! I have never lost sight of the fact that to write history is a great privilege and I give thanks every day that I have been able to sell just enough books, and win just enough awards, to keep writing (although I still need to sometimes do a bit of social work on the side which I hope helps keep me grounded!). Who are your favourite authors and why? Gosh, big question. I need to read writers who explore questions of meaning and connect our culture's religious tradition to the present. Writers like Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr and Dorothy Day have helped me grapple with the big questions from the perspective of my limited being! There are some amazing writers of accessible scholarly history both in Australia and the UK who are an inspiration to me. There is still none better than the great late E.P Thompson whose book, The Making of the English Working Class, has been read by millions of people without compromising on either scholarship or passion. I don't have as much time to read novels as I would like but of course I must mention again Richard Flanagan who is such a wise student of life and an incredibly talented wordsmith. Many of Richard's books are connected to Tasmania but he immerses himself in place so deeply that the universal longings, suffering and redemption possibilities of human existence are made transparent. A bit like the great Russian authors in this respect! If anyone has not read another of Australia's leading authors, Tim Winton, I would urge them to do so. Tim is an extraordinary writer. What has been the response to your book so far? Well, as you can imagine with a book connected with religion it varies! I have been very gratified by the reviews of both the American and Australian editions. One of the highlights of my writing career was the Washington Post write up by their inhouse reviewer, Michael Dirda, a man I admire very much. I get more reader feedback than most writers because to keep my privileged but marginal lifestyle going, I frequently sell my book at a big weekly market we have in Hobart which attracts tourists from all over the world. Some readers rave about the book, but some have been not so keen. In the case of the latter I think it is often because they came with a preconceived expectation of what the book was trying to achieve. Some seemed to think I should be setting out to pour scorn on original sin, others that as a person of faith myself I should be concerned to defend and renew it. When I do neither but just try to understand what the legacy of the doctrine means for all of us, they are disappointed. But of course I have total confidence in the famous good sense of readers in the UK! What made you want to write about original sin? Another big question that I suspect I might spend the rest of my life trying to answer! It seems a very weird subject doesn't it. When I say it is a weird book my mum and sisters, who love this book above all of my others, get very cross at me! But I think we can all agree it is a weird subject. But then perhaps us Westerners are a weird people. What other culture constructed a God who was cross at us just for being human?! I am surely not the first to wonder if the restlessness and angst that I could see in myself and in Western culture now and in the past, including our desperate attempts to find some form of redemption from our own nature, is not connected to our very particular brand of religion. But I am the first, as far as I know, to connect this angst to our own creation story. I think being Australian brings with it a certain respect for the power of creation stories. Aboriginal Australians have taught us that the cultural power of creation myths is not dependent on their literal truth or moral veracity. More specifically I am a Christian, and much of my life I have struggled with the way Western Christianity, in both Protestant and Catholic forms, has a tendency to present itself as a sort of club of the saved. It is quite arrogant I believe to make claims about who is and is not acceptable in God's eyes but that is what we seem to do over and over again. I think my book was partly a search to understand the source of what I understand as a destructive heresy. But equally important was my reading and immersion in contemporary culture - including its celebration of free market economics, consumerism, 'self help' and so on. At the root of all this restless consumption of products and ideas seemed to be a certain deeply taken for granted but rarely explored view of the inherent brokenness of human nature. I also can't deny that the book is probably also a reflection of a quest to understand my own limited self. When I was younger I used to think that my vague sense that there was something innately wrong with me was just a personal hangup. While there is no doubt some truth in that, now that I am in my fifties and have had so many conversations with so many different people, I know that this experience of a difficult to identify inner guilt, which is not directly connected to any action or deed, is something many people share regardless of their upbringing or their religion. My book is in part a search to understand where this might come from and the degree that is actually a shared cultural inheritance. What surprised you most when researching this book? Probably two big themes stand out here. First I didn't realise how sustained and widespread was the resistance to original sin within Western Christianity. It is not a new found fad to proclaim that Gods presence and loving acceptance cannot be restricted and defined by the human institution known as the Church. There have always been those who, sometimes at the cost of their lives, have proclaimed that God is with every person and the task of conversion is less about being saved from our sins than from having our eyes opened to an ever present reality of Divine love. The resilience of this diverse dissenting tradition surprised and gratified me and I wrote about it a little in the book. The great mystic, Julian of Norwich, was one of the ablest proponents of this tradition. Julian should be known to everyone in this country if only because she was the first woman to write in English - the vernacular tongue of the ordinary people. That her work was such an extraordinary and brave book that challenged the dominant spirituality of the age in order to bring comfort to ordinary suffering folk I think makes it one of this country's national treasures. The second big discovery was the extent of the continuity between the religious idea of human nature and modern assumptions about human nature. I expected to find some similarities but the degree of this was startling to me. I think it is precisely because everyone assumes that original sin was thrown into the dust bin of history by Charles Darwin that its view of the human condition has been able to so successfully live on in secular forms. What is next for you? I am currently writing a history of the resistance to the drainage of the fens. My ancestors on both my mother and fathers side came from the fens and I have long been fascinated by this largely lost landscape. The more I read about how the common people resisted the privatisation, drainage and colonisation of the bountiful wetland the more I saw similarities with the later settlement of Australia. But in the end perhaps this is yet another book about my ongoing search for home! by Lucy Moore for www.femalefirst.co.uk find me on and follow me on Would you have gotten in the car? People ask me this all the time. Maggie Mitchell In my novel Pretty Is two twelve year old girls, miles apart, willingly climb into a car with a strange man who then holds them captive in the woods for six weeks. Were you abducted? This is the other question readers ask. I was not abducted. I gave Lois, one of the characters in Pretty Is, an embellished version of my spelling bee history, but the abduction itself has no roots in my own experience. It was inspired, in part, by a newspaper article I read a long time ago: I was hooked by a brief news item about two girls, around twelve, who were abducted by a stranger and then escaped together several days later from the basement where he was holding them captive. So my novel is about abduction-and then again, it isn't. What really seized my imagination was the idea of the girls' escape, because they were strangers to each other, and an escape would have required an extraordinary degree of planning and collaboration; almost an ability to get inside each other's minds. I imagined it as a kind of telepathy. And because I remember all too well what it is like to be a twelve-year-old girl (not to mention that my old diaries offer documentary evidence that is equal parts poignant and mortifying), it struck me that this relationship would be complicated. Because twelve-year-old girls are really, really complicated. They are passionate and fierce, profoundly suspicious but eager to please, desperate for friendship but intensely competitive. Two difficult twelve-year-old girls forced into close proximity, depending on each other for their very lives: that was what I wanted to write about. Moreover, it occurred to me that whatever bond they formed would hardly be severed when they returned to their old lives. Such an experience could only be profoundly formative: whoever those girls became would have everything to do with what happened to them during those days of captivity. So in a way, no one on earth would ever understand them as well as the strange girl with whom they had spent a few days in childhood. No one else would ever really get them. In my novel, I alter the stakes of this relationship by extending the abduction to several weeks-and by making the kidnapper a charming, likable fellow, rather than a menacing attacker. Which is not to say that his very charm isn't menacing, in its own way. But, again, it's complicated. The girls, more or less willing accomplices, compete for his favor and attention. Why do they get in the car? When mothers of little girls ask, they look as if they are afraid of what I might say. But then, they were once little girls, too, so I suspect they know the answer. Because while I lifted the skeleton of this story from the newspaper, the truth is that I dredged its heart from the secret depths of my twelve-year-old self. Would I have gotten in the car? I don't know. I knew better, certainly; we all do. But my shy, bespectacled exterior concealed a reckless desire for experience; a desperate wish to be understood; a treacherous longing for everything to be different--for life to match the intensity of my feelings, the molten pre-adolescent chaos that I realize now was not nearly so peculiar as I imagined. Sure, I might have gotten in the car. I think most of us might. And some of us do. Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale have finalised their divorce. Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale The pair - who split last summer after 13 years of marriage - did not have a prenuptial agreement but have come to an amicable settlement of their assets and have agreed to joint physical and legal custody of their three sons, Kingston, nine, Zuma, seven and Apollo, two. E! News also reports that neither party will get spousal support. Gwen will keep the rights to her No Doubt and solo music while Gavin will maintain the rights to his own work with Bush. Gwen keeps their Land Rover, Honda Odyssey, Lexus GS350, Yukon Denali and Range Rover and Gavin will receive their Range Rover Vogue V8. They will share profits from the sale of their Beverly Hills home, while Gwen will keep their two other Los Angeles homes. According to the documents: "Gavin shall relinquish all of his power and authority as trustee or settlor of the Kingston Rossdale Gift Trust and the Zuma Rossdale Gift Trust and Gwen shall be the sole trustee and settlor of the Gift Trusts. There shall be no withdrawals or transfer from any of the trust except in accordance to the declaration of trust establishing each trust. Gavin is entitled to receive yearly accountings of the Gift Trusts." Gwen is now dating Blake Shelton and recently admitted she is "grateful" for the end of her marriage. She said: "It's super hard to have your family break up. "I have gone through a lot, but I feel like you have to be grateful for that. Because if I didn't do that, then I wouldn't have this. And so you have to be grateful for all of it." The extension of a preferential US trade deal with African nations has come as a boon to Kenya's apparel exports which are tipped to 5 per cent to $400 million, according to the Kenya Association of Manufacturers (KAM).East Africa's biggest economy exported clothing worth $380 million in 2015, when the US extended its African Growth and Opportunity Act agreement by a decade, according to Phyllis Wakiaga, the CEO of KAM. The extension of a preferential US trade deal with African nations has come as a boon to Kenya's apparel exports which are tipped to 5 per cent to# The 10 year extension of the AGOA agreement has offered African manufacturers more confidence to make long-term investments, especially in apparel, Wakiaga said, according to a Bloomberg report Brands such as Puma, Wal-Mart, JC Penny, H&M source some of their garments from Kenyan Export Processing Zones, which employ over 66,000 people, according to KAM. The EPZs, which are required to export 80 per cent of their output beyond the regional East African Community bloc, enjoy 10-year tax exemptions.East Africa could potentially export garments worth as much as $3 billion annually by 2025, according to a 2015 McKinsey report. According to the report, affordable electricity and cheap labour -- with monthly salaries as low as $60 -- make Kenya and Ethiopia attractive to investors.Kenya's textile industry declined in the 1980s after market liberalization policies demanded by multilateral lenders exposed the market to secondhand imports. Most new clothing sales are now sourced in China. South African retailers such as Woolworths Holdings, Truworths and Mr. Price Group also have a presence in Kenya, targeting the middle class.The regional East African Community bloc is working to revamp the domestic garment market by banning secondhand clothes imports at the end of 2018, Wakiaga said. Kenya imported used clothing worth $243 million weighing more than 100,000 metric tons in 2013, according to the UN agency Comtrade.Kenyan garment exporters ramping up their production could also tap local fashion retailers too, she said.Second hand clothes sellers have a chance to take up the sale of new clothes as the supply will be guaranteed from the manufacturers, thus they may avoid loss of jobs, Wakiaga said. (SH) Fibre2Fashion News Desk India After a string of complaints from online buyers related to delay or non-delivery of products and sub-standard goods, the government has decided to set up a committee to suggest ways to deal with grievances of e-commerce customers."E-commerce is growing. There are many consumer complaints. We will set up a committee to look into this matter and suggest how to deal with it," Consumer Affairs Minister Ram Vilas Paswan told reporters in New Delhi after the 30th meeting of the Central Consumer Protection Council (CCPC) in the capital. After a string of complaints from online buyers related to delay or non-delivery of products and sub-standard goods, the government has decided to# The Ministry is also planning to hold separate discussions with e-commerce companies on rising complaints of consumers and ways to curb them.A senior official of the Consumer Affairs Ministry official said the issue was discussed at length in the CCPC meeting and it was decided that the new committee will submit the report on e-commerce issues within 15 days.The suggestions made by the committee will be incorporated in the rules after the passage of the proposed Consumer Protection Bill in Parliament. The bill also has provisions to protect e-commerce consumers, he said.A Parliamentary Standing Committee is vetting the bill and is mostly likely to submit its report in the coming session of Parliament. (SH) Fibre2Fashion News Desk India Now is your chance to peek into your neighbors windows, brazenly and unapologetically, to see what the heck is going on in that raucous house next door. National Geographic has devoted the entire May magazine to Yellowstone National Park, Montanas neighbor to the south. The issue appeared online Friday and will hit newsstands April 26. Inside are photos and articles that go where most of us will never be able to trek, giving a deeper insight into the complexity of one of the nations most incredible wild experiments. The photos and the stories are quite amazing, said Amy Bartlett, Yellowstone spokeswoman. As a side benefit, Yellowstone will receive rights to use some of the photos and videos for educational purposes. This was definitely a very special partnership, Bartlett said. Its something the park staff worked on with National Geographic for two years. The goal is to get people to see some of the challenges Yellowstone faces. Although the special issue may draw a lot of attention to Yellowstone, Bartlett said the park doesnt need more advertising because of the problems it is already facing. Last year more than 4 million tourists visited the park, a new record. Bozeman writer One of the Yellowstone regions own writer David Quammen who has lived in Bozeman since 1984 was picked in 2014 to write the entire issue of National Geographic to give the stories a common voice. He said it took him all of five seconds to agree to then-editor in chief Chris Johns pitch. The agreement led to a two-year odyssey for Quammen winter ski trips into the Pelican Valley with Yellowstone wolf biologist Doug Smith; a flight in a slow-moving Piper Super Cub from Bozeman across the parks vast steaming landscape with veteran pilot Roger Stradley; and an eight-day horseback trip into the most remote region in the lower 48 states with biologist Arthur Middleton, photographer Joe Riis and Cody, Wyo., outfitter Wes Livingston. These were only a few of Quammens trips. Adding up the different modes of travel he used to explore the park, Quammen could name about nine, including by rope when he rappelled from the 13,776-foot top of Grand Teton peak in Wyoming. National Geographic is a great door-opening brand, Quammen said in a telephone interview from Boston, where he was researching his next book, fielding other phone interviews and speaking to groups about Yellowstone. Bear allure The attraction to exploring the region and writing about its complicated geology, history and ongoing conflicts appealed to Quammen in part because of one of the parks inhabitants the grizzly bear. Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park to the south hold the only viable grizzly population in the American West. The single most precious fact of the Yellowstone ecosystem is preserving that population of bears, Quammen said, an animal he called big enough to eat you. Its very important we preserve that. Quammen questions whether removing Yellowstone grizzly bears from the protection of the Endangered Species Act will help or harm the preservation of such an important population. I really want people to learn how complicated this issue is, as well as how important it is, he said. Although he has no desire to hunt the great bears if seasons are ever opened in Montana and he has opposed delisting in the past, Quammen said he is slow to condemn hunters. Hot shots At age 68, Quammen has written about such varied topics as Indian tigers to the disease Ebola. The stories have been published in magazine articles, books and even a novel. But none of those are quite like the comprehensive look at Yellowstone that National Geographic is taking, partly because the in-depth stories are paired with the magazines amazing photography. There are scenic and wildlife photos of grizzly bears bathing in a backcountry pond and bull bison in a dirt-throwing shoving match. Ive been here 22 years and never heard of the bear bathtub, Bartlett said. There are also photographs of some of the people tied to the landscape like Tom Miner Basin range rider Hilary Zaranek Anderson and her two daughters pictured sitting on the concrete steps of a rock house. Photographer Erika Larsen composed that last photo, one of several large format portraits she shot for National Geographic while other photographers explored the wild reaches of the backcountry. We each worked really differently, she said in a phone interview from her car parked on the side of a road in Minneapolis where shes working on her next project. I went back seasonally and finished my last shoot in December. Larsen made her very first trip to Yellowstone about 20 years ago during a cross-country drive after high school. My first impression was that it was a really, really lonely place, she said. The fires of 1988 still scarred the landscape, giving the park a sense of looming disaster, she recalled. Since shes gotten to know Yellowstone better, her favorite place now is the Orange Spring Mound atop the Mammoth Terraces. Its like its from an old Star Trek movie, she said. When Im standing there I feel like Im waiting for shadows from two suns to appear. Tourism trend There are still wild places in Yellowstone, and even in the front country at places like Orange Spring Mound visitors can find a measure of quiet. While photographing the feature Larsen said she has seen few people despite its nearness to the parks North Entrance. Will that last? Quammen foresees a time when tourists may have to park their car and board a tour bus to enter Yellowstone to avoid the growing vehicle traffic that clogs Yellowstones arteries every summer. Proof of the parks popularity with foreign tourists can be seen in West Yellowstone, the small community at the parks West Entrance. In the town Quammen counted six Chinese restaurants, four of which had signs in Mandarin. That tells you something about trends in tourism, he said. Quammen had wanted to board a bus with Chinese tourists for one of his stories, but that never worked out. Other stories he did write that werent published in the magazine will be included in a book about Yellowstone due out at the end of the summer. Great migration Quammen wasnt the only person working on the National Geographic article who had a strong tie to the Yellowstone region. Photographer Joe Riis, a biologist and University of Wyoming graduate who took up photography to add context to his field work, had his elk and pronghorn migration photos included in the May issue. Its been pretty exciting for me, Riis said from Salt Lake City where he had just finished the first of what will be several talks about his work in the Yellowstone ecosystem with fellow biologist Arthur Middleton. A photo of still-spotted elk calves climbing a rocky, dusty ridge in one of the last remaining wildlife migrations in the United States captures the essence of all of Riis hard work, he said. The elk had just swam the South Fork of the Shoshone River and were climbing the hillside, the calves mouths are agape as if breathing hard from the exertion. In a 10-foot-by-10-foot pinch point along the route, Riis set up his camera trap to capture the shot. He figures it took him 30 visits and 375 miles of horseback riding over several years to get that one important image. The time stamp on the photo was 10 minutes and 10 seconds after 10 a.m. 10:10:10. Riis photography for the May National Geographic issue allowed him to work under iconic photographer Michael Nichols, who Riis had long idolized for his interweaving of wildlife and humans and the conflicts therein, such as photographs of famed chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall. There are millions of pictures made for that magazine, so to get it dialed down to 60 or 70 images touches on the quality of the pictures in National Geographic, Riis said. I think its an issue that will live on and, more importantly, be used as an inspiration and tool for management into the future. As China's GDP growth slowed to 6.7 per cent year on year in the first quarter of 2016, experts said that the country is mildly shifting gears in economic growth, laying more emphasis on structural adjustment and the cultivation of new growth engines, according to a government press release.Li Ping, head of the Institute of Quantitative & Technical Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, pointed out that with the growth of China's overall economy and adjustment in industrial structure, China will unavoidably experience a shift from high speed growth to a medium-to-high growth. He added that China is still facing pressures to cut industrial overcapacity with the new growth engine taking shape, hence, lowering economic growth is in accord with the current stage of development. As China's GDP growth slowed to 6.7 per cent year on year in the first quarter of 2016, experts said that the country is mildly shifting gears in# Pan Jiancheng, vice director at the China Economic Monitoring & Analysis Center of the National Bureau of Statistics, said that this year, China stepped up efforts in infrastructure construction, with the Belt and Road Initiative, coordinated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area, and the Yangtze River economic belt being put into implementation. Also, efforts will be strengthened to promote cost reduction for supply-side reform and reduce the rate of enterprises' social insurance fund and public reserve funds. All of these moves are expected to have a positive effect on economic growth.This year's government work report urged cultivating new growth engines and accelerating the development of a new economy. Li Zuojun, vice director at the Institute of Resources and Environment at the Development Research Center of the State Council, stressed that supply-side structural reform should be pushed forward to foster new growth engines.While enterprises are the main body of the new economy, reform of State-owned enterprises should also be accelerated, along with reforms on the examination and approval system, commercial system, and price system, which are conducive to the transformation of government functions and could guide enterprises to achieve innovation-driven development, said Li Zuojun.A recent report on the prospects of the world economy released by the International Monetary Fund raised its growth forecast for the Chinese economy and spoke highly of the measures that China has undertaken for its economic transformation.Li Ping said China's structural adjustment was advanced through a number of vibrant high-tech enterprises possessing new technologies, new mode, new formats, but the capacity scale of traditional industry remains large, so cutting industrial overcapacity could pose a big threat to the economy. Also, the transformation of momentum is yet to be completed and innovation-driven development needs to be strengthened. The potential benefits for European jobs and growth of an EU-China Free Trade Agreement are underestimated, according to a study presented today during the EU-China Partnership Conference organised by the Foreign Trade Association (FTA). The FTA represents more than 1,700 retailers, importers and brands to promote and defend free trade and supports their international business by providing information and practical solutions towards sustainability in the international supply chain.The study, which FTA commissioned to the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) revealed that an EU-China trade deal would increase by $200 billion the combined GDP of the EU and China by 2030. This is equivalent to the GDP of Czech Republic. According to the study, a potential EU-China trade deal would impact positively the economic growth of both partners: 1.87 per cent for China and 0.76 per cent for the EU. The potential benefits for European jobs and growth of an EU-China Free Trade Agreement are underestimated, according to a study presented today# The possible benefits in terms of growth and employment from a free trade agreement between Europe and China are substantial. The presented study will serve as an excellent tool to initiate a broader discussion about the future EU - China trade relations. A deep and comprehensive free trade agreement is good for the EU and good for China, said Christian Ewert, FTA's Director General.The study also showed that EU exports to China, within the framework of a bilateral deal, would maintain more than 2.5 million jobs in Europe, including 1.1 million in Germany alone and another 1.1 million in France, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK combined. It would also boost crucial European sectors exporting to China such as machinery, automotive and electrical machinery, which currently face steep tariffs.The study also notes that a free trade deal could only succeed when China implements reforms, including on state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and opening of public procurement. China's closed public procurement market is a major frustration for EU business interested in the Chinese market. By contrast, Chinese companies routinely obtain public contracts in the EU. A comprehensive and deep trade deal is a perfect 'fit' for today's China, combining reforms and 'openness', whilst the EU can finally pursue the 'logical sequel' in its trade policy vis-a-vis dynamic East Asia, the study said. (SH) Fibre2Fashion News Desk India President of Mauritius, Dr Ameenah Firdaus Guarib-Fakim has invited the All Pakistan Textile Manufacturing Association (APTMA) to invest in the island nation, according to reports in the Pakistani media.During a meeting with an APTMA delegation, led by its Chairman Tariq Saud in Karachi on Wednesday, the Mauritian President highlighted the huge opportunities available in the technical textile sector in her country which remains unexplored. President of Mauritius, Dr Ameenah Firdaus Guarib-Fakim has invited the All Pakistan Textile Manufacturing Association (APTMA) to invest in the# She said that Mauritius is among the top six countries in Africa, which is recommended to people who wish to relocate. It is one of the leading states in the African region for ease of doing business and good governance, as per the World Bank Doing Business Survey 2016, the President said.She suggested that the Pakistani textile entrepreneurs could also take advantage of Mauritius to penetrate the US and European markets.Dr Guarib-Fakim said that her government provides a ten-year exemption from income tax on all income, inclusive of foreign investment under the Mauritian Diaspora Scheme. "There is no minimum capital requirement for the incorporation of a company, 100 per cent foreign ownership is allowed and there is no exchange control for foreign investment," she added.She invited the APTMA chairman to bring a delegation to Mauritius and experience the incentives and facilities provided by their government to the foreign investors.She also asked them to arrange a fashion show of Pakistani textile brand and also showcase products for the firsthand information of the prospective buyers.APTMA Chairman Saud told the Mauritian president that there is a need for close liaison between the business community of the two countries so that the Pakistani business class can explore the Mauritian economy as well as enter the African market. He also invited Mauritian entrepreneurs for joint ventures in Pakistani textile mills. (SH) Fibre2Fashion News Desk India Peru's Minister of Foreign Trade and Tourism and Chair of the Promperu Board of Directors Magali Silva recently launched Peru Textiles brand in the capital Lima as part of her administration's efforts to enhance the sector in the international market, the Preuvian news agency Andina has reported.With a 12.2 per cent share in non-traditional total exports, the textile industry is Peru's main exporting manufacturing sector thanks to its high quality standards and excellent commodities. Peru's Minister of Foreign Trade and Tourism and Chair of the Promperu Board of Directors Magali Silva recently launched Peru Textiles brand in the# This new brand is a new initiative supported by both the public and private sectors, which seeks to position our country as a vertically integrated textile cluster: from natural fibres and blends to completed garments, Silva said.The goal is to create consumer-oriented value added services. Peru Textiles will make Peruvian garments stand out as a quality product that meets the highest standards demanded by consumers.The launch event took place on the sidelines of a fashion show by designer Jorge Luis Salinas. His creations based on the valuable national raw material, created garments full of elegance and glamour, which captivated audience.According to Silva, this collection was the same as the one Salinas presented during the last New York Fashion Week, a catwalk he attended after he won a contest at Peru Moda 2015 within the framework of the deal Promperu signed with US department store Macy's.This sectoral brand is aimed at promoting the concept of own brand among companies in the sector, as well as to internationalize the retail format of firms. This is an important step not only for the recovery of the sector, but for the reactivation of our economy, and the strengthening of our identity on the world stage, the minister said.Another aim is to introduce and enhance the brand's position in the trading space and key fashion shows across Europe and the US. (SH) Fibre2Fashion News Desk India Optitex, a digital technology solution provider to the apparel industry, will be showcasing its latest digital innovations and advances at Hall B1, booth 623 in Texprocess Americas 2016, to be held in Atlanta, USA from May 3-5. The company will display its latest O/15.5 version including its new 2D and 3D capabilities, new cut plan features, enhanced seams and pleats, automatic nesting, and more. The visitors to its booth will get to see how 3D can help in the sales, marketing and e-commerce functions of a company, according to a press release by Optitex. Additionally, Yoram Burg, president of Optitex - US and Canada will also moderate a panel on Present and Future Trends in Product Development, which will discuss automation and robotics in the industry. Optitex will be showcasing its latest digital innovations and advances at Hall B1, booth 623 in Texprocess Americas 2016.# Commenting on the participation, Burg said, The US apparel market is one of the most innovative, and we are seeing more of our customer base adopting 3D technology to save time, reduce costs and create better products. (MCJ) Fibre2Fashion News Desk Bollywood celebs such as Amy Jackson, Rishi Kapoor, Neha Dhupia, Hema Malini, Riteish Deshmukh and Ranvir Shorey have mourned the death of the Police horse, Shaktimaan on Twitter. The celebs, have questioned the way people are treating animals and want a safe environment for them to live. Check out tweets from Bollywood celebs here, British beauty, Amy Jackson, took to Twitter and posted a beautiful picture of the Police horse Shaktimaan, and captioned it as, "RIP Shaktiman.. You'll be galloping through the clouds now". Amy Jackson, grew up riding ponies and knows horse riding really well. "Horse riding is not new to me. I have learnt it from the master herself, my mother who was an instructor in Liverpool." says Amy. So Funny! 15 Pics Of Aishwarya Rai Clicked When She Was Not Ready Rishi Kapoor, who is known to pull other people's legs on Twitter, and create funny memes of his own, suddenly tweeted in a serious manner on the way the matter is being handeled by the authorities. Rishi Kapoor, tweeted as, "If India has a conscience this man must be tried. Whosoever this Ganesh Joshi is. Are deaf Political ears hearing?". While politicians are blaming each other for the horses death, Bollywood celebs are united and asking for juctice regarding the way the animal has lost its life. Salman Khan, Shahrukh Khan & Vaani Kapoor To Star In Dhoom 4? Neha Dhupia, tweeted as, "We are sorry #shaktiman ... U did nt deserve this ... It's us... What's the human race coming to. #disgraceful". The tweet has received several likes and a lot of shares on Twitter. Hema Malini, tweeted as saying, "Shaktiman is no more- a victim of brutality & cruelty, he was powerless to protect himself. What a tragedy!". Fan Box Office Failure! Shahrukh Khan Blames 'Songs & Dance' A former Wells Fargo advisor was banished from the industry for refusing to cooperate with a FINRA investigation into wire activity in the advisor's bank account. Mark Peter Koestner, an advisor with Wells Fargo in Naples, Fla., allegedly turned down FINRA's request to appear for an on-the-record interview, a decision that automatically leads to getting barred. FINRA was looking into allegations that Koestner engaged in a private securities transaction or an outside business activity that was not approved, the regulator said in a filing. Koestner resigned from Wells Fargo in July 2014 amid an internal review of wire activity in his bank account to and from a law firm in Panama. The firm later concluded that it appeared that he had wired funds to the law firm to participate in an unapproved private securities transaction, FINRA said in the filing. Koestner joined Wells Fargo in May 2009 from Wachovia Securities, according to FINRA BrokerCheck records. He had been with Wachovia since June 2003. Koestner was barred on April 15. Koestner did not return a voice message seeking comment. In his settlement with FINRA, he neither admitted nor denied the charges but consented to an entry of FINRA's findings. His attorney, Victor Bayata of law firm Vernon Litigation Group in Naples, Fla., did not respond to voice and email messages. Anthony Mattera, a spokesman for Wells Fargo, declined to comment on the matter. Koesnter is the second bank advisor to be barred this year for failing to cooperate with FINRA investigations. Kenneth Lynn Miller, a former broker with First Tennessee Bank, refused to provide the regulator with the documents and information it requested to investigate whether he stole money from retail bank customers. Read More: Morgan Stanley's wealth management net income slumped 8% year-over-year, part of an overall weak quarter for the firm that saw companywide profits drop 53%. Morgan said that net income for its wealth management unit fell $493 million for the quarter from $535 million for the year-ago period. Senior leadership blamed the weak showing partly on volatile markets during the first quarter and "muted client activity." Commission-based revenue for the wealth management unit fell 22% year-over-year, falling to $412 million from $526 million for the year-ago period. That contributed to an overall decline in revenues of 4%. The drop was partially offset by growth in the firm's banking and lending business, which has been a key focus for Morgan Stanley's leadership. Net interest income rose 21% to $831 million. CEO James Gorman has recently been cutting costs across the company, particularly in Morgan's fixed-income business. "If these markets were to continue as is, our goals will be extremely difficult to achieve, and we would therefore take additional appropriate actions," Gorman said in a conference call with analysts. The company is reviewing every product and business to "convince ourselves that we need our footprint as its currently configured," he said. WEAK ASSET GROWTH CFO Jonathan Pruzan told analysts that while clients' risk appetite diminished during the first quarter, the Labor Department's new fiduciary rule has not been a factor in the company's performance. Client assets were down 2% year-over-year, falling to $1.999 trillion. The firm reported $5.9 billion in fee-based asset flows for the quarter down 48% from the prior quarter and 56% for the year-ago period. Advisor headcount at 15,888 remained almost unchanged from the prior quarter. Revenue per advisor slipped 4% year-over-year, falling to $923,000 from $959,000. OVERALL PERFORMANCE Companywide, first-quarter net income fell 53% to $1.13 billion, or 55 cents a share, from $2.39 billion, or $1.18, a year earlier. Profit surpassed the 47-cent average estimate of 22 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. The decline in trading revenue was smaller than some analysts predicted. Morgan dipped 0.3% to $25.69 at 11:13 a.m. in New York. The stock has dropped 19% this year, the worst performance in the 90-company Standard & Poors 500 Financials Index. While Gorman has been shrinking the fixed-income trading division to emphasize the less-volatile wealth-management business, Morgan is still exposed to slumping markets that hurt results across Wall Street. The firm follows J.P. Morgan, Bank of America and Citigroup in lowering expenses to compensate for falling revenue. Goldman Sachs, which reports results Tuesday, is embarking on its biggest cost-cutting push in years, people with knowledge of the effort said last week. With additional reporting from Bloomberg. Read more: ORLANDO, Fla. -- "What's a lie you've told recently?" Behavioral scientist and University of Toronto professor Nina Mazar challenged the audience at the closing general session of the IMCA annual conference with the indelicate question. The point, Mazar explained, is that humans have the tendency to lie in some fashion more frequently than we may like to admit. "The good news is people are mostly honest -- yet dishonesty is so prevalent in everyday life," Mazar says. "We humans are so good at selective attention and reinterpreting reality that as long as we cheat only by a small amount, we can use rationalization tricks to still feel pretty good about ourselves." Referencing the tenets of the IMCA Code of Professional Responsibility -- particularly full disclosure -- Mazar offered practice management tips for advisors who want to fight the impulse to rationalize dishonesty and preserve their client relationships. 'PERVERSE EFFECTS' Disclosure is no deterrent against lying, Mazar says, urging the audience to understand how informing clients of conflict of interests in particular can result in some "perverse effects" on both the advisor and the client. Advisors should question advice given even after they've made disclosures to clients, she suggests. "There is research that shows that conflicted advisors, once they have disclosed a conflict of interest, can inflate their biased advice," Mazar says. "An act of disclosure can act as a moral license that undermines the motivation to adhere to professional standards." Advisors should also be aware of how disclosure might negatively affect the way clients approach the relationship. "If disclosure increases trust but because the advisee is misinterpreting the advisor's disclosed [conflict] as indication of his or her professional standing, it can be misleading," says Mazar. Sometimes, clients can feel added pressure to comply to advice because they may feel obligated to satisfy advisor interests after conflicts are disclosed, she adds. A survey asking clients how they feel when receiving advice is one option to consider, she suggests, as this can offer good insight into how the advisor-client relationship is affected -- negatively and positively -- by disclosure. STANDARD COMMITMENTS Citing various case studies, Mazar says committing to a personalized moral code of conduct prevents dishonest impulses from taking hold. Her advice for planners? Create a checklist setting clear and specific rules of conduct. This means establishing these codes at the beginning of any client relationship and thinking about the language used in the office to describe them on an everyday basis. Get specific: "'You should not accept gifts from mutual fund providers' is less subject to motivated reasoning than saying, 'Advisors should not engage of conflicts of interest," says Mazar. Part of streamlining best practices regarding honesty within your practice is emulating good examples yourself or colleagues have set, Mazar says. "Publicly acknowledge and recognize role model behavior. Try to create a culture or self-image where you encourage or celebrate behaviors like proactive withdrawing from an assignment and admitting violations early on." Read more: Bringing global high speed rail capability to strategic infrastructure projects Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. (NYSE:JEC) announced today it was appointed as design partner by Align, the high-speed rail bidding consortium of Bouygues Travaux Publics, Sir Robert McAlpine and VolkerFitzpatrick. Jacobs' scope of services for awarded work includes supplying engineering design services for tunnelling, earthworks, structures, highways and viaducts. Jacobs is supported by Ingerop-Rendel, a French consultancy with significant experience in high speed rail projects. In making the announcement, Jacobs Senior Vice President Buildings and Infrastructure Bob Duff stated, "Jacobs' global high speed rail experience allows us to bring innovation and expertise from High Speed 1, the Netherlands, the USA, Hong Kong, South Africa and Malaysia to the consortium. We look forward to collaborating with Align to deliver strategic high speed rail projects." Jerome Furge, director of Align, said, "We welcome Jacobs to our consortium as a hugely reputable engineering consultancy with international experience in high speed rail design, but also an excellent track record with Network Rail in the UK." Jacobs recently won the design contract for the California High Speed Rail and provided technical consultancy for the Singapore to Kuala Lumpur High Speed Rail Project. In the UK, Jacobs has worked extensively on all aspects of HS1 in consultancy, design and representative roles since 1985 and continues to support its asset management program. Jacobs is one of the world's largest and most diverse providers of technical, professional and construction services. Statements made in this release that are not based on historical fact are forward-looking statements. We base these forward-looking statements on management's current estimates and expectations as well as currently available competitive, financial and economic data. Forward-looking statements, however, are inherently uncertain. There are a variety of factors that could cause business results to differ materially from our forward-looking statements. For a description of some of the factors which may occur that could cause actual results to differ from our forward-looking statements please refer to our 2015 Form 10-K, and in particular the discussions contained under Items 1 Business, 1A Risk Factors, 3 Legal Proceedings, and 7 Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations. We do not undertake to update any forward-looking statements made herein. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160420006646/en/ Contacts: Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. Robin Shermer, 817.735.6284 WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - PulteGroup's (PHM) shareholder and founder, William Pulte urged that the company's Chief Executive Officer Richard Dugas and Lead Director Jim Postl must resign immediately from all their positions with the Company. William Pulte noted that Messrs. Dugas and Postl have lost credibility with shareholders and cannot continue to serve in their positions as Chairman/CEO and Lead Director, respectively. They must be immediately replaced by direct shareholder representatives on the Board. To the extent Messrs. Dugas and Postl refuse to immediately resign from the Board and are not replaced by shareholder representatives, he will be voting AGAINST the entire Board at this year's upcoming annual meeting of shareholders. William Pulte called for appointment of an effective, proven homebuilding executive to reverse the company's downward trend. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. CANBERA (dpa-AFX) - The New Zealand weakened against the other major currencies in the Asian session on Thursday. The NZ dollar fell to a 6-day low of 1.1209 against the Australian dollar and a 2-day low of 0.6956 against the U.S. dollar, from yesterday's closing quotes of 1.1157 and 0.6974, respectively. Against the euro and the yen, the kiwi edged down to 1.6243 and 76.23 from yesterday's closing quotes of 1.6179 and 76.60, respectively. If the kiwi extends its downtrend, it is likely to find support around 1.13 against the aussie, 0.68 against the greenback, 1.67 against the euro and 74.00 against the yen. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. Regulatory News: This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160420006316/en/ Solution Screenshot_Courtesy of Ericsson Dassault Systemes (Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA), the 3DEXPERIENCE Company, world leader in 3D design software, 3D Digital Mock Up and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, today announced that Ericsson, world leader in communications technology and services, has chosen the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to drive its business transformation and support its market leadership. Ericsson will replace its legacy backbone and connected IT applications with Dassault Systemes' "Business Operation Excellence" industry solution experience, based on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, for a true end-to-end digitalization of its innovation, business and operations processes. This improved performance and efficiency will help the company accelerate the delivery of powerful consumer experiences to the emerging Networked Society of connected people, industries and society. By 2020, Ericsson estimates that 26 billion connected devices will be part of a Networked Society in which enhanced mobile, broadband and cloud technologies interact to make information and communication technologies faster, cheaper and more accessible and inspire new areas of transformative innovation. As part of its vision to enable this networked society, Ericsson understands that the seamless integration of IT and telecom and hardware and software is necessary to facilitate smart, connected software- and service-driven experiences. The "Business Operation Excellence" industry solution experience, which leverages ENOVIA applications, will provide Ericsson with a unified, digital environment for end-to-end flow, transparency, traceability, reporting and flexibility across its hardware, software, services and solutions. With global, real-time collaboration across disciplines-both internally and externally with customers, partners and suppliers-Ericsson can leverage existing assets, experience and knowledge while fostering new processes of open innovation, reducing delays between ideation and go-to-market. "It's great that we finally have a 'go' on the new IT platform after many attempts in the past," said Joakim Cerwall, Head of PLCM Operations and sponsor of PLM Transformation, Ericsson. "We have performed a thorough investigation and testing to find the best PLM solution for Ericsson to connect IT and the business units. This transformation is crucial to ensure an efficient digital handling of product data throughout the company, making Ericsson a competitive ICT player." "The new platform will ensure that we can automate and speed up the development flow and at the same time make relevant product information available to user groups such as sales, integrators and support," said Johan Torstensson, Head of Group IT Enterprise IT, Ericsson. "It is also crucial to enable faster time to market and to ensure that our customers are able to purchase Ericsson products through digital channels. The benefit of this project compared with previous attempts to introduce a new IT platform is that it is business driven." "The 3DEXPERIENCE platform goes beyond PLM to connect Ericsson's global product marketing, engineering, manufacturing, sales and services teams from the very early stages of ideation, to invent, design, engineer, deliver and operate complex and rich experiences made of hardware, software, content and services," said Olivier Ribet, Vice President High-tech Industry, Dassault Systemes. "Today's high-tech experiences leverage sensors, networks, mobile- and cloud-based ambient intelligent software, and continuously updated software, content and services. We are proud to accompany Ericsson in this journey and to support the surge in IoT data traffic and machine-to-machine data communications as well as to enable new solutions and experiences for smart cities, smart mobility, digital manufacturing and other areas." For more information on Dassault Systemes' industry solution experiences for high-tech: http://www.3ds.com/industries/high-tech/ About Dassault Systemes Dassault Systemes, the 3DEXPERIENCE Company, provides business and people with virtual universes to imagine sustainable innovations. Its world-leading solutions transform the way products are designed, produced, and supported. Dassault Systemes' collaborative solutions foster social innovation, expanding possibilities for the virtual world to improve the real world. The group brings value to over 210,000 customers of all sizes, in all industries, in more than 140 countries. For more information, visit www.3ds.com. 3DEXPERIENCE, the Compass logo and the 3DS logo, CATIA, SOLIDWORKS, ENOVIA, DELMIA, SIMULIA, GEOVIA, EXALEAD, 3D VIA, BIOVIA, NETVIBES and 3DEXCITE are registered trademarks of Dassault Systemes or its subsidiaries in the US and/or other countries. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160420006316/en/ Contacts: Dassault Systemes Corporate France Arnaud MALHERBE, +33 (0)1 61 62 87 73 arnaud.malherbe@3ds.com or North America Suzanne MORAN, +1 (781) 810 3774 suzanne.moran@3ds.com or EMEAR Virginie BLINDENBERG, +33 (0) 1 61 62 84 21 virginie.blindenberg@3ds.com or China Grace MU, +86 10 6536 2288 grace.mu@3ds.com or Japan Yukiko SATO, +81 3 4321 3841 yukiko.sato@3ds.com or Korea Myoungjoo CHOI, +82 10 8947 6493 myoungjoo.choi@3ds.com or India Seema SIDDIQUI, +91 1244 577 100 seema.siddiqui@3ds.com or AP South Tricia SIM, +65 6511 7954 tricia.sim@3ds.com Solid YTD Sales Growth: +3% Organic, +4% Reported Resilient Q3: +1% Organic Growth Confirmation of FY16 Guidance: Organic Growth in Profit from Recurring Operations between +1% and +3% Regulatory News: Pernod Ricard (Paris:RI) Press release Paris, 21 April 2016 Sales for the first 9 months of FY16 totalled 6,813 million. Pernod Ricard posted solid Sales in a contrasted environment, with organic growth of +3%. Reported growth was +4% thanks in particular to a positive USD impact. Regionally, this was driven by: Strong growth in the Americas (+6% YTD) driven by a dynamic USA (partly enhanced by shipment phasing), driven by a dynamic USA (partly enhanced by shipment phasing), Modest growth in Asia-Rest of the World (+2% YTD) with continued strong growth in India and Africa but a decline in China, with continued strong growth in India and Africa but a decline in China, Resilient Sales in Europe (+1% YTD), driven mainly by Spain. The Top 14 grew +1% YTD driven notably by Jameson and innovation, while Key Local Brands (+7% YTD) reported dynamic growth driven by Indian whiskies and Passportand Priority Premium Wines accelerated (+4% YTD) thanks to the UK and Australia. Sales for the third quarter of FY16 totalled 1,855 million, including organic growth of +1% and a negative FX impact (-4%) due to emerging market currency weakness. Q3 Reported growth was -3%. Growth was in part favoured by shipment phasing in the USA but negatively impacted by an earlier Chinese New Year. As part of this communication, Alexandre Ricard, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, stated, "Our Sales growth to date at +3% is solid in an environment that remains contrasted. Our strategy has remained consistent and is driving results: innovation is accelerating; operational excellence is driving efficiencies; our ongoing initiatives in the USA are starting to deliver; we are working actively to develop the new phase of growth in China, where we remain confident in the medium-term potential despite the tough current context. We confirm our FY16 guidance of organic growth in Profit from Recurring Operations between +1% and +3%1 Note: All growth data specified in this press release refers to organic growth (constant FX and Group structure), unless otherwise stated. Data may be subject to rounding. A detailed presentation of Sales for the third quarter of FY16 can be downloaded from our website: www.pernod-ricard.com About Pernod Ricard Pernod Ricard is the world's n2 in wines and spirits with consolidated Sales of 8,558 million in 2014/15. Created in 1975 by the merger of Ricard and Pernod, the Group has undergone sustained development, based on both organic growth and acquisitions: Seagram (2001), Allied Domecq (2005) and Vin&Sprit (2008). Pernod Ricard holds one of the most prestigious brand portfolios in the sector: Absolut Vodka, Ricard pastis, Ballantine's, Chivas Regal, Royal Salute and The Glenlivet Scotch whiskies, Jameson Irish whiskey, Martell cognac, Havana Club rum, Beefeater gin, Kahlua and Malibu liqueurs, Mumm and Perrier-Jouet champagnes, as well Jacob's Creek, Brancott Estate, Campo Viejo, Graffigna and Kenwood wines. Pernod Ricard employs a workforce of approximately 18,000 people and operates through a decentralised organisation, with 6 "Brand Companies" and 85 "Market Companies" established in each key market. Pernod Ricard is strongly committed to a sustainable development policy and encourages responsible consumption. Pernod Ricard's strategy and ambition are based on 3 key values that guide its expansion: entrepreneurial spirit, mutual trust and a strong sense of ethics. Pernod Ricard is listed on Euronext (Ticker: RI; ISIN code: FR0000120693) and is part of the CAC 40 index. Appendices Sales Analysis by Region Net Sales ( millions) H1 14/15 H1 15/16 Change Organic Growth Group Structure Forex impact Asia Rest of the World 1,801 39.0% 2,019 40.7% 218 12% 90 5% (3) 0% 131 7% Americas 1,242 26.9% 1,369 27.6% 128 10% 47 4% (28) -2% 109 9% Europe 1,579 34.2% 1,570 31.7% (9) -1% 14 1% (4) 0% (19) -1% World 4,621 100.0% 4,958 100.0% 336 7% 151 3% (35) -1% 221 5% Net Sales ( millions) Q3 14/15 Q3 15/16 Change Organic Growth Group Structure Forex impact Asia Rest of the World 913 47.5% 822 44.3% (91) -10% (49) -5% 0 0% (42) -5% Americas 503 26.2% 529 28.5% 26 5% 56 11% (9) -2% (22) -4% Europe 505 26.3% 504 27.2% 0 0% 8 2% 2 0% (10) -2% World 1,921 100.0% 1,855 100.0% (66) -3% 15 1% (7) 0% (73) -4% Net Sales ( millions) YTD March 14/15 YTD March 15/16 Change Organic Growth Group Structure Forex impact Asia Rest of the World 2,714 41.5% 2,840 41.7% 127 5% 41 2% (3) 0% 89 3% Americas 1,745 26.7% 1,898 27.9% 153 9% 104 6% (38) -2% 87 5% Europe 2,083 31.8% 2,074 30.4% (9) 0% 22 1% (2) 0% (29) -1% World 6,542 100.0% 6,813 100.0% 271 4% 166 3% (43) -1% 147 2% Foreign exchange impact 9M FY16 Forex impact 9M 15/16 ( millions) Average rates evolution On Net Sales 14/15 15/16 US dollar USD 1.23 1.10 -11% 175 Chinese yuan CNY 7.63 7.07 -7% 48 Indian rupee INR 75.95 72.97 -4% 25 Pound sterling GBP 0.78 0.74 -5% 18 Bresilian real BRL 3.14 4.15 32% (27) Russian rouble RUB 59.69 75.11 26% (32) Other currencies (61) Total 147 1 The FX impact on Profit from Recurring Operations is now expected to be flat to slightly positive for the full FY16, based on average FX rates projected on 31 March 2016 particularly a EUR/USD rate of 1.11 View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160420006401/en/ Contacts: Pernod Ricard Julia Massies, +33 (0)1 41 00 41 07 VP, Financial Communication Investor Relations or Sylvie Machenaud, +33 (0)1 41 00 42 74 Director External Communications or Emmanuel Vouin, +33 (0)1 41 00 44 04 Press Relations Manager or Apolline Celeyron, +33 (0)1 41 00 40 97 Press Relations Officer BRUSSELS (dpa-AFX) - Swiss foreign trade data for March is due to be released in the pre-European session on Thursday at 2:00 am ET. The trade surplus totaled CHF 4.07 billion in February. Ahead of the data, the Swiss franc showed mixed trading against its major rivals. While the Swiss franc rose against the euro, it rose against the U.S. dollar. Against the pound and the yen, the Swiss franc held steady. As of 1:55 am ET, the Swiss franc was trading at 1.0966 against the euro, 1.3924 against the pound, 0.9706 against the U.S. dollar and 112.96 against the yen. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. Revenue and operating profit significantly better than in the comparison period - focusing on omnichannel and digital commerce bears fruit Regulatory News: Brief look at January March 2016 Revenue totalled 15,4 million euros (9,1 million euros) Operating profit before non-recurring items was 732 thousand euros (464 thousand euros). The impact of the divested business on the operating result without non-recurring items was -212 thousand euros. Operating profit including the non-recurring items was 4.919 thousand euros (464 thousand euros). The non-recurring income and costs related to the divestment of MainIoT Software Ltd totalled +4.187 thousand euros Solteq Group's equity ratio was 31,8 (49,1 %). Earnings per share was 0,27 euros (0,02 euros). In line with its strategy, Solteq focused even more on operating in the field of omnichannel and digital commerce solutions during the review period, and sold the entire share capital of MainIoT Software Ltd that provides software solutions for maintenance and services management KEY FIGURES AND RATIOS 1-3/2016 1-3/2015 change% Revenue, EUR million 15,4 9,1 68,3% Operating profit before non-recurring items, EUR million 0,7 0,5 57,8% Operating profit, EUR million 4,9 0,5 960,1% Profit for the financial period, EUR million 4,4 0,3 1180,8% Earnings/share, EUR 0,27 0,02 1073,3% Operating profit -% 32,0% 5,1% 530,4% Equity ratio, 31,8% 49,1% -35,2% Repe Harmanen, CEO of Solteq: A quarter of focusing on strategy, growth and better profitability Our result for the first quarter was positive. Compared to the previous year, we both grew and improved our profitability. At the end of February, we divested subsidiary MainIoT Software Ltd that specialised in ERP software. As the focus in Solteq's new strategy is on digital commerce solutions and international operations, the deal gave us better possibilities to implement the strategy in terms of both the centralisation of operations and economic opportunities. Because of the transaction, we recognised non-recurring capital gains and reorganisation costs in the result of the first quarter. Focusing on digital commerce will improve the profitability of the Group's future operations, and now the structure of the company is extremely good for the further implementation of the strategy. The Company's financial position is good. Due to the corporate acquisition and favourable business developments, the Company's equity ratio and financial position improved significantly and normalised during the first quarter. The situation allows us to consider the best alternatives for the strategy concerning investments and possible measures related to the balance sheet. The improved financial position will open new opportunities for faster implementation of the strategy. All integration measures related to the acquisition of the Descom Group were completed during the first quarter, and no significant non-recurring items were recognised related to them. I am extremely pleased with the contribution of our experts in the creation of the New Solteq. We have made good progress. As to demand, the first quarter was clearly better and more active than during the last quarter of the previous year. Client demand in all strategic areas increased and we also managed to secure new projects in them. We expect demand to continue at a good level, and we will seek organic growth in all our strategic areas during the latter part of the year. We see that revenue erosion in older technologies has levelled out and that demand for new solutions is developing in a positive direction. At the moment, the main hindrance to our growth is the scarce availability of competent personnel in Finland and in Poland. The progress of the strategy work has been excellent and we will publish the new strategy in more detail on 25 May 2016. The focus of the strategy is on both domestic and international growth of business. The key elements are expanding the offering of digital solutions in all business operations, the solutions for retail chains and digital business in the Nordic Countries and the solutions for digital commerce globally. In Finland our growth will be mainly organic, but in the Nordic Countries and globally we aim to be active in corporate acquisitions because of the fast implementation of the strategy. We will maintain the balance between the growth and payment of dividends to be the most attractive choice for our investors as a growing and internationalizing company of digital commerce. In the heart of the strategy is the group of the best technology experts which has developed to the high level and will continually develop further. With this group we will implement the unique strategy on the field of digital commerce in Finland and globally. We will maintain the earlier profit guidance concerning the net revenue and operating profit before non-recurring items for 2016 in spite of the divestment of MainIoT Software Ltd. Guidance on Group outlook Solteq Group's revenue is expected to grow significantly compared to financial year 2015. The operating result and the operating result before non-recurring items are expected to grow compared to financial year 2015 as well. The expected growth of revenue and operating profit is mainly related to the M&A activities completed during the previous financial year and during the review period. In addition the cost synergies arising from the M&A activities are expected to be realized mainly during the year 2016. Briefing for investors and media The media and investor briefing for the announcement of financial results of the first quarter of 2016 will be broadcasted on Periscope April 21st at 11.30 on channel @SolteqTweets. The briefing will be recorded and can be accessed on the website later on the same day. Further information DISTRIBUTION NASDAQ OMX Helsinki Key media www.solteq.com Solteq in brief Solteq is an expert in digital commerce. We deliver comprehensive solutions for digital commerce under one roof: from back-office processes to customer experience from supply chain management to online marketing. We have the passion to deliver the unexpected in a fast-changing world our customers need a partner who can deliver today what they need tomorrow. We employ ca. 500 experts in three different countries and we make deliveries to Europe, North America, Asia and Australia. In 2015 our run-rate revenue was 68 million euro. This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160420006703/en/ Contacts: Solteq Repe Harmanen, +358 400 467 717 CEO or Antti Karkkainen, +358 40 8444 393 CFO Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. LUND, SWEDEN -- (Marketwired) -- 04/21/16 -- In a major breakthrough for solar energy, Swedish advanced materials start-up Sol Voltaics AB has confirmed the successful alignment and orientation of nanowires in a thin film. The achievement represents the most significant technology milestone in solar nanowire manufacturing to date, paving the way for photovoltaic (PV) module efficiencies of 27% or more -- a 50% boost in energy conversion efficiencies for today's solar modules. While showing highly promising characteristics in solar energy generation, nanowires are notoriously difficult to align due to their high aspect ratios and material characteristics. By controlling nanowire orientation and alignment at centimeter scale on standard-sized wafers, Sol Voltaics has taken a major step toward the commercial production of solar films for tandem solar PV modules. "Today's announcement marks a significant moment for both Sol Voltaics and the global solar energy industry," said Erik Smith, CEO of Sol Voltaics. "Gallium arsenide (GaAs) nanowires have recently come to the forefront as holding great promise for boosting solar module efficiencies well beyond current levels. By aligning nanowires within a membrane, we've taken our greatest stride yet toward manufacturing solar nanowire films at the commercial scale. This will enable solar panel manufacturers to greatly enhance the energy-generating capability of their products." The latest milestone follows Sol Voltaics' 2015 announcement that the Fraunhofer-ISE confirmed a world-record PV conversion efficiency of 15.3% for the company's epitaxially grown GaAs nanowire solar cells. The cells were recently retested by Fraunhofer and showed little or no degradation nearly 18 months after the initial tests, reaffirming the technology's performance reliability. In addition to the nanowire alignment breakthrough, Sol Voltaics has progressed through several generations of development of its Aerotaxy production technology. The patented process allows cost-effective III-V nanowire solar cell production via a continuous gas phase process. "We have made several significant advancements over the past few quarters, and that momentum continues on several fronts," added Smith. "Realistically, we have a few remaining hurdles to get over in order to get into commercialization but we're very confident we can deliver a truly transformative energy solution, the kind of solution called for by the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, COP 21 summit, and other global efforts to combat climate change and create a clean energy economy." About Sol Voltaics Sol Voltaics improves the efficiency of solar energy capture, generation and storage through the use of nanomaterials. A small but fast-growing company with a strong intellectual property portfolio, Sol Voltaics is developing a high-volume production platform for its patented Aerotaxy nanowire thin-film process. The company's nanowire solar cell technology will dramatically improve the efficiency of conventional solar modules at competitive costs, contributing to a sustainable energy world. Sol Voltaics is based in Lund, Sweden. Learn more at http://www.solvoltaics.com Media contact: Nick Richardson Impress Labs Email Contact +1 480 409 0775 LONDON (dpa-AFX) - UK Commercial Property Trust Limited (UKCM.L) said that its net profit for the year ended 31 December 2015 declined to 87.64 million pounds from 172.71 million pounds in the prior year. Earnings per share were 6.74 pence, down from 13.96 pence, last year. Rental income for the year declined to 69.56 million pounds from 70.58 million pounds in the prior year. Total income was 120.10 million pounds, lower than last year's 195.80 million pounds. Christopher Hill, Chairman of UKCPT, said he has decided to step down at the company's annual general meeting in June 2016. The company's board intends to appoint Andrew Wilson, currently the company's Senior Independent Director, to become chairman upon Hill's departure. The company also said that Michael Ayre has been appointed to the Board since the year end, taking the number of directors up to six for a short time. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. Espoo, Finland, 2016-04-21 09:25 CEST (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SRV YHTIOT OYJ PRESS RELEASE 21.4.2016, AT 10:25New Vantaankoski Idea Competition's winning entry proposes free city for experiments in working lifeA multidisciplinary team, led by L Arkkitehdit Oy, has been selected as the winner of the New Vantaankoski Idea Competition, jointly organised by SRV, Sanoma, the City of Vantaa and VTT. The goal of the New Vantaankoski Idea Competition was to find a concept for an innovative business campus. The winning proposal, Futurama, openmindedly breaks down the boundaries of work, leisure, home and workplace."We decided to enter because we were attracted by the new type of competition format. From the very start, we challenged the prevailing area and office construction practices, and we visualised on a concept level what working and living in the urban environment of the future will be like. We put together a team that included not only architects, but also, among others, a futurist and a working life expert. They helped to broaden our horizon and see a future full of opportunities," says Katia Salo, Development Manager at L Arkkitehdit Oy, and leader of the winning team.The winning entry is based on the premise that the sharp opposition between work, home, work and leisure will end. The working premises concept has run its course and it will be flexibly replaced according to need by an operating environment that also offers people more options in the deciding the rhythm of their daily lives."The present way of developing urban environments is inflexible and does not allow room for spontaneous innovations and rapid modification of the urban space. In the spirit of cutting red tape, we propose for the New Vantaankoski a form of free city in which the customary, restrictive rules do not apply. In a delineated area, light-touch, fast experiments on working and urban living would be permitted," explains Salo.According to the winning entry, in the future, space will be a service that is modified according to need. The urban space, including transport, for example, will also be a service, as well as a platform for events and in activity. The winning entry proposes that the campus area be allowed to develop in a business-driven way, and that fast infill and conversion construction be permitted through flexible land-use planning. The goal would be that companies, as their situation changed, would not have to leave the area, rather the premises would flexibly accommodate change."We wanted to shake up urban planning and business premises projects, and we succeeded. Next, we will launch negotiations with the winners and others who submitted interesting concepts. We will select elements from different works and develop them further. We would like to see applications of the ideas within a year or two," says Jouko Poyhonen, SRV's Director, Project Development, and chairman of the competition jury.The competition received a total of 17 entries. The competition's EUR 20,000 main prize was won by the entry Futurama. The entry Symbioosi was awarded EUR 10,000 for a concept whose strengths lay particularly in social interaction services and the reconfigurable use of space. R2D2K and The Mesh Studio shared a EUR 10,000 prize for digital services ideas. The entry Hyonteiselamaa (Insect Life) was awarded EUR 5,000 for a mobility solution in the aerial dimension. The entry Kiertotaloustulostin (Circular Economy Printer) was awarded EUR 5,000 for implementation of the circular economy in the area.Further information on the competition and its entries: The winning entries' teams and contact persons as well as comments of the jury will be published on 21 April at 10.00 a.m. on the www.uusivantaankoski.fi website.Contacts for the media: Jouko Poyhonen, Director, Project Development, SRV Group Plc, tel. +358 201 455247, jouko.poyhonen@srv.fi Hanna Johde, Communications Director, Sanoma Plc, tel. +358 40 673 8977, hanna.johde@sanoma.com Jose Valanta, Director, Economic Development, City of Vantaa, tel. +358 9 8392 1108, +358 50 523 1116, jose.valanta@vantaa.fiWe will provide representatives of the media, on request, extracts from the winning teams' competition entries. If you wish to order an information pack, please contact Aino Laakso of our partner Mailand Communications Oy. Contact information: aino.laakso@mailand.fi, tel. +358 50 553 8831.Ownership rights to the competition proposals are held by the competition organisers and publishing the entries in their entirety is not permitted. The media may, however, publish elements of the visualisations and quote the proposals. 21 April 2016 ATLANTIS JAPAN GROWTH FUND LIMITED Requisition Up-date The Board notes the announcement by LIM Advisors Limited on 19 April 2016. The Board believes the substance of the argument for continuing the Company with its closed-end structure remains unchanged and reaffirms its commitment to a number of key changes which are expected to help drive the long-term performance and enhance the appeal of the Company: Taeko Setaishi, deputy fund adviser to the Company since 1996 and the highly rated lead fund adviser to Atlantis Japan Opportunities Fund, is appointed lead fund manager with effect from 1 May 2016. AIRC (the Company's Tokyo-based investment adviser) and Tiburon (the Company's London-based investment manager) have committed to a closer day-to-day working relationship with the objective of achieving more proactive and effective communication with shareholders and marketing of the Company to potential new investors. In addition a, continuation vote (i.e. an ordinary resolution to continue the Company) will be proposed at the Company's annual general meeting in Q4 2019, following the expiry of the annual 1:5 embedded subscription right mechanism. This mechanism was introduced in 2014 to allow the Company to increase its market capitalisation and total assets, as well as decrease its expense ratio. The decision to have a continuation vote at the 2019 AGM reflects the Board's confidence that the measures that it is implementing will be successful in improving the Company's investment performance, narrowing the Share price discount and providing a platform for the growth of the Company. As previously stated, Ms. Setaishi will continue to pursue the Company's existing investment objective and policy of targeting the less well-covered small and mid-cap universe of Japanese equities. The Company will be managed with more of a conviction-led approach, holding c.65 stocks in contrast to the historical range of c.80-90, coupled with a bottom-up stock selection process and a growth style tilt. Ms. Setaishi has a long history of generating impressive returns and, over the 5 year period ended 31 March 2016, her Atlantis Japan Opportunities Fund outperformed its benchmark (TOPIX TR) by +129 percentage points and the AIC Japanese Smaller Companies sub-sector average by +75percentage points. The Board notes LIM's suggestion of a roll-over opportunity into an open-ended vehicle and rejects this proposal as it fundamentally undervalues the benefits of a closed-end structure: The Company has, and will continue to have, a bias towards investing in small to mid-cap assets and the closed-end structure provides a stable pool of capital which allows the fund manager to do this without having to manage significant inflows and outflows of cash, and therefore target some less liquid stocks that Ms. Setaishi may find attractive but is not able to hold in her open-ended fund for liquidity reasons. In addition, the ability to use gearing (borrowing for investment purposes) gives Ms. Setaishi additional flexibility to seek superior investment returns; for example to take advantage of new investment opportunities without being forced to realise existing investments that she considers still hold value. The Board notes that Pensions & Investment Research Consultants Ltd (PIRC), Glass, Lewis & Co., LLC (Glass Lewis) and Institutional Shareholder Services, Inc. (ISS), the independent shareholder advisory groups, all recommend that Shareholders VOTE AGAINST LIM'S RESOLUTION. The Board unanimously recommends that Shareholders VOTE AGAINST LIM'S RESOLUTION at the extraordinary general meeting of the Company to be held on 3 May 2016. Shareholders are reminded that the latest time and date for receipt of completed Forms of Proxy and CREST electronic proxy instructions for use at EGM is 2.30 p.m. on Sunday, 1 May 2016 (the "Voting Deadline"). Investors who hold their Shares through a non-discretionary broker, manager or other adviser, or via an execution-only platform, should ensure that they submit their voting instructions to their broker, manager or other adviser, or platform, at least several days in advance of the Voting Deadline so that their votes can be cast on the resolution to be proposed at the EGM. Noel Lamb, Chairman of Atlantis Japan Growth Fund, said: "The change of lead fund manager to Taeko reflects the Board's acknowledgement that there is room for improvement in the Company's performance, alhough we note that the Company's performance has been in line with its peers for the most part and also that its discount has been narrower. "We have already been pro-active in managing the Company's discount. In 2013, we introduced the discount control mechanism and this has helped limit the Company's discount to an average of 8.0%, narrower than the average discount for its peer group of 9.5%. "The Board firmly believes that the measures outlined in our circular on 7 April 2016 will be key to narrowing the share price discount and ultimately growing the Company. That is why the Board is introducing the continuation vote at the 2019 AGM. "On behalf of the Board I'd like to reiterate our recommendation that Shareholders VOTE AGAINST LIM'S RESOLUTION on 3 May as it is not in the best interests of Shareholders as a whole." Enquiries Sue Inglis Cantor Fitzgerald Europe T: +44 (0) 20 7894 8016 James Alexander Aravis Partners T: +44 (0) 20 7036 8172 David Masters / Henrietta Guthrie Lansons T: +44 (0) 7825 427514 T: +44 (0) 20 7294 3612 Rebecca Booth Northern Trust International Fund Administration Services (Guernsey) Limited T: +44 (0) 1481 745 189 Email: rb235@ntrs.com Notes A circular explaining the Board's reasons for recommending Shareholders to VOTE AGAINST LIM'S RESOLUTION and containing the notice convening the extraordinary general meeting of the Company, which will be at the offices of Stephenson Harwood LLP, 1 Finsbury Circus, London EC2M 7SH (commencing at 2.30 p.m.), was posted to Shareholders on 7 April 2016. Copies of that circular are available at www.atlantisjapangrowthfund.com and at www.morningstar.co.uk/uk/nsm. Words and expressions defined in that circular have the same meanings when used in this announcement. BASEL (dpa-AFX) - Swiss drug maker Novartis AG (NVS) Thursday reported a sharp decline in the first-quarter net profit, that reflected the absence of prior year's hefty asset disposal gain. Drop in net sales also hurt profit mainly due to loss of exclusivity for its cancer drug Gleevec/Glivec in the US. Looking forward, the company still expects flat net sales and core operating income for fiscal 2016. Net income for the first quarter fell to $2.0 billion from $13.0 billion in the prior year. Earnings per share decreased to $0.85 from $5.40. The prior year results were benefited by $12.8 billion exceptional divestment gains from the portfolio transformation transactions and $0.5 billion additional transaction related expenses. On a continuing operations basis, net income dropped 13 percent to $2.01 billion from the prior year's $2.31 billion, with earnings per share declining 11 percent to $0.85 from $0.96 last year. Core net income was $2.78 billion or $1.17 per share versus prior year's $3.20 billion or $1.33 per share. On average, three analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected earnings of $1.19 per share. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items. Core operating income declined 11 percent from last year to $3.26 billion. Net sales from continuing operations dropped 3 percent to $11.60 billion from $11.94 billion in the prior year, while analysts were looking for $11.90 billion. At constant currencies, net sales were up 1 percent as strong growth in Growth Products offset Gleevec impact. Growth Products, an indicator of the ongoing rejuvenation of the company's portfolio, contributed $3.9 billion in sales, or 34 percent of total net sales, and were 24 percent higher than last year. Pharmaceuticals net sales were $7.7 billion, down 3 percent due to generic competition and weak pricing. Sandoz net sales were flat as volume growth of 11 percentage points more than offset 7 percentage points of price erosion. Alcon net sales fell 7 percent. In Emerging Growth Markets, which comprise all markets except the US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, net sales grew 5 percent at constant currency, led by Brazil and Turkey. Looking ahead for fiscal 2016, Novartis continues to expect group net sales and core operating income to be broadly in line with the prior year at constant currencies, after absorbing the impact of generic competition. Generic competition impact on sales is expected to be as much as $3.2 billion compared to $2.2 billion in 2015. The anticipated currency impact for the year is negative 2 percent on sales and negative 3 percent on core operating income. Novartis shares were trading at 74.50 Swiss francs, up 0.61 percent. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de WATERVILLE, NEW BRUNSWICK -- (Marketwired) -- 04/21/16 -- ATTENTION: MEDIA AND ASSIGNMENT EDITORS FOR THURSDAY, APRIL 21, 2016 AT 5 P.M. More than 300 labour activists, allies, and family members are set to join a picket line solidarity rally on Thursday, April 21 at the Covered Bridge Potato Chip factory in Waterville, New Brunswick. UFCW Canada Local 1288P members were forced out on strike on January 5, after the company continued to refuse bargaining a first contract with a living wage, and basic workplace rights including seniority (see www.ufcw.ca/coveredbridge). The members voted to join the union more than two years ago. Since then, the provincial labour board has ruled the company violated the Labour Act five times, and ordered Covered Bridge to stop intimidating union supporters, and to get back to the bargaining. On Thursday, April 21, at 5 p.m., hundreds of CUPE members will join UFCW Canada 1288P members on the picket line, to call for a fair first contract at Covered Bridge. The CUPE activists will be travelling to the Covered Bridge picket line from the CUPE New Brunswick Division 2016 Convention being held this week at the Fredericton Inn and Convention Centre. WHAT: UFCW Canada & CUPE solidarity rally at Covered Bridge Potato Chips WHEN: Thursday, April 21, 5 p.m. - 6 p.m. WHERE: Covered Bridge Potato Chips, 35 Alwright Court, Waterville, NB E7P 0A5 Contacts: UFCW Canada Carl Flanagan National Representative 506-874-2485 carl.flanagan@ufcw.ca www.ufcw.ca LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM -- (Marketwired) -- 04/21/16 -- -- Hyundai i10 recognised as fleet sector's 'Best City Car' for second consecutive year -- i10 enhances its position as the brand's most-awarded car with top business recognition -- City car's equipment, practicality, refinement and fuel efficiency continues to impress Fleet World judges The Hyundai i10 has won 'Best City Car' at the 2016 Fleet World Honours for the second consecutive year. Praised for its practicality, generous equipment and competitive running costs, the Hyundai i10 small car reigned supreme in one of the most competitive categories. Hyundai's strong fleet proposition is founded on low BIK banding and competitive P11D levels, areas in which the i10 excels boasting 16% BIK for its SE Blue 1.0 model. Guy Pigounakis, Fleet Director, Hyundai Motor UK, said, "We are immensely proud that the Hyundai i10 continues to impress the fleet industry judges winning the city car category for the second time. Our designers and engineers created a stylish, comfortable and economical city car, which uniquely combines the agility of a small car with the features from the segment above. Reinforced by our 5 Year Unlimited Mileage Warranty, the i10 is a car that continues to prove a hit with our fleet and retail customers alike." Alex Grant, Deputy Editor, Fleet World Group said, "The city car segment is one of the most challenging, but the i10 exceeds expectations. It's chic and fun to drive, yet also well-equipped, practical and offers class-leading refinement. Operators benefit too, with a long warranty, competitive pricing and efficient engines returning up to 65.7mpg. In a tough part of the market, it remains the car to beat." Judged entirely by the Fleet World Group editors, the Fleet World Honours are highly regarded by the business community. Fleet managers and user choosers look to the Honours listings to discover the cars that offer the value, comfort and refinement expected by business drivers. The stylish Hyundai i10 is available in seven trim levels with a choice of 1.0 or 1.2 petrol engines. The highly efficient 1.0 Blue model boasts combined fuel economy of 65.7mpg and just 98g/km CO2 emissions. Cruise control is fitted as standard on SE models and above, while range-topping models feature Bluetooth connectivity with voice recognition, plus steering wheel audio and phone controls. About Hyundai Motor Established in 1967, Hyundai Motor Company is committed to becoming a lifetime partner in automobiles and beyond. The company leads the Hyundai Motor Group, an innovative business structure capable of circulating resources from molten iron to finished cars. Hyundai Motor has eight manufacturing bases and seven design & technical centres worldwide and in 2015 sold 4.96 million vehicles globally. With more than 110,000 employees worldwide, Hyundai Motor continues to enhance its product line-up with localised models and strives to strengthen its leadership in clean technology, starting with the world's first mass-produced hydrogen-powered vehicle, ix35 Fuel Cell and IONIQ, the world's first model with three electrified powertrains in a single body type. About Hyundai Motor UK Hyundai has sold vehicles in the UK since 1982. In 2005, Hyundai opened its own UK subsidiary, Hyundai Motor UK Ltd, based in High Wycombe. Since 2008, the company has risen from 21st to one of the top 10 car manufacturers in the UK and last year sold a record 88,257 vehicles. Hyundai Motor UK employs more than 3,000 people through its UK operations and dealer network. Hyundai offers a full range of vehicles from the award-winning New Generation i10 city car through to the capable Santa Fe SUV and iLoad LCV. All passenger cars come with Hyundai's industry-leading 5 Year Unlimited Mileage Warranty package. Further information about Hyundai and its products is available at www.hyundai.co.uk. Follow us on Twitter @Hyundai_UK_PR Contacts: Natasha Waddington Head of PR 01494 428646 07771 975692 natasha.waddington@hyundai-car.co.uk Laura King Senior Manager, Brand PR 01494 428685 07817 264224 laura.king@hyundai-car.co.uk Robin Hayles Product PR Manager 01494 428655 07836 579628 robin.hayles@hyundai-car.co.uk Sarah Saunders PR Administrator (Press Fleet) 01494 428617 07812 086167 sarah.saunders@hyundai-car.co.uk LOS ANGELES, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/21/16 -- Lieberman Software Corporation's privileged access management platform, Enterprise Random Password Manager (ERPM), has been named the winner of the 2016 Cybersecurity Excellence Award for Best Privileged Access Management. The award recognizes excellence, innovation and leadership in information security. The Cybersecurity Excellence Awards are produced in cooperation with the Information Security Community on LinkedIn, tapping into the experience of more than 300,000 cybersecurity professionals to recognize the world's best cybersecurity products, individuals and organizations. For a list of award winners see http://cybersecurity-excellence-awards.com/2016-cybersecurity-product-awards/. "Congratulations to Lieberman Software for being recognized as the winner in the Privileged Access Management category of the 2016 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards," said Holger Schulze, founder of the Information Security Community. "With over 430 entries, the awards are highly competitive and our winners reflect the very best in product innovation and excellence in the cybersecurity space." ERPM contains cyber attacks that penetrate the network perimeter. It automatically discovers privileged identities in the enterprise -- on-premises, in the cloud and in hybrid environments. It then brings those accounts under management, and audits access to them. ERPM ensures that each privileged credential is changed as frequently as necessary. So even if a credential is compromised, it cannot be leveraged to anonymously leapfrog between systems and steal valuable data. "We're proud to earn this award from our peers in the information security industry," said Philip Lieberman, president and CEO of Lieberman Software. "This is a valuable recognition of our commitment to furthering cybersecurity. The award highlights the value our technology delivers as a key cyber defense solution to organizations around the globe." For more information on ERPM see www.liebsoft.com/erpm. About Lieberman Software Corporation Lieberman Software proactively stops cyber attacks that bypass conventional enterprise defenses and penetrate the network perimeter. The company provides award-winning privileged identity management and security management products to more than 1,400 customers worldwide, including nearly half of the US Fortune 50. By automatically securing privileged identities -- both on-premises and in the cloud -- Lieberman Software controls access to systems with sensitive data, and defends against malicious insiders, zero day attacks and other advanced cyber threats. Lieberman Software is headquartered in Los Angeles, CA, with offices and channel partners located around the world. For more information, visit www.liebsoft.com. Product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners. Media Contact: Dan Chmielewski Madison Alexander PR 1-714-832-8716 1-949-231-2965 LEEDS, England, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Lhasa Limited, a Yorkshire based scientific software developer, is thrilled to announce that it has been recognised as one of the select businesses to be awarded the Queen's Award for Enterprise in 2016. These awards are approved by Her Majesty The Queen and are the UK's highest accolade for business success. Awarded for Innovation, this honour is in recognition of Lhasa's innovative development of the expert knowledge-based software system, Derek Nexus, for the prediction of toxicity. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160415/355776LOGO ) Created in-house and released in 2010, Derek Nexus is widely used by the pharmaceutical, chemical, cosmetic and related industries and allows scientists to rapidly assess the toxicity of chemical compounds. Its transparent and scientifically robust approach enables organisations to make decisions about their compounds, can reduce animal testing and shorten development cycles leading to the earlier market availability of safe, new chemical entities. Founded in 1983 as a not-for-profit organisation and educational charity to assist in the collaborative development and use of computer aided reasoning in scientific software, Lhasa was initially based within the Chemistry department at the University of Leeds and employed only a handful of scientists. Today Lhasa is a truly global organisation employing just over 120 people with the majority based at its Yorkshire head office at Granary Wharf in Leeds city centre. Lhasa's investment in research and development has resulted in an impressive and growing software portfolio that offers expert assistance to scientific researchers, enabling them to make more informed decisions about new chemical compounds. The success of the current software portfolio combined with the imminent launch of two further, innovative software systems means that Lhasa is always looking for highly motivated Yorkshire based software developers and scientists to bring fresh ideas to this exciting field. Commenting on the award, Lhasa Limited CEO Dave Watson, said, "On Her Majesty The Queen's 90th birthday, I am delighted that Lhasa Limited has received this prestigious award. In the last 5 years, 12 companies from Yorkshire and the Humber have received a Queen's Award for Enterprise: Innovation and we are proud to join this exclusive club. Since Lhasa was founded in 1983, scientific software development has been our core focus and we continue to engage in cutting edge, scientific research to develop innovative new software solutions and the receipt of this award is an acknowledgement of that. I would like to thank all Lhasa employees who have played a role in the success of Derek Nexus." The award will be formally presented by the Lord-Lieutenant of West Yorkshire, at Lhasa's offices in Leeds later this year and representatives of Lhasa are looking forward to meeting other award winners at a special reception at Buckingham Palace in July. About Lhasa Limited Lhasa Limited is an active, scientific research organisation working to promote the use of computer aided reasoning in chemistry and the life sciences. Our areas of specialisation include the development of software for toxicology and metabolism prediction, and data management. Working closely with Lhasa Limited members and the broader scientific community, Lhasa continues to draw on over 30 years of experience to create user-friendly, state-of-the-art in silico prediction and database systems. Lhasa Limited was founded on the basis of data and knowledge sharing. Building on its reputation as the eponymous 'honest broker', Lhasa Limited has continued to work on the basis of 'shared knowledge, shared progress' for more than 30 years. Over this time, Lhasa has regularly been trusted with proprietary data and this can be seen in the many successful consortia that we continue to be involved in. The sustained success of such consortia is demonstrative of how working with Lhasa has a positive impact on the research and development process of its members. Lhasa's products include the Derek Nexus expert system for predicting toxicity, Sarah Nexus, a transparent statistical system for predicting mutagenicity, Vitic Nexus for managing chemical data and information, Meteor Nexus for predicting metabolic fate and Zeneth for predicting forced degradation pathways. More recently, Lhasa Limited has worked with members on the development of Mirabilis, a tool for assessing the relative purging of mutagenic impurities. Contact: Scott McDonald, +44(0)113-3946020, Scott.McDonald@lhasalimited.org DUBLIN, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Research and Marketshas announced the addition of the"Fuel Additives Market: Type (Anti-oxidants, Corrosion Inhibitors, Octane Improvers, Cetane Improvers, Dyes, Markers, Demulsifiers, Others) Application (Aviation, Marine, Others) Type of Fuel (Gasoline, Diesel, Biofuel, Others)-Forecast(2015 - 2020)"report to their offering. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160330/349511LOGO ) Fuel additives are specialty chemicals which when added to the fuel improves its characteristics. Fuel additives are one of the prolific innovation of liquid engineering which helps to get little extra out of fuel. These additives are added in very small amounts, from ppm to thousands of ppm. As the engine's key source, fuel system needs extra care to operate at peak performance. Different fuel needs different additive treatment due to the dissimilarity in their properties, keeping this in mind fuel additives market is also segmented based on different types of fuel such as gasoline, diesel, biofuel and others. The report also focuses on different geographic regions and the key countries in terms of changing trends in using fuel additives in various fields. This report gives the detailed information about the product value chain right from the beginning, which as the power in the hands of producers and consumers, analysis of the degree of competition, and threats of substitutes and new entrants. Apart from the above, the report also includes raw materials till end-use. Companies Mentioned: Chevron Oronite Company LLC BASF SE Lubrizol Corporation Afton Chemical Corporation Chemtura Corporation Dorf-Ketal Chemicals India Private Limited Innospec Inc. Albemarle Corporation Evonik Industries AG Baker Hughes Incorporated Others Report Structure: 1. Fuel Additives - Market Overview 2. Executive Summary 3. Fuel Additives - Market Landscape 4. Fuel Additives - Market Forces 5. Fuel Additives - Strategic Analysis 6. Fuel Additives - By Type 7. Fuel Additives - By Application 8. Fuel Additives - By Type of Fuel 9. Fuel Additives - By Geography 10. Market Entropy 11. Company Profiles 12. Appendix For more information visithttp://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/nz4gwc/fuel_additives Media Contact: Laura Wood, Senior Manager press@researchandmarkets.com For E.S.T Office Hours Call 1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call 1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 04/21/16 -- Denison Mines Corp. ("Denison" or the "Company") (TSX: DML)(NYSE MKT: DNN) is pleased to report the completion of the winter 2016 drilling programs on its high-priority exploration pipeline projects, highlighted by the intersection of uranium mineralization and favourable geological settings on several properties. Apart from Denison's flagship Wheeler River project, the Company has an extensive portfolio of uranium exploration projects located in the infrastructure rich eastern Athabasca Basin, covering over 340,000 hectares of ground (see Figure 1). The projects are at various stages of exploration and provide a long term pipeline of potential resource growth opportunities. During the winter 2016 programs, approximately 9,300 metres of diamond drilling was completed in 23 holes on Denison operated properties - including Murphy Lake (3,695 metres, 10 holes), Crawford Lake (1,104 metres, 2 holes), Bell Lake (2,382 metres, 4 holes), Torwalt Lake (612 metres, 2 holes), Marten Lake (1,021 metres, 4 holes) and Moon Lake South (516 metres, 1 hole). Geophysical surveys are still underway on several properties as planning continues for the development of the summer drilling programs. Denison's Vice President, Exploration, Dale Verran, commented, "While much attention has been given to the results at Wheeler River this winter, we are highly encouraged by the winter results from our high-priority pipeline projects in the eastern Athabasca. Further intersections of mineralization and alteration at Murphy Lake continue to suggest we are dealing with a sizeable mineralizing system with deposit potential along strike. At Crawford Lake and Moon Lake South, reconnaissance drilling on the largely untested CR-3 trend yielded exciting mineralized results suggesting potential for future discovery in both the basement rocks and at the unconformity. These results, in addition to those from Marten and Bell Lake, reiterate the potential of Denison's pipeline projects and the team's sound exploration approach." An additional 8,100 metres of diamond drilling was completed in 31 holes on two non-Denison operated properties. At Mann Lake, operated by Cameco Corp., a total of 2,800 metres of diamond drilling was completed in 4 holes. At Wolly, operated by AREVA Resources Canada Inc., a total of 5,300 metres of diamond drilling was completed in 27 holes. Murphy Lake: Mineralized Trend Extended Murphy Lake continues to be one of Denison's highest priority exploration projects. The project is located approximately 30 kilometres from the McClean Lake mill and adjacent to the Company's Waterbury Lake project in the northern portion of the eastern Athabasca Basin. During the winter 2016 season, Denison completed a diamond drilling program as well as ground gravity and DC-IP resistivity surveys on the Murphy Lake Project (68.8% Denison, 31.2% Eros Resources Corp.). Approximately 3,700 metres were drilled over 10 drill holes during the program. The majority of the drilling was designed to test targets identified along strike and on section of MP-15-03 (a 2015 drill hole which intersected 0.25% U3O8 over 6.0 metres in strongly altered sandstones, immediately above the unconformity). Drilling confirmed the continuity of the intense hydrothermal sandstone alteration system, identified in 2015, over a strike length of 850 metres. Weak uranium mineralization was intersected in the sandstone associated with intense hematite and clay alteration in three drill holes; MP-16-08, MP-16-11 and MP-16-17. Drill hole MP-16-08, drilled on section with MP-15-03, identified uranium mineralization associated with a parallel graphitic fault zone approximately 70 metres to the south. Drill holes MP-16-11 and MP-16-17 were both drilled along strike to the west of drill hole MP-15-03 at 200 metres and 100 metres, respectively. Table 1 provides the highlights from drilling on the property to date and Figure 2 provides a summary map. Table 1: Summary of highlight intersections from the Murphy Lake 2016 Drilling Program Drill Hole From (m) To (m) Length (m)(4) U3O8 (%) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- MP-15-03(2,5) 270.0 276.0 6.0 0.25 MP-16-08(1) 275.65 278.55 2.9 0.19(1) MP-16-11(2) 267.5 282.0 14.5 0.13 (includes)(2) 271.0 272.0 1.0 0.46 (and)(2) 277.5 278.0 0.5 0.49 MP-16-17(3) 259.0 275.0 16.0 0.04 (includes)(3) 262.5 263.0 0.5 0.12 (and)(3) 268.0 268.5 0.5 0.13 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Notes: 1. Significant core loss. Result reported as radiometric equivalent uranium ("eU3O8") from a calibrated total gamma down-hole probe and composited above a cut-off grade of 0.05% eU3O8 2. Intersection interval is composited above a cut-off grade of 0.05% U3O8 3. A cut-off grade has not been applied 4. As the drill holes dip steeply to the south and the unconformity mineralization is expected to be flat-lying, the true thickness of the mineralization is expected to be approximately 90% of the intersection lengths 5. Results reported previously in Company press release dated October 22, 2015 An additional 2.2 kilometres of interpreted strike length remains entirely untested both to the east and west of the mineralized zone noted above. Within the current DC-IP resistivity coverage, which extends 0.8 kilometres east and 1.4 kilometres west of the mineralized zone, several priority targets have been identified for drill testing. The ground gravity survey has produced gravity-low targets, in some cases coincident with DC-IP resistivity targets, and has delineated potential areas of unconformity offset to the north of the mineralized zone, which constitutes a further target area. Crawford Lake and Moon Lake South: Mineralization Discovered on CR-3 Conductive Trend At the Crawford Lake property (100% Denison owned), a two hole program was designed to test targets on the CR-5 and CR-3 conductive trends respectively. Previous drilling on the CR-3 conductive trend included one historic hole, and one hole drilled by Denison in 2015 (CR-15-24), which intersected strong basement alteration and structure associated with graphite-bearing pelitic gneisses. During the winter 2016 drilling program, drill hole CR-16-26, located approximately 800 metres to the northeast of CR-15-24, extended the strike of the graphite-bearing pelitic gneisses and confirmed further strong basement alteration and structure with associated elevated uranium pathfinder elements. In January 2016, Denison entered into an earn-in option agreement with CanAlaska Uranium Ltd. (TSX VENTURE: CVV) on the Moon Lake property ("Moon Lake South"), which is contiguous with Crawford Lake and covers the northeasterly extent of the CR-3 conductive trend. A single drill hole was completed during the winter 2016 program which was designed to test the CR-3 conductive trend on Moon Lake South, immediately north of the southern property boundary with Crawford Lake. The drill hole, MS-16-01, intersected 0.102% U3O8 over 0.5 metres at the unconformity and anomalous uranium in the overlying sandstone. This hole is located approximately 1.5 kilometres northeast from CR-16-26. The Moon Lake South option agreement allows for Denison to acquire an initial 51% interest in claim S-107558 by completing exploration expenditures of CAD$200,000, and allows for Denison to increase its interest to 75% for a further CAD$500,000. The option agreement includes provisions for the formation of a joint venture and a 2% NSR Royalty which will be automatically granted if either party's interest is diluted to below 10%. The NSR Royalty may be purchased by the non-diluting party for CAD$500,000. The drilling results obtained during the winter 2016 drilling program, including extensive basement alteration and structure on Crawford Lake and uranium mineralization at the unconformity on Moon Lake South, have confirmed the CR-3 conductive trend to be highly prospective. Further drilling is warranted to evaluate this trend for unconformity and basement hosted uranium mineralization. A map showing the location of the CR-3 conductive trend and the respective drill holes is provided in Figure 3. Other Property Highlights Marten Lake (50% Denison, 50% JOGMEC) Three of the four holes completed during the winter program, testing DC-IP resistivity targets along a northeast-southwest trend, intersected significant structure and alteration. The westernmost hole encountered a significant reverse fault zone at the sub-Athabasca unconformity with 96 metres of a vertical offset and associated brecciation and alteration. These features attest to a favorable geological setting for unconformity-related uranium mineralization and suggest follow-up exploration is warranted along this fault zone. Follow-up plans will be finalized upon receipt and interpretation of the geochemical assay and clay alteration data. Bell Lake - North (100% Denison) Of the four drill holes completed during the winter program, two intersected favourable sandstone structure and alteration, and one intersected significant structure in the basement. Elevated radioactivity was intersected at or immediately above the sub-Athabasca unconformity in all four drill holes. Drilling was reconnaissance in nature and focused on testing ground electromagnetic targets on widely-spaced survey lines. These results, obtained in a new target area with no previous drilling, meet several of the important exploration criteria for unconformity-related uranium mineralization. Interpretation of the results is ongoing and follow-up work will be assessed once geochemical assay and clay alteration data have been received and interpreted. Mann Lake (30% Denison, 52.5% Cameco and operator, 17.5% AREVA): During 2014 and 2015 a significant zone of unconformity mineralization was discovered by Cameco along the Granite Contact "GC" fault over a 600 metre strike length, highlighted by 6.7% U3O8 over 3.9 metres in drill hole MN-066-01 (see Company press release dated February 4, 2015). The winter 2016 drilling program was focused on testing the underexplored southern extent of the GC fault, which is interpreted to extend approximately 2.4 kilometres to the southern property boundary away from the mineralized zone. Two holes were completed at 1.2 kilometers and 2.1 kilometres, respectively, to the south of the existing zone of mineralization and aimed at the extension of the GC fault. The southernmost hole intersected a significant zone of structural disruption and alteration in the sandstone, and indicated an 80 metre vertical offset of the sub-Athabasca unconformity. A follow-up hole, collared approximately 100 metres to the east on section, intersected encouraging sandstone and up-thrown basement rocks including quartzite and structured, graphite-rich pelitic gneisses. The results suggest the optimal unconformity target may be located further to the west, between the two holes completed on the section. Assay Methods and Lab Denison reports its initial exploration results as radiometric equivalent uranium ("eU3O8") from a calibrated, total gamma, down-hole probe. Where core recovery permits, all mineralized intersections are sampled and submitted for chemical U3O8 assay at the Saskatchewan Research Council ("SRC") Geoanalytical Laboratories using an ISO/IEC 17025:2005 accredited method for the determination of U3O8 weight %. Sample preparation involves crushing and pulverising of split-core samples to 90% passing -106 microns. The resultant pulp is digested using aqua-regia and the solution analyzed for U3O8 weight % using ICP-OES. Qualified Person The disclosure of a scientific or technical nature contained in this news release was prepared by Dale Verran, MSc, Pr.Sci.Nat., Denison's Vice President, Exploration, who is a Qualified Person in accordance with the requirements of NI 43-101. For a more detailed description of the assay procedures and the quality assurance program and quality control measures applied by Denison, please see Denison's Annual Information Form dated March 24, 2016 filed under the Company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. About Denison Denison is a uranium exploration and development company with interests focused in the Athabasca Basin region of northern Saskatchewan. Including its 60% owned Wheeler River project, which hosts the high grade Phoenix and Gryphon uranium deposits, Denison's exploration portfolio consists of numerous projects covering over 350,000 hectares in the eastern Athabasca Basin. Denison's interests in Saskatchewan also include a 22.5% ownership interest in the McClean Lake joint venture, which includes several uranium deposits and the McClean Lake uranium mill, which is currently processing ore from the Cigar Lake mine under a toll milling agreement, plus a 25.17% interest in the Midwest deposit and a 61.55% interest in the J Zone deposit on the Waterbury Lake property. Both the Midwest and J Zone deposits are located within 20 kilometres of the McClean Lake mill. Internationally, Denison owns 100% of the Mutanga project in Zambia, 100% of the uranium/copper/silver Falea project in Mali, and a 90% interest in the Dome project in Namibia. Denison has recently entered into an agreement with GoviEx Uranium Inc. (CSE: GXU) to sell its African interests, with an expected closing date in May, 2016. Denison is also engaged in mine decommissioning and environmental services through its Denison Environmental Services division and is the manager of Uranium Participation Corp., a publicly traded company which invests in uranium oxide and uranium hexafluoride. Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements Certain information contained in this press release constitutes "forward-looking information", within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and similar Canadian legislation concerning the business, operations and financial performance and condition of Denison. Generally, these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "expects", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates" or "believes", or the negatives and/or variations of such words and phrases, or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be taken", "occur", "be achieved" or "has the potential to". In particular, this press release contains forward-looking information pertaining to the following: exploration (including drilling) and evaluation activities, plans and objectives; potential mineralization of drill targets; and the estimates of Denison's mineral resources. Forward looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management as of the date such statements are made, and they are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of Denison to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Denison believes that the expectations reflected in this forward-looking information are reasonable but there can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and may differ materially from those anticipated in this forward looking information. For a discussion in respect of risks and other factors that could influence forward-looking events, please refer to the "Risk Factors" in Denison's Annual Information Form dated March 24, 2016 available under its profile at www.sedar.com and in its Form 40-F available at www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml. These factors are not, and should not be construed as being, exhaustive. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The forward-looking information contained in this press release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. Denison does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking information after the date of this press release to conform such information to actual results or to changes in its expectations except as otherwise required by applicable legislation. Cautionary Note to United States Investors Concerning Estimates of Measured, Indicated and Inferred Mineral Resources: This press release may use the terms "measured", "indicated" and "inferred" mineral resources. United States investors are advised that while such terms are recognized and required by Canadian regulations, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission does not recognize them. "Inferred mineral resources" have a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence, and as to their economic and legal feasibility. It cannot be assumed that all or any part of an inferred mineral resource will ever be upgraded to a higher category. Under Canadian rules, estimates of inferred mineral resources may not form the basis of feasibility or other economic studies. United States investors are cautioned not to assume that all or any part of measured or indicated mineral resources will ever be converted into mineral reserves. United States investors are also cautioned not to assume that all or any part of an inferred mineral resource exists, or is economically or legally mineable. Figures 1 to 3 are available at the following address: http://media3.marketwire.com/docs/1051527_Maps.pdf Contacts: David Cates President and Chief Executive Officer (416) 979-1991 ext. 362 Sophia Shane Investor Relations (604) 689-7842 Follow Denison on Twitter @DenisonMinesCo CARLETON-SUR-MER, QUEBEC -- (Marketwired) -- 04/21/16 -- Note to editors: There is a photo associated with this Press Release. This is what is being said on the international adventure and endurance races circuit! The result: the race is almost full and new registrations will be soon put on a waiting list for the ones willing to participate in the 2016 GIR that will be held from September 8th to September 11th. What's more, these spots are reserved for international teams...so hurry! www.raidintermationalgaspesie.com The Raid International Gaspesie is most intense and complete multisport adventure race that will provide spectacular action and endurance TV images of teams that will surpass themselves throughout four days of mountain biking, canoeing, trekking, climbing, river and ocean swimming and coasteering over approximately 300 kilometres that are sure to test both their solidarity and their ability to work as a team. Each team of two or four athletes is associated to one of the three following categories: men, women, or mixed. The popularity of the GIR has steadily increased since the first edition presented in 2014. This can be attributed to the national and international teams and media being blown away by the beauty of the Gaspesie region as well as the warm welcome and friendliness of its inhabitants, factors that make the GIR a unique event throughout the world. Many teams and media will be back to relive the excitement. Some will even be present for the third time in as many years. One of the best American endurance teams, Tecnu Adventure Racing, a Spanish team ranked among the best in the world, Arearaider.com-Fridama, and Brou Aventuras Kailish Cannondale, Brazilian brothers who will be participating in the GIR for the third time, are all expected to line up at the start of the 2016 edition of the event. Painted Wolf, the South African team, will also attempt to climb to first place in the overall ranking and finish ahead of Dynafit/SkimoEast and Olympian Lyne Bessette's team, Raid Bras-du-Nord. Both Canadian teams will be back to defend their titles. Of course, teams from Uruguay, Estonia, France, Czech Republic, Argentina, Costa Rica, England, Switzerland, Colombia, and even Indonesia will also join in the fun. Initially, the maximum number of participants had been set at 100. However, due to the buzz surrounding the GIR, event organizers were forced to find logistical solutions to make increasing the number of participants possible. The limit was raised to 140...and is now set at 170 participants. Beyond the exceptional scenery, crystal clear salmon rivers, extraordinary shoreline, immense forests and dignified welcome racers receive from the local population, what makes the GIR a unique event is the fact that 200 of the region's young people are given the opportunity to take part in the first day of activities, alongside the teams that will complete the international race. What's more, impressive media production always accompanies this event, making it possible to highlight adventure racing, participating teams, and the host region. The 2014 GIR Webcast was seen more than 427 047 times in 146 countries and broadcasted via television stations in 40 countries for a total of 2 500 hours of broadcasting. Finally, this year, racers will face a new course that will lead them to the RCM of Bonaventure, all without forsaking the RCM of Avignon. We look forward to meeting adventure seekers who are eager to push their limits in Quebec's wonderful Gaspesie region from September 8th to September 11th. Teaser 2 minutes in the life of an adventure racer at the Raid International Gaspesie, Imagines four days : https://vimeo.com/145150383 Are you wild enough? You are an international media willing to live this incredible adventure from the inside? Contact us! We will more than happy to have you join the adventure in Gaspesie, Quebec, Canada The Raid Intenational Gaspesie is possible with the help and partnership of: More than 200 volonters, 120 private land owners, SDMC, Carleton-sur-Mer, EnduranceAventure Developpement Economique Canada, MRC Avignon, MRC Bonnaventure, Tourisme Gaspesie, Desjardins, Movimento, Velo Cafe and Fruits2 To view the photo associated with this Press Release, please visit the following links: http://www.marketwire.com/library/20160420-course800.jpg Contacts: Daniel Labillois Spokesperson GIR Organizing committee dlabillois@hotmail.com Jean-Thomas Boily Co-president of Endurance Aventure 819 847-2197 Cell: 819 823-2607 A man accused of killing three family members in Belfry earlier this month has been extradited to Montana. Robert James LeCou, 39, was transferred to the Gallatin County Detention Center on Wednesday. He was previously held in Spokane after being arrested in Washington on April 8. LeCou faces charges stemming from the shooting deaths of his wife and two of her relatives in their Belfry home April 5. Authorities say that LeCou killed the three people and fled. In an interview with Montana law enforcement officials in Washington, LeCou said that an intruder must have broken into the house and shot the victims. No hearings in Carbon County are scheduled for LeCou, according to the Carbon County Clerk of District Court's office. Expanded Partnership Personalizes the On-Site User Experience Across RT's Global Publisher Network, Driving Audience Engagement, Monetization, and Video GrowthNEW YORK and LONDON, 2016-04-21 13:00 CEST (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Taboola, the leading global discovery platform, today announced an expansion of its exclusive, multi-year partnership with RT, one of the leading global news networks reaching over 49 million unique users online*. Working closely with RT's business, editorial, and product teams, the collaboration integrates Taboola's Full Page Personalization across the entire RT global network of desktop, tablet, and mobile properties, driving audience development, engagement, and monetization goals for the publisher.Taboola's Full Page Personalization (FPP) enables publisher teams to customize the broader on-site experience for RT users, through a variety of implementations that adapt to different audience segments in real-time. Examples of FPP include personalizing the share tool experience so that frequent sharers see bigger buttons or WhatsApp shares, while others see no sharing buttons at all. Another example is Taboola's mobile-optimized "read more" button which can be targeted to certain users to increase the visibility of in-article modules for smartphone users.RT is utilizing FPP to segment its audience into actionable user segments, including engaged users, one-time visitors, and frequent video viewers. Engaged audiences would automatically see more of RT's leading editorial content, while one-time visitors who tend to be more inconsistent in their content consumption behavior would automatically be served additional promoted stories. Additionally, on-site users who are more likely to consume video would be presented with a video-centric experience, increasing overall video views. These combined efforts have already generated a 27 percent increase in organic click-through-rates (CTR), and a 23 percent improvement in revenue."RT's global audience consumes our content daily across multiple platforms and in six languages. We consider the experience of each user to be paramount and Taboola's technology allows us to serve every individual who engages with our content in a more personalized way," said Kirill Karnovich-Valua, Head of Online Projects, at RT. "Taboola not only shares this vision with us, but has developed a full-service platform that empowers our organization to customize the on-site experience for different audiences, as our business and audience development goals change."RT's global network includes fully-responsive websites and tablet/mobile apps in English, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, French, and German. Taboola supports these languages and dozens of others around the world, including Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Portuguese, and more."Personalization has become a priority for any publisher that is fighting to retain and grow their audience, but it's especially exciting for wide-reaching publishers like RT that serve a variety of users around the world," said Adam Singolda, founder and CEO at Taboola. "RT has already done a fantastic job building on its broadcast business to become a true digital powerhouse, both across the web and on platforms like YouTube. We're excited to work together on unlocking new personalization-driven strategies that further move the needle."Taboola's predictive technology analyzes hundreds of real-time signals (such as referral source, device type, geography, and more) to predict the top handful of items a user may want to consume next. With headquarters in New York City and its European operations based in London, Taboola has signed partnerships with several leading publishers throughout Europe and around the world, including AOL, MSN, Daily Mail, ESI Media, Eurosport, and more.*According to comScore (February 2016)About Taboola Taboola is the leading discovery platform, serving over 300 billion recommendations to over 750 million unique visitors every month on some of the Web's most innovative publisher sites, including USA TODAY, Business Insider, Chicago Tribune, and The Weather Channel. Headquartered in New York City, Taboola also has offices in Los Angeles, London, Tel Aviv, New Delhi, Sao Paulo, and Bangkok. Publishers, marketers, and agencies leverage Taboola to retain users on their sites, monetize their traffic, and distribute their content to drive high-quality audiences. Learn more at www.taboola.com and follow @taboola on Twitter.About RT RT is a global TV news network that broadcasts 24/7 in English, Arabic and Spanish from its studios in Moscow, Washington, DC, and London. RT has a weekly TV audience of 70 million people in 38 countries (Ipsos), and is the most watched TV news network on YouTube with more than 3.3 billion views. It is the winner of the Monte Carlo TV Festival Award for best 24-hr broadcast, and the only Russian TV channel to receive three nominations for the International Emmy Awards for News.Media Contacts:Taboolapress@taboola.comAnna BelkinaHead of CommunicationsRTaibelkina@rttv.ru+7 499 75 000 75 GUANGZHOU, China, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- China's best automaker, GAC Motor,released itshighly-anticipated next-generation luxury sedan, theGA8, at an unveiling ceremony andpress conferenceat Guangzhou Stadium on April 16. Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160421/358189 GAC Motor invested overRMB1 billion (USD$154 million) over the course of five years to research and develop the GA8, the all-new sedan targeting the high-end market. The company has also revealed the details of the GA8's design and configuration. The model comes with cutting-edge power and electronic systems, matching technology and world-class materials for interior decoration to provide the most convenient driving and riding experience. The sedan features an all-around intelligent driving assistance system that can navigate, raise collision alerts and actively assist in braking. A 360-degree panorama visual imaging system makes driving and riding the GA8 much safer and easier. The second generation smart guide on board the vehicle also allows drivers to connect to service specialists for technical support with the touch of a button, offering 24-hour free roadside service and a four-year warranty covering 100,000 kilometers. "The GA8 is a strategic model that GAC Motor spent five years developing. It has withstood the challenges from previous appearances as service cars for both the NPC and CPPCC meetings in Beijing last month, as well as the Second G20 Sherpa Meeting in Guangzhou last week, where it was praised for its overall performance and high level of comfort. We are confident that our self-developed GA8 will open a new era for luxury sedans in the Chinese and international market," said Wu Song, General Manager of GAC Motor. At the conference, Chairman of the Board of GAC Group, Zhang Fangyou, delivered the key to the first owner. The first global GA8 sedan owner is aFrench national, Gilbert Ranoux. He not only has a deep affection for China, but also particular feelings for GAC Motor. He said, "The products of GAC Motor have seen great improvement, including a nicerdesignand more advanced technology. I believe that theGA8 will become a very popular model, and that China will soon have its own globally famous auto brand, and the brand should be GAC Motor." The GA8 is powered by GAC Motor's second generation 320T engine. The 320T is supported by technologies such as a low-inertia E-Turbo turbocharger that can bring down 35 percent of inertia, GCCS combustion control that improves the combustion rate by 22 percent while lowering the gas consumption by 15 percent, as well as DCV VT double-span variable valve timing. The streamlined vehicle has a 2907mm wheelbase, peak torque at wide range from 1600-4500 RPM and gas consumption as low as 35 MPG. "The GA8 was developed following the strictest international standards. GAC Motor's research and development bases across China are working together to bring technical innovation and the next generation of vehicles to the fore,while our worldwide support system is dedicated to providing the best VIP service to all customers," Wu Song said. The GA8 sedan has officially released in Chinese market in Guangzhou at a price starting from RMB169,800 (USD$26,217). About GAC Motor GAC Motor is a subsidiary company of GAC Group which ranks 362nd on the Fortune 500 list of enterprises. The company is committed to developing and manufacturing world-class quality vehicles, engines, components and auto accessories. GAC Motor ranked in the top eight among all brands in the 2015 China Initial Quality Study from J.D. Power Asia Pacific, the highest of all Chinese brands for the third consecutive year. Email: sukie_gacmotor@126.com, liqi@gacmotor.com More Photos: http://pan.baidu.com/s/1ge7X5Zl MADRID (dpa-AFX) - Spain's foreign trade deficit narrowed in February from a year ago, as exports grew faster than imports, figures from the Economy Ministry showed Thursday. The trade deficit fell to EUR 1.76 billion in February from EUR 2.04 billion in the corresponding month last year. Exports climbed 2.7 percent year-over-year in February to EUR 20.39 billion in February. Imports rose 1.2 percent to EUR 22.15 billion. During the first two months of the year, total trade deficit of the country was EUR 4.14 billion against EUR 4.63 billion the same period of 2015. Both exports and imports increased by 2.4 percent and 1.0 percent, respectively. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. MANCHESTER, England, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Guangzhou, the third largest city in China and capital of Guangdong Province, has won a highly competitive bid to host the World Routes air service development forum in 2018. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150730/250177LOGO ) World Routes is a unique event that moves from city to city every year to highlight different international aviation markets. It is the only route development forum that brings together aviation professionals to discuss new air services on a global scale. The 24th annual World Routes forum will be hosted by Guangdong Airport Authority, the operator of the third busiest airport in China - Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport. Around 3,000 of the most senior decision makers from 300 airlines, 700 airports and 130 tourism authorities are expected to attend the event. Founded in 214 BC, Guangzhou is an historic port on the Pearl River near the South China Sea. Known for its perennial blooming plants, the 'City of Flowers' has been an integral part of Guangdong Province's economic boom since the 1990s. The largest importer and exporter in China with a nominal GDP of 6.779 trillion yuan (US$1.104 trillion), Guangdong contributes towards 12% of China's national economic output. Guangzhou has cultivated a thriving conference industry since the first biannual China Import and Export Fair (also known as the Canton Fair) was held in 1957. The largest international trade event in China, each fair attracts 200,000 visitors from over 200 countries to generate a gross turnover of US$20 billion. World Routes 2018 will support Guangzhou's economic development by bringing the international aviation industry to the city. It is a major opportunity to showcase Guangzhou's commercial strength and the expansion of Baiyun International Airport, which has gained 67 new international services since 2011 including San Francisco, Frankfurt, Rome, Moscow and London. A second terminal is being constructed at Baiyun International Airport to increase the airport's maximum annual capacity to 80 million passengers (it currently handles 55 million a year) when it opens in 2017. The long-term aim is for the airport to have five runways and three terminals to handle 62,000 flights, 100 million passengers and three million tons of cargo a year. World Routes 2018 will also support President Xi Jinping's'One Belt, One Road'initiative. The purpose of One Belt, One Road is to create a modern day Silk Road from China through to Central and Western Asia, the Middle East and Europe; strengthening the country's trade relations through greater international connections by air, land and sea. Katie Bland, Director of Routes, said: "China is the world's second largest aviation market and it is continuing to grow. By 2034 it will have overtaken the USA as the busiest market with 1.196 billion passengers a year. "Within China, Guangzhou is a powerful driving force of the national economy. It is taking a leading role in China's national strategy to improve international transport connections so it is an excellent destination for the world's aviation industry." Mr. Zhang Kejian, Chairman of the Board, Guangdong Airport Authority, said: "The development of Guangzhou Baiyun Airport as a giant international air hub is an essential part of the national Chinese strategy to enhance the status of its civil aviation from 'large' to 'powerful'. "Taking the great opportunity of hosting World Routes 2018 will definitely improve Baiyun Airport's international connections, further boost national and regional economic and social development, enhance the core city status of Guangzhou in China, as well as promote the development of the world-class city group in the Pearl River Delta." The Guangzhou event will be the third World Routes to be held in China. Chengdu will host World Routes 2016 in September and Beijing hosted World Routes 2009. World Routes 2018, September 2018, Guangzhou, China. Notes to Editors About Routes Routes events are unique forums dedicated to the development of new air services. Five 'regional' route development forums are held between February and July in the Americas, Asia , Europe and Africa . The flagship World Routes event takes place in September. http://www.routesonline.com The events revolve around pre-scheduled meetings and an exhibition and conference which are delivered in partnership with host stakeholders. Hosts tend to be a collaboration between airports, tourism authorities and investment partners (the bidding process takes place two to three years before the event takes place). Routes is part of the EMEA division of UBM plc. For further information contact: Karen Reeves Communications & Content Marketing Manager Routes, UBM EMEA T: +44(0)161-234-2721 M: +44(0)796-6405-105 E: Karen.Reeves@ubm.com TAMPA, FL -- (Marketwired) -- 04/21/16 -- Enviro-Serv, Inc. (OTC PINK: EVSV), which targets highly profitable small service companies in the commercial and residential property maintenance industry and owner of wholly owned subsidiary Pestmaster Services -- Tampa is pleased to announce that Enviro-Serv, Inc. will be posting record setting Q1, 2016 financials by May 10th, 2016 on the OTCMARKETS.COM website. CEO Chris Trina states this to investors and shareholders, "There seemed to be a release glitch on this information yesterday morning and felt it necessary to release this great news via a different wire service. We are extremely proud of the results of our first quarter in 2016. The Pestmaster subsidiary is on a major roll whereby revenue was generated of nearly $50,000 in the first three months of this year which compares to only $10,000 same quarter a year ago. We are up almost 500% in comparison and yet our stock is trading at an all-time low which I find truly remarkable given our progress the last two quarters. Becoming a Pestmaster franchise and utilizing our funding proceeds properly last summer has given this company a much needed boost Trina exclaimed." Trina re-emphasized his comments of a few weeks ago by stating this to shareholders, "I realize our stock has been suppressed for quite some time and I truly appreciate the patience of our shareholders and investors. Even though it's impossible to predict or control the underlying stock price of EVSV I believe in my heart there is an honest to goodness disconnect of what's actually happening internally here at Enviro-Serv and our stock price at this time. Currently trading at par value (.0001) gives zero credit to the underlying stock for everything being accomplished and especially negates the amazing results of becoming a Pestmaster franchise 9 months ago. Very exciting things are happening and I fully expect the market to take notice very soon. Our new Enviro-Serv website address is www.evsvinc.com I encourage everybody to visit the new site." Enviro-Serv, Inc. (OTC PINK: EVSV) is a Tampa based corporation specializing in providing property maintenance services in geographically concentrated warm climate states. Through an aggressive acquisition strategy, the Company is building a portfolio of highly profitable enterprises that offer year round services such as pest control management, lawn and landscaping care, pool maintenance, air conditioning/refrigeration installation and repairs and a host of additional onsite maintenance offerings. Please visit our websites at www.evsvinc.com and www.pestmaster.com to learn more. Forward-Looking Statements -- This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended and such forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause future results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements. You should consider these factors in evaluating the statements herein, and not rely solely on such statements. The forward-looking statements in this release are made as of the date hereof and Enviro-Serv, Inc. undertakes no obligation to update such statements. CONTACT: CHRIS TRINA CEO Enviro-Serv, Inc. 813-708-9910 AGOURA HILLS, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/21/16 -- VAPE Holdings, Inc. (OTCQB: VAPE) (the "Company" or "VAPE"), a holding company focused on providing healthy, efficient, and sustainable vaporization products, announces success of Revival branded vaporizer's launch and new manufacturing partners for HIVE Ceramics with improved capabilities and significant cost reductions. VAPE Holdings' Revival branded vaporizer announces first orders placed by GotVape, one of the largest distributors of vaporizers and vaporization products in the country. GotVape has achieved much success, as evidenced on their social media outlets, with their sales of Revival vaporizers. Vapor Corp (VPCO) has received their initial orders of Revival as well. Revival is also in final stages of negotiation with most other major international distributors. With thousands of units sold within three months after launch, Revival is showing signs of becoming a prominent brand in the industry. VAPE Holdings is developing a REVIVAL branded clothing line focusing on simple, yet elegant designs that incorporate the refined lifestyle embraced by the brand. This line is expected to launch within 45 days on the Revival web site (www.revivalvape.com). All designs have already been finalized and manufacturing is being sourced. Revival is currently selling in 17 states and is growing rapidly. "Having so much success this soon after the brand's launch has inspired me to develop a follow-on model that will vaporize more commonly found forms of concentrates, including cannabis waxes and shatter. With our new financing partner, GHS, VAPE will have the funds available to start manufacturing this new unit as soon as it is ready," states Justin Braune, CEO of VAPE Holdings. Hive Ceramics has received initial samples from a new manufacturing partner and is in testing phase now. This new manufacturer has significantly broader capabilities including drastically reduced development time, better quality control, the ability to produce colored ceramics as well as manufacturing HIVE's new proprietary blend of next-generation vaping ceramics that promise increased durability and longevity. About VAPE Holdings, Inc. VAPE Holdings, Inc. focuses on designing, marketing, and distributing various vaporization products. The company offers medical and food grade ceramic products primarily under the HIVE Ceramics brand throughout North America, Europe and South America. HIVE offers a nonporous, non-corrosive, chemically inert ceramic vaporization element, which can be used for a range of applications, including stand-alone vaporization products and electronic cigarettes. The company is based in Agoura Hills, California. For more information on HIVE Ceramics and to visit our e-commerce site, please visit: http://www.hiveceramics.com. For more information on Revival and to visit our e-commerce site, please visit: http://www.revivalvape.com. From time to time, VAPE Holdings will provide market updates and news via its website http://www.vapeholdings.com/ or the Company's Facebook page at http://on.fb.me/1d5c7iO. Cautionary Language Concerning Forward-Looking Statements This release contains "forward-looking statements" that include information relating to future events and future financial and operating performance. The words "may," "would," "will," "expect," "estimate," "can," "believe," "potential" and similar expressions and variations thereof are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements should not be read as a guarantee of future performance or results, and will not necessarily be accurate indications of the times at, or by, which that performance or those results will be achieved. Forward-looking statements are based on information available at the time they are made and/or management's good faith belief as of that time with respect to future events, and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual performance or results to differ materially from those expressed in or suggested by the forward-looking statements. Important factors that could cause these differences include, but are not limited to: fluctuations in demand for VAPE Holdings' products, the introduction of new products, the Company's ability to maintain customer and strategic business relationships, the impact of competitive products and pricing, growth in targeted markets, the adequacy of the Company's liquidity and financial strength to support its growth, and other information that may be detailed from time-to-time in VAPE Holdings' filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Examples of such forward-looking statements in this release include statements regarding future sales, costs and market acceptance of products as well as regulatory actions at the State or Federal level. For a more detailed description of the risk factors and uncertainties affecting VAPE Holdings please refer to the Company's Securities and Exchange Commission filings, which are available at www.sec.gov. VAPE Holdings undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Contact: Investor Relations: Marcus Laun info@growthcircle.com (888) 518-3274 WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Iron Mountain Inc. (IRM) Thursday announced that the Federal Court of Australia has approved its proposed acquisition of Recall Holdings Ltd. Pursuant to the terms of the Scheme Implementation Deed, Iron Mountain's board has appointed Neil Chatfield, and Wendy Murdock to serve as directors of Iron Mountain, effective upon the close of the Transaction. The Transaction is expected to close on May 2. Iron Mountain has entered into a commitment letter with JPMorgan Chase Bank for an unsecured bridge term loan facility of up to $850 million. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/21/16 -- Gold Jubilee Capital Corp. (TSX VENTURE: GJB) ("Gold Jubilee"), is pleased to announce that, further to its news release dated April 5th, 2016, more technical details on the Deli Jovan North property for which Gold Jubilee recently signed a non-binding letter of intent (the "LOI") with Appalachian Resources Balkan doo ("ARB") to earn a 100% interest in ARB's rights, title and interest in the Deli Jovan North property in the Republic of Serbia (the "Property"). The Property consists of a single mineral exploration permit, covering over 99.89 km2 (9,989 hectares). It is located approximately 10 km from the active Bor copper-gold mines owned by RTB Bor (Rudarsko Topionicarski Basen Bor), a state mining company. RTB Bor has been in production since 1907 and is currently producing from four active mines, located both southwest and northwest of Deli Jovan North. RTB Bor has the largest open pit copper-gold mines in Europe. The Property is also located approximately 15 km north of the Reservoir Minerals/Freeport McMoran Timok property with the Cukaru Peki deposit which is currently being advanced to a production decision. The Property is considered to be early stage exploration property; there are no historic mineral resources. The mining history in the Deli Jovan area, particularly gold mining, dates back to ancient times. Local inhabitants have shown sites of old workings. Some are claimed to date from the Roman-era. Also on the property, they showed at least three adits dating from the 1950's when ore was direct shipped to Bor. These adits have been sampled by representatives of Gold Jubilee as well as ARB. Two of the grab samples collected by Gold Jubilee returned values of 22.5% Cu, 0.65g/t Au and 98 g/t Ag as well as 15.7% Cu, 1.04 g/t Au and 52 g/t Ag. Near these adits are evidence of at least six shallow trenches and at least three drill pads from prior exploration by the Serbian National Geological Institute. The core was dumped on the property, but is no longer usable. The project can obtain the rights to access and use this information from the exploration program when fees are paid to the government. ARB sampled a number of these mineralized veins with results of nearly 15% copper with associated results in gold, silver and molybdenum. Some of the grab sample results from that exploration are summarized in Table 1. Table 2 - ARB Grab Samples 2013 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sample number Cu % Au g/t Ag g/t Mo ppm ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1924 4.95 1.10 92 935 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1925 14.75 2.0 142 3300 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1926 14.55 1.0 137 216 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1932 0.06 1.0 53 3990 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Representatives from Gold Jubilee have visited a number of the historical workings and taken grab samples of vein material from both outcrop and composite dump samples, results are contained in Table 2. Table 2 - Gold Jubilee Grab Samples 2015 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sample number Type Au g/t Cu % Ag g/t ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 0.58kg OQ201504007 Subcrop 0.11 0.73 4.4 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.33kg OQ201504006 Outcrop 1.04 8.74 55 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 0.29kg OQ201504005 Composite 0.01 0.82 / ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.69kg OQ201504004 Composite 0.67 8.14 59 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.43kg OQ201504003 Composite 0.15 0.45 / ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2.01kg OQ201504002 Composite 4.04 8.52 47.6 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.52kg OQ201504001 Composite 0.55 4.28 12.5 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- These veins appear to be tension crack fillings and are considered to be possible indications of proximity to a porphyry system. The geological and geochemical reconnaissance work done to date by ARB has identified several areas on the property that are geochemically anomalous and may represent targets for porphyry-related copper-gold mineralization. Work to date on the Deli Jovan North property by ARB has included mapping, alteration studies, and soil, rock chip and stream sediment sampling. All sampling shows positive results and have identified geologic features characteristically found in the vicinity of and adjacent to porphyry copper mineral districts, including potassic hydrothermal alteration, intrusive breccia, and vein-hosted copper-gold mineralization, of the types that are found . Based on the geologic setting and styles of mineralization on nearby properties, there is also the potential for high sulphidation epithermal and sediment hosted gold mineralization at Deli Jovan North. All results will be followed up with the next stages of exploration. ABOUT GOLD JUBILEE CAPITAL CORP. Gold Jubilee Capital Corp. (TSX VENTURE: GJB) is a Canadian-based junior exploration company comprised of highly qualified mining professionals with one active copper-gold exploration project, the Pyramid project, located in northwestern British Columbia. BY ORDER OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS George Cavey, P.Geo, Vice President, Exploration and Director For further information, please contact Gold Jubilee at (604) 684-4691, email Mike Devji at mike.devji@goldjubilee.ca or visit our SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. This News Release may contain forward-looking statements including but not limited to comments regarding the timing and content of upcoming work programs, geological interpretations, receipt of property titles, potential mineral recovery processes, execution of the Option, the making of cash payments and share payments, obtaining TSX-V approval, etc. Forward-looking statements address future events and conditions and therefore involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements and Gold Jubilee undertakes no obligation to update such statements, except as required by law. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Contacts: Investor Relations Contact KIN Communications Roger Blair (604) 684-6730 gjb@kincommunications.com VANCOUVER, CANADA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/21/16 -- Flinders Resources Limited ("Flinders" or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE: FDR) is pleased to announce that graphene has been produced for the first time using graphite concentrate from the Company's Woxna mine in Sweden. In the Company's news release of September 21 2015 the Company outlined its action plan with respect to participation in Svenskt Grafen ("Swedish Graphene") a Swedish government initiative for the production of graphene from Swedish sourced graphite. Following is an update on the Company's graphene project. Key points: -- Woxna concentrate has now been processed into graphene by 2D Fab AB (figure 1). The test work was completed at bench scale test levels at the 2D Fab AB facilities in Sweden. Flinders' partner in "Swedish Graphene" is 2D Fab AB ("2D Fab"), a company spin-off from Mittuniversitetet (Mid Sweden University). -- In 2015, Svenskt Grafen ("Swedish Graphene"), a 2-year, SEK 2.4M (US$0.28M) project to investigate Woxna's Swedish flake graphite, and its suitability to produce graphene on an industrial scale was selected as one of the new projects supported by SIO Grafen (see Flinders' news release dated 21 September 2015). Blair Way, President & CEO of Flinders, states, "Flinders is very pleased with the progress made to date working with our Swedish associates at 2D Fab AB. To actually see Woxna graphene is a very satisfying achievement. We have the necessary components to investigate the commercialisation of graphene, from Woxna concentrate, for high technology applications." Sven Forsberg, founder and managing director of 2D Fab AB, states, "The large size of natural graphite flakes in Woxna concentrate, combined with a gentle energy efficient exfoliation process, are the keys to producing customer tailored, molecular thick graphene, with superior electrical conductivity and barrier properties. Additionally, the potential competitive advantage for these graphene products is that the graphitic raw material comes from a sustainable EU source." Graphene was produced using 2D Fab's proprietary low environmental footprint manufacturing technology which utilises a low energy, hydro-mechanical exfoliation process to produce high conductivity graphene (Figure 1). This process is more energy efficient and less destructive to the final graphene product, compared to other hydro-mechanical exfoliation processes, such as rotary dispersers and ultrasonic treatments. Woxna graphene films produced using 2D Fab's technology have demonstrated sheet resistance below 1.6 Ohms/sq, which is lower sheet resistance than obtained from graphene, produced from graphite, by other methods at 2D Fab's facilities with the same film thickness. A key contributor to the low resistance is that the graphene produced is large and up to 40 microns in two dimensions. Flinders and its partners, in collaboration with end users, are ensuring the graphene meets specific customer requirements. Early applications for graphene include electrodes in energy storage, barriers in plastics, conductive inks and coatings and different types of composites. The Woxna project has never defined a mineral reserve and the previous preliminary economic assessment on Woxna dated October 29, 2013, has been superseded by the Company's current technical report dated May 11, 2015. As the Woxna facility is not in production but remains on a production ready status, any future decision to recommence mining at Woxna will not be based on a preliminary economic assessment demonstrating the potential viability of mineral resources or feasibility study of mineral reserves demonstrating economic and technical viability. Under these circumstances, there is increased risk of technical and economic failure for the Woxna project, and the Company discloses additional risk factors relating thereto. The Company advises that it has not based its production decision on a feasibility study of mineral reserves, demonstrating economic and technical viability, and, as a result, there may be an increased uncertainty of achieving any particular level of recovery of minerals or the cost of such recovery, including increased risks associated with developing a commercially mineable deposit. Historically, such projects have a much higher risk of economic and technical failure. There is no guarantee that production will begin as anticipated or at all or that anticipated production costs will be achieved. Failure to commence production would have a material adverse impact on the Company's ability to generate revenue and cash flow to fund operations. Failure to achieve any anticipated production costs would have a material adverse impact on the Company's cash flow and future profitability. Mineral resources that are not mineral reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability. The estimate of mineral resources may be materially affected by environmental, permitting, legal, title, socio-political, marketing or other relevant issues. The qualified person as defined in National Instrument 43-101 for the Woxna project, Blair Way, President and Chief Executive Officer and a director of the Company, and a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, has reviewed and verified the contents of this release. On behalf of the Board, Blair Way, President and CEO About Flinders Resources Flinders Resources is the 100% owner of the Woxna graphite mine and processing facility located in Sweden. The fully permitted Woxna facility was restarted in July 2014 and able to produce up to 11,000 tons per annum of natural flake graphite concentrate. The Woxna processing facility is currently in a "production ready" status until improved graphite prices return. This allows the company to conserve working capital and work on value adding initiatives for the processing facility. Flinders Resources is working closely with technical partners to define the modifications to the current processing plant to enable production of high purity value added products to supply the emerging battery cell manufacturing market. About 2D Fab AB 2D Fab AB is a spin-off from the Mid Sweden University, refining the technology to produce graphene from graphite. The technology is scalable and can be quickly scaled up to produce large quantities of graphene. http://2dfab.se/en/partners-2/ About SIO Graphen The Swedish Vinnova funded a three-year, SEK 54M (US$6.4M) initiative "SIO grafen" to promote graphene innovations at the national level. The goals of SIO Graphen are to increase the technical maturity of the graphene, and establish graphene as a new class of materials for solving future challenges and to strengthen the transfer of knowledge between different industries and between companies, universities and institutes. The program will establish Sweden as one of the leading innovative countries in the graph, develop and introduce new value chains and enable Swedish graph-based products reach the market by 2017. It is funded in part by VINNOVA, Formas and the Swedish Energy Agency and operated out of Chalmers Technical University's Graphene Center. http://siografen.se/about-sio-grafen/ About Chalmers Graphene Center The Graphene Centre at Chalmers gathers research, education and innovation related to graphene under one common umbrella. This provides a way to have synergies between multiple graphene projects at the same time as it creates an environment that attracts researchers, students and cooperation partners. Work is ongoing to systematically analyse research results and assets at Chalmers, to detail the areas of strength and future focus and to identify possible collaborations including alignment/synergy with the Graphene Flagship. http://www.chalmers.se/en/centres/graphene/organisation/Pages/default.aspx About the Graphene Flagship Program The Graphene Flagship is the EU's biggest ever research initiative. In 2013, the European Union ("EU") launched the Graphene Flagship Project, a ten-year, EUR1 billion (US$1.1B) project to research graphene commercialization. Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden, is the project leader and coordinator; The Chalmers activities and its Graphene Center located in Gothenburg provides opportunities for links between the Swedish and European partners. http://graphene-flagship.eu/ To view Figure 1 , visit the following link: http://media3.marketwire.com/docs/Flinders_Resources_Limited_Figure_1_001.jpg Forward-Looking Information Certain information in this news release may constitute forward-looking statements or forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws (collectively, "Forward-Looking Statements"). All statements, other than statements of historical fact that address activities, events or developments that the Company believes, expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future are Forward-Looking Statements. Forward-Looking Statements are often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as "seek," "anticipate," "believe," "plan," "estimate," "expect," and "intend" and statements that an event or result "may," "will," "can," "should," "could," or "might" occur or be achieved and other similar expressions. Forward-Looking Statements are based upon the opinions and expectations of the Company based on information currently available to the Company. Forward-Looking Statements are subject to a number of factors, risks and uncertainties that may cause the actual results of the Company to differ materially from those discussed in the Forward-Looking Statements including, among other things, the Company has yet to generate a profit from its activities; there can be no guarantee that the estimates of quantities or qualities of minerals disclosed in the Company's public record will be economically recoverable; uncertainties relating to the availability and costs of financing needed in the future; competition with other companies within the mining industry; the success of the Company is largely dependent upon the performance of its directors and officers and the Company's ability to attract and train key personnel; changes in world metal markets and equity markets beyond the Company's control; mineral resources are, in the large part, estimates and no assurance can be given that the anticipatedtonnages and grades will be achieved or that the indicated level of recovery will be realized; production rates and capital and other costs may vary significantly from estimates; changes in corporate goals and strategies, the Company's preliminary economic assessment is no longer current or valid and the Company has no plans to complete a new preliminary economic assessment, a pre-feasibility or feasibility study on the project, as a result there is an increased risk of technical and economic failure for the Woxna graphite project; unexpected geological conditions; delays in obtaining or failure to obtain necessary permits and approvals from government authorities; all phases of a mining business present environmental and safety risks and hazards and are subject to environmental and safety regulation, and rehabilitation and restitution costs; the Company does not maintain insurance against environmental risks; and management of the Company have experience in mineral exploration but may lack all or some of the necessary technical training and experience to successfully develop and operate a mine. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in the Forward-Looking Statements, and the assumptions on which such Forward-Looking Statements are made, are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on Forward-Looking Statements, as there can be no assurance that the plans, intentions or expectations upon which the Forward-Looking Statements are based will occur. Forward-Looking Statements herein are made as at the date hereof, and unless otherwise required by law, the Company does not intend, or assume any obligation, to update these Forward-Looking Statements. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or the accuracy of this news release. Contacts: Flinders Resources Limited +1 604 685 9316 info@flindersresources.com SHANGHAI, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Health Industry Summit (tHIS) 2016 opened in Shanghai at the National Exhibition and Convention Center on April17. Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160421/358198 The organizer posted a record 380,000 entry scans, 216,784 professional visitors and more than 55,000 exhibiting staff to the venue overfour days. In preparation of the large concentration of visitors, the city of Shanghai initiated its municipal level security mechanism and increased the frequency of the subway to divert the large crowds and dense traffic to the venue. Hotels were also fully booked in Shanghai during the event period. Only in its second edition, tHIS has already been firmly established as the world's largest health industry event with over 330,000 square meters of exhibition spaceand 107 individual conferences. Key events include China's three top medical equipment and pharmaceutical exhibitions (CMEF, PHARMCHINA and API China) and the leading healthcare investment forum- Healthcare China 2016. This year's investment forum was co-organised by Reed Sinopharm, JP Morgan Asset management, CICC and Sinopharm Capital and was attended by more than 700 selected investors and institutions. The exhibition featured the entire industry value chain and presented some of the latest cutting edge technology including genetic diagnostics, rehabilitation robotics, wearable tech, 3D printing and more. 6,900 exhibiting companies from 30 countries were at the show presenting tens of thousands of products and services. Well-known healthcare equipment giants like GE, United Imaging, Siemens , Philips andMindray as well as major pharmaceutical groups in China like Sinopharm, Shanghai Pharma andCR Pharmaceuticals were in attendance with major stand presence. Natural Health and Nutrition Expo were among the fastest growing segments in the portfolio, helped by the expected population boom in light of the reversal of the single child policy as well as a growing health conscious middle class in China. With the start of China's 13th Five-year plan in 2016, the "Health China 2020" program focusing on the co-development of healthcare, pharmaceutical production and health insurance has put thehealth industry among the top priorities for development in China and part of the national strategy. Companies in China not traditionally associated with healthcare have also shifted major investment and resources into the sector, many renaming their company in the process to reflect this focus in industry coverage. International giants with the likes Alibaba, Lenovo, Fosun andWanda Group have alltaken a footholdinto key segments of the industry in anticipation of major opportunities in the future. The Health Industry Summit is organized by Reed Sinopharm, a joint venture between the world's leading event organizer Reed Exhibitions and China's leading state-owned pharmaceutical group Sinopharm. Its next edition will be held in May 2017 in Shanghai. PETERSBURG, VA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/21/16 -- Pamplin Historical Park, founded and owned by Dr. Robert B. Pamplin Jr., invites children to continue learning and exploring beyond the school year at its 424-acre Civil War history park. The park offers customized guides and activities for young visitors across the park's two award-winning museums, four antebellum homes and living history venues. "Successfully engaging younger learners in a historical experience is one of the park's specialties," said Dr. Pamplin. "Through our Discovery Program, our goal is to approach children on their terms and lead them into fun and interesting activities throughout the park." The Discovery Program, aimed at children ages eight to 13, begins at the museum gallery. Here, they are introduced to Delevan Miller, a 13-year-old drummer boy who served with the 2nd New York Heavy Artillery Regiment. Outfitted with personal MP3 players, children hear Miller's actual words as he describes his experiences in the Civil War. They also hear a special gallery narration scripted for children. At the Military Encampment, children can enter The Discovery Hut and sample Civil War uniforms and period clothing that is just their size. They can also try their hand at interactive computer kiosks in the Battlefield Center that feature learning games and quizzes based on what they have seen at the park. Kids from across the country have enjoyed Pamplin Historical Park for years. For more details on the park's Discovery Program visit http://www.pamplinpark.org/children.html or call (804) 861-2408. The park, including the Discovery Program, is open daily from 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. About Pamplin Historical Park One of "Virginia's Best Places to Visit" according to the Travel Channel and designated as a National Historic Landmark, Pamplin Historical Park & The National Museum of the Civil War Soldier is a 424-acre Civil War campus located in Dinwiddie County, Va., offering a combination of high-tech museums and hands-on experiences. The park has four world-class museums and four antebellum homes. The park is also the site of the Breakthrough battle of April 2, 1865, and America's premier participatory experience, Civil War Adventure Camp. For more information, please call 804-861-2408 or visit www.pamplinpark.org. About Robert B. Pamplin Jr. Robert B. Pamplin Jr. has earned eight degrees -- including two doctorates -- in business, economics, accounting, education and theology. He has been honored nationally as a businessman, philanthropist, ordained minister, educator, historical preservationist and author of 16 books and comic books, including two book-of-the-month club selections. Pamplin's business interests include media (the Portland Tribune and 25 community newspapers), textiles, construction and agriculture. He has been awarded many honorary degrees and featured in national magazines, in newspapers and on television. He has served on presidential and state commissions, and he has been chairman of the board of trustees of three colleges. Pamplin is widely recognized as America's leading historical preservationist and foremost diversified entrepreneur. For more information, visit www.pamplin.org. Contact: Wendy Lane Stevens 503-546-7897 wendy@lanepr.com BRUSSELS (dpa-AFX) - At 9 am ET Thursday, the Federal House Finance Agency will release its U.S. house price index for February. Economists expect the index to have risen 0.4 percent month-over-month. Ahead of the data, the greenback traded mixed against its major rivals. While the greenback held steady against the yen, it dropped against the rest of major rivals. The greenback was worth 1.1370 against the euro, 1.4426 against the pound, 109.71 against the yen and 0.9660 against the franc as of 8:55 am ET. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. TDC will conduct a conference call for institutional investors and financial analysts on May 4, 2016 at 14.30 CET to present the Q1 2016 results.Pernille Erenbjerg, Chief Executive Officer, will comment on the results and answer questions during the conference call.The investor and analyst conference will be held in English and will also be available as a webcast at tdc.com/ir/Investors and financial analysts can register for the telephone conference on the following link:http://event.onlineseminarsolutions.com/r.htm?e=1173388&s=1&k=A30EC66BB9398E5C54 D68FEE2C9AC422Registration for this event will enable us to provide you with faster and more efficient service. When you have completed registration, you will receive an online and e-mail confirmation. Your confirmation will include the details for the conference call such as dial-in number, an event passcode and PIN that will ensure your secure access on the day of the event.The conference call will refer to a slide deck that will be available on the link: tdc.com/ir/ from May 4, 2016 at approx. 12.00 CET. Participants wishing to derive full benefit from the conference call should obtain these slides in due time before the conference call begins.Please note that there might be a time lag between the webcast and the conference call if you are simultaneously watching and calling in to the conference.TDC A/S Teglholmsgade 1 0900 Copenhagen C DK-Denmark tdc.com Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. PALO ALTO, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/21/16 -- Adaptive Insights, the leader in cloud corporate performance management (CPM), today announced it has opened two new data centers in Australia located in Sydney and Melbourne. The new locations allow Adaptive Insights to respond to the data center residency requirements of the region, while providing increased capacity for the company's growing customer base in Australia and New Zealand. Adaptive Insights already has a significant presence in the region, with over 150 customers across a wide range of vertical market segments including food, utilities, education, government, professional services, nonprofit and health. The new data centers expand the company's global data center network, which currently has locations in the United States, Canada and Europe. "As more and more customers embrace corporate performance management software, we continue to expand and adapt our organization to the needs of our 3000+ global customers," said Robert S. Hull, founder and chairman of Adaptive Insights. "With these new data centers, Adaptive Insights continues to demonstrate its longstanding commitment to the Australia and New Zealand markets and lays a foundation for continued strong growth in the region." Adaptive Insights currently has offices in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane and a network of partners throughout Australia and New Zealand. "Establishing in-country data centers enables our government customers to continue to leverage the industry's leading CPM software and remain in compliance with recent regulations governing data," said Greg Clarke, CEO of ABM, an Adaptive Insights reseller based in Sydney. "More important, it allows us to continue to expand access to this critical financial planning and analysis platform so that companies across Australia and New Zealand can maximize the performance of their businesses." Adaptive Insights' prominent customer base in the region includes Cochlear, a provider of implantable hearing solutions; Roy Hill, an iron ore mining project; and Thiess, an integrated engineering and services provider. New customers include Bellamy Organic, Australia's leading producer of organic baby food; and Trustpower, a leading power and telecommunications company in New Zealand. Adaptive Insights Adaptive Insights is the leader in cloud corporate performance management (CPM). Via its software as a service (SaaS) platform, the company offers capabilities for budgeting, forecasting, reporting, consolidation, dashboards, and analytics that empower finance, sales, and other business leaders with insight to drive true competitive advantage. The Adaptive Suite is sold direct or is available through Adaptive Insights' robust cloud CPM channel ecosystem of 200+ partners, including Accenture, Armanino, BDO, Cohn Reznick, Intacct, KPMG, McGladrey, Plex Systems, and Workday. NetSuite also offers Adaptive Planning as its NetSuite Financial Planning Module. More than 3,000 companies in 85 countries use Adaptive Insights. These range from midsized companies and nonprofits to large corporations, including AAA, Boston Scientific, CORT, Epcor, Konica Minolta, NetSuite, Philips, P.F. Chang's, and Siemens. Adaptive Insights is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. For more information, visit www.AdaptiveInsights.com, the Adaptive Insights Blog, and follow Adaptive Insights on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Contacts: Diane Orr Adaptive Insights 650-422-7334 dorr@adaptiveinsights.com Bill Rundle Highwire PR 415-963-4174 ext.31 adaptiveinsights@highwirepr.com SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - April 21, 2016) - The Bay Area Building Industry Association recently honored Meritage Homes Corporation with the coveted "Builder of the Year Over 200 Units" award. The leading U.S. homebuilder was repeatedly recognized during the Excellence in Home Building Awards Dinner held April 8 at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis. The highly competitive Excellence in Home Building Awards recognize the industry's most outstanding building, sales, marketing, and trade professionals who have distinguished themselves by working to deliver their best each day for the betterment of the industry. "We are honored to be named as one of the best homebuilders by the Bay Area Building Industry Association," said Barry Grant, Northern California Division President at Meritage Homes. "We closed 26 percent more homes in the Bay Area last year than we did in 2014, despite the challenges of working through one of the most constrained labor markets in history. This prestigious award is an affirmation of the team's hard work, collaboration and commitment to excellence." Meritage Homes also won "Purchasing Team of the Year" award and "Escrow Coordinator of the Year." "What makes an evening of this nature so satisfying is the incredible mix of individual honors and group awards that Meritage received," continued Grant. "We are proud of the team for their dedication and well-deserved recognition." About Meritage Homes Meritage Homes is the seventh-largest public homebuilder in the United States, based on homes closed in 2015. Meritage Homes builds and sells single-family homes for first-time, move-up, luxury and active adult buyers across the Western, Southern and Southeastern United States. Meritage Homes builds in markets including: Sacramento, San Francisco Bay area, southern coastal and Inland Empire markets in California; Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Austin and San Antonio, Texas; Phoenix/Scottsdale, Green Valley and Tucson, Arizona; Denver and Fort Collins, Colorado; Orlando, Tampa and south Florida; Raleigh and Charlotte, North Carolina; Greenville-Spartanburg and York County, South Carolina; Nashville, Tennessee; and Atlanta, Georgia. Meritage Homes has designed and built more than 90,000 homes in its 30-year history, and has a reputation for its distinctive style, quality construction, and positive customer experience. Meritage Homes is the industry leader in energy-efficient homebuilding and has received the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year for Sustained Excellence Award in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 for innovation and industry leadership in energy efficient homebuilding. For more information, visit meritagehomes.com. For more information, visit www.meritagehomes.com. Image Available: http://www.marketwire.com/library/MwGo/2016/4/20/11G094371/Images/MeritageHomes_TheHeartlandEstates_GilroyCA-16e8c5e7044587a39992cc019cbc9593.jpg Contact: Vanessa Diaz 707.359.2023 vanessa.diaz@meritagehomes.com WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - In a major breakthrough in the fight against the Islamic State, Iraqi forces regained control of the key city of Hit, while a 'tough fight' remains in the Tigris River Valley. 'Last week in the Euphrates River Valley, Iraqi security forces tore Hit from ISIL's grasp and gave it back to the Iraqi people. Hit is liberated,' Army Col. Steve Warren, the spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, told Pentagon reporters in a teleconference from Baghdad Wednesday. Clearing Hit disrupts the ability of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant to move foreign fighters and supplies into the Euphrates River Valley, and it sets the stage for future offensive operations, the colonel said. Warren highlighted the close coordination between the Iraqi army, the Iraqi counter terrorism service and Sunni tribal forces. The operational achievements in the fight are a direct result of the coalition's commitment to train and equip partner forces, Warren said. In the Tigris River Valley, Iraqi forces repelled several coordinated attacks. 'Iraqi security forces continue to consolidate and improve their defensive positions while continuing to increase their combat power,' Warren said. In other developments, U.S. forces on Sunday conducted a raid that targeted Suleiman Abd Shabib al-Jabouri, a ISIL military emir and war council member. 'His removal will degrade ISIL leadership's network, and impact its ability to coordinate attacks and defend ISIL strong holds,' Warren said. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - For the first time in more than a century, the front of a U.S. currency note will feature the portrait of a woman - abolitionist Harriet Tubman. The celebrated anti-slavery activist will also be the first African-American to appear on U.S. currency - the redesigned $20 bill. In an open letter to fellow Americans on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced plans to create new design concepts for the $20, $10, and $5 notes. The front of the new $20 will feature a portrait of Tubman, who escaped from slavery and helped other slaves reach freedom as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. She was also active in the Union cause during the Civil War. Tubman will replace former President Andrew Jackson, who will be pushed to the reverse of the new bill, which will also display an image of the White House. The announcement from Lew came as somewhat of a surprise, as a new portrait was expected to replace Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill rather than replace Jackson on the $20 bill. Lew said Hamilton, a Founding Father and the nation's first Treasury Secretary, will remain on the front of the $10. However, the reverse of the new $10 will feature images of leaders of the women's suffrage movement, including Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul. The decision to leave Hamilton on the front of the $10 has partly been attributed to the popularity of the Broadway musical 'Hamilton.' Lew also revealed that a new $5 bill will honor historic events that occurred at the Lincoln Memorial and feature Martin Luther King, Jr., Marian Anderson, and Eleanor Roosevelt. The front of the new $5 will retain the portrait of President Abraham Lincoln. The Treasury Department has directed the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to accelerate plans to redesign the notes of these denominations. Lew said that final concept designs for the new $20, $10, and $5 notes will be unveiled in 2020 in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote. (Photo Credit: Library of Congress) Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de 21 April 2016 Acacia Mining plc ("Acacia" or the "Company") Registration number 7123187 Results of voting at 2016 annual general meeting The Annual General Meeting of Acacia was held on 21 April 2016. As at the date of the annual general meeting, the total number of issued Ordinary Shares was 410,085,499. Therefore, the total number of votes exercisable at the meeting was 410,085,499. The full text of the resolutions proposed at the annual general meeting was set out in the notice of annual general meeting dated16 March 2016. All resolutions at the meeting were put to Acacia's shareholders on a poll. The final voting figures of the poll as certified by the scrutineers, Computershare Investor Services PLC, were as follows: Total votes cast For (*) % Against(*) % Vote withheld(**) Ordinary Resolutions 1 Approval of the audited annual accounts for the Company for the financial year ended 31 December 2015, together with the Directors' Report and the Auditors' Reports. 376,901,956 376,146,298 99.80 755,658 0.20 82,153 2 Approval of the Directors' Remuneration Report for the financial year ended 31 December 2015. 376,981,942 375,223,500 99.53 1,758,442 0.47 2,167 3 Declaration and approval of a final dividend of US 2.8 cents per Ordinary Share, for the year ended 31 December 2015. 376,984,109 376,984,109 100.00 0 0.00 0 4 Election of Kelvin Dushnisky as a Director (non-executive) of the Company. 376,980,591 375,196,934 99.53 1,783,657 0.47 3,518 5 Election of Bradley ("Brad") Gordon as a Director (executive) of the Company. 376,980,591 376,666,047 99.92 314,544 0.08 3,518 6 Election of Ambassador Mwapachu as a Director (independent non-executive) of the Company. 376,980,591 375,996,033 99.74 984,558 0.26 3,518 7 Election of Rachel English as a Director (independent non-executive) of the Company. 376,980,591 376,666,047 99.92 314,544 0.08 3,518 8 Election of Andre Falzon as a Director (independent non-executive) of the Company. 376,980,591 376,249,055 99.81 731,536 0.19 3,518 9 Election of Michael Kenyon as a Director (independent non-executive) of the Company. 376,980,591 376,666,047 99.92 314,544 0.08 3,518 10 Election of Steve Lucas as a Director (independent non-executive) of the Company. 376,980,591 376,666,047 99.92 314,544 0.08 3,518 11 Election of Peter Tomsett as a Director (independent non-executive) of the Company. 376,980,591 376,666,047 99.92 314,544 0.08 3,518 12 Election of Stephen Galbraith as a Director (non-executive) of the Company. 376,980,591 376,341,047 99.83 639,544 0.17 3,518 13 Re-appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as auditors of the Company (the "Auditors") to hold office until the conclusion of the next general meeting of the Company at which the accounts are laid before the Company. 376,566,666 376,564,386 100.00 2,280 0.00 417,443 14 Grant of authorisation to the audit committee of the Company to agree the remuneration of the Auditors. 376,982,417 376,708,574 99.93 273,843 0.07 1,692 15 Grant of authority to the Directors, generally and unconditionally pursuant to Section 551 of the Companies Act 2006 (the "Act") to exercise all powers of the Company to allot shares in the Company or to grant rights to subscribe for or to convert any security into shares in the Company up to an aggregate nominal amount of 13,532,821, and up to a further nominal amount of 13,532,821 in connection with a rights issue, provided that this authority shall expire on the date of the Company's next annual general meeting or 30 June 2017, whichever is earlier. 376,984,067 376,469,774 99.86 514,293 0.14 42 Special resolutions 16 Grant of authority to the Directors of the Company pursuant to Section 570 of the Act to allot equity securities (within the meaning of Section 560 of the Act) wholly for cash as if Section 561 (1) of the Act did not apply (a) in connection with a pre-emptive offer or rights issue or (b) otherwise up to an aggregate nominal value of 4,100,854. This authority shall expire when the authority to allot referred to above expires. 376,984,067 375,626,106 99.64 1,357,961 0.36 42 17 Grant of authority to the Company for the purpose of Section 701 of the Act to make market purchases (as defined in Section 693 (4) of that Act) of Ordinary Shares each in the capital of the Company, subject to satisfying certain conditions and provided that the authority shall expire at the conclusion of the Company's next annual general meeting, or 30 June 2017, whichever is earlier. 376,712,524 376,370,565 99.91 341,959 0.09 271,585 18 Grant of authority to the Company to call a general meeting other than an annual general meeting on not less than 14 clear days' notice, provided that facilities are available to shareholders to vote by electronic means for meetings called at such notice. 376,982,416 363,180,858 96.34 13,801,558 3.66 1,692 VOTES OF INDEPDNDENT SHAREHOLDERS (EXCLUDING THE VOTING INTERESTS OF BARRICK GOLD CORPORATION AND ITS ASSOCIATES AS CONTROLLING SHAREHOLDER) ON THE RESOLUTIONS FOR THE ELECTION OF THE INDEPENDENT NON-EXECUTIVE DIRECTORS Ordinary resolutions: Total votes cast For (*) % Against(*) % Vote withheld(**) 6 Election of Ambassador Mwapachu as a Director (independent non-executive) of the Company. 114,733,641 113,749,083 99.14 984,558 0.86 3,518 7 Election of Rachel English as a Director (independent non-executive) of the Company. 114,733,641 114,419,097 99.73 314,544 0.27 3,518 8 Election of Andre Falzon as a Director (independent non-executive) of the Company. 114,733,641 114,002,105 99.36 731,536 0.64 3,518 9 Election of Michael Kenyon as a Director (independent non-executive) of the Company. 114,733,641 114,419,097 99.73 314,544 0.27 3,518 10 Election of Steve Lucas as a Director (independent non-executive) of the Company. 114,733,641 114,419,097 99.73 314,544 0.27 3,518 11 Election of Peter Tomsett as a Director (independent non-executive) of the Company. 114,733,641 114,419,097 99.73 314,544 0.27 3,518 (*) Includes discretionary votes (**) A vote withheld is not a vote in law and is not counted in the calculation of the proportion of votes for and against a resolution. ENQUIRIES For further information contact: Acacia Mining plc +44 (0)207 129 7150 Giles Blackham, Investor Relations Manager This announcement is for information purposes only and does not constitute an invitation or offer to underwrite, subscribe for or otherwise acquire or dispose of any securities of ABG in any jurisdiction. WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - The U.S. Air Force's B-52 Stratofortress bomber, which was deployed for strikes against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria earlier this month, conducted its first mission Monday. It targeted an ISIL weapons storage facility in Qayyarah, Iraq, said Col. Steve Warren, the spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, in a teleconference with Pentagon reporters from Baghdad Wednesday. The B-52 will conduct the 'same type of precision strikes that we've seen for the last 20 months here in this theater,' the spokesman said. Vetted Syrian opposition forces continue to clash with ISIL along the Mara Line, Warren said. He described the situation as a 'shoving match' over the Manbij pocket. 'We will continue to pressure ISIL but we expect them to fight hard to hold their ground,' he said. Warren said the area is strategically important, explaining that sealing it off will cut ISIL's final line of communication and supply line between Turkey and Syria. The situation in the area has become a 'fairly fluid and dynamic fight,' according to Warren. Warren commended the actions of U.S. Army Capt. Bradley Grimm, who is assigned to Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve in Iraq. Grimm provided actionable intelligence about a bomb threat against a school in Denmark, Warren said. For his exceptional actions, Denmark honored the officer with the Danish Defense Medal for Special Meritorious Effort. 'The information he provided helped to foil the plot and resulted in an arrest and the confiscation of explosives,' Warren said, adding that 'Brad's work likely saved the lives of Danish citizens.' Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de LONDON, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --Tyco International receives top honor out of 14 companies that ABI Research, the leader in transformative technology innovation market intelligence, ranks as leaders in the retail customer analytics space. The report evaluates each company on 13 parameters across two overall categories: innovation and implementation. Irisys, Nomi, and Tyco International received the top three slots for implementation, while Vizualize, RetailNext, and Tyco International ranked highest for overall innovation. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20151014/276887LOGO "Tyco International has one of the most innovative solutions available today," says Patrick Connolly, Principal Analyst at ABI Research. "Its acquisition of ShopperTrak and FootFall, and subsequent launch of its Synergy product, significantly boosts its market share, combined with one of the most innovative solutions available today.It is one of the first companies to truly address the need to integrate different retail technologies and bring new capabilities and ROI to retailers." The other two major players in this market, Nomi and Irisys, both built out strong market share after developing innovative technologies. To stay on top, ABI Research suggests both companies now look to the future and begin to work with new technologies and analytics tools. The competitive analysis also includes three Wi-Fi startups this year: Euclid, Purple, and Walkbase. All created powerful analytics platforms and, because of this, demonstrated strong growth in 2015. Both Purple and Walkbase also offer their own low-cost Wi-Fi analytics beacons that help improve accuracy and lower implementation cost. Additionally, Vizualize and Shopperception received strong scores in the innovation category for their work on next-generation 3D sensing technologies. Vizualize, specifically, now offers a range of in-depth analytics tools that provide metrics that extend far beyond mere people counting. "Countwise is another company with a strong portfolio of analytics tools that continues to evolve," concludes Connolly. "If its new innovations can deliver, Countwise, Vizualize, Shopperception and like-minded innovators could see a significant increase in deployments as retailers look to bring internet analytics to the brick and mortar space." These findings are part of ABI Research's Location Technologies Service (https://www.abiresearch.com/market-research/service/location-technologies/), which includes research reports, market data, insights, and competitive assessments. About ABI Research For more than 25 years, ABI Research has stood at the forefront of technology market intelligence, partnering with innovative business leaders to implement informed, transformative technology decisions. The company employs a global team of senior analysts to provide comprehensive research and consulting services through deep quantitative forecasts, qualitative analyses and teardown services. An industry pioneer, ABI Research is proactive in its approach, frequently uncovering ground-breaking business cycles ahead of the curve and publishing research 18 to 36 months in advance of other organizations. In all, the company covers more than 60 services, spanning 11 technology sectors. For more information, visit www.abiresearch.com. According to Technavio's latest report, the global plastic surgery products market is expected to exceed USD 15 billion by 2020, growing at a CAGR of over 9% during the forecast period. The global plastic surgery market growth is directly proportional to the rise in the population of older adults. Many individuals, including people aged 60 and above, undergo cosmetic surgeries to appear younger. Research studies by the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery report that dermal fillers, Botox injections, breast implants, dental implants, and other aesthetic products have substantial demand worldwide. According to Barath Palada, lead analyst at Technavio for orthopedics and general medical devices research, "Studies also report that countries such as Brazil, the US, and Venezuela account for the highest sales and use of plastic surgery products." In this report, Technavio covers the present scenario and growth prospects of theglobal plastic surgery products marketfrom2016-2020.The report also presents the vendor landscape and a corresponding detailed analysis of the top six vendors operating in the market. The market is segmented into the following three regions: Americas EMEA APAC Americas: rise in aging population to boost growth The plastic surgery products market in the Americas is likely reach to exceed USD 8 billion by 2020, growing at a CAGR of almost 9%. The Americas dominated the global plastic surgery products market in 2015, with North America being the major revenue contributor. Research studies reported that medical facilities in the US performed more than 11 million surgical and non-surgical aesthetic procedures in 2014. The population of people aged 60 and above is on the rise in the Americas. People of this age group are susceptible to age-related issues such as wrinkles, scars, and acne. Some people opt for cosmetic surgeries to treat these issues. Thus, the rise in the population of older adults will increase the demand for cosmetic surgeries, particularly for minimal and non-invasive surgical procedures. The sales of injectables and implants in North America will increase steadily, as people in this region are increasingly opting for treatments involving the use of Botox, facial dermal fillers, and breast implants. The International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons estimated that medical facilities in the US, Brazil, and Mexico performed the highest number of breast implant procedures in 2013 compared to other regions. "The demand for medical laser systems in the areas of dermatology, ophthalmology, and dentistry is high, and these systems receive rapid regulatory approval due to their safety and efficacy profiles," says Barath. Request a sample report: http://goo.gl/oDFSpw EMEA: advances in technology boost growth of the market The plastic surgery products market in EMEA is likely to reach USD 4 billion by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 8.7%. The population of people aged 60 and above is on the rise in this region. Advances in plastic surgery have led to the development of innovative products related to aesthetic procedures. Rising public awareness of these products has resulted in a rise in the number of people, particularly those aged 60 and above, undergoing medical aesthetic procedures to remove wrinkles and treat body defects. Advances in laser technology have led to the development of cutting-edge techniques, such as laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis. Its implementation in medical facilities will increase the sales of associated products related to aesthetic procedures. MEA (particularly Dubai and Saudi Arabia) is fast becoming a destination of choice for medical tourism. The demand for non-invasive medical procedures is on the rise in this region due to the cost-effectiveness of surgeries in this region compared to the US and the UK. APAC: growing public awareness of cosmetic surgeries to boost growth The plastic surgery products market in APAC is expected to reach USD 2.9 billion by 2020, growing at a CAGR of over 12%. Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, India, and China are major contributors to the market in this region. A rise in the GDP of these countries has increased the disposable income of people, and people are now able to afford medical aesthetic surgeries. Growing public awareness of cosmetic surgeries is also expected to contribute to increased adoption of procedures involving the use of Botox and dermal facial fillers. "Dermal fillers have the potential to witness rapid increase in sales due to a shift in consumer preference toward non-invasive, low-cost, anti-aging aesthetic treatments," says Barath. Key Vendors: Allergan Cynosure DePuy Synthes Galderma Syneron Medical Stryker Browse Related Reports: Global Breast Implants Market 2015-2019 Global Dermal Facial Fillers Market 2015-2019 Global Facial Interfaces Market 2015-2019 Purchase these three reports for the price of one by becoming a Technavio subscriber. Subscribing to Technavio's reports allows you to download any three reports per month for the price of one. Contact enquiry@technavio.com with your requirements and a link to our subscription platform. About Technavio Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. The company develops over 2000 pieces of research every year, covering more than 500 technologies across 80 countries. Technavio has about 300 analysts globally who specialize in customized consulting and business research assignments across the latest leading edge technologies. Technavio analysts employ primary as well as secondary research techniques to ascertain the size and vendor landscape in a range of markets. Analysts obtain information using a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches, besides using in-house market modeling tools and proprietary databases. They corroborate this data with the data obtained from various market participants and stakeholders across the value chain, including vendors, service providers, distributors, re-sellers, and end-users. If you are interested in more information, please contact our media team at media@technavio.com. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160421005012/en/ Contacts: Technavio Research Jesse Maida Media Marketing Executive US: +1 630 333 9501 UK: +44 208 123 1770 www.technavio.com media@technavio.com WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Last year, immunization led to some notable wins in the fight against polio, rubella and maternal and neonatal tetanus,' says Dr Margaret Chan, WHO Director-General. Polio was eliminated in 1 country, tetanus in 3, and rubella in 1 geographical region. 'But they were isolated wins,' says the WHO chief, who called on countries to improve vaccination coverage, and reach more children missed by routine delivery systems. During World Immunization Week 2016, held 24-30 April, WHO highlights recent gains in immunization coverage, and outlines further steps countries can take to 'Close the Immunization Gap' and meet global vaccination targets by 2020. Immunization averts 2 to 3 million deaths annually; however, an additional 1.5 million deaths could be avoided if global vaccination coverage improves. Today, an estimated 18.7 million infants - nearly 1 in 5 children - worldwide are still missing routine immunizations for preventable diseases, such as diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus. India joined Cambodia, Madagascar and Mauritania in eliminating maternal and neonatal tetanus. It also improved coverage of the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis-containing vaccines (DTP3) to 83%. Despite challenges imposed by Ebola, including for routine immunization coverage, the African Region became one-step closer to being certified polio-free with the removal of Nigeria from the list of polio-endemic countries. As recently as 2012, the country accounted for more than half of all polio cases worldwide. Now, only two countries - Afghanistan and Pakistan - remain polio endemic. The Region of the Americas became the first to eliminate rubella, a contagious viral disease that can cause multiple birth defects as well as fetal death when contracted by women during pregnancy. Additionally, 5 years after the introduction of an affordable conjugate meningitis A vaccine, immunization of more than 230 million people has led to the control and near elimination of deadly meningitis A disease in the African 'meningitis belt' that stretches from Senegal to Ethiopia. New vaccines against dengue, Ebola and malaria have the potential to be game-changers in immunization in the near future, WHO said Thursday. And, the new polio vaccination regimen, with the withdrawal of type 2 oral polio vaccine in 155 countries this month, represents a critical step towards a polio-free world, it added. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de Strong performance in Luxury in an uncertain environment Good momentum confirmed in Sport Lifestyle Consolidated revenue up 4.0% Luxury activities up 2.6% Sport & Lifestyle activities up 7.0% Revenue for the first quarter of 2016 came in at 2,724 million, up 4.0% on a comparable basis and 2.7% as reported. up 4.0% on a comparable basis and 2.7% as reported. Luxury activities: First-quarter 2016 sales up 2.6% on a comparable basis (up 2.8% as reported), lifted by retail in Western Europe, Japan and emerging countries. Confirmation of the growth momentum generated by the Gucci brand's new creative energy. Sport Lifestyle activities: First-quarter 2016 sales up 7.0% on a comparable basis (up 2.6% as reported). Continuation of the growth trajectory at Puma. Regulatory News: Francois-Henri Pinault, Kering's (Paris:KER) Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, commented: "Kering's solid first-quarter 2016 performance in a challenging market environment bears testimony to our focus on driving organic growth. The new creative energy is maintained at Gucci and the brand's new collections continue to draw an enthusiastic response. We are confident that we can extend our growth trajectory over the full year thanks to our multi-brand model, our continued strict operating and financial discipline, and the top-quality work of all our teams." Q1 2016 Reported change Comparable change(1) (in millions) Luxury activities 1,804 +2.8% +2.6% Sport Lifestyle activities 913 +2.6% +7.0% Corporate and other 7 nm nm Kering Continuing operations 2,724 +2.7% +4.0% (1) On a comparable Group structure and exchange rate basis. Luxury activities In the first quarter of 2016, Luxury activities achieved 2.6% revenue growth on a comparable basis (up 2.8% as reported), with sales advancing 3% in both directly operated stores (71% of total sales) and in the wholesale network. Brisk activity in Western Europe and Japan continues to power growth in directly operated store sales, supported by a stellar performance in certain emerging countries. Gucci Gucci confirmed its growth momentum in the first quarter of 2016, driven by the success of its new collections. Sales climbed 3.1% on a comparable basis and 2.9% as reported. Revenue generated in directly operated stores rose 3%, led by strong performances in Western Europe, while wholesale was positive for the second consecutive quarter. The arrival of new collections clearly benefited revenues of the brand's Seasonal offer (Ready-to-Wear, Shoes) and sales of recently introduced Leather Goods. Bottega Veneta Bottega Veneta's first-quarter 2016 sales fell by 8.3% on a comparable basis and by 7.6% as reported. Lower sales in directly operated stores reflect the slowdown in tourism flows, particularly in Western Europe, which nevertheless enjoyed sustained local demand, as well as in North America and Japan. Bottega Veneta continues to shift its focus to local customers and new Leather Goods lines are instrumental in successfully enhancing the visibility of its new products in its stores. Yves Saint Laurent Yves Saint Laurent posted another sterling performance in the first three months of the year (up 27% on a comparable basis and as reported), lifted by excellent sales in directly operated stores. All regions reported double-digit growth and all product categories contributed to the strong momentum. The new Creative Director Anthony Vaccarello will unveil his first collection for Spring/Summer 2017 in October 2016. Other Luxury brands Other Luxury brands put in contrasting performances in the first quarter of 2016, down 3.3% overall on a comparable basis (down 2.9% as reported), partly reflecting the strong exposure to France of Balenciaga and Boucheron. Growth in the Couture Leather Goods brands was powered by the directly operated store network. Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen posted solid performances. At Balenciaga, the first collection under the new Creative Director Demna Gvasalia was enthusiastically acclaimed. Jewelry brands posted positive revenue growth in the quarter despite the high base of comparison at Boucheron. Sales of Watches brands contended with an unfavourable market environment, although the realignment of the product offering and communications strategy at Girard-Perregaux and Ulysse Nardin was welcomed by retailers. Sport Lifestyle activities Sales generated by Sport Lifestyle activities were up 7.0% on a comparable basis and up 2.6% as reported. The difference between comparable and reported growth is attributable to the negative foreign exchange impact related to certain emerging country currencies. Puma confirmed its solid growth trajectory in all product categories (Footwear, Apparel and Accessories) and in all regions, particularly Asia/Pacific and Western Europe. 2016 first-quarter highlights Kering recognised among the world's 100 most sustainable companies On January 21, 2016, the Corporate Knights' Global 100 index published at the World Economic Forum in Davos ranked Kering as one of the 100 most sustainable companies in the world. Kering was the only Luxury group featured in the 2016 Global 100 index, and ranked second in the Textile, Apparel Luxury Goods sector. Executive Committee appointments Kering announced the appointment of Beatrice Lazat as Group Human Resources Director on February 29, 2016 and of Jean-Philippe Bailly as Chief Operating Officer on March 18, 2016. Both Ms Lazat and Mr Bailly will sit on the Executive Committee. Volcom: sale of Electric On March 16, 2016, Volcom announced that it had sold the Electric brand via a management buy-out (MBO) to a group led by Eric Crane, Electric's Chief Executive Officer. Brioni: appointment of Justin O'Shea On March 23, 2016, Brioni and Kering announced the appointment of Justin O'Shea as new Creative Director of Brioni. Mr O'Shea will be responsible for the brand's collections and image. Yves Saint Laurent: appointment of Anthony Vaccarello On April 1, 2016, Yves Saint Laurent announced the departure of Hedi Slimane as Creative and Image Director at the end of a four-year mission which had led to the complete repositioning of the brand. On April 4, 2016, Anthony Vaccarello was appointed as the new Creative Director of Yves Saint Laurent. AUDIOCAST Kering will hold an audiocast for analysts and investors at 6.00pm (CET)/5.00pm (GMT)/12.00pm (US, ET) on Thursday, April 21, 2016. Available at www.kering.com (Finance section). The audiocast will also be available by phone, using one of the dial-in numbers below: France +33 (0)1 76 77 22 22 United Kingdom +44 (0)20 3427 1907 United States +1 (646) 254 3365 Access code: 2622499 A replay of the audiocast will also be available on www.kering.com (Finance section). PRESENTATION The slides (pdf) will be available ahead of the audiocast at www.kering.com About Kering A world leader in apparel and accessories, Kering develops an ensemble of powerful Luxury and Sport Lifestyle brands: Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, Balenciaga, Brioni, Christopher Kane, McQ, Stella McCartney, Tomas Maier, Boucheron, Dodo, Girard-Perregaux, JeanRichard, Pomellato, Qeelin, Ulysse Nardin, Puma, Volcom and Cobra. By 'empowering imagination' in the fullest sense, Kering encourages its brands to reach their potential in the most sustainable manner. Present in more than 120 countries, the Group generated revenue of more than 11.5 billion in 2015 and had more than 38,000 employees at year end. The Kering (previously PPR) share is listed on Euronext Paris (FR 0000121485, KER.PA, KER.FP). Social Media Twitter: @KeringGroup LinkedIn: Kering Instagram: @kering_official YouTube: KeringGroup Appendix First-quarter 2016 revenue (in millions) Q1 2016 Q1 2015 Reported change Comparable change(1) Gucci 894.2 869.0 +2.9% +3.1% Bottega Veneta 267.9 290.0 -7.6% -8.3% Yves Saint Laurent 269.2 211.4 +27.3% +26.5% Other Luxury brands 372.4 383.6 -2.9% -3.3% Luxury activities 1,803.7 1,754.0 +2.8% +2.6% Puma 855.9 825.0 +3.7% +8.1% Other Sport Lifestyle brands 57.2 65.0 -12.0% -7.1% Sport Lifestyle activities 913.1 890.0 +2.6% +7.0% Corporate and other 7.0 7.2 -2.8% -4.1% Kering Continuing activities 2,723.8 2,651.2 +2.7% +4.0% (1) On a comparable Group structure and exchange rate basis. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160421006118/en/ Contacts: Kering Press Eloi Perrin, +33 (0)1 45 64 61 72 eloi.perrin@kering.com Floriane Geroudet, +33 (0)1 45 64 66 00 floriane.geroudet@kering.com or Analysts/investors Claire Roblet, 33 (0)1 45 64 61 49 claire.roblet@kering.com Andrea Beneventi, 33 (0)1 45 64 63 28 andrea.beneventi@kering.com Website: www.kering.com AUSTIN, TX--(Marketwired - April 21, 2016) - Bridgepoint Consulting, a leading Texas-based finance, IT and management consulting firm, announced today that Temika Jones has joined as Senior Manager in the firm's Houston Risk Services practice. Jones will help organizations address processes, risks and controls related to financial reporting and other operational business activities. Jones has more than 15 years of experience managing complex internal audit and internal controls matters for clients across a variety of industries. She specializes in process improvement, risk assessments, audit preparation, system selection & implementation, SOX compliance and merger integration. "Temika's extensive experience, particularly with risk management and compliance solutions, will play a key role in strengthening the capabilities of our Risk Services practice in the Houston market," said Manuel Azuara, Principal at Bridgepoint Consulting. "We're delighted she has joined our team." Most recently, Jones served as a Director of Accounting Controls for one of the largest multinational oilfield services companies, where she created and managed their internal controls group during company transformation. Throughout her career, she has led internal audit and controls teams in assessing and redesigning business processes, procedures and controls. Jones earned a bachelor's degree in Information Systems and Decision Sciences from Louisiana State University. She is a Certified Internal Auditor (CIA), Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) and Certified in Risk Management Assurance (CRMA). Jones is also a member of the Institute of Internal Auditors and the Information Security and Control Association. Bridgepoint Consulting opened its Houston office in 2012. The firm has supported a broad range of clients within the Houston market, including CITGO, City of Houston, Plains All American, Prince Corporation, PROS and Witt O'Brien, among others. The firm's Risk Services team has broad industry and regulatory expertise in all facets of governance, risk management and compliance, to help companies address these complex issues using a proven approach. Bridgepoint's Risk Services offerings include Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance, internal audit and IT compliance. About Bridgepoint Consulting Bridgepoint Consulting is a leading Texas-based professional services firm that provides strategic services and highly qualified professionals to solve complex financial, management and technology challenges. Since 1999, we've been helping executives and management teams reduce their business and operational risks, bridge resource gaps and improve overall performance. Whether an organization needs interim expertise to improve infrastructure and processes, or strategic management of a major transition or transaction, Bridgepoint's team of 140+ qualified professionals can help. The firm has offices in Austin, Dallas and Houston. For more information on Bridgepoint Consulting, please visit our website at www.BridgepointConsulting.com. Image Available: http://www.marketwire.com/library/MwGo/2016/4/21/11G094489/Images/Bridgepoint_Logo_Small-e06f2dd1578c920e9e40b9b811a67bf5.jpg Image Available: http://www.marketwire.com/library/MwGo/2016/4/21/11G094489/Images/TemikaJones_2x3-3d03612326c18518befa46fddd1b4c83.jpg Gina Budd Bridgepoint Consulting Ph. 512-422-6571 gbudd@bridgepointconsulting.com HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/21/16 -- Erdene Resource Development Corp. (TSX: ERD) ("Erdene" or "Company") is pleased to announce it has closed its transaction with Sandstorm Gold Ltd. ("Sandstorm") (NYSE MKT: SAND)(TSX: SSL) for total consideration of C$2.5 million to Erdene ("Transaction"). The proceeds will fund the Company's 2016 exploration projects, specifically drilling of the high-grade Bayan Khundii gold project, which commenced on April 8, 2016. The Transaction included the issuance of equity of Erdene and Sandstorm, and royalty components that resulted in total cash and securities consideration of C$2.5 million to Erdene. The Transaction includes the purchase by Sandstorm, by way of private placement, of five million common shares of Erdene at $0.20 per share. Sandstorm has committed to hold the Erdene shares issued under the private placement for a minimum of 18 months. In addition, Sandstorm has issued common shares of Sandstorm to Erdene for total consideration of C$1.5 million, the price being based on the 10-day volume weighted average price of Sandstorm common shares as at April 14, 2016. In exchange, Sandstorm has been granted a 2% net smelter returns royalty ("NSR Royalty") on Erdene's two flagship gold projects in southwest Mongolia; the Bayan Khundii gold project and Altan Nar gold-polymetallic project. The Transaction provides Erdene with a 3-year option to buy-back 50% of the NSR Royalty for C$1.2 million, to reduce the Sandstorm NSR Royalty to 1.0%. Erdene has granted to Sandstorm a right of first refusal on future stream and/or royalty financings related to the Bayan Khundii and/or Altan Nar projects. No fees or warrants are associated with the Transaction. The Company launched an exploration program at its 100% owned Bayan Khundii gold project on April 8, 2016. The program includes a 3,500 metre drill program, extensive geophysical and geochemical testing, as well as multiple studies in advance of a mining license application and economic evaluation. Results of these programs are expected to be available in late Q2 and during Q3, 2016. The program is designed to determine the continuity, grade and extent of the high-grade gold mineralization intersected in the Company's maiden Q4-2015 Bayan Khundii drill program. Details of that drill program can be found in Erdene's December 14, 2015 news release; click here. About Erdene Erdene Resource Development Corp. is a Canada-based resource company focused on the acquisition, exploration, and development of precious and base metals in underexplored and highly prospective Mongolia. The Company holds four exploration licenses and a mining license located in southwest Mongolia. These include: Altan Nar - an extensive, high-grade, near-surface, gold-polymetallic project; Bayan Khundii - a high-grade surface gold discovery made in Q2-2015 that the Company is currently exploring; Khuvyn Khar - an early-stage, copper-silver porphyry project with multiple drill targets and significant copper intersections; Zuun Mod - a large molybdenum-copper porphyry deposit; and Altan Arrow - an early-stage, high-grade, gold-silver project. In addition to the above properties, the Company has an Alliance with Teck Resources Limited on regional, copper-gold exploration in the prospective Trans Altai region of southwest Mongolia. For further information on the Company, please visit www.erdene.com. Erdene has 114,876,030 issued and outstanding common shares and a fully diluted position of 131,384,791 common shares. Forward-Looking Statements Certain information regarding Erdene contained herein may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements may include estimates, plans, expectations, opinions, forecasts, projections, guidance or other statements that are not statements of fact. Although Erdene believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to have been correct. Erdene cautions that actual performance will be affected by a number of factors, most of which are beyond its control, and that future events and results may vary substantially from what Erdene currently foresees. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include market prices, exploitation and exploration results, continued availability of capital and financing and general economic, market or business conditions. The forward-looking statements are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. The information contained herein is stated as of the current date and is subject to change after that date. The Company does not assume the obligation to revise or update these forward-looking statements, except as may be required under applicable securities laws. NO REGULATORY AUTHORITY HAS APPROVED OR DISAPPROVED THE CONTENTS OF THIS RELEASE. Contacts: Erdene Resource Development Corporation Peter C. Akerley, President and CEO, or Ken W. MacDonald, Vice President Business Strategy and CFO (902) 423-6419 info@erdene.com / www.erdene.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/ErdeneRes LOS ALAMITOS, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/21/16 -- NovaWurks Inc., a provider of high technology space products and services, announced today that Talbot Jaeger, founder and chief technologist at NovaWurks, will participate in the 2016 Space 2.0 Pre-Summit Kickoff Briefing, "Earth Pixels: Extracting Actionable Insight from the Geospatial Data Tsunami." On Tuesday, April 26, Jaeger, along with other industry experts, will participate in a panel discussion regarding the "Impact of New Technologies on What Kinds of Actionable Data Can Be Extracted from Geospatial/Earth Observation." Held in the Silicon Valley, Milpitas, Calif., the April 26 Pre-Summit Briefing precedes the three-day Space 2.0 Summit profiling industry breakthroughs in space commercialization. The focus of Space 2.0 is to provide crucial information on the navigation of the quickly-evolving NewSpace ecosystem and how to understand interlocking business models and partnering strategies. With an impending approach of the massive amount of data to come, the Pre-Summit Briefing offers insight into the value of how this data can provide the potential of actionable geospatial-derived products and services for an entirely new set of business applications. As a long-time industry veteran and space entrepreneur, Jaeger will offer an understanding of his company's Hyper-Integrated Satlet (HISat), a biologically inspired satlet technology that is the basis of NovaWurks' second HISat-based spacecraft called "eXCITe" launching from nearby Vandenberg Air Force base in mid-July. The company's SIMPL spacecraft was delivered unassembled to the International Space Station aboard the Obital ATK Cygnus capsule on December 9, 2015. Once assembled, SIMPL will be the first commercial satellite assembled by astronauts aboard the international space laboratory. "Space commercialization is on the brink of a massive shift where traditional aerospace and the new future of space development will provide untapped opportunities for a wide range of industries," said Jaeger. "With new advances taking place every day, more and more possibilities will be available in the near future." NovaWurks provides space services for organizations to reach orbit using HISats, the company's flagship technology platform. HISats are able to configure/aggregate to become a flexible and reliable spacecraft for a variety of mission purposes and provide a safe, rapid and cost-effective solution to reach space. The company is currently working on DARPA's Phoenix Program, building satlet solutions for flexible, cost-effective satellite operations in GEO. The "Impact of New Technologies on What Kinds of Actionable Data Can Be Extracted from Geospatial/Earth Observation" panel discussion takes place on Tuesday, April 26 from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM PDT. To learn more about the Summit, visit: http://www.infocastinc.com/events/space. About NovaWurks: NovaWurks, Inc., located in Los Alamitos, California, invents, designs and creates high technology products and services for a broad range of applications for space. The NovaWurks team of designers, scientists and engineers offers a diverse background in spaceflight, consulting and research work with decades of experience in managing complex, visionary projects for government, military and corporate clients. For more information, visit www.novawurks.com. MEDIA CONTACTS: Vivian Slater Echo Media Group 714-573-0899 ext. 235 vivian@echomediapr.com The notice has been updated to correctly attribute the proposals under items 1, 9, 10 and 11.Stockholm, 2016-04-21 18:16 CEST (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Notice is hereby given to the holders of depository receipts in respect of shares in Vostok Emerging Finance Ltd ("Vostok Emerging Finance" or the "Company") that an Annual General Meeting (the "Meeting") of shareholders shall be held on Thursday, 19 May 2016 at 10 am CEST at Advokatfirman Vinge, Norrlandsgatan 10 in Stockholm, Sweden.Notice to attend etc.Holders of depository receipts wishing to attend the Meeting shall:(1) be listed in the register of holders of depository receipts kept by Euroclear Sweden AB on Friday, 13 May 2016; and(2) notify the Company of the intention to attend the Meeting not later than Friday, 13 May 2016 by mail at the address Computershare AB, Vostok Emerging Finance Ltd Annual General Meeting, Box 610, SE-182 16 Danderyd, Sweden, by telephone +46 771 24 64 00 or by e-mail to agm2016@vostokemergingfinance.com. The holder of depository receipts shall state his or her name, personal or company identification number, address as well as telephone number. If a holder of depository receipts intends to be represented by proxy, the name of the proxy holder shall be stated.Holders of depository receipts represented by proxy shall issue dated and signed power of attorney for the proxy. If the power of attorney is issued on behalf of a legal entity, a certified copy of a registration certificate or a corresponding document for the legal entity shall be appended. The power of attorney in original and, where applicable, the registration certificate should be submitted to the Company by mail at the address set forth above well in advance of the Meeting. The form to use for a power of attorney can be found on www.vostokemergingfinance.com.Holders of depository receipts who hold their receipts through nominees (Sw. forvaltare) must request a temporary registration of the voting rights in order to be able to participate at the Meeting. Holders of depository receipts who want to obtain such registration must contact the nominee regarding this well in advance of Friday, 13 May 2016.Voting forms will be distributed to the holders who have complied with the above requirements and the voting form must be brought to the Meeting.Proposed agenda1. Election of Chairman for the Meeting.2. Preparation and approval of voting list.3. Approval of the agenda.4. Election of one or two persons to check and sign the minutes.5. Resolution that the Meeting has been duly convened.6. Presentation by the Managing Director.7. Presentation of the annual report and the auditor's report.8. Resolution in respect of(a) the adoption of the profit and loss account and the balance sheet; and(b) the appropriation of the Company's results according to the adopted balance sheet.9. Determination of the number of Directors and auditors.10. Determination of remuneration to the Directors and the auditors.11. Election of Directors and auditors.12. Resolution to appoint the Nomination Committee.13. Resolution regarding remuneration principles for the senior management.14. Resolution regarding introduction of new long term incentive programme.15. Closing of the Meeting.Chairman for the Meeting (item 1)The Chairman of the Board of Directors, supported by representatives of the largest depository receipt holders, Libra Fund, Alecta and Swedbank Robur Funds, proposes that Jesper Schonbeck, member of the Swedish Bar Association, is elected as Chairman for the Meeting.The appropriation of the Company's results (item 8b)The Board of Directors proposes that no dividend is paid to the shareholders and that the Company's results are brought forward.Election of Directors and auditors etc. (items 9-11)The Chairman of the Board of Directors, supported by representatives of the largest depository receipt holders, Libra Fund, Alecta and Swedbank Robur Funds, proposes:-- that the Board of Directors shall consist of five (5) Directors without any deputy members; -- re-election of all of the current Directors: Lars O Gronstedt, Per Brilioth, David Nangle and Milena Ivanova for the period until the end of the next Annual General Meeting; -- that Voria Fattahi be elected as a new member of the Board of Directors for the period until the end of the next Annual General Meeting; -- that the Meeting appoint Lars O Gronstedt to be Chairman of the Board of Directors; -- a total Board remuneration (including remuneration for the work within the committees of the Board) of SEK 1,000,000, of which SEK 400,000 shall be allocated to the Chairman of the Board of Directors and SEK 200,000 to each of the other Directors who are not employed by the Company; -- that the members of the Board of Directors be permitted, in line with Swedish market practice, to invoice the Company for their Board fees in an amount that is cost neutral to the Company, provided any Director who does so is solely liable for any tax effects; and -- that the Company's auditor, the registered audit company PricewaterhouseCoopers AB be re-elected until the end of the next Annual General Meeting and remunerated upon approval of their invoice.Voria FattahiVoria Fattahi is a Swedish citizen born 1982. Voria Fattahi serves as Investment Director at Volati AB since August 2015 focusing on investments in well-managed and profitable Nordic businesses across a broad range of sectors. Prior to joining Volati, Mr Fattahi was an Investment Manager at Investment AB Kinnevik from 2011-2015 where he was focused on investing and developing digital businesses primarily in the financial services sector across both developed and emerging markets. Prior to joining Kinnevik, he was a Senior Associate in the Financial & Business Services team at Apax Partners from 2007-2010 focusing on investments into financial services businesses globally. He began his career as an analyst in the Financial Institutions Group at JP Morgan. He serves a member of the Board of Directors of Lomond Industrier AB and Kellfri AB. Prior board directorships include Bayport Management Limited (2011-2015) and Milvik AB (2011-2015). Mr. Fattahi holds an MSc in Business and Economics from the Stockholm School of Economics and an MBA from INSEAD.For information about the current Directors proposed for re-election, please see the Company's website, www.vostokemergingfinance.com.Nomination committee (item 12)A procedure for appointing a Nomination Committee for the purposes of the Annual General Meeting in 2017 is proposed as per the following: A Nomination Committee shall be convened by the Chairman of the Board and be comprised of up to four representatives chosen from among the largest holders of depository receipts and the Chairman of the Board. The ownership shall be based on the statistics from Euroclear Sweden AB over holders of depository receipts as per the last business day in August 2016. The names of the members of the Nomination Committee shall be announced as soon as they have been appointed, which shall take place no later than six months prior to the annual general meeting in 2017. In case of a material change in ownership prior to completion of the work to be performed by the Nomination Committee, it shall be possible to change the composition of the Nomination Committee. The Nomination Committee's mandate period extends up to the appointment of a new Nomination Committee. The Nomination Committee shall appoint a Chairman among them. If the representatives cannot agree upon appointment of Chairman, the representative representing the holder of depository receipts with the largest number of votes shall be appointed as Chairman. The Nomination Committee shall prepare proposals for the following decisions at the Annual General Meeting in 2017: (i) election of the Chairman for the Meeting, (ii) election of Directors, (iii) election of the Chairman of the Board of Directors, (iv) remuneration to the Directors, (v) election of the Company's auditors (vi) compensation to the Company's auditors, and (vii) proposal for how to conduct the nomination process for the Annual General Meeting in 2018.Remuneration principles for the senior management (item 13)The Board of Directors proposes that the Meeting resolves to approve the following management remuneration principles.The remuneration to the Managing Director and other members of the senior management shall consist of fixed salary, variable remuneration, other benefits and pension benefits. Except for the Managing Director, the senior management currently includes two individuals.The total remuneration shall correspond to the prevailing market conditions and be competitive. The fixed and variable remuneration shall correspond to the respective individual's responsibility and authority. The variable component should, in the first instance, be covered within the parameters of the Company's option plan and the Company's depository receipts incentive programme and shall, where payable in other instances, be subject to an upper limit in accordance with market terms and specific objectives for the Company and/or the individual.The period of notice of termination of employment shall be three to six months in the event of termination by the member of the senior management. In the event of termination by the Company, the total of the period of notice of termination and the period during which severance compensation is payable shall not exceed 12 months.Pension benefits shall be either benefit-based or contribution based or a combination thereof, with individual retirement ages. Benefit based pension benefits are conditional on the benefits being earned during a pre-determined period of employment.The Board of Directors shall be entitled to deviate from these guidelines in individual cases should special reasons exist.Resolution regarding introduction of new long term incentive programme (item 14)The Board of Directors proposes that the Meeting resolves to introduce a new long term incentive programme for up to six employees in Vostok Emerging Finance ("LTIP 2016") in accordance with the below. LTIP 2016 is a three year performance based incentive program.Adoption of an incentive programmeSummary of the programmeThe Board of Directors proposes that the Meeting resolves to adopt LTIP 2016. LTIP 2016 is proposed to include up to six employees in Vostok Emerging Finance. The participants in LTIP 2016 are required to invest in Vostok Emerging Finance by acquiring shares in the form of depository receipts in Vostok Emerging Finance ("Saving DRs"). These Saving DRs are received by way of purchase of depository receipts (representing shares in Vostok Emerging Finance) at market value or transfer of depository receipts that such participant already holds in accordance with the terms set out under "Personal investment" below. The participants will thereafter be granted the opportunity to receive depository receipts free of charge in accordance with LTIP 2016, so called "Performance DRs" in accordance with the terms set out below.In the event that delivery of Performance DRs cannot be achieved at reasonable costs, with reasonable administrative efforts or due to market conditions, participants may instead be offered a cash-based settlement.Personal investmentIn order to participate in LTIP 2016, the participant must have made a private investment by (i) purchase of depository receipts (representing shares in Vostok Emerging Finance) at market value and for a value of up to SEK 750,0001 depending on the participants' position in Vostok Emerging Finance in accordance with what is further described below, or (ii) by transfer of depository receipts that such participant already holds (provided that the participant holds at least 100% of annual net base pay in depository receipts) for a value of up to SEK 750,0002 depending on the participants' position in Vostok Emerging Finance in accordance with what is further described below. For each Saving DR held under LTIP 2016, the Company will grant the participants ten rights to Performance DRs, meaning rights to receive Performance DRs free of charge ("Rights"). The number of Performance DRs each participant's Saving DRs entitles to depends on the Company's fulfilment of the performance conditions. A participant cannot receive more than ten Performance DRs per Saving DR.The maximum amounts for the personal investments are based on an assumed market price of Vostok Emerging Finance's depository receipts of SEK 1.14. The market price of the depository receipts may have increased or decreased by the time of the personal investment and the Board of Directors is authorised to change the maximum amount of the personal investment to take into account any material changes to the price of Vostok Emerging Finance's depository receipts, in order to give as positive effects as possible for depository receipt holders in the Company.General terms and conditionsSubject to the fulfilment of the entry level of the performance based conditions for the period 1 January 2016 to 31 December 2018 and provided that the participant has kept its investment in Saving DRs during the period from the day of allocation of the Rights until the day of the release of the interim report for the period 1 January to 31 March 2019 (the vesting period) and, with certain exceptions, kept its employment within the Vostok group and not given notice of termination at such point in time, two Rights entitles the participant to receive one Performance DR free of charge per Right.Retention and performance conditionsThe number of Performance DRs each of the participant's Saving DR entitles to depends on the Company's fulfilment of the performance conditions during the measurement period. The performance conditions are based on the Company's Net Asset Value ("NAV").The determined levels of the conditions include an entry, a target and a stretch level as regards the number of Rights that vest. The entry level constitutes the minimum level which must be exceeded in order to enable vesting of Rights. If the entry level is reached or exceeded, each participant will receive two Performance DRs per Saving DR. If the target level is reached or exceeded, each participant will receive five Performance DRs per Saving DR. If the stretch level is reached or exceeded, each participant will receive ten Performance DRs per Saving DR.The Board of Directors intends to disclose the outcome of the performance based conditions in the annual report for the financial year 2018.The RightsThe Rights shall be governed by the following terms and conditions:-- Rights are granted free of charge as soon as possible after the annual general meeting 2016 and not later than 31 August 2016. -- Vest following the publication of the Company's interim report for the period 1 January - 31 March 2019 (the vesting period). -- May not be transferred or pledged. -- Two Rights entitles the participant to receive one Performance DR per Right after the end of the vesting period, if the entry level of the performance-based conditions has been fulfilled and the participant, at the time of the release of the interim report for the period 1 January - 31 March 2019, maintains its employment within the Vostok group, has not given notice of termination and maintains the invested Saving DRs. -- In order to align the participants' and the depository receipt holders' interests, the Company will compensate the participants for any dividends paid during the three year vesting period. Compensation will only be made for dividend resolved after the time of allocation.Preparation and administrationThe Board of Directors shall be responsible for preparing the detailed terms and conditions of LTIP 2016, in accordance with the mentioned terms and guidelines. To this end, the Board of Directors shall be entitled to make adjustments to meet foreign regulations or market conditions. The Board of Directors may also make other adjustments if significant changes in the Vostok group or its operating environment would result in a situation where the decided terms and conditions of LTIP 2016 no longer serve their purpose.AllocationThe participants are divided into different categories and in accordance with the above, LTIP 2016 will comprise the following number of Saving DRs and maximum number of Rights for the different categories:-- the CEO: may acquire up to SEK 750,000 worth of Saving DRs3 within LTIP 2016, entitling the holder to allotment of not less than two and up to ten Rights per Saving DR; -- other members of management than the CEO (two individuals): may acquire up to SEK 240,000 worth of Saving DRs4 within LTIP 2016, entitling the holder to allotment of not less than two and up to ten Rights per Saving DR; -- other employees (three individuals): may acquire up to SEK 60,000 worth of Saving DRs5 within LTIP 2016, entitling each holder to allotment of not less than two and up to ten Rights per Saving DR.Scope and costs of LTIP 2016LTIP 2016 will be accounted for in accordance with IFRS 2 which stipulates that the Rights should be recorded as a personnel expense in the income statement during the vesting period. The costs for LTIP 2016 is estimated to amount to approximately SEK 7.05 million, excluding social security costs, calculated in accordance with IFRS 2.The costs for social security charges are calculated to approximately SEK 2.22 million, based on the above assumptions.In addition to what is set forth above, the costs for LTIP 2016 have been based on that LTIP 2016 comprises up to six participants and that each participant makes a maximum investment.If the maximum result is reached, and all invested Saving DRs are retained under LTIP 2016 and a fulfilment of the performance conditions of 100 percent, the maximum cost of LTIP 2016 as defined in IFRS 2 is approximately SEK 14.1 million and the maximum social security cost is estimated to approximately SEK 4.43 million.The costs are expected to have a marginal effect on key ratios of the Vostok group.Upon maximum allotment of Performance DRs, 12,368,430 depository receipts representing shares in the Company may be allocated within the framework of LTIP 2016, which would correspond to approximately 1.87 percent of the share capital and the votes in the Company. A total of 14,273,430 depository receipts, which comprise currently outstanding and allocated 1,905,000 options under existing long-term incentive program and maximum allotment of 12,368,430 Performance DRs within the framework of LTIP 2016, would correspond to approximately 2.16 percent of the share capital and the votes in the Company.Delivery of Performance DRs under LTIP 2016To ensure delivery of Performance DRs under LTIP 2016, the Company may enter into a swap agreement or other similar agreement with a third party.The rationale for the proposalThe objective of LTIP 2016 is to create incentives for the management to work for a long-term development in the Company. Furthermore, LTIP 2016 shall create conditions for retaining competent employees in the Vostok group through the offering of competitive remuneration. LTIP 2016 has been designed based on the view that it is desirable that employees within the group are depository receipt holders in the Company and that they see that working with a long term horizon pays off. Participation in LTIP 2016 requires a personal investment in Saving DRs.By offering an allotment of Performance DRs which are based performance based conditions, the participants are rewarded for increased depository receipt holder value. Further, LTIP 2016 rewards employees' loyalty and long-term value growth in the Company. Against this background, the Board of Directors is of the opinion that the adoption of LTIP 2016 will have a positive effect on the Vostok group's future development and thus be beneficial for both the Company and its depository receipt holders.PreparationThe Company's Board of Directors has prepared LTIP 2016 in consultation with external advisors. LTIP 2016 has been reviewed by the Board of Directors during March and April 2016 and has been finally reviewed at its meeting on 17 April 2016.Other incentive programs in the CompanyThe 2015 Incentive ProgramThe incentive program, that was authorised by a Special General Meeting in Vostok New Ventures Ltd on June 9 2015 and adopted by resolution of the sole member of the Company on the same day, entitles present and future employees to be allocated call options to acquire shares represented by depository receipts in the Company. The incentive plan includes granting of not more than 2,000,000 (post rights issue 5,080,000) options. A total of 1,905,000 options are currently outstanding. The options life is until 8 September 2020 and the options may be exercised during a period of three months starting five years from the time of grant. In the event all options are fully exercised, the holders will acquire shares represented by depository receipts corresponding to a maximum of approximately 2.7 (post rights issue: 0.8) percent of the share capital in the Company. For more information about the 2015 incentive program please see the annual report 2015.Majority requirementsResolution in accordance with the Board of Directors' proposal in respect of item 14 require support of shareholders representing not less than half of the votes cast as well as of the shares represented by depository receipts represented at the Meeting.MiscellaneousThe annual accounts and the auditors' report will be available at the Company's office at Hovslagargatan 5 in Stockholm, Sweden and at its website www.vostokemergingfinance.com._______________________April 2016The Board of Directors of Vostok Emerging Finance Ltd.Registered office: Clarendon House, 2 Church Street, Hamilton, HM 11, BermudaPareto Securities AB1. Corresponding to 657,895 depository receipts based on an assumed price of SEK 1.14 per depository receipt.2. Corresponding to 657,895 depository receipts based on an assumed price of SEK 1.14 per depository receipt.3. Corresponding to 657,895 depository receipts based on an assumed price of SEK 1.14 per depository receipt.4. Corresponding to 210,526 depository receipts based on an assumed price of SEK 1.14 per depository receipt.5. Corresponding to 52,632 depository receipts based on an assumed price of SEK 1.14 per depository receipt.Attachment:https://cns.omxgroup.com/cds/DisclosureAttachmentServlet?messageAttachmentId=557560 Mooreland's China Cross-Border M&A Practice Gains Traction in Industrial Automation LONDON, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --Mooreland Partners (www.moorelandpartners.com), the leading independent investment bank providing M&A and private capital advisory services to the global technology industry, today announced that it acted as the exclusive financial advisor to JOT Automation (www.jotautomation.com) on its sale to Wuxi Lead Intelligent Equipment Co., Ltd. (www.chinaxiandao.com/en) for EUR 74 million. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2016. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20141029/155139LOGO Headquartered in Oulu, Finland, JOT Automation is a leader in automated test and assembly solutions for the consumer electronics manufacturing industry. JOT Automation's production testing tools have been used to manufacture billions of devices since its founding in 1988, and the company's customers include some of the largest mobile and computing device OEMs. Wuxi Lead Intelligent Automation based in Wuxi, Jiangsu, China, designs, manufactures, and implements industrial equipment for use in lithium-ion battery, photovoltaic, and capacitor factories, and has established itself as a long-term strategic partner with multiple tier-1 technology companies, including Samsung, Panasonic, and Sony, and is recognized as the global leader in lithium-ion battery manufacturing equipment. "The acquisition of JOT Automation will provide Wuxi Lead Intelligent Automation with world class automation design capability and accelerate its global expansion" said Peter Globokar, Managing Director at Mooreland. "This is Mooreland's second cross-border China M&A transaction this year. Mooreland has been able to capitalize on its deep knowledge of the industrial automation sector, and bring together two industry leaders," added Mr. Globokar. ABOUT MOORELAND PARTNERS Founded in 2002, Mooreland Partners is a leading independent investment bank providing M&A and private capital advisory services to the global technology industry, serving clients from its offices in London, New York, and Silicon Valley. Mooreland's team of nearly 50 professionals delivers industry domain and transaction expertise across all major technology sectors including industrial technology and electronics, enterprise software and services, communications technology, as well as mobile and digital media. Learn more atwww.moorelandpartners.com; read our blog. All trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners. MEDIA CONTACT press@moorelandpartners.com U.S.A. Tel. +1 212 653 0800 U.K. Tel +44 20 7484 1350 All trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners. To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mooreland-partners-advises-jot-automation-on-its-sale-to-wuxi-lead-intelligent-equipment-300255478.html BORDEAUX, France, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- EUROPLASMA (ALEUP, ISIN FR 0000044810), designer and operator of plasma solutions for renewable energy generation and hazardous waste recovery, announces its results for the year ended 31 December 2015, approved by the Board of Directors on 20 April 2016 and audited by the Joint Statutory Auditors. At consolidated level: First results from the strategic shift: a significant improvement in sales and operating performance in each of the Group's three divisions. Revenues of 14.1 million, up 57% on 2014, driven by growth in each of the sectors. Net loss of 16.2 million, reduced by 38%. Cash of 6.9 million, down 6.7 million in relation to the performance tests at CHO Morcenx. At divisional level: Positive contribution of Plasma Solutions (excluding Corporate costs) and Asbestos Treatment to the Group EBITDA level. Major progress for the Renewable Energies division, which obtained the Final Acceptance with Reserves (FAR), opening the way for the final delivery. Commenting on the annual results, Europlasma Chief Executive Officer Jean-Eric Petit said: "For the last two years, we have been committed to a complete reorganisation of the Group, and we are starting to see the first positive signs. The most notable progress is at the operational and sales levels in our Asbestos Treatment and Plasma Solutions divisions, prolonged by continued progress at the technical and industrial levels in the Renewable Energy division. The Group's fundamentals are today more solid. Admittedly, the consolidated results still show a loss, but one reduced by 38%, and for the moment closely linked to the commissioning costs of the CHO Morcenx plant. All our efforts are thus focused on the final delivery of this plant at the end of 2016, which will allow us to significantly reduce our level of cash consumption. This is our priority. There is still some way to go to convert these positive steps into sustainable results. Each day we are working to progress in this direction. Anchored at the heart of the circular economy, we benefit from powerful drivers that support all our activities and strengthen our determination." Preliminary n ote on segment names : As decided by the Board of Directors and in order to improve the understanding of the Europlasma Group's different activities, the various activity names have been changed as follows: the "Studies and Engineering, Torches and Processes" segment has been renamed "Plasma Solutions for gases and hazardous waste" or "Plasma Solutions" and is operated under the "Europlasma Industries" trade name. As a reminder, this segment covers the Corporate costs (see Glossary). the "Destruction of Hazardous Waste" segment has been renamed " Asbestos Treatment" (Inertam). the "Renewable Energies" segment (CHO Power and CHOPEX) designation remains unchanged. Activity and results: Recovery of the Asbestos Treatment activities with a positive EBITDA of 2.7 million. Improvement in Plasma Solutions with a positive EBITDA of 0.6 million (excluding corporate costs amounting 2.8 million). Progress in the Renewable Energies sector, with the achievement of the FAR and a negative EBITDA of 9.6 million, slightly contracting ( 0.6 million), pertaining to the finalisation and testing of the plant. In thousands of euros (TEUR) 2015 2014 Difference Revenue 14,082 8,983 5,099 Other operating income 3,180 2,247 933 Other current operating expenses -26,005 -22,478 -3,527 Depreciation, amortisation and provisions -5,685 -10,366 4,681 Current operating income (loss) -14,428 -21,615 7,186 Impairment of goodwill and equity-accounted investments 0 -1,308 1,308 Other non-recurring operating income and expenses -188 -17 -171 Operating income (loss) -14,617 -22,940 8,323 EBITDA -9,068 -11,176 2,108 Source: 2015 consolidated financial statements audited by the Joint Statutory Auditors and approved by the Board of Directors on 20 April 2016.- certification in progress. Activity and Revenue Consolidated revenue amounted to 14.1 million for the 2015 financial year. The 5.1 million increase, i.e. 57% for the year, was driven by revenue growth in each of the Group's segments. The Treatment of Asbestos segment (Inertam) posted revenue of 11.3 million, a 19% rise compared with 31 December 2014, associated with growth in treated volumes to 5,802 tonnes at 31 December 2015 against 4,482 tonnes at 31 December 2014. This performance reflects the progress made through more rigorous operations and through plant reliability investments made at the end of 2014 which will continue in 2016. Commercial momentum was also sustained, as shown by the 15.9% volume growth in orders on a year-on-year basis. The Plasma Solutions segment (Europlasma Industries) generated revenue of 2.2 million compared with 0.1 million for the year ended 31 December 2014. This increase was due to the recognition of revenue and related income on the KNPP (Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant) contract and on the Chinese contract signed at the beginning of 2015, for 0.4 million and 1.7 million respectively. The Renewable Energies segment posted revenue of 0.6 million, compared with -0.6 million for the year ended 31 December 2014, i.e. +1.2 million of annual change. Revenue for this segment corresponds to the recognition of revenue on the EPC (Engineering, Procurement and Construction) contract, according to the percentage of completion recognition method. The recording of a negative revenue figure of -0.6 million on the contract for 2014 was due to a change in estimates. Recognised revenue for 2015, therefore, indicates the project's progress on the new basis established at the end of December 2014. Results and operating performance The operating loss for 2015 stood at 14.6 million. The 8.3 million improvement compared with 2014 is due, on the one hand, to a significant reduction in depreciation, amortisation, impairment and provisions over the period, and on the other hand, to the more solid operating performance. EBITDA was -9 million compared with -11.2 million in 2014. This improvement in performance was driven by each of the segments, which all posted positive contributions to this change. The recovery of the Treatment of Asbestos segment is significant, with operating income of 0.4 million compared to an operating loss of 3.1 million in 2014. This improvement is due to a combination of three factors: operational progress accomplished within the division (positive impact of 1.2 million), the reduction in depreciation expense for the furnace of 1 million and the preserved value of goodwill for Inertam, which had been subject to an impairment loss of 1.3 million at end-2014. The Plasma Solutions segment, which supports all the Group's Corporate costs, reduced its operating loss to 3.7 million, against 5.5 million for the year ended 31 December 2014, thanks, in particular, to the growth in revenue for engineering contracts and activities of 2.1 million. After restating net Corporate expenses (representing 2.8 million) the EBITDA generated by the Plasma Solutions activity stands at 0.6 million, showing the positive contribution of this sector to the Group's EBITDA. However, this result does not offset all of the depreciation and amortisation expenses for the assets of this activity and the additional impairment loss recognised on the test platform, all of which amounted a total of 1.7 million. Most of the operating loss for the year is attributable to the Renewable Energies segment, whose operating expenses directly linked to plant operations reflect the costs of the commissioning and ramp-up of the CHO Morcenx plant. An additional provision for losses upon completion on the EPC contract representing 1.4 million was also recorded (having no impact on the cash position of the period). The operating losses recorded by the Renewable Energies segment reduced 11.2 million for the year ended 31 December 2015, compared with 14.4 million for the year ended 31 December 2014, i.e. an improvement of 3.2 million. Net income Total net loss of 16.2 million, a significant reduction of 38%. In thousands of euros (TEUR) 2015 2014 Difference Operating income (loss) -14,617 -22,940 8,323 Financial income -140 -2,821 2,681 Income tax -1,296 -322 -974 Share of net income (loss) of equity-accounted entities -137 90 -227 Minority interests 26 2 24 Net income (loss), Group share -16,163 -25,991 9,828 The net financial income of -0.1 million, a significant improvement compared with 2014 (-2.8 million) reflects the reduction in borrowing and the corresponding interest. Income tax expense was 1.3 million, mainly comprising a reclassification to losses of a deferred tax asset for the same amount. In total, the loss is standing at -16.2 million, compared with -26 million in 2014, a reduction of 38%. Balance sheet and cash position Financial structure Cash position at 6.9 million, down by 6.7 million. Financial liabilities (non-current): 11.2 million, up 3.2 million. Consolidated equity: 2.5 million, down 14.3 million as a consequence of the loss. In thousands of euros (TEUR) 31/12/2015 31/12/2014 Difference Non-current assets 23,828 22,641 1,187 Current assets (non-cash) 13,102 24,021 -10,919 Cash 6,915 13,640 -6,725 Consolidated equity - Group share 2,495 16,793 -14,298 Non-controlling interests 102 128 -26 Non-current financial liabilities 11,245 7,982 3,263 Other non-current liabilities 713 673 39 Current financial liabilities 1,379 1,359 20 Other current liabilities 27,911 33,366 -5,455 Balance sheet total 43,845 60,302 -16,457 Net debt 5,709 -4,299 10,008 Net debt ratio 229% -26% 254% Shareholders' equity - Group share, in euros per share 0.04 0.24 -0.20 Source: 2015 consolidated financial statements audited by the Joint Statutory Auditors and approved by the Board of Directors on 20 April 2016. Assets : Cash and cash equivalents at 6.9 million (including 0.1 million for the Air & Gas sector, without activity and maintained in the consolidation scope), recorded a decrease of 6.7 million due to outflows over the period mainly affected to the requirements of the Renewable Energies segment. The additional guarantee for an amount of 4 million paid at the end of 2014 on the CHO Morcenx EPC contract was repaid during the half-year 2015 by the client for the amount of 3.9 million, generating a cash inflow for the same amount and contributing to a decrease in current assets (non-cash). In addition, given the timetable for the final delivery of the CHO Morcenx plant now planned for the end of 2016, the financial guarantee for the CHO Morcenx EPC contract initially placed in an escrow account was reclassified from current assets to non-current assets for its net amount of 3.8 million at 31 December 2015. Liabilities: Equity at 2.5 million saw a reduction of 14.3 million compared with 31 December 2014, due to the 16.2 million loss for the period, partially offset by the capital increases associated with the conversion of redeemable share purchase warrants (BSAR) for 0.5 million, issue premium included. The increase in non-current financial liabilities reflects the setting up of a private placement in the form of convertible obligations for a gross amount of 5 million carried out in December 2015. Subscriptions to this bond issue (including the offsetting of a liquid bridging loan with due claim on the Company) generated 4.6 million in cash, net of issue costs and capitalized interests. Consequently, the Group's net debt amounted to 5.7 million at 31 December 2015 compared with a cash surplus of 4.3 million at 31 December 2014. The Group settled the instalments of its various moratoriums (obtained in 2013 and 2014) in the amount of 1.8 million for the year 2015, contributing to the reduction of other current liabilities. Cash position and operating cash flows Operating cash flows: -8.1 million, up 3.9 million. Operating cash consumption of 12 million, reduced by 1.1 million, after repayment of the 2013 moratoriums for 1.8 million in 2015 In thousands of euros (TEUR) 2015 2014 Difference Operating cash flows -8,113 -12,020 3,907 Net cash used in operating activities -11,996 -13,083 1,086 Net disinvestments/(investments) 1,811 -4,865 6,676 Operating cash flows at -8.1 million (compared with -12 million in 2014) recovered considerably, reflecting the performance improvements for the Plasma Solutions and Treatment of Asbestos segments. However, the progress made in these segments was not sufficient to offset the (stable) deficit in operating cash flows in the Renewable Energies sector, as well as cash consumption by the Holding company. Cash consumption by operating activities takes into account cash outflows due to the repayment of the moratoriums signed in 2013 and extended in 2014. These represented 1.8 million in 2015 and a net amount of 0.7 million in 2014 (i.e. after taking the new deadline deferrals into account). The reduction in cash consumption posted is therefore limited to 1.1 million. The repayment of the additional guarantee on the CHO Morcenx EPC contract for 3.9 million largely offsets the 2.3 million in capital expenditures for the Treatment of Asbestos activity (improvements and the renewal of furnace refractories). The Divestment/investment item amounted to 1.8 million with a positive change of 6.7 million compared with 2014. It is important to note that the Group's cash consumption is currently essentially related to the completion of the delivery/reception process for the CHO Morcenx plant. Events after the reporting period and outlook Corporate: Financing In addition to the private placement of 5 million carried out in December 2015, the cash financing requirement for activities in 2016 is based on a combination of different actions including WCR-related measures and the set-up of an equity line that will secure continuity of operations. Measures related to the working capital requirement Amongst the WCR-related measures implemented, a factoring solution was deployed at the end of February for Inertam's clients, enabling this entity to cover its 2016 requirements, it being understood that all cash requirements were covered by Europlasma in 2015 (2.9 million). Set-up of an equity line At the end of February 2016, the Group set up an equity line with Kepler Cheuvreux for a maximum of 10 million in two tranches, the first one (5 million) being actionable in 2016. Drawings will depend on stock market conditions. This line should enable the Group to gain more leeway, diversify its financing sources and meet its cash requirements associated with the development of its activities with more flexibility. At the date of publication of the financial statements, the Company has not drawn on this financing line. With regard to the financing of the deployment plan for future plants, the Group is studying specific project financing solutions that guarantee the interests of Europlasma and its shareholders. Changes to the Board of Directors As announced on 20 April 2016, Europlasma's Board of Directors unanimously co-opted Yann Le Dore as an independent Director, replacing Erik Martel. This co-optation will be submitted for approval by shareholders at the General Shareholders' Meeting, scheduled on 8 June 2016. Plasma Solutions (Europlasma Industries) Radioactive waste After various delays, the KNPP (Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant, Bulgaria) project contract resumed. Europlasma teams have been on-site since February 2016 to supervise the installation of equipment and prepare them for commissioning. Final reception of this plasma unit, for volume reduction and conditioning of low-level radioactive waste, is planned for the second half of 2016. In addition, at the beginning of 2016, Europlasma received an order regarding the study for volume reduction and conditioning of low- and medium-level radioactive waste, which reinforces the Europlasma position in this new market segment. Fly ash Europlasma is actively cooperating with the Chinese Ministry for Environmental Protection (MEPSCC) in order to obtain validation for the vitrified production from the plasma treatment of fly ash from incineration as an inert and recoverable product. This validation is expected for the beginning of 2017. To accelerate its development in China, Europlasma has been assisted by a local Shanghai-based agent since the beginning of 2016. The development of the first installation of this type in China is continuing and all equipment delivered by Europlasma has now been received on-site. The installation should start up during summer 2016, and will be immediately followed by its commissioning. Recovery of precious metals At the beginning of 2016, Europlasma obtained a letter of intention from a European manufacturer to supply a plasma system which should significantly improve the known processes to recover precious metals contained in certain types of waste. The technical-economic analysis is in progress. Treatment of Asbestos (Inertam) Business development Abroad: in February 2016, Inertam signed a contract for the treatment of 2,800 tonnes of asbestos waste from a former industrial site and public building with an Italian company. Deliveries will begin during the second half of 2016, and will be spread over three years. In March 2016, Inertam received the visit of the INAIL (Italian Institute for Social Security), confirming the Italian government's interest in a final, sustainable solution for the treatment of asbestos as an alternative to landfill. In France, the order book already exceeds expectations, and holds the prospect of an increase in deliveries (excluding the Italian contract) of at least 10% compared with 2015. Renewable Energies (CHO Power) CHO Morcenx: Progress on lifting the reserves As a reminder, after the issue of the FAR (Final Acceptance with Reserves) at the end of 2015, four levels of environmental and aesthetic reserves were issued. The reserve on glycol storage was lifted at the end of 2015. The reserves on residues and soot are currently being resolved. The reserve on the treatment of effluents is being studied with the Water Agency. The last reserve of the FAR concerned the electrical production capacity installed on-site. At the end of January 2016, two GE-Jenbacher engines were ordered for 4 MWe of additional production capacity. These engines, purchased by CHO Power, then rented to CHO Morcenx, will be installed during the third quarter of 2016. Final Acceptance will take place after the installation of this additional power and environmental improvements. Regulations The application decrees for the provisions of the Energy Transition law adopted in August 2015 are being established and are still under discussion for some, and in consultation for others. Whatever the results of these discussions, in which CHO Power actively collaborates, the CODOA already secured for on-going projects (CHO Tiper, CHO Locmine, CHO Broceliande, CHO Le Poher), will remain valid, subject to the reserve of the date of work completion. Publication of FY2015 financial statements and annual report The consolidated accounts are available on the Group's site http://www.europlasma.com, in the "Shareholders & Investors" section, under the item "Regulated information". The "Document de Reference" (Registration Document including the financial report) will be online on 28 April after close of trading on the same item. About EUROPLASMA At the heart of environmental issues, Europlasma designs and develops innovative plasma solutions for renewable energy generation and hazardous waste recovery, as well as related applications for multi-sector companies wishing to reduce their environmental footprint. Europlasma is listed on Alternext (FR0000044810-ALEUP). For more information: http://www.europlasma.com Disclaimer This release contains provisional information on the best estimates of the Management at the date of their publication. This information is by nature subject to risks and uncertainties which are difficult to predict and generally outside the Group's field of action. These risks include the risks listed in the Group's reference document available on its website http://www.europlasma.com. Consequently, the future performance of the Group may differ significantly from the provisional data communicated and the Group can make no commitment to the achievement of these provisional elements. APPENDICES 1. GLOSSARY BSA: Share purchase warrant. BSAR: Redeemable share purchase warrant. CHO Morcenx: Simplified joint-stock company (Societe par Actions Simplifiee), owner of the waste and biomass-to-energy power plant in Morcenx (France), 35% owned by Europlasma Group, through its subsidiary CHO Power, at 31/12/2014. Corporate costs: Holding and SCI de Gazeification (SCIG) operating costs. EBITDA: net consolidated revenue, including companies' fiscal expenses, net financial expenses and net appropriations to depreciation and provisions (including impairment on goodwill). Net debt: financial debt less liquid assets and short-term investment securities. EPC: Engineering, Procurement and Construction contract. This concerns the contract for the CHO Morcenx power plant. FA: "Final Acceptance" or "Lifting of Reserves": Final acceptance by the client or delivery of the CHO Morcenx power plant. The reserves concern: 1/ adding additional engines; 2/ aesthetic and environmental improvements FAR: "Final Acceptance with Reserves", final acceptance with reserves of the plant by the client in its current configuration with two engines. KNPP: Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant is a contract for the supply of a plasma furnace to reduce and immobilize low-level radioactive waste at the Bulgarian nuclear power plant of Kozloduy. Net debt ratio: Net debt/ Equity - Group share SCIG: "Societe Civile Immobiliere de Gazeification": Real estate Company holding the Group's real estate as well as CHO Morcenx's land and buildings; 2. SEGMENT INFORMATION Plasma Solutions Asbestos Renewable Air & 2015 (inc. holding) treatment Energies Gas Total Goodwill 0 1,308 0 8 1,316 Other intangible assets 268 28 18 0 314 Property, plant and equipment 7,159 4,197 161 0 11,517 Other non-current assets 1,272 1,185 7,593 630 10,681 Cash and cash equivalent 5,763 377 678 97 6,915 Total Assets 17,244 11,811 14,053 737 43,845 Financial liabilities 10,708 1,913 3 0 12,624 Revenue 2,225 11,292 565 0 14,082 Net increase in depreciation, amortisation, and impairment -1,466 -2,311 -1,793 -115 -5,685 Operating income -3,662 428 -11,248 -134 -14,617 EBITDA -2,196 2,739 -9,592 -19 -9,068 Plasma Solutions Asbestos Renewable Air & 2014 (inc. holding) treatment Energies Gas Total Goodwill 0 1,308 0 8 1,316 Other intangible assets 844 35 186 0 1,065 Property, plant and equipment 8,347 3,874 66 0 12,287 Other non-current assets 1,285 914 5,170 605 7,973 Cash and cash equivalent 12,638 464 425 114 13,640 Total Assets 26,043 10,875 22,653 730 60,302 Financial liabilities 6,891 2,447 4 0 9,341 Revenue 117 9,461 -596 0 8,983 Net increase in depreciation, amortisation, and impairment -3,076 -3,278 -4,041 29 -10,366 Operating income -5,478 -3,094 -14,358 -10 -22,940 EBITDA -2,402 1,491 -10,227 -39 -11,176 Source: 2015 consolidated financial statements audited by the Joint Statutory Auditors and approved by the Board of Directors on 20 April 2016. CONTACT: Press Anne BORDERES Tel: + 33-(0)556-497-000 Investors & Analysts contactbourse@europlasma.com TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 04/21/16 -- Augusta Industries Inc. (the "Corporation") (TSX VENTURE: AAO) is pleased to provide an update with respect to the non-disclosure agreement (the "Agreement") entered into between the Corporation and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America Inc. ("Mitsubishi") an affiliate company of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd based in Japan. As disclosed in its press release of July 16, 2015, the Corporation and Mitsubishi entered into the Agreement in an attempt to better understand how the Corporation and Mitsubishi can work together to support the efforts of Mitsubishi. Subsequent to the execution of the Agreement, the Corporation and Mitsubishi have identified a specific application for the use of the Corporation's technology. The Corporation and Mitsubishi will commence on the development of a monitoring system to be deployed and used by Mitsubishi in their exclusive markets. "We are excited to be working with Mitsubishi in the development of monitoring systems specific to their requirements," said Allen Lone, the Corporation's President and CEO. "Our relationship with Mitsubishi is evidence and positive proof that the Corporation's technology continues to be accepted throughout the world." About the Corporation: Through its wholly owned subsidiaries, Marcon International Inc. ("Marcon") and Fox-Tek Canada Inc. ("Fox-Tek"), the Corporation provides a variety of services and products to a number of clients. Marcon is an industrial supply contractor servicing the energy sector and a number of US Government entities. Marcon's principal business is the sale and distribution of industrial parts and equipment (Electrical, mechanical and Instrumentation.) In addition to departments and agencies of the U.S. Government, Marcon's major clients include Saudi Arabia-Sabic Services (Refining and Petrochemical), Bahrain National Gas Co, Bahrain Petroleum, Qatar Petroleum, Qatar Gas, Qatar Petrochemical, Gulf of Suez Petroleum, Agiba Petroleum and Burullus Gas Co. Fox Tek develops non-intrusive asset health monitoring sensor systems for the oil and gas market to help operators track the thinning of pipelines and refinery vessels due to corrosion/erosion, strain due to bending/buckling and process pressure and temperature. The Corporation's FT fiber optic sensor and corrosion monitoring systems allow cost-effective, 24/7 remote monitoring capabilities to improve scheduled maintenance operations, avoid unnecessary shutdowns, and prevent accidents and leaks. The TSX Venture Exchange has in no way passed upon the merits of the proposed transaction and has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release. This press release contains forward-looking statements based on assumptions, uncertainties and management's best estimates of future events. Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated. Investors are cautioned that such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements are detailed from time to time in the Corporation's periodic reports filed with the Ontario Securities Commission and other regulatory authorities. The Corporation has no intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Contacts: Augusta Industries Inc. Allen Lone President, CEO (905) 275 -8111 Ext 226 atlone@fox-tek.com MONTREAL, QUEBEC -- (Marketwired) -- 04/21/16 -- Critical Elements Corporation (TSX VENTURE: CRE)(OTCQX: CRECF)(FRANKFURT: F12) announce that, at its annual meeting held on April 21, 2016, shareholders of the Company approved all the items, including: -- Election of Jean-Sebastien Lavallee, Jean-Francois Meilleur, Richard Saint-Jean, Jean-Raymond Lavallee, Marc Simpson and Matthew Starnes Lauriston as directors; -- The appointment of KPMG s.r.l./S.E.N.C.R.L. as auditors of the Corporation for the current financial year. About Critical Elements Corporation A recent financial analysis (Technical Report and Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) on the Rose lithium-tantalum Project, Genivar, December 2011) of the Rose project based on price forecasts of US$260/kg ($118/lb) for Ta2O5 contained in a tantalite concentrate and US$6,000/t for lithium carbonate (Li2CO3) showed an estimated after-tax Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of 25% for the Rose project, with an estimated Net Present Value (NPV) of CA$279 million at an 8% discount rate. The payback period is estimated at 4.1 years. The pre-tax IRR is estimated at 33% and the NPV at $488 million at a discount rate of 8%. (Mineral resources are not mineral reserves and do not have demonstrated economic viability). (The preliminary economic assessment is preliminary in nature). (See press release dated November 21, 2011.) The conclusions of the PEA indicate the operation would support a production rate of 26,606 tons of high purity (99.9% battery grade) Li2CO3 and 206,670 pounds of Ta2O5 per year over a 17-year mine life. The project hosts a current Indicated resource of 26.5 million tonnes of 1.30% Li2O Eq. or 0.98% Li2O and 163 ppm Ta2O5 and an Inferred resource of 10.7 million tonnes of 1.14% Li2O Eq. or 0.86% Li2O and 145 ppm Ta2O5. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Contacts: Jean-Sebastien Lavallee, P.Geo. President and Chief Executive Officer 819-354-5146 president@cecorp.ca www.cecorp.ca Investor Relations Paradox Public Relations 514-341-0408 DUBLIN, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Volkswagen is close to reaching an agreement with United States' officials to buy back almost 500,000 2.0-litre diesel cars. The deal, if completed, will include fines from regulators and compensation for owners. It is likely to be announced during a federal court hearing in San Francisco later today. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160330/349511LOGO ) In September, the company confessed to cheating on emission tests for an estimated 11 million vehicles worldwide. This was unfortunate timing for VW, with many US states cracking down on emissions in an attempt to reduce the use of conventional fuels. They are providing incentives to consumers that buy vehicles that run on alternative fuels, and the low emission vehicle market is expected to grow at 5.13% by 2019. VW will pay cash compensation to owners who sell their vehicles back or get them fixed. Owners are expected to get an additional cash payment on top of the estimated value of their vehicles before the emission scandal became public. Some reports have suggested that the deal to settle could involve paying each affected customer $5,000. Vehicle emissions and low operating and manufacturing cost are causing American automakers to turn to electric vehicles. The high performance EV market in the United States is projected to grow at a CAGR of 42.34% by 2020. Emission regulations has also led to considerable growth in the exhaust aftertreatment systems market, which is expected to reach 206,430.46 thousand units by 2020. Owners are expected to have around two years to decide whether to sell back vehicles or have them repaired. For further information on this topic, and a full list of all related documentation, please visit the Carbon Emissions and Capture section at http://www.researchandmarkets.com/rm/NQLK. About Research and Markets Research and Markets is the world's leading source for international market research reports and market data. We provide you with the latest data on international and regional markets, key industries, the top companies, new products and the latest trends. Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-emissions-usa-idUSKCN0XH2CX Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood,Senior Manager press@researchandmarkets.com For E.S.T Office Hours Call 1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call 1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 LAS VEGAS, NV -- (Marketwired) -- 04/21/16 --KSIX Media Holdings, Inc. (OTC PINK: KSIX), announces that its subsidiary, DigitizeIQ is a Key sponsor of the Mass Tort Made Perfect Bi-Annual Conference ("MTMP") in Las Vegas April 20th to 22nd, 2016. The MTMP is one of the largest plaintiff mass tort gatherings with over 800 participants and 250 of the top law firms focused on the multi-billion dollar market. http://mtmp.com/ DigitizeIQ is among Facebook's largest U.S advertising partners in the mass tort sector, and one of the largest social media advertising agencies specializing in lead generation, client survey execution, and landing page optimization. DigitizeIQ utilizes their proprietary software and direct contracts within social media to increase the effectiveness of ads and ROI for advertisers. Carter Matzinger, CEO of KSIX, stated, "KSIX growth and success is due to our ability to increase conversion rates and lower the cost per acquisition for clients across many lines of business. As the largest digital agency serving the mass tort industry in social media, we are proud to sponsor the Mass Tort Made Perfect conference, which is a significant industry gathering for plaintiffs and law firms. We are meeting with many of our valued clients as well as developing a tremendous number of new relationships that will lead to new business for our agency." ABOUT KSIX MEDIA HOLDINGS KSIX Media Holdings, Inc. (OTC PINK: KSIX) is an SEC fully reporting public company located in Las Vegas, Nevada. KSIX is a data-driven digital media and Internet marketing company specializing in driving targeted traffic for leading brands and agencies -- utilizing over 5000 affiliates and internal media buying across social media and mobile platforms. Our proprietary ad management platform was designed to automate customer acquisition with real-time data intelligence and increase advertising ROI on Facebook. It monitors social media data and dynamically analyzes thousands of data sets, matching products with relevant online activity and optimizing ad delivery -- intelligently connecting advertisers with millions of interested customers each month. Our goal is to provide our customers with the most powerful and effective cross-platform social media advertising tool available. KSIX currently operates three subsidiaries, KSIX LLC, DigitizeIQ LLC, and Blvd Media Group LLC. KSIX, LLC is a digital advertising network utilizing proprietary technology and intellectual properties designed to create revenue streams for their affiliate clients and to provide advertisers with increased measurable audience. KSIX provides performance-based marketing solutions to drive traffic and conversions within a Cost-Per-Action ("CPA") business model. KSIX has an online advertising network that works directly with advertisers and other networks to promote advertiser campaigns. KSIX manages offer tracking, reporting and distribution on the third-party platform. ABOUT DIGITIZEIQ DigitizeIQ is one of the largest agencies for social media marketing in the Tort Law industry. Utilizing proprietary software, DigitizeIQ can provide high-volume and high-quality marketing for tort law firms. DigitizeIQ creates multi-channel marketing campaigns specific to each company's advertising needs. BMG Media Group, LLC provides the tools for web publishers to drive traffic and increase revenue. BMG's mission is to monetize the Internet, promoting incentive-based advertisements resulting in more clicks, greater lead generation, and increased revenues. Forward Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements. These statements relate to future events or our future financial performance and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our or our industry's actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance or achievements expressed, implied or inferred by these forward-looking statements. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as "may," "will," "should," "could," "would," "expects," "plans," "intends," "anticipates," "believes," estimates," "predicts," "projects," "potential" or "continue" or the negative of such terms and other comparable terminology. These statements are only predictions based on our current expectations and projections about future events. You should not place undue reliance on these statements. In evaluating these statements, you should specifically consider various factors. Actual events or results may differ materially. The Company's financial results for the year ended December 31, 2015 may not necessarily be indicative of future results. These and other factors may cause our actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statement. These risks, uncertainties, and other factors include, but are not limited to, the risks and uncertainties discussed under the heading "Risk Factors" in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2015, and other reports filed by the Company from time to time with the SEC. The Company undertakes no obligation to update any of the information included in this release, except as otherwise required by law. Contact: info@ksix.com Investor Contact OmniVance Advisors Daniel Wong PR@ksix.com 858-381-5740 WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Florida Congresswoman Gwen Graham, D-Fla., announced Thursday she will not run for re-election this year and will instead consider running for governor of the Sunshine State. In a video released to supporters, Graham said the dysfunction of the Florida state government has caused her to rethink how she can best serve the people of the state. 'Floridians are hungry for new leadership - and I'm so excited to tell you, first, I'm seriously considering running for governor in 2018,' Graham said in the video. She added, 'Public servants must focus on the job they're elected to do, so I will spend the remainder of my term fully representing you in Congress - but I will not seek re-election while considering this next step of service.' Graham was previously expected to run for a second term, but she argued that redistricting has transformed Florida's second congressional district from a fair, moderate district into two extreme, partisan districts. If she decides to run for governor, Graham could be entering a crowded Democratic field in the race to replace term-limited Governor Rick Scott. Miami Beach Mayor Phil Levine and Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn are potential rivals for the Democratic nomination, according to Politico. Graham, the daughter of former Florida Governor and Senator Bob Graham, D-Fla., finished her video by explaining to supporters why she believes the state needs new leadership. 'It's time to remind the legislature, governor and lobbyists that when they come to the state Capitol, they're in North Florida, and we have a certain way of doing things here,' Graham said. 'We govern in the sunshine, we serve the people, and we care for our neighbors.' 'We call it the North Florida Way, and it's missing in the state Capitol,' she added. 'Working together, we can bring common sense back to Tallahassee, and make our state work for the people again.' Politico said Florida Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam is a favored early candidate to run for governor on the Republican side. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de DUBLIN, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- DMS Offshore Investment Services Ltd. (DMS), the world's largest fund governance firm, and Arena Capital Advisors (Arena) have announced the launch of the Arena Short Duration High Income Fund hosted on DMS UCITS ICAV platform. UCITS has created a regulatory passport for investment managers to access European investors. DMS has developed a proprietary UCITS V compliant ICAV platform to provide investment managers with solutions for their UCITS requirements to support the regulatory and fund governance challenges that UCITS presents for U.S. and international investment managers doing business in Europe. UCITS V, which came into force on March 18, 2016, strengthens the protection of UCITS investors. The regulation harmonizes the UCITS depositary regime, remuneration rules and sanctions regime broadly in line with AIFMD and its delegated acts. By providing a fully supported platform with top-tier service providers, DMS can assist with the fund structuring, establishment, regulatory, compliance, distribution, directorship, and reporting requirements of a UCITS allowing our clients to concentrate on their expertise. "DMS is very pleased to have partnered with a manager of the caliber of Arena Capital to facilitate their European fund and distribution strategy. This demonstrates their commitment and confidence in DMS's products and people and we look forward to a successful and long standing relationship," stated Derek Delaney, Managing Director of DMS Europe. Sanije Perrett, President of Arena Capital, commented: "The expansion of our UCITS product offerings reinforces Arena's dedication to European investors. We are excited by the growth potential of our new UCITS Fund, the Arena Short Duration High Income Fund, and are delighted to be partnering with DMS with their proven track record and unique focus in this area." ABOUT DMS DMS Offshore Investment Services Ltd. (DMS) is the worldwide leader in fund governance with more than 225 professionals representing leading investment funds with assets under management exceeding $330 billion. DMS provides trusted and comprehensive Fund Governance, FATCA, AIFMD + UCITS, Banking + Custody, Trust, Corporate and Outsourcing solutions that support investments across a range of structures, and diverse investment strategies. info@dmsoffshore.com ABOUT ARENA CAPITAL Arena Capital Advisors, LLC is a registered investment adviser with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Established in 2013, Arena Capital Advisors, LLC has approximately EUR 600 million under management as at 31 October 2015 and specializes in high yield fixed income, focusing primarily on short duration corporate bonds and leveraged loans. The investment objective of the Arena Short Duration High Income Fund is to generate superior risk adjusted returns through a portfolio of short duration investments. The investments in the firm's short duration high yield strategy consist primarily of short duration high yield securities and corporate loans. info@arenaca.com Media contact: Kate Bohner Managing Director/Chief Marketing & Communications Officer DMS Offshore Investment Services (p) +1.212.403.2783|(c)+1.917.863.5310 E: kbohner@dmsoffshore.com To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dms-offshore-investment-services-launches-arena-capital-advisors-on-ucits-v-irish-platform-300255066.html VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/21/16 -- True Gold Mining Inc. (TSX VENTURE: TGM) ("True Gold" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has received overwhelming shareholder approval at the special meeting (the "Meeting") held today to approve the previously announced plan of arrangement (the "Arrangement") with Endeavour Mining Corporation ("Endeavour"). At the Meeting of True Gold shareholders and True Gold optionholders (collectively, the "True Gold Securityholders"), a special resolution approving the Arrangement was approved by: -- 95.5% of the votes cast by True Gold shareholders, voting together as a single class -- 95.9% of the votes cast by True Gold Securityholders, voting together as a single class In addition, the Arrangement was approved by a simple majority of the votes cast at the Meeting in person or by proxy of the holders of common shares of True Gold, excluding the votes cast in respect of True Gold shares held by certain related parties (as defined by Multilateral Instrument 61-101 - Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions ("MI 61-101")) or joint actors (as defined by MI 61-101). On closing of the Arrangement, True Gold Shareholders will receive 0.044 of an Endeavour common share for each True Gold common share held. Additional information regarding the terms of the Arrangement are set out in True Gold's management information circular dated March 18, 2016, which is available under True Gold's profile at www.sedar.com. Endeavour also held a special meeting of shareholders today, which approved the issuance of Endeavour common shares in connection with the Arrangement, the private placement to La Mancha Holding under its anti-dilution right, and the increase of Endeavour's authorised share capital. Further information regarding the results of voting at Endeavour's meeting of shareholders is contained in a news release issued by Endeavour today. The Arrangement is subject to final approval by the TSX Venture Exchange and the Supreme Court of British Columbia whose hearing for the final order to approve the Arrangement is scheduled to take place on April 22, 2016. The closing, and effective date, of the Arrangement is expected to occur on April 26, 2016. About True Gold True Gold Mining Inc. is where gold comes to life. We are committed to growing a successful gold production company, by focusing on projects with low costs, low technical risks and solid economics. The Company's board, management and technical teams have proven track records in gold exploration, development, and production worldwide. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD Christian Milau, President & CEO Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Cautionary Statement: Certain information contained in this press release constitutes "forward-looking information", within the meaning of Canadian legislation concerning the completion of the Arrangement. Generally, these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be taken", "occur", "be achieved" or "has the potential to". Forward looking statements contained in this press release may include statements regarding our ability to complete the Arrangement, which involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties which may not prove to be accurate. Actual results and outcomes may differ materially from what is expressed or forecasted in these forward-looking statements. Such statements are qualified in their entirety by the inherent risks and uncertainties surrounding future expectations. Among those factors which could cause actual results to differ materially are the following: uncertainties as to the timing of the Arrangement and satisfaction of the conditions thereto, market conditions and other risk factors listed from time to time in our reports filed with Canadian securities regulators on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. The forward-looking statements included in this press release are made as of the date of this press release and the Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable securities legislation. Contacts: Investor inquiries: True Gold Mining Inc. 604-801-5020 info@truegoldmining.com CALGARY, ALBERTA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/21/16 -- Alberta's new royalty system brings greater clarity for producers and investors, and more work is needed to attract new investment and create more jobs, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) said today. Tim McMillan, CAPP president and chief executive officer, commended the Alberta government for its timely approach to create a more modern royalty system through a constructive process. "This has led to a royalty system that is true to the principles of the royalty advisory report," he said. "The new royalty system helps provide the clarity investors need to plan for the future." The new system harmonizes and simplifies royalty programs for all products and drilling depths, removing distortions from the old system. These changes may encourage activity in some resource plays but less in others. Overall the changes do not significantly alter the economic picture for industry. In general, industry expects to generate comparable returns for comparable activity as under the old system. With these calibrations in place, industry will continue to engage with government to calibrate what the royalty panel called strategic programs for emerging resources, enhanced hydrocarbon recovery and enhanced oil recovery. These are expected to be finalized by May 31. "The work to attract more investment to Alberta does not stop," McMillan said. "On their own, today's changes will not be enough to restore industry activity across Alberta." "Industry is working hard to adjust its own cost structures, and of course an oil and natural gas price recovery is needed as well," McMillan said. "We remain committed to working with the Alberta government to find common ground to adapt our industry to be more successful. Together, these efforts will help the province to re-establish its competitive edge." Royalties are one part of a larger system that drives investment, creates jobs, generates government revenues and builds Alberta communities. More work is required between government and industry on fiscal competitiveness, regulatory effectiveness, environmental innovation and especially the need for new energy infrastructure to connect Canada's oil and natural gas with new customers. CAPP shares Premier Rachel Notley's stated goal to reassert Alberta's competitive advantage on the world stage, as well as her government's goal to enhance industry's already strong environmental performance. "We support the government using the same timely, credible and open process it had on royalties for discussion on other policies that impact the oil and natural gas sector," McMillan said. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) represents companies, large and small, that explore for, develop and produce natural gas and crude oil throughout Canada. CAPP's member companies produce about 90 per cent of Canada's natural gas and crude oil. CAPP's associate members provide a wide range of services that support the upstream crude oil and natural gas industry. Together CAPP's members and associate members are an important part of a national industry with revenues from oil and natural gas production of about $120 billion a year. CAPP's mission, on behalf of the Canadian upstream oil and gas industry, is to advocate for and enable economic competitiveness and safe, environmentally and socially responsible performance. Contacts: Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers Chelsie Klassen 403-267-1151 chelsie.klassen@capp.ca www.capp.ca WASHINGTON, DC--(Marketwired - April 21, 2016) - In a hearing on US-Morocco relations held Wednesday in Rayburn House Office Building, members of Congress from both sides of the aisle praised Morocco as a "stable and stalwart US ally in a complicated part of the world," and called for a negotiated solution to the forty-year-old Western Sahara conflict based on a formula of autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty. "The US and Morocco have had a long and strategic relationships for so very long," said Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Middle East and North Africa Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) in opening statements at the event, which was co-sponsored by Subcommittee Ranking Member Ted Deutch (R-FL). "Morocco has been one of the few bright spots... of stability, of reform, of progress in North Africa, and we want to see that continue." Referring to the imminent renewal of the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping mission in the Sahara known as MINURSO, the Chairman noted, "That's why it is so vital that the United States reaffirm our position in support of Morocco and work with our ally to draft a clean resolution that will bring this crisis to a close." The crisis she was referring to dates back to last month when, as she explained at the hearing, "[United Nations] Secretary General Ban Ki-moon made some outrageous comments misrepresenting Morocco's administration of the Western Sahara. The Secretary General's indiscrete comments called into question the neutrality of the United Nations and its ability to facilitate what we want -- a negotiated solution." Other members of Congress in attendance included Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL), Congressman Gregory Meeks (D-NY), Congressman Carlos Curbelo (R-FL), and Congressman Albio Sires (D-NJ). A panel of experts provided testimony in support of Moroccan sovereignty over the region. "Polisario intransigence, coupled with historical North African rivalry embedded in Algeria's view of the Western Sahara, represent the two defining impediments to a solution," said former US Ambassador to Morocco Marc Ginsberg, reflecting on his experience in Rabat under the first Clinton Administration. Remarking on the UN Secretary General's recent comments on the issue, Ambassador Ginsberg expressed his "deep disappointment with the unwarranted and unhelpful interference by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon," adding that Ban "has singularly undermined the critical role which the United Nations has heretofore played to preserve the peace." "[Autonomy] under Moroccan sovereignty constitutes a just and viable solution, particularly at a time where the expansion of ISIS and Al Qaeda in North Africa should render independence the least justifiable option for American security," he went on. Echoing the sentiment, former US Ambassador to Morocco Michael Ussery said, "For the US, the clear option going forward is one of common sense, supporting Morocco, our long-standing friend and an ally in the war on terror, and a nation of religious tolerance." He warned that an independent Western Sahara "is a path that can lead to more regional instability and terrorism and possibly the next Libya." "I think it is important that we speak plainly and with common sense about the best outcome for the people and territory of Western Sahara and, frankly, what is in the national security interest of the United States," said former Senate Foreign Relations Committee Staff Director Lester Munson. "This outcome -- genuine local autonomy [under Moroccan sovereignty] for the people of Western Sahara -- is a reasonable compromise that accounts for most of the interests of all parties." Speaking to the welfare of the people of the region, Nizar Baraka, President of Morocco's Economic, Social, and Environmental Council, explained how Morocco is doing everything it can to improve life for those living in the Western Sahara, namely through the country's regionalization plan, which "consists of a large transfer of authority to directly elected regional councils," as well as a number of infrastructure and economic development initiatives. "Through their elected representatives, the populations of the Moroccan Sahara choose to take full and entire responsibility in building a better future for their children without being hostage of the long-lasting UN process." US policy on the Western Sahara dates back to 1999 and has continued under the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Administrations. In a Joint Statement issued on November 22, 2013 following a meeting between President Obama and King Mohammed VI, the US reiterated that Morocco's autonomy plan is "serious, realistic, and credible." The two leaders also affirmed "their shared commitment to the improvement of the lives of the people of the Western Sahara." The policy -- and support for Morocco's autonomy plan -- has also been reiterated by bipartisan majorities of both the US House and Senate. In April 2009, 233 members of the United States House of Representatives sent a letter to President Obama reaffirming their support for Morocco's autonomy proposal. The letter built on another letter from 2007 signed by 173 Members of the House reiterating Congressional support for the Moroccan plan, and a letter from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and other former policy makers. In March 2010, 54 members of the United States Senate affirmed their support for Morocco's autonomy plan in a letter addressed to then"Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, urging her to "make the resolution of the Western Sahara stalemate a U.S. foreign policy priority for North Africa." In its legislative report for the 2016 Appropriations Bill passed in December 2015, Congress re-affirmed its strong bipartisan support for a negotiated solution to the dispute over the region based on autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty, and encouraged American private sector investment in Western Sahara. The Moroccan American Center for Policy (MACP) is a non-profit organization whose principal mission is to inform opinion makers, government officials, and interested publics in the United States about political and social developments in Morocco and the role being played by the Kingdom of Morocco in broader strategic developments in North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. This material is distributed by the Moroccan American Center for Policy on behalf of the Government of Morocco. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC. CONTACT: Jordana Merran 202.470.2049 jmerran@moroccanamericancenter.com WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Criticizing a North Carolina law, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump suggested Thursday transgender people should be free to use whichever bathroom they want. At a town hall event on NBC's 'Today' show, Trump noted that North Carolina is paying a 'big price' for passing a law requiring people to use bathrooms corresponding to the gender on their birth certificate. 'North Carolina, what they're going through with all the business that's leaving, all of the strife,' Trump said. 'Leave it the way it is.' 'There have been very few complaints the way it is. People go. They use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate,' he added. 'There has been so little trouble.' Trump said he was unaware if he has any transgender people working for his company but said he would be fine with transgender celebrity Caitlyn Jenner using whatever bathroom she wanted at Trump Tower. The real estate tycoon's remarks drew quick condemnation from Republican rival Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., who described Trump's position as unreasonable and 'simply crazy.' 'We shouldn't allow grown adult men, strangers, alone in a bathroom with little girls, that's a point anyone who is rational should understand,' Cruz said. The dispute comes as Trump continues to try to win the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the Republican presidential nomination. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. According to the latest research study released by Technavio, the global test and measurement equipment market is expected to reach over USD 24.43 billion by 2020. This research report titled 'Global Test and Measurement Equipment Market 2016-2020', provides an in-depth analysis of market growth in terms of revenue and emerging market trends. To calculate the market size, the report considers the demand for T&M equipment from various end-users. Request sample report: http://bit.ly/1VvFUvH "The global T&M market is likely to grow rapidly during the forecast period owing to increased need from the communications industry for wireless and wireline networks. Technological advances in the industry in the form of 4G/long-term evolution (LTE), and the adoption of IoT have prompted operators to enhance T&M activities. These activities help develop new services at low costs, and deliver superior quality, which eventually increases productivity across network cycles," said Amrita Choudhury, one of Technavio's lead analysts for test and measurement equipment research. Global T&M market by product segments 2015 Wireless test equipment 34.41% GPTE 26.91% Semiconductor and test equipment 22.22% Real-time test equipment 16.46% Global wireless test equipment market: largest segment The global wireless test equipment market was valued at over USD 6 billion in 2015. The increase in demand for mobile/wireless devices is expected to fuel the demand for wireless T&M equipment. These devices help mobile phone vendors to test their products based on major technology formats such as LTE-A, LTE, GSM, GPRS, and WiMAX. The global smartphone market, in term of units sold, stood at USD 1.54 billion in 2015, and it is expected to reach close to USD 1.76 billion by 2017. India is expected to become the second-largest market for smartphones during the forecast period, overtaking the US. By 2017, Technavio predicts that India, China, and the US will contribute close to 45% in the global smartphone market. Increase in sales of mobile devices is expected to further drive the demand for wireless test equipment. The emergence of 5G technology is likely to increase the demand for T&M equipment during the forecast period in developed economies such as the US and Europe. Developing economies such as India, Indonesia, and Vietnam are on the verge of shifting from 3G to 4G networks, and this factor is driving the demand for wireless T&M equipment. For instance, In India, BSNL, which is a key player is expected to invest around USD 2.5 billion during 2016-2017 for the development of its 4G network, expansion of broadband coverage, and enhancement of network quality. Global GPTE market: second largest segment The global GPTE market was valued at USD 5.1 billion in 2015. GPTE includes different testing and measuring equipment such as oscilloscopes, multimeters, arbitrary waveform generators, logic analyzers, spectrum analyzers, power meters, electronic counters, and VXI/PXI-based instruments. Sectors such as communications, aerospace and defense, mechanical engineering, and electronics use this equipment to test their design prototypes or finished products to check conformity with the required specifications and ascertain whether the devices fulfill the intended purpose. The global GPTE market is expected to grow steadily during the forecast period because of certain emerging trends that are anticipated to propel market growth over the next few years. The demand for integrated test equipment, which has increased significantly, is one such trend. End-users are therefore shifting from standalone test equipment to multifunctional test equipment for fulfilling their needs during the forecast period. Global semiconductor test equipment market The global semiconductor test equipment market was valued at close to USD 4.21 billion in 2015. The primary driver of the market is process automation in industries that require high-tech robots. The manufacture of a computer starts with the design and fabrication of tiny processors (chips) that are responsible for rapidly churning through millions of discrete computational steps that control each of those digital actions. Chip manufacturing involves the use of machines that subject silicon (Intel) wafers to extremely powerful vacuums, high-energy plasmas, caustic chemical baths, intense UV rays, and others, in a series of discrete manufacturing steps that turn them into memory chips, CPUs, and graphic processors. These processes are not human-friendly, and most of the work takes place in sealed chambers where robotic arms move them from one processing station to another. Even a small error can ruin a CPU worth USD 400. Therefore, semiconductor manufacturing companies are unwilling to take such risks by eliminating chances of functional errors. The use of semiconductor test equipment can prevent such errors, and this is expected to spur the demand for automatic test equipment in the industry. Browse related reports: Global Communication Test and Measurement Market 2016-2020 Global Cloud Infrastructure Testing Market 2016-2020 Global General Purpose Test Equipment Market 2015-2019 Test and Measurement Equipment Market in APAC 2015-2019 Purchase any three reports for the price of one by becoming a Technavio subscriber. Subscribing to Technavio's reports allows you to download any three reports per month for the price of one. Contact enquiry@technavio.com with your requirements and a link to our subscription platform. About Technavio Technaviois a leading global technology research and advisory company. The company develops over 2000 pieces of research every year, covering more than 500 technologies across 80 countries. Technavio has about 300 analysts globally who specialize in customized consulting and business research assignments across the latest leading edge technologies. Technavio analysts employ primary as well as secondary research techniques to ascertain the size and vendor landscape in a range of markets. Analysts obtain information using a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches, besides using in-house market modeling tools and proprietary databases. They corroborate this data with the data obtained from various market participants and stakeholders across the value chain, including vendors, service providers, distributors, re-sellers, and end-users. If you are interested in more information, please contact our media team at media@technavio.com. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160421005053/en/ Contacts: Technavio Research Jesse Maida Media Marketing Executive US: +1 630 333 9501 UK: +44 208 123 1770 www.technavio.com media@technavio.com Washington DC--(Newsfile Corp. - April 21, 2016) - The Securities and Exchange Commission today issued an order to extend for one year the pilot period of the National Market System Plan to Address Extraordinary Market Volatility, commonly known as the limit up-limit down (LULD) plan. The Commission also approved a modification to the manner in which the LULD plan establishes the reference price in cases where a security does not trade in the opening auction on the primary listing exchange. In these circumstances, a security's reference price will now be the previous trading day's closing price or, if no closing price exists, the last reported sale on the primary listing exchange. The Commission believes that this modification is appropriate to potentially prevent unnecessary trading pauses that are unrelated to extraordinary volatility. The Commission extended the pilot period in order to allow the plan participants to conduct further analysis regarding the LULD plan's operation, including how it operated during the market volatility on Aug. 24, 2015. In particular, the Commission has directed the self-regulatory organization (SRO) participants to submit to the Commission further recommendations, as necessary, relating to: The appropriate harmonization of the SRO clearly erroneous execution rules with the plan such that trades that occur within the LULD price bands would not be broken absent legitimate technical failures The establishment of specific provisions relating to the trading of exchange-traded products Other changes deemed warranted in light of the market volatility on Aug. 24, 2015, including the impact of double-wide price bands during the opening period, and the advisability of coordinated reopening procedures Potential enhancements to the categorization of securities into different tiers The order is effective immediately. The pilot period will expire on April 21, 2017. SANTIAGO, Chile, April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile S.A. (SQM) (NYSE: SQM; Santiago Stock Exchange: SQM-B, SQM-A) announced today that it has filed its Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2015, with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"). SQM's Form 20-F can be accessed by visiting either the SEC's website at www.sec.govor the investor relations section of the Company's website at www.sqm.com. In addition, shareholders may request a hard copy of the Company's audited financial statements, free of charge, by contacting the Company's investor relations team at ir@sqm.com or +562 24252485. About SQM SQM is an integrated producer and distributor of specialty plant nutrients, iodine, lithium, potassium-related fertilizers and industrial chemicals. Its products are based on the development of high quality natural resources that allow the Company to be a leader in costs, supported by a specialized international network with sales in over 110 countries. SQM's development strategy aims to maintain and strengthen the Company's position in each of its businesses. The leadership strategy is based on the Company's competitive advantages and on the sustainable growth of the different markets in which it participates. SQM's main competitive advantages in its different businesses include: Low production costs based on vast and high quality natural resources; Know-how and its own technological developments in its various production processes; Logistics infrastructure and high production levels that allow SQM to have low distribution costs; High market share in all its core products; International sales network with offices in 20 countries and sales in over 110 countries; Synergies from the production of multiple products that are obtained from the same two natural resources; Continuous new product development according to the specific needs of its different customers; Conservative and solid financial position. For further information, contact: Gerardo Illanes 56-2-24252022 / gerardo.illanes@sqm.com Kelly O'Brien 56-2-24252074 / kelly.obrien@sqm.com Carolyn McKenzie 56-2-24252280 / carolyn.mckenzie@sqm.com For media inquiries, contact: Carolina Garcia Huidobro / carolina.g.huidobro@sqm.com Alvaro Cifuentes / Alvaro.cifuentes@sqm.com Tamara Rebolledo / Tamara.rebolledo@sqm.com (Northern Region) Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements can be identified by words such as: "anticipate," "plan," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "strategy," "should," "will" and similar references to future periods. Examples of forward-looking statements include, among others, statements we make concerning the Company's business outlook, future economic performance, anticipated profitability, revenues, expenses, or other financial items, anticipated cost synergies and product or service line growth. Forward-looking statements are neither historical facts nor assurances of future performance. Instead, they are estimates that reflect the best judgment of SQM management based on currently available information. Because forward-looking statements relate to the future, they involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that are outside of our control and could cause actual results to differ materially from those stated in such statements. Therefore, you should not rely on any of these forward-looking statements. Readers are referred to the documents filed by SQM with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, specifically the most recent annual report on Form 20-F, which identifies important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are based on information available to SQM on the date hereof and SQM assumes no obligation to update such statements, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise. SUNNYVALE (dpa-AFX) - AMD (AMD) said it has licensed high-performance processor and SoC technology to a newly-created JV it has formed with THATIC (Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment Co., Ltd.) to develop SoCs tailored to the Chinese server market that will complement AMD's own offerings. The company said the $293 million licensing agreement is a meaningful step in AMD's IP monetization strategy. Payments are contingent upon the JV achieving certain milestones. AMD also expects to receive royalty payments from the JV's future product sales. The company said its Assembly, Test, Mark and Pack (ATMP) JV transaction received approval from Nantong Fujitsu Microelectronics Co., Ltd. shareholders and the transaction remains on track to close in second quarter, 2016. Lisa Su, AMD CEO, said: 'We are optimistic about our growth prospects in the second half of the year across our businesses based on new product introductions and design wins.' The company reported first-quarter revenue of $832 million; down 19 percent year-over-year. The company said the year-over-year decline was primarily due to lower sales of semi-custom SoCs and client notebook processors. Computing and Graphics segment revenue was $460 million, decreased 14 percent from last year. For second-quarter 2016, AMD expects revenue to increase 15 percent, plus or minus 3 percent, sequentially. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. (ASX:AIZ) (ASX:VAH) Air New Zealand Limitedsays that it is considering selling part, or all, of its shareholdings in Virgin Australia Holdings Limited, and has retained First NZ Capital and Credit Suisse to advise on its options. The NZ airline says that, as a result of this announcement, Christopher Luxon resigned from the board of Virgin Australia at the end of March. Air New Zealand carried 1.53 million passengers in March, which is an increase of 1.8% compared with the same period last year. The company says that group-wide yields for the financial year-to-date were down 1.2% on the previous corresponding period, and that Group-wide yields were down 5.3%. Air New Zealand reported a net profit of $316.87 million at 31 December 2015. A Miles City man who made drug runs to Seattle to bring back methamphetamine for distribution in Billings, Miles City and the Crow Reservation will spend five years on federal probation. In sentencing Richard Lee Gilbert, 41, on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Susan Watters said she was giving him a substantial break because he had already gone through significant rehabilitation on his own in the three years since agents searched his trailer home. Gilberts sentencing guideline range was about nine years to 11 years. Two of his co-defendants, Jeffrey Scales and Glover Mathis, got sentences ranging from about seven to nine years for their roles in the case. Another co-defendant, Ashley Coty, is awaiting sentencing. Watters called Gilberts case unusual and said it was not logical or reasonable to send him to prison or even to community custody. It would be such a huge step backward for you, she told Gilbert. Gilbert was not in the same situation as Scales and Mathis, who had more criminal history, the judge said. Watters sentenced Gilbert to time served of 21 days and to five years of supervised release. She also ordered him to participate in the states 13th Judicial Districts drug court program in Billings. Gilbert had pleaded guilty earlier to possession with intent to distribute meth as part of plea agreement. Gilbert apologized to his children and family and people affected by his actions. He said his drug addiction led him to not make good decisions and that now he is devoted to caring for his son and to staying positive. Defense attorney Marvin McCann recommended a sentence in a community corrections program, saying Gilbert had been through treatment and is working. Prosecutor Jessica Betley initially recommended a seven-year sentence but on Thursday, recognizing Gilberts rehabilitation progress, left it to the judges discretion. Gilbert got charged along with Coty after an investigation in the spring of 2013 of meth distribution around Billings and Miles City led to the pair. Law enforcement also learned that Mathis and Scales both got meth from Gilbert and Coty. In early April 2013, Mathis and Scales each gave Gilbert $10,000 to buy meth, Betley said in court records. Gilbert then went to Seattle and came back with two and one half pounds of meth. He gave Scales and Mathis each a pound. Agents ultimately recovered a half pound of the meth that Gilbert has provided to Scales. Agents served a search warrant on Gilberts and Cotys residence in Miles City on April 13, 2013, and recovered about $8,000 cash and small amounts of meth packaged in separate baggies. Investigators also learned that the pair had traveled to Washington numerous times to buy meth for redistribution in Montana. CrunchFund, a San Francisco, CA-based early stage venture capital firm, is to raise its third fund. According to a regulatory form filed with the SEC, the firm has a closing target of $30m for Crunch Fund III, L.P. No funds have been raised yet. The document lists co-founder Patrick Gallagher as person related to the raise. Launched in 2011 by Gallagher, Michael Arrington (the founder of TechCrunch, then sold to AOL), and MG Siegler (now partner at GV), CrunchFund has no web site but its activity is described in a detailed profile on Crunchbase, the free database of the tech/venture capital/startup world. To date, CrunchFund has made 195 investments in 163 companies with 41 exits including 2 IPOs and 39 acquisitions. The latest investments include Onfido, x.ai, Trusted, Confide and Captain401. The team of the firm also includes Prashant Fonseka (Associate) and Kevin Lynch (Analyst). FinSMEs 21/04/2016 For the first time since the 1 April death of his live-in partner, TV actress Pratyusha Banerjee, Rahul Raj Singh has presented his version of what transpired. In an interview with The Times of India, published on Thursday, Rahul spoke about his allegedly troubled relationship with Pratyusha, the decision to terminate her pregnancy and the reports that he had financially exploited her. He also claimed that Pratyusha had a drinking problem. Pratyusha was drinking heavily on the day of her death According to Rahuls statement, Pratyusha had consumed a fair quantity of alcohol over the night of March 31 (as they partied with a friend) and through the day on 1 April. He says he left the apartment to get some food, at which time he asked Pratyusha to stop drinking so much. It was when he returned that he found the bell had been turned off and the door double locked. This was when his neighbours domestic help offered to climb into his balcony from the adjoining flats and unlock the door from within. The duo found Pratyusha hanging from the ceiling fan. Her finances were mismanaged While Rahul has been accused of swindling Pratyusha to the tune of several lakhs, he contends that it was mismanagement that was to blame for the Balika Vadhu actress financial straits. He has said that Pratyusha had taken on several loans (before she met him), was not paying her EMIS on time, didnt have a passport or an Aadhar card, and did not have a solo bank account. Rahul says that he helped her with several of these tasks. And in the single most poignant insight the interview has to offer, Rahul points out: It was too much pressure for a 23-year-old to handle. Rahuls denials The TV actor-producer has contested all the allegations raised against him by various sources. He has said that his relationship with Pratyusha was not violent in any way, although they argued like any regular couple; she was also fully aware of his previous marriage and subsequent divorce. He has also said that reports stating he had previously duped women financially, were false. Pratyushas parents treated him like a son In his interview, Rahul has said that he was kept away from Pratyushas funeral by her parents, while previously they had treated him as a son. He says that he had even stayed with Pratyushas mother for a while (before she moved out of Mumbai). Their present allegations against him he attributes to influence from the wrong quarters. The decision to terminate the pregnancy was mutual The histopathological examination of Pratyushas uterine tissues had revealed that the actress had possibly terminated a pregnancy a few days before her death. Rahul says that the couple had jointly decided to go in for an abortion as they were intending to get married several months later. He says that the couple went to the clinic together after Pratyusha missed her period, and that he returned to get her the prescribed medication. Rahul added that Everything has been presented to the court and the truth will be revealed in due course. His next bail hearing has been set for 25 April by the Bombay High Court. Read the full interview here. TOKYO Japanese officials raided a facility belonging to Mitsubishi Motors Corp (7211.T) on Thursday after the carmaker admitted to overstating the fuel efficiency of 625,000 cars, a revelation that has sent its shares into a tailspin. A spokeswoman for the company said the raid by members of Japan's Transport Ministry at a plant in the central Japanese city of Okazaki would continue on Friday. Earlier on Thursday, Mitsubishi shares slid for a second straight day, hitting a record low amid concerns about the potential cost of compensation and fines from the biggest scandal to hit the company since a defect cover-up a decade ago. The stock has lost a third of its market value, or $2.5 billion, in the last two days. The problem, which the government has called "extremely serious", came to light after Nissan Motor (7201.T), which markets a model made by Mitsubishi, found a discrepancy in fuel efficiency test data. It affects two models - Mitsubishi's eK mini-wagon and Nissan's Dayz, with both automakers saying they will halt sales of the vehicles. JPMorgan auto analyst Akira Kishimoto estimated the cheating could cost Mitsubishi more than 50 billion yen ($450 million), including payments to consumers, the cost of replacing parts and compensation to Nissan. And while Mitsubishi said the cars were sold only in Japan, the impact could be felt further afield. "In addition to the costs of the scandal, the secondary effects on worldwide sales could be very large," Kishimoto wrote in a client note, adding the automaker has tied its brand to environmentally friendly technology with its fuel-sipping, plug-in hybrids and fully electric vehicles. The cheating follows a cover-up scandal that brought Mitsubishi close to collapse about a decade ago, when the automaker admitted to systematically concealing defects over decades. It was Japan's worst automotive recall scandal at the time. On Thursday, Mitsubishi Motors shares were untraded for the whole day as they were swamped with sell orders prompted by the bad news. Tokyo stock exchange rules do not allow trades when there is a large imbalance in buy and sell orders, but shares close at their last indicated price. The Transport Ministry has ordered the company to submit a full report on test manipulation within a week. "We want the whole picture of the misconduct clarified as soon as possible, and want a strict response and the safety of automobiles to be ensured," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, the government's top spokesman, told a news conference. The ministry has also ordered Japanese automakers to submit fuel economy test data by May 18. Mitsubishi, which has annual sales of just over 1 million cars, is the first Japanese automaker to report misconduct involving fuel economy tests since Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE) was found last year to have cheated in diesel emissions tests in the United States and elsewhere. People briefed on the matter told Reuters that Volkswagen and U.S. officials had reached a framework deal under which the automaker would offer to buy back almost 500,000 diesel cars that used sophisticated software to evade U.S. emission rules. South Korean car maker Hyundai Motor Co (005380.KS) and affiliate Kia Motors Corp (000270.KS) in 2014 agreed to pay $350 million in penalties to the U.S. government for overstating their vehicles' fuel economy ratings. They also resolved claims from car owners. (Reporting by Chang-Ran Kim; Additional reporting by Kaori Kaneko and Tomo Uetake; Writing by Ritsuko Ando and Chris Gallagher; Editing by Edwina Gibbs and Mike Collett-White) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. New Delhi: Cracking the whip against unscrupulous taxi operators for over-charging passengers during the odd-even scheme, the Delhi government on Wednesday said it will put a stop to "surge pricing" by cabs even as it impounded 68 such taxis over the past two days. "We will bring a policy to stop surge pricing in the city by the cab aggregators," Delhi Transport Minister Gopal Rai told IANS. The sixth day of the Aam Aadmi Party government's odd-even traffic scheme saw complaints from a section of citizens against the non-availability of auto rickshaws and also that the traffic scheme aimed at battling pollution has only added to citizens' woes. Earlier in the day, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal hinted that "surge pricing" by cabs may be banned in the capital. Responding to a tweet suggesting that suspension of surge pricing should continue even after the odd-even system ends on 30 April, Kejriwal replied: "Yes. We will do it." A representative for app-based cab aggregator Ola when contacted merely said, "We have no comments to make on the subject at the moment." The Delhi government's transport department impounded 50 more taxis, including 35 registered outside Delhi for over-charging commuters. "We have impounded 50 more taxis following complaints from customers. All the taxis belong to various app based cab aggregators," a Delhi government official said. On Monday,the Delhi government had seized 18 taxis belonging to Ola and Uber for over-charging commuters, taking advantage of a leap in demand for taxis during the ongoing odd-even traffic scheme. Amid criticism of and complaints against the odd-even system by some people on Facebook and Twitter, the System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting and Research (SAFAR), which is under the union government's Ministry of Earth Sciences, said that particulate matter pollution had dipped marginally. The PM 2.5 level declined to 90.2 on Wednesday from the level of 124.6 a day ago, while PM 10 came down to 210 from 275.1, SAFAR said. "This time odd-even of Delhi Government is not working. But a few law abiders do obviously suffer," ran one complaint on Facebook. In some places, citizens complained about auto rickshaw drivers refusing to ferry passengers and demanded that the city government crack down on three-wheelers like they have on cab aggregators. On Monday, Kejriwal threatened "strict action" over "surge pricing", a technique used by cab aggregators to hike fares in the event of high demand. After app-based cab operator Uber blamed the Delhi government for taxi shortage, Kejriwal clarified in the morning through a series of tweets that his government was not opposed to online aggregators but insisted they should obey the law. "We are not against taxi aggregators. We fully support them. They provide important service to people. But they will have to follow (the) law. "Overcharging, diesel cars, drivers without license/badges and blackmailing by taxi aggregators won't be allowed," the chief minister tweeted. On Monday, Uber and Ola had suspended surge pricing after Kejriwal threatened of stern action against overcharging by cab operators. The demand for taxis has shot up in the capital on account of the odd-even traffic scheme that commenced on 15 April and will run till 30 April. Restrictions on diesel and petrol driven cars during the ongoing scheme has forced thousands of motorists to go for taxis to commute. Kejriwal has termed the surge pricing as "daylight robbery" and blamed the companies for "openly blackmailing" the Delhi government. "Surge pricing is daylight robbery. No responsible government can allow that. "Some taxis saying they will not provide cab if they are not allowed to loot. This is open blackmailing (and) government will not let that happen," he said in tweets on Wednesday. Meanwhile, former Delhi BJP chief Vijay Goel, who staged a protest on Monday and was challaned for violating odd-even norms, on Wednesday announced that he would intensify his protest against the Kejriwal regime on the issue. "The odd-even mechanism has only added to citizen's woes," he said adding that a number of citizens and representatives from various NGOs will visit the residence of AAP MLAs on 22 April and offer them a rose along with a memorandum saying that the scheme was being implemented without any ground work. Whats with Giriraj Singh and his Pakistan-phobia? First, the BJP MP claimed during the Bihar Assembly election last year that, (Mohammed Ali) Jinnahs ghost has entered Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad and they want to make Bihar a Pakistan." Of course, Nitish won and the last we heard, the state is still a part of India. Then, after Rahul Gandhi claimed he doesn't need a certificate of his patriotism from the BJP, Singh said that Rahul is speaking in a language that makes Pakistan and Hafiz Saeed happy." If that wasnt enough, he spread his phobia again on Wednesday and this time, he tied it with the always-prevalent topic of womens safety in the country. According to The Indian Express, Singh addressed a cultural yatra in West Champaran in which he claimed that the Centre needs to enforce a two-child policy for all religions, else the population of Muslims will rise and Hindu girls will not be safe. Nahin toh hamein bhi Pakistan ki tarah apni betiyon ko parde mein bandh karna hoga (Otherwise, like Pakistan, we too will have to keep our daughters under veil), the report said. He further outlined his doomsday scenario by stating that the Hindu population in certain districts of Bihar was falling while the Muslim population was rising. Instead of concerning himself with the demographic situation in Bihar, he may want to think about the problems in his own constituency. In January, posters came up in Nawada parliamentary constituency accusing Singh of not visiting the segment since after the May 2014 win and doing nothing on the developmental front. The posters in Hindi, claiming the local MP has gone "missing", were found pasted at different places in Barbigha town in Sheikhpura district of Bihar on Thursday, a district police official said. "Even after one-and-a-half years, Giriraj Singh has not utilised the funds from his Member of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme for developmental work in Barbigha," the posters said. The posters carried a list of problems faced by the voters in the constituency. Maybe you could look into that, Mr Singh? With inputs from agencies The nation's first and only grizzly bear recovery coordinator is stepping down after 35 years, saying the threatened species has recovered enough for him to retire. Chris Servheen of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is retiring at the end of April. Wayne Kasworm will become acting recovery coordinator. Servheen, 65, said he considers bear populations in Yellowstone National Park and the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem to be recovered. But when he began his work in 1981 right after getting his doctorate at the University of Montana the challenges seemed insurmountable. "I didn't think at all that we would get to recovery," Servheen told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. "In fact, I really wondered if we would even have grizzly bears around." At the time, garbage dumps, livestock herds and backcountry hunting camps were creating conflicts and bear numbers were low. He brought together state, federal and local governments as well as conservation groups to recover grizzly bear populations in six areas throughout the Northwest: the Cabinet-Yaak area in northwest Montana; the Selkirk area in parts of Idaho, Washington and British Columbia; the Bitterroot in western Montana; the Northern Continental Divide, including Glacier National Park and nearby wilderness areas at the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. "It was a great challenge and a great honor," Servheen said. Early on, one of the biggest challenges was getting people living in and visiting grizzly habitat to change their behaviors from how they disposed of their trash to cleaning up backcountry camps. "All the things that people do, they're all different now because everything has grizzly bears in the background," Servheen said. Now, the USFWS is proposing removing Endangered Species Act protections for around 700 bears in the Yellowstone area. Servheen wrote the proposed rule. Some think it's too soon, while others think it should have been done long ago. As Servheen winds down his career, he's hearing from people he's worked with, and sometimes against, in trying to improve grizzly bear habitat and their populations. In West Yellowstone last week, members of the Yellowstone Ecosystem Subcommittee of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee thanked him for his years of service, as did Scott Christensen, the executive director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. "We have at times been at odds and at opposite sides of the courtroom," Christensen said. "But we respect your contribution to grizzly bear conservation." There are up to 1,700 grizzly bears in the West, with most in Montana and Wyoming about three times as many as when Servheen began his work. Servheen told the Great Falls Tribune he plans to spend more time in the backcountry with his children with a chance to see a grizzly bear, rather than sit in meetings talking about them. He'll also continue as an adjunct professor at the University of Montana, where he has taught a course in international wildlife management for the past 18 years. "Summer's coming. The backcountry is opening up and it's calling to me, and that's where I want to be." The governing council of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in a meeting on Monday decided to terminate three-decade long association with its Director-General RK Pachauri, who has been embroiled in three cases of sexual harassment, with immediate effect. It was also decided, during the meeting, that the 75-year-old's membership for the council will not be renewed. Pachauri's membership ended on 31 March this year. The Council, in the meeting, decided to pay all the dues for the remainder of the tenure and bring an immediate end to it. "His contract with the organisation was to end next July but the Council has decided to end it and honour it by paying the remainder of the tenure to him," said a Governing Council member requesting anonymity on speaking to The Economic Times. Because of non-renewal of his membership, Pachauri will not be Executive Vice-Chairman of the organization, which he was appointed as on 8 February 2016. TERI's spokesperson in an email told The Hindu that ...Dr. Pachauris term as a Member of the Governing Council of TERI ended on 31 March, 2016. As the post of Executive Vice Chairman (EVC) is co-terminus with this membership, his role as EVC also ended along with his membership of the Council. Pachauri, however, maintained that his term as a member of The Energy and Resources Institute's (TERI) Governing Council ended on 31 March, 2016 and he felt it was time "for me to move away and get engaged in other interests which I have harboured over the past few years for activities at the global level". In a statement, Pachauri said he was issuing it "to provide the media with information" about his "stepping down" from TERI's Governing Council, suggesting the decision to call time on his association with the organisation was voluntary. In his statement, Pachauri said the TERI staff was its "greatest treasure" which under the new Director General will take the Institute to much greater heights in the years ahead. "I have had the good fortune of leading TERI for three decades and a half and have received the priceless contribution from thousands of colleagues over the years in building up this Institute to level of an outstanding organisation. Pachauri said he had "greatly" benefited from the support the green body had "always" provided. "I have also benefited greatly from the support I have always received from TERI's Governing Council, and would like to place on record my gratitude to them, beginning with the late Darbari Seth, my inspiration and leader in the initial years of TERI's development," he said. Pachauri, who headed TERI, stepped down as chairperson of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in February 2015. He began his career at TERI in 1986 and rose to the position of dean, Energy and Environment Engineering, from 1995 to 2000. Initial complaint against Pachauri In 2015, a 29-year -old former research analyst of TERI lodged the complaint against Pachauri for sexual harrasment. The victim in her statement before a magistrate said that she repeatedly told Pachauri that she had no feelings for him, but Pachauri kept sharing the poems, expressing his feelings using words like "love sequestered". On 1 March 2016, the charge sheet was filed with the Delhi police saying that there was sufficient evidence against the TERI executive. It also said that the probe in the case was complete and the accused may be called through notice and put on trial for his "criminal act". Delhi Police in its chargesheet said that Pachauri had remained "engaged in sexually-laden conversations" with the victim citing various telephone calls, e-mails, and WhatsApp messages exchanged between the two. This happened despite several messages by the victim that she could not reciprocate his feeling. In the chargesheet, it was mentioned that Pachauri had written six poems where he attributed the victim as a "classical Indian beauty". The victim had exchanged several messages with him acknowledging what he was writing, but always cautioning him not to assume that she too reciprocated his feelings. In November, the woman researcher who accused him of sexual harassment quit her job at TERI, alleging that she was treated badly. How the case progressed Days after RK Pachauri was appointed the executive vice chairman of The Energy and Resources Institute, another former TERI worker came forward with the allegation that the former TERI director general sexually harassed her while she was working at the institute. "Mr RK Pachauri would use the excuse of work assignments to repeatedly call me to his office room, even though there was no real work that he needed to discuss. This made me feel very uncomfortable and I used to try to dodge some meetings or ask my colleagues to go for the meetings," the compliant read. The complainant, the second to make this allegation, joined TERI in 2003 and worked for a year. On 31 March, a third woman was levelled sexual harassment allegations against TERI executive RK Pachauri through an open letter on Thursday. The letter was accessed from her lawyers Vrinda Grover and Ratna Appender who told IANS that the (third) woman approached lawyers with her complaint in February 2015. "He would call me during non-working hours and holidays to ask me to come to his office and when arriving it became evident that he had no specific task for me. Pachauri would indulge in frivolous talk and try to get close to me," she said. The complainant also alleged of his various advances towards her such as asking her "to join him at his summer house outside of the city for the weekend." TERI's statement in February On 12 February, TERI issued a statement to announce that Pachauri will be on leave from TERI, its governing council and university till the case was reviewed by the council. Ashok Chawla, former Competition Commission of India chief was nominated to take over Pachauri's post. The statement also said, "The governing council of TERI supports the rights of women and has consistently ensured the provision of a secure environment and a safe workplace for its employees," the statement said. The first complainant who accused TERI executive vice chairman RK Pachauri of sexual harassment took offence to the organisation's statement, saying that it did not address the harassment case. "It is really sad they speak through press releases after such a massive public outrage. The release does not make my allegations or the case the focus, but is discussing TERI operations," the complainant had told IANS. with inputs from Agencies Thiruvananthapuram: Filing of nominations for the 16 May Assembly polls in Kerala will start on Friday even as parties in the Congress-led ruling UDF, CPM headed LDF and BJP alliance have intensified their campaign. The notification for the Assembly polls would be issued on Friday and last date for filing of nominations is 29 April. Scrutiny would take place on 30 April and last date for withdrawal is 2 May. Meanwhile, Election Department said it would roll out several monitoring and reporting mechanisms such as mobile app-based poll monitoring, web casting and video recording with the help of Kerala State IT Mission. The poll day monitoring process starts the day before the actual polling. Smooth flow of poll related information from polling booths to officials, including Chief Electoral officer and Election Commission of India, will be ensured using an android and SMS-based mechanism, an official release said. Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, spearheading the UDF campaign along with KPCC President, V M Sudheeran and Home Minister Ramesh Chennithala, has already completed one round of electioneering across the state. CPM stalwart, V S Achuthanandan, who has started campaigning from North Kerala, is the main campaigner for his party-led LDF. On the other hand, BJP is approaching voters by presenting itself as the 'third alternative' to UDF and LDF. Chandy and 18 of his cabinet colleagues, eight from Congress and 10 from other UDF constituents figure among those fielded for the election. Congress is contesting 86 of the 140 Assembly seats in the state, leaving the rest to its partners. IUML, second largest UDF partner, has been allotted 24 seats, followed by KC(M) 15, JD(U) seven, RSP five, KC(J) 2 and CMP one seat. In contrast, CPM has fielded candidates in 92 constituencies, CPI 27, JD(S) five, NCP four, Congress (S) 1. Other parties supporting LDF from outside-Janadhipatiya Kerala Congress four; INL three; Kerala Congress (B), a CMP faction, Kerala Congress scaria, RSP (Leninst) one each. BJP has forged an alliance with Bharat Dharma Jana Sena (BDJS), a new party formed by Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam (SNDP), a social organisation of backward Ezhava community, allotting it 37 seats. BJP would contest in 97 seats while for the remaining six seats, it has reached an understanding with small parties. BJP's key candidates include 86-year-old former Union Minister O Rajagopal, State President Kummanon Rajasekharan, V Muraleedharan, C K Padmanabhan, P K Krishnadas and P S Sreedharan Pillai and firebrand woman leader Shobha Surendran. A total of 35,946 electronic voting machines would be used during polling. There would 21,498 polling stations which is 3.5 percent more than the last polls in 2011. At least 1.50 lakh officials would be deployed for polling process, officials said. Say Nota, and candidates in closely-fought constituencies fly into a tizzy. Those caught in neck-and-neck fights in the ongoing Assembly elections in four states and one Union Territory West Bengal, Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry must contend with this faceless enemy called Nota. Its like a candidate itself with a symbol: A ballot paper with a black cross across it. Short for None of the above, Nota is an option which allows voters to cast their votes but for none of the candidates. Those dissatisfied with all the candidates can stay at home and enjoy the election holiday, but some take the trouble of going to the polling stations to press the Nota button and register their frustration. The Election Commission (EC) introduced it in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, as directed by the Supreme Court the year before. The Nota votes are considered invalid votes and, however big their number is, the candidate who gets the most number of valid votes still walks away with the seat. But if cast in significant numbers, Nota can alter the result in close fights. Take a look at what happened in Kannur Lok Sabha seat in Kerala in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. CPMs PK Sreemathy polled 4,27,622 votes and won. The local Congress strongman K Sudhakaran, who had won the seat in the previous election, lost it by 6,566 votes. The number of Nota votes cast there: 7,026. Similarly, in the Vadakara Lok Sabha seat adjoining Kannur in the same 2014 election, it was the CPM candidate who lost the seat to the sitting Congress member by 3,306 votes. The number of Nota votes in this case: 6,107. Its clear that if the Nota voters had backed the Congress candidate in Kannur or the CPM man in Vadakara, they would have been winners. Across India, 59,97,054 voters, amounting to 1.1 per cent of the total votes polled, punched the Nota button in the 2014 election. And in the October-November 2015 Bihar Assembly polls, when Nota began to have a symbol of its own, its role as a potential game-changer became evident. The Nota count exceeded victory margins in as many as 21 Assembly constituencies in the state, according to factly.in. In all, 9,47,276 voters or 2.5 percent of the total voters went for Nota in the state. In the 2014 Lok Sabha election in the state, this proportion was only 1.6 per cent. KN Harilal, professor at the Centre for Development Studies (CDS) at Thiruvananthapuram, considers the proportion of voters who made this choice in Kerala (1.2 per cent) in 2014 to be high enough to cause concern to politicians. He told Firstpost that in Kerala, where literacy and voter turn-outs are high, even the use of Nota was a reflection of the voters high level of involvement in the election process. This was a clear vote against existing parties, and voters saw no other alternative, he said. Politicians must take note of it, he warned. We have indeed taken a serious note of it, Keralas Rural Development Minister KC Joseph said. Joseph is the Congress candidate contesting from Irikkur, that is part of the Kannur Lok Sabha seat, where Nota became a spoiler for his partys candidate in the 2014 parliamentary poll. The minister won from Irikkur in the 2009 Assembly election. We are carrying out an intensive campaign to persuade voters not to press the Nota button, Joseph said. According to him, some are resorting to it to air their frustration, but it is not an answer to their grievances. The voting right is democracys greatest strength and is too precious to be wasted in this manner, he said. Psephologist and BJP leader GVL Narasimha Rao, however, dismisses all talk about it as much ado about nothing. He told Firstpost that many activists and organisations had campaigned for an option to reject all candidates on the grounds that a lot of people were sceptical about parties and candidates. But Rao said, only a minuscule proportion of voters used it after its introduction and, on the other hand, voter turnout had only been increasing, which only showed that voters were enthused by elections. Even before 2014, voters could choose not to vote for any candidate under Section 49(O) of the Conduct of Election Rules 1961. But they had to fill a form and sign it at the polling stations, and that only meant the exercise was no secret and it made them vulnerable to reprisals by candidates. But Nota ensures both ease and secrecy. In a democracy, voters must be able to reject all candidates but, at the same, they must try to pick the best of the available lot, asserted MH Jawahirullah, President of the Manithaneya Makkal Katchi party, which is contesting four Assembly seats in Tamil Nadu as part of the DMK alliance. But how worried are the parties about it? Not overly worried, said Bhabani Kumar Baruah, the Sivasagar district President of Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) in Assam. He said that besides its potential to upset the result in neck-and-neck contests, the Nota button on the voting machine might also confuse a lot of voters. Does AGP tell voters not to use the reject-all option? We should, but we dont, Baruah said. And for AGPs Guwahati city unit secretary Girin Talukdar, it makes no sense why anybody should press this button. But it does seem to make plenty of sense to plenty of people across India. Many have already announced their intentions to reject all candidates. Before the second phase of polling on 11 April in Assam, an organisation representing thousands of goldsmiths said that they would go the Nota way to protest the Centres move to levy one per cent excise duty on ornaments. In Tamil Nadu, supporters of Jallikattu have decided to do the same thing to vent their anger over the ban against the bull-taming sport. In West Bengal, the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, which claims to represent 1.5 lakh sex workers in the state, made it clear a few days before the first phase of polling began that they would reject all the candidates through Nota to protest the unfulfilled promises of parties. Some women activists in Kerala have unleashed an online campaign, telling voters to vote for Nota wherever parties have not fielded women. Their grouse: very few women have got party tickets to contest elections. These groups may make little or no difference in their constituencies. But, as Harilal of CDS points out, Nota's popularity may be on the rise and the political class needs to watch out. The author tweets @sprasadindia Dealing a major blow to Modi government, the Uttarakhand High Court on Thursday quashed the imposition of President's rule in the state and revived the Congress government headed by Harish Rawat, who has been asked to prove his majority on April 29. Coming down heavily on the Centre for the 27 March proclamation under Article 356, a division bench of the High Court headed by Chief Justice K M Joseph said the imposition of the President's rule was contrary to the law laid down by the Supreme Court. However, according to reports, the BJP government at the Centre said that they will challenge High Court's order in Supreme Court. Ordering restoration of the Rawat government, the court ordered the ousted Chief Minister to prove his government's majority on the floor of the Assembly on 29 April. "In the present case which was set into motion with March 18 as day one and saw a proclamation being issued in less than ten days brings to the fore a situation where 356 has been used contrary to the law laid down by the apex court. "The material (considered for the proclamation) has been found wanting and justifies judicial review interfering with the proclamation," the court said. The court said "however, we must not be understood to have said that a solitary instance would not contribute for imposing 356. The proclamation of March 27 stands quashed." It said status quo ante on the day of proclamation, meaning thereby, restoration of the government led by petitioner (Rawat) will revive. The court said, however, status being restored the petitioner must necessarily obtain a vote of confidence by holding a floor test on 29 April. The ruling triggered noisy celebrations outside Rawat's residence by Congress leaders and activists who shouted slogans against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). About Centre's contention that Rawat had not disclosed the representation of BJP MLAs demand for division of votes, the court said, "This is not a case where representation not actually produced as claimed by Respondent one (Centre). But greater care should have been taken (by petitioner). "The fact remains, the petitioner actually produced it no doubt describing it as a representation given on the evening of March 18. Having regard to the totality of facts, we cannot decline judicial review on this ground of non-production of representation or the proclamation," the bench said. With regard to use of Article 356 over the years, the bench said, "It is to be remembered that power under 356 came in for considerable misuse over the years. Incidentally, we must note that the party to which petitioner belongs has not covered itself with glory with regard to its actions in first 40 years of Independence which saw nearly 100 dissolutions taking place." "Courts back then were of the view that they should adopt hands off approach. They took solace in the fact that the Parliament has to finally decide....This policy substantially precluded courts from interfering...," the bench said and added that "undoubtedly under written Constitution.. there is little place for unreviewable powers". "Article 356 has to be used only as a measure of last resort and only when the government (concerned) cannot be run in accordance with Constitution," it said. "There must be material. Material must be verified. Any material will not suffice. It has to be relevant material. Satisfaction has to be subjective satisfaction of Cabinet and not the President. "Material considered for imposing Article 356 cannot be irrelevant or extraneous. It cannot be malafide. Actions of public figure at any level must be bonafide. Therefore, action under 356 is liable to be visited with invalidation if done with malafide. The move comes as a relief to deposed Chief Minister Harish Rawat and the Congress camp in Uttarakhand. After two consecutive days of hearing on a matter filed by Rawat, the court said the proclamation of central rule in the state stood null and void. Speaking at a media briefing, Rawat said that the High Court is a victory of people of Uttarakhand. "I stand vindicated. Government had worked very sincerely to present the state budget. Uttarakhand is a wounded state and I want to tell the government at the Centre that we will try to forget this bitter chapter. The road to development should not be hindered, this is my request to the government at the Centre." Rawat added that this is not a time for celebration. The month of April was wasted. "The process of state budget was derailed. There's a lot more to do." On a question about whether the Uttarakhand government thinks that BJP will give up so easily, Rawat said, "Vo to bade seene vale hain, hum sir jhooka ke kaam karne wale hain. Hum koi jhagra nahi chahte (They are people with puffy chests. We are the kind who bow to people and keep doing our work)." On the matter of the sting video where the CM was seen bribing the defected Congress MLAs, Rawat said, "Nyay se badh ke jan nyay hota hai (I will believe whatever people want to believe.)" Meanwhile, ANI reported saying that the BJP has called all its Uttarakhand MLAs to Dehradun on Thursday. Speaking at the Congress headquarters in New Delhi, spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi said that the law is clear. "The imposition of President's Rule in Uttarakhand was unconstitutional. The court said when there is horse-trading and corruption, there are more reasons for protest. Ultimately the law is very clear and that law was deliberately and consciously violated by the central government. In the history of Independent India, this is the first time that within 10 days floor test has been ordered to be conducted. We hope that those who are watching different states with greedy eyes should learn a lesson. Congress leader and former finance minister Indira Hridayesh said her party "saluted the judiciary for upholding truth and law". The court also turned down an oral plea made by the Centre's counsel for a stay on its judgement to move the Supreme Court against it. The bench said we won't stay our own judgement. "You can go to the Supreme Court and get a stay," it said. The issue came to the division bench of the court after a single judge ordered a floor test on 28 March following controversy over the passage of Appropriation Bill on 18 March with the BJP and dissident Congress MLAs claiming the money Bill had fallen and the government has lost its majority. A day before the floor test was to have been held the Centre imposed President's Rule on March 27 citing breakdown of Constitutional machinery as a ground. Harish Rawat approached the division bench challenging the imposition of the President's Rule. During the last three days of hearing, the court has made several strong observations against the Centre on the issue of imposition of President's Rule in Uttarakhand. It had said on Monday that the proclamation under Article 356, just a day ahead of the floor test, amounted to cutting at the root of democracy. Subsequently, it had observed that the government was introducing chaos and undermining an elected government. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal tweeted soon after the HC order: This is a huge embarrassment to Modi Govt. He shud stop interfering wid elected govts and respect democracy https://t.co/ufKtxCSlXW Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) April 21, 2016 Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju said, "It is no embarrassment. There are problems within the Congress legislature. How is BJP responsible if there are dissidents within Congress party? Congress created this situation." He further added,"The judiciary has its own role to play. We honour the decision of the High Court." Left parties today lambasted the Narendra Modi government for imposing President's Rule in Uttarakhand, which was quashed by the high court there, saying the verdict was a "slap to the subverters" of the Constitution. "The anti-constitutional juggernaut of BJP's central government has been halted in its tracks by the judiciary in Uttarakhand. It is a slap to the subverters of the Constitution," CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury told PTI. Observing that "accountability is the hallmark of democracy," he asked whether "the BJP has it in itself to make heads (of those responsible) roll?" ANI reported that the floor test for the state assembly will be conducted on 29 April. Meanwhile, BJP general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya met with party spokespersons at BJP headquarters in Delhi, soon after the news about revocation of President's Rule broke. Vijayvargiya was quoted by ANI as saying that he is "not surprised" after the High Court's order. Taking into view HC bench's remarks in last 3 days,we were expecting this order.Not surprising: Kailash Vijayvargiya pic.twitter.com/GkCdMKxnah ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 Taking into view HC bench's remarks in last 3 days,we were expecting this order.Not surprising: Kailash Vijayvargiya pic.twitter.com/GkCdMKxnah ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 ????? ???? ?? ???? ???, ?? ????? ?? ????? ?? ?????? ???? ?? ? Harish Rawat on HC sets aside President rule in #Uttarakhand ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 BJP General Secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya's meeting with party spokespersons underway at BJP headquarters in Delhi #Uttarakhand ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 On Wednesday, the HC had maintained that the decision to impose President's Rule was subject to judicial review as even the President can go terribly wrong. Earlier in the day today, the High Court said it would be a travesty of justice if the Centre recalls its order imposing President's Rule and allows someone else to form a government now, strong words that came after its counsel was unable to give an undertaking till a verdict is given in the present case. The court also told the Centre that it could allow the ousted Chief Minister Harish Rawat's petition challenging the imposition of President's Rule and ensure that a floor test is held. "Should we consider their application for stay moved on April 7? It was expected that till the judgement is pronounced, Central government will not recall (Article) 356. If you recall 356 and call someone else to form a government, what else would it be other than travesty of justice," the bench said. The strong words of the court came after the Centre's counsel said it was not in a position to give an assurance that the government would consider putting on hold the recall of its order imposing President's Rule for a week. It gave the government's counsel some time to take instructions. The bench observed, "Otherwise you can do this in every state. Impose President's Rule for 10-15 days and then ask someone else to take oath. More than angry, we are pained that you are behaving like this. That the highest authority -Government of India - behaves like this. How can you think of playing with the court." "What if we allow the petition? Then things would go back to what it was prior to the President's Rule and the state government will only have to prove majority by way of floor test. Can you take exception to that also?" the bench asked the Centre. With inputs from agencies Thiruvananthapuram: Malayalam superstar Suresh Gopi on Thursday offered prayers at a temple and thanked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for nominating him to the Rajya Sabha. "This is not a political decision, it's a non-political one... our prime minister has nominated me," the 56-year-old Gopi, who has worked in over 250 films, told the media. He was accompanied to the temple by former union minister and BJP leader O Rajagopal. "This should have come earlier, but now that it has come, it's good," said Rajagopal, who was a Rajya Sabha member and a minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. Gopi was promised the post of chairman of the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) in 2015, but it failed to materialise. The BJP also tried to field him in the upcoming assembly polls, but the actor was non-committal. He, however, agreed to campaign for the party in Kerala. Of the 12 nominated members in the upper house of parliament, there are seven vacancies at the moment and Gopi will be one of the new entrants. Gopi was last week summoned to Delhi and his name was finalised after a meeting with BJP president Amit Shah. The BJP's national leadership feels the nomination would give the much needed boost to the party to open its account in the 140-member Kerala assembly, as all top leaders of the party in the state, including Rajagopal, are contesting the polls. New Delhi: Left parties on Thursday lambasted the Narendra Modi government for imposing President's Rule in Uttarakhand, which was quashed by the high court there, saying the verdict was a "slap to the subverters" of the Constitution. "The anti-constitutional juggernaut of BJP's central government has been halted in its tracks by the judiciary in Uttarakhand. It is a slap to the subverters of the Constitution," CPM General Secretary Sitaram Yechury told PTI. Observing that "accountability is the hallmark of democracy," he asked whether "the BJP has it in itself to make heads (of those responsible) roll?" Dealing a major blow to the Modi government, the Uttarakhand High Court on Thursday quashed the imposition of President' Rule in the state and revived the Congress government headed by Harish Rawat, who has been asked to prove his majority on 29 April. On a similar vein, CPI National Secretary D Raja said the Uttarakhand High Court verdict was "a huge embarrassment" for the NDA government at the Centre which acted in an "authoritarian manner". "The verdict exposes BJP's attitude of undermining the Constitution and subverting the parliamentary procedures. The Centre's decision (to impose President's Rule) has also embarrassed the President who has to go by the opinion of the Union Cabinet," he said. "The BJP celebrated the birth anniversary of BR Ambedkar with great pomp and show, but used the Article 356 of the Constitution drafted by him when there was no extraordinary situation prevailing in Uttarakhand," the CPI leader said. He said the imposition of central rule also went against the SR Bommai judgement of the Supreme Court by not allowing the floor test to take place. "For this, they had to face such a rejection by the high court," Raja added. The controversy over the killing of Ishrat Jahan in a police encounter in June 2004 has come back in the spotlight following the recent revelations that as Home Minister, Congress leader P Chidambaram had changed the original affidavit describing her as a member of a Pakistan-based Lashkar module. It now appears that Chidambaram approved the original affidavit as well as the one amended within two months in 2009 that stated there was no conclusive evidence against Ishrat. Ishrat and her three other friends were killed by Gujarat Police in June 2004 in an encounter, based on feedback from the Jammu and Kashmir Police. It was said that the group was plotting to kill the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. In July 2004, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) had published an article on the Jamaat-ud-Dawah's website claiming Ishrat Jahan as their operative. But around this time, the Congress-led UPA assumed office. The Congress as well as many human rights activists saw the incident not as a conspiracy to kill a Chief Minister but as a fake encounter, emphasising the point that in a democratic country, a criminal should be punished by the judiciary alone, not the police. As the controversy grew, the LeT issued a clarification in 2007 (after three years) saying that it was wrong in naming Ishrat as its activist in India. It was against this background that Chidambaram changed the affidavit. That Chidambaram was wrong became evident when recently David Headley, who conspired with the LeT in plotting the 26 November, 2008 (26/11) Mumbai attacks, admitted, first to the American Federal Bureau of Investigation and then before an Indian court, that Ishrat Jahan was indeed a "fidayeen" (sacrificial aspirant) working for someone named Muzammil Bhat or Muzammil Butt of the LeT to target Modi. Cornered, Chidambaram and the Congress party have now reverted back to the core issue, which, according to them, was the fake encounter. However, the main purpose of this piece is to make the point that Chidambarams decision on the Ishrat case should not be seen in isolation as a measure to implicate and oust Modi from the office in Gujarat. That may or may not have been the case, but that must be viewed as only a component of the more important and overall strategy to legitimise a concocted phenomenon of 'saffron terrorism'. And this strategy, fully manifested 2008 onwards, was necessitated for the Congress party to neutralise the adverse impacts of the 26/11 tragedy one the one hand and to revive normal interactions with Pakistan on the other. In the process, not only the Ishrat case but also those relating to blasts in Samjhuta express, Malegoan, Ajmer Sharif and Mecca Masjid (Hyderabad) were reopened simultaneously to implicate Hindu fundamentalists. It would seem that but for the capture of Pakistani terrorist Kasab alive during the 26/11 attacks, the Congress party would have termed the incident as an act of saffron terror. In fact, in 2010, the internet whistleblower organisation WikiLeaks released US embassy cables in which the then US ambassador to India was told by a senior Indian minister that the death of Hemant Karkare, a senior anti-terrorism investigator killed during the 2008 Mumbai attacks, was somehow orchestrated by Hindu extremists just because he was fighting 'saffron terror'. Coincidentally, this was the time when none other than Rahul Gandhi told American diplomats, as WikiLeaks revealed, that the real danger to India came from the Hindu terror. And importantly this strategy went in full swing soon after the Congress party won 2009 - Assembly elections in Rajasthan and Haryana. At the time, not only at the Centre but also in Rajasthan, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra there were Congress governments. Reinvestigations of the aforementioned terrorist incidents, all occurring in these four states, and implicating the Hindu terrorists for these incidents (earlier all those arrested accused in these cases happened be members of the banned Muslim organisations like SIMI), and then linking it with the Ishrat Jahan case, became very easy. It all began with Samjhauta blasts. For those uninitiated, a terrorist attack occurred around midnight on 18 February, 2007, on the Samjhauta Express, a twice-weekly train service connecting Delhi and Lahore. Bombs were set off in two carriages, both filled with passengers, just after the train passed Diwana station near Panipat. 68 people were killed in the ensuing fire and dozens more injured. The attack came just a day before the then Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri was to arrive in New Delhi to resume peace talks with Indian leaders. Initial investigations suggested that the prime suspects in the bombing were the LeT and JeM (another outfit in Pakistan), both whom have been blamed for many high-profile bombings in the past. Importantly, on 1 July, 2009, the United States Treasury and United Nations Security Council placed sanctions on LeT and named one Arif Qasmani as having played a role in the bombing. But surprisingly, all of a sudden in 2008 Police Officer Hemant Karkare, who was heading the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), came out with a theory that one Lt Col Prasad Purohit supplied the RDX that was used in the Samjhauta Express blast. Purohit, according to him, was a prominent member of the Hindu terror outfit Abhinav Bharat. Subsequently, the National Investigation Agency (NIA), which the Manmohan Singh government had specially created soon after the 26/11 attacks to act as the Central Counter Terrorism Law Enforcement Agency, filed a chargesheet against five accusedNaba Kumar Sarkar alias Swami Aseemanand, Sunil Joshi (now dead), Lokesh Sharma, Sandeep Dange alias Parmanand and Ramchandra Kalasangra alias Ramji alias Vishnu Patelin the Samjhauta Express blasts case at a special court in Panchkula. The timing was important as it was done just on the eve of the foreign secretary Nirupama Raos visit to Pakistan to talk to her counterpart there and prepare grounds for the much anticipated parleys between the foreign ministers of the two countries. Indo-Pak talks had not gathered the required pace in the absence of Pakistans co-operation in punishing those responsible for attacks on Mumbai on 26 November, 2008. By chargesheeting the alleged Hindu terrorists on the eve of Raos visit, the Manmohan Singh government allowed Pakistan to project a linkage between the two incidents. As veteran security expert late B Raman argued then, the Manmohan Singh government virtually walked into the Pakistani trap by relaxing the pressure on Islamabad to arrest and prosecute successfully all those involved in the 26/11 strikes and by succumbing to its pressure on the Samjhauta Express incident. Be that as it may, although nearly seven years have passed by and the Hindu terrorists arrested by the UPA government under the stringent MCOCA (Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act) are still in jail, charges against them are increasingly becoming untenable, legally and otherwise. Swami Aseemanand has told the court that he was physically forced to make the confession and was innocent. The Supreme Court of India has swung into action and has questioned the very basis of continued detention of Purohit and Pragya Thakur (a lady Hindu preacher) under MCOCA, as they had no criminal record. The court also observed that there was considerable doubt about their involvement in Malegaon blasts. It has directed that their bail plea should be examined by a special trial court. As already pointed out, the theory of saffron terror was evolved to neutarlise the adverse impacts of the 26/11 tragedy, particularly during the electioneering for 2009 general elections. Once evolved, there were logical follow-up measures, one of which also included a proposed Bill to combat communal violence that projected Hindus as inherently communal and therefore it was they who would be proving their innocence if charged, not the other way round, as mandated by any normal jurisprudence. In retrospect, one finds this anti-Hindu mindset of the UPA government very surprising, given the fact that despite their overwhelming majority and despite the cruel history that the community has experienced, the Hindus had no problem with having a non-Hindu Prime Minister and a non-Hindu as the chief of the countrys largest political party. In fact, when Singh became Prime Minister the first time (2004), he was administered oath by a non-Hindu President of the country as well. If anything, this proves the intrinsic secular character of the Hindus. One doubts whether in any well-entrenched Western democracy in the world, a Hindu, or for that a matter, a non-Christian, will ever be able to assume any high political office. The Uttarakhand High Court's verdict setting aside imposition of President's rule in the state on Wednesday spurred an elated Congress to attack the BJP, demanding an apology from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah for "trampling" democracy and "murdering" constitution. The verdict is a slap on face of BJP for trying to dislodge an elected government, it said. Terming the court's verdict as a victory of people of Uttarakhand, democracy and constitutional norms, AICC spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said Prime Minister Modi and Amit Shah should learn a lesson from this "decisive and resounding verdict". Here is what political leaders and state leaders had to say about the High Court order: Harish Rawat, Uttarakhand Chief Minister "I stand vindicated. Government had worked very sincerely to present the state budget. Uttarakhand is a wounded state and I want to tell the government at the Centre that we will try to forget this bitter chapter. The road to development should not be hindered, this is my request to the government at the Centre." Kiren Rijiju, Union Minister of State for Home Affairs "We all respect the court verdict. I have nothing to comment on it but just to blame the central government for a particular situation which has been created by Congress party, that is unfortunate. It is congress party's creation, not ours (BJP)," "Its not a question of embarrassment or mistake on our part. It was the situation created by the Congress party. They were in the government, they were having a majority with support of some MLAs. There was a revolt by 9 MLAs, reducing the government to a minority. How is BJP responsible for that situation?With regards to observation of the court, I do not have to say anything because we all have our defined role. We in the executive have our own role to play and judiciary has its own role to play. We do not have to comment on each other's observations or judgement. We honour whatever decision has been passed by the court" Asked about BJP's role in a similar situation in Arunachal Pradesh, he said that the situation in Uttarkhand and Arunanchal Pradesh was "not comparable". "There are slightly different situation within the Congress party. In Arunachal Pradesh, it is the Chief Minister who had lost the majority. They had disqualified some of the MLAs by using the Speakers position." "In Uttarakhand, it is just a simple revolt within the Congres party where the finance bill was not supposed to pass without majority and they forcefully tried to pass it by voice vote. It is not a comparable situation in case of Arunanchal and Uttarakhand." Randeep S Surjewala, Congress spokesperson: "This is a victory for the people of Uttarakhand, democracy and constitutional norms. This is also a slap on the face of those in BJP who sought to dislodge an elected government, elected with the mandate of people in Uttarakhand. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah will be well advised to now tender an unconditional apology to the nation and also to people of Uttarakhand for trampling upon democracy, murdering constitution norms and subjugating the will of people to their blind quest to dislodge Congress governments. We welcome the verdict." U'Khand HC sets aside President's Rule.Sinister conspiracy of BJP defeated.Democracy wins. Modiji should apologize to people of Uttarakhand. Randeep S Surjewala (@rssurjewala) April 21, 2016 Sanjay Jha, national spokesperson for Congress, tweeted with #WorstPMModi: #Uttarakhand HC verdict: Please Mr Narendra Modi, say something, Sir??? #WorstPMModi now reconfirmed . What a #shame ! Sanjay Jha (@JhaSanjay) April 21, 2016 The Indian National Congress's tweet expressed their delight with the Uttarakhand High Court's decision - A victory for Justice & Democracy in Uttarakhand. High Court strikes down President's Rule. #HCexposesBJPinUkhand pic.twitter.com/3QQWehQIaM INC India (@INCIndia) April 21, 2016 Ahmed Patel, Congress leader from Gujarat The verdict of the Uttarakhand High Court is not just a victory for the Congress party but a victory for democracy Ahmed Patel (@ahmedpatel) April 21, 2016 Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi Chief Minister: This is a huge embarrassment to Modi Govt. He shud stop interfering wid elected govts and respect democracy https://t.co/ufKtxCSlXW Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) April 21, 2016 Sitaram Yechury, General Secretary of CPM: Anti-constitutional juggernaut of BJP's central govt halted in its tracks by judiciary in Uttarakhand. A slap to subverters of Constitution. Sitaram Yechury (@SitaramYechury) April 21, 2016 Subramanian Swamy, BJP leader: With a new AG and SG we can win the Uttarakhand case. We had kep these two out of Arunachal and won Subramanian Swamy (@Swamy39) April 21, 2016 The BJP maintained it's silence amidst the criticism and only said On 29th April during floor test it will be proved that Harish Rawat is in minority. With inputs from PTI HOUSTON At least eight people have died and some 1,150 homes have been damaged in flooding triggered by torrential downpours in the Houston area this week as more rain fell in the region on Wednesday adding to vast pools of standing water. All of those who died were found in or near vehicles that had been in flooded areas, the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences and a local sheriff said. The National Weather Service said about an inch or less had fallen in the area as of Wednesday afternoon, keeping water high in parts of the country's fourth largest city where some roads have been turned into lakes. The Houston region had a record-setting drenching that dumped as much as 18 inches (45 cm) on some places on Monday. Don Oettinger, a forecaster with the National Weather Service's Houston/Galveston office, said there was a possibility of more rain on Thursday. "After tomorrow, we should dry up for a couple of days," he added. The weather service issued a flood watch from central Texas through Houston and into large parts of Louisiana. There have been more than 1,200 water rescues during the flooding, with emergency crews shuttling people by boat to dry ground and picking up hundreds of motorists whose cars were caught in rushing waters. The Houston Independent School District, the country's seventh-largest school district, said it would reopen on Wednesday after flooding caused the closure of hundreds of schools earlier this week. Some suburban school districts remained closed on Wednesday. Heavy storms can overwhelm drainage channels that move water from Houston back to the Gulf of Mexico, particularly if the ground is already saturated. The city faced similar widespread flooding during a storm last May and Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. (Reporting by Jon Herskovitz in Austin, the Houston bureau and Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee; Writing by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Paul Simao, Toni Reinhold) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. CHEYENNE It could soon be legal to keep backyard chickens in Cheyenne. The City Council will vote on the issue Monday. An ordinance allowing backyard chickens was approved by a City Council committee on Wednesday. Even if the change is approved, many residents will still be barred from keeping chickens because of pre-existing neighborhood covenants that ban the practice. New Delhi: India has told China "clearly" that there cannot be any differentiation among terrorists as all are the same, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on Thursday said, days after Beijing blocked India's bid to have Pathankot terror attack mastermind Masood Azhar designated as a terrorist by the UN. Parrikar's comment came a day after he arrived in the National Capital from his five-day visit to China during which he also raised India's concerns about the presence of Chinese troops in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), besides discussing crucial matters like boundary issues and setting up of a military hotline between DGMOs (Director Generals of Military Operations) of the two countries. "I have expressed very clearly to them that there cannot be differentiation in terrorists. All terrorists are the same and they should be dealt with the same principle, including the issue they had obstructed at the UN. They should also deal with it in the same manner," he told reporters. He underlined that External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had raised the issue in a more detailed manner in her interaction with her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi. Earlier this month, China had stopped UN sanctions committee from designating JeM chief Azhar as terrorist, maintaining that the case "did not meet the requirements" of the Security Council. Parrikar said that India did not shy away from expressing its concerns to China in a clear and firm manner. "Issue was also raised and India's concerns were presented in a clear manner. May be for the first time, it was raised clearly and firmly. Of course, they have their own justification...We did not shy away from raising our issues," he said. He said the most important takeaways from the trip were the joint decision for continuous interaction, exchanges, more talks between the armed services of both countries so that there are reduced chances of any "unwanted, undesirable" incident happening. Parrikar said that an "improved" version of the MoU on defence, signed in May 2006, is being exchanged for finalisation. Asked if China had raised the issue of India's decision to sign a logistics agreement with the US, Parrikar said, "Yes." "They mentioned it but not with the intensity as some of the media was thinking. They definitely mentioned it and we have been very clear that India's stand on various foreign policies, including this one, is an autonomous stand and India takes these decisions based on strategic and security interest of the country," the minister said. On the setting up of a hotline between DGMOs of the two countries, Parrikar said it will be a "reality very soon". He said China got back with its comments on the draft proposal within six hours of his meeting with his Chinese counterpart. The minister said the draft will go back and forth a couple of times before it is finalised. Parrikar said the effort was also to increase border meeting points. "The discussions were very frank, free and in a positive atmosphere. Overall, there appear to be better chances of getting things managed," he said. The minister said "better communication" was the need of the hour. "We agreed to increase our interactions and better management of borders." He said the "best solution" for border disputes was to finalise the Line of Actual Control (LAC) as different perceptions of the border leads to what is perceived as transgression. "Because of different perceptions, technical transgression happens. We feel it is traversing, but they (Chinese troops) are just patrolling. They come and go," the minister said. Parrikar said that such incidents had come down. PTI Beijing: China's Defense Ministry appears to have confirmed a test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) over disputed waters in the South China Sea. A three-sentence statement posted on the ministry's website on Thursday posed the question of whether China had fired an ICBM in the area of the South China Sea, which is claimed almost entirely by China. In its response, the ministry said China maintains that technological research experiments conducted within China's boundaries are normal and are not aimed at any specific nations or targets. The statement follows a report in the U.S. newspaper Washington Free Beacon that quoted unidentified Pentagon officials as saying China tested its longest-range DF-41 missile on Tuesday. The report did not say where the test took place, but said it involved two multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs). The report also stated that the DF-41 is assessed by U.S. intelligence agencies to be powerful enough to deliver between six and 10 warheads up to 7,456 milesfar enough to reach every corner of the United States from launch areas in eastern China. Jerusalem: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu left for Moscow on Thursday to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Israeli Prime Minister's Office said. Netanyahu, expected to return on Thursday itself, is to discuss the situation in Syria and weapons sales between Russia and Iran with the Russian President, Xinhua news agency reported. This is the third time that both leaders have met in the past six months. Israeli and Russian military officials have met repeatedly in the past few months to coordinate the two countries' actions around Syria's territory. According to the Israeli Prime Minister's Office, the two will talk about the coordination between Israeli and remaining Russian forces in neighbouring Syria, in order to prevent accidents, as well as the efforts to sustain a truce in Syria. Netanyahu had said Israel must make sure its security interests are kept intact following any truce agreement in Syria, fearing that militants remain near the Israeli border. Another topic which may be discussed is the sale of S-300 surface-to-air missile systems by Russia to Iran. Netanyahu said Iran poses an "existential threat" to Israel, and opposed the nuclear deal signed between the country and the international community in last July. Russian President Vladimir Putin extended the invitation to Netanyahu amid a visit by Israeli President Reuven Rivlin to Russia last month, which came several days after the Kremlin said Russia had pulled most of its military forces from Syria, who were deployed there since September 2015. MINATITLAN, Mexico A leak caused a deadly petrochemical plant blast that has killed at least 13 people and the toll could rise, Mexican oil company Pemex said on Thursday, the latest in a series of fatal accidents to batter the company. Pemex CEO Jose Antonio Gonzalez Anaya, who travelled to the site of Wednesday's blast near the port of Coatzacoalcos, one of Pemex's top oil export hubs, told local television it was unclear what caused the leak that prompted the blast. The massive explosion at the facility's chlorinate 3 plant in the Gulf state of Veracruz also injured 136 people, 13 of those seriously. "We know there was a leak, what we don't know is why, but everything points to an accident," Gonzalez Anaya said, revising the death toll up to 13. He said 18 people were unaccounted for. Gonzalez Anaya said there was an odour of ammonia in the area, and the company was investigating. Calling it a "tragic accident," President Enrique Pena Nieto said at an event in Mexico City that he would head to the region to attend to victims. The blast occurred at a vinyl petrochemical plant that is a joint venture between Pemex's petrochemical unit and Mexican plastic pipe maker Mexichem (MEXCHEM.MX). Shares in Mexichem were trading 5.5 percent lower in early trading on Thursday. "This is neither the time for excuses nor finding those to blame. It is the time to tend to the injured, be accountable and support all those affected," Juan Pablo del Valle, Mexichem's chairman, said on Twitter. In February, a fire killed a worker at the same plant, which lies within Pemex's larger Pajaritos petrochemical complex and makes vinyl chloride monomer, also known as chloroethene, an industrial chemical used to produce plastic piping. The explosion was the latest in a litany of safety disasters that have plagued the state oil giant, which is trying to stem the bleed of sliding output and slash costs as it creaks under the pressure of low crude prices. In 2013, at least 37 people were killed by a blast at its Mexico City headquarters, and 26 people died in a fire at a Pemex natural gas facility in northern Mexico in September 2012. A 2015 fire at its Abkatun Permanente platform in the oil-rich Bay of Campeche affected oil output and cost the company up to $780 million. Pemex said last year it had reduced its annual accident rate in 2014 by more than 33 percent. But a Reuters investigation found that Pemex was reducing its accident rate by including hours worked by office staff in its calculations. (Reporting by Tomas Bravo, Anahi Rama, Veronica Gomez, Gabriel Stargardter and Joanna Zuckerman Bernstein, writing by Alexandra Alper; Editing by Simon Gardner and Alan Crosby) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. LONDON U.S. President Barack Obama arrived in London on Thursday with a mission - to persuade British voters not to ditch membership of the European Union in a referendum that Washington fears could weaken the West. His visit is a welcome one for Prime Minister David Cameron, leading the "In" campaign, but has drawn scorn from those arguing that Britain should leave the EU. Obama is likely to suggest Britons should vote to stay in the bloc to preserve Britain's wealth, its "special relationship" with the United States and the cohesion of the West. "As the president has said, we support a strong United Kingdom in the European Union," Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser, told reporters in Washington before the trip. After a visit to Saudi Arabia, including talks with King Salman, Obama arrived in London on Thursday. The U.S. government - and many U.S. banks and companies - fear a Brexit would unleash market turmoil, diminish British clout, undermine London's status as a global financial capital, cripple the EU and undermine Western security. Opinion polls indicated that British voters are leaning towards the "In" camp in the June 23 referendum, but many remain undecided. Asked about Obama's views, Cameron told the parliament: "Personally I believe we should listen to advice from friends and other countries and I struggle to find the leader of any friendly country who thinks we should leave." Cameron has said that in the face of what he terms Russian President Vladimir Putin's aggression, this is no time to drop out of the club Britain joined in 1973. "BUTT OUT" For Britain's closest ally, EU membership amplifies British influence, facilitates trade for U.S. companies and strengthens the 28-member bloc which Washington views as a pillar of stability in the post-World War Two era. Opponents of the EU - many of whom laud the U.S. alliance - say that membership has shackled Britain to the corpse of a failed German-dominated experiment in European integration and that Britain, if freed, could prosper as a sole trader. New York-born Boris Johnson, the London mayor who heads the "Out" campaign, said he did not want to be lectured by Americans about EU membership. "President Obama should butt out," Nigel Farage, another prominent opponent of EU membership, told Reuters. "This is an unwelcome interference from the most anti-British American president there has ever been. Mercifully, he won't be in office for much longer." "Out" campaigners have said the United States would never agree to dilute its own national sovereignty in the way the EU requires of its member states. Ahead of a 2014 Scottish vote on independence, Obama said he hoped Britain "remains strong, robust and united", a comment that was welcomed by unionist politicians in London. Obama's term in office ends next Jan. 20. On Friday he will have lunch at Windsor Castle with Queen Elizabeth, who celebrated her 90th birthday on Thursday, and her husband Prince Philip. After lunch, Obama will hold talks with Cameron. (Additional reporting and Kylie MacLellan, Kate Holton and William James; Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Andrew Roche and Richard Balmforth) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. This website is intended for U.S. visitors only. Brussels: Key Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam has been charged over a deadly shootout with police in Brussels a week before the suicide bombings in the Belgian capital, his lawyer said Thursday. "He has been charged with attempted murder either alone or jointly" over the gunbattle at an apartment in the Forest district of Brussels on 15 March, lawyer Sven Mary told AFP. An Algerian Islamist suspect was killed and four police officers were wounded in the shooutout, which led to Abdeslam's arrest three days later in the Molenbeek area of Brussels after a four-month European manhunt. Abdeslam, 26, is due to be extradited to France in coming days over the November Paris attacks, in which he is believed to be the last surviving member of the terror squad that killed 130 people. But Belgian police have also tried to question him over his links to the three suicide bombers who struck Brussels airport and metro on March 22, killing 32 people and injuring hundreds. The Islamic State group has claimed both attacks. Asked if Abdeslam admitted being present at the Forest shootout, Mary said: "We won't discuss that, I won't comment." Abdeslam will appear before a Belgian court again on 28 April and his extradition to France will come "perhaps two days after his court appearance," Mary added. Abdeslam and alleged Paris accomplice Mohamed Abrini, who has also charged over the Brussels attacks, were moved to different jails in Belgium last week. Abrini, 31, has confessed to being "the man in the hat" caught on video with suicide bombers at Brussels airport. Abrini was also linked to the November 13 Paris massacre after being caught on video at a motorway gas station with Abdeslam. WASHINGTON/HOLLYWOOD, Fla. Republican presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Ted Cruz vied on Thursday for the support of party leaders who view them as outsiders, and turned a national controversy over a law on transgender bathroom use into a campaign issue. Trump was asked during a NBC Today Show town hall about the North Carolina law, which was passed last month and requires transgender people to use government and school bathrooms that correspond with the sex on their birth certificate. Trump took the side of those criticizing the law, saying it was unnecessary and North Carolina was "paying a big price" because of reaction from businesses that have halted or cancelled plans to expand in state unless the measured is repealed. "There have been very few complaints the way it is. People go. They use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate," Trump told the Today Show. Cruz, a U.S. senator from Texas who is a staunch social and fiscal conservative, expressed support for the law, and said the Republican front-runner has caved to political correctness as he seeks to lock down the party nomination and broaden his appeal ahead of the November general election. "Donald Trump isnt going to defeat political correctness. Today he bowed down to it," Cruz said on Twitter. "We shouldn't be facilitating putting little girls alone in a bathroom w/ grown men. That's just a bad, bad, bad idea," Cruz said in a separate Twitter post. Trump's brash demeanour has appealed to his fans, who say they admire that the New York billionaire is not afraid to say the things that other people believe privately. But his style and some of his campaign pledges have alarmed many in the Republican establishment. In recent weeks Trump has begun currying favour with the Republican Party leaders whose support he may need to secure the nomination. Trump's campaign has hired staff versed in the ways of Washington and has begun holding regular meetings on Capitol Hill with current and potential supporters. On Wednesday, a Trump aide, Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich all wooed elected party leaders at a Republican National Committee meeting in Florida focussed on the party's convention in Cleveland. Aides to Trump remained in Florida on Thursday to host an evening reception for party leaders. All three presidential contenders are trying to make the case to the RNC members, some of whom are delegates to the July convention that selects the nominee, that they have the best chance to win the Nov. 8 election. Candidates amass delegates to the convention through the state-by-state nominating contests, and need 1,237 delegates to secure the nomination outright. While Trump, 69, has long led the count, there is still a chance he might not reach the number and he has complained bitterly about the Republicans' delegate-selection process. Nevertheless, a decisive win in New York on Tuesday boosted Trump's delegate tally. He now has 845 while Cruz has 559 and Kasich 147, according to the Associated Press. The Republican delegate totals include one unbound delegate for Trump and 16 for Cruz who are free to support another candidate at any time. Cruz, 45, and Kasich, 63, are trying to prevent Trump from winning the nomination outright so they can force a contested convention. This would involve a series of sequential votes. With each cycle, increasing numbers of bound delegates, who are pledged to a candidate, would become unbound until one candidate gets a majority for the nomination. "Senator Ted Cruz has been MATHEMATICALLY ELIMINATED from race," Trump said on Twitter on Thursday. "He said Kasich should get out for same reason. I think both should get out!" Cruz insisted this week that no candidate would reach 1,237 delegates before the convention. NEXT WEEK'S CONTESTS As the RNC's three-day meeting continues, Trump aides will court delegations from the five states - Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island - that hold nominating contests next Tuesday. The RNC's rules committee is to meet on Thursday but is not expected to make any recommendations on rules changes concerning the July 18-21 convention. Some anti-Trump forces, alarmed by his comments on immigration, Muslims and trade, would like to change the rules in a way to make it easier for Cruz, Kasich or an establishment candidate to defeat Trump for the nomination. The politically powerful conservative network run by wealthy brothers Charles and David Koch under the collective banner of Freedom Partners has said it does not plan to host events at either party's convention. Koch groups that include Americans for Prosperity, Concerned Veterans for America and a Latino outreach group called Libre plan to spend $400 million collectively before the November elections. But the Kochs, unhappy with a potential Trump nomination, have indicated they will focus on congressional races in order to preserve Republican majorities in the U.S. House and Senate. (Reporting by Steve Holland; Additional reporting by Amanda Becker, Richard Cowan and Ginger Gibson; Editing by Peter Cooney, Bill Trott and Frances Kerry) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. When Trenton Zainhofsky began planning his Eagle Scout service project, he wanted to build something possibly even a house. He previously had built a deck with his dad, Blaine Zainhofsky, and enjoyed the experience. I thought: Why not step it up a notch? he said. The Bismarck youth didnt end up building a house, but he did supervise a group of Boy Scouts in the construction of an Adirondack shelter at Cross Ranch State Park over two weekends in March and April. The project completes one of his requirements to become an Eagle Scout the highest rank a Scout can achieve. The Eagle project is meant to be an exercise in leadership: A Scout must plan, organize and supervise a major service project. Park manager Eric Lang said the park along the Missouri River in Oliver County used to have a yurt in the backcountry that didnt seem to get much use. It was moved to another part of the park, but officials began hearing there also was a need for a shelter in the primitive area. Mark Zimmerman, director of North Dakota Parks and Recreation, met the Zainhofskys during a Scout event and learned about Trentons desire to build something in a state park. He thought of Cross Ranch and pitched the idea for an Adirondack shelter to Trenton. Adirondack shelters are three-sided lean-to structures named after the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, where they originally were used. Zimmerman said he was intrigued by the idea of adding such a shelter to the park system, and the primitive area of Cross Ranch seemed like an ideal location. Trenton's father, a carpenter, made sure the plans were up to code and the shelter was structurally sound. He also provided the tools. But the project was all Trentons. Trenton was involved in every phase, said Blaine Zainhofsky, who achieved the Eagle rank when he was a Scout. The shelter can be accessed by hiking about 4 miles through the park or about 100 yards from the Missouri River, Zimmerman said. He said it gives people a place to camp without having to set up a tent. I like the idea of providing some unique sights and unique opportunities for camping, he said, adding that the Cross Ranch Adirondack shelter is the first of its kind in the North Dakota state parks, and it might be the only one in the state. Lang said Boy Scout troops visit the park for hiking and camping, but they often put in time to help make improvements, too. We do have a lot of Scouts annually that help us out in the spring and the fall, he said. Contributing something to Cross Ranch was an easy decision for Trenton, 14, who has camped there often during his scouting career. Zimmerman said youth groups undertake important projects to maintain and improve state parks. Whether its planting trees, picking up litter or taking on bigger projects, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, 4-H clubs, church groups and others provide valuable services. Therere some projects we wouldnt do if it werent for Scouts or other youth groups, he said. And its not a one-way street. Zimmerman said the groups that put in time for the parks also get to enjoy the outdoors. Sometimes, families that have been part of projects say they cant wait to come back to hike or camp in the parks theyve helped improve. Its a partnership for all of us, he said. Trenton said he had hoped to get 12 Boy Scouts involved in the project, but almost 25 came out on the main day of construction. During the course of the project, the Zainhofskys estimate more than 40 Scouts put in about 250 man-hours. He definitely went big with his project, Lang said. He definitely made something thats going to be here for many years to come. Capitol Electric Cooperative in Bismarck and Central Power Electric Cooperative in Minot donated most of the materials for the shelter. Trentons grandfather, Jerry Zainhofsky, helped him make those connections and assisted in planning and designing the shelter. Other materials were donated by North Dakota Parks and Recreation. Trenton isnt the first to find inspiration for an Eagle project at Cross Ranch. Others in recent years have put in markers for the self-guided trail loop to coordinate with pamphlets; placed bluebird boxes around the campground; and built wood-duck houses for the park, Lang said. Trenton noted that he's on the young side to be completing his Eagle project. Most Scouts are 15 to 17 when they do it, he said. While he still has several requirements left to attain the ranking, he said he hopes his great-grandfather gets to see him accomplish it. Manley Hillesland, 87, has had a long involvement in scouting, which has influenced and inspired Trenton. Thats been his drive ever since he started scouting, Blaine Zainhofsky said. Trenton plans to continue in scouting even after he attains the Eagle rank. He wants to provide leadership to other Scouts and give back to others. Hes an awesome kid, and I couldnt be prouder, Blaine Zainhofsky said. He should be proud of the product, Zimmerman said. Its well built. Its going to last a long time. State regulators will continue to pursue seeking $950,000 in fines against a company for illegal dumping and expect the matter to end up in district court. The North Dakota Industrial Commission voted unanimously on Wednesday to move forward with its complaint against a trucking company despite recommendations from an administrative law judge issued last month that said it did not have jurisdiction because the incident occurred on a public road. The decision indicated that jurisdiction belonged to the state Department of Health. Were convinced that the commission absolutely does have jurisdiction there, said Lynn Helms, director of the Department of Mineral Resources said of the public roads at issue. The complaint was brought by the North Dakota Industrial Commissions Department of Mineral Resources against Casper, Wyoming-based, Black Hills Trucking Inc. for spilling saltwater on a Williams County road. Helms said the NDIC disagreed with six of the seven points outlined in Administrative Law Judge Patrick Wards decision, according to Helms, who indicated that regulatory gaps would be created if the Industrial Commission didn't have dual jurisdiction with the Department of Health. Helms said the ruling sends a completely wrong message to industry. The case stems from three separate instances of spilling of saltwater on Feb. 3, Feb. 14 and March 3, 2014. Of the $950,000 in fines being sought, $875,000 of the total comes from daily $12,500 fines associated with each spill. In December 2014, the Department of Health entered an agreement with Black Hills Trucking over its operating in the state without a proper license. A fine of $459,000 was lowered to $200,000, with the remaining fine suspended. Black Hills Trucking has 30 days to appeal to district court. We fully expect an appeal, Helms said. Super-sized squirt guns, live music and a vendor selling tie-dye T-shirts set the backdrop Wednesday at Sertoma Park in Bismarck as backers of universal use of marijuana pushed for signatures to put an initiative on a November state ballot. JD Houle organized the 420 event for the legalization of recreational use of marijuana and hemp at Sertoma Park's Community building. April 20 is known as a national pot holiday, according to Houle, who said he felt it a fitting time to seek the 13,476 signatures needed to submit the petition to the Secretary of State by the July 11 deadline. He and chair of the Legalize ND drive, Eric Olson, of Fargo, aim to secure 20,000 signatures for the cause. Prior to Wednesday's event, the group had a count of 800 signatures statewide. Houle said the initiative is for the recreational and medicinal purposes of marijuana and hemp, separate from the proposed Compassionate Care Act, focused on medical uses of marijuana only. "This event will affect thousands and millions of people's lives. It's medicinal. It helps with seizures, cancer, glaucoma, fybromyalgia and pain issues. I am leaning more toward recreational to make it legal for everybody. It frees up hemp. When we legalize hemp, we can free up hemp for fuel so we can get off fossil fuel," Houle said. "It burns more efficiently and is easier to process." He reasoned that marijuana and hemp-based items do not kill people, but alcohol and tobacco do kill and are legal. Houle, a self-described vegeterian and non-drinker, wanted to publicize the event "because some people are scared to come out." As of 5:30 p.m., Houle had gathered more than 200 signatures for his cause and 290 people, ranging in age from their early 20s to seniors in their 70s, attended the event. When not collecting signatures, Houle works at a local fast-food restaurant and likes the moniker "JD the drive-thru guy." He said similar events were being held in Minot, Fargo and Valley City. When asked, he assured no marijuana had been smoked nor cannabis products ingested at park facilities that day. Olson said he is confident the initiative will make the state ballot in November. Signatures from a similar initiative were rejected by the Secretary of State's office because it listed an outdated Century Code. A separate petition According to Mary Rennich, of Bismarck, who is involved with the North Dakota Compassionate Care Act for Medical Cannabis, about 3,500 signatures have been collected statewide for that cause and possibly 6,000 more are pending. "We're hoping for 18,000 signatures by July 11," said Rennich. She said the group will collect signatures at Sertoma Park April 30 at Shelter No. 6 when the MS Walk participants come through as well as when a separate Parkinson's Walk is held there. It took all night and, in the end, the Parshall School Board split its vote to let second-year elementary principal Lewis Reese go. School business manager Joani Tucker said the motion to not renew Reeses contract based on his performance was approved by a 3-2 vote. The non-renewal hearing started at 6 p.m. Wednesday and ended nearly 12 hours later at 5 a.m., Tucker said. Superintendent John Weidner recommended the non-renewal, based upon complaints from parents and staff and for creating a hostile work environment, according to information in Reeses personnel file. While Reese did not comment for this story, he earlier told the Tribune that test scores and attendance have improved on his watch. Im confident that Ive done a good job, he said. In May, the board will hold a similar non-renewal hearing for its eight-year high school business and technology teacher, Kevin Turner, who is on unpaid leave for a finding of sexually harassing students and staff. Turner is also under investigation by Mountrail County law enforcement. Opera has added a free VPN client with unlimited data usage in its newest developer version that offers 256-bit encryption. This allows you to browse the web more private, helps you to access region-restricted websites or shields your browsing when on public Wi-Fi. It recently added built-in ad blocking to its desktop browser. How to use Operas built-in VPN To activate the VPN in the developer version of the Opera browser, click the O menu, select Preferences and toggle the free VPN on. An icon will appear in the browser address field, from which you can see and change your location, check whether your IP is exposed and review how much data you have consumed through the VPN servers. You can download the developer version of Opera browser for desktop for Windows, Mac and Linux from Opera website here. Currently you can choose from one of three virtual locations: USA, Canada and Germany in this developer release, but the company says more locations will be available in the stable version of the Opera browser. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgOsu2PipmE Commenting on the new feature, Krystian Kolondra, SVP, Opera, said: Everyone deserves to be private online if they want to be. By adding a free, unlimited VPN directly into the browser, no additional download or extensions from an unknown third-party provider are necessary. So, today, our Opera desktop users got a handy way to boost their online privacy, as well as easier access to all their favorite online content no matter where they are. The more you dig into Bank of America's (BAC 3.71%) numbers, the more you come away thinking that its shotgun marriage eight years ago to Merrill Lynch can't last. This is particularly apparent when you consider how much Bank of America has had to deleverage since the financial crisis relative to Wells Fargo (WFC 2.70%). In 2007, Bank of America was leveraged by a factor of 9.8:1. For every $1 worth of common stockholders' equity, the North Carolina-based bank owned $9.80 worth of earning assets. Fast forward to today, and its leverage has fallen to 7.8:1. That's still a lot of leverage relative to a nonfinancial company, but it's nevertheless 20% less than Bank of America used before the crisis. Compare that to Wells Fargo. In 2007, the California-based bank was leveraged by a factor of 9.5:1. Today, the figure is 9.2:1. Wells Fargo's leverage dropped, but only by 2.7%. The impact on Bank of America's profitability has been substantial. Holding all else equal, its return on common equity would have been 10.8% last year if it employed the same amount of leverage as it did in 2007. But because it didn't, its return on common equity was only 6.8%. Under the former scenario, one could argue that Bank of America is creating value for shareholders because its hypothetical 10.8% return on equity is at least in the same ballpark as its cost of capital. But under the latter scenario, it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that the bank is eroding shareholder value when you factor in the risk of owning its stock, as well as the opportunity cost associated with forgoing the return from safer alternative investments. What does Merrill Lynch have to do with any of this? In the first case, Bank of America's acquisition of Merrill Lynch increased its size, which subjects the bank to even greater regulatory scrutiny given that it's now considered a global systematically important bank, or GSIB. This alone may have had little impact, as Wells Fargo more than doubled in size as a result of its 2008 acquisition of Wachovia. But the devil is in the details. The difference is that Wachovia, like Wells Fargo, was a commercial bank. It focused on collecting deposits and making loans. Merrill Lynch, on the other hand, is a major investment bank that plays a significant role in global capital markets. This exposes Bank of America to more risk, and increases its interconnectedness with the global financial system. The net result is that, under the heightened regulatory and capital regime of the post-crisis period, Bank of America must hold more capital relative to its assets than Wells Fargo does. You can get a sense for this by looking at their respective GSIB buffers, which tie how much leverage a bank can use to its role in the global financial system. Bank of America's GSIB buffer is 3%, while Wells Fargo's is only 2%. On top of this, Bank of America's capital-markets business seems to require it to maintain more liquidity than Wells Fargo. In 2014, regulators finalized two liquidity risk-related standards that tie the amount of unencumbered high-quality liquid assets -- namely, cash and U.S. government-backed securities -- a bank must hold to the estimated net cash outflows the institution could encounter over a 30-day period of significant liquidity stress. The principal rule is known as the liquidity coverage ratio, or LCR. There are two reasons to believe that the LCR takes an especially onerous toll on large universal banks such as Bank of America. First, as we saw with Bear Stearns during the last crisis, a bank's Wall Street operations, and particularly its prime brokerage, is often the first place that bleeds liquidity during a crisis. Second, as we saw this month with the results of the Federal Reserve's resolution plans, one of the main reasons why JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America both failed to satisfy regulators is because of the way that they managed liquidity. It's worth noting, moreover, that we may soon know exactly how much more stringent the liquidity requirements are for Bank of America than for Wells Fargo. This is because the Federal Reserve recently proposed a rule that would require large bank holding companies to publicly disclose, on a quarterly basis, certain quantitative and qualitative information regarding the LCR calculations. Either way, it's clear that Bank of America operates with much more liquidity than Wells Fargo. Only 41% of its assets at the end of the first quarter consisted of loans, which are the most lucrative, but illiquid, type of asset a bank can hold. Wells Fargo, on the other hand, allocated 51% of its asset portfolio to loans last quarter. "Simplistically, the more loans to common equity [a bank holds] the higher the return on equity," observed Richard Bove of Rafferty Capital Markets in an email. You can see the impact of this on the amount of money the two banks generate from their income-earning assets. The annualized yield on Wells Fargo's portfolio of earning assets was 3.22% in the first quarter. Bank of America's was only 2.59%. That may seem like a negligible difference, but when you consider that Bank of America had $1.8 trillion worth of earning assets, the difference between the two figures amounts to $11 billion in annual interest income. The point is that Bank of America's union to Merrill Lynch appears to require it to hold more capital than stand-alone commercial banks, as well as to increase the liquidity of its balance sheet. And while Merrill Lynch gives Bank of America the opportunity to cross-sell services to both consumer and commercial customers, there is little compelling evidence that the bank is particularly good at this, or that doing so will more than make up for the downside of being as big and globally interconnected as the combined institutions now are. "Bank of America should be able to make up the return gap with contributions from Merrill's non-capital intensive operations, but it is not happening," says Bove. None of this changes my thesis that Bank of America's shares are trading for an unconscionable discount to book value, which is why I'm bullish on its stock. But it does lead me to think differently about how the value from an investment in the $2.2 trillion bank may be unlocked in the years to come. Coal has been on the decline for years now, and last week, Peabody Energy's bankruptcy marked the fall of the last big U.S. coal producer. In this clip from the Industry Focus: Energy podcast, Tyler Crowe and Taylor Muckerman talk about how hard the coal industry has been hit by falling demand in the last decade, and how poorly Peabody has performed in the last few years. A full transcript follows the video. This podcast was recorded on April 14, 2016. Tyler Crowe: Let's start with Peabody Energy filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this week. Taylor Muckerman: Yeah. I guess the last of the big four U.S. companies to do so, I think. You have Alpha Natural Resources, Cloud Peak, and ... Crowe: Arch Coal. Muckerman: Arch Coal, yeah. So, finally. It's been a long time coming. 2011, I guess, is when you started to see prices start their slide, down 75% for coal since 2011. Not many people back then realized exactly what was happening when it started, but a five-year slog these companies have been going through. And in 2015, 2016, finally came to a head. You look at China, one of the biggest -- if not the biggest -- demand centers for coal, they're looking at possibly a third straight year of reduced coal demand. It was down 4.7% in 2015, expectations down 2% more this year in terms of coal demand out of China. And, even in coal's backyard, West Virginia, demand down 12% last year. Maryland and Ohio both down 50% since 2005, in just the last decade, half the coal production demand that they've been using for coal power plants. And 33% nationally. So, it's been a rough decade. Crowe: Not a good one, so far. Muckerman: But especially in the last five years. Crowe: I actually have a crazy stat. I did this back in December of 2015, and tweeted it out then. In December of 2010, the United States' four largest coal producers by volume had a combined market cap $32 billion. As of December 2015, that market cap was down to $300 million. Muckerman: Yeesh! The gnome is just shaking his head side to side. Crowe: And that's before Peabody Energy went bankrupt, I think, actually, even before Arch Coal filed for bankruptcy. So, that number has gotten even smaller. They're not even technically companies listed on the stock market anymore because of their liquidation -- sorry, not liquidation, it's Chapter 11, so it's reorganization. Muckerman: Apparently, they're not even planning to liquidate. I mean, maybe they are behind closed doors. But, a lot of them have kept production up or have grown production over the last year or so, in face of probably understanding that the end is near. Constellation Brands' (STZ 1.18%) stock popped to an all-time high recently after the company reported strong fourth-quarter results. Revenue and net profit were both up by double-digit percentages, and to top it all off, the dividend was raised. But before you raise your glass to toast the alcoholic beverage purveyor's shares, you may want to listen to this segment from the Motley Fool Money radio show, in which Chris Hill, Andy Cross, Simon Erickson and Jason Moser explain why, despite its stock rally, Constellation might not be the fine vintage the market seems to think it is just now. A transcript follows the video. This podcast was recorded on April 8, 2016. Chris Hill: Constellation Brands hitting a new all-time high this week after the beverage giant wrapped up the year with strong fourth-quarter results. Revenue and profits both up double digits, Simon. And speaking of dividends, they raised theirs. Simon Erickson: You know, this story made me raise a couple eyebrows. Two eyebrows. Andy Cross: How about a glass? Hill: Do you have more than two? Erickson: (laughs) Cross: Just one? Erickson: So, they acquired Prisoner Wine, which was an addition to Ballast Point, which it acquired last year, also. And all of these acquisitions they are making are immediately accretive to earnings, which looks great on the income statement. But it shouldn't be that easy for a brewery to just go out and immediately make acquisitions that are immediately accretive to your income statement like this. And, you look at this, and there are brands to these beers, but they're also loading up the balance sheet with a whole lot of goodwill. When a company goes out and pays a price to acquire a company that's larger than fair market value, you take goodwill on your balance sheet. That's an intangible asset. And goodwill is now 42% of the assets that are on Constellation Brands' balance sheet. So, I think there's a little bit of a risk to this strategy. It looks great from the income statement, and Wall Street applauded the news, but I'm a little wary. Cross: Just for comparison's sake, Chris, anything above 40% is when a lot of fundamental investors start to think, "Mm, that may be a little too high." Jason Moser: Yeah, we talk about goodwill a lot. I think we've probably run Microsoft through the ringer on this once or twice. But the problem with goodwill, it sits on the balance sheet forever, hopefully, and it's not a problem. But if it becomes a problem, and you have to take a writedown on that goodwill, if it's suddenly deemed that those assets aren't worth what they maybe once were, then that flows through the income statement and affects the company's earnings, and that's where the bad news starts coming in. So, it looks good now. It could be a problem later on. And that's the problem investors have to take into consideration. Hill: But in general, this is the move of any beverage company, isn't it? It's, "We're going to acquire, we've got better distribution." We've seen this with the soda companies, why not with an alcohol company? Erickson: It's in the brands. It's your perception of the brand and how successful that's going to be. There's a lot of play for Southern California, Ballast Point especially. Constellation is betting big on the move they're making that this brand will be successful. If it is, then yes, this could be a great acquisition. But I think we need to be a little bit cautious of that, at least, as investors. Many declining coal companies have been blaming declining demand -- especially in China -- for their bad performance. In this clip from the Industry Focus: Energy podcast, Tyler Crowe and Taylor Muckerman explain why that's not exactly fair, and how poor management probably has a lot more to do with their less-than-stellar earnings than oversupply. A full transcript follows the video. This podcast was recorded on April 14, 2016. Tyler Crowe: That is something that I find absolutely fascinating about the coal story. You talked about a lot of the weakening demand and the global glut of coal, and everybody just kind of blames that [for] these companies' demise and downturn. And, yes, that has been a huge factor. But one of the things I don't think a lot of people really think about is, these companies made some really bad moves a few years ago that are finally coming to reckoning. To give you an idea -- in 2011, the absolute peak of this cycle of coal ... Taylor Muckerman: Yeah, that's when we talked about prices being down 75%, since 2011, yeah. Crowe: Right. So, since then, right at that time, Peabody Energy buys Macarthur Coal for $4 billion. Alpha Natural Resources buys Massey Energy for $7 billion. Arch Coal buys International Coal for $3.4 billion. Walter Energy buys Western Coal for $3.3 billion. Every single one of these companies made a massive, massive purchase at the top of the cycle, took on huge debt to do it ... Muckerman: It's a gold rush right there. Everyone's competing with each other, trying to get bigger, get bigger, get bigger. Crowe: Yeah. So, when you see those huge moves, four or five years ago -- and I think this could be a good long-term investing view for people -- when you get in these big commodity boom cycles, when everybody's like, "We're going to grow like crazy because there's this booming demand somewhere overseas, and it's looking great," and you see these sort of moves, that can kind of be a little bit of a yellow flag, be like, "Woah, there's some people making some very aggressive moves." And when you're looking at something like energy, it can grow in fits and starts, but it's never a massive growth engine -- multiple, double-digit growth every year that you see in other industries. It's a slower-growing industry, and you have to understand that when it comes to the commodity cycle, because if you grow too fast, you're going to hit a bust like we're hitting now. And that was a perfect example of it. Muckerman: Yeah, I remember I first started at The Motley Fool in 2012 as an energy and materials analyst, and ... Crowe: I think we landed right about the same time. Muckerman: Yeah. It was just, all talking about, "When is coal going to turn around? When is coal going to turn around?" And here we are, four years later, and still, even worse off than we were. Crowe: We were trying to call the bottom, and everybody was like, "Oh, it can't get any worse than this." Well, it did, and it's still getting worse. Muckerman: Yeah. We even we talking about, "Oh, there's certain basins like the Powder River Basin out West, which is like, some of the cheapest coal to mine." So, you think, hey, Peabody has great exposure there. That was their saving grace for a minute, and now they're the last ones to be exposed to bankruptcy court. Despite a petition, Stanford University will not require western civilization courses as part of its freshman curriculum. The Stanford Review, a student-run publication, launched a petition to bring western civilization courses back to Stanford and then all hell broke loose. We the writers, we didnt even realize how counter-cultural and unpopular it would be on a college campus to think that all students should have a basic introduction to the greats of the western tradition, Stanford student Elliot Kaufman told the FOX Business Networks Stuart Varney. Kaufman then raised concerns over the broader potential impact of not having western civilization courses as part of Americas educational system. Being a computer-science focused school, many students go four full years and graduate without ever even having to contemplate where our liberties come from and why we cherish them. I just think thats a really untenable and dangerous position for our democracy as a whole, said Kaufman. Late last year, Hewlett-Packard split into two companies -- HP and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise . HP kept selling computers, printers, and imaging devices, while HPE sells enterprise hardware and software. Xerox , oneof HP's top rivals in printing and imaging, also recently announced that it would by year's end split its hardware and services businesses into two new companies -- a business process outsourcing company and a document and services one. Image source: Xerox. Piper Jaffray analyst George Tong recently recommended that investors buy shares of Xerox ahead of the split, declaring that a "sum-of-the-parts" valuation for both segments gave the stock an equivalent valuation of $14 -- a 25% premium from its current price. But should investors buy Xerox instead of HPE or HP Inc? A brief history of XeroxXerox was founded 110 years ago, but the company didn't become world-famous until it launched its first plain paper photocopier in 1959. It subsequently dominated the imaging device market with color printers, laser printers, and scanners over the following decades. But by the early 2000s, Xerox's bottom line had dipped into the red, cash levels had fallen, and debt levels had risen. To rejuvenate and diversify its business, Xerox acquired services and outsourcing company Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) for$6.4 billion in 2009. But ACS's IT outsourcing business failed to compete effectively against market heavyweights like HP, so Xerox sold the business to French IT services firm Atos SE for $966 million in late 2014. Xerox's new business process outsourcing company will mainly consist of ACS's remaining businesses. But will a split help?As a single company, Xerox's growth has been mediocre. Revenue fell 7.6% annually to $4.65 billion last quarter, missing estimates by $80 million and marking its 15th consecutive quarter of sales declines. Document technology revenue fell 13.1% to $1.88 billion, while equipment sales declined 10% to $770 million. Annuity revenue from contracted services, consumable supplies, and financing services fell 7% to $3.88 billion. Analysts expect Xerox's revenue to continue fading by the single digits over the next few quarters. Yet Xerox's numbers are better than those of HP Inc, which posted a 12% annual revenue decline last quarter as sales of printers and desktops fell by double digits. HPE fared better than both Xerox and HP, with a more moderate 3% sales decline, but its sales were propped up by its acquisition of networking firm Aruba Networks. Xerox's adjusted net income fell 6.7% to $333 million, but its adjusted EPS rose one cent to $0.32 per share (thanks to buybacks) and beat estimates by four cents. Gross and operating margins both declined. Analysts expect Xerox's annual earnings to improve just 3% over the next five years, which gives it a 5-year PEG ratio of 3.4. HP is expected to remain unprofitable during that period, which gives it a negative PEG ratio. HPE is expected to post 2.5% annual earnings growth, which gives it a PEG ratio of 3.7. Therefore, Xerox's shares don't look cheap, but they look cheaper than HP's or HPE's relative to its earnings growth potential. Margins and dividendsXerox plans to cut costs over the next three years to produce $2.4 billion in savings across both companies. $700 million of that total could be realized this year, depending on when the companies officially split. Xerox claims that less than 2% of the workforce will be affected by the split, although its total headcount will continue shrinking, as it has in previous years. On its own, the document technology company is expected to generate annual revenue of around $11 billion, while the business process outsourcing one will generate about $7 billion. Despite the notion that printers and copiers have become a low-margin business, the document tech business finished last quarter with an operating margin of 11.8%, while the outsourcing services business had a margin of 9.4%. By comparison, HP Inc finished last quarter witha GAAP operating margin of 8% from continuing operations, while HPE finished the quarter witha 3% operating margin. Both HP and Xerox have long records of raising their dividends, and the four smaller companies will continue that tradition. HP and HPE respectively pay forward annual dividend yields of 4% and 1.3%, while Xerox currently pays a yield of 2.8%. Since Xerox is splitting its hardware and services businesses in a similar way, the document tech business will likely retain a higher dividend, while the outsourcing services one will pay a lower one. The verdict: Xerox wins, but waiting would be wiseXerox isn't a great growth stock, but it has decent earnings growth potential and a solid dividend.Xerox faces many of the same macro headwinds as HP and HPE, but its lower (albeit not negative) 5-year PEG ratio makes it a slightly more attractive investment than both stocks. However, cautious investors who don't want to own both Xerox companies can wait for the split to conclude before deciding which stock is a better buy. When that happens, I'll come back and compare HP to the document and services half and HPE to the business outsourcing half for clearer apples-to-apples comparisons. The article Better Buy: HP Inc, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, or Xerox Corp? originally appeared on Fool.com. Leo Sun has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. 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. Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. A little over two weeks ago, Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced a deal to acquire organic grocer Whole Foods Market (NASDAQ: WFM) for $42 per share, or roughly $13.7 billion. It was immediately apparent that the agreement would have massive implications for the future of the industry. The market saw shares of several large grocery chains plunge on the news in response, among them a nearly 6% single-day decline from Costco (NASDAQ: COST). After all, it stands to reason that as Amazon uses Whole Foods to impose its margin-destroying, market share-taking ways on the grocery space, it could come at the expense of low-cost businesses like Costco. But this raises the question: Should investors buy shares of Costco on the dip? And perhaps even more interesting, could there possibly be a case to buy Whole Foods today? Let's take a closer look to find out. The case for Costco So why buy Costco today? For one, Costco has consistently demonstrated its uncanny ability to weather today's changing retail landscape, delivering solid growth despite the shift to online retail sources in recent years. Last quarter, for example, sales climbed 8% year over year to $28.22 billion, including a 5% increase in comparable-store sales. Costco can largely thank high shopper loyalty and its membership-based model for that strength. The company achieved an impressive 90.2% membership renewal rate last quarter in the U.S. and an 87.5% renewal rate worldwide. But there are a couple things investors should watch to that end. First, Costco implemented its usual annual fee increases of $5 to $10 per member -- a move that will impact around 35 million member households -- at the beginning of June, so we should keep an eye out to ensure membership renewal rates remain high as a key indicator of the stickiness of Costco's business. Assuming they do -- as per usual when Costco increases rates -- it will go a long way toward continuing to insulate Costco from any margin-destroying moves that Amazon might decide to push going forward. What's more, it will take time for Amazon's vision for Whole Foods (which remains unclear at this point) to play out. So Costco should still have plenty of time to adjust its own way forward accordingly. The case for Whole Foods Market As it stands, Whole Foods stock closed on Friday at $42.11 per share -- that's slightly above Amazon's agreed $42 acquisition price -- and traded as high as $43.84 per share in the days following the acquisition announcement. But why? For the one and only reason you might want to buy Whole Foods now: The prospect of another acquirer stepping in with an even more competitive bid to rival Amazon's offer. To be sure -- and perhaps predictably -- multiple law firms promptly announced investigations into whether Amazon was paying enough for Whole Foods under the agreement and whether Whole Foods has breached its fiduciary duty to investors by accepting the deal. After all, while Whole Foods stock was propelled to a fresh 52-week-high on the news, shares are still well off their 2015 highs as the chain has been forced to repeatedly cut prices and slow new store development plans as it fended off competition. Many Wall Street analysts and fellow Fools alike couldn't help but wonder whether another grocery giant would step in to improve Amazon's bid. In doing so, those rival bidders could either expand their own brick-and-mortar grocery presence or simply prevent Amazon from doing so in an effort to stave off the impending competitive threat. But make no mistake: This option looks less likely with each passing day. On June 23, Whole Foods confirmed that it has not received any other offers, which is why shares have continued to creep back toward Amazon's bid. So, in the end, while there's certainly a possibility that could change, I think investors today would do better to buy shares of Costco while they're still down. 10 stocks we like better than Costco WholesaleWhen investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.* David and Tom just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy right now... and Costco Wholesale wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys. Click here to learn about these picks! *Stock Advisor returns as of June 5, 2017 John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Steve Symington owns shares of Whole Foods Market. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Amazon, Costco Wholesale, and Whole Foods Market. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. When Gartner confirmed that PC sales declined yet again in the first quarter of 2016, Intel and tech brethren Microsoft weren't punished as has so often happened in the past. In fact, just the opposite. Does that mean investors, at long last, recognize that the respective transitions that the tech giants are undergoing are taking hold? If so, it would certainly bode well for Intel and Microsoft shareholders, because PC sales aren't likely to make a miraculous comeback anytime soon. Image courtesy of: Intel. Just the factsAs per Gartner, there were 64.8 million PCs shipped in 2016's first quarter, a whopping 9.6% drop from 2015's Q1. As if the year-over-year decline wasn't bad enough, last quarter was the first time in nine years that shipments fell below 65 million units. The strong dollar played a role, as did the precipitous 32.4% decline in PC shipments in Latin American markets. Another factor pressuring PC sales -- which Gartner defines as desktop units, notebooks, and ultramobile premium devices (tablets and clamshells) -- is the shift to smartphones. Particularly in emerging markets, more and more consumers look to lower-cost smartphones as their primary computing device. The only aspect of Gartner's report that could be viewed as even mildly surprising was the depth of the PC decline. Not long ago, such discouraging PC sales figures would have sent Intel's and Microsoft's stock, among others, into a tailspin. As it happens, in the couple of days following Gartner's dismal PC news, Microsoft stock rose about 2%, while Intel shares climbed nearly 1.5%. Now, for the rest of the storyIntel's recently announced Q1 earnings support CEO Brian Krzanich's view that, "Our first-quarter results tell the story of Intel's ongoing strategic transformation, which is progressing well and will accelerate in 2016. We are evolving from a PC company to one that powers the cloud and billions of smart, connected computing devices." Total revenue jumped 7%, and even Intel's client computing group, home of its PC-related sales, eked out a 2% year-over-year revenue increase. But the real news was the 9% and 22% jump in Intel's data center and IoT sales, respectively. Add Intel's 12% increase in security revenue -- another key component of Krzanich's transformation plans -- to data center and IoT, and the three units combined to make up nearly 40% of Intel's $13.7 billion in total sales. News that Intel intends to cut 12,000 jobs -- equal to 11% of its workforce -- due to the aforementioned PC slowdown hasn't hindered its solid start to 2016. Microsoft's transformation efforts, much like Intel's, are centered on the cloud. CEO Satya Nadella is also focused on getting Microsoft's Software-as-a-Service offerings, including its flagship Office 365 and Dynamics CRM, into as many devices -- mobile or otherwise -- as possible, regardless of operating system. Based on its nearly 11% increase in share price in the last three months, and its slight pop following Gartner's data on the Q1 PC sales decline, investors have bought into Nadella's "mobile-first, cloud-first" transition mantra. Heading into its fiscal 2016 Q3 earnings on April 21, Microsoft will likely surpass the $10 billion annual cloud revenue run rate. As of last quarter, Microsoft was already generating more than $9.4 billion cloud sales and has consistently reported significant improvements with each successive quarter. Microsoft's strength in SaaS delivered via the cloud, considered by most pundits as the fastest sector of the exploding market, is largely responsible for its leadership position. Investors are beginning to recognize that declines in Microsoft's personal computing division, home of its PC sales, no longer define the cloud software king. The initial reaction by investors to Gartner's PC sales report was a good sign of things to come for both Intel and Microsoft. Slowly but surely, investors are getting on board Intel's and Microsoft's transformations, which makes each a sound, long-term growth opportunity. The article Is This a Bullish Sign for Microsoft Corporation and Intel Corporation? originally appeared on Fool.com. Tim Brugger has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Gartner. The Motley Fool owns shares of Microsoft. The Motley Fool recommends Intel. 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. Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. While its stock price has endured a lot of volatility over the past year, Kinder Morgan's cash flow has remained remarkably steady despite slumping commodity prices. That stability amid the storm was clearly evident in the company's first-quarter results, which were released after the market closed on Wednesday. Drilling down into the numbersKinder Morgan reported distributable cash flow of $1.233 billion for the first quarter of 2016, which was down slightly from the $1.242 billion it produced in last year's first quarter. That decrease was primarily due to the continued weakness of the company's carbon dioxide segment, which has some exposure to oil prices. Other than that, earnings from the rest of its segments were either higher year over year or roughly flat: Note: In millions of dollars. Data source: Kinder Morgan. On an absolute basis, Kinder Morgan's natural gas pipelines segment delivered the strongest segment earnings increase at $43 million, which represents a 4% spike over the prior period. Driving this growth were contributions from last year's Hiland acquisition as well as improved performance at Tennessee Gas Pipeline due to projects placed into service. Meanwhile, the products pipeline segment delivered a very strong quarter, with segment earnings increasing $42 million, or 17% year over year. This segment benefited from higher volumes on the Kinder Morgan Crude and Condensate pipeline, the start-up of the petroleum condensate processing facility along the Houston Ship Channel, and contributions from the Double H pipeline, which also come via the Hiland acquisition. Growth at the terminals and Canada segments were a bit more muted. In fact, earnings at its Canada segment were down 2%, or by roughly $1 million, due to a weak Canadian dollar, which offset strong demand for capacity on its Trans Mountain pipeline. In the meantime, earnings at the terminals segment increased by 2%, or $5 million, thanks to strong performance at its liquids terminals. That said, its bulk terminals were affected by bankruptcies within the coal sector, which claimed another victim last quarter, resulting in a $27 million hit to that segment's earnings. Despite these weaknesses the company was still able to generate $954 million in excess cash flow during the quarter. That cash is being used to fund growth investments and strengthen its balance sheet. Image source: Kinder Morgan. The outlook for 2016Speaking of growth investments, as a result of the weaker market conditions, Kinder Morgan is pulling back growth capital spending even further in 2016. After initially planning to spend $4.2 billion on growth projects this year, it now only anticipates spending $2.9 billion. That reduction will enable the company to "more quickly strengthen our balance sheet," according to CEO Steve Kean, with the company remaining on target to meet its goal to get its debt-to-EBITDA ratio down to 5.5 times by the end of this year. Not only is the company chopping investment spending in 2016, but it's cutting its five-year capital project backlog from $18.2 billion down to $14.1 billion. That's after it removed the Palmetto Pipeline project from the backlog due to unfavorable actions in Georgia as well as taking out the market segment of its Northeast Energy Direct project because of insufficient contractual commitments. These were major capital projects that were expected to deliver cash flow growth in future years. However, with increased pushback against pipeline projects, as well as weaker energy market conditions, the company is scrapping these projects for the time being. Those weak market conditions are expected to continue to have a minor impact on Kinder Morgan's cash flow this year. Given its current outlook, it sees EBITDA now coming in roughly 3% below its $7.5 billion budget while distributable cash flow is expected to be roughly 4% below its $4.7 billion budget. That being said, the company still expects to generate more than enough cash flow to fund its current dividend and its capital budget, all while still generating excess cash flow to reduce leverage and hit its year-end target. Investor takeawayThanks to a strong foundation of fee-based assets, Kinder Morgan's cash flow is weathering the energy market storm much better than most in the sector. That said, it's not entirely insulated from the downturn, which is evident by the fact that it sees its EBITDA and distributable cash flow coming in a bit below budget. This is something investors need to keep an eye on this year, with any deterioration in energy market conditions potentially putting more downward pressure on the company's earnings. The article Kinder Morgan Inc. Earnings Are Virtually Unshaken by the Commodity Price Slump originally appeared on Fool.com. Matt DiLallo owns shares of Kinder Morgan andhas the following options: short Jan. 2018 $30 puts on Kinder Morgan and long Jan. 2018 $30 calls on Kinder Morgan. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Kinder Morgan. The Motley Fool has the following options: short June 2016 $12 puts on Kinder Morgan. 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. Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Source: Abercrombie & Fitch. Abercrombie & Fitch shares are finally starting to break out of the malaise that's plagued the stock. In the past year, shares of the teen-focused clothing retailer are up 25% versus the greater S&P 500's flat return. While the company is down 50% over the past five years, things appear to be moving in the right direction. Last year the company reported comparable sales down 3% from the year prior. While that's not a move into positive numbers, it is better than the 8% and 11% drops the company produced during 2014 and 2013, respectively. Comps got better throughout 2015, moving from an 8% drop in Q1 to a 1% gain in Q4, with the Hollister brand doing better than the Abercrombie brand. For 2016, the company expects flat to slightly positive comparable sales. Perhaps the most interesting part of Abercrombie & Fitch's story is that the company has been without a designated chief executive officer since late 2014, when CEO Michael Jeffries left the company. Currently, Chief Operating Officer Jonathan E. Ramsden performs CEO duties, and the company has suspended its search for a permanent CEO replacement. For Abercrombie & Fitch's investors, having no CEO may be better than having Jeffries at the helm. When is no CEO better than a CEO?Chief executive officers are paid for their vision, strategy, and execution. While all three are equally important, vision is essential in fast-changing industries such as teen fashion, where fickle consumers change their minds daily. The problem with Jeffries was that his vision failed to acknowledge changing consumer tastes. Are you cool enough to don the moose? Probably not. Image Source: Abercrombie. As Abercrombie's target millennial consumer increasingly favored diversity and inclusion, Jeffries continued to see the world as if it were a 1980s coming-of-age movie. One of Jeffries' big blunders came he was asked why the company did not carry plus-size women's clothing. He responded: A body-positive activist Jeffries was not. Other groups the company under Jeffries allegedly excluded were minorities. The company settled a class action lawsuit in 2004 for $40 million in response to its discriminatory hiring practices. Investors were less forgiving of Jeffries' operational performance. Following 11 consecutive quarters of comparable sales declines, Jeffries abruptly left in December 2014. While pleasantries were extended by Abercrombie, the immediate departure during the busy holiday shopping season without a named successor points to the fact that this was not a mutual decision. Shares rallied 10% in response to his departure. Bigger problems than JeffriesUnfortunately, Abercrombie's problems go further than executive leadership. The teen fashion space is struggling as millennials shun brands. Last year, Gap reported a same-store sales drop of 4%. Although Gap threw a lot of capital into the company's Athleta brand, growing store counts by 19%, Gap's popular line of athleisure clothing was unable to offset sluggish demand in the company's eponymous Gap and Banana Republic lines. There have been successes in fashion, however. In 2015, Spanish retailer Inditex reported a year-on-year sales increase of 8%, mainly through its Zara line. This growth propelled Zara founder Amancio Ortega to become the second-richest man in the world, behind Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Zara has upended the traditional fashion-retailing industry by supply chain excellence. Termed fast fashion, the company is able to push out new, popular designs much faster than competitors because of in-house production capability. It's true there are industrywide headwinds for fashion retailers, but Zara proves savvy operators will be able to grow in a tough environment. Abercrombie & Fitch made a wise decision to part ways with Jeffries, a CEO whose vision was hopelessly stuck in the past. The question is, can the company continue to move into the future? The article Abercrombie & Fitch Still Has No Ceo, but Things Are Moving in Right Direction originally appeared on Fool.com. Jamal Carnette has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. 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. Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. At least 13 people were killed in a blast at a majorpetrochemical plant of Mexican oil company Pemex, its chief executive said on Thursday, in the latest deadly accident to hit the oil producer. The explosion, which sent a huge, dark plume of smoke billowing upwards just after 3 p.m. (2000 GMT) on Wednesday at the facility's chlorinate 3 plant in the Gulf state of Veracruz, injured 136 people. Gonzalez, who traveled to the site of the blast, near the port of Coatzacoalcos, one of Pemex's top oil export hubs, told local television that the death toll could rise. He said it was unclear what caused the leak that prompted the blast. The explosion was the latest in a string of safety disasters that have plagued the state oil giant, which has vowed cost cuts to cope with the rout in oil prices. In 2013, at least 37 people were killed by a blast at its Mexico City headquarters, and 26 people died in a fire at a Pemex natural gas facility in northern Mexico in September 2012. A 2015 fire at its Abkatun Permanente platform in the oil-rich Bay of Campeche affected oil output and cost the company up to $780 million. (Reporting by Tomas Bravo Editing by W Simon) RALEIGH Charlie Miller remembers his time in Vietnam as a series of stories that spill like water from a full glass of memories flowing from a well of deepest experience. Some want only to forget what happened in war. But thats not Miller. What he cant remember, he can see again in the hundreds of Kodak color slides he shot during his time there, still loaded on carousels and viewed from time to time when his kids or someone asks to watch them with him. That officer in the photo he knows; that soldier, a name he can still recall; that hill in the jungle, one he walked with rifle and radio pack. Miller, 70, lives in Raleigh, a fading town where few people live and where, in a blink, the gravel streets fade into the beautiful countryside of sere grasses climbing the sides of old butte formations. He had a bar in Raleigh for many years, where the regulars heard his war stories many times, indulging this garrulous man who loves to talk and still has the manner of a courtly barkeep. Miller grew up south of Raleigh, graduated from St. Gertrudes High School then took a two-year business accounting course at North Dakota State School of Science at Wahpeton. School all done in that summer of 66, he and a pal took the trip of a youthful lifetime, driving a black and silver 59 Ford from home clear out to Oregon. We knew we would be drafted and, sure enough, while we were out there, my dad called and said, `Lyndon Baines Johnson sends his greetings and wants you in the U.S. Army, he said. He was just another young boy and another life changed forever, though he was one who always had hankered to be a soldier. He returned home and on his last day of freedom, he went to a local wedding dance for a young couple he knew. She (Marlene) got married and I got drunk, and the next morning I went to Carson, where the recruits were loaded on buses to Bismarck and then Fargo, he said. Marlene, who got married the night before his departure, eventually became a widowed single mom and Miller would one day marry her, raising her kids and theirs, but that comes later in the story, after Vietnam. Miller was one of 86,000 young men drafted in the same month, when the war was really building up, along with the protests back home. He joined the 1st Armored Division and trained at Fort Hood, where he learned about the 106 Recoilless Rifles, with shells a foot long, bigger than tank shells. It was a huge cannon if you will, said Miller, who got his orders for Vietnam in September 1967. He and 4,000 others in the division were stuffed into the USS Upshur, a U.S. Navy transport ship, with guys stacked seven high in the bunks, seasickness trickling down to the poor guy on the bottom bunk. Millers destination: Halfway around the world to a hot, malaria-ridden combat zone, landing in Da Nang to set up at the Hill 69 base camp as a member of the Americal Division, 198 Light Infantry Brigade Company E. He was a specialist 4th class. Turned out, his storytelling voice was a good, clear one, and he was assigned to be the radio man for his company, communicating during their search-and-destroy missions. If we were getting hit, I wanted that radio in my hand, he said. He remembers when one of the company, a soldier named Lopez, was injured and fallen up against a rice paddy embankment. The sergeant major he was a huge man was on the helicopter, standing out on the skids. He reached down and picked up Lopez by his web gear and away he goes and they made it out over the trees, he says, his mind replaying the chop-chop-chop and how the vegetation bent below the whirling blades. Lopez, he did die anyway. Just as clear is the Tet Offensive, in late January 1968, launched by thousands of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong rebels against cities in South Vietnam. We were out there on a hill, it was midnight, and the whole coastline was lit up as far as we could see, illuminating the South China Sea. I remember thinking, `You want to play war, come on,'" he said. He was one who had the mental constitution for war, but thats not to say it was easy. I tried hard and did what I could do over there. After all that, I came home and got back on the tractor and thought, `Why didnt we win the war? Why didnt I get shot? In less than three years, his younger brother Pius Miller would meet that fate, killed by hostile fire in April 1971, with just a month left on his Vietnam tour. Pius had the most beautiful girl in the world waiting for him, said Miller, who carried on and made a life, close to his roots, always. Besides owning the Raleigh Bar down the street, since resold and renamed, he and his wife were resident employees at the Prairie Learning Center, a correction-centered school setting for boys in the old St. Gertrude school. He remains active in the Flasher American Legion Post No. 69, for many years sargeant at arms, proud to conduct military honors and flag ceremonies for veteran burials at 10 area cemeteries. It wasnt until the Berlin Wall dividing East from West Germany came down in 1989 that Miller says he felt some peace with this countrys and his effort in Vietnam, the events unrelated in time, but the wall at least symbolizing an end to a communist regime. I said to myself that was all that was ever resolved out of that heartache, said Miller, who adds he is proud of his service and said Vietnam helped him learn who he was and what he was made of. Before then, I wasnt sure." A billion dollars' worth of Chinooks. Another billion dollars' worth of Apaches. Everywhere you look, Boeing seems to be piling up billion-dollar contracts for military aircraft -- and it's not done yet. Boeing's P-8A Poseidon is America's premier sub-hunting aircraft. Image source: Boeing. The news Late last month, the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency -- the Pentagon arm responsible for coordinating sales of military equipment to our allies -- notified Congress of an impending sale of military aircraft to the United Kingdom. And believe it or not, this one's nearly twice as big as the Chinook and Apache contracts combined. According to DSCA's March 24 notification to Congress, the British government has requested permission to buy nine of Boeing's P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, plus related "major defense equipment, associated training, and support," for a grand total of $3.2 billion. The goal: To reconstitute a British capability to track Russian submarines in the stormy North Sea -- a capability that has been missing since the Ministry of Defence retired its last Nimrod sub-hunter in 2010. Heads: Boeing wins. Tails: Everybody else loses.If you've been following this story long, you know that Britain has been casting about for a new patrol aircraft for quite some time now. As recently as six months ago, though, the Brits still hadn't made up their minds as to which plane to buy. Lockheed Martin's C-130J Hercules was one option, Airbus' C-295 Persuader another, and there was even a chance that Britain would rush headlong into the 21st century and buy MQ-4C Triton surveillance drone aircraft from Northrop Grumman to serve its sub-hunting needs. (Note that Northrop Grumman is also a subcontractor on the Poseidon contract.) Each of these three options had the advantage of being cheaper than the one before it -- and all three of these aircraft would have been cheaper than Poseidon. In the end, though, Britain appears to have bit the bullet and decided to buy the Cadillac of maritime sub-hunting aircraft, Boeing's P-8A Poseidon. What it means in dollars and centsAt $3.2 billion for nine Poseidons, Britain is paying roughly $356 million per plane -- a very steep price, given that BGA-Aerowebputs the 2015 "flyaway cost" of a Poseidon atjust $171.6 million. On the other hand, Australia agreed to pay $3.6 billion for just eight Poseidons in 2014, so by that measure, the UK is getting a bargain. It's also worth noting that with Boeing bundling an unspecified amount of related equipment, training, and support into the deal, Britain is really paying a sort of "all-in" price -- i.e., the $3.2 billion isn't just paying for the aircraft and naught else. That said, don't be surprised if the value of this deal goes much, much higher as time goes by. Last we heard, Britain estimated its need at not nine surveillance planes, but 21 -- the number needed to fully reconstitute the capability lost when it retired its Nimrods. At the price it's seeking to pay for this first batch of Poseidons, that implies an eventual cost of $7.5 billion to acquire 21 planes. And at the 10% profit margin that Boeing earns on its military aircraft division, this implies a total, eventual profit for Boeing of some $750 million. For Boeing shareholders, this should be welcome news indeed. The article Britain Goes All In for Boeing's P-8A Poseidon originally appeared on Fool.com. Rich Smithdoes not own shares of, nor is he short, any company named above. You can find him onMotley Fool CAPS, publicly pontificating under the handleTMFDitty, where he's currently ranked No. 315 out of more than 75,000 rated members.The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. 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. Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Graphic source: General Motors. General Motors isn't wrong. In the automotive industry today, disruption is all over the place. Considering that Uber became a household name seemingly overnight and has been valued as high as $60 billion -- which is roughly four times that of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles -- it's clear that major automakers have taken notice. What's interesting, though, is the recent events that show just how different each of the three Detroit automakers are responding. Detroit Valley? While Ford Motor Company has approached the changing automotive industry from many different angles, such as committing $4.5 billion to build out its electrified vehicle lineup and testing a plethora of smart mobility projects across the globe, its recent announcement might be the most interesting of all. Image source: Ford Motor Company. Last week Ford announced plans to transform its Dearborn facilities into a more modern, green and high-tech campus to foster innovation and drive the company's transition to an automaker a mobility company focused on changing how the world travels. That first part, though, sounds really Silicon Valley-like, except in Dearborn. Ford's transformation plan is a decade long process that will colocate roughly 30,000 employees from 70 buildings into two main locations: a product campus and a world headquarters campus. Check out this snippet from Ford's press release. "A walkable community with paths, trails and covered walkways, the product campus will include a new design center, autonomous vehicles, on-demand shuttles, eBikes, new onsite employee services, wireless connectivity speeds up to 10 times faster than today and more green spaces." It's pretty clear that Ford wants to attract Silicon Valley-type talent to Detroit, and if successful that will definitely be a huge plus for the Blue Oval as the industry likely faces more change over the next two decades than in the past half century. Meanwhile, Ford's cross-town rival General Motors is approaching the situation in a more uber-like fashion. Maven is cruising Earlier this year GM announced it was launching a personal mobility brand named Maven. The plan is for Maven to combine and expand on GM's multiple projects under a single brand. "GM is at the forefront of redefining the future of personal mobility," said GM President Dan Ammann, in a press release. "With the launch of our car-sharing service through Maven, the strategic alliance with ride-sharing company Lyft, and building on our decades of leadership in vehicle connectivity through OnStar, we are uniquely positioned to provide the high level of personalized mobility services our customers expect today and in the future." Image source: General Motors. One of those missions started in January when Maven began offering its car-sharing program to more than 100,000 people in Ann Arbor, Mich. with GM vehicles located in 21 parking spots throughout the city. More city-based programs will be launched in major U.S. cities throughout 2016. Maven is merely in the early stages, but it's clear GM is still pushing to find ways to accelerate innovation with its acquisition of Cruise Automation. Cruise will operate as an independent unit within GM's recently formed Autonomous Vehicle Development Team based in San Francisco. Not only is innovation happening with smart mobility projects such as ride-sharing, the future is going to be slowly moving toward more autonomous, self-driving vehicles. The deal, rumored to be valued at roughly $1 billion, may have hit a snag recently but it's obvious that GM wants to accelerate its development of autonomous vehicle technology as well as its mobility projects under Maven. It's a great sign for investors to see Ford and GM approach the industry's disruption with a go-get'em mind-set. It's an attitude that would have served Detroit automakers well when they long ago scoffed at the idea of designing more fuel efficient vehicles and we know how that ended. While Ford and GM are wildly changing their business strategies, FCA is all but refusing to join the club. If you can't beat 'em ... In a way, FCA has basically said that it can't make money on electric vehicles -- which, should be obvious, since nobody is making money producing said vehicles -- and that it won't waste it's time until consumers are ready to pay a premium. So, rather than investing in R&D for electrified vehicles or smart mobility projects, FCA's response to disruption appears to be pushing for a merger. It's not that FCA CEO Sergio Marchionne is clueless, the man certainly has a point. Automakers would benefit from splitting development costs of similar products. Would it be more efficient for Ford and GM to collaborate and design a more fuel efficient turbocharged engine, rather than separately developing the EcoBoost and Ecotec lineup? Absolutely, it would be. FCA chairman John Elkann had this to say recently. "For FCA, if you look at doing something with the "Big Guys," our internal analysis indicates that you could end up with annual savings close to $10 billion. If you value that in perpetuity it starts to become very interesting. But you need two to tango and most of our competitors are busy with the great opportunities that technological disruption has to offer." It's about to be a very interesting decade or two in the automotive industry. And judging by the wildly different responses to disruption, some automakers are going to thrive and some are going to be left behind, we just don't know who is who quite yet. The article Detroit Automakers Are Responding to Disruption in Many Different Ways -- Invest Accordingly originally appeared on Fool.com. Daniel Miller owns shares of Ford and General Motors. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Ford. The Motley Fool recommends General Motors. 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. Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Just like another Silicon Valley neighbor company, Tesla is a ship that leaks from the top. CEO Elon Musk is known for dropping cryptic messages about what the company is working on during live interviews as well as on social media. For the most part, investors already assume that the electric automaker is working on some type of ride-sharing mobility service, and Musk isn't doing much to quell the speculation. Quite the contrary: Musk is adding fuel to the fire. So much for not talking too much about itElectrek reports on a keynote address that Musk gave today in Norway regarding future transportation solutions. When asked about possible ways to improve public transit in urban environments, Musk suggested that Tesla is working on a mode of autonomous transport that could drop people off directly at their destinations instead of at stations or bus stops. Musk vaguely referred to "a new type of car or vehicle" that would be key to this model, adding, "There's a new type of car or vehicle that I think would be really great and actually take people to their final destination and not just to the bus stop." If at first Musk won't talk, try, try againThis isn't the first time that Musk has dropped hints. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas has put Musk directly on the spot on conference calls on numerous occasions. Here's from the August 2015 call: Just a few months later on the November 2015 call, Jonas wouldn't let the topic die, literally asking the exact same question. But this time he squeezed a little more information out of Musk: It doesn't take too much imagination to recognize the high-level idea, where Tesla offers a mobility service of autonomous, connected, electric cars that transport people directly. But the devil lies in the details. What would the vehicle look like? How safe would autonomous vehicles be? Is the regulatory environment receptive? What does the revenue model look like? Can Tesla handle the ongoing logistics for fleet management and operation at this scale? The article Elon Musk Drops More Hints About an Autonomous Tesla Mobility Service originally appeared on Fool.com. Evan Niu, CFA owns shares of Tesla Motors, andhas the following options: long January 2018 $180 calls on Tesla Motors. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Tesla Motors. 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. Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. New GM products like the Chevrolet Malibu sedan are more profitable than the models they replaced. That was one factor in GM's big year-over-year gain. Image source:General Motors. General Motors reported its first-quarter 2016 earnings before the bell on April 21. Here's what investors need to know. The key numbers: Q1 2016 Q1 2015 Revenue $37.3B $35.7B EBIT-adjusted $2.7B $2.1B EBIT-adjusted margin 7.1% 5.8% Net income $1.95B $945M EPS (excluding special items) $1.26 $0.86 Adjusted free cash flow $(1.5B) $(1.7B) Return on invested capital 28.5% 19.5% What happened at GM around the world during the quarterGM's worldwide sales actually fell 2.5% during the first quarter, to 2.36 million vehicles. But despite the drop, which GM attributed to challenging conditions in South America and Asia as well as a weak market for small commercial vehicles in China, GM managed a substantial year-over-year increase in profit. That profit increase happened for a couple of reasons. First, GM is selling more of its most profitable products. In both the U.S. and China, more and more GM customers are choosing crossover SUVs instead of sedans -- and helped in part by the availability of low-interest financing, they're choosing more upscale vehicles. Both trends deliver more profit per sale to GM. Second, several of GM's most recent models deliver more profit per sale than the models they replaced. In part, that's because GM is able to get better prices for fresher, more competitive products -- but it's also because GM designed the vehicles to be a little less expensive to produce. The models in question include some of GM's largest-selling vehicles -- the Chevrolet Malibu and Cruze, and (in Europe) the Opel Astra. The upshot is that GM is making significantly more profit per sale, on average. In the first quarter, that increase was more than enough to offset the impact of the small global decline in overall deliveries. It also helped GM reduce losses in both South America and Europe. GM is also making substantial investments in its future. During the first quarter, the company announced a $500 million investment in ride-hailing service Lyft and the acquisition of San Francisco-based self-driving start-up Cruise Automation. What GM's management had to say"We're growing where it counts, gaining retail share in the U.S., outpacing the industry in Europe and capitalizing on robust growth in SUV and luxury segments in China," CEO Mary Barra said in a statement. "This strong quarter also reflects the excellent progress we're making to improve results in our more challenged global markets. Importantly, the continued success of our core business is enabling us to invest in advanced technology and innovations that will help shape the future of personal mobility." GM's cash and debt positions as of the end of the first quarter of 2016 GM ended the quarter with $18.5 billion in cash and another $12.1 billion in available credit facilities, for a total of $30.6 billion in liquidity available to its core automotive businesses. Against that, GM had $10.8 billion in well-structured long-term debt. GM made a $1.5 billion "discretionary contribution" to its global pension funds during the quarter. Its global pension plans are now underfunded by $19.4 billion, down from $21 billion at year-end. GM repurchased about $300 million of its own common stock during the quarter, and paid out roughly $600 million in dividends to shareholders. What's ahead for General Motors GM CFO Chuck Stevens once again reiterated the company's upbeat guidance for 2016. GM expects improved pre-tax earnings, margin, and free cash flow, with earnings per share (excluding special items) expected to fall between $5.25 and $5.75 for the full year. GM earned $5.02 per share on the same basis in 2015. The article General Motors' Earnings Rise 47% as Profit Margins Jump originally appeared on Fool.com. John Rosevear owns shares of General Motors. The Motley Fool recommends General Motors. 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. Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Born in 1996, Puddles, American Water's announcer, celebrates his 20th this year. Image source: American Water. Since last summer, shares ofAmerican Water Works have been riding a wave of bullish sentiment -- consistently reaching all-time highs. Is the market overly enthusiastic about a financially unsound company, or is this a business that investors can be safe swimming with? Let's dip our toes in and check out the company's financials to find out.Tidal wave of profitsEvaluating a company is a complicated endeavor. Recognizing growth is a welcome sign, but there can be -- and usually is -- much more to the story than just details from a couple of metrics. So comparing the company to its peers and putting the growth in context of the industry at large is a smart move. For example, looking at American Water's income over the past three years suggests that the company is performing superbly. Metric FY 2015 FY 2014 FY 2013 Operating revenue $3.159 billion $3.011 billion $2.879 billion Operating income $1.075 billion $1.003 billion $948 million Net income $476 million $423 million $369 million Diluted EPS $2.64 $2.35 $2.06 Source: American Water Works 10-K. Growing operating revenue by 9.7% over the past three years is admirable, but it pales in comparison with the 28% by which the company has grown its diluted EPS over the same time period. Is this revenue growth standard for the water industry though? How about the earnings growth? AWK Operating Revenue (Annual) data by YCharts Over the past five years, American Water's revenue growth is on par with its largest competitor,Aqua America . Relative to American States Water Company and California Water Service Group , two companies whose operations are concentrated in California, American Water's growth is more remarkable. And, compared with its Brazilian peer,Companhia de Saneamento Basico do Estado de Sao Paulo (Sabesp), American Water's growth is awe-inspiring. Turning to the bottom line, though, is American Water's performance equally impressive? AWK EPS Diluted (Annual) data by YCharts You betcha. In fact, it's significantly more impressive. Clearly, the company's ability to improve its efficiency is beyond compare. It measures its performance in this regard by the non-GAAP metric, O&M (operations and maintenance) efficiency ratio -- a modified operating margin of sorts. Steadily improving from 44.2% in 2010 to 35.9% (the lower the better) in 2015; management believes there's more room to improve, estimating a drop to 34% by 2020. The O&M efficiency ratio alone isn't responsible for the EPS growth. Revenue from the regulated businesses segment accounted for the lion's share of the improvement -- $0.18 per share. On the conference call, though, management credited an improvement in O&M costs -- 1.5% in the regulated businesses segment, accounting for EPS growth of $0.02 per share.Going with the flowOperating 49,000 miles of pipeline and providing service to more than 15 million customers doesn't come cheap; the business is certainly capital intensive. Asset renewal accounts for about 66% of the company's annual capex spending -- it replaces about 350 miles of pipe each year alone. Over the past three years, the company has averaged $3.02 billion in operating revenue and $1.03 billion -- about 34% of it -- is dedicated to capital expenditures. But with 86.8% of the company's operating revenue coming from its regulated businesses segment, the company can effectively forecast its annual revenue and appropriate capex spending accordingly. Management expects capital investment spending over the next few years to meet or exceed cash flows from operating activities. Should it need to curtail capex spending to preserve liquidity, management asserts that, with its operating cash flow, it can "meet our obligations and fund our minimum required capital investments for an extended period of time."Evaluating American Water and its peers on their free cash flow yield, we get a sense of how well the companies are at converting their sales to free cash flow. AWK Free Cash Flow Yield (TTM) data by YCharts Though it doesn't outperform its peers, American Water is in good shape. It's maintained a positive yield since early 2014, and its current performance is better than what it's managed in more than 10 years. AWK Free Cash Flow Yield (TTM) data by YCharts Drowning in debt?So far, we've found that American Water is swimming in profits, but that's not to say that a leviathan of debt isn't lurking underwater. With a debt to equity ratio just under 1.3, American Water may raise investors' eyebrows. But the company has demonstrated the ability to maintain -- and even lower -- its debt load while still prospering.Judging by another leverage ratio, debt to EBITDA, which illustrates a company's ability to generate operational profits to pay down debt, we find a similar situation. At a ratio just over 4.0 (on the high side), American Water may make some investors uneasy]. Company Debt to equity Debt to EBITDA (ttm) American Water Works 1.296 4.041 Aqua America 1.041 3.824 Sabesp 0.957 4.937 American States Water Company 0.759 2.065 California Water Service Group 0.860 3.989 Data Source: YCHARTS. Though this on the high side, it has demonstrated the ability to manage it well, dropping it by almost 20% over the past five years. Sabesp, on the other hand, should be of greater concern as it currently struggles with the disparity between its revenue, in Brazilian currency, and its debt, largely in US dollars and Japanese yen. The high debt to EBITDA for Sabesp should be the most concerning. If further reassurance that the company's debt level shouldn't be of major concern is needed, one can turn to the company's recent 10-K. Management noted that in May 2015, Standard & Poor's raised the company's corporate credit rating from A- to A and confirmed its stable rating outlook. Later, in August, Moody's upgraded the long-term rating from Baa1 to A3 and affirmed a stable outlook.The takeawayTime to take our toes out. At this point, it seems that these waters seem safe. Management forecasts 7% to 10% EPS growth from 2016 to 2020. Cash flow seems steady, and management seems comfortable with the possibility of its ebbing. And though it's highly leveraged, Standard & Poor's and Moody's seem confident that the company could handle it. The article Has American Water Works Earned a Clean Bill of Financial Health? originally appeared on Fool.com. Scott Levineenjoys water and has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Companhia de Saneamento Basico (ADR). 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. Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. A McDonald's franchisee recently announced that it will open a 6,500-square-foot "McDonald's of the Future" restaurant inSt. Joseph, Missouri, in July. The location will feature customizable burgers, sandwiches, and desserts, and digital kiosks for table-side orders. McDonald's previously tested out custom burgers and digital kiosks in several markets, including in the western U.S., Australia, and the U.K.But here's the unique twist -- the location will also offer all-you-can-eat fries as a limited time promotion -- which might boost store traffic and encourage more in-store dining. Image source: McDonald's. Could this idea catch on?To be clear, all-you-can-eat fries is the idea of a single franchisee, and doesn't represent a strategic shift for all McDonald's locations. McDonald's made it clear that the endless fries will be for a limited time only at this one restaurant to promote its opening. McDonald's has generally given franchisees a lot of room to experiment with new ideas. A new 19,000-square-foot location in Orlando, which opened in March, lets guests order pizza andpasta from self-serve kiosks. But just as McDonald's isn't launching pizza and pasta nationwide, it probably also won't offer all-you-can eat fries to promote other locations. But that's not to say that McDonald's is shy about trying out new ideas. Under CEO Steve Easterbrook, who took over last March, McDonald's added all-day breakfast to its nationwide menus. That move boosted comparable-store sales by 5.7% annually last quarter, and dealt a serious blow to Jack in the Box , one of the few fast-food chains to serve all-day breakfast. Comps at Jack in the Box's namesake stores rose just 1.4% annually last quarter, down from 6.2% growth in the previous quarter. How much does it matter?If the St. Joseph location generates a lot of positive buzz and traffic, McDonald's might start testing out all-you-can-eat fries at other locations. But until it does so, the idea won't move the needle for McDonald's stock. For now, McDonald's investors should focus more on the company's broader "future" initiatives -- like tablets and self-serve kiosks -- instead of a headline-grabbing one-shot ideas like limitless fries. The article Instant Analysis: McDonald's Says All-You-Can-Eat Fries Probably Not Coming to a Restaurant Near You originally appeared on Fool.com. Leo Sun has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. 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. Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Honda's North America chief, John Mendel, showed off a 2017 Honda Accord Hybrid and a fuel-cell-powered Honda Clarity at an event on Thursday. Image source: Honda. Honda announced what could turn out to be a big push to boost its green-car clout on Thursday. The Japanese automaker said that it will broaden its portfolio of alternative-fuel vehicles by offering a new hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle, a new battery-electric car, and a new plug-in hybrid, all under its "Clarity" sub-brand. Until now, Honda's Clarity nameplate has been applied to its fuel-cell vehicles, which the company has for years sold in tiny numbers as a rolling research and development program. But now, clearly feeling pressure to step up its green-car game, Honda is committing to building out its offerings under the Clarity name. Is Honda signaling a move to challengeTesla Motors? What Honda said: Honda said that its previously announced Clarity fuel-cell sedan will get two electric siblings, both launching in 2017. Honda said that the Clarity Electric will be "the first affordable, midsize, five-passenger battery electric vehicle (BEV) to offer premium content and features." The Clarity Plug-in Hybrid "will be the volume leader in the series, seamlessly combining an all-electric driving range in excess of 40 miles with a hyper-efficient gasoline-hybrid extended range mode." "All of the Clarity models will leverage the platform that has enabled the Clarity Fuel Cell's low, wide and aerodynamic proportions and spacious five-passenger cabin," Honda said in a statement. "This shared platform strategy also enables flexibility in responding to infrastructure and market developments, and the ability to provide customers nationwide with an ultra-low carbon vehicle that meets their lifestyle needs while expanding the market for Honda advanced technology products... The first of the Clarity Series to launch will be the Clarity Fuel Cell, Honda's most technologically advanced vehicle ever, slated to begin deliveries to customers in select California markets in late 2016. The Clarity Fuel Cell will have a targeted monthly lease price of under $500." Honda's hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered Clarity Fuel Cell sedan will go on sale in California later this year. Battery-electric and plug-in hybrid versions will follow next year. Image source: Honda. Honda has set a bold goal for electrification. "On a global basis, Honda is aiming to have electrified vehicles account for two-thirds of its vehicles sales around 2030," it said in Thursday's statement. Honda also announced that a reengineered version of its Accord Hybrid for 2017 will go on sale in the U.S. later this spring. What Honda didn't say: With Honda's reputation for quality and comfort, the Clarity Electric has the potential to be a very interesting vehicle, given that it will arrive probably a few months before Tesla's Model 3is expected to start shipping. But Honda didn't tell us what kind of range the Clarity Electric will have, or even give us a general idea. Until we know the range, it's impossible to know whether this new Honda will be a serious competitor to cars like the Model 3 -- or just another "compliance car" that will sell in tiny numbers. What it means for Honda: Honda has been working on fuel cell technology for years, recently in a joint venture with General Motors . While GM has said that it doesn't expect to bring a fuel-cell vehicle to market until around 2020, Honda -- likely spurred on by Toyota's Mirai -- has clearly decided to move more quickly. Offering battery-electric and plug-in hybrid versions of the Clarity will help offset the costs of developing the fuel-cell version, and will put what appears to be a good vehicle architecture to wider use. More broadly, Honda -- like most of its global rivals -- is obviously feeling pressure to up its electric-car game in the wake of Tesla's impressive Model 3 launch. In particular, when it comes to hybrids and "green" vehicles, Honda has long stood in the shadow of Toyota, the world's leader in gasoline-electric hybrid sales -- despite being one of the first automakers to bring hybrids to market. Honda CEO Takahiro Hachigo would clearly like to recapture some of Honda's historical reputation for innovation and green leadership. The new plug-in Clarity models could help the company do that -- but the devil will be in the details, most of which haven't been revealed yet. We'll be watching. The article Is Honda Moving to Take On Tesla Motors? originally appeared on Fool.com. John Rosevear owns shares of General Motors. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Tesla Motors. The Motley Fool recommends General Motors. 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. Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Image source: Motley Fool. Netflix stock took a big beating on Tuesday, falling by nearly 13% in a single day as investors reacted with negativity to the company's earnings report. At current prices, shares of Netflix are down by nearly 30% for their highs of the last year, and this raises a crucial question: Is it time to buy Netflix or should you run away from the company before the decline gets even worse? A horror movieNetflix has been under heavy selling pressure lately. Even before the company released earnings, investors were getting increasingly concerned about growing competitive pressure from Amazon.com . The online retail king has recently implemented some changes to its Amazon Prime offering, the subscription service that includes free shipping, a music library, and online video streaming, among other benefits. Amazon Prime was previously offered for a $99 annual fee, but the program will now also be available for $10.99 monthly. Not only that, Amazon is also offering a video-only service for $8.99 per month, indicating that Amazon is paying more attention to video streaming as a business opportunity on its own merits, not just a component of a Amazon Prime service. Adding to the negativity, Netflix announced disappointing growth guidance for the second quarter of 2016. The company is expecting to gain 2.5 million subscribers in the coming quarter, this is materially below expectations from Wall Street analysts, and also a deceleration versus 3.28 million new subscribers in the second quarter of 2015. Increased competition from Amazon, in combination with disappointing growth guidance, was a one-two punch for Netflix, and many investors are now wondering what to do with the stock. Like Mike Tyson once said: "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." The good guys win at the endSuccess attracts the competition, and Netflix is obtaining impressive success in online streaming, so it makes sense to expect growing pressure from Amazon and others over the coming years. Nevertheless, Netflix is still strong enough to continue growing at a healthy rate in spite of increasing competition. Wall Street analysts and the financial media typically look at the competitive dynamics in a particular industry as a zero-sum game, meaning that one company's gains come from the other one's losses. But this is an excessively simplistic approach, online streaming is a booming industry, and it will probably allow enough room for multiple players to succeed and grow in the long term. Netflix is increasingly betting on original content to build competitive strength and differentiate the service from the competition, and this is generating impressive results for the company. In fact, growth in the U.S. was substantially above the company's guidance last quarter because of the positive effect of original content debuts. Netflix gained 2.23 million customers at home, considerably higher than management guidance for 1.75 million additions during the quarter. Investors could also be overreacting to lower-than-expected guidance for the second quarter. Management was quite clear at explaining that the deceleration in growth is because the company entered Australia and New Zealand in the second quarter of 2015, and this will make comparisons especially challenging for the same quarter this year. If it weren't for this factor, international growth would be accelerating in the second quarter of 2016. The following chart shows user growth in the U.S. and in international markets over the last several quarters, and an image is worth a thousand words. While the rate of growth can fluctuate considerably from quarter to quarter, the long term trend is clearly in the right direction, and international markets a are a powerful driver for the company. Data source: SEC filings. Netflix entered 130 new countries in January alone, and the company is barely getting started in these markets. This should provide ample room for expansion going forward. Buy Netflix and chillOnly because competition is increasing, that's no reason to run away from Netflix stock. The company has the first mover advantage in the industry, growing brand recognition, and successful original content, which differentiates Netflix from other industry players. Besides, everything indicates that the online streaming industry should offer more than enough room for Netflix, Amazon, and other companies to successfully expand over the long term. As for disappointing growth guidance, investors in Netflix need to be willing to tolerate some volatility in the short term, since performance will fluctuate from quarter to quarter. However, the long term growth story in Netflix is still pretty much intact, and the company is offering enormous room for international expansion over the long term. The way I see it, the recent decline in Netflix stock is no reason to panic. Far from that, it looks like a compelling opportunity to buy an amazing growth stock on a short-term dip. The article Netflix Stock Crashes: Buying Opportunity or Time to Panic? originally appeared on Fool.com. Andrs Cardenal owns shares of Amazon.com and Netflix. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Amazon.com and Netflix. 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. Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Japanese electronics firm Sony cut its profit estimate by 9.4 percent for the financial year that ended in March, as slowing global smartphone sales dented demand for its camera modules. Sony said on Thursday it is estimating an operating profit of 290 billion yen ($2.64 billion) for the year, down from a previously estimated 320 billion yen, citing weaker demand for camera modules. The company booked an impairment loss of 59.6 billion yen as it wrote down the value of the camera module business to match a weaker sales prospect. The impairment charge was also reflected in the revised estimate. Analysts had expected on average an operating profit of 341.7 billion yen for the year, according to Thomson Reuters Starmine. Sony will release its full-year results on April 28. Clients of Sony's camera modules include major global smartphone makers, such as Apple. Global smartphone sales are expected to grow in single digits in percentage terms for the first time ever in 2016, according to research firm Gartner Inc. Sony also said it is assessing the impact on its earnings for the current fiscal year of a series of deadly earthquakes that have halted its image sensor plant in southern Japan. ($1 = 109.6800 yen) (Reporting by Makiko Yamazaki; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman) The three U.S. legacy carriers have encountered severe revenue pressure since early 2015 due to rising competition in the domestic market and the combined impact of the strong dollar, falling fuel surcharges, and weaker demand on international routes. Last week, Delta Air Lines reported that unit revenue trends were starting to improve.However, on Wednesday afternoon, United Continental posted a steep unit revenue decline for Q1 and offered a gloomy forecast for Q2. This raises the stakes for American Airlines , which will report its earnings on Friday. Weak unit revenue but solid Q1 earningsLast quarter, United's revenue fell 4.8% year over year to $8.2 billion as passenger revenue per available seat mile (PRASM) slumped 7.4%. PRASM slumped 7.4% at United last quarter. Image source: The Motley Fool. However, the company was able to fully offset this revenue decline thanks to vastly lower fuel costs and a modest improvement in fuel efficiency. United's total fuel expense fell by 35% year over year, delivering more than $600 million of savings. As a result, United managed to produce earnings per share of $1.23, just ahead of the average analyst estimate of $1.18. Guidance is the problemAirline investors are well aware of the revenue weakness that has affected all three legacy carriers since early 2015. However, with year-over-year comparisons starting to get easier in Q2, investors are hoping to see solid improvement over the next few quarters. Delta Air Lines had some good news to report on this front. Delta's PRASM fell 4.6% in Q1, but the company projected a smaller 2.5% to 4.5% PRASM decline for Q2. Moreover, the company reiterated its forecast that unit revenue would return to growth at some point in 2016, and said that unit revenue would turn positive in the domestic market by the summer. Unit revenue trends are starting to improve at Delta. Image source: The Motley Fool. On the company's January earnings call, United's management projected sequential unit revenue improvements over the course of 2016. However, in an investor update released along with its earnings report on Wednesday, United forecast that PRASM would decline 6.5% to 8.5% in Q2. That's no better than its performance last quarter. Some part of the unit revenue weakness is (deliberately) self-inflicted. United is in the midst of "upgauging" its fleet to larger aircraft. With more seats on each flight, unit revenue tends to be lower -- but this is more than offset by lower unit costs. However, this factor can only account for a small portion of United's ongoing unit revenue declines. United is responding to the weak revenue outlook by dialing back its capacity growth. Back in January, the company said that it planned to increase capacity 1.5% to 2.5% year over year in 2016. Now it plans to increase capacity by just 1% to 2% for the full year. But cuts of this magnitude will only have a modest impact on United's unit revenue trajectory. Can American Airlines do better?Delta shareholders have no reason to worry about this weak outlook from United. Delta has consistently posted the best unit revenue performance of the three legacy carriers over the past year or so. There's no reason to doubt Delta's more optimistic revenue outlook. On the other hand, American Airlines has had just as much revenue trouble as United over the past year. American projects that PRASM declined 7% to 8% last quarter. Can American Airlines mirror Delta's unit revenue recovery? Image source: American Airlines. United's weak unit revenue guidance has to make American Airlines investors nervous about whether American will provide equally dismal guidance when it reports earnings on Friday. Its larger domestic presence relative to United may help it a bit, but American's large footprint in Brazil remains a big liability due to the turbulent political and economic situation there. Thus, it's possible that Delta Air Lines is pulling further ahead of its rivals in terms of unit revenue and profitability. But it's also possible that American will keep pace with Delta, while United Continental is falling further behind. We'll find out which is the case on Friday. The article United Continental's Revenue Slump Continues: Can American Airlines Do Better? originally appeared on Fool.com. Adam Levine-Weinberg owns shares of United Continental Holdings, and is long January 2017 $40 calls on Delta Air Lines, and long January 2017 $30 calls on American Airlines Group. The Motley Fool is long January 2017 $35 calls on American Airlines Group. 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. Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Viacom said it reached an agreement with Dish Network Corp, averting a blackout of its programs on the satellite TV network. Details of the agreement were not disclosed. The companies have been in discussions for several months over whether Dish would continue to carry Viacom's 18 channels and at what price. (Reporting by Jessica Toonkel in New York and Rishika Sadam in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty) SOURCE:FLICKR USER TOM. What:After Spotlight Research issued a negative report questioning the company's business model, shares of Intrexon Corp. crashed 26.4% today. So what:In a report released earlier today, Spotlight Research (formerlyForensic Research Analyst) questioned whether or not Intrexon Corp.'s business plans justify its multi-billion dollar market cap. Specifically, concerns were raised surrounding Intrexon's Oxitec subsidiary, which is developing male mosquitoes that can't reproduce viable mosquitoes. These genetically modified mosquitoes have been touted as a potential solution to limiting the spread of the Zika virus. However, Oxitec's technology has been around for years, and despite the potential to use it to control other significant mosquito-transmitted disease, including Dengue fever, this approach has not become widely adopted. Now what: Oxitec was acquired by Intrexon in 2015 for $160 million, and speculation surrounding the use of its mosquitoes to control the Zika virus is a major reason why Intrexon's shares jumped about 20% year to date through yesterday. Despite several potentially promising research programs underway, Intrexon remains unprofitable, with management reporting an operating loss of $147 million in 2015. After adjusting that figure for other non-operating line items, Intrexon lost investors $84 million last year. Investing in companies that are highly speculative carries a fair amount of risk, and often, that risk can lead to nausea-inspiring pops and drops. While Intrexon may be intriguing, the jury is still out on Oxitec's ability to curb the spread of Zika virus better than existing methods. For that reason, investors might be better off focusing on other investment ideas rather than bargain hunting this stock. Eventually, Intrexon will either demonstrate that its approach is effective, or it won't. Until then, expect this company's shares to remain highly volatile. The article What's Behind Intrexon's Steep Sell-Off Today originally appeared on Fool.com. Todd Campbell has no position in any stocks mentioned. Todd owns E.B. Capital Markets, LLC. E.B. Capital's clients may have positions in the companies mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. 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. Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Image source: Las Vegas Sands. What: Shares of Las Vegas Sands Corp. dropped 11% in trading Thursday after the company reported first-quarter results. So what: Revenue fell 9.8% from a year ago to $2.72 billion and net income plunged 37.5% to $320.2 million, or $0.40 per share. Revenue missed the $2.88 billion analysts expected and adjusted earnings of $0.45 per share fell short of the $0.61 estimate. Results were affected heavily by bad luck, particularly in Singapore. So, the better measure of earnings may be the hold-normalized adjusted diluted EPS number, which was $0.57. Now what: On the surface, the numbers don't look good, but Las Vegas Sands actually performed well in the quarter. The company took market share, particularly on the important Cotai Strip, and Marina Bay Sands only saw a single-digit dip in gaming volume, despite a 28% slide in gaming revenue because of bad luck. As the largest gaming company in the world, I think this is a blip on the radar for Las Vegas Sands. It has a solid balance sheet and a tremendous amount of cash flow generation. The stock also yields 6.2% right now, so it'll be a cash flow machine for investors. I think the market has overreacted tremendously today and conditions are far better than the market thinks at Las Vegas Sands. The article Why Las Vegas Sands Corp.'s Shares Plunged 11% Today originally appeared on Fool.com. Travis Hoium has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. 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. Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Top military and industry leaders convened at a cyber-summit at West Point, New York Thursday to discuss the latest advancements and struggles in America's fight against cyber terrorism. During an interview with the FOX Business Networks Jo Ling Kent, former NSA Director and General Keith Alexander discussed new demand for more privacy and security in the aftermath of the legal battle between Apple (NASDAQ:APPL) and the FBI. I think what our nation need, Alexander said. I look at what Apple is going through, really good people. They see the security of the private information as key. And I see over here Jim Comey and the FBI trying to defend the country. How do you get the information you need to be secure. Alexander, IronNet Cybersecurity CEO and a four-star general, emphasized the importance of government agencies and industry leaders working together for the good of the country to ensure the nations security, civil liberties and privacy cohesively exist. One of the central themes highlighted at the summit is the need for collaboration between private-sector companies like Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) and Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) to work together with the U.S. military and Cyber Command to defend against the next big cyber-attack. If we are to blunt that [cyber] attack, save our country, it requires government and industry to work together,Alexander said. Alexander, who currently sits on President Obamas cyber security advisory panel, also discussed the Obama administrations efforts in thwarting cyber-attacks attempted by countries who have been accused of hacking into Americans accounts and stealing intellectual properties. I dont think its just the president. Its, how is the government and industry, what the government and industry need to do to solve this problem. I think what the president has done and others are doing is lets sit-down and work together for a solution, he said. As a highly decorated military official and NSA director, the general believes the government can attract the same cyber-ready professionals and innovators who are moving to companies like, Apple, Facebook and Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL). You get innovation in the government too. The nice part of the government is that you can do things in the government to defend the country, Alexander said. In most families, parents tell children to turn off the TV and get some exercise. A new study suggests that reversing roles could have health benefits for parents. The study found that mothers of children specially trained to act as change agents of their familys lifestyle lost significantly more weight over a year than a control group of mothers. Physical activity also increased significantly among mothers of change agents, according to the report published in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity. Various school programs have helped children educate parents about such other issues as cancer screening and asthma management, researchers said. From 2012 to 2014, researchers in Sri Lanka recruited 261 mothers of eighth-grade students at 20 schools. Students at half of the schools were taught to identify chronic disease risk factors in their parents, such as smoking and inactivity, and developed ideas to change the behaviors, assisted by facilitators. The students then encouraged their parents to take action, with special emphasis on mothers, who have high obesity rates in Sri Lanka, researchers said. Students at the other schools, which served as controls, didnt receive any training. Click for more from The Wall Street Journal. Amid flooding waters that raise concern over an increase in Houstons mosquito population, health officials in the Texas city confirmed a Zika virus diagnosis in a pregnant woman on Thursday. Fox 26 Houston reported that the woman had lived in El Salvador, a Zika hotspot, before arriving in the United States, and that officials dont know how she contracted the virus, which can cause serious birth defects like microcephaly. Fox 26 Houston did not report the womans name or age. "We are closely monitoring the patient through her pregnancy and hope for the best for mom and baby," Dr. Natalie Vanek, an infectious disease specialist at Legacy Community Health, a community health center, told Fox 26 Houston. "Today we are re-issuing our advisory to pregnant women not to travel down to the Central and South American countries where the virus is rampant, and want to make the broader Houston community aware the virus can be transmitted sexually. We are focused on prevention, not panic." Since the onset of the current outbreak in April 2015, the CDC has added to its list of Zika-afflicted regions where it has advised pregnant women against traveling. Those areas include countries in the Caribbean, Central America, the Pacific Islands and South America, including Rio, the host of the 2016 Summer Olympics. In light of the possibility that Zika can be sexually transmitted, the CDC has also advised pregnant women's partners who have traveled to a Zika-afflicted region to use condoms or abstain from sex. To prepare for warmer temperatures and possible U.S. Zika diagnoses unrelated to travel, President Obama has requested an additional $1.9 billion to aid in the fight against the virus. "Washington needs to quickly find common ground on this growing public health situation," Legacy CEO Katy Caldwell, told the news station. "The virus will likely get worse along the Gulf Coast in weeks, not months, given this week's major flooding that will increase the area's mosquito population. We are hopeful the health and well-being of the American people is the top priority of lawmakers, even in an election year." After a huge New York win, Donald Trump needs to win 63 percent of the remaining delegates to secure the magic number of 1237 before the convention to be the republican nominee. Now we're hearing from party elites, people who are part of the establishment, that even if Trump is close to the magic number, it will be tough to take the nomination away from him. That's very interesting. Here could be one reason why. In the New York State exit polls last night, this one question caught my eye. It said, if no one reaches the 1237 delegate threshold, the GOP should nominate the candidate who: has the most votes, or who delegates like best. Well, 68 percent of New York GOP voters said they would nominate a candidate who has the most votes. Granted many of those voters like Donald Trump, but still, other polls have shown the majority of Americans think the peoples' voice should be heard. Yet Cruz continues to run what many have described as an amazing ground game to secure and woo delegates. Last night after coming in third in New York, he said he was still headed to Cleveland where the people will prevail, but which people? Over the last ten days, controversies have erupted over the Obama administrations continued classification of evidence of possible Saudi government involvement in the September 11th attacks and its opposition to legislation that would clarify that foreign governments like the Kingdom do not have immunity in cases where they aid a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. The legislation is called the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), and it has 23 bipartisan sponsors in the Senate. It passed unanimously out of the Senate in 2014, without any public opposition from the White House and was approved again recently by the Senate Judiciary Committee on a 19-0 vote. On Saturday, the New York Times revealed that senior White House officials had been calling members of Congress urging that they oppose JASTA, emphasizing in those conversations that the Saudis had threatened to sell off $750 billion in U.S. assets held by the Kingdom if the bill were enacted. An outcry ensued about our supposed allys threat and the administrations prostrate response. Numerous economists ridiculed the threat as empty, explaining that the Kingdom likely could not execute such a transaction at all and that any attempt to do so would devastate Saudi Arabias economy. In the face of these reactions, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest on Monday publicly abandoned the Saudis economic threat as a basis for opposing JASTA, expressing confidence that the Saudis recognize, just as much as we do, our shared interest in preserving the stability of the global financial system. While certainly welcome, this abrupt reversal begs the question why the White House ever raised it in urgent calls to senators as a reason they should oppose the bill. Shifting ground, Earnest instead urged that the administrations opposition to JASTA is grounded in an important principle of international law and that [t]he whole notion of sovereign immunity is at stake. Earnest claimed JASTAs passage could put our diplomats, service-members who are engaged in humanitarian work abroad, and taxpayers at risk of being sued in foreign courts, if they did something wrong that caused harm there. The president argued along similar lines that his present opposition to JASTA is based in fears that [if] we open up the possibility that individuals in the United States can routinely start suing other governments, then we are also opening up the United States to being continually sued by individuals in other countries. None of these concerns is the least bit valid, and all rest on troubling mischaracterizations of current law and JASTA itself. These phantom concerns have been roundly rejected by the sponsors of JASTA for very real, not imaginary, reasons. At base, the alleged concerns raised by the White House rest on the idea that sovereign immunity is an absolute principle exempting governments from suit in foreign countries, which the U.S. would be eroding without precedent by passing JASTA. That is simply not true. In fact, governments have long been subject to suits in other countries for wrongful acts. In the U.S., the immunity of foreign states is governed by a 1976 statute called the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), which subjects foreign states to suit in U.S. courts for commercial wrongs, torts, and certain property violations that cause harm here. Thus, our laws already provide that foreign governments are routinely subject to suit in our courts when they cause injury here. The fact that this has been true for the last forty years has not imperiled the interests of the U.S. or its citizens abroad. Virtually all countries that have addressed the question of foreign sovereign immunity via statute have adopted similar rules. As the International Court of Justice observed in a 2012 decision, 90 percent of the countries that had enacted foreign sovereign immunity statutes authorized suits against foreign governments for torts causing harm on their soil. Stated simply, the U.S. government already is subject to suit abroad when its conduct causes injury in a foreign country. Mr. Earnests claims that JASTA would subject U.S. diplomats and taxpayers to suit are even more perplexing. The immunity of diplomats is governed by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Immunity, to which the U.S. and 189 other countries are signatories. JASTA does not, and could not, alter the immunity of diplomats under that Convention. Further, principles of sovereign immunity have no bearing whatsoever on whether a private citizen of the U.S. can be sued for alleged wrongdoing in another country. And if a U.S. citizen commits a wrongful act that injures someone in another country, local law would ordinarily authorize the victim to sue that U.S. citizen. But what is perhaps most disturbing about the arguments that have been raised by the president and his staff about JASTAs purported dangers is that the United States affirmatively argued to the Supreme Court in 2004 that the FSIAs existing exception to sovereign immunity for tort claims could be invoked to establish jurisdiction over a foreign government for cases of terrorism on U.S. territory, such as the September 11 attacks. But when the 9/11 families sued Saudi Arabia for the September 11 terror attacks, an exception to sovereign immunity for terrorist attacks on U.S. soil suddenly became a dangerous idea in the eyes of this administration. It is dismaying that the president and his team have offered, as the basis for opposing JASTA, reasons that have no foundation in law or fact. No wonder so much of the recent reporting suggests that this is really about protecting Saudi Arabia. JASTA merely restores how our immunity rules were interpreted for the first thirty years following the FSIAs enactment. Throughout that time, courts consistently held that foreign states were subject to suit in the U.S. for aiding acts of terrorism, such as extrajudicial killings that occur here. No floodgate of suits against the U.S. in foreign courts occurred during this period. A few court decisions in the context of the 9/11 disputes against Saudi Arabia retreated from these longstanding interpretations, and have resulted in the bizarre result that foreign governments are subject to suit for ordinary torts, such as a car accident that causes injury here, but not for aiding a terrorist attack on our soil. JASTA is Congress response to this illogical result. It is narrowly tailored to provide that a foreign state does not enjoy immunity in our courts for aiding a terrorist organization in carrying out an attack on U.S. soil. That is good policy. It serves as a powerful deterrent to the sponsorship of terrorism by foreign governments. (If you have any doubts about the bills deterrent qualities, just consider the Saudi response to JASTAs possible enactment). If foreign countries enact reciprocal laws, it will not imperil the U.S., as we do not aid foreign terrorist organizations to attack civilian populations elsewhere. Abraham Lincoln famously said I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts. President Obama, who has said Lincoln is his favorite president, would be well served to heed his advice. Sean P. Carter, Jack Quinn and James P. Kreindler serve as co-counsel for the 9/11 families and victims. The Republican presidential candidates have figured out that theyll need 1,237 delegate votes to win the nomination. Ours is a federal system, so delegates are chosen according to rules of state Republican parties. Despite all too familiar broadsides against Party Elites, Donald Trump has hired one of the best convention managers on the Republican side to compete in the hunt for unbound delegates. Republicans havent had a contested convention in 40 years, so operatives with those skills are being brought back. Its reminiscent of Yoda in Star Wars decrying that no one teaches the Jedi Arts anymore. The three Republican candidates are putting together teams of professionals that are compiling information on all of the target delegates. This could be a long list given the possibility of multiple ballots, and in the age of the Internet would include quite a bit of material, such as biographical data, likes and dislikes, friends and enemies, and views on issues. The process is continual, which means multiple contacts and baby sitting to monitor evolving attitudes. Delegates can and will change their minds and good delegate operations have a plan to deal with that. Not surprisingly, the media have focused on financial inducements and potentially corrupt offers to delegates. Donald Trump recently joined the fray, boasting that he has the best toys to woo delegates and again calling the system corrupt. My experience working with GOP delegates at numerous conventions tells me they are far more interested in saving the world than making a buck. There will surely be talk of jobs offered, benefits to relatives and the like, but this is overstated and misses the point that most delegates dont seek the position to engage in petty graft. There are also numerous laws involved that campaigns would violate at their peril. Delegates are interested in picking the next president far more than incremental monetary gain. My experience working with GOP delegates at numerous conventions tells me they are far more interested in saving the world than making a buck. Likewise, threats and blandishments will be episodic at best. Unless Tony Soprano is elected from New Jersey, this tactic is unlikely to be widely utilized. In addition to Trumps broadsides, his supporters have floated ideas such as publishing recalcitrant delegates hotel room numbers. These tough guy statements will not be effective in a world of saturation media coverage. Most delegates are paying attention to the campaign and the issues so it is not surprising that the candidates will appeal to them on the basis of key issues and philosophy. There will be single issue delegates (pro-life, pro-gun rights) and the candidates will want to talk up those positions. Beyond that, we can expect the campaigns to ferret out the hierarchy of issues, i.e. which do delegates consider the most important. The campaigns issue experts will provide regular briefings on foreign policy, economic policy, and constitutional law for those interested. At the core of a good delegate operation is personal persuasion and establishing a lasting connection with the delegates. Everyone likes to feel important and delegates are no exception. Prior to the 1976 convention, uncommitted delegates were invited to the White House to attend state dinners and personal meetings with the President. More than a few were seen on Air Force One. This was all perfectly legal and, incidentally, quite effective. While none of the candidates are capable of offering such an array of inducements, a candidate could host personal meetings with his team for instance. All candidates have important surrogates who will be assigned to call delegates on a regular basis. Picture a Monday morning at the office of an uncommitted delegate, Mr. Smith, Governor Christie is calling on Line 1. Remember that Senator Graham called just a few minutes ago. Most importantly, campaigns will look to friends, business associates or even family members to weigh in directly with delegates. The good campaigns will build a web of personal advocates who will stay in regular touch with each delegate target. For the four or more days of the Republican convention, delegates will be at the center of the universe and courted right up to the final vote. Not surprisingly, arcane delegate rules are of little interest to voters angry about the status quo. Many could react poorly to a protracted contest on national television. But there are no perfect alternatives for the GOP and things could be far worse for them if they disregarded long established rules and caved to intimidation." The pursuit of uncommitted delegates is not different from a president seeking enactment of a key legislative priority with Congress, something well known to Ted Cruz and John Kasich, or a businessman asking zoning approval for a new project before City Council, something that Donald Trump surely understands. It takes focus, time, and one on one attention to round up the winning votes. In a political era dominated by big money and data accumulation, personal interactions and building relationships is a healthy development. In 2014, President Barack Obama signed 12 executive orders directing various agencies in the departments of State, Justice and Homeland Security to refrain from deporting some 4 million adult immigrants illegally present in the United States if they are the parents of children born here or legally present here and if they hold a job, obtain a high-school diploma or its equivalent, pay taxes and stay out of prison. Unfortunately for the president, the conditions he established for avoiding deportation had been rejected by Congress. In response to the executive orders, 26 states and the House of Representatives sued the president and the recipients of the orders, seeking to prevent them from being enforced. The states and the House argued that the president effectively rewrote the immigration laws and changed the standards for the deportation of unlawfully present adult immigrants. The states also argued that because federal law requires them to offer the same safety net of social services for those illegally present as they do for those lawfully present, the financial burden that the enforcement of those orders would put upon them would be far beyond their budgetary limits. Moreover, they argued, enforcement of the presidents orders would effectively constitute a presidential command to the states to spend their own tax dollars against their wishes, and the president lacks the power to do that. In reply, the president argued that the literal enforcement of the law creates an impossible conundrum for him. He does not want to deport the parents of American children, as that destroys families and impairs the welfare of children; and he cannot deport children who were born here, as they are American citizens. Hence his novel resolution. The case was filed in Texas, where a federal district court judge agreed with the states and signed an order that prohibited the feds from enforcing the presidents orders, pending a full trial. The feds appealed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans upheld the injunction against the president. In so doing, it agreed with the states that the financial burden on them that would come from the enforcement of these executive orders would be unconstitutional. It also agreed with the House of Representatives that the president exceeded his authority under the Constitution and effectively rewrote the laws. This week, the Supreme Court heard the feds appeal. Because the seat formerly occupied by the late Justice Antonin Scalia for 30 years is still vacant, the court has just eight justices -- for the most part, four conservatives and four liberals. A tie vote in the court, which appears likely in this case, will not set any precedent, but it will retain the injunction against the president. The most recent time this happened was 1952, when the court enjoined President Harry Truman from seizing steel mills during the Korean conflict. Though the issue here is immigration, the constitutional values underlying the case are more far-reaching. Since the era of Woodrow Wilson -- accelerated under Franklin D. Roosevelt, enhanced under Lyndon B. Johnson and brought over the top under George W. Bush -- Congress has ceded some of its powers to the president. It has enabled him to borrow unlimited amounts of money and to spend as he sees fit. It has looked the other way when presidents have started wars, arrested Americans without charge or trial and even killed Americans. Can Congress voluntarily give some of its powers to the president, either by legislation or by impotent acquiescence when the president takes them? In a word, no. The purpose of the division of powers -- Congress writes the laws, the president enforces the laws and the courts interpret them and decide what they mean -- is to preserve personal liberty by preventing the accumulation of too much power in one branch of government. The 26 states and the House told the Supreme Court this week that the president is enforcing the laws not as Congress wrote them but as he wishes them to have been written, because he actually directed officials of the executive branch to enforce the versions of the laws that he rewrote instead of the laws on the books. That arguably violates his oath of office, in which he agreed that he would faithfully enforce all federal laws. We know from his notes that James Madison, when he drafted the presidential oath, insisted that the word faithfully be inserted so as to impress upon presidents their obligation to enforce laws even if they disagree with them. During oral argument in the court this week, there was a bizarre exchange over terminology that the president used in his orders. In a weird series of questions, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. asked whether the president's executive orders could be salvaged constitutionally by excising or changing a few words. This was improper because it treated an executive order as if it were a statute. It is not the job of the court to find ways to salvage executive orders as it is to salvage statutes, because the Constitution has given "all legislative Powers" to Congress and none to the president. Statutes are presumed to be constitutional. Executive orders that contradict statutes are presumed to be unconstitutional, and the court has no business trying to save them. All presidents from time to time have exercised discretion upon individuals when it comes to enforcing laws that pose hardships. But none has done so for 4 million people, and none has written substitute laws of his own making. Until now. At a March 29th news conference, New York Attorney General Schneiderman announced a coalition of attorneys general from fifteen states, the District of Columbia, and the Virgin Islands all Democrats-- investigating fossil-fuel companies in order to save the planet. Schneiderman said the group was acting because Washington refuses to do so. Two weeks later, Schneiderman announced another coalition of attorneys general from seven states and the District of Columbia, who had sent letters to a number of large retail companies seek[ing] information and documents related to the companies use of on-call shifts. On-call shifts, as Schneiderman explains them, occur when Employees must call their employer, typically an hour or two before a scheduled shift, to find out if they will be assigned to work that day. The unhappy attorneys general condemned the practice as unfair to workers. Presumably, labor unions agree. These Generals (a term often applied to state attorneys general, as well as to the U.S. Attorney General) are waging ideological war, also known as lawfare, against legal, corporate practices. The practices they disapprove of involve environmental, labor, and -- in the future-- other activities denounced by the ideological Left. These Generals have likely given little or no thought to the Constitution, and if they have, are ignoring what it says. The Constitutions Framers worried that powerful forces could pull the federal system towards either of two opposing dangers. A centralized tyranny was one. The more immediate danger, however, was that the existing American confederacy of states would fragment and break apart the newly conceived Union. So the Constitution displaced it and added two provisions related to coalitions among states, one prohibiting formal confederacies and the other limiting the ability of states to enter agreements among themselves. Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution prohibited states from enter[ing] any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation. Nevertheless, it took a bloody Civil War to defeat the slave-holding Confederacy and its attempt to secede from the Union. But Article I, Section 10 also provides: No State shall, without the consent of Congress enter into Agreement or Compact with another State. As the Framers recognized, states creating power blocs through agreements external to, and unregulated by, Congress would jeopardize the Union. They could see from history that` confederations that did not dismember eventually centralized because one or more of their members possessed enough power to dominate other members. Today, Germany is moving in that direction as the de facto leader of the confederation that is the European Union. To be sure, the Supreme Court has not strictly followed the language forbidding agreements and compacts in Article I, Section 10: it has permitted certain agreements between states lacking consent from Congress. In Virginia v Tennessee (1893), the Supreme Court said that, as to some agreements, the federal government would have no possible objection because they do not encroach upon or impair the supremacy of the United States. The words of Schneiderman and his cohorts do not seem to fall within the allowable category. At his March 29th news conference, Schneiderman was clear that the coalition wanted to investigate fossil-fuel companies in order to save the planet because the Congress refuses to take action. This is not a situation where a coalition of states sues the federal government for infringing state power, a frequent practice and part of the constitutional process. Rather, this coalition of states contemplates suing and possibly prosecuting private parties operating in many states because the federal government will not act. Such extra-constitutional actions infringe federal power. While not as grand a project as saving the planet, Schneidermans announcement on April 13 is also problematic. Nowhere does the press release say that on-call shifts are illegal. Rather, in their judgment, On-call shifts are not a business necessity, because many retailers no longer use this unjust method. This group of states is attempting to abolish a particular labor practice from all states. They undoubtedly have calculated that the targeted retailers are more likely to give in because the costs of resisting eight state government will be very high. Thus, without new legislation in the states or from the federal government, nine public officials may be able effectively to outlaw a disliked, but legal, practice. The Constitution abolished the original American Confederation in large part to end the economic warfare among the states which was threatening the Union. Preserving the Union required a bloody Civil War to defeat the slave-holding Confederacy. Through agreements and coalitions, lacking congressional consent, these state Generals are creating nascent confederations. The last thing our Union needs is an ideologically driven economic war waged by some states against others. The Framers of our Constitution have already told us that. Representatives from more than 130 countries will gather at the United Nations in New York on Friday to sign the climate change pact written in Paris last December. They should be aware that the money the Obama administration has promised for these efforts just hit a major legal roadblock. This week, 28 U.S. senators wrote to Secretary of State John Kerry demanding that U.S. law be followed and U.S. contributions to the climate fund cease. The issue revolves around the U.N.s recent embrace of the State of Palestine as a full member of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. The White House unilaterally pledged $3 billion for international climate change as part of the Paris deal. The administration wants these U.S. taxpayer funds to go to the Green Climate Fund. The UNFCCC is the foundation for funding the climate change agreement. The United States is a member and provides funding for the UNFCCC yearly. Despite Congress not appropriating money specifically for the Green Climate Fund, President Obama recently transferred $500 million to it. President Obamas climate-change payoffs ran into trouble on March 17 when the State of Palestine became a full member of this United Nations agency. The 1994 Foreign Relations Authorization Act prohibits Washington from giving money to any affiliated organization of the United Nations that grants the Palestinians membership as a state. The president wants to give the UNFCCC $13 million for its operational budget in the fiscal year that begins this October, along with another $750 million for the Green Climate Fund. Once this U.N. climate-change organization recognized the State of Palestine as a full member, U.S. law prohibits the administration from sending them another dime. The UNFCCC and its related entities are clearly affiliated with the United Nations. The U.N. general secretary appoints the agencys executive secretary. It declares that it is institutionally linked to the U.N. wording that remains on its website today. The UNFCCC secretariat offices are even part of the U.N.s campus in Bonn, Germany. Likewise, the Green Climate Fund says that it is an operating entity of the Financial Mechanism of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. The U.S. law that bars contributions to these organizations was written for a good reason. Congress wanted to make sure that Israel and the Palestinians negotiate directly, free from outside interference. One of the issues in the negotiations has always been recognition of a State of Palestine. If other countries or groups intervene on that point, it changes the negotiations dramatically. The U.S. law simply affirms what the Israelis and the Palestinians have agreed on themselves. The Oslo II Agreement, Wye River Memo, and Sharm el-Sheikh Memo all prohibit either party from chang[ing] the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip prior to reaching a permanent agreement. The Palestinians have a history of ignoring these prohibitions and trying to seek statehood recognition from the international community. In 2012, they gained status as a non-member observer state in the U.N. General Assembly. Today, they have the same status as the Holy See. The Palestinians used this status to sign letters of accession to 15 international treaties and conventions in 2014. At the beginning of last year, they joined the International Criminal Court and another 17 treaties and conventions. Now, they are part of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. When the U.N. recognizes the State of Palestine, it inserts itself into negotiations and makes a peace agreement more difficult. It puts a thumb on the scale, to the detriment of our ally Israel. The Obama administration must hold the Palestinians accountable for their efforts to use the United Nations to skirt the peace process. Additionally, the administration must now tell the U.N. that it is unlawful for America to make any contributions to the UNFCCC and its related entities. President Obama has shown that he is willing to turn his back on Israel. He has also shown an obsession with the political theater of international climate change. The only question now is whether the president of the United States will follow the law. Donald Trumps commanding victory in New York Tuesday means that he is even more likely to win all of the 15 remaining Republican primary states than any other scenario. In turn, these victories position him to more handily secure the votes necessary to earn the Partys nomination between now and the Republican National Convention. While media coverage remains fixated on the delegate selection process and a multi-ballot convention, Mr. Trumps victories chip away at the basis for making this case. Further, the history of the Republican Party does not lend itself to support the possibilities for a multi-ballot convention. In every election since 1952 (Eisenhower over Taft) the Republican Party has nominated the candidate leading in the public polls going into the primary and caucus process. Add to it, the last time the voting publics clear choice at the time of the convention did not prevail was in 1940 (Willkie over Dewey). There is no denying Mr. Trump achieved frontrunner status with the voting public early in the 2016 election cycle and his New York victory puts him another step closer toward continuing these two historic GOP streaks. Beyond history, the momentum generated by Mr. Trumps victories is as good an indicator as any as to who will secure the nomination. As voters in the final states prepare to cast their ballots, a look at the latest Fox News national poll of Republican Primary voters shows Donald Trump at 45 percent, Ted Cruz at 27 percent and John Kasich at 25 percent. Mr. Trump is now earning his highest level of support. This upward trajectory is the direction of a winning campaign. The Fox News national poll underscores every indicator that Mr. Trump is going to win next week in the primaries in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. The momentum from these victories will undoubtedly impact voters in the remaining states (Indiana, West Virginia, Washington, Oregon, California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota) as well as the uncommitted delegates to the convention. As General George Patton once said: Americans love a winner. Put another way, the Super Bowl Champion always has more fans after their win than they had before. The winner factor will remain an important one for the Trump campaign even if it falls short of the 1,237 votes to secure the nomination when the primary and caucus process concludes. The stretch between June 8th and the first ballot cast at the convention will be about winning the votes of the uncommitted delegates, pulling delegates votes away from Trump opponents and holding delegates committed to him. Delegates will be influenced in many ways. However, few influences will be more powerful for Mr. Trump than his frontrunner status and delegates wanting to align with the ultimate winner. BEACH BRAWL FOR THE RNC? HOLLYWOOD, FLA When the members of the Republican National Committee contemplated their spring meeting at the seaside not only did they not expect to be swarmed by reporters, candidates, and their campaigns, they probably didnt expect there to be much of anything expect for networking and sunset cruises. Instead they find themselves in the first battle of what promises to be a long war over how their convention will pick the partys 41st presidential nominee. As one committee member put it to Fox News First, This is like a hurricane. The overriding purpose and concern of this committee is to stage a nominating convention every four years, especially in the era of super PACs and outside money, the fundamental job of the RNC is to stage a quadrennial convention. As disconcerting as it is for these members to face challenging odds in the general election, a more pressing and practical concern for these individuals is having a disastrous convention in Cleveland in July. The way it is supposed to go, and has gone for forty years, is more akin to a big event like the Academy Awards than a matter of actual political consequence. But Republican frontrunner Donald Trump and his many new Washington-based consultants and lawyers are explicitly warning that this institution could fail spectacularly. In this in ominous warning, if Trump is not the nominee, the convention would still be a branding exercise alright, but it would just be branding the Republican Party as an undemocratic, incompetent, disaster. As one state party chairman put it, If Trump comes up short, are we basically opening our wrists and bleeding out? There is certainly a path for Trump to clinch outright and win the 1,237 delegates he needs. Ask Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia, or ask Nate Cohn at the NYT, but the greatest likelihood is that even if Trump trumps in the northeast on Tuesday and figures out how to play the delegate game in Pennsylvanias complex system, he will still need the Republican equivalent of superdelegates to take the nomination. These are the 7 percent or more of delegates who will arrive in Cleveland not bound to any candidate. The most likely scenario is that Trump shows up just short and will rely on party stalwarts to give him the nomination to avoid the violence, division and upheaval that Trump and his team have warned of. Its a credible threat. Thats not the only thing on offer from Team Trump. If his party will simply meet his demands there are rewards. In closed door meetings here, there is the promise of not just a Trump who plays the party game and hires the consultant class that so dominates the GOP apparatus, but also that Trump himself will change. They point to his mostly good conduct in the past three weeks. Yes, the insults were back on the campaign trail in Indiana on Wednesday, but so to was a respectful visit to the states Republican Gov. Mike Pence, and more moderate postures on issues. The new-look Trump includes not just an effort to beef up his policy proposals, but also a more moderate side including transgender acceptance. Like, really moderate. Thats not to say that there arent many who relish the idea of a contested and maybe even chaotic convention. The many supporters of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, as well as those still clinging to the idea of a political messiah who will be revealed at the convention came here in the belief that most of the party apparatus still favored blocking Trump. One diehard Cruz supporter put it this way: I still refuse to believe that the Republican Party will allow itself to be hijacked by a charlatan who attacks our party and our system every day. Despite Trumps public menace and private persuasion there are many hold outs. But how many? The first ground on which that question will be tested surrounds an arcane and probably only symbolic procedural issue placed before the committee. Solomon Yue, a committee member from Washington state, wants the RNCs rules committee to recommend that the convention adopt different rules for how the process works. As it stands, the convention will be operated under the same rules that the House of Representatives does. That means no filibusters, no funny business, and nearly absolute power for whomever wields the gavel. And just as it is in the House that person is Speaker Paul Ryan. What Yue and a sizable number of committee members want is to use the same kind of procedure that state parties, subcommittees of the RNC, and your local rotary club follow: Decentralized power with many opportunities for delegates to block the process. Yue hasnt stated a public preference for any candidate, but he has said that he is concerned about the party leaders, including Ryan, railroading dissident delegates. At first it was assumed that the issue here would be whether an establishment switch-a-roo would deprive Trump of the nomination in favor of a more electable candidate. But as the new, consultant-backed Trump campaign hoves into view like a party boat pulling up at the dock, the debate has shifted on the question of the rules. Now, it seems that it is the Cruz delegation that has the most to lose under a heavy speakers gavel. Not only could Cruz be thrown over for a moderate establishmentarian, but might also face the possibility of an establishment yielding to Trump, and slamming the door on the first ballot without Cruz ever getting to stage a floor fight. Picture the moment: Trump arrives in Cleveland just a couple of dozen delegates short of the prize, but many of the delegates and their preferences are in dispute. Cruzs team would hope to be able to disqualify some delegates or even unbind some that dont have autonomy on the first ballot. A powerful parliamentary officer can shut down procedural tactics, calls for further debate, or the re-visitation of credentials or rules. Ryan could hammer closed the selection process on round one, and send furious Cruz backers out to the Cuyahoga night. The rules committee vote that will be held later today will not be binding on the convention and will not have anything to do with the allocation of precious delegates. But what it will be is the first, best indication we have about whether the RNC is ready to take up occupancy in Trump Tower. Cruz camp makes general election argument to GOP elite - Time: In a private meeting with members of the Republican National Committee, the Cruz campaigns high command, including campaign manager Jeff Roe, strategist David Polyansky, and delegate-hunters Ken Cuccinelli and Saul Anuzis, made the case for Cruz as the partys stronger choice for the general election and argued hed help down-ballot GOP races. [GOP delegate count: Trump 845; Cruz 559; Kasich 147 (1,237 needed to win)] WITH YOUR SECOND CUP OF COFFEE Science Daily: A new study, by researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Zoological Society of London, shows how baboons monitor each other for changes in behaviour that indicate food has been found, such as hunching over to scoop it up. This socially learned information gets transmitted through proximity: those with more neighbours are more likely to spot when someone starts feeding. Once they do, baboons will head towards the foodWhen it comes to applying and exploiting social knowledge, however, the characteristics of individual baboons -- whether its sex, status, boldness, or social ties in grooming networks -- determine who gets to eat, or where they are in any queue that forms. Got a TIP from the RIGHT or the LEFT? Email FoxNewsFirst@FOXNEWS.COM POLL CHECK Real Clear Politics Averages National GOP nomination: Trump 40.4 percent; Cruz 30.6 percent; Kasich 21.8 percent National Dem nomination: Clinton 47.7 percent; Sanders 46.3 percent General Election: Clinton vs. Trump: Clinton +9.3 points Generic Congressional Vote: Democrats +1 CAMPAIGN CASH CONTINUES TO FLOW FOR HILLARY WSJ: A super PAC backing Mrs. Clinton, Priorities USA Action, raised $11.7 million last monthmore than double its February hauland had $44.6 million left to spend at the end of March, according to its FEC filing. The group has conserved much of its funds for the likely general-election fight against the Republican Party. The PACs haul will supplement strong fundraising by Mrs. Clintons campaign, which ended March with $29 million in the bank. Mrs. Clinton had been outraised in March by rival Bernie Sandersbringing in $29.3 million to the Vermont senators $46 millionbut spent her funds at a slower rate. Mr. Sanders churned through his cash in March, spending as much as he raised, and ended the month with $17 million in the bank. Campaigns and super PACs were required to disclose their March fundraising to the FEC by midnight on Wednesday. Hillary the Hawk - NYT Magazine goes in depth on the origins of Clintons foreign policy background, and how she became more Hawkish than many in her party, including her former boss President Barack Obama. Bernie advisor claims theres still - The Hill: A top aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) says that he can win the Democratic presidential nomination before the partys convention. I think we can win the nomination before the convention, senior adviser Tad Devine said on MSNBCs The Rachel Maddow Show. Its going to be a difficult task; I think we can get there, he said. We think we can win more states. We think we can win more delegates. We think we can prove to Democratic leadership that he is the best possible candidate for a general election. THE JUDGES RULING: IMMIGRATION TAKEN UP BY THE COURT This week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on President Obamas executive orders banning various agencies from deporting illegal immigrants. Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano says that the courts discussion of wording to preserve the presidents actions is uncalled for: In a weird series of questions, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. asked whether the presidents executive orders could be salvaged constitutionally by excising or changing a few words. This was improper because it treated an executive order as if it were a statute. It is not the job of the court to find ways to salvage executive orders as it is to salvage statutes, because the Constitution has given all legislative Powers to Congress and none to the president. [Dem delegate count: Clinton 1893; Sanders 1180 (2,383 needed to win)] WAIT TIL THEY FIND OUT ABOUT THE KETCHUP PACKETS FOX 11: A McDonalds customer in Arkansas accused of emptying his cup of water and filling it with soda now faces a robbery charge, police said Tuesday. The restaurant manager said the suspect was one of three people who asked for water at the drive-thru window in Springdale. The customers parked and walked into the store before dumping out the water and pouring soda into the cup, KHBS/KHOG-TV reports. The manager spotted the three and told them to return the soda. Only 18-year-old Cody Morris refused, police say. The manager even ran out and tried to block Morris car from leaving, but the suspect reportedly drove his vehicle in reverse and hit the worker twice before speeding away. Police arrested the driver after they said they found his car at a nearby bowling alley. Its unclear whether hell face any additional charges aside from felony robbery. Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News. Sally Persons contributed to this report. Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here. This week is a little better for the visage of House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rob Bishop, R-Utah. Last week, my face broke out, he said with a laugh. You can understand why. The Utah Republican struggled last week to craft a bill to help Puerto Rico avoid a catastrophic bankruptcy. Bishop hoped to advance the measure through his committee before everything melted down. He scrapped a scheduled markup session where lawmakers forge final legislative language. Thats because he just didnt have the right vote mixture of Democrats and Republicans to move the plan out of committee and onto the House floor. Things are far from settled. But this week, Bishops outlook (for both his complexion and legislation) seems clearer. Its unclear if benzoyl peroxide, less junk food or perhaps diminished stress contributes to Bishops improved countenance. But there was sure a lot of chatter about the legislation at the Capitol Wednesday. Puerto Rico is hurtling toward a major, May 1 payment deadline. A second, more important deadline looms in July. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., convened a confab with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Wednesday. The Speaker was supposed to conduct a general meeting with the CHC on a host of issues a few weeks ago. But the Congressional schedule upended those plans. The discussion centered nearly exclusively on Puerto Rico when Ryan sat down with CHC members Wednesday afternoon. Meantime, key leadership staff from both sides of the aisle met with Treasury officials in an effort to bridge the impasse. There were no breakthroughs. But House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., emphasized that time was of the essence. Were a little bit behind schedule, Pelosi, who secured a compact with Ryan in December to settle the Puerto Rico issue in the first quarter of this year. That deadline is long gone with staggering financial payments casting a shadow over the island and in the halls of Congress. Major deadlines are coming, said Resident Commissioner Pedro Pierluisi, D-Puerto Rico, the commonwealths non-voting representative to Congress when he emerged from the Ryan meeting. There is a sense of urgency. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., doubted the chances for Congress to approve legislation to assist Puerto Rico by May 1. But the Illinois Democrat was willing to blow that deadline in exchange for something positive. I want to see them do it right, said Gutierrez, who is of Puerto Rican descent. This is not just a test for (Ryan) but for the Congress of the United States. Puerto Rico isnt the only test for Ryan and Congress these days. Ryan now presides over a stagnant legislative agenda. Its reduced most floor traffic to messaging bills or measures which dont have a chance of becoming law. Meantime, efforts to approve major issues are stalled. That slate includes a budget, extra money to combat Zika, reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration and a call to help Flint, MI fix its drinking water system. Pelosi convened a meeting with reporters Wednesday morning where she blamed Republicans for the legislative cul-de-sac on Zika, the budget and Flint. Theyre so consumed by their radical ideology, so disconnected from reality that even the pleas of expectant mothers and poisoned children fall on deaf ears, said Pelosi. I like to always make the distinction between a reason and an excuse. But its noteworthy that Pelosi didnt specifically mention Puerto Rico in her list of grievances with the GOP. Plus, she sidestepped a question if Ryan was to blame. Wherever the buck stops, the fact is, Congress is not doing its job, said Pelosi. Pelosi may be unwilling to call out the Puerto Rico issue because she sees an immediate, dire impact on the commonwealth. Plus, one Congressional aide indicated it would be counterproductive to badmouth the process when there were active talks about Puerto Rico. Thats not to say the other issues arent critical in the minds of Democrats. They sure gave Republicans an earful on their grievances Wednesday. There is no action. There is no plan, complained Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., when asked about Congressional Republicans refusing to write a $1.9 billion emergency spending bill to fight Zika. While they are fiddling, lives are at risk. DeLauro serves as the leading Democrat on the House Appropriations subcommittee which funds public health. Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., chairs that panel. The question is, do you need it now? asked Cole of the special spending request. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Ky. contends the administration continues to delay response efforts by refusing to provide basic budgetary information to Congress on their Zika funding request. DeLauro dismisses that charge. There has been more information (on Zika) then we had on going to war in Iraq where we found no weapons of mass destruction, said the Connecticut Democrat. Is this the message we want to send to women? Don't get pregnant? Cole said this week he believes the government has the money it needs to handle Zika right away. But he conceded that Congress may have to tuck additional funds into a catch-all spending measure later this year specifically for Zika. Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Mich., represents Flint and frets about the water disaster. He wants Congressional GOPers to grapple with the issue and quit with well-wishes. It's almost as though it's their obligation to send Flint a get-well card, said Kildee. The Republican Congress turns a blind eye and fails to act. We are better than this. Wednesday marked the 17th anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, CO. A small group of lawmakers used the occasion to call for a change to House rules. Its customary for the House to pause in its legislative agenda for a moment of silence to recognize the dead after mass shootings. But some Democrats want more. Theyd like to require to compel a Congressional committee to hold a hearing on gun violence after each moment of silence following a mass shooting. We just can't Tweet our condolences or stand on the House floor, said House Democratic Caucus Vice Chairman Joe Crowley, D-NY. Its like Our work is done here. Please carry on the business of the day. The full House would have to vote to approve the rules change to say nothing of securing the blessing of the House Republican brass. Dont hold your breath. And dont hold your breath on the Puerto Rico bill either. Lawmakers are skeptical that Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rob Bishop will be ready to call another markup session before Congress leaves for recess at the end of next week. When asked when the markup might be, Bishop jokingly suggested Sunday morning. Be here at 9:00. Keep in mind that Puerto Rico may be the issue with the best chances of resolution right now. Thats not saying much. But its enough to cause lots of stress on Capitol Hill. And cause faces to break out. Two weeks after the media declared Donald Trump in deep trouble, he has bounced backas a changed candidate. I quickly noticed that Trump was toning it down, and that was on full display Tuesday night, when he celebrated his New York landslide with a strikingly short speech and referred to his vanquished rivals not with nasty nicknames but as Senator Cruz and Governor Kasich. Some journalists, long accustomed to political operatives pulling the strings, are crediting Paul Manafort and others on Trumps expanded team with the change of direction. But Trump got to be the front-runner by relying on his gut, and belatedly figured out that he needed to do what he kept musing about doing: acting more presidential. Trump lowered the decibel level on his Twitter feed, practically scrubbing it of insults. He started doing fewer television interviewshe hasnt been on a Sunday show in two weeks. He railed against the rigged primary process, but not against people in particular. He avoided the self-inflicted wounds of shifting answers on abortion and going after another candidates wife. In short, he was more disciplined. At the same time, the breadth of his New York victory, winning nearly all of the 95 delegates at stake while Cruz was shut out, had an immediate impact on the punditry. Now many reporters and commentators are back to saying he is close to unstoppable, even if he falls short of the magic number of 1,237, which was pretty much the conventional wisdom until Wisconsin changed the narrative. The #NeverTrump movement hasnt given up. Its possible the Trump train could still be derailed. But for now, at least, the candidate is giving his enemies less ammunition to work with. Of course, not everyone is hailing Trumps more cautious approach. Slate says that this election has given us a good measure of just how far weve defined down presidential. Trump may indeed have been restrained on Tuesday night in celebrating his predictable but impressive win in the New York Republican primary, but he was certainly not presidential. He did his usual shtick (albeit at shorter length), mentioned the great businessmen in the room with him, told a story about a developer friend (undermining him at the same time), and inflated the nights actual primary results With Bernie all but cooked and Hillary in need of a new foil, the narrative now demanded that Trump be a candidate transformed. The narrative demanded it? Couldnt Trump just as easily flipped the bird to the narrative-pushers? The Trump-hating, Cruz-endorsing National Review all but discounted the vote in Trumps home state: Trump got only a very modest bump from New York last night. And despite the breathless TV and print commentary from our New Yorkcentered media, he still faces huge obstacles if he wants to get a sufficient number of delegates to be nominated on the first ballot. And if he is not nominated on the first ballot, given Cruzs wildly successful delegate strategy, it is unlikely he will be nominated at all. The New York Times sees a two-front war, what it calls incongruous, split-screen politics: While Mr. Trump draws adulatory crowds by the thousands to his rallies in arenas and airplane hangars, he has suffered setback after setback in the roadside hotels and high school auditoriums where Republican Party activists decide who will serve as delegates. And an internal Trump memo, which just happened to make its way to the Washington Post, "The Cruz spin machine produces more lies than anything else. Our projections call for us to accumulate over 1400 delegates and thus a first ballot nomination win in Cleveland." The Times editorial page, though, hasnt given up, saying Cruz, the thoroughly unlikable Texan, who has proved he will do or say nearly anything to win, has been raising weak ballot challenges aimed at disqualifying Mr. Kasich from various state contests Mr. Kasich is not an exciting candidate, or even a political moderate. But he is the most sane-sounding individual in the Republican field, and has been from the start. Well, Kasich did win Trumps district in Manhattan. A similar debate is playing out on the Democratic side after Hillary Clinton trounced Bernie Sanders in her adopted home state. With Sanders close to being mathematically eliminated from a first-ballot win, the pundits are asking: What does Bernie want? Will he drop out, despite sitting on truckloads of money? Or will he at least tone down his attacks on Hillary? Successful presidential candidates evolve and adapt. Clintons victory speech Tuesday night was far better and more passionate than most of her previous efforts. And Trump, amazingly, saw the virtue of brevity. Now well see, as he heads to favorable turf next week in such states as Pennsylvania and Maryland, whether he sticks to the script. Click for more Media Buzz. The family of a CIA contractor killed in the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya will receive $400,000 after the agency expanded survivor benefits for employees and contractors killed in the line of duty overseas in acts of terrorism. Glen Doherty, a former Navy SEAL who was working for the CIA's Global Response staff in Libya at the time of Benghazi, held a standard federal insurance policy that pays a survivor benefit only to spouses and dependents. Doherty, 42, was divorced and had no children, rendering his family ineligible for compensation under the 1941 Defense Base Act, which still requires all overseas contractors including CIA employees to carry disability and life insurance. According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, the CIA informed lawyers for Doherty's mother, Barbara, Wednesday that the agency's policy change had been finalized. Barbara Doherty told WFXT that she was relieved that the expanded benefit had approved. She also called on Congress to repeal the Defense Base Act. "It gives me solace that the CIA has done the right thing, Doherty said. Now its up to Congress to see if they can step up to the plate." Legislation introduced last year by Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass. and Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., would expand the death benefit to include families of all defense employees killed in terror attacks since Sept. 11, 2001, even if they don't have spouses or dependents. "It is entirely disrespectful to make [the families] fight through a long bureaucratic process to get the benefits that that heroism has earned," Lynch told WFXT. The CIA policy change is retroactive to April 18, 1983, the date a suicide attacker crashed a truck into the front of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans, some of whom were CIA officers. "It wasnt about the money, at all," Doherty told WFXT. It was a fight for [all families], because they didnt have a voice and we did thats what kept us going on, knowing that they would eventually be recognize." "I am glad the [CIA] made this decision so the Doherty family and others who have lost loved ones in service to and sacrifice for our country will finally receive the recognition and honor they deserve," Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., the chair of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, said in a statement. Doherty's family filed a $1 million damages claim against the CIA and the State Department in September 2014. The Union-Tribune reported that the family will drop all claims against the federal government in the wake of the expanded death benefit. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Click for more from MyFoxBoston.com. Click for more from the San Diego Union-Tribune. The Supreme Court is expressing doubts about laws in at least a dozen states that make it a crime for people suspected of drunken driving to refuse to take alcohol tests. The justices heard arguments Wednesday in three cases challenging North Dakota and Minnesota laws that criminalize a refusal to test for alcohol in a driver's blood, breath or urine even if police have not first obtained a search warrant. Drivers prosecuted under those laws claim they violate the Constitution's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. State supreme courts in Minnesota and North Dakota upheld the laws. The justices pressed lawyers representing the states on why they can't simply require police to get a warrant every time police want a driver to take an alcohol test. Justice Stephen Breyer pointed to statistics showing that it takes an average of only five minutes to get a warrant over the phone in Wyoming and 15 minutes to get one in Montana. Thomas McCarthy, the lawyer representing North Dakota, said the state "strikes a bargain" with drivers by making consent to alcohol tests a condition for the privilege of driving on state roads. But Justice Anthony Kennedy said the states are asking for "an extraordinary exception" by making it a crime for people to assert their constitutional rights. He expressed frustration when McCarthy refused to answer repeated questions about why expedited warrants wouldn't serve the state just as well. Kathryn Keena, a county prosecutor representing Minnesota, suggested some rural areas may have only one judge on call, making it too burdensome to seek a warrant every time. She said even if a warrant were procured, a driver could still refuse to take the test and face lesser charges for obstruction of a warrant than for violating drunken driving test laws. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the state could simply change the law to make penalties more severe for obstruction. Several justices seemed to be searching for a middle ground. Some suggested requiring a breath test without a warrant might be allowed because it's far less invasive than a blood test. "Why can't we say that with respect to a breath test that this is a search incident to arrest?" Justice Elena Kagan asked Charles Rothfeld, the attorney representing challengers to the laws. She called the breath test "about as uninvasive as a search can possibly be." Rothfeld insisted that collecting breath was just as intrusive as collecting blood. The Obama administration is supporting the states. Deputy Solicitor General Ian Gershengorn told the justices they should not assume warrants "are available 24/7." "That is not the case in the real world," Gershengorn said. He said it may be the case for terrorist attacks, but not for routine drunken driving cases. In the Minnesota case, William Bernard was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving and taken into custody after refusing to take a breath test. A divided Minnesota Supreme Court ruled the law was valid and that officers could have ordered a breath test without a warrant as a search conducted while performing a valid arrest. Under the Minnesota law, a first-degree count of refusal to take a breath test carries a mandatory minimum sentence of three years in prison. In North Dakota, refusal to take an alcohol test carries the same criminal penalties as driving under the influence. The state's highest court upheld the law against a challenge from Danny Birchfield, who was arrested after he drove his car into a ditch and failed a field sobriety test. He refused to take to more tests and was convicted under the state's refusal law, which counts as a misdemeanor for a first offense. A second case from North Dakota involves Steve Beylund, a driver who was stopped on suspicion of drunken driving and consented to a chemical alcohol test. State courts declined to suppress the evidence from that test. Other states that criminalize a driver's refusal to take an alcohol blood test include Alaska, Florida, Hawaii, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican presidential candidate, slammed members of his own party Wednesday, referring to them as a collection of closed-minded reactionaries who could face an electoral catastrophe in November. Kasich, who came in second in this weeks New York primary, railed on Republicans for being negative, in a Washington Post interview. If you dont have ideas, you got nothing, and frankly my Republican Party doesnt like ideas, Kasich said. Though Kasich has been mathematically eliminated from winning the Republican nomination for more than a month now, he maintains he isnt backing down. Kasich came under fire earlier this week when Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, called him a spoiler for staying in the race. Kasich and Cruz appeared Wednesday at the Republican National Committee meeting in Florida, where elected party leaders from across the country kicked off a four-day get-together. All three GOP contenders -- Kasich, Cruz and a representative for front-runner Donald Trump -- are making the case to party members, some of whom are delegates to the Republican National Convention in July, that they have the best chance to beat the Democratic challenger in a general election match-up. Tuesdays win in New York boosts Trumps delegate count to 845, while Cruz has 559 and Kasich 147. To become the Republican nominee, a candidate needs 1,237 delegates. Following Tuesdays New York primary, Kasich mocked Cruz on Twitter, calling out the Texans inability to clinch 1,237 delegates before Julys convention mathematically impossible a phrase Cruz himself has used in the past to call for Kasich to drop out of the race. President Obama looks set to wade into the contentious debate in the United Kingdom over whether or not the nation should remain a member of the European Union and some Brits are angry at the presidents intrusion into a delicate UK issue ahead of a major vote. Obama arrived in London late Thursday for a three-day trip. On Friday he will meet Prime Minister David Cameron -- who is reportedly keen to get Obamas backing ahead of the June 23 referendum, in which Britons will choose to remain or leave the European Union. Cameron is in a difficult position, backing the Remain campaign, while many within his own Conservative Party are campaigning for the Leave or Brexit (British-Exit) campaign. Polls have shows the race is tight, with the Remain campaign holding an edge as small as one percent. The White House has said Obama is willing to offer his opinion and may announce that he favors Cameron's position that Britain should remain in the European Union. "If he's asked his view as a friend, he will offer it," U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said. "As the president has said, we support a strong United Kingdom in the European Union." Those calling for Britain to leave the European Union are not happy at that news, with U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage saying Obama should stay home. A monstrous interference, Farage told Fox News Thursday. Id rather he stayed in Washington, frankly, if thats what hes going to do. You wouldnt expect the British Prime Minister to intervene in your presidential election, you wouldnt expect the Prime Minister to endorse one candidate or another. Perhaps hes another one of those people who doesnt understand what [the EU] is, Farage said. In March, a letter sent from Conservative MP and former cabinet minister Liam Fox, and co-signed by over 100 MPs from four different political parties, asked the U.S. Ambassador to the U.K. to persuade Obama not to intervene, calling any such intervention extremely controversial and potentially damaging. It has long been the established practice not to interfere in the domestic political affairs of our allies and we hope that this will continue to be the case, the letter to Ambassador Matthew Barzun read. While the current U.S. administration may have a view on the desirability or otherwise of Britains continued membership of the E.U., any explicit intervention in the debate is likely to be extremely controversial and potentially damaging, the letter said. London Mayor Boris Johnson -- who was born in New York and has expressed strong support for the UK-U.S. relationship -- accused Obama of hypocrisy. "I just think it's paradoxical that the United States, which wouldn't dream of allowing the slightest infringement of its own sovereignty, should be lecturing other countries about the need to enmesh themselves ever deeper in a federal superstate," Johnson said Tuesday. Cameron however, has said that the advice of allies was welcome, saying listening to what our friends say in the world is not a bad idea. "I struggle to find the leader of any friendly country that thinks we should leave," he said Wednesday. FoxNews.coms Adam Shaw, Fox News Greg Palkot and The Associated Press contributed to this report. New Yorks primary looking increasingly like it was a big turning point in the race for the White House though no one is dropping out at least so far.. as we look ahead to next Tuesdays big primaries in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Donald Trump tweeted this morning that both Ted Cruz and John Kasich should get out of the race. Donald Trump says hes becoming a more traditional candidate, but in a big speech yesterday, Donald Trump was back to calling Ted Cruz Lyin Ted and Hillary Clinton crooked Hillary. The WSJ says Trump has hired a speech writer, and will give his first official policy speech next week. The New York Times reporting today that hes softening his tone, but the comments last night contradicted that reporting. The Washington Post on their front page today suggesting the possibility of a Clinton/Warren ticket. Hes having a Town Hall this morning on the Today show. Hillary Clinton will be on Good Morning America answering questions from viewers/voters. Bernie Sanders is seeing increasing pressure to get out of the race or at least change his negative attacks on Hillary Clinton. So far, the Sanders campaign doesnt show any sign of getting out. They say they are staying in to the end. His campaign manager says they are not going to take their foot off the gas. New polling out of Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Maryland show Hillary Clinton with strong leads over Sanders in the upcoming battles. She leads Sanders by 13 in PA. in Delaware, recent polls have Hillary up by 7. In Maryland, Hillary has a 25 point lead. The New York Times writes today: Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont grappled with tough and narrowing choices about campaign strategy and fund-raising on Wednesday after his crushing loss in the New York primary and a series of difficult contests ahead. While Hillary Clinton's campaign carefully avoided any suggestion that he quit the Democratic presidential race, many of her prominent supporters argued that the moment had come for Mr. Sanders to ease off attacks for the good of Democrats in the November election. Mr. Sanders, who took the day off to rest and regroup with his advisers, is under intense pressure to win the Pennsylvania primary on Tuesday or fall even further behind Mrs. Clinton's sizable lead in pledged delegates needed to capture the nomination. A new Pennsylvania poll put Mr. Sanders 13 percentage points behind Mrs. Clinton, despite heavy spending by the Sanders campaign on television advertisements. Another loss could hamper his formidable fund-raising, which Sanders advisers described as steady but not as strong as it could have been with a New York victory. A Wall Street Journal editorial today is calling for Kasich and Cruz to team up to stop Donald Trump. Karl Rove says in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today that Donald Trumps threat to run as an independent is empty. Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz are reportedly best-prepared for the race at least by the measure of money in the bank. President Obama is wrapping up a trip to Saudi Arabia as challenging relations with the U.S. ally have taken center stage. The President reportedly got a snub at the airport, but meetings went on as scheduled. President Obama heads for London where hes involved in another crisis.. the possible UK exit from the European Union. Three killed and dozens hurt in an energy plant explosion in Mexico. Despite being under impeachment threat, Brazils president is heading to the UN this week in a show of force. Queen Elizabeth II is celebrating her 90th birthday today. She is Englands longest-serving king or queen. As the markets continue to trade at record highs, we get several key tech earnings reports today. So far, many earnings reports have been disappointing. We also get jobs numbers today. For more news, follow me on Twitter: @ClintPHenderson Speaking from the cockpit of Solar Impulse 2 as it makes its journey over the Pacific, pilot Bertrand Piccard told FoxNews.com that that solar-powered plane proves the immense potential of clean technology. Clean technology is a huge opportunity that will create jobs, make profits and protect the environment, he said, via phone. Solar Impulse took off from Hawaii Thursday on the ninth leg of its fuel-free journey around the world. The plane is expected to complete its 2,336-mile flight to Moffett Airfield, Mountain View, Calif. at around 3 a.m. ET Sunday. Related: Solar Impulse 2 takes off from Hawaii, continues epic solar-powered journey The 62-hour journey, which is the second-longest solar-powered flight in aviation history, also coincides with Earth Day Friday. Its very symbolic to be flying during Earth Day, Piccard said. This year Earth Day is a very active day - its the day when the heads of state are signing the Paris Climate agreement. If everything goes well, I have a satellite connection with the U.N. to explain the message of Solar Impulse, he added. Speaking about 3 hours into the flight, Piccard described the view of clouds and ocean from the Solar Impulse 2 cockpit as gorgeous. Related: Solar Impulse 2 reaches Hawaii, shatters records in historic Pacific flight I am feeling much better now in the air than on the ground, he said, explaining that the wait for perfect flight conditions in Hawaii was nerve-wracking. This morning, it was stressful, there was too much wind it was a relief to take off. The plane's ideal flight speed is about 28 mph, though that can double during the day when the sun's rays are strongest. The carbon-fiber aircraft weighs more than 5,000 pounds, or about as much as a minivan or midsize truck. The wings of Solar Impulse 2, which stretch wider than those of a Boeing 747, are equipped with 17,000 solar cells that power propellers and charge batteries. The plane runs on stored energy at night. Related: Solar Impulse 2s epic journey in pictures You need to manage the energy of the airplane by loading the batteries the best possible during the day, said Piccard. The pilot also acknowledged the physical and mental demands of flying for 62 hours in a single-seat cockpit that is too small to stand in. I am using a lot of self-hypnosis to regenerate mind and body, he said. The plane is the brainchild of explorer and Solar Impulse Chairman Piccard, who is taking it in turns with his fellow Swiss pilot Andre Borschberg to fly the aircraft on its journey across the globe. Related: How nutritional science is fueling Solar Impulse 2s epic journey Borschberg piloted the previous leg of Solar Impulse 2s journey - an incredible 4,480-mile, five -day flight from Japan to Hawaii. The 118-hour trek shattered the record for longest solar-powered flight both in terms of distance and duration. Piccard told FoxNews.com that he is thrilled to pilot Solar Impulse 2 to Mountain View, which is in the heart of Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is really a place for innovation everyone there tries to do better things with technology they love Solar Impulse because it goes into this spirit of thinking and doing things differently, he said. Landing 150 meters from Googles HQ is fantastic. The incredible solar-powered trek began in March 2015 when Solar Impulse 2 took off on the first leg of its journey from Abu Dhabi to Oman. Solar Impulse 2 then made stops in India, Myanmar and Nanjing, China, en route to an unscheduled stop in Nagoya, Japan. The plane originally left Nanjing, China, for Hawaii, but diverted to Japan because of unfavorable weather. Related: Electric rain? Solar panel turns raindrops into power Solar Impulse 2 reached Hawaii on July 3 2015 but the next leg of the journey was delayed for nine months while the Solar Impulse team repaired damage to the planes batteries After reaching California Solar Impulse 2 is slated to make stops in the midwest and New York before flying over the Atlantic Ocean. It will then stop in southern Europe or North Africa, depending on weather conditions, before ending its epic journey in Dubai. Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers The Associated Press contributed to this report. Researchers have discovered evidence that monkeys arrived in North America 18 million years earlier than previously believed, according to a study published Wednesday in Nature. And they were truly impressive monkeys indeed. The newly discovered Panamacebus transitus had to somehow cross the 100 miles of water that separated South America from North America prior to the formation of the Isthmus of Panama 3.5 million years ago. As far as scientists know, the monkey is the only mammal to cross the Miocene Central American Seaway into North America. We never would've predicted they would've been here, study co-author Jonathan Bloch tells Nature. While it's possible the monkeys swam to North America, it's more likely they inadvertently found themselves setting sail on rafts made of vegetation. Our current knowledge of Panamacebus transitus comes from seven fossilized teeth found at the site of the Panama Canal expansion, according to a press release. The teeth are 21 million years old and show the new monkey likely resembled a modern-day capuchin. There's no evidence Panamacebus transitus did well in its new Panamanian home; the ancestors of modern-day North American monkeys came millions of years later after the isthmus was formed. The Panama Canal expansion has been a boon for researchers. "I asked my boss for a million dollars to dig a hole in the ground," says one of the study's authors. "Then the Panamanian people voted for the Panama Canal Authority to spend $5.6 billion dollars to expand the canal." (Some 10,000 human bones found in Germany may rewrite the history of war in Europe.) This article originally appeared on Newser: North America's 1st Monkey Crossed a Sea to Get There More From Newser Scientists have analyzed the statements that astronauts have made when they see Earth from above, and landed on a common, powerful theme: a sense of awe and transcendence. David Yaden, a research scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, examined the quotations from astronauts that appeared in places like interviews or books. The awe the scientists detected seems to be triggered by viewing Earth from orbit, Yaden told FoxNews.com. It seemed to be this unique context for triggering this very overwhelming experience. Related: Exploding stars leave radioactive clues beneath Earth's oceans While feelings of awe and transcendence a connection to something much bigger are frequently associated with religion, whats interesting about awe in spaceflight, Yaden said, is that it occurs in a scientific, secular context. Awe gets triggered, Yaden said, when people perceive a sense of vastness. In space flight, that happens in two ways both perceptually, in terms of what the astronauts actually see, and conceptually. Related: 1917 glass plate offers oldest evidence of exoplanetary system People are not only talking about the perceptual aspect of seeing the beauty of the earth hanging in this massive black background of space, Yaden said, but also the conceptual vastness, of how that pale blue dot contains the totality of all that human beings care about. We learned that viewing Earth from orbit is probably among the most potent awe interventions available, he added, saying that its an extreme version of the feeling people have when they travel to a new place or view a beautiful sunset. This feeling of vastness astronauts feel was aptly described by author Frank White as the overview effect. Related: NASA releases cool images of dwarf planet Ceres Yaden said they hope to partner with NASA or a private agency to pursue the research further. The study was published recently in the journal The Psychology of Consciousness. I had another feeling, that the Earth is like a vibrant, living thing, Chinese astronaut said Yang Liu said, in one of the statements the authors included in the study. I said to myself: this is the place we live, its really magical. Solar Impulse 2 will resume its record-breaking solar-powered journey around the world Thursday when it takes off from Hawaii on a 62-hour flight to California. The plane has had a nine-month layover in Hawaii while the Solar Impulse team fixed damage that occurred during Solar Impulse 2s historic flight from Japan last year. Piloted by Bertrand Piccard, the plane will take off from Kalaeloa Airport at 12 p.m. ET on the ninth leg of its odyssey. Solar Impulse 2 is expected to reach Moffett Airfield, Mountain View, Calif. at around 4 a.m. ET Sunday. Related: Solar Impulse 2 reaches Hawaii, shatters records in historic Pacific flight After years of dreaming about flying for several days on, I can't wait to do it for real! Piccard tweeted Thursday. After years of dreaming about flying for several days on, I can't wait to do it for real! https://t.co/tx7CTOSo7O pic.twitter.com/itQjgsrcxD Bertrand PICCARD (@bertrandpiccard) April 20, 2016 Piccard will send a message to world leaders Friday, which is Earth Day, according to the Solar Impulse blog. The incredible solar-powered trek began in March 2015 when Solar Impulse 2 took off on the first leg of its journey from Abu Dhabi to Oman. Since then, the aircraft has travelled 12,401 miles and spent 254 hours and 58 minutes in the air. Related: Solar Impulse 2s epic journey in pictures The plane is the brainchild of explorer and Solar Impulse Chairman Piccard, who is taking it in turns with his fellow Swiss pilot Andre Borschberg to fly the aircraft on its journey across the globe. Borschberg piloted Solar Impulse 2 on the last leg of its journey, landing in Hawaii on July 3 2015 after an epic 4,480-mile, five -day flight. The 118-hour journey shattered the record for longest solar-powered flight in terms of distance and duration, easily surpassing the 1,491-mile, 44-hour record Borschberg set when flying from China to Japan on the previous leg of the trip. Borschberg also broke the record for longest non-stop solo flight without refueling, which previously stood at 76 hours and 45 minutes. However, the next leg of the journey was delayed for nine months while the Solar Impulse team repaired damage to the planes batteries. The flight from Japan to Hawaii posed huge mental and physical challenges for Borschberg. The former Swiss military pilot navigated difficult weather conditions and battled exhaustion in the planes cramped cockpit, which is too small to stand in. Solar Impulse 2, a larger version of a single-seat prototype that first flew six years ago, is made of carbon fiber and has 17,248 solar cells built into the wing that supply the plane with renewable energy, via four motors. The solar cells recharge four lithium polymer batteries, which provide power for night flying. The aircraft typically flies between 30 mph and 40 mph, although this can increase and decrease significantly depending on wind speed. Last year Piccard told FoxNews.com that Solar Impulse 2 proves the potential of renewable energy and clean technology. This was my vision when I created that project it was to have an airplane that can fly with no fuel, he said. This is fantastic, to prove that clean technology can achieve [the] impossible. The Solar Impulse chairman also believes that the solar plane could spark increased interest in technologies such as LED lights and electric cars, as well as lightweight vehicles. Related: Electric rain? Solar panel turns raindrops into power After flying from Abu Dhabi to Oman, Solar Impulse 2 stopped in India, Myanmar and Nanjing, China, en route to an unscheduled stop in Nagoya, Japan. The plane originally left Nanjing, China, for Hawaii, but diverted to Japan because of unfavorable weather. After reaching California Solar Impulse 2 is slated to make stops in the midwest and New York before flying over the Atlantic Ocean. It will then stop in southern Europe or North Africa, depending on weather conditions, before ending its epic journey in Dubai. Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers The Associated Press contributed to this report Solar Impulse 2 has taken off from Hawaii on the ninth leg of its record-breaking solar-powered journey around the world. Piloted by Bertrand Piccard, the plane took from Kalealoa Airport at 12:16 p.m. ET. Solar Impulse 2 is expected to reach Moffett Airfield, Mountain View, Calif. at around 3 a.m. ET Sunday after a flight lasting about 62 hours. The aircraft has had a nine-month layover in Hawaii while the Solar Impulse team fixed damage that occurred during Solar Impulse 2s historic flight from Japan last year. Related: Solar Impulse 2 set to resume epic solar-powered journey around the world Solar Impulse 2 is seen as proving the potential of renewable energy and clean technology. Just before taking off, Piccard noted that Friday is Earth Day. Its very symbolic to be in the air at that moment, he said. The plane is the brainchild of explorer and Solar Impulse Chairman Piccard, who is taking it in turns with his fellow Swiss pilot Andre Borschberg to fly the aircraft on its journey across the globe. Have a great flight, Bertrand enjoy it, and dont forget to come down! shouted Borschberg from the runway as Solar Impulse 2 took off. Related: Solar Impulse 2 reaches Hawaii, shatters records in historic Pacific flight Solar Impulse 2, a larger version of a single-seat prototype that first flew six years ago, is made of carbon fiber and has 17,248 solar cells built into the wing that supply the plane with renewable energy, via four motors. The solar cells recharge four lithium polymer batteries, which provide power for night flying. The aircraft typically flies between 30 mph and 40 mph, although this can increase and decrease significantly depending on wind speed. Borschberg piloted Solar Impulse 2 on the previous leg of its journey, landing in Hawaii on July 3 2015 after an incredible 4,480-mile, five -day flight. The 118-hour journey shattered the record for longest solar-powered flight in terms of distance and duration, easily surpassing the 1,491-mile, 44-hour record Borschberg set when flying from China to Japan on the prior leg of the trip. Borschberg also broke the record for longest non-stop solo flight without refueling, which previously stood at 76 hours and 45 minutes. Related: Solar Impulse 2s epic journey in pictures The incredible solar-powered trek began in March 2015 when the plane flew from Abu Dhabi to Oman. Solar Impulse 2 then flew to India, Myanmar and Nanjing, China, en route to an unscheduled stop in Nagoya, Japan. The plane originally left Nanjing for Hawaii, but diverted to Japan because of unfavorable weather. After reaching California Solar Impulse 2 is slated to make stops in the midwest and New York before flying over the Atlantic Ocean. It will then stop in southern Europe or North Africa, depending on weather conditions, before ending its epic journey in Dubai. Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers The Associated Press contributed to this report. In the New Mexico desert last month, a rocket-powered magnetically-levitated sled broke a world record after it blasted down a track at 633 miles per hour, faster than the cruising speed of a 747. The test occurred at Holloman Air Force Base on a special 2100-foot track on March 4. Air Force video shows the one-ton vehicle rocketing down the track, a fiery, dusty plume behind it. We have a magnetically-levitated sled, where we use a very cold liquid helium to essentially levitate the sled via superconducting magnetics, Lt. Col. Shawn Morgenstern, the commander of the 846th Test Squadron, said in the video. Related: Lockheed is developing a fighter jet that will fly at six times the speed of sound The test today was significantly faster than any test that weve previously done, Morgenstern added. The Air Force said that the sled accelerated at a rate of 928 feet per second. Before this test, the sled had reached 513 mph. Magnetic levitation systems allow for vehicles to travel in a very low-friction environment, permitting incredibly fast speeds last year, a Japanese maglev train traveled at 374 mph. And Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, has proposed a system called the Hyperloop that would use a related technology to move people or cargo at breathtaking speeds. One billion dollars of electronic warfare tech will be amping up the Growler fighter jet. This week, the U.S. Navy awarded a $1 billion contract to Raytheon to build the Next Generation Jammer (NGJ). Chosen to replace the legacy ALQ-99 systems used on the EA-18G Growler, the NGJ is a cutting-edge electronic attack smart pod that will take the already-impressive Growler capabilities to an unprecedented level. The NGJ will play a vital role in staying ahead of adversaries capabilities. The tech will give the US military even greater power, further enhanced precision, and a faster response time for electronic attack and electronic warfare counter-measures. Related: This huge combat tractor is the ultimate multitasker To help thwart adversaries from targeting them, US forces can deploy jammers, making aircraft and troops invisible to enemy tech. Preventing detection enables effective strikes and helps keep American fighters safe. Jammers can also even be used to create phantom aircraft to mislead enemy forces into believing other aircraft are in the air. Growler The NGJ will enhance what is arguably the most advanced airborne electronic attack aircraft in the world: the EA-18G Growler. The Growler regularly provides tactical jamming and electronic protection to U.S. military forces and allies around the world. A variant of the F/A-18F Super Hornet, the aircraft combines electronic attack with fighter aircraft speed and maneuverability. Typically crewed with one pilot and one weapon systems officer, Growler can reach speeds of 1190 mph. Ahead of ground, maritime, and other aircraft teams, Growler can enter the fight first, unleashing a devastating electronic attack. Using electronic attack tech, the aircraft can suppress enemy air and ground defenses. Related: DARPA wants your weapon ideas, offers cash prizes By jamming enemy radar, the Growler helps both air crews and ground strike teams to reach their target without being detected. In addition to jamming the adversarys communications over a broad frequency range, the ALQ-227 Communications Countermeasures Set also allows the Growler to locate, record, and play back enemy transmissions. US forces need to work in heavily jammed environments. The Growler can unleash its Interference Cancellation System to defeat the jamming systems and ensure uninterrupted radio communications for ground, maritime, and air forces. Equipped with AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles, the Growler can protect itself as well as attack enemy aircraft. How does it work? Electronic warfare capabilities are shrouded in secrecy and the NGJ is no exception. In electronic warfare, radio waves, laser light or other directed energy are weaponized to disrupt, disable, or confuse the enemy's electronics. This type of capability also allows US forces to sense incoming missile radar, listen to adversaries radio signals, and more. Related: Inside the first-ever Special Ops Urban Assault competition Very few details have emerged about the NGJ, but heres what we know. NGJ will involve a combination of agile, high-powered beam-jamming techniques together with truly next gen solid-state electronics. Many of the Growlers jamming capabilities fit in the gun bay and in two wingtip pods. Next steps The military will receive 14 Growler aeromechanical pods for airworthiness certification as well as 15 Engineering Development Model pods for mission systems testing and qualification from Raytheon. The Navy is aiming for operational capability in 2021. Want to boost the social media profile of one of the most famous people on the planet? Then Buckingham Palace has just the job for you. The British monarchy is looking for someone to lead its digital engagement efforts, presenting an opportunity to tweet for the Queen. It's about never standing still and finding new ways to maintain The Queen's presence in the public eye and on the world stage, explains the job ad on the monarchys website. This is what makes working for the Royal Household exceptional. The ideal candidate has experience managing social media networks for a high profile organization, according to the ad, and knows how to design digital content for different audiences. Related: Twitter wins the rights to live stream Thursday night NFL games this fall Whether you're covering a state visit, award ceremony or royal engagement, you'll make sure our digital channels consistently spark interest and reach a range of audiences, the ad explains. The head of digital engagement will be based in Buckingham Palace and paid a salary between $65,000 and $72,000. Free lunches will be provided. The royal family has ramped up its social media presence in recent years. The British Monarchy Twitter account launched in April 2009 Queen Elizabeth sent her first personal tweet from the account in 2014 when she opened a gallery at Londons Science Museum. Related: JK Rowling tweeted some of her rejection letters to encourage new authors The British Monarchy, Kensington Palace and Clarence House have, respectively, 2.16 million, 630,000 and 533,000 followers on Twitter. Don't forget to tweet us your birthday wishes for The Queen using #Queenat90 #HappyBirthdayYourMajesty pic.twitter.com/zHG6SKhryt BritishMonarchy (@BritishMonarchy) April 20, 2016 Kensington Palace is the official London residence of Prince William, the Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry. Clarence House is the official London residence of Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall. The Queen joined Facebook in 2010 with the launch of the British Monarchy Facebook page, which has since racked up more than 2.6 million likes. The monarchy made its first Instagram post in 2013 the account now has 305,000 followers. Related: Twitter celebrates a decade of tweets Queen Elizabeths 90th birthday on Thursday is being celebrated in social media with the hashtag #Queenat90. The British sovereign and her family are not the only royals to harness the power of social media. When King Juan Carlos of Spain abdicated in 2014, the Spanish monarchy shared the news via Twitter. Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers A porcelain throne is about to get the royal treatment at one of New York City's most popular museums. On May 4, the Guggenheim Museum will install a fully functional, 18-karat solid gold toilet by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. The famed sculptor even came out of self-imposed retirement to create the gilded potty. But unlike many works of art, you can literally crap all over this one. The toilet will be hooked up to the plumbing in one of the museums public bathroom stalls so patrons can actually mark their territory. You can lock the door and have your experience, whether that be just looking at the toilet or using it, Guggenheim publicist Molly Stewart told the New York Daily News. Stewart said she believes the work, titled Maurizio Cattelan: America, will be the first time a usable toilet has been on display at the Guggenheim. Cattelan, who stopped working in 2011, said its not his job to tell people what the work really means but alluded to the idea of economic inequality as the inspiration for America in an interview with the New York Times. Theres the risk that people will think of it as a joke, maybe, but I dont see it as a joke, said Cattelan. I was born in a condition where I was how do you say? forced to think about that. Its not my job to tell people what a work means. But I think people might see meaning in this piece. The museum, however, has been more forward in its presentation of the piece explaining that the work makes available to the public an extravagant luxury product seemingly intended for the 1 percent. "Cattelans toilet offers awink to the excesses of the art market, but also evokes the American dream of opportunity for all, itsutility ultimately reminding us of the inescapable physical realities of our shared humanity," states a Guggenheim press release. The gilded toilet will replace one of the museums Kohler toilets in a unisex bathroom. Museum officials are expecting large crowds so the piece will have its own full-time security guard to monitor guest usage and check in occasionally to make sure the valuable toilet is not vandalized. Cattelan, who lives in Milan, is known for his satirical sculptures that incorporate elements of surrealism with historical figures. Passengers on a SpiceJet flight were forced to spend an entire night stuck in the airplane while it sat on the tarmac of an airport in Nagpur, India. According to the Times of India, SpiceJet Flight SG487 from Mumbai to Kolkata was forced to make an emergency landing Sunday night at Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar International Airport in Nagpur due to a technical issue. Unfortunately for passengers, the Nagpur airport is not on SpiceJets regular service list and had no support or ground staff on site when the plane landed. With the mechanic having to be flown to the aircrafts location, the 190 passengers onboard Flight SG487 were forced to stay inside the plane until the following morning. Instead of booking the passengers into a local hotel, they were not even granted airport access and instead were forced to stay on the plane. One of the passengers on the plane developed a heart issue and had to be rushed to a local hospital. On Monday morning, a Spicejet engineer finally arrived at the Nagpur airport, repaired the issue with the planewhich was not identified by the airlineand eventually cleared the aircraft to continue its journey. The plane departed for Kolkata a short time later with some very disgruntled passengers onboard. More from TravelPulse Inside the Wild Lives of TV and Film Shoot Travel Agents New Hotel Study Shows How Much Visitors Pay for Stays in U.S. Attention, Cruise Lines: Here's How to Make Internet Access Better Inside the Cruise Profile: Clara Oman, Disney Cruise Line Entertainer Travel Agents Soothe Terrorism Concerns For Worried Cruise Travelers An alleged trespasser was badly hurt Tuesday when a demolition crew razed a trailer in Michigan without knowing the man was inside. The crew stopped working on the property in Pontiac after the workers heard screams coming from the pile of rubble, The Detroit News reported. The injured man was identified only as a 59-year-old. The man suffered a few broken bones and a deep laceration to his head, the report said. He was treated at a nearby hospital. The construction workers reportedly had given several warnings to people who lived in the area, telling them to avoid the property. The city had hired the crew to clear abandoned homes. Workers first moved the trailer so it could be crushed and loaded onto a truck. Pontiac is about 30 miles northwest of Detroit. Click for more from Fox 2. The Associated Press contributed to this report. A foster mom in California -- who always envisioned herself raising boys -- took in six sisters after their biological mother determined that she could not provide for the girls. Lacey Dunkin, 32, of Fresno, was certified as a foster parent in 2011, ABC 30 reported. She thought her prospects of receiving a child were slim because she is single, but three months later she received a call about five sisters and she said yes, like, before she could finish talking. About nine months passed, and the girls were eventually returned to their biological mother. It reportedly took about one month for the biological mother to realize that she could not raise the girls and reached out to Dunkin about taking back the girls, with just one change: the woman had another baby, so could Dunkin take in six children? Dunkin agreed to adopt all five girls in July 2013, and later also took in the biological mother's sixth child. I want people to know that foster children are not bad, theyre not broken, Dunkin told Parents magazine. Children are resilient, and want and need a loving home. Dunkin lives with the six children: Sophia, twins Natalie and Melanie, Kaylee, Lea and Cecily, according to The Epoch Times. You dont set out to have six little girls, Dunkin told ABC 30. Im glad that it happened, Im so blessed. Surveillance video shows more than a dozen people doing nothing to help a Chicago bartender after he is attacked, left unconscious on the street and accidentally run over by a taxi, according to a newly filed lawsuit. Marques Gaines, 32, later died at a hospital. Gaines' family filed a wrongful death and negligence lawsuit against several businesses and taxi companies in his Feb. 7 death. The video the family released Wednesday shows a man outside a convenience store punching Gaines, who falls to the ground. Seconds after he hits the ground, two men run over and steal the contents in his pocket, Chris Hurley, the attorney representing the family told FoxNews.com. Literally seconds after he hits the ground, Hurley said. Its pathetic. The video shows people ignoring Gaines and walking by before a taxi runs over his body. Hurley said the stores security guard who witnessed the fight and called 911 failed to help Gaines who was lying in the street. Chicago police say detectives are investigating and that the cab driver was not cited at the scene. Relatives tell the Chicago Tribune they hope eyewitnesses will help identify the attacker. "It was gut-wrenching," Drexina Nelson, Gaines cousin told the Tribune. "We had heard over the course of these past few three months what happened, but to actually see it with our own eyes was devastating." Hurley said an official autopsy was not released but medical records indicate that Gaines died from the taxis impact and not the punch. FoxNews.com's Edmund DeMarche and the Associated Press contributed to this report Mariah Walton has been battling to stay alive since birth because of a heart defect doctors say could have been fixed if her parents had simply trusted modern medicine, and now she wants her mother and father to face justice. The 20-year-old Idaho woman can only hope for organ transplants that could save her life, even though they may do little to stem the bitterness she feels toward her parents over their hardcore fundamentalist beliefs. Walton's older sister, Emily, said their parents are Mormon, but practice beliefs out of step with the mainstream church, relying solely on prayer and rejecting medical care. Mariah Walton blames those beliefs for the fact her congenital heart defect went untreated in childhood. She's on some powerful medicines that are keeping her going but once they stop working she'll need a lung transplant and maybe a heart transplant. Emily Walton, speaking about her sister She's in pain or feeling ill about one-third of the time, Emily Walton, who lives with her sister in Boise, told FoxNews.com. She's on some powerful medicines that are keeping her going, but once they stop working she'll need a lung transplant and maybe a heart transplant. The case raises questions about religious freedom and medicine, a debate that played out within the Walton family two years ago when Mariah who had neither a birth certificate nor Social Security number threatened her father into taking her to a doctor for the first time. She learned that she was born with a hole in her heart and was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension and irreversible heart damage. According to medical professionals, the condition could have been corrected if treated earlier. The revelation prompted Walton to cut off contact with her parents and call for them to be criminally prosecuted, according to The Guardian. "Yes, I would like to see my parents prosecuted," she told the newspaper. "They deserve it -- and it might stop others." The possibility of prosecution is remote. Under Idahos 1972 Child Protective Act, parents are immune from prosecution for any charges including involuntary manslaughter and negligent homicide if they depend exclusively on faith healing. The law states that no child whose parent or guardian chooses for such child treatment by prayers through spiritual means alone shall be deemed for that reason alone to be neglected or lack parental care. What Mariah and Emily Walton hope they can accomplish is to raise awareness of the issue and build momentum for changing a law they believe allows children to needlessly suffer. I hope that people will learn that if you think something is wrong you should say something or do something even if it's scary or even if you're afraid, Emily Walton told FoxNews.com. Last year, a task force convened by Idaho Gov. Butch Otter raised questions about the impact religious exemptions under the 1972 law have on children, with a particular focus on a Pentecostal group known as the Followers of Christ sect. That 2,000-member group, which is based primarily in Idaho and Oregon and also rejects medical care, may be 10 times higher than the rest of the state, the task force determined. At least 11 minors whose parents belong to the small sect have reportedly died within the past five years from a slew of mostly preventable conditions, such as respiratory failure and disease, sepsis, chronic pneumonia, severe vomiting and diarrhea, bone infections associated with leukemia and even a case of severe food poisoning that led to a ruptured esophagus and later cardiac arrest. The Governors Task Force on Children at Risk's recommendation that, while religious freedoms must be protected, vulnerable children must also be appropriately protected from unnecessary harm and death, prompted a repeal bill. It died without so much as a hearing in the Legislature. Five other states, Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Ohio and West Virginia, also have faith-centered safeguards for felony crimes, including manslaughter. According to legal experts, the issue does indeed raise critical questions over where the line is drawn between the First Amendment, religious and parental rights, and child abuse and rights of the minors themselves. The U.S. Constitution requires that the government not interfere with religious practices or religious beliefs, yet this needs to be balanced with the governmental interest in protecting children, said criminal defense attorney Anahita Sedaghatfar. Oklahoma-based internist Dr. Larry Altshuler also told FoxNews.com that medical professionals often find themselves restricted in what treatment they can provide to children. In order to treat against the parents wishes, a court order is necessary but is often difficult to obtain due to issues of First Amendment rights, he said. In Oregon, where the Followers of Christ has a small following, lawmakers in 2011 repealed all religious exemptions for refusing medical care. The move followed public outcry after an 11-year-old boy died from untreated diabetes and the district attorney declined to prosecute his parents, who were members of the Followers of Christ. Just last year, the state of Washington also took steps to remove faith-based exemptions pertaining to criminal maltreatment of children and at-risk adults. Rick Ross, author of Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out, said Followers of Christ is socially isolated and largely monitored, and that members often characterize the questioning of their beliefs regarding medical care as persecution. Neither Followers of Christ officials nor Waltons parents could be reached for comment. But mainstream religious leaders say it is in most cases misguided to reject medical treatment, especially when children are at risk. While no one wants the government regulating their religious freedoms, there must be laws to protect against any form of religion that prevents a child from receiving care when there is the likelihood of imminent danger, said Jay Lowder, founder of Wichita Falls, Texas-based Jay Lowder Harvest Ministries. God heals people through doctors and medicine, said the Rev. Mark Turner, pastor of Family Ministry Nansemond River Baptist Church in Suffolk, Va. We should see doctors and modern medicine as another gift of God that he gives to all, Turner said. Scripture is full of examples of people using the medicinal techniques of the day, he said. Christianity stands for life in all its forms. Parents cannot hide behind the pretense of religion to harm, abuse, or neglect a child. In the meantime, Mariah Walton, who doesnt know if her next breath will be her last, vows to live life to the fullest. Emily who she lives with this week launched a GoFundMe page titled Mariahs Going to Paris in a bid to boost her ailing siblings quality of life. Mariah's condition means that she misses out on many fun things that young people get to do, Emily Walton said. And I want to make sure that she can have some fun and we can enjoy our time together while she's feeling up to it. Virginia authorities said Wednesday that a missing firefighter called out sick before not showing up to work last Friday, adding to the mysterious circumstances surrounding her disappearance. Nicole Mittendorff, 31, last made contact with her family on April 13 -- the same day she called out sick -- before being reported missing. Her car was found Saturday at Shenandoah National Park, launching a massive search. Fox 5 DC reported Wednesday that Mittendorff's family believes that her disappearance might have something to do with files she downloaded from her cellphone. Legal teams persuaded her phone carrier to hand over the files to authorities in hopes it will provide some indication into where Mittendorff may have gone. Her family said Mittendorff, an avid runner and triathlete, might have been training on a trail near where her car was found. As you can imagine, the pain of not knowing where a loved one is can be unbearable," the woman's husband, Steven Mittendorff, said Tuesday at a news conference. Fairfax County Fire Chief Richard Bowers urged anyone with information to come forward. "We want to focus on bringing Nicole home safely," he said at the news conference at the fire station where Mittendorff works, just across the Potomac River from the nation's capital. "This is our 911 call to the public." Virginia State Police said theyve received more than 100 tips related to Mittendorff's disappearance, while investigators are still working to develop a timeline from when she last made contact with her family to when officials found her car. Fox 5 DC reported that federal, state and volunteer teams have spent days scouring the park for any signs of Mittendorff. The TV station reported that federal money has also been given to the search effort. Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said there is no indication of foul play. She was also recently reassigned from Station 30 to Station 32 in Fairfax County, sources told the station. However, the fire department wouldnt confirm whether she was reassigned. On Tuesday, Bowers lavished praise on Mittendorff, a three-year veteran of the fire and rescue department. "She's dedicated, she's respected and she's well-liked among her peers and colleagues," he said. Mittendorff is described as a white female about 5-foot 6-inches, weighing 125 pounds. She has blonde hair and green eyes. Authorities urge anyone with information about her disappearance to call 703-803-0026 or #77 on a cellphone or email information to questions@vsp.virginia.gov. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Click for more from Fox 5 DC. In a time when marriage vows seemed made to be broken, James and Rita Wagar defied the norm. Their love is eternal -- James made sure of that. The proof -- as if proof was needed -- came to Rita on Tuesday in a package. Inside was a gold, heart-shaped necklace, the diamond-studded pendant engraved with her name and that of her beloved James. The 79-year-old New Jersey grandmother was confused: James, her husband of 55 years, had died weeks earlier in their Farmingdale, N.J., home, nearly five months after being diagnosed with a fast-moving incurable form of leukemia. In early March, doctors told the retired pharmaceutical executive that he only had a short time to live -- maybe days. Unbeknownst to his family, he immediately ordered the necklace, with the couple's names and birthstones, to be delivered to his Rita after his death. "He wanted to make sure that my mom got that after he was gone," Alba Flynn said of her father, whom she described as the "pillar of our family." "They had this love affair like no other, right up until the end," Flynn said. "When my mom saw the necklace, she said, 'I'll wear this forever. I'm never taking it off.'" After receiving his undergraduate business degree from Fordham University in 1956, James was drafted into the Army, and was honorably discharged in 1964. He went to work for Allstate Insurance Co., where he fell in love with a vivacious, brunette secretary named Rita Cosenza, a 23-year-old beauty whose father had emmigrated from Italy. The couple married on May 28, 1960, and had four children: Peter, Alba, Paul and Anthony. While meeting the demands of his young family, Wagar worked to get advanced degrees from New York University and Harvard. He would go on to become vice president and treasurer of Carter-Wallace Pharmaceuticals, where he retired from in 2001. "He provided for everybody," said the 52-year-old Flynn, of Colts Neck, N.J. "My father was Irish-American and my mother came from an Italian family that always put family first. He loved that about her," Flynn said. "He also loved her innocence." The couple's favorite pastime was visiting Florida and Disney World each year -- and bringing along their 10 grandchildren. Now that James is gone, Rita has moved into an assisted living home -- but in the gold heart hanging from her neck, her beloved is always near. "She doesn't speak of him like he's gone," Flynn said. Cristina Corbin is a reporter for FoxNews.com. Follow her on Twitter @CristinaCorbin. The Oklahoma City Thunder joined more than two dozen businesses, public universities and law enforcement groups Wednesday in opposing firearms bills that would allow most adults to openly carry guns without training or background checks. The groups sent a letter to Senate President Prop Tempore Brian Bingman urging him to halt the two bills. One of them passed late Wednesday on a 37-9 vote. The constitutional-carry bill would allow Oklahoma adults over 21 without a felony conviction to openly carry guns without a license, training or background checks. Those who wished to carry concealed would still be required to obtain a license. The bill is now scheduled to go to a conference committee for possible changes before it is considered again in the House and Senate. The groups letter expressed concern that the measures could jeopardize existing gun bans by private businesses, at public colleges and universities and at public events hosted at public parks or fairgrounds. "Until these issues can be addressed, we ask that these measures not move forward in the Senate," the letter states. Sen. David Holt, R-Oklahoma City, said the measures could have unforeseen consequences should it make it on the November ballot. History will show you that about 70 percent of the laws that have even been subjected to this legal standard have been thrown out as unconstitutional, Holt told KOKH-TV. Sen. Nathan Dahm, R-Broken Arrow, the author of the bill, has insisted that any existing bans on firearms would remain in place. But despite his reassurances, Holt is still concerned that the ban of firearms at places like the Chesapeake Area, where the Thunder play, would be thrown out as well. "The NBA, for example, does not allow guns in their games. If that got flipped on its head and suddenly guns had to be in the arena, if you wanted to bring your gun, the government could not stop you from bringing your gun, that would be very problematic, that would ultimately cause the Thunder to leave," he added. Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association is mobilizing its members to support the proposed constitutional amendment. The resolution seeks a public vote on whether to amend the Oklahoma Constitution to make it more difficult for the Legislature to regulate firearms and to prohibit laws requiring registration or special taxation of firearms or ammunition. "This resolution would allow Oklahomans to strengthen the state constitutional protections for gun rights," said NRA spokeswoman Catherine Mortensen. "This improved amendment would make it crystal clear that Oklahomans have the right to use a firearm for personal defense, hunting, and recreational shooting." Mortensen says similar constitutional amendments have been enacted in Alabama, Louisiana and Missouri, but a similar measure brought up in Texas last year was derailed after opposition from the business and law enforcement communities. Under current Oklahoma law, residents wishing to carry a firearm openly or concealed in public must obtain a gun license that includes a criminal and mental health background check and some firearms training. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Click for more from KOKH-TV. An insurance group said Wednesday the hailstorm that hit the San Antonio area last week cost nearly $1.4 billion in damages, the costliest in state history. The Insurance Council of Texas said grapefruit-sized hailstones caused about $560 million in estimated insured losses to motor vehicles, while damage to homes and businesses was expected to reach $800 million. Robert Crosby, executive director of Independent Insurance Agents of San Antonio, said uninsured losses were also expected to high. The $1.36 billion damage estimate beats the $1.1 billion in damage caused by a hailstorm that hit Fort Worth on May 5, 1995. The storm rained ice chunks that were as much as 4 inches in diameter for up to 10 minutes in some areas, the Houston Chronicle reported. The newspaper said the most expensive weather related event in state history was caused by Hurriance Ike in 2008. The storm produced $13.04 billion in damages. No injuries were reported in storm that pummeled northern San Antonio and northwestern Bexar County the night of April 12. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Poll: Getting Facts Right Key to Public Trust in Media | Main | Harvard Law Record Abandons the First of the Five Ws of Journalism April 20, 2016 HuffPo Gives Platform to Another Anti-Israel Screed The Huffington Post frequently features anti-Israel pieces. Now it is accusing Israel of abusing social media rights with an article headlined "Israel-Palestine: Social Media As a Tool Of Oppression.? The article opens: Late last year, Israeli police arrested and detained 15-year-old Tamara Abu Laban after storming her house. Tamaras crime? Updating her Facebook status with the words forgive me? in Arabic. In most places in the world, a cryptic, if not slightly dramatic post written by a teenage girl seeking likes? from her friends would hardly be cause for reaction. But if you are a Palestinian growing up in Occupied East Jerusalem like Tamara, even a vague and angsty? personal Facebook status may become grounds for arrest. Israeli authorities interpreted the post as expressing intent to carry out a violent act of resistance. No context is provided for why Israeli security would interpret the social media post that way. In fact, deadly attacks have been carried out by terrorists who post about them in advance. When the article tackles the issue of online incitement to violence, it quickly dismisses the idea that social media activity is connected to Palestinian terror: Israel alleges that the sharing of online videos played a critical role in the rise of violence in the final months of 2015. However, journalists and human rights organizations have spoken out against policies of censorship that violate freedom of speech. If HuffPo readers are concerned with freedom of speech on social media, the site should publish articles about the fact that the Palestinian Authority has jailed journalists and others for insulting PA President Mahmoud Abbas. The article also promotes the meme that Israel is unfairly blocking Palestinian entrance to al-Aqsa mosque: In 2015 online activists saw their hashtags, photos and videos being shared worldwide and often getting picked up by mainstream foreign media. For example, one of the hashtags trending on Palestinian social media in the months before the October uprising was #it_will_not_be_divided, which aimed to bring attention to Israeli policies preventing Palestinian men and women from entering al-Aqsa Mosque during August and September. Such measures are matters of security. CAMERA described how organized groups of Palestinian men and women were harassing tourists and visitors to the Temple Mount. As Haaretz reported, The activity is inflammatory and endangers tourists, visitors and worshippers at the site, leading to violence that could harm human life. The goal of [these groups] is to undermine Israeli authority on Temple Mount, alter reality and existing arrangements and restrict freedom of worship, and it is tied to the activity of hostile Islamist organizations and even directed by them.? Unfortunately, incitement by Palestinian political, religious and cultural leaders particularly regarding the Temple Mount has indeed been a factor in the ongoing wave of terror attacks on Jews and others being carried out in Israel. Multiple times, the Huffington Post article provides links to reports by the International Middle East Media Center --a source that CAMERA has exposed as not credible-- which refer to Israels detentions of suspicious persons as kidnappings.? HuffPo allows this blatantly unbalanced outlet to be cited as a legitimate source. The article also references the anti-Israel NGO Addameer, which the article describes as a Palestinian human rights NGO that works to support political prisoners.? In fact, as NGO Monitor reveals, Addameer has frequently contributed to the wholesale demonization and delegitimization of Israel on the world stage. The article is penned by Nadim Nashif, a frequent contributor of anti-Israel articles to Huffington Post and a regular writer for The Electronic Intifada, a news site? whose anti-Israel rhetoric and propagation of falsehoods has been extensively documented by CAMERA. Nashifs Huffington Post bio describes him as an educator of Arab youth and the founder/director of Baladna which, according to the Huffington Post, aims to give Arab Palestinian youth in Israel the skills and resources to effect positive changes in their communities and society.? As CAMERA has reported Baladna encourages its Arab youth to segregate themselves from the Israeli population, in campaigns that, for example, urge Arab teens to spurn volunteering for the IDF because it is a branch of the occupation army, which has always acted against the Arab-Israeli population and the Palestinian people in general.? The articles blatant lack of balance and rejection of the irrefutable evidence that terrorism is incited and encouraged by Palestinian leaders and lay people through social media is nothing new, as CAMERA has covered numerous times (for example, here and here). Why doesn't HuffPo insist that their journalists report facts, not fictions? --Rachel Frommer, CAMERA Intern Posted by SC at April 20, 2016 08:38 PM "violent act of resistance" is very much the kind of language used by those attempting to legitimise terrorism so disturbing to see in what is a quite mainstream outlet. It would be interesting to know why the Israeli authorities really went to Abu Laban's house, to force Huff-Po into correcting. Posted by: Rob Harris at April 21, 2016 06:20 AM Guidelines for posting This is a moderated blog. We will not post comments that include racism, bigotry, threats, or factually inaccurate material. Post a comment Authorities in Washington state are searching for a 16-year-old who vanished Tuesday evening on his way to a church youth group meeting, Q13Fox.com reported. Tyler Christensen was last seen at about 6:30 p.m. in the Beverly Park area in Mukilteo, which is north of Seattle. He never arrived at the meeting and he never returned home. His family reported his disappearance around 3:15 a.m. on Wednesday. Christensen has no runaway history and his disappearance is considered suspicious because he has strong ties to his family and church, the sheriffs office said. The teen is homeschooled and is 5'11", 145 pounds. He has blue eyes and light brown hair in a buzz cut, investigators say. Click for more from Q13 Fox. The Donald Trump campus chalking conspiracy continues. The University of Wisconsin Lacrosse is the latest campus where messages touting the polarizing developer's presidential bid were taken as "micro-aggressions" by college students apparently seeking shelter from disparate political beliefs. "All Lives Matter," "Build the wall" and "Stop Illegal Immigration" were among the messages inscribed in chalk around the grounds earlier this month, prompting the school to send its "Hate Response Team" to investigate, according to EAGnews.org. The investigative group even posted a message on its Facebook page to quell the worries of the student body. "While we respect peoples right to express their opinions, we also recognize that some communities on campus experience these messages as discriminatory or hostile, read the message. All manifestations of prejudice and intolerance are contradictory to our mission as a university. If you experience any bigotry on or off campus, please turn to trusted friends and/or campus resources for support. Again, please remember that members of our Hate Response Team are here to support the individual and collective impacted by hate/bias and to stand up against all forms of oppression. The HRT has also encouraged the student body at UW-LaCrosse to file reports on any micro-agressions or hate crimes they encounter. Pro-Trump chalk messages have appeared on college campuses at Emory University, in Atlanta, Depaul University in Chicago, University of California San Diego and other schools around the country. "The episodes at Emory and other campuses illustrate the power of a humble stick of chalk, a utensil used by college students for decades," the New York Times reported in a story about the phenomenon that ran on April 1. Click here for more from a EAGnews.org. next Image 1 of 3 prev next Image 2 of 3 prev Image 3 of 3 A force of 1,000 soldiers and police officers is being deployed to fight gangs in rural areas of El Salvador, the government said Wednesday. El Salvador's street gangs are mainly an urban phenomenon, but in the face of government raids, gang members have been operating more in rural areas and on the outskirts of cities in recent months. Police commissioner Marco Tulio Lima said the force will go after an estimated 100 leaders of the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 gangs. The force will operate with helicopters, night-vision devices and machine guns. The gangs are also believed to have heavy armament. El Salvador's murder rate reached 103 homicides for every 100,000 residents last year. The government blames the gangs, which have expanded their territory. An explosion killed 13 people and injured scores at a petrochemical plant on Mexico's southern Gulf coast, forcing evacuations as a fire billowed a huge toxin-filled cloud into the air. The head of Mexico's civil defense agency, Luis Felipe Puente, wrote in his Twitter account Thursday that emergency personnel had been able to enter the burned-out plant and found 10 more cadavers. Three workers had been reported dead immediately following the blast Wednesday afternoon. The state oil company, Petroleos Mexicanos, said 136 workers had been hurt in the blast in the industrial port city of Coatzacoalcos. Eighty-eight of the injured remained hospitalized. The director of Petroleos Mexicanos told the Radio Formula station that 13 of the injured were in serious condition, and said the death toll could rise. Jose Antonio Gonzalez Anaya said the blast "was caused by a leak. ... We don't know how that leak occurred." Veracruz state Gov. Javier Duarte earlier told Radio Formula that the blast was felt as far as 6 miles (10 kilometers) away, adding that more than 2,000 people were evacuated from the area as a precaution. Pemex reported the fire under control late Wednesday, but initially urged people to stay away from the area as a precaution. "The cloud that emanated from the PMV plant in Coatzacoalcos is dissipating rapidly, which means it is losing its toxic effects," it said via its Twitter account. The company later said there was no longer any danger to people nearby. Still, local officials canceled classes at area schools for Thursday. Pemex said explosion occurred in the Clorados 3 plant of Petroquimica Mexicana de Vinilo. It said the plant is operated by another company, Mexichem, in partnership with Pemex. The plant produces vinyl chloride, a hazardous industrial chemical that is used to make PVC pipes and for other purposes. The Veracruz state Health Department said in a statement that two patients were in grave condition Wednesday night from burns to their air passages from toxic gases. Others were treated for minor burns, contusions and broken bones. There have been a number of accidents in recent years at facilities owned by Pemex or where it operates. In early February, a fire killed a worker at the same facility. Also in February, two people were killed and eight injured in a fire on an offshore Pemex platform in the Gulf of Mexico. A tug-of-war is being waged at the World Intellectual Property Organization to decide if 188 member nations will ever get to read a United Nations report on alleged wrongdoing by Francis Gurry, the agencys autocratic director general, who has been accused among other things of ordering illegal break-ins of the offices of his own staffers. So far the answer is no, even though the official report by the U.N.s Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), into possible illegal behavior by Gurry, has been in the hands of one WIPO dignitary for weeks. Gurry has denied the charges, calling them without foundation. As a result, frustration is building among curious countries, including the United States, which are being stonewalled in their attempts to obtain the full story of what the report says -- a process made worse by dense barricades of U.N. bureaucratic process that also stand in the way. A State Department official delicately told Fox News on Wednesday that we continue to reiterate the need for maximum transparency -- including the handover of the report -- to resolve questions about Gurrys actions that have caused upheaval for months at low-profile WIPO, which is a gatekeeper to the worlds treasure-trove of patents. The same State Department official said, we are not going to speak for other member states who might be demanding full disclosure, but added, we are not alone in our belief in the need for transparency, including access to the report. No diplomat said it, but behind the invocation of transparency, the real issue is whether -- or how much -- that full document matches up with a heavily edited and compressed excerpt handed over in closed briefing sessions to clusters of the countries over the past few weeks, the only version they have been allowed to see. The two-page redacted version, obtained by Fox News, purportedly clears Gurry of ordering the illegal 2008 break-ins of the offices of his own staffers, who he suspected had written anonymous letters against him. Gurry was seeking WIPOs top job at the time, which he gained the same year. It does find him guilty of comparatively petty interference in a procurement bid involving an acquaintance where he made no illicit gain. The digested version issues a vague recommendation that might lead to no more than a wrist-slap, if anything, by the official who issued the highly edited document in the first place: a Colombian diplomat named Gabriel Duque, who is currently serving as the Chair of WIPOs General Assembly. Indeed, the wording in the redacted version suggests only that the Chair consider taking any such action. CLICK HERE FOR THE REDACTED PAGES Duque has not responded to a series of questions by Fox News about the redacted report, whether he created it, and whether he had taken any suggestions or comments from Gurry himself in preparing the redacted version. (Under OIOS protocols, Gurry would have been presented with those findings prior to publication.) Intriguingly enough, the investigating agency, OIOS, itself declined to answer a Fox News question as to whether the wording of the redacted document adequately and truthfully reflects the conclusions of the full report as OIOS finalized it. Ben Swanson, the acting head of the OIOS investigations division, told Fox News that the report is now a WIPO internal document, and that in the circumstances, I feel that it would be inappropriate to comment. The wording of the highly-selective redacted version itself, however, raises more questions about the charges than it seemingly intends to answer. Among other things, while it notes that there are strong indications that Mr. Gurry had a direct interest in the outcome of analyzing the purloined DNA, it says there is no evidence that he was involved in the taking of the DNA samples. The initial charges against Gurry, however, which were formally raised a year ago by one of his top deputies, didnt accuse him of taking the DNA. Instead, they said it was likely that Gurry directed other officials to collect the material, which was subsequently handed over to Swiss police to begin criminal investigation. Nothing about the Swiss investigation, including any information on who actually handed over the DNA samples, and under what circumstances, appears in the redacted report either. Beyond these issues is a much broader question: of whether the ostensible owners of a U.N. agency like WIPO, the member states who make up its main lawmaking authority, can be stymied from looking at a confidential report that has fundamental implications for their own agency. It is a battle that several U.N. agencies have fought in the past ten years, usually in the course of a major scandal, and in most cases the member states have won at least partial victories, often after long and drawn-out battles. In this case, the U.S. still says only we look forward to hearing from Ambassador Duque regarding next steps. George Russell is editor-at-large of Fox News and can be found on Twitter: @GeorgeRussell or on Facebook.com/GeorgeRussell Israeli police on Thursday confirmed that a 19-year-old Palestinian man carried out a bus bombing in Jerusalem this week, as the Islamic militant group Hamas praised the man as a "martyr" for the attack. Police identified the attacker as Abdel Hameed Abu Srour, a resident of the West Bank city of Beit Jala. Police said he was critically wounded in the bombing and died Wednesday in an Israeli hospital. About 20 people were injured in the bombing, some seriously, including a teenage girl who suffered severe burns. A hospital spokeswoman confirmed Wednesday one man later died, but did not name him. In an announcement on one of its websites, Hamas said Abu Srour was a member of the group but stopped short of claiming responsibility for the attack. Israeli police said they arrested Hamas members a day after the attack who are suspected of planning and executing the attack, which was reminiscent of the grisly suicide bombings that hit Jerusalem and other cities during the Palestinian uprising over a decade ago. The blast came amid a seven-month wave of Palestinian assaults -- mostly stabbings, shootings and car ramming attacks -- that has killed 28 Israelis and two Americans. At least 190 Palestinians, the majority said by Israel to be attackers, have been killed during the same time.Israel says the violence is fueled by a campaign of Palestinian incitement compounded on social media sites that glorify and encourage attacks. Palestinians say the violence is due to a lack of hope for gaining independence after years of failed peace efforts. While President Obama was preparing to head to Saudi Arabia earlier this week, Iran launched a new long-range rocket but it did not accomplish the rogue nation's goal of putting a satellite into orbit, a U.S. official confirmed to Fox News on Thursday. The Pentagon is concerned the components Iran uses to put a missile into space are the same ones used for an potential long-range strike against the West in the future. Last month the secretive regime reportedly tested missiles featuring the phrase "Israel must be wiped out" scrawled on them in Hebrew. Iran has launched a series of rockets into orbit within the past year. The State Department claims such launches do not violate the nuclear deal signed with the U.S. and other Western nations, but are inconsistent with U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231, which was tied to the nuclear deal when it went into effect. The resolution states Iran cannot "undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology." "If it's true, and we're talking about a ballistic missile launch or the testing of ballistic missile technologies, that's obviously of concern to us," State Dept. spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Wednesday. The vehicle launched on Tuesday was a Simorgh rocket, The Washington Free Beacon reports. In 2010, then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad first unveiled the rocket to the public. Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson contributed to this report. Click for more from The Washington Free Beacon. A Christian woman's fateful and defiant stance in front of a bulldozer last week evoked the memory of Tiananmen Square and has become a rallying cry against persecution at the hands of the Beijing government. The woman, identified by Christian activists as Ding Cuimei, wife of the Rev. Li Jiangong, was trying to stop the government-ordered demolition of Beitou Church in the central Hena province city of Zhumadian. Unlike the iconic man who brazenly stopped a tank in the 1989 uprising, Ding was pushed into a ditch and buried alive as horrified congregants watched helplessly. Bury them alive for me, a member of the demolition team said according to a report by China Aid, a nonprofit focused on human rights and religious freedom in the worlds most populous country. I will be responsible for their lives. The government wants to contain the growth of Christianity. Bob Fu, China Aid The grim incident underscores the Chinese governments increasing persecution of religious minorities, say advocates. Thousands of churches across the country have been demolished in the past year, and dozens of pastors have been arrested on trumped up corruption charges, according to nonprofit groups that monitor the situation. There was a time where they [Christians] were being recognized as productive members of society. The government treated them fairly, David Curry, president and CEO of Christian advocacy group Open Doors USA told FoxNews.com. But that has changed. China has the goal of nationalizing Christians. A little more than 5 percent of China's 1.4 billion people are believed to be Christians. Curry said the Chinese government appears determined to lower the profile of the church. The effort takes varied forms, from rezoning church properties to allow for demolition, as in the case of the April 14 incident in which Ding was killed, to forcing pastors to meet weekly with local officials to explain their sermons, said Curry. It has had a chilling effect on religious freedom in China, Curry said. Two demolition workers were arrested in the death of Ding. Her husband, who was also pushed into the ditch but managed to crawl out, has allegedly been warned not to discuss the case. The incident underscores the serious violations against religious freedom in China that have occurred since President Xi Jinping took office in 2013, said Bob Fu, president and founder of China Aid. He has taken a strong ideological turn to create a new cultural revolution, Fu said. He [Xi] has really turned against the independent churches and any independent social movements. The government wants to contain the growth of Christianity. More than 2,000 churches in southern China have been forced to remove crosses from their exteriors in the last year alone, according to Fu. Most had operated freely and with government permission for decades, he said. Fu estimated that more than 500 activists and lawyers have been detained in the last year, with many still imprisoned. There is some resistance, but it is mostly passive, he said. There is not much the people can do in terms of going against the government. Satellite images reveal North Korea may have restarted a tunnel-excavating project at its main nuclear test site signaling that another major launch could be on the way, a key monitoring website says. The 38 North website, run by Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, said the activity could be carried out as preparations for another test, Reuters reported Thursday. North Koreas last nuclear test was in January. The website showed two images of small ore carts on a track crossing a road from a tunnel entrance at the Punggye-ri test site. "The presence of the two carts ... and the absence of any notable changes in the spoil pile suggests that tunnel excavation operations are about to resume, or have recently resumed, for the first time this year," the website said. "These activities by themselves do not establish that test preparations are imminent. However, the possibility of an impending test cannot be ruled out. A South Korean official declined to comment on the new images but said the military is alert over the possibility of more North Korean nuclear tests, Reuters reports. A U.S. diplomat for the region warned Tuesday that future tests could trigger new sanctions against North Korea. The reclusive country has vowed to conduct more nuclear tests, but suffered an embarrassing setback last week after its new intermediate-range ballistic missile exploded on launch. Click for more from Reuters. Russia's ambassador to NATO accused the U.S. Wednesday of trying to intimidate Moscow by sailing a Navy destroyer in the Baltic Sea, and vowed Russia would respond to future incidents with "all necessary measures." Alexander Grushko spoke following a meeting of the NATO-Russia council in Brussels, the first in nearly two years. The meeting, which involved Grushko and ambassadors from NATO's 28 member states, ran over its allotted time by about 90 minutes, but produced no major breakthroughs. "It's better to talk than not to talk," Grushko told reporters, before adding that relationships between NATO and Russia would not improve "without real steps on NATO's side to downgrade military activity in the area adjacent to the Russian Federation." Reuters reported that U.S. ambassador to NATO Douglas Lute pressed Grushko about the April 11 incident in which two Russian Su-24 attack aircraft buzzed the USS Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea. The destroyer was conducting flight operations with a Polish helicopter when the jets came within 1,000 yards of the destroyer at a height of 100 feet. The following day, a Russian jet came within just 30 feet of the destroyer. "We were in international waters," Lute told Grushko before reiterating that the incident had been dangerous, Reuters reported. U.S. officials told Fox News last week that they believed the incident breached a 1972 agreement meant to prevent such near-misses from occurring. Grushko insisted that the Russian aircraft "were acting fully in line" with international agreements Grushko told reporters the USS Cook's presence in the Baltic was a NATO attempt "to exercise military pressure on Russia", then added, "we will take all necessary measures, precautions, to compensate for these attempts to use military force." Secretary of State John Kerry said last week that under U.S. rules of engagement, the Cook could have opened fire on the planes. The Russian jets did not appear to be armed at the time. The NATO-Russia Council was founded in 2002 as a forum for consultations between the former Cold War foes, but before Wednesday, had last met in June 2014, when the Kremlin's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine sent relations with the West into a tailspin. NATO has suspended practical cooperation with Russia because of the Crimean annexation and what it views as Russia's support for the armed insurgency in eastern Ukraine. "NATO and Russia have profound and persistent differences," NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, who chaired the council, told reporters afterward. "Today's meeting didn't change that." The Associated Press contributed to this report. Click for more from Reuters. Queen Elizabeth II Britain's oldest and longest-serving monarch was celebrating her 90th birthday Thursday with a day at home with the dogs, a short walk to greet well-wishers and a family party, as the nation paid tribute to her service and stamina. Her government and subjects held gun salutes, fireworks and speeches in Parliament in the queen's honor, and televised retrospectives offered scenes from a royal life that has stretched from the Roaring '20s to the Internet age. "Her Majesty has been steadfast a rock of strength for our nation, for our Commonwealth and on many occasions for the whole world," declared British Prime Minister David Cameron He said the queen "has lived through some extraordinary times," from World War II to the moon landing, the end of the Cold War and the advent of peace in Northern Ireland. Cameron led tributes Thursday in the House of Commons to the monarch and her "unshakable sense of duty," pointing out that the queen had provided counsel to 12 British prime ministers and met a quarter of all the U.S. presidents in history. At dusk, the Parliament building will be lit up in the red, white and blue of the Union Jack. Born Princess Elizabeth on April 21, 1926, she became queen at 25 upon the death of her father, King George VI, in 1952. A majority of Britons have lived under no other monarch. The queen spent the day at Windsor Castle, leaving to greet well-wishers on a walk through the town west of London. Hundreds had lined up hours beforehand, carrying cakes, cards, balloons and Union Jack flags. The band of the Coldstream Guards played "Happy Birthday" and royal fans snapped cellphone photos as the queen, clad in pale green, greeted local dignitaries, townspeople and tourists. "She's such an icon and a real role model for the children of today. And I think everybody should respect her for all the years that she's given for her country," said Donna Werner, an American tourist from New Fairfield, Connecticut. Later, the queen will light the first in a chain of 1,000 beacons to blaze across Britain and around the world, before attending a private family party at the castle. Elsewhere, the day was being marked with an eruption of pomp. Artillery companies fired gun salutes from sites including Hyde Park and the Tower of London, and the bells of Westminster Abbey rang out in celebration. Prince Charles, the 67-year-old heir to the throne, recorded a tribute to his mother for broadcast on the BBC World Service. He recited a passage from William Shakespeare's "Henry VIII" about the birth of the monarch's predecessor, Queen Elizabeth I: "She shall be, to the happiness of England, An aged princess; many days shall see her, And yet no day without a deed to crown it." Buckingham Palace issued three portraits by American photographer Annie Leibovitz to mark the day. One shows the queen surrounded by seven young grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The queen cradles 11-month-old Princess Charlotte in her lap, while Mia Tindall 2-year-old daughter of the queen's granddaughter Zara Phillips and her husband Mike Tindal stands clutching the monarch's black handbag. Another shows the queen with Princess Anne, her only daughter. The third shows her on the steps of Windsor Castle with four of her beloved dogs: corgis Willow and Holly and dorgis (corgi-dachshund crossbreeds) Vulcan and Candy. The queen will receive more birthday greetings on Friday, when she hosts U.S. President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle Obama for lunch at Windsor Castle. But not everyone in Britain was succumbing to royal-mania. The anti-monarchist group Republic published a resolutely undeferential message headed "Happy Birthday Mrs. Windsor." "A long life is no reason for a long reign," it said. A Super Sweet Deal: Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Celebrates Super Hero Day with Free Doughnuts WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - April 21, 2016 - (BUSINESS WIRE) - Doughnuts save the day! Krispy Kreme Doughnuts today announced a sweet way to celebrate the Super Heroes in your life. Customers who buy a dozen Original Glazed doughnuts at regular menu price will get another dozen Original Glazed doughnuts absolutely free at participating U.S. shops on April 28. Sometimes all it takes is a delicious sweet treat to show appreciation for those in our lives who impact us in both big and small ways, said Tony Thompson, President and CEO of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. There really are super heroes all around us, and this is the perfect way to spread joy and celebrate those heroes. Costumes are not required, just super encouraged. Share your super hero moment with your sidekicks using #KrispyKreme. Not valid with any other coupon or offer. Valid only at participating U.S. shops. About Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc., is a global retailer of premium-quality sweet treats, including its signature Original Glazed doughnut. Headquartered in Winston-Salem, N.C., the Company has offered the highest-quality doughnuts and great-tasting coffee since it was founded in 1937. Krispy Kreme Doughnuts is proud of its Fundraising program, which for decades has helped non-profit organizations raise millions of dollars in needed funds. Krispy Kreme Doughnuts can be found in approximately 12,000 grocery, convenience and mass merchant stores in the U.S. The Company has more than 1,000 retail shops in 25 countries. Connect with Krispy Kreme Doughnuts atwww.KrispyKreme.com, or on one its many social media channels, including www.Facebook.com/KrispyKreme, and www.Twitter.com/KrispyKreme. SOURCE Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Contact: Sarah Roof Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Corporate Communications Coordinator 336-726-8878 sroof@krispykreme.com ### Comments: Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus Attitude Beer Announces Opening Date for Third World of Beer Location Cambridge Location Set to Open in Second Half of June NORTH PALM BEACH, FL - (Marketwired - Apr 20, 2016) - Attitude Beer Holding Co., "The Company" (OTCBB: HVCW), temporarily referenced on the OTC Markets as Harrison, Vickers and Waterman Inc. since its merger with the public entity, updated shareholders on the progress of its new World of Beer tavern opening in Cambridge, Massachusetts (located in the Greater Boston area). The Company plans to open the location in the second half of June 2016. Construction began earlier this year in February. The Company has already retained a General Manager for the location and is in the process of hiring staff. This will be the third World of Beer franchise location for the Attitude Beer Holding Co., with West Hartford and Milford Connecticut being the other two. "Cambridge could be our most successful location yet," said Company CEO Roy Warren. "Located near two of the largest colleges in the region, Cambridge has its fair share of craft beer enthusiasts and our World of Beer franchise should be a perfect fit." Cambridge is situated directly north of the city of Boston, across the Charles River. The city is home to two of the world's most prominent universities, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Other Locations After its first fiscal year of operation, the Company's 4,000 sq. foot West Hartford World of Beer location generated higher than expected revenues, recording $3.4 million dollars. The Milford location is also well placed, right off of the heavily trafficked I-95, in a popular mall. Revenues and earnings are expected to match or exceed West Hartford location. Craft beer, which is World of Beer's main draw, is most popular amongst millennials (18-33) and gen-xers (34-50). Approximately 40% of Milford, Connecticut's population is in this age range, which is a large potential market for the new location. About HVCW Attitude Beer Holding Co., currently trading under the symbol: HVCW - temporarily referenced on the OTC Markets as Harrison, Vickers and Waterman Inc. since its merger with the public entity - has established a joint venture with New England WOB, LLC ("NEWOB") and Southeast Florida Craft, LLC ("SFC") to develop select World of Beer franchised locations in the state of Connecticut, greater Boston area and Dade and Broward counties in southeast Florida. HVCW represents the only way to invest in the rapidly growing World of Beer franchise. For more about HVCW: visit: www.attitudebeer.com About World of Beer Since opening its first tavern in Tampa, Florida in 2007, WOB has grown to 70 locations in 18 states. What began as a neighborhood tavern to sample great craft beers and swap beer-talk for co-founders Scott Zepp and Matt LaFon is becoming a unique cultural phenomenon celebrating the world of craft beers, great food and camaraderie. Centered on a diverse selection of local and global craft beers, delicious "tavern fare" and live music, WOB offers the best craft variety on the planet to the beer aficionado and casual beer fan alike. SOURCE World of Beer Contact: Roy G. Warren CEO Attitude Beer, Inc. roy@attitudebeer.com www.attitudebeer.com ### Comments: Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus Image One USA Launches First Location in Colorado Wes Schuchman joins the commercial cleaning business with new Denver location DENVER, COLORADO (PRWEB) April 20, 2016 - Image One USA continues its nationwide expansion by establishing its fourth affiliate location in just seven months. This time, the commercial cleaning company is setting roots in the Rocky Mountain State. Wes Schuchman is leading the charge at the new Denver-based Image One, and says hes encouraged by the number of businesses in need of the commercial cleaning service he provides. Ive lived in Denver for 20 years and I love it here, but there is a serious lack of commercial cleaning services available, Schuchman said. Not only can Image One benefit customers in the area just by being a commercial cleaning company, but the services we provide are on the leading edge of this industry and only getting better. As a former commercial cleaning franchise owner, Schuchman said Image Ones commitment to enhance the company and the industry is what attracted him in the first place. The importance the franchise company places on family values and franchisee support is what made his decision to join the team an easy one. Theres very much a family feel at Image One that shows the importance they put on supporting their affiliates, Schuchman said. The system Image One has developed isnt just hot air. They are who they say they are, and they care about their franchisees. In my experience with other commercial cleaning franchises, that isnt always the case. With nearly 100 franchise owners across the United States, and a newly launched franchise affiliate program that provides additional opportunities for owners, Image One continues to expand its name and business model. Additional owner-operated locations are available across other markets in the Midwest and Southeast. Image One USA offers the low-cost commercial cleaning franchise to driven individuals who want to make a difference and grow their own business. About Image One USA Image One USA is a commercial cleaning services business. The Image One franchising model was formed on the principles of transparency, training, and top-notch financial and customer service support. In a 2015 Franchise Business Review survey measuring franchisee satisfaction, Image One received high ratings from franchisees, including a 4.3 out of a possible 5 rating in the Core Values category. Image One franchisees work for themselves in a unique relationship with Image One. Image One provides them with customer support for their business, ongoing training, along with assistance with billing, equipment, and insurance coverage. Image One has more than 80 commercial cleaning franchise locations throughout the Midwest. Immediate franchise and affiliate expansion plans call for locations across Texas, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Iowa. For more information on franchising, visit imageonefranchise.com, call (630) 616-1010 or email Director of Franchising Scott Kochanski at scott@imageoneusa.com. SOURCE Image One USA Contact: Bob Spoerl TopFire Media +1 708.249.1090 ### Comments: Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus Mellow Mushroom Showcases Its Art Experience at Sweetwater 420 Fest Mellow Mushroom Pizza Bakers invites Sweetwater 420 Fest patrons to experience its Art Experience. ATLANTA, GA. (PRWEB) April 21, 2016 - For the second year in a row, Mellow Mushroom will have an art experience at the Sweetwater 420 Fest at Centennial Park in Atlanta, GA, from Friday, April 22, till Sunday, April 24. Mellow invites guests to come in to take part in a community art project called the Mellow Mushroom Art Experience. This year, guests can watch artists hand paint rain barrels, which will be auctioned off at an upcoming event, with proceeds donated to the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper organization. Guests can also help color in a Community Coloring Book, a triptych of panels designed by artist Ben Boling; the fully colored adult coloring book panel will also be auctioned off for charity. VP of Brand Development Annica Kreider says, Mellow has a longstanding commitment to supporting artists, the community we serve and sustainability initiatives, so the Mellow Mushroom Art Experience is the perfect way to bring it all together in a fun, interactive way with the 420 Fest guests. Featured rain barrel artists include Patrick Stacey, Briana Serna, Steven Sams, Dirk Hays, Kate Emery, Erin Plew and Corey Barksdale. The artists hail from all over Georgia as well as Kentucky and Florida. Festival goers who come by the Art Experience will also receive details on how to get a $4.20 small cheese pizza at Mellow Mushroom restaurant locations. Guests can follow the creativity on Snapchat by friending MELLOWHQ. Chattahoochee Riverkeeper (CRK) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and preserving the Chattahoochee River, its lakes and tributaries for the people, fish and wildlife that depend upon them. Learn more about Chattahoochee Riverkeeper at https://chattahoochee.org/. Founded 12 years ago as an Earth Day environmental celebration, SweetWater 420 Fests eco-friendly focus grows stronger each year. Get tickets for the Sweetwater 420 Fest by visiting http://www.sweetwater420fest.com/. Mellow Mushrooms menu showcases natural flavors and the freshest of ingredients in a creative menu, featuring an assortment of pizzas, hoagies, salads, calzones and appetizers, as well as vegetarian and vegan options. A gluten free crust and a kids menu are also available. Apparel was the cornerstone of Mellows marketing when the restaurant began in 1974 in Atlanta, Georgia. About Mellow Mushroom Pizza Bakers Mellow Mushroom Pizza Bakers (http://www.mellowmushroom.com) was founded in 1974 in Atlanta, Georgia. This franchise, operated under Home-Grown Industries of Georgia, Inc., is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. For 41 years, Mellow Mushroom Pizza Bakers has been serving up fresh, stone-baked pizzas to order in an eclectic, art-filled, and family-friendly environment. Each Mellow is locally owned and operated and provides a unique feel focused around great customer service and high-quality food. For more information on Mellow Mushroom Pizza Bakers, like us on Facebook at http://facebook.com/mellowmushroom, follow us on Twitter athttps://twitter.com/MellowMushroom and follow us on Pinterest at https://pinterest.com/mellowmushroom. SOURCE Mellow Mushroom Pizza Bakers Contact: Annica Kreider Mellow Mushroom +1 (404) 665-7345 ### Comments: Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus Nestle Toll House Cafe by Chip Makes Mothers Day Gifting a Cake Walk! Dads and grads will love them, too! April 21, 2016 // Franchising.com // DALLAS, TX Looking for the perfect way to share your love with the special ladies in your life this Mothers Day? Look no further! Nestle Toll House Cafe by Chip is making Mothers Day gift decisions a cake walk this year with its wide array of customized, hand-decorated cookie cakes available at more than 100 bakery cafes across the United States, and Canada. Guests may order all of the brands popular, freshly baked confections through the Nestle Toll House Cafe mobile app, available for download free at NestleCafe.com, Google Play and iTunes. Members of the Cookie Dough Rewards program will also earn points toward loyalty rewards offered by the cafe. In a hurry? Every cookie cake ordered online or via the app is guaranteed to be made and decorated in 30 minutes, or its free! Grads and dads, we love you, too! So the same promise applies for graduation parties and Fathers Day. As an even sweeter treat, guests will receive 13 free mini cookies with the purchase of every 15 cookie cake between now and June 19, 2016. Our giant, customized cookie cakes are the perfect complement to any festive occasion, said Shawnon Bellah, chief operating officer of Crest Foods, Inc., the franchisor of Nestle Toll House Cafe by Chip. Whether youre celebrating with moms, dads or grads, our cookie cakes will bring a smile to everyone gathered around the table. And the free minis are like icing on the proverbial cake! The premium dessert destination concept is built around the world's most recognized food brand Nestle. Along with its universally loved Nestle Toll House cookies and cookie cakes, the cafes serve a wide assortment of freshly baked confections. Other items typically include smoothies, ice creams, cold drinks, Panini sandwiches, wraps and savory crepes for lunch. For information about Nestle Toll House Cafe by Chip, visit NestleCafe.com, Facebook and Twitter and check us out on Yelp. About Nestle Toll House Cafe by Chip Nestle Toll House Cafe by Chip is a premiere dessert and bakery cafe offering customers an unrivaled experience through the use of fine ingredients, indulgent creations, distinct flavor profiles, and the rich tradition of the very best Nestle brands. Crest Foods Inc., franchisor of Nestle Toll House Cafe by Chip, based in Richardson, Texas, is a premiere restaurant franchisor company. The company currently franchises more than 150 bakery cafes in the United States, Canada and the Middle East. The versatile concept has kiosk, in-line mall and street cafe locations. The first cafe opened in 2000. Nestle Toll House Cafe by Chip has been recognized by Entrepreneur magazines Franchise 500 for the last nine consecutive years through 2015. For more information please visit nestlecafe.com. Nestle, Toll House, Nescafe, Milano and associated logos and designs, are trademarks of Societe des Produits Nestle S.A., and used by Crest Foods, Inc. with permission. SOURCE Nestle Toll House Cafe by Chip Contact: Ladd Biro Champion Management Founder & Principal O: 972.930.9933 C: 817.675.3499 ### Comments: Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus Pollo Campero's Sales Growth Holds Strong for Q1-2016 Campero Reports 7.2% SSSG for the First Quarter After 2015's 10.2% Comparable Sales Growth DALLAS - April 20, 2016 // PRNewswire // - Pollo Campero, best known for its Latin-inspired chicken and bold flavors, reported a 7.2 percent same-store sales rise for first-quarter 2016, marking its 17th consecutive quarter with positive comparable growth. The brand's sales growth momentum holds strong as it continues to invest in remodels, new product development and technology. "Overlapping our double digit same-store growth numbers from 2015 was challenging, but our strong execution, new product news and remodels helped fuel our momentum," said Tim Pulido, CEO of Pollo Campero International. The brand continues to successfully engage with its millennial base, which according to Technomic's Consumer Brand Metrics, makes up more than 60 percent of its customers. "Millennials are the heaviest foodservice users, and they're looking for bold and unique flavors which plays well for Pollo Campero," said Darren Tristano, President of Technomic. Pollo Campero plans to grow its units by 20 percent during 2016, as well as continue its remodel rollout. "We're excited about our new restaurant pipeline for this yearwe opened four new units during the first months and their initial results are outperforming our expectations," shared Pulido. As the brand continues its aggressive expansion plan, Campero is also looking to bring new franchisees to support its growth plans in California, Florida and other states. About Pollo Campero Pollo Campero is a Latin QSR+ concept that focuses on fresh and authentic hand-breaded and citrus grilled chicken recipes. The brand started in Guatemalain 1971 as a tiny, family-owned restaurant and has expanded to over 350 restaurants worldwide, including 62 in the U.S. With bold and exciting Latin-inspired menu items, Campero has become a favorite for those looking for unique flavors such as Millennials. Today, as Pollo Campero marks its 45th anniversary, its focus on quality, and its mission to stay true to its Latin roots remain the same. At the heart of that commitment: the promise to use fresh, never frozen, hormone-free chicken paired with traditional Latin sides, drinks and desserts in a vibrant atmosphere. For franchise information, or to learn more about Pollo Campero, visit Campero.com. Follow the flavor on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @CamperoUSA. SOURCE Pollo Campero ### Comments: Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus Real Living Real Estate Named Real Estate Agency Brand of the Year and Most Loved Real Estate Brand in 2016 Harris Poll EquiTrend Study Brokerage network receives top honors in survey of more than 97,000 consumers IRVINE, Calif. - April 20, 2016 - (BUSINESS WIRE) - Real Living Real Estate, a real estate brokerage network operated by HSF Affiliates LLC, today announced it was named Real Estate Agency Brand of the Year and Most Loved real estate brand in the 28th annual Harris Poll EquiTrend study. Real Living Real Estate received the highest ranking in the Real Estate Agency category based on consumers perception of its brand familiarity, quality and usage consideration. Additionally, Real Living Real Estate was rated the Most Loved real estate brand among those considered in the Harris Poll EquiTrend study, underscoring respondents emotional connection to the brand. The study was based on opinions of more than 97,000 U.S. consumers surveyed online earlier this year. Its an incredible honor to be recognized by consumers in the venerable Harris Poll EquiTrend study, said Gino Blefari, CEO of HSF Affiliates, which operates Real Living Real Estate. Its certainly a tribute to the strength of the Real Living Real Estate brand and the service provided by its top-quality professionals. Added Robert McAdams Jr., president of Real Living Real Estate: This recognition truly reflects the strong, sustained progress our brand has made over the past years, he said. It tells us that consumers nationwide recognize the innovation and excellence in quality service that are characteristic of Real Living Real Estate. The brand received the highest numerical Equity Score among real estate brands included in the 2016 Harris Poll EquiTrendstudy, which measures and compares the brand health of more than 3,800 brands across nearly 500 categories from airlines and apparel to retailers and real estate. The key measure used in the study is Nielsens twice-validated measure of brand equity. Consumers responded with their brand perceptions, gauging their emotional connection to the brand, plus brand awareness, influence and familiarity. Harris Poll EquiTrend honors add to Real Living Real Estates momentum as judged by consumers. Earlier this month the brand announced an impressive 97% satisfaction rating from buyers and sellers as tracked by Quality Service Certification, Inc., an independent research firm. The mark set a record high satisfaction rating for Real Living Real Estate agents, following seven consecutive years of 96% customer satisfaction. We are humbled by the ongoing recognition weve received from clients, and well continue striving to provide our home-buyers and sellers with a premium service experience, said McAdams. About 2016 Harris Poll EquiTrend Study Real Living Real Estate received the highest numerical Equity Score and the highest numerical score relating to Love among real estate agency brands included in the 2016 Harris Poll EquiTrend Study, which is based on opinions of 97,120 U.S. consumers ages 15 and over surveyed online between Dec. 22, 2015 and Feb. 1, 2016. Your opinion may differ. Highest Ranked and Most Loved are determined by a pure ranking of a sample of real estate agency brands. About Real Living Real Estate Real Living Real Estate is a full-service real estate brokerage franchise company with a comprehensive and integrated suite of resources for franchisees and their sales professionals, as well as for consumers who work with them. The brand and its innovative concepts were recognized by Entrepreneur magazine; have won Inman Innovator Awards, and been named the Most Promising New National Brand by the Swanepoel TRENDS Report. Real Living Real Estate is a network brand of HSF Affiliates LLC, majority owned by HomeServices of America, Inc., a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate. For more information, visitwww.RealLiving.com. SOURCE Real Living Real Estate Contacts: Kevin Ostler for Real Living Real Estate 949-794-7980 kevinostler@hsfranchise.com Matt Kaufman 224-532-7631 mattkaufman@hsfranchise.com ### Comments: Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus Soft Pretzel Rolls Now Available at Breakfast? Carls Jr. and Hardees Introduce the New Pretzel Breakfast Sandwich New Breakfast Offering Features Sausage, Egg And Two Types Of Cheese Served On An Auntie Annes Soft Pretzel Roll CARPINTERIA, Calif. - April 20, 2016 - (BUSINESS WIRE) - Starting today, Carls Jr. and Hardees join forces with Auntie Annes, the worlds largest soft pretzel franchise, to redefine the identity of a New York City sidewalk staple with the introduction of the Pretzel Breakfast Sandwich, available at participating restaurants nationwide. Featuring a savory sausage patty, the new breakfast item is topped with egg and both American and Swiss cheeses, all nestled between the golden-goodness of an Auntie Annes soft pretzel roll. Soft pretzels sold from carts on the streets of New York City are pretty ubiquitous, but they dont really deliver what most people are looking for at breakfast, says Brad Haley, chief marketing officer for Carls Jr. and Hardees restaurants. With the new Pretzel Breakfast Sandwich, Carls Jr. and Hardees have solved that problem by putting sausage, egg and cheese inside a delicious Auntie Annes soft pretzel roll. Our breakfast customers are in for a real treat. We are thrilled to be partnering with Carls Jr. and Hardees on such a deliciously satisfying, yet unexpected breakfast item, said Heather Neary, president of Auntie Annes. This partnership is a tremendous opportunity for us to delight our passionate fans in a fresh way. The new Pretzel Breakfast Sandwich is available for $2.99 and may also be ordered in a combo meal with Hash Browns and a drink starting at $4.69. Prices may vary by location. Carls Jr. and Hardees will promote the Pretzel Breakfast Sandwich with a comedic new ad campaign titled Pretzel Guys, featuring New York City pretzel cart vendors reacting as you might expect them to when theyre asked for a soft pretzel with sausage, eggs and cheese. Developed by Los Angeles-, New York- and Amsterdam-based creative agency 72andSunny, the commercial will begin airing on TV nationally on April 25, as well as on the chains YouTube channels. Follow Carls Jr. and Hardees on Facebook (www.facebook.com/carlsjr and www.facebook.com/hardees), Twitter (@CarlsJr and @Hardees) and Instagram (@CarlsJr and @Hardees) for the latest product news and promotional offers. Download the Super Star Rewards app from the iTunes Store and Google Play and check in to redeem Carls Jr. and Hardees products on the spot, save points for a high-value reward, check out the full menu, and use the store locator to find any Carls Jr. or Hardees in the U.S. For more information on Auntie Annes, please visit www.AuntieAnnes.com. For the latest, real-time updates, download the My Pretzel Perks app on iTunes or Google Play and follow the brand on Twitter at @AuntieAnnes, on Instagram at@AuntieAnnesPretzels, or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/auntieannespretzels. About CKE Restaurants Holdings, Inc. CKE Restaurants Holdings, Inc. (CKE) is a privately held company headquartered in Carpinteria, Calif. Through its subsidiaries, CKE owns and licenses Carls Jr. and Hardees quick-service restaurants. CKE operates Carls Jr. and Hardees as one brand under two names acknowledging the regional heritage of both banners. After opening its first restaurants in New York and New Jersey this spring and recent international openings in Canada, Colombia and Guatemala, CKE now has a total of 3,673 franchised or company-operated restaurants in 44 states and 38 foreign countries and U.S. territories. Known for its one-of-a-kind premium menu items such as 100 percent Black Angus Thickburgers, Made from Scratch Biscuits, Hand-Breaded Chicken Tenders and Fresh Baked Buns, as well as an award-winning marketing approach, the Carls Jr./Hardees brand continues to deliver substantial and consistent growth in the U.S. and overseas. The Carls Jr./Hardees system is now 92 percent franchised, with international restaurants representing 19 percent of the system. For more information about CKE, please visit www.ckr.com or its brand sites at www.carlsjr.com and www.hardees.com. About Auntie Annes At its more than 1,600 locations around the world, Auntie Annes mixes, twists and bakes pretzels from scratch all day long in full view of guests. Auntie Annes can be found in malls, outlet centers, and Walmarts, as well as in non-traditional spaces including universities, airports, travel plazas, amusement parks, and military bases. In addition, it has extended the brand onto retailers shelves and also serves as a distributor for fundraising products. Available at select retailers nationwide, pretzel fans can enjoy Auntie Annes prepare-at-home products, from frozen Classic and Cinnamon Sugar Soft Pretzels and Pretzel Nuggets, to frozen Pretzel Dogs and Pretzel Pocket Sandwiches, to a versatile Pretzel Baking Kit. For more information, visit www.auntieannes.com, or follow on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. SOURCE CKE Restaurants Holdings, Inc. Contacts: Kate Franklin On behalf of CKE Restaurants Holdings, Inc. Coast Public Relations 818-606-9784 kate@coastprgroup.com Ashley Aberbach On behalf of Auntie Annes Finn Partners, Inc. 212-715-1524 ashley.aberbach@finnpartners.com ### Comments: Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus Sweet Lorraines Adds New Flavors and Drink Infusions April 21, 2016 // Franchising.com // SOUTHFIELD, Mich. Award-winning chef Lorraine Platman, founder of Sweet Lorraines Cafe & Bar and Sweet Lorraines Fabulous Mac n Cheez!, has launched an extensive menu of drink infusions for the newest addition to the mac and cheese empire, Mac n Brewz! Additionally, all Sweet Lorraines Fabulous Mac n Cheez! and Mac n Brewz! locations are introducing six new flavorful dishes. The new drinks include savory infusions with vodka, tequila, gin, whiskey, and rum. The vodka infusions include pho with cilantro, basil, kaffir lime, ginger with star anise, and organic strawberry with black pepper. The infused tequila includes pineapple, red bell peppers, and hot red peppers. In addition to the Michigan cherry-infused whiskey is the orange and cinnamon infused Scotch, and the French roasted coffee bean bourbon. Finally, the gin infusions include cucumber-ginger, and rum infused with mint and lime. The idea behind Sweet Lorraines new infusions was to create a buzz that guests can customize. We want our guests to be the mixologists and to come up with their own cocktails starting with our chef-driven infusions, said Platman. The infusions can be splashed with Northwood soda, sparkling wine, or topped with hard cider or ginger beer from our premium draft selection. For breakfast, Sweet Lorraines added new Boozie Smoothie, which is made with aromatic coffee bean-infused bourbon, smoothie mix, and a dash of maple syrup. Guests can enjoy the satisfying smoothie with Lorraines pastries and breakfast wraps. Sweet Lorraines Fabulous Mac n Cheez! and Mac n Brewz! locations also added new flavors to their menu including the Fiesta Fajita, Pulled Pork BBQ, and the locally inspired Detroit Coney Dog Maca twist on Detroits very own traditional Coney Island hot dog and Chef Lorraines fabulous ooey gooey mac and cheese . Guests also have the option to customize any Twisted Grilled Cheez sandwich with any of the new flavors. The lighter side of the menu also has new additions including its very first vegan dish, the Bangkok Tofu Peanut Wrap. Sweet Lorraines also added two new salad bowls for veggie lovers, the Chopped Veggie Bowl and Krunchy Kale Bowl. All drink infusions will be served at Mac n Brewz! locations only. The new food menu items will be included at any Sweet Lorraines Fabulous Mac n Cheez! and Mac n Brewz! location, and also include a Sweet Combo Deal: add a fountain drink and chips, or fountain drink with a cookie for $2.50. About Sweet Lorraines Fabulous Mac n Cheez! Sweet Lorraines Fabulous Mac n Cheez!, a spinoff of the 32-year-old Sweet Lorraines Cafe Bar brand, is a chef-driven, fast casual dining concept that specializes in unique, creative and exciting macaroni and cheese dishes. Founded in 2010 and franchising since 2013, the Detroit-based restaurant chain offers vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free soups, salads, sandwich wraps, grilled cheese and 14 different kinds of meat-topped and vegetarian macaroni and cheese, all made fresh to order. There are currently six locations open and operating throughout Michigan and Illinois, with several more in various stages of development. For more information, visit www.macncheez.com. SOURCE Sweet Lorraines Fabulous Mac n Cheez! Contact: Natalie Passarelli Franchise Elevator PR (847) 239-8171 npassarelli@franchiseelevator.com ### Comments: Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus Weight Watchers Announces First Quarter 2016 Earnings Conference Call NEW YORK - April 20, 2016 // PRNewswire // - Weight Watchers International, Inc. (NYSE: WTW) will release its results for the first quarter 2016 after the NYSE closes on Wednesday, May 4, 2016. The Company has also scheduled a conference call on May 4th at 5:00 p.m. ET. During the conference call, James Chambers, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Nicholas Hotchkin, Chief Financial Officer, will discuss the first quarter 2016 results and answer questions from the investment community. Live audio of the conference call will be simultaneously webcast over the Internet on the Company's corporate website,www.weightwatchersinternational.com. A replay of the webcast will be available on this site for approximately 90 days. About Weight Watchers International, Inc. Weight Watchers International, Inc. is the world's leading commercial provider of weight management services, operating globally through a network of Company-owned and franchise operations. Weight Watchers holds more than 32,000 meetings each week where members receive group support and learn about healthy eating patterns, behavior modification and physical activity. Weight Watchers provides innovative, digital weight management products through its websites, mobile sites and apps. Weight Watchers is the leading provider of paid digital subscription weight management products in the world. In addition, Weight Watchers offers a wide range of products, publications and programs for those interested in weight loss and weight control. This news release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and beliefs, as well as a number of assumptions concerning future events. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other important factors. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on such forward-looking statements because actual results may vary materially from those expressed or implied. The reports filed by the Company pursuant to United States securities laws contain discussions of these risks and uncertainties. The Company assumes no obligation to, and expressly disclaims any obligation to, update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Readers are advised to review the Company's filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (which are available from the SEC's EDGAR database at www.sec.gov, at various SEC reference facilities in the United States and via the Company's website at www.weightwatchersinternational.com). SOURCE Weight Watchers International, Inc. Contact: Corey Kinger Brainerd Communicators, Inc. Investor Relations (212) 986-6667 kinger@braincomm.com ### Comments: Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus Dan Ransom, a ranger wholl be part of an Earth Day beach cleanup and art activity Saturday at Caledon State Park, didnt need an introduction to nature when he arrived at the park in King George County last fall. As a boy growing up in Connecticut on land that goes back generations in his family, every day was Earth Day. My home was surrounded by a national forest, said the ranger, who now lives aboard a 34-foot sailboat in a marina in Colonial Beach. By the time I was 10 or so, my friends and I were always out in the woods. It was our playground. He went on to serve in the Air Force after high school, leaving in 1985 to work as a building contractor in his home state. In 1999, he moved to Florida and again worked in the building industry, installing high end doors for five years while living on a sailboat in the Keys and cruising off to spots like the Dry Tortugas. Drawn back north and to a profession closer to nature, Ransom thought a bit about what might make sense with his work experience. I had grown up in a national forest and had a love of nature, had served in the Air Force and had worked as a contractor, he said, summing up qualifications that made him a good fit to work in maintenance at a Virginia State Park. He landed a job first at Westmoreland State Park, where he also worked as a maintenance ranger until being transferred to Caledon last year. Though he doesnt get the chance to sail among sea turtles in Floridas warm waters these days, hes been living aboard his sailboat in a Colonial Beach marina, and hopes someday to sail south to the Virginia Islands and perhaps even to Belize. But hes tickled to death that his office these days is 2,500 acres of forest, wetlands, meadows and beaches where eagles, ospreys, herons and the occasional red-tailed hawks are as much at home as the visitors who come and go. His job at the park is a mix of everything from maintaining buildings and facilities to lending a hand with programs. Though Caledon and all state parks will be taking part in special events and tree-plantings Saturday in connection with Earth Day, Ransom and others who value the pristine park know all too well that its celebrated there 365 days of the year. STATE PARKS HOSTING EARTH DAY EVENTS At Caledon, the Trash to Art event Saturday combines a beach cleanup with a contest where participants create works of art with the trash collected. In the past, thats meant everything from trash collages to artistic figures built out of the trash gleaned from the Potomac River beaches in the park. Beach cleanup will be happening from 9:30 to noon, with art creation from noon to 2 and judging after that. Its free, open to all ages, with lunch provided for a donation. For more information and to register, call 540/663-3861 or email caledon@dcr.virginia.gov. At Lake Anna State Park, there will be a cleanup along the lakes shoreline from noon to 2 on Saturday. Park officials note that the event is a perfect fit for Boy Scout troops looking for a required service project, with certificates awarded to those who preregister. To do that or get more info, call 540/854-6245 or e-mail Lauri.Schular@dcr.virginia.gov. At Westmoreland State Park, there will be a beach and trail cleanup along the Potomac River at 11 a.m. on Saturday. The park will provide the tools but participants should bring their own gloves. From 1 to 3 p.m., at Campground C, the Westmoreland Amateur Radio Club will provide demonstrations of alternative energy sources that can help conserve and protect natural resourcesuseful for power or communications during emergencies or disasters. To find out more, call 804/493-8821 or email to westmoreland@dcr.virginia.gov. Different species of oaks will also be planted at all three parks and others throughout the state. They were provided through a grant. As we enter the mid-terms, and begin ramping up for the upcoming presidential election, we would all do well to get to know Mark Noll. 786 Socialite Celebrates Launch With Free Gifts to Founding Members 786 Socialite is celebrating the launch of 786 Socialite online by Online Event with Free Gift to founding members . Further information can be found at http://www.786socialite.ca -- In an Open online launch celebration change of pace, Events Website "786 Socialite", will be celebrating the launch of its Events Website by Online Event promoting Toronto Events , Vancouver Events, with Free Gifts to founding members . It's reported the event will take place on July 1, 2016 . In a space where most competitors simply Advertise on Facebook and fail to cause much of a stir, 786 Socialite has opted to be a little more Open online launch celebration with its 786 Socialite launch. Farhanna N, Founder at 786 Socialite, says: "The company wanted to be Open to an online launch celebration with the Events Website, because It's a worldwide launch and the members will be as well It should be really worthwhile and the company is hoping to reward the 1,000 founding members . It should go great unless the whole internet crashes down on launch day! 786 Socialite has always thrived on the idea of standing out and making a commotion. It's all part of the fun and it's going to This celebration is fun & will allow members who may be lonely, to interact with others from around the world in real time, which the company thought was better than businesses who choose to do things the 'regular' way. This launch celebration is just one of the many ways 786 Socialite achieves that goal. When asked about 786 Socialite, Farhanna N said: "The company thinks it's going to be a real hit because the new offering will be a success because people love communicating with others thru technology ". 786 Socialite is set to launch July 1, 2016 . To find out more, it's possible to visit http://www.786socialite.ca For further information about 786 Socialite, all this can be discovered at http://www.786socialite.ca For more information about us, please visit http://www.786socialite.ca Contact Info: Name: Farhanna 786 Email: 786loveraiser@gmail.com Organization: 786 Socialite Address: Vancouver, BC Phone: 778-300-4291 Release ID: 111611 For more information visit r Recent Press Releases By The Same User Agarwood Essential Oil Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 4.2% During 2016 to 2022"> (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Cyber Weapon Market by Type, Product, Application, Region, Outlook and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Landscaping and Gardening Expert Trevor McClintock Launches New Locally Optimized Website (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Sleep apnea devices Market is Evolving At A CAGR of 7.5% by 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Agriculture Technology Market 2017 Global Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Global VR Helmet Market by Manufacturers, Technology, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17) IO Zoom Launches VPS Hosting in Ashburn VPS hosting provider, IO Zoom has announced it has launched a new location for its Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting service in Ashburn, Virginia. -- VPS hosting provider, IO Zoom has announced it has launched a new location for its Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting service in Ashburn, Virginia. The facility is just 30 miles west of Washington, D.C., and will deliver fast website speeds to customers up and down the East Coast. Customers in Europe will also benefit, according to the company. The Ashburn location now compliments IO Zoom's instance at a state-of-the-art facility in Los Angeles, California. Customers on both coasts can now benefit from the company's guaranteed 100% network uptime, faster website speeds with SSD's, and promise of being credited for even just one minute of downtime. Expert network monitoring is provided 24/7 and every plan includes up to 20 Gbps DDoS protection. IO Zoom offers five plans, ranging from 1 GB Ram, 20 GB SSD storage, and 2,000 GB bandwidth for $8 per month; up to 16 GB RAM, 240 GB storage, and 10,000 GB bandwidth for $120 per month. Customers can choose to add cPanel to the server and have their VPS fully managed at no extra cost. Plans also include free backup and customers can choose their operating system - Linux, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Debian are supported. "We are excited about adding Ashburn as an additional location for our current and future VPS hosting customers. This new location helps expand IO Zoom's footprint to better serve the market," said Kiet Duong, President of IO Zoom. Add-ons include additional bandwidth, control panel, billing software, the Pro Managed VPS management service, and backup service. The value of IO Zoom's VPS hosting is also seen in the hardware. Supermicro servers, dual Xeon processors, DDR4 memory, and solid state drives are used, plus RAID 10 technology with LSI hardware. Learn more about IO Zoom, its services, and new East Coast VPS hosting offerings in Ashburn, Virginia, by going to http://www.iozoom.com. For more information about us, please visit http://www.iozoom.com/ Contact Info: Name: Kiet Duong Email: kietduong@iozoom.com Organization: IO Zoom Phone: 800-640-5918 Source: http://marketersmedia.com/io-zoom-launches-vps-hosting-in-ashburn/111648 Release ID: 111648 For more information visit r Recent Press Releases By The Same User Agarwood Essential Oil Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 4.2% During 2016 to 2022"> (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Cyber Weapon Market by Type, Product, Application, Region, Outlook and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Landscaping and Gardening Expert Trevor McClintock Launches New Locally Optimized Website (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Sleep apnea devices Market is Evolving At A CAGR of 7.5% by 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Agriculture Technology Market 2017 Global Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Global VR Helmet Market by Manufacturers, Technology, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Buyback Express Launches Brand New Company Website The website was launched at the end of 2015 and makes it easier for visitors to find what they want quickly, reports http://buybackexpress.com/. -- Buyback Express, a premier website where customers can get cash for their books, movies, music, and games, has recently announced the launch of their brand new company website. The website better reflects the company's brand and makes it easier for visitors to find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Those who would like to see the new website and learn more about how to sell their items to Buyback Express should visit http://buybackexpress.com/about-us/. Aaron Holt, a spokesperson for Buyback Express, commented "We're beyond excited to have unveiled our brand new website to the world. Our team sincerely believes that the new interface is more reflective of the brand that we've been building for more than ten years. Because we're concerned about providing top-notch customer service, we wanted to make it easier for customers to get instant quotes and sell their items, and our responsive design and easy navigation definitely help us achieve that goal." Buyback Express originally started in 2004 as The Book Place, which was an online retailer of new and used books and media. Over the years, their website evolved into a place where customers can sell their books, textbooks, and media items for top dollar, ship their items to the company for free, and get paid the same day. The new website aims to better showcase the company's identity, make it easier for visitors to complete the selling process, and introduce a new buyback category: electronics. Customers can get more information about selling their electronics to Buyback Express at www.buybackexpress.com/sell-electronics/. As Holt goes on to say, "We pride ourselves on our customer-focused business model. Our purpose in launching this new website has been to give current and potential customers a better idea of who we are and to help them get what they need without hassle. Along with our commitment to offer top dollar for their items, this website is just one more tool that will aid us in our continual quest to be the best buyback site in the online arena." About Buyback Express: Buyback Express was originally established in 2004 as The Book Place, an online seller of used and new books and media products. In 2010 they started the buyback website BookItBuyback.com in order to give customers and others a great place to sell. Over the next five years the company significantly expanded and in late 2015 they launched their newly-branded and vastly improved site, BuybackExpress.com. Buyback Express prides themselves on their customer-focused business model and try their very best to pay the top prices available anywhere, making them the best buyback site online. For more information about us, please visit http://buybackexpress.com/ Contact Info: Name: Aaron Holt Organization: Buyback Express Address: Alton, IL 62002 Phone: (866) 266-5880 Source: http://marketersmedia.com/buyback-express-launches-brand-new-company-website/111692 Release ID: 111692 For more information visit r Recent Press Releases By The Same User Agarwood Essential Oil Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 4.2% During 2016 to 2022"> (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Cyber Weapon Market by Type, Product, Application, Region, Outlook and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Landscaping and Gardening Expert Trevor McClintock Launches New Locally Optimized Website (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Sleep apnea devices Market is Evolving At A CAGR of 7.5% by 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Agriculture Technology Market 2017 Global Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Global VR Helmet Market by Manufacturers, Technology, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Thermalabs to Release 2 New Organic Exfoliating Scrubs Thermalabs is finalizing production on two new additions to its Supremasea brand. -- Thermalabs has revealed plans to release two new cosmetics products within a couple of weeks. The new launches will be organic exfoliating scrubs based on salts and minerals from the Dead Sea. In the last few months, Thermalabs introduced an exfoliating glove that's based on all natural ingredients. The product is designed from Bamboo and Loofah, Jute and Sisal mitts, all naturally-occurring constituents. The fact that this product is already a bestseller in major markets, including the US and Europe, may have motivated the company to release the organic exfoliators soon. Thermalabs appears to be doing a notable job in the cosmetics space. Already, the firm's innovative solutions have helped it keep competitors at bay. A portfolio of the company's earlier products, including the self-tanning lotion, the Glow2Go packet of tanning wipes, and the Ultimitt, are almost household names in the self-tanning niche. Critics have often argued that Thermalabs exclusive focus on natural and organic formulations has helped skyrocket it from a little-known brand to one of the biggest players in the cosmetic space. Thermalabs was founded in New York almost three years ago. Registered as an American company, Thermalabs initial focus was on the US market. Its pilot product, a lotion going by the name 'original self-tanner', was a major launch. Following an intensive pre-launch campaign that focused on the product's unique benefits and effectiveness, the lotion managed to sell thousands of units within a week. Its marketplace success attracted media attention to the then-new company, helping Thermalabs create a platform that it would later use to successfully launch future products. Currently, Thermalabs has a portfolio of at least 15 products, including self-tanning lotions, spray tanning machines and tanning accessories. The company is also dedicated to a skin cancer-free world. That's precisely why Thermalabs is big on natural and organic formulations that have no strange side effects on the skin. The firm also contributes a tenth of its annual profits to charity. Mostly, this portion goes to skin-care nonprofits that promote awareness against skin cancer, and educational institutions that that are actively hunting for a cure for cancer. The organic exfoliating scrubs that the company is set to launch will be based on a combination of Dead Sea mineral salts, and conventional ingredients whose benefits for the skin have been known for ages. The exfoliators will launch under the company's Supremasea brand, which is described as Thermalabs private collection of Dead Sea mineral based products. Already, this sub-brand introduced a product earlier last year - Tan Enhancer. This was a luxurious moisturizing lotion that helped tanning buffs maintain that perfect glow after a tan. It was based on a special blend of mineral salts, Vitamin E, Shea Butter, and other ingredients that its' protective and moisturizing benefits. The lotion keeps the skin supple and helps ward off free radicals and other environmental pollutants. It's not clear, at this stage, what the new exfoliators will be named. For more information about us, please visit http://www.thermalabs.com Contact Info: Name: James McCarthy Email: press@thermalabs.com Organization: Thermalabs Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-gBGXC2aPg Source: http://marketersmedia.com/thermalabs-to-release-2-new-organic-exfoliating-scrubs/111457 Release ID: 111457 For more information visit r Recent Press Releases By The Same User Agarwood Essential Oil Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 4.2% During 2016 to 2022"> (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Cyber Weapon Market by Type, Product, Application, Region, Outlook and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Landscaping and Gardening Expert Trevor McClintock Launches New Locally Optimized Website (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Sleep apnea devices Market is Evolving At A CAGR of 7.5% by 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Agriculture Technology Market 2017 Global Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Global VR Helmet Market by Manufacturers, Technology, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17) New Ownership Announced for ServiceMaster Restoration Franchise ServiceMaster Restoration by All-Action announced new owners of the full-service disaster restoration business, located in North Lima, Ohio. -- ServiceMaster Restoration by All-Action announced new owners of the full-service disaster restoration business, located in North Lima, Ohio. Jim Smith, the Operations Manager of the local franchise, along with Diane Butler, Cheryl Franks and Kelly Meyers, owners of ServiceMaster franchises in Pennsylvania, purchased the Ohio franchise location recently. "We are looking forward to continuing the commitment of providing exceptional customer service to customers in the territory covered by ServiceMaster Restoration by All-Action," explained Smith. The franchise services Northeast Ohio and Western Pennsylvania communities by providing property damage restoration services to both residential and commercial customers. The franchise began more than 30 years ago, by Rick Pesa, who with his sister, Cindy Glasser, co-founded the original franchise. Pesa will remain as the current General Manager of Operations. "Our team has specialized experts in solving a number of disaster restoration problems, including fire damage, water damage, and weather-related problems to property and belongings. The new owners will have the same dedication to the corporate values about the business that we started with this franchise, back in 1986," said Pesa. A high value system is part of the success of this ServiceMaster team, trusted by entire communities to handle property-related damages for many situations, including municipality sewer failure, water damage and mold remediation. The franchise belongs to the ServiceMaster Restore family of businesses, which has been providing national disaster restoration services for decades as a single-source solution to emergency response, damage cleanup and restoration, and construction rebuilds with quality contractors. The combined experience of the new owners includes every aspect of natural disaster remediation and mold mitigation, both locally and in major storm areas across the nation. "People trust the ServiceMaster name, and we are recognized by the ServiceMaster logo," explained Smith. "The new franchise ownership will continue to uphold that trust as we service our community. While this is a disaster-related business, it is also a relationship business because the people who experience the hardships of a disaster are our friends, family and neighbors in the community. We intend to continue helping them through property insurance claims and restoring their buildings and contents to give them peace of mind again." ServiceMaster Restoration by All-Action is a disaster restoration company providing water damage restoration in North Lima, Ohio and neighboring communities. To learn more about their services, please visit their website at http://www.smrbyallaction.com For more information about us, please visit http://www.smrbyallaction.com/ Contact Info: Name: Jim Smith Organization: ServiceMaster Restoration by All-Action Address: 75 Eastgate Industrial Dr. North Lima, OH 44452 Phone: +1 330 549 0102 Release ID: 111629 For more information visit r Recent Press Releases By The Same User Agarwood Essential Oil Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 4.2% During 2016 to 2022"> (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Cyber Weapon Market by Type, Product, Application, Region, Outlook and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Landscaping and Gardening Expert Trevor McClintock Launches New Locally Optimized Website (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Sleep apnea devices Market is Evolving At A CAGR of 7.5% by 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Agriculture Technology Market 2017 Global Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Global VR Helmet Market by Manufacturers, Technology, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 (Fri 2nd Jun 17) Annuities could soon overtake drawdown again as market volatility drives consumers to seek caution, according to new research be eValue. After the introduction of the freedoms last year, it was feared annuity sales would suffer due to consumers preferring a more flexible withdrawal of pension benefits. But recent data concluded preference for guaranteed income has actually risen, with 41 per cent of retirees selecting an annuity an increase of 9 per cent since the the freedoms came into effect in April last year. Flexible income products have become less popular, falling from 54 per cent to 46 per cent over the same period. Market volatility has been a key factor, by highlighting the capital risks inherent within income drawdown products. Its not surprising to see annuity sales continuing to grow because there is a fundamental need in most peoples portfolio to at least have covered essential expenditure, said Steve Lowe, group communications director at Just Retirement, adding a growing number of customers were not limiting themselves to either product, People are taking a blend of guaranteed income for life, whether that be state pension, defined benefit pension or indeed an annuity income, and mixing it with more flexible or unsecure income. Data released in March from the ABI correlated with this, and showed annuities outstripped drawdown for the first time post-freedoms in Q4 2015. A total of 21,200 annuities were sold, worth 1.1bn whereas drawdown witnessed sales of 19,700, albeit with funds worth 1.4bn. Despite this research, Aegon UK recently sold two-thirds of its UK annuity portfolio to Rothesay Life for 6bn, with the process taking place over the next two years. The sale was not driven by the freedoms, but our overall strategy puts us in a position to benefit from them, Nick Dixon, investment director at Aegon said, adding its intention is to divert resources towards a retirement platform. By focusing on the platform, were able to offer workplace savers and individuals with a financial adviser, a wide range of options to accumulate wealth and then a service which gives them a great deal of choice as to how they manage an income in retirement. 2016 presidential candidates.jpg Presidential candidates John Kasich, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are vying for the Republican nomination. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are fighting for the Democratic nomination. (AP photos) (*This post has been updated to include information about likely Republican and Democratic primary voters whose opinions were sampled in the poll) Good Thursday Morning, Fellow Seekers. With GOP frontrunner Donald Trump set to roll into the Midstate this evening, the Manhattan billionaire finds himself in a genuine horse race among registered voters in Pennsylvania's high-stakes primary. According to a new Franklin & Marshall College poll, Trump holds a 10-point lead over his nearest rivals, taking 36 percent among registered voters less than a week ahead of the election. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who hails from McKees Rocks near Pittsburgh, trails at 26 percent. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who barnstormed Hershey on Wednesday, finishes third at 24 percent. Fifteen percent of Republican primary voters remain undecided. Trump's lead expands by 14 points among likely GOP primary voters to 40 percent; 26 percent for Cruz and 24 percent for Kasich. "For Trump, demographically, Pennsylvania is good territory: It has a good mix of blue-collar, working class voters," Franklin & Marshall pollster G. Terry Madonna said. "Trump has a good base of support in the Philadelphia suburbs where he is expected to do very well against Kasich." Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, holds a commanding lead over her Democratic rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, leading 55 percent to 29 percent, among registered voters with 11 percent undecided. Among likely Democratic primary voters, Clinton's leads 58-31 percent over Sanders. "This is a Clinton state. She beat Barack Obama in 2008 by 10 percentage points in that presidential primary," Madonna said. "She has Scranton roots. Her father was born in Scranton and played football for Penn State. She has deep professional and personal connections in the Philadelphia suburbs from two decades of campaigning there." Voters who are leaning Republican and Democrat, however, might provide some cause for encouragement for the stragglers. Among GOP leaners, Cruz takes 22 percent support, to Trump's 15 percent and Kasich's 16 percent. Nearly half of GOP leaners, 46 percent, are undecided, the poll found. Among Democratic leaners, 26 percent favor Clinton, compared to 24 percent for Sanders. Again, fully half of voters (50 percent) are undecided. Reflecting the intensity of feeling around the nation, voters in each camp who have made up their minds have found their spots and are sticking to them. Three-quarters of Republican respondents said they're certain to vote, while about a quarter (24 percent) were still making up their minds. Eighty-three percent of Democratic respondents said they were certain to vote, while 17 percent are undecided. Among Democratic primary voters, nearly seven in 10 respondents (69 percent) have a favorable impression of Clinton, compared to 25 percent who do not. More than two-thirds (66 percent) feel the same way about Sanders, compared to 24 percent who have an unfavorable impression, the poll found. Republican voters, however, are more sharply divided. Forty-six percent of GOP primary respondents have a favorable impression of Trump, compared to 44 percent who do not. Cruz logs a 45-44 percent rating, while Kasich finishes the strongest with a 55-25 favorable rating overall, the poll found. Here's the full polling memo: Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia was among the right people enshrined on the memorial wall on Saturday, Oct. 21. This log includes incidents in which there might have been a public disturbance or a risk to the public. Information comes from the Corvallis Police Department, the Benton County Sheriffs Office and Oregon State Police. It does not include all calls for service. The status of incidents might change after further investigation. Locations are approximate. People arrested or suspected in crimes are considered innocent until proven otherwise. Corvallis Police Department TUESDAY, APRIL 19 CAR PROWL: 1:33 p.m., 1009 S.W. 15th St. Officers were dispatched for a prowler complaint. A woman reported that she saw a man attempting to get into her boyfriend's car in the parking lot of the Park West Apartments. Based on descriptions, police arrested and charged Kyle Hanna, 19, of Corvallis with unauthorized entry into a motor vehicle and booked Hanna into the Benton County Jail. MONDAY, APRIL 18 CRIMINAL MISCHIEF: 9 a.m., 5100 block of Southwest Meadow Flower Drive. A woman reported that an upstairs screen window at her townhouse was pried open. The woman also reported hearing the sound of a ladder being placed against the house the night before. Oregon State Police TUESDAY, APRIL 19 THEFT: 4:43 p.m., 1891 S.W. Campus Way. A student reported a theft from the Robotics Club store at Dearborn Hall. The student reported that someone forced entry into a lock box where a key is stored and used that key to open a cash register and steal the cash inside. This is the second time in the last two weeks that a theft occurred in this location. The investigation is ongoing. MONDAY, APRIL 11 CAR PROWLS: 1:50 a.m., 1220 S.W. Jefferson Ave. Troopers were dispatched to McNary Hall for a report of two car prowls in progress. A witness reportedly identified two people who were scouring the bike racks and taking bikes away. Troopers arrested and charged Benjamin Richard Cummings, 19, of Corvallis and Luis Everado Gonzalez Camarena, 18, of Corvallis with second-degree theft. Both men were booked into the Benton County Jail. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The Meals on Wheels of Staten Island's 2016 "Loverly Carriage Ball" unfolded to perfection recently at The Vanderbilt on the South Beach Boardwalk. The not-for-profit organization provides two nutritious meals each day, delivered by volunteers and staff drivers to elderly, home-bound Staten Island residents who are unable to shop for or prepare their own meals. Board members were inspired by the 1964 film version of the Lerner & Lowe's "Loverly" musical, "My Fair Lady," starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. A highlight of the annual gala is the presentation of the agency's Wheels in Motion Award, which recognizes the person(s) or organization whose activism, support and generosity have bettered the lives of Staten Islanders. This year, awards were presented to M ark Tranchina, vice president of Great Killsbased It's Our Pleasure Hospitality Group, and D r. Dan Messina, president and chief executive officer of Richmond University Medical Center, West Brighton. Mr. Tranchina's company owns and operates The Vanderbilt at South Beach, Grand Oaks Country Club, Grand Plaza, South Fin Grill, the Boardwalk Grill, Arirang and Arirang Hibachi Steakhouses in New York and New Jersey. The Tottenville resident served on Meals on Wheels' Board of Directors for 15 years. He not only is being recognized for his longtime support and generosity toward the agency, but for his efforts to bring family friendly programming to the South Beach Boardwalk and for instituting the GiveBack Wednesdays program there, which aims to bring the work of local nonprofits to the attention of a wider audience. He also created "Summer Wednesdays at the Vanderbilt," dinners staged in support of the featured GiveBack nonprofits, which receive a portion of the proceeds. Prior to joining RUMC in 2014, Dr. Messina was affiliated with CentraState Medical Center in Freehold, N.J., serving as system chief operating officer for 13 years. While there, he helped evolve the facility's Multiple Sclerosis program into the 4,400squarefoot Linda E. Cardinale Multiple Sclerosis Center, which provides comprehensive services to individuals with MS throughout the tristate area. And in 2011, he was instrumental in putting together a group that succeeded in building New Jersey's first accessible housing complex designed for people with MS the first of its kind on the East Coast and only the third one in the United States. Dr. Messina is certified as a Fellow of the American College of Health Care Executives (FACHE), is a Licensed Nursing Home Administrator (LNHA) and serves on the board of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, as well as the Society's National board of Trustees. The night kicked off with cocktails in the Vanderbilt's Palm Room, where the fare will include a sprinkling of British inspired offerings such as Fish & Chips, Beef Pasties, Welsh Rarebit and Beef Wellington, and guests can nibble on English cheeses while hoisting a glass or two of Boddington and Newcastle ales. Cocktails were followed by dinner and dancing to the music of the Silas Knight Project in the grand waterfront ballroom. WE WANT YOUR PHOTOS Because the Inside Out column thrives on commemorating celebrations, we love to capture life's poignant moments with photos. How to get featured in future galleries: Email photographs from your local charitable galas, centenarian birthday celebrations, high school reunions and love stories to Carol Ann Benanti at benanti@siadvance.com. Or just share them in the comments section below. CELEBRATIONS: APRIL 21 Happy birthday Thursday to Gloria DeVincenzi, William Higgins, Kimberly Russo, James Cauldwell, Anthony Rinaudo and Vito Napoletano. Happy wedding anniversary Thursday to Tina and Brian McGarry. Cologne/Bonn airport : Emergency plan on internet Cologne/Bonn Online and available to the public were parts of an emergency plan for Cologne/Bonn airport. Teilen Teilen Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Tweeten Tweeten Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Drucken From November until yesterday afternoon, 230 pages of emergency procedures for Cologne/Bonn airport were available online for everyone to see. This included plans for natural catastrophes, terrorist attacks, bomb threats or hostage situations. It contained telephone numbers of key people who would make important decisions in the case of an emergency, and logistical information including some sensitive areas in the airport. Airport officials say this was only an excerpt from their emergency plans; the phone numbers and people listed in the information were public anyway, and there was no detailed or sensitive information in the online information. They removed the 230 pages from the internet after being contacted by ZDF television about it, saying they regretted that it had been online and they were working to find out how that happened. Cologne/Bonn airport was in the news recently when terror group ISIS released propaganda showing it as a target. As well, workers union Verdi has complained of too few security for checking luggage. 15 personnel were brought over from Dusseldorf airport to compensate. Verdi secretary Ozay Tarim says We have around 40 to 45 too few personnel. It is because of this that Kotter Aviation, the firm responsible for security cancelled a scheduled training for some employees yesterday. At the end of last year, 200 employees were not sufficiently trained to meet requirements for recertification. This is proofed every three years. Consequently, employees were receiving further training. The balancing act was to keep enough personnel for security requirements while training them as well. Every year, 40 hours of training are required. This is important to educate workers about new developments, for example plastic weapons made from 3D printers. EU controllers found security deficits at Cologne/Bonn airport when they carried out regular testing in February. The workers are doing a good job under difficult conditions says Tarim. It is up to Kotter Aviation to provide enough personnel. In 2015, federal police authorities met twice with Kotter to discuss personnel shortages. According to previous information, 500 are employed by Kotter. The firm had not responded to the allegations yesterday at the time of the General Anzeigers deadline. Bad Godesberg city : New apartments Bad Godesberg Some of the old is being replaced by the new as areas in Bad Godesberg undergo renovations to provide more living space. Teilen Teilen Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Tweeten Tweeten Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Drucken If you ask long-time residents about developments in Bad Godesberg city over the decades, you are sure to get an earful. Whether group or individuals, everyone has an opinion about the architecture, the offers and the beauty or the beast of it. What is sure is that the City-Terrassen will see some changes. This is the area where you take a ramp or elevator up to Valtellinas Italian restaurant. For one, the terrace of the restaurant will be expanded. More importantly, however is that new apartments are being created. In addition to the 81 that are already there, 55 more are being created in space previously occupied by retailers. The new apartments are from 65 to 200 square meters in size with rental prices from 9 euro per square meter. For those on the ground floor, there will be green areas to replace what architect Helmut Rubsamen describes as areas of crime where hidden and dark corners escaped any public sense of security. Rubsamen, who is leading the project through says it will be a lovely area when finished. What about that ramp and the escalator that never works? The ramp will stay, according to Peter Brockhaus, CEO of Berlin real estate firm FFire which competed for the project three years ago and was chosen to carry it out. But the escalator will go since it is seldom in operation anyhow. People who rent apartments will get to them by private elevator. They are expected to be completed by the end of July but the overall renovation of the bigger area will take another two years. More apartments are being created in an old furniture store that has stood vacant for 20 years. The former Mobel-Franz building is finally being reinvented after many years of delays and dubious investors. Currently, a developer is working on eight lofts which are already for sale on the real estate market. Architect Martin Haupt says the apartments will be finished in Fall. They have large windows out front and ceilings 3 meters tall, big and airy. The commercial space on the ground floor will be rented out or sold. Its around 260 square meters with a basement of 700 square meters. At the end of 2000, a bicycle store there closed its doors when the owner went into retirement. Old and new seem to go hand in hand in Bad Godesberg. Public transportation : Warning strikes in Cologne will also affect Bonn Cologne/Bonn. Workers union Verdi has called for strikes next week in Cologne. Some lines will be affected in Bonn. Teilen Teilen Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Tweeten Tweeten Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Drucken Workers union Verdi has called for Cologne public transportation workers to carry out warning strikes on Wednesday, April 27. In Cologne, city buses and trams of the KVB (Cologne public transportation authorities) will not run for the entire day. No trams will run on Lines 16 and 18 which means Bonn residents who use those lines will have to find other transportation. The strikes will take place from 3:00 a.m. Wednesday morning until the start of the regular schedule on Thursday, April 28. Because the strike is the KVB, it is mainly affecting local public transportation in Cologne. There may be some buses which are operated by subcontractors and they will be allowed to run in Cologne. Trains between Bonn and Cologne will be running as normal because they are operated by Deutsche Bahn. Information in English about KVB schedules can be found at the following link: http://auskunft.kvb-koeln.de/kvb/cgi?lang=UK Hill depot facility becomes first to work on all F-35 variants By Alex R. Lloyd, Ogden Air Logistics Complex / Published April 20, 2016 HILL AIR FORCE BASE, Utah (AFNS) -- The Ogden Air Logistics Complex here became the first depot facility to perform modifications on all three F-35 Lightning II variants after it inducted a Navy F-35C carrier version April 15. The F-35C was flown in from Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, by Navy Capt. Mark Weisgerber, the 33rd Fighter Wing vice commander. "Hill has the capacity to accomplish the needed modifications and it is important to optimize the workflow within the Air Logistics Complex," Weisgerber said. The first F-35 arrived at Hill AFB for modifications in September 2013. Since then, the depot has performed modifications on the Air Force's fleet of conventional takeoff and landing F-35As. It also has completed work on four Marine Corps F-35B short takeoff/vertical landing aircraft, helping the Marine Corps reach initial operational capability. For the Navy's carrier variant, the complex's 570th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron, along with Lockheed Martin, will perform structural upgrades, low-observable restoration and system modifications that will enhance performance across the aircraft's service life. "The men and women of the 570th (AMXS)have risen to the challenges of supporting the dynamic changes in this program and take great pride in being the first depot to work on all three variants of the F-35," said Greg Hoffman, the 570th AMXS director. With the program's ever-evolving requirements, exact numbers of how many aircraft will be worked on this year is not yet available. The squadron's main focus will center on completing work on the Air Force fleet of F-35A models and Navy's F-35C models, and returning the aircraft to the warfighter better than they arrived. "We were able to support the U.S. Marine Corps with critical modifications on the F-35B to meet their initial operational capability (IOC) milestone," Hoffman said. "Today, we are working closely with the 388th Fighter Wing to provide modifications that will ensure they are able to meet their IOC target with the F-35A and are proud to support the Navy with work on the F-35C." The complex had been planning for the arrival of the C-model for months and expects work on the fighter jet to last through early September as workers train with the aircraft and perform verification and validation on the new modifications. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Iraqi Forces Liberate Hit, OIR Spokesman Says By Lisa Ferdinando DoD News, Defense Media Activity WASHINGTON, April 20, 2016 Iraqi forces regained control of the key city of Hit, while a "tough fight" remains in the Tigris River Valley, the spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve said today. "Last week in the Euphrates River Valley, Iraqi security forces tore Hit from ISIL's grasp and gave it back to the Iraqi people. Hit is liberated," Army Col. Steve Warren told Pentagon reporters in a teleconference from Baghdad. Clearing Hit disrupts the ability of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant to move foreign fighters and supplies into the Euphrates River Valley, the colonel said, and it sets the stage for future offensive operations. Warren highlighted the close coordination between the Iraqi army, the Iraqi counter terrorism service and Sunni tribal forces. The operational achievements in the fight are a direct result of the coalition's commitment to train and equip partner forces, Warren said. In the Tigris River Valley, Iraqi forces repelled several coordinated attacks. "Iraqi security forces continue to consolidate and improve their defensive positions while continuing to increase their combat power," Warren said. In other developments, U.S. forces on Sunday conducted a raid that targeted Suleiman Abd Shabib al-Jabouri, a ISIL military emir and war council member. "His removal will degrade ISIL leadership's network, and impact its ability to coordinate attacks and defend ISIL strong holds," Warren said. First B-52 Mission Against ISIL Targets Warren said the U.S. Air Force's B-52 Stratofortress bomber, which was deployed into theater earlier this month, conducted its first mission against ISIL Monday. It targeted an ISIL weapons storage facility in Qayyarah, Iraq. The B-52 will conduct the "same type of precision strikes that we've seen for the last 20 months here in this theater," the spokesman said. Syrian Developments Vetted Syrian opposition forces continue to clash with ISIL along the Mara Line, Warren said. He described the situation as a "shoving match" over the Manbij pocket. "We will continue to pressure ISIL but we expect them to fight hard to hold their ground," he said. Warren said the area is strategically important, explaining that sealing it off will cut ISIL's final line of communication and supply line between Turkey and Syria. The situation in the area has become a "fairly fluid and dynamic fight," according to Warren. Army Officer Recognized for Actions Warren commended the actions of U.S. Army Capt. Bradley Grimm, who is assigned to Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve in Iraq. Grimm provided actionable intelligence about a bomb threat against a school in Denmark, Warren said. For his exceptional actions, Denmark honored the officer with the Danish Defense Medal for Special Meritorious Effort. "The information he provided helped to foil the plot and resulted in an arrest and the confiscation of explosives," Warren said. "Brad's work likely saved the lives of Danish citizens." NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Dunford Arrives in Iraq to Assess Anti-ISIL Accelerants By Jim Garamone DoD News, Defense Media Activity BAGHDAD, April 20, 2016 On the heels of Defense Secretary Ash Carter's visit here, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff arrived in Iraq's capital city today for talks with Iraqi, American and coalition officials. Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford's visit seeks to build on that visit and on the momentum in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The Iraqis have pushed back against the terror group, defense officials have said in recent news briefings. Iraqi forces cleared ISIL out of Beiji and Ramadi and, according to today's briefing by Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren, have liberated Hit. The next logical step, officials said, is to retake Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city and the largest city that ISIL still controls. It is a complicated step, the officials noted. Mosul is a majority Sunni city with a significant Kurdish population. Before ISIL took the city, there were about 2 million Iraqis living there. Officials estimate that the civilian population has shrunk to just under a million -- still a significant population. ISIL has also had the time to put in place defenses. Iraqi and Syrian forces have severed the links between Raqqa, Syria -- ISIL's so-called capital -- and Mosul. Coalition aerial assaults have been successful in supporting indigenous forces and in killing or wounding senior ISIL terrorists. Training Continues Coalition forces are also active in training Iraqi, Syrian and peshmerga fighters. Coalition experts have trained more than 20,000 Iraqi and peshmerga soldiers, and there are 3,782 currently being trained in five sites around the country. Trainers come from the United States, Finland, the United Kingdom, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Latvia, Belgium, France and Portugal. This is Dunford's fourth trip to Iraq since becoming chairman in October. One constant in his trips is his emphasis on putting pressure on ISIL across the board. Syrian and Iraqi military forces must attack in both countries. Political, economic and diplomatic efforts must go hand-in-hand with military operations. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Defense Superiority Relies on Investment, Research, Acquisition Chief Says By Cheryl Pellerin DoD News, Defense Media Activity WASHINGTON, April 20, 2016 The Defense Department's ability to maintain U.S. technological superiority for the 21st century depends on research and development investments requested in the fiscal year 2017 budget proposal, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics told a Senate panel today. Frank Kendall testified before the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee on the department's innovation and research request for FY 17. Joining him were Stephen Welby, assistant secretary of defense for research and engineering, and Arati Prabhakar, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Focus on Innovation Kendall said the departmentwide focus on innovation, technical excellence and acquisition process improvement is intended to help sustain a long-term competitive advantage and make the most effective use of resources. "We were able to increase our research and development request in the FY17 budget by about $3 billion over the previous year's appropriation level," Kendall said. "This budget increases the use of prototyping, demonstrations and experimentation to help the department more rapidly mature technology and assess the impact these innovative technologies can have on the future force," he added. DoD investments create options for future investments in full-scale development and production, Kendall said, noting that the department must rely on Congress and others to remove the threat of sequestration and make sure the next administration has the resources it needs to put such innovative technologies into the hands of warfighters. DoD Science, Technology Welby told the subcommittee that the FY 17 budget request contains $12.5 billion for science and technology, including $2.1 billion for basic research, and confirms the department's commitment for a stable and robust DoD science and technology program. "We are at a pivotal moment in history," he said, "where the advanced technical capability and capacity that the nation has relied upon to provide us with unmatched advantage on any battlefield is now being challenged by the military technology investments being made by increasingly capable and increasingly assertive powers." Today the department employs more than 39,000 scientists and engineers in 63 defense laboratories, warfare centers and engineering centers across 22 states, Welby said, all working to sustain the department's ability to support and field critical military technology that often has no commercial equivalent. "Our defense laboratory enterprise touches the broadest range of emerging concepts through our deep engagement with academia, industry and our international partners to keep the DoD smart, knowledgeable, agile and responsive in the face of new and emerging threats," he said. DoD laboratories have produced important innovations in vital defense areas such as electronic warfare, propulsion and weapons design, Welby added, "and maintaining this unique technical expertise is critical for insuring the department's ability to prepare for future threats." Pivotal Investments Prabhakar told the senators that DARPA works closely with colleagues across DoD and directly with defense companies, commercial companies, universities and labs of all sorts. "Within that ecosystem DARPA has one particular role," she said, "and that is to make the pivotal early investments in breakthrough technologies for national security." Today, DARPA does that work in a shifting global security landscape filled with technologies moving at a furious pace, said Prabhakar, who then provided the panel an example of the agency's work. "When our aircraft go out today on a mission they have a set of jamming profiles. These are very specific frequencies and wave forms that they can transmit to jam the adversary and protect themselves," she explained. But sometimes when the aircraft go out, Prabhakar said, they encounter a radar that's transmitting a signal that doesn't match anything in their library. If that happens in a time of conflict it leaves them dangerously unprotected, she added. A Completely New Approach Upgrading the system and getting the upgrades out to all the aircraft can take weeks to months to years, Prabhakar said, reflecting "the simple fact that when those systems were built we were in a world in which the adversary didn't change that often." Now a DARPA program takes a completely new approach to the problem, she said. "Onboard the aircraft, our system looks across the radio spectrum, [using] artificial intelligence to learn what the adversary radar is doing and then right there on the spot it generates a specific jamming profile to counter that specific threat," Prabhakar said. That means aircraft will be able to protect themselves immediately in the battlespace even when the environment around them is changing, she added, noting that there are many more examples of such new technologies across the DARPA portfolio. "We have work," she added, "that ranges from radical new military systems -- for example we just christened a ship a few weeks ago that will navigate across the ocean without a single sailor on board -- and it also includes research that is harnessing everything from photons to algorithms to even living cells to create possibilities that no one could even imagine before today." NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address U.S. Department of Defense Press Operations News Transcript Presenter: Secretary of Defense Ash Carter April 20, 2016 Opening Statement as Delivered at U.S.-GCC Defense Minesterial Joint Press Conference, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Thank you, Secretary General Zayani. I'd also like to thank our hosts here in Saudi Arabia, particularly my Saudi counterpart, Deputy Crown Prince and Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman, for the hospitality and the partnership. It's good to be here in Riyadh with our partners from the Gulf Cooperation Council. For the past 35 years, the United States and the GCC have worked together to develop robust relationships and enhance regional security. We've stood together since the days of the Cold War from the Iranian Revolution, to Operation Desert Storm, to the aftermath of 9/11, to our coalition's campaign against ISIL in Iraq and Syria. And now, we look forward to building on all this progress and experience, to bring our partnership into a new era. Today I reaffirmed the United States' enduring commitments to the security of our Gulf partners, including the commitments President Obama made at last May's U.S.-GCC Summit at Camp David. And ahead of President Obama's visit and tomorrow's U.S.-GCC Leaders' Summit, we had a productive series of meetings this morning with defense ministers from each of the GCC countries Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and Kuwait. Our discussions focused on three principal areas, which, among others, will also be discussed at tomorrow's Summit: delivering ISIL a lasting defeat; countering Iran's destabilizing activities across the region; and ensuring that our nations' combined capabilities against both of these threats match our combined commitments. On the first, we discussed what more we're doing to accelerate the lasting defeat of ISIL. Earlier this week in Iraq, I announced several steps the United States will be taking to support Iraqi Security Forces in operations to retake Mosul. And today, I encouraged our GCC partners to do more as wellnot only militarily, as Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been doing and I really appreciate that but also politically and economically. That's because Sunni support for multi-sectarian governance and reconstruction, particularly in Sunni areas of Iraq, will both be critical to ensuring that ISIL stays defeated. On Iran, I noted the United States shares with our GCC partners the view that, even as the nuclear accord verifiably prevents Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, there are many more issues to be concerned with regarding Iran's behavior in the region. That's one reason why I emphasized that the nuclear accord imposes no limits on the United States, and that what we're doing in the Department of Defense hasn't changed. In our posture, our preparedness, our planning, and our partnership, the U.S. military remains committed and capable of responding to Iranian malign and destabilizing activities, and deterring aggression against our regional friends and allies,including all GCC nations. And finally, on capabilities to counter both symmetric, and, particularly, asymmetric threats, we reviewed the six key areas where we agreed at Camp David to focus our cooperation: special operations, maritime security, cyber security, ballistic missile defense, exercises, and arms transfers. Over the last year, we've made important progress across these areas. I'll give you some examples. One, U.S. and GCC special operations forces are working together more closely than ever, including in war zones. Our countries are doing more to advance regional maritime security, with combined naval task forces patrolling the vitally important waterways of this region. We're working together to develop a blueprint for a regional ballistic missile defense architecture. We've also collaborated in almost 40 exercises together since Camp David, practicing integrated air and missile defense, combined arms, tactical air operations, special operations, and maritime operationsone example of that being the International Mine Countermeasures Exercise going on this month. And we've made important strides in providing GCC nations with critical defense equipment over $33 billion dollars' worth since last May, including over 66,000 precision-guided munitions to support urgent GCC operational requirements, such as the counter-ISIL campaign. I'm confident that based on our discussions today, the United States and our GCC partners will be able to take important steps forward in these and other areas. And I expect you'll hear more about that tomorrow after the Summit. http://www.defense.gov/News/News-Transcripts/Transcript-View/Article/739082/ NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address U.S. Department of Defense Press Operations News Transcript Presenter: Colonel Steve Warren, Operation Inherent Resolve spokesman April 20, 2016 Department of Defense Press Briefing by Col. Warren via Teleconference from Baghdad, Iraq (JOINED IN PROGRESS) CAPTAIN JEFF DAVIS: -- you joining us nonetheless. Everyone is getting their tape recorders turned on here, and we will turn it over to you. Good morning. COLONEL STEVE WARREN: Well, good morning, and thanks. And it -- the technical problems apparently are on this end. I guess this internet line goes -- it's commercial contracted out locally, and so, there's a problem with, apparently the switch in downtown Baghdad. So, that's where we had to switch the telephone, so forgive me, Pentagon press corps. Well, I've got a few remarks here that I'll work through, and then we'll get to some questions. So, good morning, Pentagon press corps. Q: Good morning. Q: Good morning. COL. WARREN: During his visit here on Monday, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced there are five new accelerants, which have been approved by the president and coordinated with the government of Iraq. These accelerants are, number one, authority to place additional advisers with Iraqi Security Forces at the brigade and battalion headquarters level. Number two, authority to employ attack helicopters in support of operations to retake Mosul. Number three, we will employ HIMARS in support of operations to retake Mosul. Number four, we will provide financial assistance to the Peshmerga. And number five, lastly, we will increase the force management level from 3,870 to 4,087. We are still working on the specifics of these accelerants, and we will keep everyone updated as our plans develop. Now, on to operations. On Sunday, U.S. forces conducted a raid, which targeted Suleiman Abd Shabib Al Jabouri, one of ISIL'S military emirs and an ISIL war council member. Al Jabouri's removal will degrade ISIL's leadership network and impact their ability to coordinate attacks and defend ISIL strongholds. Last week in the Euphrates River Valley, Iraqi Security Forces tore Hit from ISIL's grasp and gave it back to the Iraqi people. Hit is liberated. During Operation Desert Lynx, thousands of fleeing citizens sought safety behind CTS forces, highlighting the effectiveness of the Iraqi Security Forces and the trust they've earned from the Iraqi people. Hit was a linchpin for ISIL; clearing Hit hampers their ability to move foreign fighters and supplies into the Euphrates River Valley, and sets the stage for future offensive operations. The liberation of Hit will serve to further fragment ISIL's operations in the Anbar corridor. A key point to emphasize is the close coordination between the Iraqi army, CTS and Sunni tribal forces. During the Hit clearance, 60 Abu Isa and Al Shamal fighters, along with Iraqi army field engineers and one scrappy tank worked side-by-side with CTS to clear IEDs and relocate evacuating civilians to safe areas. The operational achievements we're seeing are a direct result of our commitment to train and equip our partners. For example, in Anbar Province, coalition advisers are professionalizing more than 100 Sunni tribal forces in a boot camp style course. This is important, because it's the first time tribal instructors taught the curriculum themselves. By helping tribal fighters establish their own training program, we're setting them up to secure long-term stability in the region. In the Tigris River Valley, which if the map is deployed -- is the blue circle on your map, it's still a tough fight. The ISF repelled several coordinated attacks consisting of vehicle-borne IEDs, suicide vests, indirect fire and small arms fire. The Iraqi Security Forces continue to consolidate and improve their defensive positions while continuing to increase their combat power. So, over to the west, the Peshmerga continue to hold the forward line of troops in their centers. Earlier this month, the U.S. Air Force deployed the legendary B-52 Stratofortress bomber into theater. The B-52 is a long-range, heavy bomber that can perform a variety of missions, including strategic attack, close air support, air interdiction and maritime operations. On Monday, this iconic platform conducted its first mission against an ISIL weapons storage facility in Qayyarah, Iraq. I have a video of this mission, but I don't know that we have video capabilities right now, so, I'll -- we'll make sure that video gets posted online. Now, to move onto Syria, where we continue to see vetted Syrian opposition and ISIL clash along the Mara line. The Syrian opposition has made gains, but so has ISIL. And (inaudible) has developed into a shoving match over the Manbij pocket. We will continue to pressure ISIL, but we expect them to fight hard to hold their ground. In Shaddadi, the SDF continue improving positions along the forward line of troops. In preparation for future operations, the SDF recently graduated their first basic training class of 200 Arabs. These Arabs joined the SDF during the Shaddadi offensive itself. This unilaterally run training course is one example of the SDF working to incorporate Arabs into their ranks. Finally, I'd like to highlight the efforts of Captain Bradley Grimm. Captain Grimm is a United States Army officer who was recently awarded the Danish Defense medal for special, meritorious effort. Captain Grimm provided actionable intelligence about a bomb threat against a school in Denmark. And the information he provided helped to foil a plot, and resulted in an arrest and a confiscation of explosives. Brad's work likely saved the lives of Danish citizens. I've got a photo of Brad. I don't know if we've got the ability to show it. But Captain Grimm is a soldier assigned to the CJTF here, he's based out of Al Asad. His work had a direct impact in Europe. CAPT. DAVIS: Yeah, we do -- we do have the photo up. Thanks. COL. WARREN: Ok. So there you see the photo. That concludes (inaudible), And with that -- (inaudible) -- I'll take your questions. CAPT. DAVIS: Yeah, we'll start with Cami. Q: Steve, hi, can I -- I just have one quick question. Where was the B-52 mission on Monday? COL. WARREN: It was in Qayyarah, Iraq, which is -- that is part of the Operation Valley Wolf, so it's a little bit east -- excuse me, it's a little bit west of Makhmur. Q: Okay, thanks. COL. WARREN: It's on the west side of the Tigris River from Makhmur, yeah. CAPT. DAVIS: Can you maybe spell that for us? COL. WARREN: I can. I've got to find it. So, we spell it this way: Quebec-Alpha-Yankee-Yankee-Alpha-Romeo-Alpha-Hotel. Q: And what was -- COL. WARREN: If you don't know your phonetic alphabet, you need to learn it if you're going to work in the Pentagon. (Laughter.) Q: What was the target again? COL. WARREN: It was -- it was an enemy weapons storage facility. And we'll have that video posted up here I think -- I guess it will be on the CJTF YouTube page, and I'll tweet it out as well. Q: What type of weapons did they have stored there? COL. WARREN: I don't have the specific details to put out. Most of these weapons of this particular target, primarily in these storage facilities what we see is a combination of their indirect fire capability. So they'll put what they refer to as -- (inaudible) -- their home-made indirect fire weapons systems. You know, they'll mass those ahead of distributing them out. Sometimes they'll be VBIED -- the fundamentals of VBIED. So they're home-made explosives. They're truck bombs that are not completely finalized yet, but they'll go there for final assembly, then eventual deployment. Q: Thank you. CAPT. DAVIS: Okay. Joe Tabet? Q: Colonel Warren, just to follow up on Cami's question, could you elaborate more on the significance of the B-52? Do you know if this type of aircraft would be used in the operations in Mosul and Raqqah? Also, do you have any concerns that the use of a B-52 could cause civilian casualties, for example? If you could elaborate on that. Thank you, sir. COL. WARREN: So, the B-52s really are replacing the B-1s that have been flying here for almost a year. They have larger -- (inaudible) -- capability and in some cases a little bit more -- (inaudible). They can carry a heavy payload. They -- they (conduct ?) the same level of precision which is why I really wanted to show you the video. I know there are memories -- you know, -- in the collective unconscious of B-52s decades ago doing very sort of less discriminate, arguably indiscriminate bombings. I guess that's where the phrase "carpet bombing" originally came from back in the "Linebacker" days. Those days are long gone. The B-52 is a precision strike weapon system, weapons platform. It will conduct the same type of precision strikes that we've seen for the last 20 months here in this theater. So it is simply a replacement for the B-1. Obviously, the B-52 does have a long and very illustrious history. So we do like to talk about it. But really, it's -- it's simply another platform from which we can launch our precision strikes. CAPT. DAVIS: Okay. Tom? Q: Hi, colonel. Tom here from AFP. You -- earlier on, you referenced along the Mara line some gains that ISIL has made. And can you talk a bit more about these ISIL gains? And there was a report yesterday that ISIL now controls a previously government-controlled neighborhood in Deir ez-Zor. Is there anything on those gains please? COL. WARREN: Well, what you've got in the Mara line area is -- it's become a fairly fluid and dynamic place. For months, the Mara line has kind of become very stable. This was treacherous in many ways. You know, I saw some of the -- (inaudible). It looked in some cases like a World War I battlefield -- very stable, very static, trench-works on both sides, to support this sort of staring each other down. Recently, the moderate opposition began -- provided some devastating air power in support of that, and we started to see the Mara line become a little bit more fluid. So that's what you're seeing now. So, there are several towns in this -- and "town" is almost too generous -- village, really. There are several villages in this area, you know, on the Mara line that have changed hands multiple times over the last several weeks. So we'll see some friendly force maneuver and the enemy will withdraw from the town. It will be a gunfight or maybe it will just be maneuver. Then maybe it will get cloudy, and so that will limit our ability to provide air power. And we'll see the enemy then re-take that town, either through maneuver only or sometimes with fires as well. So it -- (inaudible). You know, I think right now, and I've seen some press reporting. But in our view, assigns more significance than it deserved to individual towns being taken or lost. And again, the term "town" is probably too generous. These are villages. So what you're going to see, we believe, for some time now is this kind of fluid dynamic, back and forth. That's why -- that's why I use, I picked that phrase "shoving match" very deliberately, because that's what we see. You know, the -- (inaudible) -- will kind of shove ISIL then they'll go back a few steps, and ISIL will come and will shove the opposition back a few steps. And that's what we have right here in the Mara line. We're going to continue to provide support. We're going to continue to encourage opposition forces there to press that fight. We believe it's important. You know, the Mara line is -- is the -- is the western boundary of the Manbij pocket. The Manbij pocket is the last open channel between Turkey and Syria. So if we can close -- if we can close off that Manbij pocket -- in other words, push the Mara line east to where they can link up with the Euphrates River -- to the Euphrates, we'll then have sealed off the final line of communication -- supply line between Turkey and Syria. And that -- we think that's important because that's where a lot of the foreign fighter flow comes in; that's where all the illicit items move in both directions. So we think it's important to seal that off. In Deir ez-Zor we have, there's one -- in Deir ez-Zor city, we have one portion of the city that the regime forces never lost control of. And so we're seeing continued maneuver for that final portion of Deir ez-Zor city. And we're talking about a matter of blocks in this case. So again, way too early to make any -- to assign too much significance to this very tactical work that's going on in Deir ez-Zor city. Q: So I guess just to follow, then, you haven't changed your assessment? I think the figure that you gave us previously was that ISIL has lost 10 percent of the Syrian land that they once had. Is that still the claimed number? COL. WARREN: You've got to speak up. I can't hear you. Q: Yes, sorry. So, these -- these small gains haven't changed your assessment in terms of the percentage of territory that you have retaken from ISIL? I think previously you said it was 10 percent. COL. WARREN: Right. So, we've been at kind of 15 to 20 percent for some time now. But what you're seeing up in the Mara line area is -- won't be enough to even move that percentage point in any direction. Q: Okay. Thanks. CAPT. DAVIS: Bill? Q: Hey, Steve. Quick question on Russian movements and actions inside of Syria. What percentage of -- I mean, can you give us a sense of what kind of activity they're -- they're up to right now? How much of it is targeted at Islamic State or, you know, Nusra? And -- yeah, and then give us a sense of what is their kind of fire power in the country I don't know how many weeks after they're supposed to withdrawal. COL. WARREN: Well, you know, when the Russians first came in, they claimed that they wanted to fight ISIL, and in reality, only a small fraction of their strikes were against ISIL. About 80 percent of their strikes were against the opposition. Since the cessation of hostilities was declared, we have seen that shift. At one point, the Russians really have -- they primarily had been striking ISIL. At one point, I think, in the last, I don't know, week or so, the Russians we estimated -- really more than 70 percent of their strikes were against ISIL. So I don't have today's figure and we don't track it, you know, that closely. But the Russian have been striking either ISIL or, in many cases, Nusra. That said, we have seen an uptick -- a general uptick in the number of cease-fire or cessation of hostilities violations. We have seen an uptick in the violence, primarily regime elements coming into contact with other forces. So this is a concern to us and, you know, we've called on the Russians several times to use their influence with the Syrian regime to try and tamp this down. Q: And do you believe at this point that they're preparing for an end to the cease-fire? Does it look that way from their positioning? COL. WARREN: Well, you know, I'm not going to predict -- (inaudible) -- what their intentions are. What I do know is that we have seen, you know, regime forces with some Russian support as well begin to mass and concentrate combat power around Aleppo. So this is something we're concerned about and something we'll keep an eye on. That said, it's primarily al-Nusra who holds Aleppo, and of course, al-Nusra is not part of the cessation of hostilities. So it's complicated. We're watching it. Our focus, though, as the Combined Joint Task Force, is ISIL. And so don't forget that, that's our focus. The cessation of hostilities, the diplomatic and political processes -- while they certainly have -- are of interest to us and potentially could influence our operations peripherally, our focus remains ISIL. Q: Thanks, Steve. Q: Steve, has this been a significant uptick just recently? Or is this -- is this the uptick that you've been talking about for weeks? COL. WARREN: I mean, it's just -- (inaudible) -- but it is -- it's kind of moving (inaudible)? It's a gradual increase, so last week, a little but more than two weeks ago, which was a little bit more than three weeks ago. So it is, you know, kind of an incremental uptick. CAPT. DAVIS: Tolga's next. Q: Hi, colonel. This is Tolga. I had two quick questions regarding the Mara line and follow-up questions. First, there is -- COL. WARREN: Hold up. Move closer to the phone. Q: Okay. So first question on the offensive of the opposition groups in west of Hazas. It seems that there is not any coalition air support for those groups who are fighting against ISIL in the west of Hazas and alongside the Syrian-Turkish border. Is there any particular reason? Is there any -- there is not any group that you're cooperating with there -- (inaudible)? COL. WARREN: Well I don't have a list of groups, Tolga, we are providing support for the moderate Syrian opposition forces that we are in contact with. You have to keep in mind there are hundreds of these small bands and groups of fighters, and we have not -- we're not in contact with every one of them. Similarly, some that we are in contact with don't need our fundamental vetting standards, so we won't support them. So I don't know which group you're talking about, Tolga. You know that we are, broadly speaking, providing support to the moderate Syrian opposition as they fight ISIL. Q: Okay. And the second one on the Kurdish groups in Mara line. As you know, often Kurds have now reached to ISIS boundaries in the Mara line and they are ready to attack ISIS. And on the other side, alongside the Euphrates River, just east part of the Manbij pocket they're also ready to attack Manbij. And if -- I mean, since you mentioned, about to close the gap, the last part in the -- along the Syrian-Turkish border. Did you -- did you make any decision about support -- to support Kurdish fighters, especially Afrin Kurds in this Manbij pocket? COL. WARREN: Not yet. Q: Okay. Is there any timeline or any particular reason for this? COL. WARREN: So we're still working through all of this. I don't have a timeline to give you, Tolga, unfortunately, but we are still working through it. There are, as you know, several competing sets of sensitivities that have to be managed that's being worked really at the political and diplomatic level. We would like to see, at the end of the day, the Manbij pocket closed. So, you know, there's a lot of work going on, diplomatic at the political level, as well as at the military level to try and get all the players into a place where they're comfortable closing off this pocket. Q: Got it. Thanks, Colonel. CAPT. DAVIS: Andrew Tilghman? Q: Colonel Warren, on the -- one of the accelerants in terms of putting advisers on the brigade and battalion level, can you just tell us how you think that's going to play out from here? Have you identified particular brigades and battalions that will be receiving advisers? Roughly how many, do you think? Would it be -- would it be all of them up there in the Mosul area, which you described as eight to 12 brigades and their underlying battalions, or would it be more selective than that? COL. WARREN: So too soon to tell. You know, we're continuing -- we're working now the plan. I think what you'll see is an as-needed situation, so, you know, as advisers are required with certain brigades, that's what you'll see. But it's very early right now and we are kind of continuing to develop exactly what this is going to look like. Q: Can you elaborate a little bit -- COL. WARREN: Mosul itself -- Q: What is as -- COL. WARREN: Mosul itself -- it's all right. You go. Q: What is as-needed? Can you describe like the scenario that would make a brigade or a battalion need a set of advisers? COL. WARREN: So Mosul's still several steps away, so the first thing we have to do is set the conditions in order to get us into Mosul, was what I was trying to say. You know, I'm not going make up, you know, kind of made up scenarios that don't exist yet. What I'll say is that as units -- as we assess that units could use the help of advisers and assisters or as the Iraqis request specific units receive advice -- more target advice, that's what we'll do. But you know, I'm not going to spin some kind of yarn that imagines a scenario. What I'll say is that as the Iraqi Security Forces begin their movements, there will be times when those forces need -- those forces would benefit from the type of advice and assistance that American and coalition advisers can provide. And as those -- those opportunities and requirements arise, we'll fill them. Remember, this is authorities, right? That's -- I was very careful about reading that. It's authorities that push these advisers and assisters to brigade and battalion level. So, it's a decision that, now, commanders, these commanders here on the ground, can make at the time the place of our choosing. CAPT. DAVIS: Jamie McIntyre. Q: Colonel Warren, it's Jamie McIntyre. Two questions, one about the B-52s, and I know we're dealing with perceptions here, but because these planes are older and bigger than the B-1s, do they -- are they in anyway more vulnerable to ground attack, for instance, given the reports that there maybe shoulder-fired missiles in the region? Question number one. And then question number two, more broadly about the civilian casualty question. There have been some reports suggesting that the rules of engagement have shifted somewhat in order to provide more latitude, and that might permit for more civilian casualties. Can you help us understand what real -- what's really going on with that? COL. WARREN: Sure. Jamie McIntyre, who do you work for now? (Laughter.) Q: I work for the authoritative Washington Examiner. COL. WARREN: Excellent. Q: Thanks. Thank you. COL. WARREN: That's good. That is an authoritative paper. Q: Yes. COL. WARREN: Glad to hear it. Okay, B-52s -- (inaudible) -- really, they are not more vulnerable than other platforms that we've got operating in this theater, and of course, we take all of the precautions that we can. You know, force protection is always our top priority here, and so is protecting, you know, the force that mans the B-1 bomber falls in that category. On the CIVCAS and ROE. So, what -- then there is some recent reporting that -- to the rules of engagement, or the rules for how we handle CIVCAS have changed. Here's what has happened. The authority to accept risk has been delegated to a lower level. So, when this -- when this fight began 20 months ago, the four-star general in Tampa, the Central Command commander retained the authority to be the person who decides how much we're willing to risk a civilian casualty. Since that time, as the theater matured, and as our systems have -- have developed, as our processes have gotten better, those authorities have been delegated down to a lower level. They've been delegated down to our level here at the CJTF. So, rather than the CENTCOM commander having to approve a strike that carries the risk of civilians casualties, now the CJTF commander, or in some cases, the CJTF deputy commander can -- has the authority to make a decision on that risk, on whether or not the strike that we are planning to take -- if there is a risk of a civilian casualty associated with that strike, the decision level is now here at the CJTF. Does that makes sense? Q: Yeah. So, a quick follow up. So, does it change the threshold for approving such strikes? And do you anticipate that this moving -- moving the decision closer to the battlefield would risk an increase in civilian casualties? COL. WARREN: Well, it's a war, so there is always a risk of civilian casualties. Let's be very clear about that. And in fact, there have been some civilian casualties. But this does not translate to more civilian casualties. This translates to a more rapid execution of strikes, because you don't have to send requests all the way to Tampa anymore. We can -- in some cases, we can do it here. So, the way we do this is, you know, we try to figure out what we think -- we find a target, we assess the military value of that target, and then we assess whether or not we think, if we strike that target, there might be the possibility of a civilian casualties associated with that strike. If we think there won't be any civilian casualties, based on a very extensive and thorough analysis, we hit. If we think there may be civilian casualties, then we go through a very detailed and painstaking process to determine, hey, how many civilian casualties we think might result from the destruction of that target, and what we can do to drive that number, that possible number of civilian casualties down to the smallest possible number, as close to zero as we can get. And if we can make adjustments -- for example, what time we strike the target, drop leaflets ahead of striking the target, use a different type of munition, attack from a different type of angle -- if we can make all of those adjustments, and based on our extraordinary knowledge and sophistication, have a reasonable belief that there will be zero civilian casualties, then we strike. Then after we have made all of our adjustments, if we still believe that there is a possibility of a civilian casualty occurring, well, then, that requires somebody of greater authority to approve that strike. And the authority level lies with the number of civilian casualties we believe maybe associated with that strike. So, I think that's the whole story. But at the end of the day, zero civilian casualties has to be our goal. It's our goal. We understand that there are going to be times when -- when tragedies happen and the worst happens. But then, it's certainly not our goal; our goal is to not -- we are here to help the Iraqi people, we are here to help the Syrian people. And so, with that in mind, we do everything we can to not hurt them. Q: One last clarification. When did this change of authority take place, or when it shifted from CENTCOM to theater? COL. WARREN: It has happened over time, so it has been incremental. So, again, as our systems develop, as our higher headquarters starts seeing the same type of target set come up, over time, they'll say, okay, in this case, we're going to delegate the authority. You don't need to show us that anymore. For example, oil trucks. Right? You know, so if we hit a certain target type repeatedly, over time, the higher headquarters may delegate down that target type. So it's been ,you know, it's been an ongoing, I think, process. CAPT. DAVIS: Next to Brian Emerstein. Q: Hi. Brian Emerstein with Air Force Magazine. Back to the B-52s. I wanted to talk about the precision of these strikes. Can you say what type of weapons were released on Monday? And in addition to the B-52 deployment, we've seen other new deployments of A-10s from Idaho, F-16s from Germany. Does this represent an uptick in the aircraft that are available to the coalition or are these just normal rotations and -- (inaudible) -- the same? COL. WARREN: It's both. So, you know we have seen for example the Dutch have just sent an additional F- -- or was it the Danes sorry the Danes -- have just sent additional F-16s into the fight. These are new, you know, new -- added capability. You just saw obviously, EA-6B Prowlers that are moving into Incirlik. This is on top of what we already had. This isn't a replacement. Other times, it is a replacement. So it's combination of both. On the exact munition types that the B-52 delivered in Qayyarah, Iraq, I don't have that. We can try to -- I don't know if we release that or not. I'll check with AFCENT and I'll send the info. I'll send the answer back through Matt Allen or Roger. CAPT. DAVIS: Next to Jamie Crocker Q: Hi, colonel. I just have two quick questions. Clarification on the HVT operation you spoke about on -- that look place on Sunday. Was the target -- did you say, was he captured or killed? And then following up on the Captain Grimm operation, can you just elaborate a little more on what -- where he was based and what the target was in Denmark that he identified? Is there just anything more you can provide on his role in this? COL. WARREN: So on the -- on the HVI, I didn't say if he was killed or captured. Let me get -- so I've got the citation here of the -- that was developed for him here. So Captain Grimm did several things. You know, thing number one that he did was to help develop a system to speed the flow of intelligence from here on the ground up to national capitals. So that was of benefit to the various national capitals. The other thing he did was he provided some actionable intelligence that included information taken from exploited captured documents on enemy foreign fighters who were from Denmark or who had relatives in Denmark, as well as some cyber information on possible terrorist threats to Denmark. This included one instance where the information -- information provided on a bomb threat against a school using homemade explosives in Denmark, and the information that Captain Grim was able to provide contributed to an arrest and to the confiscation of these homemade explosives. So Captain Grimm, at the time he was given the award, had provided 250 tailored reports compiled from reports and information, which were releasable to Denmark and the (unintelligible) the flow of reclassified as permitted material for NATO use. So he did all this voluntarily, you know, kind of in addition to his duties. He was based in Al Asad while he was doing all of this. So I wanted to highlight it because it's not everyday an American captain receives a very high -- prestigious medal from a foreign country. And I wanted to highlight it too because it's important to me to remind everyone who's listening how very seriously we take the threat of external ops. This is top of our minds. So as we conduct operations, as we partner with our Iraqi partners, we are continuously with them to try and draw out any tidbit of information that we can find that relates in any way to an external attack or an external operation that ISIL is planning. And when we find such information, we'll do one of two things. We will move that information where it needs to go to help protect the homeland. Two, and from our perspective just as important, is we will find whoever it is that is plotting this external attack and we will take immediate and violent action. CAPT. DAVIS: Lucas? Q: Colonel Warren, did General Votel make this order to shift or delegate authorities from CENTCOM down to CJTF level? COL. WARREN: This happened overtime, really, from -- since September really all the way up to now. I mean, like I said, it's kind of an ongoing process, but I think the most significant delegation of authority was in October, but this is a continuing process. Q: Understood. And has this sped up the decision-making process overall to bomb targets? COL. WARREN: It has. You know, the more authorities that are delegated down, the more rapid we're able to respond, frankly, on these targets. And that's just a factor of, you know, there's time and distance much easier for the, you know, commander on the ground who has nothing else to worry about than the fight to -- who's completely soaked in the daily operations to be able to assess the risk value -- (inaudible) -- assessment on the target rather than have to bring, you know, a higher level headquarters located thousands of miles away who have significantly larger scope and set of responsibilities, who will approach -- (inaudible) -- Afghanistan -- (inaudible) -- all of the CENTCOM AOR. So of course, I mean, it's natural that this would speed up the process, and so it has. Q: And of the 217 new troops that were announced this week will be going to Iraq, can you provide us a breakdown of those forces? COL. WARREN: Well I'm not going to give you a specific breakdown. What I'll tell you is that these new personnel will provide engagement support, some force protection, some HIMARS field artillery support. So these are the individuals and some advise and assist -- so these are the individual people associated with the other accelerants, right? The accelerants are advise and assist to a lower level, so some people will go do that, it's Apache helicopters, so some people will go do that. It's HIMARS, so some people will go do that. And that's it. Q: Can you give us a breakdown of the services involved? Like Marines -- COL. WARREN: No, we don't even have that yet. Q: Okay. COL. WARREN: That doesn't exist yet, so we're working through those processes now to -- you know, to do fills and generation of our own. So that's coming, but we don't even have it yet. Q: Thank you. CAPT. DAVIS: Next to Nancy. Q: Hi, Steve. I want to follow up on two areas that you talked about -- on the decision to move the -- the strike decision to the commander and deputy commander. Is it fair to say -- I just want to make sure I understand you correctly -- that that decision no longer lies in CENTCOM? Are any of those decisions made out of CENTCOM? Or are they all exclusively in-theater? COL. WARREN: There not all exclusively in-theater -- (inaudible). So, it's -- how many civilians we believe are potentially at risk. So and we're very deliberate not to give out the numbers. Q: Sure. COL. WARREN: If it's -- you know, zero civilian casualties, then, you know, somebody can approve it. If it's, you know, one civilian casualty, somebody else can approve it and on up the line. So at some point, there's a cut-line where it does have to go back to Tampa. Q: And is there any discussion of moving that decision-making process lower down to, say, General Volesky's level? Particularly as you move more troops in closer to where Iraqis are fighting, for example, and the battle toward Mosul? Is it possible that we'll see that decision made at a lower level, particularly as you move closer to Mosul? Is that being discussed? COL. WARREN: (inaudible) -- works for General (inaudible) and (unintelligible) who can approve some targets. So again, it's a rolling thing -- the same way that Central Command over time decides to delegate down to the CJTF, then over time the CJTF can further delegate in some cases. In some cases, we receive the authorities with caveats that say no further delegation authorized, but those are rare. Q: Okay. And then one of the things that you said is that we're still several steps away from Mosul. Are one of those steps Fallujah? We heard earlier about a potential offensive in Fallujah. Is that still a possibility? And is that considered one of those steps towards Fallujah? COL. WARREN: Well, Fallujah is certainly something that is talked about here every single day. There's acute awareness of the humanitarian suffering that's going on in that town. And the Iraqis are -- are very much focused on the idea of liberating Fallujah. Where the liberation of Fallujah falls in the sequence of events, frankly, has not yet been determined. There is continued discussion about that throughout the coalition and the Iraqi chain of command. So this is ongoing. Fallujah will be liberated eventually, as we hope will every square inch of Iraqi soil be free of ISIL. Q: Thank you. CAPT. DAVIS: Let's see here. Next is Gordon. Q: Colonel Warren, I may have missed it during the announcement. But do we know the timing of the arrival of the 217? COL. WARREN: We don't, Gordon. They'll flow in over time. Some are already here. Obviously, the Apaches are already here. So, you know, they'll flow in over time. Q: And can you tell us what the current number of forces are in Iraq right now? COL. WARREN: Standby. CAPT. DAVIS: He asked for the current number of forces in Iraq. COL. WARREN: Yeah. Standby. I'm looking it up. Let me check. (CROSSTALK) CAPT. DAVIS: My mistake. COL. WARREN: So, on April 15th, there were 3,350 was our FML, so. Q: So, my real question is, as you know, and thanks to some of our colleagues here, there's a difference between the public number and the number that's actually there in Iraq, because they're on temporary status or whatever. A, can you give us the number -- recognizing that it fluctuates -- can you give us the number of the temporary folks? And also, has there been any more thought to the Pentagon just providing that number as a matter of course -- the full number? COL. WARREN: No to both. Q: Can I ask why? COL. WARREN: You can. Q: Can you give us an answer? COL. WARREN: (Laughter.) Gordon, I -- you know, I've got to tell you that the chairman of the joint chiefs was very eloquent at his last press conference there in the Pentagon in the briefing room, as to what we're doing and why. There's really nothing I can add to that. I feel like he said -- he summed it all up in two sentences much more efficiently than I'm able to do. So I would refer you to his -- the secretary of defense excuse me -- the chairman of the joint chiefs' recent comments. Q: All right. Thank you. CAPT. DAVIS: Okay. Paul? Q: Colonel Warren, hi. It's Paul Shinkman with U.S. News. Just a couple of clarifying questions. On the 217, I know that you can't comment on -- on where these troops are specifically coming from, but that's an awfully specific number. So can you say are there 217 specific troops or specific kinds of troops that you have in mind, and you haven't figured out where they're coming from? Or do you know and just can't say? Can you give us a better -- excuse me -- understanding on that? COL. WARREN: So, all of the -- everything hasn't been resourced yet. You know, there's a -- there's a process for how we resource through the United States military, how we resource requirements, the request for forces process. It's been about a week, and -- (inaudible) -- probably still not understand -- (inaudible). But it's very specific. But the number 217 and why I think -- the reason it's interesting to everyone. So, it's based on units, right, so a HIMARS, you know, battery by doctrine, has X number of people in it. An Apache maintenance crew, you know, by the book, has Y number of people in it. So as we figure out what our requirements are -- okay, we need this many Apaches, with this many maintainers, and this many fuel-handlers, we just look at the book and see what it says. We may not actually get that many people. Very few units are, you know, at 100 percent filled all the time At least any unit that I've ever been assigned to has been like that. But that's where the number comes from. The number simply comes from opening up the book and seeing how many people are, by the book, assigned to a HIMARS battery. If it's 28, then we write down 28. And that's how we get our number. Q: So it may not be that 217 ultimately go. That's just the new cap on how many could go? COL. WARREN: Good question, a very smart question; 217 is the doctrinal number associated with the amount of force that we have requested. Q: And then on the civilian casualties, can you confirm how many confirmed civilian casualties there have been so far? How many requests for investigation there have been? And how many active investigations there are? COL. WARREN: I'm going to have to flip through my book here. If I recall, it's roughly 26 civilian casualties that we have announced. As you know, CENTCOM makes these announcements. I believe that there are a handful of civilian casualties that have not yet been announced; that we'll announce, you know, eventually when we get through the whole process. So these are -- these are investigations that are complete. We have determined that there have been some casualties, but haven't gotten all the way through the checking and re-checking, and people signing the paperwork, et cetera. So those will be announced when ready. And then there are several -- there are a handful of investigations that are ongoing right now. So that's where we are. I -- I don't have numbers to give out associated with the second category I just described. But my sense is the numbers are very low, though. I mean, after 20 months and 40,000 weapons releases, we're certain. We've completed investigations that lead us to believe that the preponderance of evidence indicates that there have been 26 civilian casualties. And that -- that's, I mean, remarkable by anyone's standard. And so I think that level of -- that remarkable level of precision will continue. So as these -- these handful of investigations that are virtually complete, but not yet prepared for release, as they come out, I think they're going to look an awful lot like what you've seen thus far -- one here, two there. All tragic, all -- we wish we could have avoided them. But nevertheless, remarkable in their, you know, in how small they are. Q: And then lastly, just to sort of follow up on this -- on this gradual shift in the authorities, isn't the fact that there are going to be more strikes by virtue of the fact that strikes can happen more quickly, and that you can take advantage of dynamic targets more readily, doesn't that mean that the risk of civilian casualties raises, just by virtue of the fact that they're are more strikes? COL. WARREN: Well, that's like when you flip a coin, does the percent -- does the chance that it will come up heads change because you've already flipped it twice? I mean, I'm not statistician, but I mean, to me, every single -- every single target gets the same amount of rigor, the same level of standards apply to it, the same amount of effort applies to drive the civilian casualties to zero. CAPT. DAVIS: Tom? Q: Yes, sorry, just a quick follow up on that point. Can you help me understand, if you're removing layers of scrutiny from this decision, then how is it that the threshold for a strike wouldn't be more likely to result in civilian casualties? COL. WARREN: It's not that -- (inaudible) -- remove a layer of scrutiny. All it removes is -- all it does is delegate the weight of decision to a different individual. Q: So -- okay. But I mean, it was going higher up the chain of command, and now it's lower down. That would suggest a lower level of scrutiny. COL. WARREN: I disagree. You know, I think General MacFarland applies excruciating scrutiny to every single target. CAPT. DAVIS: All right. Anything else? Yes, Luis? Q: One quick clarifier, Steve. The delegation is only to the commander and deputy commander of CJTF? Or does it go lower than that? COL. WARREN: It goes lower. Q: Thank you. CAPT. DAVIS: Lucas? Q: Colonel, maybe just one more clarification. The delegation has gone down, but has the ROE changed or the number of acceptable civilian losses? Has that changed? COL. WARREN: No. The number of acceptable civilian losses is always at zero. And then commanders have to make the decision as to whether or not the military value of the target justifies the possibility that some civilians may be killed. Q: Thank you. CAPT. DAVIS: All right. Last call. Thanks, everybody. Thank you, Steve, again. Sorry for the technical problems. I understand we'll have your video posted here -- (inaudible).' http://www.defense.gov/News/News-Transcripts/Transcript-View/Article/739157/ NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Doorstep statement by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg following the NATO-Russia Council meeting NATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organisation 20 Apr. 2016 Good afternoon, I have just chaired a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council. And we all agree that it is in all our interest to keep political channels for political dialogue open. Political dialogue among nations that share the same Euro-Atlantic area is both necessary and useful, especially in times of tensions as we experience now. However, this does not mean that we are back to business as usual. We discussed three important topics during our meeting. The crisis in and around Ukraine. Issues related to military activities; transparency and risk reduction; And an assessment of the security situation in Afghanistan, including regional terrorist threats. We had a frank and serious discussion. NATO Allies and Russia hold very different views. But we have listened to what each of us have to say. Let me start with the situation in Ukraine. Because Russia's actions against Ukraine led to the current state of our relations. NATO Allies made clear that they stand firm in their support for Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity. Allies do not recognise Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea. We stressed that the increase in ceasefire violations in eastern Ukraine in recent days is deeply disturbing. As are the recent incidents targeting OSCE monitors. All 29 members of the NATO-Russia Council agreed today on the need for a full and rapid implementation of the Minsk agreements. The signatories to the agreements must comply with their commitments. And Russia has a significant responsibility in this regard. The respect for the right for every nation to choose their own security arrangements is a fundamental principle on which the NATO-Russia Council rests. This must be observed both in words and in deeds. We also discussed transparency and risk reduction. We have a responsibility to ensure predictability, confidence and stability across our region. The armed forces of every nation and every military alliance have the right to exercise. But in recent years, Allies have seen a decrease in transparency in military activities. Combined with an increase in military activity and forces, and strong rhetoric. This is a dangerous combination. NATO Allies expressed concern about last week's incidents in the Baltic region involving Russian military aircraft. It is important to consider what steps we can all take to increase transparency and predictability. In the OSCE, all NATO Allies and Russia have agreed on rules governing military activities in Europe, including the observation and notification of exercises. Those rules must be respected. The NATO-Russia Founding Act recognised that strengthening the OSCE will prevent any possibility of returning to a Europe of division and confrontation. A number of NATO nations have tabled concrete proposals on how to modernise the Vienna Document on military transparency. It is important that everyone participates constructively in that work. More military transparency can contribute to more security in Europe. This is in both NATO's and Russia's interest. We also addressed Afghanistan. The Afghan security forces are facing a challenging security environment, but they are capable and they are dedicated. NATO remains committed to supporting them. All nations should do their part to support Afghanistan in reaching its goal of stability and security. NATO and Russia have profound and persistent disagreements. Today's meeting did not change that. NATO Allies remain firm that there can be no return to practical cooperation until Russia returns to the respect of international law. But we will keep channels of communication open. Especially when tensions are high, political dialogue is necessary to discuss our differences and to reduce the risk of military incidents. And with that I'm ready to take your questions. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS QUESTION (Associated Press): Secretary General, judging by your last remark there, is it fair to say that today's meeting did not lead to an improvement in relations between NATO and Russia? And in more detail, where there any agreements made as to further meetings of the NATO-Russia Council or the concrete steps that could be taken to reduce tensions? SECRETARY GENERAL: The NATO-Russia Council was never suspended, so I expect that we are going to meet again. We didn't decide on any schedule for next meeting, but since we never suspended the council I expect that we will meet again. I think we had a very frank, serious and actually good meeting. Not because we agreed, but because we were able to exchange views, to listen to each other, and thereby being able to contribute to better ability to talk to each other which I think is of particular importance when times are difficult as they are now. And in particular I think we had a very useful and frank exchange of views related to transparency, predictability and the importance of risk reductions and importance of keeping channels for military lines of communication open. And I think the relevance and importance of that has been highlighted by the incidents we have seen in the Baltic Region last week. QUESTION (ITAR-TASS): Mr Secretary General, do you genuinely believe now it's possible at the same time to deter Russia and to cooperate with it? SECRETARY GENERAL: We have suspended practical cooperation between NATO and Russia, but we decided that we will keep channels for political dialogue open. And that's exactly what we have proven today, that we were able to sit down and talk, exchange views. And because we disagree, and because there are difficulties I find it even more important that we sit down in meeting like the meeting we had today in the NATO-Russia Council. Deterrence is not about fighting a war but it is about preventing conflict. The reason why NATO has always been focused on importance of strong deterrence is not because we want to fight the war, but it is because we want to prevent war, and prevent conflict. And I also very strongly believe that there is no contradiction between strong defence and political dialogue. I will state again and again that the foundation for political dialogue is strength and predictability and that's the message also from NATO today. QUESTION (Reuters): Secretary General, how do you believe the Minsk process could move forward when there are such disagreements? What steps would you like to see be taken? SECRETARY GENERAL: During the meeting it was reconfirmed that we disagree both when it comes to the facts, the narratives, and the responsibilities for the crisis in and around Ukraine. And many Allies also conveyed a very strong message that we disagree when Russia try to portray this as a civil war. This is Russia destabilizing Eastern Ukraine, providing support for separatists, ammunition, funding equipment and also command and control. So there were profound disagreements related to the crisis in Ukraine, but we agreed on the importance of full and rapid implementations of the Minsk agreements, meaning respecting the ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons, and also, of course, full access for the international monitors to monitor the situation on the ground. And I think it is important that this is a clear message and is something which we agree on. And then of course we have to be able to see that this is not only something which is stated in meetings, but also then implemented on the ground and Russia has a special responsibility because Russia continues to support separatists in Eastern Ukraine. QUESTION (Channel 1 Russia): Mr Secretary General, could you please comment, this meeting was much longer than you planned before. Why was it so? And the second question, could you please comment if NATO considers Russia to be an opposing side, and if doesn't so then why NATO has increased military presence in Western Union? SECRETARY GENERAL: The meeting was longer than planned; that reflects that the meeting was a meeting where we had a frank, serious discussion about several important topics, topics which are of importance to all NATO Allies and for Russia. The crisis in and around Ukraine is of course something which is important for all of us. Military activity, transparency, predictability is important. We have seen that after the incidents in the Baltic Sea last week and of course the situation in Afghanistan is also related to our efforts to fight terrorism and increase security of all our nations. Everything NATO does and also of course in the Baltic Region is proportionate, it's defensive, and it's fully in line with our international commitments. And what we are doing is that we are responding to substantial military build-up in Russia. And we have to remember that what NATO has done in the Baltic Region with some increased military presence is in response to illegal annexation of Crimea and Russia's destabilizing behavior in Eastern Ukraine. So, NATO's increased military presence in the Baltic Region happened six months after the illegal annexation of Crimea. So there can be no doubt that the facts and the order of when different things happened confirms that what NATO has done is a response to the actions of Russia in Ukraine. QUESTION (Dominika Cosic, Polish TV): I have one questions about Baltic Region and the transparency. What can be answer of NATO is there were more incidents like recently? SECRETARY GENERAL: Our focus now is to prevent that kind of incidents. And we are doing that partly by stressing the importance of using existing channels of military to military communications. We would like to see that they are used much more. Second, we are now working with all the European nations within the framework of OSCE in Vienna to try to modernize the different documents, the different agreements, which facilitate different kinds of confidence building measures, transparency, predictability, related to military activity. So, what we are doing now is that we are calling on all members of the OSCE to be constructive and to modernize these documents, including the Vienna Document. And I hope that we can make progress during this year. So, we can have better, more efficient agreements related to how we can reduce the risks of that kind of incidents we have seen in the Baltic Sea. If that kind of incidents happen again, then we need even more transparency and predictability and lines of communications, political and military lines of communications to prevent that it spiral out of control and create really dangerous situations. QUESTION: (NPR): I am going to pick up on your last comment. You said that you think even more lines of communication would be the answer if you see more incidents like this. There are these existing mechanisms, there are these existing lines of communication. What insurances do you have from Russia that they are going to respect that because this has been going on since long before Syria now? SECRETARY GENERAL: That is one of the reasons why these kind of meetings are important. Because we stressed very much and underlined strongly in the meeting the importance of both using existing lines of communication, existing mechanisms for risk reductions, that are not used to the extent we would like them to be used today. But in addition I think there is a need of improving different agreements, different mechanisms, for instance the Vienna Document. Because many things have changed. We have increased military presence, we have all the kinds of military capabilities now. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Divers Highlight Interoperability in Finding, Neutralizing Mines Navy News Service Story Number: NNS160420-12 Release Date: 4/20/2016 2:31:00 PM By Lt. Alex Cornell du Houx, U.S. Naval Forces Central Command Public Affairs KUWAIT (NNS) -- Divers from five nations are training together to identify and neutralize mines and other threats in order to ensure the waterways in the Middle East remain safe for commercial shipping. Explosive ordnance disposal teams from Kuwait, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and the U.S. are conducting a series of drills to address some of the biggest notional threats to maritime commerce as part of the International Mine Countermeasures Exercise (IMCMEX). IMCMEX includes navies from more than 30 countries spanning six continents training together across the Middle East. The exercise is focused on maritime security -- from mine countermeasures, maritime infrastructure protection, and maritime security operations -- in support of civilian shipping and freedom of navigation. "IMCMEX brings together a different variety of coalition partners," said German navy Cmdr. Mario Fink, from Kiel, Germany, who is commanding the IMCMEX task force in Kuwait. "Working together to know the ability of the different nations and to be familiar with circumstances of this very important area is an important goal of IMCMEX." Vice Adm. Kevin Donegan, commander, U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, visited the operations April 14 and toured with Maj. Gen. Khaled Abdullah, commander of Kuwait's Naval Forces. "This exercise is about enhancing cooperation, maritime capabilities and interoperability between international partners," said Donegan. "This exercise provides an opportunity for us to build proficiency and test the latest technology available for ensuring the global maritime commons stay open and secure." Kuwaiti dive teams are conducting training with U.S. and partner nations throughout IMCMEX to include medical and harbor security operations. French navy Lt. Cmdr. Patrick Bontemps, from Lyon, France, led a vehicle-born improvised explosive device engagement and neutralization, highlighting the importance of training together. "We participate in IMCEX to improve our training level in different contexts so that when there are dangers we are used to facing them," said Bontemps. "We are also here to improve interoperability between nations." "It's the big picture - the navy is here to protect our merchant shipping," added Dutch navy Lt. Cmdr. Lodewijk de Waard from Rhenen, Netherlands, who led the demonstrations for Donegan and Abdullah. "If our merchant shipping is threatened we have to protect them. If it deals with mines or improvised mines, it is a job for our unit in the Netherlands and the international community. We do a lot of trade with the countries out here -- it is important for us to be ready to deploy with a united response." IMCMEX will continue through April 26. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address First Phase Unmanned Aviation on CVN Complete Navy News Service Story Number: NNS160420-21 Release Date: 4/20/2016 4:14:00 PM From USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) Public Affairs SAN DIEGO (NNS) -- USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) marked a historical milestone April 13 after installing the first unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) command center aboard an aircraft carrier. Capt. Beau Duarte, program manager of Unmanned Carrier Aviation program office (PMA-268), inspected the site and recognized Carl Vinson Sailors instrumental in the security, logistics and installation of the UAV suite. "This marks the start of a phased implementation of the MQ-XX system on an aircraft carrier," said Duarte. "The lessons learned and ground-breaking work done here will go on to inform and influence future installations on other aircraft carriers." The work was performed during USS Carl Vinson's recent Chief of Naval Operations Planned Incremental Availability (PIA). The completion of all phases of installation is scheduled for 2022. "We are carving out precious real estate on board the carrier, knowing that the carrier of the future will have manned and unmanned systems on it," said Capt. Karl Thomas, Carl Vinson's commanding officer. "This suite is an incremental step necessary to extend performance, efficiency and enhance safety of aerial refueling and reconnaissance missions that are expending valuable flight hours on our strike-fighter aircraft, the F/A-18 Echoes and Foxtrots." The MQ-XX program will deliver a high-endurance unmanned aircraft that will replace today's F/A-18E/F aircraft in its role as the aerial tanker for the Navy's carrier air wing (CVW), thus preserving the strike fighter's flight hours for its primary mission. It will also leverage the range and payload capacity of high-endurance unmanned aircraft to provide critically needed, persistent, sea-based ISR capability in support of the CSG and the Joint Forces Commander. The MQ-XX is scheduled to be operational in the mid-2020s. "Having a UAV asset that provides persistent, potentially 24/7, surveillance coverage for the strike group is a game changer," said Commander, Carrier Strike Group (CSG) 1, Rear Adm. James Loeblein. "Putting additional ISR capacity into the warfare commander's hands increases the flexibility and warfare capability of the entire strike group." The Carl Vinson Strike Group is scheduled to deploy on a Western Pacific deployment in 2017. Carl Vinson is currently pierside in its homeport of San Diego. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address US Forces to Conduct 9th Rotation in Lithuania - Defense Ministry Sputnik News 17:01 20.04.2016 The United States Army will conduct its ninth rotation of around 260 troops after completing service in the Baltic nation of Lithuania this week, the Lithuanian Ministry of National Defense said Wednesday. VILNIUS (Sputnik) The US Army Europe's (USAREUR) 3rd Squadron, 2nd Cavalry Regiment will be stationed in central Lithuania's Jonavos district with the Lithuanian Land Force's Duke Vaidotas Mechanized Infantry Battalion, the ministry added. "US troops, having trained for 3 months in Lithuania, will return to their place of permanent deployment in Vilseke, Germany It is planned that about 260 US troops will train in Lithuania until the end of June," the ministry said. The outgoing US troops conducted individual training of Lithuanian troops and took part in joint military exercises. The rotation is being carried out in Latvia, Estonia and Poland, in addition to Lithuania. USAREUR rotations date back to the spring of 2014 as part of the US-led NATO Operation Atlantic Resolve. US troops are embedded with the Mechanized Infantry Brigade "Iron Wolf" in the central Lithuanian town of Rukla. The town also hosts military equipment, including Stryker armored fighting vehicles, armored SUVs and trucks. Belgian, Danish, Luxembourger, Portuguese, Hungarian and German troops have also taken part in joint drills. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Russia Ready to Sell Arms to Somalia After Sanctions Lifted Sputnik News 13:53 20.04.2016(updated 14:01 20.04.2016) Moscow will be able to sell arms to Somalia after UN sanctions against the African country are lifted. MOSCOW (Sputnik) Russia is ready to fulfill weapons sales requests from any country including Somalia, once the sanctions imposed on it are lifted, a senior spokesman of the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation said Wednesday. "Russia is ready to satisfy requests for arms deliveries from all countries, including Somalia, should they not be subjected to sanctions," the official told RIA Novosti. On Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Mogadishu would like Moscow's support in developing the Somali economy and strengthening its armed forces. Russia is ready to consider cooperating with Somalia in the military-technical field, according to Lavrov. The UN Security Council introduced an arms embargo on Somalia in January 1992. The move followed the outbreak of the ongoing Somali Civil War. Today, parts of southern Somalia are controlled by the al-Qaeda affiliated al-Shabaab group, while piracy off the coast of Somalia has been a threat to international shipping since around 2005, with most pirate attacks concentrated in the Gulf of Aden. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address First Export Contract for BrahMos Cruise Missiles to Be Signed in 2016 Sputnik News 09:33 20.04.2016(updated 12:08 20.04.2016) An Asian-Pacific country will sign a contract on the delivery of Russian-Indian BrahMos cruise missiles by the end of 2016. KUALA LUMPUR (Sputnik) The first export contract on delivering Russian-Indian BrahMos cruise missiles to a country in the Asian-Pacific Region will be signed by the end of 2016, BrahMos Aerospace spokesman Praveen Pathak said Wednesday. "It's too early to be specific since negotiations are continuing, but we plan that by the end this year there will be one solid contract," Pathak told RIA Novosti in an interview. He added that the Asian-Pacific nation would be a friendly nation that neither Russia nor India has any conflicts with. First Trials of BrahMos Cruise Missiles on Su-30 Jets to Begin in 1-2 Months The first trials of the Russian-Indian BrahMos cruise missiles on Russian Su-30 Flanker C multirole fighter jets will begin in one or two months and end in November-December 2016, Praveen Pathak said. "Ground tests of the aircraft missile have ended, now we're planning to place it on an Su-30 and in the next month or two there will be trial launches," Pathak told RIA Novosti. He said that a life-sized rocket mock-up would be initially used in the tests, and then proceed with an actual BrahMos cruise missile. "We hope that all of the tests will be complete in November-December," Pathak added. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Egypt: Ban calls for fair trial standards in judicial proceedings against rights defenders 20 April 2016 United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has announced he is closely following the judicial proceedings in Egypt against a number of civil society organizations and human rights defenders. Case number 173, commonly referred to as "the case on foreign funding of civil society", is expected to resume on Wednesday in Cairo. In March, UN rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein expressed grave concern over the closure of hundreds of non-governmental organizations in Egypt and the prosecutions of numerous rights defenders for their legitimate work, urging the Government to end such repressive measures. "Defendants in the case must be able to benefit from all due process and fair trial standards," indicated a statement issued by Mr. Ban's spokesperson. The UN chief also underscored the important role that civil society plays in ensuring that States meet developmental, social and civic objectives and obligations. He stressed the need for human rights defenders and civil society in general, as well as the media, to work without undue restrictions. "The Secretary-General notes that the Government of Egypt has accepted a number of recommendations under the second Universal Periodic Review cycle to promote and protect the rights to freedom of association, as well as to adopt a new non-governmental organization (NGO) law that is compliant with the Egyptian Constitution and international human rights," the statement added. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Yemen's Opposition Pledges to Join Peace Talks by VOA News April 20, 2016 Delegations from Yemen's Houthi rebels and their allies now say they will join U.N.-brokered peace talks in Kuwait, after staying home to protest alleged cease-fire violations by pro-government forces. Representatives from both the Houthis and the party of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, which backs the Houthis, said they planned to arrive in Kuwait Wednesday or Thursday. The United Nations tried to launch the negotiations on Monday, but officially postponed the talks when only the government delegation showed up. After announcing the delay, U.N. envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed thanked the government "for its commitment" and said he hopes the Houthis do not miss the opportunity to put an end to the violence in Yemen. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged all parties to negotiate in good faith and to begin the talks without delay. "The Secretary-General is convinced that seizing this opportunity to move the process forward will help resolve outstanding issues and bring the end of this prolonged conflict closer," Ban's spokesman said in a statement. "The Yemeni people and the region deserve no less." The Houthis seized Yemen's capital, Sana'a in September 2014, and in March of last year launched an offensive to the south that sent President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi fleeing to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis responded by launching airstrikes in defense of Hadi's government. The conflict has killed more than 6,400 people and created a humanitarian disaster in Yemen. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address New York state is arguably the epicenter of the testing opt-out movement. Last school year, 20 percent of students eligible to take the statewide exams in English/language arts and math opted out. And New York state also just held a presidential primary on Tuesday. So what happened in voting booths in areas of the Empire State where opt-out was a big deal in the 2014-15 school year? We dont have final opt-out rates for the current school year yet. But we do know that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won approximately 58 percent of the vote statewide over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders 42 percent in the Democratic primary. In the Republican race, real estate executive Donald Trump got approximately 61 percent of the vote, compared to 25 percent for Ohio Gov. John Kasich and nearly 15 percent for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Lets go a bit deeper into the numbers: First, lets look at New York Citys opt-out and voting patterns. As you may be aware, the opt-out rate in Gotham last year was extremely low, about 19 percentage points off the statewide rate. But some schools did experience high opt-out rates. Chalkbeat New York reported , for example, that the Institute for Collaborative Education on the east side of Manhattan had an 84 percent opt-out rate for both the English/language arts and math exams. Thanks to a primary election results map from The New York Times , we know how each precinct in New York City voted. As a result, we can see that the precinct immediately surrounding the Institute for Collaborative Education went for Sanders over Clinton, one of the relatively few areas of Manhattan that favored him. In the same precinct, 55 percent of GOP voters favored Kasichbut there were only 18 Republican primary voters, compared to 269 Democratic primary voters in the same precinct. Three other schools in that area of Manhattan that had high opt-out rates in 2014-15 (ranging from 26 percent to 73 percent) are also located in voting precincts that favored Sanders in Manhattan. We dont know, of course, exactly what share of students at those four schools come from areas whose parents vote in those precincts. But courtesy of the New York Times information, heres the cluster of strong Sanders support (shaded in green) in those four schools neighborhoods: However, at least on the Democratic side, what happened in Manhattan didnt always happen in Brooklyn. At P.S. 29 in the Cobble Hill neighborhood, for example, where the opt-out rate last year beat the state average of 20 percent, voters in that precinct picked Clinton over Sanders by a wide margin, 72 percent to 28 percent. And at P.S. 261 and P.S. 321 in Brooklyn, voters also overwhelmingly preferred Clinton. All of the New York City schools I mentioned had opt-out rates of over 20 percent. (Less than 20 people voted in each of the precincts immediately surrounding those schools in the Republican primary, with Kasich getting the nod in two of those three precincts.) Overall in New York City, Clinton won 63 percent of the vote compared to 37 percent for Sanders. Trump won just over 64 percent of the vote, compared to 22 percent for Kasich and just under 14 percent for Cruz. Lets leave the Big Apple and look at a couple of upstate, county-level results from April 19 in areas that had relatively high opt-out rates last year. In 2014-15, Franklin County featured a relatively high rate of opt-outsof the countys 10 school districts, eight had opt-out rates that beat the statewide opt-out rate of 20 percent, and that countys Chateaugay districts opt-out rate of 89 percent was one of the highest in the entire state. Other districts in the county with high opt-out rates included AuSable Valley (63 percent), Malone (56 percent), and Brushton-Moira (55 percent). So which candidates did voters in Franklin County, which is relatively close to Vermont, prefer? In sharp contrast to Clintons strong statewide showing in the Democratic primary, 73 percent of county voters went for Sanders, compared to just 27 percent for Hillary. As for Republicans, 56 percent of Franklin County voters preferred Trump, somewhat below his statewide vote share, while 28 percent went for Ohio Gov. John Kasich and 16 percent favored Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. What about Oneida County, another area with relatively large shares of opt-outs but in a different part of the state? Of the countys 24 school districts, 21 districts opt-out rates last year either beat or matched the statewide opt-out average. Districts with particularly high opt-out rates included New York Mills (74 percent), Whitesboro (67 percent), and Sauquoit and Mount Markham (each at 65 percent). So what were the presidential primary results in Oneida County? Among Democrats, Oneida County voters favored Sanders over Clinton, 55 percent to 45 percent, nearly the reverse of the statewide vote shares for the two candidates. As for Oneida County Republicans, 56 percent of primary voters went for Trumplike in Franklin County, thats a little bit worse for Trump compared to how he did statewide. And lets touch briefly on Long Island, another opt-out hot spot. There are only two counties on Long Island: Nassau (which is closer to New York City) and Suffolk. The districts with the highest opt-out rates are largely clustered in the central part of Long Island, with some overlap between the two counties but many of them in Suffolk County. Clinton and Trump won both counties in their respective primaries. If you slice up Long Islands voting data a little bit, Clinton fared worst in the states 1st Congressional District, which is on Long Island and encompasses most of Suffolk County geographically and might have had the biggest cluster of districts with opt-out rates above 50 percent of any congressional district in the state. Clinton won by just 52 percent to 48 percent over Sanders. Trump, meanwhile, outperformed his statewide vote percentage in the 1st District, winning 73 percent of the Republican primary vote. However, without precinct-by-precinct information, its hard to say if a large share, or if any, more specific opt-out hot spots deviated from the overall voting trends in Long Island. Here are a few important things to keep in mind about this data: The results from counties with high opt-out rates in the examples we listed above track relatively closely with results in at least some adjacent areas where opt-out rates were not as high. For example, Clinton County, which is adjacent to Franklin County and is right on the border with Vermont, actually had a slightly higher share of its Democratic primary voters back Sanders, but didnt have the same kind of opt-out activity as Franklin. The same can be said for Herkhimer and Madison counties next to Oneida. And Sanders overall did very well in upstate counties. In general, its probably a big leap to claim that you can draw a straight line between high opt-out rates in a particular area and any sort of deviation from the local and statewide voting pattern, or any sort of impact. There might be a hint of correlation in parts of Manhattan and in Suffolk County, but even there its tough to say one way or the other. As in many other situations, its important to note that education has rarely been a priority issue for the five remaining major candidates in debates and other public forums in the 2016 race. Opt-out might once again be an issue in New York state this school year, but that doesnt mean it had any measurable impact on the presidential primary. Opt-out generally did not become a big issue during the New York primary. Just over a week before election day, Clinton told Newsday that she would not want her granddaughter to opt out of New Yorks tests. She voted for the No Child Left Behind Act 15 years ago, and the standardized testing regimen that was one of its key pillars, but doesnt like the idea of basing teachers pay on test scores. And Sanders is a long-time critic of standardized testing who indicated support for the testing-resistance movement in its early stages a few years ago. Meanwhile, Cruz has supported letting states opt out of any testing mandate from the federal government, but apparently hasnt made his thoughts clear on parental opt-out. Neither has Trump, although the latter thinks U.S. students do a bad job on international tests for the money the country spends on education. Kasich, meanwhile, has opposed testing opt-outs in Ohio . Photo: In this March 30, 2016 photo, students hold signs in favor of opting out of state assessments during a visit by New York Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia to the William Street School in Lancaster, N.Y. New York last year saw the highest rate of opt-outs in the country as parents protested the volume of testing and the high-stakes consequences. (AP Photo/Carolyn Thompson) Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12 . Counter-ISIL Strikes Hit Terrorists in Syria, Iraq From a Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve News Release SOUTHWEST ASIA, April 21, 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. Strikes in Syria Attack, fighter, and remotely piloted aircraft conducted three strikes in Syria: -- Near Abu Kamal, a strike struck an ISIL oil wellhead. -- Near Dayr Az Zawr, a strike struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL vehicle and an ISIL rocket system. -- Near Mara, a strike struck a large ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL vehicle and two ISIL main battle tanks. Strikes in Iraq Attack, bomber, fighter, ground attack and remotely piloted aircraft and rocket artillery and conducted 21 strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in support of Iraq's government: -- Near Baghdadi, five strikes struck three separate ISIL staging facilities and destroyed an ISIL vehicle-borne bomb and damaged an ISIL vehicle. -- Near Rutbah, a strike destroyed an ISIL vehicle bomb. -- Near Fallujah, two strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL bed-down location. -- Near Haditha, a strike destroyed an ISIL tunnel system. -- Near Hit, two strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed 27 ISIL boats and three ISIL fighting positions. -- Near Mosul, six strikes struck five separate ISIL tactical units and destroyed seven ISIL assembly areas, three ISIL vehicles, an ISIL supply cache and an ISIL command-and-control node. -- Near Qayyarah, a strike destroyed an ISIL vehicle bomb. -- Near Sinjar, a strike struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL machine gun, an ISIL fighting position and an ISIL assembly area. -- Near Sultan Abdallah, two strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL vehicle, an ISIL supply cache, an ISIL assembly area and an ISIL rocket rail. 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. Ground-based artillery fired in counterfire or in fire support to maneuver roles is not classified as a strike. 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, and the wider international community. The destruction of ISIL targets in Syria and Iraq further limits the group's ability to project terror and conduct operations. 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, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address NATO Secretary General visits NATO flagship in Aegean Sea NATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organisation 21 Apr. 2016 NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg visited FGS BONN, the German flagship of Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 (SNMG2), on Thursday (21 April) as the ship continues to conduct reconnaissance, monitoring and surveillance of illegal crossings in the Aegean Sea. The Secretary General thanked the crew for their important work and stressed that NATO's deployment in the Aegean is making a difference in the international efforts to deal with the greatest refugee and migrant crisis facing Europe since World War Two. Mr. Stoltenberg underscored that NATO ships were deployed to the Aegean within hours, following a joint request by Greece, Turkey and Germany. He noted that they are providing critical information on a daily basis to help Turkey, Greece and the EU's border agency, Frontex, in cutting the lines of human trafficking and illegal migration in the Aegean. The Secretary General outlined areas where NATO has made important progress since its Aegean deployment began in February. He highlighted that the information collected by NATO ships have enabled Greece, Turkey and Frontex to take more effective action to break the business model of human traffickers. He added that NATO is providing an additional platform for cooperation between Greece, Turkey and the European Union to deal with the refugee and migrant crisis. During the visit, the Secretary General also met with Rear Admiral Jorg Klein, Commander, SNMG2 to discuss BONN's current activities. He spoke with SNMG2 staff and Greek and Turkish liaison officers on board the BONN. He also observed the maneuvers of three frigates, TCG GOKOVA, HS SPETSAI and HNLMS VAN AMSTEL, currently operating in the same area as BONN. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address US Welcomes Denmark's Expansion of Airstrikes Against Islamic State by VOA News April 21, 2016 U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter has welcomed Denmark's decision to expand its military campaign against Islamic State militants to include airstrikes in Syria. Denmark has been a part of the U.S.-led coalition bombing Islamic State targets, but had done so only in Iraq. The country's parliament voted Tuesday to approve operations in Syria. The total Danish contribution to the coalition will include seven F-16 warplanes and 400 military personnel, some 60 of them special forces. Carter said the move shows "growing momentum" in the fight to defeat Islamic State and will increase military pressure on the group. The U.S. launched the first airstrikes against the militants in Iraq in August 2014, shortly after they had seized control in large portions of the northern and western part of the country. The coalition effort expanded to Syria a month later. Denmark joins Australia, Canada, France, Jordan, the Netherlands and Britain among countries conducting airstrikes in both Iraq and Syria. To date, the coalition has carried out more than 11,500 strikes. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Obama, Gulf Partners Remain United in Efforts to Stabilize Mideast by Mary Alice Salinas April 21, 2016 President Barack Obama said the U.S. and Gulf state leaders remain united in efforts to destroy the Islamic State group and stabilize the conflict-ridden Middle East region. "We remain united in our fight to destroy ISIL ... which is a threat to all of us," Obama said in Riyadh, using an acronym for the Islamic State group. He said members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) will also "continue to increase their contributions to the fight against ISIL and the coalition we formed." Speaking at the close of Thursday's summit with the six-nation GCC, the president reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to "deter and confront aggressions" against its partners and allies in the region. "Overall, there is a broad consensus in assisting each other in our collective security," Obama said. "Our intelligence sharing is vital in fighting against terrorism." Obama spoke broadly of areas of agreement between the U.S. and GCC leaders, such as the Gulf leaders agreeing to increase humanitarian efforts in Iraq and Syria, as well as continuing to support Iraq as it "liberates and stabilizes towns and cities from ISIL control." The U.S. and the GCC also agreed that a political solution is needed in Syria. Obama said they agreed that the only one way to end Syria's civil war is through a transitional government and a move away from President Bashar al-Assad. Iran tensions However, one area of tension between the U.S. and GCC leaders is in regards to Iran. "Probably the biggest area where there has been tactical differences has been with respect to Iran," Obama said. "The issue is not the need for shared cooperation to deter against Iranian provocations, on that we all agree." The nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers "cut off every single one of Iran's pathways to a nuclear weapon, (but) we recognize, collectively, that we continue to have concerns about Iran." However, Obama stressed diplomacy in the region and entering into dialogue "to reduce tensions." "None of our nations have an interest in conflict with Iran," he added. Besides Saudi Arabia, the GCC alliance includes Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman. Iran reaction In an op-ed Thursday in The Washington Post, Iran Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif accused Tehran's "Western-allied neighbors" of the same tactics of destabilization through a "rapid build-up of their already excessive military hardware." "They have repeatedly resorted publicly to raising the specter of military even nuclear attack on my country, in blatant disregard for international law," Zarif wrote. "I urge my counterparts around the world to reflect on what has been achieved through diplomacy rather than threats, sanctions and demonization. ... My government remains committed to constructive engagement and my initiative for a regional dialogue forum," he wrote. Tensions between Washington and its Arab allies have been apparent over differing approaches in the region. While both seek a cessation to sectarian violence, the U.S. is pressing for a greater focus on political solutions and democratic reforms, especially in states such as Yemen and Syria where cease-fires have been put in place, though they remain very fragile. However, some Gulf states, such as Saudi Arabia, have expressed doubts about the administration's vision for security in the region, especially with regard to what they perceive as growing threats from Iran. Administration officials in Riyadh downplayed disagreements. Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said all sides want to see Islamic State and al-Qaida defeated, stability in Yemen restored, a political transition in Syria, and unity and stability in Iraq. "On the core issues, there's agreement about where we want to go. There have been occasional tactical differences about what we are emphasizing," Rhodes said. "But I think what this summit allows us to do is make sure that we are working to align our approaches and strategies." Obama told reporters at the close of the summit, "A lot of the strain was always overblown. ... The fact of the matter is that friendship and cooperation between the U.S. and the Gulf countries has been consistent for decades." Following a two-hour closed meeting Wednesday, Obama and Saudi Arabia's King Salman agreed on the importance of "an inclusive approach to de-escalating regional conflicts." Following Thursday's summit, Obama next heads to London, where he will address a range of issues with British Prime Minister David Cameron, including countering terrorism, the refugee crisis in Europe and the global economy. Mia Bush contributed to this report. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Pentagon: Replacing Russian Engines on US Rockets Would Cost Extra $1Bln Sputnik News 23:29 20.04.2016 Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Logistics Frank Kendall said that the US armed forces will need to buy Russian RD-180 engines for Atlas rocket boosters to send satellites into space for at least another five years. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) The US armed forces will need to buy Russian RD-180 engines for Atlas rocket boosters to send satellites into space for at least another five years, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Logistics Frank Kendall told a Senate hearing on Wednesday. "It would be over $1 billion out of our defense budget to get us off RD-180s, and I don't think that's a good tradeoff," Kendall told the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee. The US Air Force plans to continue buying and using the RD-180s at least until 2021 while US companies develop alternate rocket engines to keep putting US satellites and other military assets into space, according to the undersecretary. "It's a complicated issue, but the department's goals have never changed, to develop two engines, so if one of them has a failure, and we have a big gap in capability, we still have access to space. We need competition to keep the expense down," Kendall explained. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Senator John McCain wants the US Air Force to stop using Russian engines by 2020 and tried to include a ban on purchasing them in the 2016 National Defense Appropriations Act but failed. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address President Xi visits joint battle command center People's Daily Online (Xinhua) 20:23, April 20, 2016 BEIJING, April 20 -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday inspected the Central Military Commission (CMC) joint battle command center, calling for building a joint battle command system with Chinese characteristics. Xi on Wednesday morning visited the center, where he serves as the Commander in Chief, calling for implementing the military strategies under the new situations and focusing on the key functions of studying on fighting wars and commanding battles. Xi, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and CMC chairman, also asked officers to change their ideas, innovate and tackle difficulties, in a bid to build a joint battle command system that was "absolutely loyal, resourceful in fighting, efficient in commanding and courageous and capable of winning wars." The strategic and operational command system should be efficient and active in both peace and war, Xi added. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Cuba's Raul Castro to Lead Communist Party for 5 More Years by Lou Lorscheider April 19, 2016 Cuba's Communist Party says 84-year-old President Raul Castro will hold the party's highest post for another five years, alongside his chief lieutenant, 85-year-old hardliner Jose Ramon Machado Ventura. Those disclosures came Tuesday, capping a four-day secret party congress that many analysts had expected to produce signs that party stalwarts - many of them in their 70s and 80s - would begin to step aside in favor of younger leaders. Government news sites said Castro, whose presidency ends in 2018, will remain the party's first secretary and that Machado Ventura will hold the post of second secretary. Castro had earlier called for drastic changes to Cuba's Soviet-style command economy, while calling for top leaders to retire at age 70. But he has also indicated that new party rules would not be operational until the next party congress in 2021. The reports say the party also chose its powerful 15-member political bureau, which observers say is largely devoid of new and younger party members. The twice-a-decade congress ended a month after U.S. President Barack Obama's historic visit to Havana, the first visit by a sitting U.S. president in nearly 90 years. Since then, Cuban leaders have sought to portray that visit as a U.S. attempt to woo ordinary Cubans away from the country's socialist values and toward a multi-party democracy. More than a half century ago, Machado Ventura fought alongside Fidel Castro and Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara in a rebellion against dictator Fulgencio Batista, who ruled in the 1950s. He has since sat on the powerful Politburo for the past four decades and has frequently been deployed by both Castros to maintain party discipline. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Castro urges people to follow communist ideals in final speech Iran Press TV Wed Apr 20, 2016 1:36AM The Cuban revolutionary leader and former president, Fidel Castro, has given a valedictory speech on the final day of the country's 7th Communist party congress, acknowledging he will not be long for this world. The 89-year-old Castro made the comments in what is likely to be his final speech to the congress at Convention Palace in the capital Havana on Tuesday, after the Communist party announced that it had reelected 84-year-old Raul Castro, Fidel's brother and the country's incumbent president, for another five years as the first secretary of the party. "I'll be 90 years old soon. Soon I'll be like all the others. The time will come for all of us, but the ideas of the Cuban communists will remain as proof on this planet that if they are worked at with fervor and dignity, they can produce the material and cultural goods that human beings need, and we need to fight without truce to obtain them," Castro said in his most extensive public appearance in years. Fidel led the 1959 Cuban socialist revolution, which overthrew the US-backed authoritarian government of Fulgencio Batista, and brought Castro to power. He served as the president of Cuba from 1976 to 2008 and as the first secretary of the central committee of the Communist party of the country from 1961 to 2011. "This may be one of the last times I speak in this room. We must tell our brothers in Latin America and the world that the Cuban people will be victorious," Castro further said, dressed in a plaid shirt and sweat top. Castro's comments came as younger Cubans complain bitterly about low state salaries of about $25 a month that leave them struggling to afford food and other staple goods. They might be disappointed by the aging leadership's decision on Tuesday and expect the leaders to begin handing over the reins to younger generation and introduce more substantial economic reforms. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Castro Delivers What May Be His Final Address Sputnik News 03:09 20.04.2016(updated 10:50 20.04.2016) In a rare public appearance, the 89-year-old former leader of Cuba, Fidel Castro, delivered a speech on Tuesday, telling Communist Party members that he is nearing the end of his life. "I'll be 90 years old soon. Soon I'll be like all the others," Castro said. The leader, who brought revolution to Cuba in the 1950s, stressed that the ideals fostered during that struggle will live on. "The time will come for all of us, but the ideas of the Cuban Communists will remain as proof on this planet that if they are worked at with fervor and dignity, they can produce the material and cultural goods that human beings need, and we need to fight without a truce to obtain them." Castro's comments come as the Communist Party selects his younger brother, current Cuban President Raul Castro, to be the head of the party for the next five years. The younger Castro is set to step down as president in 2018. Havana has seen a historic shift in relations with Washington under the administration of President Barack Obama. After normalizing trade relations, Obama became last month the first US President in nearly 90 years to visit Cuba. "This may be one of the last times I speak in this room," Castro said. "We must tell our brothers in Latin America and the world that the Cuban people will be victorious." Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Rights Group Denounces North Korean Atrocities by Brian Padden April 21, 2016 Widespread and systematic human rights abuses in North Korea continue despite two years of intense efforts by the United Nations to pressure the Kim Jong Un government to change, a new report by a Korean human rights organization found. The report released this week by the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB) was based on interviews with thousands of North Korean defectors who now live in South Korea. The finding of over 50,000 cases of human rights violations in North Korea is not verifiable and could be overstated, as it includes not only what witnesses have directly experienced and observed, but also what they have heard from others. Still it provides rare insight and documents extensive testimony to support its conclusion that conditions in the secretive and repressive North Korean state have not improved since 2014, when the United Nations released an investigative report documenting a network of political prisons camps in the country and widespread atrocities comparable to what the Nazis did before and during World War II "The [U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea] report actually had a very restricted influence overall and we do not see any significant improvement," said Yoon Yeo-sang, the Chief Director of NKDB's North Korean Human Rights Archives. The international community has tried to pressure the Kim leadership to make reforms and hold perpetrators of atrocities accountable, or face escalating penalties and eventual prosecution. Based on the Commission of Inquiry report, the U.N. General Assembly voted to refer North Korea to the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity. However, the measure has still not been brought to a vote in the Security Council, given the near certainty that North Korea allies Russia and China would veto it. Arrests and executions The NKDB report said arbitrary arrests and imprisonments accounted for almost half of the 53,000 human rights violation cases they documented. Witnesses said violations that led to detentions by the state security officers included attempting to escape from the North and trying to communicate with relatives in the South. And, families of offenders would often also be arrested. Since North Korean leader Kim Jong Un took office in late 2011, the NKDB reports, nearly 100 government and military officials have been killed in either public or secret executions. The NKDB says it is unclear if the recent purges among the Pyongyang leadership indicate the young North Korean leader is a brutal despot, or that an internal power struggle has forced him to take harsh measures. "We can see after Kim Jong Un's assent to power there have been a number of internal political problems within the country, that actually prevented any policies that might have been aimed at improving the human rights situation," Yoon said. Worse a decade ago While there are still a significant number of reported violations, in some human rights categories, the number of cases has dropped in the last decade. "Torture and inhumane treatment peaked in the 2000s but still occur at a consistent rate," said Yoon. And even though poverty is widespread, Yoon said, no North Korean has died from starvation in recent years, due in part to agricultural reforms that give farmers more incentives and increase private market trade with China. Severe famines in the 1990s that killed more than three million North Koreans were made worse by the communist government's restrictive agricultural system and a sudden halt in economic aid after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The new U.N. sanctions imposed on North Korea in March for conducting its fourth nuclear test and another long-range rocket launch this year, did not mention the country's human rights violations. China's support for sanctions is considered crucial because of its close economic ties with North Korea, and Beijing most likely would have opposed any focus on human rights abuse given its own record of, according to critics, unlawful harassment, imprisonment and torture. However new U.S. unilateral sanctions imposed on North Korea did cite human rights violations, as well as nuclear proliferation, as justifications for the punitive measures. In March, South Korea also passed legislation that will make improving human rights conditions across the border part of any humanitarian aid program, and will document rights abuses by the North Korean government and its leaders. Youmi Kim in Seoul contributed to this report. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address District of Columbia Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson asked a food-service contractor for a six-figure contribution to a black-tie district gala, according to emails obtained by the Associated Press. Hendersons request for $100,000 from Chartwells came just weeks after the company was accused, in a whistleblower lawsuit, of bilking the city out of $19 million and serving spoiled food to students. Chartwells is still serving food in the D.C. schools while the district searches for a new vendor. Heres an excerpt from the Associated Press story : After the lawsuit was filed, Chartwells and its local partner, Thompson Hospitality, gave $25,000 to support the black-tie gala, according to records from the D.C. Public Education Fund, a nonprofit that raises money for schools and organizes the $700,000 event. The emails show the companies made the contribution after Chancellor Kaya Henderson asked Thompson Hospitalitys president to give $100,000 to the event. City ethics rules generally prohibit city employees from soliciting money, including charitable contributions, from companies that do business with the city. The D.C. Council has established exceptions for fundraising by the chancellor, although they dont address D.C. Public Education Fund donations. The D.C. Ed Fund does its best to attract donors to the event, and the chancellor plays an important role in that, school system spokeswoman Michelle Lerner said in a statement. However, there is a firm wall between the management of DCPS contracts and the fundraising of the D.C. Ed Fund. Larijani: Iran-Russia agreement on nuclear plant to be enforced IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency Moscow, April 20, IRNA -- Majlis (parliament) Speaker Ali Larijani said in a press conference here that Iran and Russia has no difference on Bushehr nuclear power plant and its second phase and now the two sides are negotiating on needed construction standards and location. Larijani, who is in Moscow to attend Eurasia Parliamentary meeting, participated in a press conference and answered questions of reporters at the Iranian embassy in Moscow. He said that agreement between Tehran and Moscow on building a new nuclear plant remains in force. Larijani also announced that Iran supports every plan for development of trade ties between the two countries. He said that the two countries regularly consult at different levels concerning regional crises and security issues, adding that over the past year 10 Iranian and Russian ministers had reciprocal visits to Iran and Russia. Concerning situation in Nagorno-Karabakh, Larijani said that the region is turbulent enough and no other war should take place here. He said in a meeting with his Azeri counterpart Ogtay Asadov, the two sides discussed Karabakh issue in details and added that Iran is in agreement with Russia that no armed conflict should take place in the region. The Majlis speaker added that Iran and Russia tried to persuade Armenia and Azerbaijan Republic to settle their differences through political means. Concerning effects of Eurasia Parliamentary meeting on regional equations, Larijani said that regional issues have different complexities and now mutual understanding is needed and such meetings may increase bilateral and multilateral cooperation and improve relations between countries. Larijani, who arrived in Moscow on Monday to attend Eurasia Parliamentary meeting, in a separate meetings discussed issues of mutual interests with his counterparts from Russia, South Korea, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan Republic and Kazakhstan. Heads of parliaments from Iran, Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan Republic, Belarus, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Mongolia, Pakistan, South Korea, Russia, Thailand, the Philippines and Czech Republic took part in the meeting. 1391**1412 NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Pentagon to Spend Millions Supporting Kurdish Fighters in Iraq Sputnik News 22:51 20.04.2016(updated 23:35 20.04.2016) In an effort to push Daesh extremists out of Mosul, the United States will funnel millions of dollars to Kurdish fighters. The city of Mosul in northern Iraq has served as a stronghold for Daesh, also known as IS/Islamic State, since the summer of 2014. In an effort to liberate the city, the Pentagon is preparing an offensive that will involve 217 US Special Operations troops, AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, and M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems fighting alongside the Iraqi military. "These are capabilities that will continue the process of accelerating the defeat of ISIL," US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said in an interview with NBC News on Monday. "We are going to accelerate this campaign every time we find an opportunity to do so." But the Pentagon also plans to convince local Kurdish Peshmerga fighters to join the fight, and it's set aside $415 million for that effort. "In response to a request from the Kurdistan Regional Government for economic assistance, the Department of Defense will provide these funds on a monthly basis to support selected Peshmerga units," Pentagon spokesman Matthew Allen told Kurdish news agency Rudaw. "These forces have been among the most effective in the fight against ISIL and will be critical in the retaking of Mosul," the spokesman added. Secretary Carter stressed that the money will go toward supporting "selected Peshmerga units." Kurdish groups have welcomed the decision. Kurdistan Region Security Council Chancellor Masrour Barzani tweeted his support on Monday, saying "This war is a shared responsibility, and I hope other members of the global coalition will consider increasing their aid to Kurdistan. "I welcome the announcement by Secretary Ashton Carter to give financial aid to our Peshmerga and increase military engagement in war on ISIL." The director of the Kurdish Regional Government's intelligence agency, Lahur Talabani, tweeted, "We thank the US government for their commitment & support to our brave Peshmerga forces who have been fighting ISIS on the world's behalf." Critics argue that the plan will backfire, wasting millions in taxpayer dollars in the process. "Though the Kurdistan Regional Government clearly has some interest in seeing ISIS expelled from the area around Mosul, their interests are likely more directly on defending their own territorial gains they've made during the war, including the oil-rich city of Kirkuk," Jason Ditz writes for AntiWar.com. "Instead of leaving the Peshmerga to its own, already subsidized devices, the Pentagon seems to have decided that overt bribery is in order, to make sure the Peshmerga's involvement in the fight is centered on offensives where the US wants them." The Pentagon's support of Iraqi Kurds is also surprising, given the former's refusal to acknowledge the role played by Kurdish fighters in Syria. Despite being the most effective forces on the ground, Washington has refused to allow Kurdish groups to participate in the Syrian peace talks. This was done largely at the request of the Turkish government, which fears the creation of an autonomous Kurdish region along its borders. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Myanmar Eyes Nationwide Clemency for Political Activists by Myint Myint Khaine April 20, 2016 Myanmar officials are reviewing court cases against political prisoners and working to drop all remaining charges against them, according to a top official. Zaw Htay, a spokesperson for the president's office, told VOA's Burmese Service that an estimated 200 political prisoners will be released after the New Year holiday, which ends April 20. "The cases they review [for release] should be cases of peaceful activities based on freedom of expression, but not about criminal activities and violent acts," he said. "Home Ministry [will] review those cases and submit the list [to the president's office]." In her first statement since assuming the role of state counselor, Aung San Suu Kyi vowed to push for the release of political prisoners and student activists. President Htin Kyaw recently pardoned 196 political prisoners 113 on April 9 and 83 on April 17. Htin Kyaw's office announced the prospect of broader amnesty on Sunday, saying the president had signed the order with the goal of achieving "national reconciliation" as the Buddhist New Year begins. According to the nonprofit Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), nearly 300 political activists are still facing trials in various courts, and most of those are related to activism against land disputes and land grabbing. AAPP data indicate more than 100 activists are currently imprisoned in Myanmar, which is also known as Burma. (This report was produced in collaboration with VOA's Burmese Service.) NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Pakistan Army Chief Dismisses Top Officers for Corruption by Ayaz Gul April 21, 2016 Pakistan's powerful military chief, General Raheel Sharif, has dismissed a group of top officers from service over corruption charges. A lieutenant-general, one major-general, and three brigadiers and a colonel were among those fired after a year-long internal army probe found them guilty of corruption, military sources confirmed to VOA. "All the officers [have been] sent home on corruption," the sources said. The ousted officers were all serving in the paramilitary Frontier Corps based in southwestern Baluchistan province. Army spokespeople were not immediately available to comment on the development that dominated headlines Thursday on Pakistani television stations. The local media put the number of fired army officers at 11, describing the move as unprecedented in the history of the Pakistani army. General Sharif has been widely praised at home and outside Pakistan for undertaking significant military actions against terrorist and extremist groups operating in the country. But in recent days, he has called for uprooting "the menace of corruption" in Pakistan to sustain gains the army-led counterterrorism operations have made in recent years. "Therefore, across the board accountability is necessary for the solidarity, integrity and prosperity of Pakistan," said General Sharif, who is not related to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. PM Sharif under pressure The reported dismissals come as the prime minister is under growing pressure, including demands for him to resign, after documents leaked from a Panama-based law firm revealed his children own several offshore companies. The documents showed three of his children owned offshore companies that hold luxury residential property in London. But Prime Minister Sharif has ignored calls for establishing an inquiry commission under Pakistan's chief justice, and assisted by international auditors, to determine the legality of the Sharif family's foreign assets. Responding to questions about whether firing the army officers could increase pressure on Prime Minister Sharif, defense and security analyst Maria Sultan said, "I think any decision, which comes against corruption, definitely leads to pressure for people who would think otherwise." Prime Minister Sharif's two previous elected governments in the 1990s were dismissed for widespread corruption and misrule, though he rejected the allegations as politically-motivated. Corruption allegations are also engulfing his current government. The army has staged repeated coups in Pakistan, prompting some critics to suggest it is again creating grounds for another interference in the democratic process. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Yukos Ruling: How We Got Here April 20, 2016 by Mike Eckel WASHINGTON -- A district court in The Hague has quashed a $50 billion award that Russia had been ordered to pay the former majority shareholders of the dismantled oil giant Yukos, a major victory for Russia and its effort to portray the dismantling a decade ago as a case of righting past wrongs. The Hague court ruled on April 20 that the European arbitration court, which ruled in July 2014, misinterpreted a treaty that Russia signed but never ratified and wasn't qualified to issue the award to Yukos's former owners. The July 2014 award was the largest ever issued by an arbitration court anywhere. Yukos was once Russia's largest oil company until its co-founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was imprisoned, and its most profitable assets sold off in dubious auctions. The shareholders who took the case to the court of arbitration, known as Group Menatep Limited (GML), have vowed to appeal the April 20 decision. The Origins Of Yukos Formed in the early years of Boris Yeltsin's presidency, Yukos was put together from several Siberian oil and gas fields and refineries. In 1995, the Yeltsin government began selling off key state assets under a controversial program known as "loans for shares." Yukos ended up in the hands of a former leader of the youth division of the Communist Party, Khodorkovsky, who built up the company -- sometimes ruthlessly -- into what became Russia's largest. Khodorkovsky Arrest In 2003, Khodorkovsky, by then a billionaire, was arrested, then convicted on fraud charges, and he served his prison sentence, mainly in a Siberian penal colony, until 2013 when he was pardoned by President Vladimir Putin. In the years after Khodorkovsky's arrest, Yukos was dismantled, its key assets sold off in state-run auctions and acquired by the government-owned oil giant Rosneft. The Fight Back Shortly after Yukos started being dismantled, GML began waging a legal battle to recover some of their assets. Khodorkovsky, who now lives in Switzerland, is not among them. GML have built their case using a provision in a European treaty known as the Energy Charter, which Russia signed in 1994. Moscow has argued that, since it never ratified the treaty, its provisions don't apply, and Putin formally withdrew Russia from the charter in 2009. In July 2014, the Permanent Court for Arbitration in The Hague rejected those arguments, and awarded GML $50 billion, ruling that Yukos was deliberately destroyed through punitive tax penalties and expropriation of assets. But, in its ruling on April 20, the Hague court essentially agreed with the Russian argument on the question of the treaty's relevance. Beginning last year, court bailiffs in France and Belgium began seizing assets, mainly outstanding debt, owed by European countries to Russian government-linked companies such as the space agency, Roscosmos. By one estimate, already $1 billion has been ordered seized. Related proceedings are beginning to make their way through U.S. federal courts. What's At Stake? The fight for its legacy -- specifically compensation for its current and former shareholders -- has become a battle between Russia and the West. Before the latest ruling, Russia reacted angrily and threatened to seize other governments' property in retaliation.Aleksandr Bastrykin, the head of Russia's Investigative Committee, accused the United States this week of wielding "legal weapons" in a "hybrid war" against Russia. In light of the April 20 ruling, the asset seizure cases being heard in various courts will likely be suspended for now, though GML has vowed to appeal the latest verdict. For his part, Khodorkovsky, despite not being directly involved in the case, reacted strongly to the April 20 ruling, saying it showed that "the West had eased up on pressuring" Russia. "My friends will continue their resistance. I have, and will, go about regime change by other means," he said in a Twitter posting on April 20. Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-yukos- ruling-dutch-court-explainer/27686006.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. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address New Russian Elections Chief Calls Off Vote Said Marred By Fraud April 21, 2016 by RFE/RL The new chief of the Russian Election Commission has responded to allegations of fraud in an election in a Moscow suburb and called off the vote. Ella Pamfilova cited concern about widespread early voting in the legislative election in the village of Barvikha, although she stopped short of calling it fraud. Hours after her announcement on April 20, local authorities officially canceled the election originally scheduled for April 24. The decision came a day after four candidates who are associates of anticorruption crusader Aleksei Navalny announced they were withdrawing from the election because of fraud during early voting. The candidates documented hundreds of people with recent voter registration who were bused to the village to vote. The number of people who turned out to vote could be equivalent to 30 percent of the possible turnout, they said. Navalny welcomed the election commission's decision, which he said was a result of his allies' boycott. "It was a right political decision to demand the election be scrapped," he said on his blog. "No one believed it would be possible except us, and our guys did it." Navalny's candidates got registered to run after Pamfilova, a former presidential human rights ombudsman, was appointed last month in a possible sign of the Kremlin's willingness to clean up elections. They said their goal was to test whether she would be willing to prevent election fraud. Alleged vote rigging in the 2011 parliamentary elections under the previous commission chairman Vladimir Churov triggered the biggest antigovernment protests in a decade. Under Churov, seemingly clear cases of election fraud often were accompanied by authorities refusing to register independent candidates for spurious reasons. With reporting by AP and Interfax Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/new- russian-elections-chief-pamfilova-calls-off -vote-said-marred-by-fraud/27687572.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. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Obama, Saudi King Agree on 'Inclusive Approach' to Mideast Conflicts by Mary Alice Salinas April 20, 2016 President Barack Obama and Saudi Arabia's King Salman agreed on the importance of "an inclusive approach to de-escalating regional conflicts" during a two-hour closed meeting Wednesday in Riyadh. In a statement after the meeting at Erga Palace, the White House said the two leaders discussed the "challenges posed by Iran's provocative activities in the [Mideast] region." Tension between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia has risen over differing approaches to Iran and the fight against terrorism. The statement said Obama welcomed the recent cessation of hostilities in Yemen "and the king's commitment to providing humanitarian assistance across all of Yemen." In addition, "the president underscored the importance of accelerating the campaign against [Islamic State] and welcomed Saudi Arabia's important role in the coalition" of nations that is fighting the militant group. Later, Obama met with the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, deputy supreme commander of the UAE armed forces. The meetings came a day before a Gulf Cooperation Council summit. The United States and its Arab partners will address pressing issues facing the region at the summit, which will be attended by officials from the GCC alliance of six Gulf states: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman. The White House on Wednesday called the summit "an important opportunity for the United States and its Gulf partners to strengthen cooperation against [the Islamic State group] and also to address regional conflicts." Top threats The United States and much of Europe see Islamic State and al-Qaida as the top threats in the region and around the world. For many of the Gulf states, though, the main threat is Iran and the people and groups Tehran supports, such as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Shi'ite Houthi rebels in Yemen. The Sunni-majority Saudis have led a costly military intervention against the Houthis. The White House said Obama and GCC leaders would look at ways to step up cooperation and "align" their policies and approaches in areas of mutual interest, such as countering terrorism and promoting peace and stability in places like Yemen and Syria. Rob Malley, White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, said sectarian fights, like the one in Yemen, shift the focus away from the coalition's battle against Islamic State and al-Qaida. So, he said, the White House is seeking to de-escalate those conflicts. Saudi Arabia, which faces shrinking revenues with the downturn in oil prices, is working to build up its missile systems as regional rival Iran continues to bolster its military capabilities. "Iran does not stop improving its air, missiles and naval capabilities to threaten traffic through the Gulf," said Anthony Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Despite philosophical differences, the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia is solid, according to Fahad Nazer, a senior political analyst with JTG, Inc. and former adviser at the Saudi embassy in Washington. "The two countries continue to support each other in the military campaigns that each of them is leading," Nazer said. "Not only has Saudi Arabia been participating in the ongoing U.S.-led airstrikes against the strongholds of the terrorist group known as the Islamic State in Syria, but it has done so in a very public fashion." Intelligence, logistical support He pointed to U.S. intelligence and logistical support to the Saudi-led campaign against Houthi rebels. "I think that many of the myriad mutual interests that have sustained this relationship since the 1940's will sustain it for the future," Nazer predicted. White House officials agreed the two sides would continue to work as partners to combat terrorism, help secure the region and counter Iran's destabilizing actions. "I don't think that there can be any confusion or ambiguity about who is our partner in the region and who isn't," Malley said. After the summit, officials are expected to announce new defense assistance for the GCC and increased cooperation. Defense capabilities White House officials say the assistance will include a simplified process for transferring defense capabilities to Gulf nations, plans to boost the GCC's ballistic defense missile defense system and increased defense against cyber threats. Expectations for significant outcomes from this summit are low, especially during a presidential election year. "The Saudis obviously are looking at a situation where you have presidential candidates that as yet have not really provided any clear indication as to what the United States will be as an ally in the future." Cordesman said. Carla Babb in Riyadh and Cecily Hilleary in Washington contributed to this report. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Putin: Russia Helped Avoid Massive Civilian Losses in Syria Sputnik News 14:11 20.04.2016(updated 14:18 20.04.2016) Moscow's actions helped avoid massive civilian casualties in Syria and save its statehood, President Vladimir Putin said. He added that the Russian Aerospace Forces and the Syrian army have liberated 400 settlements and eliminated thousands of terrorists. MOSCOW (Sputnik) Moscow's support for Damascus helped prevent the collapse of Syria and avoid massive civilian losses, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday. "Recently, it has been possible to take a number of important steps toward ensuring a peaceful settlement in Syria and countering international terrorists that have settled there. The support provided by Russia to Syria's legitimate government helped prevent the collapse of the state system and the state itself, save public institutions, and avoid massive civilian casualties," Putin said, addressing foreign diplomats at the Kremlin. "Thanks to the successful actions of the Russian Aerospace Forces and the Syrian armyit was possible to free a number of towns, including Palmyra. In total, Syrian forces, backed by Russian aviation, were able to free a total of 400 settlements and eliminate thousands of terrorists, including from Russia and other CIS countries," the president noted. Syria has been mired in a devastating civil war between the government, opposition factions and terrorist groups since 2011. On September 30, Russia commenced a military operation against terrorists in Syria at President Bashar Assad's request. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Russia, Iran Poised to Break Syrian Opposition Toehold in Aleppo by Jeff Seldin April 20, 2016 Russia and Iran are gearing up around the key northern Syrian city of Aleppo in what appears to be the beginning of a renewed push to shore up the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. "We have seen regime forces, with some Russian support as well, begin to mass and concentrate combat power around Aleppo," Operation Inherent Resolve spokesman Colonel Steve Warren told Pentagon reporters during a telephone briefing Wednesday. "This is something we're concerned about," he added. U.S. defense and intelligence officials say Russia has been steadily bolstering its presence around Aleppo, shifting much of the artillery used in the offensive to retake Palmyra from Islamic State militants up north. Russian aircraft, helicopters and troops have also been moving toward Aleppo over the past several weeks, they say. At the same time, hundreds of Iranian-backed Shia militia fighters are converging on the area to bolster existing regime forces. Endgame "The Syrian regime seems to be driving towards the eventual isolation of opposition forces in and around Aleppo," a U.S. intelligence official said on condition of anonymity. The official said at least in the area north of Aleppo, Russian actions appeared to be in support of the Syrian regime, aimed at cutting off the supply lines for moderate opposition forces. "We also see indications of fighting southwest of Aleppo between Syrian forces with Russian backing and opposition elements," the official added. Russian officials have long said their actions in Syria have been aimed at terror groups such as Islamic State and al-Qaida-linked Jabhat al-Nusra, and U.S. officials admit Russia has picked up the pace of airstrikes on terror targets. But analysts caution the type of Russian equipment being sent to Aleppo suggests not just a different enemy in the short term but also a broader strategic endgame. "Russia has begun to alter the shape of its own deployment," Institute for the Study of War analyst Genevieve Casagrande said during a panel discussion Wednesday. "These types of military assets aren't necessarily used, you don't actually need them to fight ISIS," she said, using an acronym for Islamic State. Iranian role While Russian forces seem to be the primary driver behind the looming offensive in Aleppo, providing critical air support and heavy weapons, Iranian-backed Shia militias have also been playing a critical role. "Many of the Shia militia forces continued to fight even during the cease-fire," said Phillip Smyth, a University of Maryland researcher who specializes in Shia militia activity. "They've seen a greater and more open deployment around the country, particularly in the areas around Aleppo." Despite seeing heavier casualties across Syria earlier in the year, Iran has continued to recruit Shias from Iraq and elsewhere to join the fight, again increasing its online efforts, Smyth said. He estimates there could be 14,000 or more Iranian-backed Shia fighters in Syria as well as another 3,500 Iranian troops. For now, U.S. defense officials say developments around Aleppo are unlikely to affect the U.S.-led coalition effort to destroy the Islamic State terror group, though one official said it could influence operations peripherally. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Turkish-Syrian Border Pocket is Heart of Fight Against IS by Rikar Hussein April 20, 2016 Kurdish and Syrian rebels launched an offensive in late March to take back a small border region between Turkey and Syria that has become a key foothold for Islamic State militants. After weeks of fighting, local commanders say the operation is now intensifying. The 98-kilometer-long border area in northern Aleppo is the only patch of land connecting IS-controlled Syrian territory to Turkey. It has been a funnel to transport the fighters and arms supplies to and from the defacto IS capital of Raqqa, Syria. In recent weeks, Syrian rebels coming from the west have seized more than a dozen villages from IS. And Kurds, who are battling from the east, announced the establishment of a military council to push against IS. "We established this military council to free Manbij and its surrounding areas from Daesh [Arabic for IS]," Ebu Leyla, a commander of the council, told VOA, referring to a border town. "We won't stop until we clear out the entire area from Daesh thugs." IS fighters use the territory to fire off rockets almost daily into Turkish territory, and Ankara says it may seek more help from the U.S.-led coalition to seal the border and rid the area of IS fighters. The U.S. has been in discussion with Kurdish and Turkish officials over how to uproot IS there, according to local commanders who spoke with VOA. In a telephone call Monday with U.S. President Barack Obama, Russian President Vladimir Putin urged the closure of the border from where "fighters and arms supplies for the extremists make their way in," the Kremlin said in a written statement. Turkey began tightening control over the border late last year, with the Western coalition's help. That has slowed the tide of refugees and the flow of IS militants and arms. Now there is a new push to crack down on the border, and Ankara says it wants the final say in what happens there. "Only Turkey has the right to make decisions about its borders," Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Monday. Future control of area The Islamic State forces who hold the territory are battling Kurdish and Syrian rebel forces on two fronts. The Kurdish forces are opposed by Turkey but backed by the United States. On the other front, Syrian rebels who are also backed by the U.S. are fighting IS. But this means that if IS is eventually ousted, the U.S.-backed operation could result in an extended dispute over who controls the area, experts say. The advances are welcomed by the U.S., which has recently intensified its efforts to further isolate IS in Iraq and Syria. U.S. aerial support to both Syrian Kurds and the rebels has been critical in their advances, analysts say. As they move toward closing the IS corridor to Turkey, the rebels and the Kurds are also fighting one another over control of that strategic border area known as "Manbij pocket." "It is an absolute mess there," a U.S. official who wished to remain anonymous told VOA recently. "There are so many competing parties. It's really difficult to tell you what the ground realty is." Kurdish forces, Turkish threat Turkey supports the advances of the Syrian rebels, but considers the movement of the Kurds toward the border a red line. The dominant Kurdish force in the area is called People's Protection Units (YPG), which is seen by Turkey as a threat to its own national security because of its close ties to Turkey's separatist group, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). "YPG is following its own agenda in Syria and is blocking the political process. YPG also poses a direct threat to the border security of Turkey," a senior official at Turkey's Ministry of Foreign Affairs told VOA. The U.S. does not share Turkey's position on the YPG, and considers the group its most effective ground force ally in fighting IS on the Syrian border. "For the U.S., the priority is to seal that Turkish border stretch with IS no matter who does it," Aydin Selcen, the former Turkish consul general in northern Iraq, told VOA. "For Turkey, the priority is to stop PKK-affiliated Kurds no matter what it takes," he said. Selcen said the U.S. is trying to placate all parties so that Turkish concerns are addressed, and Kurdish and Syrian forces are supported in their advances against IS. Pentagon officials would not comment on the situation. "The U.S. must and will accommodate Ankara's wishes to be able to assert influence on Syria from the north, while entertaining communication with and offering some sort of support to YPG as they are the single [most] successful element against IS," Selcen said. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address U.S. Concerned By Reports Of Increased Russian Military Presence In Syria April 21, 2016 The United States has expressed concern about reports that Russia is moving more military materiel into Syria. "We think it would be negative for Russia to move additional military equipment or personnel into Syria," Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama, said on April 21. "We believe that our efforts are best focused on supporting the diplomatic process." He was speaking in Saudi Arabia, where Obama was attending a summit with Gulf Arab leaders to discuss regional security issues. Earlier the same day in Ankara, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Russia has kept a "considerable" military presence in Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assad's regime. Stoltenberg made the comments at a joint press conference with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in Ankara. On March 14, President Vladimir Putin ordered the "main part" of Russian forces to pull out of Syria, less than six months after the beginning of an air campaign. Stoltenberg also said the number of migrants crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey into Europe was "now going significantly down." Turkey and the EU last month sealed an accord that aims to end the flow of migrants, most fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, after more than a million reached Europe last year. NATO's naval back-up in the Aegean Sea has helped to stop people smugglers and reduced the flows. Based on reporting by AFP and Reuters Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/nato-stoltenberg- russia-syria-military-presence/27688371.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. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Russia Passes 3 Tonnes of Aid to Syrian Homs Province Sputnik News 00:58 21.04.2016 The Russian center for Syrian reconciliation at the Hmeimim airbase has passed three tonnes of humanitarian aid to residents of Syria's Homs Governorate. MOSCOW (Sputnik) The Russian center for Syrian reconciliation at the Hmeimim airbase has passed three tonnes (metric tons) of humanitarian aid to residents of Syria's Homs Governorate, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement. In addition to the aid which consisted mostly of food items, the Russian center for Syrian reconciliation "provided medical assistance to 32 local residents," according to the statement. More humanitarian aid convoys are being formed for residents of the Syrian Hama Governorate, according to the Russian military. Syria has been in a state of civil war since 2011, with forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad fighting several opposition factions and militant groups, such as the Islamic State (ISIL, also known as Daesh). A US-Russia-brokered ceasefire came into force across Syria on February 27. It was supported by Damascus, as well as by dozens of opposition groups on the ground. Daesh and Jabhat al-Nusra (Nusra Front), both outlawed in Russia, were not part of the deal. The ceasefire has been generally holding, which improved the humanitarian situation in the country and increased access for aid convoys. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Hundreds evacuated from four besieged areas in Syria - UN mediator 21 April 2016 In what he called "modest but very real" progress on the humanitarian track of the crisis in Syria, the United Nations envoy for the country today reported that, among other steps, more than 500,000 civilians have been reached during the cessation of hostilities, and yesterday, some 500 people were medically evacuated from several besieged. "So far, 560,000 people have been reached, between hard-to-reach areas and besieged areas. This means that about 220,000 people in the besieged areas have been so far reached, which is more or less half the people [in those areas]," UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura told reporters in Geneva, where he has been mediating intra-Syrian talks towards a resolution to the five-year conflict. He went on to say that 515 people were medically evacuated yesterday, simultaneously from Zabadani, Madaya, Kefraya and Foah, with the very active participation of the Syrian Arab Red Cross (SARC) and "with a lot of homework done by the UN." "Another [example] of modest but real progress is the fact that Khawla Mattar a woman, I want to underline, because we should remember that when we have the privilege of having courageous colleagues like her led a convoy for the first time since 2012 to Darayya," Mr. de Mistura said, underscoring that Darayya, a suburb of the capital, Damascus, "has become a symbol of inaccessibility." "Her report is certainly a wake-up call," he continued, noting that there are children there and other civilians in need of food and medicine. "And we will, together with, hopefully everyone who has been helping us, in particular I must give credit to the Russian Federation, who had been certainly arguing very much in favour of this UN convoy to Darayya [] we will follow-up on this. It is clear we cannot stop at simply a fact finding, there is a need to follow-up," he said. Turning to Deir ez-Zor he spotlighted eight "successful and unprecedented, from that altitude about 5,000 to 6000 meters [air drops]," which have reached an estimated 65,000 people, according to World Food Programme (WFP). He said WFP has reported that it plans to double the number of the agency's air drops, and that he hoped the required funding would be made available. As for issues of concern he said "we are not yet there" on the parties allowing in medical supplies. Items like dialysis equipment have still not been allowed through. In addition, vitamins, antibiotics, pain killers, surgical items, and basic medical kits were not allowed by the Ministry of Health in Syria the other day when they were supposed to go by convoy. "And this is not only worrisome but unacceptable according to international law. Even the worst enemies should allow this," said Mr. de Mistura, reiterating that medical items have become an urgent priority request from the humanitarian taskforce, in particular to the Government of Syria. "That of course applies to all besieged areas including Kefraya and Foah, not only those besieged by the Government," he added. He went on to note that the Humanitarian Taskforce also addressed problems caused by the armed opposition, in particular the access by SARC, to reach and start working again in Azaz and eastern Aleppo. On detainees he announced that he would nominate senior person working with his team to address the issue of detainees and abducted people. "[The] bottom line is there has been modest but real progress, not enough to make us comfortable at all [] the Humanitarian Taskforce is very much involved in pushing this to become more solid. If humanitarian aid increases, as should be, and the cessation of hostilities goes back into what we consider a 'hopeful mood,' that will certainly help the political discussions," Mr. de Mistura explained, adding that he plans to brief the press again tomorrow on the state of the political track. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address UN, Red Crescent Evacuate 500 From Besieged Syrian Towns by VOA News April 21, 2016 The United Nations and Syrian Arab Red Crescent have evacuated 500 people from besieged areas in Syria. The group included sick and wounded people in need of medical care, as well as their families. They were evacuated Wednesday from Madaya and Zabadani in southwestern Syria near the Lebanon border, as well as al-Foua and Kefraya in Idlib province near the border with Turkey. Pro-government forces have been blockading Madaya and Zabadani, while rebel fighters are responsible for the sieges in al-Foua and Kefraya. A cessation of hostilities in Syria has allowed the U.N. and aid agencies to bring some humanitarian relief to hundreds of thousands of Syrians living in besieged areas across the country. But officials have complained about the Syrian government restricting access and stealing some of the supplies. Since Syria's conflict began in March 2011, 4.8 million people have fled the country, and the U.N. says 13.5 million who are still there are in need of humanitarian assistance. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address US Concerned By Russia's Increased Military Presence in Syria by VOA News April 21, 2016 The United States said it is concerned about reports that Russia is moving more military equipment and personnel back into Syria, while the top NATO official said the cease-fire still remains the best chance for a peaceful solution to the crisis. "It would be negative for Russia to move additional military equipment or personnel into Syria," said Ben Rhodes, the U.S. deputy national security advisor to President Barack Obama. "We believe that our efforts are best focused on supporting the diplomatic process." U.S. defense and intelligence officials said Russia has been steadily increasing its presence around the key northern Syrian city of Aleppo, ahead of a renewed push by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Putin, Obama call Earlier this week, in a telephone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Obama stressed the importance of all of the parties living up to commitments made when the cessation of hostilities was agreed to. Russia announced in March that it was partially withdrawing its military forces from Syria, however NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said it "maintains a considerable military presence" in support of Assad's government. Stoltenberg, who spoke Thursday in Ankara, said that although the nearly two-month-old cease-fire is "under strain," it still represents Syria's best chance at a peace. Cease-fire violations The cessation of hostilities between pro-government forces and opposition fighters went into effect at the end of February, and has been widely credited with sharply reducing fighting in Syria. But both sides have reported numerous violations, including a rise in fighting the past few weeks. Stoltenberg, who met with Turkish Foreign Affairs Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, welcomed Turkey's participation in international efforts to defeat the Islamic State militant group, including allowing its Incirlik Airbase to be used by the U.S.-led coalition conducting airstrikes against the militants. Turkey's warplanes have been taking part in the airstrikes in Turkey, but not Iraq. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address No easy task to bring back 45 detained nationals in China: premier ROC Central News Agency 2016/04/20 16:13:10 Taipei, April 20 (CNA) Premier Simon Chang () said Wednesday that it will not be easy to bring back 45 Taiwanese nationals deported to China by Kenya for alleged telecom fraud. Chang said a delegation has arrived in China to negotiate the matter, and that the Cabinet will give it a "free hand to do as much as possible in the negotiation." To get the Taiwanese nationals back from China soon will be one of the topics in the talks, but Chang said it will not be easy to get them back immediately because China also has its own judicial procedure. On whether it will be possible to bring the suspects back to serve jail terms after the judicial procedures are completed, he said that there are such precedents. But since the suspects have been taken to China instead of Taiwan in the past, "we cannot be optimistic" that they can be brought back soon. The premier made the remarks during an inspection tour of a training center of the National Fire Agency in Jhushan, Nantou County. Commenting on a Taiwanese delegation's expulsion from an international meeting in Brussels Monday due to Chinese bullying, he said that he hopes the incoming administration under President-elect Tsai Ing-wen () will have enough wisdom to maintain stable relations with China so as not to undermine Taiwan's maneuvering space in the international community. He was referring to Taiwan's expulsion from a high-level symposium on excess capacity and structural adjustments in the steel sector co-sponsored by Belgium and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and held in the Belgian capital that day. The Chinese delegation said that the Taiwanese delegation was "not of a high enough level," and demanded that it should be excluded, which Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs termed "ridiculous." The premier agreed, but the Belgian deputy prime minister sided with Beijing and told the Taiwanese delegation to leave. "The public should be clear by now that the other side of the Taiwan Strait does have an influence over Taiwan's participation in international organizations and meetings," the premier said. He cited as examples China's establishment of diplomatic relations with the Gambia and that Taiwan has yet to receive an invitation to attend the annual conference of the World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the World Health Organization, which will be held in Geneva May 23-28. China has ratcheted up its pressure on Taiwan in the international community since Tsai Ing-wen of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party won Taiwan's presidential election in January. (By Tai Ya-chen, Hsiao Po-yang and Lilian Wu) ENDITEM/J NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address English Swedish First Quarter 2016 Like-for-like ("L/L") RevPAR for leased and managed hotels was up by 1.0%. The growth is due to an increase in average room rate, partly offset by lower occupancy. Revenue decreased by 4.3% to MEUR 207.0 (216.4). The decrease is mainly due to the conversion of a hotel in Sweden from leased to franchised, the temporary closure of a leased hotel in Belgium, the impact of timing of Easter and the strengthening of the Euro. On a L/L basis Revenue increased by 1.2%. EBITDA amounted to MEUR -9.2 (-0.7) and the EBITDA margin decreased to -4.4% (-0.3). In addition to the negative impact of the decrease in revenue, EBITDA is effected by higher costs for reservations as well as provisions for bad debts and accruals for central personnel costs. The Easter impact is estimated to ca MEUR -2.0. EBIT amounted to MEUR -25.0 (-12.4) and the EBIT margin decreased to -12.1% (-5.7). EBIT is further impacted by the cost for the termination of a lease in Norway of MEUR 8.0, partly offset by gain on sale of shares in subsidiaries of MEUR 1.9 and less costs for depreciation and write-downs of net MEUR 2.0. Loss after tax amounted to MEUR 21.6 (13.4). Basic and diluted loss per share was EUR 0.13 (0.08). Cash flow from operating activities amounted to MEUR -1.9 (-7.1). 1,967 (2,305) new rooms were contracted, 967 (227) new rooms opened and 303 (867) rooms left the system. MEUR Q1 2016 Q1 2015 Revenue 207.0 216.4 EBITDA -9.2 -0.7 EBIT -25.0 -12.4 Profit/loss for the period -21.6 -13.4 EBITDA margin, % -4.4% -0.3% EBIT margin, % -12.1% -5.7% Comments from the CEO Expansion of business activity in an otherwise soft quarter The first quarter is usually weak, and this year was further impacted by some distressed and challenged markets. Despite this the company has continued to gain market share. Revenue and earnings have been negatively affected by the conversion of a leased hotel to franchised, the closure of a leased hotel for renovation, the less favourable timing of Easter and termination costs for a lease in Norway. Our asset management efforts to constantly prune the Group's leased estate continued, leading to one-offs impacting our profitability but also resulting in the 25 year extension and full renovation agreement for a flagship in Sweden. In March, Rezidor announced the entry into the economy segment through the acquisition of a 49% stake of prizeotel, a dynamic, design and tech-savvy company with currently three operating hotels and one property under development in Germany. This acquisition ideally complements our brand portfolio, now reaching from economy to luxury, and allows us a fast-paced entry into an increasingly attractive sector. We maintained our strong development momentum and signed 13 hotels with 2,000 rooms out of which some 40% will still open in 2016. Openings amounted to seven hotels with 1,000 rooms and were clearly ahead of last year. The roll-out of our new lifestyle select brand Radisson RED was accelerated further during the first months of the year. We added two projects in the Middle East to the pipeline (growing the EMEA portfolio to a total of five properties) and we just opened the world's first Radisson RED in Brussels, Belgium. While the overall trading outlook remains solid, we are carefully monitoring developments in some fragile markets and will continue to pursue our focussed long-term strategy driving further margin optimisation and network growth. Wolfgang M. Neumann, President & CEO Presentation of the Q1 Results On April 21, 2016 at 09:00 (Central European Time) a combined telephone conference and live webcast (in English) concerning the report will be presented by the President & CEO, Wolfgang M. Neumann and Deputy President & CFO, Knut Kleiven. To follow the webcast, please visit www.investor.rezidor.com. To access the telephone conference, please dial: Belgium, Local +32 2 402 3092 Belgium, Free 0800 58032 Sweden, Local: +46 8 5065 3938 Sweden, Free: 0200 883 440 UK, Local: +44 20 3427 1901 UK, Free: 0800 279 4992 USA, Local: +1 212 444 0481 USA, Free: 1877 280 2296 France, Local: +33 1 76 77 22 28 France, Free: 0805 631 580 Norway, Local: +47 2 316 27 71 Norway, Free: 800 56053 Confirmation code: 4865199. For a replay of the conference call please visit www.investor.rezidor.com. Financial Calendar Q2 2016 results: July 27, 2016 Q3 2016 results: October 25, 2016 For Further Information, Contact Knut Kleiven Deputy President & CFO Tel: +32 2 702 9244 Fax: +32 2 702 9330 knut.kleiven@carlsonrezidor.com Andrea Brandenberger Senior Director Business Development Strategy & Investor Relations Tel: +32 2 702 9237 andrea.brandenberger@carlsonrezidor.com The Rezidor Hotel Group Corporate Office Avenue du Bourget 44 B-1130 Brussels Belgium Tel: +32 2 702 9200 Fax: +32 2 702 9300 Website: www.rezidor.com About the Rezidor Hotel Group The Rezidor Hotel Group is focused on hotel management and operates the core brands Radisson Blu and Park Inn by Radisson. In 2014, Rezidor announced together with Carlson the launch of two additional brands; Radisson RED, an upscale "lifestyle select" brand inspired by the millennial lifestyle, and Quorvus Collection, a new generation of distinctive five star hotels. The portfolio consists of 465 hotels with over 101,000 rooms in operation and under development in 80 countries across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Rezidor's strategy is to grow with management and franchise contracts and only selectively with leases. The strategy is also to further expand in the emerging markets. Rezidor is a member of the Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group. For more information, visit www.rezidor.com. This quarterly report comprises information which Rezidor Hotel Group AB (publ) is required to disclose under the Securities Markets Act and/or the Financial Instruments Trading Act. It was released for publication at 07:30 Central European Time on April 21, 2016. Stockholm April 21, 2016 Wolfgang M. Neumann President & CEO Rezidor Hotel Group AB (publ) The full report with tables can be downloaded from the following link: A Louisiana Senate bill unanimously approved on Wednesday aims to return schools in the Recovery School District to the local school board by no later than 2019. The bill passed 36-0 and now has to be considered by the House of Representatives. The measure came just a day after the Cowen Institute For Public Education Initiatives at Tulane University released its new poll of voter perceptions of public education in New Orleans that showed 38 percent of respondents would like the schools under the Recovery School District to return to the Orleans Parish School Board by 2018. Thirteen percent of respondents said the return should be after 2018, while 32 percent wanted to maintain the current system. The majority of respondents81 percentsaid that if charters that now fall under RSD governance were required to return to the OPSB, then a transition plan should be created before the schools shift to local control. Responses were split on whether the Orleans Parish School Board could effectively manage all of the public schools in the city, with 41 percent saying the local panel would be able to do so, while 35 percent said it cant. The Orleans Parish School Board had been plagued by governance issues, but things have changed recently. It spent two years without a permanent superintendent before hiring Henderson Lewis in 2015. Last year was also the first year that any charter school opted to shift from the RSD to Orleans Parish. After Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, Louisiana expanded the Recovery School District, which was created in 2003. The RSD eventually took over the vast majority of schools in the city. (You can see Education Weeks package on the evolution of public education in New Orleans 10 years after Hurricane Katrina .) Today, the Recovery School District oversees 52 schools in New Orleans, all of them charter schools. The Orleans Parish School Board oversees six direct-run schools and 18 charter schools. The new legislation was sponsored by Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, a Democrat from New Orleans, and it calls for the superintendents of both districts to collaborate, the Associated Press reported. While the target date for the transfer is 2018, the bill would allow the transition to be longer if complications arise. However, the transition should be completed no later than July 1, 2019, according to the AP. The bill would maintain the common enrollment process for all of the citys schools. While schools would be placed in geographic zones, priority would be given to no more than half the students who live nearby. Decisions about charter authorizing would be made by the superintendent; however, the Orleans Parish School Board could set aside those decisions with a two-thirds vote, the AP said. Danielle Dreilinger of NOLA.com noted that even if the senate bill eventually becomes law, the state will still be running schools in the city. The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education recently approved five charter schools, which will remain under state jurisdiction, and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts is also a state school, she wrote. In the intensifying debate over Illinois K-12 budget, Karen Lewis, the fiery president of the Chicagos Teachers Union, compared Republican Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner to a terrorist Thursday. Rauner is the new ISIS recruit, Lewis said during a a rally at the state capitol in Springfield, according to the Chicago Tribune . Yes, I said it, and Ill say it again. Bruce Rauner is a liar. And, you know, Ive been reading in the news lately all about these ISIS recruits popping up all over the placehas Homeland Security checked this man out yet? Because the things hes doing look like acts of terror on poor and working-class people. Catherine Kelly, a spokeswoman for Rauner, a Republican, denounced the statement. This kind of rhetoric has no place in American public discourse and sets a terrible example for our kids, Kelly said. The states legislature is debating two proposals that would alter the amount of money Chicago Public Schools, as well as suburban and downstate districts, would receive annually. The states districts suffer from a ballooning pension debt. Rauner has proposed increasing state aid to public schools by $120 million all at once rather than prorating it as the state has done for the last seven years amid financial turmoil, according to the Associated Press. CPS, as well as some Chicago suburban school districts would lose $74 million under that plan. The states Democratic legislators have proposed to completely overhaul the funding formula to provide more money to poor districtsincluding $300 million to CPSand less to wealthier ones, according to the Chicago Sun Times . The legislature has still not been able to negotiate a budget for the 2015-16 fiscal year with Rauner, a deadlock that has held up millions of dollars in funding to the states university system and other services. Rauner released money to the schools last summer. Chicagos teachers union has threatened to strike over contract negotiations that have lasted well over a year. A Chicago Tribune investigation Sunday revealed that districts in Illinois have accrued more than $20 billion in debt over the last several decades because of a quirk in the state law that allows districts to carry over debt from one year to the next. Dont miss another State EdWatch post. Sign up here to get news alerts in your email inbox. And make sure to follow @StateEdWatch on Twitter for the latest news from state K-12 policy and politics. RICHMOND Virginia Republican lawmakers failed to override several of Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffes vetoes Wednesday on coal-related tax credits, legislation related to clergy opposed to same-sex marriage and other issues. Lawmakers returned to Richmond for a one-day legislative session to vote on McAuliffes vetoes and amendments to legislation passed earlier this year. Heres a look at some of the most-watched actions: Monuments The Virginia Senate failed to overturn Gov. Terry McAuliffes veto of a bill that seeks to prevent local governments from moving Confederate and Civil War monuments. The GOP-controlled Senate was unable to muster a two-thirds majority to override the Democratic governors veto. McAuliffe said in his veto message last month that communities across Virginia are having difficult and complicated discussions about whether to remove symbols of the Confederacy. McAuliffe said doesnt believe the state should take away localities ability to make those decisions. Virginia law already bars local governments from removing war monuments. But supporters of the bill say the law protects only monuments raised since 1998. The House voted earlier Wednesday 68-32 in favor of overriding the veto. Coal tax Despite a lengthy and impassioned debate on the merits of coal-related tax credits, Republicans in the state Senate were unable to get the two-thirds majority necessary to override McAuliffes veto of legislation extending the credits for several years. GOP lawmakers from the states coal country in Southwest Virginia said the credits provide vital relief to an area hard-hit by coals decline. Utilities using coal and coal mine operators claimed $37 million worth of tax credits in fiscal 2015, according to state records. McAuliffe said the credits havent worked and are an expensive giveaway to coal company executives. Both chambers of the General Assembly approved the legislation by veto-proof margins earlier this year, but some Democrats in the Senate changed their minds to help uphold McAuliffes veto. Religious freedom The Senate upheld another of McAuliffes vetoes on a highly charged issue. The governor vetoed legislation that states clergy and religious organizations cannot be penalized for declining to participate in same-sex marriages. Similar legislation has been proposed in states across the country to protect those who due to religious beliefs decline to employ or serve certain people. Recent laws denounced as discriminatory in North Carolina and Mississippi has prompted a growing backlash from opponents. Supporters say the legislation protects religious freedom. Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam has sought to make the issue a talking point for the 2017 campaign. Ethics Lawmakers rejected proposed changes by Gov. Terry McAuliffe to the states new ethics law, saying they were unnecessary. McAuliffe had sought to tighten some of the limits on gifts lawmakers can accept from lobbyists and others. Lawmakers agreed to a $100 cap on gifts in last years session, but passed legislation this year that makes exceptions for certain kinds of gifts, including food and drinks under $20. The governor also wanted to prohibit lobbyists from bundling gifts together from multiple clients to avoid exceeding the $100 cap. Brian Coy, the governors spokesman, said McAuliffe was disappointed that lawmakers voted against amendments closing a loophole in the states ethics laws that could expand the practice of wining and dining public officials. Coy said the governor will review whether to veto the legislation following the General Assemblys rejection of his amendments. Do Liquor Stores Increase Neighborhood Violent Crime? Liquor stores are hot spots, attracting crime to a neighborhood "the way honey attracts flies," according to Susan Cheever. She is the prize-winning writer of a memoir on alcoholism recovery and the daughter of a great American storyteller whose work explored the pleasures and perils of booze extensively. Writing in The Fix, an addiction recovery publication, Susan Cheever examined studies from around the US and the world, concluding that there is a direct link between a liquor store in a neighborhood and the number of homicides that occur nearby, among other alarming things. She makes a case for closing liquor stores altogether. Let's consider it. Disturbing Details In her survey of studies, Cheever found that even small details in how stores sold their liquor impacted crime in the neighborhood. For example, if booze was sold in shot bottles and loose cans, rather than packaged, this impacted violence. Of course there are many other causes for violent crime, and these are more difficult to control than, say, closing shops. There is poverty and there are guns and drugs, among other factors that influence quality of life in a location. But Cheever's thesis is that liquor stores are one thing that can be easily controlled through regulation. Bad for Business The obstacle to regulating liquor store licensing in a very strict fashion is that it is un-American to impede business, even if it seems to bring crime. In places that are already struggling economically, the liquor store can be a big money maker. But crime is also bad for business and neighborhoods, so poor places especially are caught in a vicious cycle. "Yet violent crime in innocent-seeming neighborhoods was one of the great themes in my father's literary work," writes Cheever. Alcohol impacts all neighborhoods and Cheever recalls her own upbringing, the family hub being a local liquor store owned by a friendly guy named Norman. Now she sees the store owner in a more sinister light. Striking a Balance Ideally, some balance might be struck between the economic needs and safety. But Cheever points to stalled efforts in Baltimore as an example of the obstacles public health officials will face should they decide to crack down on liquor store licensing or attempt to change zoning regulations. The liquor lobby is strong, she writes, and so is our national love of drink. Accused? If you have been accused of crime related to alcohol or otherwise, speak to a lawyer today. Don't delay. Many criminal defense attorneys consult for free or a minimal fee and will be happy to discuss your case. Related Resources: New U.K. Treasury chief Jeremy Hunt has reversed most of an economic package announced by the government just weeks ago, including a planned cut in income taxes. Hunt said Monday he was scrapping almost all the tax cuts announced last month by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Liz Truss, and also signaled that public spending cuts are on the way. It was a bid to soothe turbulent financial markets spooked by fears of excessive government borrowing. The move raises questions about how long the beleaguered prime minister can stay in office, though Truss insisted she has no plans to quit. She vowed to lead the Conservatives into the next general election, but many in the party want her gone. TORONTO, ON--(Marketwired - April 20, 2016) - Victoria Gold Corp. (TSX VENTURE: VIT) "Victoria" or the "Company" intends to issue 80,000,000 units (the "Units") in a non-brokered private placement to Electrum Strategic Opportunities Fund L.P. ("Electrum") and existing, significant shareholder, Sun Valley Gold LLC ("Sun Valley") (the "Offering"). The Units will be issued at a price of C$0.30 per Unit for gross proceeds of C$24,000,000. Electrum has agreed to subscribe for 60,000,000 Units, while Sun Valley has agreed to subscribe for 20,000,000 Units. Upon closing of the private placement, Electrum is expected to own approximately 13.6% of the issued and outstanding shares of the Company while Sun Valley's ownership of the outstanding common shares of the Company will increase to approximately 18.0%. Following the closing of the private placement, Electrum will have the right to nominate one person for election to the board of directors of the Company (the "Board Right") and a right to participate in any future proposed equity offering of the Company (the "Preemptive Right") in order to maintain its pro rata shareholding, subject to certain exceptions. The Board Right will remain in effect until such time as Electrum no longer holds more than 10% of the outstanding voting securities of the Company and the Preemptive Right will remain in effect until such time as Electrum no longer holds more than 15% of the outstanding voting securities of the Company (in each case, on a partially-diluted basis, assuming the full exercise of any warrants then held by Electrum). Each Unit to be issued in the private placement will consist of one common share in the capital of the Company (a "Unit Share") and one-half of one common share purchase warrant (each whole common share purchase warrant, a "Unit Warrant"). Each Unit Warrant will entitle the holder thereof to purchase one common share at a price of C$0.40 for a period of 3 years following the closing of the Offering. The reference price from which the price per Unit was derived was the closing price of the common shares of the Company on Friday, April 15, 2016 of C$0.315 per common share. A duly-completed TSX-Venture Exchange Form 4A was submitted by the Company in respect of this price on Monday, April 18, 2016 and initial formal documentation with respect to the Offering was completed today. All securities issued in the private placement will be subject to a statutory four month hold period. Closing of the Offering is subject to negotiation and execution of definitive documentation and receipt of all regulatory approvals, including approval of the TSX Venture Exchange. The net proceeds of the Offering will be used to continue exploration and development of Victoria's Eagle Gold Project in Yukon. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities in the United States. The securities have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to U.S. Persons unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or an exemption from such registration is available. About the Dublin Gulch Project Victoria Gold's 100%-owned Dublin Gulch gold property is situated in the central Yukon Territory, Canada, approximately 375 kilometers north of the capital city of Whitehorse, and approximately 85 kilometers from the town of Mayo. The Property is accessible by road year-round, and is located within Yukon Energy's electrical grid. The Company has constructed and maintains a 100 person all-season camp at the project site. The Property covers an area of approximately 555 square kilometers, and is the site of the Company's Eagle Gold Deposit. The Eagle Gold Deposit is expected to be Yukon's next operating gold mine and includes Probable Reserves of 2.3 million ozs of gold from 92 million tonnes of ore with a grade of 0.78 grams of gold per tonne, as outlined in a National Instrument 43-101 feasibility study. The NI 43-101 Mineral Resource has been estimated to host 222 million tonnes averaging 0.68 grams of gold per tonne, containing 4.9 million ounces of gold in the "Indicated" category, inclusive of Probable Reserves, and a further 78 million tonnes averaging 0.60 grams of gold per tonne, containing 1.5 million ounces of gold in the "Inferred" category. About Olive-Shamrock The Olive-Shamrock target Olive lies 2 km from the proposed infrastructure at the Eagle Gold Project, along the Potato Hills Trend. Importantly, drilling and surface trench results to date indicate the existence of near-surface, high-grade potential feed into Eagle operations. (see New Releases dated May 20, June 24, July 28, August 13, and Nov 4, 2014). Metallurgical testing completed in 2015 (see New Releases dated February 24, and August 7, 2015) has indicated that the high-grade Olive-Shamrock Zone is amenable to Eagle Project heap leach recovery at the same crush size as Eagle Project feed. Olive-Shamrock is defined by a broad gold/arsenic in-soils geochemical anomaly and lies on the intrusive-sediment contact of the Potato Hills Trend (as does the Eagle Deposit) and is punctuated by several historically exploited high-grade sulphide veins. The Olive area was mined on a small scale from shallow shafts and adits in the early 1900's and via placer mining in creeks draining the area. The Olive vein system is located near the top of Olive Gulch and consists of gold-bearing quartz-scorodite-arsenopyrite vein material centralized in a shear zone structure. More detail and a current summary of all Olive-Shamrock Zone exploration can be found on the Company's website. About Electrum Electrum Strategic Opportunities Fund L.P. ("ESOF"), a mining-focused private equity fund, is a member of the Electrum Group of Companies (collectively "Electrum") that are managed by The Electrum Group LLC, a U.S.-registered investment adviser that focuses on precious and other metals, engaging in strategic hands-on investing, global resources exploration and asset development. Electrum's holdings include a significant stake in NovaGold Resources Inc., owner of a 50% interest in the Donlin Gold Project in Alaska; as well as a controlling stake in Electrum-founded vehicle Sunshine Silver Mining & Refining Corporation, owner of the historic Sunshine Mine in the Idaho Silver Valley and the Los Gatos project in Chihuahua, Mexico. ESOF also owns significant stakes in Kaminak Gold Corp., owner of the Coffee Gold Project in Yukon, Canada; NovaCopper Inc., owner of the Upper Kobuk Mineral projects located in Alaska's copper-dominant Ambler Mining district; Wellgreen Platinum Ltd., owner of the Wellgreen platinum group metals and nickel project in Yukon, Canada; and Electrum Special Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by ESOF. Electrum was founded and is majority-owned by the family of Thomas S. Kaplan, who serves as Electrum's Chairman and Chief Investment Officer. Cautionary Language and Forward-Looking Statements Neither the TSX Venture Exchange, nor its Regulation Services Provider accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This press release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this discussion, other than statements of historical facts, that address the expectations with respect to the consummation of the Offering, future exploration drilling, exploration activities, anticipated metal production, internal rate of return, estimated ore grades, commencement of production estimates and projected exploration and capital expenditures (including costs and other estimates upon which such projections are based) and events or developments that the Company expects, are forward looking statements. Although the Company believes the expectations expressed in such forward looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include failure to enter into definitive documentation for the Offering or the failure to satisfy any closing conditions set forth therein, metal prices, exploration successes, continued availability of capital and financing, and general economic, market or business conditions. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwired - Apr 21, 2016) - Denison Mines Corp. ("Denison" or the "Company") (TSX:DML)(NYSE MKT:DNN) is pleased to report the completion of the winter 2016 drilling programs on its high-priority exploration pipeline projects, highlighted by the intersection of uranium mineralization and favourable geological settings on several properties. Apart from Denison's flagship Wheeler River project, the Company has an extensive portfolio of uranium exploration projects located in the infrastructure rich eastern Athabasca Basin, covering over 340,000 hectares of ground (see Figure 1). The projects are at various stages of exploration and provide a long term pipeline of potential resource growth opportunities. During the winter 2016 programs, approximately 9,300 metres of diamond drilling was completed in 23 holes on Denison operated properties - including Murphy Lake (3,695 metres, 10 holes), Crawford Lake (1,104 metres, 2 holes), Bell Lake (2,382 metres, 4 holes), Torwalt Lake (612 metres, 2 holes), Marten Lake (1,021 metres, 4 holes) and Moon Lake South (516 metres, 1 hole). Geophysical surveys are still underway on several properties as planning continues for the development of the summer drilling programs. Denison's Vice President, Exploration, Dale Verran, commented, "While much attention has been given to the results at Wheeler River this winter, we are highly encouraged by the winter results from our high-priority pipeline projects in the eastern Athabasca. Further intersections of mineralization and alteration at Murphy Lake continue to suggest we are dealing with a sizeable mineralizing system with deposit potential along strike. At Crawford Lake and Moon Lake South, reconnaissance drilling on the largely untested CR-3 trend yielded exciting mineralized results suggesting potential for future discovery in both the basement rocks and at the unconformity. These results, in addition to those from Marten and Bell Lake, reiterate the potential of Denison's pipeline projects and the team's sound exploration approach." An additional 8,100 metres of diamond drilling was completed in 31 holes on two non-Denison operated properties. At Mann Lake, operated by Cameco Corp., a total of 2,800 metres of diamond drilling was completed in 4 holes. At Wolly, operated by AREVA Resources Canada Inc., a total of 5,300 metres of diamond drilling was completed in 27 holes. Murphy Lake: Mineralized Trend Extended Murphy Lake continues to be one of Denison's highest priority exploration projects. The project is located approximately 30 kilometres from the McClean Lake mill and adjacent to the Company's Waterbury Lake project in the northern portion of the eastern Athabasca Basin. During the winter 2016 season, Denison completed a diamond drilling program as well as ground gravity and DC-IP resistivity surveys on the Murphy Lake Project (68.8% Denison, 31.2% Eros Resources Corp.). Approximately 3,700 metres were drilled over 10 drill holes during the program. The majority of the drilling was designed to test targets identified along strike and on section of MP-15-03 (a 2015 drill hole which intersected 0.25% U 3 O 8 over 6.0 metres in strongly altered sandstones, immediately above the unconformity). Drilling confirmed the continuity of the intense hydrothermal sandstone alteration system, identified in 2015, over a strike length of 850 metres. Weak uranium mineralization was intersected in the sandstone associated with intense hematite and clay alteration in three drill holes; MP-16-08, MP-16-11 and MP-16-17. Drill hole MP-16-08, drilled on section with MP-15-03, identified uranium mineralization associated with a parallel graphitic fault zone approximately 70 metres to the south. Drill holes MP-16-11 and MP-16-17 were both drilled along strike to the west of drill hole MP-15-03 at 200 metres and 100 metres, respectively. Table 1 provides the highlights from drilling on the property to date and Figure 2 provides a summary map. Table 1: Summary of highlight intersections from the Murphy Lake 2016 Drilling Program Drill Hole From (m) To (m) Length (m)4 U 3 O 8 (%) MP-15-032,5 270.0 276.0 6.0 0.25 MP-16-081 275.65 278.55 2.9 0.191 MP-16-112 267.5 282.0 14.5 0.13 (includes)2 271.0 272.0 1.0 0.46 (and)2 277.5 278.0 0.5 0.49 MP-16-173 259.0 275.0 16.0 0.04 (includes)3 262.5 263.0 0.5 0.12 (and)3 268.0 268.5 0.5 0.13 Notes: Significant core loss. Result reported as radiometric equivalent uranium ("eU 3 O 8 ") from a calibrated total gamma down-hole probe and composited above a cut-off grade of 0.05% eU 3 O 8 Intersection interval is composited above a cut-off grade of 0.05% U 3 O 8 A cut-off grade has not been applied As the drill holes dip steeply to the south and the unconformity mineralization is expected to be flat-lying, the true thickness of the mineralization is expected to be approximately 90% of the intersection lengths Results reported previously in Company press release dated October 22, 2015 An additional 2.2 kilometres of interpreted strike length remains entirely untested both to the east and west of the mineralized zone noted above. Within the current DC-IP resistivity coverage, which extends 0.8 kilometres east and 1.4 kilometres west of the mineralized zone, several priority targets have been identified for drill testing. The ground gravity survey has produced gravity-low targets, in some cases coincident with DC-IP resistivity targets, and has delineated potential areas of unconformity offset to the north of the mineralized zone, which constitutes a further target area. Crawford Lake and Moon Lake South: Mineralization Discovered on CR-3 Conductive Trend At the Crawford Lake property (100% Denison owned), a two hole program was designed to test targets on the CR-5 and CR-3 conductive trends respectively. Previous drilling on the CR-3 conductive trend included one historic hole, and one hole drilled by Denison in 2015 (CR-15-24), which intersected strong basement alteration and structure associated with graphite-bearing pelitic gneisses. During the winter 2016 drilling program, drill hole CR-16-26, located approximately 800 metres to the northeast of CR-15-24, extended the strike of the graphite-bearing pelitic gneisses and confirmed further strong basement alteration and structure with associated elevated uranium pathfinder elements. In January 2016, Denison entered into an earn-in option agreement with CanAlaska Uranium Ltd. (TSX VENTURE:CVV) on the Moon Lake property ("Moon Lake South"), which is contiguous with Crawford Lake and covers the northeasterly extent of the CR-3 conductive trend. A single drill hole was completed during the winter 2016 program which was designed to test the CR-3 conductive trend on Moon Lake South, immediately north of the southern property boundary with Crawford Lake. The drill hole, MS-16-01, intersected 0.102% U 3 O 8 over 0.5 metres at the unconformity and anomalous uranium in the overlying sandstone. This hole is located approximately 1.5 kilometres northeast from CR-16-26. The Moon Lake South option agreement allows for Denison to acquire an initial 51% interest in claim S-107558 by completing exploration expenditures of CAD$200,000, and allows for Denison to increase its interest to 75% for a further CAD$500,000. The option agreement includes provisions for the formation of a joint venture and a 2% NSR Royalty which will be automatically granted if either party's interest is diluted to below 10%. The NSR Royalty may be purchased by the non-diluting party for CAD$500,000. The drilling results obtained during the winter 2016 drilling program, including extensive basement alteration and structure on Crawford Lake and uranium mineralization at the unconformity on Moon Lake South, have confirmed the CR-3 conductive trend to be highly prospective. Further drilling is warranted to evaluate this trend for unconformity and basement hosted uranium mineralization. A map showing the location of the CR-3 conductive trend and the respective drill holes is provided in Figure 3. Other Property Highlights Marten Lake (50% Denison, 50% JOGMEC) Three of the four holes completed during the winter program, testing DC-IP resistivity targets along a northeast-southwest trend, intersected significant structure and alteration. The westernmost hole encountered a significant reverse fault zone at the sub-Athabasca unconformity with 96 metres of a vertical offset and associated brecciation and alteration. These features attest to a favorable geological setting for unconformity-related uranium mineralization and suggest follow-up exploration is warranted along this fault zone. Follow-up plans will be finalized upon receipt and interpretation of the geochemical assay and clay alteration data. Bell Lake - North (100% Denison) Of the four drill holes completed during the winter program, two intersected favourable sandstone structure and alteration, and one intersected significant structure in the basement. Elevated radioactivity was intersected at or immediately above the sub-Athabasca unconformity in all four drill holes. Drilling was reconnaissance in nature and focused on testing ground electromagnetic targets on widely-spaced survey lines. These results, obtained in a new target area with no previous drilling, meet several of the important exploration criteria for unconformity-related uranium mineralization. Interpretation of the results is ongoing and follow-up work will be assessed once geochemical assay and clay alteration data have been received and interpreted. Mann Lake (30% Denison, 52.5% Cameco and operator, 17.5% AREVA): During 2014 and 2015 a significant zone of unconformity mineralization was discovered by Cameco along the Granite Contact "GC" fault over a 600 metre strike length, highlighted by 6.7% U 3 O 8 over 3.9 metres in drill hole MN-066-01 (see Company press release dated February 4, 2015). The winter 2016 drilling program was focused on testing the underexplored southern extent of the GC fault, which is interpreted to extend approximately 2.4 kilometres to the southern property boundary away from the mineralized zone. Two holes were completed at 1.2 kilometers and 2.1 kilometres, respectively, to the south of the existing zone of mineralization and aimed at the extension of the GC fault. The southernmost hole intersected a significant zone of structural disruption and alteration in the sandstone, and indicated an 80 metre vertical offset of the sub-Athabasca unconformity. A follow-up hole, collared approximately 100 metres to the east on section, intersected encouraging sandstone and up-thrown basement rocks including quartzite and structured, graphite-rich pelitic gneisses. The results suggest the optimal unconformity target may be located further to the west, between the two holes completed on the section. Assay Methods and Lab Denison reports its initial exploration results as radiometric equivalent uranium ("eU 3 O 8 ") from a calibrated, total gamma, down-hole probe. Where core recovery permits, all mineralized intersections are sampled and submitted for chemical U 3 O 8 assay at the Saskatchewan Research Council ("SRC") Geoanalytical Laboratories using an ISO/IEC 17025:2005 accredited method for the determination of U 3 O 8 weight %. Sample preparation involves crushing and pulverising of split-core samples to 90% passing -106 microns. The resultant pulp is digested using aqua-regia and the solution analyzed for U 3 O 8 weight % using ICP-OES. Qualified Person The disclosure of a scientific or technical nature contained in this news release was prepared by Dale Verran, MSc, Pr.Sci.Nat., Denison's Vice President, Exploration, who is a Qualified Person in accordance with the requirements of NI 43-101. For a more detailed description of the assay procedures and the quality assurance program and quality control measures applied by Denison, please see Denison's Annual Information Form dated March 24, 2016 filed under the Company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. About Denison Denison is a uranium exploration and development company with interests focused in the Athabasca Basin region of northern Saskatchewan. Including its 60% owned Wheeler River project, which hosts the high grade Phoenix and Gryphon uranium deposits, Denison's exploration portfolio consists of numerous projects covering over 350,000 hectares in the eastern Athabasca Basin. Denison's interests in Saskatchewan also include a 22.5% ownership interest in the McClean Lake joint venture, which includes several uranium deposits and the McClean Lake uranium mill, which is currently processing ore from the Cigar Lake mine under a toll milling agreement, plus a 25.17% interest in the Midwest deposit and a 61.55% interest in the J Zone deposit on the Waterbury Lake property. Both the Midwest and J Zone deposits are located within 20 kilometres of the McClean Lake mill. Internationally, Denison owns 100% of the Mutanga project in Zambia, 100% of the uranium/copper/silver Falea project in Mali, and a 90% interest in the Dome project in Namibia. Denison has recently entered into an agreement with GoviEx Uranium Inc. (CSE:GXU) to sell its African interests, with an expected closing date in May, 2016. Denison is also engaged in mine decommissioning and environmental services through its Denison Environmental Services division and is the manager of Uranium Participation Corp., a publicly traded company which invests in uranium oxide and uranium hexafluoride. Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements Certain information contained in this press release constitutes "forward-looking information", within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and similar Canadian legislation concerning the business, operations and financial performance and condition of Denison. Generally, these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "expects", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates" or "believes", or the negatives and/or variations of such words and phrases, or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be taken", "occur", "be achieved" or "has the potential to". In particular, this press release contains forward-looking information pertaining to the following: exploration (including drilling) and evaluation activities, plans and objectives; potential mineralization of drill targets; and the estimates of Denison's mineral resources. Forward looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management as of the date such statements are made, and they are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of Denison to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Denison believes that the expectations reflected in this forward-looking information are reasonable but there can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and may differ materially from those anticipated in this forward looking information. For a discussion in respect of risks and other factors that could influence forward-looking events, please refer to the "Risk Factors" in Denison's Annual Information Form dated March 24, 2016 available under its profile at www.sedar.com and in its Form 40-F available at www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml. These factors are not, and should not be construed as being, exhaustive. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The forward-looking information contained in this press release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. Denison does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking information after the date of this press release to conform such information to actual results or to changes in its expectations except as otherwise required by applicable legislation. Cautionary Note to United States Investors Concerning Estimates of Measured, Indicated and Inferred Mineral Resources: This press release may use the terms "measured", "indicated" and "inferred" mineral resources. United States investors are advised that while such terms are recognized and required by Canadian regulations, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission does not recognize them. "Inferred mineral resources" have a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence, and as to their economic and legal feasibility. It cannot be assumed that all or any part of an inferred mineral resource will ever be upgraded to a higher category. Under Canadian rules, estimates of inferred mineral resources may not form the basis of feasibility or other economic studies. United States investors are cautioned not to assume that all or any part of measured or indicated mineral resources will ever be converted into mineral reserves. United States investors are also cautioned not to assume that all or any part of an inferred mineral resource exists, or is economically or legally mineable. Figures 1 to 3 are available at the following address: http://media3.marketwire.com/docs/1051527_Maps.pdf Aberdeen's Lithium X shares currently worth more than $15 million TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwired - April 21, 2016) - Aberdeen International Inc. ("Aberdeen", or the "Company") (TSX:AAB) announces that it has closed on the agreement to sell 50% of Potasio y Litio de Argentina SA ("PLASA") to Lithium X (TSX VENTURE:LIX). PLASA owns 100% of the Sal de los Angeles lithium brine project ("Sal de los Angeles Project", or the "Project", formerly known as the Diablillos Project) in Argentina. Lithium X has an option to acquire up to 80% of PLASA by fulfilling certain conditions described below. All dollar figures are quoted in Canadian dollars. David Stein, President and CEO of Aberdeen, commented: "The Aberdeen and Lithium X teams have worked hard over the past few months to finalize and close this new partnership arrangement and we are now excited to get started. We are very pleased to see the market recognize the growth potential in Lithium X and note that as we close this deal, our holdings in Lithium X are worth more than $15 million or approximately $0.16 per Aberdeen share. This is almost equal to Aberdeen's total market capitalization and we still have the potential to earn an additional $5 million in Lithium X stock under the option agreement. With our remaining stake in the Sal de los Angeles Project, our large stake in African Thunder Platinum as well as our other assets, we see excellent potential for our company going forward." The Sal De Los Angeles Project The Sal de Los Angeles Project covers more than 95% of the Salar de Diablillos property located in Salta province at an average elevation of approximately 4,050 metres above sea level. The Project includes 32 mining claims covering approximately 8,156 hectares and is located near FMC Corp.'s Salar de Hombre Muerto lithium deposit, one of the world's largest lithium operations. Approximately $19 million has been invested in the property by previous operators, including $16.2 million in work completed at Sal de los Angeles between 2010 to 2015. Work included extensive exploration and definition drilling, pump tests, seismic & gravity geophysical surveys, basin and solute transport models, evaporation and metallurgical testing, and running a continuous pilot ponding plant on-site. Lithium X Agreement with Aberdeen Lithium X will issue 8,000,000 common shares to Aberdeen International for a 50% interest in the Project and has committed to $3,000,000 in exploration and development expenditures over a two-year period and to complete a feasibility study on the Project. Upon completing a feasibility study and its expenditure commitment Lithium X has the option (the "Option") to acquire an additional 30% interest by issuing common shares worth $5,000,000 based on a 10% discount to the 20-day volume-weighted average price of its common shares at the date of exercise to Aberdeen. As part of the agreement, Lithium X will be entitled to indirectly appoint the initial operator of the project for as long as the Company maintains an interest greater than or equal to 50% in the Joint Venture. If Lithium X elects not to exercise the Option, Aberdeen has the right following the option expiry for a 30-day period to acquire a 1% interest in PLASA back from Lithium X for C$166,000 in cash. In the event that Lithium X does not meet the expenditure commitment or complete the feasibility study within two years, Lithium X must transfer 20% of the PLASA shares back to Aberdeen, resulting in Aberdeen holding 70% of the outstanding PLASA shares. Board Nominations and Pooling Agreement Lithium X has agreed to increase its Board of Directors to seven members at its next annual general meeting, at which time Aberdeen has the right to nominate two members to the Board for a period of one year. Aberdeen reserves the right to appoint two directors at future AGMs as long as it owns more than 15% of the outstanding shares of Lithium X. If Aberdeen owns more than 10% of outstanding shares of Lithium X but less than 15%, Aberdeen has the right to nominate one member to the Board. Aberdeen also has a pro rata right to participate in any future equity financings as long as it holds a minimum of 8,000,000 Lithium X common shares and 10% of the outstanding shares. Half of the common shares issued to Aberdeen are subject to a pooling agreement pursuant to which the Aberdeen shares and common shares held by Paul Matysek, Brian Paes-Braga and Frank Giustra are subject to a one-year voluntary pool. All remaining shares are subject to a 4 month holding period Cautionary Notes Except for statements of historical fact contained herein, the information in this press release constitutes "forward-looking information" within the meaning of Canadian securities law. Such forward-looking information may be identified by words such as "plans", "proposes", "estimates", "intends", "expects", "believes", "may", "will" and include without limitation, statements regarding, proceeds to be received on closing or subsequently, the ability of the Company to generate additional value for shareholders as a result of such transactions, past success as an indicator of future success; net asset value of the Company; the potential of investee companies and the appreciation of their share price; the Company's plan of business operations; industry opportunities and dynamics and anticipated returns. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate; actual results and future events could differ materially from such statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include, among others, metal prices, competition, financing risks, acquisition risks, risks inherent in the mining industry, and regulatory risks. Most of these factors are beyond the control of the Company. Investors are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking information. Except as otherwise required by applicable securities statutes or regulation, the Company expressly disclaims any intent or obligation to update publicly forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. CALGARY, April 21, 2016 - Stratabound Minerals Corp. (TSX VENTURE: SB) ("Stratabound" or "the Company") is pleased to announce that the TSX Venture Exchange has approved the Company's application for reinstatement of trading in Stratabound's common shares, and trading is scheduled to resume on Thursday, April 21, 2016.The resumption of trading in the Company's shares is a major step forward toward completion of the Company's proposed combination with Silver Stream Mining Corp. The Company is continuing to work with the Exchange regarding the review of the transaction, although the Exchange has not yet made its acceptance. Should such acceptance be granted, and should the transaction be completed as currently contemplated, including the conversion of certain debts to Bellport Resources Ltd., the Company expects to have a total of 431,555,033 shares outstanding.The Company is presently in the process of scheduling a meeting of shareholders for late June in Calgary (date, time and location are to be finalized) and at that time the Company plans to request that shareholders approve a 6 for 1 share consolidation, which would result in approximately 72 million shares outstanding. The Company is also working to complete the audit of December 31, 2015 financial statements, and such statements would also be presented for approval at the meeting.Interim CEO Michael Page commented, "The resumption in trading of Stratabound's common shares is a major accomplishment as we work to re-establish Stratabound through the proposed combination with Silver Stream Mining Corp. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. WARNING: the Company relies upon litigation protection for "forward looking" statements. The information in this release may contain forward-looking information under applicable securities laws. This forward-looking information is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those implied by the forward-looking information. Factors that may cause actual results to vary materially include, but are not limited to, inaccurate assumptions concerning the exploration for and development of mineral deposits, currency fluctuations, unanticipated operational or technical difficulties, changes in laws or regulations, failure to obtain regulatory or shareholder approval, failure of Silver Stream to close the proposed business combination, the risks of obtaining necessary licenses and permits, changes in general economic conditions or conditions in the financial markets and the inability to raise additional financing. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on this forward-looking information. The Company does not assume the obligation to revise or update this forward-looking information after the date of this release or to revise such information to reflect the occurrence of future unanticipated events, except as may be required under applicable securities laws. 100 King Street West, Suite 5700 Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5X 1C7 Phone 416 915 4157 Fax 416 915 4257 E-mail: info@stratabound.com Website: www.stratabound.com For further information contact: Michael Page, FAusIMM, Interim CEO 720-560-3812 info@stratabound.com www.stratabound.com Inquiries with respect to the proposed Stratabound -- Silver Stream transaction may also be directed to: Terry Byberg, President and CEO Silver Stream Mining Corp. 416-915-4157 info@silverstreammining.com www.silverstreammining.com WEST KELOWNA, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - Apr 21, 2016) - Colorado Resources Ltd. (TSX VENTURE:CXO) ("Colorado" or the "Company") announces it has acquired a 100% interest in 32,825 ha in the Golden Triangle area in northwestern British Columbia through combination of staking (29,425 ha) and purchase of the Max claims (3,400 ha) from a third party (collectively referred to as the "KingPin Property"). The KingPin Property covers thirty-five BC Government Minfile (mineral) occurrences and favorable geology on strike between the past producing Granduc Mine* and Colorado's KSP Property under option from SnipGold. With the addition of the KingPin Property Colorado now joins the ranks as one of the largest landholders in the region with claims covering approximately 65 km's of prospective geology. (See Figure 1). Adam Travis, President and CEO of Colorado states, "Colorado's management and technical team's experience in the region spans over 50 years combined and resulted in the strategic decision in 2013 to pursue the option to acquire an 80% interest in the KSP Property. Since 2013 Colorado has worked alongside BC government geologists to bring further attention to this prominent belt that shares many geological similarities to the KSM/Pretium* camp located 30 km to the southeast. We look forward to the upcoming drill program focusing on the high grade gold targets at Inel (see news release of February 29, 2016) and advancing the KingPin Property in a similar manner to achieve what we have accomplished to date at KSP." Mineral occurrences on the KingPin Property include copper skarns, copper porphyries, copper gold porphyries, polymetallic veins and gold veins. Previous explorers in the 1970's, focused on the copper potential and may have not properly recognized or evaluated the gold potential. Colorado intends to advance exploration on the KingPin Property following further review and compilation of the historical data by its technical team. Pursuant to an arm's length purchase agreement dated April 20, 2016 (the "Agreement") between the Company and a third party (the "Vendor"), the Vendor has agreed to sell its 100% interest in the Max Property to Colorado subject to a retained 2% net smelter returns royalty (the "NSR") for the following consideration: On signing a $20,000 cash payment to the Vendor; and 200,000 common shares of Colorado to be issued to the Vendor within 10 days of TSX Venture Exchange ("Exchange") approval. The Company has the option to purchase from the Vendor 1% of the NSR for $1,000,000 within 240 day of commercial production and thereafter at any time the remaining 1% for $5,000,000. The Max Property will form part of the KingPin Property and the Agreement is subject to Exchange approval. Qualified Person Greg Dawson P.Geo, is the Qualified Person ("QP") as defined by National Instrument 43-101 that has reviewed and approved the technical content of this news release. Cautionary Notes *This news release may contain information about adjacent properties on which Colorado has no right to explore or mine. Readers are cautioned that mineral deposits on adjacent properties are not indicative of mineral deposits on the Company's properties. About Colorado Colorado Resources Ltd. is currently engaged in the business of mineral exploration for the purpose of acquiring and advancing mineral properties located in British Columbia and is also seeking opportunities in Southwest USA and Latin America. Colorado's current exploration focus is to continue to advance: the KSP property optioned from SnipGold, located 15 km's along strike to the southeast of the past producing Snip Mine; its 100% owned North ROK property, located 15 km's northwest of the Red Chris mine development, both located in northern central British Columbia. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF Colorado Resources Ltd. Adam Travis, President and Chief Executive Officer Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements contained in this news release, constitute "forward-looking information" as such term is used in applicable Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking information is based on plans, expectations and estimates of management at the date the information is provided and is subject to certain factors and assumptions, including: that the Company's financial condition and development plans do not change as a result of unforeseen events, that the Company obtains required regulatory approvals, that the Company continues to maintain a good relationship with the local project communities. Forward-looking information is subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause plans, estimates and actual results to vary materially from those projected in such forward-looking information. Factors that could cause the forward-looking information in this news release to change or to be inaccurate include, but are not limited to, the risk that any of the assumptions referred to prove not to be valid or reliable, which could result in delays, or cessation in planned work, that the Company's financial condition and development plans change, delays in regulatory approval, risks associated with the interpretation of data, the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits, the possibility that results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations, as well as the other risks and uncertainties applicable to mineral exploration and development activities and to the Company as set forth in the Company's Management's Discussion and Analysis reports filed under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com. There can be no assurance that any forward-looking information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, the reader should not place any undue reliance on forward-looking information or statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking information or statements, other than as required by applicable law. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. VANCOUVER, April 21, 2016 /CNW/ - Nevsun Resources Ltd. (TSX:NSU)(NYSE MKT:NSU) (Nevsun or the Company) is pleased to report its financial and operating results for the three months ended March 31, 2016. Unless otherwise noted, with the exception of earnings per share and realized price and cost per pound figures, all financial results are in millions of US dollars. First quarter 2016 highlights Continued first quartile safety performance at Bisha Produced 34 million pounds of copper at C1 cash costs (1) of $1.12 per payable pound sold of $1.12 per payable pound sold Sold 20,000 gold equivalent ounces from stockpiles Generated earnings per share of $0.04 and $33 million in operating income Ended period with working capital of $483 million, including $438 million of cash Paid quarterly dividend of $0.04 per share Financial Review Q1 2016 Q1 2015 Revenue (millions) $ 92.4 $ 117.2 Operating income (millions) 32.9 42.6 Net income (millions) 15.6 23.0 Net income attributable to Nevsun shareholders (millions) 7.5 12.6 Basic earnings per share attributable to Nevsun shareholders 0.04 0.06 Working capital (millions) 483.3 517.0 Copper price realized, per payable pound sold 2.20 2.49 C1 cash cost per payable pound sold(1) $ 1.12 $ 1.23 "We've concluded another successful and profitable quarter," stated Cliff Davis, President and CEO of Nevsun. "Nevsun earned $15.6 million during Q1 2016 ($7.5 million attributable to Nevsun shareholders) or $0.04 per share. We are pleased to see the impact of our cost reduction efforts in our $1.12 C1 cash cost per payable pound sold. The zinc expansion project continues to progress well with hot ore commissioning scheduled for late Q2 2016. The project will be completed on time and well under budget. We still have not committed any of our zinc off-take so as to take advantage of the expected tightening zinc concentrate supply." Operations Review Q1 2016 Q1 2015 Ore mined, tonnes(1) 1,337,000 657,000 Waste mined, tonnes 2,028,000 3,517,000 Strip ratio, (using tonnes) 1.5 5.4 Ore milled tonnes 584,000 441,000 Copper feed grade, % 3.1 4.7 Recovery, % of copper 87.0 83.8 Copper concentrate grade, % 23.0 24.8 Copper in concentrate produced, millions of pounds 34.2 38.0 Copper in concentrate produced, tonnes 15,500 17,200 Payable copper in concentrate sold, millions of pounds(1) 34.9 47.4 Payable copper in concentrate sold, tonnes(1) 15,900 21,500 Payable gold in concentrate sold, ounces 6,000 6,900 Payable silver in concentrate sold, ounces 226,000 369,000 (1) Ore tonnes mined for the three months ended March 31, 2016 included no oxide ore (three months ended March 31, 2015 11,000 tonnes), 732,000 tonnes of supergene ore (three months ended March 31, 2015 518,000) and 605,000 tonnes of primary ore (three months ended March 31, 2015 128,000). Cliff Davis continued, "We are off to a great start to 2016 with supergene production ahead of guidance and strong demand for our gold equivalent ounces from stockpiles. The precious metal stockpiles sales confirm the marketability of this material at more favourable commercial terms than originally expected. With the strong gold and silver prices, we will prioritize shipping precious metal stockpile material over zinc concentrate to maximize earnings and cash flow." Conference call details The Company will hold a conference call on Friday, April 22, 2016, at 8AM Vancouver / 11AM Toronto, New York / 4PM London, to discuss the Q1 2016 results. Please call in at least five minutes prior to the conference call start time to ensure prompt access to the conference. Dial in details are as follows: North America: 1 888-390-0546 / +1 416-764-8688 / +1 778-383-7413 UK: 0800 652 2435 (toll free) Other International: +1 416-764-8688 / +1 778-383-7413 The conference call will be available for replay until May 8, 2016, by calling 1 888-390-0541 / +1 416-764-8677 and entering passcode 486448. About Nevsun Resources Ltd. Nevsun Resources Ltd. is a Vancouver-based mining company with an operating mine in Eritrea. Nevsun's 60%-owned Bisha Mine ranks as one of the highest grade open pit copper mines in the world. Nevsun has a strong balance sheet and future cash flows to grow shareholder value through exploration at Bisha and acquisition of additional mining assets. Forward Looking Statements The above contains forward-looking statements or forward-looking information within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, and applicable Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking statements are frequently, but not always, identified by words such as "expects," "anticipates," "believes," "intends," "estimated," "potential," "possible" and similar expressions, or statements that events, conditions or results "will," "may," "could" or "should" occur or be achieved. Forward-looking statements are statements concerning the Company's current beliefs, plans and expectations about the future including but not limited to commercial production, future production of copper and related cash flows and are inherently uncertain. The actual achievements of the Company or other future events or conditions may differ materially from those reflected in the forward-looking statements due to a variety of risks, uncertainties and other factors, including, without limitation, the risks that: (i) any of the assumptions in the historical resource estimates turn out to be incorrect, incomplete, or flawed in any respect; (ii) the methodologies and models used to prepare the resource and reserve estimates either underestimate or overestimate the resources or reserves due to hidden or unknown conditions, (iii) exploration activities or the mine operations are disrupted or suspended due to acts of god, internal conflicts in the country of Eritrea, unforeseen government actions or other events; (iv) the Company experiences the loss of key personnel; (v) the Company's operations or exploration activities are adversely affected by other political or military, or terrorist activities; (vi) the Company becomes involved in any material disputes with any of its key business partners, suppliers or customers; (vii) the Company is subjected to any hostile takeover or other unsolicited attempts to acquire control of the Company; (viii) the Company is subject to any adverse ruling in any of the pending litigation to which it is a party; (ix) the Company incurs unanticipated power interruptions or failures due to electrical circuit failures or inadequate fuel quality or supply required to effectively operate power generators for the plant or otherwise or unexpected costs or repairs to the plant; * the Company incurs unanticipated costs as a result of the transition from the supergene ore phase of the Bisha mine to the primary ore phase or experiences challenges with copper mineralogy or host pyrite minerals that impacts metallurgical recoveries and concentrate grades in the transition zone; or (xi) are associated with the speculative nature of exploration activities, periodic interruptions to exploration, failure of drilling, processing and mining equipment, the interpretation of drill results and the estimation of mineral resources and reserves, changes to exploration and project plans and parameters and other risks are more fully described in the Company's Annual Information Form for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2015, which is incorporated herein by reference. The Company's forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs, expectations and opinions of management on the date the statements are made and the Company assumes no obligation to update such forward-looking statements in the future, except as required by law. For the reasons set forth above, investors should not place undue reliance on the Company's forward-looking statements. Further information concerning risks and uncertainties associated with these forward-looking statements and our business can be found in our Annual Information Form for the year ended December 31, 2015 which is available on the Company's website (www.nevsun.com), filed under our profile on SEDAR (www.sedar.com) and on EDGAR (www.sec.gov) under cover of Form 40-F. NEVSUN RESOURCES LTD. "Cliff T. Davis" Cliff T. Davis President & Chief Executive Officer SOURCE Nevsun Resources Ltd. This April 12, 2016 photo shows Shakespeare's Birthplace exterior, a restored 16th century home in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, where it's believed William Shakespeare was born in 1564. Today, Shakespeare's restored family home is presented as it would have looked during the 16th century when William was aged ten-years-old. (AP Photo/James Brooks) SHARE This April 12, 2016 photos shows a bust of William Shakespeare which sits above the famous British playwright's grave at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. 400 years after his death, Shakespeare's fame continues to take Stratford-upon-Avon to new heights. (AP Photo/James Brooks) This April 12, 2016 photo shows William Shakespeare's grave at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. 400 years after his death, Shakespeare's fame continues to take Stratford-upon-Avon to new heights. (AP Photo/James Brooks) This April 12, 2016 photos shows two pairs of children's shoes on display inside the "Birth Room" at Shakespeare's Birthplace, a restored 16th century home in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, where it's believed William Shakespeare was born in 1564. Today, Shakespeare's restored family home is presented as it would have looked during the 16th century when William was aged ten-years-old. (AP Photo/James Brooks) By JAMES BROOKS, Associated Press STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, England (AP) "All the world's a stage," wrote William Shakespeare, who died 400 years ago this week. But he played out much of his life in one small English market town: Stratford-upon-Avon. "It's the home of one of the greatest writers who's ever lived, whose works are translated into all the world languages ... and it's therefore a magnet to come to understand a little bit about what made William Shakespeare, what formed him, to find out about the history of his time, and to celebrate his on-going legacy," said Dr. Paul Edmondson, head of research at Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Shakespeare was born here in 1564 in a half-timbered house in Henley Street. The home has been restored to look as it would have when Shakespeare was 10. His father John, who was appointed mayor of the town in 1568, had a glove-making workshop that's been recreated downstairs, while the room where Shakespeare was believed to have been born is upstairs. "Childbirth is always difficult, but even worse 400 years ago and baby Shakespeare was lucky to survive, because there was plague in the town the year he was born and the parish register is rammed full with burials for that year," said Edmondson. Some 2 million tourists visit the town annually but it's not just Shakespeare's Birthplace that they come to see. Around 5.5 kilometers (3 miles) away in the village of Wilmcote, tourists travel back in time to experience the sights, sounds and smells of a 16th century Tudor farm. It was here that Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, grew up. It's thought Shakespeare would have spent some of his childhood helping with tasks around the farm. Literary experts believe Wilmcote makes an appearance as "Wincot" in Shakespeare's comedy "The Taming of the Shrew". "He was always in some way a country lad at heart. He loved this town, he perhaps hated this town a little bit, obviously forging his career in London with the professional theaters," said Edmondson. During the late 1580s and early 1590s, Shakespeare left Stratford to seek fame and fortune in London. In 1597, he gained enough success to purchase a new family home in Stratford-upon-Avon called "New Place," where he's believed to have written many of his famous plays. This year is an important one for Stratford-upon-Avon and its 26,000 residents. The town is marking 400 years since Shakespeare's death on April 23 with new exhibitions, theater performances and a colorful parade through its busy streets. "The buzz around this has been incredible, even greater than we had for the 450th anniversary of his birth which was literally only two years ago," said Helen Peters, chief executive of Shakespeare's England. Much attention will be focused on Stratford-upon-Avon's Holy Trinity Church, a parish church on the banks of the River Avon. Church records show he was baptized there on April 26, 1564 and buried there on April 25, 1616, two days after his death. Rev. Patrick Taylor, the vicar, says visitors initially behold "a beautiful medieval parish church ... But once they've made their way up here into the chancel, then they can see Shakespeare's grave on the floor just in front of the high altar, then his bust up on the wall there which put in by his relatives, shortly after his burial." Above Shakespeare's grave, a warning is inscribed on his gravestone: "Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear, To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones." Shakespeare is buried flanked by his wife, Anne Hathaway, who died in 1623, and Thomas Nash, the first husband of his granddaughter Elizabeth. "There's a lot of interest in this place, the final resting place of Shakespeare," Taylor said. "People seem to have a connection with this playwright who wrote about human emotions and human experiences that people over the world relate to." Mark Kimmons, visiting with his family from Anchorage, Alaska, says he grew up being taught Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. "I was thinking that he was famous in his day," Kimmons said, "but not nearly as famous as he is now, so many years after his death." West Texas to see return of rain, cooler temperatures to start week But don't expect that fall front to bring the first freeze of the year for most of the region just yet. By Ngan Ho of the San Angelo Standard-Times Lawyers for a San Angelo man convicted of sexual assault against a minor argued for a new trial after discovering a witness who claimed the girl who brought the charges against the man had lied about the assault. Justin Riordan, 30, convicted in February for aggravated sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl, appeared before 51st District Judge Barbara Walther Wednesday seeking a new trial. The hearing began around 4 p.m. and lasted more than four hours in Walther's courtroom, packed with about 35 people mostly Riordan's family and friends, including his parents, siblings, former roommate and employer. Outside the courthouse, two people with signs protested Riordin's request for a new trial. The defense attorney, Frank Sellers of Lubbock, requested that Walther grant Riordan "a new trial based upon newly discovered exculpatory evidence." One week after Riordan's conviction which sent him to prison for 10 years his attorneys obtained an affidavit from "a longtime friend of" the victim, according to court documents. In the affidavit, a 15-year-old girl from Miles, Texas, "swears" that the victim "confessed she had fabricated the allegations against" Riordan, according to court documents. The defense attorneys then filed a Motion for New Trial and Motion in Arrest of Judgement in early March, citing the affidavit as grounds to warrant a new trial. The 15-year-old girl testified in court Wednesday, recounting a conversation she had with the victim in which the victim told her she lied about a man who raped her. The 15-year-old girl's father, a counselor from Miles High School, as well the two local attorneys who represented Riordan during his trail in February, Shawntell L. McKillop and Jessica Skinner, also testified. "All we're asking for is a new trial," not seeking an immediate judgment regarding Riordan's innocence or guilt, Sellers said to Walther in closing arguments. "The state has provided no good cause to doubt (the teen's) claim." Allison Palmer, 51st District Attorney, spoke against the request to seek a new trial from the get-go to closing arguments. She argued that the affidavit is not new evidence or an alibi but rather a witness impeachment, which is the process of calling into question the credibility of a person who testifies in a trial. "This is solely impeachment evidence," Palmer said, arguing that 12 independent jurors found Riordan guilty based on substantial evidence in addition to witnesses' testimonies. "I don't believe one more impeaching item" would sway 12 news jurors to bring about a different verdict, Palmer said. Even though a verdict has been given, if granted a new trial, Riordan's case will get a second chance at reexamination by a new jury in the same court. Walther adjourned the hearing around 8 p.m. after closing arguments and said she would notify the parties of her decision. The vigil for the deceased, two fishermen shot dead by Light Infantry Battalion (LIB) No. 280, took place at 4 PM, on April 8, at Shwe San Taw Pagoda in Ye Town. At the event, locals from across Ye Township, including Parlain region, Kyaungywa village, Lamine Town and Mawkanint Village were in attendance. The villagers in southern Ye Township continuously face human rights abuses. They are oppressed. We want the world to know about this. We want peace and justice here, said Sayardaw Zanaka, as he addressed the objectives of the vigil. Before the event, a press conference regarding the case of the two victims was held at 1 PM, at Mon Hall in Ye Town. At the vigil, Ko Jimmy, director of Human Rights and Justice Initiative, participated and said that he joined the event as he believed that all ethnic groups in the country have equal rights. The respective authorities should work with transparency during the case for public knowledge. Ko Jimmy added that his organization already reported the deaths of the two villagers to the Tatmadaw [army] chief and respective authority departments. Specific divisions and battalions, township polices, township administrators and township supporting committees were invited to the press conference but were absent, according to Min Soe Thein, a member of the press conference organizing committee. The objective of the press conference is to 1) inform the public that there is no security for the locals and their homes, 2) the Tatmadaw must take responsibility and solve the case with transparency, 3) Tatmadaw must help support the victims families until they are satisfied, and 4) to have Myanmar National Human Rights Commission conduct an investigation and disclose the case. It is reported that Captain Zaw Myo Thet, of LIB No. 280, alleged shooter of the two villagers, is sued with article 302 by Kawsar Town Police Station on March 19. On March 8, around 11:30 PM, Battalion Commander Phyo Wai Thwe, Deputy Battalion Commander Aung Ko Win and Captain Zaw Myo Thet of LIB No. 280, were involved in shooting two villagers from Makyee Chaungwa Village, southern Ye Township. The victims were fishermen U Moe and U Chit Soe, who were shot dead with knife wounds found on their bodies, according to organizers of the vigil. Grindstaff SHARE By Rashda Khan, Rashda.Khan@gosanangelo.com / @Rashda_SAST Elizabeth Grindstaff, who is finishing her first term as councilwoman for Single Member District 5, is counting on her passion for urban planning and her 24 years of experience dealing with city issues to give her an edge as she runs for re-election. She is facing three challengers: Matthew Lane Carter, Martin Guinn and R.A. Cantrell. "This is what I believe I was meant to do," Grindstaff said about serving on the City Council. "It's where I can put my skills and experience to work for my community. " Besides working as the city's planning director and assistant city manager from 2005-12, Grindstaff also has worked with the city governments of Abilene, Bryan and Hillsboro. She was elected to the SMD 5 seat in 2014 and served on the board of the San Angelo Chamber of Commerce the same year. "Everyone wants to promise something. Promises are great," she said. "But you have to deliver. It's about making it happen." Grindstaff said she believes San Angelo needs experience. "I'm not a rookie. We have serious issues before us, and we need maturity, experience and knowledge." Also, she wants to be there to see through projects started by the current council. Her focus will be on water as she expects everyone's will be until viable solutions are found to meet San Angelo's needs. Economic development is also important to her. "I want to make the development process easier and more accommodating for business," she said, adding that in two years of serving on council she has heard over and over that "we don't need outside investment." However, Grindstaff said outside investment by entities such as GTE, Ethicon and Goodfellow Air Force Base have benefited San Angelo and residents' quality of life. The city, with a finite budget, has to pick and choose projects and set priorities. Grindstaff, who pioneered regular neighborhood chats to discuss city issues with San Angeloans, wants to encourage more public sector involvement and support for some amenities sought by the residents. As an example, she points to the dog park project. The majority of funding for the project was raised by community activists, led by Girl Scout Megan Allgeier. She also wants to improve council meetings and make them accessible to more constituents. Her ideas include holding one council meeting a month in the evening so people who can't take off from work can be there and managing the agenda better so the council stays focused and the public can be involved. "We can learn a lot from other communities' successes and failures, adopt best practices from what other cities are doing," she said. "The city of Abilene has an information center at the mall." While she appreciates the city's public information office getting information out through online and social media venues, Grindstaff said she would like it to work with neighborhood associations. "Why not use neighborhood associations to push information out?" she said. "That way people would feel they are included and their opinions matter." She also supports streamlining processes and eliminating redundancies within the city. "We could combine technology experts from different city departments and have one department," Grindstaff said. "Their functions are important, but coordination and consolidation is also needed for an effective city government." Grindstaff moved to San Angelo and her district 11 years ago. "My background is in urban planning, and I'm a preservationist at heart. I prefer older communities with older architecture and trees," she said. "My kids were young when we first moved, and the school was an important factor. The involvement of parents and the energy made the difference." She said her district needs reflect what everyone in the city wants: good, dependable city service, a responsive government, upkeep of infrastructure and community development that improves quality of life. "What's good for the city is good for my district," she said. ELIZABETH MILLER GRINDSTAFF Office sought: San Angelo City Council, Single Member District 5 San Angelo City Council, Single Member District 5 Age: 52 52 Employment: Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Texas-Pacifico Transportation Ltd. Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Texas-Pacifico Transportation Ltd. Education: Master of Urban Planning, Texas A&M University, August 1988 WHAT SHE SAID On her campaign: I have a demonstrated passion for public service. I have a demonstrated passion for public service. On the city water supply: Its a very complex issue, and I am interested in seeing a variety of options, seeing what is most cost-effective. The idea of reclamation is one we need to study but we need to be able to afford it and know its safe. Its a very complex issue, and I am interested in seeing a variety of options, seeing what is most cost-effective. The idea of reclamation is one we need to study but we need to be able to afford it and know its safe. On the citys solid waste contract: Its unfortunate that citizens didnt have chance to discuss it. ... Most of the price has to do with the landfill closure. I want city staff and Republic to prove its the best. Its unfortunate that citizens didnt have chance to discuss it. ... Most of the price has to do with the landfill closure. I want city staff and Republic to prove its the best. On general government: Were a service business, its difficult to trim, but each department can be tasked with trimming a certain percentage. We must stay committed to infra needs we have neglected over the years. Were a service business, its difficult to trim, but each department can be tasked with trimming a certain percentage. We must stay committed to infra needs we have neglected over the years. On access and transparency: I think its incumbent for us to look for nontraditional ways to make ourselves available to constituents. Quotes from the San Angelo Candidate Forum on April 14. To view a video of the forum, see bit.ly/1qD5pOZ. Trump has a 757 and helicopters to use, despite his Cessna lacking an FAA update. SHARE Smaller Cessna plane lacks update By William Cummings, USA TODAY NETWORK There are a lot of perks to owning a fleet of private aircraft. The downside: all that pesky paperwork. The registration for one of the private jets Donald Trump has been using to travel the country during his presidential campaign expired at the end of January, according to multiple media reports. "The aircraft registration of N725DT expired on Jan. 31, 2016, and has not been renewed," Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown told CNN. The penalties for flying an unregistered plane can include a civil penalty of up to $27,500, a criminal fine of up to $250,000 and three years in prison, although it is unlikely the FAA would impose the maximum punishment, according to The New York Times. The plane in question is not the large Boeing 757 emblazoned with the Trump name on its side which Marco Rubio mockingly called "Hair Force One" but a smaller Cessna Citation X. Getting the registration sorted out with the FAA could take months, The Times reported. Registration woes aside, don't expect Trump to plop down next to you in economy class anytime soon. He can still hop on the 757, one of his helicopters or charter a flight. SHARE Maps could aid minorities, justices rule By Richard Wolf, USA TODAY NETWORK WASHINGTON The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday that states can draw legislative districts with slightly different populations in an effort to benefit minority groups, even if the results help one political party over the other. The decision signaled a recognition by the court that despite its disdain for both racial and partisan considerations, neither violates the Constitution's "one person, one vote" principle. "We have made clear that the Constitution, while insisting upon compliance with the principle of one person, one vote, does not demand mathematical perfection." Justice Stephen Breyer wrote. It also represented the justices' third consecutive ruling on political redistricting that has pleased Democrats more than Republicans following a landmark 2013 decision that went the other way Chief Justice John Roberts' 5-4 ruling that struck down a key section of the Voting Rights Act. The new decision upheld state legislative lines drawn by an independent commission created in Arizona to take the job away from the legislators themselves. Just last June, the justices had upheld the commission's creation by a 5-4 vote over the objections of Republican lawmakers who said the Constitution gives that task to state legislatures. The commission's 2012 lines were challenged by Republican voters who said they put too many voters in GOP districts and too few in Democratic districts, thereby giving Democratic voters greater electoral clout. The challengers said neither political nor racial goals allowed for such population disparities. The high court disagreed. Even though the 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder relieved nine states and municipalities in six others, including Arizona, from having to meet Justice Department approval for changes in voting procedures because of past racial and ethnic discrimination, the justices said the commission had reason to comply with those rules the year before. During oral argument in December, justices on both sides of the ideological divide had said the five-member panel tried to draw districts capable of electing minorities, and that was sufficient reason to have population variations approaching 10 percent. As for politics, the high court has never established a standard for how much partisanship is too much when it comes to drawing district lines. During oral argument, several justices said even the commission's population variances didn't make any partisan considerations unconstitutional. The ruling will have minimal impact on states, most of which look at political affiliation in placing voters in districts. Doyle McManus is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Readers may send him email at doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com. SHARE President Obama's standing in the eyes of the American people has recovered after a three-year slump and that's good news for Hillary Clinton. Obama's job approval rating the percentage of voters who say he's doing a decent job has reached an average of about 50 percent over the last two months. A 50-50 split may not look like a historic achievement, but it's a better number than Obama has seen since 2013. And it's not a mirage; the president's standing has been on a gradual upswing for the last four months. That's been enough to make Obama aides throw their hats in the air, figuratively speaking. "Five points makes a huge difference," one of them told me last week. Politicians routinely pretend that they don't pay attention to the polls, but there's no question Obama pays attention to his. During his years in the polling wilderness, he often sounded frustrated that he wasn't getting credit for his accomplishments. Now, though, Obama sounds more confident that he might be able to end his presidency on a high note. "I feel greatly encouraged," he told Democrats in Texas last month. "I think when people step back and get some perspective, they'll say we did good." And he sounds eager to campaign for a Democratic successor "who can continue the legacy that we built" especially if it's Hillary Clinton, who has embraced his record more fervently than Bernie Sanders. A popular president, even one on the way out, is naturally a bigger asset to his party than an unpopular one. Alan Abramowitz of Emory University has found that when a two-term president leaves office, his party is likely to win the next election if his job approval is over 50 percent, but lose if the number is below 50 percent. But there's a quirk inside Obama's improved poll numbers. The president and his aides would like to think his standing has improved mostly because Americans have finally recognized that the economy is on the upswing, and acknowledge the president's role in making that happen. But most of the available evidence doesn't support that theory. The Gallup Poll's economic confidence index, a measure of how Americans feel about the economy, is the same now as it was late last year, when the president was less popular. "There's no clear correlation with presidential approval," Democratic pollster Mark Mellman noted. Instead, Obama's numbers appear to have gone up in large part because the Republican campaign in particular, GOP front-runner Donald Trump have reminded many voters why they chose Obama in the first place. The public image of the Republican Party has fallen as the president's has risen. During the last three months, the CNN-ORC poll found that the share of voters with an unfavorable view of the GOP swelled from 50 percent to 61 percent. In the same period, Trump impressed increasing numbers of American voters in the wrong direction. In the CNN-ORC poll, 67 percent of adults said they had an unfavorable impression of the real estate magnate, the highest negative rating ever recorded for a major party's presidential candidate. The Trump hypothesis is bolstered by other surveys showing that much of Obama's increased support has come from younger voters and Latinos, two groups that have reacted strongly against the Republican front-runner. Both groups are strongly opposed to more restrictive immigration policies, Trump's signature issue. Obama has tried quite bluntly to capitalize on the vulnerabilities of the GOP field as he has tuned up his message for the fall campaign. "I actually think that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have done us a favor," he said at a Democratic fundraising event in San Francisco on April 9. The favor, he explained in Los Angeles, "is laying bare, unvarnished, some of the nonsense that we've been dealing with in Congress on a daily basis. People act as if these folks are outliers. But they're not. We should thank Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz for just being honest." That's a partisan argument, of course, aimed at rallying Democrats around their president and, eventually, their new nominee. But that's what a presidential campaign is mostly about: making sure a party's voters "come home" and vote for their side or against the other side, which is just as effective. That's pretty much what Obama did in 2012, when he succeeded in painting Mitt Romney as a heartless plutocrat. Obama's standing is still fragile. He and his aides would feel better if he were over the 50 percent mark. They know that an economic reversal (which they consider unlikely) or a terrorist attack (entirely possible) could blow a hole in his job approval. But for the moment, their prospects for securing the Obama legacy with a third Democratic term have been improved thanks to the unlikely assistance of Donald Trump. Doyle McManus is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Contact hi at doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com Today we travel to a future where America has converted to a direct democracy. Everybody votes on everything! Flash Forward: RSS | iTunes | Twitter | Facebook | Web | Patreon | Reddit In this episode we explore the U.S. states that have direct democracy systems in place today, how to apply that model to the whole country, how to even gather all those votes, and what could go so, so very wrong with this idea. Illustration by Matt Lubchansky. Full show notes Canada's Health Minister Jane Philpott (hehe pot pott get it pot) said today that Canada now has a date for decriminalizing pot: Spring, 2017. The announcement was made on 4/20 Day, significant to cannabis users for reasons nobody can remember, wonder why. Jane Philpott made the announcement at a UN special session of the General Assembly in New York today. "We will introduce legislation in spring 2017 that ensures we keep marijuana out of the hands of children and profits out of the hands of criminals," said the minister in her prepared speech to delegates. "We will work with law enforcement partners to encourage appropriate and proportionate criminal justice measures. We know it is impossible to arrest our way out of this problem," she said. From Reuters: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised during last year's election campaign that his Liberals would legalize recreational marijuana, following the U.S. states of Washington and Colorado, but the time frame has been unclear. Philpott, speaking at a special session of the U.N. General Assembly in New York on drug problems around the world, said the Canadian law will ensure marijuana is kept away from children and will keep criminals from profiting from its sale. "We will work with law enforcement partners to encourage appropriate and proportionate criminal justice measures," she said. "We know it is impossible to arrest our way out of this problem." Medical marijuana is treated differently from recreational pot in Canada, and is legal already. More: "Federal marijuana legislation to be introduced in spring 2017, Philpott says" [CBC.ca] A statewide teachers group filed a lawsuit Wednesday in an attempt to block the state from implementing a controversial system that for the first time ties assessments of educators to student performance on standardized tests.In a lawsuit filed against Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath in Travis County District Court, the Texas State Teachers Association alleges that the new teacher evaluation system the Texas Teacher Evaluation and Support System, or T-TESS violates state law by requiring school districts to base 20 percent of each teacher's evaluation on student growth measures that include standardized test scores.Those student growth measures may include value added measures, or VAM, which are "typically based on a complicated formula that compares actual student test scores to the scores predicted by a mathematical target based on the standardized test scores of similar student populations, the association explained in a statement.TSTA contends that state law ... clearly requires a teacher appraisal system adopted by the commissioner to be based on observable, job-related behavior, the statement said. But a VAM model is not observable and is not even available to teachers and others who wish to understand the basis for their evaluations.Teachers are not robots, and their performance should be evaluated by an easily understood, transparent system that helps them perfect their job performance, association President Noel Candelaria said. "Educators compensation and jobs are potentially on the line here, and their work must be evaluated fairly and legally."The new teacher evaluation system, which the state has been piloting for over a year, is set to take effect July 1. Participating school districts will use it to make pay, employment and other consequential decisions. It replaces a nearly 20-year-old state-recommended teacher evaluation method known as Professional Development and Appraisal System, or PDAS.School districts are not required to use the state-recommended evaluation system, although most do to ensure compliance with state and federal regulations.Texas Education Agency spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe said Wednesday that neither Morath nor the agency could comment on the lawsuit because they had not yet been served with it.The state law the teachers association cites in its lawsuit says that the education commissioner shall adopt a recommended appraisal process and criteria on which to appraise the performance of teachers and says that the criteria "must be based on observable, job-related behavior, including the performance of teachers students.The rules Morath approved this month to implement T-TESS clarified the phrase "performance of teachers students" to mean "student growth at the individual teacher level, according to background information the agency posted online that says teachers should be assessed based on their students' academic progress rather than their outright proficiency.Morath, who assumed his role as head of the Texas Education Agency in January, created four broad ways to measure student growth for individual teachers, including student portfolios and scores on both statewide and district-level exams.Moraths predecessor, Michael Williams, also supported the new teacher evaluation system but refused to require all school districts to use the same assessment method even when the state was at risk of losing a waiver from the federal No Child Left Behind Act.The association noted in a statement that even for school districts that create their own appraisal system, state law sets the same observable, job-related behavior requirement."The business-backed Texas Institute for Education Reform blasted the lawsuit Wednesday as "an affront to teacher quality because T-TESS is a significant step forward for Texas teachers."It replaces a system that rated virtually all teachers performance the same and provides almost no useable feedback, said Courtney Boswell, the groups executive director. "Instead, T-TESS identifies high-performing teachers as well as low-performing ones with a focus on moving all teachers toward excellence."Disclosure: The Texas State Teachers Association and the Texas Institute for Education Reform are corporate sponsors of The Texas Tribune. A complete list of Tribune donors and sponsors can be viewed here. A new federal study finds Oregon's child welfare system is failing across the board when it comes to keeping thousands of children in state care safe and healthy.According to the report, caseworkers are still taking too long to check on allegations of abuse and neglect, with just more than half of investigations completed on time. Even in the most serious cases, where check-ins are required within 24 hours, the state met that goal less than two-thirds of the time."Oregon is trending in the wrong direction," the report said.The state has also struggled to keep children who've been abused from enduring new harm, either in state custody or after they leave it. Parents aren't able to see their children as often as they should.And obtaining mental health treatment has been a challenge, with foster families unwilling to sign up and private agencies finding it difficult to hire qualified staff. Available foster homes have fallen from 4,229 in 2013 to 3,847 in 2015.The findings, released Wednesday in response to public records requests, show Oregon's system losing ground after passing three of 14 areas in a similar review in 2008.They also add to the turmoil and scandal that's encompassed the Department of Human Services. Weeks ago, in the face of a $60 million lawsuit alleging neglect and abuse, the department's new permanent director, Clyde Saiki, fired two of the agency's most senior child welfare officials.That lawsuit also follows months of scandal involving a Northeast Portland provider accused of neglecting children and misspending state money for years, all under the watch of state officials who discussed the problems in emails and meetings but allowed the provider to remain open.That scandal prompted an earlier staffing shakeup last year. It also helped fuel legislation this year that created a foster care advisory commission, while also requiring quarterly reports on abuse, tightening licensing rules for providers and making it a crime for officials to knowingly ignore neglect."This just confirms that the problems are deep and systemic, and not a one-off," said Sen. Sara Gelser, D-Corvallis, who drafted new licensing regulations in Senate Bill 1515.Rep. Duane Stark, R-Grants Pass, who sponsored the bill on the foster care commission, said in a statement that "the new report is a sobering reminder of how broken our state's child welfare system is."Saiki sent a statement to lawmakers before releasing the current draft of the federal Child and Family Services Review and other reports to The Oregonian/OregonLive.He took pains to tell them "there is high quality case work" in Oregon but that "the disappointing results were no surprise to us.""The department is accountable for these results, and we are responsible for the system that protects the children and youth entrusted to our care," he wrote, later adding: "There is a substantial amount of work that needs to be done in order to improve outcomes for the children and families we serve."A final report is expected later this year, after officials conduct in-person interviews and spend time carefully reviewing dozens of case files. States that don't meet national standards must work up an improvement plan or risk federal funding.The 2008 plan emphasized the need for prompt investigations of abuse and finding ways to keep down the rate at which victims in the system are re-abused.Saiki told lawmakers that it remains "very likely Oregon will not meet national standards in the final report." He also said "it was clear" that the department "was not appropriately working and tracking" the improvement plan it launched after the 2008 study pointed to ongoing problems.In one bright spot, the report said Oregon's caseworkers have done a better job meeting with children at least once a month. That rate climbed to 90.1 percent from January 2015 to February 2016.Monthly visits are especially important for keeping children safe, advocates say, because they allow caseworkers to not only check for signs of abuse but also ensure that children are receiving adequate mental health care and adjusting to new schools.An investigation by The Oregonian/OregonLive last year found officials went months without publicly reporting that data in monthly reports.But the report found "less frequent contact" for children 15 to 18 years old, calling that "an area that needs ongoing attention and further analysis."Gelser, who championed reform legislation this year, said the report showed why -- and where -- Oregon lawmakers should spend more money on improving foster care when they head back into session in 2017.More investigations will finish on time, with better results, if caseloads shrink. She also said reimbursement rates may have to rise if the system hopes to recruit new foster families and providers, particularly those that specialize in mental health treatment."That probably means more investment," she said. "We have to invest in the system if we want to have better outcomes."She argued Saiki's "candid response" on the dismal findings in the federal review shows he's well-positioned to continue winning lawmakers' trust.Gov. Kate Brown, who took over for Gov. John Kitzhaber in 2015, appointed Saiki interim director of the human services department that fall. The job became permanent last month.Saiki's ascent came as Willamette Week reported on a scandal involving provider Give Us This Day whose roots reach back to Gov. Ted Kulongoski's administration. Brown also announced an outside review of the state's child welfare system.In an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive before her first anniversary as governor, Brown called the system's troubles "just unacceptable" and said "it angers me at such an incredible level that we basically lent a blind eye to what was happening to these children."In a statement Wednesday on the federal review, a "disappointed" Brown said recommendations from that review could emerge as soon as this fall. She called Saiki "a strong leader with a proven record of improving services to Oregonians.""Oregonians deserve a system that nurtures and protects our children," Brown said, "and opens opportunities for them to be successful and thrive."(c)2016 Privatizing to Save Money and Time The Effects of Inefficient Outsourcing Guidelines to a Successful Outsourcing Deal Last summer, residents of Maywood, Calif., woke up one morning to find the government as they knew it gone. After years of corruption and mismanagement, the small, blue-collar city south of Los Angeles fired almost all of its employees, dismantled its police department and contracted with a neighboring city to take over most municipal tasks. On July 1, local officials announced that Maywood had become the countrys first city to be fully outsourced.It was an unprecedented move spurred by a loss of commercial liability insurance and Workers Compensation. As the city drowned in deficits and faced multiple lawsuits, city leaders saw outsourcing as a light at the end of a collapsing tunnel.But it was only a mirage.Bell, Calif., the city that Maywood officials had tapped to run its services, erupted with a pay and pension scandal, forcing several top Bell officials to resign. By September, Bell had scrapped its contract with Maywood, leaving the city to fend for itself and find new contractors for its outsourcing hopes.The search for financial salvation is sweeping the country as local governments grapple with waning sales and property tax revenues. The economic recession has strangled budgets, forcing layoffs and the disbanding of departments. Feeling pushed to the brink of bankruptcy, cities are trying to find effective ways to make do with less. Maywood, in its outsourcing attempt, may be the most extreme example, but in California and other states in the past decade, more public officials have turned to outside sources for help in providing services at a lower cost to the state.In theory, the idea of contracting public services to private companies to cut costs makes sense. If someone is willing to fix streets or put out fires for less money, that should be a plus for a governments bottom line. Many state and local governments have identified hundreds of millions of dollars in savings by hiring outside contractors -- or a neighboring citys services -- to handle tasks like trash collection, pothole repair, and water and wastewater treatment.But according to analysts, outsourcing is by no means a perfect solution. Some agencies dont have the metrics in place to prove in advance that outsourcing a service will save money. Problems from poorly conceived contracts can create cost increases that surpass the costs of in-house services, and if theres shoddy contract oversight, a government is vulnerable to corruption and profiteering. The privatization of public services can erode accountability and transparency, and drive governments deeper into debt. Governments at all levels are just desperate to balance their budgets, and theyre grasping at privatization as a panacea, says Susan Duerksen, director of communications for In the Public Interest, a project that examines privatization and contracting. But theres evidence that it often is a very bad deal with hidden costs and consequences when you turn over public service to a for-profit company.Various governments -- from small towns all the way up to federal agencies -- have been sending public services to the private sector since the 1980s. The trend stems from the common belief that private companies can help governments save or make money by doing jobs faster and cheaper, or managing a public asset more efficiently.This past March, for example, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie created the state Privatization Task Force to review privatization opportunities within state government and identify barriers. In its research, the task force not only identified estimated annual savings from privatization totaling more than $210 million, but also found several examples of successful efforts in other states. As former mayor of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell saved $275 million by privatizing 49 city services. Chicago has privatized more than 40 city services. Since 2005, it has generated more than $3 billion in upfront payments from private-sector leases of city assets. In 2005, West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin worked to transform the states Workers Compensation Commission into a private insurance carrier, BrickStreet Insurance. That has led Workers Compensation rates to decline about 30 percent statewide, translating to more than $150 million in annual employer savings.Sterile philosophical debates about public versus private are often detached from the day-to-day world of public management, the New Jersey Privatization Task Force reported. Over the last several decades, in governments at all levels throughout the world, the public sectors role has increasingly evolved from direct service provider to that of an indirect provider or broker of services; governments are relying far more on networks of public, private and nonprofit organizations to deliver services.The report took careful note of another key factor: The states most successful in privatization created a permanent, centralized entity to manage and oversee the operation, from project analysis and vendor selection to contracting and procurement. For governments that forgo due diligence, choose ill-equipped contractors and fail to monitor progress, however, outsourcing deals can turn into costly disasters.No industry has gone through greater outsourcing catastrophes in the past year than government IT. Last fall, Texas cut short its seven-year contract with IBM, an $863 million deal that called for IBM to provide data center and disaster recovery services for 27 state agencies. When an audit criticized the states Department of Information Resources for lax oversight, inadequate staffing and sloppy service, the partnership fell apart. In Virginia, the states 10-year, $2.3 billion IT contract with Northrop Grumman to run the states computers, servers, e-mail systems and help desk services also has been plagued by inadequate planning, cost overruns and poor service.Technology plays such a critical role in the storage and delivery of vital data that even minor delays and deficiencies can disrupt business operations, such as car registration renewals, and unemployment and medical care services. In August, a storage area network failure in Virginia knocked two dozen state agencies computer systems offline in another devastating blow to the states IT outsourcing contract. A week later, the state Department of Motor Vehicles still couldnt process drivers licenses at customer service centers because databases were down.The problem is that outsourcing deals are really about risk, says Adam Strichman, co-founder of Sanda Partners, an outsourcing consultancy. Youre taking the risk of the unknown and dumping that on your supplier, he says. Youre outsourcing a problem to a company that has limited control over the root cause of the problem. The only way for a public-private partnership to work, he suggests, is to drive transformation from within the agency. And thats the hard part. Red tape usually prevents governments from making significant modifications, and private companies lack the authority to enforce real changes. When such a public-private stalemate stunts a project, it helps to have an exit strategy.Those risks extend beyond the technology world. In 2009, in the wake of an audit of economic development agreements between Niagara Falls and two developers, New York state Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli discovered that the projects faltered because the city failed to monitor development contracts. One of the projects, a downtown retail mall, has been vacant since 2000; the second project, which began in 1997, yielded nothing more than a rudimentary building foundation.Before governments hire outside contractors, its important to examine the cost-effectiveness, says Nicole Hanks, deputy press secretary of the state comptrollers office. More times than not, its less expensive to use state workers instead of outside contractors.A good outsourcing deal starts with a thorough cost-benefit analysis to see if a third party can effectively deliver services better and more cheaply than public employees. Strichman says governments should hire an outsourcing consultant who can provide an independent assessment. But even with a consultant, conflicts of interest can tarnish a golden opportunity. After all, private companies may want to provide a service efficiently and well -- and often do -- but governments must ride herd on implementation of the contract. As Duerksen points out, a companys motivation is not the common good; its profit. If they can cut corners in any way, they often do.In that regard, the provider that offers the lowest bid might not be the best option. But with his experience in several large-scale government outsourcing deals, Strichman has seen first-hand that in a bidding war, the company that has a liberal interpretation for the lowest price wins, which inevitably leads to strife when high expectations meet underachievement. Anyone can bid any outsourcing deal 5 percent cheaper, but the problem is you dont know what they cut out, he says. When price reductions appear unrealistic, theres no magic. They are unrealistic.Even with the proper oversight channels, policies wont work if departments dont participate. In 2005, the Wisconsin Legislature passed a law that required a cost-benefit analysis be completed for any purchase of service more than $25,000. The law outlines analysis procedures and reporting requirements. Soon after, the Contract Sunshine Act was enacted, requiring all Wisconsin agencies to provide online information about state contracts in excess of $10,000.The laws were created to promote transparency and to ensure that agencies complete an effective cost-benefit analysis prior to procurements. But compliance has been low, says Janice Mueller, state auditor for the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau. We were asked to look and see why state agencies are not consistently reporting, she says. Its really difficult to compel compliance.In other cases, outsourcing efforts may be stifled by union contracts or a lack of available services. Mayor Sharon McShurley in Muncie, Ind., wanted to outsource the citys fire protection services to save money. But the city ceased its cost analysis after realizing that no such private services existed in the area. It does tie our hands as administrators trying to figure out how to balance the budget and provide services with a reduction in revenue, she says. I like the idea of outsourcing. Competition drives prices down. We dont have the revenue that we used to have. Los Angeles workers would be able to earn at least six paid sick days annually -- twice the state minimum -- under a proposed law that the City Council backed Tuesday.Labor and community activists had pushed for L.A. to increase the mandated amount of time off for local workers who fall ill or need to take care of a loved one, arguing that employees too often are forced to decide between their health and their jobs.Under the new law, which must be drafted by city attorneys, "no longer will workers have to make a choice between putting food on the table and getting well," said Rusty Hicks, executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.Some business groups argued that the new requirements would place another burden on employers who already are facing other costly new mandates -- including a string of increases to the L.A. minimum wage that eventually will require businesses to pay at least $15 hourly. The California Restaurant Assn., for instance, warned that the new rules could jeopardize small restaurants.More sick days will impose "a big burden on our local businesses," said John Howland, government relations director of the Central City Assn.The proposed law, however, would not go as far as rules already imposed on L.A.'s big hotels and city contractors, which must provide a dozen paid days off for sickness and other needs.Business groups feared last year that the city would expand those requirements when City Councilman Curren Price said citywide rules should be "consistent" with earlier L.A. laws. Price told reporters Tuesday that city lawmakers had picked six days in "an effort to compromise."The City Council voted 13 to 1 to ask city lawyers to start drafting the new law, with Councilman Mitch Englander opposing it and Councilwoman Nury Martinez absent.If the law wins final approval, Los Angeles will join more than two dozen other cities and counties nationwide that have mandated a minimum number of paid sick days, according to the National Partnership for Women & Families.Other California cities, including San Francisco and Santa Monica, have mandated that big employers allow workers to earn at least nine paid sick days annually.The L.A. rules would go into effect for bigger businesses in July. Small businesses -- those with 25 employees or fewer -- would have an additional year before they would have to comply."We need to give these small businesses some sort of reprieve," City Councilman Paul Krekorian said.But council members balked at a move by Councilman David Ryu to completely exempt small businesses. Englander, who supported that exemption, later said that its failure was the reason he cast the sole vote against requiring more sick days.Backers of the new law estimate that more than 650,000 L.A. workers could be affected by the city requirements, based on an earlier analysis by the Institute for Women's Policy Research that gauged how many workers had no access to paid sick leave before California passed its law in 2014.Under the proposed law, Los Angeles workers would be able to accrue an hour of sick leave for every 30 hours they work -- the same rate as under California state rules. But the L.A. proposal differs from California law because the state allows employers to limit workers to using three days annually.Los Angeles employers also could offer the required sick days upfront, instead of having employees accrue them over time.Workers in L.A. would not be paid for unused sick days, but accrued time could be carried over to the next year. Businesses could cap that accrued time at 72 hours, or set a higher cap or none at all.(c)2016 the The U.S. Department of Justice has informed state officials that it is investigating Connecticut's "motor voter" program -- under which citizens can sign up to vote at the Department of Motor Vehicles -- and has found "widespread noncompliance" with federal laws."This is to notify you that I have authorized a lawsuit against the state of Connecticut and appropriate state officials to enforce compliance with Section 5 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993," which applies to local 'motor voter' programs in the states," Vanita Gupta, a deputy assistant U.S. attorney general, wrote April 15 to Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen.Officials in states around the country run local motor voter programs according to federal legal guidelines -- which is why the justice department takes an interest in what happens locally.Gupta described the state's alleged noncompliance as follows: "Throughout the State, it appears that applications for a Connecticut driver's license or a non-driver identification card generally do not serve as applications for voter registration with respect to elections for Federal office, and that change of address forms do not serve as notification of a change of address for voter registration purposes if the applicant is moving between two towns."She went on to say in her letter: "And while it appears that motor vehicle offices may provide voter registration forms to some applicants who know to request them, that practice is no substitute for Section 5 compliance."Some motor vehicle offices, moreover, will not accept and transmit completed forms to the appropriate election authorities, or do not consistently do so within the required timeframe. These failures violate the [National Voter Registration Act] and deprive numerous Connecticut citizens of important voter registration opportunities required under federal law."Gupta told Jepsen in her letter that the justice department hopes "to resolve this matter amicably and avoid protracted litigation. Accordingly, we will delay filing the [lawsuit] for a short period to permit us to try to settle this matter via a consent decree."Responsibilities for overseeing Connecticut's program are shared by the DMV and the office of Secretary of the State Denise Merrill. A DMV spokesman said, "We are working to ensure the state is in compliance with the federal motor-voter law."A spokesman for Merrill, Patrick Gallahue, said that this is no time for "finger-pointing" as to who's responsible for any problems. "Everybody's going to work together to rectify" the situation, he said.Merrill, the top state official in charge of elections, recently has been pushing to expand Connecticut's existing motor voter program beyond its present voluntary form. Earlier this year, she introduced legislation to automatically register people to vote when they conducted business with the DMV, unless they specifically declined. The bill, whose prospects of passage are uncertain, has been described by Merrill as a means of increasing voter participation.However, the state DMV, which has been experiencing nightmarish computer problems since late last summer, said recently that it isn't ready to do what the new bill would require."We love the concept, it's an interesting concept, but now is not the right time to do it," DMV spokesman William Seymour said last month. "We need to identify the level of effort and capabilities, operationally and financially, of both sides to implement the suggestions or proposal. When we have that information, we can give it to the legislature and the legislature can make a decision."Merrill's proposal would have the motor-voter system use already available government lists to fill out a voter registration form, which would then be electronically transmitted to local registrars of voters."Right now, DMV is redoing its entire registration system ... it is the perfect time to redesign with this program in mind," Merrill told legislators at a hearing last month.On Wednesday, reacting to Gupta's letter, Merrill issued a statement saying: "I have been striving for more than five years to make voting more convenient for the people of Connecticut. That's why we introduced automatic voter registration this year. I look forward to working with ... state and federal partners to bring this exciting voting modernization initiative to the state. This letter reminds us of the urgency to get this done."Some have criticized the DMV's administration of the program. According to figures collected by registrars and reported by the federal government, between 2012 and 2014 there were more than 558,000 registrations in Connecticut -- but only 26,500 were done through the DMV.The new system proposed by Merrill wouldn't be implemented for two years after the legislature and governor approved it.A spokeswoman for Jepsen's office said discussions are underway with federal officials to try to resolve the problem."We are engaged in the early stages of discussions with the Department of Justice and our client agencies regarding this letter and compliance with federal voter registration laws," Jepsen spokesman Jaclyn Falkowski said. "It would be inappropriate to comment further at this time."(c)2016 Gov. Sam Brownback plans to take more money from the state's highway fund, cut higher education spending and scrutinize other options -- including a plan that would cut funding for schools -- to close a widening budget gap.The sweeps will force the highway department to delay 10 projects slated to start in fiscal 2017 and 15 the year after that, including projects in Harvey and Reno counties.The state must cut spending by more than $290 million over the next 15 months in order to maintain a balanced budget, based on projections offered by the state's economists Wednesday.Budget director Shawn Sullivan laid out three possible solutions, including one plan that would enact a 3 to 5 percent across-the-board cut to state government, reducing K-12 education funding by $57.2 million for the fiscal year that begins in July.Another option would be to delay state payments to the pension fund.The governor's preference, however, would be to use expected proceeds from the state's master tobacco settlement to issue $158 million in bonds, Sullivan said.The state's economists have lowered revenue estimates by $93.9 million for the current fiscal year, which ends in June, and by $134.7 million for the next fiscal year.The reduction is primarily related to individual income taxes, which are now projected to bring in $233 million less in revenue over the two-year period than the state had forecast in November.That drop was partially offset by increases from nontax revenue sources. The state now faces a $140.1 million budget hole for the current year and $151.3 million budget hole for next year.Sullivan presented what he called the best three options to close the budget hole.Under all three scenarios, the governor plans to sweep $70 million from the state's highway fund for the current fiscal year and $115 million for the next fiscal year.The sweeps mean the Kansas Department of Transportation will delay 10 projects in 2017 and 15 projects in 2018, including a $47 million modernization project in Reno County on K-14 that was set to begin in October. Option 1 Option 2 Option 3 In New York, a federal prosecutor has opened a criminal investigation around the "Panama Papers," an archive of materials leaked from a Panamanian law firm that reveal a massive, secretive network of places where the world's most rich hide their riches. The Guardian broke the news yesterday on its website. From the Washington Post: In a letter to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara wrote that his office had "opened a criminal investigation regarding matters to which the Panama Papers are relevant," and he asked to speak with someone who had worked on the project. The Guardian newspaper, which was among those to analyze the materials, posted a copy of the letter on its website. While virtually all of the details of the investigation remain unclear, the letter suggests that the Justice Department has stepped up its efforts to look into possible wrongdoing the Panama Papers might show. Earlier this month, Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell, who heads the department's criminal division, would say only that U.S. officials were "reviewing the reports that we saw." While virtually all of the details of the investigation remain unclear, the letter suggests that the Justice Department has stepped up its efforts to look into possible wrongdoing the Panama Papers might show. Earlier this month, Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell, who heads the department's criminal division, would say only that U.S. officials were "reviewing the reports that we saw." "U.S. launches 'criminal investigation' involving Panama Papers" [washington post] On Tuesday, in the morning, His Excellency the Honourable Paul de Jersey AC and Mrs Kaye de Jersey departed Karumba and returned to Brisbane. Description GIS - 21 April, 2016: The Prime Minister, Minister of Finance and Economic Development, Sir Anerood Jugnauth, called upon the Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) to act responsibly in delivering their set targets and to collaborate with the Government and other stakeholders for a better Mauritius. The Prime Minister, Minister of Finance and Economic Development, Sir Anerood Jugnauth, called upon the Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) to act responsibly in delivering their set targets and to collaborate with the Government and other stakeholders for a better Mauritius. He was speaking yesterday during the third pre-budget consultations meeting with the representatives of the NGOs and the Civil Society at the Cybercity1, BPML, in Ebene. Sir Anerood Jugnauth, emphasised the increasing role of the NGOs and the Civil Society in the fight against social scourges and in helping the vulnerable segments of the society to integrate mainstream society. He further highlighted the importance of sensitisation campaigns by the NGOs whereby he underscored the use of technology to address these problems. The Prime Minister reiterated his priorities for the forthcoming budget which he said had been tentatively fixed for the 6th of June and will focus on the economy namely economic development; job creation; fight against social scourges; eradication of poverty; and law and order. He recalled that as Prime Minister he has always expressed concerns for the well-being of the society as a whole and as a caring Government he has implemented various measures to compensate for the loss in purchasing power. They are namely: an increase of Rs 5000 for old age pensions and invalids; Rs 600 for salary compensation across the board; Rs 3 billion for the implementation of the PRB Report. All these, he added have cost Government to spend some Rs 14.5 billion to increase the purchasing power of the population in addition to other measures such as free water supply up to 6m3, reduced tariff on electricity, Rs 300 million for subsidies on SC and HSC exams fees; maintaining free transport for the students and the senior citizens; among others. He also dwelt on the social problems that the country is facing and appealed to each and every one to demonstrate a sense of responsibility especially the parents to inculcate the basic and essential values to their wards. This, he said will in turn help consolidate a better society for their future and the coming generations and eventually help the country prosper and reap the benefits of the national wealth. Description GIS - 21 April, 2016: Captains of the business industry and representatives of the Private Sector gathered yesterday at the Cybercity1, BPML, in Ebene in the context of the fourth 2016-2017 Pre-Budget Consultations chaired by the Prime Minister, Minister of Finance and Economic Development, Sir Anerood Jugnauth. In his address, Sir Anerood Jugnauth, called upon the Private Sector to show their entrepreneurial drive, the innovative approach and the risk taking appetite they have shown to achieve the first economic miracle and transform the country. He also appealed for national responsibility and solidarity so as to take the country towards success and prosperity with a business environment characterised by high economic freedom as well as a low and competitive taxation system. The Prime Minister reiterated his personal commitment in maintaining and improving business confidence as well as trust in the progress and development of the economy while highlighting the purpose of the Pre-Budget consultations which served as platform to reflect on the best paths and avenues to reach the national goals with regards to economic growth, wealth creation and social progress. He recalled the setting up of the Joint Public-Private Sector Steering Committee to promote business facilitation and development, which are high on Governments agenda and more specifically to address issues that are inhibiting private sector projects, investment, job creation and wealth generation. Sir Anerood enumerated the number of initiatives to accelerate project approvals and improve the business environment since the first meeting of the Joint Steering Committee in September 2015. They are namely: 49 projects have been unlocked through the Investment Fast Track Committee for a total investment of Rs 50 Billion; enactment of the Build Operate Transfer Projects Bill to facilitate private sector participation and investment in public sector infrastructure projects. He evoked the rationale of his Economic Mission Statement, whereby he elaborated the key potential sectors of the economy, namely, tourism sector, manufacturing, renewable energy, port linked activities, services including financial services, ICT, education, health care and more medium to long term opportunities like in the Ocean Economy. He also focused on the African strategy with particular reference to the consolidation of Mauritius as a cross border investment platform, a business, aviation and maritime hub. The Prime Minister also dwelt on the Air Corridor launched earlier this year between Africa and Asia while using Mauritius and Singapore as hubs. This development, he said, provides enormous new opportunities, not only for tourism, but also for trade, investment, capacity building and knowledge acquisition He also announced the keen interest from corporates and individuals in Asia to tap and give the Air Corridor a new dimension. On this score, he invited the business community to take advantage of these opportunities and to participate fully in making our country the platform of excellence, bridging Asia and Africa. He concluded by appealing to the Private Sector to move and act fast and focus on productive activities that will generate higher value added and create national wealth to reach the targeted ambitions of propelling the country into the league of high income countries which according to him are achievable. Description GIS - 21 April, 2016: We cannot do away with the biological necessity of having babies; no country can survive with a low birth rate; no country can survive without a sound population policy. We cannot do away with the biological necessity of having babies; no country can survive with a low birth rate; no country can survive without a sound population policy. The statement was made this morning by the Minister of Health and Quality of Life, Mr Anil Gayan, at the Sir Harilal Vaghjee Memorial Hall in Port Louis, at the opening of a workshop on the theme Planet 50-50 by 2030: Step it up for Gender Equality: Managing the fertility paradox in the Republic of Mauritius. The half-day workshop was organised by the Mauritius Family Planning and Welfare Association (MFWPA) for working women from both the public and private sectors. Its objective was to sensitise women on the forthcoming challenges that the country and the families will be facing on population matters as well as their roles and responsibilities in addressing fertility issues. In his address, the Minister of Health and Quality of Life was adamant that a holistic approach must be adopted with the collaboration of all stakeholders to address the declining fertility rate of 1.4, which is below the replacement level of 2.1. We need to work together in planning a population policy in parallel with the services that will be required overtime, said Mr Gayan. Speaking on the high fertility rate among women in pockets of poverty in contrast to the decline in the general fertility trend, the Minister enjoined the Action Familial and the MFPWA to work on the effective implementation of family planning programmes with a view to improving women and children's life. Every baby born must have the best possible care and environment to succeed in life, pointed out the Minister, who called on the private sector to invest in the health and education of children with disadvantaged social and economic backgrounds. According to the Minister, empowering women and girls must be a priority for Governments across the world. He stressed that in Mauritius, women have opportunities to go to school, graduate, find employment and get ahead in their career. Mr Gayan added that adequate policies must be initiated to encourage professional women to have children such as ensuring that women who go on maternity leave do not lose on their career, as well as nursery and day care facilities at the workplace. Government Information Service, Prime Ministers Office, Level 6, New Government Centre, Port Louis, Mauritius. Email: Website: Description GIS - 21 April 2016: The Republic of Mauritius is aiming to be a high income economy and this can only be achieved through innovation. While focusing on key productive sectors including agro-industry, ICT, textiles and service-oriented sectors of health, education, energy, water, tourism and communication, Mauritius also needs to turn to new sectors such as our Exclusive Economic Zone, said the Acting President of the Republic, Mr Paramasivum Pillay Vyapoory, this morning at the Mauritius Sugarcane Industry Research Institute, in Reduit. The Ag President was speaking at the opening of a seminar on Technopreneurship and Innovation organised in the context of the commemoration of World Creativity and Innovation Day observed on 21st April each year. The seminar aims at increasing the awareness on the importance of Innovation and Creativity for the socioeconomic benefit of Mauritius. In his address, the Ag President stated that as a Small Island Developing State ( SIDS), Government endeavours to turn Mauritius into an ocean economy. These steps, he stated, will allow the country to leapfrog into its socioeconomic trajectory and be a role model to other SIDS and the world at large. At the same time, the necessary elements need to be put in place so as the benefits of these efforts reach the society at large, Mr Pillay Vyapoory stressed. Innovation, including formal and informal innovation, is crucial to enable the expansion of the blue sector as well as other productive and service-oriented sectors, he said. He also pointed out that if Mauritius is doing well in Africa and as a SIDS, it is because Mauritians have the potential to innovate. Innovation has been to a large extent behind the success of our sugar, textile and tourism industries and we should therefore reinforce these inherent qualities, he added. For his part, the Minister of Technology, Communication and Innovation (TCI), Mr Etienne Sinatambou, said that for this financial year Government has provided Rs 125 million to fund 20 schemes for research and innovation. We are hoping that in the next budget we obtain more, not for the sake of increasing the budget, but especially for the sake of triggering innovation and technology as well as the creativity and imaginative skills of our bright youth, he stated. Moreover the Minister highlighted the need to have a day of reflection where we will hear of the traditional way of advancing technology and perhaps more about 21st century type technology-driven innovation. He also spoke about introducing nanotechnology, which is what innovation and technology is about, as an economic niche for Mauritius which is expected to have a worldwide turnover of 3.3 trillion dollars in 2018. The Workshop The one-day workshop, organised at the initiative of the Mauritius Research Council, a department operating under the Ministry of TCI, is bringing together policy-makers and stakeholders from the public and private sectors as well as academics and researchers to share their experience on some key issues related to the promotion of innovation, creativity and technology driven-entrepreneurship (Technopreneurship) in key sectors of the economy. Topics being addressed include: public-private partnerships for the promotion of science and technology-based innovation: and, fostering the involvement of our youth in the fields of creativity and technology driven innovation. World Creativity and Innovation Day World Creativity and Innovation Day, celebrated on 21st April annually, aims at creating awareness of the importance of Innovation and Creativity as key determinants of sustainable socioeconomic growth and development of countries around the world. (TNS) -- While Google Fiber still hasn't confirmed it's coming to Portland, it said Wednesday that it's adding the city to a program to expand internet access to low-income residents and others who go without speedy online connections.The Digital Inclusion Fellowship program operates in partnership with a Portland organization, the Nonprofit Technology Network . Now in its second year, it awards fellowships in 11 cities to reach people without Internet access and help overcome the "digital divide."In Portland, the fellowship program will work with the Multnomah County Library and Free Geek as host organizations. The library has just posted its fellowship opening, a one- to two-year post "responsible for enhancing existing digital literacy programming while building and expanding the capacity of community partners to deliver adult digital literacy programming."Google Fiber contributes $1 million to support salaries and benefits for the fellows, and stipends for community organizations that participate.The Digital Inclusion program operates in 11 cities. Portland is the only one of them where Google hasn't committed to offer its superfast Internet service.It's plain Google is preparing an announcement, though: It has hired Portland staffers, won permission to string its fiber on local utility poles, and begun applying for permission to build network hubs in the city Expanding the Internet's reach has been a priority for Google Fiber since the service's launch four years ago. Last week, it announced a new, $15 service in areas of its cities where unusually high numbers of residents go without internet access at home.Portland is preparing its own " Digital Equity Action Plan " to improve broadband connectivity for low-income residents. State Oil and Natural Gas Rig Counts Following a sharp decline in oil severance tax revenues, Alaska lawmakers are considering bringing back the states personal income tax for the first time in nearly four decades to help close an estimated $4 billion budget deficit. Earlier this year, North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple similarly ordered 4 percent budget cuts for most state agencies to make up for a $1 billion shortfall. In Louisiana, which had its credit ratings downgraded by two rating agencies, lawmakers are debating several proposed cuts and tax increases to balance the budget.Given their struggles, a Brookings Institution report published this week calls on states to rethink how theyre collecting and spending severances taxes derived from natural resources. States can do a better job, the report authors say, of channeling oil revenues to stable trust funds that better weather the boom-and-bust cycle.Most states rely little on severance or extraction taxes usually less than 2 percent of total tax collections. But for the states with the largest oil reserves, the drop in oil prices has wreaked havoc on budgets.The consequences of inaction are especially visible now, said Brookings senior fellow Mark Muro, who co-authored the report. The bust period is the right time to look at this.Several state legislatures have weighed proposals to modify severance taxes or initiate new fees in recent years.The Brookings report recommends that a portion of states annual severance tax revenues be diverted to permanent trust funds, which encompass different types of investment products and are intended for long-term use. Fund earnings can be used to fund projects or programs, while spending the principal is typically restricted. Along with those tied to severance taxes, trust funds have also taken the form of land grant funds to support public school systems in the U.S.Eight states have established trust funds supported by severance taxes. For the most part, however, fund balances remain small relative to the amount of production thats occurred in states over a number of years. Consider the North Dakota Legacy Fund, which has a market value of approximately $3.2 billion, or Alabamas $2.5 billion fund.In two oil-rich states that levy little or no severance taxes Ohio and Pennsylvania not much discussion has occurred around new trust funds as governors have targeted tax increases to fund policy priorities.Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf has called for a severance tax to boost education funding. The state is the only major oil-producing state without a severance tax, although it does impose an impact fee. Wolf, a Democrat, initially proposed a 5 percent severance tax and an additional charge based on the volume of natural gas that would have raised an estimated $855 million in fiscal 2016-17 and $933 million the following year, according to the states Independent Fiscal Office The issue, however, has divided lawmakers along partisan lines in the state legislature, where Republicans control both chambers. If a tax were passed, its unlikely that enough money would be raised to both finance meaningful education initiatives and establish a trust fund given low tax revenues, said John Hanger, who served as Gov. Wolfs secretary of policy and planning until earlier this year.In Ohio, Republican Gov. John Kasich has sought to raise the states low severance tax to fund income tax cuts. Currently, drillers pay 20 cents per barrel of oil and 3 cents per 1,000 cubic feet of natural gas in severance taxes and regulatory assessment fees far lower than other states.The issue isnt as partisan as it is in Pennsylvania as Republicans hold large majorities in both the state House and state Senate. But lawmakers have resisted proposals for a few years now, instead forming a commission to study the states tax policy last year.The legislature has had ample time to understand this issue and no shortage of recommendations, said Wendy Patton, a senior project director for Policy Matters Ohio.Under Kasichs plan, the bulk of the additional revenues raised would fund income tax cuts. Patton, though, says the funds would be better spent on infrastructure and other long-term investments. Policy Matters Ohio advocates for a 5 percent severance tax and, when markets are strong, an additional 2.5 percent tax for a permanent trust fund.Personal income tax is far more stable than the severance tax, Patton said. You dont want to swap out one for the other.The oil and natural gas industry has pushed back against proposed tax hikes in states, arguing they cant afford the added expense at a time when prices are low.New taxes, coupled with duplicative and onerous regulations, will only exacerbate the difficult fiscal challenges facing the natural gas industry and the thousands of men and women whose livelihoods are dependent upon it, said Marcellus Shale Coalition president David Spigelmyer in a news release earlier this year.Trust fund revenues, the Brookings report argues, can further play a role in better diversifying states economies so they arent as vulnerable to economic shocks. Investments in tech-based industries and renewable energy, for instance, are much less volatile than oil and natural gas.Theres an opportunity to develop economies that deliver prosperity for a broader range of the state over time, Brookings Muro said.Despite falling oil prices, Texas has weathered the boom-and-bust cycle better than other major oil-producing states as its economy is more diversified. By contrast, Alaska, North Dakota, Louisiana, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Wyoming all recorded declines in total employment last year despite overall job growth nationally.The report authors further outline a series of recommendations for states that have already established trust funds. They include a solid governance framework, clear investment strategy, transparency standards and well-defined fiscal rules, such as when money can be withdrawn. While some state trust funds reviewed had some features, none had implemented all recommendations.One trust fund cited in the report as an example to follow is Montanas coal tax trust fund . Half of annual coal severance tax revenues are diverted to the fund, and its revenues cannot be appropriated without approval from three-quarters of the state legislature.Oil production has slowed across the country as prices have fallen. Select a state to view changes in numbers of oil and natural gas rigs over time. (TNS) -- A new Florida law puts the state at the helm of researching what may be transportation's most futuristic technology: self-driving cars.The transportation bill signed by Gov. Rick Scott earlier this month explicitly allows riderless cars to hit public roads for research. The bill brings the idea of autonomous cars, still under a controlled setting, closer to reality in the state, if not the country.Nevada passed laws encouraging autonomous vehicle testing in 2011 and was followed by Florida and California the next year. Today, states have provided money toward its study and allowed for general research, but stop short of allowing the vehicle to be riderless and not requiring a special license to operate, according to the National Conference on State Legislatures.The new Florida law changes that."Florida was the second state to look at this and by far has taken a leadership role among the states," said Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, a sponsor of the bill.The technology has also gotten national interest, as President Barack Obama's latest budget proposal allocated nearly $4 billion over 10 years to research self-driving vehicles.The legislation could pique automakers' interest in coming to the state for testing."[We worked] with partners at Audi and partners at Google the original equipment manufacturers" on the bill's details, Brandes said.Although the legislation could bring in business, a central pillar of Scott's term, Brandes said self-driving cars could ultimately be the best option for road safety. Google's self-driving car had its first at-fault accident a fender-bender with a bus this February, according to published reports."We've been able to get the legislators comfortable with this technology," Brandes said."Many of them have experienced it personally."For George Gilhooey, the Central Florida office leader for HNTB Corp., an engineering consulting firm, the new law isn't just the bellwether for safety or new business, but could have more immediate results for traffic and road capacity, especially on busy highways like I-4.The new legislation requires the Florida Department of Transportation to study what is classified as the second level of autonomous cars: cruise control and lane centering when the car is on a highway.The technology is not as evolved as a full-blown autonomous vehicle, but can conserve space on highways and create a draft effect, saving fuel costs.One aspect of that is truck platooning, which links vehicles together like a train on the highway, separated by an invisible but calculated distance between each truck through vehicle-to-vehicle communication."[The law] allows truck platooning, which has got immediate opportunities. That's one where the technology is already very mature. You actually improve the roadways' overall ability to handle more vehicles," Gilhooey said.Trucking and cargo transportation companies would see a large benefit from the technology, which could be online much sooner than a self-driving car.In the future, drivers could simply use an app and have a robotic chauffeur arrive at their door. Uber partnered with Carnegie Mellon University last year and announced it would research autonomy technology. Brandes said that Babcock Ranch in Fort Myers and other private developers were looking to build developments around autonomous vehicles."I think for right now, we're evolving into this space, and whether it's 2018 or 2025, we see that technology is coming online relatively quickly and it's exciting," Brandes said. (TNS) -- An independent lawyer assigned to represent Americans privacy interests before the nations top-secret spy court failed to persuade a judge to block FBI agents from searching intelligence databases to hunt for evidence of traditional crimes rather than restricting them to national security probes, according to a newly declassified court opinion.The ruling released Tuesday provides one of the first glimpses into how a 2015 bipartisan law aiming at reining in government intelligence-gathering is being implemented at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees requests for surveillance warrants from law enforcement agencies involving suspects inside the U.S.In the aftermath of domestic surveillance programs exposed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, Congress last year passed the USA Freedom Act, which allowed certain information-gathering practices to continue, but created a privacy advocate to represent the public interest.The newly released documents also reveal that the FBI is storing encrypted communications it has obtained in intelligence investigations until they can be decrypted and analyzed by specialists. The Nov. 6 opinion by Thomas F. Hogan, the chief judge of the FISA court, reauthorized a long-standing government spying effort known as the 702 program, which targets electronic communications of those believed to be foreigners living abroad.Hogan ruled that the nations spy agencies and the FBI were following proper procedures in how they selected targets for surveillance, gathered intelligence data and later mined it.The communications data collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ranges from phone numbers and email addresses to the content of calls and messages in the possession of U.S. telecommunications and Internet companies.FISA judges have approved the spying effort each time it has been submitted for review since 2008. But Hogans 80-page opinion was the first to rely on advice from an outside privacy advocate, known as an amicus curae, to help him determine the legality of the initiative.The advocate was attorney Amy Jeffress, a former top national security prosecutor at the Justice Department who is now a defense attorney in Washington.Giving judges the ability to tap such a lawyer for advice was a key element of the 2015 reform measure to address criticism that only the governments position was being heard in the ultra-secretive court.It is only the second publicly disclosed instance in which the court has used an outside lawyer to examine an aspect of the government's spying programs.Last September, the court asked attorney Preston Burton to examine whether the government could retain bulk telephone metadata that it had been told to destroy. Investigators wanted to keep the data for an extra few months so it could ensure the accuracy of information it would attain under the more targeted procedures enacted last year by Congress. Burton agreed that it was permissible to do so.In August, Hogan asked Jeffress to address whether the spy agencies and FBI were setting proper boundaries in how they gathered intelligence, as well as how they retained and searched the data, according to the judges redacted opinion.Jeffress generally agreed that the spy agencies and FBI were following proper procedures in targeting those they believed to be non-U.S. citizens living abroad.However, she raised concerns about how the FBI queries the sensitive data in its hunt for those who may have committed crimes unrelated to national security matters. She felt the FBI was restricted by law from conducting such searches.The FBIs procedures go far beyond the purpose for which the Section 702-acquired information is collected in permitting queries that are unrelated to national security, Jeffress argued, according to the judges opinion.Hogan disagreed, however, writing that the law clearly permitted FBI agents to search databases for such purposes. He added that such searches rarely generate a link to criminal activity.The risks that the results of such a query will be viewed or otherwise used in connection with an investigation that is unrelated to national security appears to be remote, if not entirely theoretical, Hogan wrote. The court is not prepared to find a constitutional deficiency based upon a hypothetical problem.Even so, the judge ordered the government to report any instance in which FBI personnel receive and review intelligence information that the FBI identifies as concerning a United States person in response to a query that is not designed to find and extract foreign intelligence information.The FBIs use of FISA-obtained data to help in criminal investigations is an issue that has long troubled civil liberties groups. They are particularly concerned that communications involving innocent Americans might be unintentionally swept up and stored in vast government databases only to be later linked to an alleged crime."It's clear that the government's conversion of a spying program that is justified on terrorism and foreign intelligence grounds into a tool for investigating ordinary crimes is one that raises deep constitutional concerns," said Patrick Toomey, a lawyer for the ACLU. This is what the slippery slope looks like. The government claims sweeping new surveillance authority in the name of fighting terrorism and then starts using it in routine criminal investigations.Jeffress declined to comment, as did Marc Raimondi, a Justice Department spokesman.Hogan's opinion also disclosed that the FBI is grappling with breaking into encrypted communications, an issue that was brought to light recently when the government persuaded a federal judge to order Apple to unlock an iPhone used by one of the terrorists in the San Bernardino attacks.The FBI ultimately dropped the case when it was approached by an unidentified third-party that was able to bypass Apple's security on the phone, allowing the bureau to download its contents. A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said nothing of significance was found on the device.In the opinion, Hogan noted that the FBI has been storing encrypted communications until government analysts can find a way to access and read them. Once the information is decrypted, Hogan wrote, the data will then become subject to the government's retention and deletion timetables.Law enforcement officials say they need tech companies' help to access encrypted devices and messages to investigate crimes and stop potential terrorist attacks. Privacy advocates and technology firms say creating backdoors into products would expose customers' data to hackers and foreign governments. Uruguay, Namibia, Samoa, Ghana, and South Africa all offer a greater "level of freedom of information" than the United States, according to Reporters Without Borders' 2016 World Press Freedom Index, released today. The U.S. is ranked at 41 out of 180 countries in the survey. RSF says the U.S. moved from 49th place in 2015 up to 41 this year, but "relative improvement by comparison hides overall negative trends." In other words, we're still screwed on press freedom, and the future doesn't look great. From NPR's Laura Wagner, on The Two-Way: Citing the U.S. government's "war on whistleblowers who leak information about its surveillance activities, spying and foreign operations, especially those linked to counter-terrorism," and the country's lack of a "shield law" that would allow journalists to protect confidential sources, the report takes a decidedly negative view of U.S. press freedom. Some of the policies condemned in the report come from President Obama's administration, as NPR's Sam Sanders has reported: "[Obama's] Justice Department has cracked down on reporters in an effort to prevent leaks; it also set a new record for withholding access to government files under the Freedom of Information Act (despite calling for a "new era of openness" on his first day in office); and photojournalists in 2013 from several major news organizations chastised the Obama administration for denying their 'right to photograph or videotape the President while he is performing his official duties,' instead relying on official photos shot by White House photographers." U.S. Ranks 41st In Press Freedom Index Thanks To 'War On Whistleblowers' [NPR.org] Dr Helmut Marko has dropped the biggest hint yet that Max Verstappen will be promoted to Red Bull Racing for 2017. It has been reported that unless the energy drink stable opens up a race seat for the teenage sensation, he and father Jos will be free to negotiate with fellow grandees like Mercedes and Ferrari. Marko, who manages Red Bull's young driver programme, told Sport Bild: "Very good drivers have always spent a maximum of two years with Toro Rosso and then moved up. "And Verstappen is extremely good," he said. If the Dutchman is promoted, it will almost certainly be Daniil Kvyat who is demoted back to Toro Rosso, despite his strong form at present. That is because Auto Bild claims that, in China last weekend, Marko personally told Ferrari's Sergio Marchionne that Daniel Ricciardo is not a free agent. "It is no secret that Ferrari was already interested in Daniel in 2015," Marko confirmed. (GMM) Sergio Marchionne says the 2016 title is still within Ferrari's reach. "Absolutely," the Ferrari and Fiat president told Bild newspaper. "Of course I still believe in the title." The Maranello team has come out this year with a competitive car, but race incidents and also problems with the engine mean Mercedes is still clearly ahead. "We had two problems with the (power) unit," Marchionne is quoted by Italy's La Repubblica. "(They were) Fixed. "We have to admit that these engines are complex and reliability is a problem that concerns everyone, including Mercedes, as we have seen. It is a sign that they are under pressure too," he added. Marchionne said he is happy to have satisfied Ecclestone's pre-season hopes that Ferrari will be much more competitive in 2016. According to Autosprint, Ecclestone confirmed: "Ferrari has woken up. They are competitive and should have won the last two races, but they've made one or two mistakes and also been unlucky. "Red Bull was also very, very competitive in the last race," the 85-year-old added, "but I don't know if they'll continue that." Finally, Ecclestone clarified his recent comments about the drivers, having slammed them as "windbags" following their recent GPDA letter. "I never used that word," said the Briton. "I said they should do what they are paid to do: drive the cars. "Yes, they are ambassadors of the sport, but one or two of them said how formula one should be managed. We don't need their opinion because we know it already." (GMM) F1 needs to be looking ahead to the post-Bernie Ecclestone era. That is the view of Sergio Marchionne, the Ferrari and Fiat president, amid rumours the powerful manufacturers including Mercedes may be pushing for the retirement of the F1 supremo in the coming months. "There is much work to do," said Marchionne when asked about the general state of the sport amid a tumultuous political climate at present. "Ecclestone is very good at negotiations but sooner or later we all have to retire," the 63-year-old is quoted by Italy's La Repubblica. "And when that is, we will have to re-think everything and build a more solid F1. With a real structure," Marchionne added. He said the sport would get a big boost if more manufacturers decide to compete, like Audi. "It would be perfect," said the Italian-Canadian. "Ferrari built its myth by beating the best -- beating Manor does not build a myth." Marchionne has said repeatedly in recent times that Alfa Romeo could be the next big name on the grid, but when asked if he was joking he insisted: "No, it's a real project. "First we have to make some money with Alfa and then we will try to enter. Remember, we have more success with that brand than a lot of people who are already here," he said. Asked if Alfa Romeo would be a mere branding or sponsorship exercise, Marchionne said: "No, no, I think of a commitment as a team. We have the history and the ability. "And we have our cousins here (Ferrari) that can lend a hand. Instead of helping others, or while they help others, they can help Alfa as well," he added. (GMM) There is growing concern in the American marijuana industry "about what may happen on the intellectual property frontier if and when legalization spreads across the country," Greg Walters writes at VICE in a story out today. In recent years, there's been an explosion in new strains with wacky names, and growers are looking to patent their strains just like one might for a new type of apple or rose. If or when America decriminalizes pot, our intellectual property laws could clash with the pot business boom to create one hell of a legal mess, very quickly. Boing Boing pal Michael Backes, author of "Cannabis Pharmacy" and a contributor to Boing Boing's video series on cannabis, spoke to VICE News for this story. Backes is one of the world's great cannabis science experts, and is involved in developing new forms of this ancient medicine which, I should disclose, I use daily for issues related to cancer. Mike is one of the inventors behind a notable marijuana patent that Greg Walters at VICE was recently tipped off to. Patent No. 9095554 "relates to specialty cannabis plants, compositions and methods for making and using said cannabis plants and compositions derived thereof," reads the 145-page document describing a range of hybrid strains with specific cannabinoid ratios designed for various physiological effects. Snip: A number of patents for the medical use of cannabis already exist, but Patent No. 9095554 is the first to be issued for a plant that contains significant amounts of THC, according to Veitenheimer, Gaudino, and Jonathan Page, a founder of Anandia Labs and scientist who co-led the team that sequenced the first cannabis genome. "Our patent lawyers were really, really surprised that there weren't more applications" for individual strains or classes of cannabis, said Michael Backes, one of the patent's three listed inventors and the author of Cannabis Pharmacy: The Practical Guide to Medical Marijuana. His lawyers, he noted, "expected a ton of them, and there weren't any. Ours was the first." In America, new varieties of plants, produced either through traditional breeding or as genetically modified organisms (GMO), can be considered intellectual property just like music, art, books, software, and architectural design a fact that has allowed Monsanto to sue farmers for planting patented seeds that weren't purchased from licensed vendors. So far, marijuana breeders are working in the traditional way, and nobody is known to be attempting to produce GMO marijuana. Not even big ag firms. Monsanto recently denied internet rumors that they plan to engineer weed. "Monsanto has not and is not working on GMO marijuana," the company says. "This allegation is an Internet rumor." "What a Looming Patent War Could Mean for the Future of the Marijuana Industry" [VICE] Amazon's Kindle Unlimited service allows subscribers to download as many books as they want, and then pays writers based on the number of their pages that readers have read. The service surveils your reading habits by checking the "furthest page visited" status on every book in your library, meaning that if you skip to the last page, the book considers you to have finished the whole thing. Crapflooding scammers have therefore supplied a glut of "books" that run up to 3,000 pages (the longest Amazon will permit), filled with garbage, which open with a link to the last page. By paying (or tricking) people to download their "books" and click the link, they rack up 3,000 pages' worth of credit to their author accounts. At $0.005/page, it can add up. The more of this there is, the less money there is in the system for writers who produce actual books, and the less reason there is for anyone to participate in, or subscribe to, the system. But e-books don't have to be linear. You might, for example, open up a new Kindle book and find it has a link on the first page, to take you to a later chapter or a table of contents or another language. Tapping that link could put you hundreds of pages into the book which means that the author of that file is now making money off you, even if you haven't read a word or even if there's not a single real word there to be read. And that is exactly what's happening. Scammers are basically uploading "books" that are nothing but files full of nonsense with some link on page 1 that puts readers on page 300 or 3000 (the maximum page length for which Amazon will pay out) almost instantly. In between there's nothing but nonsense, but the scammer can use click farms to drive up the ranking of their book and so people download it anyway. Amazon Unintentionally Paying Scammers To Hand You 1000 Pages Of Crap You Don't Read [Kate Cox/Consumerist] (via Super Punch) (Image: Open Book, George Hodan) Two NYPD detectives who beat up a uniformed U.S. Postal Service mail carrier were charged with felony assault in Queens wednesday. Angelo J. Pampena, 31, and Robert A. Carbone, 29, were also charged with perjury after CCTV footage of the incident demonstrated that they had lied in their official reports of the arrest. Mailman Karim Baker's harassment by NYPD began after giving street directions to a stranger who later killed two officers, reports the New York Times. But the October 2015 incident went beyond the usual stop and search, leaving Baker disabled. Mr. Brown and Mr. Subin said the detectives approached Mr. Baker as he left work on Oct. 21, 2015, in Corona, Queens. Mr. Subin said the encounter was captured on surveillance video from a building across the street, and had been paired with audio from a 911 call from Mr. Baker's cellphone that recorded what occurred. Mr. Subin said the officers had asked to see his client's identification and when he asked why he was being stopped, the officers told him he was parked too close to a fire hydrant. Mr. Baker then called 911 to ask for help, but he dropped the phone when the officers began pummeling him, Mr. Subin said. The district attorney said Mr. Baker was seated in his car when the detectives punched and kicked him multiple times in the face and body and dragged him from the vehicle. Mr. Baker sustained spinal fractures and a knee injury and has not been able to return to work, Mr. Subin said. The cops are suspended without pay in the meantime. As the taxpayer eats the financial pain of paying off police victims, there's not much incentive, other than the slim chance of individual convictions, for them to stop this behavior. So, lets hope this ends in two individual convictions. We thank our sponsor for making this content possible; it is not written by the editorial staff nor does it necessarily reflect its views. While our brains may be at capacity in terms of storage, our noggin space looks void compared to the digital organization throughout the electronics we work on. Finding a safe home for all those files is challenging READ THE REST The largest public multi-standard electric vehicle charging facility in California officially opened in Santa Clara. The Santa Clara Electric Vehicle Charging Center, located at the citys Tasman Parking Garage, features 48 Level 2 chargers and one DC Fast Charger. Santa Claras municipal electric utility Silicon Valley Power (SVP) collaborated with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Joint Venture Silicon Valley, ChargePoint and MJR Electric to obtain a grant of $393,000 from the California Energy Commission to pay for the equipment and construction of the charging center. Santa Clara staff provided labor, and operational expenses of the facility are expected to be covered by usage fees from EV drivers. The 6-story parking structure has a 370 kW photovoltaic installation, and uses battery technology from Green Charge Networks to help offset peak power demand with stored power to lower costs. While the solar power does not go directly to the charging stations, it does flow into the local SVP grid, which in turn provides the facilitys electricity. Volkswagen AG confirmed that it has reached an agreement in principle with the Department of Justice (Environmental Division); the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); and the California Air Resources Board (CARB); with the full involvement of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) concerning the diesel emissions issue. The agreement in principle will be incorporated into binding consent decrees by the Department of Justice and the FTC in the coming weeks. The agreement includes buyback offers for 482,000 2.0-liter TDI diesel vehicles and a possible fixif regulators agree on itor the cancellation of an outstanding lease, according to US District Court Judge Charles Breyer, who is presiding in the case. Furthermore, Volkswagen said it has reached an agreement on the basic features of a settlement with the class action plaintiffs in the lawsuit in San Francisco. This agreement will be incorporated into a comprehensive settlement in the coming weeks. The arrangements in the making in the United States will have no legal bearing on proceedings outside of the United States. Ongoing investigations by the Department of Justice, Criminal Division, and the State Attorneys General are not affected by these agreements in principle. GREENSBORO A local musician has encouraged others to use their art form to protest House Bill 2, which many deem discriminatory against gay and transgender people. While some musicians Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr, and rock bands Pearl Jam and Boston have canceled North Carolina shows in protest of HB 2, Steve Haines urges musicians to respond to the new law on April 30 by performing. Haines took out a full-page ad in Thursdays News & Record, asking musicians of all ages and abilities to perform outdoors at 1 p.m. April 30, to demonstrate their desire to have HB 2 repealed. Calling it an act of solidarity for human rights in the great state of North Carolina, his ad called on musicians who are an amateur or a professional, 5 or 95 years old, play an instrument, sing, clap your hands, in a band, choir or alone. Play or sing anywhere it is legal: at a restaurant, in front of our homes; young ones can practice on the front lawn, the ad reads. If it rains, perform under cover or inside, Haines ad suggests. The more people who play in different places, the better, it said. He followed with an open letter to Gov. Pat McCrory and members of the N.C. General Assembly, asking them to repeal the new law. Changing ones mind is not necessarily a demonstration of weakness, but rather of strength, Haines wrote. A double bassist, Haines teaches music at UNC-Greensboro and directs its Miles Davis Jazz Studies Program. But he emphasized that My views on this subject are my own and do not reflect the UNC systems, UNCGs, or even my hockey teams views, Haines said in a Thursday interview. Neither Haines nor the News & Record advertising department would say how much he paid for the ad. HB 2 bans local governments from adopting anti-discrimination rules that include LGBT people, some of which had already been passed in Charlotte, Greensboro and Raleigh. The section that has received the most attention is a provision requiring transgender people to use restrooms, showers, locker and changing rooms that correspond to the gender on their birth certificates in public buildings, schools and universities. That part of the law concerns Haines most. This law forces transgender people to use restrooms that dont match their gender identity, Haines ad said. Before the law was enacted, most of us never gave this issue a second thought. Weve likely shared a restroom in the past with someone who is transgender without concern. Everyone wants privacy in a restroom, including folks who are transgender. Other musicians who have defended human rights Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus and Max Roach inspired him to plan the April 30 event, Haines said Thursday. Music has a rich history with respect to creating a better place, he said. The arts have always been that way. Haines, 44, said that he and his band will perform jazz for an hour on South Elm Street downtown. He hopes other musicians will perform downtown, too. Under a city ordinance, street performers do not need a permit unless they ask for money. But he encourages participants to play anywhere its legal for 10 or 15 minutes, an hour or any amount of time they choose. You can play your harmonica in your driveway, he said. He said he hopes the movement will extend beyond Greensboro and the state, and attract national attention. As of lunchtime Thursday, he said he had received 50 to 60 emails from musicians who want to join his effort. He said he hopes to receive more. I dont want to fight this with anger, Haines added. I want people to consider that maybe a mistake was made, and we have the power to change our minds. April 21, 1971 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously Tuesday that any reasonable device including busing and racial quotas may be used to eliminate state-imposed school segregation. In probably the most far-reaching school decision since Brown versus School Board 17 years ago, it approved court ordered busing, school-pairing, and racial balancing in North Carolinas Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system. The court handed down a stern warning to other school boards that may still be resisting the final elimination of past legal discrimination. a It's been 21 years since the Republican Congress zeroed out the $20M budget of the Office of Technology Assessment, a casualty of Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America" that deprived Congress of its principal source of technological expertise. Even if you accept Gingrich's view that the US Government needed to be radically shrunk, it's hard to imagine a stupider decision than jettisoning technology experts on the eve of the 21st century, especially when those experts cost the country less than a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the Congressional budget. Whenever there's a debate about climate change, Internet censorship, encryption, or other highly technical subjects, we routinely hear Members of Congress say things like, "I'm no scientist, but" Whenever you hear that, you should substitute, "I fired all the scientists, so" The fact that Congress is flying blind, technologically speaking, explains an awful lot, from climate change denial to the crypto wars to SOPA and the Office of Personnel Management breach. The OTA was once a jewel in America's crown, widely studied and duplicated by other governments around the world. The problem was that the OTA was reality-based and reality has a well-known liberal bias. So when Reagan proposed his Star Wars missile shield, the OTA stubbornly refused to say it would work, because it wouldn't. This is the structural barrier to rebooting the OTA today. The absence of independent technical experts in Congress gives Reps and Senators cover when they introduce bad policy (which may be good for their campaign funders). They can bring in their own "experts" who'll testify against renewable energy or vaccination or whatever, and accuse the other side's experts of "partisanship." This is good for both parties, because it lets lawmakers serve their paymasters. But it's terrible possibly fatal for America. At its peak, the OTA had an annual budget of about $20 million and around 140 permanent staffers who were supplemented when needed by subject-matter experts from outside. All of them together provided detailed research on everything from acid rain and sustainable agriculture to electronic surveillance and anti-ballistic missile programs. The reports the OTA produced over the years were known for their rigor. "There was a lot of effort to make sure that the reports were really solid and had been vetted," says Andrew Wyckoff, who managed the OTA's Information, Telecommunications and Commerce program before the OTA's demise. The OTA was so revered that the Washington Times once called it "the voice of authority in a city inundated with statistics and technical gobbledygook." Other countries, such as the Netherlands, even sent representatives to DC to learn how it worked so they could replicate it back home. There's another reason lawmakers may not want to resurrect the OTA: A panel of independent experts, producing facts that contradict a lawmaker's position, make it hard for a politician to deceive and sway the public. To avoid politicization, the OTA was overseen by a bi-partisan board of 12 lawmakersdrawn equally from both parties in the House and Senatewho decided which projects OTA would tackle. Although the OTA occasionally proposed a research project on its own, the majority were requested by individual lawmakers or congressional committees. Of Course Congress Is Clueless About TechIt Killed Its Tutor [Kim Zetter/Wired] Good-bye hunger. Photo: Lucy Parker Randall KFC has assured a North Carolina woman it isnt testing fried offal at this time, explaining instead that her stomach-churning order appears to have unfortunately included something kidney-esque that didnt get yanked out during prep. The customer, Lucy Randall, says she was eating a thigh and leg last Friday when a weird glob caught her eye. Upon closer inspection, she noticed wrinkles and connective tissue, and began hurling and almost crying all at the same time. KFC has said its very sorry and agrees her meal was definitely not appetizing. KFC also stresses that eating off-menu organ meat poses no health hazard, but Randall is understandably a little freaked out anyway. She says she didnt really eat for the next four days and has already gotten in touch with the local health authorities and an attorney, plus had blood work done for salmonella and parasites. At least for now, shes also swearing off all meat. She says frantic research led her to the conclusion it was a bird kidney as well. But initially she thought it was a brain (a common misconception at KFC, as it turns out). However remote, KFC technically didnt rule that possibility out either: In its statement, the company said theres no way of definitively knowing unless Randall surrenders the whatever-it-is to the franchisee so they can test it. [WCNC] The shaved snow machine at Snowdays. Photo: Konstantin Sergeyev When 23-year-old Richard Tam opened his Chinatown shop 10Below last year, it quickly drew three-hour lines of eager customers. This was despite no real marketing on the part of Tam and his business partners, who were first-time restaurateurs. Instead, the shop specializes in a frozen dessert called Thai rolled ice cream, which is made by spreading sheets of pastry cream on a supercold anti-griddle thats cranked to -10 degrees Fahrenheit. The instantly frozen pastry sheets are scraped into rolls and served with toppings like Nutella and Oreo. Although most New Yorkers hadnt even heard of the dessert before 10Below opened, Tam was sure it could be big in this city something he decided even though he himself had never actually had it. Instead, he got the idea after watching a Facebook video of rolled ice cream being made. Three years ago, the instant rise of fake Cronuts demonstrated how social media hyperaccelerates food trends and gives chefs and owners access to a wealth of ideas theyve never had before. In the case of 10Below, it gave Tam instant insight into things that were happening thousands of miles away, in Thailand or, say, Taiwan, or Hong Kong, or, for that matter, Southern California, another hotbed of East Asian culinary influence. Rolling the ice cream at 10Below. Photo: Konstantin Sergeyev Having access to people posting in Hong Kong and Japan, were able to keep up with different trends and really stay on top of our game, says Tony Quach, the co-founder of the immensely popular Snowdays, which opened in August 2014 and specializes in a Taiwanese dessert called shaved snow. Its a variation on shaved ice, made by freezing dairy into the base, that is topped with just about anything: drizzles of condensed milk or peanut-butter sauce, grass jelly, matcha brownies, candy, red bean, and more. (The creation has also been called shaved cream, snow ice, fluff ice, milk fluff, and snowy shaved ice.) In fact, a whole scene of innovative New York shops have opened specializing in desserts that first gained traction in East Asian countries. Several other spots serving Thai rolled ice cream, also called stir-fried ice cream, have opened up over the last year. The Lower East Sides Juicy Spot Cafe added Thai rolled to its menu last year. An international Thai chain expanded to the city last August with I CE NY and has plans to open in Atlanta, Baltimore, and Delray Beach in the Miami metropolitan area. And two more downtown shops, Frozen Sweet and Minus Celsius Ice Cream, opened earlier this year. Meanwhile, 10Below has already expanded to Flushing, the current epicenter of New Yorks Chinese community. 10Belows Thai rolled ice cream. Photo: Konstantin Sergeyev Social media also helps in another key way: It spreads awareness and allows the young owners to connect with a previously underserved audience. Even if a new business is overlooked by traditional media outlets, the Instagram-friendly desserts can nevertheless find traction and a fanbase. These desserts have tapped into a growing appetite among young customers, especially first-generation Americans whose parents emigrated from spots like China and Taiwan, for over-the-top sweets. Two Los Angeles Chinese-food authorities, restaurant critic Jonathan Gold and writer Clarissa Wei, say the trend likely began in Southern California in 2006, when San Gabriel Valley shop Class 302 first introduced Thai rolled ice cream to the United States. Since then, shops selling the dessert have opened in San Francisco and elsewhere in the Bay Area, Las Vegas, Austin, Miami, Boston, Orlando, Chicago, and New York back in 2011. Shaved snow at Snowdays. Photo: Konstantin Sergeyev In New York, desserts like Thai rolled ice cream and shaved snow have also helped define a kind of modern sensibility that evolves the citys East Asian culinary scene beyond the traditional Chinatown hotbeds geared toward working-class immigrants. (Just look at the New World Mall in Flushing, which is typically mobbed with teenagers.) But the appeal is probably even simpler than that. The desserts look appealing, offer something new, and tend to amplify the best parts of traditional frozen sweets. In a city where people are always on the hunt for fresh experiences, that combination has allowed operators like Tam and Quach to expand quickly. (Quach and his partners have either expanded, or are planning to, in the West Village, Flushing, Brooklyn, and Forrest Hills.) Quach likens the growth to the recent explosion of fro-yo shops. Of course, that boom quickly went bust, something Quach and Tam probably dont want to see happen again. However, if it does, they can always turn to Facebook to find the next new dessert everyone will soon crave. The alternative (and still sort of experimental) Gmail interface known as Inbox is receiving a new update today. This one improves the handling of events and newsletters, and lets you save links inside Inbox - for reading later, presumably. The latter functionality can be achieved on a computer too, by using the new Inbox by Gmail Chrome extension, which basically does the same thing as the Google Keep Chrome extension we've discussed earlier - both save links, they just do it on different Google services. On a mobile device, just share the website you're interested in to Inbox, and it will be stored in the app for viewing at a later date. Inbox will now gather emails from a single event in the same spot, and show you what's changed at a glance. When you tap on any event you'll get a comprehensive overview of it, with all changes. The newsletters you usually read are getting smarter previews, letting you easily click through to the articles that interest you most. And once you've gone through the latest newsletter, it will be minimized in order to save space in Inbox. Source | Via These are the best offers from our affiliate partners. We may get a commission from qualifying sales. Samsung Semiconductor executives have held a special invite-only meet-up with potential new customers in Silicon Valley. The reason behind the event is the announcement of plans for a new and cheaper 14-nanometer manufacturing process. Re/Code cited Kelvin Low, Samsung Semiconductor senior director, who also said that a second-gen 10-nanometer chipmaking technology will be operational later this year. The new 10nm process will offer 10% better performance than the one before it. The battle for the top spot in the mobile semiconductor sector is heating up. TMSC is rumored to have the majority of orders from Apple to make the new A10 chip, but that might change if Samsung's plans for the second-generation 10-nanometer process become reality. Samsung already managed to snatch the production of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 chip from TMSC. Source Samsung ships twice as many smartphones as Apple in Q1 Smartphone adoption is reaching a saturation point and global shipments fell 1.3% year on year and 18.6% down quarter on quarter, for a total of 292 million units. The info comes from global market research firm TrendForce. Leader Samsung moved up the ladder, going up 5.7 percentage points in market share compared to Q1 last year. It shipped 81 million units, which is actually up quarter on quarter (usually, the holiday quarter, Q4, is the strongest). Launching the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge earlier than competing flagships helped sales. The affordable J-series has found success in China as well as globally. TrendForce expects Samsung sales to continue going up. Main rival Apple experienced a marked decline, going down 6.5 percentage points compared to the same period last year. Note that this is the quarter before the iPhone SE. This means that Apple shipped only half as many smartphones as Samsung this quarter. The iPhone SE is expected to prop up Q2 sales until the iPhone 7 arrives. LG's innovative work hasn't paid off. The company shipped a bit more than a year ago but declined compared to the previous quarter. It stays 6th globally. Chinese companies weathered the storm quite well and their combined shipments went up, despite the global downturn. They shipped more in China than Samsung and Apple combined for the first time. Demand was driven up by 4G adoption in China and growing smartphone sales in India. Even so, Q1 shipments dropped by 27 million units (20%) compared to Q4 last year. Huawei maintains its home country lead and 3rd spot globally. However, TrendForce does not believe the company will be able to overtake Apple globally. Lenovo pulled ahead of Xiaomi (they were on par Q1 last year) and shipped 17 million to Xiaomi's 16 million. Lenovo is committing a sizeable portion of its phones, 80%, to exports. TCL (which you probably know as "Alcatel") is 4th, hot on the heels of Lenovo. Oppo and Vivo combined make up 20% of Chinese smartphone shipments. Vivo is less export-oriented than Lenovo with only 10% of production heading abroad. Source Haiti - FLASH : Fraudsters no longer have to worry about the Verification Commission Between the text of the terms of reference of the Verification Commission made available before signing last April 14 and the final text after signature, two changes were made. Firstly in the mandate "check compliance of voting operations, polling and counting process in light of the provisions of the Electoral Decree," "in light" became "in accordance" which will prevent abuses by restricting the works to the electoral Decree. On the other hand a second modification and not least has been taken since the task consisting to "identify the perpetrators, beneficiaries and victims of serious irregularities or fraud proven for appropriate purposes has completely disappeared... New Final text of the terms of reference of the mandate as signed : "[...] the member of the Independent Commission of Electoral Evaluation and Verification will develop a methodology for a technical analysis of the data available at the vote tabulation center, the mandate of the commission is defined as follows : Purify the voting process by analyzing the signing sheets, partial electoral lists (LEP), counting sheets, of minutes of counting, the minutes of deficiency, incidence minutes, of ballots, and already registered complaints ; Evaluate and revise, if necessary, the decisions of CEP litigation organs having been the subject of denunciations, of regularly documented complaints, for the purposes of law ; Check the compliance of voting operations, of voting and counting process in accordance of the provisions of the Electoral Decree of March 2015; recommend measures of enforceable order to the executive power and the CEP likely to restore confidence in the electoral process and ensure the accuracy of the results [...]" Moreover in the terms of the Commission it is stated "all following parties and political groupings : Fanmi Lavalas, Pitit Dessalines, Pati Ayisyen Tet Kale (PHTK), LAPEH, Verite, Organisation du Peuple en Lutte (OPL), Ayiti An Aksyon (AAA), Konvansyon Inite Demokratik ( KID), INITE, Bouclier, Renmen Ayiti, MAS, G-30, Mosano, Canaan, Konviksyon, Pati Politik Peyizan, etc... Civil Society organizations, electoral observation organizations, all political actor duly authorized for this purpose, have the legitimate right to observe the work of the Commission." Regarding the 5 members of the Commission of Evaluation and Verification, Under reserve of their publication in a presidential decree, the most likely names circulating are : Erick Gaillard designated by the Order of Chartered Accountants Haitian ; Francois Benoit (ormer adviser of CEP 2005-2006) ; Gedeon Jean appointed by the members of the former Electoral Evaluation Commission formed in 2015 under the Martelly regime ; Former senator Marc Donald Jean, former member of the Council of Elders (2004), appointed by the Episcopal / Anglican Church ; Pierre Wilfrid Sanon, designated by the Haitian Association of construction companies (after withdrawal of the Haitian National College of Engineers and Architects) See also : https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-17220-haiti-politic-pm-fails-to-reassure-deputies.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-17190-haiti-elections-verification-commission-terms-of-reference-approved-and-signed.html SL/ HaitiLibre Haiti - Humanitarian: Drought, U.S. Government intensifies its aid to Haiti The US Embassy announced more funding for the ongoing needs of Haitian households suffering from the effects of the El Nino-induced drought, bringing US contributions to $21.9 million USD over the last six months. US Ambassador Peter Mulrean reiterated that "The US stands steadfast with Haitian families to provide for their emergency food, nutrition, and water needs. We also continue to work to strengthen Haitis future capacity to prepare for and withstand shocks, including by boosting agricultural production and closing food gaps for those most vulnerable to weather, political and price shocks." The US Agency for International Development (USAID) began working to mitigate the risks of drought-induced hunger and malnutrition in October 2015. To date the U.S Government has provided $21.9 Million USD to address emergency needs for food, nutrition, and water in all the drought-affected departments of the country: North-East, Artibonite, Centre, West, and South-East. This includes : $7.4 million to the World Food Program (WFP) for cash and food transfers to 100,000, and $1.2 million to UNICEF to treat 37,800 children who could be diagnosed with Severe Acute Malnutrition. Emergency food aid funding of $11.8 million to partners CARE, Accion Contre la Faim, and World Vision aims support at over 135,000 people, additional to the 102,000 already served by the USAID and Government Kore Lavi social safety net program, through which participants receive cash for assets, cash for work, and food vouchers to purchase locally sourced, nutritious food. For water, sanitation, and hygiene, $1.3 million is increasing clean water supply and sanitation in the South-East department, one of the hardest hit by drought, migration from the DR, and recent cholera outbreaks. This sum includes: $900,000 to Solidarites International, $250,000 to UNICEF, and $160,000 to International Organization for Migration (IOM). Finally, the US contributed $200,000 to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) for drought, migration, and cholera response coordination across and among all organizations and the government. Driven by crop losses and reduced farm labor opportunities, FEWS NET reports that many poor households are becoming increasingly reliant on non-agricultural income sources including petty-trade, labor migration, remittances and other more severe coping measures, such as charcoal production. See also : https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-17211-haiti-humanitarian-emergency-operation-to-assist-1-million-haitians.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-17122-haiti-humanitarian-$200m-call-for-funds-to-help-the-most-vulnerable.html https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-16646-icihaiti-flash-critical-situation-among-farmers-affected-by-drought.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-16645-haiti-politic-drought-usa-alongside-haiti.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-16607-haiti-agriculture-the-country-hit-by-the-worst-drought-in-35-years.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-16354-haiti-agriculture-an-improvement-in-access-to-basic-foods-is-not-for-tomorrow.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-16048-haiti-humanitarianalert-to-food-insecurity-cco-haiti-provides-support.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-16022-haiti-social-food-alert-more-than-3-million-affected-in-haiti.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-15108-haiti-agriculture-drought-alarming-situation-in-the-country.html HL/ HaitiLibre South Gospel group Gold City's baritone Daniel Riley's mother, Barbara (Mrs. Tim) Riley passed away on April 19. Barbara Riley of Glencoe was 69. Arrangements for Barbara Riley are as follows: Funeral services will be at 11:00 a.m., Saturday, April 23, 2016 at North Glencoe Baptist Church. Burial will be at Crestwood Cemetery. The family will receive friends Friday, April 22, 2016 from 5:00-8:00 p.m., at the church. Online condolences may be made atwww.collier-butler.com. Gold City was formed in Alabama in 1980. Members are bass vocalist Timothy "Tim" Riley, tenor John "Jay" Parrack, baritone Mark Trammell, lead vocalist Jonathan Wilburn, bass vocalist and guitarist Adam Borden, drummer Douglas "Doug" Riley, pianist Channing Eleton, and baritone Daniel Riley. Before joining forces for Gold City, most of the guys had spent time fine-tuning their skills with other gospel bands, like Dixie Echoes, Poet Voices, Arkansas Boys,Greater Vision, the Wilburns, and the Singing Ambassadors. By the time the new millennium rolled around, Gold City had performed at countless festivals and appeared on stage at the Southern Baptist Convention, Music City Tonight, the Grand Ole Opry, and Nashville Now. The group had also completed over two dozen remarkable albums, featuring tunes like "There Rose a Lamb," "Getting Ready to Leave This World," "What a Glad Day," "Be Not Afraid," and "Dearest Friend I Ever Had." The smooth harmonies the members of Gold City serve up on its albums have earned the group a number of significant awards, including Traditional Male Quartet of the Year and Southern Gospel Music's Band of the Year by Singing News Magazine, and Album of the Year and Favorite Group at the acclaimed Voice Diamond Awards. After two decades of using songs to witness to fans and reach lost souls, Gold City seems completely happy to stay the course and continue forward. Tags : Gold City barbara riley daniel riley gold city southern gospel group Southern Gospel barbara riley funeral gold city funeral gold city news gold city quartet Published on 2016/04/20 | Source Song Hye-kyo's words are in the spotlight. Advertisement Actress Song Hye-kyo held a press conference in celebration of the end of the KBS 2TV drama "Descendants of the Sun". The successful drama actress seemed calm and relaxed in front of the press and she was honest about her answers. - "You look better in person" VS "You look better on TV", both of them are offensive The simple question: Which do you prefer to hear? 'You look better in person' or 'You look better on TV' brought back a completely unexpected answer. Song Hye-kyo: "They are both flattering comments but if you think about it in another way they can be offensive. Saying I look better in person means I don't look as good on TV and saying I look better on TV means I don't look as good in person. As a woman I think I prefer hearing that I am just good looking (laughs)". - At the age where being cautious is a must... Song Hye-kyo couldn't avoid the questions about the cheesy lines written by Kim Eun-sook. She criticized herself and got over it. Song Hye Kyo: "I never thought the lines were cheesy but many people tell me so. There was one where the word 'doll' was involved and I was so ashamed. It was tough to say at the moment. If I was in my 20s I wouldn't have minded but at this age, I have to be cautious about what I say or it could backfire. I tried to contain the intensity of the lines, but at the same time I was afraid of what viewers in their twenties might say about me". - Did I show off? A reporter asked about her tips on maintaining her Hallyu starism in China ever since "Full House". She pointed out what was wrong and gave her answer. Song Hye-kyo: "Actually, it started since "Autumn in my Heart" and not "Full House". Did I just show off? (laughs)" - This question wasn't asked Just about when the press conference was over, she answered a question that no one asked. She'd thought about the questions and answers in her head and that was about the actors Yoo Ah-in and Lee Kwang-soo who made cameo appearances in "Descendants of the Sun". Song Hye-kyo: "I thought this question would come out. Yoo Ah-in was in the drama. He's in the same company as I am and I adore him like a brother. It was short and he was busy with "Six Flying Dragons", but he made the time. I am grateful for him and Lee Kwang-soo too. Thanks to them, our drama was a success". - Oh and Min-seok too! Song Hye-kyo said she earned 'people' through "Descendants of the Sun" and expressed her gratitude to those who had part in the drama from big to small but she forgot Kim Min-seok and hurriedly added him. Song Hye-kyo: "I earned good people through this drama. I have made many friends. Lee Seung-joon, Seo Jung-yeon, Onew, the Alpha Team, Jin Goo, Kim Ji-won and so many more. I was able to overcome difficult times thanks to them. I thank "Descendants of the Sun" for making this possible. Oh and Kim Min-seok too. (laughs)". Meanwhile, Song Hye-kyo took on the role of Kang Mo-yeon, a cardiothoracic surgeon in "Descendants of the Sun". Login or sign up to follow actresses, movies & dramas and get specific updates and news Login Sign Up New Ad-free Subscriber Login Email Password Password Username Your E-mail will only be used to retrieve a lost password. Stay logged in Help Harlow is a former New Town in Essex with a population of 86,000. Located in the upper Stort Valley, it was built in the decades after the Second World War to ease overcrowding and London and provide homes for people bombed out during the Blitz. It includes Britain's first pedestrian precinct and first modern residential tower block, The Lawn. Old Harlow, the historic part of the town, was mentioned in the Domesday Book. David and Victoria Beckham's former home, Rowneybury House, nicknamed 'Beckingham Palace', is nearby. 09:00, 23 OCT 2022 ing giant BHP Billiton is spearheading a campaign to crack down on methamphetamine use amongst its workforce amid growing concerns over employee drug issues.BHP introduced a stringent dual testing regime last year, adding urine testing to its existing saliva testing program.BHP management told Fairfax Media some 20 cases of illicit drug use, the majority involving ice or cocaine had been picked up in the first nine months of the program, which requires workers at its Goonyella Riverside Mine to undergo random yet mandatory urine testing.Based on these positive results, the global Australian plans to implement its roll expanded drug-testing regime throughout its Bowen Basin coal fleet.However, BHP has battled the union for more than two years over the introduction of urine testing, with the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) arguing such testing is an unnecessary invasion of privacy as it can pick up historical drug use which doesnt automatically mean that the employee is unfit for work.Ultimately, BHP let its employees decide if they wanted the testing or not, and took the results of the ballot to the Supreme Court, says Simon Clayer, Senior Associate at HopgoodGanims Industrial and Employment Law division.The Supreme Court decision allowing the mine employees vote in support of dual testing to stand is a significant outcome given the usual arguments that urine testing is an unreasonable invasion of privacy, Clayer told HC Online.The mining giant says tackling methamphetamine use is a priority, given a previous incident where a meth pipe was discovered in a mining truck and community concern over rising ice use.BHP Billitons request to introduce dual testing was underlined by an approach by a group of local doctors who approached mine management to report their concern about a number of mine workers they had consulted about their Methamphetamine (Ice) use, Clayer says.This was the trigger for BHP Billiton to argue the introduction of urine testing was required to meet health and safety obligations under section 42 of the Coal Mining Safety and Health Regulation 2001, Clayer says.The focus on this section of the Regulation is fitness for work, meaning a persons capacity to work without risk to themselves or others health and safety.Many things can affect fitness for work, with drugs being only one, Clayer says.Others include stress, depression, anxiety and fatigue.He says tests for use of drugs or alcohol do not definitively indicate impairment or fitness for work, and one of the problems with drug testing as an indicator of use is the detection time.For example, alcohol testing is immediate and detects current levels of alcohol in the system, so it is able to indicate some level of impairment, Clayer says.But other drugs can be detected in the system for days and sometimes weeks after the drug has been used, depending on how much and how often it has been used.Ice, for example, can be detected in saliva and blood for up to 12 hours, in urine for up to five days after use and in the hair up to 90 days after use, he says.This means that users may return a positive test, depending on the type of test used, even when they have no drugs in their system or have not used for some time.However, employers should ensure that the purpose of testing should be to deter drug use, in order to create a safe workplace rather than to catch people using drugs, Clayer says.He says a common mistakes workplaces make is to place too much focus on drug and alcohol use, rather than on impairment and fitness for work.Dual testing regimes are not common, primarily because urine testing is argued to be an unreasonable invasion of privacy given that it may return positive results for drug use outside of work hours, Clayer says.There are certainly advantages and disadvantages with each type of drug testing method, and HR professionals must always consider their employees privacy when undertaking testing, he says.He recommends employers seeking to introduce dual testing regimes base this decision on health and safety benefits, which should significantly outweigh any privacy detriments.Given the limitations of drug testing to reduce use or harm in the workplace, to be effective a workplace policy needs to be part of a broader healthy workplace solution that considers drug and alcohol use, mental health, fatigue and other impacts on fitness for work, Clayer says. The recent case of a federal police worker who lost her workers compensation claim despite suffering bullying and sexual harassment at work should serve as a timely reminder for employers on how to handle meetings with employees. The female AFP worker claimed compensation for psychiatric injury, basing her claim on a distressing meeting she had with her supervisor and a colleague, from which she went home and was later certified as unfit to return to work. The federal police worker also alleged she was bullied, intimidated and sexually harassed by colleagues over a three-year period between 2010 and 2013. Federal insurer Comcare initially rejected her claim for compensation and after the Administrative Appeals Tribunal found in the employees favour last year, Comcare launched its own successful appeal case. The argument Comcare gave was that the tribunal had erred by dealing with a claim for injury that was "fundamentally different" to the original claim, which was based on the employees management meeting. Patricia Ryan, Principal at The Workplace employment lawyers says this is because the meeting was classified as a reasonable management action and thus exempt from compensation claim. Legislation in the ACT and in the states specifically excludes claims for compensation at work where the stress or anxiety caused follows on from reasonable management action., Ryan told HC Online. Common examples of this are meetings to put allegations of misconduct or to discuss non-performance, she says. While these no doubt can be stressful; an employee cannot make a claim for any resulting psychiatric injury from the stress of the meeting where the companys action was reasonable. The main lesson for HR professionals in this instance is to ensure the company is acting reasonably in calling and conducting the meeting, or risk exposing their employer to a costly compensation claim. Ryan says HR professionals can take a number of steps to limit their employers liability. This includes giving employees adequate notice of the meeting, the rule of thumb being 24 hours, and inviting the employee to bring a support person if they choose. HR should advise the employee on the purpose of the meeting and who else will be attending. Dont load the meeting with unnecessary company representatives and make it clear that the employee will have an opportunity to respond and put their case, Ryan says. HR should consider sending the employee home until the meeting is held, and remind them of the workplace EAP, if one exists. When its time to hold the meeting, HR should ensure employees are not bombarded by a range of issues, instead each issue should be addressed separately, allowing time for responses and breaks if the meeting gets heated or emotional. The employee should be provided with minutes afterwards and made aware of the next steps, Ryan says, and if decisions are to be made, they should be made as soon as reasonably practical. HR also needs to be aware of the legal pitfalls that can arise from such a meeting and take steps to mitigate these risks, she says. The employee may allege a lack of procedural fairness and allege that any decision made or action taken is therefore itself wrong. This could mean challenging a disciplinary outcome in court, Ryan says. If the employee alleges that the meeting did not go in accordance with any dispute resolution mechanisms in their Enterprise Award, they could also challenge this in court. The employee may allege they were bullied in the meeting and seek a stop bullying order from the Fair Work Commission, Ryan says. The bullying legislation however has a similar defence of reasonable management action is not bullying. Ryan says HR can ensure management meetings are reasonable by doing the following: - Look at the circumstances that gave rise to the management action; - Look at the consequences; - The action only has to be reasonable the test is not that it could have been MORE reasonable; - The action need not be perfect or ideal - The action may be reasonable even if certain steps were not - The action must be lawful (not illegally taping for example or refusing to let a person leave a room against their will) - The action must be actually unreasonable it is not enough that the worker perceives it to be - Action could be unreasonable if it departs from established practice and procedures without good cause. - Must not be irrational, absurd or ridiculous Register Now for WWIL Round Robin Event Thursday, May 19 4:30-7:30 p.m. Meadowbrook Inn & Suites 711 Main Street, Blowing Rock $10 Per Person 4:30-5:30 Hors doeuvres and refreshments 5:30-6:30 Round Robin event 6:30-7:30 Desert and auction Call the Boone Chamber at 828-264-2225 to register. Free iLASIK Seminar May 10 in Hickory Graystone Eye and Refractive Surgeon, R.E. Trey Oursler, will host a free seminar on Tuesday, May 10th at 6 pm on the lower level of their Hickory office. Graystone Eye is located in the McDonald Crossing business park near the intersection of McDonald Parkway and Tate Boulevard. Participants will learn about vision correction procedures including iLASIK, advanced technology lens replacement options, and KAMRA, a new option that reduces dependence on reading glasses. All participants over the age of 18 will receive a certificate valued at $500 toward either procedure, and be eligible to win a $1000 discount certificate to be given away at the end of the presentation. For further information or to register for this event, call 828-304-6611, or go online at www.graystonelasik.com. CCC&TI News Briefs Watauga and Caldwell: Basic Computer Skills Caldwell Community College and Technical Institutes Department of Continuing Education and Workforce Development will offer the Basic Computer Skills class on both the Caldwell and Watauga Campuses, as well as at the Department of Social Services in Lenoir. On CCC&TIs Watauga Campus in Boone, the class will run from May 17 to June 23 and will be held on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. In Caldwell County, the class will run from May 17 to June 23 and will held on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. at the Caldwell County DSS Office in Lenoir. The class will also be offered from June 7 to July 14 on the Caldwell Campus in Hudson and will meet from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Students will learn basic computer skills with emphasis placed on keyboarding, overall comfort level with computers and using technology in the workplace. Cost of the class is $71 but course fees can be waived for those who qualify. For more information or to register, call 828-726-2242 in Caldwell County or 828-297-3811 in Watauga County or visit www.cccti.edu/coned. Watauga ServSafe Course Caldwell Community College and Technical Institutes Department of Continuing Education and Workforce Development will offer the ServSafe Prep course on the colleges Watauga Campus in Boone. The class will run Monday, July 18 to Thursday, July 21 from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. The cost of the course is $71. Students must also purchase the ServSafe Course Book (6th Edition) for use during the class. This course introduces the basic principles of sanitation and safety relative to the restaurant and hospitality industry. Topics include personal hygiene, sanitation and safety regulations, use and care of equipment the principles of food-borne illness and other related topics. For more information or to register for this course, call 828-297-3811 or visit www.cccti.edu/coned. Watauga Campus Medical Assisting Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute is now taking applications for the Medical Assisting associate degree program for the Fall Semester on the Watauga Campus. Medical Assistants perform administrative, clinical and laboratory procedures. Employment opportunities are available in physicians offices, health maintenance organizations, health departments and hospitals. Course work includes instruction in scheduling appointments, coding and processing insurance accounts, billing, collections, medical transcription, computer operations, assisting with examinations and treatments, performing routine laboratory procedures, electrocardiography, supervised medication administration and ethical/legal issues associated with patient care. Registration for Fall is June 13 to Aug. 4. The Fall Semester begins Aug. 15. For more information on applying for the Medical Assisting program, contact Health Sciences Admissions Coordinator Amy Huffman at 828-726-2710 or call the Watauga Campus at 828-297-2185. Watauga Campus EMT-Basic and EMT-Paramedic Caldwell Community College and Technical Institutes Watauga Campus is now registering for EMT-Basic and EMT-Paramedic courses to train students for jobs in emergency services. For information or to register, contact Reid Roper at 828-726-2628 or email [email protected] Chorus Concert The Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute Chorus will be performing their Spring 2016 Concert on Thursday, May 5 at 12:15 p.m. at St. James Episcopal Church located at 806 College Ave SW in Lenoir. The concert is free and open to the public. Register Now for May 30 Color Run On Memorial Day May 30th 2016, Hospitality House AmeriCorps VISTA project Welcome Home Thriftique will host the Third Annual Mast General Store Memorial Day Color Blast 5K. This 5K Run/Walk will raise funds, awareness, and support for men, women and children experiencing homelessness and poverty in the High Country. The Color Blast 5K will begin at5pm on the Boone Greenway Trail at Clawson-Burnley Park. I really enjoy having a chance to host our third annual Memorial Day Color Blast 5K, says NC Campus Compact AmeriCorps VISTA and Welcome Home Thriftique project manager Ethan Flynn. Since Memorial Day is a school day for our community, we gear this unique event to parents, teens and kids. A color blast is an event that showers runners in an environmentally safe, cornstarch-based colored powder at certain locations along the trail. The main idea is to tie-dye each runners white event t-shirt by the end of the run. The untimed 5K welcomes competitive runners, casual runners, joggers, walkers, people with disabilities, families, and all those who are willing to give back to their community. Sorry, no pets. A guide to the Color Blast is posted online at HospHouse.org and will be included in each registration packet. Participants can expect free yogurt provided by Menchies in Boone, Anna Bananas photo booth with fun props, face painting, music, finish line celebrations and water and fruit provided by Ingles. A Fun Run will be held at 6:30 for kids under 10 to run a lap on the dirt track through clouds of color. The cost is $5 and kids can sign up at the event with parental assistance. Early registration is $25 for adults and $10 for kids under 12. Early registration is online now atwww.HospHosue.org and www.WelcomeHomeThriftique.com. Early registration by May 6thguarantees an event T-shirt. On-site registration will begin at 4pm and t-shirts will be first come first serve. On-site registration will be $30 for adults and $15 for kids under 12. Cash, check, and credit cards will be accepted. Those who pre-register can pick up their packets on May 26th and 27th between 11:00am and 6:00pm or May 28th between the hours of 10:00am and 4:00pm at Welcome Home Thriftique, 182 Boone Heights Drive behind Burger King. Food donation bins for canned goods, boxed goods and dry goods, like coffee, sugar, tea and bread, will be located at the picnic shelters beside the start and finish of the race. Flynn has been organizing the event, and all proceeds will support Welcome Home Thriftiques Foundation For Success, a job skills training program and AmeriCorps initiative of Hospitality House. Welcome Home Thriftique, a four-year cooperative project between Hospitality House, Appalachian State Universitys ACT (Appalachian and the Community Together) program, North Carolina Campus Compact, and AmeriCorps, has been open since July 25, 2014. All items sold in the store have been donated by the community and 100 percent of profits go to support the men, women and children of Hospitality House. Merchandised items include art, furniture, antiques, collectibles, home goods, decor, name brand clothing and the Anna Bananas Overstock Shop. The Mast General Store Memorial Day Color Blast 5K is also sponsored by OP Smiles, Anna Bananas and Menchies of Boone. Event organizers are still welcoming sponsors. For more information, please contact Ethan Flynn at [email protected] or call Welcome Home Thriftique at (828) 355-9703. Welcome Home Thriftique is located at 182 Boone Heights Drive. Store hours areMondayFriday 11am-6pm and Saturday10am-4pm. To learn more go tohttp://www.welcomehomethriftique.com, check out their Facebook pagehttps://www.facebook.com/welcomehomethriftique and follow them on Pinteresthttp://www.pinterest.com/Thriftique182 To learn more about Hospitality House, visit them online at www.HospHouse.org, follow them on Twitter @HospHouseBoone or on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/HospHouse Share this: Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Reddit Pocket The following information is provided by local law enforcement agencies. All suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Compiled by Jessica Isaacs The following were provided by the Watauga County Sheriffs Office. April 12 ARREST: A male suspect, 35, of 300 Bluebird Lane in Boone, was charged with FTA. He was held under a $10,000 secured bond and will appear in court on May 13. April 13 INCIDENT: Calls for service were reported at 140 Barnes Road in Sugar Grove. INCIDENT: Calls for service were reported at 1360 Grady Winkler Road in Boone. INCIDENT: Obtaining property by false pretense was reported at 177 Rolling Hills Drive in Boone. ARREST: A male suspect, 38, of 2004 Groce Meadow Drive in Taylors, South Carolina, was charged with felony magistrates order for fugitive. He was held under a $25,000 secured bond and will appear in court on May 18. ARREST: A male suspect, 58, of 271 Tom Jackson Road in Boone, was charged with felony possession of a firearm by a felon. He was held under a $20,000 secured bond and will appear in court on June 14. ARREST: A female suspect, 43, of 3102 U.S. Highway 421 N in Boone, was charged with FTA. She was held under a $1,099 secured bond and will appear in court on May 17: April 14 INCIDENT: Vandalism was reported at 221 Cool Water Creek in Vilas. ARREST: A male suspect, 52, of 270 I.J. Bingham Place Unit D in Boone, was charged with failure to pay child support. He was held under a $13,987 bond and will appear in court on April 24. ARREST: A male suspect, 62, of 1132 Grady Winkler Road in Boone, was charged with felony possession of methamphetamine, possession of a firearm by felon and misdemeanor simple possession of a schedule VI controlled substance. He was held under a $30,000 secured bond. ARREST: A female suspect, 26, of 11705 Shavenrock Place in Raleigh, was charged with DWI and will appear in court on May 16. ARREST: A female suspect, 40, of 352 Old East King St. in Boone, was charged with school attendance law violation. April 15 INCIDENT: Unattended death was reported at 272 Ridgewood Road in Deep Gap. INCIDENT: Trespassing was reported at 211 Riverwood Lane in Sugar Grove. INCIDENT: Calls for service were reported at 343 Curley Maple Road in Boone. INCIDENT: Possession of a schedule VI controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia were reported at the intersection of Castle Ford and Clay Hodges roads in Boone. April 16 INCIDENT: A runaway was reported at 1571 Little Laurel Road in Boone. INCIDENT: Calls for service were reported at 1033 Seven Oaks Road in Boone. INCIDENT: Flee to elude was reported at N.C. Highway 105 S and Sleepy Hollow in Banner Elk. INCIDENT: All traffic/flee to elude, DWI and assault on LEO were reported at 100 Chestnut Valley Drive in Blowing Rock. INCIDENT: Breaking and entering and larceny were reported at 314 Hardaman Circle in Boone. INCIDENT: Drug violations, possession of a schedule IV controlled substance and DWI were reported on Old East King St. in Boone. INCIDENT: Burglary forcible entry was reported at 319 Linville Creek Road in Vilas. INCIDENT: Calls for service were reported on George Wilson Road in Boone. ARREST: A male suspect, 35, of 244 Devils Den Road in Banner Elk, was charged with flee to elude, NOL and OFA-FTA. He was held under a $16,500 secured bond and will appear in court on May 16. ARREST: A male suspect, 19, of 234 Camp Rock Road in Boone, was charged with felony flee to elude and misdemeanor DWI. He was held under a $10,000 secured bond and will appear in court on June 17. ARREST: A male suspect, 27, of 183 Summer Drive in Boone, was charged with DWI and will appear in court on June 14. April 17 INCIDENT: Possession of meth and DWLR were reported at 2849 Brownwood Road in Deep Gap. ARREST: A female suspect, 30, of 112 Bluebonnet Lane in Boone, was charged with OFA-FTA. She was held under a $500 secured bond and will appear in court on June 14. ARREST: A male suspect, 47, of 1893 Dick Phillips Road in West Jefferson, was charged with felony possession of methamphetamine and misdemeanor DWLR. He was held under a $5,000 secured bond and will appear in court on May 16. April 18 INCIDENT: Calls for service were reported at 1386 Sampson Road in Boone. INCIDENT: Calls for service were reported at 251 Saddle Hills Road in Blowing Rock. INCIDENT: Vandalism was reported at 4717 Castleford Road in Boone. ARREST: A male suspect, 32, of 106 Wade Moretz Road in Deep Gap, was charged with damage to real property and assault on a female and will appear in court on June 3. ARREST: A female suspect, 70, of 691 Sherwood Road in Vilas, was charged with probation violations. She was held under a $1,000 secured bond and will appear in court on May 31. ARREST: A female suspect, 22, of 136 Ivy Drive in Boone, was charged with child support and will appear in court on May 17. Watauga High School students Emma Balbier, Collin Linnville, Andrew Nenow, Yoojin Oh, and Aidan Williams have been chosen to attend Governors School of North Carolina, a highly selective summer program offered to some of the most academically and artistically gifted students from across the state. High schools are limited in how many students they can nominate for the program and less than half of the highly accomplished students that are nominated receive an invitation to attend. We are extremely proud of these students, said Watauga High School Principal Marshall Gasperson. We know they have worked very hard to develop their skills and talents. Their selection reflects the commitment to excellence that we strive to encourage in all of our students, and it also reflects the support they have received from their teachers and families over many years. We congratulate them on this well-deserved honor. Students attending Governors School are nominated and chosen in one of eleven subject areas: art, choral music, dance, English, French, Spanish, instrumental music, mathematics, natural science, social science, and theater. In this years students from Watauga High School, Oh and Williams were selected for instrumental music, Balbier in French, Nenow in Natural Science, and Linnville in Theater. Students concentrate their studies in the subject in which they were selected but also participate in shared courses and activities with students from all subject areas. Governors School is an intellectually demanding program in which no grades or tests are given and no course credit is received. Its courses and activities are designed to stimulate student creativity, encourage students to question basic assumptions, and develop an acceptance of change. The faculty and staff of Governors School include leading teachers, professors, and professionals from across the country. A $500 tuition fee is charged for students attending Governors School. However, Watauga High School has paid the fee for its students each year since tuition was first charged in 2010 and will do so again for 2016. The Governors School of North Carolina is the nations oldest statewide summer residential program for academically gifted high school students. The program runs for approximately five and one-half weeks and usually starts in mid-June. It operates at two locations, a western campus at Salem College in Winston-Salem and an eastern campus at Meredith College in Raleigh. Share this: Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Reddit Pocket Former North Carolina Attorney General and Secretary of State Rufus Edmisten has donated $5,000 to help families pay attendance fees for the Mabel Elementary School Extended Learning Center (afterschool) program, marking the eighth year in a row he has made a substantial donation to support afterschool services for Mabel families. Mabel Principal Mark Hagaman said that Edmisten is a true and generous friend of Mabel School. His support is especially meaningful to us because he started right here in Watauga County and has gone far and achieved much in life. He continues to give back and we are very grateful for his support. We are fortunate to have such an energetic and far-sighted friend of the school community. Edmisten told Hagaman I am very proud of the wonderful work you and your great staff, especially Patricia Sperry, do for worthy kidsYou have set a great example for those who will follow in the education of our most precious resources, our children. Patricia Sperry is the program coordinator for Mabels afterschool program. She has twice been selected as the school systems afterschool Program Coordinator of the Year, the only person to win this honor more than once. Under her leadership, Mabel was the first afterschool program in Watauga County to attain a rated license from the NC Division of Child Development. It achieved a four star license in 2010 and became the first program to attain a five star license the highest possible rating in 2012. In his letter announcing the gift, Edmisten looked back with gratitude to his school days in Watauga County. As a Watauga County native, I appreciate the caring education I received from so many dedicated teachers growing up in Watauga County. Edmisten has proved an excellent role model for using his education in Watauga County as the foundation for success in higher education and a career. He is an honors graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill and completed his law degree at George Washington University. In addition to his generous grants to Mabel, Edmistens Foundation for Good Business also awards funds to help high school students attend college. These donations have assisted students at Watauga High School and at other high schools across North Carolina. In recognition of his generous and longstanding support for students in the Watauga County Schools, the Watauga County Board of Education presented Edmisten with the Education Partnership Award in 2013. Edmisten was the Democratic nominee for governor in 1984 and won national attention as chief legal counsel to U.S. Senator Sam Ervin on the Senate Watergate Committee. In the latter role, he personally served the subpoena for the Watergate tapes to President Richard Nixon, a key development in the investigation that eventually led to Nixons resignation in August of 1974. Edmisten currently lives in Raleigh where he is an attorney in the firm of Edmisten, Webb, and Moore. Share this: Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Reddit Pocket Veterans residing in select WNC counties, 2010-2014 U.S. Census Bureau Buncombe: 19,596 Caldwell: 5,264 Jackson: 2,977 Macon: 3,744 Watauga: 3,085 Wilkes: 4,757 Statewide: 709,471 The N.C. Department of Military and Veterans Affairs (DMVA) and Smoky Mountain MCO (Smoky) public managed health care organization are teaming up on a new mental health initiative for veterans and their families in six western N.C. counties. The program will deliver mental health and addiction treatment services to military-connected families who might otherwise fall through the cracks of the veterans healthcare system. Smoky has committed $340,000 to fund the initiative through June 2017 and plans to make the program permanent. Partnership and collaboration are crucial in supporting veterans who are coming home, said Cornell Wilson, Major Gen. USMC (ret.), secretary of the N.C. Department of Military and Veterans Affairs. The state of North Carolina is stepping up like never before by bringing more local and state-level resources to the fight. We hope this initiative inspires similar partnerships statewide. The program will serve those who may be ineligible for VA healthcare and to fill gaps in TRICARE coverage, the healthcare program for uniformed service members. It will provide care and treatment to veterans who have received other than honorable or dishonorable discharges due to offenses and behaviors that can be linked to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Unfortunately, these veterans are typically ineligible for certain benefits and services and face obstacles in receiving treatment for mental health issues and addiction. Six counties in western North Carolina with high veteran populations Buncombe, Caldwell, Jackson, Macon, Watauga and Wilkes will participate. Local county veterans service officers will partner with Smoky to identify approximately 60 veterans and their families, who will receive clinical assessments and mental health and substance use outpatient therapy. This initiative will also train veterans service officers in the Mental Health First Aid program, which will help them respond effectively to veterans in crisis and assist veterans who are developing mental health issues, said Rhonda Cox, Smokys senior director of care coordination. Additionally, we will provide housing assistance to low-income veterans and Housing First training to federal Veterans Affairs staff to promote effective strategies to tackle homelessness. About Smoky Mountain MCO Smoky Mountain MCO manages public funds for mental health, substance use disorder and intellectual/ developmental disability services in Alexander, Alleghany, Ashe, Avery, Buncombe, Caldwell, Cherokee, Clay, Graham, Haywood, Henderson, Jackson, Macon, Madison, McDowell, Mitchell, Polk, Rutherford, Swain, Transylvania, Watauga, Wilkes and Yancey counties in North Carolina. Access to services is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at 1-800-849-6127. Visit us atwww.smokymountaincenter.com Share this: Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Reddit Pocket 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. When it comes to weight loss, salmon probably isnt the first food you think of. Many people eat The report, Fairness for Children, examined inequalities in child well-being in a total of 41 member states of the European Union and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) with a particular focus on the gap between children at the bottom and those in the middle. Finland is the second fairest country in the developed world for children, suggests a report published by Unicef . Denmark ranked as the fairest country in the world for children, while Finland shared second place with Norway and Switzerland. Finland, Norway and Switzerland share second place in the overall league table. They rank in the top third in each domain, except education, states Unicef. Israel and Turkey rank lowest in the overall league table. They have comparatively high bottom-end inequality in each of the four domains of child well-being for which they have valid data. Six countries were excluded from the overall league table due to two or more missing indicators. Finland came in third behind Norway and Iceland in terms of income inequality and fared well also in educational inequality for having the third smallest proportion, after Estonia and South Korea, of 15-year-olds falling behind at school. The country performed relatively well also in the remaining two domains, ranking seventh in terms of health inequality and eleventh in terms of life satisfaction inequalities. Aleksi Teivainen HT Photo: Aleksi Tuomola Lehtikuva Local man sent to prison for elaborate pot growing operation Related Stories A federal judge sentenced a 48-year-old Henderson County marijuana grower to 4 years in prison on Thursday after his conviction on charges that he operated a pot farm with high-tech lighting, air filtration and hydration systems. U.S. District Judge Martin Reidinger handed down the sentence for Gary Maxwell Lee, of Hendersonville. Jill Westmoreland Rose, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina, announced the sentence. Lee was also ordered to remain under court supervision for three years after his release from prison. Rose was joined in the announcement by Daniel R. Salter, Special Agent in Charge of the Atlanta Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which oversees the Charlotte District Office; Janie Sutton, Acting Director of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation; and Sheriff Charles S. McDonald of the Henderson County Sheriffs Office. According to filed court documents and sentencing hearing, in May 2015 law enforcement began their investigation into Lee, after receiving information that he was operating an extensive indoor marijuana growing operation behind his home on Stardust Lane off Evans Road in southern Henderson County. Investigators say Lee ran the marijuana grow house from two structures located next to the main home owned by Lee. Court records indicate that as part of the investigation law enforcement searched Lees house and the two structures located on the property, seizing 66 marijuana plants, 10.4 pounds of marijuana in various stages of drying and processing, and $4,245 in cash. One of the structures was used as a nursery for the younger plants, whereas the larger, more mature plants were stored in the second structure. Lee had set up in the structures extensive lighting, air filtration, and hydration systems to assist in the growth of the plants. Law enforcement also seized numerous firearms, including shotguns and semi-automatic rifles, as well as twelve ammo cans containing thousands of rounds of ammunition, authorities said. According to court records, Lee took steps to avoid detection of his marijuana grow operation by law enforcement, including taking his trash to the dump or burning it, and using carbon filters to cut down on the odor emanating from the grow. Court records show that Lee has a previous conviction in Florida related to the manufacture of marijuana. Lee pleaded guilty in December 2015 to manufacturing marijuana and being a felon in possession of firearms. He is currently in federal custody and will be transferred to custody of the Bureau of Prisons upon designation of a federal facility. Federal sentences are served without the possibility of parole. DEA, SBI, and the Henderson County Sheriffs Office investigated the case. Assistant United States Attorney Thomas Kent of the U.S. Attorneys Office in Asheville handled the prosecution. 5) The group walk away, leaving the victim sprawled on the ground 3) Pushed back against the wall, vulnerable victim is then punched several times by the burly man 4) The man's attacker launches a series of brutal kicks as a woman tries to stop the attack These shocking images show three feral thugs beating and robbing a young man who suffers from a form of autism in a disgusting daylight attack. The victim, who is aged in his 20s, suffered a broken nose and two black eyes in the sickening robbery in which his mobile phone was snatched. Gardai have yet to make arrests in the case but have identified three suspects, a man in his 30s and two women, one also in her 30s and another aged 18. The CCTV images which have been exclusively obtained by the Herald show the attack that happened at Bray Dart station at 6pm on Monday, April 4. The victims father last night told the Herald that his son normally leaves the train with the crowd, but he was trying to help a man in a wheelchair get off and was set upon as he left the station alone. The disturbing CCTV images show the young victim being approached by a male who proceeds to forcefully put his right hand into the vulnerable mans pocket. The cowardly gang then gather around the young man, who tries to flee. Pleading A young woman attempts to prevent the male thug from attacking the victim, but he repeatedly strikes him in the face with vicious blows. He then launches a full force kick to the victims face while he is on his knees pleading not to be hit any more. As the shocked victim leans against a wall covering his face, a female member of the gang begins to search his pockets, and ultimately his mobile phone is stolen. It has not been recovered. It can also be clearly seen that four members of the public walk by without offering any help to the vulnerable victim. The victim was attended to by paramedics at the scene of the assault. Speaking from their home in Wicklow, the victims worried father said his son has been left severely shaken by the unprovoked incident. In an emotional interview, he said he has been going on the train with his son because he will no longer travel on his own. Hes autistic, a timid lad and would be nervous, said the man, who wished to remain anonymous to protect his sons identity. Hes kind of always been a bit bullied and had a tough time when he was growing-up. He was always brought up to do the right thing when travelling, move up to the front of the train. He and another man were trying to help the man in the wheelchair on the platform by getting attention from some staff. That meant that he was last to leave the station. When he was leaving the station he went out the laneway. It was at that moment that the lowlife attackers set upon him. The male suspect is originally from south Dublin but is now living in Bray. He is known to gardai for involvement in drugs and violent street crime. The older of the two females lives in the Shankill area. The teenage female is believed to live in Bray. All three are known to be travelling regularly along the Dart line between Donabate and Bray. The victims family have now called on the new Government and Irish Rail to reconsider the layout of the laneway that passengers use to enter and exit the platform. The young mans anxious father said he would like to see extra security on trains and for the laneway to be rebuilt. Weve been talking to CIE and getting on to them about opening up that laneway because its a concrete wall and you cant see whats happening around you, he said. We want a half-wall with a railing. We just want something done after this. If the politicians and the public transport operators want people to use these facilities, they should be safe. They should make these facilities safe for people to travel on. There doesnt seem to be much security I dont see security like there used to be. A psychologist who specialises in autism has warned that ruthless thugs can easily spot vulnerabilities in people. Arlene Naughton said such a horrific attack could have a severe impact on somebody with autism. Having somebody attack you for absolutely no reason is going to be extremely difficult to comprehend, she said. A drug smuggler, who fraudulently claimed almost 30,000 in benefits for three years when he was living in Lanzarote, has been given a chance to avoid a jail sentence. Gary Mulvany (37), who now resides at an apartment in Summerhill, in Dublin 1, has been convicted of benefit fraud in a prosecution brought by the Department of Social Protection. The offence can result in a fine of up to 2,500 and/or a six-month sentence. Dublin District Court heard he failed to tell the social welfare authorities that from July 2008 until May 2011 he was not living in the country while he continued claiming disability allowance. Unlawfully Judge John O'Neill was told his fraud came to light after Mulvany was stopped as he stepped off a flight at Knock Airport. Customs officers carried out a search and recovered drugs, which resulted in him getting a three-year suspended sentence at Castlebar Circuit Court. As a consequence of that arrest social welfare authorities became aware of his time in Lanzarote, said prosecution solicitor Joseph Maguire. The court heard he unlawfully received 29,520, has repaid 3,948, leaving 25,572 outstanding. Some 28 a week is now being deducted from his disability allowance to pay back the social welfare authorities and, at the current rate, it will take 17 years to pay the amount in fulll. Defence solicitor Brian Keenan asked the court to note that Mulvany has not come to further adverse attention and that a positive probation report had been furnished to the court. Mr Keenan said his client has turned his life around. Judge John O'Neill noted that Mulvany had engaged with the Probation Service. He adjourned the case until July for an updated report on the defendant's suitability for a community service order. At an earlier stage the judge, who was furnished with pre-sentence reports on the accused, said Mulvany had a childhood "that no youngster should have gone through". Judge O'Neill was also told the 37-year-old moved to the Spanish island and "did not realise he should have notified the department". A garda told a court that the accused said 'I apologise' after he was charged Stock photo: www.jupiterimages.com A Dublin man has appeared in court charged with drugs offences following the seizure of more than 200,000 worth of cannabis. John Barry (37) was allegedly found with the cannabis following a planned search by the Tallaght District Drugs Unit. A garda told a court that Mr Barry said I apologise after he was charged. Judge Anthony Halpin remanded Mr Barry on bail to a date in June for DPPs directions on the charges after gardai said they had no objections to bail. The accused, with an address at Russell Downs in Tallaght, appeared before Dublin District Court charged with possession of cannabis herb as well as having the drug for sale or supply. The estimated value of the cannabis, pending analysis, is 220,000. The drugs were allegedly found following a search of an address at Russell Downs in Tallaght on Tuesday. Garda Stephen Coller said Mr Barry was charged, was handed a true copy of the charge sheets and in reply, after caution, he said I apologise. The garda said that he had no objection to bail, subject to a number of conditions. Judge Halpin remanded Mr Brady on bail in his own bond of 200, and ordered him to sign on twice a week at Tallaght Garda Station. He must also reside at an agreed address and notify gardai if he plans to travel outside the jurisdiction. Concerns were raised about the levels of chlorine in the water Three departments in Dublin's Temple Street Children's Hospital were without drinking water after elevated chlorine levels were found in its supply. Chlorine is used to disinfect drinking water and cuts water-borne diseases - but there are concerns about its potential side-effects at high levels. Yesterday, the affected areas of the hospital were relying on bottled water. A spokeswoman for the hospital said it was experiencing some issues with the water supply. "As a precaution, staff have been advised not to use the water from the main supplies for human consumption until further notice. Clinical "The hospital can confirm that following an inspection carried out by its water management provider that elevated chlorine levels have been found in one main water supply to the hospital." The spokeswoman said it did not affect their ability to serve meals to its young patients, staff and visitors. "The hospital can confirm that the food production areas are reading normally. "Bottled water has been made available for use in clinical areas." She added that Irish Water and Dublin City Council were working in conjunction with Temple Street Hospital to resolve the issue. A shop worker has been praised after she snatched a gun from masked raiders attempting to rob a post office. The woman, a German national, was working in Dunbar's shop and Post Office in Courtown, Co Wexford at 4.20pm on Tuesday when two men burst in brandishing what appeared to be a firearm. Owner Declan Dunbar said the thieves demanded money but his brave employee refused to open the cash register. "They were wearing woolly hats pulled down and black jackets zipped up so you could only see their eyes and noses," he said. "They demanded cash, they said 'give us the f**king money, give us the f**king money now'. But this woman just kept saying 'I have no key, I have no key'. "Then there was a shemozzle and she pulled the gun off them. The lads were so shocked that this tiny woman had taken the gun from them that they just turned on their heels and ran. "She is a hero. I don't know if I would have been quite so brave," he added. Mr Dunbar called 999 and gardai were on the scene in less than three minutes. Officers arrested one man fleeing the scene. A second man was arrested after he tripped and fell on the footpath. The men, one in his late teens and the other in his 20s, were detained under Section 30 of The Offences Against the State Act, 1939 at Enniscorthy Garda Station. Gardai have recovered the weapon and it is now undergoing ballistics tests. Mr Dunbar said that this is the third time his store has been targeted in the last two years. There was an armed robbery at the store two years ago and earlier this year windows were broken by raiders attempting to gain entry. "You can't let these things deter you. You can't give in to these scumbags. Life is tough sometimes," he said. The event, organized and run by agriculture students at the school, gave the young learners from Rhea Valley Elementary and St. John Lutheran Church Pre-School in Abingdon the opportunity to see what farming is about while getting up close and personal with more than a dozen farm animals. The high school agriculture students prepared a five-minute presentation for each of the 15 commodities they presented during morning and afternoon sessions. The children visited each booth on a rotation basis, allowing them to ask questions and pet a variety of animals, including calves, horses, rabbits, lambs, pigs, goats, chickens, and turkeys. The students also learned about grains, soil, water quality, and plant life. The young students visited the schools aquaculture facility on campus where the agriculture students raise tilapia throughout the year. Mandy Fletcher, conservation education specialist from the Holston River Soil & Conservation District, told students about the importance of preserving natural resources on the farm. The basic mission of the event is to teach elementary students about food sources where their food comes from, and to introduce them to animals raised on a farm, said Sarah Scyphers, agriculture teacher at Holston High School. Its really my favorite day of the entire year. I love to see the high school students use a culmination of things theyve learned in class during the year to teach the elementary students. My students fight for the privilege to participate, and its such a great way for them to teach others about agriculture, she said. Its just a really fun day. The program also serves as a learning experience for the high school students who organized the event. Students Adriennea Olinger and Katie Price, Food for America officers for the event, were responsible for organizing the animal exhibits. Some of the animals were on loan from the agriculture students while others live in a newly-constructed barn on the school campus that serves as a teaching tool for the agriculture students. Freshmen and sophomore agriculture students served as group leaders, directing the children to each station. BRISTOL, Tenn. Bristol Tennessee Essential Services CEO Mike Browder apologized to the city-owned utilitys board Wednesday for not keeping members as informed as he should concerning his work with a private vendor. Its always been my intention for the board to have all the information they want, Browder said. I have really good 20/20 hindsight I dont want the board or the City Council to have rough points because of the way it appears of what we did or didnt do. It was the first meeting of the board since a Tennessee comptrollers report released April 13 said Browder did not disclose to the board that he has co-ownership of a patent for a water heater load management switch made by Carina Technologies. The comptrollers office called it a conflict of interest and said Browder used $6.8 million in public money to develop and manufacture the device and prop up a financially struggling company. BTES responded last week that the report presents no actual evidence of any impropriety or improper benefit to Browder, who has also said he never profited from the switch. The load management switch is a box installed between the breaker box and the water heater that allows BTES to turn the water heater off during certain times of the day, month or year, when electricity prices are increasing. The use of the new technology helps reduce generation costs and the amount of capacity needed to generate power and helps keep electric rates lower, Browder said. Since the 1970s, BTES has had a water heater program with the Tennessee Valley Authority that Browder said is in danger of shutting down completely in the next two years. We started to put a new technology in place because if we wouldnt have done that, we wouldve had over 16,000 customers that we wouldnt be able to maintain their water heaters for, he said. Thats where Carina came into play they have the best equipment to make the water heater program work for our customers. We needed to have the device or lose the money we had invested in it. Browder said he helped to develop the technology, kept his name on the patent, and prepaid the company more than $2 million dollars for the completed switch. He also directed that BTES pay for the parts to build the switch. He added that his plan saves more than $1 million a year. Board member Michelle Denise, also a city councilwoman, asked Browder several questions, including about his decision to use public and ratepayer funds to enter into what she called a risky venture. When they [Carina] lost their line of credit and things started getting tighter for them we covered that with the agreements we had, Browder said. In the beginning, they werent a risk we were in the process of installing 5,000 units that were way better than anything in the industry and still are so we wanted to continue. When they became a risk, we put a lot of guarantees into place so we could manage all the money and still have the product we needed for our customers. Browder said he doesnt regret the venture but he would not want to go through all the crap hes been through again. But you all pay me to do a job, he said. And I felt like I was doing the best job I could do and I felt like it was a really good job. I wished I had kept the board better informed. But for all that we did for our customers Im glad we did it and I think 20 years from now well be glad we did it. After the meeting, board Chairman Bryan Boyd said he doesnt think much will result from the comptrollers report. There was a lot of accusation and innuendo in the comptrollers report, he said. I dont think theres much substance there. The investigator used the patent for the basis of the accusations of conflict of interest but he [Mike Browder] reported what he was supposed to he didnt make money on it, hasnt and isnt going to. He is also going to take his name off the patent and give his part of the ownership of the switch to BTES. Denise said she was comfortable with the outcome of the meeting and added that because a weakness in the organization was revealed the board can do a better job moving forward. Id like to have more transparency and be more aware of the business dealings behind the scenes, she said. The money is both public and ratepayer funds so we need to be especially on guard and careful with our citizens money. Last week, Sullivan County District Attorney General Barry Staubus said he had received the state comptrollers report and BTES answer and would review it and determine how to move forward. No charges have been filed. Harper's dramatic HR sends Phillies to first World Series since 2009 The reigning NL MVP hit a go-ahead home run in the bottom of the eighth inning to give the Phillies a 4-3 win over the Padres Nothing goes right for Edgewood in long trip to East Central NEWTON Prosecutors called two of the first responders in the 2011 triple murder case to testify before Superior Court Judge Nathaniel J. Poovey on Wednesday. The defendant in the case is Everette Porshau Hewitt, 37, of Conover. Hewitt is charged with three felony counts of first-degree murder, one felony count of attempted murder, one felony count of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury, one felony count of first-degree burglary, and one felony count of robbery with a dangerous weapon. Deputy Eric Miller testified that he arrived at the Oak Knoll Mobile Home Park in Conover before 5 a.m. on March 16, 2011. After arriving at the mobile home, he encountered Joseph Burke. Miller said he believed Burke to be in shock and possibly intoxicated. Burke also appeared to have a wound to his neck. Along with another deputy, Miller secured the trailer. Once inside, Miller found three unresponsive persons. He said two, Wade Sigmon and Susan Blevins, appeared dead and a third, Connie Miller, was still alive. Prior to the arrival of EMS, Miller testified that he followed procedure and photographed the scene. EMT Chad Lackey testified on Wednesday morning to his involvement. Lackey was, and still is, the night shift supervisor for Catawba County EMS. During the response to this particular case, Lackey led the EMTs on the scene. We are exposed to blood every day, but this was a significant amount of blood, Lackey said. Lackey described how blood got onto his and his teams clothes. He also referred several times to literal puddles of blood in the home. Lackey and the other EMTs triaged and determined that only Connie Miller was a viable patient. Lackey testified that he performed quick pulse checks on Sigmon and Blevins, and believed them to be deceased. Lackey and his team removed Connie Miller from the trailer on a backboard. Connie Miller later died from gunshot wounds. HICKORY Hickory citizen Larry Pope, a well-known community activist, died Wednesday. He was 65. Fellow community activist and retiree Billy Sudderth said he remembers Pope as a man who worked tirelessly to improve the quality of life and promoting equality for African-Americans. He went above and beyond, Sudderth said. Larry was an African-American lawyer, a civil rights activist, a human rights activist and on top of that, from what I remember, a dang good policeman. Sudderth, who co-founded Unifour Organizing Coalition with Pope, said he worked on a multitude of civil rights projects with Pope from the moment he moved back to Hickory from Houston after retiring from his 35-year teaching career in 2000. Whether it was through his membership with the Hickory Chapter of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Citizens for Equity in Government or as co-founder of Unifour Organizing Coalition, Sudderth called Pope the spokesman for many of the community activism projects they worked on together. He was the outspoken leader for many of the community efforts for both Unifour and as a member of NAACP (Hickory Chapter), Sudderth said. He was the dude with the courage to make demands on what he thought was right. Sudderth added that Pope wasnt just passionate about improving black lives in Hickory. He said anything that had to do with promoting fairness in democracy and representation, Pope went all-in on speaking for those causes. White or (other) races, he cared about everybody, Sudderth said. Retiree Bruce Meisner was a member of the Hickory City Council for about 32 years from 1983 to 2015. While Meisner remembers Pope as very opinionated and stubborn, during the times they had discussions at council meetings, one thing he said he respected was that Pope stuck to his guns and was consistent in standing up for what he felt was right to him. He also said when city council issues werent involved, Pope had a likeable personality. I would see him at the post office, and wed greet each other, Meisner said. He was a very friendly man. Hickory City Councilman Hank Guess said he worked with Pope when the two were with the Hickory Police Department during the late-1970s. Guess said he and Pope became friends and remembers going over to each others houses to chat or have dinner. Like Meisner, Guess recalls all the times Pope would go on to have disagreements with city council. But Guess also said he ultimately respected Popes passion for promoting human rights. He said despite the series of differences in opinion, both he and Popes friendship never really wavered. I will always remember Larry, Guess said. At the end, he had a purpose and was a compassionate person. This domain has expired. If you owned this domain, contact your domain registration service provider for further assistance. If you need help identifying your provider, visit https://www.tucowsdomains.com/ On Wednesday, a few things were explained when the horse Shaktiman died. And none of it had to do with the gangrene the animal died of. No matter how much one swears by the Vedas, and how long one holds forth on nationalism, the point of respect for life, animal or human, is missing from the grand narrative of this country. Shaktiman was a horse on duty it was from the Uttarakhand mounted police. The Opposition in the state, BJP, had staged a rally in protest against corruption of the Congress-government in power on March 14. Under the leadership of MLA Ganesh Joshi, party men beat the horse, which backed away till one of its hind legs got caught in the gap in between a railing. The beating continued. The leg was broken. They had to amputate the limb, and replace it with a prosthetic prop. The horse never recovered. Ganesh Joshi expressed regret, but his party blamed the Congress government for the animals death as it was not given adequate care. Read more | Cut my leg if found guilty, says BJP MLA Joshi after Shaktiman dies You will note that already the debate has deteriorated. Whats being scored are brownies, that abiding passion of a whole noise-loving people. What does it say of India? It explains the hadal depth of our political discourse. In any civilised country, say, Norway or Finland, the man responsible for abusing an animal would not continue to hold a public office. Joshi is still a MLA. Ironically, the sacrifice of the horse is in keeping with the Vedic tradition. So in that respect, Hindu India has been faithful to its customs. Read more | Police horse Shaktiman shows sign of slow recovery The first horse mythical to some, historical to many, depending on how we see myth as history or vice versa rose from the bottom of the sea. Its colour was white, just as Shaktimans. Its name was Uchchaihshravas. Indra took it with him to his abode in the heavens, and later gave it to man after cutting off its wings to ensure it does not fly away. Indra probably had a rough idea of the nature of the people to whom he gave the animal to. Indra clips the horses wings; down the ages, we graduate into breaking its legs. Both acts mean the same thing: You take from the animal the quality it is purposed for speed and freedom. Its not just Shaktiman. As a people we must ask ourselves when will we move up to a society that respects life. Worshipping the cow is a selective measure. A horse is as sacred as a cow. Or a pig. Or a dog. Or a human. This writer is against killing of animals. The real reason for raising questions on beef consumption is not the Vedas, it is that large mammals have a well-developed central nervous system and the pain they suffer is comparable to that of humans. But cow worshippers are unable to articulate this argument because it hasnt struck them. Its a measure of their sensitivity. Or the lack of it. Shaktimans death reduces the livestock population of Indian by just one. But according to the census figures, there has been a 24% drop (6.25 lakh) in Indias livestock population from 1992, recorded at 8.17 lakh. The large number of cattle left to die of starvation in the drought stricken hinterlands is a partial explanation for this state of affairs. The real explanation perhaps lies closer to the bone. We are just a cruel people. For instance, the state of our orphanages and the homes of the poor run both by the government and private individuals represent horrid tales of callousness. According to one study, close to 18 million children wander the Indian streets, in a state not much better than unclaimed cattle. It would be revealing to know how many related questions and actionable answers have been raised in Parliament over the years. A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse, says Richard the Third in the battlefield. That line from Shakespeare might well be written as an epitaph for Shaktiman, and the country that clipped first its wings, and then broke its legs. The writer is a senior journalist and author. The views expressed here are personal. Tomorrow is a day when many people in India and around the world will be thinking about the Earth and our environment. For many Catholics, people of all faiths and none, April 22 is international Earth Day. It is also the day when heads of state and government representatives gather in New York to renew their vows to the Paris Agreement, which they signed last December as a pledge to end the fossil fuel era. This should be a day to celebrate the world; however, the current state of our planet means we must rather bemoan its condition and act to rectify them. Read | Earths internal heat driving Greenlands ice to melt Almost a year on from the Popes Encyclical, Laudato Si, which I invite everyone to read, how much has the world and India changed? Pope Francis wrote that, due to pollution and climate change, our home is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth. Step outside in India, and often you will be breathing some of the dirtiest city air on the planet. Talk a walk through our towns and villages, and you will see the foulness of our rivers. Of course, there are reasons for optimism. The Paris Agreement on climate change has been signed. The governments ambitious targets for renewable energy sources such as solar and wind are noble, and worldwide renewable energy investments are increasing at an astonishing rate. With the cost of solar energy plummeting, the situation can only get better. And Delhi has recently trialed its car pollution-reduction scheme to great success. Read | COP21 agreement: All you need to know about Paris climate change deal This is simply not enough, however. A recent report stated that India has the worlds highest number of people without access to clean water a staggering 76 million. Droughts are currently crippling several Indian states. Six of the worlds ten worst polluted cities are Indian their citizens are breathing air thats up to 15 times dirtier than what is considered healthy. Immorally, it is of course the poor who have contributed least to these problems that are worst impacted. For their sakes, the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, coupled with unabated and unplanned urbanisation, must cease soon as possible. Twenty-one countries have already proven that it is possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while keeping the economy growing India could be among them, but is not. Read | Paris climate deal: What the agreement means for India and the world That is why, on April 18th, together with over 260 other faith leaders, I signed a declaration calling on heads of state to implement the Paris Agreement as soon as possible, and urging the swift phase-out of fossil fuel subsidies as part of a transition to using 100% renewable energy by 2050. Faith communities are already working hard to alleviate many of the worlds problems, but we can do even more by reducing emissions in homes, workplaces and centres of worship, and to divest from fossil fuels and invest in renewable sources of energy. Together, people of all faiths and none, let us therefore strive to make this April 22nd a reminder of how humanity is abusing our planet, a gift from God. Cardinal Oswald Gracias is Archbishop of Bombay The views expressed are personal Indias Middle East policy is now entering interesting times. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swarajs visit to Tehran this week days after Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit to Saudi Arabia is an indication that New Delhi is serious about its multi-vector policy towards the region. In recent days, New Delhi has moved ahead on a number of initiatives with Iran. Not only has India finalized the draft Chabahar Agreement also known as the International Transport and Transit Corridor Agreement with Afghanistan and Iran but a preliminary agreement on developing Farzad B gas field has also been accomplished during the recent visit by Indian Minister for State for Petroleum and Natural Resources Dharmendra Pradhan. All of these projects have been languishing for quite some time now much to Tehrans consternation. India and Iran have been talking about Chabahar since 2002 while the initial agreement for exploration and development of Farzad B gas field was signed with a consortium of three Indian state companies in 2000. During his recent visit to Iran, Pradhan offered to invest up to $20 billion in oil, petrochemicals and fertiliser projects in joint ventures with Iran if Tehran provides land and gas at concessional rates. He also expressed an interest in setting up an LNG plant and a gas cracker unit at Chabahar. The official lifting of western sanctions against Iran in January 2016 has expanded the scope of Indo-Iranian engagement significantly and India is trying to recalibrate its Iran policy. Irans crude oil exports to India are now three times higher compared to last year. Read | Modi in Saudi Arabia: What to expect, why this hype and what about Iran? New Delhi has signed an air services agreement with Iran enhancing the number of flights between the two nations and allowing each others airlines to operate to additional destinations. The two sides have also inked a memorandum of understanding that is aimed at increasing bilateral trade to $30 billion from $15 billion. Plans are afoot for greater maritime cooperation, and Iran has already joined the Indian Navys annual initiative, the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium, which provides a forum for the navies of the Indian Ocean littoral states to engage with each other. After years of dilly-dallying by the United Progressive Alliance government, the Narendra Modi government decided last year to invest $85.21 million in developing the strategically important Chabahar port in Iran, allowing India to circumvent Pakistan and open up a route to landlocked Afghanistan. The port, located 72km west of Pakistans Gwadar port, holds immense strategic and economic significance for India. It is already connected to the city of Zaranj in Afghanistans south-western province of Nimruz and can serve as Indias entry point to Afghanistan, Central Asia and beyond. New Delhi and Tehran both view Chabahar as critical to developing connectivity with Kabul and as a geopolitical lever vis-a-vis Pakistan. This is a high-priority issue for the Modi government. New Delhis ability to manoeuvre in Tehran had been limited because of Irans inability to find a workable solution with the West on its nuclear ambitions. As a Shia-Sunni divide fractures West Asia and as American outreach to Iran begins to reshape the regions strategic environment, Indian diplomacy will be forced to navigate these tricky waters with diplomatic finesse. Read | India should recalibrate ties with West Asian powers The certainties of the past with which New Delhi has lived so far are coming to an end and a new uncertain landscape will challenge Indian foreign policy in the coming years. New Delhi will have to move away from the ideological trappings of the past where domestic political imperatives continue to constrain Indias options. The geopolitics of the Middle East is always a difficult one to traverse, even for great powers, as the US has found to its considerable cost. Today, the Obama Administration is desperately trying to reduce its equities in a region that has been in perpetual turmoil, partly due to external interference and partly due to internal contradictions. This has led to an even greater regional turmoil in the process. Enter China in an attempt to gingerly probe its ability shape a new regional order. Chinese President XI Jinpings visit to Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia earlier this year was aimed at gaining greater political and economic salience in a region where it has been reluctant to get involved so far. But as the balance of power in the region unravels, new equations are emerging and older paradigms are no longer sufficient to engage the region. Indian Prime Ministers high-profile visits to the UAE and Saudi Arabia have been aimed at isolating Pakistan and enhancing New Delhis strategic space in the region. Now the government should push for a substantive reorientation in Indo-Iranian ties. A thaw in US-Iran relations, heralded by the new nuclear understanding between the two, should alleviate some of Indian concerns, allowing it to push forth with a more purposeful regional engagement. Harsh V Pant is professor of international relations at Kings College London. The views expressed are personal Read | India-Saudi Arabia join hands to fight terror as Modi wraps up visit Many school textbooks of the 1950s referred to the Himalayas as a wall. This metaphor reflected both the state of common knowledge about the Himalayan world at the time and popular indifference to the region. The situation suddenly changed in 1959, when the Dalai Lama, then a young man of 24, escaped from Lhasa and sought refuge in India. Thousands of Tibetans followed him and the influx continued for decades. Chinas steadfast disapproval of Indias stand and role matched the Dalai Lamas resolve to maintain a government-in-exile to serve his people. Five years ago, he decided to hand over the task of active governance to an elected head, the Sikyong or the prime minister. Last month, the Tibetan community in exile participated in this election for a second time, retaining the incumbent. The election process aroused worldwide interest, and some criticism too as one might expect in our era of social media, which permits every single image and comment to gain significance by going viral. The Tibetan presence in India has made a deep impact on our perception of the Himalaya region and its relationship with us. From being a wall that only an adventurer scholar like Rahul Sankrityayana could penetrate, the region has become a resource, both for economics and imagination. His commitment and energy enabled him to transport thousands of Buddhist manuscripts into India, saving them from the fury that the Cultural Revolution had released in China. A great Hindi writer and scholar of history and ancient languages, Sankrityayana was a Marxist who believed in freedom to seek the truth. The manuscripts he salvaged are now serving as a precious resource for research at the Tibetan University in Sarnath, Varanasi. This institution is one of the many academic enterprises that the Tibetan government in exile has successfully nourished despite the countless constraints under which it works. READ: Why the Dalai Lama may be Indias noblest resident No matter which area of public policy we look at, the Tibetan administration has pursued an agenda of community welfare with remarkable clarity. The financial resources available are limited to the small tax members of the community pay, in addition to the grants received from donors. The Tibetans have set an example of frugal, efficient use of money without a hint of corruption. Their schools in the recent past initiated a major project to improve pedagogic practices in key areas such as reading. A long-term project to enable nuns to achieve the highest levels of education in Buddhist philosophy has been pursued at the Dolma Ling nunnery in Dharmsala. The first batch of nuns, who have completed a 17-year course in Buddhist philosophy, will receive the Geshema degree, i.e. a doctorate, later this year. This will mark a new era in the history of Buddhism. The vocational education programme at Norbulingka Institute is one of the best I have seen anywhere in the area of heritage crafts. In health, the administration has revived the ancient Tibetan medical system, making its curative powers available to the wider public within India and in several other countries. One could go on and on, because the list is long and its contents largely unsung and, therefore, unknown in our age of loud-mouthed propaganda. READ: China signals policy shift on Dalai Lama It goes without saying that the Dalai Lamas presence in India as the leader of the community provides an explanation for the coherent and purposeful life it has led for over half a century without frustration. His vision of non-violent struggle for dignity and justice forms a key factor of the positive side of the Tibetan story. Sadly, China does not agree and uses an exclusively nationalist political frame to view the Dalai Lamas work. As a unique story of our times, the Tibetan refusal to dissolve and merge will undoubtedly unfold further. Those who see it in purely political terms, nationally or internationally, miss the deeper ripples it has caused. Religion is a major site of conflict in the world today, and the Dalai Lama has gently reduced the pitch and volume of religious debates. His personal scholarship permits us to separate the Buddha from Buddhism. This is a pedagogic revolution. One can now learn from a great teacher who lived more than two millennia ago without getting stuck in the doctrinaire debates that virtually shrouded his method of analysing the problems of life. China is currently rediscovering Confucius; if it can control its political instincts, it can rediscover the Buddha too by paying attention to the Dalai Lamas scholarly work. READ: Voice of sanity: Why the Tibetan cause is a deeper search for self This may not be such a fantasy as it looks, for every nation today needs a larger perspective to contemplate the problems it is facing. As a stateless leader and thinker, the Dalai Lama stretches the prevailing notions of citizenship. I am not referring to the schlock of global citizenship, but rather to the gap that has developed between the idea of a human being and a citizen. The French philosopher Rousseau had noted the likelihood of this gap growing with the spread of education under the states control. We can see in almost any corner of the world, including ours, how major a contribution education makes to the nourishment of general cussedness and indifference to the common good. The small presence of the Tibetan people in India, held together by a splendid teacher, has demonstrated that collective life can be sustained without contest and strife. It is not merely patience and extreme parsimony that the Tibetans have practised amidst us; they have also practised dignity without power. It has been a strange phenomenon to witness. It can offer unexpected insights if we, and other nations including those in our neighbourhood agree to study it with interest and humility. Krishna Kumar is professor of education at Delhi University and former director NCERT The views expressed are personal Adman Bugs Bhargava Krishna created the famous line: Taste the thunder. He is also the voice of King Louie in the Jungle Book. His moving-to-Mumbai-story is one you must know We all have our moving to Mumbai stories. If youve done it in your youth, chances are, cramped PGs and overpriced, damp rooms feature prominently. They are the stuff of books. Which, well write some day, when we are able to take a break from a life of Churchgate Fast and slow traffic. Actor and adman Bugs Bhargava Krishna moved from Bangalore to Mumbai in the early 80s. He was 19. He packed his bags and boarded a train, with Rs 500 in his pocket, on a shaky job offer from an ad agency. Naturally, he too has a story to tell. It features sleeping on pavements, and pretending to be a cook in his cousins PG. He tells it with a smile, and a sense of pride. Like any good discovering Mumbai story, it is nightmare-turned-nostalgia. My cousin was sharing a room with two other boys. The landlord had told him no one else was allowed. So, every time the landlord would visit, I would rush into the kitchen and pretend to be the cook. When this could no longer go on, he resorted to briefly sleeping outside an eatery in Juhu, and then finding a room at the YMCA. The rent per person was Rs 350. But I was paying double because they didnt have a person I could share the room with. ALSO READ: Beauty and the Beast returns for season 2: All you need to know Bugs who? At 55, Bhargava has come a long way. He walks to the Indigo Deli on Pali Hill for our meeting. I live down the road, he says. Bhargava has lent his voice to the character of King Louie in the Hindi version of the Jungle Book In the last 35 years, hes done theatre with Alyque Padamsee (his mentor, in many ways), Padamsees ex-wife Pearl, and Rahul DaCunhas theatre group, Rage, among several others. Hes acted in films (Delhi Belly, Taare Zameen Par, among others). And if you still havent heard of Bhargava, you certainly know his ads: does Taste the thunder ring a bell? Yet, he says hes always been a man without a grand plan. He still doesnt think of the long-term, he insists. He hopes to be able to write and direct movies, but doesnt care much for acting parts. Evidently, for someone so successful, in two careers no less, hes not big on showing it either. He comes dressed in what looks like a Fabindia shirt, untucked over a formal pair of trousers, a Titan watch on his wrist. And hes terribly nice. Sure, actors often are to journalists. But he actually turns up early for our meeting. Thats unprecedented. How I played a clock Bhargava (left) as Cogsworth, who gets turned into a clock, in the Disney musical, Beauty and the Beast (Courtesy: Disney India) Its not surprising then that Bhargava is friends with a lot of industry people. He refers to Rahul DaCunha, Amole Gupte and Sanjna Kapoor as good friends. ALSO READ: That Mistry girl: How Meher Mistry came to play Belle It was one of those friendships that led Bhargava to Disneys big Broadway-style show last year, Beauty and the Beast. Vikranth [Pawar, director] asked to meet at Starbucks and told me he was doing Beauty and the Beast. Then, he asked me to play the Clock [Cogsworth, the princes butler who is turned into a clock]. With a sold-out first run, and a second season now coming up, Bhargava calls it the most professional theatre experience of my life. Yet, it wasnt without its madness. There were still the mics to fix, the wheels that jammed, and the general madness of cues and costumes, but it all came together efficiently, he says. The speed at which it all happens is like that of a Formula One team working on a car in pit stop, he says. And he hopes this is just the beginning, for the sake of performance arts and theatre in the country. We dont have a West End (London) or a Broadway (New York) culture. We still operate on a weekend theatre basis. Were also a city that, in spite of years of good, evolving theatre, still lacks venues. Bhargava believes Disney, with its might and scale, can change that. We hope theyre listening. When @saritray and photographer @aalok_soni met the incredibly talented Bugs Bhargava in Bandra. Adman, actor, writer Bhargava's story on ht48hours.in #BTS #shoot A video posted by ht48hours (@ht48hours) on Apr 22, 2016 at 11:04pm PDT Catch the second season of Beauty and the Beast Where: NSCI, Worli When: May 6 to 15 Tickets: Rs 1,500 onward on bookmyshow.com SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON The Trinamool Congress is aiming to sweep the Burdwan agriculture belt to make up for possible losses in Nadia, Murshidabad and Kolkata North that go to polls on Thursday, sources in the party told HT. The third of six-phase elections is the biggest with 62 constituencies going to the polls. In 2011, the TMC won 30 of these 62 seats, with the Left and Congress getting 16 seats each. This time, an informal Left-Congress alliance is confident of eating into the ruling partys tally. In 2011, the Trinamool was in alliance with the Congress. A disastrous result is waiting for Trinamool in this phase. Their 2011 tally will go down, state Congress president Adhir Chowdhury said. In Murshidabad district, Sagardighi appears to be the only seat that Trinamool can hope to win. This was the only assembly segment in the district where Trinamool got more votes than both CPI(M) and Congress in 2014 Lok Sabha elections. With CPI(M) and Congress fighting each other, incumbent MLA Subrata Saha may have the last smile. Going by the results of 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Bengals ruling party does not stand any chance in the 21 other seats in Murshidabad, despite Left and Congress fighting each other in nine of those. In Nadia, the Left-Congress alliance hopes to reduce the Trinamools 2011 tally of 13 out of 17 seats in the region. Results of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections show the combined votes of Congress and the Left were more than that of the ruling party at Karimpur, Palashipara, Chapra and Kaligunj in Nadia. Their share of votes was almost equal at Haringhata and Krishnanagar South. Tough contests are expected at Nakashipara and Tehatta. Assembly Elections 2016: Full Coverage The Trinamools concerns over retaining its 2011 tally in Nadia became evident when a senior leader from the district told HT, We are comfortably ahead of the opposition in 9 out of the 17. In Kolkata North, where Trinamool has all seven seats, the Opposition is hopeful of wresting at least two. The ruling party hopes to bag at least 13 of the 16 seats in the agriculture belt of Burdwan. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON For more than five decades Tamil Nadu has seen a unique blend of film and politics govern the state. But, come May 16, if Anbumani Ramadoss, the chief ministerial candidate of the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), has his way Tamil Nadu will get its first non-AIADMK non-DMK chief minister in 50 years. There are a lot of things going in favour of Ramadoss: Among the CM candidates in the fray he is the youngest by at least 15 years, tech-savvy and is a professional who is not from Kollywood (the Tamil film industry). There are drawbacks as well: Many still see the PMK as a casteist party and for too long it has been in the shadow of the two main Dravidian partiesAIADMK and DMK. But these are factors that Ramadoss is confident his party and he can overcome. After a four-hour party meeting followed by a two-hour photo session with more than 200 PMK candidates when Ramadoss sits for an interview with Hindustan Times there is a clarity in his vision and an enthusiasm in his voice that cannot be missed. Excerpts of his interview to Viju Cherian. What are the main problems Tamil Nadu is facing today and how do you plan to tackle it? Alcohol and corruption. Tamil Nadu sees the highest sale of alcohol, the highest road traffic accidents, highest suicides, young widows and liver diseases in India all because of alcohol. Tamil Nadu is seeing alcohol enforcement, not alcohol sale. As for corruption, BJP president Amit Shah recently said that Tamil Nadu is the most corrupt state in India weve been saying this for the past five years. Do you have a plan on how to bring prohibition? When prohibition kicks in 90% of those drinking will stop. For the remaining the government will provide medical attention. We will set up a toll-free number to check the sale or storage of illicit alcohol. Informers will be rewarded. Special courts will be set up to fast track these cases and the maximum punishment will be life imprisonment. How conducive is the political environment in Tamil Nadu for PMK? In the last five years PMK was the true Opposition in the assembly. Even though DMDKs Vijayakanth was the Leader of Opposition, he went to the Assembly only once. The women in Tamil Nadu want the PMK to come to power because they fell that only we can bring prohibitionweve been fighting for it for the past 26 years. Today if other parties are speaking about prohibition it is because of the pressure PMK has put on them. What is your view on the parties other than the AIADMK and DMK? The BJP is a minuscule party in Tamil Nadu. The PWF is an alliance of small parties that have been sidelined by other parties. They do not have ideas or ideologies. On their own they will not even win a single MLA. Why did the PMK choose to go it alone this time? In the past when we were contesting alone we were winning more seats. But then for 13 years we formed alliances and lost our credibility. We did a huge mistake for which I apologised to the people of Tamil Nadu. Five years back we took a decision that we will not form an alliance with either the AIADMK or DMK. (HT Photo) There are four CM candidates this time. Whats the edge you have over the others? I have respect for the other three but the fact is they cannot take care of their everyday needs themselves. For five years we had a CM who could not step out of her house (as much as she should have because of health reasons), we have a 93-year-old leader (M Karunanidhi) whose own party leaders are asking him to retire. The third person (Vijayakanth) is incoherent, neither he nor the people who listen to him speak understand what he is saying. I, on the other hand, am a professionally qualified doctor and Ive proved my credentials while I was a central minister. For the 2.5 crore young neutral voters I will be a better option than the other three. Tell us a bit about your manifesto? From the beginning our stand has been that we will not give freebies no TVs, mixies, grinders, goats, mangalsurtas, dhotis... Now the other parties are following us. Tamil Nadu, over the years, has become synonymous with a freebie culture. The PMK will only give free services free education and health care. In your manifesto youve said that you would conduct a caste-based census. What the rationale behind it? Caste-based census is even done by the Centre. We want to do it because we want to give reservation to all the communities in Tamil Nadu. How important is the Sri Lankan Tamil issue this election? The Sri Lankan issue is not an election issue but an emotional issue, and through my NGO we have been highlighting this at the UN for years. But people do not vote depending on this, because the DMK-Congress combine was voted to power in 2009 when the war in Sri Lanka was at its peak. The fishermen issue is a more prominent one. The PMK is often accused of being a caste-based Vanniyar party. Your views on this? The PMK is not a caste-based party. We are a party for social justice. The PMK general secretary is a Dalit, treasurer is a Muslim and our candidates come from all sections of society. As long as we are with the two main Dravidian parties we were a normal party, the day we broke alliance with them we become a caste-based party. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON With the third phase of polling for 62 seats in West Bengal, including seven in the capital city, a tight security ring of one lakh security personnel, including 75,000 central paramilitary forces, has been deployed in election-bound areas. Election Commission officials said 714 companies of the central armed police force, comprising around 75,000 personnel, have taken their positions. Some of the personnel who were posted for the fourth phase have also been shifted to the areas going to the polls on Thursday. Sixty one companies of central forces have been deployed in Kolkata north, 261 in Murshidabad, 198 in Burdwan and 194 in Nadia, the officials said. Keeping the sensitivity of Murshidabad district in mind, two additional police observers have been given the charge, they said. Normally each district has one IPS officer as police observer. Assisting the 75,000 paramilitary personnel, who are not familiar with the local language or geography, is a contingent of 25,000-strong state police personnel. All polling premises will be guarded by central forces while stick-wielding state personnel, who understand local language, will facilitate queue management. Officials said state police will be allowed to enter booths only in extreme cases when the presiding officer seeks so. Similarly, for every mobile unit of central forces, one state police person will be assisting them in travel. Officials said increased availability of security forces has been made possible as jawans, who were deployed in Assam where voting has ended, have now been shifted to West Bengal. Actor Randeep Hooda feels that Bollywood has been portraying Haryanvis in a negative light for a long time. The 39-year-old, who was born and brought up in Haryana, hopes that his upcoming films including his latest release Laal Rang will change peoples perception about the state and its people. For a long time, films have been showing Haryana and its people in a negative way. According to films, Haryanvis only indulge in Khap Panchayats, female foeticide and honour killings. Yes, this is also true to some extent, but there is so much more to the state than that. Its kind of disappointing to know that the other part of the country does not know what the real Haryana is like, says the Kick actor. Read:Randeep Hooda reveals reason behind his slow progress in Bollywood However, I do believe that there are some films that will now change it. Salman Khan and Aamir Khans upcoming films will probably show the other side of Haryana, which will tell people that Haryana is perhaps different. These films will help break the stereotypes associated with Haryanvis, adds Randeep, whos currently in the Capital to shoot for a Salman Khan film, in which Khan plays a wrestler from Haryana. Talking about his latest release, he says, We dont abuse when we are angry. Hum pyaar mein gaali dete hain, gusse mein toh seedha hit karte hain. Thats one of the many things that people dont know about us. Haryanvis are full of zest and have a great sense of humour. That is something we have been very careful about in this film. There are no profanities in the film, because we wanted to keep it that way. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON British supermodel Naomi Campbell is in limelight again, this time because of her new limited-edition coffee table book, Naomi. Campbell has joined forces with publisher Taschen on a signed collectors item that charts the meteoric success of her 30-year career at the top of the fashion food chain. She has described it as the culmination of my lifes work. The book is divided in two volumes, showcasing Campbell as styled and shot by famous photographers, and detailing personal anecdotes from her life. (Instagram/Naomi Campbell) The two-volume work, which will be released on May 1, incorporates a photographic portfolio and an autobiographical text. Volume 1 showcases the star as styled and shot by famous photographers including Patrick Demarchelier, Jean-Paul Goude, Peter Lindbergh, Steven Meisel, Helmut Newton, Mario Testino, Ellen von Unwerth, and Bruce Weber. Volume 2 pairs the models own anecdotes with family snapshots, personal notes, and photographs of friends and collaborators from her personal archives. The books casing features contoured artwork by Pop Art legend Allen Jones. Read: Naomi Campbell gets 6 months in prison for paparazzo assault Attending a launch for the book at Burberrys London cafe Thomass this week, Campbell, who has a long history of working with the British heritage brand, said: To be able to celebrate with my family and friends like Christopher Bailey and Benedikt Taschen, and so many people from my industry that have surrounded me for over 30 years was a great honor. Naomi Campbell and Benedikt Taschen at an event hosted by Naomi Campbell, Burberry and Taschen to celebrate the launch of Naomi. (Burberry) Only 1,000 copies of the book, which can be pre-ordered from taschen.com for $1,750 until May 1, when it will retail for $2,500, have been printed, and according to the publisher they are selling fast. Taschen is also releasing 200 art edition copies, currently available for pre-order for $3,500 until May 1, when the price will rise to $5,000. Read: PDA alert: Justin Bieber, Naomi Campbell set dating rumours rolling Campbell isnt the first fashion icon to mark her impressive career with a coffee table book -- Gisele Bundchen also teamed up with Taschen at the end of last year to honor her 20 years in the industry with a similar photo book venture. The 1,000 copy run of the $700 publication sold out before hitting the shelves, thanks to the pre-order system. Fellow supermodel Kate Moss arguably started the trend back in 2012 when she released Kate: The Kate Moss Book, a retrospective of her 25-year career. Follow @htlifeandstyle for more. The David Cameron government on Thursday said it would be willing to take a 25% stake in any rescue package of Tata Steels UK assets, offering new hope to the beleaguered steel industry, which has been hammered by a surge in cheap Chinese imports, soaring costs and weak demand. After a management buyout package was revealed for strip operations at Port Talbot in Wales on Wednesday, the prime ministers spokeswoman said the government would invest on a commercial basis, but would not be in a controlling position. The announcement provided more details on the possibility of co-investing that business secretary Sajid Javid revealed in the House of Commons last week. The government has been under considerable political pressure to rescue Britains steel industry. Tata Steel recently decided to sell its assets in Britain after losses mounted to 1 million a day. Asked if the minority stake would amount to part-nationalisation, the spokeswoman said: If we were to take an extra stake it would be a minority one with the aim of supporting the purchaser in delivering a long-term future for the business. We are certainly not seeking to be controlling the company. I am not sure we would accept the concept of part nationalisation. We will be investing on a commercial basis. We would not see this as nationalisation. We would not be seeking to acquire a control in the business. We dont think that nationalisation is the right answer, she added. The package of support worth hundreds of millions of pounds will be made available from the UK and Welsh governments. The announcement follows a second meeting between Javid and Tata Sons chairman Cyrus Mistry in Mumbai early this week. The financial support package will be tailored to the purchasers strategy and financing needs. However, it is expected that all, or the large majority, will be through debt financing, official sources said. Other options included providing hybrid (convertible debt) or alternative forms of financing; supporting a purchasers financing by taking a minority equity stake (up to 25%) and acting in support of the purchaser, sources added. First Minister of Wales Carwyn Jones said: Were committed to supporting any credible bid to secure steel making in Wales. We have worked with the UK government to put in place this significant package of support and we believe that this will help secure a successful sale of Tata Steels UK operations. In addition to the support package, the UK and Welsh governments will also consider additional grant-funding support, for example, to support the development of power plant infrastructure, energy efficiency and environmental protection measures, research & development (R&D) and training, sources added. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON The founder of Chinas internet giant Tencent will donate $2 billion in shares to charity, the company said -- one of the largest gifts ever given in a country whose new super-rich have no tradition of philanthropy. Pony Ma, Tencents chief executive, will give the shares to a new foundation for mainland projects in health, education and environmental conservation, among other issues, his company said. The donation -- which will vest over several years -- appears to be the largest ever by a single individual in China, where there is great public mistrust of charitable organisations battered by years of scandal. After 10 years of exploration and participation in philanthropic activities, I increasingly feel that a longer-term and more organized way is needed to give back to society, Ma said. Pony Ma is the 34th richest man in the world with a net worth of $20.2 billion, according to Bloombergs ranking of billionaires. Chinas top businessmen fall far behind their Western counterparts in corporate social responsibility. In 2014, Jack Ma and Joe Tsai, co-founders of rival Internet behemoth Alibaba, pledged to establish a philanthropic trust funded with shares in the company estimated to be worth $3 billion at the time. But the countrys most generous donor last year was He Xiangjian, founder of appliance maker Midea, who gave 400 million yuan ($ 61.7 million), according to data compiled by Harvard Universitys Kennedy School of Government. In China, both donors and recipients have to pay taxes on donations. Many entrepreneurs find it hard to find a qualified charitable trust to manage the donations, the state-run Global Times today quoted Song Houliang, chief editor of China Philanthropist magazine, as saying. Such problems have dampened their enthusiasm for giving, he added. China passed its first charity law in March, which sought to increase public confidence in giving while tightening its control of the sector. It will take effect on September 1. China is the worlds second-largest economy but ranks 144th out of 145 countries for giving, according to a study last year by the Charities Aid Foundation. Chinese citizens donated just $16 billion in 2014, according to the most recent data from the China Charity Information Centre -- less than 0.2 per cent of annual GDP. In the US in 2014, giving accounted for 2.1 percent of GDP, according to the National Philanthropic Trust. The issue is partly driven by a lack of legal framework for charitable trusts and taxes, analysts say. Donations can be made only when the fundamentals are all in place, and thats why I think giving to charities is more difficult than earning money, the Global Times cited Jack Ma as saying in a speech at Peking University last year. The Supreme Court gave the director general of civil aviation till May 4 to ensure airlines agree to fly the mandated quota of flights to smaller cities such as Shimla largely ignored by the industry because of low passenger volumes. Indias aviation policy requires airlines deploy 10% flights they have on lucrative category-I sectors (mostly metro cities) to routes falling under non-lucrative category-II which include cities like Shimla, northeastern states and remote islands. You (Centre) are like Hanuman and need to be reminded of your immense power, the CJI told additional solicitor general PS Patwalia when he, as representative of the government and DGCA, said it was up to the airlines to implement the policy. The bench asked the government lawyer to submit a list of all airlines that have 42-seater aircraft that are better suited to low-passenger routes. If by May 4, we get the answer that air connectivity to Shimla is not being ensured, then we will...fix responsibility against those, the bench said. Lawyers representing Air India and SpiceJet expressed reservations. Air India said it had only three small aircraft, of which one is damaged. The other two fly to Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Lakshwadeep. SpiceJet said it does not have 42-seater aircraft. Reeling under the severe fund shortage for its malaria-elimination programmes, the Union government has roped in Indias biggest drugmaker Sun Pharma for monetary assistance and medicines. Sun Pharma, which makes anti-malaria drug Synriam, is expected to sign a public-private-partnership agreement on April 25. Detailed survey covering high-malaria-prevalence states such as Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Jharkhand, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Jammu & Kashmir and North Eastern States is currently in progress to identify locations where this PPP initiative can be launched, said a senior official at the health ministry. Sun Pharma is not alone. Earlier this month, Tata Trusts signed a pact with the Odisha government to eliminate Malaria from the state by 2030. Government currently spends mere Rs 500 crore annually for anti-malaria initiatives whereas the budget should be over Rs 5,000 crore. Hence, we can undertake domestic fund raising through private sector involvement only, the official said. According to a study done by the Institute of Economic Growth in 2014, the total economic burden due to malaria in India could be around $1.94 billion (around Rs 13,000 crore). As per National Vector Borne Disease Control Programme, the number of annual malaria cases in India is about 9.7 million with about 40,297 deaths . The agreement is expected to be signed by Sun Pharmas managing director, Dilip Shanghvi. Sun Pharma, however, refused to comment. Sun Pharma will be meeting the government during the coming weekend for budgetary discussions and their plans to support the initiative, said another official at the health ministry. The over five-year long project aims to eliminate malaria in targeted locations as well as sustain its malaria-free conditions. Such PPP projects are also expected to be replicated across India in a phased manner. As per government estimates, India accounts for around 70% of malaria cases as well as malaria deaths in South East Asian countries. Around 91% of the countrys population is at risk of malaria, with 14% being at high risk. Only 9% of Indias population lives in Malaria free areas. Read: HIV, diabetes, cancer drug prices may dip by up to 50% SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON The Enforcement Directorate (ED) suspects that liquor baron Vijay Mallyas now-defunct Kingfisher Airlines Limiteds brand valuation by private experts was allegedly inflated and could have helped in getting loans sanctioned from various public sector banks over the years. The firm cited its brands worth and other assets as collaterals during 2004 to 2012 while seeking loans from public sector banks and it indicates their high valuation then. It raises the question if the firms worth was authentic or over-valued and played a role in loan negotiations, an ED source said. For instance, the firm had applied for a loan of Rs 950 crore from IDBI in November 2009 at a time it suffered from acute eligibility-related deficiencies, the source added. Yet, the bank sanctioned the loan request against questionable security cited by the firm, according to the source. The IDBI banks credit committee sanctioned the loan request against security such as hypothecation or assignment of Kingfishers brand, he said. Apart from the brand, the firm had given other collaterals, such Mallyas personal guarantee and corporate guarantee his business group. According to reports, Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) is also looking at how a multinational tax and advisory firm arrived at the Rs 4,100 crore valuation in 2011. SFIO, which comes under the ministry of corporate affairs, is probing whether the valuation was deliberately inflated to get more funds from banks and siphon off money for purposes other than proposed investment in the airline, reports said. Since March, the ED is conducting a money-laundering probe into Kingfishers alleged default on a Rs 900 crore loan by public sector IDBI bank in 2009. The probe was later widened to look into the firms default on loans worth Rs 9,200 crore from a consortium of 17 state-run banks during 2004-12. On EDs request, a Mumbai court on Monday issued a non-bailable warrant against Mallya after he failed to appear before its Mumbai office for questioning in the IDBI case after three summons issued by the agency. Mallya, 60, left India on March 2 as the creditor banks closed in on him to recover dues owed by his defunct firm. Kingfishers alleged loan defaults are also being investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in a separate probe after the agency registered a case last July. The CBI is scanning the aspect of the firms valuations as well. According to CBIs First Information Report, which became the basis of EDs money-laundering probe against Kingfisher, the accused firm suffered from alleged deficiencies including negative financials, negative net worth and not satisfying the conditions/norms stipulated in the corporate loan policy of the IDBI Bank. Besides, the banks memorandum had mentioned that the accused firms auditors had observed that funds worth Rs 4,360 crore raised on short-term basis were used for long-term purposes, the FIR said. SoftBank on Thursday hit back at a bid by a group of investors to unseat its India-born president and chief operating officer Nikesh Arora, seen as heir apparent to the Japanese mobile giants billionaire founder Masayoshi Son. The company slammed the unsubstantiated allegations levelled at former Google executive Arora, whom the investors said should be investigated and possibly sacked over potential conflicts of interest tied to his role as an adviser to private equity firm Silver Lake. The Board takes its duties seriously and is in the process of reviewing the letter, SoftBank said in a statement on Thursday. I take my fiduciary responsibilities seriously and have acted appropriately and in the best interest of shareholders throughout my tenure at SoftBank and Sprint, just as I have conducted myself throughout my professional life. I am completely confident the allegations in the letter are baseless, the statement quoted Arora as saying. Son, one of Japans richest men and the chief executive of SoftBank, has referred to Arora as his likely successor. On Thursday, he backed the former Silicon Valley executive. I have complete trust in Nikesh and one thousand percent confidence in him and know he will continue to do great things for SoftBank in the future, Son said in a statement. The unidentified group, represented by US law firm Boies Schiller & Flexner, outlined its concerns in a 11-page letter to the Tokyo-based company, suggesting conflicts of interest due to Aroras existing role as a senior adviser to Silver Lake, Bloomberg News reported. It also suggests he may have been involved in past wrongdoing and generally poor business decisions. A separate letter from one investor to the board of Sprint Corp, which SoftBank controls, asks for his removal as a director there for similar reasons. Despite these issues, the SoftBank board saw fit to make Mr Arora the third-highest paid executive in the world without any track record of accomplishment at the company. The letter, dated January 20, has been signed by signed by Matthew Schwartz, a partner at the law firm. Arora, a former Google Inc executive, joined SoftBank in 2011 and quickly rose to the number two position in the company. His salary made headlines last year with reports saying SoftBank was paying him $135 million. SoftBank is also a major investor in the Indian e-commerce space, with investments in e-commerce company Snapdeal, cab ride aggregator Ola and online real estate platform Housing.com. SoftBanks investment in India crossed the $1-billion mark a year ago. The company recently said the figure will cross $10 billion soon. In June last year, SoftBank along with contract manufacturing giant Foxconn, partnered Bharti Enterprises with plans to invest $20 billion in solar power projects. (With agency inputs) Vishal Sikka and Abidali Neemuchwala took on their careers greatest challenges as CEOs separated by 18 months. Both have already set the ball rolling on the 2020 vision, when they expect to double the revenue of Infosys and Wipro, respectively. The road is likely to be anything, but smooth, considering the challenges in the global market place, primarily price negotiations with global customers. According to the operating margins in the January-March quarter of 2015, Infosys (25%), has a 5% advantage over Wipro (20%). But while Sikka wants to push the envelope to grow margins to 30% by 2020, Neemuchwala is looking at a more conservative 23%. Industry experts told HT that despite the big target ahead, Sikka enjoys certain advantages over Neemuchwala. For starters, three big verticals banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), manufacturing and retail contribute well over 70% of Infosyss annual revenue. The size advantage will reflect on how much you can convert this edge into getting more business in the digital space. Gaining numbers in the digital business is not so much a technology challenge as it is a business challenge. Sharing the leadership position among the top three in any big vertical is a clear advantage, a senior industry executive said. Moreover, energy and utilities,, which contributes 15% to Wipros topline, has been under pressure due to dismal crude oil prices. Abidali Neemuchwala, CEO of Wipro, laughs during a press conference. (Photo Courtesy: Wipro) A good part of Sikkas career, before he moved to Infosys, was with SAP, one of the largest global IT products company. With the Indian IT industry moving towards a software-cum-service model, it offers certain advantages. It has shown up in Sikkas AI (artificial intelligence) and design-based brainchild, AIKIDO. At a recent media conference, Sikka said: AIKIDO is not a department in Infosysit is Infosys. Neemuchwala has spent most of his career (23 years) in a purely IT services-oriented company, Tata Consultancy Services. Analysts also believe that Sikka enjoys a more free hand when it comes to running the show than his counterpart at Wipro. Vishal (Sikka) enjoys the complete support of the board of Infy with very little interference from the founders. I am not sure if we can say the same about Abid. Premji still has a majority stake in Wipro, and his son (Rishad) heads business strategy for the company, an IT analyst said. After a first-of-its-kind sting operation conducted by a state-employed detective agency, the Amritsar city police have arrested a lady doctor of Chheharta near here for indulging in illegal sex determination. Dr Shupla Sharma of Bharat Hospital was booked under the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostics Technique (PC-PNDT) Act at Chheharta police station. A team led by civil surgeon Dr Jai Singh conducted a raid at the hospital after receiving a complaint by the decoy patient sent by the agency to Dr Sharma on Tuesday, who wanted the sex determination test done. On receiving the doctors consent, the money was handed over to the hospital. In a press release issued on Wednesday, health minister Surjit Kumar Jyani said it is the first-of-its-kind sting operation conducted by the detective agency, which was recently empanelled by the state government to check the misuse of technology for sex determination. He said the case was registered after the doctor took `15,000 from the decoy patient sent by the agency. In the same press release, Vini Mahajan, principal secretary, health, said the department had recently hired the services of the agency to catch the violators of the PC-PNDT Act. She said the initiative had been taken to keep a strict vigil on those indulging in sex determination and female foeticide. She said the move is significant in view of the fast-changing technology that is reportedly being misused by such elements to earn a fast buck. She said the sex ratio had fairly improved in the past few years owing to the concerted effort by the department to strictly enforce the Act and the increased awareness on girl child. She said Punjab had already increased the award money to informers under the Act from Rs 20,000 to Rs 1 lakh. Chheharta SHO Arun Kumar said the decoy patient made an audio recording of her conversation with the doctor. This is a clear case of criminal conspiracy to promote sex determination, he said, adding that the raiding party had recovered the marked currency notes from the doctor. A written complaint by the civil surgeon was given to the local police and a case registered against Dr Sharma. The accused was produced in the court on Wednesday, he said. Read more: Should ban on sex-determination tests be lifted? The parents association of Budha Dal Public School has accused the school management of using political clout to turn down their demands, while calling the administrative inquiry, which gave the school a clean chit in the alleged students detention case, biased. Briefing the media at the central state library here on Wednesday, members of the association said they will move a petition in the Punjab and Haryana high court, seeking an independent inquiry into the incident. The hearing in the contempt case is scheduled in the high court on April 21, during which the parents are planning to bring up the issue of alleged detention. The association had also filed another case against capitation fee being charged by the school, which will be heard in the court on April 25. Association legal adviser Sukhjinder Singh alleged the local administration was under pressure, as the school management had cordial relations with the ruling party in the state. He said the association will request the high court to constitute an independent inquiry panel under the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) or a court. Association members questioned when the whole school was covered by closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, they why did the school only show the footage of the library to the inquiry team. If the inquiry team could record statements of parents who are in favour of the school management, they why couldnt they listen to members of our association? questioned association president Kaka Singh. He also urged the administration to release the CCTV footage of the inquiry. Association adviser JS Sodhi alleged the school had not abided by the court orders a single time and was misguiding people by giving false statements. He said if the school files any case against them, they were ready to face it with facts and figures. The association has been claiming that on April 12, the school authorities separated some students, whose parents had submitted a petition in the high court against capitation fee being levied by the school, and detained them inside the library. After the parents came to know about the incident, they barged into the school around 11am. Later, they protested outside the school. A five-member team, headed by district education officer (DEO, secondary) Harinder Kaur, on Monday gave a clean chit to the school on the basis of statements of some students and parents and the CCTV footage of the library. Upping the ante against the parents association on basis of this clean chit and testimony of parents of a girl student, the school management, during a press conference on Tuesday, threatened to file a case of defamation besides seeking criminal proceedings against those protesting against the school. A massive fire raging at the Bhalswa landfill in north-west Delhi for a week has triggered a row with the AAP government crying sabotage to derail its odd-even car rationing experiment. Brazen attempt to fail OddEven by MCD. 3 landfills put on fire. DFS trying to contain the fire, tweeted a Delhi Government media advisor. Delhis landfills are managed by the BJP-run municipal corporations. According to reports, the fire emitting toxic smoke has been burning for the past week but it became bigger on Wednesday and Friday. Government officials alleged it had been set on fire to increase air pollution in Delhi and sabotage odd-even. Delhi environment minister Imran Husain on Thursday visited the area amid the allegations. Another Delhi government officials statement, however, went against the allegations of the fires being set deliberately. Also read: Garbage burning undermines AAP govts focus on reducing air pollution A number of complaints have been received from the public against the burning of garbage at landfill sites. It is an admitted fact by the municipal bodies that often burning of garbage is observed at landfill sites which is due to methane gas generation from the decomposition process of garbage, the statement said. The Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) said that similar instances of fire were seen during inspections in May last year and in January and March this year. At 2 pm on Thursday, the particulate matter 10 (PM 10) level at Punjabi Bagh where the DPCCs air quality monitoring station closest to Bhalswa is located was 504 micro grams per cubic metre. This was higher than any reading during the past 24 hours. Open burning leads to an increase in PM 10 levels. An increase in PM 10 levels was seen at most stations even though wind speed was good. The DPCC said the three landfill sites in Delhi Bhalswa, Ghazipur and Okhla do not have any authorisation. Also read: Methane trapped beneath makes Ghazipur landfill a ticking time bomb All three landfill sites are not designed as per the Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) Rules that came into effect in the year 2000. DPCC has not granted authorization to all three landfill sites. Municipal bodies have informed they have no other option but to use these sites for disposal of MSW as land is not available in Delhi. They have informed that request has been made to DDA to allot land for landfill sites, said a statement. The DPCC had fined the east and north municipal corporations on February R 5,000 each for open burning of garbage. Notices were again issued in March. The government is set to back a proposal to punish the parents of children who drive , a move aimed at curbing rising fatalities from the underage getting behind the wheel. The plan is to amend the motor vehicles (MV) act to introduce a provision to charge the parents of juvenile drivers involved in crashes and send the errant minors to do community service. The road transport ministry is likely to discuss the proposal at a meeting of state transport secretaries on April 22. If a minor is involved, it will be presumed that the parents know and willingly allowed or influenced the child. So, they should be held accountable for allowing the minor to drive, a source said on Wednesday. The quantum of punishment for parents and the duration of community service for errant minors will be worked out after consulting the states, the source said. Read: Mercedes hit-and-run: Juvenile Justice Board rejects minors bail plea Since road transport is on the concurrent list, states will have to agree. If there is unanimity, a decision can be taken at the April 29 meeting of the empowered group of state transport ministers reviewing road safety. The governments push for stricter road safety comes amid a growing call to make parents accountable after a Class 12 student in north Delhis upmarket Civil Lines mowed down a 33-year-old marketing consultant with his fathers Mercedes car on Sunday. Read: Mercedes hit-and-run case: Father of boy driving the car arrested The father of the teen, who turned 18 four days after the accident, was charged with abetment to culpable homicide not amounting to murder but was granted bail. The Juvenile Justice Board rejected the boys bail, saying it should be a lesson for all parents who give cars to underage children as their bad parenting endangers lives of people. Existing provisions under the MV act penalise the owner or person in charge of the vehicle for allowing an unauthorised person such as a minor or someone without a drivers licence to drive. The offence carries a maximum fine of Rs 1,000 and jail for three months or both. Read: Caught on CCTV: Video of Delhi man killed by Mercedes released by family In case the vehicle is registered in a company or somebody elses name, it is difficult to hold the parents accountable. The law is silent on this aspect, a ministry official said. Cases of underage drivers causing fatal crashes are on the rise in India, where a person dies every four minutes in road accidents. But weak laws and slack enforcement often mean a long wait for justice for the victims and their families. The government began considering amending the existing law because a draft bill on road transport and safety, pending for over two years, will take some more time before it is approved by the Union cabinet and introduced in Parliament. The draft bill is set to replace the 26-year-old MV act that was amended in 2001. It proposes to increase the quantum of punishment based on the gravity of the offence: a Rs 1 lakh fine for driving an unregistered vehicle, and a Rs 3 lakh fine and seven years in jail for killing a child in a road accident. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON The Art of Living Foundation on Thursday faced flak from the National Green Tribunal over handover of the World Culture Festival venue on the Yamuna floodplains and not allowing inspections. The green court, which is expected to pass an order on Friday, asked the foundation on whose authority it had barred a high-powered committee from inspecting the festival site. How can you not allow the committee to conduct the inspection? the bench headed by Justice Swatanter Kumar asked. In reply, the counsel appearing for Art of Living told the bench that cleaning operations were still on when the committee arrived for inspection on April 15. The high-powered committee came with JCBs to collect sample of land. We asked them to come after we handed over the site to the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), the Art of Living lawyer said. The foundation had completed the clean-up of the site and officially handed it over to the DDA this Monday (April 18). Also read: AOL Yamuna fest: NGT panel yet to visit site to assess damage The ground has been returned by the foundation in a better condition than they received it greener, cleaner and with no damage to the soil. There was no water, air or soil pollution from our side, the foundation had earlier said in a statement. The green court bench, on Thursday, reprimanded the organisation and said it cant frustrate the process of law. On March 9, the National Green Tribunal had imposed an initial environmental compensation of Rs 5 crore on the foundation. The rest of the fine amount, the court said, would have to be decided after an NGT-appointed committee assessed the damage to the floodplain. Also read: Will pay fine for Yamuna event only after damage assessment: AOL App-based taxi services are introducing schemes to woo the government which banned the surge pricing strategy of multiplying fares during periods of high demand. Taxi aggregator Uber, in line with the governments focus on curbing pollution, began a ride sharing model to protect the environment. For World Earth Day on April 22, it offered 50% discount for riders on uberPOOL. Officials of Uber, which said surge pricing will be back, met chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Thursday to discuss the strategy. Sources said apart from surge pricing, the government objected to per minute charge and vehicles registered outside Delhi. Transport minister Gopal Rai on Thursday again clarified that ban on surge pricing would continue. Ubers competitor in India, Ola, announced its support to Delhi governments odd-even initiative by adding more vehicles on its platform. Ola added over 26,000 CNG vehicles in Delhi and more than 1,000 vehicles through a leasing program last week. But as the entire focus is on Ola and Uber, other private taxi companies registered with the Delhi government feel cheated. Taxi hailing apps Ridz and Magic Sewa are having a tough time, despite all clearances from the government. We do not believe in charging customers anything more than the service that we provide, said Ridz chief operating officer Abhishek Sharma. Magic Sewa filed a petition against surge prices and compliance of government-notified fares. The controversial surge pricing model hit the headlines during the ongoing second phase of the odd-even scheme in Delhi, when fares on Ola and Uber went by up to five times due to high demand. This led the Delhi government to ban it. The Uttarakhand High Courts setting aside of Presidents Rule in the state, reinstating Congress leader Harish Rawat as chief minister, has been a quick and right step intended to correct the injudicious decision of the Central government to impose Presidents Rule at the end of March. The court has also ordered a floor test on April 29. But this decision will open up many questions on the powers and functions of several institutions. The inappropriateness of the Centres decision had been manifest from the beginning because Presidents Rule came just a day before a floor test was to be held in accordance with the instruction of the governor. The Centre had justified its action on the grounds of a constitutional breakdown in the state after nine Congress MLAs had withdrawn their support to the government. However, the fact that the floor test could not take place undermined the constitutional office of the governor, who is the head of a state. But a bit of anomaly followed thereafter. There was again an order for a floor test, this time by a single-member Bench of the court, without setting aside Presidents Rule. This led to the question how a dismissed chief minister could seek a confidence vote. Thursdays verdict by a two-member Bench, which had stayed the single Benchs order, has corrected the anomaly. READ: The story of Uttarakhand is a failure of six institutions From the observations of the two-member Bench at each hearing, it was obvious that the judges, Chief Justice KM Joseph and Justice VK Bist, had been uncomfortable at the conduct of the Central government. Earlier this month the Bench told central government counsel not to do any hanky panky by revoking Presidents Rule and installing an alternative government. Next, in a tone of more stern admonition, the court told the central government that it (Centre) was cutting at the root of democracy and asked why the Centre was so concerned about the situation arising out of the rebellion by the nine MLAs. Finally the court also questioned the Presidents action. This will no doubt have implications for presidential functioning because the President is constitutionally bound to act on the advice of the Union government. Also any action taken by the president in his capacity as president should be outside judicial scrutiny. This is significant also because President Pranab Mukherjee has just alerted the judiciary about the pitfalls of judicial activism and the need to maintain the principle of the separation of powers. READ: In the end, truth wins: Harish Rawat on Uttarakhand high court ruling Not being able to stick to the processes established by law can lead to unforeseen problems, as has happened in this case. Only if the Centre had paid attention to the Supreme Court judgment in the case on the dismissal of the Karnataka government in 1989, this problem would not have arisen. The court had said only a floor test could establish whether a government could carry on in office or not. Before April 29, the court will determine the fate of the nine MLAs, who had been disqualified by the Speaker. In all, the Uttarakhand episode has greatly furthered a process that has been gaining strength for years. It is the ceding of ground by the executive and legislature to the judiciary. Ironically, the Indian Constitution, like the British Constitution, is based on the notion of legislative supremacy. If wishes were horses, the cowards who contributed to the circumstances that led to the death of the brave police horse Shaktiman would not be roaming around, giving sickening soundbites to television channels. Injured grievously in a BJP protest in Uttarakhand, the horse, perhaps the most famous in India now after Maharana Prataps Chetak, lost its battle for life after a month. In this time, it was fitted with a prosthetic leg and underwent surgery even as the case attracted the attention of millions in India and abroad. Pictures of the MLA Ganesh Joshi attacking the horse were there for all to see, though he now claims that he played no part in the incident in which the valiant horse was injured. Read | Beast of a nation: What Shaktimans death tells about India As always, as soon as the incident took place, it was politicised. The MLA in question has come up with the astounding claim that this is a Congress conspiracy to put him in jail and the party has come up with lame comparisons to the Dadri incident and other communal disturbances. None of this has anything to do with cruelty to animals, in this case a horse in the line of duty. Cruelty to animals is pervasive in India given that the penalty is a paltry Rs 50 even in cases of maiming or killing. The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960, is hardly a deterrent to those who visit all manners of indignities and cruelty on animals. After the recent tragedy in Kerala, there were some voices raised on the issue of using elephants in temple rituals. The noise, heat and crowds cause extreme discomfort to the animals. In the recent Thrissur pooram festival which uses up to 60 elephants, many of their injuries were covered with black paint. Stray dogs are culled in Kerala, despite protests. Chickens and goats meant for slaughterhouses are kept in cramped conditions before their lives end. Despite the law prohibiting the exhibition of animals in chains or in cages, it is common sight to see monkeys in chains performing for crowds in our cities. Read | Shaktiman, horse attacked in BJP rally, buried with police honours In the case of Shaktiman which so moved the nation, the guilty must be punished. The MLAs grandstanding that his own leg must be cut off if he is guilty is to add insult to injury in this case. The needless death of the horse should raise the question of whether animals are required in policing duties as also the need to make the law stricter in cases of animal abuse. Results of the intermediate public exam in Telegana, held in March, will be announced on Friday. The Board of Intermediate will declare results for both first year and second year intermediate public examinations for both general and vocational courses. Nearly 9.5 lakh students had appeared in the exams. Deputy chief minister and minister for education Kadiam Srihari will release the results at 11 am, board officials said. Read more: Chhattisgarh board Class 12 exam results declared This is the first time that results for both the first and second year will be announced at the same time. The results can be seen online by going to the following websites: tsbie.cgg.gov.in http://results.cgg.gov.in/ Results can also be obtained from the Parishkaram Call Centre (eSeva), by dialing 1100 from any BSNL land line in the state, or calling 18004251110 from any land line / mobile phone and eSeva / MeeSeva / Rajiv Citizen Service Centres in the state. They can be obtained from TS/APOnline Centres in the state as well. Principals of the junior colleges can view their college results from the site http://bie.telangana.cgg.gov.in Contrary to reports, design legend Karl Lagerfeld will not be stepping down as the creative director of Chanel and all his other design duties. It was reported that the 82-year-old will be exiting the industry after the French fashion houses cruise collection show next month in Cuba. Lagerfeld has been heading the label since 1983. When contacted by Vogue UK, a spokesperson for the brand, called the reports unsubstantiated. These rumours took over after Page Six reported an anonymous friend of Lagerfelds saying: Hes really tired...Hes not doing well and hes ready to stop. Read: Hottest trends we cant get enough of from Paris couture shows Apart from Chanel, the German fashion designer is also the head of Fendi and his eponymous label. Lagerfeld is also famous for his platinum ponytail, trademark fingerless gloves and glasses that he is never seen without. In an interview with VogueTV in 2012, Lagerfeld was reported as saying Why should I stop working? If I do, Ill die and itll all be finished. Last weekend, over a meal at a suburban pub, our order of fried calamari arrived in a large brown doggie bag. While it amused our fellow diners, who swiftly began snapping shots of the dish for Instagram, it left us highly confused. Are we being asked to leave now? was the first thought. Doggie bags are definitely pushing it. But numerous other restaurants have also retired the plain round plates in favour of slates, chopping boards, mini-trucks, even bird cages. So, what is it about a serving plate that adds, or in some cases, takes away from the dining experience? Culture on my plate Keeping with its theme (San Francisco style, ingredient-driven menu), The Table in Colaba imports crockery from the region. Its supplier, Heath Ceramics, also makes custom-made lines for other popular Bay Area restaurants. Owners Gauri Devidayal and Jay Yousuf recall painstakingly lugging over 160kg of plates all the way from San Francisco before setting up the restaurant. This crockery has a special place in my heart because of all the trouble we went through to get it to the restaurant. We knew it would be difficult to replace breakages but that didnt stop us, says Devidayal. Plates by Heath Ceramics (Photo: facebook.com/heathceramics) Apart from creating a definite connect with the food (which is inspired by the California style of cooking using fresh and local ingredients), the plates also turn into a perfect backdrop for striking creations, like the shrimp dumplings or the kale salad with garlic croutons. Similarly, at the newly opened South American-themed bar Lima in Bandra-Kurla Complex, crockery is specially designed and hand-painted keeping the theme in focus. So, deep blue and indigo tones are juxtaposed with flowers, creepers and leaves on its serving plates. Since the restaurant is designed as a verandah with a colonial feel, the crockery matches this vibe. At the Bombay Canteen in Lower Parel, dishes like Kutchi dabeli bada pao and the milk-braised Kashmiri raan are served in crockery from Baarique, a local supplier. Known for using only kansa (a metal that fuses 85 per cent copper and 15 per cent tin) utensils from the traditional metalsmiths of Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, the folks at Baarique then hand paint the utensils with India-inspired motifs like birds, lotus and mandalas. Even if one out 10 guests notices our plates, it makes me very happy, says Yash Bhanage, partner, The Bombay Canteen. Kutchi dabeli bada pao sandwich at The Bombay Canteen (Photo: Kaamna Patel) Slates over plates While some restaurants prefer that their food do the talking with subtle touches to its cutlery, there are others that use quirky presentation as crutches for shoddy fare. Since March last year, a UK-based Twitter account @WeWantPlates has been railing against pretentious, and at times impractical, food presentations by tweeting photographs with funny captions, largely submitted by its followers (see box). This online mockery of a restaurant trend that may have overstayed its course resulted in pubs and cafes putting up blackboards that read actual plates here to please customers. Read: Small plates are gaining popularity. But is the trend here to stay? It is often said that we eat with our eyes first. Hence, it is important to present food the way its meant to be. I believe in simple and clean presentation and we use long and wide white plates for that, says Nishant Mitra, owner and chef, Eddies. Closer home, serving plates are giving way to wrought-iron bicycles and weighing scales, and it seems like this trend wont fizzle out any time soon. Increasingly, restaurants are using gimmicks in the guise of molecular gastronomy to add drama (in most cases liquid nitrogen) to their food. At a popular Lower-Parel based eatery, the server brings over a big ball of chocolate filled with macarons, cake and chocolate chunks and literally throws it in the table amidst smoke rising from the plate. The resulting explosion is anything but a visual delight. There is a fine line between tasteful and gimmicky. Every country has gone through the phase of using objects that are anything but plates to serve food. Apart from adding value to the dish, the presentation should tell a story too, says Bhanage. Bubbling kulfi at Spice Klub Zorawar Kalra, founder and managing director, Massive Restaurants that runs Masala Library, Pa Pa Ya and Farzi Cafe, agrees. Right from cutlery to crockery, everything plays a role in food presentation. The visual appeal of a dish is vital as it enhances the dining experience, he says. At the Lower Parel-based Pa Pa Ya, edamame and chick pea sliders are served on a mini-jeep to make it an authentic American experience. While these touches add to the quirkiness of the space, they also make for good photos on social media. According to Devidayal, however, gimmicks are unnecessary distractions if the food is good. But maybe thats one way to make sure youre Instagrammed, she adds. We Want Plates, an online campaign against gimmicky food presentation Started in March 2015 by Ross McGinnes from West Yorkshire, UK, We Want Plates is an ongoing online campaign against serving food on bits of wood and roof slates, jam-jar drinks and chips in mugs, according to its Twitter handle. With over a lakh followers, the page regularly tweets photos of food served in a pair of shoes, hats, wellies and even an upside-down umbrella. Following the success of the campaign, McGinnes was invited for television appearances and became a local celebrity. Follow @WeWantPlates for updates. The writer tweets as @culturecola SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON An industrial hub in Maharashtras Aurangabad district with 5,000 units and tens of thousands of workers may shut down in 10 days as its intake well is running dry because of the third successive drought in the region. The hub draws water from the Nathsagar reservoir of the Jayakwadi dam that is operating at dead storage level, when the height of water is lower than the sluice gates and has to be pumped out. The hub has four industrial centres near Aurangabad spread across 3,134 hectares that uses 54 million litres of water a day, including the drinking water supply of 13 adjoining villages. If the water supply dries up, it will render tens of thousands of workers jobless in the searing heat of May in the district that is one of the eight districts in the states parched Marathwada region. Many of them migrated to the industrial hub from Marathwadas rural hinterlands where daily strife over water is common and tankers are the local residents mainstay. Over 1,100 farmers committed suicide in the past year in the region due to the drought and the deepening agrarian crisis. To solve the problem, the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) sent a letter on Tuesday to the state government, seeking permission to build a canal from the dam to its intake well. But the proposed canal will fall in the ambit of the Jayakwadi bird sanctuary and requires a go-ahead from the forest department that said such clearances couldnt be given immediately. The letter from the MIDC industrial area to the divisional commissioner, Umakant Dangat said the intake well has water only up to May 1 and as such permission may be given to dig a 700-metre-long canal from the submergence area of the dam up to it to ensure supply continues. MIDC officials said that they expected such a situation and prepared tenders for the work a month in advance but did not expect the forest department hindrance. Dangat admitted that such a situation had arisen. I received the letter yesterday and we will do what is necessary to see to it that the MIDC area doesnt shut down. There is enough water in the dead storage of Jayakwadi and this can be tapped. If a canal has to be built, we will do it, said Dangat. He, however, did not clarify on how exactly the MIDC was planning to overcome the forest department hurdle in 10 days. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON On an advisory from the Canadian foreign ministry, Punjab Congress president Captain Amarinder Singh has cancelled his political rallies in Toronto and Vancouver. However, he will meet Punjabi NRIs during his six-day visit to Canada starting Friday. Indian foreign secretary S Jaishankar told him on telephone that the Canadian rules prevented foreign governments and individuals from doing election campaigning in Canada. A Sikh group in Canada is trying to block the visit of the former Punjab chief minister. In the recent months, campaigning for next years assembly election in Punjab has arrived in distant Canada. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) commenced activities and plans to bring in its convener Arvind Kejriwal to make a pitch to its supporters. Read more: Mission 2017: Is Punjab really AAPwardly mobile? Amarinder, a Congress MP in the Lok Sabha from Amritsar, is scheduled to reach Canada before the Delhi chief minister does. But hardline activist group Sikhs For Justice (SFJ) is trying to ensure Punjab politicking doesnt make it to the country. Toronto-based law firm Goldblatt Partners, on behalf of the SFJ, has sent a memorandum to foreign minister Stephane Dion, claiming Singhs visit will violate a circular issued in September 2011 wherein the department stated it will not allow foreign governments to conduct election campaigns in Canada or establish foreign political parties or movements in Canada. Read more: Amarinder assures NRIs to visit Punjab without any fear The missive asks the Canadian government to lodge a formal objection with the Indian high commission in Ottawa over this matter. While such a policy will also apply to AAPs campaigning in Canada, the focus at this time is the Congress leaders impending arrival. Singh is expected to address two gatherings in Toronto and Vancouver and attend smaller meetings. Amarpreet Aulakh, president of the Indian Overseas Congress Canada East, said these are private events and not open to the public. This is an outreach programme for Amarinder to put forward his point to NRIs before the Punjab polls, he said. The Congress has made arrangements for additional security at the venues, given the possibility of protests. SFJ plans to up the ante in case Amarinders visit is on. In a statement, its legal adviser Gurpatwant Pannun said the group will launch a private criminal prosecution against Amarinder if he comes to Canada, on the grounds that during his tenure as chief minister, he appointed or reinstated officials allegedly involved in torture or extra-judicial killings in Punjab. The Canadian Constitution promotes human rights and does not condone the acts of those who participate or protect violators, Pannun said. The threat of a similar suit in 2013 had prompted Punjab deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal to cancel his trip to Canada. Read: Sikh group makes bid to block Amarinder Singhs visit to Canada SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON The Centre will on Friday move the Supreme Court against the Uttarakhand high courts order quashing Presidents rule in the state. Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi said the Centres petition against the high courts order reviving of the Harish Rawat-led Congress government would be mentioned for an urgent hearing before a bench headed by chief justice TS Thakur on Friday. In a counter move, chief minister Rawat filed a caveat in the apex court to ensure that no order is passed without giving him a hearing. We're filing an appeal (challenging #Uttarakhand HC order),appeal is being prepared,it will be lodged in SC tomorrow morn-AG Mukul Rohatgi ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 Earlier in the day, the Uttarakhand high court quashed Presidents rule in the state, restoring the Congress government of Harish Rawat and asking it to prove its majority in the assembly on April 29. Sources said a copy of the detailed order of the HC was unlikely to be available immediately. But terming the situation arising out of the HC order as extra-ordinary, sources said the Centre would move the SC against the HC verdict on the basis of the operating part that was pronounced at Nainital. April 21: Action Day 2:00 pm HC revokes Presidents rule after Centre fails to commit that it will not revoke its rule for a week HC revokes Presidents rule after Centre fails to commit that it will not revoke its rule for a week 3:00 pm BJP leaders Satpal Maharaj and Bhagat Singh Koshiyari rush back to Dehradun to take stock of the meeting BJP leaders Satpal Maharaj and Bhagat Singh Koshiyari rush back to Dehradun to take stock of the meeting 5:50 pm Chief minister Harish Rawat meets governor K K Paul and calls a cabinet meeting to review decisions taken during 25 days of the Presidents rule Chief minister Harish Rawat meets governor K K Paul and calls a cabinet meeting to review decisions taken during 25 days of the Presidents rule 6:00 pm BJP top brass including finance minister Arun Jaitley and home minister Rajnath Singh meets at party president Amit Shahs house BJP top brass including finance minister Arun Jaitley and home minister Rajnath Singh meets at party president Amit Shahs house 7:30 pm Attorney general Mukul Rohatgi says that the Centre will challenge the HC order in the Supreme Court The Centre brought the state under central rule on March 27, citing governance breakdown after nine Congress lawmakers rebelled against Rawat. The deposed chief minister had challenged in court the Centres decision which came just a day before he was to prove his strength in the assembly. A division bench of the high court said at the end of four days of hearing that they did not find enough material to justify the imposition of Presidents rule. #HTPoll | HC sets aside President's Rule in #Uttarakhand: Is this an embarrassment for the central government? Hindustan Times (@htTweets) April 21, 2016 Uttarakhand crisis: Full coverage Chhattisgarh police in Sukma district of Bastar zone abhorred a judicial officer whose decisions, they claimed, were detrimental to the morale of security forces fighting a virtual war against the outlawed CPI (Maoist). The sacked chief judicial magistrate (CJM) inadvertently found himself on a list of people, including human rights activists, journalists and lawyers, cited as nuisance by the Chhattisgarh police in Bastar. Information under the RTI Act accessed by HT revealed that the Sukma superintendent of police, D Shrawan, wrote to the Dantewada district and sessions judge complaining against CJM Prabhakar Gwal. In his letter dated February 8, the police superintendent mentioned six incidents related to Maoists in which the CJMs verdicts harmed the enthusiasm and spirit of the forces and the criminals got an opportunity to make a mockery of the judicial process. Gwal was dismissed on April 1 on the grounds that he compromised public interest. The Sukma SP avoided making any direct comment to HT. I am not exactly aware. Cant say without revisiting the content and knowing the context, he said. Gwal said that while posted as the Sukma CJM, he twice wrote to the state director general of police and others in December last year, expressing apprehension that fraudulent practices were being carried out in the name of the anti-Maoist campaign. Amnesty International India, the global rights watchdog, on Monday called for immediate action in the wake of human rights activists, journalists and lawyers in Bastar facing relentless crackdown by the police and vigilante group Samajik Ekta Manch, which was disbanded. A college student was expelled on Thursday, a day after he was arrested for hacking Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasads Facebook account, offcials said. Divyanshu Kumar alias Golu, in his early 20s, was arrested from his village Mehmadabad in Vaishali district by Bihar Polices economic offences unit on Wednesday. Two Samsung mobile phones and a SIM (subscriber identity module) card he allegedly used to hack the FB account in March were seized from him. We have expelled Divyanshu, a third-year student, from the college, said Santlal, director of the Patna Sahib Engineering College near Patna. He hacked the Facebook page of Lalu Prasad on March 8 and 11 and posted objectionable material on it, police said. Last month, soon after Lalus Facebook page was hacked, his younger son and Deputy Chief Minister Tejaswi Yadav lodged a first information report with Patna police. Amid demands from various quarters to get the Kohinoor diamond back from the British, the Congress on Wednesday said that it was keen on getting Indian artefacts lying abroad to be brought back to the country. All heritage belongings of India that can be brought back should be brought back, Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala told IANS. On Tuesday, the central government retracted from its earlier position and said it would make all possible efforts to bring back the Kohinoor diamond in an amicable manner. The governments reaction came a day after Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar conveyed to the Supreme Court that the British East India Company did not take away the Kohinoor but it was gifted to Britain by late Sikh sovereign Maharaja Ranjit Singhs son Maharaja Duleep Singh. Reacting sharply to the BJP governments U-turn, the Congress on Wednesday said: It reflects the immaturity and inconsistency in the decision-making process and lack of a policy direction both at the level of the prime ministers office and in the government. According to a culture ministry statement on Wednesday, independent Indias first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1956 went on record to say that there was no ground to claim the Kohinoor from Britain. He was also of the opinion that efforts to get the diamond back would lead to difficulties. To exploit our good relations with some country to obtain free gifts from it of valuable articles does not seem to be desirable. On the other hand, it does seem to be desirable that foreign museums should have Indian objects of art, Nehru was quoted as saying in the statement. Through a culture ministry statement, the government on Tuesday clarified that it wished to put on record that certain news items regarding the Kohinoor are not based on facts. The government of India further reiterates its resolve to make all possible efforts to bring back the Kohinoor diamond in an amicable manner. The factual position is that the matter is sub judice at present. A public interest litigation has been filed in the Supreme Court, which is yet to be admitted, read the statement. with regard to the Kohinoor too, the government of India remains hopeful for an amicable outcome whereby India gets back a valued piece of art with strong roots in our nations history, it further said. The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee too on Tuesday demanded that the diamond be handed over to the Sikh community, maintaining that it was taken away through deceitful means by the British. The 108-carat diamond was presented to the then British monarch, Queen Victoria, in 1850 after the Anglo-Sikh wars, in which the Britain gained control over the Sikh empire in the then undivided Punjab. The Kohinoor diamond, kept under tight security at the Tower of London, is claimed by India, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. Congress on Thursday gave a notice to Rajya Sabha chairman Hamid Ansari seeking passage of a resolution condemning the Modi government for destabilistion of the Uttarakhand government and imposition of Presidents rule in the state. The move sent signals of a stormy start to the second half of the Budget Session on Monday. Hours after the Uttarakhand high court ordered reinstatement of the Harish Rawat government in the state setting aside the Presidents rule, Congress deputy leader in the Rajya Sabha Anand Sharma gave the notice to Rajya Sabha chairman Hamid Ansari under Rule 267 for taking up the resolution after suspending all business. The resolution seeks to deplore the destabilisation of the democratically elected government in Uttarakhand and disapprove the unjustified imposition of Presidents Rule there under Article 356 of the Constitution. Delivering a major blow to the Modi government, the Uttarakhand high court gave a fresh lease of life to the government headed by Rawat, who has been asked to prove his majority in the Assembly on April 29. April 21: Action Day 2:00 pm HC revokes Presidents rule after Centre fails to commit that it will not revoke its rule for a week HC revokes Presidents rule after Centre fails to commit that it will not revoke its rule for a week 3:00 pm BJP leaders Satpal Maharaj and Bhagat Singh Koshiyari rush back to Dehradun to take stock of the meeting BJP leaders Satpal Maharaj and Bhagat Singh Koshiyari rush back to Dehradun to take stock of the meeting 5:50 pm Chief minister Harish Rawat meets governor K K Paul and calls a cabinet meeting to review decisions taken during 25 days of the Presidents rule Chief minister Harish Rawat meets governor K K Paul and calls a cabinet meeting to review decisions taken during 25 days of the Presidents rule 6:00 pm BJP top brass including finance minister Arun Jaitley and home minister Rajnath Singh meets at party president Amit Shahs house BJP top brass including finance minister Arun Jaitley and home minister Rajnath Singh meets at party president Amit Shahs house 7:30 pm Attorney general Mukul Rohatgi says that the Centre will challenge the HC order in the Supreme Court Coming down heavily on the Centre for the March 27 proclamation, a division bench of the court headed by chief justice K M Joseph said the imposition of Presidents rule was contrary to the law laid down by the Supreme Court. Ever since the dismissal of the Rawat government and clamping of central rule, Congress had mounted an offensive against the Narendra Modi dispensation. The party had started Loktantra Bachao, Uttarakhand Bachao (Save Democracy, Save Uttarakhand) campaign to mobilise public support against the Centre. Buoyed by the high court order, Congress is likely to make it a major issue in Parliament when it reconvenes on April 25. It is also likely to raise questions over the imposition of Presidents rule earlier in party-ruled Arunachal Pradesh. Four days before the second budget session of Parliament starts, the Congress got a shot in the arm after the Uttarakhand high court struck down the Presidents rule in the state. The partys central leadership has asked dismissed Uttarakhand CM Harish Rawat to get his House in order to win the trust vote, according to party sources. Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi led the attack against the NDA government that had recommended the dismissal of the Congress government in the state. Modi govts blatant power grab fails. Democracy wins, Gandhi said in a tweet. Modiji while you attack the Constitution, destroy institutions & undermine Democracy pl remember ppl of Uttarakhand & entire country are watching (sic), another tweet from Gandhi said. While the Centre will challenge Thursdays verdict in the Supreme Court, an upbeat Congress demanded an unconditional apology from the PM and Bharatiya Janata Party chief Amit Shah. This is also a slap on the face of those in BJP who sought to dislodge an elected government, elected with the mandate of people in Uttarakhand, Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said. The party is set to rock the second budget session, which starts from April 25, over issues including the dismissal of its government in Uttarakhand. Our stand in vindicated. We will unite other Opposition parties against the BJP on the issue of assault on democracy and federalism, said a senior Congress leader. India raised Beijings blocking of New Delhis bid to sanction JeM chief Masood Azhar at the UN for the third time in a week when National Security Adviser AK Doval brought up the issue during talks with a top Chinese official. Doval, designated the special representative (SR) for bilateral talks on the border dispute, raised the issue of Azhar with his counterpart, State Councilor Yang Jiechi, during a two-hour meeting at Diaoyutai state guesthouse on Wednesday. Though the talks primarily focused on the boundary dispute, (it was the 19th round of talks under SR mechanism), the two officials discussed a wide range of issues, including counter-terrorism and the situation in neighbouring countries and the region. Speaking to Hindustan Times before departing for India, Doval said it was obvious the Azhar issue would come up when terrorism was being discussed. Foreign minister Sushma Swaraj and defence minister Manohar Parrikar had raised Indias rancour on the issue with their Chinese counterparts earlier this week in Moscow and Beijing. Doval said India and China want to maintain peace and tranquillity on the border. Indias stand on the demarcation of the Line of Actual Control (LAC), he said, has been consistent for some time and there were no new suggestions on this matter. Doval called on Premier Li Keqiang before his departure in the afternoon, when he officially announced President Pranab Mukherjees visit to China in May. Referring to China blocking the bid to ban Pakistan-based terror suspect Masood Azhar at the UN, Parrikar had said on Monday: It was not exactly the right direction they have taken and having a coordinated line on terrorism is in the interest of India and China both. Explaining Chinas position, foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said on Tuesday, I can understand your concern. I would like to repeat our position that we support the central coordinating role of the UN Security Council in the world counter-terrorism campaign. She added, We always deal with the listing matter in the UNSC according to rules of procedures and basic facts. Hua did not give the reasons for Chinas stand. It is clear that if the issue of Azhar is not deftly handled by New Delhi and Beijing, it will dampen bilateral relations, which are already plagued by multiple issues. The Uttarakhand high court quashed Presidents rule in the state on Thursday, restoring the Harish Rawat-led Congress government and asking it to prove its majority in the assembly on April 29. The verdict comes as an embarrassment for Prime Minister Narendra Modis government at the Centre, accused of trying to grab power in opposition-ruled states. In Delhi, attorney general Mukul Rohatgi said the government will challenge the high courts verdict in the Supreme Court on Friday. In a counter move, chief minister Rawat filed a caveat in the apex court to ensure no order is passed without giving him a hearing. Two Union ministers, Rajnath Singh and Arun Jaitley, met party chief Amit Shah to discuss the implications of the high court verdict. Read | Centre to move SC against order quashing Prez Rule in Uttarakhand The Centre imposed Presidents rule in the state on March 27 citing governance breakdown after nine Congress lawmakers rebelled against Rawat. The deposed chief minister had challenged in court the Centres decision, which came just a day before he was to prove his strength in the assembly. A division bench of the high court said at the end of four days of scathing observations against the Centre that it did not find enough material to justify imposition of Presidents rule. When the government takes action under Article 356 of the Constitution, it is expected to be non-partisan, it cannot have any kind of bias, but we do not see it here, the bench of chief justice KM Joseph and justice VK Bist said. The court observed that such action by the Centre undermine confidence of the little man who stands with a white paper to cast his vote braving the snow, heat and rain. Congress supporters celebrating in Dehradun on Thursday celebrating the high court order,restoring the Harish Rawat-led state government. (PTI) Reactions Congress spokesman Abhishekh Singhvi who represented Rawat in court told HT that none of the eight reports sent by governor KK Paul to the Centre cited breakdown of constitutional machinery or recommended presidents rule. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time a dismissed government has been reinstated by a judicial order, senior advocate Raju Ramachandran said. Read | Uttarakhand high court quashes Presidents rule: Who said what Thursdays court decision triggered celebrations by Uttarakhand Congress workers who burst crackers and distributed sweets in capital Dehradun. We welcome the verdict. The whole country knows who was behind the political instability in the state, Rawat told reporters. We dont want to fight...They are powerful, mighty and broad-chested...I would request the Centre to forget the past and work in the spirit of cooperative federalism. Read | In the end, truth wins: Harish Rawat on Uttarakhand HC ruling Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi attacked the Prime Minister in a tweet, Modi Govts blatant power grab fails. Democracy wins (sic). Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal called the courts decision a huge embarrassment to the NDA government while Left parties said it was a slap to the subverters of the Constitution. If Rawat fails to prove his majority, the governor could either invite the BJP to form the government or dissolve the house and call fresh elections. The high court said the disqualification of the nine rebel MLAs by the speaker under the anti-defection law was no material for imposition of Presidents rule. A single bench of the court will hear on April 23 the nine rebels plea against their disqualification, which may impact Rawats floor test. The BJP put up a brave front after the adverse judgment saying that Rawat has been given relief by the court. The Harish Rawat government was in a minority yesterday, it is in a minority today and tomorrow. It will be proved on April 29, party general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya said in Delhi. (With agency inputs) Uttarakhand crisis: Full coverage Deposed chief minister Harish Rawat said on Thursday that the Uttarakhand high courts decision to set aside Presidents Rule in the state and reviving the Congress government headed by him is the victory of the people. We welcome the verdict. The whole country knows who was behind the political instability in the state, Rawat told reporters in Dehradun. I still say that we are ready to forget this chapter and I appeal to Centre to support us in our development, he added. Read | Who said what on high courts order In the end, truth wins. We respect the verdict of the high court, he had tweeted after the HC gave its verdict. The Congress leader also thanked all the party legislators who stood by him during the political crisis. The HC quashed Presidents Rule in the state and has ordered floor test in the assembly on April 29. A division bench of the high court headed by chief Justice KM Joseph said the imposition of the Presidents rule was contrary to the law laid down by the Supreme Court. The court also said it would be a travesty of justice if the Centre revokes Presidents Rule and allows someone else to form a government in the state. Reacting to the court order, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) said the Rawat government is in minority and this will be proved on April 29. Read | Even President can be wrong, Uttarakhand HC tells Centre BJP general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya met with party spokespersons at the BJP headquarters in New Delhi after the HCs verdict. Vijayvargiya was quoted by ANI as saying that he is not surprised by the order. We will review the courts order. A question does arise that how the HC gave relief to a CM who was clearly seen in a sting operation, Vijayvargiya said. The political crisis erupted on March 18 when nine Congress MLAs backed by the BJP demanded a division of votes during the discussion on the appropriation bill. The governor asked Rawat to prove majority on the floor of the assembly on March 28. However, a day before the vote, the nine MLAs were disqualified from the assembly under the anti-defection law. A day before the scheduled trust vote, the Centre imposed Presidents Rule in the state citing a constitutional breakdown. April 21: Action Day 2:00 pm HC revokes Presidents rule after Centre fails to commit that it will not revoke its rule for a week HC revokes Presidents rule after Centre fails to commit that it will not revoke its rule for a week 3:00 pm BJP leaders Satpal Maharaj and Bhagat Singh Koshiyari rush back to Dehradun to take stock of the meeting BJP leaders Satpal Maharaj and Bhagat Singh Koshiyari rush back to Dehradun to take stock of the meeting 5:50 pm Chief minister Harish Rawat meets governor K K Paul and calls a cabinet meeting to review decisions taken during 25 days of the Presidents rule Chief minister Harish Rawat meets governor K K Paul and calls a cabinet meeting to review decisions taken during 25 days of the Presidents rule 6:00 pm BJP top brass including finance minister Arun Jaitley and home minister Rajnath Singh meets at party president Amit Shahs house BJP top brass including finance minister Arun Jaitley and home minister Rajnath Singh meets at party president Amit Shahs house 7:30 pm Attorney general Mukul Rohatgi says that the Centre will challenge the HC order in the Supreme Court (With PTI and ANI inputs) Islamic state rebuffed Sri Sri Ravi Shankars attempt to open a dialogue with the terror group by sending a photograph of a beheaded man, the spiritual leader told the media on Thursday. I tried to initiate peace talks with the ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) recently but they sent me a photograph of a beheaded body of a man. Thus, my effort for a peace dialogue with the ISIS ended, he said. I think the ISIS does not want any peace talks, he told the media in Agartala. Hence, they should be dealt by military. Ravi Shankar left Agartala on Thursday for Kolkata after a three-day visit to Tripura. Holding a series of meetings across the state, he stressed on the need to bring peace to Indias northeastern region. Ravi Shankar urged the militant outfits of the region to hold peace talks with the government. The 59-year-old said his aim was to unite all cultures, religions, faith and ideologies. He said the National Greet Tribunals decision to fine the Art of Living Foundation Rs 5 crore for allegedly causing environmental damage to the Yamuna flood plains in Delhi was politically motivated. The Islamic State has reportedly executed 250 girls in northern Iraq for refusing to become sex slaves, according to a media report. The girls had been ordered to accept temporary marriages to the terrorists and were murdered, sometimes alongside their families, for their refusal to be sex slaves in Iraqs second largest city of Mosul. IS began selecting women of Mosul and forced them into marrying its militants, calling it temporary marriage since it has taken control over Mosul, and the women who refused to submit to this practice would be executed, said Kurdish Democratic Party spokesperson Said Mamuzini. At least 250 girls have so far been executed by IS for refusing to accept the practice of sexual jihad, and sometimes the families of the girls were also executed for rejecting to submit to IS request, Mamuzini told London-based Kurdish news agency AhlulBayt. Another official from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) party Ghayas Surchi said that human rights were being widely violated in all IS-held territories, particularly the womens rights as theyre seen as commodities and have no choice in choosing their spouses. Surchi said that women were not allowed to go out alone in Mosul and cannot choose their spouses. The executions follows a spate of similar killings that took place last August in which 19 Mosul women were slaughtered for refusing to have sex with IS fighters, the report said. Up to 500 Yazidi women and girls were kidnapped and sexually abused by militants in August 2014. In October, more than 500 Yazidi women and young girls were reportedly abducted by the IS when they stormed the Sinjar region in northern Iraq. ISIS took control of Mosul in June 2014 after the fall of Iraqi army in the city and since then has been slaughtering its residents for various charges to spread fear. US President Barack Obama said on Monday that he expected Mosul to be retaken from the IS eventually. My expectation is that by the end of the year, we will have created the conditions whereby Mosul will eventually fall, Obama had said. The politics over chief minister Nitish Kumars possible projection as a PM candidate in the next Lok Sabha poll has begun in Bihar, with the first sign of fissure appearing in the ruling Grand Alliance (GA) even before things take a concrete shape. After RJD chief Lalu Prasad and his son deputy CM Tejashwi Prasad Yadav backed Kumar and the Bihar CM himself came into focus with his Sanghmukt Bharat remark, another GA constituent, the Congress, struck a discordant note, terming the exercise as premature. Party leaders also made it clear the Congress had its own PM candidate. For the Congress, Rahul Gandhi is the PM candidate. Every party wants to see its leader as the PM. RJD wants to see Lalu Prasad there. JD(U) wants Nitish Kumar. That is quite natural, said Bihar Congress president Ashok Choudhary. Barely a year ago, the Congress had backed Kumar as the chief ministerial face of a secular alliance in Bihar assembly polls, even before the GA could formally take shape. However, for the PMs post, the party leaders did not seem to feel the need to look beyond Rahul Gandhi. Choudhary s statement comes close on the heels of senior Congress leader Shakeel Ahmads remark that JD(U) was a regional party and national politics was quite different. Congress legislature party (CLP) leader Sadanand Singh reiterated that for the Congress, there was just one choice for the top post. In Bihar, the party has a regional alliance. But in politics, how the situation will shape up, one cannot say at this stage. There is no point raising any controversy at this stage. In Congress, the ultimate decision is that of the high command. We are in no position to speak on hypothetical questions. It is too early to deliberate on such issues, he added. Former Bihar CLP leader Ashok Kumar said the Congress was a national party. Wherever the party feels, it goes in for an alliance. For the party, Rahul Gandhi remains the only choice for PM, he said. The Congress overtures are on predictable lines in the wake of Nitish Kumar trying to emerge as a rallying force on the national scene against the BJP after a successful experiment of the Grand Alliance in Bihar. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON The Bihar police has arrested an engineering student who allegedly hacked the Facebook account of Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad. The Economic Offences Unit of Bihar Police nabbed the 20-year-old student, Divyanshu Kumar alias Golu, from Mehmadabad village in Vaishali and seized two Samsung mobile phones he is said to have used for hacking the Facebook account. He has been taken into judicial custody. IG (EOU) JS Gangwar said that Divyanshu, a student of Patna Sahib Engineering College, had good knowledge of computer operations and social networking sites. He hacked the Facebook page twice on March 8 and 11 and posted objectionable comments on it, he added. His interrogation led to the discovery various objectionable posts, including those with communal tinge, on his Facebook profile. Action will be taken in that regard also. The police will soon file a chargesheet against him, said Gangwar. The sim card of one of the mobile phones used by Divyanshu was found to have been originally issued in the name of Vijay Kumar Singh, who resides in Saudi Arabia, the officer added. However, the police did not give up considering it an international matter and continued with the investigation, which led to Divyanshu, he added. Lalu Prasads son and Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Prasad Yadav had removed the malicious contents from the homepage and lodged an FIR with the Sachivalaya police station in Patna. The FIR was lodged under sections 419 (punishment for cheating by impersonation), 420 (cheating and dishonesty inducing delivery of property) and 406 (punishment for criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code, police said. Lawyers were on Thursday scheduled to meet a girl who activists say was illegally detained after her alleged molestation in north Kashmirs Handwara town provoked violent protests that killed five people since April 12. However, a government official said she was being housed along with her father and aunt at a relatives house without any restrictions. The Jammu and Kashmir high court directed Handwara superintendent of police Ghulam Jeelani Wani on Wednesday to facilitate a meeting of the girl with her mother and lawyers. Hearing a habeas corpus for the immediate release of the three people, the high court said that it should be clubbed with a PIL filed by the Bar Association that seeks similar relief. The PIL has been listed for April 26. Read: High court directs SP to allow Handwara girl to meet mother, lawyer The consequence of todays proceedings is six more days of illegal police custody for the Handwara minor girl. But the direction to SP Wani will ensure that the minor girl and her family receive unhindered access to legal counsel for the first time since they were detained, read a statement by the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), which is providing legal help to the girl and her family. Civil rights activists continued to dispute the states version of the circumstances surrounding the girls alleged detention. While the JKCCS and other rights groups claimed that the minor and her kin were being illegally kept under restraint, a status report filed by the police before the court on Wednesday stated that the three were shifted on the request of the father to the house of a friend. A copy of the police report is in HTs possession. Angry youngsters throw stones at police personnel as an agitation turns violent in downtown Srinagar. (PTI photo) Nayeema Mehjoor, chairperson of the State Commission for Women, told the media on Wednesday night that the girl was not in police custody but at a relatives house. However, one or two policemen are with the girl to make her feel safe as she is feeling insecure and is mentally disturbed, she added. I talked to the girl myself. She is quite exhausted and disturbed. Even the girls family members are feeling insecure about her security, which is why they are putting up at a relatives house. I dont think police have been restricting the girls movements, Mehjoor was quoted as saying by a Srinagar-based news agency. The series of conflicting statements began when the girls mother told the media that her daughters statement regarding misbehaviour by local boys as recorded in a video released by the army was made under pressure from the police. The girl, however, reiterated in a statement before the chief judicial magistrate (CJM) the next day that she was assaulted by two local boys one of whom was in school uniform. Read: From anger to violent rage: A summer of discontent in Kashmir The JKCCSS countered the statement by pointing out that her deposition had taken place in the absence of any family supervision or legal aid. The Solidarity Group for Handwara Girl, a human rights group comprising mostly women activists, held a demonstration at Press Enclave in the state capital on Wednesday to demand the immediate release of the minor from illegal detention. The Handwara girl is in police custody. They either keep her under arrest at the police station, at her home, or at some undisclosed location. She is a minor, and they cant keep her under detention like this, said Essar Batool, a Srinagar-based rights activist and writer. The protesters also sought chief minister Mehbooba Muftis intervention in the matter. Hundreds of students participated in a signature campaign undertaken by protesters at Kashmir University. A similar demonstration was also held by the All India Students Association at Delhis Jawaharlal Nehru University on Wednesday. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON Mahatma Gandhis granddaughter Tara Gandhi Bhattacharjee has been decorated with one of Frances top honour The Order of Arts and Letters for her contribution in promoting peace, solidarity, culture, education, and development. On behalf of the French President Bhattacharjee, 82, was conferred the Officier de lOrdre des Arts et Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) honour late on Wednesday by French Ambassador Francois Richier. Accepting the award Bhattacharjee said there was need to learn the fearlessness of Gandhi. The fearlessness of Gandhi was different. His was made of love and compassion. I remember his room, his doors were always open. One hardly had to take an appointment to meet him. I remember politicians coming out of the room saying they disagree with his view. They probably didnt change their view, but did become his friends for sure. Thats the fearlessness we need today, she said. This honour comes in recognition of Bhattacharjees remarkable work for promoting peace, solidarity, culture, education, and development through her commitment to perpetuating the memory and legacy of her grandfather, Mahatma Gandhi, a statement by the Embassy said. The daughter of late Devadas Gandhi and the late Lakshmi Devadas Gandhi, is the widow of the late Jyoti Prasad Bhattacharjee, a leading economist. For the past 28 years, she has been working for the Kasturba Gandhi National Memorial Trust, founded by Mahatma Gandhi in memory of his wife to serve needy women and children of rural India. The LOrdre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) is a French government distinction for persons who have distinguished themselves by their creativity in the field of art, culture and literature or for their contribution to the influence of arts in France and throughout the world. Some noted Indian recipients of this honour in the past include Bharti Kher, Subodh Gupta, Shahrukh Khan, Pt Hariprasad Chaurasia, Aishwarya Rai, Raghu Rai, Ebrahim Alkazi, Habib Tanveer, and Upamanyu Chatterjee. Mumbais Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport has become the second Indian airport after Delhis Indira Gandhi International to join the list of global airports hosting more than 40 million passengers a year. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport in United States which handled over 101 million passengers in 2015, leads the pack according to Airports Council International, a trade representative. Beijing Capital International with 89.9 million passengers and Dubai with 78 million, came second and third on the list. Passenger volume at Mumbai grew from 36.6 million in 2014 -15 to 41.7 million in the year that ended in March 2016. But despite notching up that milestone, theres bad news for passengers flying out of the City of Dreams. According to industry experts, long waits for fliers could get worse with the city airport crossing its originally designed capacity of 40 million passengers a year. Mumbai airport had the poorest punctuality record among the four private-run metro airports in the country, finishing at the bottom of the list almost every second month over the past two years. With work on the Navi Mumbai Airport yet to start, fliers from Mumbai are likely to be stuck with poor services despite paying a premium for the swanky airport, said industry experts. Passengers did not have to pay airport charges such as user development fee and airport development fee until the airport was privatised. If one has to face long waits and mediocre services despite paying a premium why privatise them? said a member of the Air Passengers Association of India. The Mumbai International Airport Limited spokesperson did not comment on HTs query on saturation and congestion. Beleaguered liquor baron Vijay Mallyas woes could mount if he does not comply with a Supreme Court deadline that ends on Thursday for a full disclosure of his assets in India and abroad to back up his offer to repay bank loans. Mallya and his defunct Kingfisher Airlines are facing separate probes by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) over their alleged default on loans worth Rs 7,000 crore from 17 public sector Indian banks, including IDBI bank. They currently owe around Rs 9, 200 crore to the banks. The SCs directive to Mallya came on April 7 after the SBI-led consortium rejected his Rs 4,000-crore loan repayment proposal. Read : IDBI loan default: ED suspects Kingfishers brand was over-valued With the two agencies, especially ED, closing in on Mallya, he can ill-afford to ignore the apex courts deadline on assets disclosure, according to an ED source. If Mallya is sincere about his offers to repay the loans owed to the banks, he should do what the apex court has asked him as a first step, to assure all concerned about his intent, said the source. The ED, in any case, is considering a move to provisionally attach such Kingfisher assets that may have originated from the Rs 900 crore loan taken from IDBI in 2009, said the source. ED has written to the external affairs ministry to seek Mallyas deportation from UK. Mallya and Kingfisher have denied any wrongdoing so far. The ED has been in touch with the 17-bank SBI-led consortium, which had in March approached the apex court for an order to impound Mallyas passport. On Monday, a Mumbai special court had issued a Non Bailable Warrant (NBW) against the embattled businessman that cannot be executed currently since he left India a month ago. But it can be executed if the ED forces his return, by seeking an Interpol alert and his extradition. Mallya, 60, left India on March 2 as the creditor banks closed in on him to recover the money. The ED had moved the court for a NBW against Mallya after he ignored three summons to appear before it in connection with Kingfishers default on the Rs 900 crore loan from IDBI Bank. Acting on an ED request, the Ministry of External Affairs recently suspended Mallyas passport, asking him to explain why his passport should not be cancelled. Loan repayment may affect probes against Kingfisher? According to a government source who is familiar with the probes against Mallya, if Kingfisher manages to repay the entire amount owed to the banks, it will, in fact, impact the (ED probe) against Kingfisher and ease the pressure on Mallya. It will have to be examined legally, especially as far as EDs probe is concerned, as to what may happen if Kingfisher pays up the entire loan and whether the EDs money-laundering charge gets weakened after the loans are repaid, the source said. The source, however, said that the CBIs probe against Mallya and Kingfisher may not get affected much even if the loans are repaid. The CBIs case, based on its July 2015 First Information Report in the IDBI unpaid loan, will stay unaffected because the agency is also looking at the role of public servants ---the IDBI Bank officials ---in not carrying out necessary due diligence prior to approving Kingfishers loan request for Rs 900 crore despite adverse indicators, said the source. Mallya had tweeted in the past that he was not on the run and would abide by the law. He is understood to have left for UK on his diplomatic passport though his exact whereabouts are not known. Mallyas key assets Among the key known assets of Mallya in India are his Mumbai-based Kingfisher House at Andheri and Goa-based Kingfisher Villa at Candolim, which were pledged as security against the loans to the SBI-led bank consortium. Kingfisher had also reportedly pledged trademarks and two choppers to the banks as collaterals. Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan has said his name was misused and that nothing illegal has been attributed to him after a fresh report on the Panama Papers alleged he participated in board meetings of two off-shore companies by telephone conference. The Indian Express reported on Thursday that Sea Bulk Shipping and Tramp Shipping had passed a resolution each on December 12, 1994, in connection with a loan of $1.75 million from Dallah Albaraka Investment Company based on new records obtained and investigated by it. The loan was for Constellation Ship Management for the purchase of all the shares issued by Tramp Shipping and held by Sea Bulk Shipping. Besides Tramp and Sea Bulk, the paper had said Bachchan was the managing director for two other offshore entities - Lady Shipping and Treasure Shipping. Both resolutions recorded Bachchans participation in board meetings by telephone conference. In their certificate of incumbency issued the same day, both companies also recorded Bachchan as director. The companies had the same directors, including Bachchan, and officers, it said. The Express had reported on April 4 that records of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca showed that Bachchan served as director of these four offshore shipping companies between 1993 and 1997. Bachchan had issued a statement saying he did not know any of the companies, had not been a director of any of them and that it is possible that (his) name has been misused. In response, Bachchans office again sent a rejoinder, which was also posted on his Twitter account. On Panama disclosures, I wish to state that queries continue to be sent to me by the media. I would humbly request them to kindly direct these to the GOI (Government of India) where I, as a law abiding citizen, have already sent, and shall continue to send, my responses, the post said. I stand by my earlier statement on the misuse of my name in the matter and in any event the press reports do not disclose any illegal act committed by me. The Indian Express, based on Mossack Fonseca records, said Umesh Sahai of Jersey-based corporate service provider City Management (now Minerva Trust) was one of the founder-directors of the four shipping companies and that he had appointed Bachchan as director and managing director in 1993. He (Sahai) also signed the board resolutions that recorded Bachchans participation in the December 12, 1994, meetings. Sahai did not respond to emails and phone calls seeking his comment on Bachchans statement denying any knowledge of the companies, the newspaper said. Bachchans name cropped up in the reports as part of a global expose of International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and over 100 global media organisations, based on millions of leaked documents of Mossack Fonseca. A high-level probe team has been constituted, with members drawn from the various agencies of the finance ministry and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) based on the orders issued by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Indian authorities have already said not all off-shore funds need be illegitimate. A pregnant Indian woman working as a nurse in Oman was found dead in her apartment, according to a media report on Thursday. The woman, identified as Chikku Robert, was found with at least a dozen stab wounds on her body, the Times of Oman reported. Robert and her husband were from Kerala and were working at Badr Al Samaa hospital in Salalah city, the capital of Dhofar province. They were married four months ago. She was found dead in her apartment yesterday. She was supposed to be on duty by 10pm. As she didnt turn up to duty, her husband went to the apartment only to find her lying dead, said Manpreet Singh, the honorary Indian consular agent in Salalah. Investigation is on, police have sealed the area and the body is kept in Sultan Qaboos Hospital, he added. An official from Badr Al Samaa hospital confirmed the death and said they are waiting for updates. Its sad news. We are waiting for updates, said KO Devassy, the group marketing manager of the hospital. Union minister Giriraj Singh proposed on Thursday to revoke the voting rights of people with more than two children to control the population. If Malaysia and Indonesia can make the law, then there must be a strict law. The nation wont progress without population control. There must be a balance. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians -- all must have at least one to two children. Those who dont follow, their voting rights must be revoked, Singh told ANI. He said the decline in Hindu population is worrying. A law is needed on population control for all religions if development is required. The people of the nation must express their thoughts and discuss it. Media has shown the condition of Hindus in Pakistan, he added. Singh said on Wednesday that if India did not change its population policy and enforce a two-child norm for all religions, then women will not be safe and might have to be kept under the veil, like in Pakistan. The BJP MP from Nawada, who was speaking at a cultural yatra in West Champarans Bagaha, was reportedly referring to districts such as Kishanganj and Araria. This is not the first time Singh has courted controversy for his comments. Earlier this month, Singh attributed the fatwa asking Muslim community members not to chant Bharat Mata ki Jai to a conspiracy by international powers to destroy India and divide it. Last month, he had said that Akhilesh Yadavs government has turned Uttar Pradesh into a nursery of terrorism and alleged that it was not dismissing Azam Khan for fear of losing Muslim votes. In the run-up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, he had called for all those critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to be sent to Pakistan. Concerned over the agrarian crisis engulfing almost half of the country, Congress on Wednrsday demanded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi call a meeting of chief ministers of drought hit states to tackle the situation on war footing. Reminding the Prime Minister of his Raj dharma, the party also wanted MGNREGA works to be taken up immediately in the three lakh affected villages and implementation of the National Food Security Act in the drought hit states. Partys chief spokesman Randeep Surjewala told reporters that the rural crisis could be gauged from the fact that the spate of farmers suicides has increased to an average of 52 deaths per day. Besides, he said the agriculture growth rate is down to 0.2 percent from 3.7 percent two years back. The resultant effect is large scale migration, farmers suicides, drinking water rationing, food shortages and a huge rural crisis, he said. Targeting the Narendra Modi dispensation, he asked the Prime Minister and his government to rise from its slumber as the grave agrarian and drinking water crisis has hit hard nearly 40 per cent of Indias population. He said over 33 crore people in 2,55,000 villages in 10 States are reeling under severe drought. He said if Bihar, Uttarakhand and Gujarat, which are also facing drought like conditions is taken into account, as much as 48.27 crore people are hit by agrarian and water crisis. Alleging that rural distress has been accentuated manifold on account of systematic undermining of MGNAREGA by Modi government, he said this could be gauged from the fact that in 2015-16, only 1.8 per cent households covered by MGNAREGA got 150 days of employment in the 10 drought-hit States. Modi government is, completely oblivious to the crisis and has only responded after Supreme Court of India has intervened in the matter and is issuing day-to-day instructions to deal with the drought conditions. This by itself reflects complete abdication of duty by Modi government, he added. Environmentalist RK Pachauri, accused of sexual harassment by his former women colleagues in the recent past, has stepped down as a member of the governing council of Teri to get engaged in other interests. The announcement came on the heels of a media report which said the green body has decided to sever its association with Pachauri even though his employment contract with Teri expires in 2017. It said the governing council had also decided to pay all the dues for the remainder of his tenure and bring an immediate end to it. Pachauri, however, maintained that his term as a member of The Energy and Resources Institutes (Teri) governing council ended on March 31, 2016 and he felt it was time for me to move away and get engaged in other interests which I have harboured over the past few years for activities at the global level. When contacted for comments, a Teri spokesperson did not confirm the contents of the media report, saying, The governing council of Teri met on April 18, 2016. Several decisions were taken in the meeting. The minutes of the meeting are currently awaiting approval. The report had quoted the spokesperson as saying: Dr Pachauris term as a member of the governing council of Teri ended on March 31, 2016. As the post of executive vice-chairman (EVC) is co-terminus with this membership, his role as EVC also ended along with his membership of the Council. Pachauri said he was issuing the statement to provide the media with information about his stepping down from Teris Governing Council, suggesting the decision to call time on his association with the organisation was voluntary. Read | Pachauri drags media houses, lawyer Vrinda Grover to court In his statement, Pachauri said the Teri staff was its greatest treasure which under the new Director General will take the Institute to much greater heights in the years ahead. I have had the good fortune of leading Teri for three decades and a half and have received the priceless contribution from thousands of colleagues over the years in building up this Institute to level of an outstanding organisation. I began with Teri as the articulation of my dream and humanitys call for a major intellectual resource, which has now grown to a size and spread straddling the whole world, with a staff strength of around 1200 professionals and world class infrastructure and expertise, he said. Pachauri said he had greatly benefited from the support Pachauri said he had greatly benefited from the support the green body had always provided. I have also benefited greatly from the support I have always received from Teris governing council, and would like to place on record my gratitude to them, beginning with the late Darbari Seth, my inspiration and leader in the initial years of Teris development, he said. Read | Three & counting: Pachauris former secy accuses him of harassment now Pachauri was removed from the post of director general last year after an FIR was filed against him following a complaint of sexual harassment made by a junior woman colleague. The Delhi Police had charge-sheeted him in the case early this year. Despite the controversy, the green bodys Governing Council created a fresh post of executive vice-chairman for Pachauri, triggering an outrage, following which he was asked to proceed on leave. Earlier this year, two more former employees of Teri, one of them a foreign national, had also accused him of sexual harassment. Former finance secretary Ashok Chawla was recently appointed chairman of Teris governing council. Read | Pachauri hits back, accuses woman of trapping him for money Police file 1,400-page charge sheet in case against Pachauri A horse was buried with police honours after dying from injuries suffered in an attack allegedly by BJP leader Ganesh Joshi, with his death triggering renewed outrage. The police horse, Shaktiman, became the subject of a weeks-long row between rival political parties after his injured hind leg turned gangrenous and had to be amputated. Ganesh Joshi, from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was briefly arrested last month on charges of cruelty to the horse that was wounded during a party protest in the Uttarakhand. Shaktiman was fitted with a prosthetic limb, reportedly rushed in from the United States, and every detail of the animals road to recovery was covered by the media. Former Uttarakhand chief minister Harish Rawat throws flower petals over the body of police horse 'Shaktiman' during a ceremony in Dehradun. (AFP Photo) But Uttarakhand police announced on Wednesday that Shaktiman had gone into shock and died after being given anaesthesia to treat another infection. The doctors had administered anaesthesia to him as they needed to treat an infection but he could not handle the anaesthesia, senior superintendent Sadanand Datte told AFP. Datte said the animal was buried with full police honours in state capital Dehradun late on Wednesday. Shaktiman was wrapped in a white cloth in a ceremony watched by politicians and police, an AFP reporter at the funeral said. File photo of Shaktiman, the Uttarakhand police horse who died in Dehradun on Wednesday. (PTI File Photo) The news triggered fresh anger, with national minister and animal rights campaigner Maneka Gandhi calling for those responsible to be thrown in jail for killing a police officer. BJP state lawmaker Joshi again denied he had attacked the horse with a stick during the protest. If I am found guilty, then cut my leg, Joshi was quoted as saying. The Uttarakhand government, run by the rival Congress party, had spared no expense in treating the horse, with the creature becoming a cause celebre. Shaktiman had been treated to repeat visits from the states chief minister and an American veterinary surgeon had reportedly been flown in from Bhutan to provide treatment, in what some critics saw as a case of political point-scoring. RIP Shaktiman the horse. You proved that the real animals are humans. Sahil Shah (@SahilBulla) April 21, 2016 People took to Twitter on Thursday over the death, some accusing politicians of using #Shaktiman as a political tool. Bollywood actor Neha Dhupia said: We are sorry #Shaktiman. U didnt deserve this... Its us... Whats the human race coming to. A Sikh group in Canada has launched a bid to block a visit by former Punjab chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh, who is expected to begin a seven-day trip to Toronto and Vancouver on Friday. In recent months, campaigning for next years assembly election in Punjab has arrived in distant Canada. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) commenced activities and plans to bring in Arvind Kejriwal to make a pitch to its supporters. Singh, a Congress MP in the Lok Sabha, is scheduled to travel to Canada before the Delhi chief minister. But hardline activist group Sikhs for Justice (SFJ) is trying to ensure Punjab politicking doesnt make it to the country. Toronto-based law firm Goldblatt Partners, on behalf of the SFJ, has sent a memorandum to foreign minister Stephane Dion, claiming Singhs visit will violate a circular issued in September 2011 wherein the department stated it will not allow foreign governments to conduct election campaigns in Canada or establish foreign political parties or movements in Canada. The missive asks the Canadian government to lodge a formal objection with the Indian high commission in Ottawa over this matter. While such a policy will also apply to AAPs campaigning in Canada, the focus at this time is the Congress leaders impending arrival. Singh is expected to address two large gatherings in Toronto and Vancouver and attend smaller meetings. Amarpreet Aulakh, president of the Indian Overseas Congress Canada East, said these are private events and not open to the public. This is an outreach programme, he said, for Singh to put forward his point to NRIs before the Punjab polls. The Congress has made arrangements for additional security at the venues, given the possibility of protests. SFJ plans to up the ante in case Singhs visit goes ahead. In a statement, its legal advisor Gurpatwant Pannun said the group will launch a private criminal prosecution against Singh if he comes to Canada, on the grounds that, during his tenure as chief minister, he appointed or reinstated officials allegedly involved in torture or extra-judicial killings in Punjab. The Canadian Constitution promotes human rights and does not condone the acts of those who participate or protect violators, Pannun said. The threat of a similar suit in 2013 may have caused Punjabs then deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal to cancel his trip to Canada. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON BJP leader Subramanian Swamy on Thursday slammed attorney general Mukul Rohatgi and solicitor general Ranjit Kumar after the Uttarakhand high court axed the Presidents Rule in the state. As the high court ruled against the BJP revoking the Presidents rule, Swamy suggested its time to get a new AG and SG for the BJP Govt. Time to get a new AG and SG for the BJP Govt Subramanian Swamy (@Swamy39) April 21, 2016 With a new AG and SG we can win the Uttarakhand case. We had kep these two out of Arunachal and won Subramanian Swamy (@Swamy39) April 21, 2016 Uttarakhand had been under the Presidents rule as Harish Rawats government was dismissed on March 27 on the grounds of a breakdown of Constitutional machinery in a decision that came after a rebellion in the ruling Congress. Read | Who said what on high courts order Read | Even President can be wrong, Uttarakhand HC tells Centre Suspected militants assaulted three women and the driver of a vehicle after it was forcibly taken to an isolated place at Keithelmanbi along the Imphal-Dimpaur road (NH-2) in Senapati district, police said on Thursday. The vehicle, transporting flowers to Imphal, was taken to an isolated place after the women reportedly objected to the monetary demands made, a police officer said. Police later recovered the vehicle. Three over-ground workers (OGWs) belonging to the Lashker-e-Toiba militant outfit were arrested from the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir on Thursday. Three OGWs of LeT outfit were apprehended at a check-point established by a joint team of police and paramilitary CRPF at Rajbagh in Srinagar, a police official said. He said the arrested have been identified as Ubaid Untoo and Yawar Muzaffar Bhat - both residents of Sopore township in north Kashmirs Baramulla district and Altaf Hussain Lone, a resident of Lashtiyal area of Kupwara. A Chinese pistol, two pistol magazines, eight pistol rounds, four hand grenades and a GPS device were recovered from their possession, the official said. He said the police have registered a case in this regard. The Uttarakhand high court on Thursday set aside the imposition of Presidents Rule in the state in what is being viewed as a major setback to the central government. After two consecutive days of hearing on a matter filed by ousted chief minister Harish Rawat, the court said the proclamation of central rule in the state stood null and void. Read | Uttarakhand crisis: HC sets aside Prez rule; floor test on April 29 Heres how political leaders reacted to the courts decision: - In a press conference ousted Uttarakhand CM Harish Rawat said We thank the high court on behalf of all secular and tolerant forces. We are overwhelmed by the way the common man fought for us. - Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi tweeted, Modi Govts blatant power grab fails. Democracy wins. He added Modiji while you attack the Constitution,destroy institutions and undermine democracy please remember people of Uttarakhand and entire country are watching. - Congress leader and former finance minister Indira Hridayesh said her party saluted the judiciary for upholding truth and law. Read | Why Prez Rule in 5th yr of Rawat rule, Uttarakhand HC asks Centre - Congress MLA and the partys communications in-charge Randeep S Surjewala also praised the courts decision in a series of tweets. UKhand HC sets aside Presidents Rule.Sinister conspiracy of BJP defeated.Democracy wins. Modiji should apologize to people of Uttarakhand. HCs Indictment of Modi Govt for misleading the President, misusing 356 & trampling upon the Constitution is historic and unprecedented, he tweeted. Read | Even President can be wrong, Uttarakhand HC tells Centre - Delhi chief minster Arvind Kejriwal, who has frequently butted heads with the centre tweeted, This is a huge embarrassment to the (Narendra) Modi government. He should stop interfering with elected governments and respect democracy. - Anti-constitutional juggernaut of BJPs central govt halted in its tracks by judiciary in Uttarakhand. A slap to subverters of Constitution, tweeted CPI(M) chief Sitaram Yechury Read | No govt will survive if graft is used to bring Prez rule: Uttarakhand HC - The BJPs reaction to the courts decision was largely muted. In a press conference, Kailash Vijayvargiya the partys general secretary said, On 29th April during floor test it will be proved that Harish Rawat is in minority. - BJP leader Subramanian Swamy slammed attorney general Mukul Rohatgi and solicitor general Ranjit Kumar after the Uttarakhand high court axed the Presidents Rule in the state. Time to get a new Attorney General (AG) and Solicitor General (SG) for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, Swamy tweeted. With a new AG and SG we can win the Uttarakhand case. We had kept these two out of Arunachal and won. April 21: Action Day 2:00 pm HC revokes Presidents rule after Centre fails to commit that it will not revoke its rule for a week HC revokes Presidents rule after Centre fails to commit that it will not revoke its rule for a week 3:00 pm BJP leaders Satpal Maharaj and Bhagat Singh Koshiyari rush back to Dehradun to take stock of the meeting BJP leaders Satpal Maharaj and Bhagat Singh Koshiyari rush back to Dehradun to take stock of the meeting 5:50 pm Chief minister Harish Rawat meets Governor K K Paul and calls a cabinet meeting to review decisions taken during 25 days of the Presidents rule Chief minister Harish Rawat meets Governor K K Paul and calls a cabinet meeting to review decisions taken during 25 days of the Presidents rule 6:00 pm BJP top brass including finance minister Arun Jaitley and home minister Rajnath Singh meets at party president Amit Shahs house BJP top brass including finance minister Arun Jaitley and home minister Rajnath Singh meets at party president Amit Shahs house 7:30 pm Attorney general Mukul Rohatgi says that the Centre will challenge the HC order in the Supreme Court The Uttarakhand high court quashed Presidents rule in the state on Thursday, restoring the Harish Rawat-led Congress government and asking it to prove its majority in the assembly on April 29. The verdict comes as an embarrassment for Prime Minister Narendra Modis government at the Centre which has been accused of trying to grab power in states ruled by opposition parties. The Centre brought the state under central rule on March 27, citing governance breakdown after nine Congress lawmakers rebelled against Rawat. The deposed chief minister had challenged in court the Centres decision which came just a day before he was to prove his strength in the assembly. A division bench of the high court said at the end of four days of hearing that they did not find enough material to justify the imposition of Presidents rule. Read | Who said what on Uttarakhand high courts order When the government takes action under Article 356 of the Constitution, it is expected to be non-partisan, it cannot have any kind of bias, but we do not see it here, the bench of chief justice KM Joseph and justice VK Bist said, referring to the constitutional provision under which central rule was promulgated. Assistant solicitor general Rakesh Thapliyal, who argued on behalf of the Centre, requested the bench to keep its order in abeyance. When the judges refused saying the Centre can approach the Supreme Court, Thapliyal said the government will do so. The court ruling came after days of scathing observations against the Centre, which has argued that courts cannot have jurisdiction over a presidential order. The courts remarks had signaled that the court could strike down Presidents rule in the state. If Rawat fails to prove his majority, the governor could chose to either invite the BJP to form the government or dissolve the house and call fresh elections. Read | Even President can be wrong, Uttarakhand HC tells Centre The high court said the disqualification of the nine rebel MLAs by the speaker under the anti-defection law was no material for imposition of Presidents rule. The judges, however, made it clear that they were not completely against central rule as it could be necessary in cases where there was a breakdown of the state machinery and constitutional norms. But this was no such case, the court observed. The high court observed that the fate of the rebel Congress MLAs was an extraneous matter and it was a constitutional sin to defect. If a defection has taken place, they have to pay for the sin by disqualification. A single bench of the high court will hear on April 23 the rebel lawmakers plea against their disqualification, which may impact Rawats floor test. Thursdays court decision triggered celebrations by Congress workers in the state capital, Dehradun. Read | No govt will survive if graft is used to bring Prez rule: Uttarakhand HC We welcome the high court decision. This is a victory for the people of Uttarakhand. People have a right to govern themselves, Rawat told reporters. The verdict also triggered a torrent of criticism against the BJP. April 21: Action Day 2:00 pm HC revokes Presidents rule after Centre fails to commit that it will not revoke its rule for a week HC revokes Presidents rule after Centre fails to commit that it will not revoke its rule for a week 3:00 pm BJP leaders Satpal Maharaj and Bhagat Singh Koshiyari rush back to Dehradun to take stock of the meeting BJP leaders Satpal Maharaj and Bhagat Singh Koshiyari rush back to Dehradun to take stock of the meeting 5:50 pm Chief minister Harish Rawat meets Governor K K Paul and calls a cabinet meeting to review decisions taken during 25 days of the Presidents rule Chief minister Harish Rawat meets Governor K K Paul and calls a cabinet meeting to review decisions taken during 25 days of the Presidents rule 6:00 pm BJP top brass including finance minister Arun Jaitley and home minister Rajnath Singh meets at party president Amit Shahs house BJP top brass including finance minister Arun Jaitley and home minister Rajnath Singh meets at party president Amit Shahs house 7:30 pm Attorney general Mukul Rohatgi says that the Centre will challenge the HC order in the Supreme Court The Congress demanded an apology from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah for trampling democracy. It described the court order as a slap on the BJPs face for trying to dislodge an elected government. Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal called the courts decision a huge embarrassment to the NDA government. This is a huge embarrassment to the (Narendra) Modi government. He should stop interfering with elected governments and respect democracy, the Delhi chief minister tweeted. The Left parties too called the court order a slap to the subverters of the Constitution. Read | Why Prez Rule in 5th yr of Rawat rule, Uttarakhand HC asks Centre The anti-constitutional juggernaut of BJPs central government has been halted in its tracks by the judiciary in Uttarakhand, CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury told PTI. Similarly, CPI national secretary D Raja said the verdict was a huge embarrassment for the NDA government, which acted in an authoritarian manner. Trouble started in the state on March 18 when the BJP and nine rebel Congress legislators led by former chief minister Vijay Bahuguna, whom Rawat had replaced in 2014, said the budget was not passed in the assembly and his government was in a minority. Though speaker Govind Singh Kunjwal said the budget was passed, Governor KK Paul asked Rawat to prove his majority on March 28. Two days before that, a sting video surfaced, allegedly showing Rawat trying to bribe the rebels. Using this, the Centre imposed Presidents rule on March 27. (With agency inputs) Uttarakhand crisis: Full Coverage A CPI(M) worker was shot dead and two others were injured in Murshidabad districts Domkol during the third and the biggest phase of polling for the Bengal assembly on Thursday which was marred by violence. Sahidul Islam, 40, was killed allegedly by TMC supporters outside a polling station minutes after voting started. Throughout the day, 960 complaints were lodged and in Kolkatas Beleghata alone, 47 people were arrested. In another place, the ruling party were accused of snipping the earlobe of a CPI (M) supporter and then breaking his leg. Till 5pm, 79.22% voter turnout was recorded. Read | Highlights of third phase of polling in West Bengal elections Crude bomb attacks and voter intimidation was also reported, despite the EC having issued 16,000 non-bailable warrants, and getting 15,562 anti-social elements bound down, officials said. Officials also seized Rs1.97 crore from the four districts that went to polls and confiscated 463 illegal arms. Sporadic violence was reported from Burdwan and Nadia districts, the erstwhile bastions of the CPI(M). The third phase is the biggest of the six phases with 62 constituencies 22 in Murshidabad, 17 in Nadia, 16 in Burdwan and 7 in Kolkata going to polls. The phase is especially crucial for the ruling TMC that has to get the maximum seats in Burdwan and Kolkata to offset loses that alliance arithmetic may inflict in Murshidabad and Nadia. Assembly elections 2016: Full coverage Kolkata saw the lowest turnout till 3pm with 49.43% of the voters having pressed the button, while 79.29%, 81.62% and 78.26% did so in Murshidabad, Nadia and Burdwan districts respectively. The police super has conveyed in its report that TMC supporters are not connected with the Domkol incident. Yet Trinamool is being held responsible for it, said chief minister Mamata Banerjee at a public meeting in Amdanga in North 24 Parganas. The police super of Murshidabad is hand in glove with the ruling party, state Congress president Adhir Chowdhury shot back. EC failed in its duty. We have demanded re-poll in 15 booths of Domkal, said leader of opposition and CPI-M politburo Suryakanta Mishra. The phase was seen as crucial for the ruling Trinamool Congress that was aiming to sweep Burdwan and Kolkata to offset possible losses in Murshidabad and Nadia, where an informal Left-Congress alliance is stronger. Sporadic violence was also reported from Ketugram in Burdwan district, where a Trinamool worker was accused of cutting off the earlobe of a CPI-M supporter and breaking his leg. In Kolkata, Union minister Babul Supriyo was seen sprinting in North Kolkata lane behind a Trinamool supporter who allegedly hurled abuses at him when the BJP leader went to cast his vote along with his parents. Anwar Khan, a Trinamool leader from north Kolkata, was arrested for saying the Election Commission deserved to be hit with a shoe. The poll panel received 2,777 complaints till 6 pm. Read | Confident of Bengal polls win, Mamata aims to capture Delhi in 2019 Liquor baron Vijay Mallya refused on Thursday to divulge details of his overseas assets to anyone other than the Supreme Court, saying these were not acquired with loans from Indian banks to his now-defunct Kingfisher Airlines. The 60-year-old Rajya Sabha MP is said to be in Britain after he left India on March 2 and the enforcement directorate (ED) has approached the foreign ministry to initiate his deportation after a Mumbai court issued a non-bailable warrant against him. Mallya, accused of money laundering and loan defaults, told the top court that he will submit details of his overseas properties in a sealed envelope on April 26. But he asked the court not to reveal the content to a consortium of 17 banks whom he allegedly owes more than Rs 9,000 crores. Read | What happens if Mallya does not stick to SC deadline? Mallya declared that he, his wife and children collectively own Rs 780 crore worth of overseas assets but Indian banks have no jurisdiction over these properties. The banks cant have the details as he and his wife were NRIs, while their son and two daughters are US citizens, he said. The banks have no right to this information, more so since these assets were never considered while granting the loans or restructuring the loans of Kingfisher Airlines, he said in an affidavit to the court. The top court had ordered Mallya to disclose his assets in India and abroad after the banks rejected his offer to repay the Kingfisher Airlines loan. He said he can deposit Rs 1,591 crore if sales of shares of his two companies, United Spirit Limited and Kingfisher Finvest (India) Limited, were allowed. Also, Mallya asked to court to order Airbus Industries SA to return Rs 688 crore perked in the aircraft manufacturing company. He denied that bank loans were misused or diverted to amass assets. Mallya called Kingfisher Airlines a genuine commercial/business failure and blamed the 2008 global economic meltdown coupled with a spike in aviation fuel price for the downfall. Read | ED suspects Kingfishers brand was over-valued His woes continued as British multinational liquor company Diageo Plc on Thursday challenged the debt recovery tribunals power to direct it to deposit $40 million, which was part of a $75 million payout package signed with Mallya. The company said the amount was paid outside India. The bank consortium had alleged that the payout as part of the sweetheart deal. The government had suspended Mallyas diplomatic passport and might soon start deportation proceedings. A non-bailable warrant and suspension of his passport are good grounds to convince the British authorities to deport the businessman, an ED official said. Read | ED likely to seek Interpols help to arrest Vijay Mallya The agency has drawn lessons from last years attempt to bring back another high-profile accused in a separate money-laundering case former IPL chief Lalit Modi, who is believed to be in Britain too. Mallya has ignored three summonses issued by the ED, seeking time till May to depose before the agency. The ED alleged that Mallya had diverted Rs 430 crore of an IDBI loan and used the money to acquire properties abroad, a charge denied by Kingfisher. The embattled billionaire, facing a multi-agency probe, was convicted on Wednesday by a Hyderabad court in a cheque-bouncing case that GMR Hyderabad International Airport Ltd had filed. Read | Downfall of the king: A look at Vijay Mallyas journey from 1983 to 2016 Amid locals protesting women entering the inner sanctum (garba griha) of the Trimbakeshwar temple, a group of women activists broke the age-old tradition early on Thursday morning by entering the core area of the temple. Agitated locals called for a bandh for the day to show their discontent over the issue. At around 6 am, women from the Swaraj Sanghatana, led by Vanita Gutte, reached the temple located in Maharashtras Nashik district in wet clothes. Having been allegedly assaulted the day before by locals who barred their entry, the activists were accompanied by police through the temple. Read more | Women denied entry, assaulted inside Nashiks Trimbakeshwar temple Following yesterdays violence, the women had requested us to provide protection while entering the temple. Accordingly, we provided them protection, said a police official. The police apparently booked around 150 people for the assault. The Trimbakeshwar Devasthan Trust last week decided to allow women into the Lord Shiva temples sanctum sanctorum for an hour every day, but with a rider -- that women be clothed in wet cotton or silk garments while offering prayers in the core area. Read more | Women activists reject Trimbakeshwars rider for entry, file complaint The decision followed the agitation by Pune-based Swarajya Mahila Sanghatana, headed by Vanita Gutte. The women activists, however, had earlier refused to follow the conditions. The issue of women entering the inner sanctum of certain temples came to national attention in January when hundreds of women activists attempted to storm into the Shani Shingnapur temple in Maharashtra. After months of protests, and the Bombay high court observing that entering a temple was a fundamental right of every person, the temple trust finally decided to allow women on Arpil 8. The decision opens the doors for women to contest similar bans at other temples. Read more | Women devotees throng to Shani temple after ban lifted Gutte expressed her gratitude to media and the state administration, including the police, for changing the temples policy. When we returned to the temple after having a bath, we were told that the time to enter the inner sanctum is now over. When we resisted, the local residents assaulted us right in front of the god, a woman activist said. For locals, both in the towns of the Trimbakeshwar temple and Shani Shingnapur temple, breaking the decades-old tradition has been a sore issue, as many believe in keeping the practice intact. Read more | After Shani Temples move, other trusts under pressure to allow women SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON Shikhar Dhawans batting has gone downhill since the start of the World T20. He was even dropped for the semifinal, which the hosts lost to West Indies. He later tweeted to admit his poor form and vowed to learn from the mistakes. The Indian Premier League (IPL) was a perfect platform for the under-performing opening batsman to regain his touch. But that has not happened. In the three games he has played, the Sunrisers Hyderabad batsman has failed to reach double figures. The ultimate blow came in the last match against Mumbai Indians when he failed to handle the yorkers from Kiwi pacer Tim Southee. Once he even fell over, failing to negotiate the swing. The performance has drawn criticism from India batting great Sunil Gavaskar. The former India skipper blamed Dhawans slow footwork for his problems, even suggesting that the batsman try skipping to sharpen his reflexes. In the World T20, the opener had a tally of 43 runs in four matches. With scores of 8, 6 and 2 in the IPL, he would be happy to take any advice he gets. On Wednesday, at the nets on the eve of his sides clash against Gujarat Lions, Dhawan spent some time talking to team mentor VVS Laxman. The former India batsman backed the opener. Shikhar is an excellent player. He has shown in the past that he is a match winner. Whenever he plays well, the team is invariably in a good position to win. We are hoping for him to do well, Laxman said. So far in this edition, openers have anchored the innings and contributed the most towards successful chases. In the T20 format, the openers or the top three play a huge role. If they lay a good foundation, teams can be in a good position to either post a big total or win, Laxman said. Dhawans struggles have made the team even more dependent on fellow opener and skipper David Warner. The Aussie has so far played a leading role so far with scores of 58 and a match-winning 90 not out. Warner had replaced Dhawan as skipper during the last season. Dhawans performances in the tournament could have a direct impact on his place in the national side. The pressure is on the 30-year-old to reverse the slide. The good batting pitch at Rajkot should encourage Dhawan to turn things around. IPL franchise Kings XI Punjab has picked Dharamsala as its second home venue to host three matches next month after the matches were moved out of Nagpur following a Bombay High Court order. We are happy to announce that Kings XI Punjab will be playing our three home games in Dharamsala. We are grateful and thankful to the HPCA for their support in helping us make this transition seamless at such short notice, the franchise said in a statement. 13 IPL matches in Maharashtra were shifted out after Bombay High Courts order owing to the severe water crisis in the state. As per the court order, no matches will be held in Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur after April 30 due to the drought conditions. However, the May 1 match in Pune between Mumbai Indians and Rising Pune Supergiants will go ahead as scheduled after the BCCI made a plea to the Bombay high court, saying shifting the match on short notice would be difficult due to logistical problems. Read | After IPL order, Bombay HC allows BCCI to hold May 1 match in Pune Because of the order, Mumbai Indians have chosen Jaipur as their home venue, while Rising Pune Supergiants have picked Visakhapatnam as an alternate home base. Bangalore will host the final of the event on May 29. After seizing 18.5 tonnes of the drug ephedrine worth Rs 2,000 crore on Saturday, the Thane polices anti-narcotics cell on Wednesday conducted more raids on firms said to have links to Avon Lifesciences Limited in Solapur, the target of Saturdays raid. The police believe Wednesdays seizure exceeds Saturdays but are yet to confirm the exact quantity seized. We are yet to determine the exact quantity and panchnama is still going on, said a police officer from the Thane commissionerate, adding such raids would continue. A few weeks ago, a Nigerian national identified as Okhay Sipren Chinnas, 30, was arrested from Vartak Nagar with half a kilo of ephedrine, worth Rs 12.5 lakhs. Two days later, two Raigad residents were arrested by the Thane crime branch and anti-narcotics cell from the Shildaighar area for possession of two kilos of ephedrine, worth Rs 80 lakh. They were identified as Sagar Powale, 28, and Mayur Sukhdare, 25, from Raigad district. Amol Walzade, police inspector, anti-narcotics cell, said, They told the police about Dhaneshwar Rajaram Swami, 28, a Solapur resident who has an MSc and deals in drugs. When we arrested him, he told us about a pharma company located at Chincholi MIDC, whose manager is also involved in this. We went to the pharma company (Avon) and arrested senior production manager Rajendra Jagdamba Prasad Dimbri, 48, a Solapur resident. A police officer from the Thane commissionerate said, As we were investigating the case, we came to know about more ephedrine stocks with other companies in the area. The amount we have seized (on Wednesday) is more than what was seized on Saturday. He added, It is quite shocking that the director of the firm was not aware of the illegal practices as they had been going on for months. Thane police commissioner Param Bir Singh said, Its too early to comment on this seizure. Our officers are working with excise and FDA officers to analyse the seized materials properly. The Gujarat ATS and crime branch have also been involved in the investigation, having seized ephedrine worth Rs 270 crore recently. The three main suspects in the racket have been identified as Punit Shringi, who was allegedly responsible for transporting drugs outside India, Kishoresingh Bhavsingh Rathod, the son of a former MLA from Gujarat, and Jay Mukhi. All three are absconding. The Thane police have sent a look-out notice to airport across India to trace them. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON Pop superstar Prince, who was widely acclaimed as one of the most inventive musicians of his era with hits including Little Red Corvette, Lets Go Crazy and When Doves Cry, was found dead at his home on Thursday in suburban Minneapolis, according to his publicist. His publicist, Yvette Noel-Schure, told The Associated Press that the music icon died at his home in Chanhassen. No details were immediately released. The man born Prince Rogers Nelson stood just 5 feet, 2 inches and seemed to summon the most original and compelling sounds at will, whether playing guitar in a flamboyant style that openly drew upon Jimi Hendrix, switching his vocals from a nasally scream to an erotic falsetto or turning out album after album of stunningly original material. Among his other notable releases: Sign O the Times, Graffiti Bridge and The Black Album. US pop star 'Prince' poses during a photocall in central London, 08 May 2007. (AFP) He was also fiercely protective of his independence, battling his record company over control of his material and even his name. Prince once wrote slave on his face in protest of not owning his work and famously battled and then departed his label, Warner Bros., before returning a few years ago. Whats happening now is the position that Ive always wanted to be in, Prince told The Associated Press in 2014. I was just trying to get here. In 2004, Prince was inducted into the Rock and Roll of Fame, which hailed him as a musical and social trailblazer. US pop star Prince enters his hotel after the first of two shows he performed during the Montreux Jazz Festival, late on July 18, 2009 in Montreux. (AFP) He rewrote the rulebook, forging a synthesis of black funk and white rock that served as a blueprint for cutting-edge music in the Eighties, reads the Halls dedication. Prince made dance music that rocked and rock music that had a bristling, funky backbone. From the beginning, Prince and his music were androgynous, sly, sexy and provocative. A small group of fans quickly gathered Thursday outside his music studio, Paisley Park, a white building surrounded by a fence about 20 miles southwest of Minneapolis. A Carver County sheriffs squad car was parking in the studio lot. Two women of a family died while another woman was critically injured after they were hit by a speeding vehicle in front of Kailash Hospital in Greater Noida on Wednesday evening, police said. The incident happened at about 8 pm on Wednesday when the family of Hemraj, who hails from Nepal, had gone to visit the city park. While they were crossing the road in front of Kailash Hospital, a speeding Toyota Innova hit his mother Shanti, 60, daughter Gita, 15 and another passerby Sunti, 25. Shanti and Gita died at the hospital while Sunti is admitted with critical injuries, said Abhishek Yadav, superintendent of police (rural) at Gautam Budh Nagar. Also read: Three days on, driver still at large in BMW hit-and-run Police said the car bearing a Haryana registration number was chased by some motorists but it managed to speed away. An FIR was registered at the Knowledge Park police station against unidentified persons. We are checking CCTV footage. We have the registration number of the vehicle. It will be verified and the driver will be arrested soon, said Yadav. This is the second such incident in Gautam Budh Nagar in last five days. Earlier on Saturday, a person driving a BMW had hit four commuters and fled the spot, causing one death. The accused of the BMW hit-and-run case, identified as Vinod Dedha, is yet to be arrested. He had moved an application for surrender before a court but is yet to appear. The Akal Takht, highest temporal seat of Sikhism, and Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) have condemned the manner in which US high school student Karanveer Singh Pannu (18) of New Jersey was forced to remove his turban during a security check at the San Francisco airport. Read: Utterly humiliated: Sikh teen forced to remove turban at US airport In a statement issued here on Thursday, Akal Takht jathedar Giani Gurbachan Singh said incidents such as this were becoming frequent. The turban, to Sikhs, is not only a religious symbol but also an important article of faith, he said, adding that American Sikhs were a hardworking community that had contributed a lot to the American progress which even US President Barack Obama had acknowledged. Giani Gurbachan Singh regretted that Sikhs in the West had also become targets of racial attacks, since they are taken for Muslims by their turbans and beard, and labelled terrorists, after the 9/11 terror strikes especially. Gurdwaras in the West have been attacked and vandalised. In the most recent incident, an explosion inside a German gurdwara left three people injured. The jathedar also called upon the Punjab government to take up the issue with the central government. SGPC chief Avtar Singh Makkar also condemned the San Francisco incident and said it was all the more unfortunate that the victim was on way to California for delivering a motivational lecture based on his book on bullying in American schools. Makkar called upon the US administration to create awareness about Sikh religious symbols and ask security agencies to respect the Sikh headgear and other articles of faith. The SGPC has already formed a panel to look into the reasons for racial violence against Sikhs. Chandigarh Housing Board (CHB) chairman Maninder Singh has ordered an inquiry into the alleged payment of excess amount of Rs 5.5 crore by the board to Parsvnath Developers in February 2015. The officials at the time did not account for the Tax Deducted at Source (TDS) amount that belonged to the CHB, principal director of Audit (Central), Chandigarh has recently reported. I have ordered an inquiry as responsibility needs to be fixed for causing the loss of Rs 5.5 crore to the board. The amount will also be recovered, the chairman added. The money was part of Rs 572 crore, including an interest component of Rs 55 crore, that the CHB refunded to Parsvnath after Prideasia, a residential project of the builder in the IT Park (near the Lalit Hotel), Chandigarh, failed to materialise. TDS amounting to Rs 5.5 crore should have been deducted on Rs 55 crore, the audit has now pointed out. The audit report also observed that the revocation deed of the project was signed by the then CHB chief executive officer Kashish Mittal and Parsvnath adviser PK Jain in the presence of the then CHB chief accounts officer AC Juneja and the then superintending engineer, Sunil Kumar. Kumar now stands suspended in another case. When contacted, Kashish Mittal said, At the time, I was given the charge of the CEO for just two days. The file had already been prepared by junior officers with the consent of then CHB chairman Vivek Pratap Singh. I-T dept has sent demand notices The fact that Rs 5.5 crore was paid in violation of the law has also been clarified by the income tax department that has issued a demand notice to the board for non-deduction of the amount. The department has also said that the payment of the amount in the shape of interest is liable for penal provisions under Section 194-A of the Income Tax Act, 1961. Know the project In October 2006, the CHB decided to develop residential/commercial and other related infrastructure with Parsvanth Developers at Rajiv Gandhi Chandigarh Technology Park on 123 acres. The land was later returned. Following court orders in January 2015, the CHB was directed to refund Rs 572 crore to Parsvnath after Prideasia, a residential project of the builder in the IT Park (near The Lalit hotel), Chandigarh, failed to materialise. TDS amounting to Rs 5.5 crore should have been deducted on Rs 55 crore, an audit report has now pointed out, leading to the ordering of the inquiry. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON Punjab chief minister Parkash Singh Badal on Thursday alleged that the Congress and Aam Aadmi Party were playing politics over death and were praying for destruction of farmers of the state for their narrow motives. Badal asked Congress and AAP to put a brake on their vulture mentality against Punjab farmers and stop praying for death and destruction so that they could get an opportunity to exploit it. Please stop playing politics of death in Punjab, the SAD leader was quoted as saying by a party release here. He claimed the issuance of Cash Credit Limit (CCL) by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to facilitate payment to farmers for the procurement of wheat was a strong vindication of the stand of the government that not a single grain of wheat was missing from stocks. The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) had on Wednesday slammed Congress leader Sunil Jakhar for claiming that wheat had disappeared from godowns in the state. The ruling party said if the charges were true, the RBI would not have issued an authorisation of CCL of Rs 17,523 crore towards first instalment for the procurement of 90 lakh tonnes of wheat. Lashing out at the Congress and AAP, Badal alleged, These parties are so desperate for power in Punjab that just in order to show the government in poor light, they went to the extent of organising havans to pray for non-clearance of money to farmers. Read more: Arvind Kejriwal changes colour like chameleon, says Sukhbir Badal Couldnt sleep till CCL was cleared As a rural Punjabi and farmer, I know with what eagerness every member of a farmers family, from children to elderly parents, waits for the harvest season and how everything in the family depends on a good crop and timely payment. I could hardly sleep all these days, till the CCL was cleared. It was such a huge relief for every farmer and for me personally when it was finally done, the five-time chief minister said. He claimed that every farmer in the state was upset and angry with the Congress and AAP for playing politics even on an issue of life and death for the peasantry. Reacting to Jakhars comment, Badal said, I expected at least you, being a farmer, to distance yourself from this vulture-mentality. Punjab goes to Assembly polls in 2017. Read more: AAP seasonal bird, Congress proven enemy of Punjab, says CM Parents protesting against the exorbitant fee and other means being adopted by the schools to fleece them marched up to the office of deputy commissioner Varun Roojam, seeking his intervention and action against erring managments. Parents also staged protests outside a couple of schools. Unhappy with the attitude of the district administration so far, the parents alleged that schools were looting them in the name of annual fee hike, diktats on buying books and uniforms, besides sundry charges, still the authorities were playing a mute spectator. The day started with hundreds of parents and students protesting outside the Sri Guru Harkrishan Public School at Golden Avenue. Parents and students sat at the main gate and staged a vociferous protest, forcing the school administration to close the school for the day. The parents started the dharna at around 7am and stayed put for the next five hours. They alleged that high fee and other expenses being charged by schools were uncalled for and a burden on them. They criticised the government for not taking steps to rein in the private school managements, who, they said, were working in a dictatorial manner. As the district administration has been facing criticism for adopting a casual approach on the issue, agitating parents on Wednesday walked up to the office of deputy commissioner Varun Roojam. As Roojam was leaving office for some work, the parents stopped him and handed over a complaint to him against various schools. The parents urged the deputy commissioner to take action against the schools that were charging unreasonable fee and also burdening the parents with sundry charges. We are being troubled by the schools. They tell us to buy books, uniform, shoes from specific shops. We have been raising the matter since long but nobody has bothered to intervene. We want action against schools for making available booked at exorbitant rates by tampering with the MRPs. The DC assured the parents of favourable solution to the issue. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON Clueless 17 days after the murder of Chand Kaur (85), wife of former Namdhari head Satruru Jagjit Singh, at the sects Bhaini Sahib headquarters near here, police are verifying if last Decembers bomb explosion in a car near Jalandhar has anything to do with it. The local police on Sunday (April 17) brought the three car-bombing accused over from the Kapurthala jail for interrogation. The production warrants of Jagmohan Singh of Gadaipur, Harbhej Singh of Sirsa, and Hardeep Singh of Bholath were secured on the pretext of looking into their alleged role in the murder of another woman in Ludhiana last September 9; but they will be questioned in the Chand Kaur murder case, police sources have said. When they were produced in the court of duty magistrate Mehak Sabherwal on Wednesday, supporters of Thakur Dalip Singh, head of Sirsa-based parallel Namdhari dera, got in to plead that the men had been implicated, besides being tortured in police custody. All this is being done on the pretext of (Namdhari sect head) Satguru Uday Singh, said advocate Harinder Singh Narang, representing the accused. He said Jagmohan was still on wheelchair since the explosion, yet his medical state had been ignored in securing production warrants.The court remanded the accused in police custody for another two days. Namdhari protesters from the Sirsa dera claimed police had slapped three false cases on the Jalandhar car bombing accused. They took them on production warrants in the 2011 case of the murder of Uday Singh follower Avtar Singh; and secured their custody about the murder of a youth named Lallan Kumar before the latest move, said a Sirsa Namdhari dera supporter who had come to court. Looking into all angles: Police Police commissioner Jatinder Singh Aulukh said the investigation into the Jalandhar car bombing case had been entrusted to the Ludhiana police, which was why the three accused had been brought to the city on production warrants. Asked if they could be linked to Chand Kaurs murder, Aulukh said police are examining all angles, including this. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON The mortal remains of Kirpal Singh, who had died in a Pakistan Jail on April 12, were consigned to flames in the presence of his relatives, friends, officials and villagers at Mustafabad Saidan, 7 km from Gurdaspur, on Wednesday. His nephew Ashwani Kumar lit the pyre. Gurdaspur deputy commissioner Pardeep Sabharwal and SSP JS Hundal were among those who laid their last respects to the departed soul. Kirpal, as per the Pakistani authorities, had died of a cardiac arrest. Punjab Pradesh Congress general secretary Fateh Jang Singh Bajwa and secretary Gurmeet Singh Pahra were present. Kirpals wife Paramjit Kaur, who resides at Ded Gawar village near Kalanaur, had also come to attend the funeral and insisted that the ashes be handed over to her, but the police asked her to leave. Dalbir Kaur, sister of Sarbjit Singh, who had died in the same jail in Pakistan after an assault in 2013, also attended the cremation. Speaking to the media, Dalbir said she had given the list of 90 Indian prisoners laguishing in Pakistan jails to home minister Rajnath Singh and minister for external affairs Sushma Swaraj, urging them to make efforts to get them released. She alleged like Sarbjit, Kirpal was also got killed by Pakistan government. Meanwhile, Paramjit claimed that after her marriage with Kirpal, she lived for about 2-3 years with him. She said after he was arrested in Pakistan in 1992, she was forced by her in-laws to leave the house. Paramjit said she went to her parental house in Aujala village, but her parents were poor and couldnt support her. She said she started living at Ded Gawar village with another man, who died a few years ago. The couple has three children two sons and a daughter. Kirpals sisters and brothers rejected the claims of Paramjit alleging she left the house when he was arrested in Pakistan to remarry. She is the mother of three children out of her second marriage. They said Paramjit had inherited the property of her second husband. Deputy commissioner Pardeep Sabharwal said the administration would follow the directions of the government in connection with government benefits. With the installation of the sewer lane from Phullanwal Chowk to Lalton on Pakhowal Road, residents of the areas that fall under Greater Ludhiana Area Development Authority (GLADA) will get a big relief. Recently, GLADA has started the work on installing the sewer system from Phullanwal Chowk on Pakhowal Road. Subdivisional officer (SDO) Tarun Aggarwal claimed they are making efforts to complete the entire work within next four months. The estimated cost of the project to lay the sewer lane on nearly 6.5 km stretch between Phullanwal and Singla Enclave near Lalton is around `7 crore. The sewerage connections would be provided in those colonies where 70% people have paid the regularisation fee of their properties, said Ram Singh, estate officer, GLADA, after the installation of sewer lane on the stretch of Pakhowal Road. An official of GLADA said nearly 200 meters of road portion near Phullanwal Chowk has been dug to install the sewer lane. After completing this task, the GLADA would conduct work on next 100-200 meters portion of the road. It is learnt that the electricity poles will be shifted for the road widening project. After completing the sewer system project, GLADA would start road widening project that is estimated to cost more than `15 crore. DECADE ON, SEWER SYSTEM YET TO BE INSTALLED The residents of the villages and colonies outside the municipal corporation (MC) limits have been demanding the installation of the sewer system for the last 10 years. Harjinder Singh of Guru Angad Dev Nagar near Phullanwal said, We have been demanding the government to provide the sewerage system for the last 10 years. Many of the residents in our area had paid the regularisation fee under the government policy. Earlier, the government had given a chance to the residents of the unauthorised colonies to get their plots regularised. A resident of Dad village, Narinder Singh said, The facility of the sewer system should also be provided in the villages and the government should form a policy in this regard. Now, the sewer lane would be passing under the Pakhowal Road that passes through our village. TRAFFIC WOES The traffic problems could mount on the Pakhowal Road until the project is completed. Meanwhile, the traffic has been diverted through Phullanwal village, Chhabra Colony and nearby colonies from Pakhowal Road. The signboards have also been installed by some marriage palaces to guide the commuters about the diverted routes. The commuters are witnessing traffic jams at Phullanwal Chowk during morning and evening hours. However, the sewer work at this chowk has been completed. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has adopted immunisation app I Sehat a brainchild of Ludhiana deputy commissioner Ravi Bhagat for the entire country. The district administration received the communique from the Centre on Thursday evening that it had decided to use SMS-based service all over India. The letter from mission director Hussan Lal says the service had been well received in Ludhiana and Amritsar and forwarded to the Centre by the Punjab health department. The app alerts parents about the childs due date for immunisation, so that no child is left uncovered. Six very important injections must be administered to every child in first year of birth. If the dose is missed, it affects the childs health in a big way, says Bhagat. In some cases, even the auxiliary nurse midwife (ANM) forgets to intimate the parents on time, so this moblie-based facility would prevent this issue. How I Sehat works From the time a pregnant woman registers at a government hospital, her telephone number is recorded and she starts getting alerts on SMS (short messaging service), later. These messages in Punjabi and English, carrying details of the immunisation date and the nearest government dispensary or hospital, are sent every Tuesday and Thursday, but not to mobile phones that have Do Not Disturb service activated. For getting the details, the parents need to deactivate this option. Bespectacled, Hindi-speaking and soft spoken, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal hardly stands out at a first glance in Punjabs political scene, dominated by mighty Panthic leaders and charismatic royals. But his young Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is shaking up the states electoral equations barely 10 months before the assembly polls and giving well-established rivals the Shiromani Akali Dal-Bharatiya Janata Party (SAD-BJP) alliance and the Congress a run for their money. Propelled by popular disenchantment against the states major formations, the AAP is attracting mammoth crowds at rallies and has drawn up an intensive campaign schedule, including a door-to-door campaign and an early announcement of candidates for all 117 assembly seats. Internal assessments give the AAP around 80 seats, an unprecedented majority for a party that didnt even exist the last time Punjab went to the polls in January 2012. Even rivals grudgingly admit the novice party is going to be a strong third force. Kejriwal and his team have a simple game plan: Create a broad coalition of youth, farmers, Dalits and non-resident Punjabis settled abroad. Corruption and drug menace are rampant in the state. People want a change and are looking for a party that will provide good governance, said an AAP strategist. The AAP hasnt missed any opportunity in the past six months to attack the SAD-BJP government, especially on Punjabs festering drug problem among the youth. In a state where personalities dominate, a party without a chief ministerial candidate is grabbing the headlines. Promising prospect Born out of a pan-India anti-corruption movement, the AAP was initially dismissed by national parties but it sprang a surprise in Punjab during the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. The state, known for backing the underdog, supported the AAP in Faridkot, Fatehgarh Sahib, Sangrur and Patiala with handsome margins. The party netted 25% of the votes, benefitting from two parallel anti-incumbencies one against a two-term Congress rule at the Centre and the other against the SAD-BJP combines eight-year rule in Punjab. People had shown their anger against the two parties in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections by voting for us, an AAP leader said. The Lok Sabha wins translated to a majority in 33 assembly seats 16 of them belonged to the SAD and 17 to the Congress. In 11 other constituencies, the AAP trailed by less than 10,000 votes. Last year, when Kejriwal swept to power in Delhi, he set his sights on Punjab, sources said. But elections taught us one should not go beyond ones capacity. So, we decided to focus on one state at a time. Punjab had embraced the party and had something going for us, said Durgesh Pathak, AAPs national organisation building head. There is a big vacuum in the state as successive governments failed the people, he added. Delhi-like strategy The anti-corruption movement boosted the AAP in Delhi but lack of organisation in Punjab where polls are fought on local issues hurt the party initially. To counter bigger rivals, the AAP replicated its strategy of working with volunteers and establishing direct contact with people. Party volunteers fanned out in different parts of the state and took up campaigns such as Parivar Jodo. This was done in a unique and scientific way. We have done mapping of each family, he added. The party will also launch the Punjab Dialogue initiative on April 23 to identify issues for drafting the manifesto. The document will have 10 issues selected through a series of discussions on the lines of the popular Delhi Dialogue. As in Delhi, the state was divided into zones, sectors, circles and booths. The party has functionaries and frontal organisations at the state level and 13 committees have been constituted for zones one for each Parliamentary constituency. Each Parliamentary zone was divided into three sectors. Then, there is a circle-level committee for 20 polling booths. The party plans to have trained workers at every booth. The party showed in Delhi how a political campaign can be run without money and muscle power. We will try to do the same in Punjab by raising issues of public importance and exposing corruption at high places, said AAPs national spokesperson Sanjay Singh. The AAP also ramped up campaigning. In Malwa and Doaba regions alone, AAP leaders have addressed 54 public meetings during the period. It also organised a series of campaigns Beimaan Bhajao, Punjab Bachao and Punjab Jodo to expand its footprint. Though it suffered a setback last year when two of its MPs Dr Dharamvira Gandhi and Harinder Singh Khalsa were suspended after speaking out in favour of expelled leader Yogendra Yadav, the party quickly got back into its stride. There is also speculation that Kejriwal could shift his base to Punjab six months before the polls though the AAP leader has dismissed such suggestions. An AAP leader hinted there could be a rethink depending on the ground situation in the state. Unlike Delhi, Punjab is a full-fledged state and Kejriwal will be able to fully prove his administrative and governance skills, the leader said. Read more: The Kejriwal question: Is Punjab that simple, really? Rivals forced to change tack The Akalis and the Congress who once dismissed the AAP leaders as seasonal birds are now frantically redrawing poll strategies. The stakes are especially high for the Congress, still reeling from its drubbing in the state in 2012 and the Lok Sabha polls in 2014. To nix turf wars and factionalism, the party brought in charismatic former chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh at the helm and roped in master strategist Prashant Kishor, credited with scripting spectacular electoral successes for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar. When embittered leaders Jagmeet Brar and Bir Devinder railed against Amarinders inaccessibility, working style and tendency to promote his cronies, the party acted swiftly against them, giving a clear message to others. Amarinder left for the United States and Canada on Tuesday to try and win over the NRIs, who are major AAP funders. But some Punjab Congress leaders are of the view that Kishors initiative Coffee with Captain (Amarinder Singh) failed to enthuse the voters, especially the youth. In some of these programmes, Amarinder faced tough questions from the audience. Congress sources admitted that the AAP could hurt its overall prospects by dividing the anti-incumbency votes. Our reports suggest the AAP is doing well. It will cut into our votes, a senior Congress functionary said. The SAD-BJP combine is also in disarray with charges of misgovernance and the cadres high-handed attitude adding to mounting anti-incumbency. Chief minister Parkash Singh Badal was the target of violent statewide protests against repeated desecrations of the Sikh holy book, Guru Granth Sahib, a few months ago. Since then, clashes between the Sikh clergy and corruption allegations against the powerful Badal family have hurt Punjabs ruling party. All parties are also wooing the Dalit community that makes up a third of the state and backed the AAP in 2014 with the novice party taking a lead in 14 of the 34 constituencies reserved for Scheduled Castes. The Congress has named Dalit MLA Charanjit Singh Channi as its legislature party leader and Amarinder has repeatedly reached out to the community during rallies. The SAD marked Dalit icon BR Ambedkars 125th birth anniversary with pomp and its ally BJP appointed Union minister Vijay Sampla, its Dalit face in Punjab, the state unit chief. Hence, the AAP is taking no chances. The public sentiment is absolutely clear. Isko bana ke rakhna hamara sabse bada challenge hai (Our biggest challenge is to maintain it), said Pathak. Long road ahead The AAP may be on a roll but it would be mistake to count the older parties out. Punjab is craving for change and AAP has emerged as an alternative. It remains the top player today, despite all its maladies. But the way the party is going about inducting discredited leaders from other parties, it is fast losing its hold, Patiala MP Dr Dharamvira Gandhi told HT. The two traditional rivals both having grassroots base and organisational set-ups may seem beset with problems and down, but are beginning to get their act together and make moves. The SAD trumped the AAP on the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal controversy, an emotional issue for thousands of farmers in the state who fear their crops will be hurt if water is shared with Haryana. The AAP is on the back foot on the issue after the Delhi government filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court siding with Haryana against Punjab. The Akalis also tried to drag Kejriwal into demolition of a piao (water kiosk) at Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib in Delhi. Amarinder and others also had a go at AAP leaders for inexperience, governance glitches in Delhi and delay in naming their CM candidate. The AAP attempted to parry these attacks by projecting initiatives such as the odd-even scheme, reduced water and electricity bills and regulation of fee hike by private schools as achievements. It also played the victim card, blaming the Centre for its slippages. The AAP peaked in the Lok Sabha polls and is losing sheen. It may seem to be ahead in political discourse, but not electorally. There is no wave. The contest seems evenly balanced. There are still 10 months to go and the political situation will change from event to event, says Dr Pramod Kumar, a political analyst. But the AAP is hoping its bold game plan and hard work in Punjab will pay off big time. The battle for the land of the five rivers has only just begun. Read more: Arvind Kejriwal vows to end Badals rule in Punjab Clearing the air over the jurisdiction of local consumer forums in disposing of online deficiency cases, state consumer disputes redressal commission has stated that consumers can very much seek relief from local consumer forums. The order was passed by state consumer commission president justice Jasbir Singh (retd) following a large number of appeals filed by the companies dealing with e-commerce, contending that only the forum where headquarters of the appellant or company is situated will have territorial jurisdiction to entertain and decide the complaint. According to the law officials, consumers feel reluctant to file a consumer complaint in such cases in order to avoid litigation at faraway places, including Gurgaon and Delhi. The commission observed that, If the said contention of the companies is accepted, it will run contrary to the spirit of Consumer Protection Act (CPA)-1986, which provides speedy, hassle-free redressal. The commission observed that in case headquarters of a company is located at faraway places and the aforesaid argument of the companies is accepted, it will amount to clogging down the district forum at Gurgaon, as the cost will also rise due to this. The commission had earlier dismissed a plea of SpiceJet Ltd, Gurgaon, where they had filed an appeal against the order of the Chandigarh Consumer Forum, contending that the Chandigarh forum does not have jurisdiction and the complaint has to be filed in Gurgaon consumer forum. The Chandigarh consumer forum had directed the firm to compensate Rs 1.25 lakh to Ranju Aery, a resident of Sector 19, Chandigarh, for not giving refund for cancellation. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON A Punjab and Haryana high court bench on Thursday issued a notice to the Punjab government, Punjab Public Service Commission (PPSC), and the high court administration on a petition seeking relaxation for the Scheduled Caste (SC) candidates in the qualifying score of the 2015 Punjab Civil Service (judicial) examinations. The response of various parties has been sought by July 12 based on a public-interest petition filed by the Rashtriya Valmiki Sabha state unit. An aggregate score of at least 45% in the main written examination is required to advance to the viva-voce section. The high court and the PPSC conduct these examinations. The PPSC has advertised 118 posts of PCS (judicial) officer, of which 13 are reserved for the Balmiki and Mazhbi Sikhs. The petition says that a tough cut-off limit of marks has allowed only two candidates from these categories to qualify for viva voce. Resultantly, 11 of the 13 reserved vacancies remained vacant, and would have to be carried forward in case the cut-off criterion is not relaxed suitably. The concept of reservation loses all its significance, if the cut-off is maintained so high that candidates of the SC category cannot be selected, HC Arora, counsel for the petitioner, had argued. Fired by the Arvind Kejriwal government for taking a pro-Haryana and anti-Punjab stance on the Sutlej Yamuna Link (SYL) canal dispute, Delhi governments former advocate Suresh Tripathy on Wednesday said Delhi Jal Board (DJB) chief executive officer (CEO) had approved the contentious submissions placed before the Supreme Court. I will place the evidence before the constitution bench on Friday to prove that I had given the written submissions on behalf of the government of Delhi after routing them through the Delhi Jal Board CEO. It is bogus and absurd to say that the submissions were not approved by the competent authority, the CEO, the lawyer, who was sacked as the Delhi government counsel, told Hindustan Times over telephone. Read more: SYL canal: AAP sacks lawyer for siding with Haryana against Punjab in SC The hot-button water dispute is before the apex court which is holding hearings on the Presidential reference about the validity of the Punjab Termination of Agreements Act, 2004. After backing Haryana and blaming the advocate for taking anti-Punjab stance, the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has told the Supreme Court that it will file a fresh affidavit opposing Haryana on the SYL canal. This flip-flop by the Kejriwal government has given a much-needed ammunition to the ruling Akali Dal which considers the rookie AAP as the main threat in the run-up to Punjab assembly elections due in January. Read more: Kejriwal against SYL canal: Punjab has no spare water The eight-page written submissions filed by and on behalf of government of NCT Delhi, reads: Act of Punjab is outright negation of the principle of our Preamble of the ConstitutionIt is inherently divisive and incompatible with the unity and integrity of the nationsuch agreements would be inconsistent with the basic feature of federalism and would lead to national disunity The act of Punjab, the Delhi government had said, if sustained as lawful would set a dangerous and unhealthy precedentPunjab does not have legislative competence to make law with respect to inter-state agreement. Read more: Affidavit favouring SYL: Sukhbir accuses Kejriwal of double standards Tripathy said his submissions in question were also in tune with the 2006 affidavit of then Delhi chief secretary filed in the apex court. But the Delhi government, due to impending Punjab elections, can go to any extent now, Tripathy said, pointing out that what he had filed was written submissions and not affidavit. Everybody in the DJB, he said, knew about the stand being taken through the submissions. Now, what Kejriwal is saying is false. Day before filing the submissions, I had sent the document through mail (April 7 at 5pm) to the DJB member RS Tyagi with a request to forward this to CEO Keshav Chandra, the advocate said. As Punjab raised heat and dust over Delhi governments stand soon after court hearing on April 8, the advocate along with the jal board CEO and member were summoned by the Kejriwal government to the secretariat for a meeting. During the meeting, water minister Kapil Mishra forced the CEO to disown the submissions. The DJB member had forwarded the mail to the CEO. Both had seen my mail. In fact, the day before the submissions, Haryana knew about Delhis stand and had released more water to the national capital. Kejriwals move to disown the submissions was guided by political compulsions, Tripathy said, describing his sacking by the Kejriwal government as dangerous and sad development. AAP has always supported Punjab: Sanjay Singh AAP national spokesman and in-charge of Punjab party affairs Sanjay Singh on Wednesday reiterated in response to a media question on the SYL canal issue that the party has always been supporting the cause of Punjab and would continue to do so in future. From left: AAP leaders Sucha Singh Chhotepur, Ashish Khetan, Kanwar Sandhu, Sanjay Singh and Bhagwant Maan at a press conference in Chandigarh on Wednesday. (Karun Sharma/HT ) I will say it a thousand times that the AAP is completely against the construction of the SYL canal as Punjab has no water to spare, he said. The Congress was the architect of the SYL canal by laying its foundation stone and the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) was instrumental in its construction. Both the Congress and the SAD are deliberately blaming the AAP for the SYL only to avert peoples attention and are not serious to resolve the issue for once and for all. Though the AAP has never been in the picture on the SYL issue, it will never let these two political parties play petty politics on Punjab river waters and would continue to safeguard Punjabs interest, he said. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON Taking cognisance of the large number of Class 5 students being absent during the exams, the state education department has asked officials concerned in every district to ascertain the reason for their absence. Sources in the department said the students may be bogus students who had never been admitted in the schools, but, instead, are being shown on the rolls by the respective schools to get the various benefits from the government. The director general school education (DGSE), in a letter (a copy of which is with HT), has asked the education department of every district to send the detailed report of absentees in the examination. The letter says, The department is sending the list of the names of absent students from your districts. The district teams will be visiting the schools where the students remained absent and will be sending the detailed report of the reasons why the students did not take the examination and remained absent. As per the information received, the DGSE had also chaired a meeting with the DEOs of every district and had asked to send the report to the department at the earliest. Meanwhile acting on the instructions, Jalandhar district education officer (primary) Massa Singh has marked an inquiry into the matter and has constituted teams which would be going to various schools to check the records of the absent students. The DEO (primary) has assigned the task to the block primary education officers of all the 19 blocks in Jalandhar to visit schools and check the detailed records, including attendant registers, mid-day meal records of the students and reason for their absence from the exams. It has also been learnt that the officers would be going to the residential addresses of the students mentioned in the registers to verify the existence of such students. Reliable sources from the department said a total of 454 students from the district remained absent throughout the exams and some came only to take a single paper. A total of 14,162 students in the district had taken the exams. It is interesting to note that to avoid any kind of cheating or conspiracy, the block primary education officers will not be checking the schools of their own block. As many as nine block officers have been assigned the task of checking the 19 blocks. Reliable sources from the department told that there was possibility that the students were bogus and were never on rolls and the inquiry may lead to a scam, as it would then be looked into as to where the grant coming for uniforms, scholarships, books and mid-day meal was being diverted. Sources also said most of the teachers were showing more number of admitted students in order to remain in that particular school, as more the number of students, the better was the chance of that teacher to stay in that school according to the education department rules. Massa Singh said the department was dedicated to remove every kind of wrong doings that were prevailing in the department. Inquiry is being conducted. If found guilty, strict action will be taken against the accused persons, he said. The Bombay high court on Thursday refused to transfer the ongoing investigation into the alleged suicide of television actor Pratyusha Bannerjee from Mumbai police. Reviewing the case, a bench of Justices Naresh Patil and AM Badar observed that the Bangur Nagar polices records showed the investigations were on track. The bench also noted that the probe conducted so far did not prima facie show that the cops were favouring Bannerjees boyfriend and the accused in the case, Rahul Raj Singh. TV producer and actor Rahul Raj Singh at Bangur police station in Mumbai on Tuesday in connection with the investigations in Pratyusha Banerjee suicide case. (PTI) The high court was hearing a plea filed by Pratyushas mother Soma Bannerjee who had alleged that the probe was misleading, unfair, and one that intended to save the accused. Her counsel, advocate K T Thomas also argued that Bangur Nagar police seemed to be in collusion with Singh, who was booked on April 5 on charges of abetment of Pratyushas suicide. Actor Rahul Raj Singh, coming out of Bangur Nagar Police Station after an investigation in actor Pratyusha Banerjee suicide case, in Mumbai. (PTI) The police are on track. They just need some time. Cases like these that do not have any eye witnesses require time. Abetment is a complex issue and the investigating agencies are required to form a conclusive opinion on abetment based on whatever evidence is available, the bench said. ...The police are recording exhaustive statements of crucial witnesses and looking into call records, bank statements, FSL (forensic) reports etc. Thus, at this stage, there is nothing to show that the ongoing probe is tainted or unfair. Read: TV actor Pratyusha Banerjee of Balika Vadhu fame commits suicide However, the court did direct police to inform it on the progress it makes on May 4, the next date of hearing. The directions came after the state government informed the court that it was awaiting the forensic lab reports to make concrete conclusions on the charge of abetment against Singh. The state submitted that it would take two months for the investigation to be completed. Follow @htshowbiz for more US President Barack Obama flies to London on Thursday with a mission -- to persuade wavering British voters not to ditch membership of the European Union in a June 23 referendum that Washington fears could weaken the West. His visit is a welcome one for Prime Minister David Cameron, leading the In campaign, but has drawn scorn from those arguing that Britain should leave the EU. Obama is likely to suggest Britons should vote to stay in the bloc to preserve Britains wealth, its special relationship with the United States and the cohesion of the West. As the President has said, we support a strong United Kingdom in the European Union, Ben Rhodes, Obamas deputy national security adviser, told reporters in Washington ahead of the trip. After a visit to Saudi Arabia, including talks with King Salman, Obama flies to London on Thursday evening. The US government and many US banks and companies fear a Brexit would unleash market turmoil, torpedo British clout, undermine Londons status as a global financial capital, cripple the EU and undermine Western security. Polls on Wednesday showed British voters leaning towards the In camp but many remain undecided. Asked about Obamas views, Cameron told the British parliament: Personally I believe we should listen to advice from friends and other countries and I struggle to find the leader of any friendly country who thinks we should leave. Cameron has said that in the face of what he terms Russian President Vladimir Putins aggression, this is no time to drop out of the club Britain joined in 1973. Butt out The UK economy will be better off within the Union than if it leaves, Charles Kupchan, senior White House director for European affairs, said ahead of the trip. And as a key economic partner, thats an issue of interest to the United States. Opponents of the EU - many of whom laud the US alliance - say that membership has shackled Britain to the corpse of a failed German-dominated experiment in European integration and that Britain, if freed, could prosper as a sole trader. New York-born Boris Johnson, the London mayor who heads the Out campaign, said he did not want to be lectured by Americans about EU membership. President Obama should butt out, Nigel Farage, another prominent opponent of EU membership, told Reuters in an emailed statement. This is an unwelcome interference from the most anti-British American president there has ever been. Mercifully, he wont be in office for much longer. Out campaigners have said the United States would never agree to dilute its own national sovereignty in the way the EU requires of its member states. Obamas term in office ends next January 20. On Friday, he will have lunch at Windsor Castle with Queen Elizabeth, who celebrates her 90th birthday on Thursday, and her husband Prince Philip. After lunch, Obama will hold talks with Cameron followed by a briefing with reporters and dinner with Prince William, his wife Kate and Prince Harry at Kensington Palace. Obama, who will be joined by his wife Michelle in London, will hold a discussion meeting with young people on Saturday before departing for Germany. Japanese transport ministry officials raided a Mitsubishi Motors office on Thursday following the shock admission by the automaker that it falsified fuel-efficiency tests in more than 600,000 vehicles. The officials descended on a research and development centre in the city of Nagoya on Thursday morning and the government may slap the under-fire company with fines over the scandal, local media said. This has critically damaged consumers trust and it wont be tolerated, top government spokesperson Yoshihide Suga said on Thursday. Its an extremely serious issue. Mitsubishis Tokyo-listed shares looked set to plunge about 20% on Thursday but were untraded owing to an overwhelming number of sell orders. The firm plunged 15% on Wednesday before it confirmed reports about its misconduct, which saw unnamed employees rig tests to make cars seems more fuel-efficient than they were. Mitsubishi said it would halt production and sales of the affected vehicle models -- mini-cars sold in Japan including some made for rival Nissan -- and warned that the number of affected vehicles would likely rise. The embarrassing revelation follows a massive pollution-cheating scandal at Volkswagen that erupted in September and which the German giant is still struggling to overcome. Mitsubishis top executive conceded on Wednesday that the brewing crisis would take a bite out of the automakers bottom line as it widens its probe to cars that it sold overseas. This is not a simple problem and we need time to assess the impact, Mitsubishi president Tetsuro Aikawa told a news briefing. But Im sure there will be an impact. The damage will be big. The rigged figures were discovered after Nissan found inconsistencies in fuel-economy data and reported it. Japans number-two automaker said it would halt sales of the affected mini-cars but added that it had no immediate plans to change its business relationship with Mitsubishi. Mini-cars, or kei-cars, are small vehicles with 660cc gasoline engines that are hugely popular in the Japanese market, although have found little success abroad. Mitsubishi sold more than a million vehicles at home and overseas in its latest fiscal year. The collapse of Mitsubishis stock on Wednesday was its biggest one-day plunge since 2004. At that time, Mitsubishi was struggling to launch a turnaround as it teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, hit by a lack of cash and a series of huge recalls linked to serious defects. German titan Volkswagen has been hammered by the global scandal that erupted when it emerged that it had installed emissions-cheating software in 11 million diesel engines worldwide. The costs of the scandal are still incalculable but are expected to run into several billions of dollars as a result of fines and lawsuits. South Korean automakers Hyundai and Kia in 2014 agreed to pay $100 million to settle a US government investigation into exaggerated fuel efficiency on 2012 and 2013 car models sold in the United States. Pakistan Army chief Gen Raheel Sharif dismissed 12 military officers, including two generals, in a surprise move on Thursday after corruption charges were proven against them. The unprecedented sackings came two days after Sharif sought across-the-board accountability to root out corruption. The move will put pressure on Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to act on revelations in the Panama Papers, which showed his two sons and a daughter were among Pakistanis with offshore assets. The army chiefs earlier statement was greeted with scepticism by members of the ruling PML-N party, who privately accused the general of interfering in the governments affairs. The sacking of the officers over corruption amounted to a rare display of accountability by the army. Lt Gen Obaidullah Khan Khattak, Major General Ejaz Shahid, five brigadiers, a colonel, three lieutenant colonels and a major were among the officers. Read | Panama Papers: Army chiefs comments add to pressure on PM Sharif Military sources privately confirmed the move and said the reason for sacking in all cases was corruption. A senior army official said the dismissed officers will not get any benefits and the amounts they are accused of embezzling will be recovered from them. Prime Minister Sharif did not seem pleased with the development and told a meeting of PML-N leaders and government officials in Islamabad a few hours after the army move that his record is blemish-free. He said conspiracies were afoot to show his government in a bad light and he would thwart them. Some quarters do not want the people of Pakistan to benefit from all the work we are doing to better their standard of living, the premier said. Read | Pak army chief accuses India of sabotaging economic corridor with China Defence minister Khawaja Asif welcomed the move and said it set a good precedent. He repeated the army chiefs call to eradicate corruption. But opposition leader Imran Khan, who heads the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, continued to attack the government. He told reporters that the Prime Minister had internationally shown the Pakistan Army in a bad light. He told the Indian government he wants peace with India but the main obstacle is the army, Khan said. Political analyst Mazhar Abbas commented that Khans remarks mean that he is accusing Sharif of being a traitor. Leader of opposition Khurshid Shah, who belongs to the Pakistan Peoples Party, was not as harsh as Imran Khan. Shah told the media the army chief had started accountability with his own home and other political parties too should start from their homes. Read | Pak army chief Raheel Sharif to step down in Nov, wont seek extension Shahs remarks were a reference to the demand by opposition parties that Prime Minister Sharif should initiate a probe against the around 220 Pakistanis, including his three children, named in the massive leak of documents from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca. The premier insists his family has done nothing wrong. He has not given in to demands by Imran Khan to appoint a sitting Supreme Court judge with powers to act against those found guilty of moving black money abroad. The army chiefs move was welcomed by many. We all said charity begins at home and that is exactly what he has shown with this move, said analyst Mosharraf Zaidi. The ball now is in the court of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to set an example, he added. Most of the sacked officers had served in the paramilitary Frontier Corps. Lt Gen Khattak was promoted to the rank in 2013 when he was serving as inspector general of the Frontier Corps in Balochistan province. Personnel of the Frontier Corps have been accused of involvement in drug smuggling and other illegal activities in Balochistan, which borders Iran. Britain on Thursday said it was aware of particular concerns over violence against women and girls in India during a review of the global human rights situation in 2015. It also listed 30 nations as human rights priority countries where it plans to prioritise engagement. India does not figure in the list that includes Myanmar, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The annual human rights report released by the Foreign Office said Britain is committed to working with the Indian government on violence against women and girls. We are aware of the particular concerns around violence against women and girls in India...We welcome the steps the Indian government has already taken, such as fast-track courts and public safety measures, it said. The report said a group of Indian women leaders visited Britain in November to learn about the approach to tackling violence against women and girls. The visit took place during the week that marked the International Day for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. The group met Baroness Anelay, parliamentarians, representatives of the private sector, UK civil society and UK officials. The objective was to help shape public policy in India so that the criminal justice system and society will be more responsive to women victims of violence, specifically those from vulnerable, marginalised and minority groups, the report said. On the global rights situation, the report said despite progress achieved at the UN level and elsewhere, significant challenges remained, including ending the many forms of violence against women, securing sexual health and reproductive rights, achieving gender equality at the workplace and in political and public life, and womens economic empowerment and equal access to education. Regrettably, despite the fact that women make up around 50% of any countrys population, and despite demonstrable benefits for countries prosperity of womens economic empowerment, too many countries at national, provincial and community level continue to restrict the human rights of women and girls, including to adequate health care and to justice, it said. The 30 priority countries were chosen using the human rights situation, a countrys human rights trajectory, and Britains ability to influence change. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON A 21-year-old man, who vandalised a gurdwara at Buena Park, a suburb of Los Angeles, California, with hateful anti-ISIS graffiti following the San Bernardino shootings, has been sentenced to 80 hours of community service at the place of worship he targeted and 240 hours of graffiti cleanup. Brodie Durazo pleaded guilty to misdemeanour vandalism and vandalism of religious property charges in exchange for serving 80 hours at Gurdwara Singh Sabha as well as 240 hours of graffiti removal elsewhere. Deputy district attorney Jess Rodriguez told the judge that gurdwara leaders had agreed to allow Durazo to work there for his community service. They believe it can be a productive result, having him learn about them and their beliefs. They wanted to see something positive come from this, Rodriguez said at the hearing on Tuesday. Durazo sprayed graffiti, including references to the Islamic State terror group, on a parking lot wall and a parked truck at the gurdwara. The graffiti was discovered on December 6. The incident came just days after Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, a married Pakistani couple living in the city of Redlands, targeted a San Bernardino County department of public health training event and a holiday party, killing 14 people. Shortly after his arrest, Durazo read an apology letter to the congregation, denying that he meant the vandalism as hate speech. I know your guys faith and church have nothing to do with the Muslim religion or Islam, that is why I did not write the profanity on your walls or temple, Durazo said to the congregation in remarks videotaped and posted on Facebook by the Sikh Coalition. The only reason I wrote what I wrote on the truck was because I was intoxicated and I figured the truck travels through the state and through the country, he said. I have shed so many tears to my daughter and fiance. I cannot imagine the amount of stress or tension I have brought upon your temple, especially with what is going on in this world at this time, Durazo said. He was initially facing felony charges in connection with the vandalism. However, a judge downgraded the charges to misdemeanours, over the objections of prosecutors. Durazo will be on probation for three years and is required to pay an unspecified amount of restitution back to the gurdwara. Indianapolis police say that a 2-year-old boy was fatally shot Wednesday evening when he got his hands a gun from his mother's purse on the kitchen counter and accidentally shot himself when he was left unattended. The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department say that the officers arrived on the scene around 9:15 p.m. to find the child unresponsive with a single gunshot wound to the shoulder. The mother had stepped away momentarily when the boy climbed to a kitchen counter, removed the pistol and shot himself at about 9 p.m. at northwest side home in the 5200 block of Alameda Road, near 52nd Street and West Kessler Boulevard, according to a police statement. Authorities arrived 15 minutes later where firefighters tried to revive the child, but they were not successful. He was then rushed to Riley Hospital for Children at IU Health in critical condition and later pronounced dead. "The grieving mother is cooperating with detectives," the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department said in a news release Thursday, "and after detectives questioned her she was later released." The mother, who has a valid gun permit for the .380 Bersa semi-automatic pistol that was used in the shooting, and child were the only people home at the time of the incident, police said. Even if the parent(s) has a valid gun permit, their children are a different story, and when left alone with a firearm, disaster is usually not too far behind. For example, back in January, a 7-year-old boy was shot and killed after his 8-year-old brother took their mother's gun out of her purse. He tried to remove the magazine, but it discharged instead, striking his brother in the head. While this played out, the mother was inside a nearby Verizon store paying some bills. It's incidents like this that have prompted the IMPD to urge gun owners to secure their weapons whenever children are nearby. They suggest keeping guns unloaded, locked and out of reach of their children. In addition, they suggest storing the ammunition and guns in separate locations, as well as keeping the keys for gun locks and ammunition safes separate from the house keys and, once again, keeping them out of reach of their children. @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. I f ITVs captivating new Sunday night drama The Durrells makes you yearn to fly out to the Corfu sunshine, a beautiful villa is for sale on the Greek island for those who have nearly 2 million to spend. The show, which stars Keeley Hawes, is based on British naturalist Gerald Durrells classic trilogy of Corfu childhood memoirs, including My Family and Other Animals. Take a tour of fabulous A-list homes... 1 /38 Take a tour of fabulous A-list homes... It's expensive to keep up with Kourtney 38 million American reality TV star Kourtney Kardashian spent a week-long getaway at a beach-chic home in Nantucket, Massachusetts. The compound includes a main house with four bedrooms, a cinema and an entertainment room, plus a two-bedroom guest cottage. (Scroll right...) Image: Rex You better believe it 64.4 million Cher's former Beverly Hills home has been transformed by the current owners into a 16-acre equestrian estate, and it's now for sale for 64.4 million. Hidden from public view by mature landscaping, the 20,000sq ft main residence has 11 bedrooms, wood-burning fireplaces and beamed ceilings. Outside there is a pool, spa and kitchen, plus a detached 7,000sq ft five-bedroom guesthouse. (Scroll right...) Image: Rex Matthew Perry's Fitzrovia rental is for sale 6.95 million Matthew Perry rented the penthouse while performing in his hit West End play 'The End Of Longing'. The flat is spread over the top three floors of the landmark Fitzrovia Apartment building in Bolsover Street and its roof terraces are more spacious than the average UK house. Perry is pictured here with cast member Jennifer Mudge. (Scroll right...) Getty Can't help falling in love 4.5 million Lisa Marie Presley is selling her 15th-century manor house with three swimming pools south of Rotherfield village in East Sussex. Located within the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the Grade II-listed property, right, named Coes Hall, also includes 11 bedrooms. Modern luxuries which Elviss daughter, left, has had installed include a cinema, and its handy for upmarket shopping in Tunbridge Wells. A stunning circular garden room has dreamy views over the garden and lake, while there are stables and a cottage in the grounds. (Scroll right...) Image: Rex/Sothebys Rex Dictator's doctor in the house 10 million Once the Thirties home of the eminent Italian doctor Sir Aldo Castellani, who skipped England in a rush after it was revealed the dictator Benito Mussolini was his patient, the last privately owned and occupied house in Harley Street is for sale. The grand central London property has been in aristocratic hands for more than 100 years. A regular visitor today is model Liberty Ross, daughter of current owner Roxana Bunty Lampson. The family is ready to say goodbye to the five-storey property which comes with three residential flats and medical accommodation. (Scroll right...) Image: Savills Savills For sale, actually 1.5 million A Grade II-listed apartment which had a starring role in the hit 2003 movie Love Actually has just come on to the market. The two-bedroom garden flat was the home of writer Jamie Bennett, portrayed in the film by Colin Firth, right. Jamie lived there with his girlfriend until he found out she was having an affair with his brother. The property is in Chiswick and was originally built for the English watercolour painter and lithographer Joseph Nash, who was apprenticed to the architectural draughtsman and artist Augustus Charles Pugin in 1827. The layout is still centred around the original artists studio which is used as a big open-plan dining room with a wonderful large window and high ceilings. (Scroll right...) Image: Marc Piasecki/John D Wood Marc Piasecki Indecent proposal revised 45 million Demi Moore has taken a staggering 12.2 million off the asking price for her New York City penthouse atop the glamorous San Remo building, below. The 7,000sq ft triplex was originally listed last year for 57.2 million. However, in a bid to sell quickly, the actress, above, has slashed the price of the six-bedroom home she bought 25 years ago with then-husband Bruce Willis from Saturday Night Fever producer, Robert Stigwood. The flat has its own lift entrance and the spacious roof terrace has one of the best views in the city. Hollywoods A-list favours the block, where neighbours include Diane Keaton, Dustin Hoffman and Steven Spielberg. (Scroll right...) Image: Alamy/Rex Alamy The Clooney's new love boat 10,000 Power couple George and Amal Clooney have splashed out on a 10,000 small boat for their Oxfordshire estate. The pair are said to be spending 20 million renovating their Thameside Sonning home which they bought for a rumoured 7.5 million two years ago. (Scroll right...) Getty Location, location 5.3 million Elstree Lodge in Hertfordshire has been used as a filming location by the likes of Reggie Yates, Fearne Cotton and Joanna Lumley. Now the five-bedroom family home is on the market for 1.35 million with Lumley Estates. The loud interiors wont be to every buyers taste but that is easily fixed. (Scroll right...) Buy Attenboroughs 2m Riviera retreat 2 million The celebrated actor and director used the property in the picturesque Provencal village of Chateauneuf-Grasse as his holiday home. Set in approximately four acres of gently sloped grounds, it offers uninterrupted countryside views all the way to the Mediterranean. Perfect for summer escapes, the grounds include a swimming pool, a covered patio and hundreds of century-old olive trees. Lord Attenborough, who acquired the plot in the 1980s, revamped the main house to include four bedrooms, three bedrooms and an open-plan living room.(Scroll right...) The race is on for Nigel's former villa 819,000 In Bendinat on the island of Mallorca, Mansells former retreat is part of a private community of 14 luxury villas with communal gardens and a swimming pool. There are four double bedrooms and the large terrace has a brick-built BBQ and a wood-burning pizza oven for al fresco dining. It would be ideal for keen golfers as the Real Golf de Bendinat club is just a few minutes away by foot. (Scroll right...) Stylish flats set for a swift sale 499,950 A Victorian building in the middle of Eton High Street, once the medical wing of Eton College, is now seven apartments. With alumni including English actor Tom Hiddleston seen right with his girlfriend, American singer Taylor Swift to Princes William and Harry, Eton has long been synonymous with wealth and privilege. The new two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartments are designed with this in mind, appealing to those with a taste for the finer things in life. At 499,950 the homes will also benefit from Crossrail completion in 2019, with trains to the City, Canary Wharf and the West End running from nearby Taplow station. (Scroll right...) Rex Kendall's 5.3m place on the Sunset Strip 5.3 million Supermodel Kendall Jenner has bought a five-bedroom home in the Hollywood Hills from British actress Emily Blunt and her American actor husband, John Krasinski. The 20-year-old sister of the Kardashians spent 5.3 million on the 4,800sq ft house in Sunset Strip. Social butterfly Kendall loves the white walls, exposed brick and the fabulous outdoor pool area with a cosy fireplace and barbecue. (Scroll right...) Getty Branson student digs sell for record price 5.95 million Brexit isnt bringing down prices on the Hyde Park Estate in W2. A home in Connaught Square, has just exchanged at the asking price of 5.95 million, a record for the square in terms of pounds per square foot. Richard Branson started Student magazine, his first business, in the basement of the 3,671sq ft property in 1968. The five-bedroom Grade II-listed house with a pretty terrace has a location to die for with Hyde Park and Oxford Street just around the corner. New residents should brace themselves for the paparazzi, as the Blairs are among near neighbours. (Scroll right...) Getty Cooking up a Cornish plot 4.4 million Gordon Ramsay has won planning permission to demolish his 4.4 million home and, despite ongoing protests from locals who claim his scheme will ruin the picturesque coastline, the council has ruled in favour of the celebrity chef. He will be able to build two properties in place of the original. One will sit at the bottom of the garden, very close to the sea. He also has his sights set on a lower ground-floor swimming pool. (Scroll right...) Rex/ SWNS Meet the Stillers new apartment 11.5 million Hollywood couple Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor have splashed out on a swish New York apartment. Overlooking the Hudson River in Manhattan, the apartment block has an on-site fitness club and private green space. (Scroll right...) Getty Duncan Bannatyne's Lake District lair 329,000 Dragon's Den star Duncan Bannatyne has put his picturesque lodge, overlooking Lake Windemere, up for sale. The wooden three-bedroom retreat is in the heart of the Lake District. (Scroll right...) Image: Rex The Highgate home with Fab Four connections 3.45 million A north London home that formed the backdrop for an iconic Beatle photoshoot has hit the market. St Jamess Villa boasts three bedrooms and a terrace overlooking trees. (Scroll right...) Robbie's LA escapology 8.3 million Robbie Williams is leaving LA and returning to live in Britain as soon as work is complete on his home in west London. Williams, who bought the 17.5 million home, from Michael Winners estate is selling his Beverly Hills mansion, above, for 8.3 million. It has seven bedrooms, and a recording studio off the master suite (Scroll right...) Image: Film Magic No red herring for Jonathan Creek 1 million The Fisheries in Hertfordshire is a go-to property for TV dramas. The Grade II-listed Regency house, above, has been a location for Waking the Dead, Midsomer Murders and Holby City, as well as Jonathan Creek, starring Alan Davies and Sarah Alexander, pictured.Built in the 1820s as the fishing lodge for the Chorleywood House Estate the three-bedroom home has been occupied by the same family for over 75 years. Image: Richard Barlow Fragrant opportunity for Kendall Jenner 8.2 million Here is a fragrant French opportunity. Estee Lauders former holiday home in Cannes is on the market.The late US cosmetics queen and her husband bought six-bedroom Villa Roche Cline, above, in 1963 and used it as a holiday home for the rest of their lives.The house passed to the two Lauder sons, but it was sold and refurbished keeping her signature mint green colour scheme. The grounds boast a cinema and a pool. Maybe Estee Lauder brand ambassador, the US model Kendall Jenner, inset, would love this glamorous retreat. (Scroll right...) Image: Pascal Pronnier/Reuters Rent Britney's NY penthouse one more time 18,190 a month The New York penthouse Britney Spears once called home is available to rent. The singer bought the 4,400sq ft flat in the Silk Building, pictured, in 2002 for 2.27 million, going on to sell it at a 758,000 profit. The current owner put it back on the market earlier this year but has failed to find a buyer so he has gone down the rental path instead. The plush three-bedroom, four-bathroom home has a sprawling outdoor space with views of downtown Manhattan. (Scroll right...) Image: Wire Image Snap up Rowan Atkinson's Waterperry home 2.65 million Rowan Atkinson has put his Oxfordshire home, The Old Rectory, up for sale for 250,000 less than when he first listed it a year ago. Originally dating from 1777, the grade II-listed, five-bedroom country pile has had a contemporary extension, linking the original Georgian village house to a stunning swimming pool complex and gym. Image: Getty Buy punk pioneer's Seventies party pad 1,995,000 Sex pistols frontman Johnny Rotten threw wild parties at his Chelsea home at the height of the bands fame in the late Seventies. The punk rocker used to visit Sex, Vivienne Westwoods boutique around the corner in Kings Road. The refurbished three-bedroom flat still has the original 400sq ft roof terrace where 50 could party. Image: Getty The Oxford flat where Aung San Suu Kyi dreamt of democracy 4,500 a month Undergraduates seeking a pad with provenance in the city need look no further than the former four-bedroom apartment of Burmas revolutionary leader Aung San Suu Kyi, which is available to rent. The study, where the Nobel Peace Prize laureate must have spent many hours planning her return to Burma to bravely lead her people to democracy, has a balcony overlooking the gardens. Image: Getty Gallagher's 11.5m Little Venice oasis 11.5 million Noel Gallagher is struggling to find a buyer for his five-bedroom house. The decor is surprisingly safe, but theres a conservatory, a private terrace and Juliet balconies. The High Flying Birds frontman bought the semi-detached house next to Regents Canal for 8m in 2010. Despite being keen to sell, the former Oasis star, is not under pressure to drop the asking price. He has already moved to another home in north-west London. Image: Rex Don't forget to invite the neighbours... 3,931,000 Brad Pitt fell in love with the Balearics after filming on the Spanish islands for his new Second World War drama, Allied. So enchanted was the Hollywood star that he and actress wife Angelina Jolies latest home is reportedly a 2.65m villa in the ancient Majorcan town of Andratx. You could be a near neighbour if you buy this villa, with equally lovely Mediterranean views. Dare we say it, but this property seems even more luxurious than Brangelinas place. Its for sale with Mallorca Sothebys International Realty. Image: Rex Mel's labour of love 2.25 million A beautiful village home renovated by Melinda Messenger is for sale. The Old Rectory, in Lydiard Millicent near Swindon, was built in 1855 by the Rev Christopher Cleobury. Messenger, of TVs Loose Women and This Morning, sold it in 2005, and the next owners lavished even more cash on the Grade II-listed house. It has six bedrooms and the master suite has lovely views over the gardens, the paddock and the Marlborough Downs. Image: Rex Stay in FC Barcelona's Neymar's 7-a-night Airbnb 7,097 a night Brazilian football player Neymar Jr is living the high life in a Beverly Hills mega mansion. The superstar, who plays for Barcelona, has been posting pictures of his stay at the palatial 22,000sq ft property, above, to his 50m Instagram followers. The seven-bedroom house has a cinema and a wine cellar and comes with maid, butler and chauffeur. For those keen to follow in the 24-year-old strikers footsteps, the estate is available to rent on Airbnb. Image: Cameron Carothers/Getty In the islands north-east corner nicknamed Kensington on Sea because of the well-heeled Brits who buy and holiday there CPA Corfu is marketing the luxurious villa for 1.97 million. Overlooking the coast, it has five bedrooms, a terrace with spectacular views, and direct access to a pristine private beach at Avlaki. It looks like you've reached a page that doesnt exist (anymore). Please use the navigation or search above to find content on Hospitality Net. Go back to home Four Seasons Resort Mauritius at Anahita has named Marc-Olivier Raffray as General Manager, following the transition of General Manager and Regional Vice President Todd Cilano to Four Seasons Hotel Doha. Raffray, whose family originates from Mauritius, arrives to the island from his position of General Manager at Four Seasons Hotel des Bergues Geneva. Before returning to the Indian Ocean, Europe had been home to Raffray for more than a decade, as prior to Geneva, he held the position of Hotel Manager at the flagship Four Seasons Hotel George V, Paris, for more than seven years. While more recent appointments have seen Raffray in the heart of thriving European cities, Mauritius is in fact Raffrays family home, with both his parents hailing from the island. Despite his Mauritian heritage, Raffray was educated in France, yet spent a lot of time in his younger years visiting the island, and later, a period of seven years working in Mauritian hotels, including the role of opening resident manager at Constance Le Prince Maurice. Beginning his career in food and beverage operations, Raffray has earned increasingly senior management roles through his journey across no less than nine countries. From the fast-paced cities of Paris and Bangkok to exotic island locations such as St. Martin and Seychelles, Raffray has developed his hospitality skills and knowledge in a career that spans across four continents. Raffray will now oversee the operations of the all pool villa Resort on the east coast of Mauritius, following its 12 week renovation in 2015 to create the new Sanctuary Pool Villas and Presidential Suite Sanctuary. Net revenue for the first quarter of 2016 decreased 9.8% to $2.72 billion, compared to $3.01 billion in the first quarter of 2015. Consolidated adjusted property EBITDA of $917.6 million decreased 12.7% in the first quarter of 2016, compared to the year-ago quarter. On a hold-normalized basis, adjusted property EBITDA increased 0.9% to $1.03 billion in the first quarter of 2016. For the Quarter Ended March 31, 2016 (Compared to the Quarter Ended March 31, 2015) - Consolidated Net Revenue was $2.72 Billion - Hold-Normalized Adjusted Property EBITDA was $1.03 Billion - Consolidated Adjusted Property EBITDA was $917.6 Million In Macao: - Adjusted Property EBITDA was $510.4 Million - Strong Cost Discipline Drove a 190 Basis Point Improvement in Hold-Normalized Adjusted Property EBITDA Margin to 32.1% At Marina Bay Sands in Singapore: - Hold-Normalized Adjusted Property EBITDA was $382.8 Million, While Adjusted Property EBITDA was $274.9 Million - On a Constant-Currency Basis, Hold-Normalized Adjusted Property EBITDA Increased 10.3% - Hold-Normalized Adjusted Earnings per Diluted Share was $0.57; Adjusted Earnings per Diluted Share was $0.45; and GAAP Earnings per Diluted Share was $0.40 - The Company Paid Dividends of $0.72 per Share, an Increase of 10.8% Las Vegas Sands Corp. (NYSE: LVS) yesterday reported financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2016. First Quarter Overview Mr. Sheldon G. Adelson, chairman and chief executive officer, said, "The operating environment in Macao remained challenging during the quarter; but we do see signs of stabilization, particularly in the mass market. Our focus on the higher margin mass and non-gaming segments and the geographic diversification of our cash flows enabled us to once again deliver in excess of one billion U.S. dollars of hold-normalized adjusted property EBITDA during the quarter. We remain intensely focused on the consistent execution of our proven global growth strategy, which leverages the power of our unique convention-based Integrated Resort business model. "Our convention-based Integrated Resort business model continues to appeal to the broadest set of customers, generate the most diversified set of cash flows and deliver the industry's highest revenue and profit from non-gaming segments, while bringing unsurpassed economic and diversification benefits to the regions in which we operate. We remain confident in our ability to both further extend our global leadership position and deliver strong growth in the future. "The prudent management of our cash flow, including the ability to increase the return of capital to shareholders while maintaining a strong balance sheet and ample liquidity to invest in future growth opportunities, remains a cornerstone of our strategy." The company paid a recurring quarterly dividend of $0.72 per common share during the quarter, an increase of 10.8% compared to the first quarter of 2015. The company announced that its next recurring quarterly dividend of $0.72 per common share will be paid on June 30, 2016, to Las Vegas Sands shareholders of record on June 22, 2016. That dividend also represents an increase of 10.8% compared to the dividend paid in the second quarter of 2015. Additionally, since the inception of the company's share repurchase program in June 2013, the company has returned $2.44 billion to shareholders through the repurchase of 35.4 million shares. Mr. Adelson added, "In Macao, notwithstanding the difficult operating environment, we delivered $510.4 million in adjusted property EBITDA across our Macao property portfolio during the quarter. We remain confident that our market-leading Cotai Strip properties, which will be complemented later this year by The Parisian Macao, targeted to open in mid-September 2016, will continue to provide the economic benefits of diversification to Macao, help attract greater numbers of business and leisure travelers, and provide our company with an outstanding and diversified platform for growth in the years ahead." Marina Bay Sands in Singapore continues to attract visitors from across the region to Singapore, which enabled us to generate yet another record mass gaming win-per-day in local currency terms. While the impact of the stronger U.S. dollar and low win percentage on Rolling Chip play negatively impacted the company's reported financial results for the quarter, both gaming volumes and our non-gaming segments remain resilient. On a constant currency basis, hold-normalized adjusted property EBITDA increased 10.3%. At The Venetian Las Vegas and The Palazzo, including the Sands Expo and Convention Center, a 10.0% year-over-year increase in RevPAR to $231 drove a 17.3% increase in adjusted property EBITDA during the first quarter of 2016. Company-Wide Operating Results Net revenue for the first quarter of 2016 decreased 9.8% to $2.72 billion, compared to $3.01 billion in the first quarter of 2015. Consolidated adjusted property EBITDA of $917.6 million decreased 12.7% in the first quarter of 2016, compared to the year-ago quarter. On a hold-normalized basis, adjusted property EBITDA increased 0.9% to $1.03 billion in the first quarter of 2016. On a GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) basis, operating income in the first quarter of 2016 decreased 17.6% to $585.6 million, compared to $711.1 million in the first quarter of 2015. The decrease in operating income was principally due to softer results across the company's Macao property portfolio and lower win percentage on Rolling Chip play at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. On a GAAP basis, net income attributable to Las Vegas Sands in the first quarter of 2016 decreased 37.5% to $320.2 million, compared to $511.9 million in the first quarter of 2015, while diluted earnings per share in the first quarter of 2016 decreased 37.5% to $0.40, compared to $0.64 in the prior-year quarter. The decrease in net income attributable to Las Vegas Sands reflected the decline in operating income described above as well as a $35.8 million mark-to-market loss on Singapore dollar forward contracts. This was partially offset by a $10.4 million decrease in net income attributable to noncontrolling interests. Adjusted net income (see Note 1) decreased to $357.3 million, or $0.45 per diluted share, compared to $531.1 million, or $0.66per diluted share, in the first quarter of 2015. Sands China Ltd. Consolidated Financial Results On a GAAP basis, total net revenues for Sands China Ltd. decreased 7.9% to $1.63 billion in the first quarter of 2016, compared to $1.77 billion in the first quarter of 2015. Adjusted property EBITDA for Sands China Ltd. decreased 2.5% to $517.9 million in the first quarter of 2016, compared to $531.0 million in the first quarter of 2015. Net income for Sands China Ltd. decreased 9.6% to $311.6 million in the first quarter of 2016, compared to $344.7 million in the first quarter of 2015. The Venetian Macao First Quarter Operating Results Despite the softer gaming market in Macao, The Venetian Macao continued to enjoy market-leading visitation and financial performance. The property generated adjusted property EBITDA of $267.8 million in the first quarter with an adjusted property EBITDA margin of 35.8%. Non-Rolling Chip drop was $1.77 billion for the quarter, with a Non-Rolling Chip win percentage of 25.1%. Rolling Chip volume during the quarter decreased 3.4% to $8.23 billion. Rolling Chip win percentage was 3.21% in the quarter, above the 2.83% experienced in the prior-year quarter. Slot handle was $1.07 billion. The following table summarizes the key operating results for The Venetian Macao for the first quarter of 2016 compared to the first quarter of 2015: The Venetian Macao Operations Three Months Ended March 31, (Dollars in millions) 2016 2015 $ Change Change Revenues: Casino $ 654.9 $ 676.9 $ (22.0) -3.3% Rooms 46.2 59.6 (13.4) -22.5% Food and Beverage 20.9 24.2 (3.3) -13.6% Mall 48.9 44.4 4.5 10.1% Convention, Retail and Other 14.1 22.1 (8.0) -36.2% Less - Promotional Allowances (36.0) (40.0) 4.0 10.0% Net Revenues $ 749.0 $ 787.2 $ (38.2) -4.9% Adjusted Property EBITDA $ 267.8 $ 269.9 $ (2.1) -0.8% EBITDA Margin % 35.8% 34.3% 1.5 pts Operating Income $ 223.9 $ 220.0 $ 3.9 1.8% Gaming Statistics (Dollars in millions) Rolling Chip Volume $ 8,226.0 $ 8,518.0 $ (292.0) -3.4% Rolling Chip Win %(1) 3.21% 2.83% 0.38 pts Non-Rolling Chip Drop $ 1,770.1 $ 1,868.0 $ (97.9) -5.2% Non-Rolling Chip Win % 25.1% 25.0% 0.1 pts Slot Handle $ 1,070.0 $ 1,062.5 $ 7.5 0.7% Slot Hold % 4.4% 4.9% -0.5 pts Hotel Statistics Occupancy % 77.7% 85.8% -8.1 pts Average Daily Rate (ADR) $ 226 $ 270 $ (44) -16.3% Revenue per Available Room (RevPAR) $ 176 $ 232 $ (56) -24.1% (1) This compares to our expected Rolling Chip win percentage of 2.7% to 3.0% (calculated before discounts and commissions). Sands Cotai Central First Quarter Operating Results Net revenues and adjusted property EBITDA for the first quarter of 2016 at Sands Cotai Central were $530.3 million and $163.5 million, respectively, resulting in an adjusted property EBITDA margin of 30.8%. Non-Rolling Chip drop was $1.50 billion in the first quarter with a Non-Rolling Chip win percentage of 20.9%. Rolling Chip volume was $3.60 billion for the quarter with a Rolling Chip win percentage of 3.92%. Slot handle was $1.56 billion for the quarter. Hotel occupancy was 77.1% with ADR of $155. The following table summarizes our key operating results for Sands Cotai Central for the first quarter of 2016 compared to the first quarter of 2015: Sands Cotai Central Operations Three Months Ended March 31, (Dollars in millions) 2016 2015 $ Change Change Revenues: Casino $ 459.0 $ 493.0 $ (34.0) -6.9% Rooms 66.6 71.9 (5.3) -7.4% Food and Beverage 25.9 28.0 (2.1) -7.5% Mall 15.4 13.5 1.9 14.1% Convention, Retail and Other 5.0 6.8 (1.8) -26.5% Less - Promotional Allowances (41.6) (41.4) (0.2) -0.5% Net Revenues $ 530.3 $ 571.8 $ (41.5) -7.3% Adjusted Property EBITDA $ 163.5 $ 155.9 $ 7.6 4.9% EBITDA Margin % 30.8% 27.3% 3.5 pts Operating Income $ 85.5 $ 76.4 $ 9.1 11.9% Gaming Statistics (Dollars in millions) Rolling Chip Volume $ 3,603.4 $ 6,083.0 $ (2,479.6) -40.8% Rolling Chip Win %(1) 3.92% 2.76% 1.16 pts Non-Rolling Chip Drop $ 1,504.0 $ 1,645.1 $ (141.1) -8.6% Non-Rolling Chip Win % 20.9% 20.8% 0.1 pts Slot Handle $ 1,559.1 $ 1,643.8 $ (84.7) -5.2% Slot Hold % 3.5% 3.2% 0.3 pts Hotel Statistics Occupancy % 77.1% 81.5% -4.4 pts Average Daily Rate (ADR) $ 155 $ 173 $ (18) -10.4% Revenue per Available Room (RevPAR) $ 119 $ 141 $ (22) -15.6% (1) This compares to our expected Rolling Chip win percentage of 2.7% to 3.0% (calculated before discounts and commissions). Four Seasons Hotel Macao and Plaza Casino First Quarter Operating Results The Four Seasons Hotel Macao and Plaza Casino generated adjusted property EBITDA of $48.2 million in the first quarter of 2016, an increase of 8.3% compared to the year-ago quarter. Non-Rolling Chip drop increased 31.0% to $300.1 million, with a Non-Rolling Chip win percentage of 19.1%. Rolling Chip volume was $2.62 billion for the quarter. Rolling Chip win percentage was 3.22% in the quarter, above the 2.81% experienced in the prior-year quarter. Slot handle was $90.2 million during the quarter. The following table summarizes our key operating results for the Four Seasons Hotel Macao and Plaza Casino for the first quarter of 2016 compared to the first quarter of 2015: Four Seasons Hotel Macao and Plaza Casino Operations Three Months Ended March 31, (Dollars in millions) 2016 2015 $ Change Change Revenues: Casino $ 111.2 $ 125.4 $ (14.2) -11.3% Rooms 8.4 10.7 (2.3) -21.5% Food and Beverage 6.5 6.7 (0.2) -3.0% Mall 31.3 29.7 1.6 5.4% Convention, Retail and Other 0.6 0.9 (0.3) -33.3% Less - Promotional Allowances (9.7) (12.1) 2.4 19.8% Net Revenues $ 148.3 $ 161.3 $ (13.0) -8.1% Adjusted Property EBITDA $ 48.2 $ 44.5 $ 3.7 8.3% EBITDA Margin % 32.5% 27.6% 4.9 pts Operating Income $ 36.8 $ 31.9 $ 4.9 15.4% Gaming Statistics (Dollars in millions) Rolling Chip Volume $ 2,621.5 $ 3,962.6 $ (1,341.1) -33.8% Rolling Chip Win %(1) 3.22% 2.81% 0.41 pts Non-Rolling Chip Drop $ 300.1 $ 229.0 $ 71.1 31.0% Non-Rolling Chip Win % 19.1% 23.1% -4.0 pts Slot Handle $ 90.2 $ 133.9 $ (43.7) -32.6% Slot Hold % 6.8% 4.8% 2.0 pts Hotel Statistics Occupancy % 69.0% 77.0% -8.0 pts Average Daily Rate (ADR) $ 358 $ 410 $ (52) -12.7% Revenue per Available Room (RevPAR) $ 247 $ 316 $ (69) -21.8% (1) This compares to our expected Rolling Chip win percentage of 2.7% to 3.0% (calculated before discounts and commissions). Sands Macao First Quarter Operating Results Sands Macao's adjusted property EBITDA was $31.0 million. Non-Rolling Chip drop was $699.9 million during the quarter, while slot handle was $657.7 million. Rolling Chip volume was $2.24 billion for the quarter. The property realized 2.45% win on Rolling Chip volume during the quarter, below the 2.86% generated in the year-ago quarter. The following table summarizes our key operating results for Sands Macao for the first quarter of 2016 compared to the first quarter of 2015: Sands Macao Operations Three Months Ended March 31, (Dollars in millions) 2016 2015 $ Change Change Revenues: Casino $ 169.5 $ 218.8 $ (49.3) -22.5% Rooms 5.2 5.6 (0.4) -7.1% Food and Beverage 7.0 9.1 (2.1) -23.1% Convention, Retail and Other 2.1 2.4 (0.3) -12.5% Less - Promotional Allowances (8.7) (10.5) 1.8 17.1% Net Revenues $ 175.1 $ 225.4 $ (50.3) -22.3% Adjusted Property EBITDA $ 31.0 $ 57.4 $ (26.4) -46.0% EBITDA Margin % 17.7% 25.5% -7.8 pts Operating Income $ 21.8 $ 44.7 $ (22.9) -51.2% Gaming Statistics (Dollars in millions) Rolling Chip Volume $ 2,241.0 $ 2,526.2 $ (285.2) -11.3% Rolling Chip Win %(1) 2.45% 2.86% -0.41 pts Non-Rolling Chip Drop $ 699.9 $ 789.9 $ (90.0) -11.4% Non-Rolling Chip Win % 16.9% 19.1% -2.2 pts Slot Handle $ 657.7 $ 707.1 $ (49.4) -7.0% Slot Hold % 3.3% 3.5% -0.2 pts Hotel Statistics Occupancy % 95.8% 98.4% -2.6 pts Average Daily Rate (ADR) $ 207 $ 226 $ (19) -8.4% Revenue per Available Room (RevPAR) $ 198 $ 222 $ (24) -10.8% (1) This compares to our expected Rolling Chip win percentage of 2.7% to 3.0% (calculated before discounts and commissions). Marina Bay Sands First Quarter Operating Results The stronger U.S. dollar negatively impacted the financial results and key performance indicators of Marina Bay Sands in Singapore in the current quarter. Low win percentage on Rolling Chip play also negatively impacted our reported financial results. The property generated adjusted property EBITDA of $274.9 million. On a hold-normalized basis, adjusted property EBITDA was $382.8 million. On a constant-currency basis, hold-normalized adjusted property EBITDA increased 10.3%. Rolling Chip win percentage of 1.42% in the first quarter of 2016 was below the expected range and considerably below the 3.41% achieved in the first quarter of 2015. Rolling Chip volume was $9.63 billion for the quarter. Non-Rolling Chip drop was $1.01 billion during the quarter, with a Non-Rolling Chip win percentage of 29.1%. Slot handle increased 8.8% to $3.36 billion for the quarter compared to the year-ago quarter. Total mass win-per-day during the quarter was $4.8 million and was an all-time quarterly record for the property in local currency terms. ADR decreased to $394 during the quarter, but occupancy increased to 97.9%, resulting in a RevPAR decrease of 1.8% compared to the same quarter last year. The following table summarizes our key operating results for Marina Bay Sands for the first quarter of 2016 compared to the first quarter of 2015: Marina Bay Sands Operations Three Months Ended March 31, (Dollars in millions) 2016 2015 $ Change Change Revenues: Casino $ 453.1 $ 631.9 $ (178.8) -28.3% Rooms 88.9 89.6 (0.7) -0.8% Food and Beverage 46.0 45.2 0.8 1.8% Mall 39.0 39.8 (0.8) -2.0% Convention, Retail and Other 21.0 26.7 (5.7) -21.3% Less - Promotional Allowances (44.3) (48.4) 4.1 8.5% Net Revenues $ 603.7 $ 784.8 $ (181.1) -23.1% Adjusted Property EBITDA $ 274.9 $ 415.3 $ (140.4) -33.8% EBITDA Margin % 45.5% 52.9% -7.4 pts Operating Income $ 186.0 $ 319.0 $ (133.0) -41.7% Gaming Statistics (Dollars in millions) Rolling Chip Volume $ 9,632.1 $ 10,090.0 $ (457.9) -4.5% Rolling Chip Win %(1) 1.42% 3.41% -1.99 pts Non-Rolling Chip Drop $ 1,006.5 $ 1,108.7 $ (102.2) -9.2% Non-Rolling Chip Win % 29.1% 25.3% 3.8 pts Slot Handle $ 3,355.4 $ 3,084.3 $ 271.1 8.8% Slot Hold % 4.3% 4.6% -0.3 pts Hotel Statistics Occupancy % 97.9% 94.8% 3.1 pts Average Daily Rate (ADR) $ 394 $ 414 $ (20) -4.8% Revenue per Available Room (RevPAR) $ 386 $ 393 $ (7) -1.8% (1) This compares to our expected Rolling Chip win percentage of 2.7% to 3.0% (calculated before discounts and commissions). Las Vegas Operations First Quarter Operating Results Adjusted property EBITDA at The Venetian Las Vegas and The Palazzo, including the Sands Expo and Convention Center, was $86.9 million for the quarter, an increase of 17.3% compared to the first quarter of 2015. On a hold-normalized basis, adjusted property EBITDA in the quarter increased 15.0% year-over-year to $102.5 million. RevPAR increased 10.0% year-over-year to $231 in the quarter, reflecting a 2.9% increase in ADR to $251 and a 5.9 percentage point increase in occupancy to 92.1%. Table games drop decreased 9.3% in the quarter to $483.5 million, reflecting softer play in both Baccarat and non-Baccarat segments, while slot handle increased 1.4% to $586.5 million. The following table summarizes our key operating results for our Las Vegas operations for the first quarter of 2016 compared to the first quarter of 2015: Three Months Ended Las Vegas Operations March 31, (Dollars in millions) 2016 2015 $ Change Change Revenues: Casino $ 104.4 $ 111.8 $ (7.4) -6.6% Rooms 147.6 130.6 17.0 13.0% Food and Beverage 74.2 68.9 5.3 7.7% Convention, Retail and Other 84.5 87.6 (3.1) -3.5% Less - Promotional Allowances (25.8) (22.5) (3.3) -14.7% Net Revenues $ 384.9 $ 376.4 $ 8.5 2.3% Adjusted Property EBITDA $ 86.9 $ 74.1 $ 12.8 17.3% EBITDA Margin % 22.6% 19.7% 2.9 pts Operating Income $ 78.3 $ 70.4 $ 7.9 11.2% Gaming Statistics (Dollars in millions) Table Games Drop $ 483.5 $ 533.1 $ (49.6) -9.3% Table Games Win %(1) 15.9% 16.6% -0.7 pts Slot Handle $ 586.5 $ 578.5 $ 8.0 1.4% Slot Hold % 8.1% 7.6% 0.5 pts Hotel Statistics Occupancy % 92.1% 86.2% 5.9 pts Average Daily Rate (ADR) $ 251 $ 244 $ 7 2.9% Revenue per Available Room (RevPAR) $ 231 $ 210 $ 21 10.0% (1) This compares to our expected Baccarat win percentage of 21.0% to 29.0% and our expected non-Baccarat win percentage of 16.0% to 20.0% (calculated before discounts). Sands Bethlehem First Quarter Operating Results Net revenues for Sands Bethlehem in Pennsylvania increased 8.6% to $138.7 million and adjusted property EBITDA increased 26.1% to $37.7 million for the quarter. Table games drop increased 6.7% to $281.0 million for the quarter, while table games win percentage was 19.8%, above the 17.3% realized in the first quarter of 2015. Slot handle increased 7.6% year-over-year to $1.08 billion for the quarter, with a slot hold percentage of 7.0%. The following table summarizes our key operating results for Sands Bethlehem for the first quarter of 2016 compared to the first quarter of 2015: Three Months Ended Sands Bethlehem Operations March 31, (Dollars in millions) 2016 2015 $ Change Change Revenues: Casino $ 130.1 $ 118.8 $ 11.3 9.5% Rooms 3.4 3.4 - 0.0% Food and Beverage 7.1 7.4 (0.3) -4.1% Mall 0.6 0.6 - 0.0% Convention, Retail and Other 4.9 4.2 0.7 16.7% Less - Promotional Allowances (7.4) (6.7) (0.7) -10.4% Net Revenues $ 138.7 $ 127.7 $ 11.0 8.6% Adjusted Property EBITDA $ 37.7 $ 29.9 $ 7.8 26.1% EBITDA Margin % 27.2% 23.4% 3.8 pts Operating Income $ 29.7 $ 23.2 $ 6.5 28.0% Gaming Statistics (Dollars in millions) Table Games Drop $ 281.0 $ 263.4 $ 17.6 6.7% Table Games Win %(1) 19.8% 17.3% 2.5 pts Slot Handle $ 1,081.9 $ 1,005.2 $ 76.7 7.6% Slot Hold % 7.0% 7.1% -0.1 pts Hotel Statistics Occupancy % 90.7% 84.5% 6.2 pts Average Daily Rate (ADR) $ 153 $ 149 $ 4.0 2.7% Revenue per Available Room (RevPAR) $ 138 $ 126 $ 12.0 9.5% (1) This compares to our expected table games win percentage of 14.0% to 16.0% (calculated before discounts). Asian Retail Mall Operations Gross revenue from tenants in the company's retail malls on Macao's Cotai Strip (The Venetian Macao, Four Seasons Macao and Sands Cotai Central) and Marina Bay Sands in Singapore was $134.3 million for the first quarter of 2016, an increase of 5.6% compared to the first quarter of 2015. Operating profit derived from these retail mall assets increased 6.9% year-over-year to $120.2 million. For The Three Months Ended March 31, 2016 TTM March 31, 2016 (Dollars in millions except per square foot data) Gross Revenue(1) Operating Profit Operating Profit Margin Gross Leasable Area (sq. ft.) Occupancy % at End of Period Tenant Sales Per Sq. Ft.(2) Shoppes at Venetian $ 48.7 $ 43.7 89.7% 780,834 97.5% $ 1,428 Shoppes at Four Seasons Luxury Retail 21.4 20.4 95.3% 142,562 100.0% 4,389 Other Stores 9.9 9.0 90.9% 118,008 97.9% 1,508 Total 31.3 29.4 93.9% 260,570 99.0% 3,128 Shoppes at Cotai Central(3) 15.3 13.4 87.6% 331,444 96.0% 872 Total Cotai Strip in Macao 95.3 86.5 90.8% 1,372,848 97.4% 1,642 The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands 39.0 33.7 86.4% 644,719 96.2% 1,334 Total $ 134.3 $ 120.2 89.5% 2,017,567 97.0% $ 1,545 (1) Gross revenue figures are net of intersegment revenue eliminations. (2) Tenant sales per square foot reflect sales from tenants only after the tenant has been open for a period of 12 months. (3) At completion of all phases, the Shoppes at Cotai Central will feature up to 600,000 square feet of gross leasable area. Other Factors Affecting Earnings Other Asia, which is principally comprised of our CotaiJet ferry operation, reflected adjusted property EBITDA of $7.7 millionduring the quarter, compared to $3.5 million in the first quarter of 2015. Pre-opening expense was $8.6 million in the first quarter of 2016 and related primarily to The Parisian Macao. Depreciation and amortization expense was $259.9 million in the first quarter of 2016, compared to $253.9 million in the first quarter of 2015. Interest expense, net of amounts capitalized, was $68.6 million for the first quarter of 2016, compared to $66.3 million in the prior-year quarter. Capitalized interest was $9.8 million during the first quarter of 2016, compared to $4.2 million during the first quarter of 2015. Our weighted average borrowing cost in the first quarter of 2016 was approximately 3.1%. Corporate expense was $46.6 million in the first quarter of 2016, compared to $45.2 million in the first quarter of 2015. Other expense was $47.1 million in the first quarter of 2016, compared to other income of $15.5 million in the first quarter of 2015. A mark-to-market loss of $35.8 million on Singapore dollar forward contracts was incurred in the first quarter of 2016. There were no contracts in place in the first quarter of 2015. The company's effective income tax rate for the first quarter of 2016 was 13.4% compared to 8.3% in the prior-year quarter. The increase relates primarily to a discrete non-cash charge in connection with a valuation allowance on certain foreign deferred tax assets. The tax rate is primarily driven by a provision for the earnings from Marina Bay Sands at the 17% Singapore income tax rate. The net income attributable to noncontrolling interests during the first quarter of 2016 of $88.7 million was principally related to Sands China Ltd. Balance Sheet Items Unrestricted cash balances as of March 31, 2016 were $1.70 billion. As of March 31, 2016, total debt outstanding, including the current portion, was $9.51 billion. Capital Expenditures Capital expenditures during the first quarter totaled $343.6 million, including construction, development and maintenance activities of $307.3 million in Macao (principally for The Parisian Macao), $17.0 million in Las Vegas, $13.1 million at Marina Bay Sands, and $6.2 million at Sands Bethlehem. A knuckle boxer called Mickey, could it be more stereotypical? Brad Pitt's Irish accent, could it be any worse? Well not to worry because we won't be subjected to Pitt's accent anytime soon because he is not to be recast in Crackle's Snatch the TV series. Sony own the rights to Crackle which is an internet TV service. After witnessing the monster success of FX's TV version of Fargo, Crackle were left inspired. Crackle then went to the drawing board and are now releasing a 10-episode series following the plot line of Guy Ritchie's cult-film Snatch. You keeping up? Ritchie's Snatch offered up plenty of storyline avenues to pursue with its interweaving plots and abundance of intriguing underworld characters. The producers intend to really delve into these characters and their dealings in the grimy underground world of London. With Sony TV behind their back, Crackle are really relying on the TV Snatch to bolster up their credibility as a couple of years ago their UK market was shut down. There's no date assigned to who we could expect to see Snatch air but it's almost definitely certain that we won't be seeing any of the original film cast which boasted Brad Pitt, Benicio Del Toro and Jason Statham. Just to remind you however, here is Brad's pitiful Irish accent (excuse the horrible pun). Harrison Forde has now revisited his iconic roles as Indiana Jones and Hans Solo and he intends to do the same for the upcoming sequel of his 1982 classic, Blade Runner If you just can't wait to bear witness to the Blade Runner sequel well you're in luck as it's expected arrival is now October 2017. Initially, it had been estimated that the sequel wouldn't be ready for screen until January of 2018 but now producers reckon that Blade Runner shall be shot, edited and produced by October 2017. 34 years after Forde appeared on screen as Detective Rick Deckard he will reprise this iconic role. Joining alongside him is Ryan Gosling and Robin Wright. Relatively little is yet known about the films plot but it will set several decades after Ridley Scott's original. Denis Villeneuve (Sicario) will reunite with his trusted Oscar-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins to reimagine the dystopian Los Angeles inhabited by the genetically engineered replicants. Hopefully, the next time we're reporting on this sequel, we'll have a trailer in tow. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Foreclosures across the Houston region have been dropping since the national housing crisis, as the strong economy helped the local housing market rebound faster than in many parts of the country. But with the lingering downturn in energy, the foreclosure rate is expected to stabilize and could even rise. "It's not doom and gloom," said real estate agent Kevin Riles, who listed about 100 foreclosed houses a month for the government during the recession. "My perspective is the market has been white hot, and it's just going to normalize." Check out the Chronicle's full annual home price database. The oil and gas boom sent demand and prices for homes in the Houston area soaring as more people moved here for jobs. But with oil prices depressed for more than a year and oil and gas companies continuing to slash positions, the real estate market is slowing as well. Those in the industry are mixed on whether they think foreclosures will rise, but most do not expect a dramatic change. In January, foreclosure rates in the area continued to decline, data analytics firm CoreLogic reported. Around Houston the foreclosure rate was 0.57 percent, lower than the national rate of 1.15 percent for the month. Residential foreclosures in Harris County began to rise in 2007 and have been steadily declining since the 2010 peak of 13,500, said Amanda LeCureux, general manager of the Foreclosure Information & Listing Service. Last year the number had dropped to 3,280 homes. However, homes posted for foreclosure in April meaning they have begun the foreclosure process, although they ultimately may not be foreclosed on is the highest so far in the first few months of 2016. LeCureux sees the April increase as an indicator that the foreclosure rate is stabilizing after years of decline. In the next six to 12 months, she said, the oil downturn likely will start to press the foreclosure rate higher. "Foreclosures are really a lagging indicator of economic activity," she said. "It will take many, many months before that actually starts to show up on foreclosure reports." The Houston Association of Realtors reports that sales of foreclosed homes peaked in 2008, when they represented 22 percent of total sales. Last year, they accounted for just 4 percent of sales, the lowest rate since 2006. Riles said that in recent years he has seen one or two foreclosures per neighborhood, and that number might reach four or five. He said he doesn't expect numbers to rise into the 25-to-30 range he saw in many neighborhoods during the housing crisis. He expects more of the foreclosures ahead will be in the higher-end market and that many families may downsize to less expensive homes. But he also noted that banks are more likely to offer ways for homeowners who get behind on their mortgage payments to sell their houses for less than they owe to avoid foreclosure. "There are a lot more tools available than there were in 2007, 2008, 2009," he said. Meanwhile, Riles predicted that sales of houses outside the high-end market will remain strong. Those who could afford $450,000 houses before will now be looking at $300,000 houses, for example. Riles said he recently listed a house for $130,000 in Fort Bend County and had four offers by the next afternoon. Oil field areas have been the hardest hit by low crude prices. CoreLogic analyst Molly Boesel found that in Midland and Odessa, the number of households more than 90 days behind on mortgage payments had risen in January from the year prior. But in Houston, the delinquency rate continued to drop. Some are optimistic that the trailing strength of the market will keep people in their homes. CBRE Houston director of research and analysis Robert Kramp said things have to get pretty bad before foreclosure happens. The economy remains strong enough that home-owners in trouble will probably be able to sell their homes before they are foreclosed on. David Jarvis, senior vice president of John Burns Real Estate Consulting, said real estate appreciation in recent years also will help protect against foreclosures. Those who might be at risk, he said, are those who bought houses last year and were recently laid off. Jarvis also expressed optimism the road ahead won't be too bumpy. "I don't think we'll be in this slump long enough for foreclosures to be an issue in this cycle," he said. "In my view, arbiters of style are self-made rather than born," mused Gary Tinterow, director of Museum of Fine Arts. Though the setting for Wednesday's exclusive preview and dinner celebrating "High Society: The Portraits of Franz X. Winterhalter" was a little less formal than the royal court scenes depicted throughout the exhibit, 70 patrons, donors and trustees relished this peek at 19th-century life through the master painter's hallowed eye. Is it fashion's responsibility to ease acceptance of different identities, to foster tolerance and understanding - or to promote a specific aesthetic expression of liberty?This may seem like a ridiculously weighty question for an industry built on the supposedly superficial business of selling clothes, as opposed to political philosophies. But it is at the core of a debate currently roiling France. On the surface, the argument is about the trend - call it that - among a growing number of fashion brands to offer Islamic, or "modest" collections. The spark that seems to have ignited the flames is the introduction of a "burkini," a full-body swimsuit consisting of a long-sleeved tunic with integral hood and matching trousers, by Marks & Spencer. Though it has been available in certain international markets for three years, it went online in February, the latest in a series of such fashion initiatives from a variety of brands, all of which are now under fire. In 2014, DKNY created a Ramadan capsule collection of its more covered-up items (think jumpsuits, ankle-length shirtdresses and skirts) available in the Middle East. That was followed the next year by similar ventures from Tommy Hilfiger and Uniqlo. Last year, H&M featured a model in a head scarf in its "Close the Loop" sustainable-fashion ad campaign, and Net-a-Porter devoted a section on its website to what it called a "Ramadan edit." And in January, Dolce & Gabbana introduced a collection of floral print, lace and polka-dot abayas (loosefitting full-length robes) with matching headscarves sold not only in the Middle East, but also in select Dolce stores in London, Milan, Munich and Paris. Which meant that, along with the M&S bathing suit, such collections were no longer relegated to a specific geographical niche. They had penetrated the Western mainstream. That evolution was largely greeted with applause, with Dolce in particular getting kudos for its work. "Why Dolce & Gabbana's Hijab and Abaya Line Is So Important," read a headline on the New York magazine website The Cut. "DKNY Just Launched a Collection for Ramadan. And It's Beautiful," BuzzFeed cried. But recently, Laurence Rossignol, French minister for women's rights, begged to differ. "What's at stake is social control over women's bodies," she said in an interview with BFMTV, the most popular news network in France. "When brands invest in this Islamic garment market, they are shirking their responsibilities and are promoting women's bodies being locked up." Shortly after her remarks, Pierre Berge, the famously tart-tongued co-founder of Yves Saint Laurent, gave an interview to the radio station Europe 1 in which he excoriated brands that made clothing aimed at the Islamic market. "Creators should have nothing to do with Islamic fashion," he said. "Designers are there to make women more beautiful, to give them their freedom, not to collaborate with this dictatorship which imposes this abominable thing by which we hide women and make them live a hidden life." He then implied that the designers were exploiting a misogynist system that, for financial gain, forces women to hide their bodies. "Renounce the money and have some principles," he said. And then philosopher Elisabeth Badinter, whom the French left wing weekly Marianne once called the country's "most influential intellectual," jumped on the bandwagon, calling in Le Monde for a boycott of brands that sell Islamic fashion. All of this is playing out against a backdrop of increased fear in Europe. Though France has had a long history of discomfort with clothing that demonstrates any religious identity - banning headscarves in public schools for both teachers and students, forbidding public servants from wearing the same, and banning the niqab (a full-face veil showing only the eyes) entirely in public - the garments have remained a lightning rod for the basic argument about what freedom means when applied to fashion in liberal society. On one side are those who say the social contract demands that everyone eschew symbols of their personal belief systems in service of the secular collective; on the other, those who insist that freedom includes the freedom to wear whatever you want (and sell whatever you want). It didn't take long for those in the wear-what-you-want camp to attack the attackers right back. A new hashtag was spawned, #rossignolresignation, and the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (the CCIF) issued a news release stating that it was bringing a class-action lawsuit against Rossignol for her statements. Sarah Dundarawy, a Saudi television presenter living in Dubai, wrote in an email: "I graduated from Boston College in Boston, MA and did my masters at the London School of Economics in London, UK. In general, I dress modestly and when I am in Saudi I wear an Abaya out of respect for my culture and convenience. Does that make me oppressed? Not beautiful? Of course not. As for the special collection of Abayas designed by Dolce & Gabbana, I saw it a nice gesture and an attempt to appeal to a large segment of the fashion market." The history of fashion is, in many ways, about facilitating acceptance; creating a bridge between the unfamiliar or the challenging, be it religious or sexual or gendered or transgressive, and the everyday. It forces confrontation, and by "fashionizing" what was hitherto seen as foreign, absorbs it, co-opts it and - to a certain extent - defangs it. Whether the motivation is moral or economic, in the end, the effect may be the same. And that is what matters. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Runoff from this week's downpour continued to make its way south and east along swollen waterways Wednesday, promising to increase flood dangers in those parts of the county as officials raced to get a handle on the damage and residents in west Harris County warily eyed the rising levels in the Addicks and Barker reservoirs. While brief rains Wednesday did not create any significant additional problems, rainwater from the days before continued to dump into the San Jacinto River, meaning more flooding for areas north and south of Lake Houston. Meanwhile, officials said water was expected to continue poolingabove the Addicks and Barker dams, flooding streets and, likely, some homes there. "The water that's going into the reservoir is going to rise for some time, and it will rise slowly," Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said. "There will be a lot of people who are rightfully concerned as they watch and see the water continuing to rise and come closer to their subdivisions." He said Highway 6, between Clay and Park Row, could be closed for four to six weeks because of water continuing to seep from the rain-soaked north and northwest Harris County. Sunday and Monday's rains dropped 240 billion gallons of water across the county, the most the area had seen in 15 years, flooding Cypress Creek, Greenspoint, Meyerland, Inwood Forest and Acres Homes ares. Emergency crews still were rescuing people in the north part of the county as teams raced to complete a critical assessment that officials said was needed before federal emergency dollars could flow to the area. River's still rising Houston City Councilman Dave Martin expressed particular concern about Kingwood, noting that the San Jacinto River water level already had passed 57 feet - four feet higher than it reached during last year's Memorial Day floods. The Harris County Flood Control District said the river was expected to crest Thursday with continued flooding of streets and some homes, particularly affecting the Highlands, Banana Bend and Rio Villa communities. By Wednesday afternoon, 60 homes in Kingwood had flooded, and Houston Fire Department personnel had rescued 30 people, Martin said. Residents in some areas had been asked to evacuate voluntarily, and buses were available to shuttle them to a civic center in nearby New Caney. "Most of them are choosing to stay, though," Martin said. "They're just going from first floor to second floor, but it's going to rise. I'd rather they get out to safe ground, go to one of these shelters before they can't get out and then we're forced to do more rescues." The councilman said he had spoken with the governor's office to inquire about slowing the rate of release from the waterways that feed into the Lake Houston area. Lake Conroe was releasing 7,000 cubic feet per second, Spring Creek was releasing 29,000, Cypress Creek was releasing 14,000 and Lake Creek was releasing 9,000. "The problem is, we can't send enough water through the Lake Houston dam out into the Gulf at the rate we're taking it on," Martin said. "We just can't get rid of it that fast. I'm trying to figure out how we monitor these levels. It's a mess." Emmett said at a news conference Wednesday that roadways around Addicks Reservoir - including Highway 6 - and some homes could be affected as streams and waterways continue to dump water into the reservoir. Army Corps of Engineers officials said they were not yet ready to release water from the dam so as to not create problems below the dams. Addicks Reservoir is expected to rise three feet and Barker Reservoir two-and-a-half feet in the next week, an Army Corps of Engineers official said. Damage data pending Emmett said the county still was working on a damage assessment that it hoped to submit to state and federal officials. The county would need to reach a threshold of more than $14 million to be eligible for certain federal disaster and emergency funds. High waters so far have impeded the county's efforts to get a full estimate of the damage, which Harris County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management spokesman Francisco Sanchez said could take days as teams move from house to house to tally damage totals. The city's office of emergency management reported that damage assessment teams had completed close to 1,000 assessments, but the city, like the county, could not yet report a total. "We have a lot of ground to cover," said Melvin Hopkins, one of the inspectors who spent time in the Meyerland and Greenspoint areas. "Basically, all four corners of the city." Sanchez said relief came much more quickly in the aftermath of the Memorial Day floods because the city lost a $25 million sewer treatment plant, rocketing the area toward its threshold, and the state was able to bundle several cities' damage over several days together as one disaster. This time, the process is expected to take longer, which could delay funding to some residents for home repairs. As of late Wednesday afternoon, Sanchez said almost 900 buildings had been damaged, with a rough estimate of $8.1 million. Also Wednesday, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said he would appoint a flood czar to coordinate regional agencies' attempts to limit damage from severe storms. "I said very early on in my administration that flooding would be a very high priority. What has happened recently only accentuates the importance of moving on it," he said. "I intend to do that and give that person the sole responsibility of pulling together all the different stakeholders and coming up with a definitive plan on how to address flooding in the city of Houston." School still out for some This week's flooding proves drainage is a regional issue, Turner said, and will take developers, neighborhood leaders, engineers and businesses, as well as city, county and federal officials at the table to address. One emphasis, he said, should be on increasing stormwater detention in the region. Detention ponds store water that otherwise would flow into the bayou system, in hopes that channels do not burst their banks, as they did Monday. Turner also announced he hoped to address residents' confusion about how to help flood victims by setting up a Greater Houston Storm Relief Fund to accept donations. Schools continued to be affected by floods, as some of the area's largest districts, including Cypress-Fairbanks and Katy, plan to remain closed through Friday, keeping nearly 200,000 students out of class for five straight weekdays. Some reprieve came as Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath announced Wednesday that school districts that canceled classes due to flooding will not have to make up two of the days. Those that missed more time can work with the Texas Education Agency on other options, such as adding extra minutes onto days or turning a teacher work day into a regular school day. Reporters Fauzeya Rahman and Ericka Mellon contributed to this story. This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate Texas is home to two of the largest and most violent white supremacist prison gangs in the nation, and gang membership is growing as groups expand their reach into the streets, according to a sweeping report set to be released Monday by the Anti-Defamation League. Nearly 100 white supremacist gangs are now operating in state and federal prisons and beyond across the United States, even as neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan membership has stagnated in recent years, according to the report. The gangs are driven more by shared criminal interests than racist ideology, the report concludes. "Members of these groups engage in a wide variety of criminal activities behind bars, and more frequently inspire hate-related criminal activity outside prison walls - on the streets of American communities, as well," states a letter sent with the report to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch from organization leaders. The Anti-Defamation League, which has long fought anti-Semitism and monitored hate groups, released the report with a series of recommendations to the U.S. Department of Justice aimed at curbing prison gang activity, including a request that federal officials track violent prison gangs and publish periodic reports on the threats they pose. The report, a copy of which was obtained by the Houston Chronicle, includes a first-ever, state-by-state inventory of white supremacist prison gangs, with their names and estimated membership, according to the organization. "White supremacist prison gangs are the fastest-growing segment of the white supremacist movement in the United States," Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow for the Anti-Defamation League, said in a written statement. "Though they are called prison gangs, it really is a misnomer, as many of these groups are just as active on the streets of America as they are behind bars." Pitcavage said the gangs combine the knowledge of organized crime - which occupies much of their business - with white supremacist ideology. "It is sort of a double danger," he said. The Aryan Brotherhood of Texas and the Aryan Circle - two of the largest white supremacist prison gangs in the nation - are among five such prison gangs now operating in Texas. Most violent gangs White supremacist prison gangs have their roots in early prison gangs that formed in the 1950s in California and Washington, including the race-based Mexican Mafia. Today, California leads the nation with 11 white supremacist prison gangs, including the original Aryan Brotherhood, which was believed to be the first such prison gang in the U.S. when it formed in the 1960s. Texas's gangs are among the most violent, however. The Anti-Defamation League has labeled the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas the "most violent extremist group" in the nation, believed responsible for at least 33 murders in Texas in the past 15 years. The group has about 2,000 members in Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. The gang's recent crimes have included the slaying of a longshoreman who was kidnapped from a Baytown parking lot as part of a carjacking and a case in which gang members used a blow torch to melt the gang tattoo off a member who was being thrown out of the group. The Aryan Brotherhood of Texas was the target of a nine-year, Houston-based probe that led to 73 federal convictions, including each of the gang's generals and several other leaders. The Aryan Circle, which is believed to have as many as 1,500 members, has kept a low profile with law enforcement in recent years. The gang, which is unique in that women can join, gained public attention nearly a decade ago when one of its members, Dennis Clem, killed two Louisiana police officers in an ambush style slaying at a motel. Clem, who was also killed at the scene, had been on a killing spree that began days earlier in Houston when he shot and killed two black teens. The Aryan Circle was also implicated in 2013, when federal authorities arrested 13 former state prison guards on corruption charges for taking bribes to smuggle cellular phones, drugs and tobacco to prisoners. That probe began when authorities arrested Aryan Circle members trying to smuggle stolen sport utility vehicles from Corpus Christi to the Texas-Mexico border. Both groups are strong in Houston and Southeast Texas, according to authorities. The two groups developed in the Texas prison system in the mid-1980s along with other gangs that formed nationwide as prisons were going through desegregation. Three other gangs - the much-smaller Dirty White Boys, Solid Wood Soldiers and White Knights of America - are also operating in Texas, according to the report. Texas and California are considered the states with the worst problems with white supremacist prison gangs, though Oklahoma, Indiana, Missouri, Oregon and Tennessee also have significant problems, according to the report. Variety of crimes White supremacist prison gangs can now be found in prisons and on the streets in 42 states, according to the report. A growing demand for methamphetamine - a major source of income for the groups - and access to new recruits through social media have fueled the expansion. Gangs now range from obscure groups such as Crew 1488 in Alaska to offshoots that have taken the Aryan Brotherhood name but may not be connected to the core groups. They are involved in a range of criminal activity, including smuggling of illegal drugs, scams and acts of violence against rival gang members, according to the report. Robert Grant, head of gang intelligence for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said the appeal of gangs to incoming prisoners is based on perceptions about how they might fare best while locked up. "They think this would make a good lifestyle for them, protect them, take care of them like a family," he said. In Texas, members of the two largest gangs are automatically locked away in high-security, one-man cells, known as administrative segregation, for the duration of their sentences, regardless of their crimes. Letting them roam freely among the prison's general population has been deemed too much of a threat to other prisoners. "In the Texas prison system, we have their activity under scrutiny and monitoring and pretty much under control," Grant said. "We don't have the situation in our prison system that you might find in other states or definitely in the free world." Texas also keeps other gang members in segregated custody, including members of the Texas Syndicate, Mexican Mafia, Bloods and Crips. Racial issues are often underlying the decision by inmates to join prison gangs, according to a recent Texas Department of Public Safety assessment. "Many of these gangs officially cite race as a reason for having organized, and some profess racial superiority over others," the DPS notes. "While individual members of these gangs may hold racial bias or prejudice, the gangs themselves often engage in business arrangements with gangs of another race when it is mutually convenient and profitable." Recommendations The Anti-Defamation League is calling on the nation's leaders to take actions to curb the spread of white supremacist prison gangs. In the letter to the U.S. Attorney General, the organization outlines five recommendations that could address the national problem. In addition to tracking the gangs, the organization is asking the Department of Justice and state prison officials to collect statistics on violent crimes committed by known or suspected prison gang members, including homicides and hate crimes. The organization also wants authorities to regularly report on "bias-motivated criminal activity" in prisons and on what they are doing to combat the problems. A law enforcement task force combining the efforts of state and federal officials could limit the impact of criminal activity by the gangs both inside and outside the prisons, the organization says. Finally, the organization calls for increased funding to encourage prison gang members to leave the organizations. "The growth and spread of these white supremacist gangs has become one of the United States' most serious - but least talked about - white supremacist problems," the report states. As many Houstonians spent Wednesday drying out and cleaning up, crisis - not recovery - remained the order of the day in northwest Harris County. Floodwaters, fed by a swollen Cypress Creek and more unwelcome rain, remained stubbornly high in the northern parts of the county, even as water receded elsewhere. Twain Kennedy, 56, moved to the Westador subdivision just three weeks ago. Then, like so many others this week, he watched the region get swamped. "I called my neighbor to see if his house was OK," he said. Instead, he learned, "the water was already halfway up his truck." Along with other plucky residents, Kennedy made his way to the water's edge, just past Nanes and Baltic, and began paddling into the neighborhood. They checked on friends' properties, rescued stranded neighbors, and brought groceries and water to those who didn't want to leave their homes. "This is how I met all my neighbors," Kennedy joked, chatting with several of them before paddling back into the floodwaters with a reporter. Water lapped at the base of many of the stately brick homes that dot the neighborhood, 20 miles north of downtown Houston. In many areas, water rose nearly to the top of cars parked along the street, including one whose unlucky owner had been trying to sell it. The words "4 Sale" could be seen, scrawled in marker across the back and side windows, just above the floodwater. A clear plastic bottle of vodka - drained - bobbed atop the mocha-colored floodwaters, as Harris County sheriff's deputies zipped through the streets in droning airboats. "It looks like Katrina," said Kennedy, who moved to the Houston area from Lafayette, La. several years ago. "There's nowhere for it to go, and we had it in about six hours." Sheriff Ron Hickman said that while deputies have spent sleepless hours in rescue operations, they have not had to deal with any looting. "We haven't had any, and if we do we will vigorously prosecute it," he said. The sheriff's office reported rescuing about 45 people from the subdivision as of Wednesday afternoon. Emergency crews from the sheriff's office, the Precinct 4 Constable's Office, the U.S. National Guard, the FEMA-Task Force 1, the Spring Fire Department and from as far away as Austin worked at different emergency sites in the area. Amanda Westfall watched deputies in airboats trawling the Westador area for residents they might have missed, as she sat on a nearby driveway, trying to soothe her aching legs. "Before all of them showed up, we did it on inflatable kayaks and paddle boats," she said. Three days of wading and paddling through the water had left the skin on her calves peeling and starting to blister. In need of supplies About six miles east, emergency responders also scrambled to help the hundreds of residents at the One Westfield Lake Apartments in Spring. The complex's parking lot had turned into a muddy lake, with water in some places creeping more than six feet high. Over the past few days, many people had gathered to help bring residents groceries after the waters rose.Jacqueline Moreno was among them. Moreno, a teacher at nearby Hirsch Elementary, said she came to the flooded complex after a student's parent called, saying he and his children didn't have any food. "We waded in and found out what they needed," said Moreno, who along with several others had spent the past few days wading or floating through the floodwaters to take groceries and other supplies. Moreno, 34, a U.S. Navy veteran with a no-nonsense attitude, said she and others soon tracked down several of the school's other pupils and their families in the complex. "A lot of students were scared and needed supplies," she said. "Once they saw the food and water, it calmed them down a little." Residents of the complex - which first responders estimated held between 800 and 1,000 people - had at first been loathe to leave their homes. By Wednesday, even as emergency responders ferried people out of their homes, several residents were trying to make their way back home through the floodwaters. Among them was Sofia Hart, who was trying to get back to her French Chihuahua, Tiny. "We've just been having a hard time," Hart said with a tired smile, pondering the muddy expanse. "I'm about to walk back in and get my dog. ... I'm not going to let it starve." The 29-year-old bartender and part-time model arrived home from work Monday about 3 a.m. By the time she woke up several hours later, the parking lot was flooded. She'd made a run for groceries that day. On Tuesday, she whiled away the time playing cards with a friend in the complex. 'If you want to go' Nearby, however, Spring Fire Department District Chief Kevin Wiseman warned residents not to return. Crews at the complex had already rescued more than 80 people and their pets, he said. "I simply don't have the resources," he said. "If you want to go, now is the time." Back at the Westador, Kennedy continued paddling around looking to offer assistance. About 1 p.m., as Kennedy was paddling down Zagar Lane, he spied Victor Mosqueda on his front porch, two bags in hand. "I would have stayed if the flooding hadn't turned off the air conditioning," the 67-year-old military veteran said. After the power died, his generator kicked on, he said. He'd planned to ride out the flooding in his home, but the rising waters swamped the generator, forcing him to endure the sticky heat without air conditioning. "That was it," he said, in an interview back on dry land as he waited for a friend to pick him up. The water had come about a foot into his home. It appeared to crest, and then recede, only to begin rising again. Now, he faces the prospect of replacing his bamboo floor and cabinets. "I already contacted some contractors," Mosqueda said. "I did that the first day. I knew there'd be a backlog." NDJAMENA, Chad - U.S. military officials say that two of the world's most feared terrorist groups - the Islamic State and Boko Haram - have begun to collaborate more closely, raising alarm that they are working together to attack U.S. allies in North and Central Africa. On Wednesday, Brig. Gen. Donald C. Bolduc, the commander of the U.S. military's Special Operations in Africa, cited a weapons convoy believed to be from Islamic State fighters in Libya that was headed for the Lake Chad region, an area devastated by Boko Haram. Jim Bourdier/STF WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Wednesday cleared the way for families of victims of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut and other attacks linked to Iran to collect nearly $2 billion in frozen Iranian funds. The court's 6-2 ruling directly affects more than 1,300 relatives of victims, some who have been seeking compensation for more than 30 years. They include families of the 241 U.S. service members who died in the Beirut bombing. AUSTIN - For the second time in a year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has blocked Texas prison officials from importing a drug intended for executions as a hedge against dwindling supplies that could thwart the use of deadly injections. At issue is about $27,000 in drugs ordered by the state that federal agents seized last year and still hold. Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark said Wednesday the latest "tentative" ruling by the FDA to block Texas' importation of sodium thiopental will be appealed. In a letter received Monday, the FDA notified state officials that it will stick with a decision last year that the drug has not been approved for injection into humans and, because of that, its importation by Texas will not be allowed. The state had appealed the July 2015 seizure of 1,000 vials of the drug destined for the Huntsville prison that houses the state's execution chamber. A shipment to Arizona also was seized. Looking at options Clark said the agency is "exploring its options moving forward regarding the lawful importation of drugs used in the lethal injection process." He would not discuss specifics of the latest decision, but said TDCJ officials are hopeful they can convince the FDA in coming months to approve the importation and release the drugs. FDA officials in Washington declined comment, saying the case remained pending. They previously have said the Texas case is the first challenge of its type involving the licensed importation of an execution drug. State records show taxpayers already paid for the drug shipment. Court filings in other states show both Texas and Arizona, which had ordered 1,000 vials each from a company called Harris Pharma, were required to pay in advance before the drug was shipped. Texas and other states have struggled for years to obtain execution drugs, most of them anesthetics and sedatives, as U.S. manufacturers stopped making them and European suppliers prohibited their export due to opposition to the death penalty. Facing a shortage of sodium thiopental, Texas in 2011 switched to a three-drug cocktail for executions, and a year later went to a single lethal dose of pentobarbital, a fast-acting barbiturate, to carry out the death penalty. Texas has carried out half of the 24 executions in the United States this year and leads the nation with 528 executions since 1982. Scarce supplies As Texas and other states scrambled to find new supplies of the execution drugs, federal courts have ruled imports of thiopental illegal because it has not been approved for importation. In 2011, Kentucky and Tennessee were forced to hand over supplies of the imported drug to the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the agency later seized Georgia's supply. As states switched to alternate drugs, supplies of those have become scarce, as well. Pentobarbital, which Texas, Arizona and other states switched to, is now so scarce that Ohio has put its executions on hold until 2017. Texas officials said the state currently has enough pentobarbital on hand to carry out the eight executions that are scheduled through Oct. 19. "TDCJ cannot speculate on the future availability drugs, so we continue to explore all options, including the continued use of pentobarbital or alternate drugs to use in the lethal injection process," Clark said. "The current execution protocol calls for the use of pentobarbital and there are no immediate plans to change it." At the time of the FDA seizure at Bush Intercontinental Airport last year, TDCJ officials insisted they had imported the drug legally with a license they received from the FDA in January 2015. FDA officials said the drug was seized because it was not approved for its intended use. Sodium thiopental is an older anesthetic generally no longer used in the United States but is widely used in developing countries. As City Council works with Mayor Sylvester Turner on addressing Houston's pension fund issues, they should ignore calls from the Houston business community to adopt 401(k)-type plans. Yes, nearly the entire private sector uses 401(k) plans. Those plans focus on achieving business objectives, like minimizing a company's contribution to employees' retirement funds, and retaining flexibility for corporate buyouts or mass layoffs. Mostly, they shift investment risks from companies to employees. They are a win-lose in the company-employee equation. And just because businesses use them does not make 401(k)s the best policy. Their advocates never discuss private sector employees' poor retirement prospects, or the how those plans have worked in other states. A growing body of evidence indicates disturbing trends. After years of difficulties with markets and investments, private sector workers feel financially unprepared for their golden years. Nationwide, people average only about $91,000 in their IRAs and 401(k)s. This is far short of the amount needed for a comfortable, secure retirement. People are responding by working longer. A recent Insured Retirement Institute survey indicates that 58 percent of people 34 to 53 said they planned to retire at 65 or later, compared with 42 percent who said the same in 2011. And consider the track record of 401(k)s in states that try them. In 1991 West Virginia closed the traditional defined benefit plan of its Teachers' Retirement System to new employees as a response to severe underfunding. The move didn't work: 14 years later the pension's funded level was 25 percent. Those teachers forced to enroll in the 401(k) were unable to retire: only 1 in 10 had more than $100,000. The state reversed course. Similarly, in 2005, Alaska faced a $5.7 billion unfunded liability for its public employees' and teachers' defined benefit plans. It pushed all new employees into 401(k)s. The legislators, however, continued to find spending "priorities" other than its defined benefit plans. Today, the systems' total unfunded liability of $6.7 billion is worse than it was. We understand the business community's advocacy of 401(k)s for the public and private sectors. From a competitive perspective for workforce talent, they would prefer all prospective new hires to have only one option for retirement benefits. Diverse, competing retirement plan structures work better for the economy. Before the oil boom went bust, cities around Texas could not find replacements for police and firefighters who wanted to retire. Thankfully, they were able to retain older workers because of their defined benefit plans. They saved money by not having to compete with the $100,000& salaries being paid to new-hire oil field workers. After the bust, the cities now have abundant new recruits at much lower municipal salary levels. Or take the example of rapidly growing North Texas cities. A young person interested in public sector work might start at a low-paying small city, absorb specialized training, and then move to a larger city for only a slight bump in salary, but better pension plans. They - with their training - remain in the public sector. Every government organization with unfunded liabilities for their defined benefit plans probably has a history of underfunding by their sponsor. It doesn't have to be that way. After years of shortchanging its teachers' and employees' defined benefit systems, the Texas Legislature made significant contributions to make them more healthy in the previous two sessions. The fire and police pension fund in San Antonio is an example where a 30-year commitment to level funding has helped the city maintain its AAA bond rating. And that pension fund only has $220 million in unfunded liabilities. Healthy defined benefit retirement plans can be achieved. Mayor Turner is on the right track in looking across the entire city budget for places where spending might be adjusted to support Houston's pension funds. Public and private sector retirement plan policies should do their best to generate a secure retirement for all employees. Otherwise they risk growing public welfare rolls with those who do not have adequate financial resources when they end their work careers. Patterson is executive director of the Texas Association of Public Employee Retirement Systems. As an existing print subscriber it is easy to get FREE access to all our online content. When you click get started below it will walk you through creating an online account to attach your print subscription number to. After your account is created it will ask you to either add a subscription for online access or click on the print subscriber button. Click the print subscriber button header and it will open a dropdown, now click on get started. 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Tags : talent workforce success Talent has always been an important driver for success, dating all the way back to the planets earliest hunters and gatherers the tribes with the best hunters survived. Today, the companies that generate the best ideas and have the highest level of productivity get ahead in the marketplace. One could even argue that the workforce is the prime determinant of business success. But building the best workforce doesnt mean just packing offices with smart people from 9:00-5:00 p.m. The most successful companies find ways to create a top-notch blend of full-time employees and external workers including temps, contractors and other project-based workers drawing on the strengths of each to balance the organizations needs. The external worker plays a big role in todays workplace and will play a bigger role in tomorrows. Right now, over a third of the total workforce is considered contingent, contract or independent, and Ardent Partners predicts that this pool will make up nearly half of the workforce in the next few years. These non-traditional workers offer top-tier, specialized skill sets and are capable of driving mission-critical projects that directly impact an organizations bottom line. The contingent workforce is made up of individuals with niche expertise across all industry verticals whether it be in the ER, the science lab, at a law firm or a public relations agency. I... If hiring is hard, that makes international hiring next to impossible? It doesnt have to be. Join Beyond, the Career Network, for a world tour of the trends and best practices that will put your company on the path to global hiring domination. Who is Beyond? Were the Career Network that helps growing companies turn focused professionals into killer new hires. We also happen to be the exclusive international partner for The Network, a global alliance of top job boards in over 130 countries. Its a role that puts Beyond in the uniquely awesome position to see international hiring first-hand, from the job boards that serve international candidates every day and use their insight and expertise to help US companies hire locally around the globe. Heres an example workers in the UK could be required to give anywhere from 1 to 12 weeks notice when leaving their current position. For the average person, thats an interesting fact. But a US company hiring in the UK, its a critical piece of information that can impact your time to fill a position. In the one-hour webinar, Global Consolidation: Is It Right for Your Company? Beyonds team of international recruitment experts will take a look at key considerations when hiring internationally and share how a consolidated strategy can simplify your global recruitment and save your organization some serious recruitment dollars. Well explore how to: Identify budgets and hiring plans per country Manage language barriers, currency and conversion issues, and other regulatory roadblocks Research local markets to maximize ROI Understand individual employment landscapes in various countries Manage and monitor the ROI of executing a global recruitment strategy Streamline the migration from a local to a global recruitment strategy By registering for this webcast you will receive email communications and notifications from the sponsor(s). Todd Korol / Reuters The Suncor tar sands tailings pond at their tar sands operation north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, November 3, 2011. A tailings pond holds all the toxic waste from oil sands extraction process. REUTERS/Todd Korol (CANADA - Tags: BUSINESS ENERGY) First it was two years. Now it'll be at least three before Canada recovers from the shock of low oil prices. So says Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz. He told a Senate banking committee on Wednesday that it could take until 2019 before the country adjusts to a massive drop in oil prices over the past two years. Advertisement "We estimate that it's sort of a three-year period while the negatives are still ongoing in the background and the positives are emerging in the foreground," he said, as quoted by Reuters. "It could be longer than three years before we're settled at that new place where the energy sector will have shrunk relatively to the whole economy and the rest of the economy will have grown to fill that space." Poloz's comments come just under a month after Bank of Canada deputy governor Lynn Patterson said it would take about two years before Canada's economy adjusted to oil prices. Advertisement In a speech to the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce, she said that when Canada finally recovers, the economy could look a lot like it did before oil reached $100 per barrel. Energy, she said, will more likely account for 40 per cent of exports, rather than the 50 per cent it did in 2014. But recent predictions for oil don't paint a promising picture for the future of development in Alberta's oilsands. A report by Cambridge Econometrics said that prices will likely only climb back up to $87 per barrel if countries start dealing with global warming, as many are expected to under the Paris Agreement. Advertisement New oilsands projects require oil prices of as much as $80 in order to break even. Also on HuffPost: OTTAWA Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is fixing the rules to ensure only a new electoral system that benefits the Liberal party will be chosen, opposition MPs say. On Tuesday, Trudeau suggested he will not hold a referendum on changing the voting method because he believes Canadians would likely choose the status quo. Many of the people...who propose that absolutely we need a referendum, well, they know that the fact is that referendum are a pretty good way of not getting any electoral reform, he told students at University of Ottawa. Advertisement Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks at an event at a university in Ottawa, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. (Photo: Adrian Wyld/CP) The prime minister said his party had put forward a very clear platform pledging that the Oct. 19 election would be the last under the current first-past-the-post system and Canadians responded positively and massively to it and to other parties who wanted change. So I think we can see that there is a fairly clear desire out there to improve our electoral system. Advertisement The current system worked pretty good for me this time, Trudeau told the students, and it could be tempting to claim it is too complicated to change it now, but, he told them it remains a priority to me. Quite frankly, political parties shouldnt be able to appeal to narrow constituencies and suddenly wield enough power to run the entire country, he said. Canadians should have an electoral system that values their voices, that creates good governments, that ensures people feel involved in the political process, and that they dont have to make impossible choices between options they dont like, he said. The Conservatives say the Liberals have a mandate to propose change but not one to dictate it. They fear the Grits will propose a system that naturally gives them the biggest partisan advantage, democratic institutions critic Scott Reid said. Advertisement This is a blatantly, nakedly opportunistic attempt to change the rules in a way that will help them to win election 2019 or do better at it by systematically disenfranchising certain Canadians, he told The Huffington Post Canada. The Canadian people must get the last word on this, he added. Conservative MP Scott Reid rises in the House of Commons Thursday February 18, 2016 in Ottawa. (Photo: Adrian Wyld/CP) A government which says that first-past-the-post produces artificial mandates can hardly argue that 39 per cent in an election is a mandate for electoral reform. The Liberals won 39.5 per cent of the popular vote last fall. For the past several months, the Conservatives have argued Trudeau should put any new electoral system to Canadians in a referendum. Advertisement In 2005, a majority of British Columbians, 57.7 per cent, voted in favour of adopting a new system suggested by the B.C. Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform. But the measure failed because the referendum required 60 per cent approval. "A government which says that first-past-the-post produces artificial mandates can hardly argue that 39 per cent in an election is a mandate for electoral reform." Scott Reid Nathan Cullen, the NDPs democratic reform critic, told HuffPost he believes Trudeau is showing a worrying lack of faith in Canadians by refusing to put a proposed new voting system to the public. But, Cullen said, his personal opinion is the government should adopt a new system and then take it out for a test drive. Give the new selection process at least two election cycles, and then ask Canadians in a referendum whether they like the new method or would prefer going back to first-past-the-post. Advertisement That way people would be voting with a clear knowledge of what it means, he said. At the moment, though, Cullen said he is primarily concerned that the Liberals are stacking the deck in their favour and inexplicably delaying the process. During the campaign, the Liberals pledged to make every vote count. They promised to convene an all-party parliamentary committee to review various reform options, such as ranked ballots, proportional representation, mandatory voting and online voting, and to table legislation within 18 months of forming government. Nathan Cullen speaks to reporters in the foyer of the House of Commons. (Photo: Sean Kilpatrick/CP) More than five months into their mandate, the clock is ticking, and no committee has been formed. The Liberals rejected Cullens proposal that they give up their majority on the committee and that seats be allocated in proportion to each partys share of the popular vote in the last election. The Liberals could simply pass anything that they want, Cullen told Huffpost. And the idea that the Prime Ministers Office would remain utterly neutral, after the prime minister has made his intentions known, is naive and, perhaps, even cynical. Advertisement Trudeau has already made it clear he prefers a preferential ballot. He told the Ottawa U students that while the Liberals are open to all sorts of different options, his own preference is that parties should be rewarded for reaching out to broad communities and finding common ground with people of different ideologies and perspectives, rather than highlighting differences and distinctions between them. This is the kind of conversation we should be having about the kind of voting future we want, he said. It shouldnt be Oh this model is best because it will help this party, or that model is best because it will help that party. Who knows what a changed model will actually have in terms of help or none help? "The idea that the Prime Ministers Office would remain utterly neutral, after the prime minister has made his intentions known, is naive and, perhaps, even cynical." Nathan Cullen Many experts believe a preferential ballot, or as it is also known, a ranked ballot, would benefit the Liberals as they tend to be the second choice of other parties supporters. An analysis by CBCs Eric Grenier suggest the Liberals would have won 224 seats under a preferential ballot, but only 134 seats under a proportional system. They won 184 seats. Trudeau, however, dismisses the criticism. Canadians are pretty smart, and when they want a better government , theyll vote for a better government. When they want to change the government, theyll make whatever system they have in front of them work, he suggested Tuesday. A good political party that has the right kind of platform or program for Canadians should be able to make any system work. Advertisement PR not too radical, Cullen says While the Conservatives are, for now, advocating for no particular voting system, the NDP is a staunch supporter of proportional representation, also known as PR, and campaigned on a promise to bring in some form of mixed-member proportional representation to make every vote truly count. The Green Party also called for a new proportional voting system. But the Liberals have not included any mention of proportionality or fairness in any of their discussions surrounding the new voting system, Cullen noted. But the Liberals have not included any mention of proportionality or fairness in any of their discussions surrounding the new voting system, Cullen noted. One of the hallmarks of voting around the world is that there is an element of proportionality, some connection between the votes cast and the result, he told HuffPost. I dont think thats too radical a notion. Last week, Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef announced, without public consultations, eight principles that will guide the selection of the new electoral system: Advertisement Canadians must perceive the outcomes as legitimate and feel their intentions are translated fairly into the results; Canadians must feel that they can influence politics and voting makes a difference; The voting system must encourage inclusive politics, meaning it must contribute to increasing civility in politics, restoring public trust in government, and strengthening representation by ensuring greater diversity in both the House of Commons and the political process more broadly. The voting system should not be overly complex or onerous; The voting system should be more user-friendly and accessible. The voting system should take into consideration the relationship and accountability between citizens and their local MPs. The new system must be objective and verifiable and protect election results from cyber or physical tampering and ensures that the secrecy of their votes is protected. The new system must inspires Canadians to find common ground, pursues consensus and encourage governments to cast a broad tent that seeks to include all Canadians regardless of their partisan disposition. All eight principles would support the choice of a preferential or ranked ballot. They would less likely apply to various proportional systems, which are complicated, might be seen to create division and could weaken constituents connection with their local MP. Also on HuffPost: Ikea is reissuing a safety alert after a third child died from a Malm dresser that toppled onto him. Theodore Ted McGee, a 22-month-old boy from Minnesota, died in February when the chest of drawers fell over and crushed him in his bedroom. At the time of the incident, his parents thought he was napping. Advertisement Safety regulators open investigation after a third child dies from an Ikea dresser tip-over. https://t.co/gKTMyWFzegpic.twitter.com/6GbbZ3txkn Tricia L. Nadolny (@TriciaNadolny) April 17, 2016 They didn't hear the dresser fall, the familys attorney, Alan Feldman, told The Philadelphia Inquirer. They didn't hear Ted scream. This is the third tragic death to occur in the past two years as a result of an Ikea Malm dresser not being properly anchored to the wall. Similar incidents occurred in 2014. Following McGees death, Ikea released a statement to Today.com: At IKEA, we believe children are the most important people in the world and the safety of our products is our highest priority. Upon being informed of this incident, IKEA immediately reported it to the authorities and an investigation is taking place. IKEA has been advised that the product was not attached to the wall, which is an integral part of the products' assembly instructions. Advertisement In 2015, Ikea issued its first safety warning regarding Malm dressers. On U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commissions website, the company advised not to use Malm dressers unless they were properly secured to the wall. They also announced a free repair program that would send out anchoring kits for about 27 million chests and drawers. The first warning was issued in response to the two child deaths that occurred in 2014. In February of that year, a two-year-old Pennsylvania boy died after a six-drawer chest toppled over him. A few months later in June, a three-drawer chest fell onto a 23-month-old boy from Washington and killed him. According to CPSC, the drawers were not secured to the wall in both cases. Despite these three deaths, an Ikea spokesperson told Metro UK that the company has no plans to recall the dressers. Instead, they are reiterating the importance of assembling and installing their furniture correctly. Advertisement Ikea has, for many years, provided tip-over restraints with all chests of drawers over a certain height, the spokesperson said. Warnings about the importance of using the tip-over restraints provided are included in the assembly instructions and accompanied by step by step instructions for their use. Ikea is now promoting their Secure It! campaign to create awareness that Ikea chests of drawers are safe to use when assembled according to the assembly instruction and attached to the wall. The company is also continuing to offer free anchoring kits to anyone who needs them. Customers can register for their free kit here. Also on HuffPost Ride service Uber is threatening to leave Toronto if the city passes new transportation regulations early next month, a move it says will leave 15,000 full-time and part-time drivers out of work. The company sent a letter to its Toronto users this week, making it clear it plans to shut down in the city if council passes proposed new transportation regulations. Advertisement Last week, the Licensing and Standards Committee voted to force Uber out of Toronto, the letter begins. If City Council votes the same way on May 3, Toronto will lose ridesharing (uberX) and the benefits that come with it. Ubers threats are often not idle. It suspended operations in Edmonton earlier this year, after the province failed to come through in time with promised insurance for ride services. The company decided not to return to Calgary earlier this year after the city passed new regulations meant to legalize the service, but which Uber said made it impossible to do business. Advertisement What looked initially like an attempt by Toronto to legalize Uber turned into the opposite last week. City staff had recommended dozens of changes to city bylaws that would normalize Ubers legal status, but the licensing and standards committee seen to be friendly to the taxi industry gutted those rules last week, effectively leaving Uber and other ride-sharing services outside the law. The taxi industry had objected to the new rules, as did Uber, even before the Uber-friendly parts were removed. Uber objected to rules such as a proposed ban on cars older than seven years, and to a one-time $20,000 licensing fee. Advertisement The taxi industry argued the new rules favoured Uber. For instance, taxis would have to be inspected twice a year at city garages, while Uber cars would only have to be inspected once. Taxi drivers say their earnings have been seriously reduced by Uber's presence. Some cab drivers say they have lost half their income since Uber set up shop in Toronto. At last count, more than 68,000 people had signed Ubers petition urging Torontos City Council not to go forward with the new regulations. Uber says it employs 15,000 driver-partners in the city, and its presence has given the accessibility community a new affordable and reliable transportation option. The company says other services it has launched in the city such as UberEATS, which delivers restaurant meals will also shut down if city council votes in favour of the new rules. Advertisement Mikhail Mishchenko via Getty Images Travel suitcase with flag of canada isolated on white On Tuesday April 19, 2016, I was a witness on behalf of the Mosaic Institute to the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration hearings regarding Bill C-6 "Bill C-6: An Act to Amend the Citizenship Act." This is an edited version of my remarks. Today I hope to desensationalize some of the ideas about those seeking Canadian citizenship and what it means to be Canadian. Advertisement I have a visceral understanding of the refugee and immigration experience, simply because I was brought up in its shadow. I understand in the heart of my hearts the value and power of Canadian citizenship. Both my parents left their ancestral homes not because they wanted to, but as a result of antisemitism and persecution. My parents' immigration experience and the work I am involved with today at the Mosaic Institute have informed my life and I have learned much that may be helpful to this committee. Firstly, people love being Canadian. Whether they arrived yesterday or have been here for generations, there is something about this country that inspires. Our work has proven that our diversity is one of the reasons people quickly ascribe to and adopt Canadian ways of life. In 2014, we received a grant from Public Safety Canada to conduct a study titled The Perception and Reality of Imported Conflict in Canada. This research was conducted as part of Public Safety Canada's efforts to "shed light on terrorism and how best to address it in Canada." Advertisement When citizenship is achieved, it is treasured and harnessed. I say harnessed because it becomes a vehicle by which people's lives are improved. So, we asked the question: to what extent, if any, do Canadians with connection to countries in conflict import that conflict to Canada? After surveying 5,000 Canadians across the country and speaking to over 220 Canadians connected to countries in conflict, we determined that, for the most part, Canadians do not import their conflict here. In fact, one-fifth of the people we surveyed told us that they were no longer as one-sided about "their" conflict -- that being in Canada had helped them to be empathetic and recognize larger factors driving these conflicts. One of the reasons given for this attitudinal shift is that people were able to connect with others who have experienced conflict. Essentially, they realized that they are not alone. The shared element of being Canadian gives people a common ground, and a foundation upon which to build their lives. Advertisement We have also found that, when citizenship is achieved, it is treasured and harnessed. I say harnessed because it becomes a vehicle by which people's lives are improved. Work is rewarded. People are safe. Access to education and other social services is available. Comparatively, Canadians are fortunate, and new Canadians recognize this fact. Ninety-four per cent of people we surveyed feel attached to Canada, with 78 per cent considering themselves first and foremost Canadian. That is almost eight in 10 of those surveyed. Truthfully, unless you are a member of our indigenous peoples, we are all immigrants, regardless if you gained your citizenship yesterday or 16 generations ago. In fact, more new Canadians supported this statement than second-generation Canadians. This is resounding evidence that the majority of those seeking Canadian citizenship do become personally connected to this country, and in doing so decide to contribute richly to Canada. There are some who will dismiss my statements because of recent tragic events in Canada. To them, the fact that a person perpetrated such acts in a manner connected to other acts around the world must mean that the person came to Canada with the intention of harming this country. To those with this view, I would respectfully disagree. However, our research indicates that, while people do not import their conflicts, they do import their trauma. Advertisement When this trauma is left unchecked it can lead to social isolation and a disassociation from Canada, particularly when it is exacerbated by other barriers such as discrimination and economic exclusion. But when Canadians are able to fully participate in society, not only do their lives improve, they also help improve Canadian society as a whole. Truthfully, unless you are a member of our indigenous peoples, we are all immigrants, regardless if you gained your citizenship yesterday or 16 generations ago. Historically, immigrants and refugees who adopted Canada as their country of choice contributed to the development of Canada's social, economic and civil fabric. Today we stand on their shoulders. My experience over the three decades of work in the plurality that is Canada confirms to me that Canadian citizenship is earned, valued and that our diversity is indeed a source of great strength. Follow HuffPost Canada Blogs on Facebook MORE ON HUFFPOST: I arrived as an Egyptian student to Canada with the conviction that Canada was a land of dignity, opportunity, and beauty. Since then, I have always known Canada to be a land of opportunities for my own growth and for me to give towards its betterment. Now, 44 years after my arrival, my wife Howaida and I have watched our family grow to become three generations of Canadians. Howaida and I have always fostered the value of giving amongst our nine children -- a pharmacist, two engineers, two teachers, a financial analyst, a culinary specialist and two university students -- and 12 grandchildren. In 2013, Minister Reza Moridi presented me with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in recognition of my contributions and achievements as a Canadian. To me, this is not a solitary achievement, but rather the culmination of years of service that our family has collectively been dedicated towards. Today, however, I come as a humble Canadian father, imploring our Canadian Prime Minister for his help. Advertisement Howaida and I have been blessed. We are proud of each of our children, including my beloved daughter, Sarah Attia. I have observed Sarah grow to become a strong woman making positive difference wherever she is and excel in every endeavor she undertakes. This is what led her to studying engineering in the University of Toronto, where she would meet her future husband Khaled Al-Qazzaz, an equally determined soul. Both were community activists on campus that left their mark on the communities around them. After marriage, they put their engineering careers on hold to go overseas and impact change. Sarah and Khaled established an education project to develop young Egyptian minds to reach high levels of academic achievement while acquiring the skills and values to become responsible members of Egyptian society. The revolution in Egypt represented everything Sarah and Khaled taught their students about democracy, rights and freedoms. This hope steered Sarah and Khaled once more in a new direction, as Khaled was asked to work in the president's office to oversee the human rights and women's rights situation in Egypt. To our dismay, a year later, my son-in-law Khaled was illegally detained for 558 days without charge. International outcry forced his release, but our family's nightmare continues. Khaled, Sarah and their four children have been held unjustly in Egypt unable to leave the country for over 13 months. Advertisement I continue to be a strong believer of that vision for our country, and I want Canadians to know that my family continues to be dedicated to bettering our communities as conscientious Canadians. It took our country's leaders, and the help of the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, to lead to Khaled's release from prison in January 2015 after 558 days of solitary confinement without charge. It has taken years of campaigning by members of my own family, their friends and many Canadian supporters, to bring international attention to Khaled's plight. Now, after all this effort, tears and sleepless nights, the Egyptian regime continues to block my Canadian family from coming home. Image of of Sarah Attia and her children reunited with Khaled Al-Qazzaz in February 2015. Egypt has blocked them from returning to Canada as a family since In David Miller's book Witness to a City, the former Toronto Mayor highlights my work amongst 18 other Canadians, in shaping the city's growth as leaders in multiculturalism and community service. I continue to be a strong believer of that vision for our country, and I want Canadians to know that my family continues to be dedicated to bettering our communities as conscientious Canadians. I am asking the Honourable Prime Minister Trudeau, and the Canadian public, to reunite us with Sarah and Khaled and their children once more. They've served this country with me for years and are in need of Canadians to stand up for them now. Advertisement I ask our new government to petition the Egyptians so my four grandchildren can return to Canada with their father. It's time for Canada to reclaim its position as an international champion of human rights. What better place to start than to stand up for one of its own? Help end this ordeal. A recent press conference in Ottawa held by the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group (ICLMG), Amnesty International and Children's Rights Expert and Assistant Professor Tara Collins of Ryerson University on Parliament Hill to call on the Honourable Prime Minister to intervene on behalf of four Canadian children A recent opinion piece published on the Huffington Post Seals and Sea Lions Pay the Price for B.C. Salmon Farming was very critical of salmon farmers and their practices. The author uses an incident from this past December 2015 to highlight his arguments. The incident at Cermaq Canada's Binns Island Salmon farm in Clayoquot Sound was publicly reported on December 22nd, less than a week after it occurred. 15 California Sea Lions were killed after the large, aggressive animals broke through control barriers, entered the salmon farm and threatened the safety of farmers. While Fisheries and Oceans Canada has defined it as "appropriate action," salmon farmers share the sentiments of many in saying that it's not OK. Advertisement At the time of the incident, Cermaq immediately launched an investigation, as did Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Many improvements have been made in recent years to passively keep seals and sea lions out of farms but, as this recent event has shown, more steps need to be put in place to ensure incidents like this do not happen in the future. Since this was the single largest incident on a farm in B.C. in almost five years - one incident is one too many - Cermaq is making it a priority to find better ways they can safeguard their farms. Investments are being made in farm employee training, site setup procedures, and in infrastructure in order to keep animals away. In addition, salmon farmers are also seeking to understand more about how climate change is affecting the food supply, behaviour and range of marine mammals on the Pacific coast. It is a challenge, but one that will be solved through innovation, ingenuity and a commitment to operating in an environment shared with an amazing abundance of wild animals. The population of California sea lions has been on a steady climb since the end of commercial hunting in the 1970's, and are now estimated to number around 240,000. Climate change is adding to the challenge and has played havoc with the sea lions' natural food supply, resulting in the death and stranding of thousands of sea lions and pups along the entire Pacific Coast. Conservation scientists agree that the species has reached "carrying capacity" - it is at the point where the environment can no longer sustain any more growth in the California sea lion population on the Pacific coast. Advertisement Harbour Seal populations are on the rise as well, and now number over 100,000 and there have been suggestions that the rise in their population may be leading to a drop in juvenile salmon stocks in the Strait of Georgia. It is part of the culture of each salmon farming company to have minimal environmental impacts, including on marine mammals. For example, Cermaq Canada has an annual target of zero marine mammal deaths. This is built in to the company's Environmental Management System, which is certified to ISO 14001 standards. The company also works to abide by the standards set by the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC certification standard) and the Global Aquaculture Alliance (Best Aquaculture Practices certification standard), which are very strict in specifying how to interact with marine mammals. Chris Wattie / Reuters Canada's Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan speaks during a news conference in Ottawa, Canada, April 6, 2016. REUTERS/Chris Wattie A little over a decade ago, Canada -- under Paul Martin's Liberals -- rejected taking part in the United States Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system along its U.S. counterpart. The Canadian government is currently reviewing its defence policy, including the possibility to reconsider its position on their participation to the U.S. BMD system. The review is expected to be released early next year. Advertisement Canada could provide interceptor and radar sites for the Boeing Ground-based Midcourse Defense system. The United States has two interceptor sites: Fort Greely, Alaska and Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. The Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence wrote a report in 2014 stating that: "The committee is unanimous in recommending that the Government of Canada enter into an agreement with the United States to participate as a partner in ballistic missile defence." If we endorse a defence system in Europe, we should do the same to defend our country. According to the report, North Korea and Iran are the two countries that could potentially target North America with Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM). However, North Korea remains the main threat, hence why both U.S. interceptor sites are based on the West Coast. NATO is slowly implementing a BMD system in Europe under the European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA). As a matter of fact, two interceptor sites -- using Aegis-Ashore system -- are anticipated in Europe. As stated in the Senate Committee report, "Canada has endorsed the idea of protecting Europe from ballistic missile attack by rogue states. Yet it fails to apply this same logic in respect of its own security." Advertisement Although I believe the threat is minimal, I believe Canada should participate in the BMD system in North America. If we endorse a defence system in Europe, we should do the same to defend our country. That said, there is always a price tag attached to new projects. So before taking a decision, Canadians should know how much it will cost. Canada bought the Iron Dome technology from Israel last year and it will be produced by Rheinmetall Canada. The Iron Dome is a mobile all-weather air defence system capable of intercepting and destroy short-range rockets and artillery shells fired from a distance between four and 70 km. The Iron Dome will most likely be deployed in Northern Canada and could possibly be deployed abroad to protect Canadian bases. That said, even with a very high success rate, the interception range is too short to protect against ICBMs. The Iron Dome is a great piece of equipment and Canada made a good move acquiring it, but it cannot replace the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system. That said, the system will be perfect to defend deployed Canadian soldiers against incoming rockets. Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan said the Liberals want Canada and North America well-defended from a variety of threats. He also invited Canadians to discuss the defence review in which the BMD system is included. "'We want to make sure that the defense review is open and wide,' he said. 'By not opening up the discussion on ballistic missile defense, allowing Canadians to have a say in this, it would not be an open defense review.'" Canada could deploy the Raytheon Upgraded Early Warning Radar (UEWR) in places like CFS Alert and CFB Goose Bay. If we do so, I would also support a Ground-based Midcourse Defense system on the East Coast, enabling NORAD to intercept incoming missiles. If we don't participate and multiple ICBMs are launched toward North America, the United States would definitely destroy the incoming ballistic missiles but would prioritize its own territory. It might sound like fearmongering, but with rogue states like North Korea there is no way to be safe. The Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system have had mixed success, however. Nine of the 17 (53 per cent) hit-to-kill intercept has been successful. So if Canada was to participate in the BMD system, I would strongly advise waiting until the success rate is higher before deploying the defence system, especially since it will most likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Boeing is actively working on its Ground-based Midcourse Defense system and conducted a successful CTV-02+ exercise last January. "Under rigorous ground and flight testing, the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system has demonstrated impressive capabilities, including the ability to shoot down an incoming ballistic missile. Recent program accomplishments include a successful CTV-02+ exercise held in January 2016. More than an intercept, ground and flight tests collect data on all parts of the system, ensuring the best missile defence for the U.S. homeland. The Ground-based Midcourse Defense system has successfully intercepted nine targets to date," said Terence Williams, GMD Communications. As I said, I am in favour of a BMD system but the success rate needs to be higher. I would be clearly against it if we spend hundreds of millions of dollars for a system that has been successful only 53 per cent of the time. The money injected in this program will most likely comes from the defence budget and with the delayed military spending, I highly doubt the Liberals would increase the defence budget over a BMD system. Before investing in a BMD system, Canada should make sure its Armed Forces is in a better state, however. The North Korean ICBM threat is still out there but I believe that our Canadian Forces soldiers, airmen and sailors need modern equipment first. Follow HuffPost Canada Blogs on Facebook ALSO ON HUFFPOST: GEOFF ROBINS via Getty Images A Canadian flag flies in front of the peace tower on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada on December 4, 2015, as part of the ceremonies to the start Canada's 42nd parliament . AFP PHOTO/GEOFF ROBINS / AFP / GEOFF ROBINS (Photo credit should read GEOFF ROBINS/AFP/Getty Images) It is now almost a pattern: every time we, as a human right organization or activist, write to government agencies inquiring about cases of Canadians detained abroad or of Canadians subject to abuse or possible discrimination, the governmental response will certainly contain somehow the issue of "privacy." "Privacy concerns" have been used as a powerful pretext for inaction or silence and this should be challenged and denounced. Advertisement This behaviour is in total contradiction with what is written by the Privacy Act. Similarly, another argument often evoked by the government for not providing us with answers is the "national security" argument. As scary and intimidating this argument sounds, murky and hollow it turns out to be. Indeed, we can never know for sure, if the concern of "national security" is real or simply a good pretext that would benefit the political interest of the government rather than the public interest. Unfortunately, this apparent obsession with privacy seems to be very selective. In fact, we noticed that when individual cases would benefit out of disclosing information about them to activists and groups, the government is adamant about privacy. On the other side, when information about citizens are being threatened or shared with government agencies without their knowledge or consent, the government doesn't seem to be much caring or to say the least outraged. This behaviour is in total contradiction with what is written by the Privacy Act. Indeed, section 8(m) of the Privacy Act allows for the release of information in some situations: "Section 8(2) Subject to any other Act of Parliament, personal information under the control of a government institution may be disclosed: (m) for any purpose where, in the opinion of the head of the institution, (i) the public interest in disclosure clearly outweighs any invasion of privacy that could result from the disclosure, or (ii) disclosure would clearly benefit the individual to whom the information relates." But those provisions seem to be falling on the government deaf ears. Meanwhile it was recently reported that the federal government departments breached the privacy of more than 45,000 Canadians in 2015 and only limited numbers of those breaches were ever reported to Daniel Therrien, Canada's Privacy Commissioner (OPC). These double standards regarding privacy issues are also very well illustrated by the troubling examples of the cases of the kids who are found in the "No-Fly" list. For instance, it is worth noting that the Canada Revenue Agency, one of the agencies with most reported breaches (3,868) affecting 13,665 individuals, is one of the agencies that reported the least number of breaches to OPC. It isn't clear if this huge number of breaches is a direct consequence of the implementation of the controversial information-sharing powers including in the Anti terrorism Act 2015 (Bill C-51). However, we recently learned from media report that at least four agencies: Citizenship and Immigration Canada, the Canada Border Services Agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and a fourth agency whose name has been redacted, have used the information-sharing provisions. It should be reminded that C-51 expends the list of agencies benefiting from the "generous" sharing of information to 17 agencies. These double standards regarding privacy issues are also very well illustrated by the troubling examples of the cases of the kids who are found in the "No-Fly" list. The government, despite all their recent promises in the media that they will deal with the matter, never told us how the names of these Canadians children came to be on that list. Is it possible that their names were racially profiled and thus shared with the U.S. "No-Fly" list? Is Transport Canada sharing these names with Air Canada or other airline carriers? If this is the case, how come that no safeguards have been taken into account? Advertisement Many crucial questions that should be taken seriously. It is time for the government to stop this schizophrenic attitude toward "privacy" and come out clean about it. Follow HuffPost Canada Blogs on Facebook ALSO ON HUFFPOST: Universal Pictures By Nina Haikara In Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker must trust himself to The Force. He is told by Master Yoda: "Do or do not. There is no try." There is truth in these words for Noah Lockwood, PhD candidate in the department of computer science at the University of Toronto and a research and development engineer at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), one of the world's leading visual effects companies. Advertisement "In R&D, some of the work is like academic research -- trying and potentially failing," he says. "However, one of the cores of the ILM spirit is that we always get the work done and finished on time. It's something that's really cool about this place, that's also a little Jedi-like." Lockwood is part of a R&D team that develops computer-generated imagery (CGI) tools used in films such as Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens and Jurassic World. "Working at Industrial Light & Magic was a lifelong dream of mine," says Lockwood, who completed two internships at ILM before joining the company. "What's really fun about ILM is that everyone is excited about every film we work on and almost everyone is a Star Wars fan." Lockwood spoke with U of T writer Nina Haikara about his interest in computer graphics and the magic behind movies. Advertisement Why did you choose to study computer graphics? I was interested in computer graphics as someone who played video games and really enjoyed visual effects in film and television. I knew that computer graphics lay at the end of an undergraduate computer science program, after a lot of foundational work in computer science and math. When I was able to take the fourth-year graphics course, it was very inspiring -- to finish a week's worth of lectures and realize how it was done in a movie, or video game. What is your thesis research about? My PhD research is on animation algorithms and changing how an animated character moves. If I have an animation of someone walking forward, I might want them to walk along a particular path instead. To create that new animation the normal way, I have to animate it by hand, bending every virtual joint, or I have to put someone in a motion capture suit. But wouldn't it be nice if I could take pre-existing motion data and edit it with a few clicks? I created an algorithm to do that, and then we've used it with different input technology including a touch sensitive tabletop -- to walk with our fingers -- to tell the system how the character should move. I've also done it on a mobile device, so moving the mobile device around controls the animation that way. Is your research connected to your work as a visual effects R&D engineer? My research isn't directly used at ILM but it's related in the ideas of it, because my role as an R&D engineer is to make tools for artists, including animators. Technology work here is balanced between day-to-day, very short-term problems and developing long-term researched technology we can use repeatedly for very complex problems. Which films have you worked on? In technology, we often do work that supports everyone in the company, and all of the artists. It's incredibly satisfying to see this work on screen that we've helped facilitate, like Jurassic World and Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. Advertisement For Jurassic World in particular, we developed a lot of new technology that was built on years of work at ILM so that we could do motion capture and show the virtual character in real-time. If you're doing animation the traditional way, it takes a very long time, and it's very difficult to change -- you have to throw it out and start from scratch. The velociraptors in the original Jurassic Park were actually people in suits, live on set, working with the actors. For Jurassic World, we essentially put our performers in a virtual dinosaur suit. That was really important because there were four velociraptors, all interacting with each other. And because it's seen in real-time, they can change it. We also did it for the Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Indominus Rex, who have a big fight. The performers were fighting and we could see the dinosaurs fighting at the same time on screen -- it was really awesome. It was a fun way of doing very complex animation for these complex creatures that were really the stars of the show. In Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, there's a sequence in the middle of the film, where there are these big alien creatures called rathtars. They're running around, grabbing things and grabbing people with their tentacles -- they're scary! That was all animated by hand, but tentacles are something that are very difficult, traditionally, for animators to control because the virtual skeleton of a character is represented as a series of joints. If you're doing something that can bend in the way that a tentacle can, representing it as a large number of joints is really difficult. So we saw some really cool technology from our friends at Pixar, using mathematical curves to represent tentacles. We were able to take the ideas from Pixar and adapt them for our needs, because visual effects are different than a feature-length animated film. We developed a new tool for tentacles, so they can easily wrap around things and stick to objects as the characters move around, and so on. We're using it again in films that are currently in production. Advertisement Have you met U of T computer science alumnus William "Bill" Reeves, Global Technology Supervisor at Pixar? Unfortunately I have not met Bill Reeves, but I have heard him speak. He is, of course, a legend in computer graphics. He was at ILM, actually, when he invented a very powerful idea in computer graphics called Particle Systems, which was first used in the visual effects for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Visual effects and animation are different facets of filmmaking, and at ILM and Pixar, we're able to learn from each other now that the walls have come down and we're all part of one big company. It was like a homecoming. Pixar started as a part of Lucasfilm. How do you compare the technological advances through the different periods' Star Wars films to today's visual effects? One thing that is still really exciting about the original trilogy was that it was done practically on set and with miniatures and paintings since the digital technology didn't exist yet. Advertisement The popular opinion seems to be, in the prequel trilogy, a lot of the digital visual effects felt artificial. Jar Jar Binks, regardless of people's opinion of the character, was a landmark achievement in terms of an extremely prominent, all-computer-generated character. Those films pushed the work that needed to be done on digital cameras and digital projection. There was a lot of CGI work done on those films that set a really high standard and influenced the industry a lot. The goal of visual effects is to make it seem like no work was done at all. Audiences have very discerning eyes, more so every year. In the first and second trilogies things were perhaps in one extreme or the other. From no computer graphics, to a lot of computer graphics. For the new Star Wars movies, that was very much kept in mind. There was more effort to do effects practically, to have real sets, instead of green screen. There's still a tremendous amount of visual effects work done, much more than audiences realize, but it's building on the stuff that's already there. Like BB-8 -- the beach-ball droid that rolls around -- in many shots, there was a real guy there, puppeteering it, and the work is to paint that out, and augment it, rather than create everything from scratch using computers. How is CGI technology keeping pace with Hollywood? If you look at the Oscars, the nominees for best visual effects are massively more money-making than the nominees in any other category. The technology is important for Hollywood, financially. The thing about visual effects that's always impressed me, is that it takes an incredibly trained and skillful artist to know what to change in order to take the work from good to great. I've sat in on sessions where they're reviewing a shot after dozens and dozens of changes and it's still not quite right, and then, someone will point out this little thing that needs to be changed and everyone knows it will instantly look better. Every detail makes a big difference. Advertisement There are a lot of people who have transitioned from working in physical effects, painting or sculpting, to working digitally, because that artistic eye is most important. If that's not there, then no amount of technology can make up for it. Our goal is to help the artists do that incredible work. Yoda said to Luke in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back: "It is finished. No more training you require." Will you feel like Jedi after defending your PhD this year? I try not to think about it too much. But it will be a big change. Feeling less like an apprentice and the start of being a master at something. It's very exciting. Follow HuffPost Canada Blogs on Facebook MORE ON HUFFPOST: By Rachel Schrader, with files from Kathryn Reid Despite his raggedy appearance, a beloved stuffed 'Puppy' is all my two-year-old daughter needs. Eliana loves Puppy unconditionally, and the tears flow quite heavily if she has to leave the house without him. Right now, my daughter needs Puppy more than ever. I've just returned to work after giving birth to my son a year ago, and the transition to not having me at home has been tough for Eliana. As adults, especially parents, we often view toys and stuffed animals as just 'stuff', things that get in the way or that we trip over. To a child, however, that specific toy or stuffed animal can be the whole world. It's their comfort during the day, and what they need to fall asleep at night. This morning, Eliana was heartbroken when I left Puppy at our house as we headed out the door to daycare. Advertisement Thinking of children in Ecuador When I remember how devastated Eliana looked when she had to leave Puppy behind, I began to get the smallest glimpse of how the children who survived the recent earthquake in Ecuador might feel. Children whose homes were destroyed in the earthquake are not leaving behind their beloved items for just a few hours, but forever. Eliana is sad to say goodbye to Mommy for the day, but some children in Ecuador have lost their parents forever. They were taken too soon by a natural disaster. Diego Rivadeneira, a member of World Vision's team in the region shared the following tragic example: Advertisement "Early in the morning on Sunday, I was notified that my cousin who lives in Pedernales, one of the most affected areas, died when her house collapsed. Her husband was able to rescue their children, a four-year-old girl and the baby she gave birth to just three months ago." "We were devastated. My young cousin was so happy weeks ago celebrating the new member of their family. Their house is totally destroyed and they have lost everything. I know that everything can be rebuilt but lives cannot." A space for comfort In the midst of tragedies like these, the child-friendly spaces like the ones World Vision is providing for children in Ecuador can be crucial. In the midst of chaos, they are safe areas where children can play and begin the long process of healing from their grief. It's amazing how natural play can be, even for children who've sustained unthinkable loss. World Vision staff are on-hand, sensitively responding to whatever needs the children may have. Advertisement Many of the children our teams meet want little more than to just 'be kids' for a few hours. Our staff provide activities, like the chance to draw or play with toys, or an opportunity to join a game or some singing. For the children who are ready and interested, we offer help in keeping up with schoolwork. Child-friendly spaces give our staff a chance to identify which children might need protection. In a crisis like an earthquake, children are sometimes found wandering alone. They might have been injured, or even abused. In cases where family members can be found, the child-friendly spaces serve as central locations where families can be reunited. Welcoming children in Ecuador To help children affected by the earthquake in Ecuador, World Vision opened two activity centers for children and adolescents this week, one in Portoviejo and another in Santa Ana Canton. "Right now, our primary concern is ensuring the needs of children and their families are met," says World Vision's national director in Ecuador, Jose Luis Ochoa. "Child-friendly spaces give us a chance to care for children who are coping with overwhelming emotional distress." Although nothing can replace what they've lost, it's our hope that children visiting a child-friendly space can find some sense of comfort, peace and familiarity in a situation where the world has turned upside down. For a few hours, they can be kids again. Advertisement The five things you need to know on Thursday April 21, 2016 1) BLUES AND ROYALS In case you missed it, today is the Queens 90th birthday. The PM has trailed some of the tributes he will make when the Commons presents a humble address to Her Majesty from 11.15am. The humble language is deliberate, for this is no debate, its a tribute. And, just like swearing the oath of allegiance, therein lies the problem for MPs with Republican views. Crossing your fingers behind your back, Tony Banks style, would be hard to pull off today. Advertisement Every single MP on the blue side of the chamber will praise the Monarch, but what about Labour and SNP members who dont quite believe in an unelected head of state? All eyes will be on Jeremy Corbyn as he gets up after David Cameron to make his own statement. Unlike No.10, Team Corbyn have very deliberately not pre-released his words. I understand it will be typically Corbyn-like. I wonder if any MP will risk that gag that both Jez and the Queen are secret Brexiteers - but are not allowed to say so? After the tributes, questions are bound to be asked of Team Corbyn about what, if any, present hes sending to Her Maj and whether he will attend any street parties (Id be amazed if he did the latter). Of course in years gone by, Corbyn would have simply stayed away from such events and quietly marked his Republicanism in his office with a hummous sandwich and an organic apple juice. After a few months in the job, hes getting more used to protocol while still believing he can do it on his own terms. If this event had taken place last autumn, as the national anthem episode proved, things would be more tricky. Many Labour MPs believe any hint of lack of patriotism is yet another reason they are facing difficulties in the May local elections (away from all the London mayoral hoopla). I note there are quite a few written ministerial statements out today, including ones on legal aid and armed forces pay, surely no one will bury bad news under the Queens birthday.will they? Advertisement 2) ACADEMY AWARDS Thanks to the forced academies plans, Corbyn had probably his best PMQs since becoming leader yesterday. He seemed to have finally got the hang of asking six focused questions, and handling the responses, to build up to a finale that left Cameron forced to ramp up his defence - as many Tory MPs sat in silence. Quoting 1922 chairman Graham Brady who says 'there is little accountability or parental involvement was very smart. Cameron didnt help himself with lame gags about McDonalds and then the own goal of trying to use PMQs to insinuate Sadiq Khan was an extremist (the shouts of racist! came from many moderates on the Labour benches). No10s post-PMQs huddle was notable for the way Downing Street stressed this was all a six year plan and there was plenty of time for more discussion. There was even talk that the timetable for legislation was not yet sorted. Does that mean the bill will not be in the Queens Speech and may be a draft only? If so, that would undermine both the point of having the Speech before the referendum - and the PMs defiant words yesterday that children didnt have time to waste to see their schools improve. Even if the full bill appears, it looks like it will have some caveats to reassure backbenchers, with some talk of rural primaries getting special safeguards. The Telegraphs James Kirkup even cites one Tory who thinks the plans will be amended to allow some councils to run multi-academy trusts (which kinda seems like a contradiction in terms). Some MPs think the EU debate has meant the whips took their eye off the ball of growing backbench dissent (and some loyalists think its all a proxy for the Brexiters to slag Dave and George, which may have a grain of truth but doesnt explain the widespread unease on the Tory benches). Meanwhile, the Guardian reports the Department for Educations annual accounts have been rated as adverse by the National Audit Office and warns the academies plan could mess up the finances even more. Just how Nicky Morgan handles any clarification of the policy could be a test of her own future leadership skills Advertisement 3) CUMMINGS AND GOINGS Barack Obama lands later tonight and is expected tomorrow to make a strong plea against Brexit (the Leave camp may not be that enamoured that Front National leader Marine le Pen has announced shes coming over here in the next few weeks). But as the EU referendum continues to cast its shadow over Westminster (if not the public), the rhetoric and bitterness in the battle has been sharpened further this week, so much so that its difficult to see how the wounds in the Tory party can be properly healed. Last night Vote Leave tweeted a mocking pic of Jeremy Hunt, adding the NHS is in crisis but can be saved if we didnt send 350m to Brussels every week. Apart from the Euroscep caveat, it looked for all the world like a Labour attack ad. But for his part, George Osbornes decision to call his opponents economically illiterate earlier this week was just as bad. Mervyn King told Bloomberg the Chancellors 4,300 was a simple minded claim. Tory MPs were dismayed further when Stephen Crabb appeared to blame the rise in unemployment on Brexit fears (the Sun and others report today Priti Patel was gagged). Vote Leave campaigns chief and former Gove aide Dom Cummings yesterday underlined just how sharp those divisions are. Cummings was famously originally barred from Government by Andy Coulson and Cameron only to be let in later. He is seen by some civil servants (whom he loathes) as an anarchist, a Steve Hilton with hobnail boots, but hes proud to be a disrupter. His three-hour session with the Treasury select yesterday was a classic, with him making a string of claims about the wide boys of Goldman Sachs, No10 threats to Brexit business leaders and so on. Its war, but not as we know it. Advertisement This morning, Labours Seema Malhotra has a speech accusing ex-BCC chief and Brexiter John Longworth of a betrayal of its members. She blogs for us HERE and also picks up on a survey of 10,000 small firms showing 75% of them want to stay in the EU. The survey was done by Aston Uni and Goldman Sachs (yes, Cummings favourite bankers). BECAUSE YOUVE READ THIS FAR Watch these two bulldozer drivers battle it out like Transformers in China. Whole new meaning to road rage. 4) TOBRUK NO DISSENT No.10 quietly confirmed a White House announcement yesterday that there will be a rather important mini-summit on Monday hosted by Angela Merkel but with Cameron, Obama, Hollande and Renzi attending. The main item will be joint counter-terrorism efforts and the need to more effectively share information between our countries and within Europe. That covers Syria, migration, Ukraine but the hot issue really is Libya. Downing Street is playing down suggestions that this is a war summit, mainly because the UK has not yet received any requests for assistance from the Libyans. But many in Whitehall are expecting our servicemen and women to be deployed sometime soon and Philip Hammond this week confirmed naval and air support could occur. Several MPs on all sides are increasingly concerned that this could all happen without Parliaments approval. Advertisement 5) ZIONS LESSON In a sign of just how deep the Corbyn effect goes among young people, the NUSs sitting president was ousted in an election yesterday by a radical student who once attacked Zionist-led media outlets. Malia Bouattia won 50.9% of the vote despite an open letter from Jewish students saying they were extremely concerned by her views. Bouttia responded by saying she had been misrepresented and that to take issue with Zionist politics is not me taking issue with being Jewish. Yet she has criticised her own alma mater, Birmingham University, as a Zionist outpost in higher education, saying it has the largest Jsoc [Jewish student society] in the country. And in a speech two years ago (footage of which was obtained by online student mag The Tab) she said that it is problematic to think Palestine can be liberated only by means of fundraising, non-violent protest and the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. Ex-NUS President Wes Streeting had tweeted NUS is lost Im afraid. There may be a movement now for individual universities to disaffiliate. It could be worse: yesterday the NUS conference heard a motion to not recognise Holocaust Memorial Day because it was wrong to elevate the Holocaust above other mass genocides. It was rejected. politics?pop=nls&nls=uk-politics&ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067" target="_hplink">HERE to get the WaughZone delivered to your inbox. Advertisement Moral. It's not a word we use very often, especially when we talk about fashion. Fashion comes with many adjectives attached: fabulous, iconic, elegant, sumptuous, dashing, nostalgic, effortless... but moral is rarely one of them. In 1725, Rev Francis Hutcheson wrote An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. In his opinion, an outward perception of beauty was impossible without an inner sense of beauty as well. He called this as a 'moral sense of beauty' and, importantly, he understood it as something which could be altered by information and reasoning. Advertisement In the mid 18th Century, the first examples of fashion press appeared in Paris with publications like Le Journal de la mode et du Gout. This was the start of the connection between fashion and taste, fashion and ideals, fashion and individualism. It was also the beginning of our moral disengagement as community values gave rise to individual values. The fashionable young women portrayed on its pages embodied the rise of consumer culture. This desire for new clothes was not confined to 18th century Europe. In Latin America, clothing was recognised as a symbol of social status and prestige and was manipulated by the marginal sectors of society in order to become more socially, economically, politically and culturally reconised. An overwhelmed husband wrote to the Mercurio Peruano in 1791 setting out the precarious financial situation in which he found himself as a result of his wife's fashion taste. He protested her need to have a different dress for every social occasion. Whilst his wife had garnered admiration from society in Lima, the husband was unable to pay his debts. For the wife mentioned in the letter, clothing had become a vehicle to make herself visible in a male-dominated society, expressing her status and social freedom. Advertisement Our desire for fashion has certainly not diminished in the ensuing 200 years. What has changed, however, is our proximity to, and awareness of, the impact of our purchases. In the 19th Century, a sweater was an employer or middleman who abused his workers with monotonous work, unhealthy or unsafe conditions and poverty-level wages. The desire of manufacturers to pay the lowest possible wage, coupled with a huge number of rural poor and immigrants looking for work in Britain and the US, produced a climate ripe for the exploitation of workers and the establishment of the first sweatshops. Sweating came to describe work which lacked respect for the human factor. A House of Lords Select Committee on the Sweating System was established in 1889 which publicly exposed the poor conditions in which garment workers toiled. Debate over the morality of production led to unionisation and concerned consumers called for reform. For a while, things got better. The 20th Century saw waves of trade liberalisation policies starting after World War II, resulting in the offshoring and outsourcing of production to Asia and Latin America. With the relocation of manufacturing came the abrogation of responsibility. It has been endlessly debated whether brands and retailers are morally and legally responsible for their workers overseas. It has also been questioned whether the fashion consumer is morally responsible for the poor working conditions and unsafe working practices in factories in developing countries. Many of us suspect that the clothes we wear have been made in a sweatshop. Does this affect our moral responsibility? In his book Profits and Principles: Global Capitalism and Human Rights in China, Michael A Santoro argues that 'consumers are a very big part of the web of moral responsibility for human rights. Ultimately it is consumers who wear the shoes and clothes manufactured in sweatshops... What is needed is a real partnership between companies and consumers, based on a very simple moral compact. Companies must agree to manufacture products in compliance with human rights codes and consumers must agree to place monetary value on such compliance. Both sides of the compact are necessary to safeguard human rights'. In other words, equity for all must become a universal standard and we all bear responsibility for ensuring this happens. Advertisement My relative Dyddgu Hamilton (pronounced Dithky) was a close friend of Hilaire Belloc and his wife Elodie. Dyddgu became Belloc's secretary and subsequently his lifetime correspondent - there are hundreds of letters between them. I've been a voracious Belloc reader for many years - he was a prolific writer with well over 100 published books. I recently came across this quote he wrote in the Sahara, and it struck me that the description of the barbarian could so easily apply to the fast-fashion addict who takes no responsibility and gives no thought to their expanding wardrobe. 'The Barbarian hopes - and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being.... We sit by and watch the barbarian...We are tickled by his irreverence ..we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles'. Returning to Frances Hutcheson's philosophy of beauty, his views are reflected in the worldview of indigenous peoples in the Andes where something which is beautiful is typically something which is well-balanced, something ayni. Everything in the Inca world was based on ayni, a system of exchange based on mutual respect and justice with other communities and cultures throughout their vast empire. Ayni has survived the conquest and capitalism and is still widely practised today. Beauty is about balance, and what is sustainability if not finding a balance between the desires of our generation and the needs of the next? Advertisement Before we can rediscover a 'moral sense of beauty' on falling in love with a new dress, we need to know that there is equity behind its beauty. To know that there is equity, we need transparency. We cannot hold the many stakeholders in the fashion supply chain to account until we can see them, and we cannot start to tackle exploitation until we can see it. That's why Fashion Revolution is asking the question #whomademyclothes. We want to know that the clothes we buy are beautiful in every way. 'Bastille Day' hangs it's hat on action sequences and clings to the Bourne-Bond coat tails - Joachim Trier's English language debut 'Louder Than Bombs' is a superbly acted family drama with a distant abstract feel - The documentary 'Mapplethorpe:Look At The Pictures,' offers a fascinating insight into the life and work of the controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe - Miguel Gormes's audacious and ambitious 'Arabian Nights' is a personal response to political reality - 'The Divide' debates the ever present belief that money buys happiness. Director: James Watkins. Idris Elba, Richard Madden, Charlotte Le Bon, Jose Garcia, Kelly Reilly. Action Thriller. France, USA 2016 90 mins. (15) *** Advertisement Reckless, subordinate and irresponsible, the pre-requisites for a maverick CIA field operative storming through Paris in pursuit of the baddies is OK but Idris Elba taking on an American accent is a bit too much. Pickpocket Michael Mason (Richards Madden) works the tourist crowds but lifting political activist Zoe Neville's (Charlotte Le Bon) bag is a lift too many and he's in the frame for an Islamist terrorist atrocity. Of course Mason's a pawn in a bigger game and when he teams up with CIA agent Sean Brier (Idris Elba) it's a bash 'em, shoot 'em and beat 'em run through Paris. Chuck in you've got 'one last chance' station chief Karen (Kelly Reilly), corrupt cops and a large-scale conspiracy and it's set for off. James Watkins' ambitious low budget action-filled thriller clings onto the Bourne-Bond coat tails, fits in social media and hash tags, drops a few humorous line and hangs it's hat on the action sequences. Idris Elba's American accent is a bit much but it's an easy 90 minute watch. I can't see that James Bond's in danger of a takeover. Released 22nd April Advertisement Director: Joachim Trier. Rachel Brosnahan, Jesse Eisenberg, Amy Ryan. Drama. Norway, France, Denmark 2015 99 mins. (15) *** It's three years since acclaimed war photographer Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert) survived the battle field only to die in a head-on car crash that maybe suicide and her colleague Richard (Davis Strathairn) is submitting a lengthy profile to the New York Times. Isabelle's eldest son Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg), strangely distant from his wife who's just given birth, rekindles the flame with ex-girlfriend, Erin (Rachel Brosnahan) whom he meets in the hospital corridor. So opens Joachim Trier's English language debut with an hilarious cast perfect set for Jesse Eisenberg that offers an insight into a family drama that echoes the past and trawls the difficulties of managing grief. A retrospective exhibition of Isabelle's work brings Jonah back to the family home and his younger angst ridden and socially withdrawn brother Conrad (Devin Druid) with whom he bonds but their father Gene (Gabriel Byrne) struggles to connect with either. Superbly acted with a distant abstract feel, Isabelle's ghost haunts the family as they struggle to reconcile their memories of a woman they thought they knew, who placed career before family. Intense and stylish, but at times too restrained, it retreads old ground seen in 'A Thousand Times Goodnight' with Juliette Binoche. Advertisement Released 22nd April Dogwoof/Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation Director: Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato. Debbie Harry, Fran Leibowitz, Brooke Shields, Edward Mapplethorpe. Documentary. USA, Germany 2015 80 mins. (18) **** 'Self-Portrait With Whip' and preparations for the Getty and LACM joint exhibition open Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's documentary on the provocative and controversial photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, the artist with an all consuming desire for sex, fame and money. Born into a Catholic family in Floral Park, Queens 'a good place to come from, and a good place to leave,' he met Patti Smith, perhaps the greatest influence in his life at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute and they moved into the Chelsea Hotel where Mapplethorpe began to experiment with abstract expression, gay porn collages and polaroids eventually leading to classically framed images. It was 70s New York, underground gay clubs, the notorious Mineshaft and the unassuming Robert Mapplethorpe, ever controversial and provocative, pushed the boundaries with brutally honest homoerotic and sadomasochistic images as seen in the X Portfolio and 'Man in Polyester Suit.' Advertisement Superbly edited with archive footage and stills, Robert Mapplethorpe acts as narrator thanks to rediscovered interviews. Friends and lovers contribute, including collector Sam Wagstaff, Debbie Harry, his older sister Nancy and brother Edward, himself an artist and photographer who was Robert's studio assistant for many years. Ironically Robert Mapplethorpe landed a major exhibition 'The Perfect Moment' at the Whitney Museum just before he died of AIDS aged 42 in 1989. Fran Lebowitz laughs when she reflects on the images Mapplethorpe gifted her which she threw away at a time when photography wasn't considered real art. Robert Mapplethorpe, a legend after death, the artist Senator Jesse Helms in 1989 denounced in Congress - 'look at the pictures.' That's what you do in this documentary. Released 22nd April Director: Miguel Gomes. Crista Alfaiate, Adriana Luz, America Silva. Drama. Portugese with English subtitles. Portugal, France, Germany 2015 125 mins. (PG) **** Audacious, ambitious, imaginative, unique and radical, Miguel Gomes's 'Arabian Nights' takes the classic Arabian Nights and adapts the beautiful young Scheherazade's tale after tale to keep her murderous husband from killing her, with real life stories that reflect Portugal's politics and the hardships suffered by ordinary people during the years of economic chaos. Shot between 2013 and 2014 and filmed as three separate volumes over 6 hours,'Arabian Nights' stems from Miguel Gomes' anger at seeing the collapse of Portuguese society and opens with 'The Restless One,' a portrait of a shipyard and a wasp-exterminator, a satirical tale of a rooster and a local election and sobering interviews with the unemployed. Advertisement Original and powerful, a mixture of fact, fiction, fantasy and the surreal, 'Arabian Nights' is a unique, personal cinematic response to political reality. Released 22nd April Director: Katharine Round. Documentary. USA 2015 74 mins. (12A) *** Based on Richard Wilkinson's book 'The Spirit Level,' Katharine Round's absorbing documentary reflects on the ever present divide between those who have and those who haven't. Weaving Archive footage from 1979 to the present day with the stories of 7 individuals in the UK and USA looking for a better life, suggests that money isn't an automatic pathway to happiness which isn't a great surprise. The ritual of moving up the ladder with the assumed cultural, social and personal tribal assets, the need to 'fit in', social status, look the part, an ever present tragi-comedy whether you're rich or poor. The search for peace, happiness and well being for others isn't an easy path. It's more personal. Released 22nd April As a son of the Emerald Isle, I know about having good craic. But when it comes to enjoying a day off, why should the Irish and our Scottish friends have more fun than everyone else? Anyone fortunate enough to live in Northern Ireland gets ten Bank Holidays a year, including days off for St Patrick's Day and The Twelfth of July. In Scotland, workers get nine Bank Holidays, ever since they were granted an extra day a year in 2008 to mark St Andrew's Day. Advertisement But it is a different story in England which has just eight Bank Holidays - compared to an EU average of 11 public holidays. In fact, as far as I know, only the Mexicans get fewer public days off. St George's Day this Saturday will again go unmarked by a public holiday. It's the same in Wales where the eight Bank Holidays do not include St David's Day. I believe it is time that changed and we honoured the patron saints of England and Wales in same ways as we honour those of Scotland and Ireland. That's why I'm calling today on the Government to look at the possibility of creating an extra Bank Holiday in both England and Wales. Advertisement It would give both nations a chance to celebrate their proud heritage in the same way as the Irish and the Scottish. And, it would provide a boost for tourism and give millions of workers a well-earned day off to enjoy as they wish with family and friends. I recognise there could be some concerns from businesses that might talk about the risk of lost productivity. But happy workers are productive workers. Bringing England and Wales more into line with Scotland and Northern Ireland is not only the fair thing to do, it's also the right thing to do. St Patrick's Day has been an official public holiday in Ireland since 1903. The Irish diaspora here in Britain, in America and across the globe have raised a glass and joined annual celebrations, wherever they may be. Advertisement It brings together strangers in foreign lands who share a common heritage and it helps promote the culture and values of Ireland across the world. These are benefits that England and Wales should also be enjoying. It's time the Government acted to end the unfairness that has seen workers in England short-changed for too long when it comes to Bank Holidays. So, this St George's Day, I echo the famous words used in the House of Commons many years ago, and say to the Prime Minister: speak for England, David, and give the English their national day off too! As a 25-year-old soldier in the British Army, I didn't think I had much in common with The Queen. I'm from Grimsby, covered in tattoos and fix tanks for a living. But it turns out there's more in common than I realised. For a start, we have the same birthday -- 21 April. I don't know what The Queen will be doing for hers this year but I'm going to be on a battlefield tour in France. Advertisement And during the Second World War, she rolled up her sleeves and got her hands dirty serving as a mechanic in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) -- doing a job just like mine. My job involves diagnosing and fixing electrical problems with the Challenger 2 main battle tank. It's a dirty job and your hands are permanently black but someone has to do it -- and I wouldn't do anything else. I think it's admirable that during the war Princess Elizabeth joined the ATS. She was 18 and by the end of the war she reached the rank of Junior Commander and passed out as a fully qualified driver. Advertisement It's important that on her 90th birthday our nation pays tribute to what she did during that time. It's good to know that our Queen mucked in for the country. For me, it's nice to know that we did a similar job all those years apart, and that we share the same birthday is a nice connection. This job isn't one that many people would want to do -- it's dirty, and there's a lot of time spent on exercise living in a field. So the fact The Queen did it in the military is extraordinary. It's an interesting side to her character. She could have got a job anywhere, doing something far more comfortable but she chose the life of overalls and elbow grease -- and I don't blame her. I love my job. I got here after a lot of training, having joined the Army because I wanted a career where I can do different things every day. I always knew I wanted to join the Armed Forces, it was just a matter of when. I was going to join the Royal Air Force but I met a guy called Sergeant Matt Telford, who said I should look at joining the Army. He told me that I shouldn't join until I was ready and 100 per cent committed to it. Until that moment there was no point, he said, because you should be ready to commit yourself. Advertisement While serving in Afghanistan in 2009, Matt was shot and killed. I was in the Middle East at the time, teaching at an international school in Qatar. When I heard the news, I came home and joined up straight away. I had been in my own world, doing my own thing, and it made me realise I needed to crack on with my life and get things done. People who knew me back home knew a slightly different me and they said I couldn't do it. They laughed at the idea of me doing as I was told and taking orders. But I knew it was what I wanted to do and I didn't let anything get in the way. I knew I wanted to work on tanks, after I saw the Challenger 2 I decided it was what I wanted to work on and I've loved it ever since. My job is to support the tanks' electronics. The tanks have objectives to meet and it's the job of me and my colleagues to support them and keep them running if anything goes wrong. It takes a lot to get this far, there are a lot of tests and training you have to go through before you qualify to do the job but it was worth the effort. When faced with the housing crisis we have, it is always tempting to start banning stuff. The list of targets is long: off-plan property sales, foreign ownership, empty homes, buy to let. But banning stuff outright is rarely straightforward and can have unintended consequences. Letting fees are one of the exceptions. Generation Rent has published its latest report on letting agent fees, finding that across 10 boroughs and 700 letting agents, the average fees for a two-person household setting up a new tenancy cost 386. That's on top of the deposit, the first month's rent, the van hire and the carpet shampooer for the last place. It's a huge amount of money to say goodbye to at the best of times, let alone during a time of high stress. Advertisement Industry insiders tell us that the actual costs of setting up a tenancy involve credit checks costing around 20 and about 4 hours' work, so even at the lower end of the scale most agents are making big profits. A handful of agents manage to make zero tenant fees work, but many opt to grossly overcharge. Tenants using one agent in Tower Hamlets, for example, would hand over 780. This is completely legal. Letting agents can charge whatever they like, as long as they publish their fees in full - which is how we've been able to compile our website, www.lettingfees.co.uk. One in seven agents still doesn't publish their fees, in breach of last year's Consumer Rights Act. The government brought in the legislation on the expectation that transparency would force agents to start competing on fees, and tenants would ultimately get a better deal. But as much as we want our website to single-handedly bring down fees, that's not how the market works. In a competitive housing market like London's, flat hunters will take the first property that ticks their boxes for location, condition and rent. In the desperation to secure a roof over your head, how much the agent will charge compared to the one down the road doesn't come into it - the other guy doesn't have a flat you want anyway. Advertisement As a result of this captive market, agents are free to overcharge. That's why we need a ban on fees. The only response we ever get when we propose this is that agents will have to charge those costs to landlords, and that will be passed to the tenant in higher rent. Even if it does, we think that's better than facing big one-off fees that some tenants need a payday loan to cover. But it won't happen, because rents are already as high as the market will allow them to go. Two-thirds of private rented properties have no mortgage on them - the landlord is making a huge margin that 386 won't dent. And that's assuming that the letting agent will charge the full tenant fee to the landlord. More likely, they won't because they know that the landlord will take his business elsewhere. The landlord, unlike the tenants, is the customer in this relationship and can choose which agent to use. Putting all the costs on the landlord will force agents to start competing properly, instead of taking their revenue from tenants with nowhere else to turn. With little impact on rents from a ban on fees, tenants might also find they get a better service from their landlord. They would now be in a position where they did not need to dip into savings in order to move somewhere else, so would be more willing to leave an unsuitable property. That threat of losing a reliable tenant would also strengthen their hand in negotiations with landlords over rent rises and repairs. Advertisement Last week, for the first time in 70 years of UN history, candidates for the post of Secretary General presented their visions and programs during hearings in the UN General Assembly. From 12 to 14 April, mornings and afternoons, Permanent Representatives of 193 Member States have listened and questioned nine candidates, who received a total of 800 questions from ambassadors and civil society. We had the opportunity to (informally) assess the competence of those running for the top and the most difficult diplomatic job in the world. Organizing these hearings is part of the commitment made last year by the President of the General Assembly, Mogens Lykketoft, to perform his Presidency in the most open and transparent manner possible, including for the process of selecting and appointing the next Secretary General. Public opinion's interest for this process is huge - the UN website for candidates' hearings was already accessed by 227,000 people from 209 countries and territories. The bar is placed high by the actual challenging international context, as well as by the legacy of the current Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, whose tenure comes to a close on 31st December 2016. Patient but persistent, determined to accomplish what he set out to do, Mr. Ban described his credo as Secretary General in an interview to Newsweek in 2007: "I believe in the power of relationships. I believe in engagement, dialogue before confrontation. Sometimes this diplomacy will be public; other times it will take place behind the scenes, since that is where the potential for success is often greatest. If there is a unifying theme to my work, a vision if you will, it is this human dimension. We may read, each morning, about human tragedies in our newspapers. But how often do we truly hear such people's voices, or try with full force and determination to help? This I pledge to do." Advertisement He is very well seconded by Deputy Secretary General Jan Eliasson and this tandem has put an undeniable mark on the organization's work. A brilliant diplomat and politician, former Foreign Minister and President of the UN General Assembly, Jan Eliasson is the author of the famous axiom: "There is no peace without development, there is no development without peace and there is neither lasting peace nor sustainable development without respect of human rights and the rule of law." Article 97 of the UN Charter provides that "The Secretary General shall be appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council", which adopts in a private meeting, with an affirmative vote of nine members, including the votes of permanent members, a resolution setting out its recommendation for the job. The five permanent members can use their veto right. The UN Charter does not prevent the Security Council from recommending more than one candidate, but a General Assembly resolution from 1946 says it is desirable to recommend one person only. Also, the practice of the Council has been to specify the term of office for the recommended candidate (customary, it is five years), and the Assembly acts similarly when adopting its resolution appointing the Secretary General. Advertisement From the nine candidates we have listened last week, seven are from the Eastern European Group and two from the Western European and Others Group. It is quite probable that other candidates will enter the race in the following weeks, which would only contribute to the quality of competition, enlarging the reservoir for the selection of the best. Important positions within the UN, including that of the Secretary General, are allocated through an informal process of regional rotation, although this happens by custom and precedent, rather than by some written rule of the UN Charter. However, article 59 of the General Assembly Resolution 51/241 of 31 July 2007 states that: "In the course of the identification and appointment of the best candidate for the post of Secretary-General, due regard shall continue to be given to regional rotation and shall also be given to gender equality." Eastern Europe is the only region that did not produce any of the (until now) eight Secretary Generals and many think the next top diplomat will come from that region. There has also never been a woman Secretary General and the idea of the first female UN chief enjoys substantial support. The resolution on "Revitalization of the work of the General Assembly", adopted on 11 September 2015, establishes a series of recommendations and attributes that the most suitable candidate for Secretary General should possess. Criteria identified for the selection process are related to professional skills, political acceptance, and acceptability to public opinion. "Professional skills" suggests a person with extensive international relations experience, proven leadership, managerial ability and linguistic ability. "Political acceptance" includes acceptability to the five Permanent Members of the Security Council. "Acceptability to global public opinion" refers to understanding and sensitivity to multicultural issues. Asked whether he had any advice for the candidates ahead hearings, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon reportedly said that he always recalls the advice a middle school teacher in South Korea gave him: Keep your feet firmly on the ground and your head in the clouds". Advertisement Candidates we have heard last week articulated their vision for the organization and the global challenges to be tackled under their leadership. We may have seen different personalities, experiences and approaches, but all shown proved commitment and determination to make the UN fit for purpose in the 21st century. From the spread of terrorism, proliferation of civil wars and huge waves of refugees, to the implementation of Agenda 2030 for sustainable development, climate change, poverty and inequality, the institutional reform of the UN, less bureaucracy, conflict prevention and mediation, early warning mechanisms and better inter-agencies coordination - all these topics are on the agenda of those aspiring to become the next Secretary General. The issue of whether he or she should rather be "a Secretary" or "a General", received various answers. I found interesting the formula "a General of the UN Secretariat and a Secretary to the UN Member States". Mr. Mogens Lykketoft remarked in a recent interview that public discussions with the candidates are "potentially game-changing, because if a leading candidate emerges and a critical number of countries rally around him or her, it will be very difficult for the Security Council to come up with quite a different person." The candidates' vision is important, but at the end of the day the Secretary General race is not only about vision, administrative ability, language skills, or personal charm. It is a political job. The election of the ninth Secretary-General in 2016 is crucial to the future of the organization, and therefore it will be one of the most important decisions the Security Council and the General Assembly will make in the next couple of years. Embarrassing our politicians and other public figures into publishing their tax returns is muddle-headed and distracting, however briefly satisfying. What we should be focused on is not what individuals are paying to the Treasury, interesting though that is, but unreasonable tax avoidance by multinational companies. There is a danger of letting our leaders off the hook of tackling this more pernicious and costly problem by feeling sated when they publish their own returns. It is a mistaken belief, anyway, that disclosure somehow means no avoidance. The reality is there may well have been plenty. The question is always not what is on a tax return, but what is not. Advertisement Lost in the fog of information and supposition when a financial furore blows up is the world of difference between hiding money from tax authorities and declaring that you have money 'hidden' from them. One is evasion and illegal, the other is avoidance, and usually not. Prime Minister David Cameron, we now know, disclosed the existence of an offshore fund to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs and paid tax on his income. None of which is tax evasion. His mother paid cash gifts to him taking advantage of a relief from inheritance tax, which is not tax evasion either, but part of routine planning undertaken by many wealthy people. Advertisement And what individuals do is also becoming less of an issue. There is plenty of action making it far harder for individuals to hide their wealth from scrutiny, including international agreement between the principal tax authorities to share data due into force next year. But far less is being achieved in wrestling a fair shake from many multinationals on the revenues they make in the countries where they choose to operate. There is also an entirely separate issue about how politicians go on to lucrative careers that trade in part at least on the status and contacts they made in office. Knowing how much they pay in taxes whilst they are pubic figures will not help resolve that vexed debate. The real tax scandal is that unlike the rest of us, big corporations can more or less choose where they want to pay tax, and rather too often it's to a sandy beached tax haven far removed from where the money was earned. This needs to stop. It not only makes if far harder for other businesses to compete, but is also unjust. Advertisement Not that they should be pilloried or shamed. They are no more to be blame for declining to pay more tax than is due than the rest of us, or David Cameron. The fault lies with politicians for failing to close down loopholes and outlaw the sort of financial juggling that allows big international firms to get away with it. Taxation is a matter of law, not choice, however complicated recent years have made this distinction. What the enormous leak of documents from Panama has certainly done is open the lid on a complex, murky world; but a murkier one exists in plain sight, involving household name companies with shareholders to whom executives are publicly accountable. The pressure on public services means that taxes will probably keep rising, particularly for people not able or inclined to afford smart advice on how to avoid them. What we need to do is get more from those global companies avoiding what less mobile businesses must pay and stop fretting about individual tax returns. Our wrists are under siege. By the end of 2015, approximately 84 million wearable devices - from fitness trackers to smart watches and connected bracelets - were sold globally. Gartner predicts that these products will exceed 500 million shipments by 2020 and almost two in five of us will use a wearable by 2019. Wearables are getting serious Judging by this year's Consumer Electronics Show and Healthcare IT trade-show, HIMSS, it's clear that wearables are making their way into the healthcare space. Quell, for example, is an FDA-approved smart cuff that wraps around the leg to relieve pain related to diabetes, fibromyalgia and sciatica. It's available on Amazon. Another offering is the non-invasive, wrist-worn, blood pressure monitor known as the Pulsewave Health Monitor. Also FDA-approved, it's very nearly as accurate as an intra-arterial blood pressure catheter. Philips' Health Watch is also listed as a medical device - it's designed to be part of an app-based personal health program with the aim of helping people make healthy lifestyle choices and supporting those at risk in managing their own health. Advertisement These devices and others like them are great examples of the first wave of what should be considered the next phase of smart devices - the serious, scientifically proven wearables that can make a real difference in people's health. For the moment however, these next-gen, medical-grade, connected health devices for clinical use are few and far between in a sea of dozens of more simplistic wearables that are mainly aimed at tracking the fitness of younger generations. And the real challenge remains: when will the medical community begin to embrace wearables and connect these devices to patient care? So what's holding serious wearables back? Developing a successful healthcare wearable is easier said than done. In the industry, there may be a plenty of buzz around healthcare apps, but most of them aren't clinically proven and many are flash-in-the-pan successes with consumers. Wearable technology is in danger of suffering from the same problem; dozens of launches from all sorts of brands steadily whittling down people's enthusiasm for the products. As an evolving technology, wearables are a long way from becoming an everyday part of the healthcare industry. In order to reach that level of ubiquity, more will have to be clinically approved. Becoming part of that industry, of course, presents its own challenges. Large medical and pharmaceutical companies hold the keys there. While many of the creators of wearable healthcare technologies are start-ups and fitness brands, they may struggle to develop the technology at the scale and complexity needed for the devices to receive approval for public medical use by national health authorities. Once more wearables are regulated and respected by the industry, there's another hurdle to jump: convincing consumers to stop viewing them as gimmicks. Advertisement A wearable is not a gadget At the moment, most of us think of wearables as nifty new gadgets. But most people get bored of new gadgets. Research by the American Council on Exercise found a third of consumers stopped using their fitness tracker within six months of receiving it. Nearly half stopped within a year. Above and beyond regulation, the most important aspect to take into account with regards to new healthcare technology is to make sure consumers take it seriously and make it part of their daily routine. To do that, wearable devices must integrate with the larger system. Wearable devices at the moment are simply one point solution at which data is collected from an individual and displayed back to them, but that end point is not the end in itself. Wearables need to be capable of addressing and analyzing multiple health conditions; to become a useful tool and monitoring option that doctors trust and one that connects seamlessly to a wider healthcare system. What will the wristbands of the future look like? The medically-approved wearables we strap on tomorrow will be trusted and integrated into clinical health programs - and we're already seeing the first early examples of these. One of the latest is a medical-grade, wearable biosensor that's part of a monitoring solution for at-risk patients in low-acuity care settings (like the general ward of the hospital); providing an early warning system that monitors for sudden deterioration so caregivers can intervene quickly. In a few years' time, serious wearables like this will be part of a wider connected health offering. They'll be able to display information on multiple devices, as well as collating information from different connected devices (thermometers, heart rate monitors, etc.), brought together on an open, secure cloud platform. Advertisement These wearables will also help us determine what is "normal" for an individual. In the case of elderly at-risk people at home, this might be spotting when they haven't got up in the morning, or are getting up too frequently at night, and flagging the discrepancy to a care-giver. There will also be different grades of wearables, depending on the needs of the wearer. For the younger, healthier types, who need less careful monitoring, the wearable technology will be basic; for the elderly or those with chronic conditions, the wearables will be truly medical-grade and capable of more sophisticated tracking. We're not at this stage yet, but we're not far off. Wearable technology is the subject of plenty of competitive interest from many companies; so it's likely that these devices will quickly be getting both smarter and more affordable. At long last the referendum battle seems to be joined. Until this week the points were all coming from the Brexit camp and the only riposte seem to be the government's rather unimpressive and very expensive leaflet. When would the Remain camp break cover, or had they decided to sleep out the campaign and rely on their opponents to trip themselves up? Well, we know now. The 200 page document from the Treasury showing the likely decline in GDP if we leave the EU is clearly the centrepiece of their case and by running the figures on different assumptions as to the new trading arrangements they have made it impressive. The broadside has been augmented by other salvos. Eight former US treasury secretaries have written to "The Times" supporting the Remain case (subject to the usual caveats about it being a matter for the British people). The Governor of the Bank of England talks about the economic cost of leaving. 200 entrepreneurs throw their weight into the lists. No doubt Mr Obama will add a word or two in due course. Mr Gove has led the countercharge on behalf of the Leave campaign. He thinks that the basis of the Treasury paper is flawed and that, either because our vote to leave will result in others following or because the balance of trade between the UK and the EU makes it in the EU's interest, we will end up with good trading terms. He talks of a wider tariff free zone running from Iceland to Turkey, running independent of EU membership. Will matters run on in this way or will we be faced with exclusionary tariff barriers to discourage others from leaving? Who knows? Advertisement The trouble is that nobody does know. If Mr Gove is wrong, the UK will clearly take a considerable long-term financial hit. But then supposing we stay in the EU. There is just as much uncertainty In as Out. Will the EU learn lessons from the dislike it seems to have engendered both here and in other member countries and finally put the idea of subsidiarity, under which it only takes responsibility for those things which cannot be done nationally, into effect? Or will it just tick on, an increasingly over-regulated continent unable to compete with the US and the Far East? It is all very well for Mr Juncker, the President of the EU Commission, to say that the EU has interfered too much in national affairs, but the idea of subsidiarity has been there since the Maastricht Treaty which came into force in 1993 and no serious attempt has been made to release powers to the member states. What makes us think they will change now? If they get a "Remain" vote from Britain our leverage will be gone. The difficulty with the debate is that there are too many uncertainties on each side, so that a decision is not so much a declaration of political principles as a giant bet. Will we be bound to a centralising and decaying system if we stay in? Will we be cut out of European markets if we leave? Is it realistic to think that we will be able to participate in those markets without freedom of movement? These are difficult questions and the best thing about the last few days is that they are now the questions on the table. Hopefully then we will hear less about the spurious side issues (who really believes that we will cease to collaborate with the EU over the curbing of terrorism?) and the debate will focus on the real points until some sort of consensus emerges. With complex matter like this we all needed somewhere to start. Thank goodness that by producing a comprehensive economic analysis the Treasury have given everyone something to work from. Advertisement When I was six years old, I was walking along the beach with my father in a seaside town in my home country of Brazil when I saw a young - maybe 12 years old - Black girl sitting on a German tourist's lap. At least from what I can remember, that was my first ever contact with prostitution. It was also far from the last. It only took a car ride after sundown in Rio, where I was born, to see prostitutes lining up along Copacabana beach waiting for cars to drive up to them - sometimes Porsches, sometimes pick-up trucks. When I was 15, I overheard boys in my school describing how they had lobbed beer bottles at these prostitutes the night before because they thought it would be entertaining. Not long after that, at 18, I moved to Sheffield for university and saw women hiding in the shadows along the route down to bars and nightclubs behind Solly Street and around Kelham Island. The most conflicting aspect of feeling sorry for these women, and angry at the system that did this to them, was that I also grew up being told their job was empowering. It was liberating, as a woman, to have the agency to choose to sell your body for money, because your body is 'an asset' and yours to 'sell', if you so choose. Advertisement But do most women really choose it? I've been fighting the instinct to agree ever since liberal feminist theory first told me they do, and the statistics seem to be on my side. Around 90% of women want to quit the industry but don't have any other means to survive, and 73% of them have been raped over five times. Women who work as prostitutes or in pornography are at considerably higher risk of drug dependency, STDs, violent aggression, and mental health problems such as depression and PTSD - in fact, PTSD is more common amongst prostitutes than war survivors. And already back in 1998, researchers concluded that, given there is significantly more physical violence in street prostitution than in brothels, but no difference in the incidence of PTSD, psychological trauma is therefore "intrinsic to the act of prostitution". And is the female body really an 'asset'? Evidently, women should be able to do as they wish with their bodies, but the misogynistic view that our bodies are mere means of production, sold for profit in the free market, is far from sexually liberating. Even Marx knew, back in the 1800s, that prostitution was a "specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer" under capitalism; that is, they are victims of the system and its modes of production that reduce women's bodies to a purchasable and profitable asset like any other - after all, as people love to say, it's merely the "oldest job in the world". As a feminist, I am vehemently against laws that seek to punish women for 'sex work', and evidently support its decriminalisation. An early and seemingly effective example of this was introduced in Sweden in 1999, where laws criminalised those who paid for sex rather than the prostitutes themselves; the so-called 'Nordic model' then spread to Norway, Iceland and, recently, Northern Ireland. Advertisement Just a couple of weeks ago, the model was also adopted in France, but suffered immediate backlash from the country's prostitutes, who came together in protest to argue that criminalising clients makes women more likely to accept men obscuring their identities, to visit their homes rather than meet in a safer location, and to ultimately take more risks to protect their clients. On the other hand, the law is now theoretically on their side, allowing women to contact the police if necessary - although we know reporting violence and coercion isn't always that black and white - and, importantly, giving them identity papers, given that the overwhelming majority of prostitutes are victims of trafficking. And while the Nordic model, or versions of it, may be implemented across Europe in the coming years, women in developed countries continue to be abused and killed at the hands of the state. Laws work against them and, with the majority hailing from slums and backgrounds of poverty rather than engaging in 'high-class' escorting, living in fear is nothing new. In 2012/13 I had the good fortune to travel to Yemen, that beautiful country at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula. I was working with a local organisation and local government to establish a programme that would enable poor women to access lifesaving delivery care and family planning. Before travelling there, and having never been to the Middle East, I only knew what I had read in the press and was nervous about my visit. Al Qaeda was active, kidnap a real threat and I had to be collected from the airport in an armoured car. However, as is invariably the case, the reality is better than the press would have you believe. I spent several enjoyable weeks in the capital Sana'a working with some of the warmest, most hospitable people I have met; soaking up the atmosphere of one of the oldest cities in the world and learning about this fascinating country. My colleague Eman, a dedicated doctor and proud Yemeni, was my guide. Life for the Yemenis was not easy, but the country had come out of a period of serious unrest and there was hope on the horizon. On my final visit things took a turn for the worse. An Al Qaeda cell stormed the military hospital in Sana'a with car bombs and AK-47s. Many died including a good colleague of mine. Intelligence suggested there were other car bombs driving around the city. After 24 fretful hours I flew out of the country, never to return. I was lucky. Advertisement From that time I have continued to work, at a distance, with Dr Eman and her dedicated team. I have talked to her weekly and heard a change come about in her. She is fearful. Since March 2015 when a coalition of forces, led by Saudi Arabia, started bombing the country in response to a coup by a tribal group (the Houthies) supported by the former dictator, Eman has become steadily more anxious. She has been living for a year in fear of sudden death from the air. She has had to move offices and house twice as those buildings have been severely damaged by air strikes; she was blown off her feet by a huge blast from a strike on a military installation - one of many in and around the city - and the conflict has claimed the lives of those she knows. Yet she is one of the lucky ones. She could leave the country for elsewhere in the region but she chooses to stay to take care of her father and because she is committed to helping her countrymen. However, many many others are less fortunate. Since March 2015, due to a combination of coalition air strikes and ground warfare, more than 6,000 people have been killed, nearly 2,800 of which were civilians. Millions have been displaced and an already desperately poor country has been brought to its knees. However, you probably didn't know anything about it. You probably didn't know that across the country people are living with no electricity, no fuel, little in the way of medical supplies, scarce food and erratic water supplies - and that is in the upper class neighbourhoods of the capital city, Sana'a. You were probably unaware that the city of Taiz, population 600,000, has been under siege since November by the rebel force - with terrible consequences for its inhabitants. You heard all about sieges in Syria of course - but not Yemen. Yemen, which is being torn apart by civil war; Yemen which barely features in the multitude of news reports about the Middle East that we see every day. Advertisement And it's unlikely that you are fully conscious of the scale of the humanitarian crisis facing Yemen. 80% of its 25 million population now require humanitarian assistance. That's 20 million people who cannot feed themselves adequately. The equivalent of just under one third of the population of the UK. But here's a strange thing. The media apparently has no real interest in a conflict that is tearing a country apart. Reports are there admittedly. Most of the major news outlets have covered the conflict in some way over the past months. But articles have been few and far between and are often buried deep within a paper or website. Television reporting has been even sparser; with even the BBC dedicating only minutes to Yemen, in comparison to the hours of reporting on Syria. Our politicians are conspicuously silent on the matter. Why is this? Could it be that, despite displacing millions of people internally, the war in Yemen has not led to a surge of migrants heading towards our shores? Could it be that, despite the fact that Yemen has long been an Al Qaeda stronghold, and is now is home to a growing IS presence, the country is not seen as a serious terrorist threat to the West? Or could it be something else? The UK has a long standing diplomatic relationship with Saudi Arabia. The House of Saud has been a friend to the west, in an often hostile Middle East, for many decades. And there is, of course, the oil. Saudi Arabia remains one of the biggest oil producers in the world. Its oil fuels much of the Western world and keeps oil prices stable. Its wealth is heavily invested in the UK. The government of Saudi Arabia is Britain's biggest defence industry customer with current contracts worth over seven billion pounds and more in the pipeline. Could it be that the UK government doesn't want us to know about the war in Yemen where, by targeting civilians, its biggest customer is committing what could be war crimes on an almost daily basis? Could it be that our leaders want to remain quiet rather than upset their ally in the Middle East? If so, we should be angry, very angry. And we should do everything we can to let our politicians and our fellow countrymen know - now. A guide to the Indian Ocean Many people dream of a beautiful Indian Ocean beach experience to treasure, and it is our mission to find the very best. To this end, we have stayed in probably all of the finest recommended beach lodges from the Seychelles to Madagascar, down the coast and islands of Kenya and Tanzania, Mozambique, Madagascar and Mauritius. It is fair to say that we know what is good and, quite frankly, what is not. Advertisement The truth is that pictures can lie. Or at least tell only a very small part of the story. And truthful, unbiased opinion counts for a lot in this new age of information. If you are to ascertain what a location is actually like from the private marketing copy supplied by an individual lodge you should analyse what is not said as much as what is; for example, if a lodge organises daily free picnic outings and snorkelling trips, you could fairly surmise that their beach is tidal and/or awful. It is a mystery beyond understanding why many so-called beach locations have appalling beaches. Tripadvisor can be useful, but falls short of providing relative, objective information, people tend to have a good time and write a good review wherever they are, especially if they are on honeymoon, and only go back to complain online if something goes calamitously wrong. There is no function on Tripadvisor to tell you about a better beach down the coast/ on a nearby island/ closer to the safari action, because all those reviews are subjective to the (often) one visit. So this is a guide to unearthing the best beaches in the Indian Ocean, from an expert perspective. These are the questions that we ask, on our mission for sublime beach joy. What is the tidal movement ? Tides may fluctuate by up to 500 metres - making swimming impossible for the majority of your day, and often water too shallow for a proper swim even when the tide is in. And as a follow up question we would ask if the hotel has a pool to compensate for those low tide moments. Advertisement What is the quality of the beach sand? Ideally we would be imagining powder white coral sand, but there are beaches with silty yellow sand, or rocks, razor clams, anemones, etc necessitating jelly shoes to navigate a path to the sea. We want to know if beaches have seaweed, and if so is that seasonal, or cleared by the hotel each day. Some of our favourite and most beautiful locations have a number of beaches with different aspects so when one is subject to seaweed, the other is fine. Waves or snorkelling, swimming or surfing? The mainland coast tends to have deeper water and big waves, whereas shallower island beaches tend to have better snorkelling. (This is a generalisation, but often true!) How big is the hotel? Again a generalisation, but small rustic lodges tend to be airy and natural and the larger lodges tend to be better equipped with mod cons. Think about what matters most to you; would you like black-out blinds, aircon that works, an isolated aspect or a kids' club? If you are travelling with children you might consider if the area is malarial, are their inter-connecting rooms, how far you are prepared to fly them. So... where then? The million dollar question. But the answer is not simple... it is dependent on a wide range of factors, including all the answers to the above questions, budget, time of year and how far you are prepared to travel from your safari. Below is a very oversimplified analysis of the main locations: The Seychelles If you have deep pockets, then North Island wins hands down with its glorious, non-tidal beaches, a small, beautifully appointed and well run lodge. BUT it does cost about E2200 per person per night (pppn). Also up there in the private island stakes are Denis and DesRoches, both private islands and far more sensibly priced, but these can be difficult to get to. The Seychelles definitely fulfils all private island dreams, but otherwise the best and most beautiful beaches on the main islands of Mahe and Praslin tend to be part of the big hotels. The Seychelles are also hard to get to and from, especially from mainland Africa. Advertisement Tanzania Still unspoilt, Tanzania is a great safari country with some very lovely Indian Ocean beach options that are easy to tack on and reasonably priced. Zanzibar has a wide range of small and large hotels, some on good breaches, some not, with good boat-based snorkelling and diving. The other main islands of Pemba and Mafia are better dive locations than they are swimming locations. Mnemba, Thanda and Fanjove are superb private islands with amazing beaches and the latter is not prohibitively expensive. Our great favourite is the tiny, rustic chic Ras Kutani, a superb beach lodge on the mainland but no diving or snorkelling. Northern Mozambique Hard and expensive to get to nowadays and usually accessed from Tanzania, there are a number of islands near Pemba in the Quirimbas archipelago that are worth travelling for! The jewel in the crown is Vamizi - a small lodge with a wonderful beach (though not cheap). Quilalea is more of a snorkelling or diving location, and we don't think the mainland beach lodges are worth the expense and effort to get to Southern Mozambique Not the easiest or cheapest to get to, most easily accessible from Johannesburg or Kruger National Park. The mainland beaches are fine yellow sand with waves, and with good diving and snorkelling - a particular favourite is White Pearl, south of Maputo. Most of the lodges, though, are in the Bazaruto archipelago on the islands of Benguerra or Bazarutu. Generally these lodges are great, but they are expensive and the beaches not amazing and are very tidal. Seriously good snorkelling, diving and fishing, however. Kenya Oh, poor Kenya, where did it all go wrong? Contrary to popular opinion there are a few nice, simple, (although expensive) lodges on the stretch from Mombassa to Malindi, but generally the hotels are either vast and horrid or pitched at the backpacker market. The coast is tidal and suffers from weed in the summer (which is illegal to remove in certain areas such as Watmu). And Kiwayu has struggled to make a comeback, perhaps just too close to the Somali border for comfort. Mauritius The domain of large hotels, buffet suppers and kids clubs. Some beautiful beaches but some very mediocre beaches too. Time of year is important here, as the East tends to be wetter and windier than the West... and there is no such thing as a small, bijou Mauritian hotel! Advertisement Madagascar The new kid on the block and much more accessible now with the new service from Johannesburg straight to Nosy Be. The infrastructure in Madagascar is still frustrating, but avoiding Antananarivo makes travelling here a lot better. Madagascar has great beaches and simple accommodation, although there are a few high end lodges being finished up as we write. Of particular note is the private island haven of Tsarabanjina, which is hotly anticipated as our next great favourite! The Maldives Not really accessible from Africa, the Maldives are a holiday destination in their own right (or combined with Southern India). Regardless of price, the different Maldivian islands tend to have everything that we dream of for our ultimate African island. The Maldives have an abundance of amazing, soft, white powdery sand, off the beach snorkelling, and many very fine lodges here are not outrageously expensive. The down sides are that many island lodges have a lot of rooms crammed onto a small island, and there are a lot of chain hotels (although there are some charming smaller lodges too). The coal industry is cracking, globally. Several nations are declaring themselves coal free, shutting down coal plants and withdrawing billions of potentially stranded coal investments. Meanwhile Peabody, the world's largest coal company, just filed for bankruptcy last week. And in Germany two remaining European bad boys, RWE & Vattenfall, are being chased (quite literally) by thousands of exceptionally determined activists. Here's why these people make a very good point. And why I've decided to join them, coming May, in the Lausitz region, south of Berlin. Advertisement The reason why the time of coal, therefore of coal companies has ended completely surpasses the direct 'work field' of destructive mining activity and heavily polluting power plants. Coal has already been bypassed by the world in its entirety. Paris. The countries of the world. Science. Real Science. And people - those representing all of life - wanting a Real Future. Want to burn your money? Buy a coal mine! The signing of the coal industry's death warrant comes not by us, but by banks, insurance companies, pension funds - it is the 22 trillion dollar carbon bubble that global financial investors are increasingly aware of. The best way to lose extremely large amounts of money, is invest in a coal company - or if you are a coal company - in buying up extra reserves, dear Energeticky a prumyslovy holding (EPH), a Czech coal company that just bought up German lignite (brown coal) reserves - apparently betting the world will return to the 19th century. Advertisement The coup the grace is the thousands of people that will join Break Free 2016 next month, the thousands of people who now demand coal companies wake up to reality - and simply go look for another job. I'm one of them, and below is why: We fought from pessimism to optimism. This transition is ours I did not have high hopes before Paris. Most of us did not. We had been mobilising massively, and fully aware of the odds. Then after the attacks we feared for the worst, a repeat of Copenhagen. But we came anyway, from across the world, and witnessing that extremely beautiful resilience of humanity, standing in the streets of Paris, from the very first day of the climate summit, was one of most touching and rewarding experiences of my life. It offered hope - hope in mankind. Hope that is captured in a number that has since echoed across the globe, from Pacific island states to the very political heart of Washington: one-point-five. It's after Paris now. We've agreed on the 1.5 degrees target. Well done - it makes sense. Now let's implement. Advertisement 1.5 simply excludes Coal: In Paris the world's political leaders actually approved your direct actions! Funny thing to realise: Whether you campaign against a coal mine in Germany, a coal plant in the UK, a coal port in the Netherlands, a coal company in Sweden, or any of the above in the US, Canada, Australia, France - anywhere really - you should know you have the support of your own government. How? Let's do a quick calculation. All above-mentioned countries agreed on the 1.5 ambition. Now even if we assume IPCC's dangerous underestimation of climate sensitivityand accept a 50 percent chance of overshoot, the 1.5 degrees target allows for just 8 years of current emissions to be spread out across the entire remainder of the century. Another way to put it, is we can continue the current consumption of fossil fuels for just 8 more years, if you believe the optimists. That means - under all scenarios - we have zero more years for coal, the most CO2-intensive of them all. And that means the thousands of people that will reclaim the open cast coal mines in the Lausitz this May, and all the other participants of Break Free 2016 across the globe, have got not only science and humanity, but also global politics on their side. Blocking each and every excavator, as a friendly reminder of undeniable facts Who is on the other side still? In essence only the coal companies. (And a very thin line of police in between - just to remind the (victorious) side of humanity and the (crumbling) side of the coal industry to stay peaceful, and of course we agree.) Advertisement Now let's end a bizarre situation that is long overdue and block each and every excavator we can get our hands on - until the entire industry comes to a grind, and all of humanity can let a cheer roar across our beautiful shared planet. The age of coal is over. For those who are still involved in that sector: It is sad, but after some 200 years your business model has ended. That's life. A bright future offers new chances though. Ende. Gelande. Break Free. See you there. When President Obama visits Saudi Arabia this week, he should dwell on the contradictions which have plagued his relationship with the Middle East throughout his presidency. His private disdain for Saudi Arabia, tribalism and sectarianism are well known, but these are at odds with his administration's continued, substantial support for these same states. The contradiction begin with civil rights. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in 1955, few could have predicted that an African American would be president just fifty-three years in the future. President Obama was born in 1961, into an America in the spasms of the civil rights movement. The ultimate success of American equal rights was in a future barely imaginable in a time of nuclear threat and Jim Crow laws. Little Abdulhadi was born in 2014, into the middle of the same climactic struggle which since 2011 has swept the Arab World. Today he is in prison with his mother. The Arab Spring has led to terror - literal, evil and unimagined - but it has also sparked a flowering movement for civil rights. Advertisement His mother, Zainab Al Khawaja, is currently serving a three years prison sentence in Bahrain for daring to express herself. She tore to shreds a portrait of the King of Bahrain, in a moment as resistant to oppression as Rosa Parks' refusal to stand up. The two acts have a single commonality: they fought repression with the extraordinarily ordinary. And that is because it remains a mark of a repressive regime that ordinary actions are made illegal. What could justify segregation sixty years ago? What can justify the repression of political opinion today? These questions go to the heart of American identity and foreign policy. Identity, because America must forever be proud in the success of the civil rights movement in the face of institutionalised racism. Foreign policy, because the United States has so frequently put itself at silent odds with the same movements abroad, when civil rights have not immediately suited its national self-interest. It could have been different. In 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushed for US bombs over Libya. In return for the Arab League's support, she conceded US support for the democratic movement in Bahrain. The expanding crack in the Gulf's facade of authoritarian stability was quickly concealed, and what could have been the first successful civil rights movement in the Gulf was traded for bombs over Libya which, while they no doubt helped shorten the burgeoning civil war, served in the long run only to quicken the North African country's collapse. With it, the opportunity for swift and peaceful democratization in Bahrain disappeared. The momentary toe-hold in the Gulf disappeared. Today, Saudi Arabia is on a violent war-path to regional hegemony: its war in Yemen, interventions in Syria, and hypocritical war against terrorism it has helped breed are all towards expanding the reach of one family. All the while, Bahrain sycophantically follows its neighbour into every new, impulsive venture: it was the first to expel Lebanese citizens from its land after Saudi Arabia's row with the Levantine state; the first to cut diplomatic ties with Iran after the execution of Saudi Arabian Shia dissidents in January; the first join Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen. Advertisement Last year, President Obama sent a clear message to his Gulf allies: "Strengthen your own societies. Be inclusive. Make sure that your Shia populations don't feel as if they're being left out. Think about the economic growth." It was a positive call, but barely begins to challenge the size of these problems. Take the Shia in Saudi Arabia: it is not simply that they "feel as if they're being left out". Saudi schoolchildren are taught that Shia are blasphemers and should be punished with death. It is no wonder that the Saudi Shia are a regular target for terrorist attacks, with bombings claiming dozens of lives in January this year and May and October last year. But the continues arms sales - $20 billion to Saudi Arabia since their intervention in Yemen - and silence on many free speech cases - Zainab Al Khawaja's is one of them - belies the rhetoric. Most alarming are the cases coming out of Saudi Arabia: the Shia youth facing crucifixion for his protest, an act of retribution aimed at his family: his uncle is Shia leader Nimr al-Nimr, whom the Saudi authorities silently executed this January past. This is President Obama's last chance to make a positive difference. His message of hope was infectious seven years ago, when he sent a message to Cairo and the Muslim world: "You must maintain your power through consent, not coercion; you must respect the rights of minorities, and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise; you must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party." That call to democracy has been undermined innumerable times since he came to power. Whatever his private misgivings, he has allowed his Saudi Arabian Wahhabi allies to spread their creed and supported their war in Yemen - a war apparently to restore the legitimate ruler, waged by one of the most repressive dictatorships in the world. President Obama calls Libya a "shit show". Nearly everything happening in the Arab World today could be called that. For eight years, opportunities have been squandered, and that "shit show" has spread from Iraq through Syria, Bahrain and Yemen to Egypt and Libya. Advertisement Small businesses will be among the biggest losers if Britain were to vote to leave the European Union (EU) on 23rd June - and they know it. Contrary to what the Leave campaign wants us to believe, an extensive survey of 10,000 small businesses found that 75% want to remain in the EU, and the figure is even higher - 82% - among small firms that actually do business in Europe, according to a survey by Goldman Sachs and Aston University. On the principle that "man bites dog" is more of a story than if it's the canine teeth that are doing the damage, so it's the business leader who is out of line who gets the media attention. Advertisement So it is with John Longworth, who has become a bit of a "Brexit" martyr after stepping down from his job as Director General of the British Chambers of Commerce. I have a good deal of respect for the work that Longworth did at the British Chambers of Commerce. He was a trenchant critic of the Government's failure to rebalance the economy towards infrastructure, exports and the region. But on the European Union, he could not be more wrong. His claim that "brighter economic future for itself" outside the EU is profoundly misguided. Zac Goldsmith, when recently asked at an Asian Business Awards dinner to name one benefit that would come to the hundreds of businesses in the room if Britain were to leave, could not give one example. I believe Longworth's claim is a betrayal of his former members. He is asking them to jump off a cliff and just to believe - against all the warnings from the IMF, OECD, the London School of Economics, the Treasury and others - that there will be no hard landing. He does not know how long the jump will be, or what the landing will be like. Advertisement The CBI puts the overall economic cost of leaving at 100billion with nearly a million lost jobs by 2020. Other analysts say the drop in GDP will cost us more than we might save in contributions to the European Union budget. And the 5-10 years "short term" uncertainty economists talk about could be an underestimate. Leaving the European Union would guarantee a bleak future for British business in general - and small businesses in particular. As is well known, he made his remarks at the BCC Annual Conference in a personal capacity - precisely because BCC members reject Brexit by a two to one majority. There are similar figures in surveys of other business organisation members. Small firms need stability and certainty to continue growing, not the disruption that a vote to leave the EU would bring. Small businesses are more globally-minded than ever before and Europe is their largest export market by far. Advertisement Around 100,000 small businesses export to the EU, but they would not the only losers from if we were to leave the EU. Many small firms are key parts of the supply chains of larger exporting companies. And small businesses are increasingly global in their outlook. According to the OECD, 40% of UK exports are part of a global supply chain. The European Single Market is especially important for small businesses that export. It gives them easy access to a market of 500million people. I was talking to a young tech entrepreneur in the North West this week. He stressed that businesses like his can become global in an instant, and being part of the European Union gave him much greater reach and opportunity to grow. If you were a new entrepreneur starting out - where would you prefer your enterprise to be based? Somewhere with a single set of rules for 28 nations - or in a country that had to contend with 27 separate bi-lateral agreements? Advertisement Small businesses couldn't afford to comply with multiple sets of rules. The fact is hundreds of thousands of small businesses know that membership of the European Union is in their interests. They believe that Brexit would be bad for them. As the referendum campaign picks up, their voices must be heard too. The UK's referendum on its continued membership of the European Union has attracted the attention of leaders from around the world. It is striking that many of them, from the Chinese President to the Irish Prime Minister, who would not continence interference from foreigners on matters so intrinsic to the national sovereignty of their own nations have no compunction about offering their views on Brexit - a British exit from the European Union. The next in line to do this is US President Barack Obama. He is so keen to make clear his support for the emerging European Super State that he is coming all the way to the UK to help the Remain campaign of his pal David Cameron. The support of the Chinese and the Irish leaders for Britain transferring more powers to unelected EU officials is understandable. One runs an authoritarian state whose communist party managed economy is under increasing pressure to liberalise or suffer significant downturn. The other runs a country that is utterly dependent on the largesse of the EU for its economic survival. The reasons why President Obama is going the extra miles to support Remain is less easy to discern. Like it or not, Obama carries a certain influence. Obama breaks the mould of what a politician should be. He may not be a statesman nor a geopolitical thinking President (like Nixon or Clinton for example). His failure to even try to tackle some of the world's major diplomatic issues during his first seven years in office (in Africa or the Middle East) is evidence of this. Yet, Obama has some celebrity value and has an appeal especially to celebrity obsessed younger voters. Consequently, it is important that the Leave campaign rebuts his arguments about how Britain would be better off by transferring its rights to govern its own affairs to EU institutions and not his arguments go unopposed. Advertisement The reality is that not many Americans (apart from President Obama and those who believe in Big Government solutions to cross border challenges) and other non-EU nations understand what the European Union is all about. Many think it is a free trade area and a loose group of countries which is intended to promote continental cooperation. They don't understand that the EU is a political union and that northern European member-states have to pay billions to be a part of this club. They don't understand that the EU is developing its own army and that the Brussels EU elite wants to diminish the power of the nation-state and move to a federal, United States of Europe, model. They forget the loss of border controls that EU states expereince and the importance to the British people of the loss of freedom and democracy that goes with this change of governance. Last month I visited the United States to make the case to key influencers and the US public about "Why Brexit is Good For America". I spoke to many members of congress, aides to presidential campaigns and sitting governors. People such as Governor Scott Walker and Senator Mike Lee, both of whom understand the positive impact that Brexit would have for America. I also spoke to hundreds of ordinary citizens and many supported the UK leaving the European Union. In fact, a common response to the Brexit briefing papers we were handing out was: "You (UK) should never have joined in the first place!". https://twitter.com/Steven_Woolfe/status/705749139783598080 Our principal arguments on why Brexit is good for America rested on four pillars: 1) If the UK leaves the EU, this will pave the way for a rapid bi-lateral free trade deal between the US and the UK, which many on both sides of the pond are interested in. The TTIP treaty currently going through the European Parliament is a bad deal and does not best fit the interests of the UK economy. Whilst we are in the EU, all trade deals have to be negotiated at an EU level. Let's leave and negotiate our trade deals once again. Advertisement 2) NATO, the bed rock of transatlantic security is being undermined by EU policymakers who are developing an EU army. If the EU continues down this path its actions will undermine NATO in what is a very uncertain world. 3) Leaving the EU will allow for Britain to have a fair, ethical migration policy which treats non-EU citizens equally to EU citizen who want to migrate to the UK. For far too long, American citizens have been classed as 'second class citizens' with respect to British immigration policy. Brexit will allow Britain to control her borders and have a migration policy which is fit for the demands of the 21st century. 4) Britain is the USA's strongest ally. A strong, independent, democratic Britain on the world stage better serves the interests of an oil independent America and the Anglosphere. As continental European nations centralise and pool their powers, Britain's influence on the world stage diminishes as long as she remains a member of the EU. Today the Government has announced that it would resettle more refugees from the region. You can be forgiven if you're now overcome by a sense of deja vu. On the 28 January the Government announced that it would "work with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to lead a new initiative to resettle unaccompanied children from conflict regions" and now they have come forward with the detail. If I was cynical I'd remark on the fact that this latest announcement comes just days before a crucial vote in the Commons which would force the Tories to take 3,000 vulnerable child refugees from Europe and it seems that the Government are trying to buy off MPs ahead of that. Of course the Government's latest capitulation to take up to 3,000 individuals from the Syrian region over the next four years is welcome but it is simply not enough. When I travelled to Greece earlier this month I saw thousands of refugee children languishing in camps that were overstretched and understaffed. Tens of thousands of vulnerable children travelling alone arrived in Europe last year - this latest announcement will do nothing for them. Instead they will continue to live on food rations, without access to education and without hope or fall prey to traffickers and those who would exploit them. Advertisement Even on the personnel side the Government is failing to step up to the plate. Today's announcement includes an offer of 75 experts to help the Greek authorities 'process' refugees as part of the new EU-Turkey deal. Given that the EU has estimated they will need 4,000 staff to do this effectively and efficiently we must do more. If the Government is committed to following through on a deal that has been widely condemned by international NGOs and now the Council of Europe we should at least properly resource it to ensure that the families caught up in it are processed quickly and in a dignified manner. The only silver lining is the Government's commitment to use the Dublin regulations and family reunion rules to proactively find those refugees who have family links to the UK. If the Government really are "committed to providing safe and legal routes for the most vulnerable refugees from Syria to resettle to the UK" as the statement professes then they would widen family reunion rules and I will continue to call for them to do this. I am convinced that this announcement in its totality is a desperate attempt to try and stop compassionate MPs voting to take 3,000 children from Europe on Monday but I would be surprised if any MP falls for it. I certainly haven't. Alamy The federal government has revealed it is prepared to use military options to respond to cyber attacks on Australia, as Malcolm Turnbull unveiled a $230 million package to boost Australia's online security -- and apparently we're worried about hackers targeting our refrigerators. The new Cyber Security Strategy, released on Thursday, outlines a four-year plan to bolster Australia's ability to "detect, deter and respond" to electronic threats. A new Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on cyber security will be appointed, as will Australias first Cyber Ambassador through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, while capabilities to prevent or minimise threats will be increased through extra support to the Computer Emergency Response Team, the Australian Crime Commission, the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Cyber Security Centre. Advertisement But the headline news out of the report is that the government is willing to use military intervention to hit back at cyber attacks and threats. "The Government must also be ready to respond to incidents when they occur. Cyber incidents do not necessarily need a cyber response and the Government can draw on a range of options, including law enforcement, diplomatic, economic or evenas a last resortmilitary responses to a cyber attack," the report said. "Any measure used by Australia in deterring and responding to malicious cyber activities would be consistent with our support for the international rules-based order and our obligations under international law." Advertisement A graphic from the report The strategy continues a trend, with February's defence white paper outlining the multi-billion dollar purchase of electronic and cyber warfare equipment, including 12 Growler "electronic attack aircraft" which can "disrupt, disable and/or confuse adversaries systems such as radar and command, control, communications, computers and intelligence systems." The white paper said 1200 cyber security attacks were detected in 2015, including some against Australian government agencies. In a foreword to the cyber security report, Prime Minister Turnbull said cyber attacks on the public and private sector, as well as individuals, were "unprecedented"; while the report itself claims Australian organisations "have been compromised." It follows reports in December that computers at the Bureau of Meteorology were targeted in a sophisticated cyber attack. On Thursday, Turnbull confirmed government agencies had been targeted recently. "I can confirm reports that the Bureau of Meteorology suffered a significant cyber intrusion which was first discovered early last year. And the department of Parliamentary Services suffered a similar intrusion in recent years," he said. The report said that the internet based economy contributed $79 billion to the Australian economy around 5 per cent of GDP -- in 2014, with estimates this could grow to $139 billion, 7.3 per cent of GDP, by 2020. "Worldwide, losses from cyber security attacks are estimated to cost economies around one per cent of GDP per year. On this basis, the real impact of cybercrime to Australia could be around $17 billion annually," the report said. Advertisement "These costs are expected to rise. Government, telecommunications, resources, energy, defence, banking and finance sectors are likely to remain key targets for cyber criminals and malicious state actors alike." Other parts of the strategy include: $30 million for a Cyber Security Growth Centre focus on training "highly-skilled cyber security professionals" 100 new government jobs in cyber security capacity and capabilities annual cyber security meetings, hosted by the Prime Minister, with business and research community leaders boosting the capacity of the Australian Cyber Security Centre and the Australian Signals Directorate boosting the number of threat detection and awareness, technical analysis and forensic assessments of cybercrime in the Australian Crime Commission and the Australian Federal Police Voluntary cyber security governance health checks for organisations Greens communications spokesperson Senator Scott Ludlam said in a statement he "welcomed" the news, but also took the opportunity to attack the government over its other communications policies including broadband and data retention. "We agree with Prime Minister Turnbull that the internet is the most important tool for innovation in Australia, so well keep fighting his efforts to cripple the National Broadband Network," Ludlam said. "We agree that the internet should be open and free, so well keep fighting the intrusive Liberal/Labor data retention scheme that places every Australian under surveillance." Advertisement The government is also telling us to check on our fridges; no, it's not the start of a bad joke (no, our fridge isn't running, so we don't need to go catch it). As the "internet of things" -- the term used to refer to internet capabilities being embedded in everyday items like light switches and kitchen appliances -- grows, there is also increasing opportunity for hackers to target those devices. "The range of possible targets is expanding from computers and phones to other devices connected to the Internet of Things, such as cars, fridges and medical equipment," the report said. PLGRM MEDIA School children in Melbourne's outer west are now sharing their grounds with 28-year-old Vincent Shin, after a two year pilot program placed the family violence survivor at Grange P-12 College, as an in-house lawyer. In an Australian first, Shin represents all students and their parents with any legal matters from public transport fines to domestic violence issues. Advertisement About $180,000 has been donated to the program, which placed the 28-year-old at the school last June. In one year Shin, who worked in the child protection system for three years during law school, has seen many cases of family violence and helped either the child or parent file an intervention order. "Every region in Australia has a legal centre, which is a free legal service. Regardless of whether I'm at the school or not, these people need to see somebody. So it just makes sense that instead of them coming to us, we just come to them," Shin told The Huffington Post Australia. "One of the objectives of this project is early intervention and prevention. And how better can you achieve that than by having a lawyer right there, right when it all happens?" And Shin, who grew up with a violent father, has his own story which he not only tells the children at school, but told in a short documentary by media network PLGRM which you can watch here. Advertisement Founder and CEO of PLGRM Kristian Michail told The Huffington Post Australia "stories like Vincent's give us the courage to be real, to be vulnerable, to be human." "The conversation of domestic violence has well and truly bolted from the gates now, and it is time that we as a community begin to transform the future for the next generation of families, marriages, children and leaders." At the premiere on Wednesday night, Shin was joined by AFL Player Jimmy Bartel and Victoria's Commissioner for Children Liana Buchanan to speak on the panel -- to a room of 200 people -- about the family violence they've all experienced. Bartel broke his silence about growing up with a violent father, former AFL player Terry Bartel, in March. The video airs in the same month the Victorian Government announced it will be spending more than half a billion dollars to combat family violence, which you can read all about here. The funding addresses 65 of the 200 recommendations made in the state's Royal Commission into Family Violence. Advertisement "Now is the time to talk about it and, if anything, I feel because there's so much already out there, I'll add my piece to help change the way people perceive family violence," Shin told HuffPost Australia. Shin, who is still technically employed by West Justice Community Legal Centre, will leave the school once the pilot program ends in mid-2017 if philanthropic or state funding isn't put forward. But the 28-year-old thinks funding should be extended not only to his position, but to a position in every school around the country. Inside Sanders' plan to gather enough superdelegates to take the nomination, a strategy at odds with his supporters' calls that the superdelegates follow the will of the people. [Amanda Terkel and Sam Stein, HuffPost] "I'm thrilled to announce HuffPost's acquisition of the virtual reality and immersive storytelling company RYOT, and the creation of HuffPost RYOT. Together, we'll be able to build on HuffPost's video offerings to bring an entirely new range of experiences to our global audience, from virtual reality to full-length films and 360." [Arianna Huffington, HuffPost] And while Alexander Hamilton will remain the face of the $10 bill, women's suffrage leaders will also feature on the back of its new version. [Paige Lavender, HuffPost] Advertisement Breaking down his possible pathway to winning the last 390 of the 1,237 delegates he needs to avoid a convention scuffle for the nomination. [NYT] "Russian attack submarines, the most in two decades, are prowling the coastlines of Scandinavia and Scotland, the Mediterranean Sea and the North Atlantic in what Western military officials say is a significantly increased presence aimed at contesting American and NATO undersea dominance." [NYT] WHAT'S BREWING The famed Red Sox pitcher was let go for a transphobic tweet, just a month after he returned from a suspension for an anti-Muslim tweet. [HuffPost] Advertisement Until at least Tuesday. Cue "Bad Blood" for her and former buddy Michael Strahan on his sudden move to GMA. [HuffPost] Watch and learn. [NYT] Again. Seriously, does she age? [People] Through 2018. Nice. [The Wrap] Some rough stats today. [HuffPost] For more from The Huffington Post, download our app for iOS or Android. WHAT'S WORKING "Spanish design firm Estudi Moline has found a way to breathe new life into the ashes of loved ones with the Bios Urn, a biodegradable urn that grows into a tree." [HuffPost] For more, sign up for the What's Working newsletter. BEFORE YOU GO ~ Breaking down the top polluted U.S. cities as world leaders gather Friday to sign the Paris climate accord. ~ Top WWE star Chyna is dead at 45. ~ According to Jon Huntsman, the Republican Party will survive Donald Trump. Probably. ~ This bride rocked pajamas to her wedding for her dying mother-in-law. ~ Are you the rooftop bar person in your friend group? ~ This new clip throws all the "Game of Thrones" fans into quite a conspiracy frenzy. ~ Happy Thursday -- here's a calendar of firefighters holding puppies. ~ This story will teach you to maybe not ask people to arm wrestle on the first date. Just, ouch. Lucien Masumbuko, a student receiving emergency education support at a school in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Source: OCHA Gemma Cortes By Stephen O'Brien and Kevin J. Jenkins In the next decade, most of the world's acutely vulnerable people will be living in fragile and conflict-affected cities and States. If current trends persist, conflict will continue to consume 80 percent of humanitarian funding, setting back development by trillions of dollars. In 2014, over 13 per cent of the global economy was drained away by violence and war. The costs of protracted violence and deepening fragility will lead to lost childhoods, lost lives and lost opportunities. We must find a better way to not only save lives now, but also to address the root causes of fragility and build resilience over the long term. Doing so must be underpinned by strong political leadership to resolve and prevent conflict. The human and financial costs of not doing so are simply too high. In the absence of political solutions from Syria to Iraq to the Central African Republic, there are severe limits to what principled humanitarian action can achieve. Advertisement When it comes to addressing fragility, international leaders, the United Nations and civil-society partners made history with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development when they pledged to leave no-one behind and to reach those furthest behind first. In doing so, international leaders promised to put the needs and priorities of the most-vulnerable people at the forefront of all development efforts. Turning this promise into action is fundamental to realizing the UN Secretary-General's vision for the first-ever World Humanitarian Summit on 23 and 24 May in Istanbul: to commit to moving from delivering aid to ending need. To end need, we must stop thinking about relief and development as a sequence. Instead, we must find new ways to comprehensively reduce vulnerability and risk while in tandem meeting pressing humanitarian needs in line with humanitarian principles. This shift will disrupt our current model, in which humanitarian, development, peace, security and other institutions simultaneously work on different projects to different time frames and budgets within the same communities. Instead, wherever operationally possible, national Governments, humanitarian and development agencies, civil society and the private sector will need to work together to set common goals and outcomes over multiple years. This will require us to work transparently to develop a common understanding of the risks and vulnerabilities people face in each context and prioritizing how to address them together. It will require each of us to overcome institutional barriers and plan our work based on each institution devoting their best services, skills and experience, context by context. We look to an end to the short-term projects, launched year after year, which have dominated humanitarian response for the past decades and provided little strategic vision for focusing on results for the people we serve. In the cases of DRC, Somalia and Sudan, annual appeals have been repeated for 13 years running. People do not want simply to survive; they want to improve their life prospects and those of their children. Long-term improvement requires genuine partnerships with local partners built on trust, sustainable support, and sharing of resources and knowledge. Advertisement Partners must, where appropriate, support existing national and regional capacity, scaling it up and complementing it when necessary, rather than replacing national systems with heavy international ones. This should be done without impinging on the humanitarian principles of neutrality, impartiality, independence and humanity. In the right context, humanitarian cash-based programmes should become the norm, not the exception, and they should build on national and regional safety nets that can strengthen social-protection systems. World Vision and many others offer assistance in the form of cash in responses as diverse as Lebanon and Jordan, South Sudan and Nepal. Going forward, cash assistance will be increasingly crucial to promote the resilience and dignity of children, families and communities affected by disasters. We must also transform the way that we invest in reducing vulnerability. It is common sense to act early to reduce risk rather than waiting for full-blown crises to play out. Predictable multi-year funding would enable better strategic planning for impact, rather than the current model that focuses on agencies' outputs. We need the transparency of medium-term goals for assessing whether we are truly reducing needs. To achieve all this, we must stop supporting isolated projects that prolong the fragmentation of services and the chaos after a crisis. Businesses, civil society, faith groups and youth each have a vital role in bridging the divide between relief and development. OCHA and World Vision are engaged in relationships with a variety of partners that are giving better outcomes. Examples are diverse and include the private sector in East Africa, faith groups in West Africa as part of the Ebola response, and civil-society leaders and youth in the Central African Republic. We are sure that as we scale up these relationships around the world, we will increase the quality, reach and effectiveness of our responses. Starting with the commitments we make at the World Humanitarian Summit, we must all agree to stop simply providing supplies to the world's most exposed, defenseless people. Instead, we must listen to them and their calls for self-sufficiency and help in reducing their vulnerability over the long term. At the Summit, World Vision will put forward bold commitments relating to financing, urban response and innovation, child protection, peacebuilding and partnerships. The UN Secretary-General is calling for strong commitments from global leaders, donors, business, investors and aid agencies to make the necessary changes that leave no one behind, and which close the relief-to-development divide once and for all. Advertisement __________________________ Stephen O'Brien is the Emergency Relief Coordinator and Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs **** NEWS FLASH - LATEST PEARSON TEST DEBACLE **** On Wednesday, April 20, 2016, New Jersey was forced to cancel high-stakes PARCC exams when students could not access the exams online. New Jersey Education Commissioner David C. Hespe called the Pearson Access Next (PAN) system malfunction "totally unacceptable." Pearson, who administers the online standardized tests said "sorry" for the mass disruption and blamed a technical glitch. The Pearson stockholders meeting in London on April 29 is the next stop in the global campaign to stop Pearson's destructive misuse of education. Pearson activities are being tracked by organizations like Education International (EI). According to EI researcher Curtis Riep of the University of Alberta, Pearson's business strategy is to turn education from a social good and essential public service into a marketable for-profit commodity. In the United States and the global-North, Pearson primarily markets much detested high-stakes tests that push rather than assess curriculum and learning. It is also big in selling data management programs of questionable value (once you have the data what are you supposed to do with it?) and digital learning platforms that are supposed to enhance (substitute for") instruction. In the global South, Pearson is selling "low fee" "Pay As You Learn" private schools to the poorest segments of society in Ghana, India, South Africa and the Philippines. Pearson makes its profit partly by hiring low paid unqualified people to work in the schools. In Ghana, high school graduates who act as teachers are paid between 15 and 20% less than what trained teachers earn in the nation's public schools. Advertisement While Pearson claims its schools, which are sold as an alternative to public education, offer access to basic education to the most marginalized populations, they actually charge much more than many poor people can afford to pay. For example, in Ghana, a low-income family would have to pay approximately 40% of their earnings to send just one child to a Pearson school. In the Philippines, Pearson schools are explicitly designed, not to educate pupils, but to "produce a repository of cheap and flexible labour that can be employed by multinational corporations operating in the Philippines." The Pearson schools in the Philippines and Ghana are part of the company's eleven equity investments in programs across Asia and Africa that currently "serve" over 360,000 students. The company invested $50 million in these projects and hopes to corral more than a million students by 2020. Overall, the global education market is estimated to be worth $5.5 trillion, but it is not clear whether students, their families, and Third World nations will be "served" and even whether Pearson will ever be able to earn a profit. A 2014 review of low-cost private schools published Great Britain's Department for International Development found "weak and inconclusive evidence" that the schools are truly affordable or accessible to the poor. One of the committee's advisors, Michael Barber, is now Pearson's chief education guru. Teacher unions and teacher pension funds from the United States and the United Kingdom and their supporters are taking the fight against Pearson malfeasance to its stockholders meeting. Advertisement The Chicago Teachers' Pension Fund has contacted approximately 70% of Pearson shareholders to make a "business case" demanding that the Pearson Board or Directors reverse the company's "strategic direction." The coalition demanding that Pearson end efforts to privatize education in Third World countries and stop promoting high-stakes testing and test prep in the United States holds almost 200,000 voting shares of Pearson stock. According to a pension fund letter to shareholders, Pearson's business strategy has failed to produce long-term growth, eroded shareholder value, and poisoned its corporate brand name, especially in the United States, a market that produces two-thirds of the company's revenue. Eleonas April 19, 2016 Upon arriving in Greece almost a week ago, the biggest question I had was this: How can Greece, in the midst of a major economic depression, also manage the refugee crises? The answer, it turns out, is that the Greek people - from officials, to everyday residents - have actually handled it pretty well, and appear to be getting better at every turn. Altogether, I visited six refugee sites in Greece. The last one was the Eleonas camp in Athens. Eleonas is designed to host refugees while they wait out what is likely a six to twelve-month asylum application process. Refugees are not housed in tents in Eleonas. Gone is the acrid smell which permeated the unofficial refugee site at Idomeni, and there is a state of the art medical unit located here. About 900 residents live in units which look like small trailers, sleep eight, and have bathrooms with showers inside. The army arranged the 110 trailers in orderly rows, and in record time. I asked where they got the prefabricated units. "They were in storage, to be used in case of a major earthquake in Athens," a Greek camp-manager told me. When I joked that she'll have nowhere to go if there's an earthquake, she just laughed, as if it hadn't occurred to her. Soon after, she made a passing mention of her husband. I had already noticed that she was wearing a rainbow pin, the symbol of LGBT pride. This wasn't the first time on my trip that I'd seen a camp official wearing one. I learned that wearing these pins was a way to signal to LGBT refugees that they are safe, and a way to send all residents a message of tolerance in their new home. Advertisement Eleonas Camp The Greek ministry in charge of the refugee crisis is very proud of the Eleonas site. In fact, the minister himself was on site a few minutes after our tour. Not only are the facilities significantly upgraded from the temporary reception locations, the services are too. Children are starting to go to school, and the neighborhood elementary schools in this area of Athens are making room, and developing special programs for them. There are also education programs for adults, English and Greek are the most popular. The biggest challenge for refugees in Greece at the moment is the registration process for those seeking asylum. Until the border was closed in Idomeni, just a few weeks ago, very few refugees sought to apply in Greece. They were on their way to Germany, where many had family and friends who had already arrived, and where jobs far more plentiful. Faced with what could be the immediate filing of 50,000 applications, the government is trying to stand up a system overnight. Its not going well. To start the process, they need to sign up via Skype. The system can handle about 100 applications per day, and crashes constantly. In the meantime, the police papers that people receive as they entry the country, which give them legal status for one to six months, depending on where they come from, are starting to expire. Advertisement It is worrisome. But overall, the process appears to be grinding to a start, and the biggest challenge is still trying to convince those in unofficial sites - like up in Idomeni on the border - to trust that the system will work, and they should relocate to these organized, longer-term camps where the conditions are much more humane, much more livable. In the meantime, people continue to work to help the refugees. Everywhere I went I asked about how the Greeks were reacting to the newcomers. Generally, the answer that came back was that they were greeting them with kindness, support and empathy. VIDEO: We chat with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Luis Miranda, Jr, and the Girls of Girl Be Heard When you think of a spotlight, it's hard to imagine a brighter one than the one shining on the Broadway juggernaut, Hamilton, and its creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda. Whether he is rapping for the President of the United States, winning a Pulitzer Prize or appearing on countless talk shows, the recent success of the hit musical about its namesake Alexander Hamilton has shot Lin-Manuel to meteoric fame. However the musical about history is not where he wants to mark his place in it. He wants to be remembered as a person who is his driven to bring about equality and change. Girl Be Heard honored that drive presenting Lin-Manuel and his father Luis Miranda, Jr. with their first ever Fairy Godfather award. This title recognizes the road paved by them as champions of equality. I've had the pleasure to get to know the girl-led social justice theatre company that helps young girls overcome mountainous obstacles and hardships they face to find their voice. Girl Be Heard encourages, inspires, and ignites a fire within young women providing a safe space to not only create incredible theatrical experiences, but to develop confidence, overcome, and believe there is opportunity for all. Advertisement Photo: Spotlight On Giving Lin-Manuel Miranda and his father, Luis Miranda, Jr. are no strangers to the fight for equality and finding theatre as an outlet. Luis has sat on numerous Boards and worked on behalf of countless nonprofit organizations. He is currently the chairperson of the Broadway League's Latino audience development program, Viva Broadway, and he has known Girl Be Heard's Co-Founder, Jessica Morris, for years as they share a passion for community advocacy. Girl Be Heard Fairy Godfathers Lin Manuel Miranda, Luis Miranda, Jr. I had the honor to speak with the exemplary father and son prior to the ceremony. I asked Lin-Manuel the earliest memory he had when he first realized female inequality. "It was probably on a cellular level before I was ever conscious of it, growing up as a boy in a Puerto Rican household and being the baby boy getting more than my sister got," he responded. "It starts on a family level and you see how that spreads systemically. Organizations like Girl Be Heard help address that." Girl Be Heard started as a small nonprofit in 2008 with just 12 girls, and has now grown to 170 members ranging from ages 12-21. It's an international movement that engages local & global audiences in schools, refugee camps, faith-based communities, detention centers, as well as the White House, the United Nations, and even TED conferences. I can tell you firsthand that I have witnessed this movement, and how it has literally saved girls' lives. Through performing arts, the girls tackle such harsh topics such as eating disorders, sexism, abuse, depression, and suicide. The vital work of Girl Be Heard has helped wonderful young women break out of stereotypes and escape insurmountable odds, helping them realize their full potential. The girls are finding their voices and through role models such as Luis Miranda and Lin-Manuel Miranda, now feel their voices have a place. Advertisement As one member of Girl Be Heard, Veronica Marks, eloquently stated during her performance, "When I thought theatre was twenty years behind, Hamilton pushed it fifty years ahead.... Hamilton proved that theatre is for all the people who have never seen themselves in it. I realized that not only is theatre filled with possibility but that it IS possibility. Not only that it demands reinvention but that WE have the power to reinvent it." In his acceptance speech, Lin-Manuel Miranda spoke of a colleague who told him he was creating ripples through his work like throwing a rock in a pond. He tearfully said seeing the girls perform made him feel like the tide was coming in; it humbled him and overwhelmed him. If this performance is any indication, these girls will create a wave of talent, power, and grace that will come to shore for many years to come. The last song in Hamilton begs the question "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story." Through the work of the likes of Lin-Manuel Miranda, Luis Miranda Jr., and Girl Be Heard, these young girls will continue to live, overcome, and tell their story. Image: Armenia Flag Fingerprint. Stock Photo. Pixabay.com The most significant human rights problem in Armenia last year was elites' use of their positions to consolidate their power, enrich themselves and corrupt the law-enforcement and judicial processes, according to a new U.S. State Department report. Although business elites were part of the problem, the main culprits were leaders of the current government administration, President Serzh Sargsyan's Republican Party of Armenia, the report contends. Among the dozens of other human-rights problems the report identifies are: -- police abuse of power, including beatings and torture to obtain confessions. -- bullying deaths of military cadets and conscripts. -- government attempts to force university administrators, faculty and even student councils to support Republican Party of Armenia policies. Advertisement The report is part of the State Department's annual assessment of the state of human rights in countries around the world. It covers subjects as diverse as election violations, treatment of journalists and domestic abuse. The report offered several examples of the Republican Party of Armenia's efforts to enhance its power in order to prolong its rule. One was a constitutional amendment that changed Armenia's political system from semi-presidential to parliamentary. The Sargsyan administration rushed the amendment through parliament, then put on a public-relations blitz to persuade the public to approve it. And in the end, it did pass. Advertisement Civil-service managers who owed their jobs to the administration put pressure on public-service employees to vote for the amendment, according to many news reports. Another administration attempt to consolidate its power involved Sargsyan going after an opposition leader whose supporters planned protests against the constitutional amendment. Sargsyan's target, Gagik Tsarukyan, a wealthy businessman turned politician, was the head of the country's second-largest party, Prosperous Armenia. Sargsyan blasted him on national television, stripped him of his National Security Council position, told law-enforcement and tax officials to investigate whether he had committed crimes or engaged in tax evasion, and threatened to strip him of his seat in parliament. Authorities also launched tax-evasion and other investigations into additional Prosperous Armenia leaders. Advertisement Tsarukyan joined many of those leaders in giving up public life. The effect of Sargsyan's initiative was to neuter almost overnight the only political party that could mount a serious challenge to the Republican Party of Armenia's rule. The State Department report contained even more examples of police misconduct than political misconduct. "Police abuse of suspects during their arrest, detention and interrogation remained a significant problem," it said, adding: "Most victims did not report abuses due to fear of retaliation." In addition to beatings, the mistreatment included electric shocks and putting gas masks over suspects' heads to make them fear they would be suffocated. Armenia allows non-governmental organizations to see what goes on in its detention centers and prisons, but not its police stations. So the majority of police misconduct occurred in the stations, the State Department report said. Advertisement In addition to using violence to obtain confessions, police threatened violence against suspects' family members, according to the report. In one instance, police tried without success to obtain a confession from a husband and wife. They finally told the couple that if they continued being uncooperative, their underage daughter, who was also in police custody, could be raped, the report said. Military officials and civilian prosecutors and judges banded together to try to cover up the bullying deaths of cadets and conscripts, according to the report. In some instances, military police leaned on those who had seen bullying deaths to lie about what happened, the report said. In other instances, investigators destroyed or replaced evidence, including fingerprints. The bullying death that generated the most headlines was four military-academy cadets' attempt to make their murder of another cadet appear to be a suicide. The four placed the already dead cadet in a noose suspended from the ground so it would look like he hung himself. Advertisement One of the four was the son of a deputy director of the Vazgen Sargsyan Military Academy who used his father's position to get away with outrageous behavior, the report said. The section of the State Department report dealing with government leaders' interference in university affairs said their motivation was to intimidate administrators, faculty and even students into supporting Republican Party of Armenia policies. Several government leaders' seats on university boards made it difficult for university communities to oppose their bidding. The board members included President Serzh Sargsyan, who headed the trustees at Armenia's most prestigious university, Yerevan State. The government's pressure on universities made the news when students at Gyumri State Economic University protested faculty attempts to sway student-council elections. Government officials had asked the faculty to help insure the election of a council that would support Sargsyan-administration views. The full State Department report is comprehensive, going into a lot more dimensions of human rights than a news article can cover. Advertisement To find the report, go to this link, then click on "Go to a Country Report," and select Armenia. 11.5 million documents and dozens of scandals later, the implications of history's largest leak have only begun to unfold. In early April, 2016, the International Consortium of Journalists leaked a wealth of sensitive documents known as the Panama Papers. The leak consisted of 2.6 terabytes of data from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, and linked 140 world leaders from more than 50 companies to secret offshore accounts in 21 different tax havens. Advertisement The use and abuse of offshore accounts has long been controversial. The practice involves individuals or companies opening bank accounts in low-tax jurisdictions -- of which Panama is one -- to gain monetary privacy and avoid taxation. Though the avoidance itself is largely legal, shell companies and the like are known to be associated with illegal activities like tax evasion, money laundering, fraud, and the underground economy. The Panama Papers cracked into a vault of well-kept secrets and potentially ill-gotten wealth, revealing vast corruption among the world's political elite. The major revelation, however, is not that powerful humans hoard billions in offshore banks, but rather the detail in the proof of their dealings. The Panama Papers are, in fact, larger than WikiLeaks in 2010 and the Snowden's NSA leak in 2013 combined. The sheer breadth of information unveiled will help investigators understand how the industry evolved over time, and how individuals and corporations work together to shield their wealth. The impact of this massive leak is likely to reverberate for a long time, whether or not changes come about as a result. Here are some of the effects that we are beginning to see as a result. Advertisement 1. Lost credibility Politicians and companies in Europe, Africa, South America, and Asia were implicated in the leak, investigations have been opened in Britain, Germany, France, Australia, Belgium, among others. The revelation is proving most troublesome in Europe, where times are tough and populations most demanding of accountability. The prime minister of Iceland stepped down due to a conflict of interest between his offshore dealings and banking negotiations, and UK's PM David Cameron is under scrutiny over shares he himself owned before taking office, which clash in an ugly way with his administration's transparency claims. This could also potentially impact the upcoming Brexit referendum: Britain's decision whether or not to leave the European Union could be tilted in favor of an exit. In countries like Brazil, the leak has added fuel to the flames of heated protests, linking Mossack Fonseca to the nation's corruption scandal and the President's impending impeachment trial. Under authoritarian regimes, the impact will be less damaging. In Russia, where multiple individuals that appear to be part of Vladimir Putin's "inner circle" were implicated, the incident is being branded "Putin-phobia" and ignored; in China, a censorship campaign seeks to curb online discussion on the leak, which implicated President Xi's brother-in-law. Advertisement 2. A new light on corruption The Panama Papers prove that corruption is much more widespread than believed. That's saying something, because it was already pretty bad: the annual Corruption Perceptions Index, most recently found that serious corruption problems were perceived by citizens in 70 percent of nations. Countries in Africa have consistently ranked the worst on the CPI, and the continent stands out as one people frequently associate with corruption: case and point, the Ugandan company that avoided $400 million in taxation, more than the entire country's annual health budget. Now, it has become apparent that corruption is an international problem. The leak has also proven that it's not just governments, but private individuals and corporations involved in morally dubious dealings. If you're wondering where the U.S. comes into play, the answer is that it doesn't for the most part. Panama is not a tax haven for the United States, and in fact, it is much easier to create a shell company in any U.S. state than it would be to do so there. As President Obama stated, "There are folks here in America who are taking advantage of the same stuff... the laws are so poorly designed that they allow people, if they've got enough lawyers and enough accountants, to wiggle out of responsibilities that ordinary citizens are having to abide by." Advertisement 3. Pressure to clean up Investigations have been launched, outrage has been ignited, and public figures have sworn to take the matter seriously and pass laws that reflect their disdain. To put a significant dent in the practice, though, would require much more than may be feasible. There will be pressure for tax reform, crackdowns on evasion, and international cooperation. Nations, companies, and wealthy individuals will be pressured into cleaning up their act, at least on the surface. There is promise, however: tax investigators from over 28 countries will meet in Paris to launch an international inquiry into the leak to better understand the offshore industry. In addition, Panama's President Juan Carlos Varela said the government will create an international committee of experts to recommend improvements in transparency in the offshore financial industry, which would share its findings with other nations in the interest of taking a united front. Even so, it is more likely that this pressure will bubble into resentment than change. With attitudes toward the political establishment and elite already sour, the Panama Papers leak reaffirms and amplifies populations' perception that the rich and the powerful play by different rules. Unsurprisingly, it will take more than 2.6 terabytes to curb global-scale greed. Adult man in black&red underwear holding/hiding/protecting his penis, isolated on white background. Another day, another round of uncritical media coverage of an empirical study about circumcision and sexual function. That's including from the New York Times, whose Nicholas Bakalar has more or less recycled the content of a university press release without incorporating any skeptical analysis from other scientists. That's par for the course for Bakalar. The new study is by Jennifer Bossio and her colleagues from Queen's University in Ontario, Canada: it looked at penile sensitivity at various locations on the penis, comparing a sample of men who had been circumcised when they were infants (meaning they had their foreskins surgically removed), with a sample of men who remained genitally intact (meaning they kept their foreskins into adulthood). Advertisement What did the researchers discover? According to a typical headline from the past few days: "Circumcision does not reduce penis sensitivity." But that's not what the study showed. Before we get into the details of the science, and looking just at this claim from the "headline" conclusion, it might be helpful to review some basic anatomy. Genital Anatomy 101 Lesson #1. The foreskin is part of the penis. It is made up of sensitive tissue (more on this below); so if you remove it, the penis loses sensitivity by definition. Specifically, it loses all of the sensitivity experienced in the foreskin itself, along with all subjective sensations that are unique to having a foreskin. Chief among these sensations is the feeling of rolling the foreskin back and forth over the head of the penis--the "glans"--during sex, foreplay, or masturbation (see this NSFW video to get the idea): that specific feeling does not exist without a foreskin. Advertisement Lesson #2. Imagine a study that claimed to show that removing a girl's labia minora--her vaginal "lips"--did not reduce the sensitivity of the vulva. "That doesn't make any sense," you might say. "The labia are part of the vulva!" Quite right. And just like the foreskin, they are richly supplied with nerve endings, blood vessels, and sebaceous glands that provide natural lubrication during sexual activity. Depending on one's sexual preferences, the labia can be tugged, stretched, sucked on, and otherwise "played with" as a part of one's sexual experience; the same thing is true of the foreskin. So if a girl has her labia removed (which is a federal crime in most Western countries), or if a boy has his foreskin removed, neither one will be able to experience any of the subjective sensations that go along with those specific activities when they grow up and become sexually active. They also won't be able to "compare" their sexual experiences with a version of themselves from an alternate universe in which their genitals had been left intact when they were children: this point will become important later on. Advertisement Lesson #3. The United States is the only developed country that practices routine circumcision on a majority of newborn boys for non-religious reasons. Circumcision in this context is often described as "just a little snip," and the foreskin as "a tiny flap of skin." I won't go into the details of what a circumcision surgery actually involves (here is a video for those who are not too squeamish), but "little snip" is not an accurate description. As for the foreskin itself, it is not a "flap of skin," but rather a double-layered, retractable, invertible sheath of tissue that functions seamlessly with the rest of the penis (here's another video); and it's only "tiny" when it's connected to a baby. The adult foreskin has on average 30 to 50 square centimeters of tissue surface area (roughly the size of a credit card), with numerous specialized nerve endings that respond to tactile stimulation. Another (rough) analogy So let me try another analogy. Saying that removing the foreskin "doesn't reduce penis sensitivity" is a bit like saying that removing the pinky finger doesn't reduce hand sensitivity. What you really mean is that removing the pinky finger (which is part of the hand) doesn't reduce sensitivity in the remaining fingers--although, as we'll see, it's not even clear that this part of the analogy holds up in the actual study. In other words, it's an odd way to frame the hypothesis. To continue the analogy, my guess is that most people--if faced with the claim that removing the pinky finger doesn't reduce sensitivity of the hand--would say, "But what about the pinky finger itself?!" And they would be right to say it. The only reason you wouldn't think to ask a similar question about the foreskin--vis-a-vis the rest of the penis, of which it is a part--is if you lived in a country where it had become the habit to cut this tissue off at birth, making it seem like something disposable. But that is not how the foreskin is treated in most developed countries, and that's not how it seems to most men who possess one. Advertisement Returning to Bossio et al. study Now that we have some idea of what we are talking about, let's take a look at the actual study. The researchers recruited 62 men, of whom 30 were circumcised and 32 were intact. The age range of participants was 18 to 37 years, which means that older men--including those ages 40 and up--were excluded. This is a little bit strange from a sampling perspective, since problems with penile sensitivity (and general function) start to pick up around that age: if you're trying to detect a difference due to circumcision, it is likelier to be more pronounced in older, rather than younger, men. Participants were also pre-selected to be free of sexual dysfunction. So if foreskin removal causes sexual dysfunction (on a statistical basis) then this study cannot find it, by design. Right out of the gate, then, we have a couple of limitations: (1) we don't know if the results of the study--whatever they turn out to be--apply beyond the age of 37, and (2) we don't know if they generalize beyond men without any sexual problems (which is the very group of men you would think we'd be interested in, given the hypothesis). Another limitation is the size of the sample: it's small. Too small. As a statistician would say, it's "underpowered." Simply put, the study didn't have enough power to detect a difference between the circumcised vs. intact men (even if one existed) across all of the different tests that the researchers used. What that means is that the absence of a measurable effect for sensitivity doesn't tell us very much. It would be like attempting to tell the difference between two photographs printed at a horrible resolution (say, 10 pixels), when the differences--if they existed--would be completely obvious at a higher resolution (say, 1000 pixels). You don't run a "10 pixel" study and conclude "the photographs are identical." Advertisement As it happens, the researchers actually used a computer program to calculate exactly how many participants they would need to detect an effect of circumcision status on penile sensitivity: for their "pain threshold" test (I'll say more about this later), they found that they would need 122 participants to detect an effect; and for their "warmth detection threshold" test, they found that they would need 238 participants to detect an effect. So they had about half as many participants as they needed for the first test, and about a quarter as many participants as they needed for the second test. Here's the bottom line. If you don't recruit enough participants to detect the effect you're looking for (in this case, a difference between circumcised men and intact men in terms of their penile sensitivity), it is misleading to say "there isn't an effect." But actually, there's more to the story. Somewhat confusingly, immediately after explaining that 238 participants would be needed "to obtain a significant effect" on the warmth detection test--which, again, the researchers didn't have (they had 62 participants)--the authors went ahead and reported a statistically significant effect of p = .02. What could be going on here? Surprising findings To understand the meaning of this "effect" (I'll say what it was in just a moment), you have to remember that there are two different comparisons the researchers were interested in. The first comparison is between circumcised and intact men--in terms of their respective sensitivity--at each location on the penis being tested. For this comparison, you needed 238 participants. Advertisement The second comparison is between different locations on the penis itself--in terms of their respective sensitivity--collapsing across the circumcision status of the men. For this comparison, you can get away with fewer participants. Now, there were four different locations on the penis that the researchers tested: two on the shaft (same location for both circumcised and intact men), one on the head of the penis (same location for both circumcised and intact men, but with the foreskin rolled back in the intact group), and one on the foreskin (intact men only). Just to clarify: the researchers tested one spot on the outside of the foreskin, versus three spots on the rest of the penis. Previous research suggests, however, that different parts of the foreskin have different distributions of nerve endings, and that it is the inside of the foreskin (the part that becomes exposed when the foreskin is rolled back, like it does during sex) that is especially sensitive. The researchers didn't test this part, which means that their study design was stacked against the sensitivity of foreskin from the get-go. So what did the researchers find? Given what I've just said, and given the way this study has been written up in the media so far, you will be surprised to learn that the "statistically significant finding"--comparing all of the penile locations just mentioned--was actually still in favor of the foreskin: the part of the penis removed by circumcision. Advertisement Specifically, the foreskin was found to be (significantly) more sensitive to warmth than the head of the penis, regardless of circumcision status, and (numerically) more sensitive than all other testing sites including the forearm, which was used as a "control." Take a look at Figure C from the study (reproduced below), and remember that a lower bar means more sensitive. What do you notice? A similar result was found on a "tactile threshold" test. For this test, the researchers applied a series of thin filaments to different parts of the penis (the same four locations described above), and wrote down how much pressure was needed before the participants could actually feel the stimulus (see here for a video demonstration). Again, you will be surprised to learn--I am quoting directly from the paper now--that "Tactile thresholds at the foreskin (intact men) were significantly lower (more sensitive) than all [other] genital testing sites" including the sites in circumcised men (emphasis added). Let me just repeat this: for the one test the researchers used that measured actual tactile sensitivity (which is what most people think of when they hear the word "sensitive" in this context), they found that the foreskin was more sensitive than any other part of the penis, including all parts of the penis that remain in circumcised men. This is consistent with a previous finding by other researchers from 2007, who concluded that "Circumcision ablates [removes] the most sensitive parts of the penis." Advertisement Take a look at Figure A, below (again, the lower the bar, the more sensitive): Mystery conclusion So how do we get from a finding, replicating previous research, that the foreskin is the most sensitive part of the penis to tactile stimulation, as well as a new finding showing that it is more sensitive to warmth than the glans ... to the conclusion that circumcision (which removes the foreskin) "does not reduce penis sensitivity"? I reached out to Jennifer Bossio to ask for clarification. As far as I can tell, her conclusion is based on the fact that the foreskin was not shown to be "more sensitive" than other penile sites on two additional tests her group used: (1) a "heat pain" test (this is the same as the "warmth detection" test, only turned up until it got hot enough to hurt), and (2) the underpowered "pain threshold" test that I already mentioned (which is the same as the "tactile threshold" test using the filaments, just pressed down harder until the participant felt pain). But I still don't see how the conclusion follows. It sounds like the foreskin is acutely sensitive to the lightest and most gentle of touches (as well as to mild sensations of warmth), while being somewhat less sensitive to outright pain. Is that supposed to count against the foreskin? Misleading headlines "Circumcision does NOT reduce sensitivity of the penis" (Daily Mail); "Study finds no difference in sensitivity between circumcised versus non-circumcised men" (Northern California News); "Foreskin doesn't make a man more 'sensitive,' study finds" (Vox); "We finally know whether or not being circumcised affects sexual pleasure" (Elite Daily). Who wrote these headlines? They are all false. What the study actually showed was that the average foreskin of a small, non-representative sample of men from Canada, was more sensitive to light touch and mild warmth, and somewhat less sensitive to outright pain, than other parts of the penis. How those differences go on to "affect sexual pleasure" (to jump to the last headline) is a complicated question, and it probably depends on the situation of each individual. Relevant factors would include how he likes to be touched, what kinds of sexual activities he enjoys, and whether those activities are even possible without a foreskin. Notice the word "average" in the previous paragraph. The individual sensitivity scores for each man's foreskin (in response to the different types of stimuli) were made invisible due to group averaging. And yet it is likely that some men's foreskins are more sensitive than others, and vice versa--everybody's different. What that means is that circumcision will affect different people differently: a man with a particularly sensitive foreskin has more to lose by cutting it off, and that's something you can't know in advance when you're looking at an infant. Advertisement Concluding thoughts Jennifer Bossio and her colleagues are to be commended for trying to "objectively" study a complicated issue (although the way they reported their results was woefully misleading). But at the end of the day, sexual experience is largely subjective: different people prefer different things when it comes to sex, and a lot of sexual enjoyment comes down to psychological factors, not penile anatomy. That is why there is a growing movement to leave the "circumcision decision" to the individual who will be affected by it, so that he can decide--when he's old enough to understand what's at stake--if he'd rather experience sex and masturbation with an intact penis (however sensitive his particular foreskin turns out to be), or with a modified one (if he wants to go for surgery). With respect to the specific question of "sensitivity," the latest findings are a lot less definitive than media reports are making them out to be (and they don't even all point in the same direction as those reports are suggesting). As Bossio and her colleagues state at the end of their paper, "replication of this study is warranted with a larger sample size" and "associated conclusions should be interpreted as preliminary." In the meantime, a precautionary approach suggests that we should leave boys' penises alone until they can assess the sensitivity of their own foreskins as compared to other parts of the penis--as well as their role in sexual experience more generally--in light of their own considered sexual preferences and values.[6] Advertisement About the author Brian D. Earp (@briandavidearp) is a scientist and ethicist with degrees from Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge Universities, including an M.Phil. degree in the history and philosophy of science and medicine, focusing on male and female genital cutting practices. He is currently a Resident Visiting Scholar at The Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institute in Garrison, New York. He has published widely in the leading journals in his fields. Notes 2. It is probably worth noting that this second group of men is considerably more representative on a global scale: North America has an unusual (and somewhat unsettling) history in adopting male circumcision as a cultural norm--although it appears to be fading away as the years go by--as the science writer Matthew Tontonoz has recently explained in a reader-friendly primer. 3. Please note that this would qualify as "female genital mutilation" or "FGM." For a discussion of the similarities and differences between male and female forms of non-therapeutic genital cutting, let me recommend a popular article I wrote on the subject for Aeon magazine (by way of a brief introduction), or else a formal paper covering the same ideas (if you have more time). 4. For the sake of this discussion I am going to set aside a rather heated debate about whether "p" values should even be used to make statistical inferences; suffice it to say that a lot of statisticians disagree with this whole approach. Advertisement 5. Remember, they didn't even test the most sensitive part of the foreskin, so this is a conservative comparison. Group of Multiethnic Business People Working After my March visit to CoLab-Factory, I left covered in construction dust just days before opening. A few weeks later, a culture has blown up in the first co-working space on the Fulton Mall in Downtown Brooklyn. At New York Natives, it's incredible to be an active member as startup stories unfold -- it's Silicon Valley with a twist on a true New York State of mind. We celebrated launch with a DJ from Verboten in Williamsburg and the acclaimed Foster Sundry drowned us in cheese. We staked out our new home, shaking hands with guests like the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce. Some of our favorite Rooftop Sessions from New York Natives played on huge screens around the place. Advertisement Then, suddenly, launch turned to workflow in the space. CoLab-Factory founder Shane Barbanel says it is a place to "build your dream, assembly required." Monday mornings are already a virtual Grand Central for tech geeks and entrepreneurs at the 8 am weekly roundtable on the third floor of 14 DeKalb Avenue. Our first game night at the co-working space, which had me up against the clock pitching a culturally-driven design firm, launching argyle-boxed whiskey-flavored Pringles, was a hoot. We came second to the FooBrew app, which delivered beer and a meal according to your mood. Many of us celebrated at Junior's with some iconic slices of cheesecake. Shark Tank addicts, eat your heart out! I sat side-by-side a startup investor representing the family office space and a teacher of videography from Columbia University. A week later, I trafficked a Refinery29 reporter in the direction of Dia, an up and coming plus size fashion line that had made CoLab-Factory their home, while they waited for their factory to be complete. But it was the events of last week that saw a true triumph for the 10,000-square-foot location and its community. Social impact startup Propel which is working out of the CoLab-Factory secured $1.15 million in seed funding. The group of investors let by Chmod Ventures, included other key investors like WinWin, an investor group formed by Coinstar founder Jens Molbak. Propel on any given days sits just a few chairs away from our production units two offices. My company is four years old and we have two locations now -- Manhattan and Brooklyn. I can tell you as a founder of a startup, an event in an environment like this matters. Everybody else's success feels like your own. It renews your faith in the small business story. Advertisement The hard knocks that come with being an entrepreneur in New York City are triumphed by seeing a colleague at a table down from you strike gold for the valuable work they are putting in day after day in an effort to literally change the world we inhabit for the better. Ultimately like the city itself, it is the community that matters most. While CoLab-Factory happens to be stunning and Shane has geeked out on the art of work as he tries to provide the best work experience to all the members, it's his latest guests Blue Ridge Labs from the Robin Hood Foundation and others that are stirring up the startup community. Positioned as the anti-poverty platform, Propel is fundamentally changing the face of social services in America. $47 million Americans spend $70 billion in food stamps each year and they largely enroll by standing in line. Check their balance by calling a 1-800 number and renew by filling out a paper form. By building software that is 100x better than the status quo, Propel is becoming a trusted interface between people and the services they need. They launched the first beta of Fresh EBT three months ago to make it easier for families receiving food stamps to manage their finances. The app is now available in all 50 states. Over 8,000 people have used the app already and 1300 people use the app every day to do things like see their balance on the app when they're in the middle of a grocery store. All of that wonderful change, A broken or outdated system is being fixed one step at a time literally at a desk nearby. I am always saying to my new American friends, "I know it is tough being gay in the US, but be grateful that you can't be put in jail for five years simply because a neighbor told the police you are a homosexual." I was born in Cameroon in 1985, into a society that believes it is perfectly fine to bully, beat, jail, and kill LGBT people. As you can imagine, coming to realize that one is gay in his teens under these circumstances is terrifying. I have a wonderful family, but religion is pervasive and a part of everything we do. I learned early on to hate myself and knew that I could never tell my mother and father. I endured the taunting at school. I tried to hold my head high and stood up for myself when I could. I was learning how to be an activist, without even knowing it. Advertisement I eventually found work at Alternatives Cameroon, an HIV/AIDS underground activist group. Doing this kind of work in a homophobic society is extremely dangerous. Eventually, local youth found out and my personal experience with assault and beatings began. One night, on my way home, a group of boys surrounded me on the street. They began beating me with clubs and one boy had a knife. I was saved by my ability to take the blows without flinching and by the intervention of a residence guard who miraculously showed up and asked the boys to stop beating me because I was already almost dead. I dragged myself home and realized that I would have to leave before I was killed. I was also starting to believe that I was, indeed, a terrible person as I turned their insults into truths about my humanity. Not long after, a fellow gay activist and friend named Eric was burned with hot irons for hours before he finally, mercifully, died. I was terrified. It was then that the boys who had beaten me found my phone number and the death threats started to flow. They called me a dirty homosexual. They said I was a disgrace, a nobody, and that the only way out for me was death. When I got home, I saw that they had written "Dirty faggot we know where you live" on my front door in animal blood. I had more frightening messages on my phone every day and received notes saying that I deserved the same punishment as Eric. Then, they started calling and threatening my family. I knew that this had to stop. I was tired of being treated like an animal. I took off with what I could carry. The best thing I packed was nothing material. I took a vision of my mother smiling at me and holding me in her arms. I carried images of my friends helping me to have the courage to carry on in life. Advertisement It was like navigating an obstacle course as I left my country, harassed by threatening text messages. I had been the subject of a documentary called "Born This Way," and my notoriety was following me. I knew I had to get to Benin--the Embassy of the US in Cameroon told me that was best. On the way, I stayed in a hotel room for three weeks without leaving for fear of the people chasing me. I got to Benin and hid for another month as I waited for my visa. Benin is also homophobic so it would have been risky to go outside. Thanks to the US embassies in Cameroon and Benin, I eventually got my visa to the US. My arrival in San Francisco was a mixture of great emotions: joy, relief, sadness and fear of the unknown all amplified by the beauty of the city, its buildings, neighborhoods, and atmosphere. It is a breathtaking place. Through mutual friends, I was introduced to Erik, who offered me his guest bedroom in Sausalito for as long as I wanted. I couldn't believe it. He picked me up from the airport and introduced me to my new American family (his mother Marian and sister Laurie) and some instant friends like Amanda and Jenny. I am still amazed at the hospitality and generosity of these incredible people. I will never forget the first time I walked through The Castro in San Francisco. I wept as I saw the huge rainbow flag, but more importantly, I saw how happy people were when they were allowed to love another person openly and publicly. They were proud and happy and all I could think was that I wanted my LGBT friends in Cameroon to experience the same thing. It has been fantastic, but there are a few challenges. The English language is a crazy one! I learned some English in Cameroon, but not enough. Having a thick French accent might sound sexy, but it is an impediment to finding work. Thankfully, I was introduced to Chris Lim, one of the co-founders of Climb Real Estate. He is a man with a heart of gold and he gave me a job. I started by helping with open houses and am now working in the marketing department. I feel safe and welcomed at Climb, where diversity is celebrated. I hope other people follow Chris' lead and offer jobs to refugees who need a starting point. Advertisement The hardest part has been knowing that I might never see my family again. I miss my mother terribly. Luckily, the widespread use of technology across Africa means that I can communicate with them often. Ten years ago, this would not have been possible. Today, I continue to help my former colleagues in Cameroon. I advise them on important matters and help write reports that aim to assist those still suffering the indignities heaped on them just for being gay. Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. speaks during a campaign rally in Erie, Pa., Tuesday, April 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer) Seeing as how it is 4/20, I thought today would be a good day to take a look at how all the remaining presidential candidates stand on the issue of marijuana policy. While mostly ignored by the media (and almost completely ignored in the debates), the issue is going to become a lot more important in the general election, as many states will have recreational legalization ballot initiatives to vote on. The issue is at least addressed by both Democrats on their campaign websites, but none of the Republicans have a single word about marijuana policy on theirs. This is likely a mistake on their part, since pro-marijuana voters are not as partisan as you might think -- the issue cuts across party lines in a way that few other contentious issues do. The tide is shifting so fast on the public's view of marijuana that America could reach a real tipping point on the legalization debate during the next president's term in office. So let's take a look at what each of the candidates have had to say about the federal marijuana policies they would pursue as president. Advertisement Hillary Clinton Both Democratic candidates, to their credit, have comprehensive plans to overhaul the failed federal War On Drugs. In both cases, this includes strong support for sentencing reform, treatment programs, drug courts, and other criminal justice reforms. Check out both campaign websites for much more detailed information on the candidate's overall plans to reverse the excesses of the War On Drugs. Hillary Clinton is specific about some non-marijuana War On Drugs policies that she would reform, most notably her call to get rid of the sentencing disparity between powder and crack cocaine. This has been a big problem (and has given millions longer sentences as a result), so it's good to see her address it. Hillary Clinton has three bullet points on her campaign website specifically dealing with marijuana (emphasis in original): Focus federal enforcement resources on violent crime, not simple marijuana possession. Marijuana arrests, including for simple possession, account for a huge number of drug arrests. Further, significant racial disparities exist in marijuana enforcement, with black men significantly more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than their white counterparts, even though usage rates are similar. Hillary believes we need an approach to marijuana that includes: Marijuana arrests, including for simple possession, account for a huge number of drug arrests. Further, significant racial disparities exist in marijuana enforcement, with black men significantly more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than their white counterparts, even though usage rates are similar. Hillary believes we need an approach to marijuana that includes: Allowing states that have enacted marijuana laws to act as laboratories of democracy , as long as they adhere to certain federal priorities such as not selling to minors, preventing intoxicated driving, and keeping organized crime out of the industry. , as long as they adhere to certain federal priorities such as not selling to minors, preventing intoxicated driving, and keeping organized crime out of the industry. Rescheduling marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule II substance. Hillary supports medical marijuana and would reschedule marijuana to advance research into its health benefits. Hillary's approach, not surprisingly, is an incremental one. Dial back federal law enforcement efforts, move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule II to remove barriers to medical research, and continue to allow the states which have legalized recreational marijuana (four currently, but this number could grow in November's election) to continue their legal experiment without overbearing federal involvement. Overall, Hillary is for continuing the policies of Barack Obama and for generally taking a "wait and see" approach to what the individual states are doing. Bernie Sanders Bernie Sanders agrees with Clinton on the need for a comprehensive approach to winding down the War On Drugs, but Bernie is (unsurprisingly) willing to go further than Clinton in how he would achieve his goals. Bernie is much more expressive on his campaign webpage (as he has been on the stump) on why this is a moral issue: Millions of lives have been destroyed because people are in jail for nonviolent crimes. For decades, we have been engaged in a failed "War on Drugs" with racially-biased mandatory minimums that punish people of color unfairly. It is an obscenity that we stigmatize so many young Americans with a criminal record for smoking marijuana, but not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for causing the near collapse of our entire economy. This must change. He also raises specific points that Clinton doesn't mention: In many cities all over our country, the incentives for policing are upside down. Departments are bringing in substantial sums of revenue by seizing the personal property of people who are suspected of criminal involvement. So-called civil asset forfeiture laws allow police to take property from people even before they are charged with a crime, much less convicted of one. Even worse, the system works in a way that makes it very difficult and expensive for an innocent person to get his or her property back. We must end programs that actually reward officials for seizing assets without a criminal conviction or other lawful mandate. Departments and officers should not profit off of such seizures. Bernie also has three bullet points that specifically deal with marijuana policy on his website: We need to turn back from the failed "War on Drugs" and eliminate mandatory minimums which result in sentencing disparities between black and white people. We need to take marijuana off the federal government's list of outlawed drugs. We need to allow people in states which legalize marijuana to be able to fully participate in the banking system and not be subject to federal prosecution for using pot. Bernie Sanders would not only continue the Obama policies, he would make significant improvements, including reforming the banking laws to allow marijuana businesses to conduct their financial affairs exactly the same as every other legal business in the country. And most significantly, Sanders would deschedule marijuana instead of merely rescheduling it. This is now the ultimate goal of marijuana activists, and would obviously happen fastest if Sanders wins the presidency. Ted Cruz Ted Cruz, quite surprisingly, actually has the best position on marijuana policy of the remaining Republican candidates. He has stated his position numerous times, and he not only takes a "hands off" approach to state legalization laws, but he fits it nicely into the whole conservative "states' rights" argument. This is an intellectually honest way of looking at the issue for a Republican, it bears mentioning. Here is Cruz, from an interview earlier this month (I should mention that quotes for Ted Cruz and John Kasich come from a wonderful page at the Marijuana Policy Project where all the candidates' views are presented and graded): Advertisement I think on the question of marijuana legalization, we should leave it to the states. If it were me personally, voting on it in the state of Texas, I would vote against it. The people of Colorado have made a different decision. I respect that decision. And actually, it is an opportunity for the rest of the country to see what happens here in Colorado, what happens in Washington state, see the states implement the policies, and if it works well, other states may choose to follow. If it doesn't work well other states may choose not to follow. As I said, this is standard conservative dogma on states' rights. Cruz is always very careful to note his own personal position on the issue ("I would vote against it"), but also that his position shouldn't necessarily be the position everywhere (or for the federal government). That is a more progressive position than most Republicans manage to take on the issue. Cruz would essentially be continuing the Obama "hands off" approach to the states which do legalize. John Kasich John Kasich -- again, surprisingly, considering his whole "compassionate conservatism" image -- has the harshest views towards marijuana of any of the Republican candidates. He has waffled on supporting even medical marijuana, going from being "totally opposed" to "I think we can look at it." But even while he struggles to sound reasonable, it's pretty easy to see Kasich's real beliefs are pretty unchanged from the "drug warrior" days. Here is Kasich's answer to a direct question about states legalizing: The people in those states have voted that way. The federal government has decided to kind of look the other way. I feel very strongly in my state, I'm going to oppose, and they're going to put something on the ballot to legalize drugs. I'm totally opposed to it, because it is a scourge in this country. Now I would have to give it thought as to, I probably would not from the standpoint that the states have gone forward to prove that. I haven't thought about this. I'd have to give it a little thought..... In my state and across this country, if I happened to be president, I would lead a significant campaign down at the grassroots level to stomp these drugs out of our country. Kasich goes from being strongly against the idea in Ohio to being totally incoherent to ending with a golden oldie about stomping out drugs. Seriously, what does: "I would have to give it thought as to, I probably would not from the standpoint that the states have gone forward to prove that" even mean? Kasich sounds like a Republican politician caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, he knows that four states have already legalized it (and whatever happened to supporting states' rights?), but on the other hand, he still seems stuck in the 1980s rhetoric about how drugs is a solvable problem that can easily be stomped out. Many politicians -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- are having to evolve their positions on marijuana, and some are doing so a little faster than others. But President Kasich would obviously not be a big supporter of reforming any federal laws at all, that seems obvious. Donald Trump Donald Trump's position is almost as incoherent as Kasich's. The only real difference is that Trump is moving from the opposite direction on the issue. Back in the 1990s, Trump was in favor of legalizing all drugs. Now that he's running for president, he's against marijuana. At least, recreational marijuana. Maybe. Or maybe not. Here is Trump refusing to take Bill O'Reilly's bait (O'Reilly's position is that medical benefits of marijuana don't exist) from an article in High Times magazine: Trump, speaking to Bill O'Reilly on Fox News this week, was asked about his position on marijuana legalization in Colorado. After expressing some concern over the health effects of marijuana, he was pressed by O'Reilly about what he would do to stop it. Trump then confessed that "I would, I would really want to think about that one Bill, because in some ways, I think it's good and in other ways, it's bad." It's hard to know exactly where Trump stands, because he is the master of the non-answer on many policy questions. But Trump is an avid supporter of the concept of medical marijuana, answering in the same O'Reilly interview: "I know people that have serious problems... and... it really, really does help them." Advertisement Trump would likely continue the Obama approach to states with medical marijuana laws, and he might even be convinced to reschedule marijuana to speed up the process of medical research, since he so personally knows it can do good. What he would do on recreational marijuana is really anyone's guess, but he certainly seems to be open to convincing ("in some ways, I think it's good") to let the states go their own way on the issue. If Hillary Clinton eventually faces off with Donald Trump, it will be very interesting to see how they both refine their position on marijuana policy. The media has (so far) been largely ignoring the issue, but if (as expected) citizen ballot initiatives appear on between five and ten states this election cycle, the issue will become a lot more prominent. That's good, because the next president may oversee a dramatic shift in federal drug policy on marijuana, so asking them where they stand on all the specifics is important. Chris Weigant blogs at: I sometimes think about the glories of "Islamic Spain," or Al-Andalus. Starting around 711 and ending in 1492, Muslim rulers maintained a spirit of convivencia, a Spanish term meaning "living in togetherness" or "coexistence", which allowed for an unprecedented level of interfaith engagement on the European continent. While Al-Andalus may represent the pinnacle of cooperation among Muslims, Christians and Jews, there is also a brilliant history - too often ignored and still inadequately assessed - coming out of Sicily, an island belonging to modern-day Italy. The unique society that developed in Sicily is hardly mentioned by historians of Europe, Christianity or Islam. Over the course of several centuries, interfaith exchanges in cultural, religious and scientific fields led to a hybrid culture stemming from Norman, Arab and Byzantine influences. For a time, Sicily was truly the crossroads between East and West, Islam and Christianity. The island was one of the rare bright spots of the Middle Ages. Arab Muslim Rule Muslims are rarely associated with Italian history, but Islamic contact with Sicily began roughly twenty years after the death of Prophet Muhammad, during the caliphate of 'Uthman. The governor of Syria at that time, Mu'awiya, sent a naval expedition to Sicily as an extension of the battles that were taking place in the east between Muslims and the Byzantine Empire. For about two-hundred years, Muslims made many efforts to control the island, then a Byzantine province. It was not until 827 that Muslims finally obtained a foothold by taking Mazara, on the western end of the island. The successful military expedition was launched from the North African Muslim province of Ifriqiya, or modern-day Tunisia. Advertisement Unlike al-Andalus, Sicily did not fall to Muslims like ripe fruit. The Islamic takeover of the island took over seventy-five years. Once they secured Sicily, Muslims divided the island into three administrative districts, the names of which survive to this day. The first district, Val di Mazara, comprises the western coast. The Arab Muslims named the capital Palermo. The central region of Sicily - including the city of Syracuse - was given the name Val di Noto, while the remaining region (and the last to be conquered) was called Val Demone. The cities of Catania and Messina were located within this final district. The word "val" is derived from the Arabic word meaning "province". Three main Muslim dynasties ruled Sicily until 1071. The first to rule were the Sunni Aghlabids, an Ifriqiyan family that had broken away from the Abbasid caliphate based in Baghdad. Following the Aghlabids were the Shi'ite Fatimids, who drove out their predecessors in 909 and founded their Sicilian base of Mahdia in 916. The Fatimids eventually conquered Egypt in 969 and transferred the seat of the caliphate from Baghdad to the newly founded city of Cairo in 973. Fatimid emirs, or governors later ruled Ifriqiya and Sicily. Under these Muslim dynasties, the population of Sicily grew rapidly and dozens of towns and cities were founded and repopulated including: Messina, Syracuse, Sciacca, Mazara and Castrogiovanni. The finest city in Sicily was Palermo, called al-Banurmu, or simply al-Medina, "the city". Ibn Jubair, a geographer, traveler and poet from al-Andalus, described Palermo in glowing terms: [Palermo] is endowed with two gifts, splendor and wealth. It contains all the real and imagined beauty that anyone could wish. Splendor and grace adorn the piazzas and the countryside; the streets and highways are wide, and the eye is dazzled by the beauty of its situation. It is a city full of marvels, with buildings similar to those of Cordoba, built of limestone. A permanent stream of water from four springs runs through the city. There are so many mosques that they are impossible to count. Most of them also serve as schools. The eye is dazzled by all this splendor. Much of the growth and expansion of Palermo was due to agricultural and technological innovations. Muslims introduced new crops including: cotton, hemp, date palms, sugar cane, mulberries and citrus fruits. The cultivation of these crops were made possible by new irrigation techniques. These agricultural innovations spurned other industries including textiles, sugar manufacture, rope-making as well as silk and paper. The Normans and Roger II The first Normans arrived in Italy about the year 1000 while returning to mainland Europe from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The reason for their arrival had to do with Prince Guaimar III of Salerno, who requested help in defending his town against Muslims. After defending the town, a small contingent of Normans remained in Italy. In 1016, Norman Christians went for pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Michael on Monte Gargano in Apulia. There they met Melus, also referred to in historical accounts as Ishmael, a leader of an anti-Byzantine rebellion in Bari. Melus asked the Normans to help him as he tried to free his town of Byzantine rule. Gradually, the Norman conquest took shape. In 1061, a modest military force under the leadership of Robert Guiscard and Roger of Hauteville were paid by a Sicilian emir, Ibn al-Thumma, to assist Muslims in the civil war. At the time the island, which had a sizeable and rebellious Christian population, was split between three Arab emirs. The Normans eventually consolidated their power. In 1071, they captured the city of Palermo, and by 1091 the city of Noto and the island of Malta - the last Arab stronghold - were taken by the Norman Christians. The most notable Norman ruler of Sicily is Roger II, a descendent of Christian knights whom previous Popes had recruited to fight Muslims in the Mediterranean region. Roger II ruled as King of Sicily from 1130 to 1154, and is considered by historians as one of the most successful rulers of 12th century Europe. He is said to have been a "product of the Mediterranean" in that he was born and bred in a cosmopolitan, multilingual world of Greek and Muslim tutors and secretaries that naturally created his hybrid identity. Roger II is also said to have spoken Arabic perfectly. Roger requested the help of Muslim troops and Arab siege engines during his military campaigns in southern Italy. Once his troops had conquered new land, he would mobilize Arab architects to help Normans build monuments in a Norman-Arab-Byzantine style. Advertisement Artist techniques from the Islamic tradition were successfully incorporated to form the foundation of Arab-Norman art. The Church of Saint-John of the Hermits is one of the greatest examples of the fusion of Arab and Norman art. Built by Roger II between 1143 and 1148 in Palermo, the Church of Saint-John is famous for its red domes that show clearly the Arab artistic influence present in 12th century Sicilian society. In his Diary of an Idle Woman in Sicily, Frances Elliot described the Church as "totally oriental... it would fit well in Baghdad or Damascus". Indeed, Giuseppe Bellafior, former Dean of Architectural History at the University of Palermo, also echoes such observations: ... the purely Norman element in Arabo-Norman architecture is less than the name might suggest. The Norman rulers had the tact and the foresight to accept, and even like, what they found. Yet they retained the tenuous links which they had with the land of their origin. The strength and efficiency of the Norman administration derived from its policy of deliberate flexibility toward the existing Muslim order on the island. Thus the culture in general, and artistic tradition in particular, owed little to the Norman's own land of origin. King Roger was keen on using a range of cultural legacies in building a new Sicilian society. Muslim soldiers, poets and scientists played important roles in his court and palace. Arab agricultural and industrial techniques developed by Arabs over the previous two-hundred years were used to further develop Sicilian art, economy and culture. Roger II's vision was multicultural long before multiculturalism became a fad in the "Western" world. The language of his court was French, but all royal edicts were written in the language of the people they were addressed to: Latin, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew. Astronomy, medicine, philosophy and mathematics were some of the subjects discussed in Roger's palace; books were translated into various languages and became the standard textbooks in 12th century universities that were popping up around Europe. Learning and the dissemination of knowledge were key components of Roger II's Sicilian society. The most famous book of his reign - The Book of Roger (also known as Kitab Rudjdjar) - was written in Arabic by Muhammad al-Idrisi, an Arab Muslim geographer. Al-Idrisi was based at the court of Roger where he was charged with writing a book on geography and climate zones. The Book of Roger was monumental considering that al-Idrisi presented the world as a sphere and hinted at the concept of gravity. In a testament to the book, historian S.P. Scott commented, "For three centuries geographers copied his maps without alteration". Roger II, unfortunately, never lived to see its publication; al-Idrisi's work appeared several weeks after the great ruler of Sicily passed away in 1154. Advertisement These quests for knowledge - regardless of the cultural or religious tradition in which the knowledge arose - led to the founding of the University of Salerno in the 13th century. Salerno became the most famous medical school in the world, and it was there that Avicenna by Ibn Sina was translated into Latin. Salerno was also the location of the first scientific dissection, carried out by a Muslim. Roger II's greatest legacy was a series of laws called Assizes of Ariano, passed in 1140 and derived from Norman, French, Muslim and Byzantine legal theories. These laws were advanced for the 12th century, because all Sicilians were equal under the law, whether Latin, Greek, Jewish, Muslim, Norman, Lombard or Arab. Roger fostered tolerance towards non-Christians, a tradition carried over from Arab Muslim rule. This tolerance led to dialogue and a climate of intellectual freedom that was the envy of the world. Indeed, as English historian remarked on the Kingdom of Sicily: Norman Sicily stood forth in Europe - and indeed in the whole bigoted medieval world - as an example of tolerance and enlightenment, a lesson in the respect that every man should feel for those whose blood and beliefs happen to differ from his own. The tolerance that Norman Christians showed towards other faiths was unusual for the 12th century. Sicilian Muslims were granted rights to live according to sharia, particularly the Maliki school. Al-Mazari, one particular qadi (or magistrate), reciprocated by ruling that Muslim jurists appointed by Christians had legal force and should be obeyed unconditionally. Muslims in Christian-ruled Sicily retained both social status and legal authority within their own communities. While the Norman Christians did deploy a slightly higher tax on Muslims than Christians, Muslims were nevertheless granted property rights and legal protection under the law. By enforcing a tax to help protect Muslims, the Christians of 12th century Sicily adopted a similar fiscal and legal structure as the Islamic jizya and dhimmi. One of the great stories coming out of Norman Sicily occurred under the rule of William II, Roger II's grandson. Ibn Jubair, the geographer, traveler and poet from al-Andalus, visited the coast of Sicily after embarking on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1184. Shipwrecked in the Straits of Messina off the Sicilian coast, Jubair and other Muslims were in danger of losing their lives to the wild sea. Local inhabitants of Messina heard their call of distress and immediately launched their boats to save them, however, as businessmen, they hoped to profit from the shipwreck by charging large fees to rescue the Muslim pilgrims. Faced with paying high fees, the Muslims could not afford the rescue effort and were ultimately faced with the possibility of dying at sea. At this moment, Ibn Jubair reports, a man rode down to the shore on horseback and delivered an order to the Messinans - the Muslim pilgrims were to be saved and taken safely to land. Astonished by the turn of events, Ibn Jubair went to thank the man who rode on horseback and discovered that he was King William II. The Norman Christian king welcomed Ibn Jubair and his fellow Muslims and promised them protection in Sicily. Upon traveling the streets, Ibn Jubair observed that many Christians spoke Arabic and that William II's top government officials were mostly Muslims. "The attitude of [William II] is really extraordinary", Jubair comments. "His attitude towards the Muslims is perfect; he gives them employment, he chooses his officers among them, and all, or almost all... can remain faithful to the faith of Islam". Jubair continues: "[William II] has full confidence in the Muslims and relies on them to handle his affairs, including the most important ones, to the point that the Great Intendant for cooking is a Muslim". Not only did William II produce coins in Arabic with Hegira dates, but the registers of the Royal Court were also written in Arabic. Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor King Roger II and William II are not the only legendary leaders to rule the Kingdom of Sicily. Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and grandson to Roger II, based his administration in Sicily. By birth, he was half-German and half-Norman. Brought up in his mother's birthplace of Sicily, Frederick II was born and bred in a half-Arab, half-Greek culture; as such, he is said to have united elements of Islam and Christianity. Not only did he speak Arabic and Greek, but Frederick also spoke Latin, German, French and Sicilian. H.G. Wells wrote that, "Frederick II came to an Islamic point of view of Christianity and to a Christian one of Islam". Frederick is also described by a contemporary chronicle as stupor mondi (the wonder of the world), and by Frederick Neitzche as "the first European". Frederick is recognized for the Constitutions of Melfi (1231, also known as Liber Augustalis), a collection of laws that remained the standard in Sicily until 1819. Building on his grandfather's Assizes of Ariano, the Constitutions of Melfi declared "equality before the law" of all citizens of the Kingdom of Sicily. Other highlights of this legal code included setting up a loyal Muslim community and army in Lucera and declaring the equality before the law of Jews in the Kingdom. Advertisement Frederick II is known for his cordial relations with Arab Muslims. He is said to have been initiated into the Sufi mystificism of Islam. In 1228, Frederick decided to embark on a Crusade to Palestine, but this was not your typical, violent Crusade. His journey is the only historical Crusade without violence. Traveling to Cairo, Frederick II met with the Egyptian Sultan Malik al-Kamil, who shared Frederick's interest of poetry, philosophy and chess. As a token of his respect for the Islamic tradition, Frederick II presented Sultan al-Kamil with one of his beloved falcons and received in exchange an elephant. Resulting from the meeting between these leaders was an armistice and treaty signed on 18 February 1229. Frederick II was given control of holy sites in Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth. The treaty also stipulated that the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque were to remain under Muslim control. This was a bloodless victory for both Christians and Muslims. A simple diplomatic exchange accomplished more than violence had ever done in terms of Christian-Muslim relations. Hence why historian Humbert Fink wrote the following about Frederick's legacy: [He] was the only Western sovereign and monarch who did not approach the East and the Arabs with the sword but with the art of persuasion and empathy attempted what up to now always had cost flows of blood. Muslim and Christian Harmony Just as it was during centuries long ago, Sicily continues to show remarkable hybrid cultural elements. Even to this day one can see living traces of the past in Sicily. Place names such as Alcantra (from the Arabic word qantara, bridge) and Gibellina (from the Arabic word, jabal, mountain) are two such examples. Many street names are still recognizably Arabic, and in some cases not only the original name, but the function, has been preserved. The district of Lattarini in Palermo has harbored perfumers and grocers since the 9th century. The Arabs called this district suq al- 'attarin, the market of the perfumers. ****Please include Marc Kielburger as co-author.**** By Craig and Marc Kielburger The city of Ouarzazate, Morocco, is no stranger to Hollywood. With scenic desert vistas, Ouarzazate has provided backdrops for Lawrence of Arabia, Gladiator and Game of Thrones. Now Ouarzazate is rolling out the red carpet for the biggest star of all: the sun. Morocco is building the world's largest solar power plant in Ouarzazate. Already, half a million solar panels are already operating. When the project is completed in 2018 the plant will produce at least 580 megawatts of energy, enough to power one million Moroccan homes. The government plans to meet 42 per cent of the country's electricity needs from renewable sources by 2020. Renewable energy offers unparalleled opportunities for nations around the globe to dream big. Investments in wind, solar, water and biomass energy can reduce national climate footprints while simultaneously creating jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities. Advertisement The United States has become a world leader in developing clean energy. Last year, $56 billion was pumped into developing renewable energy in the U.S.--second only to China, which invested more than $110 billion. However, there's much more that could be done. A new study from Stanford University in California claims the United States could realistically meet 100 per cent of its power needs from renewable sources by 2050. The switch would create more than new five million jobs and save Americans $587 billion a year by reducing pollution-related health problems, say Stanford researchers. What are we waiting for? Here are a handful of the clean megaprojects around the world that inspire us--perhaps they can inspire America to become number one in the world. Race to the Sun Pakistan wants to exceed Morrocco's accomplishments and claim the record for the most enormous solar farm. In the Cholistan Desert in eastern Pakistan, 400,000 solar panels are already generating 100 megawatts of energy. It's the first stage in a US$46 billion partnership that has Chinese contractors helping build the facility. When the solar farm is completed in 2017, it's expected to produce twice as much electricity as Ouarzazate. Advertisement Sadly, India's vision of producing 100 gigawatts of electricity from solar farms and rooftop-mounted solar panels by 2022 has been temporarily derailed by the World Trade Organization (WTO). India's requirement that a percentage of solar panels be manufactured locally, in order to create jobs and reduce poverty, is an illegal barrier under international trade agreements, according to the WTO. Winds of Change While Morocco and Pakistan compete for the sun, the U.K. aims to own the wind. U.K. company, Dong Energy, announced in February it will build the world's largest ocean-based wind farm off Britain's east coast. In the next four years, 174 massive wind turbines in the English Channel will provide enough electricity to run one million homes--three per cent of U.K. households. It's an awesome step in the right direction. The U.K. government is investing US$200 million in the project, which is expected to create more than 2,000 jobs. Earth Power In February 2015, Kenya switched on the biggest-ever geothermal power plant, using the immense heat below the earth's surface to power turbines producing 280 megawatts of electricity. Thanks to the new power source, 5,000 more schools will now have power. Riding the Wave Last year, Australia switched on the world's first commercial energy plant powered by ocean waves. As a series of underwater buoys bob in the currents, the motion drives pumps that, in turn, power turbine generators with high-pressure water. The project is part of a US$3 billion plan to generate at least 20 per cent of Australia's energy from renewable sources by 2022. As a side benefit, after the sea water passes through the turbines it goes to a desalination plant where it's transformed into fresh, drinkable water. When it comes to clean energy, America is already an inspiring role model for our own country, Canada, where investment in renewables has fallen in recent years. So come on America, dream big and show us how it's done! Advertisement This is the last of three essays that I'm writing as I begin to pivot away from a decade of work in global health. It attempts to answer a question recently asked by one of my staff members: what might this unusual Presidential election mean for future U.S. support of global health and the fights against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria? My response is that the United States government has been a leader in these investments and there is nothing about this election which points to a major pivot away from this. U.S. investments in global health and HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria have held steady in recent years, for example, despite overall discretionary funding cuts. These investments are undergirded by robust bipartisan and faith-based support. Simply put, investing in global health is the right and moral thing to do. The platforms of the remaining Republican and Democratic candidates (Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz, Gov. John Kasich, Secretary Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders) illuminate why both parties are likely to continue supporting global health investments. Advertisement All three Republican candidates identify a small number of key issues in this election. Their websites mostly emphasize security needs, immigration, and fair trade issues. The websites of John Kasich and Ted Cruz, however, also highlight the sanctity of life as a key value and, when asked about the Global Fund's lifesaving programs at a December rally in New Hampshire, Donald Trump said of the Fund: "It sounds good to me. It really does ... I mean, that's the kind of thing we should be doing." This belief in the sanctity of life is the same sentiment that led President George W. Bush to initiate the Global Fund and PEPFAR, the global, emergency HIV and AIDS program, alongside the President's Malaria Initiative. As the former President put it in a recent National Review article: If you say you're pro-life, that ought to be a priority ... So when the AIDS pandemic was destroying an entire generation, (fighting AIDS) became a priority. And I happen to believe that PEPFAR should be good for our soul. Because now people live who shouldn't have. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, each highlight more than 25 key issue areas on their websites. They focus on questions of equity and equitable access to resources, like race, gender, human rights, and fair pay issues. Extending access to health for marginalized and disadvantaged populations overseas is entirely consonant with these objectives. Advertisement Both Clinton and Sanders, in fact, have recently gone on the record as being supportive of global HIV and AIDS programs. Clinton notes that as Secretary of State she ushered in a campaign for a global AIDS-free generation, and that she remains committed to continuing the march toward increasing the number of people on lifesaving anti-retroviral therapy. Finally, principals in both parties have seen the phenomenal results of these U.S.-driven investments. The Global Fund has saved more than 17 million lives to date - a number that is expected to grow to 22 million lives by the end of 2016. The Global Fund and the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief account for approximately 80 percent of international HIV/AIDS assistance and are providing antiretroviral treatment for nearly 16 million people. Momentous results have also been achieved through the work of the Global Fund partnership and the President's Malaria Initiative, which account for 75 percent of global malaria funding. The global malaria mortality rate has decreased by 60 percent since 2000. The Global Fund and the U.S. Agency for International Development also work with partner governments to bolster tuberculosis programs and strategies across the globe; there has been a drop in global tuberculosis mortality and prevalence rates by 47 percent and 42 percent respectively since 1990. There's always a learning curve involved when you start your own small business. One of the first challenges I faced was very surprising. I discovered that hiring the best employees wasn't easy. I learned that mistakes in staffing had a negative effect on the budget and kept me from focusing on the big picture. Over the years, I've developed a recruiting process that really works. As a successful small business owner, I'm proud to share these 10 strategies that help me hire the right people for the right job. Advertisement 1. Know What You Want You can't find the best fit for a job if you're not sure about what you want. My business provides residential and commercial cleaning services, so my goal is to hire people who can handle the work and treat our clients with the very best customer care. When you know exactly what you want from a prospective employee, it's easier to hire the right person because you're doing it with confidence. 2. Fine-Tune the Job Description As I began interviewing to fill specific staff and tech positions, I realized that people were applying for jobs that didn't match their skill sets. Today, I go into every interview knowing that a potential employee understands exactly what I'm looking for because I post very detailed job descriptions. Advertisement Online listings work especially well for clearly outlining what you can expect in experience, education and industry training. 3. Tune Into Social Channels Many people post professional profiles across different online platforms. While these internet business pages outline job qualifications, don't overlook the public spaces on different social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook. The way people behave in these settings can give you a good idea of how they might interact with your employees. 4. Ask Revealing Questions Develop job interview questions that help reveal more than basic information about an applicant. ServiceMaster Restoration by Zaba provides professional disaster restoration and cleaning services in Chicago, so I ask prospective hires how they see themselves fitting into our operations. Solid applicants don't mind answering questions about why they're the best for the job, what they expect from fellow employees and where they see themselves in 10 years. 5. Look and Listen for Red Flags If you notice body language that makes you uncomfortable, don't dismiss it as interview jitters. When your direct questions get unclear answers, pay attention. Good job prospects don't set off red flags. You want to hire someone who's comfortable and confident, so trust your instincts. Pass on anyone who exhibits odd behavior or dodges inquiries with vague responses. Advertisement 6. Encourage a Two-Way Interview While you're sizing up new job candidates, they're forming opinions too. I'm proud of my business, and I make that clear during the interview. I encourage questions that give potential hires a clear picture of what it's like to work here at ServiceMaster Restoration by Zaba. I want to bring people on board who I believe will be a good fit, but I also want them to look forward to becoming a valued part of our company's team. 7. Look for More Than Skill You can teach new employees how to operate equipment or handle paperwork, but you can't teach them responsibility, respect and commitment. The best job applicants are good at making decisions. They care about other people, and they know how to work as members of the team. These are qualities that you should always look for regardless of a prospect's resume and skill set. 8. Know When to Let Go No one enjoys firing an employee, but not every new hire works out. You usually realize quickly that you've made a mistake, so don't compound the error by thinking that you can fix it. Advertisement If someone turns out to be a bad fit, you owe it to your team to address the problem quickly. When it's time to let someone go, do it without hesitation. 9. Value the Individual One of our go-to staffers who handles customer relations has purple hair. We also have team members on board who share years of field experience and are key to helping new employees navigate our procedures. Always be open to diversity when you hire new people - it shows how much you value the individual talents and perspectives that each one brings to the workplace. 10. Include Your Professional Family Whoever you hire to fill that open position will work shoulder to shoulder with people who have already proven themselves by giving you their best every day. The decision is ultimately yours, but be open to feedback from your employees. If they have opinions about a job applicant, listen to their input. As your professional family, they have your best personal and business interests at heart. Sharing Pride and Commitment Thanks to my wonderful teams, my disaster restoration and cleaning company has grown to become one of the largest of its kind in Illinois. However, I wouldn't have these great people working for me if I hadn't developed my strategies for hiring the best. Advertisement We hear so much these days about nurturing a positive company culture. It can't happen without the right people. The Paris Agreement is cause for celebration. After years of struggle, it sets a new course on global climate action. Now, four months after 196 countries came together in Paris, it's time for leaders to roll up their sleeves and determine how to move from commitments to action. As these government representatives gather on April 22 at the United Nations to formally sign the Agreement, the moment is ripe to ask what must happen next to turn the vision of a low-carbon future into reality. There isn't a moment to lose. Ever since Paris, a parade of new data points to the perils of delay: 2015 was once again the hottest year in the modern meteorological record. March 2016 was not just record hot, but jaw-droppingly so. It also marked the 11th consecutive month of record-breaking heat globally. The extent of Arctic sea ice (the measure of how much of the far north is melting) also broke the record in January and just skirted the record in February and March. A new climate model indicates that the West Antarctic ice sheet could melt faster than previously thought, fueling sea level rise. A nearly two-decade-long drought around the Mediterranean is the worst in 900 years. Advertisement Against this backdrop, many nations are stepping up with climate action. The UN summit gives world leaders the opportunity to show they are serious about shifting course. What should we look for? Countries Take the Lead Many national governments are leading. From new solar projects in Morocco and India to plans to offer enhanced national climate commitments by Argentina and Indonesia, momentum toward low-carbon is building. China and the United States, the world's two biggest carbon polluters, have committed to formally join the Paris Agreement as soon as possible this year. Apart from the message this sends to the rest of the world, these two countries together account for 38 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Once at least 55 Parties join and 55 percent of emissions are covered, the Paris Agreement will go into force. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called for leaders to sign and join the Agreement as soon as possible. Entry into force will show not only political will, but also put in motion the key elements of the Paris Agreement, including the ambition mechanism to increase action over time. Advertisement What mix of countries will be needed to get us across the 55-55 threshold? WRI's Paris Agreement Tracker offers a way to keep track of actual commitments and experiment with different configurations of countries and emissions to see which combinations could get us over the global goal. What More Needs to Happen This Year? Moving from commitment to action will take hard work and political will. While every country's capabilities are different, all need to develop very clear roadmaps for how they will put their NDCs - their Nationally Determined Contributions, or commitments to deal with climate change - into action. To make sure their NDCs can be effective, countries should get specific about their plans for renewable energy, urban infrastructure, forest management, landscape restoration and other strategies to mitigate the impact of climate change. Most NDCs are statements of intent rather than detailed, least-cost plans. Designing the policies and programs that underlie the delivery of the NDCs is not easy, and will require the best expertise. International efforts to support such processes will need to be coordinated to prevent a tangles of overlapping technical assistance offerings Countries will also need to determine how they can align their commitments to tackle climate change with the needs of the world's most vulnerable as spelled out in the Sustainable Development Goals. That is going to require clear plans for national investment and associated financing.. To actually make it possible for action on the ground, countries with climate finance pledges must get down to the nitty-gritty of what those pledges mean: what they add up to and how they can help meet the goal of mobilizing $100 billion a year in climate finance by 2020. Effective rules to track climate finance can help countries make longer-term plans for how to use the money. Advertisement More broadly, investors must show they are in line with the Agreement's aim to ensure financial flows are consistent with low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development. Financial institutions need to shift funding away from high-carbon sectors and towards climate solutions. Progress Before Marrakesh We will need significant movement between now and the next global climate meeting in Marrakesh later this year, especially by putting in place the nuts-and-bolts details that will bring the Paris Agreement to life. The Agreement has the potential to spur action at the national level, improve tracking and reporting of climate commitments, encourage greater ambition and make certain that countries have the resources and capacity necessary to effect the change we need. We need world leaders to drive action, with more finance ministers getting engaged as the world starts to implement the Paris Agreement. PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA - APRIL 07: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) speaks during the AFL-CIO Convention at the Downtown Sheraton Philadelphia on April 7, 2016 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania primaries will be held on April 26. (Photo by William Thomas Cain/Getty Images) Even before his New York primary blowout, Bernie Sanders faced such long odds for the Democratic nomination that pre-mortem speculation about the significance of the Sanders insurgency had begun. An early effort, by Jamelle Bouie is worth considering. Bouie views the Sanders campaign as both similar and distinct from earlier ones by Jerry Brown in 1992, Bill Bradley in 2000 and Howard Dean in 2004, to wrest the nomination away from the "establishment" candidacies of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry, respectively. He also mentions Jesse Jackson's 1988 effort to defeat Michael Dukakis, though Jackson's campaign had a different character. George McGovern and Barack Obama also are noted, but they both captured the nomination from the presumptive favorite. Advertisement What linked these campaigns was disparagement of the Party and/or economic "establishment," and mobilizing an army of dedicated campaign workers, Obama, a hybrid in this regard, raised enormous amounts on Wall St., in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, while still having a legion of passionate volunteers. Bouie credits Sanders for using social media to raise more than $140 million from small donors, offsetting the PAC-based funds available to mainstream candidates. But, he questions the uniqueness of other aspects of the Sanders phenomenon. For example, he dismisses the notion because Sanders considers himself a "democratic socialist" he put socialism in the political conversation for the first time since the Great Depression. Whatever Sanders' view of an ideal society might be, and the Scandinavian ones he cites are really social democracies not democratic socialist in character -- private enterprise rules alongside a generous welfare state -- his proposals are updated New Deal/ Great Society policies plus repeal of Citizens United. On foreign policy, he endorses Obama's "Don't do stupid shit" in more refined words. He wants to listen to the Palestinians also instead of kowtowing to Israel and AIPAC as American politicians overwhelmingly do now. Important, but hardly from Trotsky's playbook. Advertisement Bouie is technically correct about the way Sanders has operationalized the term in his campaign, but "feminism" also long disappeared from discourse in the US, from the attainment of women's suffrage in 1919 until the 1960s. It then dramatically reappeared and remains a vibrant and evolving force. In comparing Sanders to Bradley, Brown and Dean, Bouie observes young college-educated whites were invariably the primary enthusiasts. Sanders has drawn some support from younger blacks and Latinos, and less educated white workers, but this has not offset Clinton's large advantage with older women, blacks and Latinos. Bouie believes Sanders would have had to devote a lot more time in the black communities, speaking at black churches and radio stations to offset Clinton's substantial bond with black voters. Bouie does think, however, that there is more to the Sanders campaign, besides its incredible fundraising lessons, distinguishing it from previous insurgencies, and creating an embryo of a more left-oriented Democratic Party. He places his hope on the unprecedented youth of the Sanders base and the possibility they will model themselves after the young Goldwater activists of 1964 who stayed in the GOP for the long game, transforming it into a more right-wing party and electing Ronald Reagan sixteen years later. Bouie makes good points in recognizing common elements in the Sanders campaign and earlier ones and suggesting young activists should get involved in their local Democratic parties and become the new establishment. But, there are problems with his analysis too. First, the young don't necessarily maintain their ideological leanings. There is some regression to the mean. The Great Recession, continuing gloomy economic opportunities for young grads, and crushing student debt have played a major role in fueling youth anger and accepting "socialism." The economic prospects for this cohort might improve, leading to support of more mainstream candidates. Many, maybe most, youthful enthusiasts of McGovern, Brown, Bradley and Dean, voted for Clinton this time. I suspect all of the insurgent candidates themselves did. An exception might be Jesse Jackson. His 1988 platform went beyond Sanders', e.g., recognition of a Palestinian state, a WPA to rebuild infrastructure, while embracing the rest. Had the Jesse Jackson of 1984-1988 run now he might have been able to combine the class, race and youth-based hat trick. Watching him electrify the all-white Hormel workers in Austin, Minnesota in Barbara Kopple's great documentary, American Dream, makes one wonder. This raises the vexing but critical problem of replacing the anomalous Sanders? Who might be on deck in 2020 or 2024? Elizabeth Warren? She'd get Sanders' youth and Clinton's women. But, she might have problems with blacks and Latinos if, for example, she has to face Obama 2.0: New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. He's a Rhodes Scholar, handsome, affable, courageous, though his Achilles heel, unless he can fudge it, is being a fiscal conservative who defended private equity funds and embraces Wall St. The longshot might be NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio. Sanders-lite, with a black wife and multi-racial kids, he could displace the unpopular Andrew Cuomo as Governor in 2018 or 2022 and then take a shot. Surprisingly absent in Bouie's analysis are the Tea Party movement's election victories which suggest party coups do not always require excessive patience. However, one can argue its road to electoral successes actually began well before the 2009 date normally cited and it was fueled by Koch et al.'s "AstroTurf" operations, not just grass-roots organizing. "The perception that numerous voters may have been disenfranchised undermines the integrity of the entire electoral process and must be fixed." - Mayor Bill de Blasio "There is nothing more sacred in our nation than the right to vote, yet election after election, reports come in of people who were inexplicably purged from the polls, told to vote at the wrong location or unable to get in to their polling site," - Comptroller Scott Stringer For many, this week's primaries in NYC were a disaster. Independents couldn't vote, names were missing from voter rolls, polling places weren't open when they should have been. From the outside looking in, it seems lack of organization and a cohesive system led to a multitude of issues that could have been avoided with more careful and systematic planning. Advertisement It was heartening to read that NYC's Comptroller will be launching an audit of the Board of Elections, after the many issues that arose. He stated, "The people of New York City have lost confidence that the Board of Elections can effectively administer elections and we intend to find out why the BOE is so consistently disorganized, chaotic and inefficient." It's been nothing but disheartening though, that there has been zero attention paid to or action taken about righting the rampant disparity in the Department of Education's Fair Student Funding (FSF). Thousands upon thousands of students across the city are not receiving the funds they are supposed to. Administrators are struggling to work within tighter budgets, teachers do not have the supplies or resources they need to work effectively, students are finding classes aren't being offered, materials aren't available, academic enrichment is dwindling. Educations all over the city are being compromised. As I've written before, Brooklyn Tech, one of the city's 8 specialized test in schools, receives 87% of FSF, the lowest percentage of all the specialized schools, while others receive far more. The High School of Math, Science and Engineering, for example gets 124% of its FSF. That's a 37% differential. It's not that people don't know. The issue has been written about in the Wall Street Journal, in Schoolbook, at DNA info. It's been reported on NPR. An online petition has garnered thousands of signatures from all over the world. Eric Adams, the Brooklyn Borough President, asked the city to better fund Brooklyn Tech and other large Brooklyn High Schools. Advertisement Parents have met with higher ups at the Department of Education. Students, parents and alumni have testified at Panel for Educational Policy meetings in front of the Chancellor and members of her staff. Forms requesting an audit have been filed with the Comptroller's office. In a climate with "AP for All" and "Computers for Everyone," students at one of NYC's esteemed STEM schools are currently losing AP courses, and are often not able to complete college level curriculum because of spotty wifi and broken computer equipment. While I applaud initiatives to support more students citywide, how about an initiative maintaining what's already in place? Disenfranchised voters in the city can now look forward to a Board of Elections audit and potential overhaul that is long overdue. NYC students deserve the same. The sky above was a brilliant blue, with puffy clouds, as I crossed the courtyard of Vilnius University on my way to Yiddish class. I had come to the capital of Lithuania to learn the language once spoken by Eastern European Jews on both sides of the Atlantic, among them my grandfather and many other family members. I'd come to walk the streets my ancestors had walked. And I'd come to see how Lithuanians were engaging with the Jewish past. "Dear students," our teacher said, "you must study Yiddish not only with your eyes but also with your nose." Acquiring this beloved language, he meant, was not just a skill but an art, requiring not only our heads but our hearts. We began at the beginning, with the alphabet, just like in the old days, when little Jewish boys used to start their lessons at the age of three. On their first day, the letters in their primers would be sprinkled with sugar, to show that learning was sweet. And indeed, for me, the learning was sweet. Even grammar was a pleasure. We kiss. Me tut a kush. We kiss more than once. Mir kushn. We kissed repeatedly. Mir flegn kushn. We would have kissed. Mir voltn gekusht. We will have kissed. Mir veln hobn gekusht. Advertisement Even more than I'd hoped, learning Yiddish brought the past to life. The literary texts we read were studded with the very places we passed on our way to class. In the afternoons, the city's last Yiddish speakers walked us through the streets. Traces of the old Jewish world were everywhere if you knew where to look. We saw the spot where the Great Synagogue once stood, and the sites of libraries, schools, theaters, and markets. Once, the city was known as "yerushalayim de lite," the Jerusalem of the North. Jewish Vilna (as the Jews called it) flowered until World War II. Then came Soviet tanks, followed by the Nazi years, when tens of thousands of Jews were crammed into the Vilna ghetto. Throughout Lithuania, more than 90 percent of the country's 240,000 Jews died during World War II. After the war, the Soviet regime further erased Lithuania's rich Jewish heritage. Today the city is home to only a remnant Jewish community, numbering a few thousand. My first visit to this place of splendor and tragedy took place more than a decade ago. Since then, I've been back to study Yiddish several times. This summer I'll return again. Advertisement Part of what draws me is the opportunity to see how the people of this country - Jews and non-Jews alike - are engaging with the Jewish past. Bit by bit, they're finding ways to weave the Jewish story into their national narrative. They're using an encounter with the past - its glories and its horrors - as a means to a more tolerant future. Once again this summer I'll visit the Tolerance Center, part of the Jewish museum, which celebrates Jewish heritage and sensitively explores the dark days of the Holocaust. I'll attend Friday night gatherings at the Jewish community center and frequent the new bagel shop. I'll get together with historians, writers, and educators who are posing tough moral questions to Lithuanians young and old. I'll meet with activists who honor the Jewish past with commemorative ceremonies and tolerance awards. As always, for me, the study of Yiddish will be a touchstone and a mekhaye - a joy. As the Vilna poet Moyshe Kulbak wrote, "Gezen hob ikh yidishe verter vi fayerlekh kleyne, vi fayerlekh kleyne..." Advertisement "To my eyes, Yiddish words are like little fires, little fires, Sparks extracted from black ore. To me, Yiddish words are like pure-white doves, white doves, Doves cooing and cooing in my heart." NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 21: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump waves to members of the audience while appearing at an NBC Town Hall at the Today Show on April 21, 2016 in New York City. The GOP front runner appeared with his wife and family and took questions from audience members. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) If you noticed that the last two Sunday mornings were slightly less chaotic on the talk show circuit, that's because Donald Trump broke with his longstanding TV tradition and did not appear. (He didn't even call in.) For five months running, Trump had been a fixture on the Sunday shows (he's made 70 appearances since the beginning of 2015), spouting off endlessly and often creating controversy as producers watched their Trump-fueled ratings climb. It's been a win-win for Trump and the press. The blueprint looked like this: Trump played the role of reality TV star turned-carnival barker while the press cheered him on, feasting off the clicks and audience surges he constantly delivered. Advertisement Missing for too long from the equation? In-depth reporting and holding the blustery candidate responsible for his often fact-free statements. "I don't think he's been held accountable by the broadcast media for his erroneous statements and repeated lies," Trump biographer Tim O'Brien tells me. The author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being Donald, O'Brien gives the press a D- grade for its covering of Trump as a presidential hopeful. He's especially critical of cable news' open-door policy of Trump coverage, such as live, unfiltered broadcasts of his rallies. "They give him the backyard to run around and then train their cameras on him to see what happens," says O'Brien. But now, Trump is taking a step back and turning down media invitations. He's also supposedly trying to roll out a new, more "presidential" image. Will the press take the bait? There's no question that there's been a makeover attempt within the Trump campaign in recent days. According to press reports, longtime political operative Paul Manafort has essentially taken over the campaign. The move has been widely seen as an effort to tighten up the operation. One key trait: pulling Trump out of the media spotlight where he's been living for the last nine months. Advertisement The campaign staff shakeup and Trump's absence from the Sunday shows "give the impression that campaign veteran Manafort has taken the reigns and directed Trump to scale back on some of the off-the-cuff behaviors that have gotten the campaign negative coverage in the past," wrote conservative blogger Larry O'Connor. The new-look Trump was unveiled Tuesday night after his New York primary victory when he gave an unusually succinct victory address and avoided his usual partisan insults. Right on cue, political commentators swooned over the costume change from Trump, giving him credit for not insulting his opponents and (temporarily) dialing back the buffoonery. "He actually called him Senator Cruz!" gushed ABC World News Tonight's David Wright. "The consummate deal-maker changing his sales pitch to close the deal. The tone, more presidential." (Old habits apparently die hard -- within a day, Trump was back to calling Cruz "Lyin' Ted.") To repeat, the press gave Trump credit for not brazenly insulting people during his victory speech. And overnight, the press is hyping as "presidential" a candidate who's spent the last nine months wallowing in campaign bigotry. Talk about a standard that's been invented out of whole cloth just for him. Advertisement Commentators might be playing up the new, kinder and gentler Trump, "but where's the evidence" anything has changed, asks Trump biographer O'Brien. So far there is none. Meanwhile, note that candidates who try to unveil a new look mid-campaign usually get called out by the media's authenticity police. But there's been very little of that regarding Trump this week; very little mocking of him for attempting to construct a new public persona on the fly. We'll soon know for sure whether Trump has any plans to abandon the thuggery that's defined his campaign to date. But his absence from the Sunday shows the past two weeks suggests the campaign may be trying to throttle back his media availability to some extent. Instead of dashing in front of television cameras, or speed dialing into news programs, Trump has taken a step back, as witnessed by his recent Sunday show hiatus. In doubt is whether Trump's stepping back from his shiny-object media strategy, which the press gladly supported since last summer. "Every time he needs to raise his visibility, change the subject, or respond to an attack, he says something outrageous and the cycle starts again," wrote Joel Simon at the Columbia Journalism Review. We've seen the drill over and over. He insulted Mexicans! He insulted Sen. John McCain! He insulted Megyn Kelly! He insulted Carly Fiorina! He insulted the Pope! He insulted Ted Cruz's wife! Months of news cycles have been robotically handed over to the Trump shiny-object coverage. Advertisement That in turn has served as one of the media's justifications for showering Trump with unprecedented attention: They treat Trump differently because Trump acts so differently! Trump didn't act like other politicians, the press claimed. He wasn't guarded in his comments. He wasn't surrounded by consultants. Trump was authentic and controversial. Or so goes the argument. And best of all, Trump gave lots and lots of television interviews. His sound bites demanded unending press attention. Race, a contentious issue at the best of the times, is at the forefront of the 2016 US election thanks to a particularly off-kilter Republican candidate (hint: he has cotton candy hair and tiny hands). Whether it's talk of building a wall, banning certain cultures from entering the country, or semi-serious talk of a mass migration north to escape 'un-American values,' it's an emotionally and racially charged lead up to a pivotal election in November. Finding some levity in these serious times is The Canada Party, a welcome newcomer in the age-old contest between Democrats and the GOP. The founding principles of The Canada Party can be found in their manifesto by Brian Calvert and Chris Cannon, titled "America, But Better". In it, they outline their bold new direction for America, and present solutions for everything from immigration to education. Advertisement Addressing racial inequality faced by African Americans on an ongoing basis, The Canada Party have enlisted 'Canada's Black Guy', played by Adrian Neblett, to offer his southern neighbours a better life by simply moving north of the border. With a tactful amount of satire on an oft-painful subject, The Canada Party does well to depict a friendlier, more polite alternative to America's current political atmosphere. Learn more about The Canada Party on their website. Follow the party on YouTube, Facebook , and Twitter. Find the Canada Party's manifesto for purchase on Amazon. Many of us believe that if you want to innovate in tech, you must move to Silicon Valley. As a homeowner and small business owner in the city of Philadelphia, I am always on the lookout for local innovation. When you talk about modern businesses in my section of the city--East Falls, a great starting point is Felicite Moorman. She is the CEO at BuLogics and StratIS, and her approach to leadership has been turning some heads in the mass media, proving that tech innovation can sprout roots anywhere. Moorman has been on my radar ever since she and her husband Sean purchased a very old property in our town called the Hohenadel House, and started renovating it. Next, I learned in our local newspaper East Falls Local that she had moved herself and her family from Oklahoma to work for the companies. Finally, recently I had heard that she had moved the companies to this outstanding curved building in East Falls that I had always wondered about and was also opening up a coffee shop up the street. She had me at coffee! I reached out to find out more about her business style and was extremely impressed and refreshed with what she had to say. Advertisement "BuLogics designs, builds, and certifies Internet of Things, or connected wireless devices in partnership with Fortune 500 companies and startups," Moorman said. "We were building the Internet of Things before it was thing! StratIS provides the software platform upon which those devices sit. We're focused on mass IoT installations in MultiFamily and Campus Communities and have installed 75,000 units in the last nine months." She moved from Oklahoma to Philadelphia to join BuLogics in their Malvern office. "We quickly realized that remaining in the suburbs created a challenging commute for our top talent, and in order to grow, we'd need to be more attractive when competing with the likes of Comcast to get that talent," Moorman said. "We moved to East Falls specifically because our team is very physically active, and the Riverfront Business District and Schuylkill Trail provide an excellent opportunity for commuting via running, walking, and biking and mid-day exercise as well!" They had an opportunity to move the company to New York City, but instead choose Philadelphia, an area she has fallen in love with. This may be most showcased in her latest role as President of East Falls Forward. "I adore Philly," she said. "It felt like home immediately, and the business community is as tremendous as any I've ever known." Role as CEO of a Philadelphia tech company. BuLogics works with fortune 500 companies and others to develop technology for their products. Advertisement "Fortune 500 companies and startups contract us to speed their time to money and market," Moorman said. "Projects are 80 percent complete before we start, because we leverage our code libraries across multiple standards, including Z-Wave, ZigBee, WiFi, and Bluetooth. We've taken products from concept to shelf in as little as three months." She says that her philosophy as CEO is pretty simple. "I have two jobs: enable the best team in the world to do their best work in the world, and tell the world that they do it," Moorman said. "It's the best job I can imagine, and I'm privileged to work with the most amazing people I have worked with in my career." She says that her favorite part of her job is that her team gets to create things that don't exist today. "Seeing them overcome problems and create solutions together is amazing," Moorman said. "They're inventors, and working with them and seeing the amazement and delight of clients is something I would wake up to do every day of my life." Defining modern culture that lasts. "BuLogics, despite being thirteen years old, amazingly maintains a technology startup culture," she said. "There's a reason. Every person we hire is a linchpin, irreplaceable. We have no cogs." Advertisement While our turnover is low, people inevitably move on to their next dream opportunity. "When that happens, we have lost an integral part of our machine, and the machine has to be rebuilt," Moorman said. "Working at that consistent level of competency and intensity is amazing. Everyone is working at their best. And when we lose a linchpin, despite the pain, we have an opportunity to make changes that are meaningful to everyone." Trusting your employees want more. Trusting your workers is nothing new to the tech world, but it is still somewhat new to Philadelphia area companies. "When you hire as purposefully as we do, you end up working with givers and grownups," she said. "They know where they need to be and when. They don't need a babysitter. They need to be enabled to do their best work, their art." Moorman said that doesn't happen with arbitrary rules. "It happens with freedom," she said. "No one here is looking to get something without giving as much or more than they get. You know those cultures where everyone is looking to see what everyone else got that maybe they didn't'? I hate that. Everyone at BuLogics is looking to see what they can give, what they can add." Building more than just perks. Moorman speaks passionately about the benefits of working at both companies. Advertisement "I'm big on space, she said. "We work in one of the first "talkies" theatres in Philadelphia! The Theatre in East Falls has been renovated to become our office home - with great history and energy!" They have some other great perks as well. "We have weekly yoga, game nights, trips to the PRG rock gym down the street, waffle Wednesdays as well as the industry standards: foosball, ping pong, and movie nights! (Because what's a theatre without movies?)," she said. "We've got nap rooms, loft offices, art-filled conference rooms and breathtaking skylights! We offer unlimited vacation and competitive salaries with benefits, plus design your own desk! We have an unlimited snack and beverage bar (including beer). We also have dinner if you need to work late - all open to employees and their guests." The company takes it to a level beyond perks. "At BuLogics, Bring Your Child to work isn't a day, but a daily, so that parents can easily balance their holistic needs," Moorman said. "And we celebrate our work with bi-annual bike rides to Valley Forge (58 miles round trip) with a Pierogi picnic midway, But perhaps the coolest things about BuLogics is that we've got one of the most diverse crews in the industry and we continue to attract the best of the best to engineer the most advanced technologies in the world!" Tech trends to watch. Moorman and her team have their eye on several important trends. "We have Apple and Google looking to make their mark in the consumer IoT, but it's Amazon's Echo and peripherals that has blown me away so far," she said. "The product is dead-on incredible and really what I think we imagine the Internet of Things can be." On a broader scale, they are watching Smart Cities initiatives like those of AT&T and IBM. "Connected cities have the capacity to dramatically change our lives, especially as cities continue to grow as the world's population and urbanization grows," Moorman said. "Our StratIS platform can play an integral part in those initiatives by addressing the needs of a city's largest building footprint, apartments. We have the capacity to save cities 20 percent on the commercial residential energy spend, from public housing to Class A properties. It's not just exciting, it's necessary." Advertisement Building a team that lasts. Talking with Moorman, you get a strong sense that she is interested in building something bigger than an average company. I've lived in Kumamoto Prefecture in Kamiamakusa City for 20 months now. It's a small island town located in the Ariake Sea between Kumamoto and Nagasaki Prefectures. It's a beautiful place to live. Ariake Sea Photo by Jemma Gallagher On Thursday night, I was driving home from my weekly taiko group, and on the phone with my mom when the first earthquake alarm went off. I wasn't sure why my phone was flipping out, and although I recognized the characters that it displayed I didn't understand the meaning initially. Then my dad called to tell me that there'd been a big earthquake, and we stayed on the phone until I was safely parked outside of my house. The first night of earthquakes was terrifying. I felt like I was on the outside of a bubble looking in while following all of the chaos on Facebook. My friends were being evacuated from their apartment buildings, roads were cracking, several people in Mashiki Town had died in a building collapse, and I couldn't do anything about it. Advertisement I was stuck, sitting in my own home experiencing aftershocks, and feeling very between worlds. It wasn't terrible where I was, by comparison to what I was seeing online, but it wasn't small enough that I could just fall asleep like nothing was happening. I spent most of the night texting or calling my friends in the states and my fellow teachers to assure them that I was okay and not in danger. Honestly though, I wasn't convinced myself. I eventually fell asleep, knowing that I would likely have work in the morning. I took my regular Friday commute by boat to a smaller island located half way to Nagasaki Prefecture where I teach at an elementary school. I was picked up at the port on the other side, and the teacher driving asked me if I had been okay the night before. I told her that it was scary, but that everything was fine. My shelving hadn't fallen over, my electricity and water were still working, and life felt sort of normal again. She warned me to be careful because the aftershocks would continue throughout the day. During second period, while teaching a class of fifth graders, we experienced a larger aftershock. My students are so well prepared for this type of event that they were halfway under the desks in the time that it took for me to even recognize what was happening. Luckily, the tremor only lasted a few seconds and we were able to resume class. Temblors had occurred throughout the day. Only a few of them were big enough for me to feel as far from the epicenter as I am. I took the boat home, and immediately took a nap. I hadn't realized how drained and stressed the night before had really been. When I woke up, I went over to my neighbor's house. She's also an Assistant Language Teacher, but she had been stuck much closer to the epicenter at the time of the quake the previous night. She had stayed in an evacuation center with some other teachers, and was finally able to return home early on Friday morning. Advertisement We had a brief conversation about emergency preparedness, and I decided to walk to the store to buy some extra dry foods. In retrospect, the store was surprisingly empty. I bought some crackers and a few boxes of instant yakisoba. I had no interest in cooking. I returned to my neighbor's house with my goodies and hung out for a few hours. The company was nice, and felt very necessary after spending the previous night alone in my shaking house communicating with people on the other side of the planet who couldn't really do anything if things went south quickly. I went home, checked in with my family, and watched a movie while I texted with another friend in Kyushu. My exhaustion reached a threshold, and it was time to pass out. I had put down my futon in the only room in my house without a tall dresser. I was not going to be the girl who got trapped under her own closet. I made sure my flashlight was close and went to sleep. I was awoken at 1:26 a.m. by the big earthquake. I jumped up and turned my light on, only to have it shut off on me a few seconds later. I grabbed my phone and immediately got a text from my friend who I had texted with earlier. "You okay?" If he had felt that one and knew to text me it must have been huge. I responded quickly that I was fine, got dressed in the dark with whatever was close, grabbed my backpack, which I had already packed with my passport, computer, water, crackers, and camera, picked up my flashlight and walked to my neighbor's house. She was huddled under her kitchen table looking at her cellphone. It had been a huge earthquake, and she was looking at the Japan Meteorological Agency's website, assessing how strong it had actually been. "The map is blowing up," she said. I moved around the furniture a bit, and we took the tall standing things off of her kitchen table (the blender, some bottles, anything that looked like it would hurt if it fell on you). Huddled under the table with her I took a moment to close my eyes and collect my thoughts. Centering myself was going to be essential to remaining calm. I could hear cars outside. After a few big aftershocks, we decided to go outside and see what people were doing. Then the tsunami warning came and we went across the street to the elementary school with our belongings. The power was still out but people's car headlights illuminated the parking lot at the top of the hill. Advertisement We sat outside of a dark gymnasium for about two hours, texting everyone we knew. Anyone who was close. Friends at home. One of the teachers from the elementary school who knew both my neighbor and me came over and checked in. Asked us if we were okay, and gave us a brief update in Japanese about what was happening. After the tsunami warning was lifted, we walked back down the hill to my neighbor's house. We cleared off her tallest bookshelf a bit, so that if it did fall the damage would be minimized. I went home after that and slept in my clothes. I realized that all of the clothes I had put on in the dark had a cat on them. Cat socks, cat shirt, cat sweatshirt. It was almost 4 a.m. by the time I finally got to sleep. I spent Saturday morning feeling cloudy. I didn't have electricity, which under normal circumstances wouldn't be so terrible, but I just wanted to know how everyone was doing. Friends started posting pictures of the damage in Kumamoto City, and farther east closer to the epicenter. News articles started surfacing on my Facebook feed, and it all felt very foreign to my experience. The earthquake had registered at about a 6 where I live. I knew it had been strong. I still struggled to understand the extent of the damage. Friends who had posted pictures of the sidewalk in front of their apartment building the previous day had updated photos that showed huge rifts. Tiles had fallen off of roofs, cars were crushed, and there were cracks in the walls of city hall. It felt like on one side of me everything had fallen apart, and on the other side people had no sense of how big it was. And I was still alone in my house. I couldn't just sit there, doing nothing and waiting for my power to come back on. I didn't have much water stored up, and not nearly enough food to last me if everything was going to be off. I got in my car and drove south down the islands. Only 20 minutes from my house the traffic lights were working, but the parking lot at the drugstore was overflowed and there was a line 10 cars deep at every gas station I passed. They were limiting everyone to 1,000 or 2,000 yen worth of gas and they had run out of regular. I was living in Mad Max. 20 minutes past that everything was much more normal. The sun was shining, and the aftershocks were considerably weaker. No one was answering their phone though. It was literally like the earthquake hadn't happened. I just wanted to talk to someone and remember that I was going to be fine. I found a friend and had lunch. We talked about our latest boy problems, experiences traveling abroad, and we griped that we really shouldn't be eating so much ramen since it's probably terrible for our bodies but we had just experienced a major natural disaster and so we were entitled to a little indulgence. It gave me a few minutes of relief from checking my Facebook constantly. After lunch I went to the drugstore and picked up some extra things, but the shelves had already been cleared of all of the bottled water. I drove back towards my house and stopped at another teacher's house. My neighbor was there and another friend. There was another big aftershock. Every time there's a big aftershock everyone's phone alarms this terrible siren and announces the earthquake. "Jishin desu. Jishin desu." Like I couldn't feel it. Advertisement Myself and two of the girls ended up at my house. There was a forecast for heavy rain and strong winds. Our city was put under an "evacuation prepared" warning. If the rain was heavy, we were at high risk for landslides. It felt like the tragedy would never end. At least my power had returned and we were able to enjoy a few laughs and watch some of the new season of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. We waited for a long time for the rain to get stronger. The winds did pick up, but eventually we decided it was time for sleep. I woke up on Sunday morning almost surprised that we had made it through the night with no evacuations or major interruptions. It felt so good to finally sleep for a full seven hours. My friends in Kumamoto City are returning to their apartments. Many of them are still without water or gas, but the electricity has been restored to a lot of homes. The pictures that they're posting are absolutely devastating. Their apartments are full of completely toppled belongings and incredible clutter. There are broken dishes, mashed televisions, and people sleeping in school gyms. Favorite places and fond memories have literally been leveled. I am feeling incredibly lucky to have had a comparably mild experience. Photos by Roland Carlos The crusade against "political correctness" has finally shown its true colors. No phrase has played a more prominent role in the current presidential campaign. Intended as an epithet, the label is typically used by Republican candidates to attack those who raise legal or ethical objections to the candidate's own positions. The logic goes like this. Everyone knows that a certain policy -- e.g., torture of suspected terrorists, banning Muslim travel to the U.S., stepping up police patrols of Muslim neighborhoods, large-scale deportations of undocumented immigrants, building a wall on the Southern border, carpet bombing civilians in ISIS-controlled territory -- would further the national interest. Those who oppose such policies are motivated primarily by concern for the emotional wellbeing of ostensibly vulnerable minority communities. And by allowing concern for hurt feelings to trump sensible policy making, these proponents of "political correctness" are imperiling the nation. The critics, in turn, reply that proponents of the above-mentioned policies are not really interested in advancing the national interest at all. If they were, they would know that these policies are more likely to threaten American security than to improve it. The true motives behind absurd proposals like banning Muslim travel to the U.S. are more sinister: namely, to curry favor with a segment of the American population that harbors deep suspicions about the nation's increasing racial, ethnic and religious diversity. Advertisement With the news that Donald Trump and like-minded commentators are attacking the decision to replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, we can finally lay this controversy to rest. At first glance, it is hard to imagine how anyone not directly related to Jackson could oppose the move. Our seventh president's list of sins is well known. He helped orchestrate the Cherokee Removal -- known as the Trail of Tears -- which resulted in the deaths of some 4,000 Cherokees, and managed to enrich himself and his friends in the process. He authorized postmasters to destroy anti-slavery literature. He owned some 300 slaves over the course of his life. One of his main policy accomplishments -- abolishing the Second Bank of the U.S. -- arguably proved disastrous for the nation's economy. Surely Harriet Tubman, the courageous abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor, better represents the nation's highest ideals and aspirations. Not according to Trump. Within hours of the announcement, he had denounced the decision to drop Jackson as "pure political correctness." While Trump acknowledged that Tubman was "fantastic," she was apparently not fantastic enough to fill the shoes of a man who had graced the front of the $20 bill "for many, many years," and "who had a tremendous history of success for this country." If the government wanted to honor Tubman, perhaps it could put her on the $2 bill, he suggested. A few hours earlier, Fox News host Great Van Susteren and former presidential candidate Ben Carson had expressed similar sentiments. Although Van Susteren insisted she was not opposed to honoring women on the currency, the decision to replace Jackson with Tubman was "stupid." Instead of "dividing the country between those who happen to like the tradition of our currency...and those who want to put a woman on a bill," the Treasury should instead pursue a compromise solution, such as creating a new $25 bill. Carson, in turn, declared Jackson a "great president," and suggested, like Trump, that Tubman be honored on the rarely seen $2 bill. Advertisement And here we see the essence of the anti-political correctness crusade. The genius of the epithet is that it allows the speaker to defend the status quo without engaging in rational argument. What was so "tremendous" about Jackson's record as President as to outweigh Tubman's contributions to the struggle against slavery? Trump wouldn't -- or more likely couldn't -- say. Van Susteren didn't even bother to defend Old Hickory's record; the fact that some Americans "like the tradition of our currency" is reason enough to keep Tubman off the $20. Only Carson was able to identify a concrete achievement: Jackson was the last President to pay off the national debt in its entirety. Fair enough. But if fiscal achievements are the primary measure of presidential greatness, would Carson support honoring Bill Clinton -- the last President to balance the budget - on the currency? The implicit message was this: It's fine to honor women or minorities, but not if this means dethroning a white male President from a widely used denomination, or even engaging in a serious debate about the moral legacy of the nation's early leaders. Mega Citizenship Workshop in Long Beach, April 10. Photo by Juan Alaniz. "For 16 years, members of my family tried to become U.S. citizens. We spent thousands of dollars on fraudulent attorneys, we lived under fear and intimidation and we had no idea how to navigate the process. I finally became a citizen at 21 years old. I became mayor at age 36. My goal is to give everyone the same shot I have had; the same opportunity to contribute to this community and to this country. I love this country. When you become a citizen, you are transformed. You belong." - Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia At its best, philanthropy finds ways to reduce suffering by helping the human spirit, the human potential, express itself. It helps people in need overcome obstacles to have the sufficiency of opportunity. And if philanthropy can do that efficiently and without arrogantly interfering with that spirit and potential - well, isn't that our goal? Civic engagement is one of those topics upon which nearly all foundations agree. We need more of it. Strengthening the values of personal and community responsibility. The allegiance to this country and its ideals. We need more engaged American citizens. Advertisement It's not well known that 1 out of 40 residents of the United States, about 8.8 million people, are Lawful Permanent Residents (LPRs) but are not citizens. These are people who have come here from all over the world, have been granted legal permanent residence, sometimes referred to as "green card holders," and are eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship. To become a citizen, they must navigate a complex set of steps that frankly most current U.S. citizens could not endure. Have you seen the 20-page application? The questions? Imagine you are an immigrant, a legal permanent resident, who has a minimum-wage job and dreams of becoming a citizen. Completing the application is a legal process filled with acronyms and questions that require precision. Every page has a place where you have to interpret an answer that could jeopardize your application. Consider these questions and your potential answers: Were you EVER involved in any way with badly hurting, or trying to hurt, a person on purpose? involved in any way with badly hurting, or trying to hurt, a person on purpose? Have you EVER committed, assisted in committing or attempted to commit, a crime or offense for which you were not arrested? committed, assisted in committing or attempted to commit, a crime or offense for which you were not arrested? Have you EVER made any misrepresentation to obtain any public benefit in the United States? made any misrepresentation to obtain any public benefit in the United States? Have you EVER been a member of, involved in, or in any way associated with, any organization, association, fund, foundation, party, club, society, or similar group in the United States or in any other location in the world? List them. How did you do? Applying to be a citizen is very challenging - perhaps as it should be. But surveys of LPRs reveal many myths and fears. It is no wonder many have waited decades. With more than 755,000 LPRs in L.A. County alone, our foundation has been focused on helping them become citizens by partnering with other foundations; local, state and federal agencies; ethnic media outlets; and notable immigrants' rights organizations. On April 10, 2016, the partners in this citizenship push in Los Angeles convened an unprecedented multi-sector collaboration that assisted 1,000 L.A. residents in applying for U.S. citizenship with the help of nearly as many of their neighbors. More than 3,500 people attended this mega workshop to learn about the steps to become a U.S. citizen. Demand was overwhelming. What made this event unique was it was like a "genius bar" - a one-stop shop for citizenship. You make an appointment; you bring your paperwork and 850 volunteers, 20 nonprofits, the Los Angeles County Department of Social Services and Registrar-Recorder, 129 pro-bono attorneys and BIA-accredited representatives, the US Department of Citizenship and Immigration Services and many others were ready and eager to help. A process that would have taken weeks and months to complete was wrapped up in hours. There was hope and inspiration in the air. The human spirit thrives when deferred dreams can be realized. It was one of the most nationalistic, most American events I have ever attended. Advertisement Partners in this effort are more optimistic than ever that our goal of facilitating the applications of up to 100,000 LPRs this year is possible. What if philanthropic organizations across the country got together to develop a "genius bar" for U.S. citizenship in their communities? Philanthropy is also at its best when it is a catalyst for collaboration. Many public libraries have already set up something similar through citizenship corners. But how many residents are aware of the services? This is where partnerships with trusted ethnic media sources can play a vital role in spreading the word. What about in-language services? Build on the network of nonprofit organizations already doing this work and help them grow their efforts. Work with government agencies that have resources and services that need more visibility. Engage the business community for volunteers and pro bono services. I was emotionally moved by the embodiment of the American Dream in the story and journey of the immigrant when I heard Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia welcome us to this enormous citizenship event. We were all reminded of how our families got to this country. How much is patriotism, civic engagement and belonging worth? There are few investments that have a higher return for all of us. American utility companies are petri dishes in which you can see how companies exposed to new planetary limits react. Like organisms, some evolve while others draw inward, seeking to hide from the new stimuli. In some ways, utilities are the perfect industry to study to see how companies react to the business risks posed by climate change They are energy intensive, heavily regulated and demographically vast. They have substantial wealth, touch virtually every business and every American. And, there is a lot of information publicly available. As a result, we can easily draw comparisons. Yet for all this similarity, publicly owned utilities are responding to the business risks posed by climate change in widely disparate ways. Advertisement Some companies are changing their sources of energy, encouraging conservation through technologies like advanced metering infrastructure and managing their carbon emissions intensity. But others are fighting rearguard actions to cling to the status quo. These utilities that are resisting change and continue to rely on coal as a primary power source, lobby at state and federal levels to neuter environmental regulation and file lawsuits against the Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of the United States' Paris accord commitments to fight climate change. Two new developments provide s insight. The first provides a detailed look at the 25 largest publicly traded utilities in the United States. The report, from the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute and the Sustainable Investments Institute, is an objective look at what utilities are doing across 12 metrics. The following are among the most interesting insights: Energy Mix: Six utilities - AES, NiSource, DTE Energy, Ameren, CMS Energy and American Electric Power - still use coal as the source of more than 75% of their power. By contrast, PG&E and Sempra have no coal in their energy mix. Emissions Intensity: NiSource, NRG Energy, CMS Energy, Xcel Energy, DTE Energy, American Electric Power and AES are the most carbon intensive. PG&E and Exelon are the least. Board Expertise: Only Ameren, Exelon and PG&E have a board member with recognizable climate science expertise. Political Spending: NRG Energy, FirstEnergy, Southern and AEP are high spenders on elections and lobbying. AES, Consolidated Edison, ONEOK and PPL are low spenders. The IRRCi/SI2 report is available here. If the IRRCi/SI2 report provides a detailed picture of the state of the utility industry today, the second noteworthy development may just provide a peek into the future. On May 25, at the annual general meeting of Southern Company, shareowners will vote on a relatively new type of proxy resolution. The Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment, representing a number of institutional investors, is asking Southern to report, without revealing proprietary information, on its strategic plan to align business operations with the International Energy Association's two-degree climate change limit scenario. This is the limit governments agreed to in the historic UN climate treaty last December. Advertisement Thanks partially to the efforts of a London-based NGO, Preventable Surprises, business planning based on limiting climate change to two degrees Celsius is gaining some traction. In a notable success, last year BHP Billiton, the mega-cap natural resources company based in Australia, did just that, publishing a well-received two degrees report. But it is a relatively new idea in the US, and the Board of Southern Company is pushing back, asking shareowners to vote against requiring such a report. While the proxy proposal at Southern probably won't win -- shareowner proposals rarely do and new issues generally fare poorly -- it may just signal the direction that investors, environmental activists and companies seeking to guarantee their future in a carbon-constrained world are going. Even if the resolution loses badly, I suspect we will see many more requests for two-degree business planning in the near future. Over the past several months, the Clinton campaign and its celebrity supporters have worked hard to convince the American public that "Hillary" is synonymous with feminism. On the campaign trail, Lena Dunham stated, "Our first female president would send a message that we are here. We are ready to lead. In fact, she has been leading all along." In a pro-Hillary video posted on YouTube, Jamie Lee Curtis said, "I want my President to make decisions on my behalf based on her experience, her command, her intelligence and from her big, warm, embracing feminine heart." Countless other celebrities -- Amy Poehler, Shonda Rhimes, Kerry Washington and Katy Perry to name a few -- have all endorsed Clinton, proudly declaring #ImWithHer and celebrating Clinton's bid for the Presidency as a historic feminist victory. It would be historic to have a woman in the White House. But if we are to embrace a feminism that concerns itself with more than the inclusion of women (particularly wealthy white women) in corporate capitalism and US imperialism, then we need a President who is willing to challenge the status quo. We need a leader unafraid to stand up to a system that idolizes profit at the expense of human decency, and who will work to replace it with one that serves the interests of all its citizens. Hillary Clinton has never aspired to this. Advertisement On the contrary, Clinton has gained much of her success by forging mutually beneficial alliances with some of this country's most powerful corporations. Consider her relationship to Walmart. A longtime friend of the Walton family, Clinton served on the board of Walmart from 1986 to 1992. Even as Walmart waged a major campaign against labor unions seeking to represent store workers (the majority of whom are women), Clinton remained faithful to the company, declaring, "I'm always proud of Walmart, and what we do and the way we do it better than anyone else." In her 2003 book Living History, Clinton wrote that CEO Sam Walton "taught me a great deal about corporate integrity and success." The Walton family, whose fortune is valued at more than the net worth of the poorest 127,600,000 Americans, has donated millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation, and hundreds of thousands to Hillary's presidential campaign. Even more disturbing is Clinton's predilection for military occupation. During her time as Senator and as Secretary of State, Clinton staunchly supported military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria and strengthened political ties with dictatorships across the globe for US economic gain. Her assertion that her vote for the Iraq War was "the best decision I [could've made] with the information I had" is deceitful considering that prior to voting, she neglected to read the 92-page classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction circulated to the Senate for review by the Bush administration. The NIE went into great detail about the objections raised by the State Department and Department of Energy to claims of nuclear-weapons in Iraq, and led multiple senators, including Bob Graham of Florida, to vote against the war resolution. Advertisement As a critic of Hillary, I have had my integrity as a feminist called into question by friends and acquaintances, as well as by public figures on more than one occasion this year. The most egregious example of this type of public shaming took place this past February, when Madeleine Albright told a crowd of Hillary supporters at a middle school in New Hampshire that "there's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other." As a woman who strongly supports other women, I do not appreciate being told that I am going to hell for embracing a feminism that does not glorify identity politics or concern itself only with the women at the top of our society. Women are free to support whatever candidate they please (or none at all), but they should not feel shamed into voting for Hillary solely because prominent feminist icons say that their feminism mandates it. Gender and representation are important, but there are other critical issues relating to feminism which must be considered. In renouncing Hillary's bid for President, I stand in solidarity with Honduran indigenous rights activist Berta Caceres who, before her murder last month, criticized Clinton for her role in the 2009 Honduran coup, which has led to nationwide violence and unrest. I stand with the millions of single mothers in the U.S. who cannot support their families on a minimum wage of $12/hour. I stand with the thousands of incarcerated women, disproportionately Black and Latina, who continue to be unjustly criminalized for substance dependence and mental illness as a result of harsh crime laws and the War on Drugs. I stand with the Palestinian mothers whose families have been destroyed as a result of the Israeli occupation, and with the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians whose lives have been lost as a result of the Iraq War. Advertisement I do not think Bernie Sanders holds all of the answers, nor do I agree with him on every issue. I am enormously frustrated by Sanders supporters who denigrate women, people of color and other marginalized groups for supporting Clinton, and who equate doing so with perpetuating their own oppression. That said, I strongly believe that Bernie Sanders' record of advocating for the working class, voicing the unpopular opinion, and remaining true to his moral and political ideals offers a glimmer of hope for the future of this country. I have no illusions that as President, Bernie Sanders will be able to accomplish much of what he is campaigning for, particularly if the House and the Senate remain Republican. But unlike Hillary Clinton, he will try. He is a man of honesty and integrity, a breed of politician that comes along rarely. Further, the notion that Bernie Sanders is an out of touch idealist who lacks the ability to get anything done is unfair and untrue. According to the New York Times, over one 12-year stretch in the House, Sanders passed more amendments by roll call vote than any other member of the Congress. Loyal to the people rather than to a political party, Sanders has formed unlikely coalitions with Democrats and Republicans alike to append important provisions to larger bills. With Republican Senator Charles E. Grassley, Sanders successfully prevented foreign workers from replacing Americans at banks that have had a federal bailout, and joined together with Arizona Senator John McCain to work out an accord on a bill to expand veterans' access to health care. Sanders is also responsible for the Obamacare amendment that expanded community health care clinic funding by $11 billion. Jose Guerrreo has already won two Scotiabank CONCACAF Champions League titles and has a third set firmly in his sights.In 2009, the midfielder won the first-ever SCCL crown when Atlante topped Cruz Azul, 2-0 on aggregate. Last year, he played in eight games as Club America lifted the trophy after a 5-3 aggregate triumph over the Impact de Montreal.The Aguilas will look to kick-off their second straight SCCL final appearance with a first-leg win at Tigres on Wednesday. Guerrero cant wait for the opening whistle.There is more motivation in a final against a great team in what is a very special year for us and the club, said the 28-year-old, who has one career SCCL goal. We committed ourselves as a team to win title this year and this first opportunity to accomplish that is coming up. We are very motivated with a lot of eagerness to do it. Its going to be difficult, but we are going to fight for it.Club America is unbeaten in its last 11 SCCL outings, while Tigres has never lost at its Estadio Universitario home in seven all-time outings in the competition.Although Guerrero preferred to look at the series in its totality, he realizes that an away goal could prove vital ahead of the second leg.We have planned for the match in a good way like we always do, the former Mexico under-20 national team star finished. We want to win on this pitch and will be difficult. For that reason, we are planning an intelligent match, knowing that its a final of 180 minutes.A good result in El Volcan is also beneficial to us and thats why we are going to defend for the 90 minutes. We have to go looking for a goal because an away goal is important, so the team will try to do things well. Here in the U.S., the assessment of the future of the wine industry is pretty grim: the land area capable of producing premium wines could decrease by as much as 81 percent by the end of this century. The major impact of climate change on wine grape production is through increasing temperature; as the growth of grapevines is mostly dictated by temperature, climate change has been resulting in earlier bloom and harvest dates, with most major wine regions being impacted. Major wine-growing regions such as Bordeaux, Burgundy, and the Napa Valley have at least a few strategies available to them. One is that they can maintain the status quo by growing the same grape varieties that they grow now. As temperature increases, sugar accumulation in the grape increases, resulting in a higher alcohol wine. Acidity of the grapes decreases, color can be reduced, and compounds that are responsible for the typical aroma of some wines can decrease. Will consumers adapt to these changing styles? It's difficult to say. Advertisement A potential adaptation strategy for the industry would be to adjust production practices - which is easier to do in some regions than others. The American wine industry has substantially fewer regulations regarding vineyard and winery practices compared to most European nations. Wine makers in Bordeaux and Burgundy don't irrigate vines or add water to wines to reduce alcoholic strength. Without changes in production regulations, some European regions will have a more difficult task of maintaining their characteristic wine style. The greater need for more freshwater for irrigation and other vineyard uses is also anticipated to have considerable environmental impact. A third option for wine regions is to change to new varieties that are better suited to current and future climate trends. That's another option that is currently easier to do in the U.S. compared to much of Europe. But will consumers clamor for Napa Valley Zinfandel or a Bordeaux Grenache? Whichever options the current premium wine-growing regions choose to follow to adapt to climate change, a certain result is a loss of wine culture and history. Vineyards in the French wine region of Burgundy, for example, are inscribed as a UNESCO site, as are several other historic wine regions. In much of Europe, the long history of winemaking has resulted in such a perfect marriage between grape varieties and geography that wine is named for the region. Advertisement Fifty years from now a red Burgundy might not be Pinot noir grapes and Chianti may not be primarily made from Sangiovese as they have for centuries. Certainly emerging wine regions may take up these cultivars but the styles of these wines will be difficult to replicate without the importation of the knowledge and culture that has developed over hundreds of years of working with these grapes. European cuisines, in particular, where food and wine pairings have reached a perfect balance over the years will be affected. Certainly there are some glimmers of hope that the future for wine might not be so dark. From a potentially slower temperature change for the Napa Valley, to new vineyard regulations in Europe, and arguments about the methodology of quantifying the ability of the industry to maintain the status quo, there are valid caveats to contemplate when considering impacts on the future of wine. But there's no argument that climate change will not alter the wine industry, and potentially even less of an argument that there won't be a high financial cost associated with it. The recent reports of better wine with climate change are misleading. While the study does report higher vintage ratings in warmer years, the ratings are from a single wine critic. There is not a lot of consensus among red wine critics when rating Bordeaux wines, and even less when they are rating different regions. Koran standing on a stand in the mosque,rosary beads Pope Francis, The Grand Mufti of Istanbul & The Quran Certain historical and political factors have led to an increase in extremism and violence in the Muslim world and elsewhere, particularly in recent decades. Let us acknowledge that there are two sides to the coin of terror. As Ambassador Charles Freeman has recently stated: "We need to face up to the fact that U.S. interventions and other coercive measures have killed as many as two million Muslims in recent decades. One does not need an elaborate review of the history of European Christian and Jewish colonialism in the Middle East or American collusion with both to understand the sources of Arab rage or the zeal of some Muslims for revenge. Reciprocating Islamist murderousness with our own is no way to end terrorist violence." Advertisement The other side of the coin is undoubtedly the cancerous ideology of Islamic extremism that has grown from the soil of Arab Wahhabism, which has received direct and indirect support from the United States over many years. We're the staunch ally of Saudi Arabia, which has bred a form of Islam that betrays 14 centuries of Islamic law and culture; and in the 1980s we supported with money and arms the administration of Zia ul Haqq in Pakistan which succeeded in making Salafism almost the norm in that once Sufi culture; and of course we funded Al Qaeda in Afghanistan against the Russian occupation of that country. An intolerant ideology has been unleashed. We should not compound our ignorance by listening to the moronic Islamophobes who ignore history, context, and fundamental Islamic teachings, while promoting an unnecessary clash of civilizations. We should seek, instead, areas of common values, and insist on holding violent extremists accountable for their betrayal of the moral teachings of the Quran that condemn aggression and encourage reconciliation. A small minority of the world's one and a half billion Muslims has misconstrued the teachings of Islam to justify their misguided and immoral actions. It is most critical at this time for Muslims to condemn such extreme ideologies and their manifestations. It is equally important that non-Muslims understand that this ideology violates the fundamental moral principles of Islam and is repugnant to the vast majority of Muslims in the world. Then why does Islam seem to be associated with terrorists and suicide bombers? So-called "suicide-bombers" did not appear until the mid-1990s. Such strategies have no precedent in Islamic history. The Qur'an says quite explicitly: Do not kill yourselves. [Qur'an 4:29] Risking one's life in the course of either legitimate violence or non-violence is permitted, even if the probability of death is very high, but deliberately ending one's life is "suicide" and is never permitted under Islamic law in any circumstances. Advertisement Why have not more Muslims condemned those who supposedly "hijacked" Islam? It is an all too prevalent myth that Muslims have not protested and condemned those who have violated Islam's moral principles for the sake of their political goals. Not only have the statements and demonstrations against terrorism gone under-reported, in some cases misleading stories have been publicized. Ask any Muslim how he or she felt in the days following 9/11 and you will hear stories of grief, shame, and deep sorrow. Search online for "fatwas against terrorism" and you will find thousands of pronouncements by Muslim organizations and scholars. Does Islam justify violence in achieving its goals? When is the use of force justified? In general, war is forbidden in Islam, except in cases of self-defense in response to explicit aggression. If there is a situation where injustice is being perpetrated or if the community is being invaded, then on a temporary basis permission is given to defend oneself. This principle is explained in the following verses: Permission [to fight] is given to those against whom war is being wrongfully waged - and, verily, God has indeed the power to succor them - those who have been driven from their homelands against all right for no other reason than their saying, "Our Sustainer is God!" For, if God had not enabled people to defend themselves against one another, [all] monasteries and churches and synagogues and mosques - in which God's name is abundantly extolled - would surely have been destroyed before now. [Qur'an 22:39-40] The highest justification for a defensive war is for the purpose of defending religious freedom and human rights. This verse also acknowledges Christian and Jewish places of worship as equally worthy of defense because these are places in which "God's name is abundantly extolled." All relevant authorities show that this is the earliest Qur'anic reference to the problem of war as such. It was revealed immediately after the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.s.) left Mecca for Medina. The principle of war in self-defense has been further elaborated in the following verses which were revealed about a year later: Advertisement And fight in God's cause against those who wage war against you, but do not commit aggression - for, verily, God does not love aggressors. And slay them wherever you may come upon them, and drive them away from wherever they drove you away - for oppression (fitnah) is even worse than killing. [Qur'an 2: 190-191] The phrase "slay them where you find them" obviously refers to a situation in which a community has already been attacked and is responding defensively. Thus war is permitted when it is defensive in nature. War can only be continued to repel the enemy and must be stopped immediately after the enemy retreats. Chapter Nine (Surah Tawba) is the most authoritative chapter on the concept of war in the Qur'an and is one that is abused by both extremist Muslims and those who allege that Islam is a violent religion. However, in verses four and seven of this chapter it is clearly stated that Muslims can only declare war with people who have broken their treaty with them or who have resorted to enmity first. It is also emphasized in this chapter that Muslims must stay loyal to their commitments and never break them, and this applies to all commitments and treaties, not merely to those with other Muslims. It is further stated that if they incline to peace, incline to it as well, and place your trust in God: indeed, He alone is all hearing, all knowing! [Qur'an 8:61] It has sometimes been asserted that the Quran forbids Muslims to enter into friendly relationships and alliances with non-Muslims. What is the truth of this? This assertion is based on a misunderstanding of a verse that tells the Muslims of Muhammad's time not to take as allies those who oppose their religion. The general principle established throughout the Qur'an is that the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims should be based on peace and fairness. So that there is no ambiguity it clearly and unequivocally states: Allah does not forbid you from dealing kindly and justly with those who do not fight you for (your) Faith nor drive you out of your homes: for Allah loves those who are just. [60:8] Advertisement The Qur'an only restricts relationships between Muslims and non-Muslims as follows: Allah only forbids you, with regard to those who fight you for (your) Faith, and drive you out of your homes, and support others in driving you out, from turning to them (for friendship and protection). It is such as turn to them (in these circumstances), that do wrong. [Qur'an 60:9] To Summarize, In short, the Islamic principle of "jihad" is purely defensive in nature and is not a mechanism to settle a score or for revenge. While the principle of "eye for an eye" is allowed in Islam, it is always suggested that it should be tempered with fairness and compassion and, better yet, it is always recommended that one should forgive one's enemies. The Qur'an sets a very high standard for the just defense of human communities and religious freedom. If some Muslims or their governments have not lived up to these principles, it is not sufficient reason to condemn the religion itself. But it is the responsibility of Muslims to oppose those governments or ideologies that violate these principles. The use of physical force in Islam is permitted only to defend human rights against aggressors or armed occupiers. The requirements for the legitimate use of force in either internal revolution or external war are strict and are clearly spelled out in the Qur'an, the sayings of the Prophet (hadith), and legal texts. Fight in the cause of God those who fight you, but do not transgress limits. [Qur'an 2:190; 4:175, 5:9; 6:151, 22:39-40; 42:41-43] Advertisement If anyone slew a person - unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land - it would be as if he slew the whole people. [Qur'an 5:35] Do not kill women or children or non-combatants. Hadith The use of non-violence as a strategy to combat evil has been employed in the appropriate circumstances by some of Islam's greatest leaders. The following verse can certainly justify the strategy of non-violence: Nor can goodness and evil be equal. Repel evil with what is better. ... And no one will be granted such goodness except those who exercise patience and self-restraint, none but persons of the greatest spiritual blessing. [Qur'an 41:34-35] 22% of the world population is Muslim. Whatever the reason, the United States has invaded or attacked at least 12 majority Muslim countries in the last 15 years. The drone warfare and bombing campaigns that define our relationship with much of the Muslim world can only produce an inevitable blowback. Ignoring or worse yet distorting Islamic teachings on a "just war", and demonizing 1.3 billion people are manifestations of immoral intellectual aggression. There is no inevitable conflict between the so-called "West" and the so-called "Islamic world," but if we refer to the Quran, there is a significant basis for peace reconciliation. Hillary Clinton walked away from the New York primary last night with a big win. (Nathania Johnson / Wikimedia Commons) Tuesday was the New York primary, and despite voting issues and allegations of foul play, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both walked away with huge wins. Here's a #NYPrimary recap, after Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton win in New York https://t.co/xWPH5oWquu https://t.co/AEA0Dxe2Li Bloomberg (@business) April 20, 2016 Advertisement Hillary Clinton says her victory in the New York primary was particularly important to her. https://t.co/PwySGmamMj https://t.co/F99xpRoejK ABC News (@ABC) April 20, 2016 For the first time in a long time, New York was a key state in the presidential primary. The Ted Cruz campaign had already written off the state as a loss, but Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Clinton all saw this as a state they needed to win. Trump and Clinton solidified their leads, and the race became much tougher for Sanders. We don't all look the same, or sound the same, or worship the sameand that's one of America's biggest strengths.https://t.co/m4CJ0NgBhq Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) April 19, 2016 Advertisement As the dust settles on the most recent primary in this whirlwind of a presidential election, catch up on everything you need to know about Tuesday night. 1. Trump and Clinton had HUGE wins. This was no repeat of states like Missouri, where we held our breaths to see who would win. Trump won 60 percent of the vote with Ohio Governor John Kasich in a very distant second place with 25.2 percent. Clinton also won big, with 58 percent of the vote to Sanders' 42 percent. Both candidates claim New York as their home state: Trump is from Queens and (of course) has buildings with his name on them all over Manhattan, while Clinton was a New York senator for eight years and now lives in Chappaqua, an NYC suburb. For Trump, this win makes his path to the nomination much easier, and also helps him silence the negative headlines about him that have been dominating the press lately. His comments on abortion and accidentally mixing up 9/11 with 7-Eleven didn't seem to have an effect on New York Republicans -- exit polls show that the majority believe he's most likely to beat Clinton in a general election. Advertisement This might quiet some of his claims that the system is rigged against him. Clinton, meanwhile, finally broke her losing streak after Sanders won eight primaries in a row. New York has the second highest number of delegates for Democrats, so this win was key for her and a blow to Sanders, who also has strong ties to New York, where he was born and raised. Clinton's win was decisive in more ways than one. Not only did she win among African-Americans and Latinas... ... she also received more popular votes than every other GOP candidate combined. Dispatches from the Enthusiasm Gap: Clinton got more votes in NY tonight than all the GOP candidates combined. Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 20, 2016 While Sanders swept nearly the entire state north of New York City and voters 18-29, Clinton dominated in the highly populated Big Apple. Advertisement 2. Cruz even lost to people who aren't even in the race anymore. Cruz's campaign wasn't predicting a good day in New York -- they expected to come away with very few delegates. And they did. They came away with zero. Even though the Cruz campaign wasn't expecting much success, they probably didn't think they would lose as badly as they did. Cruz was even behind Ben Carson in some districts, who dropped out of the race weeks ago. Here's New York values for you: Ted Cruz is losing to Ben Carson in some districts. pic.twitter.com/9yYfuoHqiz Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) April 20, 2016 Ouch. Cruz ended up with about 15 percent of the vote and is already turning his focus to Maryland and Pennsylvania, which both vote next week. 3. Voters are unhappy with election rules. Another primary, another voting controversy. It almost feels routine at this point, doesn't it? More than 125,000 Democratic voters were erased from the records before the primary Tuesday for various reasons. People were FURIOUS. Advertisement As of 3:50, @AGSchneiderman voter hotline received > 700 complaints from voters across NYS. Context: Office received ~150 for '12 general. Nick Benson (@nick_benson) April 19, 2016 About 70,000 of these voters were apparently purged from the records because they were inactive in the last two federal elections. "It's absurd that in Brooklyn..[thousands] have been purged from the voting rolls." Bernie after #NYPrimary SHADE.https://t.co/WKHHctYhFo Splinter (@splinter_news) April 20, 2016 A group called Election Justice USA tried to file a temporary restraining order that would have allowed the unlisted people to vote, but a federal judge denied it. Sanders' campaign in particular was angry with how the situation was handled, and even Mayor Bill de Blasio called on the Board of Elections to reverse the purge. Advertisement There are mad conspiracy theories flying around involving the Clinton campaign. Yanno I just can't wrap my head around how thousands of voters purged from the system in Brooklyn, where sanders grew up. Its too ironic Marshal McLooney (@Harrison_rein) April 20, 2016 Sanders also wasn't happy that New York's primary is closed -- only registered Republicans and Democrats can vote. But still, we learned three things: - Brooklyn is heavily Democratic, so if Dem voters disappeared from the rolls, that affected Sanders and Clinton. There's no way anyone at the election board could know who a Brooklyn voter who hasn't voted in the past two presidential elections was going to vote for this time. - Brooklyn went overwhelmingly for Clinton, in most demographics. Clinton sweeping Manhattan, much of white liberal Brooklyn. This is not Bernie's night. pic.twitter.com/HGizEYLx87 Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) April 20, 2016 Clinton wins all of Brownstone Brooklyn Gowanus, and Bernie's old nabe https://t.co/fBtnQ6hzll Andrea Bernstein (@AndreaWNYC) April 20, 2016 Advertisement - Even if Sanders had picked up every vote that disappeared from the rolls, he still wouldn't have won. 4. Trump still lost in Manhattan, despite his name being all over the place. Despite winning #NYprimary, it appears Donald Trump may have lost Manhattan https://t.co/6kaPS00fN5 pic.twitter.com/qzcOrI4jii The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) April 20, 2016 Trump's name is plastered over more than a dozen properties in Manhattan, so you'd think that he would win that borough of New York easily ... right? Nope. Despite being virtually unable to escape reminders of Trump in the region, Manhattan voters turned to Kasich instead. Ouch. 5. Sanders refuses to back down. Most outlets are predicting the death of Sanders' campaign given Clinton's wide delegate lead, but the candidate who originally started this campaign as a protest refuses to remove his voice from the race. Advertisement After the results came in, Sanders' campaign manager Jeff Weaver says that even if Sanders doesn't have the number of delegates required to win by June 7th, the campaign will still try to persuade superdelegates to switch sides before the convention in July. There was a mixed response to this plan -- while some Bernie supporters are behind him all the way, other Democrats are a bit more skeptical of his chances at winning the nomination and think he should try to help unite the party behind Clinton instead. Hilarious how Jeff Weaver said BS could win MD. All those black ppl in MD, it ain't happening. AAs are just not that into you #WeAreWithHer Shashana (@Shashana80sKid) April 20, 2016 So much respect for Jeff Weaver tonight. I'm with the political revolution until the convention and beyond #WeWontBackDown Alik (@almyrOH) April 20, 2016 Direct from his campaign manager Jeff Weaver's mouth! THIS is why @BernieSanders is bad... https://t.co/a9rgQQc1Gc pic.twitter.com/kTyAgr0sCA Perez (@ThePerezHilton) April 20, 2016 Given that Sanders started this campaign as a way to make his voice heard and draw attention to issues he believes are important for the entire country, it's unlikely that he'll concede to Clinton that easily. With just over a month left before the end of primary voting, the race is starting to come down to the wire. Sanders and Cruz need wins more than ever, while Trump and Clinton are hoping to solidify their leads before their respective conventions over the summer. Clinton has already begun calling on Sanders supporters for party unity... "There's much more than unites us than divides us" Clinton tells those who support Sanders https://t.co/zWMkGbDUyP https://t.co/B6HLH9CGA6 BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) April 20, 2016 ...while Trump continues to say that the only way he won't receive the nomination is if there's foul play. Advertisement Donald Trump says the system is rigged but heres how he can win the delegate game: https://t.co/BhzluTsXLe pic.twitter.com/X85z3bLqwq CNN International (@cnni) April 19, 2016 Next Tuesday is another big election day, with primaries in five states: Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Next week could make or break campaigns -- make sure you stay informed. Photo: Office of the President, Nepal. The Himalayan country Nepal made history with the first female 'President', the first female 'Speaker of Parliament' and the first female 'Chief Justice'. In September 2015, the new constitution had declared Nepal as an inclusive federal democratic republican country. The Constitution of Nepal, which came into effect on Sept 20, 2015, replacing the Interim Constitution of 2007. This special day is the major milestone in the history of Nepal. The constitution was endorsed by 90% of the total lawmakers out of 598, however, some human rights activists, political groups and some ethnic groups remained dissatisfied. They accused the Constitution of being gender discriminatory especially in regards to citizenship provisions. Onsari Gharti, First Woman Speaker of Parliament. Photo: Legislature Parliament of Nepal. On the one hand, citizenship provisions in the new constitution discriminate against women; on the other hand, after the declaration of the new constitution, Nepalese women are creating one by another milestone. First time in the history, women are leading the major bodies of federal democratic republic Nepal. Last October, Nepalese lawmakers elected the country's first woman 'Speaker of Parliament'. Parliament unanimously elected UCPN-Maoist lawmaker Onsari Gharti Magar as the Speaker. With that victory, Gharti became the first woman to lead the legislative body in Nepal's parliamentary history. Earlier she had served as 'Deputy Speaker of Parliament'. Advertisement Bidhya Devi Bhandari, First Female President of Nepal. Photo: Office of the President, Nepal. Within two weeks of that historical milestone, Nepalese lawmakers elected the country's first woman 'President'. Parliament elected Bidhya Devi Bhandari as first female 'President of Nepal'. She received 327 out of 549 votes cast. Female House Speaker Onsari Gharti announced Bidya's victory as the new 'President of Nepal'. Bhandari was the vice-chairperson of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) before winning the presidential election on 28 October 2015. Sushila Karki, First Female Acting Chief Justice of Nepal. Photo: Supreme Court of Nepal. Within six months of that milestone, Nepal got first woman 'Chief Justice'. Sushila Karki became the first female acting 'Chief Justice of Nepal's Supreme Court' on April 13, ending the male domination of top posts in the judiciary. The Constitutional Council had recommended Supreme Court Justice Sushila Karki for the post of chief justice. Karki assumed office, months after the country got its first woman President and Speaker. Gauri Malla as First Female Prime Minister in TV series 'Singha Durbar'. Photo: Gauri Malla's FacebookNepal got the first female president and the first female speaker of Parliament while Nepal Television was about to launch the most awaited TV series 'Singha Durbar' which brought the first female PM to Nepal. Onsari Gharti Magar, Nepal's first female Speaker of the Parliament, launched the premiere show. The TV series was funded by USAID and was produced by Search for Common Ground Nepal, along with production partner Mila Productions. 'Singha Durbar' had featured Nepali actress Gauri Malla as Nepal's first female Prime Minister. Months after the launched of that TV series, Nepal got first woman chief justice. Cowritten by Yvon Chouinard, Founder, Patagonia Former Hewlett-Packard CEO and ex-presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina said recently that environmentalists were the cause of water problems in California because they had blocked the creation of more dams in the state. She was quickly raked over the coals by environmentalists, who pointed out that it doesn't matter how much storage you have if you have no water to store. Turns out both sides are missing the point. And the opportunity. The Great California Drought, now in year five (though Northern Cal is getting some temporary relief), is the worst drought in California history. According to NASA we are currently trillions (yes, trillions) of gallons below where we should be in groundwater. This has forced us to deplete our precious aquifers--many that took millennia to fill. Recently, NASA, using satellites to measure underground water supplies, found was that nearly one in seven US aquifers are so depleted that they must now be classified as 'extremely" or "highly" stressed, and that California's Central Valley Aquifer--which is being sucked dry to help drought-stricken farms in our core growing region--is now by far the most troubled in the United States. Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who lead the study, called the situation "critical," adding that "we are running out of groundwater." According to the federal government nine cities in California are at risk of going bone dry, and some small towns are already needing to truck in water for daily use. Advertisement So where's the good news? Truth is, we're standing on it. And more precisely, we're farming on it. New data on soil from around the world shows that if we modify our approaches to how we grow our food we could reduce the amount of water necessary by as much as 80 percent, depending on the crop. And we can do this while maintaining similar yields and making our agriculture industry more resilient. The science is actually fairly simple. Healthy soil is brimming with living organisms--billions in a single spoonful. To support these micro-organisms soil needs to store water for them, which it does by creating humus, an organic component of soil that stores forty times its weight in water. So think of healthy soil as a huge sponge A really huge sponge that acts like a water battery during droughts. Studies by the Rodale Institute have shown that years into a drought healthy soil is still producing food-- even without irrigated water. So the big question is--are we doing this--and if not, why not? The quick answer is no. Most of the state uses industrial agriculture techniques, which include mono-crops, severe tilling, and widespread use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. These techniques kill those micro-organisms in the soil, taking the health of the soil with them. Studies of industrial farms have shown a reduction in the organic matter by as much as 90 percent. And when that disappears, so does the soil's natural ability to store water. The good news is that we can reverse this quickly. According to Dr. Christine Jones, one of the world's foremost scientists on groundcover and soil, and also verified by Dr. Rattan Lal at Ohio State University, every one percent of organic matter we restore in the soil results in the retention of 20,000-60,000 gallons of water per acre. With 27,000,000 acres of planted cropland and 63,000,000 acres of range grasslands in the state, that adds up to a stored potential of 1.8 to 5.4 trillion gallons. Advertisement Accomplishing this may be easier than you think. Depending on the soil and what's being raised, it comes down to adding compost and managing the soil in a regenerative manner. For crops, that means cover crops, no (or very shallow) tilling, and reduced use of synthetic chemicals. For grazing livestock it means using moveable paddocks with dense herds so cattle can be managed in a way that replicates how herd animals move in nature, which benefits the soil instead of depleting it. We can help make this happen by supporting bills like SB 367, which would fund agricultural projects in California that store water (as well as carbon), and by supporting Governor Brown's Healthy Soils Initiative, which could protect our agriculture industry, our water, and even positively affect climate change from this moment on. As to Carly Fiorina's comments about needing more dams to solve the water crisis, here's a novel way to look at it: according to Russ Conserv, an engineer who ran Shell Oil's Gamechangers Division, adding one percent of organic matter to California's agricultural soil would store the equivalent of up to 16 Folsom dams. So if you're looking to increase California's water supply and help our agriculture industry at the same time, look down. You might just be standing on a puddle. A big, state-wide, permanent puddle. --- Yvon Chouinard is founder of outdoor clothing and gear company Patagonia, known for its environmental leadership and commitment to use business to inspire and implement solutions to environmental crises. Love of Country I do love America. How could one not love the forests of Maine; the gorges of the Cumberland plateau in Tennessee; the mesquite trees of west Texas; the ragged coastline of California? All of it like a hymn of praise, a song of thanksgiving for so much abundance and goodness. And being a grateful citizen of Music City, I must stop there a moment: how could one not love the prophetic consciousness of Johnny Cash, the mesmerizing cadences of Don Williams, the angelic strains of Alison Krauss? Or considering socio-political greats: how could one not admire the virtues of industry and wit in Benjamin Franklin; the democratic impulses of the nineteenth-century religious reformers; the cry for justice in the words of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; the humility suffusing Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address; or the persistence and sheer human courage seen in the likes of the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, and Chuck Yeager?--all like paeans to the human spirit. Advertisement One could go on and on, in all good faith, with more accounts of beauty and courage. Christian Nation Here in the Bible Belt at least, this rather honorable love for land and neighbor, however, gets conflated with another, less helpful construct: the myth of the Christian nation. "Conflated" is a word too little used or appreciated: the melding or melting of two ideas into one. I am rather convinced that to conflate love of country with the myth--or the pursuit of--a Christian nation is bad news: bad for the country and bad for Christianity. To claim that the United States once was a "Christian nation," or to seek to recover some supposedly lost "Christian nation" status, is bad news because it is historically false; misunderstands basic Christian theology and practice; and contends for a strategy that is sure to back-fire into resentment and hostility. 1. Historically false Neither "God" nor "Christianity" are ever mentioned in the Constitution. "Religion" is, of course, mentioned in the first amendment: but the amendment requires freedom to practice religion as one chooses. And Article VI of the Constitution maintains that: "[N]o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." There are references in the Declaration of Independence to "Creator" and "Supreme Judge of the World." But these are phrases that any good Deist could have and would have used. Advertisement Much noted these days is the Treaty of Tripoli, ratified in 1797 under the presidency of John Adams. Ratified unanimously by the Congress, the treaty maintained that "The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." (Picture here.) Or note the letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams in 1823, the ironic truth of which many Christians ought, I think, pay more attention: "The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words." Jefferson then takes on the claim of the virgin birth: "And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors." So Jefferson, like many eighteenth-century great minds, saw some value to the "moral teaching" of Jesus, but rejected wholesale the theological narrative which birthed such teaching to the world. Jefferson's Bible--in which Jefferson took a sharp instrument, perhaps a pen-knife, and cut out the parts of the Bible he found objectionable--ends with Jesus of Nazareth having been crucified, placed in the tomb, and the stone rolled over the entrance. Jefferson is clearly not Christian in any orthodox sense, given his forthright rejection of the resurrection of Jesus. Or consider more recent language and developments: "In God We Trust" was first placed on coins in 1861, and then only under significant political pressure. But, as I tell my students over and over again, one must look beneath mere words to the substance. In important ways, it does not really matter whether any group of people says "in God we trust," or whether the citizenry pledges allegiance to one nation "under God." Even we Christian monotheists know that the use of the word "God" is argued and fought about (as evidenced by the recent controversy at Wheaton College). Advertisement More interesting to me than the well meaning but I think naive push by Christians to make sure we say "Under God" in the pledge are the facts that, first, the phrase was later added to the pledge, in 1954, during the administration of President Eisenhower. And that same Eisenhower once noted: "our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith--and I don't care what it is." Which leads us to our second point: 2. Why the Quest for a "Christian America" is problematic theologically Some of the basic and elementary theological reasons the very notion of a "Christian America" is problematic (pat me on the back; I am restraining my language) include the following: A "nation" is geographically bounded. The Christian church, however, is trans-national. A "nation" as an entity seeks its own partisan agenda. But to identify itself with any given party, sect, nation-state, or other more narrow community of self-interest destroys the Christian church's most fundamental calling--a "ministry of reconciliation." Being geographically bounded, a "nation" maintains its existence through military might. The church is an entity that lives by, according to, and bears witness to suffering love. The church is not dependent upon self-preservation. (And, let it be noted, that this is not a mere utopian theological assertion; it is a historical fact. All empires have fallen, and those in existence will fall; meanwhile the Christian tradition has survived, for good or ill, through its own times of horrific failure and its times of creative faithfulness, for two millennia.) A "nation" encompasses citizenship according to arbitrary historical accident. The church, however, encompasses membership according to voluntary intentional commitment. Advertisement One way to put this: the quest for a "Christian America" betrays an elementary and fundamental mis-understanding of what Christianity is. Another way to put it: the quest for a "Christian America" perverts Christianity. This is not some Christian self-righteousness looking down its nose at "America." The facts are that "America" has often had to school the church: breaking down patriarchy and breaking down racism are two of the most obvious examples. It is simply a contention that a nation-state and the Christian faith are two very different things, and to seek to super-impose "Christianity" on the "nation-state" misunderstands Christianity. Some have insisted that the point of the rhetoric of "a Christian nation" is not to be taken literally, but as a way of saying "we support the greatest and historic values of 'America.'" If this is the case, I would suggest you stop confusing folks, and say what you mean. But even in saying what you might mean, on this score, other theological difficulties are raised. For example, notions of "freedom" in Western democracies are grounded in the notion of maximizing individualistic pursuits. "Freedom," generally speaking in the West, is the liberty to do what one wants. Christian notions of freedom (as well as "freedom" in many other ancient moral traditions) entail a liberty, we might say, on the other side of virtue: the freedom to do what one ought, the capacity to live a truly good life. Similarly, the whole tradition of "rights," while it has served a terribly useful function politically and practically in overthrowing various forms of oppression and injustice, is ill-founded theologically. For constitutional democracies, "life" is a "right." For Christians and Jews, life is a gift. Similarly, the very notion of a "right to private property" stands in tension with "all is gift." Related, others have raised the question: ought we not be proud of the ways in which the United States has made possible immense strides in standards of living and raised the poor up from the heap of the oppression of poverty? Advertisement 3. Why the Quest for a "Christian America" is problematic strategically When Christians attempt to do stupid things like making the Bible the official state book, or they pursue other legislation to impose their particular moral concerns, the horror of ISIS blares loudly in the public consciousness. But if Christianity is, at best, being "salt and light" in the world, as Jesus said; if Christianity is, at best, a suffering love of all, including one's enemies, as Jesus said; if Christianity is, at best, a rejection of imposition and an embrace of generosity, as Jesus said--if these things be true, then the quest for a "Christian America" can only be counted a strategic failure. Despite a sustained global commitment and technological advancements, mosquito-borne illnesses continue to claim the lives of countless men, women and children around the world each year. When you think about mosquitoes these days, the Zika virus likely leaps to mind, but tragically, it's far from the most devastating disease transmitted by this opportunistic insect. For centuries, the world has waged an unending battle against malaria, one of the world's oldest, deadliest diseases--it kills an estimated 430,000 each year and infects 214 million more. Pregnant women and children under 5 years old are particularly vulnerable because of their compromised immune systems. Malaria in pregnancy often contributes to dangerous health consequences for the mother and her unborn baby, including severe maternal anemia, low birthweight and even death. In 17 countries around the world, Jhpiego, a nonprofit global health affiliate of Johns Hopkins University, is contributing to what was once thought to be impossible: ending malaria for good. Through collaborations with governments, private partners and communities, we are helping women and families survive malaria and, most important, preventing new cases through the introduction and acceleration of high-quality malaria services. Advertisement Community health worker, Papa Esso, counsels expectant mother Jenny at her home. Photo by Eric Tchinda One of these women is Jenny, a 19-year-old mother-to-be from Cameroon. Thanks to home visits from a community health worker trained through a dynamic partnership between ExxonMobil and Jhpiego, Jenny received information on malaria in pregnancy and was encouraged to visit the local health center. There, she received antenatal care, and medication to prevent malaria in pregnancy, resulting in the birth of a healthy baby boy. Use of Intermittent preventive treatment, insecticide treated bed nets and prompt diagnosis and treatment of confirmed cases are the recommended life-saving measures that prevent transmission of malaria and save lives. Through the Jhpiego-ExxonMobil partnership, hundreds of health providers and community health workers have been trained in malaria prevention and treatment best practices to cover 700,000 women and families in Chad and Cameroon, including 125,000 children. These children will benefit from the partnership's expanded focus on ensuring access to prompt diagnosis and effective treatment through case management, which is critically important as children under 5 account for 78% of all malaria deaths. Fabien Nsengiyumva (far right) and his family. Photo by Kelly Dale In some areas of Africa, such as Rwanda, success at providing women and families with lifesaving treatment for malaria has advanced to a stage where public health workers actively search for potential new cases in effort to eliminate malaria, a process called pre-elimination Fabien Nsengiyumva and his family live in a village in northern Rwanda that is 3 miles and two mountains away from the nearest health center. Fabien came down with a fever but, lacking health insurance, he self-medicated with drugs he bought at the pharmacy. Soon after, his neighbor fell ill. The neighbor, however, decided to make the difficult trip to the Mataba health center, where he was diagnosed with malaria and properly treated. His visit triggered the next steps in the pre-elimination effort--health workers tracking down any related cases of malaria and treating them. With leadership from the Government of Rwanda, the United States Agency for International Development's flagship Maternal and Child Survival Program, which is led by Jhpiego, is working to strengthen health facilities in pre-elimination efforts and train providers on how to actively detect and treat malaria cases, using rapid diagnostic tests for diagnosis at the community level. Advertisement "I was so happy and relieved after the health care worker visited," said Fabien. "I felt the government and its partners are truly caring for me." Two destinations for the price of one? Say goodbye to stagnating in waiting areas and hello to a bonus trip. This post originally appeared on Map Happy. There are a couple of options on long trips: suffer, maybe find a hotel, or make it a bonafide stopover. In the case of the stopover option, many airlines offer the ability to jump out of the airport for what would otherwise be a boring connection. It works like this. Say I have a flight from Boston to Copenhagen and it makes a stop in Iceland. Rather than sit in Keflavik Airport for a couple hours, I hop out and tour Iceland for a few days. Then I head back to the airport and continue on to Denmark. And it's all included in the round trip fare from BOS to CPH. Electing for the stopover begets a bonus destination. Advertisement There aren't too many airlines out there that offer this option just yet, and the current stopover policies that do exist aren't created equal. Some offer complete stopover packages; others hide the option in the fine print. Icelandair is perhaps the most vocal about providing stopover options. It outright encourages travelers to stop in Reykjavik for a few nights between the U.S. and European destinations. (And offers a stopover buddy.) Middle Eastern carriers Etihad and Emirates also make it easy to add a few days in hub cities Abu Dhabi or Dubai, respectively. Other airlines, like Turkish Airways or Air France, require customers to be a bit more crafty. (Especially since a two-day stopover can sometimes make the flight cheaper!) Most of these airlines post stopover info directly on their website with the exception of Air France, Turkish, Hawaiian and Japan Air. For example, Japan Air mentions stopovers in their fare conditions but nowhere else. In that case, travelers should peruse multi-destination bookings if an "official" package isn't offered. Sam Wright Fairbanks is an editorial assistant at Map Happy. Read More : Photo by Keshawve Jeewon via ALU Whether you are a student, employer or investor at ALU, you are part of a revolution. This is exactly what Fred Swaniker, founder and CEO of African Leadership University wanted to instil, when he paralleled the inaugural campus in Mauritius to 1969's moonshot, in his speech at the Grand Opening on the 17th of March. I met up with a few of the spaceship's 176 crew members -- the ALU students -- to discuss the values and principles of learning, diversity, leadership and power. But above and beyond, I wanted to hear about the future of Africa in the 21st century, as inspired by them -- the next generation of ethical and entrepreneurial African leaders. Hellen Brahane, Sandile Dlamini and Amani Naburi have just woken up, when they join me for breakfast at the residence diner in Trou aux Biches. Where we sit, we get a glimpse of the Indian Ocean's turquoise waters and the horizon -- as deep as our conversation. Advertisement Hellen takes the lead, while Sandile and Amani are biting into their omelette: "My ALU application asked for previous leadership engagement. I was in my second year of Economics at the Moi University in Kenya, and I was one of the three ladies in the Student Government. The Government is divided into tribes, but I hated it because it's not about the tribe -- it's about what we do. My parents are from Eritrea, so I could only fit into a small tribe from the coast -- 100 people in the whole university out of 5000. But I had to hold onto it because as an independent, people wouldn't listen to me. The Student Government was a bad leadership experience, but its operations have driven me to speak out and make a change. So, here I am." I ask about their first impressions of ALU, and they all agree with Sandile: "As human beings we tend to complain. But ALU is brand new and in progress. I need to be more flexible because if I am complaining, the learner's mind-set switches off." The chat is lively and the thoughts are ebulliently flowing to all directions. These young adults know exactly where they want to be and what they want to achieve after graduation. Amani wants to become an expert in education and technology, and to start his own business. Hellen will apply for a Master's in International Relations and make her way to the United Nations. Sandile will attend an intensive international program at Tsinghua University for a better understanding of China's success story, and how it can be customised to Africa's circumstances. Amani, an attentive listener and absorbent learner, explains: "In one of our readings by Peter Thiel, I learned that getting from A to B is a process, not an accident. Achievement requires careful planning." Advertisement Does this percipience and observation come as a result of ALU, or is it the cause for being at ALU? I get my answer the following evening, when I meet with Given Edward from Tanzania, and we talk about the sense of responsibility towards Africa. "Students who came to ALU have already vowed to stay within Africa. And that's why we are here and nowhere else. It's not the opposite -- that ALU has convinced us to stay in Africa. We already had this within us. It's surprising though how we all feel the same." Given will become a technocrat leader with knowledge of emotional intelligence, and will apply technology into education. We laugh when he admits that he isn't very fond of books: "I read articles but I am not comfortable with reading the thoughts of just one person" he explains. ALU welcomes its students to unleash their potential through an engaging learning experience, where lectures are banned, but critical thinking, team work, quantitative reasoning and debates are facilitated instead. The vision of ALU isn't simply to see its alumni progress academically, but to challenge them to declare a mission for their life. Part of ALU's approach is to mix two worlds -- the university and the corporate. In the ReImagine Talent Symposium in March, it was uplifting for Hellen to see the high interest top organisations, such as McKinsey & Co. and Coca-Cola, showed towards the students. "I came out of the Symposium with one message: 'With education, I have options'". Mpumalanga Zwane from Swaziland experienced the Symposium differently. She didn't feel comfortable having to go through training on how to present herself. "I am still trying to find out who I am. But they told us: 'Here are the expectations from the corporate world', and I had to sell myself as the X person. How does this person connect to the person they will hire?" Advertisement Mpumalanga was already admitted at the University of Witwatersrand, when ALU offered her a place. Three months into ALU, she is an active member of The Voice -- ALU's debate club -- and The Poetry Society. "2016 is my year of growth, self-discovery and exploration" she confides, and her eyes glow. Her favourite ALU experience so far has been the Seminal Readings course that invites students to intensive reading and discussion sessions. The mention of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and her article African "Authenticity" and the Biafran Experience, shifts the conversation to identity. "I felt more Swazi in South Africa than in Swaziland because in Swaziland, I didn't have to think about it. Context shapes the person you are. If I decide to be Pan-African, I may lose on the beauty of Swaziland and vice versa. I choose to have multiple voices''. Mpumalanga recites her favourite lines from the poem she performed on the Cocktail Mixer -- the night before the Grand Opening: "Oh my dear people, the power that exists within you. Because this is your life, it is in your hands And you can either crush it or make it beautiful..." Everyone at ALU has a leader in their mind they admire, they learn from and they believe in. Peter Atupele Mzungu from Malawi is also sketching them -- Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln and Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam are hanging on the walls in his room. "My message to Malawi's leaders is: 'Consider people's needs before yours'. We cannot afford more cashgate scandals". Mauritius, one of the world's most famous honeymoon destinations, has turned into a pan-African hub of intelligence and enterprise. If I had to take three things only about ALU, these would be: At ALU you are sad to miss class. You are part of a creative education system that creates opportunities. You have to leave your preconceptions behind, if you want to get the best out of people. Advertisement U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a campaign rally at Mid-Hudson Civic Center in Poughkeepsie, New York April 17, 2016. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz The gutter-level of this year's campaign rhetoric is dragging all of us down -- and that includes America's children. On the day before Easter, PEZ Candy USA had to cancel its annual egg hunt in Orange, Connecticut. Adults rushed the fields where the eggs and candy had been put out, pushing aside and trampling the little ones in a mad scramble to grab the goodies for their own children. Noses bled, tears were shed and next time -- if there is one -- PEZ will have to have lots of security guards on hand to keep the grown-ups from behaving like idiots. Advertisement The debacle kind of reminded me of this year's election. As this grim electoral season cycles on, I sometimes think we're all living in Ghostbusters II, with that river of ugly pink slime coursing underneath our feet, violently reacting to our collective negativity and hate and making them worse. The decline in the level of discourse in this year's election cycle has been a disgrace, with Democrats behaving better than Republicans -- one egregious GOP candidate, of course, in particular. But even supporters of the Sanders and Clinton campaigns have stooped to disingenuous arguments, gratuitous sniping and ad hominem attacks. The trolls and zealots have been out in force with their name-calling and sometimes threats of physical violence and none of it's helping anyone. And before you say, well, mud of the filthiest kind has been slung in every American presidential campaign since George Washington was passing out the whiskey in exchange for votes, yes, it's true. But such invective came before the 24/7 news cycle and social media could relentlessly batter us with it from every corner all the time. And while it is good for everyone to be given more and more of an opportunity to have their voices heard, like those who would falsely shout fire in a crowded theater, sometimes they should just shut the hell up and silently lead themselves to the exit sign. Unfortunately, this year, the vituperation has too often escalated into actual violence among the supporters of Donald Trump, who has done his best to encourage their attacks on anti-Trump demonstrators -- and even to suggest the possibility of some degree of carnage at July's Republican convention -- while loudly proclaiming innocence and trying to pin the blame on the protesters. Advertisement This craziness has infected a political party which welcomed it in. Symptoms have manifested for years, but at last the virus has consumed its host. Here's Lauren Fox at the Talking Points Memo website, describing a gathering last weekend of the Virgin Islands Republican Party, so incredible it's worth quoting her story at length: The Republican Territorial Committee held a joint meeting Saturday at a gun range in St. Croix, but the meeting erupted into chaos with attendees shouting over one another, calling for points of order, and at one point, Gwen Brady, an elected delegate, being allegedly shoved to the ground, according to the Virgin Islands Daily News. This is just the latest in the civil war within the island's Republican Party where a fight over delegates to the 2016 convention in Cleveland has left the group in disarray. Virgin Islands Republican Party Vice Chairman Herb Schoenbohm told the paper that Brady was "slammed against the wall and thrown to the floor because she objected to the Gestapo-like tactics of the V.I. Chairman John Canegata." Schoenbohm also blasted the location of the meeting, telling the paper that Canegata was "banging the table with a large ammunition cartridge being used as a gavel" and walking around with a "firearm on his belt." Not exactly the Age of Pericles, is it? It's undeniable that the anger that stalks the landscape has roots in real despair, that in the face of record profits the lack of jobs and fair wages is enraging, that the gross disparity of income inequality creates a hunger that can only lead to lashing out. But the tone of this election, the bullying, the lack of civility is punishing not only ourselves but, it turns out, our kids. Sort of like that misbegotten Easter egg hunt writ large. There's a new study from SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, titled The Trump Effect: The Impact of the Presidential Campaign on Our Nation's Schools. According to the report, "the campaign is having a profoundly negative effect on children and classrooms. Advertisement "It's producing an alarming level of fear and anxiety among children of color and inflaming racial and ethnic tensions in the classroom. Many students worry about being deported. "Other students have been emboldened by the divisive, often juvenile rhetoric in the campaign. Teachers have noted an increase in bullying, harassment and intimidation of students whose races, religions or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates on the campaign trail." SPLC's Teaching Tolerance project notes that the report's survey of 2000 K-12 teachers was not scientific and "did not identify any candidates." Nevertheless, "out of 5,000 total comments, more than 1,000 mentioned Donald Trump. In contrast, a total of fewer than 200 contained the names Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton... "The gains made by years of anti-bullying work in schools have been rolled back in a few short months. Teachers report that students have been 'emboldened' to use slurs, engage in name-calling and make inflammatory statements toward each other. When confronted, students point to the candidates and claim they are 'just saying what everyone is thinking.' Kids use the names of candidates as pejoratives to taunt each other." Never has the teaching of civics and politics been more important, yet many of the teachers commented that they have been stymied by "gag orders" from principals and department heads, ordered not to discuss this year's election for fear of stirring trouble and offending parents. But as Maureen B. Costello, author of the SPLC report and director of Teaching Tolerance, writes, "What's at stake in 2016 is not simply who will be our 45th president or how the parties might realign, but how well we are preparing young people for their most important job: the job of being a citizen. If schools avoid the election -- or fail to find ways to help students discuss it productively -- it's akin to taking civics out of the curriculum." Advertisement Which brings us full circle; as our public education system has eroded, teaching civics (and American history) already has been run out of the curriculum in far too many schools or so watered down or distorted as to be almost meaningless. That in turn contributes to our current pickle by which too few recognize the responsibilities as well as the freedoms of citizenship and self-government that are taught in such courses and resort instead to mindless bellicosity and a blind belief in hollow promises. A New York City high school teacher told the SPLC that her students "are increasingly political (which is good), but the extreme rhetoric being modeled is not helping to utilize reason and evidence rather than replying in kind." In the words of SPLC President Richard Cohen, "We've seen Donald Trump behave like a 12-year-old, and now we're seeing 12-year-olds behave like Donald Trump." A Wendy's Co. restaurant stands in Springdale, Arkansas, U.S., on Tuesday, July 28, 2015. Wendy's Co. is scheduled to release quarterly earnings on August 5. Photographer: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images This week Jews all over the world will celebrate Passover with seders, the ritual meals that retell the Biblical story of the Exodus from slavery in Egypt. At the beginning of this retelling in the seder, the leader takes up the matzah, the unleavened bread, and says, "This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in Egypt." In this moment, the matzah recalls the oppression of slavery. Later in the seder, though, we are told that the matzah commemorates the hasty way in which we left Egypt, with no time for the dough to rise as usual. In this moment, the matzah represents redemption from slavery. How does the matzah symbolize both oppression and freedom? A clue is given in the ritual that happens just before the leader declares, "This is the bread of affliction": The matzah is broken in half. Dividing the matzah is a concrete demonstration of the dual themes of slavery and liberation that it symbolizes. And between the transformation of the matzah from the bread of affliction to the bread of redemption is the retelling of the story of Passover. We remember our march out of Egypt, from slavery to freedom. Advertisement Throughout history, since that epic march out of Egypt, there have been many marches towards freedom. In that tradition, last month we joined the Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) at a march in New York City. The CIW is a worker-based human rights organization, built on a foundation of farmworker community organizing. We have both visited Immokalee, home of the CIW, with T'ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, which brings together rabbis and cantors to act on the Jewish imperative to respect and advance the human rights of all people. For several years T'ruah rabbis and rabbinical students been inspired to work in solidarity with the courageous, committed farmworkers of the CIW. The CIW has been fighting against farmworker abuse since 1993, first calling on growers to end abuses and raise pay. In the early 2000s, CIW changed their strategy, realizing that corporate buyers of the tomatoes they picked had a unique power over the agricultural industry, and could demand that their suppliers uphold human rights for farmworkers. CIW then reached out to consumers across the country to build a national network to call on these buyers to join what would become the Fair Food Program. Up to today, 14 participating retail buyers (including Subway, Whole Foods and Walmart) and the vast majority of the Florida tomato growers have joined the Fair Food Program to work with CIW to ensure workers are treated with dignity and have better wages and working conditions. While all of Wendy's major competitors in the fast-food industry -- McDonald's, Burger King, Subway, Taco Bell, and Chipotle -- have already joined the Fair Food Program, Wendy's has refused, choosing their public image over supporting human rights. Instead of joining the Fair Food Program and its widely-acclaimed, uniquely successful worker-driven model of social responsibility, Wendy's released their own code of conduct this past January. It contains no serious mechanisms for worker participation or enforcement, effectively guaranteeing that it will fail to protect workers from the indignity they experience. But they have gone even further in their refusal to ensure human dignity for workers: Wendy's has shifted its purchases from Florida to Mexico. Rather than support U.S. growers, setting new standards for human rights in the agricultural industry, Wendy's took its tomato purchases to a country with a horrible human rights record. Advertisement Despite being the target of a three-year consumer campaign and a year-long national student boycott, Wendy's has steadfastly refused to join the Fair Food Program, continuing instead to benefit from worker poverty. The CIW was left with no choice but to launch a national boycott of Wendy's and continue the fight for human dignity. T'ruah was one of the first national faith groups to endorse the boycott, and, as members of T'ruah, we both were proud to march with the CIW last month as it announced the boycott and continued to pressure the board chair of Wendy's, Nelson Peltz, to bring the company onto the Fair Food Program. At our seders this year, we will have before us two pieces of one broken matzah. One represents the bread of our affliction in Egypt; the other represents the bread of our freedom as we leave our enslavement. As long as Wendy's continues to serve the bread of affliction, join us in refusing to eat it. More Work for Tax Lawyers Corporate tax lawyers, beware! The Obama administration is making it likely that you will be working overtime in the near future. With the legislative branch gridlocked, the executive branch has taken the lead in several areas of corporate regulation. This past week, corporate taxes took center stage with the Treasury Department's new and more stringent rules targeting tax inversions. Tax inversions are created when a US corporation merges with a foreign corporation and moves the headquarters of the combined corporation to the foreign country to take advantage of a lower tax rate there. This technique creates a powerful incentive for corporations to find willing overseas partners, especially in the world of pharmaceuticals and health care. Not surprisingly, with its 12.5% tax, Ireland is a popular inversion destination. Advertisement When AbbVie (NYSE: ABBV) tried to purchase the Irish firm Shire (LON: SHP) in a $52 billion inversion deal in 2014, the Treasury department enacted new rules that taxed AbbVie's overseas cash designated to fund the deal. Despite the claims that the primary purpose of the deal was a strategic fit, the deal fell apart a month after Treasury's action. This time, the tentative $160 billion deal for US-based Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) to buy Ireland's Allergan (NYSE: AGN) and incorporate in Ireland was scuttled by new Treasury actions that some critics say targeted this deal specifically and overstepped the executive branch's authority. As with AbbVie and Shire, claims of strategic synergy were not enough -- it took only a few days after the announcement of new rules for the Pfizer/Allergan deal to be called off. To understand both sides' reactions, it is necessary to dig into the broader tax environment that incentivizes inversions. Our Unfriendly Tax Policy Unquestionably, the main force behind inversions is US tax policy. Not only does the US have a 35% corporate tax rate -- the highest of all developed nations -- but the US is also one of the few nations to apply that rate on all profits whether they are generated in the US or in a foreign country. Advertisement A multinational corporation's US profits are taxed at 35% and overseas profits are taxed domestically at the difference between the US and foreign rate (tax credits are issued to compensate for the foreign tax). For example, using the Irish rate of 12.5%, every dollar that a US company earns in profits in Ireland is effectively subject to 12.5 cents in tax in Ireland and 22.5 cents tax in the US -- but only when those profits are brought back into the US. As a result, multinationals end up hoarding profits overseas and reinvesting them in offshore operations to avoid US taxes. This further increases corporate incentives to relocate overseas, with the associated economic impact - including tax revenue -- benefitting foreign economies, not America's. Businesses rightly argue that higher US tax bills put American corporations at a competitive disadvantage with their foreign rivals. However, it is a leap of faith to assume that simply lowering the corporate tax rate and/or going to a territorial system (exempting foreign-earned income from domestic taxation) will create enough tax reductions and growth opportunities for US corporations to stop inversions. According to Reuters, an October 2015 study suggested that, at the time, the 500 largest US companies held $2.1 trillion in profits offshore to avoid taxation. Those profits would bring in an estimated $620 billion in tax revenue when repatriated into the US. How low would corporate tax rates have to go to provide incentive to repatriate these funds? Probably a lot lower than they would be willing to go. This discussion will remain academic for now, as contentious election-year politics has brought all meaningful federal legislation to a halt. Understandably, the Obama administration is trying to fill this leadership void the only way it can -- through regulatory changes. Reassessing Inversion Thresholds and Rules There are two major elements to the Treasury Department's action: a redefinition of the rules for determining the size of the foreign entity in terms of assets and removal of a practice called "earnings stripping." Advertisement To receive the benefits of a tax inversion, the acquiring foreign entity must be the right size relative to the acquirer. The foreign company must own between 40-50% of the combined entity for full tax benefits to apply. Below 20% foreign ownership, the company is considered a US company and US taxes apply. Some companies, including Allergan, have "beefed up" by making preliminary acquisitions that put them in the proper size range for future inversions. The Treasury department is targeting so-called "serial inverters" by ignoring the previous three years' worth of acquisitions when evaluating a foreign company's shares. In Allergan's case, three recent acquisitions would have dropped "original" Allergan investors' stake in the new company below 20% -- invalidating the tax inversion. Is Treasury's action targeted specifically at Allergan? Not expressly, but the three-year mark is somewhat arbitrary and affects very few companies. Earnings stripping involves a multinational company using transfers effectively to shift income into the lower-tax foreign entity. In an inversion, the American subsidiary borrows money from the parent company and uses the interest payment deductions to offset their earnings. Treasury eliminated this avenue with new rules treating the transaction as if it were equity based instead of debt based, thus eliminating the interest deduction. However, a Forbes article suggests that the new earnings stripping rules could extend beyond inversions and adversely affect companies attempting to invest in American facilities. The article uses the example of foreign auto manufacturers investing in US manufacturing plants and suggests such investments will be more difficult in the future -- reducing the ability of depressed areas to revitalize their manufacturing economy. Advertisement The Takeaway Few, if any, companies undertake mergers and inversions solely for the tax benefits. Both companies must also have a synergistic basis merging -- for example, in Pfizer's case the Allergan deal would have provided a strong collective portfolio in both high and low-cost drugs. A prior attempt to buy AstraZeneca (LON: AZN) also had roots in diluting Pfizer's still profitable but slower-growth line of older drugs. That's not to say that tax policy wasn't a huge driving force; it clearly was. Pfizer was not only motivated by future tax bills, but also by the billions of dollars it held in overseas entities that it could not bring into the US without footing the US tax bill. Corporations must pursue legal steps to lower their tax bill, or they are not acting in the best interests of shareholders. Companies don't set the rules; they just play by them. That leads us to the real problem: inability by Congress to create a set of corporate tax laws based on reasonable and coherent policy that help level the playing field for US companies competing in a global economy. With the current environment of compromise as a dirty word, it is nearly impossible to craft tax policy that strikes the proper balance between corporate tax burdens, economic growth, and income to the Treasury Department. Thus, the Obama administration has elected to use the regulatory tools it has to address the problems. In a way, it's like trimming your shrubs with an axe because that's the only tool that you have available. You may get that one stubborn branch, but without great care, you will cause a lot of collateral damage. While the uncertainty continues, mergers and acquisitions are even more subject to abrupt changes than before. If you consider a company in merger talks to be worth the investment risk, then proceed -- just do a proper risk assessment first. This article was provided by our partners at moneytips.com Advertisement Image Source: dmc.tv Except for those who actively visit or attend the temple, Wat Phra Dhammakaya is much of a mystery to Westerners looking to explore Buddhism, despite it being the largest, most populous temple in Thailand. For those who have heard of the temple, they are probably most familiar with the photos of the temple's massive scale and grandiose ceremonies that make headlines in the West. Curious minds who try to explore the temple deeper will probably have a hard time trying to find out what really goes on there. A quick web search of Dhammakaya and you will probably run into the temple's official website, its Wikipedia page and several outsider news articles about the temple: mostly negative and sensationalist tabloid pieces. Advertisement Defendants of the temple say the media distorts the facts to get views and that if you really want to know the truth behind Dhammakaya, you should simply come visit. The doors are always open to those interested in investigating for themselves. I would agree, having been a member of the temple for much of my life, there is no better way to find out the truth than to explore it for yourself, firsthand. But for those who just prefer to use the Internet, reading this article is an okay substitute. So what's the real deal? What's so different about this so called "controversial" Buddhist temple? What is it really like at Wat Phra Dhammakaya? A Temple of Practicality from the Bottom up A side by side comparison of the chapel at Wat Phra Dhammakaya (left) along side a traditional Thai chapel, Wat Pho (right) Image source: dhammakaya.net, asiasworld.net Advertisement One of the things I've noticed about how things are done at Dhammakaya is that they put practicality at the front of their operation. In contrast to the intricate and decorative design of most traditional Thai temples in Thailand, Wat Phra Dhammakaya sticks to a simpler design. Taking a walk (or more practically, a drive) through Dhammakaya's massive main temple in Pathum Thani and you can hardly even tell you are in a Thai temple, if anything; somebody who stumbles upon Dhammakaya would confuse the place for a small modern city. With only a few odd buildings out, such as its iconic, modernly designed stupa. Image Source: Wikipedia.com Another uniquely Dhammakaya custom is the use of just one Buddha statue in the chapel, something that is distinct from the Thai custom of having a collection of various Buddha statues enshrined at the front. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with elaborate architecture or having a collection of Buddha statues, I have even heard visitors and tourists complain about all the concrete and the plain design of Dhammakaya, asserting their preference for the more majestic beauty of traditional Thai temples. Of course, Dhammakaya doesn't disagree with incorporating beauty into temples, a Thai tradition parallel to the European tradition of ornate churches. It has to do simply with the custom not aligning with the temple's goals. For Dhammakaya, it's best to allocate those resources elsewhere and to create quick-to-build, easy to maintain buildings for the primary purpose of fitting temple goers. Advertisement A side by side comparison of the inside of the chapel at Wat Phra Dhammakaya (left) along side a Traditional Thai chapel at Wat Arunratchatharam (right). Image source: en.dhammakaya.net, 360 cities.net An objective that makes a lot of sense when you consider that in just 40 some years Dhammakaya went from a single 80 acre plot of land with a few thousand attendees to the 3 million followers worldwide today that attend the 1,000 acre campus at the main temple and its near 200 affiliates throughout Thailand and in 35 countries internationally. As for the single Buddha statue issue, the reason Dhammakaya does it is because it provides essentially the same purpose as a collection of Buddha statues, with less of the work of keeping the shrine clean and dust-free. Dhammakaya Centers Itself on Meditation Image Source: dhammakaya.net Another reason Dhammakaya puts so much simplicity into the temple, other than practicality, has to do with its focus on meditation. The simple design allows for a more serene atmosphere to bring one's thoughts inward, a detail that's sensible considering the temple's special emphasis on meditation. Anybody who has explored Dhammakaya is probably familiar with its slogan, "World Peace through Inner Peace", coined by the temple's abbot the most Venerable Dhammajayo. One of the most iconic traits of Dhammakaya is its devotion to the practice and spread of meditation. Advertisement The temple does stand out with its emphasis on the "center of the body" referencing the meditation technique it teaches. While the technique is not exclusive to Dhammakaya and is used in a variety of temples throughout Thailand, Dhammakaya is by far the biggest temple that uses the technique. If you attend any service hosted by Dhammakaya you will find both monks and laity engaged in lengthy meditations en masse. If you tune into Dhammakaya's 24 hour satellite TV program, you will hear reminders multiple times a day to keep the mind centered. Image Source: watphradhammakayalondon.co.uk The temple's emphasis on meditation can even be seen in its use of symbols. While Thai temples usually employ statues and pictures of the Buddha in a variety of postures and mudras, Dhammakaya puts the Buddha in a single standard position throughout its vast grounds; a meditation position. Dhammakaya even asks all followers to wear white to the temple to promote a sense of peace and serenity conducive to meditation. Another way Dhammakaya reminds its members of the importance of meditation is in its use of regular references to the center. Everything from how they count "072" (zero in Thai sounds like center, while 7 and 2 are other references to the meditation technique), to how they fold their mats (toward the middle). A Temple with Followers Highly Devoted to Buddhist Principles Image Source: buddhachannel.tv In an earlier article, I detailed my own experiences as a devout Buddhist growing up in America. And honestly, I think my experiences would have been much different had I not grown up a member of Dhammakaya. Advertisement Another identifying characteristic of Dhammakaya is how devoted the members are to the temple and to Buddhism. The stereotypical Dhammakaya member has a no-excuses mentality when it comes to attending services, they never miss an opportunity to make merit, and they bring the teachings home with them. This description holds true for most Dhammakaya goers, even the younger attendees. And it won't be hard finding a Dhammakaya member who strictly keeps all 5 precepts in his/her daily life. The devotion Dhammakaya members have to Buddhism can also be seen in its practice of uniquely Thai customs. The Thai tradition of short term ordination as a Buddhist monk for men has been on decline in modern times. But at Dhammakaya, it's not too difficult to find a man who has undertaken temporary monkhood at least once. I myself have undertaken the Thai tradition of short-term monkhood a few times (13 occasions to be exact), if you include ordinations as a novice (below 20 years old) monk. That number may seem staggering, but I have met many fellow Dhammakaya members who have undertaken the short-term ordination tradition several times as well. This track record of devotion isn't uncommon at all among those who identify with Dhammakaya. Image Source: dhammakayapost.org So how was Dhammakaya able to achieve such a devoted base of supporters? In short, it has a lot to do with its distinct approach to Buddhism. Advertisement Dhammakaya is famous in Thailand for its strict monastic discipline aimed to uphold the faith of the laity. Even as a short term monk, I have encountered monks from other temples that have approached my group of fellow temporary monks and can instantly identify us as Dhammakaya because of our orderliness and the disciplined way we carried ourselves. Another reason Dhammakaya commands such a devoted following comes down to how Dhammakaya approaches teaching Buddhism. The temple tends to keep Buddhism practical: focusing on self-development and cultivating moral character. One of the most common sermons I hear when attending Dhammakaya is the importance of creating good habits. Practicality in teaching is present even when it comes to the metaphysical aspects of Buddhism that westerners tend to overlook. Your average Dhammakaya member tends to have a much stronger background in aspects of Buddhism involving the Law of Karma. To Conclude Image Source: dmc.tv Despite all these differences, it is inaccurate to call Dhammakaya its own sect. Talking to those on the inside, you would know Dhammakaya's goal isn't to break away from traditional Thai Buddhism, but to promote it. It's unique aspects are nothing doctrinal, and are just a part of the leader, Venerable Dhammajayo's, strategy to align the temple's operation with his vision of promoting Buddhism and advocating meditation. Dhammakaya's unique style however, has made itself stand out from traditional Thai Buddhism. And their distinct way of operation has had its own share of criticisms. Traditionalist critics and sensationalist tabloids looking to attract readers with scandalous stories about the Buddhist juggernaut are not uncommon. It's an interesting situation I'd love to address, but for length reasons, let's leave that for another time. Advertisement Image Source: dhammakaya.net Controversial or not, Dhammakaya's unconventional methods have certainly proven themselves effective in drawing in massive crowds and inspiring Buddhists by the millions. And the temple's rapid rise in membership is definitely an indicator of the success of their distinct approach. When I was a toddler, I was terrified of flying. So much so that my cries used to compete with the plane's engines for the ears of the unfortunate passengers that surrounded me. Looking back at it, I can't imagine how frustrated everyone on the plane must have been with me for being so ridiculously scared of flying when they knew there was absolutely nothing to fear. If there was one thing I remember from these fear-filled flights, it was how my mother would always hold my hand and tell me "don't be scared, everything will be perfectly okay insha'Allah." If there was one thing that helped me get over my fear of flying growing up, it was this phrase. Earlier this past week, a Muslim college student was removed from a Southwest plane because of the "potentially threatening comments" he made onboard. At this point you're wondering, what were these threatening comments? Did he threaten to harm someone? Did he say something alarming? No, he just said the word 'insha'Allah", which means "God willing". His uncle had asked him to call him once he lands and he responded by saying "insha'Allah, I will call you when I arrive". He was then removed from the plane, interrogated, and humiliated. I can talk about the dozens of Muslims that have been wrongly removed from airplanes in the past, or how one Muslim American is a victim of a hate crime every three days, or how my Muslim mother is always "randomly" selected to be searched every single time she goes to an airport, but this isn't about that. This is about putting an end to the unjustified fear that Islamophobia has caused Americans to have towards Muslims. Advertisement Here Are Five Reasons Why You Should Never Fear a Muslim on an Airplane: 1.Muslims are not terrorists.This is a fact. I have proved it here and here and here. So just as we no longer discuss the shape of the Earth when we discuss climate change because we all know that it's round, we no longer need to discuss Islam's view on terror when we discuss combating terrorism because all the facts prove that Muslims, as a religious group, are not terrorists.2.You are more likely to be killed by a toddler than from a terrorist attack on a plane.More Americans were killed by toddlers than by terrorists in 2015. And in 2014. And in 2013. And every year for the past several years. But let me be perfectly frank, the reason why Islamophobia has filled the hearts of Americans when it comes to Muslims flying on airplanes is because of the tragic 9/11 attacks (which have hurt Muslims just as much as non-Muslims). My response to this is to empty your hearts of this unjustified fear and fill your minds with this fact: Since the 9/11 attacks, less than 0.0002% of Americans killed were killed by Muslims. This means you are more likely to die from choking on airplane food than from a terrorist attack on an airplane that involves a Muslim. Please keep this in mind next time you are flying on an airplane with a Muslim. 3.If you are scared of the word "insha'Allah", then you should be terrified of the word "accident".According to information from the International Air Transport Association and the National Safety Council, you are more than 11,000 times more likely to die in an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane. Advertisement Even then, more than 3.5 billion people flew safely last year on over 37 million flights. On average, one airplane accident happens for every 4.5 million flights. This means that you are 25 times more likely to get struck by lightening before dying in a plane accident and even more likely to be struck by lightening than die from a terrorist attack on an airplane that involves a Muslim So if the Arabic language or Muslims scare you, then loose bolts, faulty turbines, and cloudy days should terrify you at least 10,000 times more. Please keep this in mind next time you are flying on an airplane with a Muslim. 4.There are real issues to fear and to work towards solving.In the time it took you to read this far, at least one American has died from a heart attack. In the time it takes you to finish this article, at least one American will have died as a result of suicide. By tonight, at least one American will have died as a result of distracted driving. By the time you wake up tomorrow morning, an American child will have died as a result of gun violence. Meanwhile, not a single American would have been harmed by a Muslim as all of this is happening. Rather than fearing Muslims who pose no harm, why not work to address the aforementioned preventable deadly leading causes of death plaguing our nation? 5.It's not the word "insha'Allah" that is scaring you. The fact of the matter is this, it is not the Arabic language that actually scares you. It's not the long beards or headscarves either. Rather it is the repeated words of Islamophobia that have caused you to fear that which you shouldn't. Advertisement When I was in Kindergarten, I stayed away from girls because I didn't want to get "cooties". I had no logical reason as to why I should fear "cooties", had never been a victim of "cooties" from a girl, and could provide no evidence that every single girl on the planet had "cooties", but I was terrified of them simply because everyone around me told me to be. Pretty funny and ridiculous right? Well Islamophobia is the modern day "cooties" because you have no logical reason as to why you should fear Muslims, you are more likely to be a victim of a terrorist attack by a non-Muslim than a Muslim, and you have no evidence that tells you to fear an entire religious group of 1.6 billion Muslims. Just as any doctor will call you a fool if you told them you are a cootiephobe, all the facts will tell you similar if you insist on being an Islamophobe. There's a painful irony in how Islamophobia has caused the very word that used to give me comfort during my flights to now become a source of fear for others. As I read the stories of the countless humiliated Muslims who have been unjustly removed from airplanes as if we are nothing more than a walking dehumanized threat, my eyes fill with tears. More importantly, my mind is filled with questions: Why it is perfectly ok to say "God bless you" on an airplane but it becomes threatening if it's said in Arabic? Why is a headscarved nun respected on a plane while a Muslim woman wearing the same exact covering is humiliated? Why is it that you can get as drunk and loud as you want on an airplane but Muslims can't even quietly speak our native language? Advertisement Orville Wright, the co-inventor of the first airplane, once said, "If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance." We as a nation will never advance and defeat terrorism if we continue to accept Islamophobia as true and let it separate us. Don't let this unjustified fear blind you from the facts that plead you to treat us just as you wish to be treated if your religion had been hijacked by extremists. BERLIN, GERMANY - APRIL 14: Children play at the container settlement shelter for refugees and migrants in Zehlendorf district on April 14, 2016 in Berlin, Germany. Locals, many of them retirees, come to the shelter regularly to help the refugees and migrants, who are from countries including Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Serbia. The coalition partners of the German government have announced a new package of legislation that includes measures to foster the integration of refugees who have received asylum status in Germany. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images) For a year now, no topic has been of greater concern to Germans than the refugee crisis. I have been as moved as everyone else has been by the issue. I think that the crisis is more serious than many could even imagine. And I believe that both politics and the media are making grave mistakes in their handling of this crisis -- and they are therefore missing out on many opportunities. A couple of months ago, I said that a dry sponge can only soak up so much water. At some point, the sponge reaches its full capacity for absorption. This statement has inspired plenty of criticism. Is this a correct position to take if you're on the left? Advertisement The fact is, the analogy was intended to illustrate that every society can reach its maximum capacity. If a crisis is poorly managed, society reaches this point sooner rather than later. If the right decisions are made, this saturation point may be delayed. However, this threshold will never completely disappear. Currently, I believe that we are making the wrong decisions in many areas -- or are failing to make decisions altogether. I am experiencing this on a personal level. We have 20 refugees living at home with us -- we are trying to help them integrate into our country. This is an extremely difficult task. First, in terms of finding a job, the refugees are trapped. They can't even work. If they are able to work after a few months, we would have to obtain complicated permits -- and report their wages to the authorities. It is an unbelievably bureaucratic nightmare. This is how it is for thousands of refugees at the moment. They would like to work, and assimilate, but they are not allowed to. That shows how unequipped we are at handling the task of integration. Advertisement Psychologists are already warning that there is an insufficient number of help centers in Germany to heal the emotional scars of these young people. There is nothing more important for asylum seekers than these two things: Education for the children and work for the parents. Both are not going out very well. This is a paradoxical situation -- for a country with such a large number of vacancies. We must give refugees more chances to construct their own lives -- the chance to provide for themselves and their families. I know from personal experience that is truly what they want. But we must act fast. Because we are facing a difficult situation. Germany is economically strong, but come the next economic downtown we may be encountering significant social upheaval. Who would then pay the additional cost for schools, housing, and childcare that asylum seekers will need? Many counties are already stretched to their financial limit. If tax revenue were to diminish due to a crisis, it would tighten the belt for all of us -- for refugees and citizens of Germany. Advertisement The faster the refugees can be given permission to work and provide for their families, the better we will weather the next crisis. However, there is another issue that is every bit if not even more important: the children who have been completely neglected. Thousands of young people -- children and teenagers -- are coming to our country. Their lives have been plagued by horror, because they are coming to us from the world's conflict zones. I must ask: What will happen to this generation? Psychologists are already warning that there is an insufficient number of help centers in Germany to heal the emotional scars of these young people. How are these children supposed to become normal, integrated adults who go to school and build careers? Many of them will stay in our country for a long time -- perhaps even permanently. So we have to help them now, and not wait until they become at-risk youth. The influx of refugees will only decrease when the senseless killing stops. We want to talk about these problems: The lack of educational integration, the scarcity of psychologists, and the shortage of therapy facilities. We also have to talk about solutions. Which projects are helpful to refugee children today? What ideas could we learn from on a national level? However, it would be a mistake to search for solutions to the refugee crisis only in Germany. This would lead to failure. Advertisement The Turkey or Libya deals are not solutions. The current contingency plans only serve to postpone the question of saturating the outer borders of the European Union. We must help to solve the problems at the source, that is, in Syria, for example, or in other parts of the Middle East and Africa. Because the influx of refugees will only decrease when the senseless killing stops. Unfortunately, I have seen little progress in this regard in recent years. What I have noticed is that many Germans are no longer willing to deal with the complexity of the situation. They no longer believe the politicians or the media. That has been proven by the recent election results. In that regard, the media is more important than ever. Since we live in a democracy, we cannot force anyone to take a certain position. We can only try to educate the people. Not everyone in Germany is well-informed. For instance, there are many young people who have no idea what happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945. As a result, they are unaware of the danger we are currently facing. Advertisement There are plenty of people who are rekindling the flames of hate. And thousands are jumping back into the fire. I find the kinds of slogans I am hearing at demonstrations these days unbelievable. People must be wondering if history is repeating itself in Germany. And it's true. Hitler and World War II didn't happen that long ago. There are plenty of people who are rekindling the flames of hate. And thousands are jumping back into the fire. We are regressing. This situation can only be deescalated with education. Radio and television must instigate this educational process. But what is on the radio today? The broadcasters are lulling the masses with shallow nonsense. Especially the private broadcasters. Meanwhile, public broadcasters are neglecting their educational function and pandering to the masses instead. This has the negative outcome of creating a monoculture, at the detriment of multiplicity. The radio is just playing what the listener supposedly wants to hear. Critical thinkers who might possibly bring up or analyze complex issues are not given the chance to speak -- lest they and disturb the harmony. The mass media has an obligation to inform, and especially, to educate. We need this more than ever now. Immigration has made Germany stronger. I still remember how it was to come here and to have to keep going somehow. It was difficult, but we had help. At the same time, we were always ready to bring something to society. Advertisement All these questions are important ones. And I am convinced that we have to discuss them. That is why I am at HuffPost Germany today. In Washingtons Drone Wars, Collateral Damage Comes Home Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com In a trio of recent action-packed movies, good guys watch terrorists mingling with innocent women and children via real-time video feeds from halfway across the world. A clock ticks and we, the audience, are let in on the secret that mayhem is going to break loose. After much agonized soul-searching about possible collateral damage, the good guys call in a missile strike from a U.S. drone to try to save the day by taking out a set of terrorists. Such is the premise of Gavin Hoods Eye in the Sky, Andrew Niccols Good Kill, and Rick Rosenthals Drones. In reality, in Washingtons drone wars neither the good guys nor the helpless, endangered villagers under those robotic aircraft actually survive the not-so-secret drone war that the Obama administration has been waging relentlessly across the Greater Middle East -- not, at least, without some kind of collateral damage. In addition to those they kill, Washingtons drones turn out to wound (in ways both physical and psychological) their own operators and the populations who live under their constant surveillance. They leave behind very real victims with all-too-real damage, often in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder on opposite sides of the globe. Sometimes I am so sad that my heart wants to explode, an Afghan man says, speaking directly into the camera. When your body is intact, your mind is different. You are content. But the moment you are wounded, your soul gets damaged. When your leg is torn off and your gait slows, it also burdens your spirit. The speaker is an unnamed victim of a February 2010 drone strike in Uruzgan, Afghanistan, but he could just as easily be an Iraqi, a Pakistani, a Somali, or a Yemeni. He appears in National Bird, a haunting new documentary film by Sonia Kennebeck about the unexpected and largely unrecorded devastation Washingtons drone wars leave in their wake. In it, the audience hears directly from both drone personnel and their victims. Advertisement I Was Under the Impression That America Was Saving the World When we are in our darkest places and we have a lot to worry about and we feel guilty about our past actions, its really tough to describe what that feeling is like, says Daniel, a whistleblower who took part in drone operations and whose last name is not revealed in National Bird. Speaking of the suicidal feelings that sometimes plagued him while he was involved in killing halfway across the planet, he adds, Having the image in your head of taking your own life is not a good feeling. National Bird is not the first muckraking documentary on Washingtons drone wars. Robert Greenwalds Unmanned, Tonje Scheis Drone, and Madiha Tahrirs Wounds of Waziristan have already shone much-needed light on how drone warfare really works. But as Kennebeck told me, when she set out to make a film about the wages of the newest form of war known to humanity, she wanted those doing the targeting, as well as those they were targeting, to speak for themselves. She wanted them to reveal the psychological impact of sending robot assassins, often operated by pilots halfway around the world, into the Greater Middle East to fight Washingtons war on terror. In her film, theres no narrator, nor experts in suits working for think tanks in Washington, nor retired generals debating the value of drone strikes when it comes to defeating terrorism. Instead, what you see is far less commonplace: low-level recruits in President Obamas never-ending drone wars, those Air Force personnel who remotely direct the robotic vehicles to their targets, analyze the information they send back, and relay that information to the pilots who unleash Hellfire missiles that will devastate distant villages. If recent history is any guide, these drones do not just kill terrorists; in their target areas, they also create anxiety, upset, and a desire for revenge in a larger population and so have proven a powerful weapon in spreading terror movements across the Greater Middle East. Advertisement These previously faceless but distinctly non-robotic Air Force recruits are the cannon fodder of Americas drone wars. You meet two twenty-somethings: Daniel, a self-described down-and-out homeless kid, every male member of whose family has been in jail on petty charges of one kind or another, and Heather, a small town high school graduate trying to escape rural Pennsylvania. You also meet Lisa, a former Army nurse from California, who initially saw the military as a path to a more meaningful life. The three of them worked on Air Force bases scattered around the country from California to Virginia. The equipment they handled hovered above war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Pakistan and Yemen (where the U.S. Air Force was supporting assassination missions on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency). That is so cool, unmanned aircraft. Thats really bad-ass. So Heather thought when she first saw recruitment posters for the drone program. I was under the impression, she told Kennebeck, that America was saving the world, like that we were Big Brother and we were helping everyone out. Initially, Lisa felt similarly: When I first got into the military, I mean I was thinking it was a win-win. It was a force for good in the world. I thought I was going to be on the right side of history. And that was hardly surprising. After all, youre talking about the perfect weapon, the totally high-tech, precise and surgical, no-(American)-casualties, sci-fi version of war that Washington has been promoting for years as its answer to al-Qaeda and other terror outfits. President Obama who has personally overseen the drone campaigns -- with a kill list and terror Tuesday meetings at the White House -- vividly described his version of such a modern war in a 2013 speech at the National Defense University: Advertisement This is a just war -- a war waged proportionally, in last resort, and in self-defense. We were attacked on 9/11. Under domestic law, and international law, the United States is at war with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces America does not take strikes to punish individuals; we act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people. And before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured -- the highest standard we can set. That distinctly Hollywood vision of Americas drone wars (with a Terminator edge) was the one that had filtered down to the level of Kennebecks three drone-team interviewees when they signed on. It looked to them then like a war worth fighting and a life worth leading. Today, as they speak out, their version of such warfare looks nothing like what either Hollywood or Washington might imagine. Excuse Me, Sir, Can I Have Your Drivers License? National Bird does more than look at the devastation caused by drones in far away lands and the overwhelming anxiety it produces among those who live under the distant buzzing and constant threat of those robotic aircraft on an almost daily basis. Kennebeck also turns her camera on the men and women who helped make the strikes possible, trying to assess what the impact of their war has been on them. Their raw and unfiltered responses should deeply trouble us all. Kennebecks interviewees are among at least a dozen whistleblowers who have stepped forward, or are preparing to do so, in order to denounce Washingtons drone wars as morally unjustified, as in fact nightmares both for those who fight them and those living in the lands that are on the receiving end. The realities of the day-in, day-out war they fought for years were, as they tell it, deeply destructive and filled with collateral damage of every sort. Worse yet, drone operators turn out to have little real idea about, and almost no confirmation of, whom exactly theyve blown away. Its so primitive, raw, stripped-down death. This is real. Its not a joke, says Heather, an imagery analyst whose job was to look at the streaming video coming in from drones over war zones and interpret the grainy images for senior commanders in the kill chain. You see someone die because you said it was okay to kill them. I was always shaking. Sometimes I would just go to the bathroom and just sit on the toilet. I mean just sit there in my uniform and just cry. Advertisement Advocates of drone war believe, as do many of its critics, that it minimizes casualties. These Air Force veterans have, however, stepped forward to tell us that such claims simply arent true. In a study of what can be known about drone killings, the human rights group Reprieve has confirmed this reality vividly, finding that, in Pakistan, in attempts to take out 41 men, American drones actually killed an estimated 1,147 people (while not all of the 41 targeted figures even died). In other words, this hasnt proved to be a war on terror, but a war of terror, a reality the drone whistleblowers confirm. Heather is blunt in her criticism. Hearing politicians speak about drones being precision weapons [makes it seem like theyre] able to make surgical strikes. To me its completely ridiculous, completely ludicrous to make these statements. The three whistleblowers point, for instance, to the complete absence of any post-strike verification of who exactly has died. Theres a bomb. They drop it. It explodes, Lisa says. Then what? Does somebody go down and ask for somebodys drivers license? Excuse me, sir, can I have your drivers license, see who you are? Does that happen? I mean, how do we know? How is it possible to know who ends up living or dying? After three years as an imagery analyst, after regularly watching unknown people die thousands of miles away on a grainy screen, Heather was diagnosed as suicidal. She estimates -- and the experiences of other drone whistleblowers back her up -- that alcoholics accounted for a significant percentage of her unit, and that many of her co-workers had similarly suicidal thoughts. Two actually did kill themselves. As Heathers grandfather points out, She had trouble getting the treatment she needed. She had trouble finding a doctor because they didnt have the right security clearance [and] she could be in violation of the law and could even go to prison for even talking to the wrong therapist about what was bothering her. Advertisement In desperation Heather turned to her mother. "Shed call me up and shed cry and shed be upset, but then she couldnt talk about it," her mother says. "When you hear your daughter talking to you on the phone, you can that tell she is in trouble just by the emotion and inflection and the stress that you can hear in her voice. When you ask her, did you talk to anyone else about it? Shed say no, were not allowed to talk to anybody. I have a feeling that if someone wasnt there for her, she wouldnt be here right now." Like Heather, Daniel has so far survived his own drone-war-induced mental health issues, but in his post-drone life hes run into a formidable enemy: the U.S. government. On August 8, 2014, he estimates that as many as 50 Federal Bureau of Investigation agents raided his house, seizing documents and his electronics. The government suspects that he is a source of information about the [drone] program that the government doesnt want out there, says Jesselyn Radack, his lawyer and herself a former Department of Justice whistleblower. To me, thats simply an attempt to silence whistleblowers, and it doesnt surprise me that that happens to the very few people who have been brave enough to speak out against the drone program. If that was the intention, however, the raid -- and the threat it carries for other whistleblowers -- seems not to have had the desired effect. Instead, the number of what might be thought of as defectors from the drone program only seems to be growing. The first to come out was Brandon Bryant, a former camera operator in October 2013. He was followed by Cian Westmoreland, a former radio technician, in November 2014. Last November, Michael Haas and Stephen Lewis, two imagery analysts, joined Westmoreland and Bryant by speaking out at the launch of Tonje Scheis film Drone. All four of them also published an open letter to President Obama warning him that the drone war was escalating terrorism, not containing it. And just last month, Chris Aaron, a former counterterrorism analyst for the CIAs drone program, spoke out on a panel at the University of Nevada Law School. In the relatively near future, Radack recently told Rolling Stone, four more individuals involved in Americas drone wars are planning to offer their insights into how the program works. Advertisement Like Heather and Daniel, many of the former drone operators who have gone public are struggling with mental health problems. Some of them are also dealing with substance abuse issues that began as a way to counteract or dull the horrors of the war they were wagomg and witnessing. "We used to call alcohol drone fuel because it kept the program going. Everyone drank. There was a lot of coke, speed, and that sort of thing," imagery analyst Haas told Rolling Stone. "If the higher ups knew, then they didn't say anything, but I'm pretty sure they must have known. It was everywhere. Imagine If This Was Happening to Us In recent months, something has changed for the whistleblowers. There is a new sense of camaraderie among them, as well as with the lawyers defending them and a growing group of activist supporters. Most unexpectedly, they are hearing from the families of victims of drone strikes, thanks to the work of groups like Reprieve in Great Britain. In mid-April, for instance, Cian Westmoreland traveled to London and met Malik Jalal, a Pakistani tribal leader who claims that he has been targeted by U.S. drones on multiple occasions. Clive Lewis, a member of Parliament and military veteran, released a photo on Facebook of the historic meeting. It's possible that one of the two men I'm [standing] between in this picture, Cian Westmoreland, was trying to kill the man on my right, Malik Jalal -- at some stage in the past seven years, Lewis wrote. Their story is both amazing and terrifying. At once it shows the growing menace and destructive capability of unchecked political and military power juxtaposed with the power of the human spirit and human solidarity." As that sense of solidarity strengthens and as the distance between the former hunters and the hunted begins to narrow, the whistleblowers are beginning to confront some distinctly uncomfortable questions. We often hear that drones can see everything by day and by night, a different drone victim of the February 2010 strike in Uruzgan told filmmaker Kennebeck. You can see the difference between a needle and an ant but not people? We were sitting in the pickup truck, some even on the bed. Did you not see that there were travelers, women and children? When the president and his key officials look at the drone program, they undoubtedly dont see women and children. Instead, they are caught up in a Hollywood-style vision of imminent danger from terrorists and of the kind of salvation that a missile launched from thousands of miles away provides. It is undoubtedly thanks to just this thought process, already deeply embedded in the American way of war, that not a single candidate for president in 2016 has rejected the drone program. Advertisement That is exactly what the whistleblowers feel needs to change. I just want people to know that not everybody is a freaking terrorist and we need to just get out of that mindset. And we just need to see these people as people -- families, communities, brothers, mothers, and sisters, because thats who they are, says Lisa. Imagine if this was happening to us. Imagine if our children were walking outside of the door and it was a sunny day and they were afraid because they didnt know if today was the day that something would fall out of the sky and kill someone close to them. How would we feel? Pratap Chatterjee, a TomDispatch regular, is executive director of CorpWatch. He is the author of Halliburton's Army: How A Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War. His next book, Verax, a graphic novel about whistleblowers and mass surveillance co-authored with Khalil Bendib, will be published by Metropolitan Books in 2017. I read something today from Iran that truly jolted me. That says a lot because one would think that a Jewish American is already inured to the never-ending stream of vile hatred and incitement that is part of the very DNA of Ayatollah-led Iran. The sad thing about hatred is that you can sometimes become immune to it. Ayatollah Khameini and other Iranian leaders have threated the American people in general, and the Jewish people in particular, with death and annihilation so many times that one instinctively begins to roll one's eyes. Mind you, it's important not to do so and to remember that genocidal incitement is expressly prohibited by the 1948 United Nations Anti-Genocide Convention to which the United States and nearly every country on earth is signatory. But what made today so much worse was the use, by Muhammad Javad Zarif, Iran's brazen foreign minister, of the holocaust mantra, "Never Again," to justify Iran's murderous military activities. Writing in a Washington Post op-ed, Zarif defended the regime's missile and nuclear program by saying they are part of "indigenous defensive capabilities... The words 'never again' resonate with Iranians, too." Iran denies the holocaust. So what does he mean "never again" resonates with Iranians? Didn't the Jews manufacture the holocaust as a way of gaining sympathy from the nations in order to steal Palestinian land? Advertisement Much more important, this vile comparison of Iran's bloodthirsty support of international terrorism with the indiscriminate murder of six million Jews, including 1.5 million children, represents a new low even for the craven Zarif. Zarif is the Iranian propaganda master who serves as a thin veneer covering the Mullah's bloodthirsty brutality. Educated in the west and a master of using Western language to mask the regime's crimes, Zarif was granted international legitimacy by Barack Obama and John Kerry in negotiating, and concluding, a nuclear agreement with the West. The Administration's legitimization of Iran gave the Ayatollah's license to threaten the Jews with annihilation without suffering any consequence. That was bad enough. But now we have Zarif co-opting the sacred language of the martyred six million to justify Iranian nuclear terror. And he has done so not in some cheap Iranian publication but in the most prestigious newspaper of our national capital. Let's be clear. The slow and gradual erosion of shock at genocide - both of the past and those that are being planned - is what allows for mass murder to take place. When the world loses its capacity to be sickened by the wholesale slaughter of innocents, it opens the door for it to happen again. That's Iran's intent. Threaten genocide enough times, or deny its occurrence repeatedly, and the world will allow you to build the weapons for the next one without raising an eyebrow. We now see Iran engaging in a calculated three step process. First, deny that the Jews were ever gassed. Second, threaten to destroy them again and get the world accustomed to the incitement. Third, cheapen the only defenses in the English language for its recurrence. Presto, you've set the stage for another holocaust and not only do people not object, they will pay you $150 billion just to sign on the dotted line. Advertisement This is the world that Obama has wrought. The President never once warned Iran that nuclear negotiations would cease pending their cessation of genocidal threats, both against his own country and Israel. He never told them once that threatening a nation which lost one third of its number just 70 years ago to mass shootings and poison gas is absolutely forbidden. He never told Khameini and Zarif that the United States would stand by the commitment of the UN Anti-Genocide Convention to stop all genocidal incitement once and for all. And now we see the consequences. Even the words "Never Again" have been defiled and made inconsequential. Last week I was invited to an event at the Harvard Club in New York City with Senator Ted Cruz, a great friend and defender of Israel. Cruz spoke about the Iran nuclear agreement as an embarrassment and a travesty. But whether people agree with him or not, support him or not, the very next night another travesty occurred when it was reported that Mohammad Zarif spoke at the very same club, bearing the name of America's most prestigious academy of higher learning. In the world that President Obama leaves us, it is perfectly acceptable to defile the memory and language of the holocaust all while threatening a renewed effort at Jewish extinction, and do it in America's most prestigious forums. My God, my God, what have we come to? Rabbi Shmuley Boteach whom The Washington Post calls "the most famous rabbi in America" is the founder of The World Values Network and is the international best-selling author of 30 books, including his forthcoming, "The Israel Warriors Handbook." Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley. (Traveller Berlina Sharma says, "Best thing I've ever done in my life. It's truly awesome.") Pokhara is definitely the first destination for most of the tourists who visit Nepal. Davis Falls is one of the wonders in the world which looks as if lying in some bottomless pit. One of the visiting tourist by the name of Davis is said to have falled down the stream while visiting the spot. Phewa Lake with a temple in the middle of it is one of the most romantic destinations in Pokhara. At a very low cost, the visitors are allowed to boat around the Phewa Lake. Phewa Lake, Pokhara (Photo : Nepal Tourism Board's Facebook) I had an extra-ordinary opportunity to travel across the western Nepal on a bus-trip along the dangerous roads which are made between very high mountains. Trisuli and Kaligandaki rivers flow just besides these very curvy roads. Rafters across scary waves of Trisuli are often seen while riding through these buses. Buses often stop at some of the small motels/hotels in the middle of the highway for the relaxation of travelers. Food and tea these motels provide has its own local taste. Tourists do not go that far most of the time unless they are familiar with somebody in the area. Travel agencies often limit the tourists to these famous trekking sites like Nagarkot, Jomsom or Mt. Everest area. Most of the travelers do not realize that Nepal is much more than these few locations. Advertisement Lot of foreign travellers often come associated with some NGOs/INGOs like Care Nepal International, Red Cross Society, etc and have been observed travelling as far as Dadeldhura and Doti District of Nepal. JICA International associates from Japan are often seen contributing in the health care industries in the most remote parts of the country. The most extra-ordinary engineering feat in Nepal, the Karnali Bridge was actually built by a Japanese company which still stands as a fantastic feat of architect above the longest river flowing in Nepal. Pokhara, Nepal (Photo : Nepal Tourism Board's Facebook) Karnali Bridge is itself a tourist spot for Nepalese from the Far-West. With Bardiya Wildlife Reserve lying beside it, it attracts most of the local tourists. Rich landlords of the area often go for hunting inside these reserves. Wild lotuses are seen blooming amongst the fresh ponds untouched by any modern air. Nagarkot is a great spot for picnic and parties. From the cliff at Nagarkot mountain, the Himalayan range consisting of Annapurna and Mt.Everest can be clearly seen in their own grandeur and immensity. No human have been able to build such structures up to this moment. Heavy tourist traffic is seen at Nagarkot beside it being a favorite spot for Kathmandu youngsters. (Photo : Nepal Tourism Board's Facebook) Jomsom is one of the most popular tourist destination with a weather that is wintry most of the times. Located among snowy mountains in the remote himalayas, Jomsom has a airport that gives domestic and international tourists the taste of one of the most remote sites. Jomsom is located in the Mustang region which has its own heritage. There is a huge community of Mustang origin people here in New York. Mustang Kydup USA connects all the Mustang origin people in USA. There are plenty of places in Jomsom where new motels and shops can be placed for the visitors. New trekking routes can be established among the snowy hilltops. French film team actually shot the movie " CARAVAN" in this area depicting the story of a Yak herdsmen. Jomsom residents also known as "Bhotes" are renowned for their service and relationship with tourists. Some of them have travelled along with their guests to different regions of Europe while others have joined British Gurkhas. Jomsom businesses can be promoted in the national level by Nepal Tourism Board. Even the Jomsom apples are popular items in the Nepalese markets and are frequently exported across different regions of Europe. (Photo : Nepal Tourism Board's Facebook) Advertisement On Monday, I witnessed a part of our democracy that not many people get to see: oral arguments before the Supreme Court of the United States. And you know what? It reminded me of the importance of women's equality. Let me explain. The case I witnessed was United States v. Texas, where the state of Texas first sued the United States to stop President Obama's executive actions on immigration from taking effect. If the United States wins, an injunction will be lifted and immigrants with deep roots in this country will be able to come forward and pay for a rigorous background check. If approved, they would be allowed to stay and work legally for a period of years and they would have to reapply and be re-evaluated periodically in order to stay in the U.S. Advertisement The reason I say that this case taught me a lesson about the importance of women's equality is because the three women on the Supreme Court really understand this case and what it is all about. These justices asked tough, insightful questions, and I have to say, it didn't sound like they were buying the arguments of the Texas Attorney General's team, nor the lawyer hired by House Republicans to attack the President. Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Elena Kagan and my fellow boricua -- of whom I am very proud -- Sonia Sotomayor, were all very forceful in poking holes in Texas and House Republicans' case, especially on the crucial point of whether the State of Texas has the right to sue the United States on this matter in the first place. We will see what happens, but when I left the court I was more confident than ever that -- even with the court not at full strength -- this was going to be a lopsided victory for the United States and the president. Advertisement The crux of the argument that the State of Texas made is that they subsidize driver's licenses to such an extent that a driver's license in Texas from their point of view is a kind of welfare. Apparently, people in Texas do not pay full price for the cost of a license. If the U.S. Department of Homeland Security vets people through a background check and categorizes these long-term residents as the lowest priority for deportation allowing them to stay, then the federal government, following its regular procedures that date back to the 1980s, will issue applicants a work permit for a temporary period of time so they can work legally and support themselves. And if an individual now has a document issued by the federal government allowing them to stay and to work, they can usually apply for a driver's license. And to the State of Texas, a driver's license is a form of state-subsidized welfare. Note, the State of Texas did not argue that President Obama--or any president--lacks the power to grant temporary deferred action to groups of immigrants if each case is adjudicated separately. That's right; the State of Texas has conceded what we already know: that the President is acting within the laws passed by Congress and the legal boundaries set by the Constitution, just as every President has done in modern times. Advertisement Instead Texas said that that the federal government is injuring Texas because Texas does not charge full price for driver's licenses. So the key points of the oral argument went like this: Um, hey Texas--and I am paraphrasing here--couldn't you charge more for the licenses? Clearly, immigrants would pay more if that is what was needed to make Texas happy, and having more drivers on the books, buying insurance, and having accountability is much better for everyone than the current system where some immigrants cannot get licenses but drive anyway. Texas said it had not really considered that option. And, um, hey, Texas--paraphrasing again--couldn't you just refuse to issue the driver's licenses? Like Arizona did with DACA for DREAMers in 2012? And Texas is all like, if we refused to issue driver's licenses to people with deferred action, we would get sued, and in that lawsuit, we might lose just as Arizona did. Which begs the question, why were we here in the first place? And then it became clear to everyone in the courtroom why Texas, Republican Governors, and Republican Congressmen had chosen this path. Advertisement They were making a political statement. They felt it was important to call the president lawless and a dictator and they used the Texas driver's licenses as their excuse. And if you take a deeper look, Texas is really saying that people can stay and the President has the power to keep families together, but they just can't drive or work if Texas has its way. Moms and dads would have to work in the underground economy, drive without licenses or insurance, not be fully covered by wage and safety laws, and always be subject to exploitation. That is the world Republicans in Texas envision. Well, as Doctor King taught us, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice, and so it often is when it comes to the American courts. When a judge is selected in Texas to hear a case because he has already denounced this President; and then the case is appealed to the most conservative, least friendly circuit in the nation; and then the case is appealed to the Supreme Court, eventually you get to a venue that looks and thinks and rules much more like America in all her rich diversity and modernism. Advertisement 01 February 2007: Super Bowl half time show performer Prince performs for the media at the Half Time press conference in Miami Florida.RTNRoth/MediaPunch/IPX Musician, icon and Minnesota legend Prince died this morning at the age of 57. I have no doubt that there will be a veritable flood of posts about Prince over the next few days, many of which will be more thorough, interesting and well-written. But I'm not writing this for you. I'm writing this for me. I've lived in Minnesota all my life. I live 17 minutes from Prince's Chanhassen home. Despite this, I never met Prince. I never bought any of his albums. I was born almost a decade after he started his music career. Advertisement When I heard that Prince had died, I was driving home from work. There was a gentle rain falling -- just enough to merit use of the lowest setting on the windshield wipers. You'd probably expect me to say that I was devastated. That I had to pull over. That the rain was the universe itself crying at this new, gaping void. The truth is, I wasn't immediately devastated. I was merely dumbstruck. Speechless. I drove the rest of the way home in silence. I spent the next hour deciding how I felt; not how I wanted to feel, but how I honestly felt. What connection did I have to this man I had never met? At the end of this reflection period, I hadn't solidified an opinion in my mind, but I felt myself breaking up anyway. I felt as though I had lost a brother. The logical part of me tried desperately to rationalize my feelings, but failed. Why did I feel this loss so strongly? Mary Lucia, a DJ from local radio station The Current, described it in three words better than I ever could: "He was Minnesota." I identify as many things. I am an American. I am a writer. I am a father. But all of these identities are fluid; I am an American, but I know and respect my German and Danish heritage. I am a writer, but sometimes writing is the last thing I want to do. I am a father, but only recently, and I'm still getting used to that. However, I am -- and have always been and always will be -- a Minnesotan. I may move elsewhere, but I will always carry my identity as a Minnesotan close to me. Advertisement A piece of Minnesota died today. A big piece. And a piece of everybody who loves this state died along with it. State Rep. Sam Singh (D-East Lansing) isn't in Congress. He's not a superdelegate. But that hasn't stopped Bernie Sanders supporters from posting on his Facebook page that he should "support the will of the people." At least the Sanders activists have U.S. Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-Southfield) pegged correctly. The congresswoman does back Hillary Clinton, just as more than 60 percent of her 14th District did in the March 8 primary (yes, even taking into account that Wayne County combined absentee ballots in two districts). So Lawrence has no plans to switch her superdelegate vote because, as Campaign Manager Christy Jensen says, she believes "hands down, that Hillary Clinton is clearly the highest-qualified candidate running for president in either party." Advertisement When Lawrence bumps into Sanders supporters at events, they're always "kind and respectful," Jensen says. The same can't be said about the flood of "bashing" phone calls and Facebook posts in which the congresswoman was "called horrible names -- things you can't print." Those have been taken down, but plenty of other angry comments remain. An innocuous Facebook post last month about a national arts competition was typically spammed by Sanders supporters, like one who warned: "You need to look in mirror and be a true representer of your district ... please vote the way your district votes ... this IS your job." Who knows if these commenters live in Michigan or could even find the 14th District on a map. Jensen wonders if many of the so-called "Bernie Bros" are just far-right operatives trying to create chaos. Of course, Lawrence is far from the only superdelegate target in Michigan or nationally. The outrage-fueled online campaign includes sending automatic tweets to supers, tying up phone lines, posting memes with their pictures urging Sanders supporters to "Find Me On Facebook" and even publishing their personal information online. Advertisement So how did things start to spin out of control? Sanders has been harping on superdelegates for months, first complaining they were unfair and then announcing his campaign will try to turn them. Naturally, the senator hasn't endorsed the more extreme tactics against superdelegates, but he hasn't gone out of his way to tell folks to simmer down, either. Fortunately, the harassment strategy seems to have died down a bit. Maybe reality (and math) is starting to set in. After all, Sanders lost big in New York on Tuesday. To clinch the nomination, he'd have to win roughly 60 percent of the remaining pledged (not super) delegates, with primaries in unfavorable states like Pennsylvania and Maryland looming. In other words, Sanders is now a complete long-shot. However, Sanders adviser Jeff Weaver isn't waving the white flag. He declared Tuesday night that the campaign is going all in on wooing superdelegates. The new line of argument is that Sanders is a stronger general election candidate, so supers should flip to his side. Of course, that's a fairly specious claim. Clinton has been bloodied for decades and has received the most negative coverage this campaign, per Vox -- more than bigoted blowhard Donald Trump. GOP operatives have barely laid a glove on Sanders -- they'd rather run against him because they think he's a weaker candidate than Clinton. Now, that may not be a correct assessment, but that is the calculation conservatives have made. Advertisement Then again, too many Sanders supporters seem to believe that superdelegates are a new Democratic National Committee plot hatched just to deny Sanders the nomination. Love 'em or hate 'em (I'm personally not a fan), but they've been around for years. And the last Democratic presidential upstart, Barack Obama, somehow figured out a way to win under similar rules. I know. I reported extensively on the 2008 delegate fight in Michigan and nationally, examining Obama's meticulous long game and Clinton's myriad miscalculations. So my pro-math record is well-established, even though diehard Sanders supporters don't care. Back in '08, it was Clintonistas sending me hate mail over it. This year, Clinton wised up and hired many of Obama's nerds to help her navigate the process. Personally, I respect politicians who learn from their mistakes instead whine about life being unfair. If Team Sanders goes all in with the superdelegate strategy, it will almost certainly flop. Elections are, after all, popularity contests. And the truth is that the prickly independent senator isn't exactly beloved by Democratic leaders (although he's certainly not as loathed by his colleagues as Ted Cruz is). That's one big reason why Sanders lags behind in superdelegates. Advertisement Maybe Weaver's vow is the flailing bluster of a doomed campaign. Maybe it will rev up unhinged Sanders supporters to start their superdelegate cyber-stalking again. Whatever the case, it's going to do precious little to derail Hillary Clinton's march to the nomination. A martial arts sensei said, "You are always practicing something. The question is - What are you practicing?" In Henry David Thoreau's Walden, written during his year in a one-room cabin, is this evocative quote: "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." He was talking about all the possessions we buy that end up owning us, keeping us awake at night. Amen to that. Now, let's substitute the word "practice" for "thing." The cost of a practice is the amount of what I will call life that must be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. Advertisement There is a direct link between one's practices and results. In my work with leaders and their teams, the practice that is often missing is courage. This missing piece costs leaders the most, and when it is present, it makes the greatest difference. While we recognize courage in heroic deeds, courage may be failing you where it counts most - in day-to-day interactions with the people who are central to your success and happiness. WHY COURAGE FAILS US Courageous acts are fueled by strong emotions, whether played out in the global media or in a meeting room. The problem is that many are primarily driven by fear. How many times have you told someone what you thought he or she wanted to hear, rather than what you were really thinking? Painted a false, rosy version of reality, glossing over problems or pretending they simply didn't exist? Tossed out the ceremonial first lie? Advertisement The desire to keep our jobs, our good standing with our boss and colleagues overrides the impulse to disclose that, in our view, the latest plan presented by management is flawed. After all, everyone has witnessed a kind of violence--a lost promotion, raise, or place at the table--visited on those who've spoken their hearts and minds, and it is painful and raw. You know how it goes. Someone speaks the truth out loud, in the presence of leaders, and tension fills the room. Finally, the leader speaks solemnly, as if to a carrier of dengue fever. "I'm aware of these concerns, John (Jane). We've got it covered." Translated: "What part of 'team player' did you not understand?!" Why put ourselves on the firing line if there is a less risky, less painful way to get through a challenging situation? So what do we do? We practice withholding what we really think and feel which costs us a lot. Meetings produce more nothing than something. Ideas die without a funeral or proper burial. Conclusions are reached at the point when everyone stops thinking, which often produces outcomes that are short of brilliant. Communication is primarily from the leader to everyone else. We avoid sharing the realities of our everyday work because is it not a career-enhancing move. Advertisement And this is a shame because our first thoughts, unfiltered, uncensored, are usually on to something, yet all too often the courage to capture and voice them fails us. THE FIERCE ALTERNATIVE Emile Chartier wrote, "Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it's the only one you have." The practice that must take center stage today is radical transparency. And to practice this effectively, we need to find our courage. What gets talked about in a company, how it gets talked about, and who gets invited to the conversation, determines what is going to happen and what is NOT going to happen. Weak leaders want agreement. Strong leaders want to know the truth. They encourage those they lead to paint the whole picture, even if it's not what they wish it to be. Because only then can we put our best efforts forward to fix what needs fixing. The first frontier is finding our own courage. In London I was privileged to help a company kick off the introduction of Fierce Conversations to their leaders in Europe. The first thing the attendees saw when they walked in was a poster with the question, "What are our mokitas?" (a Papua New Guinea word for that which everyone knows and no one will speak of). As they walked down the hall towards the meeting room, there were more posters suggesting topics guaranteed to provoke high emotions, competing perspectives and fierce debate. Advertisement The managing director was convinced that until these underlying topics were aired and resolved, the European division of the company was far from achieving its goals. Two days of radically transparent conversations resulted in increased clarity, accountability, collaboration and partnership across the leadership team, translating directly to the top and bottom lines. The best way to see more courage in your organization is to model courage yourself. Let people know that you hope to be influenced by them, that you invite them to push back on your views. Ask: What is the most important thing we should be talking about? What are our mokitas? By Zachary Siegel and Allison McCabe Earlier this year, a small handful of state legislators began what can only be described as an all-out assault on California's behavioral and mental health care industry. They introduced four separate bills on February 19 that, each in its own technical way, take immediate aim at different facets of the continuum of substance abuse treatment. Though these bills serve only the self-interest of a few affluent, coastal communities, they are being pushed at a state level, which makes their potential impact widespread. In the late '80s, the Fair Housing Act (FHA) was expanded to protect people from discrimination based on disabilities, including those who have substance use disorders. Then in 1990, these protections were further enforced under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Upon signing the act into law, President H.W. Bush called it a historic opportunity, signaling "the end to the unjustified segregation and exclusion of persons with disabilities from the mainstream of American life." 25 years ago, whether you were a Democrat or Republican, it was deemed socially unacceptable to deny people a decent standard of living based on one's history of substance use or other disability. But these four bills--AB 2403, SB 1283, AB 2772, and AB 2255--aim to unravel this progress. For the first time since the '80s, there is bipartisan effort to not only restrict the expansion of treatment centers and sober living facilities, but to shut many of them down altogether. They're attempting to turn back the clocks to a time when it was okay to exclude people based on differences. Advertisement California has a long and distinguished history of accommodating people with disabilities and caring for those afflicted with complicated illnesses. In 1880, Los Angeles was described as a "sleepy semi-Mexican pueblo of 11,000." But as clinics sprang up to treat illnesses like tuberculosis, L.A.'s population swelled to over 100,000. People flocked to the Pacific thanks to testimonies of Southern California's "healing powers," first published in a journal called The Land of Sunshine. With the advent of powerful antibiotics that could treat TB, these clinics eventually morphed into facilities to house people with severe mental illnesses. The healing culture of California remained on the cutting edge of treating populations deemed untreatable. Then came a process of deinstitutionalization, where public psychiatric hospitals began to close en masse. In an attempt to revamp treatment for people with mental health problems, President Jimmy Carter in 1980 signed the Mental Health Systems Act. Before the ink dried, President Reagan repealed Carter's community mental health project, ending the Federal Government's role in providing services to the mentally ill altogether. The aftermath of deinstitutionalization to this day remains palpable throughout California and the country at-large, as seen in those who experience chronic homelessness, a quarter of whom live with untreated mental illness, including substance abuse disorders. Many today wind up in jail or prison, the new asylums. Present day, California is a bastion for treatment centers, sober living houses, and a thriving community of people recovering from substance use gone awry. But dark clouds are on the horizon, in the form of sophisticated legislation that masquerades as safety and regulatory oversight, though in practice, only serves a potent "Not in My Backyard" (NIMBY) agenda to protect the prejudices of an elite few. Advertisement Politicians representing exclusive communities in Southern California--Malibu, Bel Air, and Newport--are hearing the cries of their affluent constituents, who want treatment centers and sober houses out of their posh, palm tree lined neighborhoods. It's a 21 century, bipartisan movement toward deinstitutionalization and an encroachment on private sector treatment, which sprang up because the government cut ties to treating those with mental and behavioral health problems in the first place. These political maneuvers, if passed, will inevitably affect the approximately 1,500 state-licensed treatment facilities and over 1,000 sober living residences in the state. California is the biggest addiction treatment provider in the country, and the number of people these bills would affect is difficult to fathom. When taken at face value, these technical revisions appear to be a boon to the field, which no doubt needs more oversight and regulation. There are indeed bad actors in the industry, whose thirst to capitalize on a vulnerable population trumps the intent to provide a safe, caring environment in which recovery is possible. "Really, what [the bills] do is not only shut down the bad players, they want to shut down all of them," said Thomas Renfree, deputy director of substance use disorder services at County Behavioral Health Directors Association of California. "It's really a discriminatory, NIMBY issue." These bills would grant local governments broad powers to weigh in on the existence of recovery facilities in residential neighborhoods. This savvy machination is most evident in Assembly Bill 2403, introduced by California Assemblymember Richard Bloom, a Democrat, who represents the wealthy District 50--Malibu and Santa Monica in particular. According to his website, "Assemblymember Bloom has also been involved in legislative efforts to combat the prescription drug overdose epidemic." AB 2403 would result in a direct negation of those efforts. His office did not return requests for comment. Advertisement This bill would force the Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) of California to prohibit the operation of treatment centers or sober houses based on their proximity to one another by introducing the concept of "overconcentration." Essentially, if there are two or more facilities--even if they're owned by the same company--that are fewer than 300 feet from each other, it's defined as "overconcentration," and on these grounds local governments would be given the power to block the issuance of a license. Treatment facilities and sober houses are often comprised of multiple properties taking up multiple lots. By defining overconcentration with these restrictive measures, this amendment will force the facility to dismantle its operation. There is another, potentially even more damaging component to AB 2403, which creates the concept of an "integral facility." An integral facility is defined as any group of treatment centers that have anything in common. This commonality could be a director, a meal service, even a shared consultant. The treatment centers might be across town from each other, but if they share the same meal service they are considered one integral facility and are issued one license. Under current law, licensed residential treatment centers are exempt from zoning codes if they have no more than six residents; this means they do not need permission from the local government in order to operate. Under the proposed amendment, however, the zoning exemption for "integral facilities" is eliminated, giving neighbors the power to vote these people out simply because they don't want them there. It's a brilliant, technical solution to sidestepping federal protection. "This is pretty Draconian," Harry Nelson, a lawyer for health care providers at Nelson Hardiman, told The Fix. "This will gut protections granted under the Fair Housing Act and Americans with Disabilities Act." "It's really scary," Nelson added, "because if AB 2403 passes, it will dial us back to pre-1988, when cities had a much freer hand to just shut out treatment." Advertisement Discrimination aside, the fact that 90 percent of people who need treatment do not receive any whatsoever makes the concept of "overconcentration," well, a rich one. Amidst an epidemic of overdose, with a 400 percent increase in overdose fatalities over the last decade, there are simply not enough beds, not enough treatment options, or enough safe spaces out there for people who wish to seek help. Where the national rallying cry is for better access to treatment, this bill seeks to restrict any expansion, and potentially shut down many facilities. "Facially, these bills look appropriate for sociological and safety reasons," said Cassidy Cousens, founder of 1 Method Center, who has decades of experience in California's treatment field, during an interview with The Fix. "But, in application, it is going to set back, I'd say, 95 percent of the programs in California... forcing them to close. There's just no way to withstand the legislation that they're talking about implementing." Cousens said this could decimate the field. And his biggest concern is the reasoning behind why these bills are being put forth. "What it comes down to is people have a stigma and attachment to mental and behavioral health patients where they just don't want them around." Such wording, however, is never made explicit by the opposing side, unless maybe you were to ask Donald Trump, who comfortably eschews all euphemism. The community concerns are coded in politically correct fears of safety. For instance, the fact sheet for Assembly Bill 2255, introduced by 67th District Republican Melissa A. Melendez (on the same day as AB 2403) cites a statistic apparently made up by Costa Mesa's Police Chief: "crimes have increased 33% in Costa Mesa because of the high concentration of sober living homes and the relapsing of addicts." There is no evidence to support this claim; no research has shown any negative relationship between the presence of these facilities and any increase in crime (in fact the opposite is true). But the facts don't help: one Costa Mesa company was just forced to shut down 33 of its sober living houses, in part because unfounded fears were stoked by dubious statistics. Not only does the research not support the claims made by police and politicians, but it directly contradicts them. A recent study conducted by Johns Hopkins, published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, analyzed crime statistics within proximity to drug and alcohol treatment centers. "The data reveal that community members should be more worried about liquor stores than drug treatment centers," the researchers concluded, because liquor stores, not treatment centers (even methadone clinics!), attracted much more crime. "Sober Living Houses should be considered essential assets to communities," Dr. Doug Polcin, senior scientist at California's Alcohol Research Group (ARG), told The Fix. "Studies show that individuals in these homes make significant improvements in their lives in terms of reducing substance use, reducing criminal justice involvement, and increasing employment." One study, conducted by Dr. Leonard Jason at DePaul University, found among Oxford Houses "that larger house sizes predicted less criminal and aggressive behavior," contrary to the fears of the cities that oppose them. One of Polcin's papers, titled Community Context of Sober Living Houses, also empirically contradicts NIMBY-agendas. What his team found was that sober living "residents are perceived as good neighbors." Polcin concluded, "If these homes are not available to individuals with alcohol or drug problems they are more likely to continue their addictive lifestyles causing harm to themselves and their communities." This was the exact outcome when Reagan annihilated the government's role in the treatment of mental health. Both crime and homelessness, to this very day, are sociologically tethered to shutting down psychiatric hospitals. Polcin suggests if these houses are not available, there will be more harm to communities for neglecting to treat and house those in need. Advertisement The concerns of wealthy communities, however unfounded, have quietly crept into the social mainstream. Whether intended or not, the consequences of these four bills will inevitably be far reaching. California's history of healing demonstrates that when people with disabilities are systematically shunned from communities, the results are dire. By enacting these bills, we aren't just turning our backs on an estimated 3.5 million people in California suffering from a substance-abuse related disorder, we are shunning them. By eliminating thousands of treatment beds across the state, most addicts will be left with nowhere to go for help. Without a thriving recovery community, The Land of Sunshine will look a lot less sunny. Zachary Siegel has been a regular contributor to The Fix since 2013. by Mary Beth Rogers We Democrats are trapped in the big red Republican bubble of hot air that has covered Texas for the past 20 years. Even though it is sprouting a few leaks these days, our crowd is still looking for ways to punch a big enough hole in the bubble to breathe freely again, and bring our hapless Party back to life. I just wrote a book called Turning Texas Blue, What It Will Take To Break the GOP's Grip on America's Reddest State. I had a few big ideas, along with a little history about how we came to be a state full of crackpots, crazies, and Machiavellian evil spirits, exemplified in perfect form by our Senator Ted Cruz who is the only viable Republican left to challenge front-runner Donald Trump to be the GOP's standard-bearer. Sad to say, my prescriptions for resurgence of our party are probably not going to happen in the 2016 elections. We haven't reached the tipping point yet. No matter who ends up on the ticketTrump or Cruz, or some as yet unknown pick of the elitesthe GOP will probably continue its presidential election sweep of Texas that started in 1980 with Ronald Reagan and has not gone for a Democrat since then. Advertisement So what's a Texas Democrat gonna do in the meantime? First, we have to face the painful reality that we haven't figured out how to move the needle very far in recent elections here. We only got 39 percent of the vote in the 2014 election for governor. Our glamorous, pro-choice candidate, Wendy Davis, lost the women's vote, virtually gave away Latino voters, and ignored white voters who in turn ignored her, giving her only 25 percent of their vote. In a non-presidential election year, white voters make up almost 65 percent of those who actually cast a ballot in Texas. No Democrat can win statewide without winning close to 35 percent of them. Ignoring that reality has been one of our follies. We've simply given up the white vote in our suburbs and mid-size cities. As a result in non-presidential election years when the turnout is lower, we get swamped. In these off-year elections we struggle to pull between 36 to 43 percent of the statewide vote against Republicans. But this is a presidential election year, dammit, and the turnout of Democratic base voters will be larger than in off years. What are we gonna to do about it this time? Let's look at what happened in 2012. Sure President Obama lost Texas. But if we toss around the numbers a bit, and if we had made a different kind of effort, life might be a little better for our hapless party today. After all, Obama carried five of our six big cities where the majority of Democratic base voters live. A mix of African American, Latino, Asian, single women, and younger voters helped put Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Austin and El Paso in the Democratic column. Those significant urban victories happened because Obama won the African American vote by 98 percent, and he got an estimated 70 percent of the Latino vote. But he only pulled about 26 percent of the white vote. If he had managed to win more than 30 percent of the white vote in Texas as he did in other Southern states like Virginia, Florida, and North Carolina, and if he had invested as heavily in a get-out-the-vote effort among traditional Democratic base voters as he did in those states, he might have won Texas too. Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? Advertisement Two factors would have been necessary to block the Republican capture of Texas's 38 electoral votes in 2012: An increase in white Democratic voters from 26 to 35 percent, and an increase in total Hispanic turnout from a paltry 39 percent of eligible voters to at least 65 percent of those qualified to vote. Here's the rub: almost 61 percent of eligible Latino voters in Texas did not cast a ballot in 2012. Only about 25 percent of Texas's Hispanics reported that any organization or political party had even contacted them leading up to the 2012 election. There's a big lesson here: if Democrats don't wage real campaigns on issues that matter to Hispanic voters, or make more significant efforts to persuade them to vote Democratic, the turnout will remain lower for Texas Hispanics than in states like Colorado, Nevada, or even Arizona. That's because Texas Republicanseven right-wingers like Rick Perryhave a history of fighting for every Latino vote they get. And in 2014, almost 44 percent of Hispanics voted for right-wing Republican governor Greg Abbott against Democrat Wendy Davis. Texas Democrats keep wallowing in wishful thinking that if by some magical transformation those non-voting Latinos would just show up to vote for the ticket, we'd blow up that big red Republican bubble for good. It's not going to happen by magic. Sign up for more essays, interviews and excerpts from Thought Matters. ThoughtMatters is a partnership between Macmillan Publishers and Huffington Post Increasing Hispanic turnout for Democratic candidates is going to have to take a different approach. First, we have to understand that the Latino vote is not encased in just one monolithic block. It is a conglomeration of many diverse and different groups with little in common except a similar heritage and language. Texas Latinos are young and old, wage earners and professionals, small business owners and PTA moms, young couples just starting out and old folks living in multi-generational families. And although the majority are Mexican Americans, whole neighborhoods in San Antonio and Houston are home to Salvadorans or Honduran new citizens. The bottom line is that they often have different interests and needs, hopes and aspirations. A single get-out-the-vote Democratic message does not resonate across the board. Most importantly, Democrats have to find a way to woo and win younger Latino voters. One third of the state's eligible Hispanic voters are between 18-29 and they are not voting. The future of the Texas Democratic Party here depends on these younger voters and we have not yet figured how to reach them where they live, which is in the new world of technology, social media, music, and massive cultural changes that are very different from what their parents and grandparents have experienced in Texas over the past 50 years. Will the hateful anti-immigration rhetoric of presidential Republicans make a difference in Texas this year? It's already stirring up Latino voters across the country. But in Texas, we've got a bigger challenge. We have to make our efforts personally relevant to native-born younger voters, whose parents are also native-born. The interesting little secret about Texas exploding Latino population is that it is built on a high-birth rate among people already here, rather than a recent immigration surge from across the Texas-Mexico border. Texas is home to Mexican American families who have been here five and six generations. Many of these established residents are not as personally touched by the immigration issue, as are first and second generation immigrants in places like Nevada and Colorado. Yet, the ethnic hatred aroused by candidate Trump and other Republicans could conceivably propel non-voters in Texas to cast ballots for Democrats in 2016. If Democrats could increase Latino turnout by 25 percent over the 2012 election, everything could change hereand nationally, as well. There is something else happening in Texas to give Democrats long-term hope. Republicans have reached their peak voting strength in Texas; they have no room to grow. Their base vote in the suburbs is older, socially conservative, white and declining as a percentage of the whole. The solid Republican suburbs around Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin are witnessing a new influx of African American, Latino and Asian homeowners, as well as millennials, LGBT+ couples, and cultural progressives who are creating increasingly diverse communities within Anglo-dominated suburbs. So while the solid Republican base vote has probably hit its ceiling, Democrats still have a lot of room to grow if they play their cards right. When some Democrat with a hefty bankroll is savvy enough to figure all of this out, the shift in Texas political fortunes will have a profound effect on how both Democrats and Republicans "run the numbers" in the Electoral College to win the presidency. If Texas were to become a genuine swing state like Florida, everything would change. Advertisement Take the example of California. When that state's prized 55 electoral votes became a sure thing for Democrats after 1992, Republicans had to scramble to win votes in states like Pennsylvania or Michigan that had strong Democratic voting histories, or they had to put together combinations of smaller state victories sufficient to secure the 270 Electoral College votes to win the presidency. That's not easy, as the last two presidential elections have demonstrated. If Texas were to flip, Republicans would have an even more difficult time implementing an effective Electoral College strategy. On the other hand, national Democrats may find that they actually need to win Texas to assure their own prospects. Their much-heralded 2012 presidential victories in states like Colorado, Virginia, Iowa, and Ohio were so close as to provide no guarantee for future victories. And if Donald Trump emerges as the Republican nominee and maintains his hold on working class white voters in the industrial Midwest, Democrats might need to make a play for Texaseven in 2016. We surely don't want to be caught in one of those ruminating regrets by recalling that "we could've, should've, might've," but just didn't. If Hillary Clinton is our party's nominee and she manages to pull at least 30 percent of the white vote here, and improves Hispanic turnout 25 percent over 2012, Texas becomes a possibility. After all, she's always been popular in Texas, drawing almost a million votes in the March primary and overwhelmingly defeating Bernie Sanders. She could actually expand Obama's 2012 margins to bring Texas into play. Today, there are even a couple of Internet betting websites that are giving odds that Texas just might turn blue next fall. One of them is the Irish gambling site, Paddy Power, and it's offering 14/1 odds that Texas will become a swing state this go-round - the first time any one has offered up anything positive about Texas politics in a long whileeven if it's far away in Ireland and run by folks who want to take your money on a risky bet. So, don't lose heart, my fellow Dems. Let's fight smart and bright in 2016, even if the odds are against us. At least someone is willing to take a bet on us. And if we're luckyas gamblers sometimes arewe just might start poking enough holes in the big red stinking bubble to let in some fresh air, fresh faces, and fresh ideas to start us down the road to really turn Texas blue. Advertisement As a new business owner, I know firsthand the challenges entrepreneurs face. However, as I look around at the business community, I notice there aren't a lot of people who look like me. The Center for Global Policy Solutions, a national non-profit, is examining the issue with the release of "The Color of Entrepreneurship: Why the Racial Gap among Firms Costs the U.S. Billions." The report found that closing the racial gap in privately held firms with employees would add 9 million jobs and $300 billion in worker income to the U.S. economy. "The economy at large suffers as a result of the underrepresentation of people of color among business owners with employees relative to their share of the labor force," said Algernon Austin, the report's author and a Senior Research Fellow at CGPS. "Interest in entrepreneurship among people of color is quite strong, but access to the resources to do it successfully is often a challenge. If we help create the economic and social circumstances for these individuals to start and grow their businesses, society overall can benefit from more jobs, less poverty, and greater economic output." According to the report, among the factors that lead to business success are existing family wealth that can be invested as startup capital, work experience in a business owned by a family member, college education, and being foreign-born. For me, the road to opening my own business was a venture decades in the making. I had a number of things working to my advantage: The fact that I was born in Guyana, graduated from college, had the opportunity to work with my parents in their real estate ventures, and benefited from their generosity in providing me with 50 percent of the down payment for my first investment property. These all created the perfect storm to increase the likelihood I would be successful as an entrepreneur. Lucky me! But what about those that aren't so "lucky"? "The Color of Entrepreneurship" uses data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Survey of Business Owners to examine changes in the economic status of privately held businesses owned by people of color during the depths of the Great Recession, between 2007 and 2012. It presents findings by race, ethnicity, and gender, and offers policy recommendations to expand access to entrepreneurship, including: provide a tax credit to promote venture capital investments in minority businesses; provide a tax credit for new low-income entrepreneurs; and encourage the use by credit rating agencies of alternative data such as rent and utility payments in establishing credit histories. The report explores average annual sales, average annual pay per employee, number of paid employees, the firms that have added jobs and those that have lost jobs between 2007 and 2012. Additional key findings include: Non-white businesses with employees added over 70 percent of the total 1.8 million jobs created by privately held businesses between 2007 and 2012.White-owned privately held businesses employed 51million people in 2012, which was about 2.5 million less than in 2007. Asian American women's firms had the strongest numerical growth--37.6 percent. Black women's firms had the largest decline in average annual sales--30 percent. Among firms owned by men of color, black men were the only group that registered a decline in the number of businesses--2.3 percent. Among businesses of color, average sales grew most for Latino men's firms--7.2 percent. Advertisement As Americans look north and observe Canada's latest kerfuffle over privacy this week, it has been like looking at ourselves in the mirror - everything is on the opposite side. Court documents released last week in Quebec revealed that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police can unlock the encryption on any and all Blackberry devices. At least six years ago, the RCMP got hold of the "passkey" and has been secretly unlocking millions of private messages with the full knowledge and cooperation of Research in Motion (RIM), the company that makes Blackberry devices. Ontario's former Privacy Minister says it was 2010 when she first heard that RIM was releasing a universal key to unlock Blackberry encryption to governments in the Middle East. Unlike the Apple execs in the U.S. who recently fought pressure from the FBI for similar access to locked smart phones, RIM apparently had no objections. In what the minister now characterizes as a "rude response" to her written inquiries, the company told her that she was being unpatriotic for asking questions. She says that's when she ditched her Blackberry and got an iPhone. Advertisement Privacy in America - A Relatively New Concept The right to privacy as we know it today has been evolving for a little more than a century. In an 1890 article for the Harvard Law Review, Supreme-Court-Justice-to-be Louis Brandeis and his law partner Samuel Warren expressed concern that "[r]ecent inventions and business methods" posed a threat to individuals, who had "the right to be let alone." The authors predicted that the law was unprepared to deal with privacy cases, and about a decade later, history proved them right. New York's highest court ruled in 1902 that nothing in the law prevented a paper mill from using the latest technology - photography - to put a picture of a young girl on its flour sacks without asking her first (let alone paying her). The case created a public outcry that prompted legislators to create a legal right to privacy. Since then, the bubble of privacy that surrounds each American has expanded. Courts have found that an individual's right to privacy protects against government eavesdropping on conversations on public phones or going through garbage cans looking for incriminating evidence. If the government wants to violate the privacy of a citizen legally, it usually needs to obtain a court order before snooping around. The Illusion of Privacy The concept of a right to privacy has become more ingrained in the American public, even as it has become harder and harder to keep anything private. Like a teenager who is horrified to learn that the little lock on her diary was insufficient to protect her secrets from a prying sibling, Americans have been surprised over and over again to learn that nothing they say or do is necessarily a sacred secret. Advertisement As far back as 1987, the televised Iran-Contra hearings on Capitol Hill gave the American public a glimpse of how electronic communication was already changing the nature of secrecy. Co-conspirators in the White House had erased their computer files and shredded hardcopies of electronic messages (called PROF-notes) to hide their actions, never suspecting that someone would find (and make public) a back-up disk with copies of all the incriminating evidence. Twenty-five years later, anonymous emails to a Floridian socialite led the FBI directly to the jealous mistress of General David Petraeus (the head of the CIA!), and the ensuing scandal precipitated the war hero's downfall -- another reminder that nothing about electronic communications is reliably anonymous. And yet, every revelation seems to come as a fresh surprise. Privacy Is Not Immunity Nothing that is in a citizen's phone would be immune to a court order if it existed as a hard-copy in a safe deposit box. Yet, somehow, digital privacy seems different. President Obama alluded to this when he warned last month against "fetishizing our phones above every other value" -- an interesting reversal from the man who was so attached to his own Blackberry before taking office that he insisted the government create one secure enough for him to use as president. Security concerns are routinely being used as justification to restrict the right to privacy. Public places in even the most open societies are routinely under the watchful eye of security cameras monitored by law enforcement. High-tech devices in the hands of police gather large amounts of data - license plate numbers, cell phone signals, airline passenger records. For the most part, society has been willing to cede some degree of privacy in exchange for security, although it is difficult to see exactly where the line is drawn. The Transportation Security Administration, for example, has long had passkeys to unlock all checked airline baggage and faced no significant resistance to that rule. Neither the luggage nor the lock-making industry rose to defend the public's right to keep the contents of their suitcases private, even after the government published photos of those passkeys, thereby making it possible for anyone with a 3-D printer to copy them. Advertisement In contrast, many of the same people who have accepted the ubiquitous presence of security cameras raise objections to security microphones. Around the country, where transit authorities have begun recording sound on busses and trains, some commuters who have no expectation of privacy regarding their public behavior have drawn the line at allowing the government to overhear their public conversations. The Right to Privacy -- An Experiment that Failed? The under-30 set has grown up with digital profiles, blogs, and a plethora of social media accounts with which they immortalize an uncensored record of their young lives - mistakes and all. Meanwhile, their elders worry that "kids today" will someday rue their failure to keep things private. The French government even reflected a protective concern about the nature of privacy last month when it warned that parents could face prison for violating the privacy of their children by posting their pictures online. Or that, someday, those children might turn around and sue their parents over the embarrassment those pictures cause. In this automation era, one must not forget the importance of nurturing relationships with customers. By understanding the right ways of speaking over the phone, businesses can form a loyal bond with their clients. Want to win the hearts of people over the phone? Forget about the sales and analyze the pain points of your customers. Speak about their personal issues in a firm yet approachable manner. 67% of customers have hung up the phone out of frustration they could not talk to a real person. Be honest in your approach. Don't dilute the value of your offer by going overboard. Keep the following tactics in minds to nourishing the bond with your customers: Pre-Call Preparations Advertisement Each year, $41 billion is lost by U.S. companies alone due to poor customer service. After facing a negative customer experience: 58% don't use company's services/product for the second time 34% post their negative experiences on social media 49% will tell friends to stay away from the company Adopt these strategies to avoid above circumstances: As 46% of customers prefer to talk about complicated issues on the phone, get an answer list of possible questions. If you are not confident about your voice throw, use a voice recorder Practice on pre-written scripts before making an actual call. Work on your script by focusing on the pace, clarity, and volume. Engage in Active Listening Good listening skills build strong business relationships and reflect helping nature. The average person speaks around 125-175 words per minute while an average number of words one can listen to per minute is around 450. Advertisement Before jumping to any conclusions, develop a listening habit. Pick up the call with the intention of listening customer's queries and feedbacks. If you feel the urge to interrupt in between, stay on the track by asking relevant questions. Use Business Phones for Strengthening Customer Relationships No matter what your business does, your employees require business phones to communicate with customers or prospective clients in a secure manner. Suppose, a worker gets the call, but he doesn't have the expertise to solve the query. He has two options: Move from his desk and look out for the right person to attend the call. OR Transfer the call to the right person while sitting on his desk. With business phones, the worker can easily transfer the call efficiently which satisfies the caller instantly. "There are phones systems to suit every need. In many cases, used phone systems are far better than the new phone systems because some companies just want systems with more phone lines and transfer call features. Most people think VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) calls will save money. In reality, saving depends on the quantity of phones lines and type of phone calls you make. Do a proper research before making the buying decision." says Pete Williams, founder of Infiniti Telecommunications. Advertisement Your staff can delight the clients from anywhere with an internet connection by staying connected to the office phone system. What is the result? You can devote more time and investment in winning your customer's heart. Be Simple in Your Explanations Stay away from technical terms and jargons. Use plain language and avoid slang words. Don't make your customers feel inferior. Almost 40% of total cost of managing business transactions is spent on problems arising from poor or misunderstood communication. Instead of using filler words like 'um', 'like', 'basically', practice how to take a pause. Always remember one thing: Keep it as short and straightforward as possible. Clarify the problems in the easiest way possible. Use Gestures During Call You might be thinking: What is the use of gesture when the receiver can't see you in person? Here is the reason: 55 percent of message meaning stems from speaker's facial expression. Apart from facial expressions, gestures also reveal a lot of information about individual emotions and intentions. Advertisement The more you use your hands while talking on the phone, the more clarity will be there in your tone. Use headsets with microphone to free your hands. Not only headsets help in improving the consumer experience, but it also helps in increasing work productivity. Headsets also reduce the risk of 41% increase in shoulder tension, neck pain and upper back by holding the telephone handset between your cheek and shoulder. Remain Positive and Summarize the Conversation Pick up the phone with a smile. It creates room for productive exchange of thoughts. At times, you have to deal with angry customers. Maintain your calm and composure to turn a 'No, thank you' response into a 'Yes, please'. Make yourself sound natural and interested. Stop using words like 'can't' and 'don't'. Suppose your customer comes up with a query for a feature which your product doesn't provide currently. Advertisement If you think the feature will add more value, don't stop the flow by saying 'We don't provide this feature.' Appreciate the customer's input by saying 'I love your proposal. I'll talk with the team members for discussing the feasibility of the feature'. It seems that every day, a new technology eliminates some inefficiency or harmful impact of old products and practices. And yet, there remains one major holdover, fighting change and trying to hold the tides from coming in: our national love of driving. The harmful societal and economic impacts of our car-dependent transportation network and culture are well-documented by researchers and well-known by nearly anyone: traffic, emission pollution, dependency on oil, deaths and injuries. Uber, Lyft and others in the ride-sharing revolution have begun to make a dent in the inefficiency of the American transportation system, but only a dent so far. Broad scale, impactful change probably remains a decade or more away. Advertisement So what more can we do right now? A new idea has emerged and its gaining prominence: Car Free NYC. Our mission is to encourage New York City drivers to choose alternative means of moving about on Earth Day, this Friday, April 22nd. Car Free Day is about encouraging people to make more thoughtful decisions in their daily lives, particularly related to transportation. On Friday, we aim to drastically limit the number of cars on New York City streets by encouraging residents and commuters to choose one of the many other forms of transportation that New York offers, for one day of the year. We are asking New Yorkers to leave their cars at home through an array of marketing, including through social media and peer-to-peer contact. Companies and organizations from across the city, including Citi Bike, New York Water Taxi and Lyft will be offering incentives to commuters for getting around the city in alternative ways, and companies like FedEx and colleges like NYU, Columbia and The New School will be limiting their own car use on Earth Day. A handful of streets will be closed to vehicles on Car Free day, including Broadway from 17th-23rd streets; Washington Square Park East, West, North & South; as well as Waverly Place and West 4th Street between Washington Square Park West and Broadway; and Wadsworth Avenue in Washington Heights from 173rd-177th Streets. The streets will feature programming from local community organizations, aimed at promoting environmental sustainability and thinking around the impact of transportation on our environment. Advertisement In a world becoming more efficient every day, moving around in personal vehicles is maybe the most inefficient thing we do. Next time you are stuck in traffic anywhere from the Van Wyck to East Midtown, look around (carefully) at the vehicles near you, and note the number of people in cars versus the number of seats in the car. Think about the space that each of those cars takes up, or how much more efficient it would be if each were on a bus or train rather than the many cars they occupy. In addition to the negative impacts we all know, the unseen victims of car-based pollution are children in primarily low-come, minority neighborhoods. Look at the childhood asthma rates in Harlem and the South Bronx - they are the highest in the city. Why? In part because of smog produced by car traffic and low-income communities typically bear the brunt of the environmental burden of vehicle traffic. Working to blunt the negative impacts of fossil fuel consumption and promoting environmental justice for all is one of the most impactful and important steps we can take in the battle against income inequality. Advertisement Car-free solutions are viewed typically with skepticism initially, and unfortunately the knee-jerk critics dominate the debate. But after implementation, car-free initiatives are wildly popular. Think about Broadway in Times Square, where parking lot-like traffic and heavy smog once reigned: now it's a wildly popular pedestrian plaza and the biggest problem we have are how to create even more walking space. Philadelphia recently got a taste of a car free center city during the Papal visit, and it was a tremendous success. Want to get involved? Pledge to go car free or have your place of work incentivize carpooling or enable employees to telecommute on Earth Day. These steps, taken en masse, can create a real change. The idea has already drawn widespread support, with hundreds rallying at City Hall a few weeks ago to celebrate the idea. Warner Bros Censorship in art, or in any other form of mass-media, has always been a problematic issue in India. And the situation seems to have spiralled out of control with the Pahlaj Nihalani-led regime that has more often than not policed content, much to the frustration of both filmmakers and audiences. Recently, director Kamal Swaroop told HuffPost India in an interview that the Congress was far more lenient than the Modi government in this issue, which is dangerous for filmmakers. This list of Hollywood films, banned because of CBFC's moral-policing, further illustrates why Swaroops statement is relevant. Advertisement Dirty Grandpa (2016) The adult-comedy starring Robert De Niro and Zac Afron hasnt gone down too well with the Censor Board, notorious for its conservative worldview. According to a DNA report, the CBFC found the film obscene (of course! grandpas should always be sanskari). Weve placed a ban on Dirty Grandpa because this grandpa is dirtier than any 70-year-old man. In fact, De Niro in this film makes Rishi Kapoor in Kapoor & Sons look like a saint. We wonder why an actor of De Niros caliber did such a sleazy film, a Board member was quoted as saying in the paper. Magic Mike XXL (2015) The sequel to the hugely successful Channing Tatum-starrer hit a raw nerve with the Indian censors, who told the studio that they cannot go ahead with the release. Reason? The high levels of testosterone possibly made the Board members uncomfortable. The Board felt 'male-stripping' was againstIndian culture. After the Examining Committee rejected it, the studio took it to the Revising Committee, (the panel consisted of 5 women, 3 men) who okayed the film after six cuts. However, after a majority vote went against the male-stripping drama, the makers had no option but to halt the release. Sorry ladies, no dirty dancing by Tatum, Bomer or Manganiello for ya'll. Advertisement 50 Shades Of Grey (2015) The controversial erotic-drama, adapted from EL James book by the same name, was promptly banned by the CBFC as it contained generous amounts of sex-scenes, something that Indians must not be exposed to, according to the Censor Board. In this case, the studio sent a trimmed-down version to obtain certificate but that reel too was a little too much for our moral police, who decided to stick to good old Indian values, over blindfolds and handcuffs. Get Hard (2015) Something rather unprecedented happened in the case of this Will Ferrell-Kevin Hart adult-comedy. Days before its premiere, Warner Brothers decided to withdraw the film's Indian release, fearful of the unpredictable cuts the CBFC would invariable inflict on their film. Yes, a film was withdrawn voluntarily, because the studio was convinced that there was no way the Board members would let Get Hard play on Indian screens the way it was meant to. Blue Jasmine (2013) Advertisement Woody Allens Blue Jasmine, a film that earned Cate Blanchett an Oscar for best actress at the 86th Academy Awards, couldnt release in India due to a highly-controversial Censor Board guideline. The CBFC clears a film only if theres a smoking disclaimer inserted in the films reel, EVERY SINGLE TIME a character lights up. Allen, who has complete autonomy over his films, refused to do so, resulting in the film not getting a Censor clearance. The film was never released in India. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011) This was going to be a tough one. The critically-acclaimed David Fincher-drama starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Maara had a lot of disturbing scenes, including a rape sequence, among other portions of full-frontal nudity (no, none of the CBFC members are familiar with nudity). So the Board decided to sit on the editing table, and sent a revised cut to Fincher and team. Predictably, The Social Network director refused to release his film with the cuts the Board recommended and so The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo never made its way to Indian theatres. Advertisement Contact HuffPost India Also See On HuffPost: Facebook A school-going Jedi from Delhi is finally fully armed to restore galactic order after a delightful surprise from e-commerce giant Amazon. After he watched The Force Awakens, the latest in the Star Wars series of film, 7-year-old Rudra wanted a lightsaber, the Jedi blade made of pure energy, for himself. His mother asked him to save up for one. There was only one problem. Rudra had managed to save Rs 1,006 -- all in coins. Advertisement Unsure whether Amazon would accept his coins in exchange for a lightsaber, Rudra wrote the company a letter. His mother, Banani Sarker Joshi posted the heartwarming story on Facebook. To the utter surprise of the boy, Amazon sent the 7-year-old a lightsaber as a gift. But it wasn't just a lightsaber that Rudra received. The company also sent him a lovely note. "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away. There was a kid named Rudra, who was waiting to get a lightsabre so he can join the force to be a Jedi...He wrote a letter to the Amaz-empire to get the lightsabre. Yoda has seen that the kid is destined for great things and decided to give him the sabre so he could join the force," the note read. Advertisement There was a personalised message from Yoda too: The force is clearly strong with Team Amazon. Also See On HuffPost: The India Today Group via Getty Images NEW DELHI, INDIA November 11: Giriraj Singh after taking charge as Minister of State for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises in New Delhi.(Photo by Praveen Negi/India Today Group/Getty Images) Union minister Giriraj Singh, who has a tendency to spark controversy with his off the cuff remarks, on Wednesday suggested a solution that would kill two birds with one stone -- address a population problem and ensure safety of Indian women. The Minister of State for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises allegedly told a gathering at Bagaha in West Champaran that India needed to enforce a two-child norm for all religions. Worried that Muslims in certain districts of Bihar would soon outnumber Hindus, the MP from Nawada told the gathering that if India wanted to keep her daughters out of the veil, restricting the number of children to two in every family of all religions, is a must. Advertisement "Hindu ka do beta ho aur Musalmaan ko bhi do hi beta hona chahiye. Hamaari aabadi ghat rahi hai. Bihar mein saat zila aisa hai jahan hamaari jansankhya ghat rahi hai. Jansankhya niyantran ke niyam ko badalna hoga, tabhi hamaari betiyaan surakshit rahengi. Nahi toh hamein bhi Pakistan ki tarah apni betiyon ko parde mein band karna hoga. (Hindu and Muslim families should have two sons each. Our population is declining. Bihar has seven districts where our (Hindu) population has gone down. We need to change our population control policy. Only then will our daughters be safe. Otherwise, like Pakistan, we will have to keep our daughters veiled," the Indian Express quoted Singh as saying. India risked losing the name 'Bharatvarsha' if the population policy was not reworked, the paper quoted him as saying. The minister in Narendra Modis cabinet had last year kicked up a political storm after he made a sexist remark against Congress President Sonia Gandhi, prompting an outraged Opposition to demand an apology from the Prime Minister. "If Rajiv (Gandhi) had married a Nigerian, things would have been different," Singh had joked. He had told a rally in Jharkhand ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha polls that those criticising Narendra Modi should be sent to Pakistan, the Express reported. The leader was quoted in a tweet by ABP News Hindi as saying that "the difference between beef and mutton is the same as the difference between our relationship with our mothers and our wives. Advertisement Contact HuffPost India Also on HuffPost: Ajay Verma / Reuters India's Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad Yadav attends an election campaign rally in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh May 11, 2009. India is holding a general election between April 16 and May 13. REUTERS/Ajay Verma (INDIA POLITICS ELECTIONS) A 20-year-old engineering student, Divyanshu Kumar alias Golu, has been arrested for allegedly hacking Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad's Facebook account. According to reports, Golu, who has a "good knowledge of computer operations" tried to hack the RJD chief's Facebook account twice on March 8 and 11. On the third attempt on March 13, the hacker succeeded and posted "objectionable comments" on Lalu Yadav's Facebook account. Advertisement The Economic Offences Unit of Bihar Police nabbed Golu and has also seized two Samsung mobile phones he is said to have used for hacking the Facebook account. IG (EOU) JS Gangwar said, Action will be taken in that regard also. The police will soon file a chargesheet against him. The officer said the sim card of one of the mobile phones used by Divyanshu was found to have been originally issued in the name of Vijay Kumar Singh, who resides in Saudi Arabia. Lalu Prasads son and Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Prasad Yadav had lodged an FIR after removing the malicious content from his father's Facebook page. Advertisement The FIR was lodged under sections 419 (punishment for cheating by impersonation), 420 (cheating and dishonesty inducing delivery of property) and 406 (punishment for criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code. "His (Golu's) personal accounts on social media is flooded with post related to a particular religious sentiments and many could be labeled as anti-national posts. However for now he has been sent to jail related to the profile hacking case of Yadav," an officer told Times Of India. Also See On HuffPost: Mark Thompson via Getty Images SINGAPORE - SEPTEMBER 20: Force India Chairman Vijay Mallya walks in the paddock before the Formula One Grand Prix of Singapore at Marina Bay Street Circuit on September 20, 2015 in Singapore. (Photo by Mark Thompson/Getty Images) Declining to reveal the details of his assets overseas to banks, liquor baron Vijay Mallya, who is facing a multi-agency probe including for alleged money laundering, told the Supreme Court on Thursday that the banks cannot lay claim to foreign assets. Mallya, whose now-defunct group company Kingfisher Airlines owes over Rs 9,000 crore to 17 banks, had left the country on March 2 and is believed to be in the UK. Advertisement In an affidavit filed in the apex court, the Rajya Sabha MP held that since his wife and children were US citizens, it exempted them from making any asset disclosures. He however agreed to submit the details of assets held by him to the court, according a report in The Indian Express. Mallya added that he is willing to deposit Rs 1,590 crore as a token amount if the court agreed to intervene in pending cases against him so that he can sell his stake in some of the businesses facing litigation. Can pay token money only if SC intervenes in pending cases, cant pay until SC allows sale of shares stuck in litigation, said Mallya, adding that Kingfisher Airline was a business failure beyond his control. Mallya, whose diplomatic passport was recently suspended, said media trial was responsible for the unseemly haste of the government action. Advertisement Meanwhile, armed with a non-bailable arrest warrant against him, the enforcement directorate has approached the External Affairs Ministry seeking initiation of deportation proceedings against Mallya in connection with its money laundering probe against him in the Rs 900 crore IDBI alleged loan fraud case. A local Hyderabad court had on Wednesday convicted Mallya in a cheque-bouncing case filed against him by GMR Hyderabad International Airport Ltd. The court, however, did not pronounce the quantum of punishment as the industrialist , who left the country last month, was not present in the court, Mallya's lawyer H Sudhakar Rao said. The quantum of punishment is expected to be pronounced on May 5 by the court, GMR lawyer Ashok Reddy said. (With PTI inputs) Advertisement Contact HuffPost India Also See On HuffPost: Hindustan Times via Getty Images DEHRADUN, INDIA - MARCH 28: Former CM Harish Rawat with his MLAs and supporters coming out of the Governor's house on March 28, 2016 in Dehradun, India. Day after Presidentas rule was imposed in Uttarakhand, Congress said it will approach all legal and constitutional forums against the injustice done to Harish Rawat government. (Photo by Vinay Santosh Kumar/Hindustan Times via Getty Images) In a major embarrassment to the NDA government, the Uttarakhand High Court on Thursday set aside the order of the Centre that put the state under President's Rule on 27 March. Allowing former Chief Minister Harish Rawat's plea challenging the imposition of President's Rule, the High Court said the nine dissident Congress MLAs will now have to pay the price of committing "Constitutional sin" of defection by being disqualified. The court ordered fresh floor test on 29 April. The High Court said the material considered for imposing President's Rule has been found wanting. Congress hailed the judgement as the "victory of democracy". Article 356 was imposed in Uttarakhand contrary to law laid down by Supreme Court, the High Court observed. Celebration broke out Rawat's residence as soon as the court announced the verdict. Advertisement #Uttarakhand HC sets aside President's rule proclamation: Celebrations at Harish Rawat's residence in Dehradun pic.twitter.com/Q1LM1acu24 ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 #Uttarakhand HC sets aside President's rule proclamation: Celebrations at Harish Rawat's residence in Dehradun pic.twitter.com/AIpzmSmsJV ANI (@ANI_news) April 21, 2016 The court also observed that the fate of nine Congress MLAs was entirely irrelevant and extraneous to imposition of President's rule in the state. "Government led by petitioner Rawat will revive," the PTI quoted the HC as saying. "We won't stay our own judgement. You can go to Supreme Court and get it stayed," the court said, rejecting the Centre's plea for a stay. Congress, predictably was jubilant. Advertisement "The Uttarakhand HC decision is a victory of people of the state," Rawat said. "This is a win for the state of Uttarakhand", he told reporters after the verdict. "Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government stand exposed for abusing their authority, misusing provision of Constitution, destabilising an elected government, using questionable means and methods. The Prime Minister and Home Minister need to apologise for the sins that were committed", said senior Congress leader Anand Sharma, reacting to the development. The Prime Minister and Home Minister need to apologise for the sins that were committed. The kind of observations the state High Court has been making for last three days, we are not surprised by its order: BJP General Secretary Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) April 21, 2016 President's Rule was imposed in Uttarakhand on 27 March, after the Centre cited a Constitutional breakdown in the wake of a rebellion in the ruling Congress. President Pranab Mukherjee signed the proclamation under Article 356 of the Constitution, dismissing the Congress government headed by Rawat and placing the Assembly under suspended animation on the recommendation of the Union Cabinet. Earlier, the court had observed that it would be a travesty of justice if the Centre revoked its order imposing President's Rule and allowed someone else to form a government before it gave the verdict. Advertisement (With inputs from agencies) Contact HuffPost India Also on HuffPost: Hutchinson's Salvation Army started in 1894 In 1910, under Captain George Seeds, the citadel at 114 West Sherman St. was built. CDs As Expanded Instruments: Pioneers Of Hacked Sound Art While compact discs are certainly on the decline as far as the average music consumer is concerned, several innovative pioneers within the music industry have and continue to explore the limits of the CD as not just a means of listening to music, but as a creative tool from which to create new sounds. _______________________________ Guest Post by Jeremy Young on Soundfly's Flypaper The Compact Disc (CD) was introduced into commercial ubiquity on October 1, 1982, alongside the worlds first-ever CD player, the SONY CDP-101. Billy Joels sixth studio album, 52nd Street, was selected to be the first recording issued on this new digital audio format, which is hilarious considering that particular album wasnt even new at the time. 52nd Street was originally released in 1978. CDs were developed over years of research with the intention of making recorded music available on an optical audio disc with superior sound quality. The audio division at Philips in the Netherlands is said to have first begun experimenting with the technology, however, SONY in Japan was supposedly also testing out optical discs, independently of Philips. By 1982, the two companies had joined forces to release the new medium to worldwide markets. One might say that the world has not been the same since. With all the conversations about sound superiority to vinyl, tapes and 8-track, laser and mini-discs aside, the compact disc has probably had the biggest influence on ushering in the vastly dominant digital music marketplace of today. Since the prolific outbursts of the Fluxus movement, almost every popular medium of creative expression has been subject to artistic interception and recontextualization. In music, the influence of John Cage has led artists to continually search for expanded worlds of sound new ways of expressing, creating, and listening to sound as music in the generative possibilities of new technology [1]. Cages experiments with tape-collage and found sound, Christian Marclay and Milan Knizaks use of turntables and prepared vinyl records and John Oswalds practice of plunderphonics, among other working artists of the 1970s and 80s, paved the road for reimagining the sounds of the medium itself as new forms of composition. Even photographer Lazslo Moholy-Nagy experimented with phonographs, imagining a way to draw the grooves to create a hand-written sound score. While the work of these artists was almost exclusively considered avant-garde, eventually the cresting popularity and surge in production of electronic glitch music in the 1990s would solidify the explorative conquest of data-driven manipulations of digital technology as an important reflection of the way everyday consumers experience music. Let me briefly digress to let tech journalist Eric B. Parizo summarize how the compact disc stores and converts binary data into audio: A player uses a low-intensity laser scanner, reflecting light off of the surface of a disc. The code on the disc consists of flat areas and pits, or microscopic grooves. The intensity of the light reflected back from the surface of the CD differs depending upon whether the light strikes a flat spot or a pit. Electric signals are then created based on the varied intensity of the reflected light. Those signals are then amplified and interpreted in audio, video, etc. Error-detection systems were put in place so that small irregularities in the laser reflection would not affect the audio. In fact, this software was introduced and developed as early as 1960, so by the time home CD players made it to market, the programs were already pretty advanced. Roc Jimenez de Cisneros explains that the coding system essentially guarantees that occasional scratches, dust or any minor imperfections on the data side of the disc do not corrupt information decoding, thus preventing them from altering the sound coming out of the speakers, which would potentially result in sporadic or even constant bursts of noise. Unlike vinyl and tape, to really prepare a compact disc requires a heightened sense of data-hacking, or at least, a much subtler hand at physical manipulation, in order to get past the error-detecting software and intervene with the data being read. Marclay has humorously stated, I like the old-fashioned turntable Because its so dumb. You can hit it, you can do all these things, and it will never stop playing. The CD players are too smart smart machines [2]. However, the end results of manipulating discs as well as CD player sensors, as we will see in the following artists work, reveal a glittering, unpredictable, and dense array of sonic possibilities. + Read more on Flypaper: 3 Artists Using Cassettes as Performance Instruments Yasunao Tone Perhaps no artist has become the emblem for prepared, or wounded compact disc manipulations than Yasunao Tone. He was definitively the first artist to experiment with these processes; his work with the medium dates back to roughly 1984, a mere two years after the CD was introduced into the market. Tones work is shaped by his focus on indeterminacy, or chance, which comes from being involved with the Fluxus movement in the early 60s. He began poking pinholes in Scotch tape and sticking small pieces to the surfaces of compact discs in the mid-80s, gauging the effect it would have on the players sensors [1]. Essentially, he found that although some of the binary data was being blocked, the machine still attempted to piece together the rest. So instead of shutting down, or skipping overany damaged audio, the CD scanned the audio as true, though it would not sound anything like the music contained on the disc. The result, as can be heard below, is like jittered white noise, dense with tones and rhythms contained in the original music, but fragmented and put back together like an audio puzzle. Excerpt from Yasunao Tones Solo for Wounded CD (Tzadik, 1998) Tone was improvisational in his performances with the wounded CDs. He would bang the CD players to get them to skip from place to place around the disc, which gave the listener a unique sense of the physical geography of the compact disc. Whereas you always know exactly where the needle is on a turntable, the compact disc sensor system is hidden inside the players internal hardware and is abstracted from the sound. Tones work, though decently documented on recordings, is predominantly based in the live andimprovised tradition. His interests have always been to create systems, or processes, by which data may be disrupted in the transfer from source to audio signal and to navigate these disruptions in performance. The following is a recording of one of his Mp3 Deviations pieces, which takes a similar approach to his work with CDs, but makes use of a custom built software that maps and interprets corrupted file error messages in MP3s. Excerpt from Yasunao Tones Mp3 Deviations #6+7 (Mego, 2011) Nicolas Collins Nicolas Collins is a multidisciplinary artist and electronic music composer, curator, writer, editor-in-chief, and organizational director. He does it all. Collins work in home-built circuitry and micro-computers was pioneering in the field of electronic sound art. His compositional practice is almost equally as important his influence on the way contemporary composers use live technology alongside an acoustic orchestra cannot be understated. His work with compact discs is not totally unlike Tones, in that there was a lot of trial and error experimentation to understand how the sensors inside the player actually functioned, and the boundaries of what they could handle. It was through a hunch [1] that Collins discovered that the players chip contained a mute pin, which is perhaps the most important mechanism in the transference of coded data into audio. He removed the pin, and to his delight, the CD player just wouldnt shut up. It translated every piece of information that the sensors picked up as audio, leaving no signals filtered. And this is where his work differs from Tones. Tone never really tampered with the player, just the discs, and while Tone was provoking the sensors to create sound, Collins work with this cracked medium is actually about controlling its silences. The piece below, Broken Light makes use of that very process: Nicolas Collins recording of Broken Light for string quartet and modified CD player Its worth noting that this work is scored, even though by nature it involves an improvisational, reactional relationship to the piece on the part of the performers. Tones work is almost all solo or improvised without a score. The score to Broken Light is viewable here, and it is super interesting to read through. The image beneath shows what each string player was given, a hacked Sony D2 Discman, a modified remote control and foot switches to call up tracks for three movements (1, 2, 3), scratch across CD (S), and nudge through tracks (N). Collins was a student of Alvin Lucier at Wesleyan, where he was able to meet John Cage, Christian Wolff, David Tudor, Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, and others. In New York, he was part of the Impossible Music Group, along with David Weinstein (one of the founders of New Yorks Roulette Arts Intermedium and a producer of Clocktower Radio), which performed works for cracked media, often including several prepared CD players. Collins also invented a multitude of instruments like the backwards guitar, the MIDI trombone, and through his tinkering with the mute pin, the unmuted CD player. Collins got the chance to showcase the MIDI trombone in every track on his album 100 of the Worlds Most Beautiful Melodies, which featured duo improvisations with John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Peter Cusack, Christian Marclay, Shelley Hirsch, and so many others. And because Collins is not shy about anything relating to his process, he also wrote an essay on how the sampling trombone device works! Read more on Flypaper: Elliott Sharps Essential Guide to Being Elliott Sharp Oval Oval was a musical project initiated in Germany in 1991 by Markus Popp, Sebastian Oschatz, and Frank Metzger, although now only Popp (pictured above) remains connected with the group. Their early albums Systemisch (1994) and 94Diskont (1995) were hugely influential in solidifying the new electronic sound known as glitch. Youll notice immediately how different Ovals music sounds from the others in this article, in that this is actually quite pleasing! Ovals Aero Deck from Systemisch (1994) Systemisch contains hundreds of samples generated from scratched and written-on compact discs, skipping and failing. But the group edited them into minimalist, pretty rhythmic grooves and tones,using them as source material for what today would be considered your basic electronic track. All of the typical CD stuttering sounds, seem to be rounded off, EQd and compressed into drum-like tracks that reference the standard sounds off a drum pad. Funnily enough, the band actually started out as more or less pop music, writing instrumental and vocal music in the late 80s. Disdaining the use of synthesizers, Oval instead deliberately mutilated CDs by writing on them with felt pens, then processed the palette of fragmented sounds to create a very rhythmic electronic style. Early digital drum and loop sequencers with interactive interfaces like Cubase were just coming into the market in the early 90s. Looking back on his process, Popp recalls, Essentially, I was looking for new musical building blocks without relying on quantized MIDI sequences plus, say, a drum machine. And the most interesting and unpredictable sequences I could find was the fascinating, irregular musical storytelling of a laser of a CD player skipping over the damaged surface of a compact disc. So one could say that the early Oval signature sound ended up mainly consisting of re-composed fragments of (what once was) other peoples music not because I was anti-music, but because this was simply my best (low budget) shot at an electronic music that was new and surprising as opposed to being purely experimental. Ovals album 94Diskont (1995) Later, through experiments in sampling and controlling the stutters into more predictable rhythmic patterns, Oval stumbled into the beautiful glitchy minimalist electronic music for which they have since become known, sampling errors into beautifully imperfect patterns. They have influenced artists such as Autechre, Bjork, and one of my favorite sampling albums of all time, Jan JelineksLoop Finding Jazz Records (2001). + Read more on Flypaper: Sampling as Instrumentation: How Recorded Noise Found Its Way into Music Others On the 2001 compilation album, Un Tributo to James T. Russell, the Spanish imprint Alku collected tracks from a range of artists using hacked compact discs to create an ironic tribute to the founder of the CD itself, Mr. Russell. You can stream the entire album at Francisco Lopezs SONM Sound Archive of Experimental Music and Sound Art for free, though you need to register. Tone and Oval are both represented here, but some of the other highlights include a work by Javier Hernando, where he records himself back-skipping over a CDs contents, and 35 consecutive 4-second tracks, all completely silent, by conceptual artist Terre Thaemlitz which open the album with a Cagean listening exercise coercing the listener to take note of the audible noise their CD player makes while playing this very disc. The compact disc is now 33 years old. There are of course, tons of contemporary artists out there experimenting with sound collage, sometimes including samples generated from CDs, CD players, and hacked lazer-read media. At the heart of many of these artists work is either the drive to create new sonic systems and landscapes from altering the way data is communicated from source to signal (Florian Hecker and Ken Gregory for example), or an intent to draw the listeners focus towards the medium and its properties as a sound-generating device (like Otomo Yoshihide and hiswork with Sachiko M, and Zorn affiliate David Weinstein). London-based sound artist and designer Aleksander Kolkowski has created a way to lathe-cut vinyl grooves onto the surface of CDs, making them playable on turntables. Thats pretty much the ultimate put-down for a medium that for so many years was advertised as Perfect Sound Forever,and reminds us of one of Nicolas Collins famous statements: music isnt just conveyed in grooves, pits and waves. Music is grooves, pits and waves. Update: This article was updated on April 5, 2016 to include quotes from Ovals Markus Popp. Notes [1] Stuart, Caleb. Damaged Sound: Glitching and Skipping Compact Discs in the Audio of Yasunao Tone, Nicolas Collins and Oval. Leonardo Music Journal Vol. 13: Groove, Pit and Wave: Recording, Transmission and Music (2003): 47-52. Print[2] Marclay, Christian and Tone, Yasunao. Record, CD, Analog, Digital. Audio Culture: Readings In Modern Music. Ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner. London: Continuum, 2004. 341-347. Print. Share on: If you know a little about quantum mechanics, or computer science, then the idea that there is anything about it that can be tested using the familiar zip compression algorithm will seem as strange as the theory. The Bell inequality is one of the key tests that separate true quantum physics from classical theories no matter how outlandish they may be. As Wikipedia puts it: "In its simplest form, Bell's theorem states: No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics." The theorem is based on what happens when you have two entangled states. No matter how far away from each other the states are, the measurement of one affects the measurement result of the second. This effect can seem to be instantaneous and seems to involve faster-than-light travel but no information can be transferred using this mechanism. The point of Bell's inequality is that it rules out a classical explanation for the effect using things like local hidden variables and as such makes clear the difference between quantum and classical physics. More cartoon fun at xkcd a webcomic of romance,sarcasm, math, and language In a test of the Bell inequality what normally happens is that the measurements are carried out many times on a set of identically prepared systems and then statistics are calculated. The new approach doesn't compute the probabilities but processes the measurements, i.e. zeros and ones, using a zip compression package. The compression ratio achieved is used as a sort of proxy for the Kolmogorov information measure. This measures the regularity in a stream of values as the size of the smallest program that can generate it. An ordered sequence can be generated by a very small program but a truly random sequence needs a program as long as it is to generate it. The quantity in question - the normalized compression difference - can be shown to be less than zero if the universe is classical, even if mimicking quantum effects. For a quantum universe it could be as high as 0.24. To settle the matter an experiment was performed that took measurements of thousands of entangled photon pairs. The researchers then used the 7-zip archiver to compress the data and came up with a value greater than zero: 0.0494 0.0076, which implies that the universe is quantum. The small value is probably due to the fact that the zip algorithm isn't working at the Shannon limit, i.e. it isn't achieving as much compression as theoretically possible. So what does all this mean? Is this proof that the universe is strictly quantum and we can't patch up classical theories to cover its behavior any time soon? Yes, this is the case, but we already know this from previous tests of the Bell inequality. What is important about this work is the approach. To quote from the paper: "We would like to stress that our analysis of the experimental data is purely and consistently algorithmic. We do not resort to statistical methods that are alien to the concept of computation. If this approach can be extended to all quantum experiments, it would allow us to bypass the commonly used statistical interpretation of quantum theory." I'm not sure that this is correct as the workings of the zip algorithm do have a statistical interpretation directly relating to the autocorrelation of the data. It seems that it is more to do with making a connection between quantum mechanics and algorithms in general and that this work puts things into a different perspective. Does it have any future uses - who knows? One thing that is certain, however, is that we really don't know how to think about quantum mechanics - perhaps algorithms are a better way. More Information Probing quantum-classical boundary with compression software Hoh Shun Poh, Marcin Markiewicz, Pawe l Kurzynski, Alessandro Cer`e, Dagomir Kaszlikowski, and Christian Kurtsiefer Related Articles Quantum Physics Is Undecidable Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum Quantum Cats QScript A Quantum Computer In Your Browser Minecraft Goes Quantum Quantum Computers Animated The Universe as a Computer To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Linkedin. Comments Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info Aurora Healthcare and Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Wisconsin are joining together to start a new insurance company. The plan is based on the assumption that Aurora can offer lower costs than competitors by people using its own network of hospitals and physicians.Wisconsin Collaborative Insurance Co. has a $10 million capitalization for start-up costs and will begin coverage in 45 counties in the state from 2017. The firms new plans will replace those sold under the Blue Priority banner.The world faces even greater catastrophic weather incidents unless leaders vow to go further to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction is today (Apr. 21) calling for signatories of the Paris Agreement to go beyond existing commitments.It is clear that weather and climate are implicated in 90% of major disaster events attributed to natural hazards. Droughts, floods, storms and heatwaves have the potential to undermine many developing states efforts to eradicate poverty. Climate change is adding to pre-existing levels of risk fuelled by exposure and socio-economic vulnerability, Robert Glasser said.He called for the more than 160 countries that have signed the Paris Agreement to scale up the level of ambition to cut emissions or face the real danger of being overtaken by the rapid pace of global warming.The issuance of catastrophe bonds reached $2.22 billion in the first quarter of 2016 according to an Aon study. Focusing on the insurance-linked securities sector, the study found that there were 10 transactions that pushed the figure to a record high for the first quarter; and up 30 per cent from the same period in 2015.Bonds covering US named storm and earthquake dominated the market in Q1, as did, to a lesser extent, Japan typhoon. Canada earthquake and US medical benefits ratio coverage were also part of the Q1 2016 issuance.The report reveals that secondary markets activity increased during the quarter, with trade volume rising more than 25 per cent compared to Q4 2015. Rhode Island is the latest to join the ridesharing regulation bandwagon, with two proposed bills competing for lawmakers approvals.Two bills were proposed to serve as regulations for companies such as Uber and Lyft operating in Rhode Island.The Senate bill, proposed by Sen. Maryellen Goodwin, defines transportation network companies (TNCs), sets regulations for them, and establishes TNC drivers as independent contractors instead of employees. This bill shares features with similar legislation in other states. It would also require TNCs to pay a yearly fee of $10,000 to secure a permit to operate in the state."It's very necessary that we take some legislative action," Goodwin testified to her fellow senators. "We don't want our residents and our visitors to the state hopping into cars that are uninsured that have drivers that don't have significant background checks."Goodwin believes her bill is the start of a conversation, and would take notes on what has and has not worked in other states.The other House bill, introduced by Rep. John Edwards, is intended to "level the playing field between the cabs, liveries and Uber" by laying down provisions that call for strict driver background inspections. The bill will require drivers to undergo fingerprinting and appear before a law enforcement officer for a national criminal records check. This bill also demands a yearly fee for a TNC permit to operate, at $15,000."They came in here and they did what they wanted to do and ignored our existing regulations," Edwards remarked. "This will bring them back into the fold."A Senate Commerce Committee has listened to Goodwins proposal April 14. Edwards bill was recently introduced and has yet to be presented in the House.An article on the Miami Herald noted that taxi operators in the region are not too keen over Goodwins bill. Taxi operators complained that the Senate bill does not go far enough in putting Uber and Lyft through the same requirements that they've been following for years.The same news feature noted that taxi operators were more in favor of Edwards bill, since it subjects TNCs to the same stringent requirements taxi companies go through. An insurance industry group has said the San Antonio hailstorm that ravaged the area last week may prove to be the costliest in Texas history.The Insurance Council of Texas said the damage caused by the storm could reach an estimated $1.36 billion. About $560 million of those losses were attributable to motor vehicle damage, while home and business losses are expected to meet $800 million. Uninsured losses are also high.The nearly $1.4 billion in damage has surged past the $1.1 billion estimated to have been caused by a hailstorm that hit Fort Worth in May 1995.No injuries were reported in the storm.The insurance industry has been working around the clock following the storm. Aaron Wilkerson with the Texas Farm Bureau told Texas Public Radio his company has transported extra staff from around the state to respond to claims.The main areas, though, that its impacted so far are the urban areas, Wilkerson said. And some of the larger hail I understand has gone through peoples roofs and through the decking into their house.According to the National Weather Service, the hailstorm weather that developed over San Antonio was unusual in that it fell over such a densely populated area for an extended period of time. The hailstorms were such that the largest hailstone reported following the weather event was a record 3 inches in diameterthe largest the area has seen since 2002. DJ Wilson, top center, gives the Board of Health data on what other municipalities have adopted in regard to tobacco regulations. North Adams Board of Health Raises Tobacco-Buying Age to 21 Dr. Thomas Hyde speaks to the Board of Health on supporting raising the age for purchasing tobacco products as a way to prevent smoking. NORTH ADAMS, Mass. Better have your ID ready to buy that pack of cigarettes. Beginning in August, you will have to be age 21 or older to buy tobacco products in the city. The Board of Health on Wednesday approved the new regulation setting a higher age limit on tobacco sales that goes into effect on Aug. 1 of this year. The decision, with only one vote against, was taken after a brief public hearing during which proponents of the regulation pointed to its likely positive effects. "This is very simple math, what it comes down to," said Dr. Thomas Hyde, a retired pediatrician, in testifying at the hearing. "Raising the minimum tobacco sale age to 21 dramatically reduces tobacco use." Stores will have to prominently display signage noting the age restriction as well as signage provided by the Board of Health that refers to smoking cessation information. The new regulations also limit the number of tobacco permits in the city to 23 and ban new tobacco retailers within 500 feet of a school; ban single cigar sales and raise the minimum sale price of two or more to $5; limit sales flavored tobacco products and ban the sale of blunts. The city is just the latest to adopt such regulations to reduce teen smoking. Donald J. Wilson, director of the Massachusetts Municipal Association's tobacco control assistance program, said 105 communities have adopted the 21 sale age, with Needham being the first in instituting it 11 years ago. Teen smoking in Needham dropped by nearly half during that decade. Fifty-two of the state's 351 communities have also restricted sales of flavored tobacco products and nearly a third have banned blunt wraps and implemented minimum pricing on cigars. "We do see a good progress with [minimum pricing] because kids, everybody is price sensitive to tobacco purchases, especially kids," he said. In 2014, Williamstown and Pittsfield also instituted tougher regulations as a deterrent to teen smoking. North Adams has the highest smoking prevalence in the state, more than double the state average of 15. According to the Tobacco21 group, sales to those between 18 and 21 account for only 2 percent of sales but some 90 percent of smokers start before the age of 21. Yet smoking is the leading cause of preventable death, said Hyde. "If we stop the chances, if we decrease the chances that you will start to smoke under 21, it has a dramatic effect on how someone will end up smoking for the rest of their life." Fines for violations range from $25 to $750 on clerks and permit owners; licenses may also be suspended for up to a year. Karl Waltermire of West Package & Variety Stores, also speaking on behalf of Robert West, read a statement saying elements of the regulation referring to mandated training would be a burden on employees and businesses. The regulation requires anyone selling tobacco products to undertake approved training through the Tri-Town Health Department and any new employees to be trained within 30 days. "This regulation will put a financial burden on all small retailers in North Adams," he said. "If compliance checks are showing retailers are doing their job, why penalize the innocent?" The board, without discussion, voted the new regulations with the minimum age separately. The first vote was unanimous but Chairman Brendan Bullett was the lone vote against the age requirement. "I think it should be done at the state level," he said afterward. "I don't think it should be done city by city. I've thought that from the beginning." The Legislature's Joint Committee on Public Health in March reported out a bill to raise the age to 21; it is currently in Ways & Means. "More and more data is showing how it's working," Hyde said. "It's absolutely the right thing to do for children in our community." Correction: This article was incorrect in detailing West Variety's objections, which were solely related to the training in the new regulations. The article has been corrected and clarified. Robert Wilmers is one of four investors to purchase the four papers. Local Investors Purchase Berkshire Eagle, Three Vermont Newspapers Fredric Rutberg said he first thought of the idea two years ago after hearing a lecturer say 'citizenship requires a town square.' For him, The Eagle is the Berkshires' 'town square.' PITTSFIELD, Mass. The Berkshire Eagle and three Vermont papers have been sold to a Stockbridge-based group of investors. The Eagle announced the sale Thursday morning during a press conference at the Berkshire Museum to frequent applause from an invited group of community stakeholders. There the new owners promised to invest in the papers, raise the quality of the product, and ultimately restore the century-old paper as the "town square" of the community. "Our plan is to grow the newspaper, not to shrink it," said former Judge Fredric Rutberg, one of the four investors purchasing the papers. "Quite simply, our business plan is by increasing the quality of the paper, we're going to attract more readers and more advertisers. The focus is on increasing the quality of the publications both digitally and in print." Digital First Media is selling New England Newspapers Inc., a group of newspapers including The Berkshire Eagle, Bennington Banner, Manchester Journal and Brattleboro Reformer, to Birdland Acquisition LLC, on May 2. Rutberg is being joined by Robert Wilmers, CEO of M&T bank; John "Hans" Morris, former president of Visa Inc. and chairman of Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art Foundation; and Stanford Lipsey, publisher of the Buffalo News, as the principals of Birdland. Rutberg, Morris, and Wilmers are all Stockbridge residents. "Under local ownership, we understand that the needs of the community will be met a little bit more readily, steadily," Publisher Edward Woods said. "The investment the new ownership has committed to will enhance the product in terms of the quantity of the content and the quality of the content." The Eagle was founded in the 1890s, although its roots in the county date back another hundred years. It was owned by the Miller family for most of its existence until being sold some 20 years ago to Denver-based Media News Group, which was later absorbed into Digital First Media. Parent company Alden Global Capital had attempted to sell off its entire national holdings wholesale but the prospective deal fell through about a year ago. Since then, the company has been selling individual papers or groups of papers such as New England Newspapers. The newspaper group had been quietly shopped around to potential local investors over the last year. Digital First had scaled back its properties in recent years for cost savings and as it prepped for a sale. That included outsourcing a number of jobs as it centralized production among its holdings. Morris said starting as early as tomorrow morning, the new owners will be setting up a plan to bring those back. "We want to bring back the jobs to the Berkshires. All of the stuff that was outsourced by Digital First Media will be brought back here," Morris said. "A lot of that includes all of the digital offerings. So we will have some very talented digital people with design and tools for advertisers." There are 154 current employees among the four papers and Woods estimated that at least 20 to 25 jobs will be brought back to The Eagle. However, he was uncertain about an actual number or if there would be additional positions available or if there is room for efficiencies. Nonetheless, he said there will be a "fair number" of jobs coming back to the Berkshires with the sale and current employees will not see a change in salary. One thing Digital First Media will retain is ownership of the real estate. Running the Clocktower building with numerous offices had become somewhat of a struggle for the paper over the years and the building has been on the market for some time. The sale now separates management of the building with the operations of the paper. "We are no longer responsible for managing a very large, piece of real estate. It is a large office park. These investors are coming on board and enhancing the quality of the newspaper. Digital First Media will continue to own the real estate," Woods said. "We will not relocate. Our home is at the Clocktower. We will simply be leasing from a different entity." John Morris said the focus will be to improve the quality of the product to attract more readers and advertisers. Morris said the new owners have a number of conceptual improvements planned. Some of those include increasing investigative reporting, creating a team of "citizen writers" to report on their towns or issues of concern, and new sections and features. Management will also create a content advisory board. "We're going to cover more of the Berkshires' social scene. We are going to cover more local history sections, enterprise reporting, and we expect to do many special editions that cover unique aspects of the Berkshires," Morris said. Print journalism as a whole has been a struggling industry recently. A number of papers have been closed over the years including the North Adams Transcript locally and staff sizes have been reduced. Meanwhile, smaller papers have been bought out by larger corporations. Rutberg said the local ownership group is looking to reverse that trend. "This was done not as an attempt to flip it over and make a ton of money and sell it to somebody else. We're here. We care about journalism. We care about print journalism," Rutberg said. "Some people might think we are fossils but I don't. There is a lot of evidence to show that newspapers are still hugely important to the social fabric of any community." Wilmers added, "circulation has been going down for years, advertising has gone down, and many believe the newspaper industry is a dying industry. We believe that communities like ours need a voice." While Thursday's press conference focused mostly on The Berkshire Eagle, Woods said the other three papers in the group will reap the same benefits and investments. "These communities are closely tied together geographically and much of our management team is traveling among those communities," Woods said. The four investors have been meeting since January to work out the deal. Wilmer said there is an agreement with Digital First Media in place to keep the sale price from being disclosed. For Rutberg, though, the idea of purchasing it was conceived two years ago when he heard a lecture in which the speaker said citizenship requires a town square. Then, he set it in his sights to take over the paper upon retirement. "The Berkshire Eagle is the town square of Berkshire County and has been for the last 100 years. But it needs some help," Rutberg said. We work towards an equitable, gender-just, self-reliant and sustainable fisheries, particularly in the small-scale, artisanal sector We work towards an equitable, gender-just, self-reliant and sustainable fisheries, particularly in the small-scale, artisanal sector We work towards an equitable, gender-just, self-reliant and sustainable fisheries, particularly in the small-scale, artisanal sector We work towards an equitable, gender-just, self-reliant and sustainable fisheries, particularly in the small-scale, artisanal sector The content you are trying to view is exclusive to our subscribers. To unlock this article: Press Release: Southern Africa Officials Participate in IMF-World Bank Debt Sustainability Regional Seminar for Low-Income Countries Press Release No. 16/180 April 21, 2016 On April 18-22 AFRITAC South, in collaboration with the Strategy, Policy and Review Department of the IMF and the Macroeconomic and Fiscal Management Global Practice of the World Bank, held a regional seminar on debt sustainability analysis for low income countries. The event was hosted by the Africa Training Institute in Mauritius. The seminar brought together government officials from Lesotho, Madagascar, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe. It focused on the main principles of debt sustainability and the link to the IMFs Debt Limit Policy and the Banks Non-Concessional Borrowing Policy. IMF and Bank experts presented and discussed with seminar participants the IMF-World Bank Debt Sustainability Framework (DSF) for Low-Income Countries (LICs). The DSF is a standardized framework for conducting public and external debt sustainability analysis in LICs. It aims to help guide the borrowing decisions of LICs, provide guidance for creditors lending and grant allocation decisions, and improve IMF and World Bank assessments and policy advice. The hands-on approach focused on how to develop baseline stress-test scenarios by using the DSF and how to interpret the results from the debt sustainability analysis. Specific attention was given to practical application of the framework by engaging participants to use the analytical tool and interpret results. Participants discussed the importance of the individual country context and macroeconomic and technical challenges they face in using the DSF as a tool for guiding their countries borrowing decisions. Based on the IMFs World Economic Outlook (WEO) projections of April 2016, the general governments gross debt, for most of these countries, is projected to increase over the medium term. In this context, the regional seminar was very timely in addressing the upgrade and sharing of technical skills to analyze African countries debt dynamics. AFRITAC South will continue to provide technical assistance and hands on training, facilitating specialized peer-learning for macro-fiscal medium-term frameworks and debt sustainability analysis. Imperial Valley News Center Computers play a crucial role in preserving the Earth Ithica, New York - Computers have helped revolutionize the commercial world and transformed the lives of the general public through the development of the Internet and mobile technologies like the iPhone. But, practically speaking, they have done little for the good of our planet. This troubled Carla Gomes, a computer science professor at Cornell University, and led her to embark on an effort to develop computational methods that can help cultivate a more sustainable world. Gomes and an interdisciplinary team of programmers, theorists, applied mathematicians, economists, biologists and environmental scientists have helped create a new field, computational sustainability, addressing challenges that computer scientists have not traditionally handled. Together, they tackle a range of issues from wildlife management to poverty-reduction. "Computational sustainability can't be achieved with piece-meal research efforts," Gomes said. "It requires truly interdisciplinary teams, where computer scientists work directly with researchers from different sustainability areas." Between 2008 and 2013, Gomes led a large collaborative team that developed fundamental computing tools for sustainability, supported by a $10 million National Science Foundation (NSF) Expeditions in Computing award. The award catalyzes far-reaching research that is motivated by deep scientific questions and has the potential for significant societal benefits. Using these tools, the team has gone on to solve pressing ecological and economic problems, from protecting endangered animals to helping poor rural herders in Africa, showing the benefit that computing can bring to real-world problems. Bear corridors Land development often results in the reduction and fragmentation of natural habitats, making wildlife populations more vulnerable to extinction. One way to alleviate the negative impacts of land fragmentation involves creating conservation corridors -- continuous areas of protected land that link zones of biological significance. However, determining the best approach to design these corridors, which often involves buying or preserving land on a limited budget, can prove tricky. Gomes and her collaborators developed a modeling technique for wildlife corridors that has proven more effective at allowing animals to traverse contested terrain than previous approaches, often at a fraction of the cost. The researchers initially implemented the technique in a study of grizzly bear corridors in the Northern Rockies, and later extended its use to include wolverines and lynx across multiple national parks. "Using our computational approach, we were able to find corridors that improved the movement of species over hand-designed corridors at a substantial fraction of the cost, considering trade-offs for multiple species," Gomez said. In 2013, the secretary of the environment of the Quito Municipal District established an ecological corridor and conservation program for the endangered Andean bears in Ecuador's mountain forests. A research team led by Cornell professor Angela Fuller -- a wildlife ecologist and the leader of the New York Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit who works with Gomez -- provides scientific support and applying computational sustainability solutions to expand the ecological corridor there. The team's approach has been shown to reduce corridor cost dramatically, allowing often contentious projects to proceed without too much expense and in a manner that helps the animals as much as possible. "A key advantage of using advanced computational methods in designing wildlife corridors is that such methods enable us to simultaneously optimize dozens of factors, incorporate large amounts of data about the landscape and environment under consideration, and at the same time consider social-economic factors, which is something quite infeasible for corridors designed by hand," Gomez said. State of the birds Citizen scientists provide critical information about bird populations, as part of projects like eBird and the Great Backyard Bird Count. However these amateur ornithologists can lack the accuracy of professionals and their sightings may not be equally dispersed throughout the country, skewing the results. To address these shortcomings, NSF-funded researchers at the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology and other Expeditions in Computing team members have developed new algorithms that can compensate for biases in the distribution and misidentification of citizen scientist birders and assist in accurately determining bird populations for conservation efforts. They did so, in part, by developing a machine learning system using an active learning feedback loop between humans and machines. The system provides observers with immediate feedback on the accuracy of their observations. This improves the expertise of the observers, while simultaneously refining the quality of the data the machine learning system uses to make decisions. The loop continually augments the effectiveness of the system as a whole. The Department of the Interior applied these approaches to its 2011 and 2013 "State of the Birds" report, which used high-performance computing techniques to produce the first systematic set of year-round species distributions at the finest spatial resolution to date. The research team is assisting with the forthcoming 2016 report. Recently, the team implemented a new incentive system called avicaching (akin to geocaching, where people search specific sites for small treasures) in order to gather more observations from under-sampled places. Birders who travel to under-reported locations and identify birds earn points that allow them to enter a drawing for binoculars. "Since the inception of avicaching in March 2015, 19 percent of the eBird observations in our pilot counties shifted from traditional locations to locations with no previous observations," Gomes said. "This has enabled scientists to refine their bird distribution models. We're currently experimenting with additional incentives, as determined by our computational model, to obtain data that is even further removed from traditional observation areas." If successful, the team will roll out their avicaching system nationwide. "It is exciting to see our computational methods help guide human observers, leading to improved data that is then used to refine predictive computational species distribution models," Gomes said. Apps for African grasslands The tools and methods that Gomes and her team have developed can help people as well as animals. For many years, the team has explored ways to improve the lives of nomadic herders or pastoralists in Kenya. The pastoralists inhabit a large area of arid and semi-arid lands in East Africa and move frequently to find the grasses needed to sustain their herds. Gomes and her team first developed a model to simulate the complex movement patterns of herders over a landscape that shows the typical unpredictable dynamics of African dryland ecology. The models they designed capture the choice processes of herders -- how individuals decide where to go and when -- which is crucial for policy-making concerning sustainable development. To augment this information, the researchers developed a mobile phone app called GrazeIt that crowdsources information about vegetation submitted by herders and combines it with information from satellite images to help herders find forage for their animals. Simple icons displayed on a cell phone allow African pastoralists to report the condition of the vegetation they observe. Tapping an icon can report "no grass," "some grass" or "a lot of grass." "In the first six month, we were able to collect 124,000 surveys of forage conditions from 112 pastoralists-citizen scientists," Gomes said. "We successfully used a dynamic incentive system in order to induce greater submission rates from undersampled regions, increasing the value of information collected by the project and reducing the number of redundant submissions. In addition, we used new experimental methods for monitoring and training to identify cost effective approaches to improving data quality." This is just one example of the many ways in which computer scientists are optimizing limited resources to benefit people across the globe. The work was presented at the 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting in February. Motivating a community Beyond the individual tools and applications developed by the Expeditions in Computing team, the project's biggest accomplishment may be kickstarting the new field of computational sustainability and inspiring others to dedicate their efforts and expertise to address sustainability questions. Initial funding from NSF has led to more than $80 million in support from other agencies and organizations, according to Gomes, and has helped stimulate the field. Computational sustainability is now taught at many universities and has its own dedicated research track at several scientific conferences. In January 2016, NSF announced its support for the next phase of the project -- the development of a Computational Sustainability Network -- through a second, five-year, $10 million Expeditions in Computing award. The network includes a diverse range of new and continuing partners, from the Nature Conservancy to the Trans-African Hydro-Meteorological Observatory to the National Institute of Standards and Technology. "Our new NSF Expedition is charged with growing and expanding the horizons of the nascent field of Computational Sustainability," Gomes said. "Advances in computational sustainability will lead to novel strategies to help herders and farmers in Africa improve their way of life, save endangered species and scale renewables up to meet 21st century energy demand. "Without this research, inefficiencies in terms of resource use and inaccuracies in data models will literally cost lives and reduce the richness of our natural world, potentially threatening future generations." Imperial Valley News Center Governor Brown to Participate in Paris Agreement Signing Ceremony Events at United Nations Headquarters New York - As millions of people around the globe celebrate Earth Day and renew their commitment to protecting the planet, Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. will join dozens of world leaders on Friday at the United Nations Headquarters in New York to participate in events marking the first day that the Paris Agreement is open for signature. "While national governments came together to reach a historic climate agreement in Paris last December, it's up to the world's states, regions and cities to make it a reality in the years ahead," said Governor Brown. "The task before us is daunting, but California will continue to lead the charge." At the United Nations Headquarters, Governor Brown will attend a luncheon with France's President Francois Hollande, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and other government, climate, business and civil society leaders. He will then participate in a panel discussion moderated by United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres and COP21 President Segolene Royal on the work being done to ensure the Paris Agreement is fully and effectively implemented. United Nations Paris Agreement Signing Ceremony Luncheon When: Friday, April 22, 2016 at approx. 1:15 p.m. EDT (10:15 a.m. PDT) Where: United Nations Headquarters, The Delegates Dining Room, 760 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017 United Nations Panel - Taking Climate Action to the Next Level: Realizing the Vision of the Paris Agreement When: Friday, April 22, 2016 at approx. 3:00 p.m. EDT (12:00 p.m. PDT) Where: United Nations Headquarters, Conference Room 1, 760 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017 **NOTE: Additional details on the day's events and media credentialing information can be found here. The events will be streamed live here. California's Leadership on Climate Change While California emits around 1 percent of the world's greenhouse gases, the state is playing a leading role in broadening collaboration among subnational leaders. These efforts include spearheading the Under 2 MOU, a global climate pact among cities, states and countries to limit the increase in the world's average temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius. A total of 128 jurisdictions representing 28 countries and six continents have now signed or endorsed the agreement. Together, they represent more than 740 million people and $20.7 trillion in GDP, equivalent to more than a quarter of the global economy. Signatories commit to either reducing greenhouse gas emissions 80 to 95 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 or achieving a per capita annual emission target of less than 2 metric tons by 2050. Last year, the Governor traveled to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, the Vatican in Italy, the United Nations in New York and the Climate Summit of the Americas in Toronto, Canada to call on other leaders to join California in the fight against climate change. Governor Brown also joined an unprecedented alliance of heads of state, city and state leaders - convened by the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund - to urge countries and companies around the globe to put a price on carbon. These efforts build on a number of other international climate change agreements with leaders from the Netherlands, Mexico, China, North America, Japan, Israel, Peru and Chile and Governor Brown's efforts to convene hundreds of world-renowned researchers and scientists around a groundbreaking call to action - called the consensus statement - which translates key scientific climate findings from disparate fields into one unified document. Last October, Governor Brown signed landmark legislation - SB 350 - to double the rate of energy efficiency savings in California buildings and generate half of the state's electricity from renewable sources by 2030. Governor Brown also committed to reduce today's petroleum use in cars and trucks by up to 50 percent within the next 15 years; make heating fuels cleaner; reduce the release of methane, black carbon and other potent pollutants across industries; and manage farm and rangelands, forests and wetlands so they can store carbon. Additionally, the Governor issued an executive order last year to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in California 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 - the most ambitious target in North America and consistent with California's existing commitment to reduce emissions 80 percent under 1990 levels by 2050. The impacts of climate change are already being felt in California and will disproportionately impact the state's most vulnerable populations. Farms that Grow Groundwater Sacramento, California - Farmers use the lions share of Californias groundwater, but they also do the most to rebuild depleted reserves of this critically important water source. We talked to Graham Fogga groundwater expert at UC Davis and a member of the PPIC Water Policy Center research networkabout farmland groundwater recharge. PPIC: How do farms recharge groundwater? Graham Fogg: Crops dont use all the water they get through irrigationa lot seeps into underlying groundwater. Farms also move water from place to place through leaky ditches. The type of irrigation can affect the amount of recharge. For example, with flood irrigation a large fraction can end up back in the aquifercommonly as much as a third or more. With micro-irrigation, a larger fraction of applied water is taken up by plants, and less ends up recharging groundwater. Many farmers have adopted micro-irrigation technology. Farmers prefer groundwater when using drip systems because its free of sediment that can clog emitters, and groundwater is available whenever the farmer needs to run the system, sometimes multiple times a week. The result is that drip-irrigated farms may pump more groundwaterand theyre not recharging the aquifer as much. Its an unintended consequence of more efficient irrigation. PPIC: Are farmers being encouraged to recharge groundwater? GF: The drought has helped many farmers realize the importance of better groundwater management, and some are figuring out how they can do more recharging on their land. The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act will require better management and balanced water budgets in each basin. This can be achieved with decreased groundwater pumping or increased recharge. In essence, we need to start managing groundwater systems in ways that are similar to surface storage reservoirs and use recharge as a hedge against future drought. If we continue to rely on irrigation for most of our recharge, it raises questions about groundwater quality. Water that goes through farmland is more likely than non-farm recharge to be tainted with salts, nitrates, and some pesticides. PPIC: What practices can improve Californias groundwater supplies? GF: We need to do a variety of things to bank groundwater or face the prospect of having to reduce pumping in dry years and in depleted basins. One solution with high potential is spreading basins. These are flat places with the right soils and geological conditions for ponding water so it can infiltrate the aquifer. We need to map these surface and subsurface features and take steps to protect them for recharge purposes. The Central Valley is not only home to some of our most over-tapped groundwater basins, but also to lands with good potential for fast infiltration. One promising approach is routing excess winter runoff onto farmlands, where irrigation infrastructure can be used to spread the water and recharge groundwater. This practice is gaining much interest from farmers. We also can manage rivers to encourage recharge, bringing benefits to entire basins. Rivers can recharge groundwater with seepage through their beds. And when rivers overflow their banks, water spreads across the floodplain. Two approaches with high potential to improve groundwater conditions are moving levees back to reconnect rivers with their floodplains, and managing groundwater and surface water as an integrated system. When groundwater systems fill to the point of spilling over, rivers and wetlands stay wet, and theres a natural exits for groundwater contaminants. Without such exits, these basins will become increasingly polluted over time. Americans Living Longer With Disability or Health Issues Los Angeles, California - Americans are living longer but in poorer health, according to a new study. The USC-led study, published online in the American Journal of Public Health, examined life expectancy trends and disability rates in a 40-year period, from 1970 to 2010. The analysis of U.S. vital statistics showed that the average total lifespan increased for men and women in those 40 years, but so did the proportion of time spent living with a disability. The study found increased longevity is not necessarily indicative of good health. Most age groups live longer with a disability or other health problem. We could be increasing the length of poor quality life more than good-quality life, lead author Eileen Crimmins, USC University Professor and AARP Professor of Gerontology at the USC Davis School of Gerontology. There are a number of indications that the Baby Boomer generation that is now reaching old age is not seeing improvements in health similar to the older groups that went before them. Only for people aged 65 and older was there a compression of morbidity a reduction in the proportion of years spent with disability. The findings have significant implications for policymaking, such as proposals to raise the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare eligibility. Clearly, there is a need to maintain health and reduce disability at younger ages to have meaningful compression of morbidity across the age range, Crimmins said. The trends for the last 40 years do not support projections and policies that are based on assumptions of a reduced length of disabled life. Findings The average lifespan for men increased by 9.2 years to 76.2 years, the researchers found. The number of years they live with a disability increased by 4.7 years while the number of years spent disability-free increased by 4.5 years. For women, the average lifespan increased by 6.4 years to 81 years. The number of years that women spend with a disability increased by 3.6 years, exceeding the increase in womens disability-free life (2.7 years). The smaller increase in healthy life than in total life for women was surprising and another indication that American women have not done as well as American men in terms of improving health in recent decades, Crimmins said. Different factors may affect disability at different ages, the researchers wrote. For instance, younger populations may have had an increase in disability because of a greater emphasis on mental health, increased diagnoses of autism spectrum and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorders, and changes in drug use. Study co-authors were Yuan Zhang of USC Davis School of Gerontology and of Yasuhiko Saito, a USC graduate now of Nihon University. The study was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging (P30-AG17265) and a special research grant from the Japan Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (H26-Tokubetsu-Shitei-029). NIST Could Help Keep Sequestered Carbon From Blowin in the Wind Washington, DC - Capturing carbon dioxide gas and storing it underground is a promising strategy for reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have taken an important first step in validating a technique for monitoring carbon dioxide emissions from sequestration sites. The NIST team members, who collaborated on the study with Harris Corporation and Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER), said the findings could permit far more effective monitoring of sequestration sites under real-world conditions, which ordinarily make it difficult to determine whether the carbon dioxide is escaping storage. Carbon sequestration involves removing carbon dioxide gas from power plant smokestack streams and other large emission sources that release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Once captured, the carbon dioxide can be pumped deep into the earth, effectively removing it from the atmosphere. A sticking point is that the carbon dioxide must remain underground for centuries. If more than 0.1 percent of the gas leaks out per year, its all for nothing. So scientists from around the world have been trying to develop an effective way to monitor sites for potential gas leaks. One approach places a system of laser reflectors above the ground directly over a carbon storage site to scan for escaping gas. Traditional methods of scanning the region with a laser can reveal leaks. Collecting useful data, however, requires a half-hour period when the wind does not shift and the sampled atmosphere does not change. This isnt a common situation, and if the wind shifts, the data is ruined. Enter the NIST-Harris-AER team. Harris and AER built the laser-based measurement system under a cooperative agreement with the Department of Energys National Energy Technology Laboratory. The system collected data over a mock storage site in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. The data went to NIST for analysis. NIST developed a mathematical model that considers the change in shape of a gas leakage plume in the wind. In this way, the model factors out other carbon dioxide sources in the sequestration area. The practical upshot is that wind variables and other outdoor field conditions are no longer a constraint. The results from their analysis surprised them, and not just because of the pleasing findings: They could now, according to their simulations, pinpoint a gas leak from the ground to within about 5 meters, or ten times more accurately than other approaches, and regardless of the wind conditions. What surprised us is that even though one of these experiments was meant to be one with no carbon source present, we found one anyway, said NIST physicist Zachary Levine. This was supposed to be the null set that we were going to compare with data from another field that has an artificial carbon dioxide source buried beneath it. Instead, we found something none of us had expected. Levine described the results as a proof of concept for carbon sequestration monitoring. The approach means far fewer demands placed on the laser sensors, and much reduced worries about unrealistic wind conditions, he said. It also means we can detect less intense leaks with far better spatial resolution. Were looking forward to testing it further on additional field campaigns. Z.H. Levine, A.L. Pintar, J.T. Dobler, N. Blume, M. Braun, T.S. Zaccheo and T.G. Pernini. The detection of carbon dioxide leaks using quasi-tomographic laser absorption spectroscopy measurements in variable wind. Atmospheric Measurement Techniques. Scientists suggest appealing to human psychology to create solutions to climate change Stanford, California - Human psychology influences the decisions we make every day, including unwise ones. Our psychological profile can make us reluctant to pay for services that benefit everyone, including those who dont contribute. It makes us focus on achieving short-term gains and avoiding short-term losses. And, most importantly, it prompts us to engage in rationalization and denial rather than tackle difficult challenges. In an article published Wednesday, April 13, in BioScience, several scientists, including Stanford researchers, explore these barriers and suggest strategies involving education, marketing, norm-creation, use of default options and various behavior interventions that could overcome these barriers to meeting the challenge of climate change. Written by some of Stanfords most eminent scholars and scientists in fields as diverse as biology, psychology and economics, the BioScience article addresses the magnitude and urgency of the challenge and points the way to strategies and policies to meet that challenge. The costs of inaction could be catastrophic in terms of loss of food production, rising seas, poverty and other threats to human health and welfare, said co-author Lee Ross, a professor of psychology at Stanford. The team approached these global issues by finding localized examples of psychological intervention that led to environmental action. Small-scale success stories include demonstrations of the power of neighborhood standards. In one provocative study, researchers showed that homeowners would lower their energy usage if they simply were told that they were consuming more than their neighbors. Small step-by-step changes in the choices and practices of individual families, as well as local measures and incentives that encourage energy conservation, can help to generate new norms and the approval of sanctions for those who violate them, the authors write. But the real challenge is the need for collective coordinated action, Ross said, which has significant benefits. Effective action, including technology research, could pay huge dividends in terms of new, environmentally friendly industries and jobs that serve our national interests and the well-being of our citizens, he said. When people are moved to care about the environment in every aspect of their lives, they profit by making their livelihoods sustainable and by relieving the stress that is currently being placed on the natural world. This research was a project of the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere and involved the collaboration of Paul Ehrlich, Lee Ross, Kenneth Arrow, Marcus Feldman, and Donald Kennedy of Stanford. It was written in conjunction with scientists Robert Cialdini, Nadia Diamond-Smith, Joan Diamond, Jennifer Dunne, Robert Horn, Craig Murphy, Dennis Pirages, Kirk Smith, and Richard York. Stanford and Wikimedia researchers create a tool to boost article creation in local language Wikipedias Stanford, California - Every day, people around the globe visit one of the roughly 300 language editions of Wikipedia, searching through millions of articles written by tens of thousands of volunteer editors who build and maintain this free encyclopedia. Most of the visitors look for articles written in English or one of the other widely spoken languages that account for the vast majority of Wikipedias 36 million entries. But with more than half the worlds population monolingual, gaps in knowledge exist from one local language version to another. To help editors in different linguistic communities identify important missing articles, computer scientists at Stanford and the Wikimedia Foundation have created a recommendation tool that identifies the most important articles not yet available in a given language. Editors can use these recommendations and, if they are multilingual, find an article in a second language familiar to them and get other help in order to translate the article for local Wikipedia readers. Thus, the system would first identify an editor in Madagascar who is interested in climatology and literate in Malagasy and French and then recommend the editor work on an article about El Nino, which is absent from the Malagasy Wikipedia. This way the editor can create an article for people on this island country explaining how El Nino may influence rainfall, which in turn affects agriculture and flooding. As university researchers, we look for projects with real-world impact, said Jure Leskovec, an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford. What could have more impact than democratizing access to knowledge? Wikimedia Foundation research scientists Ellery Wulczyn and Leila Zia and Stanford graduate student Robert West rounded out the team of collaborators who will report on their efforts this week at the International World Wide Web Conference in Montreal. Wikipedia has huge amounts of data about articles in different languages and the relationships between them, said West, a doctoral candidate in computer science. Our goal was to use that data to design a system to encourage editors to create the most important missing articles. The researchers began by creating lists of every article in each language, and then cross-referencing these lists to determine which articles were missing in which languages. The researchers then estimated the importance of each missing article based on cultural and geographic relevance. The idea was to rank the value of creating any given article missing in that language relative to all the other missing articles. We had to create a system of rankings that would be meaningful to editors in different cultural and linguistic communities because Wikipedia is shaped by the editors choices, Zia said. The researchers hypothesized that a system that accurately predicted the popularity of missing articles would appeal to editors by suggesting where their voluntary efforts would deliver the most value to their linguistic communities and, presumably, afford them the greatest personal satisfaction. To test this premise, the researchers designed a complex experiment. They began with the 4.9 million articles that existed in English Wikipedia, and found those that were missing relative to the 1.6 million articles in French Wikipedia. The researchers then chose the 300,000 most important English articles missing from French Wikipedia. These articles were randomly divided into three groups of 100,000 articles each and distributed to selected editors. The crux of the experiment involved two groups of 6,000 editors who had done at least one edit in both English and French Wikipedias in the 12 months before the experiment. On June 25, 2015, each of these editors received emails pointing them to five unique missing articles and a suggestion that it would be a community service if they translated one from English into French. In one group, the five choices were assigned at random from the master list of important articles missing from French Wikipedia. For the second group, the five choices were also drawn from a separate list of important missing articles, but were also attuned to each editors presumed interests based on articles each had edited in the past. A month after sending out their emails, the researchers assessed missing article creation. The researchers found that by simply pointing editors in the first group toward five random missing articles they could double the organic article creation rate. In the second group, where the scientists tailored the five suggestions to the editors interests, they tripled the rate at which editors plugged article gaps. Based on these results, the Wikimedia Foundation has developed an experimental tool where editors can find gaps in their local language Wikipedia and get pointed to an entry in a second, familiar language that can serve as a starting point for translating that article or creating it from scratch. The research is described in detail at arxiv.org. Society needs to better understand the economics of climate change Stanford, California - Scientists have made huge strides in understanding the physical and biological dimensions of climate change, from deciphering why climate has changed in the past to predicting how it might change in the future. As the body of knowledge on the physical science of climate grows, a missing link is emerging: What are the economic and social consequences of changes in the climate and efforts to control emissions of greenhouse gases? In a new paper in the journal Science, a team led by Stanford professors Charles Kolstad and Marshall Burke argues that relatively low funding for social science research has contributed to a knowledge gap about what climate change means for human society. This knowledge gap, they argue, renders the large advances in natural science less useful than they could be for policymakers. The paper highlights three research questions with the greatest potential to close that gap: What is the true cost of carbon emissions? The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a dollar value estimate of future social and economic damages caused by each present-day metric ton of carbon emissions. It can also be thought of as the amount of money society saves, in terms of damage avoided, by not emitting an additional metric ton of carbon. The SCC is a key policy measurement thats already being used in U.S. government regulations. But existing estimates have shortcomings and these need fixing if we are going to make the correct policy decisions around climate change, said Burke, an assistant professor at Stanford School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences, a center fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a faculty fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Current SCC calculations leave out several important factors. For example, what is the economic cost of extreme climate events such as floods and droughts? How should economists estimate non-market damages that are exacerbated by climate change, such as armed conflict, disease epidemics and deforestation? In what parts of the world does climate change slow or accelerate economic growth? Can farmers avoid lost income from climate change by adapting their crop choices and planting schedules? Getting the social cost of carbon right is most pressing, given its importance to policy, said Kolstad, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and at the Precourt Institute for Energy. Its also an area where rapid research progress should be possible. What emissions mitigation policies are best? Once researchers agree on the true cost of carbon, there are many policy options for reducing emissions. Industry regulations and subsidies for renewable energy are popular policy choices for governments all over the world, but they may be weaker at cutting emissions than less politically popular options like carbon pricing or tradeable carbon emission permits. Until we understand more about the benefits and tradeoffs of different carbon pricing options, governments are almost flying blind on climate mitigation policy, Kolstad said. When we can make a clear economic case for one policy over the other, we can better align decisions about carbon pricing systems with their actual costs and benefits and, as a result, strengthen political support for action. What role do developing countries play? Most of the existing research on climate economics tends to focus on wealthy countries, even though developing countries now contribute more total greenhouse gas emissions. Poorer countries also often face a different policy environment than richer countries and are potentially more economically vulnerable to changes in climate. We need better evidence on how impacts of climate change might differ in developing countries, as well as a deeper understanding of the climate policy choices faced by developing country governments, Burke said. Twenty-eight leading economists contributed to the Science paper, a fact that Burke pointed to as evidence of broad consensus on the need for more economic research on climate change. The biggest roadblock, the authors agree, is funding. The research problems are tough for both natural scientists and economists, but research support has been much more modest in economics, so far fewer people are working in the area and progress has been slower, Kolstad said. Dozens of teams of physical scientists around the world work with the exact same climate simulations and compare results to estimate future climate change, Burke said. Economists are just starting to do something similar, and as this collaboration develops I think it will immensely valuable. Theres a strong argument for spending research dollars on understanding the economic and social implications of that physical science. Social science is relatively cheap, so extra funding can go a long way. Kolstad encourages young researchers to pursue the many interesting, socially relevant questions in this field and advises governments to work together to strengthen long-term research funding and support for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Otherwise, he said, the large sums spent on natural science will be poorly targeted. The study, Opportunities for Advances in Climate Change Economics, is published in the April 15 issue of Science. Remarks After Meeting With Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi Cairo, Egypt - of State John Kerry: "Well, let me express what a pleasure it is for me to be back in Cairo. Im very grateful to President al-Sisi and Foreign Minister Shoukry for their welcome and for the serious conversation that we just engaged in. Regrettably, this is a short visit only because I need to join President Obama for the summit that were having in the region, but I committed to President al-Sisi today to return very soon to follow up on the discussion that we had this morning. "We talked in a very serious and very constructive way about the challenges that Egypt is facing, and I want to emphasize that the United States views Egypt as critical to the peace and security of the entire region. We care enormously about the about succeeding in overcoming the difficult challenges that Egypt faces at this moment, both in terms of security, the challenge of extremists who engage in activities that create instability and attack the peace and security of all citizens everywhere, and also the challenge of an economy that needs to see greater investment, more job creation, and growth. "The United States wants to help in those endeavors, and in furtherance of that, I will come back with additional thoughts about ways in which we can work together to invigorate the economy, to attract investment, to create jobs, and also ways that we can work together in order to deal with Daesh particularly and to help Egypt in terms of the security concerns that it has today. "We talked, of course, about politics, about Syria, about Libya, where there are real challenges and where Egypt is being enormously helpful. We have mutual interests in the security of the region. And we also talked about ways in which we can hopefully resolve some of the differences and questions that have arisen about the internal politics and choices for the people of Egypt. "Let me emphasize, most importantly, Egypt has always been and is the historical center of the Arab world. Its a quarter of the Arab population. The United States understands the importance of Egypt to this region and we are deeply committed contrary to some things that occasionally get written or some suggestions that people make we are deeply committed to the stability of Egypt and to helping Egypt through the difficult challenges that it faces, which, by the way, it doesnt face alone in the world. There are many countries going through this kind of challenge at this time. "So its important for all of us to work together to find the common through, and through a long history, Egypt and the United States have been able to do that. So we look forward to doing so in the days ahead. Thank you." Ashwin Calmly Leaving Wide Against Pakistan On Last Ball of Match Was an 'Underrated' Move Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the IndyArts email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Its getting impossible to tag Australian actress Abbie Cornish. The 33-year-old was at the Tribeca Film Festival with the horror film Lavender, in which she plays a mother facing up to her traumatic past. Last year under her rapper guise of Dusk, she supported hip-hop star Nas on the Australian leg of his Illmatic tour. Amongst a slew of movie roles coming out soon, most excitement is being garnered for her turn as British journalist Kate Adie in 6 Days, about the 1980 hostage crisis at the Iranian Embassy in London. Playing a character who has forgotten the circumstances surrounding the death of her family has got Cornish into thinking about the making of memories. When I was on the plane to New York, I was thinking about what is memory? Why do we remember things? What is it in that moment that imprints into our consciousness, or subconscious or whatever? She seems almost oblivious to the fact that her day job involves making memories for others. In an attempt to find the answer, she engaged her fans on Twitter. I didnt ask them for the reason behind their memory, because I thought it was important to share, not dissect. That desire seems to capture something that I get from meeting Cornish; she wants to provoke and cause thought, but without stopping the conversation being fun. Theres also a gregariousness to the Australian that jumps out at you. She talks fast. She oozes cool. There is no judgment, just her huge personality. Playing a mother in Lavender she was careful not to come across as maternal to her young co-stars. I was trying not to be mumsy, and not to be a mentor because who knows, I dont really know what is right or wrong as an actor. That seems a strange comment given the expertise of some of her screen performances. She has an uncanny habit of giving her characters an ethereal quality that lifts them above the mundane. Roles that remain ingrained in memory are her stunning breakthrough alongside Sam Worthington in the Australian coming-of-age drama Somersault in 2004 and playing John Keats sensitive love interest Fanny Brawne in Jame Campions 2009 Cannes entry Bright Star. The contrast between her dreamy on-screen persona and her ballsy personality in real life is remarkable. Its a difference that Cornish seems happy to acknowledge: I think parts of me are on-screen. I think on-stage, its just more me, do you know what I mean? I think, when I die, if you put all the performances together there is a small puzzle of me, whereas on stage you're stripped back and raw And here I am. Music has always been her first passion. On Twitter, she goes by the name Dusk, rather than Cornish. Well Dusk is more my name as an artist and it always has been. I started out in music and I used to graffiti write a lot and make art. My mum was a painter and so my name as a painter, as an artist, and as a rapper was Dusk. She picked this name when doing rap battles as a teenager because it was her favourite time of day. It has stuck to this day, and some of my friends still call me that. She was due to release an album last year, but put this on hold when she realised that her musical style was changing. When I was a teenager I was in a band. The band was so hard core, it was kind of underground Australian hip-hop and I was forced to be this aggressive rapper. Even now as Im getting older, Im watching it evolve and become more feminine and its not the band anymore, its Dusk. There is an evolution in that, which is quite nice. She laughs at the suggestion that the acting world might lose her to rap. But, what she wants from both acting and music is to feel fear: I know when Im pushing myself or Im exploring new territory because I feel fear, but its a beautiful fear. If you have to jump out of an aeroplane and you have never skydived before, that moment before you jump. That feeling that I feel is something that excites me and propels me as an artist. I think when I went on tour last year, I had that feeling, every time I went on stage. When she went to make 6 Days, she says that it was a steep learning curve. So I had a lot to learn about that particular incident and also about Kate Adie. She was right in the centre of really pivotal moments in history. I must admit, I became a little bit obsessed with her. To prepare for the role, she met with Kate Adie, Shes very strong, and very grounded and very intelligent. For her performance she says she just tried to do the best she can to capture the essence of the journalist. I feel like there were three versions of Kate Adie. Imagine you, there is you, right now, doing an interview, then there is you at work, and finally you at hanging out with your mates. She has just completed filming a movie in New York, the beautifully titled, The Girl Who Invented Kissing. And next January, we shall see her in action thriller Geostorm, which seems to have spent forever in post-production. Im like come on guys, I want to see myself as a secret agent to Andy Garcia, the first Spanish speaking president from the United States. Sounds fun, which is just the way Dusk likes it. Kaleem Aftab @Aftabamon Lavender and 6 Days will come out later in the year Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the IndyArts email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Mona Lisas iconic smile was based on Leonardo Da Vincis probable gay lover, an art historian has claimed. The famous portrait that hangs in the Louvre in Paris has undergone infra-red analysis to give the art world more insight into one of the worlds most renowned paintings. Following his examinations, Silvano Vinceti believes the artwork is an amalgamation of two models: a rich Florentine merchants wife, Lisa Gherardini, and da Vincis apprentice Gian Giacomo Caprotti, known to the artist as Salai, or Little Devil. The Mona Lisa is androgynous - half man and half woman, he told The Telegraph, explaining that he studied other paintings based on Salai and found striking similarities. You see it particularly in Mona Lisas nose, her forehead and her smile. Weve come up with an answer to a question that has divided scholars for years. Who was the Mona Lisa based on? Leonardo da Vinci: A brush with genius Show all 5 1 /5 Leonardo da Vinci: A brush with genius Leonardo da Vinci: A brush with genius 44visfea5_1.jpg Royal Academy of Arts, London Leonardo da Vinci: A brush with genius 44visfea1.jpg Photo Vatican Museums Leonardo da Vinci: A brush with genius 44visfea2.jpg THE PRINCES CZARTORYSKI MUSEUM, CRACOW Leonardo da Vinci: A brush with genius 44visfea3.jpg The Royal Collection 2011, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II Leonardo da Vinci: A brush with genius 44visfea4.jpg RMN / Franck Raux It is thought that Salai began working for da Vinci when he was around 10-years-old, after joining the artists household in 1490. He stayed for the next two decades. Gherardini married Francesco del Giocondo, whose family owned an extravagant villa during the period in which da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa (between 1503 and 1506). Vinceti has been excavating a covent in Florence for four years with the aim of unearthing Gherardinis remains. As ever with artistic theories, Vincetis conclusions have not gone unchallenged. Martin Kemp, a leading da Vinci expert and professor emeritus of history of art at Trinity College, Oxford, has dismissed the claims as a mishmash of known things, semi-known things and complete fantasy. The infra-red images do nothing to support the idea that Leonardo somehow painted a blend of Lisa Gherardini and Salai, he said, adding that too little is known about Salais appearance. Giorgio Vasari (a contemporary painter and a chronicler of Renaissance artists) described him as a pretty boy with curly hair, but that was a standard type of the era, he continued. It featured in Leonardos work long before Salai came on the scene. Popular theories about the Mona Lisa abound, with some art lovers claiming that a lost original featured the model nude. Others believe that the portrait once had eyebrows and eyelashes, while some are convinced that da Vinci created multiple versions of the painting. For now, the Mona Lisa remains as enigmatic and mysterious as her smile. Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey Get our The Life Cinematic email for free Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the The Life Cinematic email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} The Cambodian government has banned a British documentary telling the story of a rainforest activist who was murdered by a military police officer in 2012. Titled I Am Chut Wutty, the film follows the final months of the titular environmentalist who was shot dead at a police checkpoint while aiding two journalists in their witnessing og deforestation in the Cardamom mountain forests. It was due to be shown this week in an anniversary screening marking four years since his death. However, the Cambodian Department of Cinema and Cultural Diffusion has disallowed the film from being shown on the grounds that British co-director Fran Lambrick was not permitted to make the film. Lambrick, who met Wutty while researching in Cambodia in 2011, had begun shooting the documentary before his murder. Chut Wutty was a prominent activist and director of the Natural Resources Protection Group," Lambrick said. "His life work was to defend the rights of forest communities and speak out against the rampant deforestation that is destroying Cambodias natural heritage. We want to keep his words and his battle alive. The films to know about at Cannes 2016 Show all 14 1 /14 The films to know about at Cannes 2016 The films to know about at Cannes 2016 Julieta Director: Pedro Almodovar Starring: Adriana Ugarte, Emma Suarez What's it about? The Spanish filmmaker's 20th film is based on three short stories from Alice Munro's 2004 book, Runaway which tracks a woman's search for her missing daughter. The films to know about at Cannes 2016 American Honey Director: Andrea Arnold Starring: Sasha Lane, Kate Mara, Shia LaBeouf What's it about? In British filmmaker Andrea Arnold's (Red Road) American road movie - her first film set and filmed outside the UK - a teenage girl who gets caught up in a whirlwind of hard partying as she crosses the Midwest with a band of misfits. The films to know about at Cannes 2016 Personal Shopper Director: Olivier Assayas Starring: Kristen Stewart, Lars Eidinger, Nora von Waldstatten What's it about? Stewart reteams with French filmmaker Assayas following Clouds of Sils Maria for this ghost story set in the fashion underworld of Paris. The films to know about at Cannes 2016 It's Only the End of the World Director: Xavier Dolan Starring: Lea Seydoux, Marion Cotillard, Vincent Cassel What's it about? Xavier Dolan (Mommy) returns with this film based on the play Juste la fin du monde which tells the story of a terminally ill writer who returns home after 12 years to announce his impending death. The films to know about at Cannes 2016 Paterson Director: Jim Jarmusch, Starring: Adam Driver, Golshifteh Farahani What's it about? An original film from Amazon Studios that follows Paterson, a bus driver in the city of Paterson, New Jersey who lives an inhibited life compared to that of his wife, Laura. The films to know about at Cannes 2016 I, Daniel Blake Director: Ken Loach Starring: Dave Johns, Hayley Squires, Micky McGregor What's it about? Written by Paul Laverty (the man behind Loach's Palme d'Or winner The Wind That Shakes the Barley, the film follows the titular protagonist, a joiner who seeks financial felp from the state following an illness. The films to know about at Cannes 2016 Loving Director: Jeff Nichols Starring: Joel Edgerton, Michael Shannon, Marton Csokas What's it about? Jeff Nichols' Midnight Special follow-up tracks an interracial couple based in Virginia sentenced to prison in 1958 for getting married. The films to know about at Cannes 2016 The Handmaid Director: Park Chan-wook Starring: Kim Min-hee, Ha Jung-woo, Kim Tae-ri What's it about? The Oldboy director's latest South Korean film follows an heiress who falls in love with a petty thief. The films to know about at Cannes 2016 The Neon Demon Director: Nicolas Winding Refn Starring: Elle Fanning, Jena Malone, Keanu Reeves, Christina Hendricks What's it about? Winding Refn's third consecutive film to compete for the Palme d'Or, this horror thriller follows an aspiring model who moves to Los Angeles where 'her vitality and youth are devoured by a group of beauty-obsessed women who will take any means to get what she has.' The films to know about at Cannes 2016 Cafe Society Director: Woody Allen Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Blake Lively What's it about? Woody Allen's latest will open the Festival. It is a New York romantic comedy set in the 1930s with a cast including Steve Carell, Parker Posey, Corey Stoll and Judy Davis. The films to know about at Cannes 2016 The BFG Director: Steven Spielberg Starring: Mark Rylance, Rebecca Hall, Bill Hader What's it about? Based on the Roald Dahl classic, the story follows a young girl named Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) who befriends a friendly giant. The films to know about at Cannes 2016 Money Monster Director: Jodie Foster Starring: George Clooney, Jack O'Connell, Julia Roberts What's it about? A money-oriented live TV show is interrupted when the presenter is taken hostage by a blue-collar worker compelled to turn to violence following his recent financial losses. The films to know about at Cannes 2016 The Nice Guys Director: Shane Black Starring: Ryan Gosling, Russell Crowe Reason to see: Shane Black (Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang) and his razor sharp wit return in a comedy set in 70s LA. The films to know about at Cannes 2016 Captain Fantastic Director: Matt Ross Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Frank Langella, Kathryn Hahn What's it about? In the forests of the Pacific Northwest, a father who devoted his life to raising his six kids with an irreverent education is forced to leave his paradise and enter the 'real' world. Despite the ban, the documentary has amassed views of over 100,000 with many venues across Cambodia holding secret screenings. An English version is due to be released next week. Chak Sopheak, director of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, said: This ban provides yet another example of Cambodias pervasive culture of impunity and the lengths that the government will go to preserve it. You can watch I Am Chut Wutty for 1 on distributor Journeyman Pictures' website as well as iTunes and Google Play. Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey Get our The Life Cinematic email for free Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the The Life Cinematic email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Having starred as popular Game of Thrones character Daenerys Targaryen since the HBO series began back in 2011, it seems undoubted that Emilia Clarke will have as much success on the big screen as she does the small. However, the British actor's film career was stalled somewhat following an appearance in last year's Terminator: Genisys alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jai Courtenay. With talk of Arnie returning for Terminator 6 (yes, there'll be another one), it was unclear whether Clarke would be reprising her role of a young Sarah Connor. Grabbing the opportunity to find out, ComingSoon asked the actor if fans could expect to see her in the planned sequel; Clarke bluntly dispelled any such thoughts. "No," she said. Can I say that? Its okay. No. Uh-uh. But I have some very different roles coming up. Game of Thrones season 6 stills Show all 26 1 /26 Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills HELEN SLOAN / HBO Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills HELEN SLOAN / HBO Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills Game of Thrones season 6 stills One such role is Me Before You in which she plays Louisa Clark, a girl who forms an unlikely bond with William Traynor (Sam Claflin), a recently paralysed man she's taking care of. She will also voice a role in mystery drama Voice from the Stone which is yet to have a release date attached despite completing filming in 2014. Before that, however, she will be seen as the Mother of Dragons in Game of Thrones season six which begins this weekend (25 April). Clarke recently revealed her true thoughts about a controversial rape scene that occurred in the show's first season. You can find our compendium of all the details we know about the long-awaited sixth season here. Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey Get our The Life Cinematic email for free Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the The Life Cinematic email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Scarlett Johansson being cast as Major Motoko Kusanagi in Paramounts adaptation of Ghost in the Shell has courted controversy. Many have accused the studio of whitewashing, including both social media users and Hollywood actors, yet there has been little comment from those in Japan. The manga series, written by Masamune Shirow, was originally published in 1989 by Kodansha. It is Kodansha which owns the intellectual property, having licensed it to Mamoru Oshii for the 1995 animated film, and now for the Hollywood remake. Commenting on the controversy, Sam Yoshiba, director of international business for Kodansha, told The Hollywood Reporter: "Looking at her career so far, I think Scarlett Johansson is well cast. She has the cyberpunk feel. We never imagined it would be a Japanese actress in the first place. This is a chance for a Japanese property to be seen around the world." Yoshiba added that he had visited the films set in New Zealand and was impressed by the respect being shown for the source material. Hollywood whitewashing controversies Show all 11 1 /11 Hollywood whitewashing controversies Hollywood whitewashing controversies Scarlett Johansson cast as Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell Blonde, white US actress Scarlett Johansson was announced to be playing the clearly Japanese character Motoko Kusanagi in Hollywood's Ghost in the Shell remake, much to the dismay of Asian film fans Hollywood whitewashing controversies Tilda Swinton cast as The Ancient One in Doctor Strange Marvel sparked outrage when Anglo-Scottish actress Tilda Swinton was cast as Tibetan mystic The Ancient One alongside Benedict Cumberbatch in Doctor Strange Hollywood whitewashing controversies Zoe Saldana was criticised for 'blacking up' to play the considerably darker-skinned soul singer Nina Simone in Nina AP Hollywood whitewashing controversies Jake Gyllenhaal stars in Prince of Persia The half Jewish, quarter Swedish actor was cast to play a Middle Eastern Prince in Disney's 2010 film Hollywood whitewashing controversies Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily in forthcoming film Pan Mara was been cast in the role of American Indian Tiger Lily, sparking an online protest from angry film fans Warner Bros Hollywood whitewashing controversies Christian Bale plays Moses in Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings Ridley Scott claimed he would never cast 'Mohammed so-and-so from such-and-such a country' in a lead role in his Biblical epic, and went on to cast an entirely white cast instead Hollywood whitewashing controversies Jim Caveziel plays Jesus in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ Catholic star Mel Gibson chose to cast a Caucasian American actor in the role of Jesus for his controversial film AP Hollywood whitewashing controversies Micky Rooney plays a Japanese neighbour in Breakfast at Tiffany's Who better to play Holly Golightly's Japanese neighbour IY Yunoishi than American actor Mick Rooney. At least Hollywood has come some way since 1961 YouTube Hollywood whitewashing controversies Ben Affleck as Tony Mendez in Argo Ben Affleck became the subject of a few editorials in Latin American newspapers for casting himself (an American with English, Irish, Scottish and Swiss ancestry) as a Mexican CIA operative Hollywood whitewashing controversies Jennifer Connelly plays Alicia Nash in A Beautiful Mind Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Larde was a naturalised US citizen from El Salvador, but was played by an actress of Jewish, Irish and Norwegian descent YouTube Hollywood whitewashing controversies Chinese actresses cast in Memoirs of a Geisha What better way to alienate Japanese cinemagoers than to cast three Chinese actresses in the lead roles in a film about Japanese culture REUTERS The report also notes how many Japanese manga fans are not phased by the casting, with one saying: If you want a Japanese cast, then a Japanese company should make the film in Japan. Another fan noted how if they had cast an 'Asian-looking' actress things could have been a lot worse: "It's a shame they didn't choose a Japanese person to tell such an interesting story. But at least they didn't cast a Chinese actress like they did in Memoirs of a Geisha. [Zhang Ziyi] actually did an amazing job, but it was like, really? Again, can't they find a Japanese actress? Recently, comic writer Jon Tsuei criticised the casting, describing Ghost in the Shell as a 'fundamentally Japanese story. You can Westernise the story if you want, but at that point it is no longer Ghost In the Shell because the story is simply not Western, he wrote on Twitter. Ghost in the Shell hits UK cinemas on 31 March 2017. Sign up to Roisin OConnors free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things music Get our Now Hear This email for free Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Roisin OConnors email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} After endless pressure, the band Viet Cong have announced they will henceforth be going by a new name: Preoccupations. Theyve been planning it for a while, with vitriol over the Vietnam War-referencing name getting so bad that they were forced to cancel a gig last March due to negative reaction to the offensive name. Preoccupations said in a statement: After finishing our latest record and taking some time off, we are excited to announce that we will be performing and recording as "Preoccupations" going forward. We will be previewing new material from a forthcoming record in a series of festivals and shows in North America and Europe in the coming months. We apologize to those who were adversely affected by our former band name. This was never anticipated nor our intent. We are artists and not politicians, we understand that the name reflected pain to some individuals and we are happy to change it and move on and focus on our music. Thanks to all our friends and fans. See you all soon. Elaborating on the name change to Pitchfork, frontman Matt Flegel explained the original was down to simple naivety. Asked if he regretted glibly saying in the past that theyd chosen the name because the Viet Cong were badasses in movies, he replied: "We were pretty naive, and pretty ignorant on the subject. We know a lot more now. If we knew what we know now then we would definitely not call the band that. I personally didn't put any thought into it. We needed a new band name then. We were just starting off, and we were booking shows. It really just started out at a band practice, and we just went with it with no ill intention. Preoccupations play a string of dates across the US, Canada and Europe this summer, including UK dates at Londons Shacklewell Arms and Old Blue Last. Sign up to Roisin OConnors free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things music Get our Now Hear This email for free Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Roisin OConnors email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Brian Eno, The Ship - Warp -4/5 Download this: The Ship; Fickle Sun Obliquely inspired by the sinking of the Titanic as a metaphor for scientific hubris presaging the industrialised conflict of WW1, The Ship is a strange amalgam of Enos familiar ambient approach with poetry - the latter delivered in a sonorous basso profundothat resonates with a sort of looming, warning warmth. The Ship itself occupies 21 minutes of unhurried electronic tones and occasional stirring string-synth pads, while the three-part Fickle Sun adds descriptive percussion to its depiction of toiling labourers, possibly poor bloody infantry trapped in oceanic waveafter wave after wave of trench warfare. The final part concludes, in epiphanic manner, with a starkly rousing version of The Velvet Undergrounds Im Set Free. Sandy Denny, Ive Always Kept A Unicorn - Island - 5/5 Download this: Who Knows Where The Time Goes?; Autopsy; She Moves Through The Fair; No End; Moments Compiled to accompany the recent biography of the same title, Ive Always Kept A Unicorn offers an almost definitive account of the career of English folks most mercurial talent, distilled to its purest essence via solo demos and performances. Whether fronting Strawbs, Fairport Convention and Fotheringay, or pursuing her solo threads, Sandy Denny brought an engaging, demotic charm to whatever she sang, which both rendered her own psychologically-charged songs, such as Autopsy, grippingly personal, and helped bring more traditional material like She Moves Through The Fair vividly to life, ingeniously telescoping the distance separating past from present. At 40 songs, this is a masterclass in music essentials. Fanfare Ciocarlia, Onwards To Mars! - Asphalt Tango - 4/5 Download this: Trenul, Masina Mica; Out To Lounge; I Put A Spell On You; Fiesta De Negritos The worlds leading Gypsy brass band, Fanfare Ciocarlia are the kind of outfit that shrinks the world through their music. Theres an appealing balance between ancient and modern, serious and comic in their work, with wry nods to outside influences evident in titles like Mista Lobaloba and Out To Lounge, but nothing allowed to taint the urgent virtuosity of their Balkan jazz. Tracks such as Trenul, Masina Mica, 3 Romanians and Fiesta De Negritos emphasise the pronounced offbeat that Balkan music shares with reggae and cumbia, producing a highly infectious, insidious shuffle guaranteed to start any party. And their version of I Put A Spell On You is splendid, a suitably Transylvanian tribute to Screamin Jay Hawkins. Wire, Nocturnal Koreans - pinkflag - 3/5 Download this: Nocturnal Koreans; Internal Exile; Forward Position; Numbered Although comprised of re-worked leftovers from last years excellent Wire album, Nocturnal Koreans finds the band still managing to find new routes to take away from that tightly-focused project. Several concern the contributions of newest member Matthew Simms, whose lap-steel whine wraps around the three-note guitar figure of Internal Exile, and adds a ghostly, keening presence to the atmospheric drone and synth soundscape Forward Position, an evocative piece which seems much shorter than its five-minute length. As ever, urgent, angular riffing lends an astringent tone to the likes of Fishes Bones and Dead Weight, while the brittle, staccato groove of Numbered eventually gives way, in one of the albums most effective moves, to akosmische charm akin to the sleek psychedelic krautrock of Harmonia. The Jayhawks, Paging Mr. Proust - Thirty Tigers - 4/5 Download this: Quiet Corners & Empty Spaces; Lovers Of The Sun; Leaving The Monsters Behind; The Dust Of Long Dead Stars With its serene harmonies and Byrdsy jangle of arpeggiated guitars, Quiet Corners & Empty Spaces heralds the most potent Jayhawks album in ages, with some of Gary Louriss best songs captured at their sweetest by producers Tucker Martine and Peter Buck - the latter bringing his decades of R.E.M. experience to bear on the project. The band stretch their core approach into new areas - with its angular guitar, electric piano and ambient noise, Ace is like the experimental tracks on Wilco albums - but at their best, these are songs brimful of bonhomie, especially the lovely Lovers Of The Sun, sweetly tanned enough to have held down a place on The Beach Boys Today! album. Robin McKelle, The Looking Glass - Doxie - 2/5 Download this: Gravity; Brave Love; Get Back Yesterday Sadly, nu-soul stylist Robin McKelle has abandoned the Southern-Soul focus of 2014s splendid Heart Of Memphis in order to re-connect with the jazz roots which, she claims, allows her to employ the texture of my voice in a more intimate register. Its a Faustian pact: the resulting inclination towards Seventies-style guilty pleasure blue-eyed soul, for all its fond recollections of such as Felix Cavaliere and Hall & Oates, seems underpowered by comparison with her earlier work, while the recurrent theme, in songs like Gravity and Stand Up, of changing attitude and taking control of your life, is too half-heartedly proclaimed. But the closing Get Back Yesterday, with its recognition that living separate ways aint the way to make it work, offers a pleasing take on reconciliation. Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the IndyArts email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} British and American wildlife documentary River Monsters has featured a whole host of deadly predators since it began airing on Animal Planet in 2009, but the series' latest episode saw the crew and presenter Jeremy Wade make an altogether more unexpected discovery. While filming in Australia last November, the show's production team came across a castaway on a deserted island. The team was investigating the death of six men in a plane crash near Australia's Gulf of Carpentaria when they came across a fisherman who had been separated from his boat for 60 hours. English voyager finds whales in Egyptian desert Show all 9 1 /9 English voyager finds whales in Egyptian desert English voyager finds whales in Egyptian desert 270921.bin Garry Shaw English voyager finds whales in Egyptian desert 270920.bin Garry Shaw English voyager finds whales in Egyptian desert 270919.bin Garry Shaw English voyager finds whales in Egyptian desert 270918.bin Garry Shaw English voyager finds whales in Egyptian desert 270917.bin Garry Shaw English voyager finds whales in Egyptian desert 270912.bin Garry Shaw English voyager finds whales in Egyptian desert 270914.bin Garry Shaw English voyager finds whales in Egyptian desert 270915.bin Garry Shaw English voyager finds whales in Egyptian desert 270916.bin Garry Shaw Speaking to American television programme Inside Edition, the show's director Stephen Shearman explained how the castaway had prepared himself for death after being stranded in 110-degree heat. "He had said his last prayer. He was prepared to die and meet his maker," he stated, before revealing the crew hadn't initially planned to shoot near the island but had changed locations due to choppy waters. "Together, we spotted this blue Esky, or cooler box, that was just sat on the rock [when] ...this guy with no clothes was running out of the cave, waving his arms out." Named Tremine, the fisherman told the crew how he'd been fishing on his boat when he decided to venture out to find better oysters. "He had tried to walk back, got beaten by the sun, and made his way back to the beach," Mr Shearman said. "Meanwhile, he had suffered from sunstroke and was unable to go any further. He then spent that first night on the beach, and the next morning he tried again, but the sun had gotten to be too much for him and at this point he was now trapped." Access unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Amazon Prime Video Sign up now for a 30-day free trial Sign up The fisherman, a native of northern Australian town Borroloola, was concerned nobody would be looking for him as he has no family. Upon discovering him, the crew gave him several bottles of water and sent him for medical attention. Apart from a "bruised pride," Tremine is now fine and well, with the experience leading to a particular enlightenment: "He's promised God he's going to start smoking again," said Mr Shearman. If he had a lighter, he'd be able to cook, and he'd have a fire," Shearman said. No volleyballs were found on the island. Sign up to our free weekly newsletter for insider tips and product reviews from our shopping experts Sign up for our free IndyBest email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the IndyBest email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} When it comes to investing in a decent pair of headphones, good quality noise-cancelling is a must. But as there are two types of noise cancellation passive and active it can be hard to know where to start. Firstly, we have to distinguish between PNC and ANC. While the former is a physical element, whereby the shape of the headphones dictates how much ambient sound can sneak in, ANC brings tech into the equation. More on that later... Either way, these noise-cancelling techniques can heighten your listening experience. Although, as ANC senses external frequencies and negates them by matching them in your ears, this can have an effect on the music youre listening to: after all, tracks will most likely have frequencies that match with the outside world. And not all ANC headphones and earphones are created equal, with various degrees of success across the market. No headphones cancel out all noise (yet), but to most ears, this doesnt really matter its an odd sensation to look down at yourself typing, only to hear nothing coming back at you. And the less said about people sneaking up on you, the better. There are many brands that now offer genuinely good noise cancellation, along with quality sound output. After hours of testing, and getting sick of at least three of our favourite albums, weve put together a list thatll please any ear. How we tested When testing noise-cancelling headphones, its important to try each pair in a variety of scenarios, some more obvious than others. Yes, we tested them in busy cafes and beside main roads, but we also took care to test ANC (where applicable), for instance, in a quiet room. This is due to ANCs tendency to sometimes emit a small hiss when working, something that could begin to grate on your nerves after a while in an empty office. We tested each pair of headphones by accosting them with a smorgasbord of different audio sources: from the deep rumbles of Billie Eilishs bury a friend, to the complicated delicacy of Jacob Colliers Flow Freely, with Yo-Yo Ma, Childish Gambino and Kaho Nakamura thrown into the mix. We made sure to listen to our favourite podcasts to check for vocal clarity, and rang friends and family so much to test microphone quality that nobody wanted to Zoom us for a month. The best noise-cancelling headphones for 2022 are: Stay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletter Stay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletter Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Lifestyle Edit email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Society must take greater steps to treat acne as a serious condition, skin charities have said. The condition is characterised by pussy spots on the body and sometimes on the face, and can lead to low self-esteem and the bullying of sufferers. British Skin Foundation research has found nearly 20 per cent of acne sufferers have considered suicide and around the same percentage have ended a relationship because of it. Nearly 60 per cent experienced verbal abuse because of their condition. Campaigners have called for greater support and want to promote the idea that acne is a medical condition like any other. Severe Acne on skin of the human back (Corbis) "Every year there are instances of suicide due to people's distress around acne," said James Partridge, chief executive of the charity Changing Faces, which supports people with facial disfigurement. "Self harm is also very common," he told BBC Newsbeat. We need to show respect, help people cope, not belittle and stigmatise. Health news in pictures Show all 40 1 /40 Health news in pictures Health news in pictures Coronavirus outbreak The coronavirus Covid-19 has hit the UK leading to the deaths of two people so far and prompting warnings from the Department of Health AFP via Getty Health news in pictures Thousands of emergency patients told to take taxi to hospital Thousands of 999 patients in England are being told to get a taxi to hospital, figures have showed. The number of patients outside London who were refused an ambulance rose by 83 per cent in the past year as demand for services grows Getty Health news in pictures Vape related deaths spike A vaping-related lung disease has claimed the lives of 11 people in the US in recent weeks. The US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention has more than 100 officials investigating the cause of the mystery illness, and has warned citizens against smoking e-cigarette products until more is known, particularly if modified or bought off the street Getty Health news in pictures Baldness cure looks to be a step closer Researchers in the US claim to have overcome one of the major hurdles to cultivating human follicles from stem cells. The new system allows cells to grow in a structured tuft and emerge from the skin Sanford Burnham Preybs Health news in pictures Two hours a week spent in nature can improve health A study in the journal Scientific Reports suggests that a dose of nature of just two hours a week is associated with better health and psychological wellbeing Shutterstock Health news in pictures Air pollution linked to fertility issues in women Exposure to air from traffic-clogged streets could leave women with fewer years to have children, a study has found. Italian researchers found women living in the most polluted areas were three times more likely to show signs they were running low on eggs than those who lived in cleaner surroundings, potentially triggering an earlier menopause Getty/iStock Health news in pictures Junk food ads could be banned before watershed Junk food adverts on TV and online could be banned before 9pm as part of Government plans to fight the "epidemic" of childhood obesity. Plans for the new watershed have been put out for public consultation in a bid to combat the growing crisis, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said PA Health news in pictures Breeding with neanderthals helped humans fight diseases On migrating from Africa around 70,000 years ago, humans bumped into the neanderthals of Eurasia. While humans were weak to the diseases of the new lands, breeding with the resident neanderthals made for a better equipped immune system PA Health news in pictures Cancer breath test to be trialled in Britain The breath biopsy device is designed to detect cancer hallmarks in molecules exhaled by patients Getty Health news in pictures Average 10 year old has consumed the recommended amount of sugar for an adult By their 10th birthdy, children have on average already eaten more sugar than the recommended amount for an 18 year old. The average 10 year old consumes the equivalent to 13 sugar cubes a day, 8 more than is recommended PA Health news in pictures Child health experts advise switching off screens an hour before bed While there is not enough evidence of harm to recommend UK-wide limits on screen use, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health have advised that children should avoid screens for an hour before bed time to avoid disrupting their sleep Getty Health news in pictures Daily aspirin is unnecessary for older people in good health, study finds A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine has found that many elderly people are taking daily aspirin to little or no avail Getty Health news in pictures Vaping could lead to cancer, US study finds A study by the University of Minnesota's Masonic Cancer Centre has found that the carcinogenic chemicals formaldehyde, acrolein, and methylglyoxal are present in the saliva of E-cigarette users Reuters Health news in pictures More children are obese and diabetic There has been a 41% increase in children with type 2 diabetes since 2014, the National Paediatric Diabetes Audit has found. Obesity is a leading cause Reuters Health news in pictures Most child antidepressants are ineffective and can lead to suicidal thoughts The majority of antidepressants are ineffective and may be unsafe, for children and teenager with major depression, experts have warned. In what is the most comprehensive comparison of 14 commonly prescribed antidepressant drugs to date, researchers found that only one brand was more effective at relieving symptoms of depression than a placebo. Another popular drug, venlafaxine, was shown increase the risk users engaging in suicidal thoughts and attempts at suicide Getty Health news in pictures Gay, lesbian and bisexual adults at higher risk of heart disease, study claims Researchers at the Baptist Health South Florida Clinic in Miami focused on seven areas of controllable heart health and found these minority groups were particularly likely to be smokers and to have poorly controlled blood sugar iStock Health news in pictures Breakfast cereals targeted at children contain 'steadily high' sugar levels since 1992 despite producer claims A major pressure group has issued a fresh warning about perilously high amounts of sugar in breakfast cereals, specifically those designed for children, and has said that levels have barely been cut at all in the last two and a half decades Getty Health news in pictures Potholes are making us fat, NHS watchdog warns New guidance by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), the body which determines what treatment the NHS should fund, said lax road repairs and car-dominated streets were contributing to the obesity epidemic by preventing members of the public from keeping active PA Health news in pictures New menopause drugs offer women relief from 'debilitating' hot flushes A new class of treatments for women going through the menopause is able to reduce numbers of debilitating hot flushes by as much as three quarters in a matter of days, a trial has found. The drug used in the trial belongs to a group known as NKB antagonists (blockers), which were developed as a treatment for schizophrenia but have been sitting on a shelf unused, according to Professor Waljit Dhillo, a professor of endocrinology and metabolism REX Health news in pictures Doctors should prescribe more antidepressants for people with mental health problems, study finds Research from Oxford University found that more than one million extra people suffering from mental health problems would benefit from being prescribed drugs and criticised ideological reasons doctors use to avoid doing so. Getty Health news in pictures Student dies of flu after NHS advice to stay at home and avoid A&E The family of a teenager who died from flu has urged people not to delay going to A&E if they are worried about their symptoms. Melissa Whiteley, an 18-year-old engineering student from Hanford in Stoke-on-Trent, fell ill at Christmas and died in hospital a month later. Just Giving Health news in pictures Government to review thousands of harmful vaginal mesh implants The Government has pledged to review tens of thousands of cases where women have been given harmful vaginal mesh implants. Getty Health news in pictures Jeremy Hunt announces 'zero suicides ambition' for the NHS The NHS will be asked to go further to prevent the deaths of patients in its care as part of a zero suicide ambition being launched today Getty Health news in pictures Human trials start with cancer treatment that primes immune system to kill off tumours Human trials have begun with a new cancer therapy that can prime the immune system to eradicate tumours. The treatment, that works similarly to a vaccine, is a combination of two existing drugs, of which tiny amounts are injected into the solid bulk of a tumour. Nephron Health news in pictures Babies' health suffers from being born near fracking sites, finds major study Mothers living within a kilometre of a fracking site were 25 per cent more likely to have a child born at low birth weight, which increase their chances of asthma, ADHD and other issues Getty Health news in pictures NHS reviewing thousands of cervical cancer smear tests after women wrongly given all-clear Thousands of cervical cancer screening results are under review after failings at a laboratory meant some women were incorrectly given the all-clear. A number of women have already been told to contact their doctors following the identification of procedural issues in the service provided by Pathology First Laboratory. Rex Health news in pictures Potential key to halting breast cancer's spread discovered by scientists Most breast cancer patients do not die from their initial tumour, but from secondary malignant growths (metastases), where cancer cells are able to enter the blood and survive to invade new sites. Asparagine, a molecule named after asparagus where it was first identified in high quantities, has now been shown to be an essential ingredient for tumour cells to gain these migratory properties. Getty Health news in pictures NHS nursing vacancies at record high with more than 34,000 roles advertised A record number of nursing and midwifery positions are currently being advertised by the NHS, with more than 34,000 positions currently vacant, according to the latest data. Demand for nurses was 19 per cent higher between July and September 2017 than the same period two years ago. REX Health news in pictures Cannabis extract could provide new class of treatment for psychosis CBD has a broadly opposite effect to delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main active component in cannabis and the substance that causes paranoia and anxiety. Getty Health news in pictures Over 75,000 sign petition calling for Richard Branson's Virgin Care to hand settlement money back to NHS Mr Bransons company sued the NHS last year after it lost out on an 82m contract to provide childrens health services across Surrey, citing concerns over serious flaws in the way the contract was awarded PA Health news in pictures More than 700 fewer nurses training in England in first year after NHS bursary scrapped The numbers of people accepted to study nursing in England fell 3 per cent in 2017, while the numbers accepted in Wales and Scotland, where the bursaries were kept, increased 8.4 per cent and 8 per cent respectively Getty Health news in pictures Landmark study links Tory austerity to 120,000 deaths The paper found that there were 45,000 more deaths in the first four years of Tory-led efficiencies than would have been expected if funding had stayed at pre-election levels. On this trajectory that could rise to nearly 200,000 excess deaths by the end of 2020, even with the extra funding that has been earmarked for public sector services this year. Reuters Health news in pictures Long commutes carry health risks Hours of commuting may be mind-numbingly dull, but new research shows that it might also be having an adverse effect on both your health and performance at work. Longer commutes also appear to have a significant impact on mental wellbeing, with those commuting longer 33 per cent more likely to suffer from depression Shutterstock Health news in pictures You cannot be fit and fat It is not possible to be overweight and healthy, a major new study has concluded. The study of 3.5 million Britons found that even metabolically healthy obese people are still at a higher risk of heart disease or a stroke than those with a normal weight range Getty Health news in pictures Sleep deprivation When you feel particularly exhausted, it can definitely feel like you are also lacking in brain capacity. Now, a new study has suggested this could be because chronic sleep deprivation can actually cause the brain to eat itself Shutterstock Health news in pictures Exercise classes offering 45 minute naps launch David Lloyd Gyms have launched a new health and fitness class which is essentially a bunch of people taking a nap for 45 minutes. The fitness group was spurred to launch the napercise class after research revealed 86 per cent of parents said they were fatigued. The class is therefore predominantly aimed at parents but you actually do not have to have children to take part Getty Health news in pictures 'Fundamental right to health' to be axed after Brexit, lawyers warn Tobacco and alcohol companies could win more easily in court cases such as the recent battle over plain cigarette packaging if the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights is abandoned, a barrister and public health professor have said Getty Health news in pictures 'Thousands dying' due to fear over non-existent statin side-effects A major new study into the side effects of the cholesterol-lowering medicine suggests common symptoms such as muscle pain and weakness are not caused by the drugs themselves Getty Health news in pictures Babies born to fathers aged under 25 have higher risk of autism New research has found that babies born to fathers under the age of 25 or over 51 are at higher risk of developing autism and other social disorders. The study, conducted by the Seaver Autism Center for Research and Treatment at Mount Sinai, found that these children are actually more advanced than their peers as infants, but then fall behind by the time they hit their teenage years Getty Health news in pictures Cycling to work could halve risk of cancer and heart disease Commuters who swap their car or bus pass for a bike could cut their risk of developing heart disease and cancer by almost half, new research suggests but campaigners have warned there is still an urgent need to improve road conditions for cyclists. Cycling to work is linked to a lower risk of developing cancer by 45 per cent and cardiovascular disease by 46 per cent, according to a study of a quarter of a million people. Walking to work also brought health benefits, the University of Glasgow researchers found, but not to the same degree as cycling. Getty Mr Partridge called for nationwide access to help for people suffering from acne. He said: "There are Changing Faces practitioners, like counsellors, who are trained to help people deal with their concerns. We think that should be available across the country so people are able to deal with the psychosocial impact of acne." His concerns were echoed by dermatologist Dr Anjali Mahto, who highlighted the issue of psychological harm acne - which often affects people in their vulnerable teenage years - can cause. "I often see patients who refuse to make eye contact. People who grow their hair so it covers their face. People who refuse to go out, go to work or to go to school," Dr Mahto told the broadcaster. She stressed that this mental impact can continue to have an effect long after the acne has gone away. "If you've grown up with the mindset you're a spotty teenager, the negative body image can stay with you for many years afterwards," she said. Bevis Man, spokesperson for the British Skin Foundation said: Judging from the emails and phone calls we get, we know there are a large number of people out there who are deeply affected by acne, yet dont always have an obvious person or place to turn to about it. For some, simply being able to talk about their acne can be as important as treating the physical symptoms for it. Some acne sufferers have said many people do not realise how bad the problem is. Acne is common, said one man, but for many people who have it, they will experience this discrimination hatred in public, school and the workplace. Awareness is a very big problem at the moment. For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} The offices of Mitsubishi have been raided in Japan after the company admitted to falsifying fuel economy data, sending shares plummeting 35 per cent in two days. Investors watched in horror as the stock price fell a further 20 per cent on Thursday to trade around 583 yen following a raid on the Mitsubishi plant in the central Japanese city of Okazaki. Trading was halted due to the surfeit of investors trying to sell stock. More than third of the company's value evaporated in the sell-off. Recommended Read more Mitsubishi says employees falsified data on fuel economy tests The raid by officials came after the company admitted that employees had altered the data in fuel economy tests to give better scores to 600,000 vehicles. The Japanese government said the case was being treated as "extremely serious" and gave the company until April 27 to put together a report on the scandal. We believe this manipulation [of testing data] was deliberate, said Tetsuro Aikawa, Mitsubishi Motors president, who apologised for the cheating by making the traditional Japanese bow of contrition at a packed news conference. It is clear that the intention was to make fuel-efficiency figures look better. Data was falsified in the testing of four types of cars, including two Nissan cars. The affected models are the Mitsubishi ek Wagon and ek Space, and the Nissan Dayz and Dayz Roox. The false data was discovered when Nissan pointed out inconsistencies in the ways that vehicles had been tested. Mitsubishi then conducted an investigation and found the data had been falsified. Biggest business scandals in pictures Show all 20 1 /20 Biggest business scandals in pictures Biggest business scandals in pictures Volkswagen emissions scandal VW admitted to rigging its US emission tests so that diesel-powered cars would looks like they were emitting less nitrous oxide, which can damage the ozone layer and contribute to respiratory diseases. Around 11 million cars worldwide were affected. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Martin Shkreli and Turing Pharmaceuticals Martin Shkreli became known as the most hated man in the world after his drug company, Turing, increased the price of a 62-year-old drug that treated HIV patients by 5,000% to $750 a pill. He was charged with illegally taking stock from Retrophin, a biotechnology firm he started in 2011, and using it pay off debts from unrelated business dealings. Shkreli, who maintains he is innocent, and says there is little evidence of fraud because his investors didn't lose money. Biggest business scandals in pictures Panama Papers: Millions of leaked documents expose how worlds rich and powerful hid money - April 2016 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. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Google's tax avoidance Google reached a deal with the HM Revenue and Customs to pay back 130 million in so-called back-taxes that have been due since 2005. George Osborne championed the deal as a major success. But European MEPs have since called for the Chancellor to appear in front of the committee on tax rulings to explain the tax deal. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Rogue trader A French court cut the damages owed by rogue trader Jerome Kerviel from 4.9bn (4.2bn) to just 1m (860,000). The court ruled on that Kerviel was partly responsible for massive losses suffered in 2008 by his former employer Societe Generale through his reckless trades. Kerviel has consistently maintained that bosses at the French bank knew what he was doing all along. AP Biggest business scandals in pictures Barclays CEO under investigation for trying to identify whistleblower - Monday Paril 10 Authorities have launched an investigation into Barclays chief executive officer Jes Staley for trying to identify a whistleblower, the bank said on Monday. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) are both investigating Mr Staley after the bank notified them that Mr Staley had tried to identify the author of two anonymous letters, which were sent to the board and a senior executive in June 2016. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures UK to crack down on bank money laundering after reports of 65bn Russian scam, City minister says - March 2017 The Economic Secretary to the Treasury has vowed that the Government will crack down on money laundering practices, after several of the UK's biggest banks were accused of processing money from a Russian scam, believed to involve up to $80bn (65bn). Reuters Biggest business scandals in pictures Former HBOS bankers convicted of bribery and fraud over 245m loan scam - February 2017 Two former HBOS bankers were among six people found guilty of bribery and fraud that cost customers and shareholders hundreds of millions of pounds, the BBC reports. Lynden Scourfield, 54, a manager at HBOS, forced struggling clients to use the services of his friends David Mills, 60, and Michael Bancroft, 73. In return, the two businessmen arranged sex parties, cash and lavish gifts. On Monday, the three were convicted at Southwark Crown Court on accounts including bribery, fraud and money laundering. Mark Dobson, another manager at HBOS, Alison Mills, and John Cartwright were also convicted. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Lloyds chief apologises for damage caused by affair allegations - August 2016 Antonio Horta-Osorio, the chief executive of Lloyds Bank, has broken his silence over allegations about his private life admitting he regrets any "damage done to the group's reputation". In a message sent to the bank's 75,000 employees, the banker said that anyone can make mistakes while insisting that staff had to maintain the highest professional standards. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Christine Lagarde faces court over 340m Bernard Tapie payment - July 2016 The head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Christine Lagarde, must stand trial in France over a payment of 403 million (now 340m, then 290m) to tycoon Bernard Tapie, a France's highest appeals court has ruled. The court rejected Ms Lagarde's appeal against a judge's order in December for her to stand trial over allegations of negligence in her handling of the affair. Ms Lagarde could risk a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a fine of 15,000 euros if convicted. Reuters Biggest business scandals in pictures HSBC senior manager arrested in FX rigging investigation at JFK airport in New York - July 2016 A senior executive at HSBC has been arrested at New York's JFK airport for his alleged involvement in a conspiracy to rig currency benchmarks, according to reports. Mark Johnson, global head of foreign exchange cash trading in London, was reportedly arrested on Tuesday. He will appear before a federal court in Brooklyn on Wednesday charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, Bloomberg said. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Former PwC employees found guilty in 'Luxleaks' tax scandal - June 2016 Two ex- PricewaterhouseCoopers staffers were found guilty in Luxembourg of stealing confidential tax files that helped unleash a global scandal over generous fiscal deals for hundreds of international companies. Antoine Deltour and Raphael Halet face suspended sentences of 12 months and 9 months and were ordered to pay fines of 1,500 (1,230) and 1,000 (822) for their role in the so-called LuxLeaks scandal. Despite the minimal sentences, the ruling was described by Deltours lawyer as shocking and a terrible anomaly. The ruling puts on guard future whistle-blowers, Deltour told reporters.The LuxLeaks revelations sped beyond Luxembourg, causing European Union regulators to expand a tax-subsidy probe and propose new laws to fight corporate tax dodging, while EU lawmakers created a special committee to probe fiscal deals across the 28-nation bloc. Reuters Biggest business scandals in pictures Goldman Sachs dealmakers lavished Libyan officials with prostitutes to win contract - June 2016 A former Goldman Sachs dealmaker trying to persuade Gadaffi-era Libya to invest $1 billion with the investment bank procured prostitutes and invited Libyan officials to lavish parties in the hope of winning the business, the High Court heard on Monday June 13.The Libyan Investment Authority sovereign wealth fund is suing Goldman Sachs for inappropriately coercing its naive staff into giving its sovereign wealth fund cash to the bank to invest in products they did not understand. The products were designed to generate big profits for Goldman, the LIA claims.Goldman denies wrongdoing and says the LIA was treated as an arms-length customer Reuters Biggest business scandals in pictures Former boss of BHS said his life was threatened - June 2016 Darren Topp, the former boss of BHS, has said former owner Dominic Chappell threatened to kill him when he challenged him over a 1.5 million transfer out of the business. MPs on the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee asked Mr Topp about a 1.5 million transfer Mr Chappell made from BHS to a company called BHS Sweden. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Sports Direct founder Mike Ashley admits paying workers below the minimum wage - June 2016 Mike Ashley admitted paying Sports Direct employees below the minimum wage at a hearing in front of MPs. The company founder said that workers were paid less than the statutory minimum because of bottlenecks at security in an admission that could result in sanctions from HMRC. Reuters Biggest business scandals in pictures Mitsubishi admits improper fuel tests - April 2016 Mitsubishi has admitted to using false fuel methods dating back to 1991. The scale of the scandal is only just coming to light after it was revealed in April that data was falsified in the testing of four types of cars, including two Nissan cars. AP Biggest business scandals in pictures Quindell, the scandal-ridden insurance firm Quindell was once a darling of AIM but its share price fell in April 2014 when its accounting practices were attacked in a stinging research note by US short seller Gotham City. In August the group was forced to disclose that the 107 million pre-tax profit it had reported for 2013 was incorrect, and it had in fact suffered a 64million loss. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Toshiba Accounting Scandal The boss of Toshiba, the Japanese technology giant, resigned in disgrace in the wake of one of the countrys biggest ever accounting scandals. His exit came two months after the company revealed that it was investigating accounting irregularities. An independent investigatory panel said that Toshibas management had inflated its reported profits by up to 152 billion yen (780m) between 2008 and 2014. Biggest business scandals in pictures FIFA Corruption Scandal Fifa, football's world governing body, has been engulfed by claims of widespread corruption since the summer of 2015, when the US Department of Justice indicted several top executives. It has now claimed the careers of two of the most powerful men in football, Fifa President Sepp Blatter and Uefa President Michel Platini, after they were banned for eight years from all football-related activities by Fifa's ethics committee. A Swiss criminal investigation into the pair is ongoing. Getty Biggest business scandals in pictures Libor fraudster City trader Tom Hayes, 35, has become the first person to be convicted of rigging Libor rates following a trial at London's Southwark Crown Court. Hayes worked as a trader in yen derivatives at UBS before joining the American bank Citigroup in Tokyo. He was fired from Citigroup following an investigation into his trading methods. He returned to the UK in December 2012 and was arrested following a two-and-a-half year criminal investigation by the SFO. Getty The company said the cars were only sold in Japan, but the investigation would cover overseas. Mitsubishi is Japan's largest car maker. It sold more than one million vehicles last year but has less than 1 per cent of the UK market. This is the first time a Japanese car maker has been implicated in a vehicle testing scandal since the emissions scandal engulfed Volkswagen last year. For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Tata Steel could be part-nationalised after the Government said it was willing to put in up to 25 per cent of the amount needed to rescue the beleaguered plant and save thousands of jobs. The package would amount to hundreds of millions of pounds of financing to prop up a potential buyer. Recommended Read more Four charts that show why the UK steel industry is in crisis David Cameron has come under intense pressure to intervene since Tata Steel's Indian owners said they wanted to exit the UK business a month ago. The UK operations were reported to be losing 1 million a day because of Chinese oversupply of steel forcing prices down to artificially low levels. While the Government has resisted an intervention, Cameron's spokeswoman said on Thursday that the Government would likely seek a deal on commerical terms. This could either be though debt financing, by buying bonds from the company, or equity, by buying shares in the company. Recommended Read more Everything you need to know about the Tata Steel Scunthorpe buyer "If we were to take an equity stake it would be a minority one with the aim of supporting the purchaser in delivering long term future for the business. "We are certainly not seeking to be controlling the company," Cameron's spokeswoman said. She added that the Government would not consider this to be "part-nationalisation" because it would not be seeking control of the business. Business news: In pictures Show all 13 1 /13 Business news: In pictures Business news: In pictures Flybe collapses Airline Flybe has collapsed. All future flights on the Exeter-based airline have been cancelled leaving more than 2,300 staff facing an uncertain future, and wrecking the travel plans of hundreds of thousands of passengers. The chief executive, Mark Anderson, said: Europes largest independent regional airline has been unable to overcome significant funding challenges to its business. AFP via Getty Business news: In pictures Future product placement will be 'tailored to individual viewers' Marketing executives say that product placement in films and televison shows on streaming services such as Netflix may be tailored to individuals in future. For instance, if data shows that a viewer is a fan of pepsi, a billboard in the background of a shot would host an advert for pepsi, while for a viewer known to have different tastes it could be for Coca-Cola Paramount Business news: In pictures Corbyn wishes Amazon a happy birthday In a card sent to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on the company's 25th birthday, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn writes: "You owe the British people millions in taxes that pay for the public services that we all rely on. Please pay your fair share" Business news: In pictures No deal, no tariffs The government has announced that it would slash almost all tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Notable exceptions include cars and meat, which will see tariffs in place to protect British farmers Getty Business news: In pictures Fingerprint payment NatWest is trialling a new bank card that will allow people to touch their hand to the card when paying rather than typing in a PIN number. The card will work by recognising the user's fingerprint NatWest/PA Wire Business news: In pictures Mahabis bust High-end slipper retailer Mahabis has gone into administration. 2 Jan 2019 Mahabis Business news: In pictures Costa Cola Coca-Cola has paid 3.9bn for Costa Coffee. A cafe chain is a new venture for the global soft drinks giant PA Business news: In pictures RIP Payday Loans A funeral procession for payday loans was held in London on September 2. The future of pay day lenders is in doubt after Wonga, Britain's biggest, went into administration on August 30 PA Business news: In pictures Musk irks investors and directors Elon Musk has concluded that Tesla will remain public. Investors and company directors were angry at Musk for tweeting unexpectedly that he was considering taking Tesla private and share prices had taken a tumble in the following weeks Getty Business news: In pictures Jaguar warning Iconic British car maker Jaguar Land Rover warned on July 5, 2018 that a "bad" Brexit deal could jeopardise planned investment of more than $100 billion, upping corporate pressure as the government heads into crucial talks AFP/Getty Business news: In pictures Spotif-IPO Spotify traded publically for the first time on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday. However, the company isn't issuing shares, but rather, shares held by Spotify's private investors will be sold AFP/Getty Business news: In pictures French blue passports The deadline to award a contract to make blue British passports after Brexit has been extended by two weeks following a request by bidder De La Rue. The move comes after anger at the announcement British passports would be produced by Franco-Dutch firm Gemalto when De La Rues contract ends in July. The British firm said Gemalto was chosen only because it undercut the competition, but the UK company also admitted that it was not the cheapest choice in the tendering process. Business news: In pictures Beast from the east economic impact The Beast from the East wiped 4m off of Flybes revenues due to flight cancellations, airport closures and delays, according to the budget airlines estimates. Flybe said it cancelled 994 flights in the three months to 31 March, compared to 372 in the same period last year. Senior staff at the Port Talbot plant in Wales are said to be considering staging a "management buyout" of the company, where managers buy the business off its owners. Other contenders for the majority stake are said to be Greybull Capital, the London-based investment firm that bought Tata's Long Products Europe division in Scunthorpe, and Sanjeev Gupta, the boss of metals trader Liberty House Group. For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Latvia has banned women from wearing the Islamic full-face veil in public, despite only three people being known to wear them in the entire country. Authorities say the new legislation is necessary in order to protect Latvian culture and prevent terrorists from smuggling weapons under garments. The move follows a similar ban on full-face veils in public spaces implemented by France in 2011. Latvias Justice Minister Dzintars Rasnacs said the law which he hopes will come into place by 2017 is less to do with the number of women wearing the traditional niqab, but rather about ensuring prospective immigrants respect the countrys values. A legislators task is to adopt preventative measures, Mr Rasnacs told the New York Times. We do not only protect Latvian cultural-historical values, but the cultural-historical values of Europe. Latvia a small country with an estimated population of two million - agreed to accept 776 refugees over the next two years as part of the European Unions efforts to resettle refugees. This week, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls sparked outrage for announcing plans to prohibit the wear of all forms of Muslim headscarves in universities. Feminist groups reacted to the plans by organising a niqab day at a political sciences institute in Paris. Dozens of students wore veils handed out by the protesters at Sciences Po, to highlight discrimination faced by Muslim women. Minister wants debate on veils Recommended Read more Muslim woman agrees to lift niqab in court to avoid jail There are thought to be around 1,000 practicing Muslims living in Latvia. Speaking about the proposed ban, former Latvian president Vaira Vike-Freiberga said that those wearing a niqab or burqa at a time of terrorism presented a danger to society. Anybody could be under a veil or under a burqa, she said. You could carry a rocket launcher under your veil. Its not funny. For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} A celebrity will have to wait to find out if a privacy junction protecting him from being named by the press will remain in place after Supreme Court justices reserved their decision. The Sun on Sunday wants to publish details of the mans alleged extramarital activities after an order preventing them from doing so was overturned by the Court of Appeal. His lawyers are now asking Supreme Court justices to make a decision in the case. Supreme Court president Lord Neuberger said the court would take time to consider this matter and justices would give their decision as soon as we can. The injunction remains in place until a decision is reached. Lawyers for the Sun on Sunday argue the order should be overturned because the man, named as PJS in court documents, and his spouse have been identified in publications outside of England and Wales, where the order is in place. People news in pictures Show all 18 1 /18 People news in pictures People news in pictures 7 October 2015 Russian President Vladimir Putin takes part in an ice hockey match between former NHL stars and officials at the Shayba Arena in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. Vladimir Putin spent his 63rd birthday on the ice, playing hockey with NHL stars against Russian officials and tycoons EPA People news in pictures 6 October 2015 German designer Karl Lagerfeld (R) and model Cara Delevingne (C) appear at the end of his Spring/Summer 2016 women's ready-to-wear collection for fashion house Chanel at the Grand Palais which is transformed into a Chanel airport during the Fashion Week in Paris, France Reuters People news in pictures 5 October 2015 Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne addresses the Conservative party conference in Manchester. The Chancellor argued that reducing the payments to people in low paid jobs would give them economic security by reducing the Governments spending deficit Getty Images People news in pictures 4 October 2015 Cowboys captain Johnathan Thurston takes a moment in the centre of the field with his daughter Frankie Thurston, holding dark-skinned doll, after winning the 2015 NRL Grand Final match between the Brisbane Broncos and the North Queensland Cowboys at ANZ Stadium in Sydney. The image quickly became the talking point of Australias National Rugby League Final and provoked a strong reaction on social media, with many praising Thurston for giving his child a toy that promotes inclusiveness and diversity Getty Images People news in pictures 3 October 2015 Pope Francis gives a thumbs-up as he greets people at the end of an audience to the participants of a meeting organized by the "Food Bank" at the Paul VI audience hall in Vatican Getty Images People news in pictures 2 October 2015 Britain's Finance Minister George Osborne (L) throws an American football as he meets with former American football players Dan Marino (2nd R) and Curtis Martin (not pictured) at 11 Downing Street in London, ahead of the New York Jets playing against the Miami Dolphins at London's Wembley Stadium on 4 October Getty Images People news in pictures 1 October 2015 An honor guard opens the door as Russian President Vladimir Putin enters a hall to attend a meeting with members of the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia People news in pictures 30 September 2015 Former Mrs America Lisa Christie, who alleges misconduct by Bill Cosby, holds up photos of her younger self during a news conference at the law office of attorney Gloria Allred in Los Angeles People news in pictures 29 September 2015 Matt Damon has defended himself against claims that he instructed gay actors to remain in the closet. He had said I think youre a better actor the less people know about you and sexuality is a huge part of that. Whether youre straight or gay, people shouldnt know anything about your sexuality but an appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres show said, I was just trying to say actors are more effective when theyre a mystery. Right? Getty People news in pictures 29 September 2015 Actor Marion Cotillard has said that there is no place for feminism in Hollywood. Speaking to Porter magazine, she saidFilm-making is not about gender/ You cannot ask a president in a festival like Cannes to have, like, five movies directed by women and five by men. For me it doesnt create equality, it creates separation. I mean, I dont qualify myself as a feminist." Getty People news in pictures 29 September 2015 Actor Paul Walkers daughter, Meadow, is suing Porsche over her fathers death in a lawsuit that claims he was trapped in the burning car because of design flaws and the seat belt. The Fast and Furious star was killed when the Porsche Carrera GT he was a passenger in hit a pole in California in 2013. The driver, his friend Roger Rodas, also died when the vehicle burst into flames. AP People news in pictures 28 September 2015 Robert Mugabe waits to address the United Nations General Assembly. The leader of Zimbabwe reportedly exclaimed 'We are not gay!' as he criticised Western nation's "double standards and attempts to prescribe new rights that are contrary to our values, norms, traditions and beliefs. In 2013 he described homosexuals as worse than pigs, goats and birds. Reuters People news in pictures 28 September 2015 South African comedian Trevor Noah hosts the first 'Daily Show' since taking over from Jon Stewart as host. Stewart had presented the US satirical news show since 1999 and was described by Noah during the show as a 'Political father' 2015 Getty Images People news in pictures 25 September 2015 Sir Elton John may have received a phone call from the real Vladimir Putin. Mr Putin's spokesman announced he had made contact weeks after the singer was duped by pranksters pretending to be the Russian President. Getty People news in pictures 25 September 2015 Actor Leonardo DiCaprio was mistakenly declared as the artist who produced the Mona Lisa by Fox News anchor Shepard Smith. It was in fact Leonardo da Vinci. People news in pictures 24 September 2015 A new biography claims Donald Trump expected to be dead by 40 and never marry. The Guardian says the a new book also claims that in 1980, Mr Trump manufactured a fake vice-president of his real estate conglomerate, whom he called John Baron. People news in pictures 24 September 2015 The Dalai Lama has said that Britain's policy towards China is just about 'Money, money, money.' And asked 'Where is morality?' People news in pictures 24 September 2015 Puff Daddy secured the number-one spot on the Forbes Hip Hop Cash Kings list, with the publication calculating he made an estimated $60million (39m) between June 2014 and June 2015. But Desmond Browne QC, representing PJS, said lifting the injunction would prompt a flood of reports and draw attention to the couples children. Its hard to see that the children were afforded the primacy of importance to which they are entitled, he told justices. That is an issue not just now but for the future when they grow up. Discharging the order would have devastating consequences, he warned. This case has been hailed by some as the death-knell of the privacy injunction," he later added. "We hope that reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. Additional reporting by Press Association For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} The world of music suffered another major loss today as Prince Rogers Nelson, more commonly known as Prince, died at his recording studio at the age of 57. The news of his death was first reported by TMZ, and later confirmed by his spokesperson. He was hospitalised with flu last week, but his cause of death is not yet known. Over a decades-long career, Prince gained became an icon for his originality, flamboyance, and sheer musical talent. Naturally, his rare media appearances were filled with memorable quotes - here's some of the best. "All these non-singing, non-dancing, wish-I-had-me-some-clothes fools who tell me my albums suck. Why should I pay any attention to them?" Prince hits back at his critics in a 2006 Guardian interview. Prince - A Life in Pictures Show all 10 1 /10 Prince - A Life in Pictures Prince - A Life in Pictures Prince Rogers Nelson, known by his mononym Prince, who has died at the age of 57 at his Paisley Park compound in Minnesota PA Prince - A Life in Pictures Prince performs in concert at Riverfront Coliseum during his Purple Rain Tour in Cincinnati, Ohio, on January 22nd, 1985 AP Prince - A Life in Pictures US singer and musician Prince performing on stage at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, outside Paris on June 30th 2011 AFP / Getty Prince - A Life in Pictures US musician Prince performing on the Stravinski Hall stage during the 47th Montreux Jazz Festival, in Montreux, Switzerland on 21 April, 2013 EPA Prince - A Life in Pictures Prince performs during the 'Pepsi Halftime Show' at Super Bowl XLI between the Indianapolis Colts and the Chicago Bears on February 4, 2007 2007 Getty Images Prince - A Life in Pictures Prince plays during a press conference at the Miami Beach Convention Center, February 1st, 2007 AP Prince - A Life in Pictures Prince performs during the second day of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California on April 26th 2008 AP Prince - A Life in Pictures Prince performs before a sold-out audience, in Houston on January 11th 1985 AP Prince - A Life in Pictures Musician Prince gestures on stage during the Apollo Theatre's 75th anniversary gala in New York, June 8, 2009 Reuters Prince - A Life in Pictures Prince Rogers Nelson, known by his mononym Prince, who has died at the age of 57 at his Paisley Park compound in Minnesota PA "The internet's completely over. I don't see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won't pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can't get it." Always an individual, Prince consistently refused to hand over his music to the tech companies which changed the industry during his career. To this day, it's difficult to find his music on iTunes, Spotify, or any other streaming services. "The key to longetivity is to learn every aspect of music that you can." Appearing on The View, Prince gave some sage advice to Justin Bieber, and aspiring musicians everywhere. He should know - he consistently performed for over 40 years, and released 39 studio albums over his career. Prince dies aged 57 "Oh, I love critics. Because they love me. It's not a joke. They care." Prince had a famously disdainful view of the music press, and made it very clear in a 2015 Guardian interview. "I ain't mad at anybody. I don't have any enemies." While this quote from a Guardian interview may have been an exagerration, it's certainly true that he was universally loved by musicians around the world. "Record contracts are just like - I'm gonna say the world - slavery. I would tell any young artist...don't sign." Prince has had famously torrid relationships with some of his record labels - after getting out of his contract with Warner Bros, he pointedly titled his 1996 album Emancipation. "The internet's like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets and no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you." Plenty of internet users would agree with Prince, quoted here in a 2013 interview. For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} It goes without saying that Queen Elizabeth II lives something of a fairy-tale existence. From having her own hoard of knights to holding dominion over every British swan in the country, the day-to-day life of Her Royal Highness comprises of more perks and privileges than the most of us can fathom. While Elizabeth II might choose to spend much of her time luxuriating in her 700-room-palace choosing gaudy brightly coloured hats and playing fetch with her corgis, she could technically go out and fire the entirety of the Australian government. In other words, the Queens age-old powers and secret privileges are about far more than wealth or affluence. Here are a selection of the things the Queen can do which no-one else can: She is above the law The Queen is above and beyond the law in the most literal sense of the idiom. Not only is she immune from prosecution, she isnt expected to give evidence in court because all prosecutions are carried out in the name of the Sovereign. Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Show all 62 1 /62 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II on a walk-about in Portsmouth during her Silver Jubilee tour of Great Britain, 1977 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The future Britain's Queen Elizabeth II (R) pictured with her younger sister Princess Margaret (L) in 1933 AFP/Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The 9-year-old Elizabeth attends an aristocratic wedding with her mother and younger sister. Later in that year with the death of her Grandfather and the Abdication of her Uncle Edward VIII she became first in line to the throne, 1936 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The coronation of King George VI in 1937, Elizabeth aged 10 became the heir apparent to the throne Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Elizabeth and her sister arrive at Waterloo station to say goodbye to their parents as they leave to tour Canada. Elizabeth was thought too young to escort her parents on the tour and was described as "tearful" as they departed. She and her parents made the first ever transatlantic telephone call during their time away, 1939 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The 13-year-old Elizabeth and her sister Margret address children who have been evacuated from the cities on BBC's 'The Chilrens Hour' She said "We are trying to do all we can to help our gallant sailors, soldiers and airmen, and we are trying, too, to bear our share of the danger and sadness of war. We know, every one of us, that in the end all will be well", 1940 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Just before the end of the war Elizabeth took part in training to become an ATS officer. She is pictured learning to change a tire, 1945 AFP/Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The official announcement of Princess Elizabeth and Phillip Mountbatten's engagement. The pairing was incredibly controversial as Prince Phillip had no financial standing and he was foreign born, the prince of Denmark and Greece (though he served Britain in the war and was given British Citizenship), 1947 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II (in coach) and her husband Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh are cheered by the crowd after their wedding ceremony, on 20 November 1947, on their road to Buckingham Palace, London Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Elizabeth smiles at her first child, a month old Prince Charles. Charles was born on 14 November 1948 Corbis Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The couples second child Princess Anne was born in 1950 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Arriving back in England upon hearing the death of her father King George VI. The Kings health had been in decline for a number of years and Elizabeth had been filling in for him on an official visit to Australia by way of Kenya. As his heir Elizabeth became Queen aged 26 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth's coronation took place on 2 June 1953. It was the first ever coronation to be aired live on television, being one of the most watched events in history with millions gathering around their TV sets to see the new monarch Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II standing next to her daughter Princess Anne, 1960 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II President Eisenhower (centre) with the British Royal family (L-R) Prince Philip, Princess Anne, HM Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles and Captain John Eisenhower, at Balmoral Castle, Scotland, 1959 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II as she turns to smile and talk to an unidentified officer, during the Trooping of the Colour by the First Battalion of the Jamaica Regiment at Up-Park Camp, Kingston, Jamaica, 1966 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II walking cross country at the North of Scotland Gun Dog Association Open Stake Retreiver Trials in the grounds of Balmoral Castle in 1967 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II during her visit to the Chelsea Flower Show in London, a regular fixture in the royal calendar, 1971 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh during their traditional summer break at Balmoral Castle. The highland retreat is one of the Queen's favourite places, each year, she heads off to Scotland for the summer. "It is rather nice to hibernate for a bit when one leads such a moveable life," she once said, 1976 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II during a walkabout in Muscat while visiting Oman, 1979 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II with some of her corgis walking the Cross Country course during the second day of the Windsor Horse Trials. The monarch is responsible for introducing a new breed of dog known as the "dorgi" when her corgi Tiny was mated with a dachshund "sausage dog" called Pipkin which belonged to Princess Margaret, 1980 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II (L-R) the Queen Mother, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince William, Prince Harry and the Prince and Princess of Wales after the christening ceremony of Prince Harry, 1984 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II taking the salute of the Household Guards regiments during the Trooping of the Colour ceremony in London, 1985 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Diana, Princess of Wales and Queen Elizabeth II as they smile to well-wishers outside Clarence House in London, 1987 AP Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II, with Chief Instructor, Small Arms Corp LT Col George Harvey, firing the last shot on a standard SA 80 rifle when she attended the centenary of the Army Rifle Association at Bisley, 1993 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II South Africa's President Nelson Mandela greets Queen Elizabeth II as she steps from the royal yacht Britannia in Cape Town at the 1995's official start of the her first visit to the country since 1947 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II smiles as she visits Bowring Park in St. John's, Newfoundland, on the third day of a 10-day official visit to Canada, 1997 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh make their way into St. George's Chapel at Windsor for the annual Garter ceremony, 1999 AFP/Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and Pope John Paul II as they meet at the Vatican, 2000 AP Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and the Queen Mother leaving church by horse drawn carriage on the Sandringham Estate, Norfolk, 2000 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth rides her horse in the grounds of Windsor Castle, 2002 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth arrives for the world premiere of James Bond movie "Casino Royale" at the Odeon cinema in Leicester Square in London, 2006 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth boards a scheduled train at Kings Cross station in London, 2009 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II planting a tree at Newmarket Animal Health Trust, during a royal visit which marked her 50th year as the charity's patron, 2009 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II talking with Pope Benedict XVI during an audience in the Morning Drawing Room at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh during a four day visit by the Pope to the UK, 2010 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II visiting the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 2010 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II receives flowers from the crowd during her visit to Federation Square in downtown Melbourne, 2011 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth watches a preview of her Christmas message wearing a pair of 3D glasses, studded with Swarovski crystals in the form of a "Q", at Buckingham Palace in central London, 2012 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Members of Britain's royal family (front L to R) Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles cheer as competitors participate in a sack race at the Braemar Gathering in Braemar, Scotland, 2012 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Britain's Prince Charles kisses the hand of his mother Queen Elizabeth at the end of her Diamond Jubilee concert in front of Buckingham Palace in London, 2012 Reuters Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge laughs as Queen Elizabeth gestures during a visit to Vernon Park in Nottingham, 2012 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip attend a service for the Order of the British Empire at St Paul's Cathedral in London, 2012 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II meets young people during an official visit to The Shard building in central London, 2013 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Actress Angelina Jolie is presented with the Insignia of an Honorary Dame Grand Cross of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George by Queen Elizabeth II in the 1844 Room at Buckingham Palace, London, 2014 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh visit the Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red evolving art installation at the Tower of London, 2014 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at the State Opening of Parliament, 2015 AFP/Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II (L-R) Britain's Princess Anne, Princess Royal, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge holding his son Prince George of Cambridge, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Harry (back), Prince Andrew, Duke of York (back), James, Viscount Severn (front), Princess Beatrice of York (back), Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Eugenie of York (back) stand on the balcony of Buckingham Palace waiting to view the fly-past during the Queen's Birthday Parade, 'Trooping the Colour,' in London, 2015 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The Trooping of the Colour is an annual celebration marking the Queen's birthday, 2015 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Britain's Queen Elizabeth II stands with Kate the Duchess of Cambridge whilst pushing Princess Charlotte in a pram as they leave after attending the Christening of Britain's Princess Charlotte at St. Mary Magdalene Church in Sandringham, 2015 AP Photo/Matt Dunham, Pool Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II arrives at the Broadway Theatre in Barking, 2015 Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II greets wellwishers during a 'walkabout' on her 90th birthday in Windsor in 2016 AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Members of the Royal Family during trooping of the colour in 2017 AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The Queen waves at Prince Harry and Meghan after their wedding in 2018 POOL/AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex gesture during their visit to the Storyhouse in Chester, Cheshire in 2018 AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Prince Charles reacts as he sits with his mother Britain's Queen Elizabeth II during an event to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings, in Portsmouth in 2019 AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are joined by her mother, Doria Ragland, as they show their new son, Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, to the Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh at Windsor Castle Chris Allerton/Sussex Royal/PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II reacts as she visits the Haig Housing Trust in Morden in 2019 POOL/AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II takes her seat on the The Sovereign's Throne in the House of Lords next to Prince Charles, before reading the Queen's Speech during the State Opening of Parliament in 2019 POOL/AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II looks at the coffin of Britain's Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh during his funeral service at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle POOL/AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and Britain's Prince Charles, Prince of Wales pose alongside the tree which they planted to mark the start of the official planting season for the Queen's Green Canopy (QGC) at the Balmoral Cricket Pavilion, Balmoral Estate in Scotland POOL/AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Britain's Queen Elizabeth II cuts a cake to celebrate the start of the Platinum Jubilee during a reception in the Ballroom of Sandringham House, the Queen's Norfolk residence on February 5, 2022. - Queen Elizabeth II on Sunday will became the first British monarch to reign for seven decades, in a bittersweet landmark as she also marked the 70th anniversary of her father's death AFP/Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II arrives in Westminster Abbey accompanied by Prince Andrew, Duke of York for the Service Of Thanksgiving For The Duke Of Edinburgh on March 29, 2022 in London Getty The Queen is required to turn a bill into law Once a bill has worked its way through all the various stages of parliament, the Queens consent is necessary to convert the bill into an Act of Parliament. This is known as Royal Assent. A British Monarch hasnt declined to sign a bill into in law since Queen Anne way back in 1708. She appoints knights Imagine having a reserve of knights in shining armour at your beck and call. While the knights our Queen appoints with her silver sword do not look like your typical King Arthur types, they are knights all the same. The Queen has the power to appoint both Knights and Lords an act she carries out face-to-face in the flesh. Sir Terry Wogan and Sir Terry Pratchett are two of these knights. Elizabeth II is advised by the Prime Minister and others in her appointments. Her Majesty is exempt from Freedom of Information requests Brought in by Tony Blair in 2000, the Freedom of Information Act created a public right of access to information held by public authorities. Alas, the only public body exempt from this is the Royal Family. Cameron pays tribute to Queen The Queen has a weekly chinwag with the Prime Minister While most of us common folk have a weekly catch-up with a pal, the Queen meets the Prime Minister every week. However its impossible to ever know what is really said in the weekly meetings because no written record is made of the private meeting and both parties are obliged to ensure the information is never disclosed. She doesnt have to pay tax The Queen does not have to pay tax but is that generous that she has been voluntarily paying income tax and capital gains tax since 1992. Thanks maam. The Queen owns all the swans This rather curious tradition dates all the way back to the twelfth century and was formalised with a Royal Charter of Edward IV passed in 1482. The Queen technically owns all unmarked swans in open water in the UK. She also has an officially-appointed Swan Keeper whom dispatches swans all over the world as gifts sent in the Queens name. She can sack the entire Australian government Being the head of state in Australia, Her Majesty could technically give the whole Australian government the bullet if it took her fancy. For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Windsor has been turned into a sea of union flags to welcome the Queen on her 90th birthday. Die-hard royal fans, schoolchildren, well-wishers and tourists have flocked to the town centre in anticipation of the moment the Queen leaves her Windsor Castle home and goes on a walkabout. Many of those who braved the chilly spring morning clutched presents for the Queen, from bouquets of flowers and home-made birthday cards to soft toys and balloons. Recommended Read more Republicans call for referendum to abolish monarchy when Queen dies Fluttering above Windsor Castle's round tower was a huge version of the royal standard used for major celebrations. It was hoisted over the tower when the Prince of Wales married the Duchess of Cornwall in Windsor's Guildhall in 2005. David Cameron led the tributes to the Queen - born on April 21 1926 - who is the country's first nonagenarian sovereign. The Prime Minister tweeted: "The whole country will want to wish the Queen a happy birthday today - she has been a rock of strength for our nation." Crowds gather for the Queen's 90th Birthday Walkabout on April 21, 2016 in Windsor, England (Getty) The milestone has been marked by the release of a historic photograph of the Queen surrounded by her five great-grandchildren - including Prince George and Princess Charlotte - and her two youngest grandchildren. The image is one of three taken by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, who has also captured the Queen informally with her daughter the Princess Royal, and in the final image with four of her dogs, corgis Willow and Holly and dorgis Vulcan and Candy. One tribute will see the Houses of Parliament lit up in red, white and blue in honour of the Queen's milestone. Traditional gun salutes will thunder across London when 41 volleys are fired by the King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery in Hyde Park, and 62 rounds by the Honourable Artillery Company close to the Tower of London - the extra 21 volleys for the citizens of the City of London to show their loyalty to the monarch. Later the Queen, accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, will unveil a plaque marking the Queen's Walkway at the foot of Castle Hill in Windsor before going on a walkabout with Philip. The walkway - a four-mile self-guided walking trail of Windsor by the Outdoor Trust - has been created in honour of the Queen becoming the country's longest reigning monarch. In the evening the night sky over Windsor will be lit up by a beacon, started by the Queen, the first in a chain of more than 1,000 that will spread across the country and the globe. After she lights the beacon, heir to the throne Charles will host a lavish private dinner in the castle for his mother, attended by her family and friends. Lynn Lovell, 63, a retired teacher, said she made a spur-of-the-moment decision to join the crowds in Windsor after seeing the well-wishers on television. Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Show all 62 1 /62 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II on a walk-about in Portsmouth during her Silver Jubilee tour of Great Britain, 1977 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The future Britain's Queen Elizabeth II (R) pictured with her younger sister Princess Margaret (L) in 1933 AFP/Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The 9-year-old Elizabeth attends an aristocratic wedding with her mother and younger sister. Later in that year with the death of her Grandfather and the Abdication of her Uncle Edward VIII she became first in line to the throne, 1936 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The coronation of King George VI in 1937, Elizabeth aged 10 became the heir apparent to the throne Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Elizabeth and her sister arrive at Waterloo station to say goodbye to their parents as they leave to tour Canada. Elizabeth was thought too young to escort her parents on the tour and was described as "tearful" as they departed. She and her parents made the first ever transatlantic telephone call during their time away, 1939 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The 13-year-old Elizabeth and her sister Margret address children who have been evacuated from the cities on BBC's 'The Chilrens Hour' She said "We are trying to do all we can to help our gallant sailors, soldiers and airmen, and we are trying, too, to bear our share of the danger and sadness of war. We know, every one of us, that in the end all will be well", 1940 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Just before the end of the war Elizabeth took part in training to become an ATS officer. She is pictured learning to change a tire, 1945 AFP/Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The official announcement of Princess Elizabeth and Phillip Mountbatten's engagement. The pairing was incredibly controversial as Prince Phillip had no financial standing and he was foreign born, the prince of Denmark and Greece (though he served Britain in the war and was given British Citizenship), 1947 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II (in coach) and her husband Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh are cheered by the crowd after their wedding ceremony, on 20 November 1947, on their road to Buckingham Palace, London Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Elizabeth smiles at her first child, a month old Prince Charles. Charles was born on 14 November 1948 Corbis Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The couples second child Princess Anne was born in 1950 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Arriving back in England upon hearing the death of her father King George VI. The Kings health had been in decline for a number of years and Elizabeth had been filling in for him on an official visit to Australia by way of Kenya. As his heir Elizabeth became Queen aged 26 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth's coronation took place on 2 June 1953. It was the first ever coronation to be aired live on television, being one of the most watched events in history with millions gathering around their TV sets to see the new monarch Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II standing next to her daughter Princess Anne, 1960 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II President Eisenhower (centre) with the British Royal family (L-R) Prince Philip, Princess Anne, HM Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles and Captain John Eisenhower, at Balmoral Castle, Scotland, 1959 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II as she turns to smile and talk to an unidentified officer, during the Trooping of the Colour by the First Battalion of the Jamaica Regiment at Up-Park Camp, Kingston, Jamaica, 1966 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II walking cross country at the North of Scotland Gun Dog Association Open Stake Retreiver Trials in the grounds of Balmoral Castle in 1967 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II during her visit to the Chelsea Flower Show in London, a regular fixture in the royal calendar, 1971 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh during their traditional summer break at Balmoral Castle. The highland retreat is one of the Queen's favourite places, each year, she heads off to Scotland for the summer. "It is rather nice to hibernate for a bit when one leads such a moveable life," she once said, 1976 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II during a walkabout in Muscat while visiting Oman, 1979 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II with some of her corgis walking the Cross Country course during the second day of the Windsor Horse Trials. The monarch is responsible for introducing a new breed of dog known as the "dorgi" when her corgi Tiny was mated with a dachshund "sausage dog" called Pipkin which belonged to Princess Margaret, 1980 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II (L-R) the Queen Mother, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince William, Prince Harry and the Prince and Princess of Wales after the christening ceremony of Prince Harry, 1984 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II taking the salute of the Household Guards regiments during the Trooping of the Colour ceremony in London, 1985 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Diana, Princess of Wales and Queen Elizabeth II as they smile to well-wishers outside Clarence House in London, 1987 AP Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II, with Chief Instructor, Small Arms Corp LT Col George Harvey, firing the last shot on a standard SA 80 rifle when she attended the centenary of the Army Rifle Association at Bisley, 1993 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II South Africa's President Nelson Mandela greets Queen Elizabeth II as she steps from the royal yacht Britannia in Cape Town at the 1995's official start of the her first visit to the country since 1947 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II smiles as she visits Bowring Park in St. John's, Newfoundland, on the third day of a 10-day official visit to Canada, 1997 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh make their way into St. George's Chapel at Windsor for the annual Garter ceremony, 1999 AFP/Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and Pope John Paul II as they meet at the Vatican, 2000 AP Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and the Queen Mother leaving church by horse drawn carriage on the Sandringham Estate, Norfolk, 2000 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth rides her horse in the grounds of Windsor Castle, 2002 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth arrives for the world premiere of James Bond movie "Casino Royale" at the Odeon cinema in Leicester Square in London, 2006 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth boards a scheduled train at Kings Cross station in London, 2009 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II planting a tree at Newmarket Animal Health Trust, during a royal visit which marked her 50th year as the charity's patron, 2009 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II talking with Pope Benedict XVI during an audience in the Morning Drawing Room at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh during a four day visit by the Pope to the UK, 2010 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II visiting the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 2010 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II receives flowers from the crowd during her visit to Federation Square in downtown Melbourne, 2011 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth watches a preview of her Christmas message wearing a pair of 3D glasses, studded with Swarovski crystals in the form of a "Q", at Buckingham Palace in central London, 2012 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Members of Britain's royal family (front L to R) Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles cheer as competitors participate in a sack race at the Braemar Gathering in Braemar, Scotland, 2012 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Britain's Prince Charles kisses the hand of his mother Queen Elizabeth at the end of her Diamond Jubilee concert in front of Buckingham Palace in London, 2012 Reuters Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge laughs as Queen Elizabeth gestures during a visit to Vernon Park in Nottingham, 2012 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip attend a service for the Order of the British Empire at St Paul's Cathedral in London, 2012 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II meets young people during an official visit to The Shard building in central London, 2013 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Actress Angelina Jolie is presented with the Insignia of an Honorary Dame Grand Cross of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George by Queen Elizabeth II in the 1844 Room at Buckingham Palace, London, 2014 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh visit the Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red evolving art installation at the Tower of London, 2014 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at the State Opening of Parliament, 2015 AFP/Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II (L-R) Britain's Princess Anne, Princess Royal, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge holding his son Prince George of Cambridge, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Harry (back), Prince Andrew, Duke of York (back), James, Viscount Severn (front), Princess Beatrice of York (back), Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Eugenie of York (back) stand on the balcony of Buckingham Palace waiting to view the fly-past during the Queen's Birthday Parade, 'Trooping the Colour,' in London, 2015 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The Trooping of the Colour is an annual celebration marking the Queen's birthday, 2015 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Britain's Queen Elizabeth II stands with Kate the Duchess of Cambridge whilst pushing Princess Charlotte in a pram as they leave after attending the Christening of Britain's Princess Charlotte at St. Mary Magdalene Church in Sandringham, 2015 AP Photo/Matt Dunham, Pool Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II arrives at the Broadway Theatre in Barking, 2015 Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II greets wellwishers during a 'walkabout' on her 90th birthday in Windsor in 2016 AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Members of the Royal Family during trooping of the colour in 2017 AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The Queen waves at Prince Harry and Meghan after their wedding in 2018 POOL/AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex gesture during their visit to the Storyhouse in Chester, Cheshire in 2018 AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Prince Charles reacts as he sits with his mother Britain's Queen Elizabeth II during an event to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings, in Portsmouth in 2019 AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are joined by her mother, Doria Ragland, as they show their new son, Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, to the Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh at Windsor Castle Chris Allerton/Sussex Royal/PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II reacts as she visits the Haig Housing Trust in Morden in 2019 POOL/AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II takes her seat on the The Sovereign's Throne in the House of Lords next to Prince Charles, before reading the Queen's Speech during the State Opening of Parliament in 2019 POOL/AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II looks at the coffin of Britain's Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh during his funeral service at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle POOL/AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and Britain's Prince Charles, Prince of Wales pose alongside the tree which they planted to mark the start of the official planting season for the Queen's Green Canopy (QGC) at the Balmoral Cricket Pavilion, Balmoral Estate in Scotland POOL/AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Britain's Queen Elizabeth II cuts a cake to celebrate the start of the Platinum Jubilee during a reception in the Ballroom of Sandringham House, the Queen's Norfolk residence on February 5, 2022. - Queen Elizabeth II on Sunday will became the first British monarch to reign for seven decades, in a bittersweet landmark as she also marked the 70th anniversary of her father's death AFP/Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II arrives in Westminster Abbey accompanied by Prince Andrew, Duke of York for the Service Of Thanksgiving For The Duke Of Edinburgh on March 29, 2022 in London Getty She said: "This is a celebration, I live nearby in Langley, and it's almost as if it's a family event - we get to come along and be part of the party." Ms Lovell, dressed head to toe in a union flag outfit, said: "She's phenomenal, she ageless and timeless. She's such a role model to all of us and her energy and enthusiasm for the work she does is an inspiration." Nearby were sisters Judy and Anne Daley, from Cardiff, who were each holding a balloon that formed the number 90. Judy, 50, a civilian police worker, said: "The Queen's just remarkable, a very formidable lady, and certainly the one we all look up to. "She's remarkable for her age and her dedication to duty, day in and day out - just a wonderful, wonderful lady." Press Association Sign up to the Independent Climate email for the latest advice on saving the planet Get our free Climate email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Independent Climate email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Leaders of 160 countries are about to sign one of the most important agreements for the future of the Earth. The Paris Agreement, agreed late last year, is to be signed on Earth Day the biggest civic event in the world and a celebration of the planet. The signing ceremony in New York will be the biggest signing of an agreement in history, according to the UN, and never before have so many countries been present on the first day of an agreement. Paris climate talks in pictures Show all 12 1 /12 Paris climate talks in pictures Paris climate talks in pictures A man is covered with a multi-coloured banner with the message, "Climate" as environmentalists attend a demonstration near the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, during the World Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21) that meets in Le Bourget, December 12, 2015 Reuters Paris climate talks in pictures French President Francois Hollande (C) and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius (R) applaud after a statement at the COP21 Climate Conference in Le Bourget, north of Paris, on December 12, 2015. The years-long quest for a universal pact to avert catastrophic climate change neared the finish line today with conference host France announcing that the final draft had been completed in the early hours of the morning. Getty Paris climate talks in pictures US Secretary of State John Kerry (C) speaks with China's Special Representative on Climate Change Xie Zhenhua (R) and officials at the COP21 Climate Conference in Le Bourget, north of Paris, on December 12, 2015. The years-long quest for a universal pact to avert catastrophic climate change neared the finish line today with conference host France announcing that the final draft had been completed in the early hours of the morning. Getty Paris climate talks in pictures Delegates and members of NGO's read and work on copies of 'The adoption of the Paris agreement' is pictured after the announcement of the final draft by French Foreign Affairs minister Laurent Fabius at the COP21 Climate Conference in Le Bourget, north of Paris, on December 12, 2015. The years-long quest for a universal pact to avert catastrophic climate change neared the finish line with conference host France announcing that the final draft had been completed in the early hours of the morning Getty Paris climate talks in pictures UN climate chief Christiana Figueres (C) speaks with French President Francois Hollande (L), United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon (2ndL) and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius (R) after a statement at the COP21 Climate Conference in Le Bourget, north of Paris, on December 12, 2015. The years-long quest for a universal pact to avert catastrophic climate change neared the finish line today with conference host France announcing that the final draft had been completed in the early hours of the morning Getty Paris climate talks in pictures A Swiss Dominican priest poses with activists dressed as polar bears as activists gather for a demonstration to form a giant red line at the Avenue de la Grande armee boulevard in Paris on December 12, 2015, as a proposed 195-nation accord to curb emissions of the heat-trapping gases that threaten to wreak havoc on Earth's climate system is to be presented at the United Nations conference on climate change COP21 in Le Bourget, on the outskirts of Paris. Getty Paris climate talks in pictures Activists hold up a giant banner reading 'Climate justice' by association 'ourpowercampaign' during a demonstration near the Arc de Triomphe at the Avenue de la Grande armee boulevard in Paris on December 12, 2015, as a proposed 195-nation accord to curb emissions of the heat-trapping gases that threaten to wreak havoc on Earth's climate system is to be presented at the United Nations conference on climate change COP21 in Le Bourget, on the outskirts of Paris. Getty Paris climate talks in pictures Representatives of indigenous peoples demonstrate in Paris, France, as the World Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21) continues at Le Bourget, December 12, 2015. Reuters Paris climate talks in pictures Environmentalists demonstrate near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France, as the World Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21) continues at Le Bourget, December 12, 2015. Reuters Paris climate talks in pictures Environmentalists demonstrate near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France, as the World Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21) continues at Le Bourget, December 12, 2015. Reuters Paris climate talks in pictures Activists form a giant red line during a demonstration on the Avenue de la Grande armee boulevard in Paris on December 12, 2015, as a proposed 195-nation accord to curb emissions of the heat-trapping gases that threaten to wreak havoc on Earth's climate system is to be presented at the United Nations conference on climate change COP21 in Le Bourget, on the outskirts of Paris ALAIN JOCARD/AFP/Getty Images Paris climate talks in pictures The slogan "No Plan B" is projected on the Eiffel Tower as part of the World Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21) in Paris, France, December 11, 2015. Reuters The huge support for the pact could help speed up the deal, making it effective long before the 2020 deadline. It might even be able to come into effect by the end of this year, depending on the speed that it can be agreed upon through countrys domestic procedures. The US and China which together make up 40 per cent of global emissions have committed to join the agreement this year. "We are within striking distance of having the agreement start years earlier than anyone anticipated," Brian Deese, an adviser to President Barack Obama, said in a speech last week at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. It needs 55 countries, representing 55 per cent of emissions, to agree to it before it will come into effect. Leaders hope that will be possible soon. Climate change wreaks havoc on India's tea industry "There's incredible momentum," former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, who heads the U.N. Development Program, told The Associated Press. "We're moving as quickly as possible to action." Countries are already working together to push forward on the deal, meaning that the agreement could be ready to come in soon. The Paris Agreement contains a range of measures that are meant to counteract the damage climate change is doing to the planet (see below). When it was signed late last year it was heralded as a spectacular success, and the end of a long period of stagnation in climate negotiations. Recommended Read more Nasa calls out climate change deniers on Facebook But even if countries manage to bring the agreement into effect soon, it may not be enough. Scientists say that the measures in the document might not be enough to keep temperatures below the 2 degrees Celsius limit that, if breached, could cause huge damage across the world. "Even if the Paris pledges are implemented in full, they are not enough to get us even close to a 2-degree pathway," said John Sterman, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "I don't think people understand how urgent it is. Even if the pledges in the agreement are upheld, the world could be on track to rise as much as 3.5 degrees C, according to some analyses. For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} A plot to keep Queen Elizabeths father from becoming king has been revealed in previously unseen Cabinet papers. As the monarch celebrates her 90th birthday, The Times reports that, had the document been acted upon, the Queen would be no more than a fringe royal today. The note written by a civil servant before the abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936 proposed that instead of putting the Kings youngest brother, Bertie, on the throne, their mother Queen Mary should have instead ruled as regent. According to the newspaper, it was hoped that Prince George, Duke of Kent, would later become king. King Edward VIII abdicated in 1936 to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson (Getty Images) Queen Elizabeth would most likely now be known as the Duchess of Edinburgh if the recommendation had been followed, The Times reports. It said the proposal was the establishments Plan B to save the royal family for generations to come. At the heart of the intrigue were Sir Horace Wilson, a freelance adviser to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, and the first parliamentary counsel, Sir Maurice Gwyer. While the then King Edward was still considering whether to give up the throne in order to marry his American lover Wallis Simpson, his brother Bertie was already being prepared for the job in a number of meetings with Baldwin. Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Show all 62 1 /62 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II on a walk-about in Portsmouth during her Silver Jubilee tour of Great Britain, 1977 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The future Britain's Queen Elizabeth II (R) pictured with her younger sister Princess Margaret (L) in 1933 AFP/Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The 9-year-old Elizabeth attends an aristocratic wedding with her mother and younger sister. Later in that year with the death of her Grandfather and the Abdication of her Uncle Edward VIII she became first in line to the throne, 1936 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The coronation of King George VI in 1937, Elizabeth aged 10 became the heir apparent to the throne Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Elizabeth and her sister arrive at Waterloo station to say goodbye to their parents as they leave to tour Canada. Elizabeth was thought too young to escort her parents on the tour and was described as "tearful" as they departed. She and her parents made the first ever transatlantic telephone call during their time away, 1939 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The 13-year-old Elizabeth and her sister Margret address children who have been evacuated from the cities on BBC's 'The Chilrens Hour' She said "We are trying to do all we can to help our gallant sailors, soldiers and airmen, and we are trying, too, to bear our share of the danger and sadness of war. We know, every one of us, that in the end all will be well", 1940 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Just before the end of the war Elizabeth took part in training to become an ATS officer. She is pictured learning to change a tire, 1945 AFP/Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The official announcement of Princess Elizabeth and Phillip Mountbatten's engagement. The pairing was incredibly controversial as Prince Phillip had no financial standing and he was foreign born, the prince of Denmark and Greece (though he served Britain in the war and was given British Citizenship), 1947 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II (in coach) and her husband Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh are cheered by the crowd after their wedding ceremony, on 20 November 1947, on their road to Buckingham Palace, London Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Elizabeth smiles at her first child, a month old Prince Charles. Charles was born on 14 November 1948 Corbis Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The couples second child Princess Anne was born in 1950 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Arriving back in England upon hearing the death of her father King George VI. The Kings health had been in decline for a number of years and Elizabeth had been filling in for him on an official visit to Australia by way of Kenya. As his heir Elizabeth became Queen aged 26 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth's coronation took place on 2 June 1953. It was the first ever coronation to be aired live on television, being one of the most watched events in history with millions gathering around their TV sets to see the new monarch Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II standing next to her daughter Princess Anne, 1960 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II President Eisenhower (centre) with the British Royal family (L-R) Prince Philip, Princess Anne, HM Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles and Captain John Eisenhower, at Balmoral Castle, Scotland, 1959 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II as she turns to smile and talk to an unidentified officer, during the Trooping of the Colour by the First Battalion of the Jamaica Regiment at Up-Park Camp, Kingston, Jamaica, 1966 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II walking cross country at the North of Scotland Gun Dog Association Open Stake Retreiver Trials in the grounds of Balmoral Castle in 1967 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II during her visit to the Chelsea Flower Show in London, a regular fixture in the royal calendar, 1971 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh during their traditional summer break at Balmoral Castle. The highland retreat is one of the Queen's favourite places, each year, she heads off to Scotland for the summer. "It is rather nice to hibernate for a bit when one leads such a moveable life," she once said, 1976 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II during a walkabout in Muscat while visiting Oman, 1979 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II with some of her corgis walking the Cross Country course during the second day of the Windsor Horse Trials. The monarch is responsible for introducing a new breed of dog known as the "dorgi" when her corgi Tiny was mated with a dachshund "sausage dog" called Pipkin which belonged to Princess Margaret, 1980 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II (L-R) the Queen Mother, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince William, Prince Harry and the Prince and Princess of Wales after the christening ceremony of Prince Harry, 1984 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II taking the salute of the Household Guards regiments during the Trooping of the Colour ceremony in London, 1985 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Diana, Princess of Wales and Queen Elizabeth II as they smile to well-wishers outside Clarence House in London, 1987 AP Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II, with Chief Instructor, Small Arms Corp LT Col George Harvey, firing the last shot on a standard SA 80 rifle when she attended the centenary of the Army Rifle Association at Bisley, 1993 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II South Africa's President Nelson Mandela greets Queen Elizabeth II as she steps from the royal yacht Britannia in Cape Town at the 1995's official start of the her first visit to the country since 1947 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II smiles as she visits Bowring Park in St. John's, Newfoundland, on the third day of a 10-day official visit to Canada, 1997 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh make their way into St. George's Chapel at Windsor for the annual Garter ceremony, 1999 AFP/Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and Pope John Paul II as they meet at the Vatican, 2000 AP Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and the Queen Mother leaving church by horse drawn carriage on the Sandringham Estate, Norfolk, 2000 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth rides her horse in the grounds of Windsor Castle, 2002 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth arrives for the world premiere of James Bond movie "Casino Royale" at the Odeon cinema in Leicester Square in London, 2006 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth boards a scheduled train at Kings Cross station in London, 2009 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II planting a tree at Newmarket Animal Health Trust, during a royal visit which marked her 50th year as the charity's patron, 2009 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II talking with Pope Benedict XVI during an audience in the Morning Drawing Room at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh during a four day visit by the Pope to the UK, 2010 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II visiting the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 2010 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II receives flowers from the crowd during her visit to Federation Square in downtown Melbourne, 2011 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth watches a preview of her Christmas message wearing a pair of 3D glasses, studded with Swarovski crystals in the form of a "Q", at Buckingham Palace in central London, 2012 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Members of Britain's royal family (front L to R) Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles cheer as competitors participate in a sack race at the Braemar Gathering in Braemar, Scotland, 2012 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Britain's Prince Charles kisses the hand of his mother Queen Elizabeth at the end of her Diamond Jubilee concert in front of Buckingham Palace in London, 2012 Reuters Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge laughs as Queen Elizabeth gestures during a visit to Vernon Park in Nottingham, 2012 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip attend a service for the Order of the British Empire at St Paul's Cathedral in London, 2012 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II meets young people during an official visit to The Shard building in central London, 2013 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Actress Angelina Jolie is presented with the Insignia of an Honorary Dame Grand Cross of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George by Queen Elizabeth II in the 1844 Room at Buckingham Palace, London, 2014 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh visit the Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red evolving art installation at the Tower of London, 2014 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at the State Opening of Parliament, 2015 AFP/Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II (L-R) Britain's Princess Anne, Princess Royal, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge holding his son Prince George of Cambridge, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Harry (back), Prince Andrew, Duke of York (back), James, Viscount Severn (front), Princess Beatrice of York (back), Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Eugenie of York (back) stand on the balcony of Buckingham Palace waiting to view the fly-past during the Queen's Birthday Parade, 'Trooping the Colour,' in London, 2015 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The Trooping of the Colour is an annual celebration marking the Queen's birthday, 2015 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Britain's Queen Elizabeth II stands with Kate the Duchess of Cambridge whilst pushing Princess Charlotte in a pram as they leave after attending the Christening of Britain's Princess Charlotte at St. Mary Magdalene Church in Sandringham, 2015 AP Photo/Matt Dunham, Pool Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II arrives at the Broadway Theatre in Barking, 2015 Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II greets wellwishers during a 'walkabout' on her 90th birthday in Windsor in 2016 AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Members of the Royal Family during trooping of the colour in 2017 AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The Queen waves at Prince Harry and Meghan after their wedding in 2018 POOL/AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex gesture during their visit to the Storyhouse in Chester, Cheshire in 2018 AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Prince Charles reacts as he sits with his mother Britain's Queen Elizabeth II during an event to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings, in Portsmouth in 2019 AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are joined by her mother, Doria Ragland, as they show their new son, Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, to the Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh at Windsor Castle Chris Allerton/Sussex Royal/PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II reacts as she visits the Haig Housing Trust in Morden in 2019 POOL/AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II takes her seat on the The Sovereign's Throne in the House of Lords next to Prince Charles, before reading the Queen's Speech during the State Opening of Parliament in 2019 POOL/AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II looks at the coffin of Britain's Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh during his funeral service at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle POOL/AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and Britain's Prince Charles, Prince of Wales pose alongside the tree which they planted to mark the start of the official planting season for the Queen's Green Canopy (QGC) at the Balmoral Cricket Pavilion, Balmoral Estate in Scotland POOL/AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Britain's Queen Elizabeth II cuts a cake to celebrate the start of the Platinum Jubilee during a reception in the Ballroom of Sandringham House, the Queen's Norfolk residence on February 5, 2022. - Queen Elizabeth II on Sunday will became the first British monarch to reign for seven decades, in a bittersweet landmark as she also marked the 70th anniversary of her father's death AFP/Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II arrives in Westminster Abbey accompanied by Prince Andrew, Duke of York for the Service Of Thanksgiving For The Duke Of Edinburgh on March 29, 2022 in London Getty Gwyer wrote to Wilson, suggesting that Queen Mary should be invited to be Queen Regent. The letter in the National Archives says: The difficulty about the immediate succession of the Duke of York is that a substantial part of the country might still favour the present King and see his brother as a sort of interloper. Queen Mary as Regent would re-establish the reputation of the monarchy. The Duke of York could scarcely object and all the Kings subjects would only rejoice to see Queen Mary carrying on again. The document reflects concerns held at the time doubting Bertie's ability to be King. He was depicted by Colin Firth in the film The King's Speech and died in 1952, 16 years after ascending to the throne, leaving his daughter Elizabeth queen aged 25. Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Morning Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} The government scheme to take in up to 3,000 refugee children has been dismissed as not good enough after it emerged it will do nothing to help the hundreds of thousands stuck in camps across Europe. The Home Office announced details of the programme that will see the most vulnerable young asylum seekers resettled on Thursday, days before a separate proposal was due to be considered in the House of Commons. Refugees who have already risked their lives to reach Europe are excluded from the plan, which applies only to those currently living in the Middle East and North Africa. The limitation has provoked outrage from MPs and charities who have been campaigning for months for the UK to take in children trapped in detention centres and camps as Europes borders remain closed. Refugee crisis: Unaccompanied minors vulnerable in Greece An amendment to the Immigration Bill to let 3,000 refugee children who have reached the continent come to Britain was adopted in the House of Lords last month and will be considered by the House of Commons on Monday. Lord Dubs, who came to the UK as a child refugee on the Kindertransport, said the measure was needed to save children from exploitation and abuse. He said he welcomed the proposals on Thursday but would continue to press the Government for action on his amendment as they did not "deal sufficiently" with the issues highlighted. You also have to wonder whether the use of the 3,000 figure is a deliberate ploy to muddy the debate," Lord Dubs added. Yvette Cooper, chair of Labour's Refugee Taskforce, called for MPs to support his amendment regardless of the Home Offices announcement. The Government statement today has nothing new to help lone child refugees in Europe, she said. It is under pressure before the vote on Monday. She was among the signatories to a letter backed by the Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron and Tory Heidi Allen, among others, calling on David Cameron to help unaccompanied children. This is not good enough, Mr Farron said, dismissing the announcement as "pure calculation" ahead of Monday's vote. Refugees arrive at the Moria camp, where Pakistani men are hunger striking in protest at the threat of deportation (AP) It is a blatant attempt to buy off compassionate Tory MPs in a desperate last-ditch effort to avoid a Government defeat next week, he added. Our resolve on Monday will not be weakened. Parliament's International Development Committee (IDC) recommended the resettlement of 3,000 child refugees from within Europe earlier this year, following warnings from humanitarian organisations that thousands of unaccompanied children were left vulnerable to exploitation and violence while living in appalling conditions. Save the Children said the figure would represent Britains fair share of more than 95,000 children estimated to have entered Europe as asylum seekers. Steven McIntosh, head of government relations at the charity, told The Independent the Governments plan fell far short of what was needed for children stranded across Europe. The number of children who have reached Europe is far larger than previously estimated and they are facing an even more hostile environment, he said. Many are sleeping rough, or in detention centres and dirty police cells. Refugee crisis - in pictures Show all 27 1 /27 Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugee crisis - in pictures A child looks through the fence at the Moria detention camp for migrants and refugees at the island of Lesbos on May 24, 2016. AFP/Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Ahmad Zarour, 32, from Syria, reacts after his rescue by MOAS (Migrant Offshore Aid Station) while attempting to reach the Greek island of Agathonisi, Dodecanese, southeastern Agean Sea Refugee crisis - in pictures Syrian migrants holding life vests gather onto a pebble beach in the Yesil liman district of Canakkale, northwestern Turkey, after being stopped by Turkish police in their attempt to reach the Greek island of Lesbos on 29 January 2016. Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees flash the 'V for victory' sign during a demonstration as they block the Greek-Macedonian border Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants have been braving sub zero temperatures as they cross the border from Macedonia into Serbia. Refugee crisis - in pictures A sinking boat is seen behind a Turkish gendarme off the coast of Canakkale's Bademli district on January 30, 2016. At least 33 migrants drowned on January 30 when their boat sank in the Aegean Sea while trying to cross from Turkey to Greece. Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A general view of a shelter for migrants inside a hangar of the former Tempelhof airport in Berlin, Germany Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees protest behind a fence against restrictions limiting passage at the Greek-Macedonian border, near Gevgelija. Since last week, Macedonia has restricted passage to northern Europe to only Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans who are considered war refugees. All other nationalities are deemed economic migrants and told to turn back. Macedonia has finished building a fence on its frontier with Greece becoming the latest country in Europe to build a border barrier aimed at checking the flow of refugees Refugee crisis - in pictures A father and his child wait after being caught by Turkish gendarme on 27 January 2016 at Canakkale's Kucukkuyu district Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants make hand signals as they arrive into the southern Spanish port of Malaga on 27 January, 2016 after an inflatable boat carrying 55 Africans, seven of them women and six chidren, was rescued by the Spanish coast guard off the Spanish coast. Refugee crisis - in pictures A refugee holds two children as dozens arrive on an overcrowded boat on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugee crisis - in pictures A child, covered by emergency blankets, reacts as she arrives, with other refugees and migrants, on the Greek island of Lesbos, At least five migrants including three children, died after four boats sank between Turkey and Greece, as rescue workers searched the sea for dozens more, the Greek coastguard said Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants wait under outside the Moria registration camp on the Lesbos. Over 400,000 people have landed on Greek islands from neighbouring Turkey since the beginning of the year Refugee crisis - in pictures The bodies of Christian refugees are buried separately from Muslim refugees at the Agios Panteleimonas cemetery in Mytilene, Lesbos Refugee crisis - in pictures Macedonian police officers control a crowd of refugees as they prepare to enter a camp after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A refugee tries to force the entry to a camp as Macedonian police officers control a crowd after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees are seen aboard a Turkish fishing boat as they arrive on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing a part of the Aegean Sea from the Turkish coast to Lesbos Reuters Refugee crisis - in pictures An elderly woman sings a lullaby to baby on a beach after arriving with other refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A man collapses as refugees make land from an overloaded rubber dinghy after crossing the Aegean see from Turkey, at the island of Lesbos EPA Refugee crisis - in pictures A girl reacts as refugees arrive by boat on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees make a show of hands as they queue after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures People help a wheelchair user board a train with others, heading towards Serbia, at the transit camp for refugees near the southern Macedonian town of Gevgelija AP Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees board a train, after crossing the Greek-Macedonian border, near Gevgelija. Macedonia is a key transit country in the Balkans migration route into the EU, with thousands of asylum seekers - many of them from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia - entering the country every day Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures An aerial picture shows the "New Jungle" refugee camp where some 3,500 people live while they attempt to enter Britain, near the port of Calais, northern France Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A Syrian girl reacts as she helped by a volunteer upon her arrival from Turkey on the Greek island of Lesbos, after having crossed the Aegean Sea EPA Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees arrive by boat on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Beds ready for use for migrants and refugees are prepared at a processing center on January 27, 2016 in Passau, Germany. The flow of migrants arriving in Passau has dropped to between 500 and 1,000 per day, down significantly from last November, when in the same region up to 6,000 migrants were arriving daily. The Government needs to do more to respond to the huge suffering of refugee children in Europe. Help Refugees, a charity working with asylum seekers in Calais, also voiced its disappointment. This is not enough for us, the group said in a statement, calling on MPs to continue support for the Dubs amendment. We have a moral duty to offer sanctuary and protection to these children and offer them a real chance at life, a spokesperson added. Its own census has revealed that at least 129 unaccompanied minors have gone missing since French authorities started destroying parts of the Jungle camp. The Refugee Council said the latest plan was not good enough when borders remain closed to refugees and drownings continue in the Mediterranean and Aegean seas. A refugee camp near the Syrian-Turkish border (AFP/Getty) Maurice Wren, the charity's chief executive, said: This announcement is life-changing, if not life-saving news for the small group of children and their families who will benefit. However, its also grim news for the majority of other refugees who are desperately trying to escape conflict and persecution who the Government is try to contain in Turkey and other, poorer countries. Its not good enough to offer a lifeline to one group of refugees while colluding to close off the escape routes of everyone else -all refugees need to be able to reach a place of safety. The Government hailed its latest programme, which comes on top of a previous pledge to welcome 20,000 Syrians, as one of the world's largest resettlement programme for children. A spokesperson for the Home Office said the new scheme would see at risk children from camps in the Middle East and North Africa selected based on advice from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Children at Lesbos' Moria camp, which is guarded by police. Since the deal refugees are picked up by the coastguard and taken to the site (Nur Photo) Several hundred children are due to be resettled over the next year, with the upper threshold of 3,000 due to be reached by the next general election in 2020. Unaccompanied children are expected to be targeted but the figure includes adult relatives of some accompanied minors, who the Home Office said would be chosen in cases where the UNHCR deems resettlement is in the best interests of the child. Unlike previous British and European initiatives, the scheme is open to refugees of all nationalities, but it excludes those who have already reached Europe. The inclusion of refugee camps in North Africa is notable, as the region is the departure point for refugees fleeing war and persecution in Nigeria, Gambia, Senegal, Mali and other African nations who have been excluded by previous programmes. Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, the UNHCRs representative to the UK, welcomed the programme, which comes as refugees continue to be detained and deported from Greece, where the British Government is supporting the controversial EU-Turkey migration agreement. Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Morning Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Claims an undercover officer set fire to a high street department store while infiltrating animal rights campaigners are being investigated by the police. The Metropolitan Police announced on Wednesday it was reopening its investigation into the planting of an incendiary device in Debenhams in Harrow in July, 1987, causing 340,000 damage. The renewed investigation will pursue a number of lines of enquiry, including potential advances in DNA technique, new information and claims made in Parliament by Green MP Caroline Lucas. 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. The PoliNations programme aims to explore how migration and cross-pollination have shaped the UKs gardens and culture PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2022 Undergraduates at the University of St Andrews take part in the traditional Pier Walk along the harbour walls of St Andrews before the start of the new academic year PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2022 The Massed Pipes and Drums parade during the Braemar Highland Gathering at the Princess Royal and Duke of Fife Memorial Park PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2022 Number 12 Company Irish Guards at Wellington Barracks, central London, before commencing their first Guard Mount at Buckingham Palace PA In 2012, Ms Lucas used parliamentary privilege to name Mr Lambert as the undercover officer who had pretended to be a radical protester for five years. She referred to allegations Mr Lambert had been part of a plot with two animal rights activists to set fire to three branches of Debenhams in protest against the sale of fur. Andrew Clarke and Geoff Sheppard, who were jailed for planting devices at the Romford and Luton stores, launched appeals against their convictions in 2014, on the grounds an undercover officer had been involved in their case. Robert Lambert, then in the Muslim Contact Unit Metropolitan Police in London speaks during an anti terror Conference in Copenhagen, 26 April 2007. (AFP/Getty Images) Mr Lambert denies planting the incendiary device. A public inquiry into undercover policing in England and Wales is now under way, chaired by Lord Justice Pitchford. It was announced by Home Secretary Theresa May in 2015 after a series of claims about the secretive Special Demonstration Squad. While under cover in the 1980s, Mr Lambert fathered a child with an activist then abandoned her when his mission ended. The woman, identified only as Jacqui, required psychiatric treatment and considered suicide after discovering the identity of her child's father. Officers from the SDS used the identities of dead children as cover, and several had relationships with women who did not know their true identity, even fathering children. So far Scotland Yard has made payouts to eight women who unwittingly became involved in relationships with the officers. Additional reporting by PA Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Morning Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} When Her Majesty turns 90, not even The Independent with its dubious tendency towards indifference bordering on republicanism - wants to miss the Queens Right Royal Birthday Walkabout. So we mingled with the crowds outside Windsor Castle. This is what we saw. John Loughrey, 61, from Wansworth, south London (With his toy British Bulldog Windsor) (Adam Lusher) Im known as Princess Diana Superfan. I was the first one in the crowd for her wedding, camped out for four days. I was at the inquest. Im mentioned in the court transcripts. The judge told the members of the jury: Only you and I, and the gentleman with Diana and Dodi written on his forehead have been here for every word of evidence. I camped out two weeks for the birth of Princess Charlotte, eight days for Prince George. I was the first one here too. I have been here since Monday 4pm I got here early to avoid the rush. Three nights sleeping on the benches: I was absolutely frozen. I brought this 140 sleeping bag, and the first time I went to get in it, the zip came off in my hand. It became an open plan sleeping bag. But I carried on, because I was thinking of celebrating the Queens 90th birthday. Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, President Obama, shes better than all of them: because shes got the knowledge. Not just 90 years of knowledge, 2,000 years of knowledge. Its handed down from monarch to monarch. And our kings and queens go back 2,000 years, to before 1066, to the first queen what was her name? Boudicea. Anyone who reads that will see it makes sense. Margaret Tyler, 72, a retired receptionist, from Wembley, north London (Adam Lusher) Ive got 10,000 items of Royal memorabilia, in four rooms including the Royal Bedroom, which is all red, white and blue. People can stay there. I run a little B and B. We stay up half the night talking about the Royal Family, and then they can go off to sleep in the Royal bedroom. Theres also the Jubilee Room, for the Queens jubilees Silver, Gold and Diamond. I got here [for the noon walkabout] at 7am. I would have crawled here if necessary. Shes a star. We dont see everything the Royal Family does. The Queen works all the time, hosting all those dinners for people from abroad, with her charm and grace. Theres no-one else who could host those dinners! Were calling the Corgi on the sponge cake Susan, after the Queens first corgi. I just want her to have it, to thank her. For everything. It doesnt seem enough really she works so hard - but its something. Terry Hutt, 81, a retired carpenter from Weston-super-Mare, Somerset (Adam Lusher) I cant afford a hotel, so I arrived at 5pm on Monday and slept on the benches. I have supported the Royal Family since I was four years old. We were bombed out of our home on the Holloway Road, north London, in the Blitz. The [then] King and Queen came round to reassure us that they werent leaving the country. Thats how I got in with the Royal Family. The Queen has never put a foot wrong. She brings a lot of people happiness. She is loyal. She gives a lot of support. I hope to be there for her 100th birthday. Bruce Simpson, 54, a gardener, from East Horsley, Surrey (Adam Lusher) One of the big reasons I am here is because she sent my late grandfather Frank a card on his 100th birthday, and his 105th. Oh, he was absolutely thrilled and delighted. It was a tremendous honour. So the least I could do was to come here in person and wish her a happy 90th birthday. It would be amazing to meet her today. Shes an amazing lady. Shes served our country for 64 years. She is the mother and grandmother of the nation. I think there is a great affection towards her from the people. Shes up there with Mandela and Ghandi, and maybe because I am a proud Englishman I would say she surpasses them. But I am a bit biased. Tony Appleton, 80, Chelmsford Town Crier (attending in an unofficial capacity) (Adam Lusher) Ive made up a little song for her: Ninety, 90, 90 years old today, Our most loved monarch, We wish you a happy birthday Oh yea! Oh yea! Oh yea! I was a Gunner in the Navy. I met her, after the Coronation in 1953, as part of the Spithead Review. She inspected us on the training ship Implacable. I was 17. Oh, can you imagine! A boy sailor meeting the Queen! Shes an icon for this country; an icon we can look up to and respect. I call her a world leader. Internationally, shes the top. Judy Daley, 50, from Cardiff, with King Charles Spaniel Camilla, seven (Adam Lusher) Yes, Camilla has met the Camilla, at the Welsh Assembly five years ago. The Duchess of Cornwall was awfully kind to us, lovely, charming. We got a lovely photograph of Camilla and Camilla meeting. It was on Have I Got News For You. I wouldnt have missed this for the world. My sister Anne, Camilla and I left Cardiff at 3am this morning and arrived at about 5am. Its just going to be a wonderful day, enjoying the celebration. Its just wonderful to see the Queen and the Guardsmen. Our father was in the Irish Guards. The Queen is a remarkable, formidable lady and one I admire greatly: shes an absolutely top leader. Everybody knows our Queen. Chito Salarza-Grant, 51, an artist from Battersea Park, London (Adam Lusher) I am the hat man of London. I spent a week making this hat. Its got happy birthday in lights, her stamps and of course! - a corgi on the front. There is no queen like her in the world. She is the longest reigning, she eclipses every other monarch. Her nearest rival is her great-great grandmother, Queen Victoria. I like her. Shes part of our daily life. God Save the Queen! [Later, after waiting two hours to see the Queen.] Did you see her?! I didnt see her. The crowd was too big. But it doesnt matter. Its the thought that counts. Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Morning Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} David Cameron has led tributes to the Queen on her 90th birthday, as traditional gun salutes were held across the UK to mark the occasion. Members of the public were expected to sing Happy Birthday to the Queen as she took part in a walkabout close to her Windsor Castle home. And in the evening the night sky over her Berkshire home will be lit up by a beacon, started by the Queen, the first in a chain of more than 1,000 that will spread across the country and Commonwealth. The Prince of Wales is understood to be making a speech in tribute to his mother at the night-time event. Speaking in a special House of Commons "debate", the Prime Minister told MPs: Throughout it all, as the sands of culture shift and the tides of politics ebb and flow, Her Majesty has been steadfast - a rock of strength for our nation, for our Commonwealth and on many occasions for the whole world. An official photograph, released by Buckingham Palace to mark her 90th birthday, shows Queen Elizabeth II with her five great-grandchildren and her two youngest grandchildren at Windsor Castle (PA) The birthday has been marked by the release of a photo of the Queen surrounded by her five great-grandchildren - including Prince George and Princess Charlotte - and her two youngest grandchildren. The image is one of three taken by the American celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. One unusual tribute will see the Houses of Parliament lit up red, white and blue in honour of the Queen's milestone. Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Show all 62 1 /62 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II on a walk-about in Portsmouth during her Silver Jubilee tour of Great Britain, 1977 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The future Britain's Queen Elizabeth II (R) pictured with her younger sister Princess Margaret (L) in 1933 AFP/Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The 9-year-old Elizabeth attends an aristocratic wedding with her mother and younger sister. Later in that year with the death of her Grandfather and the Abdication of her Uncle Edward VIII she became first in line to the throne, 1936 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The coronation of King George VI in 1937, Elizabeth aged 10 became the heir apparent to the throne Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Elizabeth and her sister arrive at Waterloo station to say goodbye to their parents as they leave to tour Canada. Elizabeth was thought too young to escort her parents on the tour and was described as "tearful" as they departed. She and her parents made the first ever transatlantic telephone call during their time away, 1939 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The 13-year-old Elizabeth and her sister Margret address children who have been evacuated from the cities on BBC's 'The Chilrens Hour' She said "We are trying to do all we can to help our gallant sailors, soldiers and airmen, and we are trying, too, to bear our share of the danger and sadness of war. We know, every one of us, that in the end all will be well", 1940 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Just before the end of the war Elizabeth took part in training to become an ATS officer. She is pictured learning to change a tire, 1945 AFP/Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The official announcement of Princess Elizabeth and Phillip Mountbatten's engagement. The pairing was incredibly controversial as Prince Phillip had no financial standing and he was foreign born, the prince of Denmark and Greece (though he served Britain in the war and was given British Citizenship), 1947 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II (in coach) and her husband Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh are cheered by the crowd after their wedding ceremony, on 20 November 1947, on their road to Buckingham Palace, London Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Elizabeth smiles at her first child, a month old Prince Charles. Charles was born on 14 November 1948 Corbis Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The couples second child Princess Anne was born in 1950 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Arriving back in England upon hearing the death of her father King George VI. The Kings health had been in decline for a number of years and Elizabeth had been filling in for him on an official visit to Australia by way of Kenya. As his heir Elizabeth became Queen aged 26 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth's coronation took place on 2 June 1953. It was the first ever coronation to be aired live on television, being one of the most watched events in history with millions gathering around their TV sets to see the new monarch Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II standing next to her daughter Princess Anne, 1960 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II President Eisenhower (centre) with the British Royal family (L-R) Prince Philip, Princess Anne, HM Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles and Captain John Eisenhower, at Balmoral Castle, Scotland, 1959 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II as she turns to smile and talk to an unidentified officer, during the Trooping of the Colour by the First Battalion of the Jamaica Regiment at Up-Park Camp, Kingston, Jamaica, 1966 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II walking cross country at the North of Scotland Gun Dog Association Open Stake Retreiver Trials in the grounds of Balmoral Castle in 1967 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II during her visit to the Chelsea Flower Show in London, a regular fixture in the royal calendar, 1971 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh during their traditional summer break at Balmoral Castle. The highland retreat is one of the Queen's favourite places, each year, she heads off to Scotland for the summer. "It is rather nice to hibernate for a bit when one leads such a moveable life," she once said, 1976 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II during a walkabout in Muscat while visiting Oman, 1979 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II with some of her corgis walking the Cross Country course during the second day of the Windsor Horse Trials. The monarch is responsible for introducing a new breed of dog known as the "dorgi" when her corgi Tiny was mated with a dachshund "sausage dog" called Pipkin which belonged to Princess Margaret, 1980 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II (L-R) the Queen Mother, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince William, Prince Harry and the Prince and Princess of Wales after the christening ceremony of Prince Harry, 1984 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II taking the salute of the Household Guards regiments during the Trooping of the Colour ceremony in London, 1985 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Diana, Princess of Wales and Queen Elizabeth II as they smile to well-wishers outside Clarence House in London, 1987 AP Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II, with Chief Instructor, Small Arms Corp LT Col George Harvey, firing the last shot on a standard SA 80 rifle when she attended the centenary of the Army Rifle Association at Bisley, 1993 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II South Africa's President Nelson Mandela greets Queen Elizabeth II as she steps from the royal yacht Britannia in Cape Town at the 1995's official start of the her first visit to the country since 1947 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II smiles as she visits Bowring Park in St. John's, Newfoundland, on the third day of a 10-day official visit to Canada, 1997 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh make their way into St. George's Chapel at Windsor for the annual Garter ceremony, 1999 AFP/Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and Pope John Paul II as they meet at the Vatican, 2000 AP Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and the Queen Mother leaving church by horse drawn carriage on the Sandringham Estate, Norfolk, 2000 PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth rides her horse in the grounds of Windsor Castle, 2002 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth arrives for the world premiere of James Bond movie "Casino Royale" at the Odeon cinema in Leicester Square in London, 2006 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth boards a scheduled train at Kings Cross station in London, 2009 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II planting a tree at Newmarket Animal Health Trust, during a royal visit which marked her 50th year as the charity's patron, 2009 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II talking with Pope Benedict XVI during an audience in the Morning Drawing Room at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh during a four day visit by the Pope to the UK, 2010 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II visiting the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 2010 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II receives flowers from the crowd during her visit to Federation Square in downtown Melbourne, 2011 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth watches a preview of her Christmas message wearing a pair of 3D glasses, studded with Swarovski crystals in the form of a "Q", at Buckingham Palace in central London, 2012 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Members of Britain's royal family (front L to R) Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles cheer as competitors participate in a sack race at the Braemar Gathering in Braemar, Scotland, 2012 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Britain's Prince Charles kisses the hand of his mother Queen Elizabeth at the end of her Diamond Jubilee concert in front of Buckingham Palace in London, 2012 Reuters Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge laughs as Queen Elizabeth gestures during a visit to Vernon Park in Nottingham, 2012 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip attend a service for the Order of the British Empire at St Paul's Cathedral in London, 2012 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II meets young people during an official visit to The Shard building in central London, 2013 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Actress Angelina Jolie is presented with the Insignia of an Honorary Dame Grand Cross of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George by Queen Elizabeth II in the 1844 Room at Buckingham Palace, London, 2014 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh visit the Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red evolving art installation at the Tower of London, 2014 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at the State Opening of Parliament, 2015 AFP/Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II (L-R) Britain's Princess Anne, Princess Royal, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge holding his son Prince George of Cambridge, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Harry (back), Prince Andrew, Duke of York (back), James, Viscount Severn (front), Princess Beatrice of York (back), Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Eugenie of York (back) stand on the balcony of Buckingham Palace waiting to view the fly-past during the Queen's Birthday Parade, 'Trooping the Colour,' in London, 2015 Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The Trooping of the Colour is an annual celebration marking the Queen's birthday, 2015 Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Britain's Queen Elizabeth II stands with Kate the Duchess of Cambridge whilst pushing Princess Charlotte in a pram as they leave after attending the Christening of Britain's Princess Charlotte at St. Mary Magdalene Church in Sandringham, 2015 AP Photo/Matt Dunham, Pool Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II arrives at the Broadway Theatre in Barking, 2015 Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II greets wellwishers during a 'walkabout' on her 90th birthday in Windsor in 2016 AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Members of the Royal Family during trooping of the colour in 2017 AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The Queen waves at Prince Harry and Meghan after their wedding in 2018 POOL/AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex gesture during their visit to the Storyhouse in Chester, Cheshire in 2018 AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Prince Charles reacts as he sits with his mother Britain's Queen Elizabeth II during an event to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings, in Portsmouth in 2019 AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are joined by her mother, Doria Ragland, as they show their new son, Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, to the Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh at Windsor Castle Chris Allerton/Sussex Royal/PA Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II reacts as she visits the Haig Housing Trust in Morden in 2019 POOL/AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II takes her seat on the The Sovereign's Throne in the House of Lords next to Prince Charles, before reading the Queen's Speech during the State Opening of Parliament in 2019 POOL/AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II looks at the coffin of Britain's Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh during his funeral service at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle POOL/AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II and Britain's Prince Charles, Prince of Wales pose alongside the tree which they planted to mark the start of the official planting season for the Queen's Green Canopy (QGC) at the Balmoral Cricket Pavilion, Balmoral Estate in Scotland POOL/AFP via Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Britain's Queen Elizabeth II cuts a cake to celebrate the start of the Platinum Jubilee during a reception in the Ballroom of Sandringham House, the Queen's Norfolk residence on February 5, 2022. - Queen Elizabeth II on Sunday will became the first British monarch to reign for seven decades, in a bittersweet landmark as she also marked the 70th anniversary of her father's death AFP/Getty Queen Elizabeth II: Life in pictures Queen Elizabeth II Queen Elizabeth II arrives in Westminster Abbey accompanied by Prince Andrew, Duke of York for the Service Of Thanksgiving For The Duke Of Edinburgh on March 29, 2022 in London Getty The next day, on 22 April, the Queen will have lunch at Windsor Castle with the US President Barak Obama. In May, a four-night celebration in the grounds of the castle will be held. Tickets sold out within hours for the 25,000-seater event from 12 May to 15 May. And it will happen all over again around 11 June, the Queens official birthday, with a national service of thanksgiving at St Pauls Cathedral and the Trooping the Colour in Horse Guards Parade. Additional reporting by agencies Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Morning Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Offshore companies could be banned from owning property in the UK if they fail to reveal their owners under new Government proposals to crack down on money laundering and tax evasion. Plans to unmask the beneficiaries of offshore shell companies, which can be used by criminals to hide illegally-obtained money, will be unveiled by David Cameron at an international anti-corruption summit in London next month. While owning property via an offshore company is not illegal, it allows the real owners to evade detection because only the companys name must appear on public registers. A Government consultation document published ahead of next month's summit warns that property in the UK can provide a convenient vehicle for hiding the proceeds of crime. The high values of property in London in particular presents an opportunity for criminals to launder considerable sums of money, it adds. More than 36,000 properties in London alone are owned through anonymous companies. The total value of property in the UK owned by offshore firms is estimated to be as much as 170bn. What are The Panama Papers? The new proposals would see such companies revealing people with significant control over their operations on a register, which is expected to be made publicly available, The Times reported. Only those foreign companies listed on the register would be allowed to buy and sell property in the UK. However, it is not yet clear whether new rules would apply to around 100,000 offshore companies that already have property in the UK, or only to new purchases. Under separate proposals set out by the Home Office today, suspected money launderers could see cash and property seized if they cannot satisfactorily prove the money was earned legitimately. World leaders linked to 'Panama Papers' Show all 15 1 /15 World leaders linked to 'Panama Papers' World leaders linked to 'Panama Papers' Petro Poroshenko President of Ukraine World leaders linked to 'Panama Papers' Ayad Allawi Allawi Iraqs Vice-President between 2014 and 2015, and the countrys interim prime minister from 2004 to 2005 World leaders linked to 'Panama Papers' Salman bin Abdulaziz bin Abdulrahman Al Saud King of Saudi Arabia World leaders linked to 'Panama Papers' Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan President of the United Arab Emirates, Emir of Abu Dhabi World leaders linked to 'Panama Papers' Sigmundur Davi Gunnlaugsson Prime Minister of Iceland World leaders linked to 'Panama Papers' Sergey Roldugin Close friend of Vladimir Putin World leaders linked to 'Panama Papers' Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani Emir of Qatar 1995-2013 World leaders linked to 'Panama Papers' Li Xiaolin Daughter of Li Peng, the former Premier of China (The current vice-president of state-owned power company China Datang Gorporation and former CEO of China Power International Development, she has been nicknamed Chinas Power Queen World leaders linked to 'Panama Papers' Rami Makhlouf Cousin of Bashar Assad, the President of Syria World leaders linked to 'Panama Papers' Hafez Makhlouf Cousin of Bashar Assad, the President of Syria World leaders linked to 'Panama Papers' Clive Khulubuse Zuma Nephew of Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa World leaders linked to 'Panama Papers' Maryam Nawaz Sharif Safdar Daughter of Nawaz Sharif, prime minister of Pakistan World leaders linked to 'Panama Papers' Hasan Nawaz Sharif Son of Nawaz Sharif, prime minister of Pakistan World leaders linked to 'Panama Papers' Hussain Nawaz Sharif Son of Nawaz Sharif, prime minister of Pakistan World leaders linked to 'Panama Papers' Alaa Mubarak The eldest son of ousted former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak Read more here The Home Secretary Theresa May, will open a consultation on so-called unexplained wealth orders, which are already used in other countries, and would require banks, law firms and accountants to take special measures when dealing companies under suspicion. The crackdown comes in the wake of the Panama Papers revelations and will seen as an attempt by David Cameron to demonstrate how the UK has been at the forefront of global anti-corruption efforts. It coincides with the introduction of new rules which, from June, will require all companies incorporated in the UK will have to list their beneficial owners on a public register. Such registers are seen by transparency campaigners as a vital tool to combat tax avoidance and evasion. However, the Government has faced criticism for failing to impose similarly strict rules on all of the UKs Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories, many of which act as tax havens, and were revealed to be at the heart of the tax avoidance networks uncovered by the Panama Papers. Responding to the new crackdown, Robert Barrington, executive director of Transparency International UK, said: There are some excellent ideas here, but the proof of the pudding will be in whether they are put into action. The powers that are envisaged could make a real difference and, while it is important they are properly debated in parliament to allay any concerns over civil liberties, it is equally important that they are not watered down by self-interested lobbying during the consultation process. We are particularly supportive of unexplained wealth orders, an illicit enrichment offence and reform of the anit-money laundering supervisory regime. But lets not forget that one of the fundamental changes we need to tackle money laundering is for public registers of beneficial ownership in the Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories, which the Government has yet to deliver. And while the mood music is positive, giving the law enforcement agencies sufficient resources will be a fundamental part of making this work. Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Morning Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} The UK is to take in up to 3,000 more child refugees after months of calls to help the youngest and most vulnerable migrants risking their lives to reach safety. The Government hailed the programme, which will come on top of a previous pledge to welcome 20,000 Syrians, as one of the world's largest resettlement programme for children on Thursday. A spokesperson for the Home Office said the new scheme would see at risk children from the Middle East and North Africa selected based on advice from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Refugee crisis: Unaccompanied minors vulnerable in Greece Several hundred children are due to be resettled over the next year, with the upper threshold of 3,000 due to be reached by the next general election in 2020. Unaccompanied children are expected to be targeted but the figure includes adult relatives of some accompanied minors, who the Home Office said would be chosen in cases where the UNHCR deems resettlement is in the best interests of the child. On the UNHCRs recommendation, the scheme will not solely target unaccompanied children, but will also extend to vulnerable children at risk, such as those threatened with child labour, child marriage and other forms of abuse or exploitation, a spokesperson said. Unlike previous British and European initiatives, the scheme is open to refugees of all nationalities, but it excludes those who have already reached Europe. The caveat will come as a disappointment to charities and MPs who have been campaigning for months for the UK to take in children who have already risked their lives in boat crossings to reach the continent. Refugee crisis - in pictures Show all 27 1 /27 Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugee crisis - in pictures A child looks through the fence at the Moria detention camp for migrants and refugees at the island of Lesbos on May 24, 2016. AFP/Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Ahmad Zarour, 32, from Syria, reacts after his rescue by MOAS (Migrant Offshore Aid Station) while attempting to reach the Greek island of Agathonisi, Dodecanese, southeastern Agean Sea Refugee crisis - in pictures Syrian migrants holding life vests gather onto a pebble beach in the Yesil liman district of Canakkale, northwestern Turkey, after being stopped by Turkish police in their attempt to reach the Greek island of Lesbos on 29 January 2016. Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees flash the 'V for victory' sign during a demonstration as they block the Greek-Macedonian border Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants have been braving sub zero temperatures as they cross the border from Macedonia into Serbia. Refugee crisis - in pictures A sinking boat is seen behind a Turkish gendarme off the coast of Canakkale's Bademli district on January 30, 2016. At least 33 migrants drowned on January 30 when their boat sank in the Aegean Sea while trying to cross from Turkey to Greece. Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A general view of a shelter for migrants inside a hangar of the former Tempelhof airport in Berlin, Germany Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees protest behind a fence against restrictions limiting passage at the Greek-Macedonian border, near Gevgelija. Since last week, Macedonia has restricted passage to northern Europe to only Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans who are considered war refugees. All other nationalities are deemed economic migrants and told to turn back. Macedonia has finished building a fence on its frontier with Greece becoming the latest country in Europe to build a border barrier aimed at checking the flow of refugees Refugee crisis - in pictures A father and his child wait after being caught by Turkish gendarme on 27 January 2016 at Canakkale's Kucukkuyu district Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants make hand signals as they arrive into the southern Spanish port of Malaga on 27 January, 2016 after an inflatable boat carrying 55 Africans, seven of them women and six chidren, was rescued by the Spanish coast guard off the Spanish coast. Refugee crisis - in pictures A refugee holds two children as dozens arrive on an overcrowded boat on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugee crisis - in pictures A child, covered by emergency blankets, reacts as she arrives, with other refugees and migrants, on the Greek island of Lesbos, At least five migrants including three children, died after four boats sank between Turkey and Greece, as rescue workers searched the sea for dozens more, the Greek coastguard said Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants wait under outside the Moria registration camp on the Lesbos. Over 400,000 people have landed on Greek islands from neighbouring Turkey since the beginning of the year Refugee crisis - in pictures The bodies of Christian refugees are buried separately from Muslim refugees at the Agios Panteleimonas cemetery in Mytilene, Lesbos Refugee crisis - in pictures Macedonian police officers control a crowd of refugees as they prepare to enter a camp after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A refugee tries to force the entry to a camp as Macedonian police officers control a crowd after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees are seen aboard a Turkish fishing boat as they arrive on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing a part of the Aegean Sea from the Turkish coast to Lesbos Reuters Refugee crisis - in pictures An elderly woman sings a lullaby to baby on a beach after arriving with other refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A man collapses as refugees make land from an overloaded rubber dinghy after crossing the Aegean see from Turkey, at the island of Lesbos EPA Refugee crisis - in pictures A girl reacts as refugees arrive by boat on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees make a show of hands as they queue after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures People help a wheelchair user board a train with others, heading towards Serbia, at the transit camp for refugees near the southern Macedonian town of Gevgelija AP Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees board a train, after crossing the Greek-Macedonian border, near Gevgelija. Macedonia is a key transit country in the Balkans migration route into the EU, with thousands of asylum seekers - many of them from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia - entering the country every day Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures An aerial picture shows the "New Jungle" refugee camp where some 3,500 people live while they attempt to enter Britain, near the port of Calais, northern France Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A Syrian girl reacts as she helped by a volunteer upon her arrival from Turkey on the Greek island of Lesbos, after having crossed the Aegean Sea EPA Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees arrive by boat on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Beds ready for use for migrants and refugees are prepared at a processing center on January 27, 2016 in Passau, Germany. The flow of migrants arriving in Passau has dropped to between 500 and 1,000 per day, down significantly from last November, when in the same region up to 6,000 migrants were arriving daily. MPs on the International Development Committee (IDC) approved the move earlier this year following warnings from humanitarian organisations that thousands of unaccompanied children were left vulnerable to exploitation and violence while living in appalling conditions. An amendment to the Immigration Bill to let 3,000 refugee children already in Europe come to Britain was adopted in the House of Lords last month. The changes are due to be considered by the House of Commons on Monday. Save the Children said 3,000 unaccompanied minors would represent Britains fair share of more than 26,000 estimated to have entered Europe. The Refugee Council council said the latest plan was "not good enough" when borders remain closed to refugees and drownings continue in the Mediterranean and Aegean seas. Maurice Wren, the charity's chief executive, said: This announcement is life-changing, if not life-saving news for the small group of children and their families who will benefit. However, its also grim news for the majority of other refugees who are desperately trying to escape conflict and persecution who the Government is try to contain in Turkey and other, poorer countries. Its not good enough to offer a lifeline to one group of refugees while colluding to close off the escape routes of everyone else -all refugees need to be able to reach a place of safety." Syrian refugees ask for water in Akcakale at the Turkish border near the Syrian town of Tal Abyad (BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images) James Brokenshire, the immigration minister, said the Government was committed to helping vulnerable children who had been unjustly impacted by the humanitarian crisis. We have always been clear that the vast majority of vulnerable children are better off remaining in host countries in the region so they can be reunited with surviving family members, he added. However, there are exceptional circumstances in which it is in a childs best interests to be resettled in the UK. We have engaged with a number of NGOs, including the UNHCR on the best way to provide protection to refugee children and ensure their welfare and safety remain at the heart of every decision made. The inclusion of refugee camps in North Africa is notable, as the region is the departure point for refugees fleeing war and persecution in Nigeria, Gambia, Senegal, Mali and other African nations who have been excluded by previous schemes. Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, the UNHCRs representative to the UK, welcomed the programme, which comes as refugees continue to be detained and deported from Greece, where the British Government is supporting the controversial EU-Turkey migration agreement. The UK is offering an extra 75 staff to help with processing and administration in detention centres and has also launched a 10 million Refugee Children Fund to support the UN and humanitarian organisations. Sign up to the Inside Politics email for your free daily briefing on the biggest stories in UK politics Get our free Inside Politics email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Inside Politics email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Standards watchdogs will not investigate Prime Minister David Cameron over the off-shore controversy revealed by the Panama Papers data leak. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Kathryn Hudson, has decided not to probe the matter, but her office refused to explain the reasons for that decision. Mr Cameron was forced into the position where he had to release a six-year summary of his tax affairs after it emerged he made a 19,000 profit from selling shares in an off-shore trust set up by his father, Ian. The Prime Minister insisted he was not involved in a tax dodge, and the way the trust was set up was entirely proper. But Mr Cameron did admit he had badly handled the subsequent furore after details of the business emerged in the Panama Papers leaking. Mr Cameron said he had initially been angry about the way his father's memory had been "traduced" as a result of the controversy. After the political storm erupted, Mr Cameron said he was happy to provide more information about his personal finances to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner if required. Mr Cameron said he sold his shares in the off-shore trust Blairmore Holdings in January 2010, five months before becoming PM, because he wanted to avoid any conflict of interest. "I did not want anyone to be able to suggest that as prime minister I had any other agendas or vested interests. Selling all my shares was the simplest and clearest way that I could do that," Mr Cameron told the Commons at the beginning of last week. Cameron defends tax affairs The Prime Minister said at the time he had given information on the affair to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner. "There are strict rules in this House for the registration of shareholdings - I have followed them in full. "The Labour Party has said it would refer me to the Commissioner for Parliamentary Standards - I have already given her the relevant information and if there is more she believes that I should say I am very happy to say it," Mr Cameron told MPs. The PM used the Commons address to explain why he had not made all relevant information public sooner. "I accept all of the criticisms for not responding more quickly to these issues - but as I said, I was angry about the way my father's memory was being traduced. "I know he was a hard-working man and a wonderful dad and I'm proud of everything he did to build a business and provide for his family." Mr Cameron also faced questioning over a 200,000 gift from his mother, which followed the 300,000 inheritance he received after the 2010 death of his father Ian. The payments by Mary Cameron to her son in May and July 2011 were given tax free, and will only become liable to inheritance tax of up to 40% if the Prime Minister's mother dies within seven years of handing over the money. There is no suggestion that they have broken any rules. Mr Cameron said parents should not be embarrassed about passing money on to their children, and insisted it was something "fully recognised" in the tax system. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn dismissed the PM's Commons statement at the time as a "masterclass in the art of distraction" and suggested Mr Cameron did not understand public anger over tax avoidance and evasion. Press Association Sign up to the Inside Politics email for your free daily briefing on the biggest stories in UK politics Get our free Inside Politics email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Inside Politics email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} The Tooting-based imam who David Cameron has accused the London mayoral candidate of repeatedly sharing a platform with reportedly voted for the Conservative Party at the general election. It comes after the Prime Minister outraged Labour MPs on Wednesday when he alleged that imam Suliman Gani supports IS [Islamic State] and that he had, on nine occasions, spoke on a platform with Sadiq Khan. But, according to Sky News, the imam voted for Mr Khans Tory rival in the 2015 general election and has appeared in several photographs with an array of some of the partys top politicians. In fact, Mr Gani had previously been a supporter of Mr Khan but had decided to vote for the Conservatives as he was opposed to the Labour candidates vote for same-sex marriage in 2013. The Prime Ministers desperate dog-whistle has totally backfired, one Labour MP said. Mr Gani, who was an imam at the Tooting Islamic Centre in Mr Khans constituency until 2013, insisted on LBC radio yesterday that he had never promoted hatred or terrorism and was being used as a scapegoat by the Conservatives to discredit the Labour candidate. Mr Khan has long campaigned against Islamic extremism and has previously described it as a cancer eating at the heart of our society. In a statement published on Mr Ganis Twitter account on Thursday, he said: For the avoidance of doubt, I state again that Islamic State is in no way compatible with my beliefs. I condemn IS wholeheartedly, and have done so repeatedly in public and in private since its inception. This allegation that has been made about me is a smear on my good name. It is highly distressing to me, my family, and those who know me. Responding to the radio interview Labour MP Neil Coyle said the Prime Ministers desperate dog-whistle has totally backfired. It now turns out that Suliman Gani campaigned for the Tories at the 2015 General Election, met Zac Goldsmith in November last year and campaigned against Sadiq Khan because of his support for same sex marriage. Zac Goldsmiths refusal to sign up to both the Operation Black Vote and Electoral Commission codes of conduct shows he is trying to mislead his way to City Hall. Labour's former shadow cabinet member Rachel Reeves accused the Prime Minister of descending into "gutter politics". She told BBC Radio 4's World at One: "The insinuation that Sadiq Khan is somehow a friend of Isis is beyond contempt. He is a man of the utmost integrity. He has taken on extremism in the Islamic community and on many occasions he has fallen out with leaders in the Islamic community. A Downing Street spokesman said: "The Prime Minister makes no apology for raising very serious concerns about people Sadiq Khan has shared a platform with. "Suliman Gani, on the night of the Paris terror attacks was in Bedford calling for an Islamic state. Hes said women should be subservient. He shared a platform with him nine times. "To brand that racist does a disservice to the Labour party." The latest poll of the contest by YouGov now shows Labours Sadiq Khan with a 20-point lead over Zac Goldsmith in the final round of the contest 60 per cent to 40 per cent. Sign up to the Inside Politics email for your free daily briefing on the biggest stories in UK politics Get our free Inside Politics email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Inside Politics email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} The Culture Secretary John Whittingdale has admitted that his faith in press freedom had been "tested to the utmost" by a string of embarrassing revelations about his private life. In his first appearance in the House of Commons since a number of newspapers revealed details of his affair with a dominatrix said he still believe politicians needed to "tread very carefully" on press regulation. Mr Whittingdale has faced calls to step aside from decisions about press regulation after it emerged he dated a sex worker and that four newspapers did not publish the story in 2014, deeming it not in the public interest. MPs involved in sex scandals Show all 9 1 /9 MPs involved in sex scandals MPs involved in sex scandals Mark Oaten Mark Oaten resigned as a senior member of the Liberal Democrats in 2006 after the News of the World revealed he had paid rent boys to perform sexual activities on him. He openly spoke about the affect it had on his family life and career in his book 'Screwing Up' Rex Features MPs involved in sex scandals Simon Danczuk He admitted to sending inappropriate texts to a 17-year-old Sophena Houlihan and calls are being made for him to resign from his role as Labour's Rochdale MP. He reportedly blamed a drinking problem on his sexually explicit messages Reuters MPs involved in sex scandals Brooks Newmark Brooks Newmark resigned form his role as a Conservative member of parliament for Braintree, Essex in 2014 after being caught sending explicit photos, involving paisley pyjamas, to an undercover journalist Rex MPs involved in sex scandals Lord Lambton Lord Lambton, a Conservative MP, was pictured in bed with two prostitutes and smoking a joint in 1973, the same year he resigned. He initially denied it, but later said he had a multitude of affairs after he was bored with his job Rex Features MPs involved in sex scandals Bob Blackman Robert Blackman, a Conservative MP had an 11 year affair with another Conservative councillor, which came out after he said marriage can only work between one man and one woman Rex Features MPs involved in sex scandals Nigel Griffiths Nigel Griffiths, former MP for Edinburgh South, admitted cheating on his wife of 30 years with an un-named woman after a Sunday tabloid produced photographs of the affair on a sofa in his Parliamentary office Rex Features MPs involved in sex scandals John Major Former Prime Minister John Major and former MP Edwina Curries four year affair began in 1984 and lasted four years. The affair came out in 2002 when Ms Currie serialised her diaries in The Times BBC News/Getty Images MPs involved in sex scandals John Prescott The then deputy Prime Minster to Tony Blair had a two year affair with his appointments secretary, Tracey Temple 43, came to light in 2006. He said: "I did have a relationship with her which I regret. It ended some time ago" Getty MPs involved in sex scandals Paddy Ashdown Paddy Ashdown, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, was nicknamed "Paddy Pantsdown" in 1992 after he was forced to disclose a five year affair with his secretary, Tricia Howard. He admitted the affair to his wife BBC Since then further revelations emerged about his relationship with former topless model Stephanie Hudson, who claimed the minister had breached security protocols while they were seeing each other. Those have all been widely reported by newspapers. Addressing the issue during culture questions Mr Whittingdale said: "Having had my faith perhaps tested to the utmost I still believe that press freedom is a vitally important component of a free society and we should tread very carefully. "However the recommendations of the Leveson report have, some, already been implemented and the system is coming in today. Recommended Read more John Whittingdale in fresh controversy over dinner at lapdance club "But the exemplary damages provisions of section 40, you will be aware, have been enacted now, the remainder are still under consideration but we do not yet have a recognised press regulator in place but we will continue to consider these matters very carefully." The Shadow culture secretary Maria Eagle quipped that Mr Whittingdale has been "distracted" from his role by "extra-curricular activities". "I'm starting to realise why this department is known as the ministry for fun," she said. "We all know Mr Whittingdale's been distracted from doing his job as Culture Secretary lately by his extra-curricular activities. "I'm talking about his moonlighting for the Leave Campaign." She later raised laughs when she referred to a letter that had "fallen in to my lap". Labour's Paul Farrelly criticised the Culture Secretary for "breaking promises" by failing to push forward with parts of press regulation reform, including cost provision for victims. The Newcastle-under-Lyme MP said: "Can I thank you for taking us no further forward? "Implementation of these cost incentives was promised by the then culture secretary Maria Miller, they were promised as a key part of the Leveson reforms specifically by the Prime Minister, not only to Parliament but also to the victims of press abuse, including the family of Madeleine McCann. "So in signalling already that he has no intention of taking this step, have you reflected very much at all that it is not only thwarting the will of Parliament, breaching a cross-party agreement but also breaking very firm, clear and unequivocal promises made by the Prime Minister and his colleagues?" For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Im stood watching a policeman confiscate and fastidiously bag a young mans grinder, a procedure which, given that there are people smoking weed around him as far as the eye can see, doesnt feel so much like shutting the door after the horse has bolted, as after an entire stampede of them have already made it 50 miles down the road. Hyde Park is absolutely packed for 4/20 this year, the annual celebration of cannabis that in the UK also serves as a protest against the governments stagnant drug laws. Im bad at estimating crowd sizes, but theres a similar density of people to what youd find at a festival, and this stretches a good couple of hundred metres back from Speakers Corner, while the scent of bud reaches Marble Arch station. Talking to attendees, who mostly sit in gaggles around mini-speakers, innocuously crafting enormous, architecturally-confounding joints, it seems attendance is up from last year, as frustration only increases in the wake of fairly rapid decriminalisation/legalisation around the world. (Photo: Alan Schaller/The Independent) This much was already clear from our reportage on it, two stories in particular: Colorado is making so much money from cannabis it's having to give some back to citizens and A year after marijuana legalisation in Colorado, 'everything's fine' confirm police having attracted almost 100,000 shares between them. Its like, why not here? one man, who wanted to remain anonymous, tells me. I came from Italy where we have a lot of referendums about this and are near to legalising just purely from an economic point of view. 4/20 London - Should marijuana be legal? Its really good for the economy, but here its a rich country and the police are really, really strict. In Italy, if they found you with 10 grams theyd probably say 'Okay, just dont do it again', but here you could probably only get away with carrying one joint, at a stretch. (Photo: Alan Schaller/The Independent) (Photo: Alan Schaller/The Independent) I doubt legalisation will happen here, a teenager a few metres away chimes in. You can think about all the people who smoke weed that would vote for [parties supporting legalisation], but theres just too many people who still think its the devil. Indeed, a study last year deemed weed to be 114 times less deadly than (the very much legal drug) alcohol, but such scientific research never seems to get Parliaments attention, a recent debate on legalisation precipitated by a petition with over 100,000 signees having been steamrollered by Tory MPs pretty quickly. A lot of people at the protest arent aware that this debate even took place last year though, and it has to be said that for every person that is clued up on the situation there are at least three who are just here for the opportunity to smoke with relative impunity. Also it's very sunny. (Photo: Alan Schaller/The Independent) (Photo: Alan Schaller/The Independent) One girl in a marijuana leaf-print onesie pauses from simultaneously hitting a cone and laughing gas balloon to stand up and shout at me: Im here to protest and I think weed should be legalised because, without weed babe, there aint no love, there aint no joy. I think there are few people here who expect the rally to actually affect change; the biggest draw seems to be the amusement of watching the police try and enforce a law in the face of such vast and concentrated civil disobedience. One policeman claims entrants to the park are being carefully checked for illegal substances by police dogs, but either the K9 units are woefully underperforming (23 arrests were made), or theyve been trained to only seek out large quantities. The focus is on the dealers, the officer tells me. Ironically, given the implied danger of cannabis given its illegality, the only real threat of the day comes from a police horse, which at one point shakes off its rider and goes bolting into the park. Words by @christophhooton | Photos by @alan_schaller For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Boko Haram is strapping bombs to birds as it continues to develop more deadly weapons in its bloody insurgency in Africa. The commander of a coalition battling the Isis-affiliated militants revealed the discovery at a meeting with American diplomats and security officials. Major General Lamidi Adeosun showed gruesome photos of the victims of Boko Harams attacks and their latest weapons during the briefing at the Multinational Joint Task Force's headquarters in Chad on Wednesday. Nigeria army struggles to hold ground taken from Boko Haram One picture showed a bird with an explosive strapped on its back, demonstrating a lot of ingenuity, he said. Maj Gen Adeosun said his forces had received intelligence that Isis members were being imbedded with Boko Haram but that the Nigerian terrorist group had not satisfied requirements for greater operational co-ordination. It is not the first report of birds being used to carry explosive devices. Photos emerged in July last year claiming to show bombs strapped to chickens by Isis fighters in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. There was speculation that they could be resorting to increasingly bizarre means of destruction while running out of ammunition but the account could not be verified. The Syrian Army said Isis had rigged animals with explosives in Palmyra Isis is known to be unusually liberal with its use of explosives, which it manufactures using cheap chemicals and equipment readily available on the civilian market. A Syrian officer involved in the operation to re-take the groups former stronghold of Palmyra last month described how jihadists had booby-trapped everything, including animals and trees. Boko Harams leader Abubakar Shekau made a pledge of allegiance to Isis in March last year and released a message urging its fellow sub-Saharan jihadists to do the same, further increasing the groups reach. The move was a major coup for the so-called Islamic State, which re-named its affiliate Wilayat Gharb Ifriqiyyah (West Africa Province). After expanding its campaign of terror from Nigeria to Chad, Niger and Cameroon, Boko Haram was named the deadliest terror group in the world last year. The Global Terrorism Index said it was responsible for 6,644 deaths in 2014 and that number is expected to have risen as its insurgency against Christians and local government continues. As well as high profile terror attacks and massacres, the group has become notorious for large-scale kidnappings including the abduction of more than 270 schoolgirls from Chibok. The rise of Boko Haram Show all 20 1 /20 The rise of Boko Haram The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram The leader of the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram Abubakar Shekau delivers a message. Boko Haram has claimed responsibility for the mass killings in the north-east Nigerian town of Baga in a video where he warned the massacre was just the tip of the iceberg. As many as 2,000 civilians were killed and 3,700 homes and business were destroyed in the 3 January 2015 attack on the town near Nigeria's border with Cameroon AFP The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram People displaced as a result of Boko Haram attacks in the northeast region of Nigeria, are seen near their tents at a faith-based camp for internally displaced people (IDP) in Yola, Adamawa State. Boko Haram says it is building an Islamic state that will revive the glory days of northern Nigeria's medieval Muslim empires, but for those in its territory life is a litany of killings, kidnappings, hunger and economic collapse The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Nitsch Eberhard Robert, a German citizen abducted and held hostage by suspected Boko Haram militants, is seen as he arrives at the Yaounde Nsimalen International airport after his release in Yaounde, Cameroon on 21 January 2015 The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Officials of the Nigerian National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) visit victims of a bomb blast in Gombe at the Specialist Hospital in Gombe. According to local reports at least six people were killed and 11 wounded after a bomb blast in a marketplace in Nigeria's northeastern state of Gombe on 16 January 2015. Islamist militant group Boko Haram has been blamed for a string of recent attacks in the North East of Nigeria The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram People gather at the site of a bomb explosion in a area know to be targeted by the militant group Boko Haram in Kano on 28 November 2014 The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram People gather to look at a burnt vehicle following a bomb explosion that rocked the busiest roundabout near the crowded Market in Maiduguri, Borno State on 1 July 2014. A truck exploded in a huge fireball killing at least 15 people in the northeast Nigerian city of Maiduguri, the city repeatedly hit by Boko Haram Islamists The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram President Goodluck Jonathan visits Nigerian Army soldiers fighting Boko Haram Getty Images The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Displaced people from Baga listen to Goodluck Jonathan after the Boko Haram killings AFP/Getty The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan speaking to troops during a visit to Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State; most of the region has been overrun by Boko Haram AFP/Getty The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Members of the Nigerian military patrolling in Maiduguri, North East Nigeria, close to the scene of attacks by Boko Haram EPA The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Boko Harams leader, Abubakar Shekau, appears in a video in which he warns Cameroon it faces the same fate as Nigeria AFP The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Nana Shettima, the wife of Borno Governor, Kashim Shettima (C) weeps as she speaks with school girls from the government secondary school Chibok that were kidnapped by the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram, and later escaped in Chibok The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram South Africans protest in solidarity against the abduction of hundreds of schoolgirls in Nigeria by the Muslim extremist group Boko Haram and what protesters said was the failure of the Nigerian government and international community to rescue them, during a march to the Nigerian Consulate in Johannesburg The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Boko Haram militants have seized the town in north-eastern Nigeria that nearly 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped from in April 2014 AFP The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram A soldier stands guard in front of burnt buses after an attack in Abuja. Twin blasts at a bus station packed with morning commuters on the outskirts of Nigeria's capital killed dozens of people, in what appeared to be the latest attack by Boko Haram Islamists, April 2014 The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram The aftermath of the attack, when Boko Haram fighters in trucks painted in military colours killed 51 people in Konduga in February 2014 AFP/Getty Images The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram The leader of Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau (with papers) in a video grab taken in July 2014 AFP/Getty The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Ruins of burnt out houses in the north-eastern settlement of Baga, pictured after Boko Haram attacks in 2013 AP The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram A Boko Haram attack in Nigeria, 2013 AFP/Getty Images The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Abubakar Shekau, Boko Harams leader AP Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, commander of US special operations in Africa, described the surrounding Lake Chad Basin region as ground zero in the fight against extremism in Africa. America, Britain and other European nations are among those supporting military intervention against Boko Haram. More than 30 personnel from the British Armys Royal Anglian Regiment were deployed to train Nigerian soldiers earlier this year. We stand united with Nigeria in its efforts to defeat the murderous Boko Haram extremists, Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, said at the time. He committed to doubling the number of British personnel carrying out training in Nigeria this year, sending explosives specialists, medics and an RAF training team. Additional reporting by AP For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} One of the most horrific movements in the history of the world is strengthening its links with Isis, officials have warned. Boko Haram, a Nigerian terrorist group waging a bloody insurgency across parts of Africa, swore allegiance to the so-called Islamic State last year and co-operation between the two organisations is increasing. Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, commander of US special operations in Africa, said the groups clearly share tactics, techniques and procedures, from the way they conduct complex ambushes and set improvised explosive devices, to how they launch high-profile attacks on hotels. A large cache of different types of weapons including machine guns intercepted by Chadian authorities on its way to Boko Haram from Libya. US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, Multinational Joint Task Force Commander Maj. Gen. Lamidi Adeosun and United States Special Operations Command Africa Commander Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc during a meeting in N'Djamena, Chad, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. (AP) You can, I think, draw a conclusion, Brig Gen Bolduc said, suggesting the weapons may have been sent by Isis from its strongholds along Libyas coastline. He called the Lake Chad Basic region where Boko Haram is launching its insurgency as ground zero the fight against extremism in Africa. The nature of any operational links between the group and Isis has been unclear since Boko Harams leader, Abubakar Shekau, made a pledge of allegiance to the so-called Islamic State in March 2015. He released a message urging other sub-Saharan jihadist groups to do the same, further increasing the groups reach. The move was a major coup for Isis, which re-named its affiliate Wilayat Gharb Ifriqiyyah (West Africa Province). Boko Haram has launched attacks on Chad's territory from its base in neighbouring Nigeria, while Isis and al-Qaeda in Libya to the north and Sudan and the Central African Republic are still recovering from years of interethnic conflict. Fighting Boko Haram: Chad aims to destroy militant group Chads strategic importance in the midst of the nations has been highlighted by a visit by Brig Gen Bolduc and American officials including Samantha Power, the US Permanent Representative to the United Nations. On the final day of her visit to the country on Thursday, she said she had discussed increased partnership against Boko Haram with President Idriss Deby. Boko Haram cannot be defeated by military means alone, she added. It is one of the most horrific movements in the history of the world, and in order to defeat it we need enhanced security efforts, political and governance reforms, and economic and social development. President Deby, who has survived at least a dozen coup plots and assassination attempts during more than 25 years in power following his own coup, rejected claims of forced disappearances involving his political opponents. Ms Power also raised concerns about the crackdown on freedom of protest, the shutting down of the internet and text messaging. After expanding its campaign of terror from Nigeria to Chad, Niger and Cameroon, Boko Haram was named the deadliest terror group in the world last year. The Global Terrorism Index said it was responsible for 6,644 deaths in 2014 and that number is expected to have risen as its insurgency against Christians and local government continues. The rise of Boko Haram Show all 20 1 /20 The rise of Boko Haram The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram The leader of the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram Abubakar Shekau delivers a message. Boko Haram has claimed responsibility for the mass killings in the north-east Nigerian town of Baga in a video where he warned the massacre was just the tip of the iceberg. As many as 2,000 civilians were killed and 3,700 homes and business were destroyed in the 3 January 2015 attack on the town near Nigeria's border with Cameroon AFP The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram People displaced as a result of Boko Haram attacks in the northeast region of Nigeria, are seen near their tents at a faith-based camp for internally displaced people (IDP) in Yola, Adamawa State. Boko Haram says it is building an Islamic state that will revive the glory days of northern Nigeria's medieval Muslim empires, but for those in its territory life is a litany of killings, kidnappings, hunger and economic collapse The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Nitsch Eberhard Robert, a German citizen abducted and held hostage by suspected Boko Haram militants, is seen as he arrives at the Yaounde Nsimalen International airport after his release in Yaounde, Cameroon on 21 January 2015 The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Officials of the Nigerian National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) visit victims of a bomb blast in Gombe at the Specialist Hospital in Gombe. According to local reports at least six people were killed and 11 wounded after a bomb blast in a marketplace in Nigeria's northeastern state of Gombe on 16 January 2015. Islamist militant group Boko Haram has been blamed for a string of recent attacks in the North East of Nigeria The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram People gather at the site of a bomb explosion in a area know to be targeted by the militant group Boko Haram in Kano on 28 November 2014 The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram People gather to look at a burnt vehicle following a bomb explosion that rocked the busiest roundabout near the crowded Market in Maiduguri, Borno State on 1 July 2014. A truck exploded in a huge fireball killing at least 15 people in the northeast Nigerian city of Maiduguri, the city repeatedly hit by Boko Haram Islamists The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram President Goodluck Jonathan visits Nigerian Army soldiers fighting Boko Haram Getty Images The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Displaced people from Baga listen to Goodluck Jonathan after the Boko Haram killings AFP/Getty The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan speaking to troops during a visit to Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State; most of the region has been overrun by Boko Haram AFP/Getty The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Members of the Nigerian military patrolling in Maiduguri, North East Nigeria, close to the scene of attacks by Boko Haram EPA The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Boko Harams leader, Abubakar Shekau, appears in a video in which he warns Cameroon it faces the same fate as Nigeria AFP The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Nana Shettima, the wife of Borno Governor, Kashim Shettima (C) weeps as she speaks with school girls from the government secondary school Chibok that were kidnapped by the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram, and later escaped in Chibok The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram South Africans protest in solidarity against the abduction of hundreds of schoolgirls in Nigeria by the Muslim extremist group Boko Haram and what protesters said was the failure of the Nigerian government and international community to rescue them, during a march to the Nigerian Consulate in Johannesburg The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Boko Haram militants have seized the town in north-eastern Nigeria that nearly 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped from in April 2014 AFP The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram A soldier stands guard in front of burnt buses after an attack in Abuja. Twin blasts at a bus station packed with morning commuters on the outskirts of Nigeria's capital killed dozens of people, in what appeared to be the latest attack by Boko Haram Islamists, April 2014 The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram The aftermath of the attack, when Boko Haram fighters in trucks painted in military colours killed 51 people in Konduga in February 2014 AFP/Getty Images The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram The leader of Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau (with papers) in a video grab taken in July 2014 AFP/Getty The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Ruins of burnt out houses in the north-eastern settlement of Baga, pictured after Boko Haram attacks in 2013 AP The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram A Boko Haram attack in Nigeria, 2013 AFP/Getty Images The rise of Boko Haram Boko Haram Abubakar Shekau, Boko Harams leader AP As well as high profile terror attacks and massacres, the group has become notorious for large-scale kidnappings including the abduction of more than 270 schoolgirls from Chibok. America, Britain and other European nations are among those supporting the five-nation Multinational Joint Task Forces intervention against Boko Haram. More than 30 personnel from the British Armys Royal Anglian Regiment were deployed to train Nigerian soldiers earlier this year. We stand united with Nigeria in its efforts to defeat the murderous Boko Haram extremists, Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, said at the time. He committed to doubling the number of British personnel carrying out training in Nigeria this year, sending explosives specialists, medics and an RAF training team. Additional reporting by AP Sign up to our Evening Headlines email for your daily guide to the latest news Sign up to our free US Evening Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Evening Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Three officials are facing charges for their involvement in the Flint water crisis in Michigan which resulted in around 100,000 people drinking lead-contaminated water since 2014. The charges, authorized on Wednesday by District Judge Tracy Collier-Nix, are the first to be brought against the state of Michigan since the scandal was exposed in 2015. Mike Glasgow, the citys laboratory and water quality supervisor; Mike Prysby, a Michigan Department of Environmental Quality official; and Stephen Busch, the suspended Lansing district coordinator for the DEQs Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance, have all been charged, as reported by the Detroit Free Press. Recommended Read more Michigan Governor Rick Snyder will drink Flint tap water for 30 days The men face six, five and two criminal charges respectively, ranging from misconduct in office and conspiracy to tampering evidence and willful neglect. Mr Glasgow was accused of not testing the water supply of homes that were most at risk of lead contamination, and saying the ones he had tested all had lead pipes, which was reportedly false. Mr Prysby allegedly played a part in pushing the local water treatment plant into operation before it was ready, and said they could rely on six-month studies to determine if they needed corrosion control chemicals to treat the water. Mr Busch told a US Environmental Protection Agency official that that Flint Water Treatment plant was using optimised corrosion control when in fact it was not using any controls. Michigan governor Rick Snyder told the press: We encouraged the investigations and weve been cooperating. Weve got a lot of wonderful people working for the State of Michigan, he added. Lets not let the possible situation of a handful affect all 47,000. More charges are expected. At a previous hearing, Mr Snyder was accused himself of dripping with guilt by Representative Matt Cartwright. He had reportedly known about the polluted water supply for months before he was forced into co-operating with authorities. Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette said at a press conference on Wednesday that the men facing charges and their involvement caused him and other people "anger and despair". The things you take for granted dont happen in Flint, he said. When you jump out of bed, you wash your face, brush your teeth, take a shower, thats not normal in Flint. As a husband, father, attorney general and lawyer for the city of Michigan, Im going to find the truth. He said authorities are working through around 2.5 million emails to determine who knew what and when. He said the judge would decide on the sentencing, but he added: I think they [the three men] ought to be behind bars. Asked whether Governor Snyder would face charges, he replied: There is no target and nobody is off the table. I cant be clearer than that. Andrew Arena, who ran several major investigations as head of the Detroit FBI Office until he retired in 2012, told the press that his wife asked him why he had gone back into this when he already had a nice life. The people of Flint deserve answers, he said. The water supply was switched from Detroit to a river in Flint in April 2014 and became contaminated with lead as the river water corroded the lead lining of the pipes. Mr Snyder is encouraging residents to use their taps again as authorities have been treating the pipes with higher levels of phosphates to build up a protective coating on the pipes and prevent further lead leaking into the water. They are still investigating whether there is a link between the river water and an outbreak of Legionnaires disease among local people. Local resident Melissa Mays posted a video last week of her bath water, which had turned from yellow to a blue-green colour, which gave her family rashes and hair loss. She invited Mr Snyder and Mike Lee, the Republican senator of Utah, who stalled funding for Flint, to bathe in her "god-awful, burning" bath water which emitted a strong odour. Sign up to our Evening Headlines email for your daily guide to the latest news Sign up to our free US Evening Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Evening Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} A Florida teenager who allegedly practised as a doctor whilst holding no medical qualifications, opened his own surgery and treated patients, has been offered a plea deal. Recommended Read more Florida teen arrested for posing as a doctor and performing exams If accepted, Malachi Love-Robinson would spend three years in prison and five years in probation. The 18-year-old from West Palm Beach in Florida was arrested in February after he was accused of practicing medicine without a license. His arrest followed his family and friends calling the Florida Health Department to report him, fearing the alleged malpractice would injure someone or their children. The supposed "doctor" reportedly put their claims down to jealousy now that he had become successful. Mr Love-Robinson denied the charges and claimed he never said he was a medical doctor. He said he has a doctorate from the Universal Life Church, which can be bought online for $29.95. I am a well rounded professional that treats, and cares for patients, using a system of practice that bases treatment of physiological functions and abnormal conditions on natural laws governing the human body, a previous entry on a "find a doctor" website read. Neither Mr Love-Robinson nor his lawyer Andrew Stine would comment whether they would accept or reject the plea bargain. He faces several charges including fraud and grand theft. If he pleads guilty, Mr Love-Robinson will receive the plea deal. If he does not accept the deal, he will face trial in July and could face harsher punishment if found guilty. Additional reporting by the Associated Press. Sign up to our Evening Headlines email for your daily guide to the latest news Sign up to our free US Evening Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Evening Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} The President of Mexico has voiced his support for legalising cannabis for medical and scientific purposes and increasing the legal limit for personal possession. President Enrique Pena Nieto was speaking at the UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs when he referred to narcotics as a public health problem and said the international community should be flexible in tackling them. The Supreme Court of Mexico one of the countries hardest hit by the war on drugs voted to relax laws on cannabis in 2015. However, Mexico would continue to fight organised crime connected to the drug trade, the president said. Availability and better access to controlled substances for medical and scientific purposes should be assured, avoiding at the same time its diversion, misuse and trafficking, Mr Pena Nieto said. The aim of increasing the legal amount of cannabis for personal use is intended to decriminalise consumers, a principle Mr Pena Nieto said should be another central focus of a fresh approach on the war on drugs, as the total prohibition approach had not been effective. He added: We should be flexible to change that which has not yielded results, the paradigm based essentially in prohibitionism, the so-called 'War on Drugs' ... (which) has not been able to limit production, trafficking nor the global consumption of drugs." World's 10 deadliest street drugs Show all 10 1 /10 World's 10 deadliest street drugs World's 10 deadliest street drugs Whoonga Whoonga is a combination of antiretroviral drugs, used to treat HIV, and various cutting agents such as detergents and poisons. The drug is widely available in South Africa due to South Africas high rate of HIV sufferers, and is believed to be popular due to how cheap it is when compared to prescribed antiretrovirals. The drug is highly addictive and can cause major health issues such as internal bleeding, stomach ulcers and ultimately death Getty World's 10 deadliest street drugs Scopolamine Scopolamine is a derivative from the nightshade plant found in the Northern Indian region of South America (Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela). It is generally found in a refined powder form, but can also be found as a tea. The drug is more often used by criminals due its high toxicity level (one gram is believed to be able to kill up to 20 people) making it a strong poison. However, it is also believed that the drug is blown into the faces of unexpecting victims, later causing them to lose all sense of self-control and becoming incapable of forming memories during the time they are under the influence of the drug. This tactic has reportedly been used by gangs in Colombia where there have been reports of people using scopolamine as way to convince victims to rob their own homes World's 10 deadliest street drugs Heroin Founded in 1874 by C. R. Alder Wright, heroin is one of the worlds oldest drugs. Originally it was prescribed as a strong painkiller used to treat chronic pain and physical trauma. However in 1971 it was made illegal under the Misuse of Drugs Act. Since then it has become one of the most destructive substances in the world, tearing apart communities and destroying families. The side effects of heroin include inflammation of the gums, cold sweats, a weak immune system, muscular weakness and insomnia. It can also damage blood vessels which can later cause gangrene if left untreated World's 10 deadliest street drugs Crack cocaine Crack cocaine first came about in the 1980s when cocaine became a widespread commodity within the drug trafficking world. Originally cocaine would have attracted a high price tag due to its rarity and difficulty to produce, but once it became more widespread the price dropped significantly. This resulted in drug dealers forming their cocaine into rock like shapes by using baking soda as a way of distilling the powder down into rock form. People were doing this because it allowed for them to sell cocaine at a lower quantity and to a higher number of people. The side effects of crack cocaine include liver, kidney and lung damage, as well as permanent damage to blood vessels, which can often lead to heart attacks, strokes, and ultimately death World's 10 deadliest street drugs Crystal meth Not just famous because of a certain Walter H White, but also because it is one of the most destructive drugs in the world. First developed in 1887, it became widely used during the Second World War when both sides would give it to their troops to keep them awake. It is also believed that the Japanese gave it to their Kamikaze pilots before their suicide missions. After the war crystal meth was prescribed as a diet aid and remained legal until the 1970s. Since then it has fallen into the hands of Mexican gangs and has become a worldwide phenomenon, spreading throughout Europe and Asia. The effects of crystal meth are devastating. In the short-term users will become sleep depraved and anxious, and in the long-term it will cause their flesh to sink, as well as brain damage and damage of the blood vessels World's 10 deadliest street drugs AH-7921 AH-7921 is a synthetic opioid that was previously available to legally purchase online from vendors until it became a Class A in January 2015. The drug is believed to have 80% of the potency of morphine, and became known as the legal heroin. While there has only been one death related to AH-7921 in the UK, it is believed to be highly dangerous and capable of causing respiratory arrest and gangrene World's 10 deadliest street drugs Flakka Flakka is a stimulant with a similar chemical make-up to the amphetamine-like drug found in bath salts. While the drug was originally marketed as a legal high alternative to ecstasy, the effects are significantly different. The user will feel an elevated heart rate, enhanced emotions, and, if enough is digested, strong hallucinations. The drug can cause permanent psychological damage due to it affecting the mood regulating neurons that keep the minds serotonin and dopamine in check, as well as possibly causing heart failure World's 10 deadliest street drugs Bath salts Bath salts are a synthetic crystalline drug that is prevalent in the US. While they may sound harmless, they certainly arent the sort of salts you drop into a warm bath when having a relaxing night in, they are most similar to mephedrone, and have recently been featured throughout social media due to the zombification of its. The name comes from the fact that the drug was originally sold online, and widely disguised as bath salts. The side effects include unusual psychiatric behaviour, psychosis, panic attacks and violent behaviour, as well as the possibility of a heart attack and an elevated body temperature World's 10 deadliest street drugs Purple Drank One of the more unusual drugs around at the moment, purple drank was popularised in 90s hip hop culture, with the likes of Jay Z and Big Moe all mentioning it in their songs. It is a concoction of soda water, sweets and cold medicine, and is drunk due to cold medicines high codeine content, which gives the user a woozy feeling. However it can also cause respiratory issues and heart failure World's 10 deadliest street drugs Krokodil Krokodil is Russias secret addiction. It is believed that over one million Russians are addicted to the drug. Users of krokodil are attracted to the drug due to its low price; it is sold at 20 a gram while heroin is sold for 60. However, krokodil is considered more dangerous than heroin because it is often homemade, with ingredients including painkillers, iodine, lighter fluid and industrial cleaning agents. This chemical make-up makes the drug highly dangerous and likely to cause gangrene, and eventually rotting of the flesh The legal limit for cannabis possession in Mexico is currently five grams. In addition, users possessing 50 milligrams of cocaine or 40 milligrams of methamphetamine (crystal meth) are not in breach of the law. Mr Pena Nieto reminded the UN of the disproportionate price Mexico has paid in the so-called 'war on drugs' My country is one of the nations that have paid a high price, an excessive price, in terms of tranquility, suffering and human lives, he said. Recommended Read more The death of Mexican news in the age of drug cartels The Mexican drug war has caused massive damage and destabilisation to the country. An estimated 100,000 people have been killed in the last 10 years. An estimated 27,600 people have been forcibly disappeared, including the 43 students from the town of Iguala, in the southern Guerrero state, which drew worldwide attention. Powerful drug cartels can often operate with impunity and their influence stretches far beyond the borders of Mexico. In addition to controlling the drugs trade, the cartels have been implicated in genocide, kidnapping, people smuggling, assassinating politicians and journalists, extortion and corruption at all levels. Sign up to our Evening Headlines email for your daily guide to the latest news Sign up to our free US Evening Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Evening Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} New Yorks state attorney general has launched an investigation into alleged voting irregularities that plagued the presidential primary, resulting in the loss of thousands of registered Democratic voter records in New York City. Attorney General Eric T Schneiderman issued a statement on Wednesday announcing the investigation of the alleged improprieties by the New York City Board of Elections. He said that the office had been inundated with more than one thousand complaints on the voter hotline during Tuesdays primary. Hundreds of voters were reportedly turned away from their polling stations after discovering that their registrations were lost, including more than 120,000 registered Democrats in Brooklyn. Mr Schneiderman said he was deeply troubled by the volume and consistency of voting irregularities, adding that the office will extend the investigation to other parts of the state if necessary. New York City comptroller Scott Stringer promised to audit the Board of Elections following the of the disappeared 120,000 Brooklyn voters. The people of New York City have lost confidence that the Board of Elections can effectively administer elections and we intend to find out why the BOE is so consistently disorganised, chaotic, and inefficient, Mr Stringer said in a statement. The Board of Elections promises to fully cooperate with the Attorney Generals office during the investigation. Were not shrinking from the investigations, executive director of the Board of Elections Michael J Ryan told the New York Times. Mr Ryan, however, maintains that no voters were disenfranchised. Whatever the cause of Tuesdays irregularities, Mr Schneiderman vowed to resolve the issues moving forward. Voting is the cornerstone of our democracy, he said, and if any New Yorker was illegally prevented from voting, I will do everything in my power to make their vote count and ensure that it never happens again." For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} China is ramping up its warnings against espionage during a week of activities to mark the passing of its National Security Law last year, with state media running a cartoon campaign saying it is risky to date foreigners. President Xi Jinping has overseen a sweeping revamp of China's security apparatus, aimed at combating both domestic and foreign threats. New security laws have alarmed Western governments amid a renewed crackdown on dissent in a country where state secrecy rules are notoriously broad. As part of the security campaign, cartoon posters entitled "Dangerous Love" have also begun appearing around Beijing, warning people to be aware when dating foreigners. In the posters, a young woman is seduced by "Da Wei", or David, who woos her to get access to secret documents she has. He then vanishes and she is taken away by police as an accessory to spying. Since last Friday, when China marked its first 'national security education day', the government has released reports in state media giving unusual insight into people caught spying for foreign countries. In the latest case, state television described events leading up to the jailing for seven years of a man who gave information to an unidentified foreign power about Chinese military and other ships patrolling small islands in the East China Sea, which China and Japan both claim belong to them. The man, identified as Chen Wei, from the east coast province of Zhejiang, had studied abroad and was recruited while working overseas, state television said, in its second report this week on people jailed for security-related crimes. Mr Chen's recruiter, named as Ji Tian, whose nationality was not specified, initially feigned an interest in Christianity and said he also wanted to learn Chinese as he tried to persuade Mr Chen to spy for the thinly disguised foreign state, the report said. While not directly mentioning any country, state television showed pictures of Japan in its report, and included a reconstruction of the two meeting in a restaurant and being served by a woman in a traditional Japanese kimono. Mr Ji was said to have used their growing friendship to ask Mr Chen to take pictures of harbours in Zhejiang - which lies close to the disputed and uninhabited islands, called the Diaoyu in China and Senkaku in Japan. Mr Chen was caught in December 2013 after taking pictures of a military base and sentenced to seven years in jail, the report said, without saying when he was sentenced. "As more and more of our countrymen work and study abroad, it is vital to raise awareness of the enemy's situation," state television said. (Reuters) For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} This drone footage shows the longest and tallest bridge in China, which is set to open next month. The Longjiang Grand Bridge sits 280 metres above the Nujiang river valley and has a span of 2,438 metres (2.4 km). The distance between the central towers is 1,196 metres. The bridge is the highest to be built between two mountains in Asia, according to People's Daily. It was built in the western Yunan province to improve connections between the cities of Baoshan and Tengchong, which are located close to the border with Myanmar. The bridge is believed to have cost around 1.5 billion yuan (151 million) to build, and will open on 1 May after passing load bearing tests. 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 However, despite its great size, the bridge does not match the Akashi Kaikyo suspension bridge in Japan, which measures 3.9km in length, with a central span of 1,991 metres. The mammoth structure links Kobe on the mainland to Awaji Island in Osaka bay in the central region of the country. Meanwhile, the worlds tallest suspension bridge is Frances Millau Viaduct, which measures 343 meters high at the summit of the tallest mast. The deck of the bridge itself is 270 metres off the ground. The bridge was completed at a cost of 400 million and stretches 2,460 meters across the Tarn Valley in southern France. For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Mass murderer Anders Breivik may be allowed visits from a woman who claims to be in love with him after a court ruled that being kept in isolation in prison had violated his human rights. A court in Oslo ruled in the killers favour on one of two claims for alleged human rights violations yesterday. The right-wing extremist, who has declared himself to be a Nazi, was convicted in 2012 after shooting dead 69 people attending a Labour party youth camp on the island of Utoya and planting a bomb in Oslo that killed eight people. District judges said yesterday that his detention in prison had violated Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which relates to inhuman or degrading punishment. The verdict said: The prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment represents a fundamental value in a democratic society. This applies no matter what also in the treatment of terrorists and killers. The ruling could now mean that the killer is allowed visits by a woman known only as Victoria a female admirer who calls herself his girlfriend and claims that she is in love with Breivik, reports The Times. Skien Prison: Where Anders Breivik is incarcerated Show all 5 1 /5 Skien Prison: Where Anders Breivik is incarcerated Skien Prison: Where Anders Breivik is incarcerated Skien prison south of the Norwegian capital, Oslo Reuters Skien Prison: Where Anders Breivik is incarcerated The gym at Skien prison which was turned into a courtroom for Breivik's appeal Reuters Skien Prison: Where Anders Breivik is incarcerated Viewing through the door into a cell inside Skien prison Reuters Skien Prison: Where Anders Breivik is incarcerated A bedroom study with computer(no internet access) in Skien prison similar to the one Breivik is housed in Reuters Skien Prison: Where Anders Breivik is incarcerated Two connecting cell rooms in Skien prison similar to the three rooms Breivik is kept in Reuters According to the newspaper, the pair have exchanged hundreds of letters and she is believed to be the person he speaks to when he is allowed to make calls. But, she has so far been refused permission to meet him. Breivik is held as the only inmate in a high-security wing of Skien prison, where he is serving a 21-year sentence. He is allowed some correspondence but it is strictly controlled and he is forbidden from communicating with other right-wing extremists. The government argued that the restrictions were well within the European Convention of Human Rights and were required to ensure that Breivik remains unable to build militant extremist networks. Bjorn Ihler, a survivor of the attacks at Utoya, tweeted yesterday: What Breivik did was inhumane, which is why its crucial to treat him humanely. He doesnt set the premises for how we treat others. Our best weapon in fighting extremism is humanity. The ruling in the Breivik case shows that we acknowledge the humanity of extremists too. Referring to the UKs referendum on whether to leave the EU, to be held on 23 June, he later added: Wonder what the connection - #Breivik and #Brexit is? The European Convention on Human Rights is not a EU thing and Norways not an EU member. For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Two weeks after he launched a new political movement, Frances whizz-kid economy minister Emmanuel Macron is on the move in the opinion polls. Mr Macron only 38 and never a political candidate at any level is seen by almost four in ten French voters as an attractive candidate for the presidency next year. Even more strikingly, a man who claims to be neither left nor right, is now the most popular candidate next spring among left-wing voters. Mr Macrons popularity and refusal to toe the admittedly unclear ideological and tactical lines of the present centre-left government are also making him powerful enemies. According to reports in the French media, his mentor, President Francois Hollande, is coming under pressure to cage Mr Macron or even fire him. The President was said initially to be relaxed about his young ministers announcement on 6 April that he was launching a new movement called En Marche! (forwards) to explore new ideas and new ground beyond the traditional left-right divide. Mr Hollande was said to believe that the initiative could even help attract centrist voters and improve his own feeble chances of winning a second term next April and May. Senior figures close to Mr Hollande are now said to fear that Mr Macron, who was only appointed economy minister in August 2014, is out of all control of the Elysee Palace and is driven only by his own ambition. In a television appearance last week, President Hollande sent two verbal shots across Mr Macrons bows. 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 Asked about Mr Macron's plan, President Hollande said, he knows what he owes me and added it is a question of personal and political loyalty". Since then, Mr Macron has again angered Mr Hollande and the Prime Minister Manuel Valls by making radical statements which go beyond the cautious, market-friendly reforms of the present government. He suggested this week that it was time to scrap Frances annual tax on capital wealth, a Socialist sacred cow. He also told the Belgian daily newspaper, Le Soir, that he was developing a presidential project something that he had previously denied. But a presidential project for what year? French political commentators say that it is unlikely that Mr Macron will oppose his mentor Mr Hollande in the first round of the presidential election next year. It is, however, uncertain whether Mr Hollande will run for a second term. His approval ratings are at an all-time low of 14 to16 per cent. A series of opinion polls suggests that the President would suffer the indignation of failing to reach the two-candidate, second-round run-off. In any case, Mr Hollande has repeatedy said that he will not run unless he reverses the rising tide of French unemployment. There is, so far, little sign of that happening. If the President backs away, political analysts say, Mr Macron would be tempted to run next year, not as the official Socialist candidate but as the representative of his own new movement. Bruno Cautres, a polling expert at the premier French poitical college, Science Po, said: Its not totally impossible. French voters aspire for something new. They are just fed up with the same old politicians. French politics is moving. It feels like the end of an era. A recent poll by Viavoice for the centre-left newspaper Liberation said that 38 per cent of French voters thought that Mr Macron would be a good candidate for next year. Among left-wing voters, he was first choice with 15 per cent compared to only 10 per cent for Mr Valls and a calamitous 7 per cent for Mr Hollande. Powerful obstacles to Macron-omics remain, however. To reach the second round of the presidential election, he would have to beat the candidates of the centre-right, far-right and, conceivably, an official candidate of the centre-left. For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} A Syrian refugee has reportedly died of his injuries after being hit by a police van in Greece. The 40-year-old man died at hospital in the city of Thessaloniki on Thursday, according to the Voria newspaper. He had been undergoing treatment since Monday, when he was injured in disputed circumstances at a refugee camp in Idomeni, sparking protests met with tear gas and riot police. Footage from the scene showed migrants hurling stones at the stationary van, which was cordoned off and surrounded by officers. A pool of blood could be seen on the ground. A Greek government source confirmed at the time that there had been a serious accident involving the man, who is believed to be Kurdish. Photos showed him lying on the ground being treated by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) medics, with his face covered in blood. Officials said he who suffered cranial injuries, to his scull, but gave no information on his condition. A migrant throws a stone at a police car after clashes at a makeshift camp for migrants and refugees at the Greek-Macedonian border near the village of Idomeni, Greece, April 18, 2016. (Reuters) It was not immediately clear how he had been hurt inside the teeming camp where vehicles are forced to move at low speeds. Greek media said the man had fallen from scaffolding, while some refugees told Reuters news agency he had fainted after leaving his tent and was run over. A police statement released to Voria said the refugee had lost his balance and fallen into the path of the passing van. The camp lies the Macedonian border, which has seen regular clashes as it remains shut to many of the refugees journeying up from Greek islands in an attempt to reach other parts of Europe. Refugee crisis - in pictures Show all 27 1 /27 Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugee crisis - in pictures A child looks through the fence at the Moria detention camp for migrants and refugees at the island of Lesbos on May 24, 2016. AFP/Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Ahmad Zarour, 32, from Syria, reacts after his rescue by MOAS (Migrant Offshore Aid Station) while attempting to reach the Greek island of Agathonisi, Dodecanese, southeastern Agean Sea Refugee crisis - in pictures Syrian migrants holding life vests gather onto a pebble beach in the Yesil liman district of Canakkale, northwestern Turkey, after being stopped by Turkish police in their attempt to reach the Greek island of Lesbos on 29 January 2016. Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees flash the 'V for victory' sign during a demonstration as they block the Greek-Macedonian border Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants have been braving sub zero temperatures as they cross the border from Macedonia into Serbia. Refugee crisis - in pictures A sinking boat is seen behind a Turkish gendarme off the coast of Canakkale's Bademli district on January 30, 2016. At least 33 migrants drowned on January 30 when their boat sank in the Aegean Sea while trying to cross from Turkey to Greece. Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A general view of a shelter for migrants inside a hangar of the former Tempelhof airport in Berlin, Germany Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees protest behind a fence against restrictions limiting passage at the Greek-Macedonian border, near Gevgelija. Since last week, Macedonia has restricted passage to northern Europe to only Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans who are considered war refugees. All other nationalities are deemed economic migrants and told to turn back. Macedonia has finished building a fence on its frontier with Greece becoming the latest country in Europe to build a border barrier aimed at checking the flow of refugees Refugee crisis - in pictures A father and his child wait after being caught by Turkish gendarme on 27 January 2016 at Canakkale's Kucukkuyu district Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants make hand signals as they arrive into the southern Spanish port of Malaga on 27 January, 2016 after an inflatable boat carrying 55 Africans, seven of them women and six chidren, was rescued by the Spanish coast guard off the Spanish coast. Refugee crisis - in pictures A refugee holds two children as dozens arrive on an overcrowded boat on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugee crisis - in pictures A child, covered by emergency blankets, reacts as she arrives, with other refugees and migrants, on the Greek island of Lesbos, At least five migrants including three children, died after four boats sank between Turkey and Greece, as rescue workers searched the sea for dozens more, the Greek coastguard said Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants wait under outside the Moria registration camp on the Lesbos. Over 400,000 people have landed on Greek islands from neighbouring Turkey since the beginning of the year Refugee crisis - in pictures The bodies of Christian refugees are buried separately from Muslim refugees at the Agios Panteleimonas cemetery in Mytilene, Lesbos Refugee crisis - in pictures Macedonian police officers control a crowd of refugees as they prepare to enter a camp after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A refugee tries to force the entry to a camp as Macedonian police officers control a crowd after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees are seen aboard a Turkish fishing boat as they arrive on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing a part of the Aegean Sea from the Turkish coast to Lesbos Reuters Refugee crisis - in pictures An elderly woman sings a lullaby to baby on a beach after arriving with other refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A man collapses as refugees make land from an overloaded rubber dinghy after crossing the Aegean see from Turkey, at the island of Lesbos EPA Refugee crisis - in pictures A girl reacts as refugees arrive by boat on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees make a show of hands as they queue after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures People help a wheelchair user board a train with others, heading towards Serbia, at the transit camp for refugees near the southern Macedonian town of Gevgelija AP Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees board a train, after crossing the Greek-Macedonian border, near Gevgelija. Macedonia is a key transit country in the Balkans migration route into the EU, with thousands of asylum seekers - many of them from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia - entering the country every day Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures An aerial picture shows the "New Jungle" refugee camp where some 3,500 people live while they attempt to enter Britain, near the port of Calais, northern France Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A Syrian girl reacts as she helped by a volunteer upon her arrival from Turkey on the Greek island of Lesbos, after having crossed the Aegean Sea EPA Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees arrive by boat on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Beds ready for use for migrants and refugees are prepared at a processing center on January 27, 2016 in Passau, Germany. The flow of migrants arriving in Passau has dropped to between 500 and 1,000 per day, down significantly from last November, when in the same region up to 6,000 migrants were arriving daily. More than 10,000 people are believed to be trapped in Idomeni as crossings remain shut along the Balkans route previously used by more than a million refugees. Earlier on Monday, Greek police had tried to persuade asylum seekers to leave as they protested on the railway tracks that pass Macedonia. Most refused and the lines continue to be blocked, with goods trains stationary on the tracks. Greek police did not immediately reply to The Independents request for information. Additional reporting by agencies For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Male, 26, single, quite well-educated but not an expert on the Quran this is the profile of an average fighter joining Isis. Analysis of thousands of entry documents leaked from the terrorist group has provided vital new insight into the background and expertise of its international jihadists. The US militarys Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) said all evidence pointed to the cache being genuine, exposing personal details of 4,188 militants who joined Isis in 2013 and 2014. The importance of this data for understanding the Islamic State and, in particular, the foreign fighter flow, cannot be overstated, analysts said, hailing an important step in fathoming the groups motivations and techniques. Two of the Isis 'registration forms' (leaks.zamanalwsl.net) A unique personnel form exists for each individual, containing their real and war names, ages, education level, jihad experience, nationalities and numerous other details. Each recruit was also asked whether they wanted to be a fighter, istishhadi (suicide bomber), or inghimasi (suicide fighter), with the overwhelming majority choosing the former. Analysis by the CTC, an academic institution at the United States Military Academy, revealed citizens of 77 countries in Isis ranks, with the highest number identifying themselves as Saudi Arabian. There were 26 British fighters on the list, far below the numbers from Germany and France in the files, which included names of known UK militants and three of the Paris attackers. But the figure doubled to 57 for those saying they had been resident in the UK before travelling to Isis territories in Syria, suggesting that many of the men may have had foreign or dual nationalities. The average year of birth was 1987, making the typical recruit between 26 and 27 years old at the time of signing up. The documents appear to ask recruits a series of questions Ages varied hugely by country, with the younger fighters tending to be from Western nations including the UK, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Canada and Australia, compared to older militants from the Middle East, North Africa, Russia and China with experience fighting in other conflicts. The average age of Western fighters is lower than that of non-Westerners, the CTC noted. This suggests the need for tailored and nuanced prevention, intervention, and reintegration programmes. Another startling finding was the level of education listed, with most of the recruits saying they had completed secondary school and many listing higher education and university degrees. The report described the group as generally well educated and said that although some of the fighters recorded no formal education, a roughly equal number held advanced degrees. PhDs in economics, computer science, English, physiology and teaching were among those listed, with Western fighters being more highly educated on average. Timeline: The emergence of Isis Show all 40 1 /40 Timeline: The emergence of Isis Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2000 Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (pictured here) forms an al-Qaeda splinter group in Iraq, al-Qaeda in Iraq. Its brutality from the beginning alienates Iraqis and many al-Qaeda leaders. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2006 Al-Zarqawi is killed in a U.S. strike. Al-Zarqawis successor, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, announces the creation of the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI). Reuters Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2009 Still al-Qaeda-linked ISI claims responsibility for suicide bombings that killed 155 in Baghdad, as well as attacks in August and October killing 240, as President Obama announces troop withdrawal from Iraq in March. Getty Images Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2010 Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi becomes head of ISI, at lowest ebb of Islamist militancy in Iraq, which sees last U.S. combat brigade depart. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2012 In Syria, protests (pictured here starting in Daree) have morphed into what president Assad labelled a real war with emergence of a coalition of forces opposed to Assads regime. Syria group Jabhat al-Nusra are among rebel groups who refuse to join, denouncing it as a conspiracy. Bombings targeting Shia areas, killing more than 500 people, spark fears of new sectarian conflict. Sunni Muslims stage protests across country against what they see as increasingly marginalisation by Shia-led government. AP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2013 Al-Baghdadi renames ISI as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or Isis, as the group absorbs Syrian al-Nusra, gaining a foothold in Syria. In response, al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri (Bin Ladens successor) concerned about Isis expansion orders that Isis be dissolved and ISI operations should be confined to Iraq. This order is rejected by al-Baghdadi. AFP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - January Isis fighters capture the Iraqi cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, giving them base to launch slew of attacks further south. AP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - June Isis declares itself the Caliphate, calling itself Islamic State (IS). The group captures Mosul, Iraqs second largest city; Tal Afar, just 93 miles from Syrian border; and the central Iraqi city of Tikrit. These advances sent shockwaves around the world. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - June Around the same time Isis releases a video calling for western Muslims to join the Caliphate and fight, prompting new evaluations of extremists groups social media understanding. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - June Isis take Baiji oil fields in Iraq - giving them access to huge amounts of possible revenue. EPA Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - August James Foley is executed by the group as concerns grow for second American prisoner, fellow reporter Steven Sotloff. AP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - August Obama authorises U.S. airstrikes in Iraq, helping to stall Isis along with action by Kurdish forces following the deaths of hundreds of Yazidi people on Mount Sinjar. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - September Isis release video showing Steven Sotloffs murder prompting Western speculation his executioner is same man who killed Mr Foley. EPA Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - September Obama tells us that America will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country EPA Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - September Isis release a video appearing to show David Haines, who was captured by militants in Syria in 2013, wearing an orange jumpsuit and kneeling in the desert while he reads a pre-prepared script. It later shows what appears to be the aid worker's body. Rex Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - September Peshmerga fighters scrabble to hold positions in the Diyala province (a gateway to Baghdad) as Isis fighters continue to advance on Iraqi capital. AFP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - October Aid worker Alan Henning is killed. Self-imposed media blackout refuses to show images of him in final moments, instead focuses upon humanitarian care. AP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - October Isis raise their flag in Kobani, which had been strongly defended by Kurdish troops. The victory goes against hopeful western analysis Isis had overextended itself, while alienating much of the Muslim population through the murder of Henning. Victory causes fresh waves of Kurdish refugees arriving in Turkey. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2014 - November American hostage, who embarced values of Islam, Peter Kassig and 14 Syrian soldiers are shown meeting the same fate as other captives. But intelligence agencies will be poring over the apparently significant discrepancies between this and previous films. Seramedig.org.uk Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - February Isis has released a video revealing the murder by burning to death of a Jordanian pilot held by the group since the end of December 2014. Reuters Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - February Isis militants have released videos which appear to show the beheading of Japanese hostages Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - February American aid worker, Kayla Mueller was the last American hostage known to be held by Isis. She died, according to her captors, in an airstrike by the Jordanian air force on the city of Raqqa in Syria, though US authorities disputed this. AP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - February Isis militants have posted a gruesome video online in which they force 21 Egyptian Coptic Christian hostages to kneel on a beach in Libya before beheading them. Egypt vowed to avenge the beheading and launched air strikes on Isis positions. AP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - February The British Isis militant suspected of appearing in videos showing the beheading of Western hostages has been named in reports as Mohammed Emwazi from London. Rex Features Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - March Isis triple suicide attack has killed more than 100 worshippers and hundreds of others were injured after the group members targeted two mosques in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa. AP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - April Iraqi forces have claimed victory over Isis in battle for Tikrit and raised the flag in the city. EPA/STR Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - April Isis has claimed responsibility for a suicide bomb attack in Afghanistan that killed at least 35 people queuing to collect their wages and injured 100 more. EPA Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - April Isis media arm released a 29-minute video purporting to show militants executing Ethiopian Christians captives. The footage bore the extremist groups al-Furqan media logo and showed the destruction of churches and desecration of religious symbols. A masked fighter made a statement threatening Christians who did not convert to Islam or pay a special tax. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - May Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Isis has been "incapacitated" by a spinal injuries sustained in a US air strike in Iraq. He is being treated in a hideout by two doctors from Isis stronghold of Mosul who are said to be "strong ideological supporters of the group". Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - May Isis has also claimed responsibility for killing 300 of Yazidi captives, including women, children and elderly people in Iraq AP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - May Isis attack on Prophet Mohamed cartoon contest in Texas was its first action on US soil. Two gunmen were shot and killed after launching the attack at the exhibition. Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi have been named as the attackers at the Curtis Culwell Centre arena in Garland. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - May Isiss deputy leader, Abu Alaa Afri, a former physics teacher who was thought to have taken charge of the deadly terrorist group, has been killed in a US-led coalition airstrike. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - May US special forces have killed a senior Isis leader named as Abu Sayyaf in an operation aiming to capture him and his wife in Syria. Getty Images Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - May Iran-backed militias are sent to Ramadi by the Iraqi government to fight Isis militants who completed their capture of the city. Government soldiers and civilians were reportedly massacred by extremists as they took control and the army fled. Charred bodies were left littering the city streets as troops clung on to trucks speeding away from the city. Ramadi is the latest government stronghold to fall to the so-called Islamic State, despite air strikes by a US-led international coalition aiming to stop its advance in Iraq and Syria. AFP Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - May Isis rounded up civilians trapped in Palmyra and forced them to watch 20 people being executed in the historic citys ancient amphitheatre. The Unesco World Heritage site was overrun by militants, threatening the future of 2,000 year-old monuments and ruins. Thousands of Palmyras residents fled but many are still living within the city walls, while the UN human rights office in Geneva said it had received reports of Syrian government forces preventing people from leaving until they retreated from the city. Getty Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - May A group of Isis-affiliated fighters have captured a key airport in central Libya. The militants took control of the al-Qardabiya airbase in Sirte after a local militia tasked with defending the facility withdrew from their positions. Affiliates of Isis, already control large parts of Sirte, the birthplace of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and a former stronghold of his supporters. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - June The US Air Force has destroyed an Isis stronghold after an extremist let slip their location on social media. According the Air Force Times, General Herbert "Hawk" Carlisle, commander of Air Combat Command, said that Airmen at Hulburt Field, Florida, used images shared by jihadists to track the location of their headquarters before destroying it in an airstrike. Reuters Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - June Kurdish forces captured a key military base in a significant victory in Raqqa as well as town of Tell Abyad. YPG fighters, backed by US-led airstrikes and other rebels, consolidated their gains, when they seized the key town on the Syria-Turkey border. They are now just 30 miles to the north of Raqqa and have cut off a major supply route deep inside Isis-held territory. Ahmet Silk/Getty Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - June Isis has released gruesome footage claiming to show the murder of more than a dozen men by drowning, decapitation and using a rocket-propelled grenade as it seeks to boost morale among its fanatical supporters. Timeline: The emergence of Isis 2015 - June Isis has begun carrying out its threat to destroy structures in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, blowing up at least two monuments at the Unesco-protected site as Syrian government troops made advances on the Islamists positions. AFP The one area of education that was noticeably lacking, however, was that in Islamic law, or Sharia. Of those who answered a question on the level of their religious knowledge, 70 per cent described it as basic, while those citing greater expertise were mainly Saudis, Egyptians, Tunisians and Indonesians. The finding supports analysts assertions that Isis has twisted the Quran to serve its purposes, introducing brutal and un-Islamic punishments in its territories. An open letter signed by more than 100 Muslim scholars accused Isis of deliberately misinterpreting the holy book in 2014. It is forbidden in Islam to oversimplify Sharia matters and ignore established Islamic sciences, said the missive directed at the groups leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. One cannot cherry-pick Quranic verses for legal arguments without considering the entire Quran and Hadith. Reyaad Khan, who has since been killed in a drone strike, was among the British fighters in the documents When asked about their previous occupation, the most-cited role was unskilled labourers, then trade and student in third place. More than 200 listed themselves as unemployed, while double that number left the field blank, suggesting they were also without work. This is What's Left of Palmyra After Liberatation from ISIL The average recruit either was a student or had a job, just not a particularly high-paying one, the report said. The CTC said some of the positions in the cache might prompt concerns about future threats, including petrol technicians, former soldiers, IT experts, pilots, plane mechanics and a former aircraft security officer who was previously affiliated with the Saudi interior ministry. There are clear indicators in the data that the Islamic State was using these forms to talent scout and identify individuals with specific educational, professional, or military backgrounds that might prove useful to the group in the future, it added. Fouad Mohamed Aggad was one of three Paris attackers named in the files (AFP/Getty) Not all occupations would be seen as desirable by the so-called Islamic States fanatics. A 24-year-old from Gaziantep, Turkey was listed as having been a drug and hashish dealer. His form contained a note from an Islamic State official stating: May God forgive him and us! When the employment field was narrowed down to those with post-secondary education, the vast majority of extremists said they were students, self-employed or in trade. The CTC said the discrepancy may support theories about the radicalisation process in Europe, where many of the Isis fighters identified so far have had few prospects at home. Some in this dataset may have been motivated by frustration over failure to achieve expected success in the job market following their education, the report noted. Relative deprivation is a well-covered theory of political violence. Theresa May on Isis Analysis also showed that almost two thirds of the fighters were unmarried, while 90 per cent had no previous jihadist experience. Some of the personnel records were initially published by Syrian opposition news site, Zaman al Wasl, followed by German media outlets, Sky News and NBC, which passed their documents on to CTC analysts. The American broadcaster said it acquired the files from a former Isis fighter who became disillusioned and stole the records before defecting from the organisation. Afzal Ashraf, a visiting fellow at Nottingham Universitys centre of conflict, security and terrorism, previously told The Independent the leak was devastating for the terrorist group. It will be a great blow for their recruitment process because these documents show not just the people joining but the networks involved in radicalising them and facilitating their travel, he said. Any recruit will know they are very likely to be discovered and there will be serious consequences for them - it doesnt inspire a great deal of confidence. For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Israeli police are questioning a diamond dealer on suspicion of embezzlement as part of a fraud investigation that could involve sums of up to $65 million (45m). Announcing the arrest on Wednesday, police identified the suspect as Hanan Abramovich. Mr Abramovich was arrested the previous day, following a complaint from members of the Israel Diamond Exchange (IDE). A police spokeswoman said: "The suspect is under arrest and we are currently questioning him on suspicion of embezzlement." The IDE, based in the city of Ramat Gan, said several of its members alleged that Mr Abramovichs company owed them "tens of millions of dollars" for gems that it purchased but did not pay for. Israeli media has reported that around 12 leading firms are involved in the case, with sums involved of up to $65m. There are fears that a number of the firms could face bankruptcy in relation to the affair. The diamond exchange in Ramat Gan is one of the worlds largest, with around 1,000 firms now based within its buildings. Mr Abramovich appeared in court on Wednesday with his arrest being extended by two days. Adi Carmeli, a lawyer for Mr Abramovich said that his clinet denied any connection to criminal activity. He added that Mr Abramovich filed for bankruptcy in late 2015. Mr Carmeli told Israels Channel 2: My client acted within the framework of regular business practices... A simple investigation will validate this. Eli Avidar, the managing director of the IDE said in a statement that the exchanges board of directors "will show zero tolerance to any who bring harm to other members of the exchange." The diamond exchange management will work resolutely to clarify the case including working with the enforcement authorities, he added. Members of the IDE have also been asked to come forward with any information Mr Avidar said that Israels diamond industry had been undergoing difficulties in the past several years and unfortunately we have seen cases where some have exploited this situation". For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} President Barack Obama has attempted to reassure Americas Sunni Gulf allies that the US has not gone soft on Iran in the wake of its controversial nuclear weapons deal as he urged regional leaders to redouble their support in the fight against Isis. In a reference to Iran during a visit to Saudi Arabia to meet regional Gulf leaders Mr Obama insisted that the US would use all elements of its power to deter and confront external aggression against our allies and our partners. And he added: Even with the nuclear deal we recognise collectively that we continue to have serious concerns about Iranian behaviour. Mr Obama has long warned that the rivalry between Iran and the Sunni monarchies of the Gulf has been fuelling conflicts in Iraq and Syria. The President has called on Gulf states and Iran to forge a cold peace to de-escalate tensions in the region. Recommended Read more Obama urged to rule out trading US cluster bombs for Saudi favours However his message of solidarity was undermined back in Washington after Democrats in the Senate said they would support a Republican bill that would allow families of September 11 victims to sue the government of Saudi Arabia. A number of victims families believe that the US holds evidence of tacit Saudi support for Osama bin Ladens attacks on New York and are backing the bill that would allow the Saudi government to be successfully sued in a US court. But the White House is threatening to veto the bill because they believe it would seriously jeopardise bilateral relations and damage US attempts to persuade the Saudis to play a more active role in the fight against Isis. While Mr Obama made no reference to the bill after his meeting he admitted that significant tensions between the two countries remained. What is true is true with all of our allies and friends is that at any point of time there are going to be differences, Mr Obama said. Ben Rhodes, Mr Obama's deputy national security adviser, told reporters at a briefing in Riyadh that strains in ties in recent years reflected differences over tactics rather than goals. Mr Rhodes said a two-hour meeting with Saudi Arabia's King Salman was the longest the two leaders had shared and included a very open and honest discussion" that included issues which were a source of tension. I think they both agreed that it was good to essentially have this opportunity to clear the air, he said. During the visit Mr Obama warned that the ceasefire in Syria - that the US and Russia brokered - was under tremendous strain, blaming President Assad's forces in part for what he said were repeated violations. It may be breaking down, the President said. But he added that it was in the interest of both sides to end violence and come to a sustainable settlement. The problem with any Plan B that does not involve a political settlement is that it means more fighting, potentially for years, he said. Whoever comes out on top will be standing on top of a country thats been devastated. For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Students at one of the countrys top universities are launching a campaign to pressure their union to disaffiliate from the National Union of Students (NUS) after the controversial election of its new national president. The group at the University of Cambridge confirmed it has submitted a motion to the council of Cambridge University Students Union (CUSU) which would ensure an institution-wide referendum before the end of the academic year. The announcement has come after the NUS elected Malia Bouattia as its new president in Brighton on Wednesday. Her appointment - which is the highest post in UK student politics - was met with a mixed response after allegations of anti-Semitism surfaced just last week. More than 300 heads of student Jewish societies and protesters issued Ms Bouattia with an open letter, asking her why she referred to the University of Birmingham as something of a Zionist outpost in British higher education in a 2011 article. The Cambridge students said they have also taken issue with the fact that, at an event in 2014, Ms Bouattia - as NUSs black students officer - claimed a Zionist-led media oppresses the global south, adding that she gave support to resistance, an alleged reference to the violent form. The students claim she also led opposition to a motion at last years NUS conference condemning Isis. However, Ms Bouattia said post-election that to suggest she condones terrorist groups is simply false. The top 10 universities in the UK Show all 10 1 /10 The top 10 universities in the UK The top 10 universities in the UK 1. University of Oxford The top 10 universities in the UK 2. University of Cambridge The top 10 universities in the UK 3. Imperial College London The top 10 universities in the UK 4. University College London The top 10 universities in the UK 5. London School of Economics and Political Science The top 10 universities in the UK 6. University of Edinburgh The top 10 universities in the UK 7. Kings College London The top 10 universities in the UK 8. University of Manchester The top 10 universities in the UK 9. University of Bristol The top 10 universities in the UK 10. Durham University Jack May, leader of the campaign and English literature student at Gonville and Caius College, described the election of Ms Bouattia as being a horrifying message to Jewish students in the UK. He said: Attention has been repeatedly drawn to her anti-Semitic comments. Unfortunately, Malias election is just the latest event in a tide of anti-Semitism sweeping UK universities. Cambridge students should be given a chance to decide whether or not to remain part of the increasingly toxic culture and management of the NUS. Adam Crafton, a Jewish student at Cambridge and a supporter of the campaign, described Wednesday as a deeply disappointing day for Jewish students at Cambridge. In a statement, he said: The NUS claims on its website to be a leading exemplar of equality and diversity. Regrettably, the rise of Malia to NUS president clearly contradicts this mission statement, alienating a minority group whose fears about her previous conduct and comments are yet to be satisfactorily answered. The failure of the national body means the responsibility now falls upon our own Cambridge representatives. Therefore, both students said they are calling upon the CUSU council to recognise this shift in the political landscape, and sense the need to offer students the freedom to choose who should represent their interests. Mr Crafton concluded: As such, we implore CUSU council to pass this motion, engage in a democratic process, and ensure the freedom and security of Jewish students. In a post-election statement on Wednesday, however, Ms Bouattia said she is committed to putting liberation at the heart of the student movement, adding that she has a long track record of opposing racism and discrimination in all its forms. Anti-semitism 'is the wrong focus' She said: Jews have faced horrendous persecution over thousands of years, and Jewish students on campuses and elsewhere continue to face anti-Semitism. Our movement knows this, and will stand alongside them. I responded straight away to an open letter from Jewish society presidents and addressed every allegation, making it clear that I am fully supportive of Jewish students and societies. However, just a day before she was elected, the students union at Oxford University confirmed it would not be voting for Ms Bouattia, and said: The sabbatical team do not believe [her] response was adequate, and believe that there are still questions to be answered. For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Politicians have criticised a National Union of Students (NUS) debate on anti-Semitism after it heard arguments against commemorating the Holocaust. Labour MP for Bassetlaw, John Mann, described how some delegates comments - and their reception - were inappropriate, offensive, and point to a disturbing wider ignorance about anti-Semitism within the NUS. Reports also emerged after Wednesdays debate that some NUS delegates were applauding speeches opposing the commemoration of the Holocaust. Around 1,000 delegates and students union representatives have descended on Brighton for a three-day long national conference which aims to set out student policy for the academic year ahead. The motion for commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day was presented by students from the University of Birmingham, and described how evidence of racism and fascism is still evident on campuses throughout the UK. The motion said this had resulted in hate crimes, including a poster which recently appeared on the institutions campus, displaying a picture of Adolf Hitler with the words Hitler was right. To combat this, the motion argued that Holocaust education is vital, adding: Especially in a time when Holocaust trivialisation and revisionism is happening in society. The top 10 universities in the UK Show all 10 1 /10 The top 10 universities in the UK The top 10 universities in the UK 1. University of Oxford The top 10 universities in the UK 2. University of Cambridge The top 10 universities in the UK 3. Imperial College London The top 10 universities in the UK 4. University College London The top 10 universities in the UK 5. London School of Economics and Political Science The top 10 universities in the UK 6. University of Edinburgh The top 10 universities in the UK 7. Kings College London The top 10 universities in the UK 8. University of Manchester The top 10 universities in the UK 9. University of Bristol The top 10 universities in the UK 10. Durham University Darta Kaleja, from Chester University, was one of the students to have spoken out against commemorating the Holocaust. She said: I am against the NUS ignoring and forgetting other mass genocides and prioritising others. This, she said, suggested that some lives are more important than others. She continued: When, during my education, was I taught about the genocides in Tibet or Rwanda? It is important to commemorate all of them. Although the motion was passed, Mr Mann - who is also chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Anti-Semitism - hit out at the NUS for not doing enough to combat anti-Jewish hatred, something, he said, shows a failure in its responsibilities to its members. He said in a statement: The fact that delegates applauded these comments, and failed to recognise the attacks on Holocaust Memorial Day for what they were, underlines just how important an improved and far-reaching Holocaust educational effort in the NUS is. His comments came on the same day the NUS elected Malia Bouattia as its new national president for the next academic year. Ms Bouattias appointment received a mixed response after allegations of anti-Semitism surfaced just last week when over 300 heads of student Jewish societies and protesters issued her with an open letter after a 2011 article she co-authored came to their attention. Watch Malia Bouattia's winning speech: In the article, Ms Bouattia referred to the University of Birmingham as being something of a Zionist outpost in British higher education. Mr Mann continued: I am aghast at the new presidents previous response to the concerns raised by Jewish students and expect her to meet their representatives and to build confidence that tackling anti-Semitism in NUS will be a priority. Mr Manns comments came as he announced plans to convene a rally in Parliament against racism within NUS with former presidents of the Union. Conservative MP, Sir Eric Pickles, also voiced his concern over some views expressed at the debate and, taking to social media, said it was unbelieveable. He added: There are some within the NUS who feel that Holocaust Memorial Day should not be remembered because it is not inclusive enough. There are some within the NUS who would turn their backs on the murder of six million Jews. He also said certain figures within the national student campaign group allow anti-Semitism [to] flourish within their organisation. In a statement post-election, Ms Bouattia, who is due to begin her new post on 1 July, said: I supported and voted for the motion passed at National Conference today, which sets down an organisational commitment to tackling anti-Semitism on campuses. Jews have faced horrendous persecution over thousands of years, and Jewish students on campuses and elsewhere continue to face anti-Semitism. Our movement knows this, and will stand alongside them. Sign up to Simon Calders free travel email for weekly expert advice and money-saving discounts Get Simon Calders Travel email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Simon Calders Travel email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} I was playing cards with my mother and my wife was cooking tea in the kitchen. We ran out and clutched the frame of the front door. My wife was crying: sai baba, sai baba her favourite Indian saint save me! It was fearsome: everyone slept outside in the street, food prices soared and all the roads were blocked. Hari Sharma, my Kathmandu guide, remembers clearly the moment a 7.8-magnitude bhukampa (earthquake) rattled Nepal a year ago on Monday. In fifty seconds the same amount of time it takes to boil the kettle (plus a series of aftershocks) 600,000 homes were leveled, 22,309 injured and 8,856 lost their lives. It was the worst natural disaster to hit the country in 80 years. But the damage may have been prolonged by our reaction. Tourism is the main economic income in Nepal and it took nearly 10 months for the US and UK to lift their travel bans to the country after the disaster, despite only 14 of the 75 districts being affected. Its time to go back and one of the best ways of directing rupees straight to the source is staying with local families. UK-based responsible tour operator Rickshaw Travel arranges homestays and Id come try one. Its mid afternoon when Im dropped outside the four-storey townhouse of 37 year-old Shila Amatya. She whisks my bag off my back and ushers a cup of chai milky, spiced tea into my hands. From now on youre not a guest and Im not a host, she beams, so I seat myself on a wicker stool and watch while she entertains customers come to buy hair dye, earrings, panty liners or phone cards from her open-fronted shop. Shila is one of 15 families in Panauti one of the oldest towns in Nepal, southeast of Kathmandu who run a homestay cooperative. Guests are rotated between the families to ensure even distribution of earnings, with 80 per cent going to the host and 20 per cent going to the collective for projects such as scholarships for poor children and a new community hall. View of Panauti overlooking potato fields (Emma Thomson ) (Emma Thomson) Im a hairdresser too! says Shila, pointing to a worn leather chair facing a broad browning mirror on the wall. I pull at my own messy locks and frown at the split ends that havent seen a pair of scissors in over a year. Would you cut mine? Of course! she replies, whipping a silky black coverall off a peg and laying it across my shoulders. Ill give you a modern Nepali style, she continues, shearing off a clump of hair. Her sister-in-law, Ambika, and 15 year-old daughter, Amy, look on amused. Fifteen minutes later Im lighter and redesigned a bargain for the equivalent of 1.50. Shila stands back and appraises me: You need a sari to go with your new haircut. Ambika snatches a measuring tape from the shop countertop and lassoes it around my waist, shouting out numbers to Shila who jots them down on a notepad. She wears a red tika between her eyes and is shy. She says to leave it with her, Shila translates on her behalf. Itll only take four hours. I see Amys eyes light up behind her. An old woman is wheeling a cart down the dusty road. Pani puri! Want some? Amy calls back over her shoulder as she steps down into the street. I follow and watch as the old lady fetches half a dozen of the fried puff-pastry balls stacked up in a glass cabinet at the front of the cart. Pincering the crispy street snack between two fingers, she pokes a hole in the top with her fingernail and fills it with spicy mashed potato, onion and a spoonful of spicy chilli water and hands them over. I pop one into my mouth and it bursts like a water balloon. A wave of fiery heat sweeps down my nostrils. Whoa! The chilli is strong! laughs Amy. Throughout the day Ive been admiring Shilas golden ring. Is that Ganesha? I ask. Yes. Hes remover of obstacles lets get you one! So we hurry through the streets, crowded with people buying a last batch of tomatoes for the evening-meal pickle, and into a slip of a shop beside the river. The glass cabinets have been emptied for the night, but Shila whispers a few words to the shopkeeper and he reaches behind him and takes a small round box off the shelf. Its my last one, he shrugs. Were ring sisters, now I joke with Shila, holding the matching images of Ganesha together. People stop to chat to us on the walk home and by the time we get back, Ambika has finished my sari top. Shila leads me up to her bedroom where the shelves of an almighty dark-wood wardrobe are layered with a dozen shimmering saris. She riffles through them and pulls out a red-and-green cloth heavy with beading. She wraps the material around my waist and delicately rests the remainder over my shoulder. She nods approval and leads me back downstairs to the shop to show me off to Ambika and Amy. Ladies passing in the street laugh as I pose for photos. Its getting late. Whats for tea tonight, Mum? I tease Shila. Were having a momo party, she replies. We gather round the kitchen table in the basement. Amy rolls out small circles of dough, while Shila and I massage grated water buffalo meat, onion, garlic, coriander, ginger and masala spices together. I watch as she spoons a little into the centre of the floury circle and nips the edges together into a neat little bundle. I try to copy, but the filling oozes out. Pinch and release, pinch and release she encourages. What times does the electricity cut out tonight, Amy? asks Shila. Amy shrugs and, comically, were plunged into darkness five minutes later. We continue rolling by torchlight. We dip the steamed parcels into homemade tomato pickle and take sneaky sips of homemade raksi wine made from fermented rice. Ambika making the sari top (Emma Thomson ) (Emma Thomson) Shila shows me to my room with an en-suite toilet. We know youre not used to squatting, so we made sure all the houses have one like this for guests, she says, pointing to the Western flush toilet. I proffer a thumbs up. The bed is rock hard, but theres a mille-feuille of blankets to keep me warm. A large mandarin sun announces dawn and we join the trickle of people walking to temple. Mist still carpets the fields of potatoes and yellow mustard seed dotted between the houses and I avoid eye contact, guiltily after last nights momos, with a group of water buffalo grazing by the roadside. Golden light falls in shafts between the winding streets of the Unesco-listed medieval Old Town and we stop to greet old ladies warming up in the sun or coo over babies, their eyes emboldened with black eyeliner laced with fenugreek for eye health, Im told. Entering the Indreshwar Mahadev Temple complex, we set a kit of pigeons into the air. Priest Ramesh Prasad Jangam is preparing the lingam said to have been created by the god Shiva: dousing it with cows milk and adorning it with rice, red dye and strings of marigolds. Hes done it everyday of his life since he was 12 years old. He invites us for chai inside his house and tells us of the time he met Princess Diana when the Red Cross opened an office in town. Ladies in Panautis Unesco-listed Old Town (Emma Thomson ) (Emma Thomson) Later, I wander back into town on my own. People Ive met with Shila lift their palms to their forehead to wish me namaste grins breaking out across their sun-weathered faces. Ive only been here two days and, yet, bidding Ambika, Amy and Shila goodbye tugs at the heart. Back home, I find myself absent-mindedly fingering the red mould of Ganesha on my ring. As the Remover of Obstacles, I hope he will remove any lingering reservations tourists have about returning to Nepal. Travel Essentials Emma Thomson travelled to Nepal with Rickshaw Travel (01273 934 823; rickshawtravel.co.uk) which puts together responsible-tourism holidays from a series of bite-size trips. Emma sampled its Namaste! Warm Welcomes in Nepal itinerary, which costs 45 per person based on two sharing and includes transfers from Kathmandu. A 15-day single entry visa can be bought on arrival at Tribhuvan International Airport. The writer flew with Qatar Airways (0333 320 2454; qatarairways.com) from Heathrow to Kathmandu via Doha; returns start at 840. More information welcomenepal.com Sign up to Simon Calders free travel email for weekly expert advice and money-saving discounts Get Simon Calders Travel email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Simon Calders Travel email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Fancy a city break over next weekends bank holiday? As usual, air fares for a city break flying out on Friday and back on Monday are uncomfortably high; the cheapest deal I could find from Birmingham to Rome was 297 return, with Bristol to Barcelona slightly better at 195. And the cheapest deal for a short hop from Heathrow to Amsterdam is 336 return. Yet there are some city-break routes on which fares are being sold at way below cost, even on these peak dates. Attrition city breaks, I call them, because they result from ferocious fares wars between the budget airlines. Stansted to Edinburgh comes in at 53 return, while between Glasgow and Stansted, the fare is just 47 return. Air Passenger Duty alone accounts for 26 of this fare and since under-16s dont pay the aviation tax, a family of four can fly between Scotlands largest city and the English capital for a total of just 136 only 34 each. Ryanair and easyJet usually avoid head-to-head battles, but they are locked into a formidable fares war between Stansted and the two biggest Scottish airports. As a result, one-way fares on most days in May are 12.99 a penny less than the Chancellor earns from the flight in APD. The two no-frills giants are also competing from Luton to Copenhagen, a battle that is reverberating to other London airports. The best long-weekend deal is 113 return, flying out from Gatwick to the Danish capital on Norwegian and returning to Luton on Ryanair. For comparison, the fare from Birmingham airport about an hour up the M1 is 194. The effects of competition are clear between Edinburgh and Paris. Transavia, the low-cost offshoot of Air France/KLM this week launches the route between the Scottish and French capitals against easyJet and Flybe. For travellers who dont mind flying out to one Paris airport (Charles de Gaulle) and back from another (Orly), bank-holiday fares are as low as 120 return. That is one-fifth cheaper than from the nearest alternative airport, Glasgow, and half the price of flying from Newcastle - where Air France has a monopoly to Paris. For travellers from Tyneside, the bank holiday route of choice is Newcastle to Dublin. Its a very reasonable 85 return, taking advantage of the rivalry between Aer Lingus (now a sister company of British Airways) and Ryanair. Luton is turning out to be a real battleground this summer. Vueling (another BA sibling) has set up shop on key easyJet routes to Amsterdam and Barcelona. This impertinent move into easyJets home turf is keeping fares to the Dutch capital down over the bank holiday. The cheapest deal, out Friday and back Monday, is 136 is exactly 200 less than the lowest fare to and from Heathrow, on KLM. BAs cheapest for the hour-long hop is 414. Ralph Anker, chief analyst for the route-planning website, anna.aero, says fares from a range of UK airports to Spains largest cities could also be competitive: Vueling is flying to Barcelona from Leeds/Bradford, Newcastle and Liverpool, against a combination of Jet2, Monarch, easyJet and Ryanair. Another good one is Birmingham-Madrid. Three summers ago, no-one flew this route. Then Monarch and Norwegian started, joined this summer by Iberia and Ryanair, making a total of 14 flights a week. That could prove particularly useful for helping families from the Midlands avoid the school holiday peaks to key resort airports. Birmingham-Malaga on 24 July for a week is currently priced at 297, but the fare to Madrid is 60 per cent less with cheap and easy connections by high-speed train to the Costa del Sol. All these fares are hand-baggage only, and assume that you avoid unnecessary extras such as seat selection and priority boarding. They were all researched on Tuesday this week; fares will tend to increase closer to departure, but those on more competitive routes may actually fall. A test booking from Luton to Copenhagen, travelling just 24 hours later, revealed a fare of only 34 return astonishing value for 1,200 miles of air travel. Looking further ahead, Toronto could be the long-haul city break of choice for the summer. In May, the leading Canadian budget airline, WestJet, is moving in to Gatwick, as is the Air Canada low-cost offshoot, Rouge. Both will be up against the long-serving airline, Air Transat. Fares for the late May bank holiday weekend are widely available at under 400 around 100 lower than to New York, which is 100 miles closer to London. Sign up to Simon Calders free travel email for weekly expert advice and money-saving discounts Get Simon Calders Travel email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Simon Calders Travel email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Q My sister and I were flying from Luton to Barcelona. Having circled because of fog at Barcelona airport, we had to land at Girona airport instead. But we were advised that the second engine which fuelled the air conditioning system needed essential repairs. Our options were to stay on the flight with no air conditioning, await re-fuelling, wait for an engineer to fly over to approve of the essential maintenance once it had been completed, and fly on to Barcelona. We were told that this option would take 3 hours before we would be airborne once again, plus the flight time. Our second option was to get off the plane, and make our own way to Barcelona by public transport. As easyJet had no representatives at Girona airport, we had to wait about two hours for a baggage attendant to return our luggage from the hold. Nobody from easyJet got off the plane to help advise passengers what to do. We then purchased a bus ticket to take us to Barcelona Nord bus station, which took about 90 minutes. We eventually arrived in Barcelona four hours late. Our plans for the day had to be changed because we were late, and because we were stressed and tired from our experience. Despite the fact that we were essentially abandoned at the wrong airport, we are not entitled to compensation from easyJet. Do you think that is fair? Rebecca Kirk A Much of your story is common to weather-related diversions. The captain flies towards the destination airport, goes into a holding pattern hoping that the fog will clear, but eventually when the fuel contingency starts to run low, diverts to a nearby airport. As you discovered, if the airport is one that the airline does not usually serve, everything from refuelling to baggage handling can take an age. But because airlines cite weather-related diversions as extraordinary circumstances, arriving three hours late or more would not normally trigger any payment. However, the subsequent mechanical problem may have been a good candidate for EC261 delay compensation of 250 per person. Assuming the time from landing at Girona to landing at Barcelona was over three hours, you argue the case that clock started ticking again once on the ground in Girona. The shoddy way in which the European rules on passenger compensation were drafted means that they reward inertia and penalise initiative. Had you stuck with the refuel/repair option, you could have earned enough compensation to pay for your flights. As it is, the only liability I can see from easyJet is for the bus ticket, so I suggest you ask for that expense to be reimbursed. Every day, our travel correspondent Simon Calder tackles readers questions. Just email yours to s@hols.tv or tweet @simoncalder Sign up to Simon Calders free travel email for weekly expert advice and money-saving discounts Get Simon Calders Travel email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Simon Calders Travel email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Legend has it, if a woman passes through the hole of Ponden Kirk rock, theyll marry within the year, my guide, Stephen, said. I doubted any of the Bronte sisters scrambled down a steep crag and through a narrow crevice, so I wasnt about to. Deep in the heart of Bronte country, this rock is said to have been the inspiration for Penistone Crags in Wuthering Heights. From here I could take in the striking panoramic views of the Yorkshire moors, and the village of Haworth in the distance. This year, the cobblestone village begins Bronte200; a five-year celebration of the bicentennial births of the regions (and perhaps Britains) most famed literary family, the Brontes - starting with Charlottes, today. The imposing and dramatic landscape of the moors inspired her, along with sisters Emily and Anne, to write some of literatures most enigmatic and iconic fiction. My tour began at Ponden Hall, the 17th-century building, now run as a B&B, that is believed to have inspired Emilys Wuthering Heights. From here we marched up the moors, not seeing a soul, following signs with directions in English and Japanese a hint at the nationality of many of the areas literary pilgrims. Its hard to imagine the sisters walking through the moors in conditions like today, without proper coats and walking shoes, Stephen said. I had to agree as we tramped along boggy tracks dotted with frozen puddles, thick grass and large rocks to Top Withens, a few miles further on from Ponden Kirk. This delapidated farmhouse is thought by some to have been the basis for the Earnshaw family home in Wuthering Heights. Today, a plaque on the side reads, The building, even when complete, bore no resemblance to the house slightly dismantling that theory, and belittling the tiring walk to reach it. But still, its worth it for the views. Striding back down the valley, we visited Bronte Waterfall, a picnicking area popular with the sisters and later named after them. In dry weather, its little more than a stream trickling down the valley, but after rain the waterfall is, according to Stephen, much more impressive; it is easy to imagine why the girls walked so far in tough conditions to spend time here. Bronte Country Show all 6 1 /6 Bronte Country Bronte Country Top Withens Top Withens Bronte Country Haworth Bronte Country Ponden Hall The Earnshaw Room, with its box-bed Bronte Country Bronte Parsonage Museum Bronte Country Bronte Parsonage Museum Dining room Bronte Country Charlotte Bronte Portrait from the 1850s, painted by J H Thompson Back at Ponden Hall, I checked into the Earnshaw Room (they really dont shy away from the Bronte connection in these parts), doing as Mr Lockwood did in Wuthering Heights by sleeping in a traditional 18th-century style box bed rather like a freestanding wardrobe that you climb into via a sliding door on the side. The rooms tiny single-paned window, which the box bed surrounds, is where Emily supposedly imagined Cathys ghost clawing at the glass. But while Emilys local influence looms the largest, it was Charlotte who was the first sister to find success. Born six miles away in Thornton, Charlotte spent most of her life in Haworth, living at the Parsonage with her father, sisters and brother, until she died at just 39. The famous literary family home is now the Bronte Parsonage Museum, which contains the worlds largest collection of Bronte memorabilia. Inside, Tracey Chavalier (author of Girl with a Pearl Earring) has curated the exhibition, Charlotte Great and Small (to 1 January 2017). The exhibition is dedicated to comparing the authors physical slightness, at just 4ft10 and the constraints of her life as a woman, to the enormity of her ambition. Like her own famous heroine, Jane Eyre, Charlotte was small, plain and obscure. Bronte Parsonage Museum Quotes written on the walls and displayed alongside original artefacts emphasise the disparity. In a letter written to her aunt in 1841, Charlotte said: Papa will, perhaps, think it a wild and ambitious scheme; but whoever rose in the world without ambition? Her determination for greatness contrasts with her obsession with all things tiny, including a book she made, so small it fits in the palm of your hand. But Charlotte, a storyteller of love, never told her own love story. Among the artefacts is a letter written in French to her professor in Belgium, for whom she pronounced her love. Professor Constantin Heger became the object of her affections after she and Emily studied French literature in Brussels in 1842. The letters were torn up before being sewn back together, which Rebecca Yorke of the museum speculates were probably repaired by his wife. The rest of the house remains much as the family would have known it: the fathers study, with its piano and view of the church; the dark and rather cramped kitchen; and the little bedrooms. The most evocative space is the dining room. This is where the sisters worked, long after their father had gone to bed, walking around the table, helping each other with their writing. Here are the girls original writing desks, where the stories of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were penned. Travel essentials Getting there The closest station is Keighley. Trainline (thetrainline.com) offers tickets from London Kings Cross via Leeds from 24.50 one way. Staying there Ponden Hall (ponden-hall.co.uk). Doubles from 85 a night, B&B. Click here to find hotels in Yorkshire Visiting there Bronte Parsonage Museum (bronte.org.uk). The exhibition, Charlotte Great and Small, runs until 1 January 2017 (entry 7.50). More information visitengland.com Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inbox Get our free View from Westminster email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the View from Westminster email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} In an air conditioned office-block in Libreville, Gabon's capital, senior wildlife warden Joseph Okouyi flicks through images on a laptop. This is the exit wound, he says, pointing to a bloody mess of muscle and bone exploding from a man's leg. The stricken soldier was shot in the shin by a kalashnikov-wielding poacher in Minkebe National Park, north-east Gabon. He was lucky to survive, says Okouyi. A Belgium-sized expanse of virginal rainforest, Minkebe has no roads, and it took three days for a helicopter to reach him, by which time it was almost too late. The incident took place in December amid escalating conflict between poachers and eco-gaurds. Clashes have increased in both frequency and intensity since Gabon's national parks agency (ANPN) upped its presence in area. A rotating battalion of 100 eco-guards and soldiers now keep guard in the park, which borders Cameroon to the north and Congo to the east. When Manchester-born Lee White took over ANPN in 2009, the agency had no vehicles and 60 staffers controlling 13 national parks and 3 million hectares. It now has close to 700, and a budget of almost $20m which pays for military training, weapons and vehicles. As we became more numerous and more professional, we inevitably became more proficient at arresting people and seizing ivory, he says. Poachers responded aggressively. In the past they were naive, and, upon contact with our men, would fling their weapons in the air and run into the forest. But they very quickly worked out that unlike, say, Botswana, we weren't going to shoot them without being shot at first. For the last six months they've started systematically shooting at my men on sight. Interrogations of arrested poachers revealed many work, possibly under duress, for a gang operating out of a Cameroonian military base in Djoum, just over the border. White says they are cannon fodder and face severe punishment beatings, possibly worse if they return to Cameroon empty-handed. The women hunting big-game poachers Show all 8 1 /8 The women hunting big-game poachers The women hunting big-game poachers The Black Mambas are a specially trained team of rangers who police the park night and day to protect the animals from illegal hunting Julia Gunther The women hunting big-game poachers Lukie, 26, says, 'The next generation must know rhinos in life. If poaching is allowed they will only see them in a picture' Julia Gunther The women hunting big-game poachers Proud finds and disables a snare laid by poachers Julia Gunther The women hunting big-game poachers During a scouting trip, the Mambas examine an impala horn Julia Gunther The women hunting big-game poachers Qolile, 21, learned about wildlife and conservation at Timbavati Bush School. She would like go further both with her studies and with the Black Mambas Julia Gunther The women hunting big-game poachers Mambas on the march. The unit has so far removed more than 1,000 poachers snares, and been awarded the UNs Champions of the Earth award Julia Gunther The women hunting big-game poachers Yenzekile reports the location of a young, slain kudu to the control room Julia Gunther The women hunting big-game poachers Black Mambas Mirren, 26, Winnie, 22, Belinda, 27, and Dedeya, 26 Julia Gunther At some point in the last six months, the risk of being arrested, having guns and ivory confiscated and eventually being deported back to into the clutches of the poaching gangs in Cameroon became equal to, or worse, than the risks of shooting at my men. Intensive logging right up to the Gabonese border means Cameroonian poachers have easy access to northern regions of Minkebe, while White's men must hike or travel by boat for four days. The helicopter is expensive, and must be used sparingly. The battle against poachers brings new challenges to Gabon's army, which has never fought in a war. Okouyi's men were disturbed when two years ago they killed a poacher for the first time. It was traumatic. We have no psychologist. The men have to adapt, because it is their job, but killing another human has an effect, and it's difficult to deal with. From 2002-2011, poachers ran amok in Minkebe, killing over ten thousand of the of the park's forest elephants. Beyond the reach of the authorities a camp of 7,000 people trading ivory, gold, prostitutes and drugs sprung up in the middle of the forest. The camp coincided with soaring gold and ivory prices, the latter reaching a high of $240 per kilo in 2011. Gabonese paratroopers razed the camp in 2011, but poachers returned in smaller, harder to detect groups. White and his team are reluctant to be drawn on the number of elephants remaining in the park in case it attracts more poachers. Political stability and an environmentally-engaged government have made Gabon a relative haven for the forest elephant, whose hard, pinkish ivory is prized by carvers and consumers in the far east. Roughly half the world's forest elephants around 40,000 live in the country, despite it holding only 12 per cent of the elephant's preferred habitat. The forest elephant dwells in remote, often lawless regions of central Africa, leaving it vulnerable to armed gangs. Scientists say poachers slaughtered two thirds of the entire population in just over a decade. On 29-30 of this month African heads of state, business leaders and conservationists will meet in Kenya at the inaugural Giants Club Summit to drive front-line protection measures and work out a co-operative frame-work for saving Africa's elephants. The Kenyan government will follow the summit by burning 120 tonnes of ivory, the largest ever amount to be burned in one go. Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inbox Get our free View from Westminster email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the View from Westminster email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Edward Said, 13 years dead but intellectually un-buriable, used to say that there was only one last taboo in the United States. You could talk about blacks, gays pretty much anything you wanted the Palestinian scholar, linguist, historian and musician would tell us. But you cant talk about America and Israel. Not, at least, in any critical sense. But here we are in an American election year and Bernie Sanders is calling for a more even-handed approach to the Palestinians; Vice President Joe Biden has expressed his overwhelming frustration with Benjamin Netanyahu; even Hillary Clinton who, of course, is going to be the next US President has managed (just) to refer to damaging actions by Israel, including with respect to settlements. Not exactly earth-shattering stuff, and theyve all uttered the usual prayers. America is committed to Israels security which is non-negotiable (Clinton) and the US is Israels only absolute friend (Biden). The future President Clinton picked up 56 rounds of applause when she addressed Aipac, Israels most powerful lobbyists, in New York last month thats 18 more rounds than Netanyahu got when he addressed Congress a year ago, but he also received 23 standing ovations from the would-be Knesset members who represent American voters. Lets not get romantic. La Clinton even offered a new 10-year defence memorandum of understanding with Israel to Aipac, made the usual references to Palestinian terrorists and Irans continued aggression, and repeated the mantra that Israel and America are seen as a light unto the nations albeit not, perhaps, unto the Palestinian nation. I would vigorously oppose any attempt by outside parties, she announced, to impose a solution, including by the UN Security Council. In other words, goodbye to UN Security Council Resolution 242 Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in 1967 which was supposed to be the foundation stone of the whole wretched peace process. Yet the shift in emphasis is clearly there. Sanders is Jewish his father was an immigrant from eastern Europe and most of his family died in the Nazi Holocaust. You might expect he would try to outgun Hillary in her support for Israel. Yet he accused her of devoting only one sentence... that even mentioned the Palestinian people in her Aipac hug-in, only one line on the Palestinian people. This was not strictly accurate, although a close reading of La Clintons text shows that her references to Palestinians were more in the form of an appendage to Israeli security than a denunciation of Palestinian suffering a word that Sanders has actually used about the occupied Arabs of Palestine. Bernie believes Israel must have the right to exist in peace and security, just as the Palestinians must have the right to a homeland in which they and they alone control their political system and their economy. To that extent, its the usual stuff: no mention of Palestinian security that will be left to Israel but they can do what they like inside their pathetic little homeland. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton win big in New York primary Where Bernie has stuck out, however, is in his condemnation of Israels targeted killings (or, political murders), further Israeli settlements on Palestinian land (or, colonies) and the destruction of Palestinian homes..., Israels attacks on Palestinians have been reprehensible, he says. He may not have called a spade a spade, but he got it right. He was the first US senator to refuse to attend Netanyahus speech to the joint session of Congress last year, saying that the Israeli prime minister inappropriately used the appearance for his own political purposes. Joe Biden might not have quite the same heft. Hes been used before as the silly mid-off to defend Obama, deniable and jokey but still his masters voice. He warned that the present course Israels on is not one thats likely to secure its existence as a Jewish, democratic state... we have to make sure they understand that we understand... where the ultimate solution lies. Translated, this means what the US administration has been telling J-Street and other moderate American supporters of Israel: that if Netanyahu and his cabinet members continue to steal Arab land and gobble up the West Bank, they have either got to give occupied Arabs the vote in which case, goodbye to Israel or theyve got to run an apartheid state in which the majority Arabs are denied the vote. Israel's 'summer of discontent' over prices puts pressure on Netanyahu Show all 3 1 /3 Israel's 'summer of discontent' over prices puts pressure on Netanyahu Israel's 'summer of discontent' over prices puts pressure on Netanyahu 630737.bin GETTY IMAGES Israel's 'summer of discontent' over prices puts pressure on Netanyahu 630738.bin EPA Israel's 'summer of discontent' over prices puts pressure on Netanyahu 630739.bin GETTY IMAGES Beneath this verbal concern lies the growing success of the boycott movement (or the de-legitimisation of Israel as it is called by Netanyahu the man who is doing more than anyone else to de-legitimise Israel) and the equally growing disenchantment of Jewish Americans with an Israel which looks less and less like a light unto anyones nation. What is left of the Left in Israel takes a very worrying view of the boycott campaign, but far more serious in the long term is Washingtons growing disenchantment with the Middle East. The Saudis are being ditched in favour of the Iranians (the Saudis and Israel both loath Tehran) and an America which can stomach the anger of Arab allies of 70 years standing is clearly in no mood to suffer the humiliations of Israel forever. No, the last taboo has not been broken. The umbilical cord between Washington and Tel Aviv remains. But in future, it may not be free of charge. Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inbox Get our free View from Westminster email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the View from Westminster email {{ #verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ ^verifyErrors }}Something went wrong. Please try again later{{ /verifyErrors }} Late last year, something happened that took me by surprise. In the wake of the devastating terrorist attacks in Paris, I felt a visceral anger, a chilling feeling that troubled my liberal sensibilities. As videos of the bloodied victims emerged, no punishment could be harsh enough for the evil perpetrators of such extreme wrongdoing. Their attacks were an attack on me: I had walked those streets; eaten in similar restaurants; enjoyed the Parisian nightlife; celebrated what it is to be European, to be Western. That night, I felt a fierce commitment to the full force of retributive justice an emotion, no doubt, shared by a majority of Westerners at the time. The people who brainwashed these young men, I felt (it was a feeling, and certainly not a thought), should be hunted down and punished, even shot dead to eliminate their hatred and intolerance from our society. The punishment should meet the crime: they kill us, we kill them. These emotions troubled me because they challenged my long held beliefs: that capital punishment is both morally wrong and objectively ineffective as a deterrent to criminal activity; that the same applies to torture; that prison and punishment rarely works; that penal reform would cut reoffending rates and improve the life chances of former criminals; that poverty and isolation lead to crime; and importantly, that terrorism is in itself a symptom, as well as a cause, of fractured communities. The tension between my rational views rooted as they are in Western values of freedom and tolerance and my emotional response to the graphic horror of a terror attack on European soil remind us why it is so necessary that the rule of law is upheld at all cost. That troubling moment came to mind again this week, when the Norwegian far right terrorist Anders Breivik who is serving a 21 year sentence for the massacre of 77 people in 2011 won a lawsuit against the Norwegian government for the inhuman treatment he has suffered while imprisoned. Given the minor freedoms the man reportedly has access to a television, a games console and a computer without internet access; space to prepare food and to do laundry; three cells in which to live, study and exercise and the extent of the freedoms he stripped away from 77 others, it may seem astonishing that such a verdict could be even considered, let alone upheld by an Oslo court. Recommended Read more Victoria Wood celebrated the imperfect nature of the British way But however unpalatable it may be, the decision is the right one. It is imperative that our values of compassion and respect for the rights of all citizens is upheld for all people most especially in the case of those who have sought to rob us of those standards of virtue. Breivik, it emerged, is living in a state of solitary confinement an existence that is not only inhumane but can be psychologically damaging in the long term. He has been kept alone in his cell for up to 23 hours a day, denied all contact with other inmates and is only communicating with prison staff through a glass wall. Importantly, other prisoners in Norway are not living in the same fashion though some have, inevitably, carried out detestable and serious crimes. Like my own kneejerk response to the Paris attacks, it appeared that Breivik has been singled out for extra punishment because the atrocity carried out at his hands was so shocking. Emotionally, this feels right. Legally and morally it is wrong. Judge Helen Andenaes Sekulic, who delivered the verdict in the appeal, was correct to conclude that the right not to be subjected to inhuman treatment is a fundamental value in a democratic society. Those values apply to each and every one of us - whatever the extent of our failures as a citizen. To uphold them is the most effective defence we have against the spread of terror and barbarianism. Sniffer dog Casey, who found 250,000 illegal cigarettes in a lorry arriving at Dublin Port on a boat from Rotterdam (Revenue Customs Service/PA) Thousands of packets of illegal cigarettes have been found hidden under a cargo of farm machinery by Customs sniffer dog Casey. In her latest success, the three-and-a-half-year-old springer spaniel-cross became suspicious when a lorry pulling a low-loader came off a boat from Rotterdam at Dublin Port. Revenue said almost 250,000 cigarettes - about 12,500 packets with Marlboro Gold, Marlboro Red and Winston Blue branding - were concealed in the trailer's chassis rail. The lorry was registered in Poland and the Polish driver, in his 30s, was questioned by Customs officers. Investigations are ongoing, Customs said. I n a separate discovery at Dublin Airport on Sunday, 9,300 Kent branded cigarettes were discovered in a Moldovan passenger's bags after he flew in from Frankfurt. Revenue said the seized cigarettes were worth about 135,000 euro and would have led to a loss to the Exchequer of 116,250 euro. Opko Health is to take on 200 staff over the next five years Hundreds of jobs have been announced in two expansions by healthcare and digital marketing companies. Opko Health is to take on 200 staff over the next five years as it invests in EirGen Pharma facility in Waterford which focuses on developing and supplying specialised oncology products. In a separate investment Search Optics, which sells digital marketing to many blue chip firms, is to create 100 jobs with the opening of new offices in Dublin. Both expansions have been supported by enterprise agency IDA Ireland. Opko, which bought EirGen almost a year ago, said it plans to expand manufacturing in Waterford and set up an R&D centre. Jobs Minister Richard Bruton made the announcement and claimed the South East is now enjoying the fastest rate of jobs growth in the country. Meanwhile, Search Optics' new Dublin offices at Fumbally Square will be home to its European, Middle Eastern and African headquarters. Brendan O'Brien, of Search Optics, said Dublin is a diverse, vibrant city that offers the firm access to highly-skilled staff and a technology infrastructure that will serve as the perfect base. "We have experienced excellent support from government business development departments as well as from local businesses and suppliers, which means that setting up our HQ has been straightforward and without delay," he added. Founded in 1998 in San Diego, California, in the US, Search Optics has 12 offices in nine countries around the world. Charlie Flanagan warned the Irish border was "a major symbol of normalisation and development in north-south relations" Foreign Affairs Minister Charlie Flanagan has clashed with Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers over the future of the Irish border in the event of a Brexit. In the Dail, Mr Flanagan said frontier controls would not be decided by London and Dublin alone if Britain voted to take itself out of the European Union. "The outcome would be the result of a wider negotiation involving all of the EU and therefore no-one can say with certainty that nothing will change with the border if the UK votes to leave," he said. His remarks will be seen as a rebuke to claims by Ms Villiers at the weekend that border arrangements between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland would not have to change in the event of a Brexit. Ms Villiers said the land border would remain as "free-flowing" as it was today because of a special status for Irish citizens in the UK as well as the common travel area which pre-dates EU membership by both countries. The senior Tory minister also attacked suggestions that Brexit could threaten the peace process as "scaremongering of the most irresponsible and dangerous kind". But Mr Flanagan warned the "practically invisible border is a major symbol of normalisation and development in north-south relations". "Any implications for the current border arrangements would only arise if the UK voted to leave and, in that event, their future would depend heavily on the terms and conditions of a new relationship between the UK and the EU," he said. "In other words, the border's destiny would not be determined by the sole wishes of the Irish and British governments." Mr Flanagan was speaking in the Dail, which set aside eight hours to discuss the implications for Ireland if Britain voted to leave the EU in the in/out referendum on June 23. "In the event that the UK voted to leave the EU, customs posts would not of course be set up overnight," he said. "A negotiation period of two years or more would apply. "Ireland would work hard with the UK and with our EU partners to avoid customs posts being established and to preserve the benefits of the common travel area as a whole." Mr Flanagan appealed for people at home and in the UK to get actively involved in the debate over the coming weeks. Negotiating a British withdrawal from the European Union will be very difficult to do within the allocated two-year period, a member of the Bundestag's finance committee has said. At a German-Irish Chamber of Industry and Commerce-organised lunch on the possibility of a withdrawal, Dr Jens Zimmermann said a Brexit would be a "lose lose" for everyone. He said an exit would make both Britain and the EU weaker. Article 50 of the 2009 Lisbon Treaty sets out the process of withdrawal for an EU member state. It has never yet been triggered. The treaty allows for up to two years of negotiations. If no agreement has been reached by this point, all 27 other member states either have to unanimously agree to extend the negotiation period, or Britain exits with no deal in place. "I have the opinion that two years is not a lot of time and I don't have the impression that it will be possible after two years to have a full access to the single market," Dr Zimmermann said. "There is always the discussion about the Norway and Switzerland scenario yet these countries negotiated for far longer than two years about their access to the single market. So this might be very, very difficult." Dr Zimmermann said the issue of Brexit is not being overly discussed in Germany, as other issues, such as the migration crisis and the conflict in Syria takes precedence. However, he said the consensus among all the German political parties is that it is in the vital interest of the country that the UK remain part of the EU. He said Germany's European Affairs minister has often voiced his concern about the British relationship with the EU. "From time to time he's really fed up with the Brits," Dr Zimmermann said. "They want extra here, and extra there. They are complaining all the time. But this is like having a birthday when all the family comes together and you have that aunt, but it's family." He said it would be a shame if the EU was to lose Britain, adding the German foreign minister had contemplated writing an open letter to the British press, but thought against it. "In the end, my perception is it would be a lose-lose situation to everybody. It would be damaging to the UK, the European Union would be economically and politically weaker and it would also have negative effects to Germany and to Ireland." Meanwhile, Reuters reported yesterday that US financial regulators are demanding regular updates from Wall Street banks about their Brexit contingency plans. Scenarios under scrutiny range from how their London operations would handle lengthy uncertainty, to whether they could still offer financial services in continental Europe from a non-EU Britain. Ireland recorded a headline deficit of 2.3pc last year - higher than expected because Europe classified as government spending the conversion of AIB's preference shares to ordinary shares during the latter's capital reorganisation. When this was stripped out, the underlying deficit was 1.3pc, the Department of Finance said. The state's debt to GDP fell to 93.8pc of the value of the economy at the end of last year - lower than forecast in October's Budget. In monetary terms, that was the equivalent of 201.3bn, down from 203.3bn at the end of 2014. The Central Statistics Office said this was due primarily to a significant increase in GDP, which rose from 189bn in 2014 to 214.6bn last year. Finance Minister Michael Noonan said the data demonstrates strongly the improvement in Ireland's public finances. "Indeed, the strength of the performance is such that impact of the treatment of the AIB preference share transaction by Eurostat leaves the headline deficit at 2.3pc. This is still well within the EDP (Excessive Deficit Procedure ) limit of 2.9pc that Ireland had to achieve last year. "The one-off nature of the transaction affecting the 2015 figures has no further implications and my Department is forecasting a deficit of 1.1pc of GDP for 2016." Meanwhile, trade credit insurance group Euler Hermes has forecast that the Irish economy will grow at almost double the rate of the rest of the world for the next two years, and will remain the fastest growing country in the Eurozone despite fears about a possible British withdrawal from the European Union. Euler Hermes projected that in contrast to global GDP growth, which will only register a 2.5pc rise in 2016, before picking up slightly to 2.8pc next year, Ireland's economy will grow by around 5pc this year and 4pc in 2017. Ana Boata, European economist at Euler Hermes, said that more than 70pc of the world economy will slow down or be in recession in 2016. "China, the US, the UK, Saudi Arabia and Turkey will register lacklustre growth rates. Argentina," Ms Boata said. A former official with the National Asset Management Agency who leaked potentially commercially sensitive information has been left destitute by his criminal conviction, a court has heard. Enda Farrell (40) sent confidential information about the valuation of hundreds of properties to named individuals in investment company QED Equity Ltd and in asset managers Canaccord Genuity. The tranches covered properties linked to major developers, NAMA's hotel portfolio and NAMA properties in Germany. Farrell, of La Reine, Avenue Louise Brussels, Belgium and formerly of Dunboyne, Co Meath, appeared on bail at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court today. After hearing evidence Judge Karen O'Connor said she wanted time to consider the appropriate sentence and adjourned the case to May and remanded Farrell on continuing bail. Earlier this month he pleaded guilty to intentionally disclosing to Stewart Doyle of QED Equity Ltd by email on May 17, 2012 NAMA confidential information relating to the Cosgrave Group when he did not have the authority or was obliged to do so. Today he also admitted seven other offences of unlawfully disclosing information, in breach of the 2009 NAMA Act, between May and July 2012. He faced 13 charges in total and the court heard evidence relating to 12 of them. Mr Farrell had access to huge amounts of highly confidential information which had a potential commercial value, Detective Garda Gareth Lynch from the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation told the court. The information included lists of properties that had been taken into NAMA and valuations placed on them in November 2009. The properties included those linked to developer Paddy McKillen, the O'Flynn Group Tiger Developments, Harcourt Doherty Group, and the Cosgrave Development Group. One tranche of information sent by Farrell included valuations of 100s of hotels owned by different developers. Farrell, a married father of three, did not profit from the disclosures and NAMA was not at a loss as a result of them, Det Gda Lynch said. Michael Bowman SC, defending, said once the offences emerged his client lost his job and was left destitute by civil proceedings. He has compromised his future employment prospects by actions based on poor judgement, counsel said. A new e-mail scam posing as telecoms provider Eir is redirecting customers to a "refund" page that asks them for bank account details. The scam has been highlighted by several customers and the email bears all the hallmarks of an official message from Eir itself. Eir said that it is aware of the phishing email and urged any customers that have received the email to delete it immediately. If customers have provided personal bank account or credit card details they should contact their bank immediately to advise that their details have been compromised. Their individual financial institution will be in a position to advise regarding cancelling bank or credit cards, Eir told the Irish Independent. Phishing is described as the practice of attaining sensitive information from people by hiding behind a reputable brand. Bogus emails pretending to be eir pic.twitter.com/bsPHVgWez0 Joe Connell (@IolJoseph) April 15, 2016 The name of the sender appears as eBill My Eir but the actual address from the sender is microsoft11@e.microsoft.com. Eir advised customers to never click on web links contained in messages like it or to download content associated with it. The telecoms provider also told customers not to respond to calls or messages from an unknown source. For those who did click on the link Eir said they should change their passwords online. Another month and another bill from @eir telling me I'm owed money from an account I closed months ago pic.twitter.com/akOdESABU4 Ruairi Carroll (@RCarrollTV3) April 15, 2016 The email was sent out to both customers and non-customers on Wednesday. Eir is not the only company to fall victim to this type of scam. In March fake emails were sent out to Irish citizens from what appeared to be US streaming giant Netflix. This in fact was not the case. The very authentic-looking email asked for the receiver to update their payment method. The email came from Netflix noreply@netl.com. At the time Netflix urged its users to be extra vigilant of these kind of scams. Phishing scams are, unfortunately, very common and often exploit well known brands. Internet users should always be cautious when they receive an email, the company said. Up to 20 expressions of interest have been received for Gaelectric's wind farm portfolio, which is likely to have an equity value of between 250m and 350m, the Irish Independent understands. The enterprise value of the wind farms, which includes debt, is likely to be around 750m. It's believed that a range of potential buyers, including those in the trade, investors, and pension funds are among those that have so far kicked the tyres on the assets. It's also understood that parties from the Far East are among those interested in the wind farms, which are also being eyed by European investors. Gaelectric began a possible sales process earlier this year, hiring investment bank Rothschild to tease out potential buyers. A sale could include part or all of about 200 megawatts of wind energy output, spread over 23 windfarms that are owned by Gaelectric. Rothschild has yet to seek formal offers from potential bidders for the windfarm portfolio, but it's understood that the sales process will be complete in either the current or third quarter of the year. Gaelectric, whose chief executive is Brendan McGrath, was founded in 2004 and owns 13 windfarms in Northern Ireland and nine in the Republic. It recently acquired the 46MW Cloghboola windfarm in Co Kerry for 60m from Enercon, using hybrid project financing secured through Nord/LB. The windfarm is among the assets that might be sold by Gaelectric. Earlier this month, the company opened another windfarm, a 12 megawatt project at Monnaboy in Co Derry. Gaelectric has previously set a target of having 400 megawatts of operational windfarms by 2017. The company's ultimate sale strategy will be dependent on the proposals it receives from potential buyers. It's likely that Gaelectric could seek to continue being involved in the wind farms as an operator and maintenance provider for the assets it sells. Gaelectric intends to use the proceeds of the wind farm sale to invest in other renewable energy assets and projects, including energy storage, solar and bioenergy, as well as energy trading. US private equity giant Lonestar now has an 8pc stake in Gaelectric, after the American firm acquired debts owed by Gaelectric's co-founder, Eamonn McGrath, to IBRC. XMS Capital Partners, with offices in Dublin, London, and Chicago acted as financial advisor to Bemis. Photo: Reuters The medical packaging operations of Irish sterile packaging company Steripack are to be acquired by Wisconsin-based Bemis Company for an undisclosed sum. The US firm said the deal is expected to close on April 29. Bemis will take over a factory in Offaly, and will also get "related value-added services". "This acquisition includes a facility in Ireland as well as packaging production assets in Malaysia and the United States. These operations recorded annual net sales of approximately US$65m in 2015," Bemis said. Bemis president and chief executive William F Austen said the deal "supports Bemis' strategy to grow our healthcare packaging business". He said he expected it would add modestly to the company's earnings per share in 2016. "SteriPack's strong customer relationships and modern clean room operations will complement our new and expanding global healthcare operations and will increase our capacity to meet the needs of the growing healthcare industry," he added. Steripack's headquarters are in Clara, Co Offaly. It will maintain ownership of its contract manufacturing business. Garry Moore, founder and chief executive of Steripack Group, said the company believes Bemis "will continue to build upon the strong customer relationships and world class operations established by SteriPack over the last 21 years." "We look forward to focusing on the development of our contract manufacturing business across the globe," he added. XMS Capital Partners, with offices in Dublin, London, and Chicago acted as financial advisor to Bemis. Here are the main business stories from this morning's papers: Irish Independent * Rising levels of industrial unrest, skills shortages and infrastructural bottlenecks risks putting the economic recovery and living standards at risk, the states competitive watchdog has warned. Ireland remains an expensive location for businesses with a price profile described as high cost, rising slowly, the National Competitiveness Council said. * Up to 20 expressions of interest have been received for Gaelectric's wind farm portfolio, which is likely to have an equity value of between 250m and 350m, the Irish Independent understands. The enterprise value of the wind farms, which includes debt, is likely to be around 750m. * Ireland recorded a headline deficit of 2.3pc last year - higher than expected because Europe classified as government spending the conversion of AIB's preference shares to ordinary shares during the latter's capital reorganisation. When this was stripped out, the underlying deficit was 1.3pc, the Department of Finance said. The Irish Times * Irish companies are facing lending costs 80pc higher than the EU average according to a new report from the National Competitiveness Council. The report highlights a return to boom-era risks to the Irish economy emerging from the current property market. * The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association (ICMSA) don't think they can relate to the board of Ornua, formerly the Irish dairy board, after it was revealed its top nine executives shared more than 9m in pay, bonuses and pension contributions over the last two years. According to a report in The Irish Times, a spokesman for the ICMSA said the timing of the news couldn't have gotten much worse. * Permanent TSB has apologised for "serious failures" in relation to the handling of over 1,300 tracker mortgages at its annual general meeting yesterday. The bank's chairman Alan Cook said the lenders share of new mortgages has been helped by its 2pc cashback offer to its customers. Irish Examiner * A new report from the National Competitiveness Council has found that rising domestic costs such as wages, utility prices, property and business services are posing a large threat to the recovery of the Irish economy. The council said Ireland needs to address the rising costs within its domestic economy as exterior rising costs may well be out of its control. * Meath native Peter Bellew has been appointed as an executive board director after ex-Aer Lingus chief Christoph Muller told his staff he was leaving the airline. According to a report in the Irish Examiner Mr Bellew had previously spent time as a senior director for helping to manage Kerry Airport in the 1990s. * The Economic and Social Research Institute has urged the Irish government to immediately lobby the EU for special funds in the event of a British exit from the EU. Amongst the suggestions for granting funds by the ESRI was the construction of a major electricity interconnector to France. Over 5,000 Irish Intel workers are thought to be at low risk of being on the front line of the chip manufacturer's scheduled 12,000 job cuts. With the company set to wait 60 days to tell those targeted with redundancy their fate, there is optimism that the company will spare the Kildare site from the worst effects of its downscaling. Sources close to the tech giant, which has been gradually expanding its Leixlip facility for 27 years, said the company's recent 4bn investment in updated manufacturing facilities was a sign that it needed to keep momentum at the factory going. Meanwhile, local political representatives said they did not believe the Kildare plant was in imminent danger. "There is a feeling that this is not going to affect workers, given the investment in the Kildare plant in Leixlip," said Frank O'Rourke, Fianna Fail TD for Kildare North. Other local TDs echoed workers' cautious optimism about the situation. Social Democrat TD Catherine Murphy said: "There is no indication at this time that the Irish operation will be in any way affected. We hope that remains the case." Irish bosses at Intel have said that the company is "still evaluating [its] plans for Europe". The US-based multinational said the cuts will occur "through site consolidations, a combination of voluntary and involuntary departures, re-evaluation of projects and an increased focus on efficiency in a variety of programs". Irish policymakers still harbour hopes of further Intel expansion at Leixlip, with planning permission granted two years ago for a new factory plant. If pursued by Intel, this could bring over 3,000 new jobs in the short term. This currently looks unlikely, with the company articulating plans to save 1.2bn through the 12,000 job cuts, equal to 11pc of its global workforce. Intel has bases in dozens of countries worldwide, with major design and manufacturing facilities in Israel and the US. Intel is letting workers go because of declining sales in laptop and desktop PCs. What used to be the company's financial bread and butter has become a fading business, with a global switch over to phones as primary leisure computing devices. In Ireland, the switch from PCs to phones is particularly strong, with recent statistics from Statcounter showing that Irish people now use phones for video and web browsing more than any other country in the world. Intel missed out on making chips for smartphones and now lags behind rivals in the production of chips for mobile devices. The company says it will now focus on 'cloud' computers such as servers and machines in data centres. It also wants to become a major manufacturer of chips for smart gadgets and 'the internet of things', such as home thermostats and self-driving cars. Other PC-related multinationals based in Ireland have been diversifying away from reliance on desktop and laptop computers in recent years. Dell, which employs around 1,000 people here, has expanded into areas such as data storage and servers to limit its exposure to falling PC sales. Microsoft, which employs over 1,000 people in Ireland and has also been dependent on PCs for sales of its Windows and Office software systems, now handles a range of different functions at its base here such as gaming design and search engineering. The software giant is currently in the middle of moving into a brand new custom-built campus in south Dublin. "When we hear of an announcement like this, there's automatic concern but we don't want to engage in scaremongering," said Deputy O'Rourke. "But there will be a vacuum of 60 days which will add worry for individuals and families as it's such a massive employer in Kildare." Subscribe to The Ready Business show, in association with Vodafone via iTunes or SoundCloud. On this weeks Ready Business podcast, we find out how developments in technology have affected and improved farming life in Ireland. INMs Deputy Farming Editor, Darragh McCullough, took us through the revolutionary changes that have been occurring , and we speak to one remarkable entrepreneur and innovator Ed Harty of Dairymaster - whose ideas and inventions are changing farmers lives not just in Ireland but all around the world. Expand Close Ready Business Presenter Brian Purcell with guests from left, Edmond Harty CEO Dairymaster and Darragh Mc Cullough INM Deputy Editor Farming. / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Ready Business Presenter Brian Purcell with guests from left, Edmond Harty CEO Dairymaster and Darragh Mc Cullough INM Deputy Editor Farming. Technology affects all our lives and farmers arent immune, explains McCullough. After all, farmers were one of the first adopters of mobile phone technology. Farmers neds to be mobile and need technology to help them. Theyre becoming more professionalised, margins are becoming thinner and technology can give them an edge to help with that. In terms of the tech that is helping them, he cites the example of the tractors that have auto-steering capabilities to drive themselves around the fields using GPS technology within a couple of millimetres around the field, although, the farmer still needs to be examining and assessing the crop so its not completely automated adds McCullough. For Ed Harty, who has been called the Steve Jobs of Irish agriculture, his company, Dairymaster, is a world leader in dairy tech products from milking to milk cooling and animal health and fertility. On a farm, the animals are the most valuable asset, says Harty. Cows have to be bred at the right time and technology can help solve all those problems. Our devices can take 3 million readings from a cow every day - similar to wearable devices that humans use. All the more remarkable is the fact that Dairymaster does all its global R&D and manufacturing from its premises outside a small village in north Kerry. Dairymaster has a lot of different skills from R&D to manufacturing, he adds. And it allows us more control and to do things better. I always say its like baking a cake were bringing together different ingredients to offer better products to our customers. Based in Causeway, north Kerry, we play to our advantages. Its a great environment and when you build an interesting place to work thats a big help. Each week on the Ready Business podcast were answering your start-up and SME questions giving practical advice on how best to run your business and on this weeks Twitter poll, we asked about awareness and knowledge in farming apps in general. 72% of respondents said they hadnt heard of some of the main farming apps which leads to the question as to just how much Irish farmers are embracing new technologies? The younger generation are using apps, says Harty. And among the farming community smartphone usage and take-up is high right across the board. We have 600 farms directly connected to our smartphone monitoring milk systems so thats a sizeable amount of Irish farms being connected. Well be running our Twitter poll every Friday on @independent_ie using the hashtag #readybusinessadvice so dont forget to let us know the key business issues that you would like us to address. The Ready Business show, in association with Vodafone , is available via iTunes , SoundCloud and Stitcher or subscribe to the RSS feed of the Ready Business Podcast using your favourite podcatcher. You can check out the full Ready Business Podcast series here . In association with: "I'm sorry, I can't use the word 'super'. I'm Irish." Derrick Connell is talking to a group of nerd journalists in San Francisco about the future of Microsoft's plans in search and voice. But while colleagues and reporters liberally throw around tiresome Valley-speak superlatives ("awesome amazing really cool so exciting"), Connell's Meath-based upbringing just won't let him do it. "I do use the word 'Mom', but that's because we used it in Trim when I was growing up," he tells me later. At this point, Connell is probably entitled to use whatever the hell flavour of English he wants. Over the last 12 years in Seattle, he has risen to become one of the company's most influential corporate vice presidents in his role as head of search engineering with Bing. As such, Connell may be the most senior Irish person in the top five multinational tech companies at present. Most recently, he has been a central figure in planning Microsoft's next big online strategy: artificial intelligence. Online bots, says the tech giant, are going to be the next big thing in ecommerce and customer service. And Connell, along with Microsoft's head of applications and services, Qi Lu, was the one who helped convince Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella to build a new company strategy around such artificial intelligence. According to Bloomberg's Dina Bass, the key decision around the software giant's strategy shift was taken on a two-hour flight from Silicon Valley to Seattle. "Connell showed him designs for new, AI-enhanced versions of the Outlook e-mail program and Skype," Bass wrote. "By the time the plane landed, Nadella decided it was the big strategic move the company needed." But what are online bots? And what sort of effect will they have on ordinary users and businesses? At its Build developers' conference in San Francisco, Microsoft showcased a bucketload of new tools to help companies build and customise artificial intelligence systems online to help with everything from ordering a pizza to booking a hotel room. One of the demonstrations on stage involved a bot-made booking with the Westin Hotel Dublin within Skype. Not only did the bot make the reservation, but it also delved into the user's messages to organise a reunion with a Dublin-based friend. "Some days I think there'll be a billion bots within a year," says Connell when I catch up with him after the Microsoft event. "But sometimes I think it might be five years. I spend a lot of time in China these days and the WeChat example there is interesting. You have 80-year-old women who would connect to their phone to get a train ticket. What used to be a real person at the end of that phone is now becoming a bot, so the human only needs to take care of 20pc of the traffic. I can see this developing quickly." All of this is tied up with what Connell claims is a 'third wave' of computing and what his boss (Nadella) now calls 'Converstions As A Platform'. "If you dissect the tech that's required to do conversation as a platform, there are a few aspects," says Connell. "It's conversational in that there's an aspect of understanding speech, knowing what people are saying including different dialects and understanding intent." This is where Connell's Bing engineering team comes in. Conversations are complex strings of words, sounds, lilts and pauses. Trying to build an artificial system that can recognise, process and assign other functions to such utterances is beyond most conventional coding tasks, not to mention "the cloud based rendering user interface" that Connell is talking about. But valuable lessons have been learned from Microsoft's research in search and voice, he says. "We've been investing heavily in the things behind this, especially for search," says Connell. "It's a knowledge graph that we've been building for four and a half years. Our knowledge of the world has significantly improved. It's an exponential curve, not just for search, but for intent and understanding. The system needs to understand when my mom tells it that she's looking for a car parking space." Despite its stated ambition, Microsoft's experience with bots has not been plain sailing. Its own experimental chatbot, Tay, had to be yanked offline earlier this year when it was gamed by mischief makers to repeat racist propaganda last month. But what Microsoft wants to do now, says Connell, is to attract as many developers as possible to help build an intelligent ecosystem up. At its recent Microsoft Build conference in San Francisco, it unveiled plans for developer tools to make more advanced bots. These will be able to work with natural language and will be capable of integration into a number of platforms, including email, the web, Slack, Skype and Telegram. Connell's main role is still connected to Bing, the search product that still has an underdog tag. He runs most of its constituent parts, from its design studio, animators and editors to its engineering team and developers. "It's really diverse," he says of the 2,000-strong Bing-related workforce. "There are even people in Dublin who do work for Bing." In Europe, Bing is regarded as a novelty, miles behind Google. But in the US, Bing is now a player. According to recent ComScore reports, it has around 21pc of the desktop search market there. This is a big turnaround from the days when Bing was costing Microsoft close to 1bn per quarter. "Over the last the years, we have gotten it to competitive quality," says Connell. "I started in 2004 at its outset. At that point, no-one thought we could have a credible product compared to Google. But we targeted the top six or seven countries and spent a couple of years on that. Outside the US, we're still working on it. But in some of the bigger countries like the UK, we're close to it. Our market share in the UK is close to 11 or 12pc." Much of Bing's progress comes through deals that Microsoft has struck such as those with Yahoo and Apple's Siri. "The market is shifting," says Connell. "For any company that seeks a good partner for search engine, we make good economic deals. We're willing to be accommodating." Not everything is growing at Microsoft these days. Any strategy it had of aggressively going head to head with Apple and Google in mobile phone ecosystems has been quietly distilled over the last 12 months. This is apparent in the company's global mobile market share, which has sunk from over 7pc to below 5pc and continues to gall. In his recent 'Build' keynote, Satya Nadella addressed the issue. "For us, mobile first is not about the mobility of any single device, it's the mobility of the experience across different devices," he said. But despite Microsoft's impetus with a Universal Windows Platform project that would see developers' apps transfer between PCs, tablets and Windows phones, the company's oft-repeated 'mobile first' philosophy looks a lot more bendable than it once was. "My perspective is that Satya talked about conversations as a platform, almost entirely led by mobile," says Connell. "Conversations will be on mobile devices. Also, Internet Of Things devices will be important here too, like having a Sonos in your home that you can have a conversation with. The work that we're doing on Cortana will make this available through for any developer. And we know that the companion device may not be a Windows device. So a large part of the strategy is to be cloud-based so that we can make our services available on any endpoint device." This pivot on Microsoft's mobile strategy is not the only note of caution from Microsoft's recent Build conference. Nadella went out of his way to raise issues around machine ethics as a preface to the wider conversation around artificial intelligence. "All technology that we built has to be more inclusive and respectful," he said at the San Francisco event. "We want to build technology that gets the best of humanity and not the worst. Ultimately it is not going to be about man versus machine. It is going to be about man with machines." This may be an acknowledgement of teething difficulties with online AI system that Microsoft has tried, such as Tay. Or it may be an echo of fears raised by industry grandees, such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking about giving machines ever deeper levels of artificial intelligence only to risk the rise of genuinely dangerous robots. Killer droids, though, are not on the immediate task list for Connell. For him, computing is moving in waves. "The way I think about it is in three waves," he says. "You have the traditional PC desktop application wave which will continue for many decades in the future. That's been modernised with Windows 10 and that wave of tech will play out, with things such as intelligence and Cortana being relevant there. There's a second wave of internet and browser where search is the canonical power. That tech wave will also take advantage of things like Cortana. And then there's a third emerging wave which is the conversation as a platform. All of the partners want to get into that game. It will be interesting to see how fast they do." Google is currently embroiled in a battle with the European Commission, after it was formally charged with monopoly abuse over claims that it has been crushing competition to its Android operating system. Margrethe Vestager, the European Commissioner for competition has accused Google of having "an overall strategy on mobile devices to protect and expand its dominant position in internet search." Therefore she believes Google is in breach of European antitrust laws. Here's everything you need to know about the charges. What has Google been charged with? The Commission has three main concerns about Google's activities with respect to Android. Firstly, they allege that Google Search is pre-installed and set as the default, or exclusive, search service on most Android devices sold in Europe because the company "[requires] manufacturers to pre-install Google Search and Google's Chrome browser and [requires] them to set Google Search as default search service on their devices, as a condition to license certain Google proprietary apps." They also claim that manufacturers cannot sell mobile devices running on competing operating systems based on the Android open source code, and that they give financial incentives to manufacturers and mobile network operators on condition that they exclusively pre-install Google Search on their devices. How does Android work? About 80pc of smartphones worldwide run on the Android operating system. The smartphones aren't made by Google themselves but third parties such as Samsung or Huawei. In contrast, Apple runs iOS only on its own devices. Anyone can download Android for free and use it to run a smartphone. Some companies run a version of Android independently of Google, such as Amazon which uses it on its phones and Fire tablets. This means they don't offer Google apps or the Google Play Store. Other manufacturers pre-install Google's suite of 11 apps, such as Google Search, Drive and Photos, for free. They can also choose to install other apps such as Facebook or Skype, if they want to. The average number of pre-installed apps in Europe is 47. How does Google make money from Android? Google offers Android for free, but makes money through advertisements in Google apps used on Android phones, and also through paid apps that are bought on the Google Play store. According to the European Commission, the Play Store accounts for more than 90 per cent of apps downloaded on Android devices in the European Union. However, Apple's App Store made double the revenue in 2015 alone. The database giant Oracle, which has sued Google over the rights to the technology behind Android, told a court earlier this year that the mobile operating system had indirectly delivered $31bn in sales and $22bn in profit since its launch in 2008. Reuters reported that Google generated an estimated $11 billion last year from sales of ads running on Android phones featuring Google apps. So what's the problem? Because Android runs on most of the world's smartphones, including handsets made by other companies, Vestager said: "Our concern is that by requiring phone makers and operators to pre-load a set of Google apps, rather than letting them decide for themselves which apps to load, Google might have cut off one of the main ways that new apps can reach customers." Google does have revenue share agreements with companies where they will pay a manufacturer (like Samsung) to have Google Search as the default search provider. These are the "financial incentives" to which the Commission is likely referring. Google has to win these deals by bidding against other providers, say like Microsoft or Russian search giant Yandex. Once you - the customer - buys this phone, you are free to download an alternative if you please - although most people will stick with their default because they aren't aware of how to get to other options. Why is Apple's iPhone not facing charges? Apple doesnt licence its operating system to other phone makers, according to Ms Vestager. Hence, it does not have to compete with any company to make money off its mobile operating system. Are the charges true? This is just a preliminary view, and there will be a full investigation to see if Google has caused any real harm. They have a chance to respond to the charges over the next 3 months. Thomas Vinje, spokesman for FairSearch, a lobby group funded by Google's critics, said: "Virtually every phone maker using Google Android in the European Union has bowed to Googles demands, suppressing competition by other app makers and preventing free choice for consumers." What happens next? The Californian company has 12 weeks to respond, and faces fines of up to $7.4 billion or 10 percent of 2015 revenue or a change in operations, if found guilty. The deadline date is still unclear because the 12 week countdown only begins from the date that Google receives a full breakdown of the allegations from the EC. Ms Vestager said: The remedy in the case is quite simple. It is to stop these practices which we find to be damaging to innovation and competition. Will it affect my Android device? It shouldn't affect your phone or how you use it in the short term. The case could drag on for years, just as the European Commission's first formal antitrust probe of Google's search business, which continues since 2010. Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022] Do we have an air safety problem with drones? Should they be more tightly regulated? Last Sunday's collision between a drone and a British Airways plane at Heathrow has shone a spotlight on the recklessness with which some drone owners display when sending their shop-bought gadgets into the sky. No-one was injured in the Heathrow incident. But some experts now say that without new controls, it's only a matter of time before a drone hits an engine and causes damage, injury or death. At this point, I should admit one thing: I am a drone owner. Last month, I stumped up for DJI's Phantom 4 model. So far, I love it: it flies at up to 70km per hour, is capable of operating over 2km away from the controller and has a crystal clear video camera on board. As a photography device, it's remarkable. It's also great fun. But I am quite conscious both of the danger and the irritation it could cause, either through a collision, privacy invasion or simply through its irritating buzzing noise. (If you've never heard a drone fly, its aural effect ranges from a really loud mosquito to a flying lawnmower.) So I've only actually flown mine in north west Mayo, miles away from any aerodrome or built-up town. As we are increasingly seeing, some drone owners think nothing of flying their devices in populated areas or at altitudes that put them into dangerous proximity with passenger and commercial airplanes. This week, for example, Aer Lingus said that it has had six 'proximity incidents' with drones in recent times. In one sense, this is predictable. There is very little in place to stop the flying of drones. While the Irish Aviation Authority was, to its credit, among the first to set up a drone registration scheme, it appears to be mandatory only in theory. The agency may warn of fines, but enforcement appears to be non-existent. When asked, the IAA won't say whether it has pursued any remonstrative action against any drone owner in Ireland to date. "The IAA has engaged with those who have operated drones unsafely and come to our attention, with each case dealt with on an individual basis and evaluated for its potential impact on safety," an IAA spokesman told me this week. And in relation to action against dangerous drone flying? "It is IAA policy not to make public details of individual cases," said the spokesman. "Penalties for the illegal operation of small unmanned aircraft are entirely a matter for the judiciary following prosecution. Any unauthorised use may be referred to An Garda Siochana for investigation." I checked with An Garda Siochana on this - a spokesman was unable to say whether there has been any investigation or action taken against drone users in Ireland to date. Translated, no-one tasked with the enforcement of drone regulations is really that bothered about it. This is certainly the case with An Garda Siochana. "Honestly, they have better things to be doing," one source close to the force said to me. As for the Irish Aviation Authority, it regards itself as having taken a lead on the issue with its drone registry. But it won't discuss drone-related threats to aircraft that airline staff are starting to open up about. "Aer Lingus can confirm that there have been six incidents to date where our flight crew have seen drones in the proximity of operating aircraft," said a spokesman for Aer Lingus this week. "Four sightings occurred in 2015 and two in 2016. Two sightings were close to Dublin Airport and the others occurred outside of Ireland. All sightings are reported to Air Traffic Control and to the Irish Aviation Authority." Aer Lingus is reluctant to discuss whether any of these incidents were serious or threatened the safety of passengers in any way. (We presume that they weren't, as the IAA has not reported any dangerous drone-related incidents affecting airline safety.) But some of its pilots are not as taciturn. "Incidents of near misses are increasing on weekly and monthly basis," said Mark Prendergast, an Aer Lingus pilot and spokesman for the Irish Airline Pilots Association (Ialpa). "Hobbyists are just taking these drones out and flying them around without any real awareness of the regulations or adhering to them. They have no formal training but they're interacting in airspace where manned aircraft are operating." So is there a real problem with drones affecting safety now? If so, what can be done to prevent a serious incident (if one has not already occurred)? Context is important here. Drones are still a tiny, tiny proportion of recorded safety threats to airline welfare. The IAA's most recent figures specify drone-related incidents at just two for all of 2015. (These, presumably, were the Aer Lingus proximity events near Dublin Airport.) There is also potential in new systems currently being built to try and regulate drones in a better way. GPS technology and geo-sensing systems are openly being talked about as solutions to prevent drones from flying into restricted airspace. But so far, it remains talk. There are thousands of drones now in Ireland, with more on the way. If we don't want to read about a horror story involving a drone destroying a plane's engine, we should start to think a little more urgently about what to do about it. The episodic Hitman game is fresh from its opening gambit and ready to pile on a new location in a made up town in Italy Agent 47 has a new assignment, and he's heading to Italy. The location is the (made up) city of Sapienza in Italy. It certainly looks the part with agreeably old time buidings, sun drenched beaches and plenty of holiday-makers working on their tan. There's also a totally bald man wearing a black suit which must be sweating in all the wrong places. That's you. For his new trip, 47 has a new target - a brilliant bioengineer by the name of Silvio Caruso. And it's your job to stop him. Here's the launch trailer. It all looks splendid, and the expansive new level will give freedom fans plenty of mess around with while they want for more content to be unlocked. Hitman is all about episodic elements these days, with a basic pack for a single low price and more released as time goes by. Which seems to be working out pretty well for them so far. Sapienza will be available for download on the 26th of April 2016. The next location is Marrakesh and it will hopefully be live in May. Profits at Parlesse Investments, a Luxembourg company that's part of Larry Goodman's business empire, jumped over 17pc in 2014 to 62.1m, but the amount of tax the firm paid fell to just 144,000 from 219,000 a year earlier, newly-filed accounts seen by the Irish Independent show. The firm generates its income from dividend and interest payments, and was at the centre of some controversy last year when it emerged it had generated profits of close to 300m over a three-year period, but only paid tax of about 800,000 on those profits. The latest set of accounts for Parlesse Investments show that its total assets increased to 835.5m in the 12 months to the end of March 2014, from 809.4m a year earlier. Of its income in the 2014 financial year, 36.3m was derived from income from financial current assets, while 25.8m came from other interest and financial income, according to the accounts. Mr Goodman owns Louth-based ABP Food Group, (formerly Anglo Beef Processors) and is executive chairman of the company. It's Europe's second-biggest biggest meat processing firm and supplies beef, lamb and sausage meat to thousands of customers. It employs over 9,000 people at 37 sites around Europe, and its turnover is thought to be around 3bn a year. Last year, Mr Goodman pointed out that ABP pays substantial levels of corporation taxes every year. Parlesse Investments is a part-owner of ABP, and provides loans to a number of Mr Goodman's business interests. Aside from owning ABP, Mr Goodman has an extensive property investment portfolio which includes assets such as the former Bank of Ireland headquarters in Dublin. That was bought in the depths of the crash for 40m, and 100m has since been spent on its renovation. Much of Mr Goodman's personal investments are handled via the Parma group and related entities. He's estimated to have a personal fortune worth about 800m. The ABP group business is unlimited, meaning it doesn't have to file publicly available accounts with the Companies Registration Office. Companies such as Parlesse Investments therefore only provide a snapshot of part of the Mr Goodman's business activities, including intra-company affairs. Mr Goodman's businesses also utilise companies in other jurisdictions such as the Netherlands, Jersey and Liechtenstein. Such structures are common among large companies and investment vehicles, and perfectly legal. They're often used to help minimise overall tax liabilities, but also to manage financing aspects of businesses. A spokesman for Mr Goodman's Parlesse investment vehicle told the Irish Independent: "All of Mr Goodman's businesses are fully compliant with the tax requirements in all of the jurisdictions in which they operate." Toyota may not scrap its "best built cars in the world" slogan - despite a ruling by the Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland (ASAI) that it should do so. A spokesman for the car company said a ruling by the ASAI was not legally binding and company chiefs were currently considering what to do. He told the Irish Independent the judgment confirmed that Toyota cars were the best built "mass produced" cars - but, theoretically, an artisan company might build better cars. The ASAI considered a complaint against the Japanese car manufacturer by Dublin-based advertising agency Owens DDB on behalf of Volkswagen, although the complaint was withdrawn late last year. A number of customer complaints were also made about the tag line. "They centred on the question of the compatibility of the claim with the widely publicised recalls (of cars)," a statement from the ASAI said. The ASAI committee found that to prove a "superlative" claim such as "best built" would require a very high level of substantiation, especially if the claim was "best built in the world". Industry experts commissioned by the ASAI were happy for Toyota to say they made the "best built mass-produced cars in the world". However, following the investigation they decided to prohibit Toyota from using the current form of its 20-year-old phrase as part of its brand proposition. The company was also refused the opportunity to appeal the decision. A statement from the ASAI confirmed its rulings were not legally binding, but part of a voluntary code. "Cases are not legally binding. However, monitoring has shown a 98pc compliance rate," a statement said. "Publication of the case reports of the complaints committee, including names of advertisers, promoters and agencies involved, is an important element of the self-regulatory system. "A marketing communication which breaks the rules must be withdrawn or amended and media will refuse to publish a marketing communication which fails to conform to code requirements," it said. Toyota Ireland's chief executive, Steve Tormey, said: "We are absolutely bemused by this ruling from the ASAI and their refusal to allow an appeal." He added it appeared to his company that the ASAI "are dancing on a pinhead" in their use of the "English language and common sense". This, he said, was especially the case considering the fact that the independent automotive industry expert commissioned by the ASAI expressed the viewpoint that the claim was valid. "We will now move forward and continue to do what we do best, dedicating our time and energy to serving the best interests of the 390,000 Irish customers of Toyota who have, and continue to, put their faith in the best built cars in the world," he said. Owens DDB previously made a complaint for Volkswagen about a 2013 Toyota TV advertisement in which the car maker claimed to have the best resale value of any car brand in Ireland. That complaint was upheld. Musician Prince gestures on stage during the Apollo Theatre's 75th anniversary gala in New York, June 8, 2009.. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson/File His Purple reign is over. Doubtless doves will really cry tonight. The Mozart of Minneapolis has sung his last note. Prince having left the stage forever is a sad moment for anyone who loves eccentric soul music with tunes that milk men could whistle back in the day: 1999, Kiss, Raspberry Beret, Purple Rain and Little Red Corvette. There really wasnt anyone like Prince. How could there be? He was more than a maverick, more than an iconoclast. He went on strike from his own record company in 1994, saying the music industry made him a slave. He blurred the genders with his image (dressing in his black under pants and a coat like a flasher, on the cover of the Dirty Mind album in 1980) and with his songs (If I Was Your Girlfriend from 1987 is about Prince wanting the physical closeness that two women together could have.) He wrote about HIV AIDS before anyone in the mainstream culture in 1987 on Sign Of The Times: a big disease with a little name. I loved him from the beginning. So flying to Paris in June 2011 to meet him on the fifth floor of the Bristol Hotel on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore was a privilege. 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 In this Nov. 22, 2015 file photo, Prince presents the award for favorite album - soul/R&B at the American Music Awards in Los Angeles. (Photo by Matt Sayles/Invision/AP, File) Musician Prince gestures on stage during the Apollo Theatre's 75th anniversary gala in New York, June 8, 2009.. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson/File File photo dated 10/08/88 of Prince, who has died at the age of 57, his publicist said. PA Wire File photo dated 17/09/88 of Prince, who has died at the age of 57, his publicist said. PA Wire File photo dated 12/02/85 of Prince File photo dated 24/02/97 of Prince arriving at the Brit Awards in London, as the singer has died at the age of 57, his publicist said. PA Wire File photo dated 25/02/07 of singer Prince who has died at the age of 57, his publicist said. Yui Mok/PA Wire File photo dated 20/09/95 of Prince, who has died at the age of 57, his publicist said. Fiona Hanson/PA Wire File photo dated 08/05/07 of singer Prince who has died at the age of 57, his publicist said. Ian West/PA Wire File photo dated 02/10/02 of Prince, who has died at the age of 57, his publicist said. Tim Whitby/PA Wire Singer Prince gestures as he announces upcoming live dates at the Apollo Theater in New York October 14, 2010. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson/Files Musician Prince (L) performs for members of the news media in Miami Beach, Florida February 1, 2007. REUTERS/Brian Snyder/Files Singers Prince (R) and Beyonce perform during the 46th annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles February 8, 2004. REUTERS/Gary Hershorn/Files File photo dated 02/10/02 of Prince, who has died at the age of 57, his publicist said. Tim Whitby/PA Wire File photo dated 15/02/06 of Prince performing on stage at the Brit Awards, as the singer has died at the age of 57, his publicist said. Yui Mok/PA Wire File photo dated 15/02/06 of Prince performing on stage at the Brit Awards, as the singer has died at the age of 57, his publicist said. Yui Mok/PA Wire File photo dated 12/08/86 of Prince Rogers Nelson PA Wire File photo dated 12/08/86 of Prince Rogers Nelson PA Wire File photo dated 12/08/86 of Prince Rogers Nelson PA Wire File photo dated 12/08/86 of Prince Rogers Nelson PA Wire File photo dated 12/08/86 of Prince Rogers Nelson PA Wire File photo dated 12/08/86 of Prince Rogers Nelson PA Wire U.S. singer Prince leaves the French Open tennis tournament in Paris June 2, 2014. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/Files U.S. singer Prince watches the French Open tennis tournament in Paris June 2, 2014. Musician Prince gestures on stage during the Apollo Theatre's 75th anniversary gala in New York, June 8, 2009. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson/Files Prince performs during the halftime show of the NFL's Super Bowl XLI football game between the Chicago Bears and the Indianapolis Colts in Miami, Florida, February 4, 2007. REUTERS/Mike Blake/Files Prince performs during the halftime show of the NFL's Super Bowl XLI football game between the Chicago Bears and the Indianapolis Colts in Miami, Florida, February 4, 2007. REUTERS/Kyle Carter/Files Prince performs during the halftime show of the NFL's Super Bowl XLI football game between the Chicago Bears and the Indianapolis Colts in Miami, Florida, February 4, 2007. REUTERS/Mike Blake/Files / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp In this Nov. 22, 2015 file photo, Prince presents the award for favorite album - soul/R&B at the American Music Awards in Los Angeles. (Photo by Matt Sayles/Invision/AP, File) It didn't matter particularly that he looked like Dot Cotton from Eastenders dressed up as Jim Hendrix for Halloween. He was still my hero. There was a staccato rap to his speech. I asked him where did the astral riff from 1999 come from. "Some place." What do you do when you want to hear music? "I play." Video of the Day He was mad as a bag of squirrels on acid. And I loved him for it. Prince said he had has little or no interest in contemporary music. Expand Close File photo dated 15/02/06 of Prince performing on stage at the Brit Awards, as the singer has died at the age of 57, his publicist said. Yui Mok/PA Wire / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp File photo dated 15/02/06 of Prince performing on stage at the Brit Awards, as the singer has died at the age of 57, his publicist said. Yui Mok/PA Wire "A lot of it sounds phoned in. It is all machines. You can't jam with a machine. You can put your dirty clothes in a machine but you can't jam with it. Carlos Santana, who is a real cosmic guy, told me that, we are analogue creatures. We feel music as human beings. But a lot of the new stuff lacks feel." I asked him if he watched the movie Black Swan. I thought Darren Aronofsky's dark pyscho-sexual masterpiece would have been Prince's kind of movie. "That must have passed me by. It's not my cup of tea." What was is your cup of tea? "English Breakfast Tea. Do they have Irish Breakfast Tea?" Can't believe @prince is dead! Some concert tickets I'd kept from the times I'd seen him in #Ireland #RIPPrince pic.twitter.com/zwSMdx9BuU Steve Humphreys (@stevehpix) April 21, 2016 They have Barry's Tea, I pointed out. "Your tea? You have a tea? Would you like a tea?" Prince getting up to make himself a cup of tea in heels. Returning with a tea for himself and a Coke for me, His Highness In Heels never really looked like falling off them onto the ground of his palatial suite in the City of Light. I hope God has enough sense to vacate the most palatial suite tonight in Heaven and let Prince lay down his weary head. ______ You can read Barry Egans unexpurgated interview with Prince in this Sundays Sunday Independent The arrival on a Kerry beach of Sir Roger Casement and his travelling companions, Robert Monteith and Daniel Bailey one hundred years ago today commemorated at a State Ceremony at Banna Strand attended by the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins Photo By : Domnick Walsh Eye Focus LTD Thousands turned out to remember Roger Casement on Banna Strand this afternoon for a State ceremony to mark the 100 year anniversary of his capture near the North Kerry beach. In the early hours of Good Friday morning on April 21st, 1916 Casement, with travelling companions Robert Monteith and Daniel Bailey, arrived at the strand on a U-boat hoping to meet with the German ship the Aud which had carried 20,000 rifles into Tralee Bay for the Rising. But the ship was intercepted, the plot foiled and Casement, who was in ill-health, was caught and later executed in the Tower of London. President Higgins told the crowds that Roger Casement was not just a great Irish patriot but also a great founding humanitarian of the 20th century. He talked of Casement's astonishing conversion over just five years where he went from receiving a knighthood from the King to being executed for high treason. Over 100 members of the Defence Forces participated in the event with the Irish air corp providing a fly-over and a wreath laid by President Higgins at the original anchor of the Aud which stands by the strand. Earlier in the day a ceremony also took place at Ballykissane Pier near Killorglin where three volunteers lost their lives when their car plunged into icy waters after theyd taken a wrong turn on Good Friday, 1916. Charles Monahan, Con Keating and Donal Sheahan were the first fatalities of the 1916 Rising. Police in Australia are hunting for an Irishman who went on the run after being sentenced to prison for a vicious, unprovoked attack on a fellow dog walker in Sydney. New South Wales police issued a photograph of David Mulligan (33), who is wanted for revocation of parole in connection with the assault on dog-walker Karl Nissen in the Sydney suburb of Alexandria on September 11, 2014, the 'Sydney Morning Herald' reports. Mulligan, a personal trainer, pleaded guilty to assaulting Mr Nissen after the pair's dogs became entangled on a footpath. Disturbing CCTV footage showed Mulligan repeatedly punching a man in the face during the altercation. The vicious assault left Mr Nissen with a fractured eye socket, fractured jaw and a collapsed sinus that led to a lung infection, the local District Court heard. Mulligan pleaded guilty to the assault and was given a 15-month suspended sentence on condition he pay Mr Nissen $15,000 AUD (10,350) in compensation and be of good behaviour. But the Court of Criminal Appeal overturned the sentence on April 1 saying it was "manifestly inadequate" and ordered Mulligan be sent to prison. A warrant was issued for his arrest, however police haven't been able to find him since. A high court judge has refused to allow an English company to fund a legal action against the State, businessman Denis O'Brien and former minister Michael Lowry. The decision, based on a law that dates back to 1634, means that the case will not go ahead, as the plaintiff does not have enough money to pay the legal fees. Ms Justice Aileen Donnelly said yesterday third-party funding in such cases is illegal under Irish law. The plaintiff, James Boyle of Persona Digital Telephony, said he does not have the 10m needed, and will therefore have to drop the case. Mr Boyle had sought to take a case after his company lost out on a mobile phone licence that was issued to Denis O'Brien's Esat Digifone consortium in 1996. He claimed that Esat won the competition by bribing the then Communications Minister Michael Lowry - which is denied. While third-party funding of legal cases is common in Britain, it is banned in Ireland under the ancient law of 'champerty'. It states that no third party should be allowed to fund a legal case in the hope that they will take a share of any financial award. The law is believed to date back to Roman times and became part of Irish law during British rule when the Maintenance and Embracery Act was passed in 1634. This case was the first time that a direct challenge has been made to the law in an Irish court. In her judgment, Judge Donnelly said she had considered arguments made by Persona's legal team that the constitutional right to access to the courts should supersede an ancient law that had been abandoned in Britain and elsewhere. She said she accepted an affidavit filed by Mr Boyle in which he said he is "nowhere near the estimated 10m required to finance the proposed litigation". She said Mr Boyle had confirmed that if the funding arrangement is not approved, he will have no other means of prosecuting the case. She added that Persona's legal team had said their claim is "of great public importance" and that if she allowed the funding arrangement she would ensure "the constitutional guarantee of access to justice". But citing numerous judgments by Irish courts upholding the law of champerty, she said third-party funding arrangements, "cannot be viewed as being consistent with public policy in this jurisdiction". She also pointed out that Persona had not challenged the constitutionality of the law. Irish Water is being prosecuted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for failing to comply with an order to upgrade a drinking water treatment plant. The utility has been summonsed to appear in court after it failed to upgrade the Carraroe treatment plant in Galway by last November, and faces a fine of up to 5,000. It comes after the EPA revealed that more than 803,000 people are drawing their drinking water from 119 plants considered to be at risk of failing to meet quality standards. This is up by 21,000 people since the end of 2015. The plants, which are across 21 counties, are failing to remove dangerous bugs including cryptosporidium, are failing to meet standards to remove cancer-causing THMs, have excessive levels of pesticides or aluminium in the water or require operational improvements. The EPA said there were "underlying problems" with the drinking water network, some of which were flagged as far back as 2008. It would "escalate" enforcement action where Irish Water was not considered to be making efforts to comply with legally-binding directions, but it stressed that the water produced was meeting quality standards, but was produced by plants in need of major works. "We're not saying they're breaching the standards, but that they're at risk of non- compliance," a spokesman said. Details of the affected plants are contained in the Remedial Action List (RAL) for the first quarter of this year, which is published today. It shows: Almost 40,000 people served by 11 plants in Cork, Galway, Roscommon and Tipperary are subject to boil water notices or restrictions. Another 37 plants serving 130,000 people are failing to meet THM standards, and another 85,000 served by 17 plants are at risk of cryptosporidium. Improvements are needed at another 50 plants, serving more than 540,000 people. At four plants, serving 5,000 people, measures are in place to deal with cryptosporidium but are subject to verification they are working properly. The RAL also shows that the EPA has issued 20 directions to Irish Water to complete works. Irish Water plans to abandon 28 plants or supplies, and connect the areas with another facility, and upgrade or build another 63 plants. Some 90 of the 119 affected supplies will be dealt with by the end of 2018. Other schemes, such as the 200m upgrade to the Vartry Reservoir, will not be completed until 2020 but will address concerns for more than 200,000 people. Irish Water said that when it took control of the network in January 2014, some 140 plants were on the RAL and 900,000 people affected. Since then, it had completed works at 57 plants, but another 36 had been added to the list. Some 2bn would be spent improving drinking water to 2021, including 327m addressing THMs. A total of 29 plants would be removed from the RAL by the end of this year. "By adopting a single national best practice approach to assessing and managing drinking water supplies, Irish Water has shown beyond any doubt that drinking water quality across the country has been seriously compromised by a systematic failure in how water services have been planned, delivered and funded over several decades," Mark Macaulay, water supply strategy lead at Irish Water said. "Irish Water's work in the past two years has indicated serious compliance challenges ahead for hundreds of drinking water supplies." He added there would be no schemes on the RAL by 2021. Authorities could be forced to release people from jail within days due to the crisis over the striking down of laws enforcing suspended sentences. Criminal defence lawyers have begun writing to the State claiming clients are being held unconstitutionally and asking for their sentences to be vacated. A number of High Court writs alleging unlawful detention are also expected. The development came as two people, a homeless mugger and a woman convicted of false imprisonment, who had been due to have sentences activated yesterday, were set free as a result of Tuesday's High Court ruling. A solution to the deepening crisis has yet to emerge with the formation of a new government still in limbo. Department of Justice sources said intensive efforts were being made to clarify whether legislation was needed. Acting Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald said emergency amending legislation could be introduced, possibly within days, but the matter remained under "urgent examination" by Attorney General Maire Whelan. It comes after Mr Justice Michael Moriarty this week struck down Section 99 of the Criminal Justice Act 2006 following judicial review proceedings taken by six men. He found that the instant activation of suspended sentences where a criminal is found guilty of a new offence was unconstitutional. This was because they were not given the opportunity to appeal against their conviction for the second offence before being committed to prison. The ruling has had two major effects. Firstly, it has raised the prospect that an unknown number of convicted criminals may have to be set free because they are being unlawfully detained. Secondly, it has stopped courts from approving applications to activate the suspended sentences of people who have re-offended. Solicitor Cahir O'Higgins, who represented one of the six men who took the challenge, said he had at least 15 clients who may be affected by the judgment. "I have written to the State and have advised them of the difficulty and have given them a reasonable opportunity to address the matter," he said. He said he was seeking to have those cases listed back before the courts again so requests could be made to vacate orders activating suspended sentences. Separately, it is understood six other prisoners are preparing to take legal challenges in the High Court, claiming they are being unlawfully detained. Aside from people who are already in jail, applications to activate suspended sentences are not enforceable as a result of the ruling. Two such applications were dropped yesterday at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court alone. One involved Sonia Eglinton, of Back Lane, Dublin, who was sentenced to four years in prison with two suspended in 2013 for falsely imprisoning a recruitment agency owner in their office while she looted the premises. The other involved Karl O'Brien (21), a homeless man sentenced to four years with two suspended for mugging a UCD student in Dublin city centre last year. A previous hearing heard how O'Brien had admitted to the mugging but said he had no memory of it as he was on a "two-day bender" at the time. He had 20 previous convictions at the time. New legislation will be required to resolve the situation, which sources insist can be done "extremely quickly" and brought before the Dail despite there being no formal government. However, a potential stumbling block will be the passing of legislation through the Seanad. Polling in the Seanad election ends on Tuesday with the election of 59 senators, but it is the responsibility of the Taoiseach to appoint the final 11 members. However, without a government this cannot happen meaning the ability of the new Seanad to approve legislation will be in a "constitutional grey area". Ms Fitzgerald said: "The Government will take all necessary action open to it to address the issues arising from Judge Moriarty's judgment." She sought to play down fears there could be a mass exodus of prisoners from jails - but she admitted she expected criminals to seek release from prison. The husband of Audrey Fitzpatrick, whose daughter Amy disappeared in Spain in 2008, has applied to adjourn his trial for the murder of Amy's brother Dean because he says he needs a hip replacement. Lawyers for Mahon (44), who is accused of killing 23-year-old Dean Fitzpatrick at Northern Cross on the Malahide Road in May 2013, yesterday made an application at the Central Criminal Court to adjourn the trial which was due to begin next Monday so that he can have a hip replacement. The judge said that he will need a sworn affidavit from Mr Mahon's consultant surgeon regarding the "urgency" of the operation before he can consider adjourning the trial. Sean Guerin, the barrister representing Mahon, told Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy that his client has had two hip replacements and that one of the replacements "hasn't taken". Mr Guerin said that his client is waiting for an operation, scheduled to take place in two weeks' time. The trial is expected to last two weeks, the court heard. The barrister presented letters from Mahon's consultant surgeon and his G.P. to the court. The G.P.'s letter said the failure of the existing replacement was causing Mr Mahon "severe pain", the court was told. Mr Justice McCarthy said that he could not adjourn the trial on the basis of letters from the surgeon and G.P. "I'm not prepared to adjourn on the basis of a report," the judge said. He told Mr Guerin that he needed a sworn affidavit from Mahon's surgeon, highlighting the "urgency" of the operation and that it cannot be postponed, before he could consider adjourning the trial. Mahon, of Ongar Village, Clonsilla today said his solicitors are trying to get in touch with his surgeon in the hope he will sign the affidavit. "I don't know if he has signed it yet. It would be great if he did," Mahon told Independent.ie. "He's one of the best surgeons in the country and there is an 18 to 24 month waiting list for him but I was called early and I don't want to miss the chance to get it done because I'm in a lot of pain with it. "At the same time I want to get the trial over with. I don't want to delay it. I told the surgeon I have a murder trial to go to but he said the operation was important. I've had both hips replaced but the left one, which I had done last March, just didn't take and it needs to be done again," he added. "What I don't want is that I would be called for surgery in the middle of the trial and have to miss the operation. I just don't want the trial and the surgery to coincide." The case is listed for mention again tomorrow morning when the surgeon's sworn affidavit is expected to be presented to the court. The son of a senior civil servant who violently assaulted two men after his ex-girlfriend claimed she had been raped has been jailed for three and a half years. The hotel suite where Sean O'Dea (28) attacked the two men looked like a bomb had hit it, with blood on the walls and ceilings, Garda Niall Murray told Dublin Circuit Criminal Court. O'Dea of Woodside, Clontarf, Dublin pleaded guilty to two counts of assault causing harm to his two victims at the Radisson Hotel in Dublin city centre on September 21, 2013. He is the son of the former chief executive of the family support agency, the court heard. Judge Melanie Greally said crimes committed in retribution for perceived criminal acts do not belong in a special category. She said O'Dea' s actions demonstrated an intolerable disregard for the law. She said it was noteworthy that the Director of Public Prosecutions had ultimately not prosecuted the man accused of the rape. Judge Greally noted O'Dea had since lost the certificate to operate his security business and that testimonials handed into court spoke well of him. She imposed concurrent sentences totalling three and a half years. The night before the attack took place, O'Dea's ex-partner was socialising with a group of people including the two victims, the court heard. The group booked a suite in the hotel to continue partying and the next morning, O'Dea's ex-partner alleged one of the men had raped her. Later that morning, O'Dea and his ex-partner went to the suite, where O'Dea hit one of the men over the head up to six times with a wheel brace. He then smashed a number of glasses, cut the man accused of rape around the face and chin with the stem of a wine glass and punched him several times. During the attack, O'Dea said: Do you know who I am? I'm going to come back with a gun and shoot you, Gda Murray told the court. Hotel staff called the gardai who pulled O'Dea over in his car shortly after the attack. There was blood inside the car, including on the steering wheel, the court heard. His victims were taken to hospital for treatment for several lacerations to their heads. In victim impact statements submitted to court, the men said they suffered from anxiety and depression in the wake of the attack. O'Dea's glassing victim said he feared for his life during the attack. The court heard the man was interviewed by gardai in relation to the rape allegation and a file was sent to the DPP. No charges were laid. Defence barrister, Padraig Dwyer SC, told the court O'Dea deeply regretted the attack. He said his client, who ran a security services business, had offered to pay 5000 to each of his victims as an expression of remorse, but this was declined. The money would be given to the state or a charity instead, Mr Dwyer said. O'Dea, who has 27 previous convictions, mainly relating to road traffic offences, has never been in prison before and was a positive individual, his barrister said. His family was in court to support him. His life has been significantly upturned by two to three minutes of madness which was preceded by this particular allegation being made, Mr Dwyer said. ...It was an offence committed in a moment of rage and one he will forever regret. A Dublin mother has pleaded guilty to unlawfully receiving more than 15,000 in children's allowance payments while she working for Microsoft in Australia for three years. Clodagh Logue (42), with an address at Granville Road, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin, pleaded guilty in a prosecution brought by the Department of Social Protection. The offence, which is under the Social Welfare Consolidation Act, can result in a fine of up to 2,500 and/or a six-month sentence. Judge John O'Neill heard at Dublin District Court that she received 15,618 but has been making repayments and still owes 8,848. She had been working for Microsoft in Ireland but was moved by her employer to its operation in Sydney. She was there for three years while she was still claiming child benefit. Her solicitor said the money was paid into her Dublin account and it was "out of sight, out of mind". She came back just once in the three years. The case was adjourned to October to allow her to repay the full amount. The demand for Georgian investment properties in north Dublin resulted in intense bidding wars and high sale prices. A 70-year-old man facing charges relating to a child sexual assault offence has been denied bail. The man was arrested in Mayo on Monday evening and charged under the Child Trafficking and Pornography Act 1998 with restricting the personal liberty of a child for the purpose of his or her sexual exploitation. The charge carries a possible prison term of 14 years. The 70-year-old, who is originally from the UK, was denied bail after gardai raised concerns about the seriousness of the charge and that he was a flight risk with no ties to the State. The court heard that when charged, he replied: "Nothing to say, need to speak to my solicitor." Inspector Tom Calvey told Castlebar District Court that he believed there would be further charges in the case. The court heard the defendant had lived in Ireland since 2002 and was the sole carer for his disabled wife who is in a wheelchair. Garda Orla Browne told Judge Mary Devins that the accused's wife had made a report to gardai that she wasn't receiving the care she needs and was making arrangements to move back to England without him. Gda Browne said she was of the belief the defendant would not return for hearing if granted bail. The accused said he would provide a surety of 2,000, surrender his passport and sign on as required. "Everybody knows us. I've been of good character and raised money for charities and I do good for the community," he added. The court heard the couple moved to Ireland in 2002 residing initially in Kerry before moving to Mayo and he had not returned to the UK since. "This has torn us apart. We could lose everything," the accused said. "I built up a good character over the past 10 years, I raised money for charity, I try to help anyone I can," he added. Judge Devins denied bail but said it could be revisited at a later date. She also deferred making a ruling on a legal aid application. The accused will appear before Harristown Court on Friday, April 22. TALKS: Fine Gaels Simon Harris, Leo Varadkar, Frances Fitzgerald, Sean Kyne and Simon Coveney arrive for discussion with Independents and Greens. Photo: Tom Burke Fine Gael's Simon Coveney says negotiators aim to finish talks with Fianna Fail by Saturday but must get through Irish Water first. Both parties will discuss the controversial issue and other topics tomorrow to try reach agreement which facilitates a minority Government. There's a lot of people watching this process. We're conscious of that and we're looking to close out that process over the next two days, he said tonight after over four hours of talks. Both parties did not discuss Irish Water today as Mr Coveney said they were awaiting advice from technical advisors tonight. We didn't talk about Irish Water because it's a complex technical issue as well as a political one, Mr Coveney added. We needed to take advice from water experts to ensure that anything we potentially agree actually works. We'll get that (advice) this evening and discuss it late tomorrow morning when we meet again. Fianna Fail's Barry Cowen dismissed reports that both sides reached agreement on Irish Water. We'll be here tomorrow and if we haven't reached agreement we'll be here the next day, Mr Cowen said. People are saying this taking a long time. I'd rather have an agreement that we're all happy with so we can serve the people well. Children in three departments in Temple Street Hospital in Dublin were relying on bottled water yesterday after high chlorine levels were found in its mains supply. Chlorine is used to disinfect drinking water. But there are concerns about its potential side-effects at high levels. It is understood the higher chlorine levels were linked to a recent fire at an ESB substation. Children and visitors in the affected areas of the hospital were given supplies of bottled water instead. A spokeswoman for the hospital said it was experiencing some issues with the water supply in three departments. "As a precaution staff have been advised not to use the water from the main supplies for human consumption until further notice. It did not affect the ability to serve meals to its young patients, staff and visitors. There are a number of water supplies into the hospital but only one supply was affected." Its water comes from municipal mains. Irish Water and Dublin City Council were said to be working to resolve the issue. 7/4/16 Fine Gael's Frances Fitzgerald, Simon Coveney and Leo Varadkar pictured speaking at the Dail following Fianna Fail's rejection of Fine Gael's offer of partnership in Government.Picture: Arthur Carron Acting Health Minister Leo Varadkar has confirmed that funding earmarked for mental health will be diverted elsewhere, but said the full 35m allocation will return next year. Mr Varadkar was speaking in the Dail after several TDs criticised the country's mental health services, with one, Fianna Fail's John McGuinness, saying they are in "absolute chaos". Sinn Fein's Caoimhghin O Caolain said it is "absolutely deplorable" that funding is to be taken from the additional 35m that had been ring-fenced for mental health. Mr Varadkar said "claims of some sort of raid are entirely inaccurate". He said the overall budget for mental health is 791.6m. He said the 35m figure was an increase in "development funding" and that part of this was for recruitment. Mr Varakdar said it wasn't possible to fill all the posts from January 1 so savings made from not hiring the staff will be transferred elsewhere. "The 35m will be fully provided for in the base budget for next year," he added. Earlier Mr McGuinness claimed that people "under debt pressures" from banks have killed themselves and that mental health services aren't equipped to deal with the problem. During the debate Mr Varadkar also said the first quarter of 2016 has seen patient numbers at emergency departments jump 6.7pc over the same period last year. Clare GP and TD Michael Harty said the health system should "embrace technology" saying "virtual consultations" would prevent unnecessary hospital attendances. AAA-PBP TD Gino Kenny said there is a "crisis" in the Irish home care sector. Over 1,500 Irish people have died abroad since 2009 - startling new statistics have revealed. Last year was the worst in recent times with 263 Irish people losing their lives abroad - 65 of these were in Spain alone. Ahead of the holiday season the Department of Foreign Affairs has now issued a warning to all travellers to get insurance and register their travel plans. The figures, obtained exclusively by Independent.ie, reveal that 369 Irish people died in Spain in the period from 2009 to 2015. Among those to lose their lives in the Mediterranean country are gangland victims Gary Hutch in September 2015 and Gerard Hatchet Kavanagh in 2014. Many other deaths were not connected to criminality. Read More Expand Close Gary Hutch (34) murdered on September 24, 2015 / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Gary Hutch (34) murdered on September 24, 2015 Gary Hutch (34) murdered on September 24, 2015 Expand Close Gerard Kavanagh / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Gerard Kavanagh Gerard 'Hatchet' Kavanagh The USA has the second largest number of deaths in the same period with 153. Last year was the worst on record for the States with 29 including the five Irish students who died in the Berkeley balcony collapse. Read More Students Olivia Burke, Eoghan Culligan, Lorcan Miller, Niccolai (Nick) Schuster and Eimear Walsh, all 21 years old, and Ms Burkes cousin Ashley Donohoe, 22, of Rohnert Park, California, died when the fourth-floor balcony they were standing on collapsed during a 21st birthday party in the early hours of June 16, 2015. Expand Close The six students who lost their lives in the tragic accident, top left to bottom right: Lorcan Miller, Eoghan Culligan, Nick Schuster, Ashley Donohoe, Eimear Walsh and Olivia Burke / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The six students who lost their lives in the tragic accident, top left to bottom right: Lorcan Miller, Eoghan Culligan, Nick Schuster, Ashley Donohoe, Eimear Walsh and Olivia Burke Australia with 135 and Great Britain with 132 are in third and fourth positions while 84 Irish people died in Thailand in the same period. Our interactive chart (above) shows the total breakdown across the globe. Among those who lost their lives in the UK in the last number of years were student Karen Buckley who was murdered last April by Alexander Pacteau. Read More The Department of Foreign Affairs also provided assistance to the family of vet Catherine Gowing who was brutally murdered and dismembered in Wales in October 2012. Expand Close Vet Catherine Gowing who was murdered by Clive Sharp / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Vet Catherine Gowing who was murdered by Clive Sharp Catherine Gowing There have been a number of high profile deaths in Australia in the last number of years including the brutal rape and murder of Jill Meagher in September 2012. The Department of Foreign Affairs did not break down the numbers by age, gender or cause of death. In total 1,537 people died abroad in the seven years up to and including 2015. A spokeswoman for the department issued some advice to all those travelling abroad this summer: We strongly recommend that when travelling abroad that the person travelling obtains comprehensive travel insurance as it is in these difficult scenarios that having the right cover can make things a lot easier for the next-of-kin. Expand Close Jill Meagher / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Jill Meagher Jill Meagher who was murdered in Melbourne, Australia in September 2012 Irish citizens travelling or living overseas are encouraged to register their contact details with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The information will allow us to contact the person travelling, and provide assistance, if necessary and possible, if there is an unforeseen crisis such as a natural disaster or civil unrest, or if the person travelling has a family emergency while overseas. The spokeswoman explained that a death abroad can be particularly upsetting for family in Ireland. Under the best of circumstances, learning of the death of a loved one is difficult. In our experience, this is exacerbated when that person was travelling abroad and it is an exceptionally difficult situation for the family to find themselves. Read More When notified of the death of an Irish citizen abroad, the Departments priority is to try to ensure that the family is informed of the death as soon as possible and in the most appropriate way possible. We work closely with An Garda Siochana to ensure this happens quickly and sensitively. Once the family has been informed, the role of the Department is to assist them in navigating the official processes that are required when a person dies abroad and to assist by minimising any delay caused by local red tape around the formalities. We can also provide the family with practical local information, assist with initial interpretation to get key information to the family and in so far as we may be able to, assist with any visa issues or emergency travel documentation that may arise for family travelling at short notice. Senior Garda officers have called for more targeted operations to tackle crime and terrorism - but warned that fresh initiatives must be properly resourced and fully funded. They want a significant increase in recruitment to the force to offset the impact of the previous ban on new personnel and the numbers either leaving or being promoted. Garda superintendents believe a regular intake of 800 recruits is needed, rather than the existing batch of 550 to 600. They say the existing figure is not enough to cope with annual retirements and resignations, which are estimated at about 300, as well as those being promoted from rank and file. Association of Garda Superintendents president Noel Cunningham told its annual conference in Naas that substantial gaps existed across the force as a result of the five-year moratorium on public service recruitment. Apart from the big drop in the overall strength of the force, he said promotions also meant that deployment of personnel had to be distributed to keep up the levels of specialist units - without impacting on other areas of the organisation. Mr Cunningham recommended the setting up of more targeted operations, which were focussed and properly funded. He said Operation Thor, which was launched last November to crack down on burglaries nationwide and property crime, was a good example of how initiatives yielded the right results. He said intelligence-led operations were needed to tackle areas such as organised crime, rural crime and dissident republican activity. Mr Cunningham said he welcomed the promised modernisation programme but said it had to be properly managed and could take a number of years before the benefits of new technology and equipment could be seen. He questioned the claim by the head of the Garda Inspectorate, Bob Olsen that 1,500 gardai could be released from desk duties and sent out to police the streets while being replaced in the offices by civilians, and that 300 of those could be freed up immediately. Mr Cunningham wanted to know where those people could be found - and pointed out that many of those officers filled pivotal roles in areas such as communications and would have to be replaced by civilians, who needed to be trained. He also said he did not accept that morale in the force was low. "I see people out there every day doing their job. It's a professional police force. That is not to say that they are not struggling in their personal lives", he added. He said their problems should be sorted out by re- activating the Haddington Road agreement and bringing it to an early conclusion. He was supported by association general secretary Denis Ferry, who said the stalling of Haddington Road was a big factor. One of Ireland's most distinguished journalists James Downey has died. Mr Downey, who was an Irish Independent columnist and former deputy editor at the Irish Times, died peacefully at Blackrock Clinic, Co Dublin yesterday. President Michael D Higgins has sent condolences to his family. In a statement the President said: "It is with sadness that I have learned of the death of James Downey." "He will be remembered as one of Ireland's most committed journalists and editors and as having made a lasting imprint on journalism through his deep knowledge of the world of news and public affairs." "In his career as a journalist in Leitrim and Dublin, James Downey showed a continuing concern for the public interest and transparency. He was driven by a strong belief in the power of information and the need for critical analysis to further political accountability." Sad to hear of the passing of James Downey. His political observations were always refreshing & independent. pic.twitter.com/52BXG5B4RO Charlie Flanagan (@CharlieFlanagan) April 21, 2016 Sad to hear of death of journalist & former Labour candidate James Downey. He corresponded with me often. A good man. May he Rest in Peace. Cllr Dermot Lacey (@LaceyDermot) April 21, 2016 James Downey continued to write in a perceptive manner on politics until last week, despite ill health. RIP. https://t.co/yR6dePbXrD Fionnan Sheahan (@fionnansheahan) April 21, 2016 Sabina and I extend our heartfelt sympathy to his wife, Moira, his daughters Rachel and Vanessa, his siblings and family and his large circle of friends." Seamus Dooley, Irish Secretary of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) described James Downey as a journalist of formidable intellect, style and wit who believed passionately in the right of journalists to ask difficult questions. He added: James Downey was a provocative columnist. He had an unrivalled knowledge of Irish politics. James was urbane and sophisticated yet never lost touch with his rural roots or his love of Co Leitrim. He was the best of company and will be missed as a friend and mentor. He could be provocative, controversial and even annoying but no one could ever accuse him of being boring. Irish journalism has lost a significant figure but he leaves behind a rich legacy through the archive of his work, his memoir and the many memories cherished by former colleagues. He is survived by his beloved wife Moira, and his daughters Rachel and Vanessa, sisters Eva, Frances and Maria, brother Tony, sons-in-law Sean and Brendan, extended family and friends. His funeral mass will take place in St Patricks Church, Dromahair at 12pm on Saturday. Foreign Affairs minister Charlie Flanagan led the tributes to Mr Downey on Twitter this morning. A Wicklow woman who managed to shed over 13 stone in just 15 months has spoken of the 'wake-up call' she received which prompted her to totally change her lifestyle. Carol Ann Curley has Unislim to thank for her dramatic weight loss. In November of 2013, after a visit to her doctor, Carol Ann was diagnosed with high cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes. She was also informed that her kidneys were starting to fail. Aged just 47 and with a young family to look after, Carol Ann decided she had to act promptly. "I have four sons and at the time had one grandchild and another on the way. I felt like my life was crashing around me and I was in fear of my life. Would I live to see them? What would my kids do without me? These are thoughts that went through my head. "I myself had lost my mother at a young age, she was only 46, and died from a heart attack, caused by high cholesterol. My father was a diabetic and was in a coma and on kidney dialysis for three weeks before he passed. My future was looking anything but good." She joined Unislim in Bray and hasn't looked back since. Expand Close Carol Ann Curley from Roundwood with a picture of herself before she lost an amazing 13 stone and four pounds in 15 months / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Carol Ann Curley from Roundwood with a picture of herself before she lost an amazing 13 stone and four pounds in 15 months "My biggest fear was that they wouldn't have a weighing scale that could hold my weight but the leader assured me not to worry. We just clicked. I was weighed and a plan was devised to help me lose weight." In February of last year Carol Ann reached her target weight, having lost a total of 13 stone 4 lb in just 15 months. In April she won the title of 'Most Inspirational Unislim Member 2015.' While some find shedding the pounds difficult and isolating, Carol Ann is full of praise for the team effort and family atmosphere she encountered during her struggle. "I have made friends for life. It is a great help to be surrounded by people who understand what you are going through. "I was never the most confident of people but I still managed to reach my target weight, mainly thanks to all the support I received." Now that Carol Ann is 'living the life I only ever dreamt of', she herself has started running Unislim classes in Wicklow town and Ashford to help others with their weight loss goals. She can be contacted on (085) 1157830 if anyone would like to find out more. Teenage schoolgirls in all girls schools are more likely to develop eating disorders than their counterparts in mixed schools Anorexia is more prevalent in girls schools and pupils in single sex schools are twice as likely to battle the disorder than their mixed school peers, according to new research. Researchers from Oxford University found that single-sex schools prompt a culture of perfectionism, which they suggested helped conditions such as Anorexia and Bulimia to spread. The research involved more than 55,000 Swedish pupils who finished secondary school between 2002 and 2010 and found that 2.4pc of the girls studied suffered from an eating disorder. Yet, the figures varied depending on the type of school pupils attended and the background of the students. Pupils from well-educated families who went to all-girls schools had more frequent occurrences of eating disorders than students from less-educated backgrounds who went to mixed schools. The research suggested that girls can develop eating disorders after witnessing behaviour in their peers. The study, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, found that in all-girls schools, the number of pupils suffering from eating disorders was 3.3pc, while in mixed schools the number suffering from eating disorders was lower at 1.3pc. "These results suggest that female students at fee-paying or selective schools are more likely to have a diagnosed eating disorder, particularly if the schools are single-sex," they wrote. Lead author Dr Helen Bould, child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of Oxford said: It might be an unintentional effect of the aspirational culture of some schools that makes eating disorders more likely; it might be that eating disorders are contagious and can spread within a school. On the other hand, it could be that some schools are better than others at identifying eating disorders in their students and ensuring they get diagnosed and treated, she said. Speaking on behalf of Irish Eating Disorder Support Network Bodywhys, Psychotherapist Harriet Parsons said Irish research doesn't reflect that attending a same sex school impacts the likelihood of an eating disorder. "Our experience wouldn't be that attending a same-sex school could be a contributing factor in developing an eating disorder. "Certainly those who develop eating disorders often have traits which see them strive for a sense of perfectionism and place an emphasis on it so it is interesting to see that the study suggests that being in a school that places emphasis on achievements and coming from a family of high-achievers might be a contributing factor. "Our experience at BodyWhys has been that our services are being sought out by more and more boys schools and mixed schools, to help young Irish men suffering from eating disorders. It's not just a female problem." For more information and support visit www.bodywhys.ie There's a pot of gold at Ornua, and it's not made of butter. Yesterday the company, which successfully markets Irish dairy products including Kerrygold butter to domestic and international consumers, outlined its own executive pay levels for the first time. The total pay for the top nine managers at Ornua last year was 4.4m, including pensions and benefits. That works out at close to half a million euro each, though it seems safe to assume that chief executive Kevin Lane was paid significantly more than his ninth most senior executive . However, despite pledges of transparency from Ornua, previously known as the Irish Dairy Board, they refused to disclose the individual pay packets of top executive staff. Ornua did disclose that its top nine executives received 4.4m last year, or in excess of 1m each on average over 2014 and 2015. The total pay and pensions fell from the 4.8m paid out in 2014 as performance-related bonuses and incentives had been reduced. By comparison, Glanbia's Siobhan Talbot took home a pay packet of 1.6m in 2014. Kerry's Stan McCarthy made 4.23m in 2015. Both Kerry and Glanbia are bigger businesses than Ornua, and we have long known what the heads of big public listed companies are paid - thanks to stock exchange rules. But under new rules Ornua had to provide details in its annual report of the total pay packages of its nine most senior executives. Despite previously being called the Irish Dairy Board, Ornua is a private enterprise. Taxpayers' money is not at play - but Ornua is ultimately owned by a combination of the country's biggest dairy co-ops, and in turn owned by thousands of farmers. And they do have a right to know how much of their money is supporting managers' salaries. As shareholders, it is vital that as they can make informed decisions about whether they think they are getting value. The figures released for the first time yesterday are a good start, but ultimately it makes sense for Ornua to provide the same level of detail about the pay of its most senior executives as its stock market-listed peers. That would mean individual breakdowns of the full details of all of the pay and benefits of its most senior managers. The Dail sat for seven hours yesterday, and our TDs had plenty to say. There was talk about mental health funding, the trolley crisis and rising insurance premiums. They actually weren't bad debates, with many new deputies making their maiden speeches. Across in another room the new Housing Committee met for the first time to decide on a chairman and on their priorities. But what did it all mean? Very little. A number of TDs argued that the Dail should debate the High Court ruling that has called into question the application of suspended sentences - but no, that wouldn't be possible. The acting Taoiseach did make a short statement saying the acting Government was working on it and could have legislation within days. But that was it. Outside the chamber, most TDs were milling around the corridors speculating on what might happen to Irish Water or enjoying the sun trap that is the Leinster House plinth. Politicians and journalists were on edge as rumours of problems at the Government talks filtered back from Trinity College. Everybody was quick to realise that the real business was being done away from Leinster House and, unless that reaches a swift and positive conclusion, all the talk about fixing the health and housing crises is pointless. So, for the moment, it remains the 'Do Nothing Dail'. It dawned on Fianna Fail's Robert Troy as he made his contribution on insurance. "There's no point in anybody coming here making statements if nobody is going to listen," he told the four other people in the chamber. Today we will be treated to nearly eight hours of debate on Brexit - but it's unlikely David Cameron or Boris Johnson will feel the need to tune into it. Meanwhile, the 'election' word is still being mentioned in hushed tones. As Ireland moves on from its Centennial celebration, Irish citizens around the world are still making sense of it all. We were delighted that the Irish abroad were featured in the Centenary closing event and even more pleased that the video uniting the Irish abroad with the Irish at home in reciting the Proclamation got great reviews. Yet, at the same time, our awareness of our exclusion is heightened, as the contrast between old ideals and current realities are laid bare. While the nation has the Proclamation fresh in mind, we would like to highlight that its signatories called for a new national government representative of "the whole people of Ireland" and elected by "the suffrages of all her men and women". That word 'all' would surely include us, Ireland's overseas citizens, including one of six Irish-born people. Yet here we are a hundred years later, without the vote. Irish emigrants played an enormous part in the Rising. Thomas Clarke and James Connolly, both American citizens, returned to Ireland to lead the rebellion; the Kimmage Brigade, made up of emigrants from London, Glasgow and Manchester, fought in the GPO; Clan na Gael in the United States financed the effort; and hundreds of thousands of Irish emigrants in the United States bought millions of dollars in Irish Bonds to help create the Free State. All through the hard economic decades, Irish people abroad sent back remittances to keep Ireland afloat, sending much of their wages home instead of saving for their own futures. In the 1990s the Irish in America succeeded in getting President Clinton and the United States involved in the peace process in Northern Ireland. And when Enda said come back for the Gathering and that Ireland was "open for business", we showed up. Yet still no vote. It says so right there in the rules - "If you are an Irish citizen living abroad you cannot be entered on the register of electors. This means that you cannot vote in an election or referendum here in Ireland." Concise, clear and to the point: we can't vote. Hundreds of thousands have left Ireland in the last few years to find work. Many would like to come back - but in the meantime, we would like our right to equality as citizens to be respected. Our entitlement to be part of the Irish Nation is enshrined in Article 2 of the Constitution. So we've made some modest proposals on emigrant political participation for the new programme for government, and with a coalition of organisations have sent them on to the Taoiseach. We would like to be able to vote for the next President of Ireland and vote in constitutional referendums. It would also help if Ireland would create a modern electoral commission and absentee ballot process - over 125 nations and territories have them up and running. Indeed, Ireland sits at the bottom of the EU tables when it comes to protecting the rights of its emigrant citizens to vote. The Irish political class speaks highly of its worldwide diaspora - the global Irish are always welcome to bring money and business. But the establishment is more wary of its overseas citizens having a voice in the political system than just about any other government in the EU. An Irish citizen who intends to be away for more than 18 months loses the right to vote the day he or she leaves. As you leave your family and friends behind at the departure gates in Dublin Airport, you also lose your most basic right as a citizen. So we would like, for our part, to be just as clear, concise and to the point as well. Ireland's current electoral system perpetuates a two-tiered system of citizenship and is fundamentally undemocratic. It falls short of the inclusive democratic vision and language of the Proclamation - and of today's global democratic norms. The leaders of the Rising had a democratic imagination and zeal for equality. The leaders of today seem content to maintain the status quo. The pride and loyalty of the Irish abroad is legendary, and it translates into concrete help - whether it's investing, networking into new markets, acting as informal cultural and tourism ambassadors, philanthropy, and more. Yet we have no political voice on policies that can have a direct impact on our lives: decisions made about the economy will directly affect our ability to return; social welfare policies impact our access to job seekers' and caretakers' benefits for returning emigrants; and more than a few emigrants are still paying taxes on homes we own back in Ireland. For many of us abroad, any changes in spousal and descendent access to citizenship will affect our families, those with a substantial work record in Ireland will be affected by changes in the contributory pension levels, those of us with private pension accounts in Ireland were affected by the pension levy, older and vulnerable people are affected by the emigrant support budget, and we all are affected by the diaspora strategy. Michael D did a splendid job leading Ireland during the Centennial weekend. He also seems to fully understand and appreciate the relationship between Ireland and the Irish abroad. In a 2012 lecture, he said: "The impact of the Irish immigrant experience on Ireland itself was creative, profound and lasting. Modern Ireland was constructed as much in Edinburgh and New York as in Galway or Dublin." We believe that this will be no less true in the future than it has been in the past; that Ireland going forward will be constructed in London and Sydney as in Galway and Dublin, in New York and Shanghai as in Limerick and Cork. The Irish abroad have been contributing to Ireland's success for 100 years now and will do even more in the years ahead. We can construct the new "Global Island", as the DFA likes to call Ireland, and make Ireland a more just and equal nation as well. But we also hope that our friends, neighbours and fellow citizens back home will finally see us as equal citizens as well. Ireland took a major step toward inclusion in voting Yes on last year's same-sex marriage referendum - and we hope that the same spirit of equality will allow citizens at home to see our desire to vote in the same vein. We're part of the "all" in the Proclamation. The line that calls for "cherishing all of her children equally" is quite important to us. We hope you think the same. It's right there in the video. Feel free to watch it again. We would like to vote. Kevin J Sullivan wrote this article with the assistance of Noreen Bowden. They are co-founders of www.votingrights.ie, a global coalition of Irish emigrant groups As the incomes of dairy farmers collapse, the news that nine Ornua executives were paid an average of over 1m in remuneration over two years comes as something of a bombshell. While chief executive Kevin Lane has claimed "full transparency" on the payments, we do not actually know precisely how much each individual was paid. He also claimed that they had been benchmarked against industry peers. They clearly were not benchmarked against the farmer who must work seven days a week to produce milk which barely covers the cost of production. As such farmers struggle to survive after an annus horribilis given the flooding crisis, these huge sums are likely to make eyes water in families all across the country. Dairy is a major industry for Ireland, with exports valued at 3.24 billion in 2015. And Irish dairy production is also expected to increase by 50pc to more than 7.5 billion litres by 2020. But these figures mask the struggles of dairy farmers, who are up against plummeting prices due to an international glut in supply. Many also heavily invested in their farms, betting on the lifting of quotas to boost demand, whereas the opposite has taken place. This is the context in which these enormous payouts will be seen. New accounting rules have obliged the country's premier dairy co-op to publish details of executive pay for the first time. Ornua recently acknowledged the crisis farmers are facing, announcing that it is to suspend its milk levy from May, specifically as a result of the collapse in dairy prices. The necessity to do so further suggests that the exorbitant payouts to executives could be regarded as less than appropriate. Ornua said: "There is an urgent need for global supply constraint and any recovery of demand will be dependent on the Chinese economy, improved oil prices, and the lifting of the Russian ban." Once more, given such exceptionally difficult challenges, it is pertinent to question the wisdom of such huge payments. "We are confident that, whilst recognising the challenging market conditions that exist, our business will continue to deliver strong returns and growth, thereby enhancing value for the farmers we represent," Ornua said. Payments of 9m to a group of executives certainly constitute "strong returns" to those concerned, but hard-pressed farmers may choose to describe them in less ebullient terms. The following letter is based on notes and memories from discussing the Rising with some relatives which you may find interesting: On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, when hearing that the Rising had started, Clan Na Gael Girl Scouts Margaret Fagan, Mary Jane Stapleton, Annie Tobin and Mary McLoughlin, under Captain May Kelly, reported for duty at their outposts at the GPO. At the Four Courts: the two Healy sisters, Kathleen and Teresa (their younger brother, Sean Healy, a 15-year-old Fianna boy, was shot at Phibsboro after calling to his mother to say he was all right while carrying dispatches). At Jacobs: Annie O'Hagan and Cecilia Conroy. Captain Kelly had already sent the younger members of Clan Na Gael on a hike up the Dublin Mountains to keep them away from the city. On Monday evening, Captain Kelly and the other girls were sent to watch troop movements from Collins Barracks. They did this and reported back to James Connolly. They were then sent to Drumcondra to collect ammunition, which they brought back while avoiding checkpoints. That night, they helped the doctor with the wounded. On Tuesday, Captain Kelly was ordered to report to Commandant Thomas McDonagh in Jacobs. For the rest of the week, she was sent on missions to the College of Surgeons to find ammunition and report on the dead. She had to be careful, as there was a lot of sniping from the Shelbourne Hotel. Captain Kelly and the other Clan girls, when the spirits of the volunteers started wavering with fatigue, started singing 'The Rising of the Moon' and other uplifting ballads, and in a lull in the fighting, they held a ceili. When the surrender took place, Commandant McDonagh praised them for their service to Ireland. The girls took letters home to the wives and mothers of the volunteers. As the GPO was in flames, the Clan girls helped carry the stretchers of the wounded under the protection of the Red Cross flag to Jervis Street Hospital. They were arrested on the North Circular Road, brought to Broadstone Station for interrogation and then released. After the Rising, when pensions and medals were being given out, the authorities didn't want to recognise them. But because the Volunteers held them in such high esteem, the authorities had to give in. Captain May Kelly's uniform is on display at the Museum of Decorative Arts and History at Collins Barracks, Dublin. It's a small uniform - she was only 17 years old in 1916. Toirbhealach Lyons Grand-nephew of May Kelly Give public a say in the Seanad As I sifted through all the election literature from Seanad candidates (30 for the NUI Panel), I started to think about the fact that the Taoiseach will nominate 11 more. Who might they be? There will be 60 senators in total, 49 elected through the various panels and a further 11 at the Taoiseach's discretion. Some are those who lost Dail seats in the General Election, came close to taking a seat or were prospective candidates. Others are those from various strands of society who may have an input into political debate, legislation, or are just running for the sake of it. University graduates have the opportunity to vote for the candidates on the NUI panel, but councillors are permitted to vote for other panels, whilst non-graduates have no say at all. This is hardly democratic and, having strongly supported the retention of the Upper House, I am disappointed, if unsurprised, at the lack of reform since the referendum on the Seanad was defeated. However, I note that the majority of the candidates whose literature has arrived through my door pledge to bring about Seanad reform this time. I will certainly hold those who I believe merit my vote accountable for this. If they do, the Seanad could prove to be a very useful institution, but if not, then it serves no purpose. There is plenty of ability going forward for the NUI panel and I would urge anybody with a vote to exercise their constitutional right and appeal to those who are successful to ensure that everybody who has a vote in general elections has a vote in the Seanad elections next time (which may not be too far away). As regards the Taoiseach of the day's nominees, why don't we change this and either make all 60 seats electable or allow for an online vote by the public for the Seanad? I appreciate that there is always the danger of Dustin the Turkey topping it (mind you, that could be an improvement on some) but imagine some of the valuable nominees: Michael O'Leary, Dermot Desmond, Denis O'Brien, Roy Keane, Martin O'Neill, Katie Taylor, Olivia O'Leary, Claire Byrne and former Presidents Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese. Mike Geraghty Newcastle, Galway Don't demonise all non-voters In his letter (Irish Independent, April 19), Patrick Murray makes a sweeping assumption when he says that those who did not vote in the General Election are lethargic people sitting at home watching television. Does Mr Murray not know that some people are away from their homes much of the time due to work, while others may be sick and unable to get out to vote? Perhaps he would spare a thought for elderly registered voters who may have no mode of transport. Does he think that lethargic citizens such as myself are responsible for the ineptitude of all TDs, or just one third of them? Tadgh Martin Leixlip, Co Kildare Europe's refugee dilemma President Michael D Higgins has offered much-needed insight into the ordeal of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean while trying to flee their poverty- and war-ravaged countries. This comes at a critical juncture, when Europe is facing internal and external threats, not least from the scourge of global terrorism. The European Union itself was envisaged as an answer to decades of darkness and despair, to bring peace, healing, cultural innovation and religious harmony. However, we should not delude ourselves by believing that Europe can admit the hundreds of millions from every state reeling from the disastrous upheavals of civil war, diseases and destitution. This would be a political, economic, environmental, religious and cultural suicide beyond limits. What is needed is a more sustainable development response to the ever-growing global refugees crisis, and a serious attempt to address the root causes of wars, marginalisation and the despair that throws people into the clutches of terror groups. Dr Munjed Farid Al Qutob London, UK Queen Elizabeth II (C) posing on the steps of the east terrace with four of her dogs (top L-R) Willow, Vulcan, (bottom L-R) Holly and Candy in the garden of Windsor Castle in Windsor. ANNIE LEIBOVITZ/AFP/Getty Images 18. For his first Trooping The Colour, George stole the show among a balcony of royal family members, including Queen Elizabeth II. This handout portrait picture taken by US photographer Annie Liebovitz shows Queen Elizabeth II (C) posing with her daughter Princess Anne in the White Drawing Room of Windsor Castle in Windsor. ANNIE LEIBOVITZ/AFP/Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II (C) posing with her two grandchildren, James, Viscount Severn (L) and Lady Louise (2L) and her five great-grandchildren Mia Tindall (holding handbag), Savannah Philipps (3R), Isla Phillips (R), Prince George (2R) and Princess Charlotte (C) in the Green Drawing room at Windsor Castle in Windsor. Picture: ANNIE LEIBOVITZ/AFP/Getty Images Queen Elizabeth II (C) posing with her two grandchildren, James, Viscount Severn (L) and Lady Louise (2L) and her five great-grandchildren Mia Tindall (holding handbag), Savannah Philipps (3R), Isla Phillips (R), Prince George (2R) and Princess Charlotte (C) in the Green Drawing room at Windsor Castle in Windsor. Picture: ANNIE LEIBOVITZ/AFP/Getty Images Buckingham Palace have released three official photographs to mark the Queen Elizabeth II's 90th birthday. The photographs show the British monarch posing with two of her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren, as well as her with her daughter Princess Anne and her corgis. The photographs were released at midnight on the Queen's birthday. Meanwhile, a host of political figures have congratulated the nonagenarian. Expand Close This handout portrait picture taken by US photographer Annie Liebovitz shows Queen Elizabeth II (C) posing with her daughter Princess Anne in the White Drawing Room of Windsor Castle in Windsor. ANNIE LEIBOVITZ/AFP/Getty Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp This handout portrait picture taken by US photographer Annie Liebovitz shows Queen Elizabeth II (C) posing with her daughter Princess Anne in the White Drawing Room of Windsor Castle in Windsor. ANNIE LEIBOVITZ/AFP/Getty Images Scotland's First Minister and Holyrood's party leaders have congratulated the Queen on her milestone birthday. Nicola Sturgeon spoke of the monarch's "incredible bond" with Scottish people as she sent best wishes on behalf of the country. The Royal Banner - the Lion Rampant - will be flown from the Scottish Government's main building to mark the occasion. Expand Close Prince George stands on foam blocks during a Royal Mail photoshoot for a stamp sheet to mark the 90th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II. The sheet features four generations of the Royal family, from left, the Prince of Wales, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince George and the Duke of Cambridge, and the picture was taken in the summer of 2015 in the White Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace. Photo: Ranald Mackechnie/Royal Mail/PA Wire / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Prince George stands on foam blocks during a Royal Mail photoshoot for a stamp sheet to mark the 90th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II. The sheet features four generations of the Royal family, from left, the Prince of Wales, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince George and the Duke of Cambridge, and the picture was taken in the summer of 2015 in the White Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace. Photo: Ranald Mackechnie/Royal Mail/PA Wire Read More The First Minister said: "Many congratulations on behalf of the people of Scotland to Her Majesty The Queen on the occasion of her 90th birthday. "Just last year, we were fortunate enough to be able to celebrate with Her Majesty as she became the United Kingdom's longest serving monarch on the day she also opened the new Borders Railway. Video of the Day "Over the course of that incredible day, it was clear the huge affection Her Majesty had for Scotland and the incredible bond she has forged with the people who live here over her many years of dedicated public service. "Many thousands across the country will be toasting Her Majesty today as she marks this wonderful milestone and I am delighted that there will be more opportunities for people across Scotland to help her celebrate when she makes her annual visit during Royal Week." Expand Close 18. For his first Trooping The Colour, George stole the show among a balcony of royal family members, including Queen Elizabeth II. / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp 18. For his first Trooping The Colour, George stole the show among a balcony of royal family members, including Queen Elizabeth II. Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale also sent her best wishes. She said: "Her near 65 year reign is a remarkable dedication to public service. It is fitting that we use this happy occasion to pay tribute to that. "The Queen takes a keen interest in what's happening in Scotland and in the Scottish Parliament so I'm sure people all across Scotland will join me in passing on our best wishes to the Queen and her family." Read More Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie said: "The Queen has offered our country a lifetime of service. "She was there for people at the worst of times, with the support she offered families in Dunblane and the best, as she helped launch the 2012 Olympics. We wish her all the very best as she celebrates this landmark birthday." Leader of the Scottish Conservatives Ruth Davidson said: "I offer my sincerest congratulations to Her Majesty on her 90th birthday today. "It is entirely typical that she is still fulfilling a hectic schedule of duties this week as, throughout her reign, she has been the embodiment of public service and duty. "I hope she finds time to enjoy this special day first and foremost with her family. And I hope she knows that people right across Scotland, the Commonwealth and the world are wishing her well. "They - like me - look forward to her reign continuing for many years to come." Scottish Greens co-convenor Patrick Harvie wished the Queen and everyone else celebrating their birthday "a great day". David Baddiel was one of the stars who paid tribute to Victoria Wood at the Funny Girl opening night Victoria Wood has been hailed as "one of the most talented women of our time" at the opening night of a musical about a female comic breaking into showbusiness. Comedians and actors paid tribute to Wood on the red carpet at the opening of Funny Girl in the West End, starring Sheridan Smith as Fanny Brice. Comedian David Baddiel said: "I think she's an incredibly important comedian. You get bogged down a bit talking about female comedians, I don't think she should be thought of in just those terms. "She's just a brilliant comedian that we lost but it's also true that round about the time Victoria was starting out there weren't a lot of women comedians on the telly so she was a pioneer, but she was also just really funny and unbelievably good at creating ground that meant people thought, 'she's talking about my life'. Nobody was doing that either. "I didn't know her that well, I didn't know she was ill, but she came to see my show and afterwards we had a long chat and went home in a cab. I dropped her off at her house and I thought, 'I'm so privileged to get to share a space with these people'." Actress Samantha Bond broke down in tears as she said: "I didn't know her but she's been a part of my life for as long as I can remember so to lose a talent like that at the age of 62 is completely devastating." Gavin & Stacey star Alison Steadman added: "She was one of the most talented women of our time. It's terribly sad that she's gone, it really is. "She was so clever and her simplicity of humour was so lovely, it wasn't complicated, it was just truthful and brilliant and we are going to miss her terribly." Funny Girl runs at the Savoy Theatre until October 8. Children play in a makeshift camp at the northern Greek border point of Idomeni (AP) One of the largest ever international aid convoys has reached a government-besieged opposition stronghold in Syria. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said that together with the UN, it is delivering its largest humanitarian aid convoy, destined for Rastan, an opposition-held town under siege in the central Homs area. The aid convoy is the first to reach the town of Rastan in over a year, ICRC spokesman Pawel Krzysiek said. Mr Krzysiek said about 120,000 people live in the area. Rastan has seen its population double because of the influx of people fleeing nearby fighting. The convoy is made up of 65 trucks containing food, medicine and medical equipment, electricity generators and water treatment materials. Staffan de Mistura, the UN special envoy for Syria, said there has been "real but modest" progress in the country's humanitarian situation. Mr de Mistura, the UN envoy, said he would address the "next steps" in the UN-brokered peace talks on Friday after the Western-backed opposition walked out, accusing President Bashar Assad's government of trying to wreck the negotiations with new fighting. Mr de Mistura called for improved aid access to besieged areas, which he said would boost the chances of salvaging the teetering ceasefire. "Bottom line: If humanitarian aid increases as they should be and the cessation of hostilities goes back into what we would consider a hopeful mood that would certainly help the political discussions," he said. The US-Russia-engineered ceasefire between Assad's government and rebel fighters, which went into effect in late February, has excluded Islamic State (IS) and al Qaida's branch in Syria, designated as terrorist organisations by the United Nations. The truce has significantly reduced violence in Syria but has all but collapsed in the north of the country. Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned that the suspended participation of the Syrian opposition in the Geneva talks could lead to "a return of total armed conflict". "We have a situation where terrorists are desperately trying to disrupt the political process," she said, referring to the Syrian opposition's High Negotiations Committee, which said it is halting its involvement in talks. Ms Zakharova told reporters in Moscow that the armed standoff in Syria is growing, especially to the north and south of Aleppo. While the Russian official blamed Turkey for continuing to destabilise Syria by colluding with extremist groups, US deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes expressed his country's concern about Russia's build-up in Syria. Mr Rhodes addressed reports that Russia was moving military personnel and equipment back into Syria, weeks after Moscow said it would scale back its presence. A Russian air campaign aiding the Syrian government launched in September has significantly reversed the tide of the war in recent months, enabling government advances. "It would be negative for Russia to move additional military equipment or personnel into Syria," Mr Rhodes said. "We believe that our efforts are best focused on supporting the diplomatic process." Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg echoed that stance, saying that Russia has maintained a "considerable military presence" in support of the Syrian government despite announcing a partial withdrawal. Speaking in the Turkish capital Ankara, Mr Stoltenberg said the ceasefire was "under strain" but remains the "best basis for a negotiated, peaceful solution to the crisis". Despite the dire straits in the political talks, Mr de Mistura said there has been modest progress in the humanitarian situation in Syria - where aid convoys have reached 560,000 people in hard-to-reach and besieged areas. He also said six areas remain off limits to the aid convoys. Mr de Mistura said 515 people were medically evacuated on Wednesday from four communities, Zabadani, Madaya, Kfarya and Foua, besieged by government and rebel groups. He said it was one of the largest evacuations of residents from besieged areas. The Syrian Arab Red Crescent Society (SARC) said its convoy came under fire during the evacuation from Madaya and Zabadani, besieged by the government forces in rural Damascus. In a statement, the SARC said one of its vehicles, clearly marked, was hit but that the team carried on with its mission. A photograph posted on SARC's website shows the rear window of the vehicle damaged from what appears to be a bullet that hit right next to the large white and red SARC logo. Mr de Mistura also said there were eight airdrops of aid in Deir el-Zour, a stronghold of IS which is locked in a fight over control of the province with the government. A vaccination programme is expected to begin later this month to reach more than two million children, he said. Mr de Mistura said some medical supplies and medicines are still not being allowed into besieged areas by the Syrian health ministry. "This is not only worrisome but unacceptable according to international law." Dialysis equipment has been allowed in, he said. Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump with his wife Melania at his New York primary night rally in Manhattan, New York Photo: REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton Billionaire Donald Trump and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton won sweeping victories in the New York primary yesterday, bolstering their bids to secure the Republican and Democratic nominations for the White House. It was the most decisive New York primary in decades and leaves self-styled democratic socialist Bernie Sanders with a tough decision on how to proceed as Ms Clinton extends her overwhelming lead over the Vermont senator. Ms Clinton relished the victory in her adopted home state to stall momentum generated by Mr Sanders, who had won seven out of the eight previous nominating contests. "Thank you New York," she said to chants of "Hillary, Hillary, Hillary" from jubilant supporters in a Manhattan hotel, where she walked on stage with her husband Bill Clinton and heavily pregnant daughter Chelsea. "Today you proved once again there's no place like home," said the 68-year-old candidate looking to make history as the first woman president of the United States. "The race for the Democratic nomination is in the home stretch and victory is in sight," Ms Clinton added. She noted that she had gained more than 10 million votes and won in every region of the country. The former first lady and New York senator won 57.9pc of the vote to 42.1pc for Bernie Sanders, CNN said, based on more than 90pc of precincts. Her win in New York followed some of the most heated personal exchanges of her campaign against Mr Sanders. After her victory in New York, Ms Clinton extended an olive branch to supporters of Mr Sanders, who has galvanised millions of young voters with his calls for healthcare as a right, free college education and campaign finance reform. "I believe there's much more that unites us than divides us," she said. But she could not resist a dig at her rival, repeating language she has used recently to criticise Mr Sanders (74) for offering vague policy ideas without a concrete explanation of how he would achieve them. "In the bright lights of New York, we have seen it's not enough to diagnose problems, you have to explain how you actually solve them," she said. Tad Devine, a senior adviser to Mr Sanders, said the senator still has a path to the Democratic presidential nomination but will need to perform well in primary contests next week. While New York City is largely Democrat, Republicans in rural areas and fallen manufacturing cities upstate warmed to Mr Trump's populist message, despite his insults towards women, Mexicans and Muslims. The three main candidates all claimed New York as home: Mr Trump, who has never lived anywhere else; Ms Clinton, who was twice elected the state's US senator; and Mr Sanders, who was raised in Brooklyn. The 74-year-old Mr Sanders had hoped for a much closer margin to keep alive his White House dreams. Ms Clinton now leads with 1,930 delegates compared to 1,223 for Sanders, according to a CNN tally - putting her even more firmly on course to clinch the 2,383 needed to secure the party's presidential nomination. New York's 247 Democratic delegates and 44 super-delegates are the party's second- largest state haul, second only to California, which votes in June. But there were deep frustrations over New York's strict rules governing the vote, particularly among independent voters not allowed to participate and who could have been expected to favour Mr Sanders. Voters and rights monitors reported numerous errors on voting lists in Brooklyn, including the purging of entire buildings and blocks of voters from the electoral roll. Only New York's 5.8 million Democrats and 2.7 million Republicans who registered by last October - four months before the nation's first caucus election in Iowa - were eligible to vote. Mr Trump was on course to win more than 60pc of the vote and take around 90 of the 95 delegates on offer. The result meant that is was still possible that the billionaire Republican could secure the 1,237 delegates needed to avoid a contested convention in July and secure an outright victory. He said his win meant that his rival Ted Cruz was "just about mathematically eliminated". "We don't have much of a race anymore based on what I'm seeing on television," Mr Trump said. "To the people that know me the best - the people of New York - when they give us this kind of a vote, it's just incredible," Mr Trump said to his cheering supporters inside his Manhattan Trump Towers skyscraper. Mr Cruz was pushed into third place by Ohio governor John Kasich. Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022] A celebrity who wants to keep his name out of a tabloid newspaper story about his alleged extra-marital activities faces a wait to find out if he has won a battle at the Supreme Court. A panel of five justices reserved their decision in the case on Thursday following a hearing in London. They have heard a challenge by the man against a Court of Appeal decision earlier this week that an injunction barring the Sun on Sunday from naming the man should be lifted. The newspaper wanted to publish an account of his alleged extra-marital activities earlier this year, but the man argued that he had a privacy right and took legal action. Three Court of Appeal judges ruled on Monday that the order should be lifted. Lawyers for News Group Newspapers, publishers of the Sun on Sunday, had successfully argued that the ban should go because the man has been named in articles abroad and his identity could be found on the internet. Supreme Court president Lord Neuberger announced at the conclusion of the legal argument on Thursday that the court would "take time to consider this matter". He said the justices would give their decision "as soon as we can". In the meantime, the injunction remains in place. Isil is planning to massacre more Western tourists at some of Europe's most popular beaches this summer, according to Italian intelligence reports. The militant network has "concrete plans" for terrorists to pose as refugees selling ice cream, drinks, souvenirs and T-shirts at popular tourist hotspots in the south of France, Italy and Spain, according to sources cited in German newspaper 'Bild'. It claims terrorists from the Boko Haram group in Nigeria are intent on carrying out attacks at popular beach resorts, such as the massacre of 38 people at the Tunisian resort of Sousse last June which killed three Irish holidaymakers. Athlone couple Larry and Martina Hayes, along with Lorna Carty from Co Meath, were among the victims - 30 of whom were British holidaymakers. They were gunned down by Islamic State terrorist Seifeddine Rezgui, who fired at holidaymakers using a Kalashnikov semi-automatic rifle hidden in a beach umbrella at the Riu Imperial Marhaba Hotel resort. According to the report, members of the terror group and sympathisers from Africa who regularly travel to Europe will be called to take part in the terror campaign. The warning comes from a tip-off from Italian intelligence from what the newspaper described as a "credible source" in Africa. The sickening plot involves terrorists blasting holidaymakers with high-powered automatic weapons at crowded beaches and waterfronts. The plans also involve suicide bombings and detonating explosive devices that have been buried in the sand between sun loungers. Seck Pouye, police chief of the Senegalese town of Saly, told a reporter: "These people travel regularly to Italy and other places with visas and documents. "They are not illegal, because they are viewed as business people and traders. That is what makes them so dangerous." Pat Dawson, CEO of the Irish Travel Agents' Association, said the threat of terrorist attacks has already had an impact on the European holiday market, and is increasing demand in southern European destinations. Rather than seeing a decrease in bookings from holidaymakers, popular resorts in southern Europe are now filling up fast due to increased demand from Russians and northern Europeans, like Germans and Scandinavians, who would normally spend their summer holidays in Turkey or Egypt. But following the high level of terrorist threats in those countries, they are booking out resorts in France, Spain and Italy this year instead. As a result, Irish tour operators are having a hard time finding reasonably-priced holiday packages because prices have shot up, he told the Irish Independent. "The problem our agents have is getting the right booking at a reasonable price," he said. He added that Irish bookings for summer package holidays are actually up by 12-14pc compared to last summer. "We have had no reports of people wanting to cancel their bookings. The opposite is happening, and people are scrambling to get bookings," he added. A large plume of smoke rises from Petroleos Mexicanos' petrochemical plant after an explosion in Coatzacoalcos (Inmel Enoc/AP) An explosion has ripped through a petrochemical plant on the Gulf of Mexico's southern coast, killing three people, injuring dozens and sending a toxin-filled cloud into the air. State oil company Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) said 58 workers were hurt in the mid-afternoon blast in the industrial port city of Coatzacoalcos on Wednesday. Veracruz state governor Javier Duarte told Radio Formula that three people had lost their lives and tweeted that 105 people were injured, including the 58 workers. The blast was felt as far as six miles away, Mr Duarte said, adding that more than 2,000 people were evacuated from the area as a precaution. By early evening the fire was reported under control, but Pemex still urged people to stay away from the area. Officials cancelled Thursday's classes at local schools. "The cloud that emanated from the PMV plant in Coatzacoalcos is dissipating rapidly, which means it is losing its toxic effects," the company said. The plant produces vinyl chloride, a hazardous industrial chemical that is used to make PVC pipes and for other purposes. In early February a fire killed a worker at the same facility. Pemex said the explosion happened at 3.15pm at the Clorados 3 plant of Petroquimica Mexicana de Vinilo. The plant is operated by another company, Mexichem, in partnership with Pemex. Twenty of the injured workers were treated in a company clinic in Coatzacoalcos and 38 taken to nearby hospitals. The Veracruz state health department said two patients were in a grave condition after suffering burns to their air passages from toxic gases. Others were treated for injuries including minor burns, bruising and broken bones. There have been a number of accidents in recent years at plants owned by Pemex or where it operates. Also in February, the company reported two people killed and eight injured in a fire on an offshore platform in the Gulf of Mexico. SHARE Volunteers who have helped with this year's cleanup campaign around Lake Hartwell will get a party Saturday. This weeklong Lake Hartwell Clean Up Green Up campaign this year ends with an 11 a.m. Earth Day picnic at Big Oaks Recreation Area on the Georgia side of the Hartwell Dam, in Hartwell, on U.S. 29. The menu will include hamburgers and hot dogs, and there will be music, door prizes and activities for children. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers runs the annual campaign and picnic, with help from the Lake Hartwell Association. "I think every year we get more and more interest," said Herb Burnham, Lake Hartwell Association executive director. "The important thing is that people not just do it one time a year." Volunteers are needed to walk the shoreline, islands and surrounding land to pick up trash throughout the boating season, especially around bridges over the lake that are common destinations for local anglers. Scouts, churches, schools and other community groups are welcome to help out. For more information, contact Park Ranger Dale Bowen at thomas.d.bowen@usace.army.mil or 888-893-0678, ext. 348. Staff report SHARE By Nikie Mayo of the Independent Mail An Anderson man pleaded guilty Wednesday to voluntary manslaughter in the death of Artis Valentine, a 61-year-old military veteran who was beaten and left in a driveway. Carson Nance, who knew Valentine, was sentenced to 30 years in prison, suspended to 12 years behind bars and five years probation. The sentence was handed down by Judge Cordell Maddox, according to the 10th Judicial Circuit Solicitor's Office. Valentine, a veteran of the Army and the National Guard, was found lying face down in a driveway on Sanders Street on Oct. 27, 2014. According to arrest warrants and prosecutors, Nance, now 29, kicked Valentine until he knocked Valentine's dentures into his esophagus. Valentine's upper dentures were left blocking his airway, which caused Valentine to lose oxygen and die, according to prosecutors. The solicitor's office said in a prepared statement that before Valentine died, he and Nance got in a fight outside "a known drug house" on Sanders Street. Nance fled after the fight, taking Valentine's car. Anderson police said in previous interviews that Nance's mother and Valentine knew each other. At some point, Nance, his mother and Valentine had all shared the same house on McCully Street in Anderson. According to police records, both men were still using that same address the night Valentine died. Their home was a little more than a mile away from where the beating occurred. According to court records, Nance has previously pleaded guilty to several drug charges, some of which date to 2008. He also pleaded guilty to fighting earlier in 2014, before he was charged in Valentine's death. Follow Nikie Mayo on Twitter @NikieMayo SHARE By Charlie Bauder, AM WNEG Special to the Independent Mail TOCCOA, Georgia A local businessman faces more than 30 counts of various charges in connection to an investigation of alleged racketeering and theft activities at Stephens County Sheriff's Utility Buildings. The Stephens County grand jury has indicted Shane Steven Sheriff, 41, of Toccoa, on a total of 35 counts. Charges include theft by deception, forgery, criminal attempt to commit a felony and violation of Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, Act. According to the indictment, the alleged crimes happened between October 2014 and March 2015. Twenty-seven of the charges deal with theft by deception. The indictment alleges Sheriff unlawfully obtained money from BLI Rentals LLC, a Kansas-based company that provides consumer financing for the purchase of outdoor sheds and utility buildings, through a pattern of criminal conduct whereby Sheriff would submit fraudulent and forged paperwork to BLI Rentals LLC for utility buildings that were never sold in order to defraud BLI, said Mountain Judicial Circuit District Attorney George Christian. According to Christian, the total amount of the alleged theft is estimated at between $250,000 and $500,000. The indictment included a RICO Act violation because Sheriff "did unlawfully maintain an interest in an enterprise commonly known as Sheriff's Utility Buildings aka Sheriff's Used Cars, through a pattern of racketeering activity." Arraignment for Sheriff is scheduled for May 11 in Stephens County Superior Court. SHARE By Ray Chandler, Special to the Independent Mail WESTMINSTER Some low-income Westminster utility customers could see help with their electric bills through a program approved Tuesday by the City Council. The council unanimously approved the creation of a "roundup fund" under which city utility customers who choose can round up their own electric bills to the nearest dollar. City utility customers facing hardships could then apply for assistance from the fund, with the decision in the hands of an oversight board. The measure was recommended to the council Tuesday by a citizens advisory board formed by the council to address concerns over utility costs. The council approved the measure contingent on no legal concerns being encountered. Teresa Bryson, a committee member, said that in effect utility customers are being asked to donate "their change" from paying their own electric bills to help those facing hardships. The coming of summer, Bryson said, brings on the greatest hardship for many. Under the rough guidelines, anyone within the 29693 Westminster area code who is also a city utilities customer would be eligible to apply for assistance from the fund. By a 3-4 vote Tuesday the council failed to adopt a social media policy for city employees or anyone acting on behalf of the city. The recent suspension by the state Supreme Court of the Oconee County Probate Judge Kenny Johns, allegedly related to Facebook postings, have prompted concerns, according to Westminster officials. Mayor Brian Ramey said the last three classes he has taken with the South Carolina Municipal Association have included material on social media interaction as a growing concern. "A social media policy would give us some liability control," Ramey said. City Attorney Derek Enderlin suggested that the city administrator should set any social media policy. Councilman Yousef Mefleh said he believed anyone who would fall under any such policy had the ability to police themselves from posting anything hurtful or legally actionable. Ramey said a policy would have a chilling effect on members of the public who were members of citizen committees the council has formed to study and advise on city issues. Ramey and Councilmen Bill Brockington and Doug Williams voted in favor of setting a policy. Opposing were Mefleh, Susan Ramey, Charles Miller and Ron Dodson. Brian Ramey reported Tuesday that they city has received 19 applications for the job of city administrator. The council plans to interview five of the 19 and hopes to hire a new administrator in May. Current City Administrator Jeff Lord will be leaving the last week in May to become city administrator of Moncks Corner. Westminster officials also reported Tuesday that ideas for reopening the city swimming pool will be brought up at next month's city meetings. Fifty issues with the pool will need to be resolved before the pool can open, according to Westminster officials, and it's hoped the publicity will spur donations, including donations of work by local contractors. Westminster closed its pool beginning with the 2013 season, citing mounting operating costs and needed repairs and alterations, including lifts to bring the pool into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The city of Warwick approved a controversial ordinance Monday night clearing the way for the use of license plate readers in the city. The move comes a year after the city of Cranston made a similar move and is touted by officials as a way to improve safety by alerting police officers if a certain license plate is detected. Critics of the ordinance, including the Rhode Island chapter of the ACLU, expressed concern over the use of such cameras, expressing concerns over privacy, how data would be used and who they might target. Do you support the use of license plate recognition cameras in your community? Why or why not? Let us know in this week's poll question below. You voted: KANNAPOLIS Hilbish Ford and the Community Free Clinic are partnering up on Saturday, April 30 to help raise up to $6,000 in support of the clinics healthcare services as part of Ford Motor Companys Drive 4 UR Community program. The Cabarrus County community will have the opportunity to raise money for the Community Free Clinic by test-driving a Ford vehicle. For every person who test-drives a new Ford vehicle at this one-day event, Ford Motor Company will donate $20 to the designated organization, giving up to $6,000, to Community Free Clinic. Funds will be used to support the provision of needed medical care and prescribed medications for low income uninsured adults diagnosed with chronic health conditions. Come enjoy great prizes provided by Ford Motor Company. Tim Vaughn and team will provide hot dogs and hamburgers for those who participate and support Community Free Clinics Mission, Keeping People Healthy. The event runs from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, April 30 at Hilbish Ford, 2600 S. Cannon Blvd., Kannapolis and each test-drive will take about 7 to 10 minutes. Participants must be 18 or older and have a valid drivers license and the event is limited to one test-drive per household. As per latest release by US Department of Agriculture, the Paraguay soyabean production area reported at 3.33 million hectares in 2016-17, a one percent increase from the 2015/2016 estimate. This increase is marginal as production area in the major producing departments - Itapua, Alto Parana, Catindeyu, and Caaguazu - has been maximized. Today, area expansion potential is focused in the department of San Pedro along with Cordillera and Concepcion. Post forecasts the 2016/17 area planted for first crop soybeans (zafra) at 2.8 million tons with yields returning to historical averages at 2.75 tons per hectare. Second crop soybean (zafrina) is expecting to decline to 530,000 hectares as result of greater competition from corn for area. Zafrina yields are forecast at 1.5 tons per hectare. Based on these conditions, total Paraguayan soybean production is estimated at 8.5 million tons for 2016/2017. For 2015/16, Post revises production up to 10.0 million tons as excellent weather conditions - especially during the crucial September and October months - resulted in record average yields over 3 tons per hectares. The report stated that double-cropping of soybeans continues to be widespread, although planting soybeans on soybeans is considered agronomically unwise and can be exhausting to soils in the long term. While producers have had success with this arrangement since zafrina (second crop) soybeans first arrived in the 2011/2012, we expect a decline in area as producers plant more second crop corn. Zafra (first crop) soybeans tend to be planted primarily in the months of September and October and harvested in January and February. Zafrina soybeans can then be planted as early as mid-February. The government and select farm groups are encouraging producers to not plant zafrina soybeans due to these agronomic reasons. There is some speculation among industry observers that the government could intervene and restrict zafrina soybean production. However, this is still only speculation and no formal plan or intention has surfaced. Powered by Commodity Insights As per latest release by US Department of Agriculture, Moscow forecasts Russian sugar beet production in 2016 at 42 million metric tons (MMT), nearly an 8 percent increase from the 2015 crop. The area planted to sugar beets is forecast to increase to 1,050 million hectares in 2016, from 1,020 million hectares in 2015. Sugar beet prices have continued to increase through the period November 2014 to February 2016. This increase in beet prices, as well as the world price for white sugar, is expected to stimulate Russian farmers to expand the area sown to beets. Also, because the soft ruble increased the cost of imported cane sugar, FAS/Moscow expects the demand for domestic sugar beets to remain high and stable during the forecast MY 2016/17. Thus, the incentive for farmers to plant sugar beets will be high. However, there are several constraints that may curb growth of yields and production in 2016/17: Strong competition for land for production of grains and oilseeds, especially in the high yielding provinces of the Southern and Central federal districts of Russia. Imported inputs are more expensive due to the soft ruble, and may lead to the use of less expansive, but less productive inputs. This will ultimately reduce yields. The increased price of fertilizer and chemicals may result in decreased use of these inputs, also potentially lowering yields Industry analysts estimate that Russian processors are currently able to process approximately 40 MMT of sugar beets. In early 2000, the government of Russia (GOR) set goals to build new sugar processing facilities. To date, none of these facilities have been constructed, however many processing facilities were modernized between 2011/12 and 2013/14. Many plants decreased losses of sugar while storing and processing beets. Industry analysts estimate that, given the good quality crop and the expected high sugar content in the beets, some modern plants will be able to realize sugar output reaching 15 percent. Several years ago, plants averaged 12 to 13 percent. Despite the current economic problems in Russia and the soft ruble, large vertically integrated companies seek to continue further modernization of sugar processing facilities in 2016/2017. This is more likely given the lucrative crop and the increasing profitability with the current worldwide prices for sugar. However, analysts suggest that in 5 years the sector will be totally consolidated into just a few, large organizations, and individual farmers will not be able to compete. Powered by Commodity Insights It's consolidated operating profit of Rs. 101.80 crore for the quarter, declined 7.06% qoq but grew 12.8% yoy. Operating profit margin for the current quarter at 12.48% contracted by 153 bps qoq but expanded by 12 bps yoy. For the year ended March 31, 2016, the company reported consolidated net profit of Rs. 326.25 crore, down by 7.63% yoy. It's consolidated revenue for the current period stood at Rs. 3,095.57 crore, registering growth of 13.15% yoy. Cyient Ltd's consolidated core operating profit for the current period stood at Rs. 463.51 crore, increasing by 15.73% yoy. Operating margin for the current period at 14.45% contracted by 19 bps yoy. On standalone basis, the company reported net profit of Rs.24.92 crore for the quarter ended March 31, 2016, registering decline of 59.87% qoq and 65.62% yoy. Its revenue stood at Rs. 284.22 crore, declining 4.57% qoq and 13.36% yoy. Cyient Ltd's operating profit of Rs. 36.24 crore for the quarter, declined 46.2% qoq and 54.24% yoy. Operating profit margin for the current quarter at 12.75% contracted by 987 bps qoq and 1139 bps yoy. For the year ended March 31, 2016, the company reported standalone net profit of Rs. 233.45 crore, down by 13.91% yoy. It's standalone revenue for the current period stood at Rs. 1,245.56 crore, registering decline of 3.74% yoy. Cyient Ltd's core operating profit for the current period stood at Rs. 250.01 crore, declining by 17.03% yoy. Operating margin for the current period at 18.71% contracted by 457 bps yoy. Cyient Ltd, company focused on engineering, networks and operations, reported consolidated net profit of Rs.66.06 crore for the quarter ended March 31, 2016, registering decline of 23.93% qoq and 29.49% yoy. The companys revenue stood at Rs. 815.84 crore, clocking growth of 4.36% qoq and 11.75% yoy.It's consolidated operating profit of Rs. 101.80 crore for the quarter, declined 7.06% qoq but grew 12.8% yoy. Operating profit margin for the current quarter at 12.48% contracted by 153 bps qoq but expanded by 12 bps yoy.For the year ended March 31, 2016, the company reported consolidated net profit of Rs. 326.25 crore, down by 7.63% yoy. It's consolidated revenue for the current period stood at Rs. 3,095.57 crore, registering growth of 13.15% yoy.Cyient Ltd's consolidated core operating profit for the current period stood at Rs. 463.51 crore, increasing by 15.73% yoy. Operating margin for the current period at 14.45% contracted by 19 bps yoy.On standalone basis, the company reported net profit of Rs.24.92 crore for the quarter ended March 31, 2016, registering decline of 59.87% qoq and 65.62% yoy. Its revenue stood at Rs. 284.22 crore, declining 4.57% qoq and 13.36% yoy.Cyient Ltd's operating profit of Rs. 36.24 crore for the quarter, declined 46.2% qoq and 54.24% yoy. Operating profit margin for the current quarter at 12.75% contracted by 987 bps qoq and 1139 bps yoy.For the year ended March 31, 2016, the company reported standalone net profit of Rs. 233.45 crore, down by 13.91% yoy. It's standalone revenue for the current period stood at Rs. 1,245.56 crore, registering decline of 3.74% yoy.Cyient Ltd's core operating profit for the current period stood at Rs. 250.01 crore, declining by 17.03% yoy. Operating margin for the current period at 18.71% contracted by 457 bps yoy. Result Highlights: (Rs. in crore) Reported Results IIFL Estimates Variance (%) Consolidated Revenue 815.84 834.16 [2.20] Consolidated Net Profit 66.06 98.12 [32.67] Consolidated EPS for the quarter stood at Rs. 5.88. Bloomberg estimated the companys consolidated net profit at Rs. 91.89 crore. Management Comments : Commenting on the results, Mr. Krishna Bodanapu, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, said FY16 was a challenging year for Cyient. The core business of the company consisting of the Engineering and DNO operations was flat. Margin in these businesses increased during the course of the year by 100 bps. In addition to revenue growth in the core business, we faced significant headwinds in some of the investments we made. While Softential which will now be called Service Management & Assurance (SMA), is performing well from an integration perspective, we had a challenge in software sales in Q4. This reflected as a challenge in revenue growth and profitability. In Rangsons which will now be called DLM, we faced significant headwinds with the cyclicality of the business. While the backlog is in line with expectations, the execution of backlog has moved significantly. We had consistent Q-o-Q growth, but the revenue for the year was lower than what we originally committed. As a result of these challenges FY16 was a disappointing year. Mr. Ajay Aggarwal, Chief Financial Officer, said I am pleased to note that Cyient generated a robust cash flow of 64.6% of EBITDA for FY16 which is a 8% improvement from FY15. This has been a reflection of continuous improvement in DSO collection, SEZ deployment, capex optimization and other initiatives. As I reflect over past years, it gives me immense pleasure to see the various initiatives undertaken by Cyient resulted in continuous improvement in the cash flow. Over the years we have been working towards ensuring that informative and useful disclosure are provided to our investors. As part of our initiative of providing additional disclosure, we have started publishing Free Cash Flow statement starting this quarter Though FY16 has been challenging in terms of revenue growth and integration of acquired companies is taking longer, we were able to protect our margin erosion despite wage hike by working on various operational improvement parameter and improve margin of our core business. This will be our area of focus in FY17 as well. In Q4, the growth momentum is back in our core business as well Rangsons and hence gives me confidence on our revenue growth in coming quarters as well. Stock Commentary: Cyient Ltd is currently trading at Rs. 484.25, down by 17.7 points or 3.53% from its previous closing of Rs. 501.95 on the BSE. The scrip opened at Rs. 508.7 and has touched a high and low of Rs. 510 and Rs. 480 respectively. So far 156526(NSE+BSE) shares were traded on the counter. The current market cap of the company is Rs. 5646.1 crore. The BSE group 'A' stock of face value Rs. 5 has touched a 52 week high of Rs. 641 on 15-Oct-2015 and a 52 week low of Rs. 370.5 on 12-Feb-2016. Last one week high and low of the scrip stood at Rs. 517 and Rs. 474 respectively. The promoters holding in the company stood at 22.18 % while Institutions and Non-Institutions held 64.53 % and 13.28 % respectively. The stock is currently trading below its 200 DMA. Supreme Industries, country's largest plastic processors, reported consolidated net profit of Rs. 114.56 crore for the quarter ended March 31, 2016, registering growth of 12.06% yoy and 39.47% qoq. The companys revenue stood at Rs. 1,200.30 crore, up 4.22% yoy and 19.82% qoq. Its consolidated core operating profit of Rs. 140.21 crore for the quarter, declined by 29.23% yoy and 9.03% qoq. Operating profit margin for the current quarter at 11.68% contracted by 552 bps yoy and 371 bps qoq. For nine months ended March 31, 2016, the company reported consolidated net profit of Rs. 221.24 crore, growing by 36.1% yoy. Its consolidated revenue for the period stood at Rs. 2,974.84 crore, registering decline of 0.08% yoy. Supreme Industries' core operating profit stood at Rs. 385.12 crore, recording decline of 5.68% yoy. Operating margin for the current period at 12.58% contracted by 113 bps yoy. On standalone basis,Supreme Industries Ltd, reported standalone net profit of Rs. 102.64 crore for the quarter ended March 31, 2016, registering growth of 6.82% yoy and 38.34% qoq. The companys revenue stood at Rs. 1,200.47 crore, up 4.23% yoy and 19.85% qoq. Its standalone core operating profit of Rs. 140.17 crore for the quarter, declined by 29.25% yoy and 9.63% qoq. Operating profit margin for the current quarter at 11.68% contracted by 552 bps yoy and 380 bps qoq. For nine months ended March 31, 2016, the company reported standalone net profit of Rs. 213.09 crore, growing by 21.77% yoy. Its standalone revenue for the period stood at Rs. 2,974.84 crore, registering decline of 0.06% yoy. Supreme Industries' core operating profit stood at Rs. 386.01 crore, recording decline of 5.41% yoy. Operating margin for the current period at 12.6% contracted by 111 bps yoy. Result Highlights: (Rs. in crore) Reported Results IIFL Estimates Variance (%) Standalone Revenue 1200.30 1200 0.04 Standalone Net Profit 114.56 119 [3.36] Consolidated EPS for the quarter stood at Rs. 9.02. Bloomberg estimated the companys consolidated net profit at Rs. 74.18 crore. Management Comments : Mr.M.P Taparia, Managing Director, The Supreme Industries Limited, said : The Polymer prices hovered at a lower level during most pa rt of the year. The Polymer consumption in the country has grown by aro11nd 14% in volume terms close to two times GDP growth during the year. Such consumption driven growth has not been seen in the last decade. The Country has consumed around 13.7 million tons of Plastics in last year compared to around 12 million tons in the previous year. This augurs well for the Company's growth plan. The Company is confident of meeting its Capital Expenditure requirements through its internal accruals & suppliers' Credit. Company has no plans to increase its borrowing levels. It wishes to become virtual debt free in next couple of years. Corporate Action : Supreme Industries Ltd has informed that the Board of Directors of the Company, have transacted the following business: 1. The Board of Directors declared two Interim dividends aggregating 375% i.e. Rs 7.50/- per equity share of face value of Rs. 2/- each. The Board has considered it prudent to keep the same as total dividend for the period under review. Therefore, no further / final Dividend has been considered. 2. The present Statutory Auditors, M/s. Chhogmal & Co., Chartered Accountants, has expressed their unwillingness to continue and reappointed as the Statutory Auditors of the Company from the conclusion of the ensuing 74th Annual General Meeting of the Company. As recommended by the Audit Committee, the Board has proposed appointment of M/s. Lodha & Co., Chartered Accountants as the Statutory Auditors of the Company from the conclusion of the ensuing 74th Annual General Meeting of the Company. 3. Pursuant to the provisions of Section 108 of the Companies Act, 2013 and Rule 20 of the Companies (Management and Administration) Rules, 2014 the Company shall provide its members the facility to exercise their votes electronically for transacting the items of business as set out in the Notice of the Annual General Meeting. Stock Commentary: Supreme Industries Ltd is currently trading at Rs. 801.5, up by 0.65 points or 0.08% from its previous closing of Rs. 800.85 on the BSE. The scrip opened at Rs. 810 and has touched a high and low of Rs. 834 and Rs. 796.6 respectively. So far 325910(NSE+BSE) shares were traded on the counter. The current market cap of the company is Rs. 10174.8 crore. The BSE group 'A' stock of face value Rs. 2 has touched a 52 week high of Rs. 818 on 20-Apr-2016 and a 52 week low of Rs. 540 on 25-Aug-2015. Last one week high and low of the scrip stood at Rs. 818 and Rs. 768.05 respectively. The promoters holding in the company stood at 49.71 % while Institutions and Non-Institutions held 28.86 % and 21.43 % respectively. The stock is currently trading below its 50 DMA. The Automotive Tyre Manufacturers Association (ATMA) has reportedly asked the Centre to take urgent measures to halt the relentless imports and dumping of Chinese tyres.Tyre manufacturers in India have made major investments in greenfield and brownfield projects for manufacturing radial tyres, ATMA Chairman K.M. Mammen has been quoted as saying.However, indiscriminate imports and dumping of cheap tyres from China are queering the pitch for the domestic tyre manufacturers, he added.The domestic tyre industrys' petition, seeking imposition of anti-dumping duty on cheap imports from China is pending with the Commerce Ministry.According to ATMA, TBR (Truck & Bus Radial) tyre imports have surged from 7.8 lakh units in FY15 to 12.8 lakh units in FY16, registering an increase of 64 per cent.In the last two years, TBR tyre imports are up by 2.5 times.From an average per month import of about 40,000 units in FY14 and 65,000 units in FY15, tyre imports crossed the one lakh units per month mark in FY16.Most of these imports are from China, as TBR export prices there are significantly lower than the prices of such tyres in the Chinese market and prices of similar exports from Thailand and South Korea.The per unit import price from China in many cases is less than the cost of raw materials in India, according to ATMA. The Real estate sector continues to build-up stock and is sitting on inventory of close to three years of revenue, largely supported by high cost funding as banks have turned off the tap, believes India Ratings and Research (Ind-Ra). Inventory in the sector has risen to 2.9 years in 1HFY16 compared to 2.6 years in FY15 and 2.2 years in FY12, which is a concern especially in the current scenario when sales are falling.The implementation of Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 is likely to improve confidence of buyers in the sector, as it improves transparency, provides for various buyer-friendly measures and encourages timely completion of projects. However, the Act is unlikely to lead to a significant improvement in sales volume during FY17, as it does not impact the two key variables impacting sales prices and economic growth.Sale of residential units has been weak due to persistent high property prices, making units unaffordable to end-customers and leading to deferral of purchase decisions. Revival of property demand would depend on a meaningful reduction in prices or a drastic improvement in economic growth resulting in positive customer sentiments. This is unlikely until FYE17, as property prices will remain high due to the refinancing of sector companies debt through higher-cost funding from non-banking finance companies/ private investors. Also, Ind-Ra expects GDP growth to improve only marginally to 7.9% in FY17 (FY16: 7.4%).Ind-Ra revised its rating Outlook on the real estate sector to negative for FY17 from stable in our report Demand Not Expected to Improve for Real Estate Sector in FY17, on the back of rising debt and falling profits and cash flows. Growth in bank credit to the Real estate sector has slowed down to single digits in 2015 from the earlier double digits growth seen in 2014. Many companies are relying on higher-cost funding from non-banking finance companies and private investors to refinance bank loans, which only shifts the stress to the future.The interest of investors in the sector remains high. However, investments are increasingly through debt or debt-like hybrid instruments and bulk apartment purchases, instead of equity investments. The use of debt/hybrid instruments is a concern, as it only shifts the funding gap to the redemption date with high funding costs. Mallya has repeatedly defied the ED's order summoning him, and asked for additional time to appear before them. As reported by Business Standard, ED has already placed an 'extradition request' with the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), which will be subsequently sent to the authorities in United Kingdom (UK) for his deportation to India. Earlier, a local court in Hyderabad on Wednesday convicted Vijay Mallya in a cheque-bouncing case filed against him by GMR Hyderabad International Airport Ltd. Troubles seems to be far from over for Vijay Mallya, as the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has reportedly begun extradition proceedings against him in connection with money laundering probe and Kingfisher Airlines.Mallya has repeatedly defied the ED's order summoning him, and asked for additional time to appear before them.As reported by Business Standard, ED has already placed an 'extradition request' with the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), which will be subsequently sent to the authorities in United Kingdom (UK) for his deportation to India.Earlier, a local court in Hyderabad on Wednesday convicted Vijay Mallya in a cheque-bouncing case filed against him by GMR Hyderabad International Airport Ltd. The court, however, did not pronounce the quantum of punishment as the Rajya Sabha MP, who left the country last month, was not present in the court, Mallyas lawyer H. Sudhakar Rao said. The quantum of punishment is expected to be pronounced on 5th May by the court, GMR lawyer Ashok Reddy said. Two cases pertaining to cheque-bouncing were going on against Kingfisher Airlines in the court and the matter was posted for arguments. After the arguments today, the court convicted Mallaya, Kingfisher and a senior official of the airline under section 138 of Negotiable Instruments Act," Sudhakar Rao told a domestic news agency. Because Vijay Mallya was not here, the sentence has not been pronouncedonly conviction has been recorded. Since no accused have appeared before the court, only conviction has been recorded, he added. The court had earlier issued a non-bailable warrant against the Kingfisher Airlines, its Chairman Vijay Mallya and another senior official of the company for allegedly dishonouring of a cheque of INR 50 lakh given to GMR Hyderabad International Airport Ltd (GHIAL), which operates the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in Hyderabad. In October 2012, GHIAL had withdrawn a case over 'bounced cheques against Mallya after the airline agreed to pay the outstanding amount due to the airport operator. However, Kingfisher Airlines made only a part payment and defaulted on the rest, prompting the airport operator to approach the court. While the automotive world is still reeling under the devastation of the "dieselgate" by Volkswagen, another news from a world-renowned manufacturer is set to bring havoc to their life. Japanese automakers Mitsubishi Motors has admitted that they manipulated fuel-economy data in nearly 6 lakh cars.The issue came to light after Nissan, one of the companies for which Mitsubishi maufactures, found irregularities between test results. As per reports, Nissan asked Mitsubishi Motors to investigate and this led the company to discover improper conduct and tests that did not meet Japanese law.In an official statement from Mitsubishi Motors Corporation (MMC), the company said that the applicable cars are four mini-car models, two of which are the "eK Wagon" and "eK Space" which have been manufactured by MMC; and the other two are the "Dayz" and "Dayz Roox" which have been manufactured by MMC and supplied to Nissan Motors Corporation (NM) since June 2013. Up until the end of March 2016, MMC has sold 157 thousand units of the eK Wagon and eK Space and supplied 468 thousand units of the Dayz and Dayz Roox to NM.The press release also read," In connection with the certification process for the mini-cars manufactured by MMC, we found that with respect to the fuel consumption testing data submitted to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT), MMC conducted testing improperly to present better fuel consumption rates than the actual rates; and that the testing method was also different from the one required by Japanese law. We express deep apologies to all of our customers and stakeholders for this issue."The shares of MMC has crashed nearly 15% in the two days since the news broke out. The Japanese government has termed the revelations "extremely serious" and has given MMC a deadline of April 27 to respond to the matter. Meanwhile, one of the offices of the company in Okazaki has been raided by the authorities for more gathering more information.The company has decided to stop production and sales of the applicable cars. NM also has stopped sales of the applicable cars, and MMC and NM will discuss compensation regarding this issue. In a major initiative to get administration of the Ministry of Commerce & Industry closer to people and changing the paradigm of Governance, the Minister of State for Commerce & Industry (I/C). Nirmala Sitharaman launched the Twitter Seva. Through this Twitter Seva, queries on matters relating to Department of Commerce(DoC) and Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion(DIPP) will be answered. Queries regarding DGFT, DGS&D, SEZs, Tea, Coffee, Rubber & Spices Boards, APEDA, MPEDA and any other matter relating to Department of Commerce will be addressed by DoC while queries regarding Manufacturing Policy, Industrial Corridors, Investment Promotion, Make in India, Start-up India, Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB), FDI, Intellectual Property Rights, Patents, Trade Marks, Designs, Geographical Indicators, Copyrights, Paper, Light Engineering Industry, Cement, Linoleum and Rubber Industry will be addressed by DIPP. Under this Seva, anyone who is desirous of assistance from the Ministry of Commerce & Industry can use the hashtag #mociseva . An institutionalized mechanism with a special Twitter cell has been created in the Ministry manned by a set of dedicated officers who will monitor and direct all the tweets to the concerned officers of the Department. All officers have been sensitized to respond to the tweets within a short time frame. This Seva is open to all the services provided by the Department of Commerce and Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion. This is an initiative of the Minister of Commerce & Industry keeping in line the dictum Minimum Government, Maximum Governance of the Prime Minister. The Indian equity market ended flat with the Nifty snapping a six-day winning streak. The BSE Sensex, which surged beyond the psychological 26,000 levels in morning trades, erased almost all its gains amid selling in IT, capital goods, power, realty and FMCG stocks. Even the mid-cap and small-cap stocks were under pressure.On the other hand, banking stocks rallied on a media report the Reserve Bank of India trimmed the list of companies whose loans need to be provided for against the risk of default.ICICI Bank, SBI, Coal India, Bank of Baroda, BPCL, Tata Motors and ONGC were among the gainers on NSE, whereas Wipro, Bharti Infratel, UltraTech Cement, BHEL, ACC and Ambuja Cement were among the losers today.Equitas Holdings debuted at the exchanges at Rs 146.53 per share, up 33% from issue price of Rs 110. The stock ended at Rs135 surging 22%. Its IPO price was at Rs110 per share. The company attracted demand for more than 17 times the number of shares on sale in its IPO.Wipro cracked 7% to Rs.559 on BSE. The company reported a fall in profit in Q4 ending 2015-16. Its consolidated net profit dipped 1.6% to Rs 2,235 crore for the quarter ended March against a net profit of Rs 2,272 crore in the same quarter last fiscal. The company's revenue, however, rose 12.9% to Rs 13,741.7 crore during the reported quarter, from Rs 12,171.4 crore in the year-ago period.The BSE Sensex ended with a gain of 36 points at 25,880. The BSE Sensex opened at 25,980 touched an intra-day high of 26,080 and low of 25,783.The NSE Nifty closed with a loss of mere three points at 7,912. The NSE Nifty opened at 7,954 hitting a high of 7,978 and low of 7,884.The India VIX (Volatility) index was down 3.29% to 16.5125.On the global front, China's Shanghai Composite index slipped 0.68% and Hang Seng jumped 2%.In Europe, the FTSE 100 is trading marginally lower by 0.73%. On the other hand, DAX and the CAC 40 down 0.7% each.The Indian Rupee was trading down 6 paise at 66.28 per US dollar.Out of 1,429 stocks traded on the NSE, 846 declined and 533 advanced today.Jay Bharat Maruti jumped 11.8% to Rs.158 on BSE. The company reported Rs.12.69 crore net profit for the quarter ended March 31 compared to Rs.10.02 crore reported in the same period a year ago. The company has recommended a final dividend of 40% (i.e. Rs. 2/- per equity share of Rs. 5/- each) for the financial year ended March 31, 2016 which shall be paid after the conclusion of the 29th Annual General Meeting subject to approval of the shareholders of the company.Sakthi Sugars gained 1.7% to Rs.38.95 on BSE. The company said that a scheme of demerger of ABT Limited has been approved by the high court of judicature at Madras.Network 18 dropped 4.5% to Rs.42.55 after the company reported a fourth-quarter loss of Rs.3.7 crore compared with a year-earlier profit. Revenue rose 7.3% to Rs.902.9 crore for the quarter ended 31 March.TV18 Broadcast slipped 1.8% to Rs.38.80. The company's profit fell to Rs.82.5 crore from Rs.95.4 crore for the same period a year ago. Its revenue rises 6.6% to Rs.671.3 crore for the March quarter.VST Industries gained 1% to Rs.1,7715 on BSE. The company reported Rs.49.3 crore net profit for the quarter ended March 31 compared to Rs.152.20 crore reported in the year-ago period.Stone India climbed 6.2% to Rs.78.90. The company bagged an order for supply & installation of 9090 units of Bio-Toilets to Govt. of Chattisgarh valuing Rs. 28.70 crores via its Business Associate, Cranberry Westlink T & D Inc.Tide Water Oil Co. (India) gained 2.3% to Rs.6367 on BSE. The company entered into an agreement to acquire UK-based lubricant maker Price Thomas Holdings Ltd for 9.59 million (Rs.91.3 crore).A total of 34 stocks registered a fresh 52-week high in trades today, whereas 13 stocks touched a new 52-week low on the NSE.Adi Finechem, Ahluwalia Contracts (India), Carborundum Universal Limited, Cosmo Films Limited, Electrotherm (India) Limited, Equitas Holdings Limited, Essel Propack Limited, Gujarat Narmada Valley Fertilizers and Chemicals Limited, Harrisons Malayalam Limited, Havells India Limited, HeidelbergCement India Limited, Hind Syntex Limited, ITD Cementation India Limited, JSW Steel Limited, Kakatiya Cement Sugar & Industries Limited, Kamdhenu Limited, Lakshmi Energy and Foods Limited, Maithan Alloys Limited, Manappuram Finance Limited, Marico Limited, Next Mediaworks Limited, Pricol Limited PTL Enterprises Limited, Ruchira Papers Limited, SKS Microfinance Limited, Supreme Industries Limited, Swaraj Engines Limited, Transformers And Rectifiers (India) Limited, VIP Industries Limited, VST Industries Limited, V.S.T Tillers Tractors Limited, Winsome Yarns Limited, Yes Bank were some of the prominent stocks to log a fresh 52-week high.Alkem Laboratories, ANG Industries Limited, Birla Cotsyn (India) Limited, BS LIMITED, Equitas Holdings Limited, KDDL Limited, Mohit Industries Limited, Paras Petrofils Limited, Rainbow Papers Limited, Raj Rayon Industries Limited, Shrenuj & Company Limited, Visesh Infotecnics Limited, Visagar Polytex were some of the notable stocks to record new 52-week low. Piyush Goyal, Union Minister of State for Power, Coal, New & Renewable Energy visited the UK on 19-20 April, 2016 to strengthen India-UK collaboration on power and renewable energy, building up on the agreements made during visit of Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi to the UK in November 2015. visited the UK on 19-20 April, 2016 to strengthen India-UK collaboration on power and renewable energy, building up on the agreements made during visit of Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi to the UK in November 2015. The Minister was accompanied by an official delegation which included Secretary, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, Joint Secretary, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, Director (Technical), IREDA and nine member business delegation. On the first day of the visit, the Minister met officials from Natgrid and UK Power Network who briefed the Minister about their functions and capabilities and on how they can contribute on enhancing grid stability in India. The Minister explained about his plans and vision to increase the power generation in India and renewable energy scale up plan has been drawn up to 2022. Shri Piyush Goyal also met Lord Bourne, UK Minister for Energy and Climate Change and discussed about enhancing future cooperation between India and UK in the energy sector. The Minister also met Lord Jim ONeill, Commerce Secretary to the Treasury and Mr. Nick Hurd, Minister, Department of International Development and discussed about enhancing bilateral relationship particularly in the power sector. He emphasised the need for the developed world to show its commitment towards climate change by putting money in climate finance. He mentioned that India needs low cost long term finance for its ambitious renewable energy scale up plans and finance hubs like London could take a front seat in mobilising it. Shri Goyal also emphasised on the historical, cultural and financial ties between India and the UK and hoped to work on it expeditiously to strengthen and deepen the bilateral engagement. The Minister met the media during the visit and briefed about steps the Indian Government is undertaking to improve energy access, rapid scale up of renewable energy, enhancing grid reliability, integration of renewables in the grid and the massive opportunity presented by the untapped demand in the Indian market. As India gears up to meet its ambitious renewable energy targets of 175 GW of installed capacity by 2022, the country is exploring international mechanisms of funding and is evaluating new and innovative tools to finance the renewables sector. As a step in this direction, Indian public sector giants are likely to examine rupee denominated debt instruments like Masala Bonds to create and develop a new market and identify benchmark prices for these new instruments. The issuances which would be offered by blue chip government companies are expected to help evolve new vistas of funding for the renewable energy space. Companies including NTPC, Neyveli Lignite Corporation, Power Finance Corporation, Power Trading Corporation and Rural Electrification Corporation are likely to launch these Masala Bonds totalling $1 billion in the next three or four months in the UK to gauge the investor appetite. The tenor of these bonds is likely to be limited to a band of five to seven years and these are going to be in smaller denominations ranging from $150-250 million. These will be subject to decisions made by the Boards of the PSU energy companies. In addition, Energy Efficiency Services Limited could explore issuance of Green Masala Bond subject to credit rating. , said Piyush Goyal, Union Minister of State (IC) for Power, Coal and New and Renewable Energy, Government of India. He was speaking at a Round table, Financing Renewables and Energy Efficiency organized by the City of London in London today. In 2015, IFC issued the first Masala bond listed on the London Stock Exchange. The bonds worth over Rs 1000 crore were issued in a range of tenors, including a ten-year, 10 billion rupee-denominated bond to raise funds for infrastructure projects. Masala bonds are primarily rupee denominated bonds issued to overseas buyers Talking about the changing landscape the Minister said that several measures are being taken to address the risks in the system one among them the distribution reform UDAY. This is expected to hard stop future losses for distribution companies and is targeted to get these companies back on track. While some of these companies are likely to be revived sooner the entire distribution segment should be on track by 2019. Shri Goyal also announced that IREDA is coordinating a billion dollar equity fund perhaps the largest in the renewable space. This will be professionally managed by an independent international fund management company. Indian public sector companies gave already committed $ 315 million. Wipro registered a 6% rise in net revenue at Rs.13,742 crore in Q4 as against Rs.12,952 crore in Q3. The net profit of the company increased marginally to Rs.2,235 crore in Q4 FY16 as against Rs.2,234 crore in Q3.Bharti Airtel will sell more than 5 percent stake in its tower arm Bharti Infratel through an open market block deal, as per media reports.Maruti Suzuki India Ltd is working on having exclusive service facilities for Nexa customers, ED (Marketing & Sales) R.S. Kalsi has been quoted as saying by a business daily.The management of the UK strips division of Tata Steel has expressed interest in buying out the groups five-million-tonne unit, reports a business daily.The bank will announce its Q4 numbers today.IIFL estimates the banks net revenues to soar to Rs.1,247 crore, growing at 35% yoy and 6% qoq.The company has bagged an order for supply & installation of 9090 units of Bio-Toilets to Govt. of Chattisgarh valuing Rs. 28.70 crores via its Business Associate, Cranberry Westlink T & D Inc.IGL recorded highest CNG sale of 26.7 lakh kg a day this week, according to reports.Hindustan Zinc will announce its Q4 numbers today. As per IIFLs forecast, the companys net profit for Q4 FY16 is expected to plunge to Rs.1,712 crore, at a rate of 13.8% yoy and 5% qoq.Supreme Petrochem reported its net profit increased 164.8% to Rs.54.3 crore compared with Rs.20.5 crore in the corresponding quarter of the previous year.Adani Enterprises has received approval from the Gujarat government to begin work on building a solar power equipment plant, according to reports.Skipper has secured new orders worth approximately Rs.200 crore from Power Grid Corporation of India Limited and is favourably placed for contracts worth another Rs. 300 crore with them.Aries AgroTide Water Oil Co. (India) Ltd concluded an agreement to acquire UK-based lubricant maker Price Thomas Holdings Ltd for 9.59 million (Rs.91.3 crore) as part of its plans to expand overseas sales.The company reported Rs.49.3 crore net profit for the quarter ended March 31 compared to Rs.152.20 crore reported in the year-ago period.: The company has annoounced that a scheme of demerger of ABT Limited has been approved by the High Court of Judicature at Madras.: Narayana Hrudayalaya has launched Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Narayana Superspecialty Hospital at Kakryal Tata Steel Europe has noted the current press coverage regarding a potential Management Buy Out bid for Tata Steel UK. has noted the current press coverage regarding a potential Management Buy Out bid for Tata Steel UK. As previously announced, following the Board meeting of Tata Steel Limited on March 29th and on numerous occasions since that date, Tata Steel Europe is engaged in a process to seek strategic alternatives for Tata Steel's UK operations. To deliver greater clarity for all key stakeholders such as employees, customers and suppliers, Tata Steel Europe is committed to seeking all credible options in an urgent manner. As announced on Monday 18th April this process had already resulted in the advisers to Tata Steel Europe beginning the initial exploration of interest in Tata Steel's UK operations with 190 potential financial and industrial investors worldwide. More detailed information sharing will commence this week as the process moves into the confidential phase. Betsy McCaw, president and CEO of 16 Tech Community Corporation, is looking to innovate. Shes not looking to simply lead her own business; shes looking to build a community that will develop to retain and attract talent to the city and will hopefully strengthen the regional economy. Encompassing 60 acres of land, 16 Tech rests along Indiana Avenue between 10th and 16th streets near several city hotspots such as IUPUI, IU Health and a variety of neighborhoods such as Riverside and Near Westside. The master plan of 16 Tech is to provide flexible research space for industries such as technology, life sciences and advanced manufacturing, in addition to developing a prevalent place to live, work and play. Anchor tenant, The Indiana Biosciences Research Institute, a $360 million industry-led institute, will be the first organization to ignite the area. The Indianapolis Recorder Newspaper spoke with McCaw to learn more about the future of the project and how it will impact surrounding communities. Indianapolis Recorder Newspaper: In your opinion, what is an innovation community? McCaw: Its a place for talented people to come together to create opportunities. Our purpose here is to create access, opportunity and growth for what exists in the city. An innovation community provides a platform to do that. Its bringing together partners across industries, research institutions, neighborhoods and universities. It creates this campus-within-a-campus or city-within-a-city feel. Youve got the university and all of the research systems (in the area), you have the hospitals, neighborhoods that are very engaged and also the history of Indiana Avenue. Our hope is that it will look like downtown in 1015 years. Much of this innovation plan involves attracting and retaining talent. What is the strategy to change the focus of attracting new talent? There will be talent that wants to interact with specific companies in 16 Tech, and part of that draw is who those anchor and initial tenants will be. Companies are already interested in coming here. Some will want to work there, and others will just want to simply interact with it. They may have a membership to TechShop or come on-site for various events those companies may hold. We hope that over time people and companies will interact with the area then eventually move to the area. When you talk about talent from a variety of different fields, what other specific industries are you looking to attract besides technology, life sciences and advanced manufacturing? Well have maker space (a collaborative area where artisans have access to industrial tools and programming) here with TechShop, and Rolls Royce, as well as some of the engineering institutions around the state, are very interested in that. Weve also been talking to those involved in the arts to enhance public art in a space by using music, especially with the history of The Avenue. Anyone who is doing structural art can also use that maker space. Right now, all of those industries are sitting in their own spaces, and we want to bring them together. We would also love to bring the Cultural Trail through. What do you say to those who look at this project as another way to gentrify historic neighborhoods? From a technical standpoint, we dont touch any residential properties, which is really important to us. They dont want taxes to go up or to be moved out of their homes, whether they cant afford it or someone drops a townhouse next door. I respect all of those issues, and Im hopeful the neighbors of the area have the strength to work well with developers and voice their concerns. A study conducted by Battelle estimates that Phase 1 of 16 Tech development will create more than 2,678 jobs, and 61 percent will be entry-level and middle-skill jobs. With so many developments focusing on high-skill jobs when developing in low-income areas, why are these results important for 16 Tech? Battelle did a significant amount of research and found were not retaining much talent here in central Indiana. We then had them (Battelle) go back and study the opportunity available at 16 Tech. They took the master plan and the general uses at the time and compared that to other innovation districts around the country. They looked at types of jobs that existed in other districts, and some of them are science or multi-industry focused, and they looked at the type of jobs we hope to have at 16 Tech and came back to us with those statistics. We hope everyone can find an opportunity at 16 Tech. The 16 Tech Community Corporation, established in September 2015, was approved for $75 million in tax increment financing (TIF) bonds by the City-County Council in November 2015 for the infrastructure adjustment to begin. How exactly will that money be used? Of that $75 million, we will use $56 million to $59 million. One of the reasons this area was never fully developed is because so much of the water infrastructure is underground. For more information on 16 Tech, visit 16TechIndy.com. Eight Ph.D. candidates from the IU School of Education will not only celebrate the completion of their degrees, but will also make history, as they are the first group of eight African-American women to earn this accomplishment together. Calling themselves the great eight, these women are mothers, wives and community leaders who have formed an unbreakable bond cheering one another along as they made their way to the finish line. The Indianapolis Recorder Newspaper spoke with the eight Ph.D. candidates to learn how it feels to be one of eight Black women to make history, and what this accomplishment means for them and their families. Jasmine Haywood These women are change agents, theyre mothers, theyre wives, theyre former athletes, theyre former foster youth and more. We are not all in the same program, and we did not all start the same year, so it is divine intervention that we are finishing together. The Great Eight victory is collective, and we want to honor the communities we came from and the community of Black women faculty members that supported us along the way. Demetrees Hutchins My family is unconventional, and it includes numerous people throughout the community and at IUPUI. The genuine and continued support I have received from my family throughout my life and academic career coupled with a strong determination to succeed as a former foster youth and become a change agent was the catalyst to completing this terminal degree. This is a peoples degree, and I am honored to obtain it on my familys behalf. Tiffany Kyser Having a network of women, Black women and women of color in my field of study, within the social sciences and within a supportive recognition of intersectional identity was and is significant. My hope is this story speaks to something much more comprehensive and necessary the potential institutions of higher education, such as Indiana University, have to create more inclusive and equitable policies, practices and fiscal allocations that engender spaces of intellectual, cultural, socio-emotional and physical safety for all students, staff and faculty. Shannon McCullough Being a member of The Great Eight has been a truly inspirational, motivational and humbling experience. I also attribute my motivation to persist through this degree to being a model for my own children. My son and daughter sat beside me during this journey, hearing the importance of education, hard work and never giving up as you strive to be the best you can be despite the struggles along the way. Nadrea Njoku So many times in our collective experiences at Indiana University, we have been one of two or the only Black female in the classroom. I find it remarkable that, as we wrap up this major accomplishment, we have the blessing to do it as a unit a sisterhood bonded by common experiences. However, I do not want our historical accomplishment to overshadow the struggles of Black women in obtaining advanced degrees at predominately white institutions. Jada Phelps-Moultrie The importance of my Ph.D. demonstrates our tenacity to be successful, despite wherever we started or whatever we went through in life as a family. I have a picture of my great-great-great grandmother who had to pose with her slave master. Nonetheless, the message of pulling yourself up amidst racism transmitted through each generation. I know my ancestors would be proud. Juhanna Rogers A dear friend told me eight is a number of completion, and this milestone will be complete in a culturally affirming manner. I am honored that my journey is concluding with a community of seven. When I think about us walking across together, I cant help but feel like the spirit of our ancestors are with me in such a real way. Johari Shuck Getting a Ph.D., particularly in education, means continuing a legacy while forging a new path for my children and other young people in my family. What has meant the world to me is seeing my family members, many of whom never made it to college at all, get excited about my educational journey, which is actually an accomplishment for us all in my eyes. Despite efforts by church leaders to keep Indianapolis historic Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church open, the building has been sold to a developer and will become part of a new hotel. The 180-year-old church, which is led by Rev. Louis Parham, has struggled with dwindling attendance and deteriorating facilities in the past few years. The infrastructure itself is definitely a challenge. It is aging not so gracefully, but were trying to restore that, Parham told the Indianapolis Recorder in a January interview. Parham noted in the same conversation what had once been a congregation of more than 700 people several years ago was down to about 120. Prior to reaching an agreement with Indianapolis-based Sun Development and Management Corp., Parham said the church turned down several offers and was instead working on a capital campaign to raise the $2 million to $3 million needed to make the necessary repairs to the building. In addition to Bethel AMEs congregation having to rehome, the sale of the church raises concerns about conserving its history. The church, which is the oldest African-American church in the city, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1991. Prior to the Civil War, Bethel AME was among the many refuges in the north for free Blacks, and it was a safe place for fugitive slaves to stop en route to Canada. The church was founded in 1836 by William Paul Quinn and Augustus Turner and started as a small congregation that met in Quinns log cabin and went by the name Indianapolis Station. According to the National Park Service within the U.S. Department of the Interior, In 1841 a small house of worship was constructed, and by 1848 the church had 100 members and became active in the antislavery movement, often harboring fugitive slaves en route to Canada. Sun Development and Management Corp. has built hotels across the country and in Canada, including in several Indiana cities. The separation of church and state is a vital principle in the U.S. government, but as debates about hot-button issues like abortion and same-sex marriage indicate, lawmakers cant always put their personal religious beliefs entirely aside while working. On the Supreme Court of the United States, especially, where so much of the work involves interpretation, full objectivity can be difficult to grasp. Prior to the death of Justice Antonin Scalia earlier this year, the court had six Catholics: Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, John Roberts, Scalia, Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas. The remaining three justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagen are Jewish. Though political ideologies are tied in part to ones religious beliefs, the SCOTUS justices dont necessarily vote in religious blocs. Sotomayor, for example, is typically a progressive voice on the court, though she shares her Catholicism with some of the most conservative justices on the bench. President Barack Obamas nominee to fill the vacancy left by Scalia Merrick Garland is Jewish (a faith traditionally associated with being left-leaning), but hes been praised by conservatives in the past. Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice, a watchdog group that opposes activist judges, told Religion News Service the religion of justices hasnt mattered much in the past and likely wont in the future, either. Its true that the Jewish members of the court right now are liberal and I am sure that has some correlation to the fact that most Jewish Americans are liberal, but its certainly not determinative, much like race, he said. Most African-Americans are liberal, but that doesnt make Justice (Clarence) Thomas any less conservative. Still, the court plays a major role in policing the separation of church and state and the frequent clashes among religions and the non-religious. Here are some of the most recent landmark religion cases the court has decided, according to the Bill of Rights Institute: Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2010) The court ruled that a student organization at a public university was not free to limit its members to those who shared their belief system if that resulted in discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Hein v. Freedom from Religion Foundation (2007) After the Bush Administration created the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives for the purpose of allowing religious charity organizations to gain federal funding, the Court ruled that taxpayers cannot bring Establishment Clause challenges against programs funded by the executive office. Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal (2006) The courts ruled unanimously in favor of a small religious group who had argued that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 required that they be free to use hoasca an illegal drug under the Controlled Substances Act for religious purposes. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the Court had to review individual religious freedom claims and grant exceptions to generally applicable laws. Cutter v. Wilkinson (2005) A federal law prohibiting government from burdening prisoners religious exercise did not violate the First Amendments Establishment Clause. McCreary County v. ACLU (2005) Two large, framed copies of the Ten Commandments in Kentucky courthouses lacked a secular purpose and were not religiously neutral and therefore violated the Establishment Clause. Haneens* friends have not left her side since she walked to a campus building at her school and saw fliers posted calling her a terrorist. The Muslim womans friends have escorted her to all of her classes at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), but she still looks over her shoulder while walking on the campus where she once felt safe. Until recently, I fully believed (IUPUI) was a place I could call home, Haneen, a junior, wrote in a statement read by Erin Polley, a member of the American Friends Service Committee, during a news conference last week on IUPUIs campus. The student was targeted for her work with a pro-Palestinian student group on IUPUIs campus, and the case has put Haneen and her supporters at odds with IUPUI administration and Chancellor Nasser Paydar, who Haneen believes has refused to acknowledge the harassment she faced. After campus police were called and a police report was filed, my name began popping up more and more on the internet, Haneen wrote. While my campus administrators have made efforts to console me and ensure my safety is not at risk, they have yet to release a public statement condemning the acts of abusive harassment that have put me in real danger. Haneen is the leader of the IUPUI branch of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group that works for human rights, and began receiving harassing, anonymous phone calls as IUPUI hosted a conference for SJP groups in the Midwest. Blog posts appeared on the internet, degrading her appearance and calling her a terrorist and a national security threat. The posters and fliers around campus also called her a terrorist. She reported the incidents to IUPUI police and the FBI. Since the incident, more than 75 students and faculty have sent letters to Paydar, asking him to say he disapproves of what happened to Haneen, as well as give an update on the status of the investigation. In the recent news conference, student and faculty supporters of Haneen said Paydar has not done enough to acknowledge the incident. No one has condemned what happened, said Hassan Jamal, a senior at IUPUI. It gives us a bad name on IUPUIs campus when we allow something like this to happen to Haneen. Paydar sent an email to faculty that said the university is committed to free expression for students and faculty but condemns bigotry and racism. However, Haneen said the letter was not sent to students. Haneen wants Paydar to specifically reference the harassment she has faced on campus in a statement to faculty and students. I would like him to call out the situation, to say in words, This is whats been going on on your campus. We dont approve of this. Whoever is doing this, we will find you, Haneen said. Rahul Saksena a staff attorney for Palestine Legal, which offers legal aid to Palestinian advocates in the United States said Haneens right to free speech was violated when she was harassed for her work with SJP, and she could file a Title VI complaint with the U.S. Department of Education if she feels the school has not responded appropriately. The school has a legal obligation to make sure her educational opportunities are not infringed upon by discrimination by race, color, national origin, Saksena said. Margie Smith-Simmons, a spokeswoman for IUPUI, said campus police are still investigating the incident. She said they are working with the Indiana Intelligence Fusion Center, a state agency that gathers intelligence to share with law enforcement throughout the state. Smith-Simmons said Paydar does plan to release a public statement once the investigation is concluded, but she declined to release any more information about the case. Meanwhile, Haneen still fears walking through campus alone, wondering what will happen next time she travels or goes to class, given that a Google search of her name yields results that say terrorist. Weve simply asked our university, my university, to condemn specifically, publicly, this attempt to create terror in my life, Haneen said. *The Indianapolis Recorder agreed not to release the students last name in order to protect her safety. Follow us on royal kitchens revealing secret recipies New Delhi: Erstwhile royal families have closely guarded culinary secrets of their kitchens like treasures down the ages. But the struggle to keep the estates sustainable is forcing the descendents to open up. Nearly six decades after independence, the hosts of the royal palace resorts are opening their recipe books to contribute to the experimental culinary wave sweeping through the kitchens of urban India."Cooking a family recipe is like singing a 'ghazal'. It sounds different each time, but you know the flavour. One of our favourites was 'Shahi Sabzi Pulao'," Randhir Singh, scion of the family of the erstwhile Maharaja of Patiala, told IANS.It was a dry pulao that could be improvised with meat arranged in layers, he said. Read More Lifestyle News Were excited to announce that indmin.com is now part of fastmarkets.com. A new look and an improved experience means you can still stay ahead of this fast-moving market with price data, news and market intelligence right here on Fastmarkets. Discover more than 2000 prices, news and analysis in primary and secondary metals markets. We cover base metals, industrial minerals, ores and alloys, steel, scrap and steel raw materials. If you already have a Fastmarkets account, youll still have uninterrupted access to your markets by logging in with your current details. The EUs relevant Commissioner warned that there are no quick-fix solutions to quickly reducing joblessness in hardest hit Greece, as she admitted, while nevertheless pointing out that the Commission foresees a modest 2-percent increase in Greek employment in 2017. The federal governments target of generating 10,000 megawatts of electricity by 2019 is realizable, Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, has said. Speaking with State House correspondents after yesterdays Federal Executive Council meeting, which was chaired by President Muhammadu Buhari, the minister said the determination to achieve the target is very high. Mr. Fashola, however, decried the vandalism of pipelines in the Niger Delta, which he said has affected power generation from 5,000 megawatts to about 3,200 megawatts. He said: Essentially, its gas supply issue arising from the problems thats now well reported of the failure of our operational platforms at Focados where the repairs are ongoing to restore the petroleum lines gas lines. As a result of this, our power production has dropped from 5,000 megawatt to about 3,200 megawatt depending on other collateral problems. What was not enough at 5,000mw is even now much more difficult to share at 3,000mw. The minister also announced the increasing success with some of governments transmission projects across the country. So, areas in the country that did not have power supply when we were at 5,000mw now have transmission restored. Places like Maiduguri, Okada, Makurdi transmission projects have been completed there, theyre now benefiting from what was difficult to share initially. So, its a mixed blessing in some places. We understand that people are going through a difficult time. Its a bad time to have energy crisis and there is no good time to have one. But its a temporary thing, well go back to normal service when gas is fully restored. Were working to make sure that should this happen again in future, well be better position to respond by increasing the opportunities for local gas allocation and production from the non-associated lines. This is a teething problem; it wont last for long. Our determination to overcome it is bigger than the problem, and Im very sure it will be overcome, Fashola said. The Lagos state police command is presently in search of one Alex Onuora accused of stabbing two brothers, Elvis and Kene Mekwa, after their younger sister refused his advances. According to PM news, one of the twins, Elvis Mekwa, a mass communication undergraduate at National Open University, died on the spot while his brother Kene is presently lying critically ill. Trouble started when Alex and his friend Alia, accosted the younger sister of the twin brothers in front of a Hotel at Liasu road at council bus stop in Ikotun area of Lagos and made advances at her which she turned down. An angry Alex reportedly assaulted the girl who ran home and reported the matter to her brothers. The brothers met with Alex and when they asked him why he attacked their sister, an argument ensued which degenerated into a fight. Alex broke a bottle and allegedly stabbed the two brothers. One of them died on the spot while the other is lying critically ill in a Lagos Hospital. Alex and his friend Alia have since fled their home. Source: Linda Ikejis blog At least 40,000 Syrians have fled fighting near the northern city of Aleppo in recent days as government forces continue an offensive against opposition fighters despite a truce, the United Nations said. Escalating violence has pushed people eastwards towards the strategical border town of Azaz, as well as the Bab al-Salam and Sijjou refugee camps, the UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Wednesday. Taking into account the previous influx of over 75,000 internally displaced people into the Azaz sub-district in January and February, humanitarian needs are expected to rise exponentially, OCHA said in a statement. The UN expressed deep worry on Wednesday over the fate of the thousands displaced by the fresh fighting. We are extremely concerned at the intensification of fighting in northern Syria and its impact on civilians, as well as humanitarian delivery to the area, and continue to monitor the situation closely, Ariane Rummery of the UN refugee agency said. Aid agencies have distributed food baskets and blankets, jerry cans, mattresses and plastic sheeting for thousands of newly displaced people and are preparing to scale up the response, she said. The medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said that there were now more than 100,000 people trapped on the Syrian side of the Turkish border, with 35,000 having fled in the past week from camps that had been taken over by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) fighters or had become too close to the frontline. An attempt by the National Publicity Secretary of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Olisa Metuh, to halt his ongoing trial before Justice Okon Abang of the Federal High Court sitting in Maitama, Abuja was unsuccessful yesterday. In a new twist Wednesday, counsel to the second defendant (Destra Investment Limited Metuhs Company) Tochukwu Onwugbufor (SAN), informed the court that he had filed a preliminary objection challenging the jurisdiction of the court to entertain counts 1 and 2 of the charges preferred against his client by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. He insisted that proceedings in the trial be put on hold pending the hearing and determination of issues raised in the application dated April 13 and filed on April 14. Mr. Metuhs counsel, Emeka Etiaba (SAN), aligned himself with Mr. Onwugbufors submission. However, counsel to EFCC, Sylvanus Tahir, objected to the motion, citing Sections 396 (2) and 221 of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) as sufficient legal provisions to encourage continuation of trial.Objections such as the one issued cannot be taken or entertained during proceedings or trial on grounds of imperfection or error on the charge, Mr. Tahir said. Section 396 (2) makes it clear that after the plea has been taken, the defendant may raise any objection to the validity of the charge, provided that such objection shall only be considered alongside substantive issues, and ruling on such objections delivered at the time of judgment of the matter. He added that, the timing of the preliminary objection was curious and urged the court to discountenance it. In his ruling, Justice Abang refused Mr. Onwugbufors application and held that the objection would be heard at the end of proceedings. Submissions by all counsels have been duly considered. The matter involving the defendant is a criminal matter, and the ACJA is the law governing such matters, made pursuant to the 1999 constitution. However, the objection will be heard at the end of proceedings, and the ruling delivered along with the judgment,Justice Abang ruled. Thereafter, the first defence witness (DW1), was called to enter the witness box for further cross-examination, but Mr. Onwugbufor, who was apparently not satisfied, insisted that his application should be heard, even if ruling would eventually be made at the end of the trial. Angered by the counsels conduct, Justice Abang ordered the witness to be cross-examined. Cross examine the witness! I have given a ruling. If you have no question, tell the court so that we can make progress in the matter, he said. Cross examination of the witness was eventually conducted and concluded after Etiaba intervened and pleaded on behalf of Mr. Onwugbufor. The matter was adjourned to April 27, 2016 for continuation of trial. Mr. Metuh is standing trial alongside one other, Destra Investment Limited, for allegedly receiving the sum of N400 million (four hundred million naira) from a former National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, who is also standing trial in separate cases. The National Secretary of Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Prof. Wale Oladipo, has appealed to Vice President Yemi Osinbajo (SAN) to be allowed to refund the N75 million he received from embattled former National Security Adviser (NSA), Mohammed Sambo Dasuki. The PDP scribes request is contained in a letter to Vice President Osinbajo in which he sought to be excluded from prosecution. Oladipo is one of several high profile members of the former governing party who are currently standing trial for allegedly receiving questionable payments from funds operated by the Office of the NSA for the war against Boko Haram. The existence of Oladipos letter was confirmed in the suit he filed at the Federal High Court, Abuja, through his lawyer Babs Akinwumi, The NATION reports. According to the report, the PDP scribe is seeking to, among others, restrain the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) and four others from arresting, detaining and prosecuting him. The others are Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC), the inspector general of Police (IGP) and the Department of State Services (DSS). In a supporting affidavit, the PDP chieftain confirmed writing to Mr. Osinbajo on his intention to refund the money he received from the Office of the NSA, without knowledge that it was proceed of unlawful dealings, with the understanding that he would be shielded from prosecution. Oladipo, who claimed to have received an anonymous message on his telephone, inviting him for questioning, urged the court to, among others, restrain the respondents from moving against him. He alleged that the respondents were being used by agents of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) to harass, intimidate and persecute him, being a key opposition figure. But the respondents faulted Oladipos letter, arguing that his letter could not shield him from investigation and prosecution. Assuming without conceding that Exhibit 1 (the letter) exists, it is our further contention that the exhibit cannot come to the aid of the applicant because a letter written to the Vice President to return N75 million cannot act as shield from investigation and possible prosecution, rather it is suggestive of corruption, requiring investigation, ICPC said in its objection to the suit. Other respondents faulted the suit and urged the court to dismiss it on the grounds that Oladipo was merely seeking to hide under a spurious text message, whose source he failed to establish, to prevent statutory established bodies from performing their responsibilities. It is clear that the applicant has failed to discharge his duty of establishing nexus between the 3rd respondent and the so called witch-hunt of APC against him. The applicant, in anticipation of possible invitation by the 3rd respondent (ICPC) to answer questions with respect to the N75 million, which, he said, he received from officials of the PDP, has come to this court to twist the arms of the law and challenged the statutory powers of the 3rd respondent in carrying out its constitutional duties and ultimately escape from criminal invitation. It is submitted that the applicants suit is incompetent, misleading, lacking in merit and should be dismissed. We urge the court to so hold and strike out or dismiss this suit, ICPC said. In his response to the suit, the AGF, Abubakar Malami (SAN), argued that Oladipo only raised unsubstantiated allegation of persecution and harassment against the respondents on account of funds he received from his party members and is thus seeking to restrain the respondents from performing their constitutional duties. The AGF also denied taking any steps against Oladipo in respect of money received by the applicant either from party members or other sources. Even the alleged invitation by the 2nd respondent (EFCC) did not state that the applicant was invited because of funds, which he received. The applicant, on his free volition and admission, wrote to the Vice President wherein he offered to return to the Federal Government funds which he received. Rather than comply with the invitation, if indeed it exists, to clear his name, the applicant, via the instant suit, resorted to engage the instrumentality of the law to stop or frustrate his investigation and possible prosecution, Mr. Malami said. The court adjourned hearing to May 19 to enable ICPC file its responses. A massive explosion at an oil facility in southeastern Mexico has killed at least three workers, injured 136 and triggered evacuations, officials and state-run energy giant Pemex said on Wednesday. A huge plume of toxic grey smoke could be seen spewing from the plant, known as Pajaritos, in the city of Coatzacoalcos, in Veracruz state. The blast, which was felt from as far as 10km away, forced the evacuation of nearby schools and businesses. The cause of the explosion at the Petroquimica Mexicana de Vinilo plant, jointly owned by Pemex, was not immediately known. Javier Duarte, the Veracruz state governor, told Milenio Television that the blast killed three people at the plant. Another 58 people were hurt, according to Pemex. Duarte rushed to the scene of what he said was a very strong explosion, where fire crews had the blaze under control. People living in the vicinity should remain indoors as the cloud of chemicals dissipates, Duarte said. School classes in Coatzacoalcos and five nearby communities were suspended. President Enrique Pena Nieto said on Twitter that the government would help the affected workers and neighbours of the area. Fires at oil facilities in Mexico are fairly regular occurrences. In February, two people were killed and at least seven injured in a blaze at a Pemex oil platform off the coast of Campeche, also in the southeast. Pemex provides a fifth of the Mexican governments revenue but has posted huge losses amid crumbling production and oil prices. AFP. The Australian owner of a dog thought to be the worlds oldest at 30 years of age announced the canine died peacefully in her sleep. Dairy farmer Brian McLaren announced his dog, Maggie, was found to have died in her sleep Tuesday morning at his Woolsthorpe, Victoria, home. According to Scoop, She was 30 years old, she was still going along nicely last week, she was walking from the dairy to the office and growling at the cats and all that sort of thing, McLaren told The Weekly Times. She just went downhill in two days and I said yesterday morning when I went home for lunch She hasnt got long now.' Im sad, but Im pleased she went the way she went, McLaren said. Maggie was believed to be the oldest dog in the world at 30 years of age, but McLaren was unable to have the canines age recognized by Guinness World Records because he didnt have any paperwork proving her advanced years. The oldest dog recognized by Guinness died in 1939 at the age of 29. McLaren said his family adopted Maggie when she was only 8 weeks old. She wasnt pampered but she was well looked after. She always had milk not too much of it, but she loved her milk and anything else shed wanted, McLaren told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. She loved chasing the motorbike. When she was up and going she would want to run along beside it, so the faster you went, the quicker she would run. She had the greatest life, McLaren said. The Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, yesterday reacted to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commissions disapproval of the Anti-Corruption Ambassador award bestowed on him by the commissions National Assembly Liaison Officer, Suleiman Bakari, on Tuesday. The EFCC in two separate statements on Wednesday, said Bakari acted on his own in the investiture of Mr. Ekweremadu as an Anti-Corruption Ambassador, saying it was not in the business of awarding titles to individuals or politicians for that matter. The anti-graft agency then vowed to carry out strict administrative action on its errant officer. But Ekweremadu in a statement by his media aide, Uche Anichukwu, insisted that Bakari decorated him on behalf of the commissions management. We want to put it on record that Mr. Suleiman Bakari and his team applied for and subsequently paid a courtesy call on the Deputy President of the Senate in his office on Tuesday, April 19, 2016. Mr. Bakari, amongst other issues he raised, solicited the support of the Senate and National Assembly towards the anti-corruption crusade of the present administration, and even presented a frame with a bold picture of President Muhammadu Buhari, bearing the inscription: If we dont kill corruption, corruption will kill Nigeria. Mr. Bakari also, on behalf of the Acting Chairman, management, and staff of the EFCC, decorated Senator Ekweremadu as an anti-corruption ambassador of the EFCC. As for the purported claim by the EFCC spokesperson that the agency had never and could not have decorated anybody as an anti-corruption ambassador, since, according to him, the commission is not in the habit of awarding titles to individuals, we wish to refer him to December 7, 2007, when the Nuhu Ribadu-led EFCC conferred the Role Model Award in the fight against corruption on certain persons, including a former president of the senate, a taxi driver, and a former justice of the Federal High Court at the Musa YarAdua Centre, Abuja, the statement said. Mr. Ekweremadu stressed that denial by the EFCC coming in two different statements within a few hours is baffling, inexplicable, and contradictory. The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, yesterday expressed confidence that Premium Motor Spirit will be available every part of the country by the end of next week. This came again after an earlier promise that the persistent queues for PMS at filling stations across the country would disappear by April 7. Speaking to State House correspondents after the Federal Executive Council meeting yesterday, Kachikwu expressed gratitude to Nigerians for their unbelievable level of patience over the current fuel scarcity. As at today (yesterday), we are delivering about 1,200 trucks, by weekend, we should be delivering same number of trucksI hope by the end of next week, with the refineries helping us to stay on course, every part of the country will get fuel, he said. The minister, however, blamed the persistent queues at filing stations on acts of sabotage. According to Kachikwu, government had asked the Department of Petroleum Resources to deploy officials to ensure that products are sold at the right prices because it is only through price stabilization that systemic queues will disappear. Pfizer Good health is vital to all of us, and finding sustainable solutions to the most pressing health care challenges of our world cannot wait. Thats why we at Pfizer are committed to applying science and our global resources to improve health and well-being at every stage of life. We strive to provide access to safe, effective and affordable medicines and related health care services to the people who need them. Job Title: GCO Director, Knowledge Architecture Job ID: 1030207 Location: Nigeria Full-Time: Regular Role Description Develop and implement completely novel global Commercial Operations, Knowledge, & Portal/Platforms Management practice, process, workflows, operational data analytics and reporting, and technology infrastructures within global Business Analytics and Insights (BAI) operation and Global Commercial Operations (GCO). Directly lead and contribute to global operating model transformation, speed to market, significant reductions in budget and efficiencies, and operational long-range value delivery at enterprise levels for both Global Commercial Operations (GCO) and Business Analytics and Insights (BAI). This is a virtual role based in Europe, preferred location Walton Oaks, UK. Job Focus Are you energized by leading efforts in business transformation that have direct impact on business performance through strategically enhanced analytic and commercial operations service delivery? Are you motivated by working with talented people from countries and cultures across the globe, and by having opportunity to work across different functional areas of expertise to execute new business models and ways of working through the application of digital execution, virtual collaboration, social technology, analytics, reporting, and digital knowledge management? An exciting opportunity has arisen to join Pfizer Global Commercial Operations, Knowledge and Operations Knowledge Architecture Center of Excellence. The global department is primarily focused on leading business transformation efforts that focus on launching and enabling global platforms and strengthening the operating models of internal commercial services and analytics organizations at Pfizer to meet the changing needs of business unit clients. The available role is for an experienced lead with executive presence who will be responsible for global projects with an EU regional emphasis in stakeholder management and execution. Fundamental to the role is the ability to influence without authority, lead change management, and understand key stakeholders (business unit clients, analytics colleagues, commercial operations colleagues) and their business challenges in the EU markets at Pfizer. This opportunity manages highly visible efforts with significant exposure to executive senior leaders at Pfizer. Job Duties Leads assessment, research, design, development, execution, and measurement of new, GCO and BAI portals/platforms, operations, and knowledge management strategies globally and within regions. Ideates, identifies, designs, creates, implements and sustains operations & knowledge management methods, tools, processes, and solutions for global GCO and BAI implementation. Executes responsibilities across program development & management, technical & functional delivery, and business partnership domains with senior GCO and Business Unit (BU) stakeholders in one of the newest GCO/BAI functional areas of exceptional complexity requiring a high degree of ingenuity, creativity, business, analytic, operations, digital strategy expertise, and influence. Deploys significant leadership, influence, and transformation management capability in unusually complex interactions across multiple geographies, countries, and across GCO and BAI matricies. Executes both independently and as part of a solid line and complex matrix reporting team. Acts independently to uncover and resolve issues and create process and technology solutions associated with the development and implementation of operational programs, knowledge and expertise sharing, workflow, tools, and reporting development, and works as part of a complex, broader team. Responsibilities Prime consultant/implementer and Operations/Knowledge leader to GCO and BAI regional and global teams to ideate, identify, design, create, implement and sustain critical operating and knowledge management solutions Collaboratively build a knowledge management operating model to transform GCO and BAI operations across the domains of people, process, and technology with scalable frameworks Provide global and regional expertise, insights, and influence on knowledge asset management (understand and influence workflow, develop knowledge maps, assess flow needs, and influence change to drive greater efficiency, effectiveness, re-use, hard dollar savings and value from BAI operations and GCO ); viewed as expert in field within Pfizer Plan and lead KA communication and transformation strategy and efforts globally and within region Co-lead and influence KA Collaboration initiatives, Communities of Practice [CoP], Knowledge exchange comprised of all levels of GCO and BAI colleagues with senior GCO, BAI, and BU functional executives Develop, track, measure, and insight driven reporting of GCO and BAI KA KPIs to drive influence Ensure Global Knowledge Management solutions drive global transformation and align with global and regional business partner requirements Partner with senior GCO & BAI leaders, Procurement, BT and external vendors/suppliers to scope, develop, and implement sophisticated and highly advanced, new KA processes and technology applications to accomplish long-range GCO and BAI objectives Identifies, designs, and implements transformational KA approaches requiring significant senior leadership, organizational, analytic and reporting, and operational alignment and influence. Attuned to the technology enabled knowledge management and information sharing trends within and outside the pharma sector Qualifications Educational qualification, MA/MS/MBA in Management, Marketing Research, Statistics, Operations, IT, Info Science required Certification(s): Knowledge Management, Technology, Statistics, Change Management, Consulting, Business Process Management preferred Proven seasoned experience in Technology, Consulting, BPO, Operations, Analytics Critical competencies Knowledge/Information Management Analytics Operations Business Process & Workflow Technology Business Transformation Learning Agility Influence Cross-cultural Awareness & Engagement Business Partnership Click here to apply Ijaw youths have called on the Bayelsa State House of Assembly to swear-in three opposition lawmakers, who won judgment at the Court of Appeal, without further ado. Alfred Belemote (APGA, Brass 2), Gabriel Ogbara (ADC, Ogbia 2) and Gibson Munalayefa (LP, Ogbia 2) were denied admission to the House two months after securing victory at the appellate court. The Ijaw Youths Council, IYC, which made the call on Wednesday at a press briefing addressed by its President, Comrade Udengs Eradiri, in Yenagoa, the Bayelsa State capital, condemned the exclusion of the three lawmakers, despite receiving their certificates of return from INEC. According to the IYC, the continued exclusion of Messrs Belemote, Ogbara and Munalayefa from the activities of the State House of Assembly was unfair and an injustice to the constituents they represent. The non-swearing in of the three honourable members who are Ijaw people and Bayelsa people have become a matter of concern and I call on the leadership of Bayelsa House of Assembly to swear them as a matter of justice. Information at our disposal indicates that they already have their certificates of return. It is injustice to them and their constituents because issues concerning their constituencies are not discussed at the Bayelsa House of Assembly. That alone negates the oath of office of the speaker, who took an oath to protect the rights and interests of our people; and when you trample upon the rights of the people it is unacceptable. We urge the speaker of Bayelsa Assembly to do what is right and swear them in. We have received complaints from the constituents who are Ijaw people; there cannot be injustice orchestrated by Ijaw people against Ijaw people, Mr. Eradiri said. Speaker of the Assembly, Kombowei Benson, declined comments on his alleged refusal to swear in the lawmakers-elect while the Commissioner of Information, Jonathan Obueibite, distanced Governor Seriake Dickson from the controversy, saying the governor never meddled in the affairs of the legislature. News emerged that Nollywood actress Myde Martins put her husband Afeez Owo on blast days back on Instagram. She accused him of abandoning her and their children for months and that his show of love for her on her birthday is all a camouflage. Reliable sources are saying that the reason the actress marriage ended was because she cheated on her movie producer husband with his best friend. An online news site wrote:- One of the sources said shortly before her husband moved out of their matrimonial home, Mide traveled to South Africa with one of her friends husband, a real estate mogul that was once mentioned on this site. The source said Mide Martins allegedly slept her way to an endorsement deal that later materialized upon her return to Nigeria. The man who slept with her confided in a friend who in turn informed her husband. She is also reported to have tried faking a heart attack just to win back the love of her husband but it proved abortive. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, Wednesday reiterated its position that there was no concrete evidence of corruption that could provide grounds for the prosecution of the Chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal, Justice Danladi Umar. The EFCC said the allegations against Justice Umar were suspicious and insufficient. In a letter addressed to the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Babachir Lawal, the anti-graft agency said the CCT chair was being cleared the second time after its personnel carried out a thorough investigation on the petitions against him. The Head of Public Relations of the Code of Conduct Tribunal, Ibraheem Al-hassan, who disclosed the details of the letter in a statement yesterday, said the EFCC was responding to the conclusion of a petition against Mr. Umar that he allegedly received a N10 million bribe from one Abdulrashid Owolabi. The statement reads: The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has today conveyed a letter to the chairman Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT), Hon Danladi Yakubu Umar, exonerating him on the alleged N10 million bribe by one AbdulRashid Owolabi, in his petition to the commission, Alhassan said. The letter was addressed to the secretary to government of the federation, captioned RE: Investigation Report RE: N10million Bribery Allegation against the Chairman Code of Conduct Tribunal, Abuja with reference NO: EFCC/P/NHRU/688/V.30/99, dated 20th April, 2016. The letter, which was signed by Emmanuel Adegboyega Aremo, secretary to the commission reads: Kindly recall our correspondence of 5th March, 2015, (reference EFCC/EC/SGF/03/56) with the above subject, please. We would like to reiterate the commissions position in regard to this matter as earlier communicated to you and stated that the allegations levelled against Justice Umar were mere suspicions and consequently insufficient to successfully prosecute the offence. According to Alhassan, todays clearance letter was second to the previous one sent on the March 5, 2015 during the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan through the office of the then secretary to the government of the federation Chief Pius Anyim. Our correspondent reports that it the first letter written to Mr. Anyim clearing Mr. Umar of corruption allegations, the EFCC said while there was no strong case against the CCT chair, there was prima facie evidence to prosecute his personal assistant who could offer no coherent excuse for receiving N1.8 million naira into his salary account from Taiwo, who is an accused person standing trial at the Tribunal. Since commencing the trial of the Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki over alleged false assets declaration, the CCT chair has come under intense with many, including supporters of Saraki, accusing him of being equally tainted and calling on him to excuse himself from hearing the case. One of such supporters is Senator Dino Melaye, who used his organization, the Anti-Corruption Network, ACN, to petition the National Assembly that Mr. Umar used his office to purchase N34.9million exotic vehicles, furniture and other household items without following due process. Mr. Umar denied the allegations. The Nigerian Army has dissociated itself from a proposed solidarity rally being organised by some civil groups to celebrate the successes being achieved over Boko Haram in the ongoing counter-insurgency operations in the Northeastern part of the country. The Army was reacting to the recent disclosure by a group North East Coalition Against Terrorism that it had concluded plans to hold a solidarity march in support of the soldiers in the battlefront. The National Coordinator of the group, Yusuf Mshelizza, had written a letter, dated Wednesday, April 20, 2016, to President Muhammadu Buhari and the Chief of Army Staff, stating their resolve to hold a solidarity march in appreciation to the government and the Nigerian Army for returning peace to North Eastern States. We will forever appreciate the Nigerian Army; we lost almost everything including our homes, properties and lives due to the incessant killings and destruction of properties by Boko Haram insurgents in the last few years, Mr. Mshelizza said. But the Army said while the motive behind the planned solidarity march could be borne out of sheer patriotism, it could also be dangerous as it is capable of distracting the soldiers and the Army authority. The Acting Director, Army Public Relations, Colonel Sani Usman, said in a statement Thursday that the public should rather remain more vigilant at this crucial stage of the battle. His statement reads:The attention of the Nigerian Army has been drawn to a number of groups and individuals celebrating the routing out and decimation of Boko Haram terrorists on our soil. So much as we thank them for that, it is imperative to state that we do not begrudge such persons (and) their desire to identify and associate themselves with this success. However, the Nigerian Army wishes to disassociate itself from such celebrations and solidarity rallies. We also would like to advice that they should tread with caution as this could be distractive to us. The public are please informed that the terrorists are surreptitiously fanning out of their last enclaves in Sambisa to cause havoc or seek refuge elsewhere. Therefore, there is need for all to be more vigilant and security conscious to enable us clear the remnants of these terrorists wherever they might flee. We would like to reassure the public that we will remain professional and focused in clearing the remnants of these criminals on the Nigerian soil. Punch National Publicity Secretary of the Peoples Peoples Democratic Party, Chief Olisa Metuh, has said he will not be vying for any position in the party at its national convention slated for May 21 in Port Harcourt. Vanguard One Oluwafemi Ogunleye, 29, who allegedly obtained N47,000 under the pretext of securing a container for his girl friend was on Thursday docked before an Ikeja Magistrates Court. Thisday Senate President, Dr. Bukola Abubakar Saraki, who is standing trial for false assets declaration, has accused the Chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT), Mr. Danladi Yakubu Umar of bias, insisting that he cannot get justice under his chairmanship. The Sun The Chairman of the Code of Conduct (CCT) Tribunal, Danladi Umar has asked security operatives to throw out Raphael Oluyede, one of the lawyers representing Senate President Bukola Saraki, for talking back at him. Daily Times National Chairman of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Chief John Odigie-Oyegun on Wednesday said the APC will never compromise on the leadership of the Senate Presidency even as he maintained that, the APC as a party of change cannot interfere with the ongoing judicial process. Daily Trust Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) said last week that it will organise a one-day warning strike to protest against the state of the nation, especially the recent 45 percent increase in electricity tariff without commensurate improvement in supply by the power distribution companies (Discos). Leadership The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) in Kano State on Thursday urged the state government to re-examine the list of ghost workers discovered in its ongoing workers verification exercise. The Nation Senator Ben Murray Bruce has said he will not accept the 35.6million SUV bought by Senate for members. Tribune As many states of the federation battle to pay backlog of salaries owed their workers, Osun State chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC), on Wednesday, called on the Federal Government to urgently intervene by assisting states in tackling salaries challenges. NigeriaApril, 20, 2016: Mahindra Comviva, the global leader in providing mobility solutions and makers of popular Nigerian music app Mooditt, today announced the release of Mooditt 2.0 music app, the latest version with improved features. The remarkable success of the Mooditt music app in mainstream Nigeria is a testament to how quickly the Nigerian music industry has mature with value chain players joining the mix and creating new wealth. The rise of Mooditt app as a content platform also reveals a growing subculture of content consumption over the mobile in Nigeria with some analysts hinting, that the value added services industry could significantly displace traditional media in content storage, generation and distribution in coming decades. Mooditt is a high quality multimedia mobile application streaming service with a rich suite of local catalogue based digital music content. The application rejigs the streaming quality of the song depending on network bandwidth to ensure uninterrupted and seamless music experience to the consumers. The service allows users to create and share playlist and also download songs and ringtones for listening offline, wirelessly. The app offers direct search for tracks, artistes across albums and similarly browse tracks by genres. At the launch of Mooditt 2.0, Olubukola Awodumila,Marketing lead, Mooditt said she was confident that the upgraded app will attract more downloads from Nigerians and enjoy better rating than earlier version. In her words: Our older version of the Mooditt music app recorded 30k thousand music downloads and was ranked No.1 music app in Google Play StoreTMfor eight months in a row. We recorded 2 million unique sessions, over 2 million songs streamed and an average 7 minutes spent per Mooditt app user, she says Atul Madan, Head-Digital Services, Mahindra Comviva said, The expansion of regional music brands and increase in smartphone user-base has been key growth drivers for digital music in Nigeria and the growth of content consumption on digital has been exponential. The new Mooditt 2.0 music app comes with improved skin and highly fluid user interface (UI) but one of the apps key offering is a first-of-its-kind music cataloging by moods. Sunil Maharaj Kumar-Head of D2C Business, Mooditt said this unique dashboard feature was designed based on insight into the Nigerian consumer who consumes music at any given time based on his or her prevailing mood. For the average Nigerian music lover, the feeling of boredom will go with some like Afro-hop or Hip-pop music while when we want to be alone or just a loved one, our musicselections tilt towards Soul, RnB and slow tune genres, says Sunil Kumar. Mooditt 2.0 music apps improved algorithm place Nigerian songs into unique mood selections making it easy for users to browse through Moodittcontent and enjoy songs of their favorite artistes which blend with their mood at any given time,he added. New Mooditt 2.0 music app does not just allow users to create personalized playlists but also allows them to interact with their favorite artistes on social media, play puzzle games and enjoy weekly top charts of hottest Nigerian songs. Other features of the app include FREE downloadable ringtones of all songs in the catalogue, users can set favorite songs as caller ring back tunes right from the app (for Airtelsubscribers only) and all payments made in the app are through secure online portals of service providers like PAGA, QuicktellerTM etc. Mooditt 2.0 music app will easily top the ranking on app stores again as the No.1 music app in Nigeria; a lot has been put into its design and user experience,says AtulMadan. Mooditt 2.0 music app is available on Google Play Store for android device users and on Apple store for iOS users. Web users can also access Mooditt content onhttps://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mlsmooditt https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mooditt/id930416805?ls=1&mt=8# ### Mahindra Comviva has a long history of working in the mobile music space in Africa. The company has collaborated with over 95 local and international content providers, copyright bodies, local artistes, premium music labels and production houses in the continent. Currently, the company owns the rights to over 300,000 unique music tracks in African, Arabic and international categories in more than 36 local African languages. Music services in Africa, on an average, contribute 40 per cent to operators downloadable content revenues. Nigerias digital music market was valued at US$ 100 mn (N16.1 bn) in 2013 while the YoY growth forecasted at 20%. Nigerias music market generated revenues of $51.3 million in 2012, up from the 2008 revenue $45 million, annual revenue is forecast to grow by a CAGR of 0.9% to reach $53.8 million in 2017. Digitals share of total spending on recorded music in Nigeria will rise to an estimated 66.6% by 2017, up from 49.0% in 2012) by PricewaterhouseCoopers. A quiet storm is gathering in the opposition Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, over a clandestine plot to retain the national chairmanship position of the party in the North-East. Those opposed to the plot, which includes some leading stakeholders, have vowed to hold a parallel convention should the chairmanship position be retained in the North-East, the zone where the incumbent, Senator Ali Modu Sheriff, hails from. Vanguard reports that opposition to the plot resulted in a stalemate and indefinite adjournment of Tuesdays meeting of the committee on zoning of positions in the party, chaired by Governor Emmanuel Udom of Akwa Ibom State. The newspaper cited sources within the party as saying that associates of Mr. Sheriff were bringing pressure on all to zone the office to the North-East. According to sources in the party, while a few PDP governors want the chairmanship position retained in the North-East, other members of the party, including some on the Board of Trustees, BoT, are opposed to this position and have vowed to organize a parallel convention, if the earlier position of the party to zone the chairmanship to the South-West, is not respected. The sources said the decision by the Governor Emmanuel-led committee on zoning to retain the position in the North-East has pitched the committee against some major forces in the party, who believe that zoning the position to the North-East was just a ploy to allow the incumbent to retain the position. According to a member of the BoT, the selection of members of the zoning committee is carefully done to ensure that the zoning favoured Sheriff, whose tenure is supposed to end on May 21, 2016 during the national convention of the party. We are aware of the intrigues going on but we will not allow that to happen. We know that some governors, especially that of Ekiti State, are working hard to retain the zoning to the North-East. What he failed to understand is that the party took a decision long time ago to zone the Presidency to the North and the party chairman to the South-West. How can the President and the party chairman come from the same zone? It is not going to work. We in the South-West are ready to take what belongs to us and we will not trade our right for a pot of porridge, the member, who does not want to be identified, said. Members of the House of Representatives Thursday unanimously agreed to summon the Controller General of the Nigeria Prisons Service, Dr Peter Ekpendu, over the alleged battering of a female lawmaker. Mr. Ekpendu is to appear before the House Committee on Interior. The decision was sequel to a motion by Minority Leader, Leo Ogor, who came under a matter of privilege, to inform the House that some personnel of the prisons boss assaulted and harassed Reps Mrakpor Onyeamaechi Jona (PDP, Delta) on Wednesday. The House said Ekpendu, who is due for retirement next week, should appear before the committee to explain why he should not be committed to prison for the action by his men, while he sat in his car watching. The House also summoned all the security agencies at the National Assembly gate including the Sergeant-At-Arms, to brief the Green Chamber on what steps they took to protect Reps Jona when the incident happened. Ogor said: A member of this great chamber was leaving for a service, while the convoy of the CG Prisons was passing. She was blocked and an aide to the CG battered her car. One of the security officers slapped her on the face. The CG of prisons will sit in the comfort of his car, while a Nigerian is being assaulted? I dont want to give him the honour of appearing before this Hon House. It will be embarrassing to us for him to appear here. He has clearly violated the legislative powers of the constitution. For the principle of fair hearing, we should let him appear before the committee, he said. The Lagos State Governor, Mr Akinwunmi Ambode on Wednesday compensated two police officers with commendation letters and N250, 000 cash each, for the recovery of N5 million which fell-off a bullion van around Alausa, Ikeja. A statement by Mr Adebayo Taofiq, Lagos State Taskforce Public Affairs Officer, said the two policemen were attached to the Lagos State Environmental Sanitation and Special Offences Unit ( Taskforce ). These two police officers, Insp. Abiona Hezekiah and Sgt. Ogunbiyi Agbabu recently recovered N5 million that fell-off a bullion van around Alausa, Ikeja. The money was discovered, after due investigation, to belong to Skye Bank Plc.. The governor, who was represented by the Commissioner of Police (CP), Mr Fatai Owoseni, made the presentation of the commendation letters and cash to the duo. The statement said that the CP commended the duo for their high sense of patriotism, honesty and integrity in the line of duty. This heroic act and professional conduct, is in line with the Change Mantra of the present administration which will ensure a renewed confidence in the Nigerian Police Force by the populace. I want to appreciate these officers for their honesty and commitment while discharging their duties at the Lagos State Taskforce, it quoted the governor as saying. The statement said that the officers thanked the governor and promised to remain steadfast in the discharge of their duties at the Lagos State Taskforce. Source: Vanguard On this day in 2014: Parents of kidnapped girls told the Governor of Borno State Kashim Shettima that officials did not listen to them when they drew up the compiled list of missing children. Also on this day in 2009: Gunmen attacked an oil tanker off the coast of the Niger Delta, the ships captain and engineer were kidnapped. Equally on this day in 1994: Security officials report that levels of political violence have dropped significantly in South Africa Two days after the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) agreed to participate in South Africas first non-racial elections, security officials and independent monitoring groups reported that political violence had dropped significantly in South Africa. The most remarkable incident of political violence took place in February 1990 after South African President F.W. de Klerk made a speech at the opening of Parliament, announcing among other measures, the lifting of a 30-year ban on the African National Congress (ANC), the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and other anti-apartheid organisations. The extreme right reacted with anger to the reforms by Mr. de Klerk. One black was killed in the town of Klerksdorp and the United Kingdom Embassy in Pretoria was attacked. The violence continued countrywide and affected places like Boipatong, Bisho, to mention just a few. Some of this violence continued even after the Convention for a Democratic South Africas (CODESA) had been initiated. Equally, on this day in 1897: Sir Alfred Milner became High Commissioner for South Africa and Governor of the Cape Province in 1897. His efforts to gain political rights for the Uitlanders (foreigners who flocked to the gold-fields in the Transvaal) heightened growing tension between Britain and the South African Republic (Transvaal). With his rigid attitude he played a prominent role in events leading up to the Second South African War (Anglo-Boer War 2). He assisted in negotiating a peace treaty that ended the South African War. After the war he became the British governor of the Orange Free State (Orange River Colony) and the Transvaal Colony and was tasked with reconstructing South Africa. To that effect he introduced a policy of reconstruction dubbed reconstruction under arms. Gulf Arab countries and the United States have agreed to deploy joint patrols to intercept ships smuggling Iranian weapons to Yemen. The secretary general of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) said the bloc and the US would stage joint maritime patrols to stop weapons smuggling from Iran. Tuesdays agreement was reached during a meeting between US Defence Secretary Ash Carter and his Gulf Arab counterparts in Riyadh. The two sides also agreed on joint cooperation towards improving Gulf missile defence, special forces and maritime security, but no new deals were announced. Carter is part of the US delegation accompanying President Barack Obama in his current visit to Saudi Arabia. National Security Adviser Susan Rice and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan are among Obamas entourage, demonstrating the focus on security in the presidents agenda with his Gulf counterparts. Also on Wednesday, Obama met Saudi Arabias King Salman. There was no information on what the two leaders discussed in the two-hour meeting. On Thursday, Obama will attend a GCC summit that comprises Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Aljazeera. The official Windows Update list says 24 patches were released on April 19. But it seems only two of them -- KB 3138378 and 3140245 -- were released that day, and the rest came out on April 20. The list itself wasn't updated until April 20. Documentation is kind of an afterthought for Microsoft these days. Three of the patches fix problems with earlier security patches. Here's what's on tap with this latest batch of fixes: KB3103616 fixes a memory leak in the Wmiprvse.exe process that causes WMI queries not to work in Windows Server 2012 R2 or Windows Server 2012, for Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2. KB3103709 fixes several issues with Windows Server 2012 R2-based domain controller, for Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2. KB3125424 fixes Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) deadlocks on Windows Server 2012 R2 or Windows Server 2012 that cause the server to stop responding to login requests from Exchange email clients such as Outlook, ActiveSync, and Outlook Web App as well as Remote Desktop connections, remote administrative commands through PowerShell, and local console logins. Issued for Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Embedded 8 Standard, and Windows Server 2012. KB3134179 adds performance counters for Remote Desktop (RD) Connection Broker in Windows Server 2012 R2. KB3138378 is an update for Windows Journal. It's one of the mystery patches released without documentation on April 19. Intended for Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Embedded 8 Standard, Windows Server 2012, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Vista KB3139921 fixes a problem that affects operating systems using the "Windows Kerberos Security Feature Bypass." After you install security update 3126041, when you try to change your password through an untrusted domain, you may receive an error message that looks something like this: The security database on the server does not have a computer account for the workstation trust relationship. Intended for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista. KB3140245 is the other mystery patch that was released without documentation on April 19. It adds a DefaultSecureProtocols registry key in Windows that allows users to change system-wide default protocols for WinHTTP and hardcodes Webio default protocols to include TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2. Once the key is enabled, you have to set it manually. Intended for Windows Embedded 8 Standard, Windows Server 2012, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2. KB3143777 addresses two issues, firstly when a critical error occurs when you shut down the cluster service. For example, the "[Shutdown] Groups failed to terminate in a timely manner. Cluster service will exit." error message is logged when you shut down the cluster service. And secondly, when data deduplication doesn't work on a BitLocker-encrypted cluster shared volume (CSV) provisioned by using a tiered storage space. It fails even if the drive is unlocked, and the following error message is logged: "This drive is locked by BitLocker Drive Encryption. You must unlock this drive from Control Panel." Intended for Windows Server 2012 R2. KB3144474 addresses a problem that occurs after you install security update 3081320 and the Team Foundation Server (TFS) application pool and the Certreq.exe process crashes when you run customized scripts with NcryptOpenStorageProvider involved. This issue occurs if the CNG key isolation service is disabled. Intended for Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2. KB3144850 enables downgrade rights between Windows 10 IoT and Windows Embedded 8.1 Industry. The operating system is not activated when it downgrades from Windows 10 IoT to Windows Embedded 8.1 Industry. This update provides the required Product Keys that bridges Windows 10 IoT Enterprise and Windows Embedded 8.1 Industry. The change is made to the Windows Embedded 8.1 license file to accept the Product Keys that has been issued to the Windows 10 IoT Enterprise edition. Intended for Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2. KB3145126 addresses an issue in which a Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1)-based DNS server that has Active Directory-integrated zones takes a long time to load DNS zones. The problem occurs after installing security update 3100465 or hotfix 3022780. Intended for Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 Edition. KB3145384 increases the MinDiffAreaFileSize registry key value limit from 3GB to 50GB. You may encounter the event ID 25 error because of heavy I/O. To fix this issue, install the update and then set the MinDiffAreaFileSize registry to an appropriate size depending on the I/O amount. Intended for Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2. KB3145432 fixes an issue where cluster nodes or virtual machines (VMs) go into failed state on a Windows Server 2012 R2 host and may not be migrated automatically to other cluster nodes. KB3146600 fixes problems that occur when a backup is taken on a GUID partition table (GPT) formatted drive in Windows Server 2012. Wbengine.exe crashes when you run a backup on a GPT formatted drive in Windows Server 2012. Intended for Windows Embedded 8 Standard and Windows Server 2012. KB3146601 addresses issues when you use Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) to import a backed up GPO. The import may fail if a file is held open in one of the temporary directories that is created during the import process. When this issue occurs, you receive the following error message: "The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process" and the GPMC will then roll back the import process, which may result in the target policy being deleted. Intended for Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2. KB3146604 fixes Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) service crashes. When this issue occurs, users may find that every functionality that uses the WMI interface will fail. For example, Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) uses the WMI interface to show the status of virtual machines (VMs) on a Hyper-V host. If the WMI service on that Hyper-V host crashes, VMM can't show the status of the VMs on that host. In addition, all services that share the same service host process with the WMI service will also become unavailable, and users may experience other problems that are not related to WMI service itself. Intended for Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, and Windows Server 2012. KB3146621 fixes an issue where the iSCSI target service crashes randomly. This occurs when the Windows Server 2012 R2-based computer has the iSCSI Target Server role installed and the iSCSI target server encounters random I/O error. Intended for Windows Server 2012 R2 KB3146627 addresses a problem where mapped network drives to a DFS share don't work for subsequent users. This issue occurs when User Account Control (UAC) is enabled and the EnableLinkedConnections registry value is set to 1. Intended for Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2. KB3146751 fixes a problem that occurs with App-V logon in Windows Server 2012 R2. When you log on to App-V and then log off, the next time you try to log on using Mandatory User Profiles (Ntuser.man), you can't log on and receive a "Logon is not possible" error message. When you use Roaming User Profiles (NTuser.dat), a temporary profile will be created on the next logon. Intended for Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2. KB3146978 fixes issues when connecting with Remote Desktop Services (RDS) and working on any redirected resources (drives, printers, and ports) becomes very slow. Intended for Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2. KB3148146 fixes a problem that occurs when not all the printer queues settings are restored correctly after you restore a backup by using the Printbrm.exe command-line tool. To be specific, the settings that are not restored are in the PrinterDriverData structure. The corresponding settings are not in the backup file itself, meaning that it never even got backed up in the first place. Intended for Windows Server 2012 R2. KB3148217 fixes a problem that occurs on a Windows Server 2012 R2-based Work Folders sync server. High network usage may occur when the File Server Resource Manager (FSRM) file screening is implemented on the Work Folders sync server to block certain file types. For example, audio or video files, image files, executables, system files, and Outlook data files. The FSRM file screening blocks the files when they are transferred to the Work Folders sync server. The Work Folders service then tries to re-sync the files, which causes increased network usage. Intended for Windows Server 2012 R2. KB3148812 enables Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) to natively decrypt Electronic Software Distribution (ESD). See "Known issues with KB 3148812" for important details. Intended for Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, and Windows Server 2012. KB3149157 fixes various network and computer issues that occur when TCP ephemeral ports are exhausted in Windows 8.1 or Windows Server 2012 R2. The update includes additional reliability improvements. Intended for Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2. Lean Hogs Weekly Forecast Kolhanov.com - Sun Oct 23, 3:11PM CDT The uptrend may be expected to continue, while market is trading above support level 89.150, which will be followed by reaching resistance level 93.025. Feeder Cattle Weekly Forecast Kolhanov.com - Sun Oct 23, 3:10PM CDT The uptrend may be expected to continue, while market is trading above support level 178.550, which will be followed by reaching resistance level 183.550 and 188.250. Live Cattle Weekly Forecast Kolhanov.com - Sun Oct 23, 3:09PM CDT The uptrend may be expected to continue, while market is trading above support level 151.775, which will be followed by reaching resistance level 156.475. Soybean Oil Weekly Forecast Kolhanov.com - Sun Oct 23, 3:08PM CDT The downtrend may be expected to continue, while market is trading below resistance level 73.75, which will be followed by reaching support level 68.16 and if it keeps on moving down below that level,... Soybean Meal Weekly Forecast Kolhanov.com - Sun Oct 23, 3:07PM CDT The downtrend may be expected to continue, while market is trading below resistance level 419.1, which will be followed by reaching support level 398.8. Soybean Weekly Forecast Kolhanov.com - Sun Oct 23, 3:06PM CDT An downtrend will start as soon, as the market drops below support level 1356, which will be followed by moving down to support level 1315.6. Corn Weekly Forecast Kolhanov.com - Sun Oct 23, 3:05PM CDT The uptrend may be expected to continue, while market is trading above support level 680, which will be followed by reaching resistance level 698.6 and if it keeps on moving up above that level, we may... Wheat Weekly Forecast Kolhanov.com - Sun Oct 23, 3:04PM CDT The downtrend may be expected to continue in case the market drops below support level 832.6, which will be followed by reaching support level 791.2. Natural gas Weekly Forecast Kolhanov.com - Sun Oct 23, 3:03PM CDT The downtrend may be expected to continue in case the market drops below support level 4.980, which will be followed by reaching support level 4.459 and 3.876 We often hear that anyone equipped with a smartphone can be journalist. The contention underscores an almost religious debate in the journalism world. Smartphones, coupled with social media, have empowered scores of average citizens to report on the news. Yet at the same time, posting a photo on Twitter is far different than an in-depth, on-the-ground piece about the Syrian refugee crisis. Social media and smartphones haven't rendered the craft of journalism obsolete. Not yet, at least. But this is little solace to many journalism outlets, particularly those in small markets facing dwindling subscribers, falling advertising revenues, and shrinking budgets. They don't have the money to send a reporter to the state capital, much less Brussels or Paris. And so a strange phenomenon occurs. While thousands of smartphone-equipped individuals can "report" on a news item in some far-flung location, eminently trained journalists have no choice but to stay home and view the photos on their Twitter feeds. The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is acutely aware of this challenge. It provides funds for international reporting to small outlets that otherwise couldn't afford it. And now, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, one of the centers founding donors, is pledging $12 million to the center with a catch: Pulitzer Center officials must attract gifts of up to $12 million from other donors to provide a total of $24 million for an endowment. Needless to say, Pulitzer views the gift as an integral step in ensuring the center's long-term financial stability. "The institution has to go beyond the present donors and the leadership," she said. "Weve seen how matching grants have brought in new donors, and significant ones. If the institution is to survive, thats crucial." The center gives out more than 100 grants annually and is set to award a total of $1.6 million this year to journalists covering stories around the globe. The center receives support from the Gates Foundation, which backed global health and development stories and has helped the center expand its partnerships with European news organizations, and the MacArthur Foundation, which gave the center a new grant of $2.5 million for general operating support in December. And while the center has expanded its programs in recent years to include educational and news literacy components, its core mission remains supporting reporters covering international beats. The center isn't alone in helping freelance journalists and smaller outlets adapt to an increasingly interconnected and globalized world. Check out the Knight Foundation's related efforts in helping regional newsrooms thrive by testing new media tools, propping up local communities that run the risk of becoming "news deserts," and hosting conversations with academic and industry leaders around best practices. Meanwhile, one of the biggest new funders in the international reporting space is the Howard Buffett Foundation, which has given at a large scale to support women journalists working globally. Buffett strikes us a prime candidate to step foward with a matching grant for the Pulitzer Center. Related: Howard Buffett Kicks in Another Ten Million Bucks for Women Journalists See more articles by Mike Scutari. There's an old adage in the consulting worldby the time the consultant's report hits the client's desk, it's already obsolete. That's because conditions on the ground are always changing. A report that took a year to compile and pulls six-month-old data may as well reference the Stone Age in our current philanthropic climate. Recent news recalls that adage: The Wallace Foundation aims to spend a whopping $52 million on identifying ways that arts organizations can expand audience engagement. Clearly, Wallace's efforts are worthwhile. And while the nonprofit arts landscape is constantly evolving, we're confident that many organizations can take some (most?) of Wallace's eventual takeaways and apply them to their daily lives. That said, it's also instructive to keep an eye out for interesting audience engagement efforts unfolding in real-time. Take developments out of Saratoga Springs, New York, where the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation helped create a three-year, $1.2 million initiative at Skidmore Colleges Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery. The foundations contribution to the grant amounts to $840,000, while the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation and Skidmore College have provided a total of $360,000 in matching funds. In essence, the initiative will boost audience engagement through the perspective of "identity and race." And how, precisely, will it accomplish this? Glad you asked. The initiative will: Enable original scholarship on works of art recently acquired by the museum by artists such as Nayland Blake, Willie Cole, and Lorna Simpson. Develop new courses that "cross disciplinary lines and use collection objects as the catalyst for conversations and innovative curricular development." Invite visiting artists and scholars to interact with faculty, staff, and students in the form of talks, workshops, performances, and exhibitions. Allow for new initiatives, including a documentary and research project that will highlight more than 1,500 works in the museums collection. Fund the creation of a digital archive that will be free and accessible to all. Is their plan earth-shatteringly innovative and unprecedentedly "outside the box?" Not really. But that's not the point, is it? What counts is the degree to which the museum can engage existing and new audiences, and equipped with over a million dollars, Tang seems well on its way. The gift also falls squarely in line with the funding priorities of the two grantmakers. Mellon remains committed to addressing the lack of diversity in the curatorial world, while a 2015 Ellsworth Kelly Foundation grant supported the conservation of the Tang Museum's collection and established the museums first endowment for conservation. Meanwhile, other real-time experiments in audience engagement continue apace throughout the arts philanthropy world. One vector that's been especially ahead of the curve is theater. Case in point: The Theatre Communications Group, whose Doris Duke-funded Audience (R)Evolution program, recently identified eight organizations with particularly effective audience-engagement strategies. What's more, some of these strategies, in our humble opinion, can be adopted by non-theater arts organizations. Click here and take a look for yourself. See more articles by Mike Scutari. By Cheli Rosa A smart self-storage owner wants to squeeze every dollar he can from his business. Is there a point at which profits are maxed out? Maybe, but probably unlikely. Even if your occupancy rates are up and youre happy with your facilitys performance, does that mean theres nothing left to do but watch the money add up? No, it means its time to start looking at your revenue and figure out what money youre leaving on the table. As the saying goes, Theres always room for improvement. Debt collection is one area in which theres always room to improve in the self-storage business. Collections arent fun. Id be surprised to meet anybody who liked to call people and tell them they owe money. Even worse is having to tell them that if they dont pay you, youll sell their prized possessions. Fortunately, you can put steps in place to avoid having to make those dreaded calls. The key is to get yourself and everyone who works at your facility into the right mindset to collect debt. Its up to the owner to hire the right managers, train them on proper collections procedures, and empower them to feel like its their money they need to collect. Starting on the Right Foot Facility managers handle many tasks: accounting, marketing, maintenance, customer service and collections. This can quickly become overwhelming, and collections can be especially intimidating. Theres a reason collections companies are always hiringits a tough, thankless job that has the potential to really affect ones psyche. From the time theyre hired, managers need to understand that everything they do, starting on day one, will impact the rest of their job and can make it easieror more difficult. For example, those who work hard to keep the facility clean from the beginning will likely take steps to ensure it stays that way. The same can be said for collections. If you establish a firm payment policy on day one and the manager takes immediate action whenever a tenant strays, hell be able to keep collections under control. To get in the right mindset, managers must understand that customer service is an important part of their job. Creating a good rapport with tenants will allow them to more easily interact with them when they need to address a sensitive issue, such as late payments. They should stand up when a customer enters the office, put down the phone, come out from behind the counter, shake his hand and listen when he talks. By making customers feel important, managers also make them feel a responsibility to the business to pay their bill. The practice of ensuring timely payments starts with the lease presentation. The manager shouldnt race through it. Rather, he should take the time to go through the document with each tenant, asking the customer to initial next to important sections, including those that spell out due dates and late fees. You can include addendums if further clarification is necessary. Your lease is a legally binding document. It should cover all of your policies and procedures and be very clearly explained to each renter. Explaining the lease and giving customers the knowledge they need to be a great tenant is the basis of good customer service and can help reduce the possibility of late payments. Knowing What to Do and When Once managers have the right mindset about how to treat customers, they need to know how to handle collections. Most people dont know proper collection procedures. Its not a skill they go into the world thinking theyll need. Managers must be trained, and your business must have procedures in place. The biggest mistake an owner can make is thinking his manager will be responsible for implementing these systems. How will an employee know whats expected of him if you dont tell him? First, make sure managers know collections are a priority. Managers often make these calls when they have nothing else to do. This isnt the appropriate way to address the task. Rather, these efforts should be part of the everyday to-do list. Have a specific plan in place; for example, managers can call late-payers on Monday morning, e-mail those same people the next day, call them Tuesday afternoon, and then text anyone with whom they havent connected on Wednesday. Determine a system that works for your business and stick to it. Establish monthly goals regarding delinquency percentages. Do you allow managers to waive late fees? If you start forgiving fees, people will expect to get off the hook. What steps do you want a manager to take if he cant get a tenant to pay? Should he try to get a settlement and force the tenant to vacate? If so, what percentage of owed rent does he need to obtain? Put these policies in writing and make them a part of the facility operations manual. You can also display them on a white board next in the office. Make sure everyone knows the rules and understands that collections are as important as the daily walk-through. Teach managers they shouldnt take anything personally when trying to recover debt. They should see collections as simply another part of day-to-day business. While making calls, managers should be firm but friendly. They need to approach it as if its part of good customer service. Theyre letting the tenant know hes late because they dont want him to get charged a late fee and certainly dont want to see him lose his possessions at lien sale. Theyre trying to help customers, not calling to harass or berate them. Finally, make sure your managers arent violating the Fair Debt Collections Act. For example, they cant tell anyone other than the tenant how much money is owed or why. There are also certain times of the day when collection calls are prohibited. Many states have policies about this as well. Its the owners responsibility to relay this information to his managers so they dont violate any laws. Sharing Empowerment The last hurdle is to get the manager to operate as if its his own money hes trying to collect. Managers often waive late fees because they think, What do I care? Its not my money. They dont always feel a sense of urgency when it comes to collections because it doesnt give them any measurable benefit. They dont get to keep the cash. However, there are ways to combat this lack of motivation. If you make it clear that collections are as important as all other elements of their job, managers will know they need to make them a priority to succeed and stay employed. Prosperous collections might lead to an increase in pay or other incentives. At that point, it does become their money theyre trying to collect. Many self-storage lawsuits are the result of manager error. If owners can empower their staff to feel as if its their business and money at stake, theyll be able to better safeguard themselves from liability. Self-storage is big business, and the operation rests largely in the hands of one or two people. Success begins and ends with the facility managers. A responsible owner will take the performance and well-being of those people seriously. Collections are part of the equation. Collecting past-due cant be an afterthought that gets addressed once per month. If managers operate that way, facility owners are losing money, and they shouldnt accept this. Creating the right mindset is the key to success in recovering debt. Cheli Rosa is director of marketing for StorageStuff.Bid, which provides online storage-auction services. Shes a former high school teacher turned storage professional turned auctioneer. Shes worked in all areas of self-storage. Her constant desire for additional knowledge led her to immerse herself in the lien-foreclosure process. For more information, call 877.758.4243; visit www.storagestuff.bid. Tuck Realty Corp., a land-planning and development company, is seeking approval from city officials in Epping, N.H., to build a mixed-use project that will include self-storage, a car wash and retail space on a 40-acre parcel along New Hampshire Route 125. The property at 276 Calef Highway is near Tellys Restaurant and Pizzeria. The development would include a three-story self-storage facility, a 17,000-square-foot retail building and a car wash at the front of the property. The storage facility would be branded as Bluebird Self Storage. Two lots at the back of the property would be reserved for future industrial development, said Joseph Coronati, a project representative and co-owner of Jones & Beach Engineers Inc. Tenants for the retail area, which would include a drive-through, have yet to be identified, he added. Coronati also met with representatives from the New Hampshire Department of Transportation to discuss the sites point of entrance. It was determined the ingress and egress should line up with the entrance to Epping Regional Health Center, which is on the opposite side of Routh 125, according to the source. Creating a four-way controlled intersection to access the health center and new development would be the goal, Coronati said. No action was taken during the April 14 planning meeting, and a follow-up has been scheduled for May 12. Founded in 1990 by W. Turner Porter, Tuck Realty focuses on residential land development in Maine and Southern New Hampshire. Bluebird Self Storage is owned by Bluebird Storage LLC, which also operates the Greenland Self Storage brand. The company opened a Bluebird Self Storage facility in Rochester, N.H., earlier this year and is building three more in the state. Based in Stratham, N.H., Jones & Beach Engineers is a civil-engineering firm that provides construction inspection, land development and surveying. OpenTech Alliance Inc., a Phoenix-based provider of self-storage kiosks, call-center services and other technology, is rolling out a television-advertising campaign aimed at online self-storage auction bidders. The promotion comes three months after OpenTech acquired a majority stake in StorageTreasures.com, an online-auction website that serves self-storage businesses and auction buyers. The 60-second commercial depicting big scores such as classic cars, jewelry and precious metals, is based on actual storage-unit auctions. The commercial will air on the A&E Network during episodes of "Duck Dynasty" and "Storage Wars." "We're investing heavily in promoting and building our community of bidders," said Robert A. Chiti, CEO and president of OpenTech. "The idea is to play off the popularity of reality shows like Storage Wars. StorageTreasures.com is uniquely positioned to give its storage operators more exposure for their auctions to recoup as much debt owed as possible." The auction website currently supports more than 900,000 registered bidders and serves more than 6,500 self-storage facilities managed or owned by operators such as A-1 Self Storage, Central Self Storage, Compass Self Storage, Extra Space Storage, Great Value Storage and US Storage Centers, according to an OpenTech news release. More than 20,000 auctions are posted each month on StorageTreasures.com. The number is expected to more than double over the next two years, the release stated. "This commercial will reach millions of people, some of whom never knew an online storage-auction platform exists. We should definitely see a spike in new bidder registrations, said Chelsea Horne, product manager for OpenTech. "In addition to our commercials, we educate thousands of consumers through our training videos, blogs and forums about the how to hunt for valuable items, buy them at auction prices and sell them for a profit. For many people, this process has become a successful long-term business." StorageTreasures.com is a free locator service identifying storage auctions and self-storage facilities in Canada and the United States. The website offers auction schedules and site-specific guidelines for auction hunters and self-storage owners. OpenTech provides several models of INSOMNIAC self-serve kiosks as well as a range of self-storage rental solutions including the INSOMNIAC Live! Call Center, INSOMNIAC Online Web and mobile applications, LiveAgent! software products, and the INSOMNIAC ILock Security System, all available through the company's self-storage cloud. Sovran Self Storage Inc., the real estate investment trust that operates the Uncle Bob's Self Storage brand, has purchased the four-property Magellan Storage portfolio for $105 million from The Magellan Group. The facilities in Los Angeles and Orange County, Calif., comprise more than 450,000 rentable square feet of storage space in 3,700 units. The seller was represented in the transaction by David Hasbrouck, executive vice president of Cushman & Wakefield, and Greg Wells, director of the firms Self Storage Practice Group. Mark Root, managing director of the companys Equity, Debt & Structured Finance Group, and Lars Platt, senior managing director of its Valuation & Advisory Group, also assisted. This portfolio was significant for a variety of reasons. The Magellan Storage portfolio offered an incredibly rare opportunity to acquire class-A, institutional-quality assets in the highly desirable Los Angeles and Orange County markets, Wells said. The combination of the high-quality assets, locations with high barriers to entry and compelling demographics, provided Sovran Self Storage with an opportunity to expand on its recent entry into the Southern California market. The portfolio generated interest from a range of parties, according a press release. The number of interested purchasers for this portfolio was as broad and diverse as we have seen recently, Wells added. Southern California is an extremely difficult market in which to acquire high-quality, self-storage assets, and the buying community recognized that. One potential buyer commented that Magellan was one of the most hotly contested portfolios they have seen in recent years. Based in Buffalo, N.Y., Sovran operates more than 500 facilities in 26 states. Its portfolio of owned and managed facilities comprises more than 36 million square feet. Founded in 1990, The Magellan Group is a real estate investment and development firm with in-house acquisition, development, finance, leasing and property management. The company also operates Magellan Aviation, a provider of hangars and services at McClellan-Palomar Airport in Carlsbad, Calif. Founded in 1917, Cushman & Wakefield offers a complete range of services for all property types including consulting and appraisal, corporate services, debt and equity financing, investment banking, leasing, and sales and acquisitions. Its Self Storage Practice Group is dedicated to the self-storage asset class. The group offers consulting, data services, feasibility, investment advisory and valuation in major markets nationwide. Closetbox Inc., a startup business specializing in valet self-storage services, has raised more than $5 million from 16 investors in exchange for company equity, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The April 12 filing by company CEO Marcus Mollman doesnt identify the investors. The infusion of capital comes after Closetbox expanded to 24 markets at the end of 2015. The company scaled quickly from its initial service market in Denver after raising $2 million from 21 investors in 2014. It now serves 37 metropolitan markets nationwide, according to the company website. Closetbox service differs from that of some valet-storage operators by allowing customers to reserve a set amount of storage space in addition to storing items by the box. Customer belongings are stored in climate-controlled warehouses. Headquartered in Greenwood Village, Colo., Closetbox uses an online platform that allows customers to schedule free item pickup, print barcodes to affix to boxes and oversized belongings, and keep track of items using a private dashboard. It operates in 22 states and Washington, D.C. @targanl @ChumpCarCanada ST. JOHNS (April 21, 2016) The ability to promote a major motorsports event, such as Targa Newfoundland, across the country is an important part of any marketing strategy. To accomplish this important goal, Targa has reached a cross-marketing agreement to promote two other Canadian racing series ChumpCar Canada and the Canadian Sportscar Sprint Series (CS3). The agreement provides ChumpCar Canada and CS3 access to all competitors of Targa via promotion on the Targa official website, marketing material being given to each competitor at registration, logo promotion on banners, and decals of each series on all competitor vehicles during the 15th anniversary Targa this September. In return, Targa receives promotion on both the ChumpCar Canada and CS3 official websites, marketing material being available at all ChumpCar Canada and CS3 events during the 2016 racing season, a large Targa banner placed within the paddock at each event, and decal placement on all ChumpCar Canada and CS3 competitor vehicles. An incentive for competitors in each event and series is that with the agreement, the overall winner in ChumpCar and CS3 will each get to enter Targa in 2017, and the overall winner in Targa with the least amount of penalty time this year will be able to compete in a ChumpCar or CS3 event in late 2016 or during the 2017 racing season. Robert Giannou, President of Targa, is ecstatic with the new agreement and the access to potential new competitors from across the country. Being able to reach this marketing agreement is truly a great accomplishment for all involved. Targa will now reach competitors in both ChumpCar and CS3 that potentially would not be familiar with our event. And they in turn will reach a whole new group of potentials from our Targa competitors. It really shows the great motorsports community we have in this country. Wendy Edwards, Executive Director of ChumpCar Canada and CS3, echoes Giannous excitement with the agreement. We at ChumpCar Canada are excited to be partnering with Targa Newfoundland in this cross sponsorship program. Racing is alive and well in Canada and we hope by promoting each others events and series that we enlighten and educate even more Canadians about Targa Newfoundland, ChumpCar Canada and the new Canadian Sportscar Sprint Series. We look forward to a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Owned and operated by Newfoundland International Motorsports Limited, Targa Newfoundland is one of three internationally recognized Targa motorsports events in the world. The 2016 competition will start in St. Johns on September 12th and concludes back in the capital on September 16th. The annual rally will cover more than 1,600 kilometers of the challenging, twisty roads of the central and eastern portion of Newfoundland, including over 440 kilometers of closed-road, flat-out Targa stages. Contact: Media: Robert Giannou 1-877-332-2413 rgiannou@targanewfoundland.com Competitors: Darren Sheppard 1-877-332-2413 registrar@targanewfoundland.com Websites: targanfld.com www.facebook.com/targanl www.twitter.com/targanl www.instagram.com/targa_nl Join us for the 15th Anniversary Targa Newfoundland September 10th to 17th, 2016 Enjoy Targa: Watch from a Safe and Secure Place Newfoundland International Motorsports Limited 303 Thorburn Road, Suite 2-D, St. Johns, Newfoundland & Labrador, Canada. A1B 4R1 Tel: 709-722-2413 Tel: 877-332-2413 Fax: 709-753-7646 targanfld.com www.facebook.com/targanl www.twitter.com/targanl International Monetary Fund officials remain optimistic about sub-Saharan Africas economies, despite average growth that has slowed to a 15-year low amid slumping commodity prices and signs of an economic unraveling in regional powerhouse Nigeria. The narrative of Africa rising is not over, IMF deputy managing director Mitsuhiro Furusawa told a panel at the Funds spring meeting in Washington this past weekend. We are sure that the regions future is still bright. After a decade of renaissance that spurred talk of Africa succeeding East Asia as the worlds economic tiger, sub-Saharas average growth will slide to 3 percent this year, barely outpacing population expansion of 2 percent, the IMF forecasts. Commodity-dependent nations such as Angola, Nigeria and Zambia are grappling with plunging currencies and gaping budget gaps and thus rushing back to international institutions for financial assistance. Yet commodity-importing neighbors, including Cote dIvoire, Kenya and Senegal, are reaping the benefits of lower prices, Furusawa pointed out. We have eight countries in the region that exceeded 5 percent growth, he said. The drivers of an improved business environment combined with favorable demographics are still intact. Hard times, meanwhile, may necessitate vital reforms in exporting nations that are suffering, Furusawa said. Nigerian Finance minister Kemi Adeosun, who also spoke at the panel, gave a spirited explanation of how her government is not letting the crisis go to waste. A key to Nigerias current financial instability is that oil receipts account for 13 percent of gross domestic product but 70 percent of government revenue. We have begun to think about what happens to the other 87 percent of our economy, said Adeosun, a London-born accountant who was appointed last November by newly elected President Muhammadu Buhari. The Nigerian state collects just 6 percent of GDP in taxes, according to the IMF. That compares with 16 percent for Rwanda, which the Fund holds up as an African model, and 18 percent for India. Nonoil income is largely siphoned off by quasi-independent state companies that control the countrys ports, airports and other lucrative chokepoints, Adeosun discovered. The Nigerian government has begun hand-to-hand combat to recapture those flows for the state treasury, she said. Adeosun is simultaneously attacking what the administration has called indiscipline, which squanders too much of existing revenue on civil service salaries and perks leaving next to nothing for investment. Last year we had only 10 percent of our budget for capital expenditure, she said. This year we hope to reach 30 percent. Her ministry is also cracking down on corporate tax evaders, forcing more than 300 companies to pay value-added tax over the past few months, she said. Our rate of VAT compliance is about 12 percent, she said. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit. At the same time, however, Adeosun ducked the issue that is wreaking the most immediate economic havoc in Nigeria: a decision to leave the national currency, the naira, officially pegged to the dollar and control access to hard currency. This has roiled corporate finances and spurred a black market that trades naira at discounts of some 40 percent. The Finance minister said such matters are determined by the central bank, and she voiced impatience with investors concern about the resulting chaos. For the first time, Nigeria has an administration that is committed to the fight against corruption, and now everyone is only concerned about monetary policy, she said. Ministers from less financially turbulent African nations than Nigeria pledged that a global macroeconomic chill would give them fresh impetus to reform. Rwandan Finance and Economic Planning minister Claver Gatete said at the weekend panel that he is focused on financial sector development, using mobile technology to draw the populations cash resources out from under the mattresses and into the banks, and regional integration with Uganda and other East African neighbors. We are working intensively on reducing border obstructions and eliminating cell phone roaming charges, he told the IMF audience. Our aim is to harmonize growing economies from Ethiopia to Tanzania. Kenya, which is expected to maintain growth above 6 percent this year, is pressing forward with measures to break up market cartels, said Francis Kariuki, director-general of Kenyas competition authority. Having battled monopolies in the provision of essential foodstuffs such as maize and sugar, the Nairobi authorities have moved on to services such as telecommunications and banking, he said. Kariukis agency was cited in a World Bank report for beating back a price-fixing scheme last year among the countrys private doctors and hospitals, saving consumers $1.7 million annually. A steady stream of positive steps like this one creates momentum for sub-Saharan Africa that should outlast the current commodities-driven turbulence, said Arvind Subramanian, a former IMF official who is now chief economic adviser to the government of India. We have seen underlying improvement in governance taking place for the past ten to 12 years, he said. The view is very upbeat. Get more on emerging markets. coastalrisk.com.au Australian insurance brokers now have a specialised website they can use to identify the risk to potential clients living near flood risk areas.The new websiteuses an interactive map tool to paint a vivid picture, based on the worst case, best case, and current day data to show how the Australian coast may look by the year 2011.Using Google Earth Engine technology, Coastal Risk Australia allows brokers to measure the extent of coastal profusion using the latest 3D models of the Australian coastline.An Insurance Council of Australia spokesman said that the majority of home insurance policies did not cover flooding caused by actions of the sea such as king tides, coastal erosion or rising sea levels.93% of all new home insurance policies purchased in Australia now include flooding under the standard definition, but home insurance typically does not cover actions of the sea.The Insurance Council spokesman said it was up to governments to introduce preventative measures to protect home-owners and businesses from threats and has called for urgent investment.Lloyds of London Head of Asia Pacific Kent Chaplin said The insurance industry sits at the forefront in helping to mitigate the impact of extreme weather.Communities across Asia Pacific are highly exposed to these risks and catastrophe modelling firms and insurers need to account for surface sea level and air temperature rises in their modelling so we can better understand and prepare for their impact.Insurers can also help to strengthen defences against climate change by sharing our knowledge and expertise with the public sector to encourage climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies across the most vulnerable regions.The state government is actively preparing for the effects of rising sea levels and has provided $40 million so far to support local government projects aimed at addressing climate change. The Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) has welcomed moves by the federal government to strengthen the powers of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission ( ASIC ) but The Financial Rights Legal Centre has said the moves are no silver bullet for issues facing financial services.The Turnbull governments $127.2 million reform package will equip ASIC with greater powers and funding and bolster consumer confidence in the sector while ASIC chairman Greg Medcraft will see his term extended by 18 months.Treasurer Scott Morrison and assistant treasurer Kelly ODwyer said in a joint statement that the increased funding will see the regulator enhance its surveillance capabilities.The broad reform measures will equip ASIC with stronger powers and funding to enhance surveillance capabilities better enabling our corporate watchdog to combat misconduct in Australias financial services industry and bolster consumer confidence in the sector, the statement said.ICA chief executive officer Rob Whelan says properly resourced regulators play a critical role in upholding public confidence in the countrys financial sector which is an essential contributor to the economys growth and employment.The Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) welcomes moves by the Federal Government to bolster the resources and powers of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), Whelan said.The ICA recognises that properly-resourced regulators play a vital role in maintaining confidence in the countrys financial sector, which is a key contributor to economic growth and employment.The ICA anticipates the new funding model and powers will better equip ASIC to meet the expectations of financial services consumers.However, he says its essential that the proposed new funding model creates incentives for regulators to maximise efficiency in order to keep costs down for financial services providers and their customers.The general insurance sector poses lower systemic risks relative to other sectors and this should be reflected in the volume of any levy for general insurers. The ICA looks forward to the opportunity to consult with the government as it seeks to design and refine the funding model.The Financial Rights Legal Centre has also endorsed the announcement of major additional funding and powers for the regulator.Principal solicitor Katherine Lane said its essential to fund a strong and healthy regulator and the extra money and extra powers are positive news for the industry but the move is no silver bullet to fix the multitude of problems faced by financial service customers.Funding a strong and healthy regulator is essential and the extra money delivered today is good news, as is the additional powers, Lane said.I would note however that while funding a strong regulator is critical, it will not fix the multitude of problems faced by financial service consumers.It wont make unfair terms laws apply to insurance; it wont ensure insurance policies are suitable for the needs of customers; it wont improve claims handling in insurance; it wont address poor service and conflicted behaviour in mortgage broking; it wont regulate the proliferation of debt management firms who are currently preying on customers in financial difficulty, taking their cut and making problems worse; and it wont address cultures which are technically legal but ethically repugnant. New Yorks financial regulator promoted Scott Fischer to be the states top insurance watchdog, a position that involves overseeing about 1,700 companies with more than $4 trillion of assets. Fischer, 44, a former corporate attorney, was named executive deputy superintendent for insurance, reporting to Maria Vullo, the acting superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services, the regulator said Thursday in a statement. Laura Evangelista was named deputy superintendent for insurance and will report to Fischer. The New York role is one of the most important regulatory posts in the industry, given the size of the market and the departments reputation for strict oversight and capital standards. Former DFS Superintendent Benjamin Lawsky worked to crack down on intra-company life insurance transactions that he said could mask risk. Lawsky, who stepped down in 2015 after extracting more than $6 billion in settlements from financial institutions over four years, also demanded increased policyholder protections when private-equity firms purchased insurers. We welcome Scott and Laura, with their deep insurance and legal backgrounds, Vullo said in the statement. Together they bring invaluable government and industry experience to the pool of talented professionals. Liquidation Bureau Fischer was the special deputy superintendent at the New York Liquidation Bureau, where he helped oversee the wind-down of more than 25 domestic insurers and managed a staff of more than 200. He previously worked at the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development in London, and as an assistant attorney general in New York. He received a bachelors degree from Dickinson College and a law degree from New York University, according to the statement. Evangelista previously worked as vice president and assistant general counsel at Nausch, Hogan & Murray Inc. She has a bachelors degree from Trinity College and a law degree from Hofstra University. U.S. insurers are regulated by individual states, rather than by a national overseer, and smaller jurisdictions often follow the lead of the most prominent departments. Regulators weigh companies requests for rate increases, protect consumers against abuses and make sure insurers have enough capital to back policyholder obligations. Robert Easton previously led the New York insurance division before stepping down last year, according to Richard Loconte, a spokesman for the department. Related: Copyright 2022 Bloomberg. Topics New York The Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America has awarded Tom Minkler with the Woodworth Memorial Award, the highest honor the association bestows on one of its members, during the annual Big I Legislative Conference. Minkler is president of the Clark-Mortenson Agency in Keene, New Hampshire, and former Big I chairman. The Woodworth Memorial Award recognizes the meritorious and outstanding contributions of an independent agent or broker to the national association, to his or her Big I colleagues and to the insurance industry. Minkler is a past chairman of the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of New Hampshire (NHAIA), past New Hampshire director on the Big I Board of Directors and past president of the Massachusetts Association of Insurance Agents. The state of New Hampshire insurance community can never repay Tom for his lifetime of hard work and dedication to the industry, said Will Infantine, NHAIA chairman. His unparalleled commitment in the state and on a national level has resulted in lasting innovation and set the foundation for the next generation of insurance professionals. The award is certainly representative of New Hampshires appreciation for his tireless service, Infantine added. At the national association level, in addition to having served on the executive committee and rising to the rank of chairman, Minkler has championed the Consumer Agent Portal (CAP) project since 2009 and is past chairman of the Big I Government Affairs Committee. Minkler has also served on various other Big I committees including the Professional Liability Committee, the Agents Advocacy Fund, the IIAA Agency Administrative Services board of directors, and the Captive Study Committee. Minkler is a frequent speaker for the insurance industry and has provided testimony before the U.S Congress on behalf of the Big I on a variety of topics. In 2007, he received the highest IIABA Government Affairs award, the Sydney O. Smith National Legislative Award, and in 2006, 2010 and 2012, he was recognized for his outstanding service to the insurance industry with an IIABA Chairmans Citation. He is active in his community and has served on numerous boards for charitable organizations and civic groups including the Keene Community Kitchen and the Greater Keene Chamber of Commerce. The Woodworth Award was established in 1925 in memory of C.H. Woodworth of Buffalo, New York, the second president of the association. It is awarded to the Big I member who best demonstrates outstanding service benefiting independent insurance agents and the entire insurance industry. Topics Agencies New Hampshire The Augusta, Maine, Police Department says officers in the states capital city will be more focused on cracking down on distracted driving from now until September. Sgt. Christian Behr says extra patrols dedicated to limiting distracted driving will be deployed thanks to an $8,500 grant the department received from the Maine Bureau of Highway Safety. Police say the program looks to curb texting while driving and failure to maintain control of a motor vehicle, both of which are violations in the state. Officers involved with the program will conduct traffic details and educate residents through high visibility enforcement. Behr says the initiative is part of the departments mission to reduce the numbers of accidents in both Augusta and statewide. Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Law Enforcement Personal Auto Maine Ruschlikon, the global community of insurers, brokers and reinsurers with a mission to optimize industry administrative costs and enhance client services, announced achieved several important milestones in 2015 a year that saw an expansion of its global footprint. Ruschlikon* said the milestones include: The number of accounting and claims transactions being electronically processed using ACORD ** standards grew globally by 20 percent to around 1.2 million; standards grew globally by 20 percent to around 1.2 million; The global community of insurers, brokers and reinsurers now totals more than 100 implementations across six continents in the re/insurance industry across all types of business. An expansion of the community with a number of new relationships with insurers, from its historical membership base of brokers and reinsurers. In 2015, Ruschlikon continued to systematically deliver and track benefits as a base for ongoing financial and operational improvements. These benefits range from faster payment or the elimination of unmatched cash to more streamlined and efficient processes, responding to the need to continuously reduce administrative costs, according to Regis Delayat, Ruschlikon chair and SCOR CIO. Another important aspect is Ruschlikons contribution to data quality, required not only for operational efficiency but also for accurate business decisions and regulatory compliance, Delayat added. Ruschlikon Technology Provider Group In late 2015, the Ruschlikon Technology Provider Group was formed with the primary purpose of working with Ruschlikon to increase, broaden and simplify global implementations of ACORD messages and Ruschlikon best practices. As top-tier providers of e-processing services for re/insurance, members of the group are: CSC, EBIX, Effisoft, INVEOS, msg, NIIT, Pro., Sequel, Scyllogis, Trace, WebConnectivity, Xchanging and Xuber, said Ruschlikon in a statement. James Willison, managing director of WebConnectivity, and Ian Summers, business development director at Sequel Business Solutions, were elected as co-chairs of the group. London Market Target Operating Model Ruschlikon has formally started to work with the London Market Target Operating Model (TOM), a modernization project that is aiming to make it easier to do business with the London market. One area of focus for Ruschlikon has been to ensure process and data consistency between Ruschlikon and electronic accounting for the London Market Bureau business, working with the Central Services Refresh Programme (CSRP), the statement from Ruschlikon said. Another area of focus is to help with the development of ACORD standard placing messages, which would be globally applicable. The TOM-Ruschlikon working group has representatives from a variety of geographies and business lines. As well as high level meetings between the Ruschlikon Steering Group and leaders of the London Market TOM, many Ruschlikon members are involved in more detailed TOM workshops, working groups and management groups, said the statement from Ruschlikon. * Ruschlikon aims to further automate back office processes by implementing best practice processes based on ACORD message standards for re/insurance and commercial business. The Ruschlikon Steering Group is composed of AIG, Aon Benfield, Guy Carpenter, Munich Re, SCOR, Swiss Re, Willis Towers Watson and XL Catlin. ** ACORD (Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development) is a global, nonprofit organization serving insurance and related industries. ACORD facilitates the development of open consensus data standards and standard forms, and works with its members and partner organizations to drive the implementation of those standards. Source: Ruschlikon Topics Trends Reinsurance London An attorney for a Minnesota man accused of firebombing a Somali restaurant across the North Dakota border in Grand Forks said that any racial overtones were overblown by people who arent familiar with the case. Defense attorney Ted Sandberg made the comments to The Associated Press after filing notice in federal court that Matthew Gust plans to plead guilty to two counts for the Dec. 7 fire at the Juba Coffee House. The plea deal calls for a sentence of 15 years in prison. The fire came three days after vandals had spray-painted what some have described as a Nazi-like symbol on the business. While investigators have said theyre not sure about the nature of the symbol and dont know whether it was connected to the fire, Sandberg said many people outside of law enforcement and the media jumped to inappropriate conclusions. While the racial undertones of this case were often over-emphasized and exaggerated by many people outside of the case, my client and the U.S. government never gave into such hyperbole or opinions, and instead stuck to business and reached an agreement on a very straightforward criminal matter, Sandberg said. Sandberg said he has received messages from people who are either unhappy he is defending Gust or believe the attorney is an ally in their cause, whatever that may be. U.S. Attorney Christopher Myers of North Dakota declined to comment. Sandberg said Gust will plead guilty to malicious use of explosive materials and interfering with a federally protected activity. A charge of use of a destructive device in a crime of violence, which would have carried a minimum 30-year sentence, would be dismissed. A change of plea hearing has not been set. Investigators say the fire was started by a homemade explosive made from a 40-ounce beer bottle and caused an estimated $90,000 in damage. Vandals had spray-painted graffiti and the go home on the business a few days earlier. Grand Forks Police Lt. Derik Zimmel said earlier there are a lot different ways the graffiti can be interpreted. A spokeswoman for a group that supports refugees said recently that the cafe owners have been approved for insurance and are hoping to reopen in Grand Forks, but arent sure about financial details. Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Can you be charged with a crime for refusing to take a Breathalyzer test when stopped on suspicion of drunken driving? Its hard to think of a constitutional rights question that affects more people. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will take it up, considering whether the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure protects your breath and your blood from a warrantless search. Two different states involved in the case offer different constitutional reasons for their practices a sure sign that something is fishy here. The bottom line is that mandating a search without a warrant violates the Constitution, and the court should say so, regardless of the legitimate importance of combating drunken driving. A review of the states positions should make that clear. North Dakotas Supreme Court said that you implicitly consent to taking a blood test when you get into a car there. It added that you arent really forced to take the blood test you just get convicted of a crime if you dont. In a sense, the court was saying that driving is a privilege, not a right. The government cant condition the exercise of a constitutional right on the waiver of another one. The reason you can be searched before getting on an airplane is that flying isnt recognized as a fundamental constitutional right. Is driving a constitutional right? The Supreme Court has never said so, although it has recognized a constitutional right to travel. In todays U.S., especially if you live someplace without public transportation (like most of North Dakota), you cant really travel if you cant drive. Making consent to an invasive blood draw the condition of driving seems clearly unconstitutional. As for the assertion that you dont have to take the test, thats even weaker: the very definition of being required to do something is that youll be convicted of a crime if you dont. The Minnesota Supreme Court said that requiring a Breathalyzer counts as a search incident to arrest, which is one of the two recognized exceptions to the usual rule that the police can only search you if they have a warrant. The trouble with this argument is that the exception is designed to provide for the safety of the arresting officer. This is an important exception, to be sure. And for better or worse, its the legal basis for the stop-and-frisk policing policy that has been the subject of both praise and condemnation in recent years. But while the officers safety may require a pat-down to make sure the arrested person isnt carrying a gun or a knife, testing the arrestees breath doesnt make the officer safer. The Minnesota court pointed out that it had already allowed photographing and fingerprinting arrestees. But these administrative actions arent searches in the same way as a Breathalyzer, which analyzes the chemical contents of the inside of the body. The Minnesota court emphasized that the search was reasonable because a Breathalyzer test is so minimally invasive. In essence, the court was saying that the Fourth Amendment allows the state to engage in a cost-benefit analysis. If the search is minimal and the gain is great, then the Constitution permits the search. Admittedly, the Fourth Amendment is written in general terms. But the word reasonable shouldnt be taken as authority to trade away the right not to be searched because the state has much to gain. If the police carried X-ray machines around with them, they might be able to see hidden weapons or drugs, and the gain might be great but the viewing would be a search within the terms of the Fourth Amendment, even if it wasnt invasive at all. Theres no question that we need better mechanisms to police and prevent drunken driving. But it would be a serious mistake to sacrifice the right against unlawful search while were figuring out what those are. New technology will come. But the principle of mandatory search will sit about like a loaded weapon, to use the phrase coined by Justice Robert Jackson. The court should protect privacy and put the burden on states to figure out better ways to save lives. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Copyright 2022 Bloomberg. Topics Personal Auto Minnesota A 1981 Ferrari GTSI that has been missing for 21 years has been recovered, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB). The car, reported stolen in 1987 from Newport Beach, Calif. while on consignment at a dealership, was recovered at the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach earlier this month. The original owner was paid about $37,000 for the insurance theft claim in 1987 for the vehicle, one of 1,743 of that model made in 1981, NICB said The original owner has been contacted, according to the theft bureau. After it was stolen, the vehicle identification number (VIN) was later switched to the VIN of a 1982 Ferrari that had already been exported to Norway in 2005. When the vehicle arrived at the port, it was headed from Texas to Poland. Working with Customs and Border Protection, the California Highway Patrol and Ferrari representatives, NICB said it was able to determine the true identity of the car and to recover the original theft report filed with Newport Beach Police in 1987. NICB records showed only 12 stolen red Ferraris still unrecovered at this time. The NICB is supported by property/casualty insurance companies and self-insured organizations. News and Video Source: NICB Topics Auto Fraud The Travelers Companies Inc. reported net income of $691 million for the quarter ended March 31, 2016, down 17 percent from $833 million in the prior year quarter. Operating income in the current quarter was $698 million compared to $827 million in the prior year quarter. These declines were primarily due to higher catastrophe losses mainly arising out of hail storms that occurred in Texas in late March, according to the insurer. Alan Schnitzer, chief executive officer, said the company was pleased with its $428 million underwriting gain for the quarter (compared to $620 million in 2015s initial quarter) especially in light of the high catastrophe losses this year. The company achieved a 92.3 consolidated combined ratio compared to 88.9 for the first quarter in 2015. He also praised business retention, premium increases and gains in business in both Business and International Insurance (94.9 combined ratio) and Bond & Specialty Insurance (69.3 combined ratio). In Personal Insurance (93.7 combined ratio), Schnitzer said the company continued to build on its agency channel, with net written premium growth of 9 percent, resulting from 13 percent growth in agency automobile business and 2 percent growth in agency homeowners business. Our results from time to time will be impacted by higher levels of catastrophe losses, as they were this quarter, but the strength of our franchises, our meaningful and sustainable competitive advantages and our relentless execution have enabled us to deliver industry-leading returns over time, and we are well positioned to continue to do so, Schnitzer said in a statement. Travelers, one of the first insurers to report quarterly results, is not alone in feeling the effects of recent Texas storms. Allstate has not reported its overall results for the first quarter but did estimate its catastrophe losses in the first quarter from 17 events to be $830 million, with about $638 million of that in March. The insurer blamed Texas storms for two-thirds of its catastrophe losses for the quarter. Texas has also suffered damaging hail and rain storms in April. Estimated insured losses from just one storm that hit the San Antonio area on April 12 are expected to reach $560 million for vehicles and $800 million for homes and businesses, according to the Independent Insurance Agents of San Antonio. Topics Texas Profit Loss Windstorm The Allstate Corp. this week announced estimated catastrophe losses for the month of March of $638 million pre-tax, and an estimated $827 million pre-tax for first quarter 2016, in the wake of severe hailstorms in the Southwestern and Southern U.S. Catastrophe losses occurring in the first quarter comprised 17 events at an estimated cost of $830 million pre-tax, partially offset by a minor reserve re-estimate of prior reported catastrophe losses. These storms, one of which ranks as the largest hailstorm to ever impact Allstate, produced unusually heavy damage to both homes and cars given the size of hail and wind speeds, Thomas J. Wilson, Allstate chairman and chief executive officer, said in a statement. Two severe hail events, primarily impacting Texas in March accounted for two-thirds of the catastrophe losses for the quarter, according Allstate. The larger of the two storms occurred on March 23 and extended from Texas to Florida. It produced violent thunderstorms with 2.5 in. hail and 65 mph winds in Texas, and 1 in. hail and similar winds in Florida. The smaller of the two events occurred during morning rush hour on March 17 and produced hail as large as 2.75 in. in Texas and 1.75 in. as it moved east into Louisiana. The cities of Fort Worth and Arlington saw the greatest amount of damage from the storm. Allstates claim volume has been heaviest in Collin, Dallas and Tarrant counties where the Allstate brand has estimated market share greater than its statewide average, according to the carrier. Related: Topics Catastrophe Natural Disasters Trends Texas Profit Loss Its not for the faint of heart, I can tell you that Anyone who comes in here and thinks its an easy job really does not have any idea what theyre getting into. But its been a joy Its been a labor of love for me to serve in this capacity. Its been a great challenge, but its been a great reward as well. Thats how Kevin McCarty signed off his last interview as Florida Insurance Commissioner with Insurance Journal after a nearly 13-year career serving the state. McCarty announced in January he would leave office in May to pursue other opportunities. Retrospective, candid, and modest, McCarty talked about what issues have affected him the most during his tenure and said he hopes his legacy will be remembered as one of fairness and respect. I think Ive prided myself and promoted within our organization a culture of what I consider fair hearing. I want everyone to know that everyone who comes to the Florida Office will be given a fair hearing, and that were not predisposed on one side or the other, McCarty said. As the insurance commissioner of a state as diverse as Florida, its important that we have listened to stakeholders. I think thats what weve done. McCarty said his advice to his successor, who may be chosen by the Florida Cabinet on April 26, is to consider the many different backgrounds and experiences of those he or she will work with and serve. I think that the most important thing is to come here with an ability to listen to the advice and counsel of a variety of people, and to make it a practice to ensure that youre getting the benefit of all the information and taking in all of the stakeholders positions before you make a decision, McCarty said. The best, to me in my mind, is someone who is experienced in judgment and can take in a balance of opinions and use the benefit of their experience that would be the best background, I think, to be a good insurance commissioner in our state or in any other state. That person doesnt necessarily have to be someone who has experience in Florida, McCarty said, though he does think someone from the state would have an advantage in dealing with catastrophe risk. McCarty noted, however, that property insurance is only one aspect of the Florida insurance market. I dont think anyone should be discounted, either in the state or outside of state. I think whats important is to have somebody who can strike the balance between protecting consumer issues, and understand[ing] the importance of a robust and competitive market, McCarty said. Every decision you make can affect millions of people directly or indirectly. McCarty said balancing working with insurance companies versus protecting the consumers is part of the job that he has taken very seriously. I think striking that balance is very important because I firmly believe that capital markets work 90 percent of the time, just like life insurance works 99 percent of the time, McCarty said. I think the [governments role] has to be very strategic, and it needs to be a very limited role for those people who need it those are the ones that will benefit from it. Other highlights from McCartys podcast interview: On Strength of Florida Insurers McCarty said his successor will be inheriting a Florida property market that is in the strongest position its been in in a decade. It has seen back-to-back years of profitability, he said, and the reinsurance market is also very strong. McCarty also touted the stability of Citizens and other insurers in the state. Through our stress testing last year, weve seen that our companies can withstand a Hurricane Andrew or the 2004 or 05 seasons. Weve even seen Citizens get to the point where they could successfully take a 1in100year event without doing an assessment, which is pretty remarkable, he said. McCarty disagreed with claims from some that Floridas domestic insurers that have entered the market in the last 10 years havent been tested and would falter if a big storm hit the state. He said many of the newer insurers domiciled in Florida dont just write in the state and have been tested by catastrophes in other regions. Those are things that we look at in addition to their ability to maintain the capital position. Some of these companies have been tested in other areas. They were in the Northeast for Superstorm Sandy, and paid claims during that time, he said. Weve seen some of our companies tested in that regard, and have met that challenge. I feel good about it. That said, McCarty added, not every company is destined to succeed. There will be failures in any scenario. Were in the risk assuming business, and when youre in the risk assuming business youre going to have companies that fail. Thats just a reality, McCarty said. I think the overwhelming majority of our companies are positioned in terms of managerial skills and abilities, in terms of their underwriting, in terms of their financial capacity and wherewithal to withstand a series of catastrophic events. On Ongoing Florida Challenges McCarty said flood insurance is an ongoing issue for the state as the National Flood Insurance Programs (NFIP) rates continue to go up and the program goes further into debt. McCarty said Florida pays the highest flood insurance rates in the nation and has been a net donorto the rest of the country. McCarty has worked with several Florida legislators on addressing the flood insurance rate problem. Last year he requested ratemaking data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) of Florida policyholders. The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation (OIR) and Florida legislators have also passed laws encouraging insurance companies to offer flood insurance in the state to increase competition and give residents other options. But he says more will need to be done. I frankly dont know how my successor can ignore that issue. So much of the Florida marketplace dominates the federal flood programI dont know how anybody who is insurance commissioner of Florida can ignore the federal flood program and the alternatives to the Federal Flood Program, he said. The skyrocketing increase in water loss claims as a result of what many are claiming is abuse of policyholders assignment of benefits (AOB) is another issue McCarty sees as a top priority for his successor. One order of business in his final months was to approve policy form wording changes submitted by Citizens Property Insurance to encourage policyholders to contact Citizens first in the event of a water loss. He said additional proactive steps should be taken by other insurers to protect policyholders and help address the issue. We have been encouraging companies to look at the Citizens filings, but it is important to note that this is not a cutting of benefits, McCarty said. We worked very hard with Citizens to craft a balance to make sure that the language that has always been intended is in the contract. McCarty said the workers comp market is another area that will need to be closely watched. While rates have gone down consistently since reforms were passed back in 2003, cases currently before the Florida Supreme Court could impact this market going forward. Any one of those cases could wreak havoc in the marketplace, and we would have to be poised to take whatever necessary legislative action to ensure stability in the marketplace, McCarty said. Read Part 2 of Commissioner Kevin McCartys interview where he discusses how hes changed his approach to the position through the years, what he considers to be OIRs biggest achievements during his tenure, and whats next for him after leaving OIR: Part 2 of Insurance Journals outgoing interview with McCarty To hear the interview in its entirety, click on the podcasts below: Related: Topics Carriers Florida Flood Advocates for medical marijuana in Montana have begun gathering signatures for an initiative that would ask voters to undo legislation limiting the use of the substance. But backers of I-182 have just nine weeks to collect the 24,175 valid signatures needed to place the measure on the November ballot. The Yes on 182 campaign said during a news conference at the state Capitol on Tuesday that signature gatherers were already fanning out through the state. Voters in 2004 legalized marijuana for medicinal use, but the law was rolled back by the 2011 Legislature. Earlier this year, the state Supreme Court upheld key provisions of the legislative changes. If approved, the measure would lift the three-patient limit imposed on providers and establish licensing fees to pay for administering the program. Related: Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Cannabis In line with venture capitalist Marc Andreessens 2011 proclamation that software is eating the world, it may be appropriate to also add the corollary that software is eating the insurance business. That's the gist of a post from Matteo Carbone, principal at Bain & Company, who asserts that the insurance sector is undergoing a profound change. Digital transformation has become a major challenge for insurance companies all over the world. In his native Italy, he notes, telematics installations became an integral part of 15.5% of new policies and renewals during the third quarter of 2015. For more proof, Carbone adds, follow the money. The insurance technology category has seen investments of almost $2.65 billion coming in during 2015 compared with $0.74 billion in 2014. The companies succeeding in this category are focusing on developing industry solutions around platforms and roles for various players across the insurance value chain. Companies from outside the traditional value chain, aside from carriers, agencies and brokers, are making their presence felt. An example may be telecommunications providers, who are designing and deploying the in-vehicle or in-fleet telematics systems that insurers are now embedding into their offerings. The lines between the classical roles of distributor, supplier (coming even from other sectors), insurer and reinsurer are getting blurred, says Carbone. In a scenario like this, the balance of power (and consequently the profit pool) among various actors is bound to be challenged and each one of them may well choose to collaborate or compete depending on context and timing. The key to managing and succeeding in this new era of digital insurance will be partnerships and ecosystems that extend well beyond the boundaries of insurance. This means working closely with established tech providers, as well as startups with new ideas. It may also mean collaborating with established companies outside the insurance sphere as well perhaps a company such as GE, with its Predix real-time sensor systems for engines and equipment, could play a role. Its noteworthy that GE, long considered a heavy equipment and appliance manufacturer, is now a huge player in the software business as well. Its only a matter of time until insurance companies emerge as software companies as well. By Matthew Thompson Before moving to Vinson & Elkins, Stewart established herself as a senior tax associate working for Slaughter and May. There, her practice covered the tax implications of domestic and cross-border M&A deals and group reorganisations among others. She continued her practice at Herbert Smith Freehills where she also advised on real estate, insurance, energy and infrastructure transactions. At Vinson & Elkins, Stewart will be working with clients in a range of industries including, telecoms, finance and private equity. E arrivata lufficialita, dopo una giornata di voci rincorrenti: per il triennio 2018-2021 sara lemittente Sky a godere dei diritti televisivi per trasmettere, in esclusiva assoluta, le partite non solo delle prossime edizioni dellEuropa League ma anche quelle della massima competizione continentale, la Champions. Un pacchetto da favola per il quale la tv satellitare di Rupert Murdoch avrebbe messo sul piatto unofferta giudicata piu congrua di quella presentata dalla concorrente Mediaset. A dare lannuncio dellaffare concluso e stata la stessa Sky che, in un comunicato, ha spiegato che il nuovo format sviluppato dalla UEFA ci consentira di portare ai nostri abbonati un prodotto rivoluzionario per il calcio europeo in Italia. Per la prima volta la UEFA Champions League e la UEFA Europa League saranno insieme in unesclusiva offerta integrata, che permettera agli appassionati di seguire fino a 7 squadre italiane, mai cosi tante prima dora, impegnate nelle sfide con i migliori club europei. Sky: Rafforzata leadership Anche il livello tecnico dellofferta sara altissimo ed e ancora lemittente a rivelare i dettagli: Continueremo a fare innovazione, trasmettendo le partite piu importanti anche in 4K HDR. Questofferta senza precedenti rafforza la posizione di Sky come leader della programmazione sportiva in Italia ed e anche un altro passo importante di sostegno al calcio italiano. Insomma, per i prossimi tre anni, sara unegemonia totale quella della satellitare sul calcio europeo, avendo mantenuto il pacchetto Europa League (gia sua esclusiva) e affiancandola a quello ancor piu appetibile della Champions League ad appannaggio Mediaset dal 2015 al 2018. Sfida Serie A Ora la sfida fra i due colossi delle trasmissioni sportive si spostera sui diritti televisivi della prossima Serie A, per la quale si e ancora in attesa di un nuovo bando che, come annunciato dal commissario della Lega, Carlo Tavecchio, avra le stesse caratteristiche del precedente, andato pero a vuoto: solo una delle offerte presentate per i cinque pacchetti, infatti, superava la soglia minima richiesta dalla base dasta. Niente di fatto, quindi, anche in virtu della stessa Mediaset che, in sostanza, ha disertato il bando (giudicato inaccettabile) non presentando alcuna offerta. La battaglia, anche in questo caso, sara sulle esclusive: del resto, dopo essersi vista scivolare via una componente importante come la Champions, sulla Serie A Mediaset dara sicuramente battaglia. Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have come a long way since the first U.S. fund, Standard & Poor's Depositary Receipts, better known as spiders (SPDRs), was launched back in 1993. This first ETF tracks the S&P 500 and its popularity with investors led to the introduction of ETFs based on other benchmark U.S. equity indexes, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nasdaq 100. From their early beginnings as equity-index trackers, ETFs have grown to encompass a huge array of investment choices, but they aren't all equal in quality. In fact, the flip side to the phenomenal growth in ETFs is that it increases the risk that some of them will be liquidated, primarily due to a lack of investor interest. And that makes it all the more important to choose wisely. Key Takeaways As an investor, buying ETFs can be a smart and low-cost strategy to build an optimal portfolio. But, with so many ETFs out there, it can feel overwhelming to select just those that fit your strategy and goals. Luckily, there are several tools out there to help you narrow down the right ETFs and to find the lowest cost, most efficient one for each asset class or index you want to own. 2:19 Click Play to Learn More About ETFs Narrowing a Wide Selection of ETFs The choices in the ETFs space include traditional index ETFs based on U.S. and international equity indexes and subindexes, and others that track benchmark indices in bonds, commodities, and futures. There are ETFs based on investing style (value, growth, or a combination of both) and that focus on market capitalization. You will also find leveraged ETFs that provide multiples in returns (or losses) based on the underlying index's movements, as well as inverse ETFs that rise when the market falls and vice-versa. There are currently more than 2,000 ETFs listed on U.S. exchanges with combined assets exceeding $5.8 trillion. As an investor, the first thing you need to do is narrow down this enormous universe of ETFs and focus on just those that will suit your portfolio and long-term investment strategy. There are many ways to do this, but you can start with an asset screener that will filter out anything you don't wantlike those riskier leveraged or inverse ETFs, perhaps. Even after you've settled on the types of ETFs you want and the general asset classes or indexes that you want to track, you still have some work to do. Competition Among Similar ETFs The ETF market has become intensely competitive. This has generally been positive for investors, as it has driven the fees associated with ETFs down toward zero, making them extremely low-cost and efficient securities. But that can also leave investors confused. If you want an ETF that tracks the S&P 500 index, you can go for the original SPDR (SPY). But there is also a Vanguard S&P 500 ETF, a Schwab S&P 500 ETF, and an iShares S&P 500 ETF. In fact, there are at least a dozen S&P 500 ETFs listed on major U.S. stock exchanges. In a bid to differentiate themselves, some ETF issuers have developed products that are either very specific in focus or are based on an investment trend that may be short lived. An example is the Loncar Cancer Immunotherapy ETF (CNCR). This esoteric ETF tracks the Loncar Cancer Immunotherapy Index and invests in 30 stocks that focus on the research and development of drugs and technology to fight cancer using immunotherapy. As for ETFs that are based on hot investment trends, examples include the recently launched Robotics & Artificial Intelligence ETF (BOTZ) or the Drone Economy Strategy ETF (IFLY). There's even one called the Obesity ETF (SLIM) that invests in companies in the business of fighting obesity and related diseases. Picking the Right ETF Given the bewildering number of ETF choices that investors now have to contend with, it's important to consider the following factors: Level of Assets : To be considered a viable investment choice, an ETF should have a minimum level of assets, a common threshold being at least $10 million. An ETF with assets below this threshold is likely to have a limited degree of investor interest. As with a stock, limited investor interest translates into poor liquidity and wide spreads. : To be considered a viable investment choice, an ETF should have a minimum level of assets, a common threshold being at least $10 million. An ETF with assets below this threshold is likely to have a limited degree of investor interest. As with a stock, limited investor interest translates into poor liquidity and wide spreads. Trading Activity : An investor needs to check if the ETF that is being considered trades in sufficient volume on a daily basis. Trading volume in the most popular ETFs runs into millions of shares daily. Some ETFs barely trade at all. Trading volume is an excellent indicator of liquidity, regardless of the asset class. Generally speaking, the higher the trading volume for an ETF, the more liquid it is likely to be and the tighter the bid-ask spread. These are especially important considerations when it is time to exit the ETF. : An investor needs to check if the ETF that is being considered trades in sufficient volume on a daily basis. Trading volume in the most popular ETFs runs into millions of shares daily. Some ETFs barely trade at all. Trading volume is an excellent indicator of liquidity, regardless of the asset class. Generally speaking, the higher the trading volume for an ETF, the more liquid it is likely to be and the tighter the bid-ask spread. These are especially important considerations when it is time to exit the ETF. Underlying Index or Asset : Consider the underlying index or asset class on which the ETF is based. From the point of view of diversification, it may be preferable to invest in an ETF that is based on a broad, widely followed index rather than an obscure index that has a narrow industry or geographic focus. : Consider the underlying index or asset class on which the ETF is based. From the point of view of diversification, it may be preferable to invest in an ETF that is based on a broad, widely followed index rather than an obscure index that has a narrow industry or geographic focus. Tracking Error : While most ETFs track their underlying indexes closely, some do not track them as closely as they should. All else being equal, an ETF with minimal tracking error is preferable to one with a greater degree of error. : While most ETFs track their underlying indexes closely, some do not track them as closely as they should. All else being equal, an ETF with minimal tracking error is preferable to one with a greater degree of error. Market Position: The first ETF issuer for a particular sector has a decent probability of garnering the lion's share of assets before others jump on the bandwagon. It is prudent to avoid ETFs that are mere imitations of an original idea, because they may not differentiate themselves from their rivals and attract investors' assets. In Case of ETF Liquidations The closing, or liquidation, of an ETF is usually an orderly process. The ETF issuer will notify investors, generally three to four weeks in advance, about the date when the ETF will stop trading. That said, an investor with a position in an ETF that is being liquidated still has to decide on the best course of action in order to protect the investment. Essentially, the investor has to make one of the following choices: Sell the ETF shares before the "stop trading" date : This is a proactive approach that may be suitable when the investor believes that there is a significant risk of a substantial near-term decline in the fund's price. In such cases, the investor may be willing to overlook the wide bid-ask spreads that are likely to be prevalent for the ETF, due to its limited liquidity. : This is a proactive approach that may be suitable when the investor believes that there is a significant risk of a substantial near-term decline in the fund's price. In such cases, the investor may be willing to overlook the wide bid-ask spreads that are likely to be prevalent for the ETF, due to its limited liquidity. Hold on to the ETF shares until liquidation: This alternative may be suitable if the ETF is invested in a sector that is not volatile and the downside risk is minimal. The investor may have to wait a couple of weeks for the issuer to complete the process of selling the securities held within the ETF and distributing the net proceeds after expenses. Holding on for the liquidated value eliminates the issue of the bid-ask spread. In any case, the investor will have to contend with the tax issue. If the ETF was held in a taxable account, the investor will owe taxes on any capital gains. The Bottom Line When selecting an ETF, investors should consider factors such as its level of assets, trading volume and underlying index. In the event that an ETF is to be liquidated, an investor has to decide whether to sell the ETF shares before it stops trading or wait until the liquidation process is completed, with due consideration given to the tax aspects of the ETF sale. Investopedia does not provide tax, investment, or financial services and advice. The information is presented without consideration of the investment objectives, risk tolerance, or financial circumstances of any specific investor and might not be suitable for all investors. Past performance is not indicative of future performance. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Petrodollars are not a currency; they're simply U.S. dollars that have been exchanged for crude oil exports. The term rose to economic and political prominence in the mid-1970s amid growing interdependence between the U.S. and crude oil exporters. Foreign oil exporters' reliance on the U.S. dollar as the principal means of exchange and store of value reflected the dollar's already established role as the global reserve currency, which continues without serious challenge to this day. The dollar's global stature and wide use stem from the U.S. economy's leading global role and its openness to foreign trade and investment. These advantages proved irresistible to oil exporters, and their reliance on the dollar in turn extended its dominance. Key Takeaways Petrodollars are dollars paid to oil-producing countries for their exports. The petrodollar emerged as an economic concept in the 1970s as growing U.S. imports of increasingly costly crude oil increased the dollar holdings of foreign producers. Petrodollar recycling is the reinvestment of crude oil export revenue denominated in dollars. The dollar's status as the leading global currency preceded petrodollar's rise and has continued amid increased U.S. energy production and widening current account deficits. Rise of the Petrodollar The Bretton Woods system of fixed currency exchange rates tied to gold through the U.S. dollar collapsed in 1971 because the global economy and its demand for safe assets outgrew the available supply of bullion. Only the dollar could realistically fill that void, and as the global supply of dollars grew amid U.S. trade and budget deficits, so did the accumulation of petrodollars earned by oil exporters benefiting from sharply higher crude oil prices. Exporters accepted dollars because they had no alternative: it was the currency of their leading customer and, even more importantly, the currency of international trade and finance. Growing mutual dependence led to deals between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia setting the terms for the reinvestment of Saudi petrodollars in U.S. Treasuries in 1974 and for U.S.-run development projects in Saudi Arabia in 1979. The development of oil and gas reserves outside the Middle East starting in the late 1970s eventually spread the petrodollars around to new exporters like Norway, whose sovereign wealth fund was worth $1.4 trillion at the end of 2021 and held nearly 1.5% of all publicly listed global equities. Returns on Petrodollar Recycling The most important benefit from the reinvestment of petrodollars in the U.S. and abroad was that it allowed business to proceed as usual. Foreign oil exporters could keep supplying crude and get paid in the most useful currency, while the U.S. maintained its economic, financial, technological, and military pre-eminence. The rise of the petrodollar forced the U.S. to share political and economic power with the developing countries supplying its energy. In addition to development projects and cross-border investment flows, the petrodollar also financed U.S. weapons exports that accelerated the Mideast arms race. The petrodollar extended the dollar's global dominance by fueling demand for dollar-denominated investments outside the U.S., including in the burgeoning eurodollar market. $595 Billion The global net oil export revenue from OPEC members in 2019, according to the U.S. Energy Information Association. Doomsday Predictions Vs. Reality There's an inherent tension between global demand for investable assets denominated in a widely used currency and the likelihood that issuing such liabilities in volume over time will dent the issuer's creditworthiness, eroding confidence in its currency. The conundrum, first outlined by economist Robert Triffin in 1960, is now known as the Triffin Dilemma. In practice, the advantages of a dominant reserve currency accrue to users immediately, while the drawback Triffin identified manifests at a glacial pace with unpredictable timing. The British pound accounted for 30% of global foreign exchange reserves as late as 1968, nearly a century after the U.S. supplanted the U.K. as the largest global economy. As of 2020, the U.S. economy still accounted for nearly a quarter of global GDP and was more than 40% larger than its nearest rival. It also had by far the world's largest current account deficit. As Triffin noted, a large current account deficit is unavoidable for the issuer of a reserve currency. Global economies continue to evolve in ways that can ease stresses on the system. For example, the U.S. became a net oil and petroleum products exporter in recent years, reducing the flow of "petrodollars" in favor of plain old dollars accruing to oil producing states like Texas. The reshoring process, which gained extra impetus amid supply chain disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, could eventually slow or even reverse the growth of the U.S. trade deficit. The Bottom Line The rise of petrodollar oil export earnings reflected and further entrenched the primacy of the U.S. dollar in global trade and investment. Big gains in domestic energy supply have diminished the U.S. economy's reliance on oil imports, and petrodollar reinvestment. Meanwhile, the global economy remains deeply dependent on the dollar as a reserve currency. 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. Healthcare jobs topped the list of the highest paid jobs, and the sectors future is very bright. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), employment in healthcare occupations is projected to grow 16% from 2020 to 2030. This should add about 2.6 million new jobs. This growth is mainly due to an aging population, leading to greater demand for healthcare services, according to the agency. Here's a snapshot of the highest paid jobs. Be sure to read on for the details of each. Anesthesiologists: $331,190 Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons: $311,460 Obstetricians-Gynecologists: $296,210 Surgeons: $294,520 Orthodontists: $267,280 Physicians (Other): $255,110 Psychiatrists: $249,760 Internal Medicine Physicians: $242,190 Family Medicine Physicians: $235,930 Chief Executives: $213,020 Nurse Anesthetists: $202,470 Pediatricians (General): $198,420 Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers: $198,190 Dentists (All Other Specialties): $175,160 Dentists (General): $167,160 Computer and Information Systems Managers: $162,930 Architectural and Engineering Managers: $158,970 Natural Sciences Managers: $156,110 Financial Managers: $153,460 Marketing Managers: $153,440 Physicist: $151,580 Judges: $148,030 Podiatrists: $145,840 Petroleum Engineers: $145,720 Prosthodontists: $143,730 Key Takeaways Several healthcare jobs topped the list of the highest paid jobs. Fifteen of the top 25 highest-paying occupations are healthcare positions. Corporate chief executives are in the highest-paid profession outside of the healthcare field. The average projected growth rate for all jobs between 2020 to 2030 is 8%. Being your own employer or owning your own practice will significantly affect salary potential. However, that is not considered here outside of chief executive officers (CEOs). The Methodology Used Rankings are based on salary data from the BLS. Instead of using median salaries for each occupation, which signify the annual wage of a typical employee in that role, the BLS uses mean, or average salaries in the annual report, National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates. 1. Anesthesiologists: $331,190 The BLS defines anesthesiologists as physicians who administer anesthetics and analgesics for pain management prior to, during, or after surgery. This highly specialized career has topped the list of highest-earning professions. Work hours for an anesthesiologist follow the schedule of the operating room, which can be long and unpredictable. Thats because anesthesiologists need to be there for both scheduled surgeries and emergency procedures, such as traumatic events and childbirth. Education Following four years of medical school, aspiring anesthesiologists in the U.S. typically complete a four-year residency in anesthesiology and possibly even more, depending on the subspecialty. Following four years of medical school, aspiring anesthesiologists in the U.S. typically complete a four-year residency in anesthesiology and possibly even more, depending on the subspecialty. Job Outlook Overall, employment is expected to drop 1% from 2020 to 2030, according to the BLS. 2. Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons: $311,460 Oral and maxillofacial surgeons treat a wide range of diseases, injuries, and defects in and around the mouth and jaw. Among the more common problems theyre likely to manage are problematic wisdom teeth, misaligned jaws, tumors, and cysts of the jaw and mouth. They may also perform dental implant surgery. Education Typically, oral and maxillofacial surgeons require an undergraduate degree, a four-year dental degree, and at least four years of residency. After their training, surgeons often take a two-part exam to become certified in the United States by the American Board of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. Typically, oral and maxillofacial surgeons require an undergraduate degree, a four-year dental degree, and at least four years of residency. After their training, surgeons often take a two-part exam to become certified in the United States by the American Board of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. Job Outlook From 2020 to 2030, employment is expected to increase by 8%, according to the BLS. 3. Obstetricians-Gynecologists: $296,210 Doctors specializing in vaginal, ovarian, uterine, and cervical reproductive health and childbirth, known as obstetricians-gynecologists, or OB-GYNs, make slightly more than the annual wages listed for general surgeons. Successful OB-GYNs are good at communicating information to patients that improve their health and that of their babies. They also excel at handling high-stress situationsmost notably childbirththat can occur at odd hours of the day. Education Becoming an OB-GYN requires graduation from medical school as well as the completion of an obstetrics program and a gynecology residency program, which typically last four years. After two years of clinical practice, these physicians have to pass a licensure exam. Becoming an OB-GYN requires graduation from medical school as well as the completion of an obstetrics program and a gynecology residency program, which typically last four years. After two years of clinical practice, these physicians have to pass a licensure exam. Job Outlook The number of OB-GYN jobs is expected to decrease by 2% from 2020 to 2030, according to the BLS. 4. Surgeons: $294,520 Although becoming a surgeon requires several years of specialized training, these elite physicians are rewarded with one of the highest-paying careers. Surgeons may find themselves working long, irregular hours, depending on their specialty. While those focusing on preventative and elective surgeries may have a more predictable schedule, surgeons working in fields such as trauma or neurosurgery often work extended, even overnight, shifts. Surgeons perform operations to treat broken bones and diseases, such as cancer. Surgeons help manage the patients care before and after surgery. Even when theyre not scheduled for work, a surgeon may need to address patient concerns over the phone, and on-call surgeons sometimes make emergency trips to a hospital. Education Becoming a surgeon requires the successful completion of medical school, a multi-year residency program, and sometimes a specialized fellowship. Becoming a surgeon requires the successful completion of medical school, a multi-year residency program, and sometimes a specialized fellowship. Job Outlook Overall, employment is projected to increase by 3% from 2020 to 2030, according to the BLS. 5. Orthodontists: $267,280 Orthodontists specialize in corrective measures for the teeth and are often referred out by the patients dentists. These doctors frequently take X-rays, apply braces, create mouth guards, and perform other procedures as needed. High-achieving orthodontists require good communication skills, as they work with patients directly, plus strong analytical and problem-solving abilities. While some work for large orthodontic offices, others own their own practice, which requires strong management skills. Education After earning a college degree, future orthodontists need to complete a dental school program that involves classroom and clinical experience. These newly minted doctors must then complete a specialized residency program and sit for a licensing exam. After earning a college degree, future orthodontists need to complete a dental school program that involves classroom and clinical experience. These newly minted doctors must then complete a specialized residency program and sit for a licensing exam. Job Outlook By 2030, the BLS expects the number of orthodontic jobs in the U.S. to reach 6,900, reflecting an 8% increase from 2020. 6. Physicians (Other): $255,110 If you take the mean salary of all physicians working in all other specialties, they would come in sixth place. This other grouping includes jobs as varied as allergists, cardiologists, dermatologists, oncologists (who treat cancer), gastroenterologists (digestive system specialists), and ophthalmologists (eye specialists). It also covers pathologists, who study body tissue for possible abnormalities, and radiologists, who analyze medical images and administer radiation treatment to cancer patients. Education Any medical doctor (M.D.) or doctor of osteopathic medicine (D.O.) is going to require medical school after attaining a bachelors degree. Most clinical professions also require the completion of a residency program, although some may go on and receive fellowship training after that. Any medical doctor (M.D.) or doctor of osteopathic medicine (D.O.) is going to require medical school after attaining a bachelors degree. Most clinical professions also require the completion of a residency program, although some may go on and receive fellowship training after that. Job Outlook Total employment among all physicians is expected to increase 5% from 2020 to 2030, according to the BLS. 7. Psychiatrists: $249,760 While all psychiatrists help treat mental health issues, its a field with a vast range of specialties. Some work on child and adolescent psychiatry, for example, while others specialize in forensic (legal) psychiatry, addiction psychiatry, or consultation psychiatry, which occurs in a medical setting. Others specialize in psychoanalysis, where the psychiatrist helps the patient remember and examine past events and emotions to better understand their current feelings. Psychiatrists can be found in any number of work environments: private practice, hospitals, community agencies, schools, rehabilitation programs, and even prisons. Education Unlike psychologists, psychiatrists are medical doctors. After receiving an undergraduate degree, they have to complete medical school, followed by a residency program. According to the American Psychiatric Association, the first year of residency typically involves working in a hospital setting and managing a variety of medical conditions, followed by three or more years focused on mental health and medications. Thereafter, graduates often apply for certification from the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. Unlike psychologists, psychiatrists are medical doctors. After receiving an undergraduate degree, they have to complete medical school, followed by a residency program. According to the American Psychiatric Association, the first year of residency typically involves working in a hospital setting and managing a variety of medical conditions, followed by three or more years focused on mental health and medications. Thereafter, graduates often apply for certification from the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. Job Outlook Among physicians, psychology is expected to be one of the fastest-growing specialties over the next several years. The BLS predicts that employment will grow 13% from 2020 to 2030. 8. Internal Medicine Physicians: $242,190 Internists, who often serve as primary care doctors or hospitalists, specialize in the care of adult patients. As with other general practice physicians, internists who work in a primary care capacity see a lot of patients and need to treat a range of ailments, from asthma and diabetes to high cholesterol and hypertension. With visits often lasting 15 or 30 minutes, quick decision-making skills are a must. Education After receiving a college degree and successfully completing medical school, internists typically complete a residency program where they rotate through multiple healthcare specialties. Some pursue more specialized training in areas such as cardiology, pulmonology, and oncology. Internists who are board-certified have a major edge in the job market. After receiving a college degree and successfully completing medical school, internists typically complete a residency program where they rotate through multiple healthcare specialties. Some pursue more specialized training in areas such as cardiology, pulmonology, and oncology. Internists who are board-certified have a major edge in the job market. Job Outlook Employment among general medicine internists is expected to drop 1% between 2020 and 2030, according to the BLS. 9. Family Medicine Physicians: $235,930 The BLS defines this category as physicians who "diagnose, treat, and provide preventive care to individuals and families across the lifespan." These medical doctors often refer patients to specialists for advanced treatments. Family medicine physicians, also known as primary care physicians, are typically where patients go for periodic exams and the treatment of common health ailments, such as sinus and respiratory infections, as well as chronic illnesses, such as diabetes, asthma, and heart disease. Some primary care doctors specifically work with adults (internists) or children (pediatricians). Those who treat patients of all ages, from childhood to advanced age, are known as family physicians. Because of their varied patient population, family practice doctors generally manage a wider range of medical conditions. Education After graduation from medical school, family medicine physicians complete a residency program. Doctors are required to complete a certain number of months in each training area before applying for board certification. After graduation from medical school, family medicine physicians complete a residency program. Doctors are required to complete a certain number of months in each training area before applying for board certification. Job Outlook According to the BLS, employment among family medicine doctors is expected to grow 5% from 2020 to 2030. 10. Chief Executives: $213,020 Chief executives represent the highest-paid profession outside of the medical or dental fields. As the highest-ranking employee of a company, the CEOs job is to make critical decisions regarding the management team, steer the organization toward new markets or product areas, and interface with the board of directors. While highly paid, many chief executives have daunting schedules. A Harvard Business Review survey found that the average CEO spends 62.5 hours per week on the job, with about half their time spent in the office and half traveling. Education Not surprisingly, a Forbes study found that the majority of Fortune 100 CEOs (53%) received a bachelors degree in business administration. However, many had undergraduate majors in unrelated fields (though some later received a master of business administration, or MBA, degree). Many executives in tech-related companies studied engineering as undergraduates. Not surprisingly, a Forbes study found that the majority of Fortune 100 CEOs (53%) received a bachelors degree in business administration. However, many had undergraduate majors in unrelated fields (though some later received a master of business administration, or MBA, degree). Many executives in tech-related companies studied engineering as undergraduates. Job Outlook The number of people working as top executives is expected to grow about 8% from 2020 to 2030. 11. Nurse Anesthetists: $202,470 Nursing tends to pay well in general compared with most other career paths, although nurse anesthetists do particularly well. Per the BLS, nurse anesthetists administer anesthesia and provide care before, during, and after surgical, therapeutic, diagnostic, and obstetrical procedures. While their role is similar to that of an anesthesiologist, they dont complete the same level of training. That means becoming a nurse anesthetist takes less time and money than going to medical school and becoming a physician. Certified registered nurse anesthetists (CRNAs) may work in a broad array of different settings, including hospital surgical suites, obstetrical delivery rooms, ambulatory surgical centers, doctors offices, and pain management centers. Education Candidates have to graduate with a masters degree from an accredited program, which typically takes 24 to 51 months. Some go on to complete a fellowship program, particularly if theyre specializing within the field. To become a CRNA, candidates also need at least one year of full-time experience working as a registered nurse in a critical-care setting. Candidates have to graduate with a masters degree from an accredited program, which typically takes 24 to 51 months. Some go on to complete a fellowship program, particularly if theyre specializing within the field. To become a CRNA, candidates also need at least one year of full-time experience working as a registered nurse in a critical-care setting. Job Outlook Its hard to find a job that will grow faster than nurse anesthetists over the next several years; the BLS expects employment to grow 45% between 2020 and 2030. 12. Pediatricians (General): $198,420 Pediatriciansphysicians who specifically treat childrenmake less than internists and general practitioners but are still among the highest-paid professionals. These general practitioners perform checkups and exams for younger patients, treat common ailments, and administer immunizations. They often refer patients to a specialist when their health issues are more complex. Pediatricians require strong critical-thinking skills, especially given the large number of patients they often serve, as well as excellent interpersonal skills and empathy. Education After medical school, pediatricians enter residency programs that allow them to develop their skills in a clinical environment. They must pass licensing exams to practice, and most receive board certification to boost their prospects in the job market. After medical school, pediatricians enter residency programs that allow them to develop their skills in a clinical environment. They must pass licensing exams to practice, and most receive board certification to boost their prospects in the job market. Job Outlook There are currently around 30,200 pediatricians practicing in the United States, although the BLS expects that number to drop by 2% between 2020 and 2030. 13. Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers: $198,190 Working in the aviation industry can mean a lot of time away from home, but it also leads to a nice paycheck in many cases. The BLS lumps airline pilots, copilots, and flight engineers into one category. The pilot, or captain, typically has the most experience operating a plane and oversees the other members of the flight crew. The copilot is the second in command during the flight and helps the captain with responsibilities in the cockpit. Flight engineers do preflight checks, monitor the planes cabin pressure, assess how much fuel is being burned, and perform other important duties. However, because of the increased amount of automation in new aircraft, there are fewer jobs for flight engineers than there used to be. Education Airline pilots usually require a bachelors degree and have an Airline Transport Pilot certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration. They often start out as commercial pilots and accrue thousands of hours of experience in the cockpit before gaining employment with an airline. Airline pilots usually require a bachelors degree and have an Airline Transport Pilot certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration. They often start out as commercial pilots and accrue thousands of hours of experience in the cockpit before gaining employment with an airline. Job Outlook There are roughly 74,700 individuals employed as airline pilots, copilots, and flight engineers in the United States. The BLS expects that number to rise by 14% between 2020 and 2030. 14. Dentists (All Other Specialties): $175,160 Dentists who specialize in other practice areas also get compensated quite well. The BLS lumps these other specialists into one group. Among the practitioners included in this category are endodontists, who perform root canals and other procedures dealing with the inside of the tooth, and periodontists, who treat the gums and bones around the teeth. Education Most dental programs require a bachelors degree with coursework in biology and chemistry. Like other dental professionals, specialists must take the Dental Admission Test to get accepted into an accredited dental program. After dental school, specialists typically complete two to three years of additional training in the field of their choice. Most dental programs require a bachelors degree with coursework in biology and chemistry. Like other dental professionals, specialists must take the Dental Admission Test to get accepted into an accredited dental program. After dental school, specialists typically complete two to three years of additional training in the field of their choice. Job Outlook The BLS expects employment in the specialties listed above to increase 5% between 2020 and 2030. 15. Dentists (General): $167,160 Dentists often show up in lists of the best jobs in healthcare. While the pay tends to be attractive, the combination of relatively low stress and flexible scheduling certainly adds to the appeal. In a typical week, dental practitioners might find themselves analyzing X-rays, filling cavities, extracting damaged teeth, and administering sealants. Its a job that requires a strong grasp of best practices in the field, attention to detail, and the ability to develop a good rapport with patients. Education While not always required to do so, dentists often select biology or other science majors as an undergraduate. After college, they take the Dental Admission Test (DAT) to get into a dental school, where they learn about subjects such as local anesthesia, anatomy, periodontics, and radiology. They also receive clinical experience under the supervision of a practicing dentist. While not always required to do so, dentists often select biology or other science majors as an undergraduate. After college, they take the Dental Admission Test (DAT) to get into a dental school, where they learn about subjects such as local anesthesia, anatomy, periodontics, and radiology. They also receive clinical experience under the supervision of a practicing dentist. Job Outlook The BLS expects overall employment among dentists to increase by 8% from 2020 to 2030, with over 139,000 in the field. 16. Computer and Information Systems Managers: $162,930 Computer and information systems (IS) managers oversee functions such as electronic data processing, information systems, systems analysis, and computer programming. They evaluate the information technology (IT) needs of a business or government body and work with technical staff to implement computer systems that meet those objectives. Successful managers need to develop sound plans that mesh with the goals of the organization, as well as the ability to motivate employees who are under their supervision. Before becoming IS managers, individuals generally have several years of experience under their belt in a related field. In general, larger organizations require more-seasoned IT managers than smaller companies or startups. According to the BLS, a chief technology officer (CTO), who supervises the entire technology function at a larger organization, will often need more than 15 years of IT experience. Education Most computer and information systems managers have received a bachelors degree in a computer-related major. Some have graduated from management information systems (MIS) programs, which add business coursework to the normal computer programming and software development classes. To advance into a managerial role, IT professionals sometimes work toward a master of business administration (MBA) or other graduate degrees. MBA programs usually take two years to complete full time, although some employers take courses part-time while they continue to work in an IT capacity. Most computer and information systems managers have received a bachelors degree in a computer-related major. Some have graduated from management information systems (MIS) programs, which add business coursework to the normal computer programming and software development classes. To advance into a managerial role, IT professionals sometimes work toward a master of business administration (MBA) or other graduate degrees. MBA programs usually take two years to complete full time, although some employers take courses part-time while they continue to work in an IT capacity. Job Outlook The BLS projects that total employment will jump 11% between 2020 and 2030, much faster than the economy-wide average. 17. Architectural and Engineering Managers: $158,970 These managers are charged with coordinating all the technical aspects of architecture or engineering projects. That can include consulting with clients and preparing specifications for the project, analyzing the feasibility of work being proposed, and reviewing contracts and budgets. In addition to having strong administrative skills, managers in these fields need a background in architecture or engineering to understand the demands of a particular project. Education While some engineering management positions may only require a bachelors degree, some employers require a masters. For positions that are nontechnical in nature, managers often pursue a masters in business administration. For those in more technical roles, however, degrees such as a masters in engineering management are often more beneficial. While some engineering management positions may only require a bachelors degree, some employers require a masters. For positions that are nontechnical in nature, managers often pursue a masters in business administration. For those in more technical roles, however, degrees such as a masters in engineering management are often more beneficial. Job Outlook Jobs in architectural and engineering management are expected to grow 4% between 2020 and 2030, according to the BLS. 18. Natural Sciences Managers: $156,110 Moving up the organizational chart is the ticket to a good payday in just about any field, and the sciences are no different. Professionals who supervise chemists, physicists, biologists, and other scientists are in the top 25 of all occupations when it comes to mean pay. Natural sciences managers can have any number of titles, including health sciences manager, laboratory manager, research and development director, research manager, senior investigator, and senior scientist. What they have in common is a responsibility to coordinate activities such as testing, quality control, and production and to oversee research and development. Education The typical career path for managers begins as a scientist. In some cases, that may only require a bachelors degree, although many roles necessitate a masters degree or Ph.D. in a scientific field. Some managers pursue a professional science masters (PSM) degree program, which fuses advanced scientific learning with business coursework. The typical career path for managers begins as a scientist. In some cases, that may only require a bachelors degree, although many roles necessitate a masters degree or Ph.D. in a scientific field. Some managers pursue a professional science masters (PSM) degree program, which fuses advanced scientific learning with business coursework. Job Outlook The 2020 to 2030 outlook for natural sciences managers looks bright, with 6% employment growth expected by the BLS. 19. Financial Managers: $153,460 The finance department plays a pivotal role, especially in medium- and large-sized organizations. Among their responsibilities are planning investment activities and assessing market trends to maximize profits while controlling risk. They also create financial reports that help the senior management team make decisions and inform shareholders. Jobs that fall within the fast-growing financial manager category include controllers, who prepare financial reports such as income statements and balance sheets; treasurers, who devise investment strategies for the organization; and risk managers, who use various measures to limit the companys exposure to financial or currency risk. Education According to the BLS, financial managers usually need a bachelors degree or higher in fields such as finance, accounting, economics, or business administration. Before assuming a manager role, most finance professionals have several years of experience in jobs such as loan officer, accountant, securities sales agent, or financial analyst. According to the BLS, financial managers usually need a bachelors degree or higher in fields such as finance, accounting, economics, or business administration. Before assuming a manager role, most finance professionals have several years of experience in jobs such as loan officer, accountant, securities sales agent, or financial analyst. Job Outlook The need for financial managers is likely to grow much faster than the job market overall. The BLS foresees a 17% increase in total employment between 2020 and 2030. 20. Marketing Managers: $153,440 Products and services dont sell themselves. It takes talented professionals to analyze how much demand there is for a particular offering and find ways to bring it to market. These functions are crucial to a business's bottom line, so it may not be a surprise that marketing managers are among the highest-paid professions in the U.S. To flourish, marketing managers have to demonstrate a blend of creativity and business acumen. Day-to-day activities include everything from acquiring market research to planning promotional activities to developing websites and social media campaigns. Education Marketing managers typically need a bachelors degree, with classwork in areas such as management, economics, finance, computer science, and statistics being particularly helpful. Highly competitive jobs may require a masters degree. Marketing managers typically need a bachelors degree, with classwork in areas such as management, economics, finance, computer science, and statistics being particularly helpful. Highly competitive jobs may require a masters degree. Job Outlook The BLS expects the job market for marketing managers to grow faster than average, with an estimated 10% growth from 2020 to 2030. 21. Physicist: $151,580 Physicists can often be the most important person on a project as they conduct research into physical phenomena, develop theories on the basis of observation and experiments, and devise methods to apply physical laws and theories. In short, they make sure things both work and work well. While many work in an office environment, it isn't always desk work. Physicists can find themselves jockeying between paperwork and working in research labs. Education It is a common requirement for positions that a physicist possess a Ph.D. in physics, astronomy, or a related field, which is usually concerned with advanced mathematics or engineering. Common courseload will include courses such as quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and electromagnetism. It is a common requirement for positions that a physicist possess a Ph.D. in physics, astronomy, or a related field, which is usually concerned with advanced mathematics or engineering. Common courseload will include courses such as quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and electromagnetism. Job Outlook Physicists are in demand, as much as any other occupation. Between 2020 and 2030, the BLS states that physicists should expect to see employment projections of 8%. 22. Judges: $148,030 Judges don't only swing the gavel. They preside over hearings, determine the relevance of information presented, apply laws and precedents to seek judgments, and write opinions on their decisions regarding cases and disputes. Judges are also required to guide a jury when a jury is selected to decide the case. When there is no jury, the judge makes the final ruling. They ensure that hearings and trials are conducted fairly and that the legal rights of all involved parties are protected. Education Many judges were successful as lawyers before they became judges. Law school is a requirement for the position, as well as a clean record of practicing. Most judges are appointed or elected, which means there is a fair bit of politics when it comes to pursuing the bench, taking terms between 4 and 14 years. Certain judges are appointed for life. Many judges were successful as lawyers before they became judges. Law school is a requirement for the position, as well as a clean record of practicing. Most judges are appointed or elected, which means there is a fair bit of politics when it comes to pursuing the bench, taking terms between 4 and 14 years. Certain judges are appointed for life. Job Outlook The job growth rate for judges is slower than the average of all occupations. Judges can expect to see a growth of 3% from 2020 to 2030, significantly slower than the national average of 8%. 23. Podiatrists: $145,840 Podiatrists diagnose and treat diseases and deformities of the foot, ankle, and lower leg. They provide medical and surgical care. Most podiatrists work in offices of podiatry, either on their own or with other podiatrists or health practitioners. Others work in private and public hospitals, in outpatient care centers, or for the government at a federal executive branch. Education Podiatrists must have a Doctor of Podiatric Medicine (DPM) degree from an accredited college of podiatric medicine. A DPM degree program takes four years to complete. After earning a DPM, podiatrists must apply to and complete a three-year podiatric medicine and surgery residency (PMSR) program. Residency programs take place in hospitals and provide both medical and surgical experience. They may need to complete additional training in specific areas, such as podiatric wound care or diabetic foot care. Podiatrists must have a Doctor of Podiatric Medicine (DPM) degree from an accredited college of podiatric medicine. A DPM degree program takes four years to complete. After earning a DPM, podiatrists must apply to and complete a three-year podiatric medicine and surgery residency (PMSR) program. Residency programs take place in hospitals and provide both medical and surgical experience. They may need to complete additional training in specific areas, such as podiatric wound care or diabetic foot care. Job Outlook One drawback of a future career as a podiatrist is a potential lack of job openings. According to the BLS, employment in this sector is projected to grow 2% from 2020 to 2030, slower than the average for all occupations. An average of 900 openings for podiatrists are projected each year. Most of these openings may result from the need to replace workers who transfer or retire. 24. Petroleum Engineers: $145,720 Energy sources, including fossil fuels such as oil and gas, are the lifeblood of the economy. However, extracting those important resources efficiently requires some serious know-how, and petroleum engineers play a big role. Their main goal is to develop methods to pull oil and gas from new deposits below the Earths surface and design new ways to extract fossil fuels from existing wells. Typically, the responsibilities of a petroleum engineer include ascertaining operational methods, performing a cost-benefit analysis for a given project, and analyzing survey or geographic data. Among the titles they may possess are completions engineers, who help devise the optimal way to finish a well; drilling engineers, who figure out how to efficiently and safely drill the well; production engineers, who evaluate oil and gas production after the well has been created; and reservoir engineers, who estimate the amount of oil and gas available in underground deposits, which are known as reservoirs. Education Future petroleum engineers benefit from taking extensive coursework in math and science as early as high school. Entry-level jobs in the field require at least a bachelors degree, with coursework generally focusing on engineering principles, thermodynamics, and geology. Some universities offer five-year combined programs that lead to a bachelors and a masters, which may be necessary for some employers or for those hoping for greater advancement. Future petroleum engineers benefit from taking extensive coursework in math and science as early as high school. Entry-level jobs in the field require at least a bachelors degree, with coursework generally focusing on engineering principles, thermodynamics, and geology. Some universities offer five-year combined programs that lead to a bachelors and a masters, which may be necessary for some employers or for those hoping for greater advancement. Job Outlook When it comes to employment growth, the BLS expects petroleum engineering to be roughly average between 2020 and 2030, at 8%. 25. Prosthodontists: $143,730 Prosthodontists fix damaged teeth or missing teeth with artificial devices such as dental implants, dentures, bridges, crowns, and veneers. Physicians who thrive in this specialty have a strong inclination toward science, are able to diagnose complex dental problems, and possess the mechanical acumen to properly address ailments. Many of them work with cancer patients, making it important to understand the needs of surgical patients and treat individuals going through radiation or chemotherapy. Education A career in prosthodontics requires a college degree, followed by completion of a dental school program, where they become either a doctor of dental surgery (DDS) or a doctor of dental medicine (DDM). Candidates follow that up with a residency program and ultimately apply for certification from the American Board of Prosthodontics. A career in prosthodontics requires a college degree, followed by completion of a dental school program, where they become either a doctor of dental surgery (DDS) or a doctor of dental medicine (DDM). Candidates follow that up with a residency program and ultimately apply for certification from the American Board of Prosthodontics. Job Outlook Its a pretty exclusive clubthere are only about 700 prosthodontists in the U.S. However, the number of prosthodontists is expected to grow 8% from 2020 to 2030, according to BLS projections. What Is the Highest Paying Job in the World? The highest-paying job in the world, in a traditional sense, holds the number one spot in this article: anesthesiologist. They are also the only job listed above $300,000 a year. The list, however, does not take into account mega-CEOs like Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos, who make considerably more than that. Who Gets the Highest Salary in the World? CEOs of massive companies always top the list. In 2020, that was Tim Cook, Apple CEO, who cashed in some stock options and took home an enormous $265 million. That's slightly over $1 million for each working day. Tim Cook took home almost $100 million in 2021. How Can I Get a High-Paying Job? Most high-paying jobs require advanced degrees such as a Ph.D. or medical degree. Although some of the jobs on this list require only an undergrad, the reality is that it's increasingly more difficult to land a coveted position when you are competing against someone with secondary degrees. The Bottom Line When it comes to high-paying jobs, its hard to beat a career in healthcare. Specialists tend to earn the largest paychecks, but general practitioners and even nonphysician roles, such as nurse anesthetists, certainly bring in attractive salaries. If the medical field isnt for you, then careers such as engineering and management can also lead to lucrative jobs. Donegal airport has been voted among the most beautiful places in the world where you could touch down on your holidays. A global poll of travel experts and and fans placed Irelands most northerly airport as the seventh best place in the world to catch a phenomenal view as your plane approaches its landing, which is a comforting thought for anybody who is a bit of a nervous flyer. With Aer Lingus Regional operating services to Dublin just twice daily from this location, as well as a four-times weekly service to Glasgow, Donegal Airport is far from the normal hectic transfer or getting-through-security-and-customs-stress that you probably associate with airports. From above it's even less stress-inducing. Set between the Atlantic Ocean and Donegal mountains, the airport is located in the midst of the countys Gaeltacht in Carrickfinn and has travelers gushing about its landing and takeoff backdrop. "You arrive in the Emerald Isle adjacent to one of the most beautiful beaches in the world; Carrickfinn with a backdrop of the majestic Mount Errigal on one side and an array of craggy islands on the other. The clear turquoise blue sea is just a bonus on a sunny day!" explained one fan. There's nothing more breathtaking than flying over the rugged coastline of Donegal. Awe-inspiring to say the least. The rugged landscape transports to a time long ago and much forgotten, commented another. The airport itself is delighted to have won international acclaim, despite its small number of services. "We're over the moon and the team are delighted," said Pauline Sweeney, Marketing Manager with Donegal Airport. "This will really create awareness for the airport and its location. It will highlight the county and the Wild Atlantic Way. It's all about awareness." Stunning "Donegal Airport" voted 7th most scenic airport in the world. Boom times ahead for Donegal Tourism pic.twitter.com/FDNqbmXBMc Donegal Daily (@DonegalDaily) April 20, 2016 Landing at Carrickfinn airport in west Donegal Czapla at http://t.co/KXiAQZeG3n pic.twitter.com/QZohBuCCfB Visit Donegal (@visit_donegal) July 12, 2015 Donegal Airport's inclusion on the 2016 list will also, hopefully, work to boost the airport yet again following its 3.5 percent increase in travelers in 2015. Fine Gael Minister of State for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Joe McHugh, yesterday congratulated the airport on its achievement when announcing further government investment in the site for the coming year. The airport was granted $262,386 (232,200) in funding. I wish to commend the excellent standard of work the staff and team are doing at Donegal Airport, and wish to congratulate them on being voted one of the world's top 10 scenic airports this year. Todays news is a welcome development, and will no doubt help to continue the exceptional service being provided by Donegal Airport, McHugh said. THe poll was conducted by private jet booking service PrivateFly. Thousands of people voted on a short-list of airports chosen by a panel of international travel experts, including ex-New York Times travel writer Joe Sharkey. Ireland and its neighboring isles fared extremely well, taking three of the top ten spots. Donegal was joined by the lovely Barra Airport in Scotland in fourth place and London City Airport finishing off the list at number ten. The complete list included: Malta International Airport, Malta Nice Cote D'Azur Airport, France Queenstown Airport, New Zealand Barra Airport, Scotland, UK Saba Airport (Juancho E Yrausquin), Caribbean Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, Canada Donegal Airport, Ireland St Maarten Airport (Princess Juliana International), Caribbean Los Angeles International Airport, USA London City Airport, UK H/T: Donegal Airport The head of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson has extended Malachy McAllisters time in the US by up to one year. The Irishman, who has spent 20 years living responsibly in New Jersey after fleeing sectarian violence in Northern Ireland with his family, has been informed of the stay of deportation and will be meeting with Homeland Security officials on Monday. Supporters are hoping that he will be given the full year to sort out his case, though the change of administration in January may complicate things. This one year reprieve comes after sustained pressure from leading Irish American politicians, led by Joe Crowley, as well as New York Senator Chuck Schumer, New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez, Representative Bill Pascrell, and NY Representative Peter King. McAllister, a Belfast native, was slated to be deported on Monday, April 25. He was told by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to report for deportation at an office in Newark, NJ on that moning an action which would have brought an abrupt end to McAllisters 20 years in the U.S. after fleeing Northern Ireland with his family in fear of their lives after their home was shot at by Loyalist paramilitaries in 1988. Read More: Irish refugee who fled Troubles faces deportation from the US after 20 years A number of McAllister's children and grandchildren were born here. He owns a successful stone mason business in New Jersey which has employed several U.S. citizens, and a new Irish bar and restaurant in Manhattan, Wolfe Tones Irish Pub and Kitchen. His record has been spotless since arrival in the U.S., and he has long disavowed paramilitary activity in the North, staunchly advocating for the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement. In addition to senators and congressional representatives from New York and New Jersey, McAllister has received strong support from the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Irish American community, and met with Hillary Clinton at an Irish rally for the presidential candidate Monday Night. Read More: Desperate efforts to stop deportation of Malachy McAllister from the US Malachy McAllister won the support of Hillary Clinton on Monday night in his ongoing quest to avoid deportation next Monday, April 25. McAllister, a resident of the U.S. for 20 years who fled his home in Belfast after Loyalist paramilitaries attacked it with gunfire in 1988, met with Clinton at an Irish American rally hosted by John Fitzpatrick at the Fitzpatrick Grand Central Hotel. She was shocked to hear that my case is still going on, that it hasnt been settled, McAllister told the Irish Voice on Tuesday morning. She remembered me from my speaking at a Brehon Law Society event in 2004. She was very surprised that Im facing deportation. McAllister was accompanied to the Clinton meeting by attorney Brian ODwyer, who stressed to Clinton the importance the Irish American community places on McAllisters case and his goal to remain in the U.S. with his family which includes a four-year-old son. She gave me great time and consideration and I was very grateful for that, said McAllister, a resident of Rutherford, New Jersey who owns a successful contracting business and recently opened an Irish pub in Manhattan. Last week, New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez and Congressman Bill Pascrell introduced a private bill, HR 4920, seeking to block the deportation ordered by the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which sent a letter to McAllister last month ordering him to report to an ICE office in Newark, New Jersey for deportation. McAllisters status in the U.S. has received an order of deferred action each year while his case for legalization continues in the courts, after a denial of his political asylum application. McAllister, a former member of the INLA who served three years in prison in the 1980s for his role in the outlawed paramilitary group, also traveled to Washington, D.C. last week for a meeting with political supporters on Capitol Hill. A letter signed by 44 members of the House and Senate to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and ICE Director Sarah Saldana is also circulating on his behalf. Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams has also written to the Department of Homeland Security, stressing the importance of continuing to secure the Good Friday peace deal in the North, and the bad signal that would be sent if McAllister were to be deported. We have great support in Washington, Joe Crowley, Peter King, Richie Neal, so many. We met with politicians and everyone is doing everything they can, McAllister said. The congressional letter urges Johnson and Saldana to continue granting deferred action to McAllister. For the past 20 years, Mr. McAllister has lived in the Tri-State New York/New Jersey area, contributing to American society and raising his family in safety and security. We urge you to consider fully his current contributions and weigh them against the circumstances surrounding his previous convictions, which we believe provider a greater context that is critical to developing an understanding of Mr. McAllisters background, the letter says. Mr. McAllister presents no threat to the safety and security of the United States, or to any other country, and his offenses are historical, committed over 30 years ago in the course of a now much-resolved centuries old political conflict. He clearly meets the departments guidelines for prosecutorial discretion on a number of different grounds, not least because he has resided here for decades and has a very young U.S. citizen child and family who depend on him, and which will suffer significant adverse consequences of his removal. With less than a week to go before the April 25 deportation deadline, McAllister is understandably nervous. The clock is ticking, and weve done everything we can do, said McAllister, who hopes that Johnson, a native of New York, will take note of all the local political support McAllister has and suspend the deportation order. On Tuesday, AOH National President Brendan Moore sent a letter to members of Congress urging them to take note of HR 4920 and the support that it has. Your colleagues are asking Homeland Security to suspend the deportation order on Malachy McAllister, a long time New Jersey resident and respected Irish community leader and business owner, Moore wrote. I ask you on behalf of our fellow AOH member, Malachy McAllister, his young family and all of those like him who continue to promote Peace in Ireland, to encourage HSE Director Jeh Johnson to allow Malachy to stay with his family in the USA. UPDATE: McAllister granted one year stay of deportation by Homeland Security The case of Malachy McAllister is expected to be resolved this week as it looks increasingly like it will take an executive decision by the White House and Homeland Security to save him from being sent back to Belfast. He is due to be deported Monday April 25. There is a McAllister bill before the House but Senate Judiciary Chairman Senator Jeff Sessions has apparently indicated he will not bring it up before that body. That means the only act that can save McAllister is for Homeland Security head Jeb Johnson to grant him a stay of deportation. Congressman Joe Crowley has led the fight to have McAllister stay in the US and he describes the situation as critical. What appears to have happened, according to Crowley, is a complete lack of institutional memory at DHS as a new breed, utterly unfamiliar with the peace process and the role played by people like McAllister, view the case through only a terrorist prism and seek to have him deported. We will continue to fight this until the bitter end, he said. There is no reason to deport this decent man who has helped the peace process. The Irish community deserve better. McAllister is caught in the kind of Kafka nightmare that makes most sane people shake their head. Caught up in the Northern troubles from an early age, McAllister slightly injured a RUC officer in a shootout in 1981 at a time when that force was looked upon like a Gestapo unit in many Catholic neighborhoods. Some time later in 1988 his house, where his wife and children resided, was attacked by a loyalist gang who riddled the home with bullets. McAllister packed up his family and fled, first to Canada then to the United States where he has lived an exemplary life for 20 years in Rutherford, NJ.. Out of the blue his case was reviewed and deportation ordered despite the fact that the British had not requested him and there was recent new evidence that he was a target for assassination by British forces when he lived there. It was heartening that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Malachy McAllister at the Clinton rally in New York this week. After the meeting McAllister stated, She was shocked to hear that my case is still going on, that it hasnt been settled, McAllister told the on Irish Voice newspaper on Tuesday morning. She remembered me from my speaking at a Brehon Law Society event in 2004. She was very surprised that Im facing deportation. She is one of many US influential figures to call for justice in the McAllister case. Irish American organizations are increasingly angry over the enforced deportation of a good and decent man who has been a valued member of the Irish community for over two decades. On Tuesday, AOH National President Brendan Moore sent a letter to members of Congress urging them to take note of HR 4920 and the support that it has. Your colleagues are asking Homeland Security to suspend the deportation order on Malachy McAllister, a long time New Jersey resident and respected Irish community leader and business owner, Moore wrote. I ask you on behalf of our fellow AOH member, Malachy McAllister, his young family and all of those like him who continue to promote Peace in Ireland, to encourage HSE Director Jeh Johnson to allow Malachy to stay with his family in the USA. Malachy, a stonemason and restaurateur, was a passionate proponent of the peace process and served as a living example of what can be achieved by determination and hard work as he made the American dream happen for him and his family, even after his first wife passed away tragically and he later remarried. He was so much a peace proponent that he was one of those recommended by the US administration to effectively receive non-deportation and amnesty status after the peace process was successful. Indeed, he was considered a model of what was possible in this life by immigration judge Judge Maryanne-Trump Barry, a sister of the presidential candidate but a woman clearly with very different views. When he exhausted his legal options before a Federal Court of Appeals in 2006, Judge Trump-Barry issued a plaintive call from the bench for relief from the executive:I refuse to believe that Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free is now an empty entreaty. But if it is, shame on us. Judge Trump-Barry concluded, we cannot be the country we should be if, because of the tragic events of September 11, we knee-jerk remove decent men and women merely because they may have erred at one point in their lives. We should look a little closer; we should care a little more. I would ask no, I would implore the Attorney General to exercise his discretion and permit this deserving family to stay. Armed with Barry's words and with broad bipartisan support in Congress it was a no-brainer that McAllister would be allowed to stay by the immigration authorities in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement. Then on March 25 this year came the hammer blow. McAllister was arrested and the Department of Homeland Security moved to have him deported by April 25, next Monday. What appears to have happened, according to insiders, is a complete lack of institutional memory at DHS as a new breed, utterly unfamiliar with the peace process and the role played by people like McAllister, view the case through only a terrorist prism and seek to have him deported. This makes no sense, Congressman Peter King said. The British arent asking to have him sent back. And if he does get sent back, there are dissidents in the republican movement who are trying to disrupt the peace process and they could use this. McAllister, who tragically lost his wife Bernadette during his fight to remain in America, states: My only desire for my family was to stake a piece of ground on the Eastern seaboard of the United States which we can finally call home. The past should remain where we left it. We say Amen! to that. Call your local congressman and demand that Malachy be allowed stay. The Capitol switchboard is 212-224-3121, ask to be put through to your congressman or senators office and ask for his or hers urgent support for HR 4920. Read more: Bill Clinton cant get enough of the New York Irish During the Easter of 1916, in the middle of the Great War, a rebellion took place in Ireland which sowed the seeds for the establishment of an Irish state independent of Great Britain. A seminal event in Irish history the equivalent of Americas 4th of July the Easter Rising had significant implications for other imperial relationships. Invoking the spirit of her 2.3 million exiled children in America, the rebels in Dublin proclaimed a new Republic one of whose role-models was the United States of America. As the Allies increasingly sought American support in continental Europe, Anglo-American relations were pressed on the Irish question and on Britains role in determining the fate of her small nation neighbor. Renowned historian and Director of NYUs Glucksman Ireland House NYU Joe Lee has observed, No America, no New York, no Easter Rising. Simple as that. Glucksman Ireland House, the Center for Irish and Irish American Studies at New York University, is currently presenting a four-day program examining the American dimensions of Irelands 1916 Easter Rising through film screenings and a symposium featuring over twenty scholars from throughout Ireland and U.S. The full four-day program, which began on April 19 and ends tomorrow, 22, interrogates that assertion by placing the Rising in a trans-national and trans-Atlantic setting. Twenty-two scholars, from a variety of disciplines, will excavate the ways in which the United States was an equally critical theater of war in Irelands journey towards independence. The symposium will begins today Thursday, April 2 and also runs tomorrow, Friday, April 22, at Pier A Harbor House, 22 Battery Place, New York City. As a prelude to the conference, Glucksman Ireland House NYU screened the acclaimed acclaimed docudrama A Terrible Beauty, followed by a Q&A with its filmmakers, on April 19 and April 20. The symposium will conclude with a special event in Washington Square Park, New York City, tomorrow, April 22, at 7pm. The Proclamation of the Irish Republic will be read in both English and Irish, followed by a short musical program by the Glee Club of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick. Irish actress Lisa Dwan, known for her performances of Samuel Becketts work, will read the Proclamation in English; she can currently be seen in Samuel Beckett Trilogy: Not I, Footfalls, Rockaby at NYUs Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. Full details for the programs, including ticketing, are available on the Ireland House website or by emailing ireland.house@nyu.edu. Glucksman Ireland House NYU is one of the top-ranked academic Irish Studies programs in the United States. Through innovative undergraduate and graduate academic curricula and extensive public programming, it provides access to the best in Irish and Irish American culture. Its initiatives include American Journal of Irish Studies, an extensive oral history project, and a weekly cultural affairs radio program Saturday mornings on WNYE 91.5FM. The Irish Blood Transfusion Service says it will make a decision in June whether to change its lifetime ban on receiving donations from gay and bisexual men. It is hearing from experts from countries which have switched to deferral periods, including the UK and Canada. President Michael D Higgins has led a day of commemorations for Roger Casement by describing him as a great Irish patriot and one of the 20th century's great humanitarians. Wreaths were laid at the monument dedicated to his role in the 1916 Rising beside Banna Strand and also at a State ceremony overlooking the sea where the rebel arrived in a German U-boat. Thousands of people attended the event with every vantage point taken on the dunes above the beach. The President said the commemoration was about taking pride in Casement's idealism, his exposure of exploitation by empires and his commitment to the cause of freedom in Ireland and abroad. Mr Higgins said the centenary is a chance to engage with the fundamental questions he raised about power and human rights, the rights of communities and indigenous peoples and foreign policy and international trade rules. "It is only now, despite the pioneering humanitarianism of such as Casement, that the degradation of indigenous peoples has grew into a central issue in human rights discourse," he said. "At the same time, it is in those very regions visited by Casement that we continue to see today the greatest damage to ecosystems and communities - and where, outrageously, once again immunity is being sought by irresponsible but powerful commercial interests in sectors such as logging and mining." Casement was hanged in Pentonville Prison, London, on August 3, 1916 after being found guilty of treason. His remains were returned to Ireland in 1965. After years working for Britain's foreign service, and exposing abuses in rubber plantations run by Belgium's King Leopold II in Congo, he was knighted. In 1914 he exposed similar human rights issues in Brazil. At the same time was a member of the Irish Volunteers and helped in the Howth gun running of that year. After spending 18 months in Germany while the First World War raged he travelled on U19 under Captain Raimund Weissbach to rendezvous with The Aud, a ship carrying 20,000 guns to Kerry for the Rising. The link-up did not go as planned and Casement came ashore at Banna with Captain Robert Monteith and Daniel Bailey on Good Friday, April 21. The Aud was intercepted by the British Navy and was scuttled by its captain, Karl Spindler, off Cork. Casement was arrested while holed up in McKenna's Fort near Banna suffering from the affects of malaria. His grandniece Lesley McNaughton laid a wreath in his honour at the monument near Banna before the State ceremony took place. A descendant of Captain Weissbach, Christian Weissbach, accepted an invite to the commemoration. The German and British ambassadors to Ireland, Matthias Hopfner and Dominick Chilcott, also attended. The deaths of Con Keating from Caherciveen, Donal Sheehan from Newcastle West and Charlie Monahan from Belfast on Good Friday 1916 were also remembered at Ballykissane Pier, Killorglin. They drowned in an aborted Irish Republican Brotherhood mission to to seize wireless radio equipment from the Atlantic College in Caherciveen. President Higgins, who laid a wreath at the anchor from the Aud in front of Banna Strand, also opened the country's first major exhibition on Casement at the Kerry County Museum. He described him as a full-blown Irish revolutionary. "Today we must also recall how, in a true Republican spirit, Roger Casement's generous vision for the Ireland of the future was one that included all of the people of Northern Ireland, in the diversity of their beliefs, origins and history," the President said. "This was a vision which Casement recalled in that same speech from the dock, when he said: 'We aimed at uniting the Ulster Volunteers to the cause of United Ireland. We aimed at uniting all Irishmen in a natural and national bond of cohesion based on mutual self-respect'." Let Me Tell You is a new bespoke podcast series from Hosts Daniel McConnell and Paul Hosford take a look back at some of the most dramatic moments in recent Irish political history from the unique perspective of one of the key players involved. Tesco has denied reports that it is to attend talks at the Workplace Relations Commission today. Management said that they are still waiting for a date to sit down with staff representatives at the WRC. An explosion has ripped through a petrochemical plant on the Gulf of Mexico's southern coast, killing three people, injuring dozens and sending a toxin-filled cloud into the air. State oil company Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) said 58 workers were hurt in the mid-afternoon blast in the industrial port city of Coatzacoalcos yesterday. Veracruz state governor Javier Duarte told Radio Formula that three people had lost their lives and tweeted that 105 people were injured, including the 58 workers. The blast was felt as far as six miles away, Mr Duarte said, adding that more than 2,000 people were evacuated from the area as a precaution. By early evening the fire was reported under control, but Pemex still urged people to stay away from the area. Officials cancelled Thursday's classes at local schools. "The cloud that emanated from the PMV plant in Coatzacoalcos is dissipating rapidly, which means it is losing its toxic effects," the company said. The plant produces vinyl chloride, a hazardous industrial chemical that is used to make PVC pipes and for other purposes. In early February a fire killed a worker at the same facility. Pemex said the explosion happened at 3.15pm at the Clorados 3 plant of Petroquimica Mexicana de Vinilo. The plant is operated by another company, Mexichem, in partnership with Pemex. Twenty of the injured workers were treated in a company clinic in Coatzacoalcos and 38 taken to nearby hospitals. The Veracruz state health department said two patients were in a grave condition after suffering burns to their air passages from toxic gases. Others were treated for injuries including minor burns, bruising and broken bones. There have been a number of accidents in recent years at plants owned by Pemex or where it operates. Also in February, the company reported two people killed and eight injured in a fire on an offshore platform in the Gulf of Mexico. The decision, based on a law that dates back to 1634, means the case will not go ahead, as the plaintiff does not have enough money to pay the legal fees. Ms Justice Aileen Donnelly said yesterday that third-party funding in such cases is illegal under Irish law. The plaintiff, James Boyle, of Persona Digital Telephony, said he does not have the 10m required, so would have to drop the case. Mr Boyle had sought to take a case after his company lost out on a mobile phone licence that was issued to Denis OBriens Esat Digifone consortium in 1996. He claimed Esat won the competition by bribing the then minister for communications, Michael Lowry, which is denied. While third-party funding of legal cases is common in Britain, it is banned in Ireland under the ancient law of champerty. It states that no third party should be allowed to fund a legal case in the hope that they will take a share of any financial award. The law is believed to date to Roman times and became part of Irish law during British rule, when the Maintenance and Embracery Act was passed in 1634. This case was the first time the law was directly challenged in an Irish court. In her judgment, Justice Donnelly said she had considered arguments made by Personas legal team that the constitutional right to access to the courts should supersede an ancient law that had been abandoned in Britain and elsewhere. She said Mr Boyle had confirmed that if the funding arrangement was not approved, he would have no means of prosecuting the case. However, citing numerous judgments by Irish courts upholding the law of champerty, she said third-party funding arrangements, cannot be viewed as being consistent with public policy in this jurisdiction. She said third-party funding remains a civil wrong and a criminal offence in Ireland, regardless of changes in attitude to similar arrangements in Britain or elsewhere. She also pointed out that Persona had not challenged the constitutionality of the law and that the Superior Courts of Ireland have upheld the elements of champerty. Justice Donnelly further noted that the legislature upheld the law on champerty in 2007, when it held a review of ancient laws and disposed of some of them. The injunction was sought by Ken Fennell in respect of a premises at 131 D Slaney Rd, Glasnevin, Dublin 11. The proceedings were brought against a number of people who, it was alleged, had been in occupation of the premises. Mr Fennell was appointed receiver of the premises by AIB in October 2014 after the bank obtained a judgment of 2.18m against the propertys owner, Christopher Noone. Yesterday Mr Justice Paul Gilligan said the receiver was entitled to an injunction until the full dispute has been resolved, and gran- ted him possession of the property. Mr Fennell, an insolvency practitioner of Deloitte Ireland, sought the injunction because he was unable to secure possession of the premises. Several parties were in occupation of parts of the property. The proceedings were brought against the parties Mr Fennell said were in occupation: Ben Gilroy; Anderson Prado; Sylwia Waliszewska, trading as Sun Body Solarium; Paul OCallaghan; Mariusz Jurkiewics; and Arthur Fluskey. Mr Gilroy had opposed the application. A solicitor held a watching brief from Ms Waliszewska. There was no appearance in court by the other defendants. When the case came around for hearing, the court was told that Mr Fluskey was no longer in occupation. Seeking the orders, counsel for Mr Fennell said that following his appointment the occupants were asked for, but did not furnish him with, details of the legal basis of their occupancy of the building. They had no lawful entitlement to be on the premises and were trespassers, the receiver submitted. Mr Gilroy, who claimed he was a tenant and had told the receiver he had been asked to respond on behalf of the tenants, opposed the application. He advanced several grounds as to why the injunction should not be granted, including that he was entitled to occupy the premises based on a contractual agreement he had with Mr Noone. He also disputed the validity of Mr Fennells appointment as receiver. Mr Justice Paul Gilligan said that, from the evidence, he was satisfied that none of the defendants had made out any basis for their occupation and Mr Fennell was entitled to an order for possession. The judge said that, despite repeated requests from the receiver to do so, none of the defendants had submitted proof of their occupancy to Mr Fennell. The judge also dismissed all grounds advanced by Mr Gilroy on why the injunction should not be granted. The appointment of Mr Fennell, the judge said, as receiver over the property had been a valid one. The matter was adjourned for a week to allow both sides consider the decision. Fine Gael MEP Sean Kelly said failure to secure the long-term future of the countrys only oil refinery would leave Ireland in a precarious situation in the event of a Brexit. Should the UK vote to leave the EU in the June 23 referendum it would no longer be bound by EU energy regulations which require member countries to share resources in certain circumstances. In Ireland, 80% of the petrol we use is imported. Of these imports, 70% come from the UK meaning that the UK supplies us with well over half of the petrol we consume. The figures are similar if we take the heavier gas/diesel oil, of which 50% of our final consumption is imported from the UK. In the event of a crisis and [the UK wasnt] in the European Union, we would be in a very bad position because wed be dependent on their goodwill more than any obligations on them. So its fraught with uncertainty at the moment, Mr Kelly said. The refinerys future remains up in the air after its US owner Phillips 66 put it back on the market in November 2015. Phillips 66s contractual obligation with the state to operate the refinery comes to an end days after voters go to the polls in Britain. While there is no indication that it wont operational past the July cutoff point at present, the long-term future of the refinery remains a cause for concern with about 300 staff employed in Whitegate. Close to 160 workers are directly employed at the refinery with an additional 130 or so contractors on site. Phillips 66 said at the time the facility was put back on the market that it expected the sales process to last several months. UK company, PTFPlusOne Ltd, is known to have expressed an interest in purchasing the refinery but no decision has been made. Mr Kelly said the refinery must be a priority for the next government, adding that it is without doubt of key strategic importance to the security and reliability of the Irelands fuel supply. We would be totally reliant on external supplies on more or less an ad hoc basis. We wouldnt have refinery capacity and that would leave us even more vulnerable [if Britain leaves the EU]. So its something I think that the new government will have to look at very strongly. The whole question of energy supply is something we have to take a far more strategic line on, Mr Kelly said. Associate research professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute Edgar Morgenroth told the Irish Examiner that Ireland should immediately lobby the EU in the event of the UK leaving to fund major initiatives such as building an electricity interconnector to France, transport networks on the island and accessing transit permits for trucks travelling via England to continental ports. He said the Government would also need to campaign to remove the risks facing milk and other agricultural goods. Associate research professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Edgar Morgenroth, told the Irish Examiner that Ireland should tap goodwill among other EU states in the event of the UK leaving the bloc to access special funds to build an electricity interconnector to France, transport networks on the island, and access transit permits for trucks travelling via England to continental ports. He said the Government would also need to secure a special deal over milk and other agricultural goods across Ireland. The food startups attended the three-day UK event as part of the Taste Cork regional export programme, supported by Cork County Council, Cork City Council and the Local Enterprise Offices in Cork. Tim Lucey, Cork County Council chief executive, said: We hope that by building a strong regional brand, Corks reputation as a centre of excellence for food and drink continues to grow, supporting sustainable employment in communities throughout the region. Benchmark Brent crude stepped up nearly 1% to $44.35 (39.20) a barrel, rebounding from earlier falls when Kuwait oil workers called off a three-day strike, which had been keeping oil prices afloat after talks on a production freeze ended in stalemate over the weekend. The Ftse 100 was up 4.9 points to 6410.3, having hit a fresh four-month high on Tuesday, closing above 6400 for the first time since early December. Germanys Dax was up 0.7% and the Cac 40 in France climbed 0.6%. The Iseq index, meanwhile, fell 41.41 points (-0.66%) to end the session at 6,212.40 Telecoms giant BT and Paddy Power-Betfair were among the biggest fallers after being hit with broker downgrades, dropping 12.9p to 438.3p and 405p to 8925p respectively Jefferies cut its recommendation on BT to hold from buy and said the outlook for BT is looking increasingly uncertain. Meanwhile, Credit Suisse handed Paddy Power-Betfair an under-perform recommendation because it said the benefits of its recent tie-up had been exaggerated by the market. Apple chipmaker ARM Holdings fell back from gains earlier in the session amid investor concerns over a slowdown in the smartphone market. Shares were down 10p to 954p despite posting a forecast-beating 14% hike in underlying first-quarter profits to 137.5m (174.7m). Elsewhere, Punch Taverns surged more than 11% or 11.5p to 108.5p, as it insisted it was making good progress on its strategy despite revealing underlying earnings fell from 105m to 94m in the first half of the year. The firm said it had sold off a number of less profitable pubs as it attempted to cut its 1.4 billion debt pile. Online fashion group N Brown was the biggest faller in the Ftse 250 Index, plunging more than 12% after it reported a 2% fall in annual underlying pre-tax profits to 84.5m and said trading since the year end had been subdued. Shares dropped 40.6p to 275p. Metro Bank was 33p higher at 2040p as it kicked off life as a listed company with a record first-quarter performance and narrowed losses. The challenger bank, which floated in March, trimmed underlying losses by 7% to 7.9 m, although 3.2m in costs for its stock market listing saw it post bottom-line losses of 11.1m. It said customer savings deposits surged by 790m in the first three months of 2016 to 5.9bn and attracted a record 62,000 new customers in the quarter, while net lending more than doubled year on year to 4.1bn. The biggest risers in the Ftse were Anglo American up 39.5p to 792p, Rio Tinto up 90.5p to 2423.5p, BHP Billiton up 32.5p to 997p, and Standard Chartered up 17.1p to 559p. The biggest fallers were Hargreaves Lansdown down 61p to 1314p, Paddy Power Betfair down 405p to 8925p, BT Group down 12.9p to 438.3p, and Associated British Foods down 83p to 3330p. Mr Bellew was the second in command at Malaysia under Mr Muller, who had departed as boss of Aer Lingus in 2014 to help turn around the troubled Asian carrier. Mr Mullers unexpected resignation comes as the carrier is beginning to turn around after two plane crashes in 2014 dented its sales and reputation, prompting the government to buy out all shareholders and take the company private. The Irish Examiner profiled Mr Bellew as he prepared to take up the job as chief operations officer at Malaysia last September. A native of Bettystown, Co Meath, he lived outside Killarney. His current job at Malaysia made him responsible for all operations at the airline, including engineering, flight operations, and ground operations, as well as having responsibility for the pilots and in-flight crew across a fleet of 140 planes. He had been a senior director helping to manage Kerry Airport in the 1990s. Malaysia had poached Mr Bellew from Ryanair, where he had responsibility for pilots at the airline, and the punctuality of the airlines services. Friends at the time said that though he was leaving to join a much larger airline, he was looking forward to the challenges of helping to turn around deep problems at Malaysia. He started his career as a travel and air travel specialist dealing with Ryanairabout 30 years ago. He later joined Kerry Airport where the passenger numbers increased from 6,000 to 400,000. He had worked for Ryanair for nine years and managed legal disputes with pilots. Previously, he was responsible for sales and marketing. The show must go on, Mr Muller wrote to employees Tuesday, informing them he was leaving the carrier in September. We have delivered our financial budget for the first three months of 2016, our on-time performance is increasing and very stable and our customer service index is recovering with more significant improvements in the pipeline, he said. The companys new Dublin office located in the Bloodstone Building on Sir John Rogersons Quay will initially host two teams with the creation of between eight and 10 jobs. The centre will help support the companys global e-commerce business and is expected to scale-up further once the initial batch of employees have been recruited. Irish start-up, Agricultural Magnetics, trading as MagGrow, has won the opportunity to pitch to leading agriculture Venture Capitalists for funding of up to $5 million. The company says its magnetic spraying technology system reduces spray by more than 80%, and delivers superior crop coverage by facilitating fine spray droplets The magnetic inserts attached onto a sprayer imparts an electromagnetic charge into the sprayed liquid. Because all living plants and soil have a magnetic field, the magnetically charged liquid is attracted to its target. The MagGrow system can be easily fitted to new or existing spray equipment including crop sprayers, backpack sprayers, greenhouse gantry sprayers, aerial sprayers, air blast sprayers, and centre pivot irrigation systems. MagGrow is headquartered at NovaUCD, the Centre for New Ventures at University College Dublin. Claimed benefits of its technology include increased profitability through chemical savings; increased productivity through increased spray windows and spray capacity; and it is better for the environment. Trials of the MagGrow system in the Netherlands showed more than 25% chemical savings and water rate reduction, more than 20% disease reduction, and more than 10% yield improvement. Trials in the US showed more than 20% weed reduction and 10% yield improvement. Conversion of a typical 24m crop sprayer would require at least six main magnet housings, one boom arm magnet housing per boom section, and one nozzle adaptor per nozzle. Through the eight-week Thrive Accelerator Programme in California, participating companies will benefit from high-level mentorship and collaboration. Over 200 start-ups from 35 countries applied to take part in the 2016 programme. Over 30 were chosen to pitch to senior competition judges. The winning companies will participate in the 2016 Forbes AgTech Summit in July. Nuritas Research, the Irish bioinformatics start-up, participated on the 2015 Thrive Accelerator Programme and was the winner of the overall 2015 Thrive Accelerator Award. MaGrow CEO Gary Wickham said: We are truly delighted to be selected to the final 12 companies on the 2016 Thrive Accelerator Programme. Earlier this year MagGrow won the 2016 LAMMA Innovation Award for the Best Product or Innovation for the Environment category. LAMMA is the UKs leading farm machinery, equipment and services show. MagGrow, founded in 2013 by Gary Wickham, Derek Wickham and David Moore, employs 12. Mr Kelly was ordered to attend after the housing committees first meeting said he must answer questions about the scandal. The group has been tasked with compiling a report by June 17 on the causes and resolutions to the housing crisis in a bid to put in place long-term reforms. It is due to meet with representatives from Nama, the rental market, those affected by mortgage arrears, homelessness, and social housing groups, and other individuals over the nine-week period. Mr Kelly will be first to attend the committee. Labours deputy leader has previously confirmed he is willing to attend any meeting with the committee in order to help address the problems continuing to affect housing levels. When the likely request was first raised this month, as plans were being put in place to establish the committee, a spokesperson for Mr Kelly said he would be open to such a forum and happy to engage. There are believed to be concerns that any discussion could result in a politicised row as parties try to gain the upper hand over the issue. At its first meeting yesterday, the committee which will hold two meetings on Tuesday and two on Thursday from next week, and, like the reform committee, can make recommendations before a new government emerges elected Fianna Fail TD John Curran as chairman. The body, called for by Sinn Fein TD Eoin O Broin, heard claims from Independent TD Mick Wallace that Ireland can solve the housing crisis by telling the EU to provide 10bn immediately. While a number of TDs said yesterday that new thinking is needed, Independent TD Maureen O Sullivan said the reality is we dont need to reinvent the wheel. The effect loneliness has on the heart is similar to that seen in people who suffer anxiety or have stressful jobs, experts found. Researchers from the University of York, the University of Liverpool, and Newcastle University reviewed evidence on the impact loneliness has on heart disease and stroke risk. They examined 23 relevant studies, involving more than 181,000 adults, where 4,628 coronary heart disease, and 3,002 stroke events were recorded. After analysing the data they found that loneliness and isolation were associated with a 29% increase in risk for coronary heart disease and a 32% increase in risk of stroke. We found an association between poor social relationships and incident cardiovascular disease comparable in size to other recognised psychosocial risk factors, such as anxiety and job strain, the authors wrote in the journal Heart. Our findings indicate that efforts to reduce the risk of coronary heart disease and stroke could benefit from taking both loneliness and social isolation into account. Tackling loneliness and isolation may be a valuable addition to coronary heart disease and stroke prevention strategies. Health practitioners have an important role to play in acknowledging the importance of social relations to their patients. Previous research has already linked loneliness and social isolation to premature death but until now the but the size of the associated risk to cardiovascular health was unclear. In a linked editorial, Dr Julianne Holt-Lunstad and Dr Timothy Smith from Brigham Young University in the state of Utah in the US say health workers should inform patients of the importance of social interaction as part of a healthy lifestyle. Medics should also be aware of whether or not their patients are lonely so they can assess whether or not they are at risk. They call for more research into the use of technology for interaction, saying that while it can boost social interaction, it may also contribute to problems exacerbating risk. They wrote: With such rapid changes in the way people are interacting socially, empirical research is needed to address several important questions. Does interacting socially via technology reduce or replace face-to-face social interaction and/or alter social skills? Due to the rapid and instant access afforded, does technology accelerate relationship processes (both positive and negative) leading to accentuation of sociality or lack thereof? Do social relationships/interactions via technology have a similar influence health and wellbeing? Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK, said: Not only does loneliness make later life unbearably miserable as this research shows, its awful for our health too. We know that lonely older people are more likely to suffer health problems and to require long-term care, have a higher use of medication and need to visit their GP more often. This means that loneliness is placing further pressure on health care social care services making it an issue that governments simply cant afford to ignore. Director Risteard O Domhnaill has been touring West Cork and Kerry in a mobile cinema to bring the documentary, which successfully raised nearly 50,000 in crowdfunding before the Irish Film Board agreed to match what he had raised, to the communities he feels are most affected by the issues in the film. The film tells the story of fishermen from Ireland, Newfoundland, and Norway as they battle with falling fishing quotas, super-trawlers, oil explorations that jeopardise spawning grounds and indifferent politicians to preserve their way of life. Gleeson got involved and agreed to narrate the documentary after playing the part of a Newfoundland fisherman in the 2014 Canadian comedy The Grand Seduction. So far, Mr O Domhnaill has had screenings in Union Hall and Castletownbere in Co Cork; and Caherciveen and Dingle in Co Kerry. Mr O Domhnaill said the reception for his film had been outstanding, with four screenings at the event in Castletownbere, the largest whitefish port in Ireland, due to the demand. Fish was very much on the menu with local chefs dishing up paella for the occasion. Its fantastic bringing the mobile cinema down on to the pier in fishing villages and showing this film; its empowering and it shows people that their story really counts, said Mr O Domhnaill. Powerful companies are moving in on the fishing resources and the oil resources and the small fishermen are being pushed out and their communities are suffering as a result. The Atlantic was Mr O Domhnaills second feature documentary. He also directed The Pipe, the critically acclaimed film documenting the struggles of local people in Rossport, Co Mayo, against Shell. Mr O Domhnaill said the film was designed to serve as a warning about the health and finite resources of the Atlantic. We can look at short-term gain or we can look to our future. Theres no quick buck in it but if we have politicians willing to look after the small man these communities can sustain themselves indefinitely. In that ruling, Mr Justice Michael Moriarty declared that parts of Section 99 of the Criminal Justice Act 2006 were unconstitutional. This section allowed the court to activate suspended portions of sentences if a person re-offended. A number of cases appear before judges every day on the States application to have previously suspended sentences activated. Yesterday, the State requested that no order be made in two cases where a suspended sentence was to be activated. Sonia Eglington, aged 23, was sentenced to four years in prison with two suspended in 2013 for falsely imprisoning a recruitment agency owner in their office while she looted the premises. Eglington, of Caretakers Hostel, Back Lane, Dublin, had pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to falsely imprisoning the woman at Harcourt St on July 18, 2013. She was released from prison last year but four months later was caught fishing money from a church poor box. As a result, Eglington was sent back to Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to have her suspended sentence activated. However, as a result of the High Court ruling, lawyers for the State asked Judge Melanie Greally to make no order in the case, meaning the sentence was not activated. Eglington is currently in custody on other matters. In a second case, a homeless man who was out on a suspended sentence when he stole from shops also had his case dismissed because of the ruling. In March 2013, Judge Patrick McCartan sentenced Karl OBrien, aged 21, to four years with two suspended for the mugging of a UCD student in Dublin city centre. Last December, OBrien pleaded guilty to offences, including a minor assault and theft, committed in January 2015. Derek Cooney, prosecuting, told Judge McCartan that his instructions from the DPP were that no order should be made in light of the recent decision. OBrien was in custody but was released as a result. The document, launched yesterday by Tony McNamara, the chief executive of the Cork University Hospital (CUH) Group, is believed to be the first of its kind developed by an Irish hospital. He described it as a significant statement from the 800-bed CUH, where some 340 doctors from all over the world are in training, to address a rather ambivalent attitude historically towards junior doctors. We care about our staff and recognise we have obligations to ensure that, while training in our hospital, we must afford them every opportunity to get the very best training possible in an environment that treats each patient or staff member as a valued individual, he said. It was launched ahead of the presentation in Brussels today of new data on the HSEs compliance with the European Working Time Directive (EWTD) for junior doctors. Dr Colm Henry, the national clinical adviser for the HSEs acute hospitals, said trainee doctors had not been fully respected or valued. But he pointed to enormous improvements in recent years, particularly in relation to the EWTD. The proportion of trainee doctors now complying with shifts of 24-hours or less is now at 96%, and the more important indicator, the 48-hour week, we are now at 80% compliance, he said. But much more importantly is whats not measurable the quality of the relationship between hospital management, consultants and trainee doctors has improved immeasurably. I have no doubt the improved results we present today is due to this new relationship, instead of an atmosphere where doctors in training were not always respected and valued. Dr Mike OConnor, clinical director of CUHs directorate of medicine, and who worked on the charter with Dr Liam Healy, also hailed the EWTD improvements. A lot of new doctors will never work more than a 13-hour shift and theyll do that about once every seven or eight weeks, and predominantly, the rest of their days are an eight or a 10-hour day. And as a result, the quality of their work is much better, he said. Dr Healy said there is strong ambition to deliver on the charter to ultimately produce doctors who will provide better and safer healthcare to patients. In times past, in Irish medicine in general, we havent treated people as well as we should have and there is a recognition of that, he said. But we are recognising the mistakes of the past, we are trying to learn from them, and were doing our best to implement the changes to make sure those mistakes are not repeated. It follows complaints that CIT is advertising for student counsellor with qualifications below an agreed standard. The protest, which will be held on CIT campus this lunchtime, has been organised by members of the Teachers Union of Ireland branch at the institute, and has been prompted by an advertisement issued by management for a position in the colleges student counselling service. Yesterday, the TUI said that the terms of the job, as advertised, are a breach of a national agreement. CIT management intend to press ahead with an appointment to a post in student counselling that was advertised with qualifications below that agreed between TUI and the institutes of technology in a national agreement as defined in a Department of Education and Skills circular letter, the TUI said. In spite of the fact that the branch had initiated a formal grievance under the institutes agreed grievance procedure, CIT management have elected to ignore the agreed industrial relations procedure. Instead of talking with the staff representative union with a view to resolving the dispute, the management is ignoring their own industrial relations procedures and pressing ahead with the appointment. The union warned that the developments represented a further deterioration of industrial relations at CIT and that it will ballot members on industrial action up to and including strike action if management do not agree to talks with a view to resolving the dispute before an appointment is made. In a statement, CIT said it advertised for a full-time student counsellor to complement the existing part-time, and contract based service. The full-time post will be implemented with the nationally agreed contract. The TUI have been given an assurance that any successful candidate will be fully qualified in accordance with any national agreement on professional counselling requirements. CITs primary concern is the safety and welfare of its students. There is a significant demand on our excellent student counselling team and we have assured students that we will not delay in providing a full-time support to the service, it stated. However Paul Rothwell, chair of the CIT branch of the TUI, questioned why the post has been advertised with lower qualifications sought, if CIT insists the successful candidate will meet agreed standards. Unfortunately when we ask this question we are told this was none of our business, he said. He added that the TUI fears that the vacancy in counselling will be used to appoint a manager for the service instead. The dispute arose when state pathologist Marie Cassidy voiced concern over evidence given in the trial by her former deputy, Khalid Jaber. Michael Furlong, aged 37, the Moyne, Enniscorthy, Wexford, was on trial for the murder of Patrick Connors, aged 37, at the Carraig Tur apartment complex, Enniscorthy, in April 2011. He denied murder. The jury was discharged in November 2013 and the case put into a list to fix dates for a possible retrial. The DPPs application for a discharge of the jury followed a letter written by Prof Cassidy after she happened to see Dr Jaber giving evidence in the trial. In it, she expressed concern to the DPP about that evidence. Dr Jaber resigned as deputy state pathologist in 2013 following a row with Prof Cassidy. Luke Byrne, 16, a fourth-year student at Colaiste Craobh Abhann, Kilcoole, Co Wicklow, developed a simple silicone band called Headphone Helpers. His mini-company is already making money. Since December he has sold 770 Headphone Helpers at 7 each netting a tidy profit of almost 2,000. Luke developed the product because he wanted a solution to a personal problem. I run myself, and the one thing that annoyed me was that my earphones kept falling to the ground and tripping me up, he said. Luke also realised there was a huge potential market for the unique patent-pending product. Headphone Helpers are really for anybody who is active and doesnt want the bother of them falling out and getting tangled. His product, suitable for all earphone makes, is simply a silicone band that is placed around the neck of the user. The earphones are then slipped up through the loops and inserted into the users ears. He started working on developing the project last October and, two months later, began selling the product on the internet. The teenager was delighted to have won the top prize. He had always believed his product would come out tops. Luke was among 201 enterprising students who showcased their inventions and businesses at the national final of 14th Annual Student Enterprise Awards in Croke Park, Dublin, yesterday. A record 22,000 students from 620 schools took part in the programme this year, with 76 student business making it through to the final, which is co-ordinated by the Local Enterprise Offices. Chair of the enterprise education committee with the Local Enterprise Offices, Sean OSullivan, said the awards gave young teenagers an opportunity to experience what it was like to run a business. Learning the fundamentals of running a business now will help them throughout their studies and career, he said. He said an additional 5,000 students and 200 schools took part in the programme that started last September. What is striking is the quality of the projects: students are coming up with extremely good business ideas. They really want to go out and make money and find ways of making their product even better. The intermediate category that was open to second and third-year students was won by two 14-year-old second year students, Sean Og Harrington and Oisin McLaughlin from Scoil Mhuire in Buncrana, Co Donegal. Their company, Irish Wood Working, produces a wide range of handcrafted giftware. Sean Og comes from a family of skilled craftsmen and from a very young age had a great interest in anything made from wood. He started helping his grandfather in his workshop before he even started school. One of his chores at home was to clean up the cutoffs from the timber that was used for the fire. He decided that it was a waste to throw out such good wood so a business idea was born. Oisin oversees marketing and finance. Irish Woodworking which produces bowls, candlesticks, wine racks, honey dippers, and place mats already has a successful export business, with customers in England and Canada. The top prize in the junior category for first year students went to Amor from St Oliver Post Primary School in Oldcastle, Co Meath, for their modified stirrup tread for horse- riding. Four 13-year-old students, Emily Finnegan, Kate OReilly, Ava Cadden and Mary Freeman solved the problem of foot positioning when riding. Our product is a steel- metal frame attached onto an angled rubber band. The metal frame cradles the foot into the correct position. We also have a rubber surrounding the heel of the metal frame so as not to injure the horse in any way, said Mary. They will take the stress off the riding instructor because they wont have to keep reminding riders to keep their heels down so the lesson will be more enjoyable, she said. Mary said the patent-pending product costs 30 and they had already sold 130 pairs to riding schools across the country. The police boss backed calls by senior garda managers for 800 recruits to be taken on every year 200 more than currently. Speaking at the annual conference of the Association of Garda Superintendents (AGS), the commissioner also said: Gardai would never take their eye off our relentless fight against organised crime and terrorist activity; Public confidence in the force was up from 67% to 85% in the last two years; And called on the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors, which threatened to take industrial action, to return to established industrial relations mechanisms. She told superintendents that the forces capacity and capabilities had been seriously diminished under austerity. We were strapped before the recession hit, she said. We were devastated by necessary government action resulting from that recession. Substantial recent increases in monies available to us allow us to begin to address problems weve had for a long, long time. She added: Lets not sugar coat it. In many areas, we are 20 years behind where we should be, particularly when it comes to technology. Those had enormous implications for our response to emerging security and crime challenges. She referred to various reports of the Garda Inspectorate which highlighted the forces outdated technology. She said a big challenge for the organisation was in the area of building up its capacity to deal with cyber crime and cyber security. The inspectorate pointed out that the organisation currently did not have a dedicated cyber crime unit. The commissioner welcomed the 300m-plus commitment under the outgoing government in garda technology. AGS president Noel Cunningham said the Government was currently in a state of flux and urged the new administration to reassert its commitment to this funding. Ms OSullivan supported calls from AGS for 800 recruits to be taken on every year, 200 more than the 600 currently being taken in. Certainly if there were to be a number of 800 that would be very, very welcome because that would allow us to fill spaces at a much quicker pace and rebuild the capabilities of the organisation, she said. The commissioner described last weeks gangland murder of innocent homeless man Martin ORourke in Dublins north inner city the fourth in the Kinahan-Hutch feud this year as absolutely horrific. She said all the murder investigations were going very well and that part of their efforts was to prevent a further escalation. News: 4 The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission said the agreement represented a disturbing European trend of regression from fundamental human rights values. It called on Ireland to show moral leadership in pushing to replace it with real protections for people fleeing Syria and other conflict zones. It said Ireland must improve its offer to take in 4,000 refugees by the end of 2017. Dr Fergal Callaghan, chemical engineer, told an oral hearing that, contrary to myth, incinerators are not responsible for 70% of all dioxins. In fact, based on Environmental Protection Agency projections, uncontrolled combustion processes such as forest fires, burning of agricultural residue, and uncontrolled domestic waste burning accounted for 84% of total emissions, he said. Dr Callaghan was speaking as an expert witness for Indaver Ireland on day two of An Bord Pleanalas oral hearing into proposals by the waste management company to build a 160m incinerator in Ringaskiddy. Occupational health specialist Dr Martin Hogan, on behalf of Indaver, said the impact on human health of living near an incinerator would be negligible, based on all the available evidence. Engineer Thomas Leonard, an expert witness for Indaver, said several submissions in relation to the proposed 240,000 tonnes per annum waste-to-energy facility cited an incident that occurred at the companys Antwerp site on February 26. An explosion occurred after fire spread from a road tanker to a warehouse storing chemicals. Mr Leonard said that this scenario could not arise at the Ringaskiddy plant due to significant differences between the facilities, namely that Ringaskiddy would not be used to collect or handle waste of the type that gave rise to the Belgium explosion. An Bord Pleanala inspector Derek Daly said he required a little bit more detail. I certainly would want, and the board would want, some clarity so the level of risk can be quantified, said Mr Daly. Mr Leonard also referred to concerns raised by PDFORRA about the potential impact to a natural gas pipeline at the site in the event of an incident at the Ringaskiddy facility. He said there would be no impact to the pipeline from any of the accident scenarios that could arise at that site. A coastal erosion expert on behalf of Indaver, Julie Ascoop, said coastal protection mitigation measures were not required for the waste-to-energy facility element of the development. However, coastal protection measures to reduce the rate of erosion which Indaver claims is 50cm per annum would be implemented as a precautionary measure. She said applying this rate of erosion resulted in an expected maximum retreat of 15m in 30 years time. She confirmed that rock armour would not be used to combat coastal erosion. Its completely out. There is no rock armour, she said. On foot of a recommendation from Cork County Council, Ms Ascoop said monitoring would take place every year after winter storms. Joanna OBrien, Arup geology expert, told the hearing the development will have minimal negative impact on the soils, geology, hydrogeology, and hydrology of the site. In response to HSE concerns about the affect of the proposed facility on private wells, she said there would be no emissions to ground or groundwater and very comprehensive measures will be implemented to prevent spills or leaks entering the ground or groundwater. In relation to concerns that a nearby wind turbine could have an adverse effect on the dispersal of the plume, a report by expert witness Dr Edward Porter said the impactwill not be significant and will not lead to an exceedance of the ambient air quality standards. Indaver Ireland rejected claims that its planned incinerator will be yet another blot on the landscape of Cork Harbour. Architect John Kelly said it was another part of the evolution of Cork Harbour. Indavers expert witnesses concluded their presentations yesterday. The hearing continues today and will include contributions from State bodies, including Cork County Council. Government formation discussions between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail broke up last night without resolution on the future of the utility. Government sources have said that limited extra spending power means plans by both parties to reduce and abandon the USC would have to be forgone to fund the changes being proposed in relation to water charges. Yesterday, it emerged that among the plans being discussed by the two parties is an increase in the allowance granted to homes before charges kick in, and an expansion in the level of waivers to groups like the elderly, the sick, and the unemployed. Sources have warned that both measures would impact on the funding model of Irish Water and require an increase to the state subvention to Irish Water, which amounts to 479m for 2016. Such an increased cost to run the utility would severely impact on plans to cut taxes, it has been warned. Two leading economists have stated that gaps in the funding for Irish Water or whatever company succeeds it would have to be met from existing funds elsewhere. Economist from the University of Limerick, Stephen Kinsella, last night said: It is a straight decision, a like for like swap and I have gotten the feeling since the election that Fine Gael have wanted to drop the USC plan anyway. Fellow economist, Colm McCarthy, said: Clearly if they are collecting less money, there is an exchequer cost to that. Fine Gael had committed to abolishing the USC entirely over the next five years, while Fianna Fail had committed to abolishing it for workers earning up to 80,000 over the same period, which they said would cost 2.64bn. Talks between the two parties were delayed several hours yesterday over an impasse on the issue of Irish Water. The stand-off required a meeting of Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin, but they failed to agree a solution. It is understood that Fine Gaels negotiating team continued to push the possibility of household allowances, waivers and other fee-reduction measures as part of any Irish Water deal. Fine Gael put forward the option as a compromise measure between its position and that of Fianna Fail. However, Fianna Fail rejected the proposal because of concerns the ongoing existence of the utility would make the party vulnerable to claims it sold out on its commitment to scrap Irish Water entirely. Fianna Fail separately put forward the prospect of deferring all charges until every house in the country is metered, at which point an accurate measure of how much water individuals are using could be put forward. This would allow an allowance system to be introduced whereby households would be given a substantial amount of free water and would only pay for what excess levels it used. However, Fine Gael rejected this offer as the complete freezing of charges would effectively be handing victory to Fianna Fail, which sought the move in its election manifesto. The meeting lasted less than two hours and the parties will meet again today. Health Minister Leo Varadkar said he understood the peoples frustrations with the slow pace of the talks. The process is slow and we have to refer back to our party leaders, he said. Its almost two months since the election and I know members of the public as well as politicians are frustrated but I think its moving in the right direction. Finance Minister Michael Noonan has said that Fine Gael and Fianna Fail are keen to compromise but admitted that Irish Water remains a major issue. Well, nothing is agreed until everything is agreed, to use the usual formula, he said. But its down to about five or six net points, I would think and Irish Water obviously is one of them. Banker Declan Garrity, originally from Tyrone, was due to appear in court in Manhattan on Tuesday on animal cruelty charges. He is accused of ripping out Lucy the cats nails, breaking bones in her face, pelvis, and legs, and burning her at the shared Manhattan apartment. Manhattan Supreme Court heard he left the US after losing his job with Barclays Bank following his arrest, and also therefore his visa to work in the country. Barclays appear to have paid for his one-way ticket home, according to a report in the New York Daily News, which quoted his termination letter, stating he had to leave or change his status. But prosecutors were not impressed, with assistant district attorney Erin Satterthwaite telling the court: This is absolutely a willful and voluntary absence. She spoke to officials at the US Department of Homeland Security, who told her there are different procedures when a criminal case is pending. Defence counsel Telesforo Del Valle told the court Mr Garrity took advice from an immigration lawyer before leaving. The lawyer told him he would be in the US illegally if he didnt leave, Mr Del Valle said. Mr Garrity is also charged with criminal contempt after he returned to the apartment to collect his belongings without a police escort, as ordered by the court. At Tuesdays hearing, Justice James Burke ordered a bench warrant to be issued for Mr Garrity and revoked his bail. Mr Garrity is accused of torturing the cat after he moved into the apartment last November. The 24-year-old was arrested in late February after the cat was found to have suffered broken bones and burns. In its termination letter, seen by the New York Daily News, Barclays human resources department wrote: It is your obligation to comply with the immigration regulations by either departing the US or applying to US citizenship and immigration services for a change in status to another nonimmigrant visa category as soon as possible. It continues: We understand that your last place of foreign residence is Northern Ireland, UK, We have determined the cost of a one-way, economy fare ticket to Belfast, Ireland is $662.90. A representative association described the earnings as a national scandal. PDforra, which represents enlisted men in the Defence Forces said it had completed a list of earnings of all the 250 members who had served on last years mission, and the breakdown on hourly earnings, including special allowances. The organisations vice president, Mark Keane, said a database had been compiled and the association was preparing to furnish it to an arbitrator who, it was hoped, would decide on an increased allowance which PDforra believes the naval service ratings are entitled to receive. The association argued the naval personnel should have been allocated the recognised overseas allowance for armed duties, as some had to carry weapons for security reasons. This allowance amounts to extra 25 a day. The two allowances payable under the overseas peace support allowance (OPSA) work out at a standard rate of 55 per day for non-armed missions and 80 daily for armed missions. PDforra said the crews should be paid the higher allowance as the ships are armed with powerful guns and, at various times on operations, personnel have to carry weapons. Typically in the Med during Operation Pontius they were working 16 to 18-hour days. When they had completed a rescue and dropped people in port, crews had to sanitise the ship before heading out again, said Mr Keane. He said senior members of the ships, such as chief petty officers who had an average of 20 years service and were the backbone of the crews, received on average 8.15 per hour after tax. Last October, Minister for Defence Simon Coveney said he was willing to send the OPSA claim to arbitration. Since then, talks on the issue between PDforra and civil servants in the Department of Defence have broken down. Mr Keane said his organisation was now insisting Mr Coveney live up to his word and get an arbitrator appointed immediately to address the grievance. The organisations vice president said the database compiled will be used by PDforra in its negotiations to secure increased pay for young entrants who currently get 21,850 a year. Dont get me wrong, all of our members volunteered to go out there and were happy to save lives, even though it was very traumatic at times. But surely they should be given something better than what is regarded as less than the minimum wage for their efforts, said Mr Keane. They are calling our lads heroes but then treating them as second-class citizens by effectively paying them way below the minimum wage. Many of them witnessed harrowing scenes when they had to dive over dead bodies to rescue the living. Theyre proud of what they did to save lives but theres a high degree of frustration in the aftermath with what they have been paid, he added. Amarenco, which was founded by former Bord Gais boss John Mullins, received the setback after Cork County Council officials expressed concern over site entrance and road safety, during the construction process. The massive solar farm of 22,000 panels was earmarked for an 8.57 hectare site at Ballinvarrig East, Castlelyons, near Fermoy. It is the first planning refusal the company has encountered so far, having secured permission for solar farms at Inniscarra and Kilmoney, near Carrigaline. It was also granted planning permission for a similar project in Co Waterford. Mr Mullins said rather than lodge an appeal directly to An Bord Pleanala, the company was looking at introducing mitigation measures which would resolve the issue. As soon as such matters were finalised, Amarenco would lodge a revised plan for the Castlelyons site with the local authority, he said. Mr Mullins said Amarenco was also seeking planning permission for solar farms in Crookstown, Kanturk, Timoleague, Cloyne, Mallow, Rathcormac, Cobh, and Whitechurch. Each of the solar windfarms would generate five megawatts of electricity, the equivalent of powering 1,000 homes. All the solar farms are earmarked for agricultural land. Mr Mullins said despite panels being in the ground, the system allows 90% of normal grass growth. The company is also looking at developing other solar farms in Kerry, Waterford, Wexford, Carlow, and Kilkenny, with plans to have all areas operational by 2019. Amarenco currently operates five huge solar farms in France, some since 2011. Thomas Coffey, aged 54, and his nephew Patrick Coffey, aged 21, of Ballyspillane, Killarney, Co Kerry, were brought from jail to Cork Circuit Criminal Court for sentencing yesterday for stealing 11,000 from the woman living at MacCurtains Villas, College Rd, Cork, on July 28 last year. Judge Sean O Donnabhain imposed two years on each man, backdated to February, when they went into custody, and suspended the balance of the sentence from yesterday. The 11,000 was repaid in full and the two men came up with a total of 3,000 on top of that to compensate her for the wrong done. Judge O Donnabhain said: This is a very mean type of offence. These two men preyed on an elderly vulnerable person in her own home on a continuous basis over a period of days, extracting increased amounts of money from her to a total of 11,000. Garda Michelle OLeary said previously the theft of a total of 11,000 was carried out over a period of three days, from July 28 to July 30 last. The 79-year-old woman rang a number in the Golden Pages to have her roof repaired and she got through to the two accused. They came out to the house and quoted her 400 for the work, only to go on and tell her that it was a much more serious and expensive job. After getting a number of sums of cash from her, the victim was then driven to her local bank by a Lithuanian man at the request of the two Coffeys. The bank notified the gardai when workers became suspicious of what might be happening as the woman indicated that she wanted to withdraw 10,000 in cash. She had intended paying the Coffeys more money and using some of it for other matters. In the follow-up investigation, the roof was examined and found to have had only a minimal amount of work that was not done to a high standard. Ray Boland and Sinead Behan, defending, said the defendants co-operated fully with the investigation, paid back more than they had stolen, and apologised for the offence. In their favour, the judge noted their pleas of guilty and the fact that they had paid back the money. The unfortunate lady does not have to come to court to give evidence and I am told she did not want to come to court, said Judge O Donnabhain. Those 20, on Monday and Tuesday night, were among 78 people who either slept on the streets or had to avail of Cork Simons emergency accommodation. The charity warned last night that the figure would increase, unless housing was provided for the 50 people in the city it deems long-term homeless. Its chief executive, Dermot Kavanagh, said the situation would worsen without housing. My fear is, if we continue to let things slide, we are going to see that number increase. The provision of housing is essential, he said. Those deemed to be long-term homeless account for just 12% of our shelter accommodation population, yet they account for almost half of all the bed nights. Moving them into long-term accommodation would free up almost 25 beds a night. He also criticised the long turnaround for vacant council houses, and called for incentives to encourage people to rent, or sell, vacant private houses. Cork Simon said 20 people slept rough in the city on Tuesday night, 51 people stayed at its 44-bed emergency shelter, and another seven people were accommodated in temporary beds. But we still didnt have enough beds for everyone, a spokesperson said. With temperatures dipping to five degrees, 20 people had to sleep rough. We provide warm clothing and blankets, and make sure they are prioritised at our day service, where people can take a shower, change their clothes, have a warm breakfast and take a rest. But its not good enough. The latest spike in the citys homeless figures comes ahead of a housing protest to take place on the steps of Corks City Hall, before a council meeting next Monday. Protesters have been targeting council meetings to highlight that there are 340 vacant or boarded-up council houses around the city, despite the risk of homelessness. The private meeting of the five rural TDs, held on Tuesday night, was also attended by the two Healy-Rae brothers. It is understood that Michael Healy-Rae asked the other six non-aligned TDs at the meeting who would vote for Mr Kenny as taoiseach. A show of hands resulted in support being pledged by newly elected Clare TD Michael Harty, Roscommon-Galway TD Denis Naughten, as well as Michael Healy Rae. It is also thought that Galway West TD Noel Grealish could be persuaded to support Mr Kenny for the next vote. Sources said that, if the result of the private meeting is reproduced at the next vote for Mr Kenny, it would give him at least three to four extra votes in his bid to form a minority government. It is thought the other two TDs in the rural alliance, Tipperarys Mattie McGrath and Cork South Wests Michael Collins, are unlikely to vote for Mr Kenny. Separately, Danny Healy-Rae yesterday said Fine Gael and Fianna Fail are both just interested in the next general election. It is understood that he is unlikely to support Mr Kenny or a minority government. The support of three to four rural TDs for Mr Kennys efforts to form a minority government would greatly aid his position if the six-person Independent Alliance gets behind him. The alliance is waiting until the government talks are finished between the two big parties before making a final decision. One member, Waterford TD John Halligan, is reluctant to commit to supporting a Fine Gael minority government without funds for a full-time cardiac care unit for his local hospital. Alliance sources say they are confident of their local demands being addressed and that a deal hangs upon what Fianna Fail demands. Support from the alliance, as well as the four rural TDs, would give Mr Kenny up to 62 backers at the next vote in the Dail, a position which would make him taoiseach, if Fianna Fail abstains in any vote. Joe Healy claimed farmers saw it as an insult that incumbent Simon Coveney had to split his time between agriculture and other posts such as defence. A dairy farmer from Athenry, Co Galway, he was the clear winner of the presidential contest as the IFA looks to move past the fall-out from last years damaging revelations over the pay packets of former presidents and its ex-general secretary, Pat Smith. Mr Healy said while his overall priority is to improve farm income, in the short term he and other senior IFA members want to install a new general secretary as quickly as possible. However, he stressed that the most important element is to ensure they hire the right person for the job. Commenting on the damage caused by last years pay revelations, he said: Look, its still there. What is different is we need to prioritise more because of the chaos and trauma that engulfed the organisation. Mr Healy said he supports the idea of a dedicated rural affairs minister and was blunt about his expectations regarding the post of agriculture minister. What we dont want from the next government is a situation where we see the agriculture minister has his portfolio halved, he said. Its the largest indigenous industry and farmers took it as an insult in the last reshuffle the ministers time had to be divided. Mr Healy said he does not know what his own salary will be as IFA president. It is to be set by an independent remuneration committee. He did pledge that there would be more transparency over salaries and expenditure. While he was portrayed during the election campaign as an outsider who had not been a member of national council in recent years, Mr Healy said he had not tried to cultivate that image and had instead canvassed as many views as possible from members around the country. While an estimated 500 farmers have explicitly cancelled their membership in recent months, another 4,500 have lapsed. Mr Healy said they are going to be contacted to ascertain whether they want to recommence full membership. As an organisation, we need to improve the ground-up structure and have a structure where branches are not just meeting once a year and hear a report about the past year, said Mr Healy, adding that he wants to make them feel more of an ownership of the organisation. Analysis: 13 The Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland made the ruling following a number of consumer complaints questioning the veracity of the claim in light of widely publicised vehicle recalls. Javelin Advertising, the agency for the car manufacturer, outlined what Toyota considered to be the key elements of its success and also submitted a range of publications and reports from a variety of international locations which it said provided substantiation for the claims. It claimed Toyota dominates annual quality awards and value for money rankings, and stated its vehicles are known for holding their value better than competitors products. It also pointed to five reports outlining the quality of Toyota manufacturing. The authority also sought independent expert advice on the substantiation provided by Javelin. The expert said that while he was not satisfied that a claim that a particular Toyota car was better built than cars such as Ferrari or Rolls Royce (which he described as super cars) had been substantiated, he considered that Toyota had substantiated a claim to be the best-built mass-produced cars in the world. However, the authority ruled a very high level of substantiation would be required to prove a superlative claim such as best built, particularly in the context of it being in the world. In response to the ruling, Toyota Ireland said the authority undertook its enquiry following an initial complaint by Owens DDB on behalf of Toyotas largest competitor Volkswagen, which subsequently withdrew the complaint last year and a very small number of individual consumer complaints. The chief executive of Toyota Ireland, Steve Tormey, said he was bemused by the ruling and the authoritys refusal to allow an appeal. It would appear to us they are dancing on a pinhead as regards the use of the English language and common sense, particularly given the independent automotive industry expert commissioned by the Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland expressed the viewpoint the proposition had been substantiated in relation to the best built mass produced cars in the world, he said. Mr Tormey said the company firmly believes the validity of its brand line is stronger than ever and said the authority has consistently accepted its claim as the best-built car in the world over a number of years. The Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland decision is all the more baffling given we have been using the proposition in the Irish market for 20 years. The Toyota advert was one of 15 found to have been in breach of the ASAI code on grounds relating to misleading advertising, principles, non-response and substantiation. The numbers affected have risen by 21,000 since the end of last year despite progress by Irish Water in tackling long-running problems in counties Roscommon and Dublin throughout the year. David Flynn, programme manager with the EPA, said: There has been a reduction but 800,000 is far too many and its really a case now of having to get sustained investment to bring the water network up to what would be an acceptable standard. Some 40,000 people served by 11 local supplies are currently on boil water notices or other restrictions, according to the EPAs latest Remedial Action List published yesterday. The remainder could face similar issues at any time. New to the boil water list is Whitegate in east Cork where restrictions came into effect in February, disrupting more than 10,000 people. The list shows Irish Water has yet to submit its plans for addressing the problem. Irish Water is already facing legal action by the EPA for failing to comply with directions to resolve problems at Carraroe, Co Galway where 4,700 people are on boil water notices due to cryptosporidium contamination. The case is due before the courts next month. Several other directions issued in relation to other supplies in recent years have also been breached and Mr Flynn said the EPA would prosecute if necessary. The EPA first compiled the remedial list in 2008 and 457 separate water supplies have featured on it at one time or another with the number of people potentially at risk peaking at 1.2m. While the number of supplies listed has fallen to 119, the population affected remains extensive because some supplies involved are very large such as the Cork City Water Supply which serves 106,000 and is tagged as needing significant improvements to ensure a safe and secure supply. Irish Water said 57 water supplies had been removed from the remedial list in the past two years and it was committed to removing 29 more by the end of this year. Mark Macaulay, head of water supply strategy, said 2bn would be invested in improving drinking water by 2021 and the ultimate plan was to make the list redundant. Drinking water quality across the country has been seriously compromised by a systematic failure in how water services have been planned, delivered and funded over several decades, he said. Yesterday began with talk of progress between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail on the issue of Irish Water. Irish Water, as we all know, has become a dirty term in political circles, the bastard child which is an embarrassment to the family. Fianna Fail fought the recent election on the basis of abolishing it and scrapping water charges for five years. Fine Gael had argued for the retention of a slimmed down Irish Water and committed to keeping water charges. Billed as the main issue of disagreement between the sides, we were greeted to news on our radios as we awoke that some progress had been made. We were told there was a proposal for Irish Water to change from a commercial utility to a state agency. On the charging model, we heard the two sides discussed a Fine Gael proposal to provide assistance to those on lower incomes with the introduction of a household utility payment which would offset the charges. The discussion moved towards the introduction of a generous usage allowance with all users only paying for the water they used above that limit. In glorious sunshine, as people began arriving in Leinster House for what was being billed as D-Day 2, it was clear all was not as clear cut as previously thought. Fianna Fail people were quick to pour cold water on the progress, insisting nothing was agreed. But something weird happened. The two negotiating teams were not high tailing it down to Trinity College, but rather loitering around the Dail. It quickly emerged that Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin were holding a crisis face-to-face meeting as the negotiating teams failed to agree a breakthrough on Irish Water. The two rivals, who do not get on to say the least, met in a bid to resolve thestandoff which threatened to end government formation talks and force a second election. The meeting, described as tense and terse, failed to resolve the matter but the leaders eventually cleared their teams to meet again yesterday evening in a sundrenched Trinity College. This lead many to think that the earlier row was manufactured to give the impression of brinkmanship. On his way in, Finance Minister Michael Noonan said Fine Gael and Fianna Fail are keen to compromise but admitted that Irish Water remains a major issue. Well, nothing is agreed until everything is agreed, to use the usual formula, he said. But its down to about five or six net points, I would think and Irish Water obviously is one of them. Transport Minister Paschal Donohoe insisted the parties were trying to come up with acceptable principles around Irish Water, but more work had to be done. For their part Fianna Fail were putting a brave face on it and talking up the promise of compromise. Barry Cowen said the parties will have to tread slowly and Irish Water remained an issue. Michael McGrath said: The art of any negotiation is compromise. If everyone takes an absolutist position on every issue then you never agree anything. But behind the scenes, one Fianna Fail TD spoke of his concern as to the hardline personnel from his side in the talks. Look at the bodies in the room for us. They are hardliners who will be fierce slow to give an inch on anything. This is a long way from being done, he said. Healy-Raes won't vote for Enda Kenny as Taoiseach; parties ironing out 'thorny issues' in https://t.co/R7edi5o4Mp pic.twitter.com/iJOU4deNiG Irish Examiner (@irishexaminer) April 19, 2016 The talks broke up for the evening shortly before 7pm with a commitment to meet again. Elsewhere, the Labour Party finally ruled itself out of going into power. The chairman of the parliamentary party, Willie Penrose, said the party did not get a mandate to re-enter government. The Rural Alliance appears to be in chassis with the Healy-Raes divided on what they will do. Danny Continuity Healy-Rae is not for doing a deal, while Micheal Real Healy-Rae is game for it. While Mattie McGrath is out, private votes within the rural alliance suggested three of the five are ready to support Enda Kenny. Come on lads get on with it, we all cry. Will there be a grand tour for the prospective minister for rural affairs? Will he theres no she in the frame as of yet be paraded through towns and villages on the back of a lorry, greeted like a liberator, a saviour, a human bulwark against decline and death. It now looks like there will be a minister with a rural affairs portfolio. The recent talks between Independent deputies with large rural tracts in their constituencies, and both Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, have put the prospect on the table of the next government. The rural alliance is taking a step back in formation talks, but irrespective of whom exactly answers the call to government, it will be difficult to retreat from the idea that rural Ireland is getting a minister. Both the moral and the strategic case for a minister for rural affairs is unimpeachable. This was illustrated most recently with the publication of Social Justice Irelands (SJI) socio-economic review on Tuesday. SJI director Sean Healy said the publication illustrated how poverty was more likely to occur in rural Ireland. The poverty rate in rural Ireland is 4.5 per centage points higher than in urban Ireland, he said. The border, midlands and western region has the highest poverty rate and lowest median income in the State. The report shows how this region has seen one of the greatest reductions in employment since 2008. It also has one of the lowest levels of IDA-supported employment. The signs of decline are all around, from bordered-up shops to the heavy pall that hangs over a town struggling for air. There has been some speculation on which individual might fill the portfolio. One name that is constantly suggested is Michael Fitzmaurice, who appears to have a grasp on what exactly is wrong, and how it might be putright. Maura Healy-Rae: Planning laws forcing rural dwellers to go underground like hobbits. Whomever lands the job, the task will not be easy. There are short-term problems that will attract the required urgency to fix them. The absence of proper broadband is a shocking deficiency. Attracting and keeping GPs in rural Ireland has become a major problem. Farm incomes are falling. The future of rural transport has to be secured. A sustainable post office network has to be secured. Health services are deteriorating. The biggest challenge, however, will be to attract investment, the lifeblood of a rural community today. Without that, all else is just a support structure doing little to reverse the decline. There are plenty of ideas out there. Bodies like SJI, Teagasc and in particular, the Commission for Economic Development in Rural Areas (CEDRA). The chair of CEDRA, Pat Spillane has been vocal about the lack of progress being made in implementing the main recommendations of the report. All of the reports have blueprints for kick-starting indigenous industry, and for making adjustments to existing business. Some, like the economic red zones to attract investment, are getting off the ground. There has also been some success in developing tourism. But serious political will is required to fully invest time and resources to reshape rural economies. All of that will be of serious concern to a minister for rural affairs. Resources will be made available to address the most immediate worries. Never enough, but a lot more because there will be a voice for rural affairs at the cabinet table. Much tougher than all that will be securing the future, because that will introduce the bugbear of ministerial seals having to make decisions. Should every school in the country remain open? What if a case is made that some should close in order for others to remain open in the long term? The same applies to hospitals. The health service is frequently thrust at the mercy of politics. Would a minister be equipped to take difficult decisions if he believes its in the longer-term interest? Sustainability will mean discommoding some, and possible division. One issue welded to the long term is planning. Planning is a staple of the local politician. The latest rural planning incident to make the national media came from Maura Healy-Rae last week at a Kerry County Council meeting. Maura was co-opted onto her father Dannys seat after his election to the Dail. Ms Healy-Rae suggested that the planning restrictions on high ground would soon have all new dwellings beneath the soil. Are they going to have to go underground like hobbits? she said. The restrictions in question are mainly there to preserve an asset for the future, and tourism for the present. Will a new voice at cabinet use the ear of his colleague in the Department of the Environment to plan for todays votes rather than a brighter tomorrow? It wont be an easy gig if the incumbent takes the job as seriously as the portfolio requires. Making decisions will be new territory for a minister from the ranks of Independent TDs. Heretofore the life of an Independent TD was uncomplicated. Good work is often done on the opposition benches by the growing number of Independents, but none ever have to make unpopular decisions. For those lucky enough to be invited to support a government in the past, there has been the jackpot of resources and services for their own constituency. Now and then, a difficult vote might have to be swallowed, but it provided an opportunity to lie back and think of the goodies. A minister wont have access to such comforts. Instead, he would have to face up to responsibilities that go beyond the next election. Rural Ireland has been in decline for more than 40 years. The trend is one way. Now there may well be an opportunity for a minister assisted by like-minded deputies to make a serious difference. Lets hope the opportunity isnt missed. FORGET about it all. The whole shooting match. When you think of 1916 just remember the voice of Nora Clitheroe who was escorted home from searching for her Citizen Army husband in the violent streets of Dublin. Accused of cowardice by combatant women, she says she risked more for love than they would risk for hate. She has her husbands baby in her belly but loses it when he throws her away from him. Her blood, her screams, are graphically counter-pointed by the blood and screams of a dying insurgent in Sean Holmess powerful new production of The Plough and The Stars for the Abbey Theatre. OCaseys message comes across clearly: The struggle for the birth of a child is the work of love while the armed struggle for the birth of a nation state is the work of hate. People always talk about the strength of OCaseys women but I think their message is more important than their gender. OCasey is not saying that men arent as good as women but rather that womens priorities are better than mens. Nora is focussed on love and home and husband and child. By contrast, Jack Clitheroes relationship with the Citizen Army is an auto-erotic one. The neighbour Mrs Gogan even jokes that he brought his new Sam Browne belt to bed with him. His pride is wounded when he is not made a captain of and he is sulking loudly when a fellow combatant calls him up for the Rising. He leaves a rare opportunity for intimacy in a tenement house an undressed wife and pulled-down bed in Sean Holmes production and chooses to stroke his own ego by going out to fight. You have a wife, Clitheroe, demands Captain Brennan in the pub and Clitheroe responds, Ireland is greater than a wife. The auto-erotic sexuality of armed combat is made explicit in the voice of prostitute Rosie Redmond, who is doing no business because the men have much more exciting things on their minds. When the word comes that Clitheroe has died for Ireland and that Noras grief should be joy because her husband was a hero the response of Bessie Burgess, the alcoholic neighbour who has been nursing Nora through miscarriage and incipient insanity, is one of OCaseys classic lines in understatement: If you only seen her, youd know to thdiffer. Astonishingly, this brave play went up at the Abbey Theatre just 10 years after the Rising and it provoked the most serious protests at the theatre since the Playboy protests in 1907. Prominent among the protestors were women from Cumann na mBan and the Citizen Army, many of them widows, sisters, and other relations of men who died in 1916. Hanna Sheehy Skeffington wrote that the play was a travesty of Easter Week it concentrated on pettiness and squalor, unrelieved by a gleam of heroism. There is truth in the criticism and historian Diarmuid Ferriter comments in his programme note that OCasey, late of the Citizen Army himself, had his own axes to grind. But that doesnt take away from the power of his message, wholly misunderstood in the programme note written by TCD womens studies lecturer, Mary Mc Auliffe, that Here OCaseys portrayal of women is as symbols of domesticity and passivity, underplaying their role in the armed struggle and in revolutionary politics. What a load of bally-hoo. OCasey is absolutely clear that his Nora and his Bessie are true heroines. If it is true that Nora Clitheroe is obsessed with respectability it is also true that achieving a clean, ordered home in which to bring up a family in a tenement house in 1916 was a heroic struggle. It could make the difference between children who lived and children who died, children who clambered out of poverty and those who didnt. This State stands on the shoulders of women who fought to spring their children out of misery. Sean OCasey, Secretary of the strikers Womens and Childrens Relief during the Great Lockout of 1913, knew all about the war which these women waged on illness, dirt, and hunger. Neither does he shy away from the stories of women who stray from the path of respectability, as firmly laid down in Ireland in the early 20th century. His Rosie Redmond may sell her body for a living but at least she is not hurting anyone and OCasey gives her dignity: Im a woman, anyhow, an if Im a prostitute aself, I have me feelins. And then from 1914, there were the further challenges of war and insurrection. Why Bessie Burgess is drunk and shouting, Yiz are all rightly shanghaid now! from set-designer Jon Bausors evocative scaffolding, was never clearer to me than it was in this production: her only son is fighting in France. Up at the Gate Theatre, Mark ORowes much more traditional but equally brilliant production of Juno and the Paycock, highlights Junos scorn for her wounded sons Easter Week sacrifice for his principles: You lost your best principle, son, when you lost your arm. First staged just two years after the Civil War ended, it depicts the brutality of tit-for-tat reprisal shootings and their horrifying impact on the women left behind. I doubt there were many dry eyes in the house during Mrs Tancreds famous plea, O blessed Virgin, where were you when me darlin son was riddled with bullets! Sacred Heart of the Crucified Jesus, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts o flesh! Take away this murdherin hate an give us Thine own eternal love! The play focuses just as clearly as does The Plough on the work of love which is bringing a child into the world. It sheds a harsh light on the men who run for the hills as soon as Junos daughter Mary says she is pregnant. The first is the childs father, the second Jerry Devine, the militant socialist who has always loved Mary just not enough to marry her now shes pregnant by another man. My God, Mary, have you fallen as low as that? asks our political ideologue and Mary responds, Its only as I expected your humanity is just as narrow as the humanity of the others. We really dont deserve OCasey, one of the six who survived from his widowed mothers family of 13 in Protestant, working-class Dublin. He started as a labourer, immersed himself in politics, the Irish language, the Bible, Shakespeare and Dion Boucicault, then upped and wrote four of the greatest plays in the English language. But we have him and he wrote about us and in this centenary year we dont have to ask ourselves another question except how much wider is our humanity now than it was when he wrote those plays? The Plough and the Stars opens at the Cork Opera House on Tuesday, April 26 and tours to the National Opera House, Wexford, from May 4 to 7, the Lime Tree Theatre, Limerick, May 10 to 14, and the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, from May 24 to 28. The Oslo district court said Breiviks solitary confinement for killing 77 people in 2011 bomb-and-gun massacres breached the European Convention on Human Rights ban on inhuman treatment. The prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment represents a fundamental value in a democratic society. This applies no matter what also in the treatment of terrorists and killers, the court said. The court ordered the government to pay Breiviks legal costs of 36,000. However, it dismissed Breiviks claim that the government had also violated his right to respect for private and family life. Breivik had sued the government, saying his isolation from other prisoners, frequent strip searches and the fact he was often handcuffed moving between the three cells at his disposal violated his human rights. During a four-day hearing at the Skien prison where he is serving his sentence, he also complained about the quality of the food, having to eat with plastic utensils and not being able to communicate with other right-wing extremists. The government rejected his complaints, saying he was treated humanely despite the severity of his crimes. Breiviks attacks shocked Norway on July 22, 2011. After months of meticulous preparations, he set off a car bomb outside the government headquarters in Oslo, killing eight people and wounding dozens. He then drove to Utoya island, where he opened fire on the annual summer camp killing 69 people mostly teenagers. Bleaching occurs when the water is too warm, forcing coral to expel living algae and causing it to calcify and turn white. Mildly bleached coral can recover if the temperature drops, otherwise it may die. Although the impact has been exacerbated by El Nino, scientists believe climate change is the underlying cause. US networks called the race for Trump seconds after the polls closed, signaling a crushing victory that is likely to alarm his opponents desperately hoping to block his path to the nomination with a contested party convention in July. Trumps crushing defeat of Ted Cruz in Tuesdays primary election tilted the energy in the Republican race back to the front-runner, just as Republican National Committee members begin meeting in Florida to discuss their July convention, where the nominee will be chosen. To the people that know me the best the people of New York when they give us this kind of a vote its just incredible, a delighted Trump, flanked by his family, told a Manhattan victory party. For the Democratic favourite, Clintons more narrow victory over Bernie Sanders snapped a string of victories by the 74-year-old democratic socialist and gave her a much-needed lift with more tough fights ahead. The eventual victors of the Democratic and the Republican nominating campaigns will face each other in Novembers general election. Trumps win, celebrated to the tune of Frank Sinatras New York, New York at Trump Tower in Manhattan, marked a rebound from his Wisconsin defeat two weeks ago. It set him up for another big night on April 26, when Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Maryland will hold primaries. With a campaign staff reboot and a more focused performance, Trump has sought to improve in recent weeks as a candidate. The tone of his victory speech was in keeping with a more measured style the often-brash billionaire has adopted. We dont have much of a race anymore based on what Im seeing on television, Trump said as television networks projected a large margin of victory for him. Senator Cruz is just about mathematically eliminated. Trump, 69, predicted some amazing weeks ahead for his campaign. Still, he has a long way to go to seal the nomination and begin trying to heal the wounds in his bitterly divided party. Some fence-mending may happen when he sends campaign advisers to the RNC meeting in Hollywood, Florida. Trumps haul of most of New Yorks 95 delegates moved him closer to the 1,237 needed to win the nomination outright. Anything short of that will lead to a contested convention when Republicans hold their national conclave on July 18-21 in Cleveland. Theres only two issues left for Republicans: Will Trump get 50 percent of the delegates prior to Cleveland, and if not, how close will he be? New York gives him a nice boost, but it will take weeks before we know the answer, said Ari Fleischer, who was White House press secretary under President George W. Bush. Cruz, a 45-year-old US senator from Texas, came in third in New York and gave his primary night speech in Philadelphia, where he was already focused on running in Pennsylvania. He called on Republicans to unite around his candidacy. Ohio Governor John Kasich, 63, a long-shot candidate, is seeking to use his second-place showing in New York as proof he is emerging as Trumps central challenger in the states that come up next on the calendar. Clinton, a former US senator from New York, former secretary of state and former first lady, got nowhere near the knockout punch she needed to finally put Sanders away. But the broad smile on her face as she gave her victory speech spoke volumes about how important New York was to her bid to become the first female US president. Today you proved once again theres no place like home, Clinton said. This one was personal. The race for the Democratic nomination, she said, is now in the home stretch, and victory is in sight. Clinton, 68, was campaigning in Philadelphia yesterday while Sanders flew home to Vermont to take a day off the campaign trail. Clintons win made it nearly impossible for Sanders to overtake her commanding lead in delegates needed to win the nomination. Dilawar Syed, a tech entrepreneur who is also the co-founder and vice chairman of the AAPI Victory Fund, a Super PAC focused on mobilising Asian-American voters, said it looked like Clinton has the nomination. Clearly Senator Sanders has a lot of supporters and enthusiasm there. He also has raised a lot of good resources, Syed said. I think the primary will go on for some time. But just looking at the numbers, we know where this is going. While New York City is largely Democrat, Republicans in rural areas and fallen manufacturing cities upstate warmed to Trumps populist message, despite his insults towards women, Mexicans and Muslims. The three main candidates also claimed New York as home: Trump, who has never lived anywhere else; Clinton, who was twice elected the states US senator; and Sanders, who was raised in Brooklyn. The 74-year-old Sanders had hoped for a much closer margin to keep alive his White House dreams. EU competition regulators said that by requiring mobile phone manufacturers to pre-install Google Search and the Google Chrome browser, the US company was denying consumers a wider choice of mobile apps and stifling innovation. Google is already facing EU charges over the promotion of its shopping service in internet searches at the expense of rival services, in a case that has dragged on since late 2010 despite three attempts to resolve the issues. The stakes are higher for Google in the Android case as it made about $11bn (9.7bn) last year from advertising sales on Android phones through its apps such as Maps, Search, and Gmail, according to estimates by financial analyst Richard Windsor. A competitive mobile internet sector is increasingly important for consumers and businesses in Europe, European competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in a statement. We believe that Googles behaviour denies consumers a wider choice of mobile apps and services and stands in the way of innovation by other players, she said. Suppliers of browsers including Microsoft, Mozilla, as well as Apple, and Opera Software, were not immediately available to comment. The European Commission said about 80% of smart mobile devices in Europe and the world run on Android, the operating system developed by Google. Google, which has 12 weeks to respond to the charges, said in a statement that Android was based on open-source software and open innovation. We look forward to working with the European Commission to demonstrate that Android is good for competition and good for consumers, said Googles general counsel Kent Walker. FairSearch, the lead complainant, said Google had launched Android as an open-source project, but was now hindering the development of versions that might lead to new operating systems able to compete with Android. The commission alleges Google has breached EU competition rules by making phone manufacturers pre-install its search function and Chrome browser, and by preventing them from selling mobiles running competing operating systems based on the Android open source code. The EU also charged the company with giving financial incentives to manufacturers and network operators to pre-install Google Search exclusively on devices. Dominant companies have a responsibility not to abuse their position, said Ms Vestager. Google has abused its dominant position. Ms Vestager said the move in no way prejudges the outcome of its investigation. It is an interim step and not the end of the road. It could be one of the worst tragedies since the start of the migrant crisis in Europe. Somalias government said on Monday about 200 or more Somalis may have died in the tragedy while trying to cross illegally to Europe. After talking to survivors, the UNHCR agency said the overall death toll might have been much higher. If confirmed, as many as 500 people may have lost their lives when a large ship went down in the Mediterranean Sea at an unknown location between Libya and Italy, the UNHCR said. The agency said the survivors 37 men, three women and a three-year-old child were rescued by a merchant ship and taken to Greece. They recounted they had been among 100 to 200 people who set sail from Libya last week headed for Italy. After several hours at sea, the traffickers tried to move them onto a bigger ship that was already packed with migrants. This ship sank before the survivors could board it. They then drifted at sea for up to three days before being saved. The group was made up of 23 Somalis, 11 Ethiopians, six Egyptians, and one Sudanese national. The Somali government said on Monday the capsized boat had set sail from Egypt. The survivors told us that they had been part of a group of between 100 and 200 people who departed last week from a locality near Tobruk in Libya on a 30m (100ft) boat, the UNHCR said in a statement. After sailing for several hours, the smugglers in charge of the boat attempted to transfer the passengers to a larger ship carrying hundreds of people in terribly overcrowded conditions, it said, adding the larger boat then capsized and sank. News of the disaster emerged on the first anniversary of one of the worst disasters in the Mediterranean in recent times, when an estimated 800 migrants drowned off the Libyan coast after the fishing boat they were sailing in collided with a mercantile vessel that had been attempting to rescue them. Some 150,000 migrants reached Italy by boat in 2015, the vast majority sailing from Libya. So far this year, about 25,000 migrants have arrived, an increase of 4.7% over the same period last year, according to Interior Ministry data. More than 3,700 people died in 2015 trying the make the perilous crossing over the Mediterranean, with 761 recorded as dead or missing in 2016. On Saturday, Pope Francis again highlighted the humanitarian crisis by visiting the Greek island of Lesbos and returning to Rome with three refugee families who fled the conflict in Syria. Burma Pardon for Two Student Activists, Lawyer in Mandalay Two student activists who were facing trial for their involvement in education reform protests last year are released, and a land-rights activist also walks free. MANDALAY A court in Myingyan Township, Mandalay Division, on Thursday released two student activists who had been facing trial for their involvement in education reform protests last year, part of an ongoing series of political prisoner pardons initiated by Burmas new National League for Democracy (NLD) government. Soe Hlaing, a Technological University student from Monywa, and Zin Ko Thant of Mandalays Yadanapon University were accused of replacing Burmas national flag with a student union flag at Myingyan Degree College during a protest for education reform in January 2015. Their release is the latest in a string of amnesties that President Htin Kyaw has signed off on since taking office this month. Fellow students who were recently released from Tharyarwaddy Prison and also some others in Mandalay were present at the court to greet their friends and held a welcoming ceremony at Myingyans Soon Loon Gu Monastery on Thursday. Elsewhere in Mandalay Division, lawyer Zaw Win, who has fought for victims of land confiscation, was released from one year and eight months detainment from Mandalays Oh-bo Prison. Zaw Win was on trial under Burmas Peaceful Assembly Law, as well as facing charges of incitement and showing disrespect to the court, for staging a protest at the Pyin Oo Lwin District Court. Inside Oh-bo prison, Myo Win, a fellow farmers rights activist from Mandalay, Yaypu Sayardaw from Mogok, and interfaith activists Zaw Zaw Latt and Pwint Phyu Latt remain behind bars, but are believed to soon be released. Burma Petition Launched Over Anti-Muslim Violence Against Vendors An online petition is in the works to take action against Buddhist monks who on Sunday threatened Muslim vendors near Rangoons Shwedagon Pagoda. RANGOON An online petition has been launched to push Rangoons chief minister to take action against Buddhist monks who on Sunday threatened Muslim vendors not to sell items near Rangoons Shwedagon Pagoda. The petition was created by a Burmese man who identifies as Thet Swe Win, and it is addressed to Phyo Min Thein, Rangoons new chief minister, urging him to respond lawfully to the Buddhist monks who mistreated Muslim vendors on Burmas New Years Day. Thet Swe Win claimed in the petition that multiple Buddhist monks in the area around the pagoda seized goods from Muslim vendors and demanded letters from them to the police and local authorities stating that they would close shops around the pagoda in the future. These threats also included physical assaults, he added. We demand [the authorities] take effective action, since this incident could lead to religious disputes and have a negative impact on [Burmas] democratic transition and on interfaith harmony in the country, Thet Swe Win said in the petition. He also said the monks actions violated Article 370(a) of the Constitution, which states that every citizen has, in accordance with the law, the right to conduct business freely in the Union for national economic development. The petition gained more than 2,500 supporters within 24 hours after it was launched on change.org on Wednesday. The Irrawaddy was unable to reach Thet Swe Win for comment on Thursday. According to a report by Central Ma Ba Tha Online Media on Wednesday, U Thu Seikkta, secretary of the Patriotic Monks Union (in Rangoon) admitted to physically assaulting Muslim vendors but said that it was because the vendors were trying to escape. He added that the actions were not related to the nationalist monk association, Ma Ba Tha. No one could have done anything if they had bombed the pagoda while wearing their burqas, in which case they would not have been able to be identified, the media outlet quoted U Thu Seikkta as saying in the report. Thats why we prevented them from selling goods around there, he said. Our group is going to continue doing this for the sake of Shwedagon Pagoda. Thaung Htut, a National League for Democracy (NLD) lawmaker for Rangoons Bahan Township and a member of Rangoons Social Affairs Committee, told The Irrawaddy on Thursday that there would be a committee meeting on Friday, at which time he would attempt to put the incident on the table for wider discussion with other committee members. Its an important issue, and we have to handle such a case fairly, he said. Since anti-Muslim riots broke out in Arakan State in 2012, relations between Muslim and Buddhist communities in Burma have deteriorated. Many political analysts believe that one of the biggest challenges for Aung San Suu Kyis NLD government will be to generate stability in areas beleaguered by religious strife. Burma Rangoon Housing Prices Drop, Signaling Market Shift Rangoon real estate prices fall as much as 25 percent, a sign that a larger market correction may be on the horizon. RANGOON Real estate prices in Rangoon have fallen as much as 25 percent in recent months, a sign that a larger market correction may be on the horizon, reversing a three-year-long trend of soaring prices. Many new apartment buildings have been built in the last two decades and vacancy rates remain high, several real estate agents told The Irrawaddy. This has recently led to apartment owners and real estate developers selling below market price. Particularly in outlying townships, like Thingangyun, Hlaing, Insein, South and North Okkalapa, the prices of some older apartments have fallen up to 10 percent, said Zaw Zaw, a senior manager at Unity Real Estate Agency. For example, a low-story apartment in Sanchaung [Township] that would have previously gone for 60 million kyats [US$50,000] is now selling for 50 million kyats. While prime real estate in downtown Rangoon has not experienced a similarly precipitous fall, prices have still dropped 5 to 10 percent, according to the real estate agents. In Thingangyun Township [northeastern Rangoon], a brand new, 800-square-foot, sixth-floor apartment that has had no previous tenants, has dropped from 25 million kyats to 22 million kyats, Zaw Zaw said. So you can see the size of the drop depends on location. Demand for high-end property has cooled off in recent years, although prices have remained stubbornly high, with some apartments costing as much as $1,500 per square foot. Many Burmese are uncertain about the countrys future during this time of political transition, and therefore buyers and sellers have tended to take a wait-and-see attitude. This has suppressed transaction volumes more than would be expected in a more mature market. Developers working in the suburbs are in need of capital to keep their construction projects going, and they have cut their prices up to 25 percent to address these cash flow issues, said Than Oo, managing director of Mandine Real Estate Agency. In the past, developers would normally raise capital in advance by selling apartments before the construction even began. But this practice is changing, and developers now try to sell as many apartments as quickly as possible once a building is completed. This has induced them to lower their prices in order to boost sales. This is a sign that demand is remaining low while supply is increasing, and people are waiting to see what happens with the political transition, Mandines Than Oo said. And now real estate is no longer the only show in town. Much investment went to the stock market since it launched earlier this year, so thats impacting the real estate market now, Than Oo said. Falling land prices due to shifting government policies will also affect apartment prices in Rangoon, according to The Su Mon, manager of Vantage Tower, which is run by developer Myint & Associates. If the government policies on land and apartments improve, it will be a lot easier for the middle class to realize their dream of owning their own apartments, The Su Mon said. Burma Restoration Work Resumes on Siamese Kings Tomb in Mandalay After a two-year hiatus, an excavation team is given the green light to resume restoration on King Uthumphons tomb in Mandalay. MandalayRestoration work on Siamese King Uthumphons tomb, located near U Bein bridge in Mandalay, will resume after a two-year hiatus. The work was stalled in March 2014 by an order from the Mandalay City Development Committee (MCDC), which had plans to transform the four-acre venue into a park. Mandalays divisional government gave the green light for work to resume on Friday. Following pledged donations from influential abbot Sittagu Sayardaw, the ex-chief minister of Mandalay Ye Myint approved the work in March 2016, before handing over his duties to his successor. We can only resume work now; we had to do a lot of preparation involving technicians from Thailand, said Win Maung, an author and architect who will lead an excavation team to conserve King Uthumphons tomb. According to the team, which consists of Burmese and Thai archeologists, historians and experts, it is financially backed by the Thai Royal Treasury and has been provided an initial budget of 40 million baht (over US$1.1 million), and a projected six-month timeline. Previously, the excavation team had requested that authorities grant the four-acre Linzin Hill, which houses the tomb, for the creation of a historic park. After being halted in 2014, the area was fenced by MCDC for their proposed recreational park projects. Some parts of the 150-foot ancient brick road, which connected the tomb, the monastery and the palace of Amarapura, had been destroyed. The area was enclosed with brick walls, and Linzin Hill was deserted among bushes and trash, which the excavation team now has to clear. Although some parts of the ancient brick road and buildings were destroyed, we will do our best to make this a historic area and to preserve the tomb and the pagodas without affecting their original structure, said Win Maung. We also need to clean all the trash, which makes this a nasty place. According to Burmese history, King Uthumphon was captured by the Burmese King Hsinbyushin [17631776] during the invasion of Thailands ancient capital of Ayutthaya in 1767, and brought to Mandalay from Thailand as a prisoner of war. He later died in monkhood during his captivity and was buried at Linzin Hill. Linzin Hill, the tomb ruins, and nearby pagodas on the edge of Taungthaman Lake in Mandalay Divisions Amarapura Township, are all tourist attractions, especially for Thai visitors. If this project is finished and the historic park becomes neat and tidy, I believe it will be more convenient for tourists and strengthen the relationship between Thailand and Burma as well, said Win Maung. Burma SSA-N: Burma Army Demands Withdrawal From Strategic Outposts The military has reportedly threatened renewed offensives if the Shan State Army-North does not withdraw from two mountain posts near ethnic Wa territory. RANGOON The Burma Army has threatened renewed military offensives if the Shan State Progress Party/Shan State Army-North (SSPP/SSA-N) refuses to withdraw from two mountain posts bordering ethnic Wa territory, according to local sources. A sergeant from the SSA-N told The Irrawaddy on the condition of anonymity that his armed group would not abandon these northern Shan State posts and that they would defend their territory in the event of a strike by government forces. We have two brigades there, the officer said. We have no conditions under which we would withdraw from our posts because this was our area and we have been based here for a long time. We are prepared to fight if they take action. The warning to withdraw came in the form of a letter from the Burma Armys Northeastern Command in Shan States northern city of Lashio, just before the annual water festival last week, the sergeant said. He expressed concern that the Burma Army might be planning an operation on a larger scale. We are even worried about whether they will attack our other bases, not only these two mountain posts, he added. The two small bases in question straddle territory controlled by the United Wa State Army (UWSA), and are located in the Loi Lan and Loi Say hills near the Salween River in Tanyang Township. The location is a half-days travel from the SSPP/SSA-N headquarters in central Shan States Wan Hai, and has been scouted as a potential location for a larger Shan base. The area is strategic for both the SSA-Nthought to be an ally of the Wa armyand the Burma Army, who, some speculate, would prefer to defeat the UWSA, Burmas largest ethnic armed organization. It is not the first time that the Burma Army has demanded that the SSPP/SSA-N withdraw from their posts or face an offensive from government forces. The last attack against the Shan armed group began under similar circumstances just two days after the nationwide election held in November 2015, when the military called for a retreat of the SSA-N from posts outside of Wan Hai. Fighting continued for months, displacing thousands of villagers in central Shan State. Citing a lack of inclusivity, the SSPP/SSA-N opted out of becoming a signatory to Burmas so-called nationwide ceasefire agreement (NCA), signed by the previous government and eight of the countrys more than 20 ethnic armed groups last October. As a new National League for Democracy-led (NLD) administration finds its bearings, ethnic armed leaders expect that a new round of peace talks will begin soon. We are waiting to see how much the military will cooperate with the new government while the new government is calling for peace and reconciliation, the SSPP/SSA-Ns Col Pein Pa told The Irrawaddy earlier this month. The Burma Army has continued to fight other NCA non-signatory groups, including the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) near Laiza in nearby Kachin State, allegedly seizing three of the KIAs mountain posts, according to recent reports by the local Kachin News Group. Another large offensive has been launched in Shan State by government forces against the ethnic Taang National Liberation Army (TNLA). Since March, clashes have occurred in Namkham, Namhsan, Kutkai and Kyaukme townships. Ethnic Palaung (Taang) rights groups have reported arbitrary detainment of locals, as well as torture and forced portering in areas where the Burma Army is active. According to a statement issued by the TNLA, four Burma Army infantry divisions withdrew from the region before the mid-April water festival. Burma Thai Court Sets Final Appeal Deadline for Koh Tao Murder Case A Thai court has accepted the final request to extend the appeal deadline for two Burmese migrant workers accused of murdering two British backpackers. CHIANG MAI, Thailand A Thai court has accepted the final possible request to extend the appeal deadline for two Burmese migrant workers sentenced to death for the murder of a pair of British backpackers on Thailands Koh Tao island in 2014. The court accepted the request from the Lawyers Council of Thailand on Tuesday, moving the deadline to May 23, said Aung Myo Thant, a lawyer for an investigation team formed by the Burmese Embassy in Bangkok. We have requested an extension for the appeal deadline because we have not yet finished gathering all the information we need for the case. We will continue gathering information since the request has now been accepted. But the court has warned that this is the last time [that such a request would be granted], Aung Myo Thant told The Irrawaddy. This is the fourth time the lawyers, acting on behalf of the convicted Burmese migrant workers, have requested an extension since the initial one-month deadline to appeal their verdict, which expired on Jan. 24. On March 25, members of the Lawyers Council of Thailand and the Burmese Embassy investigation team went to the prison where Win Zaw Htun and Zaw Lin are being held to collect information, but the interpreter was denied access to the prison, thereby delaying the process and prompting lawyers to request an extension for the appeal deadline. Lawyers were allowed to see the two men, but the interpreter was not, said Aung Myo Thant, adding that this was legally wrong. The defendants are Burmese, and the members of the Lawyers Council of Thailand are unable to communicate with them directly without an interpreter, Aung Myo Thant said, while noting that the two appellants appeared to be in good health. A court in Koh Samui sentenced Win Zaw Htun and Zaw Lin, both 22, to death on Dec. 24, 2015, for allegedly killing two British backpackers, David Miller, 24, and Hannah Witheridge, 23, on the island of Koh Tao. The murder occurred in September 2014. The subsequent investigation by Thai authorities has been plagued by claims of malfeasance, including evidentiary irregularities and claims by the defendants that they were tortured while in detention. How to Promote Yourself on the Job Last week, I wrote about Anna Frazzetto and the emergence of the chief digital officer, a role she fills at Harvey Nash, a UK-based tech recruitment and outsourcing services provider. When I spoke with Frazzetto, who has a double major in math and computer science from New York University, I was also eager to get a sense of her experience as a female in such a high-profile technology role. To that end, I began this portion of the conversation by asking Frazzetto, for whom the CDO position at Harvey Nash was created, how her being female might have contributed to the molding of the role there. She said whats more relevant is the message that seeing a female in that role conveys to women who want to pursue a career in the technology field: Its doable, its achievable, and its possible to fulfill a desire to go down that path. The other thing it does is, anytime youre sitting in any kind of management meeting or discussion, having that diversity at the table creates better productivity. I think cultural differences and gender differences really do help contribute to that, so I feel my role in the organization helps take the company to the next level. When you have that mixture, we all bring a different component to the table, and you get the best possible results that way, as opposed to having a management team that is only one-dimensional. I asked Frazzetto how the role at Harvey Nash might be different if the first CDO had been male. She said it was a difficult question for her to answer, and she explained why: I think that Harvey Nash does a good job as far as diversity balance. The question might be more relevant if we had an all-male management team, and then we introduced the first female executive, and you ask how that changes the dynamics. But thats not the case at Harvey Nash, so its kind of hard for me to answer that. That response warranted some clarification, for a couple of simple reasons: First, of the 10 members of Harvey Nashs executive council, only one is femalethe group director of talent. Second, while the chairman of the company is female, shes the only woman on the companys seven-member board of directors. When I mentioned that, Frazzetto elaborated on her response this way: My involvement is more with the U.S. and Asia-Pacific, so I look at the management structure that we have within the U.S. and Asia-Pac, where were more than 50 percent female. Its completely different from the corporate executive council. So I think Harvey Nash as a whole, when you look at all of the management structures across the board, does a really good job with gender balance and diversity. Specifically with respect to the board, I have not seen any impact [of the lack of gender diversity] from my perspective. Im not as involved, since I dont really deal directly with the board. But again, I dont see that it has had any impact, one way or another. I asked Frazzetto what the biggest obstacles have been as a female taking the career path shes chosen. She said the person sitting across the table from her often faces a more formidable obstacle: When you start dealing with some organizations where the management might be a little bit older-school in thinking, they might encounter a hurdle in sitting across from a woman who is competent, and who can help them with the business challenges they might have. That happens all the time. It also happens in terms of cultural differences. If Im doing business in Chinaor pick any country that might not necessarily be as advanced in thinking that you can have female senior executives vs. male senior executivesyou run into that challenge all the time. But I think whats always helped me, is when I enter a room, I never look to see whether Im the only female. I never think, Oh my goodness, there are only three other women in a forum of 100 executives. Never. I go into a room, I conduct business, and I let my abilities speak for me, not the fact that Im female rather than male. I think thats a challenge some people have, but I think the more confident you are in the message youre delivering, regardless of who youre sitting across the table from, they will eventually only pay attention to what youre talking about, not whether youre female, male, Muslim, Catholic, Jewish, or whatever the case may be. Finally, I asked Frazzetto if she had it to do all over again career-wise, what she would do differently. She said she probably wouldnt have been a programmer for as long as she was: Part of the reason why I was a programmer was because of not having other options available to me. I think the options available to women have changed. Years ago, it wasnt that easy for a woman to go down different paths. I was a programmer, because I loved math and computer science, so when I graduated, what else would I do other than become a programmer? But in reality, theres this whole other element of interacting with people and working with clients. That was never really offered up until I happened to have a manager who said I had really great people skillsshes the one who led me down my next career path. Thats what Im hoping that I can do for other women in technology. A contributing writer on IT management and career topics with IT Business Edge since 2009, Don Tennant began his technology journalism career in 1990 in Hong Kong, where he served as editor of the Hong Kong edition of Computerworld. After returning to the U.S. in 2000, he became Editor in Chief of the U.S. edition of Computerworld, and later assumed the editorial directorship of Computerworld and InfoWorld. Don was presented with the 2007 Timothy White Award for Editorial Integrity by American Business Media, and he is a recipient of the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for editorial excellence in news coverage. Follow him on Twitter @dontennant. Every once in a while, I run into something amazing. In this case, it is an effort announced at the AFCEA Defensive Cyber Operations Symposium that should ensure that BlackBerry and Microsoft dominate government and high-security enterprise mobile solutions, an effort that is not actually driven by Microsoft or BlackBerry. This effort comes from a partnership between two other companies, and I think it showcases the fact that strategies to change both of these major companies are working and that, once again, the success of both firms is tied to partners and not just the firms own insular efforts. Let me walk you through this. The Critical Mobile Security Problem for Government Organizations like the Department of Defense (DoD) want, and critically need, their people to be able to use mobile technology to collaborate. Literally, the fate of the free world often depends on this happening. Originally, BlackBerry dominated this effort, but other platforms have been tried as users wanted to move to trendier platforms that accommodated their personal needs more easily. But with that movement came management and security exposures. The DoD and similar organizations also want and need applications like Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Lync, OneDrive and Yammer, which enable collaboration and comply with security standards. But SharePoint, while technically proficient, isnt that friendly to folks who dont have an IT background. And collaboration, because of its risks, hasnt been great enough to actually drive people to use the service even though the government already owns the licenses. So agencies needed something that could provide the kind of BlackBerry-like security protections demanded by government, with full management control, and they needed a SharePoint-like product that people would actually use. They needed a partnership between BlackBerry and Microsoft, but these firms werent partnered. The Secret Partnership Secret partnerships are usually formed in the bowels of the companies. For instance, Oracle refused to work with Microsoft, but customers needed integration. So a secret group formed in Oracle that worked with their counterparts in Microsoft in stealth to fix the related problems. But in this Microsoft/BlackBerry case, the partnership was formed between B&D Consulting Inc., a huge government-focused consultant with tons of BlackBerry experience that specializes in security, unified communications, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence (AI), and harmon.ie, one of the top-rated Microsoft partners focused on humanizing Microsoft Office and all of the other tools listed above from within Outlook (check out the video). These two firms effectively became proxies for BlackBerry and Microsoft and today announced a massive joint DoD effort to solve the problems I have described. However, the resulting solution has far broader implications. The Microsoft Office Backstory Office was always conceived to be more of a development platform than a final product; it just never seemed to go that way. When it came to market, it was massively cheaper than the word processing machines, calculators, automated rolodex systems and costly graphics solutions it replaced. Conceptually, it was supposed to be a foundation that partners would then use to target specific needs. Instead, it had the curse of being good enough and, even as dominant as it was, it never reached its full potential. BlackBerrys strength has moved from devices to management and, with the acquisition of Good Technology, moved solidly cross-platform. But, in the meantime, BlackBerrys resources have become constrained, so it needs partners to help it carry the ball. In this one effort, both needs have been met. Im astonished that it appears to be happening organically and is not being directly driven by the technology providers. I think this is the first time Ive seen this. Support for BlackBerry PRIV and Windows Phones I picked up some additional tidbits during the briefing. First, the partners are setting up to aggressively support Windows Phones and the BlackBerry PRIV. There is no visible demand for the Windows Phones, but there has been substantial demand for the Surface tablets, which both firms report are replacing iPads in mass numbers. This suggests that they are hedging and anticipating the possible success of the rumored Surface Phone. Their most requested phone for support is the BlackBerry PRIV, however, which is undergoing security certification. Apparently, what held it up was that BlackBerry didnt want to have to certify it twice in a short time; the availability of Android Marshmallow delayed the process, which should be complete shortly. This suggests that there will likely be a rather large number of government employees moving from iPhones to BlackBerry PRIV phones by year end. Wrapping Up: Encouragement Wins over Force My grandmother told me a story when I was around seven, and it has stuck with me. It was about a fictional struggle between the wind and the sun. They made a bet about which could get a woman to take her coat off. The wind tried to force the issue. The harder it blew, the tighter the woman held her coat. The sun just gradually warmed, and eventually the woman took her coat off. The moral of the tale is that encouragement can work far better than force. Both BlackBerry and Microsoft have been aggressively moving to enable this kind of collaboration ever since each changed leadership, and they got the result that their predecessors seemed to be trying to force far more successfully, albeit they got it through partners rather than through their own efforts. I think thats a good lesson. Something to noodle on this week. Rob Enderle is President and Principal Analyst of the Enderle Group, a forward-looking emerging technology advisory firm. With over 30 years experience in emerging technologies, he has provided regional and global companies with guidance in how to better target customer needs; create new business opportunities; anticipate technology changes; select vendors and products; and present their products in the best possible light. Rob covers the technology industry broadly. Before founding the Enderle Group, Rob was the Senior Research Fellow for Forrester Research and the Giga Information Group, and held senior positions at IBM and ROLM. Follow Rob on Twitter @enderle, on Facebook and on Google+. Magic Leap, the world's hottest startup, promises to revolutionize the future of virtual reality. The secretive firm isn't located in Silicon Valey - like most of the tech companies - but in suburban Florida. Magic Leap is a pioneer startup in the field of mixed reality. Mixed reality or MR consists in virtual reality (VR) overlaid on the real world. In many ways mixed reality is the more powerful of the two technologies because it is more difficult to achieve it that the classic virtual reality. Of course, Magic Leap is not the only startup developing mixed-reality technology. However, to date, the technology created by Magic Leap allows a quality of virtual visions that exceeds all others, according to Wired. Because of Magic Leap's lead in the field, many investors are funding the company. Among them are included big names like Google, Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz. According to the same publication, executives from most major tech and media companies have visited Magic Leap's office park in the past year, to experience for themselves its futuristic augmented reality. The company completed at the beginning of this year a round of financing worth $793.5 million. To date, Magic Leap received impressing funding of $1.4 billion. And all this is even more noteworthy, because the company has not released yet a beta version of its product. Aside from potential advisers and investors, Magic Leap allowed few people to see its mixed reality gear in action. This combination of mystery and impressive funding has created great curiosity. On Tuesday, April 19, the secretive Florida-based startup has released some new footage of its system in action, according to Mashable. The video is the most elaborate to date in terms of how Magic Leap's augmented reality technology might have practical use. Among the tools that make an appearance in the footage is Snapchat, even if Magic Leap has not confirmed yet any deal with the company. Tech analysts expect that the virtual reality technology will become a crucial platform in the near future. In this context, startups like Magic Leap might join the ranks of the largest companies ever created. A recurring theme at this years SAS Global Forum is the acute shortage of trained business analysts and data scientists. The shortfall of big data and analytics professionals in the US could reach 190,000 by 2018. One keynote speaker emphasised that if you want to guarantee your kid a job interest them in analytics. According to Big Data Innovation magazine women represent 47.4 percent of the labour force, yet they fill only 25 percent of STEM roles. It says cutting out 50% of the population from a business area (analytics) that is struggling for enough applicants simply makes no sense. Capella University and analytics leader SAS have joined forces to combat the looming skills gap by providing pathways for women to enter and advance in the high-demand field of analytics. The Capella Women in Analytics scholarships not only fully fund bachelors and masters degrees in analytics, they bolster the experience with mentoring and networking opportunities. Employers are clamoring for analytics experts to make sense of their data, said Emily Baranello, Vice President of the SAS Education Practice. Women are too frequently underrepresented among those seizing these rewarding opportunities. Efforts like the Capella Women in Analytics scholarships will help turn the tide. The Capella Women in Analytics scholarships consist of two full-ride scholarships each for Capellas Bachelor of Science in Information Technology Data Analytics program and Capellas Master of Science in Analytics program. The application period runs from April 20 through May 31, 2016. Winners will receive the opportunity to attend Analytics Experience 2016 in Las Vegas. In addition, winners will be invited to visit SAS corporate headquarters in Cary, NC, where they will network with other analytics professionals, including the SAS Womens Initiatives Network (WIN). WIN is a group of more than 600 female SAS employees who foster female leadership and professional excellence at SAS and reach into communities to encourage women to pursue STEM-related careers. As a woman in analytics, Ive oftentimes been the only woman in the room. I understand how isolating and intimidating this can feel. While I was fortunate to have female mentors, its not always common for others, said Shawna Thayer, PhD, Vice President of Data Strategy and Institutional Analytics at Capella University. Capellas partnership with SAS is an opportunity to not only build a community of women supporting one another, but to help advance the fast-growing and in-demand field of analytics. Capella is continually assessing ways for our educational offerings to solve problems, both for individuals and for industries. Capella and SAS first worked together in 2014 to launch Capellas BS in IT Data Analytics and BS in Business- Business Intelligence programs. In July 2015, Capellas Master of Science in Analytics program launched to help meet the need for graduate-level professionals in data and analytics. Today's announcement was made at SAS Global Forum, the world's largest analytics conference, with more than 30,000 business and IT users of SAS software participating on-site and online. The author attended the event as a guest. The IT security concerns are greatest among IT leaders of small companies, with 94% concerned about the level of security available in open plan work areas compared to 85% of medium companies, and 79% of large companies. According to the research by recruitment company Robert Half 86% of Australian Chief Information Officers (CIOs) see potential threats in having an open plan office layout. Robert Half says CIOs across all businesses have different concerns about the implications of open plan offices in terms of security, with protecting corporate information with todays workspace designs becoming so open that in some situations they are starting to lose practicality, while also impacting employee confidentiality. David Jones, Senior Managing Director Robert Half Asia Pacific says open plan layouts can be cost effective for businesses and can promote communication and collaboration between employees but the key downside to this is the increased potential for IT security breaches.The level of threat may vary according to the sensitivity of information employees in an open plan area are working with. Nonetheless it is a risk that cannot, and should not, be discounted altogether.Jones says every organisation faces a constant battle to protect its IT infrastructure from external threats, and internal security threats, provoked by the growing popularity of open plan office spaces, are causing additional concerns.Jones points out that todays dynamic open workspace can involve communal standing desks, walking desks, and the concept of hot desking, which shy away from the traditional cubicle walls. Enclosed spaces have been replaced with work stations that are either separated by a small divider screen, or not at all, which can have an impact on personal privacy but also corporate security.The survey reveals that more than one-third (37%) of Australian CIOs are primarily worried about colleagues or external parties overhearing confidential or sensitive information, followed by 35% who refer to visual security. An open-plan office also may increase the risk of devices, documents or even personal property being stolen.David Jones says many companies are introducing additional security measures to help mitigate this risk, and Key steps to introduce include developing clear security guidelines and policies, allocating responsibility for security, and ensuring all staff have at least a basic understanding of the organisations security issues and policies.Providing continuous training for employees in IT security so they are up to date with the latest activity is an efficient way for companies to create the necessary security awareness and to prevent putting customer and personal information at risk, Jones suggests. The Federal Government today unveiled its cyber security strategy along with the appointment of Alastair MacGibbon as the Prime Minister's special adviser on cyber security. "The Australian Government has a duty to protect our nation from cyber attack and to ensure that we can defend our interests in cyberspace. We must safeguard against criminality, espionage, sabotage and unfair competition online," said the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull. Australia's Cyber Security Strategy [PDF] says "we must elevate cyber security as an issue of national importance." The strategy has five main aspects. As much of the nation's digital infrastructure is privately owned, the government proposes annual cyber security meetings hosted by the Prime Minister and attended by leaders from the business and research communities. The Australian Cyber Security Centre will move to new premises providing room for growth and better cooperation with the private sector, and the government will sponsor research into the costs of malicious activity to help local organisations make better investment and risk management decisions. Strong cyber defences The government proposes better information sharing between the public and private sectors, with joint cyber threat sharing centres and an online portal. The cyber security and cybercrime capacity and capability of the Australian Cyber Security Centre, CERT Australia, Australian Signals Directorate, Australian Crime Commission and Australian Federal Police. Governments, businesses and the research community will co-design national voluntary cyber security guidelines to promote good practice by all organisations, and voluntary cyber security governance 'health checks' will be offered. Global responsibility and influence As most cybercrime targeting Australians originates overseas, partnerships with international law enforcement, intelligence agencies and other computer emergency response teams will be developed to help build cyber capacity to prevent and shut down safe havens for cyber criminals. Australia will appoint a cyber ambassador charged with identifying opportunities for such collaboration and to represent the country on related issues. Growth and innovation Cyber security is seen as an export growth opportunity, so the government will establish a Cyber Security Growth Centre, and boost the cyber security capacity of the CSIRO's Data61 in part by instituting a PhD scholarship program. A cyber smart nation There are two main aspects to this part of the policy: increasing the number of skilled cyber security professionals through the education system, and sustained joint public-private awareness initiatives and education campaigns to help ensure all Australians understand how to protect themselves online. The strategy seems to have received a positive reception from industry. Cisco senior vice president and chief security and trust officer John N. Stewart - one of the five experts selected by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to provide key recommendations - said "Digitisation continues to be a driver of Australia's economic transition, causing industry and government leaders to focus on managing risk, creating opportunities to differentiate, cultivating an IT service base that is globally competitive, and building trust. cyber security can be that differentiator and business advantage." Webroot APAC managing director Robbie Upcroft told iTWire that the strategy is "all very encouraging" but in the light of the "rising tide of threats hitting small businesses" more attention could have been paid to that sector as larger organisations already have protective mechanisms in place. Upcroft said the government should broaden its outreach program by including accountants and other professionals that provide advice to small businesses. While the government's proposals for threat intelligence sharing makes sense, it presents commercial challenges. "We would welcome a discussion" of this aspect, Upcroft said. Australia's Cyber Security Strategy is "something we all should be encouraged by," it is "one thing to announce a policy, another to enact it," he said. WatchGuard Technologies APAC technical director Rob Collins said "As a pre-sales engineer with various internet security companies over the years, I've preached the importance of strong cyber security too often to deaf ears. "Government agencies that are not taking advantage of the latest technologies like Sandbox malware analysis and layered security are leaving themselves vulnerable. "Hopefully, with these announcements and funding for education and establishing best practices, CEOs and CIOs will appreciate the need and budget for robust cyber security initiatives." Ian McAdam, Symantec's ANZ managing director Ian McAdam said "With the incidence and severity of cyber security threats increasing across the country, Symantec supports the Australian Government's Cyber Security Strategy. "The investment announced by the government today demonstrates there is no one silver bullet that can protect our nation from cyber security threats. The government's strategy to apply a multi-pronged approach across cyber security education, partnerships, research and development, and global awareness is an important step in helping to reduce cyber security threats. "Given the borderless nature of cybercrime, building trusted partnerships with the private sector and other governments to share intelligence that tackles critical cyber risks will be critical to helping Australia stay on the offensive." CyberArk ANZ regional director Sam Ghebranious thought the government's $230 million cyber security investment will support the overall raising of awareness of the problem of cyber security and opportunities for Australian security skills development. But he also said "today's confirmation by the government that the attack on the Bureau of Meteorology was indeed the target of a cyber attack provides compelling evidence that governments need to make a fundamental shift in their overall security strategies. "Historically, many government agencies have simply failed when it comes to the basics of passing Security 101, including patching servers, implementing regular system updates, and tightening controls around privileged accounts and administrator credentials." Ghebranious added "We believe the Australian government is well positioned to play a leadership role in helping raise awareness about cyber security risks and provide the resources needed to help enterprises and government agencies develop robust, proactive IT security strategies, including greater access to education and training. Today's announcement is very encouraging for the community." Dell SecureWorks APJ head of incident response and forensics Liam Rowland said "The Government Security Strategy tells us something with certainty, the Australian government is getting very serious about Cyber Security, meaning organisations operating in Australia are going to need to follow suit." "Australia's attitude to security, as a whole, is evolving. It is critical anyone that operates in Australia evolves with it." He also drew the attention of Australian businesses to the Privacy Amendment (Notification of Serious Data Breaches) Bill 2015, which the government is seeking to pass. "With the new cyber security strategy and breach notification regulations coming into place in Australia, organisations will now have to be transparent around breaches. This means people will be asking more questions about why their data wasn't secured to the degree to prevent a breach should one occur. If the cause is because the business didn't have an incident response plan in place, not only will they be fined under the new regulations and have to report it to their stakeholders but also may face customer backlash and resentment around the loss of their personal data." A new deal will see Optus provide RigNet Australia with satellite capacity. RigNet, a communications provider to the oil and gas industry, has reached an agreement with Optus for the supply of satellite capacity. RigNet - - the Australian arm of the global digital technology group based in Houston Texas - will install its own equipment at the Optus Satellite east and west coast earth stations. The existing diverse connectivity between those two locations will help ensure network redundancy for RigNet's customers. "This partnership provides RigNet access to world class facilities and terrestrial networks, as well as domestic and international satellite fleets across the Australasian region," said RigNet regional VP for APAC and the Middle East Rob George. "RigNet has been securing contracts across the region and will require more capacity domestically," said Optus Satellite vice president Paul Sheridan. "So while they will continue to use their own capacity, this partnership also allows access to capacity from our Optus Satellite fleet and our partners." According to Sheehan, the existing links between the two Optus teleports are provided by a diverse Optus SDH fibre network, which is a key benefit for RigNet to ensure their customers have true redundancy for their services. Sheehan said that utilising Optus Lockridge and Oxford Falls satellite facilities also enabled RigNet to focus on providing targeted and fully managed communications solutions and other network-based services to customers within region. The Optus Satellite fleet enhances RigNets overall market offering, and complements RigNets current satellite access. Peter Di Pietro, Sales Director for RigNet Australia said the Optus partnership provides RigNet with the flexibility to offer products and services at the price points that this challenging market is dictating. Based on the Civica Spydus platform, the app will provide around-the-clock access to library services. The ability to search and list items in languages such as Vietnamese and Chinese will be provided on launch, and a full Chinese-language online catalogue will be added later this year. The smartphone app will cover the Cabramatta, Bonnyrigg, Fairfield, Wetherill Park and Smithfield branches when it is made available in early May. Readers will be able to search, reserve and renew library items at any time; download ebooks, audio books and emagazines; and use the phone's camera to scan a book's ISBN (eg, in a shop) to see if copies are available from the library. The accompanying web version can also be used to view upcoming events, access accounts and contact librarians. And yes, the app does work in English, and it will be available for Android and iOS. "The library service plays a vital role in supporting the life-long learning aspirations of the Fairfield City community, where many different cultures are valued and respected," said library manager Paul Scully. "This new app is part of the Council's Open Libraries program, our commitment to modernising all Fairfield libraries with improved access to technology and applications. We are delighted to work with Civica to help share this important community resource with the people of Fairfield." More than half the municipality's population were born overseas, with 49% coming from non-English speaking countries. Civica claims to be the biggest local government services and software supplier in ANZ. The joint Digital Futures report a case study of the Northern Inland region of NSW - identifies what Vodafone says are the significant opportunities communications technologies present for the Northern Inland region, and suggests other regions should employ the cooperative development approach exemplified to achieve similar success. Vodafone Chief Strategy Officer, Dan Lloyd, emphasised how crucial it is for communities to work together to take full advantage of the benefits of mobile communications. Mobile communications are especially important to regional Australia, to enable people to keep in contact across vast distances and access emergency services, as well as to grow businesses and create jobs. We must work together to deliver modern infrastructure so the benefits of mobile communications can be realised in our regions.Lloyd said Vodafone is building 18 sites in the Northern Inland region as part of the Governments Mobile Black Spot Program, and is working closely with providers and local communities to identify further opportunities.One great example of cooperative development in the report is the White Rock Wind Farm, west of Glen Innes. Several different groups came together to build this new site under the Mobile Black Spot Programme including the Federal and NSW Governments, Inverell Shire and Glen Innes Severn Councils, Vodafone and wind farm company, Goldwind, Lloyd notes.Lloyd cites comments by the Minister for Barnaby Joyce highlighting the critical importance of digital innovation in regional Australia to realising the national potential.The report gives us insight into how regional businesses and groups can harness the opportunities together to springboard into an exciting and profitable future, Joyce said.The growth and jobs which will come from smarter businesses in regional Australia will not be realised without reliable, modern, telecommunications infrastructure.Regional Australia Institute CEO, Jack Archer, recommends the next step from the research is to help residents and businesses use technology to its full potential.Communications technologies play an increasingly important role in enabling regional Australia to participate in the digital economy. Through the coordinated efforts of various groups, we can drive the identified local strength and creativity to achieve significant prosperity. Archer concluded. Get unlimited access to all content and features at ivpressonline.com with our Full Online Access Subscription. Read our E-Edition, the digital replica of the print newspaper online, access content in exclusive sections including Family, Teen, Business, Databases, Farm and more. This option does not include daily home delivery of the Imperial Valley Press newspaper. For home delivery service, please select Premium or Premium Plus. Fulham 0 The season cannot end soon enough for Fulham as they were easily swept aside by play off hopefuls Wolves. The home side were far too good for this Fulham team who tried to stifle them by employing a back five and three central midfielders. The game came to life early in the second half when Alan Neilson was allowed a free header from a Kevin Muscat corner to give the home team a deserved lead. Fulham were unfortunate to concede a second goal when Terry Phelan was adjudged to have fouled Michael Branch inside the penalty box when it appeared to be outside. Muscat converted the spot kick. The third goal came in the last minute. The Fulham 'keeper failed to gather a Neil Emblem cross and his namesake Scott Taylor, hammered the ball home from close range. It is easy to see why Fulham have only scored three away league goals in the past 13 games. Wholesale changes are needed if the club are to sustain a challenge for promotion. A creative midfielder and two strikers must be at the top of new manager Jean Tigana's shopping list. Library bond unanimously approved Voters waited in line for 45 minutes Tuesday to participate in an eight-minute meeting that resulted in the unanimous approval of a $600,000 bond to help renovate the North Road... Ferryboat business told to halt operations The ferryboat company operating from the municipally owned docks at East Ferry is illegally using that space, according to correspondence mailed to business owner Bill Munger. Town Administrator Jamie Hainsworth... A DOGGONE NEW BUSINESS A former business that used to clean peoples clothes is reopening as a groomer to tidy up the fur of those peoples four-legged companions. The defunct laundromat at the McQuades... Racial discrimination has been in America since the 17th Century. It has been transcribed in America's history ever since the Europeans set foot in North America. Racial discrimination started with the Native Americans then transcended to African-Americans, as told by Sound Vision. Now, racial discrimination is in the news and the workplace. In New Orleans, a Parish African-American man is suing a Chevrolet dealership for racial discrimination. According to Louisiana Record, Terry Gibson is suing the dealership for allegedly committing unlawful employment practices, retaliation and wrongful termination. A lawsuit was filed on Apr. 6, 2016 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. The lawsuit was against the local dealership, Leson Chevrolet Company, Inc. Gibson is represented by Atty. Christopher L. Williams. The claim held that the dealership violated the Title VIII of the Civil Rights as well as the Louisiana Employment Discrimination Law. Gibson was terminated from his employment with the Chevrolet dealership in may 2015. The plaintiff is seeking a trial by jury for compensation for lost wages and fringe benefits, reinstatement, front pay, punitive damages, attorney fees, expenses, costs and all other relief as the court deems proper. According to Gibson, he had lost income, benefits and also suffered damages. The damages also included the embarrassment and humiliation he experienced because of how he was treated at Leson Chevrolet. In the complaint, he was not allowed to be on the sales floor to mingle with the customers while his Caucasian counterparts are able to do so. The suit cited preferential treatment to Caucasians which collected all the sales. In addition to the complaint, he was also denied promotion and development opportunities while the company continued to hire Caucasians for the same positions Gibson applied for. The reason why he was not promoted was because he was not qualified, although he allegedly claimed he was more than qualified. Verizon workers have been rallying against Verizon's practice of outsourcing jobs outside America. It has been a big issue brought to the table by labor unions during their week-long strike against the company. Union leaders have pointed out that there is evidence of the practice. The union contends that Verizon wants, in a labor contract, to shift more jobs to contractors. This brought out nearly 40,000 Verizon workers to go on strike, according to Computer World. Marilyn Irwin, President of the Washington area Communications Workers of America Local 2108 (one of the labor union groups on strike), explained that Verizon wants to contract 50% of its operations offshore. While Verizon is busy making sure its operations are still running, the issue has been getting attention nationwide. The likes of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders has also shown a spotlight on the issue. "They want to outsource decent paying jobs," Sanders said at the Verizon picket line. It's no secret that in order to compete with other companies, businesses are looking to hire cheaper labor offshore. However, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam responded through his LinkedIn account against Sanders' remarks. "Contrary to Sen. Sanders's contention. the proposal that Verizon is making to the union does not call for mass layoffs or shipping jobs overseas. Rather, we've asked for more flexibility in routing calls and consolidating some of our call centers, some of which employ a handful of people." According to reports, this was the only time Verizon has spoken about the issue. The company did not respond to other requests for comments or clarification. While Verizon keeps mum about the issue, Verizon workers have been filing applications with the United Sates Labor Department for Trade Adjustment Assistance benefits because they lost their jobs from companies outsourcing to other countries. One former employee noted in her TAA application that - "Verizon has been in the process of moving all production for all products off shore for the last few years. We were notified in April [2015] that all the remaining VOIP Order Management was being moved to Manila." Harriet Tubman's legacy lingered and memories lingered on the forthcoming new $20 bill. It stands out that Harriet Tubman is replacing former President Andrew Jackson as the new character on the paper money. Harriet Tubman's legacy has gained much influence not only in her era but in the present as well. The Founding Father will remain on the front of the $10 bill, and suffragists who fought to give women the right to vote will be added, including Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul and on the $20 bill, abolitionist Harriet Tubman joins the rank as well, according to a report from NBC News. Even Treasury Secretary Jack Lew stated, "I'm very excited by it and I think it's much bigger than just honoring one woman. This is about saying that our money is going to tell a much bigger part of our story." It appears that the paper money will undergo various changes and improvements. There will also be changes to the $5 bill and it will depict famous events from the Lincoln Memorial, such as the historic moment when First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt invited Marian Anderson to sing on the monument's steps because the concert halls in Washington D.C. were segregated, as reported by the same post. The legacy that Harriet Tubman has rendered will resonate through time and space and now it is being heightened even more by her appearance in the new $20 bill. Tubman's life and works are one of a kind. Tubman, a black woman, escaped slavery to become a conductor on the Underground Railroad, risking her life to lead slaves to freedom while Jackson, the son of Scots-Irish immigrants and owner of slaves, was elected president as a war hero and became known for policies that led to the deaths of countless Native Americans, reports The Los Angeles Times. It stands to reason that even in the past links Jackson and Tubman and now both their names are being linked as well in relation to the face of the new $20 bill. Email Links to our top local news stories of the day, Monday through Saturday. Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Deborah Ross on Wednesday tried to hammer two-term Republican incumbent Richard Burr after the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a school policy in Virginia, similar to North Carolinas House Bill 2, violates a U.S. Department of Education regulation in Title IX. Burr is wrong to say that HB2 does not discriminate and to downplay its possible effect on federal funding for education, Ross campaign spokesman Austin Vevruka said. As a condition for receiving federal money, N.C. Public Schools must comply with Title IX, according to Vanessa Jeter, the director of communication and information services at the N.C. Department of Public Instruction. In the 2015-16 fiscal year, N.C. Public Schools K-12 received $831 million in federal money, she said. Other news reports say that federal money for all education programs statewide, from kindergarten to college, comes to nearly $4.6 billion. Vevruka said Burr should be a leader. He was wrong to say it isnt a federal issue. He should admit he was wrong and do whats right be a leader and work to repeal the law, he said. For Burr, legislative spokeswoman Taylor Holgate tried to suggest that the issue is out of Burrs hands. This is a matter for the courts and will be settled in due time, she said. In the Virginia case, a federal judge had rejected a claim made by student Gavin Grimm of sex discrimination against the Gloucester County School Board. But on Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit appellate court, which also covers North Carolina, ruled 2-1 to overturn the school boards policy. The court said the judge ignored a regulation in Title IX that transgender students in public schools must be allowed to use the restroom that corresponds with their gender identity. Claim reinstated In doing so, the court reinstated the students claim and ordered the federal district judge to reconsider his decision in the case, according to Wake Forest University political science professor John Dinan. The court arrived at its decision primarily by deferring to the U.S. Department of Educations interpretation of regulations implementing Title IX, Dinan said. The court also made clear that Congress could change this policy by statute and that the next president could change this interpretation, he said. Republican state legislators passed HB2 last month in response to a broad anti-discriminatory ordinance passed by the city of Charlotte. Among its provisions, it said that people could use public restrooms based on gender identity. HB2 overrode the city ordinance, requiring people to use restrooms based on gender at birth. Grimm, 16, was born female but identifies as male. He was allowed to use the boys restrooms at his school for several weeks in 2014. But after some parents complained, the school board adopted a policy requiring students to use either the restroom that corresponds with their biological gender or a private, single-stall restroom. Burrs refusal to do whats right is threatening to put our states federal education aid at risk, Ross said in a news release. Burrs campaign spokesman, Alex Johnson, said the senators position is no secret to voters. Senator Burr has already responded to questions on the issue several times, and the voters know where he stands, Johnson said. But it is what Burr has said that has come under fire from Ross. Its a state issue, Burr told The Charlotte Observer two weeks ago. In an interview with Durham television station ABC11, Burr said HB2 is not discriminatory. Responding to the comment released by Ross, Johnson fired back: It is time for Deborah Ross to stop trying to hide from her radical record as the chief lobbyist for the ACLU and tell the voters why she fought against a sex offender registry that protects women and children. Vevruka said Johnsons response is why people are tired of Washington politicians like Richard Burr. Of course Deborah Ross supports the sex offender registry she voted multiple times to improve our states registry in the General Assembly. She also championed domestic violence protections, he said. WASHINGTON Visiting justices from Canadas high court sat in on Mondays immigration arguments before the Supreme Court and after their 90-minute education in the current state of American jurisprudence, our neighbors to the north would be forgiven if they had fantasies of building a border wall of their own. The Senates refusal to confirm a replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia has left the U.S. high court evenly split and increasingly paralyzed. As the justices heard arguments about President Obamas executive actions on illegal immigration, there were really only two possible results: chaos or more chaos. A divided Congress couldnt agree on legislation to deal with the 11 million immigrants here illegally. Obama tried to do something on his own use his executive authority to defer deportation of parents of children who are American citizens and the rift grew deeper. Texas, supported by 25 other states, most led by Republican governors, sued. Sixteen other states and the District of Columbia filed briefs on the other side. The GOP-led U.S. House sued as well, but 186 members of the House and 39 senators (virtually the entire Democratic caucus) filed opposing briefs. Now the Supreme Court has to rule on Obamas DAPA policy (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans). But with no expectation that the justices can reach agreement on the merits of the case, that leaves two options: Chief Justice John Roberts joins the liberals in dismissing the case on a technicality that Texas doesnt have standing in court. This would leave it unclear whether DAPA is legal and set off confusion in the country as other entities try to file suit and the administration tries to enforce its legally ambiguous policy. Or, the justices come to a 4-to-4 tie on the merits of the case, and even greater chaos ensues. An appellate ruling invalidating the law stands, at least in part of the country. Cases will be brought in other circuits, probably causing different views of the law to arise in different parts of the country. With either of these two possibilities you have chaos about whether DAPA is legal or not, says Neal Katyal, the Supreme Court litigator with Hogan Lovells who filed a brief in the case from former immigration officials supporting the administration. The current confusion, following the 4-to-4 split in an important labor case, is another indication that the Supreme Court is struggling to function. The justices have granted only three cases since Scalia died, according to a list kept by the court, a figure Supreme Court watchers say is extraordinarily low. Theyre tending away from deciding much, and when they do reach decision, it is often a very narrow ruling, Katyal tells me. On Monday, the justices seemed split down the middle, both on the merits of the case and the question of standing. Roberts said Texas position, that it would lose money because it would have to issue drivers licenses to those aided by Obamas order, was the classic case for standing, and he accused the administration of putting Texas in a Catch-22. Justice Anthony Kennedy, too, said that the policy was being done backwards and upside down and that the decision should be a legislative, not an executive, act. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor ridiculed the claim that the executive orders would have a negative economic impact on Texas. Those nearly 11 million unauthorized aliens are here in the shadows they are affecting the economy whether we want to or not, she said. If Congress really wanted not to have an economic impact, it would allot the amount of money necessary to deport them, but it hasnt. Nobody disputed that the administration has the discretion to defer action on certain illegal immigrants. What disturbed lawyers for the House and for Texas was that those who receive such deferred action are, under long-standing federal law, eligible to apply for authorization to work based on economic need, even though they dont have legal status. Erin Murphy, representing the House, said flatly that Congress has passed a statute that says if you are living in this country without legal authority, you cannot work. But Donald Verrilli, the administrations solicitor general, pointed out that, even without DAPA, there are millions of people who dont have legal status but legally work in the United States. They would be out of luck and out of work under the law as the House Republican majority would like it to be interpreted. Tossing millions from their jobs would cause chaos. But chaos is what you get when you sideline the Supreme Court. SHARE By of the The inversion crackdown by the Obama administration that blocked Pfizer's big merger won't stop Johnson Controls Inc.'s merger with Tyco International, the companies announced Thursday. The announcement came in a filing with securities regulators. The companies said they have completed their review of the new rules, announced this month, and that the deal is expected to be completed on schedule on Oct. 1. The new rules represented the Treasury Department's third attempt in recent years to thwart companies looking to move their headquarters offshore for tax purposes. Inversions have become an issue on the presidential campaign trail this year, with Democrats calling the tax-shifting moves unpatriotic and Republicans arguing the practice underscores the need for tax reform. Analysts and tax experts who weighed in on the Treasury Department's latest attempt to make inversion deals more difficult had predicted it would not stop the Tyco-Johnson marriage, but the companies had declined to comment on the impact of the regulations until Thursday. Significantly, the companies said they still expect the deal to deliver $650 million in operational and tax savings over three years. When the deal was announced in January, the companies said they expected $500 million in operational savings and $150 million in tax savings as a result of the combined company being headquartered in Ireland. "Following a review of the U.S. Department of Treasury's Temporary and Proposed Tax Regulations issued on April 4, 2016, Tyco and Johnson Controls today confirm that they will proceed with their merger plans and that the combined company expects to deliver $650 million in operational and global tax synergies over the first three years after closing," the companies said in the filing. Glendale-based Johnson Controls is in the midst of several transformational moves, including its merger with Tyco International and its plan to spin off its automotive business into a separate company, to be known as Adient. Both will be run from Milwaukee. Johnson Controls will become an Irish company for tax purposes and adopt Tyco's Ireland office as its global headquarters. But its primary North American headquarters will be in Wisconsin. In conjunction with its earnings announcement, Johnson Controls signaled that its automotive business also will be domiciled in Ireland. Without saying that specifically, the company said the spinoff would be completed at the end of October, after its merger is completed, and that the automotive seating business would have a tax rate in the range of 10% to 12%. Johnson Controls' own tax rate last year was 19%, and the company said in January it expected the combined company would have a tax rate of 12%. The announcement came as Johnson Controls executives prepared to update analysts and investors on the company's performance and merger planning in conjunction with its second-quarter results. "This is a truly historic time for our company. We continue to make significant progress on our path to building two leading, independent global companies," Alex Molinaroli, chairman and chief executive, said in a statement. "The merger between Johnson Controls and Tyco is expected to close October 1, 2016. My confidence that this powerful combination will create a world leader in buildings and energy technologies with significant strategic value for our customers, employees and shareholders just continues to grow." Johnson Controls reported a loss of $530 million, or 82 cents a share, in the quarter, with its results weighed down by merger, tax and severance expenses. Excluding the one-time items, the company said, its operating profit was 86 cents a share, 4 cents above the forecast of analysts who track the company. The company increased its operating profit outlook for the full fiscal year. The company's quarterly sales fell to $9 billion from $9.2 billion. The company said its strongest performance came from a 33% jump in sales for its building efficiency business, the heating and cooling equipment and controls unit based in downtown Milwaukee. That business saw strong growth and announced several key new orders, including a $67.8 million contract over 23 years for energy improvements at the Norfolk Naval Base and a partnership with Target Stores to replace heating and cooling equipment at 225 stores to maximize energy savings. The company reported sales were unchanged in its battery business, which saw a 60% increase in shipments to China, Johnson Controls' key market for growth. China sales in the automotive seating and interiors business grew 51%. Johnson Controls is Wisconsin's largest company based on sales, with $37 billion in revenue last year. That was divided among its three businesses, which supply car batteries, car seats and other auto parts, and building heating and cooling equipment and controls. Packers defense has no margin for error because rest of team is awful Certainly the Green Bay defense had lapses at inopportune times, but the loss at Washington can't be placed on Joe Barry's unit. SHARE By , Volkswagen has reached a settlement in principle with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, California regulators, California attorney generaland consumers over a plan to fix or buy back nearly half a million vehicles that violated emissions standards, a federal judge said Thursday. The deal includes "substantial compensation" for owners of cars powered by two-liter "clean diesel" engines that were fitted with software to cheat emissions tests, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer said in a hearing from a courtroom in San Francisco. The accord could finally bring about a solution to a crisis that has bedeviled Volkswagen engineers, who have been unable to deliver a fix that was acceptable to the EPA. Consumers will be allowed to sell back their vehicles to Volkswagen or get repairs, the judge said. But financial details of the offer, which is still being finalized, were not disclosed. Breyer issued a gag order and scolded parties for leaking previous details to the media, which included reports of $5,000 in compensation for some VW car owners. Breyer said that former FBI director Robert Mueller, who was appointed to pursue a settlement, had reached an agreement with all the major parties on a fix for vehicles and a plan to pay vehicle owners. "There is definite momentum to resolving these issues," Breyer said. Volkswagen will also be required to invest funds to "promote green automotive" initiatives, the judge said. Justice Department attorney Joshua Van Eaton said the Federal Trade Commission is also expected to support the deal. The FTC recently sued Volkswagen over the German automaker's "clean diesel" advertising, which the agency called deceptive. Breyer set June 21 as a deadline for the parties to file preliminary proposals on the settlement, after which the public will have a chance to comment before he signs off. The agreement helps Volkswagen avoid a trial over the emissions violations and economic losses to consumers, which Breyer had threatened to schedule if VW did not meet Thursday's deadline to reach an agreement. Attorneys for the U.S. government, state regulators and consumers worked 14 hours a day, seven days a week since a March 24 hearing to reach a deal, the judge said. The agreement is far from the end for Volkswagen's emissions scandal. For starters, the Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into Volkswagen's intentional evasion of emissions standards, which was first exposed by the EPA and California Air Resources Board in September. The company is also facing several investigations in Germany, its headquarters, where it has much larger sales. Analysts have estimated that the company could be forced to spend tens of billions in fines, repair costs and settlements. The cost to buy back all of the cars affected by the scandal would be more than $7 billion, Kelley Blue Book estimated. The scandal also includes about 90,000 3-liter diesel vehicles, including Audi sedans and Porsche crossovers. Those vehicles are not included in the agreement. "It is the court's expectation that the parties, in addition to finalizing the agreements that I just discussed, will work expeditiously on resolving these outstanding issues," Breyer said. In this November 2013 photo, a milk truck leaves after making a delivery at Grassland Dairy Products, Inc. in Greenwood. MARK HOFFMAN/MHOFFMAN@JOURNALSENTINEL.COM Credit: MARK HOFFMAN/MHOFFMAN@JOURNALSENTINEL.COM SHARE By of the Grassland Dairy Products, of Greenwood, says Canada is preparing to take steps to halt imports of ultra-filtered milk from the U.S., a move that could result in the loss of $100 million in annual exports from Wisconsin. Ultra-filtered milk is protein liquid concentrate used to make cheese. Unlike whole milk, it enters Canada duty-free from the United States. Canadian dairy farmers have objected to the duty-free imports. Grassland says the milk used to produce the protein concentrates helps support more than 700 Wisconsin dairy farms and the company's plant in Greenwood. Leon Gregorich, Grassland CEO, and Trevor Wuethrich, Grassland president, have written a letter to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, expressing "serious concern" about the issue. Hahn Hilary begins a world tour with a recital Satruday at Wilson Center in Brookfield. SHARE Hilary Hahn and Cory Smythe enjoy a fun moment after winning the 2015 Grammy for best chamber music/small ensemble performance for In 27 Pieces: The Hilary Hahn Encores. Frazer Harrison Pope Benedict XVI stands with violinist Hilary Hahn following a concert at the Vatican in 2007, on the occasion of the popes 80th birthday. ALESSANDRA TARANTINO By , Brookfield is not exactly a hot spot for internationally renowned classical musicians to kick off recital tours, which is part of what makes Hilary Hahn's recital Saturday at the Wilson Center such a treat. Following the performance here, Hahn and her recital collaborator, pianist Cory Smythe, will take the program on a U.S. tour, followed by multiple performances in Europe and Japan. Smythe is familiar to many in Milwaukee as the New York pianist who plays with Present Music several times each concert season. Hahn and Smythe won a Grammy together in 2015 for "In 27 Pieces: The Hilary Hahn Encores." The album is a collection of encore-length pieces, all commissioned by Hahn. Speaking by phone recently, Hahn explained that two of the pieces on her Brookfield recital program are tied to her "Encores" project, including Tina Davidson's "Blue Curve of the Earth," which appears on the "27 Pieces" album. "She (Davidson) wrote the piece on an artists' retreat, I believe out in Wyoming," Hahn said. "She had seen a picture of the Earth taken from space. She took that image, combined with Wyoming landscape, and created this piece." "The piece represents another side of American music, but doesn't sound like Americana," she said. (Listen to Hahn and Smythe's recording of the piece at youtu.be/ArymdmpJVO0.) Hahn is including the Bach Violin Sonata No. 3 in C major on the program, as well as one of six partitas she commissioned from composer Anton Garcia Abril, whose "Third Sigh" appears on the "27 Pieces" album. "He (Abril) has this remarkable gift for polyphony (multiple voices)," she said, "but he has evolved away from the original sense of the word." Hahn "got goose bumps" when Abril "showed up with a first draft of all six pieces." She said she requested a few small changes to the pieces to adapt them to her technique. She will premiere three of the pieces this season and three next season. The program also will include Mozart's Violin Sonata No. 27 in G major, and Copland's Sonata for Violin and Piano. Including the Copland sonata, a piece that's not heard terribly often, was sort of a no-brainer for Hahn. "I love Copland's music, and I don't get to play it very often. This is the first piece of his I get to play where I'm not part of a larger ensemble." In addition to her delight in performing the music on this particular program, Hahn is glad to be working with Smythe, and to be traveling with him as well. "What I like about touring with someone is that the reason you're touring together is that you're playing multiple concerts together and not starting from scratch every week," she said. "Usually I get to a city and have two rehearsals with the orchestra and then one to four concerts, depending on the series," she continued. "But we will have the great musical opportunity to build a performance together over different concerts and try things over and over again. At the end of a tour like this, you really feel like you've done something with an arc to it." "I really love working with Cory," she said. "We have similar approaches to the work, but not so much that it's redundant. I learn a lot from him every time I work with him." She added that she and Smythe can chatter comfortably for hours while traveling together or can just as comfortably make it a relatively silent trip. Smythe shares that feeling about Hahn, and not just about musical matters. "She has done a lot more traveling than I have, and she really has it down and knows how to make it relatively painless," he said. Among the nonmusical things he's learned from her, he added, is "recognizing when and how to find time for yourself" while traveling. One of her travel tips is taking a picture of her room number with her phone at each new hotel so she can't forget it. So what does someone immersed in violin music listen to for pleasure? Hahn's answer, when asked what she had listened to last, was quick: "Tracy Chapman, 'Telling Stories,'" she said. "I used to listen to a lot of Tracy Chapman when I was a teenager. I know most of her songs word for word. I realized recently that it's been awhile since I listened to her, and that it's time to revisit the catalog." What does a violinist who has been immersed in encores for the past several years play as an encore on a recital? We will find out on Saturday. IF YOU GO Violinist Hilary Hahn performs in a recital with pianist Cory Smythe at 8p.m. Saturday at the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts, 19805 W. Capitol Drive, Brookfield. Tickets: $42. Call (262) 781-9520 or visit wilson-center.com. Milwaukee rapper Pizzle recently dropped a long-in-the-works full-length, Grand De$ign. Credit: Michael McLoone This week's batch of local album reviews features anticipated releases from two local rappers: Lorde Fredd33 from hip-hop collective New Age Narcissism, releasing his fullest solo offering to date with "Dead Man's View;" and Pizzle's "Grand De$ign." Conundrum, "Physiognomy" (facebook.com/conundrumtrio) If you love jam bands, you'll want to absorb Conundrum's adventurous debut. But even if you think jam bands are boring, that's never the case on "Physiognomy." The band never lulls into complacency or allows a jam to roll on into tedium; "Phantom Gravitas," for example, nimbly infuses elements of jazz, Latin music, metal rock and metal. Next gig: 9 p.m. April 29, Linneman's Riverwest Inn, 1001 E. Locust St. $5. Lorde Fredd33, "Dead Man's View" (facebook.com/LRD33) Lorde Fredd33 stands out in the local rap scene, and amongst his fellow New Age Narcissism members, through his intense physicality. But "Dead Man's View" shows a new perspective. Yes, the full-length is filled with aggressive, trap production, but there's plenty of creativity, like on "Trap Jazz" which sounds much like the title would suggest. There's controversy too; there's no way to passively listen to "rANTZ" with its charged, provocative insults. Next gig: 12:30 a.m. Sunday, Club Timbuktu, 520 E. Center St., for Arte Para Todos. $7 for the show (begins Saturday at 9:30 p.m.). Northless, "Cold Migration" (northless.com) The local sludge titans once again create a sound that sticks to your ears like tar. The dragged-out guitar reverb at the start of the title track acts like a chain slowly reeling you into a swamp. And "Conduit" is grandiose from the first strikes of thundering guitar all the way to the climactic swarm of noise and haunting lingering fade that comes more than 11 minutes later. Next gig: 4:30 p.m. April 30, Frank's Power Plant, 2800 S. Kinnickinnic Ave. $5. Pizzle, "Grand De$ign" (facebook.com/thefakepizzle) "Grand De$ign" is a must-listen for the first track alone, "Need More Time," where Pizzle proves there's no one in the Milwaukee hip-hop scene who can come close to matching the speed and skill of his breathtaking flow. This album's been in the works for at least three years, and the incredible care is obvious throughout. It's also deeply personal; from the despair of "Sweet Jones," influenced by his difficult childhood, to the joys of the gospel-oriented "Myself," a love song to his children, who make heartwarming cameos. Next gig: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, the Jazz Gallery, 926 E. Center St., for Arte Para Todos. $7 for the show (begins at 7 p.m.) More online For more local album reviews, visit tapmilwaukee.com. Tweed Funk, "Come Together" (tweedfunk.com) The funky blues group, led by real deal old school soul man Joseph "Smokey" Holman, has already earned big press from national blues publications, plenty of Wisconsin Area Music Industry Awards, even accolades by Elwood Blues himself, Dan Aykroyd. But "Come Together" incredibly is its best offering yet. The inspirational and autobiographical "Sweet Music" is on par with Daptone Records soul darlings Sharon Jones and Charles Bradley. Next gig: 8 p.m. April 29, Anodyne Roasting Coffee Company, 224 W. Bruce St. $8 at the door and anodynecoffee.com. SHARE By of the A teachers aide at Bay View High School was arrested Wednesday after pushing a student to the floor, officials said. The incident occurred shortly before 11 a.m. when the 39-year-old man pushed the 14-year-old boy to the floor and held him there, according to Milwaukee police. The staff member was arrested on an allegation of physical abuse of a child and the student was taken to a hospital for treatment of minor injuries, police said. The incident remained under investigation Wednesday, according to police. Milwaukee Public Schools spokesman Tony Tagliavia said the incident is "deeply disturbing." "As soon as the school administration was notified of the incident, the Milwaukee Police Department was contacted and the staff member was removed from the classroom," Tagliavia said in a statement. The staff member is a paraprofessional teacher's aide who faces disciplinary action, including termination, Tagliavia said. The incident was captured on video provided to WISN-TV in Milwaukee. SHARE By of the MAPLEWOOD, Minn. (AP) Law enforcement officers rescued a driver from a Wisconsin lake after the woman fled from police who tried pulling her over in Minnesota. Authorities say officers attempted to stop the woman in the Twin Cities suburb of Maplewood about 3 a.m. Thursday on a traffic violation. The driver sped away with officers in pursuit. Officials say the woman drove about 15 miles east, across the state border and into Lake Mallalieu (MAL'-ah-loo) in St. Croix County, Wisconsin. KSTP-TV reports three officers from Minnesota jumped into the lake, broke windows on her van and pulled her out before the vehicle became completely submerged. The woman was unconscious and was taken to a hospital. There's no immediate word on her condition. 3 officers rescued a woman from a Hudson lake after she fled and crashed into the water/ https://t.co/nBjtWEqryE pic.twitter.com/xDuRrHJdcd KSTP (@KSTP) April 21, 2016 SHARE By of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank on Thursday responded to a list of demands delivered earlier in the day during a protest sparked by a police officer pulling a black student from class a week ago to question him about anti-racism graffiti sprayed on campus buildings. Protesters demanded that criminal charges against the student be dropped; for university officials involved in the incident to resign; and for the dean of students to forgo the student conduct process so the young man can graduate in May. Student protesters also demanded community control or oversight of the campus police department and that the university return any of the arrested student's personal property being held as evidence. The list of demands pasted on the statue of Abe Lincoln outside Blank's Bascom Hall office gave campus administrators 48 hours to comply "or further action will be taken." Blank said she believes UWMadison has taken appropriate steps to respond to community concerns. "Embedded in the student demands are requests for actions that I do not believe are reasonable, or even lawful, for me to take," the chancellor wrote in a blog post late Thursday afternoon. "In fact, several of the demands seek to apply authority that the university does not have under state law or UW System policies and procedures." UW-Madison Police Chief Sue Riseling apologized for an officer entering the student's classroom last Thursday, is reviewing departmental procedures and shared available footage of the incident to ensure transparency, Blank said. "It is imperative that we continue the dialogue that has started within our campus community," the chancellor wrote. "In times of crisis and heightened tension, we will only progress if we all work together to do a better job of making all students feel welcome at UW-Madison." Students staged a walkout from classes at 11:30 a.m. Thursday the same time that the black student was pulled out of a class for questioning last Thursday. Hundreds of students then marched through campus, linked arms and blocked traffic at a major intersection for several minutes. There were no arrests, and public information officer Marc Lovicott of the UW-Madison Police Department described it as a peaceful protest. "We facilitated and shut down traffic to be sure they could do what they needed to do safely," Lovicott said. "We chose to make sure they were safe." The "We are God: A day of disrupting white supremacy & anti-Black racism at UW-Madison" protest was organized through a Facebook events page. "At the same time (the student) was taken out of his classroom by UWPD (11:30am), we will be walking out of our classrooms to stand in solidarity with him and to organize against the anti-Black racism that has plagued our campus historically and contemporarily," the Facebook event page said. "We will be delivering our demands to the chancellor and UWPD and need student support. We have to let them know that there are consequences for perpetuating white supremacy." Protesters said the 21-year-old black student's rights were violated when police removed him from class last week to question him about 11 incidents of anti-racism graffiti sprayed on buildings around campus in recent months. Police said they had been trying unsuccessfully to reach him for two weeks before they located him in class. The Dane County district attorney's office has not charged the 21-year-old. Police said it cost $4,000 to clean the graffiti from campus buildings. Police estimated that 300 to 400 protesters participated at the height of Thursday's march around campus. The protest began on Bascom Hill. When protesters marched down Park Ave., they linked arms and temporarily blocked the busy intersection at University Ave. Video of the march posted on Twitter showed an upset motorist who got out of his car and told students that he needed to drive through the intersection. Traffic backed up for several blocks while the intersection was blocked by protesters, including some who lay down on the street. Data compiled by the DNR show 9.4% of white-tailed deer tested in 2015 in the state were positive for CWD. Credit: Journal Sentinel files SHARE By of the Two Democratic legislators have met with Gov. Scott Walker's staff to discuss measures to control chronic wasting disease, and a spokesman for Walker said Thursday that the governor's office was evaluating the proposals and would review them with the Department of Natural Resources. "If the measures are viewed by experts as effective steps, we look forward to adding them to our ongoing efforts," spokesman Tom Evenson said in an email. "Governor Walker takes this issue very seriously and wants a healthy deer population and harvest." The meeting between state Reps. Chris Danou (D-Trempealeau) and Nick Milroy (D-South Range) and Walker's chief of staff, Rich Zipperer, came a week after the legislators requested the governor and DNR secretary "immediately develop a comprehensive plan" to address the spread of the fatal deer disease in Wisconsin. Data compiled by the DNR show 9.4% of white-tailed deer tested in 2015 in the state were positive for CWD. Last year for the first time, more than half of Wisconsin's 72 counties were listed as "CWD affected" by the DNR. At Wednesday's meeting, Danou and Milroy suggested the following steps: Require double fencing of captive deer farms to prevent CWD from spreading to the wild deer population. Study whether lures that contain deer urine or other bodily fluids or parts such as tarsal glands contain CWD prions. Other states have banned them. Analyze other states' policies regarding baiting and feeding of deer. Consider intensive culls at sites where new infections have been discovered. Restore the DNR Science Services Bureau positions that were eliminated in the 2015-'17 state budget. Examine what Illinois is doing to contain CWD and consider adopting those measures. Evenson said Walker welcomes "constructive input," adding that "combating CWD should not be a partisan issue." Chronic wasting disease is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy similar to scrapie and mad cow disease. It is caused by a misshapen prion, or protein. Research in recent years has shown the prion is present in plants, soil and muscle tissue of infected animals. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends meat from CWD-positive animals not be eaten. The Wisconsin Division of Public Health recommends venison from deer harvested in CWD-affected areas not be consumed or distributed until test results are known to be negative. Chronic wasting disease was identified in Colorado in 1967 and has since spread to at least 23 states. It was found in Wisconsin in 2002. The DNR processed 3,133 deer for CWD testing in 2015; 295 were positive (9.4%). In 2014, the agency found 331 positives on 5,468 deer (6.1%). The percentage of positive deer has been increasing, from 1.5% in 2008, 2.9% in 2010 and 5.1% in 2012, according to agency data. After a few years of aggressive measures, Wisconsin no longer attempts to control the disease spread. Instead, it conducts limited, sporadic testing. The disease was also found in Illinois in 2002. Since then, the Illinois DNR has used sharpshooters and encouraged higher deer kills by hunters in CWD-affected areas. The strategy has kept the disease prevalence much lower; in 2015, Illinois officials reported a 1.2% prevalence rate. "Deer hunting brings $1.3 billion into the Wisconsin economy each year," Danou said in a statement released Thursday. "We can't afford to let CWD continue to spread unchecked. I hope that 2016 brings renewed efforts by the Walker Administration to control this devastating disease." Milroy said it is the legislators' hope "that Governor Walker and DNR Secretary Cathy Stepp will strongly consider adopting the policies that we suggested as we work to halt the spread of CWD." Lee Bergquist of the Journal Sentinel contributed to this report SHARE By of the A truck that had been fleeing a Dane County sheriff's deputy Thursday went on to strike two girls who were walking in Middleton. The girls, whose ages and conditions were not known, were hospitalized, according to a sheriff's office news release. The suspect driver was arrested at the scene, and the Wisconsin State Patrol is investigating the incident. According to the sheriff's office, the deputy noticed a white truck speeding and driving erratically on county Highway M near Oncken Drive in the Town of Westport. But when the deputy tried to pull the truck over, the driver refused to stop and went west on Highway M toward Middleton. A sheriff's supervisor ordered the pursuit terminated as the suspect approached Middleton. Moments later the truck hit the girls at Highway M and Frank Lloyd Wright Drive. Nearly one in eight employees left their state jobs last year for retirement, another job or other reasons, with one in five workers in some health care fields departing. Credit: Mike De Sisti SHARE By of the Madison The stream of workers leaving state agencies last year gushed at the highest level seen in at least a decade, driven by an improving economy that is making private employers more attractive in relation to their counterparts in government. Nearly one in eight employees left their state jobs last year for retirement, another job or other reasons, with one in five workers in some health care fields departing. In all, 3,600 workers outside of the University of Wisconsin System moved on from their state jobs in 2015, which was 23% more than 2014 and nearly twice as many as in 2010. The numbers, released to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel through an open records request, don't explain on their own why more workers are leaving or show that Wisconsin government is any worse than state governments around the country. It's clear that a big part of the trend can be explained by an improving economy that's giving workers more job opportunities than several years ago, when state employees hunkered down and generally didn't leave their jobs for reasons other than retirement. "We're seeing a definite trend in that it's difficult to recruit and retain state workers (nationally). It's due in significant part to compensation. In some parts of the country, it's not competing with market rates in the private sector," said Leslie Scott, executive director of the National Association of State Personnel Executives. But the figures also add fire to an ongoing debate about whether stagnant wages and changes to union rules have made state government a less attractive employer to its workforce. Though controlling labor costs can be good for taxpayers, higher turnover, vacant jobs and the learning curve for new workers can also drive up overtime and training costs and affect public services. With the baby boom generation also hitting retirement age, the loss of experienced workers is likely to remain an issue for the state for some time to come. Citing that problem and the need for more efficient hiring practices, Gov. Scott Walker in February signed a broad overhaul of the state's century-old system of merit hiring and firing. "These reforms will allow us to better compete with the private sector and recruit the best and the brightest state employees to ensure we are providing high quality state services to citizens. These reforms also give agencies more tools to retain employees while allowing the state to hire more quickly and efficiently, which will help mitigate" departures, Walker administration spokeswoman Laurel Patrick said. During the Great Recession, new opportunities for workers and turnover in state government both plummeted, dropping in 2010 to 1,821 civil servants, or 6% of the state workforce, who left their non-university jobs for a variety of reasons, from retirements and resignations to terminations, layoffs and death. The figures don't include workers who took a different state job, and the numbers don't differentiate between resignations and firings. In 2011, Walker signed the law known as Act 10, repealing most union bargaining for most public workers and increasing state workers' benefit contributions by an amount equal to about 8.5% of take-home pay. That year, retirements jumped as employees sought to avoid fundamental changes to their retirement benefits, which didn't end up materializing. But with the recession still deep, relatively few employees resigned to take other jobs. The state offered across-the-board raises of 1% in 2014 and 2015, along with some merit increases for select employees, but no increases in the current two-year budget. Improved hiring climate As the unemployment rate has dropped and hiring has risen across the nation, more and more state workers are leaving for reasons other than retirement 2,300 of them in Wisconsin in 2015, or more than in any other year in the available records going back to 2005. In all, 12% of the state's civil servants left state employment last year for all reasons, including retirement. Turnover rates rise even higher in some health care jobs for the state such as doctors and personal care technicians. Scott said other high areas of turnover nationally include prison guards, information technology workers and financial professionals. Good comparison numbers aren't readily available for state governments nationally, but Scott said she doesn't believe Wisconsin is an outlier. In February 2014, Governing magazine reported that states such as Montana, Georgia and Louisiana had all seen turnover rates of 13% or higher in recent years. Figures from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics show even higher turnover rates for state and local governments around the country but those figures aren't an apples to apples comparison because they include seasonal and temporary workers, while Wisconsin's figures are for permanent workers. Christopher Taber, a labor economist at UW-Madison, notes that the higher turnover today is partially due to pent-up demand that built up during the recession. For example, a worker who wanted to take a job closer to his or her family may not have been able to do so in 2010 but now has a better chance, he said. "In general this is a good thing. This is a sign that the economy is improving," Taber said. Rick Badger, executive director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in Wisconsin, sees another factor at play: the effects of years of cost-cutting measures. "This does add a little more credence to what we're saying that people are not feeling valued and they vote with their feet," Badger said. Scott said some other challenges for state agencies include attracting younger workers into public service and the overall perception of government workers. Walker has said the legislation he signed in February will help fill vacant state jobs and attract younger workers by shortening a hiring process that took months under the state's civil service system. A big part of the change is eliminating the state's civil service exams in favor of a resume-based system for evaluating applicants and deciding which of them get job interviews. "This is really about bringing Wisconsin into the 21st century when it comes to recruitment and retention," Walker said in February. Union officials like Badger have argued that the civil service changes could open up decisions on hiring, firing and compensation to more political influence. If that happens, it could also hurt the state's ability to attract good workers, he said. Reddit Email 0 Shares By Shahram Akbarzadeh | (Informed Comment) | President Hasan Rouhanis honeymoon period is over. He faces mounting opposition in Iran, and very difficult questions abroad. How can he respond to these challenges? The gloss of the November 2015 nuclear deal that removed some international sanctions on Iran is losing its shine. President Hasan Rouhanis opponents in Irans fractured political system have become bolder in their dismissal of the agreement on Irans nuclear program as an unwarranted compromise. The Editor in-Chief of the Keyhan daily, the mouthpiece of conservativism and aligned with the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, challenged Rouhani to show the public one tangible benefit of the nuclear deal. Keyhan contemptuously called the nuclear deal a bag of unsubstantiated promises. This came after the governor of the Iranian Central Bank stated that the bank has not yet gained access to its frozen US$100 billion in the United States. Rouhani is clearly conscious of the gathering storm and focused on keeping his opponents at bay. This explains his reluctance to be drawn into further conflict with his conservative critics over domestic issues. He has quietly dropped the freedom of Mehdi Karroubi and Syed-Hussein Mousavi, under house arrest following the 2009 crack-down on the Green movement. This was electoral campaign agenda in 2013. His choice to give up on this agenda item appears to have been predicated on the assumption that his critics would reciprocate and give him scope to advance the nuclear deal. Regardless of how realistic this unspoken deal has been, it remains to be an ongoing embarrassment for his government. The issue came to the fore when Karroubi published an open letter to Rouhani (9 April) requesting a formal legal hearing of his case. He called the arbitrary house arrest extrajudicial and promised to abide by any ruling made in a court of law, even if the ruling was not in his favour. Publicity around this letter has caused a headache for Rouhani and he would very much prefer to shift attention away from this controversial issue. This explains his silence in regards to the letter and the virulent attacks that the conservative media has launched on Karroubi. Rouhanis position internationally is not any more secure. The adoption of an explicitly anti-Iran resolution at the Organisation of the Islamic Countries at the conclusion of the Istanbul summit on 16 April was a humiliating blow to Rouhanis agenda. Rouhani has been trying to normalise Irans relations with its neighbours as part of a comprehensive strategy to dismantle the widely-held image of Iran as irrational. Instead, Rouhani and his Foreign Minister Javad Zarif have sought to present Iran as a responsible actor and force of stability. The obvious problem for the Rouhani team is that this new image is far from convincing. The OIC resolution accused Iran of supporting terrorism and interfering in the affairs of Syria and Yemen. This message echoes statements of displeasure from the Obama Administration. In January this year John Kerry, the US State Secretary, publicly stated that Irans continued support of terrorism was of a major concern for Washington. US criticism gained greater salience in the wake of Irans ballistic missile tests, prompting Vic-President Joe Biden to warn that Irans missile program maybe in contravention of its international obligations which would merit its referral to the UN Security Council. Even with a nuclear deal and constant proclamations of promoting Muslim unity in the region, Rouhanis regional and international standing is seriously undermined. The OIC declaration was the most obvious evidence of how Irans regional rival, Saudi Arabia is gaining the upper hand in diplomatic circles. Not only Rouhani has failed to convince the United States that Iran is not a sponsor of terrorism, he has also failed to win over other Muslim states. This was an embarrassing blow to Iran and to Rouhani personally. Unfortunately for him, Irans policy on Syria and Yemen are outside his control. Instead they are set by the Supreme National Security Council which reports directly to the Supreme Leader. So all he could to in protest to the OIC declaration was to walk out of the final session. But not all is lost. The new national parliament (majlis) will convene in May 2016 and Rouhanis pragmatic camp has managed to win a majority in the new assembly. This could facilitate economic reform to encourage foreign investment and lubricate international trade. How quickly will Rouhanis government be able to show tangible benefits from the nuclear deal depends on how quickly Irans cumbersome legal system is reformed to protect foreign economic interests. Rouhanis re-election in 2017 depends on his ability to deliver economic revival. Shahram Akbarzadeh is professor of Middle East and Central Asian politics at Deakin University, and co-editor of Iran in the World (with D Conduit, Palgrave 2016). - Related video added by Juan Cole: CNN: Expert: Saudi-U.S. tensions go deeper than Iran deal Reddit Email 0 Shares By IMEMC | After nearly two years of delay, the leading suspect in the brutal death of 16-year-old Palestinian Mohammad Abu Khdeir was convicted of murder, this Tuesday. The Abu Khdeir familys lawyer Muhannad Jbara told Maan News Agency that an Israeli court rejected insanity pleas presented by the lawyers of Yosef Chaim Ben-David the ringleader responsible for kidnapping and burning the teen alive in July 2014. Jbara said the court ruled that the 30-year-old Israeli was fully aware of his actions when committing the crime, and that Ben-David had been acting out his alleged mental illness for Israeli authorities investigating the attack. The court also found Ben-David guilty of planning to kidnap Palestinian child Moussa Abu Zalloum from the Beit Hanina neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem, Jbara added.Ben-David will receive his sentencing on May 3. Abu Khdeirs parents said that they were relieved by the courts decision, demanding that Israeli authorities give their sons killer a life sentence and demolish his home, in line with an official Israeli policy carried out for Palestinians who kill Israelis. The teens father, Hussein, said they were convinced from the day their son was murdered that Ben-David had carried out the attack with full mental capability, citing his previous record of burning Palestinian vehicles on racist grounds. In every court session he [Mohammad] is burned again, as we were hoping that he [Ben-David] would be sentenced more quickly without procrastination or chances to escape the sentencing, the father said. Two Israeli minors who assisted in killing Mohammad were convicted of murder in February, one receiving a life sentence and the other 21 years in prison. While Ben-David admitted to carrying out the crime, he repeatedly escaped conviction after seeking a last minute psychiatric evaluation. Knesset members from the Arab Joint List Usama al-Saadi and Ahmad Tibi attended the court session in support of Ben-Davids conviction, with Tibi calling Mohammads death one of the ugliest crimes to be committed in the past few decades. Mohammad, a 16-year-old from Shufat in occupied East Jerusalem, was kidnapped and murdered by the three extremists in July of 2014. All three confessed to beating the teenager unconscious before pouring flammable liquid on him and setting him alight. An autopsy later confirmed the teen had been burned alive. Following Februarys sentencing of Ben-Davids accomplices, Mohammads father slammed the Israeli justice system for failing to uphold justice for Palestinians. Israeli courts have two faces of judiciary: one for the Palestinians and another for the Israelis, Hussein said at the time. If a Palestinian child throws a stone, he is sentenced to years in prison, but when an Israeli settler burns and kills a Palestinian child, he is sentenced to 21 years. Tuesdays conviction comes shortly after the Israeli authorities came under international spotlight when an Israeli soldier was caught on camera shooting a wounded Palestinian at point-blank range through the head in Hebron. The incident and subsequent investigations and trials were put under scrutiny, with critics alleging that Israels justice system his long granted immunity to those who carry out violent acts against Palestinians. Via IMEMC - Related video added by Juan Cole: New China TV: Jewish extremist convicted for killing palestinian teen Reddit Email 4 Shares By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | Despite US schools tendency to give students several years of American history, over and over again, most of us probably have only a foggy idea who Harriet Tubman, chosen to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, was. That she was an abolitionist and helped out with the Underground Railroad might lurk in the back of the mind. But she didnt just help out. She led what were essentially armed guerrilla raids into enemy territory. That role prepared her to be one of the great spies in American intelligence history, during the Civil War, serving President Lincoln. Thats right. She was Jane Bond in the mid-19th century. Not content to provide intelligence, she actually led a company-sized military unit of 150 men (making her the equivalent of a captain or major) in a riverine naval raid that freed hundreds of slaves and destroyed the estates of several major wealthy secessionists. US History writes: Perhaps the most outstanding conductor of the Underground Railroad was Harriet Tubman. Born a slave herself, she began working on the railroad to free her family members. During the 1850s, Tubman made 19 separate trips into slave territory. She was terribly serious about her mission. Any slave who had second thoughts she threatened to shoot with the pistol she carried on her hip. Here, then, are seven ways Tubman was a badass: 1. She led 19 dangerous expeditions into the South to bring slaves up north and to freedom. 2. She wore a pistol on her hip during these expeditions. 3. She threatened to shoot any slaves who got cold feet once the rescue was initiated. She freed some 70 slaves from Maryland and helped 50 or 60 more got to Canada. 4. In 1862-3 she carried out dangerous espionage missions in South Carolina for the Union army, working with General David Hunter. 5. She then led the Combahee River raid on South Carolina; Blackpast.org explains: On the night of June 2nd three federal gunboats set sail from Beaufort, South Carolina up the Combahee River. Tubman had gained vital information about the location of Rebel torpedoes planted along the river from slaves who were willing to trade information for freedom. Because of this information Tubman was able to steer the Union ships away from any danger. She led the ships to specific spots along the shore where fugitive slaves were hiding and waiting to be rescued . . . eventually 750 boarded the vessels. The boats however had a specific military mission. They carried Union troops who came on shore and succeeded in destroying several influential South Carolina estates owned by leading secessionists, including the plantations of the Heywards, the Middletons, and the Lowndes families. Many of the Union soldiers who took part in the raid were former slaves who saw the burning and pillaging of these estates as an opportunity to enact revenge on the master class. 6. Blackpast.org concludes: Harriett Tubman was the only woman known to have led a military operation during the American Civil War. 7. After the war, Tubman supported womens rights and the granting of the vote to women. The Harriet Tubman Historical Society explains: Many supporters of Harriet Tubman during her Underground Railroad years who let her use her properties to harbor fugitives and funded her trips, were involved in the womens rights movement. After the Civil War Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Canton and Lucretia Mott had become strong advocates and leaders of the womens rights movement. Tubman believed in the equality of all people, black or white, male or female, which made her sympathetic to the womens rights movement. Tubmans role was not that of a leader but that of a strong supporter. As a woman who had fought for her own freedom and the freedom of others, Tubman set to work with her friends by touring and giving speeches about her own experiences as a female slave and as the liberator of hundreds born under the bondage of slavery. Blackpast.org observes, In 1911, two years before she died, she attended a meeting of the suffrage club in Geneva, New York, where a white woman asked her: Do you really believe that women should vote? Tubman reportedly replied, I suffered enough to believe it. Tubman died in 1913. Women got the vote in 1920. VANCOUVER, April 21, 2016 /CNW/ - GREAT PANTHER SILVER LIMITED (TSX: GPR; NYSE MKT: GPL) ("Great Panther"; the "Company") announces that it has entered into an At-the-Market Offering Agreement dated April 20, 2016 (the "ATM Agreement") with Rodman & Renshaw, a unit of H.C. Wainwright & Co., LLC ("Rodman"). Under the ATM Agreement, the Company will be entitled, at its discretion and from time-to-time during the term of the ATM Agreement, to sell, through Rodman, as placement agent, such number of common shares of the Company (the "Common Shares") having an aggregate gross sales price of up to US$10.0 million (the "Offering"). Sales of the Common Shares will be made through "at the market distributions", as defined in National Instrument 44-102, directly on the NYSE MKT LLC (the "NYSE MKT ") or on any other existing trading market in the United States. No offers or sales of Common Shares will be made in Canada on the Toronto Stock Exchange (the "TSX") or other trading markets in Canada. The Common Shares will be distributed at market prices or prices related to prevailing market prices from time to time. As a result, prices of the Common Shares sold under the Offering will vary as between purchasers and during the period of distribution. The Offering will be made by way of a prospectus supplement dated April 20, 2016 (the "Prospectus Supplement") to the Company's existing Canadian short form base shelf prospectus (the "Base Shelf Prospectus") and U.S. registration statement on Form F-10 (the "Registration Statement"), each dated October 14, 2014. The Prospectus Supplement has been filed with the securities commissions in each of the provinces of Canada (other than Quebec) and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"). The Canadian Prospectus Supplement (together with the related Base Shelf Prospectus) is available on the SEDAR website maintained by the Canadian Securities Administrators at www.sedar.com. The U.S. Prospectus Supplement (together with the related Registration Statement) is available on the SEC's website (www.sec.gov). Alternatively, the Company or Rodman will send the Prospectus Supplement (including the base shelf prospectus) upon request. Such requests may be made by calling Rodman & Renshaw, a unit of H.C. Wainwright & Co., LLC at 212 356 0500. The Company intends to use the net proceeds of the Offering, if any, together with the Company's current cash resources, to fund operating, development and exploration expenditures at its mining operations and projects, for possible future acquisitions and for general corporate and working capital purposes. The Company will pay to Rodman a placement fee for Common Shares sold under the ATM Agreement. This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy securities, nor will there be any sale of the securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to the registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction. ABOUT GREAT PANTHER Great Panther Silver Limited is a primary silver mining and exploration company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange trading under the symbol GPR, and on the NYSE MKT trading under the symbol GPL. Great Panther's current activities are focused on the mining of precious metals from its two wholly-owned operating mines in Mexico: the Guanajuato Mine Complex, which includes the San Ignacio Mine, and the Topia Mine in Durango. The Company holds an option agreement to acquire a 100% interest in the Coricancha Mine Complex in the central Andes of Peru where an active exploration program is ongoing. Robert A. Archer President & CEO CAUTIONARY STATEMENT ON FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS This news release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian securities laws (together, "forward-looking statements"). Such forward-looking statements may include but are not limited to the sales of Common Shares under the ATM Agreement, the amount of proceeds and the use of proceeds from such sales, the Company's plans for production at its Guanajuato Mine Complex and Topia Mines in Mexico, exploring its other properties in Mexico and Peru, the overall economic potential of its properties, the availability of adequate financing, and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements to be materially different. Such factors include, among others, risks and uncertainties relating to potential political risks involving the Company's operations in a foreign jurisdiction, uncertainty of production and cost estimates and the potential for unexpected costs and expenses, uncertainty in mineral resource estimation, physical risks inherent in mining operations, currency fluctuations, fluctuations in the price of silver, gold and base metals, completion of economic evaluations, changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined, permitting risks, the inability or failure to obtain adequate financing on a timely basis, and other risks and uncertainties, including those described in the Company's most recently filed Annual Information Form and Material Change Reports filed with the Canadian Securities Administrators available at www.sedar.com and reports on Form 40-F and Form 6-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and available at www.sec.gov. SOURCE Great Panther Silver Limited VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - April 21, 2016) - Focus Ventures Ltd. (TSX VENTURE:FCV) ("Focus" or the "Company") is updating shareholders on progress on its Bayovar 12 phosphate project, located in the Sechura desert of northern Peru. Optimization Study Update Focus' senior management recently met with Independent Mining Consultants and M3 Engineering, both of Tucson, Arizona, to review progress with respect to changes-in-scope to the Bayovar 12 Pre-Feasibility Study. The changes-in-scope have been designed to improve the economic performance of the project and include: one large processing plant instead of the staged commissioning of two smaller ones; owner-operated instead of contractor-operated overburden removal; a doubling of pre-production overburden stripping to simplify the mine plan and production schedule; larger and more cost efficient loading and hauling equipment; and finally, a more logical and staged buildout of the tailings storage facility. The results of the updated Pre-Feasibility Study are expected in early May 2016. Jeff Franzen Joins Team as an Advisor Focus is pleased to announce that Jeffrey Franzen, P.Eng. has joined the Focus team as an advisor. He will provide technical and capital markets guidance and is now working closely with management on the Pre-Feasibility Study update. Simon Ridgway, Chairman and CEO of Focus, said: "Adding Jeff's experience and capital markets contacts to our team will help us move the Bayovar 12 project closer to construction and production. He is working closely with our technical team to provide guidance on the complexities of reviewing and optimizing engineering studies. Jeff has been involved with a number of high profile projects over the years, and we hope to leverage that knowledge base as we move to unlock efficiencies at Bayovar 12." Mr. Franzen is a registered Professional Engineer with over 40 years of experience in advanced project development and mine operations with a focus on project de-risking and feasibility-level studies. He has been associated with several development-stage mining projects that were subsequently sold to third parties including: North American Metals Corp. (1988), Continental Gold Corp. (1990), Francisco Gold Corp. (1997) and Mar-West Resources Ltd. (1998), Western Keltic (2008) and Terrane Metals Corp (2010). He has held leadership roles in the British Columbia & Yukon Chamber of Mines, Mineral Deposit Division of the Geological Association of Canada and Vancouver Mineral Exploration Group. Mr. Franzen holds a B.Sc., (Honours Geology) from the University of British Columbia and a M.Sc. (Structural Geology) from Carleton University. Qualified Person The technical information presented in this news release was reviewed by David Cass, Focus's President, who is a member of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia, and a Qualified Person in accordance with National Instrument 43-101. The information presented is regarded as a representative and accurate summary of the information presented. About Focus Focus is developing the Bayovar 12 phosphate deposit located 40 km from the coast in the Sechura District of northern Peru. Bayovar 12 hosts a large resource of highly-reactive sedimentary phosphate rock - a key raw material input for fertilizers and vital to world food production. Reactive phosphate rock from Sechura is a natural, slow-release source of phosphorus that can be applied directly to crops. Focus aims to supply direct application phosphate rock to the nearby agricultural regions of South and Central America, the fastest growing fertilizer market in the world. For further information, please call 604-630-5544 or visit our web site www.focusventuresltd.com. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD Ralph Rushton, Director & Vice-President, Corporate Development Symbol: TSXV-FCV Shares Issued: 120.4-million Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements contained in this news release constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation. All statements included herein, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements and include, without limitation, statements about the Company's plans for its Bayovar 12 Project. Often, but not always, these forward looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as "estimate", "estimates", "estimated", "potential", "open", "future", "assumed", "projected", "used", "detailed", "has been", "gain", "upgraded", "offset", "limited", "contained", "reflecting", "containing", "remaining", "to be", "periodically", or statements that events, "could" or "should" occur or be achieved and similar expressions, including negative variations. Forward-looking Statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by forward-looking statements. Such uncertainties and factors include, among others, the Company's plans for its Bayovar 12 Project will proceed as intended; changes in general economic conditions and financial markets; the Company or any joint venture partner not having the financial ability to meet its exploration and development goals; risks associated with the results of exploration and development activities, estimation of mineral resources and the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits; unanticipated costs and expenses; and such other risks detailed from time to time in the Company's quarterly and annual filings with securities regulators and available under the Company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results to differ from those anticipated, estimated or intended. Forward-looking statements contained herein are based on the assumptions, beliefs, expectations and opinions of management, including but not limited to: that the Company's plans for the Bayovar 12 Project will proceed as intended; and that there will be no material adverse change affecting the Company or its properties; and such other assumptions as set out herein. Forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and the Company disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise, except as required by law. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. TORONTO, April 21, 2016 /CNW/ - Laramide Resources Ltd. ("Laramide" or the "Company") (LAM: TSX/ ASX) is pleased to announce results from the Company's updated Preliminary Economic Assessment ("PEA") for the Westmoreland Uranium Project, located in the North West Queensland Mineral Province, Australia. The independent study was completed by Lycopodium Minerals Pty Ltd. A copy of the PEA has been filed and available for viewing and download at www.sedar.com and the Company's website www.laramide.com. Key Highlights of the PEA (at US$65/lb U 3 O 8 life of mine price) Initial capital expenditures (" CAPEX ") of US$268M plus US$49M contingency are estimated to construct the mine and a 2M tonne per annum (tpa) mill with a nameplate capacity of 4Mlb U 3 O 8 per annum; ") of plus contingency are estimated to construct the mine and a 2M tonne per annum (tpa) mill with a nameplate capacity of per annum; Total sustaining capital of US$58M over the Life of Mine (" LOM "); over the Life of Mine (" "); Cash operating cost to average US$21.00 /lb U 3 O 8 for the first five years of operation and US$23.20 /lb U 3 O 8 LOM; for the first five years of operation and LOM; Net Present Value ("NPV") at a 10% discount rate of US$598M pre-tax and US$400M post tax. pre-tax and post tax. Internal Rate of Return (" IRR ") of 45.4% pre-tax and 35.8% post tax with a capital payback estimated at 2.5 years post-tax. ") of pre-tax and post tax with a capital payback estimated at 2.5 years post-tax. Low 2.3:1 strip ratio for the first 5 years of operation and 4:1 LOM. Simple, open cut mining operation. for the first 5 years of operation and 4:1 LOM. Simple, open cut mining operation. Mine scheduling allows best practice in-pit tailings storage to be employed without the requirement for a temporary tailings storage facility; Opportunities have been identified to further reduce operating cost through reagent recycling. Further testwork is required to confirm this assumption before incorporating it into the process model. Marc Henderson, President and Chief Executive Officer, commented, "The PEA on Westmoreland demonstrates the Project to be one of the best in Australia with attractive economics. The PEA and the Churchrock acquisition reiterates Laramide's strategy of growing a portfolio of lower technical risk, low-cost uranium projects in stable political environments." Chief Operating Officer, Bryn Jones, said, "Westmoreland has always been a beacon in the Australian uranium project pipeline for me and this PEA has highlighted the low technical risk and robust nature of the project. The PEA has highlighted multiple opportunities to further improve the Project through process optimization and additional resource drilling which I look forward to investigating as the Project moves towards a Pre-Feasibility Study." PEA Study Details The PEA contemplates a conventional open pit mining operation with a processing facility operating over a 13 year life at a throughput of 5,500 tonnes per day ("tpd"). The planned processing route consists of milling followed by conventional agitated tank leach with sulphuric acid with Continuous Ion Exchange ("CIX") employed for uranium recovery from the leach solution as represented in the Simplified Overall Treatment Flowsheet below. Key Production and Financial Parameters Mine life 13 years Average annual throughput 2 million tonnes Processing methodology Tank Leach CIX Overall process recovery 95% Open pit strip ratio (LOM) 4.0:1 Average diluted feed grade 840 ppm U 3 O 8 Average annual production 3.52 million lbs U 3 O 8 Total uranium recovered (LOM) 45.8 million lbs U 3 O 8 Financial Parameters Uranium price US$65 / lb U 3 O 8 USD:AUD exchange rate 0.70 Average operating cost US$23.30 / lb U 3 O 8 Initial CAPEX (including contingency) US$316 million Sustaining CAPEX (LOM) US$58 million Corporate tax rate 30% Royalties Qld State Government 5% IRC 1% (capped at $10m indexed) Inflation Not included Pre-tax Post-tax NPV (10% discount Rate) US$598 M US$400 M IRR 45.4% 35.8% Payback period 2.5 years The previous PEA from 2007 was based largely on information acquired from Rio Tinto following the Westmoreland asset purchase. Since this time Laramide has completed several drilling campaigns, re-estimated the resource and has an improved knowledge of the metallurgical conditions required for cost effective uranium extraction on the Project. The PEA reflects current inputs including currencies, commodity price forecasts, fuel costs and other input costs. The key differences between the 2007 PEA and the 2016 revised PEA are, as follows: Parameter 2007 PEA 2016 PEA Resource Size 48.5 Mlb 51.9 Mlb Mill Design Tonnage 1.5 Mtpa 2 Mtpa Overall Uranium Recovery 90.6% 95% Namplate Prodution Capacity 3 Mlb/a 4 Mlb/a Mine Life 12 years 13 years Uranium Capture Technology Solvent Extraction Continuous Ion Exchange Tailings Storage Technology Traditional Tailings Dam In-pit, dry stacked The Project is located in the North West Queensland Mineral Province, an area impacted by the closure of the Century Zinc mine. The total direct employment generated by the Project will be in the order of 220 to 250 for the 13 year mine life. Mineral Resource Estimates The May 2009 Mineral Resource estimate for Westmoreland has been reviewed to ensure compliance with JORC 2012 and is restated as the 2016 Mineral Resource. The mineral resource estimate has been classified under the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum's (CIM) code of mineral classification and complies with National Instrument NI 43-101. The 2016 mineral resource estimate for Westmoreland is outlined in the following tables (refer to notes and other details in Section 14 of the NI43-101 report). Westmoreland Mineral Resource Estimates - Indicated Category,2016 Resource Category Deposit Tonnes Grade % (U 3 O 8 ) M lbs U 3 O 8 Indicated cut-off 0.02% U 3 O 8 Redtree (Garee) 12,858,750 0.09 25.5 Huarabagoo 1,462,000 0.08 2.7 Junnagunna 4,364,750 0.08 7.8 Subtotal 18,685,500 0.09 36.0 Note: reported tonnage and grade figures have been rounded off from raw estimates to the appropriate number of significant figures to reflect the order of accuracy of the estimate. Minor variations may occur during the addition of rounded numbers. Westmoreland Mineral Resource Estimates - Inferred Category,2016 Resource Category Deposit Tonnes Grade % (U 3 O 8 ) M lbs U 3 O 8 Inferred cut-off 0.02% U 3 O 8 Redtree (Garee) 4,466,750 0.07 6.6 Huarabagoo 2,406,000 0.11 5.8 Junnagunna 2,149,500 0.08 3.6 Subtotal 9,022,250 0.08 15.9 Note: reported tonnage and grade figures have been rounded off from raw estimates to the appropriate number of significant figures to reflect the order of accuracy of the estimate. Minor variations may occur during the addition of rounded numbers. The LOM production targets are based on approximately 70% indicated resources and 30% inferred resources. The inferred resources are predominantly scheduled in the latter stages of the mine life and have had mining factors applied. No reserves for this project have been stated at this time. PEA Cautionary Statement The preliminary economic assessment is preliminary in nature and includes inferred mineral resources that are considered too speculative geologically to have the economic considerations applied to them that would enable them to be categorized as mineral reserves, and there is no certainty that the preliminary economic assessment will be realized. Mineral resources that are not mineral reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability. Qualified Person The technical information in this news release has been prepared in accordance with the Canadian regulatory requirements set out in NI 43-101. The information has been reviewed and approved by Bryn Jones, MMinEng, FAusIMM a Qualified Person under the definition established by National Instrument 43 101 and JORC. Mr. Jones is the Chief Operating Officer of the Company and a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy. The estimated mineral resources underpinning the production target are prepared by competent person in accordance with the requirements in Appendix 5A (JORC Code 2012). The information in this report that relates to Exploration Results, Mineral Resources or Ore Reserves is based on information compiled by Mr. Andrew Vigar, a Competent Person who is a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy. Mr. Vigar is a full time employee of Mining Associates Limited and is a consultant to Laramide Resources Ltd. Mr. Vigar has sufficient experience that is relevant to the style of mineralisation and type of deposit under consideration and to the activity he is undertaking to qualify as a Competent Person as defined in the 2012 Edition of the 'Australasian Code for Reporting of Exploration Results, Mineral Resources and Ore Reserves'. Mr. Vigar consents to the inclusion in this report of the matters based on his information in the form and context in which it appears. To learn more about Laramide, please visit the Company's website at www.laramide.com. About Laramide Laramide is engaged in the exploration and development of high-quality uranium assets. Its wholly owned uranium assets are in Australia and the United States. Laramide's portfolio of advanced uranium projects have been chosen for their production potential. Its flagship project, Westmoreland, in Queensland, Australia, is one of the largest projects currently held by a junior mining company. Its U.S. assets include La Jara Mesa in Grants, New Mexico, and La Sal in the Lisbon Valley district of Utah. Its portfolio also includes joint venture, strategic equity positions and royalty participation in uranium development and exploration companies that provide additional geographic diversification and uranium exposure for shareholders. Forward-looking Statements and Cautionary Language This News Release contains forward looking statements which are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties which could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those reflected in the forward looking statements. The Company does not intend to update this information and disclaims any legal liability to the contrary. SOURCE Laramide Resources Ltd. Simplified Overall Treatment Flowsheet {cbdocembed url="http://stream1.newswire.ca/media/2016/04/21/20160421_C2472_PDF_EN_671504.pdf"} Ireland-based free-from foods maker BFree Foods, set up five years ago, is growing rapidly and expects that to continue this year, with plans to double its turnover in 2016. Demand for free-from products is rising but the sector, however, is becoming intensely competitive. Hannah Abdulla talks to BFree Foods general manager Alex Murphy to find out how the company plans to continue to expand. BITESIZE STATISTICS Name: BFree Brands: BFree Products: Pitta breads, wraps, rolls, fajita kits, loaves, bagels Markets: Australia, US, UK, Ireland, Norway, Sweden Founded: 2011 just-food: Since BFree Foods was launched in 2011, how has the company evolved? Alex Murphy: When we started the brand was developed to cater to coeliacs. After this we got really stuck into consumer research and wanted to expand to consumers that were intolerant to wheat. But when we went on-shelf it was with dairy and egg in our products and we were getting feedback that 30% of people that had a gluten intolerance also had an intolerance to dairy. We removed dairy, replacing the whey protein with other sources such as pea and fibre from apples. As we grow, we see the number of non-sufferers now buying into this market rising. Those concerned with weight loss, health, fitness and so on. We knew we had to cater for the large, trending and emerging consumers. Last year we took out egg from our products. Now BFree is the only brand in the US and the UK that is free of all the top allergens, which opens us up to being suitable for vegetarians and vegans. j-f: You mentioned the growing appeal of free-from foods among non-sufferers. Who then would you say, today, is the primary consumer of your products? Murphy: We think its roughly 50-50. Fifty per cent are sufferers that buy it every week because they have to. The other 50% are those concerned with health. Typically in gluten free, manufacturers add in more oil, fat and sugar to make up the taste, flavour and structure. Weve gone about it a different way. There used to be some breads [in the market] containing up to 14% fat. People eating them frequently could see they were gaining weight. So while we were focused on taking out the allergens from our products, we knew didnt want to go down the sweet/fat route with this brand. Our brand is exceptionally nutritious for you, high-fibre, low-fat we add things like quinoa, chia, peas, apples and potatoes instead of traditional commodity flavours j-f: Consumers are becoming increasingly aware of the practice in the free-from industry to replace allergens with poor-nutritional ingredients. Do you think this is damaging the sector? Murphy: Years ago when we began this journey, before we made any recipe of our own, we brought in about 200 breads from around the world. Back then 90% of the bakery items were gas-packed. Some of them could last up to a year, having been pumped with preservatives, sugar, fat. That has changed an awful lot. A lot of the manufacturers are bringing out really high-quality stuff now. In terms of freshness and ingredients, consumers are more savvy. Sugar is a big deal; we get asked if we add sugar. and what kind of sugars we work with. The perception is real. Consumers are looking at this differently; they know gluten-free doesnt actually mean healthy. So the bad reputation it [free-from] had manufacturers are having to react to it. j-f: Your export business makes up almost 80% of your revenues. In which markets are you present? Murphy: Were in Sweden and Norway. Two years ago we launched in Australia where we have a presence in about 950 Woolworths Ltd stores. Theyre branching out their distribution with additional lines. And we are in the US, the UK and Ireland. j-f: Any plans to expand further afield? Murphy: We are still a young brand, a young company. We strategically said lets just stop for the moment. Were not looking for new markets. We have a real challenge to create sustainable sales for the markets we are in and increase brand awareness. The UK and US are certainly our focus markets for now and growing our brand in these two places over the next few years is fundamental. j-f: BFree Foods has a target for its international markets to account for 90% of its revenues by 2020. How do you intend to meet that goal? Murphy: The UK is our biggest market and we are focused on securing additional distribution. Morrisons also came on board recently and weve got the Co-op and Waitrose coming on in May. The brand is becoming a real leader in the UK. A Mintel report just came out that shows BFree, nearly after two years of trading, is in the top ten brands in the UK free-from sector. That shows the growth. I cant tell you how quickly it is taking off for us right now in the US. We began research into the market about two, two-and-a-half years ago. Its a maze; its distribution systems are so tricky and the route to markets are very complex. Last August we launched into Ralphs on the west coast owned by Kroger. That is 220 stores. And in the first quarter of 2016 we launched into Meijer. Between Meijer and Jewel-Osco, they represent 90% of the midwest area. The US is not as formalised in terms of listing windows. BFree is running at such a pace that the retailers see this is something very different. The quality is second-to-none versus whats out there already and the nutritional value of BFree is outstanding versus the competition. Thats what is winning new listings for us. So I dont see 2000 stores by 2020 actually, I see 2000 stores by the end of next year without a shadow of a doubt. j-f: The UK and the US, as well as Scandinavia and Australia, how have fairly developed free-from markets. How do you navigate what are increasingly mature markets? Murphy: This is a cliche answer, but this is a demand situation. New consumers are coming into this category whereas before it was only coeliacs. For example, the weight-loss market was never part of free-from because products were so high in fat. Now, BFree is the only gluten-free brand Slimming World recommends because we got ahead of that challenge. Our wraps for example are the lowest calorie wraps on the market. Its sort of matching mainstream with free-from as there is now a new consumer shopping the aisle. The bays are stretching out; Im not sure how much more the sufferers are buying but the mainstream consumers are coming into the category. j-f: With the way free-from is growing, will it enter the mainstream aisles of the supermarket? Murphy: Its already happening. M&S are doing it with their made without wheat range and in the US, we feature in the free-from freezer but also in the mainstream bakery aisles. So that time is now, its happening as we speak. j-f: And is that an important development for your growth as a company? Murphy: Absolutely. For us the people who are shopping free-from know exactly where they are going but for those not necessarily seeking it out they might not shop that aisle ever. j-f: What is your take on more of the larger, international packaged food companies entering the free-from category? Murphy: It surely is a challenge. The amount of competitors that have entered in the last few years is incredible and technology is changing all the time. To keep ourselves relevant, our only focus is on free-from. For a lot of companies, it might be a side focus but this is our only mission. For us to really stay instrumental within this, new product development is is key. We like to think we have a real innovative spark with products like seed kits that add value to lines and make things convenient. And what we try and do is match what is in the mainstream. We launched a pitta bread this year but we wont go in thinking of it from a gluten-free point of view, we go in thinking how can we make this as normal as possible? So we make the pitta bread in a real stone-fire oven for example like a traditional pitta would be baked. For us, staying relevant through NPD, innovation and offering it out to as many consumers that shop this category is fundamental. j-f: You mentioned BFree Foods sole focus area is free-from. Is that important in setting you apart from competitors at a time where millennial consumers in particular are looking for brands they trust? Murphy: I think its a healthy balance. When the mainstream brands come in it does help raise awareness of the category for sure since awareness goes up and technology moves along. But for us, yes, weve built a trust with our consumers and they are very loyal. We bring them along on a journey with us. So this being our sole focus, I do believe consumers really trust the brand. 150 Shares Share Over the past few months, the federal government has mobilized against what is being called the opioid crisis: a national epidemic of fatal overdoses that in 2014 claimed more than 14,000 lives, the most ever recorded. Since most of these opioids were originally prescribed by physicians to treat pain, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently finalized a guideline containing recommendations for appropriate opioid prescribing. The Food and Drug Administration will require that all opioid-containing medications be labeled with a new boxed warning about the serious risks of misuse, abuse, addiction, overdose and death associated with these drugs. And the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health has released a National Pain Strategy that is designed to complement restrictions on opioids by promoting and reducing access barriers to non-pharmacologic management options for patients with chronic pain. What is notably missing from these efforts is an attempt to understand why more people are experiencing chronic pain in the first place. In a recent article published in the Harvard Business Review, public policy and business professors Eileen Chou, Bidhan Parmar, and Adam Galinsky reviewed studies that linked widening U.S. income inequality and unemployment to greater levels of physical pain and purchases of over-the-counter painkillers. They also demonstrated in a series of experiments on college students that the prospect of economic insecurity increased the perception of pain and reduced pain tolerance. Chou and colleagues wrote: Why does economic insecurity hurt? The cause is likely rooted in human psychology. When people encounter economic insecurity, they typically feel a loss of control. A sense of control is one of the foundational elements of well-being. When people lose this sense of control, their body goes a bit haywire and responds to stimuli differently displaying weakened resilience and a lower pain threshold. They went on to suggest that public and private organizations could do much address the opioid crisis by restoring peoples sense of personal control through policy changes designed to promote economic security. Increasing wages and reducing layoffs are obvious (if not always possible) solutions, but so are rent controls, education and childcare subsidies, and free-market policies aimed at reducing the cost of living. One of the questions on my practices intake questionnaire asks whether the patient is experiencing financial insecurity. It has always struck me as a little odd; compared to, say, the question that asks if they feel safe at home, there seemed to be little I could do in the clinic to lift the burden of someones student loans or persistent joblessness. A similar argument has been made against proposals to present community vital signs data in electronic health records: How are individual physicians supposed to act on information about social determinants of health? On the other hand, I can tell you all about the connections Ive seen between economic stress and physical symptoms such as headaches or backaches, and how knowing more about my patients day-to-day struggles to stay financially afloat has frequently averted our going down an unproductive path of invasive and/or expensive testing. So it isnt a stretch to suggest that well-intentioned government efforts to stem the tide of opioid overdoses may flounder without explicitly addressing the social determinants of pain. Kenneth Lin is a family physician who blogs at Common Sense Family Doctor. Image credit: Shutterstock.com The Kilkenny 2016 Commemorations Plan will honour Thomas MacDonagh a signatory to the Proclamation, who was amongst those executed after the 1916 Rising. Kilkenny County Councils all party commemorations committee decided to promote a series of events centred on the life and times of MacDonagh and the places, people and events in Kilkenny which had a significant influence on him. Seachtain Mhic Dhonnchadha / MacDonagh Week will commence on April 30 and run to May 9. MacDonagh had very strong connections with Kilkenny, he lived and worked in Kilkenny and became more radical during his time here in the formative years of the early 20th Century. Seachtain Mhic Dhonnchadha / MacDonagh Week is one of the central planks in this year of commemorations. Cathaoirleach of Kilkenny County Council Cllr. Mary Hilda Cavangh formally launched Thomas MacDonagh Week on Friday 15th April at James Stephens Military Barracks, Kilkenny. She noted in her speech, I can hear people asking why wait until May, why are we commemorating MacDonagh, weeks after the recent National Easter Rising ceremonies in Dublin? Well, as we know Easter is the original moveable feast and Easter Monday in 1916 fell on 24th April, and following the Rising came the surrender, closely followed by the Courts Martial, and then, finally, the executions. She added The first military courts martial sat on May 2nd; they immediately sentenced three men Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke and Thomas MacDonagh to death. The three were taken that evening to the disused Kilmainham Gaol and shot at dawn on May 3, 1916 in the Stonebreakers Yard. And so we are taking the opportunity to reflect on the life and times, and legacy of MacDonagh on his anniversary, starting on 30th April, running through to 9th May, through street theatre, theatrical performance, music and song, and by a lecture as Gaeilge, in Rothe House, which held a special place in his heart. March Past One of the highlights of Seachtain Mhic Dhonnchadha will be on May 3rd next, MacDonaghs 100th Anniversary, when Kilkenny City will host a March Past by troops bound for the Lebanon as part of an ongoing U.N. Peacekeeping mission. Joe Malone, Mayor and Chairman of Kilkenny County Councils Commemorations Committee said, It will be open to the public to come and view the Army as they parade through the city streets and I encourage people to come to Kilkenny on the day with tricolours flying to show our appreciation and support for those who are continuing the proud peacekeeping traditions of Oglaigh na hEireann. Other events throughout the week will include: Rise Rise' presented by Heritage Tales - Street theatre from 30th April to 3rd May 2016, 7pm daily. Booking essential at Rollercoaster Records, Kieran Street, Kilkenny The Stories of the past are woven in stone Rise with revolutionary Thomas MacDonagh as he summons the people of Kilkenny to join in the campaign for independence. Join the men and women of Kilkenny who were influenced by MacDonagh and fought for a free Ireland. Their stories are brought to life on the historic streets of Kilkenny. For more information please visit Facebook.com/the1916project The Stories Our Streets Can Tell The Stories Our Streets Can Tell: Kilkennys Military Heritage 1913-1923, from April 30 to May 7, 10.30am & 3pm daily. Free of charge for Seachtain MacDonagh, Tours are normally 5/person Take the Military Heritage Tour of Kilkennys military heritage sites. You will be expertly guided around the landmark buildings and places which were linked to all aspects of activity in the lead up to Easter 1916, and its aftermath. Get the story of the use of buildings such as the Tholsel, Kytelers Inn, Rothe House and hear the story of the Friary Street ambush. Tours are guided and booking is through the Watergate Theatre at www.watergatetheatre.com Mass Mass: Capuchin Friary Church in Kilkenny, 1st May 2016, 10.30am - Aifreann ag comoradh Laochra na Casca The 53 Inf Gp currently preparing for it's upcoming departure to Lebanon will have their Ministerial Review in Kilkenny Castle on May 3 at 2.30pm The Group are commanded by Lt Col Stephen Ryan and are made up of troops predominantly from James Stephens Barracks and the Southern Brigade. The Ministerial Review will commence with a ceremony in Kilkenny Castle followed by a march through Kilkennys High Street where a Minister of Cabinet will be present at City Hall for the March past to review the group. The troops have prepared for their tour of duty with extensive training since March in Kilworth Camp and the Glen of Imaal. Midwives of a Nation Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny, May 20 at 8pm 4th May 2016 11am Free Of Charge, ticketed, booking is through the Watergate at www.watergatetheatre.com. Carnation Theatre presents: "Midwives of a Nation" co-written with Joe O'Byrne. Midwives celebrates the oft forgotten contribution of women to the events of 1916 - the big and the not so big characters of which there are so many: Elizabeth O'Farrell, Margaret Skinnider, Countess Markievicz, Winnie Carnie to name but a few. These ladies were the dispatchers, the doctors, the First-Aiders, the snipers, the tea makers, the gun runners...the list goes on! Join Carnation theatre as we celebrate the women who were there at the birth of our nation. Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny, 5th May 2016, at 8pm The Count, The Countess & The Tommy Free Of Charge, ticketed, booking through www.watergatetheatre.com Kilkennys Watergate Theatre will be the venue this May for the premiere of Myles Dungan's new 1916 show The Count, The Countess & The Tommy. The show, starring soloist Simon Morgan - as seen on RTE's Late Late Show - centres on the life and music of the celebrated Irish tenor Count John McCormack, and features some of the best-known songs of a hundred years ago. May 5th is the date set for the first-ever performance of the show, which goes on to tour Dublin, Roscommon, Cavan, Leitrim and beyond, as part of broadcaster Myles Dungan's Paths To Freedom roadshow project, a unique package of lectures, presentations and shows remembering the Rising, one hundred years on. Thomas Mac Donagh agus a Rol san Eiri Amach 1916 Teach an Rutaigh (Rothe House), Leacht Cuimhneachain 1916, 6th May 2016, 7.30 i.n. Conradh na Gaeilge Cill Chainnigh leacht: Thomas Mac Donagh agus a Rol san Eiri Amach 1916 a thabharfaidh Alan Titley, Udar agus Scolaire. Failtiu agus Cantoiri an Rutaigh "1916 - Portraits and Lives" MacDonagh Train Station Kilkenny, Remembering Thomas MacDonagh, 7th May 2016 at 10am "1916 - Portraits and Lives" Portraits and Lives of Rising leaders to be brought to daily commuters, by Iarnrod Eireann in partnership with Royal Irish Academy. In 1966, the State renamed fifteen stations on the rail network after the executed Leaders of 1916 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Rising. A further fifty years on, and to mark the centenary of the Rising, Iarnrod Eireann have partnered with the Royal Irish Academy to enable daily commuters, tourists and visitors to learn more about the people whose names are celebrated in these stations. Kilkennys railway station was named after Thomas MacDonagh, who was a signatory to the Proclamation and who was executed on 3rd May 1916. MacDonagh lived and worked in Kilkenny in the early years of the 20th Century. The display in Kilkenny will feature a specially commissioned portrait of MacDonagh by artist David Rooney and information about his life, taken from the Royal Irish Academy's "1916 - Portraits and Lives" publication. A QR code is included in so that customers can download the chapter of the book about Thomas MacDonagh for free. They can also be downloaded through the following link www.ria.ie/research-projects/1916-portraits-and-lives. Schools poetry recital As part of Iarnrod Eireann's 1916 commemoration programme we will be hosting a special event, on 7th May in Kilkenny, to remember Thomas MacDonagh, after whom Kilkenny Station was renamed in 1966 MacDonagh Junction Shopping Centre, Kilkenny, will hold a schools poetry recital, 7th May at 11am. St Kieran's College As part of their 1916 commemorations, St Kierans College are celebrating the lives of former members of staff Thomas MacDonagh and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington with an inter-schools poetry competition. This event will showcase the finalists chosen by poet Stephen Murray from first year secondary schools in Kilkenny. In addition Stephen Murray will hold a free poetry masterclass for interested persons in the MacDonagh Shopping Centre on the day. Any person wishing to register for this event should email info@macdonaghjunction.com or see www.macdonaghjunction.com for further details. Library show There will also be traditional music and dance performances on the day. Carnegie Library, Johns Quay, Kilkenny. 9th May 2016 - 12 noon to 4pm Free event To mark the centenary of the Easter Rising, family history experts from Findmypast and Eneclann are touring Ireland to help you trace your ancestors. Join us for a FREE day full of family history on 9th May 2016 in the Carnegie Library, Kilkenny. On the day you can expect: Free access to billions of family history records on www.findmypast.ie Talks on finding your roots and the 1916 Rising. The cornets tooted and the trombones thrilled while the sound of the euphonium, bass and drums filled the air as a huge crowd attended the official opening of the new home for Graignamanagh Brass Band which was formed in 1760, making it the oldest band in Ireland. The cornets tooted and the trombones thrilled while the sound of the euphonium, bass and drums filled the air as a huge crowd attended the official opening of the new home for Graignamanagh Brass Band which was formed in 1760, making it the oldest band in Ireland. And recently appointed Minister for Rural Affairs, Ann Phelan was on hand to do the honours in her home town. For years, its musical tradition has been carried on by local families such as the Dohertys, the Fenlons, and the Hoares, but to name a few, she said. We all remember fondly, Piery Fenlon, Sean Hoare and Dick Byrne, who were prominent members of the Brass Band down through the years. Its great to see it filter down through the generations, with Denise and Debra Fenlon, Pierys daughters involved. I also understand that, it is extending into the next generation, into Pierys grandchildren and I wouldnt expect anything less, she added. She spoke of the exceptional revival under the new Band Master, Nick Cooney. Apart from the very complex calendar of events that the band take part in throughout the year, such as on St Patricks Day and Easter Sunday, they are renowned for their Christmas concert in Duiske Abbey. As it the case for many people, Christmas time is my favourite time of the year and listening to the Brass Band around this time, makes it all the more special, she said. In their wine coloured jackets which proudly bears the bands crest, long standing band members, such as Willie Flood, Ned Fenlon and Eddie Cody from Inistioge, play among the other band members at each and every event. Willie has often regaled the story of how the band played the Dead March as it paced through the streets of Graignamanagh when news filtered through that the Titantic had sunk in 1912, Minister Phelan said. The band is held in exceptionally high esteem by the people of Graignamanagh, Thomastown, New Ross and Inistioge, which is home to some of the band members. They are an intrinsic piece of the fabric of the town and I wish them all the very best with their new Band Room and I look forward to enjoying their music for many years to come, she added before encouraging everyone to buy the bands DVD, which, she said, would make a great Christmas present for loved ones at home and abroad, reviving fond memories for all, Minister Phelan added. Bremerton Parks and Recreation worker Mike Volpe spreads peat moss at Lillian & James Walker Park in West Bremerton on Thursday. Grants helped pay for development of the park in the Anderson Cove neighborhood, which opened last summer. The new nonprofit Bremerton Parks Foundation, once it has fully established an endowment, hopes to provide funding for future parks-related capital projects. SHARE Lucy Moynihan, 3, of Bremerton, plays at the popular playground at Evergreen-Rotary Park in Bremerton on Thursday. A nonprofit group called Bremerton Beyond Accessible Play paid for the playground, which opened in 2014. A new nonprofit, called the Bremerton Parks Foundation, has been created with the intention of paying for future parks improvements. By Josh Farley of the Kitsap Sun BREMERTON The city's parks system just got its own trust fund. The recently formed nonprofit Bremerton Parks Foundation aims to raise an endowment large enough to fund one capital project at a park each year. Its five-member board of directors has raised more than $60,000, but much more will be needed before any project can be supported. "This is a funding mechanism that will last into perpetuity," said Sunny Wheeler, the board's president. "No donation's too big or too small." Similar to other endowments, the goal is to raise enough money that the interest alone can cover an annual project, preserving the principle. Mayor Patty Lent praised the foundation's formation, calling it a "thinking-outside-the-box" strategy that will eventually ease financial constraints on the parks department. "I'm just thrilled. This is just the first step, but it's a mighty important step," Lent said. The city's park force took a drubbing in the recession. Its budget fell from $3.4 million in 2008 to $2.5 million in 2013. Its parks maintenance staff is the same size it was in 1977, despite more than 17 additional parks and streetscapes. Foundation board members include Wheeler, the chairwoman of the Bremerton parks commission; Jim McDonald, a former city councilman; Wyn Birkenthal, the former city parks director, who retired in December; Teresa Bryant, a financial adviser with Edward Jones; and Kevin Cure, an attorney with the Bremerton firm Sanchez, Mitchell, Eastman and Cure. The City Council and parks commission have discussed creating an endowment to help replace equipment or create new amenities in parks. Other cities, such as Spokane, have their own foundations. The Bainbridge Metropolitan Park District is supported by an endowment, but that endowment is governed by the district's board. The foundation would fund projects endorsed by either the city government or its parks commission, but otherwise "the bureaucracy of the city won't have any influence," Wheeler said. Part of the reason for that separation is to ensure that the city never comes to expect the funding and can simply use it to offset expenditures elsewhere. "That would be like running in place," Birkenthal said. Funding of projects also would be monitored closely to ensure accountability, Wheeler added. Last fall, a small group including Birkenthal and Wheeler started to explore the concept more seriously. Birkenthal took inspiration from Kiwanis Park, a neighborhood play area that was once "dilapidated, underutilized and known to have its share of vagrants." But with help from grant money, as well as $400,000 in community funding, the park underwent an overhaul. Rather than dead space, "It's now the center of that neighborhood," Birkenthal said. And he believes there's a number of parks in Bremerton where the same kind of revitalizing can occur. PARKS DONATIONS To donate to the Bremerton Parks Foundation, write the organization at PO Box 745, Bremerton, 98337 or email bremparksfoundation@gmail.com. Wendy Carter and Dave Parker ride the final leg of their circumnavigation of Bainbridge on Wednesday on the beach at Little Manzanita Bay. SHARE Dave Parker takes his fatbike out Wednesday for the final leg of his Bainbridge Island journey at the beach at Little Manzanita Bay. LARRY STEAGALL / KITSAP SUN Wendy Carter and Dave Parker celebrate Wednesday finishing the final leg of their circumnavigation of Bainbridge Island on bikes. Dave Parker and Wendy Carter celebrate Wednesday as they finish their Bainbridge Island journey. By Tristan Baurick of the Kitsap Sun BAINBRIDGE ISLAND Plenty of people have sailed or paddled around Bainbridge Island. A few have even walked its 53-mile-long shoreline. Dave Parker and Wendy Carter might be the first to bike it. Using bikes with cartoonishly fat tires designed for deep snow, the couple pedaled every mile of island beachfront. Their trek, which they did in low-tide sections beginning on Easter, has taken them over barnacled rocks, fallen trees, stretches of deep, loose pebble and swaths of tire-sucking mud. "It's amazing what you can bike over with these fatbikes," said Parker, a real estate agent on the island. "There's no way you could do this with a regular mountain bike." Custom-built fatbikes have been around since the 1980s. It wasn't until Alaskans started racing them on the Iditarod Trail that manufacturers took notice. Around 10 years ago, fatbikes' puffed and studded tires started rolling into bike shops around the country. They're now common at ski resorts and on cross-country ski trails. Parker and Carter, a Bremerton resident and nurse at Harrison Medical Center, tried fatbikes for the first time less than two months ago at Whistler ski resort in British Columbia. With the ski season ending, the owner was in the mood to sell. Parker and Carter snapped up a pair for about $1,400. Problem was, they had no snowy trails on which to ride. So they tried the beach. They biked from Fay Bainbridge Park to Murden Cove and back. The fat tires handled everything from loose cobble, gravel, shells, mud and even small logs with ease. "But it's not easy," Carter said. "You can't go fast, and there's no coasting. You're pedaling the whole time." Avid mountain bikers, the couple regularly make weekend dates to ride trails in North Kitsap and Bainbridge. Unlike those rides, which wind through thick forest, beach biking affords wide-open views of sea, sky and mountains. On their sunny Wednesday morning ride from Manzanita Bay to Port Madison, they spotted three herons, two eagles, an otter and got a rare underside view of the Agate Pass Bridge. During the last of the 53 miles, they pedaled by a hard-to-reach rock carving thought to be more than 1,500 years old. "So cool," Parker said, touching the Native American petroglyph. "I'd heard about it, but never knew where it was." The ride around Bainbridge has allowed Parker to get better acquainted with his island home. It's also been good for business. "The Realtor who hired me back in 1988 always said, 'Know your inventory.' Well, now I can say I've seen every waterfront property," he said. He's sold a few, too. "Sold that one for $2.4 million," he said, passing by a sprawling house overlooking Manzanita Bay. The island's shoreline is dominated by expensive homes. Most of the homeowners Parker and Carter came across have been friendly. Some have offered beers. "Everybody's got questions about the bikes," Carter said. "People say, 'I've lived here 25 years and have never seen anything like that before.'" The only trouble they've encountered was concentrated at one property. "This lady came out barking, 'You can't be here! This is private property!' And then her husband came and started yelling," Carter said. "I just waved at them and said, 'Have a nice day.'" Their dog took off after Parker. The chase ended when Parker grabbed his water bottle and gave the pooch a squirt in the face. Parker is confident he has the law on his side when it comes to traveling Washington's beaches. He cites the Public Trust Doctrine, an ancient legal principle granting public access across privately owned tidelands. While other states have invoked the principle in law, Washington has dodged the issue. The state Supreme Court has failed to affirm or deny a right to cross private beaches. For Parker, that's neither a do or a don't. It's more like a shrug. The Kitsap County Prosecutor's Office has said people who cause problems or damage property on beaches could be charged with a crime. That's tough to prove if somebody is simply walking or biking across the beach. Parker said their bikes leave behind little more than tracks. Despite their burly appearance, the bikes' tires are soft and have much lower pressure than road or mountain bikes. The couple are also careful to start and end their rides from the island's 70 public road ends, which grant narrow channels for water access, or from the dozen or so waterfront parks. On Wednesday, they started their last 6-mile leg at the end of Dock Road and finished up with high-fives and hugs at the sandy end of Gordon Road on Port Madison Bay. "Well, we did all of Bainbridge," Parker said to Carter. "What's next? All of Kitsap?" SHARE By Josh Farley of the Kitsap Sun See the Kitsap Sun's database of confidential licenses, and the agencies that use them, here. The state's Department of Licensing has issued more fictitious driver's licenses to the Central Intelligence Agency since 2007 than any other government entity, according to records revealed ? and later withheld ? by state officials. In crafting legislation motivated by a Kitsap Sun public records request, the Department of Licensing, or DOL, acknowledged for the first time in about three decades it was issuing fake IDs to local, state and federal law enforcement agencies for undercover investigations. Not even former two-term Gov. Chris Gregoire, also once the state attorney general, knew about the program, a spokesman for Gregoire confirmed Monday. Lawmakers in Olympia are grappling with how to erect safeguards that will prevent the program from being abused ? all while being in the dark about how exactly it's used. Who is using it, too, is now a murkier question. Three weeks ago, DOL officials showed the Sun and public radio's Northwest News Network a list of agencies that have been issued confidential licenses since 2007. That list included the CIA with 288 licenses, and the Department of Defense with 198, as the top two recipients. Local agencies, including the Kitsap County Sheriff's Office and Bremerton Police Department, were issued fictitious licenses as well. But when the DOL released the official roster of agencies that use the confidential licenses via email Friday, it lumped together all "federal law enforcement" agencies ? numbering 595, or 53 percent of the 1,121 issued ? and did not list any by name. On Monday, the DOL said it could not discuss the original list, citing a nondisclosure agreement some DOL employees sign with the U.S. government. "A lot of information that was compiled should not have been discussed," DOL spokesman Brad Benfield said, adding later that is was "classified information." "We simply can't talk about it anymore without further putting ourselves in legal jeopardy," Benfield said. Federal agencies queried for this story, including the CIA, declined to comment as to their uses for the fictitious licenses. The Defense Department would "not characterize or otherwise discuss our participation in this program," spokesman Lt. Col. Tom Crosson said. "Naval Criminal Investigative Service does use a few confidential licenses for undercover purposes," NCIS spokesman Ed Buice said. "Beyond that it would be counterproductive for us to comment in any greater detail." That the CIA uses Washington state identification came as little surprise to Tim Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter who wrote "Legacy of Ashes," a book that documents the CIA's history. He said undercover officers need an "ironclad" false identity to do their work. This state, populous with globally known companies like Boeing and Microsoft, is ripe from which to pluck a "cover identity." Rather than the CIA creating its own fake IDs, they must actually be legitimate to make them fireproof, he said, as agents conduct covert work overseas. Not every state necessarily need make IDs for the CIA ? a check of Oregon's confidential license program shows none issued to the country's top spy agency. But then again, a "grain merchant from North Dakota" might not be as convincing, he said, as an "Asian-American software salesman who lives in the greater Seattle area." There is the possibility they're working in the state, too. William Arkin, a national security consultant and author who once worked in Army intelligence, speculates the CIA is using confidential licenses here, noting the submarine base at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor and security, overt and undercover, is necessary to help safeguard national assets. Regardless of their use, Weiner said, such a program can be lawful but it "needs adult supervision." "And it cannot be an informal relationship," he said. "It needs to be codified." The DOL set out to do that this year, sparked by records requests from the Sun in 2012 for the number of confidential and undercover license plates issued to government cars around the state. DOL officials decided to pen legislation aimed at tightening disclosure laws around them to protect officers and, within the same effort, put its long-running program of issuing fake IDs to investigators into state law ? something that had never been done. The DOL's legislative efforts endured little scrutiny ? the bills to tighten disclosure and make official the undercover licensing program sailed through the state Senate on a 47-1 vote ? until it arrived at the House's Transportation Committee. There, Republican lawmakers Matt Shea and Jason Overstreet were surprised to find the DOL had been printing fake licenses for government agencies for about the past three decades, though no one knows for sure when, and why, the program began. "The first and obvious question is why (has) the CIA asked for and received 288 Washington state identifications," Overstreet said. "It seems like a big number." He's sought answers but hasn't been able to get them. The state's confidential license plate program, separate from the one for driver's licenses and identity cards, has been growing for decades. See the Kitsap Sun's database of confidential license plates around the state here. "I think that the public demands a response," he said. "Not classified information that would compromise officer safety, but I think the DOL owes the public a response as to why they've been operating this program the way they have, outside of state law." The ACLU of Washington also is seeking information about the program and agrees it needs oversight and accountability. "The Department of Licensing needs to explain more clearly what it is that they do, what standards they have," ACLU spokesman Doug Honig said. Lawmakers Overstreet and Shea have altered legislation to provide additional safeguards to the program ? including that they may only be used for the duration of an undercover officer's covert assignment and that they must be returned to DOL following that assignment. The bill now awaits a vote on the House floor. The legislation also limits the use of confidential licenses for undercover and covert law enforcement work. That might prove problematic for the CIA, which Weiner said is not a police agency and has no police powers within the country. "That language, as written, would cut the CIA off from this program," he said. This story was a collaboration with Austin Jenkins of public radio's Northwest News Network. His work can be heard on KUOW and KPLU. Database To see a list of all agencies that use the state's confidential license program, click here. SHARE By Tad Sooter of the Kitsap Sun BREMERTON The Kitsap Public Health District will drastically scale back proposed restrictions on vaping in the county, after the governor signed statewide rules into law this week. The district spent months drafting and vetting an ordinance that would have banned vaping in public places, prohibited sales to minors and placed regulations on vapor product retailers. Senate Bill 6328, signed by Gov. Jay Inslee on Tuesday, enacts some of the same restrictions statewide, while also preventing local jurisdictions' from regulating many aspects of vaping and the vapor industry. Keith Grellner, environmental health director for Kitsap Public Health, said the bulk of the draft county ordinance will be nullified by the state law. "There's a lot of strikeout in the draft we're working on now," he said. Grellner said the district will release a revised version of its draft ordinance next week. The health board will review the draft at its May 3 meeting but won't take formal action until later this year. The state law covers much of the same regulatory ground addressed by the proposed Kitsap ordinance. It bans minors younger than 18 from possessing or purchasing vapor product, requires vapor retailers to obtain licenses and prohibits vaping in some public places, such as schools and playgrounds, frequented by children, among many other provisions. Grellner said the health district's revised draft ordinance will focus on prohibiting vaping in indoor public spaces not covered by the state law, such as workplaces, ferry terminals, buses and restaurants. The indoor vaping ban would follow rules in place for tobacco smoking, Grellner said. The district is removing a number of proposed restrictions on retailers because the state law prevents local jurisdictions from regulating vapor sales. Under the original draft ordinance, retailers would have purchased licenses from the health district. Now, the state Liquor and Cannabis Board will issue licenses and collect fees. Also being nixed from the draft ordinance is a controversial provision limiting the number of customers that can sample vapor products in stores. The state law appears to not limit in-store sampling, Grellner said. The health district began developing the county ordinance because vaping was largely unregulated, despite the activity's growing popularity and a lack of knowledge about its long-term health effects. Several Washington counties already have vaping rules. Vapor users inhale from electronic devices that vaporize flavored liquids. The liquids usually contain nicotine and other chemicals. For information on Kitsap's draft ordinance, go to kitsappublichealth.org/vaping. SHARE The Department of Licensing has been running the program without legislative authority. By Josh Farley of the Kitsap Sun The state's confidential license plate program, separate from the one for driver's licenses and identity cards, has been growing for decades. See the Kitsap Sun's database of confidential license plates around the state here. More than 1,000 fictitious state driver's licenses and identification cards help cloak the identities of undercover law enforcement, long issued under a Department of Licensing program to safeguard those officers' lives. One problem: It appears the program was too confidential. No state laws guide its use; no one at DOL even knows how it started. And, up until now, no one bothered to tell the Legislature it existed. "At this point it appears there's no oversight whatsoever," Rep. Matt Shea, R-Spokane Valley, said of the program, "and (DOL) has been doing this above the law literally for years." Shea and Rep. Jason Overstreet, R-Lynden, were floored last week when a recently passed Senate bill etching the state-sponsored fictitious ID program into law arrived at the House's transportation committee, upon which they both serve. Neither of the Republican lawmakers is opposed to the IDs to help keep undercover cops safe. But they believe it's time the program got some oversight. "I think the public deserves to know how these things are being used," Overstreet said. The DOL's legislative effort was spurred by records requests from the Kitsap Sun in 2012 for a story about the issuance of confidential and undercover license plates, according to DOL spokesman Brad Benfield. DOL officials wanted to tighten disclosure laws surrounding confidential plates. But they also wanted the Legislature's blessing on the undercover identification card and driver's license program. Benfield could not say when the DOL undercover license program began ? no one there now knows ? but those familiar with the program believe it has been "a reasonable thing to do," he said. "Everyone who's involved in this program takes it very seriously," Benfield said. Speaking on behalf of the state's law enforcement community, Mitch Barker, executive director of the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, said the program is imperative for effective ? and safe ? undercover work. "It's a tool we absolutely need," Barker said, adding later: "I think a driver's license is a pretty cheap way to protect an officer." Barker cites one of his own experiences as an example of why the program is needed. While working undercover as a Des Moines police officer years ago, he attempted to buy 2 pounds of marijuana from a drug dealer when he lost his backup officer. In a tavern parking lot, he told the dealer he needed to make a phone call. In that time, the dealer went through Barker's car, finding an insurance card making it clear he was a government employee. Thankfully, backup did arrive before things got ugly. "I thought he was gonna try to run me down in the parking lot," he said. The undercover program helps further mask officers' identities, he said. The confidential license program is run out of the DOL's licensing integrity unit, the agency's investigative wing, which is headed up by Fred Bjornberg, a retired Washington State Patrol detective sergeant, Benfield said. Only a handful of DOL employees are capable of issuing confidential licenses. A qualifying applicant can't just go to the nearest DOL office to get one; they must go to Olympia to DOL's headquarters, Benfield said. After five years, just like regular licenses, they expire. The requesting agency must fill out a one-page form, which includes a space to fill in the desired fictitious name. The local, state or federal agency must present the reason for getting the fictitious ID on agency letterhead. Among the dozens of law enforcement agencies whose officers and detectives have the IDs are the Kitsap County Sheriff's Office and Bremerton Police Department. Top brass at the departments say they're used for undercover law enforcement. Benfield said that a department must prove the ID will be used for a "criminal justice function." Benfield said there have never been reports of misuse, though one officer who left an agency forgot to cancel an undercover ID. He added that the program's always had internal rules to ensure it was not being abused. For instance, if a police officer's fictitious license were run through DOL's database by other law enforcement, the licensing integrity unit would be notified. "We really have to have faith that these law enforcement agencies are using these properly," Benfield said. The two Republican lawmakers on the House transportation committee plan to introduce amendments to the legislation that would define legitimate use of the licenses, ensure the program's transparency and create accountability should it be abused. They appear to be the first two to have scrutinized the bill. It sailed through the Senate on a 47-1 vote. Sen. Bob Hasegawa, D-Beacon Hill, was the lone no vote. "It was portrayed as a housekeeping bill," said Sen. Christine Rolfes, D-Bainbridge Island. Rolfes said she assumed DOL had been issuing fictitious licenses all along for the purposes of undercover work. She said there were no issues raised about the program in the Senate transportation committee. But she commended Shea and Overstreet for probing the program more. "I'm glad they're raising those questions," she said. Sen. Tim Sheldon, D-Potlatch, said he voted in favor of the bill because he felt the program needed to be transparent in state law. "If there's legislative oversight, we'll get more uniformity" in the program, Sheldon said. "It's predictable and, this way, it won't be abused." Rep. Jan Angel, R-Port Orchard, who is on the House transportation committee with Shea and Overstreet, said she supports the bill as is. But she said she will take a look at any amendments they might propose to the bill. Angel said she recalls deputies using undercover licenses to help with their work during her time as a Kitsap County commissioner. She believes the current legislation has appropriate safeguards ? for both the officer and in deterring misuse. "The most important thing is that the process keeps people safe and also keeps any fraud or abuse from happening," Angel said. Rep. Sherry Appleton, D-Poulsbo, said that she supports a confidential license program not only for the protection of law enforcers but for their families. But she'd have preferred the DOL had come to the Legislature before starting such a program. "I think they should have asked first," she said. _______________ This story was a collaboration with Austin Jenkins of public radio's Northwest News Network. His work can be heard on KUOW and KPLU. SHARE Judith Ann Duke Bremerton, WA Sept. 5, 1942 to April 16, 2016 Judy passed away on Saturday April 16th with her husband and children by her side after her long journey with memory loss. Born on September 5, 1942, in Seattle, WA, to Don and Mary Campana, she graduated with honors from Central Kitsap High School in Silverdale, WA. She then attended the University of Washington where she was a member of Alpha Chi Omega. There she met her future husband Robert (Skip) Duke. They were married the summer after their graduation, on June 27,1964. In 2014, Judy and Skip celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. Judy graduated in 1964 with a Bachelors degree in Speech Pathology. She spent many years dedicated to making a difference in the lives of elementary school students with her commitment and dedication. Caring for others was a defining feature of Judys life. She was a loving wife, mother, grandmother, and daughter who always put others first. Generous, compassionate, and strong-willed, she was a loyal friend and family member always committed to whatever cause she was supporting. Judy loved silly jokes, playful moments, and always danced with a huge smile on her face. Her joy was contagious and she loved games and having fun. Together with Skip, Judy spent many winters enjoying the mountains as ski school chaperons for the Central Kitsap School District with their family and friends. Always willing to take a risk, mid-season and about the age of 50, she showed up with a snowboard tucked under her arm ready to learn to shred. Judy had a lifelong love of the water and marine life. She grew up on the waterfront in Chico and was an excellent water skier at an early age. It was so much fun to watch her make smooth carving turns with a beautiful smile on her face. She made it look effortless and was skilled at finishing her runs without even getting her hair wet. Throughout her life it was rare to see Judy without binoculars scanning for seals, birds, and other wildlife. She was passionate about the ocean and delighted in seeing animals in their habitat and being an advocate for protecting their lives and homes. Judy was the backbone of her family working full time, doing the majority of the shopping, cooking family meals and caring for the kids. She was an amazing woman that did it all, rarely complained, and totally committed to support her family in every possible way. On those rare moments she wasnt busy she loved sinking into a cozy chair and devouring a book or two. She always was a voracious reader and had half-read books all over her house. Judy grew up camping and exploring the outdoors with her parents and siblings and shared the tradition with her husband and kids. She and her family were longtime VW van owners and adventured all over the US and Europe in their little campers. Judy loved to travel. She and Skip traveled to many countries around the world including visiting her relatives in Italy and also Australia. Judy and her family also lived in Germany for two years and traveled extensively around Europe on many trips. She was also fortunate to spend time with family in Mexico, Hawaii, Palau, Fiji, Alaska, and once made a special celebratory trip to Africa with her husband Skip. Judy is survived by her loving husband Skip Duke, her son Gar (Nicole), and her daughter Gia (Justin), and her two grandsons Tobin and Crusoe. She is also survived by her brother Jerry Campana (Sue), and her sister Sue Bell (Tony). And her nieces Felicity Bell and Talia Speer and her nephew Brett Fuller, and her much loved St. Bernard, Bernie. A Celebration of Life Ceremony for Judy will be held on Friday April 22 from 3:00 5:00pm at the Kitsap Conference Center at the Ferry Terminal in downtown Bremerton. The family would like to thank Marine Court and Harrison Hospital for their professionalism, compassion and care. In lieu of flowers or gifts, donations can be made to the nonprofit organization Greenpeace, in her name. View a full tribute at www.lewischapel.com. Shenandoah, IA (51601) Today Windy with scattered thunderstorms. Potential for severe thunderstorms. Low 57F. Winds SSW at 25 to 35 mph. Chance of rain 40%.. Tonight Windy with scattered thunderstorms. Potential for severe thunderstorms. Low 57F. Winds SSW at 25 to 35 mph. Chance of rain 40%. By Hayes Hickman of the Knoxville News Sentinel A decorated former Knoxville police officer indicted on drug conspiracy charges this week has been the subject of seven Internal Affairs investigations since 2007, officials said. Joshua Hurst, a 13-year veteran of the Knoxville Police Department, is among eight people charged in a scheme to distribute prescription painkillers in Knox and other counties across East and Middle Tennessee, prosecutors said. Hurst, 38, had been under probe by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation since late February, when Knoxville Police Chief David Rausch alerted Knox County District Attorney General Charme Allen to possible criminal conduct within the department, authorities said. "Hurst's police powers were suspended right after the investigation was launched," KPD spokesman Darrell DeBusk said Thursday. Hurst's tenure includes accolades and previous allegations of wrongdoing since becoming an officer in November 2003. He was named KPD's Officer of the Month in May 2007 for a traffic stop that led to a series of arrests on drug and gun charges. He also received the department's Lifesaving Award in February 2007 for helping pull a driver from a burning car. Hurst has prompted repeated investigations into his conduct as an officer as well. The most recent resulted in a three-day suspension without pay in October 2012, following allegations of unsatisfactory performance and discourtesy, failure to exercise knowledge of laws and courtesy, and violation of KPD's patrol prisoner search and transport policy, according to DeBusk. All of the allegations were sustained, but DeBusk didn't give specifics. A separate investigation in 2012 also sustained allegations of unsatisfactory performance and discourtesy by Hurst. The details of any disciplinary action taken were not available, DeBusk said Thursday. Hurst was the subject of a third internal investigation in 2012 that sustained an allegation of discourtesy, while a related accusation of theft of money could not be substantiated. Other related allegations of violation of the prisoner search and transport policy and of failure to exercise knowledge of laws and regulations resulted in discovery of infractions not mentioned in the initial complaint, DeBusk said. Details of the case were not available Thursday. In 2007 and 2009, allegations against Hurst of unnecessary force, mistreatment of a prisoner, unbecoming conduct and two instances of theft of money proved unfounded, according to DeBusk. Hurst was exonerated of an allegation of excessive force in 2009. Following his indictment, Hurst was taken into custody Wednesday at KPD headquarters by TBI agents. He submitted his resignation through his lawyer, whom DeBusk would not identify. Hurst was released Wednesday night after posting a $100,000 bond through a bail bondsman, according to jail records. KPD officials were in the process Thursday of drafting a request to have Hurst's certification revoked by the state Police Officers Standards and Training Commission, which would prevent him from working in law enforcement again. The paperwork should be filed by Monday, DeBusk said. Charges against Hurst include conspiracy to possess oxycodone and oxymorphone, both painkillers, with intent to deliver in a drug-free zone, four counts of official misconduct , possession of a gun during the commission of a felony and delivery of methamphetamine. Authorities have yet to disclose details of the case. DeBusk said Thursday the conspiracy did not involve any drugs seized as evidence by KPD, and the agency does not plan to conduct an audit of the drug locker in its property unit. DeBusk would not say whether Hurst had been selected for the department's random drug screening within the past two years, citing medical privacy laws. Also charged in the case are Milbern Breeden Jr., 51, of Knoxville; Erin Keenan, 41, of Knoxville; Pamela Moretta, 43, of Knoxville; Trevor Loy, 37, of Wartburg, Tenn.; Paul Gilbertson, 44, of Knoxville; and Hurst's brother, Jacob Hurst, 35, of Clarksville. All were arrested Wednesday, with bonds set at $100,000 each. Breeden was released Thursday on bond, while the others remained in custody. The eighth person indicted Gilbertson's brother Mark Thomas Gilbertson, age unavailable, was taken into custody Thursday at the La Quinta Inn on Alcoa Highway. SHARE By News Sentinel Staff LENOIR CITY A robber in a home invasion stole some pain pills and asked for a prayer, according to authorities. The Loudon County Sheriff's Department is investigating an incident that occurred Thursday morning during which an intruder came in on a woman in the Cedar Park trailer court between Dixie Lee Junction and Lenoir City and "said he needed pills," 9th Judicial District Attorney General Russell Johnson said. The robber was described as a man wearing dark clothes and a bandanna, possibly armed with a .22-caliber handgun. After saying he needed pain pills and demanding money and jewelry, the man took a bottle of hydrocodone medication. "He asked the lady to pray for him before he left and told her that she saved his life, and that there was a drug dealer in Knoxville that was going to kill him if he didn't bring him pills," Johnson said. The prosecutor said the woman reportedly offered up a prayer for the robber but refused to give him the ring she was wearing, saying she'd rather die first. Several vehicles in the trailer park were also broken into, Johnson said. SHARE Gary Hamilton, Knox County teaching assistant who sough pretrial diversion after admitting he punched a student. By Jamie Satterfield of the Knoxville News Sentinel Using the case of a Knox County teacher's assistant who admitted to punching a student as a backdrop, the newly-configured Tennessee Supreme Court is poised to reconsider just how much authority appellate courts should have to override prosecutorial decisions. The high court on Friday will hear arguments in Nashville in the case of Gary Hamilton, an in-school suspension teacher's assistant at Fulton High School who resigned and was charged with assault in September 2013 after he punched a student he already had wrestled to the floor outside a classroom. The court will use that case along with a Coffee County case involving a drunken mother accused of having sex with a 17-year-old friend of her daughter during a party in which she and another mother allowed teenagers to drink and smoke to revisit the legal standard by which appellate courts judge prosecutors' decisions in refusing to grant the rare legal privilege known as pretrial diversion. For the first time in more than a decade, Republican appointees hold a majority on the state's high court. Friday marks the first time that newly-configured court which now consists of three Republican appointees and two Democratic appointees will hear cases together and begin the process of putting their stamp on Tennessee jurisprudence. First on the agenda in a review by the high court are the two Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals decisions that overrode prosecutors' denial of pretrial diversion in the Knox and Coffee county cases and the legal standard that the appeals court used. In the Knox County case, prosecutor Ashley McDermott refused to grant Hamilton, then 49, pretrial diversion in the assault on the student. Pretrial diversion is a rarely granted legal privilege in which the charge is essentially put on a shelf for the length of the sentence allowed for the crime. In Hamilton's case, the misdemeanor assault charge carried a maximum sentence of one day shy of a year. If Hamilton behaved in that time, he would never have to admit guilt or stand trial. It is solely within the discretion of the prosecution to decide whether pretrial diversion should be granted, although the law sets out the factors the prosecution must consider. A defendant can appeal a denial to a judge, which Hamilton did. Knox County Criminal Court Judge Bob McGee backed the state. Hamilton's defense attorney, Stephen Ross Johnson, then turned to the appellate court. McDermott conceded Hamilton was an otherwise upstanding citizen unlikely to commit future crimes. She took issue with Hamilton's shift from full responsibility in his resignation for losing his cool and punching the student after a scuffle between the two to what she said was a diminishment of his conduct in his diversion application by stressing the student's bad behavior leading up to the punch. She also said a granting of pretrial diversion would appear to the public as coddling and fail to serve as a deterrent to bad behavior by other educators. In both cases, the appellate court found no fault with the process McDermott used to make her decision. She cited the right factors and provided evidence to support her conclusions on each one, the court held. But the court went further, saying the law also required a "reviewing court" to decide whether the prosecutor's decision overall was "supported by substantial evidence." In that regard, the appellate court took on a fact-finding role rather than merely reviewing the legal correctness of the procedure the prosecutors in both cases used. Whether the appellate court has or should have that type of authority to use its own judgment to decide whether a person qualifies for pretrial diversion is what the state Supreme Court is expected to consider. Although prior court decisions, known as legal precedent, remain binding even when the makeup and political leanings of an appellate court change, they are not sacrosanct. In an oral argument held in Knoxville earlier this year, two of the new Republican-appointed justices Holly Kirby and Jeffrey S. Bivins made clear in questions posed to a defending attorney they were unafraid to take a fresh look at the precedents. It will be months before the court issues a ruling in the pretrial diversion cases. SHARE Elizabeth Alves, Leadership Knoxville 2010 class. By News Sentinel And Chattanooga Times Free Press Staff Elizabeth Ferreira Alves, assistant superintendent and chief academic officer for Knox County Schools, is a candidate for director of Cleveland City Schools, the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported Tuesday. She has been with the Knox County district since 2006. Twenty-four candidates are applying for the director's post with Cleveland City Schools. In February, the Cleveland Board of Education fired then-Director Martin Ringstaff because of "behavior unbecoming" following revelations he exchanged sexually explicit social media messages with a woman who was not his wife. After terminating Ringstaff's employment, the board hired the Tennessee School Boards Association to conduct a search for the next director. Before the launch of the director search, TSBA Executive Director Dr. Tammy Grissom cautioned board members that the process faced several challenges concerning the quantity and quality of available candidates. At that time, she named at least seven other Tennessee school districts seeking new superintendents, including Hamilton, Knox and Davidson counties. The director search timetable calls for TSBA to recommend up to five candidates on May 2, with interviews to follow soon after. The school board has announced intentions to select a director no later than mid-June. SHARE By Bob Fowler of the Knoxville News Sentinel KINGSTON Roane County Board of Education members, after peppering the two finalists for school director with questions during separate interviews, opted for a newcomer over a familiar face within the administration in the 7,000-student Roane County School District. Board members in special session Wednesday voted 7-3 to offer the district's top job to Leah Rice Watkins, currently instructional supervisor with the 1,760-student, kindergarten-through-eighth-grade Paris Special School District in West Tennessee's Henry County. She was chosen over Keevin Woody of Kingston, the Roane County supervisor of elementary education and a 32-year veteran of the county system. "We had some great candidates, and it came down to two outstanding candidates," board member Danny Wright said. He said it was a difficult decision but one made in the best interests of the county's students and the educational system. "I think the board voted their conscience and voted who they thought best for the job," said member Mike Miller. Voting to hire Watkins were Wright and Miller, along with Mike Taylor, Larry Brackett, Drack Langley, Sam Cox and Vic King, while board members Everett Massengill, Hugh M. Johnson and Rob Jago favored Woody. The board will now enter into contract negotiations with Watkins. If she takes the post, she'll start her new duties overseeing the 17-school system after the current director, Gary Aytes, retires on June 30. Aytes gave notice months ago that he planned to step down after a 41-year career in education capped by his four-year stint as director. The board hired Wayne Qualls, a former state education commissioner, as a consultant in the search for Aytes' successor. There were 12 applicants, and board members last week interviewed nine semifinalists. Candidates then were ranked on a point system, and Watkins topped the list, followed by Woody. Aytes said his current salary is $116,250. During his tenure, he rejected a pay raise during one fiscal year. His current pay level, he said, is among the state's lowest for a school director. Aytes said he has enjoyed his tenure as director. "It's a great place to work, and the teachers and our support staff are tremendous," he said. Christina Hartlage of the Tennessee Department of Health Division of Health Planning oversees a forum for public input into the state's health plan Wednesday at Knox County Health Department. About 15 people attended. SHARE By Kristi L. Nelson of the Knoxville News Sentinel The state's Health Plan, updated yearly, affects all Tennessee residents, in theory. Any of them can have input. But getting the word out and getting people interested in participating in the state's public health planning process well, that's another matter entirely. The state held the first of its 2016 State Health Plan public forums Wednesday afternoon at the Knox County Health Department. Around 15 people attended not the usual 40-50, said Christina Hartlage, a fellow with the state health department who led the forum, but not bad for a weekday afternoon meeting that got little advance publicity. (If you missed it and don't mind driving, the state will have eight more meetings one for each congressional district in April and May.) At the forum, Hartlage explained a shift in the state's focus, from more emphasis on services to more emphasis on outcomes. What that means that is that more resources will be spent figuring out how to prevent the problems that plague unhealthy Tennesseans, rather than just treating them primarily, health during pregnancy and birth, child health, diabetes, tobacco use and obesity. It doesn't mean the state is telling local health departments not to provide services, or mandating they make changes just that the emphasis going forward is on prevention, using practices already proven to work. The federal government mandated the change when it gave the state a grant to innovate a program that could be a model for the rest of the country in this case, getting TennCare/Medicaid to reimburse providers for preventive programs like smoking cessation. Colleges across the state have proposed solutions to health problems. The University of Tennessee is focused on perinatal health, Tennessee State on child health, the University of Memphis on obesity, East Tennessee University on tobacco cessation, and Meharry Medical College on diabetes. They came up with a list of recommendations on each topic. Some, like a task force to address neonatal abstinence syndrome and offering contraception to those misusing opiates, already are being used in parts of the state. Others are still ideas and Hartlage asked attendees, many of whom were from community agencies, to evaluate them in small groups. While they thought some of the ideas had merit, such as a specific tobacco education program in schools and getting healthier foods to neighborhoods in "food deserts," some of the ideas such as an after-hours center offering health and exercise classes wouldn't be a good fit for this area, they said. "Just because you build something and you think it's great doesn't mean people are going to come," said Karen Pershing, director of the Metro Drug Coalition. "How do you get people engaged?" Hartlage will use feedback from the forums for a final State Health Plan draft to submit to Gov. Bill Haslam in July. State Health Plan public forums Chattanooga: 5-8 p.m. Thursday, Eastgate Building, 5600 Brainerd Road Clarksville: 9 a.m.-noon Tuesday, Montgomery County Health Department, 330 Pageant Lane Nashville: 1-4 p.m. Wednesday, William R. Snodgrass Tennessee Tower (third floor, Tennessee Room No. 1), 312 Rosa L. Parks Blvd. Cookeville: 9 a.m.-noon April 28, Upper Cumberland Regional Health Office, 100 England Drive. Gray: 9 a.m.-noon April 29, ETSU Natural History Museum, 1212 Suncrest Drive. Fayetteville: 5-8 p.m. May 3, Fayetteville City Municipal Building, 110 Elk Ave. S. Memphis: 4-7 p.m. May 5, University of Memphis University Center (Fountain View Room), 499 University St. Jackson: To be determined Online: tn.gov/health/topic/health-planning By News Sentinel Staff Around 250 people came to a meeting Thursday night to hear the state's plan for widening parts of Chapman Highway. Some came out of curiosity. Some came with an agenda finding a fix for specific streets, for example, or reviving the plan to extend the James White Parkway. And some came to share memories of loved ones lost on the 24-mile state highway, which extends from Knox into Sevier County and was built in the 1930s. The public design meeting's purpose was for the Tennessee Department of Transportation to share plans for and get community input about one specific project on Chapman: the widening of a section of Chapman from south of Simpson Road in Sevier County to Hendon Chapel Road in Knox County. TDOT regional director Steve Borden said the section, about a mile long, has seen five fatal crashes and 245 crashes with injury over the past 10 years because of "speed and configuration of the road." TDOT proposes widening that portion of road to a five-lane roadway with a 12-foot two-way center left turn lane, involving realigning East Circle Drive, improving visibility at Simpson Road, and adding a 2-3-foot shoulder and six retaining walls. The speed would drop to 45 miles per hour, from 55. Construction on the project, now in the design phase, would begin in 2018. Simpson Road resident Darius Hawkins said he would welcome improvement to where the inclined road meets Chapman at the bottom of a hill, where he often finds himself between backed-up traffic waiting to turn onto Chapman and a freight train. "I can't count the times I've just said a prayer and held on," Hawkins said. Others noted turning onto Simpson from Chapman is equally dangerous because of limited visibility and traffic speed. Borden also reviewed some other proposed projects for Chapman. One plan, pending local officials' approval, would turn seven miles between Tittsworth Springs and White School Road in Sevier County into a three-lane cross section with dedicated passing lanes and paved shoulders. Another would widen a four-lane segment from Evans Road to Burnett Lane to five lanes with a center turn lane; Borden said the state would begin seeking rights-of-way as soon as money to pay for the project was identified. A third plan, already in the right-of-way stage and scheduled for construction next year, will widen four-lane highway between Macon Lane and Boyds Creek Highway to five lanes with a center turn lane. Seymour resident Amanda VanHoose said she was pleased with the plans. "Some of them will definitely help" make the road safer, said VanHoose, who said she attended because a friend's daughter was killed in an accident on Chapman. Brenda Cunningham of Seymour suggested people mark on the aerial photographs at the meeting at spots where they'd lost friends or family to traffic accidents, saying "nearly everybody in this room" had. "That way, it will be in the public record," said Cunningham, a proponent of expanding James White Parkway to relieve traffic on Chapman. "The people who don't know this area don't know that we all have lost loved ones on this highway." A court reporter was present to take public input, which also can be emailed to TDOT.comments@tn.gov or mailed to Project Comments, Tennessee Department of Transportation, Suite 700, James K. Polk Building, 505 Deaderick St.., Nashville, TN 37243-0332, in the next 20 days. Chancellor Jimmy Cheek speaks to leaders of the Diversity Matters coalition during the coalition's second meeting with administrators at the Frieson Black Cultural Center at University of Tennessee on Tuesday, March 1, 2016. (CAITIE MCMEKIN/NEWS SENTINEL) By MJ Slaby of the Knoxville News Sentinel University of Tennessee Chancellor Jimmy Cheek said Wednesday that he "will continue to fight" for diversity on campus as students grew frustrated with his responses to their pleas for him to publicly denounce legislation that would defund UT's Office for Diversity and Inclusion. Throughout the spring semester, members of the UT Diversity Matters coalition and administrators have met to address a list of demands from students that include reinstating a web post about gender-neutral pronouns, adding inclusivity training and making improvements to accessibility on campus. The coalition, largely compiled of student groups, was formed after such online posts, including a list of suggestions for inclusive holiday parties, caused an uproar from lawmakers. Wednesday was the last meeting of the semester for the coalition and campus leaders, and roughly 40 students attended. After a review of students' demands and where the situation stands, the conversation turned to pending legislation that would defund the UT Office for Diversity and Inclusion. Kristen Godfrey, a graduate student and member of the coalition, asked administrators what defunding the diversity office would mean for UT and for goals of becoming a Top 25 university. "We don't know," Cheek said, noting the university will have to wait for the outcome of the bills." Cheek stressed his dedication to diversity and inclusion on campus, pointing out diversity was added as a priority to the campus strategic plan. "I'm going to work as hard as I can to not have that (legislation) approved," Cheek said. The students pressed him. They asked repeatedly for Cheek to publicly denounce the bill. They told him students have worked hard and advocated the "right way" with letters, calls and visits to lawmakers. They asked why Cheek isn't telling Gov. Bill Haslam to veto the bills if they reach his desk. The students said they want transparency. "We've been working as tirelessly as you have," Cheek said. "Obviously, we have not been successful." The chancellor told students he's talked with Haslam and is considering all options. After the meeting, he said the university has also done a good job communicating with lawmakers about the importance of diversity. Students also asked about the future of UT's vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion position, asking what would happen if the bill passes or if current Vice Chancellor Rickey Hall leaves. Hall has been a finalist for at least three similar positions at other universities. Cheek said that would depend on the law and how it's applied. Hall reminded the students that the units within the diversity office, such as the Pride Center, existed before the office and before his position. "We created the Pride Center under my administration and plan to keep it around," Cheek told students. Cheek said he and other administrators pride themselves on their dialogue and interactions with students. He called the diversity coalition an intense and passionate group. He said he knows some of the students were disappointed after the meeting, but reviewing the students' demands has created progress and made strides for diversity. Cheek said he expects the meetings with the coalition to continue into the next academic year. In a heated moment during the meeting, Godfrey said the pressure that students are putting on administrators is the same pressure that students feel with the looming possibility that the diversity office could be defunded and the services they use regularly gone. Dean of Students Melissa Shivers said she understood and said she's also concerned what could happen to recruitment of faculty, staff and students who hear about what's happening with Tennessee lawmakers. "It is hard to hear the rhetoric in Nashville," she said. SHARE As a veteran of the Vietnam War, I had the privilege of participating in the 20th Honor Air Flight on April 13. This was an event that I will remember for the rest of my life. I believe that the other 129 World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam veterans feel the same. Every minute of the day was well organized. From the check in process at McGee Tyson Airport until my wife picked me up at the end of the day, everything went smoothly and efficiently. I have traveled extensively over the years both for business and leisure, and I have never encountered such first-class treatment. Mayors Madeline Rogero and Tim Burchett were there to send us off, and Rogero accompanied us on the trip the entire day. U.S. Sen. Bob Corker and U.S Rep. John J. Duncan Jr. took time out of their busy schedules and spoke with us individually while at the Air Force Memorial. I don't have enough words to express my gratitude to all those who made this trip possible. The attitude of everyone involved was exceptional. This was not routine to them. They truly wanted this to be a memorable experience for us. I can't remember when I got more respect and gratitude from a group of people. When I returned home from Vietnam I didn't get an overwhelming welcome from society. It didn't really disturb me then, and it hasn't over the years. I was just glad to get home to my love ones in one piece. This trip was my official welcome home. This trip uprooted emotions in me that I didn't know existed. The Honor Guard send off, the reception at Reagan International Airport and the welcome reception at the Knoxville airport were overwhelming. I don't know how many hugs, handshakes and "thank you for your service" comments I got. They were too numerous to count. Thank you, Honor Air. Thank you to the volunteers who participated. Thank you, sponsors. You have made a lasting memory for an old soldier. Steve Barber, Knoxville By Lee Hyo-sik Mercedes-Benz, Porsche and other foreign import car brands are found to be stingy in making social contributions, while sending the lion's share of their earnings here back to headquarters in Europe and elsewhere. Foreign car brands also face criticism for their reluctance to expand their business-related facilities here and create jobs. Critics say that rather than simply taking money out of Korea, foreign car importers should return larger portions of their profits to the local community if they want to do business here for the long run. According to audits released by the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), Thursday, Mercedes-Benz Korea (MBK) and seven other import car brands spent a combined 4.2 billion won ($3.7 million) in 2015 to finance their corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs. MBK spent 2 billion won last year on implementing CSR programs, followed by BMW's 1.8 billion won and Porsche Korea's 150 million won. But Audi-Volkswagen Korea, FCA Korea and Volvo Korea did not spend even a penny. The eight companies sent a total of 83.6 billion won in dividends to their headquarters abroad, 20 times more than their corporate giving in Korea, which shows they were eager to pay handsome dividends to shareholders in their home countries. In 2015, MBK transferred 58.5 billion won in dividends to its shareholders in Germany, 66 percent of its 88.7 billion won net profit. In 2014, the German auto brand also paid out 50 percent of its net profit in dividends. This suggests that the German car brand decided to send more money back to its German headquarters rather than invest more locally to hire workers and expand its business. Audi-Volkswagen Korea, which did not spend even a penny on CSR, paid 16 billion won, or half of its 2015 net profit, in dividends to its German headquarters. Porsche Korea also paid all of its 60 billion won net profit in dividends to its shareholders abroad, while spending a mere 150 million won to implement several CSR programs. Volvo Korea sent 3 billion won in dividends to its headquarters last year but did not spend anything on CSR. "Everybody knows that foreign car brands' dividend payments are excessive," said an official at the Citizens' Coalition for Economic Justice. "They say that they are doing so in accordance with their headquarters policies. But that is such a lame excuse. They should refrain from paying such high dividends and instead increase spending to support the local community." The official also urged foreign carmakers to hire more university graduates and build more business facilities if they want to do business here. "Given that they generate hundreds of billions of won in profit each year, they should also fulfill their responsibility as corporate citizens by helping the underprivileged." According to the FSS audits, foreign car importers have been reluctant to expand their workforces here in recent years, despite surging sales. MBK, which posted 3.14 trillion won in sales in 2015, has only 168 local employees. Similarly, BMW Korea and Audi-Volkswagen Korea, which posted over 2 trillion won in sales last year, are found to have only 175 and 167 on their payrolls, respectively. Four out of 10 South Korean companies obliged to adopt the peak wage system this year have implemented the new wage scheme, a business lobby said Thursday. Starting this year, the companies that have more than 300 employees are required to introduce the peak wage system to share jobs with younger generations. According to the survey from the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI), 42.7 percent of 300 respondents adopted the system. In the peak wage system, employees get less pay from the age of 55 to the retirement age of 60 to provide more jobs for younger hires. As the retirement age was extended to 60 from 2015, larger companies are required to adopt the system starting this year. In 2017, companies that hire fewer than 300 workers are also required to adopt it. (Yonhap) President Park Geun-hye called Thursday for more innovation in South Korea's research and development (R&D) area in her latest push to boost competitiveness in the country's science and technology sectors. "There should be innovation in the country's R&D system to ensure the creative economy can succeed and create new technology and new industry," Park said in a speech at the state-run Korea Institute of Science and Technology in Seoul. Park's signature creative economy policy calls for turning new ideas into real businesses with the help of cutting-edge science and information technology. The president said the creative economy is the only viable growth engine for the country's economic takeoff. Park's father, late President Park Chung-hee, set up the state-run institute in 1966 with US$10 million in aid that Washington offered to South Korea in gratitude for sending troops to fight alongside the United States in the Vietnam War. South Korea has increased investments in science and technology over the past decades, a move that has contributed to Seoul's economic rise from the ashes of the 1950-53 Korean War. Park also renewed her commitment to creating and presiding over a strategic council on science and technology to "drastically enhance productivity in our R&D investment." (Yonhap) BMW Korea CEO Kim Hyo-joon, center, poses with students during a BMW Korea Future Fund event at the BMW Driving Center in Incheon, last year. / Courtesy of BMW Korea By Jhoo Dong-chan BMW Korea is proving the company's quality in corporate social responsibility (CSR) through various charity and social investments, in contrast to other foreign auto brands who reportedly only paid heavy dividends to their headquarters without any social contributions. According to a BMW official, Thursday, the company donated a total of four billion won ($3.5 million) last year, the top donor among foreign auto brands in Korea. Of this, it used three billion won for the BMW Korea Future Fund established in 2011 as a part of the company's efforts to find and train future global leaders while one billion won was donated to various charity activities. BMW Korea has reportedly donated a total of 18.3 billion won through the future fund for the last five years. The company's donation ratio to operating profit was 8.51 percent in 2014 and 3.9 percent last year, higher than most domestic companies. The company's CSR responsibility was rewarded in 2011 when it received the Korea-EU Social Benefactor Award. "BMW sells not just a car but also values within," said an official. "BMW offers not only high-performance luxury driving pleasure but also the company's belief in mutual and sustainable growth with society. BMW Korea CEO Kim Hyo-joon also shares such values and takes utmost efforts in CSR activities." Its CSR is not limited to helping people in need and education. The company invested a total of 77 billion won to build the BMW Driving Center in Incheon, offering a new type of auto leisure for Koreans. In a bid to fulfill its responsibility in mutual growth, BMW Korea has partnered with 22 local subcontractors and ordered a total of 319 billion won in parts from them last year. An estimated contracted deal between 2011 and 2020 is expected to be over eight trillion won. In October, BMW Korea workers visited a local orphanage in southern Seoul to carry out volunteer work with 60 orphans aged between 1 and 21. By the end of this year, the company promised to renovate the old orphanage building and will offer various educational activities. "I understand the headquarters in Germany was also impressed by BMW Korea's various CSR activities and will carry out similar operations in other countries," said an official. "BMW Korea will do its best to not only offer best-performance cars but also sharing values through its commitment to society." By Yoon Ja-young So-called "zombie businesses" are seriously hurting the economic health of the nation while the government is failing to lead the restructuring of industries. According to CEO Score, a business information provider, 8.7 percent of the country's top 500 firms are in the "zombie" zone. Zombie businesses refer to those that made so little operating profit for three consecutive years that they cannot even pay for the interest of their loans. Firms that cannot even pay the interest are supposed to go bankrupt but they are sustaining themselves on support by the government or the creditors. When including the firms that failed to cover interest for two years and are thus on the verge of turning into "zombie" companies, the ratio rises to 11.3 percent. The data showed that these zombie firms sustained on average a 155 billion won operating loss, each. While their interest burden decreased 5.9 percent last year from the previous year, their operating loss snowballed by 34.4 percent. By industries, 27 percent of the zombie firms were construction or construction material companies, while petrochemical firms and shipbuilding, machinery and facility businesses took 18 percent, each. According to a report by Korea Development Institute (KDI), the support on zombie firms is causing inefficient distribution in labor and capital, pulling down overall productivity of the nation. It is also negatively affecting employment and investment of normal businesses. According to the analysis by KDI, if the ratio of zombie companies' assets sees an increase of 10 percentage points, the employment increase of normal firms is cut by a 0.53 percentage point and investment is slashed by a 0.18 percentage point. Some industry analysts say that the government is not as aggressive in restructuring as it should be, as the country has a poor social safety net _ it fears that the restructuring will lead to massive unemployment. In a report titled "Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs 2016," the OECD noted that banks eased lending conditions for SMEs in Korea not because of their willingness to absorb SME's credit risks but because of the government's advice to banks to automatically roll over loans to SMEs. "Additionally, government guarantee programs contributed to the banks' lending behavior to SMEs despite their own liquidity shortages and difficulty in meeting regulatory standards," the report notes. It added that while many SMEs in Korea were financially pinched after the outbreak of the global financial crisis, "they avoided bankruptcy thanks to financial support from the government." "It should be noted that while SMEs avoided bankruptcy because of the policies of the central and regional governments, they were still financially stressed due to low economic growth," the report added. Grand Hyatt Seoul's Aroma 322 Courtesy of Grand Hyatt Seoul By Kim Se-jeong Most recently, in March, Grand Hyatt Seoul launched its own coffee brand Aroma 322, named after its street address. The brand has three types of coffee bean blends green gold and black blended by the hotel's three trained baristas themselves. The blends are served at the hotel and are available for individual sale. Green is a blend of beans from Colombia, Guatemala and India and is ideal for serving at weddings and conferences, while gold is a blend of Ethiopian, Colombia and Guatemalan beans and is served at Paris Grill, one of the hotel's restaurants. Black, which is a blend of Colombian, Indonesian and Tanzanian beans, has the strongest flavor of all. "Developing the Grand Hyatt coffee flavor was a challenging journey for us, but I am pleased to do it. I hope more people will come to Hyatt to drink coffee," said Kim Bong-seok, one of the baristas. Beans are also available for individual sale. The Westin Chosun Seoul also roasts its own coffee beans and is the first hotel to launch its own coffee brand in 2015. VIVENTE No. 8, which was launched as part of the hotel's 100th anniversary celebration, is a blend of beans from Ethiopia, Jamaica, Indonesia, Brazil and Colombia. The blend is served all of the hotel's restaurants and is available for individual sale. The Westin Chosun is not a stranger to the coffee business. For one, it's own by Shinsegye, the manager of Starbucks Coffee in Korea. The hotel also imports its specialty coffee, which is loved by many of the hotel guests. According to the hotel, its imported beans are among the top 7 percent in the world in terms of quality. Meanwhile, Novotel Ambassador Doksan will hold a coffee tasting event in May, with the help of its professional baristas. The hotel's president Song Yeon-soon, a certified barista himself, will brew coffee for guests for one hour during the weekdays at the hotel's lounge coffee shop, Phoenix. A cup of hand drip coffee will cost 15,000 won and 20,000 won with a piece of cupcake. South Korea plans to launch a committee as early as next month to handle preparations for a foundation tasked with supporting South Korean victims of Japan's wartime sexual slavery, a government source said Thursday. The foundation is a centerpiece of last December's agreement under which the two countries agreed to settle their decades-long dispute over the so-called "comfort women." Tokyo apologized for the crime, acknowledged responsibility, and pledged to pay 1 billion yen (US$9.1 million) into the foundation once it is set up by Seoul. The government has begun to select members of the preparatory committee with plans to launch it as early as next month, the source said. Until now, the ministries of foreign affairs and gender equality have had informal meetings with members of the private sector, including former Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan, to prepare for the foundation, the source added. The implementation of the deal has faced various setbacks amid reports that Tokyo accepted it in exchange for the relocation of a statue symbolizing the victims from outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. Some of the victims have also refused to accept the deal and demanded it be scrapped. South Korea and Japan have continued to hold director-general level talks over the implementation of the deal with the aim of launching the foundation as soon as possible, according to officials here. Historians estimate that up to 200,000 women, mostly from Korea, were forced to work in front-line brothels for Japanese troops during World War II. Korea was under Japanese colonial rule from 1910-45. (Yonhap) The remains of a South Korean soldier killed in a northwestern North Korean town during the 1950-53 Korean War were reunited with family 66 years after his death and a posthumous journey to the United States, the defense ministry said Thursday. Pfc. Lim Byung-geun was one of 12 South Korean soldiers whose remains were accidentally excavated by a U.S. team that was repatriating its own Korean War dead in 2001. Under a mutual agreement with the North, the U.S. was excavating the site of the Changjin Lake Campaign, which is remembered as one of the most hard-fought battles of the three-year civil war. The remains were brought to the headquarters of the U.S. Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (now named Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency) in Hawaii before the U.S. set apart the remains of the 12 South Korean soldiers as non-American forces. "If North Korea knew the remains were those of South Korean soldiers, bringing them out of the country would have been impossible because the agreement allowed shipment of only American soldiers," the Ministry of National Defense said in a statement. In May 2012, the remains of the dozen South Korean soldiers were brought back to South Korea, and the identifications of only two of them had been confirmed until the ministry successfully tracked down Lim's relatives. According to Lim's family, he joined the U.S.' 7th Marine Regiment as a member of the Korean Augmentation Troops to the U.S. Army, or KATUSA, in August 1950. He was 20 at the time. The military said Lim traveled a total of 21,000 kilometers -- from his hometown of Busan, to the North Korean battle site where he died and then to Hawaii and back to Seoul. Lim's remains, meanwhile, were delivered to his 71-year-old nephew Lim Hyun-sik who now lives in Busan, South Korea's second-largest city, earlier in the day, the ministry said. It said while Lim has been returned to his family, the remains of the rest of the nine soldiers killed remain unidentified, according to the ministry. On April 28, the U.S. will send home another batch of 15 South Korean soldiers' in a ceremony to be held at the ROK-U.S. Combined Forces Command. In the ceremony, South Korea will deliver the remains of two U.S. soldiers found in South Korea's front-line regions to the U.S. side. "The remains of some 40,000 South Korean war heroes are believed to be buried north of the Demilitarized Zone, we are ready to bring them home if only North Korea would agree to it," Col. Lee Hak-kee, in charge of the ministry's remains excavation mission, said in the statement. (Yonhap) Ex-MPK chief most preferred as next president By Yi Whan-woo Rep. Moon Jae-in Ban Ki-moon Minjoo Party of Korea (MPK) former Chairman Rep. Moon Jae-in and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon are in a neck-and-neck race in the latest poll on potential presidential candidates. The two are the top two picks for Korea's next leader. Moon led Ban within a margin of error 42.8 percent to 42.3 percent in a two-way hypothetical race in a telephone survey conducted by Realmeter, Monday and Tuesday. The survey of 1,012 adults nationwide had a 3.1 percent margin of error. By region, Moon, a presidential candidate in 2012, beat Ban in Seoul, Incheon and Gyeonggi Province. The former opposition leader earned 42.8 percent support to Ban's 35.4 percent in Seoul, and 47 percent to 42.5 percent in Incheon and Gyeonggi Province combined. In the opposition stronghold of Gwangju and North and South Jeolla provinces Moon had a comfortable lead over the U.N. chief with 53.4 percent to 27.2 percent. Ban is seen as a potential candidate for the ruling Saenuri Party although he has never shown any public interest in running for the presidency. The U.N. chief received 57.2 percent support against Moon's 27.4 percent in Daegu and North Gyeongsang Province combined, both of which are the ruling party's turf. Ban, a native of North Chungcheong Province, led Moon 43.9 percent to 35.8 percent in North and South Chungcheong provinces combined. By age groups, Moon enjoyed popularity among those in their 20s to 40s while those in older age groups favored Ban. Moon led Ban 61 percent to 26.9 percent among the survey respondents in their 20s, 61.8 percent to 20.3 percent among those in their 30s, and 56.5 percent to 30.4 percent among those in their 40s. Ban led Moon 53.4 percent to 30.4 percent among those in their 50s and 73 percent to 12 percent among those aged 60 or older. Meanwhile, Ban beat minority opposition People's Party co-chair Ahn Cheol-soo 41 percent to 32.3 percent overall in a two-way mock race. Ahn, who also ran in the 2012 race, left the MPK following a power struggle against Moon. Shin Yul, a political science professor at Myongji University, attributed Moon's lead over Ban to the MPK's better-than-expected performance in the April 13 general election. He cited that Ban had been the most favored potential candidate for the 2017 presidential election in a number of surveys before April 13. "I'd say Moon is benefitting from the MPK's surprise victory although it remains uncertain how long his popularity will last," Shin said. Despite a factional feud involving Moon, the MPK won 123 of 300 parliamentary seats up for grabs to become the largest party for the upcoming National Assembly term. The Saenuri Party secured 122 seats and the People's Party 38 seats. Ban's second term as the U.N. chief will end this year. Col. Lee Hak-kee, right, from the Ministry of National Defense, delivers a certificate of identity confirmation to Lim Hyun-sik, a nephew of Pfc. Lim Byung-geun, who died during the Korean War, at the nephew's home in Busan, Thursday. / Courtesy of Ministry of National Defense By Jun Ji-hye The remains of a South Korean soldier, who died during a fierce battle in a North Korean town at the height of the 1950-53 Korean War, were returned to his family Thursday. Pfc. Lim Byung-geun died in a battle that took place from Nov. 27 to Dec. 11 in 1950 near Changjin Lake after joining the Korean Augmentation to the United States Army (KATUSA) belonging to the 7th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army, months earlier. KATUSA is a military program initiated during the war under an agreement between then-South Korean President Syngman Rhee and U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur. The battle was known as one of the fiercest in the war. Lim was 20 years old. He was among the 12 remains that were excavated in the North by the U.S. Joint Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command (JPAC) in 2001. At the time, the JPAC, now the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), was exhuming remains of U.S. soldiers in accordance with a mutual agreement between the U.S. and North Korea. The remains were sent to the JPAC headquarters in Hawaii and the U.S. military later found that the remains were South Korean. "If the North knew that the remains were those of South Korean soldiers, bringing them out of the country would have been impossible because the Pyongyang-Washington agreement stipulated that only the remains of U.S. soldiers can be taken out of the North," the Ministry of National Defense said in a release. In May 2012, the remains of the dozen South Korean soldiers were brought back to the South, and only two of them had had their identities confirmed before the ministry successfully tracked down Lim's relatives last November. Lim's relatives cooperated in a DNA test and, finally, the ministry confirmed his identity this February, the ministry said. On Thursday, ministry officials visited Lim's 71-year-old nephew, Lim Hyun-sik, in Busan and delivered his remains covered by the national flag. Lim will be laid to rest in the Daejeon National Cemetery in June upon the request of the family, the ministry said. "When I was young, I heard that my uncle disappeared after volunteering for military service on behalf of his sibling," said Lim Hyun-sik, the son of Pfc. Lim's older brother. "After I saw my grandparents crying, I just guessed that he was killed." Lim's other nephew, Kwon Soon-young, 79, said, "My uncle sang well and spoke good English. I think that was why he joined KATUSA." The ministry noted that while Lim has been returned to his family, the remains of the other nine soldiers are still unidentified, adding that it will keep working to find their families. On April 28, the U.S. will send home another batch of 15 South Korean soldiers in a ceremony to be held at the ROK-U.S. Combined Forces Command. During the ceremony, South Korea will also return the remains of two U.S. soldiers found in South Korea's border regions in Gangwon Province. "The remains of some 40,000 South Korean war heroes are believed to be buried north of the Demilitarized Zone," said Col. Lee Hak-kee, in charge of the ministry's remains excavation mission. "We are ready to bring them home if only North Korea agrees to it." By Jun Ji-hye Local defense manufacturer Huneed Technologies signed a contract with Korean Air, Thursday, to supply core parts for reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) being manufactured by the airline company. The contract is worth $4.3 million, which is approximately 8 percent of Huneed's sales revenue last year. Korean Air is producing division-level reconnaissance UAVs under a contract with the Defense Acquisition Program Administration signed last December. Huneed will supply Korean Air with core secondary data link equipment, which will be used to exchange mission control information with ground units. "This project is an important milestone for Huneed as it is the first time for the firm to participate in mass production of UAVs," the company said in a release. "Huneed has been closely cooperating in developing UAV-related technologies with two global aerospace companies, Boeing and Airbus." The company said that the Korean Air deal will help it pursue continued growth in the domestic aerospace market. "Huneed will keep expanding its UAV-related business to meet demand at home and abroad," said Huneed Chairman Eugene Kim. By Kim Se-jeong The Korean office of Reckitt Benckiser, the British manufacturer of a toxic humidifier disinfectant, expressed regret over the death of Koreans using the product Thursday. It also promised to donate 5 billion won for the victims. "We apologize that we have failed to communicate with victims and their families sooner. Now, we would like to be in active dialogue with them to find ways to support them," Oxy Reckitt Benckiser said in an email to local journalists. The move came after Lotte Mart, another manufacturer based in Korea, apologized for the disinfectant scandal Monday. Family members of the dead and surviving victims expressed their disapproval of the Oxy Reckitt Benckiser apology. "This is not an apology. Oxy is a murder and deserves punishment," the victims said in a statement released through the Asian Citizen's Center for Environment and Health. Oxy made its first donation _ 5 billion won _ to victims in 2014, which the Ministry of Environment is holding. It also made clear that the donation wasn't a token of apology. Meanwhile, the families of the victims said Thursday that they will file a damage suit with an English court against the manufacturer as early as next month, demanding compensation for 100 deaths. These developments came as prosecutors are conducting an extensive investigation of Oxy Reckitt Benckiser and other local manufacturers for alleged wrongdoings and negligence in the making of disinfectants for humidifiers. Link holds an inauguration ceremony on Wednesday in Busanjin-gu, Busan. / Yonhap By Kim Da-hee Migrant wives who are fluent in Korean have established a cooperative association in Busan to provide newcomers with translation services. The association, named Link, was launched on Wednesday. Dozens of migrant wives have jointly funded for the organization. They have voluntarily offered similar services since 2013 in Busan and South Gyeongsang Province with support from the Solidarity with Migrants (SOMI), a NGO for migrants. "There are about 60,000 immigrants in Busan, many of whom have had a hard time because of the language barrier," said a Link staff member. "We will help immigrants adjust to Korean society." For more information, call 051-818-5759. Opposition focuses on steps appealing to conservative voters By Kim Hyo-jin The main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea (MPK) is shifting its focus from welfare to economic growth after its recent victory in the general election, where it overtook the ruling Saenuri Party as the National Assembly's largest party. Interim leader Kim Chong-in said Thursday that the party would launch a taskforce to produce policy proposals for corporate restructuring, and asked the government to also present relevant programs. He stressed the need to carry out structural reforms for economic recovery, saying the MPK will present a bill to spur restructuring. The main opposition party had previously taken a lukewarm or negative stance to corporate restructuring, as it could entail job cuts. The MPK also changed its position regarding allowing for-profit hospitals, saying it will support this as a way to revitalize the services sector. This had been a contentious issue between rival parties in the outgoing 19th National Assembly. The position change is seen as an attempt to push economic issues ahead of the 2017 presidential race, seeking to appeal to conservative voters, according to political pundits. "We're planning to set up a taskforce to look into corporate and industry restructuring," Kim said, adding this was critical for the future of the Korean economy. "The stagnant economy can only recover when structural problems are removed. The country cannot repeat Japan's lost decade of economic growth." The MPK commenting positively about corporate restructuring is a rare move by the main opposition party that had been passive toward the idea due to job security concerns. "Only more fundamental and active restructuring can guarantee our mid- to long-term growth," Kim said during a party meeting, Wednesday. "We should not repeat restructuring in a way to prolong insolvent enterprises as we did during the 1997-98 foreign exchange crisis." Kim called on the government to prepare preemptive measures against the unemployment that will follow restructuring. On the same day, Choi Woon-youl, the head of the MPK's economy monitoring office and a lawmaker-elect, said the party needs to become "company-friendly." "The biggest complaint I got from the public during the campaign was that our party has stifled business too much," Choi said during a speech to MPK lawmakers-elect. "Jobs are hardly created in an anti-business environment. We should all become company-friendly." Choi argued that allowing for-profit hospitals should be included in a pending bill aimed to revitalize the services sector, saying it will create more jobs. The service industry promotion bill has been pending in the Assembly due to the opposition's strong opposition to private medical services. The MPK even stepped up the restructuring initiative, proposing a new bill. "We can't turn a deaf ear to conglomerates' difficult situation. It's time to pave the way for a bill to help corporate restructuring," Lee Jong-kul, the party's floor leader, said in a radio interview. The government responded positively to the party's move, saying it is ready to coordinate with the opposition for structural reforms and industrial renovation. "It is a tactical shift eyeing a change of government," said Yang Seung-ham, an emeritus professor of political science at Yonsei University. "It could build an image of a potential ruling party by working closely with the government." Rep. Ahn Cheol-soo, the co-chairman of the splinter opposition People's Party, also aligned with the MPK, calling for the government to execute structural reforms from a broader perspective. The ruling Saenuri Party remained silent over the matter amid a leadership crisis in the aftermath of the election. A member of the Citizens?Coalition for Economic Justice holds a complaint against the Federation of Korean Industries (FKI), before filing it with the Seoul Central District Prosecutors?Office, Thursday. The civic group claimed that the nation's largest business lobby financed right-wing group's rallies. / Yonhap FKI allegedly supported right-wing group's rallies By Lee Kyung-min A liberal civic group asked the prosecution Thursday to investigate allegations that the Federation of Korean Industries (FKI), the nation's largest business lobby, funneled money to a right-wing group in 2014 to organize pro-government and pro-business rallies. The Citizens' Coalition for Economic Justice (CCEJ) filed the complaint with the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office, following a media report Tuesday that the FKI allegedly transferred 120 million won ($105,000) between September and December 2014 to the conservative Korea Parent Federation (KPF). The report claimed that the money was sent to a bank account controlled by KPF Director General Choo Sun-hee. The account was opened under the name of a now-defunct Christian missionary group. Money from the account was then sent to the parents' group, according to the report. The money was allegedly offered in return for organizing pro-government and pro-business rallies by hiring North Korean defectors to participate in them. The history of the transactions showed that 29 million won was sent to the head of a North Korean defectors' group, surnamed Kim. Six million won was sent to the landlord of the building in which the KPF is currently a tenant. Earlier, the weekly magazine Sisa Journal reported that the parents' group hired 1,259 North Korean defectors as participants in 39 rallies against the commemoration of the Sewol ferry victims between April and November 2014. According to the parents group's account book, a total of 25.18 million won was spent to pay 20,000 won to each participant. The book contains the recipients' names, their bank account numbers, and the date of the payments. Since 2014 the group held rallies in favor of state-authored history textbooks for secondary school students and increased monitoring authority for the National Intelligence Service. It also staged rallies to drum up support for deregulation bills in favor of conglomerates, while holding demonstrations against the victims of the sinking of the Sewol. "We demand that the prosecution and the National Tax Service begin an investigation to find out whether the powerful business lobby was involved in illegal deals with the group in 2014," the CCEJ said in a statement. "The FKI is believed to have orchestrated a number of rallies to protect its own and the conservative administration's interests." The CCEJ pointed out that the FKI might have engaged in breach of trust and tax evasion in the process of providing financial support for the parents' group, while using aliases in the financial transactions. The FKI is also facing allegations that it tried to prevent liberal civic groups from holding rallies by having the conservative group seek a police permit before they did. Under the law, only those obtaining a police permit in advance are allowed to hold rallies at major locations, including city hall and Gwanghwamun Square, central Seoul. The 613-member FKI is comprised of the nation's conglomerates including Samsung, Hyundai, GS, SK, Lotte and Hanwha. An FKI official was unavailable for comment. Alongside the FKI, the Korean National Police Veterans Association (KNPVA), a retired police officers' group, faces allegations of transferring over 20 million won to an account belonging to another North Korean defectors group last year, drawing a strong backlash from many retired officers. The state-supported association is required to maintain political neutrality, critics said. "The KNPVA is resorting to a cowardly act to advance their politically-motivated causes, hiding behind North Korean defectors," one retired officer said during a protest Wednesday. Also, another allegation said that Cheong Wa Dae was involved in giving instructions to the parents' group to hold pro-government rallies. The Sisa Journal reported that a political affairs official at Cheong Wa Dae controlled the KPF and another conservative mothers' group comprised of North Korean defectors. The magazine cited a KPF official as saying that the presidential office was seeking revenge against the group after it refused to hold a rally in favor of a verbal agreement between Korea and Japan on the sexual slavery victims issue last December. Tokyo offered 1 billion yen ($8.9 million) in payment to the victims. In response, Cheong Wa Dae issued a statement denying the report. "The Sisa Journal report is inaccurate," presidential spokesman Jeong Yeon-guk told reporters, refusing to answer whether it would ask for a correction from the magazine. Opposition political parties issued statements demanding that the National Assembly launch a probe to determine where the money came from and under what conditions, and how it was spent. Some 150 countries including South Korea will sign a universal climate pact this week in a collective step towards the effectuation of last year's landmark deal, Seoul's ministries of foreign affairs and environment said Thursday. The U.N. will hold a high-level signing ceremony on Friday (New York time) for the so-called Paris Agreement adopted in December to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change. The signing is part of the process for countries to formally join the new pact. Environment Minister Yoon Seong-kyu will sign the agreement on behalf of the Seoul government. During a speech at the signing ceremony, the minister plans to mention Seoul's efforts to push for an early domestic ratification of the agreement and tackle climate change issues, the ministries said in a press release. Following the signing ceremony, 55 countries, which represent at least 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, must complete their domestic ratification procedures to enable the Paris Agreement to come into effect. In December, nearly 200 countries adopted the historic climate agreement in a show of global unity over one of the world's toughest challenges -- climate change. The agreement aims to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 C compared to pre-industrial times. Scientists say 2 C is the threshold to stave off the disastrous impact of climate change. The agreement also features universality as both developed and developing countries pledged to join the fight against climate change. The previous pact only involved developed countries, which contributed the most to global warming. To encourage the participation of many countries, the pact adopts a "bottom-up" approach, which allows each country to devise its own plan for carbon emission cuts, or "nationally determined contributions (NDC)." The previous deal employed a top-down system to give countries targets and schedules for reducing carbon emissions. Seoul has set its 2030 target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 37 percent from business-as-usual, or BAU, levels. It plans to finalize its roadmap this year to achieve the target and establish a system to evaluate the enforcement of its emission reduction pledge. Meanwhile, Minister Yoon plans to attend a high-level discussion on Thursday over global cooperation in achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs). He is set to propose a direction to help attain the SDGs, Seoul officials said. In September, world leaders adopted 17 SDGs to end poverty, fight inequality and injustice, and tackle climate change by 2030. The new goals were formulated after a 15-year campaign to tackle a series of global challenges under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). During the discussion, Yoon also plans to introduce Seoul's overseas aid project, called "Better Life for Girls." Seoul has been pushing for the project -- worth around US$200 million -- to help girls in developing countries get better education, health care and job training. (Yonhap) South Korea and China will hold bilateral maritime demarcation talks in Beijing this week in a move to accelerate efforts to address issues surrounding the two countries' overlapping exclusive economic zones, Seoul's Foreign Ministry said Thursday. The working-level talks will be held on Friday, led by Park Chull-joo, the director general of the international legal affairs bureau at South Korea's Foreign Ministry, and his Chinese counterpart Ambassador Wang Xiaodu. "The two sides will exchange views over maritime demarcation and related issues in a comprehensive manner," the ministry said in a press release. The two governments agreed to hold the talks when they held vice-minister-level talks over the exclusive economic zones (EEZ) in Seoul in December. The high-level talks were set up after Chinese Premier Li Keqiang proposed the early resumption of negotiations during his summit with President Park Geun-hye in Seoul in October. The two sides had held more than a dozen rounds of negotiations over the EEZ between 1996 and 2008. But the negotiations yielded little progress, with both sides refusing to budge from their positions. Seoul has demanded that the EEZ be demarcated by drawing a median line. However, Beijing has argued that the coasts and the population along them must be taken into account to conduct a proportional EEZ demarcation. The EEZ is a sea zone over which a country has special rights regarding the exploration and use of marine resources. It stretches out to 200 nautical miles from the coastline. (Yonhap) South Korea's chief nuclear envoy will visit China this week for talks on North Korea, Seoul's Foreign Ministry said Thursday, amid growing concerns Pyongyang may conduct another nuclear test. Kim Hong-kyun, special representative for Korean Peninsula peace and security affairs, will visit Beijing on Friday where he will meet with his Chinese counterpart, Wu Dawei, to discuss ways to deter additional North Korean provocations and faithfully implement U.N. Security Council sanctions against Pyongyang, ministry spokesman Cho June-hyuck said in a regular press briefing. Concerns have grown that North Korea will conduct its fifth nuclear test in the coming weeks, with satellite imagery showing increased activity at its main nuclear test site at Punggye-ri, in the northeastern part of the country. The UNSC sanctions, which were adopted last month in response to the North's fourth nuclear test and long-range rocket launch earlier this year, are designed to starve the regime of the money it needs to develop its nuclear and missile programs. China is North Korea's main ally and economic lifeline, meaning its cooperation will be crucial for the sanctions to have an effect. Cho also noted that Wu will meet with his U.S. counterpart, Sung Kim, later in the day. The back-to-back talks between the chief nuclear envoys of South Korea, China and the United States are expected to boost trilateral cooperation over the North Korean nuclear issue, he said. (Yonhap) South Korea expressed concern Thursday over Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ritual offering to a controversial war shrine in Tokyo, urging him to make efforts to develop a "future-oriented" bilateral relationship. "Our government cannot help but express concern over the fact that he sent an offering again to the Yasukuni Shrine that glorifies the past colonial invasion and honors war criminals," Seoul's Foreign Ministry spokesman Cho June-hyuck said during a regular press briefing. "We urge the Japanese government to make active efforts to develop a future-oriented relationship by squarely facing history and showing its genuine repentance for its past through actual action." The conservative Japanese leader has reportedly sent a symbolic offering to the shrine on the occasion of an annual spring festival. The shrine, seen as a symbol of Japan's militaristic past, honors Japanese war dead, including 14 Class-A criminals from World War II. Abe's symbolic offering further dampened the mood for bilateral cooperation, which emerged after the two neighbors agreed in December to settle their decades-long dispute over Japan's wartime sexual enslavement of Korean women. (Yonhap) /Korea Times File By Lee Han-soo Seven North Korean waitresses, who worked with the 13 women who defected to South Korea on April 11, have finally spoken to CNN. The waitresses all worked at the same restaurant in Ningbo City, in southern China. Because the restaurant is closed the seven have returned to North Korea. The waitresses claim the restaurant manager tricked the others into defecting. "In mid-March our restaurant manager gathered us together and told us the restaurant would be moved to somewhere in Southeast Asia," head waitress Choe Hye-yong told CNN. Choe said that when she realized the manager's real intention she only managed to alert a few of her colleagues. The waitress claimed that a South Korean businessman was involved in the mass defection under orders from the South Korean government. "I think about our colleagues being deceived and dragged to South Korea and facing extreme hardship there," another waitress said. "It tears our hearts." The South Korean Unification Ministry denied the claims and reiterated that the defection was not coerced. "Thirteen defectors voluntarily decided to leave and pushed ahead with the escape without any help from the outside," a spokesperson said. "Following their voluntary request to defect, our government accepted them from a humanitarian point of view." North Korea has since threatened South Korea with destructive consequences if it does not return the waitresses. /Courtesy of the World Institute for North Korea Studies By Lee Jin-a Nearly 700 North Korean defectors will gather in Seoul this month to speak about human rights violations and other hardships facing North Koreans. The World Institute for North Korea Studies will host the "North Korean Defector World Conference,"at Myungsung Church in Gangdong-gu, southeastern Seoul, on April 29. VIP guests will include Park Kwan-yong, former National Assembly Speaker; Hyun Byung-cheol, National Human Rights Commission former chairman; An Chan-il, chief of the World Institute for North Korea Studies; and Suzanne Scholte, chairman of the North Korea Freedom Coalition. Human rights activists from the U.S., the U.K. Australia, and Japan will also attend. Participants will launch an international network to help North Korean defectors at home and abroad. They also plan to establish a North Korean government-in-exile. "We will use the unity of North Korean defectors to get their voices heard around the globe," said An Chan-il, an event organizer. "The conference will symbolize that the fall of Kim Jong-un's regime is getting closer." By Robert Skidelsky LONDON The European Union has never been very popular in Britain. It joined late, and its voters will be asked on June 23 whether they want to leave early. The referendum's outcome will not be legally binding on the government; but it is inconceivable that Britain will stay if the public's verdict is to quit. Over the years, the focus of the British debate about Europe has shifted. In the 1960s and 1970s, the question was whether Britain could afford not to join what was then the European Economic Community. The fear was that the United Kingdom would be shut out of the world's fastest-growing market, and that its partnership with the United States would be at risk as well: The Western alliance would consist of two pillars, and Europe, not a shrunken Britain, would be one of them. Today, it is the enfeeblement, not power, of Europe, that drives the UK debate. The British perceive themselves as doing rather well, whereas Europe is doing badly. Indeed, ever since the 2008 crash, the EU has been identified with failure. Outside Britain and Germany, there has been almost no economic growth. It cannot defend its frontiers against terrorists ("Europe is not safe," proclaims Donald Trump). Its institutions lack legitimacy. Made up of 28 quasi-sovereign members, it cannot act, but only issue intentions to act. No wonder there is a move afoot to reclaim national sovereignty, where some decision-making power still resides. The EU's fate has become hopelessly entangled with that of its most vulnerable feature: the 19-member eurozone, the single-currency heartland of economic stagnation. To officials in Brussels, the eurozone is the EU. Only Britain and Denmark have been allowed to opt out. The other members, including Sweden, are expected to join when they meet the criteria. The eurozone was to be the engine of political union. But the engine has stalled. To be sure, the 2008 crisis started with the banking collapse in the US. But most of the rest of the world has recovered, whereas most of Europe has not. To assess why, a recent symposium on the subject at Nuffield College, Oxford, focused on the lack of a sovereign authority able to protect the European economy as a whole from contagious crises starting elsewhere. The missing bits of sovereignty include a fiscal transfer system to respond to asymmetric shocks; a risk-free asset (eurobonds) in which to park redundant money; a single system for supervising banks and capital markets; a central bank able to act as lender of last resort; and the ability to organize an EU-wide stabilization/recovery program. The eurozone has weakened the nation-states comprising it, without creating a supranational state to replace the powers its members have lost. Legitimacy thus still resides at a level of political authority that has lost those attributes of sovereignty (such as the ability to alter exchange rates) from which legitimacy derives. Meanwhile, promises of action continue to flow. The so-called Five Presidents' Report calls for "completing Europe's economic and monetary union" as a prelude to "political union." But is that the right sequence? Historically, political union precedes economic and monetary union. As Otmar Issing , a former ECB chief economist, never tires of pointing out , without a sovereign, the process of transferring competences including monetary policy to ever higher levels will create a huge legitimacy deficit. The EU has tried to achieve political union incrementally, because it was impossible to start with it. Indeed, barely hidden in the "European project" was the expectation that successive crises would push political integration forward. This was certainly Jean Monnet's hope. The alternative that the crises would have the opposite effect, leading to the breakup of the economic and monetary union was never seriously confronted. Few people in the UK would welcome a rapid move toward a political union, assuming this means filling in the gaps in sovereignty that have crippled the eurozone. Indeed, in the deal that Prime Minister David Cameron negotiated with European heads of government as a condition of remaining in the EU, Britain is specifically exempted from commitment to "ever closer political union." Yet, without a political union, it is hard to see how the eurozone can be made to work. The eurozone is therefore likely to break up into more compatible parts, after further failed efforts to muddle through. One can imagine a northern single-currency area, with enough sovereignty (provided by Germany or, more plausibly, by Germany and France acting together) to make it work, linked by free trade to a southern area that is not subject to the northern bloc's monetary and fiscal rules. Specifically, members of the southern bloc would have fixed, but adjustable, exchange rates with one another and with the northern union. The southern bloc, however, would lack a member with the weight and prestige to counterbalance Germany. That member could only be Britain. And this is the main argument against pulling out of the EU: By staying in, Britain would be able to ensure that, if and when the eurozone's breakup comes, the process is not too messy, and will at any rate preserve something of the spirit of the EU's founders. Britain has much to fear from an acrimonious divorce, as it will inevitably be swept into its turbulent wake. It has always been part of Britain's role to act as a bridge between different worlds. It can play this role in the two Europes of the future, but only by not cutting itself off from the one Europe that currently exists. Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords, is professor emeritus of political economy at Warwick University. Copyright belongs to Project Syndicate. Latest news reports are highlighting Cheong Wa Dae's alleged involvement in a scandal surrounding the conservative Korea Parent Federation (KPF), which reportedly has been paying people to take part in pro-government, pro-chaebol rallies. The office of the secretary to the president for public communication is suspected of directing the KPF to stage a rally to support the controversial agreement between Korea and Japan over the so-called comfort women at the height of public indignation toward it. Cheong Wa Dae spokesman Jeong Yeon-guk denied the allegation raised by the Sisa Journal during a press briefing Monday. The presidential office is distancing itself from the KPF scandal that also involves the Federation of Korean Industries (FKI), which is facing allegations of funneling hefty sums of money to the right-wing group. But Cheong Wa Dae has already invited serious questions about ethics just by being mentioned alongside a group that has staged rallies promoting the government's position on the most divisive issues of the Park Geun-hye administration. They include labor reform, the state-authored history textbooks for high schools and increased monitoring capability by the National Intelligence Service, among others. Cheong Wa Dae's denial of involvement with the KPF was not convincing enough to assuage mounting public suspicion that the presidential office is engaging in inappropriate activity to influence public opinion by orchestrating politically-motivated rallies. A thorough probe should be conducted of the public communication office and punishment meted out if any wrongdoing is found. The involvement of the FKI, which is in conflict with labor unions on many issues, should also be investigated. The business lobby group is facing allegations that it funded the rightist group which often prevented liberal civic groups and labor unions from holding rallies at major protest sites. The prosecution and relevant authorities should launch a probe into the FKI to find out if there were any illegal transactions with the KPF. The FKI, an association of Korea's major conglomerates including Samsung and Hyundai, has previously sparked criticism for its politically biased activities such as a signature collecting campaign to urge the National Assembly to pass economic and labor related bills proposed by the Park administration. The FKI-government collusion must be stopped once and for all. Saenuri should hurry to bring drastic changes The governing Saenuri Party is drifting aimlessly following its crushing defeat in last week's general election. Now is the time for the ruling party to do some soul-searching and seeking for innovation. But it is wasting precious time doing nothing, and one has to wonder if the party even understands the people's will revealed through the latest poll. From the beginning, it was wrong that the Supreme Council, the party's highest decision-making body, nominated floor leader Rep. Won Yoo-chul, one of the key figures responsible for the ruling party's worst election defeat ever, as the interim leader. Faced with strong resistance from lawmakers-elect, Won said he would surrender his temporary leadership as soon the next floor leader is elected. This is natural, given the weight of his responsibility for the governing party's fiasco. Still, it's doubtful if it's right that the new floor leader will assume the role of steering the party as head of its emergency committee. Of the Saenuri Party's 122 lawmakers-elect, those loyal to President Park Geun-hye number more than 70. So it's highly likely that one from the pro-Park faction will actually take the helm of the emergency committee if Won's proposal is adopted at next week's meeting of lawmakers. After all, it's no wonder that the pro-Park group is eager to keep its hegemony in the embattled party although it is highly accountable for the election debacle. It's needless to say that the pro-Park lawmakers should refrain from rash action, considering that failures in nominations arising from the faction's hegemonic ambitions were the prime cause for the party's defeat. Since the elections, there have been calls for overhauling the ruling party completely. Yet there have been no sincere moves to innovate the party across the board. Given its chaotic state now, it looks as if the Saenuri Party is still ignorant of what the people want and what is meant by the altered political landscape, The three-party system in the upcoming 20th National Assembly requires both the ruling and opposition parties to change a lot. The Saenuri Party, in particular, will face serious problems in operating the legislature unless it drops its evil practice of blindly yielding to Park and the presidential office. Simultaneously, the party won't be able to fulfill its duties as the governing party. It's evident why the ruling party should be reborn anew through deep self-reflection. That's because it shares the responsibility for state affairs although it has been reduced to the second-largest party. The people asked President Park and her governing party to carry out drastic reform through last week's election. Apparently, popular sentiment toward the ruling elite will be aggravated further if the party fails to understand the will of the people and remains stuck in the past. The Saenuri Party must hurry to form an innovative emergency committee preferably led by an outsider that can bring drastic changes to it. If not, it will suffer a more stunning defeat in the upcoming presidential election. North Korea's failed launch of its Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missile last week sparked a huge fireball that damaged the launcher and could have also injured or killed missile technicians on the ground, a news report said Wednesday. The missile blew up about 300 feet above the ground, shortly after Friday's launch, and U.S. strategic defense surveillance systems, both airborne and space-based, videotaped the explosion, the Washington Free Beacon reported, citing U.S. defense officials. Two road-mobile Musudan launchers were set up for the test, but the second was not fired after the explosion, the report said. It also cited a diplomatic source as saying that the likely cause of the explosion was a faulty fuel system or turbo pump failure. The Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missile is an indigenous variant of the Russian SS-N-6 submarine-launched ballistic missile, known by Moscow as the R-27, which the North obtained covertly from Russia sometime in the 1990s, the report said. "The North Koreans seemed to just believe it would succeed because the R-27 SLBM of former Soviet Union was one of the most tested nuclear warhead delivery systems ever produced, and North Korea had already done a lot of ground tests," the source was quoted as saying. "However, a real launching test is totally different from the ground test." Western intelligence agencies do not know the ultimate cause of the launch failure. "And the North Koreans probably don't either," the source said, according to the report. Comment from the U.S. Defense Department was not immediately available. The launch was the latest in a series of provocative acts the North has undertaken in defiance of international pressure increased in the wake of its fourth nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch the following month. Concerns also persist that Pyongyang could carry out yet another nuclear test in an effort to project an image of Kim Jong-un as a strong leader in the lead-up to the Workers' Party Congress next month. (Yonhap) By Lee Min-hyung The nation's antitrust watchdog has rectified Apple Korea's unfair repair policies, putting an end to growing customer complaints that the iPhone maker was "too bossy" in business operations here. The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said Thursday it has rectified a total 20 unfair provisions in contracts between Apple Korea and its official repair service providers. This comes about four months after the watchdog launched an investigation of the company's repair policies which customers and repair firms claimed undermined their rights. The previous provisions included "Apple Korea can terminate or modify contracts with its repair service providers without prior notification." But Apple is now required to give advance notice. Another controversial provision was that Apple Korea did not allow repair firms to translate their English contracts into Korea, even though the U.S.-based IT giant operates business here under the domestic legal system. The FTC rectified the provision, saying "Korean version of contract can also be provided." Apple's repair companies were not allowed to file lawsuits against Apple Korea a year after controversial incidents, but this provision won't be in effect anymore, the watchdog said. "An official from Apple headquarters visited the FTC and actively cooperated to revise such unfair terms of the contract," Min Hye-young, an FTC official in charge of contract reviews, said in a briefing. This is the first time that an Apple overseas branch has revised its contract terms. "Our latest decision will pave the way for protecting the rights of both customers and Apple's repair service operators, and build a fair trade ecosystem," she said. The revised terms will be applied to all Apple products, including iPhones, MacBooks and Apple Watches, according to the FTC. "Last year, we rectified a provision that states Apple customers cannot request a refund over repair service costs," she said. "We are going to continue to revise unfair provisions." Apple Korea's six official repair service providers are UBase, Dongbu Daewoo Electronics Service, Peach Valley, Beyond Tech, Tuva and Jongro Mac System. In December, FTC Chairman Jeong Jae-chan said in a meeting with reporters that the watchdog would review Apple Korea's provisions in contracts it had signed with local repair service operators. By Lee Min-hyung LG Chem posted 457.7 billion won ($402.97 million) in first-quarter operating profit, up 26.5 percent from a year ago, with its earnings lifted by robust sales in its basic materials sector. Sales came in at 4.87 trillion won, down 0.8 percent from the previous year, the company said in a regulatory filing, Thursday. Net profit was 338.1 billion won, up 37.3 percent from a year ago, a 63 percent increase on a quarterly basis. LG Chem said the profit growth was driven by high profitability from diversified premium lineups in its basic materials division. "We achieved a healthy first-quarter performance, largely due to improved profitability from diversified business portfolios focusing on premium products lineup in the basic materials sector," LG Chem said in a statement. The division was the company's major profit booster, posting 466.2 billion won in operating profit, up 45.1 percent from a year ago. But the company recorded operating losses in its battery and electronics materials sectors. The company's electronics materials division had an operating loss of 8 billion won, with its sales reaching 627.2 billion won, down 7.2 percent from the previous year. It attributed the decline to seasonal factors and falling unit prices for electronics materials. The battery sector also suffered an operating loss of 300 million won, despite its sales rising 15.3 percent to 814.4 billion won from a year ago. This was attributable to falling demand for small- and medium-sized batteries used in portable devices, the company said. It cited seasonal factors as another reason to have hampered growth in its medium- to large-sized battery business for electric vehicles (EV) and energy storage systems (ESS). For the April-June period, the company expects to continue its winning streak in operating profit, backed by a bright outlook for the basic material business and increasing demand for value-added materials. "The electronics material sector is also expected to post better performance in the second quarter, backed by our expansion into the Chinese market," said the company. The division's representative products include polarizing plates, a key material for liquid crystal displays (LCD). The company previously said its Nanjing plant in China, which produces the materials, reached full capacity as of this January. The company plans to establish two more manufacturing facilities there by the end of this year to meet surging demand for the plates in the Asia's largest market. "Expectations are that our battery business will also post a turnaround in the second quarter, due to increased orders from the electric tools market and automakers," the company said. LG Chem closed at 316,000 won on the Seoul bourse, down 1.86 percent. Messe Berlin CEO Christian Goke, left, and Shenzhen Vice Mayor Chen Biao demonstrate head-mount virtual reality devices made by Chinese company dlodlo after the opening ceremony of Consumer Electronics (CE) China at the Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center in the southern Chinese city, Wednesday. / Courtesy of Joint Press Corp. By Yoon Sung-won Messe Berlin, the host of Europe's largest electronics exhibition IFA, opened the first-ever Consumer Electronics (CE) China in Shenzhen, China, Wednesday. This first CE China, which is being held at the Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center April 20-22, has German electronics makers Bosch and Siemens, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and the Chinese branch of U.S. online retailer Amazon participating alongside smaller Chinese businesses. Shenzhen Vice Mayor Chen Biao, Messe Berlin CEO Christian Goke, Alibaba's retail subsidiary Tmall President Yin Jing and BSH Chairman and President Roland Gerke all attended the opening ceremony. "As a German brand, we provide premium home appliances here in China," Gerke said. "We entered the Chinese market in the 1990s and continue to research what Chinese consumers want. Just because we are a European brand doesn't mean we do not understand Chinese customers." Unlike other international consumer electronics fairs such as the IFA in Berlin and the International Consumer Electronics Show (ICES) in Las Vegas, CE China focuses on connecting global electronics makers planning to enter the Chinese market with influential retailers in China to promote new business opportunities. To this end, Messe Berlin successfully invited China's leading retailers including Alibaba, Suning and Guomei. Messe Berlin continued to emphasize during this year's IFA Global Press Conference in Hong Kong that it seeks to expand its presence in the Chinese market through CE China, targeting the country's rising middle class which accumulates more purchasing power as their incomes keep rising. The expo organizer said its goal is to slake the thirst of Chinese middle-class consumers for globally branded, high-quality home appliances with the desire of global electronics makers to enter the world's largest consumer market. Messe Berlin's hosting of CE China in Shenzhen can be interpreted in the same context with large world electronics expos such as Mobile World Congress (MWC) and ICES which have both held their own exhibitions in Shanghai, China. Besides the large businesses, China's local startups and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have also established exhibition booths at CE China, seeking opportunities to cooperate with larger electronics brands and retailers. Meanwhile, global electronics makers such as Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics and Sony, as well as China's leading home appliance providers Hisense, Haier and Konka did not join the event. By Kim Yoo-chul, Lee Min-hyung SK Telecom said that it has no intention of halting operation of its budget mobile business in return for receiving approval from the government for its proposed merger with CJ HelloVision (CJH). "SK Telecom has no plan to drop its budget mobile business even after the government approves the merger with CJH, which is still pending," an SK Telecom official told The Korea Times, Thursday. He added that the speculation is groundless that SK Telecom has approached Naver to initiate discussions on the move. CJH also backed SK Telecom by saying that its HelloMobile business recently returned to profitability after struggling. "We have no reason to sell a business that generates profit. Still, the government has yet to approve the specific conditions of the proposed merger with SK Telecom," a CJH official said. The remarks follow a government official's recent announcement that it will closely review whether CJH's services within KT's network as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) would hurt competition. "This will be the point that will be carefully considered by the government," said Song Jae-sung, an official at the telecommunications competition policy bureau of the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (MSIP). A decision by government agencies including MSIP, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) and the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) which have the right either to authorize or block the proposed SK-CJH merger has been delayed. Both of SK's rivals KT and LG Uplus oppose the plan, claiming that the merger will hurt the best interests of consumers and fair market competition, while SK says the merger is necessary to expand its outreach to international markets by realizing "economies of scale." The agencies are planning to reach a final decision on the matter at a plenary meeting scheduled to be held towards the end of April. However, it's unlikely that the agencies will make their final announcement by the end of this month. A KT spokesman said the nation's second-biggest mobile carrier won't accept "conditional approval" from the government for the SK-CJH deal. "We've heard that SK Telecom was in talks with the three government agencies to drop the budget mobile business as a condition to gain approval from the government to close the CJH deal," he added. "However, if that scenario materializes, then it will also help SK Telecom lift their profits. This will be a huge plus, which KT can't afford to have accepted." LG Uplus, the telecommunications unit of LG Group, said the sale of the budget mobile business by SK Telecom would not bring greater impact so as to threaten SK's current market position. "The SK-CJH deal will be conditionally approved, eventually. From SK's point of view, the effects of the sale of CJH-owned budget mobile business will be short-lived," said a spokesman at LG Uplus. Although the country's antitrust watchdog was technically required to reach a decision on the deal within 120 days (by April 1, 2016) as per the Fair Trade Act, the watchdog has made use of a term allowing for supplementary data acquisition to delay its ruling. U.S. Pacific Commands Air Contingent began flying operations at Clark Air Base, Philippines, April 19, with the successful launch of four A-10C Thunderbolt IIs and two HH-60G Pave Hawks. The aircraft are part of the newly stood up Air Contingent here conducting operations ranging from air and maritime domain awareness, personnel recovery, combating piracy, and assuring all nations have access to air and sea domains throughout the region in accordance with international law. The A-10s conducted a flying mission through international airspace in the vicinity of Scarborough Shoal west of the Philippines providing air and maritime situational awareness. These missions promote transparency and safety of movement in international waters and airspace, representing the U.S. commitment to ally and partner nations and to the Indo-Asia-Pacific regions continued stability now and for generations to come. Our job is to ensure air and sea domains remain open in accordance with international law. That is extremely important, international economics depends on it free trade depends on our ability to move goods, said Col. Larry Card, Commander of the Air Contingent. Theres no nation right now whose economy does not depend on the well-being of the economy of other nations. The A-10 missions enhance the U.S. military assets in the region upholding freedom of navigation and over flight. We are out here and were going to do the best we can to achieve the mission; there is no doubt in my mind we will be successful, Card said. That success is achieved in part by the close partnership held between the U.S. and Philippine militaries. The two countries air and ground forces maintain a close bilateral bond through consistent military exercises Interoperability with the Philippine military is at the forefront of our mission, Card said. The standup of the Air Contingent promotes this collective focus as we build upon our already strong alliance, and reaffirm our commitment to the Indo-Asia-Pacific region. Card said it takes more than just aircraft to accomplish this feat, however, as he explained the critical role his Airmen play in this missions overall success. Our Airmen are the top. Ive worked with the majority of these guys for the last month already and theyve excelled; theyve blown me away with their ability to generate air power and I expect nothing less as we move into this next phase. All personnel in this first deployment are Air Force Airmen assigned to various Pacific Air Forces bases, and include aircrew, maintainers, logistics and support personnel. I have a lot of pride in our Airmen; and their ability to quickly understand a mission theyre not accustomed to and within minutes be motivated and execute that mission is truly phenomenal, the colonel said. These Airmen truly are the best of the best. U.S. Pacific Command plans this first iteration of the Air Contingent mission to last for the next several weeks. Future Air Contingent deployments will be fulfilled with various platforms and personnel from either Air Force or other service components. Road to Healing Audio Article Ceyapi, this past Saturday we cried as we listened to the stories of many who were hurt in one of... Disparities can bring early death Audio Article This past week brought me to the Black Hills and to Bear Butte. Bear Butte is a one of small... Hechena Unnipi Audio Article Hechena Unnipi, we are still here is being heard more often as we move out of the layers of reading... The SLFP does not condone the continuation of the Emergency Regulations (The Public Security Ordinance) more than a day necessary Read more The year was 1972. Bernie Sanders was running for governor of Vermont, as the candidate of the Liberty Union Party. Reporter David Haldane was there to interview Sanders for the Vermont Peoples Voice. At some point, Haldane writes, Sanders caught a first glance of himself on television. He glared and shook a fist at the unkempt activist on the screen: He looks like the village idiot...I would never vote for a bum like that! Haldane recounts the scene in a new piece for a reconstituted online version of the old Los Angeles Free Press alternative newspaper. Haldane wrote for the original Freep and for the Los Angeles Times for a couple of decades. More recently, he is the author of a memoir, "Nazis & Nudists." Previously on LA Observed. From his piece on first meeting Sanders in 1972: Back then, Sanders self-assessment and accomplishments were considerably less than they are today. In fact, he was just another long-haired radical freak with political aspirations. It was those aspirations that had landed me in Bernies cramped Burlington, Vermont, apartment. I was a brand new reporter for the leftist Vermont Peoples Voice. He was an unknown protest candidate for the Liberty Union Party, which he had helped found. So, while everyone knew that his chance of winning was virtually zero, there we sat, watching the pre-taped candidates debate. Both of us were at the beginning of our careers; he giving his first newspaper interview in his first political campaign; me enthusiastically writing down someone elses words in what would become my lifes work. Bernie did lose that race, one of four he ran before becoming Burlingtons mayor, eight-term Vermont pick for the U.S. House of Representatives, two-term U.S. Senator and, finally, a serious contender for the American presidency. Re-reading that interview today, I am struck by how much of it could have been written, well, earlier this week. Under a headline asking whether this was A New Kind of Candidate?, Sanders declares, among other things, that The main problem with this state and with this country is that too much power resides with too few peopleYou cant talk about politics and power without talking about the concentration of wealthThe first thing that has to happen is that the power and wealth has to be taken away from the relatively few people who possess it and redistributed. Haldane reports that Art Kunkin, the founder in 1964 of the alternative LA Free Press, is now living in Joshua Tree. He is 88 years old, per the website. This article appears in the April 22, 2016 issue of Executive Intelligence Review. HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE Change History by Ennobling Man [PDF version of this article] Dennis Speed: To introduce our opening remarks person, Id like to quote something that some of you may have heard before, in part, from Percy Shelleys In Defense of Poetry: But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: They are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: A poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. . . . The Schiller Institute is named after a poet, and all of its actions are intended to be poetic, informed by the principles of poetry and the idea of Classical poetry. The person who took it upon herself to conduct a mission to impart that profound and impassioned idea of poetry to America in particular, and to the world in general, also founded the organization which has convened you here today. Id like Helga LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, to come and give us opening remarks. Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Confucius wrote many important things about music and the relationship between music and the state. He said, if you want to judge the condition of a country, you should look at its music. Now, by that measurement, I think we in the West are in deep trouble. EIRNS/Stuart Lewis So that is why the Schiller Institute has given the highest importance to Classical music, and Classical art in general. But in a society which is so dividedin which all the issues are so divisive, and people have so many opinions that you cannot find two people who agree on one point of any given issuehow do you get it back to truth-seeking? And, to seek the truth no matter what you do, no matter what you do, if its music, if its teaching, if its science, if its doing business, people should be truthful. Because only then are they really human beings. The only areas where truth-seeking is truly possible without the deviation of being opinionated or just taking over the opinion of someone elsethe media, your neighbors, whateverthe two areas where it is possible to seek the truth are natural science, because there you can discover principles which are universal, because when you discover them in Germany, they also function in China, or in the United States, so therefore, there is a criterion of truth. And the only other area where this applies fully, is Classical art. Because only in Classical art can you find principles which are as eternal and as truthful as scientific principles. So the question therefore, is how do we get society backhealedfrom the terrible condition in which it is right now? Educate the Emotions Well, we have to educate people again to know what beauty is. In Schillers famous controversy with Kant, Kant said, in the categorical imperative, you must. You must be moral, you must act in such a way that you will not violate the rights of someone else. . . . Schiller was horrified by this, and said, Poor Kant! He must have had a terrible childhood, because he only wrote for slaves, for servants, and not for beautiful souls. The beautiful soul is one that loves freedom so much, that it does not even want to contemplate a procedure to force itself to be moral: That would mean suppressing something, and true freedom must not suppress. And that is why the beauty in everything, especially in Classical art, is so absolutely crucial, because beauty is an expression of reason. Schiller demands that beauty be defined, not by experience, but by reason. But at the same time, beauty is also manifest naturally in the realm of the senses, and therefore, there is no contradiction between reason and emotions, in beautiful art and other expressions of beauty. Schiller was absolutely convinced that the most important task of his time was to educate the emotions. Because if people are emotionally crippled, so that they have only one faculty or skill, and have neglected all others, or if they have somehow mismanaged their whole life, the only remedy is through the education of the emotions, up to the point where your emotions guide you on the level of reason, so that you can blindly follow whatever your impulse is, because it is never against what reason would command. Now Schiller called this aesthetical education. And the way to achieve it is through great Classical art. He had much to say in the beautiful Aesthetical Letters as to why only great Classical art can bring about the moral improvement and ennoblement of the individual. He was convincedand it has been my firm credo for a very long timethat change in politics cannot come through anything but through the ennoblement of the individual. So therefore, lets have some beautiful art, and understand that this is politics on the highest level. This article appears in the April 22, 2016 issue of Executive Intelligence Review. LAROUCHE IN DIALOGUE: Convey the Importance of the Individual as a Creative Force! [PDF version of this article] This is an edited transcript of Lyndon LaRouches April 9, 2016 Dialogue with the Manhattan Project. Dennis Speed: We had a conference a couple of days ago which began the process which we are going to now amplify here and deepen here. Those of you who were there know that there was a very lively second session. Mr. LaRouche was able, in his capacity as Dialoguer in Chief, to give some people a lesson in what it means to actually try to think about asking questions. So, Lyn, Id like to first ask you if theres anything youd like to say at the beginning, and otherwise well start the questions. Lyndon LaRouche: I would say, simply, that there was a confusion there which was resolved, I think, in the process of presentation, to recognize exactly what the principles are, on which the human voice and mind are capable of understanding each other. I think thats the key mission, is to get a recognition among people of what the truths are, as opposed to some of the jazzed up work, which does not actually amount to anything, in terms of art. Speed: Maybe well have a few questions in that regard. So lets go right to questions. Lets take our first question. Question: Good afternoon! This is Jessica from Brooklyn, New York. I want to start by talking a little bit about what people have said to me about the conference, and how Ive thought about the conference in response. It was the question and answer period that really stuck out in my mind. After a barrage of statements and non questions from the audience, Kesha Rogers said something that I actually wrote down, and Im going to repeat it right now: Its not all these little issues, its not all this stuff youre talking aboutclimate change over here (which is ridiculous), and all these other thingsthat is important; what really is important, is that this is the threat to your humanity. Thats what this was about: the threat to our humanity. In thinking about that, the entire thing came together to me as peace through development. I think one of our EIR pamphlets said, Development Is the New Name for Peace, so the peace through development idea is there. I want the American people to respond in that way. How do we get the American people to respond to the idea that the Silk Road, and all these other concepts such as the space program represent peace through development? Id like you to comment on that for us, please. LaRouche: Okay. The crucial thing that I ran into, in the discussion process, where people were quarreling around this, and arguing this and arguing that, and I simply said, No! Because there are certain principles which do define the function of a human being, the true function of a true human being. Thats what you have to go for. You have to find out what the truth is and understand why it is the proper instruction to mankind, for the future of mankind. The problems that arose in some peoples minds, were they wanted to bring in all kinds of explanations, other than the name of human. Our point is that everything is based on the principle of human, and that principle of human has to be defined correctly, as being the intention to bring mankind to a higher level of achievement for the future of mankind, and that that is the most important issue. Question: At the conference, there was one thing that you said that really stuck with me, and Ill paraphrase. You said something like, Science is the process of moving whats in the mind, into physical reality. So, my question is, how do you define what science actually is? And then how can we think more scientifically in the way that Einstein, or a Kepler, or you do? LaRouche: Well, theres a certain principle there, which can be described summarily, but I dont like to describe it summarily, because its much more complicated than that. The point is, we all are able, if we wish toif we wish toto recognize what the meaning of human life is, and people will know it, recognize it, from themselves. People who have any sensitivity at all will recognize this. This is something which is for man, by man, and for the future of mankind. Those principles, which I quoted during the course of that argument there, are the universal principles, as far as I know. These are the principles on which the foundation of mankinds understanding of himself depends. Once they recognize this, they have no choice but to recognize the truth. Question: Hello, Lyn. My name is A, from Montreal, Canada. Ive been following what this organizations been doing for about a year now. How can we, as organizers when we go out and organize, stick to a certain tradition of beauty, and convey beauty while still trying to expose the ugliness within the culture? How can we expose the ugliness within the culture, without falling into the ugliness within language? And how can we use certain language that respects the tradition of beauty and exposing beauty through truth? LaRouche: Simply, you have to understand: You say, What is Satanic? Just ask the question, What is actually Satanic in the common practice of mankind? You say, Acts of cruelty against other people. Cheating. Lying. And so forth, as opposed to the simple idea of the desire to fulfill something which makes ones life have meaning for the future of mankind. That means: What is the progress that we can contribute as individuals, toward the progress of mankind? This is the basis on which different nations, or nationalities, can come together with a common intention; is to get that common intention which creates the success of the human species among all participants in human perception. Every nation, every nationality, has a requirement to find in itself something which is truly universal to mankind. Question: Hi. Thank you for having us here. My question is: Why, or why wont, our expanding noosphere catch up with the expanding universe? LaRouche: Well, actually, we are all part of the universe. All of us are. The meaning of our existence is of that nature. What do we contribute, by our existence, by our development, by our practice and development? What do we contribute to the totality of mankind? In the recent event we had on Thursday, we had a test of that on a large scale for China. We got involved deeply with some of what the Chinese development is. So, the recognition of this thing which actually unifies humanity, in effect, as the demonstrations and the arguments and the proceedings showedthat is where mankind is. Mankind has to find its own identity, which means different kinds of inspections. But they all must come back to one thing, and that one thing is the power of mankind, the power of the human individual, when realized. That is the one thing which unifies all people: the ability to access a common progress for a better future for the totality of mankind, and mankinds mission for the universe. Contributing to the Future of Mankind Question: Good afternoon, Lyn! Im from the Detroit area. Im a veteran. I belong to at least three veterans groups, and I was wondering why there arent more veterans gravitating toward the organization and what we do here? Because youre working toward preventing a number of future wars. And what is it that you think we can do to persuade more veterans to be involved with what we are doing? LaRouche: First of all, you can start with Franklin Roosevelt, because Franklin Roosevelt was treated like a bum in the closing period of his life. He was one of the greatest thinkers in the history of the United States, in terms of the effect of what he contributed to a mankind which had been going into desperation, and now was reconstructing itself, where people in the early 1930s were totally into despair. Just the ordinary citizen was usually in total despair, or was a thief otherwise. And what happened is, Franklin Roosevelt brought that citizen, who was often demoralized by what he had been subjected to, to cause him to aspire, to accrete to something which is going to be greater for the purpose of mankind, generally. And what has happened since is that those in the system of government, certain people in the system, have become no damned good at all. So therefore, we had so many no-damned-good candidates for leadership, in the United States, that we are sometimes ashamed of ourselves without asking and finding out why! But thats it. We have to fight for that purpose. We have to understand what the meaning of that purpose is, of mankind. Not just for soldiers, because every one of us is going to die. And therefore the question is, what is the meaning of our living in the process which we know is going to end with dying. That means that you are looking at humanity, not as an object. You are looking at humanity as something which has an intrinsic continuity in terms of the contributions. For example, what happens, people talk about life and death. Well, everyone dies. Every human being dies. Its unavoidable. Well then, what is the purpose of the person having lived? That is the question. Its not how we die, its how we, in the process of our existing, have contributed, and are continuing to contribute, to the meaning of the future of mankind. And that is probably the simplest way of saying it. Question: Hi Lyn, Alvin here. I did a fair amount of work leading into the conference, and what I was really inspired by, and at the same time embarrassed by as an American, was the international participation on the panel, and the excellent ideas and representations of where they see their nations leading to, and, of course, in essence, asking the United States to not wage war, but join them in that process. But what I come out thinking today is, where do we go next? Where do we advance? Whats our next move here in Manhattan, as an extension of that process that was in three parts presented to us on Thursday? And my thinking here in New York is that we have the release of these documents called the Panama Papers; we also have what will obviously be a widely seen broadcast on 60 Minutes, where the 28 pages will be gone through with many of the people that this organization has worked with and helped organize; and then later in the week we have Fred and Ethel, otherwise known as Bernie and Hillary, coming into town. Id like to know from you how we should approach this week, since there is a lot for us to do around this, and the implications are vast. LaRouche: I would say that, with some brief exceptions, relatively speaking, among Presidents and among others, even most people, they are not worth much, at all. You know, you have to look at the question, as I do, from the standpoint of what is the meaning of a newborn baby? One that is going to live, or that we expect to live. Why do we put a value on that child? Because it is supposed to be, not just living for a while, it is supposed to be able to develop, in its self development, through mankind. We bring the baby, the child, or the fortunate child at least, into a role which mankind has never achieved before. In other words, the idea is to bring the newborn baby to be not merely a continuation of the parent, as such. The question is, can this baby, this person, represent the future of mankind in the course of its own existence? Thats the important thing! Having a baby is not whats important, as such. Whats important is creating a system which creates babies and makes babies into future geniuses! Einstein, for example, typifies that model. And for many of us today who understood the history of Einstein, and his problems, Einstein has always meant that, for us who understood this. That Einsteins role was a dedication to a discovery of the future, even when he would have died! Therefore, his existence is a permanent existence, because it represents something which has never been overturned. And others should learn from his example. Question: Mr. LaRouche, this is R from Bergen County, New Jersey. Youre talking about the issue of genius, and you mentioned Einstein. Einstein existed from the late 19th through middle 20th Century, and, as I see it, the objective conditions surrounding Einstein werent necessarily great. There was World War I, there was anti-Semitism, he had to move from Germany to New Jersey. And yet he was a genius, theres no doubt the man was brilliant. And there have been many other cases of genius, people who have done their great work under adversity. We all know specific cases. My question is, there seems to be a need for the cultivation of genius as a higher proportion of the population right now, and going forward. How do you visualize, how do you see a system, which would optimize or better grow this need for genius? LaRouche: Take the history of genius in terms of the United States, and take the founding leadership of the United States as such. Then look at what happened afterward. We had Presidents; we had a whole string of Presidents who were really treasonous, in terms of their attitude about the nation. Then you had other people who came back, a few of them, as leaders, in terms of the development of the United States. Beyond Lincoln, we had a few people who actually filled that kind of role, of being a person whose life is devoted to creating a future for mankind. Not just a future for mankind, but a future for the improvement of mankind. White House Historical Association/The Peace Makers by George Peter Alexander Healy Now, what happened was that you had an evil bastard, I use the term freely, who became Bertrand Russell. And what Bertrand Russell did, he succeeded in getting at most of the people who were then at that time considered scientists, and they all turned rotten, every one of them. And Einstein was the only man who really furnished the policy of honesty, in the development of the future of mankind and mankinds future. Some other people have made contributions, but we want to talk about a systemic approach to the improvement of mankind and mankinds destiny. This is not just a step of progress. We have turned back to evil, which was brought in by Bertrand Russell. And most people in the United States today are still worshippers of the policies of Bertrand Russell. Theyre still followingthe schoolteachers, university student teachers, in the United States today, are mostly Bertrand Russell followers. They believe in simple mechanics, in terms of science. They have no creativity whatsoever. And therefore what we treasure is the idea of having children being born, and knowing that those children will become something new and great beyond what has existed now, to hope that mankind will accede to actual progress of the development of the individual member of society. And that has been very much in jeopardy, and thats what is in jeopardy all the time. And thats what I like to fight about. A Child Is Born . . . and Becomes a Genius Question: Hello, Lyn, This is M from Montreal. Ive been able to work here for three weeks to help with the second Handel Messiah concert and the conference. Something Ive been struggling with, that I hope you can help out with, is that practicality has been something which we all tend to fall into, and theres a lot of pressure to bring truth into practical terms, terms that people who dont know anything can understand. But the idea of actually winning, the intention to win, I realize that has not been somethingfor the years I have been doing thisthat I have not had governing my world. And that, in general, the way I have been thinking, wrongly, has been that I have been trying to inoculate people against the evil of the culture, at best, but the idea that you can actually win has not been, until very recently, a living concept organizing my mind. Now this is completely different, especially for me. Being a part of this conference is a paradigm-shifting process. I know that if practicality was governing the minds of a Benjamin Franklin or a Brunelleschi, not only would there never have been a dome, but there never would have been a Renaissance, and there never would have been a Declaration of Independence. So, I am hoping you can say a few words to help people like myself and others to not fall back into practical terms, and to keep their minds focused on self organizing processes. LaRouche: I would say thats commendable, I think its necessary. The thing to do is look at the idea of the concept of the baby, the human baby, and look at the meaning of what that human babys birth should mean to humanity. It means that that child, or some children like that, are going to become a legion of people, from whom a future of mankind will be newly created, beyond anything that mankind has achieved previously. Therefore, the idea of the existence of the new baby must be, in some degree, a sample of a future of mankind; where the future of mankind has been reached, in a certain touch, that someone becomes the genius. A child is born, and in due course becomes, for one reason or another, a kind of a genius, and contributes to mankind what mankind has never acceded to before. And that is the thing which we should call happiness, or the meaning of life. EIRNS/Philip Ulanowsky Question: Good afternoon, Mr. LaRouche. R from Brooklyn here. I was at the conference this week and I was glad to see the progress the Egyptians have made in the Canal Zone. The United States Merchant Marine in the 1970s had a proposal for a two way system, and Egypts participation in the New Silk Road is key to North Africa and Southwest Asia and humanity at large. Do you feel humanity will be able to overcome the effects of the British Empire to stop the Silk Road project? LaRouche: I think we are, some of us, at least, determined to make that improvement permanent. Not only possible, but permanent. Not everybody will do it, will achieve it, but a great part of mankind can achieve it, and that will be good enough for the rest of them. Question: Its me, Kesha. As I was sitting here listening, I was really struck by what you have defined as the necessity for the integrated, united, United States, and how that is being done with the representation of the Manhattan Project and New York as reviving the principle of Alexander Hamilton and what were doing in Texas. And what struck me about that is, that we are really defining right now the fight against the slavery and anti human conception that has dominated our United States. And I think about this idea of the Hamiltonian Principle which acted as an anti-slavery idea against what weve seen in the Confederate South, and youve talked about the Confederate South a lot. But the interesting question is, Why was it necessary that the space program be put in those areas that were a part of what was known or accepted as the Confederate South? It was because you had to give those people, those poor and backward regions access to their humanity. When people think about the space program, they think about it as some happy go lucky people making some scientific experiments. But I think about it from the standpoint that we have a responsibility of integrating the entire United States, and giving them access to their own humanity. And I want to get your sense of that, because I think theres still a failed idea and conception, as to why it is so important that we integrate the United States and that this whole conception that has dominated the thinking and the populationthe slavery that still exists! The South is still backward, and were actually organizing to restore the principle of a unified United Statessomething that no one else is thinking aboutbut this has to be the method by which we bring the United States and the world into one accord again. What do you think of that? LaRouche: What do I think of that? I think you should probably just tell other people about things that you already know. At a certain point you participated in the program of the space program, and up to that point this was a fine experience. But suddenly Obama came along, and Obama shut down the space program. Scan courtesy NASA/Johnson Now today, you happen to be in a key position for fostering the revival of the space program. Youre a leader in the space program. And therefore youre going to do more to try to reach out to get more people involved, in it. Well even allow people in California to participate in the space program. These are the nice things that we can probably offer. But the point is, that place is there! The same area that you were working in, when the space program was shut down, is still there. And were now trying to struggle our way out from under the mud, to get into full and normal reaction to what the space program had meant in the beginning. That was shut down by Obama. Now were bringing it back. And now we know that were capable of bringing it back and what were going to do it to bring it back, and were going to bring it back to the entirety of the people of the United States, among others, right now! Question: Hello, Lyn. Its E from Montreal, Canada. Its great to follow up Kesha. What I wanted to ask you: How does your concept of energy-flux density in the economy and progress upwards, translate into the moral domain of mankind? In other words, how does an individual in everyday life achieve better, more productive ways of contributing and participating in the universe? LaRouche: I think its better not to think of oneself as living in that kind of context. I think its the idea of opportunity to get access, to create something for mankind, which is beyond what mankind has otherwise been able to get. And thats the simple foundation of things, that makes work good from failure. Zealous Defense of Degeneracy Question: Hello, Lyn. Its H again from Montreal. I became involved with the organization about a year ago. Before that I was very much part of the degeneration and the ugliness of the culture, and finding myself here today, and the person Ive become because of joining this organization and organizing myself, I struggle with fighting, as you say, with the Russell within myself and trying to find a way to inspire others to find the strength to fight that within themselves. And in particular, when it comes to youth, and the youth movement which you started for the future, as you mentioned, every week youre only getting older, and were all only getting older, and the organization, a lot of the members are only getting older: So how can we, as an organization, find a way to fight, or to inspire young people, who are so zealous and adamant in defending the very system that is degenerating them? And in particular, I know many young artists, very talented in terms of the technical aspects of art, but very depressed in why they do what they do and the reasons they do what they do. And for everyone watching this all over the world, and for here, how can we find a way to fight that zealousness within young people? LaRouche: Fighting is a necessary occupation in these matters. For example, lets take Western Canada. A whole area, there, have been becoming suicide cases, where they had been enriched and progressive. The question is, how do you answer that question? How do you account for that? Now throughout the United States youll find whole areas where people who were earlier progressively qualified people, suddenly become not only incompetent, but they become suicidal, en masse. They use drugs; they use other devices in order to get out of the experience of their life. And this is true in much of the world. Its not just in these two areas, the phenomenon in Canada, which is significant, or the United States. And you go into the South, the southern states of the Americas. You see how desperate the situation is. Theres a force of evil, which I would locate as taking root, at the beginning of the 20th century, the Bertrand Russell influence. The Bertrand Russell legacy spread out throughout much of the world, throughout the trans Atlantic community and beyond, affecting, therefore, entire generations of people in these categories. We have to actually campaign, to bring people to understand the importance of the human individual as a creative force. And thats the only thing that will do anything for mankind, the asserting of mankinds role as a creative force, in the future. Question: Hi Lyn, this is B from New Jersey/New York and Los Angeles. I run into people just thinking on a lower level, object perceptions or sense perceptions. I think many of the qualities of this spiritual aspect of mankind [are found in Einstein]. For me, in just brief readings of Einsteins work, it really does give a sense that he was not a sense perceptual person. He did not believe in sense perceptions. It seems that in music it works pretty much the same way, if you do not believe in the notes, that is. Why is it that people just have a difficult time with this question of the spirituality of the human race? LaRouche: Well, I dont find any problem in it. First of all, its simple: You have to have a perspective. And the perspective is that you are going to do something to promote the creation and development of new human beings, and that you will have a part in the development of these new human beings. We were supposed to educate children. Well, I can say that since Bertrand Russell came into power, we dont educate children any more, we downgrade children. We have had Presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and a couple of others who were creative, but most of our recent Presidents were trash or worse. Therefore, the struggle is to try to create an organization in society which gets rid of the trash problem; we call it the Bertrand Russell legacy. But most people have given inmost teachers have given in to this kind of thing, this treason against mankind. We dont develop creative minds seriously. Or if they are creative, we stultify their ability to express creative powers of development. So I think that latter issue is the point which we ought to focus on, because there are many people who are wasting their entire lives by getting rich, and making the poor richer. That sort of thing. So therefore, we should actually demand of ourselves that we take into account this kind of issue. And look at yourself from the standpoint of that kind of issue. What can you do to resolve your relationship to that issue? Classical Composition Defines Creativity Question: Hi, its Diane. Yesterday at the conference, I was actually very struck by what happened in the Q&A period, because in the morning, we had Helgas speech; the Chinese representative discussing the One Belt, One Road; the speaker from Korea who was talking about the per capita income in Korea having gone from whatever it was, $100 per person, to being a major economy; the presentation by the Egyptian Consul on the extraordinary transformation and potential of that country; and then Helgas very distinct challenge to Americans to return to our Constitutional principles and the greatest identity of our nation. Then when people got up to ask questions, it was as if this beautiful feast had been laid out before them, and they turned around to grab something out of the garbage can! It was like they stuck a banana peel on top of their heads and said, theres so much evil and Im so oppressed. So I was just very struck by this, and two things come to mind: One, a number of weeks ago, you emphasized the question of natural law, which I think is something that people dont have that great of an understanding of; and then also, the question of why the music work is so important in terms of dealing with this kind of phenomenon. Do you have more to say about this? LaRouche: I will say it, because its essential. This is essential. The composition of music, the way we are trying to bring it up to standard now, at this time, in this area, that is whats crucial. Why? Well, people say they have all kinds of uses for what they call music. But we know today, since the 20th century, most of what was called music became immediately junk! There were no more great composers! None! They were crushed. They didnt cease to exist, but they were crushed at every opportunity that institutions could crush them. Only a handful of people even approximated honest musical conceptions. Societe Wilhelm Furtwangler And you cannot separate that issue or issues from themselves. These things are important, and in their Classical compositional form, are intrinsically essential, if youre going to get a mind that is capable of understanding what music is. Thats the thing to put on the plate right now. Thats the issue! Youve got to be able to deliver Classical artistic composition, alive! Question: [Renee Sigerson] Hello, Lyn. I was really struck yesterday when the professor on the final panel [Ben Wang] was showing the painting from China, and was discussing also the Chinese characters and the Chinese languageand that each character is monosyllabic, which really shocked me. It reminded me of the discussions we had had on Classical Greek with Tony Papert, because the thing that suddenly hits you, when youre attempting to learn Greek, is that its a language which actually functioned in the Classical period with the assumption that the person that you were speaking to had a mind! When we would work on this, I would really be struck, and say you know the way we use English, we always assume that the person were speaking to really doesnt have a mind! In terms of the functioning of the organization, part of the answer to what were discussing here, isand its related to the pedagogy of music or like when we were just listening to the Furtwanglerthat people have to really challenge themselves to hear the inner voice of the other at all times, that kind of discipline, and really get rid of this traffic-light way of having dialogue with people. Because its really not a question. I think what the Chinese example showsbecause they have survived all these centuries, and discovered and rediscoveredis that what is metaphorical within language is something which is embedded in the process by which people live and work together. And theres such a strong emphasis in China on multi-generational survival, that obviously this is somehow embedded in what theyre doing. But maybe you can explain this better than I can. LaRouche: There are several aspects of this question which you pose which I can deal with here; because some of it goes deeper, there. But I take it in terms of my own life. I succeeded several times in my life, and each timecoming out of military service, back into normal non military life was quite a differencebut I was then a victim of the evil forces that conjured this thing, and I battered around for a while, and I rose to a significance in the course of a generation; and I was put into prison. I got out of prison, and I got help in a sense, from Bill Clinton and others who sponsored my getting out of the prison system; and I went back into scientific work again, in Russia and other parts of the world. So thats the way life sometimes goes. So the question is, what underlies the difference between one kind of experience and another? And the main thing, which lies within the human being, or one whos prompted to living, is that Classical artistic composition, true Classical artistic composition is the universal principle on which everything thats important is based. And I know it comes in different forms of expression, but I can say Classical musical composition is a paragon defining creativity. Its what the baby learns eventually, what the adult learns, and what somebody ends up producing. Question: Hi Lyn. You mentioned a couple things that just resonated with me right nowthe metaphor of the baby, and Classical composition. The first thing that went through my mind when you mentioned the baby was Platos Symposium and the idea that we all are pregnant, either in body or in mind. How can this organization help all of us refine our ability to give birth to that child, metaphorically speaking, using the Classical composition? Using the Classical ideas of what humanity is, and what the spirit of humanity is? LaRouche: Well, when theres been a cutoff of periods of creativity in the history of mankind, you find that theres a cutoff. And then you look around and you find that eventually somebody comes back and brings something new which is also creative. So the design of mankind to become creative, to live as a creative personality, that is a driving force in and of itself. And often people will discover that in themselves, rather than discovering it from some other source. They simply decide themselves that they want to think and talk in this way. They want to communicate in this way. They want to live in this kind of way! So sometimes, many people are successful, not the greatest number of people, but a great number of great people, are able to do that. And if they are influential and allowed to become influential, then it works. If you get the kind of teachers that are trained under Bertrand Russell from the beginning of the Twentieth Century, then you get a stinking project! And a product to go with it. Thats been the problem. Thats the problem we face when we talk about the question of the relationship of mankind to the future. There are people who are actually disgusting, they do not respect the principle of the future of mankind, that mankind must be motivated to find in himself and herself something of creativity, which gives them access to understanding something which is beautiful, and which they want to serve. And I think thats the only easy way to get a description of it. Speed: I think were at the end of the questions, Lyn. I think todays dialogue has been notable for several reasons. One if that we actually have a dialogue with Lyn and the Policy Committee, because we have Diane and Kesha here, and you have an audience for that dialogue made up of organizers, whove actually been qualified to be in it. This is a higher level meeting, I think, than weve had. So, if you have anything else to say to us, please go ahead. LaRouche: I should say, we should be more creative than youve ever been before! This article appears in the April 22, 2016 issue of Executive Intelligence Review. EDITORIAL New Documents Further Detail Obamas Collusion with 9/11 Sponsors [PDF version of this article] April 19The Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP), the highest declassification authority in the Executive Branch of the U.S. Government, housed at the National Archives, has declassified 29 new documents relating to the governments investigations into the 9/11 attacks, and they reveal new, damning details about the Saudi Royal Familys deep involvement in those September 11, 2001 attacks. From the time of his first campaign for President in 2008, Obama has promised the families of the 9/11 victims that he will declassify the 28 pages from the Joint Congressional Inquiry, which detail the Saudi involvement in those heinous attacks. He has not only broken that promise. Obama has consistently protected the Saudis from justice over their role in 9/11 and is now openly showing his hand by pledging to veto the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), now before the Congress, just prior to his now ongoing visit to Saudi Arabia. The President has sold out the American people to his slavish loyalty to the Saudis and their British patrons. This is a crime that demands, at minimum, President Obamas immediate impeachment. The 29 documents now declassified, contain work sheets, interview notes, and other documents from the 9/11 Commission, that make clear that the Federal investigators probing the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks had compiled massive amounts of evidence of direct involvement by agents of the Saudi Royal Family, the Saudi Ministry of Religious Affairs, and the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation. They provide a backdrop to the suppressed 28-page chapter from the earlier Joint Congressional Inquiry, which merely summarized the volumes of evidence compiledand covered upabout the direct Saudi government complicity in 9/11. Perhaps the single most damning document, declassified last year, is a 47-page memorandum by Dana Leseman and Michael Jacobson, detailing all of the Saudi government officials who were implicated in the 9/11 attacks. Leseman was a Justice Department attorney and Jacobson was an FBI Special Agent. Both had served as key investigators for the Joint Congressional Inquiry, and had authored the 28-page chapter that Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have suppressed. They went on to work for the 9/11 Commission, where their efforts to pursue the Saudi leads from their earlier work were stymied by Commission director Philip Zelikow. Leseman was ultimately fired by Zelikow for refusing to obey his orders to stop the probe of Saudi Royals ties to 9/11. The 47-page document identified a total of 21 confirmed and suspected Saudi government employees who abetted the San Diego hijackers cell during the year-and-a-half that they were in the United States preceeding the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The document detailed all of their roles in supporting the two West Coast hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. It also called for a thorough investigation of the FBI, which had an informant in San Diego who housed the two 9/11 hijackers in his home for months before the attacks. One of the central figures linking the Saudi regime to the 9/11 plotters was Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi intelligence agent who was the main financier of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar during their entire time in the United States. In addition to his no-show job, with a sizeable expense account from a Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation contractor, Dallah Aviation, al-Bayoumi earlier received $400,000 from the Saudi Ministry of Religious Affairs during the 1990s, ostensibly to build a mosque in the San Diego area. Investigators believed that those funds may have been used to build up terrorist cells in the area. These beliefs were buttressed by the fact that the San Diego mosque was run by Anwar Al-Awlaki, a spiritual leader of Al Qaeda, who was ultimately killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemenand who may also have been an FBI informant. The evidence of deep Saudi involvement is almost matched in the 47-page document by evidence of FBI coverup of the 9/11 story. One segment of the recently declassified Document 17 featured a series of questions about FBI stonewalling and coverup. The document posed the following two questions: 1. Did the FBI intentionally withhold from the Joint Inquiry information about the informants relationship with the hijackers and subsequently attempt to obstruct the Joint Inquirys investigation of the matter? 2. If the FBI did withhold information and obstruct the Joint Inquirys investigation, were the FBIs actions indicative of a larger pattern of FBI non-compliance with Congressional oversight? What changes would therefore be needed to ensure more effective Congressional oversight of the FBI? A thorough review of all of the newly released documents is now underway. But sufficient evidence is already reviewed, proving the deep Saudi role in 9/11 and the ongoing coverup by President Obama and top officials of the FBI. The evidence of President Obamas witting role in this coverup already meets and passes the Constitutional standards of high crimes and misdemeanors requiring impeachment proceedings. There are credible reports circulating in Washington that President Obama is using his current visit to Saudi Arabia to solicit funds from the Saudi Royals for his post-presidential library and careerperhaps in return for guarantees that the 9/11 story will continued to be covered up at the top. Is there any justification for delaying one moment more the launching of those long-overdue impeachment proceedings? In a spectacular collapse that took just nine months, SunEdison filed for Chapter 11 protection Thursday, marking the largest bankruptcy in the history of the renewable energy industry. Our decision to initiate a court-supervised restructuring was a difficult but important step to address our immediate liquidity issues, SunEdison Chief Executive Ahmad Chatila said in a statement. The court process will allow us to right-size our balance sheet and reduce our debt. In July 2015, SunEdison appeared to be riding high, building and operating commercial solar energy projects around the world, including several in Southern California. Its stock market value reached almost $10billion. Advertisement But the company, based in Missouri and with solar headquarters in San Mateo County, went on an acquisitions bender, racking up $11.7 billion in debt in the last two years. SunEdison gobbled up projects in every continent except Antarctica. It doesnt work to try to be the biggest and get the biggest market share at the expense of profits, said Jenny Chase, head of solar analysis for Bloomberg New Energy Finance. You do have to have some focus on A) your strategic competencies and B) the bottom line. The company said the bankruptcy will not affect its two publicly traded subsidiaries, TerraForm Power and TerraForm Global. It said that $300 million in new financing will be used to keep up day-to-day operations such as paying vendors, delivering employee paychecks and benefits, and supplying capital for ongoing projects. According to the Chapter 11 filing, SunEdison declared assets of $20.7 billion and liabilities of $16.1 billion as of Sept. 30. SunEdison asked a bankruptcy judge to appoint an independent examiner to go over recent transactions, even though the company said it is unaware of any particular wrongdoing. The company has lost more than $9 billion in equity and before trading was halted its stock was selling at 34 cents a share, down from $33.40 last July. Last month, SunEdison revealed it is facing scrutiny from the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission over questions surrounding its financing practices and how much cash it had on hand when its stock meltdown occurred. Given its size, the SunEdison bankruptcy figures to be complicated. One of SunEdisons problems was that they had no idea what was going on within its divisions because it had so many of them, said Chase, who is based in Zurich, Switzerland. Theres a lot of stuff there that needs to be sorted out. Energy analysts say a growing number of investors worried that SunEdisons aggressive acquisitions culture led the company to pay far more than it should have on various projects. When the stock market took a bearish turn at the end of 2015, the cost of equity went up and a vicious cycle began. Accelerating the process was SunEdisons embrace of yield co financing mechanisms. A yield co is a subsidiary that buys projects from its parent company to fuel growth, free up cash, and pay shareholders a big dividend yield. But as capital markets got shaky, partly because of crashing oil prices, investors started taking a closer look at the quality of SunEdisons new acquisitions and concluded the company was paying far more for the assets than it should have. One acquisition that eventually fell apart offered a big warning sign. Last summer, SunEdison bought Utah-based Vivint Solar for about $2.2 billion, with eyes on Vivints rooftop solar portfolio. But last month Vivint terminated the deal, contending that SunEdison had failed to meet the agreements obligations. Vivint said it intends to seek all legal remedies available to it in respect of such willful breach. I think what we found is that management was incredibly optimistic as to how the deals that they were pulling together would pan out, said M.J. Shiao, director of solar research for Greentech Media. And that optimism ran counter to the market forces at large. Even one of SunEdisons yield cos, TerraForm Global, turned on its parent company, filing a suit this month accusing SunEdison of failing to deliver on $231 million on projects in India. Despite the scope of the collapse, financial analysts say SunEdison possesses a number of valuable assets that can be sold off to at least partially placate creditors. There are good projects here that have signed contracts in place and they have very reasonable returns associated with them, Shiao said. You have a number of other developers and solar asset buyers that will be interested in taking this on, looking at these projects and perhaps taking them off of SunEdisons hands. Is the news of the SunEdison collapse, coming less than a month after Spanish renewable energy giant Abengoa filed for bankruptcy in the U.S., an indication that the solar industry is in trouble? I definitely dont think so, Shiao said. You can see some of its peers like SunPower and First Solar are profitable businesses. You can see that the industry itself is growing both within the U.S. and at a global level, and the cost of solar is falling as well. But critics of renewable energy subsidies say federal tax credits, which were extended for solar for an additional five years in a deal hammered out by Congress last December, should come to an end. The U.S. Department of Energy website showed that SunEdison received $968,120 in a DOE cooperative award to take part in the departments SunShot Incubator program, which has funded more than 350 projects aimed at driving down the cost of solar power. In addition, SunEdison received grants totaling $1.87 million from the federal governments stimulus package. The simple reality is that many of these companies have been dependent on financing, especially federal financing, and it means they take risks they normally would not take, said Dan Simmons, vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research. rob.nikolewski@sduniontribune.com Twitter: @robnikolewski Times staff writer Samantha Masunaga contributed to this report. I need the Mexicans looking dispossessed, a frustrated assistant director barks at local townsfolk hired to add background color to the big-budget movie Desposeidos! In any dialect, the cue is all-too apropos: Their lowly status on the film set mirrors the societal bottom rung occupied by the undocumented protagonists of eXtras, the sharp-edged, bicultural dramedy making its English-language premiere at the Rubicon Theatre in Ventura. A coproduction between Rubicon and Mexico City-based Foro Shakespeare, this two-actor, multicharacter tour de force transposes the plot and central metaphor of Marie Jones Stones in His Pockets from Ireland to a desert California-Mexico border community. Here, as in the original, the residents lives are upended by the invasion of a Hollywood movie crew. Sabina Bermans adaptation gives timely voice to the culturally dispossessed lurking in the shadows of our raging immigration debate. The production leverages the versatility of prominent stage, film and TV veterans Bruno and Odiseo Bichir, who, along with their Oscar-nominated brother Demian, performed eXtras in its original 2003 Spanish-language incarnation. (They rotated in the roles so that there would always be one extra waiting in the wings.) Advertisement See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour >> The staging spotlights performance stripped to its essence, relying only on inventive use of red bandannas and atmospheric lighting shifts to conjure up a dizzying array of vivid characters. Bruno, who also directed, brings whimsy and hilarious physical dexterity to characters ranging from wannabe screenwriter to pampered starlet to rowdy teenager. Odiseo exudes complementary gravitas as the rugged loner who becomes the starlets love interest of the moment, the films imperious but clueless director, and a leftist old timer who once had been an extra on the 1950s Elia Kazan film Viva Zapata! and still venerates its ideals. Adding emotional resonance is the original score composed and performed by 17-year-old prodigy Maya Burns in a variety of styles -- traditional ranchero, corrido ballads, even Mexican Surfer Punk -- befitting the characters and their stories. (Burns and accompanist Marcos Ruedas also perform a half-hour preshow thats well worth an early arrival.) Even during occasional Spanglish exchanges, the Bichir brothers differentiate their characters with precision and clarity that make following the narrative straightforward, entertaining and touching. The May 1 performance will be in Spanish, honoring Mexicos Labor Day. Instead of building a wall, the piece advocates an inclusive vision of shared humanity that transcends racial, national and cultural borders. ------------ eXtras, Rubicon Theatre, 1006 E. Main St., Ventura. 2 and 7 p.m. Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends May 1. $44-$54. (805) 667-2900 or www.rubicontheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes. Get more entertainment news on Facebook Its been more than 10 years since a painter has represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. That was Ed Ruscha in 2005. This week, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University announced that another Los Angeles painter, Mark Bradford, would be given free rein at the U.S. Pavilion for 2017s Venice Biennale. Its too soon for Bradford to divulge details about what he has in mind for his Venice installation, but we can be sure that it will be more than simply pretty paintings hanging on walls. There will be a message. The artists international reputation rests on deeply layered canvases that take on issues of class, culture, race and gender in abstract ways. He also helped launch a social services organization and gallery space in Leimert Park called Art + Practice, devoted in part to helping foster youth. Advertisement This attention to politics and activism, along with Bradfords formidable painting skills, are why Rose director Christopher Bedford says Bradford is the right artist right now to represent the U.S. at one of the most high-profile contemporary art events in the world. I dont know if weve seen someone with the dexterity of [Abstract Expressionist Willem] De Kooning who is also committed to activism, Bedford says. That is unique to art. Bedford sounded ebullient as he discussed the news over the telephone on Wednesday morning. I have two hats of loyalty here, he says. First and foremost to Mark. I want this to be his moment in the sun. But there is a secondary story: I want people to think about the Rose. That the Rose Art Museum, which just half a dozen years ago was in danger of having its collection sold off to make up for recession shortfalls, is the sponsoring institution is an unprecedented comeback of a nearly shuttered museum. Certainly, Bradfords selection is momentous on its own. He is only the third African American artist to represent the U.S. at the Biennale in a solo capacity. (The other two were Robert Colescott in 1997 and Fred Wilson in 2003.) And as the first painter to take over the vaunted U.S. pavilion in a dozen years following a series of artists working in installation, performance and video his choice proves once again that painting isnt dead, nor does it even have a passing fever. At this point, painting is like a vampire, jokes Bradford on the telephone. Its been resurrected so many times. Certainly, in his hands it has come alive in singular ways. Bradfords stormy abstract compositions are comprised of layers of paint and detritus (from street signs to perm papers) that comment on societal issues in sly and beguiling ways. Ive always been interested in art history, the history of painting, reanimating, expanding that history, says the artist. Its always been central to my work. Bedford says it makes sense that the two most recent painters to represent the U.S. at the Biennale would hail from L.A. I think you can divide the art world in the United States roughly as follows, he explains. The center for academic art history is Boston. The commercial art world is in New York. And the center for art schools is Los Angeles. So the idea that great painters would emerge from that context shouldnt surprise anyone. And, in fact, it was Bradfords dexterity as a painter that captivated Bedford to begin with. The pair have known each other for roughly a decade. They first met in the mid-2000s, when Bedford was an assistant curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and he paid the artist a studio visit, then included him in the 2008 group exhibition Hard Targets. Two years later, after Bedford had gone to work at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio, he helped organized a traveling exhibition of the artists work that was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and San Franciscos Museum of Modern Art, among other institutions. (L.A. missed the boat.) But it was a 2014 exhibition of Bradfords paintings and sculptures at the Rose, titled Sea Monsters, that made Bedford think the time was right to aim for something even bigger. That was a really fantastic show, he says. The idea that Mark might represent the U.S. in Venice hit me when I saw those sublime paintings of his. In his review of the exhibition, Boston Globe critic Sebastian Smee described them as a bold, body-shaking suite of paintings and sculptures. Mark Bradford in front of a sign for his solo show, Scorched Earth, at the Hammer Museum in the summer of 2015. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) This ethos is something that fits well with the history of the Rose Art Museum and its academic setting, Brandeis University. The museum was established in 1961 with a social justice mission. But following the economic collapse of 2008, the university pursued the idea of disbanding the museum and selling off its collection priceless works by artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. Or as Bedford puts it, The greatest collection of Modern and contemporary art associated with any university in the country. ... The idea that that story would dissolve is unthinkable. An outpouring of support (as well as a lawsuit filed by museum supporters) led the university to scuttle the plan. In the intervening years, the little university museum that was almost scavenged for parts has come roaring back. Bedford joined as director in 2012. Bradford joined the museums board about two years ago, at Bedfords urging. But he says that he was most inspired by the universitys commitment to social issues. The idea of social justice permeates every single department of the school, he explains. Social practice wasnt just a department in the school, it was in every single area of the school. Now the museum and one of the artists who has participated in its revival are going to Venice as representatives of the United States. Good news for Los Angeles. Even better news for the Rose. Staff writer Jessica Gelt contributed to this story. Twitter: @cmonstah Walt Disney Co.'s ABC and Univision Communications have ended their nearly 3-year-old Fusion network joint venture aimed at millennial viewers. Disney on Thursday sold its 50% stake in the venture back to Univision, which plans to reposition several of its assets, including Fusion, as a multi-platform destination for the new, rising American mainstream, Univision said in a statement. Terms of the sale were not disclosed. Univision now takes over ABCs role in handling distribution and ad sales functions for Fusion and will maintain editorial control. The company said it was establishing a new business group to include several Univision properties, including Univision Music, Fusion, El Rey, The Root, The Onion, A.V. Club and Clickhole. Advertisement The ABC-Univision partnership failed to achieve the level of success the companies had hoped for when they launched the outlet in October 2013 in a high-profile bid to reach young bilingual Latino adults desired by Madison Avenue. Fusion ended up losing tens of millions of dollars for Univision and ABC. The TV channel is available in just about 40 million homes, making it difficult to attract major advertisers. The channel lacks distribution by two major carriers, Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Cable. Last summer, Univision acknowledged that Fusion and another start-up TV channel, El Rey, lost $85.2 million in 2014, according to regulatory filings. Disney executives became frustrated with the partnership when Univision abruptly changed course several months before the channel launched. Univision news executives decided to position Fusion as a network for all ethnicities, rather than focus on Latinos. But Disney already owns a channel, called Freeform, that is targeted to the same demographic, and the company did not want to own competing properties. The Fusion cable TV channel and its edgy website also took on a political tone that made some executives inside Disney uncomfortable, according to two people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. The Fusion website, in contrast, was able to attract a large audience with its cultural coverage, a variety of viewpoints and aggressive reporting, including during the 2014 cyberattack at Sony Pictures Entertainment. Fusions website says that it attracts more than 10 million visitors a month. Fusion represented Univisions first major push into English-language programming, an acknowledgement that the privately held Spanish-language media company needed to reach beyond its loyal audience of immigrants to stay relevant for younger audiences. Through impactful journalism and smart satirical commentary, this first-in-kind multicultural-focused media portfolio will continue serving a rising generation with meaningful content, Isaac Lee, Univisions chief news and digital officer, wrote in an email to Fusions staff. Most second- and third-generation Latinos watch TV in English, so Univision began aggressively courting those viewers with Fusion. Two-thirds of Latinos ages 16 to 25 in the U.S. were born here, and nearly all are proficient in English, according to a Pew Research Center report in 2013. Advertisers are keenly interested in reaching this segment, the largest and youngest minority group in the U.S. As media have evolved, so has Fusion. meg.james@latimes.com Twitter: @MegJamesLAT Dish Network and Viacom Inc. executives continued negotiations late Wednesday night to try to reach a new carriage agreement for such popular channels as MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, BET and Nickelodeon. No deal had been reached by the Wednesday night deadline, but talks continued into the night. Viacom channels remained on Dishs satellite TV system that serves nearly 14 million customer homes nationwide. Negotiations continue, said one person close to the situation. Advertisement Earlier Wednesday, Dish Networks Chairman and Chief Executive Charlie Ergen said his company was prepared to live without Viacoms 18 TV channels -- permanently. But Ergen also sounded a positive note, saying that he saw a path to a deal and that the two sides had made some progress in their talks since last weekend. Dish has nearly 500,000 customer homes in the Los Angeles region. Wall Street has been keenly interested in the situation because the stakes are high for both companies. The battle could test whether a major pay-TV distributor, in this case Dish, was serious about dropping a group of well-known TV channels -- risking customer defections. For Viacom, the threat of a Dish blackout has been hanging over the company for months. Viacom has become more vulnerable in recent years because of declining ratings at its marquee networks, including Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon. (The childrens channel has improved its performance in recent quarters.) Viacoms stock has fallen 45% in the last year, and the company could ill afford to lose one of its biggest pay-TV partners. Wells Fargo Securities media analyst Marci Ryvicker, in a report Wednesday, said Viacom could lose as much as $700 million in annual revenue if Dish were to drop the channels permanently. Dish would also suffer from a lengthy outage. We estimate Dish could lose 330,000 to 660,000 subscribers, Ryvicker wrote. Earlier Wednesday, during a conference call to discuss his company earnings, Ergen said that Dish was simply trying to hold the line on programming costs that have been rising steadily. Consumers are frustrated by the size of their pay-TV bills. We try to protect our customers from two things: One, needless price increases, and two, paying for product that they are viewing other places, Ergen said. meg.james@latimes.com Twitter: @MegJamesLAT 4:14 P.M. Sheila E. shares her memories of working with Prince Prince performs with Sheila E. at the 2007 National Council of La Raza ALMA Awards in Pasadena. (Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press) When Sheila E. picked up the phone Friday evening, she didnt need to be asked how it felt to lose her friend, Prince. The breathy, reassuring voice of this singer and percussionist a familiar presence in the mid-1980s thanks to tunes like The Glamorous Life and Erotic City had grown small and measured, a clear indication that the news of Princes death Thursday at age 57 had taken a toll. Yet Sheila E. who first made a name for herself in the Bay Area playing with her father, percussionist Pete Escovedo, and other jazz musicians seemed to brighten as she began telling me about her experiences with the legendary musician. After meeting in 1978, the two started working together around the time of Purple Rain, then spent much of the next half-decade side by side, both on the road and in the studio; they remained close, she said, even after they drifted apart musically. Here are excerpts from our conversation. Read more 3:59 P.M. Prince fans pay tribute with pop-up stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame 4:49 P.M. Prince and Big Daddy Kane made a Batdance remix that Warner Bros. wouldnt let you hear Michael Keaton as Batman. (Warner Bros.) So, lets just get this out of the way: My favorite Prince album is the Batman soundtrack. Its criminally underrated. Its dark, its frantic and its headlined by Batdance, a wild track that flips Bruce Wayne, Vicki Vale and Joker samples into a sexually charged future funk opera. I just wish the world couldve heard the remix of Batdance, which features a guest rap verse from Big Daddy Kane. Its wildly different -- stripped-down percussion, vocals from Prince that werent in the original, riffs on the old Batman TV theme, and a furious, wailing synth solo. Prince apparently loved it, but Warner Brothers wouldnt release it. But why? Read more 4:40 P.M. What it sounds like when a thousand high school choir students pay tribute to Prince Students participating in the 27th annual High School Choir Festival at Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles honored Prince with a rendition of Purple Rain. 5:09 P.M. Princes last shows: A view from the front row A detail of a photo taken from the front row at one of Princes final shows, at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta on April 14. (Amiee Stubbs / For The Times) During Princes second-to-last concert, the early show in Atlanta on April 14, his voice was perfection -- said a photographer who was seeing him for the seventh time and found herself in the right place at the right time to snap a photo she knew she shouldnt be taking. I wasnt going to share it, said Nashville photographer Amiee Stubbs, 42, who had a third-row seat but found herself standing pressed up against center stage as the show was coming to a close. Then this happened. He was so perfect that night. He played Linus and Lucy from A Charlie Brown Christmas and David Bowies Heroes, she said by phone from Nashville on Friday, and he took his songs and made them like Ive never heard them. As for his health, there were no indications that he wasnt feeling well, said Stubbs, who made the drive to Atlanta twice after Prince got sick and at the last minute pushed his Feb. 7 shows to the next Thursday. He had the flu before ... but I was thinking he couldnt be here if he couldnt give his all. Im just so glad I took that photo I shouldnt have taken. Amiee Stubbs, photographer and Prince fan Because he was performing sans guitar, with only a piano and a microphone, he didnt move around as much, she said, but looked as sexy as ever strutting out to the keyboard. Everything we love about him, it was there, even though the style was so different, she said. With no-photography rules strictly enforced at Prince shows -- she said shes seen three people get booted just for pulling out their phones -- Stubbs wasnt about to broadcast what she was doing. But with the best seat in the house, after the musician high-fived her and others up against the stage, she decided she had to get the shot. I was thinking, I may never get this chance again, to be so close to Prince, she said. I assumed there would be another time I saw him, though. I didnt think I would be putting an iPhone photo in my portfolio. But, she said, now I have that moment, and maybe it could transport some people there. Im just so glad I took that photo I shouldnt have taken. Christie DZurilla 3:56 P.M. LACMA pays tribute with a purple Rain Room 3:40 P.M. Purple Rain is coming back to theaters this weekend Prince in the movie Purple Rain. (Handout) Princes 1984 movie, Purple Rain, is coming back to the big screen in the L.A. area and elsewhere for a limited run starting this weekend. The film will screen Saturday through Thursday in select AMC theaters. The screenings are designed to pay tribute to the musician, the theater chain said. Purple Rain will be shown at the AMC Atlantic Times Square 14 in Monterey Park, AMC Broadway 4 in Santa Monica, AMC Covina 17 in Covina, AMC Norwalk 20 in Norwalk, AMC Ontario Mills 30 in Ontario, AMC Orange 30 with IMAX in Orange, AMC Promenade 16 in Woodland Hills and the AMC Rolling Hills 20 in Rolling Hills. Carmike Theaters also will show the film in about 80 theaters in 28 states during the same period. None of those theaters is in California. Christie DZurilla 2:47 P.M. Funky? Soulful? Of course. But Prince was a brilliant lyricist, too Prince, shown performing in Los Angeles in 2009, died Thursday at age 57. (Kristian Dowling / Getty Images) Much has already been written about Prince the composer, Prince the performer and band leader, Prince the musical pioneer. His skills at crafting a pop song and making it just weird enough to jump out amid lesser specimens was unparalleled. Criminally less celebrated are his lyrics. Where aged, respected songwriters like Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello are praised for their language, few Prince appreciations have focused on his skills as a wordsmith. But Prince was as eloquent with the pen as those bards. Could it be that by wrapping his talent beneath spangled pantsuits and a high-heeled facade rather than in blue jeans or well-tailored suits, Prince has been given short shrift as a lyricist? Princes primo opening lines, for example, are some of the best scene-setters in pop: I guess I should have known by the way you parked your car sideways that it wouldnt last, from Little Red Corvette, contains a novels worth of information about a relationship, a rendezvous and its futility. Read more 1:27 P.M. Sheriff: Princes death is not believed to be a suicide Read more 1:03 P.M. Cinefamily to honor Prince with 35-millimeter screenings of Purple Rain A crowd pays tribute to Prince inside the club First Avenue in Minneapolis, where Purple Rain was shown late Thursday (Renee Jones Schneider / Star Tribune / Associated Press) Often regarded as Princes crowning achievement, his album and film Purple Rain is -- through the hazy lens of 2016 -- ridiculous, overwrought and full of enough leaden dialogue to sink the film into the waters of Lake Minnetonka. But taken as a document of the artist at the peak of his powers, its essential, even astonishing in moments, most visibly in its performances from Prince and his band. Whether you were there in the 80s as the movie captivated pop culture or somehow missed seeing the movie the first time around, L.A.'s Cinefamily has you covered with a series of screenings going into this weekend that serve as a fitting tribute. And if you dont get chills leading into Prince performing the films title track, check to make sure youre still with us too. 12:46 P.M. The Coachella artists who should cover Prince this weekend -- and a few who shouldnt Prince performs at Coachella in 2008. (Los Angeles Times) Were still processing that were now living in a world without Prince. With a loss of this magnitude comes the inevitable, well-meaning tributes (keep your eye on the next Grammys, Oscars, the AMAs -- basically anywhere theres more than five musicians in the same room). Included in that is this weekends Coachella, which just went from absorbing idle speculation about which famous guest will turn up to which of the acts will pay tribute to one of musics true indelible icons. In a sense, the Empire Polo Club remains Princes house since his unforgettable Coachella set in 2008. Following is a list of a few acts that could deliver fitting and goose-bump-raising Prince covers this weekend if they desired, along with a few other artists who, while their hearts may be in the right place, may want to think twice. Read more 11:26 A.M. Reporting from Washington Obama listened to Prince to get warmed up for a meeting with the British prime minister President Obama started his day of diplomacy in London on Friday with an important moment of meditation with the U.S. ambassador, listening to Prince hits Purple Rain and Delirious on vinyl. It was a fitting start for Obama and Ambassador Matthew Barzun as their generation mourned the death of the multi-genre superstar whose work was often political. Princes 1980s-era music mourned nuclear proliferation and exhorted President Reagan to talk to Russia before it was too late. But Obama cited simpler reasons for his kinship with the performer, who last summer put on a show at the White House for the Obamas and a few of their closest friends. I love Prince because he put out great music, Obama said. He didnt know the artist well, he said, but was struck by his power as a performer. He was extraordinary and creative and original and full of energy, Obama said. The ambassador has a turntable at Winfield House, his residence in London, Obama said, and put on the two songs from two different albums, both vintage 80s. Just to get warmed up before we left the house for important bilateral meetings like this, Obama joked. Prime Minister David Cameron took no offense. In the name of great music, he said. 8:30 A.M. Actor Louie Anderson, a Minnesota native, shares an emotional goodbye to Prince 8:00 A.M. The L.A. Times remembers a true genius 7:12 A.M. The Fans A dance party fit for a Prince: The memorial in Leimert Park Julya Baer honors Prince in Leimert Park, where fans laughed, cried and danced in remembrance of the music legend. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times) Dozens of fans gathered in South Los Angeles on Thursday to pay homage to pop icon Prince with a musical celebration that united generations of listeners. Toddlers and seniors grooved to the tune of The Purple One and swapped stories about how his music had affected their lives. The festive tone turned somber when the slow, melodic chords of Princes hit Purple Rain blared from the speakers. Dancing ceased. Fans thrusted candles and cellphones into the darkening sky and swayed their arms to the beat. Tears rolled down the cheeks of some peoples faces. Depress Badys voice choked with emotion as he recalled the lyrics to the first song on Princes debut album titled For You. The one-minute, eight-second song with one verse was an ode to his fans. Through his music, he touched my life, said the 44-year-old Leimert Park resident. He didnt conform and always challenged himself. I try to do that in my daily life. . . . Read more 7:04 A.M. How the cast of Hamilton celebrated the life of Prince, with a dance off Hamilton creator and lead actor Lin-Manuel Miranda shared how he and the cast of Broadways Hamilton paid their respects to the recently departed Prince, with a dance off. We lost a giant today, Miranda said to the crowd before breaking into the introduction of Princes song Lets Go Crazy. Moments later the cast would burst into dance. Thankfully Miranda tweeted the whole moment so everyone could partake: 6:42 A.M. Watch Jennifer Hudson and the Broadway cast of The Color Purple bring down the house singing Purple Rain The cast of the Broadway version of The Color Purple took to song Thursday night to pay tribute to Prince. Jennifer Hudson (who plays Shug Avery in the play) addressed the crowd, Tonight, with you guys in mind, we would like you all to join us in honoring Prince. He said his music will live on and he will live through his music, and we want to keep him alive today with his song. The impromptu performance was led by Hudson and Cynthia Erivo. Try not to lose it when Hudson asks to cut the music and the whole room sings a cappella. 6:22 A.M. Otherworldly in the best possible way: Key and Peele remember Prince (Steve Dietl / Warner Bros. Entertainment) The comedy team of Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, best known from their sketch TV show Key & Peele, frequently explores ideas of identity, masculinity and race. Which are, of course, things that Prince frequently grappled with throughout his career as well. The duo are busy promoting their upcoming film Keanu, directed by Peter Atencio, in which a pair of meek, nerdy cousins have to pretend to be drug-dealing gangster henchmen to retrieve a lost cat. The movies unexpected intersection of the hard attitudes of an action movie with the soft cuddliness of a kitten in itself is something of a product of a joyful, jaunty post-Prince worldview. Key and Peele were previously scheduled to get on the phone for separate interviews well before the startling news of Princes death shocked the world on Thursday. Each of them had individual connections to and insights on the musician, but their shared language and perspective came shining through. Keegan-Michael Key: The first time I ever head Lets Go Crazy and I heard the guitar solo, it just meant a lot to me. I was like, Oh, that guys black and hes playing guitar like that. And it was because of him that I really, really started getting into Jimi Hendrix. I was like, Is there anybody else in the world, in this sphere of music, who is like this? And I had to go backwards in time to find it. It was Eddie Hazel from Funkadelic and Jimi Hendrix, and Prince was from that tradition. He was such a consummate, consummate professional. He was otherworldly in the best possible way. Absolutely one of the greatest. He defined so many different parts of my life, what I thought was cool, what I thought music should sound like. Ive never seen anybody musically be so elegant and so raunchy and so adult and so playful all at the same time. Hes one of those guys. Hes like Bowie to me. Losing him is like losing Bowie. Jordan Peele: Its such a profound loss. Just really, really sad. He was really inspiring to artists everywhere, just because of his originality and his intense ability. Im with everyone else processing this. And it does seem a linked tragedy that we lost Bowie and Prince in the same year. They had such an otherworldly spirit. Five years after signing off from daytime television, Oprah Winfrey is returning to the small screen in Greenleaf, a scripted drama about an affluent African American family that presides over a Tennessee megachurch. The premiere episode, which screened Tuesday at the Tribeca Film Festival, follows Grace Greenleaf (Merle Dandridge), prodigal daughter of Bishop James Greenleaf (Keith David), the leader of Greenleaf World Ministries, and his regal wife, Lady Mae (Lynn Whitfield). When Grace returns home for the funeral of her sister, who has died under mysterious circumstances, she stirs up long-simmering tensions within the family. In her first series role, Winfrey plays Graces unconventional Aunt Mavis, the black sheep of the family who has incriminating information about one of the churchs most prominent members and encourages Grace, a reporter, to investigate. Advertisement Being able to do this series is a dream come true, Winfrey said in a Q&A session after the screening of the first episode, which was met with an enthusiastic response from the audience. She credited Tyler Perry, creator of hits like The Haves and the Have Nots, with helping turn around the once-struggling Oprah Winfrey Network and allowing her realize her dream of being able to do this kind of scripted television. Although it could accurately be described as juicy, Greenleaf, which debuts in June, is a departure from Perrys soapier fare and explores serious themes of faith, community, family and the corruptive influence of money. It was created by Craig Wright, who wrote for Six Feet Under, and, as it turns, was once a minister himself -- albeit for a flock of just 40 (a revelation which prompted Winfrey to joke, That was a Sunday school). The project stemmed from conversations between Winfrey and Wright about the role of the church in the African American community. When you try to depict religion in the white church, it inevitably degenerates either into satire or sanctimony, Wright said. Although the show is critical of the church -- the pilot hints at corruption within the Greenleaf empire -- it takes faith really seriously, he said. It doesnt seem silly, it doesnt seem laughable or foolish, it actually seems deeply grounded and important and integral to the lives of the characters, so you actually take their struggles seriously. The writer added that he was thankful for the opportunity to dramatize religion in a way that doesnt devalue it. Another key theme for Wright, who also created the ABC series Dirty Sexy Money, is greed. Ive been pretty much saying the same thing over and over again on television, which is: Money is dangerous and you should live for the heart and the soul, and I just think its a message that needs to be said all the time. Whitfield, whose regal and ruthless character Lady Mae at one point in the pilot thanks Jesus for no longer having to fly commercial, said the show is a reminder of the disappointment that often comes from organized religion and spiritual leaders. Its not the messenger you must follow, she said to a hearty round of applause. You have to continue to follow the message. Yes, but what if the messenger is Oprah? Winfrey herself described Greenleaf as part of a broader mission of enlightenment. My real role on Earth is to lift the consciousness, she said, to use the platform of television to show people new ways of seeing themselves and seeing the problems and the flaws and the dysfunctions we all have. Follow @MeredithBlake on Twitter. It was probably just a matter of days before FBI secretary Martha Hanson (Alison Wright) was arrested for treason. So Marthas husband spy-with-a-conscience Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys) defies his KGB supervisor and acts unilaterally to protect her in The Rat, Episode 406 of The Americans on FX. I dont understand whats happening, Martha exclaims after being rushed to a Soviet safe house. Im scared! What am I doing here? Advertisement Stunned KGB handler Gabriel (Frank Langella) also has questions for Philip. Specifically, what was he thinking when he brought in Martha? Youre acting impulsively, Gabriel says, barely containing his rage. I know the things we do are complicated, but we can fix this. Have Martha return to work tomorrow. This never happened! Resuming her duties is a nonstarter, Philip insists, for Martha knows what he looks like sans wig and glasses. If the FBI interrogates Martha, shell crack, Philip predicts. And when that happens, Philip and his KGB wife Elizabeth (Keri Russell) could be headed for federal prison. Youve risked lives, Gabriel says, calling it flat out wrong for Philip to remove his disguise. When were you going to tell me? Or were you going to tell me? Stop handling me, Gabriel, Philip yells, because Martha is done! Apparently so, since the KGB hurriedly prepares for her exfiltration to the Soviet Union. I dont care, Martha tells Philip, realizing her previous life is kaput. Doesnt matter, not anymore, as long as were together! Philip nods, sparing Martha the harsh reality that her next destination is Russia and their time together is almost over. At FBI headquarters, Agents Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) and Dennis Aderholt (Brandon J. Dirden) are all but convinced that Marthas a traitor. After she calls in sick, Stan and Dennis search her apartment while a forensics team dusts for fingerprints. I think Marthas bad, Stan solemnly tells his boss Frank Gaad (Richard Thomas), director of the counter-terrorism division. Frank blames himself for being deceived by Martha, who unfortunately had access to everything. Nobody could have put that pen there more easily than Martha, Frank says, referring to a KGB listening device discovered in his office. How could I not see it? When Martha was a trusted FBI employee, she secretly copied surveillance reports about William (Dylan Baker), a suspected Soviet asset conducting research at a Department of Defense laboratory. William is working for the USSR, of course, and he just sneaked out a sample of tularemia, a highly infectious pathogen thats easily weaponized. Gabriel orders Philip to rendezvous with William, not knowing if the FBI is watching. Its worth the risk, Gabriel emphasizes, because bioweapons are critical for the motherlands safety. If they [U.S. armed forces] target our nuclear capacity in the first strike, Gabriel warns, our people back home will have nothing to defend themselves with, unless they fight back with biological warfare. Luckily for Philip, the FBI isnt watching when he meets William and comes away with a tularemia sample contained in tissues of a dead rat. Martha, meanwhile, panics when she wakes up and Philip is gone. Moreover, a gun she hid in her purse is missing. What have you done to him? Martha angrily asks Gabriel, fearing her husband is in danger. What is happening to me? We are all working very hard to get you to a safe place, Gabriel says, desperately attempting to placate Martha. Get away from me! I know what you are, Martha says defiantly. Ill scream and everyone will know that youre KGB! With that, Martha walks away from the safe house and toward a very uncertain future. Much like his adventurous, over-the-top life, music icon Prince Rogers Nelson, simply known as Prince, had an adventurous sense of fashion. By being himself, Prince, who died Thursday at age 57, pushed gender boundaries, caused wonder and awe among observers and fans, became a sex symbol, and, particularly during the 1980s and 90s, helped liberate teenagers and young adults considered to be outsiders artists, misfits, members of the LGBTQ community and others who often had to repress their identities, sexuality and behavior. Despite his Midwest upbringing, Princes fashion tastes werent conservative. His style was more in line with the looks of David Bowie, Little Richard and Liberace than they were with more traditional pop, rock and R&B acts of the 1970s and 80s. Prince didnt stick to the confines of a masculine versus feminine wardrobe. Instead he blended the two as he did with musical genres such as rock, soul and pop, creating a sartorial spectacle by wearing high heels, ruffles and colorful suits and often having permed hair all while sporting facial hair such as a goatee, beard or mustache. Prince performs during the halftime show at the Super Bowl XLI football game at Dolphin Stadium in Miami in 2007. (Chris OMeara / Associated Press) Advertisement While he appeared somewhat coy during interviews, Prince explored fashion in a loud, wild and colorful way. He did so on his own terms, as did fellow 80s megastars Michael Jackson (his frenemy) and Madonna (his friend and alleged sometimes frenemy). All three, born in 1958 in the Midwest, broke free of the standards associated with their upbringing and the decade, that being the 1980s, that defined their careers. During his long music career, Prince wore an assortment of jumpsuits, hats, belly shirts, jewelry, high collars and loose-fitting dress suits and had a Liberace-like love of sequins as well as a penchant for diamonds and pearls (Diamonds and Pearls was the name of a 1991 Prince album and song with the lyrics, If I gave you diamonds and pearls/Would you be a happy boy or a girl). While he was spotted with a long list of women with exotic names like Vanity and Apollonia, Prince often spoke about culture, his sexuality and himself as an artist in his music as well as through his style. Here are six ways Prince explored fashion and sexuality throughout his career: Prince performs The World"/"Get on the Boat"/"The Glamorous Life at the 2007 NCLR ALMA Awards. (John Shearer / WireImage) The color purple Though he once sang about a woman wearing a raspberry-colored beret, Prince had an allegiance to the color purple. Purple, a combination of calming blue and the fierceness of red associated with royalty, ambition and power was often referenced in Princes work and fashion. On the cover of the Prince and the Revolution album and soundtrack, Purple Rain, Prince sits on a motorcycle wearing a purple suit and a white ruffle shirt that could easily come from another era. The cover of his hit album 1999 has a purple background, and many of the suits Prince wore were shades of the color. The gender symbol In the way that Michael Jackson was known for his white glove, Prince was known for meshing together the male and female symbols. His version of the symbol sometimes referred to as the Love Symbol became the shape of several of his guitars, and it appeared on his album covers. During a feud with his longtime record label, Warner Bros., Prince dropped his name and changed his stage name to the symbol. Because the symbol wasnt easily printable, the media and other referred to him as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince or simply, The Artist. The heels Prince was a short, thin, fit man, standing at 52 in height. He often paraded around on and off stage in high-heel shoes and boots for a needed lift. He wore heels long before it was acceptable for men in the United States, in more recent decades, if not, centuries, to wear high heels. Prince performs on stage on the Hit N Run-Parade Tour at Wembley Arena in London in August 1986. (Michael Putland / Getty Images) The clothes Princes stage silhouettes ran the gamut from super-skin-tight cropped tops, bulge-enhancing high-waisted pants and the occasional pair of cheeky trousers with an open-air derriere to baggy, double-breasted suits, bolero jackets and voluminous turtleneck sweaters. The hair In his early days, Prince had facial hair and permed hair before letting his hair evolve into other styles he often stuck to a combination of straightened hair and curls traditionally considered womens looks and cuts. In more recent years, Prince opted for natural hair and had an afro similar to his younger years. Prince presents the award for British female solo artist at the BRIT Awards 2014 at 02 Arena on Feb. 19, 2014 in London. (Matt Kent / WireImage) The glasses Prince often wore an assortment of eye-catching eyewear, besting any performer this side of Elton John. These included asymmetrical 80s shades, granny glasses and third-eye sunnies. Staff writer Adam Tschorn contributed to this story. marques.harper@latimes.com Follow me on Twitter: @marquesharper MORE: 10 great moments from Princes career Princes movie legacy: Will there ever be another like Purple Rain? From the Archives: Prince: If I knew the things I know now before, I wouldnt be in the music industry A restaurant in Huntington Beach has just opened, with what the business describes as a to-go bacon bar. Saint Marc Pub-Cafe, Bakery and Cheese Affinage (thats the real name) now has a bacon bar where customers can walk up and order 11 different types of bacon by the slice. The restaurants signature bacon flavors include garlic Parmesan, maple, apple pie and habanero. Advertisement Order one flavor, or make yourself a bacon flight. You can also order Kobe beef-chilli-cheese fries, the mac daddy grilled cheese sandwich and fountain drinks at the bar along with all that bacon. 21058 Pacific Coast Hwy., Huntington Beach, (714) 374-1101, www.saintmarcusa.com. I prefer my bacon thick cut. Follow me on Twitter and Instagram @Jenn_Harris_ ALSO: This new Pasadena restaurant serves 11 kinds of poutine Eat more broccoli with this charred broccoli and citrus salad recipe Food events: Eastside food festival, English-muffin-making classes, BBQ & Beer Fest Like Beyonce, we now know, Hillary Clinton has hot sauce in her bag. She said so on New Yorks Power 105.1, so it must be true. Still, Donald Trump doesnt believe her, nor do Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham nor many of Fox News talking heads. Even Power 105.1 host Charlamagne Tha God kind of accused her of pandering. Is she pandering? I think she just likes hot sauce and not just because shes on record as a chilehead in interviews going back at least to 2008. Advertisement Her hot sauce of choice, an aide revealed to Time, is Ninja Squirrel, a cheery Sriracha knockoff. When your hot sauce of choice is a non-GMO Whole Foods exclusive named after a YouTube meme, you are probably not pandering. Ninja Squirrel is the hot sauce equivalent of a Town & Country mini-van. But I couldnt help thinking: Could Ninja Squirrel really be as blandly inoffensive as it sounds? Would a former secretary of State, a woman who presumably has easy access to the best hot sauces in the world, actually prefer a sauce with a cute animal label to the finest Srirachas of Eastern Thailand or, for that matter, Irwindale, Calif.? So a few hours before the polls closed in New York this week, Jonathan Gold and I sat down at Pok Pok LA, Andy Rickers Thai restaurant in Chinatown, with 10 bottles of Sriracha. The occasion not only was the latest primary, the most important contest before the June 7 California vote, but this latest batch of political flash points. Earlier that morning, Id stopped by my local 99 Ranch market to pick up the control Irwindales own Huy Fong Sriracha and then went to LAX-C, the massive Thai food warehouse just north of Chinatown. Gold stopped by Bangkok and Bangluck markets in Thai Town, although I think he volunteered for the mission mostly so he could have an excuse to stop by Lacha Somtum for a plate of papaya salad with black fermented crab, a dish far spicier than anything in the bottles hed picked up. At Pok Pok, there were bowls of fresh noodles in coconut curry, a platter of grilled Chiang Mai sausage with steamed cabbage and pork rinds and a lovely heap of hoi thawt, broken crepes with mussels, which came with its own small bowl of imported Double Chicken brand Sriracha coincidentally, one of the sauces that crowded our table. If we were going to taste our way through the universe of Sriracha, we were going to do so with the foods that purees of chiles, garlic, vinegar and sugar had evolved to accompany in the first place. Most of the sauces from Thailand Shark, Por Kwan, Sriraja Panich, Grand Mountain and Double Chicken came in containers as big as whiskey bottles. Our five domestic bottles were smaller: Lee Kum Kee, the Huy Fong, the Trader Joes house brand, a squat jar of barrel-aged Sosu from Oakland and a Ninja Squirrel sourced from a neat shelf at my local Whole Foods. Clearly the Clinton controversy had not inspired a run on the stuff, at least not in Pasadena. At Pok Pok, the sausages and mussel crepes were severely delicious, but we developed a happy routine of tasting the Srirachas with pork rinds and leaves of steamed cabbage, dipping them into tiny saucers, cleansing our palates between sauces with turmeric-flavored drinking vinegar and icy swigs of beer. There was not, it must be said, a huge amount of variation among the sauces, particularly the ones from Thailand. We needed to concentrate. The Double Chicken was mellow and garlic-heavy, chile-forward but not super hot. The Shark had a deeper flavor, as if it were spiked brown sugar Gold thought it tasted a little like a lean, mean Carolina barbecue sauce, pourably thin with a hint of smokiness. The Panich tasted muddier oddly sweet while Por Kwan seemed distinctly spicier than the others, with a honeyed finish and a strange consistency that reminded me, not pleasantly, of creme Anglaise. And the Grand Mountain? Kind of great: thick, with a bright, fresh chile taste and a lovely lingering finish. We kept sneaking back to the Grand Mountain throughout the tasting; it was what we thought the beloved local Huy Fong Sriracha should have tasted like. On to the non-Thai sauces: The Lee Kum Kee, made by a Hong Kong-based company, tasted overwhelmingly, strangely, like pineapple juice, a strange effect given that it was the only one of the sauces that included anchovy in its list of ingredients. Sosu, aged in an oak whiskey barrel, was thick, jam-like and smoky a completely different animal than the other sauces on the table. The famous Huy Fong product seemed almost exaggerated in flavor, spicier, sweeter and more garlicky than its competitors, brassy and all-American. And the sauce in the Trader Joes bottle a dragon etched in white against the bright orangey red of the bottle, in place of Huy Fongs famous rooster well, lets just say it was emergency Sriracha. If your knowledge of Sriracha came from Sriracha potato chips, Gold said, it would probably be this. And finally to Ninja Squirrel. Why is there a squirrel in a ninja mask on a bottle of Thai hot sauce? A good question. Jonathan dipped a pork rind into the bowl: Its ketchup. This Whole Foods sauce is also the kind of hot sauce that makes sense for the former first lady: made in the USA, available across America and basically unchallenging. Would we like her better if shed kept a fifth of Shark sauce in her bag? If shed decided that Double Chicken was her jam? I kind of respect her for knowing what she likes. Plates and bowls and tasting notes cleared, bottles of sauce packed up and softly clanking in my shoulder bag, we walked south through Chinatown toward the newsroom, where the early results of the primary were coming in. I always had a bottle of hot sauce in my bag, I told Gold, so I sympathized with Clinton on this one. But I grew up in Iowa, where the food of my childhood seemed to require it. It was mostly a default setting tied more to memories of potlucks than it was a cultural statement or otherwise. Do you carry hot sauce around? I asked Gold. He shook his head. He grew up in Los Angeles. But if I had to spent a lot of time in Iowa, he said, a bottle of Shark sauce might end up being my best friend. Times staff writer Jonathan Gold contributed to this story. Pok Pok LA, 978 N. Broadway, Los Angeles, (213) 613-1831, pokpokla.com. Because taking pictures of food is almost as much fun as eating it, on Instagram @latimesfood. ALSO: Hot sauce taste test: A walk-off for Sriracha? Kogi Taqueria, the brick-and-mortar version of the Kogi truck, is now open in Palms Californias presidential primaries matter this year and too many voters may be left out The state high-speed rail authority is poised to adopt a new business plan at a board meeting Thursday, despite concerns voiced by lawmakers, regional officials and independent experts. The draft business plan, released in February, was criticized for its lack of specificity about the source of funding to complete the $64-billion project. The Legislative Analysts Office called for more explanation about how the rail authority would close a $43.5-billion funding gap to complete the system. Local groups expressed serious concerns about the effects the project would have on their communities. Advertisement More than 200 public comments were submitted by farmers, regional planning authorities, cities and groups supporting or opposing the plan. The city of San Jose said the $50 million the state budgeted to prepare the local train station for high-speed rail operations was far too low. The city suggested the cost would be $1 billion to $2 billion. San Francisco said it remained a champion of the project but wanted a $2-billion contribution for its Transbay Terminal in downtown reinstated. The new plan cuts the contribution by $1.5 billion. Cities in the San Joaquin Valley suggested the authority budget $3 billion for local rail improvements, saying funding at that level would be consistent with the authoritys plan to invest $2 billion in the Burbank-to-Anaheim corridor. All the demands or recommendations would add more money than the $4 billion the new business plan shaved off the plan it replaced, which called for spending $68 billion. Those savings came from various engineering changes some of which are now under review. For instance, the state fire marshal is reviewing the authority plan to save money by eliminating an emergency ventilation system from mountain tunnels, one of which could be 17 miles long and require a lengthy evacuation in any kind of accident. Almond farmer Kole Upton said the state should not sacrifice people with long-standing roots in their communities. Interested in the stories shaping California? Sign up for the free Essential California newsletter >> Retired World Bank executive William Grindley submitted a 167-page analysis that asserted the rail system would fail to achieve its financial and transportation objectives, arguing its ridership projections are overblown and it will require massive subsidies. Joseph Eisenberg, one of many individuals who sent comments, said he commended the rail authority for this improved, realistic business plan. I would strongly support further federal and state support to complete the full HSR system. The Legislature has held three hearings on the plan this year, subjecting it to greater scrutiny than any proposal by the rail authority in recent years. But by and large, the plan is expected to be adopted as written, a state official close to the project said Wednesday. The board will pass it tomorrow with few revisions, said the official, who is not authorized to speak to the news media. The rail authoritys news representatives did not return calls or emails. A staff memorandum posted to the rail authoritys website took note of a number of the concerns, including the objections of Merced over not being part of an initial operating segment, which is to run from San Jose to a vacant farm field north of Shafter. Bakersfield officials want the initial segment to run roughly a dozen miles south of Shafter to reach their city at a cost of $2.9 billion. San Francisco is not happy about the train stopping in San Jose. Southern California officials want a clear affirmation of commitments made in 2012 for funding certain projects. The staff did not propose to address any of those concerns. Instead, the memo said staff would present options for the boards consideration and seek guidance for addressing the issues. The wording appeared to leave open the possibility that approval of the plan would be delayed. Under the law, the business plan must be completed and presented to the Legislature by May 1, meaning any delay might have required a special board meeting. The official close to the project said the board may make comments for the record without ordering changes to the plan. ralph.vartabedian@latimes.com Join the conversation on Facebook >> ALSO Santee community rallies in support of a gender-neutral bathroom after fight As UC Berkeley tries to close its deficit, administrators feel the ire of traditional faculty allies Homeless measures take center stage in Mayor Garcettis 2016 budget proposal Cambodian Gen. Hun Manets visit to Long Beach this month was seen as a chance to build bridges with refugees who fled the country four decades ago amid a government-orchestrated genocide. But the visit did more to inflame old wounds than heal divides in Cambodia Town, prompting protests as well as a violent confrontation that roiled the community. The eldest son of Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander, Manet is seen by many Cambodian Americans as the heir apparent to a government that has been repeatedly accused of election fraud and human rights abuses. News of Manets planned visits to Long Beach and Lowell, Mass. two of the largest Cambodian enclaves in the U.S. was met with denouncements from public officials and community leaders. Advertisement Interested in the stories shaping California? Sign up for the free Essential California newsletter >> The general abandoned plans to march in a Cambodian New Year parade in Long Beach last week after hundreds planned protests, local activists said. He participated in a similar event in Massachusetts earlier this week, but was greeted by scores of opponents who urged him to go home. The uproar underscores the deep divides between the Cambodian government and the American immigrant community scarred by Cambodian leader Pol Pots murderous legacy. Long Beach is home to about 22,000 ethnic Cambodians, the largest Cambodian population in the U.S. Refugees flooded into the city in the 1970s to escape the Khmer Rouge, which took the lives of more than a million people during a bloody civil war. The refugees created a vibrant commercial district amid the rows of shops in central Long Beach. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, left, with his son, now-Gen. Hun Manet, during a ceremony at a military base in Phnom Penh in 2009. (Tang Chhin Sothy / AFP/Getty Images) But they have struggled in ways other immigrant groups in the Los Angeles area have not. Studies have found that some Cambodian immigrants suffer high rates of mental illness, related to the violence they witnessed. The poverty rate among Cambodians remains higher than for other Asian immigrants, and gang violence has been a periodic problem in the community. The community has been on the upswing, with Long Beach officially designating the neighborhood as Cambodia Town and its restaurants drawing foodies from around the region. But disdain for the Cambodian government remains strong. Several years ago, a local community figure was convicted of masterminding a deadly attack on several Cambodian government buildings in an effort to overthrow the government. While many in the community rejected that violence, local activists say the fierce opposition to Manets visit should not have come as a surprise. Were trying to educate the community in Long Beach. You have rights. You live in a country with freedom of expression, said Bona Chhith, the California-based vice president of media relations for the Cambodian-American Alliance. We cant have this in the U.S. The low point in Manets visit occurred outside La Lune Restaurant in Long Beach. A private investigator said he was hurled to the ground and suffered a severe spinal bruise April 9 while attempting to serve Manet with a lawsuit on behalf of a Long Beach man being held prisoner by Hun Sens regime in Cambodia. The investigator, Paul Hayes, said he was knocked unconscious by the blow and briefly lost feeling in his arms and legs. Hayes and several community leaders claim he was attacked by Manets private guard. The alleged assault has drawn condemnation from legislators and community leaders in Cambodia Town. U.S. Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach), who sits on the House Foreign Affairs committee, said the incident proved that Manets presence here only served to cause panic and disruption in Cambodia Town. Im outraged that a person who was just doing their job was subjected to this brutal attack. I am also outraged that Hun Manets untimely presence brought this violence to what was a peaceful demonstration, Lowenthal said in a statement. Hayes, 59, of Compton, said he arrived at the Atlantic Avenue restaurant around 5 p.m., hours before Manet was scheduled to appear for a gala. He informed several police officers he planed to serve Manet with the civil suit, which was filed earlier this month on behalf of a Long Beach resident who is being held prisoner in Cambodia for his role in election protests. Manet did not arrive until 8:30 p.m., and by that time, approximately 100 protesters had arrived outside the restaurant, Hayes said. When Manet approached the entrance, flanked by suit-clad Cambodian men who Hayes believed to be bodyguards, Hayes extended the envelope and called the generals name. Then someone grabbed him. Wearing a neck brace inside his Compton home, Hayes said he has no doubts that Manets private guard attacked him. They treated him the way they would treat a Cambodian protester in their own country, said Keith Rohman, president of Public Interest Investigations, the downtown Los Angeles firm hired to serve Manet with the court papers. Calls to the Cambodian Consulate in Los Angeles were not returned. A spokesman for the Cambodian Council of Ministers told the Cambodia Daily newspaper that Hayes tried to attack Manet and was pepper-sprayed by a bodyguard. Hayes told police he wants to press charges, but identifying his assailants could prove difficult, said Sgt. Brad Johnson, a Long Beach police spokesman. Hayes was unable to give officers any description of his assailants at the time of the attack, Johnson said. If the attack was carried out by Manets bodyguards, they may have diplomatic immunity, Johnson said. The suit Hayes was attempting to serve Manet with involves a celebrated human rights case. Meach Sovannara, a Long Beach resident and media director for the Cambodia National Rescue Party, was arrested and charged with inciting an insurrection for his role in election protests in Phnom Penh in 2014, according to court papers. Sovannara was sentenced to 20 years in Cambodias Prey Sar prison, according to the suit. Join the conversation on Facebook >> As a lieutenant general, Manet oversees the soldiers responsible for crackdowns on protesters in Cambodia, including the one that ensnared Sovannara, activists say. Manet left Long Beach last week. But many in the Cambodian community remain outraged by the visit. Hun Sen and his henchmen tried to paint a picture of peacefulness and unity in the Cambodian communities, said Bo K.S. Uce, a Long Beach resident and spokesman for the Steering Committee for Cambodia, an advocacy group. In reality, Cambodian Americans have been jailed, like Meach Sovannara. Twitter: @JamesQueallyLAT ALSO Wrestling star Chyna found dead at Redondo Beach home Global warming has made the weather better -- but dont get used to it Harriet Tubman is the next face of the $20 bill; $5 and $10 bills will also change Good morning. It is Thursday, April 21. In honor of the Pink Moon, there will be a party Saturday night at the top of Mammoth Mountain. Revelers are encouraged to run, ski or bike to the top of the 11,053-foot mountain. Heres what else is happening in the Golden State: TOP STORIES Unpleasant visit Advertisement Cambodian Gen. Hun Manets visit to Long Beach, home to the largest Cambodian population in America, has opened old wounds. The lowest point of the trip came April 9 when a private investigator says he was attacked while attempting to serve Manet with a lawsuit. Im outraged that a person who was just doing their job was subjected to this brutal attack. I am also outraged that Hun Manets untimely presence brought this violence to what was a peaceful demonstration and especially during the celebrations of the Cambodian New Year, said U.S. Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach). Los Angeles Times College debt Administrators at UC Berkeley are facing criticism from faculty over their handling of the universitys $150-million budget deficit. Its unbelievable to me that a Berkeley professor can head the Federal Reserve [Fed Chair Janet Yellen] and yet somehow the campus budget is a more opaque and difficult program than the entire U.S. economy, said Paul Fine, an associate professor of integrative biology. Los Angeles Times Helping the homeless L.A. Mayor Eric Garcettis proposed $8.76-billion spending plan for next year includes $138 million to help the homeless, but already critics are questioning whether the city can deliver that money. Half of those proposed funds would come from sources that do not yet exist. These are phony numbers. The mayor and the council continue to try to make the public think theyre doing something about this when theyre doing almost nothing, said Mark Ryavec, president of the Venice Stakeholders Assn. Los Angeles Times DROUGHT AND CLIMATE Smoggy air: Bakersfield and Los Angeles have some of the dirtiest air in America, according to a study. Eight out of 10 Californians live in an area with unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution some time during the year. Associated Press Ready for a quake: The eastern edge of the Sierra is long overdue for a major earthquake. Weve experienced such a long stretch of not having earthquakes, weve sort of built in a sense of complacency, said Nevada Seismological Laboratory Director Graham Kent. Associated Press L.A. AT LARGE New attractions: Long Beach is counting on a $250-million development to bring attention back to the Queen Mary. Urban Commons is looking to build a boutique hotel, marina amphitheater, jogging and bike paths and possibly a Ferris wheel. The big question, though, is whether this project can deliver where so many others have failed. Los Angeles Times POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT Fight over hacking: Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter are coming together to lobby against a federal bill to restrict what type of encryption the companies can use on their devices and products. The legislation is co-sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein. We believe it is critical to the safety of the nations, and the worlds, information technology infrastructure for us all to avoid actions that will create government-mandated security vulnerabilities in our encryption systems, according to the tech companies. BuzzFeed New fees: The city of Oakland is looking to implement a new fee on developers as a way to raise money for affordable housing. The effect, however, will be fairly small the fee will pay for 600 units over the next 10 years. In the last year and a half, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Oakland has increased from $1,600 to $2,250 a month. KQED Changing of the guard: The U.S. attorney in Sacramento is leaving his post. Benjamin Wagner is expected to step down at the end of April. Sacramento Bee CRIME AND COURTS Legal settlement: The city of Los Angeles will pay $750,000 to a woman who says she was raped by a police officer while his partner acted as a lookout. The plaintiff in the civil suit is one of four women who accused Luis Valenzuela and James C. Nichols of forcing them into sexual acts. Prosecutors say Valenzuela and Nichols preyed on women from 2008 to 2011 and abused them in their unmarked patrol car while threatening them with arrest. Both men have pleaded not guilty. Los Angeles Times On the rise: San Bernardino has had 20 killings so far this year, up from 13 during the same period of time last year. On Tuesday, a man was killed and a woman shot as they drank in Blair Park, authorities said. San Bernardino Sun Joy ride: A 46-year-old man commandeered an airport shuttle at San Diego International Airport on Tuesday, police said. Eight airport employees were on the bus at the time. The man was arrested on felony charges of kidnapping and auto theft. Los Angeles Times Students arrested: Two lacrosse players from Chapman University are accused of stealing a turkey from the Orange High Schools petting zoo. Tim the turkey was found wandering around a neighborhood by himself. He was covered in a sticky substance and was suffering from numerous injuries, including a broken toe and a partially missing tail, according to a teacher. Orange County Register CALIFORNIA CULTURE In the water: A great white shark was spotted jumping out of the water near Sunset Beach. At six-and-a-half feet, the shark is probably still a juvenile. Orange County Register Where to eat: Pizza! Coffee! Burritos! Its the eating guide to San Francisco. Vice Back in time: In honor of her 90th birthday, here is a look back at Queen Elizabeth IIs visit to California in 1983. Los Angeles Times CALIFORNIA ALMANAC San Diego will be mostly sunny and 75. Itll be mostly sunny and 79 in Los Angeles. Riverside will be 88 and mostly sunny. Sacramento will have clouds as temperatures reach a high of 75. San Francisco will have low clouds and a high of 66 degrees. AND FINALLY Todays California Memory comes from Tom Summerfield: It was 1958. My family lived just north of Whittier Boulevard in East Whittier on a small street named Calmada Avenue. Our world changed a lot when Bobs Drive-In opened on that corner. My friends in eighth grade and I went early in the morning and were the first people to ever eat there. They put up my dollar bill on the wall. Everyone would party in the drive-in portion of the restaurant and wouldnt eat much. Finally Bobs had to close fun was more important than food. Cruising Whittier Boulevard was the in thing to do, and it all started with Bobs. If you have a memory or story about the Golden State, share it with us. Send us an email to let us know what you love or fondly remember about our state. (Please keep your story to 100 words.) Please let us know what we can do to make this newsletter more useful to you. Send comments, complaints and ideas to Alice Walton or Shelby Grad. Feral pigs that scientists once feared could pose a serious threat to fragile ecosystems in San Diego Countys backcountry have been all but eradicated by government-contracted hunters and years of devastating drought that have slowed breeding. Officials say it appears only eight wild hogs remain in the county, based on data from hundreds of wildlife-tracking cameras and other forms of monitoring. NEWSLETTER: Get the days top headlines from Times Editor Davan Maharaj >> Advertisement Professional hunters working with a consortium of federal, state and local agencies have trapped and euthanized about 150 of the animals over the last five years, some leaders in the effort said. The work that has been done through our group has helped quite a bit, said Megan Jennings, a San Diego State University research ecologist in charge of the monitoring program for the Inter-governmental Feral Pig Group. Its been a real targeted effort, wide-scale across the county, and been a major contributor in getting the numbers down. Wild hogs began showing up in the county around 2007, though no one knows for sure how they arrived. In 2010 various wildlife agencies began tracking and trying to kill the pigs, and in 2014 an official eradication effort was launched. At that time, it was estimated that perhaps 1,000 of the animals were roaming the eastern and southern portions of the region. The pigs typically travel in groups of up to 15, known as sounders, rooting around in fields and churning up soil like a Rototiller. Adult males can reach up to 300 pounds. Because the pigs breed quickly, the concern was that they would multiply and become an overwhelming ecological problem, destroying riparian habitats where endangered and threatened birds and animals thrive. That doomsday scenario didnt pan out, and officials now say the 2014 estimates were probably way too high, in part because they werent based on firm data and didnt take into account the ongoing drought. See more of our top stories on Facebook >> When the project started there were numbers being thrown around of 300 to 500 pigs, even 3,000 to 5,000 pigs, said Ryan McCreary, a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services. When we started using trail cameras in several different locations it became obvious the population was much smaller. The parched ecosystem helped keep the wild hogs in check. If you release a population of pigs or goats or any animal and they dont know where any water is or what their resources are, theyre going to struggle, particularly if there is any kind of drought, McCreary said. Jennings said the monitoring cameras and evidence collected by field researchers indicate that only about eight pigs remain, though there may be a few additional stragglers. Clark Winchell of the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife said most of the pigs were captured and killed by placing a brew a fermented, stinky bait inside a pen. Cameras would then record the activity in the pen, and when it appeared all of the pigs in the area had gathered around the bait, the corral door was closed. The trapped pigs were then killed and their carcasses typically buried. Wild hogs can carry more than 24 diseases, according to the Centers for Disease Control, which publishes a pamphlet on how hunters should protect themselves when handling the animals. After the pigs were spotted in San Diego County, the first mass eradication occurred on Warner Ranch near Lake Henshaw in 2012 when 30 pigs were captured. Since then efforts have largely been centered in the southeastern part of the county, sometimes on private ranches south of Interstate 8, and in the Cleveland National Forest in places such as the Hauser Wilderness Area and near Cottonwood Creek, not far from Pine Valley. County officials had feared the hogs would move into county parks, but no pigs were taken in those areas, officials said. Private hunters were also encouraged to take out hog permits, but Winchell said they killed few pigs partly because most werent big enough to make good trophies. Pig hunting is difficult because the hogs are often found in some of the remotest, most difficult terrain in the backcountry, he said. Winchell said there had been no reported sightings in vulnerable areas such as Palomar Mountain, although just a few weeks ago an unverified sighting of a single pig was reported in the Julian area. Weve been earnestly working at this for a number of years, Winchell said. It has been very successful. Exactly where, when and how the pigs were introduced to the county is unclear. In 2007, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that 30 wild hogs brought to the region by someone who wanted to start a hunting program had been released in the wild behind the El Capitan Reservoir. The report was confirmed by a game warden, but denied by others in the area. McCreary said it appeared that there were several intentional releases in the last decade. Whatever the source, by 2012 a Feral Pig Working Group comprised of numerous public agencies and private conservation groups had been formed, and state and federal officials were preparing environmental assessment plans to sanction the use of trapping, hunting with dogs, aerial hunts and traditional hunting to combat the problem. At the time some animal rights activist opposed the plan, saying it was cruel to kill the pigs that were doing nothing other than trying to survive. But officials said that trapping and relocating them made little sense since the pigs are not wanted anywhere, and that logistically it would have been almost impossible. Jones writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune. ALSO Wrestling star Chyna found dead at Redondo Beach home Global warming has made the weather better -- but dont get used to it Harriet Tubman is the next face of the $20 bill; $5 and $10 bills will also change Queen Elizabeth the II, who turns 90 today, visited the West Coast of the United States for the first time in February and March of 1983. Her trip started in San Diego and moved north from there: to Los Angeles for a meeting with then-Mayor Tom Bradley, to Santa Barbara to meet then-President Reagan, and on to San Francisco, Sacramento, Yosemite and finally Seattle. She then went on to Victoria, British Columbia. These Los Angeles Times photographs document parts of Queen Elizabeth IIs visit to California. The queen at Yosemite March 5, 1983: Queen Elizabeth II visits Yosemite National Park, accompanied by park superintendent Robert O. Binnewies. This photo was published in the March 6, 1983, Los Angeles Times. (George Rose / Los Angeles Times) The queens visit to Yosemite was marred by the deaths of three U.S. Secret Service agents in a head-on collision with a Mariposa County Sheriffs Department car. The agents, part of a detail protecting the queen, were driving around a curve on Highway 132 when they crashed, The Times reported then. They were George P. LaBarge, 41, of Ohio; Donald A. Bejcek, 29, of Chicago; and Donald W. Robinson, 38, of Newark, N.J. Advertisement The queen with the president March 1, 1983: Queen Elizabeth II and President Ronald Reagan chat at Santa Barbara airport before a visit to the Reagans hilltop ranch. This photo was published in the March 2, 1983, Los Angeles Times. (George Rose / Los Angeles Times) A storm was howling and dumping rain on the Santa Barbara coastline when the queen arrived for a trip to President Ronald Reagans retreat at 2,400 feet up in the mountains. It was an extremely hazardous venture by any standard, The Times reported. A narrow, twisting, steep obstacle course of flooded streams, washed-out sections, downed tree limbs and falling boulders. A Chevrolet Suburban got the president and the queen up the hill: She found the trip delightful and terribly exciting, Elizabeths press secretary was quoted as saying. The queen meets Mayor Tom Bradley Feb. 28, 1983: Queen Elizabeth II waves to a crowd while being escorted into Los Angeles City Hall by Mayor Tom Bradley. This photo was published in the March 1, 1983, Los Angeles Times. (Fitzgerald Whitney / Los Angeles Times) While in Los Angeles, Elizabeth met Mayor Tom Bradley. In a speech at City Hall, she defended Britains actions in the Falkland Islands, praised Los Angeles diversity and economy, and even got in a joke (recounted in a Page 1 article Feb. 28, 1983). The queen lightheartedly reminded Los Angeles residents that her northward journey from San Diego this weekend paralleled a similar trip made 400 years ago by Sir Francis Drake who (unsuccessfully) claimed this territory as Nova Albion for the first Queen Elizabeth and for the queens successors forever. I am happy, though, to give you an immediate assurance, Mr. Mayor, that I have not come here to press that claim. The queen with a spaceship Feb. 28, 1983: In Downey, Queen Elizabeth II and George Jeffs, president of Rockwell Aerospace, visit a display of an Apollo space capsule. This photo was published in an evening edition of the Feb. 28, 1983, Los Angeles Times. (Larry Armstrong / Los Angeles Times) On the same day as her speech at City Hall, the queen saw a bit of exploration history: a mock-up of the space shuttle and the Apollo 14 command module at Rockwell International in Downey. The queen with the stars Feb. 27, 1983: During banquet at 20th CenturyFoxs Sound Stage 9, Queen Elizabeth II, center, jokes with actor Michael Caine, left. On the right is Tony Richardson and Nancy Reagan. Holmes Tuttle sits between Caine and the queen. This photo was published in the March 1, 1983, Los Angeles Times View section. (George Rose / Los Angeles Times) On the second day of her trip, though it was still raining, the stars came out. Center of Attention Everywhere, The Times headline read, Queen the Star From Church to Hollywood. In attendance at the event above on the set of MASH, which was airing its final episode that night were Elton John, Fred Astaire, Bette Davis, Jimmy Stewart, LAPD Chief Daryl Gates, Cesar Romero and Vin Scully, among others. The Times reported that Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Dionne Warwick and George Burns performed. The queen and the prince Feb. 27, 1983: Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip board Air Force II in San Diego for trip to Palm Springs. This photo was published in the Feb. 28, 1983, Los Angeles Times. (Bob Grieser / Los Angeles Times) Although this image is from the beginning of the trip, its a fitting way to finish. Elizabeth II has been back to the United States several times since 1983, but her journeys havent brought her to the West Coast. Amid mounting concerns over delays in putting body cameras on thousands of Los Angeles police officers, a City Council member formally asked Wednesday for several reviews to determine whether the Police Department selected the best product at the best price. Councilman Mitch Englanders motion took a step back from his call last week for the LAPD to restart the vendor selection process and accept new bids. That proposal prompted an awkward back-and-forth between Englander and other city officials, including the mayor and police commissioners, who said they feared a new bidding process would push the completed rollout of the 7,000 cameras back at least another year a delay Mayor Eric Garcetti called unacceptable. Advertisement Instead, Englanders motion calls for the Police Department and other city agencies to look at other large contracts for cameras by departments around the country to determine whether the LAPD used the best process to select its camera vendor. The motion also seeks a review of the body camera market as well as an analysis of how much the cameras could save the city in costly police-related litigation or investigations of complaints against officers. Englander said his goal was to formally answer outstanding questions from his fellow council members, who he worried might reject the body camera initiative. He noted that on Friday, the council voted to temporarily move some city funds earmarked for body cameras to housing programs. On Tuesday, however, the council reversed its decision and moved the money back to fund the camera initiative. Englander said he believed the action reaffirmed the councils support for putting cameras on cops. Police Commissioner Steve Soboroff, who has spearheaded the effort to bring body cameras to the LAPD and had expressed concerns about the delays, said he was relieved that Englanders motion did not seek a new round of bids. The LAPD already has deployed about 860 cameras, purchased through private donations. Last year, the department negotiated a contract with Taser International to provide thousands more as well as replacement equipment, digital storage of the recordings and thousands of Tasers. Weeks later, the City Council balked at the programs price tag: $57.6 million over five years, including a $31.2-million contract with Taser. Council members also voiced dismay that the initiative would require scores of LAPD officers to review recordings and oversee the program, a plan the LAPD quickly revised to include more civilian staffers. A new vote was never scheduled. LAPD officials said current delays would push the completed rollout to the fall of 2017 at the earliest, well beyond Garcettis previous pledge to finish by the end of this year. Starting a new bidding process, officials said, would have moved the completion date to the end of 2018. Maggie Goodrich, the LAPDs chief information officer, estimated it would take the department about 90 days to put together the reports sought in Englanders motion. The new estimate for the completed rollout, she said, is early 2018. But the cameras continue to spark controversy beyond City Hall. As one group of activists held a news conference Wednesday to demand the quick distribution of cameras, another sent lawmakers a letter calling for more changes to the program. The letter, signed by nearly a dozen groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, urged the council to reconsider the policy for LAPD body cameras that was adopted last year. Critics have said the policy doesnt allow for public review of the footage and unfairly lets officers see the recordings before writing their reports, undermining the transparency advocates say the devices bring to policing. Robert Saltzman, the only police commissioner to vote against the policy, said he agreed with the underlying concerns described in the letter but believes the initiative should still move forward. The sooner we implement the on-body camera program, the sooner we will begin to have the information necessary to review the policies that govern their use, he said, and the sooner we will benefit from the increased transparency and accountability. kate.mather@latimes.com Twitter: @katemather ALSO Bullet train agency is expected to go forward with business plan despite widespread criticism Santee community rallies in support of a gender-neutral bathroom after fight As UC Berkeley tries to close its deficit, administrators feel the ire of traditional faculty allies Hundreds of students and community members rallied outside Santee Education Complex on Wednesday to defend a bathroom and the Gay Straight Alliance students who advocated for its creation. The bathroom is gender-neutral, meaning it can be used by both boys and girls, and last week it was the first one to open in L.A. Unified. The rally came one day after a fight broke out between students and protesters outside the school over the bathroom. While school police blocked the intersection of Maple Avenue and Washington Boulevard, students waved rainbow flags and signs saying, its just a toilet. Advertisement Show me what queer power looks like, GSA secretary and junior Monique Garcia, 17, shouted into a megaphone around 3 p.m. This is what queer power looks like, about 100 people chanted back. Vanesa Palomino, 23, lives nearby and graduated from Santee in 2011. She said she was at the rally to support the current students. A member of the LGBT community, she said the outpouring of support felt different from her time at the school, when there was no gay-straight alliance. Im amazed, Palomino said. A small group of adults called the Official Street Preachers, which is not connected to the school, gathered Tuesday around 2:45 p.m. on Maple Avenue across the street from Santee. They had a sign that said homo sex is sin and used a loudspeaker to tell students as they left school at 2:55 that they were sinning and going to hell, Principal Martin Gomez said. We expected protesters, Gomez said, but not verbal attacks. Some students confronted the protesters, and others threw objects at them. I saw an apple and one water bottle, Gomez said. Some tried to pull down one of the signs from behind, and a fight broke out. The fight was caught on video, and it was circulated online Tuesday afternoon. I stood on the sidelines and cried, said Kween Robinson, an alliance spokeswoman and one of the bathrooms advocates. She and other GSA students said that although some stood in front of the protesters, they didnt engage in the fighting. One student was detained by school police during the fight but was released and was not charged or cited, school officials said. Ron Gochez, who used to teach at Santee and lives near the school, saw online that the protesters threatened to return Wednesday, so he organized a counter-rally through Union del Barrio, a San Diego-based political group that has a presence in South L.A., and spread the word on Facebook. Were a phone call away and we will be here, Gochez said at the rally Wednesday. Jose Lara, GSAs faculty advisor, spoke on behalf of staff. Were one family here, he told the students. We are not going to give in to hate. The school had extra police present Wednesday, and teachers talked to students to discourage them from violence, Gomez said. The school is developing a plan in case there are future protests, he said. The gender-neutral bathroom, Gomez said, will remain open. On Wednesday, as the rally wound down, Robinson reflected on the events. Santee is poppin. I love this, she said. Thats all you need in life people to help you fight against your oppressors. sonali.kohli@latimes.com Twitter: @Sonali_Kohli See more of our top stories on Facebook >> ALSO Bullet train agency is expected to go forward with business plan despite widespread criticism UC Berkeley has a $150M deficit, and professors say the process to fix it is shrouded in secrecy Border drug tunnel is longest ever in California, feds say Monterey Park police said Wednesday they had arrested the driver of a minivan accused of killing an elderly pedestrian in a January hit-and-run in which the victims body was dragged nearly half a mile. Investigators served an arrest warrant just before 9 a.m. on 33-year-old Cecilia Morales DeToledo, Monterey Park Police Sgt. Brent Archibald said. The Los Angeles County district attorney filed felony hit-and-run, misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter and misdemeanor unlicensed driver charges against DeToledo, Archibald said. Advertisement NEWSLETTER: Get the days top headlines from Times Editor Davan Maharaj >> DeToledos arrest concluded a three-month investigation and brought relief to the family of the victim, Kwai-Ling Hong, 80. ------------ FOR THE RECORD 3:32 p.m. April 21: A previous version of this post said Kwai-Ling Hong was 82. He was 80. ------------ Were happy that this finally happened, but its just one step, said the victims son, George Hong, 41. Theres still a trial left. Investigators said the accident occurred about 3:30 p.m. on Jan. 7 in the 600 block of Hathaway Avenue in Monterey Park. Police said the driver was making a left turn to go south on Hathaway Avenue when she struck the victim. DeToledo kept driving and dragged Hong for nearly half a mile to her home in the 2400 block of Wetherhead Drive in neighboring Alhambra, where she called 911, police said. George Hong said Det. Robert Julian told him that at least two children were inside the van when the incident occurred. In a February interview with the Alhambra Source, DeToledo said she was driving with a drivers permit from the Department of Motor Vehicles. She had obtained the permit in September 2015. She told the paper she didnt know she had struck Kwai-Ling Hong. I parked my car and as I walk to my door I noticed there was someone in the street and another man yelling in my direction, she told the paper. I didnt know what was going on. See more of our top stories on Facebook >> George Hong said investigators confirmed to him that DeToledo had a drivers permit only at the time of the incident. DeToledo is free on $50,000 bail. Her arraignment is scheduled for Thursday at Alhambra Municipal Court, arrest records show. For more Southern California news, follow @latvives ALSO Surfer films great white shark going airborne off Orange County beach Chyna, a former wrestling star and actress, found dead at Redondo Beach home Valencia man who duct-taped cats paws is sentenced to a year in L.A. County jail A car-to-car shooting in a residential San Bernardino neighborhood has left two people dead, police said Wednesday. About 3:15 p.m. someone inside a car at 29th Avenue and Pershing Street opened fire on a black Honda, fatally wounding both the male driver and female passenger, said San Bernardino police spokeswoman Eileen Hards. The Honda continued rolling and crashed into a shed on the front lawn of a residence, she said. The driver was pronounced dead at the scene and the passenger was pronounced dead after being transported to a hospital. Their names and ages were not immediately available. Advertisement See the most-read stories this hour >> No arrests have been made and police had only a vague description of the shooters car, Hards said. The shooting took place just south of the 210 Freeway and Mountain View Avenue. Police were at the scene interviewing potential witnesses hours after the slayings, authorities said. For breaking California news, follow @JosephSerna. ALSO 3-year-old girl bitten by rattlesnake remains in critical condition Dude, you ever wonder, like, why people celebrate pot on 4/20? Valencia man who duct-taped cats paws is sentenced to a year in L.A. County jail Four L.A. County social workers on Wednesday asked to postpone entering pleas to felony charges in connection with the 2012 death of Gabriel Fernandez, the 8-year-old tortured and killed even though authorities had numerous warnings of abuse in his home. Judge Sergio C. Tapia granted the request and set the next arraignment date for June 2. Prosecutors charged Stefanie Rodriguez, Patricia Clement, Kevin Bom and Gregory Merritt each with one felony count of child abuse and one felony count of falsifying public records. Advertisement Each is free in lieu of $100,000 bail. The charges carry up to 10 years in prison. The case is the first time in California that social workers at a child protective services agency have been criminally prosecuted on allegations that they failed to protect a child. The case is stirring intense debate about whether high caseloads and other systemic problems at the Department of Children and Family Services severely impeded the workers from saving Gabriel, or if their conduct was criminal despite their challenges. The union representing social workers, SEIU 721, issued a statement Thursday saying the decision to prosecute was unprecedented and reckless. Social workers also appeared in court to support the defendants, who sat stoically in the audience awaiting their hearing. Bom, a 36-year-old elder at his church and masters graduate of USCs School of Social Work, held his wifes hand. On his wrist was a plastic bracelet with the scripture verse Jeremiah 29:11. The verse reads: For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. County prosecutors allege that the county Department of Children and Family Services employees minimized the significance of the physical, mental and emotional injuries that Gabriel suffered [and] allowed a vulnerable boy to remain at home and continue to be abused. Gabriels death sparked widespread outrage and prompted a series of reforms designed to improve how county officials monitor children who show signs of being abused. Prosecutors said the social workers actions were so troubling that they warranted the rare step of filing criminal charges. Follow me on Twitter: @gtherolf ALSO Surfer films great white shark going airborne off Orange County beach Grand jury report blames under-funding for problems at coroners office Homeless measures take center stage in Mayor Garcettis 2016 budget proposal A Valencia man convicted of duct-taping a cats paws together was sentenced Wednesday to a year in county jail, according to the L.A. County district attorney. In addition, Tyler Scott Vest, 23, was sentenced to three years of formal probation and ordered to complete 24 hours of animal cruelty counseling. Vest and his girlfriend, Kylie Stringer, 27, of Canyon Country, both entered no-contest pleas to animal cruelty charges during their arraignments on Jan. 13. Advertisement Vest also pleaded no contest to a felony count of possession of heroin. Stringer was sentenced on March 2 to three years of informal probation and was ordered to complete a six-month drug treatment program, to perform 15 days of service for Caltrans, and to undergo 24 hours of animal cruelty counseling. The couple is also banned from owning, possessing or having direct contact with animals for five years and had to forfeit their cat. The couple was arrested on the night of Jan 9 in Santa Clarita when two Los Angeles County sheriffs deputies approached their car parked near Sand Canyon and Soledad Canyon roads. The deputies searched their vehicle and found heroin and narcotics paraphernalia, prosecutors said. The deputies also found a cat inside a pet carrier with all four of its paws duct-taped and bound together, prosecutors said. The cat, named Lily by animal rescue workers, was taken to an animal shelter, where it recovered. The case was investigated by the Los Angeles County sheriffs Santa Clarita Station. For more Southern California news, follow @latvives Jacques S. Yeager, a former University of California regent who ran an influential construction business that dramatically expanded Californias highways and left a mark on the states political landscape, died Wednesday. Yeager was 94. Yeager was the president of E.L. Yeager Construction Co., a company that his father started in 1919. It became one of Californias largest contractors, according to a 1991 UC Berkeley report. In its earliest days, the company built parking lots and streets in San Bernardino, but it eventually moved on to more ambitious projects. The firm built part of historic Route 66, the 15 Freeway and the 91 Freeway. In 2010, the state Assembly recognized those contributions to the states freeways by naming the interchange at the 60 and 15 freeways after the company. E.L. Yeager Construction was widely lauded for its quick work in repairing two 80-foot bridges on the 5 Freeway at Gavin Canyon that were damaged in the Northridge earthquake in January 1994. The company earned a $4.8-million bonus for finishing the repairs a month ahead of schedule. Advertisement Yeager was named a UC regent in 1988 and served until 1994. Im absolutely thrilled and want to thank all the people in the Inland Empire who sent in all the letters to support me to the governor. This is a lifetime ambition, Yeager said at the time. Yeager, a Republican, helped push forward a successful campaign in the early 1950s to turn UCs agricultural outpost in Riverside into a full-blown campus. Yeager made donations to UC Riverside throughout his career, creating an endowed chair in bioengineering, as well as an environmental research fund and endowed chair. The Riverside native and UC Berkeley alumnus spoke volumes in his active and generous support for UCRs programs, UC Riverside said in a statement. natalie.kitroeff@latimes.com Jose Sorto wanted to bring his son and daughter from El Salvador to the U.S. legally. Sorto, 42, had moved to Washington in 1998, got legal status to work in 2003 and found a job as a cook at an Italian restaurant earning about $30,000 to support his family back in the port city of La Union. El Salvador has since become the homicide capital of the world, and last spring, five of Sortos relatives were shot and killed by gangs. Increasingly, gangs have threatened Sortos 12-year-old son, Ernesto, and his daughter, Jocelyn, 20. Advertisement In July, Sorto applied to a newly created program, run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the State Department, that in theory would allow his children to join him quickly in the United States. The Central American Minors program was started to stem the flow of children crossing the border illegally, more than 68,500 unaccompanied minors in fiscal year 2014. At the time, a White House spokesman called it an orderly alternative to the dangerous journey that children are currently undertaking to join relatives in the United States. Parents living in the U.S. legally can apply to bring their spouses with children under age 21, who are then interviewed by U.S. immigration services officials in Central America, screened and admitted either as refugees or with temporary status, known as humanitarian parole. As of mid-April, 6,892 parents and children had applied to come to the U.S. from El Salvador, 933 from Honduras and 176 from Guatemala. When Sorto applied to the program, he was told he would have to pay to have his childrens DNA tested, which would cost about $1,000 each. He was willing to pay, and awaited word on his application. By fall, the family had grown so scared of gangs, they moved twice, taking only what they could carry. Sorto called to inquire about their application, was told it had been lost and applied a second time in November. Then he waited some more. Finally, last month, Sorto did exactly what the program was designed to prevent: He paid a smuggler $9,000 to bring his wife and children across the Rio Grande into Texas illegally. We needed to get out much quicker, he said. If they want to help people, they have to do more. Advocates say Sorto is not alone: Other parents frustrated by delays in the Central American Minors program are turning to smugglers. State Department officials said it takes about eight months on average to vet families, but acknowledged that after more than a year, among the 8,001 who applied, fewer than 200 came to the U.S. As with all of our refugee programs, we are always seeking ways to streamline without sacrificing the security or integrity of the process, said Simon Henshaw, the principal deputy assistant secretary of State. The first group of half a dozen youths admitted under the program didnt arrive in the U.S. until November. So far, 197 parents and children have been admitted under the program, according to the State Department. Once a parent applies, the State Department screens him or her and sends instructions to begin DNA testing, an official said. If the DNA results confirm the parent-child relationship, the immigration services agency schedules interviews in Central America and makes recommendations to the State Department about who should be admitted as a refugee or with humanitarian parole. The cost of DNA testing is reimbursed if the result is positive, regardless of the outcome of the interview, the official said. There were 113 people admitted under the program with humanitarian parole, about one-fourth of the 419 approved by the immigration services agency. An additional 84 were admitted under the program as refugees, 41% of the 205 approved by the agency. Those with refugee status can generally pursue U.S. citizenship after five years, while those with temporary status must apply to renew it every two years and are not eligible for U.S. citizenship. Most cases approved by the immigration services agency came from El Salvador (480), followed by Honduras (102) and Guatemala (six). Last month, agency officials conducted interviews in an additional 794 cases that are still being processed. Next month, they plan to return to Central America for the next round of 1,000 interviews. Its not working, said Kevin Appleby, the Washington-based director of international migration policy at the Center for Migration Studies. Because theres a bottleneck and theyre not interviewing enough kids in a timely fashion, youve got backlogs. They need to put more resources into the program. State Department officials noted that processing for the Central American Minors program is much quicker than for refugee resettlement, which takes 18 to 24 months. Lavinia Limon, president and chief executive of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, said she attended a meeting at the White House after the program was created and warned officials that the childrens cases needed to be handled more quickly than those of other refugees. Like Appleby, she has heard of parents leaving the program in favor of smugglers. Her agency was notified that at least a dozen have had to cancel interviews for the program because they had already been smuggled into the U.S. Its sad because these parents are legally here and theyre trusting the system, and then they find that they cant and their child is in danger. Then if they bring them here, the child is undocumented, she said. Sortos wife and children turned themselves in to the Border Patrol after they crossed the Rio Grande on April 9. They are seeking asylum and entered Texas immigration detention centers last week. I hope they can get out and come back to me, Sorto said, because our country is too dangerous for them. For news from the Southwest, follow @mollyhf on Twitter. ALSO In blow to Republican challenge, Supreme Court upholds Arizona redistricting Supreme Court rejects challenge to Googles online library of books Obamas immigration plan appears to be in trouble after Supreme Court hearing Amid all the uncertainty over whether Republicans will nominate Donald Trump for president, the GOP front-runner is pivoting more and more overtly to a presumed general election contest against Democrat Hillary Clinton. In both tone and substance, the shift was clear in Trumps appearance Thursday morning on NBCs Today show before a town hall audience on the plaza of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. Trumps hard line on illegal immigration has been one of his strongest appeals to Republicans in the party nomination race. But when a Long Island woman in the crowd asked how he would handle her relatives who have lived in the U.S. illegally for 25 years, Trump played down his plan to deport millions of such immigrants. Advertisement Im sure these are very, very fine people, Trump said, a stark contrast to his earlier denunciations of Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. Theyre going to go, and were going to create a path where we can get them into this country legally, OK? It was only last month that Trump vowed in a radio interview to set up a system for Americans to report neighbors they suspect of living in the country illegally. Theyre going to report them, and were going to come and take care of the situation, because thats the only way were going to find out where they are, Trump told radio host Jamiel Shaw, a Trump supporter whose son was killed in Los Angeles by an immigrant in the U.S. illegally. On taxes, too, Trump appeared to change his stance Thursday in a way that could carry more appeal to the broader November electorate. Asked whether he believes in raising taxes on the wealthy, Trump responded, I do. Including myself. But in September, when Trump was competing with several GOP rivals pledging huge tax cuts, the New York businessman proposed lowering the top personal income tax bracket from 39.6% to 25%, a windfall for the wealthy. The ideological calibration comes as Trump, a master of the crushing insult, is trying to soften his public image. Lined up on stools beside him on the Today stage were his wife, Melania Trump, and four of his children, who paid elaborate tribute to his personal qualities, just as they did in a similar event last week on CNN. Trump has also turned to the paramount general election task of defining Clinton on his own terms, captured by a new nickname, Crooked Hillary, that can keep his message focused on trust and ethics. I like to sort of brand people, brand them honestly, and Ive branded some of the people that Ive been against on the Republican side, Trump told Fox News host Bill OReilly on Wednesday. I think its been effective. Thats what I branded her. You know the story as well as anybody else -- got a lot of problems. But with almost seven more weeks of GOP primaries ahead, Trumps modulation for the November election carries risk. He is struggling to accumulate the 1,237 delegates he needs to win the partys White House nomination without a high-drama floor fight at its Cleveland convention in July. His chief rival, Ted Cruz, can easily outflank Trump on the right in upcoming contests in Nebraska, Indiana and other states. In the town hall Thursday morning, Trump gave the Texas senator an opening to do just that when he answered a question on North Carolinas new law barring transgender people from using bathrooms that dont match their sex at birth. Trump suggested people should use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate, saying there had been very few complaints. So if Caitlyn Jenner were to walk into Trump Tower and want to use the bathroom, you would be fine with her using any bathroom she chooses? anchor Matt Lauer asked. That is correct, Trump replied. Cruz pounced, saying the safety of daughters, sisters and wives was in danger without bathroom laws like North Carolinas. Trump has succumbed to the lefts agenda, which is to force Americans to leave God out of public life while paying lip service to false tolerance, Cruz said in a statement that also pounded the reality-TV star for supporting legal abortion in the past. Trump now opposes legal abortion, but has had trouble keeping his position coherent. He recently said women should be punished for having abortions once the procedure is outlawed, sparking universal outrage. Trump quickly backpedaled, saying only doctors should be sanctioned, which did little to calm his critics, most notably Clinton. On Thursday, Trump told NBC that the Republican Party platform on abortion should be changed. Its call for a complete ban, he said, should be adjusted to allow abortions in cases of rape, incest or the preservation of a mothers life. I would absolutely have the three exceptions, he said. michael.finnegan@latimes.com Twitter: @finneganLAT Perhaps City Councilman Mitch Englanders sudden eagerness to delay a massive deal to buy 6,140 body cameras for Los Angeles police officers has nothing to do with the fact that he is in a tough race for county supervisor or the revelation that he received thousands of dollars in campaign donations from a dozen people affiliated with the company seeking the contract. Well take his word that putting the LAPD through more hoops is designed to assuage the cost concerns of his colleagues on the Public Safety Committee. In any case, he is entirely correct that a $31.2-million contract for body cameras, accessories, upgrades and storage ought to be done right. And this one wasnt. But scrapping the entire deal after so much time, work and money has already been sunk into it is not the answer. The best way out of this corner is to move forward. A better time for scrutiny was months ago when the Los Angeles Police Department first undertook an unorthodox contracting process that allowed the city to save time by piggybacking on a Kern County search for similar equipment rather than putting the contract out to bid. (The LAPD had already conducted a limited field test of body cameras.) Yet not a peep of protest came then from Englander or his fellow council members. Another good time for someone to say huh? was when the police department took possession of 860 Taser body cameras donated by private funds last year. Someone might have asked whether that was tying the department too tightly to a single company. Advertisement The troubles go back even farther, to December 2014, when Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that all LAPD officers would be outfitted with body cameras by July 2016, with a price tag in the high single-digit millions. Everyone was so enthusiastic about the idea of police accountability at the time that questions about cost and practicality may have fallen by the wayside. But when the council saw the bill in December 2015, it had a bad case of sticker shock. Council members were right to push back and question the police chief about the contract cost and staff requests 128 new positions! Since then LAPD officials have responded comprehensively to the questions, and even significantly scaled back the staff positions to just a handful. But theres nothing they can do to fix the fact that the contracting process was flawed from the start. Its a regrettable situation, and it is certainly tempting to dump the Taser deal altogether. But Englanders motion asking for even more reports by LAPD opens the door to restarting the entire bidding process, which could delay the body camera program by a year, maybe longer. Thats a bad idea. A delay could imperil the future of the program, especially if the commitment to body cameras were to diminish, and a $1-million federal grant that expires in 2017 could be jeopardized. The best option now is for the City Council to suck it up, let the deal go forward and learn from the mistakes. Its worth pointing out that no one says the Taser body cameras are inferior. In fact, the department is happy with the Taser cameras it has. And Los Angeles is getting a pretty good deal for the cameras $99 each. Kern County paid $399 each. There are many lessons to be learned. One is that using piggyback contracting for large procurements ought to be reserved for more prosaic purchases such as, say, toilet paper not for massive investments in new and controversial technology. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook The seaside community of Venice is home to one of the largest concentrations of homeless people in the city of Los Angeles. An estimated 1,000 people without housing camp on its streets and sidewalks, leading to clashes with residents, merchants and police. The L.A. City Council recently adopted a comprehensive strategy for tackling the problem, but it hasnt found a way yet to raise the considerable amount of money needed to pay for it. Rather than waiting for that to happen, Councilman Mike Bonin has laid out a way to move forward a few productive steps at a time. One part of Bonins plan is to repurpose the shuttered Westminister Senior Center, a sizable city-owned property in Venice, for much-needed storage space where homeless people could stash their belongings. Another would direct the citys Department of Recreation and Parks to identify public restroom facilities near the beach that could be open 24 hours a day, instead of closing late at night and reopening early in the morning. And the most ambitious proposal calls for the city to lease a 177-space parking lot owned by the citys Department of Transportation to a non-profit developer to build housing for homeless people while still providing parking spaces to the public. According to Bonin, the site could support up to 90 small units. All of these proposals require the approval of the full council, and none by themselves would eradicate homelessness in Venice, let alone in the city of L.A., where 26,000 residents are homeless. The sites hes suggested may also draw neighborhood opposition, an obstacle that stymied a number of previous efforts around the city. But Bonins proposals are just the sort of steps that need to be undertaken locally and championed by local elected officials. The citys overall strategy calls for officials to identify potential sites for storage and housing, particularly on idle city-owned property. Using city property would dramatically cut the costs faced by the developers of the housing. And in this case, Bonin has identified property on the Westside, one of the most expensive areas of the city. Advertisement The mayors proposed 2016-2017 budget has also identified, with support from other council members, city-owned sites in several council districts that could be good locations for new housing for homeless people. Still, city officials have calculated that it could take almost $2 billion to build housing on the scale necessary to address homelessness in a sweeping manner. So until the city comes up with that revenue stream, council members will need to support local building projects across the city that can, more quickly and affordably, help stem one of the citys most pressing crises. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook Theres an old legal adage that good facts make good law, and bad facts make bad law. In the case of campus sexual assault, it may be that absurd facts will eventually make good law too. About five years ago, the Department of Educations Office for Civil Rights issued a letter that would change the face of campus sexual misconduct proceedings at colleges across the country. The letter directed university administrators to judge allegations according to the lowest burden of proof available: the preponderance of the evidence, a mere 50.01% certainty that whatever the accuser claimed actually happened. It also highly discouraged cross-examinations, suggesting they might violate federal anti-discrimination law. Advertisement To avoid the governments ire and bad press colleges set up hard-line, zero tolerance policies. They began suspending or even expelling students on the basis of allegations that, even if true, fell short of what most people understand as assault. In recent months, however, some disputes have migrated from campuses to the real-world court system, and real-world judges are pushing back on absurd situations with common sense. One case involves two Brandeis students who dated for almost two years. Six months after the breakup, the young man whod ended the relationship filed a two-sentence complaint against his former boyfriend, alleging numerous inappropriate, non-consensual sexual interactions. No details, no specific incidents just that two-sentence complaint about bad things that happened during a lengthy relationship. Brandeis immediately launched an investigation and charged the accused with 12 separate violations of school policy. He was ultimately found responsible for four of them three counts of sexual misconduct and one count of invasion of privacy. As a result, he was fired from his internship and forced to explain what happened to every potential graduate school or employer. His crimes? Looking at his boyfriend naked when they were in a communal bathroom during their relationship; waking his boyfriend up by kissing him; trying to perform oral sex on his boyfriend when they were staying at the boyfriends fathers house; and, at the start of their relationship, putting his hand on his boyfriends crotch. Thats right -- someone was punished for waking up another person in a long-term relationship with a kiss. Thats right someone was punished for waking up another person in a long-term relationship with a kiss. In the logic of campus proceedings, this outcome makes a certain kind of sense. A kiss or any other sexual contact is non-consensual if the other person is asleep. And the Department of Education has told colleges that they mustnt treat non-consensual contact lightly. Yet campus rules overlook the realities of relationships and how people function in them. Failed by university administrators, the accused student sued Brandeis in federal court, alleging that the school had, among other things, violated its promise to conduct his disciplinary proceeding with basic fairness. In a forceful decision, a U.S. District Court judge lambasted Brandeis for how it treated the student, noting that there are few things in life as complex as a long-term relationship and permitted the case to move forward. In another case, a student sued the University of Southern California for suspending him for a year not for sexually assaulting his accuser, but for failing to intervene quickly enough when someone else slapped her on the bottom. The school did this despite a complete lack of evidence that the student knew the slap was coming or could have done anything to prevent it. The court threw out USCs decision entirely and ordered the student back to school. In the span of two pages, it used the words no evidence four separate times. Sexual assault does occur on college campuses, and schools are right to take it seriously. But that doesnt mean common sense has to go out the window. It is no less ridiculous to brand a college student a rapist for making an unwanted pass at his boyfriend than it is to brand a 7-year-old a threat for eating a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun. Yet in the mindless world of zero tolerance, such distinctions are lost. Sex, especially between college students, is messy and confusing. The notion currently in vogue that students must give explicit consent at every step of the way may be great in theory, but thats just not how people behave. People in romantic relationships sometimes wake each other with a kiss. Maybe the other person doesnt want the kiss or doesnt want to be woken up but does such behavior warrant even a formal response from a university, much less punishment? Slowly but surely, courts may be starting to realize that they have a role to play in making sure that schools treat everyone fairly, both the accusers and the accused. As any economist (or any parent) will tell you, people respond to incentives. If colleges fail to bring common sense back into their disciplinary processes, then courts may force them to do that and absurd facts will make good law. Justin Dillon and Matt Kaiser are partners at Kaiser, LeGrand & Dillon in Washington and have represented dozens of students nationwide in campus sexual assault cases. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook The California Environmental Quality Act is a valuable protector of this states resources. It guides planning by forcing agencies to consider the environmental implications of proposed projects. CEQA is also a woefully blunt instrument that thwarts economic growth and, perversely, can actually harm the environment. Thats exactly whats happening with a proposed switching yard at the Port of Los Angeles. The railway company BNSF has spent more than a decade working with the port to design a yard close to the port where trucks could deposit containers from ships onto the rail network. The new yard, called the Southern California International Gateway, would mean reduced traffic and air pollution in the region. Still some neighbors and environmental groups filed suit under CEQA to challenge the projects environmental impact report. Late last month, Superior Court Judge Barry Goode reviewed the report and concluded that it came up short in a few areas. In Goodes opinion, the EIR was an impressive piece of work, but it did not adequately consider the ports potential growth or the yards implications for another nearby facility. He also found that it overlooked some potential noise and traffic impacts. Advertisement That may be true. BNSF disagrees, but these are difficult projections to make, and Goodes 200-page ruling is detailed and comprehensive. Whats indisputable is that the project has been excruciatingly studied. In the 11 years since it was introduced, the switching yard proposal has been the subject of public hearings and press scrutiny. Its been reviewed and approved by the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners and the City Council. The EIR runs more than 5,000 pages. It is clear, Goode wrote in his decision, that a great deal of careful thought has been given to the environmental impact of this project. If thats not enough, what is? CEQA exists to protect the environment, and Goodes blocking the BNSF project may indeed have a beneficial impact on the area next to the proposed rail yard. It will be less noisy, and have less traffic than if the yard were built. But were not talking about pristine wilderness here; the yard is planned for an industrial site adjacent to a freeway. The nearest homes are across the freeway; the immediate neighbors are a tank farm and an industrial operations area. With or without the switching yard, this is a noisy, congested, polluted spot. CEQA is ... a woefully blunt instrument that thwarts economic growth and, perversely, can actually harm the environment. In fact, Goodes ruling will have a negative effect on the regions environment, if not the neighborhoods. Today, many trucks that pick up cargo at the port trundle their loads 24 miles up the 710 freeway to deposit them at a rail station. If the switching yard were built, those trucks would instead travel less than four miles. BNSF estimates the new yard would eliminate 1.5 million truck trips a year up and down the freeway. And since those trips cause traffic and air pollution, the project would reduce both. Thats one of the troubles with CEQA: The judge is not empowered to consider the overall implications for the environment; he has to examine the micro implications raised in the lawsuit. And then theres L.A.'s economy. BNSF says it would take 1,500 construction workers to build the facility. Once operating, again according to BNSF, the yard would spur enough economic growth to add 22,000 direct and indirect jobs to the region ranging from the people actually running the 24-hour-a-day facility to those involved in goods movement across Southern California. Even if the company is being overly optimistic, the new yard is likely to produce thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in tax revenue to the local, state and federal governments. Finally, there is the issue of uncertainty. BNSF has been pursuing this project since 2005. It has invested millions of dollars in environmental review and planning, to now be sent back to the drawing board. Imagine if you were considering an addition to your home and were told it would take a fortune and more than a decade just to determine whether you would be allowed to build it. Would you go forward? The homeowners and environmental groups that fought the switching yard had every right to do so, but the BNSF case is a powerful reminder that CEQA, for all its protective qualities, can work against the public interest as well as for it. There is no reason CEQAs potential for abuse couldnt be mitigated. However, since it was enacted in 1970, the act has accumulated powerful allies. Unions use it to leverage concessions from developers; businesses employ it to hamper competitors; neighborhoods use it to fend off undesirable development; lawyers bill for years on end by picking through impact reports and finding weak spots. Those are powerful constituencies, and all of them resist change. Fortunately for California, we have a governor who no longer is subject to many of the rules of political pressure. Jerry Brown, now in his fourth and final term and at the peak of his influence, has the capacity and freedom to take on CEQA reform. It would be a challenge worthy of his ability. As for the BNSF yard, a spokeswoman this week said the company was considering all of its options, but theyre not as environmentally protective as the yard. Jim Newton, a former editor and columnist for The Times, is the editor of UCLAs Blueprint magazine. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook On Tuesday, former New York police officer Peter Liang was sentenced to probation and community service -- but no jail time -- in the 2014 killing of Akai Gurley, an unarmed black man, in the stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project. This notably light sentence is a relief to some Asian Americans -- particularly Chinese Americans -- who leaped to Liangs defense from the start, arguing that the shooting was a tragic accident and that Liangs prosecution and conviction were proof of selective prosecution and racial scapegoating. But many progressive Asian Americans -- who called for Liangs conviction and rallied Asian Americans to stand in solidarity with black people against police violence -- are bitterly disappointed with Liangs sentence. Advertisement This divide over the Liang trial reflects a much deeper political division within Asian American communities about whether to pursue an Asian-first strategy or a broader racial justice agenda. At the heart of that debate is a crucial topic that often gets swept under the rug, one the Liang trial will hopefully bring to the fore: the beneficial positioning of Asian Americans in the countrys racial order. Asian Americans are not, as they are often labeled, a model minority whose cultural endowments have allowed them to outstrip other less equipped minorities. However, like whites, they do enjoy a priceless set of structural privileges and immunities, as evidenced by high educational and residential integration and intermarriage rates with whites. They have also been immunized, relatively speaking, from the systemic, routine and often lethal violence exercised by the state against the black community -- not just episodes of individual killing, but the institutionalized violence of residential segregation, educational segregation, job discrimination, policing and mass incarceration. This advanced positioning of Asian Americans relative to black people in the U.S. racial order can be traced all the way back to the mid-19th century. Chinese arriving in San Francisco were residentially segregated, subject to mob violence, harassed through municipal laws and widely scorned as inferior to and unassimilable with whites. Still, they were universally seen -- on the authority of the ethnological science, racial common sense and international norms of the day -- as a different, superior order of being as compared with black people. They were aliens ineligible for citizenship, but they were also ineligible for enslavement. Peter Liangs supporters have zoomed in on the narrow question of whether he was treated more harshly than his white counterparts, while blocking out the larger picture of the privileges and immunities Asian Americans enjoy. The notion that Asian Americans are pawns or sacrificial lambs in the war between whites and blacks is a recurrent fantasy among many Asian Americans. A scapegoat, however, is by definition a moral innocent, one made to bear the blame for others. By what authoritative procedure have Asian Americans absolved themselves of moral responsibility for the hierarchical racial order in which they are embedded? That Asian Americans experience discrimination does not secure their innocence. Nor does the fact that their privileges and immunities are not as complete or robust as those of whites. This is a pivotal moment in the political history of Asian America. Currently, some Asian American groups are forging alliances with conservative white politicians to defeat state affirmative action bills and spearhead anti-affirmative action lawsuits against elite universities. Others have moved in the opposite direction, denouncing these Asian-first moves and calling for Asian-black solidarity in the fight against white supremacy. The Achilles heel of the latter position it that it assumes the unity of nonwhite interests, even though Asian Americans are positioned differently from black people in the U.S. racial order. The Liang case challenges Asian Americans to develop a political ethos that calls for confronting racial hierarchy and anti-black racism, even when the self-interest of Asian Americans dictates otherwise. Claire Jean Kim is a professor of Asian American studies and political science at UC Irvine. She is the author of the award-winning book Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook MORE FROM OPINION Prince failed as often as he succeeded -- and thats why he was so great Why is the world of architecture so male-dominated? Absurdity reigns in campus sexual assault trials To the editor: It would be helpful to have some context when discussing the Golan Heights, namely how Israel came to capture that area. (Netanyahu says Israel will never give up the Golan Heights, April 17) In the months leading up to the Six Day War in 1967, Israeli civilians in the north were subject to numerous attacks from the Golan Heights, which at the time was still possessed by Syria. Israel retaliated and captured the Golan Heights during the Six Day War only after Syria had attacked Israel. While it is true that Israel launched a preemptive attack on Egypt to begin the formalized fighting of the Six Day War, Israel did not attack Syria first. Advertisement Just as Americans would not put up with attacks by its neighboring countries, Israel should be allowed to defend itself as well. Aaron Levinson, Woodland Hills .. To the editor: For years the Israeli government has made it clear that Israel reserves the right to annex most of the West Bank at a time that suits them likely after most Palestinians are either forced out or corralled in enclaves. That unwillingness to allow Palestinians their right of self-determination is the major barrier to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put the Golan Heights in the same category, making peace with Syria (at some future time when the country is stabilized) impossible. Both these Israeli positions are contrary to U.S. policy. Yet the United States enables these Israeli policies by it annual military support of more than $3 billion now, scheduled to increase by 50% over the next few years. If the United States wants to promote peace in the region, ending military support of Israels territorial expansionism would be a good start. Jeff Warner, Los Angeles Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook Tubman is in, Hamilton is saved and Jackson is banished to the back of the bill. That is the news from the United States Treasury, where it was announced on Wednesday that the face of a venerable and brave African American woman will be the first to grace the front of the nations paper currency. Harriet Tubman, a slave who escaped from bondage and then devoted her life to freeing more of her brothers and sisters from the Souths slave empire, will soon take center stage on the $20 bill. For years there has been a push to make room for someone besides famous white men on the money that passes through our hands every day. A weak attempt was made when suffragette Susan B. Anthony and, later, Shoshone guide Sacagawea took their turns on the little-used dollar coin. Though the image on the Sacagawea coin, in particular, was lovely, agitation for a non-white, non-male person on more heavily utilized currency only increased. RELATED: Harriet Tubman is the next face of the $20 bill; $5 and $10 bills will also change Advertisement Last June, the Treasury laid out plans to pick a worthy female to replace our countrys first Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, on the $10 note. That scheme ran into resistance, not only from feminists who insisted a woman should get the prime spot on the more ubiquitous $20 bill, but also because Hamilton, a lesser-known Founding Father, had suddenly become cool with the kids, thanks to the huge success of the Broadway rap musical Hamilton. 1 / 51 la-1491523602-y7ephyarj1-snap-image (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 2 / 51 la-1491368625-0bgh58ihw8-snap-image (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 3 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 4 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 5 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los angeles Times) 6 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 7 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 8 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 9 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 10 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon. (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 11 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 12 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 13 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 14 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 15 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 16 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon. (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 17 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 18 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 19 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 20 / 51 Trump inspires millions to take to the streets -- to oppose him. (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 21 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 22 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 23 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon. (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 24 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 25 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 26 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon. (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 27 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 28 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 29 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 30 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 31 / 51 Top of the Ticket cartoon (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 32 / 51 Cartoon caption contest winner at the DENT conference in Sun Valley, Idaho: Jon Duval, executive director of the Ketchum Community Development Corporation. (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 33 / 51 Old radicals and big media descend on Selma (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 34 / 51 Horsey imagined the creation of the Ann Coulter phenomenon in this cartoon from 2007. (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 35 / 51 This David Horsey drawing is a reconfiguration of a cartoon he first published in 2006. (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 36 / 51 Donald Sterling, owner of the L.A. Clippers, should give Cliven Bundy a call. After Sterling loses his NBA franchise and the deadbeat Nevada rancher loses his cattle, the two old racists will both need a buddy. Maybe they can team up together and open an all-white rodeo. (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 37 / 51 Besides sending a chill up the spine of the international community, Vladimir Putin has accomplished one other thing by seizing Crimea and threatening the rest of Ukraine: Putin has brought back the bear. (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 38 / 51 The right-wing insurrection at the Bundy ranch in Bunkerville, Nev., has taken another weird turn with new revelations about the family history of Cliven Bundy. (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 39 / 51 See full story (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 40 / 51 See full story (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 41 / 51 See full story (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 42 / 51 See full story (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 43 / 51 See full story (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 44 / 51 See full story (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 45 / 51 David Horsey / Los Angeles Times (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 46 / 51 See full story (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 47 / 51 See full story (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 48 / 51 See full story (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 49 / 51 See full story (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 50 / 51 See full story (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) 51 / 51 See full story (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times) While Hamiltons new fan base has insured his face will stay on the $10, President Andrew Jacksons popularity has been falling, making him an easier target for demotion. For decades, Democratic Party organizations around the U.S. held annual Jefferson/Jackson dinners, named to honor the two leaders considered to be the fathers of the party. Recently, though, activists have complained that both Thomas Jefferson and Jackson were slave owners and, therefore, are no longer the best representatives of modern, multi-ethnic Democrats. Jefferson has a long list of redeeming attributes that makes it possible to counter the ire of revisionists. The author of the Declaration of Independence openly recognized the evil of slavery, even if he could not break from the economic thrall of the institution. Jackson, on the other hand, is harder to defend. Not only did he have an early career as a slave trader, there was the heinous matter of genocide. As president, Jackson engineered the forced removal of peaceful Native American tribes from their homes in the South to lands west of the Mississippi River. For the most part, these were people who had assimilated and become farmers and shopkeepers. That did not prevent the confiscation of their property and a forced march along the notorious Trail of Tears, where the Indians died by the thousands from hunger, cold and disease. This racist land grab by white settlers and slaveholders was opposed by 19th century notables such as Davy Crockett and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was also declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. Jackson ignored them all and heartlessly enforced the policy. Jackson has had more than enough time in an honored place on our currency (his image bumped the picture of President Cleveland from the bill in 1929). Besides, he will not entirely disappear. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said Old Hickory will show up somewhere on the back of the $20, if only in a representation of the equestrian statue that stands across from the White House in Lafayette Square. These changes to the currency are, predictably, being derided by at least a few conservatives. Ben Carson, the failed Republican presidential candidate, called Jackson a tremendous president and said Tubman should perhaps be relegated to the nearly unused $2 bill. Kristin Tate, one of the numerous young libertarian women vying to follow Ann Coulters lucrative path into the right wing medias pundit pool, was more caustic. We must remove historical figures to make room for a Muslim, a Native American, a Chinese American, an Indian and a transgender person, Tate said, tongue firmly in cheek. I personally suggest Caitlyn Jenner. Anything less would be offensive. It is obviously impossible for the conservative chattering class to resist characterizing these changes in Americas currency as pathetic political correctness, but it is worth noting that a lot of them have been lobbying to get Ronald Reagan on the $50 in place of Ulysses S. Grant or on the dime, where he would bump liberal icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Objectively, though, should we open a space for yet another white male president before giving recognition to great American women and inspiring civil rights leaders? Our history is richer than that. MORE FROM OPINION Sorry, Harriet Tubman fans, paper money isnt what it used to be Absurdity reigns in campus sexual assault trials Why is the world of architecture so male-dominated? A different Bernie Sanders or at least a different Bernie Sanders message showed up in Scranton, Pa., on Thursday as he resumed campaigning after his New York primary loss. In an hourlong rally, there was no mention of Hillary Clintons top-dollar speeches to Wall Street, no demands that she release transcripts of them, no mockery about how, to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, those speeches must be Shakespearean in quality. There was no mention of the $15 million raised by super PACs working for her from Wall Street employees, or the $25 million her supporters raised from special interests, gibes that have been common in his speeches in recent weeks. Advertisement Was it proof of a truce between the Democratic presidential candidates? Not so fast. A few hours later, at an appearance in Reading, Pa., Sanders was back to criticizing Clintons campaign money, the super PAC fundraising and the Wall Street speeches. Not a bad days work, he said sarcastically, proceeding with a set piece in which he pretends to release transcripts of his speeches to Wall Street speeches that never occurred. Earlier in the day, a truce of sorts seemed to be holding between Clinton and Sanders. Democrats have increasingly demanded that, fearful that the antagonistic primary race was hurting the chances of the eventual nominee. The partys most probable choice is Clinton, who holds a large delegate lead over the Vermont senator. On Wednesday, in her first campaign appearance in Pennsylvania after the New York results, Clinton made only a slight mention of Sanders, on the subject of gun control measures she has supported and he had opposed. In Scranton, Sanders appeared to respond in kind. He went on for 26 minutes without mentioning the former secretary of State. Over the last half of his speech, he noted several areas in which he and Clinton disagree over the minimum wage, trade agreements, fracking and lifting the income cap to better fund Social Security. But his comparisons were of the just-the-facts variety. Election 2016 | Live coverage on Trail Guide | Track the delegate race | Sign up for the newsletter I opposed all these trade agreements. Secretary Clinton supported most of them; that is a big difference, he said. He did hold a grudge of sorts against New York, complaining about the fact that only Democrats were allowed to vote in New Yorks Democratic primary. He said that rule disenfranchised independent voters. We just had a Democratic primary in New York state, he said, prompting boos from the crowd. Well, I share those sentiments, but heres the point: I dont mind losing, but 3 million people who registered as independents did not have the right to participate. That really is not democracy. Changes of tone are a given in political campaigns, and particularly in this riotous one. Republican candidate Donald Trump took the high road Tuesday night, calling Texas Sen. Ted Cruz by his honorific, but by Wednesday morning, he was back to castigating him as Lyin Ted. But Trump and Cruz are in a ferocious battle that likely will not end until the July national convention in Cleveland. Clintons better odds of clinching the Democratic nomination by the end of the primary season is what has led to calls for a calmer contest lest Democrats be handing Republicans their general election talking points. (Sanders team believes it still has a path to the nomination but acknowledges its more than likely to require superdelegates now supporting Clinton to flip to Sanders.) In lieu of criticizing Clintons judgment and mocking her political alliances, Sanders had set out a different band of culprits: the establishment and Congress. The greed, recklessness and illegal behavior of Wall Street drove this country into the worst economic downturn in the modern history of this country, since the 1930s, he said. What did Congress do? They bailed them out. I didnt vote for that, but thats what Congress did. He made a pitch for his proposal to tax Wall Street speculation and use the money to finance his free tuition plan. This is not an idea the establishment feels all that comfortable with, he said. They might like the idea of bailing out Wall Street thats OK. But bailing out the middle class and helping their families, that is a terribly radical idea. I dont think so! Sanders did offer generic slights at politicians who raise money from the wealthy as most politicians do but did not attach those complaints explicitly to Clinton, as he has in the past. The reason this campaign has been doing so well is we are listening to the people of this country, not just wealthy campaign contributors, he said. A lot of what American politics is about today is candidates running around, sitting in mansions of billionaires, listening to the terrifying problems the millionaires have. But by the time his next event ended, the criticisms of Clintons link to wealthy contributors and the insinuation that she was part of a corrupt campaign finance system was explicitly back in the mix. cathleen.decker@latimes.com Follow me on Twitter: @cathleendecker. For more on politics, go to latimes.com/decker. ALSO: Who will play nice first, Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders? With New York wins, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump aim at November Live coverage from the campaign trail Widening his delegate lead, Donald Trump has taken a significant stride toward clinching the Republican presidential nomination and avoiding a knockdown fight at the partys summer convention. But the contest is far from settled. Trumps landslide win in Tuesdays New York primary snagged him at least 89 delegates, pushing his total to 845 of the 1,237 needed to secure the GOP nomination. His nearest rival, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, was shut out and trails the Manhattan real estate mogul by nearly 300 delegates. With seven weeks left in the primary season, Trump must capture about 55% to 60% of the remaining delegates for a first-ballot victory at the convention in Cleveland a formidable but not impossible task. Advertisement The Republican front-runner is likely to substantially add to his delegate total next week, when five politically friendly states hold their primaries. He stands a good chance to win them all and most of the 172 delegates at stake. But after Tuesday, a major test looms May 3 in Indiana, the closest thing left on the primary calendar to a pure toss-up. Even if Trump does well there, he will still need a strong performance in California on June 7, the final day of the Republican primary season, to win the nomination before delegates gather in Cleveland six weeks later. That will be the sort of Waterloo, said Katie Packer, the head of Our Principles political action committee, a group funded by major Republican donors that has spent heavily on advertising to keep Trump from capturing the nomination. Either he wins or he loses its going to happen there. Trump has retooled his campaign and become a more restrained, better disciplined candidate of late. But the political map and mathematics of delegation selection will dictate his fate as much or more than any personnel move or personality makeover. The next several states to vote, on April 26 Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island line up well for Trump. They are urban, largely secular and lean Democratic. Republicans, as members of the minority party, often feel oppressed by the Democratic regime that runs their states and the White House, and that feeds into a sense of alienation that Trump has capitalized on, said David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, who has closely studied the demographic patterns of the presidential race. You could expect him to do very, very well. Other states stack up better for Cruz, including Nebraska on May 10 and Montana on June 7, which, combined, offer 63 delegates. Trump has not done especially well in the countrys midsection or less urbanized portions of the West. ------------ FOR THE RECORD April 21, 8:49 a.m.: An earlier version of this article stated that there are 91 Republican convention delegates at stake in Nebraska and Montana combined. The two states have a total of 63 delegates. ------------ Indiana, with 57 delegates, is a state where Trump and Cruz both start out competitive. It has a significant number of Christian conservative voters and well-educated suburbanites; the latter helped drive Cruzs landslide victory this month in Wisconsin. There is also a large number of working-class voters who have suffered from Indianas manufacturing decline; victims of such economic upheaval are a big portion of Trumps base. Even Ohio Gov. John Kasich, largely an afterthought in the race, could do well in pockets of Indiana that touch upon his home state of Ohio. Kasich picked up a handful of delegates in New York. In an unusual plea for intervention, his chief strategist, John Weaver, issued a memo Wednesday laying out a state-by-state strategy for anti-Trump forces to attack the businessman in next Tuesdays contests. Several well-funded groups that pounded Trump in earlier states, with mixed results, sat out New York, and Weaver said that contributed to Trumps overwhelming success. Failure to engage on April 26 would put Donald Trump on track to win the nomination on the first ballot, Weaver warned. Packer said the anti-Trump group she leads was deciding whether to target some congressional districts in Maryland and would make a more substantial investment in Indiana. But nothing will be settled until the GOP contest comes to California, which offers 172 delegates by far the most of any state. California Republicans have a long history of staunch opposition to illegal immigration, an important edge for Trump. But Cruzs alignment with the religious right also makes him a comfortable fit, especially in the agricultural heartland of the Central Valley. As in New York, Kasich stands at least an outside chance of gaining a few delegates in the more prosperous, better-educated coastal regions where many Republicans prefer party establishment types. Still, the arcane rules governing the high-stakes delegate fight mean this will not be a typical California campaign with costly TV advertising driving the result. Instead, organizational muscle will be crucial. Cruz has taken advantage of Trumps inexperienced campaign to outhustle the neophyte candidate in a number of states choosing their representatives to the national convention. Apart from vigorously crying foul, Trump has responded by shuffling his team, hiring several more experienced political insiders to oversee the delegate-wrangling process. The question, though, is whether the change comes too late; Trump is also in danger of being outmaneuvered in California, where his lead in the polls wont necessarily translate into the kind of delegate landslide he pulled off in his home state. Under party rules, its a winner-take-all contest in each of Californias 53 congressional districts, with three delegates up for grabs in each. Another 13 delegates go to the statewide winner. First, though, each candidate has until May 8 to submit a slate of 169 delegates; the remaining three are party leaders. The candidates must be careful, though, to find loyalists who wont abandon them if multiple votes take place at the national convention. In other states, many Trump delegates plan to switch to Cruz if they get the chance. To find three staunch supporters in every California congressional district, along with three alternates, is no easy task. Its a daunting logistical and organizational challenge, said Jeff Randle, a GOP operative in Sacramento who rounded up California delegates for Mitt Romney in 2012. The Cruz campaign has a huge head start. Led by former chairmen of the state GOP, the Cruz team has been building its delegate slate and plotting a district-by-district strategy since last August. The Trump campaign only hired its state director last week. Josh Putnam, a University of Georgia expert on the delegate selection process, has been carefully tracking the nominating fight and charting the progress after every contest. Either way you slice it, he said, it looks like this thing is going to be really close. mark.barabak@latimes.com Twitter: @markzbarabak michael.finnegan@latimes.com Twitter: @finneganLAT Barabak reported from New York and Finnegan from Los Angeles. A palm-tree-studded Florida beach resort is the unlikely new arena this week for the contentious GOP presidential race. The heart of the partys establishment members of the Republican National Committee is convening here for the groups quarterly meeting, a typically cloistered affair. But in this unruly primary season, even the most insider of gatherings has been propelled into the public eye. Theres never been as much personal scrutiny by reporters and our constituents in any of our experiences, said Shawn Steel, a national committee member from California. Advertisement The three-day gatherings main event is a meeting on Thursday of the RNCs 56-member rules committee, which helps shape the guidelines governing this summers nominating convention in Cleveland. The arcane rules have assumed an outsized significance with the prospect of a contested convention. Whatever we propose, thats it -- its a proposal. Its a humble suggestion. Shawn Steel, a California member of the GOP rules committee Still, the committee has already tamped down expectations of proposals out of the meeting that would substantially modify existing convention rules. The party is wary of appearing to help or harm any candidates by endorsing new nominating guidelines. Were in a politically charged environment, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said on CNN on Sunday, adding that changing the rules now would be a bad idea. Thats in part because the confab comes at an especially delicate time for the committee. Republican front-runner Donald Trump has waged an escalating feud against his party, taking direct swipes at Priebus and denouncing GOP elites as having a rigged system that he says has imperiled his path to the nomination. Priebus has scoffed at Trumps complaints of an unfair process, noting that primary rules were long-established and should be well-known to prepared candidates. But even if committee members were to endorse major procedural changes Thursday, it would not be a binding decision. Whatever we propose, thats it its a proposal. Its a humble suggestion, said Steel, a former chairman of the California GOP who now sits on the rules committee. Committee members can make recommendations on convention rules, but the main authority lies with the convention rules committee, a separate body of 112 delegates who will be chosen by the individual delegations of every state and U.S. territory. That committee, which will meet just before the July convention, can rewrite the rules on the nominating proceedings before presenting them before the full convention for approval. The intrigue surrounding this weeks conclave underscores how much this turbulent Republican race hinges on the often-invisible nitty-gritty of the nominating process. Trump continues to lead in primary votes and in notching delegates who will officially vote for the nominee on the first ballot at the convention. But he may fall short of capturing an outright majority of 1,237 delegates, raising the possibility of multiple rounds of voting in Cleveland. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, meanwhile, has proved adept at shepherding supporters into delegate slots, ensuring a cadre of loyalists likely to support Cruz over Trump on a second ballot or beyond when the bulk of delegates are no longer required to vote for the candidate who won their states primary. Cruzs successful maneuverings have prompted an outcry from Trump, who has sharply jabbed at his rivals strategy as subverting the will of the voters. Its a crooked system. Its a system thats rigged.... Nobody can take an election away with the way theyre doing it in the Republican Party, Trump said Tuesday after his resounding win in the New York primary. Beyond Trumps public pronouncements, there were signs in Florida that his campaign hoped to thaw relations with the party elite. His top operatives were there briefing delegates. Rivals Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich themselves also flocked to Florida to huddle with party members. Cruz, who has made railing against the Washington establishment a central tenet of his campaign, pushed back against the notion he was making a pilgrimage to the party elite. Rather, he portrayed the meetings attendees as elected grass-roots activists from the states. I am happy to go where the grass roots are, to ask for their support and to answer their questions at any and all times, Cruz told reporters. When not hobnobbing with presidential contenders, attendees were set to discuss obscure rules that rarely garner notice beyond political wonks. One example is a spat over the parliamentary order governing the convention. Typically, the convention operates under the rules of the U.S. House of Representatives. One committee member proposed switching to a different protocol, Roberts Rules of Order, which is more commonly used by civic groups to conduct meetings. Such a move would give more authority to the delegates, instead of a powerful convention chair. Its proponent, Solomon Yue, said that would make the nominating process more transparent. Others say the protocol could pave the way for convention floor chaos or make it harder for the party to designate a compromise candidate should there be a deadlock. But the RNC leadership signaled it would not want such a significant rules change to happen in such a politically fraught environment. Especially in the middle of the current primary contest, it is important that the RNC not take action that can be interpreted as attempting to favor one candidate or another, wrote John Ryder, the RNCs general counsel, in an email to rules committee members over the weekend. Major changes now are dangerous and not a good idea, he added. Yue, meanwhile, mused about how the minutiae of parliamentary procedure has suddenly captured national attention. Rules are such a boring subject until someone tries to play games with rules, he said. Then it becomes an issue. Follow @melmason for more on California government and politics. ALSO Wrestling star Chyna found dead at Redondo Beach home Global warming has made the weather better -- but dont get used to it Harriet Tubman is the next face of the $20 bill; $5 and $10 bills will also change In the wake of Hillary Clintons expansive win in the New York primary, both she and challenger Bernie Sanders face a freighted decision: whether, and how, to pull back on rhetoric that has grown sharper and nastier in recent weeks as they battle for the Democratic nomination. The choices, whether to lay down arms or continue strafing, would seem to be simple. But the stakes are so high that the strategic imperatives are complicated. Both candidates are seeking delegates in Pennsylvania and in four other states Tuesday. But neither wants to risk alienating voters by coming off as too negative. Both candidates particularly Clinton, the leader in delegates with a far better shot at the nomination are looking at the difficulties inherent in unifying a fractured party in November. Advertisement At least initially, both candidates appeared to be muting their criticisms, keeping them squarely in a comparative I opposed, my opponent didnt vein. But the sentiment was fleeting on Sanders side. In her first post-New York appearance in Philadelphia on Wednesday, Clinton reminded a group assembled in a Baptist church of Sanders vote to give legal immunity to gun makers and sellers in a shooting involving their weapon. Thats one of the big differences between me and Sen. Sanders, she said, repeating in milder form one of the main thrusts of her New York campaign. Theres been a lot of talk in this campaign and the primary campaign about the power of certain interests in this country, she said, referring to Sanders criticism of her ties to Wall Street, but there is no more powerful lobby than the gun lobby, none. Sanders, in his first campaign event after New York, a rally on Thursday in Scranton, Pa., was similarly careful with his words. In an hourlong speech, he made no mention of Clintons top-dollar speeches to Wall Street and no demands that she release transcripts of them. He didnt talk about the millions of dollars that super PACs have raised on her behalf from Wall Street nor of additional money she has accepted from other special interests. All of those complaints have had prominent roles in Sanders speeches for weeks. Sanders noted several areas in which he and Clinton disagree over the minimum wage, trade agreements, fracking and lifting the income cap to better fund Social Security. But his comparisons, like Clintons, were more bland than they have been. I opposed all these trade agreements; Secretary Clinton supported most of them. That is a big difference, he said in what served as Thursdays template. But hours later in Reading, Pa., Sanders was back to mocking her Wall Street speeches and the millions of super PAC dollars she has received from groups of whom he disapproves. The tone in any campaign, this one included, can alter at any time; in recent weeks, an offhand comment by one candidate has prompted a heightened response from the other, escalating into a cascade of insults. Clinton and Sanders and their teams have blamed each other for escalating the negativity and thus each had insisted the other needed to take the first step to change the tone. Bernie always wanted to have just an up-or-down debate on the issues, said Sanders chief strategist, Tad Devine. If they want that, they can have it. If theyre going to run the kind of campaign they ran in New York, theres going to be a tough response from Bernie. Hes not just going to take it. The Sanders campaign expected better results in New York, where Clinton won by 16 points. That big-state victory gave her a net gain of 33 delegates, nearly wiping out Sanders net gain of 45 delegates in his last five victories. That points to a persistent problem for Sanders: His losses in highly populated states, combined with the proportional way Democrats allocate delegates, have made it tough for him to close Clintons advantage of far more than 200 pledged delegates. Sanders campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, said Tuesday night on MSNBC that the candidate would spend the period before the July convention attempting to flip superdelegates, party leaders who have agreed to support Clinton. That effort, an acknowledgment that Clinton will win more pledged delegates, would extend the campaign season beyond the last big primaries in June, heightening the tension between the candidates. But Devine said that finishing with more pledged delegates remains the goal. He said the campaign was looking forward to a brilliant winning streak through California and New Jersey, which both vote on June 7. We dont do this unless we win, he said. We have to win next week, we have to consistently win in May, and we have to have big wins in May. In the meantime, prominent Sanders supporters were sharply divided about how to navigate the course ahead. All year long, exit polls have shown that Sanders supporters are less willing to consider voting for Clinton in November than her supporters are about voting for him. The tone of the New York campaign, if anything, heightened concerns about the willingness of Sanders supporters to back Clinton if, as the odds have it, she becomes the nominee. Sanders outraged Clintons side by declaring her unqualified for the presidency because of her vote for the Iraq war, her campaign fundraising and her links to Wall Street. Clinton outraged Sanders by hitting him hard on the gun immunity vote. Robert Reich, a UC Berkeley professor who is a prominent Sanders backer and served as President Clintons first secretary of Labor, suggested Wednesday that both teams retreat. I want to urge Bernie supporters to tone down negative characterizations of Hillary and Hillary supporters to do the same with regard to Bernie, he wrote in a Facebook post. I know both candidates personally. Both are thoughtful and dedicated people who care deeply about this nation. Either of them would be a thousand times better president than any of the Republican candidates. Its important that we not jeopardize that future joint effort through excessive divisiveness now, he said. But another key Sanders supporter insisted that Sanders should campaign unrelentingly and she did so in language sure to inflame the Clinton forces. Speaking of the New York loss, RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United, a union that was an early Sanders endorser, said it makes us far more determined because the election was essentially stolen. Her argument, seconded by Sanders in Scranton on Thursday, was that independents should have been allowed to vote in the New York primary, even though they are not Democratic Party members. If the independents were able to vote in New York, Bernie would have won, she said. Anywhere where the vote was fair, Bernie won. We are not going to be deterred by a stolen, corrupted system. She characterized Sanders as treating Clinton with kid gloves and said she is great at being the victim. She is one of the most aggressive females Ive ever watched, and she has a tendency to pose as a victim. We plan on beating Clinton, she added. This isnt Kumbaya time. The immediate news isnt good for Sanders in Pennsylvania, the largest of the five states that will vote on Tuesday. A Monmouth University poll found Clinton leading in the state, 52% to 39%. It fits the profile of places where Clinton has done well: diverse and bigger states where primaries are limited to Democrats. How they choose to contrast each others views will affect not only the primary campaign but also the general election particularly if Clinton, already suffering from high unfavorability ratings, chooses or is forced to campaign in a highly negative way to secure the nomination. cathleen.decker@latimes.com Times staff writers Mark Z. Barabak in New York and Noah Bierman in Philadelphia contributed to this report. Follow me on Twitter @cathleendecker For more on politics, go to latimes.com/decker ALSO: With New York wins, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump aim at November Why young voters are flocking to Sanders and older ones to Clinton Dont eat pizza with a fork, and other lessons of the New York primary Live coverage from the campaign trail Hillary Clinton talks police conduct with Sandra Blands mother at her side Hillary Clinton sat beside women who had lost loved ones to confrontations with police as they recounted vivid details of the deaths Wednesday evening in a steamy packed church. For the mothers, fathers that have lost children and she didnt call you, I am sorry. I only know that she called me. She called these sisters on the stage, said Geneva Reed-Veal, whose daughter, Sandra Bland, died in a jail cell last year, three days after a traffic stop near Houston. Reed-Veal and some of the women had appeared with Clinton before, providing powerful and personal testimony that is far different from typical campaign rallies. They also provide a rebuttal to critics of former President Bill Clintons get-tough-on-crime strategies that have caused some black activists to criticize Hillary Clinton. Clinton, who sat with former U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder, promised to champion their cause, invoking her own daughter Chelsea as she tried to empathize with their loss. She talked about changing police policies, demilitarizing police forces, and increasing training programs designed to de-escalate tense situations. As she typically does, Clinton warned that no one would get everything they want, that there would have to be compromise. Theyre asking us to be there for them, Clinton said. I will do everything I can imagine. I want these women and so many other family members to hold me accountable for everything I can possibly do, because it is wrong. Clintons event was held at St. Pauls Baptist Church, a 126-year-old African American institution in Philadelphias West Poplar area. Pennsylvania is the site of the next primary. Inside the small church, media competed for space with church members, activists and campaign people. The event was billed as a discussion of police conduct, gun violence and incarceration of black men. Clinton touched on all three topics. But the presence of the women ensured that police conduct took prominence. I cant even imagine, she said, looking at one of the mothers. You mentioned Chelsea. I cant even imagine. I have the greatest respect for what each of them has gone through, but also their protests, their speaking out, their demands. Because that is what all of us should be doing. The format is a contrast to large rallies, at which Clinton has trouble competing with the passion and size of the crowds generated by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination. The poignant stories provided a different kind of emotional charge. Theres no one person, no one victim thats more important than the other, said Nicole Paultre, whose fiance, Sean Bell, died in 2006 after a confrontation with police in New York on the night of his bachelor party. Its a club that no one wants to be a part of. ... We dont want no more members. Clinton said little about Sanders, but she did not refrain from criticizing him, despite calls from some Democrats to tamp down the increasingly contentious primary battle. Theres been a lot of talk in this campaign and the primary campaign about the power of certain interests in this country, Clinton said. But there is no more powerful lobby than the gun lobby. None. Clinton then criticized Sanders vote to give legal immunity to gun makers and sellers in the event of a shooting involving a weapon they made or sold. Thats one of the big differences between me and Sen. Sanders, she said. Tougher gas storage rules inspired by Californias Aliso Canyon storage facility leak would be required under a bill approved unanimously by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on Wednesday. The bill, which reauthorizes the Department of Transportations pipeline safety program for four years and sets new federal safety standards requirements for the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, also includes language proposed by Rep. Steve Knight (R-Palmdale), who represents the Porter Ranch area affected by the leak. Knights portion of the bill requires the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration to set federal minimum safety standards for underground natural gas storage facilities within two years. Under the bill, standards would be based on a consensus of what the industry considers to be safe methods, and would have to take into consideration the resulting costs to consumers and businesses. Advertisement FULL COVERAGE: Porter Ranch gas leak >> The Protecting Our Infrastructure of Pipelines and Enhancing Safety Act of 2016, sponsored by Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Turlock), also reauthorizes the Transportation Departments pipeline safety program for four years and sets new federal safety standards requirements. It was an opportune vehicle and it seemed like the right place to put something that was heavily needed in our district, Knight said. A vote hasnt been scheduled, but Knight said he hopes the bill will go before the House in May. The nearly four-month leak at Southern California Gas Co.'s Aliso Canyon facility displaced thousands of Porter Ranch families and closed businesses and schools. It was capped in February. Though the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration has the authority to regulate natural gas storage safety standards, it has left the regulation of Aliso Canyon and most other storage facilities to the states. Interested in the stories shaping California? Sign up for the free Essential California newsletter >> Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Porter Ranch) said hed like a few tweaks, but overall is pleased. He had filed legislation to require the agency to set standards, and asked for the regulations to be set within 180 days, rather than two years. He also prodded the Obama administration to commit to using its existing authority to set those standards. Sherman said hes worried that the bill focuses too much on how the regulations will affect the gas industry and too little on safety, and doesnt define who gets a say in defining the safety standards. There are some in the industry that think consensus standards mean that all the oil companies agree, Sherman said. Knight disagreed, saying it balances public safety and thoughtful regulation. The bill allows state regulations to exceed the federal rules, and Sherman said he expects California will implement stricter standards. When Im fighting for nationwide standards, Im fighting for the other 49 states that have not learned the lessons of Aliso Canyon as well as we have, he said. sarah.wire@latimes.com Follow @sarahdwire on Twitter Read more about the 55 members of Californias delegation at latimes.com/politics ALSO: Strong odors spark new fears in Porter Ranch and prompt an investigation Company aims to resume injecting natural gas in Aliso Canyon storage field this summer 229 leaks found in states underground gas storage facilities, most considered minor This post was updated April 21 to fix the rule making timeline Rep. Brad Sherman proposed. It was originally posted April 20. Were there: Lt. Gov. Newsom says he has enough signatures for gun control initiative Citing the failure of the state Legislature to act, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday that he has collected 600,000 signatures of California voters to qualify a gun control initiative for the November ballot. Were there. This is going to be on the November ballot, Newsom said Thursday. Over 600,000 registered voters want to take some bold action on gun safety. Newsoms campaign plans to begin delivering signatures tomorrow to county clerks for verification. If at least 365,880 signatures are found to be valid, the measure will qualify for the ballot. Newsom said most of the proposals in the initiative have one thing in common, that over the past number of years they have suffered the fate of either being watered down or rejected by the Legislature. Were hopeful and confident that the voters of California will overwhelmingly support the initiative. The broad measure would require background checks for purchasers of ammunition; ban possession of ammunition magazine clips holding more than 10 rounds; provide a process for felons and other disqualified persons to relinquish firearms and require owners to report when their guns are lost or stolen. The initiative would also address an issue caused by the previous adoption of Proposition 47, which made thefts of guns worth less than $1,000 a misdemeanor. The ballot measure would make all gun thefts a felony. Last week, Senate President Pro Tem Kevin De Leon (D-Los Angeles) said key provisions of the initiative, including the ban on large-capacity magazines, are addressed by legislation this year, but that bills could be harmed by the initiative going forward. A campaign committee including gun groups and law enforcement is being formed to defeat the initiative, according to one member, Sam Paredes, executive director of Gun Owners of California. He noted that the measure has already been opposed by the California State Sheriffs Assn., which said it would put restrictions on law-abiding people without taking guns from criminals. its an initiative that carries multiple proposals that were either killed by the Legislature as not workable or vetoed by the governor, Paredes said. Newsom has collected failed policy issues from the Legislature and put them up as an initiative. Its going to be a massive effort to defeat him. Paredes said the initiative is a cynical attempt by Newsom to gain higher office. We know hes doing this to pump himself up for his gubernatorial run, Paredes said. Newsom said his campaign for governor is secondary to his effort to enact gun safety laws. He said he has been active in the gun safety movement going back 15 years when he was mayor of San Francisco and a founding member of the group Mayors Against Guns. The National Rifle Assn. was so upset, they protested at his wedding in Montana, he said. I expect a good challenge from them, Newsom said of the NRA. They have been very aggressive to date. But we are very enthusiastic to be getting to this next phase. He cited internal polls indicating more than 70% of California voters support the initiative, and a Field poll that found greater support for provisions of the measure, including the ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines. About 400,000 Californians who might be planning to vote in the states pivotal Democratic presidential primary June 7 could be in for a shock. Theyll be told, Sorry, your votes no good here. Theyre getting rooked, although they primarily rooked themselves. The state also is to blame, however. It sat back, not giving a hoot, and allowed this to happen. It should have been protecting the voters. Advertisement These are the Californians who carelessly signed up with the late George Wallaces obsolete, inconsequential, far-right American Independent Party, apparently believing they were registering as an independent small i nonpartisan voter. Theyll find that the only so-called presidential candidates they can vote for in the primary are some obscure AIP members who probably couldnt be elected local crossing guard captain. Therell be no Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders on their ballot. No Donald Trump, Ted Cruz or John Kasich. To vote for a Democrat, you must be registered as either a Democrat or no party preference. Sanders is probably losing some California support because many self-described independents who are inadvertent AIP members wont be allowed to vote for him. Sanders has been cleaning up with nonpartisans all over the country where theyve been permitted to vote. They werent Tuesday in New York, and the Vermont senator was trounced. A recent California Field poll found that likely voters registered as nonpartisans supported Sanders over Clinton by roughly 5 to 4. Thats the opposite of registered Democrats. Counting both groups, Clinton led by 6 percentage points. To vote in the GOP primary, youve got to be a registered Republican. My guess is that most right-leaning, independent-thinking AIP members would side with Trump. Fortunately, its not too late for these Californians to correct their mistake. Theyve got until May 23 to reregister as a Democrat, a Republican or with no party at all. The latter is officially categorized as no party preference, though not on the confusing voter registration form, which looks like it was written by a chimpanzee. It asks people: Do you want to disclose a political party preference? Disclose? As in, disclose whether you cheated on your taxes? On your spouse? If someone answers yes, theres a list of eligible parties to choose from, and the first in alphabetical order is American Independent. I hate alphabetical order anyway, being an S. And in this case the party names should be rotated. We also should return to the question that was asked on the voter registration card eight years ago, before it was clumsily altered. Back then it was simply: Do you want to register with a political party? Secretary of State Alex Padilla could probably change it back on his own. Whats sorely needed, however, is for the Legislature to pass a law banning the word Independent from the name of a political party. The word is disingenuous because it conveys a false meaning. Thats especially true when increasing numbers of voters are registering as independent nonpartisans. At last count it was up to 24% of the electorate. And by my calculation, it would be around 26% if many voters hadnt mistakenly joined the AIP, which accounts for 2.7% of those registered. (Democrats are at 43% and Republicans are down to less than 28%.) Maybe all thats really needed is to tweak an existing law. It forbids a new party name so similar to an existing one that voters could be misled. The word independent clearly is misleading. After the 2016 election, the Legislature should make sure these confusions never happen again. If it were a problem that affected the Democratic Party maybe even the GOP you can bet it would have been fixed long ago. The voter fog involving the American Independent Party and nonpartisan independents has been known for decades by political pros, pollsters and many journalists. But the only evidence was anecdotal. Then The Times published a story Sunday that verified the confusion based on polling. The survey conducted by a bipartisan polling team interviewed 500 AIP members. It found that 73% thought they were registered as independent voters without a party affiliation. That equates to 345,000 of the states 472,000 AIP members. Fewer than 4% of those surveyed actually knew they were AIP members. More than twice as many thought they were in the GOP, and even more believed they were Democrats. Moreover, 3.4% figured they were in some sort of nonpartisan party, although no such thing exists. All told, based on the poll, nearly 400,000 believe they are either nonpartisans or Democrats and, if they were correct, could vote in the Democratic presidential primary. Its like going into a restaurant, says Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc. Everybody gets served a tuna salad sandwich. But only 4% remember ordering a tuna salad sandwich. I find myself being offended by a mass violation of voter intent. Its definitely violating these voters intent to not be associated with a political party. Any voter, regardless of party, can participate in a California open primary for state office or Congress. Its only presidential primaries that have party restrictions. Im open to change, Padilla told me regarding the registration confusion. But its not something that can be done overnight. Were up to our eyeballs now with the June primary. OK. But before the next presidential election in 2020, the state should get rid of this inexcusable nonsense. george.skelton@latimes.com Follow @LATimesSkelton on Twitter MORE FROM THE SERIES Is this your party? 73% of American Independent Party members unaware they are in it Are you a member of the American Independent Party? Find out using our database Colleens story: That time I realized I was registered with the wrong party Would-be independents joining the American Independent Party could blame Californias voter registration card Check or change your voter registration before the May 23 deadline Scientists examining the bones of a baby titanosaur from Madagascar have found that the young sauropods actually looked like miniature adults. The findings, described in the journal Science, shed fresh light on the development and behavior of these large long-necked dinosaurs. For many creatures in the animal kingdom, the young look very different from the adult stage. Human babies, for example, have much larger heads relative to their body size than adults do. Imagine how odd it would look if an infant had a body like a miniature adult. And yet thats exactly what happens for the sauropod known as Rapetosaurus krausei, according to a new paper led by paleontologist Kristina Curry Rogers of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. Curry Rogers came across the strange fossils while sifting through a jumble of crocodile and turtle bones at Stony Brook University that had been collected from Madagascar. Advertisement See the most-read stories in Science this hour >> Turtle crocodile bones are shapely and sinuous, but these bones were columnar straighter and simpler looking and bore muscle scars and articular surfaces that she found very familiar. I recognized them immediately as Rapetosaurus, because they look so similar, said Curry Rogers, who was one of the scientists to name the species. Young dinosaur fossils arent easy to come by. Many animals dont spend much of their lives in a juvenile stage, and smaller bones are also harder to preserve over the eons. As a result, scientists know relatively little about how sauropods such as Rapetosaurus grew up. Baby dinosaurs in general are rare, and I would say that for sauropods they have been even rarer, Curry Rogers said. So the scientists analyzed the specimen, which included bones from the limbs, vertebrae and even the hip. They studied patterns in the bone and subjected them to CT scans to look for growth patterns in their structure. Rapetosaurus krausei plodded across the Earth during the Cretaceous period, growing some 40 to 50 feet long. Young or no, this baby dinosaur was already pretty big by the time it died, weighing in at approximately 40 kilograms and standing 35 centimeters tall at the hip, even though it was only a few weeks old. Thats a pretty big jump since hatching, when this dinosaur probably weighed about 3.4 kilograms. Fast growth doesnt seem to be an uncommon trait for large herbivorous dinosaurs it minimized the time that they spent being targets for hungry predators looking for an easy meal. But the adult-like proportions of their bodies hint to researchers that these animals probably had to start fending for themselves pretty early in life. For sauropods, it doesnt appear that they were very good parents at least after their babies hatched, Curry Rogers said. That life may have been a rough one. The scientists calculated that this young dinosaur only lived from 39 to 77 days. The tiny titanosaur likely died of starvation, perhaps a victim of an ongoing drought at the time. Follow @aminawrite on Twitter for more science news and like Los Angeles Times Science & Health on Facebook. MORE FROM SCIENCE Loneliness: The new (old) smoking? New genome editing technique can target single letters of DNA sequence Global warming has made the weather better for most in U.S. -- but dont get used to it, study says Families torn apart, the arduous and frightening life behind barbed wire, emaciated bodies and then the death march as Russian and Allied forces moved in. Sam Silberberg spoke with precision as if the events were still fresh. He paused at certain points to let his audience process what he was telling them. Silberberg, 86, had the rapt attention of fourth- and fifth-graders at Top of the World Elementary this week as he shared what life was like in two Nazi concentration camps and his subsequent escape. Advertisement It was the first time Silberberg, a Laguna Woods resident, had spoken to an elementary school audience, and so he needed to tailor his content. But in a way it was fitting that he talked to this age group, since Silberberg was 10 and living in Poland when the Germans entered the country in 1939, intent on cleansing the land of Jews. During the next six years, the Germans shipped the Silberbergs and other families to ghettos, compounds where they werent allowed to leave without permission and thus could not work to make a living. Many starved. The Germans eventually eliminated the facilities and sent the people to one of two camps, Silberberg said. The Nazis grouped able-bodied men in one camp, relegated to forced labor, while invalids, women and children were shipped immediately to gas chambers in Auschwitz. There was a lot of crying and agony, Silberberg said of families being torn apart, not knowing if they would see each other again. Silberbergs father, Solomon, decided it would be best if the family split up to maximize each persons chance at survival. Silberberg and Solomon stuck together while Silberbergs mother, Baila Siegman Silberberg, along with his two brothers and sister, remained a group. Silberberg, then 13, and Solomon, a devout Jew who held to the tenets of his faith, were standing among a crowd as an officer began assigning people to camps. Fearing his short stature would lead Nazi officers to consider him a child, Silberberg found a concrete block and stood on it so he would appear taller. When the guard asked him what he did for living, he said he was a masons helper. The Nazis shipped Silberberg and his father together to a camp called Blechhammer in present-day Poland. The Germans assigned each prisoner a number, a striped uniform, a canister and sack that officers filled with each days food a few slices of bread, margarine and cup of watery soup, according to Silberberg. Handcuffed prisoners walked to their work assignments. Silberberg assisted a welder piecing together beams. Over time, paltry amounts of food took their toll. Silberberg said he saw emaciated mens rib bones sticking through stretched skin. If they became ill and could not work, German officers killed and cremated them. Curious students occasionally asked Silberberg to explain certain terms, such as ration. Silberberg also involved students by asking them if they understood specific words. Much of the time the children simply listened as Silberberg, invited to speak by teacher Marie Bammer, continued with his story. Silberberg longed to escape the confines of a building surrounded by a barbed wire fence harboring electrical currents, but his father urged against it. Silberberg admired his father for his devout Jewish faith, but ruminated over and at times became angry with God. I told him, You pray to God, yet the Nazis claim God is with them, Silberberg said. What is the point of living if all we do is work for the Germans? Silberberg recalled his fathers words: Youve got to have faith. Be an optimist. God controls everything. His fathers encouragement resonated with Silberberg as he found himself hopeful of an escape in the midst of a death march. With the Russian and Allied armies hot on the Germans tails in early 1945, the Nazis evacuated the camps, sending prisoners back to Germany. Prisoners marched in deplorable conditions, with no food or water during the entire duration of the march. To get water, prisoners filled canisters with snow, which they pressed to their bodies in hopes the warmth would melt the snow. Many collapsed along the side of the road and died. On the fifth day with no food or water, Silberberg, who later wrote a book about the experience called, From Hell to the Promised Land, said he reached the breaking point. Then on Jan. 26, 1945, Silberberg capitalized on an opportunity. While walking along a road with German soldiers guiding French prisoners of war, Silberberg noticed a German officer had turned his back for a split-second. Silberberg, wearing two sets of clothes, took off his striped uniform so others could see him dressed in a woolen sweater and cap emblematic of a French POW. Silberberg said he had gotten the woolen sweater and cap while at Blechhammer, where English and French POWs were stationed. With these clothes, Silberberg had the freedom to approach a roadside camp where a French cook nurtured a kettle of soup. The cook gave Silberberg a large slice of bread with melted cheese and soup, a meal Silberberg called heavenly. Horse-driven sleds traversed the area, thus Silberberg grabbed hold of the back of one sled until he got to Neisse-Neustadt. A bridge that crossed a river led to the Catholic convent where Silberberg knew his mother worked in the geriatric center. A German guard stood at the bridges entrance, thus Silberberg needed to create a believable story that he was from the area. In a thick French accent, Silberberg told the guard he was working for a German farmer and the two lost each other while running into the fields during a Russian air raid. Silberberg pretended he could not understand the guard and said all he wanted was to go to the employment office and be assigned to another local farmer. Finally he got tired of me and motioned with his arm across the bridge telling me to go ahead, Silberberg said in the book. This was just the break Silberberg needed as he eventually reunited with his mother. The rest of his immediate family, including his father, died at the hands of the Nazis. Of the 1.3 million people shipped to the Auschwitz camps between 1940 and 1945, 1.1 million died, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. When asked how he made split-second decisions, such as using the cinder block to stand on, Silberberg replied, When you are under stress you have a choice, either succumb or fight. By the way my instincts were honed, I was able to do it. Silberbergs talk coincided with a unit on survival that Bammer teaches. Bammer had invited Silberberg to speak after attending a conference on anti-bias at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. Im always drawn to the World War II stories to bring history to the kids ... to share stories of survival and perseverance, Bammer said. Students wrote thank you letters that the teacher will deliver to Silberberg. The kids adored him, she said. The favorite part for some was how he reconnected with his mom. A lot [of students] talked about realizing they could get through anything after hearing his story. They learned he has been through so much, they can get through things too. -- bryce.alderton@latimes.com Twitter: @AldertonBryce Sailors from near and far travel to Newport Beach to participate in the 69-year-old Newport to Ensenada International Yacht Race. But few come as far as John Shulze. For six years, the 67-year-old has made the 8,800-mile journey from his home in Singapore to Newport Harbor to participate in the annual race, which starts Friday. Sailing in the overnight contest is a tradition that he began a decade ago while living in Orange County. Moving wasnt going to keep him from competing. Its just a fun race, he said. Theres a lot of really great competition, and I get to sail with all my good friends. We usually do pretty well too. Last year, Shulze finished the race in his Santa Cruz 50 sailboat, Horizon, in 21 hours and 44 minutes and sailed away with four trophies. Horizon and his other craft, Linstar, a J109 sailboat, will be among hundreds of vessels setting sail from the Balboa Pier and then heading 125 nautical miles south to Ensenada, Mexico. Some participants, like Shulze, race to get across the finish line in Ensenada well before their competition, while others just hope to cruise into Mexico in time for dinner, tequila and parties. Were serious about the race, Shulze said. Everything has to be well-planned and prepared beforehand. Its really a team effort. No man can do it alone. N2E, as it is known to the faithful, will wrap up with an awards ceremony in Ensenada before the boats sail back Sunday or, for those who want to party a little longer, Monday. While many locals compete year after year, the race has encountered troubled waters in the past decade with a decline in participation. However, organizers are trying to turn the tide and are seeing an uptick. In the races heyday in the early 1980s, more than 600 sailboats would hit the course. But a variety of factors, including the economic recession in 2008-09, drug crime in Mexico and the deadly accident that claimed the lives of four sailors in 2012, took a toll, said race spokesman Peter Bretschger. Bretschger said the races downsizing also can be chalked up to the fast pace of life in the 21st century. Life was a little bit slower back then, he said of the races peak years. Participation hit an all-time low in 2014, when only 168 signed up. In 2015, about 200 turned out. In an attempt to draw more participants, organizers set up a short course this year for boats leaving from San Diego on Friday afternoon. Its intended for those who cant make it in time for the launch in Newport Beach. Weve been working hard to rebuild it, to breathe new life in the tradition, Bretschger said. The numbers have inched up. This year, 211 sailors signed up to make the journey, with roughly 30 participating for the first time. Chris Hemans, sailing out of the Balboa Yacht Club, is getting back in after a years-long absence caused in part by the high cost of insuring boats heading into Mexico. But hes competing this week with his daughter on a Rogers 46 Varuna, rekindling his memory of what he terms a nice race down the coast. -- Hannah Fry, hannah.fry@latimes.com Twitter: @HannahFryTCN Glendale city officials and community leaders recently unveiled an exhibition at the Brand Library and Art Center that explores the history of the Armenian people as well as the context and aftermath of the Armenian Genocide. Armenia: An Open Wound, which opened Saturday to a crowd of about 500 attendees, runs Tuesdays through Saturdays until June 11. Admission is free. NEWSLETTER: Stay up to date with whats going on in your community>> The exhibition presented by the citys Library, Arts and Culture Department in partnership with the Armenian American Museum takes between 30 to 45 minutes to walk through. It comes to Glendale after a one-year run in Mexico Citys Museum of Memory and Tolerance, where it was created. Visitors start Armenia: An Open Wound in a room dedicated to the history and origins of Armenia. It includes a scale replica of Ani, a medieval Armenian community, now in ruins, in present-day Turkey. 1 / 11 Zaven Kazazian enters the next part of the gallery showing the history of the genocide in a gallery named Armenia: An Open Wound, at the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale on Monday, April 18, 2016. The City of Glendale and the Library, Arts & Culture Department presented the gallery in partnership with the Armenian American Museum. (Tim Berger / Staff Photographer) 2 / 11 A model of the ancient city of Ani, called a city of one thousand churches, in the first room featuring Armenian life in a gallery named Armenia: An Open Wound, at the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale on Monday, April 18, 2016. The City of Glendale and the Library, Arts & Culture Department presented the gallery in partnership with the Armenian American Museum. (Tim Berger / Staff Photographer) 3 / 11 Community outreach director Tigranna Zakaryan, with the Armenian American Museum, walks through a door into a desert area called Deir ez-Zor at a gallery named Armenia: An Open Wound, at the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale on Monday, April 18, 2016. The City of Glendale and the Library, Arts & Culture Department presented the gallery in partnership with the Armenian American Museum. (Tim Berger / Staff Photographer) 4 / 11 Carnations lie on the floor from an event last Saturday when hundreds of visitors placed them at the Blood and Sand Memorial display at a gallery named Armenia: An Open Wound, at the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale on Monday, April 18, 2016. The City of Glendale and the Library, Arts & Culture Department presented the gallery in partnership with the Armenian American Museum. (Tim Berger / Staff Photographer) 5 / 11 Zaven Kazazian and Tigranna Zakaryan point to a small child in a photograph that they said was recognized by a museum visitor to Mexico Citys Museum of Memory and Tolerance, where the exhibit Armenia: An Open Wound" ran for a year before coming to Glendale. (Tim Berger / Staff Photographer) 6 / 11 Community outreach director Tigranna Zakaryan, with the Armenian American Museum, points to a photograph of a meeting with the Pope at a gallery named Armenia: An Open Wound, at the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale on Monday, April 18, 2016. The City of Glendale and the Library, Arts & Culture Department presented the gallery in partnership with the Armenian American Museum. (Tim Berger / Staff Photographer) 7 / 11 19th century hand embroidered womens shoes with the Armenian alphabet on the wall in the first room featuring Armenian life at a gallery named Armenia: An Open Wound, at the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale on Monday, April 18, 2016. The City of Glendale and the Library, Arts & Culture Department presented the gallery in partnership with the Armenian American Museum. (Tim Berger / Staff Photographer) 8 / 11 Zaven Kazazian walks through the part of the gallery showing the history of the genocide in a gallery named Armenia: An Open Wound, at the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale on Monday, April 18, 2016. The City of Glendale and the Library, Arts & Culture Department presented the gallery in partnership with the Armenian American Museum. (Tim Berger / Staff Photographer) 9 / 11 Community outreach director Tigranna Zakaryan, with the Armenian American Museum, stands in a Syrian desert mock-up called Deir ez-Zor at a gallery named Armenia: An Open Wound, at the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale on Monday, April 18, 2016. The City of Glendale and the Library, Arts & Culture Department presented the gallery in partnership with the Armenian American Museum. (Tim Berger / Staff Photographer) 10 / 11 Community outreach director Tigranna Zakaryan, with the Armenian American Museum, stands at the front of an image of the Blood and Sand Memorial, as it is in Armenia, in a gallery named Armenia: An Open Wound, at the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale on Monday, April 18, 2016. The City of Glendale and the Library, Arts & Culture Department presented the gallery in partnership with the Armenian American Museum. (Tim Berger / Staff Photographer) 11 / 11 Zaven Kazazian and Tigranna Zakaryan enter the Deir ez-Zor desert of Syria, including sand on the floor, at a gallery named Armenia: An Open Wound, at the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale on Monday, April 18, 2016. The City of Glendale and the Library, Arts & Culture Department presented the gallery in partnership with the Armenian American Museum. (Tim Berger / Staff Photographer) The second area delves into the atrocities, including targeted massacres, committed against the Armenian people from approximately 1821 to 1918. The subsequent section, called the Blood and Sand Memorial, includes a life-size photo of Tsitsernakaberd, an Armenian Genocide memorial erected in Yerevan. Hundreds of flowers were placed in front of the Tsitsernakaberd photo Saturday. The center of the photo has also been cut out, allowing visitors to pass through it and into a separate room behind that transports them into the Deir ez-Zor desert in Syria. The room, which has dirt on the ground, features 360-degree photos of the barren landscape. Playing in the background is music featuring the duduk, an Armenian woodwind instrument. Zaven Kazazian and Tigranna Zakaryan point to a small child in a photograph that they said was recognized by a museum visitor to Mexico Citys Museum of Memory and Tolerance, where the exhibit Armenia: An Open Wound" ran for a year before coming to Glendale. (Tim Berger / Staff Photographer) The Deir ez-Zor scene commemorates and symbolizes the harsh journeys imposed upon the Armenian people, who were forced to leave their ancestral homeland, organizers say. It also shows how isolated they became and even where they died, hence the name blood and sand, said Tigranna Zakaryan, community outreach director for the Armenian American Museum. Armenia: An Open Wound " will have personal meaning to almost every Armenian, added Zaven Kazazian, a member of the museums executive committee. Recalling the exhibitions name, he said that chapter in Armenias history is still an open wound because the Turks have never admitted that they committed these atrocities. Cathy Billings, senior library, arts and culture supervisor for the Brand Library, said the galleries have never shown an exhibition of such scale before. Walls had to be built quickly to create the narrative path in time for the opening on Saturday. Its totally new for us, she said. Armenia: An Open Wound includes free special events on particular topics, the first of which will be from 7 to 9:30 p.m. on Thursday. Titled Global Realities, Local Perspectives, it will feature refugee-rights professionals talking about humanitarian assistance. For more information about the exhibition, visit www.armenianamericanmuseum.org or call the Brand Library at (818) 548-2051. The Brand Library and Art Center is located at 1601 W. Mountain St., Glendale. -- Bradley Zint, bradley.zint@latimes.com Twitter: @BradleyZint -- ALSO: Armenian Genocide documentary to premiere Thursday in Glendale Teachers win laughs at Crescenta Valley Highs ComedySportz match $50,000 reward offered in hit-and-run that killed 81-year-old man Las Vegas has plenty of places to drink craft beers, Champagne and margaritas. So what about tea? French restaurant Alize at the Top of the Palms Casino Resort overlooking the Strip fills the gap with a tea-pairing dinner on June 16. The seven-course Tea Pairing in the Sky dinner celebrates the 2016 World Tea Expo coming to the Las Vegas Convention Center frm June 13 through 17. Menu items include a first course of beef carpaccio and marinated heirloom tomatoes paired with Lao Shu Hong Cha Old Tree Yunnan Black Tea, and a fourth course of duck breast and abalone mushroom with Que She Sparrows Tongue Wuyi Rock Wulong Tea. Advertisement Former Bon Apetit editor-in-chief Barbara Fairchild hosts the event; executive chef Mark Purdy creates the dishes to match top teas from Seven Cups Fine Teas. Dinner begins at 7 p.m. Tickets cost $175 per person until Saturday and $220 after that date. VIPS who buy $300 tickets includes the meal plus bottomless Champagne, a gift bag and a meet and greet before the event with Fairchild. Info: Alize at the Top of the Palms Casino Resorts Tea Pairing in the Sky MORE A pink moons coming -- and with it a party on top of Mammoth Mountain Grab your paddle! Rafting heaven predicted at these 7 spots in California Pool parties? Check. Parade? Check. Ponies? Check. Theyre all LGBT events coming to Las Vegas Las Vegas: In-N-Out Burger and Canters Deli to go all in at Linq Promenade Whip around Las Vegas with this 360-degree virtual-reality app Welcome to another edition of In the Loop, the Los Angeles Times theme park newsletter. Im Funland theme park blogger Brady MacDonald, and this week, we prepare to meet Leatherface at Horror Nights 2016, stick a shovel in Star Wars Land, sip a margarita on a zipline coaster, set sail at a Noahs Ark theme park and head skyward on vertical coasters. Warner Bros. Warner Bros. announces plans to build a $1-billion theme park in Abu Dhabi next to Ferrari World. Advertisement This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Ben Affleck, left, and Henry Cavill in a scene from, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Warner Bros. plans to feature the Batman and Superman characters in its Abu Dhabi theme park. (Clay Enos / AP) Horror Nights Universal Orlando unveils the first maze of Halloween Horror Nights 2016: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Star Wars Disney celebrates the groundbreaking of Star Wars Land at Disneyland and Disneys Hollywood Studios with a digitally enhanced construction image that includes robots, X-wing fighters, androids and Stormtroopers. Disneys Hollywood Studios will lengthen the Star Wars fireworks show and add projection mapping of movie scenes to the Florida parks replica of Graumanns Chinese Theater. Vertical coasters A new class of extremely compact and vertically oriented roller coasters popping up at theme parks around the world packs lots of thrills into tight spaces. Margaritaville A new Margaritaville resort in Biloxi, Miss., will feature the first indoor zipline roller coaster in the United States. Walt Disney Imagineering A new documentary about Rolly Crump pays tribute to the self-described worst artist ever hired by Walt Disney Animation Studios who went on to help create three of Disneylands most beloved attractions: Its a Small World, the Haunted Mansion and the Enchanted Tiki Room. And finally Kentuckys Ark Encounter theme park opening this summer with a 510-foot-long replica of Noahs Ark will require employees to sign a Christian oath and profess Christ as their savior. Still need more theme park news? Check out the Los Angeles Times Funland theme park blog on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Instagram. Also feel free to email me with any feedback on the newsletter. ALSO 32 best new theme park additions of 2016 8 unanswered questions about Disneylands Star Wars Land Disneyland 2055: What the future may hold for the original Disney park Disneyland 1955: Walts Folly got off to a nightmare start 21 creepiest abandoned amusement parks Cattle can mean everything in South Sudan. They are wealth, status, survival, the price of a bride and the ability to marry and have children all things young men are willing to kill and die for. Thats what thousands of armed young men from the Murle tribe did last week, pouring across the border on foot into Ethiopias Gambella region, killing 182 people, including women and children. They surrounded 13 villages, firing randomly, killing civilians and abducting 108 children. Twenty-six more were killed in Ethiopia last month, bringing the total death toll in the raids to 208, according to Ethiopian officials. Advertisement The men were there to steal cattle. They seized 2,000 of the prized long-horned beasts and drove them back across the border. Poor security in South Sudans remote eastern region has led to a surge in violence, with a series of cattle-raiding attacks that have left scores of villagers dead, including women and children. Violence and cattle raiding between the rival Murle and Lou Nuer peoples go back generations in South Sudan, where long-existing tensions over land and water simmer. The attacks are silent and carefully planned. Huge columns of fighters move on foot across the flat, bushy grassland, taking villagers from rival tribes by surprise, shooting people, slashing them with machetes and burning them in their round thatched huts. Just a few months after South Sudan gained independence in 2011, bitter fighting broke out between the two groups. Attacks on Murle villagers by Lou Nuer fighters in December 2011 left about 900 dead and hundreds missing and displaced 120,000, according to a report by the peacekeeping United Nations Mission in South Sudan, in some of the worst ethnic violence seen in years. One local official, then-Pibor County Commissioner Joshua Konyi, said 3,000 were killed. The next year, more than 1,000 people were killed in clashes between the two groups. Convulsions of extreme violence have continued intermittently. The eastern region of South Sudan is so remote that it can take weeks for news of attacks to filter out. Help is far away and villagers tend to flee into the bush to hide, fearing further killings. Helicopter video of past attacks taken by U.N. peacekeepers shows the outlines of burned huts, called tukuls, as far as the eye can see. In 2013, reports of fighting suggest hundreds or thousands may have been killed. At least 11,000 men were involved in the attacks, according to the government, but casualty figures were never released. For groups like the Murle and Lou Nuer, cattle are central to life. Tribespeople drink the milk, eat the meat, sleep on the hides, sacrifice bulls at important events and see cows as their only store of wealth. It takes 20 cows to buy a bride, and without a herd, no young man can hope to marry. To some, the fastest way to get cattle is through raiding. Tension over cattle is common in East Africa, with deadly raids seen in other countries in the region, including northern Kenya. In past generations, attacks using machetes and sticks were an intrinsic part of reaching manhood and showing valor. Now, after decades of civil war, the region is awash with guns, and young men armed with high-powered weapons from the Murle and the Lou Nuer exact a devastating toll on rival villages. In the Murle cultural tradition, all cattle belong to the tribe. Militias frequently abduct children during cattle raids, who are then raised as their own. Child abduction is a long and troubling tradition for the Murle people, the roots of which are unclear, though it may be a means to increase the numbers of the small minority group. The attack in Gambella followed similar, smaller raids in recent months, mainly in South Sudans Jonglei state. Tit-for-tat violence between the groups in the region has been going on for years, often leading to indiscriminate massacres of civilians. Escalating attacks late last year left dozens dead, many children abducted and hundreds of cattle stolen. In 2016, militias have stolen hundreds of cattle and abducted more than a dozen children in Jonglei. On March 29, armed Murle men tried to raid a large herd of cattle, but Lou Nuer herders repelled them. In February, Lou Nuer youths attacked Murle villagers for five days. A local Murle chief, Abraham Mamayo, said many civilians had been killed and thousands of cattle stolen, according to Radio Tamazuj. In January, 24 people were killed in a cattle raid in South Sudans Sobat state, two children were abducted and 800 cattle were stolen, according to the Sudan Tribune. The U.N. peacekeeping force in South Sudan has not been able to protect vulnerable villages in the huge and remote eastern swathe of the country. Ethiopian communications minister Getachew Reda said Ethiopian forces had killed at least 60 of the perpetrators of Fridays attack. Ethiopian forces pursued the attackers into South Sudan in a bid to free the abducted children. One factor in the recent upsurge in violence appears to be a long-standing security vacuum in the east. Authorities have always struggled to prevent ethnic conflict in the region. But the situation appears to have deteriorated after South Sudanese President Salva Kiir removed the Pibor state administrator, David Yauyau, leader of the Cobra militia of Murle fighters; merged Pibor into a new state, named Boma; and appointed a new governor, Baba Medan, who has little influence over the Murle fighters. Follow @RobynDixon_LAT for news from Africa. Fighting an effort by lawmakers here to boot her from office, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff reportedly plans to argue her case Friday at the United Nations. The U.N. has no power in deciding her fate. But a persuasive argument on an international stage could potentially help sway opinion back home and put pressure on the men trying to remove her and take over. Rousseff will have the opportunity to take the floor before the U.N. General Assembly in New York at the signing of the climate change agreement negotiated last year in Paris. Advertisement Brazilian news outlets reported Wednesday that she will lay out the case that the impeachment effort is essentially a coup detat motivated purely by politics. Her office has neither confirmed nor denied the reports. She has used her U.N. platform before to sound off on an issue unrelated to the business at hand delivering a fuming speech in 2013 denouncing U.S. surveillance efforts. This week, Rousseff defiantly declared that she would not stop fighting for her survival in office. Political differences are not the basis for impeachment, she told reporters Tuesday. She said she was driven by her personal convictions, much as she was decades ago when she was fighting the dictatorship that ruled Brazil at the time. Once wildly popular, Rousseff has seen her support plummet amid economic decline, a multibillion-dollar scandal at the state-run oil company and now deepening political chaos. The latest and most serious blow came Sunday, when more than two-thirds of the lower house of Congress voted to put her on trial for allegedly breaking fiscal responsibility laws by shifting government funds to cover budget shortfalls. The proceedings against her now move to the Senate, which could vote as soon as next month on whether a trial should proceed. If that happens, she would be forced to step down from office during the trial and for good if convicted. Rousseff contends that the impeachment effort is illegitimate because the accusations against her do not rise to the level of a serious crime as required by the constitution. Brazilians are still trying to digest the circus-like spectacle of Sundays impeachment vote, which was televised for hours as legislator after legislator took the floor. Few addressed the accusations against her. Instead, they said they were voting for God or family or to defend conservative values. One said he was voting for impeachment to prevent Brazil from becoming like North Korea. Others made shout-outs to family members or businesses in their states. One prominent conservative, Jair Bolsonaro, dedicated his vote to Col. Brilhante Ustra, who tortured Rousseff and other dissidents during the military dictatorship. Joaquim Barbosa, a former Supreme Court justice and popular anti-corruption crusader, later said the proceedings were cause for tears of embarrassment. Ordinary Brazilians agreed. Their behavior has become a national joke, said Guilherme Silva, an airline agent here. Its embarrassing, he said. I think impeachment is probably the right way forward, but it was shocking to watch that. Those people are supposed to represent us? Bevins is a special correspondent. Rescue workers in Ecuador continued to sort through rubble in search of 155 people still missing after last weekends massive earthquake. Five people were pulled out alive late Wednesday, including an Argentine tourist and his 3-year-old son. But as days pass, the chances of finding more survivors diminish. The death toll as of Thursday afternoon stood at 577, up from 553 a day earlier. Foreign Minister Guillaume Long said that figure included 20 foreigners. Advertisement See the most-read stories this hour >> The rescue effort was focused on the coastal province of Manabi, which was hit hardest by the magnitude 7.8 quake Saturday. The government has begun planning for multibillion-dollar reconstruction. President Rafael Correa proposed a series of emergency measures to pay for it. They include a increase in the sales tax, a surtax on corporate profits and a special tax on wealthy people. 1 / 28 Firemen carry a body from a collapsed building in Pedernales, Ecuador. Rescuers pulled survivors from rubble Sunday after the strongest earthquake to hit Ecuador in decades flattened buildings and buckled highways along its Pacific coast. (Dolores Ochoa / Associated Press) 2 / 28 A man evacuates his belongings in Manta, Ecuador, after a powerful 7.8-magnitude quake hit the country. (Luis Acosta / AFP/Getty Images) 3 / 28 General scene of the destruction in Manta, Ecuador, after a powerful 7.8-magnitude quake hit the country. (Luis Acosta / AFP/Getty Images) 4 / 28 A vehicle rolls on a cracked route after a 7.8-magnitude quake in Chone, Ecuador. (Juan Cevallos / AFP/Getty Images) 5 / 28 Residents sleep under a makeshift tent outside the emergency center in the town of Portoviejo, Ecuador. Parts of Ecuador have been devastated by the countrys strongest earthquake in decades. (Rodrigo Abd / Associated Press) 6 / 28 Ecuadors President Rafael Correa kisses a group of children after meeting with local authorities in the emergency center in Portoviejo, Ecuador. (Rodrigo Abd / Associated Press) 7 / 28 Veronica Paladines removes rubble in search for her husband in the Tarqui neighborhood in Manta, Ecuador, after a powerful quake hit the country. (Luis Acosta / AFP/Getty Images) 8 / 28 Heavy damage in the Ecuadorian town of Pedernales, after a 7.8-magnitude quake hit the country. (Rodrigo Buendia / AFP/Getty Images) 9 / 28 People carry an empty coffin on a pickup truck as they drive to collect the body of an earthquake victim in Pedernales, Ecuador. (Dolores Ochoa / Associated Press) 10 / 28 Lighted candles burn in front of a collapsed building as a tribute to victims of a 7.8-magnitude earthquake in La Chorrera, Ecuador. (Dolores Ochoa / Associated Press) 11 / 28 Rescue workers search the rubble after a 7.8-magnitude quake in Guayaquil, Ecuador. (Luis Acosta / AFP/Getty Images) 12 / 28 Scene from Manta, Ecuador, after a powerful quake hit the country. (Luis Acosta / AFP/Getty Images) 13 / 28 A man searches a collapsed building on Sunday in the Pedernales, Ecuador, the day after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit. (Jose Jacome / EPA) 14 / 28 A woman cries in the quake-ravaged town of Pedernales, Ecuador. (Dolores Ochoa / AP) 15 / 28 Residents react as they gather in the street in the Pacific coastal town of Pedernales after the Ecuador earthquake. (Dolores Ochoa / Associated Press) 16 / 28 Collapsed buildings in the town of Pedernales, Ecuador, after the earthquake. (Jose Jacome / EPA) 17 / 28 Residents sleep in the street in the coastal town of Pedernales, Ecuador, after the earthquake. (Dolores Ochoa / Associated Press) 18 / 28 Residents wary of returning to their homes prepare food in a street in Pedernales, Ecuador. (Jose Jacome / EPA) 19 / 28 A man checks out a fallen building in Guayaquil after the Ecuador earthquake. (Marcos Pin Mendez / AFP/Getty Images) 20 / 28 Rescuers work to pull survivors from a collapsed building in the city of Manta, Ecuador. (Ariel Ochoa / AFP/Getty Images) 21 / 28 Rescue crews check a car after a bridge collapsed in Guayaquil, Ecuador, when a 7.8 earthquake hit. (Freddy Constante / EPA) 22 / 28 People rest in a Guayaquil park after the Ecuador earthquake. (Marcos Pin Mendez / AFP/Getty Images) 23 / 28 People take pictures of a collapsed bridge in Guayaquil, Ecuador, after the earthquake hit. (Jose Sanchez Lindao / AFP/Getty Images) 24 / 28 Rescue workers stand before a destroyed car after the collapse of a bridge in an earthquake in Guayaquil, Ecuador. (MARCOS PIN MENDEZ / AFP/Getty Images) 25 / 28 Residents walk on a street amid destroyed buildings following an earthquake in Guayaquil, Ecuador. (ARIEL OCHOA / AFP/Getty Images) 26 / 28 Patients and relatives wait outside the Colombia Clinic in Cali, Colombia, after being preventively evacuated following a powerful earthquake that hit Ecuador. (LUIS ROBAYO / AFP/Getty Images) 27 / 28 An image taken from Venezuelan channel Telesur shows Ecuadors Vice President Jorge Glas updating quake information at a news conference in Quito. (AFP/Getty Images) 28 / 28 Patients and relatives wait outside the Colombia Clinic in Cali, Colombia, after being preventively evacuated following a powerful earthquake that hit Ecuador. (LUIS ROBAYO / AFP/Getty Images) In addition, anybody earning more than $1,000 a month will be required to contribute one days salary to a reconstruction fund. Correa, who has estimated the cost of reconstruction at $3 billion, said the nation would also raise money by selling government-owned assets, though he didnt specify which ones. He said he would send the emergency tax bill to the National Assembly for approval in coming days. The economy minister said it aims to raise $1 billion. The government said a total of 1,125 buildings were destroyed, leaving about 25,000 people in emergency shelters. NEWSLETTER: Get the days top headlines from Times Editor Davan Maharaj >> International aid continued to arrive. A Colombian air force cargo plane landed in Manta on Wednesday with 15 tons of food, electric generators, tents and a specialized rescue team, a day after a Colombian navy ship unloaded 55,000 gallons of water and half a ton of clothing and medicines at the Pacific port of Esmeraldas. Russian President Vladimir Putins government announced it was sending a shipload of 30 tons of relief supplies including food, tents and electric generators capable of helping 2,000 people. Bolivia has sent 50 rescue workers and a Hercules military aircraft filled with 10 tons of medicine, water and food for those left homeless. Viteri is a special correspondent. Special correspondent Chris Kraul in Bogota, Colombia, contributed to this report. ALSO Why hundreds of people are dying over cattle in East Africa On the frontline of Brazils war with Zika, a mothers first question: How big is the head? 6-year-old Afghan girls murder puts spotlight on history of discrimination and abuse in Iran On the last day of her short life, Setayesh Qoreishi a 6-year-old Afghan refugee stepped out of her familys home in the Tehran suburbs to buy an ice cream. She didnt return. Police records say she was kidnapped by a teenage Iranian neighbor who raped and stabbed the girl to death, and then attempted to dispose of her body by drowning it in a tub full of acid. When Setayeshs body did not dissolve, the boy began to panic. He called a neighbor, who called his parents. They alerted police, who took the boy into custody. Advertisement The brutality of the April 9 incident shocked Afghans, who have complained for years about facing violence and injustice in Iran, where millions live as refugees. And it has also fueled outrage among Iranians who have been unable to comprehend the cruelty of her killer. News reports have said he was 17 years old, though his mother has been quoted saying he is 15. For a rare moment, Afghans in the Islamic Republic and many of their Iranian hosts were emotionally united. As the news of Setayeshs killing spread, it shined a spotlight on the discrimination and abuse Afghan refugees say they face daily, though it goes almost unnoticed by the Iranian public. Iranian social media embraced the hashtag I Am Setayesh. Hasan Khomeini grandson of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of modern Iran said, Any wrongdoing against the Afghan people, who are our guests, is a matter of shame for us. Iranian Vice President Shahindokht Molaverdi condemned the despicable murder and assured the public that there would be a punishment appropriate to the magnitude of the horrific crime. Yet widespread hostility in Iran against Afghan refugees has led many in both countries to doubt those words. Jila Baniyanghoob, who attended a candlelight vigil this week near the Afghan embassy in Tehran, said Iranian police officers openly asked why those assembled felt pity for Afghans who have committed many crimes here. As many as 3 million Afghans live as refugees in Iran, although only 1 million are documented, according to Human Rights Watch. The first waves of Afghans crossed over during the Soviet occupation of their country in the 1980s. While many have returned to Afghanistan, a new exodus to Iran has begun in recent months due to economic stagnation and worsening hostilities between Afghan government forces and Taliban insurgents. Most Afghans in Iran work as hawkers, construction workers or low-skilled laborers. Human rights groups say Afghans find it difficult to find formal jobs or education, and live in perpetual fear of being arrested and deported. They are barred from holding bank accounts or cellphones in their names, and only recently were Afghans allowed to enroll their children in public primary schools. Nearly one-third had faced some form of physical abuse, Human Rights Watch found in a 2013 survey of 100 Afghan refugees in Iran. Untold numbers of others have been detained and even put to death inside Irans opaque justice system. Two years ago, amid reports that at least 3,000 Afghans were imprisoned in Iran for various alleged offenses, the Afghan government called for an end to what it said was the continuous practice of its citizens being executed in Iranian jails. At demonstrations on behalf of Setayesh in several Afghan cities, Afghans said they worried that the Kabul government would not be able to apply enough pressure on Tehran to ensure justice will be served. Unfortunately I spent 22 years of my life in Iran, and in that time I suffered through thousands of instances of daily abuse, said Soghra Atayi, 37, an activist who participated in a demonstration in the central province of Bamiyan. Behista Rohan, who attended a protest this week outside the Iranian consulate in the western city of Herat, said history has shown that abuses against Afghans in Iran often go unpunished. This case highlights the double standard in Iran, Rohan said. If an Afghan is suspected of even the smallest crime they are put to death, but when one of their own commits such a heinous crime nothing happens. Yaghma Golrouee, a prominent Iranian poet and songwriter, addressed this prejudice in an Instagram post. Admit it or not, we are racist people, proud of our history and old civilizations and ancient kings, he wrote. The boys father said the crime has brought shame on his family, and that his son should face appropriate punishment. His mother, too, has expressed remorse, saying the two families were close and that she often commiserated with Setayeshs mother about the difficulties they both faced. Yet some in Iran already appeared to be seeking to explain the attack against Setayesh, for which police have yet to give a motive. One hardline Iranian news agency, Raja News, blamed online pornography for motivating the teenage boy to rape the girl. Atayi, the former refugee, said she returned to Afghanistan 13 years ago following the U.S.-led military invasion, deciding that she would rather take her chances with the Taliban than endure continued ill treatment in Iran. I laugh when I hear that Iranis are now calling for justice, Atayi said. There have been hundreds of other cases of abuse and murder that went unnoticed. Now that they have been publicly shamed in their own media the Iranians are calling for justice. Special correspondents Mostaghim reported from Tehran and Latifi from Kabul, Afghanistan. ALSO 9/11 attacks reemerge as a critical test of U.S.-Saudi relationship Boat transfer in Mediterranean turns deadly; 500 migrants feared dead, U.N. says On the frontline of Brazils war with Zika, a mothers first question: How big is the head? The greatest test yet of a U.S.-Saudi relationship already under strain may be the one that has been hiding in plain sight the longest: the Arab kingdoms connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. It has been nearly 15 years since 15 Saudi citizens helped perpetrate the worst terrorist strike on U.S. soil; nonetheless, given the complex geopolitics that arose, the attack forged greater security cooperation between the longtime allies. But on his fourth and final visit as president to Saudi Arabia, which concluded Thursday, President Obama had to reconcile his need for the kingdoms help on regional security with increasing skepticism back home about the relationship, including his own. Theres no question that this is an important alliance that has accrued to the benefit of the United States in many ways, Sen. Christopher S. Murphy (D-Conn.) said Thursday at a forum at the Brookings Institution in Washington. But as time goes on, its harder and harder to ignore the holes in the relationship. Advertisement NEWSLETTER: Get the days top headlines from Times Editor Davan Maharaj >> The Saudi connection to the 9/11 attacks has reemerged as a critical question for those assessing the alliance. Ahead of his trip, Obama fought to manage increasing scrutiny over the possibility of deeper Saudi connections to the attacks than are publicly known. ------------ For the record In the April 22 Section A, an article about strained U.S.-Saudi relations referred to the potential declassification of 28 pages of the 9/11 Commission Report. The pages are from a 2002 congressional report. ------------ Obama downplayed possible consequences from the potential declassification of 28 pages of the 9/11 Commission Report, which some believe will shed more light on potential Saudi involvement in the planning of the attacks. Senior intelligence officials were working to ensure that any newly released information would not compromise U.S. security or give an incomplete or inaccurate picture of what U.S. intelligence found, Obama said in an interview with Charlie Rose on CBS This Morning. Obama has less control, though, over legislation that could open the Saudi government to criminal prosecution over the attacks. Families of the 9/11 victims have stepped up lobbying on behalf of a bill that seeks to clarify a 1976 law governing the principal of sovereign immunity. They want the law to specify that foreign governments could be held culpable in American courts for terrorist attacks in the U.S. for which the foreign governments liability could be proved. The bills sponsors say the legislation is key to removing legal obstacles to a pending lawsuit against the Saudi government. Its very simple: If the Saudi government was complicit in terrorism, then they should pay the price, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters Tuesday. Neither Obama nor King Salman, the Saudi ruler, made mention of these issues as they sat down for a one-on-one meeting Wednesday. Aides later said the meeting lasted for more than two hours their longest encounter but that the legislation did not come up. Join the conversation on Facebook >> Talk of a strain in the relationship was always overblown, Obama told reporters Thursday before leaving a summit with Persian Gulf leaders in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. One of the things, at a time when the region is so fraught with so many different problems and challenges, is the need for more consistent institutionalized communication at every level of government, he said. And thats part of what weve been able to achieve. But in Washington this week, the Saudi Embassy re-released a 2003 statement from Prince Saud Al-Faisal, the former Saudi foreign minister, responding at the time to the 9/11 Commissions just-published report. He said his nation was indicted by insinuation because of the decision not to release the 28 pages and insisted that any accusations of involvement by Saudi officials were based on misguided speculation and is born of poorly disguised malicious intent. As for the legislation, the White House has long opposed it, worried about the potential for fallout beyond the U.S.-Saudi relationship. This is a matter of how generally the United States approaches our interactions with other countries, Obama told Rose. If we open up the possibility that individuals in the United States can routinely start suing other governments, then we are also opening up the United States to being continually sued by individuals in other countries, he said. Yet it is Obamas own Democratic Party that is most supportive of moving the legislation forward; Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) blocked it this week from proceeding in the Senate while working on a compromise. Lawmakers and the White House are still debating the merits of the bill, a Democratic congressional aide said. There are certainly sensitivities around the timing, given the trip, the aide said, demanding anonymity to speak in detail about talks with the White House. Schumer said this week that allowing a suit against Saudi Arabia to go forward, which the legislation aims to do, would give victims families some measure of justice. But it would also send a message to other governments about the consequences of cooperation with terrorists. Saudi officials have made their own case against the legislation directly to U.S. lawmakers, warning that its passage could bring economic consequences. The Saudis consider the effort to hold it legally culpable for 9/11 a major political attack, said Anthony Cordesman, a national security expert at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies. While theres no evidence from the 9/11 Commissions public findings that the kingdom supported Al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden, the panel did conclude that some of its senior figures and those from other regional countries did support extremist charities and causes, and that controlling the flow of all such funding remains virtually impossible. SIGN UP for the free Essential Politics newsletter >> Deputy national security advisor Rhodes made a similar point this week on the Axe Files podcast, saying that Al Qaeda was allowed room to thrive through unregulated space in the Saudi regime, even as he insisted that the U.S. view is that the Saudi government itself did not play a role. There was certainly, at least, an insufficient attention to where all this money was going over many years from the government, Rhodes said. Obama himself was described in an article in the Atlantic magazine this month as irritated that foreign policy orthodoxy requires him to treat Saudi Arabia as an ally. Obamas candid comments in the story, based on a lengthy interview, had already complicated the visit. But Rhodes said the blunt and direct discussions between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are a result of a deeper engagement that looks beyond what had previously defined the relationship oil. The Saudis see the rise of the Islamic State and broader instability in the Middle East as more of a danger than they once viewed regional terrorism. Rhodes told reporters Thursday in Riyadh that the new discussions helped clear the air. Even as there have been some tensions over the years ... on a set of core issues, we are in alignment, he said. ALSO Inside Trump Nation: Virginia voter, struggling to make ends meet, finds a voice with take-charge Donald Trump Owners of emissions-cheating Volkswagens can choose buybacks or repairs, judge says On the frontline of Brazils war with Zika, a mothers first question: How big is the head? All material is subject to strictly enforced copyright terms & conditions and cannot be repurposed or reproduced. 19882022 Latin American Financial Publications Inc. On 18 April US Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Rose Gottemoeller paid a visit to Brazil the last leg of a Latin American tour that began in Colombia on 11 April. According to a US State Department press release, in Brazil Gottemoeller was due to meet officials from the local foreign ministry and the defence ministry for discussions on expanding longstanding partnerships on peacekeeping, defence, arms control, non-proliferation and security cooperation. During her 14-15 April visit to Argentina, the press release notes that Gottemoeller was due to build on President Barack Obamas recent visit to discuss peacekeeping, security cooperation and nonproliferation with officials from the Office of the President, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Defense in Buenos Ares. In Ecuador, which Gottemoeller visited on 13-14 April, she consulted with senior officials from the foreign ministry; while in Colombia she also met with officials from the local foreign and defence ministries to discuss bilateral security cooperation. End of preview - This article contains approximately 767 words. Subscribers: Log in now to read the full article Not a Subscriber? Choose from one of the following options In a span of 24 hours, U.S. lawmakers went from cautious optimism to public opprobrium of a rescue bill to assist cash-strapped Puerto Rico. The House Committee on Natural Resources abruptly delayed Thursday's meeting because of provisions in the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) that committee Chairman Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, said created "uncertainty in both parties." "This legislation needs bipartisan support, but members need time to understand the complexity of the issue and the ramifications of any proposed changes," Bishop said during the committee's opening statements on Wednesday. Congress favors legislation curving the island nation's massive $72-billion in debt, but the bill has drawn bipartisan criticism, from Democrats for being too controlling and from some conservatives who believe PROMESA essentially serves as a bailout. Puerto Rico on the Brink of a Bailout Ranking committee member Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., used his opening statement Wednesday to remind lawmakers of Puerto Rico's vulnerability. Grijalva cited a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report warning that one of every four residents could contract the Zika virus within the next year, and that local hospitals would not have funds or basic resources to treat patients. The congressmen said Puerto Rico is incapable of a dependable fiscal plan going forward, arguing that Wall Street hedge funds prefer it stay this way. "These vulture funds are now aggressively campaigning against a solution to help the island relieve some of its debt. They are more interested in padding their profits than ensuring the well-being of American families suffering in Puerto Rico," Grijalva said. "As Members of Congress, we have to decide who comes first - vulture funds and others who steadfastly refuse to join other investors in a good faith, compromise solution, or the American people." Several Republicans believe Puerto Rico can restructure its debt payment plan without U.S. government assistance. They worry about ramifications on American taxpayers if the Treasury allocates billions of dollars, and wonder whether it will do anything for Puerto Rico's long-term economic health. As Heritage Action for America Vice President Dan Holler put it, PROMESA offers no direct financial bailouts to creditor or to Puerto Rico. "The new draft does not maintain legal continuity or promote much needed economic growth," Holler told Latin Post. "This is not a constructive, conservative solution to Puerto Rico's problems." The conservative political advocacy organization released a brief on April 1 urging lawmakers to keep three priorities in mind; no bailouts, promote reforms in public administration, and maintain legal continuity. The latter partially refers to bankruptcy proceeding that would allow Puerto Rico unpunishable default on payments. "Congress does not have to solve all of Puerto Rico's problems, but it can take limited steps that improve economic conditions and promote negotiated restructuring," the brief read. "In a limited approach, Congress could shelve the Oversight Board for the time being and leave bankruptcy law alone." Payment Deadline Looms Puerto Rico owes creditor Government Development Bank $422 million on May 1, but Thursday's setback assured payment won't be made in time. In her weekly news conference, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the deadline was still possible but still has "serious concerns" over influence creditors may have over restructuring decisions. On Wednesday, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., reminded Republican leaders that special interest groups want PROMESA to fail. "Many big-money interest groups on Wall Street know this and have put a lot of money towards sabotaging this legislation in order to force a last-minute bailout upon Puerto Rico, putting U.S. taxpayers on the hook for their bad loans," Ryan said. "They call this a bailout, because they know it is not. And a bailout is what they want." Immigrants all over the country find themselves in the same place. Data shows a growing movement among the 8.8 million immigrants eligible to become naturalized citizens aimed at assuring that they have met all the requirements mandated to participate in the upcoming 2016 presidential election. With the chasm between Democrats and Republicans on the issue of what should be done about immigration as wide as its ever been, the stakes are increasingly high for the entire Latino community, which could see as many as 11 million immigrants deported if Republican front-runners Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are able to accomplish their stated desires. Part of Plan Aimed at Defending President Obama's Immigration Programs "There are concerted efforts to mobilize people to naturalize and register to vote with the intention of fighting back against the hate expressed by candidates at the natural level as well as to defend President Obama's actions on DAPA," said Breandan Magee, senior director of programs for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), told Latin Post. He later added, "The general mood among immigrant populous is they feel the need to stand up for themselves and their families against what they see as blatant racism. They waited a long time to become citizens, but they felt a great need to do so now." Elena and Esteban Salgado stand as prime examples of that way of thinking. The couple has been living in America for more three decades and has owned their own green cards for more than 20 years. Still, they've never voted, and up until now have never really seriously considered it. That's all changed with the battle over immigration simmering as it has this election season. "We want to become citizens so we can vote against Trump," said 57-year-old Esteban. They're not alone. ICIRR organizers see a serious uptick among the estimated 350,000 immigrants living in Illinois that feel the same way the Salgados do. "He's racist, and he speaks very badly about Mexicans," added Elena. "It shouldn't be like this." Indeed, the outspoken Trump formally launched his campaign by deriding Mexicans as criminals and drug dealers. Since then, he has also vowed to erect a massive wall along the Mexican border to keep out all immigrants. Texas Sen. Cruz has echoed many of Trump's sentiments, insisting that he too would quickly move to mass deport millions of immigrants. Immigrants everywhere have taken note of all the fiery rhetoric, particularly across Illinois where Chicago-based ICIRR has helped nearly 1,000 permanent residents seek to become citizens for the express purpose of being able to vote in November's general election. In addition, unions and advocacy groups alike are revving up their outreach to immigrants as the issue of immigration becomes more pronounced. All Eyes on Supreme Court Immigration Ruling Earlier this month, the Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments on the merits of President Barack Obama's immigration programs, some of which could aid as many as four million now people living in the U.S. illegally in becoming legal citizens. "Having presidential candidates using a platform of hate toward specifically Mexicans--- we do realize we have a lot of folks who need to be put on that path toward citizenship," said Idalia Cervantes, a program manager for Chicago's branch of Juntos Podemos, which advocates for Mexicans living in the U.S. "It's the same group of people we'll be using in the 2016 elections to push them to get out and vote. Meanwhile, a native of Ireland set to vote in his first election, Magee only became a naturalized citizen earlier this year. "If we're creating these workshops and promoting citizenship we have to lead by example," he said. "It's something I owe to my community and I definitely feel an urge to participate in the process." Unaccompanied migrant children coming into the United States are being housed with adults who may be here without legal authorization, according to documents retrieved by the Associated Press. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services data shows eight of every 10 children seeking refuge between February 2014 and September 2015 -- primarily from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras -- were placed with family or guardians vulnerable to deportation. Six percent went to sponsors with temporary protection status (TPS), short-term legal status granted to immigrants escaping civil wars, natural disasters or other transitory situations. TPS lets an undocumented individual work here legally, but does not let them petition for their child's residency. Of an estimated 71,000 children, just four percent were sponsored by American citizens. Background Checks for Sponsors HHS and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security struggled with the massive influx of undocumented Latino children that arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border two years ago, some 47,000 of which were apprehended. Then, as it is now, children were sent to oft-times overcrowded temporary shelters until Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) caseworkers found adequate sponsors. Parents are always the first choice, followed by aunts, uncles, siblings, and any other close relatives, regardless of immigration status. Potential sponsors must agree to ensure the child's safety ahead of impending immigration hearings. They provide proof of identity and, in some cases, open their home up to ORR inspections. An HHS statement report March 29 defines sponsors as adults who "provide for the child's physical and mental well-being and have not engaged in any activity that would indicate a potential risk to the child." At least two lawmakers have taken issue with the last point. Divide Across Party Lines Last December, Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, accused the Obama administration of being lax on background checks, in some cases allowing undocumented children into the homes of drug dealers and child molesters. "Apparently, ORR has struggled to ensure that (Unaccompanied Alien Children) are not placed with criminals since 2013, when it issued an alert warning of three 'fraudulent sponsors' with addresses in Colorado, Iowa, and Minnesota seeking to claim unrelated unaccompanied minors," read a letter authored by the senators. They added, "It seems little corrective actions has been taken, and many are still released into criminal hands." Democrats and Republicans see the HHS data in different lights. Left-leaning politicians say a sponsor's status is not an issue if they care for the child. Conservatives, like Virginia Sen. and U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chair Bob Goodlatte, sympathizes with Grassley's concerns. Goodlatte questions whether relatives have illicit intentions. "Since the president refuses to enforce our immigration laws, unlawful immigrants in the United States consistently pay criminal organizations along the border thousands of dollars to smuggle their family members into the United States," Goodlatte said in a statement to the AP. A state-by-state table of unaccompanied children released to sponsors found HHS housed 22,798 children in a four-month span beginning last September. A total of 27,520 were released in the 12 months beforehand. "HHS is engaged with state officials to address concerns they may have about the care or impact of unaccompanied children in these states, while making sure the children are treated humanely and consistent with the law as they go through immigration court proceedings," the report read. The HHS report added that children have "histories of abuse or may be seeking safety from threats of violence. They may have been trafficked or smuggled." A Portugal appeals court has overturned the libel conviction of an ex-Portuguese detective who published a book alleging the parents of missing girl Madeleine McCann were involved in their daughter's disappearance. A court of appeals in Portugal upheld the appeal of Goncalo Amaral, an ex- police chief who worked on the disappearance case of Madeleine McCann. The British girl went missing in Algarve, Portugal in 2007, the Guardian reported. Her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, sued Amaral over his book, published in 2008, titled, "The Truth of the Lie." Amaral was ordered by the court judge to pay Kate and Gerry McCann 395,000 in damages April last year. The British couple has sought 1.2m as compensation in the case, stating they were "totally destroyed, depressed and felt ashamed" over Amaral's claims. It was allegedly suggested from the book that they were to be blamed for the girl's disappearance. According to Telegraph, Amaral accuses the parents of staging their daughter's kidnapping, claiming in truth that the girl died during their holiday vacation on their Algarve apartment. A judge in Lisbon also ordered Amaral to pay interest for exceeding the freedom of speech limits. The couple's representing Portuguese lawyer, Isabel Duarte, confirmed the ruling, saying they were disappointed; however, she said she was not surprised. Duarte added that Kate and Gerry McCann told her to file an appeal. The Lisbon lawyer explained that the said decision was unanimous and the initial decision has been revoked by the Portugal appeals court, Daily Mail reported. "This decision was an appreciation of the law and not the facts. The court is basically saying he had the right to express his opinions," Duarte said. Because of the appeal decision in Amaral's favor, the book will be available again for sale in store. The McCanns never received the compensation money from the initial ruling. Madeleine McCann's disappearance case was opened in 2008, wherein no crime was detected. British authorities are still investigating the case. The United Nations has begun informal briefings to screen prospective successors of South Korea's Ban Ki Moon as the next Secretary-General of the United Nations. As the position remains in debate, Argentina's Foreign Minister Susann Malcorra addressed rumors that President Mauricio Macri will nominate her. Malcorra stated the Latin America is also considering the issue of the next UN leadership since there are "many candidates in the mix," The Washington Post reported. "I'm sure there will be a point where Latin America will come together and most likely have a view on this, and we shall see," Malcorra said, who did not clarify whether President Macri has indeed sponsored her for the position or not. When asked if she would accept the nomination, Malcorra said, "I love this organization. I deeply believe that this organization is more needed today than ever before." Before serving as Argentina's foreign minister, Malcorra was a former UN undersecretary-general and chief of staff to current Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon. As per the United Nations, there are currently 9 nominees for the UN top post, all of which has faced some 800 questions from UN delegates and the public as to how they would "lead the world body" if selected. "My impression is - of course my experience is short - but during the months I've been here, we never had that frank and substantial discussion about the future of the United Nations as the one we got during these informal dialogues," UN General Assembly President Mogens Lykketoft said about the dialogue with the candidates. Lykketoft said the candidates presented their "vision statements" and also identified the pressing flaws of the Uinted Nations. They were also able to present a blueprint of how they plan "to do things ever better." As a new standard of transparency, each candidate was given a two-hour televised and webcast timeslot to present themselves and their platforms. The candidates that appeared before the General Assembly include Igot Luksic (Montenegro), Irina Bokova (Bulgaria), Antonio Guterres (Slovenia), Danillo Turk (Slovenia), Vesna Pusic (Croatia), Natalia Gherman (Moldova), Vuk Jeremic (Serbia), Helen Clark (New Zealand) and Srgjan Kerim (Yugoslavia). The 15-member Security Council will vote on who to recommend for UN's top post, and the 193-member General Assembly will then vote to accept the nominee or not. According to Voice of America, the Security Council will begin discussions on their recommendation in July. A new secretary-general may be declared as late as November, just a month before incumbent Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon ends his 10-year term in Dec. 31. Traditionally, the secretary-general seat is rotated among regions, but there are some key points that could influence how the votes turn out. East European nations, which includes Security Council member Russia, contend that they have never had a security-general and that it's their turn. There's also mounting pressure to elect the United Nations' first female secretary-general. The United Kingdom government warns its LGBT citizens who will travel to Mississippi and North Carolina. It is relevant to the existing law these states have regarding the rights of LGBT individuals. According to ABC News, the UK government posted in its website about a travel advisory for all LGBT citizens who plan to travel to Mississippi and North Carolina. Just recently, North Carolina adopted a law wherein LGBT individuals should use bathroom according to their sex identity at birth and not according to their sexual preferences. On the other hand, Mississippi has a law that allows establishments with religious objections to deny service to LGBT customers. The travel advisory says that "The US is an extremely diverse society and attitudes towards LGBT people differ hugely across the country. LGBT travelers may be affected by legislation passed recently in the states of North Carolina and Mississippi. Before traveling please read our general travel advice for the LGBT community." According to The Washington Post, the travel advisory doesn't include any political statement but merely to warn its LGBT citizens before traveling to the two states. The travel advisory is posted in the UK government's website. Some of the warnings stipulated there are public display of affection within same-sex couples are best avoided while in public, if they receive any unwelcome remarks or negative comments, it is advised to ignore it and lastly, there are hotels in these states that don't accept bookings from same-sex couples so it is best to check first before going. The adopted law in Mississippi and North Carolina sparks anger to LGBT individuals and organizations supporting it. Big companies such as PayPal Holdings and Deutsche Bank cancelled its projects in North Carolina because of the law which is supposed to give more jobs to people. Entertainers and celebrities also expressed their disappointment towards the law. Entertainers such as Bruce Springsteen and Ringo Starr cancelled concerts. Transgender's use of bathroom is also an on-going battle in the U.S. Cases of transgender students who filed for complaint on discrimination were filed. On the other hand, LGBT community supporter, Target, is still vocal of its support towards lesbian and transgender individuals. Just recently, the retailer giant announced its move to allow transgender workers and customers to use bathroom of their choice. Target's support to LGBT has not any negative impact to its business. Debates and protests on the rights of LGBT people are still happening in the U.S. On Wednesday, Massachusetts' top securities regulator alleged a unit of custody bank State Street Corp habitually of overcharging clients for items such as messaging services. Reuters reported that Secretary of Commonwealth William Galvin said in a statement that State Street Global Markets has engaged in a legal pattern of overbilling its customers. Galvin noted in an administrative complaint that the company often labeled the charges for secure electronic messages, also known as SWIFT messages, as out of the pocket expenses that contained hidden markups of up to a mind-boggling 1,900 percent. According to the Chicago Tribune, the company has run afoul of regulators in recent years. In 2014, the FCA claimed that State Street has developed and executed an intentional strategy to charge concealed payments at a unit which helps institutions restructure their own investments. State Street is a custody bank, which tracks performance, keeps records, and lends securities for institutional investors including hedge funds, pension funds, and mutual funds. The bank is also considered to be one of the giant providers of exchange funds internationally and manages investments of institutions and individuals. For the past few years, it has encountered several regulatory investigations on matters including soliciting business from public pension plans and foreign-exchange trading. Anne McNally said in a statement via email that State Street claimed it discovered invoice errors on several expenses and notified officials including the office of Galvin, reports Jutia Group. The company said it will pay customers and will reform its billing practices as required. The company has been in negotiations with customers over the matter, together with the government authorities, also pledging to cooperate. The complaint is the latest regulatory action to evaluate claims of overbilling at State Street which was based in Boston. In 2014, State Street agreed to pay a fine of $32.91 million dollars to the United Kingdom Financial Conduct Authority for charging customers with hidden markups, which the customers claimed they had not agreed to pay. Newmont Mining, one of the biggest gold producers, has commenced its investigations into some external business operations. The investigation into activities of Newmont's foreign unit and servicers in nations outside the US comprises an evaluation of agreement that complies with the US Foreign Corrupt practices Act. The miner is unable to estimate the result of the investigation approach and has not provided any information on it in its financial report. Omar Jabara, a spokesman for Newmont, said Reuters that it is the duty of the company to organize an investigation in the event of receiving trustworthy facts. However, Omar refused to provide additional information regarding the investigation. The company's business operations outside the country include Ghana, New Zealand, Suriname, Peru, Australia and Indonesia. The miner has the largest share in the market value. Newmont is working together with the Department of Justice and the US Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with the investigation process. Last month, the miner signed a one-year pact with the SEC ringing the decree of limitations in connection with the investigation. In addition, the company recently signed a similar deal with the Department of Justice (DOJ). The form 10-K filed with the commission on February 17, 2016, showed that the company's business operations comply with the US Foreign Corrupt Practises Act (FCPA). The company had also noted that any violation with regard to this foreign policy would lead to fines, removal of permits or license and other related security penalties including a reputation damage. "We occasionally identify or are apprised of information or allegations that certain employees, affiliates, agents or associated persons may have engaged in unlawful conduct for which we might be held responsible," the miner said in a filing with the Securities Exchange Commission. Newmont also stated that it is investigating foreign business issues with the help of external counsel. Meanwhile, the DOJ said that it will add additional resources to the FCPA, with ten fresh prosecutors and detective agents. The increase will improve the justice department's harmonization with foreign law management colleagues. The pilot program that is created to boost self-reporting indicates how the justice department will trim penalties if firms reveal FCPA breach voluntarily. The program also requires the firms to cooperate completely with the investigation and personal prosecution of the DOJ, JD SUPRA BUSINESS ADVISOR reported. For the eligible companies, the DOJ might cut penalty up to 50% below the bottom end of the fine range set by the US Sentencing Guidelines. Meanwhile, the reduction is 25% below the bottom end of the fine range for the companies that opt not to reveal FCPA breach, however, collaborates with an official investigation in the later stage. South Korean government denies the killings and abused of vagrants ina welfare facilities that happened over three decades ago. Several survivors of the violence were saddened as nobody has been held accountable until now for the deaths and rapes. Choi Seung-woo recount the torture he suffered from a police officer for accusing him of stealing a piece of bread. According to Star and Stripes, Choi was among the vagrants in Brothers welfare institution, one of the dozen built facilities in the year 1970s and '80s. The "vagrants" includes people without shelters, drunkards, disable people and mostly were street children wandering on the streets, are forced to be imprisoned to the said welfare facility. The government came to roundup them, as they prepared to bid for and host the 1988 Seoul Olympics. This opportunity was seen as "international validation" of the nation as a modern country by the ruling dictators. On the investigation conducted by the Associated Press, they discovered many of the so-called "vagrants" were forcibly imprisoned in the facility and suffered violation of human rights or abused, in which their stories were not really known in the public. The investigations also revealed that these violence and misconducts were highly covered-up by the governement, Salon reported. "Two early attempts to investigate were suppressed by senior officials who went on to thrive in high-profile jobs; one remains a senior adviser to the current ruling party," source cited. The products made on slave labors on the facility were all sent to countries in Europe as well as in Japan. It was also believed that the family who owned Brothers welfare facility still runs other facilities as well as educational buildings until just two years ago. Former inmates of the said institution said the South Korean government have not yet given them compensation, recognition or even an apology, the Salt Lake Tribune reported. Now, the current government of the country declined to review the case as opposition lawmakers said the evidence is too old. Meanwhile, survivors from the facility still suffer from the memories from the facility. Some of them continue their efforts to inform the public, including making a public demonstrations and holding an exhibition of paintings about the affair. Anders Behring Breivik has won a part of his lawsuit against the Norwegian state. The Norwegian mass murderer accused the state of violating his human rights in his solitary confinement in a high-security prison. According to The Guardian, Oslo District Judge Helen Andenaes Sekulic said in her decision that the Norwegian state violated article 3 of the convention. She said that the prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment represents a fundamental value in a democratic society. She added that these fundamentals "apply to no matter what" regardless of the crime the person committed. She also ordered the government to pay Breivik's legal cost of 331,000 kroner or $40,600. The decision of the judge was based on several factors including Breivik's isolation and the lack of consideration of the mental impact of the system. The judge also found out that the routine nude inspections were not clearly justified according to security perspective, Q13 Fox wrote. The gymnasium at the Skien prison served as a courtroom during Breivik's hearings. Breivik gave his testimony, alleging the Norwegian authorities of instituting sadistic plans of killing him. His lawyer, Oystein Storrvik said his client has already shown signs of emotional damage as evidenced by the psychiatric reports. As reported by the New York Times, Storrvik asked the court to maintain strict legal rules and look beyond the popular cry of the masses. He compared his client's condition to a terrorist known as "The Jackal" who has been allowed to see several lawyers, marry one of them and even also publish a book from his cell. Observers, on the other hand, are concerned that maybe Breivik will use his appearance in court in order to publicize his extremist ideology. Breivik's crime was considered the deadliest attack in Norway since World War II. Breivik killed 8 people after detonating a bomb in Oslo and shot 69 young people who attended the Labor Party youth camp. Breivik believes that the rise of multiculturism in Norway was because of the Labor Party's influence. Six men who were arrested during last year's riot in Baltimore filed a police brutality lawsuit. They sued police department and state of Maryland following violent demonstration to protest the death of Freddy Gray in April 2015. One of the plaintiff is Larry Lomax, a 24-year-old man whose video when he was pepper-sprayed and arrested went viral. Baltimore Sun reported that Lomax said the city police officers tore apart their constitutionally protected rights amid heavy-handed enforcement during protests. Following the arrest, Lomax was acquitted of disorderly conduct after three charges against him dropped. Other plaintiffs who tried to avoid the protests were wrongfully targeted by the police who beat them with the batons, they are Albert Tubman, 45, and Roosevelt Johnson, 44. While Eric Glass, a 27-year old was filming the incident when police threw him to the ground, then kicked and punched him. Other plaintiff is a 21-year old journalist from news outlet News2Share, Andrew Fischer who was arrested for violating the curfew. The latest is Myreq Williams, 21 who was pulled off by police one night after the protest. The Baltimore civil unrest occurred after a 25-year-old African American resident Freddie Gray was arrested by the police on April 12, 2015. During the arrest, Gray suffered injuries to his neck and spine when transported to the police station. After a consequent coma, Gray died a week later. Residents protested which led to civil unrest. At least 20 police officers were injured and 250 people were arrested. Mayor of Baltimore Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who is also an African American had to request National Guard from Maryland Army to control the situation. Regardless of the riot, Mayor Rawlings-Blake, a native of Ashburton neighborhood in northwest Baltimore is confident her term is a successful one. In an interview with USA Today, she affirmed her conviction that she leave Baltimore a better place. She will end her terms in December this year. "I think the lessons are still being learned," she told USA Today. "I think what we adopted was resilience and a community coming together and a resolve to be better than our worst days." Meanwhile, trial of six police officers who were charged in the death of Freddie Gray still continue. On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Baltimore City Circuit Judge Barry Williams ruled that a second Baltimore police officer must testify against two other officers. Officer Garrett Miller and Officer Edward Nero are two officers who involved in arresting Gray. As the judge granted the motion from state's prosecutors, Garrett Miller must take the witness stand to testify on Edward Nero's trial scheduled May 10. Miller must also testify on the trial of Lieutenant Brian Rice set for July 5. Six men who were arrested during last year's riot in Baltimore sued police department. They filed a police brutality lawsuit after violent demonstration to protest the death of Freddy Gray in April 2015. Mike Fleck Mike Fleck campaigns for Easton mayor in 2007. (lehighvalleylive.com file photo) The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on Thursday filed charges of bribery and extortion against former Easton city councilman and mayoral candidate Michael Fleck. Fleck, according to a spokeswoman for the office, was pleading guilty in the case. The feds charge that Fleck pressured potential political donors to give money to campaigns in Allentown and Reading in a pay-to-play scheme. Fleck provided consulting services to Allentown Mayor Ed Pawlowski, who has not been charged. Pawlowski is identified only as Public Official #3 in the following charging papers the U.S. Attorney's Office filed on Thursday against Fleck: An Allentown mother allegedly sold methamphetamine to a police informant and claimed she needed the cash to feed her 3-year-old son. Courtney Shaffer-Beasley, 24, of the 2800 block of Mosser Street, faces drug charges after allegedly selling methamphetamine to the informant on March 14 in an undisclosed location of Bethlehem Township. The informant previously bought meth from Shaffer-Beasley and owed her $1,000, records indicate. Police worked with the informant to arrange a controlled buy. Police said Shaffer-Beasley received phone calls and text messages from the informant seeking more meth and a time to pay her the $1,000. Shaffer-Beasley pulled into the location with her 3-year-old son in the backseat only secured by a seat belt, according to police. The pair exchanged drugs for cash. Police then stopped Shaffer-Beasley, who immediately blurted out to an officer she knew the reason for the stop and all she had in her possession was "weed," police said. Shaffer-Beasley allegedly went on to tell the officer she was not a drug dealer and only sells meth to the person who was the informant. Police seized a video on Shaffer-Beasley's phone saying, "It doesn't matter if I am bagging up dope or cutting up rock ... I'm trying to feed my (expletive) son." She added, "Working is not going to cut it." Shaffer-Beasley is charged with possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver, criminal use of a communication facility, child endangerment, possession of a controlled substance, marijuana possession and possession of drug paraphernalia. She was arraigned Wednesday before District Judge Patricia Broscius, who set bail at $1,000 unsecured. Pamela Sroka-Holzmann may be reached at pholzmann@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @pamholzmann. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. One by one on Thursday, the family of Jillian (Faustner) Rohrbaugh faced the man who strangled her to death and remembered the funny and loving young woman they were still mourning. Gordon H. Rohrbaugh III, left, and Jillian H. (Faustner) Rohrbaugh, right. (Facebook/courtesy photos | For lehighvalleylive.com) Jillian's mother sobbed in the courtroom audience as her two daughters spoke of the sister they miss every single day, and of Jillian's two-year-old daughter, Nora, who will grow up without her mother. When it was time for Joan Coberly to speak, she held back tears as she described her youngest daughter being taken away so soon. Coberly discovered her daughter's body in the Whitehall Township apartment they shared. "She was robbed of enjoying a life with her family," Coberly said. "We will never forget Jillian ... our lives will never be the same. There will always be a piece missing." Gordon Rohrbaugh's, Jillian's husband, pleaded guilty Thursday to third-degree murder for strangling his wife to death last October. As part of the plea deal, Gordon Rohrbaugh was sentenced to 20 to 40 years in prison. A crowd of the victim's family and friends, many wearing purple, filled the courtroom for the hearing. Some said they wished for life in prison for Gordon Rohrbaugh. Stacey Faustner, Jillian's sister-in-law, said she fears Gordon Rohrbaugh getting out of prison and Nora seeing him on the street. Or worse, a woman "might come to love him one day and face the same fate" as Jillian, Faustner said. Jennifer Lentz, Jillian's oldest sister, said her sister's "torturous" murder eats at her every day. "That is not a husband. That is a monster!" Lentz said as she spoke between sobs. "He didn't just kill Jillian that day. He killed a part of all of us that day." Rosa Soto, Gordon Rohrbaugh's mother, wailed in court as she apologized for her son, and begged for forgiveness from the victim's family. "I know he's a good boy. I love you, Gordon," Soto said. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry from the bottom of my heart." Rohrbaugh, in court wearing a striped shirt, dark dress pants and shackles, could be seen wiping away tears periodically during the hearing. "Nothing I have to say will change your pain," he said to his in-laws. Rohrbaugh said he has flashbacks and nightmares about what happened the morning of Oct. 21, and he has asked for God's forgiveness for what he did. "All I wish for everyone is peace and love," Rohrbaugh said. He ended his statement by speaking to his mother in Spanish, leading her to break down in the courtroom audience with her hands clasped in front of her. Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahCassi. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. Former Easton city councilman and mayoral candidate Mike Fleck pleaded guilty Thursday morning to two federal charges related to an investigation into bribery and extortion used to raise campaign funds in Allentown and Reading, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Fleck was charged with conspiracy to commit extortion and bribery as part of a pay-to-play scheme involving Reading and Allentown's governments, court papers say. Fleck was also charged with income tax evasion after concealing $130,897.41 of income, overstating certain deductions and not paying $43,467 in federal taxes on his total income of $921,951 in tax years 2011-13, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District charges. Fleck's guilty plea hearing was underway Thursday morning in federal court in Philadelphia, a U.S. attorney's spokeswoman said. Fleck and his company provided consulting services to Allentown Mayor Ed Pawlowski and Reading Mayor Vaughn D. Spencer. Neither politician has been charged with a crime, but members of Pawlowski's staff have pleaded guilty. Pawlowski and Spencer aren't referred to by name in court papers -- they are called Public Official #1 and Public Official #3. Court papers lay out a scheme in which potential political donors and a law firm were pressured to participate in pay-to-play schemes. The public officials used Fleck and his employees to communicate "to certain donors that they were expected to provide items of value, including campaign contributions, in return for certain past or prospective official actions in Reading and Allentown," court papers say. Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. A Laois family is hoping that authorities can broker a deal to release their son who travelled to Syria last year and ended up fighting against ISIS. Joshua Molloy, aged 24 from Ballylinan, is being held prisoner in Iraq by Kurdish rebels along with two Britains. The former British soldier was at the front line of action against ISIS until deciding to leave Syria through Iraq. However, after crossing the border they were stopped and detained. Joshua's father, Declan and his mother Anne-Marie, live in Ballylinan. Mr Molloy said his son travelled to Syria in March 2015 to help in a humanitarian way, but ended up fighting. Joshua saw it as a humanitarian crisis as much as anything else, he said. Mr Molloy admired his son's courage. I think he's very courageous. It is a very brave thing to do but very worrying for his family, he told RTE's Radio's Liveline. Mr Molloy hoped that Irish diplomats could help the British Foreign Office in securing his son's release. Minister for Foreign Affairs, Charlie Flanagan is involved in attempting to have Joshua released. We are aware of the case and are working actively with partners on the ground to resolve it. Minister Flanagan is closely monitoring the situation, said the Department. Permanent TSB has declined to comment on the status of any outstanding former Newbridge Credit Union loans. Last month the Leinster Leader reported how a widow was awarded 2,500 in compensation after the bank 'froze' her former Newbridge Credit Union savings account. Her daughter had got into difficulty with her own loan, which her mother had signed as guarantor. The daughter's repayments were then rearranged. The Financial Services Ombudsman found the bank acted unlawfully in restricting access to the mother's savings account in response. In 2013, the bank took over the existing accounts and loans held by Newbridge Credit Union. At the time, the Central Bank predicted the financial institution was just 2.2 million away, or 29 days away, from liquidation. A local group which formed to save the Credit Union disputed this assertion. In the wake of the recent Ombudsman's finding, the Leinster Leader sent a list of questions to the bank asking what action has been taken against any other outstanding former Newbridge Credit Union loans. We asked if Permanent TSB froze any other accounts. The Leader previously reported on thirty six cases involving members of the former Credit Union which came before Naas District Court on February 17 2014 with many agreeing to installment orders and other cases struck out. The largest loan dispensed by the Credit Union during the boom amounted to 3.2 million. According to the Central Bank's online resolution report, 2.8 million was outstanding on that loan on September 30 2013. Permanent TSB refused to comment as to whether this has been paid off, or written off. The paper also asked how many former CU loans were written off, and what were they worth? Its not clear how many of the 37,000 Newbridge Credit Union members are still banking with Permanent tsb. The bank responded; Thank you for your email Permanent TSB declines to comment in response to your queries. There was no fooling about for Clane girl, Lucy Watson on April 1. The school girl was walking at the Top Model UK final in the London Metropole hotel that Friday. Lucy was one of twenty nine competitors in the commercial category. Out of the nine awards presented on the night she won the Iver Academy skin and beauty award. Based at the famous Pinewood Studios in London, the Ivor Academy is one of the UK's leading training academies for hair and beauty in the television, theatre and fashion industry. The Ivor Academy worked backstage on hair and make-up for the duration of the show so Lucy was thrilled to receive this award, said her mother Shirley. Apart from competing in the event, Lucy also raised nearly 500 towards the Children with Cancer UK charity which is the charity partner of Top Model UK. I would like to thank everyone who supported me with the public vote, she said. Lucy was supported on the night by her mother and a group of friends from Ireland and England who travelled to watch her take to the runway. It was a fantastic experience but for now it's back to school books for her Junior Certificate, said Shirley. This week the High Court in England heard argument in a legal challenge by UK citizens living abroad to their disenfranchisement in the European Referendum on 23 June. British citizens who have lived abroad for more than 15 years are to be denied the vote, unless (as their counsel pointed out) they hastily move back to the UK. They cannot vote while Commonwealth citizens living in the UK, whether for a long or a short time, can vote. Aidan O Neill QC for the claimants pointed out the great deal at stake for the claimants their right to live, work or study in the European Union. He also highlighted that the government has said it plans to abolish the 15-year for other elections, does not know how many UK citizens are affected and has not identified its justification for the 15-year rule, which makes it an arbitrary rule. James Eadie QC for the government argued that deciding who should have the vote was a matter for the government and the consequences for British citizens abroad, in event of a Leave vote, are unknown. The case was heard Lord Justice Lloyd-Jones and Mr Justice Blake (who heard the Gurkha case that Liberal Democrats took a strong interest in). They have reserved judgment, meaning they wish to consider matters further and give a judgment at a later day. Either side might appeal to the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court. I expect the Supreme Court would consider it a matter sufficiently important to be heard by that court and might be expedited to go there directly. At times like this I am glad Englands judiciary is generally respected for its party political neutrality, unlike the US Supreme Court whose majority judgment in Bush v Gore is a monument to partisan decision-making in court. * 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. IN the excitement of the Easter Rising Commemorative Ceremonies, it may be easy to forget an incident which occurred in Limerick in May 1915, and in which such prominent Sinn Fein Volunteers as Padraig Pearse, Ned Daly and Eamonn de Valera were involved. These men, later to become National heroes, were stoned while leading the great Irish Volunteer parade of Whit Sunday, 1915, through Mungret Street and Broad Street. The incident, for fairly obvious reasons, has been but rarely referred to in the years between, but it is worth remembering in that it reflects the highest credit on the discipline of the Volunteers, and shows that these men were not afraid to express their national convictions in a time when it was not fashionable to be patriotic. Over a thousand Volunteers and Fianna Scouts from Dublin, Cork and Charleville travelled to Limerick by special excursion trains for the parade and they were joined by about 150 of the local body in the city. The Volunteers wore uniforms and were fully equipped and included in their number such prominent members of the organisation, such as Perase, Tom Clarke, Willie Pearse, Liam Mellows, Sean McDermott, Ned Daly, Terence McSwiney, Seoirse Clancy and Thomas McCurtain. The parade assembled at Pery Square and, headed by two bands, followed the traditional route of all such great demonstrations OConnell Street, OConnell Avenue, Boherbuoy, the Irishtown, the Englishtown, across Thomond Bridge, and Sarsfield Bridge, and through OConnell Street. Everything went well until passing through Mungret Street, where the Volunteers got a hostile reception. In this locality, which includes Watergate and Palmerstown, they were loudly boohed and stones were freely thrown. For a time the situation looked very threatening; a number of blank shots were fired in an endeavour to check the violence of the women, girls and boys who had attacked the Volunteers with all sorts of missiles. The marchers, however, maintained the highest discipline and, though a few of their number had been injured, the parade was continued along by Broad Street, where the attack was again resumed. A shower of stones was fired into the ranks of the Volunteers, who, however, kept their temper and the march continued without further incident. While the men paraded through the Irishtown district, hearty cheers were raised for the Munster Fusiliers and other Irish regiments by the crowds on the sidewalks, who had relatives and friends in those units fighting at the front. In other parts of the city, things were rather quiet, having regard to what happened in the Mungret Street area. However, there were isolated attacks on the Volunteers, who in a few instances drew their revolvers but did not use them. Several had to obtain police protection from the crowd, which became more demonstrative as the as the day advanced. In Davis Street a number of ladies wearing the Sinn Fein colours had to take refuge in a licensed premises from the mob. An officer of the Dublin Brigade, Captain Eamon de Valera, went to their assistance and he and the ladies were later rescued by a party of Limerick Volunteers. Long before the departure of the Cork and Dublin trains, a large mass of people congregated in front of the railway station, the approaches to which were barred and held by a number of officials, who refused admission to all except those holding tickets. Some time before seven oclock, the Cork Volunteers marched up and were received with boohs and jeers. The mob became almost unmanageable; stones and bottles were thrown at the visitors, who only succeeded in getting through into the station yard after a desperate struggle. Shots were fired and the butts of rifles used by some of the Volunteers to beat off the hostile attentions of the attackers. It was only when the Dublin section of the Volunteers made their appearance that the disturbances reached their height. In the scrimmage, seven rifles were wrested from the Volunteers. The Limerick Volunteers, under Comdt MP Colivet, remained under arms at the Fianna Hall during the time the Dublin, Cork and Tipperary brigades were being marched to the station, and were actually on their way to assist their comrades. Their intevention, however, was not necessary. A number of the local clergy, particularly Rev JM OConnor, Rev Fr Bernard, OFM, and Rev Fr Mangan, CSSR, Spiritual Director of the Arch-Confraternity of the Holy Family, did valuable work in pacifying the crowd, and when the last train had left at 11pm, order has been restored. Later that week, a meeting of the whole House Commitee of the Limerick Corporation thanked the clergy, who by their presence and influence were highly successful in restoring order at the Railway Station. The Committee deplored the conduct of the women in the Irishtown as it might cast a slur on the good name of the whole city and paid a high tribute to the Volunteers, who showed great restraint in not retaliating under the provocation they received. - This article appeared as part of a series of supplements produced by the Limerick Leader in the run up to the centenary of the 1916 Rising A WOMAN who was attacked in the precincts of Limerick District Court was fined 200 after she pleaded guilty to public order offences. Leanne Ryan, aged 27, of Moylish Crescent, Ballynanty admitted engaging in threatening and abusive behaviour during an incident at Limerick Courthouse on September 1, last. Limerick District Court was told that after Garda Robert McCarthy was alerted to a disturbance in a corridor outside the courtroom he observed two women fighting. He requested assistance from colleagues who were inside the courtroom and the pair were separated by gardai a short time later. Erin OHagan BL, defending, said her client had been in court on the day to support her boyfriend who was due before the court. She said there is an ongoing battle between the two families and that the woman who attacked her client just so happened to also be in court on the same day. Referring to a message posted on Facebook following the incident, Ms OHagan said the other woman made what appeared to be full admissions that she had assaulted her client. Judge Marian OLeary was told she wrote that she had bounced her off a wall and that she was very lucky the guards pulled me off her. In the post she also described Ms Ryan as a fool and a handicap. She attacked my client, said Ms OHagan. Judge OLeary was told the defendant has not come to the attention of gardai since the incident and that she wants to put it behind her. She is doing her best to stay away from her, said Ms OHagan who added that her client, who is unemployed is actively seeking employment. Convicting Ms Ryan, Judge OLeary commented that what had happened was unbelievable stuff. Noting that she is living at home and is in receipt of social welfare, she gave her four months to pay a 200 fine. LIMERICKS Troy Studios has confirmed that it has a deal in place with Pinewood, home to Star Wars and James Bond, to handle its international bookings. The studio, which has leased the old Dell building in Castletroy from Limerick City and County Council for the purposes of transforming it into a major film and television production hub, also confirmed that it expects to open its state-of-the-art studio facilities this summer. Troy said in a statement issued to the Limerick Leader that it was delighted to confirm that Pinewood On Location platform has been appointed to market and handle bookings for the studios internationally. Pinewood On Location, it said, was a well-known global brand with specialist sales studio expertise in the film and tv area. The company Troy Studios Limited pulled in funding of 2.7m earlier this year and said its facilities extended to 340,000 sq. feet of high-specification sound studio and support facilities for film and television productions, providing the perfect set-up for large scale movies and/or high-end television series. The Limerick Leader reported in July of last year that Pinewood was eyeing up a deal with the studio, which has been visited by big name producers since the deal was struck with the local authority last summer. Troy, according to promotional material on the Pinewood website, offers three sound stages, support facilities including workshops, production offices, a 5 acre backlot, water tanks, nine star dressing rooms, en suite and ten single dressing rooms, a restaurant with seating for up to 280 people, an extras holding area and parking for 800 cars and trucks. The studio is likely to employ 6-10 full time core staff on site, with up to 500 staff employed during production, which will typically last 3-9 months depending on the project. It is anticipated that, of these, 350 would be full time staff and 150 would be extras on a typical production. The principals in Troy Siun Ni Raghallaigh, Ossie Kilkenny and John Kelleher signed the long-term lease agreement to take it over and develop a media hub for film and television production. The trio are also key figures in Ardmore Studios in Wicklow, where series such as Penny Dreadful and Vikings are filmed. Limerick council boss Conn Murray has previously estimated that the facility could result in a 70m spin-off for the local economy, creating upwards of 750 jobs. FORMER secretary general at the Department of Finance, John Moran, has repeated his assertion that Limerick can be Ireland's "second city", yet this time to an audience at Dublin's Chamber of Commerce. Mr Moran, chair of the Hunt Museum and a board member that played a key role in bringing Narrative 4 to Limerick, as well as working on contract with Uber Ireland, told the Dublin 2050 Conference that he was "calling for a real balanced debate" and "and some real forward planning rather than continue to go blindly into the future with everyone competing with each other". The Mungret native, a member of the Limerick Economic Forum, first made the same call at a Limerick chamber event in Thomond Park in February. He said then that there was a golden opportunity to become Irelands second major city but to achieve this, a dramatic change was needed in how people see their way of living. Speaking this week in Dublin and admitting his bias as a member of the Economic Forum, Mr Moran said "a Limerick metropolitan area encouraged to grow rapidly to a vibrant urban part of 600,000-750,000 or more would not only provide considerable relief to Dublin but it would ignite not just rural Clare and Tipperary but also Galway and Cork who would find new services only an hour away rather than the more than two hours to Dublin. "They in turn would attract more activity from Dublin and help greater economic spillovers into the areas between each of the cities. "Of course, if we had enough to put the services in each of Galway, Cork and Limerick at the same time I would do that. But sadly we dont and so we need to think if the right approach is not to start with one and as we succeed and create value, we can invest more elsewhere rather than investing a little everywhere and nothing works. "So in short, I would suggest that taking a city already working to fix years of neglect and seeing a mini renaissance as it retransforms itself along the modern lines I mentioned above could help focus the scarce resources until we have the right solution which we can then spread elsewhere." Mr Moran told the Limerick Leader at the Narrative 4 launch that development such as the global arts-education organisation setting up in Limerick and the Limerick 2020 bid for European Capital of Culture was "all part of one big goal, a patchwork quilt, if you get all the pieces coming together nicely, than you just get a radical transformation of the way the city works". We and our partners use cookies to Store and/or access information on a device. We and our partners use data for Personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. An example of data being processed may be a unique identifier stored in a cookie. 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Business / Local by Pamela Shumba BUSINESS tycoon Phillip Chiyangwa has urged owners of liquidated businesses in Bulawayo to work towards resuscitating them, saying it would take ages if they wait for the government to revive the industries in the city.Chiyangwa, who is also the Zifa chairman, was in Bulawayo yesterday to assess progress on the revival of one of his companies, Zeco Holdings in Belmont.The engineering company once supplied rail wagons to the National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) locally as well as regionally to countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, and Zambia.Chiyangwa said business owners must resuscitate their companies to improve the economy, create employment and fight poverty."It must be everybody's effort. Those that own those businesses must put up something like I'm doing with Zeco. Remember Zeco as well as G and D were liquidated companies. I put the assets together and revived them. Other company owners must do the same. Zeco is on the stock exchange and chances of restoration are high," he said."Although it's operating at very low capacity due to the underperforming economy, we've decided to find other avenues to promote our products. We've agreed that the company must seize opportunities and it's something the management there is already working on. I visited the company to find out how far they've gone with taking it to higher levels and I'm impressed."Chiyangwa added that chances of the company's performance improving rapidly were high, as it had no debts."I'm happy that Zeco is the only company that has no debts here in Bulawayo. The only debt it has is maybe electricity and tax. This, therefore, gives it a better chance to perform like it used to before the liquidity crunch," he said.Chiyangwa became a huge player in Bulawayo beginning 1998 when he bought Zeco Holdings, G & D Shoes as well as Belmont Leather.Since 2009, numerous firms have closed shop, with more than 200,000 workers losing their jobs, despite government's efforts to bail out struggling companies.Bulawayo was once considered the country's industrial hub due to its active industries and proximity to the key markets in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Zambia. Business / Local by Thobekile Zhou Scores of job seekers have besieged Zimbabwe International Trade Fair arena hoping to be hired by exhibiting firms as casual workers.Traditionally, showcasing companies with stands do hire people to spruce up their pavilions. However, this year job seekers say its tough to be hired."Its different from years gone by. Few companies are interested in us," said Lazarus Dube outside the exhibition centre.Dube said he has lost hope of being hired."I have been coming here since Tuesday and no one has hired me, its frustrating," he said.His counterpart Albert Tshabangu said its a reflection of the economy."iTrade Fair seyawa. Years back we would select which job offer to take as there where many companies exhibiting."But today I have not seen many trucks coming through with exhibition stuff. The economy is tough."Casual workers are paid up to $20 a day, depending on the company and nature of the job.Togolese President Faure Essozimna Gnassingbe is expected to officially open the 57th edition.The exhibition runs from April 26 to 30 under the theme "Innovate -Integrate-Industrialise". News / Local by Stephen Jakes Harare mayor Bernard Manyenyeni has said he stick to James Mushore as the twon clerk despite the government' s threats that he will be in trouble over the issue.Harare Residents Trust said Manyenyeni claims that Council is sticking with Mushore until the court challenge is resolved."The HRT is demanding that the Council follows due process by making a submission of the list of Candidates to the Local Government Board, especially the top three that they chose following the Town Clerk position interviews," said the trust. "If they did very well in the interviews and selected the best candidates, it means any one of the top candidates should be selected as the Town Clerk."The trust said the HRT is closely monitoring developments on this matter, and urges the City of Harare to rally behind the Constitution of Zimbabwe and the Urban Councils Act, following the law, and not pursue partisan decisions to please political leadership.However Local Government Minister Saviour Kasukuwere yesterday announced that he has suspended Manyenyeni following his reneging to halt the employment of Mushore. A stunning, solid gold crucifix unearthed by a hobbyist with a metal detector may be the oldest Jesus on a cross in Denmark. A solid-gold cross depicting Jesus with his arms outstretched may be Denmark's oldest crucifix, dating back more than 1,100 years. The gorgeous pendant was unearthed in March by a hobbyist with a metal detector. Found in a field on the island of Funen, Denmark, the Viking jewelry piece may have been worn by a Viking woman, according to the Viking Museum at Ladby, where the pendant was on display. "It's a completely sensational find that dates back to the first half of the 900s," Malene Refshauge Beck, a curator and archaeologist at stfyns Museum, told the Danish newspaper DR Nyheder. "This object will definitely need to figure in future history books as it could alter the period when it is believed that Danes became Christian." [Fierce Fighters: 7 Secrets of Viking Seamen] Fruitful day off work The stunning find was pure chance. Dennis Fabricius Holm, a metal detector hobbyist living in Aunslev, Denmakr, was enjoying a few hours off work by doing scouting in the empty field outside a medieval church. He encountered a gold pendant, and posted a photo of it to social media, where others suggested he contact an archaeologist, he told the Danish newspaper. "I got off early on Friday, so I took just a few hours, I went around with my metal detector and then I came suddenly on something," Holm told DR Nyheder. "Since I cleared the mud and saw the jewelry, I have not been able to think of anything else." The Viking bling is about 1.6 inches (4.1 cm) long and shows a man with outstretched arms. The Jesus figure is crafted out of filigree gold pellets and gold thread and weighs 0.46 ounces (13.2 g). The weighty cross likely belonged to a wealthy woman, though it's not clear whether the woman was Christian or whether a pagan Viking was showing some stolen goods, according to the museum. Rare find The Viking trinket is rare in a number of ways. It's unusual to find such a delicate and expensive piece of jewelry intact in an open field. While archaeologists had found fragments of crosses in Viking burial ships, those dated to later periods, were made of silver and were smaller that this discovery. A very similar cross, dating to about the same time period, however, was found in Sweden. Dating to the first half of the 10th century, the new find predates the A.D. 965 Jelling Stones, which include Harald Bluetooth's rune stone. That stone, which tells of King Harald's conversion of the Danes to Christianity, was previously thought to be the oldest depiction of Christ on a cross in Denmark. The medieval church near the field dates to the 1200s, but other rare objects, such as a rune stone, have been unearthed in the area before, according to a statement. That suggests the church may have been founded near an ancient Viking settlement. The new find pushes back the date at which Christianity entered the region, Beck said. "Over the last few years there have been more and more signs that Christianity was spread earlier than previously thought and up until now, this find is the clearest proof of that," Beck told DR Nyheder. The popular conception is that manly Viking pirates pillaged and terrorized Europe for centuries before converting to Christianity and settling down to a sober life of praying, farming and churchgoing in the 11th century. Over the last several decades, archaeologists and historians have realized the reality was much more complicated. For instance, most Vikings were only part-time pirates and had day jobs as farmers. Viking women came along on adventures, too. And many Vikings didn't simply loot and run, but established far-flung urban centers that are still occupied today, such as the city of Dyfflin, or Dublin, which was founded by Vikings. The new find was on display during the Easter season at the Viking Museum at Ladby, but has since been sent for preservation work, according to the statement. Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter and Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science. This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Science rests on data, of that there can be no doubt. But peer through the hot haze of hype surrounding the use of big data in biology and you will see plenty of cold facts that suggest we need fresh thinking if we are to turn the swelling ocean of "omes" genomes, proteomes and transcriptomes (opens in new tab) into new drugs and treatments. The relatively meagre returns from the human genome project reflect how DNA sequences do not translate readily into understanding of disease, let alone treatments. The rebranding of "personalized medicine" the idea that decoding the genome will lead to treatments tailored to the individual as "precision medicine" reflects the dawning realization that using the -omes of groups of people to develop targeted treatments is quite different from using a person's own genome. Because we are all ultimately different, the only way to use our genetic information to predict how an individual will react to a drug is if we have a profound understanding of how the body works, so we can model the way that each person will absorb and interact with the drug molecule. This is tough to do right now, so the next best thing is precision medicine, where we look at how genetically similar people react and then assume that a given person will respond in a similar way. Even the long-held dream that drugs can be routinely designed by knowing the atomic structure of proteins, in order to identify the location in a protein where a drug acts, has not been realised. Most importantly, the fact that "most published research findings are false," as famously reported by John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist from Stanford University, underlines that data is not the same as facts; one critical dataset the conclusions of peer reviewed studies is not to be relied on without evidence of good experimental design and rigorous statistical analysis. Yet many now claim that we live in the "data age." If you count research findings themselves as an important class of data, it is very worrying to find that they are more likely to be false (incorrect) than true. "There's no doubt of the impact of big data, which could contribute more than 200 billion to the UK economy alone over five years," says Roger Highfield, director of external affairs at the Science Museum, London. But "the worship of big data has encouraged some to make the extraordinary claim that this marks the end of theory and the scientific method." Useful but not profound The worship of big data downplays many issues, some profound. To make sense of all this data, researchers are using a type of artificial intelligence known as neural networks. But no matter their "depth" and sophistication, they merely fit curves to existing data. They can fail in circumstances beyond the range of the data used to train them. All they can, in effect, say is that based on the people we have seen and treated before, we expect the patient in front of us now to do this." Still, they can be useful. Two decades ago, one of us (Peter) used big data and neural networks to predict the thickening times of complex slurries (semi-liquid mixtures) from infrared spectrums of cement powders. But, even though this became a commercial offering, it has not brought us one iota closer to understanding what mechanisms are at play, which is what is needed to design new kinds of cement. The most profound challenge arises because, in biology, big data is actually tiny relative to the complexity of a cell, organ or body. One needs to know which data is important for a particular objective. Physicists understand this only too well. The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN's Large Hadron Collider required petabytes of data; nevertheless, they used theory to guide their search. Nor do we predict tomorrow's weather by averaging historic records of that day's weather mathematical models do a much better job with the help of daily data from satellites. Some even dream of minting new physical laws by mining data. But the results to date are limited and unconvincing. As Edward put it: "Does anyone really believe that data mining could produce the general theory of relativity?" (Image credit: Leigh Prather / Shutterstock.com) Understand laws of biology Many advocates of big data in biology cling to the forlorn hope that we won't need theory to form our understanding of the basis of health and disease. But trying to forecast a patient's reaction to a drug based on the mean response of a thousand others is like trying to forecast the weather on a given date by averaging historic records of that day's weather. Equally, trying to find new drugs through machine learning based on accessing all known drugs and existing molecular targets is liable to fail because it is based on existing chemical structures and tiny changes in a potential drug can lead to dramatic differences in potency. We need deeper conceptualisation, but the prevailing view is that the complexities of life do not easily yield to theoretical models. Leading biological and medical journals publish vanishingly little theory-led, let alone purely theoretical, work. Most data provides snapshots of health, whereas the human body is in constant flux. And very few students are trained to model it. To effectively use the explosion in big data, we need to improve the modelling of biological processes. As one example of the potential, Peter is already reporting results that show how it will soon be possible to take a person's genetic makeup and with the help of sophisticated modelling, heavyweight computing and clever statistics select the right customised drug in a matter of hours. In the longer term, we are also working on virtual humans, so treatments can be initially tested on a person's digital doppelganger. But, to realise this dream, we need to divert funding used to gather and process data towards efforts to discern the laws of biology. Yes, big data is important. But we need big theory too. Peter Coveney, Professor of Physical Chemistry & Director of Centre for Computational Science, UCL and Edward R Dougherty, Distinguished professor, Texas A&M University This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates and become part of the discussion on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science. This male-on-male behavior, seen in this pair in Botswana, is common in lions and is not proof of gay partnership in these animals, a lion expert says. The Internet was buzzing this week with interest over images that appear to show two male lions engaging in homosexual behavior. The photos and videos, shot by photographer Nicole Cambre in Botswana in March, feature two long-maned lions looking very cuddly. At one point, one lion mounts and humps the other. By their social media posts and online comments, people seemed fascinated and elated to see what looked like same-sex behavior in these beloved wild cats. But these "gay" lions are not gay. "It's affectionate, and it's kind of reinforcing the dominant status of the one that's doing the humping," Craig Packer, director of the Lion Research Center at the University of Minnesota, told Live Science. "You see that in monkeys all the time, and it doesn't make the newspapers that there are homosexual monkeys out there." The male-on-male behavior, Packer said, is fairly common in lions and many other species, and should not be considered proof of homosexual partnerships in animals. [10 Gay Animals in the Wild] Lion coalitions Although these photos don't show animals breaking any barriers, the pictures are still windows into an important, intimate relationship for lions, Packer said. Male lions are up against serious competition when it comes to finding females. This prompts them to team up in groups of two or three, called coalitions, to work together and win mates. Not only are coalitions vital to the lions' reproductive success, but from what scientists can tell, these relationships are also meaningful and involve caring, Packer said. "It's really scary being a lone male lion out there, and he might find a companion," said Packer. "And when you see two solitary males who've lived in fear who suddenly now have a companion, they're so happy. It's amazing. They're so affectionate to each other." They are, however, not sexual partners, he added. Packer compared male-male mounting to dogs humping a leg. They are making a point with the behavior. In the case of the lions, the behavior represents a mix of affection and re-establishment of the pecking order. In this pair, the dark-maned male is the dominant member of the partnership over the blonde male, Packer said. [See Photos of the Biggest Lions on Earth] A long-maned male lion mounts another male lion in Botswana. (Image credit: Nicole Cambre It was obvious that the lions were not participating in any type of penetrative act, Packer said. Lions, he said, ejaculate very quickly after entering a female and let out a characteristic yowl at the moment of ejaculation. These lions seemed to be humping longer than is typical in a sexual act, he said. Beyond that, he said he found nothing noteworthy about the "viral" images. Lion sex As for the possibility put forth by National Geographic (opens in new tab) that one of these lions was, in fact, female, Packer said that idea was ill-conceived. To his eye, the lions are both clearly male, as evidenced by body size, head size and the presence of male genitalia when viewed from behind, he said. The male lions in Botswana take a nap. (Image credit: Nicole Cambre In email interview with Live Science, photographer Cambre said she shares this belief, citing her videos as almost certain proof that both lions are male. The idea that a female lion could have a mane comes from previous reports (opens in new tab) of one or two maned lions lacking male genitalia that were spotted some years ago in Botswana. Manes require substantial testosterone in order to grow, said Packer, who noted he has seen males unable to grow manes but never a female who had one. This possibility has piqued his interest, though, and he has planned a meeting with the man who commented in the National Geographic piece about the evidence for maned lionesses, he said. Cambre noted that the, even if the maned females from previous reports do exist, they were seen in an area far from where her photos and videos were taken. "As far as I am aware the maned females were seen near Mombo on Chief's island in Moremi Game Reserve in the Okavango delta," said Cambre."The Kwando concession is in the north in the Kwando-Linyanti wetlands so there is some distance between the two so it is not really the same area." The distance between those two areas seems to be about 100 miles. She added that the Kwando safari guides have reported sightings of male lions that may have crossed into the area from Namibia, one of which has a light mane and is collared, like the blonde-maned male in the images. Cambre has reached out to the Kwando Carnivore Project in Namibia to see if they collared this lion and have any further information about it. Whether wild animals can be gay depends on how a person defines that term. Doting male-male bonding that can include sexual activities and attempts by males to mate with anything that might be mate-able (including other males) has been seen in many species, including several types of primates and insects. Researchers have also observed that some birds establish long-term same-sex pairings. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science. That spark of creativity you crave might begin with a tiny zap. In recent experiments, researchers delivered gentle, targeted electrical impulses to 31 young adults who volunteered to have their brains zapped in the name of science. Results showed an in increase in creative thinking after the zaps, demonstrating for the first time that electrical stimulation can enhance creativity, the researchers said. Far from science fiction, the technique has the potential to help anyone think more creatively, be it for art, science or business, the researchers said. The method is also promising for people who have speech and language difficulties: A targeted brain zap might enable those individuals to think of new ways to express their thoughts, the researchers said. But before you try the DIY route by licking your finger and sticking it in a socket, the researchers warned that they are in the early stages of understanding how electrical stimulation may enhance thought. You can hurt yourself if the stimulation is done improperly, they said. These scientists use specialized equipment that can accurately control the strength and direction of the electrical stimulation. [10 Things You Didn't Know About the Brain] The researchers, co-led by Adam Green, a psychology professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., discussed this technique in a paper published online April 13 in the journal Cerebral Cortex. Green said no single task encompasses all types of creative thinking, but one important form of creative intelligence is the ability to find new connections between concepts that seem far apart. His research group's earlier work determined a location in the brain that appeared to support this kind of creativity. The region is called the frontopolar cortex. In the new study, the researchers used Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) to stimulate this region while volunteers received verbal cues to think more creatively. If brain activity in frontopolar cortex is indeed a driver of creativity, then boosting this brain activity with electric current would shift creativity into overdrive, the team predicted. "Just zapping the brain is easy. The tricky part is knowing where and under what conditions it is likely to work," Green told Live Science. He added that his team's objective was to "tickle it and see if it laughs," referring to the frontopolar cortex. Green said the study participants were told to "put on their thinking caps," both figuratively and literally. They were asked to think creativity while wearing networks of electrodes across their skulls that produced electrical current for about 20 minutes. Sometimes the electrodes stimulated the frontopolar cortex, but other times, they stimulated regions of the brain not thought to be related to creativity, as a control. When the participants were zapped in just the right spot, the frontopolar cortex, they experienced a burst of creativity and could make more creative connections between concepts in word-association and analogical-reasoning tasks. Green said the experiment demonstrated that creativity is malleable, unlike IQ. Green said that researchers have for years experimented unsuccessfully with ways to improve a person's innate intelligence, or IQ. By contrast, creativity appears to be a nonstatic feature of the brain that really can burst to higher levels, Green said. The tDCS promoted the firing of nerve impulses in the frontopolar cortex. This effect on the brain faded within about an hour after the tDCS was complete. Dr. Peter Turkeltaub of Georgetown University Medical Center, the other lead investigator on the study, said the tDCS could one day be used to help people with aphasia, a communication disorder in which a person has difficulty speaking, reading and writing. The condition often results from a brain injury. "Enhancing creative analogical reasoning might allow them to find alternate ways of expressing their ideas using different words, gestures or other approaches to convey a similar meaning," Turkeltaub said. [10 Things That Make Humans Special] Green said the effects of tDCS differed from those of hallucinogens, which some have claimed can also enhance creativity. Although hallucinogens might induce imaginative imagery, there's no evidence the drugs can make someone more creative in the sense of helping them produce ideas that are not just novel but also meaningful and useful, Green said. Moreover, hallucinogens don't target the frontopolar cortex. "The most effectively creative people have a big menu in the back of the brain and a discerning palate in the front of the brain," Green said. "You've got all these wild ideas, and you've also got the frontopolar cortex that's putting them together in a meaningful way." Green said that Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, Inc., was the type of person who could connect those wild ideas ingredients, if you will and produce something tasty in the kitchen of his frontopolar cortex. Neuroscientists are just starting to understand this process, and that that's really exciting, Green added. Follow Christopher Wanjek @wanjek for daily tweets on health and science with a humorous edge. Wanjek is the author of "Food at Work" and "Bad Medicine." His column, Bad Medicine, appears regularly on Live Science. If you ordered your lunch online today, you might be eating something a little healthier than you'd get if you went to a restaurant or ordered over a deli counter, a new study suggests. The study found that people tend to pick food that's higher in calories (and less healthy) when speaking their order out loud, as opposed to when they choose by pushing a button or writing it down. This may be because people activate different areas of their brain when they make decisions by speaking out loud, rather than by doing something manual, such as pushing a button, the researchers said. For example, speaking out loud may more strongly activate areas of the brain involved in emotion, as opposed to areas involved in critical thinking. [13 Kitchen Changes That Can Help You Lose Weight] "We speculate that speaking may elicit greater impulsiveness and less reflection than manual expression," the authors of the study said in a statement. In one experiment, which was conducted at a real restaurant, the researchers found that people were more likely to choose a high-calorie dessert (made primarily of chocolate) rather than a healthy dessert (fruit) if they ordered out loud, compared to if they ordered by pushing a button. In another experiment, the researchers found that students chose higher-calorie foods from a vending machine if they ordered by speaking into a microphone, rather than by pushing a button. In a third experiment, researchers asked students to choose between a Twix and a banana for a snack. When students made their choice out loud, 62 percent chose the Twix. In comparison, when the students chose by pushing a button, 35 percent chose the Twix, and when they wrote down their choice, 43 percent chose the Twix. The findings could have implications for consumers and businesses as people shift from purchasing things in stores to purchasing them online, the researchers said. For example, a person who is booking a hotel might be more likely to pick a more practical and less expensive hotel if they book online than if they book in person or over the phone, the researchers said. And restaurant diners may make healthier choices if they order via an electronic tablet (which some restaurants now use) rather than speaking their order, the researchers said. The study, conducted by researchers at Tilburg University and Maastricht University in the Netherlands, and Stanford University in California, is published in the December issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. Follow Rachael Rettner @RachaelRettner. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science. News / Local by Stephen Jakes Harare Residents Trust has said refuse collection in the communities is erratic. Residents are dumping waste in open areas."This has left most residential areas contaminated. There have been complaints about the speed at which the refuse collection trucks move within the communities," said the trust. "This endangers children who play along the streets. Local council offices have inadequate plastic bins to distribute to residents, yet when the refuse collection trucks get into the communities they refuse to empty sacks, resulting in illegal dumpsites."The trust said it shall be the policy of the HRT to demand systematic refuse collection from the local authority, at least once a week in each community."Where this is impossible the HRT shall engage the local authority to find alternative spaces for refuse disposal," the trust. "The HRT shall consistently demand the close supervision and monitoring of City of Harare workers, especially those in the Waste Management Department who are responsible for refuse collection in the communities. The HRT shall educate citizens on how to maintain a clean and safe living environment." News / Local by Stephen Jakes Harare Residents Trust has said the city of Harare is busy giving residents last warning letters for them to settle their water debts.The Harare Residents Trust said the City Council is working tirelessly, giving residents final warning letters."This has been done in suburbs like Budiriro, Tynwald, Glenview, Glen Norah and Mabvuku. In such suburbs residents are not receiving constant council services like tap water and refuse collection and sewage reticulation," said the trust. "ln Tynwald South since Friday 15 April 2016 a sewer pipe busted along the railway line area. Residents have since then reported the case but the council is saying they do not have transport to attend to the problem."The trust said the council is finding money to send messengers with warning letters yet no money for meter readings and sewer fixing."The question now is how then does the council derives the charges they make residents pay? Which services are residents are paying for?" said the trust. Local News, Business & Finance, Community, Charity & Cause, Press Releases By Long Island News & PR Published: April 21 2016 Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today announced the next phase of the $40 million NY Prize microgrid competition which seeks to modernize New York States electric grid, help communities reduce costs, and promote clean energy. Albany, NY - April 20, 2016 - Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today announced the next phase of the $40 million NY Prize microgrid competition which seeks to modernize New York States electric grid, help communities reduce costs, and promote clean energy. The next round of funding will provide $8 million in awards for engineering designs and business plans for community microgrids to ensure local power networks can operate independently during emergencies or outages. This phase was first announced by the Governor during his State of the State address in January 2016. This competition will help make communities more resilient as well as bring New York one step closer in its goal toward achieving 50 percent renewable energy by 2030, Governor Cuomo said. By creating strong local power networks, we can help modernize our energy grid while providing clean, reliable power to New Yorkers for years to come. Microgrids are an important component of Governor Cuomo's Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) strategy as they make the electric grid more resilient and reliable, add jobs and stimulate economic development, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and expand customer choice and control. By integrating local renewable energy into the power system, microgrids will help meet the Governor's goal of achieving 50 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2030. New York State Chairman of Energy and Finance Richard Kauffman said, Community microgrids will reduce costs and add more clean energy technologies like solar, wind and batteries into the electric grid. NY Prize is an essential component of Governor Cuomos Reforming the Energy Vision strategy to modernize our energy infrastructure and provide New Yorkers with greater opportunity to choose how they power their communities for greater reliability, affordability and a cleaner environment. The NY Prize engineering design and business plan component will award up to $1 million to each of the eight winners. The deadline for proposals is October 13, 2016. For more information, visit online. Local governments, community organizations, non-profit entities and for-profit companies can apply for the awards. Applicants do not have to have received feasibility study awards previously from NY Prize to win. However, all applicants must provide a completed benefit-cost analysis model and comparable feasibility analysis for their proposed microgrid. Projects that are not chosen to receive engineering design and business plan funding will be connected to resources at NYSERDA, the New York Power Authority (NYPA), their local distribution utility and private sector companies to help them advance their clean energy agenda. In February 2015, Governor Andrew Cuomo launched NY Prize to support the development of community microgrids. Last year, NY Prize received 147 community microgrid applications from communities across the State to conduct feasibility studies and awarded $100,000 to each of 83 proposals. The NY Prize competition is administered by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), which is currently reviewing final reports and conducting an analysis and evaluation of the feasibility studies, which will be made public over the coming months. More information on the NY Prize feasibility study projects and a map of microgrid Opportunity Zones can be found here. NYSERDA President and CEO John B. Rhodes said, "NY Prize encourages communities to act locally to ensure a cleaner and continuous energy supply in the event of extreme weather and to help secure their energy future. This program is an essential component of Governor Cuomos REV strategy and will help make community energy systems stronger and more resilient. NYSERDA Director of NY Prize and Strategic Advisor for Innovation Micah Kotch said, Under Governor Cuomo's leadership, communities across the state now have access to meaningful data on the costs and benefits of building local microgrids to provide clean, reliable power in the event of emergencies, and many have already made significant progress in identifying world-class partners to help design and build these critical systems. The state looks forward to continuing our work with communities, their partnering utilities, and innovative companies to advance local power and create models for others to replicate. A NYSERDA report on Microgrids for Critical Facility Resiliency in New York State provides guidance and recommendations to communities considering applying for Phase II funding. It includes feasibility studies at five sites that experienced extreme weather events, including three in New York City and Long island. About Reforming the Energy Vision Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) is Governor Andrew M. Cuomos strategy to lead on climate change and grow New York's economy. REV is building a cleaner, more resilient and affordable energy system for all New Yorkers by stimulating investment in clean technologies like solar, wind, and energy efficiency and generating 50% of the state's electricity needs from renewable energy by 2030. Already, REV has driven 600% growth in the statewide solar market, enabled over 105,000 low-income households to permanently cut their energy bills with energy efficiency, and created thousands of jobs in manufacturing, engineering, and other clean tech sectors. REV is ensuring New York State reduces statewide greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2030 and achieves the internationally-recognized target of reducing emissions 80% by 2050. To learn more about REV, including the Governor's $5 billion investment in clean energy technology and innovation, visit online and follow @REV4NY. Local News, Crime, Community, Charity & Cause, Press Releases By Long Island News & PR Published: April 21 2016 In the wake of the recent devastating earthquakes in Ecuador and Japan, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today encouraged New Yorkers to donate to reputable organizations assisting in relief efforts and to avoid scams seeking to ... Albany, NY - April 20, 2016 - In the wake of the recent devastating earthquakes in Ecuador and Japan, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today encouraged New Yorkers to donate to reputable organizations assisting in relief efforts and to avoid scams seeking to capitalize of these tragic natural disasters. Our hearts go out to the victims and families affected by the devastating earthquakes in Ecuador and Japan, Governor Cuomo said. In times of need, New Yorkers come together to help our neighbors, whether they be across the street or across the globe. I urge those wishing to assist to do so through a verified charity and to avoid those seeking to take advantage of these terrible international tragedies. Fraudsters posing as charitable organizations commonly seek to prey on those willing to help in the aftermath of major disasters with solicitations that divert much-needed aid from those who truly need assistance. These scams can include efforts to solicit money via telephone calls, mailings, social media posts and e-mails that lead to convincing, yet fake, websites. The following New York-affiliated charities are assisting in relief efforts: Association for Aid and Relief (Japan) donate here CARE (Ecuador) donate here GlobalGiving (Japan) donate here Global Shapers (Ecuador) donate here Japan Society (Japan) donate here OxFam (Ecuador) donate here Peace Winds America (Japan) donate here Red Cross (Ecuador) donate here Red Cross (Japan) donate here UNICEF (Ecuador) donate here Additional information about donations can be found on the Ecuador Consul General and Japan Consul General web sites. Linda Machucha, Counsel General of Ecuador in New York said, We appreciate the solidarity of New Yorks diverse communities and are thankful for the multiple displays of affection and assistance given towards the Ecuadorian people during this difficult time. We invite all New Yorkers to join the efforts to bring needed help to earthquake victims in our country. Ambassador Reiichiro Takahashi, Consul General of Japan in New York said, "I express my profound gratitude for Governor Cuomo's initiative. The Japanese people have never forgotten how kind and compassionate the people of New York were at the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake five years ago. This earthquake in Kumamoto has claimed the lives of more than 40 citizens and more than 100,000 citizens have been evacuated. I believe that the warm friendship extended to us by the people of New York and the United States will again be a pillar of support for the affected citizens and the bereaved in Kumamoto, Japan." Acting Secretary of State Rossana Rosado said, Our thoughts and prayers go out to victims of these catastrophes. Unfortunately, even in the face of such sad circumstances, there are opportunists who may seek to capitalize on these tragedies and we encourage the public to practice their due diligence when selecting a charity. Acting Secretary Rosado oversees the States Division of Consumer Protection, which tracks and investigates scams and apparent frauds to alert and educate the public on scam identification and response. To prevent your donation money from falling into the wrong hands, the Division of Consumer Protection recommends taking the following precautions: Research the charity. Verify that the organization is registered with the Internal Revenue Service. Find out the charitys mission, program and finances, as well as its experience and track record of success dealing with certain types of disasters in specific regions by searching the New York State Attorney General's online database of registered charities at www.give.org, Verify that the organization is registered with the Internal Revenue Service. Find out the charitys mission, program and finances, as well as its experience and track record of success dealing with certain types of disasters in specific regions by searching the New York State Attorney General's online database of registered charities at here , and by visiting websites such as www.bbb.org www.charitynavigator.org and www.guidestar.org in addition to visiting the charitys website. Designate your donation. Find out what percentage of your donation will directly go toward the cause as opposed to administrative costs. Ask the charity whether you can designate your donation to a specific effort rather than a general contribution fund. Resist high-pressure tactics. Watch out for direct e-mails from victims and solicitors who employ heart-wrenching stories, insisting that you donate immediately. It is strongly advised not to give money over the phone to unsolicited telemarketers, and instead ask the caller to send written materials about the charity. Do not disclose personal or financial information. Never give your Social Security number, credit card or debit card number or other personal identifying information in response to an unsolicited charitable request. Avoid giving cash. Give your contribution by check or credit card to ensure that you have a record of the donation. Make checks out to the charity, not to an individual. If you choose to make a donation via a charity's website, check that the website is secure and that your computer is equipped with the latest anti-virus protection. Do not send contributions with a "runner," by wire or overnight parcel pick-up. Dont assume. Check an organizations tax status Check an organizations tax status here to find out if the donation is tax deductible. For more information on recent consumer scams, visit the Scam Alert page on the Divisions website. If you desire more information regarding scam prevention and mitigation, please contact the New York Department of State, Division of Consumer Protection at (518)-474-8583. Follow the New York State Division of Consumer Protection on Twitter and Facebook. Local News, Press Releases, Seasonal & Current Events By Long Island News & PR Published: April 21 2016 Senator Ken LaValle is requesting nominations for induction into the NY State Senate Veterans Hall of Fame. Mount Sinai, NY - April 12, 2016 - Senator Ken LaValle is requesting nominations for induction into the NY State Senate Veterans Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame is designed to pay tribute to the men and women of New York who selflessly served in the U.S. Armed Forces. Senator LaValle said, Each year at this time, we take this opportunity to recognize the distinguished service of one of our notable men or women in our Senate District, who so admirably gave back to our country. We are very fortunate to have so many potential nominees to choose from for inclusion in the Hall. It is my hope anyone who is aware of a special veteran submits a nomination for consideration. The Senate will honor a distinguished veteran from our area and throughout the state on Tuesday May 24th during a ceremony in Albany. Each honorees photograph and biography will become part of a special on-line exhibit proclaiming the contributions of these exemplary New York Veterans and in a printed book to memorialize their status. The New York State Senate Veterans Hall of Fame was created to honor and recognize outstanding veterans from the Empire State who have distinguished themselves both in military and civilian life. Their meritorious service to our nation deserves the special recognition that only a Hall of Fame can provide, as a fitting expression of our gratitude and admiration. In order to nominate an individual for the Hall of Fame, click here to download the form. The information needed will be a biography; high-resolution photograph; nominees rank and at at the time of discharge or end of service, as well as military awards, honors, or achievements. In order to be considered, please submit the forms and related information by Monday, April 25, 2016. Customers should consult the Special Timetable for the Montauk Branch - Sperry Rail Testing Schedules available at terminals and stations or online. Monday, April 25 Babylon to Patchogue Buses will replace train service between Babylon and Patchogue from 9:16 a.m. until noon. Eastbound Customers traveling to stations Bay Shore through Speonk will disembark at Babylon and board buses to their final destination, experiencing up to 23 minutes of additional travel time. Westbound Customers at stations Patchogue through Bay Shore will board buses to Babylon where train service will resume. Customers will board buses up to 36 minutes later and travel time will increase by up to 27 minutes. Tuesday, April 26 Patchogue to Montauk Buses will replace train service between Patchogue and Montauk from 8:01 a.m. until 5:41 a.m. Eastbound Customers traveling to stations Bellport through Montauk will disembark at Patchogue and board buses to their final destination, experiencing up to 41 minutes additional travel Westbound Customers at stations Montauk through Bellport will board buses to Patchogue where train service will resume. Customers will board buses up to an hour and 5 minutes later and will experience up to 32 minutes additional travel time. Wednesday, April 27 Speonk to Montauk Buses will replace train service between Speonk and Montauk from 6:49 a.m. until 6:15 p.m. Eastbound Customers traveling to station Westhampton through Montauk will disembark at Speonk and board buses to their final destinations. Customers will experience up to 28 minutes of additional travel time. Westbound Customers at stations Montauk through Westhampton will board buses to Speonk or Patchogue where train service will resume. Customers will board buses up to one hour and 16 minutes later than usual and travel time will increase by up to 27 minutes. Thursday, April 28 Babylon to Patchogue Buses will replace train service between Babylon and Patchogue from 9:16 a.m. until noon. Eastbound Customers traveling to stations Bay Shore through Patchogue will disembark at Babylon and board buses to their final destination, experiencing up to 23 minutes of additional travel time. Westbound Customers at stations Patchogue through Bay Shore will board buses to Babylon where train service will resume. Customers will board buses up to 36 minutes later than usual and will experience up to 33 minutes of additional travel time. For More Information For up-to-the-minute service info, customers can download the LIRRs Train Time app or sign up for LIRR service alerts at www.mymtaalerts.com. They can also contact the LIRRs Customer Service Center by calling 511, the New York State Travel Information Line, and saying: Long Island Rail Road. If you are deaf or hearing impaired, use your preferred relay service provider for the free 711 relay to reach the LIRR at 511. Hit Show American Pickers with Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz Looking For Leads on Long Island Music, Movies & Entertainment, Local News, Local Steals & Deals, Arts & Culture, Travel & Local Attractions, Press Releases By Long Island News & PR Published: April 21 2016 Saint James & Sayville welcomed Mike Wolfe, Frank Fritz and Antique Archeology to the area in 2015, now the American Pickers are looking for more leads. Long Island, NY - April 21, 2016 - Saint James & Sayville welcomed Mike Wolfe, Frank Fritz and Antique Archeology to the area in 2015, now the American Pickers are looking for more leads - It's Picking Time! American Pickers is a documentary series that explores the fascinating world of antique picking on History. This hit show follows two of the most skilled pickers in the business, Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz, as they embark on an epic road trip across the U.S. in search of Americas most valuable antiques from motorcycles, classic cars and bicycles to one-of-a-kind vintage memorabilia. Mike and Frank are on a mission to recycle America, restore forgotten relics to their former glory, and learn a thing or two about American history along the way. American Pickers is looking for leads and would love to explore what you may have. They are on the hunt for interesting characters with interesting and unique items. Some of what they look for: vintage bicycles, toys, unusual radios, movie memorabilia, advertising, military items, folk art, vintage musical equipment, vintage automotive items, early firefighting equipment, vintage clothing, pre-50s western gear. American Pickers is produced by Cineflix Productions for History. Local News, Health & Wellness, Press Releases By Long Island News & PR Published: April 21 2016 Suffolk County today released a report on tick- and mosquito-borne diseases in Suffolk County. The report, produced by the Suffolk County Tick and Vector-Borne Diseases Task Force (TVBDTF), provides an overview of the diseases transmitted ... Suffolk County, NY - April 21, 2016 - Suffolk County today released a report on tick- and mosquito-borne diseases in Suffolk County. The report, produced by the Suffolk County Tick and Vector-Borne Diseases Task Force (TVBDTF), provides an overview of the diseases transmitted by ticks and mosquitoes and outlines a needs assessment for approaching vector-borne diseases. We are grateful to the task force for their study and recommendations for dealing with this public health and safety issue, said County Executive Steve Bellone. Our approach is multi-pronged and comprises the efforts and expertise of several county departments. Among the recommendations for further action is the creation of a countywide tick-borne pathogen surveillance program. This year Suffolk County began a tick surveillance program at 10 strategically located sites, examining tick populations and tick-borne pathogens at those sites. Also as part of a tick management strategy for Suffolk County, the Department of Public Works Division of Vector Control is providing technical advice and training workshops for tick management to municipalities, commercial pesticide applicators and other entities that are conducting tick control. Vector Control is also exploring opportunities to use new tick control technologies and working with New York State Parks to manage ticks in parkland. Education is of key importance when dealing with public health protection, said Commissioner of Health Services Dr. James Tomarken. We encourage doctors to be familiar with case definitions and to consider vector-borne diseases when diagnosing patients. We also employ social media, video clips, and wide distribution of educational materials to encourage our residents to be vigilant and take the necessary steps to avoid vector-borne diseases. To view the Suffolk County Tick and Vector-Borne Diseases Task Force Report, please go online here To view video clips and for more information on vector-borne diseases, please go here The TVBDTF was created by the Suffolk County Legislature in 2011. It consisted of representatives from the Suffolk County Department of Health Services Arthropod-Borne Disease Laboratory, SUNY Stony Brook Department of Medicine, Suffolk County Legislature, Shelter Island Deer and Tick Committee, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Suffolk County Cornell Cooperative Extension, Suffolk County Medical Society, Suffolk County Pediatric Society, Suffolk County Psychological Association, Professional Nurses Association of Suffolk County, Homeopathic Medical Society of the State of New York, Empire State Lyme Disease Association, New York State Veterinary Medical Society, and New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Looking to stay up to date about all of the news stories and local headlines that are important to Long Islanders? We've rounded up the top coverage for all of the important topics from multiple sources around Long Island, so you can be sure you've got the most recent update on the top stories for Long Island. Have an idea for a news story? Email us at news@longisland.com Columnists Press Releases News / Local by Staff Reporter A man from Domboshava is in trouble after he threatened to kill his wife and commit suicide.This was heard by Harare Civil court when Melody Tamboyeka accused Timothy Chinhete of physical abuse where she was seeking a protection order.The wife said her husband resort to insulting and assaulting her regularly and sometime he threatened to kill her and commit suicide.She said she is a professional teacher and the husband embarrasses her at work and asked the court to stop him from visiting his work place.The magistrate Gamuchirai Siwardi granted the protection application. News / Local by Staff Reporter A woman from Epworth in Harare committed suicide in police cells after being arrested for attacking her husband.Anna Mugabe (22) crushed her husband's testicles after an altercation over marital issues not revealed. The husband Simeon Magasa (32) is battling for his life at a hospital in Harare.National Police Spokesperson Assistant Commissioner Charity Charamba confirmed that the woman committed suicide in police cells.She said Anna used a blanket to end her life. News / Local by Staff Reporter A couple in Harare is reportedly offering its only one bedroom to prostitutes on condition the hookers supply them with drugs worth $50 daily.Following a tip off the police in the capital city raided the house along Livingstone Avenue and arrested the couple Daphne Chivhunga and Tapiwa Chivhunga.The illegal deals came to light when one of the hookers Nyasha popularly known as Bams teamed up with her colleague known as Noku under the influence of drugs and attacked a police officer whop had attended a scene where a man had been extorted of cash.The two were arrested and taken to Harare Central Police where they were assisting the police with investigations as they told the cops that they got the drugs from the couple.The couple reportedly admitted supplying the drugs to the ladies of the night on their arrest. News / Local by Stephen Jakes Harare West MP Jessie Fungayi Majome has said Local Government minister Saviour Kasukuwere has no legal right to suspend elected councillors and mayors.Majome's remarks come after Kasukuwere announced that he had suspended Harare mayor Bernard Manyenyeni over misconduct after he recommended the appointment of the new town clerk."Where is the Attorney General of Zimbabwe when his client the government and its minister continually ride roughshod over not only the law but the Constitution itself?" said Majome. "The A.G. must advise his client to respect the courts, the legal process and the Constitution which dissolved the powers that a local government minister used to have and gave them to the residents of municipalities through their elected councils."Majome said the Minister can't suspend elected councils anymore!"The High Court had said so over and over again. Please sign and share the online petition 'Hands off Harare!' on https://www.change.org/p/hands-off-harare-minister-of-local to allow the city to prosper and defend the Constitution if the A.G. won't do it," she said.MDC-T President's spokesperson Luke Tamborinyoka said Kasukuwere has cited section 114 in his illegal suspension of the mayor of Harare. But only last month, in restating another illegally suspended mayor in Gweru, justice Francis Bere said in his judgement: "There can be no doubt that section 114 of the Urban Councils Act is in direct conflict with section 278 of the Constitution. It is abundantly clear that whereas section 114 of the Urban Councils act gives all power to suspend and dismiss councillors to the first respondent (Min. of Local Government), section 278 o the Constitution provides a new paradigm shift from this scenario.He said Section 278 sets out a completely different regime in the removal of councillors from office."The section arrogantly and authoritatively removes such powers from the Minister," he said. The Tawhid wal Jihad battalion (KTJ), a predominately Uzbek and Central Asian group within the Al Nusrah Front, has released a video showing its forces training what it calls commandos in Aleppo. A small number of fighters, only 15 in total, are shown undergoing weapons training on variants of the Kalashnikov assault rifle, machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). The training is meant to provide experience for urban combat within the city of Aleppo, where the group maintains a heavy presence. Other groups in Syria include Al Nusrahs Liwa al Muhajireen wal Ansar, which is a mainly Russian-speaking brigade, and the Islamic State have trained fighters for urban combat. (See LWJ report, Jihadists in Syria train for urban warfare.) It also maintained a presence in Idlib Province. During the Jisr al Shughur offensive in Idlib earlier last year, KTJ operated closely alongside Junud al Sham, led by the Chechen Muslim Shishani, and the Syrian-wing of the Turkistan Islamic Party. Muslim Shishani is a US-designated global terrorist and has an extensive history with the al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic Caucasus Emirate (ICE). KTJ was also known to have operated at least two training camps in Syria. KTJ pledged allegiance to the Al Nusrah Front, al Qaedas official branch in Syria, in September of last year shortly after the mainly-foreign group Jaish al Muhajireen wal Ansar (JMA) also pledged its allegiance to Nusrah. JMA was historically a Chechen and North Caucasian group before being led by a Tajik and then a Saudi. A small group of mainly Crimean Tartars and other Russian-speaking militants, called the Crimean Jamaat, pledged allegiance just a few days later, swelling Nusrahs ranks with Russian-speaking fighters and other militants from Central Asia. (For more information, see LWJ report, Foreign fighter group officially joins Al Nusrah Front and Threat Matrix reports, Uzbek group pledges allegiance to Al Nusrah Front and Crimean Jamaat reportedly pledges allegiance to Al Nusrah Front.) Photos and Screenshots from the commando training: Caleb Weiss is a research analyst at FDD's Long War Journal and a senior analyst at the Bridgeway Foundation, where he focuses on the spread of the Islamic State in Central Africa. 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. News / National by Stephen Jakes Out spoken Zanu PF youth member Fidelis Fengu has hailed the country's entrepreneurs for contributing to the national development through their under rated businesses."Do you know that you contribute immensely to the growth and development of Zimbabwe , and for that you deserve a special thank you and mention for your contribution to the growth of the economy," he said."You contribute to the gross National Product GNP through the products and services you provide, the more the products and services available the higher the GNP. You contribute to employment creation , you create jobs and provide a means for others to earn an income so that they too can meet their needs and channel that money back into the economy."He said they contribute towards a better life for people , and they invest their time, effort and money into meeting a need , by starting their businesses to fulfill a need in the market and in society and this ensures that people have a better life with more goods and services at their disposal"You promote international trade. You bring diversity in products and services as well as healthy competition which helps consumers access goods at competitive rates and quality. Entrepreneurs make a huge difference , and help keep the economy going , without you the economy would be down and out," he said. "I thought to take time out and recognise every entrepreneur , may God bless you and your hustle , may it be fruitful and successful for the sake of Zimbabwe. Lets celebrate our entrepreneurs." Luton is a large town, borough and unitary authority area of Bedfordshire. Luton and its near neighbours, Dunstable and Houghton Regis, form the Luton/Dunstable Urban Area with a population of about 258,000. Luton is home to Championship team Luton Town Football Club, London Luton Airport and The University of Bedfordshire. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter. For all the latest news from Luton sign up to our newsletter here. Opinion / Columnist Human rights are the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are considered entitled to. These rights include right to education, shelter, food, freedom of expression and movement among others.It is disgraceful that some human rights and civil society groups have a propensity of accusing government over baseless accusations on human rights. Since independence, government has been working flat out to remove all repressive laws that were enacted in favour of former colonialists.This was done as a way of empowering the black majority at the expense of the few white minorities who were benefitting from our own resources.Any government that protects human rights is accountable to its citizen's security. Zimbabwean government is one of them. Protection of citizen's rights strengthens international peace and security, thereby enjoying a shared prosperity with other stable democratic countries around the world.However, it is disheartening to note that Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP) has been asserting that there is a shrinking democracy in Zimbabwe. Truth be said, this is untrue. Democracy prevails in Zimbabwe. Before the nation attained its independence, some streets like First Street in Harare, were no go areas for black people. Presently Zimbabweans have freedom of movement. Any person can move from one point to the other freely.Zimbabwean government extremely maintains the rights of citizens. The recent demonstration by opposition party, MDC-T depicts that there is indeed democracy in Zimbabwe. Opposition parties are free to hold either public rallies or demonstrations without any interference. However, these demonstrations are at times prohibited as they end up into violence which will cause damage of infrastructure.Zimbabwe is a peace loving country. Hence, the laws that were enacted by Government were passed as a way of maintaining the existing peace within the country. For instance, Public Order and Security Act (POSA) was enacted as a measure of dealing with those that are obsessed of public violence. Violent extremists should not be given the space to meddle with the citizen's right of association.It is known that ZPP is a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) claiming and boasting to be a champion of human rights and watchdog of citizen's rights whilst in actual fact its singing for its supper. There is indeed nothing to monitor here as government is always supporting and keeping the rights of its citizens. Unfortunately, ZPP wants to be seen doing something by their funders hence foolishly condemning government of failing to uphold citizen's rights.Strong nations will always value the rights of its citizens. In actual fact, they support and empower their citizens rather than blocking their way. This is typical with the Zimbabwean government which is a government of the people, by the people and for the people. Following that, one cannot deny that the government considers the interests of the people and value their rights.After government realized that its people were suffering in their own land, it decided to empower them through the land reform programme. The launch of the land redistribution programme was done as a way of increasing food production through empowering the black majority populace. There wasn't any haphazard in land distribution as ZPP feels. Land was fairly distributed that most Zimbabweans benefitted from the programme.Also, ZPP wrongly believes that government is accountable for the abductions of people. Government is actually concerned and worried about the reports of missing people. People are being kidnapped now and then. That is why the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) has a section which deals with missing persons.As stipulated by the Constitution of Zimbabwe, general elections are held after every five years. All Zimbabwean citizens who qualify to vote are given the opportunity to exercise their right of electing a leader of their choice through the ballot box.Zimbabwe is one of the countries which respect the freedom of worship. Unlike in other nations where people are coerced to worship certain religions, Zimbabwe values the right to practice whatever religion one chooses.Ever since Zimbabwe attained its independence, the government has been valuing and maintaining all these citizen's rights. For a product that doesnt exist and might not come to market for many years, theres still an awful lot of talk about the Apple Car. Just this week there have been reports about a new European home for Apple Car development and a large feature package from a major magazine trying to envision what the Apple Car will look like. Its always fun to imagine future Apple products, so long as you remember that wild speculation is exactly that. But the Apple Car is worth considering as a way to understand some of the decisions Apple makes today and to envision what kind of company it might be tomorrow. Why bother? There was a time when Apple was a computer company. It made computers, and accessories for those computers, and that was it. Then came the iPod, and things started to change. With the iPhone and iPad, it became clear: Apple was not just a maker of computers. The company even changed its name, from Apple Computer to simply Apple. But by a certain definition, all the products Apple sells are still just computers. In fact, the iPod was arguably the least computery product Apple has made, given that it was a single-purpose device without support for third-party software. The iPad, iPhone, Apple TV, Apple Watch are absolutely computers, just in new forms. Apples already gotten started on the software side. But cars arent computers, right? No, they arent but maybe they are, from a certain point of view. Given a broad enough horizonthinking out 20 years, lets sayits hard not to think that cars will be powered by rechargeable batteries and managed by complex software systems connected to the global Internet. Or as Apples Jeff Williams said, the car is the ultimate mobile device. Its hard for incumbents in markets to change their ways. Surely all the worlds car companies know that the future of the car is software and sophisticated sensors and electric motors. But they have to run their businesses todayand that makes it hard for them to focus too much on the future. New companies, especially ones with deep pockets, can do what traditional companies cant. So if youre Apple, you might look at the car of 2030 and realize that your technology expertise is just as vital as their automotive expertise, and you dont carry any of their baggage. Lets not forget that, as iPhone sales slow, Apple is also a company that is looking for new areas of growth. It has tens of billions of dollars to spend on new initiatives, and is well aware that the most dominant tech companies of one era become the doormats of the next. Apple knows better than most that the only way to keep on top is to keep re-inventing yourself. Entering the automotive market seems weird, but Apple needs to keep finding new product categories to enter in hopes of finding growth. The dangers of artists conceptions This brings us to Motor Trend, which posted a feature package about the Apple Car that included, at its center, an artists conception of the interior and exterior of the car. iPhone concepts were a lot closer to an iPod with a number pad than the eventual all-touchscreen iPhone. Ive never been a fan of mock-ups of anything, because (quite simply) mock-ups arent product design. Sometimes mock-ups can be useful in getting your ideas across, and when restrained and done with a huge amount of detail they can be an effective illustration, but thats the rare case. Mock-ups are often the product of a single designer working on a short time-frame to create usable art for a publication. They have no business constraints. Interfaces dont have to be functional, only look familiar. Hardware doesnt have to actually work, it just needs to look interesting. And of course, mock-ups are almost always about what we know now, extrapolated into the future. This is why all the iPhone mock-ups in 2006 looked like iPods with a cellphone keypad tacked on. Apple, meanwhile, will take years of work with entire design teams to create a real Apple car that will contain a whole bunch of new ideas. What Im saying is, the Motor Trend story is a fun flight of fancy, but does it tell us a lot about the Apple Car, really? No. How could it? Call in the Germans The one other piece of Apple Car news recently was a report that Apple had set up a car lab in Berlin. As someone I know who has traditionally loved German cars puts it, The Apple Car is part German? Now Im listening. The Germany report suggests that Apple is scooping up automotive-industry talent thats frustrated by the conservative, slow pace of incumbent automakers. Its an interesting thought, that Apples reputation for innovation and the fact that its a blank slate in terms of automotive engineering may allow Apple to build its car team. Motor Trend Im less interested in what the Apple Car will look like than what it costs and how it reflects Apples philosophy. So there are people in Silicon Valley and maybe Germany working for Apple on something car related. This seems like a sure thing. The real question, to me, is what Apple is thinking about the long game. Apples brand promise is one of affordable luxuryit makes premium items, not cheap items, but theyre items that middle-class people can afford. How does that work in the long run in the automotive world? Teslas much-ballyhooed cheap car, the Model 3, has a base price thats more expensive than the most expensive car I have ever bought. Is Apples goal to make $70,000 cars, or $30,000 cars? Will it go it alone, as Tesla has done, or find partners? (It seems impossible to imagine Apple teaming up with one or more carmakers, but it also seems impossible to imagine Apple selling a line of cars, so) There was a time when the most common metaphor involving the Mac was that it had the market share of a luxury automaker like BMW, but because Macs werent compatible with Windows software they were like BMWs that needed their own custom roads. If there can be one thing we can be sure of about the Apple Car, whatever it may be, its this: Im sure it will run on all the roads. Malaria Consortium Uganda project wins communications award at African Excellence Awards 21 April 2016 Cape Town, 21 April 2015 We are delighted to have been chosen for the Change Communication award. We hope that this campaign approach can inspire other public health campaigns to engage the private sector and stimulate the individual responsibility for health seeking behaviour to create sustainable gain in behaviour change. Daudi Ochieng, Malaria Consortium Uganda Communications Manager, was addressing an audience of communication professionals at the African Excellence Awards Winners Day in Cape Town today, where he received the award in the category Change Communication for the Malaria Control Culture Project. The award honours outstanding achievements and the most successful campaigns and projects in the field of PR and communications in Africa. The winning project has been running in Tororo district in Uganda for two and a half years and is funded by Comic Relief. Since Tororo district has a high malaria burden - malaria accounted for 40 percent of outpatient attendance rates - Malaria Consortium designed this project to embark on a behaviour change communications campaign for Tororo residents to strengthen health orientated behaviour with respect to malaria prevention and treatment. It focused on two communication objectives: to create a culture of sleeping under an insecticide-treated net every night and to promote other malaria control behaviour, such as seeking treatment within 24 hours of fever onset and testing before treatment. This communications campaign found additional value when followed by a government net distribution campaign that achieved universal coverage of insecticide treated nets across Uganda. The Tororo project noted some remarkable results: mosquito net use among children rose to 91.6 percent in the second year of the project, district residents bought more mosquito nets from the private sector over the years of project implementation, school attendance improved and fewer children under five fell ill with malaria. Malaria cases have dropped from 40 percent to 16 percent in Tororo. The award comes at a timely moment as the global health community is gearing up to celebrate World Malaria Day 2016 on Monday (April 25th). Malaria Consortium has chosen innovation as this years focus. The award underlines our organisation is at the forefront of using innovative communication approaches in the fight against malaria, and these tools are proving to be very effective, Mr. Ochieng concluded. Opinion / Columnist The annual Earth Day celebrations on 22 April will this year be marked by the signing of the landmark Paris Agreement (COP21), the historic climate protection treaty adopted by consensus of the 195 nations present at the December 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris.The landmark agreement to be signed by some 120 countries including the United States and China, the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases is a sure show of commitment that the world has finally woken up to the devastating effects of climate change and is ready to stare it right in the eyes.When signed, the treaty establishes a framework for a new era in with greenhouse emissions mitigation, adaptation, financing and lays the foundation for a future crediting mechanism, underpinned by robust and transparent accounting provisions starting in 2020.Zimbabwe has committed itself to fight climate change and is stepping up efforts towards climate change adaptation and mitigation seen by its adoption of the National Climate Change Response Strategy (NCCRS) in 2014 that was officially launched by Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa in November last year in Harare.He noted that 70% of the country's population was resident in rural areas and their main livelihood, farming, has been affected by erratic rainfall thereby causing food insecurity hence the importance of the NCCRS in charting a way for climate change adaptation.Environment, Water and Climate Minister, Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri said low rainfall patterns experienced over the years have caused the depletion of water bodies in the region, threatening electric energy generation and impacting negatively on food security."The government will ensure the national climate change response strategy is implemented to benefit a number communities," she said during the same launch back in November last year.Zimbabwe's position on climate change was incorporated into the African position that was endorsed at the COP 21 in France in December last year and will be on Earth Day represented by His Excellency President Robert Mugabe at the signing ceremony, accompanied by Minister Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri.The country is facing its worst food shortage since 1992 due to the El Nino induced drought that has left more than three million people and their livestock facing starvation. Opinion / Columnist It dies hard among politicians and political analysts that where ever there is a revolution there is always a counter revolution. The government introduced the Indigenisation and Economic Policy to deliberately empower the historically disadvantaged indigenous Zimbabweans, and to grant them ownership and control of the country's means and factors of production.This would enable them to be significant players in the mainstream of the country's economy. However some agents of regime change are trying by all means to derail this policy.The indigenisation policy has been clearly been distinguished into three economic sectors, namely; the Natural Resources sector, Non-Resources sector and the Reserved sector. It has been highlighted that these sectors are to be approached differently, in terms of the implementation of and compliance with the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Policy. However some political malcontents have decided to go against the policy.It is alleged that a critical look at the statement signed by President Robert Mugabe is proposing to exchange the 51% shareholding threshold for value in the form of wages, taxation, community ownership schemes and procurement programmes. It is also alleged that regulations forcing foreign owned firms are to transfer a 51% stake to black Zimbabweans will no longer apply to existing business in the natural resources sector where government does not have 51% ownership.It can be deduced that the interpretation of the so called think tanks is based on the agents and advocates of regime change. It is also quite interesting in that the so-called think tanks are not investors at all but they are only out there to criticize government policies that tend to promote black empowerment.The policy is clear and there is no disfunctionality, confusion and incompetence in the government as alleged. In fact the policy is as revolutionary as the land reform and the liberation struggle itself. This means it is open to attack by forces not only opposed to ZANU PF, as a revolutionary party but also as a government that has done a lot to change the status quo ante of a previously colonized African nation.The ideal situation to come from a policy such as indigenisation is an empowered black majority that can lay claims to the means of production in the national economy. Serious investors in the likes of Aliko Dangote, are not scared of the indigenisation policy. Mega deals worthy many billions have been signed between the government of Zimbabwe with Russians, Chinese, and the Japanese. We hope and trust that these deals will come into fruition.The parliament should try to accelerate all the legislation that is aimed at promoting indigenisation. On the other end the line ministries should implement the policies as has been clarified by President Robert Mugabe in order to end the confusion and profusion being manufactured by the enemies of the state. 90 in 20: Chelsea v United Video 90 in 20 | The extended highlights of Saturday night's clash at Stamford Bridge are not to be missed... Opinion / Columnist Zimbabwe People First (ZPF) leader, Joice Mujuru urged youths during the weekend in her independence speech to shun the million men march being organized by the Zanu PF youths in solidarity with President Robert Mugabe.Mujuru is labouring under the delusion that the historic march is a product of coercion by President Mugabe. No, that million men march is absolutely being organized by the youths wing of the revolutionary party on their own volition. It does not add up for Mujuru to encourage the youths to shun their own initiative.Her calls for the youth to ignore the march are tantamount to telling children not to heed an advice from their father. President Mugabe is like a father to these youngsters and that march is a show of appreciation for his leadership that has been hinging on empowerment of the previously marginalized black people. Mujuru herself still holds the same veneration towards President Mugabe. Her rumbles are just sour grapes and she is still more than willing to be taken back into Zanu PF even as an ordinary card carrying member. Remember her statement in which she revealed that she would never leave Zanu PF, the only political home she has known since birth. It must not surprise you one day when you see her knocking at the Shake-shake door.The MDC-T, over 2000 of them, was in the streets last Thursday demanding the stepping down of President Mugabe. Mujuru never urged the youths to ignore the demonstrations. This alone exposes her insincerity. The message coming from Mujuru is that only the MDC-T that must demonstrate and not Zanu PF.As a political leader who is frantically trying to put both of her feet on the political ground, Mujuru must appreciate such basic democratic tenets that allow such youths to march in solidarity of any leader of their choice. It is in this vein that we saw MDC-T marching through the streets of Harare on Thursday. Zimbabwe is a democracy. Despite their nuisance behaviour in the streets, they were allowed to demonstrate.Theirs was a Mugabe must go' demonstration. The Zanu PF youths will respond with a Mugabe must stay' march. It is to be seen which call will receive the greatest endorsement. So far, the MDC-T call was endorsed by 2 000 people who included both adults and youths. The coming march will only consist of youths, which even makes the comparison a bit unfair for the forthcoming message. Nevertheless, that will still give a rough barometer of what Zimbabweans think about President Mugabe's leadership.Hopefully there will be no one who will come out and say the march was rigged. We know of certain people who are always quick to say that when results are not in their favour.In the same speech, Mujuru also attempted to lure war veterans. "To all war veterans, you don't deserve to be treated in the manner you are mistreated," she said adding that the ex-freedom fighters must not allow themselves to be used and abused."We know the courage and spirit of sacrifice that guided you during our revolutionary struggle. This is not the time to give up what you sacrificed your lives to achieve. The struggle was not about having one leader in power until death," said Mujuru.President Mugabe created a whole ministry to baby sit on the welfare of war veterans. The freedom fighters recently met the President, who is their patron, where the later promised to look into their grievances. With all this effort, Mujuru says that the war veterans are being abused and used. She reminds the war veterans of their courage and spirit of sacrifice, a statement that borders on incitement to revolt. The hand of Rugare Gumbo, an experienced chap in revolting against the leadership, is visibly seen here.The war veterans are deeply rooted in the revolutionary ideology to waiver on same. Mujuru has denounced the revolutionary that the war veterans fought for, thus, as water and oil, they can never mix.By saying the struggle was not about having one leader in power until death; Mujuru exposes her long held conviction. It is not a conviction she started holding when she was dumped by Zanu PF. She had the conviction even when she was second in charge of this country. It saves to exonerate those who dumped her.It turned out this week that Mujuru's statement on war veterans was a cheap attempt to lure war veterans to join the war vets body that her party is setting up. It is to be seen if the body will attract genuine war veterans save for the war time rebels like Gumbo and Bernard Manyadza.War veterans must not be duped by a political has been who has no political future. They must remain united for it makes it easy for government to deal with the welfare of a unified force. Fragmented war veterans bodies aligned to various political formations only save to derail the fight for their welfare. During the struggle, the existence of ZIPRA and ZANLA drew back the struggle to some extent as these forces sometimes fought against each other. Let the comrades learn from history. Louisiana-based shipbuilder Metal Shark has been awarded a small shipyard grant by the United States Department of Transportations Maritime Administration (MARAD). Metal Shark was one of nine shipyards selected for an award from a field of 118 applicants. Grants were awarded to U.S. shipyards with the intent to support modernization, increase productivity, and to maintain competitiveness in the global marketplace. Metal Sharks award, in the amount of $582,410, will be used to acquire and implement portable work shelters and marine transporters at its Franklin, Louisiana waterfront shipyard facility. We are honored to have been selected by MARAD for this award, especially considering the crowded field of applicants said Metal Shark president Chris Allard. This grant will allow Metal Shark to enhance its productivity as the company expands into new markets with larger and increasingly complex vessels. Wed like to thank MARAD for recognizing our commitment to innovation and technology as we continue to grow our business. In announcing the award, Congressman Charles Boustany (R-Lafayette) said, Louisianas shipbuilders are renowned throughout the world for a commitment to engineering excellence and innovation. This grant will ensure that Metal Shark is fully equipped to continue to supply our armed forces, local and state governments, and many commercial partners with the high-quality product Louisiana manufacturing is known for. Owners resisting charterers' attempts to push market lower; rates slip from 5-1/2-month highs. Freight rates for large capesize dry cargo ships on key Asian routes face an uncertain outlook next week with some owners resisting charterers' attempts to push hire rates down even as freight rates nudge lower, ship brokers said. That came after a rally this week that saw freight rates hit the highest level since early December fuelled by a flurry of chartering activity by miners including Rio Tinto and Fortescue Metals. Rates for the Brazil-China route rose to $8.95 per tonne on Wednesday, up from $7.49 per tonne on the same day last week, chartering data on the Reuters Eikon terminal showed. Rates hit $9.28 per tonne on April 18, the highest since Dec. 9. Capesize charter rates for the Western Australia-China route climbed to $4.16 a tonne on Wednesday, against $3.74 a tonne a week ago. Rates hit $4.41 per tonne on Tuesday, the highest since Dec. 1. Brokers however reported that a South Korean shipowner had accepted a rate of $8.35 per tonne on Thursday to haul an iron ore cargo from Brazil to China, equivalent to a loss of $102,000 on a standard 170,000 tonne cargo. "The little rally earlier this week gave a slight bit of optimism in the market, but the way prices dropped shows how fickle the market is. There is no premium on rates for quality ships," a Singapore-based capesize broker on Thursday. "Hopefully the market won't tumble completely, but the party's over for the moment." Norwegian ship broker Fearnley said ship operators saw steady cargo demand but the considerable number of idle ships would curb a dramatic improvement in freight rates. "It is so hard to fix charters now because owners and charterers hold totally different views of the market - it's hard to predict how the market will move," said a Shanghai-based capesize broker on Thursday. A slightly "toppish" sentiment has seen forward rates in the panamax market lose some of their strength, the Fearnley note said. That came as panamax rates for a north Pacific round-trip voyage hit $4,927 per day on Wednesday, up from $4,611 per day last week. That's the highest since Oct. 30 and compares with $1,938 per day on Feb. 2. Freight rates for smaller supramax vessels are facing mixed signals in both the Pacific and Atlantic although rates are around $7,000 per day for a voyage from China to India, the Fearnley note said. The Baltic Exchange's main sea freight index rose to 669 on Wednesday, up from 567 the same day last week. Reporting by Keith Wallis The U.S. Postal Service has previewed a new stamp highlighting Californias San Francisco Maritime Historical Park with a photograph of an iconic three-masted sailing ship. The stamp is the 14th of 16 new Forever Stamps to be revealed over a three-week period to celebrate the National Park Services 100th anniversary. The stamp image is a portion of a photograph by Tim Campbell, showing the square-rigger Balclutha. Just visible to the right of the deep waterman/salmon packet sailing vessel is the 1907 steam tugboat Hercules. Located near the Fisherman's Wharf neighborhood, San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park offers the sights, sounds, smells and stories of Pacific Coast maritime history through five National Historic Landmark vessels berthed there. Norwegian ferry Bast Fosen I is the first vessel commissioned with a globally certified International Maritime Organization (IMO) Tier III compliant marine engine that does not need urea based after treatment. The completely refurbished and repowered Bast Fosen I has been equipped with GEs Marine Solutions 16V250MDC, a 16 cylinder 250 mm bore marine diesel engine that is certified to meet both IMO Tier III and EPA Tier 4 emission standards, reducing key emissions by more than 70 percent, according to the engine manufacturer. GE said choosing a medium speed engine with EGR technology over urea based systems saves engine room space by eliminating the need for a separate SCR system and urea storage tanks, preserving space for cargo, accommodation and fuel, water and oil tanks. Additionally, this option minimizes operating expenses, as urea based systems can add 5-8 percent of fuel expenses, while also maximizing engine efficiency and load response with a ramp up from idle to full load of about 15 seconds. The Norway stationed Bast Fosen I ferry is commissioned to cross the Oslo fjord, operating the 30-minute route between Horten and Moss. The route currently uses three ferries, carrying 2.5 million people annually. The Bast Fosen II ferry will make the trek to Fiskerstrand Verft AS in the fall for refurbishing and installation of its own IMO Tier III compliant GE diesel engine. Bast Fosen has also ordered six, 8L250MDC, IMO III compliant eight-cylinder in-line engines for three new ferries currently under construction, which launch later in 2016. Bast Fosen, part of Torghatten Group ASA, is a major ferry operator in Norway providing annual transit service to more than 1.7 million vehicles and 3.4 million passengers. Local service support for Bast Fosen will be provided by GEs distributor, Turner EPS. Related News New Lock at the Soo: Unlocking the Great Lakes The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Detroit District works on unlocking the Great Lakes by providing a much-needed resiliency Shareholders Approve SAAM's $1 Billion Terminals Sale to Hapag-Lloyd SAAM shareholders at an extraordinary shareholders meeting on Tuesday approved a deal valued at about $1 billion to sell U.S. to Launch Floating Wind Rights Sale off California Coast in December President Joe Biden's administration on Tuesday said it would hold the first-ever sale of offshore wind development rights Gallery: Itapu Oil Field FPSO Leaves Shipyard (Brazil) Estaleiro Jurong Aracruz (EJA), a Brazilian subsidiary of Singapore's Sembcorp Marine, has completed the construction of the P-71 FPSO Trending News Severe Weather Led to Fatal Seacor Power Capsizing Freeport LNG Plant to Require Full US Approval Before Partial Restart New Lock at the Soo: Unlocking the Great Lakes Eastern Shipbuilding Group, Inc. delivers the escort tug Neptune to Suderman & Young Towing Company and launches the Escort Tug David B to Bay-Houston Towing Co. Eastern Shipbuilding Group, Inc. has delivered the escort tug Neptune (Hull# 237) on March 28, 2016. The Neptune is the second in series of four identical Robert Allan, LTD. (RAL) designed Z-Tech 2400 Class terminal and escort tugs currently under construction for Suderman & Young Towing Company at Easterns Nelson Street facility. Neptunes delivery follows the delivery of Triton (Hull #235), lead vessel of the series, late last year. Eastern is also constructing four tugs for Bay-Houston Towing Co. G&H Towing Company is the owners onsite representative and agent during the engineering, construction and delivery for both companies Suderman & Young and Bay Houston. G&H Towing Company will operate the vessels for the owners after delivery. On March 30, 2016, Eastern launched the escort tug David B (Hull #239), third in a series of four identical Robert Allan, LTD. (RAL) designed Z-Tech 2400 Class terminal and escort tugs currently under construction for Bay-Houston Towing, Co. at Easterns Nelson Street facility. The David B is scheduled to deliver later this year. The launch ceremony was held at Easterns Nelson Street facility and hosted by Patrick DIsernia, Project Manager at Eastern, with many employees and guests in attendance. Patrick praised the Eastern employees for all their hard work and G&H Towing for their commitment to the project. Deacon Earl Mirus of St. Johns Catholic Church of Panama City, Fla. blessed the vessel. Annalise Reeves, daughter of ESG Project Manager, England Reeves, had the honor of christening the vessel. Also in attendance was Mike Nigro, Vice President of Engineering for G&H Towing. The H. Douglas M (Hull #236), lead vessel of the series was delivered February of this year. Robert Allan, LTD (RAL) of Vancouver, B.C. has provided the Z-Tech 2400 design and engineering. G&H Towing's fleet currently consists of eight Z-Tech tugs in operation. Eastern has over the years constructed and delivered 21 Z-drive tugs of similar size and complexity for several customers in the United States. The Neptune and David B Z-Tech 2400 features the following characteristics: ESG Hull #: H237 and H239 Dimensions (Overall): 80-0x 38-3x 15-9 Total Horsepower: 5,150 HP at 1,600 RPM Main Engines: (2) Caterpillar 3516C (B rating) Tier 3 marine propulsion diesel engines Main Propulsion: (2) Schottel Model SRP 1215FP in Nozzles Z-Drives Main Generators: (2) John Deere 4045AFM85 Tier 3, 99kW 480V at 1,800 RPM marine diesel generator sets Hawser Winch: (1) Markey Machinery Fairleader 50HP Electric Hawser Winch, Model DEPCF-48S, 36 wide Drum Mid-drum brake holding capacity 300,000 lbs Classification: ABS +A1, Towing Vessel, AMS and Escort Service ABS Loadline (SoC), Statement of Compliance Flag: United States of America Last week's frightening incident in the Baltic Sea, where Russian warplanes repeatedly buzzed the destroyer USS Donald Cook over a two-day period, left many Americans wondering why the U.S. Navy didn't simply splash the SU-24 attack aircraft. According to a report in Reuters, Russia accused the United States on Wednesday of intimidation by sailing a U.S. naval destroyer close to Russia's border in the Baltics and warned that the Russian military would respond with "all necessary measures" to any future incidents. Alexander Grushko, Moscow's ambassador, however, saw the issue differently. Speaking after a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council, the first such gathering in almost two years, Grushko said the incidents underscored that ties between both sides could not improve until NATO withdraws from Russia's borders. "This is about attempts to exercise military pressure on Russia," Grushko told reporters. "We will take all necessary measures, precautions, to compensate for these attempts to use military force." While the jets were unarmed, they certainly endangered the ship and the Polish helicopter crew that was practicing takeoff and landing procedures, by flying so close and so aggressively. Obviously, Navy commanders didn't wish to risk a reprisal that may well have been ordered by Russian forces if the Cook had fired on the jets. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the NATO member states had, during the meeting, rejected Grushko's account of the crisis in eastern Ukraine, where 9,000 people have died since April 2014. Opinion / Columnist For more than three decades Africa has been in serious war challenges due to various political, social and economic reasons. Many people have died in the whole war and cheap military drama. Have we ever thought as a continent about the plight of women and girls in war zones? Women due to the nature of their creation require a maximum of two times bath a day. I don't imagine a war situation giving such a chance to our women running away with their lives from war zones. They will be no time and even that dirty water to bath what more of toilets and sanitary pads in war bases and bushes.It had been a tough time for Chibok girls in Nigeria, those kidnapped by the BokO haram, Sudan and DRC are other examples of such challenges. Women are human species that require maximum hygiene and care.In Sudan they travel miles and miles through stretching deserts to Algeria and other countries to seek refugees and peaceful lives. Some do not reach the intended destinations due to the challenges mentioned above. Most of them will use bush leaves as sanitary pads during their menstrual cycle and wash their with long-time stagnant water resulting into serious diseases like cervical cancer, bilharzia and other. Some of these water bodies contain poisonous gases emitted by industry during peaceful times. The health of women is at stake and some die because of thirstiness, dehydration and heat waves because of changes in climatic patterns that have been caused by various negative effects in the atmosphere that also include deforestation and the use of fossil fuels and impact on the ozone layer hence climatic and weather problems. Other war refugees are flooded by raging floods due cyclones, especially when they flee from war during the rainy season. Climate might also be one most affecting challenge or major factor in the situations of war, because most people will be always travelling and mostly outdoors because their shelters would have been destroyed by war.Several young girls and women in Chad and Central died because of various water borne diseases, dehydration and other ailments. Diseases like dysentery, cholera, diarrhoea, tuberculosis and cervical cancer are endemic in these war zones due to air pollution, poor water and the absence decent sanitation facilities.In Beitbridge, the border capital of Zimbabwe. Young women and girls running away from the sweating economy also suffer the same fate as their counterparts in warzones of west, east and central Africa. The women in gold panning communities of Zimbabwe like kadoma, shurugwi, kwekwe and bindura suffer the same brunt as well as others. The water they use in severely polluted by chemicals used in sifting gold. Thus the water they bath and drink. Sanitation pads are rare in such areas for those areas do not have proper infrastructure for health of well being. Zimbabwe is in an economic war that even vendors in cities and mothers /girls in villages do not afford sanitary pads. So imagine if this happens in such at least better areas what about areas in critical war conditions. Unicef and International Migration Organization are always at a difficult spot because they cannot catch up with everyone especially deserters who run away from both political, religious and economic wars. So the victims will die without any help and unknown and we loose precious lives.Its time to think how we need to stop and eradicate war zones forever and mostly these wars are perpetrated by fossil fuel barons, mostly oil barons who cash with oil and invoke wars that are endless. The United Nations Assembly should move a step forward in taking these concerns seriously. We have a Women body in the United Nations which should be able to find measures to protect women and girls in political, military, religious and economic warzones. Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines ministers to meet in Jakarta as up to 18 Indonesians, Malaysians held captive in Philippines. Indonesia fears piracy on a busy shipping route along its maritime border with the Philippines could hit levels seen in Somalia unless security is tightened, its chief security minister said on Thursday, following a spate of kidnappings. The route lies on major shipping arteries that analysts say carry $40 billion worth of cargo each year. It is taken by fully laden supertankers from the Indian Ocean that cannot use the crowded Malacca Strait. For the first time, concerns over rising maritime attacks by suspected Islamist militants are disrupting coal trade between the Southeast Asian neighbours, with two Indonesian coal ports suspending shipments to the Philippines. Up to 18 Indonesians and Malaysians have been taken captive in three attacks on tugboats in Philippine waters along the route by groups suspected of ties to the al-Qaeda linked Abu Sayyaf militant network. Abu Sayyaf, a small but violent group which has posted videos on social media pledging allegiance to Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, has demanded 50 million pesos ($1.1 million) to free the Indonesian crew. "We don't want to see this become a new Somalia," Indonesian chief security minister Luhut Pandjaitan told reporters, referring to the southern Philippine waters of the Sulu Sea, where the abductions took place. Piracy near Somalia's coast has subsided in the last few years, mainly due to shipping firms hiring private security details and the presence of international warships. The foreign ministers of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines would meet in Jakarta to discuss the possibility of joint patrols, Pandjaitan said. He did not give a date, but said the armed forces chiefs of the three countries would meet in Jakarta on May 3. Authorities at two Indonesian coal ports had blocked departures of ships for the Philippines and more suspensions were expected, said Pandu Sjahrir, chairman of the Indonesian Coal Mining Association, and a director of Jakarta-listed coal producer Toba Bara Sejahtera. Toba had suspended all shipments to the Philippines, Sjahrir said. Other companies had cancelled shipments "from both sides", he added. Indonesian state-owned coal miner Bukit Asam said it was diverting Philippine coal shipments to Hong Kong for the next three months. The company ships less than 1 million tonnes to the Philippines per year, Bukit Asam corporate secretary Joko Pramono told Reuters. A company with a fleet of 40 dry cargo ships saw a silver lining, however. "If Indonesia bans tugs and barges from exporting coal then it will have to travel in larger cargo ships, of 32,000 to 64,000 tonnes," said Khalid Hashim, managing director of Bangkok-listed Precious Shipping. "All this would of course be beneficial for shippers like us." Indonesia, the world's largest thermal coal exporter, supplies 70 percent of the Philippines' coal import needs, which Indonesian data shows stood at about 15 million tonnes, worth around $800 million, last year. Philippine coal importers, however, said they could can import coal from other countries including Australia, South Africa and Russia and source more locally if Indonesian shipments dry up. By Keith Wallis, Fergus Jensen and Kanupriya Kapoor The cruise business is booming, and Evac said it has benefitted directly with 40 percent annual growth. The cruise business is the fastest-growing category in the leisure travel market, and demand is outstripping supply with average annual passenger growth of over seven percent since 1980. Another record was broken in 2014, with annual occupancy rates exceeding 100 percent and 22.1 million passengers cruising to many of the worlds nearly 1,000 ports. Nearly 23 million passengers are expected to take a cruise in 2016. Cruise lines are currently ordering new vessels for launch during the 2018 to 2026 period, supporting growth of Evac, provider of integrated waste-, wastewater-, and water management systems for the marine, offshore and building industries. In 2015, Evacs turnover grew 40 percent to 98 million euros, thanks especially to large cruise, navy, coast guard, and offshore contracts. At the end of the year, Evacs backlog value grew 50 percent compared to the same period in year 2014. In the first quarter of 2016, Evac won two cruise projects including Evac Complete Cleantech Solution covering the integrated waste and wastewater management systems for altogether seven cruise vessels. The total value of these projects was about 40 million euros. These, and many other already contracted projects, will fuel Evacs turnover in future years. The cruise industry continues to grow, said Tomi Gardemeister, Evac CEO, and its growth means great things for the state of the art cleantech marine products that Evac provides. According to Evac, of particular appeal to the cruise industry is its Complete Cleantech Solution, a five-system product array that includes waste-, wastewater- and water management systems. Evac systems purify wastewater to 99 percent clean effluent and one percent sludge that can be burned in Evac incinerators. Evac vacuum toilets consume only 1.2 liters of water per flush versus 3 to 10 liters consumed by traditional gravity toilets. With an average cruise passenger flushing a toilet 10 times per day, Evac systems save a typical vessel a minimum of 59,000 liters of water per day. A top U.S. official on Thursday said China's land reclamation and militarisation in the disputed South China Sea was raising tensions and serious questions about its intention. On a visit to Vietnam, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Washington would continue to play a constructive role in supporting its regional allies but was not looking to set up bases for its troops. "United States and Vietnam are sharing interest in maintaining peace and stability in the region, so is China," Blinken said in a speech at a Hanoi university. "But its massive land reclamation projects in the South China Sea and the increasing militarisation of these outposts fuels regional tension and raises serious questions about China's intention," Blinken said. Blinken also called on China, and all nations, to respect an upcoming decision by an international arbitration court in a case brought by the Philippines that could dent China's claim to nine-tenths of the South China Sea. Similar comments by Hugo Swire, British minister of state responsible for East Asia, angered China earlier this week. Beijing claims virtually all of the South China Sea and rejects the court's authority in the case, which numerous experts believe will go in favour of the Philippines, potentially raising tensions in the strategic waterway. "The United States will defend our national interests and support our allies and partners in the region," said Blinken. "We are not looking for bases but we will continue to sail, to fly, to operate anywhere that international law allows." More than $5 trillion of world trade is shipped through the South China Sea every year. Apart from China's territorial claims there, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam have rival claims. Reporting by Mai Nguyen China Petroleum and Chemical Corp (Sinopec) has taken delivery of the first LNG cargo at its new terminal at Beihai City in Guangxi Zhuang, with the arrival yesterday of the LNG carrier Methane Spirit, delivering a cargo from ConocoPhillips-operated Australia Pacific LNG (APLNG)project in Australia. The cargo was delivered onboard the 160,000 cbm Methane Spirit LNG carrier, Sinopec said. Located in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, the facility is the second of five LNG terminals planned by Sinopec as China works to raise the proportion of natural gas in its energy consumption and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The first LNG facility in the Guangxi region. The company started construction on the LNG project in 2013 with 17.78 billion yuan ($2.8 bln) of first phase investment. The first phase of the facility in Beihai City can produce three million tonnes of natural gas a year, with most of the LNG to be imported from Australia, said Wang Zhigang, Sinopec senior vice president. Guangxi LNG plant received the commissioning cargo from the APLNG project at the end of March onboard the BW Pavilion Vanda LNG carrier. Sinopec has a 7.6 mtpa long-term contract with APLNG that shipped its first cargo of chilled gas in January this year. Chinese oil and gas giant also owns a 25 percent stake in the Australian LNG project. In the future, some contracted volumes would go to Sinopec's existing LNG terminal in Qingdao, but given the size of the contract, more volumes would most likely be sold, a source close to the company said. ClassNK Consulting Services software solutions ClassNK CMAXS PMS and ClassNK CMAXS SPICS have just been installed on two ships managed by Manila-based Rosy Star Ocean Vessels Management Co., Inc., marking the first adoption by clients outside of Japan. ClassNK CMAXS PMS is a complete and simple solution for managing machinery maintenance on board ships, whilst ClassNK CMAXS SPICS offers supports for spare parts inventory management and purchase order creation. Both feature user-friendly interfaces and are easy to install and operate. ClassNK CMAXS PMS and ClassNK CMAXS SPICS not only manage the spare parts inventory and enable users to view the daily maintenance work reports and records, they also facilitate better fleet management and information sharing between ship and shore by collecting the data from each vessel and sending it to the cloud database. They were developed in collaboration with IMC Co., Ltd and with support from the ClassNK Joint R&D for Industry Program. Through the provision of ClassNK CMAXS PMS and ClassNK CMAXS SPICS, ClassNK Consulting Service aims to simplify and reduce the workload of ship management. Launched at the Hyundai Mipo dockyard in Ulsan, South Korea, the newly built Lindanger is the worlds first methanol fueled ocean-going vessel. The ship is the first of two dual-fueled 50,000 dwt tankers owned by Norwegian firm Westfal-Larsen that will be chartered to global marine transportation company Waterfront Shipping. With a MAN designed HyundaiB&W 6G50ME-9.3 ME-LGI dual-fuel, two-stroke engine on board, the Lindanger can run on methanol, fuel oil, marine diesel oil or gasoil. The Lindanger has been assigned the additional notation LFL FUELLED to demonstrate her compliance with the DNV GL rules for low flash point marine fuels. DNV GL was the first classification society to publish rules covering LFL fuels in July 2013, to ensure that the arrangement and installation of these systems have an equivalent level of integrity in terms of safety and availability as a conventional system. We are very pleased to see the completion and launch of this exciting and innovative newbuilding, said Knut rbeck-Nilssen, CEO at DNV GL Maritime. This is the first time a dual-fuel engine with a Low Flashpoint Liquid (LFL) fuel system has been installed on an ocean-going vessel and it is a testament to the excellent cooperation between all the project partners that we have been able to complete this unique project and gain flag state approval. Methanol as a marine fuel is a very promising option to enable owners to reduce the environmental impact of their vessels and to comply with low sulphur and ECA regulations and we look forward to working on many more projects using this innovative marine fuel and technology. We are proud to take delivery of Lindanger this week one of the first Korean built methanol-fueled ocean tankers thats innovative, clean burning and fuel efficient, said Rolf Westfal-Larsen, President and CEO, Westfal-Larsen Management. Jone Hognestad, President, Waterfront Shipping, added, It is exciting to be working with our partners to advance this new, clean technology. Investing in methanol-based marine fuel is an important step in the right direction and reinforces our commitment to sustainable proven technology that provides environmental benefits and meets emissions regulations. We are so privileged to become the first shipyard in the world to deliver a methanol fueled vessel, said Man Choon Kim, Vice President, Contract Management Department, Hyundai Mipo Dockyard Co., Ltd. It will reduce SOx emissions by about 95 percent and NOx emissions by about 30 percent compared to conventional marine diesel oil. Methanol could become one of the popular alternative marine fuels in the future as an environment friendly solution with lower fuel costs, easier handling with the existing storage and bunkering infrastructure and lower installation and retrofit costs. The Lindanger is the first in a series of seven vessels which will be chartered by Waterfront Shipping over the course of 2016. Four of the seven vessels are being constructed to DNV GL class, including two vessels owned by Westfal-Larsen, the Lindanger and a sister ship, and two owned by a joint venture between Marinvest/Skagerack Invest and Waterfront Shipping. A further three ships, where DNV GL carried out a hazard identification study, will be owned by Mitsui OSK Lines (MOL). Waterfront is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Methanex Corp, the worlds largest producer and supplier of methanol, and operates a fleet of 22 deep sea tankers of between 3,000 dwt and 50,000 dwt, which are used for transporting methanol worldwide. Methanol is a safe, cost-effective, clean-burning fuel of today and the future, according to DNV GL. Of growing interest in the shipping world, methanol is sulphur free (SOx) and with lower particulate and nitrogen oxide emissions. It is a promising option for vessels which are operating in ECAs (emission control areas) and for meeting both current and future regulations covering SOx emissions. Methanol is produced from natural gas and can also be produced through renewable sources, such as biomass, recycled CO2, agricultural and timber waste. The energy content of methanol is roughly half that of standard heavy fuel oil, but as it is a liquid, methanol can be handled by conventional bunkering and storage solutions without extensive modifications. The cost to build new and covert existing vessels to run on methanol is significantly less than alternative fuel conversions. Also, as one of the top five chemical commodities shipped around the world each year, methanol is available around the world through existing global infrastructure. Lindanger main particulars: tanker for chemicals and oil products with LFL fueled engine LOA: 186 m LBP: 177 m Breadth: 32.2 m Depth: 19.1 m Draught: 12.85m Deadweight: 49,999 dwt Speed: 15.8 knots Main engine: HyundaiB&W 6G50ME-9.3 LGI (Tier II) Output: 10,320 kW at100 RPM Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades has said that building an LNG terminal in Cyprus will depend on discoveries and the results of the countrys third licensing round. Discussing the Cyprus Exclusive Economic Zones third licensing round, Anastasiades said that the construction of an LNG terminal in Cyprus - and Cyrpus consequent conversion into an energy hub would rely upon the results of ongoing research programmes or new licenses. As for the new licences mentioned, Anastasiades referred to the third offshore licensing round for hydrocarbon exploration the country launched on March 24, 2016. Three blocks are open for licensing, with the application deadline set for July 22, 2016. An LNG plant was planned to be built in Vasilikos, processing not only its own gas but also the supplies from Israel and potentially Lebanon. In January 2016, Cyprus extended the exploration phase for the Eni-Kogas consortium for an additional two years. Within the two years, the consortium intends to conclude studies aimed at identifying prospects necessary to complete the drilling obligations. Cyprus government in June last year welcomed declaration of commerciality of the Aphrodite natural gas offshore field by the operator, Noble Energy. IMTRA, a manufacturer and importer of commercial marine products, has delivered equipment to the first U.S.-flagged offshore wind farm crew transfer vessel (CTV), Atlantic Pioneer. IMTRAs scope of supply includes the Colorlight CL20 high-output searchlight, Decca Straight Line wiper system and LED deck, interior and engine room lights for the Blount Boats-built, 69-foot CTV. The vessel was locally built in Rhode Island and has been delivered to its operator, Atlantic Wind Transfers which is based in Quonset Point, R.I. Atlantic Wind Transfers is the first offshore wind farm support company in the U.S., and will provide transfer services for GE technicians and supplies to the offshore wind farm. The Block Island Wind Farm will be the countrys first offshore wind farm it is currently under construction by Deepwater Wind off the coast of Rhode Island, and will be fully serviced by the Atlantic Pioneer. The Colorlight CL20 halogen dual-lamp searchlight can rotate a full 360 degrees on two axes, which allows it to illuminate all parts of the turbine from directly underneath. Powered by 24VDC, each of the two lights is rated at 250 watts and its IP66 rating and acid-proof stainless steel housing enables the unit to withstand extreme marine environments. For additional durability, searchlight operation is controlled by powerful brushless digital motors with no external mechanical moving parts. Decca Straight Line wiper systems are manufactured specifically for use in commercial applications. Built in Norway and engineered to survive the rigors of the North Sea, they are engineered to work in extreme conditions. Each wiper can clear as much as 90 percent of the window. A range of IMTRA LED lights are installed on the Atlantic Pioneer to help create a safer and more comfortable working environment for crewmembers. In the engine room, LED ERLs provide bright, cool white light to make engine inspection and maintenance easier. Walkways are illuminated by F25 lights and Cockpit Spreaders provide lighting across the decks. IMTRA Omega and Ventura lights are installed throughout crew stations and the pilot house. The bi-color Ventura offers white light for daylight use and red light to reduce night blindness. Both Omega and Ventura lights are wired to operate in 24VDC and 110VAC power environments, and double as back-up lights in emergency situations. All of the IMTRA lights on the Atlantic Pioneer are IP65 compliant. A twin-hulled, aluminum catamaran, the Atlantic Pioneer is under license from South Boats IOW in the U.K. It will be dual-certified by the U.S. Coast Guard to carry either offshore workers or traditional ferry passengers. Designed to carry up to 12 tons of cargo in the bow, three tons of cargo in the stern and has a crane fitted onto the bow, the vessel also has a specially designed rubber fender at the bow that helps it stay in contact with the wind tower while personnel are transferring. Using two environmentally friendly MAN Diesel engines to drive Hamilton waterjets, the vessel will cruise at a speed of more than 27 knots. The Indonesian Navy has instructed all commercial vessels to avoid piracy-prone waters around the southern Philippines, a spokesman for the Indonesian military said on Thursday, following a spate of kidnappings and piracy in recent weeks. "The Indonesian Navy, through the Western Sea Security Cluster, is increasing the intensity of patrols up to the exclusive economic zone border with the Philippines and Malaysia to prevent acts of piracy and hijacking," Indonesian military spokesman Tatang Sulaiman told Reuters in a text message. The busy shipping route along Indonesia's maritime border with the Philippines carries $40 billion worth of cargo each year, notably fully laden supertankers from the Indian Ocean that cannot use the crowded Malacca Strait. "The most important thing for the Indonesian military is how in the near term to implement an MOU (memorandum) on coordinated patrols between Indonesian, Philippine and Malaysian armed forces in that maritime region," Sulaiman said. (Reporting by Fergus Jensen; Additional reporting by Bernadette Christina Munthe) The U.S. Coast Guard has expanded Automatic Identification System (AIS) requirements to include additional commercial vessels. The change, which applies to U.S.- and foreign-flagged vessels that are 300 gross tons or less, went into effect this month. Most commercial vessels operating on U.S. waterways are required to have AIS, a navigation safety communications system designed to mitigate collisions. AIS increases situational awareness across the U.S. Marine Transportation System, the vital economic arteries that enable the continuous flow of overseas trade, sustain 13 million jobs and facilitate $3.2 trillion in commerce Opinion / Columnist Zimbabwe's next elections, set for 2018, will be won and lost on the four main fronts:1) Who can amass the most funds As the incumbent government, Zanu PF will commandeers all the state human and material resources for use in its election campaign. In Zimbabwe, like many other African countries, the difference between the ruling party and government is very blurred and so it normal for army helicopters to be used transport party officials, national solos to be raided and the food distributed at party rallies and even plant and machinery sourced and pay for using public funds distributed to the party faithful as has been happening at Grace Mugabe's recent rallies.Zanu PF is known for punishing the opposition supporters by denying them access to public food and other assistance. The party is known for stopping foreign donors helping the needy because they would not abide by the party's rules of denying opposition supporters. Teachers and other public servants have been dismissed for supporting the opposition.During the GNU Finance Minister, Tendai Biti, complain of Zanu PF running a parallel government complete with its own funding. There is no doubt that huge expense of running this phantom government is borne by the taxpayer directly through swindled public funds or indirectly through the looting of national treasures.Whilst Minister Biti had to scrounge around to get enough to pay civil servants wages let alone do anything else, the Zanu PF parallel government was loaded as soon revealed during the 2013 elections. President Mugabe millions of dollars of outstanding President Scholarship fees in various Universities in SA; he bought each Zanu PF election candidate a brand new car plus tens of thousands of dollar in election expense, costing hundreds of millions of dollars; etc. Opposition candidates were on a shoestring budget!2) Whoever has unfettered control of the state institutions will be able to manipulate the electoral process in their favour Zimbabwe's new constitution failed to take away the President's power appoint and dismiss all the top brass in the Police, Army, CIO, ZEC, Judiciary, Public Media, etc.; it is therefore not surprising that all these important institutions have all saved President Mugabe and Zanu PF's selfish interest at the expense of the nation's interest, especially during elections. ZEC has turned a blind eye to Zanu PF blatant disregard of its legal obligation to produce a voters roll and the Police have done nothing to stop Zanu PF instigated violence.Indeed in the 2018 elections it was the Police, Army and CIO who coordinated the wanton violence against the opposition and reportedly carried out most of the abductions and murders!3) Intimidation and violence to induce fear remains the not effective vote rigging tool, especially in the rural areas. Professor Jonathan Moyo was right in saying in his book, Voting for Democracy, that the 1980 elections was about voting "to end the civil war". Anyone who thought the people's fear the civil war would continue if Zanu PF had lost those election was unfounded was proven wrong when President Mugabe unleashed the barbaric Gikurahundi murderers a few years later.Zimbabwe's culture of political intolerance and the tendency to view one's political opponent as one's enemy dates back to the pre-independence days; fighting between Zanu and Zapu supporters, for example, was a common occurrence. The people were caught between the two and, to on the safe side, it was normal for povo to have membership cards of both parties which they kept up to date at great expense.Ever since the nation attained her independence Zanu PF has maintained its strangle hold on the nation by using state and party machinery to remind the people that the party can make their lives hell if they did not tow party line. Fear has always been there in Zimbabwe body politics and, at present, Zanu PF pulls all the strings! 4) It is not enough to blatantly rigging elections, one must also be able to get away with it and that demands good intelligence and counter intelligence.The fear that the opposition has detailed information of his vote rigging schemes and there release to the whole world will expose him for the cheat must be one of President Mugabe's greatest fears. After the 2013 rigged elections President Mugabe did not come out to celebrate as one would have expected; he had to be 100% sure Tsvangirai's court challenge of the result was going nowhere and no other vote rigging dirty was coming out. The vote rigging leak could start from anyone and quickly become the Tsunami sweep all before it.Elections, by their very nature, are public events taking place at national level; and so rigging elections is a huge challenge and tougher still is making sure the vote rigging details are kept under tight wraps! So rigging the elections and keeping the dirty tactics a secret is the soft underbelly of Zanu PF's otherwise well-armed and well-armoured vote rigging juggernaut. President Mugabe has had to implement some dare-devil vote rigging tactics dangerously exposing his political soft underbelly.In 1990 he increased the number of polling stations without telling the opposition who were surprised to know there had been so many as the number of ballot boxes exceeded the known polling station. President Mugabe must have known he would not get away with that one again. So in the 2013 elections President Mugabe announce the increase of polling station from 2 000 to 9 000 just two days before the elections. Some election observers reported of polling stations manned by Zanu PF officials only and no opposition party officials or even ZEC officials!The most audacious move by President Mugabe in the 2013 elections has to be the tampering with the voters roll by NIKUV, the Israeli company, so that one million were denied the vote because they details were not in the constituency voters roll they expected them to be. President Mugabe stubbornly refused to release the voters roll although this is a legal required and got away with it too!Yes President Mugabe has proven to be a cunning fox still he must also thank his lucky stars that he has had some breathtakingly incompetent political opponents whom he was able to cheat in broad daylight and still get away with it. Given that he will be facing Tsvangirai and Mai Mujuru in the next elections my money is on President Mugabe out foxing the two, as he has done repeatedly in the past!There only way to effectively stop all Zanu PF election shenanigans and getting away with murder, literally, is for the nation to implement the far reaching democratic reforms designed to under the party's dictatorial control over state institutions and open the window to public scrutiny of public finance and use of the nation's resources such as diamonds.If it was not for the fact that there is so much at stake in ensuring the next elections are free and fair; it would be laughable that Mai Mujuru and her ZimPF are claiming they are ready for 2018 elections when they have done nothing to stop Zanu PF rigging the elections! Tsvangirai and his MDC friends were equally confident of winning the 2013 although they too had failed to implement even one reform and we know Zanu PF went on to blatantly rig those elections.Zimbabwe's ability to end the 90% plus unemployment rate, to rebuild its barely functioning health and education services, to restore clean running water and electricity supplies, etc. hinge on the nation holding free, fair and credible elections and having a good and competent government after the 2018 elections. The people of Zimbabwe will certainly be naive to trust Tsvangirai or Mujuru to implement the democratic reforms and deliver free and fair elections! Crowley Maritime Corporations 2016 Thomas B. Crowley Sr. Memorial Scholarships are helping to further educational opportunities for three students of Texas A&M University, all of whom are enrolled in the colleges License Option program and have expressed an interest in pursuing a career in the towing or petroleum shipping industry after graduation. The three recipients, each of whom have either sailed with Crowley or are scheduled to do so, were chosen based on their demonstrated leadership skills and financial need. The awardees are Texas natives Bradley Schein from Houston and Baylor Nix from Austin along with Benjamin Miner from San Martin, Calif. Scholarship recipient Schein earned his associates degree in petroleum engineering technology from Houston Community College prior to transferring to Texas A&M. He will graduate in 2018 and is scheduled for his first summer school ship cruise this summer with Crowley. Nix, who is also scheduled to graduate in 2018, is majoring in marine transportation with a minor in marine administration while pursuing an Unlimited Tonnage Third Mates license from the U.S. Coast Guard. As a deck cadet, he sailed aboard the USTS Golden Bear, a U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD) training ship, as it transited across the globe and back. Nix will also sail aboard one of Crowleys vessels this summer. Miner served in the U.S. Navy in five overseas deployments and was named Navy Europe Volunteer of the Year prior to joining the U.S. Navy Reserve and turning to Texas A&M to pursue his education. Set to graduate Magna Cum Laude and earn a Third Engineer Unlimited license, Miner completed ship training program on board T/S General Rudder, began an extracurricular research project in material science and conducted his commercial cruise aboard the Crowley-managed Yorktown Express. Since 1984, Crowley has provided more than $3 million dollars in scholarship funding for more than 1,000 students. The company has also donated more than $2 million over the years to support other educational programs. In 1994, Chairman and CEO Tom Crowley Jr. established the Thomas B. Crowley Sr. Memorial Scholarship Program in honor of his father who led the company to extraordinary heights before passing away in 1994. The company continues to give scholarship dollars to deserving students in the U.S., Alaska and Puerto Rico. In 2006, the program was expanded to Central America and to date, has provided financial assistance to more than 20 students in that region. To learn more about the Crowley scholarship program, visit www.crowley.com/scholarships. EU approval conditional on NOL pulling out from G6 alliance. French shipping group CMA CGM's $2.4 billion takeover of Neptune Orient Lines is set to be cleared by the European Union's competition regulators, on condition that NOL pulls out from a rival shipping alliance, two people familiar with the matter said on Thursday. CMA CGM, the world's third-biggest container shipping company, is looking to strengthen its position against bigger rivals Maersk Line and Swiss-based Mediterranean Shipping Co (MSC). CMA CGM's plan to withdraw NOL from the G6 alliance, which competes with its own Ocean Three alliance, was able to address European Commission concerns, the people said. Shipping alliances, which involve sharing vessels and routes to save costs, are seen as crucial to helping the industry deal with a severe market downturn. The concession is similar to that offered by German container shipping company Hapag Lloyd and Chilean peer Compania Sud Americana de Vapores (CSAV) two years ago in return for the EU approving their tie-up. European Commission spokesman Ricardo Cardoso declined to comment. CMA CGM had no immediate comment on the EU review. Its spokesman said the intention is for NOL to join the Ocean Three group, a four-way alliance unveiled on Wednesday. An NOL spokeswoman declined to comment on the deal but said that NOL unit APL will remain in the G6 Alliance until the first quarter of 2017. Ocean Three, whose members include CMA CGM, China's COSCO Container Lines, Evergreen Line and Orient Overseas Container Line, will focus on Asia routes. It has more capacity than the rival grouping of Maersk and MSC. By Foo Yun Chee [email protected] has been taken to the heart of the Singapore public with an anticipated 4,000 visitors, expected to throng the two state-of-the-art Offshore Support Vessels (OSV) Pacific Legacy and VOS Prince moored at local shopping mall Vivocity Waterfront Promenade from 21 to 23 April 2016. Local institutes of higher learning are lending their support to this inaugural event with some 600 students from the Institute of Technical Education and Ngee Ann Polytechnic already registered to attend. This industry-led project, spearheaded by the Singapore Shipping Association (SSA) and held in conjunction with Singapore Maritime Week, is designed to create awareness of the offshore marine sector a key sector in the Singapore maritime industry. In addition to representatives from the SSA community, the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA), offshore marine companies, port and pilotage operators, ship agencies and even the legal community put in more than three months of work to make [email protected] a reality. A further 22 companies have stepped up as sponsors and exhibitors of the event to showcase the strengths of this important sector. Besides ship models of OSVs, visitors will get up close and personal with subsea dive equipment, subsea remotely operated vehicles, oceanography survey equipment, as well as other sector-related products and services displayed onboard the two OSVs. Some 80 industry practitioners aged between 19 years old to a youthful 74, have stepped up to volunteer as ship ambassadors to share their maritime experience with visitors. [email protected] will be officially launched on 22 April 2016 by Mrs Josephine Teo, Senior Minister of State, Prime Minister's Office, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Transport. Speaking at the opening ceremony, Esben Poulsson, President of the Singapore Shipping Association (SSA), will point to the importance that the offshore sector, and shipping in general, can play in the lives of Singapores educated and talented youth and the high value career opportunities on offer. We hope this event will provide opportunities for students to uncover the myriad of career opportunities that shipping can provide. It is with the help of our MaritimeONE partners, MPA, Singapore Maritime Foundation and Association for Singapore Marine Industries that we have been able to use [email protected] as a platform to reach out to the youth of Singapore, he will tell attendees. Filip Olde Bijvank, Managing Director of Vroon Offshore Services Pte. Ltd., was appreciative for the opportunity to showcase its last newbuild Platform Supply Vessel VOS Prince to the wider Singapore public. Vroon has a long tradition in servicing the offshore oil and gas industry with a modern diversified fleet of fuel efficient OSV vessels. All our vessels are operated by our dedicated crew at the highest safety standards. Our staff and crew are especially proud to be in the spotlight this week as they usually operate in remote deep oceans away from the publics eye. Ron Mathison, Managing Director, Swire Pacific Offshore Operations (Pte) Ltd. said, I applaud Singapore Shipping Associations efforts and garnering the strong support from Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore and the industry to raise the profile of the offshore sector as part of the Singapore Maritime Week 2016. Swire Pacific Offshore commemorates our 41st anniversary this year and the opportune use of Pacific Legacy as part of [email protected] is a great way to celebrate our presence in Singapore and the strong partnerships we have forged in the Singapore maritime community. We hope that our participation will allow members of the public to gain a deeper appreciation of the offshore sector and the work we do. In appreciation, Mr Poulsson said, ''I would like to sincerely thank the whole team at the SSA Secretariat and our industry partners, not least the shipowners, for all their hard work and commitment in making this event a reality. It is a great example of the collaborative and constructive way in which Maritime Singapore works together. Capt. Mike Meade, Chairman of the SSA Offshore Services Committee, added: The sterling effort put in by the working committee is truly admirable. Their energy and selfless sharing of expertise from the multiple disciplines needed to pull off this event warms my heart with pride. It only goes to show that the maritime community of Singapore has a resilient, go-getting, can-do attitude when it puts its mind to it. I urge anybody who has an interest of embarking in a career in the maritime industry to register online at www.osvatvivo.org and come and spend some time with us this weekend to experience this magnificent showcase first hand. The Baltic Exchange's main sea freight index tracking rates for ships carrying dry bulk commodities, rose marginally on Thursday as steady demand for smaller vessels offset weaker rates across capesize and panamax vessels. The overall index, which factors in rates for capesize, panamax, supramax and handysize shipping vessels, rose by one point, or 0.15 percent to 670 points. The supramax index rose 8 points to 551 points, and the handysize index was up 6 points at 348 points. Average daily rates for the smaller shipping vessels were higher on Thursday, with supramax up $87 at $5,765 and handysize up $82 at $4,973. The capesize index, fell 18 points, or about 2 percent to 1,004 points. Average daily earnings for capesizes, which typically transport 150,000-tonne cargoes such as iron ore and coal, dropped $106 to $7,639. Freight rates for large capesize dry cargo ships on key Asian routes face an uncertain outlook next week with some owners resisting charterers' attempts to push hire rates down even as freight rates nudge lower, ship brokers said. The panamax index fell for the first time in nearly a month, down four points to 743 points. Average daily earnings for panamaxes, which usually carry coal or grain cargoes of about 60,000 to 70,000 tonnes, fell $27 to $5,921 on Wednesday. (Reporting by Nithin Prasad and Koustav Samanta in Bengaluru) North P&I Club has partnered with CSO Alliance, an online community of maritime company security officers (CSOs), to encourage its members to join and take part in security-related information sharing. In a first for the P&I sector, all CSOs in Norths 131 million GT owned fleet will receive a 20 percent reduction in membership fees for the first year and North will subsidies a further 40 percent. Founded in the U.K. in 2012, the CSO Alliance has more than 380 members responsible for security on more than 6,000 ships worldwide. Members have access to a comprehensive and authoritative real-time incident and attack database and can share information, opinions and best practice. The management team is in regular contact with key naval commands and maritime crime reporting centers, evolving a rapid, coordinated response capability. North deputy loss prevention director Colin Gillespie said, North supports the concept of information sharing on security-related risks, both physical and cyber. As such we believe membership of the CSO Alliance will offer real benefits to CSOs employed by our members, so we have negotiated a subsidized rate for their first year of membership. CSO Alliance managing director Mark Sutcliffe said, North has long been one of the most innovative and forward-thinking P&I clubs and we welcome their support. They join BIMCO, the International Chamber of Shipping and numerous national shipowner associations and security suppliers in supporting our mission to build a scalable, adaptable and durable coalition against organized crime. North said membership of the CSO Alliance will assist individual CSOs in the prevention of criminal attacks against their ships, including from piracy, stowaways and fraud. The sharing of security information, opinions and views in a closed, community-based online forum will aid operational efficiency too, Gillespie said. For example, access to maritime crime data allows port risk assessments to be produced more cost-effectively. With maritime cyber security moving further up the regulatory agenda, North says the CSO Alliance also provides an ideal forum for CSOs to explore and discuss the technological issues relating to this new area of fraud and operational disruption. Above all we believe membership of the CSO Alliance will increase knowledge and assist professional development of CSOs through international workshops, video conferencing, newsletters and online information exchange. German shipping company Hamburg Sud raised its revenue last year due to the acquisition of Chilean line Compania Chilena de Navegacion Interoceanica (CCNI), yet the container business still performed weaker than expected. The company reported an increase in total turnover by 16.8 percent to EUR 6.05 billion (USD 6.8bn). Shipment volume in the liner business rose on the previous year by 21.5 percent to 4,101 million TEU. Despite the weakness of the South American economies (especially Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela), this made it possible to meet the volume growth planned for the reporting year. A fleet capacity of 625,000 TEU (+16 percent year on year) propelled the Hamburg Sud Group into the ranks of the ten largest container shipping lines worldwide for the first time. Due to global overcapacity, freight rates declined by roughly 16 percent. The resulting loss of revenue could only partially be offset in the liner division by falling fuel prices, and restrictive capacity and cost management. The result in this sector failed to meet expectations and must be described as less than satisfactory. Bulk shipping was also characterized by very difficult market conditions. Due chiefly to Chinas lower raw material imports, demand for shipping space remained static while global fleet growth rose once again on the previous year. As a result, the revenue generated fell sharply. Bulk shipping fell well short of the result planned for the reporting period. Only the product tanker segment achieved a satisfactory result. Capital spending totaled 437 million euros, putting it above the level of the previous year. The number of employees increased to 5,960 on an annual average due to growth. Following the significant growth of shipment volume in liner shipping in the past fiscal year, Hamburg Sud anticipates a further significant, albeit more moderate increase in carryings of some 8 percent for 2016 compared to the previous year. The once again above-average increase in excess of market growth is based primarily on the capacities and market shares built up in the past fiscal year, which are to be maintained throughout 2016 and selectively further expanded. Because freight rates are expected to remain under pressure due to continuing overcapacities and weak economic development, it is anticipated that the shipping groups turnover will stay roughly the same. Rapp Marine has received two new orders for the supply of complete electrical deck machinery packages for the two pelagic trawlers, Rockall and Themis, announced Morten Stenkjr, VP Sales Fisheries Rapp Marine. Rapp Marine signed the contract in March 2016 with the shipbuilder Karstensens Skibsvrft in Skagen, Denmark, for these two newbuildings. Astrid Fiskeri AS in Skagen owns Rockall, while Themis is owned by Themis Fiskeri AS in Thyborn. Rockall will be to fully outfitted with deck machinery suitable for twin trawl fisheries. Accordingly, Rapp Marine has tailored the equipment to meet the company's needs and requirements, Stenkjr said. That means we will be delivering to Rockall extremely powerful winches in relation to the ship's size, which includes three 80-ton trawl winches and four net drums. Themis, meanwhile, is also equipped for twin trawl fishery from Rapp Marine, but with slightly less capacity on the winches. Stenkjr said, The pelagic fleet has traditionally been a loyal user of Rapp Marine hydraulic deck machinery over the years, machinery which was continuously developed in accordance with the clear requirements of, and feedback from, the fishing fleet. When we developed the electrical equipment for the fishing fleet we based the technology on the same experiences, philosophy and reliability that has stood us in good stead over the years. In the fisheries market, we have previously delivered electrical equipment to bottom trawlers and supplied electrical deck machinery to single trawl pelagic fishing vessel in the United States, Stenkjr said. We have also delivered electric deck machinery to many vessels within the marine and offshore markets. Electrical deck machinery for #436 Rockall Pelagic Trawler 69,90M 3 x 80t Trawl Winches 4 x 60t/ 80t Net Drums 3 ea. Electric Main Trawl Winches, model TWS-22035RE 1 ea. Electric Tail End Winch, model SW-7502BE 2 ea. Electric Net drums, model ND-20001BE 2 ea. Electric Net Drums, model ND-26000BE 4 ea. Mooring Winches, type GW-2200B 2 ea. Auxiliary winch, model GW-200N 1 ea. Electric Net sounder winch, model SOW-502RE 1 ea. Electric Anchor winch, model AWW-2300E 1 ea. Rapp Marine Trawl Computer model PTS-Pentagon CbusEF. Hose reels and Control Panels Electrical deck machinery for Pelagic Trawler 63,00M NB #437 Themis After a long and rocky convoy, the travelers arrived at their destination to the sound of locals yelling in a foreign language, protesting the Marine presence. The Marines dismounted their tactical vehicles and began controlling and directing the locals while providing security to the patrol base. The chaotic scene escalated as three local women shouted and raised their hands at a Marine sergeant who calmly explained the situation. A native man and his friend attempted to distract Marines holding security in an attempt to swarm the patrol base. The scene unfolded for Marines with 7th Engineer Support Battalion, 1st Marine Logistics Group, during a tactical convoy course at Camp Pendleton March 25, 2015. Marines performed the training in preparation for upcoming deployments with Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force Crisis Response Central Command, Marine Rotational Force-Darwin and Koa Moana. The convoy training consisted of three phases: Marines performing crowd control while refueling a patrol base, immediate action drills from hostile fire and casualty evacuation from a helicopter landing zone. These are skills that need to be constantly maintained and perfected during a time of peace so it can be executed in the chaos of combat, said 1st Lt. Steven J. Bernard, training officer with 7th ESB. These skills can atrophy if not constantly practiced. Role players were used to help create realistic training for the Marines so they will be prepared to properly handle chaotic crowds. The goal of the training is to interact with local nationals and learn how to effectively perform crowd control at a minimum level and resupply the patrol base, said Bernard. Some of the role players come from the Middle East and Southwest Asia area. With the refueling exercise finished, the convoy moved on from crowd control to immediate action drills. As the convoy progressed down a dirt trail, they hit a simulated improvised explosive device. The movement stopped and Marines dismounted to investigate the scene. Immediately upon exiting their vehicle, they took on simulated enemy fire from hostiles. The intent was to induce friction in a combat scenario to force the Marines to execute techniques, tactics and procedures and immediate actions while receiving enemy fire, said Bernard. Once they eliminated the simulated insurgents, Marines conducted IED sweeps to ensure there were no secondary explosions. With the area cleared and their Marine casualties accounted for, the convoys moved on to their final objective, a helicopter-landing zone. The team grabbed the simulated casualties from the back of the tactical vehicles and moved them to the ground, while a Marine signaled for a notional helicopter using smoke grenades. Once on the deck, the squad evacuated the simulated casualties, on foot, to the helicopter. Being able to safely and quickly get a wounded Marine out of the kill zone and evacuated to higher level care is what ensures they are able to survive on the battlefield, said Bernard. This is something that is practiced almost daily and can never have enough attention placed on it. That coupled with the chaos of the training in an unfamiliar setting better prepares Marines to execute these tactics in real life. The Marines of 7th ESB are one step closer to taking their basic combat skills, machinegun skills and immediate action drills into upcoming deployments with the SPMAGTF-CR-CC, Marine Rotational Force-Darwin and Koa Moana. More Media Usually, a labor market report showing modest job growth and a flat unemployment rate would barely rate attention. Such data are generally a veritable snoozefest, with no forward-looking implications-despite what you will read most everywhere else, job markets follow broader economic trends at a very late lag, not the other way around. But these are not normal times. For one, pundits globally are looking for a cloud in every silver lining, eager for evidence to support their "eek the global economy is about to roll over and die" warnings. This is especially true in the UK, as politicians use every last data point to support their preconceived notions about the economic implications of "Brexit"-the scarier and more colorful, the better. And so the very benign, very boring February UK Labour Market Report attracted all sorts of attention, solely because it showed a slight increase in the number of unemployed people. Some called it a sign of creeping weakness. Others called it evidence Brexit risk is taking a toll. In our view, neither of those statements is true. Dive into the data, and there is more to cheer than jeer. We probably wouldn't even be writing this article if Work and Pensions Secretary Stephen Crabb hadn't said the following in a BBC interview: "There will be companies right now today who have been looking at major investments into the UK who are hanging back and considering whether that's the right thing to do. So of course that will have an impact. Now, I'm not saying that the increase of 21,000 in unemployment is as a direct result of that, but it's an example of the kind of really gritty questions that those people who say Britain should leave the single market need to respond to and explain why their vision of coming out of the single market actually makes the picture better and enhances job opportunities for British workers." That statement caused a firestorm in the Conservative Party, pitting the pro- and anti-Brexiters against each other once again. It was also widely lampooned by the press, as the data in question come from the December - February period, all but six days of which occurred before PM David Cameron scheduled the EU referendum and Brexit talk became daily front-page fodder. But we'll leave it to others to pillory the political cynicism on both sides of the Brexit debate. We remain neutral and will merrily concede convincing arguments on both sides. Heck, good old Mervyn King, the former BoE Chief, might have said it best Wednesday: "I think it's very important that people should not exaggerate the impact, either of staying in or leaving. I do worry that people on both sides treating this as a public relations campaign rather than as a debate on the future of our country are inclined to exaggerate because they feel they are selling a position." Economically, whether the UK stays or leaves will probably be a footnote in 100 years' time. But when politicians spin yarns, investors see it, and it hits sentiment-hence why we have spent so much time these past few weeks debunking claims of Brexit doom. We don't mean to influence the debate, and we worry at times that we occasionally appear pro-Brexit despite our best intentions, but it's important for investors to be able to accurately assess the impact of a "Remain" or "Leave" vote on capital markets. The popular narrative of Brexit doom, in our view, risks doing investors a disservice: inspiring them to dump UK stocks if Brits pick Brexit on June 23. Deep fear is abundant and therefore baked in to prices. A much more benign outcome would be a relieving surprise and probably quite bullish. Selling out of fear could be a very costly error. (Of course, this will all be moot if voters decide to stay-it's very much a toss-up and will likely remain so until the bitter end.) With all of that said, let's look at that unemployment report, because timing isn't the only reason those Brexit-risk-job-destroying claims are basically nonsense. Even if this report covered February-April and showed the exact same numbers, it wouldn't be a sign of creeping Brexit risk. Or economic weakness. Or anything terribly bad, really. Yes, the number of unemployed rose by 21,000. But the number of employed people rose by 20,000. The employment rate for people aged 16-64-total employed divided by total population-hit 74.1%, the highest on record.[i] Total jobless benefits claims fell in all three months (though they rose a tick in March). So why are there more officially jobless people? Same reason the number of unemployed Americans frequently rises alongside rising employment: More people joined the labor force. Total population rose by 81,000 during those three months, while the number of "inactive" people aged 16-64-those not working and not looking for work-fell by 53,000. That brought the economic inactivity rate to 21.7%, the lowest on record. That means 53,000 students, stay-at-home parents, caregivers and previously discouraged workers rejoined the rat race between December and February, extending their steady return to the job market since early 2011. This is not the sort of thing you see when labor markets and economic prospects are worsening. That tends to discourage potential workers, not motivate them. If Brexit risk were really destroying job markets, it would be very odd indeed for tens of thousands of previously disengaged workers to wake up with a spring in their step, put on pants and pound the pavement in search of employment. People return to the labor force when businesses are hiring, not when they're cutting back. Again, this is all backward-looking-nothing in any jobs report ever will tell you where the economy is going. Jobs data only confirm what other metrics like GDP showed months earlier. But as far as reasons to be bearish about Brexit go, this simply isn't one. Or a reason to fear the end of Britain's expansion is nigh. It merely confirms that a few months ago, things were fine. Bernies gone and the new Trump towers after NY Primary Bernies gone. You know that? Bernies gone, Trump said on April 20 at a rally in Indianapolis, Indiana, the day after Hillary Clinton routed Sanders in the New York primary. I love running against crooked Hillary, he said. Bernie wouldnt be as much fun. Every election year promises full employment in industry sectors that serve the public with almost daily opinion polls that tell you what one- to two-thousand people (a sampling) think about every candidate and issue; and, in case you cant think for yourself, a generous assortment of pundits (usually biased) who will connect the dots and tell you what most Americans think. Dont statistics lie? an insurance company retiree asked me. I replied that people can lie when answering polls and companies can lie when structuring data for public release. But poll results must meet acknowledged standards for methodology, sampling, margin of error and accuracy (if not, garbage in=garbage out). To use results selectively and without context can lead to deceptive and distorted conclusions that bolster predetermined outcomes and biases. How accurate were New York primary election polling forecasts that were conducted from April 11 to April 18 (data sources compiled at RealClearPolitics.com)? Final Election results from the April 19 New York Primary are: Clinton 58, Sanders 42 (Clinton +16) Trump 60.4, Kasich 25.1, Cruz 14.5 (Trump +35.3) Pollster/Results/Spread April 18 Polls: Emerson: Trump 55, Kasich 21, Cruz 18 (Trump +34) Emerson: Clinton 55, Sanders 40 (Clinton +15) Gravis: Trump 57, Kasich 22, Cruz 20 (Trump +35) Gravis: Clinton 53, Sanders 47 (Clinton +6) April 17 Polls: CBS News/YouGov: Trump 54, Kasich 19, Cruz 21 (Trump +33) CBS News/YouGov: Clinton 53, Sanders 43 (Clinton +10) April 16 Poll: NBC 4 NY/WSJ/Marist: Trump 54, Kasich 25, Cruz 16 (Trump +29) April 15 Poll: 0ptimus: Trump 49, Kasich 23, Cruz 14 (Trump +26) April 14 Poll: NBC 4 NY/WSJ/Marist: Clinton 57, Sanders 40 (Clinton +17) April 13 Polls: Siena: Trump 50, Kasich 27, Cruz 17 (Trump +23) Siena: Clinton 52, Sanders 42 (Clinton +10) April 12 Polls: Quinnipiac: Trump 55, Kasich 20, Cruz 19 (Trump +35) NY1/Baruch: Trump 60, Kasich 17, Cruz 14 (Trump +43) PPP (D): Trump 51, Kasich 25, Cruz 20 (Trump +26) Liberty Research: Trump 52, Kasich 23, Cruz 19 (Trump +29) Quinnipiac: Clinton 53, Sanders 40 (Clinton +13) NY1/Baruch: Clinton 50, Sanders 37 (Clinton +13) PPP: Clinton 51, Sanders 40 (Clinton +11) April 11 Polls: NBC/WSJ/Marist: Trump 54, Kasich 21, Cruz 18 (Trump +33) NBC/WSJ/Marist: Clinton 55, Sanders 41 (Clinton +14) Monmouth: Clinton 51, Sanders 39 (Clinton +12) Final election results (April 19): Clinton 58, Sanders 42 (Clinton +16) Trump 60.4, Kasich 25.1, Cruz 14.5 (Trump +35.3) Conclusions: All polls correctly predicted Clinton and Trump wins. All twelve polls underestimated Clintons margin of victory except the April 14 NBC 4 NY/WSJ/Marist Poll: (Clinton +17) All thirteen polls considerably underestimated Trumps margin of victory. All eleven polls correctly predicted Kasich as runner-up. All eleven polls correctly predicted Cruz in third place. Note: The Reuters Polling Explorer (polling.reuters.com) is a wondrous interactive tool for finding current and historical poll results on presidential candidates that can be filtered to demographic subsets (e.g., what percentage of white, middle-class millennials voted for Bernie Sanders vs. what percentage of hi-income evangelicals ages 65+ voted for Ted Cruz vs. what percentage of unemployed whites ages 18-29 voted for Donald Trump). **** On the day following the New York Primary, April 20, political pundits carried on: Following his sweeping victory in New York, Donald Trump was markedly more disciplined, gentler and more appealing than the version of Trump we've seen for much of the last year, wrote Chris Cillizza for the Washington Post. The new Donald Trump should scare the hell out of the GOP establishment... Republican strategist Steve Schmidt: Donald Trump Will Be Nominee on First Ballot; Will Clear 1,237 Mark By 50 Delegates. (RealClearPolitics, April 20) Schmidt predicted Trump will not only get the required 1,237 delegates, but will have at least 50 more. Schmidt appeared on Wednesday's Morning Joe, following Trump's landslide victory in his home state of New York. "He will clear the 1,237 mark by at least 50 to 60 delegates by the time the votes are counted on June 7th in the state of California. And that presumes really Ted Cruz over performing at a level that he hasn't been able to perform at thus far in the campaign, said Schmidt. Trump strategist Roger Stone: Even If Trump Wins 1,237 Delegates, Cruz Could Use Procedural Means To Take Away His Majority. (RealClearPolitics, April 20) Unfortunately just because Donald Trump gets the 1,237 [delegates needed to win], doesn't mean we aren't going to have a brokered convention, Roger Stone told NJ 101.5 radio. My sources, who are pretty good in the Republican Party, indicate to me that Ted Cruz intends to work a rules strategy to try to euchre this nomination away from Donald Trump. In kind of a shady, using political trickery and so on, utilizing these Trojan Delegates we have been talking about -- Where Trump delegates, from the results of the primary -- those seats are filled with non-Trump voters, non-Trump supporters who will vote against Trump on procedural issues in either rules or credentials that could be used to take away his majority. It's over for the Vermont senator, shouted Douglas E. Schoen at FOX News. (April 20) I in no way want to denigrate what Bernie Sanders has accomplished in this campaign, which has been truly remarkable. When he started out he was over 60 points down in New York and he made this a real race (as he has across the nation), admitted Schoen. But after Tuesday nights victory the reality is truly setting in that the delegate math just isnt there for Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders Campaign Manager Jeff Weaver told MSNBCs Steve Kornacki during election night coverage (April 19): [E]ven if Hillary Clinton secures the nomination through pledged and superdelegates the campaign would still challenge her at the convention ...We're going to go to the convention. It is extremely unlikely either candidate will have the requisite number of pledged delegates to get [the nomination]. So it's going to be an election determined by the superdelegates," claimed Weaver. As suspected by some that Bernie Sanders is a gate keeper for Hillary and despite gestures by Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein to run a third party independent campaign with her as VP, Sanders campaign aide says Sanders now will be Democrat for life. (msnbs & Bloomberg, April 19) He is a Democrat, he said hes a Democrat and hes going to be supporting the Democratic nominee, whoever that is, Bernie Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said on Bloomberg Politics show With All Due Respect. Trump says as President, hed mull pursuing Clinton indictment. (FOX News & Bloomberg, April 20) Youd certainly have to look at it very fairly, and I would only do something 100% fair but certainly that is something you would look at, Donald Trump said in interview with Fox News Bill OReilly. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says: (TheHill, April 20) Donald Trumps blowout victory in Tuesdays New York primary makes him the presumptive Republican presidential nominee that the party should unite behind, reported Jessie Hellmann in The Hill. Gingrich asserted Trump would win the nomination on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention this summer in Cleveland. It is time for the GOP establishment to work with this new reality rather than wage war against it, he said. In an exclusive interview for Politico on April 6, Hillary Clinton said she has had enough of Bernie Sanders. She is clearly frustrated with his easy appeal to voters under 35. She even suggested for the first time (in public, anyway) that the septuagenarian from Vermont was feeding a simplistic, cynical line of argument to turn young voters against her, wrote Politico interviewer Glenn Thrush. There is a persistent, organized effort to misrepresent my record, and I dont appreciate that, and I feel sorry for a lot of the young people who are fed this list of misrepresentations, Clinton said. I know that Sen. Sanders spends a lot of time attacking my husband, attacking President Obama. I rarely hear him say anything negative about George W. Bush, who I think wrecked our economy. The pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC Priorities USA raised nearly $12 million in March, the bulk from a dozen six- and seven-figure contributions, according to Politico. The PAC spent almost as much as it raised, with the vast majority $10 million marked for a digital ad reservation through Precision Network. Another $541,000 to Civis Analytics was labeled as General Election Analytics." In her victory speech on April 19, Hillary Clinton asked her admirers: I hope you will join the 1.1 million people whove already contributed at HillaryClinton.comand by the way, most with less than $100because we have more work to do. Hillarys top donor during the month of March, hedge fund billionaire James Simons, contributed $3.5 million, and four other donors topped the $1 million mark. Two $900,000 donations from the Pritzker family were also listed as part of the haul. I love running against crooked Hillary, Trump said. Bernie wouldnt be as much fun. Sources: [1] Trump declares: Bernies gone. Brianna Gurciullo. April 20, 2016. Politico. http://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-gop-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/04/trump-bernie-sanders-campaign-over-222221 [2] Election 2016 Presidential Polls. RealClearPolitics. (caveat: site fires multiple pop-ups) http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/president/ [3] Reuters Polling Explorer. http://www.polling.reuters.com [4] The new Donald Trump should scare the hell out of the GOP establishment. Chris Cillizza. Washington Post. April 20, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/20/the-kinder-more-disciplined-donald-trump-should-scare-the-hell-out-of-the-gop-establishment/ [5] Steve Schmidt: Donald Trump Will Be Nominee on First Ballot; Will Clear 1,237 Mark By 50 Delegates. RealClear Politics. April 20, 2016. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/04/20/steve_schmidt_donald_trump_will_be_nominee_on_first_ballot_will_clear_1237_mark_by_50_delegates.html [6] Stone: Even If Trump Wins 1,237 Delegates, Cruz Could Use "Procedural" Means To "Take Away His Majority". RealClear Politics. April 20, 2016. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/04/20/stone_even_if_trump_wins_1237_delgates_cruz_could_use_procedural_means_to_take_away_his_majority.html [7] Clinton shuts down Sanders with a big win in New York. It's over for the Vermont senator. Douglas E. Schoen. FOX News. April 20, 2016 http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/04/20/clinton-shuts-down-sanders-with-big-win-in-new-york-its-over-for-vermont-senator.html [8] Sanders campaign undaunted by NY loss, will fight to the end. Steve Kornacki. MSNBC. April 19, 2016. http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/sanders-campaign-undaunted-by-ny-loss-669591619932 [9] Sanders Now Will Be Democrat For Life. Chelsea Mes. Bloomberg Politics. April 20, 2016. http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/trackers/2016-04-20/sanders-now-will-be-democrat-for-life-campaign-aide-says [10] Trump Says as President, Hed Mull Pursuing Clinton Indictment. Chelsea Mes. Bloomberg Politics. April 20, 2016. http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/trackers/2016-04-20/trump-says-as-president-he-d-mull-pursuing-clinton-indictment [11] Gingrich: Trump is presumptive nominee. Jessie Hellmann. TheHill. April 20, 2016. http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/gop-primaries/277016-gingrich-trump-is-presumptive-nominee [12] Pro-Clinton PAC rakes in high-dollar donations, eyes general election. Kyle Cheney. Politico. April 20, 2016. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/hillary-clinton-super-pac-222234 [13] Full Transcript: Hillary Clintons New York Primary Victory Speech. Newsweek. April 20, 2016. http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-full-transcript-new-york-victory-speech-450349 [14] More information about polling can be learned at American Association for Public Opinion Research. http://www.aapor.org/ (c) 2016 Michael T. Bucci (Michael T. Bucci is a retired public relations executive now living in New England. He has authored nine books on practical spirituality collectively titled The Cerithous Material.) 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication. Crude Oil Complacency Climbs US production at 18-month lows was partly behind the recent surge in crude oil prices following yet another report of building onshore inventories. Despite the veritable flood of crude oil prices hitting global markets, crude prices continue to rise amid rising speculation that key global producers will elect to increase production even further. Since the freeze deal fell through, Russia has underlined its doubts that any such agreement will be possible, potentially paving the way for OPEC members to further stray from a single policy, opting instead to put national interests ahead of economic rationality. While prices have jumped to the highest levels since November on new forecasts that anticipate a rebalancing of the market my 2017, complacency amongst traders continues to grow as problematic fundamental conditions remain intact. Comments earlier from IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol give credence to the idea that the ongoing low price environment is impacting production across the globe negatively, especially for higher cost extraction operations. According to Birol, non-OPEC suppliers will see output fall to the tune of 700,000 barrels per day this year. Much of this is coming thanks to reduced investment in the industry as low prices eat away at profit margins for exploration and production companies. In the United States in particular, data released yesterday by the Energy Information Administration showed that output fell 8.953 million barrels per day, the lowest since October of 2014. However, the one caveat to the market reaching his forecasted equilibrium in 2017 is the emergence of any major economic downturn.Acting against any proposed rebalancing however are certain OPEC and non-OPEC producers such as Russia. On the heels of the Doha failure, Russia has come out on the offensive, hinting that production could rise even further towards the 12.000 million barrel per day level last recorded during the Soviet production era. Remarks from Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak unequivocally highlighted this point, stating that oil production could exceed 10.800 million barrels per day this year. Additionally, he lambasted OPEC for failing to regulate its own production while calling for other global players to freeze output. However, the fractures within OPEC continue to grow, with the Saudis pledging not to freeze output without the participation of Iran, a condition that is unlikely to be fulfilled in the near future.Outside of the fraying relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran is the ability for the lost American production to be offset by rising OPEC production. Despite inventory concerns being largely shrugged off by markets despite the sheer size of the supply imbalance, should global onshore inventories continue to fill at the current pace, it could be a looming disaster for prices. Rising production from Iraq along with the potential for a rebound in Libyan output could add to oversupply concerns. Additionally, from the demand side of the equation, many of the existing forecasts anticipate growing demand, especially from emerging markets. However, slowing growth in China and uneven expansion in India may hamper those expectations despite the revision higher in forecasts from key industry groups like the IEA. While prices continue to trend higher, these factors could spell a forthcoming correction lower in crude oil.Outside of the limited fundamental rationales for higher prices, technical indicators are pointing to levels that might be potentially unsustainable for WTI crude oil. Added volatility thanks to the steady flow of news headlines is creating a set of conditions that could potentially be ideal for swing traders with a multi-day view of markets. While some of the indicators are suggestive of additional upside potential, the relative strength index is adding to a growing sense of overvaluation. Although not above the key 70 level that would corroborate the idea of being overbought, the trajectory towards these levels is bolstered in part by the emergence of an upward trending equidistant channel formation since January. The pattern channel pattern, which has a predominantly bullish bias, is reaching the upper channel line limit, supported in part by the 50-day moving average which is trending underneath the current price action. Typically when trading a channel, the best strategy is to follow the trend and not fight it. In this particular instance, initiating positions at the top of an upward trending channel is not necessarily wise due to shrinking reward potential and the confluence of the 200-day moving average acting as resistance against any sustained upside in crude oil prices over the short-term. From a longer-term perspective, the ongoing rebound may have merit as a technical rebound, but is still falling short of a full on reversal higher in prices. Should prices overcome resistance at $48.34 it could be the sign that a longer-term reversal is in place. To Conclude While fundamentally crude oil prices have limited reason to be trending at current levels, speculation of further losses in non-OPEC production and rising demand from emerging markets has been enough to offset the risks of rising inventories and production. While it may be too early to call for a rebalancing of the market as early as 2017 considering the factors contributing to present oversupply conditions, market sentiment continues to gravitate towards optimism despite growing complacency. While technical factors point to additional upside potential, chasing after recent gains might be premature considering the host of factors expecting a correction to momentum higher over the last few sessions. Should bullish sentiment prevail, a better entry point will be possible closer to the bottom of the channel while a break below the line could indicate a resumption of the prevailing downtrend and a reversal from recent highs. Anyoption is the world's leading binary options trading platform. Founded in 2008, anyoption was the first financial trading platform that made it possible for anyone to invest and profit from the global stock market through trading binary options. Our goal here at Market Oracle is to provide readers with valued insights and opinions on market events and the stories that surround them. Website anyoption.com 2016 Copyright Anyoption - 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. It appears the concept of satire is alive and thriving in the minds of many readers of The Roanoke Times. Im drawing this conclusion from the many responses to a satirical apology April 3 for an earlier satirical column March 29. That one poked fun at the idea of a special prosecutor investigating some Facebook threats from Henry County resident Andy Parker to state Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin. Parker is the father of WDBJ (Channel 7) reporter Alison Parker, who was fatally shot along with cameraman Adam Ward by former station employee Vester Flanagan during a live broadcast last summer. Since then, Parker has advocated for tighter gun control. Stanley is a gun-rights proponent who receives high marks from the National Rifle Association. Parker has said the message he sent Stanley via Facebook Im going to be your worst nightmare you little bastard was only political. Stanley has said he felt threatened. That led to a special prosecutor taking a look. And me turning to satire, featuring a fictional grand jury transcript delivered to my third-floor desk by a talking homing pigeon who used the elevator. Not everyone realized that was a put-on, especially an editor at guns.com, who rewrote the thing and treated it as serious news. Hence the April 3 apology column, in which the initial letters of the first nine paragraphs spelled out ITS SATIRE. (I had to drop the apostrophe because nobody begins a sentence with one of those.) Its almost unbelievable that some people didnt get it, Margaret Klapperich of Roanoke wrote. It scares me somewhat that the American intellect lacks the reasoning ability, the sense of humor, and the general intelligence of reading a column such as that and not understanding that it was satire. And then she raised a question worth pondering: Could it be that critical thinking is not being taught in schools? Could it be that teachers are so restricted by [Standards of Learning] that they have no time to inculcate critical thinking? Peggy Lester of Radford agreed. I am seriously worried about the intellect of your reading public. Anyone believing a pigeon delivered anything readable to you needs help. Keep on with the satirical and the absurd. I get a kick (not literal kick) out of it! You keep writing like this, offered Bill Camper of Roanoke. Some people now need a wet nurse to understand or comprehend. Ritch Duffy of Moneta suggested I pen another satire on the current Republican presidential nomination process. Perhaps you can write a column on how great [Donald] Trump would be as president, he said. They wont get that one either, but at least youll get a ton of praise from his supporters 47% have a high school diploma only, or less. Another 35% have some college or an associate degree according to the most recent survey. Duffy added: The rest of us must do everything in our powers to get the intelligent, college-educated voters out this fall. Otherwise the least informed, most uneducated people in the country will choose the next president, based on racism/extremism/hatred. Hard to believe that this mentality exists in 2016 isnt it? William Adams of Roanoke found little humor in either column. Sorry but a special prosecutor was absolutely proper and necessary, Adams wrote. Suppose someone came up to you and punched you in the face then said Oopsies, sorry I really didnt mean it lets just forget that it happened. He continued: Andy Parker should be tried, found guilty and given at a minimum a humongous fine to send a lesson to the other libtard nutzoids out there that their Saul Alinsky-George Soros tactics are illegal. (The special prosecutor, by the way, decided it wasnt in the interest of justice to pursue a case.) Bonnie Sumner of Christiansburg couldnt disagree with Adams more. While I found myself laughing out loud at times, I was also struck with profound sadness, she wrote. Sadness that a publicly elected official failed to be sensitive to the Parkers sudden, violent loss of Allison [sic]. This local incident is indicative of many politicians being out of touch and focused more on winning reelection than true public service to all of their constituents. Last but not least was a missive from Jim McDonel of Roanoke. He was responding to another satirical column, published Feb. 18, about an Orwellian-titled piece of legislation. The Government Nondiscrimination Act passed the Virginia House but failed in the Senate. It would have barred government from taking any action against individuals and businesses who refused service to any customer, gay or straight, based on sincere religious objections to the customers perceived sex life. The column made fun of that bill. But McDonel wrote that he understood where it was coming from. As a pianist, I wouldnt want to play a paid gig at an orgy because I dont subscribe to that behavior, McDonel wrote. I dont think things have come to the point where I could be successfully sued [for] refusing to play but it also isnt an illogical extension of the current trend, should that ever occur. I agree with McDonel wholeheartedly our government should never force pianists to play at orgies. If things ever get to that point, Ill be the first columnist in America to stand up and cry Enough. This craziness has gone too far! And then Id go out and take piano lessons. You never know when such talents may come in handy. Thanks, readers, for all the great phone calls, letters, emails and comments posted online. Please keep those coming. A program offered Wednesday by the Interfaith Council of Martinsville and Henry County offered different perspectives on the topic of religious freedom. The program was held at Patrick Henry Community Colleges (PHCC) Frith Hall and was moderated by Pastor Kameron Wilds of Grace Design United Methodist Church (UMC). The four speakers offered different observations on the topic of religious freedom, whether historical, scriptural or personal. Terry Young, who is Interim Dean of the Academic Success and College Transfer Division at PHCC and also is a history and political science professor at the college, offered a brief history of religious freedom in the U.S. The ideas espoused in the First Amendment of the Constitution that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof evolved significantly from the earliest English settlements in the country, he said. Virginia played a significant role in establishing religious freedom, Young said. Founding Father Patrick Henry proposed legislation in 1784 that would have required citizens to belong to a denomination of their choice and to provide tax revenue to support that denomination. That proposal was opposed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Jefferson authored the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom that disestablished the Church of England and guaranteed freedom of religion to people of all faiths. Madison, considered the father of the Constitution, wrote after the Constitutions ratification that the practical distinction between Religion and Civil Government is essential to the purity of both, and as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. Rev. Lynn Bechdolt of Fork Mountain UMC in Franklin County said that as a child, she was taught that many came to the new world to flee religious persecution and worship as they chose. What was not said was that this flight for religious freedom continued and is still going on, she said. Its still going on among Christians, but especially among non-Christians. They come here believing that we mean what we say about religious freedom. Its up to us to make sure that we really mean it. Out of four siblings, Bechdolt said, she is the only one who remains active in church. For many, she said, the church has become too institutional and hypocritical. For example, she said, her sister was told she was not welcome at one church because she was twice divorced. What (those who do not attend church) are seeing is that we dont love our neighbors as ourselves and were far too concerned about judgment and remaining stainlessly self-righteous, despite the fact that among us Christians, the head of our faith, Jesus, railed against that very same thing in his own time, Bechdolt said. And having decided that God has blessed us as a nation and that we were inheritors of Gods kingdom, American Christians are truly struggling with the fact that Christians are leaving churches. We dont know how to respond. Gods real purpose in bringing us together is to bring us together for peace in the wonderful creation He has made, she continued. We wont get there by demonizing each other, demonizing other Christians, or people of other faiths, or people of no particular faith. Many of them are as good, if not better, at loving their neighbor as we are. Martha Woody, who has been a member of Ohev Zion Synagogue since 1978 but did not formally convert to Judaism until the mid-1990s, offered her own perspective on the topic of religious freedom. Jews have often championed certain causes and fought against others, and it has sometimes been interpreted as a war on Christianity, a war on religion, a war on God, Woody said. I think it is often hard for people who are members of the majority religion to understand how it is to operate in a culture that doesnt exactly align with what you believe and what you do. To illustrate, Woody provided an example from her life. We were trying to schedule something, and it happened to be in the fall, and it happened to be around the time of one of the high holy days of the Jewish faith, she said. I said, I cant do it that day Ill be in synagogue. The response I got was, Arent you lucky? You get our holidays and then you get yours. I dont remember how I responded. Looking back on it, one response could be, I am forced to take your holidays when I have nothing to celebrate and I have to make special accommodations to figure out how Im going to observe my holidays. Woody said that while she believes in being respectful of differing beliefs, religious beliefs must be balanced against fairness and justice, and compassion should be at the heart of any religion. Quoting the famous Jewish leader Hillel the Elder, she said, That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole of the Torah; the rest is commentary. Khalil Shadeed, who is a member of the Interfaith Council of Suburban Maryland, the founder and former president of the Islamic Society of Prince George County, and producer of the television program The Scholars Chair, among other achievements, spoke about Islams traditional respect for religious diversity. Shadeed said that the Holy Quran clearly articulates a Muslims requirement to respect religious diversity. That same concept also was articulated by Thomas Jefferson, he said, who wrote that God has absolute power to force his will, yet chose not to propagate religion by coercion, as was in his Almighty power to do so. According to the Quran, he said, Jews, Christians and Muslims are united in their willful submission to God, and are allowed to choose their religion based on the information available to them. Muslims view the trajectory of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) as a continuous, linear whole, he said, rather than as three discrete parts a concept that is often difficult for any faith, Muslims included, to grapple with. The Quranic values and the American ideals for religious freedom, though not perfect, are in congruence, he said. Following a brief question and answer session with members of the public, moderator Wilds closed out the interfaith dialogue. In ages past, Wilds said, if conflict erupted between religious factions, one group could simply move toward the frontier and remove itself from the equation. Thats how the Mormons ended up in Utah, Wilds said. They didnt start off there; they started off closer to the east coast. The idea was that if you didnt like each other, just move, and just keep moving until you end up on the other side of the country. Now, what were starting to see is that globalization brings whats happening around the world into our very own homes. It causes us to wrestle with the fact that were a globalized society. We start to see a lot of other histories playing into our own history. We no longer live in a world where you can move west. We have to learn to deal with one another. An old, unused water storage tank on Bethel Lane in Martinsville will be dismantled soon. City Engineer Chris Morris told Martinsville City Council on Tuesday that the tank will come down during the week of May 2. The project should take no more than a day, he said. The city received four bids from contractors interested in dismantling the tank. The project was awarded to the lowest bidder, Iseler Demolition of Romeo, Mich., for $25,400, city Water Resources Director Andy Lash said. Other bids were received from Allstate Tower of Henderson, Ky. ($29,789), the D.H. Griffin Cos. of Greensboro, N.C. ($29,876) and the E. Luke Greene Co. of Roanoke ($121,244). Lash did not know why the latter bid was so much higher than the others. Fifteen thousand dollars was included in the citys budget for fiscal 2016, which will end June 30, to dismantle the tank. Lash said the extra money needed to cover the remainder of Iselers charges likely will be taken from a capital expenses line-item account in which money has been left over from other projects. Lash said that Morris is overseeing the project. Morris could not be reached Wednesday for further comment. Built in the late 1800s, the 79-foot-tall tank, described in documents as a standpipe, is Martinsvilles oldest. It has not held water since the late 1980s because of holes that have formed in its iron plates, officials have said. In November 2014, the city council voted to remove the tank after area residents complained about the citys plans at that time to let a mobile phone service company put an antenna atop the structure. Complaints centered on a potential for radiation from such antennas posing health risks, although information provided by the West Piedmont Planning District and American Cancer Society showed that theory has not been proven. More than 200 people signed a petition asking the city not to let the antenna be installed and to remove the tank. The dismantling will include razing the tank to the ground level and closing off inflow and outflow pipes to stop liquids or foreign materials from entering underground city pipelines, the request for proposals showed. The tanks foundation is to remain. Also, all disturbed areas are to be graded smooth, then seeded, fertilized and covered with a layer of mulch to help germinate grass seeds, according to the request. A massive protest movement in France has been taking place since February. Sparked by the announcement of a reactionary new reform of the labour laws, this movement is mobilising masses of youth. It has given birth to a new method of organization - imported from the Spanish Indignados movement - called the Nuit debout (Night Stands Up). This movement is supported by a huge majority of the population who are tired of years of counter-reforms and cuts carried out by the so-called left government of the Socialist Party (SP). The Hollande government During the 2012 presidential election, the Socialist Party candidate Hollande made a lot of pledges (the right for non-French citizens to vote, defence of the public services, etc.) and even said that his enemy was the world of finance. To most voters this seemed preferable to a continuation of the Sarkozy years, even if they were not whole-heartedly enthusiastic about Hollande. But disillusionment quickly set in. From the first months of his presidency, Hollande put forward a great deal of counter-reforms, following the example of the PASOK in Greece or the PSOE in Spain. Many laws were passed suppressing workers rights, to the benefit of the French capitalists who were eager to make the working class pay for the crisis. The Macron law, for example, authorized stores to open on Sunday forcing their employees to work without any special pay. It also softened the punishment for bosses hindering shop stewards activities. Officially these measures were to solve the issue of unemployment, which was very high especially among the youth (rising to 25.7% for those below the age of twenty-five). These measures failed miserably to solve this growing problem... which is no surprise. These laws were created to make sackings easier, and it is not by firing your employees that you fight against unemployment. Under these conditions anger began to grow against the government, whose popularity collapsed. With an eighty-five percent disapproval rating, Hollande is the most unpopular President since approval-rating opinion polls have been carried out. His prime minister, Manuel Valls, is just a little bit more popular, withonly seventy-four percent dissapproval. This anger expressed itself in a series of small explosions of class struggle, such as the Air France struggle during late Autumn 2015. The situation is clearly favourable for the rise of an opposition to the left of the Socialist Party, as with Syriza in Greece or PODEMOS in Spain. The candidate for this role appeared to be the Left Front. But it has failed more than once to embody this popular anger since 2012. Failure of the Left Front The Left Front was formed in 2009 by an alliance between the Communist Party (CP) and a small split from the Socialist Party called the Left Party. It had enjoyed great popularity when Melenchon, head of the Left Party and candidate of the Left Front in 2012 presidential election, ran a campaign directed against the SP and against austerity politics, calling for people to take the power. Melenchon gained eleven percent of the vote, a success which put on the agenda a continuation of this line and the transformation of the Left Front into a real left opposition to the government. For the leadership of the CP, this was unacceptable because it meant a break with the Socialist Party, even in the local elections. This would be unnacceptable for the CP bureaucrats who regard alliances with the SP as a matter of life or death. Since the party began its decline in the 80s, its leaders have been clinging to the SP. The electoral alliances with the SP guarantees the election of their local councillers and through that, subsidies to fund the party. The CP is heavily dependent on these financial sources, which amounts to fifty-seven percent of its income. This led to a de facto split of the Left Front in the 2014 municipal elections. The CP formed alliances with the SP in some of the biggest cities, while the Left Party allied with the Greens, who were still members of the government carrying out reactionary laws. The same situation of confusion and unprincipled alliances has been repeated in almost every election since 2012. Today, the leadership of the CP is deeply divided on the question of the 2017 Presidential election its majority wants to join with the so-called left-wing of the SP in the Primary election to designate a candidate for the left, while a minority wants to pursue the Left Front with Melenchon (albeit on the same basic economic program as that of the majority). Meanwhile, Melenchon has announced his candidacy above the parties, and is attempting to create a movement in support of his candidacy. During the local elections last year the effect of these vacillations were clearly expressed. With the left unable to pose as an alternative, a great part of the popular anger expressed itself through votes for the extreme right-wing National Front, but also (and in fact mostly) through abstention. Abstention rose to fifty percent in the regional elections, and thirty-nine percent in the municipal elections. This is the biggest abstention level ever seen in this kind of election in France since 1945. All this expresses a mass feeling of rejection towards the existing political system. The government has tried to divert this growing anger through calls for unity and racist propaganda. The government has repeatedly tried to use racism to divide the working class. Prime minister Manuel Valls even called on the French to boycott brands producing Islamic clothing, calling them a threat to the Republic. This racist propaganda was greatly assisted by the terrorist attacks in Paris in January and November 2015, creating a temporary mood of national unity, gathering the nation around its leaders. This also gave the state an excuse to enact a state of emergency, giving the government the right to suppress any demonstration and giving the police extended rights, such as home searches without a warrant. The Labour Law The government tried to take advantage of the shock created by the terrorist attacks and the promulgation of the state of emergency to enact a raft of reactionary measures. One such measure is the draft law on Labour, also called the El-Khomri law from the minister of labour, Myriam El Khomri. This law is a frontal all-out attack on workers rights. It make sackings (even mass sackings) easier giving companies the right to fire masses of workers without having to suffer economic penalties. It hugely reduces the power of the unions, authorizing bosses to organize referendums in their companies to approve deals that had been rejected by the unions, and gives them the right to conclude deals on almost everything at company level: wages, work length, etc. The law also reduces unemployment benefits, even if the unemployed had been illegally fired by his boss. This law was an unexpected gift for the French ruling class - at first even the bosses organisation didnt know how to react. It is one of the biggest attacks on labour rights and amounts to a declaration of love to the bourgeoisie by the leadership of the SP. At the beginning the reaction from the trade unions was very weak, calling for a demonstration a month later and not even daring to demand the withdrawal of the draft law. But for a great part of the population, this was one law too many. Mobilisations began with youth organisations, notably the student union UNEF, setting a date for demonstrations on a national level for March 9th, much sooner than the trade unions. They were joined by a youtube video-makers collective who produced a campaign called On vaut mieux que ca (were worth more than this) speaking about general conditions of work and asking people to send an example of the worst thing they have endured at work. In the unions, and notably in the CGT (the biggest and oldest union in France which was closely linked with the CP in the past), the rank and file began to push for a more radical response, bypassing the leadership. More and more local unions began to call for demonstrations on March 9th and helped the youth activists to organise it. In Lyon, for instance, some railway CGT unionists helped students with the administrative process in order to have the demonstration authourized by the police. A move towards a national day of strikes and demonstrations began in ranks of the unions and succeeded in forcing the leadership of the CGT to reluctantly come out for the mobilisation (but without calling to strike). A massive mobilisation March 9th was a big success. Half a million demonstrated in the streets of most of the big cities. The movement gained huge popularity within the general population: fifty-three percent of French people supported the mobilisation. But what is really impressive is the figures among the youth (seventy-two percent support of under-35s) and workers (seventy percent of the factory workers). The mobilisation also grew in universities and high schools, resulting in occupations of schools by students showing a very militant spirit. It is in fact the biggest mobilisation since the fight against the CPE (the Contrat Premiere Embauche, a counter-reform that was withdrawn after a big mobilization and the beginning of a general strike) in 2006, and even maybe since the great strike movement of 1995. Following March 9th, the union leaderships turned their forces to the preparation of the March 31st general strike, while youth organisations called for earlier days of mobilisation one every week until the 31st. The union leaderships called for their members to support the youth mobilisation (in order to allow the rank-and-file to let off some steam) but without any national coordination of the struggle only public servants were given a strike permit by the unions. The leadership of the CGT clinged to its strategy of so-called days of action: organizing a national strike every month to put (moral) pressure on the government. This was the same strategy practiced during the 2010 movement against pension reform. Back then, the idea was to organize separate days of general strike (called inter-professional days of action, to exorcise the ghost of May 68) each month, growing in power until the government would retreat and drop its proposal. There were big mobilisations, even at one time more than three million marching in the streets against the draft reform. But the government didn't retreat. A push for a true general strike lasting until victory began to form in the rank and file some sectors even began to put it into practice but the leadership didn't follow and the movement ended in defeat. The main problem with the strategy of the trade union leadership was, that it thought it would be possible to force the ruling class to retreat without mass mobilisation of the working class in a general strike, bringing the economy to a halt. The truth is the leadership of the CGT is paralysed by the fear of setting up such a general strike and failing, exposing its weakness, or worse, succeeding in organising such a strike but losing control of the movement. Because this happened in 1968, placing French capitalism on the edge of a cliff. This episode still haunts the French bourgeoisie. But it is also a nightmare for the trade union bureaucrats and reformist leaders, who above everything else dream of peace and stability, not to a difficult and unpredictable fight. The Nuit debout In spite of the hesitations of the leaders, this time the mobilisations continued to grow and March 31st was a big success, bringing more than one million people into the streets. Nevertheless, it was not followed up, apart from calling for another day of action on April 28th. Nature, however, abhors a vacuum. Deprived of a national organisation and leadership, some in the movement tried to bypass it by setting up an alternative way of organizing the struggle and determining its orientation. Nuit Debout (which means Night stand up or Night Awake) began in Paris, called by intellectuals and militants from small groups and associations (such as the left-wing paper Fakir) and helped by some high-profile social commentators (such as the left-wing economist scholar Frederic Lordon). It was a call for an occupation of a square after the March 31st demonstration, on the model of the Indignados in Spain. Nuit Debout assumed a mass character in Paris with the occupation of the Place de la Republique on the eve of April 1st, gathering several thousand people every night since, among which are many youth looking for answers about the shortcomings of the system and searching a way to fight it. The vast majority of these were not involved with any political parties, and while some had taken part in protests before, many had not. As the weeks passed Nuit debout meetings were set up in a great number of other cities and towns even in some small rural towns. It showed that, contrary to the numerous talks about the the youth - or generation Y - described as apathetic and depoliticized by the mainstream press, the youth massively rejects the political system and want a big change in society. These assemblies were mostly characterized by a very high fighting spirit, calling for an all-out fight against the Labour Law, as shown by some of the banners seen on the Place de la Republique (such as The bourgeois are treating us like dogs - Now we are going to bite), but also by the great varieties of topics that are discussed. One of the key aspects of the Nuit debout is that it discusses, not only the Labour law, but (as one slogan puts it) also its world, that is the world that made it possible for such a law to exist, which means, in fact, the capitalist system. All problems can be (and are being) discussed more or less freely in the Nuit debout. The organisation is simple, there is a general assembly during which anybody is free to talk, which are preceded and followed by discussions in freely created commissions. If someone wants to organize a commission on a specific topic (such as Labour, Women's rights or Art), he can do it simply by announcing it to the crowd during the general assembly. There are numerous discussions on jobs, organization of labour, the ways of setting up a more egalitarian economy, etc Already, the question of the struggle against the El-Khomri law has been linked with a great number of issues such as the fight for the lifting of the state of emergency, access to housing and the fight against racism or sexism. The question of the relationship between the movement as a whole and the Nuit debout is a complex one. The Nuit debout is characterized by a great skepticism towards organizations, parties and trade-unions. This is the product of the betrayals of the leadership in previous struggles and the defeats of the past, leading the people organizing on the squares to fear that the leadership of the big organisations might take control of their struggle. This is an understandable fear, as we see what these leaderships did and are doing. But this is also an error, because organisations, in general, are not just tools of oppression, if they are equipped with the right ideas and programme they they become indispensable means of liberation. The capitalist system, with its state, its press, its politicians and its bourgeois parties cannot be defeated without an organisation to structure and lead the fight. This rejection of organisation also helps the union leaderships hold back its rank-and-file from joining this mobilisation, adopting a very authoritative approach. Some old trade unionists even attacked the Nuit debout militants for not joining the union. Nevertheless, a number of the more militant or young rank-and-file from the trade unions (and also from the political parties including the CP and Left Party) are participating in the Nuit Debout. Repression and police brutality For the government, this movement has been a nightmare. Less than a year before the next Presidential election, masses of youth and workers are flooding the streets, shouting slogans against the system. The government tried and still try to frighten the youth into stopping the mobilisation by using police repression. The mobilisation of the youth had been met with the batons of the CRS and the BAC (light police specialized in the fight against suburban youth). A great numbers of cases of violence and arrests were reported and videos and pictures of heavy-handed policemen had been widely circulated. In an unsurprising turn of events, it has had an effect opposite to the one intended, helping to popularise the movement and nourishing the anger against the government for sending police to beat fourteen year-old kids. The Minister of Interior had even been forced to condemn some policemen after a video showing three police officers beating a high school student they had just arrested. Nevertheless, the most reactionary layers of the bourgeoisie are calling for more offensive actions from the government. Francois Fillon, one of the leaders of the Republicans (the right-wing party of former president Nicolas Sarkozy) said he was surprised that, under a state of emergency, such a turmoil was tolerated by the authorities. The National Front called for massive repression of the Nuit Debout, describing it as the headquarters of the vandals who were destroying Paris. But the government is very cautious, pushing police to attack demonstrations on the one hand and blaming them when they do it in front of a camera. That is because the government remembers too well that the 1968 strike movement began as a twenty-four hour solidarity strike against police brutality toward students. In the conditions of today, with widespread anger and frustration throughout society, open mass repression of the movement could have the same result. What now? One of the main topics discussed at the Nuit debout and the movement against the El-Khomri law, is naturally the issue of the best way to win the fight against the law. If it continues on the path of the days of action, the movement could lose its momentum. Already, we could see that a great part of the working class is refraining from the fight. In the CGT, some militants complain that some of their own union members aren't even joining the strike. After the mobilisation on the 28th, what will be next? Another one, and another one until the movement declines? This strategy has shown in the past that it cannot succeed against a government determined to stand its ground. Nevertheless, the leadership of the CGT have nothing else to put forward. The risk of such failure is still very present in the minds of the most militant layers of the working class. That explain why the idea of a general strike is so popular among the protesters. Frederic Lordon was applauded wildly when he explained, at Republic Square during a Nuit debout, that a "general strike" was the only chance of forcing the government to withdraw the draft law. It is perfectly true. Only a general strike paralysing the economy and putting the capitalists on their knees could force them to fall back and withdraw the draft law. This poses another question: can the Nuit debout alone organise a general strike, in the factories, railway and docks? The answer is, of course, no. Such a strike needs union activists and organisations to join in. This is why we need to unite the forces that are fighting against this reactionary law, in the union rank-and-file, on the squares and everywhere. But this is not the only problem. If this struggle is successful, and forces the withdrawal of the draft law without touching the capitalist system, this same law (under a new name) will be back in a few months or years. Because it is not an isolated attack, but a part of an economic system based on the exploitation of workers. French capitalism has been in decline, at least since the 1970's. Today it is subject to fierce competition from Germany in Europe, from China in Africa, and suffers from the same world crisis that effects every other nation. In this situation, French capitalism must make the workers pay the crisis which means transforming the French labour laws to enable it to compete and retain its position, wealth and privileges. The problem is the system as a whole, a system that had nothing else to offer than poverty. A true victory could only be attained by attacking the bosses' power on society. What is needed is a political direction of the struggle that puts forward a programme against austerity and capitalism. The Nuit debout had already shown that the basis of support for such a programme exists. And this basis of support will enlarge as the crisis continues to unfold, because the overthrow of the capitalist system is the only way to put a stop to never-ending austerity and build a system that will permit every man or woman to live a decent life. Source: Revolution In Defence of Marxism is committed to safeguarding your privacy. At all times we aim to respect any personal data you share with us, or that we receive from other organisations, and keep it safe. This Privacy Policy (Policy) sets out our data collection and processing practices and your options regarding the ways in which your personal information is used. This Policy contains important information about your personal rights to privacy. Please read it carefully to understand how we use your personal data. We may update this Policy from time to time without notice to you, so please check it regularly. The provision of your personal data to us is voluntary. 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If we come to discover, or have reason to believe, that you are 15 and under and we are holding your personal information, we will delete that information within a reasonable period and withhold our services accordingly. Security of and access to your personal data We endeavour to ensure that there are appropriate and proportionate technical and organisational measures to prevent the loss, destruction, misuse, alteration, unauthorised disclosure or of access to your personal information. Your information is only accessible by appropriately trained staff and volunteers. We may also use agencies and/or suppliers to process data on our behalf. We may also merge or partner with other organisations and in so doing transfer and/or acquire personal data. Please note that some countries outside of the EEA have a lower standard of protection for personal data, including lower security requirements and fewer rights for individuals. We may transfer and/or store personal data collected from you to and/or at a destination outside the European Economic Area (EEA). Such personal data may be processed by agencies and/or suppliers operating outside the EEA. If we transfer and/or store your personal data outside the EEA we will take reasonable steps to ensure that the recipient implements appropriate measures to protect your personal data. Otherwise than as set out in this Privacy Policy, we will only ever share your data with your informed consent. Your rights Where we rely on your consent to use your personal information, you have the right to withdraw that consent at any time. This includes the right to ask us to stop using your personal information for direct marketing purposes or to be unsubscribed from our email list at any time. You also have the following rights: (1) Right to be informed you have the right to be told how your personal information will be used. This Policy and any other policies and statements used on our website and in our communications are intended to provide you with a clear and transparent description of how your personal information may be used. (2) Right of access you can write to us to ask for confirmation of what information we hold on you and to request a copy of that information. Provided we are satisfied that you are entitled to see the information requested and we have successfully confirmed your identity, we have 30 days to comply. (3) Right of erasure as from 25 May 2018, you can ask us for your personal information to be deleted from our records. (4) Right of rectification if you believe our records of your personal information are inaccurate, you have the right to ask for those records to be updated. (5) Right to restrict processing you have the right to ask for processing of your personal data to be restricted if there is disagreement about its accuracy or legitimate usage. (6) Right to data portability to the extent required by the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) where we are processing your personal information (i) under your consent, (ii) because such processing is necessary for the performance of a contract to which you are party or to take steps at your request prior to entering into a contact or (iii) by automated means, you may ask us to provide it to you or another service provider in a machine-readable format. To exercise these rights, please send a description of the personal information in question using the contact details in section 15 below. You can also unsubscribe from our email list by sending a blank email to news-unsubscribe@marxist.com Where we consider that the information with which you have provided us does not enable us to identify the personal information in question, we reserve the right to ask for (i) personal identification and/or (ii) further information. Lawful processing We are required to have one or more lawful grounds to process your personal information. Only 4 of these are relevant to us: Personal information is processed on the basis of a persons consent Personal information is processed on the basis of a contractual relationship Personal information is processed on the basis of legal obligations Personal information is processed on the basis of legitimate interests (1) Consent We will ask for your consent to use your information to send you electronic communications such as newsletters and and fundraising emails, and if you ever share sensitive personal information with us. (2) Contractual relationships Most of our interactions with supporters are voluntary and not contractual. However, sometimes it will be necessary to process personal information so that we can enter contractual relationships with people. For example, if you subscribe to one of our publications, or purchase merchandise online. (3) Legal obligations Sometimes we will be obliged to process your personal information due to legal obligations which are binding on us. We will only ever do so when strictly necessary. (4) Legitimate interests Applicable law allows personal information to be collected and used if it is reasonably necessary for our legitimate activities (as long as its use is fair, balanced and does not unduly impact individuals rights). We will rely on this ground to process your personal data when it is not practical or appropriate to ask for consent. Achieving our purposes These include (but are not limited to) promoting socialist policies Governance Internal and external audit for financial or regulatory compliance purposes Statutory reporting Publicity and income generation Conventional direct marketing and other forms of marketing, publicity or advertisement Unsolicited messages, including campaigns, newsletters, and fundraising appeals Analysis, targeting and segmentation to develop and promote or strategy and improve communication efficiency Personalisation used to tailor and enhance your experience of our communications Operational Management Maintenance of suppression files Processing for historical, scientific or statistical purpose Purely administrative purposes Responding to enquiries Delivery of requested products or information Communications designed to administer existing services including subscriptions, administration of petitions and financial transactions Thank you communications and receipts Maintaining a supporter database and suppression lists Financial Management and control Processing financial transactions and maintaining financial controls Prevention of fraud, misuse of services, or money laundering Enforcement of legal claims Reporting criminal acts and compliance with law enforcement agencies When we use your personal information, we will consider if it is fair and balanced to do so and if it is within your reasonable expectations. We will balance your rights and our legitimate interests to ensure that we use your personal information in ways that are not unduly intrusive or unfair in other ways. Data retention The length of time each category of data will be retained will vary depending on how long we need to process it for, the reason it was collected, and in line with any statutory requirements. After this point the data will either be deleted, or we may retain a secure anonymised record for research and analytical purposes. In the event that you ask us to stop sending you direct marketing/fundraising/other electronic communications, we will keep your name on our internal suppression list to ensure that you are not contacted again. Policy amendments We keep this Privacy Policy under regular review and reserve the right to update from time-to-time by posting an updated version on our website, not least because of changes in applicable law. We recommend that you check this Privacy Policy occasionally to ensure you remain happy with it. We may also notify you of changes to our privacy policy by email. Third party websites We link our website directly to other sites. This Privacy Policy does not cover external websites and we are not responsible for the privacy practices or content of those sites. We encourage you to read the privacy policies of any external websites you visit via links on our website. Updating information You can check the personal data we hold about you, and ask us to update it where necessary, by emailing us at webmaster@marxist.com Contact We are not required by law to have a Data Protection Officer however we have a Data Protection Manager. Please let us know if you have any queries or concerns whatsoever about the way in which your data is being processed by emailing the Data Protection Manager at webmaster@marxist.com EAGLECROP.jpg the Berkshire Eagle has been sold to local ownership. (Photo Provided) PITTSFIELD -- Four newspapers, including the Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, have been sold to a group of Western Massachusetts investors, some with deep ties to the newspaper industry. Included in the deal are the Bennington Banner, the Brattleboro Reformer and the Manchester Journal, the Eagle reportedA Thursday on its website. The papers had been owned by Digital First Media Inc. The price of the sale was not disclosed. The Berkshire Eagle will return to local ownership for the first time in 20 years. The new owners, Birdland Acquisition LLC, take over on May 2. Principals in the new company include three Stockbridge residents: John C. "Hans" Morris, former president of Visa Inc.; Fredric D. Rutberg, former Pittsfield District Court judge; and Robert G. Wilmers, chairman and CEO of M&T Bank. The fourth principal is Stanford Lipsey, publisher emeritus of The Buffalo News and former owner, publisher and Pulitzer Prize winner for The Sun Newspaper Group in Nebraska. According toA The Eagle's story: "Rutberg said Birdland's investment is intended to:"reinvigorate The Eagle and its future" as a quality print and digital news and information resource devoted to the local community it serves. As a first step, the new ownership group intends to add new jobs to the staff during the first year." The paper said new positions will be in the newsroom, marketing, web and technical services, finance and accounting. Existing staff will remain in place. Paul McCartney Paul McCartney performs at the Lollapalooza Music Festival in Grant Park on Friday, July 31, 2015, in Chicago. (Steve C. Mitchell/Invision/AP) What a long and winding road Paul McCartney's had since 1970, the year the Beatles broke up. In the decades since, he's released two dozen studio albums, played with everyone from Michael Jackson to Nirvana, been given a knighthood and has circled the globe multiple times on tour. Every McCartney era, from "Ram" to Wings to 2013's "New," has its supporters, but even one of the world's most beloved songwriters has his highlights. We've counted down 15 of our favorites since Sir Paul and the Fab Four called it quits. Stream this playlist on Spotify. 15. "New" McCartney worked with a handful of top producers for his 2013 album of the same name, arriving at one of his better, bolder latter-day collections. "Don't look at me," he warns on this one, a bright flash of piano-pop that plays it too humble: who's still doing songs this great 50 years later? 14. "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" McCartney's first solo No. 1 remains one of his strangest songs, a split track detailing some odd British characters alongside rain sounds and a return of the "Yellow Submarine" telephone voice. 13. "Ebony and Ivory" The history of race-relations pop is littered with failuresa"Accidental Racist," anyone?aso it's a relief that the marriage of McCartney and Stevie Wonder is a loving, slightly adventurous collaboration. The 1982 track spent seven weeks at No. 1, which was a new peak for even the hit-making Wonder. 12. "Vanilla Sky" Soundtrack work has been fruitful for McCartney, whose song for the Tom Cruise film evokes the acoustic solemnity of "Blackbird" as well as the double-tracked vocals of Beatles apostle Elliott Smith. 11. "Cut Me Some Slack" An unexpected track with the remaining members of Nirvana, recorded for Dave Grohl's "Sound City" documentary, 2013's "Cut Me Some Slack" is probably the heaviest McCartney's been since "Helter Skelter." He crushes it. 10. "Say, Say, Say" It's a shame Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney's relationship fell apart after the King of Pop bought the Beatles catalog at auction: Jackson's energy coaxes an urgent performance out of McCartney, and the song's ecstatic horns tap the former Beatle into a soulful vein he hadn't touched since his early days covering the likes of Little Richard and Chuck Berry. 9. "Let Me Roll It" A very John Lennon songathe slapback vocal effect, the crackling blues guitarathat softens into a harmonious chorus. 8. "The Back Seat of My Car" Vocals flow with syrupy sweetness on the "Ram" track, a nowhere-to-go ballad that shifts gears masterfully from lazy verse to chorus force. 7. "Here Today" A haunting song posed as a question to the late Lennon, the 1982 track was produced by "Fifth Beatle" George Martin and is rich with the feeling of his signature strings. 6. "Listen to What the Man Said" Probably McCartney's finest entry into the Peak Hot Sax era of the '70s and '80s, courtesy of player Tom Scott 5. "Another Day" One of those effortless campfire sing-a-longs McCartney's done dozens of, and yet when he leans into that "so sad, so sad," it's heartbreak all over again. 4. "Band on the Run" One of McCartney's biggest hits with Wings, "Band on the Run" remains an escapist anthem, with its many sections proof his ambitions didn't end with the Beatles. 3. "Live and Let Die" What an opening line: "When you were young and your heart was an open book," McCartney sings with nostalgic ease, before the song turns spy-movie melodramaticaa classic McCartney segue, and one of the James Bond franchise's finest theme songs. 2. "Jet" McCartney gets back on that U.S.S.R. plane, bound somewhere even more exciting on the driving 1973 single. 1. "Maybe I'm Amazed" The best solo love song by the best love song writer of the rock era, with a guitar solo so good, McCartney plays it twice. -- David Greenwald dgreenwald@oregonian.com 503-294-7625; @davidegreenwald Instagram: Oregonianmusic HOLYOKE -- It gets hot in the kitchen feeding large groups of hungry people, but the latest class of foodWorks@Kate's Kitchen graduates can handle the heat. A group of nine students were celebrated Wednesday evening for successfully completing the culinary training program operated by Providence Ministries Service Network in South Holyoke. The 12-week program offers hands-on kitchen instruction, career development classes and life skills training. Their skills are put to use by cooking hot meals at the soup kitchen every day of the year. In an average week, the chefs-in-training cook meals for up to 200. It is open to individuals with barriers to traditional education, and enrollment preference is granted to those recently released from prison, homeless, veterans and low-income people. A portion of the graduates from the most recent class are homeless and several enrolled to provide a better life for their children. The students and their families celebrated their achievement during a graduation ceremony held at the Hamilton Street center on Wednesday evening. As each student was handed a certificate of completion, the room erupted into applause and cheers. "This is our seventh and largest class to graduate," executive chef Ralph Webb said. The graduates include: Adam Harrison, Montsho Gallardo, Denis Maro, Michael Medina, Jason Nieves, Jocelyn Nieves, Jose Ortiz, Aidy Santiago and Carol Wilson. Students complete an internship with Log Cabin Delaney House as apart of the three-month course. In recognition with the group's hard work, every student has been offered a position with the Holyoke business. "Not all will be able to take it," Webb said, due to transportation barriers some students face, but he believes they'll accept other employment opportunities soon after graduation. Several local officials attended the ceremony to congratulate the students. State Rep. Aaron Vega said he looked forward to each running a kitchen or opening their own restaurants someday. State Sen. Don Humason joked with the group that he looks forward to seeing them in their places of employment soon. He said, "In case you didn't know this, I like to eat." c.jpg Amherst Regional Middle School students want to change Columbus Day to Indigenous People's day movement. From left, Aarti Lamberg, Innis Gallagher, Hillary Atkinson (kneeling), Mohan Setty-Charity (center), Melinda Medwinter(kneeling), Jesse Barker Plotkin (standing, behind), Kelly Brown (far right). (Diane Lederman / The Repubilcan) AMHERST -- The Amherst Regional School Committee recently agreed to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day, but the eighth-grade students who brought this to the committee are not done. Next up is the Amherst Town Meeting next month. The meeting begins May 2, but the date the student-driven petition article will be heard is unclear. The students are asking the town to recognize Indigenous Peoples Day -- a holiday with roots in Berkeley, California, that honors Native American history and culture instead of Christopher Columbus. "I was impressed and moved by the students presentation to the School Committee," their Amherst Regional Middle School teacher Matthew Venditti said in an email. "The members of the School Committee made it clear that they value student initiative and participation in a democratic process. "We are tremendously grateful to the School Committee as well as Assistant Superintendent (Michael) Morris for allowing the students the opportunity to share their thoughts," Venditti wrote. Eighteen students from Venditti's class are bringing the request to Town Meeting following a class project in which they studied Columbus. The resolution that Town Meeting will consider asks that, in Amherst, the second Monday of October will commemorate Indigenous Peoples Day "in recognition of the indigenous people of America's position as native to these lands, and the suffering they faced following European conquest of their lands." Through a range of readings, students said they learned about accounts of Columbus enslaving indigenous people, including selling girls as young as nine into slavery. Students said they had heard snippets about Columbus having a less-than-stellar history, but nothing like what they learned in this project. While students are happy with the School Committee decision, celebrations will wait, Venditti wrote. Right now, "students are focused on preparing for the Town Meeting." Katie Allan Zobel.jpg Katie Allen Zobel, president Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts, speaks at "Informed Giving: A Look at Philanthropy's Role in Estate Planning" panel March 30. (Glenmeadow Retirement Community) LONGMEADOW -- In a panel discussion last month, attorneys and financial advisers outlined the opportunities and benefits of combining estate planning with philanthropic ventures. Part of Glenmeadow Retirement Community's Glenmeadow Learning series, the panel was held at Longmeadow Country Club March 30. The event, called "Informed Giving: A Look at Philanthropy's Role in Estate Planning," was presented as a partnership between Glenmeadow and the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts, a Glenmeadow statement said. "The majority of Americans are reactive givers," said Katie Allen Zobel, president of the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts, who moderated the panel. "Many of us don't stop and think strategically about what we're trying to accomplish with our gifts." The Community Foundation, which has been operating for 25 years, is a local nonprofit that focuses on philanthropic gifts from members of the community, the statement said. Each year it distributes $8 million to $10 million through grants and scholarship programs that benefit students and nonprofits in Hampden, Hampshire and Franklin counties. During the presentation last month, the approximately 20 people in attendance listened as five panelists went over the financial and legal mechanisms through which gifts can be made. They also talked about tax benefits of giving gifts and shared some stories of their own philanthropic ventures. Answering questions about developing a plan, Zobel recommended assembling a team including a financial planner and tax attorney. Todd C. Ratner, an attorney with Bacon Wilson P.C., told the group that some simple ways people can give are bequests in wills and revocable trusts. More complicated charitable giving includes charitable remainder trusts and charitable lead trusts, Panelist David Starr, president and former publisher of The Republican, told the group about a charitable trust he and his wife, Peggy, set up for the Springfield Museums, WFCR radio, Springfield Symphony and WGBY-TV. "We wanted to make sure (the money would) live on after we didn't," Starr said. "We gave it while we were still alive, and while they all needed the funds." john maybury.jpg John Maybury, of East Longmeadow, is the 2016 winner of the Boy Scouts of America's Western Mass. Council Distinguished Citizen Award. (THE REPUBLICAN FILE) EAST LONGMEADOW For his 40 years in business, in which time he maintained a working relationship with the town of East Longmeadow, the Boy Scouts of America's Western Mass. Council is bestowing John Maybury with its Distinguished Citizen Award. Maybury will receive the award at a ceremony at Chez Josef in Agawam on April 26 at 6 p.m. In a statement about the award, the Boy Scouts Western Massachusetts Council applauded Maybury's success in business and his focus on community relations. "Maybury's success can be attributed to John's visionary leadership, complemented by his hands-on approach to people and process management," the statement says about Maybury's leadership of Maybury Material Handling, of which he is president. Maybury founded Maybury Material Handling with his father in 1976, while he was still a student at Western New England University. "John's past and current community involvement is extensive both regionally and nationally," the BSA statement says. "Some of the more recent positions that he has held include Safety Council of Western Massachusetts Board Member and President of the Material Handling Equipment Distributors Association (MHEDA)." Maybury is a longstanding member of the Young Presidents Organization and is currently the Chair of the Board of Directors of the WestMass Development Corp. He also is on the Board of Trustees of Baystate Health System and is immediate past chair of the board for Baystate Health Foundation. Maybury currently serves as a member of East Longmeadow's Board of Public Works, to which he was re-elected last week. Major General L. Scott Rice, of Southampton, will serve as a guest speaker at the event. Rice, an Eagle Scout, is adjutant general in the Massachusetts National Guard. He currently serves as Chairman of the Air National Guard Structure and Modernization committee of the Adjutants General Association. He has been nominated by President Obama for his third star in the rank of Lt General, and has been nominated by Secretary of Defense Ash Carter to become director of the Air National Guard. APTOPIX Ecuador Earthquake Neighbors Carlos Bardales, left, and Cesar Filay, share a mattress as they sleep outside their collapsed homes damaged by a 7.8-magnitude earthquake, in Manta, Ecuador, Wednesday, April 20, 2016. Ecuadoreans began burying loved ones felled by the country's deadliest earthquake in decades, while hopes faded that more survivors will be found. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd) (Rodrigo Abd) MANTA, Ecuador -- A magnitude-6.1 aftershock Wednesday set babies crying and sent nervous residents pouring into the streets, fearful of yet more damage following the deadly earthquake over the weekend. The pre-dawn jolt was the strongest aftershock yet since Saturday's magnitude-7.8 quake that killed more than 500 people. Some people in Portoviejo abandoned their homes, even those with no apparent damage, and headed to a former airport where temporary shelters have been set up. The government said the number of known dead stood at 553, but officials expected more bodies to be found. About 7,000 were injured. At least 11 foreigners were among the dead, including two Canadians and three Cuban doctors who had been on a medical mission to Ecuador. The final toll could surpass casualties from earthquakes in Chile and Peru in the past decade. Among the survivors, the situation was growing increasingly tense. While humanitarian aid has been pouring in from around the world, distribution is slow. In Manta on Wednesday, people waited for hours under the tropical sun for water and food supplies. Soldiers kept control with fenced barricades. "They looted the store. I'm taking out what little remains," Jose Encalada said as he cleaned up his paint store in Pedernales, one of the hardest-hit towns. Reflecting some of the desperation, residents in Manta could be seen scavenging through the rubble, no longer looking for loved ones but trying to salvage metallic objects and other items of value. Grief mounted as families buried loved ones, but people held out hope of finding some of 163 people the government said were still missing. Since Saturday, 54 people have been rescued from rubble alive. Rescuers who have arrived from Mexico, Colombia, Spain and other nations said they would keep searching for survivors, but cautioned that time was running out and the likelihood of finding more people alive grew smaller with the passage of every hour. As authorities begin to shift their attention to restoring electricity and clearing debris, the earth continued to move. Local seismologists have recorded more than 550 aftershocks, some felt 105 miles (170 kilometers) away in the capital of Quito. Saturday's earthquake destroyed or damaged about 1,500 buildings and left some 23,500 people homeless, the government said. It was the worst temblor in Ecuador since one in 1949 killed more than 5,000 people. A helicopter flyover of the damage zone Wednesday showed the scale of the devastation, with entire city blocks in ruins as if they had been bombed. Some 13 nations and 32,000 volunteers are involved in the relief effort. Cuba sent more health workers. Venezuela has flown in food and the U.S. government said it would send a team of disaster experts as well $100,000 in assistance. President Rafael Correa has spent the past days overseeing relief efforts and delivering supplies. On Wednesday, he said he would soon announce economic measures to help rebuild. The quake caused $3 billion in damage, about 3 percent of gross domestic product, he said. "This isn't a problem of just three days, three weeks or three months," Correa said. "It's a problem that will take years." After a deadly earthquake in Chile in 2010, that South American country was able to get back on its feet quickly thanks to a commodities boom that was energizing its economy. But Ecuador must rebuild amid a deep recession that has forced austerity on the OPEC nation's finances. Even before the quake, the International Monetary Fund was forecasting the oil-dependent economy would shrink 4.5 percent this year. evp pr bentley.jpg Bentley and his owner, Mike Smist, visit a resident at East Village Place in East Longmeadow. EAST LONGMEADOW Residents and staff at an assisted living facility this month will recognize a helping hand ... or paw. East Village Place in East Longmeadow will recognize Bentley, a 3-year-old Bichon Maltese mix on Pet Therapy Day, April 30, for his work bringing comfort to residents in need of some extra love, East Village Place marketing director Jessica Szczepanek said. "Everybody loves seeing him," Szczepanek said. "He certainly brightens everyone's day, he's always wagging his tail and is happy to see everybody." Bentley has become East Village Place's resident pooch, visiting twice each day. His laid-back attitude and penchant for petting have made residents at the facility look forward to seeing their furry friend. Owner Michael Smist started bringing Bentley to East Village Place, where his aunt lives, soon after he adopted him. Immediately, he became the facility's most popular pup. "As we walked in, people would just come over and pet him whether it be residents or staff," Smist said. "Everybody's so in love, he has a great temperament." Bentley even shows a spiritual side, sitting in his own chair and listening attentively during Catholic Mass services held at East Village some Fridays, Smist said. But once the ceremony is over, he often jumps right into the priest's arms. Visits from Bentley bring joy to many residents who used to have their own dogs before moving to East Village Place, said Szczepanek. Contact with pets is known to benefit elders, East Village Place executive director Pam Skiba said in a statement. "Dogs and companion animals provide affection and unconditional love and we appreciate (Bentley's owner, Mike Smist) and Bentley's regular visits," Skiba said. "He brings a smile to everyone's face and has a wonderful calming effect on people." On April 30, staff and residents will show their thanks to Bentley with treats and toys, Szczepanek said. But according to Smist, they won't have to look very far to find something Bentley likes. "He loves their food (at East Village Place)," Smist said. "Anything that they serve him he likes." DALLASU.S. District Judge Sidney Fitzwater earlier today denied the Motion for Preliminary Injunction against the City of Dallas filed by Three Expo Events, LLC in its attempt to rent the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center for this year's Exxxotica Lifestyle Expo. The judge apparently bought the city's contention that rather than being a public forum for free speech, which has been rented out over the years to religious and political groups, the convention center is merely "rented for commercial purposes" and is a "limited public forum"which nonetheless hosted the Exxxotica convention in 2015. Accepting the city's claims that Exxxotica's manager J. Handy had allowed "many of the women at Exxxotica" to wear "only pasties or tape covering their nipples and areolas and otherwise exposed their breasts; that sexual activities, including 'the fondling or other erotic touching of genitals, pubic region, buttocks, anus or female breasts' had occurred, and "that Three Expo did not arrange for drapes or screens to be positioned so as to block the view of the exhibit space from the lobby, and that, when entrance and exit doors were open to permit passage, persons in the Convention Center lobby could observe adult material; that identification was not uniformly checked, and attendees of Exxxotica saw a young woman in the exhibit space who did not appear to be age 18; and that Three Expo failed to post signs at the entrance doors prohibiting unlawful conduct, as it had promised," the judge ruled that Exxxotica had violated the promises it had made to the city regarding conduct at the convention center. The judge also apparently believed the city's claim that "lewd acts, assault, and human trafficking" had occurred at the 2015 Expo. [Emphasis added for the defamation] After concluding that Three Expo had standing to bring its preliminary injunction motion, the judge detailed four requirements that Three Expo had to meet in order to prevail in its motion: "(1) a substantial likelihood that it will prevail on the merits; (2) a substantial threat that it will suffer irreparable injury if the injunction is not granted; (3) that the threatened injury outweighs the threatened harm the injunction may do to defendants; and (4) that granting the preliminary injunction will not disserve the public interest." [Citations omitted here and below] While it seems obvious that Three Expo meets all of those criteria, and though the judge recognized that Exxxotica's acceptance of its exhibitors' promotion of sexually explicit content was within everyone's First Amendment rights, he nonetheless ruled that the convention center is not a "traditional public forum" nor a "designated public forum" which would require the city to "show that its regulation is necessary to serve a compelling state interest and that it is narrowly drawn to achieve that end," nor even a "limited public forum," where "the government is not required to, and often does not, allow persons to engage in every type of speech." Even so, in a limited public forum, the government may not "discriminate against speech on the basis of viewpoint," as the Dallas City Council Resolution clearly does. Judge Fitzwater, a Ronald Reagan appointee, also considered whether the convention center is actually a "nonpublic forum," which "describes public property that is not by tradition or designation open for public communication," apparently no matter how many groups of whatever size have already used the convention center as the forum for extolling their views. "As with a limited public forum, the government can restrict access to a nonpublic forum as long as the restrictions are reasonable and are not an effort to suppress expression merely because public officials oppose the speakers view," the judge wrote in his opinion. The judge bought Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's claim in his amicus brief that "the City, 'acting as a proprietor,' manages the Convention Center as a commercially useful asset," and that "the Convention Center is a commercial enterprise intended to promote economic development," and that "the Citys maintenance and management of the Convention Center are for the purpose of fueling economic growth, not for encouraging public discourse." The judge noted that Three Expo had never addressed the issue of whether the convention center was in fact a "public forum," apparently because that seemed obvious from its size and capacity, and from its history of hosting religious, political and other groups which had engaged in speech activity while there, which Three Expo did mention in its filings. "Amici recognize that '[s]peech does, of course, take place at the Convention Center,' but they argue that because the City did not create the Convention Center for purposes of providing a forum for expressive activity, the presence of speech does not convert the Convention Center into a public forum," the judge wrote. "Rather, they posit that any speech at the Convention Center 'is simply the byproduct of the commercial enterprise.'" In the end, Judge Fitzwater ruled that the question was whether the convention center is a "designated public forum" or a "limited public forum," and essentially ruled that that is such a fact-intensive question that it will need to be left to a judge and/or jury to decide. "The capacity of the Convention Center to host an event such as Exxxotica, however, does not establish, or even necessarily support, the premise that the City has designated the Convention Center to be the functional equivalent of a quintessential public forum," Judge Fitzwater concluded. "Nor are statements on the Convention Centers website that 'the Convention Center is big and big things happen there' sufficient to establish, as Three Expo contended during oral argument, that the Convention Center is a designated public forum because it is 'open to anyone who wants to stage an expo or a trade show [there].' Although Three Expo may be able to do so at a later stage in this litigation, it has not supported its motion for a preliminary injunction with any evidence that would permit the court to find that the City has opened up the Convention Center for all types of expressive activity, or that members of the public who wish to use Convention Center space can do so without first obtaining the Citys permission." Finally, the judge ruled that it was reasonable for the city to deny Exxxotica's use of the convention center because Handy had reneged on promises made regarding exhibitors' and guests' conduct during the expo, which conduct had violated the city's sexually oriented businesses ordinance, including "evidence that the DPD [Dallas Police Department] arrested nine 'Johns,' who had responded to ads that the DPD had posted on a website that referred to 'Exxotica' or 'Exxxotica.'" "On this record, the City has proved that its posited justifications for refusing to enter into a contract with Three Expo for Exxxotica in 2016 were reasonable in light of the purpose to be served by the Convention Center," he wrote. "As Amici point out in their brief, the Convention Center is a commercial enterprise intended to promote economic development and revenue generation for the City. It is reasonable, in light of this purpose, for the City to refuse to enter into a contract with Three Expo... The preliminary injunction record does not support the finding that the City was actually motivated by a desire to suppress Three Expos viewpoint. On its face, the Resolution is both content and viewpoint neutral." The judge's full opinion can be read here. According to Three Expo attorney J. Michael Murray, the judge's ruling means that Three Expo will be unable to hold Exxxotica at the convention center during May 20-22, though it may try to find another venue for the expo. "We were disappointed with the court's ruling, but we regard this to be just a temporary setback," Murray told AVN. "We plan on forging ahead with the litigation and gather additional evidence to fortify our position. And while we may not be able to meet the projected dates for the convention in May, there are other dates that will become available, so it doesn't eliminate the need for further litigation. We are currently studying all of the legal options that are available and will be deciding on which of the various options to pursue after talking to the clients and my co-counsel." (H/t to Susan and David Bradley for all the info.) Adult star MILF Julia Ann is heading to Hedonism, Jamaica for her second annual Fan Vacation with members of her official site JuliaAnnLive.com and her new site WomenByJuliaAnn.com . The Fan Vacation is scheduled to run from Saturday, April 30, to May 7, 2016 . Last minute bookings can be set up using this link "I tried a fan vacation for the first time ever last year," Julia Ann stated. "I have to say it was an absolute blasteverything from snorkeling to just relaxing by the pool. It's been another busy year of shooting and I am looking forward to the trip. Hedo really relaxes me. My website members and fans are a big part of my life. Sharing a tropical vacation is a unique way for fans to interact and bond with me. There's still time to book a trip and jump on a plane! Clothing is not required once you get off the plane!" For those who can't make it to Hedo, Julia Ann is live most Wednesdays at her official site JuliaAnnLive.com and Mondays for members of WomenByJuliaAnn.com. She is scheduled to appear at Exxxotica Chicago July 8-10. It has been another busy year for Julia. In addition to her regular schedule of shooting, she just launched her new women's lifestyle site WomenByJuliaAnn.com to rave reviews. Julia Ann is a Hall of Fame star (AVN & XRCO), plus she won AVN's fan vote for Hottest MILF 2015. She has a product line with Doc Johnson, "Julia Ann: MILF in a Box." She was named by CNBC one of the top 12 stars in all of adult. Julia Ann is part of Vicky Vette's popular VNA Network of Girls which also includes stars like Jelena Jensen, Nikki Benz, Puma Swede, Sara Jay and others. Her national commercial for popular dating giant CougarLife.com is still running across the United States. The SugarCane Boy Book Club (SCB Bookclub) successfully launched their book club at Elles c Nous Association on Saturday, 17th September. The launch saw the presence of HE B. Vyapooree, former Vice President of Mauritius, Mrs Milene Abdoolkader MSK, Founder and President of the association, Mrs Anju Hawoldar, Business Development Executive of Leavers to Leaders and Mr Dharvin Appadu, Head of Operations, SCB bookclub. During the launch, those giving their speech emphasised the importance of reading and education. Dreams and ambition were spoken of, with the children mentioning their aspirations of becoming footballers, and artists. | All the children were offered the book The SugarCane Boy: The Journey Begins, sponsored by Leavers to Leaders. The book was written by Alyssia A. Reddy, a young author of 16 years. Her two titles, The SugarCane Boy, The Journey Begins & The Adventures in Dodo land are based on the superhero Sam, a boy simple at sight, special on the inside who gains his superpowers from the sugar cane crop. Her journey as an author seems to have inspired some of the children present as a young talent was put in the spotlight. Henley, a vital member of Elles C Nous Assoc, did a scale-up picture of the book cover for the launch of SCB Bookclub Elles C Nous. Mrs Abdool Kader MSK said: I am delighted to see this collaboration with SCB bookclubs and after 15 years in service, we are really looking forward to the next 15 years. Mrs Anju Hawoldar added: As a training organisation, we are on a mission to develop the next generations of leaders. Mauritius is an ageing population, and this means we have to ensure that those underprivileged children are our focus. As Samuel T. Reddy says, we are living in a time when business leaders can solve some of the worlds biggest problems. Ours at Leavers to Leaders is aligned with SDG 4 to improve youth literacy. In October this year, we are opening in Kenya, Nairobi which is the biggest slum in Africa. Mr Barlen Vyapoory said: Sugar cane is a magical plan, it just needs sun & water to provide us with so many things, and today it is the name of a book club to improve youth literacy. SCB Bookclub is a project to improve youth literacy and is run in RCA, Government & Private schools, as well as in selected NGOs, shelters and orphanages. SCB Bookclub Elles C Nous SCB Bookclub Elles C Nous SCB Bookclub Elles C Nous SCB Bookclub Elles C Nous SCB Bookclub Elles C Nous SCB Bookclub Elles C Nous Partager et informez vous aussi...... 0 shares Share Tweet LinkedIn Articles similaires Adult stars Vicky Vette and Sunny Lane announce that they are signing this weekend April 22 through 24 at the popular horror-themed expo Chiller Theatre at the Sheraton Parsippany Hotel, 199 Smith Road, Parsippany, NJ 07054. Fans can check both stars' Twitters (@vickyvette and @SunnyLane) for exact showtimes and news over the weekend. This is the first time either star has appeared at the popular mainstream convention. The diverse list of performers appearing this weekend at Chiller includes Weird Al Yankovic, Alice Cooper, Meatloaf, the stars of C.H.I.P.s, comedian Rob Schneider, Kim Coates from Sons of Anarchy, Tara Reid from Sharknado and the surviving members of the Monkees (the full list of guests can be found here. One of adult's best known stars, Vicky Vette was just inducted into the AVN 2016 Hall of Fame but also just won the AVN Award for Best Solo Site of the Year for VickyAtHome.com. Vicky is one of only three adult stars ever to star in a mainstream Indonesian horror movie (Pacar Hantu Perawan), a feat that was chronicled in Time magazine due to Indonesia's strict censorship of adult videos (Sasha Grey and Tera Patrick being the other two). She also starred in indie horror movie Fuckenstein. Sunny Lane is one of adult's successful mainstream crossover stars. Mainstream projects include Chillerama, Midgets vs. Mascots (starring Gary Coleman, Jason Mewes, Scottie Pippen, and Ron Jeremy), Look, Guido (starring Gary Busey, and Billy Zane) and more. She was the object of Joseph Gordon-Levitt's fantasies in Don Jon and the one of the focal points of the documentary Naked Ambition, which can be seen on Netflix. In adult, Sunny has starred in features such as Alice ( a XXX retelling of Alice in Wonderland) and BatGirl XXX. "I am very excited to go to my first ever Chiller," Vicky said. "It's completely different for me. Fans are already hitting me up on Twitter excited to go to the event. I will be dressing up in a different costume every day for fun. My biggest horror movie credit was shot for Indonesia but it remains one of the my career highlights. I still get asked about it because it was very controversial in that country. I am looking forward to mingling with the fans this weekend!" "It's amazing with all the conventions I do every year around the country that I never have gone to a Chiller Theatre before," Sunny noted. "They are known for being a lot of fun. I have always enjoyed getting involved in mainstream projects and look forward to doing more in the future. This weekend in New Jersey should be a blast. Come out and meet us!" Both Vicky and Sunny are part of the popular VNAGirls.com Network. They plan on streaming live for members of their respective websites from the convention. On social media follow Vicky Vette on Twitter and Instagram. On social media follow Sunny Lane on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Chicken will be the best-positioned protein due to its low price position in times of pressure on consumer spending power but rises in production costs and the long-term impact of COVID-19 threaten to disrupt the sector, according to Rabobank. AppNexus announced updates to its viewability offering on Thursday, as well as a Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation on its viewability measurement tools for desktop display ads. MRC-accredited vendor based in Paris . Now, the MRC is accrediting the new AppNexus viewability tech with Alenty's tech baked in -- allowing clients to run AppNexus's viewability reporting or opt for a third party vendor's reporting. First, there's the accreditation. In 2014, AppNexus acquired viewability measurement company Alenty , an. Now, the MRC is accrediting the new AppNexus viewability tech with Alenty's tech baked in -- allowing clients to run AppNexus's viewability reporting or opt for a third party vendor's reporting. AppNexus is using the Alenty tech acquisition with two products: viewable deals and automated viewable guarantees. With both products, AppNexus is investing in what it sees as a future ad market where viewable impressions are the currency people will be trading on, said Andrew Eifler, VP-product management, AppNexus. A viewability-transacted media ecosystem could mean publishers design pages in a way that betters the user experience. High-quality publishers will get more money, and sites made just for purpose of hosting as many ads as possible simply will not be paid, Eifler said. Eifler also mentioned that most of the companies with MRC viewability accreditation are pure-play viewability or brand safety companies. Will other ad stacks follow AppNexus by baking viewability tech into their platforms? Eifler thinks so. "In general, its fairly clear to us that the future of digital media will be transacting on a viewable basis," he said, adding, "I think, in a year from now, if a DSP or SSP doesn't have this solution, they will be left behind. Its just very clear that's the way market's going." by J. Max Robins , Featured Columnist, April 20, 2016 When President Obama registered his support for allowing consumers to (gasp!) choose their own set-top boxes, I envisioned the collective exploding heads of the cable lobby. For decades, the cable industry has had a tyrannical stranglehold on customers, minting millions from set-top-box rentals. The president was wisely drafting on a Federal Communications Commission proposal that would loosen the cable/telco/satellite industry grip on those pesky boxes and open the market wide to companies like Apple, Roku and Google. The presidents chief economic advisor, Jason Furman, rightly compared it to the bad old days of the telco monopoly, when everybody was stuck with rotary phones, even though more efficient devices were available. Right on cue, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association lashed back at the president, saying he was playing favorites to his Silicon Valley pals that have been lobbying the FCC to let them compete with behemoths such as Comcast, AT&T and Verizon to be the set-top box of choice. Predictably, Republicans in Congress claimed Obama was overstepping his bounds, in an imperial White House gambit to bully the FCC. Michael Powell, the commissions former chairman under George W. Bush, and now head of the National Cable & Telecommunications Associationwhere he enjoys a salary about five times the presidentscharged that the White House was choosing to inject politics and inflammatory rhetoric into a regulatory proceeding by what is supposed to be an independent agency. Certainly the White House is playing politics hereand a smart game of political gamesmanship at that. And oh, the irony to hear such alleged proponents of free markets in Congress and elsewhere, rail against removing regulations that would open up the set-top-box market. Its a smart move by the Obama Administration to target set-top-box liberation as the model on how to address myriad industries where domination by a few major players means higher prices for consumers while putting the brakes on innovation. All of which begs a question: Which companies have a higher consumer satisfaction rating and are generally considered more trustworthy? Apple, Amazon and Google, or those on the other side of the debate, such as Comcast, Verizon and AT&T? Obviously, Obama knows the answer, as Im sure everyone reading this does. Oh,wait: The cable companies will answer as soon as the next representative is free. One can understand the consternation of the cable and telco industries. They, as well as the Motion Picture Association of America, among others, argue that the FCC proposal supported by the Obama Administration might undermine copyright protections, hurt minority programmers, reduce consumer privacy and impose new costs to reengineer networks. Certainly, the proposed changes would present challenges, but they all seem surmountable. As weve seen in the exploding TV Everywhere universe, with the success of Netflix, YouTube, Hulu and others, the more open things get, the more diverse programming becomesnot less so. Those braying against Obama and the FCC have the technological wherewithal to address what are, in my view, overstated concerns about privacy, copyright and piracy. Yes, liberating the set-top box will tighten the spigot on a reliable cash cow for the cable industry, but its smarter to try to discover the opportunities afforded by that coming reality than to fight it. Maybe cable and the telcos could win cord-cutters back by thinking outside the box. 9to5Mac , Thursday, April 21, 2016 9:05 AM Apple has confirmed what Siri told us earlier today. The company has now issued a press release in which it says that WWDC will be held from June 13th through June 17th in San Francisco. The same lottery process applies to getting tickets this year as in previous years. Developers can apply for tickets via the WWDC website now through Friday, April 22 at 10:00 a.m. PDT. In a change from traditional years, the Monday keynote will be held at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, not Moscone West. All other conference sessions will take place at Moscone, though. The annual Bash will also be held at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium.] In an unusual chain of events, it appears Apple is announcing the WWDC dates through Siri. Although the Apple website has not been updated with any new info, Siri is proudly proclaiming that WWDC 2016 will indeed be held in San Francisco from June 13th to June 17th. Read the whole story at 9to5Mac by Richard Whitman , Columnist, April 20, 2016 IPG agency Tierney has announced the addition of two new senior creative directors to its leadership team. Michael Lander and David Lan have both been named Senior Vice President, Creative Director reporting into Executive Vice President, Executive Creative Director, Patrick Hardy. The team will serve clients in Tierney's Philadelphia and New York offices. Of the hires, Tierney President and CEO Mary Stengel said, "We plan to continue to invest in and recruit top talent. Our people and the creative solutions they provide our clients is critical to our success. We are committed to expanding our teams across the agency. By adding professionals like Michael and David, we are positioned to offer even better integrated solutions to our clients." In the past, Lander led creative for brands including PNC Bank, Citibank, Dime Bank, IBM, Samsung, Dos Equis and the NFL. At BBDO, he ran social and digital for Visa and developed creative technologies for HP. At EURO RSCG/HAVAS, he headed the digital team for Oppenheimer and served as Social Media Creative Director for Cadillac at BigFuel. He's received recognition from Cannes and the New York Addys and he's received a Webby for his work on Samsung and an Effie nod for the website he developed for the Visa Signature Card. Lan began his career as an art director at Ogilvy. He's led campaigns for OBERLAND, 360i, McCann, Digitas, and MRM Worldwide. During his career Lan has developed a variety of social media and creative campaigns for global brands such as IBM, PNC Bank, Intel, Motorola, Canon, American Express, AT&T, Lenovo, and the NY Mets. His work for IBM has been recognized by the Effies and the New York Addys. by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, April 21, 2016 You never need a good reason to watch a Coen brothers film but Google could have saved itself an awful lot of bother by listening to the end of Burn After Reading. After a hilarious sequence of events has seen everyone either shot or fleeing the country, the CIA superior, played by JK Simmons asks his junior officer what they'd learned from the fiasco before offering his own observation. The CIA had at least learned "not to do it again," even though neither officer had a clue what they'd actually done. Google is in a far more privileged position. It knows exactly what it's done in both of the European Commission anti-competition cases against it. What's more, it knows what it has done because it's similar to the Microsoft case which saw the Seattle giant forced to pay a near half billion Euro fine in 2004. It too had to be less restrictive in its licensing practices and couldn't insist its software was pre-installed and set up as the default. It's hard not to think Google must be dumb, isn't it? You'd have thought it had noted that, although it took six years in that case for the original complaint to lead to a massive fine, the European Commission gets you in the end. It's a little like a Roman catapult that takes a long time to wind up but it's payload is not a pleasant thing to be on the end of when the tension is finally released. Readers of this column will know that I think the American tech giants have misread the feeling in Europe and particularly of the new European Parliament which has expressly told the Commission, its executive arm, to take firmer action against Google. We're almost moving to a position where politicians are saying if you're not going to pay our taxes, we'll find a reason to fine you instead. I'm now wondering whether they have instead read the mood perfectly but have simply done the maths. Going back to those giants, Facebook is on firmer ground because the main complaints leveled against it regard privacy. Just like copyright, this is a notoriously difficult area to get a European-wide ruling on because laws and common practices can vary from one country to another. Instead of facing the European Commission, Facebook will instead find itself fighting individual fires here and there in member states. It's the same for Google around copyright issues that have plagued it for the past couple of years. No, the EU is all about business, or at least it was when it was set up, and so the area where it can deliver the biggest, most concerted punch on the nose to a tax-dodging US tech giant is competition law. It is so obvious that it beggars belief that Google would just carry on ploughing its way to a huge fine. Surely it would smell the proverbial coffee and change its ways? So there are two options here. Google is either incredibly dumb or fantastically clever. The dumb argument is the one that first strikes you but then, if you stop to think, what's the worst that could happen? Let's just imagine it eventually gets fined a tenth of its annual turnover, and remember this is a few year's down the line and we have no idea how much it may get fined this year for its search charge not relating to Android. Some people have another word for losing a tenth of your annual turnover -- tax. In fact, it's normally more than that but if you dodge tax, then 10% once or, worse case scenario twice as a charge for monopolistic abuses doesn't seem too bad, does it? You only have to look around Europe to see that Android is the dominant player and an entire generation is now used to searching via Google. The very worst case scenario is that this will cost Google way less than it should've realistically paid in tax. So, the EU ends up looking strong for fining the naughty tech giant and Google gets to pay way less than it should have if it didn't aggressively avoid tax. Only, at the same time, it gets to dominate the European smartphone market. They say in poker there's a fool round every table and if you don't know who it is, it's probably you. by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, April 21, 2016 BOSTON -- The advertising, media and marketing technology community demonstrated just how strong it truly is here Wednesday during an OMMA Boston conference that covered both very current issues like ad blocking and the shift from ad tech to marketing tech, as well as long-term ones like a consumer-controlled, permission-based ad model and even AI. Consumers have the control in this equation. Although they dont have control of it, is how Josh Engroff, Chief Digital Media Officer of MDC Partners The Media Kitchen, characterized the current paradox of the digital advertising marketplace during the last panel of the day, which focused on how a data-driven consumer marketing scenario might evolve by 2021. Engroff said consumers have grown accustomed to being quantified, and see it as a benefit so long as it creates explicit value or service for them, but that all too often the ad industry applies it in ways that treat consumers as a quantified object. That means you are being quantified by someone else, he said, adding, that doesnt work at all. And for all the lip service Madison Avenue pays to the user experience, Engroff said the reality of the current digital media and advertising environment is that we made the user experience shittier. The seemingly obsessive focus on improving consumer experiences with digital media and advertising reflects the fact that consumers are either ignoring it (ie. banner blindness) or avoiding it altogether (ad blockers, etc.), which is forcing the industry to rethink the core tenants of the so-called value exchange advertising has historically provided. Were still in the early days of the [new] value exchange, acknowledged Robert Tas, CMO of Pegasystems Inc., adding that after 20-plus years of conditioning consumers that they can find and access most content easily and can get most of it for free, the original exchange in which advertising subsidized or underwrote the cost of media content simply no longer works. That was a point made eminently clear during the Sustainable Media Future panel moderated by former New York Times Co. digital chief Martin Nisenholtz, now a professor at Boston University, which revealed that the sustainability of high quality newspaper journalism may depend on a much more explicit value exchange: money. Asked by Nisenholtz why so few people actually pay for newspapers these days, The Boston Globe CEO Mike Sheehan indicated that is beginning to change. He said the Globe how has 70,000 digital subscribers paying $1 a day and that the paper upped the cost 54% last May and that nobody complained about it. He said part of the papers shift to a paid digital subscription success was due to the fact that it removed much of its exclusive Globe content from its free-to-access Boston.com website, as well as the fact that there simply is an increasing regard for the value of the newspapers content, especially following Hollywoods treatment of it in the Oscar-winning movie Spotlight. We have to tighten up our walls and make sure they can only get it by paying, he said. While that doesnt necessarily bode well for the prospects of an ad-supported mass circulation model for newspaper publishing, it revealed how the value exchange between consumers, media and advertisers is entering a new phase. Nowhere was that clearer than during OMMA Bostons opening panel, which focused largely on the impact of ad blockers and strategies for dealing with them. In fact, panelist Alan Pafenbach, creative director, SapientNitro, went so far as to characterize it as the exchange rate is in the process of changing. He said that consumers may still understand the implicit model that advertising is necessary to move the economy along, that it actually helps consumers discover things they didnt realize they needed, and that it pays directly or indirectly for much of the media content and access they receive, but that digital technology has effectively changed the value of the exchange rate. He said that consumers simply dont have a tolerance for intrusive advertising that doesnt provide a direct benefit to them, and technology enables them to avoid -- or in the case of ad blockers -- remove it altogether. Panelist Vegard Johnsen, product manager, Google, who is leading the search and display giants ad blocking blocking efforts made a strong case for their appeal to consumers, noting that they are frictionless, fast and easy to use -- by his count, taking just 18.73 seconds to install on a phone -- and they are being spread by word-of-mouth, with friends recommending them and passing installation links along to friends. Even worse, he said, was that they are a sticky experience and once a user installs an ad blocker, they are likely to keep using them unless given a reason to stop. He said Google is currently in the midst of conducting consumer surveys about their ad blocking experiences and is encouraging the industry-at-large to come together to define standards and best practices for dealing with them. The first step, he said, was to come up with common definitions of what constitutes an obnoxious advertising experience that a consumer would use an ad blocker to block. At least then, he said, the industry would have a basis for creating experiences that consumers dont want to block. Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, April 21, 2016 Facebook this week made strides toward improving transparency, that buzzword everyones chattering about lately. In a blog post, it said its adding independent ad vertification partners to ensure advertisers trust their ad delivery data. Facebook said its partnering with Nielsen, Integral Ad Science and comScore to measure the effectiveness of the video ads on its platform. The expansion of Facebook's third-party verification program as it relates to viewability and attention metrics is a good and timely move. As the fever pitch over transparency and trust grows louder, Facebook made the right move as a leader in the digital advertising ecosystem. advertisement advertisement Frankly, Facebook could have such a move sooner. The company has come under criticism, since marketers dont want to pay for video views that consumers are scrolling past in their newsfeeds vs. actually viewing. They want Facebook to tighten up and improve viewability standards. They want to know whether a consumer actually viewed a video. Is that too much to ask? Last fall, Facebook partnered with Moat, which offers independent verification of Facebook video ad metrics. With the addition of three more partners, Facebook should be inching closer to launching viewability and attention metrics for its platform. Marketers and their agency partners are right to be voicing their frustration. Think of it this way: Dont you want what you pay good money for? In Q1 2016, for example, Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak told the New York Times that 85 cents of every new dollar spent on digital advertising goes to either Facebook or Google. Its incumbent on Facebook and Google to deliver viewability metrics--and soon. by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, April 21, 2016 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (or someone who makes these decisions on her behalf because she could care less) has decided the monarchy could use a little help on social media, it seems. This week Buckingham Palace posted a position serving as social media editor with the Royal Household, the organ which handles these sorts of details so the queen is free to continue being queen, unimpeded by this nonsense. The Royal Household is advertising the job of Head of Digital Engagement with a salary of up to 50,000 (around $71,000), but clearly many of the attractions of working with the queen are non-monetary in nature, as with the British aristocracy in general. The sheer prestige afforded by proximity to the worlds best-known monarch would probably be sufficient inducement to many. The help wanted ad isnt shy about the prestige thing: Its knowing your content will be viewed by millions. It's about never standing still and finding new ways to maintain The Queen's presence in the public eye and on the world stage. This is what makes working for the Royal Household exceptional. advertisement advertisement The listing describes the basic duties, which should sound familiar to many a summer intern: Whether youre covering a state visit, award ceremony or royal engagement, youll make sure our digital channels consistently spark interest and reach a range of audiences. With an eye to the future, youll work to hone and shape our digital communications through sharing best practice, understanding new technologies and stimulating creativity. The queen currently has around 5.3 million followers across social media, a relatively modest number given her fame, suggesting there is plenty of potential for growth, assuming a more active stance in terms of content and interaction. The potential fan following is by no means limited to Britain. By one measure there are at least 300 million fans or enthusiasts who follow the British monarchy around the world: thats the number of viewers who tuned into the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in 2011, including 23 million Americans (estimates of two billion global viewers seem rather a stretch). by Sara Guaglione , April 21, 2016 Just one month after Digital First Media successfully won a bid to acquire Freedom Communications, the media company announced that it will sell New England Newspapers Inc. and The Salt Lake Tribune. New England Newspapers Inc. includes three dailies and one weekly: The Berkshire Eagle, The Brattleboro Reformer, the Bennington Banner and the weekly Manchester Journal. The papers were sold to a local group of investors called Birdland Acquisition LLC. According to an article from Berkshire Eagle announcing the sale, the new owners are led by retired District Court Judge Fredric D. Rutberg, who will be president of NENI. The purchase takes effect May 2. According to The Berkshire Eagle, the new ownership group plans to return an estimated 20 to 25 outsourced jobs in the advertising and production areas and replace them with local hires. An expansion of the local news staff is also expected during the first year, as well as a substantial number of new hires in Web and technical services, finance and accounting. advertisement advertisement Yesterday, Digital First Media announced they were selling The Salt Lake Tribune and its affiliates to Paul Huntsman, son of businessman Jon M. Huntsman, Sr. and brother of former Utah governor and presidential candidate Jon Huntsman Jr. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The Salt Lake Tribune has been an independent news source in Utah since 1871. In 2015, the Tribune had an average paid distribution of 74,000 printed newspapers daily, making it the highest distributed daily newspaper in Utah, according to a statement. We are honored to be stewards of The Salt Lake Tribune, stated Paul Huntsman. It is important that The Salt Lake Tribune continues in its indispensable role for our community and to be locally owned. At the end of March, Publishers Daily reported that Digital First Media won a bid to acquire the assets of Freedom Communications in a bankruptcy auction. Tribune Publishing's $56 million bid was the winning offer, at nearly $10 million more than Digital Firsts runner-up bid to acquire Freedoms assets, which includes the Orange County Register and Riverside Press-Enterprise. Tribune lost the bid only because the Department of Justice stepped in to object to the acquisition. The amount of fat stored in our bodies may be influenced by exposure to phthalates, says research published in Toxicology in Vitro. Share on Pinterest BBPs appear to contribute to the accumulation of lipids. Phthalates are chemicals that occur in a range of products, from nail polish to soap. They commonly feature in plastics, where they enhance elasticity. Previous studies have revealed the presence of phthalates in fluids in the human body, and there is growing evidence to suggest that they are detrimental to human health. Research has linked some phthalates with reproductive problems at high levels of exposure. However, the impact of low-level exposure to butyl benzyl phthalate (BBP) has not been studied fully. Researchers led by Lei Yin, an assistant research scientist at the University of Georgia (UGA) College of Public Healths department of environmental health science believe that phthalates may contribute to the development of various conditions and diseases. With this in mind, they wanted to find out whether BBP affects the way fat accumulates in cells. During the past two decades, vitamin D status, defined as serum concentration of 25-hydroxyvitamin D, has emerged as a predictor of key clinical outcomes including bone health, glucose metabolism, cardiovascular health, immune health and survival. Now, a University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Penn Nursing) team, including senior author Terri Lipman, PhD, CRNP, FAAN, the Miriam Stirl Endowed Term Professor of Nutrition, Professor of Nursing of Children and Assistant Dean for Community Engagement, has examined the association between 25-hydroxyvitamin D and diabetes control in children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes. The results demonstrate the high prevalence of patients with low levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D, specifically in healthy weight and Caucasian children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes-- patients previously considered at no or low risk of having low levels of vitamin D. These data underscore the importance of vitamin D screening in all children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes. The team's findings have been published in Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice. "To our knowledge this is the first study that has been adequately-powered to examine the association between 25-hydroxyvitamin D and HbA1c (a measure of diabetes control) in children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes," said Lipman and colleagues. "These data suggest the need for monitoring of vitamin D in all youth with this disorder." The study included about 200 children and adolescents from the Diabetes Center for Children at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, who were recruited during regular follow up visits. Non-fasting blood samples were collected from the participants to measure 25-hydroxyvitamin D and blood glucose levels. HbA1c and other key variables were abstracted from patients' medical records. A study from the Journal of the American College of Nutrition (JACN) discusses fluid intake adequacy in detail and a simple tool is reviewed that may help healthy, active, low-risk populations answer the question, "Am I drinking enough?" The article "Am I Drinking Enough? Yes, No, and Maybe" by Samuel N. Cheuvront PhD, RD and Robert W. Kenefick PhD is made available with Free Access in JACN Issue 35(2) 2016, the official publication of the American College of Nutrition. Adequacy of fluid intake for replacing meaningful water losses (dehydration) can be assessed simply, inexpensively, and with reasonable fidelity among healthy, active, low-risk individuals. A wide range of fluid intakes are compatible with euhydration (drinking enough), whereby total body water varies narrowly from day to day by 600 to 900 mL (<1% body mass). One measure of fluid intake adequacy involves enough fluid to prevent meaningful body water deficits outside this euhydration range (i.e., dehydration). A second measure of fluid intake adequacy involves enough fluid to balance the renal solute load, which can vary widely inside the euhydration range. The subtle but important distinction between the two types of adequacy may explain some of the ambiguity surrounding the efficacy of hydration status markers. The results show that adequate fluid intake can be dually defined as a volume of fluid (from water, beverages, and food) sufficient to replace water losses and provide for solute excretion. Fluid needs can differ greatly among individuals due to variation in the factors that influence both water loss and solute balance; thus, adequacy is consistent with a wide range of fluid intakes and is better gauged using hydration assessment methods. Adequacy of fluid intake for replacing meaningful water losses (dehydration) can be assessed simply, inexpensively, and with reasonable fidelity among healthy, active, low-risk individuals. Adequacy of fluid intake for solute excretion per se can also be assessed among individuals but is more difficult to define and less practical to measure. The purpose of this article is to explain the theory and practice for using common hydration assessment methods to distinguish between fluid intake adequacy for replacing water losses and balancing solute load. To the authors' knowledge, no paper has addressed fluid intake adequacy using hydration assessment or approached the question with dual perspectives on adequacy. When combined, this approach should improve our application of hydration assessment measures for determining fluid intake adequacy. Long-lasting effect of motivational interviews in reducing risky opioid use. As America battles an epidemic of deaths from misused pain pills, a new study suggests an inexpensive way to cut risky use of these drugs by people who have a high chance of overdosing. And it could happen exactly where many patients get those drugs in the first place: the emergency room of their local hospital. Just a single half-hour session with a trained therapist during an ER visit was enough to motivate people who misused prescription opioid painkillers to reduce their use as well as their riskiest behaviors, the study finds. Over the six months after their ER visit, they were less likely to use the drugs in a way that was inconsistent with a prescription or in ways that could lead to an overdose. Meanwhile, misuse and risky behavior didn't drop as much in a comparison group of similar patients over the same time. The results, from work by a University of Michigan team performed through the U-M Injury Center, were just published online in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence. "It's very promising that we see a reduction in risky behavior with this brief, one-time intervention, among people who weren't seeking treatment for their opioid use but had a history of non-medical use of these drugs," says lead researcher Amy Bohnert, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychiatry in the U-M Medical School and member of the VA Center for Clinical Management Research. "Further research is needed to understand if this leads to longer term impact on health." Motivating users to change The therapists used a technique, called motivational interviewing, that's already been shown to help people reduce their use of tobacco, drugs and alcohol, or to lose weight. In fact, some clinics and hospitals already offer it to help motivate patients to change their behavior, and some insurance companies cover it. But this is the first time it's been studied in a randomized controlled trial specifically to reduce risk for overdose. Just over 200 people participated in the study, and most of them connected with the researchers six months after their ER visit. Motivational interviewing helps people understand the risk that their drug use poses to them, and factors that can increase that risk, such as drinking alcohol or taking certain other drugs such as benzodiazepines while they are on pain medications. But it goes beyond education, using standard techniques to help individuals increase their desire and commitment to change their behavior and make choices different from before. They focus on what they'll need to do to reach the goals that they lay out for themselves. Although the study was just a pilot project, the results are so encouraging that the researchers are hoping to launch an even larger study of the technique. Why the emergency department? Bohnert and her colleagues, including senior author Maureen Walton, M.P.H., Ph.D., conducted the study in a single emergency department, but one that draws a wide range of patients from urban, suburban and rural areas of southeast Michigan. They chose this setting because about half of emergency department visits involve pain, and nearly one-third of emergency patients in the U.S. receive treatment with prescription painkiller medication. Emergency visits related to prescription opioid use - including non-fatal overdoses that can leave a person with permanent lung and brain damage - have more than quadrupled since the 1990s. But emergency care also reaches people who might not visit other healthcare environments, including mental health and addiction treatment centers. And ER visits offer a crucial "teachable moment" during a health crisis that has been thought to be valuable for changing behavior. They screened more than 2,700 emergency patients between the ages of 18 and 60 - the peak years for opioid misuse and overdoses of all kinds, fatal or not, intentional or not. Only people who reported that they took opioid pain pills for non-medical reasons were asked to answer a questionnaire, and to agree to be randomly assigned to one of two study groups. Two-thirds had had a prescription for such pills in the last six months. One group received the usual care, and brochures about how to prevent or respond to overdoses, and how to find local resources for treatment and suicide prevention. The other group had a session with a trained therapist, in addition to receiving these resources. Then, the researchers followed up with all the patients six months later - and most of the 206 people who took part in both groups agreed to fill out a follow-up survey. In the end, those who went through a motivational interview session had a 40.5 percent reduction in behaviors that raised their risk of an overdose, on average, compared with a 14.7 reduction among those who didn't get the session. They also had a 50 percent average reduction in non-medical use of opioids, compared with 39.5 percent reduction in the comparison group. "This intervention was about reducing risk and harm, not necessarily the amount of use, which may have meant the messages were better-received among those who weren't actively seeking treatment for opioid use," says Bohnert. She notes that some larger emergency departments already have social workers and others on their staff who are trained in motivational interviewing with people who report heavy alcohol use. That same training could be applied to people with opioid misuse patterns. The researchers will make their handbook and therapist's guide available for free on the U-M Injury Center website, http://www.injurycenter.umich.edu. The same team is also studying whether the approach works in primary care clinics at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System, with patients who have prescriptions for opioids. To what degree does the excess rate of death in individuals with alcohol use disorder (AUD) happen because of a predisposition in the person who develops AUD compared with the direct effect of the AUD itself? That's the question Kenneth S. Kendler, M.D., of Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, and coauthors examined using Swedish registry information for members of the general population and half-siblings, full-siblings and monozygotic twins discordant (differing) on AUD, according to a new article published online by JAMA Psychiatry. The authors report AUD was associated with excess mortality. The excess death associated with AUD appears to come from both the predisposition of the person who develops AUD and as a direct result of having AUD. The effect of predisposition to AUD was more prominent when people were younger and in the earlier years of AUD and the direct effect of AUD became more important later in life and later in the course of AUD. "These results have clear implications for interventions that seek to reduce the substantially elevated rates of mortality in those with AUD," the authors conclude. Amgen has announced that The Lancet published results from a Phase 3 randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of Nplate (romiplostim) in children with symptomatic immune thrombocytopenia (ITP). The study showed that 52 percent of Nplate patients achieved a durable platelet response, compared with 10 percent of placebo-treated patients (p=0.002, odds ratio 9.1, 95 percent CI: 1.9, 43.2). "Children with ITP are at risk for serious bleeding events due to low platelet counts, which can be very frightening for these children and their parents," said Michael D. Tarantino, M.D., The Bleeding and Clotting Disorders Institute, professor of Pediatrics and Medicine, University of Illinois College of Medicine-Peoria, Peoria, IL. "The results of this study suggest that romiplostim could reduce the frequency and severity of bleeding events for children suffering from symptomatic ITP, thus providing them with another potential treatment option." The study met the primary endpoint of durable platelet response and showed that children who were treated with Nplate had increased rates of overall platelet response, and patients who responded to Nplate maintained consistently elevated platelet counts. These findings demonstrate that Nplate may be a potential treatment option for children with symptomatic ITP of more than six months duration. The most frequently reported adverse events (AEs) included contusion, epistaxis, headache and upper respiratory tract infections. The overall safety profile observed in the Nplate arm was similar to the known safety profile of Nplate. "Nplate helps bone marrow produce more platelets, which in turn helps prevent bruising and bleeding which is important for children faced with this condition. These data are important in understanding how Nplate may play a role in helping children manage this disease," said Sean E. Harper, M.D., executive vice president of Research and Development at Amgen. "We will work with regulatory authorities towards an approval for Nplate for pediatric patients." The treatment goal for children with ITP is to promote a platelet count that maintains appropriate control of bleeding,1 improve symptoms and increase the number of platelets.2 ITP is a rare, serious autoimmune disease characterized by low platelet counts in the blood (a condition known as thrombocytopenia) and impaired platelet production.2,3 In the United States (U.S.), an average estimate of the incidence in children is 5 cases in 1,000 each year.4 About the Phase 3 Study This Phase 3 double-blind study randomized 62 children who have had ITP for more than six months to weekly Nplate or placebo (2:1) for 24 weeks. Durable platelet response, the primary endpoint of the study, was defined as achieving weekly platelet responses (increased platelets) without rescue medication in at least six of the final eight weeks. Secondary endpoints of the study included the evaluation of overall platelet response, the total number of weekly platelet responses, the use of ITP rescue medications, composite bleeding episodes and the overall safety of Nplate. Exploratory endpoints included the evaluation of bleeding incidence and changes in patient reported outcomes (PROs). Rescue medication was defined as any medication intended to increase platelet counts or prevent bleeding, and any increase in dose, frequency or additional therapy was categorized as rescue medication. Patients entering the study were permitted to use the same standard-of-care therapy, dose and schedule from when screening platelet counts were measured. By the final eight weeks of the study, noncutaneous bleeding had decreased with Nplate, and rates of durable platelet response were 52 percent compared to 10 percent with placebo (p<0.002, odds ratio 9.1, 95 percent CI: 1.9, 43.2). Rates of overall platelet response with Nplate were 71 percent (30/42) compared with 20 percent with placebo (p=0.0002, odds ratio 9.0, 95 percent CI: 2.5, 32.3), and rates of any platelet response were 81 percent (34/42) with Nplate compared to 55 percent (11/20) with placebo (p=0.0313). The overall safety profile on the pediatric subjects who received romiplostim in this study was similar to the known safety profile of romiplostim. The most frequently reported AEs included contusion, epistaxis, headache and upper respiratory tract infections. Oropharyngeal pain occurred more frequently with Nplate [26.2 percent (11/42) vs. 5.3 percent (1/19) in placebo-treated patients]; of the 11 patients treated with Nplate with oropharyngeal pain, streptococcal pharyngitis (n=2), allergic rhinitis (n=2), gastroesophageal reflux (n=1) and serum sickness from IVIg (n=1) were also reported. No oropharyngeal pain AEs were serious or considered treatment-related. No patients died and none withdrew due to AEs. Serious adverse events (SAEs) were seen in 23.8 percent of Nplate patients and 5.3 percent of placebo patients. SAEs seen in the Nplate arm included epistaxis, contusion, and headache (n=2 each), bronchiolitis, nausea, petechiae, epilepsy, fever, thrombocytosis, urinary tract infection and vomiting (n=1 each). One subject with treatment-related serious adverse events experienced headache and thrombocytosis, which did not recur when romiplostim was restarted. There were no thrombotic events reported in the study. About Nplate (romiplostim) Nplate is a thrombopoietin (TPO) receptor agonist indicated for the treatment of low blood platelet counts in adults with chronic immune thrombocytopenia (ITP), who had an insufficient response to other medicines or surgery. Nplate mimics the body's natural thrombopoietin and is designed to increase platelet counts in patients with chronic ITP.5 Nplate is the first FDA-approved treatment specifically for adult chronic ITP. It is also being investigated for potential use in children ages 12 months to 18 years old with chemotherapy-induced thrombocytopenia (CIT). In the U.S., Nplate is indicated for the treatment of thrombocytopenia in patients with chronic ITP who have had an insufficient response to corticosteroids, immunoglobulins or splenectomy. Nplate is not indicated for the treatment of thrombocytopenia due to myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) or any cause of thrombocytopenia other than chronic ITP. Nplate should be used only in patients with ITP whose degree of thrombocytopenia and clinical condition increase the risk for bleeding. Nplate should not be used in an attempt to normalize platelet counts. In the European Union (EU), Nplate is indicated for the treatment of adult chronic ITP patients who are refractory to other treatments (e.g., corticosteroids, immunoglobulins). Nplate was named as a recipient of the U.S. Prix Galien 2009 "Best Biotechnology Product" award and also received the 2009 Scrip Awards for "Best New Drug." Nplate has also been honored with numerous awards throughout the EU, including a 2010 Prix Galien in France in the category of "Drugs for Rare Diseases," and the 2011 Prix Galien in Germany in the category of "Specialist Care." In September 2010, Nplate was awarded the 2010 International Prix Galien Award, an award granted every two years which recognizes the "Best of the Best" selected from previous national Prix Galien award recipients. Nplate is also approved in Canada, Australia, Russia, Mexico, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Japan, Argentina, Israel, South Korea, Hong Kong, Chile, Serbia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Singapore, Colombia, Kuwait, Taiwan, South Africa, Brazil, Guatemala, Morocco, Ecuador, Macau, Egypt, Lebanon, Peru and Venezuela. Nplate has received orphan designation for chronic ITP in the U.S. (2003), the EU (2005), Switzerland (2005), Japan (2006), Mexico and South Korea (2010). For more information about Nplate, please visit www.Nplate.com. Important U.S. Safety Information Regarding Nplate (romiplostim) Risk of Progression of Myelodysplastic Syndromes to Acute Myelogenous Leukemia In Nplate clinical trials of patients with myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) and severe thrombocytopenia, progression from MDS to acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) has been observed. Nplate is not indicated for the treatment of thrombocytopenia due to MDS or any cause of thrombocytopenia other than chronic ITP. Thrombotic/Thromboembolic Complications Thrombotic/thromboembolic complications may result from increases in platelet counts with Nplate use. Portal vein thrombosis has been reported in patients with chronic liver disease receiving Nplate. To minimize the risk for thrombotic/thromboembolic complications, do not use Nplate in an attempt to normalize platelet counts. Follow the dose adjustment guidelines to achieve and maintain a platelet count of 50 x 109/L. Loss of Response to Nplate Hyporesponsiveness or failure to maintain a platelet response with Nplate should prompt a search for causative factors, including neutralizing antibodies to Nplate. To detect antibody formation, submit blood samples to Amgen (1-800-772-6436). Amgen will assay these samples for antibodies to Nplate and thrombopoietin (TPO). Discontinue Nplate if the platelet count does not increase to a level sufficient to avoid clinically important bleeding after 4 weeks at the highest weekly dose of 10 mcg/kg. Laboratory Monitoring Obtain CBCs, including platelet counts, weekly during the dose adjustment phase of Nplate therapy and then monthly following establishment of a stable Nplate dose. Obtain CBCs, including platelet counts, weekly for at least two weeks following discontinuation of Nplate. Adverse Reactions In the placebo-controlled trials, headache was the most commonly reported adverse drug reaction, occurring in 35% of patients receiving Nplate and 32% of patients receiving placebo. Headaches were usually of mild or moderate severity. Most common adverse reactions ( 5% higher patient incidence in Nplate versus placebo) were Arthralgia (26%, 20%), Dizziness (17%, 0%), Insomnia (16%, 7%), Myalgia (14%, 2%), Pain in Extremity (13%, 5%), Abdominal Pain (11%, 0%), Shoulder Pain (8%, 0%), Dyspepsia (7%, 0%), and Paresthesia (6%, 0%). Nplate administration may increase the risk for development or progression of reticulin fiber formation within the bone marrow. This formation may improve upon discontinuation of Nplate. In a clinical trial, one patient with ITP and hemolytic anemia developed marrow fibrosis with collagen during Nplate therapy. Please see full Prescribing Information for Nplate at http://www.Nplate.com. Important EU Nplate Safety Information The EU Summary of Product Characteristics for Nplate lists the following Special Warnings and Precautions: reoccurrence of thrombocytopenia and bleeding after cessation of treatment, increased bone marrow reticulin, thrombotic/thromboembolic complications, progression of existing MDS (in patients with MDS), medication errors, loss of response to Nplate, and effects on red and white blood cells. The most common adverse reactions observed include hypersensitivity reactions (including cases of rash, urticarial and angioedema) and headache. As with all therapeutic proteins, there is a potential for immunogenicity. Advertisement To hold the rise in global average temperature to less than 2 0 C higher than pre-industrial levels. C higher than pre-industrial levels. To take efforts to limit the temperature rise to 1.5 0 C higher than pre-industrial levels (These might significantly lower the impacts and risks of climate change). C higher than pre-industrial levels (These might significantly lower the impacts and risks of climate change). To increase the ability to adapt to the climate change's adverse impacts. To foster climate resilience and development of reduced greenhouse gas emissions such a way that it does not threaten food production. To make consistent finance flows towards reduced greenhouse gas emissions at the earliest. To fight climate change & pollution To support communities and their local economies To protect biodiversity To inspire millions of people to join us in environmental citizenship Take a pledge at school or work and attend an Earth Day Fair - Work together to boost accountability! Plant trees- The planet needs 7.8 billion trees. Divest from fossil fuels. Find a carpool service- It is the best way to combat climate change. Go paperless- Stop using papers by switching on to electronic mode. This might help prevent cutting down trees for it. Make cities 100% renewable by creating a recycling plan and Work as a team - Gather as a group to clean up your locality. Take the momentum from the Paris Climate Summit and start building on it. http://www.earthday.org/about/ http://www.earthday.org/2016/01/19/earth-day-2016-trees-earth/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Day It is now coordinated on a global level by the Non-profit Organization "Earth Day Network" which calls itself as 'The largest secular holiday in the world'!It aims to diversify and broaden the environmental movement throughout the world and mobilize it as the most effective means to develop a healthy, sustainable environment that addresses climate change and protects the planet for future generations. The network has grown to be the world's largest recruiter of the environmental movement with more than 50000 working partners working from 196 different countries. They aim to build an environmental democracy by working through a combination of public policy, education and consumer campaigns.This year, on Earth day, the landmark Paris Agreement has been scheduled to be signed by 120 countries throughout the world including the United States and China. The signing of the agreement satisfies an important requirement for the entry into force of the historical draft Climate Protection Treaty adopted by the consensus of the 195 countries that took part in the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris last year.It is an agreement that lies within the framework of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It deals with mitigation of greenhouse gases emissions, adaptation & finance of the year 2020. France's Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, the Head of the Paris Conference has announced that it is an ambitious and balanced plan that will be a historic turning point with the aim to reduce global warming . It will be open for signing until one year from now, and is scheduled to come into force in the year 2020.The process of signing the agreement requires formal approval by a minimum of 55 nations representing 55% of emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human beings.Currently, the planet is losing more than 15 billion trees every year due to deforestation , bad forest management and land development.This mission will focus on regions of the planet that are most affected by deforestation. For achieving this goal, all the people should work with partners from every level of the society to integrate trees into all of our existing campaigns, collaborating with national & sub-national governments, leaders, civilians and businesses throughout the world.Trees help combat climate change as they absorb harmful and excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They absorb pollutant gases like ammonia, sulphur dioxide, ozone and nitrogen oxides and filter the air by trapping them on their bark and leaves. Thus, they help us breathe pure air. They help the communities achieve their economic sustainability by providing food, energy and income.This earth day, let us get together to join the movement that channels human energy towards environmental issues. We are entering the 46year and today, it is more than just a single day's event. It is taking a stand!Here is how you can celebrate the Earth Day and become an environmental steward!We are currently experiencing a critical moment in the fight to defend the planet's health and we need to do it before it is too late!Source: Medindia Please complete this form and we'll send you a personalised information that is requested You may use this for your own reference or forward it to your friends. Please use the information prudently. If you are not a medical doctor please remember to consult your healthcare provider as this information is not a substitute for professional advice. Advertisement The new strategy also aims to reduce the rate of newly-diagnosed leprosy patients with visible deformities to less than one per million; and ensure that all legislation that allows for discrimination on the basis of leprosy is overturned."The key interventions needed to achieve the targets include detecting cases early before visible disabilities occur, with a special focus on children as a way to reduce disabilities and reduce transmission, targeting detection among higher risk groups through campaigns in highly endemic areas or communities, and improving health care coverage and access for marginalized population," said Khetrapal.She said screening all close contacts of leprosy affected people, promoting a shorter and uniform treatment regime, and incorporating specific interventions against stigma and discrimination are the other strategic interventions that endemic countries need to include in their national plans to meet the new targets."The new strategy builds on the success of previous leprosy control strategies. It has been developed in consultation with national leprosy programs, technical agencies and NGOs, as well as patients and communities affected by leprosy," she said.The strategy focuses on equity and universal health coverage which will contribute to reaching Sustainable Development Goals on health.According to the health data, the main and continuing challenges to leprosy control have been the delay in detection of new patients and persisting discrimination against people affected by leprosy which has ensured continued transmission of the disease.India, Brazil and Indonesia account for 81 percent of the newly diagnosed and reported cases globally.Leprosy was eliminated globally in the year 2000 with the disease prevalence rate dropping to below one per 10,000 population.Though all countries have achieved this rate at the national level, at the sub-national level, it remains an unfinished agenda.Leprosy continues to afflict the vulnerable, causing life-long disabilities in many patients, subjecting them to discrimination, stigma and a life marred with social and economic hardships.Source: IANS Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) like angina pectoris and acute myocardial infarction have been some of the major health problems in the developing countries. About 12 million people who suffer from CVD die every year. Nowadays, periodontal disease (gum disease) is a common dental problem, especially in people with cardiovascular diseases. It has been revealed that a good dental health can prevent heart diseases , particularly among those who had a family history of heart diseases or have experienced heart problems themselves. Large scale interventional clinical studies have provided evidence to support the association between periodontal disease and cardiovascular diseases. The emergence of periodontal disease as a potential risk factor for heart diseases is leading to a convergence in healthcare that will only benefit the public health. Studies conducted earlier used nonspecific clinical definitions of periodontal disease for infectious exposure; whereas some recent studies have enhanced the specificity of the infectious exposure definitions by measuring antibodies to the selected periodontal pathogens or by a direct quantification of the oral microbiota from the sub-gingival dental plaque. Results showed a positive relation between the periodontal disease and cardiovascular diseases. The potential role of periodontal disease to be associated with cardiovascular diseases can be explained in such a way, that both of the diseases mentioned above should have many common factors to support a moderate link between them. Advertisement Usually, the diseases of the heart and blood vessels are related to the thickening of the artery walls (atherosclerosis). This condition results from damage caused to the artery walls that results from the inflammatory blood vessels along with the fat deposits. The fat deposits along with the artery wall inflammation lead to the development of plaque (Atheroma). Researchers believe that this inflammatory damage is caused by infections from various sources; the bacteria from gum infections enter the bloodstream via the gum pockets. When your gums bleed, it creates a path for the bacteria to enter your bloodstream, which can spread to distant sites of the body, including the heart. While that happens, the arteries become less elastic and the interior walls are reduced in size resulting in small blood clots. These blood clots clog the arteries and cut off their blood flow which might result in a stroke or heart attack depending on the location of the blood clot. The incidence of coronary heart disease increases when the age-adjusted alveolar bone loss is more. This suggests a dose response, such as higher the prevalence of periodontal disease at the baseline, the greater is the incidence of coronary heart diseases. Bleeding gums during eating or brushing Gaps develop between the teeth Swollen or tender gums Receding gums (gums pulling back from the teeth) and changes in the way your teeth fit while biting Persisting bad breath Pus between teeth and gums Mouth soreness Bacterial Infection It has been reported that more than 400 bacterial species are found to proliferate in the sub- gingival plaque (The sticky deposits found in the gums). The most common bacterial species include Fusobacterium nucleatum, Porphyromonas gingivalis, Actinobacillus actinomycetemcomitans, Prevotella intermedia, Tannerella forsythensis (Bacteroides forsythus) and spirochetes. Bacterial infection has also been the main cause of heart failure. Studies have reported that bacteria are present in the gum pockets of heart disease patients. Thus, it is evident that oral infections have an important role in the implementation of heart diseases and maintaining a good oral hygiene can help in preventing different heart problems. Bacterial infections have been postulated to have a profound effect on macrophages, endothelial cells, lipid metabolism, monocytes, thrombocytes and blood coagulation. Dental infections are the single risk factor, excluding the other common classic coronary risk factors for developing a heart problem. It is observed that dental infections are a significant risk factor for developing new cardiovascular events. C-Reactive Protein (CRP) C-reactive protein levels were recorded highest in patients who had an infection due to periodontal pathogens and also CRP been a single risk factor for cardiovascular diseases. When periodontal disease patients were treated with root planing, scaling, and flurbiprofen, they exhibited lower levels of CRP after a year. Advertisement Myocardial Infarction In the year 1989, a study conducted in Finland reported that people with evidence of oral infection were 30% more likely to present with myocardial infarction than people having no dental problem. They conducted two separate case-control studies involving 100 patients who were diagnosed with acute myocardial infarction and they performed a dental examination on all of them. Atherosclerosis Mattila and co-workers, who worked on a case-control study, noted the association between dental infections and the degree of atherosclerosis (ATH). They examined the patients who were first diagnosed with coronary angiography and their total dental index score was taken (The dental index score was taken as a general score for periodontal infections, dental caries, and periapical lesions). It was found that there was a significant association between severe coronary atheromatosis and dental infections. Coronary Heart Disease The association between cardiovascular disease and periodontal disease was assessed with the help of a national survey. It was found that those with periodontitis had a 25% increased risk of coronary heart disease. Also, it was observed that in the male population, who were below 50 years of age and with periodontitis had 72% higher risk of developing a coronary heart disease. A tooth abscess is a complicated tooth decay condition, that occurs when a tooth is chipped or broken. Openings in the tooth enamel allow bacteria to enter and infect the center of the tooth, also known as pulp. The infection spreads from the root to other areas of the body, resulting in complications like endocarditis, brain abscess or pneumonia. Endocarditis is inflammation of the endocardium (the tissue lining of the inner chambers of the heart) and it can be a life-threatening infection. It occurs when bacteria spreads through the bloodstream and proliferate inside the heart. Certain dental procedures are more likely to cause bacteraemia (presence of bacteria in the blood). High-risk dental procedures that cause bleeding or tissue damage are dental extractions, periodontal procedures like scaling, root planning, surgery, routine periodontal cleaning and people who are at risk of endocarditis are recommended to take antibiotics. Streptococcus viridians are the most common cause of endocarditis after dental procedures and use of antibiotics are recommended to prevent endocarditis infection. While poor oral hygiene has been linked to CVD, the relation between preventive dentistry and the reduction of heart diseases have been undetermined. Taiwanese researchers studied this association by using a population-based cohort study. The results revealed that tooth scaling was an independent factor for reducing the risk of myocardial infarction and other cardiovascular diseases. Conclusion Oral infections have turned out to be an important factor in determining the hypothesis of dental infection of being a cardiovascular disease risk factor. Gum infections have been reported to be one of the leading culprits, with studies reporting the link between heart diseases and periodontal diseases. It has been firmly established that a connection exists between periodontal disease and cardiovascular diseases. There is an epidemiological association between the periodontal infections and the cardiovascular diseases; i.e. periodontal infections are predominant among patients with heart diseases. You should discuss your symptoms of gum disease and other risk factors of cardiovascular diseases with your dentist. It is highly recommended that a periodentist (dentist for periodontal diseases) evaluates oral health and treats any dental problem if exists. Cancer in men can go unnoticed as its symptoms like back pain and indigestion are treated as minor health symptoms. Noticing the signs of cancer can help detect cancer early and this in turn can help in the complete cure of cancer. Symptoms of cancer in men can include changes in restroom habits, trouble swallowing, hoarseness of voice, unexplained weight loss, mouth changes and stomach or abdominal pain. Routine screening tests for cancer is the best way to find cancer early. Many people ignore cancer symptoms or do not have an idea how serious their condition is until it is too late. However, the symptoms of cancer are too vague and generally occur in routine life that anyone would hardly attribute cancer as the possible cause. Cancers affect men and women equally, but statistics show that men and women are prone to different types of cancers. Most common cancers that occur in men are: Prostate cancer Lung cancer Colorectal cancer Bladder cancer Kidney cancer Non-Hodgkin lymphoma Mouth and throat cancers Leukemia Pancreatic cancer It is important for men to know the difference between normal aches and pains or fatigue and the symptoms that can possibly be cancer. Some of the cancer symptoms that men should not ignore are as follows. 1. Weight Loss Without Trying A sudden and unexpected weight loss is welcome in people who are trying to lose weight for health purposes. However, if there is a sudden drop in weight without trying is a matter of concern. An unexpected loss in weight is a sign of pancreatic cancer, stomach cancer and lung cancer. Advertisement Other reasons for weight loss without trying include overactive thyroid gland, diabetes, cirrhosis, hookworm infections and tuberculosis. 2. Changes in Restroom Habits and Abnormalities While Urinating Changes in the flow of urine that can be indicative of cancer include: Difficulty in starting the flow of urine Difficulty in stopping the flow of urine Stream of urine that is weaker than normal Dribbling or leaking of urine Changes in the frequency of need to urinate Swelling or shrinkage of size of testicle or lump in testicle Heaviness in the scrotum Erection problems Above symptoms are indicative of prostate and testicular cancer in men. Some symptoms like irregularities in urine flow can also suggest bladder cancer in men. Other causes of abnormalities in urination include urinary incontinence, urinary tract infections and bladder control problems. 3. Mouth and Throat Changes Certain changes that can be noticed in the mouth and throat as signs of cancer include: White spots or patches in the mouth Persistent pain in the mouth and throat areas Difficulty in swallowing Difficulty in moving the lower jaw Tooth or teeth that come out or loosen without any known reason Swelling of facial features Numbness or tenderness in lips, cheeks or tongue Sores or bleeding inside the tongue Persistent cough or hoarseness of voice Coughing out blood Symptoms of the mouth and throat can be suggestive of various types of cancer. Oral cancer, lung cancer or non-Hodgkins lymphoma are some of the possibilities. Other causes of changes in mouth and throat areas include mouth and throat ulcers, gastroesophageal reflux disease, pharyngitis (inflammation of pharynx), oral gonorrhea, Hand-Foot-and-Mouth disease and allergic reactions. 4. Breast Changes Male breast cancer is very rare and accounts for about 1 percent of all breast cancers. This is the very reason that men can ignore the signs of breast cancer. Breast cancer in men can be caused by increased levels of estrogen, exposure to harmful radiation or family history of breast cancer. Infiltrating ductal carcinoma is the most common type of breast cancer occurring in men. Among the various symptoms of breast cancer in men include: Enlargement of breast (usually on the affected side alone, but may occur on both sides) Nipple pain Inversion of nipple or retraction of nipple Sores on the nipple, areola and around it Lump felt in the breast, that may or may not be painful Discharge from the nipple that may be clear fluid, black or bloody Enlargement of lymph nodes under the arm Redness or scaling of nipple and surrounding area Enlargement of breasts or changes in the breasts may occur due to reasons other than cancer. These conditions may include hormonal changes, kidney or liver problems, low testosterone levels, nutritional or hormonal supplements, drug and alcohol use and medicines like tricyclic antidepressants. 5. Abdominal Pain and Stomach Upsets Stomach aches and abdominal pains are symptoms of many conditions other than cancer. But one cannot ignore the possibility of cancer when the symptoms are persistent in spite of taking measures to reduce them. Advertisement Some of the symptoms of the abdominal discomfort include: Poor appetite Chronic acidity and heartburn (stomach or throat cancer) Vomiting, with or without blood Swelling up of abdomen or fluid build-up in the abdomen Stomach aches that may be dull feels like pressing inward (pancreatic cancer) Stomach cramps and upset stomachs (liver cancer) Abdominal pain towards the lower left side of the abdomen (Leukemia due to enlarged spleen) Unexplained pain in the lower right side of the abdomen (liver cancer) Feeling full after a small meal Blood in the urine or stool (kidney or bladder cancer, colon cancer) Causes of abdominal pain and discomfort and changes in bowel habits can be due to plenty of other reasons like gastroesophageal reflux disease, stomach ulcers, gall bladder infections, cirrhosis of liver, irritable bowel syndrome and food poisoning. The symptoms of cancer can be specific or vague, or cancer may be present without any symptoms at all. One must go for routine screening tests and the possible risk factors associated with cancer. Once cancer is detected, the treatment should be started immediately. So, early cancer detection can help in optimal treatment and management of cancer. MEMRI is now offering readers interested in its Russian Media Studies Project an opportunity to sign up to receive this project's publications by email, separately from MEMRI publications concerning Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Pashtu, and Turkish. Subscribers will receive all MEMRI Russian Media Studies Project publications, including translations, clips, reports, and analysis by email. To subscribe, click here. The following are reports and clips already published by the project: MEMRI Reports: Adding Russian To MEMRI's Priority Languages, MEMRI Daily Brief - No. 73 - January 11, 2016 Statements By President Putin, Defense Minister Shoygu On Russia's Intervention In Middle East, Deployment Vis-A-Vis NATO, Special Dispatch - No. 6257 - January 11, 2016 Russian Media Outlets Compare U.S. To Nazi Germany, Describe Battle Over Syria As Today's Stalingrad, Special Dispatch - No. 6259 - January 12, 2016 Anti-American Cartoons In Russian Media On U.S. Foreign Policy, War On Terror, Special Dispatch - No. 6261 - January 13, 2016 Anti-American Articles In The Pro-Regime Russian Media On U.S. Foreign Policy, War On Terror, Special Dispatch - No. 6265 - January 14, 2016 Russian Media Outlets Slam Turkey: Discuss Option Of Nuclear Attack On It, Accuse President Erdogan Of Supporting ISIS, Special Dispatch - No. 6269 - January 19, 2016 A New National Security Strategy For The Russian Federation, Special Dispatch - No. 6271 - January 20, 2016 Russia-Syria Agreement On Unlimited Duration Of Russian Airforce Deployment In Syria, Special Dispatch - No. 6273 - January 21, 2016 Russian Analyst Victoria Zhuravleva In Russian Business Daily: 'Should We Expect A Reboot Of Russia-U.S. Relations?', Special Dispatch - No. 6278 - January 25, 2016 Article On Pro-Government Russian Website Suggests Litvinenko Was Assassinated By U.S., Special Dispatch - No. 6283 - January 28, 2016 Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov Launches Media Campaign Against Russian Opposition, Special Dispatch - No. 6291 - February 4, 2016 Russian Analyst On Pro-Regime Website: The West Wants To Bring About Russia's 'Mental Destruction', Special Dispatch - No. 6295 - February 8, 2016 Leading Economists At Russia's Sixth Gaidar Forum: The Oil Age Is Over; Russia Needs Internal Reforms To Overcome Recession Special Dispatch - No. 6297 - February 9, 2016 Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov: We Will Not At This Time Be Returning To Nuclear Arms Reduction Talks With U.S. Under 'New START' Treaty Special Dispatch - No. 6299 - February 10, 2016 Russian Diplomat Maria Khodynskaya-Golenishcheva: De Mistura Must Fix His Mistakes Before Talks Over Syria Can Be Resumed Special Dispatch - No. 6300 - February 11, 2016 Editorial In Russian Online Paper: Despite The Invitation Putin Extended To Them, Jews Are Not Likely To Flock Back To Russia Special Dispatch - No. 6302 - February 12, 2016 Russian PM Threatens Third World War Special Dispatch - No. 6306 - February 14, 2016 Ceremony Held In Russia To Mark The Anniversary Of The Iranian Revolution Special Dispatch - No. 6310 - February 16, 2016 Russian Magazine: Russia's Air Force In Syria Is Winning The Battle For Assad Special Dispatch - No. 6311 - February 17, 2016 Russian Oppositionist Gennady Gudkov Criticizes The Kremlin's 'Castration' Of The Duma Special Dispatch - No. 6315 - February 18, 2016 Posters Calling Obama 'A Killer' Seen On Moscow Streets Special Dispatch - No. 6317 - February 22, 2016 Russian Political Analyst: The Russian Business Elite Will Not Rebel Against Putin Special Dispatch - No. 6325 - February 25, 2016 Russia Takes Countermeasures In Response To Washington's Plans To Increase Funding For Military Forces In Europe Special Dispatch - No. 6320 - February 23, 2016 Russian Oppositionist Leonid Gozman to Putin: "Mr. President, You Must Resign!" Special Dispatch - No. 6329 - February 26, 2016 Russian Sociologist Denis Sokolov: Chechen President Kadyrov Has Placed Himself In The Best Position For A Possible War Of 'All Against All' In Russia Special Dispatch - No. 6331 - February 29, 2016 Interview With Russian Political Analyst Sergey Karaganov: The Four Reasons Why Russia Intervened In Syria Special Dispatch - No. 6335 - March 2, 2016 Russian Analysts: Through Its Intervention In Syria, Russia Seeks To Reshape Its Global Standing Special Dispatch - No. 6338 - March 4, 2016 Putin To The Federal Security Service: Russia's Enemies Abroad Plan To Intervene In Next Fall's Duma Election Special Dispatch - No. 6339 - March 7, 2016 Mikhail Gorbachev: Russia Must Return To A Path Of Real Democracy Special Dispatch - No. 6343 - March 9, 2016 Russian State-Owned Media Outlet: 'Why American GDP Won't Matter In A War With Russia' Special Dispatch - No. 6345 - March 11, 2016 Russian Political Analyst Sergey Karaganov: The Escalation Of The Conflict Between Russia And The West Has Brought The Nuclear Issue To The Fore Special Dispatch - No. 6347 - March 14, 2016 Russian President Putin: Russia Will Withdraw Most Of Its Military From Syria - But Russian Activity At Tartus Naval Base And Hmeymim Airbase Will Continue As Before Inquiry & Analysis Series Report - No. 1235 - March 15, 2016 Cartoons In Gulf Press Criticize Russia's Military Intervention In Syria Inquiry & Analysis Series Report - No. 1236 - March 15, 2016 MEMRI TV Clips #5208 - Russia Today TV 10th Anniversary Clip: In 2035, Obama, Kerry Forgotten Old Timers, Snowden President, The Internet, Russia Today TV (Russia) - December 2, 2015 #5300 - Former Russian Energy Minister Yuri Shafranik: U.S. Priorities 'Are Directed Today toward Iran', Russia Today TV (Russia) | February 1, 2016 | 02:22 #5264 - Ex-Inmate Shaker Aamer to Russia Today TV: Families Should Refuse to Send Their Sons to Serve in Guantanamo, Russia Today TV (Russia) - January 12, 2016 - 02:39 #5274 - Russian Grand Mufti during Visit to Iraq: Even in the Days of Communism, We Managed to Protect Our Religion and Unity, The Internet - January 16, 2016 - 03:16 #5295 - Russian Ambassador to Kuwait: We Are Moving from the Hegemony of a Single Country to a Multipolar Stage, The Internet, January 26, 2016 - 02:15 #5310 - Russian Diplomat Maria Khodynskaya-Golenishcheva: De Mistura Must Fix His Mistakes before Talks over Syria Can Be Resumed Sama TV (Syria) - February 7, 2016 - 03:41 #5324 - Ceremony Held in Russia to Mark the Anniversary of the Iranian Revolution Press TV (Iran) - February 12, 2016 - 02:13 #5334 - Patriarch Kirill, Head of Russian Orthodox Church: Ties between Russian and American Christians May Improve Political Relations between the Two Countries Russia Today TV (Russia) - February 16, 2016 - 03:20 #5343 - Syrian Sculptor Iyad Bilal Creates Bust of Russian Pilot of Plane Downed by Turkey Syria News TV - February 15, 2016 - 01:54 #5386 - Russian Muslim Designer Celebrates Syria Ceasefire with a New Collection Russia Today TV (Russia) - March 1, 2016 - 02:39 #5391 - ISIS Suicide Bombers Threaten "to Raid" Moscow The Internet - March 10, 2016 - 03:32 A bill proposed by several U.S. Congress members, which, if approved, would hold Saudi Arabia and top Saudi officials liable in U.S. courts for involvement in the 9/11 terror attacks, has generated anger in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. According to a report published in The New York Times on April 15, 2016, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir threatened, during a March visit to the U.S., that his country would sell off 750 billion dollars in U.S. Treasury securities and other assets to avoid their being frozen by U.S. courts. Such a measure on the part of the Saudi government might bear severe consequences for the U.S. economy.[1] In response to the bill proposal, the Saudi daily 'Okaz published an article claiming that an Iranian lobby was operating within the U.S. Congress in an effort to implicate Saudi Arabia in the 9/11 attacks. Additional articles in the Saudi and Bahraini press criticized the bill and the efforts to link Saudi Arabia to 9/11 and to hold it responsible for the terror attacks.[2] According to the articles, these allegations lack any factual basis and are likely intended to harm relations between Saudi Arabia and the U.S., thus serving the terrorists' interests. The authors claimed that Saudi Arabia is the main party harmed by Al-Qaeda, in part because of the country's relations with the U.S., and stated that Saudi Arabia leads the fight against terrorism in general and against Al-Qaeda in particular. American policy was described as "schizophrenic" because the U.S. is accusing Saudi Arabia of supporting terrorism, but at the same time, forming an alliance with it to confront terrorism. It was also claimed that the U.S. had supported the mujahideen in Afghanistan, just as Saudi Arabia had, and that the fact that these mujahideen had joined Al-Qaeda stemmed from mistakes perpetrated by the U.S. The U.S., it was claimed, is therefore more responsible than Saudi Arabia for the deeds perpetrated by Al-Qaeda. Some writers claimed that the bill reflects a change in the position of the U.S. administration toward Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states and stated that a rift in the relations between the countries was possible. The articles were written on the eve of U.S. President Obama's visit to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states on April 21 and reflect the anger and criticism harbored in the Gulf states toward the policy of his administration.[3] President Obama and King Salman (Image: english.alarabiya.net) Al-Sharq Al-Awsat Editor: These Are Baseless Claims Aimed At Sabotaging U.S.-Saudi Relations Salman Al-Dosari, editor of the London-based Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, wrote: "These allegations about Saudi links to the infamous 9/11 attacks are not new. They die down for a while and then reemerge suddenly, whenever certain individuals want them to... These claims are not based on facts, proof, or legal evidence, and their actual purpose is to cause cracks in the unified ranks of the two main allies that oppose terrorism [Saudi Arabia and the U.S.] and to undermine the trust between the two sides. How indeed can you win a war when you doubt your main ally [in the struggle] against your common enemy?... "I wish to remind those [who link Saudi Arabia to 9/11] that from the 9/11 terrorist attacks to this day, it has been proven, with clear-cut evidence, that the damage done by Al-Qaeda and its attacks to Saudi Arabia - its citizens, its officials, its government, and even its royal family - surpasses the damage that it did to the U.S. Is this not enough to prove that Al-Qaeda is first and foremost an enemy of Saudi Arabia? How is it possible to think that anyone would defend those who kill him and act to destabilize him? "[Even] if 15 of the 9/11 perpetrators were Saudis, this is not grounds for Saudi Arabia bearing the blame for their crime forever. For example, the French Prime Minister said in the past that 5,000 Europeans were fighting alongside the extremists in Syria and Iraq, and that, according to French intelligence estimates, this number was expected to rise to 10,000 ISIS fighters by the end of 2015. Would it be fair to blame the [European] governments of these extremists and hold them accountable because such a startling number [of their citizens] joined this one terrorist organization?... "Saudi Arabia wants to know the facts regarding these [9/11] terrorists - who assisted and funded them - not just in order to protect the U.S. and the entire world from the danger [such terrorists] pose, but also in order to protect itself, since this terrorism primarily targets Saudi Arabia. Accusations like those being thrown around randomly are not based on facts, but are merely conjecture and baseless personal opinions that should be disregarded. Additionally, they contradict the laws and the constitution of the U.S. itself. Naturally, Saudi Arabia does not address claims that are irrelevant and without legal basis. The dangerous thing here is that, whenever officials from the two countries try to strengthen trust between them, people come along and punch holes in [this trust], which renders [their joint] efforts to combat terrorism ineffective. The ones who gain the most from this are the very terrorist that the world is trying to eliminate. Saudi Arabia is a prominent partner in this complex issue [of fighting terror, and therefore] the administration of President Barack Obama is tasked with the major role of getting the alliance between the two countries back on track and preventing [acts of] momentary opportunism from harming the strategic relations between Riyadh and Washington..."[4] Saudi Columnist: Is The U.S., Which Accuses Us Of Supporting Al-Qaeda, Schizophrenic? Khalaf Al-Harbi, a columnist for the official Saudi daily 'Okaz, wrote: "Fifteen years after the events of 9/11, our beloved [friends] the Americans have suddenly discovered that Saudi Arabia is responsible for this terrorist crime that changed the face of the world. This strange discovery prompts us to present several innocent questions: [If Saudi Arabia is responsible for the attacks,] why then did the U.S. destroy the impoverished Afghanistan until nothing was left standing there? Why did it invade Iraq and set it back a thousand years? Why did it choose Saudi Arabia, of all [countries], as its ally in its war on terror and rely on it heavily in its fight against Al-Qaeda?... [As a matter of fact,] the establishment of the brigades of Arab mujahideen in Afghanistan was carried out in cooperation with the U.S., and the role played by the CIA in this is public knowledge. The fact that some of those same mujahideen later strayed and joined Al-Qaeda has more to do with the U.S. than with Saudi Arabia. "More importantly, after the events of 9/11 and the U.S. becoming embroiled in Afghanistan and Iraq, Saudi Arabia entered into a fierce war against Al-Qaeda in its own territory, simply because this organization saw Saudi Arabia as a strategic and political U.S. ally. So how can Saudi Arabia be behind Al-Qaeda, which is fighting against it due to its relations with the U.S.? Moreover, the U.S. signed security cooperation agreements with Saudi Arabia in order to fight Al-Qaeda, pursue its members, bomb its strongholds, and sever its organization channels. Has mother America become schizophrenic, that it now accuses us of backing our common enemy?! I believe that our foreign diplomacy currently faces the historic task of standing against these American defamations, so that we are not forced to confront unjust allegations regarding mistakes that were not ours [in the first place], but rather mistakes made by the Americans themselves!"[5] Bahraini Journalist: Saudi Arabia's Threat To Sell Off Its U.S. Assets Should Be Commended; It Could End Saudi-U.S. Relations Columnist 'Abd Al-Mun'im Ibrahim wrote in the Bahraini daily Akhbar Al-Khaleej: "These media leaks reveal the extent of the shift in American positions - [the positions of] both the administration and Congress - regarding U.S. ties with Saudi Arabia and the other GCC states. Apparently the American administration no longer sees the GCC states as strategic allies. In fact, things are at a point where the U.S. even adopts positions that harm Saudi interests in the region. A debate in Congress is all it takes for Saudi Arabia to be accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks. [The bill] that will enable [Saudi Arabia] to face prosecution in American courts is sufficient indication of the change in the U.S. political attitude towards Saudi Arabia and the GCC states. If this bill passes in Congress, then similar ones will be passed regarding the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain, and possibly also Oman, since they are all home to citizens involved in terrorist activity. "Recent debates in Congress reveal the existence of a pro-Iran, anti-Saudi lobby in the U.S. government. This lobby does not make do with portraying Iran in a positive light, but also engages in blackmailing Saudi Arabia and the other GCC states financially and economically, and threatens to prosecute regional countries in American courts. It is important to commend the strong and courageous Saudi position in response to the proposed bill in Congress, as well as the Saudi threat [made by Foreign Minister 'Adel Al-Jubeir] to freeze its vast financial fortune in the U.S. [This Saudi position] will spell the beginning of the end of Saudi-American ties and place the entire region on the lip of an erupting volcano."[6] Bahraini Writer: U.S. Worries Saudi Arabia Will Become A Strong Leading Arab Force And Therefore Harms It With 9/11 Issue Faisal Al-Sheikh wrote in the Bahraini daily Al-Watan: "It is clear that the increasing Saudi activity since the ascension of Saudi King Salman bin 'Abd Al-'Aziz Al-Saud, which is meant to unite Arab and Islamic ranks, is worrisome to U.S. decision makers. This is evidenced by the increase of attempts to harm the big sister [Saudi Arabia] on multiple fronts. Saudi Arabia's decisive positions have become a crisis for the U.S., which is trying to prove its self-proclaimed status as guardian of the global abilities. Now the U.S. Congress is trying to harm Saudi Arabia through the gate of 'terrorism,' by attempting to tie it to the 9/11 attacks... The goal that members of Congress are attempting to attain serves the domination[-oriented] trends of the White House, even if President Obama is trying - like in some pathetically directed movie scene - to seem as though he is trying to dissuade Congress from passing this bill. "Their problem with Saudi Arabia stems from the fact that it has impressively emerged as an Arab force that cannot be discounted, and is able to unite Arab ranks and positions. A serious examination of King Salman's moves, particularly his recent visits, reveals a significant warming in Saudi Arabia's relations with Egypt and Turkey, and Washington cannot stand idly by and watch this happen. The U.S. often presents itself as the primary country providing annual financial aid to world countries... But recent reports show that Saudi Arabia provides the most aid to its regional neighbors and to Islamic countries. This means that the Arab and Islamic world has a strong support [pillar] that renders Western forces unnecessary... "Forceful Saudi activity on this front is a source of great concern for the White House, especially in light of [Saudi Arabia's] clear success in uniting Arab and Islamic ranks, both in the war to liberate Yemen from Iran's agents, the Houthis, and regarding the united Arab and Islamic forces and the strength they showed during the 'Northern Thunder' military exercises, which U.S. military experts studied generally and in detail, and examined their scenarios and implications. "That is why [the Americans] are attacking Saudi Arabia... But their problem is that Saudi Arabia's determination will not falter even if they attack it, since Saudi Arabia operates according to the logic of power and discretion, which means that it and those beside it cannot be broken and their arms cannot be twisted."[7] Endnotes: On April 20, 2016, the NATO-Russia Council's first meeting in almost two years took place in Brussels, Belgium. The last time the NRC met was in June 2014.[1] Following the Ukrainian crisis and the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, civilian and military cooperation between NATO and Russia was suspended; however, some channels of communication remained open, and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov several times during the past two years. Following the NRC meeting, Stoltenberg said that NATO and Russia continue to have "profound and persistent disagreements."[2] Three main topics were discussed during the meeting: the Ukrainian crisis, NATO and Russian military activity in Europe, and the security situation in Afghanistan. Concerning Ukraine, Stoltenberg said that "NATO Allies made clear that they stand firm in their support for Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity," stressing that NATO does not recognize the "illegal" annexation of Crimea by Russia.[3] He also mentioned that Russia continues to support separatists in Eastern Ukraine. Stoltenberg expressed concern about the incidents in the Baltic Sea on April 11-12, 2016, when a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 attack aircraft made a low-altitude pass near the U.S. guided missile destroyer USS Donald Cook (DDG-75). Stoltenberg concluded, "NATO Allies remain firm that there can be no return to practical cooperation until Russia returns to the respect of international law."[4] Concerning Afghanistan, both Russia and NATO expressed strong concern about the development of the situation in that country.[5] All the heads of missions of the 28 NATO member states participated in the meeting, which went nearly two hours longer than planned. Russia was represented by its Permanent Representative to NATO, Ambassador Alexander Grushko. The following is a review of Russian government officials' reactions to the meeting: NATO is expanding on the Russian border (Source: Ria.ru, April, 19, 2016) Russia's Permanent Representative to NATO: "Without Russia, It Is Impossible To Solve Any International Problem" Even though, according to Permanent Representative to NATO Grushko, NATO members have no intention of cooperating with Russia, he asserts that the fact that the NATO-Russia Council meeting took place attests to the failure of the West's policy to isolate Russia. He told Russia's Rossiya 1 TV: "I think that this is recognition that the project dubbed 'isolation of Russia' [has] failed. It is evident that without Russia it is impossible to solve or regulate any international problem." Underscoring that the NATO countries realize that they can't "keep isolating themselves from real processes in the sphere of security," Grushko added that Russia is not against holding a new meeting in the future, as long as there will be a "real agenda."[6] On the gun: "NATO", cartoon by pro-Putin media outlet Sharzh I Pero, published on April 4, 2016, NATO's anniversary and the day of NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg's visit to the U.S. The Russian news agency TASS reported that Grushko said that Russia is not interested in returning to previous formats and wants to understand how NATO will be building its security plans in Europe, since today NATO's words and actions are contradictory: it makes declarations about opposing a new Cold War while at the same time building a military presence in Eastern Europe and along Russian borders. The question - says Grushko- is whether NATO has already embarked upon the traditional anti-Russian course, dominated by the American narrative.[7] The Russian news agency RIA Novosti reports that Grushko stressed that dialogue based on trust is impossible without reducing NATO military activity along Russia's borders. Grushko pointed out that Russia is not adversely affected by the lack of cooperation with NATO. Concerning the incidents in the Baltic Sea, he said that by sending the USS Donald Cook close to the Russian border, Washington was trying to put pressure on Moscow, and that Russia will take appropriate action should similar acts recur in the area.[8] Previously, on March 30, Grushko said that Russia will not passively observe the U.S. military buildup in Europe and will provide an "asymmetrical" response.[9] "We are not passive observers, we consistently take all the military measures we consider necessary in order to counterbalance this reinforced presence that is not justified by anything. Certainly, we'll respond totally asymmetrically," Grushko said to Russian television channel Rossiya 24. Grushko further stressed that NATO's continuing expansion eastward will raise the tension between the West and Russia to an unimaginable level: "As of the present day, assessing as a whole what the U.S. and NATO are doing, the point at issue is a substantial change for the worse in the security situation. One can't imagine a situation in which those countries [Ukraine and Georgia] continue to cherish the hope of joining NATO and the alliance really plans to admit them, as this would cause the situation to explode and bring Europe to the brink of a crisis, whose size and scale can't be imagined today."[10] Russian Presidential Press Secretary: NATO Retained Its Original Purpose - To Deter Russia Speaking about the worsening of relations between Russia and NATO, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov told the Russia Today television channel that Russia will not tolerate any attempts to dictate to it how it should behave, and that it will retaliate against any military advances of NATO member states close to Russia's borders, such as the stationing of a missile defense system, "with our military and technical capabilities." Antonov also stated that Russia is opposed to entering an arms race, "no matter who is trying to impose one on us," adding that restoring military cooperation with NATO would only be possible based on the principles of "equality, dialogue, mutual respect, and acknowledgement of each other's interests."[11] In an interview released the day before the meeting, Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Russia-NATO relations are characterized by total mistrust and that this would be difficult to overcome. According to Peskov, the Russia-NATO dialogue "will not be an easy one, because confidence is destroyed very quickly, but is restored much more slowly and this requires considerably greater efforts." Peskov also reiterated that NATO military buildup near Russia's borders poses a "threat to its national security." He said: "We have recorded very unfriendly actions of the Alliance in terms of its military buildup on our borders; we believe that NATO's actions pose a threat to Russia's national interests and national security... Moreover, we have to state that the recent actions of the Alliance have once again confirmed that NATO has failed to adapt to modern conditions and retained its original purpose - to deter the Russian Federation and be in confrontation with the Russian Federation."[12] Cartoon by pro-Putin media outlet Sharzh I Pero, published on April 4, 2016, NATO's anniversary and the day of the visit of NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg to the U.S. Appendix: Russian Daily Izvestia Interview With Russian Permanent Representative To NATO Amb. Alexander Grushko, April 1, 2016 Russian permanent representative to NATO Amb. Alexander Grushko (Source: Missiontonato.ru, April 1, 2016) Izvestia: "How does Russia assess the U.S. intention to deploy another armored brigadein Eastern Europe?" Permanent Representative to NATO Amb. Alexander Grushko: "We need to have a look at how these intentions will be implemented. We will assess these plans not only in terms of what the U.S. can further deploy on the eastern flank, but together with the measures already taken. If we speak about a new pattern of force deployment on the eastern periphery of NATO, we witness a qualitative change in the very configuration of this presence and a significant deterioration of the situation in the military sphere. Today, constant rotation of U.S. forces is carried out in six Eastern European countries, and exercises are held on a regular basis with the participation of both the U.S. and European contingents. Naval forces in the Baltics are being reinforced. Storage options for equipment are being created; and this equipment is used by rotational units during joint exercises with national contingents. The improvement of infrastructure for new reinforcement troops is taking place. The air military activity has increased along our borders. The number of reconnaissance flights has increased many times over. There are talks about possible reinforcement of the military presence in the Black Sea region. All these attest to the fact that the policy of deterrence, which was declared on paper, is taking shape now in the form of concrete decisions in the area of military planning. This lays down a long-term negative tendency not only for regional security, but also for the security of Europe as a whole. The problem is that in fact nobody knows whether this process will stop. The decision to deploy an additional armored brigade was announced at a moment when nothing critical for NATO's interests was occurring on the eastern flank. It becomes ever more obvious that these military preparations are artificial. There is no direct threat either to Poland, or to the Baltic countries. Nevertheless, the [dis]information campaign continues to unfold. We hear absurd horror stories that Russia would attack the Baltics if it were not for NATO which undertook measures and deployed forces in this region. We have all the reasons to speak about a serious change in the military situation for the worse." Izvestia: "Is it fair to say that NATO's actions violate the agreements with Russia, in particular the Founding Act of 1997?"[13] Grushko: "The additional armored brigade to strengthen the eastern flank contradicts the spirit of the Founding Act. Moreover, NATO tries to claim that all these military efforts fully correspond to the provisions of the NATO-Russia Founding Act, according to which NATO committed itself not to deploy additional substantial combat forces on a permanent basis. We have repeated many times that continuous rotation is in no way different from permanent deployment. But I would like to note that the two sites of the European segment of the global [missile defense] MD system are under construction. The [missile defense] site in Romania is already operational and will be transferred [to] NATO command in May [2016]. The construction of the facility in Poland is underway. These bases certainly meet the criteria of being substantial and permanent." Izvestia: "How will the reinforcement of the U.S. forces affect NATO-Russia cooperation?" Grushko: "It will not have any effect. Cooperation as such does not exist. In April 2014, NATO countries made a decision to suspend all practical cooperation with Russia. All projects were stopped. Today we do not have any positive agenda with NATO. We often hear from NATO representatives that they are open to dialogue. The dialogue with the Permanent Mission continues, and we have good contacts with the leadership of the Alliance, and with all Missions to NATO. But all these contacts cannot replace practical cooperation between Russia and NATO, that was built over the years to ensure the security of all NRC members in a number of areas. We worked together on Afghanistan and we made efforts in the fight against terrorism - not only through joint threat assessment and exchange of experience, but also by implementing projects that were designed to avoid tragedies similar to the Brussels attacks." Izvestia: "How would you describe the work within the NATO-Russia Council [NRC] now?" Grushko: "The work of the NATO-Russia Council has not been formally interrupted. At our initiative, the Council was convened for a special meeting in June 2014, in the wake of the punitive operation that the Kiev authorities launched in southeastern Ukraine. There have been no sessions since that meeting. Work is under way to convene an NRC meeting." Izvestia: "Is it possible to appeal to the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE Treaty) in the present situation?"[14] Grushko: "The buildup of U.S. forces is taking place at a time when the arms control regime in Europe is undergoing erosion. The CFE Treaty regime was a cornerstone of European security. It established quantitative restrictions for basic categories of armaments, provided for detailed exchanges of information and an intrusive inspection regime. In the early 1990s, it became clear that the Treaty did not correspond to the new political realities, and talks about its adaptation began. These efforts culminated in the signing of an adapted CFE Treaty in 1999, which made the regime more responsive to the new realities. It provided for concrete mechanisms for engaging political instruments in cases when forces were deployed beyond certain limits. In 2004, Russia ratified this Treaty, but NATO countries delayed its ratification based on artificial pretexts. As a result, it has not been enforced. As long as the CFE Treaty continues to be out of touch with reality, we must state that the arms control regime in Europe is dead, which further complicates the security situation. But this choice was made by the NATO countries themselves." Endnotes: Within the framework of the initiatives we are taking, today we have the meeting of the four states of the region, so that we can talk about the issues and the refugee crisis and cross-border cooperation in general. Our Ministry has decided to hold a number of international meetings outside of Athens. In fact, we are planning to hold a meeting in the second week of September, between the Arab countries and member states of the EU I will announce it as of now in Rhodes. Thank you very much. J.-M. AYRAULT: I am very pleased to be meeting with my colleague and friend, Nikos Kotzias, whom I see regularly at the EU Council of Foreign Ministers. We were together on Monday, in Luxembourg, and the times before that in Brussels. We obviously talked about the bilateral relations between France and Greece, and you remember that famous slogan (Greece-France alliance) I think that is a phrase that sums up our relations. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras was in Paris last week, to meet with President Hollande. France hopes for the success of Greece, a brave country that has committed to major reforms to change its economic situation. These reforms are starting to bear fruit, entailing a real cost for the Greek people, but highlight Greeces strong bond with Europe. So it is important for Europe to show solidarity with Greece in the context of the latters efforts. This is Frances view, I reiterated it to Nikos a short while ago. We also know that Greece is facing major difficulties with regard to the hosting of the refugees and that the agreement with Turkey was necessary. It is in the process of being implemented, with a commitment from France to support the Greek efforts. Together with Germany we have decided to offer our assistance in the form of personnel this is specific assistance that will enable Greece to vet all of the applications for asylum on an individual basis. Greece has brought in reforms to its justice system: The Hellenic Parliament passed legislation quickly with regard to the asylum processes and the processes for appeals, so that international law can be respected. The EU-Turkey agreement is being implemented within the framework of international law, with major commitments on matters of readmission and relocation. But as concerns France, we are committed to helping Greece with regard to hosting refugees on our territory, through the relocations taking place. Every day, new refugees reach France and are hosted here, which is a specific support. We are committed to doing this and are doing it. Nikos and I talked about a number of issues, and the last is Syria. We had the opportunity to ascertain our convergence on a peacemaking process. War is not an option. The ceasefire that has been declared must be fully respected. Today, the major problems in the region around Aleppo, on the part of the regime, can jeopardize the ceasefire. It is important for there to be respect for the ceasefire from all sides. I said this yesterday, as well, on the opportunity of my visit to Moscow, to Vladimir Putin and to my counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. Because it is also very important for the humanitarian aid to reach all of the affected populations and for the peacemaking process to be completed. It is difficult, but it is the only path. It is in this direction that we, Greece and France, must coordinate our efforts. We also talked about other issues in the sector of bilateral cooperation, in the sector of culture, education, research and innovation. France and Greece are partners. They are friends, because we share the same values. It is these values that have led us to believe in Europe. Nikos told me that he believes in Europe as I do, even if Europe has flaws and may sometimes disappoint us. It is a commitment to joint resolution of the problems of Europe, helping, initially, each country deal with its own difficulties through solidarity, whether these difficulties are financial, economic, or related to migration. We also talked about other issues, but I would simply like to address you regarding the substance of these issues. We talked about Cyprus, Ukraine, but I think it was important for us to put into a few words the substance of what we discussed, which I am sure will be followed by others, given that we meet at least once a month, or more if necessary. N. KOTZIAS: Greece-France alliance is also expressed by the good weather in Paris today. The Minister and I discussed the major problems facing our region and Europe, the major crises, economic and geopolitical. We talked about Ukraine, Syria, Libya, countries in which the role of France and of the EU is very important, so that there can be peace and different social and economic development. I invited the Minister to Greece and I will receive him with pleasure in Athens. Athens is always pleased to be visited by the French spirit. Greece and France have a strategic relationship that will also be expressed in the cooperation Roadmap that is being formulated. We support the French initiative for the Middle East, because peace in the Middle East means peace and stability for all of us. The Minister and I talked about the economic crisis that is putting great pressure on my country. We again expressed our gratitude to the French leadership for the solidarity they are showing with Greece. Solidarity, understanding, not just on the economic issues, but also on the refugee issue. Regarding the need for the EU agreements and decisions to be implemented. We talked about our bilateral relations, which are developing significantly on matters of research, education, know-how, economy, investments. We are the Greece of ancient civilization, which is always timely; we are in the France of the Enlightenment. Finally, we referred to the initiatives Greece is taking in its region, from tomorrows meeting with the other Balkan countries, regarding cross-border cooperation problems, to our initiative for holding a Conference on stability and security in the Eastern Mediterranean. France always has an open invitation to our country and to our Conferences and to our heart. Jean-Marc, thank you very much for our talks and for the cooperation we have here and in all the European organs. J.-M. AYRAULT: Perhaps few people know that Greece is a member of the International Organisation of La Francophonie, and thus I want to welcome this commitment. I remind you that there is a French-Greek school with 1,600 students. It is an old school that I think symbolizes French-Greek relations. Thank you, Nikos, for your visit, and until we meet again. JOURNALIST (ANA-MPA): Did todays talks allow, in a specific manner, for the bilateral relations between the two countries to move ahead? Mainly on the issue of the Roadmap, which I think is to be signed in June, are there specific items, for example in the sector of the economy or in other sectors? J.- M. AYRAULT: It is a little early for us to release the content of the Roadmap, which is still in the preparation stage. That is why we are talking about a visit, with the invitation I received from Nikos just before these statements to the press. And besides, the Prime Minister will be visiting Greece. We are working for something specific, solid and enduring. JOURNALIST (Reuters): Does France intend to ask for an emergency meeting on the Syria issue? J. - M. AYRAULT: In Moscow, I had the opportunity to discuss the prospect of convening an emergency meeting of the Monitoring Group, and I said that France is prepared for such a meeting of the Monitoring Group on the ministerial level, if need be. Moreover, it is an issue that will be discussed in a few days in Hanover, given that, as you know, the French President will be in Hanover, on the occasion of President Obamas visit. There will be a discussion with Germany, Great Britain and Italy, during which the Syria issue will certainly be discussed. N. KOTZIAS: I think we took a step forward in our cooperation with our northern neighbours. The meeting today and tomorrow of the Foreign and Interior Ministers of the four countries is yet another of our initiatives. You know that some here are also invited to Rhodes, in the second week of September, where we will host an international meeting with Arab countries on stability and security in the Eastern Mediterranean. The main subject of our discussion was cross-border cooperation, not just on the refugee and migration issue, but also on issues that concern the programmes of the European Union, cooperation in the economic and cultural sectors, as well as in the sector of education. I must note here that we talked about the initiatives we need to take with third states, as well as the stance maintained by the institutions of the European Union. The conversation took place in a very good atmosphere. A number of proposals were heard. All of the sides agreed with the basic proposals we made. We continue tomorrow with more specialized issues: police cooperation and the fight against terrorism. And we agreed at the end of todays session that this meeting, structured in this way among the states that have common borders in the Balkans, will be repeated at regular intervals; that is, it will take on an institutional, permanent nature.